In Paris before 1914 the Okhrana’s surveillance of dissident émigrés had been delegated to a private detective agency, Bint et Sambain, in order to distance the Russian embassy in Paris from the watch. After 1920 the Cheka determined to use Vigilance in post-war London rather as the Okhrana had used Bint et Sambain in pre-war Paris. The agency’s detectives were soon recommended by Hayes to a young journalist named William Norman Ewer.
Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald
Norman Ewer had been born in 1885 in the middling London suburb of Hornsey. His father dealt in silk, and later moved to Muswell Hill. The family kept one live-in housemaid. Ewer rose up the rungs of the middle class by passing examinations. He attended Merchant Taylor’s School in Charterhouse Square in the City of London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won first-class degrees in mathematics and history. From an early age, he was nicknamed ‘Trilby’ because, like the heroine of George du Maurier’s novel, he liked to be barefoot. After Cambridge he became private secretary to an exotic plutocrat known as Baron de Forest.
Born in 1879, de Forest was ostensibly the son of American circus performers who died of typhoid when their troupe visited Turkey. After a spell in an orphanage, he was adopted in 1887 by the fabulously rich Baroness Hirsch, who believed that he was the illegitimate child of her dead son. He inherited a castle and many millions in 1899, was created Baron de Forest by the Austrian Emperor and converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Subsequently he settled in England, where he held the land-speed record and was the victorious radical candidate at a parliamentary by-election in 1911. He forthwith spoiled his political prospects by suing his mother-in-law for slander. In 1912 de Forest contributed to the fund launched by the Labour MP George Lansbury to save the fiercely partisan Daily Herald from insolvency. Ewer was installed as de Forest’s nominee in the Daily Herald management: he soon became, together with the young Oxford graduates G. D. H. Cole, Gerald Gould and Harold Laski, one of ‘Lansbury’s lambs’ working as a journalist there. His idealism became the overworked centre of his existence.
After the outbreak of war in 1914 Ewer opposed conscription, registered as a conscientious objector, became an indentured agricultural worker in Waldorf Astor’s pigsties at Cliveden and published anti-war verses. He was aghast at the mayhem of the Western Front, was revolted by the militarism of the Austrian, British, German and Russian monarchies, and loathed the inequities of free-market capitalism. He saw the undoubtable humbug of the British claim to be fighting for liberal democracy when its main ally was tsarist Russia, which had sponsored the pogroms of 1903–6 and sent dissidents into captivity and internal exile. As Ewer wrote in 1924, Lenin emerged as the greatest historical leader of the epoch because he saw world revolution, not national victory in the European war, as the primary aim. German socialists collaborated with German capitalism, British socialists exerted themselves for national interests, and pacifists strove for peace. ‘Only the great voice of Lenin cried from Switzerland that all were wrong; that the job of Socialists was Socialism; neither to prosecute the Imperialist war nor to stop the Imperialist war, but to snatch a Socialist victory from the conflicts of Imperialism; to turn war into revolution.’ For Ewer, like Lenin, imperialism was the apotheosis of capitalism.6
When Ewer applied for a post-war passport to visit the Netherlands and Switzerland, Gerald Gould assured the Foreign Office that the ‘extreme’ socialism preached in the Daily Herald was a bulwark against Bolshevism. Counter-espionage officers assessed him differently. ‘EWER is pro-German principally on the grounds that other Governments are not less wicked than the German,’ reported Special Branch’s Hugh Miller. ‘He preaches peace with Germany, followed by “revolution through bloodshed”.’ In Miller’s estimate, Ewer was a risk to national security: not only ‘a clever writer and fluent speaker’ but ‘a dangerous and inflammatory agitator’.7
In 1919 Ewer was appointed foreign editor of the Daily Herald. He collaborated during that year with the pro-Bolshevik MP Cecil L’Estrange Malone and a director of the Daily Herald named Francis Meynell in formulating a programme for a Sailors’, Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Union which would certainly have been revolutionary in intent. Ewer became a founding member of the CPGB in 1920, and liaised between the newspaper, CPGB headquarters in King Street and Nikolai Klyshko, who was both secretary of the Soviet delegation that arrived in London in May 1920 to negotiate a trade agreement and the Cheka chief in London. Klyshko controlled Soviet espionage in Britain, and funded subversion, until his recall from London in 1923.
George Lansbury visited Moscow and met Lenin in 1920. ‘I shall always esteem it the greatest event in my life that I was privileged to see this fine, simple, wise man’, he wrote in besotted terms in his memoirs. Lenin was ‘a great man in every sense of the word’, who held supreme national power and yet remained ‘unaffected and without personal pride’. Lansbury, who became chairman of the Labour party in 1927 and its leader in 1932, told the party conference at Birmingham in 1928 that the Bolshevik revolution had been ‘the greatest and best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world’. Socialists should rejoice that the ‘fearful autocracy’, which ruled from the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the Volga to the Pacific, had been replaced by that magnificent venture in state socialism, the Soviet Union. ‘The peasants and workers of that great nation, encircled by implacable foes who ceaselessly intrigue, conspire and work to restore Czardom, need our sympathy and help, and we need theirs.’ It was the role of the Daily Herald, thought Lansbury and his lambs, to provide and receive sympathetic help.8
In August 1920 GC&CS intercepted and deciphered a signal from Lev Kamenev, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader and acting head of the Soviet trade delegation, reporting that he had given to the Daily Herald a subsidy of £40,000 raised by selling precious stones. In return, it was understood that the newspaper would be the mouthpiece of Moscow on Anglo-Russian relations and would support Bolshevik agitation and propaganda against the Lloyd George government. Meynell, the courier used to smuggle many of these jewels, made several visits to Copenhagen to meet Moscow’s star diplomat Maxim Litvinov. The surveillance of these meetings was comically blatant: a window-cleaner appeared on a ladder, and a banister-polisher on the landing, whenever Meynell entered Litvinov’s hotel suite. Once Meynell returned from Copenhagen with two strings of pearls secreted in a jar of butter. On another occasion he posted a box of chocolate creams, each containing a pearl or diamond, to his friend the philosopher Cyril Joad. All these shenanigans were known to Ewer, although it may have been kept from him that £10,000 of the jewels money was invested in the Anglo-Russian Three Ply and Veneer Company run by George Lansbury’s sons Edgar and William. Edgar Lansbury was a member of the CPGB, who in 1924 was elected communist mayor of Poplar. His mother-in-law, Hannah (‘Annie’) Glassman, was used to convert the jewels into cash.9
MI5 resorted to family connections and social contacts in order to handle Kamenev and the Daily Herald. Jasper Harker had recently married Margaret Russell Cooke at a Mayfair church. She was the sister of Sidney (‘Cookie’) Russell Cooke, an intellectual stockbroker and Liberal parliamentary candidate, who had inherited a fine house on the Isle of Wight called Bellecroft. Russell Cooke had been a lover of Maynard Keynes, whose lifelong friend and business associate he remained, and was the son-in-law of the captain of the Titanic. Virginia Woolf called him ‘a shoving young man, who wants to be smart, cultivated, go-ahead & all the rest of it’. Harker used his brother-in-law to compromise Kamenev. Russell Cooke invited Kamenev and the latter’s London girlfriend Clare Sheridan, who was a sculptor, Winston Churchill’s cousin and a ‘parlour bolshevik’, first to lunch at Claridge’s and then to stay at Bellecroft for an August weekend. Lounging on rugs by the tennis court, Kamenev spoke vividly for over an hour, ‘stumbling along in his bad French’, about the inner history of the revolution
