LITMIR.BIZ

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Oldham

      One of the leading figures in Room 22 and the Mine was Ernest Oldham. Born in 1894 in Lower Edmonton, he was the son of schoolteachers. Most of his education was at Tottenham County School, although he spent some months at an obscure sixth-form boarding school near Staines in Middlesex. In 1914, aged nineteen, he joined the Chief Clerk’s Department at the Foreign Office. As a junior officer on the Western Front in 1917–18 he endured bombardment and poison-gas attacks amid the trenches, dug-outs, shell-holes and mine-craters. He was never one of those Englishmen who were reconciled to the carnage of the Western Front by leaving wreaths of Haig poppies at the base of war memorials.

      In his determination to rise from the ranks, Oldham made himself into a proficient French-speaker. His bilingualism resulted in his appointment in 1919 as a clerk at the Paris Peace Conference. During his six months in the French capital he mastered its streets and by-ways, which was to prove helpful when years later he needed to escape surveillance. After returning from Paris, Oldham applied for admission into the Consular Service. There seemed a chance of his appointment as Third Consul at Rio de Janeiro, for in addition to good French he had reasonable knowledge of Spanish, Italian and German. After some hesitation, he was rejected by the promotion board in 1920, but offered a post in the Communications Department. This was insufficient salve, for Oldham aspired to the social cachet of the Consular Service.

      Like other men in the department, Oldham doubled as a King’s Messenger. He visited Constantinople and other Balkan capitals as well as closer destinations. In May 1922 he was sent by air – travelling in a fragile single-engine biplane – to deliver a document intended for King George V, who was visiting war cemeteries in Belgium. These travels made him adept at buying and selling foreign currencies at good rates. The offices of every embassy or legation in a foreign capital were alike, with similar stationery, filing cabinets, pencils, punches and calendars and the same red copies of the Foreign Office List and Who’s Who, as Owen O’Malley recounted. ‘In the residential part of the house too, though the servants may be white or black or yellow, there will be the same kindly discipline, the same Lux [soap], Ronuk [floor-polish], chintz, pot-plants, water-colours, large bath towels and Bromo [a patent cure for hangovers and upset stomachs], which the Englishman carries round the world like a snail its shell: which form indeed the temple and fortress of his soul.’ To these familiar surroundings King’s Messengers brought office talk from Whitehall and from other European capitals, and exchanged it for local gossip. All the staff, from the Ambassador downwards, pumped Oldham about diplomatic trends, promotions, political currents and whatever was afoot in London.¹⁰

      Oldham was given charge of managing the routes for King’s Messengers across Europe. The location of the League of Nations in Geneva required his frequent visits to Switzerland, either as a courier of documents or as an encrypter and decrypter. For ten years meetings of the League there were held in the Hôtel Victoria. ‘By day the hotel was a babel of strange sounds,’ as Slocombe remembered: ‘conversations in many languages, the machine-gun rattle of typewriters, the shrilling of telephone bells, and the whine of the mimeograph machines multiplying copies of speeches just made in the drab hall beyond the faded plush of those Victorian sitting-rooms’. At night there was heavy drinking and poker. It was into this mêlée that the boy from Tottenham County School was pitched.¹¹

      A change in Oldham’s circumstances came in 1927 when, falsely describing his father as a gentleman and giving the Foreign Office as his home address, he married a prosperous Australian widow twelve years his senior. With his wife’s money, they bought 31 Pembroke Gardens (near Kensington High Street) and employed two housemaids and a chauffeur for their Sunbeam coupé. Oldham filled his wardrobe with monogrammed clothes, and could afford to drink spirits more deeply than ever. ‘He arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen, and fared sumptuously,’ said Antrobus. ‘So sumptuously … that he contracted delirium tremens.’ As an auspicious sequel to this marriage, Oldham was promoted to be Staff Officer of the Communications Department in 1928.¹²

      In October 1929 Gregori Bessedovsky, the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires in Paris, who had been ordered back to Moscow for punishment after being denounced for criticizing Stalin’s maltreatment of the peasantry, fled over the embassy wall and was granted asylum by the French government. Maurice Oldfield, a future head of SIS, used to say that ‘defectors are like grapes; the first pressings are always the best’. Wilfred (‘Biffy’) Dunderdale, SIS’s station head in Paris, who had spent his boyhood in Odessa and spoke Russian fluently, interviewed Bessedovsky three days after his defection, but did not press him well. Dunderdale discounted Bessedovsky’s material because he found him sharp, ‘but neither frank nor principled’. Although Dunderdale had a reputation for shrewdness, he was prone to SIS’s cultural contempt for foreigners. ‘British intelligence’, recalled Elizabeth Poretsky, ‘appeared to consider the Soviets mere rabble.’¹³

      Early reports of Bessedovsky’s revelations were garbled, but indicated that some months earlier an Englishman had called at the Russian embassy offering secret cipher books of the British government. The ‘walk-in’, as such unheralded visitors were called, was seen by the OGPU Director Vladimir Ianovich (born Wilenski), a coarse man who had previously been a dock-worker. Ianovich’s wife managed OGPU finances in Paris (she received large dollar bills in the diplomatic mail, and exchanged them for francs). Her impersonations of a Hungarian countess in Berlin, of a Persian diplomat’s wife in Vienna and of a diamond merchant’s widow in Prague were admired by the illegals, although her husband was not. Ianovich took away the codebooks, saying that he had to show them to the Ambassador, but gave them instead to his wife, who had a brightly lit room for taking photographs and a well-equipped darkroom for developing them. After she had copied the codebooks, Ianovich – either suspecting an agent provocateur’s trap or wishing to save OGPU money – threw them back at the walk-in Englishman and ejected him from the embassy in an insulting fashion.

      SIS continued to assess Bessedovsky as shifty, talkative and imprudent. This was not far wrong: years later he tried to make money by forging the journals of Maxim Litvinov, the former Foreign Affairs Commissar of the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1929, Special Branch did not investigate his tale of purloined codebooks. Norman Ewer’s Daily Herald on 29 October pooh-poohed Bessedovsky’s information in a manner that suited Russian interests: it depicted the fugitive diplomat as an opportunist whose stories were derided in Whitehall. If leakages had occurred, the Communications Department was a likely source, and its Staff Officer, Oldham, should have led an investigation. He was however both the walk-in with the codebooks and absent undergoing treatment for alcoholism from mid-October until March 1930. It can be surmised that his collapse began with a panicky binge after Bessedovsky’s story appeared in London newspapers.

      Bessedovsky’s warning was duplicated in 1930 by Georges Agabekov, then the most senior OGPU officer to have defected. The English parents of his young girlfriend complained to the French authorities that he was a seducer who had alienated her loyalty to them: he was deported to Belgium (more on grounds of public morality than national security) in July 1930. After his deportation, Jasper Harker, head of MI5’s B Division (investigations and inquiries), Guy Liddell of Special Branch and Jane Sissmore, who was MI5’s specialist in Russian community activity, agreed that Agabekov and his correspondence should be put under surveillance. Liddell was sent to interview him in Brussels, and maintained telephonic contact with Sissmore while in the Belgian capital. Agabekov was pressed about the Soviet agent who was obtaining Foreign Office secrets (now known to be the Rome embassy servant, Francesco Constantini). He described OGPU’s network of agents and their operations to Liddell. He also reported that Moscow received copies of the secret exchanges between the Foreign Office and the High Commissioner in Egypt, Lord Lloyd. This renewed confirmation of a breach in coded traffic was reported to the Foreign Office. It is known that the Communications Department led an internal investigation, but the identity and report of the investigators are unknown. Agabekov made similar revelations in newspaper articles and in two essays which were published together in a garbled, facetious English edition in 1931.

      The truth behind the tales of Bessedovsky and Agabekov was that in July 1929 Oldham had gone to the Russian embassy in Paris with two books bound in red buckram containing Foreign Office,

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