Declassification

How 1920s British spy agency files reveal a proto-Cold War rife with intrigue

Belfast native Timothy Phillips, author of Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (2008), has an Oxford doctorate in Russian Studies. Since his Beslan book—about the siege at the southern Russia school by Chechen terrorists—he has pored over newly declassified British files pertaining to the turbulent 1920s. In them Phillips found traces of a proto-Cold War that began decades before the real one, the foundations of Western-Russian relations for the coming century, and a treasure trove of very human details, all laid out in his new book, The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians and the Jazz Age.

Q: How did the release of this material come about? This is not, to put it mildly, the usual practice of a spy agency.

A: Back in the 1990s, MI5 decided to declassify some of its historic material. Basically it started with First World War material and then moved on to the second war—the best stories for them to tell because we were the good guys and we were on the winning side. Starting 10 to 15 years ago came the stuff from the 1920s. Now we pretty much have it all—96, 97 per cent of what wasn’t destroyed over the years. All from MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence agency, that is. MI6, which spies abroad, has not been subjected to the same declassification exercise, although very occasionally in the MI5 archives I found an MI6 document that had been shared with its counterpart, and that was a very exciting moment. My book is the beneficiary of what I think is a unique project in the world—a major intelligence agency unilaterally deciding to open its files.