The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [330]
Valentine Vivian was not happy about Syers, who was, he said, among a number of SIS officers who were ‘so far Left as to be scarcely distinguishable from Communists’. Although, having looked at Syers’s file, he found no evidence to support his contention, in November 1944 he nevertheless asked Roger Hollis of MI5 to look into Syers’s background. Towards the end of the year, Syers announced his intention to marry an SIS secretary, who had worked most recently at Bari. When Rex Howard checked up on her, he discovered that she was a niece by marriage of Maxim Litvinov, the prewar Soviet Foreign Minister, a fact which, curiously, did not appear on her file. Vivian then raised the matter with Kim Philby, who also wrote to Hollis. Hollis replied in January 1945 that MI5 had no record of her and ‘nothing of great relevance’ on Syers. Two months later, however, Hollis reported that they had evidence that connected Syers to ‘a certain Communist in the Army Education Corps named Hobsbawm, who was before the war an undergraduate at Cambridge’ (and who subsequently became a very distinguished historian). When Vivian passed Hollis’s letter on to Philby, saying ‘I don’t much like the look of this,’ Philby rallied to Syers’s defence, though in terms which seem remarkable, given the benefit of hindsight and his own role as a Soviet agent in SIS:
Syers seems to be remarkably unfortunate in his choice of friends! I have had several conversations with him recently and he has consistently reiterated his intention of taking up journalism at the earliest possible opportunity. It would seem, therefore, his connections with Communists are less sinister than might be supposed, since it is hardly conceivable that the C.P.G.B. [Communist Party of Great Britain], or any Soviet organisation, would dream of letting him leave S.I.S. once he had got his foot well inside it. Moreover, he makes little attempt to conceal his interest in Marxism and Marxists - an attitude which is hardly consistent with sinister designs.
In July Philby still professed that he was at a loss to know what to advise about Syers and suggested pressing Hollis for more information. This time Hollis was more forthright, noting further contacts between Syers and Eric Hobsbawm and at least one other ‘leading Party member’. He advised that Syers and other similar left-leaning officers in SIS should be allowed to ‘return to journalism or whatever work they wish to follow as soon as this can be done’. So it was to be. Syers, the suspected Communist sympathiser, left to work for the Liberal-leaning News Chronicle, while Philby, the unsuspected Soviet spy, stayed on.
Dealing with the Soviets and penetrating the Balkans
SIS’s relations with the Soviet Union during the Second World War were extremely problematic. The USSR and its global ambitions, having been a major target for SIS since the revolutionary years, remained so for the period from the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 until Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But, all of a sudden, the USSR became an ally, and a British mission was sent to Moscow to underpin good inter-Allied relations, facilitate support for the Soviet war effort and, it was hoped, encourage the exchange of (among other things) information which might be of mutual benefit. Right at the start, too, it was also seen as an intelligence opportunity. In July 1941 Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, wrote to Menzies about the possibility of embedding intelligence officers in Moscow who could work on acquiring information about the Soviet navy. It was, he declared, a ‘golden opportunity to obtain that intelligence regarding the U.S.S.R. which we have lacked for so long’. But there were worries in Broadway that any