June 29, 2013

Finest Hour 135, Summer 2007

Page 57

Vital Insights to a Key Colleague

Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence, by Gill Bennett. London, Routledge 372 pages, hardbound, £49.95. Not available from Churchill Centre Book Club. We suggest Amazon UK.

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From 1995 till 2005 Gill Bennett was Chief Historian of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and this book is the latest in the Government Official History series; series authors are afforded free access to all relevant material in the official archives (which remain closed to the public).

Thus Bennett has found as much as is ever likely to be known about the official life of Desmond Morton. Her quest for information has been frustrated because of Morton’s extreme sense of privacy: he was unmarried and destroyed all his private papers. Despite this handicap, the author has unearthed as much as possible from other sources, though these remain scanty.

Morton was born in 1891 and was severely wounded in 1917, a bullet lodging so near his heart that it was too dangerous ever to remove; he nevertheless lived to be 79. Lady Soames tells a delightful story of observing him playing tennis at Chartwell. Her father, fascinated by Morton’s permanent bullet, had informed her that “he could keel over at any moment,” and she could not help but watch in fearful anticipation for this possibility!

Morton first met Churchill in 1916, when he provided 6th Battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers with artillery support at Ploegsteert, Belgium. After recovering (to some extent) from his wound, Morton became aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Haig, C-in-C of the British Expeditionary Force. In this capacity he frequently escorted important visitors. One of these, Churchill as Minister of Munitions, remembered him from their Ploegsteert encounter. Their early relationship centred on technical matters but developed into friendship, WSC later writing: “I formed a great regard and friendship for this brilliant and gallant officer.”

Morton joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1919 and specialised in longer term intelligence gathering on Soviet Russia, to which he was dedicated. He later expanded his interest to the whole field of industrial intelligence, studying the economies of potential enemies in order to assess their sustainable military capabilities. He was the driving spirit for the study of industrial intelligence in Britain, and for its contribution to defence, rearmament and economic planning in the years leading up to World War II. He also bought a house only three miles from Chartwell one year after WSC’s purchase; from that time he became a frequent visitor and the two men often held long discussions together.

Morton was involved in the 1924 saga of the Zinoviev Letter, addressed to the Communist Party of Great Britain by the President of the Comintern’s executive committee, urging the party to rouse the proletariat in preparation for armed insurrection and class warfare. Copies were distributed (possibly by SIS) to those with vested interests, and the first Labour government (under Ramsay Macdonald) was severely embarrassed. It has never been proved whether or not the Zinoviev was a forgery. Gill Bennett gives several examples of obfuscation by Morton when things went wrong; he thus protected SIS and his own situation.

In 1931 Morton was appointed Chairman of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, and this became his main activity. Between 1934 and 1937 his correspondence with Churchill became more frequent and less restrained, WSC being free actively to campaign in order to arouse the government to the dangers ahead. There is no hard documentary evidence to suggest that Morton supplied anything which Churchill was not entitled to know—indeed the evidence points in the other direction. Morton’s chief value was checking and correcting information supplied from other sources; he even received valuable information from WSC himself. It is interesting to read some of Morton’s facetious letters and reports, which were often not appreciated by the traditional Civil Service.

Much of Desmond Morton’s time in the years leading up to World War II was devoted to developing plans for a Ministry of Economic Warfare to be established in the event of war; by the time of Munich this planning was complete, Morton continuing with his intelligence work and maintaining his links with Churchill. When the war began he developed a role for himself as liaison between covert and overt spheres of decision and action, with Churchill as Prime Minister setting a high value on this activity

From the outset of WSC’s premiership Morton doubled the role of intelligence interface with that of liaison with the Allied governments-in-exile, and was consulted by Churchill on a wide range of other issues, yet had no official position other than as a member of the Prime Minister’s personal staff. An advantage of this arrangement was that he could access government at any level without bothering about subverting the chain of command; this was a vital resource when the PM wanted a rapid, flexible response on any topic, or if he preferred to send messages other than through official channels. Morton was the PM’s eyes and ears in quarters WSC did not have time to inspect personally and became the personal embodiment of WSC’s will to make things happen. As a “gatekeeper” he took the blame if things went wrong, for example if someone failed to secure an interview with the PM or received an unfavourable response to a message. By late 1941, as Churchill’s control of government machinery became more solid, Morton’s involvement and influence lessened; but he stayed with WSC till the end of the war.

In addition to the official files, much of the author’s research has been facilitated through the voluminous correspondence between Morton and the writer R.W. Thompson, author of The Yankee Marlborough, an early critical work (FH 27). Morton felt that Thompson had been over-critical of Churchill and corrected much of what he had drafted. Nevertheless, in Churchill and Morton (FH 51), published after Morton’s death, Thompson revealed that in later life, Morton had become bitter and disillusioned by his loss of close contact with Churchill. Still, Morton had told Thompson that later historians would be bound to write WSC’s name in Valhalla, “even though it may be more difficult to find it in Heaven.” The truth was that events and time brought a gradual end to a friendship that was always based more on shared interests than on shared psychology.

Morton himself wrote to Thompson that he could not imagine a better epitaph than: “Desmond Morton might have been a greater figure in the affairs of his country had he been less of a gentleman”; such an aspiration by Churchill, according to Gill Bennett, would have been an irrelevance.

This book is much more than a biography of Desmond Morton; it is also a textbook on the history of the SIS, including many tedious details of internal jealousies. So, together with its high cost, it is unlikely to achieve major sales. But as a piece of detective work uncovering information about an intensely private man, it will be required reading for those who want to know everything possible about an important figure at Churchill’s elbow.

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