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he can give you on the spot’. Farina remained at Riga for ten years, during which he developed an impressive-looking organisation for work against the Soviet target, mainly due to the efforts of his assistants ‘FR/3’ and ‘FR/4’. The former group, comprising eleven sub-sources, seems to have been run through a Russian head agent, a journalist based in Riga, who was known as ‘FR/3/Riga’. Strikingly few of the sub-agents’ names were known, which raises the question whether they ever existed at all. The anonymous star source of the group, resident in Moscow and recruited before May 1923, was run through an equally anonymous cut-out (a trusted middleman providing a deniable link with an agent) in Riga. The agent, designated ‘FR/3/Moscow’ (also ‘FR/3/K’) and said to be employed in the Comintern Secretariat with access to documents, was a prolific producer, with over fifty reports from him remaining on file. But he is also credited with having supplied the Zinoviev Letter in October 1924. Since this was later adjudged to be a forgery, it may well be that his existence was fabricated as well as his reports. On the other hand, a sub-source introduced in late 1924 by FR/3/Moscow, whose name was known and who was said to be a fully conscious and paid agent, provided minutes of Sovnarkom (the Soviet of People’s Commissars) meetings. Regarded as particularly valuable by SIS and its customers, Head Office Circulating sections subjected them to careful scrutiny and concluded they were probably genuine.

The FR/4 group included twenty-four sub-agents allegedly overseen by ‘FR/4/Riga’, whose main sub-source was said to be his brother-in-law (name unknown), who lived in Moscow. Initially designated ‘FR/4.V/ Moscow’, he later became ‘31004/V’. FR/4 never explained to an incurious Head Office how he had met FR/4/Riga, nor what steps (if any) he had taken to confirm the existence of 31004/V, who transmitted reports from some fifteen other anonymous sub-agents in Russia, allegedly based in a wide range of Soviet civilian and military organisations. In March 1928 Desmond Morton initiated a thoroughgoing analysis of the group. While some of the sub-sources were believed to have provided genuine information, the investigation concluded that most reports were bogus. One sub-agent, ‘an alleged airman friend who could supply reports in Persian from the Persian Embassy at Moscow . . . supplied one complete fake which turned out to be a Turkish translation of a portion of the Koran’. Intelligence about a Russian ‘death ray’ from another sub-agent ‘proved to be feats of imagination’. Morton concluded that there was ‘something very wrong indeed with the group’. While there was (he argued) some evidence that FR/4/Riga was honest and that he had ‘certain genuine contacts’, the same ‘could not be said’ about the Moscow agent 31004/V, whose sources were ‘supplemented in a very large degree by [forged] reports received from a “club” source in Berlin, probably Orlov’. After it had emerged that the French in Riga were also being supplied with many identical reports, which they also doubted, in April 1928 Sinclair declared, ‘All this is most unsatisfactory & unless there are strong reasons to the contrary, 31004/V’s agency must be closed down,’ which it was.

Across the region SIS appointed representatives with some Russian experience. In November 1926 Ernest Boyce, Passport Control Officer at Helsinki as well as Tallinn, and who had worked in the Russian mining industry before the war, was replaced as head of station at Tallinn by a Cambridge graduate, son of a British shipbuilder and a Russian mother. He had served with army intelligence in Salonika and the Caucasus in 1916-19, spoke Russian and French fluently and had ‘moderate’ Bulgarian. In March 1930, he was replaced as Passport Control Officer by an Oxford man who had served with the British Military Mission in south Russia in 1918-19 and had ‘considerable experience of producing amateur dramatics’. Afterwards described as ‘an eccentric individual who flies off at a tangent and is difficult to pin down