The Guy Liddell Diaries, Volume I: 1939-1942: 1939-1942: MI5's Director of Counter-Espionage in World War II

Product Information

The watchers failed to pick up Maclean since his departure for the country on Friday and we now learn from the Foreign Office that he was given a day's leave on Saturday. The difficulty, he observed, was how to do so without causing offence to the State Department, with whom we have been in touch via the Counsellor of the American Embassy here ever since the war". When war broke out, he was Assistant-Director, under Jasper Harker, of B Division, responsible for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage.

It took me a while to get through this: mostly the extended day and as consequence the additional hours in the garden, so come late evening the eyelids were drooping. Liddell provides a day-by-day account of the unfolding drama, while the diaries' matter-of-fact writing style barely conceals how personal the betrayal was for the MI5 man who was close friends with some of the key protagonists and who struggled to believe what they had done. He said he had evidence of this as he had been making copies of the correspondence between President Franklin D. It infuriated M (Maxwell Knight) when his assessments of a situation were dismissed as unimportant by people who ought to have known better. The Germans set them up with a bogus philatelic business so they could send secret messages on the back of stamps.

It had nothing organisationally to do with the Wireless Board, which was a cross-departmental group, set up in January 1941, that supervised the work of the XX Committee.

He had been friendly with Burgess for many years, and when Burgess went, so too did whatever chances Liddell still had for the top job. SIS was keen, also, to improve 48000's position, as he had hitherto "never had a really good working arrangement with the U. During the war Liddell ran MI5's counterespionage division, where Anthony Blunt was his personal assistant. He was such a key figure in the pre-war days and the days during the war when our security services took their eye totally off the ball of communist penetration. Guy Maynard Liddell, CB, CBE, MC (8 November 1892 – 3 December 1958) was a British intelligence officer.Thus Liddell, while maintaining an interest, was not nominally responsible for handling Soviet espionage during most of the war. Was this the same officer whom John Costello, David Mure, Goronwy Rees, Richard Deacon and SIS chief Maurice Oldfield all * thought so poorly of that they named him as a probable Soviet mole? MI5 tracked 'Snow's' payments to a German agent in Bournemouth and used the Welsh nationalist line as a cover for further operations. R.E [Commander, Royal Engineers] at Lemnos, in the Aegean, where he was concerned with On the other hand, it might be said that Sillitoe could have well riposted to his critics, after the Fuchs affair, that the established officers in MI5 did not understand counter-intelligence either.