The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [148]
In November 1934 Eric Holt-Wilson of MI5 told Stewart Menzies that Landau, apparently seeking a British publisher for his book, had approached the British literary agents Curtis Brown. Menzies wanted them warned off, ‘bearing in mind our main purpose is to prevent the publication of the newest version of the book over here’. Landau, who by now had become an American citizen, was thought to be travelling to England and, ‘in view of his close association with this office’, Menzies was ‘considering whether it would not be a good move if I interviewed him and warned him that he is running a grave risk of being prosecuted for infringement of the Official Secrets Act’. Although Landau did not then return to England, there was no British edition of his memoirs until in 1938 Jarrolds published a rather anodyne autobiography, Spreading the Spy Net: The Story of a British Spy Director, which covered his early life and wartime experiences, including a short account of ‘the Dane’. He also repeated word for word from All’s Fair how he had met Cumming for the first time. Taken to an office at the top of Whitehall Court, he ‘was confronted with a kindly man who immediately put me at my ease. It was the Chief, Captain C., a captain in the Navy. He swung around in a swivel chair to look at me - a grey-haired man of about sixty, in naval uniform and short of stature.’63
The designation of ‘C’ was information which Vivian in October 1932 had judged ‘objectionable’ in Compton Mackenzie’s book. ‘The agreed impersonal term (“C”), by which the head of S.I.S. is still known in Government Departments’, he wrote, was among the details by which ‘interested persons’ could ‘identify Sir Mansfield Cumming’s successor’. By 1934 this was evidently old news and no action was taken against Landau or his British publishers. In any case, Cumming’s successor had already passed judgment on this ex-Service officer at the time his first book had been published. In a circular to all SIS’s European and Middle Eastern stations, while placing him on ‘the Report list’ (to keep track of his movements), Sinclair effectively excommunicated the former officer. ‘Landau’, read the message, ‘was once employed in this organisation. His conduct has since been unsatisfactory and contact or communication with him should be avoided.’
8
Existing on a shoestring
Between the wars SIS’s limited resources were thinly spread across the world. It was, moreover, never a very large organisation. Of the thirty-three overseas stations in the early 1920s, most were one-man operations (there were no female station heads until after the Second World War), with one or perhaps two secretaries (usually women) for administrative support. By 1938-9, there were sixty-nine officers and 134 ancillary staff in thirty-four overseas stations, and the overseas deployment of the Service amounted only to some 200 personnel, though there was, of course, also an uncountable number of agents. The expansion of the Service reflected the increasing demands being made of it, though this was constantly limited by the lack of funds. In November 1929 Valentine Vivian prepared a memorandum for the Foreign Office highlighting the rather modest resources devoted to secret service in Britain as compared to other countries, observing, moreover, that ‘No Government, except that of Great Britain, would seem to be so ingenuous as openly to budget for, and accurately to publish, the amount annually intended for Secret Service expenditure.’1 The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 inevitably stimulated a sharp rise in demands for information from SIS which, in turn, led Sinclair on 9 October to sign off a strongly worded ‘memorandum on Secret Service funds’, in which the evident frustrations of his dozen years as Chief, trying to meet incessant demands with inadequate resources, fuelled a cri de coeur for increased funding. ‘Since the War,’ he began, ‘the British Secret Intelligence Service has been constantly hampered, by lack of funds, in the performance of its duties.’ The