The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [146]
A memorandum prepared by SIS for the Director of Public Prosecutions listed a series of passages in the book ‘held to be objectionable on the ground that they prevent and endanger the present and future practice of the Secret Service’, the ‘whole foundation’ of which was its ‘secrecy’. The ‘lengthy and detailed statements of organisation, which may appear dull to the general reader, afford valuable links to an officer of a Foreign Secret Service endeavouring to piece together our system of working’. Personal details, ‘recorded and carefully collated by the Secret services of foreign countries’ might ‘cause the persons mentioned to become objects of retribution’ and render them useless for ‘effective service’ in the future. Sir Reginald Lane Poole, one of Mackenzie’s lawyers, asserted that the government wanted to make an example of him ‘in order to warn Lloyd George and Winston Churchill’ against using unreleased official documents in their memoirs. Someone else told Mackenzie ‘that there had been a Cabinet meeting at which the Attorney-General had announced I had destroyed the whole Secret Service . . . and that it was going to cost the country at least two million pounds to undo the harm I had done’. Whatever the reason, Mackenzie was prosecuted under the technical provision of the Official Secrets Act of ‘communicating to unauthorised persons . . . information which he obtained while holding office under his Majesty’. Mackenzie, in fact, was legally sunk by the way in which he had assembled the book, cutting and pasting lengthy passages from official documents and telegrams. He afterwards jocularly blamed his wartime secretary for suggesting making ‘a third copy’ of any documents which he ‘might one day find useful’. Without these ‘testifying documents’, Greek Memories ‘would never have been accepted as anything more than the embroidery, or even the deliberate invention, of a novelist’.57
At the committal proceedings Valentine Vivian appeared in camera and gave detailed evidence of the passages ‘to which grave objection can be taken on Secret Service grounds’, naming sixteen individuals who as officers or agents had connections with SIS.58 He was quite roughly cross-examined by one of Mackenzie’s barristers, St John Hutchinson, so much so that Vivian prepared a ten-page expansion of his arguments for the subsequent trial. In open court Hutchinson had extracted admissions from a Foreign Office official that, although the publication of official documents was prohibited by the Official Secrets Act, he did not think ‘the public interest’ had been ‘prejudiced’ by the actual contents of the material which Mackenzie had used and that ‘the publication of these documents’ could ‘do no harm to anyone’. Evidently sensing that adverse publicity - always a problem in cases of this sort - might outweigh the exemplary value of the prosecution, the government moved to come to an arrangement with Mackenzie’s lawyers. After a conference had been held at the Foreign Office between Vansittart, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Vernon Kell and Vivian, ‘at which it was decided on certain conditions not to press for imprisonment’, Mackenzie was offered a deal that if he pleaded guilty it would ‘only be a fine not exceeding £500 and £500 costs’.59
When the case went to trial in January 1933 Mackenzie duly pleaded guilty. Extremely good character references for him were produced in court and the judge was persuaded that Mackenzie was ‘an honourable man’ who believed he was ‘doing no harm’ in publishing the documents. The judge also hoped that the case might ‘do something’ to ‘warn those who are urged to write similar books that they are offences’. Declaring that he had ‘thought deeply over the matter’ and (in the circumstances rather improbably since the matter had been settled in advance) ‘hesitated very much whether I ought to send you to prison’, he imposed a comparatively light fine of only £100, as well