524 • STEWART, BOB
appointed the British representative on theComintern’s Executive
Committee, and he visited Moscow often, attending the Fourth Con-
gress of the Third International and being elected to the Praesidium
of the Fifth Congress. All of this political activity was a matter of
public record, and even theTimesreported in June 1924 that Stewart
had taken charge of the party’s propaganda section.
Stewart’s move to London marked his participation in the under-
ground cells, and in March 1930 he made a visit to Germany that
may have been significant because thereafter Moscow’s financial
support for the party was channeled through him exclusively. Within
a month of his return to England, Stewart was in Ireland to organize
the party there, and by August he was writing articles inPravda,
under his own name, supposedly as a specialist in military affairs.
This new role coincided with MI5 noting that he had approached a
member of the party who lived in Crayford and worked at Vickers,
asking for information about new weapon designs. Almost simulta-
neously, the Dublin Garda reported to MI5 the existence of ‘‘a prom-
inent Soviet agent’’ living at Stewart’s North London address.
By June 1932 Stewart had been elected to the CPGB’s Central
Committee, and it was in this capacity that his name became known
toWalter Krivitsky, who mentioned him to MI5’s Jane Sissmore
while being debriefed in London in February 1940. Meanwhile,Spe-
cial Branchdetectives were filing reports on his many visits to Ire-
land, to meet Communists and members of theIrish Republican
Army, and over the following year the number of his trips abroad
escalated considerably, with departures logged to Berlin in October
1932, to Paris in January 1933, to Zurich in March, and to Brussels
in April and June, in addition to other trips to Esbjerg, Copenhagen,
and Amsterdam. On each occasion, either SIS was alerted to monitor
his movements, or the local police kept him under surveillance, but
when he went to Moscow in June 1936 no such facilities were avail-
able and he was able to confer with his Soviet intelligence controllers
in relative freedom. On this visit, Stewart may have been submitting
a progress report onPercy Glading, with whom he had been in con-
tact in May and June, immediately prior to his departure.
In contrast, Stewart’s activities were watched extremely closely in
London, and a microphone, codenamedtable, picked up all his of-
fice conversations in King Street. Another, codenamedkaspar, re-