The Defence of the Realm (23 page)

The turning of the tide in favour of the Allies on the Western Front in the summer of 1918 removed the last fears of serious wartime subversion. The British victory at Amiens on 8 August was, said the German commander General Erich von Ludendorff, ‘the blackest day for the German army in the history of the war'. It was the British army, stiffened by strong divisions from Canada and Australia, which bore the brunt of the fighting in the victorious final stages of the war. In the three months between Amiens and the Armistice the British army took 188,700 prisoners of war and captured 2,840 guns – almost as many as the other Allies combined.
¹³³
As victory came in sight pacifism disappeared from view. Working-class morale all over the country, wrote Thomson on 21 October, three weeks before the Armistice, was ‘probably at its highest point' since the war began.
¹³⁴

Thomson was already canvassing support for a post-war intelligence organization headed by himself to monitor peacetime subversion. He was encouraged in his ambitions by naval intelligence. Both Blinker Hall and
his assistant, Claud Serocold, were on friendly terms with Thomson but disliked Kell as ‘short-sighted and timorous'.
¹³⁵
Thomson also enjoyed more powerful support than Kell within the government. His most committed supporter was Walter Long, Secretary of State for the Colonies. On 14 October Long sent Thomson ‘unofficially and as a friend' an eccentric memorandum ‘on the question of our Secret Service'. ‘There is in this country', wrote Long, ‘a very strong Bolshevik Agency which succeeds, owing to the want of efficient Secret Service and prompt action, in causing great domestic trouble.' Long admitted that he might be ‘unduly suspicious' but argued strongly that the strikes in the police, on the railway and on the Clyde were all due to ‘German intrigue and German money'. During the police strike, wrote Long, ‘I have undoubted information that we escaped really by the skin of our teeth from a disaster of terrible dimensions in London.' He added: ‘I believe an efficient Secret Service is the only way in which to cope with the Bolshevik, Syndicalist, and the German spy. I am satisfied that these three are still actively pursuing their infernal practices.'
¹³⁶

Privately Thomson did not take seriously Long's fears of a vast Germanfinanced subversive conspiracy, but he was anxious not to lose Long's support. He therefore agreed with Long on the existence of ‘a strong Bolshevik agency in this country, which is growing' – but added reassuringly that he knew ‘the principal persons concerned in it and to some extent the source of their funds'. Thomson went on to endorse enthusiastically Long's call for a co-ordinated domestic intelligence system. He predicted that the main opposition would come from MI5, which wished to preserve a peacetime monopoly of counter-espionage – in Thomson's view ‘a very essential part of Home Intelligence, the experience of the War having shown that Contra-Espionage goes far beyond the business of detecting foreign spies, since their enemy intrigue ramifies in every direction'. With Blinker Hall's and Serocold's support Thomson put the case for a civilian head of the entire intelligence community, which he intended to be himself. He supported a scheme proposed by Hall and Serocold to help finance peacetime intelligence through a secret War Loan investment of about a million pounds managed by trustees: ‘It is very doubtful whether parliament will continue to vote an adequate sum for Secret Services after the War, more especially if a Labour Government comes into power . . .'
¹³⁷
Long supported Thomson's proposal and forwarded it to the Prime Minister.
¹³⁸
Over the next few months he bombarded Lloyd George with messages about the reorganization of intelligence. ‘Unless prompt steps are taken,' he wrote on 18 November, ‘I am informed we shall find the Secret Service seriously crippled just when we shall need it most.'
¹³⁹

Kell's sick leave in the final months of the war and lack of powerful backers in Whitehall left him ill equipped to compete with Thomson for the post-war control of British domestic intelligence. A surviving letter from Kell to his deputy Holt-Wilson sent from Northumberland on 7 September 1918 reveals, despite the hospitality of the Duke of Northumberland, a rather lonely and bored director whose concerns are limited to personal and office matters, with no reference to the dramatic developments on the Western Front, which appeared daily on the front pages of the newspapers, or the debate under way in Whitehall on post-war intelligence reorganization which would have a major effect on the future of MI5:

I am much fitter and have had a good rest here – But no fishing – low water and fish not taking anyhow. John [Kell's son] caught a small trout today fooling on a lake . . .

My wife has become very keen on fishing – although it has been fallow. I wish she could have come up to Morpeth with me as the Duke's fishing might be good for her.

. . . My 2 months [leave] are up on 1st Oct, but as I did 5 days work in Dubl[in] and Edinboro, I may, if the weather keeps fairly decent, add those 5 days on and return to London on Friday 4th October and look in on 5th – and start work on Sunday. But if the weather breaks I shall return earlier – and you will see me walk in any day! Looking much the better for wear. If there is any fellow who badly wants a week's leave send him along here as I am all alone and beastly dull in the evenings. I can offer him a most comfortable hotel and good food and lovely air. I am longing to be back with you.
¹⁴⁰

While Kell was recuperating in Northumberland, Thomson was lobbying in London for a post-war intelligence system in which he would have the leading role.

In January 1919 the War Cabinet set up a Secret Service Committee to review the performance of the intelligence agencies and how best to co-ordinate their work. The chairman was Lord Curzon, who was in charge of the Foreign Office while Balfour was at the Paris peace conference and was to succeed him as foreign secretary in June. As viceroy of India at the beginning of the century Curzon had become involved in the Great Game on the North-Western Frontier, and viewed the Bolsheviks' designs on India with even greater suspicion than those of their Tsarist forebears. Like Long and Churchill, who also served on the Secret Service Committee, he attached great importance to intelligence reports on the advance of the Red Menace. Curzon described Thomson as ‘an invaluable sleuth hound'. The Secret Service Committee under his chairmanship met intermittently for two years, overseeing the reorganization on a peacetime footing of the
greatly expanded intelligence services which emerged from the First World War. The Committee rejected Thomson's ambitious proposal for a single civilian head of the whole intelligence community. But it did approve an earlier proposal by Long for a ‘Civil Secret Service' to monitor subversion. Its first report in February 1919 recommended Thomson's appointment as head of a new Directorate of Intelligence under the Home Office.
¹⁴¹
Like Kell, Thomson was knighted later in the year.

His new office, which he assumed on May Day 1919, formally confirmed him as the chief watchdog of subversion and left him in control of the Special Branch. Eddie Bell, who was responsible for intelligence liaison at the US embassy in London, told Washington in May 1919 that the coming man in British domestic intelligence was not Kell but Thomson, who was ‘already well in the saddle and going strong': ‘it is going to be very important to us in future to have a good liaison with him.'
¹⁴²

Section B

Between the Wars

Introduction

MI5 and its Staff: Survival and Revival

On 24 March 1919 MI5 celebrated victory in the Great War with the ‘first (and last) performance' of the ‘Hush-Hush' Revue, followed by a dinner-dance. The invitation card showed a female secretary dressed in male officer's tunic with very short skirt and high heels, carrying a notepad marked ‘MI5'. The programme for the evening made attendance subject to ‘the following conditions':

(a)   That you give up all election eggs, dead cats and similar missiles at the door. These will be devoted to the starving Bolsheviks' Relief Fund (Food Committee)

(b)   That you refrain from snoring, shooting and strong language

The Revue, a ‘Sententious Stunt' by MI5's ‘Barmy Breezies', began with a sketch featuring Captain Fond O'Fluff and Miss Dickie Bird, which continued the mildly flirtatious theme of the invitation. The hit musical
Chou Chin Chow,
then playing at the Haymarket Theatre opposite MI5's Charles Street headquarters, inspired a number of pseudo-Chinese jokes. Helen Johnson of the Registry later recalled that MI5 officers' windows ‘apparently . . . looked directly into the Chorus Girls' changing rooms!'
¹
A wartime MI5 cartoon shows the disappointment caused when an attractive female silhouette glimpsed by male officers through a Haymarket window turns out to be a tailor's dummy.

The Revue also drew some of its inspiration from the traditions of the regimental concert party. A majority of MI5 officers were already familiar from their military careers with the concert-party tradition of poking fun at those in authority. The commanding officer, regimental sergeant major, medical officer and chaplain, among others, were expected to show the capacity to laugh at themselves, and were liable to be offended if no mockery was directed towards them. Thus it was in MI5. Among the targets for gentle mockery in the ‘Hush-Hush' Revue was Kell himself, whose wife Constance later recalled:

Invitation to the March 1919 MI5 Victory celebration dinner-dance and programme for the ‘Hush-Hush' Revue.

It was a clever take-off of all the bosses of the various sections, rather merciless in some cases, but all of it taken in very good part and most amusing. K[ell] was very convincingly caricatured and he was delighted with the thrusts at him, for they had got him walking with his familiar stoop and with all his tricks of manner. The show was followed by a really good dance, and the whole thing was voted a great success.
²

Despite the good humour of the evening, the success of the Revue and MI5's collective pride in its contribution to victory, the spring of 1919 was a worrying time for Kell and for many others in MI5. The Director had already lost the power struggle with Basil Thomson and now had to face the prospect of having to dismiss many of his staff. Probably unknown to most staff, Kell was fighting for the survival of MI5. He continued to do so at intervals for the next six years. The first report of the Secret Service Committee in February 1919 had paid tribute to the quality of British wartime intelligence – ‘equal, if not superior, to that obtained by any other country engaged in the War' – but criticized the weakness of co-ordination between the agencies.
³
The Director of Military Intelligence, Major General Sir William Thwaites, with the support of Blinker Hall's successor as DNI, Captain Hugh Sinclair (later chief of SIS), and the Director of Air Operations and Intelligence, Brigadier General R. M. Groves, proposed to Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, PUS at the Foreign Office, the merger of MI5 and SIS in the interests both ‘of economy and of efficiency'.
⁴
Cumming, like Kell, was appalled at the idea of merger, which he denounced as ‘utterly unworkable'.
⁵

On 7 April Kell attended a meeting at the Admiralty, chaired by Lord Hardinge. Others present included Mansfield Cumming, Thwaites and the DNI. Though the proposal to combine MI5 and SIS was not mentioned, all were warned, as they had doubtless expected, of probable Treasury demands to cut the intelligence budget:

Colonel Kell said that it had occurred to him that Parliamentary opposition to the Secret Service vote
¹
would be greatly reduced if he were to take the Labour Members into our confidence to the extent of showing some of the most prominent of them a little of the work which had been done during the War. He could easily let them see many parts of his work which were not really very secret, but which were impressive as showing good results. He thought that this would help, not only to make them interested in the continuance of the work, but would also tend to dispel the feeling which appeared to be prevalent in many quarters that Secret Service funds were used to spy upon Labour in this country.