Richard Davenport-Hines - Enemies Within

The Soviet Union’s earliest spies inside the Foreign Office are the subject of this chapter, which is avowedly revisionist. The security failings of the Office and of the intelligence services have been treated in the terminology of class for over sixty years. Public schoolboys supposedly protected one another in obtuse, complacent and snobbish collusion. The secrets of Whitehall were lost on the playing-fields of Eton, so the caricature runs. This, however, is an unreal presentation. The first Foreign Office men to spy for Moscow – in the years immediately after the disintegration of the Ewer–Hayes network – were members of its Communications Department. That department was an amalgam of Etonians, cousins of earls, half-pay officers, the sons of clergymen and of administrators in government agencies, youths from Lower Edmonton and Finchley, lower-middle-class men with a knack for foreign languages. Their common ingredient was masculinity. The predominant influence on the institutional character of the department, its management and group loyalty, its fortitude and vulnerability, all derived from its maleness. As in the Foreign Office generally, it was not class bias but gender exclusivity that created the enabling conditions for espionage. The Communications Department spies Ernest Oldham and John King, and the later spy-diplomatists Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean, had colleagues and chiefs who trusted and protected them, because that was how – under the parliamentary democracy that was settled in 1929 – public servants in a department of state prided themselves on behaving to their fellow men.

Reader Bullard reflected while Consul General in Leningrad in 1934: ‘Schools are not meant to give boys a good time, but to teach them to be happy together even when they are not having a good time.’ The office culture of the Communications Department was an extension of school: the staff there tried to be cheery in a hard place, valued camaraderie and professed individual self-respect as their creed; its vulnerabilities were easy for Oldham and King to exploit. Their male colleagues swapped banter and chaff, forgave and covered each other’s mistakes. They aspired to be tolerant, unflappable and conscientious. The departmental spirit precluded grudges and doubts among colleagues. They were not social equals, but they found their common ground as men. As a nationality, the English had too high and yet too juvenile a reckoning of themselves. ‘The strength of the British lies in never quite growing up,’ Vansittart, PUS of the Foreign Office, said with satisfaction: ‘the cause of our mercifully arrested development is that we have not been liable to introspection.’ 1

Boyish ideas about good sports were ubiquitous. The deputy governor of Parkhurst prison during the detention there of the spy Wilfred Macartney was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ and was popular with most inmates. In 1930, on Jumbo’s last Sunday at Parkhurst, after his promotion to be governor elsewhere, the prisoners held a farewell concert to honour him. ‘I’ve found you fellows a jolly fine set of sports in playing the game,’ he told them after the concert in his pronounced Oxford accent. ‘Cheer up, and don’t forget that the game is not over till the stumps are drawn or the final whistle blown.’ Although these virile sentiments may seem laughable in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s they meant the world for many men: Jumbo was cheered for a full five minutes by the Parkhurst prisoners. 2

The office culture of the Communications Department is richly evoked in the memoirs of George Antrobus. ‘Bozo’ Antrobus was born in 1892, the only child of an official in the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He was educated at Westminster School before reading history at Oxford. He lived as a bachelor with his parents a short walk from Leamington Spa station, and commuted daily by train. He appeared punctually at the Foreign Office in suits shiny with age, with a tattered umbrella and greasy bowler hat. He liked musty smells: wet straw, tar, coal-dust, oil, dead rats, fried fish, sweat and spilt beer are all praised in his memoirs. He was an obsessive compiler of railway statistics whose tabular reports on the punctuality of trains are still used by train-spotters today.

Antrobus joined the Foreign Office in 1915 as a temporary clerk in the Parliamentary Department. This designation was a classic of misdirection, because the department had sole charge of the urgent, heavy wartime traffic in ciphered messages. He soon learnt the skills necessary for decoding or encrypting messages at top speed. By 1917 he had some forty temporary wartime colleagues, including ‘gentlemen of leisure’, the filmstar Athole Stewart and the portrait-painter John Collier. Antrobus was one of the minority who stayed in government service when, in 1919, a new Communications Department to handle coded messages was organized. He was at the same time appointed a King’s Messenger.

King’s Messengers were the men – often ex-officers – who carried confidential material to and fro between the Foreign Office and its embassies and legations in Europe. They travelled by train and steamer, bearing a red passport marked courier du Roi , transporting versions of Post Office bags, which were known as ‘crossed bags’ because their labels bore a conspicuous black cross. Under the 1919 arrangement of the Communications Department, these couriers spent the intervals between their European journeys working on encoding and deciphering in the Office. This was craft work, for which they were adequately but not lavishly paid. Members of the department were ranked with diplomatic staff, but unlike other officials they were not pensionable, and received on retirement lump sums computed on the length of their service. Their status in the building was ambiguous, their financial position felt precarious and these anomalies intensified their esprit de corps .

Outgoing Office telegrams were enciphered and incoming messages were deciphered in Room 22. It was a gaunt and lofty space lit by two vast, rattling windows looking northwards. The furniture was hard and plain: half a dozen tables, a dozen chairs, two ranges of cupboards 9 feet high. All was fuggy and frenetic. The clerks were ‘a hard-bitten lot’, recalled Patrick Reilly. They chain-smoked pipes and cigarettes, working in pairs, one calling aloud from the codebook and the other transcribing the message, at a speed of thirty codewords per minute when encoding and fifty words per minute when decoding – all this hour after hour. The pressure left them, said Antrobus, ‘sweating like pigs, with hair awry and shirt-sleeves rolled up, cheeks aflame and collars pulp’. Their finished work was taken to a cacophonous adjoining room, where it was typed on noisy machines using wax stencils rather than paper to enable mass duplication. A careworn official checked every document for its sense: ‘Take this back to Room 22, and ask them what the hell they mean by this tripe,’ he would shout when he found errors, shouting because behind him dispatch boxes were being slammed shut, before being taken by special messenger to the King, to every Cabinet minister, to departmental heads. 3

Because of the incoming and outgoing coded messages, Room 22 had as clear a sense of international events as any other section in the Foreign Office. The latest news of treaty negotiations, conference adjournments, troop movements, armaments contracts, political chicanery, financial hanky-panky, sudden deaths, reprisal raids, incendiary speeches and ultimatums was decoded in that austere, noisy department.

Before the European war the Office had resembled ‘a small family party’, recalled Don Gregory, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1902 and resigned in 1928. But the European war and subsequent worldwide dislocation required huge expansion of Office responsibilities, activities and personnel. ‘Nowadays,’ Gregory lamented in 1929, ‘with its multifarious new activities, its ramifications, divisions and sub-divisions, its clerks and short-hand typists running here, there and everywhere, its constant meetings and interdepartmental conferences, its innumerable visitors, it is tending to resemble a large insurance office or, in times of stress, a central railway station on a bank holiday.’ With the exception of Lord Curzon, foreign secretaries and junior ministers in the Office were notably honeyed in their dealings with officials before 1929. Increasingly thereafter, complained Vansittart, diplomats encountered political chiefs ‘seemingly fresh from elevenses of vinegar’. 4