ABSTRACT
The fate of India was a constant preoccupation both for the Comintern plotters in Moscow, Berlin and London, and for their adversaries in Whitehall and Delhi. Several of the senior figures in the British intelligence establishment had cut their teeth in countering subversion in India, including Sir David Petrie, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau from 1924 to 1931, and the author of a secret report, Communism in India 1924-1927, who was later to be appointed Director-General of MI5 from 1940 to 1946. One of his subordinates, Felix Cowgill, updated the document in 1935 for Petrie’s successor, Sir Horace Williamson, and later was posted back to England to SIS’s counter-intelligence branch, Section V, then headed by Valentine Vivian, who himself had retired from the Indian Police in 1925 after nineteen years of experience. Another influential figure in the British intelligence community in London was Sir Philip Vickery, another Indian intelligence chief, demonstrating that the intelligence establishment was staffed in large measure by professionals who had acquired ample experience resisting Soviet-inspired political subversion which had been infiltrated into the jewel in Britain’s crown from Persia, China and Afghanistan. Nor had the IPI operated in isolation. The long-serving Deputy Director-General of the Security Service, Eric Holt-Wilson, who had been appointed in 1912 and had remained in the post for twenty-eight years, took great pride in what he regarded as his greatest accomplishment, the creation and coordination of an Imperial Security Intelligence Service which had extended across the globe and had included 260 chiefs of police in more that fifty overseas territories. Excluded from Holt-Wilson’s overall supervision was the IPI which had developed its own ethos and methodology, and was considered highly effective, running well-informed agents in all the bazaars and keeping the Comintern at bay.
