14 • ALL-RUSSIA COOPERATIVE SOCIETY
enemy-occupied France during World War II and headed byMarie-
Madeleine Fourcade.ALL-RUSSIA COOPERATIVE SOCIETY.The All-Russia Cooper-
ative Society (ARCOS) was the principal Soviet trade organization
in Britain in the 1920s, during the period when there was no formal
diplomatic recognition of Lenin’s Communist regime. It shared
premises at 49 Moorgate with theSoviet Trade Delegation.InMay
1927, the ARCOS office was raided bySpecial Branchon the suspi-
cion that a classified Royal Air Force manual had been passed to an
employee. The raid failed to recover the missing manual, thought to
have been handled byWilfred Macartney, but did succeed in find-
ing a quantity of interesting documents and lists ofCominterncover
addresses overseas. The police occupation of the building lasted 104
hours and resulted in the publication of a White Paper disclosing ma-
terial seized from the strong rooms and incinerator, together with a
selection of wireless traffic intercepted and decrypted byGovern-
ment Code and Cipher School.
ALPASS, JOHN.A careerMI5officer, John Alpass served as one of
Dame Stella Rimington’s two deputy directors-general until 1994,
when he was appointedintelligence coordinator to the Cabinet.In
1996 he played a key role in chairing the interdepartmental commit-
tee supervising the preparation and publication ofTheMitrokhinAr-
chive.
AMERASIA.A pro-Communist journal based in New York. In January
1945 Amerasiapublished an article based on a British Intelligence
assessment of postwar policy on southeast Asia concentrating on
Thailand, and when scrutinized it was evident that the content had
been drawn from a classified paper written by anOffice of Strategic
Services(OSS) officer, Kenneth Wells. Fearing a leak and following
a complaint from the British, OSS’s security section conducted an
investigation into the source ofAmerasia’s information and made an
illicit search of the editor’s office on Fifth Avenue. Hundreds of clas-
sified official documents, from virtually every branch of the govern-
ment, were found. Surveillance of editor Philip Jaffe and his staff
resulted in the June 1945 arrest by theFederal Bureau of Investiga-