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country; but they had no “agents” and had to rely on informers and the interception of letters in the post’. Following this statement, Sir John Anderson asked did SIS ‘at present employ any agents in the United Kingdom?’ With a slight air of evasion, Sinclair replied ‘that as neither M.I.5 nor Scotland Yard were prepared to do so, he had been compelled to make his own arrangements in this respect for checking information received from abroad and had done so successfully’. At the committee session devoted to examining co-operation (or otherwise) between SIS and Special Branch, Wyndham Childs had complained about Sinclair’s unilateral employment of an agent in England who in Childs’s view, moreover, had provided unreliable information. At a subsequent meeting, Anderson once again ‘expressed concern at C’s activities in this country, which he thought, if not curtailed, might sooner or later lead to trouble’.33 So it did.

Towards the end of 1925 Valentine Vivian’s new Section V began to handle counter-intelligence and counter-Communist work. Liaison with the India Office and Scotland Yard was transferred from Section I (which continued to process work for the Foreign Office). The new section took over the running of what became known as the ‘Casuals’: United Kingdom-based sources, including Desmond Morton’s existing network acquired through Sir George Makgill and other contacts. Morton, indeed, as head of Production, retained a close interest in the work of the section, which overlapped with that of both Scotland Yard and MI5. Following the recommendations of the 1925 Secret Service Committee, SIS endeavoured to improve liaison particularly with the counter-subversion experts, Captains Hugh Miller and Guy Liddell, in Scotland Yard’s semi-autonomous section SS1, which was loosely part of the Special Branch. In April 1926 Sinclair proposed to Childs that Vivian should actually be seconded to SS1, though nothing came of the suggestion. The following month the British General Strike conclusively demonstrated to Sinclair’s satisfaction the sinister links between international Communism and domestic labour unrest. On 13 May, the day after the nine-day stoppage had been called off by the trade union leadership, Sinclair sent a draft memorandum to Childs ‘showing the connection of the Soviet Government with the Trades Unions’. Linking Soviet statements about labour activism, British trade union attendance at international workers’ conferences and organisations such as the Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee, the evidence gathered by SIS proved ‘beyond doubt’ that the idea for the General Strike had been ‘conceived many months ago at Moscow’; that the Soviet ‘directors of the movement’ had ‘found facile accomplices’ in British trade unionism; and that ‘through the combined efforts of these unscrupulous people, the responsible Trade Union leaders have been exploited and swept along’.

Sinclair (who copied the paper to Bland at the Foreign Office) told Childs that he hoped the occasion would not arise which would ‘necessitate’ it ‘being made use of ’. He advised him that, if it were to be used, Foreign Office permission would first have to be obtained as, in his opinion, ‘its publication in any form would entail a severance of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Government’. Since Sinclair described his document as having been ‘set out in a popular and elementary form’ (evidently suitable for publication), and he appears also to have volunteered its transmission to Childs, it is not clear how seriously we should take his hope that the necessity for using it would ‘not arise’. But it is obvious that he was well aware of the potential political ramifications which intelligence-based revelations from anti-Communist operations might provoke. So was the government. In March 1927, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, reconvened the Secret Service Committee to examine ‘the state of affairs at Scotland Yard’. At the first meeting Sir William Tyrrell explained that Baldwin’s ‘principal source’ of concern ‘was the fear that the political