Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines
days earlier. The Home Office issued postal warrants for Slocombe’s private and business addresses. They found that Ewer sent him about £210 a month, of which one-third was spent on bribes to obtain copies of secret documents from the Quai d’Orsay or embassies in Paris. The trusting fealty between Ewer and Slocombe was helped by juvenile matiness. They disdained upper-case typing in their unsigned missives, in which the keynotes were bluff irreverence and Jew-baiting.
In November 1925 Slocombe became infuriated by the Bolshevik – whom he codenamed ‘flivverman’ – who had arrived in Paris to run him. ‘He’s a thin-lipped hebrew who despises politics of which d’ailleurs [anyway] he’s supremely ignorant and is interested only in originals of whatever value,’ Slocombe told Ewer. Flivverman had conveyed Moscow’s dissatisfaction that Ewer’s network seldom obtained original diplomatic documents. ‘He despises the London food service as too costly thinks you are all a lot of reckless spendthrifts is sceptical of your efficiency, and is generally jewish, but without the hebrew wit.’ Ewer replied on 20 November that he had seen ‘the chauffeur’ (his controller at Chesham House): ‘He’s damned angry with the yiddisher brat whom I think he does not love.’ Slocombe added a covering note with the batch sent on 26 November: ‘Yid improves slightly on acquaintance but … entirely preoccupied with first editions regardless of value. hope however to train him. our personal relations cordial enough. inferiority complex characteristic of his race responsible i think for his preliminary rudeness.’27
Moscow sent almost £1.25 million to fund the miners’ strike of 1926, which developed into the General Strike. The consequent industrial disruption and civil strife, ample proof of Soviet-inspired subversion within the British Empire and Moscow’s support of Chinese communist revolutionaries against British control in Shanghai determined the Conservative government to break off diplomatic relations with Moscow. In January 1927 an ARCOS employee named Edward Langston informed Herbert (‘Bertie’) Maw of SIS that he had been instructed to photocopy a secret Signals Training manual obtained from Aldershot barracks. This information was passed to MI5, where Kell and Harker spent weeks checking its authenticity, interviewing the informant and consulting an ARCOS accountant who was a reliable SIS source in ARCOS. The Home Secretary, Sir William Joynson-Hicks, was an impulsive populist well described by his parliamentary colleague Cuthbert Headlam as ‘a miserable creature – a shop-walker attempting to pose as a strong man’. When the situation was explained to him (as the result of an intervention of the Secretary of State for War, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans), Joynson-Hicks initiated a raid on the ARCOS offices, with the intention of finding evidence for a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.28
Compton Mackenzie, who had worked for SIS in Greece during the war and wrote an insultingly farcical novel Water on the Brain (1933) about Sir Mansfield Cumming’s regime, commented on the ARCOS raid: ‘anti-Russian propaganda was being worked up solely with the object of persuading the country not to vote for the Labour Party at the next election; but the Russian government, less aware than ourselves of the unscrupulousness concealed by the pleasant masks of party politics in Great Britain, might be forgiven for supposing that the mind of the country was being prepared for a declaration of war against the U.S.S.R.’. Mackenzie exaggerated by using the word ‘solely’, but his phrases expressed a widespread and justified suspicion of the motives of Joynson-Hicks, Worthington-Evans and other ministers in Baldwin’s Cabinet.29
Ginhoven and Jane were unable to warn the FPA of the impending raid, because Special Branch received misdirection, when they were deployed, that the target of the swoop was contraband in the London docks. The raid, on 12 May 1927, was hastily prepared and ill-executed. Desmond Morton was one of the SIS officers who participated in the descent on 49 Moorgate: his biographer Gill Bennett depicts uniformed City of London constables, Special Branch men and SIS officers hurtling around in strenuous, uncoordinated activity. One squirted ink on to a portrait of Lenin’s face hanging on the office wall. No one took charge; almost no one knew the extent of their legal powers to seize materials or detain individuals; few searchers knew what documents to seek. The seized items proved ‘inconclusive and confusing’, once they had been translated, Bennett reports. The stolen Signals Training manual, which it was the primary object of the raid to retrieve, was not found.30
‘An immense quantity of police descended on the place, searched the inmates, impounded documents, and for 48 hours have been occupied in smashing up concrete walls in order to break open concealed safes,’ noted Lord Crawford. ‘Secret hiding-places existed all over the building – behind panelling, under floors, in thicknesses of walls; and the place has been throbbing with pneumatic road-breakers, and with expert safe-breakers working acetylene gases.’ The rupture of diplomatic relations with Russia, which was the sequel to the raid, made the ‘Clear out the Reds’ section of the Conservative party rejoice. ‘At last we have got rid of the Bolsheviks,’ a Cabinet minister Lord Birkenhead rejoiced. ‘We have got rid of the hypocrisy of pretending to have friendly relations with this Jewish gang of murderers, revolutionaries and thieves. I breathe quite differently now that we have purged our capital of these unclean and treacherous elements.’ Birkenhead’s cooler-headed colleague Neville Chamberlain considered the raid ‘farcical’.31
The raid was a blunder, which breached with disastrous results the intelligence principle of watch and learn. Having failed to find any clinching proof of espionage, subversion or schemes of sabotage, the government, which was set on severing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, had to justify its decision by producing, instead of the incriminating documents expected from the ARCOS raid, communications between the Soviet Mission at Chesham House and Moscow, which had been secretly intercepted by GC&CS. This proved to be a grievous error. As Gill Bennett has summarized the position, ‘The production in Parliament and publication of these documents for all to see in a Command Paper, revealed their source beyond question, leading to the immediate abandonment by the Soviet Foreign Ministry of its methods of encipherment in favour of unbreakable one-time pad systems for its communications; thereafter no high-grade Soviet diplomatic messages could be read by the British authorities.’
Admiral Sinclair, the head of both SIS and GC&CS, deplored this heedless political irresponsibility. ‘The publication of these telegrams automatically stops their source of supply,’ he wrote. ‘It was authorized only as a measure of desperation to bolster up a cause vital to Government, which had the facts been fully known at the time, needed no such costly support.’ Both SIS and MI5 had been watching and learning from ARCOS, which had been a promising source of intelligence for the British secret services. Sinclair characterized the ARCOS raid as an ‘irretrievable loss of an unprecedented opportunity’.32
After the raid, Ewer sent James Marston, Hayes’s predecessor as general secretary of NUPPO, to visit the former ARCOS employee Edward Langston, who was rightly suspected of being the source of the leak and had just started a new life as a publican at the Dolphin in Uxbridge. When Marston began hanging around the Dolphin, disguised as a tramp, Langston sent a panicky telegram to Harker, addressed to the chambers in the Temple of Harker’s brother-in-law Sidney Russell Cooke, asking to be sent a revolver for self-defence. Rose Edwardes had meanwhile ceased deliveries of material from the FPA to Chesham House. Instead, secrets were written in invisible ink in a book which she or Walter Dale took as couriers to Paris. From thence it went underground to Warsaw and thence to Moscow. The expulsion of the Soviet delegation after the raid left Ewer’s network short of funds. The CPGB secretary Albert Inkpin began travelling to Berlin to collect dollars, which he then took to Paris. There Slocombe arranged for Rose Cohen, or other women couriers, to smuggle the dollars to London, where Holmes laundered their conversion into sterling. But this procedure was too complex, and despite obtaining £100 from Slocombe in Paris, the network had shrivelled by October 1927 for lack of funds.
MI5 investigates the Ewer–Hayes network
Lakey, who with his taste for disguise was by now established in the new identity of Albert Allen, was left in financial straits after the FPA’s diminuendo. Ewer provided £20 to finance his move to Bournemouth, where he managed Dean’s Restaurant at 261a Wimborne Road, Winton. Jane