The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
entirely undeclared to Curzon, and was sometimes backing the Greeks in treaty negotiations against his own foreign secretary. Curzon was an emotional individual, and knowledge of the ‘dirty’ activities of his friends and allies stirred apoplectic outbursts. In 1922, meeting with the French prime minister Raymond Poincaré, Curzon had to be led weeping from the room, and refused to return until Poincaré apologised for his behaviour.86
Curzon deliberately kept much intelligence away from Downing Street. Things were made worse by the lack of a system for synthesising intelligence material and presenting it to leaders in a way that would allow it to inform strategy. Instead, attention often focused on single documents. This was typified by the impact of intelligence on talks about the future of Britain’s alliance with Japan during the early 1920s, a decision that would cast a long shadow. Intelligence focused less on Japan’s intentions and capabilities than on plots and nefarious activities: Lloyd George told cabinet that other friendly powers did things that were ‘infinitely worse’ than the Japanese secret service. Curzon argued for a renewal of the alliance, despite the fact that he considered the Japanese ‘insidious and unscrupulous’. Churchill opposed a continued alliance with Tokyo, and to back up his argument showed his cabinet colleagues a secret Japanese map of Gibraltar that had come into the hands of MI5. Intelligence was often about alarms and incidents, and rarely informed national assessments.87
Meanwhile, the Irish problem had been rumbling on. The Easter Rising and the First World War were swiftly followed by the Irish War of Independence in 1919. Peace negotiations began in 1921, culminating in the formation of the Irish Free State the following year. This time Lloyd George lacked signals intelligence, but he did draw upon other forms of intelligence to aid the British position. Unfortunately, the material reaching him and his ministers came from military intelligence officers who opposed the truce. Consequently, they offered biased worst-case scenarios in which Sinn Féin and especially the IRA intended to play for time before resuming their offensive, including ‘fantastical reports’ of chemical weapons. Fortunately for the peace process, a more confident outlook emanated from the civilian authorities in Dublin, and the ‘two opposing interpretations of the Irish situation battled it out from July to December 1921’. Lloyd George fell into the optimistic camp, and was determined to reach peace, but the alarmist intelligence came perilously close to collapsing the negotiations altogether. By early December, the prime minister had had enough. He issued a dramatic ultimatum: accept the peace or resume war in three days. This was a gamble. Contradictory and inaccurate intelligence meant that he had no idea whether Sinn Féin would accept – and Britain was in no position to resume war so soon. However, the starkly pessimistic intelligence coming out of Ireland offered enough warning about IRA rearmament to convince Lloyd George to set a strict deadline. The negotiations hung in the balance, and there was ‘palpable relief’ when the Irish signed the deal.88
Prime ministers must celebrate when they can; success is often short-lived. In May 1922, Lloyd George was livid when he was shown the new Irish government’s draft constitution, despairing that it represented ‘a complete evasion of the treaty’ he had gambled on securing. Intelligence uncovered numerous plots, some more real than others, against Northern Ireland and the British mainland, in which the Dublin government was complicit. Frustrated, Lloyd George feared that the Irish ‘may have to face re-conquest’. When IRA men assassinated Field Marshal Henry Wilson in London the following month, the government found itself under pressure to wipe out the IRA headquarters in Dublin. A single piece of intelligence wrongly linked the murder to a Dublin conspiracy, and an attack on the IRA headquarters by British troops would have wrecked Britain’s Irish policy ‘at one stroke’. Nevertheless, led by Churchill, the cabinet approved the strike. Once more, Churchill failed to appreciate the nuances of raw intelligence and exhibited his famous impetuousness. All this frustrated the prime minister, but fortunately for Lloyd George and his Ireland policy, the army refused to obey the order.89 This marked Lloyd George’s final dealings with the Ireland problem, but Churchill would have to return to it during the Second World War. More ominously, it was merely a taste of the troubles to come for future prime ministers, from Harold Wilson onwards.
Bonar Law, who replaced Lloyd George in 1922, was the shortest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century, spending only 211 days in office. He died of a throat tumour shortly afterwards, and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. During the funeral, Asquith described him as ‘the unknown prime minister’. Hankey noted in his diary: ‘Poor Bonar never had the nerve for the job of prime minister. The responsibility preyed on his mind and, I feel sure, hastened on his cancer.’ Turning to Bonar Law’s successor, he added, quite correctly, ‘Baldwin has the nerve but scant capacity and I fear will not last long.’ Stanley Baldwin’s first term in office indeed lasted only eight months, and he stepped down in January 1924. Alongside these figures, Lloyd George appeared a political giant, and it was under him that British intelligence took its most adventurous step forward.90
A connected British intelligence community was not created in 1909, but it had already begun to centralise and professionalise. Indeed, it has been suggested that Asquith’s government changed the very meaning of the word ‘intelligence’. At the turn of the century, intelligence was something that existed in the far-flung service of empire, and meant information of almost any kind, so long as it impacted upon policy or made colonial rule more efficient. Much of it was supplied by an army of enterprising amateurs serving on ‘special duties’, supplemented by eccentrics who divided their time between collecting rare beetles or tulip bulbs and sketching Turkish fortifications. By 1918, intelligence was about secret work, and incorporated a strong emphasis on counter-intelligence. Most importantly, it had also become increasingly militarised, and had embraced the science of codebreaking. Room 40 had produced astonishing intelligence in just four years, but as yet no one knew how to interpret it or to use it securely.91
Lloyd George, perhaps assisted by the wise counsel of Maurice Hankey, had begun to learn his trade. In contrast to his early years as prime minister, by 1920 he knew that context was everything in interpreting decrypts. Accordingly, Lenin’s hot language had not alarmed him. He also came to understand that access to decrypts was acquired with difficulty, and given away easily – a lesson quickly forgotten in Number 10. Therefore, although he eventually discussed codebreaking in his memoirs, he said no more than had already appeared in the public domain, and worked closely with Hankey on the agreed text.92
By contrast, his cabinet colleagues performed poorly – even those with more intelligence experience. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary between 1919 and 1924, should have been a master of intelligence, having presided over a sophisticated espionage system in his previous existence as viceroy of India. Yet personal insults from the French, revealed in all their glory by intercepts, literally drove him to tears of rage. Churchill’s performance was even worse, and despite boundless enthusiasm for intelligence he was impulsive in its use. Moreover, when he rushed out his own history of the First World War in 1923, he made many references to British codebreaking capabilities. The Germans were soon avidly reading his account, and it is no coincidence that shortly afterwards they began to take an interest in a new and effective cipher machine called Enigma. In the mid-1920s, however, Germany had not yet resurfaced as a problem. The First World War was over, and a young man named Adolf Hitler had only recently established a nascent Nazi Party. Instead, it was the Russians who attracted the attention of Britain’s secret service. An early cold war of subversion and subterfuge was emerging, in which incoming prime ministers would need to use intelligence subtly and wisely. Inexperienced in handling the secret world and lacking an integrated intelligence assessment community, this may have been asking too much.
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Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald (1923–1937)
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