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MOSCOW'S INTERWAR INFILTRATION OF BRITISH INTELLIGENCE, 1919–1929

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2003

VICTOR MADEIRA
VICTOR MADEIRA
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 915 - 933
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Sincere thanks to the editors, anonymous referees, Christopher Andrew, Gill Bennett, James Bruce, and especially Mathilde von Bülow. The author is indebted to the British Council, the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Cambridge Faculty of History, the Canadian Centennial Scholarship fund, Gonville and Caius College, the Royal Historical Society, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generosity. Cabinet office (CAB), foreign office (FO), and security service (KV) files are at the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office), London. Fonds Moscou (FM) files are at the Service Historique de l'Armée de Terre (SHAT), Château de Vincennes, France.