600 • ZINOVIEV LETTER
ted U-boat warfare as of 1 February and directed the ambassador to
approach the Mexican government with an offer of support if it at-
tacked the United States to recover ‘‘lost territory in Texas, New
Mexico and Arizona.’’
The intercepted text was decrypted inRoom 40by the Reverend
William MontgomeryandNigel de Greyand was passed to the
U.S. Embassy in London by thedirector of naval intelligence,Ad-
miral Hall, before being made public in March 1917. Surprisingly,
when challenged, Count Bernstorff confirmed the authenticity of the
telegram. As a direct consequence, President Woodrow Wilson told
Congress in April 1917 that America’s neutrality in World War I
would cease.ZINOVIEV LETTER.In September 1924 Colonel Ronald Meikle-
john at theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) station in Riga acquired
a copy of aCominterndirective, typed in Cyrillic and dated 15 Sep-
tember 1924, from a source with access to files in Moscow. Meikle-
john’s secretary translated what turned out to be a letter signed by
Grigori Zinoviev, Vladimir Lenin’s president of the Third Interna-
tional, and addressed to the Central Committee of theCommunist
Party of Great Britain(CPGB). It advocated sedition on a grand
scale and agitation within the armed forces, all eloquent proof that
the Soviets deliberately had reneged on the terms of the recent
Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement that had opened diplomatic relations
between the two countries, although it remained to be ratified by Par-
liament.
The translated letter was received in London by SIS’s chief of pro-
duction, MajorDesmond Morton, and was circulated routinely to
the services,MI5, and the Foreign Office, although as was customary
there was no indication of how or where SIS had acquired it. Morton
later claimed that he had not appreciated the political potential of the
text, just as the country was preparing for a general election, and
when asked for verification of its authenticity, he confirmed that an
SIS source inside the CPGB had reported that the CPGB’s Central
Committee had met recently to discuss Zinoviev’s instructions.
While nobody quibbled with the general sentiments expressed in the
directive, which were entirely in conformity with the Comintern’s
policy of exporting Soviet-style Communism, there were immediate
demands for assurances of its provenance.