The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [131]
MacDonald’s political position was gravely undermined when over the summer of 1924 the government clumsily mishandled the Campbell Case. John Ross Campbell, a Scottish Communist and acting editor of the fiercely left-wing Workers Weekly, had published ‘An Open Letter to the Fighting Forces’ calling on servicemen ‘not merely to refuse to go to war’ but also ‘to go forward in a common attack on the capitalists and smash capitalism for ever’. Campbell was arrested and charged under the 1797 Incitement to Mutiny Act. This was accompanied by political uproar: right-wingers called for this revolutionary to be locked up, while left-wingers complained about the suppression of free speech. When the government dropped the prosecution, ostensibly for technical reasons, the Liberals, asserting that this had been done under left-wing pressure, withdrew their support. MacDonald lost a vote of censure in parliament and called an election for 29 October.
On 24 October the right-wing Daily Mail published the leaked text of a letter purporting to be from the Soviet leader Grigori Zinoviev to the Communist Party of Great Britain urging them to rouse the British proletariat in advance of armed insurrection and class war.14 The same day, as the rest of the British press reported on 25 October (a ‘Bombshell’ and ‘The truth at last’, declared The Times), the Foreign Office released the text with that of a strongly worded protest to the Soviet chargé d’affaires in London.15 Although it has been claimed that the Zinoviev Letter decisively contributed to Labour losing the election, their vote in fact went up, and the Conservatives under Baldwin won an absolute majority due to the collapse of the Liberal vote. The suspicion remains, nevertheless, that right-wing elements, with the connivance of allies in the security and intelligence services, deliberately used the letter (and perhaps even manufactured it) to ensure a Labour defeat. SIS was certainly involved, as the letter had been obtained by the Riga station, who had forwarded an English text to Head Office on 2 October. The source cited was FR/3/K, Riga’s star agent in Moscow. It took about a week to reach London and, having been evaluated by Desmond Morton, was circulated by SIS on 9 October to the Foreign Office and other departments.16 A covering note said that the document contained ‘strong incitement to armed revolution’ and ‘evidence of intention to contaminate the Armed Forces’, and was ‘a flagrant violation’ of ‘the Anglo-Russian Treaty signed on the 8th August’. Though, apparently, no systematic checks had been made, SIS also categorically vouched that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’.17
The first page of the notorious Zinoviev Letter, showing its despatch from Latvia on 2 October 1924 and its circulation to British government departments a week later.
The Foreign Office, nevertheless, carefully sought further corroboration from SIS. This was provided by Desmond Morton on 11 October based (he maintained) on information received from ‘Jim Finney’ (code-named ‘Furniture Dealer’), one of the agents jointly run with Makgill’s organisation, who had been infiltrated into the Communist Party of Great Britain. According to Morton, Finney reported that the Party Central Committee had recently received a letter of instruction from Moscow concerning ‘action which the C.P.G.B. was to take with regard to making the proletariat force Parliament to ratify