Misdefending the realm|Paperback (original) (raw)
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CHAPTER 1
Historical Background
"Every time you sacrifice one of your potential allies to this pathetic desire to appease the tyrants, you merely bring nearer and make more inevitable that war which you pretend you are trying to avoid." (Josiah Wedgwood)
"The differences which ... existed between the Nazi and the Bolshevik systems were, in fact, no greater than those which separate Woolworths from Marks and Spencer. One of them is painted red." (Harold Nicolson)
"We English hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So, if there is somewhere where fascists and bolshevists can kill each other off, so much the better." (Stanley Baldwin)
The subject of this book – the negligence of MI5 in its handling of the menace of communist subversion at the beginning of World War II – has its roots in an event that cast a permanent shadow over the twentieth century, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Marxist doctrine had been converted into action by Vladimir Lenin, the émigré firebrand and demagogue, and a devout autocracy had been quickly turned into a bloody prison-camp, with the ruthless suppression or extermination of those held to be part of the old regime. The rallying slogan calling on the proletariats of every country to unite constituted a dire warning to the elites of the western democracies, demonised in Communist propaganda as 'capitalists' and 'imperialists' who would necessarily have to be destroyed.
The 1917 Revolution had come as a severe shock for the British government. Lenin had planned to export the proletarian dictatorship internationally, and had set up the Communist International (or Comintern) to execute that strategy. The Comintern's declared mission was to destroy the stronghold of 'the bourgeoisie' and 'imperialism' that Britain's place in the world represented. Britain's ministers and civil service leaders soon identified the nation's primary security goals as protecting the Empire against the subversive influences of communist doctrine. For Britain was assuredly 'imperialist': its political leaders regarded the interests of the country and the Empire as inseparable.
Their reasoning was well-established: they regarded Britain's prosperity as being largely dependent upon protected colonial markets, and the associated control of vital resources and shipping routes. Communism, through its ideological attack on imperialism, and on the dependent status of the colonies, presented an essential threat to such arrangements. It also represented a potential menace to the British way of life, which was the cultural lifeblood of the Empire. Communism was a totalitarian system of government dominated by one ruling ideology and party, committed to extremist notions of class warfare, and deploying no division of powers. It required government control of industry and the media, all accompanied by harsh punishment for dissenters subject to laws enacted by edict, or even to arbitrary sentencing without trial. If communism spread to Britain, its ruling class would be faced with the same fate that befell the tsarist system.
Although Britain's governing class did not accept the inevitability of a proletarian dictatorship, as predicted by Marx, it considered that any domestic actions to facilitate this socio-economic upheaval needed to be closely monitored and stifled. Within two years, in 1919, the British War Cabinet had set up a committee of the recently established Secret Service Bureau to investigate how the country's civil intelligence should be strengthened to face this new threat of Communist subversion. The committee decided that the authority for the new Directorate of Intelligence should reside with the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, while MI5 (which had been created in December 1915 as an offshoot of Military Intelligence) would remain in charge of monitoring subversion in the armed forces. Nevertheless, during the next decade, the Special Branch, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) had frequent disagreements about control of the intelligence machinery, and the Secret Service Committee remained in operation to oversee the three organisations.
From the perspective of the British government, the fortunes and reputation of the Soviet Union blew hot and cold after this time, but the threat of subversion remained very real. Britain's coalition government had attempted – but failed – to help strangle the emergent Soviet Union at its birth. In 1924, professing some ideological sympathy with the communist cause, the first Labour administration had decided to recognise the new state. The Labour Party was nevertheless resolutely opposed to extra-parliamentary means of implementing change, as espoused by the restive foundling on its doorstep, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Even though the CPGB appeared to exert less direct political influence than had been feared at first, it turned out to be a corrosive factor in the unions and the armed forces, where it represented a constant threat for disruption and even mutiny. The discovery of espionage taking place under cover of the Soviet trade organisation, ARCOS, in 1927, highlighted the menace of subversion, and prompted Britain to break off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
Further evidence of subversion surfaced in 1928, when a communist network was shown to have infiltrated the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police itself. MI5 and SIS collaborated in tracking the movements of the network leader, William Ewer, who was paying his contacts with money supplied by the CPGB. Perhaps chastened by its experience of the ARCOS trial, at which testimony betrayed the fact that the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) must have broken Soviet ciphers, the Attorney General decided not to prosecute the Special Branch officers who had revealed information on surveillance activity to their Communist suborners. Moreover, despite the measure of cooperation exercised during this case, both Special Branch and MI5 complained at this time about the incursions of SIS onto their mainland territory.
The Comintern, meanwhile, had increased its pressure on British institutions, taking advantage of a deteriorating economic environment. The symptoms of the financial depression that started in 1930 turned the political spotlight anew on the ability of a market economy to sustain a high level of employment, and thus ensure a satisfied citizenry. Interest in the Soviet experiment, and the possible advantages of nationalisation of 'the means of production, distribution and exchange', increased. The voices of intellectuals and democratic socialists expressing doubts about the efficacy of private enterprise became louder. Early in 1930, MI5 reported on increased communist subversion in the armed forces, which came to a head in the Invergordon mutiny of September 1931. A more systematic approach for detecting subversion and espionage was needed. At the final meeting of the Secret Service Committee, later that year, MI5 was handed the exclusive task of managing the bolshevik threat within the United Kingdom, while SIS was directed to focus on its mission of gathering intelligence on foreign soil.
In 1929, MI5 had assigned responsibility for the surveillance of Soviet espionage to the first woman officer appointed in the organisation. The woman's name was Jane Sissmore, and her achievement represented a significant breakthrough both in British intelligence and in British professional life. (For more information on her career, see Chapter 2.) Sissmore's first significant contribution was recorded in 1935. In November of that year, she wrote a report on the Communist Party of Great Britain, stating that the department's mission should be to stay informed of 'activities, policy and mischievous potentialities of subsidiary bodies of the Comintern operating under the direction of the Communist Party of Great Britain'. The spirit of the report, however, suggests that MI5, despite its alarming experience with Special Branch in 1931, had not yet internalised the threat of direct subversion of the intelligence services. Sissmore's analysis, signed off by Guy Liddell and Jasper Harker, her bosses, concentrated on members of the CPGB, and their ability to cause damage through subversion and sabotage. Yet by now, the twin arms of Soviet intelligence, the military organisation (GRU), and the state department (OGPU, which became the NKVD in 1934), had begun to apply fresh pressures, deploying new methods of subverting the Western democracies, with special attention on Britain. MI5 was unaware that the Soviet Union had recently started to recruit sympathetic high-fliers from Oxbridge, who were to be inserted into Britain's political and diplomatic ranks. The seriousness of the duel was increasing, yet the focus of MI5 was still on the Communist Party.
By the time of Sissmore's report, however, a new threat, couched in an alternative totalitarian ideology, had emerged. In 1933, Adolf Hitler had grabbed hold of power in Germany, with the objective of enforcing his ideology, and his territorial ambitions for a new German Reich, as set out in Mein Kampf (first published in 1926). Now, unlike the doctrine of communism, Hitler's manichean message was not of the brotherhood of man, and of equality, but of nationalistic strength and racial superiority – with an avowed goal of expanding the Reich's borders into Eastern Europe and Russia. It was, however, equally totalitarian, and shared the same features of fully integrated control of society through government organs, and fierce repression of opponents, that were the emblems of Stalin's Russia. Thus, while the appeasing factions at the time (e.g. the majority of the Tory Party, royalty and the House of Lords, and the group known as the 'Cliveden set', which included the editor of the influential Times newspaper, Geoffrey Dawson) obviously did not recognise this threat, Germany also represented an existential menace to Britain. Hitler wanted to add colonial possessions, preferably re-acquiring territories conceded to Britain after World War I, and his increased warnings about uniting disparate ethnic Germans outside Germany's national borders threatened the balance of power in Europe. His claims about wanting a peaceful coexistence with the British Empire were trusted by too many: those who objected were accused of provocation – a trap into which even Stalin was later to fall. Yet what action should be taken was unclear. In the mind of those who had experienced it, the horrors of World War I resonated more strongly than the fears of German revanchism. And a specific German threat to the British Isles was not perceived by MI5 or SIS until Germany's re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, which caused the services to take fresh stock of their intelligence-gathering and surveillance processes.
The interplay of fascism and communism in the political and intellectual arenas of the 1930s posed considerable problems for Britain's intelligence services. Oswald Mosley founded his British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, and the Home Office decided, in November 1933, that it should up its response, and that MI5's policy towards Fascists should mimic its treatment of Communists. In 1935, the Comintern developed a 'Popular Front' campaign that undermined the old class warfare slogans with a message of unison against fascism. As the thirties progressed, the traditional horror of bolshevism was reinforced in some quarters by news of Stalin's slave camps, show trials, and purges; others claimed the oppression was overstated, or even justified. In 1936, the apparent righteousness of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War tilted much of public opinion against the naked aggression of fascism, while Stalin's equally vicious organs were able to operate more furtively in support of the Republican government. The Nazis followed up their domestic oppression of leftists and Jews by incorporating Austria under force (in March 1938), and then by annexing the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia (in September). As the threat of European-wide war became more likely, countries struggled to determine who their enduring adversaries and allies were. And while Britain represented a beacon of freedom, it also became a haven for a heterogeneous set of refugees. Such visitors were initially welcomed in the cause of humanity, but they were still 'aliens', and thus inherently suspicious. In the eyes of the Home Office, they might well have been fleeing from Hitler's persecutions, but could also have been concealing their Communist sympathies from the domestic authorities. Was Britain's liberal policy of allowing asylum-seekers into the country increasing the potential success of subversion and potential insurrection, and thus making its task more difficult?
Opinion in Great Britain was sharply divided over how the country should react to these twin totalitarian threats, apparently ideologically opposed, but similar in methodology. Some of the populace regarded bolshevism as the eternal enemy, and were thus prepared to make accommodations with Hitler despite their distaste for Nazi Fascism, a point of view that dominated Chamberlain's administration, and especially the Foreign Office. Others, including most members of the Labour Party and intellectual fellow-travellers, inspired by Stalin's 'antifascist' clarion call, and maybe regarding the goals of communism as more healthy and honourable than those expressed in Mein Kampf, were ready to overlook the inherent horror of Stalin's dictatorship, believing that only communism was strong enough to fight fascism. Another set of more high-minded pacifist voices, perhaps taking their cue from Church of England clerics, remembered the carnage of WWI, and placed their hopes in the League of Nations and the idea of 'collective security' spawned at Versailles, calling for worldwide disarmament. There was also a fourth group of independent pragmatists, embodied by such as Churchill and Sir Robert Vansittart (Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), which could be said to constitute those who believed that all forms of totalitarianism had to be resisted more urgently, and looked for greater determination and muscle in re-arming the country to fight it. Such a divergence of views was the price of living in – and governing – a pluralist democracy, and politicians had to deal with the realities. While the totalitarian regimes became bolder and more oppressive, Britain's decision-making on security was characterised by further rounds of subcommittees, working-parties, memoranda, and submissions, and negotiations between different government departments. Due attention had to be paid to such topics as the constitutional role of MI5, while the Home Office's reinforcement of the principle that arrests should not be made purely on the basis of suspicion, and that popular opinion, and the morale of the workers in the factories, all had to be taken into consideration when more stringent measures against subversion and espionage were being evaluated, caused dithering and delay. Britain's peacetime values of tolerance and pluralistic debate were a liability in times of crisis.
MI5 was perhaps too complacent about the threat of Nazi subversion. Its officers may have been fed with the assertion that the Treaty of Versailles had forbidden Germany to develop an espionage service. However ambiguous such a ban was, Hitler blithely chose to ignore such proscriptions, concluding, quite correctly, that 'collective security' was a paper tiger. An active Nazi organisation for propaganda and intelligence-gathering was accordingly working in Britain by the mid-1930s. The aims of German intelligence were quite straightforward. It tried to encourage the Chamberlainite policy of appeasement, to drive home to opinion-leaders the perils of bolshevism, and to bolster the native fascist movement. It sought also to determine what plans and actions Britain might be pursuing towards an alliance with Germany's eastern adversary, the Soviet Union. It exploited the disaffection with British rule of provincial groups (especially the Irish), and sought out agents in such territories. Yet its efforts betrayed no mission-critical agenda, and were blatantly obvious, such as in Hitler's wooing of Lord Rothermere and the future King Edward VIII. As the historian Max Hastings has written: "Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. He recognised its utility only at a tactical level: the Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad."
The dangers for Britain were that, if Hitler were able to keep Britain subdued, he would be free to execute his plans on his eastern borders first, gaining valuable resources for his war machine, before turning his brutal attentions to the UK, and trying to dismantle the British Empire. Elsewhere (e.g. in Czechoslovakia in 1938, and later in Poland, in 1939) Germany had been able to facilitate its invasion by use of a 'Fifth Column' of operatives in contact with military command, and to exploit the presence of native sympathisers who could assist in the takeover of political control. Despite the existence of the British Union of Fascists, it was not until after Chamberlain's demise in May 1940 that a fear of such a force appeared intensely in the United Kingdom, with the arrest in London, of the American spy working for the Nazis, Tyler Kent. The collapse of Denmark and Norway that month brought a rapid insertion of the terms 'Fifth Column' and 'quisling' unto political debate.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2017 Antony Percy.
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