Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 25

What of the officers and men who worked for MI5? Edwin Woodhall joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty in 1906. Before the war he worked for the Special Branch squad protecting Cabinet ministers from suffragette aggression and for MI5. Later he was personal protection officer to the Prince of Wales in France. He described the auxiliary officers with whom he served in wartime counter-espionage as drawn from ‘the best class of educated British manhood’ procurable in wartime: ‘stockbrokers, partners of big business houses, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, artists, journalists, surveyors, accountants, men of travel – men of good family, men of the world. In fact, the finest types.’³⁰

Typical of wartime MI5 officers was William Hinchley Cooke, who had been born in Germany to an English father and German mother. He attended school in Dresden and university in Leipzig, spoke German with a Hamburg accent and was fluent in French and Dutch. Like Woodhall he spent much of the war in counter-espionage on the Western Front. After his release from full-time government service, he had an attachment with the Birmingham city police; studied law at Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the bar; and then joined the staff of the armaments company Vickers, which gave him cover for travelling in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.

Vernon Kell sought the finest types for MI5: he liked men to be linguists, to enjoy outdoor life, to be shrewd readers of character, to be monuments of solid sense. In 1912 he recruited Reginald (‘Duck’) Drake, an army officer who spoke excellent French and passable German and Dutch, and whose listed recreations included hunting, shooting, beagling, skiing, golf, cricket, hockey, polo, otter-hunting, swimming, tennis and squash. Another recruit of 1912, Eric (‘Holy Willy’) Holt-Wilson, was an Old Harrovian, an instructor in military engineering at Woolwich Military Academy, a champion revolver shot and a keen skier. Holt-Wilson was seconded to the Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau in Paris in 1915, and headed the Rhineland police commission after the Armistice. MI5’s first graduate recruit, in 1914, Maldwyn (‘Muldoon’) Haldane, studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Göttingen, spoke German, French and Hindustani, and gave his recreations as trout-fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry-farming, gardening, history, ethnology, palaeontology and biology.³¹

Haldane’s recruitment belies the story that Dick White, who had read history at Christ Church, Oxford, was the earliest graduate to join the Security Service in 1936. Criticisms that Kell recruited from a narrow social group are similarly unfair. His budget for salaries was tight, and became more constricted by the funding cuts of the 1920s. Few men could live on the sums offered unless they had other income: White, then a young bachelor schoolmaster, rejected the first approach to him because he was offered the puny sum of £350 a year (albeit in cash, and tax-free). It was pragmatic of Kell, after the European war, to recruit men who were in receipt of army, navy or Indian police pensions. They had not only shown their trustworthiness in public service, but could afford to accept low salaries, which did not divert too much of the budget into personnel. MI5 got the only officers that it could afford. The retired Indian police officers have been disparaged as ‘burnt out by the sun and the gin’, and their colleagues as ‘washed-up colonial administrators’ and officials in ‘the twilight of their careers’. Such denigration is partisan. No doubt they were conventional-minded and responsive to discipline, or persevering to a fault, but they took pride in trying to do a good job. There is little evidence for the reiterative assumption that they were obtuse or inflexibly prejudiced (which is perhaps to mistake them for Special Branch). On the contrary, MI5 looked for multiple meanings, burrowed beneath superficial statements, used intuition in their relentless paperwork and knew the place in counter-intelligence work of paradox. They were never lazy or corrupt. Kell assembled an efficient body of men who worked well together on meagre budgets. White, who became head of MI5 a dozen years after Kell’s retirement, was well placed to appraise him. ‘Kell’, he judged, ‘was a shrewd old bugger.’³²

The pre-eminent example of an MI5 officer bolstered by income from an Indian police pension, Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker, was recruited by Kell in 1920. Born in 1886, Harker was the son of a professor at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, and had been invalided home from the deputy police commissionership in Bombay in 1919. He was a hard, astute, dutiful, prudent man, who headed B Branch (or Division), which ran investigations and inquiries with a staff of six officers and a three-man Observation section charged with shadowing suspects and pursuing inquiries. When the ailing Kell was dismissed in 1940, Harker, who was by then his deputy, had the sense to recognize that he was not the best man to succeed as Director, but took charge until a stronger leader was found. Harker’s appointment in 1920, like White’s in 1936, occurred years before security vetting of new staff was considered necessary. Vetting was not introduced until the 1940s: initially, there was negative vetting (background checks on potential new employees) and then, with reluctance, positive vetting. Checking the backgrounds, affiliations, personal habits and character of all civil servants with access to confidential material (which is what is meant by positive vetting) is a laborious, time-consuming, costly procedure, which diverted over-stretched personnel from their traditional priorities. There were neither security men vigilant at the entrances to MI5 offices nor security passes for its staff.

Intelligence officers in both Moscow and London understood the melodramatic stupidity of the officers of the Austrian General Staff after they proved in 1913 that Colonel Alfred Redl, the head of their Intelligence Bureau in Vienna, had been spying for tsarist Russia. They left him alone in a room with a pistol and waited for him to shoot himself. He took with him to his death any chance of identifying his accomplices, contacts, informants and tradecraft. Worst of all, the Austrians never learnt how many mobilization plans, armaments blueprints and transport schedules had been betrayed by him. Unlike these pre-war Vienna blunderers, MI5 practised patient watchfulness, psychological shrewdness and discreet understatement in preparing people to give them intelligence without exerting sanctions or threatening pain.

From 1925 onward MI5 preferred to identify traitors, establish understandings with them, draw information from them and amass knowledge of their procedures and contacts. It disliked the confrontation and finality, to say nothing of the uncontrollable public disclosures and reckless speculative half-truths in newspapers, which arose from criminal trials. This was not a matter of class loyalties and corrupt cover-ups, as has been suggested with the Cambridge spies, but a technique of accumulating, developing and sifting intelligence rather than introducing unnecessary crudity and spoiling sources. None of the Englishmen who spied in Britain for communist Russia was executed. In several trials – Glading in 1938, Nunn May in 1946, Marshall in 1952, Vassall in 1962 and doubtless others – prosecuting and defence counsel settled in advance what evidence was to be aired in court and how it was to be interpreted. The public disclosures in such trials often bore scant resemblance to the reality of what had happened.

In many cases public trials were avoided. The two Special Branch officers, Ginhoven and Jane, who were discovered in 1929 to be supplying secret material to Moscow were dismissed from the force after a disciplinary hearing in camera, but kept out of court. In consequence of this debacle, Special Branch responsibilities for monitoring and countering domestic communist subversion were transferred in 1931 to MI5, which was thereafter known as the Security Service. SIS reaffirmed in 1931 that it would not operate within 3 miles of British territory, and that all such territory across the globe came under the ambit of the Security Service. The new service was invested with enhanced status within Whitehall as an inter-departmental intelligence service providing advisory material to the Home, Foreign and Colonial offices, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, chief constables in the United Kingdom and imperial police authorities.

In 1929 MI5 had only thirteen officers, including Kell, Holt-Wilson and Harker. Its operations were divided between A Branch (administration, personnel, records and protective security) and B Branch (investigations and inquiries). The transfer of the SS1 section from Special Branch into MI5 in 1931 brought two notable officers into MI5, Hugh Miller and Guy Liddell. Miller had been a pre-war lecturer at the universities of Grenoble, Dijon, the Sorbonne and Cairo, and had joined SS1 in 1920. When he died after a fall in 1934, his cryptic obituary in The Times called him ‘a man of high intellectual interests’ who had since the war ‘devoted himself to sociological research applied to the domain of politics’ – a striking euphemism for defeating subversion. ‘The services he rendered to his country, though anonymous, were of great value.’ Miller was admired by his colleagues as a connoisseur of Japanese prints rather as Liddell was respected by them as an accomplished cellist.³³

‘When I joined MI5 in 1936 it was Guy Liddell who persuaded me to do so,’ Dick White recalled over forty years later. ‘He was the only civilising influence in the place at that time & I think this was felt by all the able men & women who joined MI5 [after 1939] for their war service.’ Liddell had ‘infinite diplomatic skill’, his Security Service colleague John Masterman judged. ‘At first meeting one’s heart warmed to him, for he was a cultured man, primed with humour.’ His years in Special Branch had made Liddell contemptuous of policemen: the Metropolitan force, as he saw first hand, was saturated by corruption as well as bungling. Somerset Maugham lunched with him in 1940: ‘a plump man with grey hair and a grey moon face, in rather shabby grey clothes. He had an ingratiating way with him, a pleasant laugh and a soft voice.’ If one had found Liddell standing in a doorway, apparently sheltering from the weather, one would mistake him, said Maugham, for ‘a motor salesman perhaps, or a retired tea planter’.³⁴

All the European powers recognized that their safety required intelligence systems; but the traditions, assumptions and values of the ruling cadres in different capitals diverged. The variations between Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany and the Third Republic in France – to take obvious examples – affected every particle of the espionage and counter-espionage operations of those countries. William Phillips, the head of MI5’s A Branch, took over the files of Special Branch’s SS1 section in 1931. It seemed wrong to him that Scotland Yard had compiled files on atheists, Scottish nationalists, conscientious objectors and what he called ‘Hot Air Merchants’. The spying by the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes on their citizens, and the terrifying system of vengeful denunciations and violence, enormities that were emulated in parts of Vichy France, had more systematized ferocity than the crass incarceration and maltreatment of ‘enemy aliens’ in 1939–40 or the racist killings and colonial torture that were perpetrated by soldiers and officials in the British Empire.³⁵