The Forgotten Spy (37 page)
Authors: Nick Barratt
*****
When writing about shadowy figures such as Ernest Holloway Oldham, it is tempting to claim a retrospective significance when the contemporary reality was something different. This is usually a result of the historian’s curse of hindsight, when mistakes can be spotted and consequences more easily discerned
over a longer period of time. The men and women of the Foreign Office, MI5, SIS and Special Branch were not afforded such perspective, nor did they have anything like the surveillance technology of today. Card indexes, phone taps and a network of contacts were their tools, so success depended primarily on their wits, instinct and hard work.
Nevertheless, the case of Oldham and the ‘cipher boys’ should rightly rank alongside the Cambridge spy ring as one of the greatest breaches of British security in history. The decision to hold an internal investigation within the Foreign Office conducted by amateurs such as Kemp, rather than hand the entire matter over to the professionals, meant that the full extent of Oldham’s activities were left undetected for a decade. It was preferable to cover up the entire episode and protect the reputation of senior civil servants rather than pursue the unpalatable concept that highly confidential material had been sold to overseas agencies. However, other parties were equally culpable.
The operation from 14 July onwards was compromised by mistakes – in particular the decision not to intercept phone calls from the continent when Oldham was holed up in the Jules Hotel which might have led SIS to Bystrolyotov, or indeed the hesitancy to bring Oldham in for questioning for fear of the revelations that might ensue. Perhaps most damaging of all, no investigation was ever conducted into his travels abroad either before or after his dismissal from the Foreign Office, especially given his position at the League of Nations or pivotal role at the heart of Room 22. Indeed, the reluctance to believe a trusted official within the Foreign Office had betrayed state secrets can be traced all the way back to 1929 when Bessedovsky jumped over the wall of the Soviet embassy in Paris talking about ‘Mr Scott’; the wrong man was under suspicion until 1947. Even after Oldham’s death, MI5 and SIS had the name Perelly with which to work but failed to pursue this line of inquiry and it seems that no attempt was made by Vivian or his associates to link the King inquiry to that of Oldham until 1950.
It is this catalogue of cumulative failure that allowed Oldham to become the forgotten spy, a legendary figure and a cautionary tale within the Foreign Office amongst junior staff. Yet no widespread changes were made within Whitehall until after the King case, when Oake and Quarry were dismissed
and the entire Communications Department staff were replaced with the exception of Kemp, who not only kept his job but also earned advancement, perhaps on the tacit understanding that he would maintain his silence over the events of 1933. Even then, the entire affair was deliberately covered up until 1951. In contrast, when the Soviet sources are examined, it is clear that great importance was placed on Oldham’s activities, and he was seen as a key informant during a difficult period for Soviet intelligence. He was the man who had given access to the heart of the British diplomatic machinery.
The flow of information, patchy at first but invaluable during the pivotal Lausanne Conference, demonstrated to the Soviets the necessity of having men on the inside. Thus Oldham became the first in a line of moles within the Foreign Office who provided sensitive intelligence, while the parallel policy of cultivating ideological recruits from universities, who would take up prominent positions within the establishment, was launched in the wake of Oldham’s death. It is no coincidence that OGPU mourned the loss of one of their key assets. It is only the British who have not accepted Oldham’s status as the progenitor spy who, if not the man who started Cold War espionage, certainly helped shape its terms of reference.
Yet it is easy to overlook the person amidst the hyperbole. One of the reasons that this book concentrates on Oldham’s entire career, rather than just events after 1929, is that it hopefully gives greater perspective to the forces that shaped his life. In many ways, he is a tragic and complex figure, a product of his time as the world struggled to come to terms with cataclysmic events and Britain moved from the Victorian era to a new, fast-paced age of technology and rapid change. On one hand he was a war hero, fighting for King and country only to return home a changed and damaged man, stepping back into civilian life in a government department that had failed to stop the carnage in the first place and then asked to help shape the peace that defined the world in which he lived. On the other hand, he was weak and greedy, prepared to betray the same King and country for financial gain to support the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed and literally addicted.
It is easy to write Oldham off as another hopeless alcoholic, but clearly he was an intelligent and skillful man who had transcended his station in life – the
ability to hold OGPU at bay after first contact for nearly two years, followed by the equal ability to give British intelligence the slip for a month at the end of his life, shows that he could have been a formidable asset to British intelligence had he been given the chance in 1918. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that, had he been brought in for questioning by MI5 and SIS in the summer of 1933, Oldham would have been devastatingly useful as a double agent. The role of Lucy is equally hard to fathom – was she a fully complicit Lady Macbeth figure who suggested that Oldham should sell secrets to foreign powers to prop up her lavish lifestyle, or yet another victim of events as her life spiralled increasingly out of control? In the murky world of espionage, nothing is clear-cut and there are no definite answers.
It should be no surprise to learn that one person at least had a strong view on the matter and it seems fitting that the last word should go to one of Oldham’s contemporaries and our companion throughout, the proud King’s Messenger George Antrobus. His feelings of hurt and bitterness and his sense of betrayal are contained in a passage that he wrote in 1940 with Oldham clearly in mind. It still has the power to sting today. Initially, Antrobus’s polemic was sparked by indignation towards people who brought the name of the messengers into disrepute, but it soon became far more specific:
King’s Messengers suffer more severely from pretenders to their own title. It is bad enough to find that some bumptious, overbearing, Englishman-abroad, whipper-snapper with a temporary red passport has been calling himself a King’s Messenger and making the name stink in the nostrils of porters, ticket collectors, and customs officers – all of whom are the Greyhound’s [King’s Messenger’s] best friends and with whom he takes great pains to keep on the friendliest of footings. It is far worse when a downright knave takes his name in vain.
This has happened more than once, but the most serious and embarrassing instance of it concerned a man – I can hardly call him a gentleman – who was himself a Foreign Office official. He was a clever little upstart, a permanent civil servant, with a face like a
rat and a conscience utterly devoid of scruples. He took advantage of his position to make himself an agent for smuggling articles of value in the bags and when a consignment of particular importance turned up he provided himself with a red passport and took the bag in person. He had of course a confederate in the embassy at a big European capital and his delinquencies were not discovered until after his death.
It turned out that he had married a wealthy woman whose assets he had succeeded in transferring to himself. He lived in impressive style, with a fine house in London; a big car, and a smart chauffeur; he arrayed himself, if not in purple, at least in fine linen and fared sumptuously. So sumptuously indeed did he fare that he contracted delirium tremens, absented himself from office and rounded off an interesting career by committing suicide. I am afraid, with all our humanity, we never succeeded in producing anything in the least like this permanent civil servant; I comfort myself with the thought that he was not typical of his order.
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Given the way that the King affair was covered up, it is astonishing that Antrobus was permitted to publish this passage – another sign of lax Foreign Office security, perhaps? However, it is interesting that Oldham attracted An-trobus’s withering and vitriolic verdict rather than King. Given some of the earlier passages in Antrobus’s book about the plight of the temporary clerks, he perhaps had sympathy for the actions of the cipher boys, given his own future without the financial security of a pension.
Maybe Oldham deserved Antrobus’s epitaph, but then people can be weak or greedy, make terrible mistakes for which there seems no chance of retribution and pay the ultimate penalty; the repercussions of their actions often resonate many years down the line in the most unexpected ways. However, consider the words of one of Ernest’s nephews, Anthony Stanforth, who has been instrumental in piecing together many of the family connections described above:
We wonder how much Ernest’s parents knew, and whether they protected Michael and my mother from the details. My mother only ever spoke well of her brother. She clearly idolised him, and said his death was from ‘never having properly recovered from being blown up in the Great War.’ No mention of marriage, suicide, or worse. But that was another age, when shameful secrets were kept hidden, even within the family.
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For better or for worse, Ernest’s tale is now told in full. This book is partly written for those who have been unwittingly affected by events outside their control. It is a lesson that history is woven from many different perspectives with unforeseen repercussions, not just for the principal players, but for the families that often stand in the shadows and suffer equal or greater collateral damage and loss.
There are several key publications that lie behind this one. The first is Emil Draitser’s account of Oldham’s handler, Dimitri Bystrolyotov, based on an interview that took place in 1973 just before the Soviet agent’s death. This is supported by Nigel West and Olgev Tsarev’s account of Oldham’s activities during this period. Both works draw heavily on Bystrolyotov’s files in the KGB archives, from which many quotes are taken.
Equally, the accounts of life in the Foreign Office by Tilley and Gaselee, and Wheeler-Holohan are important; but the marvellously irreverent and idiosyncratic memoirs of George Antrobus help to paint a vivid picture of Oldham’s working environment during the period covered. Tragically, Antro-bus was killed in World War II when his home suffered a direct hit during a German bombing raid; he never saw his work in print.
Most of the key works are listed in the endnotes, including articles and books used for short quotes. The following is a core expanded reading list that has been used to research Oldham’s life and times.
C. Andrew,
The Defence of the Realm
(Penguin, 2009)
C. Andrew and V. Mitrokhin,
The Mitrokhin Archive
(Penguin, 1999)
G. Antrobus,
King’s Messenger 1918–1940
(Herbert Jenkins, 1941)
G. Bessedovsky,
Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat
(Williams & Norgate, 1931)
E. Deacon,
With My Little Eye
(Frederick Miller, 1982)
Prince Lichnowsky,
My Mission to London, 1912–1914
(George H. Doran, 1918)
E. Draitser,
Stalin’s Romeo Spy
(Duckworth Overlook, 2011)
W. Duffy,
A Time for Spies
(Vanderbilt UP, 1999)
Viscount Grey,
Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916
(Frederick A. Stokes, 1925)
K. Jeffrey,
MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service
(Bloomsbury, 2010)
A. Mallinson,
1914: Fight the Good Fight Britain, the Army and the Coming of the FirstWorldWar
(Bantam, 2013)
H. Nicholson,
Peacemaking 1919
(Houghton Mifflin, 1933)
J. Tilley and S. Gaselee,
The Foreign Office
(Putnam, 1933)
R. C. Tucker,
Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941
, (Norton & Company, 1992)
S. Twigge, E. Hampshire and G. Macklin,
British Intelligence
(The National Archives, 2008)
N. West and O. Tsarev,
The Crown Jewels
(Harper Collins, 1998)
V. Wheeler-Holohan,
The History of the King’s Messengers
(Grayson and Gray-son, 1935)
P. Wright,
Spycatcher
(Viking Penguin, 1987)
Primary sources
There are precious few family archives for Ernest Oldham. In fact, the first time many of his relatives even knew what he looked like was when his MI5 file was released, containing the two snapshots included in this book. When his parents died on the Isle of Wight, the house was cleared by the family but no material relating to Oldham was found to have survived. Ironically, given Oldham’s putative posting in the Diplomatic Service, his parents’ house was called ‘Rio’. Piecing together many of the family details has involved standard genealogical sources, many of which are available online from websites such as www.ancestry.co.uk, www.findmypast.co.uk and www.freebmd.org.uk – civil
registration certificates, census returns, passenger lists, electoral lists and street directories.
The key primary sources for Oldham’s story can be found at The National Archives, Kew, hidden amongst the records of the Foreign Office. As stated in the text, most of the registered files produced by the Communications Department have been destroyed during the crucial period of Oldham’s activity. Instead, the four sequences of day books were explored (TNA series FO 1103) – over 100 files with infrequent glimpses of Oldham’s work or, towards the end, his absences. Equally, the main series of registered correspondence of the Foreign Office proved surprisingly fruitful, with additional references to Oldham’s summons to jury service, and the mysterious receipt of a package from Spain in the early 1920s, located but not included in the main story. A summary of his career can be found in the annual
Foreign Office Lists
.
