Chapter 4 - Lenin’s First Secret Agent

Summary

When Alexander Sirnis returned to England from Switzerland in September 1915 one of his first visitors was Theodore Rothstein. In August 1914 the leadership of the British Socialist Party (BSP) had issued a Recruitment Manifesto and had urged pro-war members to appear on recruitment platforms alongside army recruiting sergeants calling on the workers to ‘join up’. Rothstein had resigned from the BSP's Executive Committee in protest and had gathered around him a talented group of socialists opposed to the war, among them a close-knit group of Russian political émigrés including his sister-in-law, Zelda Kahan. On Alexander Sirnis's return to England in September 1915 he was approached by Theodore Rothstein and asked to join this opposition group. However, unbeknown to Sirnis, Rothstein was also working for British intelligence, having been recruited to Military Operations 7 (MO₇) sometime in 1915.

MO₇ was an important branch of military intelligence and among its remit was the ‘censorship of Press cables’ and all ‘articles of a military nature’. It was also responsible for transmitting the decisions of the General Staff to the directors of the Press Bureau and ‘communiqués of prohibitory notices’.

In January 1916 a reorganization of the Imperial General Staff took place and MO₇ became MI₇. A sub-section, known as MI₇(d), was later ‘constituted to deal exclusively with the study of the foreign Press and the production of the Daily Review of the Foreign Press (DRFP), a digest of important information, military, naval, political or economic, collected by the readers of the foreign Press’.

The DRFP was under the ‘general direction of the Director of Special Intelligence’, and its brief was ‘to read the foreign press and to produce Daily Extracts of military importance’ . The staff consisted ‘at first of one junior officer and a small number of readers who were for the most part officials in other Government offices, or volunteers who wished for war work and were acquainted with languages and political and economic affairs. The papers were sent to these readers and the extracts which they marked and annotated, were translated and edited in the War Office, and then printed and circulated to the General Staff and to General Headquarters, France.’