ZINOVIEV LETTER• 601On 25 October, four days before polling day, the entire content of
the letter was published in theDaily Mail. As a consequence, Ramsay
MacDonald’s first Labour administration, which had already lost a
vote of confidence in the Commons and was losing its Liberal sup-
port, was portrayed as having been willing to tolerate the Kremlin’s
subversion, and Stanley Baldwin was swept into office in a landslide
victory. The fact that Zinoviev protested that he had never sent any
such letter, and the CPGB denied ever having received it, was dis-
missed as typically, predictably duplicitous and spurious.
SIS’s involvement in the Zinoviev Letter affair, and the Labour
party’s preoccupation with the scandal, survived into 1998 when
Tony Blair’s administration commissioned an investigation of SIS’s
files to establish once and for all whether the letter was a forgery, as
the left had maintained for the previous seven decades, and if so, who
had been culpable. The investigation was conducted by the Foreign
Office’s chief historian, Gill Bennett, and her subsequent report,
which drew on an earlier investigation conducted by Millicent Bagot
of MI5, established the sequence of events that had followed safe re-
ceipt of the document from Riga.
Recently retired from MI5, Bagot was commissioned to write a
report on the affair following the publication in 1967 ofThe Zinoviev
Letterby threeSunday Timesjournalists, in which they claimed that
the letter had been forged in Berlin. She took three years to complete
her task and her report, submitted to the director-general,Sir Martin
Furnival Jones, which remains closed to the public, was devastating.
Morton had circulated the three-page letter to the usual recipients,
any number of whom could have had a motive for leaking it first to
Conservative Central Office and then to the newspapers. Among the
suspects, apart from Morton himself, was the formerdirector of
naval intelligence(DNI), AdmiralReginald Hall, who had been
elected to the Commons as a Conservative MP in 1922; Mansfield
Smith-Cumming’s former deputy Freddie Browning, who died in
1929, at the age of 56, of cirrhosis of the liver; the head of SIS’s
army section,Stewart Menzies, who allegedly later acknowledged
to Morton that he had sent a copy to theDaily Mail; Donald im
Thurn, a well-connected former MI5 officer who had been actively
lobbying for the letter’s publication but had not actually seen it for
himself; C’s aideBertie Maw; and Colonel W. A. Alexander, an MI5
officer close toVernon Kell.