Summary
Trilby’s People ~ The General Strike ~ ARCOS Condemned
Dobb is anxious to visit Russia … but … wants Rothstein to help him get there. MI5 comment on Maurice Dobb letter
to Andrew RothsteinFrom a British point of view … the scope of any … activities in which the [Ewer] group may be concerned is of primary importance.
MI5 minute on the Federated Press network[P]oet … or politician, the mind of the Russian instinctively seeks the twilight that borders on the subconscious. It is feline in its discrimination of inner shades, and almost unerring in its analysis of individuals.
Anonymous“C” – Hugh Sinclair since June 1923 – felt the ‘British Secret Service … was fundamentally wrong.’ Five agencies (GCCS, Indian Political Intelligence, MI5, SIS and Special Branch) operated without ‘a central control of policy’ and lacked ‘coordination and cooperation’, resulting in ‘overlapping and waste of time’. Though “C” was pursuing the self-serving goal of controlling the entire community, he had valid concerns. For these reasons, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin reconvened the Secret Service Committee on 10 February 1925 to redress the situation.
Two related issues were at the heart of the Zinoviev affair. First, would a Conservative Cabinet be either willing or able to distinguish between legitimate left-wing opposition and calculated subversion by foreign states? Second, even if government could always make this distinction (which it could not), might hardliners not still attempt to lump both issues together in the name of national security and national interest? Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill, for instance, had little time for distinctions:
There is no fundamental difference between the “moderate” Labour men and the Communists: the managers and leaders of the Trades Unions are now nearly all of them Socialists and the “moderate” Socialists are aiming, in effect, at the same things as the Communists: the only difference is their method of procedure. … The most dangerous position is when a “moderate” party by so-called constitutional methods soothes public opinion while stealthily and with smooth words it proceeds step by step to revolution.
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- Britannia and the BearThe Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars, 1917-1929, pp. 131 - 156Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014