The Secret History of MI6 - Keith Jeffery [67]
This was over-optimistic. Russian revolutionary forces were being strengthened, as confirmed by reports circulated through MI1(c). In April a cable reported that the principal figure at a series of émigré meetings in New York had been ‘Leon Trotzki’, a ‘pretended Russian socialist who, it is believed, is in reality a German’ (here ‘No’ was written in the margin). He was reported as advocating the overthrow of the new government in Russia and ‘the starting of revolutions in England and Germany’. Trotsky ‘and various other socialists’ had left New York for Russia on 27 March. Trotsky was interned at Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a month, apparently on orders from the Naval Intelligence Division in London, but was allowed to proceed early in May.13 At almost exactly the same time agent ‘SW5’ reported from Berne that ‘40 Russian revolutionaries, fanatical followers of Lenin, including Lenin himself, [had] left for Russia via Germany’ – this was the famous ‘sealed train’ which conveyed the Bolshevik leader to Petrograd. Permission to travel had been granted by the German government only after receiving Lenin’s personal guarantee ‘that every one of his 40 followers’ favoured ‘an immediate peace’. SW5 argued, however, that the members of Lenin’s party were ‘in the minority among the Russians in Switzerland’, and that their beliefs were ‘held to be of a fanatical and narrow-minded nature. My own view is that these people would be absolutely harmless if, which unfortunately is not the case, other Russians had been allowed to return.’ He considered it ‘highly expedient’ that visas should immediately be given to ‘followers of the patriotic Russian revolutionary movement to visit Russia via France and England’. It must, he declared, ‘at all costs be avoided’ that Lenin’s group ‘be allowed to represent the opinions of those Russians living in Switzerland, who on account of their so-called martyrdom and exile have attained a certain prestige in this country’. They had, he added, been sought out by enemy spies ‘to play the game of Germany’.
Neither Lenin nor Trotsky was a German agent, and they ‘played the game of Germany’ only in so far as they wished to take Russia out of what they thought was a costly and unnecessary war. As Russia staggered from political crisis to political crisis during 1917, and disaffection began to spread through its armed forces, the Allied governments (joined by the United States when it declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917) strove to keep Russia in the war. One part of this effort involved an intelligence operation initiated by Cumming’s representative in the United States, Sir William Wiseman.
Secret service in the USA
There is very little evidence indeed about the early work of the Secret Service Bureau in the United States. Before the war British intelligence activities in North America had been confined to sporadic operations run by the Home Office, the Irish Office and the India Office, targeting Irish and Indian revolutionaries based in emigrant communities across the country.14 The first mention of United States work in Cumming’s diary was in March 1915 when he interviewed an agent to ‘act as N.Y. correspondent’. In July a ‘new agent’ was despatched to New York, and a note about the processing of telegrams sent from America, which mentioned a well-known firm of United States bankers and information of interest to the Director of Army Contracts, suggests that the main priority was blockade and commercial intelligence. Supporting