The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [153]
There were limitations to what SIS could achieve in the USA. In May 1935 Kathleen ‘Jane’ Sissmore of MI5 raised with Valentine Vivian ‘the poverty of your information with regard to the progress of Communism in the United States’, with one notable exception, a network run by Jay Lovestone in New York, which had been comprehensively penetrated by SIS. Lovestone, who led the anti-Stalin Communist Party (Opposition), had worldwide contacts, and London was particularly interested in information about those in Britain and the empire. Canadian names were passed on to the Ottawa authorities, while others, including the Indian Communist M. N. Roy, the Trinidadian ‘rabid Trotskyite’ C. L. R. James and the liberal-Marxist British intellectual Harold Laski (who could hardly be described as a ‘subversive’), were passed on to Scotland Yard, MI5 and Indian Political Intelligence. Flatteringly for SIS, an October 1935 report quoted Lovestone (who was planning a trip to Europe) as saying ‘that the British Intelligence Service was the only thing he had ever been afraid of ’ and he was very fearful of being arrested if he went to England.8
On 30 December 1936, Sinclair, taking a Christmas holiday trip across the Atlantic, inspected the New York office himself. The books and card index, he reported, ‘were well kept and up to date’, but the office, ‘though clean, presents a somewhat dingy appearance, owing to the furniture and fittings being completely worn out, having been in use for over twenty years’. He immediately ordered Taylor to arrange ‘the complete refurnishing of the office’ and interviewed the four members of staff ‘most of whom are elderly married men [who] appeared rather down at heel’. Having satisfied himself that, ‘owing to the extremely high cost of living in New York, they had not really enough to live on’, and in a gesture that showed why his staff liked him so, he ordered supplementary payments to be made to them out of the secret service ‘Other Moneys’.
Generally the British and United States authorities co-operated well, particularly concerning the Bolshevik target, and their intelligence representatives in the Baltic states pooled reports. Between the wars, however, US-UK intelligence liaison was principally handled through the United States embassy in London, originally with Basil Thomson and Scotland Yard and more latterly with MI5. In October 1937, observing that the British had ‘for some time been seriously worried by the development of German Nazi and Italian Fascist organisations within the British Empire’, Guy Liddell (writing from MI5 on behalf of Vernon Kell) proposed to N. D. Borum at the United States embassy that ‘the official exchange of information that has operated between us so successfully over a period of eighteen years on Comintern affairs’ should be extended to cover German and Italian matters. Washington was not keen, distinguishing between the activities of the Comintern, with which the Soviet government had consistently denied any link, and those of German Nazi and Italian Fascist political organisations which were ‘admittedly connected with the political parties controlling the governments of Germany and Italy respectively’. Reflecting that this position was not in practice utterly inflexible, the State Department official John Hickerson nevertheless allowed ‘the possibility of exchanges of information in specific instances where such exchanges appear to be mutually appropriate and advantageous’.9
But Liddell wanted something more formal, to build on MI5’s success in helping the FBI round up an important German spy ring operating in the USA which had been communicating with Germany through a Mrs Jessie Jordan in Perth, Scotland.10 In the spring of 1938 he visited the USA and determined that both the military authorities and the FBI were ‘more than anxious to establish a liaison with us, which could cover