The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [130]
The Zinoviev Letter
Although the 1921 Secret Service Committee had clearly distinguished between domestic and foreign intelligence (with SIS primarily responsible for the latter) and had found little or no overlap between the different agencies, absolute separation of activities was impossible to achieve in practice. SIS’s role in monitoring revolutionary activities of various sorts, especially those of international Communism, meant that no hard-and-fast rule could consistently be applied against working within the United Kingdom. If, say, a suspected Communist agent was being tracked by SIS across Continental Europe and came to Britain, it might not be feasible or, indeed, desirable suddenly to hand over the operation to MI5 or Special Branch at the moment the suspect entered the country. During the 1920s and early 1930s SIS also ran some agents exclusively within Great Britain. Foreign diplomats and businessmen presented another range of both threats and opportunities in which SIS might have a legitimate interest. In particular (and complementing GC&CS’s work on diplomatic cable traffic in and out of London), embassies (and their staff) themselves could constitute a source of ‘foreign intelligence from foreign sources’. In the interwar years, too, a number of shadowy organisations, mostly organised and funded by right-wing businessmen, worked alongside the formal British security and intelligence agencies. Some were exploited by Basil Thomson in the immediate postwar years, but it is clear that SIS also had direct contact with them. One such was the Committee to Collect Information on Russia, with which Sidney Reilly had links and which in 1921 produced a ‘Who’s Who in Russia’ that both SIS and the Foreign Office found useful. Another was the Makgill Organisation, an ‘industrial intelligence service’ set up after the Russian revolution by a wealthy baronet, Sir George Makgill, with backing from the Federation of British Industries and the Coal Owners’ and Shipowners’ Associations. In 1920 or 1921, after Vernon Kell of MI5 had introduced Makgill to Desmond Morton of SIS, the two men collaborated by exchanging information and pooling two of Makgill’s sources in particular. One (who was used up to 1923) ‘reported on Communist affairs in [the] U.K. and, with increasing vividness of imagination, on international and continental communism’. The other, Kenneth A. Stott, employed by SIS in 1924-5, was ‘wholly UK based’, ‘had a long previous communist connection’ and reported on ‘some international communist matters as they affected U.K.’.12
Right-wing fears about the onward march of Communism were reinforced by a change of government in Britain. Seeking a mandate from the electorate to back a new policy of economic protectionism, the Conservative Stanley Baldwin, who had succeeded Andrew Bonar Law as Prime Minister in May 1923, called a general election at the end of the year. Although the Conservatives won the largest number of seats, they failed to secure an overall majority, and in January 1924 Labour, the second largest party in parliament, with Liberal Party support unexpectedly formed their first-ever government with Ramsay MacDonald as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. Conscious of their minority position, the new administration proved both moderate and capable. Although the Labour Cabinet included idealistic internationalists like C. P. Trevelyan, who favoured dismantling the security and intelligence services, there is no evidence that this had any practical effect. According to one new Cabinet minister, Josiah Wedgwood, the government’s slogan was ‘we must not annoy the Civil Service’, and this seems to have applied to SIS as much as