Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century

By David Caute

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839762482

David Caute

David Caute, a quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. His recent books include Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic; Politics and the Novel During the Cold War; and The Dancer Defects.

Book preview

Red List

Red List

MI5 and British Intellectuals

in the Twentieth Century

David Caute

First published by Verso 2022

© David Caute, 2022

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-245-1

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-247-5 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-248-2 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available

from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Sabon by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

In Memory of Martha

Contents

Note on Sources

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I

1. MI5 and the First World War

2. MI5 and the Communist Party of Great Britain

PART II

3. Dangerous Voices, Disloyal Pens

4. Theatre and Players

5. Film Censorship

6. Discordant Musicians

PART III

7. History as Heresy

8. Veteran Academics

9. Black Liberation and the Africanists

PART IV

10. Science and Treachery

PART V

11. Not to Be Trusted

12. Illegitimate Lawyers

13. Publish and Be Damned

14. The BBC Toes the Line

15. Art and Design

PART VI

16. MI5 and the Labour Left

Conclusion: MI5 and ‘Subversion’

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Indexes

Note on Sources

The released files available to the public can be found in the National Archive (TNA) at Kew in south-west London, or online.

Within the main text, most of the file references in the TNA have been retained, often beginning KV2, plus some serial numbers and other source data. The reference notes following the text include non-archival sources consulted.

Although the procedure of file-release excludes the living, my apologies to any persons who suffer embarrassment because their loved ones are named – or chagrin because they are not (when I was younger we would joke that ‘I would rather die than admit my telephone isn’t tapped’).

List of Abbreviations

AEU Amalgamated Engineering Union

ARP Air Raid Precautions

BAOR British Army of the Rhine

BBC British Broadcasting Corporation

BFBC British Film Board of Censors

BYFC British Youth Festival Committee

CIA Central Intelligence Agency (US)

CID Criminal Investigation Department

CMF Combined Military Forces

CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

COMINTERN Communist International 1919–43

CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain

CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union

CPUSA Communist Party of the United States

CRTF Czechoslovak Refugee Trust Fund

DG Director General (MI5)

DORA Defence of the Realm Act

ENSA Entertainments National Service Association

FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation (US)

FO Foreign Office (UK)

GDR German Democratic Republic (also DDR)

GPO General Post Office

GRU (Soviet) Armed Forces Main Intelligence Directorate

HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee

HOW Home Office Warrant

ILP Independent Labour Party

IRD Independent Research Department (Foreign Office)

KGB (Soviet) Committee for State Security

LASCAR MI5 telephone intercepts

LCC London County Council

LP Labour Party

LSE London School of Economics

MET Metropolitan Police

MI5 Military Intelligence section 5

MI6 Military Intelligence section 6

MOI Ministry of Information

MOP Musicians Organisation for Peace

MU Musicians Union

NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (US)

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NCCL National Council for Civil Liberties (UK)

N-CF Non-Conscription Fellowship

NKVD (Soviet) People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs

NMM National Minority Movement

NUM National Union of Mineworkers

NUS National Union of Seamen

NUWM National Unemployed Workers Movement

OBE Order of the British Empire

OCTU Officer Cadets Training Unit

PCF Parti communiste français (Communist Party of France)

PEN Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists (Scottish)

PF Personal File (MI5)

POUM Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Spanish: Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista)

PWE Political Warfare Executive

RAMC Royal Army Medical Corps

RILU Red International of Labour Unions (Profintern)

RNVR Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve

SB Special Branch of Metropolitan Police

SCR Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR

SHAEF Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force

SIS Secret Intelligence Service (see MI6)

SLO Security Liaison Officer

SPL Subversion of Public Life

SSS School of Slavonic and East European Studies

TGWU Transport and General Workers Union

TNA The National Archive

TUC Trades Union Congress

TW Theatre Workshop

UDC Union of Democratic Control

UCL University College London

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation

VOKS (Soviet) All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries

WFSW World Federation of Scientific Workers

WMA Workers Musical Association

WOSB War Office Selection Board

WRP Workers Revolutionary Party

YCL Young Communist League

Introduction

What we here call the ‘Other History’ of MI5 may be a melancholic introduction to the political mindset and culture of the British state during the twentieth century. We may prefer to imagine MI5 as a shadowy but romantic outfit smoking briar pipes while intent on trapping Nazi fifth columnists engaged in reporting the shallows and tides of potential landing beaches. Or in flushing out clandestine Nazi radios relaying shortage of rifles in Dad’s Army. Or perhaps the outstanding work of the double agent Juan Pujol, codenamed GARBO, transmitting valuable disinformation to the Abwehr before the Normandy landings.

Here we explore MI5’s covert pursuit of men and women arbitrarily designated as ‘subversives’, as threats to national security – but who were no such thing. Typically, they were unafraid to express dissenting views of the national interest. Most were perceived by MI5 as guilty by association, real or imagined, with the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Together they constitute MI5’s invisible Red List.

This suspicion of a socialist insurrection, at any time, was the core of MI5’s values and pursuits for seventy years. The circles of perceived subversion extended out even to Marxist groups critical of the Soviet Union, Trotskyists for example, and also black nationalists challenging white British rule throughout the Empire. While MI5 pursued the national interest as defined by successive British governments, the Security Service was a law unto itself, shielded by secrecy, its principal officers being strong characters engaged in pursuits, prejudices, hunches of their own. Its agenda was firmly focused on the perpetual Red threat on the horizon and the perceived internal dangers from the nation’s cultural and educational elites.

In The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (2009), Christopher Andrew offers a general claim that throughout its history MI5 scrupulously respected a clear dividing line between ‘national security’ and ‘party politics’. The available record does not entirely confirm that claim. For example, selective information was presented by MI5 to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson after he took office in 1964 and was considering his team for ministerial office. It has also been revealed that MI5 had a file on Wilson himself and on the future Labour leader Michael Foot, though neither file had been released by 2020.

The hitherto released files and press cuttings also acquired a life of their own. MI5’s file-checkers might be hunting for clues from earlier decades, a ‘subversive’ meeting attended, a recorded Party card, a pro-socialist published article, a marriage to a suspect, a divorce. This is one reason why the individuals on file cannot be inevitably correlated with what historians might regard as the main periods or issues of the era. Investigations often appear random, haphazard and fixated by association.

This reality formed an ‘other history’, largely suppressed, in MI5’s official centenary history of itself, made public in Christopher Andrew’s authorised account. Those interested in the Security Service’s pursuit of actual spies engaged in espionage or sabotage, or ‘traitors’ generally, will be rewarded in full by Andrew’s impressive mastery of the history of espionage and counter-espionage. But that is not our subject.

In many cases the pursuit of ‘subversives’ amounted to an intrusive assault on civil liberties in Britain. The methods used included warrants granting phone taps latterly known as LASCARS, intercepted letters, bugged premises, burglaries, or Special Branch shadowing a lady heading for – as it turned out – Fortnum & Mason.

As a student in the late fifties, the present writer remained innocent about the reach of the secret state. Though born in the year when the Spanish Civil War began and Edward VIII abdicated, I remained largely ignorant of what befell German and Austrian refugees of the thirties who had sought sanctuary in Britain while maintaining covert (they wrongly thought) Communist loyalties. Some were heading blindfolded for the internment camp of 1940 on the Isle of Man, some for deportation to Canada. The foreign-born women among them were far from immune to methodical pursuit, though they kept remarrying or changing their names, as harassed refugees tended to do, inundating MI5’s files with née or more commonly NEE.

One may now discover how difficult it was at the outset of the Second World War – yet in some cases how inexplicably easy – for a young Communist to get an army commission, let alone service in Intelligence, however linguistically qualified. It will become apparent in later chapters that after June 1941 MI5 regarded the Soviet Union as yesterday’s enemy, today’s ally, tomorrow’s enemy. Tomorrow was now today.

I never suspected – during weekly visits to hear about the complexities of the English Civil War from a renowned Balliol historian – that I sat within feet of a tapped telephone. I had never heard of a HOW (Home Office Warrant enabling ‘telechecks’). I had no idea when reading a recent article in Past & Present that other unseen eyes at Leconfield House, off Curzon Street, were also scanning the same pages for suspicious contributors while perhaps diverted from the footnotes by the prospect of a club lunch likely to extend well into the afternoon.

It could not occur to many students in the fifties that the local chief constable was regularly reporting on the membership of the socialist clubs they attended – or that the distracted physicist or biochemist glimpsed hurrying along Broad Street to deliver a lecture had a numbered ‘PF’, a personal file not only noting their membership of the World Federation of Scientific Workers but also suspect embarkations from Newhaven, while also exploring their irregular love life courtesy of informers called ‘reliable sources’.

Within the Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury, London, the affable figure leaning on the saloon bar with a pint was quite likely an informer poised to engage in an incriminating conversation with an unsuspecting journalist from the New Statesman, an actor currently at the Old Vic, an architect working for the London County Council, a tenor performing in the Wigmore Hall … From the files, we learn that MI5’s legmen in Special Branch (SB) did not favour Jews with ‘noses’, still less opinionated Indians or black men walking with white women. ‘Scruffy’ intellectuals were particularly suspect to SB whose prejudiced reports sometimes exasperated the better educated officers of MI5.

The released files, now housed at the National Archives in Kew, remind us of the epoch before the ‘defenders of the realm’ were equipped with computers and mobile phones. Reports and intercepts from the front line had to be doggedly typed out by never-complaining twinsets and pearls – though women were increasingly taken on as officers, two eventually ascending to the highest rank. A June 1949 advert in The Times ran:

Applications are invited from girls of good education for pss in London with good prospects and possibility of service abroad for periods: age 18-30, must be able to type; shorthand also required for some vacancies; minimum initial salary £5 p.w. – Write Box 0.706, The Times, EC4.

One such young woman had been MI5’s mole Betty Gordon, who achieved ten years within the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the British-Soviet Friendship Society, and even took a job on Soviet Weekly. She befriended such senior Party figures as Harry Pollitt and Betty Reid, and kept MI5’s counter-subversion F4 branch supplied with a stream of intelligence.¹

Photographic copies of letters intercepted by the General Post Office (GPO) usually arrived white-on-black, close to unreadable. The GPO building at Mount Pleasant housed a large and crowded room serviced by steaming kettles. A few wizards knew how to extract a letter without disturbing the seal on the envelope – a skill we are probably bound by the Official Secrets Act not to divulge. The Act and its attendant legal prohibitions bestrode the land with the same rectitude as Customs Officers at Newhaven or Northolt searched suspects’ baggage in search of subversive publications carried by scientists, historians and African-ists whose journeys abroad were regularly monitored at the ports of exit and entry.

The central problem with meaningful histories of Intelligence and Security services is the jealous padlocking of files, which remain closed to independent historians. Indeed, this was signalled by Christopher Andrew himself when he began an earlier work, The Secret State (1985), with a strong remonstrance against ‘Whitehall secrecy’ carried ‘to preposterous lengths’. However, Andrew was subsequently commissioned by MI5 to write its ‘official centenary history’, enjoying unique access to almost 400,000 files (as he reports), but with a caveat: no freedom to identify or quote from those files still classified. Many of these are found undesignated in The Defence of the Realm and cited only as ‘Security Service Archives’, their contents and provenance unknown to the reader.²

Some personal files have been passed to the National Archives in redacted form. The Service’s informers remain protected, although without their identities we know less than we should how institutions were penetrated and how colleagues were persuaded to snitch. A further problem is that persons still living are exempt from public disclosure by the Security Service. Yet one notices that some personal files of the dead, released to the National Archives well before The Defence of the Realm went to press in 2009, are likewise omitted.

For instance, in 2003 newly released files [KV2/1385] showed that future Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis was under surveillance from 1933, when he made his first donation to the election fund of the CPGB. Other files also name W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender – but these prominent writers, though deceased, go missing in The Defence of the Realm. The ‘Other MI5’ remains largely out of sight.

The basic indictment of MI5 as a threat to civil liberties can be found in the many cases described in the present study of British citizens whose recorded activities carried no hint of espionage or sabotage, no threat to the security of the realm – yet who suffered the intrusion of the state on their correspondence and their telephones, and the bugging of their homes. Informers were planted in their perfectly legal meetings, local police questioned their neighbours, reports were gathered on their parents, siblings, marriages and sexual relationships. Attempts were made to block their employment by the BBC, the British Council and other bodies close to the state. Citizens suffered interference with their military service, exposure of their bank accounts, denial of passport visas, reports from Customs and Immigration, blacklisting of shop stewards, penetration of trade unions – and more.

Of course, the FBI in the United States and the KGB in Soviet Russia operated on a much larger scale from conflicting versions of parallel mindsets. And let it be granted that the legal climate in which MI5 operated was more respectful of civil liberties, more restrained in its penalties, than the often-punitive crusade pursued by its close transatlantic ally across the Atlantic, the FBI. Unlike its Soviet and American counterparts, MI5 was not endowed with power of arrest – a task vested in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch. But arrest threatened publicity or the exposure of informants, which MI5 was generally anxious to avoid, preferring to let personal files chase their own tails, and tales.

For more than half a century, the ethos of MI5 was predominantly military or colonial, empire-addicted and class-ridden, staffed by former army and naval officers, by ex-colonial district commissioners, with loyal female secretaries, all defenders of the Empire quite confident about the giveaway indicators of disloyalty and therefore ‘subversion’. Reports from Special Branch often reflect gut prejudice, both xenophobic and racial.

MI5 had always shared the FBI’s obsessive pursuit of a small body of persons loyally beholden to the Moscow line of the moment. Yet the Communist Party of Great Britain remained a mere dwarf in comparison – in the varying decades of their ascendancy – with its German, French, Spanish and Italian counterparts. By the 1970s, the proliferating yet minuscule Trotskyist parties, influential beyond their numbers among young radicals, also generated alarm. And when it came to broad-based challenges to government policy from the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), MI5’s response was to go searching for ‘Reds under the bed’. Even the Jewish Defence Committee, originally filed as ‘founded in response to the growing threat from Hitler to the Jews’, was subsequently listed as ‘affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties’ – which was held to be a Communist front [KV5/24].

Was the British Communist Party ever a real threat to parliamentary democracy, to cherished liberties, the right to dissent or freedom of expression? Did the Russians ever seriously hope to impose the Communist system on Britain? We shall come to these questions.

Can it be said that the objectives and general outlook of MI5 from 1909 to the 1980s passed through definable phases linked to the major issues of the twentieth century? The general pattern of acute concerns focused before and during the First World War on the military contest against Germany and the war itself. By 1917 the spectre of Bolshevism surfaced followed by intense hostility to Russia’s withdrawal from the war on the Eastern front. The issue of pacifist subversion of the war effort gradually yielded to socialist subversion and domestic support for Lenin’s Revolution.

Henceforth, from about 1920 to the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989–91, MI5’s principal target remained consistent: Soviet Russia (USSR), the British Communist Party and its various fronts. Even the rise of fascism caused little deflection until the outbreak of war in 1939 impelled a renewed round-up of ‘enemy aliens’, not a few of whom were German and Austrian Communists who had fled from Nazi persecution. Despite variations from 1941 to 1945, when MI5 was essentially but inconsistently fighting ‘on two fronts’, the Cold War settled the Security Service back in its prewar anti-Communist groove but with rising intensity.

Did changes in the Security Service’s senior personnel throughout the period markedly affect policies and pursuits? By and large, no. The files show a more or less homogeneous mindset reinforced by recruitment policies. Whenever a targeted intellectual begins his or her career within a personal file, regardless of date, the initial pretext is usually the same: membership of or amicable contacts with the USSR, the CPGB, or dissident bodies judged by MI5 to be Communist fronts – although as with CND, they might be nothing of the sort. To the Service’s officers it was axiomatic that the CPGB could and would seek to control any dissident resistance to state policy.

Because of the essentially personal, ad hominem nature of most of the National Archive’s KV/2 files, I have grouped the investigated intellectuals by profession and creative activity – I hope illuminating dominant concerns within specific groups while reflecting the impact of national and international crises. The chronological dimension is, of course, discovered within each individual file, carrying with it such major conflicts as the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the varying stance of the CPGB, the General Strike, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi–Soviet Pact, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Hungarian Revolution and de-colonisation.

Communist subversion was the perceived Satan of MI5’s political theology. Broadly this outlook echoed that of the state no matter which party was in government. Over the course of some seventy to eighty years, MI5’s mindset was consistently weighted by ideological aversion to both socialism and colonial liberation. When the latter conflict faltered during the ‘wind of change’ in the early 1960s, bringing greater risk of Soviet penetration into Africa and Asia, MI5 hastened to offer its neo-colonialist services to newly independent states. Capitalist dominance of the economy was taken for granted. MI5’s fixation with subversion meant that few walks of professional and political activity evaded its tentacles.

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 Queux’s 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 Kipling’s magical novel Kim (1901).

Perhaps paradoxically in view of MI5’s 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 Asquith’s Liberal Government.

The search for the Kaiser’s 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 1910–11. 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 – although about 700 left during the war. At the time of the armistice in 1918, MI5’s 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. MI5’s 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 Branch’s 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) – 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, Labour’s 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 ‘short war’ 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 [KV2/1917–21]. MI5 monitored wartime meetings of the ILP as well as Brockway’s pamphlets ‘Is Britain Blameless?’ and ‘The Devil’s Business’, 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 ‘Non-Conscription Fellowship’, his membership of the ‘Stop the War’ movement and of the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Author of ‘Why I Am a Pacifist’, 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 paper’s 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 defence’s 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 Brockway’s one-act play ‘The Devil’s Business’ (1915), which exposed international armaments rings. Brockway recalled: ‘Its 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.’ 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 ‘Hun-lovers,’ ‘The save-their-skins brigade,’ ‘The won’t-fight-funks’. The N-CF extended beyond pacifists and vigorously campaigned against the Military Service Bill. Brockway recalled that it was constantly under surveillance by ‘plain clothes police’. 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 ILP’s National Council ‘acclaimed the magnificent achievement of the Russian people as a step towards the coming of peace, based not on the dominance of militarists and diplomats, but on democracy and justice’.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. MI5’s 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 ‘no evidence of German funding for British pacifists and revolutionaries emerged from investigations by either MI5 or the Special Branch.’⁷

MI5 treated the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) – and virtually every organisation defending civil liberties against DORA – as implicitly ‘pro-German’, 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 government’s 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 MI5’s files as ‘very active’ [KV2/666]. We find NCCL’s 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 NCCL’s honorary treasurer and wife of Philip Snowden, joined with J.A. Hobson in protesting (1 March 1918) to Barclay’s Bank, Covent Garden, after the NCCL’s cheques and vouchers were handed over for audit to Scotland Yard, at the request of MI5, in ‘violation of the fiduciary relations between customer and client’, as Mrs Snowden put it [KV2/667].

But ‘fiduciary relations’ 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

MI5’s 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 Russia’s revolutionaries in exile, discerned that they might be worth financing to undermine Russia’s 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 1917–18, ‘The Bolshevik Party’, 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 ‘deserting our boys’ on the Western front.

In an undated, unsigned memo, ‘A few points to remember about the Bolsheviks’, point 4 states that ‘the chief Bolshevik leaders are not Russians but Jews who carefully hide their real names’. Point 22 states that ‘these 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 stealing’.

The memos in the MI5 file barely mention the tsar or his downfall. Nevertheless, in point 36, support for the February ‘democratic’ revolution is implicit. Its leading spirits, Plekhanov, Kerensky and Miliukoff (Miliukov), praised as ‘all unquestionably enlightened, loyal democrats who do their utmost to remain on the very best political terms with England, France and the USA’. 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: ‘He 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.’⁹

MI5’s point 37 denounces the Bolsheviks for having repudiated all of the treaties, agreements, financial contracts, and so on concluded with Britain and Russia’s 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: ‘I 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).’¹⁰

This was evidently how the British Empire defended ‘little Belgium’. 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: ‘Meanwhile 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.’ 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 ‘was imprisoned by His Majesty’s Government’ (under the DORA). Maclean was a revolutionary socialist of the post-1910 ‘Red Clydeside’ era.

A report on Bolshevik affairs in Russia dated 7 March 1918 is found under M.I.5. (g/3c) I.P. No 265508: ‘All 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.’ Indeed, ‘this is a microbe which the entire civilised humanity must combat.’ Furthermore, ‘it is deplorable that a distinguished man like Mr [H.G.] Wells should have allowed himself to be bamboozled by these desperadoes.’ (H.G. Wells did not visit Bolshevik Russia until September/October 1920, publishing Russia in the Shadows in 1921.)

MI5’s reports were loaded with emotionally loaded words like ‘loyal’: all the ‘loyal’ elements in Russia ‘devoted to England and Russia are being hunted down by the Bolshevik autocrats’. 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. MI5’s claim that Russian soldiers and sailors were by 1917 ‘devoted to England’ was wishful thinking.

That the MI5 documents should praise the democratic election of the Constituent Assembly at the end of 1917, and express horror at its dictatorial dissolution by the Bolsheviks, might not sound like hypocrisy had the British government ever expressed dismay that the tsar’s war against Germany and Austria had been launched without the faintest element of democratic consultation.

However, these documents provide a historical platform for MI5’s ardent advocacy of Allied military intervention in the Russian Civil War following the defeat of Germany, as well as its relentless antagonism to the emergence of a British Communist Party under the direction of the Communist International (Comintern). For MI5, the October Revolution of 1917 marked the temporary triumph of the chaotic plebeian rabble against legitimate authority. Egalitarian or socialist measures were greeted with hostility, for example on 8 December 1918 new rules for Russia’s railways and for internal trade [KV2/667].

MI5 and Dissident British Journalists

MI5 and British Intelligence targeted two prominent journalists, Arthur Ransome and W. Morgan Philips Price. Reporting from Russia for the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News, Ransome, later the author of the renowned Swallows and Amazons children’s adventure stories, incurred the hostility of MI5 in broadly similar circumstances to Philips Price. Both reported from Russia during the upheavals extending from the overthrow of the tsar to the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ unilateral secession from the Great War, and the Allied attempt at military intervention during the ensuing civil war.

Both supported the Bolsheviks as Russia’s necessary saviours, castigating the ruling class in Britain, France and the United States for supporting the White armies. Price wrote to a relative on 15 August 1917 that ‘the Daily News man here, Arthur Ransome, is very good. He and I send all the material we can in support of C.W. & S.D’ (initials not understood) [KV2/1903].

In Arthur Ransome’s case MI5’s dossier mirrored the hostile attention he attracted from the War Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). It is said that Ransome became a double agent when SIS successfully recruited him in Sweden during his sojourn there in 1918. Yet in both the short and long term this affected his pro-Bolshevik attitudes and activities remarkably little. What emerges from Roland Chambers’s