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the Anglo-Soviet Treaty’ and that ‘particular efforts were to be made to permeate the Armed Forces of the Crown with Communist agents’. This, concluded Morton, ‘seems undoubtedly confirmation of the receipt by the C.P.G.B. of Zinoviev’s letter’. But the original report contained no reference to any particular communication from Moscow, and Morton said he had ascertained details of a specific letter only during a subsequent meeting with the agent. Reflecting how curious it was that the agent had not mentioned so apparently significant a directive from Moscow in the original report, Milicent Bagot, a retired MI5 officer who spent three years in the late 1960s exhaustively investigating the affair, suggested that the agent had been ‘asked “loaded” questions by Morton, who is known to have been working on the Riga report and had no doubt put the two together in his mind’.18

On 13 October SIS assured Sir Eyre Crowe that Morton’s information provided ‘strong confirmation of the genuineness of our document [the Zinoviev Letter]’. This was interpreted by Crowe as ‘absolutely reliable authority that the Russian letter was received and discussed at a recent meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain’, and on this basis he recommended to MacDonald that a formal note of protest be submitted and full information be given to the press.19 Morton’s ‘strong confirmation’, therefore, already perhaps more than the evidence supported, became ‘absolutely reliable authority’, and the basis for explicit government action. It was only after the Soviet chargé, Christian Rakovsky, had dismissed the letter as ‘a gross forgery’ (which it almost certainly was) that on 27 October Crowe asked Malcolm Woollcombe for further information. Had, for example, the text been received in English or Russian and could an SIS officer explain things personally to the Prime Minister, who in the meantime had himself begun to wonder if the letter were bogus? Riga told Head Office that their original version had been in Russian, which had been translated by a secretary in the station before transmission to London, thus revealing that the English text was not quite as ‘authentic’ as had at first been claimed. 20

The Cabinet met to discuss the case on 31 October. Some ministers, including Trevelyan and Lord Parmoor, were very critical of ‘Foreign Office officials’, suspecting that some had ‘stooped to a mean political trick to damage the Labour Party’. Parmoor, who over a thirty-year political career moved from being a quintessential establishment man and Conservative MP to an international socialist and senior Labour leader, favoured an inquiry which would (as the assistant Cabinet Secretary Thomas Jones recorded) ‘table all the available evidence and expose our Secret Service’, and a committee was deputed ‘to examine at once the authenticity of the Zinovieff letter’.21 Responding to more questions from MacDonald about the text and provenance of the letter, SIS declared that it was ‘highly important’ that ‘definite proof be obtained for our own satisfaction and for that of the Foreign Office’. Perhaps appreciating that this could be interpreted as back-pedalling on the assurances already given, SIS added that this did ‘not, of course, imply that either we or the Foreign Office doubt the authenticity of the document in any way’. But, despite further exchanges with Riga, SIS could add nothing more conclusive. Reflecting a perhaps over-fastidious attitude towards the Secret Service, MacDonald was noticeably reluctant during the whole affair to question any SIS officer in person. On one occasion Crowe took Malcolm Woollcombe of SIS’s Section I with him to the Prime Minister, but (according to Woollcombe’s son) the intelligence officer had to remain ‘out of sight in an adjoining room with a communicating door, and the Prime Minister’s questions were put to him by Crowe, who relayed the substance of my father’s answers’.22 Sir Wyndham Childs (the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, responsible for the Special Branch), whom the committee also