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Dedicated to the memory of three distinguished scholars and good friends, who all played a part in this book and are sadly missed
Peter Freeman (1937–2006)
Tony Bishop (1938–2012)
Keith Jeffery (1952–2016)
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me with this book. In particular, I should like to thank those supportive friends and colleagues who have read it in draft and offered constructive comment: Jim Daly, Professor George Peden, Professor Patrick Salmon, and Professor David Stafford. I have enjoyed, as always, the encouragement and friendship of Professor Christopher Andrew and Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield. I am grateful to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historians, and to the FCO generally, for facilities and help; to the Cabinet Office Knowledge and Information Management Unit; to the staff of The National Archives; and to colleagues across Whitehall who have ensured the book’s smooth progress. I owe the biggest debt to Bill Hamilton of A.M. Heath, whose idea it was and who has encouraged me at every turn. Many thanks also to Matthew Cotton at Oxford University Press, and to all his team.
7.
5.
6.
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
@ Alias/also known as, in intelligence context
ARCOS All-Russian Cooperative Society Ltd
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
C/CSS Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service
Cheka Soviet security and intelligence service, 1917–23
CIA Central Intelligence Agency, US foreign intelligence service
Cmd/Cmnd Command Paper
Comintern Communist International
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union
DBFP Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939
DBPO Documents on British Policy Overseas
DG Director General of the Security Service
DNI Director of Naval Intelligence
DVPS Dokumenty vneshney politiki SSSR (Foreign Policy Documents of the USSR)
ECCI Executive Committee of the Comintern
EU European Union
FAPSI Federal’ naya Agenstvo Pravitel’stvennoy Svayazi i Informatsii, Russian Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation, US domestic intelligence organization
FO/FCO Foreign Office/Foreign and Commonwealth Office (from 1968)
FSB
List of Abbreviations
Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, Russian domestic intelligence service
GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters (from 1946)
GOCs
GPU
GRU
HN
General Officers Commanding, i.e. commanding officers in the British armed services
Godudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, Soviet security and intelligence service within Internal Affairs Commissariat, 1922–3
Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, Russian military intelligence organization
History Note, i.e. 1999 report on Zinoviev Letter published by the FCO
HQ Headquarters
IIB
Industrial Intelligence Bureau
IKKI Ispolnitel’niy Komitet Kommunistischeskogo Internatsionala (Executive Committee of the Comintern)
ILP Independent Labour Party
INO
Inostrannyi Otdel, foreign department of Cheka
IPI Indian Political Intelligence
ISA Intelligence Services Act, 1994
ISC Intelligence and Security Committee
KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Soviet security and intelligence service, 1954–91)
MI1(c) Early name for Secret Intelligence Service
MI5 Security Service, UK domestic intelligence agency
NARA US National Archives and Records Administration
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NKID (Narkomindel) Narodnyi Kommissariat Inostrannykh, People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
NKVD Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, People’s Commissariat for International Affairs, incorporating state security 1922–3 and 1934–43
NSY New Scotland Yard
OGPU
List of Abbreviations xv
Obyedinennoye Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravleniye, Soviet security and intelligence service, 1923–34
Politburo Political bureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU
PQ Parliamentary Question
PRO Public Record Office
PS Private Secretary
PUS Permanent Under-Secretary
PUSD Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department, FO, responsible for liaison with the secret intelligence agencies
RVF Russian Volunteer Fleet
SIGINT Signals Intelligence (interception and codebreaking)
SIS Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6)
Sovnarkom Sovet narodnykh kommissarov, Soviet Council of People’s Commissars
The Impact of the Zinoviev Letter on British Politics
Noone knows for certain who wrote the letter supposedly addressed to the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) on 15 September 1924 by Grigori Zinoviev,1 head of the Comintern or Communist International, the propaganda arm of the Bolshevik Russian regime. The text of the Zinoviev Letter—in English—was transmitted to London in a telegram from the Riga station of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS),2 arriving at SIS head office on 9 October. No original of the letter was ever found: the CPGB denied receiving it, in the post or by any other means, and there is no evidence that they did. Zinoviev denied writing it, and there are good reasons to believe him. Alternative copies that have turned up in various countries appear to be retranslations of the version received by SIS. Yet this document—which may never have existed in the form of an original letter and was almost certainly not written by Zinoviev—has haunted politics, especially Labour politics, in the United Kingdom ever since.
Since the 1920s, scarcely a decade has passed without a mention of the Letter in print. There have been several cross-Whitehall investigations into its provenance and exploitation. More than ninety years later, political commentators still tend to refer to it as if everyone
Figure 1. First page of Zinoviev Letter as received in SIS
knows what they are talking about. An article written during the European Referendum campaign in 2016 referred to the Zinoviev Letter, comparing the Daily Mail’s treatment of Prime Minister David Cameron to its treatment of the first Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald during the 1924 election campaign.3 In the spring of 2017, accusations by Prime Minister Theresa May of foreign interference in the British general election campaign prompted comparisons with the effect of the Letter in the 1924 campaign.4 The Zinoviev Letter, which David Aaronovitch has called ‘the great British conspiracy’,5 refuses to go away. This book seeks to explain why.
In 1924 relations between Britain and the Bolshevik government that had come to power after the October 1917 Revolution in Russia were strained. Western powers, particularly those like Britain with empires targeted by Bolshevik propaganda, had struggled in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Civil War6 to find a way of interacting with a regime dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism. On the one hand, it was the avowed policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to encourage the spread of communism to other countries, inciting proletarian revolution through propaganda, subversion, and espionage. At the same time, for economic reasons Russia wanted to normalize relations and be treated as a regular trading partner. The Zinoviev Letter received in October 1924 seemed a typical example of the tactics employed by the Soviet regime in pursuit of these twin policies. It exhorted the CPGB to greater effort in stirring up the British proletariat, in order to bring pressure on Parliament to ratify Anglo-Soviet treaties that would grant a muchneeded loan to Russia and restore ‘business collaboration’ between the two countries’ proletariats. It went on to admonish the British communists for the weakness of their ‘agitation-propaganda’ work in the British armed forces, who in the event of war must be ready to ‘paralyse all the military preparations of the bourgeoisie’.7
It was part of Zinoviev’s job to stir up revolution overseas, and he had signed many similar letters to communist parties in Europe, Asia, and even in the United States. Western governments had copies of
these, obtained by their intelligence services and shared with each other. Other documents on these lines, received earlier in 1924, testified to the Comintern’s view that the CPGB was underperforming. What was surprising about the 15 September letter was its timing: for it arrived just when the first ever Labour government in Britain, in power since January 1924, had run into serious trouble. Indeed, on 8 October, the day before SIS received the letter, the government was defeated on a Liberal amendment to a Conservative motion of censure in the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister, J. Ramsay MacDonald, had asked HM King George V to dissolve Parliament so that a general election could be called.
Within a fortnight of its arrival in London, copies of the Zinoviev Letter had reached Conservative Central Office and the Tory-controlled press. It was published in the Daily Mail on 25 October—four days before the general election—together with a note of protest drafted in the Foreign Office and issued, according to MacDonald (who served as Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister), without his authorization. This was a gift to Labour’s political opponents, who in the last stages of the election campaign could portray MacDonald’s government as both incompetent and in thrall to the ‘Reds’ in Moscow. Despite this, on 29 October 1924 Labour polled over a million more votes than they had in the election of December 1923 that had put them in office. But the Conservatives, who had healed damaging internal divisions and reformed their party machinery, gained 48.3 per cent of the total vote to Labour’s 33 per cent, while the Liberals, the traditional party of opposition, slumped to 17.6 per cent.
The Zinoviev Letter may, as all parties claimed, have damaged the Labour vote; it did not lose them the election. But that view was not shared by many of MacDonald’s ministerial colleagues, the trade unions, or the wider Labour Party. They felt cheated and humiliated by what had happened, sentiments that were exacerbated by the mystery surrounding the whole affair. In the febrile atmosphere following electoral defeat, it was only too easy for Labour supporters to blame dirty tricks by a reactionary Establishment, in which they included
the intelligence services, the civil service, and the press as well as Conservative Central Office. Early enquiries were contradictory and inconclusive, and a steady stream of scandals kept the story alive. The fact that successive investigations made it more likely that the Zinoviev Letter was a forgery did not diminish its political potency. Each decade seemed to bring a new ‘revelation’ that reignited suspicions about what happened in 1924. The Letter was to rear its head again in successive general elections, in the context of atomic espionage, the treachery of the Cambridge Spies, internal divisions within the Labour Party, and even the Falklands War. There were a number of official enquiries, including a major investigation in the late 1960s in the aftermath of Kim Philby’s defection8 and the publication of a book on the Letter by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team that claimed to have solved the mystery.9
The Zinoviev Letter has not only haunted British politics, it has haunted my career as well. As an official historian working for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) for more than forty years, my job involved, among other things, investigating and explaining historical conspiracies, and debunking them where possible, though the most persistent ones never go away. When I joined the FCO in 1972, new questions had been raised recently about the authorship of the Letter, based on material found at Harvard, and this was followed by a rash of articles speculating on the authenticity of the Letter and deploring the archival obstacles to discovering the ‘truth’. Later, when a new set of documents was released by the Treasury in 1992, it added further fuel to the fire.10 Nothing that was published had laid the matter to rest satisfactorily.
Why has this curious document had such a lasting impact? One reason lies in the history of the Labour Party itself. Established in 1900, by 1924 it had replaced the Liberal Party as the principal opposition to the Tories: a remarkable achievement. Nevertheless, during the first 100 years of its existence Labour was in power for only twenty-three. When Labour governments took office, they struggled against the assumption that the Conservatives were the natural party
of government. Powerful media, financial, and business interests tended to support the Conservatives. Some right-wing individuals and organizations were less than scrupulous in the methods they used to try and prevent Labour coming to power, and to attack them when they did. At the same time, Labour governments faced damaging splits in the ranks of their own party, with strong criticism from left as well as right. During the two world wars, party politics and party divisions were suppressed to an extent by the need for national unity, but peacetime saw the resurgence of old habits at all points on the political spectrum.
Long intervals between periods in office cause problems for any political party. Incoming ministers usually lack experience of government, of working with the civil service, the military, and the intelligence agencies. In Labour’s case, these elements of the British Establishment were suspected by many party members of being not just innately conservative, but actively hostile. In particular, some Labour ministers suspected the intelligence agencies—which had been in existence roughly as long as the Labour Party—of undermining them behind the scenes. This did not stop ministers from working professionally and harmoniously with those agencies during all Labour administrations (nor from trying to use them for the detection of industrial subversion from the Left). But 1924 was never forgotten, and the Zinoviev Letter returned to haunt both government and officials at times of trouble and vulnerability.
Another key element was the ambivalent relationship between the Labour Party and the Soviet Union. From Ramsay MacDonald’s first administration in 1924, Labour governments rejected the totalitarian nature of the Bolshevik regime that had come to power so violently in 1917. They were committed to changing society through reform rather than revolution; and after the Second World War, the threat posed to British and Western interests by the Soviet bloc meant that Cold War considerations predominated in Anglo-Soviet relations. Yet there remained within the wider Labour movement a certain residual fellow feeling for the Soviet regime, an admiration for the first real
government ‘by the people for the people’, that ministers could not ignore altogether. In practice, successive Labour governments were often actively hostile to the Soviet Union: but there was always an element in the party who felt they ought to get on well together.
This ambivalence went both ways: Soviet leaders tended to prefer Conservative administrations in Britain, and to be suspicious of, if not openly hostile to, their Labour counterparts. As Conservative Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain remarked in 1927, the Soviet government was more ready to shake hands with him than they were with Labour ministers: ‘They regarded Conservatives as their natural enemies, but the more moderate among the Labour leaders they looked upon as traitors.’11 This remained true when Labour came to power in 1945: Stalin would far rather have dealt with Winston Churchill than with Clement Attlee. The tension between the advantages of ‘normalized’ political and economic relations, and the clash between Soviet communism and Western capitalism, were felt in Moscow as well as in London. Set against this context, the ghost of Zinoviev was never quite exorcized.
Of course, the relationship changed over time and according to the international context. The first two Labour governments, in 1924 and 1929–31, held office at a period of global economic dislocation and growing resentment on the part of those on the losing side in the First World War. The Soviet Union combined an active programme of hostile propaganda, espionage, and subversion, aimed both at Britain and its Empire, with the pursuit of normalized relations at intergovernmental level. After a major political and economic crisis in 1931 that led to the formation of a National Government under Ramsay MacDonald, there was no further Labour government until 1945. In the meantime, many on the left were alienated by the Stalinist purges of the 1930s; others, like the ‘Magnificent Five’ Cambridge spies,12 committed themselves secretly to communism; still others maintained stubbornly that the Stalinist regime was not as black as it had been painted.
During the Second World War, the Soviet Union was the staunch ally of the Western powers from 1941 to 1945 and made an enormous
contribution to Allied victory. It was, however, no surprise to those Labour ministers like Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who had served in Churchill’s War Cabinet, that the Russian wartime ally turned into a Soviet enemy as the Cold War unfolded during the early post-war years. Attlee, and his colleagues in the government formed following Labour’s resounding victory in the 1945 general election, found that they had to spend a great deal of time combating communist threats both overt and covert, within Britain and overseas, at the same time as carrying out their ambitious domestic reform agenda.
Labour’s defeat in 1951 was followed by another long period out of office, and the government formed by Harold Wilson in 1964 had to start from scratch in building good working relationships with Whitehall, and indeed with the Soviet Union. They succeeded in both, but not without considerable turbulence and distrust under the surface. A sharp increase in hostile Soviet espionage activities within the United Kingdom during the 1960s contributed to the atmosphere of suspicion. At the same time, Wilson made great efforts, with American encouragement, to foster good relations with Soviet leaders to secure their good offices with Hanoi in trying to bring an end to the long-running conflict in Vietnam. Despite the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the political advantages of engaging with the Soviet Union made Wilson unwilling to adopt too antagonistic a stance—a major reason why tackling Soviet espionage in the UK was left to his Conservative successor, Edward Heath.
But it was on the domestic front that the legacy of the Zinoviev Letter caused the most disturbance during the Wilson government of 1964–70. Ministers, and Wilson in particular, were on high alert for attempts to undermine the government, whether from right or left. Very sensitive to press criticism, they accused each other and officials of leaks (though most leaks came from No. 10). This affected their relations both with the civil service and with the intelligence establishment, though Wilson had a high regard for both. But insecurity and paranoia, in a rather febrile political and economic atmosphere, created the perfect climate for the ghost of Zinoviev to reappear.
A number of articles and books were published on the Letter during this period, and in 1967 a major official investigation into the authenticity and handling of the Zinoviev Letter was launched, carried out by a retired member of MI5. In fact, this investigation was prompted more by the spy scandals of the 1950s and 1960s than by accusations of political conspiracy. But it is directly relevant to the central question of the impact of the Zinoviev Letter on successive Labour governments. The atmosphere of suspicion continued during the second Labour government of 1974–9, after the Conservative administration of Edward Heath had taken decisive action against the Soviet Union by expelling 105 of their intelligence officers in 1971.13 Though there was little mention of the Zinoviev Letter in this period, the increasing paranoia of Harold Wilson, until his resignation in 1976, was a source of tension within the government and Whitehall. His replacement as Prime Minister, James Callaghan, did not share Wilson’s suspicions of plots against him by domestic or foreign agencies, but rumours spread by conspiracy theorists that the security services were involved in a disinformation and destabilization campaign to discredit both Labour and Liberals were unsettling to the party.14
By the time Labour came to office again in 1997, after another long period of opposition, the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was no more. The Red Menace had dissipated with the crumbling of the communist underpinning of the Eastern bloc, and the early years of the Blair government saw the beginning of a new, promising period of Anglo-Russian relations. And yet the shadows of the past had not been dispelled entirely. The revelations of a former KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, provided new evidence of the extent of Soviet espionage during the Cold War.15 Meanwhile, the intelligence landscape in Britain had been transformed by legislation between 1989 and 1994, putting the security and intelligence services onto a new statutory basis under parliamentary oversight, their heads named openly for the first time. Though secrecy remained an imperative, there was a greater willingness to discuss intelligence matters with the aim of increasing public understanding of the importance to national
