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Red List
MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
David Caute
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Red List
MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
David Caute
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About This Book
In the popular imagination MI5, or the Security Service, is known chiefly as the branch of the British state responsible for chasing down those who endanger national security-from Nazi fifth columnists to Soviet spies and today's domestic extremists. Yet, working from official documents released to the National Archives, distinguished historian Caute discovers that suspicion also fell on those who merely exercised their civil liberties, posing no threat to national security. In reality, this 'other history' of the Security Service, was dictated not only by the consistent anti-Communist and Imperial aims of the British state but also by the political prejudices of MI5's personnel. The guiding notions were 'Defence of the Realm' and 'subversion.' Caute here exposes the massive state operation to track the activities and affiliations of a range of journalists, academics, scientists, filmmakers, writers actors and musicians, who the Security Service classified as a threat to national security. Guilt by association was paramount. Letters were opened, phones were intercepted, private homes were bugged and citizens were placed under physical surveillance by Special Branch agents. Among the targets of surveillance are found such prominent figures as Arthur Ransome, Paul Robeson, J.B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, Dorothy Hodgkin, Jacob Bronowski, John Berger, Benjamin Britten, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Kingsley Martin, Michael Redgrave, Joan Littlewood, Joseph Losey, Michael Foot and Harriet Harman. More than 200 victims are listed here but further MI5 files will be released to the National Archives.
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PART I
1
MI5 and the First World War
The origins of MI5 (otherwise the Security Service) are to be found in the protracted spy scare that preceded the First World War. Anglo-German military and imperial rivalry had become acute both in reality and in the British popular mind, aroused by influential fiction writers such as Erskine Childers, whose The Riddle of the Sands (1903) was later credited by Winston Churchill as prompting new British naval bases at Invergordon, Rosyth and Scapa Flow. Equally exciting to public opinion was William Le Queuxâs bestselling anti-German invasion fantasy, The Invasion of 1910 (1906). The Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II had supplanted tsarist Russia as the imperial enemy depicted in Rudyard Kiplingâs magical novel Kim (1901).
Perhaps paradoxically in view of MI5âs subsequent combat of seventy years against Soviet Communism, neither socialism nor Bolshevism figured on their desks when in October 1909 two British officers, Commander Mansfield Cumming and Captain Vernon Kell, set up the Secret Service Bureau in a crowded little office that was to become the origin of both MI5 and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS). The initiative was taken at the behest of the Admiralty and the War Office under Herbert Asquithâs Liberal Government.
The search for the Kaiserâs spies is not our subject, although the early years witnessed initiatives that were to loom large in later counter-subversion strategies, notably the enlistment of regional chief constables and the introduction of the Home Office Warrant (HOW) enabling the interception of suspect correspondence, a step taken by Churchill when home secretary in 1910â11. From the outset Vernon Kell also discouraged arrests leading to the open trials that were mandatory in England; trials exposed informants, alerted the enemy and hampered ongoing investigations.
The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) that was operative from the outset of the First World War, granted powers to censor news and detain or restrict movements of individuals without due process of law.1 Punitive measures did not need the consent of Parliament, only Orders in Council authorised by DORA. Regulation 14B, June 1915, permitted detention of all enemy aliens, including those naturalised. Some 32,000 enemy alien men, mainly of military age, were interned, and up to 20,000 other men, women and children were repatriated. By 1919, over 25,000 had been expelled.
Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914, the Service was divided. In 1916 the home, counter-espionage section became the Directorate of Military Intelligence Section 5 (MI5), with a vastly increased personnel: 423 recruits in 1916, 366 in 1917, 484 in 1918 â although about 700 left during the war. At the time of the armistice in 1918, MI5âs personnel numbered 844, including 291 female registry and secretarial staff.
For Kell, who was to head MI5 until the onset of the Second World War, secrecy and its cousin anonymity were paramount. Parliament and the press obliged. The security and intelligence services did not officially exist, and their personnel, whether officers or support staff (largely upper-class women), were forbidden to disclose where they worked even to their families. MI5âs budget was not disclosed to Parliament. Not until 1989 did the Secret Service Act put MI5 on a statutory basis for the first time, followed by the creation in 1994 of a parliamentary oversight body, the Intelligence and Security Committee, charged with publishing an annual report.
In 1914 the main intellectual opposition to the war came from the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) including prominent MPs such as Charles P. Trevelyan, James Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Ponsonby, together with Norman Angell and Edmund D. Morel. Special Branchâs chief, Basil Thomson, snared Morel, imprisoned for six months on what appeared to be a technicality, if not a trumped-up charge. Morel had sent mail to the French pacifist Romain Rolland in neutral Switzerland (illegal) â whereas such correspondence to France would have been technically legal.
In 1914 political opposition to the war was minimal. Only six of forty Labour MPs opposed the war at the outset. Indeed, throughout Europe the Social Democratic parties of the Second International abandoned their pledge to oppose war. Only small breakaway factions, like those associated with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, demurred. In August 1914, the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) announced an industrial truce for the duration of hostilities. Arthur Henderson, Labourâs wartime leader, joined the coalition government formed by Asquith in May 1915.
The main dissenting opposition came from the small Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the Stop the War Committee. But, as conscription expanded its grip, reaching out to married men, and the âshort warâ became a protracted slaughter, domestic opposition inevitably grew and, with it, repression.
Within MI5 the lead role in combatting the Non-Conscription movement was accorded to G Branch led by Major Victor Ferguson, an Oxford graduate and talented linguist. In June 1916, G Branch authorised Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police to raid the London headquarters of the Non-Conscription Fellowship and to remove its records. Documents seized weighed one and a half tons.2
A prominent victim of DORA was the lifelong ILP activist Fenner Brockway, born in 1888 and the subject of five MI5 files extending from 1916 to 1960 [KV2/1917â21]. MI5 monitored wartime meetings of the ILP as well as Brockwayâs pamphlets âIs Britain Blameless?â and âThe Devilâs Businessâ, and his editorship of Labour Leader. Recorded was his attendance at meetings in the company of Bertrand Russell,3 his role as honorary secretary of the âNon-Conscription Fellowshipâ, his membership of the âStop the Warâ movement and of the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Author of âWhy I Am a Pacifistâ, Brockway attracted close attention from Colonel Sir V.G. Kell, KBE, CB, head of the MI5 department of the War Office. Discussed was a suggested prohibition on the export of such papers as Labour Leader, Tribunal and the New Statesman, MI5 having found extracts from Labour Leader quoted by the enemy press.
As told by Brockway, there were two occasions during the war when the authorities persecuted Labour Leader while he was editor. For the issue of 5 August 1915, the paperâs office and press were raided by police and a whole edition seized. The public prosecutor brought an action under DORA, asking for destruction of an offending edition. The case was heard in camera despite the defenceâs protests, but the court found nothing to justify destruction. On the second occasion, police arrived as Labour Leader was going to press, taking away page proofs and much else to Salford police station. A letter from Clive Bell (brother-in-law of Virginia Woolf) that might prejudice recruiting was ordered to be excised. A protest by C.P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian followed and the matter was raised in Parliament.4
Harassment extended to the anti-war Independent Labour Party (ILP), headed by W.C. Anderson MP and the economist J.A. Hobson, author of the ground-breaking Imperialism (1902). Police raided ILP bookshops in Manchester and London, taking away lorry loads of anti-war literature, including Brockwayâs one-act play âThe Devilâs Businessâ (1915), which exposed international armaments rings. Brockway recalled: âIts theme was an interview between members of the Cabinet and an armaments salesman, who threatened to take his weapons to the enemy if Britain would not buy.â In Manchester the play was acceptable to the police, but in London it was ordered destroyed.5
*
The first convention of the Non-Conscription Fellowship (N-CF) was held in November 1915, creating a storm in the press against cowards, and âHun-lovers,â âThe save-their-skins brigade,â âThe wonât-fight-funksâ. The N-CF extended beyond pacifists and vigorously campaigned against the Military Service Bill. Brockway recalled that it was constantly under surveillance by âplain clothes policeâ. He suffered his first internment in July 1916 after the government invoked DORA to prosecute the national committee of the N-CF for an offending leaflet. Brockway was imprisoned for two months in Pentonville where the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was in residence, a source of lively speculation among the prisoners (too posh to be hanged, and so forth). In November 1916, Brockway was arrested again under the Military Service Act, and not released for twenty-eight months until April 1919, much of it spent in solitary confinement as reprisal for defiance of prison regulations.
Following the February 1917 overthrow of the Russian tsar, the ILPâs National Council âacclaimed the âmagnificent achievement of the Russian peopleâ as a step towards âthe coming of peace, based not on the dominance of militarists and diplomats, but on democracy and justiceââ.6 Alarmed by subsequent anti-war Bolshevik propaganda, in October 1917 the War Cabinet instructed the Home Office to investigate the funding of all pacifist propaganda. MI5âs active rival in this operation was Sir Basil Thomson of Special Branch, director of intelligence and assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police reporting to the Ministry of Labour, the Admiralty and GHQ (Military). Thomson found that âno evidence of German funding for British pacifists and revolutionaries emerged from investigations by either MI5 or the Special Branch.â7
MI5 treated the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) â and virtually every organisation defending civil liberties against DORA â as implicitly âpro-Germanâ, a deadly stigma extending to pacifists and conscientious objectors.8 The NCCL marked a response to the increasing infringements on personal liberty resulting from the Military Service Acts and the governmentâs deployment of DORA. The NCCL received significant support from nonconformist clergy in certain regions; for example, on 6 June 1918 NCCL sent Mrs Ethel Snowden a list (intercepted) of twenty-four pacifists, all clergymen in Wales, eight of whom starred in MI5âs files as âvery activeâ [KV2/666]. We find NCCLâs secretary, B. Langdon-Davies, writing (14 December 1917) to Lt Col Russell at the War Office asking for the return of NCCL account books, correspondence and other literature seized. Ethel Snowden, the NCCLâs honorary treasurer and wife of Philip Snowden, joined with J.A. Hobson in protesting (1 March 1918) to Barclayâs Bank, Covent Garden, after the NCCLâs cheques and vouchers were handed over for audit to Scotland Yard, at the request of MI5, in âviolation of the fiduciary relations between customer and clientâ, as Mrs Snowden put it [KV2/667].
But âfiduciary relationsâ were scarcely the most severe casualties of the tragic war. Meanwhile, the government and the War Office viewed events in Russia with rising alarm.
MI5 and the Russian Revolution
MI5âs first domestic contact with violent Bolshevik Communism occurred in 1915 with an investigation of the Communist Club at 107 Charlotte Street, where a gang of violent Latvian revolutionaries capable of armed robbery held out. The war against Germany now dovetailed with fear of Bolshevism when it became apparent that Berlin, though contemptuous of Russiaâs revolutionaries in exile, discerned that they might be worth financing to undermine Russiaâs failing war effort. In April 1917, German agents organised the return of Lenin and his fellow-exiles in Switzerland back to Russia in a sealed train. The subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power in October had the effect intended by the Germans, leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 and leaving the Western armies without a diversionary ally in the East.
The deep-rooted hostility of MI5 towards the Bolsheviks is abundantly evident in an early file from 1917â18, âThe Bolshevik Partyâ, packed with unsigned polemics [KV2/498]. Hatred and even hysteria surface in otherwise well-informed reports from Russia reflecting fury about Lenin pulling Russia out of the war, thereby âdeserting our boysâ on the Western front.
In an undated, unsigned memo, âA few points to remember about the Bolsheviksâ, point 4 states that âthe chief Bolshevik leaders are not Russians but Jews who carefully hide their real namesâ. Point 22 states that âthese new rulers and the Russian glorious proletariat have been from the outset living almost entirely of [sic] the plunder of the bourgeoisie, which is the idealistic name for everybody who possesses anything worth stealingâ.
The memos in the MI5 file barely mention the tsar or his downfall. Nevertheless, in point 36, support for the February âdemocraticâ revolution is implicit. Its leading spirits, Plekhanov, Kerensky and Miliukoff (Miliukov), praised as âall unquestionably enlightened, loyal democrats who do their utmost to remain on the very best political terms with England, France and the USAâ. The journalist W.M. Philips Price of the Manchester Guardian recorded a meeting early in the war with the leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the Duma, Professor Pavel Miliukov: âHe was all for the War and had the most imperialist ideas ⌠Turkey must be broken up and Russia must have Constantinople, the Dardanelles, a naval base in the Mediterranean and all the Eastern Provinces of Anatolia.â9
MI5âs point 37 denounces the Bolsheviks for having repudiated all of the treaties, agreements, financial contracts, and so on concluded with Britain and Russiaâs other Allies. But the actual content of such treaties passes unrecorded by MI5. Philips Price remembered being admitted to the Russian Foreign Office on the day, 23 November 1917, when the Bolsheviks secured the keys to the secret treaties.
There in black and white was an agreement between Great Britain, France and Russia giving France a free hand in Western Europe to the Rhine on condition that Russia had a similar free hand in Poland.
This clause had actually been dropped more recently and only Alsace-Lorraine was now claimed for France. The treaty was followed by another quite cynical one which bribed the Romanian government to enter the war by giving it the Banat with its Yugoslavs, the Bukovina with its Romanian population and Transylvania with its large number of Magyars. Philips Price was shown a treaty which gave Russia Constantinople and five Vilayets or provinces of Eastern Turkey, while France got Syria and Great Britain Mesopotamia. Another treaty would virtually have partitioned Persia between Great Britain and Russia. Philips Price recalled: âI immediately translated the documents, rushed to the [Moscow] Telegraph Office and sent off some four or five despatches giving the essence of these Treaties. My despatches appeared in the Manchester Guardian on November 27th, 28th and 29th (1917).â10
This was evidently how the British Empire defended âlittle Belgiumâ. It was also clear that Ireland, India, Egypt and Morocco could whistle for self-government if the Allies prevailed. At the close of 1917 it was announced that the forthcoming Paris Conference of the Allies would be concerned only with the prosecution of the war and not with war aims.11 The hidden agenda of all the major powers was expansion, and this notably came about following the disintegration of Turkish imperial rule in the Middle East, with Britain and France grabbing the vacated territory.
An MI5 memo warned: âMeanwhile at home, there is every reason to believe that the Bolshevik Independent Labour Party is using the Bolshevik arguments only to suit their own narrow party ends, and to exploit recent strikes in Manchester and Glasgow.â Point 49 expresses indignation that in Glasgow the Bolsheviks have appointed as their consul Mr (John) Maclean, who has been preaching rebellion and pacifism and âwas imprisoned by His Majestyâs Governmentâ (under the DORA). Maclean was a revolutionary socialist of the post-1910 âRed Clydesideâ era.
A report on Bolshevik affairs in Russia dated 7 March 1918 is found under M.I.5. (g/3c) I.P. No 265508: âAll the Bolsheviks stand for is inciting the labouring classes in all the countries against the property owners. They do not care about Russia nor any country.â Indeed, âthis is a microbe which the entire civilised humanity must combat.â Furthermore, âit is deplorable that a distinguished man like Mr [H.G.] Wells should have allowed himself to be bamboozled by these desperadoes.â (H.G. Wells did not visit Bolshevik Russia until September/October 1920, publishing Russia in the Shadows in 1921.)
MI5âs reports were loaded with emotionally loaded words like âloyalâ: all the âloyalâ elements in Russia âdevoted to England and Russia are being hunted down by the Bolshevik autocratsâ. Missing throughout is any recognition of the history of spontaneous Russian naval and military mutinies against a war that had brought only destruction and destitution, a tsarist war perpetuated by Kerensky and the heirs of the February Revolution. MI5âs claim that Russian soldiers and sailors were by 1917 âdevoted to Englandâ was wishful thinking.
That the MI5 documents should...