The Ingenious Mr. Pyke by Henry Hemming

Author:Henry Hemming [Hemming, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610395786
Publisher: PublicAffairs

PYKE HUNT, PART 4

On 19 March – the day that Combined Operations agreed to go ahead with the Plough scheme – Special Branch filed a new report casting Pyke in a suspicious light once again. They had learnt of a covert organisation called the Inter-States Committee of Communist Groups in Great Britain (ISC), later described as a ‘hush-hush body’ that was ‘shrouded in secrecy’. Chaired by Harry Pollitt, the restored head of the CPGB, it was a ‘channel through which the different refugee communist groups have contact with Moscow’ and, as one man close to it observed, it ‘came near to being a little Communist International in itself’. For Special Branch, the existence of this body was evidence of just what ‘a dangerous experiment’ it had been during 1939 to allow ‘so many leading Czech, German and Austrian Communists – many of them being the most experienced and trusted Communists of Central Europe, while others were for years the frontier workers of the Comintern’s illegal groups – to find a refuge in England’. These communists were now laying the foundations for a post-war Europe that was in thrall to Moscow. They saw themselves as ‘the rulers of tomorrow’, and were ‘closely in touch with London Soviet circles, who saw their importance at a time when others thought that they counted for little’.

One of the ISC’s strategies was to set up émigré organisations called ‘Free Movements’ in the style of the Free French movement. These were designed to look and sound like governments-in-waiting, in the hope that the Allies would instal them after the defeat of the Axis powers. In reality they were under hidden Communist control.

In late 1941 the German communists in Britain were instructed to start a Free German Movement. The only problem was that their arch-rivals, the German socialists, had got there first and were now on the verge of setting up their very own ‘Free German Committee’. The communists decided to launch a smear campaign.

‘THE “FREE GERMAN” TRICK’ was the headline splashed over the front page of the left-wing Sunday Dispatch on 8 February 1942, followed by a virulent denunciation of this socialist-backed Free German Committee. ‘The men concerned must be watched,’ the article fumed, ‘and their activities curbed.’

Special Branch was curious to know who had placed the article, as this would obviously lead them to the ISC. They soon had a name. One of their informants assured them that the individual behind this Sunday Dispatch article was also ‘said to be in charge of Communist “action propaganda” ’. His name was Geoffrey Pyke.

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