Читать книгу: «Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire», страница 4

Despite the scanty resources at its disposal, sharing an office with MI5 allowed IPI to collaborate closely with other sections of British intelligence. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, MI5 and IPI continued to monitor the activities of Indian revolutionaries in Britain. Their main subject matter increasingly became communist agents travelling between Britain and India on behalf of the Communist International (Comintern), an underground network that Moscow had established in March 1919 to act as a vehicle to export the ‘workers revolution’ from the Soviet Union to countries abroad. MI5 and IPI’s investigations were focused on detecting agents acting as secret couriers for the Comintern, passing information between the British Communist Party and communist cells in India. The main investigative mechanism they relied on was a Home Office Warrant (HOW), which allowed for the interception of telephone and postal communications. Unlike SIS, which operated abroad and collected intelligence from foreign countries illegally, MI5 and IPI’s area of operations, domestically in Britain and also in the empire, were constrained by law in ways that did not apply to SIS. This was the case even though at the time MI5 (and IPI) did not have any powers at its disposal, either in statute or in common law, which allowed it to intercept mail. Despite existing in a shadowy legal netherworld, MI5 records reveal that it worked hard to operate hard within a legalistic framework, even if not a legal one.

In order to impose a HOW, MI5 had to apply to the Home Office, with a written explanation of why a warrant was sought, and the Home Secretary then had to sign off on it. HOWs were extremely resource intensive – hence the small number that were operating in the 1920s. The actual interception of communications was carried out by a small, secretive section of the General Post Office (GPO), known as the ‘special censor section’, whose workers had all signed the Official Secrets Act. This section’s work was laborious and far from glamorous: its office was equipped with a row of kettles, kept almost continually boiling, which were used to steam open letters, after which their contents were photographed, resealed and sent on their way. Some of these intercepted communications, still found in MI5 records today, contain information about the private lives of MI5 targets and their broader social history that cannot be found in any other archive. Telephone calls were likewise intercepted (‘tapped’) by the GPO, which employed a small team of transcribers at the main telephone exchange in Paddington, London. The team included foreign-language speakers, especially ‘White’ (anti-Bolshevik) Russian émigrés, who translated telephone conversations in Russian and other Eastern European languages. Later, MI5 and the GPO developed an innovative device, based on a modified gramophone machine, which was used to record telephone conversations. This machine allowed record discs to be mechanically added and taken off the recording device, or ‘pooled’, thus eliminating the hitherto tedious task of GPO workers having to switch them manually.²⁸

The first agent identified by MI5 as acting as a Comintern courier was Percy Glading, a member of the British Communist Party who in 1925 travelled to India under the alias ‘R. Cochrane’. Glading’s covert trip was revealed to MI5 and IPI by intercepted communications through a HOW. Over the following years he also used his secretary, a pretty twenty-five-year-old blonde named Olga Gray, to deliver funds to communists in India. However, unknown to Glading or anyone else in the British Communist Party, Olga Gray was in reality an undercover MI5 agent, who had been recruited and planted into the British Communist Party in 1931 by MI5’s legendary agent runner, Maxwell Knight, one of MI5’s most successful counter-espionage officers in the twentieth century. After retiring from MI5 as a spymaster in 1946, Knight embarked on a highly successful broadcasting career, becoming known as ‘Uncle Max’, a colourful presenter of children’s radio nature programmes. According to a later report on Knight’s agent-running section, ‘M Section’, the six-year penetration of Gray into the British Communist Party had been so successful that she had achieved ‘the enviable position where an agent becomes a piece of furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’.²⁹

Olga Gray’s courier mission in 1935 to India for the British Communist Party provided MI5 and IPI with an extraordinary insight into how Comintern agents were run, and also revealed the identities of communist agents in India. However, her trip was an extremely delicate task for MI5, which had to go to remarkable lengths not to blow her cover. As Maxwell Knight later recalled, it was so badly organised by the British Communist Party that without MI5’s help it is unlikely that she would ever have got to India. Knight helped her devise a suitable cover story – that she was a prostitute – without making it appear that she had received help in concocting it. He also feared that if her passport and other paperwork for travel to India were approved too quickly, her superiors in the Communist Party might become suspicious. Her MI5 handlers therefore ensured that it was delayed sufficiently not to arouse any suspicion. After her trip, Gray revealed to MI5 the existence of a substantial Soviet espionage network operating in Britain. Its ringleader was none other than Percy Glading, and it was based at the Woolwich Arsenal in London, where Glading worked as a mechanic, and where he and his agents gained access to sensitive information on British armaments.

The strain of acting as a double agent began to take a toll on Olga Gray – she appears to have had at least one nervous breakdown – so in 1937 MI5 decided to wind up the Soviet network at the Woolwich Arsenal and have its agents arrested. Gray testified at Glading’s trial for espionage at the Old Bailey in February 1938, appearing anonymously behind a screen as ‘Miss X’. Her evidence helped to convict him of spying for Soviet intelligence, for which he was imprisoned for six years. The trial judge congratulated her for her ‘extraordinary courage’ and ‘great service to her country’. Soon afterwards, she left for Canada under a new name.³⁰

As well as providing intelligence on Soviet networks in India and Britain, Olga Gray’s position in the British Communist Party – unassuming but central – provided her, and thus MI5, with unique access to codes used by the Party to send radio messages to Comintern networks in Europe. Her information helped the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), Britain’s first official peacetime SIGINT agency, established in 1921, to break radio traffic messages passing between the headquarters of the Comintern in Moscow and its numerous representatives abroad, in countries as far apart as China, Austria and the United States. GC&CS gave this radio traffic the codename ‘Mask’. The Mask traffic revealed to the British government that Moscow provided secret subsidies to the British Communist Party and also to its newspaper, the Daily Worker. In January 1935 Mask revealed the existence of a secret radio transmitter, based in Wimbledon, in south-west London, which was being operated by a member of the British Communist Party’s underground cell to send messages to Moscow. MI5 closely monitored the activities of those agents identified.³¹

MI5 and IPI identified other Comintern couriers, such as British Communist Party member George Allison, alias ‘Donald Campbell’, who, following a tip-off from MI5, was arrested in India in 1927 for travelling on a forged passport. However, the most important direct involvement of British intelligence in the empire at this time was with the so-called ‘Meerut conspiracy case’, a long-drawn-out trial that opened in India in 1929. Although their involvement was not publicised, both MI5 and IPI provided crucial evidence of the Comintern’s attempts to use communist agents in India to incite labour unrest there. In August 1929 the Deputy Director of MI5, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, led a delegation of British officials to India to provide evidence at the trial and to testify to the authenticity of the intercepted documents – thus overcoming any objections the defence counsel might raise that the documents were unreliable ‘hearsay’ evidence, and should be inadmissible. The delegation, travelling First Class by ship and train, included five London Metropolitan Police Special Branch officers, as well as the head of the special censor section of the GPO, Frederick Booth, and the official in charge of the team in the GPO that actually photographed the documents, H. Burgess. They liaised closely with Sir David Petrie at the IB in Delhi, and judging from existing IPI records, it also appears that GC&CS provided intercepted communications passing between Moscow and a communist cell operating in India.³²

After providing evidence at the Meerut trial, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson embarked on an enormous worldwide tour, visiting and liaising with security officials from Hong Kong to New York. Holt-Wilson’s extensive trip was all the more remarkable given that it was made in an age before long-distance air travel, when the journey from Britain to India took weeks. More than any other MI5 officer in the first half of the twentieth century, Holt-Wilson – nicknamed ‘Holy Willy’ on account of his strong Anglican beliefs and because he was a rector’s son – was responsible for promoting the idea that MI5 was an imperial agency. In fact, he often referred to it as the ‘Imperial Security Service’. Holt-Wilson returned to India in 1933, at the conclusion of the Meerut trial, which led to the prosecution of a number of communist agents. Upon his return to London the next year he gave a closed lecture to the London Special Branch, at which he emphasised MI5’s imperial responsibilities:

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.³³

Holt-Wilson went on another extensive overseas journey in 1938. The main purpose of this trip was to review local security and intelligence services in India and a number of other colonies and Dominions, and ensure that their security standards were adequate to meet the needs of the looming war with the Axis Powers. However, during the trip he himself displayed a remarkable disregard for basic security procedures – certainly far less care than he was attempting to instil in the colonial authorities he visited. In a series of soppy love letters that he sent by open, unsecured post back to his wife – a vicar’s daughter twenty years his junior – in England, Holt-Wilson described in detail the local intelligence officials he met, and also lamely attempted to glamorise for her benefit the nature of his ‘cloak and dagger’ work. If these letters, found in his personal papers now held in Cambridge, had been intercepted by the Axis Powers, they would have revealed a range of sensitive information on British imperial security and intelligence matters. The fact was that Holt-Wilson, a keen huntsman and one-time President of the Ski Club of Great Britain, was not one for modesty – which is surprising for someone whose career necessitated working in the shadows. In his own words he was ‘a champion shot’, and in the official description he penned for himself in Who’s Who, he stated that he was the Director-General of the ‘Imperial Security Intelligence Service’, and also accurately but pompously noted that he was ‘author of all pre-war official papers and manuals on Security Intelligence Police Duties in Peace and War’. Not very subtly for one of Britain’s senior intelligence officials, Holt-Wilson also listed his home address in his Who’s Who entry. ³⁴

In March 1938 Holt-Wilson arrived in India, where he met the new head of the IB in Delhi, Sir John Ewart, whom he referred to as the ‘K [‘Kell’] of India’. He next travelled to Singapore and Hong Kong, where as he reported to his wife, he was spotted by local press reporters as being involved with ‘hush-hush’ work. In Singapore he liaised with a local MI5 officer stationed there, Col. F. Hayley Bell, in Holt-Wilson’s unflattering opinion a ‘deaf madman’, whose deafness made hushed conversations difficult. He also met Hayley Bell’s daughter, Mary Hayley Bell (later Lady Mills), who in 1942 would write a popular wartime play, Men in Shadow, about resistance groups in France, which would attract the attention of MI5 for revealing sensitive details of escape routes from occupied France. MI5 only allowed the play to be performed after the passages in question were removed. At a dinner held in his honour during Holt-Wilson’s visit to Hong Kong in April 1938, which was officially described as an ‘inspection of the colony’s defences’ so as not to attract too much press attention, the Governor proposed a toast to ‘good old Thames House’ (MI5’s headquarters), which was lost on all the guests except for himself and Holt-Wilson.³⁵

Ireland was a particularly important recruiting ground for colonial police officers, many of whom would deal with intelligence matters across the empire. After the Irish Free State was granted a form of Dominion status in 1921, a stream of former officers of the disbanded Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) moved into the Indian and other colonial police forces, particularly in Palestine, where they gained a reputation for stern discipline and ‘backbone’. Ireland was also the theatre that provided a model for policing and counter-insurgency operations that persisted in British military thinking for several decades. In 1934 Major General Sir Charles Gwynn published an influential book, Imperial Policing, on low-intensity conflicts or ‘small wars’. Drawing on lessons from Ireland, and the tactics the British used to crush the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s and other Indian revolts at Dinshawai (1906) and Amritsar (1919), Gwynn recommended that to be effective, colonial policing required the use of minimum necessary force, with the aim of restoring civilian government as soon as possible, and tactics such as troops moving in sweeping column formations against enemies. While Gwynn’s recommendations were undoubtedly applicable to Palestine in the 1930s, they left their mark for much longer than they should have on British military authorities, who continued to apply these tactics to anti-colonial insurgencies in the post-war years, when they were largely irrelevant because Britain’s enemies in those conflicts did not fight in open, regular and identifiable formations. Thanks in large part to Gwynn, there was a direct continuum between the way the British military crushed colonial revolts in India in the 1860s, and how it tackled post-war insurgencies in places like Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus.³⁶

THE THREE-MILE RULE

In 1931 the British government finally drew an official distinction between MI5 and SIS’s responsibilities. Ever since the establishment of the two services in 1909, when MI5 was made responsible for ‘domestic’ security intelligence and SIS for ‘foreign’ intelligence-gathering, there had been confusion over whether the empire and the Commonwealth counted as domestic or foreign territory. The issue was finally resolved following a fierce turf war within Whitehall over intelligence matters. In 1931 the London Special Branch, led by its eccentric head Sir Basil Thomson, essentially attempted to take over MI5. Although the bid was unsuccessful, it led to a major review of intelligence matters within Whitehall, led by the top-secret committee responsible for them, the Secret Service Committee, chaired by Sir John Anderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Home Office. One of the recommendations of the Committee in June 1931 was that MI5 should have increased responsibilities. From that point on MI5 was given responsibility for all forms of counter-espionage, military and civilian – previously it had been limited to detecting espionage in the British armed forces – and a number of skilled officers were transferred from the London Special Branch to MI5, including Guy Liddell (a future Deputy Director-General of MI5) and Milicent Bagot (who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Comintern activities, and is thought to have been the inspiration for John le Carré’s character, the eccentric Sovietologist Connie Sachs). One of the other major decisions taken by the Secret Service Committee was that MI5 would assume responsibility for security intelligence in all British territories, including the empire and Commonwealth, while SIS would confine itself to operating at least three miles outside British territories. In other words, from 1931 onwards a three-mile demarcation line was drawn around all British territories worldwide, at the time covering roughly one-quarter of the globe, which acted as the official boundary between MI5 and SIS.³⁷

With this operational border established, MI5 was given more of a free rein to concentrate on imperial security matters – hence Holt-Wilson’s numerous trips overseas and his attempts to promote the view that MI5 was an imperial service. Throughout the 1930s MI5 collaborated with IPI and the Delhi IB to keep a close watch on the main anti-colonial political leaders in India, such as Nehru, whom IPI considered – accurately – to be, next to Gandhi, the ‘second most powerful man in India’. Whenever Nehru travelled to Britain in the 1930s, which he did on several occasions, MI5 monitored his activities, often imposing HOWs to intercept his post and telephone conversations, and instructed Scotland Yard to send undercover officers to his speaking engagements. Judging from IPI records, it also seems that IPI acquired a source close to Nehru himself: it obtained sensitive information relating to the death of his wife from tuberculosis in 1936 at a hospital in Switzerland following a trip Nehru made to Britain. The information reaching IPI included private arrangements that Nehru’s family was considering for the funeral, which most likely came from an informant within Nehru’s close entourage. MI5 and IPI also attempted to track the activities of the Comintern agent Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, also known as M.N. Roy – but were not always successful: on at least one occasion Roy was able to travel to Britain without being discovered. At the same time, MI5 and IPI also scrutinised the activities of the British Communist Party’s leading theoretician and anti-colonial Indian campaigner, Rajani Palme Dutt, who acted as a Comintern agent on at least one trip to India. They likewise kept a close eye on Dutt’s younger brother Clemens, who led the ‘Indian section’ of the British Communist Party, and even discovered the cover address that Clemens used to communicate secretly with underground communist sympathisers. Furthermore, although no specific file has yet been declassified, it is likely that MI5 also worked in conjunction with SIS to track the movements of the notorious German Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, who moved widely around Europe and even further afield, and in 1927 organised a conference in Brussels against imperialism.³⁸

However, MI5’s claim in the 1930s that it was an imperial service was more aspiration than reality, more chest-puffing than fact. Throughout the decade it had such limited resources at its disposal that there was no way it could have a meaningful supervisory role over imperial security intelligence as a whole. As late as 1938 it had a total staff of just thirty officers, only two of whom worked in its counter-espionage section, B-Division, in London – that is, a grand total of two officers formed the front line of detecting Axis espionage in Britain, to say nothing of the empire. However, a turning point for the involvement of British intelligence in the empire occurred in the late 1930s, when MI5 broke with its past practices and, instead of merely receiving intelligence from colonies abroad, began to post officers to British territories overseas for the first time. These officers were known as Defence Security Officers (DSOs) and were attached to British military general headquarters (GHQs) in British colonies and other dependencies. Their responsibilities were focused on coordinating security intelligence on Comintern activities, and as the Second World War approached, increasingly on the threat posed by the Axis Powers.³⁹

The first DSO stationed abroad was posted to Egypt. Egypt had gained independence from Britain in 1935, but in a manner that would be replicated over subsequent decades in other British territories – as we shall see – the British government had negotiated a series of favourable treaties for itself, which allowed for a continued British presence in Egypt. From 1935 onwards British military headquarters for the Middle East was based in Cairo, and London continued to have control over the Suez Canal, the strategic gateway to India – which would become a hotly contentious subject after the war, and the focus of one of Britain’s greatest ever foreign policy disasters, signifying the final eclipse of Britain’s imperial power in the Middle East. MI5’s first DSO in Egypt was Brig. Raymund Maunsell, an old India hand whose appointment in 1937 was followed by those of other DSOs in Palestine and Gibraltar in 1938. These officers would form the basis of MI5’s wartime security liaison outfit run throughout the Middle East, known as Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), which would form the vanguard of countering wartime Axis espionage in the region. On the outbreak of war in 1939, MI5 increased the number of its DSOs permanently stationed abroad to six: in Cairo, Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong.⁴⁰

Although the establishment of MI5’s DSOs was a watershed in the history of British intelligence, with just six officers stationed overseas, MI5 was still clearly not the imperial service that it claimed to be. As the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War noted, in 1939 MI5 was just a ‘skeleton’ of an imperial security service. It took the war for it to become truly the imperial service that it claimed to be. It was also the war that transformed the involvement of Britain’s largest and most secret intelligence services, GC&CS, in the British empire.⁴¹

In the pre-war years, MI5 claimed to be – but had not yet actually become – a service for the empire. Even at this stage, however, it was a service of the empire. This was most clearly shown by the high proportion of senior MI5 officers in the pre-war years who began their careers in the empire. Its first head, Sir Vernon Kell, and his deputy who served him for twenty-eight years, Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, had both previously served in British colonial campaigns. Its Director-General during the Second World War, Sir David Petrie, was similarly an old colonial sweat, having served as the head of IB in Delhi from 1924 to 1931, and carried scars of his service (literally) on his legs with wounds from a bomb attack inflicted by an Indian revolutionary in 1914. The sources that Petrie used for his classified official history, Communism in India, included intercepted correspondence of both Indian communists and the Comintern. The post-Second World War head of MI5, Sir Percy Sillitoe, likewise had a former colonial police career, having served in the British South Africa Police. One of the few pre-war British counter-espionage desk officers, John Curry, had served with the Indian police for a quarter of a century before joining MI5 in 1933. Curry was among the limited number of people in British intelligence, and in Whitehall generally, who recognised and warned about the threat posed by Nazi Germany after 1933. He had previously written a history of the Indian police, which attracted the attention of Sir David Petrie, and in 1945 was the author of MI5’s in-house history, which has now been declassified. MI5’s most successful wartime interrogator, Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens (discussed in the next chapter), was also a former Indian policeman, as was MI5’s semi-senile septuagenarian wartime Deputy Director-General, Brigadier O.A. ‘Jasper’ Harker, later described by the notorious KGB spy Kim Philby as filling his position in MI5 with handsome grace, but little else. With such strong colonial connections in the pre-war years, MI5’s working culture and outlook undoubtedly also had a colonial feel. An examination of the CVs of MI5 officers before the Second World War reveals that several of them included ‘pig sticking’ among their hobbies, a hangover from colonial service in India of the pink-gin-and-polo type. Moreover, because pay in MI5 at the time was so poor, many of its senior staff, doubtless burnt out from too much sun, came from independently wealthy backgrounds.⁴²

These connections with the British empire did not only exist in MI5: they were also prominent in the rest of the pre-war British intelligence community. In fact, a remarkable number of Britain’s leading spooks in those years had previously served in the empire. In SIS, for example, the two most important counter-espionage desk officers st the time were both former Indian policemen. The first was Valentine Vivian, known to his friends as ‘Vee Vee’, the son of a Victorian portrait painter, who entered SIS in 1925 after serving in the Indian police and in an IPI station in Constantinople. Vivian had a glass eye, which he tried to shield by awkwardly standing at right angles to those he met. Philby – who had a vested interest in making his former SIS colleagues look as incompetent as possible – depicted him in his KGB-sponsored memoirs as being afraid of his subordinates in SIS, and acidly described him as ‘long past his best – if, indeed, he ever had one’. Vivian’s subordinate in SIS’s pre-war section dealing with counter-espionage, Section V, was Felix Cowgill, the son of a missionary, who had served as a personal assistant to Petrie in the Delhi IB. Cowgill’s colonial past gave him, as one of his wartime colleagues described, a ‘sallow face and withdrawn tired air that came of long years of service in India’. Philby poisonously described him as tempestuous and incompetent: ‘His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by a lack of imagination, inattention to detail and a sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in,’ but even Philby conceded that Cowgill had ‘a fiendish capacity for work’, sometimes toiling through the night, knocking an array of pipes into wreckage on a stone ashtray on his desk. Whether this was the case or not, he was certainly spectacularly outmanoeuvred by Philby for wartime promotion within SIS – with disastrous consequences for British intelligence, as we shall see.⁴³

There were similar colonial connections within GC&CS, the first Director of which, Alistair Denniston, began his career in India, where he successfully intercepted and decrypted Russian traffic. Likewise, the department in GC&CS that successfully broke Comintern radio traffic in the 1930s was led by a brilliant major from the Indian army, John Tiltman, who had been running a small but successful interception outfit in north-west India before being brought back to London in 1929. There were also colonial connections in Special Branch at Scotland Yard. Its pre-war head, Basil Thomson, had an eccentric colonial career: after being educated at Eton and dropping out of Oxford he joined the Colonial Office, and at the age of twenty-eight became the Prime Minister of Tonga, where – as he vividly noted in his memoirs – his first true friends were cannibals. He also went on to become private tutor to the Crown Prince of Siam and Governor of Dartmoor Prison.⁴⁴

Officers in Britain’s intelligence services brought to their new roles many of the practices they had acquired in their colonial postings. In GC&CS, Tiltman wholeheartedly incorporated decryption techniques pioneered in India. The Special Branch adopted the technique of fingerprinting, which became the most basic form of police and security investigations in the modern world, from India, where it had been invented. MI5 also embraced techniques pioneered in the empire. When its Registry collapsed during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 – essentially giving up under the strain imposed on it during an apparently imminent Nazi invasion – Petrie advised reforming it on lines that he had devised for card-cataloguing ‘revolutionaries and terrorist suspects’ in India.⁴⁵

The intelligence services of other major European powers had similar colonial hangovers, both in terms of staff and practices. Some influential French intelligence officers during the Second World War started their careers in the French colonial empire. More ominously, there were also colonial connections with the secret police and intelligence services of Europe’s murderous ‘totalitarian’ regimes before 1945. This was first identified by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism had its roots in European colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. Arendt believed that the type of savagery that European powers inflicted upon colonial populations, as graphically depicted in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, modelled on Belgian rule in the Congo, was in the first half of the twentieth century brought back to its heartland: Europe. Although Arendt’s thesis was at first largely discounted by scholars, more recently it has been re-examined, and is now regarded by historians as having in many ways been proved correct.⁴⁶