The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [117]
Western and Central Europe
During the early 1920s SIS overseas deployments settled down into a pattern which continued until the mid-1930s. In the spring 1923 budget £27,000 was allocated for the Baltic and Scandinavian stations; £22,000 to the German Group (£8,000 of which was earmarked for Holland and £3,000 for Belgium); £16,000 for the Swiss Group, which also included France, Italy, Spain and Portugal; and £10,000 for the Central European Group of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania. Further afield, £20,000 was allocated for the Near East; £18,000 for the Far East; and £9,000 for New York.
In October 1919 Henry Landau, who had done so well in the Netherlands during the war, was sent to Germany to be the Service representative there. Cumming, as Landau recalled in a memoir, assured him that Berlin was ‘the best of his appointments abroad’. In addition to his Secret Service work, Landau was to be the chief Passport Control Officer, but when he arrived he found that, as a result of much ‘competition and overlapping’ between different Allied missions on the intelligence side, there was little such work for him to do. In what was effectively a one-man station he also encountered administrative problems, and he was perhaps not best suited for the bureaucratic demands of peacetime intelligence work.18 Although ‘brilliant in conception’, wrote an SIS colleague, he required ‘a practical man with him to work anything out’. In Berlin, he got into financial difficulties and had to leave the Service in 1920. London subsequently had some difficulty in satisfactorily filling the Berlin post. After two officers had followed in quick succession, Captain Frank Foley was installed as head of station in 1923, where he remained until the outbreak of war in 1939. Foley, born in 1884, was a studious youth who had hoped for an academic career and studied philosophy in France and Germany before the war. In August 1914 he was in Hamburg and, ‘disguised as a German’, managed to escape through the Netherlands to England, where he joined the army in 1915. Wounded on the Western Front in March 1918, he transferred to the Intelligence Corps, who posted him to the British occupation forces in Cologne, whence he was appointed, initially as an assistant, to the Berlin Passport Control Office.19
From its inception until the mid-1930s the Berlin station concentrated on the Bolshevik target. With the establishment of a Soviet mission there in early 1920, Berlin, as reports in late 1920 asserted, was seen as a ‘centre for International Bolshevism’ where the Western European Secretariat, or Bureau, of the Comintern was based, dedicated to ‘the spreading of Communist ideas throughout Western Europe’. Soviet personnel in Berlin were believed to be employing ‘the usual Bolshevik tactics, viz. camouflaging espionage and propaganda under a veneer of respectability and sincerity’. Some reports tracking the travel movements of individual Soviet and Comintern officials appear to have been reliable and were circulated to Scotland Yard, who found them helpful in their study of the Bolshevik threat to the United Kingdom, but it is evident that the mostly White Russian sources (who included Vladimir Orlov) were frequently unreliable and many of the documents they supplied were forgeries. In 1922, one female agent, ‘BN/61’, supplied purported records of Western European Secretariat meetings, but after investigation Berlin had to report, with ‘regret’, that, although ‘the majority of the facts’ were genuine, most of the documents themselves were forged. Told by her case officer that he would pay only for actual minutes, ‘in order to earn her money’ the agent