The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [141]
Carter, meanwhile, became extremely suspicious of SIS’s growing domestic network of Casuals, which was expanded during 1929 by Morton’s recruitment of Maxwell Knight, a fervent anti-Communist, mildly eccentric jazz musician and keen naturalist who had worked for Sir George Makgill. According to Morton, Knight had ‘a small amateur detective or secret service in London, consisting of about 100 individuals in all walks of life, many of whom speak foreign languages’. He also claimed that, ‘when required to for his previous masters’, Knight ‘and two friends burgled, three nights running’, the offices of Communist and Labour Party organisations in Scotland. Knight was taken on, initially for a three-month trial, but after Morton had sent him around the country to gather information on Communist organisations he reported that ‘with every passing month MK has got his agents nearer and nearer the centre of affairs’ and Sinclair approved his continued employment. Carter, however, soon got wind of this expanded operation and was understandably aggrieved at SIS muscling in on his territory. Indeed, if a report by Knight of a meeting over lunch with the Deputy Assistant Commissioner on 23 July 1930, as passed on by Morton, is anything to go by, Carter was incandescent with fury about the development. He accused Morton (whom he called a ‘worm’) of ‘exceeding his duties’. The policeman declared that he would make Morton ‘go on his knees to him on the carpet at Scotland Yard before he has done’. Carter, whose political sympathies appear to have been rather more left-wing than those of either Knight or Morton, contended that Morton was ‘doing the whole of this thing for the Conservative Party’. He observed that Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government (which had come into power after Labour won the most seats, though not an absolute majority, in the May 1929 general election) were ‘against this sort of work’ and he had ‘to carry out their policy’.
Although a meeting was held in October between Vivian and Carter at which (according to Vivian’s record of it) it was agreed that SIS should continue to collect information through domestic sources, ‘in consultation’ with Scotland Yard, the dispute ground on until Sir John Anderson (whose department was administratively responsible for the police) intervened and summoned Sinclair to the Home Office in January 1931 to what turned out to be a very uncomfortable meeting about the Casual organisation. Recalling Sinclair’s evidence to the 1925 Secret Service Committee, Anderson noted that when the organisation had been started ‘it had been represented as a small one designed for the purpose of checking certain items of C’s information from abroad’. It now appeared that it ‘was expanding and as such was proving a source of grave embarrassment to the Home Office’. Anderson complained that ‘endeavours had been made to recruit Civil Servants’, a procedure ‘that he could not possibly countenance’. One of the ‘principals in the organisation [evidently Maxwell Knight] was, or had been, connected with the British Fascisti and was under suspicion of working for political organisations, such as the Conservative Party’. Anderson further ‘pointed out the danger of a Government organisation such as S.I.S. being in any way associated with such undertakings’. Sinclair, on the defensive (and presumably briefed by Morton), said that the ‘organisation at present consisted of only five individuals including the principal referred to. The latter had not been connected with the British Fascisti for the last three years, and documentary proof could be produced to support this. Neither was he connected with any of the political secret organisations.’ On the matter of using civil servants, Sinclair admitted that two officials ‘had been recruited temporarily to assist in pursuing certain lines of enquiry but that their services had long since