As prime minister, MacDonald did receive a weekly summary of British revolutionary movements written by Special Branch. He was not impressed, thinking the reports suffered from political bias and added little insight. To the anger of Special Branch, he refused to circulate them to cabinet. His attitude towards intelligence did soften over time, especially when dealing with growing problems of industrial unrest, and he came to realise that domestic intelligence provided by MI5, Special Branch and even MI6 could help to determine government responses.14 His hard work won respect amongst the Whitehall establishment. The cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, for example, liked MacDonald ‘very much’, and got on with him ‘like a house on fire’.15 MacDonald was no Soviet stooge, and indeed was disliked by the Soviet ambassador in London, who called him fickle and vain. Throughout his premiership, MacDonald remained committed to monitoring Soviet activities just as much as did his Conservative counterparts.16 But the notorious ‘Zinoviev letter’ delivered a fatal blow to MacDonald’s burgeoning relationship with the secret world, and cast a dark shadow over relations between Labour ministers and secret service for decades to come.17
MacDonald found himself in a precarious position in 1924, perched delicately atop an unstable minority government. The fact that his was the first ever Labour administration made his position even more perilous. He, and his young party, had a lot to lose. Rather like Harold Wilson half a century later, MacDonald had been elected early in the year, but faced another general election in October. MacDonald too found enemies among right-wing sections of the establishment, eager to smear the prime minister and destabilise his nascent Labour government.
Days before the election of October 1924, the Daily Mail published a sensational story: ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists: Moscow Order to our Reds’.18 The newspaper had somehow obtained a copy of a letter purportedly written by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, to the Communist Party of Great Britain. So close to an election, this ‘revelation’ inevitably had damaging implications for MacDonald and his Labour government – which was exactly why the Daily Mail published it so gleefully. Addressed ‘Dear Comrades’, the letter sought to ‘stir up the masses of the British proletariat’ and instigate rebellion. It mentioned ‘agitation-propaganda work’ inside the armed forces, and urged communists to penetrate ‘all the units of the troops’. Perhaps most damaging to MacDonald, it referred to a group inside the Labour Party ‘sympathising’ with closer Anglo–Russian relations.19 This implied that the government was soft on Bolshevism – an injurious charge, given the enduring paranoia about Moscow.
Although MacDonald had sought to distance Labour from the British communists, as prime minister he had already offered de jure recognition of the Soviet Union and signed two treaties with the new state. Like Lloyd George before him, he hoped simply to improve bilateral trade and bring the Soviet Union into the international community. Unfortunately, his approach ‘seemed nothing less than treachery’ to establishment figures fearful of the relentless march of communism. The popular press were critical too, dubbing one of the treaties ‘Money for Murderers’. To make matters worse, the Labour cabinet had also resisted prosecuting John Campbell, a communist journalist accused of subverting the armed services, on the grounds that he had an excellent war record.20 Personally, MacDonald had some reservations about that decision, and rightly worried that ‘more will be heard of this matter’.21
Questions over the role of the intelligence community in the notorious Zinoviev affair lingered for almost a century. Did intelligence officers deliberately forge the letter to bring down a democratically elected prime minister? If not, did they at least publicise the letter in order to achieve that end? Was the secret civil service during the 1920s simply anti-Labour? MI6’s official historian, Keith Jeffery, sums up the suspicions nicely: ‘Right-wing elements, with the connivance of allies in the security and intelligence services, deliberately used the letter – and perhaps even manufactured it – to ensure a Labour defeat.’22 These questions are crucial. They raise issues of accountability and political legitimacy at the heart of the secret world.
The Zinoviev letter was almost certainly a fake. Gill Bennett, the Foreign Office historian with access to MI6 sources, concludes that it was ‘highly unlikely’ to have been written by Zinoviev. Instead it was most likely a forgery produced by someone with links to the international intelligence community and a decent knowledge of Comintern. Bennett adds that the mystery forger was also probably ‘aware that there were interest groups in Britain who would make use of the forgery to further their own cause by damaging the Labour Government and derailing the ratification of the Anglo–Soviet treaties’. It is more than possible that information about the proposed forgery could have reached British intelligence officers looking to aid the Conservatives in the forthcoming election.23
White Russians, the exiled supporters of the tsar, were the most likely culprits. Those based in Britain certainly possessed motive, given their vehement opposition to MacDonald’s Anglo–Soviet treaties. They also had the means, including a sophisticated intelligence network and forgery capabilities in Europe. It is likely that the forger was based in Riga – some of the individuals passing intelligence to MI6 in that city were certainly involved with White Russian circles.24 One of a team of four key White Russian suspects in the forgery, Alexis Bellegarde, had close links with MI6, and went on to become one of the service’s most successful wartime double agents working against the Nazis.25 Others would exaggerate the authenticity of the letter as it was passed upwards – eventually to MacDonald himself.26
On 2 October 1924, MI6’s Riga station obtained the letter and despatched an English version to London. A week later, MI6 headquarters sent copies to the Foreign Office with a covering note asserting that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’. It was, they insisted, by Zinoviev. In fact, MI6 conducted no checks on the authenticity of the letter. Nobody inside MI6, for example, had asked how Riga had obtained it; nor did anybody enquire as to whether it was the original or a translation.27
The Foreign Office rightly sought ‘corroborative proofs’ before showing the letter to the prime minister. MI6’s Desmond Morton supposedly provided these on 11 October. His report, apparently based on information received from an agent who had infiltrated the Communist Party of Great Britain, stated that the British communists had held a meeting at the start of October to consider a letter received from Zinoviev, thereby validating the Riga letter. Intriguingly, however, the agent’s original written report made no mention of any letter from Moscow at all. Morton claimed that the extra information had been gained after he met the agent on 10 October for further discussion. Morton appears guilty of, at the very least, asking leading questions to generate information to fit the Zinoviev story. At most, he knew the letter was a forgery, but realising the implications for MacDonald, intended it to be treated as genuine. He certainly disliked both the Bolsheviks and the Labour Party.28
Morton’s rather weak ‘confirmation’ was good enough for the Foreign Office. The permanent secretary observed: ‘We have now heard definitely on absolutely reliable authority that the Russian letter was discussed at a recent meeting of the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain.’29 The prime minister was duly informed. Upon first reading the letter on 16 October, MacDonald was suspicious. He ‘did not treat it as a