Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  The Vigilance detectives resembled tugs in the London docks, sturdy and work-worn, speeding hither and thither, but taken for granted and therefore unseen. The material collected by them served as tuition lessons for Soviet Russia in British tradecraft. By watching targeted individuals, Vigilance operatives identified SIS and MI5 headquarters. They shadowed employees from these offices to establish their home addresses. They tracked messengers, secretarial staff and official cars. In 1924 they realized that Kell was MI5’s chief by tracking him from his house at 67 Evelyn Gardens: surveillance was easy, because his address was in Who’s Who and the Post Office London Directory, and his chauffeur-driven car flew a distinctive blue pennant displaying the image of a tortoise with the motto ‘safe but sure’. They watched MI5 and Special Branch methods of monitoring Soviet and CPGB operations, and thus helped the Russians to study and improve the rules of the game. They checked that Ewer and his associates were not being shadowed by the British secret services. They observed embassies and legations in London, and tracked foreign diplomats. Possibly this surveillance led to the recruitment of informants, although no evidence survives of this. Vigilance men monitored employees of ARCOS, CPGB members and Russians living in England who were suspect in Moscow eyes. ‘If a Russian was caught out, invariably he was sent home and shot,’ boasted Ewer’s chief watcher in 1928.14

  Ewer, under the codename HERMAN, was Moscow’s main source in London. He accompanied Nikolai Klyshko to Cheka headquarters in Moscow in 1922, and visited Józef Krasny, Russian rezident in Vienna. He returned to Moscow in 1923 in the company of Andrew Rothstein @ C. M. Roebuck, a fellow founder of the CPGB and London correspondent of the Soviet news agency ROSTA. He also became the lover of Rose Cohen. Born in Poland in 1894, the child of garment-makers, Cohen had been reared in extreme poverty in east London slums. After studying politics and economics, she joined the Labour Research Department, and was a founder member of the CPGB. Harry Pollitt, who became general secretary of the CPGB in 1929, was among the men who became infatuated with this ardent, clever and alluring beauty, whom Ivy Litvinov described as ‘a sort of jüdische rose’. Cohen criss-crossed Europe after 1922 as a London-based Comintern courier and money mule. Eventually she committed herself to a monstrously ugly charmer, Max Petrovsky @ David Lipetz @ Max Goldfarb, a Ukrainian who translated Lenin’s works into Yiddish and went to England, using the alias of Bennett, as Comintern’s liaison with the CPGB. Together Cohen and Petrovsky moved in 1927 to Moscow, where her manners were thought grandiose by other communist expatriates.15

  Ewer returned from Moscow in 1923 with boosted self-esteem and instructions, or the implanted idea, to run his espionage activities under the cover of a news agency. Until then, it had been based in Lakey’s Bloomsbury flat, or later in premises at Leigh-on-Sea: Ewer had met Lakey and other operatives either in cafés or at the Daily Herald offices. Accordingly, in 1923, Ewer leased room 50 in an office building called Outer Temple at 222 The Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice at the west end of Fleet Street. There he opened the London branch of the Federated Press Agency of America, a news service which had been founded in 1919 to report strikes, trade unionism, workers’ militancy and radical activism. The FPA issued twice-weekly bulletins of news, comment and data to its left-wing subscribers. It was based first in Chicago, shifted its offices to Detroit and then Washington, before settling in New York. The FPA had developed reciprocal relations with socialist, communist and trade union newspapers internationally and acted as an information clearing-house in the United States and Europe. It may have served broad Comintern interests, but was not a front organization for Moscow. According to Ewer, the only American in the FPA who knew that its London office operated as a cover for Russian spying was its managing editor, Carl Haessler, a pre-war Rhodes scholar at Oxford.

  Moscow sometimes sent money to Haessler in New York, who remitted funds either to the communist bookshop-owner Eva Reckitt in London or to the Paris correspondent of the Daily Herald, George Slocombe. Usually dollars arrived in the diplomatic bag at Chesham House and were distributed to the FPA and the CPGB by Khristian Rakovsky, Soviet plenipotentiary in London from 1923 and Ambassador from 1925. An associate of Ewer’s named Walter Holmes (sometime Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald) converted the dollars into sterling by exchanging small amounts at travel agencies and currency bureaux. These arrangements ended after the ARCOS raid in 1927.

  For a time Ewer had a source in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), who was dropped because the product was suspected of being phoney. Ewer had a sub-source in the Foreign Office, who reported confidential remarks made by two officials, Sir Arthur Willert of the Press Department and J. D. Gregory of the Northern Department; but his network never obtained original FO documents which could be sent to Moscow for verification. Probably the remitted material from the Foreign Office and India Office was limited to low-grade gossip. Don Gregory, the Office’s in-house Russian expert until 1928, enjoyed his half-hour briefings with Ewer, whose facetious anti-semitism amused him: ‘he is an admirable and loyal friend, though I have heard him described as a dangerous bolshevik’. The only diplomatic documents obtained by Ewer’s network came from his second prong in Paris, where his sub-agent was the Daily Herald correspondent George Slocombe.16

  George Slocombe in Paris

  Slocombe had been born in 1894, and grew up in the semi-industrial northern districts of Bristol called Horfield and Bishopston. He was baptized in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. His father was a commercial traveller (who left an estate worth only £268 in 1929). He attended the Merchant Adventurers’ Technical College at Bristol, where his best friend was a lively peasant boy from Touraine on a government scholarship. In July 1909, aged fifteen, Slocombe was appointed as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank, behind London’s Olympia, which had recently been converted from a hippodrome into an exhibition centre for motor-cars and furnishings. According to the 1911 census, he lived nearby at 63 West Kensington Mansions, as a friend rather than a lodger, with Emma Karlinsky, who had come to England from the Crimea in 1909 with her two daughters, Fanny and Marie. Her husband Joseph was an attorney at Yalta and business adviser to a grand duke.

  Young Slocombe arranged nearby accommodation for his French friend, who had meanwhile adopted the name of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He was proud of being the sculptor’s most intimate English friend: when he started a Post Office Savings Bank internal magazine, a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing decorated its cover. Slocombe’s sonnet raging against tyrants and celebrating the assassination of the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911 was published in the Marxist magazine Justice. ‘Nobody then foresaw’, Slocombe recalled a quarter of a century later, ‘the day when the theories contained in the badly printed, red-covered volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital would become the official religion of a hundred and sixty million people seated astride Europe and Asia.’17

  As an impressionable youth, Slocombe was drawn by the anarchism of Kropotkin. He found a mentor in a stern, gloomy Scottish-Italian recluse, who lived, worked and slept in a book-lined cellar under a Hammersmith tailor’s shop. This underground cell, which daylight never reached, was the haunt of nihilistic young workmen, French, Russian and Spanish exiles, and the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who had escaped from an Italian prison-fortress and worked as an electrician in Soho. Slocombe’s youthful eagerness won him the trust of ‘men who lived in dread of informers, who distrusted strangers, who walked warily from bitter knowledge of the world’s prisons’. He learnt the mentality and methods of the plotters who created European despotism. ‘When, long afterwards, I met Mussolini for the first time, we met on common ground,’ he claimed. ‘We spoke the same secret language, the language of the men working blindly in cellars, in prisons, writing burning words to be printed on small and hidden presses, talking burning words at street corners, ardent, disdainful, self-righteous.’18

  In 1912, aged eighteen, Slocombe married seventeen-year-old Marie Karlinsky, who was pregnant w
ith their son Ralph. He joined the staff of the Daily Herald at about the same time, and the Royal Flying Corps as a second-class mechanic in 1916. He had a winter digging roads in Lincolnshire before deployment in France, where he spent eighteen months in intelligence translating German military wireless messages. When the first attempts were made to bug prison cells with microphones, Slocombe was told to eavesdrop, and felt relief that the stone paving of the prison cells caused such echoes that the indiscretions of captured German aviators were incomprehensible. He found headquarters life to be monotonous, and compared the staff officers to golfing stockbrokers.19

  Slocombe wrote an empurpled ‘Letter to Lenin’, published in the Daily Herald of 24 August 1918. ‘Your first proclamation, after the Second Russian Revolution, was a deep blast upon the Bugle of the Army of the World’s Freedom,’ he apostrophized Lenin. ‘You are aiming, as I believe sincerely, at the liberation and the redemption of man. The hate you have been shown by the rich, the monopolists, the concession-hunters, the feudalists, the diplomatists and the Press of all countries – German and allied alike – is a sure sign of your earnestness in the cause.’ These ebullitions seemed suspicious to the security services in London, but Slocombe’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Harry Goldsmith defended him to Stewart Menzies of SIS: ‘he was a M.T. [motor-transport] driver, but having crashed a senior officer into a ditch, was taken off cars & put to clerking. He is an educated man & … writes verses, patriotic & not bad at that for the Tatler.’ Goldsmith, who was a future military ADC to King George V, continued with the tolerance that often characterized authority’s attitude to oddballs: ‘I don’t think he is a bad chap on the whole, & I am rather inclined, if you agree, to talk to him myself & tell him I know he wrote this article addressed to Lenin & ask him if he think it’s playing the game to butter up a fellow whose actions caused very heavy losses to the French & ourselves by setting free troops hitherto employed on the Russian front, who is now assisting the Germans to enslave the Poles & Ukrainians etc.’20

  After demobilization in 1919, Slocombe returned to the Daily Herald as news editor. ‘He was a timid and anxious man,’ recalled Francis Meynell, ‘until he grew a beard to hide his receding chin. The change was immediate and remarkable: he became master of his scene.’ In the spring of 1920 Slocombe went as the Daily Herald’s special correspondent in Paris, which he loved as the capital of rumour. His work took him roaming in Europe: everywhere he resisted standardization and vapidity. The suicide of millionaires and dethroning of monarchs enlivened him. He liked to meet currency smugglers, concession-hunters, bankers-condottieri, political grafters, stock-exchange tipsters, swagger beaux, faithless men with awkward principles, and idealists who uttered only flippancies. He savoured the furtive exiles found in every European capital, ‘nursing midnight dreams of liberty, power and martyrdom’ and conjuring vengeful conspiracies.21

  A Home Office warrant was issued in 1921 to intercept letters to Slocombe’s house at Sutton in Surrey on the grounds that he was bringing Bolshevik literature into Britain and communicating with ‘leaders of the Red Trade Union International movement’. In 1922 a major international conference was held at Genoa to promote the economic stabilization and revival of central and eastern Europe, and to reconcile European capitalism with the Bolshevik economy. Shortly before the conference convened, Ewer sent Slocombe ‘hints about Genoa for your private ear’ which he intended to be passed to Soviet contacts. These hints comprised information from Edward Wise, a civil servant who was Lloyd George’s economic adviser during the Genoa deliberations and sympathetic to Bolshevism, that London hoped to use the Genoa meeting to parlay an agreement between the Soviet Union and the other European powers. The French embassy in London reported in 1923 that Slocombe had visited Lausanne under the alias of Nathan Grunberg. The French tied him to Clare Sheridan, who was reputed to have been his lover. His expulsion from France was contemplated in 1926 after he was seen in regular meetings with a Bolshevik agent.22

  Slocombe’s sister-in-law Fanny Karlinsky was the object of further suspicions. She won a scholarship to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith, and read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford in 1913, but fell ill and spent much of 1914 in the French Pyrenees recuperating. During 1916–19 she worked as an Anglo–Russian translator and interpreter. In 1919 she became a telegraph coder and decipherer for ARCOS, and worked in its offices for twelve years. She was anonymously denounced to Special Branch in 1924 for her alleged association with Edith Lunn, wife of Andrew Rothstein. There were two separate code-rooms in ARCOS offices, one for purely commercial traffic and the other for political messages: Fanny Karlinsky claimed to have worked only in the first room. She was present during the police raid of 1927, was listed for possible expulsion to Russia by the authorities and had her application for British citizenship denied. She continued working for ARCOS until 1931, when she refused orders to return to Russia and was stripped of her Soviet passport. Guy Liddell, then still in Special Branch, noted in 1928: ‘although she is not a full member of the Party, she is in close touch with party circles and ready to assist in any way she can’. MI5 suspected her of being a sub-agent of Lenin’s State Political Directorate, the GPU. Later she ran a boarding-house, but in the 1950s needed an allowance from Slocombe in Paris to keep her from privation.23

  The Zinoviev letter and the ARCOS raid

  The Ewer–Hayes network first attracted MI5’s interest in 1924 in the aftermath of the Zinoviev letter scare. The background was this. A Scottish communist named John Ross Campbell, acting editor of the Workers’ Weekly, was arrested on 5 August on the instructions of Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He was charged under the Incitement to Mutiny Act of 1797 with seducing members of the armed forces from their allegiance. He had done this, Bodkin alleged, by publishing ‘An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’, expressed in terms similar to Cecil L’Estrange Malone’s speech of 1920 at the Hands Off Russia meeting. Campbell urged ‘soldiers, sailors and airmen, not merely to refuse to go to war, or to refuse to shoot strikers during industrial conflicts’, but also to join with urban proletariat and rural labourers ‘in a common attack upon the capitalists, and to smash capitalism forever, and institute the reign of the whole working class’. Bodkin’s motives were mixed, according to A. J. P. Taylor: ‘perhaps stupidity (and the director of public prosecutions is usually a stupid man); perhaps also to embarrass the government’. Certainly Campbell was arrested on the same day that Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government reached terms for an Anglo-Russian trade treaty, which communism’s adversaries were determined to thwart. When the government withdrew the prosecution on 13 August (on the pretext that Campbell was a decorated soldier, who had been crippled by war wounds), its opponents protested at political interference with the law. A general election was called when on 8 October MacDonald’s government opposed and lost a parliamentary motion calling for an independent tribunal to inquire into the handling of Campbell’s prosecution.24

  Amid the furore over the proposed Anglo-Russian treaty and the Campbell case, a message was supposedly sent from Moscow, dated 15 September 1924, from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, to the CPGB’s general committee. The message conveyed Comintern orders to prepare for revolution by subverting the armed forces and by duping Labour party leaders. It was obtained by the SIS station in Riga, which sent it to SIS headquarters in London on 2 October. SIS circularized copies to the Foreign Office, Admiralty, War Office, Air Ministry, MI5 and Scotland Yard (which failed to pass it to Special Branch). The letter was spurious, probably concocted by White Russian forgers in Riga, and possibly planted by die-hard intelligence anti-Bolshevists, but it differed little from genuine Moscow messages to the CPGB. Lakey told MI5 that the CPGB gave Ewer a categorical denial that it had received any such letter. As both the army and MI5, even without the Campbell case, feared subversion of troops, MI5 on 21 October sent copies of the Riga letter to General Officers Commanding in Britain.
A copy certainly went to Conservative Central Office (most probably by the hand of Sir Joseph Ball, head of MI5’s investigative branch); Desmond Morton of SIS may have meddled alongside Ball; and another copy of the letter was, according to Morton, given by Stewart Menzies of SIS to the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail, which doubtless received a confirmatory copy from Conservative Central Office, published the forgery four days before the general election on 29 October. Publication did not swing voters against socialism: the financial terms of the doomed Anglo-Russian treaty aroused more suspicion. Labour got 5.3 million votes, compared with 4.3 million in 1923; but the collapse of Liberal support since 1923 gave a majority of seats to the Conservatives, and created a bitter Labour feeling that they had been cheated out of power by the Daily Mail’s Zinoviev stunt.

  In the final meeting of the Labour Cabinet after their defeat, Lord Parmoor, Sir Charles Trevelyan and Josiah Wedgwood voiced their suspicion that ‘Crowe and Gregory had stooped to a mean political trick in order to damage the Labour Party,’ reported the official taking the minutes, and ‘were quite prepared to blow up the F.O. if they could get rid of the spy system’. (During the 1930s Trevelyan was one of the most gullible of fellow-travellers to Bolshevist Russia, who described Stalinist penal colonies as a ‘grand method of human regeneration’, while Parmoor was an apologist for Stalinist slave labour and religious persecution.) In fact Gregory had opposed publication, and Crowe was so mortified by his mismanagement of the letter’s distribution that he broke down in tears as he apologized to MacDonald for contributing to the election defeat. ‘The Zinoviev letter killed Crowe,’ MacDonald said in 1928. ‘He never lifted up his head after that.’25