The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [163]
Jonny’s first report (delivered in March 1933) was a twenty-eight-page description of ‘Communist disintegration work among H.M. [His Majesty’s] Forces’, which Sinclair (after checking corroborative details with MI5) judged to be ‘genuine and of the utmost value’. Communication with Jonny was problematic. SIS had no way of contacting him and, after Vivian had provided him with a ‘dead letterbox’ address, it was left that he could meet his SIS handlers only (as Vivian recalled) ‘if he was able to give us an address where he could meet him in comparative safety’. In March 1933 Nazi pressure forced Jonny out of Germany and Foley had to meet him in Prague. Three months later Jonny was sent under business cover as a ‘soybean merchant’ to review a clandestine Soviet mission in Manchuria (then occupied by the Japanese and known as Manchukuo). On his return to Europe in December he was debriefed by Vivian in Copenhagen over a period of several days. Jonny’s next Comintern assignment was to Shanghai in February-July 1934 to revive their Far East organisation, which had been disrupted in the wake of Hilaire Noulens’s arrest. There he was handled by Harry Steptoe, who transmitted reports back to London on the weakness of the Comintern presence in China and stating, reassuringly, that the subversive threat to British forces stationed in Shanghai was negligible, a conclusion the War Office described as ‘quite interesting’. A later report from Jonny after his return from Shanghai in autumn 1934 stressed that the connection between Comintern activities and Soviet foreign policy was so close that it was impossible to imagine them apart from one another.
The main value of Jonny’s reporting, however, lay not so much in the political aspects of Comintern activity as in what Vivian called the ‘technical aspects’: the aliases, passport details, physical descriptions and travel plans of other Comintern agents that Jonny met, about which Vivian commented extensively. In this respect the damage done to the Comintern by Jonny was considerable, and he was right to be mindful of his own security and to remind SIS, as he did, of evidence of Communist penetration of Scotland Yard.20 What was Jonny’s motivation? Although financial considerations remained important, by late 1934 Vivian thought there were additional personal factors. Foley, for example, was able to help with the welfare of his wife while Jonny was away. What is clear is that Jonny was brilliantly exploited and handled by Foley, Vivian and even the much maligned Steptoe.
The most dramatic part of the Jonny case was the role he played in disrupting a planned Communist revolution in South America. Briefed in Paris in November 1934, Vivian learned that Jonny was being sent to Brazil. With special operations and explosives training, his task was to assist a Comintern operation in support of Luís Carlos Prestes’s revolutionary movement which aimed to topple the right-wing government of President Getúlio Vargas, who had seized power in 1930. There was no SIS station in Brazil, and thus no one to handle Jonny, or to provide communications, or to deal with the embassy in a situation which might develop disastrously for British interests - at a time, moreover, when the United Kingdom had very substantial investments there. Vivian, therefore, with a warm recommendation provided by Vansittart at the Foreign Office to the ambassador, Sir William Seeds, went out himself to make the appropriate arrangements. By the time he arrived in Rio de Janeiro on 11 February 1935, Vivian had an address for Jonny but no rendezvous. In his version of the story he found the house and rang the doorbell: ‘a negro servant opened the door, screamed and shut it in my face’. Vivian rang again, but there was no answer, so he went round the side and found an open, though high, window. ‘As I scrambled in and fell down the other side, an enormous arm protruded from a curtain levelling a 500 automatic Colt [sic] at me.’ The arm belonged