Special Branch by Ray Wilson

Author:Ray Wilson [Ray Wilson and Ian Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849549639
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SOVIET ESPIONAGE IN THE 1930S

ALTHOUGH THE MPSB had its functions reduced in 1931 when MI5 became the lead organisation for protecting the security of the state, it still retained its responsibilities for prosecuting cases of espionage within its jurisdiction.

The Communist Party of Great Britain continued attempts to foster discontent in the British armed forces, as it had been doing since its formation in 1920, prompting Parliament to pass the Incitement to Disaffection Act in 1934. The communists also infiltrated the trade unions to incite industrial unrest and many communists travelled to Russia in order to be schooled in these matters. All these activities were monitored by the Branch and the Security Service. Between 1934 and 1938 a secret radio link between an address in Wimbledon and Moscow was monitored by Special Branch, on behalf of the Security Service. This was codenamed ‘Operation Mask’.

The Security Service could only request police action and not order it, and it still lacked powers of arrest and search of its own. Operational decisions remained with senior police officers. With only between twelve and twenty-six officers during the 1930s to carry out its many tasks, the Security Service relied increasingly on the good will of senior police officers for any executive action that was necessary. With the outbreak of IRA violence in mainland Britain at the end of the decade, the resources available to cover all aspects of the security of the state were seriously stretched. Nevertheless, the Branch still contrived to render valuable assistance to the Security Service in its constant probing of communist activities.

In 1939, Sir Vernon Kell, the Director General of MI5, boasted to the French foreign intelligence service, ‘Soviet activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion.’1 He was wrong, but the scale of Russian penetration of the British establishment was certainly not apparent as we now know, with the benefit of hindsight. This was partly due to the Security Service’s inability to cope with their task, given the resources available to them. Churchill regarded them as inefficient and by the end of the decade, when he became Prime Minister, he dismissed an ageing and ailing Kell.

Soviet espionage was organised in three different ways:

(a) through legal residents with diplomatic status in the Russian embassy,

(b) by illegal residents working independently with false identities,

(c) through a secret group within the CPGB.

In fact, far from being non-existent, Soviet activity in this country was considerable, as the following cases will show. And all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, required Special Branch involvement, whether through surveillance, interrogations, arrests or prosecutions.

In 1929, a Foreign Office cipher clerk employed in Geneva, Ernest Holloway Oldham, ran into financial difficulties through heavy drinking and offered his services to the Russians. He was handled by an NKVD agent, Dimitri Bystrolyotov. In 1933 Oldham was sacked by the Foreign Office for drunkenness, and committed suicide. Despite information from two Soviet defectors in 1929 and 1930, his betrayal was not fully appreciated by the authorities, who believed he was leaking information to the French, rather than the Russians.

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