The Guy Liddell Diaries, Volume I: 1939-1942: 1939-1942: MI5's Director of Counter-Espionage in World War II

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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. Mure describes his informant for the Ellen Wilkinson story as an old friend of Liddell’s mother’s, ‘the widow of a food controller in the First World War’, which does not quite fit the profile of Sir Humphrey Mackworth, whom Viscountess Rhondda had divorced in 1922. Hayden Peake "Definitely one of the most important Second World War intelligence documents to have been declassified in recent years. But for the general or casual reader of history, there are titillating details of Liddell's relations with Anthony Blunt (later outed as a Soviet spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher) and J.

Kennedy agreed to waive Kent's diplomatic immunity and on 20th May, 1940, the Special Branch raided his flat.In 1902, aged 32 – already with over 17 years professional engineering and management experience – he volunteered for the Royal Engineers and was commissioned as 2nd Lieutenant. Surprisingly he did not notify the White House or the US Office of Naval Intelligence about this plan. As I showed in an earlier posting, the Radio Security Service (RSS) was a separate unit, part of MI8. His agent, Duško Popov, provided an Abwehr questionnaire suggesting that the Japanese Air Force planned to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor. I knew and liked David Mure, John Costello and Richard Deacon, and had many conversations with them over many years, but I have never agreed with their views regarding Guy Liddell’s loyalty to his country.

He was a talented cellist in his youth, and was studying in Germany for a career as a professional musician when the First World War began. Here he declares that Deacon was ‘exceptionally well-informed’, but he finesses the controversy over Liddell completely. By December he was still attending two days a week and had ‘rigged up’ a studio in premises on Silverdale Road. When I assemble a bibliography, a reference is intended to covey to the reader that the title listed has been read, but does not amount to an endorsement of the content, nor even necessarily a recommendation for a reading-list.

Liddell thought that there was now "a unique opportunity" to capitalise on the "existing good relations and reinforce cooperation which might prove of vital importance' if the liaison developed `in future emergency or war". Even in 2002, fifty years later, when they were declassified, multiple passages were redacted because some events were still considered too sensitive. He subsequently also painted landscapes in oil, in a modern slightly ‘cubist’ style, of which one of Crail harbour, Fife, has been sighted. He (Guy Liddell) would murmur his thoughts aloud, as if groping his way towards the facts of a case, his face creased in a comfortable, innocent smile. Another agent recruited by Maxwell Knight was Joan Miller, a member of various right-wing organizations.

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". It is an abridgment of a private diary that Guy Liddell kept during the Second World War, detailing on an almost daily basis via dictation to his secretary, his work in the counter-espionage realm. According to Nigel West: "His reliance on personal contacts led him to choose some impressive intellectual talent, and B division effectively took control of the enemy's entire espionage organization in Britain.Covering the period from August 1939 to June 1945, the diaries reveal how double agents smuggled microfilm and explosives out of occupied Europe; deep cover British spies operated inside German embassies; and how prostitutes in Britain were uncovered as German agents.

Liddell provides a day-by-day account of the unfolding drama, while the diaries' matter-of-fact writing style barely conceals how personal the betrayal was for the MI5 man who was close friends with some of the key protagonists and who struggled to believe what they had done.M, undaunted, got the paper off to Desmond Morton, Churchill's private secretary, who was also a personal friend of his, with the plea that it should be passed on to the Prime Minister. The Radio Security Service had grown, under Liddell’s supervision, from an inter-service liaison committee known as the Wireless Board into a sophisticated cryptographic organisation that operated in tandem with Bletchley Park, concentrating on Abwehr communications, and enabling MI5 case officers to monitor the progress made by their double agents through the reports submitted by their enemy controllers to Berlin. Russia with the utmost cynicism signed the Russo-German pact and thereby precipitated a world war, doubtless on the assumption that the British Empire and Germany would fight themselves to a standstill when Russia would come down like a vulture and pick up the pieces. This extraordinary achievement, documented by Sir John Masterman in The Double Cross System (1972), resulted in numerous future High Court judges and university dons running a large stable of double agents, thereby providing the deception planners with a reliable conduit into the German high command.