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I am just begining to scan the reading but it is shocking that MI5, with the exception of Kell who suffered from lack of financial resources to recruit good people (giving him the benefit of the doubt) seems to have had average to poor leaders and senior personnel – Harker Petrie Sillitoe White.
Imaginary moles, identified as the result of mistaken leads, began to multiply rapidly in print: among them Donald Beves, Frank Birch, Andrew Gow, Sir Roger Hollis, Guy Liddell, Graham Mitchell and Arthur Pigou (all dead), Sir Rudolf Peierls (who denied claims that he too was dead and sued successfully for libel), Lord Rothschild (the victim during his lifetime of innuendo rather than open allegation in case he also sued) and Wilfred Mann (who did not sue but wrote a book to prove his innocence). His latest work, Cold War Spymaster, subtitled The Legacy of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5, is a puzzling creation, as I shall soon explain. His social connections proved important because in 1940 he employed Anthony Blunt as his personal assistant and became a close friend of both Guy Burgess and Victor Rothschild, and was acquainted with Kim Philby. Liddell was expected to succeed David Petrie as Director General of MI5, but was passed over when Home Secretary Herbert Morrison was informed by Ellen Wilkinson of rumours that he might be a double agent and was instead appointed Deputy-Director-General under Percy Sillitoe. In this role he was involved in exposing the spying activities of the All Russian Cooperative Society, a spy ring based in London.R.E [Commander, Royal Engineers] at Lemnos, in the Aegean, where he was concerned with One of his papers, for example, entitled "The Comintern is not Dead", predicted with great accuracy the developments in Russia's policy with regard to Britain after the war, as well as underscoring the harmful character of her current subversionary activities. Astonishingly, Petrie’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography asserts that Petrie had recommended Liddell for the post, but had been overruled by Attlee – an item of advice that would have been a complete volte-face in light of his memorandum three years earlier.
Definitely one of the most important Second World War intelligence documents to have been declassified in recent years. BBC History MagazineWALLFLOWERS is the codename given to one of the Security Service's most treasured possessions, the daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5's Director of Counter Espionage, Guy Liddell, to his secretary, Margo Huggins. Although showing Tedder in civilian dress it is probably derived from a Cecil Beaton photograph taken of him in uniform in 1942, when he was AOC in Cairo. Indeed, in The Greatest Treason, Deacon outlined Wilkinson’s machinations behind the scenes, attributing her reservations about Liddell to what Münzenberg had personally told her about his ‘enemy in British counter-espionage’ before he was killed. closely with the start of the period studied in Misdefending the Realm) is the appropriate place to begin.He, Burgess, and Blunt were friends, and Liddell was very much a part of the hothouse wartime circle revolving around Victor Rothschild's 5 Bentinck Street flat, in which Burgess and Blunt both lived. He transferred to MI5 with his team in October 1931, where he became an expert on Soviet subversive activities within the UK and recruited agents, including his private secretary Dick Wright, and future head of B5(b) Maxwell Knight, in preparation for possible war with Germany. Its historical importance is enhanced by the editing of Nigel West who, apart from decoding several obscure references to the secret war, persuaded the Security Service to break their rule of maintaining an agent's anonymity.
This led in 1944 to the most extraordinary operation of all, when the German high command was fooled into thinking the main invasion of Europe would be around Calais rather than on the Normandy beaches. Thus West founds a large part of what he characterizes as a ‘remarkable’ career on a misunderstanding: Liddell’s lifework was one dominated by missed opportunities.The cracking of the German Enigma code meant that each agent could be tracked to check the misinformation was believed. Liddell was one of three brothers who all won the Military Cross during the First World War and subsequently joined MI5. Liddell also painted several portraits of Field-Marshal Montgomery whom he claimed was one of the easiest and quickest subjects to repeat, and Tedder himself owned one of these.
The difficulty, he observed, was how to do so "without causing offence to the State Department, with whom we have been in touch via the Counsellor of the American Embassy here ever since the war". This week, for the first time, the 12 volumes of Liddell's detailed daily journal will be released to the public. He joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a private, a unit his brothers David Liddell MC and Cecil served with.
He was Assistant Director of Works to the British Adriatic Commission for the relief of the Serbian Army. Mr Liddle must have been quite a force and, of course, lucky enough to have secretary (assistant) with the energy required. He discovered information suggesting that the Japanese Air Force planned to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. After all, the top brass in Whitehall was unaware at this time of Blunt’s treachery (although I contend that White and Liddell, and maybe Petrie, knew about it), and Burgess had mixed and worked with all manner of prominent persons – all of whom rapidly tried to distance themselves from any possible contamination by the renegade and rake.
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