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

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Liddell was expected to succeed David Petrie as Director General of MI5, but was passed over when Home Secretary Herbert Morrison was informed by Ellen Wilkinson of rumours that he might be a double agent and was instead appointed Deputy-Director-General under Percy Sillitoe. I am just begining to scan the reading but it is shocking that MI5, with the exception of Kell who suffered from lack of financial resources to recruit good people (giving him the benefit of the doubt) seems to have had average to poor leaders and senior personnel – Harker Petrie Sillitoe White. Thus West founds a large part of what he characterizes as a ‘remarkable’ career on a misunderstanding: Liddell’s lifework was one dominated by missed opportunities.

A 1988 article in The Atlantic also suggested that Liddell may have been the "Fifth Man" of the spy ring, due to his close relationship with Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby.In this role he was involved in exposing the spying activities of the All Russian Cooperative Society, a spy ring based in London. M, undaunted, got the paper off to Desmond Morton, Churchill's private secretary, who was also a personal friend of his, with the plea that it should be passed on to the Prime Minister. I cannot see Attlee falling for it, and this particular urban legend should be buried until stronger independent evidence emerges.

He joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a private, a unit his brothers David Liddell MC and Cecil served with. Regarded by historians as the most important military intelligence documents from the whole of the second world war. 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 drafted the patently mendacious, demonstrably erroneous 1955 white paper on the Burgess-Maclean defection.

Incidentally, a scan of various memoranda and reports written by Harker, scattered around MI5 files, shows a rather shrewd and pragmatic intelligence officer: I suspect that he may have received a poor press. In 1930 the neurotic, manipulative Maxwell Knight was put in charge of MI5's plan to penetrate the Communist Party.

Foot, The Spectator'Regarded by historians as the most important military intelligence documents from the whole of the Second World War. Lieutenant-Colonel Guy Liddell, who first trained as a civilian engineer, was subsequently an officer in the Royal Engineers, a patent engineer and inventor, and lastly an amateur painter, only seriously taking up the last activity in 1942 at the age of 75.Even in 2002, fifty years later, when they were declassified, multiple passages were redacted because some events were still considered too sensitive. Mure describes his informant for the Ellen Wilkinson story as an old friend of Liddell’s mother’s, ‘the widow of a food controller in the First World War’, which does not quite fit the profile of Sir Humphrey Mackworth, whom Viscountess Rhondda had divorced in 1922. The document was considered so highly classified that it was retained in the safe of successive Directors General, and special permission was required to read it.