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By Root 2698 0

Mrs Moon, had been targeted by Ewer’s agent, Rose Edwardes, who approached the woman ‘representing herself to be a member of the American Intelligence Service’. She offered Moon £5 a week to work for her, ‘and a good bonus for any useful pieces of information she might be able to obtain’. But the SIS secretary ‘apparently got nervous and eventually refused to take up the work’, although over ‘a number of conversations’ Edwardes had apparently been ‘able to find out a good deal of what went on at Melbury Road so far as it was known to Mrs Moon’. Moon had at the time reported the approach to the authorities but, reflected Jasper Harker of MI5, she had ‘suppressed a good deal’ and had not been ‘anxious to give such information as would put us on the track of the mysterious lady from the American Secret Service who was supposed to have approached her’.41

This was by no means the only suspected Communist targeting of SIS. Another intriguing case concerned the four Lunn sisters, all born in Russia of an English expatriate family, whom Desmond Morton asked MI5 to report on in August 1925. Edith, the eldest, regarded as a committed Bolshevik, had worked as a secretary for the Comintern in 1919 and, by 1925, was travelling about Britain with a known Soviet agent, Andrew Rothstein, ‘as husband and wife’. The next sister, Lucy, was said to have been working as a secretary for SIS’s Near Eastern organisation since 1919. Helen, the third sister, had worked as a ‘lady translator’ at the Government Code and Cypher School since about 1920, while the youngest, Margaret, had briefly worked as an SIS secretary in Helsinki, before being dismissed for suspected espionage based on Communist sympathies. But she, too, afterwards got a job for a while as a translator with GC&CS. In this unusual case, guilt by association was evidently not assumed. In March 1926 Morton told MI5 that he had consulted Sinclair, who wanted no further action to be taken. He was, it seems, satisfied that both ‘Lunn girls . . . employed under S.I.S.’ (Lucy and Helen) were ‘quite sound from a security standpoint’.42

The revelations about Ginhoven and Jane intensified Sinclair’s desire for the rationalisation of British intelligence, including (as he caustically observed in May 1929 to Sir Ronald Lindsay, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) ‘the radical reorganisation of the Special Branch on a basis allowing for a proper realisation of the intricacy, delicacy and secrecy of the subjects dealt with’. Exchanges between SIS and Special Branch in early 1929, following the appointment of a new police Assistant Commissioner, Trevor Bigham, indicate their respective roles. SS1 in Scotland Yard performed ‘the civil work of a Home Intelligence Service’ (while MI5 covered the military side). Sinclair told Bigham that during 1928 SIS had supplied 908 reports to the Special Branch, including 412 about individuals, 299 about organisations, seventy-eight about ‘arms traffic’ and eight concerning the ‘forgery of British currency’. Reviewing the Special Branch for Sinclair in January 1929, Vivian observed that it existed to combat a ‘special type of crime’, which ‘may be described as one vast conspiracy to subvert the existing social order and the Constitution by violent means’. He told Sinclair that SS1 not only possessed ‘an almost unequalled knowledge of the subject in all its ramifications, but the cordial co-operation of S.I.S.’. But serious practical difficulties arose from the attitude of Colonel J. F. C. Carter, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner directly responsible for Special Branch, who in Vivian’s opinion was ‘hardly competent for the task’ and ‘lived in a mental atmosphere narrowly circumscribed by the exigencies of local information and concrete Police action’. Carter, in fact, had more counter-intelligence experience than Vivian, having worked with both Hoare (in Rome) during the war and Sir Robert Nathan in 1921. Some progress towards co-ordination was made in April 1929 when an SIS officer was appointed joint head of the SIS and Special Branch Registries