Richard Davenport-Hines - Enemies Within

Slocombe’s success in conducting ‘secret work unmolested for such a long period is proof of the high standard of his efficiency as an espionage agent’, MI5 concluded in 1930. ‘His high standard and reputation as a journalist give to him, as to EWER, most excellent cover for his treasonable activities and unrivalled opportunities for the collection of valuable confidential information.’ In August that year Harker cautioned Sir Arthur Willert (the Foreign Office’s press officer) about Ewer: ‘I considered him by far the most dangerous individual from a S.S. point of view that the Russians had in this country, and that Sir Arthur Willert might rest assured that anything he told Ewer, would go straight to the Soviet Embassy.’ Willert responded by asking unprompted if Harker knew Slocombe. Harker replied that Slocombe was Ewer’s deputy, and ‘very nearly as dangerous’. Willert thought the pair were ‘the ablest and most entertaining journalists he had ever met’, and offered to introduce Harker to them. ‘Though nothing would please me more personally, I did not think it wise at this juncture,’ Harker said. 44

Around this time Lord Southwood’s profit-driven printing combine Odhams Press bought control of the Daily Herald . Ewer continued as the paper’s foreign editor, in an editorial office in which communist affiliations were less acceptable and commercial considerations had higher ranking. Slocombe, however, left the Daily Herald : he was later foreign editor at the Sunday Express and a Daily Mail special correspondent. Ewer was summoned to a disciplinary meeting with Pollitt and Willie Gallacher in the Lyons tea-shop next to Leicester Square tube station in September 1931. ‘They parted on very bad terms,’ MI5 understood. ‘Ewer stated that from now on he was going to be bitterly anti-Communist.’ Pollitt subsequently described Ewer as ‘a posturing renegade who never loses a single opportunity of getting his poison over’, while the Daily Worker was to denounce him as ‘pro-Nazi’. 45

During the purges of 1937 Rose Cohen, the former lover of both Ewer and Pollitt, was arrested – apparently to stop her from meeting Pollitt in Moscow and reporting that her husband Max Petrovsky had been arrested as a Trotskyite ‘wrecker’ and was awaiting execution. The Daily Herald made a weasel defence of Soviet maltreatment of her. British officials were disinclined to help this ‘“Bloomsbury Bolshevik” or “parlour pink”’, as they called her: one of them asked, as a marginal joke in her file, ‘I wonder whether Miss Cohen is now solid or liquid?’ Ewer convinced himself that she had been sent to a Siberian camp (in reality she was shot after months of abysmal terror), and felt haunting distress about her fate. He did not know that Pollitt had made strenuous private appeals on her behalf, and therefore found it unforgivable that CPGB leaders knew how hard she had worked for ‘the Cause’ but, as he told MI5, never intervened on her behalf. 46

In the late 1940s Ewer worked with the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department in countering communist propaganda and apologetics. He broadcast for the BBC and wrote commentaries expressing the bitterness of a betrayed and disillusioned idealist. Younger diplomatic correspondents, who consulted their amiable doyen ‘Trilby’ for interpretations of official opacities, never guessed that this urbane man had once been an inflammatory communist zealot. It was suggested in September 1949 by Ann Glass and Jane Archer that given the leakages attributed by Soviet defectors to highly placed government circles, Ewer and Slocombe should be questioned in the hope of establishing whether some of their sources in 1919–29 had since reached senior positions. The task was allotted to Maxwell Knight, a former naval midshipman, preparatory school teacher and journalist, who during the 1930s had become MI5’s pre-eminent agent-runner. Knight invited Ewer to lunch at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair in January 1950.

For the first hour they exchanged ‘trivialities about the war and the comparative efficiency of the German and Russian Intelligence Services’. When lunch was over, Ewer said jokily, ‘Well now, disclose the great mystery.’ Finally, some quarter of a century after MI5 had first rumbled his network, one of its officers confronted him. ‘He had no inkling of the real purpose of the interview,’ Knight reported.

As he is a very highly strung person, in spite of his experience and undoubted intelligence, I thought it might be a good idea to deal him a rapid blow at the outset. I therefore said to him that what I really wanted to talk to him about was the Federated Press of America. This certainly took him by surprise, and it was on the tip of his tongue to pretend some difficulty in remembering what this was; but as he hesitated, I took out from my dispatch case a rather formidable bundle of typescript, whereupon, with a slightly self-conscious smile he changed his tone and said, ‘Oh yes, of course, I can remember the Federated Press of America very well.’

Knight made clear to Ewer that ‘there were “no strings” at all attached to this interview … and that if he felt he did not wish to discuss the matter with me, he had only to put on his hat and go home, and there would be no hard feelings on my side. I explained that, on the other hand, if he would be kind enough to discuss the case with me, I felt it might be extremely helpful.’

Knight explained that MI5 ‘made a habit of going over what might be termed “classic cases” in the light of new information or the general trend of international politics, as by doing so we not only frequently re-educated ourselves, but also obtained new information and clearer interpretations of matters which were originally obscure’. Ewer listened attentively, and nodded his agreement. Knight said that two or three recent cases indicated that there might be persons in high government positions who were giving information to the Russians. Ewer agreed to help, with the reservation that he felt hesitant about naming individuals. ‘I passed lightly over this, saying that I quite understood,’ Knight recorded. Ewer talked slowly and quietly, as if weighing every word. He seemed to Knight evasive, forgetful, ‘obstinately vague’ and sometimes ‘unconvincing’. He claimed that, with the exception of Slocombe’s activities in Paris, his group did not touch espionage, but only undertook counter-espionage. The limit of their interest was the actions and plans of the British intelligence services against Soviet and CPGB activities in Britain. This was hard to disprove (certainly in a criminal trial), but sophistical. 47

There was no official discrediting of Ewer. His fifty years of diplomatic journalism was marked in 1959 by his investiture as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Colleagues hailed him as a fearless anti-communist who had once quenched Andrei Vyshinsky’s verbal outpourings at a Moscow press conference. Thirty years after the arrest of Dale, Ginhoven and Jane, their spymaster was honoured with a special pass to the Foreign Office which was valid for the rest of his life.

Years later Brian Stewart, the SIS officer who nearly succeeded Maurice Oldfield as Chief in 1978, declared that objectivity was the first necessity for successful intelligence work. ‘Report nothing but the unvarnished truth and, as far as possible, the whole truth. Understand, but do not pander to, the prejudices and preconceptions of the customer.’ Stewart was equally emphatic about the assessment of intelligence material: ‘beware of intellectual laziness, mirror imaging, prejudice, racial or professional arrogance, bias, groupthink, and the sin of assuming that the future will develop, broadly speaking, along the same lines as the past’. These commandments were the result of a century’s experience by the intelligence services, including MI5’s treatment of the Ewer–Hayes network. MI5 officers showed themselves as shrewd, efficient and decent in their questioning and turning of informants. Contrary to the caricature, they did not behave like clumsy oafish schoolboys playing rough sport. Effective counter-espionage needs tact and patience. Mistakes occur when time is short, or opponents are demonized. Although MI5 has often been depicted as blimpish, rigid, reactionary and thick, in reality its ductile liberalism ought to impress. There was a culture of respecting individuals. Secret policing was not oppressive. The security services were usually more considerate than Fleet Street reporters in minding people’s feelings. 48