Among the Security Service recruits in the few years before the Second World War were two future DGs, Dick White and Roger Hollis, neither of whom had the military background common to most Service officers. White also went on to become chief of SIS. After graduating in history from Christ Church, Oxford, where he won the Gladstone Memorial Exhibition and an athletics Blue, he had spent two years at American universities before becoming a sixth-form teacher at Whitgift School. White had attracted the attention of Malcolm Cumming who, before joining the Security Service in 1934, had met White while both were involved in running a British public school tour of Australia and New Zealand. Cumming, who had been educated at Eton and Sandhurst (‘recreations: riding, hunting, point-to-point racing’), told Harker that during the tour he had formed a ‘profound respect’ for White’s ‘ability and judgement’. Though White was likely to go to the top of the teaching profession, ‘. . . I happen to know he often wishes that his work was of a nature that could bring him into closer touch with current world affairs, which really form his natural interest.’111 Harker wrote to Kell in August 1935:
Re Dick White. I am sorry to have to worry you on your holiday but I have seen this young man and I think he is what we want . . . At first appearance, his manner is a little shy and diffident, but once you get over that, I think you will agree that he is a young man both of character and very wide travel experience for one so young.
The fact that Harker contacted Kell during his summer holiday indicates how closely the Director personally supervised recruitment. Harker assured Kell that White fully understood ‘that nothing is definite in any sense unless and until you have seen him and approved of him as a suitable candidate’.112 After being accepted by Kell, White spent several months in Munich and Berlin improving his German and building up an impressive range of German contacts before formally beginning work in the Security Service in January 1936.113
Roger Hollis joined the Security Service in June 1938, two and a half years after White. He came from a prominent Anglican family; both his father and elder brother were bishops. Hollis left Worcester College, Oxford, without taking his degree to begin a business career in the Far East. In 1937 he was advised to return to Britain for health reasons, and contacted the Security Service to say that he had been told there was a vacancy for ‘someone with a practical knowledge of the Far East’.114 Hollis struck his initial Service interviewer as ‘A rather nice quiet young man, whose only qualifications were a knowledge of the northern Chinese language and Chinese and Japanese commercial industry. ?Might perhaps be given a job.’115 Kell decided to recruit him.
By the time Hollis joined the Service, White had already demonstrated one quality which Kell conspicuously lacked – the ability to form close and friendly relationships with senior Whitehall officials. Malcolm Cumming had noted when recommending White: ‘I know from personal experience of the remarkably successful way in which Dick White dealt with Dominion Premiers and representatives of Government Departments, and that he was afterwards congratulated by the authorities upon his work.’116 Once in the Security Service, White quickly impressed the PUS at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, finding him ‘eager, sometimes over-eager’ to be briefed on the intelligence the Service was obtaining from within the German embassy.117
Despite White’s contacts with Vansittart, the Security Service during the 1930s was a more introverted agency than SIS. Kell was still a less influential figure within Whitehall than the far more clubbable Quex Sinclair, Chief of SIS. Sinclair’s surviving papers from the 1930s consist largely of elaborate menu cards from private dinners, some hosted by himself, at the Savoy and other exclusive locations. He treasured notes from appreciative guests such as Admiral Percy Noble, who thanked him for ‘the best dinner I have eaten in years’, and Admiral Bromley, who complimented him enthusiastically on his ‘excellent’ wines. ‘C’ could count on the support of the three most influential civil servants of the 1930s: Vansittart at the Foreign Office, Sir Maurice Hankey, cabinet secretary from 1916 to 1938, and Sir Warren Fisher, PUS at the Treasury and head of the civil service from 1919 to 1939. Together Vansittart, Hankey and Fisher composed the Secret Service Committee which had at least the notional responsibility for overseeing the intelligence services. When Sinclair fell ill in March 1939, well before it was clear that his illness would prove fatal, Fisher (who had, admittedly, a sometimes effusive epistolary style) wrote him an extraordinarily affectionate letter which began ‘Hugh dear’ and ended ‘Bless you, with love, Warren’.118 It is impossible to imagine Kell receiving a letter from Fisher which began ‘Vernon dear’.
Despite Kell’s low profile in Whitehall, there were signs during the 1930s that the Security Service was broadening its international horizons. With the rise of Hitler it attached greater importance to international liaison, especially with France.119 It also showed a growing sense of its imperial role – unsurprisingly for a service in which a high proportion of officers had served in India or elsewhere in the Empire. During the 1920S the Service’s most active imperial liaison had been with the Delhi Intelligence Bureau (DIB or IB), whose diminutive London office, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), was situated inside MI5’s headquarters. Among the chief topics on which MI5 exchanged intelligence with Delhi through the IPI were the secret CPGB couriers to India on which it had HOWs. The first, travelling to India in 1925 under the alias ‘R. Cochrane’, was Percy Glading (later jailed for spying in Britain for Soviet intelligence).120 Glading was followed in 1926 by George Allison (alias ‘Donald Campbell’), who was jailed in India in January 1927 for travelling on a forged passport.121 Next came Philip Spratt,122 one of the leading defendants accused of involvement in a Soviet-led plot to overthrow British rule during the long-drawn-out ‘Meerut Conspiracy’ trial which opened in 1929.
Despite the interchange of intelligence with Delhi during the 1920s, MI5 lacked the resources to maintain and develop the imperial connections it had created in the First World War. The tribulations of the first significant interwar MI5 mission to the Empire (or at least the first of which record survives), to assist in the Meerut Conspiracy trial in 1929, are evidence of the lack thus far of a direct working relationship between MI5 and DIB officers. The mission, headed by Holt-Wilson, included Frederick Booth, in charge of ‘special censorship’ at the GPO, and H. Burgess, head of the department which photographed intercepted correspondence. Holt-Wilson seems to have been well looked after in Delhi. Not so Booth and Burgess in Meerut. In November 1929 Burgess sent Holt-Wilson a despairing letter, reporting that he had been told by a representative of the DIB (then headed by the future director general Sir David Petrie) that the paperwork for funding the MI5 mission was ‘so confused and inaccurate that he thought it better not to pay over anything, but to refer the matter back to Delhi’. ‘No doubt’, Burgess concluded, ‘you will fully perceive the comedy and tragedy of the situation.’123
In February 1930, with the confusion apparently largely resolved, Holt-Wilson left Delhi for what seems to have been the most extensive official tour yet undertaken by a senior Security Service officer, visiting Calcutta, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Yokohama, Honolulu, San Francisco, Victoria, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and New York, before returning to Southampton at the start of May.124 In 1933, following the conclusion of the Meerut trial, in which all the main defendants were found guilty (though their sentences were reduced on appeal), Holt-Wilson returned to India to confer with the Delhi Intelligence Bureau on matters of imperial security.125 A year later he proudly proclaimed:
Our Security Service is more than national; it is Imperial. We have official agencies cooperating with us, under the direct instructions of the Dominions and Colonial Offices and the supervision of local Governors, and their chiefs of police, for enforcing security laws in every British Community overseas.
These all act under our guidance for security duties. It is our duty to advise them, when necessary, on all security measures necessary for defence
and civil purposes; and to exchange information regarding the movement within the Empire of individuals who are likely to be hostile to its interests from a security point of view.126
Holt-Wilson’s claim was essentially aspirational. With less than a hundred staff (only a quarter of whom were officers), the Service was simply too small to provide security supervision and guidance for an empire which covered a quarter of the globe. In the final years of peace, however, to counter the threat from the Rome–Berlin Axis and Comintern operations, the Security Service began posting permanent liaison officers to some British overseas territories. In 1937 MI5 established its first permanent defence security officer (DSO) abroad, in Cairo, followed in 1938 by DSOs in Palestine and Gibraltar.127 These three DSOs formed the basis of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), the inter-service MI5 liaison organization operating throughout the Middle East, officially under GHQ command. The first Cairo DSO, Robert Maunsell, became the first head of SIME. British wartime strategic deception was to originate not in the European theatre of conflict but in the Middle East.128 In the spring of 1938 Holt-Wilson went on another imperial tour with four weeks in Singapore and shorter stops in Malta, Aden, Port Said, Colombo, Bombay and Hong Kong.129 By the outbreak of war, MI5 had DSOs in Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong, each with a small staff seconded by the local military command.130 In the Second World War and the early Cold War the Security Service was to build the imperial security network to which Holt-Wilson had aspired in 1934.
1 The Secret Service Vote (increasingly referred to as the ‘SecretVote’), which fluctuated greatly in size, had been used to finance intelligence and other secret activities since the eighteenth century.
2 Within MI5 ‘branch’ and ‘division’ were often used interchangeably. In internal administrative documents ‘branch’ predominated until 1931, ‘division’ from 1931 to 1940, ‘branch’ in 1941–2 and ‘division’ from 1943 to 1950. From 1953 onwards the accepted term was ‘branch’.
3 MI5’s use of upper or lower case in the titles of branch sections (for example B1F or B1f) was inconsistent. Administrative documents tended to use lower case in the 1920s, both upper and lower case for much of the 1930s, and upper case from 1941 onwards.
1
The Red Menace in the 1920s
No Bolshevik had ever imagined that revolution in Russia could be other than part of a world (or at least European) revolutionary movement. The crumbling of the great empires of Central Europe during the final months of the First World War raised Lenin’s hopes to fever pitch. He wrote on 1 October 1918: ‘The international revolution has come so close within the course of one week that we may count on its outbreak during the next few days . . .’1 It is easy now to dismiss such confident predictions of revolution sweeping across Europe as hopelessly optimistic, as indeed they proved to be. At the time, however, they were taken seriously by some of the Bolsheviks’ opponents as well as by their supporters. ‘Bolshevism’, wrote President Woodrow Wilson soon after he arrived in Europe for the post-war peace negotiations, ‘is moving steadily westward, has overwhelmed Poland, and is poisoning Germany.’2
Western leaders saw Bolshevism seeping out of Russia, threatening religion, tradition, every tie that held their societies together. In Germany and Austria soviets of workers and soldiers were already seizing power in the cities and towns. Their own soldiers and sailors mutinied. Paris, Lyon, Brussels, Glasgow, San Francisco, even sleepy Winnipeg on the Canadian prairies had general strikes. Were these isolated outbreaks or flames from a vast underground fire?3
The founding of the Moscow-dominated Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919 was intended to fan the flames. ‘The whole of Europe’, wrote Lloyd George, ‘is filled with the spirit of revolution.’ Soviet republics were declared in Hungary on 21 March and in Bavaria on 7 April. Grigori Zinoviev, the president of Comintern, forecast that ‘within a year all Europe will be communist.’ But the Bolsheviks were forced to stand helplessly by as the Bavarian Soviet was crushed after less than a month and again as the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown in August.4 Despite these reverses, hopes and fears that Bolshevik rule would spread westward from its Russian base (consolidated during the Civil War of 1918–20) lingered for several years.
In post-war Britain Soviet subversion was initially seen as a greater threat than Soviet espionage. Until 1931 the responsibility for dealing with civilian ‘revolutionary movements’ belonged to Thomson’s Directorate of Intelligence and, after its demise, to the Special Branch. Kell was obliged to tell chief constables in 1925 that MI5 was’only concerned with Communism as it affects the Armed Forces of the Crown’. ‘Civil’ subversion was Thomson’s responsibility.5 MI5’s New Year card for 1920 showed the attractive figure of ‘Liberty and Security’ in diaphanous gown, holding aloft the torch of freedom and standing on a pedestal erected by the heroic efforts of British fighting and working men (stage right). But ‘Liberty and Security’ is menaced by an assortment of subversives (stage left): a defeated Hun in pumpernickel helmet (by now a reminder of past dangers rather than a present menace), the rebel Irish (a much smaller threat on the mainland than in Ireland) and Bolshevik revolutionaries. The main threat comes from the Bolsheviks, who are shown attempting to undermine the foundations of ‘Liberty and Security’. Kell draws an appropriate moral from the initials MIV (V = the roman numeral 5): ‘Malevolence Imposes Vigilance’. Lying full length at the bottom of MI5’s New Year card, keeping watch on the subversives, however, is a note-taking policeman, not an MI5 officer.
MI5’s first post-war investigation of possible subversion within the armed forces arose from the clumsily handled demobilization of the largest army in British history. The failure at the outset to adopt the simple principle ‘First in, first out’ bred a sense of injustice which erupted in mutinies at army camps in Calais and Folkestone. MI5 reports linking some of the troubles with pro-Soviet agitators led the War Office to circulate in February 1919 a ‘secret and urgent’ questionnaire to the commanding officers of all British military installations asking for information ‘without fail’ each week on the political sentiments of their forces ‘with a view to the establishment of an efficient intelligence service whereby the Army Council can keep its finger on the pulse of the troops’. COs were asked, inter alia, whether any ‘soldiers’ councils’ on the Soviet model had been formed; whether troops would ‘respond to orders for assistance to preserve the public peace’ and ‘assist in strike breaking’; and whether they would ‘parade for draft to overseas, especially to Russia’. The questionnaire, however, backfired. A copy was published in the socialist Daily Herald and produced, according to Thomson, ‘great resentment against the Government’.6 The attempt to distinguish between civil and military subversion, combined with the decision to make different agencies responsible for dealing with them, was a recipe for organizational confusion. As the Secret Service Committee belatedly acknowledged in 1925:
MI5’s New Year card for 1920.
A Communist, working in naval or military circles at Portsmouth or Aldershot, may spend his Sundays making revolutionary speeches in Hyde Park. The former of these occupations is a matter for research by MI5; his week-end relaxations bring him into the preserve of the Special Branch.7
The Second Comintern Congress, which met in Moscow in the summer of 1920, established ‘twenty-one conditions’ for membership, mostly drafted by Lenin, imposing something approximating to military discipline on the infant CPGB as on all other member parties. Labour leaders had good reason to describe the CPGB as ‘intellectual slaves of Moscow’. But the servitude was freely, even joyously, entered into. A critical British delegate wrote after his return from the Comintern Congress: ‘It is fairly evident that to many Communists Russia is not a country to learn from, but a sacrosanct Holy of Holies to grovel before . . .’ The ‘twenty-one conditions’ required total and unconditional support of Soviet Russia by illegal as well as legal means, including ‘systematic propaganda and agitation in the armed force
s and the organisation of Communist cells in every military unit. This work by Communists will for the most part have to be conducted illegally.’ The Soviet-dominated executive committee of Comintern took care at regular intervals to spell out to member parties what was expected of them.8
Kell viewed Comintern’s commitment to military subversion with peculiar horror. During the war DORA Regulation 42 had made ‘any act calculated or likely to cause mutiny, sedition or disaffection among any of His Majesty’s forces’ punishable by life imprisonment (or death if the act was intended to assist an enemy). To Kell’s dismay the Commons rejected an attempt to embody this draconian legislation in the 1919 Army Act on the sensible grounds that it would tend to stifle legitimate criticism of the peacetime armed forces. He denounced the lack of legislation specifically directed against civilian attempts to stir up ‘disaffection in the services’ as ‘a serious gap in our national armour’. The gap was not filled until 1934.9 In 1920 and again in 1921 MI5 investigated about ninety-five cases of ‘suspected communism’ in the armed forces (of which about sixty were in the army).10
Kell claimed that MI5’s responsibility for military counter-subversion required it to keep track of civilian pro-Bolshevik movements, since it was these which were attempting to subvert the armed forces. Between the wars more MI5 resources were devoted to the surveillance and investigation of the CPGB than of any other target. MI5 followed the formation of the British Communist Party in 1920 with as close attention as its declining resources allowed, and studied the product of HOWs on its most influential leaders: among them Harry Pollitt,11 David Ramsey,12 Robert ‘Robby’ Robson,13 John Campbell14 and Robert ‘Bob’ Stewart.15 MI5 also monitored known Communist front organizations in Britain, such as the National Minority Movement in the trade unions, as well as organizations with Communist affiliations, including Collet’s Book Shop in London.16 In October 1920 the US military attaché reported to Washington the ‘considerable irritation’ felt by Sir Basil Thomson at MI5’s encroachment on what he regarded as his territory.17 The deputy military attaché added in December:
The Defence of the Realm Page 20
