British journalist and author Philip Knightly had said that spying is the world’s second oldest profession. Although we detest intelligence agencies, we lap up anything written on spies even if the stories are a century old.
Hence it is not surprising that our media had given wide publicity when the British National Archives recently released some old intelligence files on the late A.C.N. Nambiar.
Most of these files are prior to the Second World War when he was residing in Europe as a journalist. He was also our ambassador to West Germany in the early 1950s. During our freedom struggle he was a close associate of Jawaharlal Nehru and also of Netaji Subhas Bose.
Some of our correspondents went overboard by calling him a “shadowy figure” and a “Soviet agent”, although the files only spoke of him being under surveillance in the category of “Soviet Intelligence Agents and suspected agents”.
All intelligence agencies and police organisations keep their watch lists under different categories for easy retrieval. Our media should realise that a name occurring in a list does not confirm that he was an agent.
Actually several intelligence files on activities of Bose and Nambiar while in Berlin were released long ago by the British archives. Some of the newly released files are repetitions.
The current files give details of Nambiar’s interrogation after his arrest in 1945 when he was kept in the custody of the Allied forces for six months. Nothing would have prevented the British agencies from prosecuting him had they found any evidence against him for being a Soviet spy.
The two trials against Ghadr (“Revolt”) Party activists in Chicago and San Francisco courts (1917-1918) were initiated by British intelligence.
Also, there would have been no need for the Soviets to utilise a Berlin-based Indian correspondent to pry into the secrets of the British Empire when he had no direct access to official British government papers.
Christopher Andrew, who wrote the official history of MI-5 (The Defence of the Realm), had said that the Soviet intelligence agencies were far more successful in penetrating into British secrets in the 1930s than vice versa.
He says that this success was because of “Whitehall’s still primitive grasp of protective security”. He says that the Rome embassy was leaking like a sieve. Nearly 100 British high grade documents were copied and sent to Moscow in 1935 by the Soviet intelligence by subverting a local chancery servant who was a favourite of the ambassador.
The reason why Nambiar was kept under watch was different. During that era, Communism was the biggest danger for British politicians and intelligence services. They were quite comfortable with Fascism and Nazism.
Benito Mussolini, who founded Il Popolo d’Italia newspaper, was recruited in 1917 by Samuel Hoare, then in charge of the Rome station for keeping Italy on the Allied side in the First World War.
Mussolini was paid £100 a week, “then a considerable sum”. Even Winston Churchill called him a “Saviour of his country”. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, sent Mussolini friendly letters even while he was destroying the Italian Socialist Party.
The same attitude prevailed towards Hitler. In the late 1930s, MI-5 had raised an excellent source in the German embassy in London. He was Wolfgang zu Pulitz, an aristocrat-diplomat whose family had owned the castle at Pulitz.
He had told MI-5 that Hitler would have lost the initiative, had UK stood firm at Munich. Instead the appeasement had made him feel that Britain was a decadent power. Home secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, who had by then become Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain’s closet foreign policy adviser, reacted quite adversely when Pulitz’s intelligence was conveyed to him.
He told his constituents on March 10, 1939, that “appeasement” would usher in a “Golden Age”. Five days later, Hitler annexed Bohemia and Moravia after occupying Prague.
The British intelligence leadership also displayed similar attitude. Christopher Andrew says that till 1933 MI-5 paid no attention to the Nazi threat.
After the Reichstag Fire incident (February 27, 1933) in which Nambiar and other pro-Communists were arrested, the Nazis sent word to MI-5 claiming that they had seized solid documents proving the Comintern’s conspiracy against the West.
Guy Liddel, senior MI-5 officer visited Berlin in March 1933 to peruse these documents, which turned out to be worthless, and to start intelligence liaison with the “German Political Police”.
That was a week after the Nazis had opened the brutal Dachau concentration camp. Andrew accused Liddel of underrating the Nazi threat and overestimating the Communist menace.
Nambiar’s brother-in-law, Viren Chattopadhyaya (brother of Sarojini Naidu), who had moved to Berlin from London, was already in the crosshairs of British intelligence since 1909 as he had defended Sir William Curzon Wyllie’s assassination by Madanlal Dhingra.
In Berlin he set up the “Indian Committee” for freedom struggle. But two Indians in the Committee, Harish Chandra and Jasraj Singhji Sisodia, betrayed him by giving intelligence to MI-5 on their attempts to subvert the loyalty of Indian PoWs in Germany.
They also revealed that the King of Afghanistan was trying to organise a jihad against the British Raj. These two also gave intelligence to MI-5 on the Ghadr movement which resulted in pursuing two court cases in America.
The suspicion on Nambiar was confirmed when he simulated his brother-in-law by setting up the “Indian Information Bureau” in 1927 in Berlin, as desired by Jawaharlal Nehru to guide the Indian students.
From 1942 onwards he was in charge of the Free India Office opened by Bose. An additional reason for watching Nambiar was his close association with the “League Against Imperialism” in which Viren was actively involved.
The 1927 Anti-Colonial Congress in Brussels where Nehru spoke was organised by them. The Germans had told Guy Liddel that this was a “front organisation” of the Comintern, created to stir up trouble in all colonies. In those days anyone sympathetic to Communism was suspected to be a Soviet spy.
The writer is a former special secretary, Cabinet Secretariat, and member of the two-man 26/11 enquiry committee
