The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  In the aftermath of Invergordon both MI5 and the service ministries viewed with peculiar horror the crude tracts prepared by the CPGB for distribution to the armed forces. Their basic message was summed up in the Soldier’s Voice call to class war in May 1932: ‘Let us use the knowledge of arms which they give us, when the opportunity presents itself, to overthrow their rule, and in unity with our fellow workers, to establish free socialist Britain.’15 The young Bristol Communist Douglas Hyde, later news editor of the Daily Worker, recalled how bundles of Soldier’s Voice were ‘smuggled down from London’ to be dropped by night over the wall of the local barracks: ‘Since the risks were high, volunteers were called for, who then drew lots. I volunteered but drew a blank. The unlucky one that night was caught in the act and disappeared into the neighbouring jail for eighteen months.’16 The Security Service read Soldier’s Voice more attentively than the Bristol soldiers.17

  Early in 1933 new ‘information of the highest importance’, probably from one of Knight’s agents in the CPGB,18 threw ‘a flood of fresh light’ on Comintern plans for ‘seducing the Armed Forces of the Crown from their allegiance’.19 The Security Service was able to use this information to strengthen its hitherto ineffective campaign, begun after the First World War, for new legislation to discourage subversion in the armed forces.20 On 18 October the cabinet considered the first draft of an Incitement to Disaffection Bill together with a memorandum signed by the Home Secretary and the service ministers:

  The primary object of the Bill was to provide a summary method of dealing with attempts to seduce members of His Majesty’s Forces from their duty and allegiance, the second main object being to empower Justices of the Peace to grant search warrants where they are satisfied that there is reasonable ground for suspecting that an offence under the Bill has been committed.21

  Extract from the Red Signal, a Communist tract distributed to naval ratings in September 1933 which the DPP considered an incitement to mutiny.

  The Bill made its first appearance in the Commons on 10 April 1934. At the second reading six days later the Liberal Isaac Foot (father of the future Labour leader Michael Foot) asked ‘what evidence there is that a single soldier has been influenced in his allegiance or that a single sailor has done more than deride these wonderful papers, “The Soldier’s Voice” and “The Red Signal” . . .’. None was produced. The National Government’s huge parliamentary majority ensured none the less that the Bill became law before the year’s end. To the surprise of both its opponents and its supporters, it led to only one prosecution before the Second World War.22

  The most serious subversive threat in time of war was sabotage. M15 and the Special Branch jointly reported in 1930:

  It is an indisputable fact that the British Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, is endeavouring by every means possible, to make such preparations that, in the event of war being declared by this country or in the event of a general mobilisation for war against Russia, chosen members of the Party should carry out previously arranged plans of sabotage. Definite orders have been issued from Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain that, in the event of a declaration of war, workers must be able to frustrate the campaign by general disorganisation.

  The main focus of MI5 concerns about preparations for sabotage was the Soviet trading organization Russian Oil Products (ROP), which had been established as a British limited-liability company in 1924. MI5 noted in the following year that all its shareholders were Russian nationals. Among prominent Party members in contact with ROP was Willie Gallacher. MI5 and the Special Branch calculated in 1930 that ROP had almost a thousand employees, about one-third of whom were members of the CPGB, and had built up a network of thirty-three offices, depots and installations across the UK.23 Holt-Wilson reported to the Committee of Imperial Defence that parts of the ROP network were located dangerously close to what was later called Britain’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), especially fuel-storage depots.24 If war broke out with the Soviet Union, MI5 believed there was a danger that ROP lorry tankers would be driven to British fuel or munitions depots and detonated. In 1934 the Home Office agreed to a Security Service proposal that, in an ‘emergency’ or international crisis, the movements of the tankers should be made subject to police regulation. Because of the additional danger that ROP ship tankers could be detonated in British ports, port authorities were asked to keep them under close supervision.25

  Security Service investigations into ROP extended to counter-espionage as well as protective security.26 The priority given by Soviet intelligence to the use of ROP as a front for scientific and technological intelligence operations is indicated by the amount of money spent on it. A combined MI5 and Special Branch analysis of ROP finances in 1930 calculated that it was run at a loss of £370,000 to £390,000 per annum.27 The Security Service reported in 1932 that ‘one of the principal comrades who acts as liaison between ROP and the Party’ was Percy Glading,28 later convicted of espionage at the Woolwich Arsenal.29 ROP provided a sophisticated front for the increasing Soviet scientific and technological intelligence operations of the 1930s: among them probably the first Russian use in Britain of the ‘false flag’ technique, where a recruiter working for one agency claims to represent another. In September 1932 an employee of the ROP Bristol branch was discovered to be posing (under the alias ‘Olsen’) as a Romanian journalist reporting on the British oil industry, in an attempt to obtain commercial secrets from employees of the Shell Mex Company in London.30 The Security Service obtained an HOW on ‘Olsen’s’ address, which revealed that his real name was Joseph Volkovich Volodarsky. In November 1932 he pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to bribe a Shell employee and was fined £50.31 In 1933 Volodarsky left Britain for North America, where he helped to provide false identity documents for the Soviet illegal2 Willy Brandes before his posting to London.32

  Potentially the most important suspected Soviet spy investigated by the Security Service during the early 1930s was the distinguished Russian physicist and future Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa, who in 1924 had come to work at the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and was elected a fellow of Trinity College. The Security Service had good reason to be suspicious of Kapitsa. Its surveillance of ARCOS, whose activities provided cover for Soviet espionage, revealed that Kapitsa was in contact with it; SIS reported that ARCOS had provided funding for his research. An informant in Trinity College also revealed that Kapitsa was in close contact with the leading Cambridge Communist Maurice Dobb,33 later the Trinity undergraduate Kim Philby’s economics supervisor and an important influence on him. It was to Dobb that Kim Philby turned on his last day in Cambridge for advice on how best to devote his life to the Communist cause.34 In 1931 the Security Service obtained an HOW on Kapitsa’s correspondence. In the same year, Guy Liddell had a secret meeting with an informant in the Cavendish Laboratory who, perhaps prompted partly by professional jealousy, claimed that Kapitsa was a Soviet spy.35 Kapitsa’s contact with the Communist Andrew Rothstein, who was then involved in recruiting agents to supply scientific and technological espionage, also seemed suspicious. In June 1934 an intercepted telegram from Moscow revealed that Rothstein had been instructed to obtain information from Kapitsa on his ‘new plant for the dilution of helium’. A month later a Security Service report on Kapitsa noted that the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, and members of his staff were ‘making mysterious motor-car drives to Cambridge and other neighbouring towns’.36

  Though there were reasonable grounds at the time for suspicion by the Security Service, it now seems highly unlikely that Kapitsa was engaged in espionage in the Cavendish Laboratory. His willingness to talk about his own research and discuss that of his colleagues was an accepted part of Western scientific culture whose absence, despite his support for the Soviet regime, he bemoaned in Russia. The main purpose of the contacts with him by the Soviet embassy in London in the summer of 1934 was probably to persuade him to visit Moscow. When Kapitsa did so i
n the autumn, he was deeply dismayed to be prevented from returning to the Cavendish. It was another two years before he was able to resume the research he had been carrying out at Cambridge in low-temperature physics and magnetism.37

  The Security Service was entirely unaware that, at the very moment when its understandable but unfounded suspicions of Kapitsa reached their peak in the summer of 1934, the most successful agent-recruitment campaign ever conducted by Soviet intelligence in Britain was just beginning, with Cambridge University as its main target. In June 1934 Kim Philby, who had graduated from Trinity College in the previous year with the conviction that ‘my life must be devoted to Communism’, had his first meeting with his Soviet controller. He spent most of the year after graduation in Vienna working for the Communist-backed International Workers Relief Organization and acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party. While in Vienna he met and married a young Communist divorcee, Litzi (or ‘Lizzy’, as Philby called her) Friedmann, after a brief but passionate love affair which included his first experience of making love in the snow (‘actually quite warm, once you got used to it’, he later recalled). In May 1934, they returned to live in London.38 Not until almost thirty years later, on the eve of defecting to Moscow, did Philby at last admit how he had been recruited:

  The photograph in MI5 files from which Philby later discovered the real name of the charismatic recruiter of the Cambridge Five and other Soviet agents, Dr Arnold Deutsch. Deutsch’s attention to his own personal security was sometimes slipshod: but for his recall from Britain late in 1937 he might well have been caught by MI5.

  . . . Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a ‘man of decisive importance’. I questioned her about it but she would give me no details. The rendezvous took place in Regents Park. The man described himself as Otto. I discovered much later from a photograph in MI5 files that the name he went by was Arnold Deutsch. I think that he was of Czech origin; about 5ft 7in, stout, with blue eyes and light curly hair. Though a convinced Communist, he had a strong humanistic streak. He hated London, adored Paris, and spoke of it with deeply loving affection. He was a man of considerable cultural background.

  Otto spoke at great length, arguing that a person with my family background and possibilities could do far more for Communism than the run-of-the-mill Party member or sympathiser . . . I accepted. His first instructions were that both Lizzy and I should break off as quickly as possible all personal contact with our Communist friends.39

  Philby became the first of the ‘Cambridge Five’, the ablest group of British agents ever recruited by a foreign intelligence service.

  Deutsch, whose role as a Soviet intelligence officer was not discovered by the Security Service until 1940,40 well after he had left England for the last time, had an even more outstanding academic record than any of the Cambridge Five. Though, as Philby recalled, he was of Czech origin, his parents had moved to Austria when he was a child. At Vienna University he had progressed in only five years from undergraduate entry to the degree of PhD with distinction. Deutsch’s description of himself in university documents throughout his student career as an observant Jew (mosaisch) was probably designed to conceal his membership of the Communist Party. Though his doctorate was in chemistry, he had also taken courses in psychology and philosophy. After being awarded the PhD, he had, remarkably, combined secret work for Comintern and the OGPU with open collaboration with the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, who was then engaged in an attempt to synthesize the work of Marx and Freud and later earned a probably undeserved reputation as ‘the prophet of the better orgasm’. Deutsch publicly assisted Reich in the ‘sex-pol’ (sexual politics) movement, which ran clinics designed to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers, and founded a small publishing house, Münster Verlag (Dr Arnold Deutsch), to publish Reich’s work and sex-pol literature. At the time when he moved to London in April 1934, Deutsch was under surveillance by the ‘anti-pornography’ section of the Vienna police.41 Even if, during Deutsch’s period in England, the Security Service had known of his earlier involvement with Reich and the sex-pol movement, it would probably have regarded his unusual career as improbable cover for a Soviet spy.

  Deutsch had the lead role in recruiting the Cambridge Five.42 The key to his success, apart from his flair as an agent-runner, was his new recruitment strategy, endorsed by the Centre (Soviet intelligence headquarters), based on the cultivation of young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power:

  Given that the Communist movement in these universities is on a mass scale and that there is a constant turnover of students, it follows that individual Communists whom we pluck out of the Party will pass unnoticed, both by the Party itself and by the outside world. People forget about them. And if at some time they do remember that they were once Communists, this will be put down to a passing fancy of youth, especially as those concerned are scions of the bourgeoisie. It is up to us to give the individual recruit a new [non-Communist] political personality.

  Since the universities of Oxford and Cambridge provided a disproportionate number of Whitehall’s highest fliers, it was plainly logical to target Oxbridge rather than the less ancient redbrick English universities. The decision to begin the new recruitment in Cambridge rather than Oxford was due largely to chance: the fact that Philby, the first potential recruit to come to Deutsch’s attention, whom he codenamed SÖHNCHEN (‘Sonny’), was a Cambridge graduate.43

  Half a century later, after his defection to Moscow, Philby still remembered his first meeting with Deutsch as ‘amazing’:

  He was a marvellous man. Simply marvellous. I felt that immediately. And [the feeling] never left me . . . The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment . . . And he had a marvellous sense of humour.44

  Though Deutsch had trained in Moscow as an OGPU illegal with the alias ‘Stefan Lange’,45 he used his real name and nationality with the immigration authorities when arriving in England, probably so that he could use his cousin Oscar Deutsch, the millionaire owner of the Odeon cinema chain, as a referee.46 (Though the name of the chain was derived from the Greek odeion (concert hall), the spelling was adapted to form an acronym for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’.) Arnold Deutsch’s Home Office file does not survive,47 but it is clear that there was nothing on file to attract suspicion to him from the immigration authorities. Apart from the backing of his millionaire cousin, he was academically very well qualified for postgraduate work at London University which provided ideal cover for his intelligence work as well as giving him first-hand experience of British university life. From October 1934 to January 1936, he took (but did not complete) the Psychology Diploma course at University College London, which would have qualified him to move on to a PhD.48 Though the name of his postgraduate supervisor is not recorded,49 later Security Service investigations suggest that it may well have been the controversial head of the Psychology Department at London University, Professor Cyril Burt (later knighted), whom Deutsch used as a referee.50

  Deutsch’s initial reports to the Centre on Philby, who he believed needed ‘constant encouragement’, reflected his interest in psychology as well as his intelligence training:

  SÖHNCHEN comes from a peculiar family. His father [currently adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia] is considered at present to be the most distinguished expert on the Arab world . . . He is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son. He repressed all his son’s desires. That is why SÖHNCHEN is a very timid and irresolute person. He has a bit of a stammer and this increases his diffidence . . . However, he handles our money very carefully. He enjoys great love and respect for his seriousness and honesty. He was ready, without questioning, to do anything for us and has shown all his seriousness and diligence working for us.51

  De
utsch asked Philby to recommend some of his Cambridge contemporaries. His first two nominations were Donald Maclean, who had just graduated from Trinity Hall with first-class honours in modern languages, and Guy Burgess of Trinity College, who was working on a history PhD thesis which he was never to complete. By the end of 1934, with Philby’s help, Deutsch had recruited both, telling them – like Philby – to distance themselves from Communist friends. Burgess did so with characteristic flamboyance, becoming personal assistant in the following year to the right-wing Conservative MP Captain ‘Jack’ Macnamara, with whom he went on ‘fact-finding’ missions to Nazi Germany which, according to Burgess, were largely devoted to sexual escapades with gay members of the Hitler Youth.52

  At the very moment when the recruitment of the Cambridge Five was beginning, the Security Service was actively investigating Pyotr Kapitsa. Identifying Cambridge’s most militant student Communists at the same time would not have been difficult had the Service realized they were being targeted by Soviet intelligence. A generation later, after Philby, Maclean and Burgess had all defected to Moscow, the Service obtained, by means unknown, the minute book for the period 1928 to 1935 of Cambridge’s main student Communist organization, the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS), which usually met in Trinity College.53 The minutes record that Maclean, the son of a former Liberal minister, was elected a committee member during his first year at Trinity Hall in 1931 and later put in charge of CUSS publicity at a meeting when ‘Members created a precedent in Cambridge by singing the Internationale and other songs vociferously.’ Philby was elected treasurer of the Society in 1932.54 He reported in March 1933, three months before graduating, that ‘the financial position of the Society was very insecure and that a deficit was in prospect owing to the fact that very few fresh members had joined in the present term.’ He remained in active contact with CUSS after graduation. A committee meeting in March 1934 considered ‘a . . . letter from H. A. R. Philby appealing for support’ for persecuted Austrian workers. It was agreed that a collection would be taken, and Guy Burgess was one of two CUSS militants put in charge of managing a fund to respond to Philby’s appeal.55 The Security Service, however, carried out no serious investigation into CUSS. Given the Service’s small size and limited resources, it is perhaps understandable that student Communist groups should have been considered too low a priority to merit active investigation.