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By Root 2894 0

his flag rank as an admiral, this helped give him greater Whitehall clout than his predecessor. Unlike Cumming, on the other hand, Sinclair was a noted bon vivant, and had a stormy private life, being divorced in 1920. His nickname ‘Quex’ had been bestowed on him as a young man, and was derived from Arthur Pinero’s play The Gay Lord Quex, in which the hero was described as having been ‘the wickedest man in London’, though he had subsequently become a reformed character. 35 While one of his obituarists claimed that he ‘was intolerant of any sort of slackness or inefficiency, which he was likely to castigate with an astonishing flow of forcible language, such as was traditional in an earlier generation of sea officers’, he was also ‘one of the most imperturbable of men’, and it was claimed that ‘no emergency ever saw him “rattled”’. In addition he was ‘always appreciative of good service in a subordinate’, and he appears to have been a very popular commanding officer (he was captain of HMS Renown in 1916-17). Judging from an account of the ‘annual submarine dinner’ in 1921, he was very affectionately regarded by his subordinates in the Submarine Service.36 Whatever his qualities of leadership, which in the early summer of 1923 were yet to be proved for SIS, those of his predecessor had ensured that the Service had a future for him to preside over.

6

From Boche to Bolsheviks

At the end of the First World War, Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, declared that ‘our real danger now is not the Boch[e] but Bolshevism’. This became an underlying consideration for much British policy-making during the years that followed. Indeed, this perceived threat was intermittently to dominate British foreign (and some domestic) policy perceptions for much of the twentieth century. In December 1926, reflecting on the events of the British General Strike that year and of supposed Soviet agitation in the Far East, Sir William Tyrrell, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, told the Foreign Secretary that ‘Russian interference in our coal strike and Russian proceedings in China might justify us in assuming that we are virtually at war.’1 These attitudes had an impact on SIS. In the years following the First World War the Service was mainly preoccupied with the challenge of international Communism, powerfully backed by Soviet Russia. In the post-revolutionary Russian turmoil, the Service sponsored a number of adventurous operations in an effort find out what was going on and forged links with various anti-Bolshevik White Russian and ethnic-minority groups. As well as operating within the Soviet Union itself, SIS took responsibility for identifying Communist front organisations and tracking revolutionaries and subversives across Europe and the wider world.

Targeting Bolshevik Russia

On 28 December 1918 Cumming called on Lord Hardinge at the Foreign Office and secured his permission ‘to our continuing our organisation in Russia’ at £3,000 a month ‘until 31st March’. Cumming’s own accounts the following autumn included £6,600 for ‘Russia’, but also £50,000 for ‘Scandinavia’, most, if not all, of which was earmarked for Russian intelligence work. The Service’s 1922-3 in-house review made it clear that ‘the actual location of an S.I.S. office’ had ‘but little bearing on the nature of the information emanating from that office’, and specifically noted that, for example, an office in Norway (‘a country never likely to be of itself of any interest to Great Britain’) could ‘really be the chief centre of information concerning Russia, or some important international movement with ramifications in every civilised country’. The ‘first principle of the S.I.S. overseas organisation’, it stated, was ‘to gather news about the countries bordering on the one in which the local headquarters is situated, the more so, since generally speaking, Representatives are warned not to attempt to acquire information of a nature likely to be actively resented by the country affording asylum’. That this was substantially the case is