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By Root 2622 0

by the Code and Cypher School. In mid-1921 (by which time he had succeeded Balfour as Foreign Secretary) Curzon unequivocally described the School as ‘by far the most important branch of our confidential work’. The ‘decyphered telegrams of foreign Govts.’, he wrote, ‘are without doubt the most valuable source of our secret information respecting their policy and actions. They provide the most accurate and, withal, intrinsically the cheapest, means of obtaining secret political information that exists.’5 By this stage, taking advantage of the fact that in February 1921 Walter Long, who was interested in intelligence matters, was replaced at the Admiralty by Arthur Lee, who was not, Curzon had already begun to press for the administrative transfer of the School to the Foreign Office. In May Lee agreed (Sinclair does not appear to have objected) and from 1 April 1922 the Foreign Office assumed direct responsibility for the School (while agreeing to return five named individuals to the Admiralty in the event of a war).6 But this arrangement did not suit the service ministries, who lodged a vigorous complaint in April 1923, claiming that the School had ‘entirely lost its interdepartmental character’ since the Foreign Office had taken over ‘complete control’. The row simmered on until November when Sir Eyre Crowe, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, devised a compromise whereby the School was placed under the general authority of Sinclair, by now Chief of SIS. Personally acceptable to the armed service intelligence chiefs, Sinclair nevertheless remained answerable to the Foreign Office.7

This is not to say that Sinclair was necessarily the best man for the job. Although as Director of Naval Intelligence he had been involved in the creation of the GC&CS in 1919, and clearly appreciated how valuable signals intelligence could be, his role as a customer for sigint in the summer of 1920, when the service intelligence chiefs wanted to publicise the details of intercepted Soviet telegrams, suggests that he did not at this time fully understand how the injudicious use of signals intelligence could risk the precious source itself. From May 1920 GC&CS succeeded in reading the communications of the Soviet Trade Delegation in London. These revealed that the Soviets were indulging in secret political work, including providing a subsidy to the left-wing Daily Herald, and contemplating ways of ‘arming the British “proletariat”’. Some intercepts were leaked to the press on 17 August, and the evidence of Soviet perfidy mightily enraged senior military and naval officers, including the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who was shocked at the extent to which the government was apparently prepared to ignore the Soviet behaviour. He told his political master, Winston Churchill, that ‘our (soldier) loyalty to the Cabinet’ was being put under ‘severe strain’ and (with a hint of political blackmail) that ‘we had a still higher loyalty to our King and to England’. Churchill, in fact, agreed and urged Lloyd George to publish more intercepts. But aware of the accompanying risk to the source of the intelligence, Churchill asked the service intelligence chiefs (including Sinclair) ‘to report to what extent the incriminating telegrams can be published without undue damage to the permanent interests of the cipher school’. The servicemen (as well as Basil Thomson) concluded that the threat posed by the Soviet delegation justified disclosure. The Cabinet sensibly decided otherwise, although a few intercepts were leaked to the press, presumably by members of the intelligence community.8

As it happened, the Soviets missed the significance of the published intercepts and did not apparently realise that their communications were being deciphered until December, but the episode reveals how Sinclair and his colleagues let their patriotic (and right-wing) political hearts override their intelligence chiefs’ heads, as well, perhaps, as their constitutional duty to serve the government in power. For them, the evidence