LITMIR.BIZ

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paper-trail.

      The arrest of spies was not the invariable first object of counter-espionage. It was often more profitable to watch and learn. If a spy was allowed to go free, watchers could study his methods and identify his contacts. That was why SIS betrayed its inexperience of domestic counter-espionage when, in 1927, its men arrested Georg Hansen, the Soviet handler of the spy Wilfred Macartney, three days after his arrival in England, before he had found his bearings or met his contacts. Arrests might lead to exciting public denouements, but counter-espionage officers prefer to accumulate and refine intelligence rather than arrest suspects, put them on trial and thus risk disclosure of their methods.

      One early example of their watch-and-learn procedure can be given. Theodore Rothstein was ‘a short, stumpy, bearded, bespectacled revolutionary who looked like Karl Marx’. Before 1914 he had collaborated with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s campaigns against British imperialism in Egypt and India: during the war he was a triple agent working for Lenin’s Bolsheviks, British military intelligence and the Turkish secret service. In 1919 he wished Leonard Woolf, a former colonial official turned radical activist, to publish Lenin’s recent speeches and insisted on delivering the texts in person. Woolf was instructed to walk on the inside of the pavement along the Strand eastwards towards Fleet Street on a Wednesday afternoon, timing it so that he passed under the clock of the Law Courts at 2.30. At that exact moment he met Rothstein walking westwards from Fleet Street on the outside of the pavement. Rothstein carried in his right hand an envelope containing Lenin’s speeches, which, without either man speaking or looking at each other, he transferred into Woolf’s right hand. These precautions were in vain, for Rothstein was shadowed everywhere by Special Branch and the handover was seen. A few days later the police raided Woolf’s printers and seized the documents. Although Rothstein was kept under surveillance, he had been neither arrested nor dismissed from his wartime job at the War Office: officials judged that it was better to keep him in sight rather than expel him to Russia, where out of reach he might prove a dangerous opponent. This was a pattern of behaviour that was to be repeated in cases over the next century.³

      In 1919 there was a sensation when the miners’ leader Robert Smillie, as a member of the Royal Commission on the Coal Industry, browbeat three coal-mining magnates, the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquess of Londonderry and the Earl of Durham, and quoted egalitarian extracts from the Christian gospels at them. ‘The public is amused by the spectacle, but few realize its sinister significance,’ commented Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham. ‘The very foundations of the whole social fabric are challenged. The tables are plainly turned; and it requires very little to transform the Commission into a revolutionary tribunal, and Smillie into an English Lenin … preparing an immense catastrophe.’⁴

      Lord D’Abernon, who was an eyewitness to the Russian advance into Poland in 1920, felt sure that ‘Western civilisation was menaced by an external danger which, coming into being during the war, threatened a cataclysm equalled only by the fall of the Roman Empire.’ He had little hope that the European powers would forget their rivalries and combine to prevent ‘world-victory of the Soviet creed’. The communist threat to ‘England’s stupendous and vital interests in Asia’ was graver than those posed by the old tsarist regime, judged D’Abernon, for ‘the Bolsheviks disposed of two weapons which Imperial Russia lacked – class-revolt propaganda, appealing to the proletariat of the world, and the quasi-religious fanaticism of Lenin, which infused a vigour and zeal unknown to the officials and emissaries of the Czar’.⁵

      There was no English Lenin. The nearest home-grown version of him was the foolhardy Cecil L’Estrange Malone. Born in 1890, the son of a Yorkshire clergyman and nephew of the Earl of Liverpool, he entered the Royal Navy in 1905, and trained as a pioneer naval aviator in 1911. He flew off the fo’c’sle of a battleship steaming at 12 knots in 1912, planned the historic bombing raid by seaplanes on Cuxhaven harbour on Christmas Day of 1914 and commanded the Royal Navy’s converted packet-steamer from which the first seaplanes flew to drop torpedoes from the air and to sink enemy vessels in 1916. He became a lieutenant colonel aged twenty-seven, and the first air attaché at a British embassy – Paris – in 1918. With this reputation for derring-do Malone was elected as a Liberal MP in the general election after the Armistice. Crossing frontiers illicitly, making night marches through forests and swamps and armed with a Browning automatic, he reached Petrograd in 1919. There he met Litvinov, Chicherin and Trotsky, visited factories and power stations under workers’ control and was converted to communism. He forsook the Liberals and joined the CPGB at its formation in 1920. He was thus the first communist MP to sit in the House of Commons (two years before the election of Walton Newbold). In October 1920 Special Branch raided his flat in Chalk Farm, and arrested Erkki Veltheim, a twenty-two-year-old Comintern courier from Finland who was in possession of seditious literature. Although Veltheim was evidently staying as a guest, Malone pretended that he was a burglar who had broken in while he was away. The young Finn was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, and then deported. During the police search of the flat in Wellington House, they found two railway-cloakroom tickets wrapped in plain unmarked paper inside an envelope addressed to Malone. The tickets led them to parcels containing a booklet, probably written by Malone, which was a training manual for officers of a British ‘Red Army’. It contained instructions on improvised guerrilla tactics, street-fighting, execution of provocateurs and traitors, machine-gun drill, building barricades by overturning buses and trams, blockading coal-mines, seizing banks and post offices, cutting telephone and telegraph lines, and instigating naval mutinies.⁶

      At a meeting organized by the CPGB and the Hands Off Russia Committee, held at the Royal Albert Hall on 7 November 1920, Malone made an inflammatory speech extolling the Bolshevik revolution and denouncing ‘the humbug’ of traditional parliamentary candidates. Capitalist manipulation of the proletariat was foundering, he averred: ‘the day will soon come when we shall pass blessings on the British revolution, when you meet here as delegates of the first all-British congress of workers, sailors and soldiers. When that day comes, woe to all those people who get in our way. We are out to change the present constitution, and if it is necessary to save bloodshed and atrocities we shall have to use the lamp-posts.’ From the Albert Hall stage he promised vengeance to an audience of over 8,000 Bolshevik sympathizers: ‘What, my friends, are a few Churchills or a few Curzons on lamp-posts compared with the massacres of thousands of human beings? … What is the punishment of these world-criminals compared to the misery which they are causing to thousands of women and little children in Soviet Russia?’ At this juncture there were cries of ‘Hang them’, ‘Burn them’ and ‘Shoot them’.⁷

      Malone was arrested and tried for sedition. The prosecutor at Malone’s trial, Travers Humphreys, suggested that ‘young alien East End Jews of a disorderly type’ in the Albert Hall audience might have been roused by Malone’s violent exhortations. As to the revolutionary pamphlet, Humphreys warned that in many large British towns there were ‘persons of weak intellect, of vicious and criminal instincts, largely aliens, who will … act in response to any incitement for looting, murdering and brawling’. Malone was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment: his mother died of dismay a few weeks later. On his release he went abroad to recover, refused to respond to CPGB overtures and failed to organize a campaign to defend his parliamentary seat at the 1922 general election. Subsequently he travelled in the Balkans, visited Siberia, China and Japan, and rethought his ideas. As a Labour candidate avowing constitutionalism and disavowing extra-parliamentarianism, he was re-elected as an MP in a by-election of 1928 but lost his seat three years later. He then became an international wheeler-dealer, working for the Armenian oil millionaire Calouste Gulbenkian to extend Soviet influence in the Persian oilfields, and from 1934 served as the paid propagandist of Tokyo, running the venal East Asia News Service, defending Japan’s invasion and atrocities in Manchuria, acting as London agent of the South Manchuria Railway and operating the Japan Travel Bureau.⁸

      Malone was a Lenin who took two years to fizzle out. The civil war in Ireland in 1920–2 caused little disruptive aftermath elsewhere in the British Isles. The workers’ challenge to capitalism represented by the General Strike in 1926 was only moderately divisive. The extension of the parliamentary franchise to younger women in 1927 was a voluntary act by the government rather than a sop to appease civil unrest. Demonstrations against high regional unemployment

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