Krasin and himself, and depicting the Cheka’s chief Felix Dzerzhinsky: ‘a man turned to stone through years of travaux forcés, an ascetic and fanatic, whom the Soviet selected as head of La Terreur’. Kamenev inscribed a poem in which he likened Sheridan to Venus on a £5 banknote. He signed Bellecroft’s visitors’ book with the slogan, ‘Workers of the World Unit [sic].’10
Next month, on the eve of Kamenev’s scheduled return to Moscow with Sheridan, Lloyd George upbraided him for his part in the contraband-jewels subsidy. In order to gain political advantage, Lloyd George’s entourage spread the notion that he had given Kamenev peremptory orders to leave the country. The Prime Minister also yielded to pressure to publish the intercepts in order to justify his confrontation with Kamenev, although this compromised future SIGINT by betraying the fact that GC&CS could read Moscow’s ciphered wireless traffic. Journalists duly raised uproar about the Daily Herald diamonds under such headlines as ‘Lenin’s “Jewel Box” a War Chest’.11
When Kamenev and Sheridan left together for Moscow, Russell Cooke found an excuse to meet them at King’s Cross station, to accompany them on their train and to see them on to their ship. Sheridan’s handbag went missing on the journey, and was doubtless searched. At Newcastle it reappeared in the clutches of Russell Cooke, who claimed to have traced it to the lost luggage office. In Moscow Sheridan sculpted heads of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders. Soon afterwards, the Cheka informed Kamenev that Sheridan had lured him into staying with the brother-in-law and informant of an MI5 officer, and she found herself shunned when she returned to Moscow in 1923.12
Meanwhile, on 28 February 1921 the Daily Herald published a photograph of an imitation of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda which was circulating in England. The identifying marks of printers in Luton proved this issue to be a forgery which, as the Home Secretary admitted in the Commons, had been prepared with the help of the Home Office’s Director of Intelligence, Sir Basil Thomson. This trickery was adduced by Ewer, when MI5 interviewed him in 1950, as his reason for starting his counter-intelligence operation. In fact the groundwork had been laid before the forged Pravda incident; but it is true that his network coalesced in 1921.13
Hayes was the talent-spotter who put Ewer in touch with dismissed NUPPO activists and disaffected Special Branch officers willing to undertake political inquiries. Ewer in turn exerted his jaunty charm to inspire his operatives with team spirit. They wanted to prove that they could do a good job for him, both individually and as a group. Their skills were a source of pride to them. Shadowing and watching in the streets of London was akin to a sport that needed brains as well as agility. Smarting from their dismissals by the Metropolitan Police, they were glad to join an organization that appreciated team-work. The Vigilance brigade of detectives believed in manly self-respect and masculine prowess.
Ewer’s security officer Arthur Lakey had been born at Chatham in 1885. His father came from Tresco in the Scilly Isles: his mother was an office cleaner and munitions worker from Deptford. He worked as a railway booking clerk and in a brewery office before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1900 and serving on the torpedo training vessel HMS Vernon. He left the navy to join the Metropolitan Police in 1911, but was recalled for war service, and spent eight hours in the sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1916. After this ordeal, he kept to land and was employed as a sergeant in Special Branch. During the NUPPO struggles of 1918–19, Lakey entered General Macready’s office at Scotland Yard, rifled his desk, read confidential papers and reported their contents to NUPPO.
In 1921, while Lakey was in the Doncaster mining district raising relief funds for dismissed NUPPO activists, he was summoned by Hayes to meet Ewer in the Daily Herald offices. Ewer asked him to investigate the circumstances of the Pravda forgery, implying that the inquiry was on behalf of the Labour party. When Lakey tendered his report, Ewer told him that the work had been commissioned on behalf of the Russian government and established that he had no misgivings about undertaking further work for the same employer. He was put in contact with Nikolai Klyshko, who paid the rent of a flat at 55 Ridgmount Gardens, Bloomsbury, where Lakey lived and worked to Klyshko’s orders. Walter Dale and a policeman’s daughter named Rose Edwardes worked with Lakey in Ridgmount Gardens.
Hayes also introduced Ewer to Hubert van Ginhoven and Charles Jane, who held the ranks of inspector and sergeant in Special Branch, and were discreet NUPPO sympathizers. Ewer began paying them £20 a week to report on Special Branch registry cards on suspects, on names and addresses subject to Home Office mail intercept warrants, and on names on watch lists at major ports. They also furnished addresses of intelligence officers and personnel, and gave forewarnings of Special Branch operations. In addition Ginhoven and Jane supplied material enabling Ewer to deduce that communist organizations in foreign capitals were under SIS surveillance, which made it easier to identify SIS officers or agents abroad who were targeting these foreign organizations. Leaks were facilitated by the Special Branch practice of trusting officers with delicate political information. This guileless, unreflecting camaraderie had nothing to do with the old-school-tie outlook or class allegiances (Guy Liddell and Hugh Miller were rare within Special Branch in being privately educated). It was how men at work were expected to behave with one another.
Ginhoven, who worked under the alias of Fletcher within the Ewer–Hayes network, was a familiar visitor to the Special Branch registry, where he flirted with women clerks and snooped when they had gone home. Every week or ten days Ewer dictated an updated list supplied by Ginhoven of addresses for which Home Office warrants had been issued. These were typed in triplicate, with one copy going to Chesham House (the Soviet legation in Belgravia), another to Moscow via Chesham House and the third to the CPGB. It was found in 1929 that traces of Home Office warrants issued for Ewer’s associates, together with any intercepted letters, had vanished from the files at Scotland Yard. So, too, had compromising documents which had been seized during the police raid on CPGB headquarters in 1925.
The Vigilance detectives resembled tugs in the London docks, sturdy and work-worn, speeding hither and thither, but taken for granted and therefore unseen. The material collected by them served as tuition lessons for Soviet Russia in British tradecraft. By watching targeted individuals, Vigilance operatives identified SIS and MI5 headquarters. They shadowed employees from these offices to establish their home addresses. They tracked messengers, secretarial staff and official cars. In 1924 they realized that Kell was MI5’s chief by tracking him from his house at 67 Evelyn Gardens: surveillance was easy, because his address was in Who’s Who and the Post Office London Directory, and his chauffeur-driven car flew a distinctive blue pennant displaying the image of a tortoise with the motto ‘safe but sure’. They watched MI5 and Special Branch methods of monitoring Soviet and CPGB operations, and thus helped the Russians to study and improve the rules of the game. They checked that Ewer and his associates were not being shadowed by the British secret services. They observed embassies and legations in London, and tracked foreign diplomats. Possibly this surveillance led to the recruitment of informants, although no evidence survives of this. Vigilance men monitored employees of ARCOS, CPGB members and Russians living in England who were suspect in Moscow eyes. ‘If a Russian was caught out, invariably he was sent home and shot,’ boasted Ewer’s chief watcher in 1928.14
Ewer, under the codename HERMAN, was Moscow’s main source in London. He accompanied Nikolai Klyshko to Cheka headquarters in Moscow in 1922, and visited Józef Krasny, Russian rezident in Vienna. He returned to Moscow in 1923 in the company of Andrew Rothstein @ C. M. Roebuck, a fellow founder of the CPGB and London correspondent of the Soviet news agency ROSTA. He also became the lover of Rose Cohen. Born in Poland in 1894, the child of garment-makers, Cohen had been reared in extreme poverty in east London slums. After studying politics and economics, she joined the Labour Research Department,
