The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The response to Kell’s letter suggests that no serious thought had been given in Whitehall to the future management of the Security Service. Cadogan passed the letter on to Sir Warren Fisher, head of the civil service and chairman of the Security Service Committee, with the comment that Kell seemed ‘active enough to carry on his present work efficiently, though one cannot of course tell how long that will continue to be the case. I should be quite content to see him continue for as long as he can . . .’15 Fisher saw Kell in January 1939 and agreed that he should stay on, apparently on the yearly contract he had proposed.16 A year later, however, Kell was in declining health and finding it difficult to cope with the huge increase in wartime work.17

  Among the clearest evidence of Kell’s shortcomings was his failure to learn from his own past experience. He made no serious preparation for the rapid recruitment which the experience of the First World War should have taught him would follow the outbreak of the Second. According to a later report by his main wartime successor, Sir David Petrie:

  When the war broke out, each officer ‘tore around’ to rope in likely people; when they knew of none themselves, they asked their acquaintances. Occasionally recruits who were brought in knew of other ‘possibles’. Various Ministries also contributed surplus staff. In much the same way, retired officers came to notice, and new people continued to be got by the same processes . . . If I am correctly informed, there have been cases in which recruits have been taken on by divisions (or sections) without so much as informing Administration.18

  Though somewhat chaotic, ‘tearing around’ by MI5 officers succeeded in bringing into the Service a remarkable array of academic, legal and other talent. Dick White recruited his former history tutor at Christ Church, (Sir) J. C. Masterman, later vice chancellor of Oxford University.19 Guy Liddell’s recruits included the brilliant young zoologist Victor (third Baron) Rothschild, heir to a banking dynasty, an accomplished jazz pianist and one of Britain’s most gifted polymaths, who was assembling the finest collection of eighteenth-century English books and manuscripts in private hands. Rothschild founded MI5’s first counter-sabotage department (B1C) in a cell in Wormwood Scrubs, as well as maintaining a laboratory at his own expense. He in turn talent-spotted a friend he had first met at Trinity College, Cambridge: the leading (though traitorous) art historian Anthony Blunt. Rothschild’s first wife asked early in their marriage whether it was really necessary to invite Blunt so frequently to dinner. ‘Darling,’ replied Rothschild, ‘you are talking of a saint.’20 MI5’s wartime recruits from the law included six future judges – Patrick Barry, Edward Cussen, Helenus ‘Buster’ Milmo, Henry ‘Toby’ Pilcher, Edward Blanchard Stamp and John Stephenson – as well as a series of other able barristers and solicitors. Among the solicitors was Martin Furnival Jones, who went on to become director general of MI5 from 1965 to 1972.21 One of the barristers, Sir Ashton Roskill QC, later commented that the overall calibre of the wartime recruits was ‘too high’.22 In retrospect Dick White agreed. ‘In the national interest’, he told Masterman, ‘I think that we appropriated too much talent. The demand for men of ability in other departments was enormous and perhaps we were a bit greedy.’23

  The number of officers in the Security Service grew from thirty-six in July 1939 to 102 in January 1940 (not including Security Control personnel in ports), 230 in January 1941, 307 in January 1942 and a wartime peak of 332 in January 1943. Secretarial and Registry staff increased from 133 in July 1939 to 334 in January 1940 (not including Security Control personnel in ports), 617 in January 1941, 934 in January 1942 and a wartime peak of 939 in January 1943.24 Security Control officers at ports grew steadily throughout the war from twenty-nine in September 1939 to 117 in May 1943 and 206 in April 1945.25 There was also a significant expansion in MI5’s imperial presence. At the outbreak of war it had six defence security officers (DSOs) permanently stationed abroad, in Cairo, Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong. By the end of hostilities in 1945 the total number of Security Service officers in the Empire and Commonwealth had risen to twenty-seven, supported by twenty-one secretaries despatched from London.26

  There was no wartime expansion, however, in the number of female MI5 officers. At the outbreak of war, the Security Service had only one such officer: Jane Archer (née Sissmore), its main Soviet expert, who married the Service’s RAF liaison officer, Wing Commander John ‘Joe’ Archer, during the lunch-hour on the day before war was declared.27 Her interrogation of the Russian defector Walter Krivitsky, early in 1940, was a model of its kind the first really professional debriefing of a Soviet intelligence officer on either side of the Atlantic.28 In November 1940, however, she was sacked after denouncing the incompetence of Kell’s successor as director, Jasper Harker.29 Though Guy Liddell believed that Archer ‘had unfortunately gone too far’, he had no doubt that Harker was mainly to blame: ‘but for his incompetence, the situation would never have arisen, and he had, moreover, over a period of many years, encouraged frank criticism from Jane Archer.’30 Harker was himself replaced a few months later. Archer moved on to SIS.31 No other woman was given officer rank for the remainder of the war, even if a substantial number performed officers’ jobs. Though the surviving evidence is fragmentary, new regulations introduced in 1941 (for which the then Director General, Sir David Petrie, bore ultimate responsibility) seem to have made it impossible for women to be promoted to officer rank.32

  Women continued to be actively employed as agents. The Security Service’s leading pre-war penetration agent in the CPGB had been Olga Gray, run by Maxwell Knight.33 Early in the Second World War, Knight succeeded in placing three female agents (among them his secretary, Joan Miller, who lived with him for several years)34 in the pro-Nazi Right Club, some of whose members identified themselves by the initials ‘P.J.’ (‘Perish Judah’).35 Knight’s section also ran a number of women, employed by London embassies and diplomats suspected of assisting the Nazi cause. Among them was an agent described as an ‘exceptionally capable, reliable and discreet woman’, who between 1941 and 1945 worked for, and reported on, employers of six different nationalities.36 Knight appears to have been the first MI5 officer to put on paper his views ‘On the subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents’. Female agents, he argued, should ‘not be markedly oversexed or undersexed’:

  It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex.

  What is required is a clever woman who can use her personal attractions wisely. Nothing is easier than for a woman to gain a man’s confidence by the showing and expression of a little sympathy. This cannot be done by an undersexed woman. However, it is important to stress that I am no believer in what may be described as Mata-Hari methods. I am convinced that more information has been obtained by women agents by keeping out of the arms of the man, than was ever obtained by sinking too willingly into them.

  . . . It is frequently alleged that women are less discreet than men: that they are ruled by their emotions, and not by their brains: that they rely on intuition rather than on reason; and that Sex will play an unsettling and dangerous role in their work. My own experience has been very much to the contrary. During the present war, M.S. [Knight’s department] has investigated probably hundreds of cases of ‘loose-talk’: in by far the greater proportion of these cases the offenders were men. In my submission this is due to one principal factor: it is that indiscretions are committed from conceit. Taking him generally, Man is a conceited creature, while Woman is a vain creature: conceit and vanity are not the same. A man’s conceit will often lead him to indiscretion, in an endeavour to build himself up among his fellow men, or even to impress a woman: women, being vain rather than conceited, find their outlet for this form of self-expression in their personal experience, dress etc.37

  Wrongly believing at the outbreak of war that it faced a far more dangerous challenge from German intelligence than in the First World War, the Security Servi
ce was deeply frustrated at having to spend most of its time dealing with enemy aliens in Britain rather than with counterespionage. Government policy for most of the First World War, though not always enforced, had been to intern all enemy aliens unless they could prove that they presented no threat.38 The Service favoured the same policy at the beginning of the Second World War, largely because it saw no practicable alternative.39 With a mere thirty-six officers in July 1939, rising to only 102 by January 1940, it lacked the resources required to distinguish rapidly those enemy aliens who posed a potential threat to national security from those who did not. Two days before the declaration of war, however, the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, informed the Service that, instead of mass internment, tribunals would be set up to review individually the cases of all male enemy aliens over the age of sixteen.40 Four hundred and fifteen enemy aliens were arrested immediately under the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act of September 1939, and all others were required to report to the police. By the end of the year 120 tribunals had divided resident German and Austrian nationals into three categories. The 569 placed in Category A were interned; the 6,800 in Category B were made subject to restrictions such as curfews and limitations on their movements; those in Category C (64,000) were subject to no restriction.41 The Service, wrote Jack Curry, was given ‘the impossible task of obtaining concrete evidence against individual enemy aliens, and this process contributed to overwhelm it in a mass of detailed enquiries.’42 Liddell complained that much of the evidence it did collect was ignored:

  The proceedings were laughable . . . Our records were not consulted, except to a small extent in the metropolitan area; the Chairmen had no standards and no knowledge of the political background of those who came before them; no record[s] of the proceedings were kept.43

  In December 1939, by Liddell’s jaundiced calculations, four-fifths of MI5’s time was spent dealing with the alien population, leaving it with inadequate resources to investigate the potentially serious threat from German espionage.44 The refusal of successive home secretaries to authorize HOWs on British Fascists, and the consequent lack of Security Service eavesdropping on them, had left the Service, as Curry later acknowledged, with ‘no definite knowledge whether there was any organized connection between the German Secret Service and Nazi sympathisers in this country, whether British or alien nationality’.45

  By the time Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940, the dramatic growth in the demands placed on the Security Service had brought its administration close to collapse. Kell had failed to heed the warning contained in an MI5 report at the end of the First World War that in the next war it would be deluged with ‘a flood of paper’. Even had Kell been more far-sighted, however, his pre-war budget was too small to have funded adequate preparations for wartime conditions. During the second quarter of 1940 MI5 received, on average, 8,200 requests a week from newly security-conscious government departments for the vetting of individuals and the issue of exit permits. Curry later described some of the demands made on the Service as ‘almost Gilbertian’ in their bureaucratic absurdity - such as the attempt to insist that it vet individually all enemy aliens (even in Category C) who were permitted to post parcels abroad.46

  Government policy on internment changed dramatically as a result of Germany’s six-week conquest of France and the Low Countries. The extraordinary rapidity of the German victory was mistakenly ascribed, in part, to large ‘fifth columns’ supposedly working behind the lines. Sir Nevile Bland, the British minister in the Netherlands, cited a report, reminiscent of the spy scares of the First World War, that a German maid had led paratroopers to one of their targets. Bland warned that Britain faced the same danger from the ‘enemy in our midst’: ‘Every German or Austrian servant, however superficially charming and devoted, is a real and grave menace . . .’ There was, he claimed, a fifth column of enemy aliens in Britain who, when the signal was given, would ‘at once embark on widespread sabotage and attacks on the civilians and the military indiscriminately’. Bland’s warning was taken seriously. When his report was presented to the War Cabinet by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, on 15 May, Churchill, now Prime Minister, declared that ‘urgent action’ was required.47 A Home Intelligence report to the Ministry of Information concluded on 5 June: ‘Fifth Column hysteria is reaching dangerous proportions.’48 The Security Service was overwhelmed by a torrent of deluded reports from the public. Marks on telegraph poles were frequently interpreted as codes designed to guide a German invasion; investigation revealed that some were the work of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides who ‘readily agreed to refrain from the practice’.49 Pigeons were widely suspected of secret intercourse with the enemy; counter-measures included the use of British birds of prey to intercept suspicious pigeons in mid-air.50 One new recruit spent his first day in the Security Service in June 1940 dealing with a series of time-wasting reports which began with ‘a letter from lady pointing to the danger of sentries being poisoned by ice-creams sold by aliens’.51 The Security Service’s lack of preparedness to deal with public paranoia about German-inspired subversion reflected a failure, once again, to remember the lessons of the First World War. In the autumn of 1914, wrote Sir Basil Thomson, then head of the Special Branch, spy mania had ‘assumed a virulent epidemic form accompanied by delusions which defied treatment’.52 As in 1914, spy mania in 1940 afflicted some in high places and government departments as well as the general public. Shortly before being replaced as C in C Home Forces in July, Field Marshal Sir Edmund (later Baron) Ironside, warned that there were ‘people quite definitely preparing aerodromes in this country’ for use by the Luftwaffe.53 One of the lessons drawn by Sir David Petrie, who became director general in 1941, was:

  the need to have people ready to deal with alarmist rumours about wireless, lights, pigeons and so on; in fact all the scare stories that are bound to descend like a flood. Such material must be kept away from and not allowed to clog the wheels of the real counter-intelligence machinery.54

  None of the reports sent to MI5 led to the discovery of any real fifth column or the detection of a single enemy agent. Fear of fifth columnists, however, produced insistent demands for mass internment from the military authorities. On 19 June the Chiefs of Staff called for all enemy aliens to be interned ‘immediately’.55 Their most influential supporter was Churchill. Guy Liddell noted on 25 May: ‘It seems that the Prime Minister takes a strong view about the internment of all Fifth Columnists at this moment and that he has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views. What seems to have moved him more than anything else was the Tyler Kent case.’56 Tyler Kent was a cipher clerk in the US embassy in London who had previously been stationed in Moscow and struck the British writer and wartime SIS officer Malcolm Muggeridge as ‘one of those intensely gentlemanly Americans who wear well-cut tailor-made suits, with waistcoat and watch-chain, drink wine instead of high-balls, and easily become furiously indignant’.57 Kent directed much of his fury against President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, he believed, was in danger of compromising American neutrality, of which he was a strong supporter. With the aim of discrediting Roosevelt’s foreign policy, he amassed a private collection of about 1,500 US diplomatic documents, including cables exchanged between Churchill, while first lord of the Admiralty, and FDR. Publishing these documents, he believed, would expose a plot hatched by Roosevelt and Churchill to bring the United States into the war.58

  Maxwell Knight had discovered Kent’s activities as a result of his penetration of the pro-German, anti-Semitic Right Club, of which Anna Wolkoff, a British associate of Kent, was a leading light. One of Knight’s three agents (all female) in the Right Club, codenamed M/Y, was so successful in posing as a pro-Nazi that Wolkoff called her ‘the little Storm Trooper’ and fantasized about ‘a triumphal procession’ in which she would ride in the same car as the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler.59 Wolkoff introduced Kent to the head of the Right Club, Captain Archibald Ramsay, a maverick Tory MP who had been seduced by the
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and was by his self-imposed mission ‘to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence’.60 On 23 April 1940 M/Y reported that Kent was passing Wolkoff classified information. Wolkoff told M/Y that she had seen ‘the signature of one Liddell of the Military Intelligence to a letter concerning American radio detectors and Hoovers [sic]’. What she had actually seen was correspondence between Guy Liddell, then deputy head of B Branch, and J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, on the purchase of US radio direction-finding equipment.61 Wolkoff was also in contact with the ardently pro-Nazi William Joyce, who had fled to Germany on the eve of war. Knight concluded that, in view of her correspondence with Joyce, ‘there was . . . abundant evidence that Anna Wolkoff was indeed to be classed as an enemy agent.’62 On 2 May M/Y reported to Knight: ‘There is no doubt that Tyler Kent is a definite Fifth Column member.’63 Kent had developed such close links with the Right Club that it was later discovered he had been entrusted with a locked red-leather-bound book containing the names of its 235 members. At the time neither MI5 nor Churchill had any means of knowing that the Kent–Wolkoff case was not the tip of a much larger, as yet undiscovered fifth-column iceberg.

  Anna Wolkoff was not content simply to be passed US diplomatic documents by Kent. On 11 May, the day after Churchill became prime minister, she boasted to M/Y that she had secretly purloined and copied some of his private hoard of documents.64 The documents copied by Wolkoff were messages exchanged between Churchill (then first lord of the Admiralty) and Roosevelt, some of them dealing with secret Anglo-American co-operation,65 which she planned to pass to Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Since Italy remained officially neutral until June, she gave them in the first instance to the Italian embassy in London which was, she believed, ‘charmed to receive the copies of the letters’.66 Italian diplomatic telegrams decrypted by British codebreakers revealed that Rome was passing to Berlin ‘practically everything from Ambassador Kennedy’s despatches to President Roosevelt, including reports of his interviews with British statesmen and officials’.67 Churchill must have been seriously alarmed. Had his secret dealings with Roosevelt been publicly exposed, they would, at the very least, as Kent intended, have strengthened the hand of American isolationists whose influence Churchill was struggling to diminish.