Émigré and dissident groups always find it hard to vet new recruits effectively. Any publicly identifiable member becomes an easy target for bullying, blackmail or bribery. Once penetrated, such groups become an asset to their foes, not a threat. Only outfits with small memberships based on close personal friendships have a chance of escaping this fate. That was not the hallmark of the amateurish and feuding Russian diaspora in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the Baltic émigrés in the 1940s and 1950s. Add the extra unreliability caused by affiliation, real or imagined, with the secret world, and it is easy to see how Western intelligence services were ensnared in Bolshevik plots. As the official historian of SIS writes, ‘1920s Europe was full of dubious White Russian characters representing themselves as secret agents.’36 They produced little intelligence of any significance37 but sometimes did real damage: asserting, for example, that the Soviet Union was fomenting insurrection in Ireland and India. Britain issued a thunderous protest, only to be embarrassed when a Soviet response proved that the intelligence, far from being drawn straight from the Politburo (as claimed) was entirely fabricated. SIS bosses complained, and vainly introduced new rules designed to prevent the service paying good money for forged documents. As the British purse strings tightened in the 1930s, many agents began diversifying their sources of income, particularly by offering their services to the Abwehr (German military intelligence).
Phoney intelligence particularly affected Riga, the most productive of SIS’s stations in the region. Its best agent was a local Russian journalist who supposedly ran a network of eleven sub-sources. An investigation in 1928 concluded that many if not most were bogus: producing entirely imaginary information, for example, about a Russian ‘death ray’.[49] Reporting from Riga also led to one of the greatest howlers in the history of SIS. Published in the Daily Mail on 24 October 1924, it purported to be a letter from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern – the organisation through which the Bolshevik leadership coordinated its activities with foreign communist parties – urging the British Communist Party to lead an insurrection. The story came in the run-up to a general election in which Britain’s Labour Party, in office for the first time, in a minority government, was hoping to hold on to power. The letter was not decisive: though the Conservative party won the election, Labour’s vote went up. But many suspect that right-wing elements in SIS cooked up the ‘leaked’ letter, supposedly provided by a sub-agent called FR/3/Moscow, employed in the secretariat of the Comintern (the office which linked the Soviet leadership with foreign communist parties). Riga had filed it to London with a covering note38 flagging the ‘strong incitement to armed revolution’ and a ‘flagrant violation’ of the newly signed Anglo-Russian agreement. SIS also asserted that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’. Worse, when the Foreign Office tried to verify the letter SIS claimed (probably falsely) that another agent had corroborated the content. The most elementary checks were missing. Had SIS obtained the letter in English or in Russian? Who exactly was the sub-agent? SIS was unable or unwilling to give firm clear answers and came close to outright lies.39
The exceptions to this rather unimpressive performance came from British intelligence links with their local counterparts, especially in Estonia (history may not repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes). An agent called ‘Baron’, run by Carr, reported the start of secret Nazi–Soviet negotiations in the spring of 1939, and confirmed in June that they were making good progress. But the desk officer at SIS headquarters in London refused to circulate this intelligence further, believing that the agent could not possibly have had the access necessary.40 It contradicted the Foreign Office line, that its envoy to Moscow Sir William Strang was making progress on an Anglo-Soviet agreement. The same fate befell another scoop a year later. Although SIS closed its Baltic stations in September 1940 following the Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, many of the agent networks remained, mostly run from Helsinki. A British agent codenamed ‘Outcast’, formerly run from Tallinn, presented himself to the Helsinki station in September 1940.41 A Russian émigré living in Berlin (but with no love for the Nazis), he had escaped from Tallinn with German help, in return for agreeing to work for the Abwehr against Russia. Now he wanted to spy against them, for the British. In November 1940 he reported to his British case officer: ‘German command preparing (June) campaign against USSR.’ Sadly, Carr dismissed this as ‘incredible’ and probably mere propaganda.
Had politicians in London heeded the SIS sources and gained advance warning of the Hitler–Stalin pact, what could they have done? The deal was the culmination of a long period of diplomatic and political failure, in which Britain and France had been outmanoeuvred and Hitler had seen obstacles to his expansion plans melt one by one. It is hard to imagine even the most piercing intelligence insight reversing that. Nor is it easy to see what Britain would have done with the warning of Hitler’s assault on the Soviet Union. Stalin had plenty of warnings from other sources: he usually responded by punishing the messenger. Exercises in speculative history are as unrewarding as they are tempting. Yet it is hard not to feel frustration that such accurate intelligence went unnoticed. The wider lesson, if any, is that espionage is valuable only when decision-makers let the results change their thinking. Spies may provide confirmation only that the currents in the depths and shallows are similar. If they offer a different version of events, or prediction of them, officials and politicians must be willing to act on what they are told.
That is one weakness of Western intelligence even in the present day. Readers trying to understand why Russian spymasters so frequently run rings round their Western counterparts will also find it striking that so many other mistakes of the past are replicated so frequently. The tendency to pay good money for bad intelligence is deeply ingrained. Even after the fiascos of the early years, most intelligence from the interwar Baltic was barrel-scrapings, as this downbeat vignette illustrates.
Baltic agent ‘BP/24’ who was resident in Moscow and had ‘connections in Soviet institutions’, agreed for a retainer of £50 a month to ‘send information three times monthly’ about political matters and ‘on subject of propaganda’. After his own involvement with OGPU (who blackmailed him over gambling debts) was discovered, he was charged with treason but escaped to Austria, where he continued to peddle intelligence on Russia until the early 1930s. There he was reported to be employed by the Nazi Intelligence Office in Berlin and was offering reports to SIS though a mutual contact in Finland. By 1934 (as SIS discovered in 1946 from captured German documents) he had graduated to the Abwehr, was reporting to them on Russia and into the bargain had passed them an SIS questionnaire on Russia received from his Finnish contact.42
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aw It is tempting to speculate that this real-life example may have inspired Graham Greene, himself an SIS officer, with the mysterious giant suction device – in fact a domestic vacuum cleaner writ large – depicted in