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
Office cultures and manly trust
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 recomme
nded 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.
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