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

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This week, for the first time, the 12 volumes of Liddell's detailed daily journal will be released to the public. The diaries reveal how U35 ran an agent, 'P', in the British consulate in the Hague who later had to be smuggled into England after his cover was blown. Cecil Frederick Joseph Liddell, who served as Head of MI5's Irish section from 1939, and David Edward Liddell; and was a second cousin of Alice Pleasance Liddell, the child friend of Lewis Carroll who was the basis for the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. He initially first served in the Metropolitan Police Special Branch at Scotland Yard, dealing primarily with cases of Soviet espionage, until he was transferred to MI5 in 1931. Sillitoe had worked in East Africa as a young man, but since 1923 as a domestic police officer, so he hardly met Petrie’s criteria, either.

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. It then went to Guy Liddell and various other Soviet-experts, all of whom expressed the opinion that M was allowing his personal distaste for Communism to swamp his judgement. Again, vaguely referring to his subject’s ‘supervision’ of projects, and ‘key role’ in recruiting such as White and Blunt, West goes on to make the following extraordinary claim: “Thus Liddell was closely associated with two of MI5’s most spectacular accomplishments, the interception and decryption of German intelligence signals by the Radio Security Service, and the famed ‘double cross system’. 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.Augustus Frederick Liddell RA, a retired Royal Artillery officer, and his wife Emily Shinner, who died when Liddell was eight years old. She was surprised to find herself growing to like these Bolsheviks of whom she had heard such hair-raising things.

After the war, Liddell joined Scotland Yard where, in liaison with Special Branch and the Foreign Office, he was involved in breaking a spy ring based around the All Russian Cooperative Society in London. Unwilling to waste his talents, the CP and the Comintern agreed that he should spend his enforced idleness at the Lenin School in Moscow. In October 1937, observing that the British had "for some time been seriously worried by the development of German Nazi and Italian Fascist organisations within the British Empire", Guy Liddell (writing from MI5 on behalf of Vernon Kell) proposed to N.Yet this is a position with which West is clearly not in sympathy, as is shown by his repeated encomia to Liddell’s performance.

The document was considered so highly classified that it was retained in the safe of successive Directors-General, and special permission was required to read it. First, for a leftist agitator like Wilkinson (who had also been the lover of Münzenberg’s henchman, Otto Katz) to confirm her close association with Münzenberg, and take up Münzenberg’s cause against Stalin, was quixotic, to say the least, even if her convictions about the communist cause had softened. Fourth, if Attlee had really listened carefully to her, and found her arguments persuasive, he would hardly have allowed Liddell to continue on in MI5 without even an investigation, and to be promoted to Deputy Director-General as some kind of designate.Olga Gray worked for the CP for six years, from 1931 to 1937, first as a volunteer and then full time at King Street. Hollis became deputy in 1953 and moved up in 1956 to be director general until his retirement, in 1965. 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. Liddell had also been seen drinking with other suspects Philby and Anthony Blunt in a pub in Chelsea. According to Nigel West: "He (Liddell) was responsible for co-ordinating the police raid on the Arcos building in Moorgate in May 1927 (which also housed the Soviet trade delegation), in pursuit of a missing classified RAF document.