Articles

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The attitude of many British diplomats towards security in the 1930s was appalling. As war approached, servants in British missions often had unfettered access to classified documents. Papers were frequently left lying about on desks when diplomats were absent from their offices while many chanceries were unguarded at night time. The opportunities for the enemy to recruit servants as spies, most of whom were natives, or to break-in and gain access to British premises, were plentiful. Despite a major breach of security at the Rome embassy, which had finally been unmasked by the British in 1937, old habits died hard. As the Foreign Office tried to introduce new procedures before the war to tighten security, they were faced with obstruction not just from their own diplomats but also the Cabinet Secretary, who declared that Ministers could not effectively carry out their work if more restrictive measures were put in place. Many ministers, officials and diplomats therefore continued to work in their own insecure way allowing the enemy to continue to profit from such laxity well into the Second World War.

This article contains some personal reflections on working with the late, distinguished academic Professor Keith Jeffery and the writing of the authorised history of the Secret Intelligence Service. One of the most important challenges was to get the story right. Professor Jeffery was a stickler for fact-checking and getting to the truth. He was an outstanding scholar: there would be no assertions about what a particular individual ‘might have thought’ or leaps of faith where there was no evidence to support an opinion as to what might have happened. There would be no embellishments or the deployment of ‘artistic licence’ to make some stories a racier read: a current, worrying trend in the intelligence historiography we see in our bookstores today. Professor Jeffery marshalled the evidence to tell the story as he saw it. No one (not even his research team) cajoled or influenced him when it came to writing the history of the Service. It was Professor Jeffery's interpretation of the sources he had in front of him alone.

During the last twenty years, the role of members of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in helping Jewish refugees flee Nazi persecution in the 1930s has garnered wide interest. It has been claimed that SIS officers in their cover role as Passport Control Officers (PCOs) helped ‘save’ thousands of Jews from the Third Reich by issuing immigration visas. The focus, however, has been on the individual SIS officer, rather than the collective effort of the many passport control staff involved in issuing visas. There has also been a tendency to devolve the matter into a process of producing crude balance sheets of Jews ‘saved’. This article seeks to understand how SIS came to exploit passport control work as cover for its activities and to assess the impact of the refugee crisis on SIS operations. It also aims to make sense of some of the statistics regarding visas issued by individuals such as Captain Frank Foley and Captain Thomas Kendrick, identifying some wild over-estimates. The article suggests that the humanitarian work carried out by SIS/PCO personnel should not be rendered as a competition as to who ‘saved’ the most refugees. It is important to research the subject forensically without a partisan attitude towards the personalities involved in order to uncover the truth and understand what happened.

This article seeks to analyse the Foreign Office reaction to the 'Cicero' spy affair. Papers  released in 2003 and 2005 provide some fascinating insights into leaks that were occurring at the Ankara embassy long before 'Cicero', how diplomats tried to trap the notorious spy and how the Foreign Office sought to block any outside interference in its investigations, particularly from the Security Service (MI5). The article also sheds light on how the Foreign Office attempted to deal with the fallout when the full scale of the 'Cicero' leak became publicly known. At the time, the Foreign Office investigation into the leak failed to identify 'Cicero' but it did highlight that Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to Turkey, was culpable in allowing documents in his possession to be photographed. It appeared, however, that Knatchbull-Hugessen had got off lightly when he was rewarded with the ambassadorship at Brussels in September 1944. Why had this situation come about? Was the Foreign Office closing its ranks to protect one of its own? And, did this confirm oft-repeated accusations that as an institution, the Foreign Office could not be trusted when it came to security?

Sir Ronald H. Campbell was the first British ambassador during the Second World War to manage a key bilateral relationship with a wartime ally. When the Germans invaded France in May 1940, Campbell's Embassy was transformed from a diplomatic reporting post into a frontline base that had to brief London not only on the political situation in France but also on strategic military matters. However, the British ambassador would constantly struggle to register his authority in the overall management of the Franco-British relationship, and more often than not, was bypassed by Whitehall departments, special advisors and senior ministers. Campbell only found himself in a more pivotal role as communications between the British and French Governments disintegrated and the latter moved to Bordeaux. It then fell upon Campbell to make some of the most dramatic decisions in twentieth century Franco-British history.

This article focuses on British intelligence in China, Japan, and Korea from the end of the Second World War to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. It seeks to ascertain whether the collection of secret intelligence and its subsequent interpretation provided an accurate picture of Soviet and local communist intentions in East Asia. Since the war against Japan began, the region was largely an American responsibility and remained so after 1945 when they occupied Japan, Korea below the 38th parallel, and sent forces to China. Much of the intelligence effort for East Asia also devolved upon the Americans. Yet, the British retained an intelligence interest there not least because of their extensive commercial assets in China and the region’s proximity to Britain’s imperial position in Southeast Asia. That interest gathered pace after growing Communist threats inside China and Korea. However, the available intelligence resources for the Far East as a whole were scarce, making it difficult to piece together a clear picture of fast moving events in East Asia.