374 • MONTAGU, EWEN
account of the episode,Moscow, 1911–1933, was not entirely candid.
He omitted mention of his experience as an intelligence officer in
Russia during the 1918 Allied intervention in Archangel, service that
he had shared with Richards, the export manager of Metropolitan-
Vickers. At the trial, the Soviet prosecutor had emphasized Monk-
house’s intelligence connections but in his own version Monkhouse
ignored the issue entirely.MONTAGU, EWEN.Lord Swaythling’s eldest son, the Honourable
Ewen Montagu worked in theNaval Intelligence Divisionduring
World War II. A barrister by trade, he represented the Admiralty on
theTwenty Committee, which supervisedMI5’sdouble agentop-
erations. In 1953 he wroteThe Man Who Never Was,an account of
the celebrated strategicdeceptionscheme codenamedmincemeat,
involving planting a corpse on the Spanish coast intended to mislead
the Germans.See alsoMONTAGU, IVOR.
MONTAGU, IVOR.The Honourable Ivor Montagu was aGRUspy
codenamednobilitywho appeared invenonamessages sent from
London in 1940. Born in 1904, Montagu was the third son of the
immensely rich Lord Swaythling and brother ofEwen Montagu.He
was also an ardentCommunist Party of Great Britain(CPGB)
member and later its president. Sixvenonatexts refer to Montagu
and confirm his importance to the GRU. The Londonrezident,
Simon Kremer, used him as a conduit to theX Group, apparently
because, as he reported on 6 September 1940, ‘‘intelligensialives
in the provinces and it is difficult to contact him.’’ Montagu was also
trusted sufficiently to handle other agents, as is suggested by Colonel
Sklyarov’s fragmented signal of 12 August 1941 in which he stated
thatnobilitywas undergoing training ‘‘so that he can organizebar-
on’s very onerous task.’’
Educated at Westminster and King’s College, Cambridge, Mon-
tagu studied zoology at the Royal College of Science and was well
known in artistic circles, being a friend of Sergei Eisenstein and par-
ticularly interested in the cinema as an editor, writer, director, pro-
ducer, and critic. One of Montagu’s great successes was the
screenplay, coauthored with Walter Meade, ofScott of the Antarctic,
starring John Mills, which was released in 1948. Montagu was ex-