The Defence of the Realm (20 page)

In September 1914 the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, told his Foreign Ministry: ‘England appears determined to wage war until the bitter end . . . Thus one of our main tasks is gradually to wear England down through unrest in India and Egypt . . .'
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A newly created Intelligence Bureau for the East, attached to the German Foreign Ministry, was given the task of working out how to do so. It began by setting up an Indian Committee in Berlin, led by the academic and lawyer Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who had become a revolutionary while studying at the Middle Temple in London.
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Berlin's hopes of stirring up disaffection among Britain's Muslim subjects were greatly encouraged when the Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany's side on 5 November 1914. The Ottoman government issued fatwas calling on all Muslims to wage jihad against the Allies: among them the Muslims who made up one-third of the Indian army.
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Censorship of a sample of the correspondence of the 138,000 Indian troops who fought on the Western Front in 1915 provided welcome reassurance for the Indian government and the wartime interdepartmental Whitehall committee on Indian ‘revolutionary' activity. It revealed no significant support either for Indian ‘revolutionaries' or for pan-Islamism, though one censor reported a worrying trend among Indian soldiers to write poetry, which he considered ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude'.
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Kell's main Indian expert early in the war was Robert Nathan, who, after qualifying as a barrister, had spent twenty-six years in the Indian civil service, becoming vice chancellor of Calcutta University, but had been forced to return to England because of ill health early in 1914.
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He joined MO5(g) on 4 November 1914,
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serving with Kell as one of the Bureau's representatives on the wartime interdepartmental Whitehall committee on Indian ‘revolutionary' activity.
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Nathan also worked closely with Basil Thomson, who praised his collaboration in all the Indian cases which came his way at Scotland Yard. Indeed Nathan was the only MI5 officer whose assistance Thomson acknowledged in his memoirs. Contrary to the impression given in the memoirs, Nathan was the more influential of the two; Thomson did not sit on the interdepartmental committee.
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Intercepted correspondence indicated that Indian revolutionaries in 1915 were planning an assassination campaign in England, France and Italy. Though the campaign did not materialize, Nathan had good reason to take it seriously.
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The last political assassination in Britain had been the killing in London of Sir William Curzon Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp of the
Secretary of State for India, by an Indian student, Madan Lal Dhingra, in the summer of 1909. Even Winston Churchill, despite his hostility to Indian nationalism, had seen Dhingra as a romantic hero, calling his last words before execution ‘the finest ever made in the name of patriotism'.
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It was reasonable to expect that the First World War would produce other Dhingras. In the summer of 1915 the Indian Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI) reported that, according to information from ‘a trustworthy source', the Indian nationalist Dr Abdul Hafiz and other German agents in Switzerland were plotting to assassinate Italian government ministers. Though Hafiz was expelled from Switzerland, reports of assassination plots continued. On 29 November Nathan sent a request through the Foreign Office to the Italian government for all Indians arriving from Switzerland to be stopped at the border and, if possible, deported to England.
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In October 1915 an Indian ‘revolutionary', Harish Chandra, confessed during interrogation by Nathan and Thomson that he had been working for the Indian Committee in Berlin, seeking to subvert the loyalty of Indian POWs, and revealed German attempts to persuade the Amir of Afghanistan to join in a Muslim jihad against the British Raj. Nathan and Thomson succeeded in persuading Chandra to work as a double agent. In October 1915, they also recruited another Indian, Thakur Jessrajsinghji Sessodia, whose involvement in assassination plots had been discovered from his intercepted correspondence. Both Chandra and Sessodia proved to be reliable double agents. Their intelligence, some of which was corroborated by other sources, increasingly exposed the unrealistic nature of German plots to stir up Indian unrest. The interdepartmental committee in Whitehall concluded in the course of 1916 that the best plan was to continue to monitor the development of the plots and encourage the Germans to waste money and resources on them.
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In the spring of 1916 Nathan left to head an office established in North America by the DCI to track down Indian revolutionaries.
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His office provided the US authorities with much of the evidence used at two major trials of members of the Indian Ghadr (‘Revolt') Party, charged with conspiracy to aid the Germans by plotting revolution in India. The first trial, in Chicago, ended with the conviction of three Ghadr militants in October 1917. The second trial, in San Francisco, reached a dramatic climax in April 1918 when one of the accused, Ram Singh, shot the Ghadr Party leader, Ram Chandra Peshawari, dead in the middle of the courtroom.
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Basil Thomson commented:

In the Western [US] States such incidents do not disturb the presence of mind of Assize Court officials: the deputy-sheriff whipped an automatic from his pocket, and from his elevated place at the back of the court, aiming above and between the intervening heads, shot the murderer dead.
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One of Nathan's assistants wrote delightedly: ‘I think the whole case is a great triumph and has done a lot to help us in this country. It has shown to the public the utter rottenness of the Ghadr Party . . . More than this, it has been a very successful piece of propaganda work.'
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Veterans of the Indian army, police and civil service continued to make up a significant minority of MI5 personnel. Of the twenty-seven officers in G Branch (investigations) early in 1917, eight had served in India.
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The Indian National Congress seems to have attracted no significant wartime attention from either MI5 or any other section of the British intelligence community, because it had no German connection and posed no threat of violent opposition to British rule. Before the First World War, Congress was a middle-class debating society which met briefly each December, then lapsed into inactivity for another year. There was nothing in 1914 to suggest that it would emerge from the war as a mass movement which would become the focus of resistance to the British Raj. The man who brought about this transformation was M. K. ‘Mahatma' Gandhi, an English-educated barrister of the Inner Temple who, more than any other man, set in motion the process which, a generation later, began the downfall of the British Empire. When Gandhi returned to India in 1915 from South Africa, where he developed the technique of
satyagraha
, or passive resistance, which he was later to use against the Raj, the DCI assessed him as ‘neither an anarchist nor a revolutionary' but ‘a troublesome agitator whose enthusiasm has led him frequently to overstep the limits of the South African laws relating to Asiatics'.
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In the course of the war MI5 extended its involvement in imperial intelligence from India to the Empire and Commonwealth as a whole. In August 1915, with the support of the Colonial Office, it began an attempt to ‘secure rapid and direct exchange of information' between its own headquarters and colonial administrations. A year later, according to a post-war report, it was in touch with ‘the authorities responsible for counter espionage in almost every one of the colonies'. In the autumn of 1916 the section of G Branch responsible for co-ordinating overseas intelligence became a new D Branch, headed by Frank Hall,
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which was also responsible for ‘Special Intelligence Missions' in Allied countries, notably in Rome and Washington DC. According to a post-war report on
D Branch, couched in unrealistically grandiloquent terms, ‘particulars were obtained of German activities in all parts of the world, from Peru to the Dutch East Indies and the Islands of the Pacific, and a watch was kept on German propaganda through missionaries or otherwise on every continent.'
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Henceforth MI5 saw its role as ‘more than national': ‘it is Imperial.'
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Subversion in mainland Britain first became a serious concern for MI5 in 1916. ‘It was not until 1916', wrote Thomson later, ‘that the Pacifist became active.'
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The immediate cause of the pacifist revival was the introduction of conscription for men of ‘military age' (between eighteen and forty-one), first for unmarried men in February 1916, then for married men two months later. Within MI5 the lead role in investigating the anti-conscription movement was taken by Major Victor Ferguson of G Branch, who had joined on the outbreak of war and had a combination of skills characteristic of a number of MI5 officers. He listed hunting, shooting (‘some big game') and fishing as his chief recreations (followed by motoring, skiing, cricket and ‘formerly football'). As well as following outdoor pursuits, he was an Oxford graduate with, again like many of his colleagues, a gift for foreign languages. Ferguson had translator's qualifications in German, Russian and French (the languages of the main foreign revolutionaries and subversives who attracted MI5's attention), in addition to having some competence in Spanish, Dutch and Arabic.
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In June 1916, by agreement with G Branch, Special Branch officers raided the London headquarters of the No-Conscription Fellowship and removed its records and papers, as well as three-quarters of a ton of printed material. They seized a further 1½ tons of documents next day from the National Council Against Conscription (NCAC). This vast mass of paper was then examined by MI5 officers with a view to bringing prosecutions under the Defence of the Realm Act.
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Ferguson sent a sample of the material seized to the Legal Adviser at the Home Office.
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The real aim of the NCAC, he believed, was ‘to work up feeling, especially in the workshops, against measures necessary for the successful prosecution of the war':

Whatever their policy may have been originally, and it is not denied that it was, to commence with, quite legal, there is not the least doubt that it has been divorced from its original purpose and has become a dangerous weapon whereby the loyalty of the people is being prostituted and the discipline of the army interfered with . . . If they are not for the success of our country it is not unreasonable if they are classed as pro-German. That, at any rate, is what the mass of the public consider them; and the public is substantially right.
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Between June 1916 and October 1917 MI5 investigated 5,246 individuals ‘suspected of pacifism, anti-militarism etc.'.
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Little came of the protest against conscription. About 7,000 conscientious objectors agreed to non-combatant service, usually with field ambulances; another 3,000 were sent to labour camps run by the Home Office; 1,500 ‘absolutists' who refused all compulsory service were called up and then imprisoned for refusing to obey orders.
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These figures paled into statistical insignificance by comparison with the numbers of conscripts. By the end of 1916 conscription had increased the size of the armed services from 2½ million to 3½ million. During 1917–18 their size stabilized at between 4 and 4½ million – one in two of men of ‘military age'.
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MI5's first contact with Communism (which after the Bolshevik Revolution was to dominate its counter-subversion operations for over seventy years) arose from its investigation, begun in 1915, of the Communist Club at 107 Charlotte Street, London, whose members included a number of Russian revolutionary exiles, among them two future Soviet foreign ministers, Georgi Chicherin and Maksim Litvinov.
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In December 1915 Chicherin was briefly imprisoned while an unsuccessful attempt was made to assemble evidence for a successful prosecution.
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Kell reported to the Home Office that the Russians in the Club were ‘a desperate and very dangerous crowd'. Some, he believed, were ‘closely connected with the Houndsditch murders' before the war.
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The chief murder suspect in the Communist Club was the Latvian Bolshevik Yakov Peters, who after the Revolution became a bloodthirsty deputy head of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. In December 1910 he seems to have been involved with a gang of violent Latvian revolutionaries who had been disturbed by a police patrol while robbing a Houndsditch jeweller to fund their cause. The revolutionaries shot three police officers dead and seriously wounded two others. Though the gang scattered, several members were arrested over the next few weeks. Among them was Peters, who was acquitted at his trial – after being ably defended by, ironically, William Melville's barrister son James (later a Labour solicitor general).
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During 1916 G1 (which investigated suspected espionage cases) discovered links between the Communist Club and the Diamond Reign public house, which, it reported, was ‘a meeting place for bitterly hostile British citizens of German birth'. G1 reached the alarmist conclusion that the Communist Club ‘fomented' the strike wave at Clydeside munitions factories in the early spring of 1916.
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Though there is little doubt about the Club's support for ‘Red Clydeside', it is unlikely to have had a significant influence on the strikes. There were, however, widespread suspicions in
Whitehall that subversive forces were at work. Christopher Addison, Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, suspected ‘a systematic and sinister plan' to sabotage ‘production of the most important munitions of war in the Clyde district' in order to frustrate the great offensive planned on the Western Front in the summer of 1916. His suspicions were fuelled by ill-founded reports of German machinations from a small Clydeside intelligence service secretly organized by Sir Lynden Macassey KC, chairman of the Clyde Dilution Commissioners (who dealt with the ‘dilution' of skilled by unskilled labour). Addison, who was soon to succeed Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions, wrote in his diary after receiving Macassey's reports: