The Defence of the Realm (22 page)

Though it later emerged that Clemenceau and his supporters had greatly exaggerated the extent of German-financed subversion, at the time many British observers took it at face value. On 3 October Sir Edward Carson, Minister without Portfolio in Lloyd George's War Cabinet, declared it a ‘fact' that German money had been ‘promoting industrial trouble' in Russia, France, Italy, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Chile – ‘in fact wherever conditions were suitable for their interference'. Carson's claims were taken seriously by his colleagues. At the War Cabinet on 4 October: ‘It was pointed out . . . that the only really efficient system of propaganda at present existing in this country was that organised by the pacifists, who had large sums of money at their disposal and who were conducting their campaign with great vigour.' The cabinet minutes record no challenge to this preposterous allegation.
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The War Cabinet discussed the question of German finance for pacifism again at its meeting on 19 October. The minutes reveal, once again, extravagant conspiracy theories, this time that ‘anti-war propaganda was being financed by wealthy men, who were looking forward to making money by opening up trade with Germany after the war'. This claim too appears to have gone unchallenged. The War Cabinet decided that the Home Office (in other words Thomson rather than Kell) should ‘undertake the coordination and control of the investigation of all pacifist propaganda and of the wider subjects connected therewith', and report back.
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Thomson groaned inwardly at the news. While he considered ministers too alarmist, he was conscious that failure to give
their alarms due – or rather undue – weight might be interpreted as complacency in the face of subversion. He wrote in his diary on 22 October:

The War Cabinet . . . are not disposed to take soothing syrup in these matters. Being persuaded that German money is supporting [pacifist and revolutionary] societies they want to be assured that the police are doing something. I feel certain that there is no German money, their expenditure being covered by the subscriptions they receive from cranks.
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Thomson's report contrived to show a prudent awareness of the dangers of German-financed subversion, while none the less arriving at a reassuring conclusion. German money, he informed ministers, had been neither widely nor effectively deployed. Except for the ILP, pacifist organizations had been ‘financially in low water for some time'; the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) was ‘not a revolutionary body' and had little appeal outside ‘the intellectual classes'; the British Soviets were ‘moribund'; the BSP, though ‘very noisy', did not ‘carry very much weight' and had to be bailed out by the ILP; the shop stewards were ‘generally . . . in favour of continuing the war'. Boredom, concluded Thomson, did more than Germany to encourage pacifist propaganda. The working classes (particularly young, unmarried men with money in their pockets) missed ‘the relaxations to which they were accustomed before the war, owing to the curtailment of horseracing, football and other amusements, and to the reduction of hours when public houses are kept open'.
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News of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, however, revived the War Cabinet's anxieties. Following the triumph of subversion in Russia, their fears of subversion in Britain scaled new heights. The Foreign Office claimed on 12 November, five days after the Revolution, that Bolshevism had been ‘fastened on and poisoned by the Germans for their own purposes' to undermine the Russian war effort: ‘It is not yet possible to say which of the Bolshevik leaders have taken German money; some undoubtedly have, while others are honest fanatics.'
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Some ministers inevitably feared that British subversives had taken German money too. The Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, suspected that German-financed subversion had been more widespread than Thomson had suggested, and ordered ‘further investigations' by a joint committee of MI5 and Special Branch officers, including an examination of the records of pacifist and revolutionary societies seized in police raids to trace the source of their income.
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No evidence of German funding for British pacifists and revolutionaries emerged from investigations by either MI5 or the Special Branch. Thomson's dismissive comments on the No-Conscription Fellowship, circulated to the War
Cabinet on 13 December, were typical of his contemptuous attitude to pacifists in general: ‘The documents disclose no evidence of Enemy influence or financial support. The Fellowship is conducted in an unbusinesslike way by cranks, and its influence outside the circle of Conscientious Objectors seems to be small.'
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Kell took the threat of Soviet subversion more seriously. The MI5 New Year card for 1918, personally designed by Kell's deputy Holt-Wilson and drawn in the Pre-Raphaelite manner by the leading illustrator Byam Shaw, shows the loathsome, hirsute figure of Subversion, smoke billowing from its nostrils, crawling on all fours towards a British fighting man, clad in the garb of a Roman soldier and oblivious of the danger to his rear, his eyes fixed firmly on the vision on the horizon of ‘Dieu et Mon Droit' and victory in 1918. Just in time MI5, depicted as a masked Britannia, impales Subversion with a trident marked with her secret monogram before it can stab the British warrior in the back. In January 1918 Kell began an investigation into possible Soviet subversion in munitions factories, urging that chief constables should:

report to us any change of attitude on the part of Russians [working] on Munitions, which would be denoted by: pacifist or anti-war propaganda, a disinclination to continue to help in the production of Munitions, or any active tendency towards holding up supplies, either by restriction of out-put, or destruction of out-put or factories.
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Despite its fears of Soviet subversion, MI5 seems to have made no attempt to assess the broader significance of the Bolshevik Revolution and its likely impact outside Russia.
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The immediate impact of the Revolution on the British labour movement appears, in retrospect, surprisingly slight, arousing much less support than the overthrow of the Tsar eight months before. While the small BSP supported the Bolsheviks, most ILP leaders did not. The leading Labour journalist H. N. Brailsford in the
Herald
denounced the Revolution as ‘reckless and uncalculating folly'.
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While interned in Brixton Prison, Georgi Chicherin discovered from the newspapers that Leon Trotsky, the Russian Commissar for Foreign Affairs, had appointed him Soviet representative in London. He telegraphed Trotsky from prison to accept.
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In January 1918
Chicherin and another imprisoned Russian revolutionary were allowed to return to Russia in exchange for the release of Britons detained by the Bolsheviks. A friend who saw Chicherin off on the boat train at Waterloo reported that, ‘as the train steamed out of the station, the “International” was sung in Russian and cheers were given for the Russian Revolution.'
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In February 1918 Chicherin was a member of the Bolshevik delegation that concluded the peace of Brest-Litovsk which conceded to Germany huge territorial gains in the east (all lost later when it was defeated in the west). Lenin insisted that the Bolsheviks had no other option open to them but a humiliating peace: ‘If you are not inclined to crawl on your belly through the mud, then you are not a revolutionary but a chatterbox.'
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Both the peace of Brest-Litovsk and the beginning of the last great German offensive on the Western Front in March undermined British opposition to the war. Brest-Litovsk seemed evidence of the Bolsheviks' German sympathies, and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's ‘Back to the Wall' message to his troops on the Western Front, when it looked as if the Germans might achieve a breakthrough, was widely supported on the Home Front. Thomson declared himself taken aback by the strength of the popular reaction against pacifism due chiefly – according to all his informants – to ‘the critical position of the relations of the working class who are fighting in Flanders'.
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During the final year of the war the main expansion of MI5 activities was the continued growth of the Ports Police (325 strong by the Armistice),
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who were now on the lookout for Bolshevik as well as German sympathizers, the establishment of a Rome station and a substantial increase in its presence in the United States. The opening of MI5's Rome station, the British Military Mission, on 1 January 1918 was a consequence of the battle of Caporetto two months earlier when Austrian and German forces achieved what threatened to become a major breakthrough on the Italian front, which had to be shored up with six Anglo-French divisions. The head of mission, Sir Samuel Hoare MP, a baronet and future foreign secretary, was the only serving MP ever to become an MI5 officer.
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For most of the past two years Hoare had worked for MI1c, Cumming's wartime foreign intelligence service, serving before the February Revolution as its head of station in Petrograd, where he had sent back to Cumming the first grisly details to reach the West of the assassination of Rasputin, the charismatic but dissolute monk who had won the confidence of the Tsarina. Hoare had an exaggerated view of the role of pro-German ‘Dark Forces', including Rasputin, in undermining the Russian war effort,
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and spent much of his time in Rome seeking to identify and counter similar subversion in Italy. He sent Kell a series of reports (at least some of them copied to Cumming) on the divisions within the Vatican between supporters and opponents of the Allies, denouncing the papal nuncio in Munich, Eugenio Pacelli, as ‘a convinced pro-German'; in 1939 Pacelli was to become Pope Pius XII. Hoare's counter-subversion operations included bribing pro-Allied journalists, among them the former socialist Benito
Mussolini, who in 1919 was to found the Fascist movement. Hoare paid Mussolini the then considerable sum of £100 a week.
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During 1918 thirty MI5 staff, fourteen of them officers, were posted to its Washington and New York stations.
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Liaison in Washington had begun immediately after the United States entered the war in April 1917 when Claude Dansey arrived to give detailed briefings to US military intelligence. Dansey plainly impressed his audience. After one of his lectures, Major General Joseph Kuhn, president of the US Army War College in Washington, emphasized ‘how excellent the British service is'.
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In August 1917. Dansey left MI5 for SIS, where he spent the rest of his career, rising to become assistant chief. In January 1918 Lieutenant Colonel Hercules Pakenham, late of the Royal Irish Rifles and an experienced foreign liaison officer, became head of MI5's Washington office.
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An Old Etonian and former ADC to the Governors General of Canada and India,
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Pakenham also had long American family connections; one of his ancestors not only lost the battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, but managed to do so after the peace treaty ending the war had been signed. The arrival of US forces on the Western Front further increased the importance of American liaison. In August, because of the substantial numbers of US citizens passing through British ports and the large German-American community which had earlier opposed US entry into the war, MI5 opened an ‘American suspect index', which was shared with the Director of Military Intelligence in Washington and no other ally.
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From August onwards, a surviving MI5 visitors' book shows a small but steady stream of US intelligence officers calling at its London headquarters.
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On 1 March 1918 Major Norman Thwaites, previously deputy to Cumming's US head of station, Sir William Wiseman, became head of the MI5 office in New York.
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Thwaites had been partly educated in Germany and spoke fluent German. While working in pre-war New York as private secretary to the prominent journalist Joseph Pulitzer (later founder of the Pulitzer Prizes), he had become well connected in the German-American community.
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Before the US entry into the war, Thwaites had managed to purloin and copy a photograph of the German ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff, with his arms round two women in bathing suits. Thwaites exposed Bernstorff to public ridicule by using his press contacts to arrange for its publication. The Russian ambassador kept a copy on his mantelpiece.
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Like Hoare, Thwaites remained in touch with MI1c while working for MI5. Both collaborated closely with the New York police, the Bureau of Investigation (later FBI), US Customs, military and naval intelligence. MI1c reported that the refusal of any of the US security and
intelligence agencies in New York to employ German-Americans gave Thwaites's role particular importance: ‘For months Major Thwaites has been the only intelligence officer in New York who was able to read and speak German. He has spent many nights at Police headquarters, etc examining captured enemy documents.'
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Among the US military intelligence officers in New York with whom Thwaites probably dealt (though firm evidence is lacking) was the former British double agent Captain Roslyn Whytock.
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Thwaites's expanding operations were probably responsible for persuading Wiseman that Kell was planning to take over the New York MI1c station.
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Within Britain the security problem which most concerned the government during the last summer of the war was a strike by the London police. On 30 August 10,000 of the 19,000 Metropolitan Police officers failed to report for duty, demanding both the recognition of their union and an immediate rise in pay. Lloyd George was so shaken that he later claimed that Britain ‘was nearer to Bolshevism that day than at any other time since'. Kell was on sick leave when the strike occurred, and no record of his assessment of the strike seems to have survived. Thomson, however, took a less alarmist view than Lloyd George. ‘No strike would have taken place,' he believed, if the pay rise promised as soon as the strike began had been announced beforehand. The pay rise was sufficient to persuade the police to return to work without their union being recognized.
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Though the strike was quickly settled, it left Thomson with a lingering unease about the willingness of the police to deal with Bolshevik-inspired unrest. The Met was to go on strike again in the following year.