The Defence of the Realm (33 page)

Hutchings, however, remained in Moscow.
¹¹

The exaggerated fears of naval subversion provoked by Invergordon produced an extensive purge of naval personnel. Almost a thousand were discharged.
¹²
On 16 November the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty formally congratulated the Security Service on its ‘excellent work' in the aftermath of the Invergordon mutiny: ‘My Lords realise that [the Security Service] was not organised to deal with unrest in such circumstances or on so extensive a scale and they desire to convey . . . an expression of their high appreciation.' The Admiralty paid particular tribute to the investigations carried out at Plymouth by Captain Con Boddington, Harker's ‘assistant for special inquiries'.
¹³
Few details of Boddington's operations survive.
¹⁴

In the aftermath of Invergordon both MI5 and the service ministries viewed with peculiar horror the crude tracts prepared by the CPGB for distribution to the armed forces. Their basic message was summed up in the
Soldier's Voice
call to class war in May 1932: ‘Let us use the knowledge of arms which they give us, when the opportunity presents itself, to overthrow their rule, and in unity with our fellow workers, to establish free socialist Britain.'
¹⁵
The young Bristol Communist Douglas Hyde, later news editor of the
Daily Worker,
recalled how bundles of
Soldier's Voice
were ‘smuggled down from London' to be dropped by night over the wall of the local barracks: ‘Since the risks were high, volunteers were called for, who then drew lots. I volunteered but drew a blank. The unlucky one that night was caught in the act and disappeared into the neighbouring jail for eighteen months.'
¹⁶
The Security Service read
Soldier's Voice
more attentively than the Bristol soldiers.
¹⁷

Early in 1933 new ‘information of the highest importance', probably from one of Knight's agents in the CPGB,
¹⁸
threw ‘a flood of fresh light' on Comintern plans for ‘seducing the Armed Forces of the Crown from their allegiance'.
¹⁹
The Security Service was able to use this information to strengthen its hitherto ineffective campaign, begun after the First World War, for new legislation to discourage subversion in the armed forces.
²⁰
On 18 October the cabinet considered the first draft of an Incitement to Disaffection Bill together with a memorandum signed by the Home Secretary and the service ministers:

The primary object of the Bill was to provide a summary method of dealing with attempts to seduce members of His Majesty's Forces from their duty and allegiance, the second main object being to empower Justices of the Peace to grant search warrants where they are satisfied that there is reasonable ground for suspecting that an offence under the Bill has been committed.
²¹

Extract from the
Red Signal,
a Communist tract distributed to naval ratings in September 1933 which the DPP considered an incitement to mutiny.

The Bill made its first appearance in the Commons on 10 April 1934. At the second reading six days later the Liberal Isaac Foot (father of the future Labour leader Michael Foot) asked ‘what evidence there is that a single soldier has been influenced in his allegiance or that a single sailor has done more than deride these wonderful papers, “The Soldier's Voice” and “The Red Signal” . . .'. None was produced. The National Government's huge parliamentary majority ensured none the less that the Bill became law before the year's end. To the surprise of both its opponents and its supporters, it led to only one prosecution before the Second World War.
²²

The most serious subversive threat in time of war was sabotage. M15 and the Special Branch jointly reported in 1930:

It is an indisputable fact that the British Communist Party, under instructions from Moscow, is endeavouring by every means possible, to make such preparations that, in the event of war being declared by this country or in the event of a general mobilisation for war against Russia, chosen members of the Party should carry out previously arranged plans of sabotage. Definite orders have been issued from Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain that, in the event of a declaration of war, workers must be able to frustrate the campaign by general disorganisation.

The main focus of MI5 concerns about preparations for sabotage was the Soviet trading organization Russian Oil Products (ROP), which had been established as a British limited-liability company in 1924. MI5 noted in the following year that all its shareholders were Russian nationals. Among prominent Party members in contact with ROP was Willie Gallacher. MI5 and the Special Branch calculated in 1930 that ROP had almost a thousand employees, about one-third of whom were members of the CPGB, and had built up a network of thirty-three offices, depots and installations across the UK.
²³
Holt-Wilson reported to the Committee of Imperial Defence that parts of the ROP network were located dangerously close to what was later called Britain's Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), especially fuel-storage depots.
²⁴
If war broke out with the Soviet Union, MI5 believed there was a danger that ROP lorry tankers would be driven to British fuel or munitions depots and detonated. In 1934 the Home Office agreed to a Security Service proposal that, in an ‘emergency' or international crisis, the movements of the tankers should be made subject to police regulation. Because of the additional danger that ROP ship
tankers could be detonated in British ports, port authorities were asked to keep them under close supervision.
²⁵

Security Service investigations into ROP extended to counter-espionage as well as protective security.
²⁶
The priority given by Soviet intelligence to the use of ROP as a front for scientific and technological intelligence operations is indicated by the amount of money spent on it. A combined MI5 and Special Branch analysis of ROP finances in 1930 calculated that it was run at a loss of £370,000 to £390,000 per annum.
²⁷
The Security Service reported in 1932 that ‘one of the principal comrades who acts as liaison between ROP and the Party' was Percy Glading,
²⁸
later convicted of espionage at the Woolwich Arsenal.
²⁹
ROP provided a sophisticated front for the increasing Soviet scientific and technological intelligence operations of the 1930s: among them probably the first Russian use in Britain of the ‘false flag' technique, where a recruiter working for one agency claims to represent another. In September 1932 an employee of the ROP Bristol branch was discovered to be posing (under the alias ‘Olsen') as a Romanian journalist reporting on the British oil industry, in an attempt to obtain commercial secrets from employees of the Shell Mex Company in London.
³⁰
The Security Service obtained an HOW on ‘Olsen's' address, which revealed that his real name was Joseph Volkovich Volodarsky. In November 1932 he pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to bribe a Shell employee and was fined £50.
³¹
In 1933 Volodarsky left Britain for North America, where he helped to provide false identity documents for the Soviet illegal
²
Willy Brandes before his posting to London.
³²

Potentially the most important suspected Soviet spy investigated by the Security Service during the early 1930s was the distinguished Russian physicist and future Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa, who in 1924 had come to work at the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University and was elected a fellow of Trinity College. The Security Service had good reason to be suspicious of Kapitsa. Its surveillance of ARCOS, whose activities provided cover for Soviet espionage, revealed that Kapitsa was in contact with it; SIS reported that ARCOS had provided funding for his research. An informant in Trinity College also revealed that Kapitsa was in close contact with the leading Cambridge Communist Maurice Dobb,
³³
later the Trinity undergraduate Kim Philby's economics supervisor and an important influence on him. It was to Dobb that Kim Philby turned on his last day in Cambridge for advice on how best to devote his life to the
Communist cause.
³⁴
In 1931 the Security Service obtained an HOW on Kapitsa's correspondence. In the same year, Guy Liddell had a secret meeting with an informant in the Cavendish Laboratory who, perhaps prompted partly by professional jealousy, claimed that Kapitsa was a Soviet spy.
³⁵
Kapitsa's contact with the Communist Andrew Rothstein, who was then involved in recruiting agents to supply scientific and technological espionage, also seemed suspicious. In June 1934 an intercepted telegram from Moscow revealed that Rothstein had been instructed to obtain information from Kapitsa on his ‘new plant for the dilution of helium'. A month later a Security Service report on Kapitsa noted that the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Maisky, and members of his staff were ‘making mysterious motor-car drives to Cambridge and other neighbouring towns'.
³⁶

Though there were reasonable grounds at the time for suspicion by the Security Service, it now seems highly unlikely that Kapitsa was engaged in espionage in the Cavendish Laboratory. His willingness to talk about his own research and discuss that of his colleagues was an accepted part of Western scientific culture whose absence, despite his support for the Soviet regime, he bemoaned in Russia. The main purpose of the contacts with him by the Soviet embassy in London in the summer of 1934 was probably to persuade him to visit Moscow. When Kapitsa did so in the autumn, he was deeply dismayed to be prevented from returning to the Cavendish. It was another two years before he was able to resume the research he had been carrying out at Cambridge in low-temperature physics and magnetism.
³⁷

The Security Service was entirely unaware that, at the very moment when its understandable but unfounded suspicions of Kapitsa reached their peak in the summer of 1934, the most successful agent-recruitment campaign ever conducted by Soviet intelligence in Britain was just beginning, with Cambridge University as its main target. In June 1934 Kim Philby, who had graduated from Trinity College in the previous year with the conviction that ‘my life must be devoted to Communism', had his first meeting with his Soviet controller. He spent most of the year after graduation in Vienna working for the Communist-backed International Workers Relief Organization and acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party. While in Vienna he met and married a young Communist divorcee, Litzi (or ‘Lizzy', as Philby called her) Friedmann, after a brief but passionate love affair which included his first experience of making love in the snow (‘actually quite warm, once you got used to it', he later recalled). In May 1934, they returned to live in London.
³⁸
Not until almost thirty years later, on the eve of defecting to Moscow, did Philby at last admit how he had been recruited:

The photograph in MI5 files from which Philby later discovered the real name of the charismatic recruiter of the Cambridge Five and other Soviet agents, Dr Arnold Deutsch. Deutsch's attention to his own personal security was sometimes slipshod: but for his recall from Britain late in 1937 he might well have been caught by MI5.

. . . Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a ‘man of decisive importance'. I questioned her about it but she would give me no details. The rendezvous took place in Regents Park. The man described himself as Otto. I discovered much later from a photograph in MI5 files that the name he went by was Arnold Deutsch. I think that he was of Czech origin; about 5ft 7in, stout, with blue eyes and light curly hair. Though a convinced Communist, he had a strong humanistic streak. He hated London, adored Paris, and spoke of it with deeply loving affection. He was a man of considerable cultural background.