Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 26

What was the political and bureaucratic environment in which Kell’s service operated? What were the institutional mentalities that prevailed in inter-war Whitehall and Westminster? How was national security evaluated and managed before the Cold War?

Political assessments were often crude during the 1920s. ‘Everyone who is not a Tory is either a German, a Sinn Féiner or a Bolshevist,’ declared Admiral Sir Reginald (‘Blinker’) Hall, wartime Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, and post-war Conservative MP for Eastbourne. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–9, denied any ‘fundamental difference between the “moderate” Labour men and the Communists: the managers and leaders of the Trades Union movement are now nearly all of them Socialists and the “moderate” Socialists are aiming, in effect, at the same thing as the Communists: the only difference is their method of procedure’. Churchill’s supreme fear was of outward moderation, which ‘by so-called constitutional methods soothes public opinion while stealthily and by smooth words it proceeds step by step to revolution’. This assessment was not wholly unfair, for Lenin in a pamphlet of 1920 had recommended that communists should urge the British proletariat to vote Labour: in doing so communists would support Labour leaders ‘in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man’. Churchill’s absolute incapacity for irony or scepticism – his avidity for intense and dramatic beliefs – made his judgement too belligerent. His compulsion to treat weekly incidents as if they were historic events made him equally unsound in his use of intelligence reports. As one of Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues confided to the Viceroy of India in 1927: ‘I don’t believe Winston takes any interest in public affairs unless they involve the possibility of bloodshed. Preferably he likes to kill foreigners, but if that cannot be done he would be satisfied with a few native Communists.’³⁶

After 1929, although the British Empire had been made by conquest and was ruled by force, its leaders were committed to rule by democratic consent. Conservative politicians of the period, in the words of a Cabinet minister in 1929, wanted to trust an ‘electorate trained by the War and by education’ to work together without class antagonism. After 1929, British leaders began an experiment in the art of parliamentary rule. They attempted to solve, as the art historian and administrative panjandrum Kenneth Clark said in a different context, ‘one of the chief problems of democracy: how to combine a maximum of freedom with an ultimate direction’. Their purposes were at odds with communists such as J. D. Bernal, who wrote in Cambridge Left in 1933: ‘the betrayal and collapse of the General Strike combined with the pathetic impotence of the two Labour governments had already shown the hopelessness of political democracy’. Communists wanted to reduce liberty, limit parliamentary sovereignty and tighten party directives. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the aim. An MI5 summary of a bugged conversation at CPGB headquarters in 1951 reports James Klugmann, the party stalwart who animated Cambridge undergraduate communism, ‘holding forth about “The British Road” saying that … “we” could make Parliament – transforming or reforming it as “we” went – into an instrument to give legal sanction to the people, as they took the power into their own hands’.³⁷

Humour or lack of it was a leading point in appraising public servants. Thus Vansittart on ‘the Bull’, Lord Bertie of Thame, Ambassador in Paris: ‘Snobbish, sternly practical, resolutely prosaic, he knew no arabesques of humour or irony, but only hard straight lines’; Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow during the Cold War, on Vansittart: ‘his witty comments always imparted a cheerful and soothing note into our frenzied conveyor-belt of files boxes’; and the insider who wrote the enigmatic obituary in The Times of Hugh Miller of MI5: ‘Captain Miller’s marvellous knowledge of human nature … [and] his never-failing humour … established his undisputed authority in a select circle’. It was recognized that geniality might help in handling Stalinist officials. Alan Roger of MI5, recommending cooperation with the Russians in running a deception campaign from Tehran to Berlin in 1944, insisted that a measure of mutual trust could be won from Soviet officials ‘by persistent good humour, obvious frankness, personal contact and a readiness to be helpful in small things’. Jokes all but extenuated communist activism. Charles Moody was a dustman in Richmond, Surrey who was industrial organizer of the Thames Valley branch of the CPGB in the 1920s and took subversive literature to army barracks, went underground in the 1930s, and in the 1940s was used as an intermediary when the atomic scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs wished to make emergency contact with his Russian cut-out – a go-between who serves as an intermediary between the leader of a spy network and a source of material – or to defer a meeting. After 1950 he underwent several interviews with MI5’s prime interrogator without any incriminating admissions. ‘Mr MOODY continues to impress as being a very likeable man,’ declared an MI5 report of 1953, before praising his ‘quiet sense of humour’. It is hard to imagine US or Soviet counter-espionage investigators appreciating a suspect’s jokes.³⁸

Trust was an important civilizing notion in the 1920s and 1930s. Men subdued expression of their feelings if they could. ‘We possess one thing in common,’ Masterman had been told in adolescence, ‘the gorgeous … power of reticence, and it binds, if I may say so, tighter than speech.’ The initiators of personal conversations were distrusted by the English: the poet, painter and dandy Villiers David advised his godchildren in 1943, ‘Never speak first to anyone you really want to know.’ If men refrained from intimacies, they often talked without guard of impersonal matters. The inter-war years were a period of careless Cabinet talk. Speaking at a dinner of parliamentary correspondents in 1934, George Lansbury, then leader of the Labour party, ‘derided the superstition of Cabinet secrets – had, he felt sure, told many because he hadn’t realised that they were secrets’. Collin Brooks of the Sunday Dispatch described the Cabinet of 1935 as ‘a chatterbox Gvt’.³⁹

Senior ministers discussed at dinner parties confidential material which had been circulated to them, including Foreign Office telegrams and dispatches, without any glimmering that they were being culpably indiscreet. The position of Sir Eric Phipps as Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin was weakened because Cabinet ministers were circulated with his dispatches about the Nazi leadership and recounted them for laughs at social gatherings. Above all there was Phipps’s famous ‘bison despatch’, in which he described a visit to Göring’s country estate:

The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods … and then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.

After Phipps’s transfer to the Paris embassy, he was cautioned by Vansittart against candour about French politicians in telegrams that had a wide circulation among members of the government.⁴⁰

Embassies and legations, like the Office in London, were cooperative, hierarchical organizations in which mutual trust was indispensable. This was not a matter of class loyalty or old-school-tie fidelity, but an obvious point about raising the efficiency of its staff. Sir Owen O’Malley estimated that about one-third of his ambassadorial energy went into making his embassy work well. ‘It begins to lose power whenever one man gets discouraged or another too cocky or a third jealous … when wives quarrel it is hell.’ It was indispensable for an ambassador to be trusted by the government to which he was accredited. ‘One of the many illusions about diplomacy is that it consists in diddling the other fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. It consists more than anything else in precision, honesty, and persuasion, which three things should hang together.’⁴¹

‘Democracy is not only a theory of government, but also a scale of moral values,’ the economic historian Sir Michael Postan insisted in a 1934 essay on Marx. As someone born in Bessarabia under tsarist despotism, who had escaped from the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1919, Postan valued parliamentary democracy as a flower of the European tradition of humanitarian individualism. ‘It accepts human personality and individual man as an end in themselves, the sole purpose and the only justification of a social system. It judges political actions by the good or evil they do to individuals, rather than by their effects on the collective super-individual entities of race, state, church and society.’ Postan countered the modish communists in his university who excused collective authoritarianism: ‘majority rule, representative institutions, government by consent and respect for opinions are merely broad applications of humanitarian ethics to problems of state government’. Social networks were central in Postan’s model society, where transactions were characterized by trust, reciprocity and the absence of avarice – but never led by the popular will. Maynard Keynes, Cambridge economist and Treasury official, thought on similar lines to Postan. ‘Civilisation’, he said during the looming European catastrophe of 1938, ‘was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved.’⁴²

After the transformative crisis of 1914–18, and despite the widespread earlier qualms about Victorian imperialism, most of the administrative leaders who helped to govern inter-war Britain believed that they represented a civilizing force in the world: ‘all my life and all my strength’, as Eric Holt-Wilson declared with staunch sincerity of his work for MI5, ‘were given to the finest cause on this earth – the ennoblement of all mankind by the example of the British race’. There were self-seekers and time-servers, of course, but also efficient, modest men, who took pride in doing the best possible job that they could. Sir Alan Brooke, the most effective Chief of the Imperial General Staff in history and afterwards Lord Alanbrooke, wrote on New Year’s Day of 1944: ‘Heard on the 8 am wireless that I had been promoted to Field Marshal! It gave me a curious peaceful feeling that I had at last, and unexpectedly, succeeded in reaching the top rung of the ladder!! I certainly never set out to reach this position, nor did I ever hope to do so, even in my wildest moments. When I look back over my life no one could be more surprised than I am to find where I have got to!!’⁴³

Such men as Holt-Wilson and Brooke were convinced upholders of values which required the practice in their working lives of such personal virtues as pride in service, individual self-respect and group responsibility. Cynicism was thought a sign of mediocrity. It is easy to scoff that these beliefs covered hypocrisy, selfishness, bullying, prejudice and inefficiency; but many public servants upheld these beliefs, which were at the core of their self-identification and a vital motive in their work. They were rich in the social capital of group loyalty, and therefore rich in trust. Although the British Empire rested on force, and its diplomats exerted coercion, it was the pride of Whitehall that it worked by influence rather than power.

‘Power’, to quote Lord Beveridge, ‘means ability to give to other men orders enforced by sanctions, by punishment or by control of rewards; a man has power when he can mould events by an exercise of will; if power is to be used for the good, it must be guided by reason and accompanied by respect for other men.’ Beside the power of money, exerted by giving or withholding rewards, stood governmental power: ‘making of laws and enforcing them by sanctions, using the instrument of fear’. In contrast, Beveridge continued, ‘influence … means changing the actions of others by persuasion, means appeal to reason or to emotions other than fear or greed; the instruments of influence are words, spoken or written; if the influence is to be for good, it must rest on knowledge’. It was believed that the official integrity and impartiality of men of good influence would not be warped by personal preferences. When Burgess and Maclean disappeared from the Foreign Office in 1951, the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told the Commons that all ministers trusted the neutrality of their officials, and felt sure ‘that the civil service has no part in political views’. His apparent implication was that it was irrelevant if the two missing diplomats – or any of their colleagues – were secret communists, because their partisanship outside the Office could not have tinged decision-making within the Office.⁴⁴

In 1940 the Home Defence (Security) Executive, newly constituted by Churchill’s War Cabinet to oversee the defence of the nation from fifth columnists and best known as the Security Executive (SE), recommended that a regulation be implemented making it an offence to subvert government authority. This was opposed by Sir Alexander Maxwell, the PUS at the Home Office, as ‘inconsistent with the historic notions of English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and that the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues.’ Maxwell had a first-class degree in politics and ancient philosophy from Oxford, and was married to a Quaker physician: together they gave an annual party for the Home Office charwomen with their sons acting as waiters. He was humorous, gentle, unruffled and a model of upright neutrality who always remembered that Home Office decisions affected, not an undifferentiated mass of citizens, but individual lives, each of which had peculiar problems and potentialities. Maxwell respected, as few officials in his department have done since 1997, ‘historic notions of English liberty’. Activities which showed the authorities as contemptible were not necessarily subversive in Maxwell’s judgement. ‘They are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution … but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.’⁴⁵

A description of Algernon Hay, chief of the Foreign Office’s Communications Department during 1919–34, shows the Whitehall ideal personified. Hay mastered ‘the supreme art of making others obey him without knowing they were obedient’, recalled one of his subordinates. ‘He knew how to talk, not merely to those in his own station of life but to everyone, from a royal duke to a scullery maid. He never let anyone down or gave anyone away … true loyalty, such as his, needs qualities of the head as well as of the heart.’ Hay and his kind inculcated an esprit de corps that had admirable elements. What distinguished the Office in 1936, so Gladwyn Jebb recalled, ‘was an intellectual liveliness and complete liberty, inside the machine, to say what you thought and press your own point of view, provided that outside you were reasonably discreet about the official line’. No one questioned the motives – as opposed to the judgement – of colleagues in public service, or impugned their loyalty. Colleagues ‘regarded themselves as a band of brothers who trusted each other … the great thing was that all, however junior, would express an individual view which, if it was intelligently voiced and to the point, might come up to the Secretary of State himself’.⁴⁶

The fact that senior members of the Diplomatic Service were classically educated has been condemned by later generations, but it had advantages. ‘Latin is a thrifty language and demands a keen eye and ear for the single word which contains so much,’ as John Drury has written. Latinists were invaluable in finding and making sense of the key words embedded in the evasive rigmarole of diplomatic exchanges: trained too in detecting fallacies, making distinctions between major and minor propositions, and giving clarifications in eloquent, impartial prose. A tone of festive irony was not inimical to these exacting standards. Junior officials who were verbose, or offered fallacious reasoning, found that their seniors could be crushing. Ivone Kirkpatrick, who joined the Western Department of the Office in 1919, had his draft papers returned with cutting comments: ‘rejected with contumely’; ‘this seems to me the bloody limit of blatant imbecility’. On one occasion Kirkpatrick was telephoned by the PUS, Sir Eyre Crowe, about a draft memorandum. ‘Either you do not mean what you say, in which case you are wasting my time,’ Crowe snapped at him, ‘or you do mean it, in which case you are writing rot.’ With that, Crowe put down the receiver. He was anxious that his young staff would not be disillusioned by exposure to politicians. When Lloyd George asked that a junior official should attend meetings of a Cabinet committee, Crowe demurred: ‘if young men from the Foreign Office go to Cabinet committees, they will learn what Cabinet ministers are like’, Crowe warned.⁴⁷

These vivacious exchanges were enabled in the Office and other departments of state by an admirable tool of orderly, discriminating administration: the circulating file. All but ultra-secret dispatches, telegrams and incoming letters went first to the most junior official in the responsible department, who read the document, wrote a minute (that is, a comment or preliminary recommendation) and perhaps made annotations. Then the document would rise through the hierarchy, with each official adding comments, exploring alternatives, adding emphasis or making retractions, in order to improve the recommendation. Having started at the bottom, the file would finally reach the Secretary of State. Evidence and arguments were sieved, weighed, evaluated and refined like rare metals. In some ways the ministries resembled the court of a Renaissance humanist monarch in which learned experts proposed, replied, explained, objected, discoursed and resolved. This system of calm, self-contained reciprocity relied on trust. ‘In most foreign ministries,’ wrote Sir Owen O’Malley, ‘the presiding politician, less confident in the loyalty of officials or more apprehensive that his doings should be known outside his own personal entourage, often employed in confidential or shady transactions a small group of adherents who could be as dangerous to themselves as to him.’ Such shenanigans impaired the trust between ministers and officials, caused delays, confusion and duplicated labour, and devalued the objective advice of those excluded from the inner ring. (The circulating file is a grievous loss in the age of emails and ‘Reply all’ circulation lists.)⁴⁸

Condescension and chauvinism were ubiquitous. When the British Minister in Prague was asked if he had many friends among the Czechs, he was incredulous. ‘Friends!’ he exclaimed. ‘They eat in their kitchens!’ Sir Alexander Cadogan, lunching at the Ritz Hotel in 1940, was irritated by the proximity of ‘Dagos and Coons’. Assumptions of racial superiority were treated as a national virtue. ‘It looks as if the peak of white supremacy has been reached and that recession is now inevitable,’ lamented Sir Victor Wellesley, Deputy Under Secretary at the FO until 1936. ‘Of all the calamities which that gigantic struggle [in 1914–18] inflicted upon Europe, none in the end may prove to have been greater than the loss of prestige which the white race has suffered in the eyes of the coloured world.’ Even communist informants thought that the exceptionalism of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was part of the natural order. ‘Nature has put Great Britain at the cross-roads of civilization,’ declared a Labour MP Wilfrid Vernon in 1948 (eleven years after he had been caught leaking aviation secrets to the Soviets). Duff Cooper, Ambassador in Paris during 1944–7, ‘has a tremendous feeling about the superiority of the British race and about our system of government’, Guy Liddell noted. ‘He thinks the old school tie is one of the finest institutions we have got, and that widespread education is a mistake.’⁴⁹

Racism was a majority pleasure. In 1940 the Duke of St Albans, after a day on guard at Admiralty Arch, went in battledress to dine at Brooks’s club. ‘I hate all Europeans, except Scandinavians,’ he growled to a fellow diner; ‘of course I loathe all dagoes.’ Dining at the Blue Train Grill, one Fleet Street editor endured ‘a cabaret which consisted of two niggers at a piano – one a full-blooded fellow and the other a chocolate-coloured coon. It was odd how my old Tory blood revolted at these self-satisfied niggers ogling our women, and at our women mooning over them.’ Foreigners were called Fuzzy-Wuzzies, Levantines, kaffirs, chinks and worse. They were identified with failure, contraceptives, trickery, idleness, perversion, cowardice, absenteeism and disease: Balkanization, Dutch caps, French letters, Greek gifts, Greek ease, Hunnish practices, Dutch courage, French leave, Spanish influenza, German measles, the French disease. ‘Egyptian PT’ (physical training) was afternoon sleep, and a ‘Portuguese parliament’ was where everyone talked but no one listened. Orientals were wily, Hindus were lazy, Hungarians were reckless, and Slavs were dreamy and lethargic. Treachery was sincerely thought to be unEnglish: it was the trait of subject breeds. ‘Don’t trust the natives: they’re treacherous,’ the war correspondent Philip Jordan was told when he visited Ceylon in the 1930s. ‘It’s only when you’ve been out here as long as I have’, said expatriates who thought themselves kind and good, ‘that you will realise how little you know about “our coloured brethren” as we must call them now.’⁵⁰

London was the capital of ‘the greatest democracy in the world’, the Cabinet minister Sir Samuel Hoare averred in 1936. ‘If British liberty and democracy collapse in a catastrophe, liberty and democracy will be exterminated in the world.’ Few people in England thought such Anglocentrism was absurdly overblown, or that Hoare was insular and foolish. After all, Germany and Italy were already autocracies, Austria and Spain were being overwhelmed by anti-democratic forces, and the Second Republic in Portugal and the Regency in Hungary were authoritarian regimes. King Alexander I had imposed personal dictatorship on Yugoslavia in 1929. There had been a military seizure of power in Bulgaria in 1934, although by 1936 King Boris III had engineered a semi-democratic counter-coup which prevailed until 1939. A fortnight after Hoare’s speech a military junta in Greece proclaimed the dawn of the Third Hellenic Civilization, which meant the abolition of the constitution, the dissolution of parliament and the suppression of political parties. King Carol II was preparing to suppress all democratic pretences in Romania. Britain, with its new constitutional settlement of 1927–9, was indeed one of the leading survivors among the diminishing number of free European democracies. It was to prevent resurgence of the dictatorial nationalism of the 1930s that the European nations coalesced economically, judicially and politically in the late twentieth century.⁵¹

There was justified pride in the intelligence, neutrality and inviolability from corruption of Whitehall. ‘The Greeks, like many other races, lack a competent civil service with established traditions of hard work and integrity,’ wrote Sir Daniel Lascelles from the Athens embassy in 1945. After years of Turkish domination, their political tradition was ‘to evade and thwart governmental authority’. It was said in their favour, continued Lascelles, that Greeks had ‘plenty of guts. So, I believe, have the Irish.’ There were a few exceptions to this patriotic unity: Goronwy Rees, who spied for Moscow in 1938–9, disparaged the land mass of England, Scotland and Wales as ‘Bird’s Custard Island’ because it was thick, tasteless and sickly. Millions of his compatriots however believed that British was best. Sometimes for sound reasons, but often with the benefit of self-assured inexperience, they presumed that the English language was the richest in the world, and that the nation’s policemen, beer, pageantry, countryside, sense of fair play, engineering, handshakes, comedians and parliament were unmatched. Nationalist pride permeated every social group: ‘the lags were as uncritically patriotic as book-makers or actors’, said Wilfred Macartney of his fellow inmates in Parkhurst prison, where he was detained in 1927–35 after trying to obtain RAF secrets for Moscow. ‘Everything English was best, from a Rolls-Royce to a cigarette.’⁵²

Such unreal assumptions vitiated national influence throughout the Cold War period. ‘The British have a great liability: so many of us still believe in the “effortless superiority” … of all British men and some women,’ wrote the sociologist Michael Young in 1960. ‘This terrifying attitude is not confined to Bournemouth. Many solid working-class people have it too, Labour voters as well as Tory.’ When, during the Suez crisis of 1956, Young conducted an opinion survey in the inner London suburb of Hornsey, he was ‘dismayed by the number of manual workers who backed Eden wholeheartedly, talked of Wogs, Dagoes and Gyppies as vituperatively as they did when they were “seeing the world” in the Army’.⁵³

Pretensions of English singularity, coupled with the delusion that public institutions could be made inviolate from continental influences, beset the cruder politicians, virulent editorial journalists and the more ignorant voters. Officers in Special Branch may have been hoodwinked by such ideas, but they made less headway in MI5, where most officials were well-travelled linguists rather than the blockheads imagined by the agency’s detractors. Diplomatists from Crowe, Vansittart and Cadogan downwards, though they were patriotic, saw the best hopes of peace lay in supra-nationalism, not nationalism. ‘The only sure guarantee against a renewal of fratricidal strife lies in the realisation, not only of the economic, but of the social solidarity of Europe,’ Don Gregory (the former Foreign Office expert on Soviet Russia) wrote in 1929. He warned against the special danger of Britain being lulled into complacency because ‘we are almost the only Europeans who have no traditional hatreds, who have no land frontiers to bother about, who need never be dragged into a war unless we wish to be’. European ideas and power had mastery over British destiny.⁵⁴