in 1929, was among the men who became infatuated with this ardent, clever and alluring beauty, whom Ivy Litvinov described as ‘a sort of jüdische rose’. Cohen criss-crossed Europe after 1922 as a London-based Comintern courier and money mule. Eventually she committed herself to a monstrously ugly charmer, Max Petrovsky @ David Lipetz @ Max Goldfarb, a Ukrainian who translated Lenin’s works into Yiddish and went to England, using the alias of Bennett, as Comintern’s liaison with the CPGB. Together Cohen and Petrovsky moved in 1927 to Moscow, where her manners were thought grandiose by other communist expatriates.15
Ewer returned from Moscow in 1923 with boosted self-esteem and instructions, or the implanted idea, to run his espionage activities under the cover of a news agency. Until then, it had been based in Lakey’s Bloomsbury flat, or later in premises at Leigh-on-Sea: Ewer had met Lakey and other operatives either in cafés or at the Daily Herald offices. Accordingly, in 1923, Ewer leased room 50 in an office building called Outer Temple at 222 The Strand, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice at the west end of Fleet Street. There he opened the London branch of the Federated Press Agency of America, a news service which had been founded in 1919 to report strikes, trade unionism, workers’ militancy and radical activism. The FPA issued twice-weekly bulletins of news, comment and data to its left-wing subscribers. It was based first in Chicago, shifted its offices to Detroit and then Washington, before settling in New York. The FPA had developed reciprocal relations with socialist, communist and trade union newspapers internationally and acted as an information clearing-house in the United States and Europe. It may have served broad Comintern interests, but was not a front organization for Moscow. According to Ewer, the only American in the FPA who knew that its London office operated as a cover for Russian spying was its managing editor, Carl Haessler, a pre-war Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Moscow sometimes sent money to Haessler in New York, who remitted funds either to the communist bookshop-owner Eva Reckitt in London or to the Paris correspondent of the Daily Herald, George Slocombe. Usually dollars arrived in the diplomatic bag at Chesham House and were distributed to the FPA and the CPGB by Khristian Rakovsky, Soviet plenipotentiary in London from 1923 and Ambassador from 1925. An associate of Ewer’s named Walter Holmes (sometime Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald) converted the dollars into sterling by exchanging small amounts at travel agencies and currency bureaux. These arrangements ended after the ARCOS raid in 1927.
For a time Ewer had a source in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), who was dropped because the product was suspected of being phoney. Ewer had a sub-source in the Foreign Office, who reported confidential remarks made by two officials, Sir Arthur Willert of the Press Department and J. D. Gregory of the Northern Department; but his network never obtained original FO documents which could be sent to Moscow for verification. Probably the remitted material from the Foreign Office and India Office was limited to low-grade gossip. Don Gregory, the Office’s in-house Russian expert until 1928, enjoyed his half-hour briefings with Ewer, whose facetious anti-semitism amused him: ‘he is an admirable and loyal friend, though I have heard him described as a dangerous bolshevik’. The only diplomatic documents obtained by Ewer’s network came from his second prong in Paris, where his sub-agent was the Daily Herald correspondent George Slocombe.16
Slocombe had been born in 1894, and grew up in the semi-industrial northern districts of Bristol called Horfield and Bishopston. He was baptized in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. His father was a commercial traveller (who left an estate worth only £268 in 1929). He attended the Merchant Adventurers’ Technical College at Bristol, where his best friend was a lively peasant boy from Touraine on a government scholarship. In July 1909, aged fifteen, Slocombe was appointed as a boy clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank, behind London’s Olympia, which had recently been converted from a hippodrome into an exhibition centre for motor-cars and furnishings. According to the 1911 census, he lived nearby at 63 West Kensington Mansions, as a friend rather than a lodger, with Emma Karlinsky, who had come to England from the Crimea in 1909 with her two daughters, Fanny and Marie. Her husband Joseph was an attorney at Yalta and business adviser to a grand duke.
Young Slocombe arranged nearby accommodation for his French friend, who had meanwhile adopted the name of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. He was proud of being the sculptor’s most intimate English friend: when he started a Post Office Savings Bank internal magazine, a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing decorated its cover. Slocombe’s sonnet raging against tyrants and celebrating the assassination of the Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin in 1911 was published in the Marxist magazine Justice. ‘Nobody then foresaw’, Slocombe recalled a quarter of a century later, ‘the day when the theories contained in the badly printed, red-covered volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital would become the official religion of a hundred and sixty million people seated astride Europe and Asia.’17
As an impressionable youth, Slocombe was drawn by the anarchism of Kropotkin. He found a mentor in a stern, gloomy Scottish-Italian recluse, who lived, worked and slept in a book-lined cellar under a Hammersmith tailor’s shop. This underground cell, which daylight never reached, was the haunt of nihilistic young workmen, French, Russian and Spanish exiles, and the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who had escaped from an Italian prison-fortress and worked as an electrician in Soho. Slocombe’s youthful eagerness won him the trust of ‘men who lived in dread of informers, who distrusted strangers, who walked warily from bitter knowledge of the world’s prisons’. He learnt the mentality and methods of the plotters who created European despotism. ‘When, long afterwards, I met Mussolini for the first time, we met on common ground,’ he claimed. ‘We spoke the same secret language, the language of the men working blindly in cellars, in prisons, writing burning words to be printed on small and hidden presses, talking burning words at street corners, ardent, disdainful, self-righteous.’18
In 1912, aged eighteen, Slocombe married seventeen-year-old Marie Karlinsky, who was pregnant with their son Ralph. He joined the staff of the Daily Herald at about the same time, and the Royal Flying Corps as a second-class mechanic in 1916. He had a winter digging roads in Lincolnshire before deployment in France, where he spent eighteen months in intelligence translating German military wireless messages. When the first attempts were made to bug prison cells with microphones, Slocombe was told to eavesdrop, and felt relief that the stone paving of the prison cells caused such echoes that the indiscretions of captured German aviators were incomprehensible. He found headquarters life to be monotonous, and compared the staff officers to golfing stockbrokers.19
Slocombe wrote an empurpled ‘Letter to Lenin’, published in the Daily Herald of 24 August 1918. ‘Your first proclamation, after the Second Russian Revolution, was a deep blast upon the Bugle of the Army of the World’s Freedom,’ he apostrophized Lenin. ‘You are aiming, as I believe sincerely, at the liberation and the redemption of man. The hate you have been shown by the rich, the monopolists, the concession-hunters, the feudalists, the diplomatists and the Press of all countries – German and allied alike – is a sure sign of your earnestness in the cause.’ These ebullitions seemed suspicious to the security services in London, but Slocombe’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Harry Goldsmith defended him to Stewart Menzies of SIS: ‘he was a M.T. [motor-transport] driver, but having crashed a senior officer into a ditch, was taken off cars & put to clerking. He is an educated man & … writes verses, patriotic & not bad at that for the Tatler.’ Goldsmith, who was a future military ADC to King George V, continued with the tolerance that often characterized authority’s attitude to oddballs: ‘I don’t think he is a bad chap on the whole, & I am rather inclined, if you agree, to talk to him myself & tell him I know he wrote this article addressed to Lenin & ask him if he think it’s playing
