The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
dealing with terrorist threats. They knew full well that there would be serious recriminations if they did nothing and the prime minister was assassinated. The police did not remove the protesters from outside Parliament, but increased the number of officers there instead. They did not wish to give prominence to the idea of assassination, fearing that publicity might ‘act on the minds of these half-insane women, and might suggest effectively the commission of the very act which we wish to prevent’. Moreover, the removal of the pickets would be looked on by the women as an act of violence and injustice, and would ‘make them furious and more ready to commit such a crime’. In addition, the government thought that if there was an assassin, it would be easier to stop her if police knew she would be amongst the picketers, rather than walking ‘up and down between the House of Parliament and Downing Street at the hour when the P.M. may be expected to drive down’. Thanks to Mrs Moore, the prime minister remained able to pass in and out of Parliament unscathed.32 Recent research shows that the suffragettes included some notably dangerous groups, who fire-bombed churches and later sent a letter-bomb to Lloyd George. Some of the more violent women would go on to become active supporters of the extreme right, including Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts.33 Yet, remarkably, Asquith and all his successors through to the Second World War remained largely unprotected.
It was an act of assassination that finally triggered the outbreak of war in August 1914. Intelligence now had a more crucial – and real – role to play. The new secret services quickly pounced upon the small German espionage network in London, and rounded up all twenty-two known agents. The authorities had been assiduously following this spy ring, run from a barber shop in London by a naturalised German, since 1911. In an early intelligence success story, close monitoring had prevented the ring from passing useful information on to Berlin. Several hundred people were placed under surveillance. Predictably, the biggest problem was public paranoia. In the first two weeks of the war, the Metropolitan Police were forced to investigate thousands of people, with little to show for it. The newspapers followed this eagerly, and noted with satisfaction that by the end of November 1914 there had been over 100,000 reports of espionage, with 6,000 homes entered and searched.
Popular enthusiasm for war, combined with paranoia about spies, forced the Asquith government to look tough. Eleven German spies were shot at the Tower of London, a location chosen for its sinister appearance and reputation. More people were executed there during the First World War than under the Tudors. The amateurish German spies were not difficult to capture. They used lemon juice and peppermint oil instead of ink to render their reports to Berlin invisible, but were often arrested in possession of pen nibs corroded by the acidic lemon juice.34 Such tales allowed le Queux to continue to pump out his pulp-fiction spy thrillers. He maintained his phoney reputation as a spymaster to the end, and even now some of his relatives insist that he was assassinated by Russian agents in 1927.35
No one was safe from the paranoid public. Not even Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect and designer, who dared to sketch in the Suffolk village of Walberswick, close to the sea; or the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sat down with a notebook to write ‘The Lark Ascending’ on cliffs near Margate. Both attracted vigorous police attention. Any Continental connection became a form of contagion. A Polish girl, who was a friend of the Asquith family, was fired from her teaching job simply out of fear that she might be mistaken for a German spy.36 The Asquith government stepped up internment, rounding up some 60,000 Germans living in Britain.37 Under popular pressure, and perhaps against his better judgement, the prime minister personally emphasised that all non-naturalised adult males ‘should, for their own safety, and that of the community, be segregated and interned, or, if over military age, repatriated’.38
The First World War triggered Britain’s tangible intelligence changes. MI5 had only fifteen staff prior to the conflict, but it soon expanded. The Post Office also assumed an intelligence function. It grew into a Censor’s Office that employed over 2,000 officials, each steaming, scanning and resealing some 150 letters per day. Britain now boasted a serious domestic surveillance apparatus.39 By the last year of the war, censorship employed 4,871 people, a sizeable engine of surveillance.40 In the empire, MI5 worked closely with security agencies in Delhi to thwart German plots to promote revolts amongst imperial subjects. With good intelligence to hand, Asquith’s government allowed the German Foreign Ministry to continue its ludicrously ambitious plans to promote insurrection on the subcontinent, content that they were unlikely to succeed.41
Overseas, MI6 remained weak. The majority of important international intelligence instead came from a revival of codebreaking. For at least a decade before 1914, the War Office had plans to recreate a codebreaking centre if a military crisis occurred, and both the army and navy did so independently in August 1914. Although they initially cooperated, differences developed in both personality and approach, rendering any harmony short-lived. Nonetheless, they still managed to break German, French and American codes, alongside a host of other streams of high-level communications. Starting from scratch in 1914, this was an amazing feat. The Admiralty’s famous codebreaking unit, codenamed ‘Room 40’, was the more effective; directed by Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, it pioneered many of the scientific methods used by Bletchley Park two decades later.42
The First World War may have transformed British intelligence collection, but Asquith still took little interest. The prime minister was in fact deeply uninterested in war, strategy or intelligence, although he found time for bridge, lavish dinner parties and country weekends. He was not lacking in energy or application, but his focus was elsewhere, not least on his mistress Venetia Stanley, more than thirty years his junior. Asquith wrote to her over five hundred times during his period as war leader, sometimes as often as three times a day. The qualities that had made him a good peacetime prime minister were unhelpful in wartime. He was an affable chairman of the board, able to reconcile differences of opinion and find compromises. But he failed to appreciate the value of some of his partners in the wartime Liberal–Conservative coalition, and above all he failed to take hard decisions that were required for the vigorous prosecution of the war. He offered little guidance and support to the military, which was then led by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener.43
Intelligence proved important in the context of Ireland. Again, however, Asquith seemed broadly unaware of troubling developments, and instead engaged intermittently with particular incidents. The British had failed to properly penetrate the dissident movement, so human sources inside Ireland were few, and their reports fragmented and contradictory.44 Consequently, little warning of the 1916 Easter Rising came through these channels. Room 40 provided more solid intelligence. Decrypted secret German cables from America gave important intelligence on the international activities of Irish nationalists, including details relating to the Rising, during which Berlin assisted the exiled Irish nationalist Roger Casement in fomenting rebellion. Casement’s dealings were not news to the prime minister. Although the flow of intelligence to Downing Street was patchy, Asquith had enjoyed a stream of incriminating material on Casement.45 What appeared to be an intelligence bonanza turned out to have come from an untrustworthy source, Casement’s bisexual manservant and lover, who was ‘a liar, a blackmailer and a fantasist’. When Casement found out about his betrayal he publicly (but falsely) alleged a British plot to murder him. Although the incident embarrassed Asquith’s government, it was enough for MI5 to open a file on Casement and unearth more details of his nationalist scheming – and ultimately his German connections.46
Room 40 intercepted more than thirty cables dealing with German assistance to Ireland during the first two years of the war.