Throughout his employment with Sir Herbert, Rayner was reading for the Bar. He was admitted with Honours in the Bar finals of 1914, and when the war began he joined the Officer Training Corps of the Inns of Court in September 1914. The Corps had immediately been embodied as a territorial force on the outbreak of war and had initiated a crash training programme for those seeking commissions. Rayner was among twenty-one new recruits to a company under Lt Reggie Trench, who initially described them as ‘an awful rabble’. They were immediately sent off to Richmond Park to begin the basic training that would ultimately lead most of them to service regiments on the Western Front. Rayner appears to have been an exception. In October 1914, a little over a month after he joined the Corps, he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, Interpreter. He was fluent in French, German, Russian and Swedish. It is generally known that Col Francis Errington, the Corps CO, actively resisted attempts by junior officers to transfer out. However, within three months Rayner had been seconded to ‘special duties’ in the Intelligence Department of the War Office.
Quite how and why, in January of 1915, he was given this secondment can only be the subject of speculation. Whether certain linguists like Rayner were simply identified by the War Office and transferred accordingly, or whether he had a sponsor who guided him in the direction of intelligence work, is unclear. He certainly had a number of influential political contacts in Whitehall through his employment with Sir Herbert Samuel, and as we shall see later on, he would not have been the first person to lobby for such a post.
It was while working for the War Office in 1915 that Rayner made the brief acquaintance of another junior officer, one Lt George Hill, who had initially gone to Ypres on the Western Front in a Canadian infantry battalion attached to the Manchester Regiment. Following a serious injury while on a mission in No Man’s Land, the multi-lingual Hill had then been seconded to the War Office’s Intelligence Department. Both Hill and Rayner, like other new recruits to the department, had a four-week course on intelligence work which covered shadowing, methods of using invisible inks, code and cipher systems and lock-picking among other skills. While their time together in London was to be brief, their paths would cross again some three years later when they would be among the first agents recruited to the new Stockholm SIS station run by Major John Scale.
Towards the end of 1915 Hill was sent to Greece, where he was to work with agents behind enemy lines. Not long after his departure, Rayner was also given his first intelligence posting abroad. In November of 1915 he and Major Vere Benet were assigned to the British Intelligence Mission in Petrograd, where they were to take up responsibility for censorship. In a memo to Sir Samuel Hoare written shortly after Rasputin’s murder, Vere Benet discusses the nature of their censorship responsibilities and describes what ‘Rayner and I have done, are doing and still hope to do’:
Censorship does not mean reading private correspondence in the spirit of inquisitive curiosity, but is rather a branch of military intelligence, which if rightly used, is of great assistance to the Allies.
…I have avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs (except trade), and passed onto them all such internal matters as espionage and politics. I have impressed on them that my object, besides helping them, is to obtain information regarding the activity of the Scandinavian and neutral countries, whose agents act as intermediaries for German trade… MI8 wrote to me recently, ‘The copies you send are most useful to the Shipping Department of the Blockade and give us an entirely new and fresh lot of Scandinavian names’. Extracts from intercepted correspondence also show the enemy’s appreciation of ‘English Censorship’.9
Despite his claim to have ‘avoided all interference in purely Russian affairs’, it very much depends on how one interprets the words ‘avoided’ and ‘interference’. Benet and Rayner’s definition seems to have meant intercepting Russian communications of all kinds on a grand scale and, when they felt so inclined, sharing some of them with their Russian counterparts without playing any active role in what ensued. The report is also a very firm confirmation of the fact that very little news or information was changing hands between friends and foes alike in Petrograd without Benet and Rayner being in the know. Benet himself states elsewhere in the memo that he has ‘read, censored and made notes on some 28, 000 telegrams since April 1916’.
In wartime the Russian Imperial General Staff gave over part of their offices to the French and British Intelligence Missions. They were housed with various Russian government and police departments in a semi-circular sweep of offices, pierced by an arch over a busy road, overlooking the square in front of the Winter Palace. Almost all the British contingent spoke Russian fluently. Some, like Rayner, were censors. Others were engaged in identifying enemy units on the Russian front. This did not involve camouflage and binoculars. It was a desk job, usually accomplished by piecing together whatever snippets of news reached them from other theatres of war and working out which Germans the Russians must be fighting by a process of elimination.
Samuel Hoare, who had a nice eye for detail, wrote a wry account of what he found when he arrived at the Mission in the spring of 1916.
True to Russian type, the façade was the best part of the building. At the back of the General Staff was a network of smelly yards and muddy passages that made entrance difficult and health precarious. Inside, the bureaucracy showed its unshaken power by maintaining a temperature that in those days of fuel shortage was far beyond the reach of any private house… Our caps and galoshes were left in the keeping of a Finnish gendarme in a stuffy waiting-room. The Finn’s other duty was to bring us tea during the day.
Soon after my arrival, two tiresome events happened in the Mission. One of my galoshes was missed from the waiting-room, and the samovar simultaneously struck work.
Inevitably, the two crises were linked, the galosh having been left to stew in the samovar for several days. Office life, with its hourly glasses of sugar-laden tea, crawled by at a sluggish pace. There were time-wasting formalities when Russians visited the British office and vice versa; according to Russian military protocol, all personnel had to shake hands with everyone in the room on arrival and departure, and must wear swords at all times. The system was almost paralysed by this kind of thing, not to mention other imperatives to stop work.
Upon all public holidays the General Staff was closed, and our office with it… There were no less than fifteen public holidays in the month of May and five on end in the last week of August owing to a perfect covey of saint’s days and national anniversaries… Upon the Church festivals that were not important enough to be honoured with a whole holiday, services of considerable length would be held in the General Staff chapel… Even when the department was working, the hours were uncertain, and it was never easy to make an appointment with a Russian colleague. I remember, for instance, that at the time of my arrival the Quartermaster General, the senior officer of the General Staff, made a common habit of arriving at his office at about eleven at night, and of working until seven or eight the next morning.