Enemies Within

The married-women ban was formally lifted from the Home Civil Service in 1946, although it endured unofficially for many years longer. In the 1960s officials of the Civil Service Commission justified the bar in the Diplomatic Service on married women as necessary to clear the way for men to get promotion. The interdiction on married women continued in the Service until 1973. There were three women Cabinet ministers between 1919 and 1964 with a combined length of service of seven years. The first female PUS was installed at the suitably domestic Ministry of Housing in 1955. Although the bicameral Westminster legislature was idealized as ‘The Mother of Parliaments’, women were excluded from membership of its upper chamber, the House of Lords, until 1958. Such were the sacrifices expected of mothers that all the early life peeresses were childless. Hereditary women peers, unlike their male counterparts, were debarred from the Lords until 1963. The first woman judge was appointed in 1962, the first woman ambassador in 1976 and the first married woman ambassador in 1987; the first female chief of a security agency was Stella Rimington of MI5 in 1992; the Whitehall mandarins’ preferred club, the Athenaeum, admitted its first women members in 2002. Women were excluded from full membership of Cambridge University until 1948: the first all-male colleges there began admitting female undergraduates in the 1970s.

These facts were more important to departmental temper, to office procedures and to relations between colleagues than the fluid or ductile gradations of class. It is compelling to note that critiques of the Whitehall ministries – starting in earnest after 1951, when Burgess and Maclean absconded from the Foreign Office – as class-bound in their recruitment, sectional and exclusive in their operations, inimical to modern technological progress, averse to private enterprise were all written by men. The position of women in government employment was seldom raised before a woman prime minister took office in 1979. Even then, it was treated as an issue for women writers, whose criticisms were discounted, sometimes with contempt, as a minority issue – despite Disraeli’s axiom that the history of success is the history of minorities. The hegemony of class explanations belonged to a phase of thinking that should be long gone. As this book will show, gender exclusivity – not class exclusivity – helped men in their espionage for Soviet Russia. Whitehall’s response to the discovery of such espionage was fashioned by male affinities, not class connivance.

The ideal of fraternity among men was fundamental to the way that everything worked. Collin Brooks, editor of the Sunday Dispatch, was among thirty journalists invited to the Treasury for a briefing on gold-conversion policy in 1932. ‘We had tea and plum-cake in the Chancellor’s room, talking very informally over pipes,’ Brooks recorded. ‘It was an interesting confidential pow-wow, and a beautiful example of the informality of British government.’ This relaxed manliness in action required gender exclusivity: women subordinates may have prepared the tea and plum-cake, but they were not present to inhibit the men pulling on their pipes.27

Manliness can be defined in many ways: virility, fortitude, enterprise, aggression, logical powers, compassion, gullibility, boorishness, sentimentality, lumbering thoughts. ‘They can laugh at anything – including themselves,’ Vansittart said of his male compatriots. ‘They boast of their smallest possession, common sense, and win victories for which no foresight qualified them.’ Among colleagues, in offices and committees, nicknames proliferated as a way of bringing cheerful cohesion: ‘Waterbeast’, ‘Snatch’, ‘Moly’ and the rest. (Unaffectionate nicknames, such as ‘Sir Icicle’ for Alexander Cadogan, were not used openly.) Manly good humour was prized. ‘I doubt if he has a very powerful head,’ the Solicitor General, Sir Donald Somervell, said of the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, in 1934; but ‘he has a very robust & humorous outlook … & knows how to deal with men’. This seemed preferable to the volatility of brilliance.28

Masculine hardness was especially valued by Conservative leaders: their admiration for fascists and Nazis was expressed in gendered terms. Speaking of ‘national glories’ to the Anti-Socialist Union in 1933, Churchill thundered: ‘I think of Germany, with its splendid, clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich, singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their Fatherland.’ He praised, too, the Italian hard man Mussolini for inspiring his fascists with their ‘stern sense of national duty’. This was men’s stuff.29

Security Service staffing

What of the officers and men who worked for MI5? Edwin Woodhall joined the Metropolitan Police at the age of twenty in 1906. Before the war he worked for the Special Branch squad protecting Cabinet ministers from suffragette aggression and for MI5. Later he was personal protection officer to the Prince of Wales in France. He described the auxiliary officers with whom he served in wartime counter-espionage as drawn from ‘the best class of educated British manhood’ procurable in wartime: ‘stockbrokers, partners of big business houses, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, artists, journalists, surveyors, accountants, men of travel – men of good family, men of the world. In fact, the finest types.’30

Typical of wartime MI5 officers was William Hinchley Cooke, who had been born in Germany to an English father and German mother. He attended school in Dresden and university in Leipzig, spoke German with a Hamburg accent and was fluent in French and Dutch. Like Woodhall he spent much of the war in counter-espionage on the Western Front. After his release from full-time government service, he had an attachment with the Birmingham city police; studied law at Gray’s Inn, but was never called to the bar; and then joined the staff of the armaments company Vickers, which gave him cover for travelling in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Yugoslavia.

Vernon Kell sought the finest types for MI5: he liked men to be linguists, to enjoy outdoor life, to be shrewd readers of character, to be monuments of solid sense. In 1912 he recruited Reginald (‘Duck’) Drake, an army officer who spoke excellent French and passable German and Dutch, and whose listed recreations included hunting, shooting, beagling, skiing, golf, cricket, hockey, polo, otter-hunting, swimming, tennis and squash. Another recruit of 1912, Eric (‘Holy Willy’) Holt-Wilson, was an Old Harrovian, an instructor in military engineering at Woolwich Military Academy, a champion revolver shot and a keen skier. Holt-Wilson was seconded to the Inter-Allied Intelligence Bureau in Paris in 1915, and headed the Rhineland police commission after the Armistice. MI5’s first graduate recruit, in 1914, Maldwyn (‘Muldoon’) Haldane, studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Göttingen, spoke German, French and Hindustani, and gave his recreations as trout-fishing, rowing, rugby, walking, poultry-farming, gardening, history, ethnology, palaeontology and biology.31

Haldane’s recruitment belies the story that Dick White, who had read history at Christ Church, Oxford, was the earliest graduate to join the Security Service in 1936. Criticisms that Kell recruited from a narrow social group are similarly unfair. His budget for salaries was tight, and became more constricted by the funding cuts of the 1920s. Few men could live on the sums offered unless they had other income: White, then a young bachelor schoolmaster, rejected the first approach to him because he was offered the puny sum of £350 a year (albeit in cash, and tax-free). It was pragmatic of Kell, after the European war, to recruit men who were in receipt of army, navy or Indian police pensions. They had not only shown their trustworthiness in public service, but could afford to accept low salaries, which did not divert too much of the budget into personnel. MI5 got the only officers that it could afford. The retired Indian police officers have been disparaged as ‘burnt out by the sun and the gin’, and their colleagues as ‘washed-up colonial administrators’ and officials in ‘the twilight of their careers’. Such denigration is partisan. No doubt they were conventional-minded and responsive to discipline, or persevering to a fault, but they took pride in trying to do a good job. There is little evidence for the reiterative assumption that they were obtuse or inflexibly prejudiced (which is perhaps to mistake them for Special Branch). On the contrary, MI5 looked for multiple meanings, burrowed beneath superficial statements, used intuition in their relentless paperwork and knew the place in counter-intelligence work of paradox. They were never lazy or corrupt. Kell assembled an efficient body of men who worked well together on meagre budgets. White, who became head of MI5 a dozen years after Kell’s retirement, was well placed to appraise him. ‘Kell’, he judged, ‘was a shrewd old bugger.’32

The pre-eminent example of an MI5 officer bolstered by income from an Indian police pension, Oswald (‘Jasper’) Harker, was recruited by Kell in 1920. Born in 1886, Harker was the son of a professor at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester, and had been invalided home from the deputy police commissionership in Bombay in 1919. He was a hard, astute, dutiful, prudent man, who headed B Branch (or Division), which ran investigations and inquiries with a staff of six officers and a three-man Observation section charged with shadowing suspects and pursuing inquiries. When the ailing Kell was dismissed in 1940, Harker, who was by then his deputy, had the sense to recognize that he was not the best man to succeed as Director, but took charge until a stronger leader was found. Harker’s appointment in 1920, like White’s in 1936, occurred years before security vetting of new staff was considered necessary. Vetting was not introduced until the 1940s: initially, there was negative vetting (background checks on potential new employees) and then, with reluctance, positive vetting. Checking the backgrounds, affiliations, personal habits and character of all civil servants with access to confidential material (which is what is meant by positive vetting) is a laborious, time-consuming, costly procedure, which diverted over-stretched personnel from their traditional priorities. There were neither security men vigilant at the entrances to MI5 offices nor security passes for its staff.

Intelligence officers in both Moscow and London understood the melodramatic stupidity of the officers of the Austrian General Staff after they proved in 1913 that Colonel Alfred Redl, the head of their Intelligence Bureau in Vienna, had been spying for tsarist Russia. They left him alone in a room with a pistol and waited for him to shoot himself. He took with him to his death any chance of identifying his accomplices, contacts, informants and tradecraft. Worst of all, the Austrians never learnt how many mobilization plans, armaments blueprints and transport schedules had been betrayed by him. Unlike these pre-war Vienna blunderers, MI5 practised patient watchfulness, psychological shrewdness and discreet understatement in preparing people to give them intelligence without exerting sanctions or threatening pain.

From 1925 onward MI5 preferred to identify traitors, establish understandings with them, draw information from them and amass knowledge of their procedures and contacts. It disliked the confrontation and finality, to say nothing of the uncontrollable public disclosures and reckless speculative half-truths in newspapers, which arose from criminal trials. This was not a matter of class loyalties and corrupt cover-ups, as has been suggested with the Cambridge spies, but a technique of accumulating, developing and sifting intelligence rather than introducing unnecessary crudity and spoiling sources. None of the Englishmen who spied in Britain for communist Russia was executed. In several trials – Glading in 1938, Nunn May in 1946, Marshall in 1952, Vassall in 1962 and doubtless others – prosecuting and defence counsel settled in advance what evidence was to be aired in court and how it was to be interpreted. The public disclosures in such trials often bore scant resemblance to the reality of what had happened.

In many cases public trials were avoided. The two Special Branch officers, Ginhoven and Jane, who were discovered in 1929 to be supplying secret material to Moscow were dismissed from the force after a disciplinary hearing in camera, but kept out of court. In consequence of this debacle, Special Branch responsibilities for monitoring and countering domestic communist subversion were transferred in 1931 to MI5, which was thereafter known as the Security Service. SIS reaffirmed in 1931 that it would not operate within 3 miles of British territory, and that all such territory across the globe came under the ambit of the Security Service. The new service was invested with enhanced status within Whitehall as an inter-departmental intelligence service providing advisory material to the Home, Foreign and Colonial offices, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Air Ministry, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions, chief constables in the United Kingdom and imperial police authorities.

In 1929 MI5 had only thirteen officers, including Kell, Holt-Wilson and Harker. Its operations were divided between A Branch (administration, personnel, records and protective security) and B Branch (investigations and inquiries). The transfer of the SS1 section from Special Branch into MI5 in 1931 brought two notable officers into MI5, Hugh Miller and Guy Liddell. Miller had been a pre-war lecturer at the universities of Grenoble, Dijon, the Sorbonne and Cairo, and had joined SS1 in 1920. When he died after a fall in 1934, his cryptic obituary in The Times called him ‘a man of high intellectual interests’ who had since the war ‘devoted himself to sociological research applied to the domain of politics’ – a striking euphemism for defeating subversion. ‘The services he rendered to his country, though anonymous, were of great value.’ Miller was admired by his colleagues as a connoisseur of Japanese prints rather as Liddell was respected by them as an accomplished cellist.33

‘When I joined MI5 in 1936 it was Guy Liddell who persuaded me to do so,’ Dick White recalled over forty years later. ‘He was the only civilising influence in the place at that time & I think this was felt by all the able men & women who joined MI5 [after 1939] for their war service.’ Liddell had ‘infinite diplomatic skill’, his Security Service colleague John Masterman judged. ‘At first meeting one’s heart warmed to him, for he was a cultured man, primed with humour.’ His years in Special Branch had made Liddell contemptuous of policemen: the Metropolitan force, as he saw first hand, was saturated by corruption as well as bungling. Somerset Maugham lunched with him in 1940: ‘a plump man with grey hair and a grey moon face, in rather shabby grey clothes. He had an ingratiating way with him, a pleasant laugh and a soft voice.’ If one had found Liddell standing in a doorway, apparently sheltering from the weather, one would mistake him, said Maugham, for ‘a motor salesman perhaps, or a retired tea planter’.34

All the European powers recognized that their safety required intelligence systems; but the traditions, assumptions and values of the ruling cadres in different capitals diverged. The variations between Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany and the Third Republic in France – to take obvious examples – affected every particle of the espionage and counter-espionage operations of those countries. William Phillips, the head of MI5’s A Branch, took over the files of Special Branch’s SS1 section in 1931. It seemed wrong to him that Scotland Yard had compiled files on atheists, Scottish nationalists, conscientious objectors and what he called ‘Hot Air Merchants’. The spying by the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes on their citizens, and the terrifying system of vengeful denunciations and violence, enormities that were emulated in parts of Vichy France, had more systematized ferocity than the crass incarceration and maltreatment of ‘enemy aliens’ in 1939–40 or the racist killings and colonial torture that were perpetrated by soldiers and officials in the British Empire.35

Office cultures and manly trust

What was the political and bureaucratic environment in which Kell’s service operated? What were the institutional mentalities that prevailed in inter-war Whitehall and Westminster? How was national security evaluated and managed before the Cold War?

Political assessments were often crude during the 1920s. ‘Everyone who is not a Tory is either a German, a Sinn Féiner or a Bolshevist,’ declared Admiral Sir Reginald (‘Blinker’) Hall, wartime Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, and post-war Conservative MP for Eastbourne. Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–9, denied any ‘fundamental difference between the “moderate” Labour men and the Communists: the managers and leaders of the Trades Union movement are now nearly all of them Socialists and the “moderate” Socialists are aiming, in effect, at the same thing as the Communists: the only difference is their method of procedure’. Churchill’s supreme fear was of outward moderation, which ‘by so-called constitutional methods soothes public opinion while stealthily and by smooth words it proceeds step by step to revolution’. This assessment was not wholly unfair, for Lenin in a pamphlet of 1920 had recommended that communists should urge the British proletariat to vote Labour: in doing so communists would support Labour leaders ‘in the same way that a rope supports a hanged man’. Churchill’s absolute incapacity for irony or scepticism – his avidity for intense and dramatic beliefs – made his judgement too belligerent. His compulsion to treat weekly incidents as if they were historic events made him equally unsound in his use of intelligence reports. As one of Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues confided to the Viceroy of India in 1927: ‘I don’t believe Winston takes any interest in public affairs unless they involve the possibility of bloodshed. Preferably he likes to kill foreigners, but if that cannot be done he would be satisfied with a few native Communists.’36

After 1929, although the British Empire had been made by conquest and was ruled by force, its leaders were committed to rule by democratic consent. Conservative politicians of the period, in the words of a Cabinet minister in 1929, wanted to trust an ‘electorate trained by the War and by education’ to work together without class antagonism. After 1929, British leaders began an experiment in the art of parliamentary rule. They attempted to solve, as the art historian and administrative panjandrum Kenneth Clark said in a different context, ‘one of the chief problems of democracy: how to combine a maximum of freedom with an ultimate direction’. Their purposes were at odds with communists such as J. D. Bernal, who wrote in Cambridge Left in 1933: ‘the betrayal and collapse of the General Strike combined with the pathetic impotence of the two Labour governments had already shown the hopelessness of political democracy’. Communists wanted to reduce liberty, limit parliamentary sovereignty and tighten party directives. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the aim. An MI5 summary of a bugged conversation at CPGB headquarters in 1951 reports James Klugmann, the party stalwart who animated Cambridge undergraduate communism, ‘holding forth about “The British Road” saying that … “we” could make Parliament – transforming or reforming it as “we” went – into an instrument to give legal sanction to the people, as they took the power into their own hands’.37

Humour or lack of it was a leading point in appraising public servants. Thus Vansittart on ‘the Bull’, Lord Bertie of Thame, Ambassador in Paris: ‘Snobbish, sternly practical, resolutely prosaic, he knew no arabesques of humour or irony, but only hard straight lines’; Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow during the Cold War, on Vansittart: ‘his witty comments always imparted a cheerful and soothing note into our frenzied conveyor-belt of files boxes’; and the insider who wrote the enigmatic obituary in The Times of Hugh Miller of MI5: ‘Captain Miller’s marvellous knowledge of human nature … [and] his never-failing humour … established his undisputed authority in a select circle’. It was recognized that geniality might help in handling Stalinist officials. Alan Roger of MI5, recommending cooperation with the Russians in running a deception campaign from Tehran to Berlin in 1944, insisted that a measure of mutual trust could be won from Soviet officials ‘by persistent good humour, obvious frankness, personal contact and a readiness to be helpful in small things’. Jokes all but extenuated communist activism. Charles Moody was a dustman in Richmond, Surrey who was industrial organizer of the Thames Valley branch of the CPGB in the 1920s and took subversive literature to army barracks, went underground in the 1930s, and in the 1940s was used as an intermediary when the atomic scientist-spy Klaus Fuchs wished to make emergency contact with his Russian cut-out – a go-between who serves as an intermediary between the leader of a spy network and a source of material – or to defer a meeting. After 1950 he underwent several interviews with MI5’s prime interrogator without any incriminating admissions. ‘Mr MOODY continues to impress as being a very likeable man,’ declared an MI5 report of 1953, before praising his ‘quiet sense of humour’. It is hard to imagine US or Soviet counter-espionage investigators appreciating a suspect’s jokes.38

Trust was an important civilizing notion in the 1920s and 1930s. Men subdued expression of their feelings if they could. ‘We possess one thing in common,’ Masterman had been told in adolescence, ‘the gorgeous … power of reticence, and it binds, if I may say so, tighter than speech.’ The initiators of personal conversations were distrusted by the English: the poet, painter and dandy Villiers David advised his godchildren in 1943, ‘Never speak first to anyone you really want to know.’ If men refrained from intimacies, they often talked without guard of impersonal matters. The inter-war years were a period of careless Cabinet talk. Speaking at a dinner of parliamentary correspondents in 1934, George Lansbury, then leader of the Labour party, ‘derided the superstition of Cabinet secrets – had, he felt sure, told many because he hadn’t realised that they were secrets’. Collin Brooks of the Sunday Dispatch described the Cabinet of 1935 as ‘a chatterbox Gvt’.39

Senior ministers discussed at dinner parties confidential material which had been circulated to them, including Foreign Office telegrams and dispatches, without any glimmering that they were being culpably indiscreet. The position of Sir Eric Phipps as Ambassador in Hitler’s Berlin was weakened because Cabinet ministers were circulated with his dispatches about the Nazi leadership and recounted them for laughs at social gatherings. Above all there was Phipps’s famous ‘bison despatch’, in which he described a visit to Göring’s country estate:

The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary’, his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones, all mere toys to satisfy his varying moods … and then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.

After Phipps’s transfer to the Paris embassy, he was cautioned by Vansittart against candour about French politicians in telegrams that had a wide circulation among members of the government.40

Embassies and legations, like the Office in London, were cooperative, hierarchical organizations in which mutual trust was indispensable. This was not a matter of class loyalty or old-school-tie fidelity, but an obvious point about raising the efficiency of its staff. Sir Owen O’Malley estimated that about one-third of his ambassadorial energy went into making his embassy work well. ‘It begins to lose power whenever one man gets discouraged or another too cocky or a third jealous … when wives quarrel it is hell.’ It was indispensable for an ambassador to be trusted by the government to which he was accredited. ‘One of the many illusions about diplomacy is that it consists in diddling the other fellow. Nothing could be further from the truth. It consists more than anything else in precision, honesty, and persuasion, which three things should hang together.’41