The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [145]
Dukes’s careful submission of material prior to publication probably owed something to the difficulties Compton Mackenzie had incurred in 1932 with his book Greek Memories. This was Mackenzie’s third volume of wartime memoirs, in the second of which, First Athenian Memories (1931), he had recounted his first few months in late 1915 working for Mansfield Cumming’s Bureau. Although he revealed that ‘the real object of C’s organization’ was ‘to obtain information about the enemy’, he did not provide much detail or further identify Cumming. ‘The initial of C’, he wrote, ‘was invoked to justify everything, but who C was and where C was and what C was and why C was we were not told.’54 Although livelier and more personal than Somerset Maugham’s fictionalised account, the book does not appear to have caused the authorities any concern, though chapter five, ‘Early absurdities of secret-service’, cannot have endeared him to all of his former colleagues in the Service. Trouble came with the much more informative Greek Memories, published in October 1932, which provoked the first (and by no means the last) prosecution under the Official Secrets Act through which the British government sought to suppress the publication of a memoir about the security and intelligence services.
The press reaction to Greek Memories focused on the revelations about Cumming. ‘Mystery Chief of the Secret Service’, ‘Capt “C’s” identity disclosed’, trumpeted the Daily Telegraph on the day of publication, 27 October. Reporting on the book, Hector Bywater, Cumming’s very successful prewar agent (a fact he did not disclose) and now the Telegraph’s naval correspondent, announced that ‘the identity of this remarkable man, who before and during the war probed the naval and military secrets of the Central Powers’, had been ‘revealed in print for the first time’.55 This sensational disclosure prompted Sinclair to get MI5 to initiate moves to have the book banned. By three o’clock that afternoon the Director of Public Prosecutions had himself telephoned the publishers and ‘suggested to them that they might like to withdraw the book, pointing out however that he was merely giving them friendly advice’.56 The same day Sinclair sent Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office ‘a list of some points’ which were ‘considered objectionable from the point of view of national interest’, and which rehearsed the kinds of arguments which would be deployed again in similar future prosecutions. The volume blew SIS’s cover, a perennially important concern for the Service. It ‘blazons the connection between the Passport Control Department and the S.S.’. While conceding that ‘this is already known in some quarters’, the manner in which it was now explained and emphasised was ‘highly undesirable’. Mackenzie had also betrayed ‘the fact that the Section known as “M.I.1.c” in the War Office’ was ‘a cover of the S.S., thereby disclosing the identity of certain present officers of the service’, whose names were printed in the publicly available War Office List. He had given ‘the full names and particulars of a number of individuals previously employed in the S.S.’, some of whom were ‘earmarked for re-employment in case of future war, and some of whom unofficially assist the present S.S. It thereby renders both classes useless and renders those living in foreign countries liable to dangerous interference.’ Finally, the book established ‘a very dangerous precedent for present