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 did not erupt into riots. Men parading in Trafalgar Square holding aloft banners bearing empty slogans – ‘Workers of the World, Unite’, ‘Long Live the World Solidarity of the Proletariat’, ‘Walthamstow Old Comrades’, ‘Balham Branch of the Juvenile Workers League’ – never endangered national security.9
Westminster and Whitehall worried, though, about Walthamstow and Balham. The police strike of August 1918, the return of demobilized troops after the Armistice in November 1918 and firebrand propagandists led to the inauguration of the Cabinet’s Secret Service Committee in February 1919 and to the formation of the Home Office’s Directorate of Intelligence, which was charged with combating domestic sedition. The Directorate’s chief Sir Basil Thomson (hitherto head of Special Branch) reported direct to the Cabinet. His summaries of opinion and sentiment from across the country – intelligence from human sources (later called HUMINT) – were a piecemeal version of the Cheka’s surveillance of opinion. In time his reports were recognized by their recipients as opinionated, subjective and contradictory. His animosity towards workers, foreigners, theoreticians, voters and those elected leaders who had the temerity to disagree with him led to increasing mistrust of his product. Suspicions that he had made disruptive, unauthorized leaks of foreign signals and communications (since known as SIGINT) prompted his dismissal in 1921. As a reaction to Thomson’s biased HUMINT, Cabinet ministers and senior officials preferred SIGINT because it seemed neutral and enabled them, if they chose, to assess it themselves without tendentious interpretations urged on them by forceful outside advisers.
Good intelligence officers remind their customers that they cannot give iron-clad guarantees about the future, although they can make informed predictions. This wariness does not make them beloved by politicians in search of certainties or by officials who want to limit the risk of mistakes. In the 1920s particularly, when Westminster politicians and Whitehall officials were still inexperienced in the techniques and benefits of intelligence-collection, SIS and MI5 were not cherished. There was more concern about subversion than about espionage. It seemed preferable to pay for police to
