The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [113]
Nineteen-twenties Europe was full of dubious White Russian characters representing themselves as secret agents. One of Orlov’s associates in Berlin, for example, was Count Alexander Nelidov who, having offered his services to SIS in Istanbul in 1925 and been turned down, was arrested and deported by the Turks the following year and reappeared in Berlin in 1927, working with Orlov and claiming to be a British agent.
By 1928 he was in the pay of the Germans, though he was suspected by them of working for the French and the Poles, and was already renowned as a purveyor of faked intelligence. In 1929 the Germans arrested and expelled him, apparently for paying a senior official of the Interior Ministry with forged £100 Bank of England notes for information allegedly for the British. He then moved to Brussels where he continued to work with Orlov. In 1940, after the Soviet Military Intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky had defected to the Americans and been debriefed by MI5, SIS learned that Nelidov had also been working in Berlin for the Russians. At least one of these people came to a sticky end. Orlov, who moved to Brussels after the Nazis came to power in Germany, was arrested by the Germans and died after being tortured in December 1940.13
This toxic state of affairs led to a major embarrassment for SIS in 1921 when Lord Curzon, ignoring the reservations of some of his Foreign Office advisers, as well as Sir Robert Nathan and Sir Basil Thomson, sent a protest note to the Soviet government about their alleged interference in Ireland and India. This was based on SIS reports from two documentary sources: agent ‘BP/11’ based in Estonia, and another allegedly well-placed source in Berlin. The station chief in Tallinn, Meiklejohn, assured London that BP/11 had penetrated the Estonian office of Litvinov (at the time Soviet Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs) and was ‘an agent whose reliability has been proved on many occasions’. The agent had supplied over two hundred ‘summaries and paraphrases’ of cables between Litvinov in Tallinn, Moscow and the Soviet Trade Delegation in London during the spring of 1921, which revealed Soviet aid for Sinn Fein ‘germ cells’ in Ireland. Although both Nathan and Thomson individually expressed some concerns about the material and its source, SIS argued that it was ‘hardly possible that the long series of telegrams could be a forgery’. In the summer of 1921, SIS provided the newly established interdepartmental committee on Bolshevism with a selection of documents, said to have been obtained from the Soviet representative’s office in Berlin, which detailed Soviet subversion against India. The Soviets responded to Curzon’s protest based on this material with a disconcertingly cool dismissal, which convincingly exposed the reports for the elementary fabrications they were. This naturally enraged Curzon, who was ‘positively appalled’ and dismayed that SIS should have relied on discredited ‘German sources of information’.14
One result was a tightening up of procedures in SIS, reinforcing Desmond Morton’s introduction of more systematic methods into the Production Department (which was also known as the Production Section or Production Branch). A memorandum on the ‘classification of reports’ issued in May 1922 laid down that all information should be ‘submitted to careful consideration, both as regards reliability and value’. Reports were to be given one of three gradings: ‘A1’, ‘A2’ and ‘B’. The highest category included ‘those whose subject matter suggests their being regarded as of primary importance’, and which were based either on ‘original documents actually in the possession of S.I.S. or to which a representative of S.I.S. has had access’, or ‘statements by agents of exceptional reliability in which the S.I.S. repose especial confidence for peculiar reasons’. The second category included reports ‘which, for various reasons, cannot be classified as ‘A.1’, but which are of significance, both as regards subject matter