The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
no interest in peace initiatives at this point. Either way, diplomacy was not Lloyd George’s responsibility. When rebuked by the foreign secretary for meddling, he used the decrypts to defend himself. Far worse, he also alluded to secret information when explaining his actions in Parliament. Even as he assumed office in Downing Street in December 1916, more decrypts crossed his desk which he wrongly – and amateurishly – assumed suggested that the Kaiser and Wilson were still working together. This was not an auspicious beginning, and pointed to a wider failure around the assessment of intelligence at the centre of government.60
Lloyd George brought his undoubted talents for planning and organisation to the highest level of government. The most important part of this reform was the creation of a professional secretariat by Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marine officer who became the first cabinet secretary. His background was in intelligence – as a junior officer assigned to HMS Ramillies, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, he had engaged in unofficial reconnaissance. By 1902, he had joined the staff of the Naval Intelligence Department in Whitehall. An outstanding officer who spoke many languages, he was the perfect administrator. In 1909, he had written a report for the Committee of Imperial Defence that proposed a Secret Service Bureau.61 Now, in the newly created Cabinet Office, he was joined by Thomas Jones. Once described as ‘a disguised Bolshevik whom Lloyd George had discovered somewhere in a Welsh coal pit’, Jones was nevertheless an equally formidable organiser. It is difficult to capture the chaos that surrounded cabinet affairs before their arrival, and it is no exaggeration to say that they invented modern cabinet government.62
Hankey’s reforms were a triumph. They became central to the development of a modern British interdepartmental coordination system, with its labyrinthine sub-committees and orderly minutes focused on Downing Street. Cabinet meetings were no longer rambling conversations amongst twenty-three people, with no agenda. Instead, they became businesslike discussions at which decisions were made and properly recorded. Yet the reforms were a tragedy for secret service. Hankey created a central mechanism for everything except intelligence. Jones, his deputy, recalled that he had been insistent that the new Cabinet Secretariat should not become ‘an Intelligence department’,63 and although the design of the war cabinet at first envisaged ‘a comprehensive and regular gathering of intelligence’, this never happened.64 The lack of a central clearing house for assessing intelligence had been a constant criticism of government for some time, so while Hankey is celebrated as a moderniser of the government machine, he simultaneously retarded the British intelligence community by twenty years. The idea of a central intelligence machine located alongside Downing Street had to await a further world war, and the arrival of Winston Churchill as premier.65
Lloyd George’s personal record as a user of decrypts did not improve during the war. He was often left to deduce the story from individual intercepts, or ‘flimsies’ as they were called, because of the thin paper on which they were recorded, that arrived without context or comment. He was also given little guidance on the need for security. Thus in February 1917, when the American ambassador, Walter Page, visited Downing Street to convey a message from President Wilson, the prime minister could not restrain himself. He boasted that he had already seen Wilson’s message, attributing this to a leak. Page thought it possible that the telegram had been obtained by a ‘British spy service’ from an unreliable American official. In any case, knowing Wilson’s hatred of leaks, he did not inform Washington. Indeed, the president was obsessively secretive, and actually insisted on deciphering his more sensitive telegrams himself, sometimes with the help of his wife. The realisation that Lloyd George was reading his every word would not have endeared London to him.66
Surprisingly, even as Lloyd George put their work in peril, British codebreakers delivered the greatest intelligence coup of the First World War. They had intercepted what would soon become famous as the ‘Zimmermann telegram’. In this amazing message, Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, promised Mexico the reward of three of America’s southern states if she joined the German cause and declared war on her northern neighbour, the US. The message was one of the most secret of the war, and was supposed to have been taken by safe hand on a German submarine. But the vessel broke down before leaving port, forcing Berlin to trust the safety of its ciphers.
The Zimmermann telegram is a rare example of a single piece of intelligence changing the course of history. The way in which the British exposed it was elegant, but had nothing to do with Downing Street. Instead, it was a cooperative venture between Room 40 and the Foreign Office – and perhaps for that reason it was not bungled. Lloyd George, doubtless kept abreast given his strong interest in American orientations, was a mere observer. President Woodrow Wilson had won his recent election campaign on the slogan ‘He kept us out of war’. But, provoked by the Zimmermann telegram, alongside Berlin’s aggressive submarine policy, he declared war on Germany in April 1917.67 In his memoirs, Lloyd George records his gratitude to the codebreakers of Room 40 and their ‘uncanny efficiency in the unearthing of German secrets’.68
By the end of the war everyone seemed to be aware of the British secret service. The famous German philosopher Hannah Arendt, for example, was fascinated by the rise of Britain’s professional spies. She wrote that after the First World War, British secret services ‘began to attract England’s best sons, who preferred serving mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of their country’, adding that as a result ‘the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors’. However, she noted that with the British, unlike the Russians and Germans, ‘a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded’.69 Bertolt Brecht wrote that Britain controlled detective fiction and also controlled the world, clearly feeling that these two things were connected in some subterranean way.70
Room 40 was created as a wartime emergency. Nevertheless, its product proved too valuable for it to disband once the guns fell silent, and in peacetime Britain continued to read the secret communications of many countries. As the armistice talks opened in France, President Wilson sent his trusted confidant Colonel Edward House to join the negotiations. Lloyd George was able to read everything sent between House and Wilson. Yet strangely he had not been bitten by the intelligence bug, and useful as he found it, was not an enthusiast. Intelligence spending dwindled dramatically after the war, and the prime minister was happy to leave the reorganisation of peacetime intelligence matters to his cabinet colleagues. Accordingly, although Lloyd George established a governmental committee to review secret service in 1919, he did not join it. Instead, Churchill, an avid intelligence enthusiast, was the leading light in this important reordering.71 Its most important decision would be to maintain the wartime codebreaking effort and focus all resources in one unit: the Government Code and Cypher School, or GC&CS.72
Nonetheless, in February 1920, Lloyd George was required to revisit intelligence matters. He sought to end the festering conflict with the Bolsheviks, viewing Britain’s support for the White Russians as an unhappy extension of the First World War, and therefore a chapter that should now be closed. Although reluctant to offer recognition to the revolutionaries, the prime minister offered Moscow trade agreements as a path to restoring relations. His cabinet colleagues Churchill and Curzon were horrified, not least because of mounting evidence of Bolshevik subversion against the British Empire. Indeed, although there was clear evidence of Soviet funds going directly to the increasingly communist-dominated Labour Research Department during the early 1920s, it was Moscow’s interference in areas such as India that really got the British cabinet excited.73 MI6 had been active in this clandestine conflict too, and many military intelligence officers who had been heavily involved in the Russian Civil War were also dismayed.