THE ZINOVIEV LETTER
The forging of the Zinoviev letter was the high water mark in Reilly’s whole career.
Documents purporting to originate from the executive committee of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow had been appearing in anti-Communist circles in Paris for some months prior to the discovery of the so called ‘Zinoviev letter’ in October 1924. The letter, which was almost certainly a forgery, was supposedly written by Gregory Zinoviev, the president of Comintern. It called on British Communists to mobilise ‘the group in the Labour Party sympathising with the treaty’ to bring pressure to bear in support of its ratification. It further urged them to encourage ‘agitation-propaganda’ in the armed forces.2
At the 5th Congress of the Communist International in June and July, Zinoviev had clearly spoken out in favour of making Britain a priority for Comintern agitation and propaganda. The letter therefore fitted into an already established picture. The identity of the forger has never been satisfactorily established, although Michael Kettle has claimed proof positive for his theory that it was none other than Sidney Reilly. Kettle asserts that the letter ‘was first deciphered as being in Reilly’s handwriting by the present author [Kettle]’.3 Kettle called on the services of John Conway to authenticate his Zinoviev theory, who declared that he was ‘satisfied that from the quality of the writing – that is pen control and spacing, the letter formations and sizes and other characteristics – that they were written by the same person’.4 Bearing in mind then Conway’s flawed verdict on earlier Kettle theories (see Appendix 2), one has to be highly sceptical of his conclusion in this case.
It must also be borne in mind that the only piece of Reilly’s handwriting Conway had from Kettle for the purposes of comparison was in English, taken from Pepita Reilly’s Britian’s Master Spy book.5 As Conway himself concedes ‘the fact that the texts are in languages with different alphabets makes for some difficulty in comparison’. In spite of this he concludes that ‘the design and drawing of characters are the same’.6 In order to carry out a more reliable comparison, a handwriting analyst would require a sample from Reilly that was actually written in Russian in order that he could compare like with like. This Conway did not have. Since Conway’s analysis over thirty years ago, samples of Reilly’s Russian letter formation have come to light7 and add further weight to the view that Reilly was not the writer of the letter published in Kettle’s book.
In view of Conway’s questionable record and his inability to make a like comparison, his verdict can only be regarded as unsafe. Without this, Kettle’s theory is supported by only the flimsiest of circumstantial threads, namely the diary of former MI5 officer Donald Im Thurn.8 Im Thurn had a peripheral connection with events surrounding the letter’s eventual publication in the Daily Mail, in that he allegedly sold a copy of it to Lord Younger, the then treasurer of the Conservative Party. On 8 October Im Thurn recorded in his diary that an individual he referred to as X had met him that day and given him a very brief verbal account of what would turn out to be the Zinoviev letter.9 Clearly intrigued, Im Thurn asked X to find out more. On 13 October X asked for more time to ‘dot the i’s a bit more’ and the following day alleged that Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was endeavouring to prevent news of the letter getting out.10 With no more than the fact that Reilly had used a similar phrase in two letters of 25 and 30 March 1925 to former SIS colleague Ernest Boyce,11 Kettle immediately concluded that here was proof that Reilly and X were the same person. Reilly, however, was on the other side of the Channel on 13 October, and therefore could not have simultaneously been in London meeting Im Thurn.12
Further doubt is cast on Kettle’s theory by newly declassified government papers on the Zinoviev episode. These point to Col. Stewart Menzies, then deputy chief of SIS, as the person responsible for leaking the letter to the Daily Mail. His allegiance, ‘lay firmly in the Conservative camp’,13 and he later admitted sending a copy of the letter to the paper’s editor.14 In April 1952, Menzies, who had risen from deputy chief to chief of SIS in 1939, wrote to the Foreign Office to say that there would be ‘no harm whatsoever’15 in destroying some of the papers concerning the Zinoviev episode. The Foreign Office later conceded that ‘perhaps some letters and papers have been destroyed in the past which ought to have been preserved under the Public Records Act’.16 It is highly unlikely that SIS knew the true origin of the letter or that Reilly had any connection whatsoever with the episode.
Despite the fact that the Daily Mail published the letter only four days before the General Election, under the headline ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters’, it is highly questionable as to whether this in itself lost Labour the election. All the indicators were pointing to a Labour defeat well before the Mail’s revelation. Although Labour seats fell from 191 to 151, the party’s vote actually rose by more than a million. The real losers of the 1924 election were the Liberal Party, whose seats fell from 159 to 40.
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
BI - United States Bureau of Investigation (now FBI)
BT - Board of Trade
CAB - Cabinet (UK)
CCAC - Churchill College Archives Centre
FSB - Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service)
FO - Foreign Office
GPU - Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye (State Political Directorate)
HO - Home Office
MID - Military Intelligence Division (US)
MI1c - Military Intelligence 1c (see SIS)
MI5 - Military Intelligence 5 – the Security Service
NID - Naval Intelligence Department/Division (UK)
OGPU - Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye (Unified State Political Directorate)
ONI - Office of Naval Intelligence (US)
PRO - Public Record Office, Kew (now National Archives)
SIS - Secret Intelligence Service (MI1c, now MI6)
WO - War Office
NOTES
INTRODUCTION AND PREFACE
1. Ian Fleming, The Man Behind James Bond, Andrew Lycett (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), pp.216–17.
2. The Life of Ian Fleming, Creator of James Bond, John Pearson (Jonathan Cape, 1966), p.189.
3. Leonard Mosley, a foreign correspondent and contemporary of Fleming’s, who later became a successful espionage writer himself, recalled their conversation in a review of the book Master Spy, Edward Van Der Rhoer (Charles Scribner’s, New York, 1981).
4. Ibid. (p.112).
5. The Secret War of Charles Fraser-Smith, Charles Fraser-Smith with Gerald McKnight and Sandy Lesberg (Michael Joseph, 1981), p.127ff.
6. Ian Fleming, The Man Behind James Bond, Andrew Lycett, pp.118 and 132.
7. The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, volume 1: 1915–1938, Kenneth Young (ed.) (Macmillan, 1973), pp.153–54, 165.
8. Ian Fleming, The Man Behind James Bond, Andrew Lycett, p.223.
ONE–A SUDDEN DEATH
1. Highways and Byways of Sussex, E.V. Lucas (Macmillan & Company, 1904).