The Spying Game: The History of the Secret Services

By Al Cimino

Throughout history, secret services have been employed by repressive regimes to keep the populace in check at home, while hiring agents to collect intelligence abroad. Britain's first secret service was established by Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary of state to Elizabeth I; meanwhile the US Secret Service was set up in 1865 as a specialized department of the Treasury, charged with stopping the circulation of forged banknotes.

This book concentrates on more recent covert operations conducted by the modern-day security services of the USA, Britain, Russia and China, a game of spy versus spy played out day by day and decade by decade across the world, with the ultimate stake each nation's freedom. From Sidney Reilly 'Ace of Spies' through the heyday of the KGB, CIA and MI5/ MI6 to today's super-snooper Big Brother set-up, The Spying Game gives you the inside track on an incredible cloak and dagger world of international intrigue now being eclipsed by computers and electronic surveillance as the NSA in America and Britain's GCHQ take over the reins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788284134

Al Cimino

Al Cimino is the author of "Great Record Labels," "The Mafia Files," and "Spree Killers".

Book preview

Chapter 1

Secret services

Early years

James Bond is older than you think. In the reign of Henry VIII, he would have worn doublet and hose and been employed in the service of Sir Thomas Cromwell, who ran agents across Europe on behalf of the king. Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham had a network of fifty agents gathering intelligence on the hostile intent of the Spanish in the run-up to the planned Armada invasion. His interception of secret messages from Catholic conspirators led to the arrest and execution of Mary Queen of Scots.

As the overseas territories claimed by England under Elizabeth blossomed into a global empire, the role of the secret services expanded. In India, for example, just 1,200 British civil servants ran a country of 280 million and a British garrison of only 60,000 men, plus 200,000 sepoys, was charged with keeping the peace from Egypt to Hong Kong. So it was vital to have up-to-date and accurate intelligence from a network of informants and agents. These agents played a vital role in the Great Game, the battle for influence over Central Asia played out beyond the northwest frontier of India. The struggle for the control of Afghanistan goes on to this day.

While British agents in the field disguised as butterfly collectors and ethnographers were easy enough to spot, the British had a secret weapon. In 1844, the Indian Army set up a bureau for decrypting encoded messages its agents had intercepted. During the British occupation of Egypt in 1880, agents were deployed to spy on competing interests and other agents were sent deeper into the continent during the scramble for Africa. These activities were formalized in 1887 with the establishment of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, which was further expanded during the Second Boer War, 1899–1902.

It took some time for the United States to catch up. While the US Secret Service had been set up in 1865, it had a narrow remit. As a specialized section of the Department of the Treasury, its job was to stop the circulation of forged banknotes and prevent other threats to the economy. However, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, the agency was given responsibility for the protection of important federal officials and their families, as well as foreign dignitaries while they were on US soil. Although it still has this jurisdiction, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was established in 1924 it took over much of the Secret Service’s broader role.

By 1909, the British began to perceive the burgeoning German Empire as a threat, so the Committee of Imperial Defence set up the Secret Service Bureau; in secret, of course. As a joint initiative by the Army and the Navy, it was divided into two sections. The Army section was the domestic branch that became MO5(g) and then MI5 and, in peacetime, the Security Service. It was responsible for counter-intelligence, counter-sabotage and counter-subversion. Under Army Captain Vernon Knell, formerly an intelligence analyst at the War Office, it had a lot to do. At the time, it was rumoured that there were thousands of German spies in Britain.

‘Refuse to be served by a German waiter,’ the Daily Mail advised its readers. ‘If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.’

The Navy section was the foreign branch. It became MI1(c), then Military Intelligence section 6 or MI6 and, in peacetime, the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS. Its job was to investigate Germany’s military and naval expansion. Initially, it was not the only organization in the game. In August 1910 two Royal Navy officers, no doubt inspired by Erskine Childers’ 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands, which was about a planned German invasion of Britain, were arrested photographing naval installations on the German North Sea coast. They were put on trial and sentenced to four years for spying. After that the Naval Intelligence Division at the Admiralty sought to distance itself from such activities. From then on, spying on the Germans would be the exclusive role of the Secret Service Bureau.

Command of overseas operations was given to Commander Mansfield Smith-Cumming, a fifty-year-old naval officer forcibly retired from the active list due to chronic sea sickness. He then spent the next ten years as superintendent of the boom defence at Southampton. But he was a redoubtable character. Legend had it that after being involved in a serious car accident in which his son was killed he was forced to amputate his own leg with a penknife.

Smith-Cumming brought with him from the Navy the practice of writing in green ink and he used the codename ‘C’. These customs have been adopted by every chief of the department since. He ran the department from his own flat in Ashley Mansions, Vauxhall Bridge Road, always carried a swordstick, described espionage as ‘capital sport’ and met contacts wearing elaborate disguises designed at William Berry Clarkson’s theatrical shop in Soho’s Wardour Street. In keeping with his eccentric ways, Smith-Cumming ran a ring of often rather disreputable agents.

The fledgling intelligence services of the UK and the US were happy to spy on each other. Indeed, it was Britain’s tapping of the transatlantic telegraph cables and its interception of a telegram sent from the US embassy in Berlin that brought the United States into the First World War. On the first day of the war, the British cable ship Telconia tore up the German transatlantic cable, forcing Germany to use cables owned by neutral nations, including those belonging to a still non-belligerent America.

Then on 16 January 1917, the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann delivered a coded message to the US embassy for transmission to the German embassy in Washington, DC. The American cable ran through a relay station at Porthcurno on the tip of Cornwall, where the signal was boosted before it was transmitted across the Atlantic. The British simply tapped the cables there and intercepts were sent to the codebreakers in Room 40 at the Admiralty. The Zimmermann telegram informed the ambassador that Germany planned to resume unrestricted submarine warfare to starve the British and French into submission. This risked bringing America into the war. The telegram was to be forwarded to the German consul general in Mexico City, who was to offer the Mexican government generous support if it would attack the US in an attempt to retake its lost territories of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. American troops would then be tied down defending their country’s southern flank, rather than being sent to the Western Front in Europe, and supplies being sent to the Western Allies would be diverted.

The British could not admit that they had tapped US diplomatic traffic and made out that the cable had been stolen in Mexico City. The text was handed to the US government, an English translation was published in American newspapers and on 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany. With Britain and America now allies, the two countries’ codebreakers began to co-operate in breaking German signals. It was the beginning of a special relationship in intelligence sharing that continues to this day.

In the interwar years, though, the relationship went on ice. When President Herbert Hoover appointed Henry L. Stimson secretary of state in 1929, he closed the US Cipher Bureau, which had been successfully reading Japanese diplomatic traffic, on the grounds that ‘gentlemen do not read each other’s mail’. America’s top codebreaker, Herbert O. Yardley, found himself out of a job when the Wall Street Crash heralded the Great Depression. To save his family from penury he wrote The American Black Chamber, which was about the Bureau’s codebreaking activities.

‘The Black Chamber,’ he wrote, ‘bolted, hidden, guarded, sees all, hears all. Though the blinds are drawn and the windows heavily curtained, its far seeking eyes penetrate the secret conference chambers at Washington, Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Rome. Its sensitive ears catch the faintest whisperings in the foreign capitals of the world.’

The book was an international bestseller. As Yardley had travelled to Europe towards the end of the war to liaise with the British, they were not best pleased that he was giving their secrets away. The US government’s reaction was to amend the Espionage Act, prohibiting the disclosure of foreign codes or anything sent in code. Consequently, Yardley’s second book, Japanese Diplomatic Codes

1921–22, was impounded. Like others in his profession, he went on to write spy novels.

Russia, the new enemy

The First World War spawned a new enemy – Bolshevik Russia. Although the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in London on and off from 1902 to 1911, even editing a revolutionary newspaper in Clerkenwell, it was only when he returned to Petrograd in April 1917, crossing Germany in a closed train, that the British government realized that he was a dangerous man. Seizing power in the October Revolution six months later, the Bolsheviks began making peace overtures to the Germans, resulting in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918. With the war on the Western Front still under way, clearly this was not in Britain’s interest and the British decided to do something about it.

The British Secret Intelligence Service had an impressive array of agents in Russia at the time. For instance, there was Sidney Reilly, the self-styled ‘Ace of Spies’. In an effort to keep Russia in the war, his lieutenant George Hill had become an adviser to Trotsky and had set up a counter-intelligence service to thwart German agents in Russia, while running his own ring of spies for the British. Paul Dukes – ‘the Man of a Hundred Faces’ – managed to infiltrate the Cheka, the secret police and forerunner of the KGB. When Dukes returned to Britain, Winston Churchill tried to introduce him to the prime minister, but Lloyd George thought that it would be inappropriate for him to be seen in the company of a spy. At the time, the SIS did not officially exist. However, Mansfield Smith-Cumming – the original ‘C’ – arranged an audience for Dukes with George V, who called him ‘the greatest of all soldiers’.

Somerset Maugham had been recruited by Sir William Wiseman, British intelligence’s liaison officer in the US, to go to Russia in 1917 and report back to both SIS and the State Department. Fellow author Arthur Ransome was there too, ostensibly as a journalist. He got close to Lenin and Trotsky, eventually marrying Trotsky’s secretary.

Although Britain had broken off relations with Russia in the aftermath of the October Revolution, Bruce Lockhart was sent as an envoy in January 1918. He had £648-worth of diamonds to pay for the agents there. That month, an assassination attempt was made on Lenin. His car was shot up, but Fritz Platten, the Swiss Communist who had arranged his return to Russia, shielded him and was grazed by a bullet.

Sidney Reilly, the self-styled ‘Ace of Spies’.

The Lettish Plot

Sidney Reilly then came up with the Lettish Plot, which the Russians called the Lockhart Plot. Two disillusioned Lettish (Latvian) officers had approached Lockhart, saying that they wanted to get a message to General Poole, commander of the British intervention force in Archangel, to arrange the surrender of their men. Latvian troops formed the bodyguard for Lenin and Trotsky in the Kremlin, as the government had moved to Moscow by then. The Latvians were mercenaries and Reilly – a fanatical anti-Communist – bribed them to arrest the two Bolshevik leaders, which was planned to take place in early September.

At the same time, Reilly arranged for 60,000 White Russians to stage an uprising in Petrograd and arrest the head of the Cheka, Moisei Uritsky. The White Russians, under General Judenitch, would then form a provisional government. But things got out of hand. On 30 August 1918, Uritsky was shot dead in his office. The next day, a young Jewish woman named Fanya Kaplan shot Lenin twice at point-blank range as he was leaving a factory meeting in Moscow. This was thought to have been ordered by Reilly’s associate, Jacob Peters, another SIS plant in the Cheka, once suspected of being ‘Peter the Painter’ in the Siege of Sidney Street. One bullet lodged in Lenin’s lung and the other hit him in the neck, narrowly missing a main artery. He was not expected to survive.

The Cheka knew who to blame. They burst into the British embassy in Petrograd and shot the naval attaché Captain Cromie, who had first introduced the Latvian officers to Reilly. The rest of the staff were seized.

There was no uprising by the White Russians, and Reilly and Hill fled the country pursued by the Cheka. They were sentenced