The Forgotten Spy (14 page)

But like it or not, a separate system was indeed in place, and Oldham built up a network of trusted men to send, often junior staff such as Raymond Oake, who regularly appeared in the Foreign Office day books, claiming expenses that Oldham would authenticate. Tensions between the official and unofficial King’s Messengers never really abated.

Therefore by the mid-1920s, Oldham enjoyed an influential position within the Foreign Office – he was the puppet-master, pulling the strings of Britain’s communications network with Europe and the near east, ensuring the most expedient routes to destinations both close and distant. As part of the team of permanent officials entrusted with ensuring the safety of both message and messengers, Oldham found himself acting for King and country in the front line once more, albeit in a very different struggle. Instead of facing German machine guns in the woods at St Quentin, a more subtle foe lay in the shadows. This enemy could strike at home or abroad at any time – agents of the Bolshevik revolutionary forces that were sweeping out of Russia, a communist menace that sought to gain access to the heart of Britain’s diplomatic network in whatever way they could.

If the Russian revolutions of 1917 sent a shockwave through the world, then the brutal murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family on 17 July 1918 was met with revulsion and disbelief, as well as realisation that the Bolshevik movement was prepared to do whatever it took to preserve its hold on power.

Ernest Oldham’s life and work in the Communications Department were directly affected by events in Russia after 1917. Without spending too much time on the details, it is important to understand just why European states were so concerned about the impact of the Russian revolutions. First, and perhaps most importantly, the collapse of the Triple Entente had ushered in a new era where ideological class warfare – communism against capitalism, the proletariat versus the privileged bourgeoisie – created international tension in a post-Versailles world shattered by the recent global conflict. The threat of armies clashing along geo-political
lines was replaced by fears of communist agents of change operating within states to foment revolution, fears which grew more hysterical throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

At the time of the Versailles Treaty, this was not a baseless concern; all across Europe, new countries were born while old ones were torn apart as the effects of Versailles were played out. Germany itself had witnessed this first-hand with its November revolution of 1918 being followed by the rise of socialist politics that stopped just short of embracing communism. The establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919 ended any further movement in that direction. Hungary was also torn apart by internal protest driven by the working classes and the Hungarian Soviet Republic was established in 1919. However, the regime collapsed within months without support from their comrades in Russia.

Russian inability to assist another nascent communist regime was due to the increasingly brutal civil war being fought between the revolutionary Red Army of the Bolsheviks and the anti-communist White Army. The latter were initially aided by Allied troops, which increased the hostility of the Bolshevik leaders towards western states thereafter. However, western enthusiasm for prolonged military involvement waned in 1919 and by 1920 the White Army was defeated in most of Russia’s associated provinces. It would be a further two years before Siberia and the far east were fully under Red control. Nevertheless, many former Russian provinces gained independence – Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – while others were only subdued through the Red Terror. Oppression and atrocities such as torture and massacres were employed in places such as the Ukraine to ensure compliance to the new political system. It is not officially known how many people died, but a conservative estimate put casualties in the hundreds of thousands.

It was the Bolshevik state security organisation, the Cheka, which undertook the repression. Created by Lenin on 20 December 1917 as the ‘All-Russian Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage’, its role was to fight any attempt to undermine the communist system at home, with local Cheka established in all the major cities and regions to suppress political opposition and persecute deserters from the Red Army. The
result was many thousands of people fled Russia during the civil war, ending up as refugees in places such as Constantinople.

Internal security through fear and violence was one thing but it was the stated intent of the leaders of the Russian state to export the Bolshevik revolution to the rest of the world, especially as Russia was faced by, in the words of Lenin, ‘hostile capitalist encirclement’.
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Alternative mechanisms were needed to spread communism within other nation states and thus the Soviet Communist International (or Comintern) was founded in 1919 to struggle ‘by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state’.
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Comintern essentially encouraged and provided support for revolutions in other western countries. One immediate outcome was the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920, a merger of several smaller Marxist groups, labour movements and socialist parties, which was then re-founded in 1921 when more organisations joined.

The leaders of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic also saw diplomacy as another way to achieve its goals, by keeping its enemies – which pretty much consisted of the rest of the world – divided. The main drawback to employing diplomacy on any scale was that by 1920 only Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania formally recognised the new country and then purely out of expediency as a means of confirming their own independence. The fact that the Bolsheviks had signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk meant exclusion from the Paris Peace Conference, the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. They had also earned the growing distrust of America, which was gripped by the first red scare in response to communist ideals. The Russians were isolated from the diplomatic community and were unable to operate consulates and embassies across the world.

Nevertheless, there were some signs of a thaw in international relations, particularly on humanitarian grounds during the great famine of 1921–23, during which several million people perished. Organisations such as the American Relief Association, under the control of future US President Herbert Hoover, provided food and support when Lenin softened his stance towards
outside assistance. At the same time Lenin introduced his New Economic Policy – a form of ‘state capitalism’ that was deemed necessary to breathe life into a moribund economy shattered by constant warfare since 1914.

Yet one thing that did not soften was Lenin’s determination to continue the revolution abroad. In an attempt to exert even greater control, the State Political Directorate – abbreviated to GPU from the Russian
Gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravlenie
– was formed on 6 February 1922 to supersede the Cheka. The GPU acted as a combination of intelligence service and state police within Russia, and also had a foreign department involved with overseas intelligence.

At the same time, in a move designed to consolidate the political gains of the 1917 revolution within existing Soviet republics, delegates from the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian governments agreed to create a new federal state. They approved the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on 28 December 1922 with Lenin at the head. The GPU was transferred from Russian control in 1923 and became the All Union State Political Administration of the USSR – or OGPU (
Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye
). Part of its remit was to operate agents on foreign soil, establishing
rezidentura
or a base of intelligence operations, usually within an official organisation such as an embassy. OGPU would place key staff in prominent positions, thus giving them a legal reason to be there. The
rezident
, or head of the operation, would also run a series of ‘illegal’ (the term for covert) agents, who would often pose as disaffected emigrés or businessmen – any cover story that would suit their needs. By the late 1920s, many of the most professional of these agents would move from country to country when required, earning them the nickname the Great Illegals or the Flying Squad. OGPU was also involved with preventing western counter-espionage operations within the USSR. The seeds of the Cold War were sown.

As we’ve seen previously, British intelligence services were reorganised after the war – mainly to deal with the post-Versailles international situation. A Secret Service Committee chaired by Lord Curzon, the new Foreign Secretary who replaced Balfour in October 1919, met later the same year and published a report that identified Bolshevism as the greatest threat to the
fabric of British society. It recommended changes to the existing and somewhat complicated structure.
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The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was given a remit to gather intelligence overseas and placed under Foreign Office control.
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It certainly had its work cut out handling the rise of communism. Desmond Morton was placed in charge of Section V, dealing with counter-Bolshevism activities in the 1920s. A network of field agents existed, mainly from military backgrounds working under the cover of diplomatic status on missions in Russia. These included men such as Robert Bruce Lockheart, Acting Vice Consul to Moscow; Captain Francis Cromie, naval attaché to the British Embassy in Petrograd; Captain George Hill and ‘ace of spies’ Sidney Reilly who, with Lockheart and Hill, had been involved in a failed attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918. Reilly was sentenced to death in his absence, having escaped in a desperate flight across Russia, while Lockheart was lucky to avoid trial and was swapped for his counterpart in the UK, Maxim Litvinov. Within days of their return to Britain and after a debriefing with the Head of SIS, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, both Hill and Reilly returned to Russia under cover of a British trade delegation to continue their espionage work. Reilly was officially dismissed from SIS in 1921 but continued to work with counter-revolutionaries and enjoyed a freelance relationship with SIS. Still a wanted man by the Bolsheviks, he was duped into returning to Russia in 1925 by the OGPU-led Operation Trust, captured, and shot.

Closer to home, MI5 continued to investigate the threat of espionage and sedition on British soil although Sir Vernon Kell’s resources were severely limited after the war.
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MI5 was largely restricted to gathering evidence of Bolshevism in the armed forces, reflecting its roots as a military intelligence organisation. One of his key recruits was Jane Sissmore, placed in charge of MI5’s Registry in 1922 and destined to rise still further within the organisation. In order to specifically tackle Bolshevik activity, a new Directorate of Home Intelligence was established under the control of Sir Basil Thomson, given his success in maintaining security in Paris. The directorate had the power to arrest potential spies identified by MI5. However, the arrangement was not deemed to be a success as the directorate clashed constantly with
MI5 and the police. Thomson’s ego was another problem and he soon lost the confidence of his political masters. The Secret Service Committee was reconvened in 1921, including Sir Eyre Crowe to provide the perspective of the Foreign Office. The Directorate of Home Intelligence was disbanded, Thomson removed and the responsibility for both domestic and military intelligence passed to Kell at MI5.

This was a period of turmoil and upheaval within Europe, when borders and regimes changed overnight and revolution might only be round the corner. Add to the mix the 1919 to 1923 Turkish War of Independence that followed the break-up of the Ottoman Empire under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres and it is easy to see why the politicians placed such importance on accurate intelligence. The work of the Communications Department in the Foreign Office was all the more important in preventing counter-espionage, taking a front line role to ensure the secure delivery of British messages to embassies around the world. Given his report on the reorganisation of the King’s Messengers and growing influence in the cipher room as one of the permanent clerks, Oldham played his part in the defence of diplomatic material throughout this period.

It is worth pausing briefly to reflect on the League of Nations, which was created by the Treaty of Versailles with its own permanent secretariat under the command of former Foreign Office official (and champion of Esperanto, among other things), Sir Eric Drummond. The intention was to continue the diplomatic work begun in Paris with the agreement of all major powers to respect the territorial integrity of each other. Their work would be upheld not by military force but by a Permanent Court of International Justice. Indeed, the League of Nations wished all member states to disarm ‘to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety’. A General Assembly was established, plus an Executive Council formed of the major world powers. In reality, there were concerns that the League was a device to ensure the hegemony of France and Britain over Europe given the rather surprising failure of the Americans to sign up. Yet not everyone in the UK was keen on the new world order – especially in the Foreign Office, where there was great concern that its century-old monopoly on the diplomatic process was under threat. Crowe wrote to Hardinge
on 9 December 1919 about his fears that the League of Nations secretariat might try to ‘perpetuate and extend the system which has unfortunately prevailed very largely at the Peace Conference and of which I feel sure both you and Mr Balfour will have realised the grave inconveniences from the point of view of the proper conduct of business’.
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