Misdefending the Realm: How MI5's incompetence enabled Communist Subversion of Britain's Institutions during the Nazi-Soviet Pact by Antony Percy

Author:Antony Percy [Percy, Antony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781789559316
Google: yyGMzQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
Published: 2020-11-18T22:18:49+00:00

MI5’s attitude towards Communists, in the period from 1935 to 1945, evolved from a policy of disciplined opposition to a position of reluctant tolerance, which in turn developed into a stance of ambiguous endorsement, and finally a state of strategic confusion. This path was not an even one, broken into clear phases, and guided by strategic insight. It was subject to waxing and waning political influences, and punctuated by asymmetrical events such as Stalin’s persecution of his own agents, the influx of refugees from Hitler’s persecutions, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the enigmatic testimony of Krivitsky, the rise of Churchill and his ascent to the Premiership, the fears of Fifth Columns, and, lastly, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. That last event caused the latter to become an ally of Great Britain, and changed the groundrules for ideological battles, at least until the end of the war.

MI5 would have preferred the Communist threat to have come exclusively from the domestic Party, the CPGB, and for long periods of time it assumed that no bolshevik subversion could possibly arise unless it had close contacts with the Party itself, and that the main threat would come from open Party members. The Security Service continually struggled with the challenge of detecting, among the thousands of immigrants and visitors who appeared to find the cultural climate in Britain stimulating and liberating, those whose goals were actually to destroy it. It perpetually had trouble in dealing with the notion of subterfuge – the practice by which persons with nefarious purposes would go to great lengths to conceal their intentions, or even their identity.

During the first phase of disciplined opposition, MI5 struggled to identify an essentially shadowy target, since one of the critical components of the Soviet Union’s espionage apparatus in the 1930s was the system of clandestine ‘illegals’. Later, Walter Krivitsky was able to educate his British interrogators about such structures, which had been originally created by the Fourth Department of Military Intelligence. Krivitsky’s emphasis was on Military Intelligence structures, although Archer’s report shows that he represented OGPU as using the same techniques. And, as Krivitsky told MI5, OGPU began to control Military Intelligence in 1935, thus blurring the organisational distinctions between the two departments. These groups of infiltrators were not called ‘illegal’ because they were necessarily in the targeted country under false pretences, although, as it happened, in nearly every case their members would enter on a forged passport, or a visa acquired by illicit means. As illegals, they were contrasted to the legal organisation of spies found in the Soviet embassy, where the resident NKVD or GRU officer would carry out his tasks under cover of a diplomatic title. Thus the members of the legal structure had all the protections afforded to diplomatic personnel, and were able to exploit reliable and secure communication facilities at the Embassy, but were under consistent watch because of their official status. The illegals, on the other hand, enjoyed much more freedom of movement, but had to be more imaginative

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