British intelligence has undoubtedly made the most significant contribution to the popularization and glorification of the espionage craft, and in terms of the number of "legends" of espionage, it is unlikely that anyone can compare with it. It was during the years of the First World Intelligence that it began to be considered the lot of gentlemen, heroes and intellectuals, which it owes primarily to people like Lawrence of Arabia or the writer Somerset Maugham, who later devoted a cycle of stories to his espionage experience.
NEW SPECIAL SERVICE
Despite the fact that Britain had centuries of experience in intelligence activities, it was in the years preceding the First World War and some subsequent ones that the formation of its special services began in the form in which they exist to this day. However, British intelligence officers during the First World War did not manage to write down any outstanding victories, except for the creation of "legends".
For the most part, they achieved success either on the periphery, or in such a boring and "unheroic" sphere as radio interception and decryption of radio communications and radio communications.
Officially, British Intelligence was founded as the Bureau of the Secret Service. On August 26, 1909, a meeting was held at Scotland Yard between Sir Edward Henry, Commissioner of the London Police, Major General Evart, Lieutenant Colonel McDonogham and Colonel Edmonds of the War Office, with Captain Temple, representing Navy Intelligence, which ended with an agreement to establish The Bureau of the Secret Service with a Navy unit (led by Mansfield G. Smith Cumming) and a military unit to be led by Captain Vernon G. Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment. A copy of the minutes of the meeting in CV 1/3 and other correspondence in series FO 1093 and WO 106/6292, as well as the notice that Kell accepts the post and a copy of his biography, are preserved in CV 1/5.
As indicated in a number of sources, Kell's father was from Great Britain, and his mother was from Poland. He did intelligence work during the Boxer Uprising and wrote the chronology of the Russo-Japanese War. He spoke French, German, Russian, Italian and Chinese.
Cumming's professionalism is an even bigger mystery, although he was an expert in mechanics and technology, he drove well, was a founding member of the Royal Aero Club and became a pilot in 1913.
For a number of reasons, including personal controversy, the Bureau quickly began to split into intelligence and counterintelligence. Kell was engaged in counterintelligence, and Smith Cumming (commonly known as Cumming or "C") was in foreign intelligence. Melvidd and Dale Long were Kell's agents dealing with suspicious foreigners in the UK. Kell established contact with the police chiefs vital to his job and slowly began recruiting personnel. His first clerk, Mr. Westmacott, was hired in March 1910, and a year later his daughter joined him. By the end of 1911, he had hired three more officers and another detective. Cumming, on the other hand, worked alone until Thomas Laycock was appointed his assistant in 1912.
Kell and Cumming never worked together, although it was implied that they would work together. Cumming lived in an apartment in Whitehall Court, used it to meet with agents, and gradually it became his headquarters.
In 1919, the so-called Room 40 was merged with Military Intelligence, and as a cover it was called the Government School of Codes and Ciphers (GC&CS) under the direction of the Director of Naval Intelligence. The school had a legitimate public role: training military personnel and creating ciphers for the military and departments. Many of Room 40's employees have joined the Government School of Codes and Ciphers.
Under this cover, the Government School of Codes and Ciphers has been engaged in intercepting and breaking ciphers, often with remarkable success. The first Russian codes were especially vulnerable. Japanese Navy codes have been cracked, as have many foreign diplomatic codes.
As a result of one significant error, the British were able to read Soviet ciphers introduced in the late 1920s. The government school of codes and ciphers was more successful in breaking the ciphers of the Comintern. The material circulated under the code name "MASK" and appears in the reports of KV 2 and Russian and British communists.
In 1922, the Government School of Codes and Ciphers was annexed to the Foreign Office, and when Admiral Sinclair became head of the SIS, he also became director of the Government School of Codes and Ciphers. Both organizations operated in buildings on Broadway. The Government School of Codes and Ciphers has functioned effectively as part of the Secret Service, but because of its obvious role, there are different staffing tables available in the FO 366 series and in future releases in the HW and FO 1093 series. This means a good picture can be drawn of how who they were and what they did, how the interception and decryption of radio and telegraph messages worked.
Lord of the Planet
By the beginning of World War I, the British Empire occupied a dominant position on the planet: its territory, being three times the size of the French colonial empire and 10 times the German one, occupied about a quarter of the world's land area, and the royal subjects - about 440 million people - were about the same a quarter of the world's population. Entering the war, which the American writer Kurt Vonnegut later called “the first unsuccessful attempt of mankind to commit suicide,” Britain already had a developed network of agents on all continents and in all countries without exception. And although the creation of the Royal Security Service itself, whose functions included intelligence and counterintelligence, dates back only to 1909, espionage was widely used in the interests of British monarchs back in the Middle Ages.
Already during the reign of Henry VIII (XV-XVI centuries) in England there was a certain gradation of intelligence officers who worked directly under the leadership of the king. At that time, spies were already classified according to their specialization into residents, informants, killers and others. And yet, the ancestor of British intelligence is considered the minister of Queen Elizabeth I, a member of the Privy Council, Francis Walsingham, who by the end of the 16th century created an extensive intelligence network throughout Europe.
Not without the help of Walsingham and dozens of his spies, England during the reign of Elizabeth overpowered Catholic Spain, finally breaking with papal Rome and establishing itself as the leading European power. Elizabeth's minister is also considered the first organizer of the transcription service - the interception of postal correspondence and decryption of coded correspondence. The successor of the Walsingham case was the head of the secret service under Oliver Cromwell, John Thurlow, who for many years successfully fought against attempts to restore the Stuart monarchy and prevented dozens of attempts on the life of the Lord Protector.
“As a world power, Britain has long had to maintain extensive intelligence,” wrote in his book Secret Forces. International espionage and the fight against it during the world war and at present "the head of German intelligence in 1913-1919, Walter Nicolai, - she learned and appreciated its significance in the struggle for world domination."
By the end of the 19th century, specialized intelligence units were established in the British War Office and the Admiralty. One of the ideologues of intelligence during this period was the Boer War hero, founder of the scout movement Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who wrote several books on this topic, including the well-known "Scouting for Boys". Baden-Powell in many ways broke the British tradition of considering intelligence and espionage as dirty and unsuitable for a real gentleman, especially an officer.
In the first decade of the 20th century, the Intelligence Department of the British War Department, according to Nikolai's recollections, contained the largest spy bureau in Brussels under the command of Captain Rendmart von War-Stahr. This bureau had offices in Holland, mainly in Amsterdam, where most of the negotiations with the spies took place. In recruiting new agents, according to Nicholas, British intelligence went so far as to persuade even German officers to spy abroad: "It was an extremely clever game of England, aimed at concealing its world espionage and diverting suspicion of Germany."
“Agents of all major states, including England, traveled to different countries in search of information,” the Englishman James Morton describes in his book “Spies of the First World War” the situation in Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. - The British spied on the French, and later on the Germans, the Italians - the French, the French - the Italians and Germans, the Russians - the Germans and everyone else, if necessary. The Germans spied on everyone. Despite all their beautiful words and well-meaning thoughts, politicians all over Europe were well aware of the development of the political situation and were quite ready to use spies if required."
The cover for this bureau, from which MI5 (Security Service) and MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) subsequently emerged, was a detective agency that was owned and operated by former Scotland Yard employee Edward Drew. The bureau was co-founded by South Staffordshire Captain Vernon Kell and Royal Navy Captain George Mansfield Smith-Cumming.
HUNTING GERMAN SPIES
The main task of the new British intelligence service on the eve of the First World War was the fight against German spies - the actual espionage fever around Berlin agents became the basis for the bureau's birth. As it turned out later, fears about the scale of the activities of German agents in Britain were greatly exaggerated. So, on August 4, 1914, the day Great Britain declared war on Germany, the Ministry of the Interior announced that the authorities had arrested only 21 German spies, while by that time more than 50 thousand Kaiser subjects lived in Foggy Albion. But it was during the war years that the structure of MI5 and MI6 was formed, which subsequently demonstrated their effectiveness more than once.
According to the English publicist Phillip Knightley, who published the book "Spies of the 20th Century" in 1987, MI5 grew from one room and two personnel in 1909 to 14 in 1914 and to 700 by the end of the war in 1918. Kell and Smith-Cumming's organizational talent also contributed greatly to this.
Another area of activity of British intelligence in the pre-war period was the study of the possibility of landing troops on the German or Danish coast. So, in 1910 and 1911, the Germans arrested British agents - Navy Captain Bernard Trench and Hydrographer Lieutenant Commander Vivienne Brandon of the Admiralty, who were observing Kiel Harbor, as well as a volunteer lawyer from the City of London Bertram Stewart, nicknamed Martin who was interested in the state of affairs of the German fleet. All of them were released before the start of the war.
As in the pre-war years, the primary task of the British special services was to capture enemy, primarily German, spies on the territory of the kingdom. Between 1914 and 1918, 30 German agents were arrested in Great Britain, although in the first two weeks of the war, in the midst of spy mania, Scotland Yard in London alone received more than 400 signals of the detection of enemy agents. 12 of them were shot, one committed suicide, the rest received various prison terms.
The most famous German spy caught in Great Britain was Karl Hans Lodi. Subsequently, after the Nazis came to power, a destroyer was even named in his honor, which fought with Soviet and British ships during the Second World War.
Lodi's first mission during the war was related to the collection of data on a British naval base located near Edinburgh. Lodi, disguised as an American Charles A. Ingliz (passport was stolen from a US citizen in Berlin), waiting for a steamer across the Atlantic, organized surveillance of British ships. He sent the collected information to the German resident in Stockholm, Adolf Burchard. Based on the data obtained in Berlin, they decided to attack the base in Scotland with the help of submarines. On September 5, 1914, the U-20 submarine sank the British cruiser Pathfinder and shelled the artillery cellars of the port of Saint Ebbs Head.
After that, Lodi's telegrams began to be intercepted by British counterintelligence. At the end of October, Lodi was arrested, and on November 2, the court sentenced him to death. The verdict was carried out the next day, and Lodi refused to plead guilty, saying that, as an officer in the German fleet, he only fought the enemy on his own territory.
The rest of the German spies caught in the British metropolis, according to Phillip Knightley, had little to do with real intelligence. For the most part, they were adventurers, criminals, or vagabonds. According to the memoirs of Vernon Kell, at the beginning of the First World War, six types of foreign agents were distinguished in Britain:
- a traveling (traveling) agent working under the cover of a traveling salesman, traveler-yachtsman or journalist;
- a stationary agent, which included waiters, photographers, language teachers, hairdressers and pub owners;
- agents-treasurers who financed other agents;
- inspectors or chief residents;
- agents involved in commercial matters;
- and finally the British traitors.
SPY ACCOUNTING
At the same time, due to the harsh punishment for espionage, the cost of keeping one agent in England for the Germans was 3 times higher than, for example, in France. The average salary of a German agent in Britain at the beginning of World War I was between £ 10 and £ 25 a month, a year later it rose to £ 100, and in 1918 to £ 180. “Typically, despite how potentially dangerous any of these spies could be, their value to Germany was practically nil,” Knightley said. At the same time, as Ferdinand Tohai, a former British intelligence officer, writes in his book The Secret Corps, by the start of the war Britain was spending £ 50,000 on the secret service, while Germany was spending 12 times more.
RUSSIAN FRONT
The British secret service penetrated deeply into various structures in many countries of the world, not bypassing its attention and Russia. British intelligence officers were constantly working to create a wide network of agents and recruited agents in various circles of Russian society. Naturally, the greatest interest for the British secret service was represented by circles close to Nicholas II, to Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, to other members of the imperial family, as well as to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (for example, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire Sazonov S. D.), the Military the Ministry, the General Staff of the Army, the commander of the military districts and the highest officers of the country's army and navy. The most valuable agents were acquired among the clear and constant supporters of Britain, among the employees of the Russian embassy in London, among former graduates of British universities (for example, F. Yusupov is a graduate of Oxford University), various colleges and trading companies and representatives of large industry who maintained constant contact with England.
British agents were working to study and control the general internal political situation, including to control the growth of revolutionary sentiments of the masses in large Russian cities, as well as to create a revolutionary situation in Russia, with the task of not allowing Russia to leave the war and conclude a separate peace with the warring side.
Each of the countries entering the war set specific tasks and changes in their territorial possessions at the expense of the enemy's territory. So, one of the aggressive tasks of Russia in Europe was the acquisition of the strait zone. Our allies, the British, proceeded from the assumption that in the event of a victory of the Entente, Russia would have Turkish straits. But for 200 years England blocked all our attempts to enter the Mediterranean Sea through the narrow "plug" of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The British believed that it was impossible to give the straits to the Russians. But if a revolution occurs in Russia or it loses the war, then the straits can not be given back.
Before entering the First World War, England was considered the largest naval power and during the war sought to free itself from all competitors in every naval theater of war. As one of the examples of the vigorous activity of British intelligence in undermining the combat power of its potential competitors, one can consider the death in Sevastopol on October 7, 1916, of one of the largest battleships of the Imperial Black Sea Fleet - "Empress Maria". After the death of the ship during the war itself and immediately after its end and its escalation into a civil war in Russia, it was not possible to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the death of the ship. Only in Soviet times, two versions were formulated about the sinking of the ship. One of these versions was covered in the Soviet feature film "Kortik". In the film, the cause of the death of the most powerful battleship was simple human greed. But life is not a movie. Who would benefit from the death of the most powerful battleship on the Black Sea? Given the war with Germany, the sabotage and death of the battleship was beneficial to Germany. This is definitely. However, over time, information surfaced that seriously undermined the German trail in the death of the battleship.
To understand a little of the background of that time, one must recall the failed attempt of the British to seize the Black Sea straits in 1915. The Dardanelles operation failed. Meanwhile, the Black Sea Fleet of Russia was gaining strength and was ten times superior to what the Turks and Germans could oppose. The appearance of the strongest battleship finally confirmed Russia on the Black Sea.
In 1915, the Black Sea Fleet strengthened its superiority over the enemy and almost completely controlled the sea. Three battleship brigades were formed, the destroyer forces were active, the submarine forces and naval aviation were building up the combat power. Conditions were created for the Bosphorus operation. The ruler of the seas, Great Britain, which for centuries did not allow Russia to enter the Mediterranean, looked jealously at Russia's preparations. England could not allow Russia to once again "nail the shield on the gates" of Constantinople (then Constantinople, or Istanbul).
MYSTERIOUS COLONEL
On the night before the death of the giant, Gunnery Voronov was on duty at the ship's main weapon tower. His duties included inspecting and measuring the temperature of the artillery cellar. This morning, Captain 2nd Rank Gorodisskiy was also on alert for the ship. At dawn, Gorodissky gave the order to Commandant Voronov to measure the temperature in the cellar of the main tower. Voronov went down to the cellar and no one saw him again. And after a while the first explosion thundered. Voronov's body was never found among the bodies of the victims. The commission had suspicions about his account, but there was no evidence, and he was recorded as missing.
But recently, new information has emerged. The English writer Robert Merid, who for a considerable time was engaged in the mysterious death of the battleship, undertook his own investigation. From it you can learn very interesting and shameful information for the "ally" of the Russian Empire. Robert Merid unearthed the story of British Naval Intelligence Lieutenant John Haviland. Lieutenant of British naval intelligence served in Russia from 1914 to 1916, a week after the explosion, he left Russia and arrived in England as a lieutenant colonel. After the end of the war, he retired and left the country. After a while, he appeared in Canada, bought an estate, began to equip it, lived the usual life of a rich gentleman. And in 1929 he died under strange circumstances: a fire "happened" in the hotel where he spent the night, everyone was saved, including a woman with a small child and a paralyzed old man in a wheelchair, and a military officer could not escape from the 2nd floor.
This begs the question: who did the colonel in the deep periphery interfere with world processes, being in retirement? Investigations of the photo archives led to unexpected results - the lieutenant colonel of British intelligence John Haviland and the gunner of the battleship "Empress Maria" Voronov are one and the same person. The same Voronov who disappeared on October 7, 1916 at the time of the explosion of the battleship Empress Maria.
So the version of the explosion, voiced in literature and cinema, is not so far from the truth. But the motives that prompted the destruction of the battleship were different and were not immediately visible. It is also interesting that some Russian immigrants made an attempt on John Haviland shortly before his death, and among them was the former electrician of the battleship "Empress Maria" Ivan Nazarin. Maybe they also got on his trail and tried to somehow avenge their ship !?
The targeted assassination of Grigory Rasputin had the greatest resonance in the Russian Empire, in the world and in the life of the Russian monarchy. In this case, we can once again be able to see how important it was for British intelligence to destroy Rasputin and thereby force Russia to continue the war on the Eastern Front of the First World War. Huge books have been written and feature films have been made about the murder of this man, there are a lot of newsreels and short films. This terrorist act should be seen as a deliberate act of British intelligence and the British government in general of that time against the royal family and the possible likelihood of Russia's withdrawal from the war on the Eastern Front of World War I.
On the eve of the collapse of Germany and the following redivision of the world, Russia, as a participant and winner in the war, should have received the dividends agreed upon in advance. One should not think that the strengthening of Russia suited the "allies" very much. The events of 1917 in Russia strongly resemble the scenario of modern color revolutions.
