Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 32

Lakey, who with his taste for disguise was by now established in the new identity of Albert Allen, was left in financial straits after the FPA’s diminuendo. Ewer provided £20 to finance his move to Bournemouth, where he managed Dean’s Restaurant at 261a Wimborne Road, Winton. Jane Sissmore suggested a Home Office warrant to monitor Allen’s decline into debt, and a carefully timed approach to debrief him when he needed financial extrication but would not be too expensive to rescue. After an approach by Kell to Sir William Tyrrell, PUS of the Foreign Office, MI5 was granted £250 for this purpose.

The first approach to Allen was made by John Ottaway, the chief of MI5’s observation section B6. Ottaway had been born in 1870 in a Midland Railway cottage at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the son of a pointsman and signalman. In 1891 he became a constable in the City of London Police, lodging in a police boarding-house in Bishopsgate hugger-mugger with other young constables. He rose fast in the force, for ten years later he was already a police inspector, living in Leyton with a Scottish wife by whom he had at least five daughters. While City of London constables managed the formidable traffic congestion of the financial district, officers like Ottaway tracked forgers, swindlers and embezzlers. City of London detectives tended to be well-groomed men, suggesting the managing clerk of a solicitor’s office, rather than burly, heavy-footed plodders. In 1909 Ottaway was appointed detective superintendent – effective head – of the City of London Police, and his family were allotted apartments in Cloak Lane police station. In 1911 he participated in the search for the murderous anarchist Peter the Painter. During 1916 he joined a Freemasons lodge and received the freedom of the City of London. He was recruited to Kell’s department in 1920, and died in retirement at Bournemouth in 1954 leaving the notable sum of £12,000.³³

In 1942 Ottaway’s successor Harry Hunter described Section B6’s surveillance techniques to Anthony Blunt, who was then working for MI5. ‘His methods are very unscientific and depend above all on the experience and patience of his men,’ Blunt informed Moscow. ‘Recruiting is usually through a personal recommendation from some contact of Hunter’s, or by recommendation of Special Branch.’ The training for watchers was ‘primitive’. Hunter inducted new recruits with a few lectures, but relied on practice making perfect: ‘new men are sent out almost immediately on minor jobs accompanied by more experienced watchers, from whom they learn the methods in the actual process [of] following’.³⁴

Ottaway approached Allen in June 1928 offering to pay £75 for each interview that they had. In July Ottaway took Harker to meet Allen. As Harker reported to Kell, he and Ottaway motored to the Bournemouth suburb where Allen lived. He sat in his car in a small side-road, surrounded by half-built houses and wasteland, while Ottaway, who was masquerading as Mr Stewart of the Anti-Socialist Union, fetched Allen to the car. Harker then explained that he represented Kell, whose position in MI5 Allen knew. He decided that it might inhibit Allen, who talked for over an hour and a half, if he tried to take notes. He knew how often confession is a kind of pride. Interrogators can seem therapeutic: they encourage their subjects to talk about themselves and how they relate to other people; they discourage introspection; they do not lead the conversation by questioning or responses; they try to maintain an appreciative impassivity, never looking too keen, as their targets reminisce, boast, grumble, explain, retell rumours and produce telling anecdotes about other people. ‘I very quickly found’, Harker reported, ‘that we were on quite good terms, and, by treating him rather as my opposite number, found that he was quite ready to talk up to a point. He is, I think, a man who is extraordinarily pleased with himself, and considers that the work which he did for some eight years for the Underground Organisation known as the F.P.A. was admirably carried out, and has not received quite the recognition from its paymasters that Allen considers it deserves.’ Harker recognized Allen’s relief at talking ‘openly about his past life to someone who is not only a sympathetic listener, but also appreciates the technical side, and can thus see what an admirable Intelligence Officer Allen has been’. Harker was careful not to prompt or steer Allen, because ‘entirely spontaneous remarks’ were more useful than answers to questions. ‘Before we got down to talking generally, I explained to Allen that I understood from Mr Stewart that there were names that he did not wish to give away, and that this naturally would considerably impair the value of his information, if it was to be made with reservations.’ Allen reflected for a moment before replying, ‘I do not want to give away my late boss, because personally, I was very fond of him.’ Harker responded, ‘Perhaps I could tell you the name of your late boss, in which case you would not be placed in such an awkward position,’ then wrote the initials ‘W.N.E.’ on a piece of paper, and showed them to Allen asking, ‘That was your late boss, wasn’t he?’ Allen said: ‘Yes, Trilby. Trilby is a good fellow and damned smart!’³⁵

After further corroborative investigation Dale, Jane and Ginhoven were arrested on 11 April 1929; but Scotland Yard was determined to obscure as far as possible the infiltration of its Special Branch. After the three men’s detention Harker went straight to Bournemouth, where he asked Allen to tell all that he knew about the leakages from Scotland Yard, and the names of those responsible. ‘I explained to him that this information was of interest to me if given at once, but that if not given at once I was not prepared to pursue the matter further. I also stated that if ALLEN told the story in a manner which appeared to me to be correct, I would hand over to him the sum of £50, and that if the story which he told me was found to be of use to the authorities, I would consider giving him a further £50, but that, in any case, until I had heard his story, I was prepared to give him nothing.’ Allen accepted Harker’s terms. Before Allen began to tell his story, Harker asked him to note the time (5.10 p.m.) and that he was writing on a blank piece of paper. Harker then wrote, out of Allen’s sight, the names of Ginhoven and Jane together with the time. As Harker reported, ‘I then asked ALLEN to tell me his story straight away without any questions on my part and to preface it by giving me the names of the individuals in Scotland Yard who were known to have been passing on information to the F.P.A. organisation in the past. ALLEN at once gave me the names of GINHOVEN and JANE, whereupon I handed him the paper on which I had written these same names. ALLEN expressed considerable surprise and then continued with his story.’

The watch on Rose Edwardes had meanwhile revealed that she was running a new front for Ewer’s group, the Featherstone Typewriting Bureau in Holborn, which had been started soon after Ewer’s closure of the FPA. Ewer, Holmes, Dale and Edwardes often conferred in Holborn; Dale, under cover of a Shoreditch Borough Council investigator, acted as Ewer’s intermediary with the Special Branch informants. When Allen had ended his account, Harker revealed that the other FPA personnel had continued working together at the typewriting bureau. ‘In all my previous dealings with him, he has always been calm and collected and rather humorous … but on receipt of the information that the show had practically been going on minus himself, his self-control broke down,’ Harker reported. ‘He stamped round the room, swore and expressed the opinion that he, ALLEN, had been double-crossed, even going so far as to say he would give evidence against the — — — who had let him down in this scandalous manner.’ Harker doubted if there was much risk of this. ‘ALLEN is not a fool and he realises that, were he to come into the open with his full story, it would be quite impossible for him to lead subsequently a quiet life in this country, and in order to induce him to come into the open, it would be necessary … to arrange for him to retire to some other country where he could start life again under a new name.’ When Harker paid the £50, Allen ‘went out of his way to express his gratitude to [sic] my generosity in coming down and giving him the chance of telling a story which I had found out already for myself’.³⁶

After his arrest Ginhoven contacted Hayes, who defended him in an article in the Police Review and used him as an intermediary to contact Ewer. Harker became convinced that Moscow had ‘some hold’ over Hayes – perhaps evidence that Hayes had always understood the nature of his men’s work for Ewer although, in Harker’s words, ‘as he began to get on more in the world, HAYES ceased to interest himself in the [undercover] organisation, and latterly apparently had little if anything to do with it’.³⁷

Hayes had made a success of politics in the previous six years. It will be recalled that NUPPO’s strike of 1919 had taken hold only in Merseyside. Hayes, who had worked in youth at a corrugated-iron business at Ellesmere Port, stood unsuccessfully in the Liverpool municipal elections of 1919 as a NUPPO-sponsored Labour candidate and again unsuccessfully for the Liverpool parliamentary constituency of Edge Hill at the next general election. In 1923, when a by-election was called in Edge Hill, he was elected as Liverpool’s first Labour MP. Arriving in London by train to take his seat in the House of Commons, he was hoisted shoulder high and carried across the station concourse by 200 cheering NUPPO members blowing bugles.³⁸

In parliament Hayes was counted as a moderate socialist. Appointed as an opposition whip in the Commons in 1925 and elected to the party’s national executive in 1926, he became a reliable, sapless party hack. As the government’s third most senior whip after Labour’s victory at the general election of 1929, his duties included the compilation of a daily summary for King George V of Commons debates. The Tory MP Sir Henry Betterton, afterwards Lord Rushcliffe, had a story of seeing two Labour whips on a visit to Palestine. ‘Jack Hayes (the Liverpool policeman), now Treasurer of the Household, was very drunk and staggering about on the platform. As a train drew in, his pal urged him to pull himself together and said, “the Treasurer of Palestine is on this train.” Hayes clicked his heels and stood at attention with his hand at the salute and said “Treasurer be b—d. I am His Majesty’s Treasurer”, and added fervently, “Gawd bless ’im”.’³⁹

The general election of May 1929 was approached with heavy apprehension by many Conservatives because it was the first contest with the enlarged franchise of the so-called Flapper Vote. ‘Votes for women at 21 is alarming people up here and there is no doubt that we are taking a big leap in the dark,’ judged Cuthbert Headlam, a Tory whose constituency lay in a northern mining county. He expected ‘a big increase in the Socialist vote. In our pit villages the women are far wilder than the men – they are hopeless to argue with – they listen to the sob stuff with open ears.’⁴⁰

The involvement of a popular Labour whip in a spying scandal during election year would have aroused suspicions that the arrests were a pre-election stunt by intelligence mavericks similar to those behind the Pravda and Zinoviev forgeries. The government was to prove chary in 1934 when the CPGB member Edgar Lansbury, late of the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company, was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act: as the Solicitor General, Somervell, noted, ‘The Cabinet are very apt to be afraid that a quasi-political prosecution will lead to a row.’ Similar squeamishness was one reason for the decision not to prosecute Ginhoven and Jane who, after hearings by a disciplinary board, were dismissed from the police on 2 May (the general election was to be held on 30 May). Another good reason for disciplinary proceedings rather than a criminal trial was to avoid discomfiting public revelations in court. It would have harmed future MI5 investigations if the extent to which Allen had been turned by MI5 and had informed on his former employers, both English and Russian, had been publicized. MI5’s improving tradecraft was saved from public exposure. The agency was enabled to continue watching and learning from its adversaries.⁴¹

Ginhoven and Jane expected demotion to the ranks of sergeant and constable, and were indignant at their dismissal from Special Branch. Harker was disquieted to find that ‘both inside the Special Branch and outside, there is a good deal of sympathy with the two men, who – by the majority ignorant of all … the true facts – are considered to have been punished with unjustifiable severity’. This reaction resulted from ‘the Scotland Yard policy of concealing all the true facts as far as possible. One begins to wonder how far the very clumsy investigation may not have been inspired by a desire to produce such a state of mind with the Disciplinary Board itself!’ Another puzzle is the fate of Sidney Russell Cooke. In July 1930 he was found in the dining-room of his chambers in the Temple dead of an oddly angled gunshot wound to the abdomen. It was unlikely that the wound was accidental; hard to believe that ‘Cookie’ had killed himself; but the possibility that he died as the result of his association with Harker has never been aired.⁴²

Labour’s electoral victory encouraged Ewer, who in the weeks afterwards seemed to the incoming junior FO minister Hugh Dalton to be ‘a tiresome busybody’, lobbying for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Moscow, which had been severed after the ARCOS raid. Disillusion with Marxist orthodoxy came soon. In August Ewer took a reflective holiday in Warsaw and the Carpathian resort of Zakopane. After returning in September, he wrote an article for the communist Labour Monthly in which he argued that Anglo-Russian tensions were not simply an ideological clash of capitalism and communism, but also derived from their nineteenth-century rivalry as Asiatic powers. The piece was denounced as counter-revolutionary and Ewer was expelled from party membership. In a letter to Rajani Palme Dutt, the Stalinist doctrinaire in the CPGB, possibly written in the knowledge that his words would be intercepted and read by MI5, Ewer declared his apostasy. Communists ‘have come to talk only in an idiom, which, once a powerful instrument of thought, has become so worn and so debased that – like the analogous idiom of the Christian Churches – it no longer serves for thinking, but only as a substitute for thinking’. In all disputes ‘they rely upon the repetition of phrases which have come to be as mechanical – and yet, to them, as magically authoritative – as the formulae of the Athanasian creed’. He rejected the authoritarianism which enforces doctrinal conformity, ‘condemns all “deviation” as a moral offence’ and imposes obedience by the ‘apparatus … of confession, of absolution, of excommunication’.⁴³

Slocombe’s success in conducting ‘secret work unmolested for such a long period is proof of the high standard of his efficiency as an espionage agent’, MI5 concluded in 1930. ‘His high standard and reputation as a journalist give to him, as to EWER, most excellent cover for his treasonable activities and unrivalled opportunities for the collection of valuable confidential information.’ In August that year Harker cautioned Sir Arthur Willert (the Foreign Office’s press officer) about Ewer: ‘I considered him by far the most dangerous individual from a S.S. point of view that the Russians had in this country, and that Sir Arthur Willert might rest assured that anything he told Ewer, would go straight to the Soviet Embassy.’ Willert responded by asking unprompted if Harker knew Slocombe. Harker replied that Slocombe was Ewer’s deputy, and ‘very nearly as dangerous’. Willert thought the pair were ‘the ablest and most entertaining journalists he had ever met’, and offered to introduce Harker to them. ‘Though nothing would please me more personally, I did not think it wise at this juncture,’ Harker said.⁴⁴

Around this time Lord Southwood’s profit-driven printing combine Odhams Press bought control of the Daily Herald. Ewer continued as the paper’s foreign editor, in an editorial office in which communist affiliations were less acceptable and commercial considerations had higher ranking. Slocombe, however, left the Daily Herald: he was later foreign editor at the Sunday Express and a Daily Mail special correspondent. Ewer was summoned to a disciplinary meeting with Pollitt and Willie Gallacher in the Lyons tea-shop next to Leicester Square tube station in September 1931. ‘They parted on very bad terms,’ MI5 understood. ‘Ewer stated that from now on he was going to be bitterly anti-Communist.’ Pollitt subsequently described Ewer as ‘a posturing renegade who never loses a single opportunity of getting his poison over’, while the Daily Worker was to denounce him as ‘pro-Nazi’.⁴⁵

During the purges of 1937 Rose Cohen, the former lover of both Ewer and Pollitt, was arrested – apparently to stop her from meeting Pollitt in Moscow and reporting that her husband Max Petrovsky had been arrested as a Trotskyite ‘wrecker’ and was awaiting execution. The Daily Herald made a weasel defence of Soviet maltreatment of her. British officials were disinclined to help this ‘“Bloomsbury Bolshevik” or “parlour pink”’, as they called her: one of them asked, as a marginal joke in her file, ‘I wonder whether Miss Cohen is now solid or liquid?’ Ewer convinced himself that she had been sent to a Siberian camp (in reality she was shot after months of abysmal terror), and felt haunting distress about her fate. He did not know that Pollitt had made strenuous private appeals on her behalf, and therefore found it unforgivable that CPGB leaders knew how hard she had worked for ‘the Cause’ but, as he told MI5, never intervened on her behalf.⁴⁶

In the late 1940s Ewer worked with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department in countering communist propaganda and apologetics. He broadcast for the BBC and wrote commentaries expressing the bitterness of a betrayed and disillusioned idealist. Younger diplomatic correspondents, who consulted their amiable doyen ‘Trilby’ for interpretations of official opacities, never guessed that this urbane man had once been an inflammatory communist zealot. It was suggested in September 1949 by Ann Glass and Jane Archer that given the leakages attributed by Soviet defectors to highly placed government circles, Ewer and Slocombe should be questioned in the hope of establishing whether some of their sources in 1919–29 had since reached senior positions. The task was allotted to Maxwell Knight, a former naval midshipman, preparatory school teacher and journalist, who during the 1930s had become MI5’s pre-eminent agent-runner. Knight invited Ewer to lunch at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair in January 1950.

For the first hour they exchanged ‘trivialities about the war and the comparative efficiency of the German and Russian Intelligence Services’. When lunch was over, Ewer said jokily, ‘Well now, disclose the great mystery.’ Finally, some quarter of a century after MI5 had first rumbled his network, one of its officers confronted him. ‘He had no inkling of the real purpose of the interview,’ Knight reported.

As he is a very highly strung person, in spite of his experience and undoubted intelligence, I thought it might be a good idea to deal him a rapid blow at the outset. I therefore said to him that what I really wanted to talk to him about was the Federated Press of America. This certainly took him by surprise, and it was on the tip of his tongue to pretend some difficulty in remembering what this was; but as he hesitated, I took out from my dispatch case a rather formidable bundle of typescript, whereupon, with a slightly self-conscious smile he changed his tone and said, ‘Oh yes, of course, I can remember the Federated Press of America very well.’

Knight made clear to Ewer that ‘there were “no strings” at all attached to this interview … and that if he felt he did not wish to discuss the matter with me, he had only to put on his hat and go home, and there would be no hard feelings on my side. I explained that, on the other hand, if he would be kind enough to discuss the case with me, I felt it might be extremely helpful.’

Knight explained that MI5 ‘made a habit of going over what might be termed “classic cases” in the light of new information or the general trend of international politics, as by doing so we not only frequently re-educated ourselves, but also obtained new information and clearer interpretations of matters which were originally obscure’. Ewer listened attentively, and nodded his agreement. Knight said that two or three recent cases indicated that there might be persons in high government positions who were giving information to the Russians. Ewer agreed to help, with the reservation that he felt hesitant about naming individuals. ‘I passed lightly over this, saying that I quite understood,’ Knight recorded. Ewer talked slowly and quietly, as if weighing every word. He seemed to Knight evasive, forgetful, ‘obstinately vague’ and sometimes ‘unconvincing’. He claimed that, with the exception of Slocombe’s activities in Paris, his group did not touch espionage, but only undertook counter-espionage. The limit of their interest was the actions and plans of the British intelligence services against Soviet and CPGB activities in Britain. This was hard to disprove (certainly in a criminal trial), but sophistical.⁴⁷

There was no official discrediting of Ewer. His fifty years of diplomatic journalism was marked in 1959 by his investiture as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Colleagues hailed him as a fearless anti-communist who had once quenched Andrei Vyshinsky’s verbal outpourings at a Moscow press conference. Thirty years after the arrest of Dale, Ginhoven and Jane, their spymaster was honoured with a special pass to the Foreign Office which was valid for the rest of his life.

Years later Brian Stewart, the SIS officer who nearly succeeded Maurice Oldfield as Chief in 1978, declared that objectivity was the first necessity for successful intelligence work. ‘Report nothing but the unvarnished truth and, as far as possible, the whole truth. Understand, but do not pander to, the prejudices and preconceptions of the customer.’ Stewart was equally emphatic about the assessment of intelligence material: ‘beware of intellectual laziness, mirror imaging, prejudice, racial or professional arrogance, bias, groupthink, and the sin of assuming that the future will develop, broadly speaking, along the same lines as the past’. These commandments were the result of a century’s experience by the intelligence services, including MI5’s treatment of the Ewer–Hayes network. MI5 officers showed themselves as shrewd, efficient and decent in their questioning and turning of informants. Contrary to the caricature, they did not behave like clumsy oafish schoolboys playing rough sport. Effective counter-espionage needs tact and patience. Mistakes occur when time is short, or opponents are demonized. Although MI5 has often been depicted as blimpish, rigid, reactionary and thick, in reality its ductile liberalism ought to impress. There was a culture of respecting individuals. Secret policing was not oppressive. The security services were usually more considerate than Fleet Street reporters in minding people’s feelings.⁴⁸