When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Norman Ewer, to whom reference was made in last week’s report, passed through Berlin on his way to Russia on January 3rd: it is interesting to note that he was travelling with Klishko, of the Russian Trading Delegation, who figured in connection with the offer of £75,000 by the Third International to the Daily Herald last summer.126

  The next year, 1923, Ewer was back in Moscow. The Comintern, the Soviet government organisation responsible for international propaganda and other matters, had just completed an evaluation of the CPGB and its relations with journalists at the Herald. According to some, Ewer was there ‘to discuss possible arrangements for the transfer of the paper to the Comintern’s control’.127 One tangible thing emerged from this visit. Shortly afterwards the Herald serialised a pamphlet by Leon Trotsky, then a senior member of the Politburo, that justified Bolshevik rule in Georgia.

  By the end of 1923 Ewer had attracted attention because he was a journalist on a left-wing newspaper, had criticised government policy, was a pacifist and conscientious objector, had helped to found the Communist Party in Britain, had travelled to Moscow, fundraised for his paper and printed Communist propaganda in it. But none of those was illegal.

  Advert

  It is what happened next that changed the game. Ewer probably knew that he was being spied on by MI5, so he decided to spy on them. To get started he put an advert in the paper – his paper, the Daily Herald – in November 1924. Headed ‘Secret Service’, the advertisement sought assistance for ‘the Labour group’, which, it said, was investigating undercover work. The advertiser said it ‘would be glad to receive information and details from anyone who has ever had any association with any secret service department or operation’ and it gave a Daily Herald box number for reply.

  The advert worked. Someone was soon in touch. It was MI5: they had ‘information and details’ that the Labour group would be interested in, but they certainly weren’t planning to hand it over. Instead they saw this as another opportunity to add to their information. They got one of their agents to contact the Herald undercover and offer to meet up. The agent was given a rendezvous so off he set. What he didn’t know was that the advertiser, the so-called ‘Labour group’, had worked out that he had a connection with MI5 and was watching him from a distance. MI5 itself had the whole scene under surveillance and was watching their man being watched by this other man. It was time to call it off.

  Far from disheartened, MI5 managed to arrange another undercover meeting with the people trying to spy on them. This time the person from the ‘Labour group’ who met the MI5 agent posing as a helpful soul was positively identified as Norman Ewer himself. He asked the agent how the security system worked and how it kept the Labour group under surveillance. Ewer apparently said that the group had been contemplating setting up its own security operation as a means of defending itself.

  MI5’s biggest lead came not from Ewer but from the man they’d spotted at that first, unconsummated, meeting. He was identified as Walter Dale and traced to a left-wing news agency.128 By reading the agency’s post and tapping its phones MI5 uncovered documents, some of which they eventually traced back to the French foreign office. But also in an early foretaste of what would later come to be known as the phone-hacking scandal, which gave rise to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry, the news organisation was discovered to have links to a detective agency: the Vigilance Detective Agency (VDA). It was run by someone called Jack Hayes. He turned out to be a former police sergeant.

  Hayes was a union activist who had resigned from the Metropolitan Police and become the head of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO). Back in August 1918 the London police had gone on strike over pay, union recognition and the reinstatement of a union agitator who had been sacked. At its height almost 12,000 police walked out. Fears were expressed that the capital was being left to ‘any evilly disposed person who cared to take advantage of it’. Coming soon after the Russian Revolution, and while Britain was still at war, nerves in Westminster were tense. The strike was soon settled, but a number of militant policemen were sacked. In following months there were other police strikes, in Birmingham and Liverpool. There, as in London, police officers were sacked. Some found employment with the Vigilance Detective Agency and, MI5 concluded, became part of Ewer’s enlarged circle. It appeared that the foreign editor of the Daily Herald effectively had his own private force of former policemen.

  But, extraordinarily, Ewer’s network went further than that, beyond former policemen to two serving Special Branch detectives, a sergeant, Charles Jane, and an inspector, Hubertus van Ginhoven. The three men met regularly at a Lyons café in Walbrook in the City of London with Walter Dale from the left-wing news agency. Dale kept a diary of this and similar meetings.

  On 11 April 1929 the three men were arrested. MI5 had been tipped off by yet another former policeman who had been sacked after the police strike and who had now also been fired by Dale. Offered money by MI5, this man told them what they wanted to know about Norman Ewer. Ewer’s days of spying on the spy-catchers were over.

  MI5 had puzzled over how Ewer’s ‘network’ operated and what it had done. Apart from acting as a courier service, passing documents to Russian contacts, MI5 discovered that the Special Branch men at the Lyons café were the key. Inspector van Ginhoven, who had been involved in the arrest of some leading members of the CPGB four years before, and his colleague Sergeant Jane passed on Special Branch and MI5 information about planned actions against either the British Communist Party or people closely associated with it.

  However, Ewer’s network carried out another activity: its team of ex-policemen kept MI5, MI6 and the Government Code & Cipher School (the forerunner of GCHQ) buildings and key staff under surveillance, reporting where their targets lived, their car registration plates and so forth.

  MI5’s conclusion was that ‘it became abundantly clear that for the past 10 years [the 1920s], any information regarding subversive organisations and individuals supplied to Scotland Yard by SIS [Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly known as MI6] or MI5, which had become the subject of Special Branch enquiry, would have to be regarded as having been betrayed to Ewer’s group’.129 This was a tribute of a kind to a man who also held down a day job at the Daily Herald. It was also quite an operation by MI5 to put all the pieces of Ewer’s jigsaw together.

  With the ring rounded up, what happened next? The answer, which may appear surprising, is nothing. No one was ever prosecuted and no one was ever sent to prison for what they had done. Norman Ewer just carried on at the Daily Herald. The Attorney-General decided against charging anyone. In the case of the serving Special Branch men, van Ginhoven and Jane, a file note records that ‘although ample evidence was obtained … it was decided that this would not be a suitable case for prosecution and Ginhoven and Jane were dismissed from the force on 25.4.29’.130

  Some have suggested that the case came at an unwelcome time for the leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald. His first ever Labour government had left office back in November 1924, after less than a year in power and in the wake of allegations about its connections with Soviet Russia. These had come to a head with the scandal over the so-called Zinoviev letter, which purported to urge the Labour Party ‘to stir up the proletariat of Great Britain in support of … recently concluded Anglo-Soviet treaties, in preparation for eventual armed insurrection and class war’. It had been published in the press just before the 1924 general election and caused the party severe embarrassment. Only decades later was it confirmed as a fake and a dirty trick by MI6. Now, in 1929, Ramsay MacDonald was on the cusp of re-entering office and, in the light of the Zinoviev letter scandal, probably would have had little stomach for another damaging Russian case – particularly one that could be traced back to a newspaper that had been controlled by Labour and the TUC since 1922.

  But there is also another possible reason, which the historian of the intelligence services Christopher Andrew has mentioned. One of Ewer’s network,
Jack Hayes of the Vigilant Detective Agency, had gone on to become a Labour MP, a junior member of Ramsay MacDonald’s first government, and a member of Labour’s national executive. MI5 knew that Hayes had introduced the serving policemen into Ewer’s circle and even provided help in the shape of his constituency agent in shadowing a suspected Scotland Yard agent. Arresting him might just have been too politically explosive. This was appreciated by at least some in MI5.

  A prosecution might also have led to disclosures about the extent of MI5’s surveillance activities and the embarrassing disclosure that Special Branch had been a source of the leaks. Perhaps it was judged that the country wouldn’t be ready for the news that some former and serving policemen could betray their country and, for a long time, outwit MI5 and MI6.

  Or could it just have been that despite MI5’s ‘ample evidence’ against two of the men there might not have been enough real and hard material on which to convict?

  Speaking to MI5’s Maxwell Knight much later in life, Norman Ewer justified what he had done by saying that it was ‘purely counter’ and that ‘they did not touch espionage’. His aim was ‘to obtain information as to what the British authorities were doing, and what steps they were taking against Russian and Communist activities in this country’. Knight didn’t record whether Ewer ever argued that it was journalistic endeavour to find out what the security service was doing. If he did, it seems Ewer would have had difficulty pointing to any journalistic output which resulted from his very active research. But there was one other factor that neither discussed: the postal intercepts that had revealed the French foreign office documents, which Ewer’s team had obtained. MI5 believed they had ultimately been forwarded to the Russians. Their source had been traced back to the Daily Herald’s Paris correspondent, George Slocombe, who purchased the documents from corrupt officials in the French foreign ministry. MI5 had lacked cast iron evidence, but in their view that had been espionage, pure and simple.131

  A change of course

  Back in 1929 Norman Ewer wisely decided it might be a good time to go abroad for a bit; he went to Poland. MI5’s surmise was that he had gone to tell Russian intelligence what had taken place ‘and to get fresh instructions’. But he soon returned to the Daily Herald and slowly began a full 180-degree about-turn in his political affiliations; having once been a supporter of Stalin he became a fierce critic.

  Following an article he published late in 1929 he fell out with the CPGB and eventually resigned from the party, never to return. But during the 1930s some were still wary of Ewer’s old pro-Communist leanings. The TUC’s General Secretary, Walter Citrine, argued that he was giving foreign news ‘a heavy pro-Soviet slant’. Ewer seemed to cool towards Communism and toward Stalin’s Soviet Russia. It might have been a bluff. Soviet agents were sometimes ordered to create covers by rejecting former Communist sympathies. But, it is also possible that Ewer’s break was more genuine, like that of many of his near-contemporaries, in response to news that emerged of what life was really like in Soviet Russia.

  A scan through The Times court circular shows that he and his wife Monica, who by this time was carving out a successful career as a writer, were now having their very own version of the Roaring Twenties. They were fairly frequent regulars at gatherings of the great and the good. Throughout this period he continued to be a regular visitor to the Foreign Office News Department. MI5 records show that he had been an intimate of each successive head since the early 1920s, which would be the ambition of most diplomatic correspondents. Ewer was watched intermittently, but at the end of 1929 MI5 was forced to admit that it just didn’t know whether or not he had closed down that part of his career for good.

  During the 1930s the Daily Herald, which had gained a circulation of around two million, ‘was unfailingly supportive of the Labour Party or the TUC line of the moment’. It was in favour of re-armament, and supported both Clement Attlee, the new Labour leader, and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin during the abdication crisis. Nazism was a different matter, however. Writing later, the paper’s then editor, Francis Williams, said,

  I was a good deal more suspicious of National Socialism from its very beginning than was Ewer who, whatever his private doubts, could hardly avoid reflecting in his news contributions a certain amount of the professional optimism of the Foreign Office – although he abandoned it long before the Foreign Office itself did.132

  Later in the decade the Herald was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. Ewer was by then not only ‘an unrelenting anti-Communist in reaction to his earlier views’, but was also leaning towards Chamberlain’s policy, whereas Williams was a critic. It was a state of affairs that seemed to reflect the confusion that was at the heart of the Labour Party’s own views at the time of the 1938 Munich crisis. During that time one Home Secretary complained to the head of the Foreign Office that Ewer was one of the three ‘darlings of the news department’, all of them, by implication, representing trouble. Only when Germany seized the rump of Czechoslovakia the following spring did the paper’s stance change.

  A year later and still shocked by the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the outbreak of war, Ewer wrote an article in which he referred to Stalin as a twentieth-century Genghis Khan. It was strong stuff and hardly a way of endearing himself to his former CPGB colleagues. Weeks later, and while things were going badly for Stalin’s armies in the Russo-Finnish war, Ewer and others – including left-wingers such as Kingsley Martin and Fenner Brockway – were publicly attacked by the CPGB as ‘people who had always been anti-Soviet’ because they had not been prepared to follow the faith without question or reservation.

  During the war Ewer helped to deliver the Herald’s ‘crisp, concise war and diplomatic coverage’. As the end of the war approached it was becoming clear to many that the alliance between the Big Three – in which America and Britain had joined with Russia – would soon end in tears. The Soviet Union’s territorial gains in eastern Europe were not going to be surrendered lightly, but reinforced. The chilly winds of the Cold War began to blow across Europe within months of Hitler’s death. It was at this stage that Norman Ewer’s career took yet another twist, and just as his early pro-Soviet activities had been partly secret, so too were his new anti-Soviet ones.

  A general election was called and Churchill, his party worn out by years in office, lost to Clement Attlee’s Labour Party. But the Labour Party entering office had a large majority and experience of government, having shared in the wartime coalition. It was no longer seen as a sop to the Soviet Union; Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin was distinctly cool, if not hostile. A former trade unionist, he had spent much of his earlier life battling against Communist agitators and was under no illusions about their nature or their methods.

  New opportunities

  Government focus shifted onto the Soviet Union as a potential adversary. With ministerial support, Foreign Office officials established what was called the Russia Committee, whose objective was to co-ordinate policy towards Russia, to evaluate intelligence and deal with Russian propaganda.

  The Foreign Office proposed to ‘expose totalitarianism and communism in all their forms and wherever they may be found’ but argued that ‘no direct attack should be made on the Soviet government’.133 Government accepted the diagnosis and what emerged over the next two years was a new and very shadowy Foreign Office outfit called the Information Research Department (IRD). It was set up officially in 1948, with much of the political spadework performed by a young Labour junior Foreign Office minister, Christopher Mayhew. For almost its entire life – it was closed down by Dr David Owen in 1977 – it operated as a covert propaganda and information organisation, producing anti-Communist literature, films and rebuttals of Communist campaigns. Its products were designed for use worldwide. It worked closely with MI6, diplomats, selected politicians, and carefully chosen journalists and academics. At its peak in the 1960s its staff numbered hundreds. One of its heads went on to lead MI6; another became
a Conservative MP.134 It had no public profile and was largely unheard of among the British public, although its activities were known to the Soviet Union almost from its inception – an early staff member was Guy Burgess (Chapter 4).

  The IRD was run by the Foreign Office but it operated anywhere – overseas as well as domestically, including in Northern Ireland. It briefed MPs and decision-makers and helped to support small specialist overseas news agencies, some of which had been set up by MI6.135 The IRD recruited a band of ‘safe’ journalists who received privileged access to secret factual background materials, which undoubtedly helped their careers. In return some wrote articles, books and pamphlets which ‘tame’ publishers then brought to the market. It is said that a few less assiduous journalists were presented with finished articles to which they had only to append their name. Academics were not entirely immune. The acknowledged scholar Robert Conquest, who helped to expose the details of Stalin’s Terror and the Ukrainian famine, worked for the IRD from 1948 to 1956 (see Chapter 3). Some journalists later claimed that they knew the origin of the information they received and treated it just as they would any other source, but some sounded more convincing than others when deploying the argument.

  By the time the IRD was created, Norman Ewer was positively hostile towards the Soviet Union and Communism. While he was still at the Herald, the IRD recruited him as one of its select band of journalists who would spread the word and fight Communist propaganda. The poacher had indeed turned gamekeeper.

  In May 1947 Ewer wrote a critical series of articles about life in Russia. He also debated what life was like in Soviet Russia with a leading Communist, D. N. Pritt, KC, MP, an unrepentant Stalinist who had been expelled from the Labour Party seven years earlier. Ewer joined the Fabian Society’s International Advisory Committee where, with Denis Healey, he represented ‘the right of the spectrum’.