106 • COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN
gence purposes and that individual Germans had been observed
making sketches and topographical notes. It was reported that in one
instance a number of Germans of a military bearing had been living
for 18 months in a house in Hythe; two or three men had stayed there
for about two months at a time before being replaced by others, so
that over the 18-month period about 20 different men had been seen.
Allegedly they had used the house as a base for tours and their inter-
est in Lydd and the surrounding area had been noted. The general
impression was such that the situation resembled that in France be-
fore the German invasion in 1870. France’s defeat in 1870 had been
attributable to a lack of an appropriate intelligence organization, and
it was widely accepted that the great generals of the past, such as
Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and theDuke of Wellington,owed
much of their success to a carefully developed espionage system. Im-
mediately after hostilities had commenced in the 1870 war, the
French had attempted to set up acounterintelligenceorganization
from scratch, but it had been too late.COMMUNIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN (CPGB).Founded in
January 1921, the CPGB was regarded byMI5as an instrument of
the Kremlin, funded by the Soviet Union and led by Marxists inher-
ently disloyal to Great Britain, and was therefore the subject of inten-
sive study by MI5 throughout its existence. As a result of MI5
surveillance, two CPGB national organizers,Percy Gladingand
Douglas Springhall, were convicted of espionage, and numerous
other members were suspected of participating in spy rings. A mem-
ber of the National Executive,Bob Stewart, acted as a link between
the party’s underground cells and theNKVD,andJames Klug-
mann, the party’s historian, was responsible for recruiting and han-
dlingJohn CairncrossandMichael Straight.
Proof that the CPGB was never an independent organization was
found in the intercepted wireless messages, codenamedmask, ex-
changed between theCominternin Moscow and the party’s secret
radio transmitter located in Wimbledon.
Technical surveillance of the CPGB’s headquarters in King Street,
Covent Garden, was compromised in 1941 byAnthony Blunt, who
warned the NKVD that microphones had been inserted into the walls
of the building. Information from this source had been circulated