The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [152]
Much reporting, however, concerned left-wing subversives. In June 1927 Captain Hugh Miller of Scotland Yard forwarded a request from the United States embassy in London for information about a named American citizen who was suspected of having been involved ‘in the transmission of funds for Soviet propaganda in the Philippines’ (then under United States rule). Vivian reported ‘No Trace’, but added that a similarly named person was involved in a ‘reported Communist Centre in Macao’. SIS also volunteered information. In April 1928 Vivian told Miller that the SIS representative in Peking (Beijing) had obtained information from a source in Harbin that the Comintern had ‘ordered the despatch of six agitators from the Far East to the United States, with instructions to work among employees in the textile industries’. They were to be supplied with American passports and ‘chosen from graduates of the Lenin Institute for Propaganda’. Vivian said that the information could be passed on to the Americans ‘provided the source is carefully concealed and no indication whatever’ was given that it ‘emanates from Harbin’.
The SIS representatives in New York supplied a steady stream of reports on Communist activities in the USA, drawn from police and Military Intelligence contacts, as well as their own sources. While SIS regularly circulated this material, there were periodic doubts about its quality. In autumn 1928 Vivian complained that Jeffes’s successor J. P. Maine’s ‘style is peculiar, his views are exaggerated and his perspective is extremely doubtful’. When in June 1930 Maine’s successor, Taylor, asserted that there were ‘at least two million persons enrolled in Communist or Communist-affiliated organisations’, Captain Miller thought the figure was ‘very much exaggerated’. Even after Taylor had defended the figure, quoting an American journalist, Walter S. Steele, Miller still doubted it. Steele, he thought, was ‘a journalist of the excitable order, who is inclined to lump all Radicals as Communists’, and it was ‘quite improbable that a vast organisation as carefully and systematically articulated as that which he describes can exist in the U.S.A.’.
In March 1932, Vivian, responding to a report on the left-leaning League for Independent Political Action, charged Taylor with being too unselective in his reporting. ‘The U.S.A.’, minuted Vivian, ‘is the home of crank societies - most of them semi-social and semi-political - but practically all devoted to the generation and release of hot-air.’ Unless they had ‘a real connexion with international subversion movements’, reports about them could ‘serve no possible purpose here but fill up space in the registry’. Taylor had claimed that the League’s aims were ‘merely the Communist programme re-written’, but Vivian said that was ‘not in itself sufficient’ to identify the organisation ‘with subversive Communist propaganda or organisation to make the report worth recording. After all,’ he added sarcastically, ‘some of J. M. Keynes’ tenets coincide with Communist tenets, but we don’t keep a file of his students of Economics.’ The Chief himself instructed Taylor to be more discriminating. Before he sent a report ‘on any of these unimportant societies’, insisted Sinclair, ‘the test should be applied - “Is there any proof of any connection whatsoever between the Society concerned and organised Communism?” If the answer is “No” the report is not required.’ There were other criticisms, too. In May 1934 London told Taylor (who had been asked in August 1930 to ‘keep a sharp look-out for personnel suitable for the penetration