Moscow's Interwar Infiltration of British Intelligence, 1919–1929

Abstract

The celebrated ‘Cambridge five’ have hitherto been believed to be the first long-term communist penetration agents in HM government, beginning with Donald Maclean in 1935. However, new research indicates that by 1919 another Cambridge man – like four of the ‘five’, a Trinity graduate – had already begun working for Moscow. This article is the first to examine how William Norman Ewer, known as ‘Trilby’ to his co-conspirators, organized networks in Great Britain and France to target the governments of those two powers. Under close Soviet supervision, Ewer's subordinates infiltrated half-a-dozen Whitehall departments, foremost among them Scotland Yard. Operating under the aegis of the home office, the Yard was a vital cog in the machinery of government set up to combat the ‘red menace’ in this country immediately after the First World War. By compromising the lead agency tasked with fighting them, the Bolsheviks thus created the requisite conditions for the metastasis in Great Britain of Soviet espionage in the 1920s.

Communist history, police history and the archives of British state surveillance

“…No wider research was drawn upon, and in a subsequent contribution to the same journal it was argued that the article's publication did not meet the normal canons of historical research nor subject to the usual critical scrutiny such obviously partial sources as Maxwell Knight. 44 The specific points at issue can be left to the reader to decide: thanks to Ewer's relative notoriety, the 'dialectic of the discipline' could in this instance function through the more widely accessible documentation of some at least of the different aspects of his very public career. Nevertheless, the basic points are ones of wider application: that the exercising of such highly restricted forms of access in the case of an organisation whose operating principle is dissimulation ('neither confirm nor deny') should least be of all be exempted from routine critical research procedures; and that in using the archives of any organisation, we must first of all come to terms with the nature of that organisation itself.…”