The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [151]
Substantial evidence of somewhat uneven reporting from New York on Communist and radical groups in North America has survived in the archive, but there is only a little relating to armed forces intelligence. In 1930-1 an employee in a firm of consulting engineers with American naval contacts was taken on as a ‘paid conscious agent’ who knew that he was working for the British. But the Admiralty was unimpressed with the result. One report, about solidifying gasoline, was described as ‘absolute nonsense’, and another, on steel density, was ‘obvious nonsense, and informant appears to be unacquainted with subject’. By 1932 the agent had been dropped. An undated report sent by New York in the early 1930s indicates the kind of naval intelligence sought (though not, alas, whether any was actually acquired). A British ex-Royal Navy sailor had two American brothers-in-law who were ‘working on one of the new cruisers’ being constructed in Philadelphia. Taylor was assured that the Briton could obtain from them ‘any information required’. In May 1934 London noted that if figures ‘giving the reserve ammunition for the United States Army’ could be acquired, ‘they would be of considerable interest’.
As in the latter years of the First World War, SIS’s North American operation continued to concentrate on the activities of Irish republicans and Indian radicals. These were reported to Indian Political Intelligence, Scotland Yard and MI5. Wiseman, Nathan and their associates had been so successful that in a February 1921 report on ‘British espionage in the United States’, the future long-serving director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, claimed that at the end of the war ‘the English were much better informed on radical activities in this country, at least in New York, than the United States Government’. By 1921, he asserted that the British were still very active and ‘must have a very efficient force in operation’. Hoover appended a ‘list of known British agents’, evidently based on extremely circumstantial evidence. It included such improbable characters as the Jamaican-born black activist Marcus Garvey, the Irish labour radical James Larkin and a ‘P. S. Irwin’, the ‘active head of an organization at Miami known as the “Overseas Club”’, an ‘international British Society with headquarters in London’. Irwin’s guilt was apparently due to his being ‘the only white man connected with the branch at Miami all the others being negroes’, and the fact that he appeared ‘to be greatly interested in collecting data concerning both the black and white races, which will interest the British Government’.5
The United States authorities regarded British intelligence activities with some ambivalence and revelations had the potential to be very embarrassing. In June 1921 Jeffes cabled that a former confidential secretary had ‘become violently mad. Detained in public hospital. Talking freely of secret service affairs.’ ‘Do you wish anything done?’ he asked. Cumming gave Jeffes ‘a free hand in the matter’, but little was possible. Warning Norman Thwaites, Desmond Morton remarked: ‘As a matter of fact, presumably so far as you are concerned, all that she can say is ancient history, and as awkward for the Americans as for ourselves,’ a consideration which ‘really applies to our show at large’. In March 1920 Frank L. Polk in the State Department, who had worked closely with Wiseman during the war, asked that the ‘British Secret Service office in New York