ZINOVIEV LETTER• 603Riga, the Soviets, who were as interested as anyone else in who had
been counterfeiting Comintern directives, concluded that it was a no-
torious White Russian forger, Vladimir Orlov, who had been General
Piotr Wrangel’s chief of intelligence. Orlov had made a good living
fabricating ostensibly plausible Soviet documents, mainly for propa-
ganda purposes, and when SIS contacted Meiklejohn to conduct in-
vestigations into his source, yet more supporting evidence
conveniently materialized, including a record of the minutes of an
emergency meeting of the Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Com-
missars, convened on 25 October 1924 to discuss the crisis in En-
gland and supposedly chaired by Leo Kamenev. This second
document, containing admissions that the Zinoviev directive was
genuine, was sent to London on 6 November and was seized on by
Sinclair as empirical proof, but this too had been forged by Orlov.
The issue of the letter’s authenticity was to be decided by a Cabi-
net committee, chaired by the foreign secretary, Austen Chamber-
lain, who conducted a secret inquiry and issued no concluding report.
Sinclair supplied a five-point memorandum to prove the case for au-
thenticity and claimed that the source run by the Riga station worked
for the Comintern secretariat in Moscow and had access to the Com-
intern’s secret files, whereas Meiklejohn had only ever claimed to
have run an agent in Riga who in turn was in touch with such an
individual (whose identity was unknown to him). Sinclair also
claimed that the letter’s content was entirely consistent with what
was known to be the Comintern’s policies, but his fifth and final ar-
gument, that if the document had been a forgery, it would have been
uncovered as such, seems bizarre and even desperate. Nevertheless,
the committee reported to the full Cabinet on 19 November that they
‘‘were unanimously of the opinion that there was no doubt as to the
authenticity of the Letter.’’ Clearly Sinclair’s evidence had swayed a
committee of Tory politicians, who must have been predisposed to
accept his assurances, but if there was any weight in Sinclair’s belief
that a forgery would surely have been discovered, it perhaps follows
that he had indeed made just such a determination. Significantly, As-
sistant Commissioner Sir Wyndham Childs, the head of the Special
Branch, who had declined repeatedly to offer an opinion on the let-
ter’s authenticity, insisted that ‘‘the document was secured by the
Foreign Office organization and their opinion must outweigh that of