Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ with a ‘minimum amount of light and airspace’ and with half the main room ‘in darkness’, as to be almost ‘uninhabitable’. IPI was run on such a minuscule budget from the India Office that in 1926 it had only a handful of officers in London, equipped with three secretaries, one clerk and one typist, and apart from a few liaison officers in India, it had only two officers stationed elsewhere abroad, in Paris and Geneva. These few personnel formed the entire official security intelligence liaison channel between British intelligence and authorities in the subcontinent of India. Just how ill-equipped IPI was can be seen from a report in 1927: Vickery had to campaign hard for the purchase of ‘one extra hanging lamp’ for IPI’s attic office – for which the Department of Works ultimately seems to have refused to pay. When MI5 moved to its new headquarters, ‘Thames House’, Millbank, near Lambeth Bridge, IPI came with it, though its new accommodation was no better than before.²⁷

      Despite the scanty resources at its disposal, sharing an office with MI5 allowed IPI to collaborate closely with other sections of British intelligence. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, MI5 and IPI continued to monitor the activities of Indian revolutionaries in Britain. Their main subject matter increasingly became communist agents travelling between Britain and India on behalf of the Communist International (Comintern), an underground network that Moscow had established in March 1919 to act as a vehicle to export the ‘workers revolution’ from the Soviet Union to countries abroad. MI5 and IPI’s investigations were focused on detecting agents acting as secret couriers for the Comintern, passing information between the British Communist Party and communist cells in India. The main investigative mechanism they relied on was a Home Office Warrant (HOW), which allowed for the interception of telephone and postal communications. Unlike SIS, which operated abroad and collected intelligence from foreign countries illegally, MI5 and IPI’s area of operations, domestically in Britain and also in the empire, were constrained by law in ways that did not apply to SIS. This was the case even though at the time MI5 (and IPI) did not have any powers at its disposal, either in statute or in common law, which allowed it to intercept mail. Despite existing in a shadowy legal netherworld, MI5 records reveal that it worked hard to operate hard within a legalistic framework, even if not a legal one.

      In order to impose a HOW, MI5 had to apply to the Home Office, with a written explanation of why a warrant was sought, and the Home Secretary then had to sign off on it. HOWs were extremely resource intensive – hence the small number that were operating in the 1920s. The actual interception of communications was carried out by a small, secretive section of the General Post Office (GPO), known as the ‘special censor section’, whose workers had all signed the Official Secrets Act. This section’s work was laborious and far from glamorous: its office was equipped with a row of kettles, kept almost continually boiling, which were used to steam open letters, after which their contents were photographed, resealed and sent on their way. Some of these intercepted communications, still found in MI5 records today, contain information about the private lives of MI5 targets and their broader social history that cannot be found in any other archive. Telephone calls were likewise intercepted (‘tapped’) by the GPO, which employed a small team of transcribers at the main telephone exchange in Paddington, London. The team included foreign-language speakers, especially ‘White’ (anti-Bolshevik) Russian émigrés, who translated telephone conversations in Russian and other Eastern European languages. Later, MI5 and the GPO developed an innovative device, based on a modified gramophone machine, which was used to record telephone conversations. This machine allowed record discs to be mechanically added and taken off the recording device, or ‘pooled’, thus eliminating the hitherto tedious task of GPO workers having to switch them manually.²⁸

      The first agent identified by MI5 as acting as a Comintern courier was Percy Glading, a member of the British Communist Party who in 1925 travelled to India under the alias ‘R. Cochrane’. Glading’s covert trip was revealed to MI5 and IPI by intercepted communications through a HOW. Over the following years he also used his secretary, a pretty twenty-five-year-old blonde named Olga Gray, to deliver funds to communists in India. However, unknown to Glading or anyone else in the British Communist Party, Olga Gray was in reality an undercover MI5 agent, who had been recruited and planted into the British Communist Party in 1931 by MI5’s legendary agent runner, Maxwell Knight, one of MI5’s most successful counter-espionage officers in the twentieth century. After retiring from MI5 as a spymaster in 1946, Knight embarked on a highly successful broadcasting career, becoming known as ‘Uncle Max’, a colourful presenter of children’s radio nature programmes. According to a later report on Knight’s agent-running section, ‘M Section’, the six-year penetration of Gray into the British Communist Party had been so successful that she had achieved ‘the enviable position where an agent becomes a piece of furniture, so to speak: that is, when persons visiting an office do not consciously notice whether the agent is there or not’.²⁹

      Olga Gray’s courier mission in 1935 to India for the British Communist Party provided MI5 and IPI with an extraordinary insight into how Comintern agents were run, and also revealed the identities of communist agents in India. However, her trip was an extremely delicate task for MI5, which had to go to remarkable lengths not to blow her cover. As Maxwell Knight later recalled, it was so badly organised by the British Communist Party that without MI5’s help it is unlikely that she would ever have got to India. Knight helped her devise a suitable cover story – that she was a prostitute – without making it appear that she had received help in concocting it. He also feared that if her passport and other paperwork for travel to India were approved too quickly, her superiors in the Communist Party might become suspicious. Her MI5 handlers therefore ensured that it was delayed sufficiently not to arouse any suspicion. After her trip, Gray revealed to MI5 the existence of a substantial Soviet espionage network operating in Britain. Its ringleader was none other than Percy Glading, and it was based at the Woolwich Arsenal in London, where Glading worked as a mechanic, and where he and his agents gained access to sensitive information on British armaments.

      The strain of acting as a double agent began to take a toll on Olga Gray – she appears to have had at least one nervous breakdown – so in 1937 MI5 decided to wind up the Soviet network at the Woolwich Arsenal and have its agents arrested. Gray testified at Glading’s trial for espionage at the Old Bailey in February 1938, appearing anonymously behind a screen as ‘Miss X’. Her evidence helped to convict him of spying for Soviet intelligence, for which he was imprisoned for six years. The trial judge congratulated her for her ‘extraordinary courage’ and ‘great service to her country’. Soon afterwards, she left for Canada under a new name.³⁰

      As well as providing intelligence on Soviet networks in India and Britain, Olga Gray’s position in the British Communist Party – unassuming but central – provided her, and thus MI5, with unique access to codes used by the Party to send radio messages to Comintern networks in Europe. Her information helped the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), Britain’s first official peacetime SIGINT agency, established in 1921, to break radio traffic messages passing between the headquarters of the Comintern in Moscow and its numerous representatives abroad, in countries as far apart as China, Austria and the United States. GC&CS gave this radio traffic the codename ‘Mask’. The Mask traffic revealed to the British government that Moscow provided secret subsidies to the British Communist Party and also to its newspaper, the Daily Worker. In January 1935 Mask revealed the existence of a secret radio transmitter, based in Wimbledon, in south-west London, which was being operated by a member of the British Communist Party’s underground cell to send messages to Moscow. MI5 closely monitored the activities of those agents identified.³¹

      MI5 and IPI identified other Comintern couriers, such as British Communist Party member George Allison, alias ‘Donald Campbell’, who, following a tip-off from MI5, was arrested in India in 1927 for travelling on a forged passport. However, the most important direct involvement of British intelligence in the empire at this time was with the so-called ‘Meerut conspiracy case’, a long-drawn-out trial that opened in India in 1929. Although their involvement was not publicised, both MI5 and IPI provided crucial evidence of the Comintern’s attempts to use communist agents in India to incite labour unrest there. In August 1929 СКАЧАТЬ