MI5 had little to do with the official handling of the Zinoviev letter, apart from distributing copies to army commands on 22 October 1924, no doubt to alert them to its call for subversion in the armed forces.52 The possible unofficial role of a few MI5 officers past and present in publicizing the Zinoviev letter with the aim of ensuring Labour’s defeat at the polls remains a murky area on which surviving Security Service archives shed little light. Other sources, however, provide some clues. A wartime MI5 officer, Donald Im Thurn (‘recreations: golf, football, cricket, hockey, fencing’), who had served in MI5 from December 1917 to June 1919, made strenuous attempts to ensure the publication of the Zinoviev letter and may well have alerted the Mail and Conservative Central Office to its existence. Im Thurn later claimed implausibly to have obtained a copy of the letter from a business friend with Communist contacts who subsequently had to flee to ‘a place of safety’ because his life was in danger.53 This unlikely tale was probably invented to avoid compromising his intelligence contacts. After Im Thurn left the Service for the City in 1919, he continued to lunch regularly in the grill-room of the Hyde Park Hotel with Major William Alexander of B Branch (an Oxford graduate who had qualified as a barrister before the First World War). Im Thurn was also well acquainted with the Chief of SIS, Admiral Quex Sinclair. Though he was not shown the actual text of the Zinoviev letter before publication, one or more of his intelligence contacts briefed him on its contents. Alexander appears to have informed Im Thurn on 21 October that the text was about to be circulated to army commands. Suspicion also attaches to the role of the head of B Branch, Joseph Ball.54 Conservative Central Office, with which Ball had close contacts, probably had a copy of the Zinoviev letter by 22 October, three days before publication. Ball’s subsequent lack of scruples in using intelligence for party-political advantage while at Central Office in the later 1920s55 strongly suggests, but does not prove, that he was willing to do so during the election campaign of October 1924. But Ball was not alone. Others involved in the publication of the Zinoviev letter probably included the former DNI, Admiral Blinker Hall, and Lieutenant Colonel Freddie Browning, Cumming’s former deputy and a friend of both Hall and the editor of the Mail.56 Hall and Browning, like Im Thurn, Alexander, Sinclair and Ball, were part of a deeply conservative, strongly patriotic establishment network who were accustomed to sharing state secrets between themselves: ‘Feeling themselves part of a special and closed community, they exchanged confidences secure in the knowledge, as they thought, that they were protected by that community from indiscretion.’57
Those who conspired together in October 1924 convinced themselves that they were acting in the national interest – to remove from power a government whose susceptibility to Soviet and pro-Soviet pressure made it a threat to national security. Though the Zinoviev letter was not the main cause of the Tory election landslide on 29 October, many politicians on both left and right believed that it was.58 Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express and Evening Standard, told his rival Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, that the Mail’s ‘Red Letter’ campaign had won the election for the Conservatives. Rothermere immodestly agreed that he had won a hundred seats.59 Labour leaders were inclined to agree. They felt they had been tricked out of office. And their suspicions seemed to be confirmed when they discovered the part played by Conservative Central Office in the publication of the letter.
As prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald preferred to keep the intelligence agencies quite literally at arm’s length. It is unlikely that he ever knowingly met any officer from either MI5 or SIS. When he finally decided to question the head of the SIS political section, Major Malcolm ‘Woolly’ Woollcombe, about the Zinoviev letter in the aftermath of his election defeat before the formation of the second Baldwin Conservative government, MacDonald could not bring himself to conduct a face-to-face interview. Instead, Woollcombe was placed in a room adjoining MacDonald’s at the Foreign Office while the PUS, Sir Eyre Crowe, positioned himself in the doorway between the two. The Prime Minister then addressed his questions to Woollcombe via Crowe, who reported the answers to MacDonald. At no point during these bizarre proceedings did Woollcombe catch sight of the Prime Minister.60
On 17 November ‘C’, Admiral Sinclair, submitted to a cabinet committee of inquiry chaired by Austen Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary in Baldwin’s incoming Conservative government, a document probably drafted by the SIS officer Desmond Morton which detailed ‘five very good reasons’ – all since shown to be ‘misleading, if not downright false’ – why the letter was genuine. On 19 November the committee declared itself ‘unanimously of opinion that there was no doubt as to authenticity of the letter’. Since the beginning of the month, however, reports had been arriving from SIS stations that the letter was a forgery, probably originating in the Baltic states. On 27 November Morton informed MI5 that ‘we are firmly convinced that this actual thing is a forgery.’ Probably motivated chiefly by a desire to protect SIS’s reputation, however, neither Sinclair nor Morton admitted as much to the Foreign Office.61 A series of other undetected forgeries which appeared to provide corroboration subsequently strengthened their belief that it was genuine after all. On 16 December SIS circulated a fabricated set of Sovnarkom (Soviet government) minutes in which Chicherin was quoted as saying, ‘The original of the [Zinoviev] letter upon its receipt by the British Communist Party was destroyed by Comrade Inkpin [the Party secretary general].’62 On 9 January 1925 Morton made the extraordinary claim to the Special Branch (and probably to MI5): ‘We now know the identity of every individual who handled [the letter] from the day the first person saw Zinoviev’s copy to the day it reached us. With the exception of Zinoviev himself, they were all our agents.’63 Probably by now, certainly later, Con Boddington, the only MI5 officer who was also an undercover member of the Communist Party, knew that Morton’s claim that the CPGB Central Committee had discussed a document corresponding to the Zinoviev letter was false. Boddington knew ‘Jim Finney’,64 whom Morton gave as the source for this claim; he also knew that ‘Finney’ had made no such report.65
Soon after Labour’s election defeat in October 1924, MI5 began the long process of unravelling the first major Soviet espionage network to be detected in Britain. Its eventual success was due to a mixture of operational skill in deploying its slender resources and to the sometimes amateurish tradecraft of the network. The case started with a remarkably simple lead. An advertisement in the Daily Herald on 21 November 1924 announced: ‘Secret Service – Labour Group carrying out investigation would be glad to receive information and details from anyone who has ever had any association with any Secret Service Department or operation – Write in first instance Box 573, Daily Herald.’ Correctly suspecting a Soviet or Comintern attempt to infiltrate British intelligence, Jasper Harker, head of B Branch, arranged for an agent, ‘D’, to offer his services to Box 573 in the hope of penetrating the ‘Labour Group’. ‘D’ received a reply signed ‘Q.X.’ (later identified as William Norman Ewer, the foreign editor of the Daily Herald) but, though a meeting was arranged, ‘Q.X.’ did not appear. The head of MI5’s three-man Observation section, John Ottaway, who had been sent by Harker to keep the rendezvous for the meeting under surveillance, reported that while ‘D’ waited for ‘Q.X.’, he was kept under observation by a man he codenamed ‘A’ (later discovered to be a former police officer, Walter Dale, working for Ewer’s network).66 Next day ‘Q.X.’ contacted ‘D’, offered ‘sincere apologies’ for failing to turn up, and arranged another meeting at which he questioned ‘D’ about the working of the secret service and its use of agents inside the labour movement. He also revealed plans for the labour movement to set up a secret service of its own to defend itself against that of the government. Following ‘D’s’ meeting with ‘Q.X.’, MI5 obtained an HOW to intercept the correspondence of Box 573 at the Daily Herald.67
On 4 February 1925, following another meeting between ‘D’ and a representative of the ‘Labour Group’ (probably Ewer, once ag
ain), Ottaway succeeded in following ‘A’ (Walter Dale) to the Moorgate offices of the All-Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS), whose ostensible purpose was to promote trade between Britain and Russia but which was also used as a front for Soviet intelligence operations. From ARCOS, still tailed by Ottaway, Dale moved on to Outer Temple, 222–225 Strand, which contained, among other offices, those of the Federated Press of America (FPA). The FPA’s London office, opened in 1923 and run by Ewer, had little connection with its notional American parent company, and served mainly to provide journalistic cover for espionage. Tapping the FPA telephone line produced ‘immediate results’, revealing calls to ARCOS, to prominent Communists and to at least one suspected Soviet intelligence operative.68 The HOW on postal correspondence discovered regular packets from Paris addressed to ‘Kenneth Milton’ (a cover name for Ewer) containing ‘copies of despatches and telegrams from French ministers in various foreign capitals to the Quai D’Orsay [and] reports on the French political and financial situation’.69 MI5 discovered the provenance of the packets when one of the reports sent to ‘Milton’ from Paris appeared almost verbatim in the Daily Herald on 8 May 1925 in an article by its Paris correspondent, George Slocombe, who was also manager of the FPA Paris office.70
The incomplete evidence which survives suggests that from 1925 to 1927 MI5 and SIS collaborated in operations against Ewer and his network, with MI5 in charge of letter and telephone checks, as well as some physical surveillance in London, and SIS watching their movements abroad. Sinclair later reported that the operations conclusively established ‘that the group, of which the head and financial controller was undoubtedly Ewer, were conducting Secret Service activities on behalf of, and with money supplied by, the Soviet Government and the Communist Party of Great Britain . . .’71 Intercepted correspondence revealed that Ewer was paying Slocombe about $1,000 per month to pay his informants – a clear indication of the importance attached to his intelligence. (Moscow’s annual secret subsidy to the CPGB was $20,000.)72 Slocombe’s correspondence also showed that he was in contact with a Paris address identified by the Sûreté, the French national police, as used by Soviet intelligence.73 At the insistence of Sinclair, MI5 agreed not to reveal the operation to the Special Branch74 – despite the fact that the activities of Ewer and the London office of the FPA were of obvious interest to it. That decision, though of dubious propriety, turned out to be a fortunate one since the investigation eventually revealed that the Special Branch was Ewer’s most successful penetration.
MI5 and SIS operations against the Ewer network were disrupted during 1927 by what became known as the ARCOS raid. On 31 March Sinclair passed to Kell information from a disaffected former ARCOS employee that the front organization had photocopied a classified Signals Training manual from the Aldershot military base. Probably with the example of the Zinoviev letter still fresh in their minds, Kell and Harker spent the next six months checking the reliability of SIS’s information, conducting inquiries at Aldershot and interviewing both the disaffected ARCOS employee and another SIS source in ARCOS, who was described by Morton as ‘a British subject of undoubted loyalty’. Once convinced that ARCOS had indeed copied the classified manual, they drew up a report on the case for the Director of Public Prosecutions. At 11 a.m. on 11 May the DPP confirmed to Kell that the possession by ARCOS of the Signals Training document was an offence under the Official Secrets Act. Kell’s subsequent difficulties in gaining approval for a raid on ARCOS premises shows how much less well connected he was in Whitehall than Sinclair: during the remainder of the morning of 11 May Kell tried and failed to secure appointments with, successively, the PUS at the Home Office, the Directors of Military Operations and of Military Intelligence and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.75 On his way back to the office from lunch, however, Kell had a chance encounter with the Secretary of State for War, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, who agreed to see him at 5.15 p.m. Worthington-Evans in turn referred Kell to the rabidly anti-Soviet Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, who immediately took a note prepared by the Director to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin gave his permission to raid ARCOS in order to procure evidence of a breach of the Official Secrets Act.76
The raid on ARCOS headquarters, which the body shared with the Soviet Trade Delegation, at 4.30 p.m. on 12 May was poorly prepared and badly co-ordinated. The uniformed police, Special Branch and intelligence officers who took part in the raid were uncertain of their respective roles, and no one seemed sure who was in charge. Neither the Signals Training manual nor any other major evidence of Soviet espionage was discovered.77 After the raid, the Soviet chargé d’affaires informed Moscow in a telegram decrypted by GC&CS that there had been no ‘very secret material at the Trade Delegation’. A month earlier, with the possibility of a police raid in mind (though he doubted that the Special Branch would enter the embassy itself) he had advised Moscow in another decrypted telegram ‘to suspend for a time the forwarding by post of documents of friends, “neighbours” [probably a reference to the CPGB and Soviet intelligence officers] and so forth from London to Moscow and vice versa’.78 A later MI5 report concluded that the ARCOS raid had disrupted existing Soviet espionage operations in Britain.79 The government response to the outcome of the raid, however, was to cause even more serious disruption to British intelligence collection.
The Baldwin cabinet found itself in a quandary when it met to discuss Anglo-Soviet relations on 23 May. Under pressure from a vociferous backbench Conservative campaign against Soviet subversion, strongly supported by Churchill and some other ministers, the government had already decided to break off diplomatic relations with Moscow and had hoped to use documents seized in the ARCOS raid to justify its decision. A cabinet committee concluded, however, that the ARCOS haul did not even prove ‘the complicity of the Soviet Diplomatic Mission’ in the ‘propagandist activities’ of the Trade Delegation. Still lacking usable evidence of espionage, the cabinet concluded that it must at least give public proof that the Soviet legation had breached the normal rules of diplomatic behaviour. The only proof available was the telegrams exchanged between the legation and Moscow decrypted by GC&CS. These were, as the cabinet minutes euphemistically observed, ‘secret documents of a class which it is not usual to quote in published documents’.80 To make its charges against the Russian legation stick, the cabinet decided to follow the undiplomatic example of Lord Curzon’s outraged protest to Moscow in 1923 (the ‘Curzon ultimatum’) and quote intercepted Soviet telegrams. The first public reference to the intercepts was made by the Prime Minister on 24 May in a Commons statement on the ARCOS raid. Baldwin read out four Russian telegrams which had, he drily observed, ‘come into the possession of His Majesty’s Government’. An Opposition MP challenged Baldwin to say how the government had obtained the telegrams, but there was uproar (or, as Hansard put it, ‘interruption’) before he could finish his question. The Speaker intervened and deferred further discussion until the debate two days later on the decision to end diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.81
The debate, on 26 May, developed into an orgy of governmental indiscretion about secret intelligence for which there is no parallel in modern parliamentary history. Both the Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, and the Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks (‘Jix’), followed Baldwin’s bad example by quoting intercepted Russian telegrams. Chamberlain also quoted intercepted Comintern communications in an attempt to show that ‘the Zinoviev letter was not the only or the last’ such document. Jix became quite carried away while accusing the Soviet Trade Delegation of running ‘one of the most complete and one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet’. ‘I happen to have in my possession’, he boasted, ‘not merely the names but the addresses of most of those spies.’82 On the day of the debate Chamberlain informed the Russian chargé d’affaires of the decision to break off diplomatic relations because of Moscow’s ‘anti-British espionage and propaganda’. The Foreign Secretary gave his message an unusually per
sonal point by quoting an intercepted telegram to Moscow on 1 April from the chargéd’affaires himself ‘in which you request material to enable you to support a political campaign against His Majesty’s Government’.83 Baldwin’s government was able to prove its charge of Soviet dabbling in British politics. But the documents seized in the ARCOS raid and the intercepted telegrams published in a government White Paper contained only a few cryptic allusions to espionage.84 The government contrived in the end to have the worst of both worlds. It failed to produce public evidence to support Jix’s dramatic charges of ‘one of the most nefarious spy systems that it has ever been my lot to meet’, yet at the same time compromised its most valuable Soviet intelligence source. Moscow responded to the publication of the intercepts by adopting the virtually unbreakable ‘one-time pad’1 for diplomatic and intelligence traffic. Between 1927 and the end of the Second World War GC&CS was able to decrypt almost no high-grade Soviet communications (though it had some success with Comintern messages).85 Alastair Denniston, the operational head of GC&CS, wrote bitterly that Baldwin’s government had ‘found it necessary to compromise our work beyond question’.86
Following the ARCOS raid in May 1927, MI5 noted that Ewer’s intelligence activities were winding down. A year later Harker, the head of B Branch, concluded that ‘the organisation known as the FPA has now definitely broken up’. Intelligence on one of its members, Albert Allen, suggested that he ‘may have quarrelled with his former employers, a fact which might be disclosed from his correspondence, and should this be discovered, it is obvious that we might be able, by careful approach, to get valuable information from him’. Allen, whose real name was Arthur Lakey, was a former Special Branch sergeant who had been dismissed after the police strike of 1919. On 25 June 1928 he was approached by John Ottaway of the Observation section who introduced himself as ‘G. Stewart of the Anti-Communist Union’ and claimed that the Union had sent him to ask Allen about his involvement with the FPA. Allen agreed to provide information on the FPA, ARCOS and other Russian ‘intrigues’. Ottaway reported after the meeting that, as Harker had suspected, Allen’s ‘late masters evidently have let him down, and he seems embittered in consequence.’ As evidence of the importance of the information he could provide, he revealed that he knew of leaks from both the Foreign Office and the Special Branch.87
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