Enemies Within - Richard Davenport-Hines

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also became field marshal and CIGS, while Herbert (‘Lorenzo’) Lawrence became both a general and chairman of Vickers from 1926.18

      In contrast to the Soviet Union’s confidence after 1917 in communism’s inevitable triumph over capitalism, the rapidly expanding British Empire showed imperialism at its most pessimistic. Bravado about national destiny and chauvinism about the British genius for world leadership were super-abundant; but they always raised countervailing voices which decried the interminable wars against the weak: Zulus, Ashanti, Benin, Afghans, Burmese and others. The colonial expansion and ‘scramble for Africa’ of the 1880s and 1890s were both vaunted and beset by misgivings. ‘Military adventure … is extremely distasteful to me,’ commented Dufferin when in 1885 he was instructed by London politicians to annex Burma. ‘The Burmese are a nice people, easily managed, and I cannot bear the thought of making war upon them.’ After the conquest of Burma, Dufferin anticipated ‘nothing but trouble and annoyance’. Sir Cecil (‘Springy’) Spring Rice, future Ambassador in Washington, wrote in 1899 after the outbreak of the South African war: ‘We are surrounded in the world by a depth and intensity of hatred which is really astonishing. If we fall we shall have a hundred fangs in our throat.’ He disliked the new bellicosity: ‘Imperialism is not so bad a thing if you pay for it in your own blood, but spending 3 per-cent out of your stock exchange gains to buy people to fight for you in picturesque places, in order to provide you with interesting illustrated papers (or new investments) is a different thing.’ On the eve of the twentieth century Spring Rice saw ‘great danger threatening’ and wished British imperialists ‘hadn’t boasted and shouted so much and spoilt our own game and turned the whole thing into a burglar’s prowl’.19

      In the post-mortem after the South African war of 1899–1902, the ID was the only branch of the army to avoid censure. Scorching public anger at the humiliating defeats of British imperial forces by Boer irregulars required the Edwardian generals to submit to organizational reform: a general staff was belatedly instituted in 1904. This coincided with the reorientation of British foreign policy, which embraced its traditional enemies France and Russia as allies against its new chief adversary, Germany. The Directorate of Military Intelligence, which replaced the ID, continued the old successful methods of combining reports of British officers travelling overseas, the gleaning of OSINT from newspapers and gazettes, diplomatic and consular reports, and espionage. The Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID) relied on similar sources, supplemented by commercial and business informants. The Foreign Office however disliked the use of military and naval attachés for espionage, fearing that they might be entrapped by counter-espionage officers and thus embarrass their embassy. Accordingly, in Berlin and other power centres, service attachés collected open material by legal methods, but shunned covert or illicit acquisition of official secrets. It was partly to keep attachés clear of spy work that new security agencies were established in 1909. It is indicative of the relative standing of military and naval intelligence that the ‘MI’ in the designations ‘MI5’ and ‘MI6’ represents Military Intelligence, not Naval Intelligence.20

      The ID had further long-term influence for the good in the quality and activities of military attachés appointed to foreign embassies. They were skilled in using the well-tried ID techniques: they cultivated cordial contacts with the military officers of the countries to which they were posted; they attended manoeuvres, and watched new tactics and armoured formations; they were politically aware and kept alert to changing social and economic trends in their territories; they read newspapers and monitored specialist periodicals. Linguistic skills were a prerequisite. Noel Mason-MacFarlane, who was Military Attaché at Vienna and Budapest in 1931–5 and at Berlin in 1937–9, spoke excellent French and German and was conversant in Spanish, Hungarian and Russian. His Assistant Military Attaché in Berlin, Kenneth Strong, began intelligence work as a subaltern in Ireland in the early 1920s. During the struggle against Sinn Fein he ran informants such as railway porters, shopkeepers and barmen who would warn him of suspicious strangers in his district. He was fluent in four foreign languages and had smatterings of others. During the 1930s he was instrumental in starting the War Office’s Intelligence Corps. ‘The task of the Intelligence Officer’, Strong wrote, ‘is to exercise a spirit of positive inquiry and faculty of judgement, above all in discarding that large part of the incoming material which does not appreciably alter the known or anticipated situation, and from the residue to form a coherent and balanced picture, whether for a Supreme Commander, a Prime Minister … or for someone less elevated.’21

      The power, the pride and the reach of the British Empire seemed in constant jeopardy after the defeats in South Africa. Lord Eustace Percy, who began his diplomatic career in Washington in 1911, recalled Edwardian England as always ‘overshadowed by premonitions of catastrophe’. He had been reared in a ducal castle, but ‘whatever privileges my generation enjoyed in its youth, a sense of security was not one of them’. There was no time ‘when a European war did not seem to me the most probable of prospects, or when I forgot my first ugly taste of public disaster in the Black Week of Colenso and Magersfontein, which had darkened the Christmas school holidays of 1899’.22

      The temper of Edwardian England remained apprehensive. Newspapers profited by intensifying public anxieties. In 1906 the Daily Mail paid columns of morose men to march along Oxford Street in London wearing spiked helmets, Prussian-blue uniforms and bloodstained gloves. They carried sandwich-boards promoting a new novel of which the newspaper had bought the serialization rights, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 – a novel catering, as the Daily Mail’s shameless proprietor said, to his readers’ need for ‘a good hate’. Daily Mail readers were urged to refuse to be served by German waiters: ‘if your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport’. Le Queux was a bombastic sensationalist who pretended to intimate knowledge of European secret services. The fearful insecurity aroused by his next booming scare-stunt, Spies of the Kaiser (1909), overcame the Liberal government’s sentiment that domestic counter-espionage was a mark of despotic regimes. In October 1909 a Secret Service Bureau was established in rooms in Victoria Street.23

      After months of dispute over purposes and responsibilities, the Bureau was sub-divided. The home section, which was known as MI5 from 1915 and also after 1931 as the Security Service, was given the purview of counter-espionage, counter-subversion and counter-sabotage in Britain and its overseas territories. The foreign section, known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI1c, also later as MI6) was charged with collecting human intelligence (HUMINT) from non-British territories. In addition, Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) was formed to monitor the activities of Indian nationalists, revolutionaries and anarchists and their allies not only in Britain but across Europe. There were also three divisions of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, which had been formed in 1883 in response to Irish dynamite attacks in London. A draconian Official Secrets Act of 1911 was a further signal that national security was being treated more systematically, and also being kept determinedly from informed public comment.

      Vernon Kell, the first Director of MI5, was a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, whose father had been an English army officer and whose maternal grandfather was a Polish army surgeon. After his parents’ divorce, he travelled widely in Europe with his mother, visiting exiled members of her family and mastering French, German and other European languages. The War Office in the late 1890s posted him to Moscow and Shanghai to learn Russian and Chinese. There was no insularity about this multilingual man of action. He had the type of keen, alert efficiency that allows no time for showiness. The great hindrance to his work was that he had funds for only a small staff. Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary when European war erupted in 1914, said with revealing naivety: ‘if we spend anything on Secret Service, it must be very trifling, because it never comes to my knowledge’. As Lord Eustace Percy noted, the ‘Secret Service’ account at the Office was devoted to the financial relief of impoverished British subjects overseas.24

      There was a clear understanding by the new intelligence services of the benefits of watch-and-learn. In 1911 Heinrich Grosse was convicted of spying on the Royal

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