The Spy Who Painted the Queen (29 page)

The British had long been aware that companies, individuals and German officials had been using neutral countries' diplomatic bags or post as a means of avoiding the world-wide censorship system. Items of intercepted ordinary mail sometimes made reference to it. A letter from a German lady dated 29 July 1916, intercepted on the high seas, described how she received letters from the USA via the Colombian diplomatic bag between Washington and Berlin and through the Dutch Foreign Ministry. An intercepted telegram between Buenos Aires and Hamburg said the easiest way to get a letter through was via the Argentine legation. Two letters sent from Germany in the US diplomatic bag and posted on to Tonga in the ordinary mail were intercepted by the censor in Samoa and reported to London by the New Zealand government.

There is some evidence that diplomatic mail was being opened as early as 1915, as three packets addressed to the Swedish legation in Washington had been found to contain enclosures addressed to the German Embassy. A packet stamped by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs opened by the Singapore censor in June 1916 contained a packet from Vienna to the Dutch East Indies. A letter bearing a Peruvian legation seal, and stamped by it, was intercepted on the SS
Frederik VIII
and, on being opened, was found to contain pro-German propaganda destined for Venezuela. His Majesty's Minister in Bangkok informed the Foreign Office that he was suspicious that the Dutch Legation Bag was being used to carry official German correspondence to Java. It's clear that the ordinary censorship was no respecter of the stamps and seals of neutral consulates or embassies, though there is no mention of diplomatic bags, which appear to have been sacrosanct.

It's generally assumed that the opening of foreign diplomatic bags by the British secret services began in the 1920s when SIS established their N Section, probably a joint section with MI5, that was reputed to ‘have a team of thirty seamstresses' who could open and re-sew a diplomatic bag ‘in a fashion calculated to avoid detection'. As a natural sceptic, the current author doubted the validity of some of these stories until a former member of a foreign diplomatic service, who had sealed bags regularly, thought through the process and described how, theoretically, opening one undetected might be done. The method postulated matched, in the most important details, the method allegedly used by MI5 to open Ignatieff's courier's bag. It does seem possible that this might have occurred, but it would have involved a great deal of deception, particularly of the Foreign Office, which was notoriously sensitive to such matters and which, through its control of the Secret Service Fund, was to a large part MI5's paymasters.

One point militating strongly against the breaking into diplomatic bags is a paragraph in the Special Section report in KV 4/16 which says:

Under the Defence of the Realm Regulations the only media for the conveyance of uncensored written or printed communications from this country to neutral countries was the Private bags despatched from the various Embassies in London. The Diplomatic objections to any interference with these bags have always been too strong to permit of steps being taken to examine their contents, even when there has been reason to suspect that their immunity was being taken advantage of by enemy agents and it has always been felt that this channel constituted a grave source of danger which it has not been possible to eliminate.

But they would say that, wouldn't they?

The unfortunate Arpad Horn, following his arrest and questioning, was returned to Donington Hall and placed in solitary confinement, with only one hour's exercise each morning and evening, for forty-one days. On 29 August he was court-martialled and sentenced to fourteen days' imprisonment, for which he was transferred to Chelmsford Prison. Here, he complained, he was ‘shut up in a narrow cell and was allowed to spend 1 hour morning and evening in the prison court yard under the supervision of 3 sentries. For exercise there was a space of about 15 x 4 metres where I was placed together with English convicts.'
He wasn't allowed newspapers, his food was restricted and he was expected to pay for it, he was only allowed to smoke in the exercise yard and his cell was so damp he fell ill from the effects. After his sentence he was transferred to Dyffryn Aled, a POW camp in north Wales surrounded by moors and far from the coast. From here he raised complaints about his treatment via the Swedish legation, which was looking after Austro-Hungarian interests in Britain for the duration of the war. Presumably he was repatriated in 1919.

Adrienne van Riemsdyk's only daughter, Marguerite Louise, married a British officer, Major Samuel John Barrington of the Suffolk Regiment, on 24 May 1919. Curiously, one of the witnesses was Colonel Oppenheim, British military attaché to The Hague, who had had extremely close links to the British secret services during the war. Adrienne van Riemsdyk herself died, after a long illness, while visiting her daughter and son-in-law in East Anglia, on 19 October 1919.

Despite enormous cuts in MI5's budget and staff numbers post-war and its relegation to the monitoring of foreign spies and communist agitation in the armed forces (communism generally – industrial relations, terrorism and sedition passed back to Special Branch), Vernon Kell was regarded as a safe pair of hands and steered the organisation through the difficult waters of the 1920s. In part because MI5 was able to expose two communist ‘moles' within Special Branch, and partly because of the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany, the organisation took on increased responsibilities in the early 1930s, absorbing part of The Branch, as well as a top secret organisation used by SIS to carry out investigations within the UK (a breach of the rule that it should only gather information abroad). The organisation expanded in the late 1930s in anticipation of war with Germany, but for all Kell's planning, MI5 came close to collapse once again when war broke out, under the sheer volume of enquiries. It had planned a huge round-up of potentially hostile aliens on the outbreak of war, but this had been severely watered down by the Home Office, only to emerge again with the crisis brought on by Dunkirk in 1940. In the resulting chaos, Kell was obliged by Churchill himself to take retirement, with his deputy, Eric Holt Wilson, joining him. Despite threats of mass resignations among the MI5 staff (which didn't occur), the organisation soldiered on to become, once again, a highly efficient counter-intelligence organisation. Kell became a special constable and died on 27 March 1942.

Thomson's star was firmly in the ascendant in 1917. The return to Special Branch of duties connected with industrial disputes (following the dissolution of PMS 2, the Ministry of Munitions intelligence department), meant he had the ear of senior politicians frightened about revolution at home. In 1919 he became Home Office director of intelligence incorporating Special Branch within an organisation for domestic intelligence gathering. His natural right-wing inclinations meant he saw political events in the worst possible light, and it's safe to say he scare-mongered when reporting on left-wing movements. He exceeded his authority in using his uniformed officers without consulting the commissioner and had to be reminded that, in his police duties, he was a subordinate, and was instructed personally to submit a weekly report on the royal and ministerial protection duties being carried out, as well as all the other activities of the Special Branch officers. He proposed MI5 should be incorporated into one central intelligence organisation headed, naturally, by himself, and Kell was able to resist this only with the backing of the director of military intelligence. In 1921 Lloyd George ‘retired' him summarily, without an official explanation, though the press speculated it was because of a security failure at Chequers. In 1922 Thomson wrote
Queer People
about his work in Special Branch, appearing to take the credit for the discovery, as well as the arrest and prosecution, of the spies captured during the war. This did not sit well with MI5.

On 12 December 1925, Thomson was arrested, along with a young lady, Thelma De Lava, for committing an act of indecency in Hyde Park (it was alleged she was ‘manipulating his person'). Recognised by the sergeant at the police station, he appeared to give a false name (Hugh Thomson rather than Basil Thomson), and was directed to attend Marlborough Street Police Court on 14 December, which he failed to do. Miss De Lava also failed to attend. The commissioner advised the officers to proceed as they would usually. De Lava was traced and charged. She pleaded guilty and was fined £2. At his trial, Thomson argued he had gone to the park to research a new book on solicitation and explained that at the police station he had given his name as Home (pronounced Hume) Thomson, using his middle name. The latter story was accepted, but he was found guilty of the indecency offence and fined £5. He immediately appealed, and at the hearing Thelma De Lava gave evidence against him. Despite attempts to discredit police evidence and the presence of a number of prominent character witnesses, the appeal was dismissed.

Thomson spent much of the rest of the 1920s and 1930s in France, and continued to write both novels and books about the police and the war. He died on 26 March 1939.

During 1915 Nathan was gradually shifted to work involving Indian seditionist groups. Through the Censorship Department he discovered an Indian seditionist and Italian anarchist plot, hatched in Switzerland and financed in Germany, for (allegedly) the assassination of every one of the heads of the Allied nations, which resulted in details being leaked to the Swiss police and the plot thwarted. In 1916 he went to the USA and helped the US authorities in the smashing of German plots with Dr Chandra Chakravarti to supply weapons to a planned revolt in India, leading to the successful 1917/18 conspiracy trials in San Francisco.

In 1919 he was a key player in Foreign Office talks with Maxim Litvinov in Scandinavia about the release of British subjects still held in Russia. Though the mission was headed by a Labour MP (Mr O'Grady), Nathan and Lionel Gall (an SIS officer) seem to have done much of the negotiating. He was later proposed to head the British trade mission to Moscow (actually a cover for SIS operations), but ill-health prevented him from taking up the post. He died in 1921.

Anson remained with G Branch until 31 December 1919. He worked closely with SIS officer Redmond Burton Cafferata in the running of double agents in Switzerland in 1917, with Cafferata running the agents on the ground and Anson co-ordinating things from London. During the 1920s and 1930s he served in the Public Security Department, Ministry of the Interior, Cairo, monitoring Bolshevik activity in Egypt and Palestine. He was awarded the Insignia of Officer of the Order of the Nile, 1938 ‘in recognition of valuable services rendered by him in the employment of the Egyptian Government'.

Carter remained as head of G Branch until March 1918, when he transferred to the Intelligence Mission in Rome, which liaised closely with Italian intelligence. He left Rome in February 1919 and joined the Metropolitan Police where he was deputy assistant commissioner, in charge of Special Branch 1922–38, and assistant commissioner, Metropolitan Police, 1938–40. He resigned in September 1940. It's likely that Carter was the policeman whose application for the post of chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in late 1939 caused the three armed services to settle their differences and agree to the appointment of the soldier, Stewart Menzies, to the post. Carter died on 14 July 1944.

Curtis-Bennett left MI5 in October 1917 to become an assistant to Basil Thomson at Scotland Yard, but remained an RNVR officer until he was demobilised in February 1919, when he returned to his legal practice. He was elected Conservative MP for Chelmsford in 1924 and served until 1926. He defended some of the most high-profile cases of the day, including Herbert Armstrong, the Hay solicitor accused of poisoning his wife (1922); Ronald True, the drug taking murderer (1922); and Sir Almeric Fitzroy, on charges of annoying women in Hyde Park (1922). He was defending barrister in the Irish sedition trial of 1923, and in 1929 he defended ‘Colonel Barker', a woman charged with having married another woman whilst disguised as a man. When Basil Thomson was charged with the indecency offence in Hyde Park in 1925, Curtis-Bennett appeared for him. In 1933 he defended former SIS officer Compton Mackenzie at his Official Secrets Act trial.

He died on 2 November 1936 aged 57, dropping dead immediately after finishing a speech at the Dorchester. Basil Thomson wrote of him:

As one who worked closely with Sir Henry Curtis Bennett throughout the war, I can testify to his great gifts as an examiner of suspects. He sat with me at Scotland Yard practically throughout the war, and almost all the suspects taken off ships or travelling through England came before us. It was interesting to note that when he was most dangerous to the guilty was when his manner was most suave and gentle. I came to know those danger signals when I turned an examination over to him. He was a delightful colleague to work with, and had a quiet humour about him that was most refreshing.

Bigham remained with the Paris Intelligence Mission until 1919 when, after the Treaty of Versailles, ‘Our archives had to be gone through in detail before they could be sent out to a huge incinerator in the fortifications and burnt; and then I handed over what remained of my business to the Military Attaché and to the War Office.' In 1929 his father died and he became a member of the House of Lords and, in 1945, Liberal chief whip in the House. He sat on numerous public bodies and wrote several books, including a two-volume autobiography
A Picture of Life
and
Journal and Memories
. He died in 1956.