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

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Roger Hollis, to whom the paper was first submitted, sent it back with the comment that it was over-theoretical. 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. The administrative nature of such a job did not appeal to him; his agents were loyal to him and he reciprocated that loyalty.

The diaries, made available online from the National Archives on Friday, cover the period when evidence emerged of the treachery within the British establishment in the form of the men - who would become known as the Cambridge Spies - who had spied for the Soviet Union. When war broke out, he was Assistant-Director, under Jasper Harker, of B Division, responsible for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sacked Director-General of MI5 Vernon Kell and in June 1940 Liddell was promoted to Director of B Division in charge of counter-espionage, where he appointed Dick Wright and Anthony Blunt to senior posts. Liddell was one of three brothers who all won the Military Cross during the First World War and subsequently joined MI5. He subsequently also painted landscapes in oil, in a modern slightly ‘cubist’ style, of which one of Crail harbour, Fife, has been sighted.In the spring of 1938 he visited the USA and determined that both the military authorities and the FBI were "more than anxious to establish a liaison with us, which could cover not only Soviet, German and Italian activities, but also those of the Japanese". Of course the massive job they had to do at a time when recruitment was increasing exponentially meant that mistakes were made which cost Britain dear in the post war world. I am skimming through The Perfect English Spy (White was not a spy) and cannot believe that Hollis was recruited on the basis of a tennis match! These include Sir Dick White, Philby's nemesis in both MI5 and MI6, both of which White headed, and Peter Wright (of Spycatcher fame), one of the most avid of all mole-hunters. The diaries contain disastrously inaccurate information from the secret intelligence service MI6, suggesting its agents in turn may have been compromised by the Nazi secret service.

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. Hollis became deputy in 1953 and moved up in 1956 to be director general until his retirement, in 1965. There is an informative article about Liddell in the Eastbourne Herald of 16th December 1944, which provides a rough overview of his earlier career. During the war Liddell ran MI5's counterespionage division, where Anthony Blunt was his personal assistant. A gifted cellist he was studying in Germany and was destined to become a professional musician until the outbreak of the First World War.

Wolkoff, Kent and Ramsay talked about politics and agreed that they all shared the same views on politics. He also claimed that Liddell was also a traitor and had been part of the Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt spy ring. When she began to help Percy Glading with a scheme to convey plans of a British gun to the Soviet Union, she found herself liking the man. She did not leave the intelligence world, but moved to SIS, so her behaviour cannot have been that subversive. His agent, Duško Popov, provided an Abwehr questionnaire suggesting that the Japanese Air Force planned to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor.

He was Assistant Director of Works to the British Adriatic Commission for the relief of the Serbian Army. 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). According to Francis Beckett, the author of The Enemy Within (1995): "Olga Gray worked for the CP for six years, from 1931 to 1937, first as a volunteer and then full time at King Street. It describes in meticulous detail the daily workings of MI5 (the Security Service), MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) and other parts of the Whitehall intelligence machine: the turf battles, the personalities, anecdotes, successes and failures.

One of these was Percy Glading, a former member of the CP Central Committee who worked at Woolwich Arsenal. 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. Despite these links, when Liddell retired from the Security Service in 1952 he was appointed security adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, an extremely sensitive post following the conviction of the physicist Klaus Fuchs two years earlier. Liddell was born in Madras (Chennai) on 8th November 1868, as second son of William Byam Liddell, a tea-planter and merchant also born there in 1836 (d. 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.