A publisher who smuggled Soviet diamonds hidden in chocolates and an eminent scientist whose reputation was almost ruined by a fake application to the Communist Party were among others who had MI5 files.
Francis Meynell, who was knighted in later life, caught the attention of the secret service for his radical views. Described as “an extreme Socialist”, he was director of the Daily Herald, editor of The Communist and a conscientious objector during the First World War.
An MI5 memo dated December 1920 reveals that he smuggled into England Soviet diamonds belonging to the recently murdered Tsar. “They were ... concealed in chocolates, extracted the cream contents and filled within with the diamonds,” it reads.
Meynell gave a far more detailed account in an interview the following year in the Evening News. He mocked the efforts of the security services, and in particular Sir Basil Thomson, who was then director of Special Branch at Scotland Yard, to track him. “On one occasion I talked to secret service agents with diamonds rattling rather uncomfortably against my teeth,” he said. “The secret service men proved most helpful with my bags.”
A second individual who caught MI5’s attention was the openly left-wing Solly Zuckerman, who later became the Government’s chief scientific adviser and received a peerage in 1971. He was put under surveillance in the lead-up to the Second World War, when fears were high of scientists leaking sensitive information.
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MI5 kept tabs on Lord Zuckerman, at the time a professor at Birmingham University, as he rose up the scientific ranks and was particularly interested in any communist connections, which would undermine his suitability for senior government work.
In 1949, they came across a typed application to join the Communist Party made out in his name. A note reads: “[A]s this document is not signed by Zuckerman we cannot ignore the possibility that it may have been sent without his knowledge and with the intention of embroiling either him or us.”
A covert inquiry discovered that a fellow scientist at the university, Professor Lancelot Hogben, may have planted the application. A 1952 note cited an unnamed source as saying: “Hogben still continues to make vicious and libellous charges concerning a number of his university colleagues. And still gives the impression of being a very embittered individual.”