372 • MONKHOUSE, ALLAN
Driberg, respectively, into theCommunist Party of Great Britain
in 1932 and the Young Communist League in 1934.MONKHOUSE, ALLAN.Allan Monkhouse lived in the Soviet Union
for nine years and devoted more than 22 years of his life to develop-
ing trade between London and Moscow. All his efforts were nullified
when he was arrested in March 1933 and accused of being part of a
massive conspiracy to undermine Communism and sabotage Stalin’s
plans for economic reform and recovery. Monkhouse’s arrest by the
notoriousOGPU, together with that of 42 others, among them six
British engineers, did not come as a complete surprise. Monkhouse’s
Russian secretary had been detained briefly that January, and a strong
protest had been registered by her employer, Metropolitan-Vickers
Electrical Company, which was supervising heavy engineering con-
tracts for the installation of electricity-generating plants in various
Soviet power stations. After some hours of interrogation at the Luby-
anka Prison, during which he was accused of espionage on behalf of
the British Secret Service, sabotage, and bribery, Monkhouse and a
colleague, Charles Nordwall, were released on the condition they
would not leave Moscow.
The eventual indictment handed to the defendants on 9 April,
which ran to 85 pages, revealed that Monkhouse’s secretary had
made an incriminating statement to the OGPU about the activities of
Monkhouse’s chief engineer, Leslie C. Thornton. At the subsequent
trial of 17 defendants, Monkhouse’s lawyer pleaded his client guilty
to a charge of bribery. Thornton made what was purported to be a
signed confession in which he admitted having worked for theSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS), naming Monkhouse as the organizer of a
network of 26 engineers, all his agents.
All our spying operations on USSR territory are directed by the British
Intelligence Service, through their agent, C. S. Richards, who occupied the
position of Managing Director of the Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Ex-
port Company Limited. Spying operations on USSR territory were di-
rected by myself and Monkhouse, representatives of the above-mentioned
firm, who are contractors, by official agreement, to the Soviet Government,
for the supply of turbines and electrical equipment and the furnishing of
technical aid agreements. On the instructions of C. S. Richards given to
me to this end, British personnel were gradually drawn into the spying or-