MI5 in the Great War

by Nigel West

  Moreover, Danes and Spaniards were getting their letters sent in legation bags. In July 1915, Regulation 24, prohibiting illicit letter carrying had been amended so as to cover persons at the ports who ordinarily came in contact with the crews of vessels, and in June 1916, shipping-agents were instructed to forward for censorship in London all letters addressed to persons on board ships sailing for a port not in an Allied country. Only three classes of letters were excepted, and they were letters from the owner to the captain of the ship; letters relating to charter; and letters relating to cargo.

  Still reports came in of letter-smuggling by ships’ crews and G4 commenting on the report of our inspecting officer indicated five possible methods of evading the regulation and declared the only complete solution to be in cutting off all intercourse between the crews and the shore. There remained for consideration the censoring of seamen’s correspondence. After much debate the work of censoring all correspondence addressed to the captain and crews of vessels trading to neutral countries was transferred to the military control officers who forwarded anything they did not understand or considered suspicious to MI5G or to the Censor for translation or comment.

  DRR 24B was issued in November prohibiting the conveyance of any written or printed matter to any enemy or neutral country except under special permit and with the exception of the following classes of letters: ships’ papers; patent specifications authorised for export; letters, etc., carried by the GPO.

  Early in April 1916, it was known that evasion of the censorship on mail to the United States was carried out by posting letters to intermediaries in Canada. A test censoring of Canadian letters was made in April and letters passing between Ireland and Canada were censored for a while. After, the Irish rebellion censorship was reimposed in August, and in September a warrant was obtained for the occasional examination of the mail to Canada.

  In June censorship of the South and Central American mail was extended to outgoing correspondence, and in September, after the discovery of the new German secret ink, MI5 urged that the whole of the American mail should be censored. In November a test censoring of the French mail was carried out.

  In dealing with outgoing mails the great weapon was delay – delay sometimes inevitable under pressure of work or German attack, in special cases, however, deliberately imposed. In June 1916 it was estimated that no letter could reach Rotterdam within forty-eight hours and that no wire could reach the German authorities within about fifty-four hours. The result was beneficial in other ways; it was considered possible to restrict censorship on the inward terminal mail to that correspondence of persons on the German Black List, to abrogate the delay on outgoing letters to British prisoners of war, and to remit censorship on incoming letters from PoWs with the exception of those sent by the so-called Irish Brigade at Zossen and Limburg.

  Owing to the discovery that Joseph King MP was corresponding with Otto Gaupp, a suspect German journalist at The Hague, the privilege which projected outgoing letters from the House of Commons was withdrawn. The regulation prohibiting the use of secret ink was extended to cover mechanical means of transmission such as concealing a letter in the binding of a book or between the pages of a pamphlet gummed together. Indiscreet persons had reported facts and speeches made in a secret session of the House and certain reports were published. Two copies of these having been found in envelopes addressed to persons connected with a Dutch shipping company, it was made illegal to publish any report of or reference to, a secret session of either House of Parliament or of Cabinet proceedings. In August the export to enemy countries of any kind of printed matter had been prohibited, as also all correspondence with book-makers, lottery-agents, fortune-tellers and pseudo-scientific institutions. This order was specially aimed at institutions in touch with the Rozroy Agency which prepared horoscopes for soldiers, and concerning which Steinhauer had made special enquiry in pre-war days.

  It was in the power of MO5 to make arrangements for secret censorship for a limited period in any particular town and, in February 1916, a report on the secret censorship begun at Inverness in July 1915 showed that good work had been done in preventing strikes, disorder and leakage of information. On the other hand, an inland censorship for Chatham imposed in September 1915 ran for one month only as it had proved valueless. Suspicious telegrams from ports were referred by the port officer to the Censor’s department and arrangements could be made for overhearing telephone messages from any suspected call-box or telephone office. A record was kept in such a case of the suspected person’s connections and the conversations were submitted periodically to this bureau.

  An instance in point is the case of George Spicer of the Dover Standard, who telephoned information about the movements of troops. Spicer had been prosecuted in the civil court in connection with some information sent by telephone which had been overheard by arrangement with the GPO. The magistrates dismissed the case on the grounds that it was a press offence which had not been referred to the DPP, and as it had not had his sanction the action must fail. Mr Moresby, MO6G’s legal adviser, considered that it was not a press case as there was no evidence to show that the information was intended for publication. But the GPO raised the question of legality; the regulation forbidding alien enemies to have telephone lines, except with the consent of the police, was administered by the police. In twelve cases, however, by arrangement with MO5, the GPO kept observation on lines which might be used for enemy purposes. This was a special precautionary measure not based on any regulation but justified by the exceptional circumstances. The GPO however, objected strongly to any proposed extension of the system. In replying to the GPO, Major Clayton stated that MO5 had asked that calls from a certain number at Dover should be censored and the results had been very valuable and he wished to continue the present arrangements, promising that no requests for the interception of telephone messages would be made except when there were strong grounds to expect important results.

  The action could be covered by principles of common law and, if any case were brought into court, the overhearing of a conversation could be proved in camera which was a safer way from a preventive point of view than promulgating a new regulation to legalise the deed. The position was accepted by the GPO, with the warning however, that identification and proof in London would be a very different matter from proof in a small locality.

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  Reports received from various sources between April and December 1915 disclosed three kinds of traffic involving money. Repatriated PoWs or people returning from the Continent were carrying British, French and Belgian gold and notes, involving in some cases considerable sums of money. The Germans were having quantities of Russian notes bought for their account in London, it was supposed for espionage purposes, possibly also to gain a hold over businessmen. It was expected that one of the conditions of peace would be the transfer into German hands of the French holdings of Russian securities. Traffic in copper coins was suspected.

  Taking the last point first, in September a dearth of copper coin was noticed in Devon and soon after the shortage of such coin became acute in Ireland. Silver coinage also began to fail. Various reasons for this shortage were put forward by the Mint and other authorities. Then the trouble spread to Sweden. In October the Swedish government prohibited travellers from carrying more than one Krona’s worth of copper out of the country and at the same time it became known that the Germans were requisitioning Belgian copper money and sending it to Germany. Whether the German demand was responsible for the shortage in other countries was never clearly established.

  As early as April 1915 passengers were reported to be carrying abroad gold coins sewn into their linen or hidden in boxes of cigarettes or in cloth buttons. MO5 warned the port officers of such practices, and also of the traffic in Russian notes. In August 1915, in order to place some restriction on the export of British and Allied currency, MO5 made arrangements at the ports to exchange such gold and notes into German currency if the traveller was bound for G
ermany or German-occupied territory; moreover the Treasury was warned of the practice.

  The Treasury, however, declined to press for a regulation limiting the export of notes and specie, on the grounds that such action might impair the national credit, so MO5 subsequently attempted to extend the system of exchange at the ports to all currency being conveyed out of the country in considerable amounts without regard to the ultimate destination of the traveller. In February 1916 it became known that German financial agents in New York were buying English sovereigns for the South American Exchange and were refusing to buy other gold coins or bar gold. Moreover English gold coinage was being carried to the Continent by the crews of South American boats. Certain Belgians at Flushing were said to be collecting all the British and French gold they could and selling it to the German authorities at Brussels; in August of the same year a Spanish woman was sent into France via Italy to buy up French gold and soon after the Banco Hispano-Americana was seeking to import into Spain gold supplies from a firm in Glasgow.

  On 5 December 1916 DRR 30E was issued prohibiting the melting down or using of gold coin of British or foreign currency for any purpose except currency, and a further regulation, 41B, was drawn up restricting the remittance of money to countries in German occupation except under license.

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  It is not possible to enter into the special work done by Section G1 but one set of enquiries had so important a bearing on the future conduct of the war that it sails for notice. During the latter end of 1915 and the whole of 1916 G Branch had investigated the cases of the Diamond Reign public-house, and the Communist Club at 107 Charlotte Street.

  After the closing of various German clubs on the outbreak of war, the Diamond Reign became a meeting-place for bitterly hostile British citizens of German birth and enquiry showed that close touch was maintained between some of its habitués and those of the Communist Club, which boasted such members as Georgi Chicherin, Maxim Litvinov and Artur Zummermann.

  The Communist Club kept in touch with German PoWs, intrigued with the Labour Party to stop the arrest of ‘peaceful’ alien enemies, fomented strikes on the Clyde and spread revolutionary doctrine among Russian seamen, through the Russian Seamen’s Union which maintained close connection with the International Transport Workers’ Union in Berlin. The Russian Seamen’s Union had its centre at the Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union in Commercial Road.

  Between September 1915 and April 1916 ten Germans and nine naturalised British subjects of German birth, all of them frequenters of the Diamond Reign, were interned, and in November 1916, the Communist Club was raided and twenty-two persons of various nationalities were recommended for internment. The Home Office sanctioned the internment of seventeen, and three were freed as the case against them was weak, and two, Chicherin and Sandelevitch, were offered the choice of internment or deportation on the charge of hindering recruiting and fomenting labour trouble. Chicherin was interned for months and after the Russian Revolution was allowed to return home with many other Russian communists.

  The action of the police in these cases and, particularly with regard to the Communist Club, calls for comment. The Germans were confident they could bribe the police, and the favourable reports always sent in about the Communist Club were not adequately explained by the excuse that it was convenient for the police to keep the anarchists and communists undisturbed in one centre; of this the police strike of a later date affords abundant proof. It is probable that the unwillingness of the police hampered the Special Intelligence Bureau considerably in procuring adequate punishment for these men; the work of informers had to be relied upon and this had a notable effect after the war when the question of denaturalising disloyal subjects came before the Advisory Committee.

  The following instances taken from the report for September 1915 give a general idea of the work of the branch. All the cases, it must be remembered, would not come under the cognisance of the branch but only those in which investigation was required.

  – Prosecuted: the pro-German wife of a clergyman at Darlington. Offence: enquiry about munitions factories. Punishment: month’s imprisonment.

  – Ordered for arrest: conditionally on proving identity with a pre-war German spy, a man who had applied for a permit to go to Holland.

  – Signalled not to be allowed to leave the United Kingdom: a man suspected of illicit trading in munitions.

  – Under observation: five, among these a nurse on the east coast who had spent most of her youth in Antwerp, Germany and Russia.

  – Check on correspondence: a house which had been the rendezvous of German immigrants studying textile machinery.

  F Branch dealt with cases of internment under DRR 14D but all enquiry was carried out by G Branch. Interned: a Roman Catholic priest, ex-officer of the Landsturm, officially allowed to visit Belgian wounded soldiers in Northumberland; a German who had posed as a naturalised British subject for over twenty years, and had special knowledge of the Tyne river; a German posing as a Luxemburg citizen; a naturalised British subject who had served in the Prussian Guard and was in the habit of visiting the concentration camp at Frimby; a German managing director of a company for synchronising clocks all over London, in a position to do mischief by sending a high voltage current along the wires, twice convicted of minor offences under the ARO.

  Recommended for internment: seven, of whom four were persons sentenced to various terms of imprisonment for false declarations under ARO, and a fifth was to be prosecuted for the same offence. One of these offenders was a former German consular official who had obtained employment in munitions works.

  – Recommended for deferred internment: one, a man who when drunk uttered pro-German sentiments.

  – Removed or recommended for removal from ports or other places: three women, two men of whom one was in a position to damage the Leeds waterworks.

  – Under orders for arrest: one, the son of a naturalised Frenchman of Polish origin and a German mother, evaded service in the French Army and went to Sweden.

  – Recommended for deportation: after imprisonment of six weeks, a woman who entered a prohibited area and failed to register under ARO.

  – Repatriated or recommended for repatriation: four women, two of whom lived on the English coast, one at Londonderry, and the fourth was engaged to a British officer.

  – Not to be allowed to return: one German woman who posed as a Swiss, went frequently to Folkestone, made friends with officers, and left for Germany before proceedings could be taken.

  Among other aliens the following G cases are reported: a Dutchman, who offered, his services as a Secret Service agent and was kept under observation; a Belgian sub-agent employed to recruit Belgians for munitions work in England and on whom incriminating documents had been found in Holland was arrested under DRR 55 and interned; a Belgian who had been twice to Germany since the outbreak of war and had tampered with his passport.

  – Suspected cases in the army: eighty, and, of these, four were G cases; a sergeant was arrested at Chatham as he could give no satisfactory proof of his nationality (it was proposed to discharge him as undesirable and leave him to the police to be dealt with under ARO); an intelligence officer with the army in France married to a German lady residing at The Hague and friendly with a well-known German agent (GHQ informed and checks placed on the correspondence of the officer and his wife); two other less interesting cases.

  – Suspects on account of their correspondence: seventy-eight.

  – Intercepted telegrams: from Liverpool to an address supposed to be a spy address, telling a German prostitute to get leave to go to New York; prolix telegram from Newcastle to Amsterdam sent by a man of the same name as a would-be informer against the Germans in 1909: from London to Stockholm asking for money: from Amsterdam to Leghorn sent by a man bearing the name of an enemy agent at Rotterdam. Several other telegrams satisfactorily solved.

  – Observation: six cases, of these a person writing from Scheveningen to one employed in munitions wor
ks at Sheffield suggested that letters could be sent by the Foreign Office bag to avoid censorship. No explanation could be given by the Foreign Office.

  – Check on correspondence: two, of these a person writing from Geneva to south London asked to be paid for forwarding letters and squaring the Secret Police to keep silence.

  – Censor Department informed: one, an officer in a well-known regiment was found to be corresponding with a woman reported to be dangerous and living at Frankfurt.

  – Severe caution: one, forwarding old photographs of submarines to America.

  – Warning: a lady in London who was to act as intermediary for German correspondence between Hankow and Germany.

  – Eastern suspects: nineteen, in May there had been five such cases. Barcelona was found to be a meeting-place for Indians of whom one travelled on some unexplained business between points in Spain, Paris and America; Grimsby was said to be a port whence Pan-Islamic literature was despatched to India; and seditious Indian publications were reported to be coming into England from America; a Swiss woman married to a Persian was reported to be coming to this country as a German spy; a number of Indian revolutionaries were found, or suspected to be, in touch with Indian revolutionary leaders who were acting as German agents in Switzerland: of the Indians in England one had been interned, another had been searched and interrogated and proceedings under DRR 14B were in contemplation; the others had not been arrested but their cases were still under investigation. An Indian and his wife of German origin were arrested at Hull and Liverpool respectively; and a Hindu, a mystic, was arrested on the 4 September, pending extradition. Other suspects were of Egyptian origin.