The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [154]
SIS was keen, also, to improve 48000’s position, as he had hitherto ‘never had a really good working arrangement with the U.S. authorities’. But, as Vivian explained to his colleagues in London, Liddell’s own contacts had been ‘based on the assumption that Great Britain has clean hands, so far as the U.S.A. is concerned, and that we indulge in no espionage activities whatever in the U.S.A., which, if discovered, would undoubtedly destroy mutual confidence and put an end to such liaison’. Before proceeding (and naming 48000 - by now Sir James Paget - as the primary link with the United States authorities), Liddell wanted SIS ‘to make a frank avowal of the Rutland business’, which had preoccupied both SIS and MI5 for some time. Since 1933 it had been known that Frederick Joseph Rutland, a former RAF officer and expert in naval aviation, had been working as a spy for the Japanese. Although he had been based in the USA and was working against American aviation targets, no word of this had been breathed to the Americans. 12
The Rutland case was one thing, but what Liddell did not know was that SIS was currently ‘actually engaged in air and naval espionage against the U.S.A.’. When Vivian told him this, it appears to have shocked him rigid (Liddell, Vivian noted with considerable understatement, ‘was definitely not happy’). It clearly jeopardised his existing contacts and also made it ‘quite impossible for him to sponsor 48000 as the local representative of British-American Intelligence liaison in the United States’. For SIS, therefore, as Vivian put it to his colleagues in May 1938, ‘it is for us to consider whether our Air and Naval work against the U.S.A. is of sufficient importance to maintain against the potential advantages of a satisfactory liaison’. The issue went round to the various sections in Head Office, who (though in some cases slightly grudgingly) agreed that active espionage in the USA might be stopped. The Air Section, for example, reported the Air Ministry’s opinion that collaboration had improved recently and the United States air attaché had been ‘considerably more open’. As a result, they considered that they could obtain through the attaché ‘any information which we should otherwise have got’. They additionally expressed the hope that the enhanced MI5 liaison on counter-intelligence matters might desirably develop into ‘collaboration with the Americans in obtaining information on Germany and Japan’.
With assurances from all the sections that, in effect, it was more productive to be friends with the United States than continue to treat it as an intelligence target, on 7 June 1938 Sinclair ordered that ‘work against America is to cease as soon as possible’. ‘We hope’, wrote Vivian to Liddell, ‘that this will finally clear the way for a valuable liaison, which will not stop at the exchange of information regarding international subversive movements, but will expand into a solid Anglo-American liaison on the German and Japanese activities which threaten the interests of both countries equally.’ In fact matters moved rather slowly thereafter. During 1939 Paget began making direct contacts with the FBI and both the Army and Navy Departments, but as the international situation deteriorated, and especially after the outbreak of war on 3 September, the State Department became, as Liddell put it, ‘anxious to bottleneck everything and not to let the soldiers and policemen get loose on their own’. Accordingly, ‘in view of the delicate political situation’, Paget was ordered to restrict his contacts to the State Department.