The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Apparently unaware of the evidence given by Sinclair and Horwood, Kell claimed that ‘his liaison with C and Scotland Yard were excellent’. Aware, however, that MI5’s survival was at stake, he put the emphasis on its unique responsibility for ‘what might be described as home security’:

  He was responsible for the safety of the armed forces of the Crown in this country, both in respect of foreign espionage and communist interference.

  . . . There was no overlapping between MI5 and Scotland Yard. The latter were not in a position to carry out the work which he did with the armed forces. He had free and direct access to all naval and military and air commands. He could see anyone he wished and give advice as to the action to be taken to deal with matters within his purview.

  The Committee agreed that, if it were starting a British secret service from scratch, ‘we should not adopt the existing system as our model.’ After months of discussion, however, it recommended no substantial change. Impressed though the Committee was with Sinclair, his proposals were simply too radical:

  We admit the vast potentialities inherent in the position of the chief of a combined secret service, but the danger there lies, we think, not so much in the use to which a good chief would put his powers, but in the difficulty of ensuring a succession of officers capable of filling such a post, and in the harm which might be done in it by a man who, after appointment, turned out to be incompetent.22

  By 1925, though MI5 had fought off merger or extinction, it had only thirty-five staff,23 about 4 per cent of its strength at the time of the Armistice. Since 1922 the much reduced Registry had been run by one of MI5’s most remarkable wartime recruits, Kathleen ‘Jane’ Sissmore, who was also made controller of women staff. She had been recruited as an eighteen-yearold clerk in 1916 and rose rapidly through the ranks. The headmistress of Princess Helen’s College, Ealing, where Sissmore had been head girl, described her as ‘a strong character, very straight, well principled, industrious’. In her spare time, she trained as a barrister, gaining first-class examination results, and was called to the Bar in 1924.24 Largely because of lack of resources, the Registry filing system was no longer state of the art. Though the Roneo card system had helped to give the pre-war Service an up-to-date data-management system, it fell behind between the wars25 – with serious consequences when war broke out in 1939.26 Kell’s slender resources and diminished responsibilities were reflected in the small number of HOWs it was operating to assist its investigations: only twenty-five in June 1925, down to twenty-three a year later.27

  Kell told the Secret Service Committee in 1925 that, because of his diminished resources, ‘he had no “agents” in the accepted sense of the word, but only informants, though he might employ an agent for a specific purpose, if necessary[,] in which case he would consult Scotland Yard about him, if he were in doubt as to his character, or he might even borrow a man from Scotland Yard.’28 One MI5 officer, Captain (later Major) Herbert ‘Con’ Boddington, had, however, succeeded in joining the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1923 on Kell’s instructions. On entering MI5 in 1922 at the age of thirty, despite being wounded in the war, Boddington had listed as his recreations ‘All outdoor games. Principally boxing, rowing and running.’ Unusually for an MI5 recruit, however, he had added: ‘Can act. Have played light comedian [sic] both at home and abroad.’ Boddington also claimed ‘literary experience’, which included writing stories for silent films.29 At least some of these skills were probably of assistance in passing himself off as a Communist.

  Kell’s search for informants to compensate for his post-war lack of an agent network led him to co-operate with Sir George Makgill, a businessman with ultra-conservative views and a deep-seated dislike of trade unions. At the end of the war, with the support of a group of like-minded industrialists, Makgill set up a private Industrial Intelligence Bureau (IIB), financed by the Federation of British Industries and the Coal Owners’ and Shipowners’ Associations, to acquire intelligence on industrial unrest arising from subversion by Communists, anarchists, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others. From an early stage Makgill was in contact with Kell, who claimed that he had helped Makgill found ‘an organisation of a secret nature somewhat on Masonic lines’ – probably a reference to the IIB. (Unlike Kell, Makgill and his son Donald were both prominent Freemasons.)30 Before joining MI5, Boddington had worked for the IIB and remained in touch with, notably, Makgill’s agent, ‘Jim Finney’, who, like Boddington, succeeded in joining the CPGB.31

  The IIB’s most talented member was, almost certainly, Maxwell Knight, a youthful, self-taught agent-runner who later joined the Security Service. Born in 1900, Knight had become a naval cadet in 1915, serving as a midshipman in the Royal Naval Reserve during the last year of the war.32 For several years after the war, he worked as a teacher in a preparatory school and as a freelance journalist.33 To those unaware of his intelligence work, Knight came across as a gregarious eccentric who did not mind ‘being considered a bit mad’. ‘In a world where we are all tending to get more and more alike,’ he believed, ‘a few unusual people give a little colour to life!’ Knight’s most obvious eccentricity was a passion for exotic pets which he claimed went back to a picnic lunch at the age of eight when he found a lizard and hid it from his parents in his box camera. For the remainder of his life he preferred ‘queer or unusual pets’, ranging from grass-snakes to gorillas. Visitors to his home might, as one of them recalled, ‘find him nursing a bush-baby, feeding a giant toad, raising young cuckoos or engaging in masculine repartee with a vastly experienced grey parrot’. For several years Knight also had a pet bear named Bessie who, unsurprisingly, ‘excited a great deal of attention and admiration’ when he took her, sometimes accompanied by a bulldog or a baboon, for walks near his Chelsea home.34 ‘High on the list of subjects which those who prefer to indulge in observations out of doors should embrace’, wrote Knight, ‘is the fascinating and essential one of the senses of animals.’35 Some of Knight’s self-taught intelligence tradecraft derived from his study of animal behaviour.

  According to a later account by Knight:

  In 1924 at the request of the late Sir George Makgill Bt who was then running agents on behalf of Sir Vernon Kell I joined the first of the Fascist Movements in this country – The British Fascisti. I remained with this organisation until 1930 when it more or less became ineffectual. My association with this body was at all times for the purposes of obtaining information for HM Government and also for the purposes of finding likely people who might be used by this department for the same purposes.36

  Knight’s political views in the mid-1920s had more in common with those of the British Fascisti, renamed the British Fascists (BF) in 1924, than he was later willing to acknowledge. Like a majority of the BF, however, his views were those of die-hard conservatives rather than the radical right. A young MI5 officer who served under him after the Second World War later recalled that Knight ‘had no time for democracy and believed the country should be ruled by the social élite’.37 That social elite included the Duke of Northumberland, who had provided hospitality for Kell during his convalescence in the last summer of the war38 and went on to become one of the founders of the Fascisti.39 In 1924 Knight became assistant chief of staff as well as director of intelligence of the BF, then about 100,000 strong; his Fascist connections in the 1920s later assisted his successful penetration of the more extreme British Union of Fascists and the Right Club during the 1930s. The first of his three wives, Miss G. E. A. Poole, whom he married in 1925, was the director of the BF Women’s Units.40 In the mid-1920s, on Knight’s instructions, six British Fascists posing as Communists succeeded in joining the Party to work as penetration agents for Makgill’s IIB. Knight’s most important recruit while working for the British Fascists, a Communist student, continued to work for him (and later for MI5) for over thirty years.41

  Knight claimed in a report in 1933, two years after he had joined MI5, that the early British Fascist groups were ‘fundame
ntally constitutional’: ‘It can be confidently said that at no time between 1923–1927 was there any intention on the part of the British Fascisti to act in any unconstitutional manner, nor to usurp the functions of the properly constituted authorities.’42 Admiration for Benito Mussolini’s supposed achievements in Italy during the 1920s had nothing like the significance that it acquired in the 1930s. Winston Churchill called Mussolini ‘the saviour of his country’. Sir Austen Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary in the Conservative governments of 1924 to 1929, felt ‘confident that he is a patriot and a sincere man’. Even Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, sent Mussolini friendly letters even while he was destroying the Italian Socialist Party. Mussolini made much of his friendship with British statesmen and their wives. In 1925 he ordered one and a half million postcards showing himself in conversation with Lady Chamberlain, and distributed them all over Italy.43 Though Knight’s early enthusiasm for Mussolini’s victory over Italian Bolshevism was widely shared by mainstream conservatives, however, he had a number of more extreme Fascist acquaintances, if not friends, during the 1920s whose opinions must later have embarrassed him. He was recommended to Desmond Morton of SIS, later Churchill’s intelligence adviser, by the right-wing anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Mrs Nesta Webster.44

  Lacking his own directly controlled agent network, Kell kept a reserve list of former members of MI5 for use in emergencies.45 In order to keep in touch with retirees and other former MI5 officers Kell founded the IP (Intelligence and Police) dining club, which continued to meet until the Second World War.46 During the General Strike, called by the TUC on 3 May 1926 ‘in defence of miners’ wages and hours’, the War Office department MI(B), which was given a major role in both intelligence co-ordination and intelligence collection during the strike, consisted entirely of (mostly retired) MI5 officers under Kell’s deputy Holt-Wilson. The return of the retirees gave MI5 once again, though only temporarily, the resources to run agents. Five agents were sent by MI(B) to investigate reports of Communist subversion in and around the Aldershot military base, and reported, after visiting local pubs: ‘In most cases, when political arguments were started the soldiers finished their beer and left at once.’ The ‘ordinary working men and labourers’ in Aldershot, as well as the soldiers, ‘seemed to be perfectly loyal’.47

  One of the most resourceful agents employed by MI(B) succeeded in penetrating the offices of the Daily Herald, which was then jointly controlled by the TUC and the Labour Party.48 He pushed his way into the offices through ‘a gang of say 100 men’, knocked on a door bearing a sign ‘Committee meeting’, and was allowed in by ‘two stalwarts’. Inside he found ‘18 men sitting on chairs lined round the wall. Hoping not to be identified as an intruder, the agent asked a ‘darkish fellow’, who was taking minutes, if his name was Blackadder. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘Blackadder has gone up to the Central Committee.’ As the agent turned to go, the ‘darkish fellow’ stood up and demanded, ‘Who are you?’

  I said, ‘Alright comrade, I am P.B. correspondent of the I.I.’ He said, ‘You will find Williams next door; go to see him. He may give you some news.’

  It is uncertain what, if anything, a ‘P.B. correspondent’ was and whether the ‘I.I.’ news corporation actually existed. On his way out the agent saw Williams’s wife and asked her, ‘Have you any news?’ ‘Well the men are solid to a man,’ she replied. ‘They will not go back unless they are taken back in their old places.’49 In reality the TUC quickly realized that it could not win. The General Strike was called off after ten days, and Kell wrote proudly to MI5 staff: ‘I desire to thank all Officers and their Staffs, also the Ladies of the Office, for their splendid work and co-operation during the General Strike. The manner in which all hands have put their shoulders to the wheel shows that the ancient war-traditions of M.I.5 remained unimpaired.’50

  Despite the success with which former members of the Service on Kell’s reserve list had been reintegrated during the General Strike, the fortunes of MI5 were at a low ebb. Lack of resources led at the end of 1926 to the loss of one of MI5’s ablest officers, Major (later Sir) Joseph Ball, the head of B Branch, which during the post-war cutbacks had taken over responsibility for investigations. Ball had joined MI5 in July 1915 after a decade at Scotland Yard, dealing mainly with aliens. He was also a barrister, having passed top of the Bar final exams, and spent much of the war questioning prisoners, internees, suspects and aliens.51 Ball’s decision to leave MI5 at the end of 1926 seems to have been related to dissatisfaction over pay and prospects. He had complained in 1925 that his pay and pension would both have been higher had he remained at New Scotland Yard.52 In March 1927 the Conservative Party chairman, J. C. C. (later Viscount) Davidson, recruited Ball to help run ‘a little intelligence service of our own’, distinct from the main Central Office organization:

  We had agents in certain key centres and we also had agents actually in the Labour Party Headquarters, with the result that we got their reports on political feeling in the country as well as our own. We also got advance ‘pulls’ of their literature. This we arranged with Odhams Press, who did most of the Labour Party printing, with the result that we frequently received copies of their leaflets and pamphlets before they reached Transport House [the Labour HQ]. This was of enormous value to us because we were able to study the Labour Party policy in advance, and in the case of leaflets we could produce a reply to appear simultaneously with their production.53

  In 1930 Ball was appointed first director of the new Conservative Research Department, becoming a confidant of the future Party leader Neville Chamberlain.54

  An in-house history of MI5 later concluded that midway between the wars: ‘The pay was small and the prospects such as to make no appeal except to a small number of officers with private incomes. The work itself was light and no one in authority in the War Office or elsewhere was closely interested.’55 With slender resources and little influence in Whitehall, MI5 made only modest strides in strengthening protective security (later defined as ‘all aspects of security that exist for the protection of classified information viz. personnel, physical, documentary, communications and technical security’).56 The first recorded interdepartmental protective-security committee meeting took place on 29 July 1926 under Kell’s chairmanship. It was convened as the result of two burglaries in the Cabinet Office, at least one with the apparent aim of purloining classified documents. The meeting’s notions of protective security were limited to recommending elementary security measures such as improved control of access to government buildings and the provision of steel cupboards for housing classified documents. There was no further interdepartmental discussion of protective security until 1938.57 Even in MI5 headquarters, protective security was primitive by today’s standards. One former employee later recalled that when she joined the Service from Scotland Yard in 1931:

  Security was almost non-existent. No one was vetted on joining. In most cases staff were recruited on the basis of knowing someone already employed, though in my case I came in through St James’ Secretarial College which had a good reputation as it supplied Buckingham Palace with secretarial staff. No passes were issued and no one was on the door to let us in. The only instruction we were given on joining was that no one, not even our own families, should be told where we worked or for whom.58

  In 1929 MI5 had only thirteen officers (including Kell and Holt-Wilson)59 and two Branches (also known as Divisions):2 A, which was responsible for administration, personnel, records and ‘precautionary measures’ (later known as protective security); and B, which conducted ‘investigations and inquiries’. A Branch was headed by Major William A. Phillips, who had joined MI5 in 1917 after being wounded on the Western Front and was awarded an OBE for his work as military control officer for ten ports in the English Channel. Despite his injuries, he continued to list his recreations as shooting, fishing and ‘field sports in general’.60 According to an obituary after his death in 1933 at the age of only fortyseven, ‘His n
atural urbanity and capacity for making new and retaining old friendships in all circles peculiarly fitted him for his special duties.’61 Two of Phillips’s four section heads in A Branch were women (though neither had officer rank): Miss Mary Dicker, who ran the Registry as well as being controller of women staff, some of whom later remembered her as ‘very nice, rather beautiful’ and formidable;62 and Miss A. W. Masterton, who in the First World War had become the first female controller of finance in any government department.63

  The head of B Branch was the forty-three-year-old Oswald A. ‘Jasper’ Harker, who had spent the first fourteen years of his career in the Indian police, rising to become deputy commissioner at Bombay, before being invalided home in 1919, probably after a tropical illness. One of the attractions for Kell in taking on Harker, initially on loan from the India Office in 1920, at a time of heavy cutbacks, was that, until Harker formally resigned from the Indian police in 1923, he did not require a salary from MI5. On joining MI5 Harker gave his recreations as big-game hunting, riding and fishing.64 Secretarial staff and the Registry tended to find him an intimidating figure. One later recalled Harker as ‘a fearsome character’,65 another as ‘rank conscious’,66 a third as ‘good looking but not clever’.67 The six officers in Harker’s B Division included Jane Sissmore, formerly head of the Registry and MI5’s first woman officer. In 1929 she was responsible for Soviet intelligence and the only female staff member with an MBE.68 Sissmore later proved a formidable interrogator.69