I have been scrutinising in some detail the Curry Report, The Security Service: its problems and organisational adjustments 1908-1945 –– the in-house history of MI5 which was written by John Court (‘Jack’) Curry (1887-?), a senior MI5 officer, during 1944-6. In so doing I have solved one of the great mysteries about Maxwell Knight. Anthony Masters has Knight joining MI5 in 1924 or 1925 (1) and Joan Miller has him joining in 1924 (2); but the Treasury Solicitor’s file regarding the Ben Greene case indicates that Knight became an MI5 officer in around 1931.(3)
The answer to the conundrum is in the Curry Report at p. 74 (KV 4/1): ‘A direct consequence of the reorganisation of functions in 1931 was that the agency which had been employed by S.I.S. and had furnished them with information about Communist matters inside this country came under the control of the Security Service, where it was later known as the M Section [i.e. Max Knight’s section].’
So he was working for MI6 from 1924/5 to 1931.
MI5’s Fishy Official Curry (as I like to call it) was originally intended to be a survey of MI5’s wartime work, but it turned into an extended account of (and apologia for) MI5’s activities since its inception. The three typescript volumes of the Report were released into the PRO, in sanitised form, in January 1999 under the Piece Nos. KV4/1-3. Similarly redacted versions of some of the section histories on which Curry based his Report were released in January and September 1999 in the KV4 Class. In August 1999 the PRO published a hardback book version of the Curry Report, The Security Service 1908-1945: The Official History; 442 pp.; ISBN 1-873162-79-0; £50:00, with an introduction by Christopher Andrew and a newly-compiled index.
According to ‘Nigel West’, the Curry Report was effectively buried after its completion in 1946 because the D-G, Sir David Petrie, believed that it exposed too many of MI5’s failings to serve the purpose for which it was intended – a weapon in post-war turf battles. The official line is that the Report simply turned out too long and was overly concerned with MI5’s more distant past.
As Nigel West suspects (‘Incompetence or worse?’, the Spectator, 2 October), the recently-published official history of MI5 up to 1945, by Jack Curry, has indeed been ‘sanitised’, even though the published version claims that gaps in the narrative (indicated thus: “[…]”) only occur ‘where the original text cannot be deciphered’. Comparison with the original typescript (held at the Public Record Office under reference KV 4/1-3) reveals that many of the missing passages have actually been excised and ‘retained in department’ under section 3(4) of the Public Records Act 1958. In at least one instance an excised passage goes unmarked in the published version.
Similar sloppiness is apparent in Professor Christopher Andrew’s introduction to the volume. For instance, he wrongly identifies MI5’s Brigadier O. Allen (‘Jasper’) Harker with A. W. A. Harker, a brigadier in the Ordnance Corps; this despite the fact that O. A. Harker’s correct initials are given in the book’s appendices. Ironically, the confusion between the two Harkers can be traced back to Nigel West’s 1981 history of MI5, which Professor Andrew once mocked for the number of howlers it contains.
As regards what the book reveals, Mr West is wrong to assert that, excisions notwithstanding, it is ‘a comprehensive history’ and ‘a candid chronology’ which reveals ‘the grisly truth’ about still unexplained failings in operations against Soviet espionage. These supposed failings exist largely in Mr West’s imagination and are a hangover from all the tosh written in the 1980s about an undetected ‘super-mole’ at the top of MI5.
Curry’s history is actually a tendentious, self-serving and obfuscatory account which glosses over MI5’s inherent right-wing bias (presumably in order to mollify the post-war Labour government). The book’s treatment of a number of awkward facets of the organisation’s pre-1945 history make this abundantly clear.
MI5’s First World War offshoot PMS2 is given only a cursory mention by Curry. There is no reference to its employment of the agent provocateur William Rickard, who in 1917 framed a family of socialists (the Wheeldons) on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate Lloyd George.
The Zinoviev Letter is mentioned, but not the fact that MI5 officers (notably Joseph Ball, who later became a Conservative Party official) were prime suspects for leaking it to the press in order to damage the Labour Party’s chances at the 1924 election.
Curry implicates British Communists in sabotage of Royal Navy vessels. Yet the Admiralty files prove that MI5 found not a shred of evidence and that the dockyard workers dismissed following the sabotage scare, in 1937, were victimised solely for their political affiliations.
The history praises the achievements of MI5’s star agent-runner, Maxwell Knight but it does not mention that Knight was a leading member of the British Fascists and seems to have colluded with them against the left while he was an intelligence officer.
Professor Andrew notes that an MI5 agent, James McGuirk Hughes (whose name Andrew misspells), became the British Union of Fascists’ head of intelligence, presenting this as proof of MI5’s effectiveness and anti-fascist credentials. He neglects to mention that the historian whose work he (incorrectly) cites, John Hope, argues that Hughes colluded with the fascists.
A ‘candid’ and ‘comprehensive’ history of MI5 would be one which dealt fully with these and other murky matters; for such an account we shall have to look beyond the works of in-house historians, tame professors and airport bookstall writers.
Notes
- Anthony Masters,The Man Who Was M, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) pp. vi, 15 and 18-9
- Joan Miller,One Girl’s War, (Dingle [Ireland]: Brandon, 1986 p. 18; Sunday Times Magazine, 12 October 1981, p. 95)
- Knight’s ‘Additional Note’, para. 3, in TS 27/522