Читать книгу The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers - Richard Aldrich - Страница 10

A rumour spread next day in true war-time fashion that Lord Chetwynd had caught three German spies trying to signal the Zeppelin with lights, and had shot them out of hand.

David Lloyd George1

The British intelligence system was already immense by the dawn of the twentieth century. The entire British Empire, sprawling across more than half the globe, served as an intelligence machine – a veritable ‘empire of intelligence’.2 It depended on information of every kind to project British rule in remote places. Romanticised in the works of Rudyard Kipling, intelligence was about amateur imperial adventurers, revelling in deceit and subterfuge. Unlike today, espionage was conducted informally by local agents, eccentric travellers and scholars. Lawrence of Arabia and the legendary team of British archaeologist-spies at Carchemish, working across the Turkey­–Syria border, typified the way great-power rivalry in the Middle East and Asia mixed with academic debates about how archaeology might change understandings of the Bible. Importantly, scholarly research was not merely a cover for secret service work. Intelligence was considered to be every kind of information, including that obtained by peculiar scholars who spoke many languages, collected eggs, bulbs and butterflies, and mixed ‘comfortably and innocently’ with the local population. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, British officials in Mesopotamia feared an archaeologist-gap and urged the India Office to contact learned societies which could send more scholar-spies to buttress British interests.3 India itself, the vast jewel of the empire, depended on spies too. It became an extraordinary ‘empire of information’, allowing just over a thousand British civil servants to superintend close to 280 million people.4

An empire of information, in some form, existed at home too. New public health initiatives and social programmes meant the state knew much more about its people than ever before. Meanwhile Irish nationalists and bomb-throwing anarchists from the Continent had forced the Metropolitan Police to develop the world’s first ‘Special Branch’ in 1883. Inevitably perhaps, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Special Branch had broadened its net beyond Fenians and anarchists to collect intelligence on possible foreign spies, anti-colonial agitators, suffragettes, union leaders, pacifists, and even those with radical views on sex.5

Nevertheless, these developments were more about keeping authoritarian surveillance at arm’s length from the British public. Mysterious battles with Russian spies in Central Asia were reassuringly remote, while the creation of a small Special Branch of intrepid detectives to counter terrorism was seen as a low-key alternative to the sort of harsh and repressive security legislation preferred in Europe. Accordingly, intelligence remained a matter for distant vice-consuls travelling to Samarkand, or detective sergeants in Whitechapel. It rarely resonated at the centre of British government. More rarely still did a prime minister take a personal interest in espionage.

All this began to change over the next decade. Bizarrely, it was literary fashion which drove the transformation of British intelligence, thrusting it towards the heart of government for the first time. A wave of popular Edwardian ‘invasion literature’ forced Herbert Asquith, an otherwise uninterested Liberal prime minister more focused on progressive domestic reforms, to take notice of foreign espionage. Acting only under pressure, Asquith set in train a course which would fundamentally alter the landscape of British intelligence forever. The intelligence revolution may have been forged by Churchill and Attlee, but the first sparks came through the unlikely Asquith. Nonetheless, despite the expansion of espionage during the First World War and greater interest on the part of Asquith’s successor David Lloyd George, it took time and endless trouble before successive prime ministers learned to use intelligence effectively.

Fiction paved the long pathway to the creation of a modern British intelligence service. During the nineteenth century, a stream of often sensational crime novels fed a growing public fascination with detection, police work and science. This generated cultural change, gradually eroding anxieties about government surveillance. Created by writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, fictional detectives gradually became heroic figures to be worshipped, rather than bogeymen associated with distasteful and un-British authoritarianism.6 Journalists, who often exchanged information with real policemen, accelerated this transformation, helping to create real-life detectives who enjoyed a similar cult status.7 William Melville, who became head of Special Branch, was one example. He famously foiled several anarchist attacks, including the ‘Jubilee plot’ against Queen Victoria in 1887 and another dastardly scheme known as the ‘Walsall plot’, in which anarchists from the West Midlands sought to manufacture a bomb. Many now believe that he created the latter plot himself for mere self-glorification.8

Over three hundred spy novels went into print between 1901 and 1914, mostly focused on the ‘German Menace’. This new fiction effectively rebranded itself as a barely concealed form of ‘true crime’ writing, supposedly based on the patriotic leaking of government secrets. In 1903, Erskine Childers published The Riddle of the Sands, which narrated the summer sailing adventures of two young British men along the East Frisian coast who stumble upon a German plot to invade England with a flotilla of barges. Childers claimed to be offering the British people nothing less than a warning of what was to come, and Rudyard Kipling urged the public to support him in taking a firm stand against the ‘shameless Hun’.9 The story was improbable – the German admiralty had long written off the possibility of an invasion from East Frisia – but the hapless Royal Navy was forced to investigate the claims regardless.10

Members of Parliament from constituencies on the east coast, the closest part of Britain to Germany, bombarded the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, with difficult questions. In response, he ordered the Naval Intelligence Division to write a detailed report on the invasion plan outlined by Childers. After reconnaissance of the Frisian coast, the report concluded that the lack of railways and roads, together with the shallowness of the water and general lack of facilities, made a secret invasion from there impossible. ‘As a novel it is excellent; as a war plan it is rubbish,’ insisted Lord Louis Battenberg, the director of naval intelligence. To Childers’ barely disguised delight, the Kaiser banned the book in Germany. Childers also claimed that when he next went sailing in the Baltic, German spies dogged his every move.11

Spy fiction developed a darker side, shifting its focus closer to home, portraying immigrants and foreign visitors as the hidden hand of subversion. The new trope was Germans as a hidden fifth column already within Britain. Most active of all was a mischievous thriller-writer called William le Queux. He almost single-handedly created a fifth-column panic and then demanded the creation of a domestic security service to combat the undercover ‘German Menace’, with which the day of reckoning would surely come.12 Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 became the most influential of these books. Published in 1906, it told of German armies over-running the country with the help of spies and saboteurs. Le Queux admitted to a political purpose, explaining his intention to illustrate how poorly British defences would stand up to this sort of sneak attack. He also insisted that the content of his book was factually correct, and had been informed by conversations with ‘the authorities’.13

William le Queux posed as an international espionage expert, but was in fact nothing of the sort. Instead, he was a tireless and well-paid pulp-fiction writer who produced five novels a year until his death in 1927.14 The Invasion of 1910 sold more than a million copies, and publicists at the Daily Mail, which possessed serialisation rights, sent columns of men marching up Oxford Street dressed in Prussian uniforms, complete with bloodstained gloves, carrying sandwich boards that advertised the book.15 An inevitable flood of literary emulators hit the presses as le Queux’s royalties rolled in. Not to be outdone, le Queux responded in 1909 with Spies of the Kaiser, which insisted that no fewer than 5,000 German undercover operatives were at work in Britain. This was a new idea. A whole undercover army, not just a few spies and saboteurs, were apparently biding their time until the Fatherland told them to retrieve their weapons from a series of arms dumps in the British countryside. No less important, the novel also claimed to offer the inside story of intrepid British detectives working with agents to uncover these foreign networks.16

The British public were whipped into a frenzy. Politicians who wanted to expand Britain’s relatively small peacetime army jumped on the bandwagon. In 1908 Lord Roberts, Britain’s most distinguished soldier, claimed there were 80,000 trained undercover German soldiers in England ready to assist in the event of an invasion.17 Newspapers offered £10 to members of the public who reported sightings of suspicious activities that they could pass on to le Queux so he could ‘supplement his investigations’. Unsurprisingly, they were inundated with information, and soon it seemed a supposed German saboteur had been spotted in every town in the land,18 including some unfortunate Foreign Office clerical staff holidaying on the east coast.19 The government was annoyed by the obvious political scheming by advocates of increased arms spending. In 1906, Asquith’s predecessor as prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, rose to his feet in Parliament to denounce le Queux as a ‘pernicious scaremonger’ whose stories risked provoking an unnecessary war with Germany.20

Despite prime ministerial condemnation, several key figures in government worked hand in glove with le Queux. James Edmonds, head of a fledgling military intelligence unit called MO(5), maintained that Berlin had an extensive ring of operatives in Britain. Edmonds had long been nagging a dismissive Richard Haldane, secretary of state for war under both Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, about the shortcomings of British counter-espionage. He therefore found le Queux’s activities more than welcome.21 Indeed, much of the evidence that he presented to his masters came from le Queux, who in turn said that he had received it from concerned members of the public. There had only been five cases of German espionage reported in 1907, but unsurprisingly by 1908 this had risen to forty-eight. Edmonds created a helpful map of agent sightings. Perhaps equally unsurprisingly, this was soon leaked to the press. He also recruited William Melville, the former head of Special Branch, who while a talented agent-runner, had a reputation for embellishing his stories.22

By 1909, nefarious German agents were apparently hiding behind almost every bush in Britain. Asquith, however, had other things on his mind. His overwhelming, and rather challenging, priority was to take on and reform the House of Lords, which had consistently blocked his progressive agenda. The time and energy he devoted to this issue only increased further when the Lords famously rejected his government’s budget in 1909. But with the public suffering from spy-fever, the prime minister now had to take note of intelligence matters. As chancellor of the exchequer and in his early months as prime minister, Asquith had already chaired a senior committee to consider the invasion threat in response to pressure from Roberts and le Queux. His report demolished their theories, and showed a surprise attack to be impossible.23 Nonetheless, still under immense public pressure, in 1909 Asquith asked the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider the danger of foreign agents operating in the UK. All this accelerated an important cultural change away from the idea that counter-espionage at home was authoritarian and un-British.24

Although flawed and bogus intelligence reports shaped its ultimate findings, Asquith swiftly sanctioned the committee’s recommendation to establish a new Secret Service Bureau. This top-secret decision – very few people knew about the bureau’s existence – fundamentally altered the landscape of British intelligence forever. British espionage was nothing new, but its formalisation and growing proximity to Downing Street marked the beginning of a more organised and centralised intelligence system. It was not yet, though, an intelligence community linked to Downing Street, and early prime ministers remained unable or unwilling to engage with the secret world particularly closely.

The Secret Service Bureau was comprised of two branches. MO5(g) was the domestic branch, responsible for counter-espionage, and would soon come to be known as ‘MI5’, or the security service. It inherited a number of army counter-intelligence officers, and was led by Captain Vernon Kell, deputy to James Edmonds at MO(5). Kell went on to serve continuously in the role for more than twenty years. Ever present around intelligence matters for nearly half a century, Winston Churchill, as home secretary, oversaw Kell’s appointment. Adding a symmetry to Kell’s long career as spymaster, Churchill, when prime minister, would remove him from office in 1940.25 The Secret Service Bureau also had a foreign branch. Initially called MI1c, it soon restyled itself MI6, and was headed by the remarkable figure of Sir Mansfield Cumming, a retired naval officer. Despite losing his leg in a traffic accident in France, Cumming continued to run MI6, speeding down the corridors of Whitehall by planting his wooden leg firmly on a modified child’s scooter. MI5 was a small organisation and MI6 even smaller, but a key change had occurred. Hitherto, individual government departments, especially the India Office, had gathered intelligence locally and conducted espionage for their own purposes. Now Whitehall had an interdepartmental intelligence machine at the centre, delivering a ‘service’ to all government departments and anointed with the cult of specialness.26

After 1909, Asquith’s government went further. Harassed by continued public concern about nefarious German activities, it introduced the trappings of a secret state that previous successive governments had resisted for a century. Between 1909 and 1911, Asquith not only created the Secret Service Bureau, but also passed a draconian Official Secrets Act and allowed for much wider mail interception, something a Liberal government had banned as a diabolical infringement of liberties some fifty years before.27 The new Official Secrets Act, encouraged by Edmonds of MO(5), also helped the government to crack down on the press.28 Asquith, a facilitator rather than a dictatorial prime minister, also set up a new committee under Winston Churchill to consider how Britain would tackle ‘Aliens in Time of War’. With foreigners and exiles at the heart of this scare, the government created a register of aliens living in Britain. By 1913, it would have 11,000 Germans on this list, and had already prepared internment legislation.29 Notwithstanding domestic spy-fever, on the eve of the First World War much British intelligence activity lay elsewhere. Intrepid consuls, attachés and military officers carried out most of the spying on German armament programmes, while MI6 relied on the collection of specialist journals by travellers, or open observations, rather than actual espionage. Despite a lack of coordinated assessment, this material gradually filtered up into the higher reaches of government and influenced Britain’s diplomatic and strategic behaviour.30

The most immediate physical threat to Asquith came not from swarms of German spies, but from other quarters, notably the suffragette movement. In September 1909, two women were busy improving their shooting skills at a rifle range at 92 Tottenham Court Road with the rather improbable name of ‘Fairyland’. They intended to assassinate the prime minister, who was a firm opponent of votes for women. The two would-be assassins planned to join a group of suffragettes who had been picketing the gates of Parliament for eight weeks. Asquith passed them frequently, and therefore presented a tempting close-range target. Fortunately for the prime minister, the police received a tip-off. The informant was a Mrs Moore, a member of the Women’s Freedom League, but also a close friend of Asquith’s sister-in-law. She was an advocate of peaceful protest, and spent a great deal of time trying to dissuade her fellow suffragettes from violent acts.

Moore produced a letter from one of the two women who had been practising with a revolver.31 She refused to name names, but the police made enquiries at the shooting range, whose owner, Henry Morley, told them that two suffragettes had indeed been practising with a Browning automatic pistol. Their alarm was increased by the knowledge that the same range, and the same type of pistol, had been used only months earlier by an assassin who had killed Sir William Curzon-Wylie, aide to the secretary of state for India. Although undercover officers hung about for some days afterwards, neither woman returned. This left Asquith’s government with a dilemma familiar to later administrations dealing with terrorist threats. They knew full well that there would be serious recriminations if they did nothing and the prime minister was assassinated. The police did not remove the protesters from outside Parliament, but increased the number of officers there instead. They did not wish to give prominence to the idea of assassination, fearing that publicity might ‘act on the minds of these half-insane women, and might suggest effectively the commission of the very act which we wish to prevent’. Moreover, the removal of the pickets would be looked on by the women as an act of violence and injustice, and would ‘make them furious and more ready to commit such a crime’. In addition, the government thought that if there was an assassin, it would be easier to stop her if police knew she would be amongst the picketers, rather than walking ‘up and down between the House of Parliament and Downing Street at the hour when the P.M. may be expected to drive down’. Thanks to Mrs Moore, the prime minister remained able to pass in and out of Parliament unscathed.32 Recent research shows that the suffragettes included some notably dangerous groups, who fire-bombed churches and later sent a letter-bomb to Lloyd George. Some of the more violent women would go on to become active supporters of the extreme right, including Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts.33 Yet, remarkably, Asquith and all his successors through to the Second World War remained largely unprotected.

It was an act of assassination that finally triggered the outbreak of war in August 1914. Intelligence now had a more crucial – and real – role to play. The new secret services quickly pounced upon the small German espionage network in London, and rounded up all twenty-two known agents. The authorities had been assiduously following this spy ring, run from a barber shop in London by a naturalised German, since 1911. In an early intelligence success story, close monitoring had prevented the ring from passing useful information on to Berlin. Several hundred people were placed under surveillance. Predictably, the biggest problem was public paranoia. In the first two weeks of the war, the Metropolitan Police were forced to investigate thousands of people, with little to show for it. The newspapers followed this eagerly, and noted with satisfaction that by the end of November 1914 there had been over 100,000 reports of espionage, with 6,000 homes entered and searched.

Popular enthusiasm for war, combined with paranoia about spies, forced the Asquith government to look tough. Eleven German spies were shot at the Tower of London, a location chosen for its sinister appearance and reputation. More people were executed there during the First World War than under the Tudors. The amateurish German spies were not difficult to capture. They used lemon juice and peppermint oil instead of ink to render their reports to Berlin invisible, but were often arrested in possession of pen nibs corroded by the acidic lemon juice.34 Such tales allowed le Queux to continue to pump out his pulp-fiction spy thrillers. He maintained his phoney reputation as a spymaster to the end, and even now some of his relatives insist that he was assassinated by Russian agents in 1927.35

No one was safe from the paranoid public. Not even Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect and designer, who dared to sketch in the Suffolk village of Walberswick, close to the sea; or the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sat down with a notebook to write ‘The Lark Ascending’ on cliffs near Margate. Both attracted vigorous police attention. Any Continental connection became a form of contagion. A Polish girl, who was a friend of the Asquith family, was fired from her teaching job simply out of fear that she might be mistaken for a German spy.36 The Asquith government stepped up internment, rounding up some 60,000 Germans living in Britain.37 Under popular pressure, and perhaps against his better judgement, the prime minister personally emphasised that all non-naturalised adult males ‘should, for their own safety, and that of the community, be segregated and interned, or, if over military age, repatriated’.38

The First World War triggered Britain’s tangible intelligence changes. MI5 had only fifteen staff prior to the conflict, but it soon expanded. The Post Office also assumed an intelligence function. It grew into a Censor’s Office that employed over 2,000 officials, each steaming, scanning and resealing some 150 letters per day. Britain now boasted a serious domestic surveillance apparatus.39 By the last year of the war, censorship employed 4,871 people, a sizeable engine of surveillance.40 In the empire, MI5 worked closely with security agencies in Delhi to thwart German plots to promote revolts amongst imperial subjects. With good intelligence to hand, Asquith’s government allowed the German Foreign Ministry to continue its ludicrously ambitious plans to promote insurrection on the subcontinent, content that they were unlikely to succeed.41

Overseas, MI6 remained weak. The majority of important international intelligence instead came from a revival of codebreaking. For at least a decade before 1914, the War Office had plans to recreate a codebreaking centre if a military crisis occurred, and both the army and navy did so independently in August 1914. Although they initially cooperated, differences developed in both personality and approach, rendering any harmony short-lived. Nonetheless, they still managed to break German, French and American codes, alongside a host of other streams of high-level communications. Starting from scratch in 1914, this was an amazing feat. The Admiralty’s famous codebreaking unit, codenamed ‘Room 40’, was the more effective; directed by Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, it pioneered many of the scientific methods used by Bletchley Park two decades later.42

The First World War may have transformed British intelligence collection, but Asquith still took little interest. The prime minister was in fact deeply uninterested in war, strategy or intelligence, although he found time for bridge, lavish dinner parties and country weekends. He was not lacking in energy or application, but his focus was elsewhere, not least on his mistress Venetia Stanley, more than thirty years his junior. Asquith wrote to her over five hundred times during his period as war leader, sometimes as often as three times a day. The qualities that had made him a good peacetime prime minister were unhelpful in wartime. He was an affable chairman of the board, able to reconcile differences of opinion and find compromises. But he failed to appreciate the value of some of his partners in the wartime Liberal–Conservative coalition, and above all he failed to take hard decisions that were required for the vigorous prosecution of the war. He offered little guidance and support to the military, which was then led by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener.43

Intelligence proved important in the context of Ireland. Again, however, Asquith seemed broadly unaware of troubling developments, and instead engaged intermittently with particular incidents. The British had failed to properly penetrate the dissident movement, so human sources inside Ireland were few, and their reports fragmented and contradictory.44 Consequently, little warning of the 1916 Easter Rising came through these channels. Room 40 provided more solid intelligence. Decrypted secret German cables from America gave important intelligence on the international activities of Irish nationalists, including details relating to the Rising, during which Berlin assisted the exiled Irish nationalist Roger Casement in fomenting rebellion. Casement’s dealings were not news to the prime minister. Although the flow of intelligence to Downing Street was patchy, Asquith had enjoyed a stream of incriminating material on Casement.45 What appeared to be an intelligence bonanza turned out to have come from an untrustworthy source, Casement’s bisexual manservant and lover, who was ‘a liar, a blackmailer and a fantasist’. When Casement found out about his betrayal he publicly (but falsely) alleged a British plot to murder him. Although the incident embarrassed Asquith’s government, it was enough for MI5 to open a file on Casement and unearth more details of his nationalist scheming – and ultimately his German connections.46

Room 40 intercepted more than thirty cables dealing with German assistance to Ireland during the first two years of the war.47 The codebreakers not only gave full warning of the Easter Rising, but also revealed Germany’s plans to send weapons to Ireland in an attempt to divert British attention from the Western Front, allowing the Royal Navy to intercept a German U-boat carrying Casement to Ireland and the arms shipment to be captured. The signals intelligence, though, was only sent to a small military circle. It seemingly did not reach the politicians, even Asquith.48 Nor did it reach the authorities in Dublin. The sorry episode reflects the perennial problem of using signals intelligence: it is difficult to do so without compromising the source, thereby leading to a reluctance to share, even inside Westminster. More intriguingly, there is evidence that the British authorities deliberately allowed the Easter Rising to go ahead in order to justify repression of the Irish dissidents. Under interrogation, Casement offered to publicly call off the rebellion, but this was declined. Instead, he was told that ‘it’s a festering sore’, and it was ‘much better it should come to a head’.49 Either way, the Easter Rising failed.

Despite the work of Room 40, Asquith experienced the rebellion as ‘a real bolt from the blue’ – albeit one with a ‘comic side’.50 His wife Margot confessed in her diary that ‘none of us had any idea what had really happened’.51 Upon hearing the news of the Easter Rising, and in the midst of a conscription crisis, the prime minister simply said, ‘Well, that’s something,’ and went to bed. Intelligence seemingly had little impact in Number 10. Such nonchalance belies Asquith’s growing interest in Irish affairs, which had been a key issue in the months prior to war. He subsequently took on the office of Irish secretary himself, and headed off to Dublin to try unsuccessfully to sort things out.52 General John Maxwell, appointed by Asquith to force a military solution on a political problem, drew on Special Branch intelligence to persuade the prime minister that the case against every executed rebel leader had been overwhelming.53

They included Roger Casement. Partly because signals intelligence had thoroughly convinced the authorities of his treacherous links with Germany, Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916. To counter calls for clemency, the ‘Casement Diaries’, containing what were regarded as shocking descriptions of Casement’s homosexual exploits, were leaked by Blinker Hall to influence the trial. Previously, many Irish nationalists had mistakenly insisted that these diaries were forgeries.54 This episode underlines the long history of the selective use of intelligence to influence public opinion.

Meanwhile, the seemingly directionless war strategy left the cabinet unimpressed. Discontent also arose over the quality of information reaching them. Asquith had formed an ultimately unpopular coalition government, with Andrew Bonar Law as his Tory partner. In early September 1915, Bonar Law pressed the prime minister to make changes to the leadership of the war effort. He sought the resurrection of a General Staff at the War Office, with the hope that this would result in better strategic advice to cabinet. Nothing was done until 22 September, when Kitchener was conveniently absent. The Tories then took the lead and insisted on a smaller and more active War Council, together with the provision of better intelligence to cabinet by the General Staff. Asquith was finally forced to write to Kitchener, insisting on an improved flow of intelligence to the centre. He appointed General Archibald Murray as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but beyond that none of the suggested reforms were implemented, and Asquith did not follow up on the cabinet’s requests for more intelligence.55

The Asquith coalition government disintegrated in late 1916, as a result of its own incompetence and disorder. Lacking personal authority, Asquith had spent much of his time assembling factions and alliances. There was little planning, and astonishingly, letters sent by the prime minister to the King after each meeting formed the only record of cabinet discussions. When Bonar Law joined the coalition in 1915 he had been amazed by the lack of any method or even agenda for cabinet meetings. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign at the start of 1916 accelerated the decline of the Asquith government. Mercifully for the war effort, in June 1916 Lord Kitchener, the aged secretary of state for war, died at sea off the Orkneys in mysterious circumstances, an event that many attributed to a bewildering mixture of German, Irish or Russian saboteurs. He was replaced by the energetic David Lloyd George. At the end of the year, however, both Asquith and Lloyd George resigned in short order, while Bonar Law declined to form a government. Lloyd George became head of a new coalition two days later, establishing a Supreme War Council. Neither Asquith nor Bonar Law was mentally equipped to handle the range of decisions required by modern war. The main challenge for Lloyd George, now and for the rest of the war, was to try to wrest strategic control of the conflict from the military chiefs, a task that he never quite completed.56

Asquith had been notably detached from the business of war. He may have presided over the creation of the Secret Service Bureau and the rapid expansion of every kind of intelligence after 1914, but it had interested him very little. By contrast, in December 1916, David Lloyd George became the first prime minister to embrace intelligence, albeit often in an amateurish manner. This was partly to do with his nature, for he was by temperament a man of enormous energy and sudden impulses. But his initial mistakes also reflected the fact that British intelligence lacked a central brain. No system existed for sifting and interpreting intelligence for top policymakers. Despite a quantum leap in the organisation of Downing Street, and the creation of the Cabinet Office in late 1916, intelligence was deliberately left out. As a result, Lloyd George lacked context and made emotional responses to the raw intelligence he received – with unhappy results.57

His previous interactions with intelligence had been in the context of the ongoing spy-mania. In May 1915, as minister of munitions, he sought to confront the problem of factory explosions. Such disasters were almost invariably the result of primitive manufacturing processes, running at maximum capacity, which did not privilege safety. Like many others, however, Lloyd George was obsessed with the danger of the German ‘hidden hand’, and blamed saboteurs. His staff were allowed to set up a counter-intelligence unit to ferret out these imaginary enemies. Given the name P.M.S.2, it failed to find any spies, and slowly shifted its attention to trade union activity in the munitions factories.58

Lloyd George later admitted that he and some of his friends had deliberately encouraged rumours of saboteurs within the British munitions programme. This included the vast shell-filling factory at Chilwell on the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham, the largest concentration of high explosives anywhere in Britain. In January 1916, a Zeppelin was reported to be hunting up and down the Trent, supposedly hoping to bomb the factory. The next day, rumours circulated that Lloyd George’s friend Lord Chetwynd, who ran the huge complex, had caught three German spies in the act of trying to guide the Zeppelin to its target with hand-held torches and had shot them. Chetwynd exploited the false rumour by asking a labourer to dig three graves on the hillside by night, placing an anonymous black post at the head of each. This, recalled Lloyd George, ‘turned the rumour into unquestioned history’ and discouraged the curious from prying around the factory. Predictably, when it suffered a catastrophic explosion later in the war, it was blamed on yet more spies.59

In late 1916, shortly before Lloyd George became prime minister, the Germans asked the American ambassador in Berlin to explain to President Woodrow Wilson that they were ‘anxious to make peace’. But they did not wish to appear weak, so they secretly asked the United States, which was then neutral, to make a ‘spontaneous’ offer of mediation. Unfortunately for Germany, Britain’s Room 40 had decrypted the American message. When Lloyd George read it, he wrongly assumed that it signified collaboration between America and Germany. With the cabinet in disarray, and lacking intelligence-assessment machinery, the impulsive Lloyd George decided to act alone. He warned the American press against interference by Washington, and asserted that the war must be a ‘fight to the finish’. In reality, President Wilson was immersed in an election campaign and had no interest in peace initiatives at this point. Either way, diplomacy was not Lloyd George’s responsibility. When rebuked by the foreign secretary for meddling, he used the decrypts to defend himself. Far worse, he also alluded to secret information when explaining his actions in Parliament. Even as he assumed office in Downing Street in December 1916, more decrypts crossed his desk which he wrongly – and amateurishly – assumed suggested that the Kaiser and Wilson were still working together. This was not an auspicious beginning, and pointed to a wider failure around the assessment of intelligence at the centre of government.60

Lloyd George brought his undoubted talents for planning and organisation to the highest level of government. The most important part of this reform was the creation of a professional secretariat by Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marine officer who became the first cabinet secretary. His background was in intelligence – as a junior officer assigned to HMS Ramillies, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, he had engaged in unofficial reconnaissance. By 1902, he had joined the staff of the Naval Intelligence Department in Whitehall. An outstanding officer who spoke many languages, he was the perfect administrator. In 1909, he had written a report for the Committee of Imperial Defence that proposed a Secret Service Bureau.61 Now, in the newly created Cabinet Office, he was joined by Thomas Jones. Once described as ‘a disguised Bolshevik whom Lloyd George had discovered somewhere in a Welsh coal pit’, Jones was nevertheless an equally formidable organiser. It is difficult to capture the chaos that surrounded cabinet affairs before their arrival, and it is no exaggeration to say that they invented modern cabinet government.62

Hankey’s reforms were a triumph. They became central to the development of a modern British interdepartmental coordination system, with its labyrinthine sub-committees and orderly minutes focused on Downing Street. Cabinet meetings were no longer rambling conversations amongst twenty-three people, with no agenda. Instead, they became businesslike discussions at which decisions were made and properly recorded. Yet the reforms were a tragedy for secret service. Hankey created a central mechanism for everything except intelligence. Jones, his deputy, recalled that he had been insistent that the new Cabinet Secretariat should not become ‘an Intelligence department’,63 and although the design of the war cabinet at first envisaged ‘a comprehensive and regular gathering of intelligence’, this never happened.64 The lack of a central clearing house for assessing intelligence had been a constant criticism of government for some time, so while Hankey is celebrated as a moderniser of the government machine, he simultaneously retarded the British intelligence community by twenty years. The idea of a central intelligence machine located alongside Downing Street had to await a further world war, and the arrival of Winston Churchill as premier.65

Lloyd George’s personal record as a user of decrypts did not improve during the war. He was often left to deduce the story from individual intercepts, or ‘flimsies’ as they were called, because of the thin paper on which they were recorded, that arrived without context or comment. He was also given little guidance on the need for security. Thus in February 1917, when the American ambassador, Walter Page, visited Downing Street to convey a message from President Wilson, the prime minister could not restrain himself. He boasted that he had already seen Wilson’s message, attributing this to a leak. Page thought it possible that the telegram had been obtained by a ‘British spy service’ from an unreliable American official. In any case, knowing Wilson’s hatred of leaks, he did not inform Washington. Indeed, the president was obsessively secretive, and actually insisted on deciphering his more sensitive telegrams himself, sometimes with the help of his wife. The realisation that Lloyd George was reading his every word would not have endeared London to him.66

Surprisingly, even as Lloyd George put their work in peril, British codebreakers delivered the greatest intelligence coup of the First World War. They had intercepted what would soon become famous as the ‘Zimmermann telegram’. In this amazing message, Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, promised Mexico the reward of three of America’s southern states if she joined the German cause and declared war on her northern neighbour, the US. The message was one of the most secret of the war, and was supposed to have been taken by safe hand on a German submarine. But the vessel broke down before leaving port, forcing Berlin to trust the safety of its ciphers.

The Zimmermann telegram is a rare example of a single piece of intelligence changing the course of history. The way in which the British exposed it was elegant, but had nothing to do with Downing Street. Instead, it was a cooperative venture between Room 40 and the Foreign Office – and perhaps for that reason it was not bungled. Lloyd George, doubtless kept abreast given his strong interest in American orientations, was a mere observer. President Woodrow Wilson had won his recent election campaign on the slogan ‘He kept us out of war’. But, provoked by the Zimmermann telegram, alongside Berlin’s aggressive submarine policy, he declared war on Germany in April 1917.67 In his memoirs, Lloyd George records his gratitude to the codebreakers of Room 40 and their ‘uncanny efficiency in the unearthing of German secrets’.68

By the end of the war everyone seemed to be aware of the British secret service. The famous German philosopher Hannah Arendt, for example, was fascinated by the rise of Britain’s professional spies. She wrote that after the First World War, British secret services ‘began to attract England’s best sons, who preferred serving mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of their country’, adding that as a result ‘the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors’. However, she noted that with the British, unlike the Russians and Germans, ‘a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded’.69 Bertolt Brecht wrote that Britain controlled detective fiction and also controlled the world, clearly feeling that these two things were connected in some subterranean way.70

Room 40 was created as a wartime emergency. Nevertheless, its product proved too valuable for it to disband once the guns fell silent, and in peacetime Britain continued to read the secret communications of many countries. As the armistice talks opened in France, President Wilson sent his trusted confidant Colonel Edward House to join the negotiations. Lloyd George was able to read everything sent between House and Wilson. Yet strangely he had not been bitten by the intelligence bug, and useful as he found it, was not an enthusiast. Intelligence spending dwindled dramatically after the war, and the prime minister was happy to leave the reorganisation of peacetime intelligence matters to his cabinet colleagues. Accordingly, although Lloyd George established a governmental committee to review secret service in 1919, he did not join it. Instead, Churchill, an avid intelligence enthusiast, was the leading light in this important reordering.71 Its most important decision would be to maintain the wartime codebreaking effort and focus all resources in one unit: the Government Code and Cypher School, or GC&CS.72

Nonetheless, in February 1920, Lloyd George was required to revisit intelligence matters. He sought to end the festering conflict with the Bolsheviks, viewing Britain’s support for the White Russians as an unhappy extension of the First World War, and therefore a chapter that should now be closed. Although reluctant to offer recognition to the revolutionaries, the prime minister offered Moscow trade agreements as a path to restoring relations. His cabinet colleagues Churchill and Curzon were horrified, not least because of mounting evidence of Bolshevik subversion against the British Empire. Indeed, although there was clear evidence of Soviet funds going directly to the increasingly communist-dominated Labour Research Department during the early 1920s, it was Moscow’s interference in areas such as India that really got the British cabinet excited.73 MI6 had been active in this clandestine conflict too, and many military intelligence officers who had been heavily involved in the Russian Civil War were also dismayed.74

Once more, Lloyd George had access to his opponents’ decrypts. Not for the last time, a British leader was able to read the derogatory terms in which his opposite numbers discussed him. Lenin denounced the prime minister as a deceiving ‘swine’ and a man without scruples, and urged the Soviet trade delegation in London to repay him with even greater levels of deception. This, of course, was difficult, given that every line of Lenin’s instructions was being decoded by the British. Lloyd George declared himself ‘unruffled by Bolshevik intrigues’, which he considered amateurish and unimportant. He was also prepared to turn a blind eye to the war between Russia and Poland that developed in late 1919. But Moscow was a highly political and divisive issue, and by early 1920, some senior military chiefs had begun to question Lloyd George’s motives. On 15 January General Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary: ‘I keep wondering if L.G. is a traitor & a Bolshevist, & I will watch him very carefully.’ Wilson was especially paranoid about Bolshevik plots, and made several similar entries to the same effect over the next few months.75

The activities of Soviet negotiators in Britain were inflammatory. In August 1920 Leonid Krasin, a Soviet trade representative, had arrived for talks accompanied by Lev Kamenev, head of the Moscow Communist Party. Decrypts clearly showed that Kamenev was establishing secret contact with the embryonic British Communist Party, and subsidising the far-left newspaper the Daily Herald, using smuggled diamonds. Every move was visible to the codebreakers, and General Wilson was incredulous that Lloyd George had not immediately ejected the trade mission. On 18 August, Wilson confided his worries to Winston Churchill and the director of military intelligence, General Sir William Thwaites. Over the next few days he did the rounds of the security chiefs, including Lord Trenchard, who commanded the RAF, Sir Basil Thompson from the Home Office, and Rear Admiral Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, director of naval intelligence, and received a sympathetic hearing.76 On 24 August he noted in his diary: ‘Trenchard with whom I discussed the matter later and to whom I showed … the intercepts thinks like Basil Thompson, that Lloyd George is a traitor.’77

On 2 September, with Lloyd George away in Lucerne, his coalition partner Bonar Law summoned a meeting at Downing Street that included Balfour, Churchill and Basil Thompson. Thompson circulated the latest material from the codebreakers. Thomas Jones, the deputy cabinet secretary, recalled that ‘Everyone felt that the last intercept from Lenin where he lays down propaganda as the business of the Russian Delegation put the lid on and that there was nothing for it but to clear them out as quickly as possible.’78

Hankey, who had accompanied Lloyd George to Lucerne, argued exactly the opposite. He insisted that Wilson was absurdly alarmist, and that the activities of the Soviets in London were silly and easy to counter. His main worry was that if they ejected the Soviets they would have to publish the decrypts to justify their actions, placing the prime minister in a very difficult position. Britain would then lose its ‘most valuable and trustworthy source of secret information’, as no matter what they did to try to disguise the fact, Moscow would probably realise its communications were being read. He continued: ‘This particular cypher is a very ingenious one which was discovered by great cleverness and hard work. The key of the cypher is changed daily and sometimes as often as three times in one message. Hence if it becomes known that we decoded the messages all the governments of the world will probably discover that no messages are safe.’79

Back in London, Lloyd George forced a showdown with his critics. He freely admitted that the Soviets were engaged in ‘perfidy’ and ‘trickery’, but argued that good intelligence could be obtained by keeping the trade mission in place. Although he thought their activities ineffective, he could see that political opinion in cabinet was turning against him, and probably regretted not having taken a closer interest in secret service matters, since the intelligence chiefs had been part of this pressure to act. An opportunity to do so arose in early September, when Kamenev decided to return to Moscow and came to Downing Street to pay his respects. He walked into a diplomatic ambush. Lloyd George met him accompanied by Hankey, Jones and Bonar Law. The prime minister opened with a tirade about ‘gross bad faith’ and interference in British internal affairs, including Soviet attempts to recruit labour leaders and secretly subsidise the Daily Herald. He also accused Kamenev of attempting to turn Poland into a client Soviet state – but did not mention the decrypts. There was obviously a double game going on here, with the prime minister trying to clear himself of suspicions of being overly sympathetic to Bolshevism.80 Perhaps for audience effect, he warned Kamenev that if he did not leave Britain he would be deported.81

Lloyd George’s hard line resulted in his also being criticised by the left, so he was eventually pushed into publishing eight of the intercepts. He used a rather thin cover story, claiming that they had been provided by a neutral country. Churchill, showing his characteristic impulsiveness and little nuanced appreciation of the value of intelligence, had led the charge demanding publication. Amazingly, blinded by their ideological hatred of Moscow, the intelligence chiefs had agreed. Quex Sinclair, now head of MI6, who had superintended the best wartime codebreakers, insisted that ‘even if the publication of the telegrams was to result in not another message being decoded, then the present situation would fully justify it’. Intelligence officials leaked further decrypts to newspapers three weeks later. Lloyd George fired Basil Thompson shortly afterwards, leading some to suspect that it was he who was responsible for the leak. His departure was a positive move, and ensured that the Foreign Office and MI6 extended full control over foreign intelligence.82

The prime minister maintained his policy regardless, and secured an Anglo–Soviet trade agreement in 1921. Although a further surge of Soviet subversive activity was discovered in 1922, Lloyd George was overtaken by political scandal before he could respond, accusations of selling seats in the House of Lords forcing him to resign in October. In the summer his colleagues, led by Bonar Law, had chosen to make more Soviet decrypts public. Moscow predictably changed its cipher system, and an important stream of high-grade intelligence disappeared.83 Despite the deliberate and foolish revelations of 1920, 1922 and 1923, GC&CS continued to read much high-level Soviet traffic.84

Astoundingly, Soviet incompetence was even greater than that of the British. As early as July 1920, Kamenev and his colleagues had requested a replacement for their ‘Marta’ cipher system, believing it to be insecure. But their superiors resisted this request as requiring too much effort. They not only ignored the revelations in The Times but also strident warnings from senior Red Army commanders that their most secret correspondence in Europe ‘is known word for word to the English, who have organised a network of stations designed particularly for listening to our radio’. By the end of 1920, Georgy Chicherin, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, seemed to have got the message, and warned his mission in London that very sensitive material should be sent only by courier. But many secret communications continued to be intercepted by GC&CS.85

GC&CS therefore remained the star in Britain’s interwar intelligence firmament. Between 1920 and 1924, it issued over 13,000 intercepted signals, approximately 290 a month, including more than half of all French traffic. Yet little of this went to Downing Street. If the prime minister was not regularly in receipt of these gems, where did they go? The answer is to the Foreign Office, which aggressively clawed back control over foreign intelligence from the military following the end of the war. Intercepts informed the negotiation of complex post-war settlements and treaties that followed the First World War, such as those at Sèvres and Lausanne, often giving British diplomats the upper hand. One of the most important customers was the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon. By 1922, Curzon also enjoyed power over distribution, deciding what secrets should go to the prime minister or to members of the cabinet. Unfortunately, the decrypts often revealed the fact that Lloyd George was pursuing a separate and secret foreign policy, entirely undeclared to Curzon, and was sometimes backing the Greeks in treaty negotiations against his own foreign secretary. Curzon was an emotional individual, and knowledge of the ‘dirty’ activities of his friends and allies stirred apoplectic outbursts. In 1922, meeting with the French prime minister Raymond Poincaré, Curzon had to be led weeping from the room, and refused to return until Poincaré apologised for his behaviour.86

Curzon deliberately kept much intelligence away from Downing Street. Things were made worse by the lack of a system for synthesising intelligence material and presenting it to leaders in a way that would allow it to inform strategy. Instead, attention often focused on single documents. This was typified by the impact of intelligence on talks about the future of Britain’s alliance with Japan during the early 1920s, a decision that would cast a long shadow. Intelligence focused less on Japan’s intentions and capabilities than on plots and nefarious activities: Lloyd George told cabinet that other friendly powers did things that were ‘infinitely worse’ than the Japanese secret service. Curzon argued for a renewal of the alliance, despite the fact that he considered the Japanese ‘insidious and unscrupulous’. Churchill opposed a continued alliance with Tokyo, and to back up his argument showed his cabinet colleagues a secret Japanese map of Gibraltar that had come into the hands of MI5. Intelligence was often about alarms and incidents, and rarely informed national assessments.87

Meanwhile, the Irish problem had been rumbling on. The Easter Rising and the First World War were swiftly followed by the Irish War of Independence in 1919. Peace negotiations began in 1921, culminating in the formation of the Irish Free State the following year. This time Lloyd George lacked signals intelligence, but he did draw upon other forms of intelligence to aid the British position. Unfortunately, the material reaching him and his ministers came from military intelligence officers who opposed the truce. Consequently, they offered biased worst-case scenarios in which Sinn Féin and especially the IRA intended to play for time before resuming their offensive, including ‘fantastical reports’ of chemical weapons. Fortunately for the peace process, a more confident outlook emanated from the civilian authorities in Dublin, and the ‘two opposing interpretations of the Irish situation battled it out from July to December 1921’. Lloyd George fell into the optimistic camp, and was determined to reach peace, but the alarmist intelligence came perilously close to collapsing the negotiations altogether. By early December, the prime minister had had enough. He issued a dramatic ultimatum: accept the peace or resume war in three days. This was a gamble. Contradictory and inaccurate intelligence meant that he had no idea whether Sinn Féin would accept – and Britain was in no position to resume war so soon. However, the starkly pessimistic intelligence coming out of Ireland offered enough warning about IRA rearmament to convince Lloyd George to set a strict deadline. The negotiations hung in the balance, and there was ‘palpable relief’ when the Irish signed the deal.88

Prime ministers must celebrate when they can; success is often short-lived. In May 1922, Lloyd George was livid when he was shown the new Irish government’s draft constitution, despairing that it represented ‘a complete evasion of the treaty’ he had gambled on securing. Intelligence uncovered numerous plots, some more real than others, against Northern Ireland and the British mainland, in which the Dublin government was complicit. Frustrated, Lloyd George feared that the Irish ‘may have to face re-conquest’. When IRA men assassinated Field Marshal Henry Wilson in London the following month, the government found itself under pressure to wipe out the IRA headquarters in Dublin. A single piece of intelligence wrongly linked the murder to a Dublin conspiracy, and an attack on the IRA headquarters by British troops would have wrecked Britain’s Irish policy ‘at one stroke’. Nevertheless, led by Churchill, the cabinet approved the strike. Once more, Churchill failed to appreciate the nuances of raw intelligence and exhibited his famous impetuousness. All this frustrated the prime minister, but fortunately for Lloyd George and his Ireland policy, the army refused to obey the order.89 This marked Lloyd George’s final dealings with the Ireland problem, but Churchill would have to return to it during the Second World War. More ominously, it was merely a taste of the troubles to come for future prime ministers, from Harold Wilson onwards.

Bonar Law, who replaced Lloyd George in 1922, was the shortest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century, spending only 211 days in office. He died of a throat tumour shortly afterwards, and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. During the funeral, Asquith described him as ‘the unknown prime minister’. Hankey noted in his diary: ‘Poor Bonar never had the nerve for the job of prime minister. The responsibility preyed on his mind and, I feel sure, hastened on his cancer.’ Turning to Bonar Law’s successor, he added, quite correctly, ‘Baldwin has the nerve but scant capacity and I fear will not last long.’ Stanley Baldwin’s first term in office indeed lasted only eight months, and he stepped down in January 1924. Alongside these figures, Lloyd George appeared a political giant, and it was under him that British intelligence took its most adventurous step forward.90

A connected British intelligence community was not created in 1909, but it had already begun to centralise and professionalise. Indeed, it has been suggested that Asquith’s government changed the very meaning of the word ‘intelligence’. At the turn of the century, intelligence was something that existed in the far-flung service of empire, and meant information of almost any kind, so long as it impacted upon policy or made colonial rule more efficient. Much of it was supplied by an army of enterprising amateurs serving on ‘special duties’, supplemented by eccentrics who divided their time between collecting rare beetles or tulip bulbs and sketching Turkish fortifications. By 1918, intelligence was about secret work, and incorporated a strong emphasis on counter-intelligence. Most importantly, it had also become increasingly militarised, and had embraced the science of codebreaking. Room 40 had produced astonishing intelligence in just four years, but as yet no one knew how to interpret it or to use it securely.91

Lloyd George, perhaps assisted by the wise counsel of Maurice Hankey, had begun to learn his trade. In contrast to his early years as prime minister, by 1920 he knew that context was everything in interpreting decrypts. Accordingly, Lenin’s hot language had not alarmed him. He also came to understand that access to decrypts was acquired with difficulty, and given away easily – a lesson quickly forgotten in Number 10. Therefore, although he eventually discussed codebreaking in his memoirs, he said no more than had already appeared in the public domain, and worked closely with Hankey on the agreed text.92

By contrast, his cabinet colleagues performed poorly – even those with more intelligence experience. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary between 1919 and 1924, should have been a master of intelligence, having presided over a sophisticated espionage system in his previous existence as viceroy of India. Yet personal insults from the French, revealed in all their glory by intercepts, literally drove him to tears of rage. Churchill’s performance was even worse, and despite boundless enthusiasm for intelligence he was impulsive in its use. Moreover, when he rushed out his own history of the First World War in 1923, he made many references to British codebreaking capabilities. The Germans were soon avidly reading his account, and it is no coincidence that shortly afterwards they began to take an interest in a new and effective cipher machine called Enigma. In the mid-1920s, however, Germany had not yet resurfaced as a problem. The First World War was over, and a young man named Adolf Hitler had only recently established a nascent Nazi Party. Instead, it was the Russians who attracted the attention of Britain’s secret service. An early cold war of subversion and subterfuge was emerging, in which incoming prime ministers would need to use intelligence subtly and wisely. Inexperienced in handling the secret world and lacking an integrated intelligence assessment community, this may have been asking too much.