The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [133]
MacDonald resigned the same day and the matter passed to Baldwin’s new Conservative government. On 12 November another committee, chaired by the new Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, and including Lord Curzon, was formed to investigate the matter. A week later, ‘after hearing all the necessary witnesses’, they ‘were unanimously of the opinion that there was no doubt as to the authenticity of the letter’.24 We do not know who constituted ‘all the necessary witnesses’ (there is no written report of their deliberations), but they do not seem to have included anyone from SIS. Sinclair had evidently been ready to give evidence, for he provided Crowe with a note of ‘five very good reasons’ why the letter was considered genuine which he had prepared in the event of being called before the committee. Sinclair declared, wrongly, that the letter had come ‘direct from an agent in Moscow for a long time in our service, and of proved reliability. He is an official in the Secretariat of the 3rd International, who works directly under Zinoviev and has access to his secret files.’ Though Sinclair may have believed this to be so, it was not precisely the case, as the claimed source was one of FR/3’s sub-agents, about whom much was alleged but little definite was known. In his second and third reasons, Sinclair repeated some circumstantial corroboration, including the highly suspect assertion that the letter had been received by the Communist Party of Great Britain. Two further reasons turned round the possibility of the letter being a forgery. On the one hand, Sinclair baldly stated that ‘if it was a forgery, by this time we should have proof of it’, which was more a matter of faith than evidence, and, on the other, he declared that ‘the possibility of being taken in by “White Russians”’ had been ‘entirely excluded’. SIS ‘made it our special business to be acquainted to the methods and personnel of the various “White Russian” and other forging organisations, especially the main one in Berlin [Orlov], with the object of preventing ourselves from having forgeries planted on us’. In this particular case, moreover, he stated categorically that SIS was ‘aware of the identity of every person who handled the document on its journey from Zinoviev’s files to our hands’. We might allow that Sinclair (or whichever SIS subordinate drafted the paper) had in mind some rather fine distinction between being ‘aware of ’ and ‘knowing’ an identity, but in the sense which the assertion was clearly meant to convey to Crowe or the Foreign Secretary (or whoever), it was simply untrue, as FR/3 never revealed the specific identity of his alleged Comintern source. Only one of Sinclair’s reasons, his fifth - ‘because of the subject matter’ - was actually any good at all, though this was still essentially circumstantial evidence. Sinclair correctly argued that the letter ‘was entirely consistent with all that the Communists have been enunciating and putting into effect’, though he ignored other evidence which suggested that, at least temporarily, the Comintern had been anxious to avoid any action which would undermine MacDonald’s minority Labour government.25 In the spring of 1924, for example, the Riga station had sent London a copy of a letter from the Comintern to the CPGB stating that overt anti-government action ‘was only permissible should the Government commit some grave infringement of the rights of the working classes’.
SIS’s resolute validation of the Zinoviev Letter, and its suppression of any evidence to the contrary, underpinned the consistent Foreign Office position for the next fifty years (at least) that the letter was genuine. Since the general content of the letter was never in doubt - the Soviets were indeed keen on fomenting revolution in Britain - and bearing in mind the broadly