Free Fighting to Lose by John Bryden Page A

(Military Censorship 1) was under the War Office and headquartered along with MC4 (Telegraph Censorship) in the former Wormwood Scrubs Prison along with the MI5’s archive and library, the Registry. The chief military censor was rebuked at the beginning of 1940 for MC1 spending too much effort examining letters and telegrams for security reasons rather than for intelligence gathering.28 The fact was, MI5 was the weak sister of Britain’s secret services. From the 1917 Russian Revolution on, it had focused mainly on domestic labour discontent, first in the armament industries during the war, and then, afterward, more broadly in the working classes. The Bolsheviks in Russia had seized estates, destroyed the nobility, and had executed the British king’s cousin, Czar Nicolas II. Visions of similar phalanxes of grimy workers spilling out of the industrial ghettos of England armed with shovels and coal rakes haunted the Establishment in Britain. This led Vernon Kell, MI5’s director from its pre–First World War beginnings, to sideline the task of countering foreign espionage in favour of deploying most of his resources in the 1920s and ’30s against communist subversion in Britain’s labour movement.29
    Indeed, even in the mid-1930s, when Nazi Germany and fascist Italy became ever more clearly threats to Britain’s interests, MI5’s response was anti-subversion rather than counter-espionage, the principal effort being to infiltrate homegrown German- and Italian-leaning fascist organizations. Up to the outbreak of war, only one officer, Colonel W.E. Hinchley-Cooke, was working full-time on German counter-espionage, while Italy did not even rate attention. “There was a natural tendency not to take the military threat from Italy very seriously,” noted one MI5 officer looking back at those early days.30
    The tools MI5’s two dozen or so officers had to work with were basic: a plainclothes team of six to shadow suspects; Home Office warrants (HOWs) giving permission to open mail and listen in on telephone conversations; paid and unpaid informers; and a huge collection of files on individuals who had come to notice, generally for something they had done or said that was “Bolshi.” This latter was the Registry, and accounted for eighty of the 103 mainly female, mainly clerical staff who backed up the officers who led the various sections. It kept thousands of names and the “person files” (PFs) that went with them. It served as memory bank to both MI5 and MI6.31
    MI5 did get a chance to move forward with the times. In mid-1938, with tensions mounting over Hitler’s threats to Czechoslovakia, Lieutenant-Colonel Adrian Simpson was appointed adviser to MI5 on matters to do with wireless interception. He had been chief of MI1(b), the code- and cipher-breaking agency of the army (the War Office) during the previous war, and a senior executive with the Marconi Telegraph Company since.32 Advances in technology had made the wireless transmitter a practical and available alternative to the mails for spies reporting to their home countries, and Simpson proposed that MI5 set up a wireless listening section capable of detecting their transmissions. It was to consist of fixed stations and mobile units to close in locally.
    MI5 rejected the idea, however, being firmly of the view that German agents would only be using the mails or couriers to send in their reports. The matter was turned back to the War Office, which responded by creating MI1(g), a new military intelligence section consisting of a veteran First World War signals officer and two or three staff who were given space in Wormwood Scrubs along with MI5 and the Telegraph Censorship Department. There they received reports from three fixed Post Office wireless receiving stations with direction-finding capability and twenty-seven “volunteer interceptors” — amateur radio operators scattered across the country. MI5’s role was to make the appropriate inquiries when