The Defence of the Realm (35 page)

So far as the Soviet Union was concerned, throughout the 1930s the FO was, without realizing it, often practising open diplomacy. In 1935 alone, over a hundred of the diplomatic documents purloined from the Rome embassy were considered sufficiently important to be ‘sent to Comrade
Stalin': among them the FO records of talks between the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, the junior Foreign Office Minister Anthony Eden (who became foreign secretary at the end of the year) and Hitler in Berlin; between Eden and Maksim Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, in Moscow; between Eden and Eduard Beneš, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, in Prague; and between Eden and Mussolini in Rome.
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The versions shown to Stalin, however, were doctored in order to conform to Stalin's conspiratorial worldview and remove material likely to offend him. A striking omission from the Foreign Office documents shown to Stalin in 1935 was Eden's account of talks with him in Moscow. The Centre lacked the nerve to pass on Eden's view of Stalin as ‘a man of strong oriental traits of character with unshakable assurance and control whose courtesy in no way hid from us an implacable ruthlessness'.
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No British intelligence agency during the 1930s had access to any Soviet diplomatic documents which began to compare in importance to the British documents obtained by the Centre. Since 1927 GC&CS had had little success with most Soviet diplomatic and intelligence traffic. Early in 1930, however, naval and military intercept stations began picking up what the head of GC&CS, Alastair Denniston, described as ‘a mass of unusual and unknown transmissions, all in cipher except for “operators' chat”'. Analysis of the transmissions revealed that they were messages exchanged between Comintern in Moscow and a worldwide network of clandestine radio stations.
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The operation, codenamed MASK, to identify, locate and decrypt the Comintern messages was led by Lieutenant Colonel John Tiltman, a brilliant mathematician who had been offered but turned down a place at Oxford University at the age of only thirteen. Tiltman arrived at GC&CS in 1929 from India, where he had headed a SIGINT unit which had intercepted a variety of Soviet traffic. At the beginning of Operation MASK, two Metropolitan Police intercept operators, Harold Kenworthy and Leslie Lambert, set out to track down the Comintern radio transmitter in London by driving round the capital at night, when the transmitter was active (sometimes for only a few minutes), with direction-finding equipment in a van supplied by SIS. As Kenworthy later recalled:

Some exciting moments were experienced – particularly on one occasion, after going round a neighbourhood for some time a police car stopped us. On being asked: ‘What have you got in that parcel?' – the parcel being a short-wave set – Mr Lambert said: ‘I don't want to tell you.'

Thereafter Kenworthy and Lambert had to produce a special pass in order to avoid being mistaken for burglars. It took them several months to track
down the Comintern transmitter to a house in Wimbledon.
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An MI5 surveillance operation identified the owner of the house as a known CPGB member named Stephen James Wheeton, and revealed that he had regular meetings with another Party militant, Alice Holland, to whom he passed Comintern messages.
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In April 1935 Wheeton was replaced as radio operator by another Communist named William Morrison.
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Operation MASK continued until October 1937, when Morrison left to fight in the Spanish Civil War,
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after which no further messages were picked up.
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During 1933, if not earlier, Tiltman's attack on the Comintern ciphers achieved ‘complete success'.
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On 31 January 1934 SIS forwarded to MI5 MASK decrypts for the period 22 April 1931 to 9 January 1934.
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The decrypts provided further evidence of Soviet-inspired subversion in the navy and docks. Comintern had instructed the CPGB in May 1931:

In view of growing danger of war and preparation intervention against USSR winning over of seamen and harbour workers to our side become[s] of special importance. Political Commission direct you strengthen your work amongst seamen and harbour workers, strengthen and develop work revolutionary trades union and trades union opposition.
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From February 1934 to January 1937 GC&CS was able to supply current MASK intercepts of Comintern traffic to SIS Section V, which forwarded them to the Security Service.
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The decrypts revealed the identities of a number of previously unknown secret members of the CPGB, as well as details of Comintern couriers and British Communists studying in Moscow. Among the students at the Lenin School identified in the MASK decrypts was Jomo Kenyatta, who a generation later became the first leader of independent Kenya.
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Analysis of the decrypts showed that some of the messages to the CPGB leader Harry Pollitt used his real name, while others, relating to secret activities, used a cover name.
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The intercepts also provided details of Moscow's secret subsidies to the CPGB and the Communist
Daily Worker.
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Ivan Maisky, who had arrived in London as Soviet ambassador in 1932, three years after the resumption of diplomatic relations, was informed by the Foreign Office that the subsidies were closely monitored. Partly because of the CPGB's political weakness, ‘Moscow gold' caused far less outrage in Whitehall than a decade earlier. Sir John Simon, Foreign Secretary in the National Government of 1931–5, told Maisky that Soviet subsidies were ‘a waste of money': ‘He thought it his duty to repeat in a very friendly but very emphatic fashion his conviction that the game was not worth the candle from the Soviet Government's point of view, and that from his own it was a petty and pointless irritant.'
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MASK intelligence was supplemented by SIS agents in Comintern, in particular a walk-in to the SIS Berlin station, Johannes Heinrich de Graaf (‘Jonny X'), a German Communist recruited by Soviet military intelligence who had been involved in the organization of the Comintern illegal network in Britain.
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Much of the Comintern traffic, even when decrypted, turned out to be obscurely phrased. Both Comintern and the CPGB sometimes had difficulty in understanding the radio messages exchanged between them and had to ask for clarification. The Security Service and Section V of SIS, which collaborated on MASK, lacked sufficient staff to make a detailed analysis of much of it. There were simply far too many decrypts to process.
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Surviving MASK decrypts provide no insight into the problem of dockyard sabotage which was one of the Security Service's main concerns in the mid-1930s. Between 1933 and 1936 there were six quite serious cases of sabotage to ships' machinery (five in Devonport and one at Sheerness) which prompted a detailed investigation by the Security Service of Communist activity in royal dockyards and naval ordnance works. Investigations led by Con Boddington
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identified as the likely ringleader John Salisbury, a Communist shipwright, who had been ‘reliably reported' to have urged the Plymouth Communist Party in December 1931 ‘to damage as much machinery as they could. He described this as “sabotage” and said it would prevent war and would stop men from taking up arms.'
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Following a Security Service recommendation for Salisbury's dismissal, a meeting in the room of the Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty on 8 January 1936, attended by Kell, Harker and Boddington, recommended that Salisbury should be interrogated by the Admiral Superintendent of Devonport Dockyard, assisted by Boddington.
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Salisbury was dismissed on 1 February.
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Salisbury's dismissal caused little protest. Local officials of the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) were told in confidence some of the case against him. Ernest Bevin, the TGWU general secretary (and future foreign secretary), who had already had a number of bitter disputes with Communists, said privately that ‘nobody would attempt to defend Salisbury.' In October 1936 Kell recommended eight more dismissals: four from Devonport, one from Sheerness and three from the Naval Ordnance Works in Sheffield. His recommendations were considered by a three-man committee headed by Sir Archibald Carter, permanent under secretary at the Admiralty. In addition to studying Security Service reports on the eight men concerned and photographs of their intercepted correspondence, the Carter Committee also heard oral evidence from Kell and from Boddington, who impressed them ‘by his fair-minded attitude'. The Committee believed
it ‘impossible, largely owing to the inability to disclose secret sources of information, to produce proof to satisfy a court of law'. But they concluded that in the case of the Devonport workers Francis Carne, Alfred Durston, Henry Lovejoy and Edward Trebilcock:

It is certain, beyond any reasonable doubt . . . that all four men have been actively engaged in dangerous subversive propaganda, and not merely in the doctrinaire preaching of Communism as a political creed.

There is also very strong suspicion, though not amounting to certainty, that they were intimately connected with acts of sabotage.

None of the four has been very active since the dismissal of Salisbury, but there is good reason for believing that they have received orders from above . . . We recommend that they should all be discharged.

The Committee also approved the dismissal of Henry Law, a shipwright at Sheerness, who ‘apart from other considerable activities . . . took an active part in attempting to get the public to refuse cooperation in the experimental “black-out” at Sheerness in 1935'. Carter and his colleagues concluded that MI5 had not produced ‘sufficiently definite evidence' to justify the dismissal of the Sheffield Ordnance workers: ‘They are, however, suspicious characters, and a closer watch will be kept upon them.' On this occasion local trade union officials were not consulted and the five dismissals produced a flood of union protests. Bevin, acting both as chairman of the TUC and general secretary of the TGWU, wrote to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, calling for an independent tribunal. At a private meeting in the House of Commons, Baldwin took at least some of the wind out of Bevin's sails. When Bevin argued that in the case of Alfred Durston ‘there appeared to have been a miscarriage of justice,' Baldwin read out to him compromising extracts from Durston's intercepted letters.
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Outside the armed services, ports and the defence industry, the Security Service believed that Communist subversion was of declining significance. During the Popular Front era of the mid-1930s, when Moscow favoured participation by Western Communist Parties in anti-Fascist fronts, agents in the CPGB and MASK intercepts provided reassuring evidence of Comintern attempts to persuade the CPGB to moderate its propaganda in the interests of anti-Fascist unity. The Special Branch reported in 1935, for example, after Comintern had sent instructions to tone down attacks on the Royal Family:

The leading members of the Communist Party in London are not at all pleased with these instructions, and they propose taking up the matter with the Communist
International. It is to be emphasised that the recent increase in the sales of the ‘Daily Worker' and other communist literature is definitely attributed to MARO's anti-royalist cartoons, and the satirical articles by various writers about the King [George V] and other members of the Royal Family, which have now become a common feature.
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The Security Service's most valuable penetration agent in the CPGB was Olga Gray (‘Miss “X” '), the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a
Daily Mail
night editor in Manchester recruited by Maxwell Knight as a long-term penetration agent in 1931. Gray was a classic example of Knight's maxim that, when seeking to penetrate any subversive body, the initial approach ‘should if humanly possible always be made by the body to the agent, not the agent to the body'. On Knight's instructions, Gray, who was a highly competent secretary, came to London in the autumn of 1931 and made herself available for work in Communist organizations without ever applying for jobs in them. Initially she did not even join the CPGB but simply attended meetings of Comintern front organizations. After doing part-time voluntary typing for the Friends of the Soviet Union, she was asked to do secretarial work for the League Against Imperialism and the Anti-War Movement, where she got to know both Harry Pollitt, the CPGB general secretary, and Percy Glading, an officer of the League who was later found guilty of espionage for the Soviet Union. Only then did Gray join the CPGB. ‘She had attained that very enviable position', Knight wrote, ‘where an agent becomes a piece of furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not.'
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In 1934 Pollitt asked Gray if she would undertake a ‘special mission', ‘carrying messages from here [Britain] to other countries'. The invitation was repeated by Glading. Gray did not reply immediately. Knight noted approvingly, ‘With very becoming self-restraint, Miss “X” did not appear too keen.' She eventually agreed, however, to act as a courier to Indian Communist leaders, taking with her money, instructions and a questionnaire. But her travel arrangements were so incompetently planned that, as Knight noted, without his assistance she might never have reached India:

They were proposing to send her to India during the monsoon period – a time of the year when normal people do not choose to travel to India; they proposed that she should stay there for a matter of only a few weeks, another unusual circumstance; and the Party shewed themselves so out-of-touch with general social matters, that they did not realise that an unaccompanied young English woman travelling to India without some very good reason stood a risk of being turned back when she arrived
to India as a suspected prostitute. Our department was faced with a peculiar situation whereby Miss ‘X' had to be assisted to devise a cover-story which would meet the requirements necessary, without making it appear to the Party that she had received any expert advice. This was no easy task but eventually a rather thin story of a sea-trip under doctor's orders, combined with an invitation from a relative in India met the case.