‘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 Coope
r, 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
CHAPTER 4
The Vigilance Detectives
The first English network of communist espionage reporting to Moscow came into existence because of a commotion in a Pimlico side-street in 1909 some eight years before the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Wolverhampton, Chatham, Hornsey and Bristol – not Cambridge colleges – spawned the earliest Soviet spy ring. Renegade policemen worked for Moscow first. The covert activities of these policemen and their journalist associates, and the way that MI5 handled them, is fundamental to understanding secret service priorities and techniques in the seventy years before the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The uprising of the Metropolitan Police
One night in the year of the foundation of the British secret services two patrolling constables detained two rowdy men who were ringing doorbells in Pimlico. The miscreants were taken to the local police station, where they were identified as neighbours who had been locked out by their irate wives after carousing too late at the pub. The Metropolitan Police inspector on duty that night at Pimlico, John Syme, sent the men home without charge. The rumpus ought to have ended there. Instead, it led to rebellion inside the Metropolitan Police, demonstrations, strikes and the first organized network of Englishmen spying for the Bolsheviks.
After Syme had rebuked the constables for being officious, they made counter-complaints against him. A tortuous disciplinary procedure ended with his demotion to the rank of sergeant. When he protested, he was suspended from duty for insubordination. In 1910 he was dismissed for declaring that he would take his grievances outside the force to his MP. Sir Edward Henry, the fingerprint pioneer who was Chief Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, threatened resignation in 1911 when Winston Churchill, as Home Secretary, seemed inclined to reinstate Syme. In June that year Syme was arrested after sending a letter to Churchill which threatened murder. He was p
ut under police watch lest he offer violence to King George V. He and his wife Nellie were evicted from their police flat. He protested at the Palace of Westminster. There were terms of imprisonment. Twice he went on hunger-strike. He was sent to Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum. Scotland Yard’s determination to crush a man who had, under stress, threatened violence is comprehensible: a barman shot and wounded Sir Edward Henry in 1912 after his application for a licence to drive a motor-bus had been rejected at Scotland Yard.
Jack Hayes, a Liverpool MP and former London policeman, using the language of racism and sportsmanship that connoted manliness to his generation, told the House of Commons in 1923: ‘Inspector Syme, one of the whitest men who ever wore a police uniform, a man who has undergone untold suffering, was really playing the game as an inspector of the Metropolitan Police.’ Three years after Syme’s death in 1945, his misfortunes were again debated in parliament. ‘I remember him away back in the years before the first world war – tall, fine, handsome he was, and … very clean in his character,’ said the communist MP Willie Gallacher. ‘Injustice wore down that strong body and practically destroyed the mind and soul of that fine man.’1
Syme’s treatment was seen as a travesty by many London policemen, who projected a workplace association to resist victimization and favouritism. The authorities responded in 1913 by forbidding policemen from union membership, under penalty of dismissal. Money became a pressing issue, too. Although policemen considered themselves to be a class above the urban labouring poor, they were paid at similar levels. From the declaration of war in 1914 to the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, the cost of living in London rose by 76 per cent but police pay by only 20 per cent. Policemen resented losing prestige to munitions workers earning three times as much. They fainted on duty from hunger.
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