• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2930 0

work at Scotland Yard might at any moment give rise to a scandal, owing to the Labour Party obtaining some plausible pretext to complain that a government department was being employed for party politics’. Tyrrell further suggested that ‘Scotland Yard’s anti-red activities’ might be ‘handed over to somebody who was not “on the books”’. In a subsequent letter he was more explicit, recommending ‘the transfer to S.I.S.’ of all the relevant ‘members of the staff of Scotland Yard’. Tyrrell clearly shared the desire for an amalgamated intelligence organisation, and, as he assured Sinclair in May 1927, he ‘never missed an opportunity . . . of taking advantage of any opening in order to bring it about’. Over the first two meetings, however, Sir John Anderson, defending his departmental interests (and backed up by Hankey and Fisher), argued against Tyrrell, emphasising ‘the necessity for retaining in the hands of the Home Secretary the control of any civil measures for the internal security of the country’. Rather than SIS taking over the ‘political work’ of Special Branch, he suggested that it might be concentrated in MI5.34

By the time the committee met again, the Arcos raid on 12 May 1927 had once more highlighted the problems of intelligence co-ordination as well as the considerable costs of its political fall-out. Arcos, the All-Russian Co-operative Society Limited, through which all Soviet businesses operated in the United Kingdom, was widely (and rightly) regarded as a front for Soviet propaganda and subversion. From the early 1920s both SIS and MI5 had taken a close interest in the company and its headquarters at 49 Moorgate in the City of London. From October 1926 an Arcos employee (‘a British subject of undoubted loyalty’) had passed information to SIS’s Bertie Maw, who worked in Morton’s Production branch. In March 1927 the informant provided evidence that a British army signals training manual had been copied in the Moorgate office .35 Since (as Sinclair reported later) this ‘concerned an act of espionage against the Armed Forces’, SIS passed the evidence over to MI5 who, having satisfied themselves that the evidence was genuine, on 11 May set it before the uncompromisingly anti-Communist Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks. He, in turn, persuaded the Prime Minister to authorise a raid on the Arcos offices, which, hastily organised and poorly executed, took place the following afternoon.36

No significant evidence of Soviet espionage was discovered. At SIS Sinclair and Morton were furious about the raid, which, apart from anything else, ruined Section V’s continuing operations against Arcos. On 23 May the Cabinet resolved to break off diplomatic relations with the USSR, and, in the absence of any bona fide evidence from the Arcos offices, decided to use signals intercept evidence to justify the break. There was a stormy debate in the House of Commons on 26 May, during which Vivian, rather like Woollcombe three years earlier, sat in Sir Austen Chamberlain’s room ‘writing answers to scribbled questions on which the Foreign Secretary required information’. In Christopher Andrew’s words, the debate on the affair ‘developed into an orgy of governmental indiscretion about secret intelligence for which there is no parallel in modern parliamentary history’. Alerted to the vulnerability of its diplomatic communications by these revelations and the publication of six intercepted telegrams in a subsequent White Paper, Moscow adopted the much more secure ‘one-time pad’ method of encryption and robbed Britain of one of its most valuable intelligence assets.37

Sinclair as Director of GC&CS in 1927 took a rather different view of the public use of intercept evidence than he had done as Director of Naval Intelligence in 1920. On the day of the Commons debate he sent a ‘personal & urgent’ note to Tyrrell stating that there was a document from the Arcos offices which provided ‘direct proof of the participation of members of the Soviet Legation in revolutionary activities in this country’. But it was too late to stop the revelations.