Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

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This systematic intelligence-gathering was instigated by Thomas Jervis, a retired Indian Army officer of whom it was said that cartography was second only to Christianity as the ruling passion of his life. Shortly before the outbreak of the Crimean war, he bought copies of the Russian army’s secret map of the Crimea and of the Austrian staff map of Turkey-in-Europe from a source in Brussels. At his own expense he then provided the War Office with tactical maps of the seat of war. These proved invaluable at a time when British military inadequacy in the Crimea was being exposed by The Times war correspondent and by war artists whose drawings dismayed readers of illustrated magazines. The politicians sought to deflect public anger at the maladministration and tactical failures in the Crimea by incriminating the military. Sidney Herbert, the reform-minded Secretary of State for War, told the House of Commons that responsibility for the bungles ‘lies with that collection of regiments which calls itself the British Army and not with the Government!’

Jervis campaigned for peacetime map-making, fact-gathering and tactical analysis. In 1855 he was appointed director of a new Topographical & Statistical Department (T&S) charged with supporting reconnaissance in war and intelligence-gathering in peacetime. This was reconstituted in 1873 as the Intelligence Department (ID). Although the Horse Guards generals were relentless in disliking the ID as an incipient General Staff which would reduce their prerogatives, the ID soon proved its value to the great offices of state by discounting the bellicose opinions of the military hierarchy. It provided prime ministers and foreign secretaries with evidence-based intelligence shorn of the generals’ bluster. ‘If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome,’ the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Lord Salisbury said in 1877: ‘if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.’ By the 1880s the ID was a major supplier of intelligence to the Foreign Office as well as a prototype general staff for the War Office.

ID officers scoured the foreign daily press, and weekly and monthly periodicals, for material on foreign armies, territories and thinking. This was later known as open source intelligence (OSINT). Interesting items were indexed under four or five headings, and pasted into cuttings-books. The cellars of the nondescript ID offices at 16–18 Queen Anne’s Gate, Westminster, two minutes’ walk from the Foreign Office and Downing Street, bulged with the largest secret military library in the world. Within months of the advent of the Dewey Decimal system of cataloguing in 1876, the ID had begun cataloguing the information in its holdings to as much as seven decimal points. Its officers took pride in map-making, and established cartography as a valued precision craft. Their voracity in amassing facts, and their canny analysis of material, provided the Foreign Office, the Cabinet and ministries with product that was both hallmarked as reliable and based on innovative thinking. The ID was a paper-bound bureaucracy, in which lucid, clarifying desk-work brought promotion: Sir John Ardagh, Jervis’s ultimate successor as the ID’s mastermind, was renowned for producing ‘beautifully expressed far-seeing memoranda on the most abstruse questions’.

The Indian Army remitted recurrent scares about Afghan uprisings and the mustering of Russian battalions. Lord Dufferin was rare among viceroys in discounting the likelihood of a Russian invasion of India: he protested in 1885 against ‘putting a frightful hole in our pocket’ by mobilizing the Indian Army ‘every time that a wretched Cossack chooses to shake his spear on the top of a sand-hill against Penjdeh’. Prime ministers learnt to trust ID reassurances about Russian intentions. Responding to an Indian Army alarm that Russia was preparing a major invasion of Afghanistan and India, the ID obtained and analysed the annual contract for procuring flour for the Russian army. It ascertained that there were no plans to build or expand flour points for bakeries on the trajectory of the planned invasion. As bakeries on lines of march to the Hindu Kush were indispensable to invasion plans, the ID advised the Foreign and India offices that without bread supplies there would be no military advance. This was a radical new way of assessing risk and laying plans.

Politicians like to rely on instinct, which is inherently a primitive force, or on flair, ‘which means you guess what you ought to know’, as Robert Vansittart noted. The ID countered the makeshifts of instinct and flair with factually grounded intelligence assessments that gave reassurance about imperial security when rabble-rousers, apoplectic generals and press stunts seemed to presage impending Russian invasions of India. In the words of an ID paper of 1880 dispelling rumours of Russian expeditions into Afghanistan, ‘Ignorance is weakness, and this weakness we constantly show by the undignified fear displayed at every report of the threat of Russian movements.’ Just as military reverses were often attributable to poor field intelligence, so British diplomacy was sometimes outwitted by other European powers through deficient information.

The ID attracted a new breed of ‘scientific officers’, mainly engineers and artillerymen. Unusually for the nineteenth-century army, at least a dozen had attended Oxford, Cambridge or Dublin universities; almost all were good linguists. Humour was prized: each section kept a screen on which were displayed ‘screamingly funny’ cuttings from foreign newspapers, such as an Austrian officer’s account of a Gibraltar cricket match and a Spanish scheme to train swans to tow reconnaissance balloons. The ID during the last quarter of the nineteenth century eventually produced three chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, two field marshals, six generals, eleven lieutenant generals and fifteen major generals. Over half were gazetted with knighthoods or peerages. Fewer than half ever married. Beaver identifies the ID as ‘the first real meritocratic cadre in modern British government’. As Stalin told the graduates of the Red Army Academy in a Kremlin speech of 1935, ‘cadres decide everything’.

The ID trained men who later attained non-military but intelligence-informed positions of power: Vincent Caillard, an ID officer who served on the Montenegrin frontier commission, was rewarded with the presidency of the administrative council of the Ottoman Public Debt (1883–98), which brought him rare influence and privileged information in Constantinople. He corresponded with Salisbury on Turkish affairs, and was knighted at the age of thirty-nine. After 1906 he became central to military and naval preparedness as financial comptroller of the armaments company Vickers. In 1915–18 he was involved with the arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharoff in a fruitless scheme to bribe the Young Turks out of the war.

After the European powers began to scramble for African territories in the 1880s, the Intelligence Division (as the Intelligence Department was renamed in 1888) became active in that continent. Its officers knew how to hold their tongues, said Ardagh, and could commit crimes while remaining gentlemanly. Theirs, he continued, were ‘the qualities disowned by the bishop who “thanked God that Providence had not endowed him with the low cunning necessary for the solution of a quadratic equation”’. All this was accomplished despite the Treasury keeping, in the words of an ID section head in the 1890s, ‘a frightfully tight hold on every sixpence’.

‘Spies have a dangerous task, and not an honourable one; consequently, except in very rare and extreme cases, officers will not accept the invidious duty,’ wrote Captain Henry Hozier in 1867 after espionage had helped Prussia to its battle victories over Austria. Nevertheless, ‘adventurers and unscrupulous men will, if well paid, do the work, and, for the sake of a sufficient sum, run the risk of certain death’. Despite this disavowal, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century ID officers traversed the globe, ran networks in Egypt, the Sudan, the Upper Nile and the new French spheres of influence along the west coast of Africa. Always and everywhere they drew maps: cartography was an English weapon to box the French, the Germans and the Italians in Africa, the Austrians and Turks in the Balkans, and the Russians in Asia. Medals were bestowed in order to distinguish officers who were willing to reconnoitre enemy positions from those whom Hozier stigmatized as ‘mercenary wretches who will sell friend and foe alike’. Claude Dansey, the Vice Chief of SIS during the 1940s, had a soldier uncle who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courage as a scout in the Ashanti war of 1874, and a military cousin who won the VC in 1914 for reconnaissance of enemy positions in the German West Africa protectorate.

Clive Bigham, Lord Mersey’s young son and heir, who had distinguished himself in China during the Boxer rebellion of 1900, was recommended by the Foreign Office to Ardagh, and served in the ID until 1904. Almost his first task was to go to Paris, where he bribed newspaper editors to halt their abuse of Queen Victoria (his expenses for this task were put under the heading ‘Remounts’). Next he was posted to ID’s Section E, which covered Austria, Hungary, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, and commissioned to compile handbooks on Abyssinia, Morocco and Arabia. ‘These were long and interesting jobs,’ Bigham recalled, ‘for I had to sift, check, compile and arrange a mass of material; but the work attracted me and taught me a lot.’ Section E was headed first by George Forestier-Walker, who rose to the rank of major general, and then by George (‘Uncle George’) Milne, afterwards CIGS, field marshal and Lord Milne. Among Bigham’s colleagues William (‘Wully’) Robertson also became field marshal and CIGS, while Herbert (‘Lorenzo’) Lawrence became both a general and chairman of Vickers from 1926.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s confidence after 1917 in communism’s inevitable triumph over capitalism, the rapidly expanding British Empire showed imperialism at its most pessimistic. Bravado about national destiny and chauvinism about the British genius for world leadership were super-abundant; but they always raised countervailing voices which decried the interminable wars against the weak: Zulus, Ashanti, Benin, Afghans, Burmese and others. The colonial expansion and ‘scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s and 1890s were both vaunted and beset by misgivings. ‘Military adventure … is extremely distasteful to me,’ commented Dufferin when in 1885 he was instructed by London politicians to annex Burma. ‘The Burmese are a nice people, easily managed, and I cannot bear the thought of making war upon them.’ After the conquest of Burma, Dufferin anticipated ‘nothing but trouble and annoyance’. Sir Cecil (‘Springy’) Spring Rice, future Ambassador in Washington, wrote in 1899 after the outbreak of the South African war: ‘We are surrounded in the world by a depth and intensity of hatred which is really astonishing. If we fall we shall have a hundred fangs in our throat.’ He disliked the new bellicosity: ‘Imperialism is not so bad a thing if you pay for it in your own blood, but spending 3 per-cent out of your stock exchange gains to buy people to fight for you in picturesque places, in order to provide you with interesting illustrated papers (or new investments) is a different thing.’ On the eve of the twentieth century Spring Rice saw ‘great danger threatening’ and wished British imperialists ‘hadn’t boasted and shouted so much and spoilt our own game and turned the whole thing into a burglar’s prowl’.

In the post-mortem after the South African war of 1899–1902, the ID was the only branch of the army to avoid censure. Scorching public anger at the humiliating defeats of British imperial forces by Boer irregulars required the Edwardian generals to submit to organizational reform: a general staff was belatedly instituted in 1904. This coincided with the reorientation of British foreign policy, which embraced its traditional enemies France and Russia as allies against its new chief adversary, Germany. The Directorate of Military Intelligence, which replaced the ID, continued the old successful methods of combining reports of British officers travelling overseas, the gleaning of OSINT from newspapers and gazettes, diplomatic and consular reports, and espionage. The Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID) relied on similar sources, supplemented by commercial and business informants. The Foreign Office however disliked the use of military and naval attachés for espionage, fearing that they might be entrapped by counter-espionage officers and thus embarrass their embassy. Accordingly, in Berlin and other power centres, service attachés collected open material by legal methods, but shunned covert or illicit acquisition of official secrets. It was partly to keep attachés clear of spy work that new security agencies were established in 1909. It is indicative of the relative standing of military and naval intelligence that the ‘MI’ in the designations ‘MI5’ and ‘MI6’ represents Military Intelligence, not Naval Intelligence.

The ID had further long-term influence for the good in the quality and activities of military attachés appointed to foreign embassies. They were skilled in using the well-tried ID techniques: they cultivated cordial contacts with the military officers of the countries to which they were posted; they attended manoeuvres, and watched new tactics and armoured formations; they were politically aware and kept alert to changing social and economic trends in their territories; they read newspapers and monitored specialist periodicals. Linguistic skills were a prerequisite. Noel Mason-MacFarlane, who was Military Attaché at Vienna and Budapest in 1931–5 and at Berlin in 1937–9, spoke excellent French and German and was conversant in Spanish, Hungarian and Russian. His Assistant Military Attaché in Berlin, Kenneth Strong, began intelligence work as a subaltern in Ireland in the early 1920s. During the struggle against Sinn Fein he ran informants such as railway porters, shopkeepers and barmen who would warn him of suspicious strangers in his district. He was fluent in four foreign languages and had smatterings of others. During the 1930s he was instrumental in starting the War Office’s Intelligence Corps. ‘The task of the Intelligence Officer’, Strong wrote, ‘is to exercise a spirit of positive inquiry and faculty of judgement, above all in discarding that large part of the incoming material which does not appreciably alter the known or anticipated situation, and from the residue to form a coherent and balanced picture, whether for a Supreme Commander, a Prime Minister … or for someone less elevated.’

Edwardian espionage (#ulink_71a7391d-d9b2-5772-a212-f7f14aad9b33)

The power, the pride and the reach of the British Empire seemed in constant jeopardy after the defeats in South Africa. Lord Eustace Percy, who began his diplomatic career in Washington in 1911, recalled Edwardian England as always ‘overshadowed by premonitions of catastrophe’. He had been reared in a ducal castle, but ‘whatever privileges my generation enjoyed in its youth, a sense of security was not one of them’. There was no time ‘when a European war did not seem to me the most probable of prospects, or when I forgot my first ugly taste of public disaster in the Black Week of Colenso and Magersfontein, which had darkened the Christmas school holidays of 1899’.

The temper of Edwardian England remained apprehensive. Newspapers profited by intensifying public anxieties. In 1906 the Daily Mail paid columns of morose men to march along Oxford Street in London wearing spiked helmets, Prussian-blue uniforms and bloodstained gloves. They carried sandwich-boards promoting a new novel of which the newspaper had bought the serialization rights, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 – a novel catering, as the Daily Mail’s shameless proprietor said, to his readers’ need for ‘a good hate’. Daily Mail readers were urged to refuse to be served by German waiters: ‘if your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport’. Le Queux was a bombastic sensationalist who pretended to intimate knowledge of European secret services. The fearful insecurity aroused by his next booming scare-stunt, Spies of the Kaiser (1909), overcame the Liberal government’s sentiment that domestic counter-espionage was a mark of despotic regimes. In October 1909 a Secret Service Bureau was established in rooms in Victoria Street.

After months of dispute over purposes and responsibilities, the Bureau was sub-divided. The home section, which was known as MI5 from 1915 and also after 1931 as the Security Service, was given the purview of counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-sabotage in Britain and its overseas territories. The foreign section, known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI1c, also later as MI6) was charged with collecting human intelligence (HUMINT) from non-British territories. In addition, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) was formed to monitor the activities of Indian nationalists, revolutionaries and anarchists and their allies not only in Britain but across Europe. There were also three divisions of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, which had been formed in 1883 in response to Irish dynamite attacks in London. A draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911 was a further signal that national security was being treated more systematically, and also being kept determinedly from informed public comment.

Vernon Kell, the first Director of MI5, was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, whose father had been an English army officer and whose maternal grandfather was a Polish army surgeon. After his parents’ divorce, he travelled widely in Europe with his mother, visiting exiled members of her family and mastering French, German and other European languages. The War Office in the late 1890s posted him to Moscow and Shanghai to learn Russian and Chinese. There was no insularity about this multilingual man of action. He had the type of keen, alert efficiency that allows no time for showiness. The great hindrance to his work was that he had funds for only a small staff. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary when European war erupted in 1914, said with revealing naivety: ‘if we spend anything on Secret Service, it must be very trifling, because it never comes to my knowledge’. As Lord Eustace Percy noted, the ‘Secret Service’ account at the Office was devoted to the financial relief of impoverished British subjects overseas.

There was a clear understanding by the new intelligence services of the benefits of watch-and-learn. In 1911 Heinrich Grosse was convicted of spying on the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, but the network of which he was part was left all but undisturbed. Identities were established, addresses, correspondence and activities were monitored. One or two individuals were arrested, when it was considered unavoidable, but the majority were allowed to continue transmitting inaccurate material. ‘In other words, we just played them,’ recalled Superintendent Percy Savage of Scotland Yard. Karl Ernst, a hairdresser at King’s Cross, who acted as the postbox for this spy network, was arrested in the first round-up of German agents in August 1914. Once the two nations were at war, it was no longer safe enough to keep him under surveillance: he had to be detained.

England’s cabinet noir for intercepting and reading private and diplomatic correspondence, the Decyphering Branch, had been abolished in 1844 after parliamentary protests at the opening of the correspondence of the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and the sharing of their contents with the Austrian and Neapolitan governments. Perlustration was not resumed for seventy years. At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the Post Office (which was a government department, headed by a minister, the Postmaster General) employed a single censor intercepting, opening, reading and resealing suspect letters. By the Armistice in 1918 the Censor’s Office employed over 2,000 staff, who were expected to open at least 150 letters a day each.

At the outset of war MI5 comprised Kell, six officers, its chief detective William Melville (formerly the Metropolitan Police superintendent in charge of Special Branch), two assistant detectives, six clerks and a caretaker. Its initial priority was to catch spies and saboteurs; but from 1916–17 its political masters were equally anxious about civil unrest and subversion. By 1918 MI5 had a staff of over 800, including 133 officers. Jervis would have rhapsodized at the amplitude of their records: over 250,000 index-cards cross-referencing 27,000 personal files in its central registry by the time of the Armistice that halted the European war in November 1918. Similarly Kell’s counterpart at SIS, Sir Mansfield Cumming, numbered his staff (exclusive of agents) as 47 in June 1915 and 1,024 by October 1916.

The months after the Armistice were a time of political instability, strange alliances and imponderable risk. Exterior perceptions might mislead. In the east London slum district of Limehouse, during the last months of the war, Irish nationalists combined with socialists to organize a militant constituency cohort led by a pharmacist called Oscar Tobin. One day in January 1919 a newly demobilized soldier, carrying a nondescript suitcase like the terrorist in Conrad’s Secret Agent, visited Tobin’s shop, went up the backstairs with him and laid plans for socialists to take control of Stepney Borough Council. Tobin was a Jewish Romanian who was to be refused naturalization as a British subject in 1924. To a watcher the confabulation above his shop might have seemed the inception of a revolutionary cell; but the demobbed soldier was Clement Attlee, and this was the first step in a political career that always upheld constitutionalism and culminated in his leadership of his country during the Cold War. History is full of misleading appearances. The balance between trust and treason, as Queen Elizabeth said, is seldom easy to get right.