Incompetence or worse?
Nigel West THE SECURITY SERVICE, 1908-1945: THE OFFICIAL HISTORY by Jack Curry PRO, £50, pp. 442 At the end of the second world war MI5's Director-General, Sir David Petrie, selected one of his senior subordinates to write a brief account of how well the organ- isation had performed. Unfortunately Jack Curry knew the grisly truth and ignored his brief by spending two years preparing a comprehensive history tracing MI5's ori- gins back to before the first world war, and reproducing the notorious Horrocks Report of 1940 which warned that the Security Service was in danger of total collapse because of administrative incom- petence.
Petrie had been infuriated by Curry's oeuvre that was a far cry from the docu- ment he had anticipated and which he had intended to wield as a weapon in White- hall's postwar turf battles. Instead of being circulated widely, the Curry Report was hidden away, but has now been declassified and published by the Public Record Office with an introduction by the ubiquitous Christopher Andrew of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and a new index.
For supposedly one of Britain's most secret organs of state, much has been writ- ten about the Security Service over the past decade, and this release may be a response to the material that has emerged from the KGB's archive in Moscow which consists mainly of documents purloined by Anthony Blunt.
Although 1908-1945 has not been sani- tised, there is a note that certain sections of the original 'cannot be deciphered'. Coinci- dentally, and few as they are, these pas- sages seem to occur when the most sensitive topics are discussed, such as the specific neutral embassies in London that were targeted for surveillance and penetra- tion. Although the censors have been at work, further information on these undiplomatic issues will be revealed when most files are disclosed in Moscow next year. Anthony Blunt, it turns out, was the officer assigned to supervise the recruit- ment of agents inside the foreign missions, and he was also responsible for developing the most secret source of all, codenamed Triplex, which was the illicit copying of the contents of various ambassadors' diplomat- ic bags.
Despite the deliberate omissions, Jack Curry's report is a candid chronology of MI5's inability to cope with German spies before the second world war, and Soviet spies generally. Even when they managed to pull off a considerable coup in 1938 by placing a mole close to Percy Glading, the communist at the heart of the Woolwich spy-ring, they failed to catch the Soviet mastermind who neatly slipped out of the country before he could be arrested, What remains baffling is the scale of MI5's knowledge of Soviet espionage dur- ing the second world war, and its inability or unwillingness to confront it. A spy was caught red-handed inside the Hungarian section of SOE, but little attention was given to his court-martial; a petrol coupon forger turned out to be part of a much wider Soviet military intelligence network, based on veterans of the Spanish civil war, but nobody else was prosecuted. Whether this was a consequence of operational necessity, chronic ineptitude or political guidance remains a mystery with sinister implications.
Did you notice if this device was making a little clicking noise about an hour ago?'
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