The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [116]
Harry Carr, born in Archangel in 1899 where his father managed a sawmill, spoke Russian like a native. At Haileybury School in England he captained the rugby XV. Commissioned into the army too late to serve during the war, he was sent to north Russia as an interpreter in 1919 and on demobilisation back in England towards the end of the year was given a temporary posting by MI1(c) as a Russian translator in Helsinki. Soon made a permanent member of staff, initially as Assistant Passport Control Officer (PCO), he stayed with the Service for the rest of his working life. When Ernest Boyce left the Service in the summer of 1928, Carr became first acting head, then head of the Helsinki station, where he remained until July 1941. At Riga, Farina was succeeded in March 1931 by Harold Gibson, who was followed in 1934 by Captain Leslie Nicholson, a regular army officer who had worked in the intelligence section of the British occupation forces in the Rhineland in the early 1920s. In 1930 he had been taken on by SIS and initially posted to Prague as PCO.17
The pattern of activity at Riga was to a very great extent repeated elsewhere in the Baltic. The Tallinn station was in direct or indirect touch with some forty significant contacts from the early to mid-1920s. It is difficult, however, to discern any reporting sources among them who were both regular and reliable. Some had multiple intelligence relationships and haunted the whole region, like ‘31017’, resident in Finland from 1918, in Tallinn from 1920 and in Danzig in the late 1930s. He had been a member of the Petrograd Secret Police before the war and from 1918 onwards worked successively, and sometimes simultaneously, for exiled White Russian intelligence organisations in Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Berlin and Paris; and also for the Estonians in Tallinn, the Germans in Berlin and the French in Paris.
The most important and trustworthy contacts in Tallinn were among those from local intelligence organisations. An Estonian signals intelligence agency, for example, provided intercepts of Soviet wireless messages between 1931 and 1939 which contained order-of-battle information ‘of great value’ to the War Office. Liaison relationships also involved information from the British side, though this had to be transmitted with some care. Towards the end of 1930, the representative at Tallinn told Head Office that a contact in the Estonian counter-intelligence organisation ‘would be extremely grateful’ if he could obtain for them ‘photographs of OGPU and Comintern agents and other Russian Communists’, who had been expelled from the United Kingdom ‘on account of espionage, or propaganda, and other underground and disruptive activities’. Passing the request to Special Branch at Scotland Yard, Valentine Vivian noted that SIS’s man in Tallinn ‘would be more than obliged since the Estonian authorities give him much useful local information and he would be glad of a quid pro quo to give them’. In due course material was provided, but Scotland Yard warned SIS that there could be ‘most unpleasant complications’ if the source of the information was ever publicly revealed. In turn Sinclair (briefed by Vivian) told Tallinn ‘that any indiscretion of the part of the local authorities in respect of this information or the source from which it emanated would create the greatest embarrassment and effectually prevent any further co-operation’.
Liaison services themselves were by no means immune to the inherent problems of reporting on Russia. Baltic agent ‘BP/42’, who was resident in Moscow and had ‘connections in Soviet institutions’, agreed for a retainer of £50 a month to ‘send information three times monthly’ about political matters and ‘on subject of propaganda’. After his own involvement with the OGPU (who blackmailed him over gambling debts) was discovered he was charged with treason but escaped to Austria, where he continued to peddle intelligence on Russia until the early 1930s.