The Records of the Permanent Under-Secretary's Department, 1873-1939

the war on the Allied side.10 Although some of the early part of this story is already in the public domain, the current collection adds significantly to what is known and casts a new light on Prime Ministerial diplomacy during the First World War. A rather different story is that of the Comintern Agent Hilaire Noulens, told in FO 1093/92-103. Noulens (whose real name, Jakob Rudnik, was only discovered thirty years after his death in 196311) was arrested in Shanghai in 1931, while engaged in fostering the work of Communist parties in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies. On his arrest, a search of his safe deposit box uncovered a treasure trove of records of the Comintern ’s Far East Bureau, as detailed in the Exhibits attached to the Noulens papers. These documents identify for the first time Valentine Vivian, head of SIS ’s Counter-Espionage section, Section V, as the author of the report on the Noulens case.

The overall picture painted by the PUSD archive is not one of sinister secret or scandal, although some might consider the sums that British Cabinet Ministers were willing to entrust to ‘Zedzed ’ little short of scandalous. It is, rather, a picture of constant if sometimes ineffectual official attempts to keep some kind of control over secret service expenditure (see, for example, FO 1093/31, containing papers critical of the Washington Embassy ’s use of their secret service allowance, and attempts to make the Ambassador use his own funds). The papers also reveal a surprising willingness on the part of the Foreign Office to engage in elaborate and apparently speculative attempts to deceive a foreign enemy or potential enemy. In this sense, the collection fills in valuable pieces of the jigsaw of early twentieth century foreign policy.

There is no doubt, however, that in general the Foreign Office preferred its clandestine connections to be swept firmly under the carpet into the PUSD files. The extent of official distaste, not to put it more strongly, for secret intelligence is exemplified in an exchange of minutes that took place in March 1939 between senior FO officials (FO 1093/86). On that occasion the Private Secretary to the PUS, Gladwyn Jebb (later Lord Gladwyn) found himself having to defend SIS against a scathing attack from Assistant Under Secretary Sir George Mounsey: SIS reports were not, Jebb assured Mounsey, obtained by ‘hired assassins . . . sent out from this 7