THE GREATER WAR

1912–1923

General Editor
 
 Counterterrorism
Between the Wars
An International History, 1919–1937

MARY S. BARTON

1
 3
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 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stephanie Ireland, Cathryn Steele, Katie Bishop, Christina
Fleischer, and the editorial staff of Oxford University Press for their generous
assistance in the publication of this book. I am grateful to Robert Gerwarth for
the opportunity to be part of The Greater War series. The careful reading and
suggestions of two anonymous readers improved the text immensely—all remain-
ing shortcomings in it are my own. I extend my appreciation to them as well as to
Katherine Unterman, who has continuously supported my scholarship, and to
Michael Neiberg, who provided encouragement and advice at a key moment.
I am deeply indebted to the following institutions and organizations for sup-
porting this project by allowing me to conduct archival research in the United
States, United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland: the Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences, University of Virginia; the Society of Fellows, University of Virginia;
the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia; the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, University of Virginia; the Robert
J. Huskey Travel Fellowship, University of Virginia; the Robert A. and Barbara
Divine Graduate Student Travel Grant, Society for Historians of American
Foreign Relations; the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; the Hayek Fund,
Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University; and the Kennan
Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
I would like to extend my gratitude to the archivists and staff at the following
repositories: the National Archives of the United Kingdom; the British Library;
Special Collections, University of Birmingham; the U.S. National Archives and
Records Administration; the Library of Congress; the Georgetown University
Special Collections Research Center; the Albert and Shirley Small Special
Collections Library, University of Virginia; the Hoover Institution Library and
Archives, Stanford University; the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
France; and the League of Nations and United Nations Office at Geneva Archives,
Switzerland. I would also like to thank the library staffs at the University of
Virginia and Dartmouth College.
I am enormously appreciative of the scholarly and intellectual community at
the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, where I had the
great fortune to be part of a supportive graduate student community. I would like
to thank my professors and mentors for their time, support, and service as
educators: Brian Balogh, Alon Confino, Robert Geraci, Erik Linstrum, Jeffrey
Rossman, Stephen Schuker, Mark Thomas, Elizabeth Thompson, and Philip
Zelikow. My thanks go especially to Melvyn Leffler for his careful reading of my
vi 

work and inspiration to become a better scholar and writer. There are not enough
words to thank my adviser, William Hitchcock, who read numerous seminar
papers, grant applications, conference papers, draft versions of chapters, and,
finally, the book manuscript. I am forever grateful to him for believing in me.
In addition to my studies at the University of Virginia, I benefited enormously
from an outstanding undergraduate education at Bryn Mawr College, Haverford
College, and the University of Oxford. My classes and professors at these institu-
tions instilled in me a deep love of history. During graduate school, I also had the
opportunity to participate in the Summer Seminar in History and Statecraft,
hosted by the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas
at Austin; the International Policy Scholars Consortium and Network, hosted by
the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies; and the New Era Workshop hosted by the
Bridging the Gap Project at American University. These experiences allowed me
to meet scholars and practitioners interested in national security, and I am
tremendously grateful to William Inboden, Francis Gavin, and James Goldgeier
for their continued support and encouragement. My postdoctoral fellowship at
the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth
College was a magical year of scholarship and fellowship. I extend my gratitude
to Dartmouth’s History and Government Departments and members of the
Dickey Center—especially Daniel Benjamin, William Wohlforth, Daryl Press,
Jennifer Lind, Jennifer Miller, Udi Greenberg, Edward Miller, and Jeffrey
Friedman. To the 2016–17 cohort, I could not have survived a New England
winter without you!
I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Society for Historians of
American Foreign Relations and the Historical Office of the Office of the
Secretary of Defense for reading my work and becoming friends and mentors
along the way. I have been deeply influenced by the work of Richard Bach Jensen
and Silke Zoller, and would like to thank them for sharing their scholarship with
me. I am very grateful for the intellectual community of Washington, D.C., where
I have been lucky enough to continue to learn from preeminent scholars as well as
world-class policymakers and national security practitioners.
I would like to express my deepest thanks to my brother and sister-in-law,
Adam and Hannah Barton, and my parents, Brooke Stephens and Jonathan
Barton. I have been blessed by the expansion of my family in the past year.
I thank Dee and Richard Wilson; Katherine, Anthony, Rhys, and Dylan Edgar;
and LouAnn, Andy, and Oliver Mauk for enriching my life. Finally, I would like to
thank James, my partner in all endeavors.
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Praise xi
Introduction 1
1. Arms and Diplomacy in the Postwar Order, 1919–25 11
2. Intelligence, Empire, and Terror: The British Experience 42
3. Fear and Liberty: The United States and the Communist Threat 72
4. The Arms Traffic Conference of 1925 102
5. Counterterrorism in British India 129
6. State-Sponsored Terror, 1934–37 152
Conclusion 179

Bibliography 189
Index 199
 List of Illustrations

Figure 0.1 Émile Cottin, escorted by French police officers after attempting
to assassinate Georges Clemenceau 2
Figure 1.1 The Delegations at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, September 1919 17
Figure 1.2 Sveta Nedelya Cathedral after the April 1925 bombing 40
Figure 2.1 The Second World Congress of the Communist International,
Petrograd, 1920 51
Figure 3.1 Boylston A. Beal, upon his graduation from Harvard, 1886,
and twenty-five years later, in 1911 85
Figure 3.2 The U.S. Legation at Riga, 1922 92
Figure 4.1 The FN Model 1924 rifle, produced for the Yugoslav Army by Belgian
Fabrique Nationale (FN) 117
Figure 5.1 The administrative building of the Hijli detention camp 138
Figure 6.1 Veličko Kerin following the assassination of King Alexander I
of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou 160
Figure 6.2 The laying of the first stone of the Palace of Nations 166
 Praise for Counterterrorism
Between the Wars

“Fluidly written, prodigiously researched, and cogently argued, Counterterrorism

Between the Wars succinctly tells a story that has long awaited telling. . . . A must-
read history of power-held versus power-sought.”
– Richard H. Immerman, Emeritus Marvin Wachman Director, Temple
University Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy
“This fascinating, exhaustively researched exploration of the complex interaction
between terrorist violence, counterterrorism, the international arms race, and
state-sponsored terrorism between 1919 and 1937 fills a crucial gap in the
historical literature. Moreover, by pointing out parallels between the present-
day, seemingly insoluble, dilemmas posed by terrorism and those of the interwar
period, the author adds greatly to the significance of this very impressive book.”
– Richard Bach Jensen, author of The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An
International History 1878–1934

“Mary S. Barton recovers a forgotten side of the interwar period, an explosion of

global terrorism sparked by a combustible mix of surplus weapons, nationalist
movements, and state-sponsored violence. Her rigorously researched, perceptive
analysis of the Great Powers’ responses illuminates the origins as well as the limits
of international counterterrorism efforts today.”
– Katherine Unterman, Associate Professor of History, Texas A&M University
“Counterterrorism Between the Wars is a shocking behind-the scenes tale of global
assassinations. Drawing back the veil on a secretive world, Mary S. Barton reveals,
for the first time, the international diplomacy triggered by the death and destruc-
tion dealt out by the world’s first truly international terrorists. . . . Based on
impressive research in numerous archives, Counterterrorism Between the Wars
contains many lessons for the present era and constitutes essential reading for
both historians and policy-makers alike.”
– Richard Aldrich, Professor of Politics and International Studies, University
of Warwick

“A fascinating and insightful analysis of the modern roots of international coun-

ter-terrorism operations. This is applied history at its best. Scholars and practi-
tioners alike should give it a close read for its many insights”
– Michael S. Neiberg, author of The Path to War: How the First World War
Created Modern America
 Introduction

Paris was quiet on February 19, 1919. Abuzz for a month as the peacemakers
bickered, cajoled, and negotiated the peace treaties that formally ended the Great
War, the city finally rested as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime
Minister David Lloyd George took a brief leave to return home, leaving behind
Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister known to all as “the Tiger.”
That morning, Clemenceau departed his house in the 16th arrondissement of
Paris for a meeting with President Wilson’s chief adviser, Colonel Edward House,
and the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, at the Hôtel de Crillon. As the
prime minister’s car turned from the Rue Franklin onto the Boulevard Delessert, a
young man jumped into the street and fired his weapon, a Browning pistol
purchased from a demobilized French soldier returning from the trenches.¹ The
spray of bullets broke the windshield and wounded a police officer. The would-be
assassin continued shooting, chasing after the vehicle as it advanced down the
boulevard.² One bullet struck Clemenceau between the ribs, missing his vital
organs but lodging itself permanently in the Tiger. Another hit his chauffeur.
The crowd awaiting the prime minister’s arrival rushed the assailant, Émile
Cottin, nearly killing him. In police custody, Cottin confessed to being an
“Anarchist” who had intended to murder the prime minister, “an enemy of the
working class.”³ Incriminations outpaced the formal investigation. “He’s an ugly
fellow with reddish hair and looks rather Russian,” one bystander told a reporter.⁴
“This is a Russian,” chanted a crowd of supporters outside Clemenceau’s home.⁵
The French newspaper, Le Matin, claimed that a Bolshevik cell in Lausanne
had dispatched two hired guns to France to take out the prime minister. When
news of the attack reached Lloyd George, he immediately inquired whether Cottin
(shown in Figure 0.1) was a Bolshevik agent. If so, did it mean the end to peace
and the renewal of war?⁶ No one in Europe could have heard the news that winter
day and not recalled the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the
summer of 1914.

¹ “Anarchist Shoots Premier Clemenceau,” New York Times, February 20, 1919, 1.
² “Attempt on M. Clemenceau,” The Times [London, England], February 20, 1919.
³ “The Shooting of M. Clemenceau,” The Times [London, England], February 20, 1919.
⁴ “Cottin Boasts of Attack; Calls Himself Friend of Man, Not Excluding Huns,” The Washington
Post, February 20, 1919, 2.
⁵ “Aged Premier is Struck by Three Bullets,” The Washington Post, February 20, 1919, 1.
⁶ Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House,
2003), 149–50.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
2    

Figure 0.1 Émile Cottin, far right, escorted by French police officers after attempting
to assassinate Georges Clemenceau (Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo)

Fortunately, Clemenceau recovered. His many well-wishers found the old

politician reclining in his favorite armchair in good spirits and ridiculing the
marksmanship of Cottin—“a Frenchman who misses his target six times out of
seven at point-blank range.” “The Maharaja Bikenir invited me to hunt the tiger in
his country,” the prime minister supposedly told an associate during his conva-
lescence, “Well, it is the anarchists who have hunted ‘The Tiger’, but they missed
him.”⁷
Tried by court martial, Cottin was sentenced to death. Upon the urging of the
Tiger, French President Raymond Poincaré commuted Cottin’s sentence to ten
years. The would-be assassin served half that time and outlived Clemenceau, who
passed away in 1929 still with a bullet inside him. In 1936, upon the outbreak of
the Spanish Civil War, Cottin signed up to fight in the International Anarchist
Brigade. He died that year on the Aragon Front, three years before the whole of
Europe again descended into madness. Seventeen years earlier, however, Cottin’s

⁷ “Anxiety for Premier,” The Washington Post, February 21, 1919, 1.

  3

attempted murder of Clemenceau with a Browning pistol from a demobilized

French soldier elucidated the dangers lurking for the postwar order.

* * *
This is a book about terrorism, weapons, and diplomacy between the First and
Second World Wars. The attempted murder of Clemenceau in Paris in 1919
foreshadowed not only the potency of terroristic violence in the fragile order
following the Great War but also the danger posed by the millions of small arms
and ammunition manufactured for the frontlines. Ideas fueled conflict in a
postwar world awash in newly-built weapons. Oftentimes citing legitimate his-
torical grievances, proponents of radical political ideologies cried out for recog-
nition. This book charts the convergence of the manufacture and trade of arms;
diplomacy among the Great Powers and domestic politics within them; the rise of
national liberation and independence movements; and the burgeoning concept
and early institutions of international counterterrorism. The prioritization of
national and colonial self-interests, however, prevented the former Allied
Powers of the First World War from managing the complex global problems of
small arms proliferation and state-sponsored terrorism.
Four themes emerge in the chapters that follow. The first is an evolution in the
meaning and practice of terrorism after the First World War. The attack on
Clemenceau drew upon an older tradition of anarchist terrorism from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸ While assassinations of high-ranking
officials continued, terrorism changed after the Great War. Transnational net-
works of revolutionaries were transformed into bureaucratic terrorist organiza-
tions that espoused extremist ideologies, received state sponsorship, and utilized
the millions of small arms manufactured during the war. Large-scale violence
continued in Europe and the colonies after the armistice of November 1918.⁹
Interwar terrorism was directly tied to revolutions and counter-revolutions of the
postwar years triggered by three ideologies the war had unleashed: Soviet com-
munism, fascism, and ultra-nationalism based on exclusive categories of ethnicity
and race. Unlike their anarchist antecedents, terrorist organizations of the inter-
war era sought and received government assistance. State-sponsored terrorism in
Europe was tied to the postwar settlements of 1919–20. The treaties of Versailles,
St. Germain, Sèvres (later revised by the Treaty of Lausanne), and Trianon
converted the multinational domains of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and
Ottoman empires into nation-states and created an armed and destabilizing

⁸ Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001);
Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
⁹ Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014); Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
4    

“revisionist” bloc on the European continent. Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and

Hungary—the defeated nations of the war—and Italy, a former wartime ally of the
Entente, opposed these agreements. While the vanquished nations lost territories,
the Italian delegation at Paris failed to secure all of the lands, including parts of
Dalmatia and the Adriatic coast and islands, promised to the government for
joining the war on the side of Britain and France. Italy was subjected to a
“mutilated victory,” declared the Italian poet and fierce nationalist, Gabriele
D’Annunzio.
The vanquished nations and Italy carried out legal and public relations cam-
paigns against the Versailles system, while also clandestinely supporting foreign
terrorist groups in proxy wars against their neighbors. Opposing them were the
“status quo” powers led by France and the governments of the Little Entente:
Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Among the victors in the Great War,
the Little Entente and France desired to maintain the Versailles system, which
defined borders separating states on the European continent. (Preserving the
“status quo” sometimes meant providing safe haven to militant groups and
discrediting “revisionists” through overt and covert actions). The latter camp
could look to Moscow. Directly in opposition to the Paris Peace Conference, in
March 1919, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin organized the Third Communist
International (or, “Comintern”) to launch world revolution. Following the Reds’
victory in the Russian Civil War and the establishment of the Soviet Union at the
end of 1922, the Kremlin accelerated its export of funds, military equipment,
intelligence, and foreign fighters to assist anti-imperial and nationalist uprisings
everywhere.
A second theme of the book is the inability among the Great Powers to
harmonize perceptions of the nature and threat of international terrorism.
During the interwar years, Western governments deferred to nationalist and
imperialist interests even as they attempted to coordinate efforts to combat
terrorist violence. Such was the case with arms trafficking. The Great Powers
recognized that they needed the assistance of other governments to keep small
arms and explosives from reaching rebellious groups in their own territories.
However, when it came to foreign lands, these governments wanted the ability
to arm groups they favored, which led to major disagreements and diplomatic
rows between former wartime partners.
Disarmament during the interwar years is often associated either with the
Kellogg-Briand Pact, an agreement to outlaw war signed on August 27, 1928, or
the massive (and ultimately futile) World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34. It
has been portrayed as the taming of governments and industry by peace move-
ments and the work of sentimental policymakers. The truth is more complicated.
Immediately after the First World War, with revolutions erupting on Europe’s
mainland and Lenin’s calling for the demise of democratic capitalism, Allied
governments pursued international treaties to curb the global arms trade out of
  5

a sense of mutual Great Power self-interest. During the 1920s, however, the
wartime cooperation responsible for an anti-terrorism strategy based on the
suite of arms control agreements established at the Paris Peace Conference quickly
disintegrated along national and imperial security lines, particularly among the
British, French, and Americans. Differences among the former Allies arose from
domestic matters in addition to economic and diplomatic imperatives in which
the export of arms proved to be an important foreign policy tool.
A third theme of the book is the establishment of the infrastructure of modern
intelligence. Intelligence agencies of the British Empire became permanent, global,
and increasingly influential after the First World War. In the United States, the
first Red Scare saw the formation of new offices within the Department of Justice
as well as efforts by the Department of State to build out a capacity for technical
collection and intelligence analysis. The relationship between the British secret
services and U.S. officials in the 1920s would blossom during the Second World
War, emerging as the most significant intelligence consortium of the Cold War.
Based on the 1943 BRUSA Agreement and the 1946 UKUSA Agreement, the
intelligence alliance known more recently as Five Eyes grew to include the United
States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Since the early
1950s, these nations have shared signals intelligence (SIGINT), along with
methods and techniques related to signals intelligence operations.
Not all intelligence relied on clandestine methods and sources. The gathering of
publicly available information grew in importance, particularly for the League of
Nations, which did as much as any institution to establish the field of open source
intelligence. League of Nations cases brought to light the continuation of terrorism
in Europe and documented violations of the disarmament clauses of the postwar
peace treaties. The historical record highlights the difficulty League officials faced
in enforcing the arms and anti-terrorism treaties. The international press covered
the League’s conferences and cases as did the League’s own publicity department.
From 1926 onward, the Disarmament Section of the League compiled and pub-
lished information on the global arms trade as a Statistical Year-Book of the Trade
in Arms and Ammunition. The final edition, issued in 1938, contained data on
sixty countries and sixty-four colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories.¹⁰
Information compiled and published by the League of Nations indicated mass
violations of the European peace settlements and revealed a world awash in guns.
The availability of information, however, infrequently translated into political
action. While intelligence can reveal looming dangers, the decision to act remains
in the hands of politicians.

¹⁰ Andrew Webster, “Making Disarmament Work: The Implementation of the International

Disarmament Provisions in the League of Nations Covenant, 1919–1925,” Diplomacy and Statecraft
16, no. 3 (2006): 563–4.
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A fourth and final theme of this book is the concept of peacetime. This book
contends that violence has a way of transcending formal peace treaties.¹¹ Even as they
refrained from directly attacking one another during the 1920s and much of the 1930s,
the victors and vanquished of the Great War employed other means of hostilities.
Peacetime lacked large interstate wars, yet proxy wars, colonial policing, active
intelligence measures, and international terrorism abounded. Macedonian and
Croatian terrorist organizations lent assassination services to the Bulgarian and
Italian governments. France and her Allies gave refuge to Mussolini’s political oppon-
ents and Russian exiles who plotted to overthrow the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. The
Soviets kidnapped and murdered anticommunist leaders of the White Army and
exported arms to assist revolutionary nationalists as part of a broader struggle against
imperialism. In British India, a revolutionary terrorist movement challenged British
rule for the entire duration of the interwar period. While these smaller conflicts paled
in comparison to the two World Wars, they destabilized the Versailles system. As
Georges Clemenceau and the other victorious leaders quickly learned in Paris, peace
was elusive. The “return to normalcy,” as then Senator Warren Harding promised
during the 1920 U.S. presidential election, was a peacetime fraught with danger.

* * *
Terror and guns conspired against peacekeepers. Terrorism was an evolving concept
in the pivotal years between the First and Second World Wars. The words “terror-
ism” and “terrorists” were used before and increasingly after the First World War,
and applied to both non-state actors and governments inflicting violence against
their own populations.¹² Before the Great War, terrorism was associated with
anarchist bombings and assassinations, a form of warfare known as “propaganda
by deed.” Afterward, terrorism was ideologically fractured, widespread, and often
state-sponsored. The First World War and its peace settlements unleashed Soviet
communism, fascism, and ultra-nationalism, whose leaders forwarded their causes,
in part, by reviving the French Revolution’s concept of terrorism as justifying the use
of mass violence as virtuous. Among social revolutionaries and national liberation
movements seeking to gain political autonomy, terrorism consisted of low-level
attacks and covert operations. It was a weapon of the weak against a more powerful
adversary, the rough equivalent of twenty-first-century asymmetrical warfare. By the
end of the era, right-wing and nationalist-separatist groups sponsored the majority of
terrorist operations at home and abroad.¹³ The term “international terrorism” was

¹¹ As historian Mary Dudziak puts it: “we tend to assume that wartime is always followed by
peacetime, and therefore that an essential aspect of wartime is that it is temporary.” Mary Dudziak,
War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4.
¹² The usage of terrorist and terrorism (and counterterrorism) in this book frequently draws on the
usage during the time period that it covers; it ought not to be interpreted as the rendering of moral
judgment or the endorsement or discrediting of political aspirations.
¹³ Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 17, 74. Right-wing terrorism grew in
ascendancy not only in Europe but also in Japan and Egypt. Japanese terrorists in the 1920s were
  7

also used during the interwar years. In cables back to Washington, U.S. diplomats
associated “international terrorist methods” with the Soviets.¹⁴ European legal
scholars in the International Association of Penal Law and the International
Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Law considered international terrorism to
be symptomatic of European politics and a lasting legacy of the territorial
arrangements of the postwar years. The League of Nations’ engagement with
international terrorism also derived from the proxy wars of the revisionist and
status quo powers on the European continent, leading to the 1937 Convention
for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism.¹⁵
Political polarization across borders during the interwar era led governments to
provide weapons, money, and safe haven for militant groups while encouraging
them to carry out attacks. In this book, state-sponsored terrorism refers to a
government’s aiding of foreign terrorist groups, generally outside its own terri-
tories. Counterterrorism encompasses a government’s actions to protect its own
state officials and institutions from political violence. Governments used anti-
terrorism laws to dispose of political opponents and persecute ethnic minorities.
Joseph Stalin maximized the use of anti-terrorism decrees during the Great Terror
of 1936–38, when he approved the execution of 350,000 Soviet citizens in 1937.¹⁶
Labeling a group a terrorist organization was a powerful weapon for leaders not
necessarily as evil as Stalin. It allowed for indiscriminate arrest, political purges,
and the stifling of voices protesting government repression.
In February 1919, as he was recovering from the attempt on his life,
Clemenceau was probably not contemplating such things. He surely appreciated
the unprecedented scale of weapons manufacture between August 1914 and
November 1918 on the part of the Central Powers and the Allied Powers, which
together included the most powerful and highly industrialized nations of Europe.
Just as each of the major combatants in the First World War had initially
misjudged the duration of the conflict, so too did they misconstrue the nature of
battle. Which, in turn, demanded relentless innovation and improvisation to make
up for natural resources denied to belligerents in wartime—the most notable being

manipulated by military leaders who desired the government to implement a more aggressive policy of
expansion abroad. In the 1930s and especially in the 1940s, the Muslim Brotherhood and other extreme
right-wing groups such as Young Egypt employed systematic terrorism and killed two prime ministers
and a few other leading officials.

¹⁴ Ferdinand Mayer to Secretary of State, December 13, 1934, U.S. Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1934, Volume I, General, the British Commonwealth,
eds. Rogers P. Churchill, Matilda F. Axton, Shirley L. Landau, Newton O. Sappington, and Kieran
J. Carrol (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), 204.
¹⁵ Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment,
1919–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State,
“International Terrorism—Report and Resolution Presented by Rapporteur Adopted by the Council,”
December 11, 1934, American Consulate Geneva, Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly Confidential,
1934, Volume VI, League of Nations Political (International Terrorism), RG 84, NARA.
¹⁶ Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 73.
8    

the Haber-Bosch method of producing synthetic nitrates in Germany, whose

armament industries were now cut off from access to saltpeter in Chile. It also
meant the retooling of domestic economics to support the manufacture of weap-
ons and ammunition to be expended by armies following the first battle of the
Marne in September 1914.
By early 1915, generals on both sides were complaining about shell shortages
and the existing procurement system. The traditional arrangement of government
contracts with private companies was found to be inadequate in a time of total
war.¹⁷ A key development that year was the creation of the United Kingdom’s
Ministry of Munitions, which enabled then Chancellor of the Exchequer David
Lloyd George to oversee the national armaments industry on his way to even
higher office. In the summer of 1916, amidst stalemate on both the Western Front
and Eastern Front, Kaiser Wilhelm sanctioned the so-called Hindenburg
Program, a massive armaments buildup, promoted by Field Marshal Paul von
Hindenburg and his deputy, General Erich Ludendorff. Together, Hindenburg
and Ludendorff persuaded Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to lift
the restriction on submarine warfare against the United States. Armaments
production was ratcheted up yet again with the consequent emergence of the
United States as an Associated Power fighting on behalf of the Allies.¹⁸
The mobilization of industry at home, facilitated in particular by the hundreds
of thousands of women who went to work in munitions plants, equipped the
armies of the Great War with modern firepower. Military expenditures in Britain,
France, and Germany increased by 2,000 percent between 1913 and 1918, while
total government spending rose by almost 1,200 percent. The armed forces of the
belligerent nations constituted more than 25 percent of the national income,
whereas before the war, they had consumed less than 4 percent of the budget.¹⁹
As a result, the belligerents steadily increased their outputs of guns, gas,
grenades, tanks, and aircraft for reconnaissance and combat missions over the
course of the war. German industry also developed anti-tank weapons to counter
the thousands of tanks manufactured by the Allies. The use of gas as a battle
weapon was one of the grimmer innovations. The Germans first used gas as a
weapon of war on the Eastern Front in January 1915. Their use of it at Ypres in
April 1915 marked a turning point, as the Allied Powers soon followed suit and
incorporated gas into their arsenal.²⁰ Along with gas, machine guns and grenades
were prevalent on the Western Front. By the middle of 1915, European arsenals

¹⁷ Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New
York: Gotham Books, 2006), 198–201.
¹⁸ David Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018),
1–10.
¹⁹ Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from
1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 262; Max Boot, War Made New, 198–201.
²⁰ Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Combat and Tactics,” in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of
the First World War, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 151–73.
  9

produced more than a million grenades a week. After four years of war, the
belligerent nations had developed almost one hundred variants of this icon of
the Trench.²¹
The end of the war left millions of surplus stocks of arms and ammunition.
Upon the armistice at the 11th hour of November 11, 1918, 555,390 tons of filled
shell remained in British hands.²² Before withdrawing to its frontiers, the German
army handed over 5,000 artillery pieces, 25,000 machine-guns, 3,000 trench
mortars, and 1,700 airplanes, according to Hew Strachan’s magisterial The First
World War, Volume I: To Arms.²³ In January 1917, then Lieutenant-Colonel Sir
Mark Sykes—who is perhaps best known for his secret negotiations with France to
divide up the Ottoman Empire—submitted a memorandum to the Committee of
Imperial Defense’s Sub-Committee on Arms Traffic warning that if “there are 10
or 12 million spare arms in the world, five or six hundred thousand will be
trafficked, and such a number is enough to arm every black man who wants a
rifle.”²⁴ By the time of the armistice, almost two years later, the number of arms
manufactured during the war had grown exponentially; so had British fears of
imperial revolt in Asia and Africa.
While the precise number of weapons produced on all sides during the First
World War was unknown to Sykes and his contemporaries (and shall probably
remain so forever), the surplus stocks was one of the many pressing matters facing
the peacemakers who gathered in Paris in January 1919. The First World War had
taken the lives of almost 10 million combatants and wounded more than 21
million.²⁵ While the ratio of combatant to civilian casualties would be reversed
twenty years later, the First World War killed a high number of civilians.
Approximately 950,000 died from direct military action, and 5,893,000 civilians
died from the impact of war-related famine and disease. A new plague, the
influenza virus known as the “Spanish flu,” preyed upon the fertile breeding
ground created by the war to spread across the globe, causing a loss of life on a
scale that dwarfed even the slaughter of war.²⁶
The war left the old order of Europe in shambles. Revolutions in Russia had
toppled the tsarist regime and the Romanov dynasty. In November 1917, the
Bolsheviks commenced their assault against the provisional government. The Red
Army seized the bulk of the old tsarist army arsenal, including 2.2 million rifles,

²¹ Frederic Guelton, “Technology and Armaments,” in ibid., 240–65.

²² David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press, 2011), 380.
²³ Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 326–7.
²⁴ Memorandum by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, Bart, MP, “Some Considerations on the
Traffic in Arms as a Post-War Problem,” January 12, 1917, India Office Records and Private Papers,
British Library, London, United Kingdom, IOR/L/PS/18/D223.
²⁵ Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, “Combat and Tactics,” 151–73.
²⁶ Peter Hart, The Great War: A Combat History of the First World War (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), xx, 468.
10    

18,036 machine guns and 3 billion clips, 430,000 midrange or light guns, 500
Vickers heavy guns, 1.56 million hand grenades, and 167,000 officers’ pistols and
revolvers. The Bolsheviks also controlled the arms factories of Tula.²⁷ These
weapons would assist the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and communist
revolutions that followed the Russian-German armistice in December 1917.
The Soviets and Germans formalized the end of hostilities with the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk signed on March 3, 1918. According to the provisions of the treaty,
Russia lost one-fourth of its pre-war European empire. New states arose in the
ceded territories, and included Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the
Ukraine. The collapse of the Habsburg dynasty added to the list of new nation-
states. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and a South Slav republic, known as the
State of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929) emerged in
the former imperial domains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Finally, the defeat
of the Ottoman Empire led Arab lands to be placed under British and French
administration. British wartime agreements fueled unrest and nationalist aspir-
ations in Mandatory Palestine by both Arabs and Zionists, while in eastern
Anatolia, Armenian and Kurdish leaders called for independent states. In 1923,
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk established the Republic of Turkey, ending an Allied
occupation of Constantinople, which would be renamed Istanbul.²⁸ These terri-
torial settlements would have profound implications when it came to arms and
terror in the interwar years and beyond.

²⁷ Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 286.
²⁸ Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 4–6.
 1
Arms and Diplomacy in the Postwar Order,
1919–25

Danger loomed for the Western Powers before and after the attempted murder
of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau on February 19, 1919. Repre-
sentatives attending the Paris Peace Conference confronted not only the
destruction from the war but also domestic unrest, revolution, and anticolonial
uprisings. In his speech the previous year on the potential termination of war and
establishment of peace, President Woodrow Wilson had articulated Fourteen
Points, which included: “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which
there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy
shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”¹ In their postwar challenge to
the victorious and newly expanded British and French empires, anticolonial
nationalists cited Wilson’s first point as well as the fifth: “A free, open-minded,
and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict
observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty
the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the
equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.” In Europe,
aspirational and irredentist movements in the former Habsburg, Romanov, and
Hohenzollern empires demanded homogenous nation-states. During the years
between the First and Second World Wars, in lands far and near to the victors
of the Great War, self-determination frequently devolved from a noble dream of
upliftment into an exclusionary form of nationalism that legitimized political
violence and encouraged the militarization of state institutions.² The unprecedented
levels of arms production during the Great War, moreover, flooded the European
continent with guns.
In March 1919, in direct opposition to the Paris Peace Conference, Vladimir
Ilich Ulyanov, better known as V.I. Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks who had seized
power in November 1917, organized the Third Communist International (the
“Comintern”) to launch world revolution from Moscow. Lenin’s conception of
self-determination challenged that of Wilsonian liberalism. And, to their discredit,

¹ Colonel House’s annotated text of Wilson’s Fourteen Points is in Papers Relating to the Foreign
Relations of the United States (hereinafter FRUS), 1918, Supplement 1, The World War, vol. I,
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1933), 405–13.
² Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 9.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
12    

Allied statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference missed an opportunity to integrate

into the Versailles state system colonial leaders such as Saad Zaghloul of Egypt
and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. The Big Three, among others, dismissed the
aspirations of nationalists desiring greater self-governance, thus allowing the
Bolsheviks to make crucial inroads into the colonial world.³
While the peacemakers at Paris did not anticipate the revanchist and state-
sponsored terrorism that would bedevil the Great Powers during the interwar
years, members of the British delegation persuaded their French and American
counterparts that the unprecedented scale of production of weapons in wartime
would translate into an upsurge in global arms trafficking in peacetime. They
signed the Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, at
Saint-Germain-en-Laye on September 10, 1919. National priorities and diverging
security concerns in the years following the treaty, however, took precedence
at the cost of the international cooperation necessary to enforce the terms of
the treaty.

The Arms Traffic Convention of 1919

The roots of the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919 lay in an internal British
memorandum two years earlier, when the Imperial Defense Committee tasked a
sub-committee “to consider the general question of the Traffic in Arms after the
War with special reference to Native Races.” Following two months of studies and
deliberations, Under Secretary of State for India Lord Islington produced a March
10, 1917 report based on a long-term forecast about a peacetime not yet in sight:
“The world’s total stocks of destructive weapons will in fact be infinitely greater
than at any previous period in history; and the difficulty of preventing these
weapons from reaching undesirable hands will be proportionately increased.”⁴
Not only would former belligerents be tempted to sell surplus arms to private
dealers to recoup wartime losses, the report warned, Germany—should it be
defeated and shorn of its colonies in Africa—would have every incentive to
promote a traffic in arms that would potentially weaken the imperial systems of
the wartime victors. “Of all the Powers, Great Britain, with her extensive Asiatic
and African dependencies, offers by far the most vulnerable front to this line of
attack,” the report concluded. At the peace conference—which, again, was con-
tingent on the Allied Powers defeating the Central Powers on the battlefield—
London should therefore seek four objectives: (1) a general agreement among

³ Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of
Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), x.
⁴ Committee of Imperial Defense, Report of Sub-Committee on Arms Traffic, March 10, 1917, India
Office Records and Private Papers, British Library (hereinafter BL), London, United Kingdom, IOR/L/
PS/18/D224. The report, marked secret, was reprinted for the War Cabinet in February 1919.
       , – 13

theretofore belligerents not to sell surplus stocks, along with internal regulations
on the manufacture of pistols and ammunitions, and an international convention
to regulate the arms trade; (2) a separate understanding with France, whose
colonial holdings abutted those of Great Britain; (3) an international convention
with respect to Africa; and (4) special consideration of Maskat (Muscat, Oman),
the Persian Gulf, Persia, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), as well as China and the Far East.
The sub-committee’s report emphasized that parts of Asia and Africa represented
a “danger zone,” where it was of “special importance to prevent modern arms and
ammunition from reaching the hands of the indigenous races.”⁵
An important influence on the deliberations that led to Islington’s report was
diplomat and adviser Sir Mark Sykes, whose own January 1917 memorandum
considered “the general problem arising out of decent weapons getting into the
hands of inferior races.” Sykes had also famously represented the British govern-
ment in the previous year’s secret negotiations with the French on a post-Ottoman
Middle East. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (the latter so-named
after French diplomat François Georges-Picot), which assumed British control of
Transjordan and Mesopotamia, French control of the Levant, and mutual free
passage for trade within these spheres of influence, the non-proliferation of small
arms—however distastefully Sykes defined the problem—would be an immediate
postwar priority. While pre-war efforts had focused on keeping modern “arms of
precision” from reaching imperial subjects, Sykes wrote to the Sub-Committee on
Arms Traffic, imperial authorities now faced a situation where “immense masses
of modern arms have already been issued to natives in Persia, Arabia and Turkey,
and these will spread in all directions.” He summed up: “If there are 10 or 12
million spare arms in the world, five or six hundred thousand will be trafficked,
and such a number is enough to arm every black man who wants a rifle.”⁶
Sykes also cited the automatic pistol’s potential to wreak havoc. The Sidney
Street siege of January 1911, a gunfight in the East End of London during which
the Metropolitan Police Service had called on the military for assistance, would
not have been possible without the advent of the 1896 Loewe Broomhandle
Mauser, an automatic pistol that could fire ten bullets a second. On June 28,
1914, Gavrilo Princip had fired another automatic pistol, a Belgian Browning,
killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Small arms, which were cheap and easily transportable, could have
significant consequences. Even after a potential British victory in the Great War,
Sykes warned, revolutionaries armed with pistols alone could carry out acts of
terrorism disproportionate to their numbers. The automatic pistol was “the
weapon of the intellectual, the anarchist, the town desperado and the secret

⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Memorandum by Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Mark Sykes, Bart, MP, “Some Considerations on the
Traffic in Arms as a Post-War Problem,” January 12, 1917, BL, IOR/L/PS/18/D223.
14    

revolutionary society,” according to Sykes, who concluded: “Sydney Street and the
Moscow revolution was a foretaste of what may come.”⁷
Efforts by Sykes and Islington yielded results. The Foreign Office drafted a
convention intended to “bind the Contracting parties to observe the strictest
possible control over the disposal of the enormous stocks of munitions of war
actually in their possession since the termination of hostilities”; “tighten up the
measures already in force for the future control of this trade in arms and
ammunition in the areas specified in the Brussels Act [resulting from the
Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference of 1889–90, which also restricted the arms
trade]”; and, to extend those areas to deter arms trafficking in the Red Sea, the
Persian Gulf, and Ethiopia—all strategic chokepoints in the far-flung empire.⁸
This initiative came while the government was also pressing for domestic firearms
legislation. In February 1918, Sir Ernley Blackwell, a lawyer in the Home Office,
chaired a committee to consider “the question of the control which it is desirable
to exercise over the possession, manufacture, sale, import and export of firearms
and ammunition in the United Kingdom after the war.” Both the Islington and
Blackwell committees regarded the vast quantities of surplus weapons left over
from the war as a source of danger to the British Empire. According to the
Islington report, surplus weapons could come into the hands of bad actors such
as “Savage or semi-civilized tribesmen in outlying parts of the British Empire.”
“The anarchist or ‘intellectual’ malcontent of the great cities, whose weapon [was]
the bomb and the automatic pistol,” was an additional menace.⁹
British policymakers hoped to enlist their French counterparts, notwithstand-
ing the latter’s pre-war failure to “exercise any effective control over the import of
arms through French Somaliland into Abyssinia whence they have found their
way into the neighboring British or Soudanese territories.” Between the fighting
years of 1915 and 1917, however, with the constant demand for bodies to man the
trenches along the Western Front, anti-conscription protests had spread through-
out French North and West Africa. By 1919, British policymakers expected that
the French would regard a postwar arms treaty with a more “accommodating
spirit.” They also took heart that American officials recognized the concern of
gun-running in the more “backward States of South and Central America.”¹⁰ And

⁷ Ibid. See also Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (New
York: Penguin Press, 2018), 388–9. As Satia puts it: “Sykes foresaw a world in which unrest took the
form of terrorism by pistol-armed anticolonial individuals capable of wreaking more havoc than
insurrectionary soldiers.”
⁸ Sir H. Read, G.S. Spicer, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Malkin, Sir A. Hinzel, Sir L. Mallet, Lord Hardridge,
February 1, 1919, The National Archives (hereinafter TNA), London, United Kingdom, FO 608/217.
⁹ Committee of Imperial Defense, Report of Sub-Committee on Arms Traffic, March 10, 1917, BL,
IOR/L/PS/18/D224; Colin Greenwood, Firearms Control: A Study of Armed Crime and Firearms
Control in England and Wales (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 36–45.
¹⁰ Sir H. Read, G.S. Spicer, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Malkin, Sir A. Hinzel, Sir L. Mallet, Lord Hardridge,
February 1, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217; Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads
from Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 13.
       , – 15

they believed that the present and future security interests of the Big Three
opposing Wilhelmine Germany required an extraordinary level of postwar col-
laboration. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 offered British policymakers the
opportunity to propose an international arms treaty when American and French
cooperation seemed possible, and at a time when the French had hopefully learned
from past mistakes. Countries such as “Abyssinia, in which the guarantee of the
Head of the State is hardly sufficient,” as one British official in the Foreign Office
wrote on a draft version of the treaty, accentuated the need for Great Power
cooperation.¹¹
Meanwhile, Lord Islington and his supporters in the Foreign Office had to
contend with the gargantuan task of financing and administering the British
Empire. Created after the Shell Crisis of 1915 to revamp the industrial output of
munitions, the Ministry of Munitions balked at an arms trafficking treaty because
the British government had already entered into a contract with the U.S. govern-
ment to sell surplus stocks.¹² The position of the Ministry of Munitions also
reflected the heavy debt incurred by the British government to finance the war.
Payment was due to the Americans in particular.
Legal advisers cautioned that the government of Egypt “assembled” arms in a
government arsenal for the use of the small Egyptian army and the British army of
occupation, which during wartime consisted of British territorials and some
50,000 imperial troops in defense of the Suez Canal. Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs Lord Curzon made clear that Egypt needed to be outside of the
African “prohibited zone” so that the British army could continue to receive arms,
ammunitions, and explosives. An inter-departmental conference held at the India
Office on February 24, 1919, resulted in a modified arms convention that allowed
prior munition contracts to be filled and permitted Egypt to assemble weapons for
the British army. The meeting was held at the India Office to ensure that British
India’s neighbors—particularly Afghanistan and Persia, nominally independent
countries over which Britain wielded outsized influence—remained within the
prohibited zones and that the millions of arms left over from the war would not
find their way to the region to be picked up ultimately by Indian revolutionary
terrorists.¹³
Two months later, in April 1919, British and French representatives submitted
to the Supreme War Council in Versailles a joint draft convention for the control

¹¹ Draft Convention for control of Arms Traffic, February 22, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217.
¹² For circumstances leading up to its establishment, see Ministry of Munitions, History of the
Ministry of Munitions, vol. I, Industrial Mobilisation, 1914–1915 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary
Office, 1922).
¹³ Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen to William Malkin, February 20, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217; Lord
Curzon to Arthur Balfour, February 20, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217; William Malkin, February 21, 1919,
TNA, FO 608/217; Arthur Balfour to Lord Curzon, February 17, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217; Foreign
Office, Report of Inter-Departmental Conference held at the India Office, February 24, 1919, TNA, FO
608/217.
16    

of the traffic in arms and ammunition.¹⁴ After working with French officials to
complete a draft arms trafficking treaty, British officials reached out to the
American Commission to Negotiate Peace, which included President Wilson’s
closest adviser, Edward M. House. Assistant Under Secretary to the Colonial
Office Herbert Read followed up in unofficial lunches with another commissioner,
historian George Louis Beer, who was serving as President Wilson’s colonial
expert. After submitting a number of amendments, including one that expanded
the types of arms banned from export, Beer indicated that the U.S. government
would sign the arms treaty.¹⁵
By the end of the summer of 1919, Britain was unilaterally adhering to the
treaty. No other country had signed on to it. Lord Curzon bemoaned to Foreign
Secretary Arthur Balfour that the British government could not “persist in a policy
which prejudices British trade to the advantage of foreign competitors.”¹⁶ Lord
Balfour, whose December 1917 declaration of support for a Jewish homeland in
Palestine has forever linked him to the modern Middle East, took action. On
September 1, he wrote the French minister of foreign affairs, Stéphen Pichon, to
reiterate the treaty’s vital importance to the British government and propose an
exchange of signatures when the representatives gathered in Paris later that month
to sign a peace treaty with Austria-Hungary.¹⁷
Curzon’s timing was propitious. The September 10, 1919 Treaty of Saint-
Germain-en-Laye, which dissolved the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire,
afforded the gathered Allies the opportunity to sign on to the Convention for
the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, more commonly known as
the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919. Representatives from twenty-three govern-
ments, shown in Figure 1.1, included those of the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and newly-created Czechoslovakia.¹⁸
“Whereas the long war now ended, in which most nations have successively
become involved, has led to the accumulation in various parts of the world of
considerable quantities of arms and munitions of war, the dispersal of which
would constitute a danger to peace and public order,” the text of the treaty began,
twenty-six articles followed. Signatories agreed to prohibit the export of “artillery
of all kinds,” including “flame-throwers, bombs, grenades, machine-guns and
rifled small-bore breech-loading weapons, as well as the exportation of the

¹⁴ William Tyrrell, British Delegation for Arthur Balfour, Foreign Office, April 16, 1919, TNA, FO
608/217.
¹⁵ George Louis Beer to Sir Herbert J. Read, Hotel Majestic, Paris, June 6, 1919, TNA, MUN 4/6366.
¹⁶ Lord Curzon to A.J. Balfour, August 27, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217.
¹⁷ Arthur Balfour to Stéphen Pichon, September 1, 1919, TNA, FO 608/217.
¹⁸ The treaty consisted of twenty-six articles. The first five articles addressed the export of arms and
ammunition. The next sixteen articles covered the import of arms and ammunition and established
“prohibited areas” and a zone of maritime supervision. The last five articles contained general
provisions. The text of the Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and
Protocol, signed at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paris, September 10, 1919, is in FRUS, 1920, vol. I,
180–96.
       , – 17

Figure 1.1 The Delegations at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, September 1919 (Chronicle/

Alamy Stock Photo)

ammunition for use with such arms.” Much of the treaty focused on the regulation
of the arms trade through Africa and Asia, particularly in the region that became
the Middle East. It proclaimed that the “Brussels Act of July 2, 1890, regulating the
traffic in arms and ammunition in certain regions, no longer [met] present
conditions, which [required] more elaborate provisions applicable to a wider
area in Africa and the establishment of a corresponding regime in certain terri-
tories in Asia.”¹⁹
Specifically, the convention prohibited the importation of small arms to all of
Africa (excluding Algeria, Libya, and the Union of South Africa), Trans-Caucasia,
Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Asiatic territories that formerly belonged to
the Ottoman Empire. Within the prohibited areas, individuals were required to
obtain a license to house arms and ammunition, and “any person licensed to keep
a warehouse for arms or ammunition must reserve for that special purpose
enclosed premises having only one entry, provided with two locks, one of which
can be opened only by the officers of the Government.”²⁰ In addition, the treaty
contained provisions that prohibited the trade and transfer of weapons through a
vast maritime zone that included the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Persian

¹⁹ Ibid., 180. ²⁰ Ibid., 184.

18    

Gulf. Signatories of the treaty agreed to publicize the number of export licenses
granted for arms sales to be compiled by a new Central International Office under
the League of Nations and published on an annual basis.
They also endorsed a protocol attached to the convention that aimed to bring
the provisions of the treaty immediately into force. Galvanized by the movement
of weapons to colonies and protectorates amidst burbling unrest among antic-
olonial groups, the imperial governments of France, Italy, Japan, Great Britain,
and Belgium met again in Paris in 1920, and agreed to carry out the provisions of
the treaty in Africa and the Middle East.²¹ “The British negotiators regarded the
Protocol as much more important than the Convention,” as historian Simon Ball
has written, because the immediate goal of the protocol—as one British official in
the Foreign Office put it—was to “prevent, as far as possible, the uncontrolled
dispersal of the large stocks of arms then existing in numerous countries.”²²
By that point, the Americans had departed the stage. The United States did not
take part in the second meeting in 1920, and the U.S. Senate never ratified the
Arms Traffic Convention of 1919. American opposition to the treaty stemmed
from the convention’s ban on sales to countries that had not signed the treaty, as
this would have slashed U.S. exports to Latin America, which were considerable.
According to the inaugural edition of the League’s Statistical Information on the
Trade in Arms, Ammunition and Material of War, in 1920 the United States
exported to Argentina and Brazil $2,571,300 worth of loaded cartridges as com-
pared to $3,401,000 to the rest of the world, along with $675,000 worth of
revolvers and pistols as compared to $702,400 to all other countries. Argentina
and Brazil ranked second and fourth in the import of U.S.-manufactured rifles and
shotguns, well behind Canada and close to Russia.²³ U.S. officials also voiced
concerns that the treaty would discourage a rebellion against an outside oppressor,
invoking a common American criticism of European imperialism in the interwar
years.²⁴ Outranking these particular objections to the Arms Traffic Convention
was the U.S. Senate’s final vote against the Treaty of Versailles in March 1920.
Chastened by defeat, the Department of State was reluctant to support an inter-
national treaty that a newly-emboldened Congress saw as encroachment upon the

²¹ In a December 1, 1924 letter to Raymond Poincaré Lord Crewe cited the 1920 agreement as well
as Articles Seven and Eight of the 1919 Arms Traffic Convention in expressing British objection to the
export of arms and ammunition to the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz by French and Italian firms.
December 1, 1924, SDN 986, The Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Archives du Ministère
des Affaires Etrangères] (hereinafter MAE), La Courneuve, Paris, France.
²² Simon Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth
Century,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 4 (2012): 822.
²³ Statistical Information on the Trade in Arms, Ammunition, and Material of War (Geneva, 1924),
60–3. [A.30. 1924. IX.] League of Nations. Secretariat. Disarmament Section.
²⁴ John Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail: Anglophobia in the United States, 1921–48 (London:
MacMillan Press, 1999); The Secretary of the Navy (Denby) to the Secretary of State, April 4, 1922,
in FRUS, 1920, vol. I, 548–50; The Secretary of State, Charles E. Hughes, to President Harding, August
2, 1922, in ibid., 551–3.
       , – 19

U.S. Monroe Doctrine’s banning outside political interference in the Western

Hemisphere.²⁵
Even prior to the first Senate defeat of the League of Nations, in November
1919, U.S. inaction over the Arms Traffic Convention became a point of conten-
tion between the United Kingdom and United States. Following the signing of the
treaty, in September, the British government refused to export arms to countries
that had not signed on to it, and the Foreign Office forbade individuals and
corporations from exporting or re-exporting arms to countries within the pro-
hibited zones.²⁶ The Americans took a different approach. “With reference to the
protocol quoted in your message under acknowledgment,” Acting Secretary of
State Alvey Adee wrote the U.S. Commission to Negotiate Peace on October 17, “it
is considered necessary to inform you that this Government cannot regard itself as
bound by the terms thereof which are contrary to the existing laws of the United
States.”²⁷ The U.S. delegation was further instructed to explain to the other
signatories of the Convention the Wilson administration’s position that “the
present restrictions of the War Trade Board on the exportation of arms and
munitions of war to certain countries will suffice for the time being to prevent
any material departure from the intent and spirit of the Arms Traffic Convention
which it interprets as the desire of the signatories first to prevent any dispersal of
the large surplus of war material to regions where it might ultimately be used to
the detriment of the signatory powers and second to regulate the arms traffic in
the districts described in Section 6, Chapter II of the Convention.”²⁸ Even as the
administration supported the treaty’s goal of non-proliferation of arms produced
during the Great War, in other words, the protocol had no binding legal authority
prior to the Senate’s ratification of the treaty.
“His Majesty’s Government are of opinion that the effect of the Protocol is not to
render the Convention binding on its signatories pending ratification,” Counselor
of the British Embassy in Washington Ronald Lindsay wrote Secretary of State
Lansing on November 13, “but merely to prohibit transactions which would be
contrary to its provisions were it in force.”²⁹ A test case was Brazil, which had
not yet signed the treaty and to which the British government was denying the
export of arms and munitions from a private U.K. firm. In response to Lindsay’s
December 23 inquiry about Brazil, Lansing responded, “as regards the sale of
Government owned arms and munitions, it will, as a matter of policy and in

²⁵ The Secretary of State to President Harding, August 2, 1922, in ibid., 547–55; see also David
R. Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty: The League of Nations’ Drive to Control the Global Arms
Trade,” Journal of Contemporary History 35 (2000): 217–20.
²⁶ Foreign Office to Sir C. Kennard, October 24, 1919, TNA, MUN 4/6366.
²⁷ The Acting Secretary of State to the Commission to Negotiate Peace, October 17, 1919, in FRUS,
1920, vol. I, 198.
²⁸ Ibid.
²⁹ The British Appointed Ambassador on Special Mission (Grey) to the Secretary of State,
November 13, 1919, in ibid., 199.
20    

keeping with the spirit of the Convention, decline to sell arms to non-signatory
states except under a guarantee that the non-signatory power in question will
adhere to the Arms Traffic Convention when an opportunity is offered.”³⁰
Getting at the heart of British concerns, however, Lansing went on to say: “I
would point out that this Government is not at the present time controlling the
exportation of arms and munitions by private concerns to any government,
signatory or non-signatory, except Mexico, China, and Bolshevik Russia.”³¹
London was clearly underwhelmed by this position. “I have now received a
reply instructing me to point out to the United States Government that any failure
to prevent export by private firms would nullify the point of the Convention,”
Lindsay wrote Lansing on February 3, 1920, “namely:—the disposal of the
existing stocks, a contingency which the protocol signed by the United States
Representatives, was expressly designed to avert.” He went on to say: “Neglect to
observe the spirit of the Convention, pending ratification, would constitute a
precedent which would justify any of the signatories in allowing private shipments
to say, Mexico, which country as the United States Government are aware, has not
hitherto been allowed to buy arms in the United Kingdom.”³² “His Majesty’s
Government find it difficult to understand why if an effective control is exercised
by the United States Government over the export of privately owned Arms and
Ammunition to the three countries mentioned [Mexico, China, and Bolshevik
Russia], this control cannot be extended to cover all destinations,” Lindsay wrote
on March 9, before adding: “I understand that the French Government share the
views of His Majesty’s Government in this respect.”³³
Despite Lindsay’s conveyance of frustration and thinly-veiled threat to allow
the private shipment of arms and ammunition to Mexico, the Department of State
reiterated its position that it was bound only to those terms of the convention
already sanctioned by existing national law. Acting Secretary of State Frank Polk,
who would go on to co-found the international law firm Davis Polk, put his legal
training to use. He stated that the American Commission to Negotiate Peace had
clearly expressed its understanding and intentions during the final negotiations in
Paris in October 1919; and, following Adee’s directive on October 17, the United
States government had received notice that the principal Allied and Associated
Powers acknowledged in informal discussions not only their understanding of
the position of the United States but also their own similar interpretation of the
protocol.³⁴

³⁰ The Secretary of State to the British Chargé (Lindsay), January 6, 1920, in ibid., 202.
³¹ Ibid.
³² The British Chargé (Lindsay) to the Secretary of State, February 3, 1920, in ibid., 203.
R.C. Lindsay, British Embassy to Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, February 3, 1920, MUN 4/6366.
³³ The British Chargé (Lindsay) to the Acting Secretary of State, March 9, 1920, in ibid., 204. See also
R.C. Lindsay, British Embassy, to Frank L. Polk, Acting Secretary of State of the United States, March 9,
1920, TNA, MUN 4/6366.
³⁴ The Acting Secretary of State to the British Chargé (Lindsay), March 13, 1920, in ibid., 205.
       , – 21

“Under existing laws of the United States this Government may prohibit the
exportation of arms to any American country in which a state of domestic
violence exists,” he went on to say, “but there is no provision of law in pursuance
of which the exportation of arms generally may be controlled, except while this
country is at war.”³⁵ Peacetime exceptions of Mexico, China, and Russia notwith-
standing, the U.S. government did not “feel that it would be feasible to reinstate
the war time regulations in this respect.” Polk nonetheless reasserted the
U.S. position that it would adhere to the “spirit” of the convention by declining
“to sell Government arms to non-signatory states except under a guarantee that
the non-signatory power in question will adhere to the Arms Traffic Convention
when an opportunity is offered.”³⁶
Less than a year after signing the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919, as Polk’s
response confirmed, the United States retreated from ratifying a treaty that would
have extended its obligations to former wartime Allies into peacetime. Despite the
litigious and obscure language used in responses to British inquiries, the
U.S. government in many ways followed the treaty except when it came to Latin
America or penalizing private arms manufactures. Yet, these very exceptions
demonstrated the difficulties an international arms trafficking agreement faced,
as nations advanced their own interests and priorities. Transatlantic discord
mirrored imperial bickering. British diplomats found themselves trying to per-
suade not only the Americans but also the French and Italians to follow the Arms
Traffic Convention. However, for the duration of the early 1920s the British and
later the League of Nations held the U.S. government responsible for the conven-
tion’s failure.³⁷

Britain, France, and Italy

America’s descent from the lofty heights of Wilsonian peacemaking left enforce-
ment of the Arms Traffic Convention in the hands of Britain and France, whose
adjacent colonial holdings led to friction among the two countries and Italy.
Having arrived at the peace conference with extensive territorial demands,
Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando was initially one of the “Big Four” alongside
Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George. However, Orlando stormed out of the
conference following the denial of Italy’s territorial claims to Fiume on the
Dalmatian coast. President Wilson’s appeal to the Italian people over the head
of their leader failed to assuage Italian resentment. During the early 1920s, chaotic
domestic conditions in Italy dominated the short-lived postwar ministries (six
between 1919 and 1922) and left little time or inclinations for foreign adventures.

³⁵ Ibid. ³⁶ Ibid., 206.

³⁷ Lord Crewe to Raymond Poincaré, September 10, 1923, SDN 986, MAE.
22    

Following his October 1922 “March on Rome,” however, Benito Mussolini

espoused a nationalist and expansionist agenda to reclaim ancient glory in “making
the Mediterranean our lake . . . and expelling those in the Mediterranean who are
parasites.”³⁸ With his immediate sights on Libya, which lay directly between French
Algeria and British Egypt, the irredentist Mussolini added another complication
to London and Paris’s struggle to come to terms on the Arms Traffic Convention
elsewhere on the African continent.
“As your Excellency is aware negotiations have for some time past been
proceeding between the French Government, the Italian Government, and His
Majesty’s Government, with the object of introducing some system for controlling
supplies of arms and ammunition to the Abyssinian Government,” British
Ambassador to France Charles Hardinge wrote President Raymond Poincaré
December 1922; cooperation among the three had recently led to mutual agree-
ment to allow import of a shipment of machine guns from America to Ras Tafari
(then Crown Prince, and future Emperor Haile Selassie), which the British held in
Aden for several months.³⁹ Given the circumstances, Hardinge went on to say,
Foreign Affairs Secretary Lord Curzon “was greatly surprised on being informed
by His Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires at Addis-Abeba that the French representative
at that town had permitted Ras Taffari to purchase and bring back with him
secretly from Jibuti approximately two thousand rifles and twenty thousand
cartridges.”⁴⁰ Hardinge conveyed dissatisfaction with a French official in Addis
who claimed: “only [to have] issued permission to Ras Taffari to import two or
three hundred rifles and that Ras Taffari has deceived him by bringing two
thousand.”⁴¹
“When the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919 was being negotiated at Paris, the
British representative made it clear to their French colleagues that the main object
of His Majesty’s Government in proposing such a conversation was to put an end
to the uncontrolled admission of arms into Abyssinia,” Hardinge’s successor, Lord
Crewe, wrote Poincaré in September 1923, before recapitulating the importance of
trilateral cooperation with the Italians and the case of the two thousand rifles.
“Regret . . . has not been expressed for the transaction,” Crewe stated, “nor has the
French Minister at Adis Ababa been reprimanded, and His Majesty’s Government
feel that a most dangerous precedent has been created, which may well lead to the
uncontrolled import of arms into Abyssinia and thus to a resumption of slave
raiding and looting on the British frontiers.”⁴²
The official French response was that the admission of Abyssinia to the League
of Nations nullified such provisions of the Arms Traffic Convention. A sovereign

³⁸ Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 86–90, 317, 329.
³⁹ Lord Hardinge to Raymond Poincaré, December 5, 1922, SDN 986, MAE. ⁴⁰ Ibid.
⁴¹ Ibid. ⁴² Lord Crewe to Raymond Poincaré, September 10, 1923, SDN 986, MAE.
       , – 23

state had the right to control its own foreign policy, it insisted, and to import such
weapons as necessary for its protection.⁴³ Reflecting Whitehall’s desire to maintain
political preponderance in these regions and to lessen the chance that weapons
would reach insurgent and terrorist groups operating in weak states with limited
government control or surveillance capabilities, Britain’s response was that
Ethiopia remained in the prohibited zone irrespective of its League membership.
Northeast and across the Red Sea, cooperation among the former wartime
Allies would again be put to the test. During the First World War, British
policymakers had decided to sponsor the Hashemites—King Hussein and his
sons Faisal and Abdullah—as leaders of the postwar Arab Middle East. Britain’s
dedication to Hussein came from his launching a military campaign against the
Ottoman Empire—the much-heralded “Arab Revolt.” By 1918, Hussein was locked
in combat with another British protégé, Ibn Saud, meaning that Whitehall was
supplying considerable subsidies to two warring dynamistic regimes competing
for hegemony over Arabia.⁴⁴ The twin imperatives of access to oil and the
defense of transit routes to India and Asia prevented a full British withdrawal
from the region. In 1922, Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner of Iraq, reached a
settlement with Ibn Saud that included frontier agreements defining the terri-
torial boundaries between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait.⁴⁵
In December 1924, Lord Crewe acknowledged the request of the Hashemite
government in Arabia to receive arms and munitions from the French and
Italian governments. The British ambassador reminded his colleagues in Paris
and Rome of their obligations under the Arms Traffic Convention and the
subsequent agreement of 1920 among the French Republic and the Italian,
Belgian, Japanese, and British governments to apply the provisions of the 1919
convention to prohibited areas such as Arabia. Crewe requested that the French
and Italian governments deny export licenses to their armament manufacturers for
the shipment of arms and munitions to the Hejaz “so long as no government exists
in that country capable of giving adequate guarantees of the nature indicated in the
Convention of 1919.” Britain was only interested in the strict enforcement of the
convention, he went on to say, and its policy “as regards the present conflict between
the Emir Ali [King Hussein] and the Sultan of Nejd [Ibn Saud] for the posses-
sion of the Holy Places of Islam is one of complete neutrality.”⁴⁶ The note did
not mention that Britain was subsidizing both parties.

⁴³ Lord Crewe to Raymond Poincaré, February 15, 1924, SDN 986, MAE.
⁴⁴ A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “The War, Imperialism, and Decolonization,” in Jay Winter, Geoffrey
Parker, and Mary Habeck, eds., The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 249; John Fisher, Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East,
1916–19 (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999), 294; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 21.
⁴⁵ David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the
Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 424–5, 510, 514, 560, 562.
⁴⁶ Lord Crewe to Raymond Poincaré, December 1, 1924, SDN 986, MAE.
24    

Britain’s actual interest in Arabia was anything but neutral. Lord Crewe’s
December 1924 note to France and Italy was a reminder of Britain’s investment
in Arabia and its desire to maintain stability. The British government did not
propose to issue licenses for the export of arms to either party. However, some
British policymakers, such as the leftist MP Joseph Kenworthy, feared that the
British arms supplied to Saud would be used against them. Such anxieties reflected
memories of the war when British soldiers in the Dardanelles had come under fire
from Ottoman troops using guns supplied by Vickers, a British armaments
manufacture.⁴⁷ The British, moreover, did not want the Hashemites—Faisal
now presiding over Iraq and Abdullah over Transjordan—to find a new foreign
backer that might allow them to undermine the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that
established the post-Ottoman Middle East. As it turned out, Ibn Saud and his
Wahhabi followers resolved this test of the Arms Traffic Convention in early 1925
by invading the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz on the Arabian peninsula and
driving Hussein into exile.
Any reprieve on the Arms Traffic Convention was short lived, as Britain and
France would again discover in the Far East. An embargo on arms exports to
China dated to May 1919 when the Great Powers had agreed to “restrain their
subjects and citizens from exporting to or importing into China arms and
munitions of war . . . until the establishment of a government whose authority is
recognized throughout the whole country.”⁴⁸ The hope was to bring stability—the
flow of weapons to China after the First World War only perpetuated the fighting
among factions—and to counter Japan, which was sending arms and financial
support Duan Qirui’s pro-Japanese government.⁴⁹ In March 1925, the British
government lodged a complaint against French aircraft shipments to China.
Responding that they were commercial airplanes for strictly civilian use, French
officials illustrated the problem with aircraft technology: it would always be dual
use. “The technical obstacles to inspection and enforcement were vexatious,”
writes historian Michael Sherry, “above all because it was too easy to convert
airliners to bombers—agreement to limit naval arms faced no similar barrier . . .
[and] banning civilian aviation was impossible.”⁵⁰ Unlike the submarine and other
diabolical instruments of the Great War, the airplane transformed commerce and
culture in peacetime. Ultimately, Britain acquiesced after France promised to
uphold the other statutes of the arms embargo in China.⁵¹

⁴⁷ Satia, Empire of Guns, 392.

⁴⁸ Note from Dean of Diplomatic Body (Jordan) to Chinese Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs
(Ch’en Lu), May 5, 1919, in FRUS, 1919, vol. I, 670.
⁴⁹ Phoebe Chow, Britain’s Imperial Retreat from China, 1900–1931 (New York: Routledge, 2017),
122.
⁵⁰ Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), 33.
⁵¹ Lord Crewe to French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, March 26, 1925, MAE.
       , – 25

Throughout these years, American observers looked askance at the endurance

and expansion of the British and French empires. State Department officials could
not shake off suspicions that the “real object” of the Arms Traffic Convention was
to “enhance and strengthen the authority of European powers in various regions
of the world in which political conditions are unstable—particularly in Africa and
in Asia,” as Stanley Hornbeck in the Office of the Economic Adviser put it. To
him, the treaty was a “political arrangement to protect existing governments” and
render physical opposition impossible in European colonies and mandates.⁵² This
suspicion was hardly unfounded.

The League of Nations

“The High Contracting Parties who exercise authority over territories within the
prohibited areas and zone specified in Article 6 agree to take, so far as each may be
concerned, the measures required for the enforcement of the present Convention,
and in particular for the prosecution and repression of offences against the
provisions contained therein,” read Article 22 of the Arms Traffic Convention
of 1919. Absent a resolution there, Article 24 identified the next step: “The High
Contracting Parties agree that if any dispute whatever should arise between them
relating to the application of the present Convention which cannot be settled by
negotiation, this dispute shall be submitted to an arbitral tribunal in conformity
with the provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations.”⁵³ The signatories of
the treaty were supposed to resolve matters themselves, in other words, and
reserve for the most stubborn cases arbitration in Geneva. While the British
labored to bring the Americans on board and the France into compliance,
however, the League took on an expanded role in the enforcement of agreements
limiting the traffic and stockpiling of arms.
In August 1920, the Permanent Advisory Committee on Military, Naval and
Air Questions (PAC), which had been created that May to coordinate disarma-
ment efforts, identified the number of export licenses granted by signatory states
for the export of arms and ammunitions as well as individual quantities and
intended destinations.⁵⁴ The PAC requested that League members supply it with
such information to assist in the formation of a Central International Office,

⁵² S.K. Hornbeck, Office of the Economic Adviser, Department of State, February 8, 1924, 500.A14/
403–500A15/5, Box 5197, Central Decimal File 1910–29, Record Group 59: General Records of the
Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), U.S. National Archives (hereinafter NARA).
⁵³ Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and Protocol, Signed at
Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Paris September 10, 1919, in FRUS, 1920, vol. I, 193–4.
⁵⁴ Van Hamel to Secretary-General, May 7, 1920, Regarding Present Traffic in Arms, R 186,
1919–27, Classification 8, League of Nations Archives (hereinafter LNA); F.P. Walters to Van
Hamel, August 13, 1920, Classement 8, Document 22651, Dossier 4407, R 186, 1919–27,
Classification 8, LNA.
26    

which would compile these statistics and publish them at regular intervals.⁵⁵
Signatory governments of the convention responded in the same vein as the
British Foreign Office: they could not provide information since the treaty “had
not yet been ratified by any of the Signatories and was only in partial operation as
the result of an informal modus vivendi.”⁵⁶
Most League officials held the United States responsible for the treaty’s failure,
and acknowledged that the convention would remain a “dead letter” until the
American government ratified it. Without American participation, no other
manufacturing county would unilaterally limit its military production and incur
financial losses by purposely diverting trade into other hands.⁵⁷ Clear-eyed League
officials were persistent in their approach to Washington. In a December 1920
invitation to the United States to propose representatives who would sit on a
commission to study the reduction of armament, Secretary General Sir Eric
Drummond guaranteed that the presence of a U.S. representative would “in no
way commit the American Government to whatever opinions may be finally put
forward in the report of the Commission.” He further promised that American
participation would not encroach upon the government’s “liberty of action.”⁵⁸
Acting Secretary of State Norman Davis declined the invitation, which arrived a
few weeks after the 1920 presidential election in which the victor, Republican
Senator Warren Harding, took square aim at President Wilson’s foreign policy
legacy. While noting that the American government remained “most sympathetic
with any sincere efforts to evolve a constructive plan for disarmament which is so
necessary for the economical rehabilitation, peace and stability of the world,”
Davis replied to Drummond that the United States, a nonmember of the League of
Nations, could not appoint an official to participate in deliberations that adhered
to the League’s covenant.⁵⁹
With the inauguration of President Harding in March 1921, Davis was suc-
ceeded by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, the once and future Supreme
Court Justice, who had been the Republican presidential nominee in 1916. When
it came to the Arms Traffic Convention, Hughes maintained the position that
the United States should not sign a treaty that required penalizing private arms

⁵⁵ Secretary of the Permanent Advisory, Commission of the League on Military, Naval and Air
Questions to Sunderland House, Curzon Street, London, August 26, 1920, R 186, 1919–27,
Classification 8, LNA.
⁵⁶ R. Sperling, Foreign Office, September 9, 1920, R 186, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁵⁷ Memorandum by the Legal Section of the Secretariat, Temporary Commission for the Reduction
of Armaments, July 27, 1921, R217, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA; League of Nations, Report of Sub-
Committee A of Commission N 6 (Armaments) 1920, Report on the Arms Traffic Convention, R189,
Classification 8, Document No 9531, Dossier 9531, LNA.
⁵⁸ Council of the League of Nations to the Government of the United States Approved by the
Council, December 1, 1920, R 189, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁵⁹ Norman H. Davis, Acting Secretary of State to Permanent Advisory Commission for Military,
Naval and Air Questions, December 9, 1920, R 189, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
       , – 27

producers or limited the shipment of military supplies to Latin American coun-

tries that were not members of the convention.⁶⁰
Despite these rejections, change was in the air. Criticism mounted against the
Permanent Advisory Committee (PAC) on Military, Naval and Air Questions,
which was tasked with carrying out the 1919 convention. Composed exclusively of
military officials in the chain of command of their own individual governments,
the PAC reported to the Council—as opposed to the larger Assembly—lending
disproportionate weight to the concerns of the Great Powers such as the French
demand that the commission focus primarily on disarming Germany.⁶¹ In the
summer of 1921, the Assembly organized an alternative body to oversee disarma-
ment: the Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments (TMC). Staffed by
leading experts in politics, economics, business, and labor, the commission
stood in contrast to the military officials of the PAC. Designed by the Assembly
to be an international body of private citizens free from national obligations, the
TMC was expected to achieve greater results.⁶² Ensuring that the TMC would not
actually be an entirely civilian body, however, the French and British included on
the committee six military representatives, drawn from the PAC, who could check
the “dangerous idealism” of the civilian members.⁶³
In July 1922, the Temporary Mixed Commission reviewed the status of surplus
stocks and the steps needed to be taken for their destruction. It concluded that in
“certain ex-belligerent countries the question is entrusted under the Treaties of
Peace,” while in “other ex-belligerent States stocks have been reduced by the
Governments concerned to the minimum which, in their opinion, is indispensable
for national mobilization.” The commission also arrived at the dubious conclu-
sion: “the surplus stocks which undoubtedly existed at the close of the world-war
have, during the three and a half years which have elapsed since that date, been
destroyed or liquidated, or in the progress of liquidation.”⁶⁴ This position reflected
the stark realities of sovereignty, whereby an international committee had little
power forcing governments to reduce their weapon stockpiles, and also the ill-
founded belief that nations had simply requisitioned their stocks. U.S. Colonel
Edwin Bricker had testified that at the end of war the Army had “shipped back to
the United States all the serviceable guns and gun carriages.”⁶⁵ Among military

⁶⁰ Secretary of state, United States Government to Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction
of Armaments, September 12, 1923, R 229, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁶¹ Peter Jackson, “France and the Problems of Security and International Disarmament after the
First World War.” Journal of Strategic Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 252–3; F.P. Walters, A History of the
League of Nations (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 217, 219–20; Webster, “Making
Disarmament Work,” 553–4.
⁶² Webster, “Making Disarmament Work,” 553–4.
⁶³ Webster, “The Transnational Dream,” 502.
⁶⁴ League of Nations Report of the Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments, September 7,
1922, “Destruction of Surplus Stocks,” 19.
⁶⁵ Testimony of Col. Edwin D. Bricker, Ordinance Department, United States Army, War
Expenditures Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 (Foreign Expenditures) of the Select Committee
28    

officials—more so than civilian staff—there was a general unwillingness to

acknowledge the problem of leftover guns.
Gun-running of surplus stocks continued, and not until the prominent inquir-
ies of the 1930s—the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions
Industry (the “Nye Committee”), in the United States, and the Royal
Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms, in the United
Kingdom—would the full extent of it become known. The commissions would
shed light on the activities of Captain John Ball, who had claimed to the president
of the American Armament Corporation that he was the sole “selling channel” for
small arms belonging to the British War Office, boasting that he controlled stocks
“of such magnitude that the sale of a big block of them could alter the balance of
power of the smaller states.” Those stocks amounted to “a million rifles and a
hundred and twenty million rounds of ammunition for rifles and machine guns,
and many tens of thousands of machine guns of various rifles.” Ball had helped to
sell British surplus arms even after the government had banned the disposal of its
stocks, directly or through a contractor, in April 1924.⁶⁶ To the horror of members
of the Royal Commission, the War Office defended their man and Ball’s selling of
surplus weapons.⁶⁷
After 1922, the TMC soon shifted its focus from eliminating surplus stocks to
countering arms trafficking as the League’s publications made clear the discrep-
ancy between net exports and net imports. Despite including French military
representatives on the TMC, French policymakers continued to view the TMC as
a threat, and acted to limit the commission’s authority. First, the French stripped
the TMC of a permanent secretariat, permanent committees, and a mandated
schedule of meetings. Next, the French government appointed René Viviani, an
elder French statesman, as the president of the commission. Viviani steered the
committee’s work toward non-controversial issues that suited French interests.⁶⁸
Three of the TMC’s first four meetings were held in Paris, where the commission
elaborated on the difficulties of achieving disarmament, especially without the
active participation of the United States, Germany, or Russia. The commission
also undertook a statistical survey of national armaments, expanded the League’s
“right of investigation” within the ex-enemy powers, and emphasized the

on Expenditures in the War Department, House of Representatives Sixty-Sixth Congress, Third Session
on War Expenditures, Vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 4283.

⁶⁶ Less than a year later, that decision was reversed. In 1929 the ban was reinstated; it was canceled
the following year.
⁶⁷ Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth
Century,” 828–32.
⁶⁸ Peter Jackson, “France and the Problems of Security,” 254–5; Andrew Webster, “ ‘Absolutely
Irresponsible Amateurs’: The Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments, 1921–24,” Australian
Journal of Politics and History 54, no. 3 (2008): 376–7.
       , – 29

importance of establishing international controls over the global arms trade and
the private manufacture of armaments in word but not practice.⁶⁹
London’s approach to the TMC was conflicted. Delegate Hubert Llewellyn
Smith, the liberal social reformer and former permanent secretary of the ministry
of munitions, supported the TMC and advocated controlling the private manu-
facture of arms. The Foreign Office, in contrast, viewed the emphasis on regulat-
ing the private manufacture of arms as misplaced and the TMC’s lack of national
accountability as dangerous and amateurish. The Admiralty and Foreign Office
worked to ensure that any changes to the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919 would
not enable the flow of small arms to “natives and specified disturbed districts,” and
that the general question of private manufacture of arms would be dealt with as a
distinct subject.⁷⁰ With the Great Powers divided about the utility of the Arms
Traffic Convention of 1919, arms control efforts languished until the appointment
to the TMC of Robert Cecil, the distinguished lawyer and politician from London
who had been a key architect of the League of Nations during his time in the
foreign ministry and cabinet. Cecil added vigor to the commission’s work at the
same time that the French and Americans changed their stance against an arms
trafficking treaty.
In order to garner the support of the Americans, the TMC dispatched Italian
and British policymakers to rekindle U.S. interest in the Arms Traffic Convention
in advance of a ministerial gathering in Washington in the fall of 1921. This initial
approach failed. Signor Schanzer of the Italian delegation reported that American
feeling remained hostile; the British delegation never even raised the issue.⁷¹ As
Secretary-General Eric Drummond put it to Professor Bernardo Attolico, chief of
the Disarmaments Section, shortly thereafter, American officials remained “most
suspicious of any European move which they think may be intended to bring them
into European political entanglements.”⁷²
However, from a longer perspective, the Washington Naval Conference, which
lasted from November 1921 until February 1922, commenced a reorientation of
U.S. positions on international disarmament efforts. Naval disarmament found

⁶⁹ Webster, “ ‘Absolutely Irresponsible Amateurs,’ ” 376–7; Webster, “The Transnational Dream,”

503–4.
⁷⁰ Alex Flint, principal assistant secretary to the Admiralty, Admiralty to War Office and Air Ministry,
January 1, 1923, TNA, CAB 16/59; Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small
Arms in the Twentieth Century,” 824–5; Webster, “ ‘Absolutely Irresponsible Amateurs,’ ” 374.
⁷¹ League of Nations, Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments, February 23,
1922, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA; Eric Drummond, secretary general to prime minister of the
British Government, March 6, 1922, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA; Carlo Schanzer to Bernardo
Attolico, League of Nations, November 29, 1921, R217, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.; H. Llewellyn
Smith, British Empire delegation to Bernardo Attolico, League of Nations, November 26, 1921, R217,
1919–27, Classification 8, LNA; secretary to the Cabinet for prime minister to secretary-general, March
30, 1922, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁷² Eric Drummond to Bernardo Attolico, League of Nations, February 10, 1922, R217, 1919–27,
Classification 8, LNA.
30    

broad support among various constituents in the United States. Church groups,
women’s organizations, and the postwar peace movement all held rallies to reduce
armaments. Republican William Borah of Idaho, who had led opposition to
Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, sponsored a congressional resolution
calling for Washington to host an international naval disarmament conference.
Motivated by domestic considerations and in response to risings tensions in
East Asia, President Warren Harding and Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes
convened the Washington Conference in late 1921. Hughes’s charismatic leader-
ship led to the first major international agreement on arms reduction. The
conference produced a number of treaties among the world’s largest naval powers,
including the Five-Power Treaty, which established specific warship tonnage
allowances for the United States, United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Japan. The
signatories also agreed to cease production of capital ships and to scrap older
ships, thereby reducing the size of their navies. The conference had the added
benefit for the Americans of effectively ending the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
Although deliberately conducted outside the auspices of the League of Nations,
the Washington Conference marked a turning point for the Republican adminis-
trations of the 1920s. Afterward, U.S. officials began opening the mail from
Geneva and sending observers to League conferences that were considered to be
nonpolitical.⁷³ Eventually, the United States agreed to attend a follow-on arms
trafficking conference in Geneva in 1925.
Despite their lackluster support of the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919,
particularly in the eyes of the British, the French also found reasons to support
a new arms trafficking convention. During the early 1920s, French security policy
evolved toward a new multilateralist strategy of security based on mutual assist-
ance pacts and compulsory arbitration rather than a traditional balance of power.
After 1922, French policymakers shifted to using disarmament negotiations as a
means of obtaining security guarantees and acquiring a British commitment to
underwrite the European status quo.⁷⁴ The May 1924 electoral victory of the
Cartel des Gauches, a coalition consisting of the Radical Party, the Socialist
Party, the Republican Socialists, and a few ex-communists, completed the reorien-
tation of French security policy under the government of Édouard Herriot.
Herriot advanced a foreign and security policy based on “arbitration, security,
disarmament.” French advocacy for a new arms control treaty reflected the
government’s emphasis on disarmament negotiations to enlist Anglo-American
cooperation and strengthen the coercive powers of the League of Nations.⁷⁵

⁷³ George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 450–6; Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 217, 219–20.
⁷⁴ Jackson, “France and the Problems of Security,” 248–9, 265, 276; Peter Jackson, Beyond the
Balance of Power: France and the Politics of National Security in the Era of the First World War (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 424.
⁷⁵ Jackson, Beyond the Balance of Power, 1, 7, 418–27.
       , – 31

In addition, a number of anticolonial uprisings rendered French politicians

more willing to support an arms trafficking treaty. In contrast to the situation in
Britain, France’s overseas empire had not been popular at home before the First
World War. The imperial contribution to the war effort, however, had changed
public opinion by demonstrating the importance of the empire for manpower
reserves. Challenges to France’s bloated empire erupted in the mid-1920s. In
1925–26, the Riff War in northern Morocco and a major rebellion in French
Syria put colonial counter-insurgency on the front pages of the Paris press for the
first time since the end of the Great War.⁷⁶ The Syrian insurgency, which began in
1925, prompted French mandate officials to “systematically” disarm the popula-
tion and strictly control the arms trade, although some smuggling still occurred on
the frontiers.⁷⁷ The brutal response of the French in Syria led to allegations that
the French government had contravened the terms of the Syrian mandate by
“arming one section of the nation (the Circassians) and disarming the others.”⁷⁸
International outcry over the bombing of Damascus and the petitions of Syrian
nationalists prompted the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) at the
League of Nations to address the issue in 1925–26. Political maneuvering by
French politicians, and the support given to them by the British, led the PMC to
issue a report that sided with the mandatory power and called on the warring
factions to put down their arms.⁷⁹ As noted by the historian Susan Pedersen, the
PMC’s decision regarding Syria cost the commission what little credibility it had
among Arab nationalists and demonstrated that the Great Powers could manipu-
late the organs of the League to support their prerogatives in the mandated
territories.⁸⁰
In North Africa, the French became involved in a costly war against a former
ally, Abd el-Krim of the Riff. Previously, the French had armed Abd el-Krim while
he was fighting the Spaniards. Quelling the rebellion took a combined Franco-
Spanish assault that required the French government to send 100,000 troops to
Morocco under the command of Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun.⁸¹ Renewing
international efforts to curb the weapons trade in Africa and Asia appealed to
French officials confronting the Syrian revolt, Riff War, and subsequent rural

⁷⁶ Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 1–8; Kanya-Forstner, “The War, Imperialism,
and Decolonization,” in Winter, Parker, and Habeck, eds., The Great War and the Twentieth Century,
248.
⁷⁷ Permanent Mandates Commission, Minutes of the Twenty-Ninth Session (Sessions XXI–XXX),
June 4, 1936, C.170.M.117.1937.VI, LNA.
⁷⁸ Austen Chamberlain to Major Leslie Hore-Belisha, August 16, 1926, SDN 568, MAE.
⁷⁹ Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2015), 142–68.
⁸⁰ Ibid., 168.
⁸¹ Kanya-Forstner, “The War, Imperialism, and Decolonization,” in Winter, Parker, and Habeck,
eds., The Great War and the Twentieth Century, 248–52.
32    

insurrections in Indochina. Such a treaty also offered another means of securing

British cooperation in France’s quest for a security guarantee against Germany.
Four years after its signing, adherence to the Arms Traffic Convention of 1919
varied among the former Allies. Yet, another international conference to control
global arms trade was on the horizon. Owing much to the perseverance of League
officials, along with changes in American and French foreign and security policies,
the Great Powers would gather again in 1925 to try again to outlaw gun-running.
That endeavor is the subject of Chapter 4.

Inter-Allied Military Commissions of Control

The second component of the international arms control regime enacted in Paris
in 1919 focused specifically on the restriction of weapons in Europe. “The Inter-
Allied Commissions of Control [IMCCs] will be specially charged with the duty of
seeing to the complete execution of the delivery, destruction, demolition and
rendering things useless to be carried out at the expense of the German
Government in accordance with the present Treaty,” stated Part V, Section IV,
Article 204 of the Versailles Treaty.⁸² As per Article 205, commissioners “shall be
entitled as often as they think desirable to proceed to any point whatever in
German territory, or to send sub-commissions, or to authorize one or more of
their members to go, to any such point.”⁸³
Each Allied government sent one representative to each of the IMCCs, which
were set up for each of the defeated Central Powers and comprised of politically
neutral, unarmed weapons inspectors.⁸⁴ Although it also included investigators
from Belgium, Italy, and Japan, the Commission of Control in Germany was
heavily influenced by representatives from Britain and France. Here and else-
where, the United States was conspicuous in its absence. John H. Morgan, a British
lawyer on the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control in Germany, later
recalled: “For the Americans we waited and continued to wait.”⁸⁵
The Commission of Control in Germany generated considerable attention,
given the centrality of the “German problem” at the Paris Peace Conference and
in all discussions of European security thereafter.⁸⁶ In August 1919, nine months

⁸² For the drafting of this article, see Minutes of the Meeting of the Supreme War Council Held at
the Quai d’Orsay, Paris, Monday, March 17, 1919, at 3 p.m., in FRUS, 1919, The Paris Peace
Conference, 1919, vol. XIII, 356.
⁸³ Ibid., 401. The ex-enemy powers were subject to the general prohibition of the export of arms,
munitions, and war material and to accept and observe any convention made by the Allied Powers
relating to the trade in arms. See League of Nations, Report of Sub-Committee A of Commission N 6
(Armaments) 1920, Report on the Arms Traffic Convention, R189, Classification 8, Document No.
9531, Dossier 9531, LNA, Geneva, Switzerland.
⁸⁴ J.H. Morgan, Assize of Arms: The Disarmament of Germany and Her Rearmament, 1919–1939
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 29, 45.
⁸⁵ Ibid. ⁸⁶ Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 19–20.
       , – 33

after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the newly-elected Social Democratic
government led by Friedrich Ebert promulgated a new constitution and declared
the formation of the Weimar Republic. The post-Wilhelmine government faced
ongoing pressures from left and right. German communists launched two upris-
ings and clashed with veteran Reichswehr (German military) troops including
right-wing paramilitary units known as the Freikorps. During the Spartacist revolt
the preceding January, thirty thousand Freikorps members, heavily armed with
automatic weapons and artillery pieces, stormed the streets of Berlin and killed
over a thousand communist rebels over the course of four days. The Weimar
government failed to disarm the Freikorps, most of whom were battle-hardened
veterans; in March 1920, right-wing nationalists attempted a putsch to overthrow
the Weimar regime. It took a massive nationwide strike by Germany’s labor
unions to end the insurrection and restore power to Ebert and the Social
Democrats.⁸⁷
The violence and upheavals of the early postwar years notwithstanding,
Germany emerged from the First World War in a relatively strong position.
Even with the annulment of the lopsided March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,
upon the defeat of the Central Powers that November, Germany benefited from
the Bolsheviks’ destruction of tsarist institutions. And the disintegration of
Austria-Hungary left Germany surrounded by small, weak neighbor-states.⁸⁸
“Germany was less well placed than its enemies, but less far down the road to
collapse than its allies,” writes historian David Stevenson. “It did not, as of autumn
1918, face hyper-inflation, mass starvation, or the collapse of its fighting forces for
lack of weapons.”⁸⁹
In contrast to those of France, Germany’s industrial base and productive
capabilities remained intact after the war—nearly all of the devastation of the
Great War had occurred outside the country that had surrendered. “After the
stabilization of the front,” writes historian Hew Strachan, “France’s industrial
heartland lay either under German control or within the battle zone”; in the
year prior to outbreak of war, “the north-east of France was responsible for 74
per cent of the nation’s coal production, 76.5 per cent of its coke, 81 per cent of its
pig iron, 63 per cent of its manufactured iron and steel, 25 per cent of its
engineering products, 81 per cent of its wool, and 44.5 per cent of its chemicals.”⁹⁰
Germany also remained heavily armed when it surrendered. Members of the
Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control in Germany found themselves
enforcing disarmament clauses in a country with a military force of over 400,000

⁸⁷ Howard M. Sachar, The Assassination of Europe, 1918–1942: A Political History (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2015), 1–30.
⁸⁸ Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 67–8.
⁸⁹ David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011), 419.
⁹⁰ Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 1049.
34    

soldiers, tens of thousands of artillery pieces and trench mortars, approximately

100,000 machine-guns, countless rounds of ammunition, and a range of types of
other military equipment.⁹¹ The actual number of weapons of war were higher
than any estimates from the time. Not until the collapse of East Germany in 1990
were historians from the Reichsarchiv able to comb the files of the General Staff
and the Prussian War Office, where they would find that the August 1916
Hindenburg Programme to ratchet up arms production and bolster sagging
morale understated the vast output of German armaments throughout the war.
“Whereas the Hindenburg Programme demanded a ‘tripling’ to 7000 [machine-
guns] per month, existing War Office orders already called for (and attained)
7200 units per month by July 1917; in autumn 1917 that figure rose to 14,400,”
writes historian Holger Herwig.⁹² By the winter of 1917–18, the new artillery,
trench mortars, and machine-guns rusted on loading docks, as the Army lacked
the manpower to use them.
As described in previous sections, competing priorities among policymakers in
London and Paris foiled a common and effective approach to reducing the
stockpiles amassed during the Great War. Curtailment of the arms trade that
threatened its vast overseas colonies was more important to British policymakers
than enforcement of German disarmament, which was the paramount objective of
their French counterparts. London officials tended to accept the reports of the
British ambassador in Berlin, Lord d’Abernon, who stressed that Germany had
largely been disarmed and that French demands on Germany were tedious and
overbearing.⁹³ The British response was disengagement from the IMCC. When it
came to the European continent, British officials decided, enforcement of the
disarmament clauses of the Versailles Treaty should be transferred to the League
of Nations. French policymakers regarded the continuance of the IMCC as
“necessary for their national security,” as historian John Fox put it, “while
Britain increasingly felt that its maintenance was a hindrance to European
security.”⁹⁴
As with the Arms Traffic Convention, it fell to the League of Nations to attempt
to enforce an agreement after the Great Powers had failed to do so. Anticipating
the dissolution of the IMCC in Germany and the other ex-enemy states, the

⁹¹ Richard Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I: The Diplomacy of International Arms
Inspection 1920–1931 (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–2.
⁹² Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: German and Austria-Hungary 1914–1918, 2nd ed.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 260.
⁹³ Hans W. Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1954), 15–16. The Foreign Office resented the appointment of Lord d’Abernon by Lloyd George
as the British ambassador in Germany. D’Abernon had been selected because of his financial expertise,
a knowledge Lloyd George believed was necessary to mediate the complex problems of reparations
payment and reconstruction. See Michael Hughes, British Foreign Secretaries in an Uncertain World,
1919–1939 (London: Routledge, 2006), 18–19.
⁹⁴ John Fox, “Britain and the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control, 1925–26,” Journal of
Contemporary History 4 (1969): 143–5.
       , – 35

League’s Permanent Advisory Commission for Military, Naval and Air Questions
considered how it might conduct investigations into possible rearmament.
Consensus was elusive. The French delegation to the PAC argued for permanent
committees that could undertake “surprise investigations.”⁹⁵ In opposition to
continual supervision, the Swedish delegation asserted that it “would be incom-
patible with the spirit of the covenant of the League of Nations to doubt the pacific
intentions of any country.” Swiss representatives added that the League should
only consider accusations made by government officials, as private sources might
be motivated by political or commercial ends.⁹⁶ In 1924, however, the Council of
the League of Nations hammered out procedures and protocols for subsequent
investigations once the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control left Germany,
Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary. It guaranteed that members of the commissions
of investigation would retain diplomatic privileges and immunities and any
additional support to execute their mission.⁹⁷
The transition from commissions of control to a League investigation system
was broadly popular. By the mid-1920s, public sentiment outside of France had
turned against the postwar settlements, thanks in no small part to John Maynard
Keynes’s bestselling The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which eviscerated
Allied statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference.⁹⁸ Representatives of the van-
quished (and neutral) countries in the First World War believed that the com-
missions of control were imposed by the victors and represented only the interests
of the Great Powers.⁹⁹ Britain was preoccupied with its empire and ready to revert
to its traditional policy of “no permanent military commitments on the
Continent,” writes historian Stephen Schuker.¹⁰⁰ To Lord Parmoor, who in 1924
served also as both Lord President of the Council and the British representative to
the Council of the League of Nations, the commissions of investigation better
reflected a “League atmosphere” of trust and conciliation.¹⁰¹ Meanwhile, more
skeptical French civil and military authorities opposed turning over control to a
League committee that lacked the IMCC’s onsite inspection capabilities and no
real enforcement mechanism.¹⁰²

⁹⁵ Memorandum by the French Delegation, Permanent Advisory Commission for Military, Naval
and Air Questions, C.P.C. 79.1924, R214, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁹⁶ Second Memorandum by the Swedish Delegation, Permanent Advisory Commission for
Military Naval and Air Questions, September 3, 1924, C.P.C. 77.1924, R214, 1919–27, Classification
8, LNA.
⁹⁷ Report by Viscount Ishii adopted by the Council on December 11, 1924, R215, 1919–27,
Classification 8, LNA.
⁹⁸ John Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1919).
⁹⁹ Hungarian Minister in Rome to the President of the Council, December 8, 1924, C.17.M.12.
1925. V., R215, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
¹⁰⁰ Stephen Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and
the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1976), 255.
¹⁰¹ Memorandum by Lord Parmoor, November 1924, R215, Dossier 15365, Document 39353,
Classification 8, LNA.
¹⁰² Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 247.
36    

Germany stood the most to gain from Allied discord. The talented Gustav
Stresemann, who served as the Weimar Republic’s foreign minister from 1923 to
1929, successfully negotiated the end of the control commissions, tying the
removal of the IMCC to five agreements that seven European powers signed in
Locarno, Switzerland, on October 18, 1925.¹⁰³ In his campaign for the withdrawal
of the Inter-Allied Control Commission, Stresemann made the case that the
broader Locarno package demonstrated Germany’s commitment to a peaceful
Europe.¹⁰⁴ Stresemann also knew that League oversight would be easier to breach
than that of the IMCC, and that German officials would have greater control over
rearmament investigations after Germany joined the League of Nations. While it
had been briefly suspended during the French and Belgian military occupation of
the Ruhr, which began in January 1923 and lasted until August 1925, the IMCC
had clashed repeatedly with German military officials over Germany’s failure to
surrender surplus arms.¹⁰⁵
The IMCC’s inspections and reports also indicated that Germany was in default
of its treaty obligations. These violations just covered rearmament at home,
although it later emerged that Germany had concluded secret agreements with
the Russians to receive arms and training. IMCC inspections revealed that
Germany retained the capacity to produce war material, and that the German
army would be able to quickly mobilize reserves drawing on auxiliary police and
paramilitary organizations.¹⁰⁶ Additionally, the German High Command con-
tinued to use forbidden arms and maintain fortresses on the eastern front.¹⁰⁷
The French press published sections of the commission’s reports showing that the
German government—not just the military—supported rearmament and was
obstructing the inspections.¹⁰⁸ In 1924, IMCC member John H. Morgan published
“The Disarmament of Germany and After,” in the Quarterly Review, exposing the
pressure within the British government to ignore Germany’s evasion of the treaty
sanctions and outlining how the German military and government officials had
stymied the work of the commission.¹⁰⁹
As British intelligence agencies and imperial institutions would report back to
British policymakers, it was impossible to disaggregate the problem of German
stockpiles from that of the transport of weapons throughout its empire. The
Government of India stressed that arms shipments went from the port of
Hamburg to the Far East—usually Hong Kong—before making their way to

¹⁰³ Jon Jacobson, Locarno Diplomacy: Germany and the West, 1925–1929 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1972), 3.
¹⁰⁴ Gatzke, Stresemann and the Rearmament of Germany, 15, 46. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 15.
¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 24–5, 79. In return, the Soviets received financial and technical aid. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 53.
¹⁰⁸ Edward Bennett, German Rearmament and the West, 1932–1933 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979), 79.
¹⁰⁹ Bennett, German Rearmament and the West, 89.
       , – 37

“Indian extremists” waging a terrorist campaign against British rule.¹¹⁰ The

Government of India’s Home Department reported that most of the arms found
in the possession of Bengal terrorists were of German make. According to the
Intelligence Bureau of India, Hamburg provided the largest market for the trade of
illegal arms and at least some of its police were “credibly reported” to be taking
bribes from arms traffickers.¹¹¹
In October 1924, Lt. Col. Norris of the Military Inter-Allied Commission of
Control in Germany alerted the War Office that “there were Indians in Berlin who
were buying large quantities of war material from German armament firms for
transport to India.”¹¹² The War Office relayed this information to the India
Office.¹¹³ A month later the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) concluded
that 90 percent of traffic in arms was conducted from Hamburg, and that no
effective assistance could be hoped for because the custom officials were in the pay
of the shipping companies.¹¹⁴ British and Indian intelligence reports suggested
that Hamburg continued to be a hub for the illegal arms trade. As historian
Richard Shuster notes, German civilian and military officials illegally exported
arms and other forms of artillery to neutral countries, particularly the
Netherlands.¹¹⁵ “Germany often exported arms, machines, gauges, and other
types of war material to prevent its destruction,” Shuster goes on to say, summing
up Morgan’s unpublished second volume of Assize of Arms.¹¹⁶

Arms and Terror in Central and Eastern Europe

As in Germany, the control commissions in Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria

reported widespread violations of the military clauses of the peace treaties. As
part of their revisionist campaigns against the territorial settlements of 1919, the
defeated nations provided safe haven for terrorist organizations. The Internal
Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) operated in Bulgaria, while
the Ustaša, a fascist Croatian organization, set up terrorist training camps in
Hungary and Italy. Austria served as a weapons depot and entrepôt for both the
Little Entente—comprised of Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia—and the

¹¹⁰ Major J.A. Wallinger to David Petrie, March 4, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, India Office Records, BL,
London, United Kingdom.
¹¹¹ Home Department, Government of India to His Majesty’s under-secretary of state for India,
India Office, April 16, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
¹¹² Memorandum on the Situation in Bengal and the Arms Traffic, Inter-Departmental Committee
on Eastern Unrest, October 29, 1924, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
¹¹³ War Office to J.W. Hose, India Office, Extract from report received by M.I.A.C.C., Lieutenant-
Colonel Norris October 6, 1924, L/PJ/12/78, BL.
¹¹⁴ Situation in Bengal and the Arms Traffic, Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest,
November 7, 1924, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
¹¹⁵ Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I, 56–61. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 56.
38    

revanchist states.¹¹⁷ Despite the presence of international weapons inspectors, the

defeated nations of the First World War sponsored and harbored European
terrorist groups during the interwar years.
Political violence was rampant throughout central and eastern Europe follow-
ing the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Romanov empires. Some 16
million defeated soldiers returned home from the Great War to devastated lands
whose inhabitants were grappling with the convulsions of the two Russian revolu-
tions of 1917, German occupation, territorial amputation following 1919, and
competing nationalist projects. The end of autocratic rule brought to a boil ethnic
tension between majority and minority populations that had simmered for cen-
turies. Between the armistice of 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, over
4 million people died in the region as a result of civil wars and inter-ethnic
struggles.¹¹⁸ The cycle of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence
ended what had been a common association between terrorism and leftist groups.
Unlike in the era of anarchist terror, right-wing paramilitary units employed
terrorist tactics such as assassinations to forward their nationalist political agenda.
The League of Nations was actively involved in the domestic affairs of the new
eastern and central European states; and, in its efforts to uphold the Arms Traffic
Convention and disarm Germany, the League was attempting to curtail the
international transfer of guns. Yet the organization lacked both the will and
sufficient instruments to intervene in cases of domestic or international terrorism
in the 1920s.¹¹⁹
In Bulgaria, this was particularly detrimental. Just as with Germany, Austria,
and Hungary, Bulgaria was beset by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary
violence. In the aftermath of the Great War, the Bulgarian Agrarian National
Union (BANU), which was the first mass peasant party in the Balkans, formed a
government under Aleksandar Stamboliiski, who, after consolidating power, went
after the party’s rivals: socialists, nationalists, businessmen, intellectuals, army
officers, and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO).
Formed in 1893 as a revolutionary committee opposed to Ottoman rule and
favoring the creation of an autonomous Macedonian nation, the IMRO ratcheted
up its campaign in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference, where in the Treaty of

¹¹⁷ Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (New York:
Penguin Books, 1999), 398–401, 435, 418, 431–5.
¹¹⁸ Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 11; Jochen Böhler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer,
eds., Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag München,
2014), 1–6; Robert Gerwarth, “Fighting the Red Beast: Counter-Revolutionary Violence in the Defeated
States of Central Europe,” in Legacies of Violence: Eastern Europe’s First World War, eds. Jochen
Böhler, Wlodzimierz Borodziej, and Joachim von Puttkamer (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag München,
2014), 210.
¹¹⁹ Carole Fink, “The League of Nations and the Minorities Question,” World Affairs 4 (1995):
197–205; Patricia Calvin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations,
1920–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33.
       , – 39

Neuilly—despite the petition for an independent Macedonian state—the Allied

Powers distributed most of the Macedonian heartland to Yugoslavia, with the
exception of Petrich in southwest Bulgaria.¹²⁰
In June 1923, the IMRO and Military League, which was composed of former
military officers, launched a successful coup against Stamboliiski, who returned to
his native village of Slavovitsa to commence plotting his return. Upon capturing
him and citing his complicity in the Treaty of Neuilly, the IMRO executed
Stamboliiski and sent his head back to Sofia in a tin. The new military government
in Sofia unleashed a “white terror” against the peasantry whom they accused of
supporting the now-dismembered former leader, and communists, who purport-
edly at Moscow’s urging had launched a failed insurrection. General Ivan Vŭlkov,
the fascist strongman behind the regime, effectively mobilized the IMRO against
the Bulgarian people. The regime killed between 1,500 and 15,000 people—
although diplomats at the time put the figure at 10,000.¹²¹
On April 16, 1925, Bulgarian communists reciprocated by carrying out one of
the “most spectacular, bloody and self-defeating acts of terrorism in the history of
the twentieth century” by detonating explosives in the Sofia Sveta Nedelya
Cathedral, which is seen in Figure 1.2, killing 160 people and wounding hundreds
(though neither anyone in the government nor their intended primary target, Tsar
Boris III, who was not actually in the cathedral at that moment).¹²² From here, the
“white terror” escalated, as the military government bombed cities, slaughtered
civilians, and employed members of the IMRO as political assassins.¹²³
The Bulgarian government also exported terror, supporting attacks against its
neighbors as part of its revanchist campaign against the postwar peace treaties.
Bulgarian and Macedonian “comitadji” (irregular soldiers, resistance fighters)
carried out raids in Greece, Romania, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes. In its response to the formal grievance submitted by these three coun-
tries, the League of Nations declined to pronounce an opinion on the merits of the
dispute and advised all parties to come to an agreement by negotiation.¹²⁴

Conclusion

The rise of state-sponsored terror in Central and Eastern Europe did not yet
threaten to destabilize the European continent. By the end of 1924, however, the
basic security strategies of the British, Americans, and French had diverged. France
needed to protect her eastern border; when Britain and America backed away from
political guarantees, she turned to the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control as a

¹²⁰ Glenny, The Balkans, 396–402. ¹²¹ Ibid., 400. ¹²² Ibid. ¹²³ Ibid., 401.
¹²⁴ British Legation, Sofia to Lord Curzon, October 17, 1922, TNA, FO 286/818.
40    

Figure 1.2 Sveta Nedelya Cathedral after the April 1925 bombing (INTERFOTO/
Alamy Stock Photo)

means of monitoring and disarming Germany. While the United States withdrew
from the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control, the State Department oscillated in
its commitment to an international arms trafficking treaty. The longstanding
principle of “no entangling alliances” reemerged in American diplomacy, yet that
did not stop the State Department—and U.S. business community—from engaging
with European partners and the League to address the pressing problems of the
day, which included the global arms trade. While the State Department waivered
in its commitment to the control of small arms, American arms manufacturers
continued to supply and export weapons. The arming and disarming of groups
accorded with national priorities rather than international consensus. States
such as Soviet Russia and Germany, which entered the League that year, sold
their stockpiles to the highest bidder, especially when doing so aided groups that
challenged British and French rule.
As Britain and France failed to harmonize their policies and as the United State
charted its own course during the years 1919–24, the League of Nations emerged
as the principal organization concerned with stopping international arms traffick-
ing and keeping surplus munition stocks from being “distributed to persons and
       , – 41

states who are not fitted to possess them.”¹²⁵ The qualifier “fitted to possess them”
was deliberate. The Allied and Associated Powers had intended the Arms Traffic
Convention of 1919 to keep “arms of precision” out of the “hands of individuals in
the less civilized areas of the world,” according to a 1920 sub-committee report;
rigid control over the traffic in arms was needed to safeguard “the peace, order and
security of those areas” and make them easier to govern. The Armaments
Section believed that experience in all “civilized countries during the last few
decades has shown the use which persons of evil disposition, such as anarchists
and criminals can make of high explosives, automatic pistols, and similar com-
modities; commodities of which vast quantities must be manufactured and used in
time of war.”¹²⁶ Four years later, after the demise of the Inter-Allied Military
Commissions of Control, the League would assume investigatory powers within
the defeated nations of Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary.¹²⁷
The League inherited a dual mission at which the Great Powers had failed, in
other words; it was one thoroughly enmeshed with the preservation of the British
Empire, the enhancement of French security, and the preservation of some shared
conception of a hierarchical global order. Curtailment of the arms trade and
enforcement of disarmament required more tools than the League could provide.
Still, the League could play an important role in the standardization of informa-
tion about arms sales and distribution. Open source intelligence was meant to be
shared to shame violators while also enhancing the level of debate whether in
Washington, London, or Paris. The League could also play an important facili-
tating role, as it would do in subsequent treaties chronicled in Chapters 4 and 6.
The inter-allied disagreements that thwarted this postwar international arms
regime were not the fault of any one individual. All participants in the high-level
negotiations in Paris, Geneva, and elsewhere aspired to ensure that the millions of
guns manufactured during the Great War would not be employed in acts of terror
such as the one that had precipitated a catastrophe in June 1914. The threats to
established orders were real. The rise of state-sponsored terrorism forced policy-
makers to make difficult choices and pursue broader objectives that appeared
high-minded at the time and are less noble in hindsight. In crafting the Arms
Traffic Convention of 1919 and attempting to enforce it, Britain prioritized
disarming the colonial world to safeguard her empire—above all, British India—
which is the subject of the next chapter.

¹²⁵ Permanent Advisory Commission for Military, Naval and Air Questions, June 12, 1922, R217,
1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
¹²⁶ League of Nations, Report of Sub-Committee A of Commission N 6 (Armaments) 1920, Sub-
Committee A of Committee N 6, Report on the Arms Traffic Convention, R 189, 1919–27,
Classification 8, LNA.
¹²⁷ Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I, 35; Previously, the IMCC had reported to the
Conference of Ambassadors and the Allied Military Committee of Versailles.
 2
Intelligence, Empire, and Terror
The British Experience

The British Empire reached its largest territorial size in the years immediately
following the armistice of November 1918. It acquired a substantial share of the
former German Empire, both in Africa and the Pacific, and expanded into the
Middle East, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. In May 1920,
less than two years after Allied victory in the Great War, Field Marshal Sir Henry
Wilson, the Ulsterman Chief of the Imperial General Staff charged with the
strategic defense of the British Empire, identified a long list of threats, including:
the prospect of civil war in Ireland; Soviet penetration of Persia; and food riots and
nationalist ferment in India.¹ “In no single theatre are we strong enough,” Wilson
cautioned.
Defending and administering a bloated empire was a top priority for the British
government and the General Staff once the guns in Western Europe went silent.²
Neither task was ever easy; nor, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War,
would the pressures relent. Massive protests erupted in Egypt in March 1919
following the deportation of nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul, who would even-
tually return, in advance of Britain’s recognition of Egypt’s independence, in 1922,
and become prime minister of that country in 1924. On April 13, 1919, in what
became known as the Amritsar Massacre, British Indian Army troops opened fire
on a crowd of Indians gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh garden, killing at least 379,
injuring at least 1,000 more, and sparking civil unrest throughout the Punjab
region.³ On May 6, British and Indian troops were fighting a Third Anglo-Afghan
War that would end in British recognition of an independent Afghanistan later
that summer. Also in May, Mustafa Kemal—upon whom the Turkish Parliament
would later bestow the surname Atatürk (“Father of the Turks”)—rallied his
countrymen to repel the Greek landing at Smyrna on the Anatolian peninsula;
and, after August 1920, to defy the Treaty of Sèvres, which partitioned the

¹ Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads from Empire (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 11.
² Keith Jeffrey, “Sir Henry Wilson and the Defense of the British Empire, 1918–22,” The Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 5, no. 3 (May 1977): 270.
³ The Hunter Commission’s figure of 379 killed was disputed by the Indian National Congress,
which estimated over 1,000 killed. On the legacy of Amritsar, see Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An
Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
 , ,  :    43

Ottoman Empire and codified the British Mandate of Iraq and British Mandate
for Palestine.
These challenges to the empire followed V.I. Lenin’s March 1919 declaration
that Great Britain was the greatest enemy of the Bolsheviks and his pledge of
Soviet support for anticolonial revolutions around the world. His purported anti-
imperialism notwithstanding, Lenin proved to be as interested as his tsarist
predecessors in the “Great Game” in Central Asia, on the approach to India. In
February and March 1921, Soviet Russia signed treaties of friendship with Persia,
Afghanistan, and Kemal’s government in Turkey, returning the specter of Russia
to the northwest frontier of British India. Meanwhile, Britain’s fortunes further
declined. In December 1921, Britain conceded the Irish Free State. In March 1922,
it would abrogate the Egyptian protectorate while retaining control over the
defense of Egypt and the administration of Sudan.⁴ By 1923, nationalist uprisings
endangered Britain’s new empire in the Middle East, where it would rely on air
power and indirect rule through the Hashemite sons of King Hussein—Faisal in
Iraq and Abdullah in Transjordan.
While Britain retrenched and considered more indirect forms of rule through-
out its empire, policymakers in London and Delhi remained committed to
protecting British India, the so-called Jewel in the Crown. During the first half
of the twentieth century, three campaigns of revolutionary terrorism challenged
British rule in India. In comparison to the nationalist movement led by the Indian
National Congress and its leaders Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the
armed struggle of the interwar years is not well known. Even less familiar is the
British anti-terrorism strategy.
British policymakers implemented a multifaceted approach to safeguard the
external and internal security of British India based on the collection, crafting, and
application of intelligence. Intelligence became vital to anti-terrorism initiatives in
India because the capabilities of the intelligence services had improved so much
during the First World War, and because colonial administrators hoped to exploit
information to define threats to shape policy outcomes in London. Indeed,
intelligence from Delhi shaped imperial policies in the form of arms controls,
passport regulations, and domestic anti-terrorism legislation based on the war-
time powers of the 1915 Defense of India Act. Decisions made in Delhi, however,
remained subject to London’s approval.

⁴ Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds., Empires at War, 1911–1923 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 4, 12; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 29–35; A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “The War,
Imperialism, and Decolonization,” in Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary Habeck, eds., The Great
War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 250–2; Richard Popplewell,
Intelligence and Imperial Defense: British Intelligence and the Defense of the Indian Empire 1904–1924
(London: Frank Cass, 1995), 306–7; Rob Johnson, The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They Fight
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 175–204.
44    

Government divisions appeared immediately at the end of the First World War.
The policies toward Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, on the part of Prime
Minister David Lloyd George and his foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, had pro-
duced a sharp rebuke from Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, who
claimed that they antagonized Indian Muslims and fostered the pan-Islamic
movement in India’s neighbor states. Just as the dominion governments—those
of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa—
renegotiated their relationships with London after the war, the Government of
India should aspire to greater foreign policy autonomy, according to Montagu. He
had made some progress on that front by gaining separate representation for India
within the British Empire delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and separate
membership in the League of Nations. Indeed, directly below the signatures of
representatives for the dominions (minus Newfoundland) on the September 1919
Arms Traffic Convention is that of Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, the 1st Baron Sinha,
on behalf of India. In March 1922, however, Lord Curzon decisively reasserted
London’s control over India’s foreign policy and forced the independent-minded
Montagu to retire, an action that demonstrated India’s subordinate place in what
historian John Darwin calls the “British World-System.”⁵
London officials also challenged domestic anti-terrorism legislation enacted in
India on the grounds that it stifled political protest and fueled the nationalist
movement. Government of India officials found themselves repealing the legisla-
tion to appease London and appeal to Indian public opinion. Furthermore, the
Foreign Office and Cabinet refused to follow Delhi’s policy recommendations for
arms controls and proposed overhaul of the empire-wide passport system. During
the interwar years, London and Delhi increasingly disagreed over security strat-
egies and foreign policy objectives. These disagreements shaped and impeded
counterterrorism in British India and spurred the Government of India to rely on
its intelligence services for the purposes of influencing policies in London.
The divide between London and Delhi reflected a larger disagreement among
Western countries over how to craft a successful Western counterterrorism
strategy. Decades of experience against the revolutionary movement led colonial
administrators to argue that effective counterterrorism depended upon inter-
national cooperation and coordination. British officials in India were willing to
sign on to international legal regimes regulating small arms, passports, and terrorist
financing—if doing so helped them defeat domestic terrorism. However, officials in
the United Kingdom remained cautious about altering national laws or imperial
practices to combat terror. London did not believe that the Indian terrorist
movement posed a vital threat, or that it merited enacting coercive domestic

⁵ John Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War,
1918–1922 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 250–7. See also Darwin, The Empire Project: The
Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
 , ,  :    45

legislation.⁶ Differing perceptions of terrorist threats, an aversion to revoking

national laws for intergovernmental regulations under the League of Nations,
and ingrained beliefs about the superiority of one’s own legal and political
system were among the primary factors behind the West’s failure to prevent
weapons and funds from reaching terrorist groups of varying ideological per-
suasions during the interwar era.

Postwar World

Challenges to British rule after the Great War sparked internal debate within
Whitehall. What had caused the crises afflicting the British Empire in the postwar
years? Were the perpetrators of violence, despite their physical distance and
cultural differences, drawing inspiration from one another?⁷
While opinion remained divided in London, officials began to consider that the
opposing forces were linked together and centrally organized. Possible culprits
included: Enver Pasha, Mustafa Kemal, King Faisal, the pan-Islam movement, the
Germans, Standard Oil, the Jews, and the Bolsheviks.⁸ Conspiracy theories pro-
liferated. Field Marshal Henry Wilson, who did not lack confidence in judgment,
believed that the German Foreign Office directed a world-wide conspiracy that
brought together “all the elements most hostile to British interests—Sinn Feiners
and socialists at our own doors, Russian Bolsheviks, Turkish and Egyptian
Nationalists and Indian Seditionists.”⁹ Such connecting of the dots gained cred-
ibility with the India Office, even as analysts in the Foreign Office and the Middle
East Department of the Colonial Office discounted it as “mere bogey.”¹⁰
Exchanges between the Foreign Office and the India Office reflected not only
differences of opinion but also a desire among Foreign Office officials to downplay
potential threats, in part as a cost cutting measure during a period when the

⁶ Charles Townshend, “In Aid of the Civil Power: Britain, Ireland and Palestine 1916–48,” in Daniel
Marston and Carter Malkasian, eds., Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (New York: Osprey, 2008),
20, 36; Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counter-Insurgency in the Twentieth Century
(London: Faber & Faber, 1986).
⁷ Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 46–7; Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political
Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 28.
⁸ David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the
Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 453–4.
⁹ John Ferris, “The British Empire vs. The Hidden Hand: British Intelligence and Strategy and ‘The
CUP-Jew-German-Bolshevik combination,’ 1918–1924,” in Keith Neilson and Greg Kennedy, eds., The
British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956: Essays in Honour of David
French (Farnham: Routledge, 2016), 326.
¹⁰ Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: the Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert
Empire in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 206–7.
46    

British public was demanding an end to conscription and a scaling back of

overseas ventures.¹¹
British officials turned to their intelligence agencies for a better understanding
of the evolving security environment. The Government of India, in particular,
used intelligence reports to craft policy responses. The First World War had
elevated the importance of intelligence agencies for safeguarding British India.
During the war, forewarning provided by intelligence analysts thwarted an open
revolt in the Punjab planned by the Ghadar Party from its outposts in North
America and Europe, and disrupted large shipments of arms from German agents
to revolutionary terrorists in Bengal. These intelligence victories were crucial to
the defense of India; from 1914 onward, intelligence agencies would be permanent
fixtures in the security architecture of British India.¹²
The Government of India relied on imperial and metropolitan intelligence
agencies. Its own Home Department ran an Intelligence Bureau, and, in conjunc-
tion with the India Office, oversaw a global intelligence agency, Indian Political
Intelligence (IPI).¹³ Britain had created IPI in 1909 after the assassination of Sir
William Curzon Wyllie, political aide-de-camp to the secretary of state for
India, by an Indian student in London, Madan Lal Dhingra. Political violence
in Great Britain up to that point had been largely quiescent following the
cessation of the 1880s Fenian dynamite bombing campaign waged by Irish
republicans, which had precipitated the establishment of the Metropolitan
Police’s Special (Irish) Branch in 1883.¹⁴ IPI’s initial focus, inside London, was
on Indian “anarchists,” a misnomer concocted by British officials unwilling to
acknowledge militant nationalism in India; it soon extended its purview to
include revolutionaries of any origins who threatened the internal or external
security of British India.
During and after the First World War, IPI conducted overseas intelligence
operations in Europe, North America—especially inside the United States—and
the Far East. It worked with the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS, later known as MI6) to infiltrate revolutionary groups and gather
human intelligence. Signals intelligence contributed to IPI’s source base in the

¹¹ Ibid. ¹² Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 100–215, 331–4.

¹³ After the 1935 Government of India Act, IPI became a subsidiary of the Intelligence Bureau,
although in practice it retained autonomy. U.K., European, and American operations were overseen by
IPI in London; Indian operations were directed by the Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Home
Department, Government of India.
¹⁴ On the establishment of Special Branch as well as that of British intelligence services during the
twentieth century see Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 125; Thomas Hachey, Britain and
Irish Separatism: From the Fenians to the Free State 1867–1922 (Chicago: Rand McNally College
Publishing Company, 1977), 12–13; Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in
a Liberal State, 1858–1874 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), xiii; Nigel West, MI5:
British Security Service Operations 1909–1945 (London: The Bodley Head, 1981), 33–5; Christopher
Andrew, The Defense of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), xx.
 , ,  :    47

1920s, as British codebreakers mastered Soviet ciphers and intercepted telegraph

and telephone traffic using techniques honed during the Great War.¹⁵

Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest

The Government of India also received strategic intelligence from the Inter-
Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest (IDCEU), an inter-agency commis-
sion that operated from 1922 until 1927. An India Office initiative sanctioned by
the Foreign Office, the IDCEU analyzed the causes of “Eastern Unrest” that had
swept across North Africa and the Middle East after the war. IDCEU analysts
quickly realized the nationalist origins of these movements, their challenge to
British prestige, and the threat they posed to British India.¹⁶ In December 1921,
Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu wrote to Secretary of State for Foreign
Affairs Lord Curzon that several offices had collected valuable information on
intrigue within the British Empire, but this information was not utilized, because
of a lack of intra-governmental coordination; Montagu recommended that a
single department be in charge of putting “the whole of the information
together.”¹⁷ He also suggested that the Inter-Departmental Committee focus on
groups that posed the greatest threat to the interests of the British Empire: namely,
Turkish nationalists; Egyptian nationalists; Indian nationalists, the pan-Islamic
movement in Anatolia, Turkey, and Asia; the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP), and Indian revolutionaries in Europe, America, and Asia. The committee
ought next to draft reports on the structure of these organizations, their aims and
goals, and their inter-connections, Montagu went on to say, so as to ascertain
whether their activities merited supervision or that it was “safe to ignore them.”¹⁸
As noted by the historian Durba Ghosh, the IDCEU was one of the first “British
efforts to coordinate the work of its isolated departments and far-flung colonies in
fighting what it considered Britain’s war on terrorism.”¹⁹

¹⁵ Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence
Community (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 259; Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense,
310–12; Fridrikh Firsov, Harvey Klehr, and John Earl Haynes, eds., Secret Cables of the Comintern,
1933–1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3, 19; Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism:
Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45; Ferris, “The
British Empire vs. The Hidden Hand,” 329, 338–9.
¹⁶ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, December 1922, The National Archives of the
United Kingdom (hereinafter TNA), London, England, CO 537/835; M.C. Seton, India Office to the
Permanent Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, December 13, 1922, TNA, CO 537/835.
¹⁷ Reconstitution of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, March–May 1926,
L/P&J/12/156, India Office Records, British Library (hereinafter BL), London, United Kingdom.
¹⁸ Ibid.
¹⁹ Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh
and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (Hyderabad:
Orient Longman, 2006), 270–1.
48    

The IDCEU consisted of former Arab Bureau affiliates and some of Britain’s
most powerful politicians, including Maurice Hankey, a seasoned civil servant and
secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defense; Malcolm Seton of the India Office
served as the chairman throughout its duration.²⁰ Meetings of the IDCEU were
regularly attended by the Colonial Office, the India Office, the War Office
(Military Intelligence Directorate and Military Operations Directorate), Home
Office (Scotland Yard), and the Foreign Office, while SIS, IPI, and MI5 occasion-
ally sent advisers.²¹ In March 1926, Lord Birkenhead with the concurrence of
Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain instructed Seton that the committee
should “give consideration to such matters of policy as may from time to time
emerge from the evidence which it has examined, with a view either to making
recommendations itself or to asking for consideration from the Cabinet or the
Committee of Imperial Defense.”²² In addition to policy initiatives, the committee
recommended police counter-measures regarding arms smuggling.
In December 1922, the IDCEU produced its first report, on the proliferation of
anticolonial uprisings after the Great War. Pre-war conditions had contributed to
the unrest, the committee concluded, and among them were resurgent national-
ism, education campaigns, and industrialization. Six war and postwar conditions
“gave impetus” to the uprisings: (1) general disruption resulting directly from
hostilities; (2) the spectacle of the Great Powers fighting each other, with the
participation of Orientals in that struggle; (3) the Great Powers’ preoccupation
with the war effort at the expense of paying attention to Eastern affairs; (4) the
dismemberment of the Russian Empire and the subsequent flooding of commun-
ist propaganda into now-contested territories; (5) the proliferation of arms and
ammunition; and (6) overall economic distress.²³
While all of these factors contributed to anticolonial movements, the
Committee stated: the “fundamental cause of unrest in Eastern countries is an
intense nationalism, which may be briefly described as an attempt on the part of
the various Eastern peoples to emancipate themselves from any form of control by
Europeans.” It was therefore “not surprising to find an anti-European fanaticism
prevalent throughout the East.” While no evidence had been found that any single
central organization directed the intrigues, the shared objective of resisting Great
Britain brought disparate parties together. It was entirely understandable—though
incorrect—to expect some international coordination lurking behind all civil
unrest.

²⁰ Satia, Spies in Arabia, 206–7.

²¹ Reconstitution of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, March–May 1926,
L/P&J/12/156, BL. In March 1926, Naval Intelligence declined the committee’s invitation to participate
in its meetings.
²² M.C. Seton, India Office to Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, April 7, 1926, TNA, CO 537/
838.
²³ Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, December 1922, Summary of
General Conclusions, TNA, CO 537/835.
 , ,  :    49

Extremist sections in different units within the British Empire, the report also
acknowledged, required continued and careful watching; so too did certain agen-
cies of external powers. While the various factors that caused the unrest did not
fundamentally challenge the empire’s existence, the committee concluded, their
cumulative effect was to undermine Britain’s prestige. This constituted “a source
of real danger if allowed to develop without restraint.” By identifying and tracking
certain individuals, the committee went on to say, British agencies could mitigate
violence. Recommendations of its report included: strengthening the intelligence
services and tightening the issuance and control of passports.²⁴
Colonial administrators followed the IDCEU’s policy proposals. For the dur-
ation of the interwar period, British officials in India advocated a more robust
intelligence apparatus and a stringent regime of arms controls and passport
regulations.²⁵ The Foreign Office, which regarded the IDCEU as the mouthpiece
of the India Office, tended to discount its reports.²⁶ That did not stop the
Government of India from focusing on the IDCEU’s linkage between “external
agencies” and domestic terrorism. The ideologies of pan-Islamism and inter-
national communism, it feared, threatened to bring together various anticolonial
groups and create a united front against British rule. While both the government
in London and the Government of India focused on this potential confluence, they
could not agree on the magnitude of the threat or what to do about it.

Interwar Intelligence Gathering

Colonial authorities focused on emergent anticolonial nationalist groups and what

they regarded as the subversive enemy within. Interwar intelligence agencies had
benefited from wartime bureaucratic advances such as the reorganization and
streamlining of military and police agencies and the expansion of qualified
individuals available for colonial service and intelligence work.²⁷ During and
after the Great War, British officials and intelligence analysts carefully monitored
the growth of pan-Islamism. When the Ottoman Empire joined the Central
Powers in 1914, the Sultan/Caliph in Istanbul issued five fatwas (religious pro-
nouncements) calling upon all Muslims to wage jihad, or holy war, against the
Allies. The Ottoman government hoped to inspire Muslim unrest in Egypt, Persia,
Afghanistan, and India to bolster the war effort against the British.²⁸ The call for
jihad threatened the British Empire with invasion from outside, subversion from

²⁴ Ibid.
²⁵ M.C. Seton, India Office to the Permanent Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, December
13, 1922, TNA, CO 537/835.
²⁶ Satia, Spies in Arabia, 206–7.
²⁷ Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 14–15; Thomas, Fight or Flight, 19–20.
²⁸ Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 179.
50    

within (over a million Muslims lived in the empire), and the potential mutiny of
the “martial races”—a dubious categorization created after the rebellion of 1857—
that comprised the most effective fighting forces within the Indian army.²⁹
While Indian Muslims largely remained loyal to the British government during
the war, fears of pan-Islamism as a disruptive transnational force were revived
with the emergence of the Khilafat movement in India. With the stated objective
of preserving the authority of the caliph as leader of Sunni Muslims—especially
after the harsh terms that the victors imposed on the Ottoman Empire in the
August 1920 Treaty of Sèvres—leaders of the movement in India found common
domestic political cause with the Indian National Congress. Coming after the
unrest in the Punjab and the outbreak of the Third Afghan War in the summer of
1919, the Khilafat movement rallied support among Indian Muslims, who looked
askance at the Lloyd George coalition government for its approach to Muslims in
the collapsing Ottoman Empire.³⁰ While the movement had already dissipated,
Turkish President Mustafa Kemal effectively ended it when he abolished the
Caliphate in March 1924.³¹ Although imperial and metropolitan intelligence
agencies continued to monitor pan-Islamism, the specter of it would be outlasted
by that of another: communist subversion directed from Moscow.
No foe of the British Empire was more committed than the Soviet Union, which
employed the Communist International to replace Wilhelmine Germany as the
lead sponsor of opposition to British rule over its colonies. Lenin’s hostility toward
the British Empire was unsparing. He repudiated the Anglo-Russian Convention
of 1907, which had ended the rivalry between the British and Russian empires in
Asia, and reinvigorated a more ideological “Great Game” even as he denounced
imperial rivalries. In December 1917, Lenin called on the peoples of Asia to
overthrow their European masters and pledged Bolshevik support for revolution
in the colonial regimes. In August 1919, as communist revolutions failed to
consume Europe, Lenin’s protégé, Leon Trotsky, who had led the Soviet delega-
tion at Brest-Litovsk and founded the Red Army, declared: “We have up to now
devoted too little attention to agitation in Asia. However, the international
situation is evidently shaping in such a way that the road to Paris and London
lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal.”³²

²⁹ James Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-Building in
Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 254; Bose, “Indian Revolutionaries during the
First World War,” 110–11. On “martial race,” see Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military,
Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2004).
³⁰ Darwin, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East, 247.
³¹ John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy and Comintern Policy
1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 20–1.
³² Leon Trotsky, August 5, 1919 in Jan M. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, 1917–22, vol. 1 (The
Hague: Mouton & Co., 1964), 621–7.
 , ,  :    51

Soviet leaders redoubled their commitment to fostering revolution in the

colonial world at the Second World Congress of the Communist International
(Comintern). In Baku in September 1920, they convened the “Congress of Peoples
of the East,” which drew over 2,000 European and Asian communists and
nationalists and was devoted specifically to the “colonial question.” Included
among them was Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, better known by his alias M.
N. Roy, who a few months earlier in Petrograd was photographed standing behind
and to the left of Lenin (Figure 2.1). A revolutionary from Bengal, Roy had fled
India to avoid arrest in 1915 and spent the majority of the First World War in the
United States and Mexico, where he fell in with Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin and
became a communist. “An anti-British Brahmin, Roy wanted to get the British out
of India with the aid of whoever was willing to provide it,” writes historian Daniela
Spenser.³³ In Baku, Roy emphasized that the “future for Communism lay in the
colonial world, and not in Europe,” as historian David Priestland writes, while
Bolshevik leaders like Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek employed the rhetoric of

Figure 2.1 The Second World Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd,
1920 (Wikimedia Commons)

³³ Daniela Spenser, Stumbling Its Way Through Mexico: The Early Years of the Communist
International, trans. Peter Gellert (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2011).
52    

national self-determination to appeal to anticolonial movements in Turkey,

Central Asia, Persia, India, and China.³⁴ Competing priorities notwithstanding,
the Third International resolved to open up a “second front of the World
Revolution” in the colonial world.³⁵
The Comintern focused first on establishing relations with Afghanistan and
Persia in order to pose a military threat to British India. The main Soviet
representative in Kabul was Obeidullah Sindhi, a Sikh who had converted to
Islam and played a prominent role in earlier German plots in Afghanistan. In
addition, the Comintern trained Indian agents for subversion and sabotage at
centers in Tashkent and Moscow. In Tashkent, the Central Asiatic Bureau of the
Comintern established an Indian Military School and provided military training
for Muslims who had fled India over their participation in the Khilafat movement.
In Moscow, the Soviets created the “Communist University of Toilers of the East”
for revolutionaries who went to work anywhere throughout Asia—though mainly
in India.³⁶
In 1920, M.N. Roy and the staff for the military training school traveled to
Tashkent with twenty-seven wagons of arms and ammunition; two wagons of gold
coins, bullion, and pound and rupee notes; and ten wagons of dismantled air-
planes. His mission was to provide military supplies and financial assistance to the
frontier tribes along the Afghan-Indian border. The Comintern had also tasked
him with building a liberation army from Indian army deserters and other anti-
British confederates.³⁷
Roy failed at both projects. In May 1921, the Soviets disbanded the Indian
Military School in Tashkent in an attempt to revive economic relations with Great
Britain as part of Lenin’s “New Economic Policy.” In October 1922 Amanullah,
Amir of Afghanistan, expelled all of the Indian revolutionaries from Afghanistan.
The failure of the Afghanistan government to allow free passage across its
territory, which lay between India and Soviet Russia, ended plans to use the
Indian frontier area as a revolutionary base. The Central Asiatic Bureau of
the Comintern was also abolished. A newly-created Eastern Commission of the
Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), headquartered in
Moscow, assumed responsibility for fomenting revolution in Asia, and was to be
assisted by indigenous communist parties within the Western colonial powers.
After the failure of their activities in Afghanistan and Persia, the Soviets
concentrated on establishing communist cells inside India and expanding the
Communist Party of India. Roy reached out to radical Congress members, veterans

³⁴ David Priestland, The Red Flag: A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009), 237–8.
³⁵ Silvio Pons, The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism, 1917–1991, trans.
Allan Cameron (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 54.
³⁶ Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 306–9.
³⁷ Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India, 11–13, 21.
 , ,  :    53

of the Khilafat movement, the Bengali revolutionary societies, and trade union
workers in an attempt to integrate the Communist International and the broader
Indian nationalist movement. The Comintern also reoriented itself toward China,
where its lead agent Mikhail Borodin served as an adviser to Kuomintang leader
Sun Yat-sen. In March 1925, Chairman of the Communist International Grigory
Zinoviev reported that China had replaced Persia and Afghanistan as “the central
starting-point for action in India.” Communist penetration of China would
provide moral inspiration for Indian revolutionaries and serve as a strategic
base from which the Soviets could provide direct assistance. “Via revolutionary
China to the Federal Republic of the United States of India,” as one Comintern
slogan put it.³⁸
The Government of India responded to Soviet actions by establishing forward
bases at Meshed in north-eastern Persia; on the western border of Afghanistan;
and to the east of Afghanistan, at Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan. General Sir
Wilfrid Malleson, a former commander of British forces in Persia, oversaw
intelligence operations against the Soviets at Meshed. Malleson built surveillance
networks around Central Asia and tracked the movements of Soviet agents
operating inside Persia. The British Consulate-General ran the forward base at
Kashgar under the direction of Colonel Percy Etherton, who maintained officers
inside Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia and strove to prevent communist
agents from entering India. British intelligence officers—who were able to
decipher Soviet codes from 1920 until 1927—monitored communist radio traffic
from Meshed and Kashgar.³⁹
The Government of India gained additional information from its intelligence
services and police forces operating inside India. In Bengal, the police fielded 24,000
full-time constables and 80,000 auxiliaries, while the Criminal Investigation
Department (CID) was reconstituted as a counter-intelligence bureau aimed to
thwart revolutionary terrorism in Bengal.⁴⁰ The Indian police obtained the
correspondence among Roy and his network. Meanwhile, British intelligence
organizations operating in the Fast East, North America, and Europe sent word
about communist and pan-Islamic agitators.⁴¹ Though they had initially been
downsized following the end of the Great War, the imperial and Indian intel-
ligence services were now reinvigorated; in their reports to the Government of
India’s Home Department, they drew upon their wartime experiences combat-
ting German subversion.

³⁸ Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India, 20–4, 58–60; Popplewell, Intelligence and
Imperial Defense, 308–9.
³⁹ Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 309–17.
⁴⁰ Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European
Colonial Empires, 1918–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 45.
⁴¹ Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 297–314.
54    

Threat Perception

Whereas the specter of pan-Islamism had loomed large at the start of the 1920s,
over the course of the decade British surveillance reports and predictive threat
assessments emphasized the dangers of communist subversion in the Arab
world.⁴² Intelligence analyses that wound up on the desks of British India officials
portrayed an interventionist Soviet Russia and Turkey whose agents were organ-
izing cells in Persia, Afghanistan, and Iraq with the intent to take “forward” action
inside India. They indicated that the Communist International was using Soviet
consuls in Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Persia to disseminate arms, funds, and
propaganda to Indian revolutionaries. After British intelligence networks had
infiltrated revolutionary groups, colonial administrators concentrated their efforts
on stopping the importation of weapons to adherents of the Khilafat movement
and revolutionary terrorists in Bengal. Government of India officials desired to
reform the empire-wide passport system to deny entry to, and deport, British
communists who were purportedly acting on orders from the Communist
International.⁴³
In the fall of 1922, officials in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) reported on the
Soviet government’s progress in Persia. IPI believed that Moscow’s objectives
included the “destruction of British influence”; the formation of a Soviet State of
Persia; and, at the very least, Britain’s exclusion from the Northern Oil Concession
(over which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—the predecessor to BP—was com-
peting with Standard Oil of New Jersey—now ExxonMobil—and Sinclair Oil).⁴⁴
While Persia was perhaps willing to accept Russia’s money, communist doctrines
failed to take hold in that country; however, should Persia’s “government collapse
in circumstances of disorder the Russians would probably find a pretext for the
employment of Red Troops in Persia and possibly for an attempt to install a Soviet
Government with the aid of the press which they subsidize and of the communist
elements in towns.”⁴⁵
IPI suggested that Moscow’s interest in Persia was tied to its desire to create an
Oriental Alliance in the wake of Kemal’s triumph. This projected Soviet bloc in the
Middle East would consist of Turkey, Persia, Bukhara (a city in present-day

⁴² Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 38, 90.

⁴³ As John Torpey puts it: “The passport became the backbone of the system of documentary
substantiation of identity used to register and keep watch over the movements of aliens in the United
Kingdom.” John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 143.
⁴⁴ Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), Bolshevik Intrigue in Persia, June–October 1922, L/P&J/12/128,
BL. On the competition for the Northern Oil Concession, see Michael A. Rubin, “Stumbling through
the ‘Open Door’: the U.S. in Iran and the Standard–Sinclair Oil Dispute, 1920–1925,’ Iranian Studies,
vol. 27, no. 3–4, 1995, 203–29.
⁴⁵ Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), Bolshevik Intrigue in Persia, June–October 1922, L/P&J/12/
128, BL.
 , ,  :    55

Uzbekistan), and Afghanistan. According to IPI sources, during its October 1922
meeting the Third International had vowed to exploit nationalist movements in
these countries to help bring this about.⁴⁶ IPI contended that Moscow’s intrigues
in Persia endangered British India because its representatives, who were sponsor-
ing anti-British propaganda in the Persian press, had also arranged for the
smuggling of Soviet agents into India. In addition, the Soviet consuls at Ardebil
and Tabriz were distributing arms to tribesmen; IPI estimated that this was
standard practice in Soviet consulates from Iraq to Bombay.⁴⁷ The Soviets had
also established secret stores of arms to supply Persian revolutionaries, according
to IPI reports, consisting of 800 revolvers and 1,330 rifles.
British and Indian intelligence officers also monitored political developments
in the Independent Territory, which lay between the North-West Frontier
Province and Afghanistan and was not directly under British rule. The Inter-
Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest reported that “mischievous” anti-
British elements at work in the Independent Territory made the inhabitants as
“responsive as ever to the golden magnet of the Soviet Representative at
Kabul.”⁴⁸ While the pan-Islamic movement seemed to be declining, various
religious organizations received considerable funds from abroad—including
from the United States, India, and Egypt—that allowed for “pan-Islamic activity
and [the] flow of propaganda.”⁴⁹
In early 1923, the IDCEU noted two setbacks suffered by the “Bolshevik
campaign against India.” The Government of India had arrested eight Moscow-
trained Indian communists, and the Afghan government had expelled the college-
educated Indian seditionists and revolutionaries who “had been carrying on their
intrigues from that country for some years.” ⁵⁰ Still, however, the Soviets had
recruited the Sikh revolutionary Mota Singh and established a summer camp in
Afghanistan that “appeared to be an advance base for Bolshevik intrigue with
regard to India and Independent Territory.”⁵¹ Sources indicated that in May 1922
the Soviets had set aside large sums of money and a store of rifles—some
100,000—as well as ammunition, bombs, and pistols to equip insurgents in a
general tribal rising. Additional sources revealed that Soviet agents had been
dispatched to Afghanistan to establish contacts with “local revolutionary elements
and with Indian malcontents.” Moscow had provided the agents with local

⁴⁶ Ibid. ⁴⁷ Ibid.
⁴⁸ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Anti-British Conspiracy and Intrigue in
Afghanistan and on the Indo-Afghan Frontier, April 1922-January 1923, L/P&J/12/152, BL.
⁴⁹ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Turkish Pan-Islamic Activities, Relations with
Russia, September 8, 1923, SIS copies to Foreign Office (Eastern and Northern Departments), War
Office (M.I.1.c), India Office, Colonial Office, and Admiralty, L/P&J/12/127, BL.
⁵⁰ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Anti-British Conspiracy and Intrigue in
Afghanistan and on the Indo-Afghan Frontier, April 1922-January 1923, L/P&J/12/152, BL.
⁵¹ Ibid.
56    

currency and instructed them to await further orders from Soviet representatives
at Kabul.⁵²
The rise of Turkish influence in Kabul also raised alarms, especially as it was
reported from several sources that the Turkish and Soviet representatives in Kabul
had decided to combine in “energetic anti-British propaganda and intrigue.”
IDCEU members assessed that Turkey wanted to expand pan-Islamic agitation
and that Afghans supported Khilafat agitation in India. They were disturbed to
learn, in January 1923, that Khushal Khan of Barikab (Peshawar District), “a
wealthy Californian businessman” suspected in connection with the arms trade
and revolutionary politics, had traveled from Moscow to Kabul, where he was
working as an intermediary with Indians on behalf of the Russian Minister.⁵³

The Baku Council of Action and Propaganda

After receiving information that it was directing Soviet activities in the Middle
East, the Inter-Departmental Committee scrutinized the meetings of the Baku
Council of Action and Propaganda established at the September 1920 congress.
Informants connected to the Baku Council kept British officials aware of the
meetings of the Comintern with a focus on the fraught relationship between
Soviet Russia and Turkey, where in 1922 and 1923 authorities arrested commun-
ists on the grounds that they had taken money from the Soviet government for
propaganda and agitation against the Turkish state.⁵⁴
In January 1923, relying on “a very trustworthy informant,” the IDCEU
monitored Moscow’s response to the arrest of Turkish communists as well as
the Turkish government’s reluctance, at the Lausanne Conference, to support a
Soviet proposal to exclude non-Black Sea powers from deciding naval passage of
the Turkish Straits.⁵⁵ In Baku, having just returned from the Fourth Congress of
the Third Communist International in Moscow, Sergei Kirov, friend of Joseph
Stalin and then First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan
Communist Party, called for more “active measures” in order “to combat the
ever-increasing pan-Islamic propaganda of the Turks throughout Caucasia and
Turkestan.” “The oppression of the Turkish Communists by Kemal’s Government
shows only too clearly that they fear Communism,” Kirov went on to say. “The
Communist party in Turkey, however, is far from dead, and it behooves us to
assist in every possible way to revive its activities.” Kemalist-sponsored “anti-
Russian propaganda in Persia” was also “becoming more and more noticeable.” In

⁵² Ibid. ⁵³ Ibid.
⁵⁴ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Russo-Turkish Relations, March 14, 1923, SIS
copies to Foreign Office (Eastern and Northern Departments), India Office, Colonial Office, and
Scotland Yard, L/P&J/12/127, BL.
⁵⁵ Moscow would eventually sign on to the 1923 Lausanne Straits Convention.
 , ,  :    57

addition to propaganda of its own, Kirov called for an increase in military forces
in the Caucasus. “The Third International . . . has recommended the inclusion of
special Communist units, the proportion of which would not be less than 20% of
the whole military force.”⁵⁶
In February 1925, the IDCEU reported that the Baku Council was escalating its
activities. The previous month, according to a “first-hand source,” it had dis-
patched agents to Kabul with the special mission of reorganizing and intensifying
Soviet propaganda in Afghanistan and India by forming “subsidiary propaganda
cells on the Afghan-Indian frontier.” Pro-Soviet propagandists in India were
instructed to amplify the slogan “expulsion of Europeans from the Colonies”
and support revolutionary nationalism within India.⁵⁷ The same source reported
that the Baku Council was establishing a new propaganda school in Persia to train
agitators and encourage them to join existing cells inside Turkestan and two
cities—Khiva and Bukhara—in present-day Uzbekistan. The curriculum for mili-
tant workers included a six-month special course to prepare them for “terrorist
work in foreign ‘colonies,’ chiefly India, as well as for organizing militant detach-
ments for action.” Young Muslim communists tended to be selected.⁵⁸ IDCEU
also noted that the Baku Council was extending its activities to western China and
Kashgar. The Kashgar center was expected to seek out Chinese and Indian traders
who had ongoing business in Northern India to employ in the transfer of money,
propaganda, literature, and secret instructions between Indian revolutionaries and
Soviet agents.⁵⁹
In July 1925, the IDCEU reported that the Baku Council had held another
meeting with Comintern agents that resulted in plans for a permanent military
department to oversee “instruction in the theory and application of civil and
colonial warfare in order to create a cadre of revolutionary fighters drawn from
colonial and Eastern elements.” The Council also voted to organize a special
“strikes” department that would train instructors on how to shut down factories
in imperial colonies, and agreed to begin organizing revolutionary cells in gov-
ernment departments of foreign powers, particularly in defense organizations,
police, post offices, telegraphs, and finance departments. The initial targets were
Afghanistan, Persia, India, China, and Turkey.⁶⁰

⁵⁶ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Russo-Turkish Relations, January 1, 1923, SIS

copies to Foreign Office (Eastern and Northern Departments), India Office, Colonial Office, War Office
(M.I.1.c.), D.N.I., and Air Ministry, L/P&J/12/127, BL.
⁵⁷ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Soviet Eastern Policy, Communist activities
against India directed from the Baku and Kabul Centers, February 26, 1925, Copies to Foreign Office
(Mr. Bland and Northern Department), War Office (M.I.1.c.), India Office, and IPI, L/P&J/12/177, BL.
⁵⁸ Ibid.
⁵⁹ Ibid.
⁶⁰ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Intensification of Soviet Eastern Propaganda;
Militant Conference at Baku, August 4, 1925, Copies to Foreign Office (Mr. Bland, Northern and Far
Eastern Depts.), War Office (M.I.1c), India Office, Colonial Office, and Scotland Yard, L/P&J/12/
177, BL.
58    

The Baku Council had sent nine “propaganda” agents to Kabul to strengthen
the Indian work of the Kabul Center, the IDCEU reported in November. These
included a number of Armenians who were chosen for their exceptional know-
ledge of Eastern languages. The Kabul Center also planned to recruit Muslim and
Hindu agitators for dispatch to Bombay, Lahore, and elsewhere in India. And it
assisted the Baku Council in establishing a regular system of couriers for the
transfer of funds and propaganda literature as well as the dispatch of arms and
munitions through waypoints along the Indian frontier.⁶¹
The IDCEU even summarized the bureaucratic obstacles around which Kabul
Center navigated. When Kabul Center requested that the Comintern set up a
bureau in charge of forging passports and buying up Afghan and Persian official
documents, the Comintern declined; the Baku Council already had a fully
equipped passport forging section, its agents pointed out. In response, Kabul
Center accused the Comintern of failing to understand the “needs of the
moment.” In a gesture of solidarity, the Baku Council sent 100,000 rubles to
Kabul Center to allow it to purchase Afghan passports.⁶²
“The Kabul Centre is setting up new cells in Afghanistan and the N.W. Frontier
of India not only for the purpose of providing itself with secure means of
communication with agents who are to be planted in India itself, but also as a
means of commencing an active campaign for the [S]ovietization of Afghanistan,”
the IDCEU reported to the India Office and War Office in December 1925. Taking
orders from the Baku Council of Action and Propaganda, which, according to the
report, had met the previous month, the Kabul Center was planning to “gain
control over the Afghan Government” as “part of the general Comintern plan,
which provides, first, for the consolidation of Russian influence in Afghanistan,
and second, for the establishment of an autonomous Afghan Republic under
absolute control of the Moscow Government.” Soviet control over these hinter-
lands of the Middle East and Southwest Asia would hasten “direct revolutionary
action” in India. In the meantime, were the Government of India to crack down
on suspected terrorists, Afghanistan would play an essential role in harboring
them and reconstituting the Comintern’s networks of subversion. “Parallel, there-
fore, with its main task of organizing a network of Soviet espionage and propa-
ganda activity on a grand scale in India,” the report concluded, “the Kabul Centre
is undertaking the political and social subjugation of the intervening buffer state—
Afghanistan.”⁶³

⁶¹ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Communist Activities in India directed from

Kabul, November 6, 1925, Copies to Foreign Office (Mr. Bland and Northern Department), War Office
(M.I.1.c), India Office, and Scotland Yard, L/P&J/12/177, BL.
⁶² Ibid.
⁶³ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Communist Activities Against India
Directed from Kabul, December 14, 1925, Copies to India Office, War Office (M.I.1.c.), L/P&J/12/
177, BL.
 , ,  :    59

These reports came at a time when the India Office was concerned that the Riff
War in Morocco—where France had intervened on behalf of Spain to put down
the Berber Republic—would reignite pan-Islamic agitation in the Middle East and
India. “I find that the India Office had noted the attitude taken toward the troubles
in the Riff by certain Indian Moslems, and was alive to the indications that Pan-
Islamic agitators have been trying to exploit events in Morocco,” remarked
Frederick Edwin Smith, secretary of state for India, to the Spanish ambassador
in London. Smith believed that “Red Crescent” missions in particular used
philanthropic schemes to obscure their political designs: “The diversity of views
on general politics among those Englishmen who have displayed particular
interest in medical aid for the Riff is remarkable, and illustrates the plausibility
of the promoters.”⁶⁴
In August 1925, Scotland Yard’s G.M. Liddell reported that the British com-
munist Arthur Field had started a Muslim Committee for the Defense of the Riff
to raise money in protest to France and Spain’s actions in Morocco, and to “make
the position of the Riffs an international question, which would have to be dealt
with by some international body.” Absolute independence of the Riffs, Field
contended, would embarrass the British government and elicit strong support
for Indian independence.⁶⁵ MI5 and the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch kept
close track of Field—who had requested help from the Third International—
reading his correspondence and infiltrating meetings of anticolonial and com-
munist sympathizers. According to Special Branch records, these groups included
the East-West Circle, the Anglo-Turkish Society, formerly known as the Anglo-
Ottoman Society, and a new organization started by Field, the Muslim Committee
for the Defense of the Riff.⁶⁶
Meanwhile, the Third International was also spreading intrigue into Iraq
through the Kurds, Assyrians, and the Ulema. Two years later the IDCEU turned
its attention to Iraq. After the war, the Soviets had set up a propaganda center in
Kermanshah.⁶⁷ In the mid-1920s, the IDCEU surmised that the Comintern was
attempting to establish a subversive cell in Iraq that could be linked to those in
Persia and Turkey. By March 1927, the Air Ministry concluded that “a contam-
inating Soviet influence” was being “quietly” introduced in Iraq, but it was
unclear if the Communist International had succeeded in setting up a Soviet
network in Iraq.⁶⁸

⁶⁴ The Earl of Birkenhead to Spanish ambassador, Embassy of Spain in London, April 16, 1925,
L/P&J/12/230, BL.
⁶⁵ G.M. Liddell, Special Branch to Gerald Villiers, Foreign Office, August 10, 1925, L/P&J/12/
230, BL.
⁶⁶ Extract from report by New Scotland Yard, March 11, 1925; G.M. Liddell, New Scotland Yard,
August 10, 1925 L/P&J/12/230, BL.
⁶⁷ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Bolshevik Intrigue, June 10, 1923, L/P&J/12/
152, BL.
⁶⁸ Air Ministry to Colonel C.A. Smith, India Office, March 24, 1927, TNA, AIR 5/485.
60    

In sum, the Indian Political Intelligence became a permanent intelligence

agency with a global reach following the First World War. The organization
liaised with the Secret Intelligence Service to monitor anticolonial nationalism,
international communism, and pan-Islam in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Members of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest analyzed the
intelligence information. The committee’s reports reviewed the various terrorist
groups opposing British rule and stressed any intragroup connections or foreign
support. As an India Office initiative, IDCEU operated primarily for the protec-
tion of British India. While the IDCEU was less successful in persuading London
officials, the Government of India followed IDCEU’s recommendations to main-
tain intelligence capabilities, disrupt gun-running, and secure India’s borders from
communist infiltration.

Policy Responses: Arms Controls, Passport Regulations,

and Domestic Legislation

Intelligence reports from Indian Political Intelligence and the Inter-Departmental

Committee on Eastern Unrest led the Government of India to enact measures to
disrupt the flow of weapons into India made possible by the surplus stocks in
Europe left over from the Great War. The India Office informed the Intelligence
Bureau in India that Turkey and Afghanistan, which were key supply routes to
anticolonial forces in India, had found a buyers’ market in Germany and Austria
when it came to munitions. German firms offered military equipment and air-
planes to the “Turks, Russians or whoever will buy them” with the only stipulation
that the armaments not pass through Germany. The Afghan government also
reached out to the French and Italian governments for arms. British India officials,
who believed that these weapons were meant to be smuggled to Indian revolu-
tionaries across the border, had every incentive to limit the flow of military
equipment from the European continent.⁶⁹
Most weapons entered India by way of ships, and by 1924 Indian officials
concluded that this illegal arms trade had reached alarming proportions. In
January of that year, the Calcutta Police reported that Soviet agents in China
had used cases containing Chinese and Japanese toys to transport a large con-
signment of arms, ammunition, and high explosives from M.N. Roy’s faction in
Berlin to revolutionaries based in Calcutta.⁷⁰ They had also smuggled arms through
the French possessions of Chandernagore and Pondicherry. Long a nuisance to

⁶⁹ J.W. Hose, India Office to Cecil Kaye, Director Intelligence Bureau (DIB), August 10, 1921,
L/P&J/12/44, BL.
⁷⁰ Calcutta Police, January 29, 1924, L/PJ/12/78, BL.
 , ,  :    61

British officials, the French territories offered safe haven for exiles to publish
subversive works undeterred.⁷¹
A considerable traffic in arms moved from Marseilles to China, the IPI
concluded—and, on a smaller scale, from the French port to Egypt and India.⁷²
French authorities themselves reported that arms smugglers based in Marseilles
were sending revolvers to China, along with other small arms and stocks of
ammunition, according to IPI reports. Americans were also (surreptitiously)
running machine guns to China.⁷³ And, in May 1924, Soviet representatives had
transported 800 British rifles, six machine-guns, and twenty-four cases of cart-
ridges from Tashkent to Mazār-e Sharif with the apparent purpose of moving the
weapons into India.⁷⁴
After expending a “considerable sum of money” to ascertain the sources on the
European continent from which smugglers secured their supplies, the
Government of India concluded that smugglers were obtaining weapons primarily
from Hamburg, Antwerp, and Marseilles. Police at these ports either failed to
enforce laws that restricted the sale of arms or—as with Antwerp prior to 1933—
no laws existed. The larger consignments of arms originated in Hamburg and
were transported to Hong Kong, Singapore, or Shanghai in the Far East before
reaching India.⁷⁵ Closer to home, gun-runners in Kabul were distributing
revolvers throughout British India and especially in Punjab.⁷⁶
Disinclination among German, Belgian, and French officials to punish arms
traffickers led British officials to negotiate directly with steamship companies and
customs officials. The Government of India implored private shipping companies
to instruct their captains to ensure that members of their crews did not transport
small arms into India. In addition, British customs authorities were advised to pay
special attention to vessels sailing from continental ports to London and headed to
India.⁷⁷ The Indian Home Department provided secret service money to the
Collectors of Customs at seaports to “extend and tighten up the arrangements
for the interception of illicitly imported arms,” and made sure that the new
authority overseeing customs, the Central Board of Revenue, was aware of the
grave danger of arms smuggling and the need for vigilance at the ports.⁷⁸
Following an October 1924 memorandum on the illicit traffic of arms, the
Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest held a meeting at the India

⁷¹ IPI, Activities of Revolutionaries in Bengal Subsequent to August 31, 1924, L/P&J/12/253, BL.
⁷² IPI to J.W. Hose, India Office, The Smuggling of Arms to India, October 6, 1924, L/PJ/12/78, BL.
⁷³ J.W. Hose, India Office to Foreign Office, Scotland Yard, War Office, Colonial Office, and IPI,
Arms Traffic between France and the Far East, October 1924, L/PJ/12/78, BL.
⁷⁴ J.A. Wallinger, IPI to J.W. Hose, India Office, October 14, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
⁷⁵ J.A. Wallinger, IPI to David Petrie, Intelligence Bureau, March 4, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
⁷⁶ Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, Report on Police Administration
in the North-West Frontier Province for 1925, L/PJ/12/81, BL.
⁷⁷ Home Department, Government of India to all local governments, November 19, 1932, L/P&J/12/
93, BL.
⁷⁸ David Petrie, Intelligence Bureau to J.A. Wallinger, IPI, December 4, 1924, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
62    

Office to address Islamic movements in North Africa and the ties between arms
smuggling and Bengal terrorism.⁷⁹ IPI officials used the meeting to bemoan the
inability of customs officers in London to conduct thorough searches of ships. The
committee decided that Commissioners of Customs and Excise would notify
authorities about any seizures of arms and that Scotland Yard would follow up
such cases with an investigation.⁸⁰
IDCEU appointed a sub-committee to examine the question of illicit traffic in
arms to the East, particularly India.⁸¹ In its first meeting, at MI5 Headquarters on
November 10, 1924, Major Wallinger of Indian Political Intelligence outlined how
vessels carrying arms from the European continent stopped at British ports to
unload other cargo and refuel. Customs officers needed to interrogate the captains
and crews of these vessels to ensure that no weapons were being transported,
Wallinger insisted; in cases where customs officials found arms, representatives
from the War Office, India Office, or Scotland Yard should be sent to the ships to
carry out investigations. Deciding that it needed more information on the origins
of the arms in transit for the East, the sub-committee tasked Major Wallinger—
who was nominally its leader—and the War Office’s Colonel Menzies to come up
with a scheme to place agents in foreign ports, starting with Hamburg, Germany.⁸²
It would take seven months for IPI to convince Scotland Yard to convene another
meeting, this time on the proposal to send an Indian agent to Hamburg.
Meanwhile, the German port continued to supply the majority of weapons that
reached India.⁸³ Ultimately, SIS and Scotland Yard voted against it, advocating
instead for the placement of agents onboard ships that docked at foreign ports.
These agents were to infiltrate the crews and report back to IPI any evidence of
arms smuggling.⁸⁴
And yet the guns kept coming. In July 1925, the Government of India wrote the
governments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, and Burma that officials were alarmed
by the light penalties being imposed on convicted arms smugglers. The Government

⁷⁹ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Memorandum on the Situation in Bengal and

the Arms Traffic, October 29, 1924, L/PJ/12/91, BL. This meeting was attended by Sir Malcom Seton,
Col. Sir Vernon Kell, MI 5; Col. S.F. Musptratt, War Office; Mr. Hose, India Office; Mr. J. Murray,
Foreign Office; Mr. G.L.M. Clauson, Colonial Office; Mr. H.R. Palmer, Nigeria Office; and represen-
tatives of SIS and IPI. Regarding Islamic movements in North Africa, IDCEU concluded that Al Ashar
University in Cairo played a central role in disseminating Eastern influence through Africa. The
committee suggested that a liaison officer from Nigeria be placed in Cairo and Jeddah during the
Hajj in order to collect information on pan-Islam and its influence in Nigeria.
⁸⁰ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, India Office, November 7, 1924, L/PJ/12/
91, BL.
⁸¹ Members of the sub-committee included: Col. Sir V.G.W. Kell, MI5, War Office (President);
Major J.A. Wallinger, India Office; Lieut. Col. S.G. Menzies, M.I.1.c; Captain G. Liddell, Scotland Yard;
Major W.A. Phillips, M.I.5, War Office. Mr. J.E. Sutton, a principal of the Board of Customs attended
the meeting to assist the Committee, at the request of Col. Kell.
⁸² Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, MI5, War Office, November 10, 1924, L/PJ/
12/91, BL.
⁸³ The Viceroy, Home Department, to secretary of state for India, January 5, 1925, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁸⁴ Meeting, Scotland House, June 19, 1925, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
 , ,  :    63

of India argued that smugglers would continue to move weapons into India if they
did not face severe repercussions. Delhi instructed the local governments to bring
their magistrates into line and ensure that they imposed adequate sentences for gun-
running cases.⁸⁵
By the end of the 1920s, the Government of India knew that Europe supplied
most of the arms coming to India, and that weapons were typically smuggled on
vessels in small numbers rather than large shipments. The “objects of the traffic
are beyond dispute,” as one Indian official summed up the problem a few years
later. “The arms are wanted for the furtherance of terrorist aims and for no other
reason.”⁸⁶ Government officials, however, had not been able to stop the illicit arms
trade because authorities at major ports on the European continent failed to
enforce their own arms trafficking laws if and when they existed.

Passports

The Government of India also sought to control the movement of foreign fighters
and communist agitators into India. Prior to the First World War, passports had
generally not been required for travel. After the war, a conference organized in
Paris by the League of Nations on Passports and Customs Formalities and
Through Tickets established standards for all passports issued by League mem-
bers. The same year, 1920, the Government of India enacted the Passport (Entry
into India) Act, which tightened border controls by requiring passports for all
those traveling to British India.⁸⁷ In the early 1920s, Indian officials considered
denying passports to Indians who wished to travel to Germany, which, they
believed, was plotting against British rule and had established “a night school
for the manufacture of bombs and explosives.” The Government of India
requested that local governments undertake an extensive background search on
Indians who applied for passports to Germany and grant passports only to those
with unquestionably “good character.”⁸⁸
In November 1922, the Home Department reiterated to local government
officials and administrations its concerns about Indians traveling to Germany.
Since the removal of the travel embargo, a considerable number of Indians—
generally students—had traveled to Germany, and once there, were exposed to the
dangers of “Indian irreconcilables” and revolutionary doctrines, authorities at the

⁸⁵ Home Department, Government of India to the governments of Madras, Bombay, Bengal, and
Burma, July 13, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
⁸⁶ Deputy Inspector General of Police for Railways and Criminal Investigation, Burma, August 30,
1935, L/P&J/12/93, BL.
⁸⁷ India: Act No. 34 of 1920, Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, September 9, 1920.
⁸⁸ LPO Somell, Home Department, Government of India to William Duke, Under Secretary of State
for India, India Office, September 7, 1922, L/PJ/12/98, BL.
64    

Home Department contended. The Government of India requested that all local
governments instruct their officials that “passports for Germany or Switzerland
should not be granted without close scrutiny and careful inquiry into the ante-
cedents and the bona fides of the applicant.” Moreover, passport authorities
needed to be aware that Indians could first travel to Switzerland, the United
Kingdom, or another country in Europe before proceeding to Germany. In
addition, the Government of India decreed that local governments provide the
Home Department and India Office with a list of names of those who had been
denied a passport to Germany or Europe, along with the grounds for such a
refusal.⁸⁹
The next year, the India Office advocated for stricter immigration controls after
officials learned that Indians traveling to Germany were being “trained in
Bolshevik activity.” In January 1923, it wrote to the Government of India that
reports from Europe and intercepted letters indicated that Bolshevik agents were
aggressively recruiting “able and determined persons” from India. The India
Office believed that the Intelligence Bureau knew the men sent from Europe to
fetch recruits as well as the men in India whom the Bolsheviks contacted to find
recruits and arrange for their journeys. The India Office wanted the Government
of India to deny passports to any suspected Bolshevik recruits because “[t]he evil is
great and increasing,” wrote J.E. Ferard of the India Office’s Judicial and Public
Department, and “[t]he association of internal conspiracy with the activities of a
foreign enemy Government appears to the Secretary of State to be extremely
dangerous.”⁹⁰
In the mid-1920s, the Government of India and India Office turned their
attention to preventing the entry of British communists into India. Since the
Government of India could not prevent the entry of passport-holding British
subjects into India, the India Office requested that the Home Office supply the
Passport Office with a list of known British communists, and that Scotland Yard
work with the Passport Office to monitor requests to visit India and Hong Kong
from individuals suspected of “communist proclivities.”⁹¹
The Passport Office confirmed that it would coordinate with the Metropolitan
Police and carefully examine all applications for passports to travel to India and
Hong Kong. Any suspicious cases would be reported to Scotland Yard. However,
the Chief Passport officer argued that the success of this approach depended on
prior knowledge as to whether an applicant had an established connection to the

⁸⁹ Home Department, Government of India to all local Governments and Administrations,

November 13, 1922, L/PJ/12/98, BL.
⁹⁰ J.E. Ferard, India Office to Home Department, Government of India, January 18, 1923, L/PJ/12/
98, BL.
⁹¹ B.E.W. Childs, New Scotland Yard to H.S. Martin, Passport Office, April 8, 1927, L/P&J/12/
312, BL.
 , ,  :    65

Communist Party. He cautioned that the Comintern circumvented travel restric-

tions by using lesser known agents to obtain passports.⁹²
The Government of India believed that the Comintern, along with Russian and
British communist parties, supplied Indian revolutionaries with money and logis-
tical support. Since many communist agents were also British subjects, the
government requested an immigration act that would allow the Government
of India to deport British subjects convicted of organizing subversive activities.
In 1927, the secretary of state for India, Frederick Edwin Smith, better known as
Earl and then Lord Birkenhead, called to the attention of the Home and Foreign
Offices the “British subjects, agents or emissaries of the Communist International”
who had entered India in recent months for the purpose of communist propa-
ganda. Lord Birkenhead requested that the secretary of state for foreign affairs,
Austen Chamberlain, help to strengthen the passport system and keep “British
subjects, well known to be Communists,” from obtaining passports for journeys to
foreign and particularly continental destinations.⁹³ The Foreigners Act
empowered the Government of India to deport foreigners, but British subjects
could not be expelled from India unless they had broken the Indian Passport
Regulations or were reduced to a state of vagrancy. Lord Birkenhead stated that
the increase in communist activity in India and its connection to “subversive
agencies directed against British rule in India” threatened the government. British
India’s security was tied to the passport system, and passport authorities in the
United Kingdom needed to be more circumspect about granting an empire-wide
endorsement or travel visas for India.⁹⁴
Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain replied that he was “prepared to take
such steps as are possible to meet the Earl of Birkenhead’s wishes, always provided
that His Lordship is prepared to assume full responsibility in Parliament for
the action taken.”⁹⁵ After conversing with the police, the Home Office promised
Lord Birkenhead that authorities would make every effort to ensure that “no
Communist interesting himself in Indian affairs shall escape inclusion from the
list of persons to whom Empire wide endorsements are not to be granted.”
However, the Home Office cautioned that Communist Party instructions deter-
mined where most communists traveled, and a person may not indicate any
personal interest in India before requesting a passport. It would be difficult for

⁹² Hubert Martin, Passport Office to Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, New Scotland Yard,
April 11, 1927, L/P&J/12/312, BL.
⁹³ Secretary of State for India to Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office and Under Secretary of
State, Home Office, June 10, 1927, L/P&J/12/312, BL.
⁹⁴ Lord Birkenhead to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, June 10, 1927, Copies to Foreign
Office and Chief Passport Officer, L/P&J/12/312, BL.
⁹⁵ Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Under Secretary of State, India
Office, May 25, 1928, L/P&J/12/312, BL.
66    

the police to know in these cases if a lesser known communist had been selected
for a particular mission.⁹⁶
The India Office also suggested that the Government of India enhance its
border control checks to better examine passports and interrogate suspicious
individuals. The Government of India was reluctant to follow this advice, as the
“existing somewhat cursory system of examination causes some degree of resent-
ment among travelers.” Colonial officials thought it “unwise to tighten up this
procedure in a way which is likely to cause irritation and thus possibly provoke an
agitation against the passport system itself, the retention of which is so essential a
part of our defense.” Instead, the Government of India argued that the intelligence
system in the United Kingdom needed to better monitor British communists and
that the responsibility lay with passport authorities in London. ⁹⁷

Domestic Legislation

In addition to arms controls and passport restrictions, the Government of India

relied on domestic anti-terrorism laws to arrest and detain revolutionary nation-
alists. The terrorist movement was strongest in the province of Bengal, where anti-
British agitation dated to 1905. Escaping the tumult of Bengal was a key factor in
the British decision to move the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi in 1911.
Political violence in India only escalated after the outbreak of the Great War.
While the majority of Indian forces were fighting on the Western front and the
British war effort was faring badly both there and in the Near East, internal
terrorism perpetrated by Hindu bhadralok (upper caste, educated elite) threatened
to undermine British rule in India.⁹⁸
Revolutionary terrorism in Bengal consisted of armed dacoities (robberies) and
the assassinations—or, at least, attempted assassinations—of high-ranking gov-
ernment and police officials. These acts were more common than open insurrec-
tion, as the British Arms Act of 1878 had effectively disarmed the populace and
made it nearly impossible for Indian revolutionaries to organize large-scale
operations.⁹⁹ During the war, British law enforcement had relied on the Defense
of India Act, modelled on the Defense of the Realm Act, which led to the detention
of a thousand suspected terrorists in the interest of Britain’s imperial and national

⁹⁶ E. Blackwell, Home Office to Under Secretary of State for India, India Office, July 1, 1927, L/P&J/
12/312, BL.
⁹⁷ Home Department, Government of India to J.E. Ferard, India Office, October 27, 1927, L/P&J/12/
312, BL.
⁹⁸ Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defense, 5–6; Garton, “The Dominions, Ireland, and India,”
159; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 273.
⁹⁹ Peter Heehs, “Terrorism in India during the Freedom Struggle,” The Historian 55 (1993): 469–70;
Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorism, 9.
 , ,  :    67

security.¹⁰⁰ Peacetime anti-terrorism legislation would be based on the emergency

war powers.
British officials feared that the expiration of the Defense of India Act would lead
to a revival of terrorism. In 1917 the Government of India appointed a committee
under a Scottish judge, Mr. S.A.T. Rowlatt, “to investigate revolutionary conspir-
acies” and suggest policies for controlling terrorism. The committee’s reports
indicated that Bengal, Bombay Presidency, and the Punjab remained dangerous
centers of revolutionary activity, and recommended that the government maintain
emergency powers in those areas. The committee also recommended the exten-
sion of wartime controls, including trials of seditious crimes without juries.¹⁰¹
With reluctance, Secretary of State for India Montagu sanctioned the Rowlatt
Bills carrying out these recommendations. While he considered them to be “most
repugnant,” Montagu also believed that the legislation was necessary to stamp out
“rebellion and revolution.” The Government of India relied on its “official major-
ity” (of members nominated by, and including, the Viceroy’s Executive Council)
to get the legislation through the Imperial Legislative Council in early 1919, even
though every Indian member voted against the law. Although the Rowlatt Act
(also known as the Revolutionary and Anarchical Crimes Act) drew upon the
Defense of India Act (as well as the much older Bengal Regulation III of 1818), it
contradicted many of the central tenets of British legal tradition by denying due
process and the writ of habeas corpus. The speed at which the Government of
India implemented the legislation, following its passage in March 1919, height-
ened its shock and was the rallying cry for crowds such as the one at Amritsar the
following month.¹⁰² And while the Government of India Act of 1919 derived from
Montagu’s work with Viceroy of India Lord Chelmsford to establish limited self-
government (the “Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms”), the final result fell short of the
expectations of most Indian nationalists.¹⁰³
Among those disappointed was a lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, who led the
non-cooperation movement in the aftermath of the Rowlatt Act and Amritsar
massacre. Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign brought together disparate reli-
gious groups.¹⁰⁴ It also attracted theretofore militant revolutionaries, including
hundreds of Bengalis who had been interned under the Defense of India Act and
later released, in early 1920, as the Government of India attempted to quell the
furor directed against the Rowlatt Act (the government would gradually extend
amnesty to include most of the leaders of the revolutionary movement). At least

¹⁰⁰ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 275.

¹⁰¹ Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 196.
¹⁰² Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 133. The Government of India was under the misapprehension
that the Defense of India Act powers would lapse six months after the end of the war.
¹⁰³ Brown, Modern India, 198; Garton, “The Dominions, Ireland, and India,” 152–78.
¹⁰⁴ Biswakesh Tripathy, Terrorism and Insurgency in India, 1900–1986 (New Delhi: Pacific Press,
1987), 41.
68    

initially, Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement contributed to the decline of

militancy, as many revolutionaries joined in civil disobedience rather than take
up arms. According to the records of British police and intelligence, the period
1918–20 saw a dramatic decrease in what London and Delhi regarded as terrorist
acts. In 1919, the police recorded only one revolutionary crime, and in 1920 no
such crime was recorded. Intelligence officers attributed the reduction of political
violence in India to the granting of wider powers to the police, who were newly-
empowered to intern a suspected terrorist before he committed a crime, and could
also arrest leaders, recruiters, and minor members as soon as their names
appeared on reports by reliable agents.¹⁰⁵
With the frequency of attacks against British officials decreasing, the
Government of India repealed most of the laws used against the revolutionary
terrorist movement.¹⁰⁶ Some of those who had been released simply fled (or
“absconded” as British officials put it) to Burma to avoid being detained; others
became active in politics at the provincial level.¹⁰⁷ After 1922, the bhadralok—well-
educated elites trained and expected to fill positions in colonial administration—
constituted a majority membership in the two main political parties of the
Indian National Congress, the Anushilan and Jugantar parties. Many members
of the bhadralok participated in the largely peaceful Swadeshi movement of
boycotting British goods.¹⁰⁸ Others supported the organized violence of revolu-
tionary terrorists—a phenomenon that historian Durba Ghosh has termed
“gentlemanly terrorism.”¹⁰⁹
From the perspective of British officials, the years after the First World War
constituted a new phase in the Bengali terrorist movement where political revo-
lutionaries were actively involved in congressional politics and local congressional
committees such as the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee. These legal
political organizations allowed militant Bengalis to expand their networks, draw
in more recruits, secure new streams of funding, reorganize into terrorist cells, and
attract public support. British officials feared revolutionaries would not only use
legal and political apparatuses to further their causes but also deter any legislation
aimed at suppressing armed resistance. Were militant revolutionaries to comprise
a majority in the Bengali Congress, the Bengal government would lose the ability
to enact criminal laws that outlawed terrorism and punish those who committed
armed dacoits, assassinations, or assassination attempts of high-level government
officials.¹¹⁰

¹⁰⁵ H.W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974 [Simla,
1937]), 4–5.
¹⁰⁶ Tripathy, Terrorism and Insurgency in India, 41.
¹⁰⁷ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 277–8, 282. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 273.
¹⁰⁹ Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India,
1919–1947 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1.
¹¹⁰ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 277–8; Hale, Political Trouble in India, 5–6.
 , ,  :    69

In March 1922, the Government of India arrested Gandhi for sedition and
encouraging anti-British agitation. His arrest and the decline of the non-violent
non-cooperation movement led to a revival of political violence. During this
period, Subhas Chandra Bose began to influence the Bengal Congress party and
formed the New Violence Party and the Bengal Volunteer Group. Revolutionaries
increasingly drew inspiration from the anticolonial struggle in Ireland, which
helped to intellectually justify the use of physical force. Indeed, the New
Violence Party encouraged Bengali youths to study the methods of the Irish
Republican Army and the writings of Dan Breen and Padraig Pearse.¹¹¹
The recurrence of political violence in the 1920s led the government to suspect
that terrorists no longer feared legal consequences, and that “unless immediate
action [was] taken Bengal would again be exposed to the dangers of the previous
outbreak of revolutionary crime.” In 1924, the police arrested numerous revolu-
tionaries they believed to be part of a widespread conspiracy to assassinate police
officers and high government officials. Among high-level British officials of the
Government of India, the rise in violence in the early 1920s led legislators to call
for new legal measures to contain the threat posed by Bengali terrorists, and to
admit that the Bengal Provincial Congress now supported the removal of British
rule by force.¹¹²
On October 25, 1924, the governor-general of Bengal, Lord Reading, enacted
the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, which gave the Bengal govern-
ment special powers for arresting and detaining revolutionaries and terrorists. The
Bengal government and the viceroy of the Government of India wanted to codify
emergency powers in permanent legislation. The London-based India Office
opposed these measures, however, and the Cabinet hesitated to extend “special
powers” to the Bengal government or the Government of India to deal with the
“conspiracies of violence.”¹¹³ While the India Office and Cabinet assented to
allowing the Government of India to assume powers to search for arms and
explosives, government officials in London worried that permanent legislation
suggested that the British government was unwilling to cooperate with Indian
political parties who advocated for gradual self-government.
Lord Oliver, the Liberal secretary of state for India, criticized the ordinance on
the grounds that it stifled political freedom broadly and would be used against the
Swaraj political party and its leader C.R. Das. He believed that the Bengal
government—and the Government of India, to a lesser degree—had a “constant
tendency to identify not only the Swarajist political Party, but the whole of the
progressive movement in India with the Bengali terrorist organisations and their
conspiracies.”¹¹⁴ Officials in London were also aware of the vehement opposition

¹¹¹ Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 145–6. ¹¹² Hale, Political Trouble in India, 8, 10.
¹¹³ Memorandum by the secretary of state for India, September 1924, TNA, CAB 24/168/50.
¹¹⁴ Ibid.
70    

among Indians toward the set of ordinances. By the end of November 1924, there
had been over a hundred public meetings to protest the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Ordinance, and numerous resolutions had been passed, including
one that condemned the ordinance as “repressive and calculated to stifle legitimate
political activities.” Both the Bengal Legislative Council and Bengal Provincial
Council rejected the legislation.¹¹⁵
In 1925, a Supplementary Act was added to the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Ordinance, which was renamed the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act. The
final package allowed the government to detain and arrest alleged terrorists
without warrant or trial, maintain surveillance, and try cases under a closed
Special Tribunal (as opposed to a public jury trial). The government intended to
suppress the terrorist campaign by allowing local police and law enforcement
officials to target minor figures in the revolutionary movement. By arresting
members of the rank and file, the government and police believed they could
undermine Bengali terrorist cells and prevent them from metastasizing. In the
short term, they had reason for optimism. British intelligence and police records
indicated a decrease in terrorist violence after the enactment of the Criminal
Law Amendment Act. The police and Bengal government strongly believed that
the legislation deterred political violence and argued for the act to remain in
force indefinitely.¹¹⁶

Conclusion

1919 was a year of trial for the Government of India. The Amritsar massacre was
followed by war with Afghanistan. Protests erupted in the Punjab, the Khilafat
movement expanded, and Bengal witnessed a revival of revolutionary terrorism.
To make sense of threats that were real or perceived—and, in either case, often
attributable to imperial policies—British officials employed intelligence agencies
that were newly equipped from the Great War. Intelligence agents successfully
infiltrated revolutionary groups while analysts kept officials abreast of the expan-
sion of pan-Islam and international communism and their mutual challenge to
the British Empire. Intelligence reports painted a picture of escalating danger with
the Communist International moving funds, guns, and foreign fighters to
Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Persia, and Iraq for rapid deployment into India. The
communist cells in these countries also disseminated propaganda and weapons to
Indian revolutionaries and encouraged the nationalist movement to overthrow the
British Raj. Meanwhile, at conferences in Geneva and elsewhere—as described in

¹¹⁵ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 11–12; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 280.
¹¹⁶ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 11; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 279; Memorandum by the
secretary of state for India, 1933, Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, L/P&J/12/397, BL.
 , ,  :    71

Chapter 1—British diplomats impressed upon the other Great Powers the urgency
with which it sought to curtail the international arms trade flowing from West to
East following the end of the First World War.
Heavily influenced by intelligence reports, the British counterterrorism strategy
in India depended on three parts: arms controls, passport restrictions, and
domestic anti-terrorism legislation. However, as colonial administrators learned
following passage of the Rowlatt Act, domestic anti-terrorism legislation would be
revoked were Indian and London politicians to consider it to be oppressive. As a
result, local governments relied on special powers and temporary emergency
legislation. These five-year measures provided only a short reprieve, as it also
allowed revolutionary organizations to regroup in other provinces and return
once the emergency powers expired.
Intelligence monitoring and analysis applied not only to imperial security
but also to the transatlantic relationship between the British secret services
and the U.S. State Department. As with the case of British India, much of this
information sharing focused on the Communist International, the activities and
movement of individuals considered subversive by the police and intelligence
agencies, and the financing and arming of revolutionary groups. The following
chapter examines the peacetime intelligence partnership between the govern-
ments of the United Kingdom and United States, which grew out of wartime
cooperation and lasted through much of the 1920s.
 3
Fear and Liberty
The United States and the Communist Threat

When V.I. Lenin created the Third Communist International, or Comintern, in

March 1919, the United States was gripped by union strikes, race riots, and
political violence. Lenin’s call for the overthrow of world capitalism sparked
further unrest and division. In late April, unknown terrorists, later revealed to
be anarchists, sent bombs through the mail to prominent politicians, judges, and
state officials. Ultra-nationalist groups including the American Protective League
and less prominent amalgamations of veteran organizations and business associ-
ations responded by attacking May Day celebrations. States passed sedition laws,
banned red flags, and used criminal anarchy laws to arrest anyone whose writings
might be construed as espousing violence.
On June 2, bombs exploded in eight cities, including at the doorstep of the
home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer a few blocks from Dupont Circle in
Washington, D.C. Warning that a revolutionary uprising was imminent, Palmer
declared war on radicals. He organized a special section in the Justice Department’s
Bureau of Investigation, the Radical Division, headed by the young and ambitious
lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover. At Palmer’s instigation, the Justice Department launched
two dragnet raids in November and December 1919, arresting thousands of sus-
pected subversives and deporting hundreds more. Palmer and his agents relied on
the deportation provisions of U.S. immigration law established in 1903—two years
after the assassination of President William McKinley by a self-proclaimed
anarchist—and expanded by Congress in subsequent years.¹ By 1918, federal
immigration legislation enabled the government to expel aliens who advocated
the overthrow of government by force or violence or belonged to organizations
associated with such goals.² As with anarchist terrorism in the early 1900s, the
U.S. government employed exclusionary immigration legislation as a form of
counterterrorism to detain revolutionary ideologies at the border. The main focus

¹ Mary S. Barton, “The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist
Terrorism, 1898–1904” Diplomatic History 39 (April 2015) 39: 303–30.
² Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919–1943
(Copenhagen: University of Cophenhagen Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 26–7; Melvyn Leffler,
The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1994), 14–15.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
   :  ..     73

was on any connection to Soviet Russia, which Palmer and Hoover regarded as a
state sponsor of terror.
Mitchell and Hoover may have conflated radicals of different stripes and
transgressed American legal norms. Yet the call to arms from Moscow was real.
While the Communist International professed to be a supranational organization
comprised of likeminded revolutionaries, its agents advanced foreign policy
objectives of the Soviet Party, which dominated the organization. That
September, just prior to the Palmer raids, radicals in the United States heeded
Lenin’s call and organized themselves into two rival communist parties: the
Communist Party of America, led by Charles Ruthenberg; and the Communist
Labor Party, led by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. Both competed for Moscow’s
attention while advocating the end of U.S. constitutional government.³
Mass arrests and deportations brought on by the Red Scare convinced com-
munist parties to go underground. Leaders adopted aliases and held secret meet-
ings where cadres distributed party literature. Responding to Moscow’s orders, in
1921, the Communist International pressured the two American parties to merge
into a consolidated Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).
The Comintern further directed American communists to organize a quasi-
independent, aboveground party apparatus while maintaining a covert arm to
assist Soviet espionage operations. Both entities were funded by Moscow.⁴
An embryonic U.S. intelligence apparatus emerged in response to the
Communist International. This included a special relationship between U.S. and
British policy elites, who viewed the Communist International as a common
enemy that merited the sharing of each nation’s most sensitive intelligence even
as the two countries competed in a naval build-up and failed to reach agreement
on stopping the international arms trade, as described in Chapter 1.⁵ Given the
level of anti-British sentiment in the United States in the war’s immediate
aftermath—which contributed to the defeat of the Treaty of Versailles in the
Senate—this relationship defied the odds and reflected close personal relationships

³ Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, eds., The Secret World of American
Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 5, 7, 21–2; Fridrikh I. Firsov, Harvey Klehr,
and John Earl Haynes, eds., Secret Cables of the Comintern, 1933–43 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2014), 7–8.
⁴ Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, eds., The Secret World of American Communism, 6–7, 17–19. The
release of Soviet Comintern records in the 1990s underscored the close relationship between the
CPUSA and Communist International. This relationship had long been a source of debate. The
orthodox view of the CPUSA as subordinate to the Comintern emerged in the immediate postwar
years of the Second World War. Revisionists then challenged this view by emphasizing domestic
aspects of the American Communist movement over the influence of the Comintern. Most recently,
“neo-orthodox” scholars have reasserted the importance of the Comintern and cite records in Russian
archives to support their case. See Hugh Wilford, “The Communist International and the American
Communist Party,” in International Communism and the Communist International 1919–1943, eds.
Tim Rees and Andre Thorpe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 225.
⁵ See Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 259–94.
74    

that had been established during the war.⁶ The Department of State’s access to
British intelligence regarding the Communist International provided American
officials with a broader understanding of communism’s global reach; it also
entrenched the perception of the Soviet Union as a state sponsor of foreign terrorist
groups.
Anglo-American information sharing did not coalesce into a unified counter-
terrorism policy, however. The two governments remained divided over British
imperialism abroad and near. The U.S. Congress and American public largely
supported an independent Ireland, while Samuel Gompers’s American Federation
of Labor and a number of church groups called for Indian independence.⁷ Despite
highlighting Soviet assistance to revolutionary anticolonial movements, British
intelligence services failed to convince interlocuters within the U.S. State
Department that Irish and Indian diaspora groups residing in the United States
constituted actual terrorist organizations.
After the First World War, the accumulation and interpretation of U.S. intel-
ligence took place in the Office of the Under Secretary of State and a parallel office,
the Office of the Chief Special Agent. In 1927, these functions were transferred to
the Division of Eastern European Affairs, which remained opposed to recognizing
the Soviet Union because of Moscow’s support of foreign terrorist groups and
interference in the domestic affairs of other countries. While some information
sharing with British secret services and attachés continued, anti-communism
coordination between the two governments declined as both London and
Washington gravitated toward policies more clearly aligned with a narrow con-
ception of the national self-interest. It may have been the precursor to the Five
Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement between the United States and United
Kingdom and its former dominions Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which
would take hold during the Second World War and outlive even the Cold War.
During the 1920s, however, this relationship was fraught with parochial interests
that were often more pressing than a shared sense of Anglo-American community
and destiny.

The Red Scare

Lasting from the spring of 1919 until May Day 1920, the Red Scare in the United
States was a short-yet-intense convulsion of anti-radicalism that extended the
transition from wartime to peacetime. An ecumenical term for purported

⁶ For this view, see John Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail: Anglophobia in the United States, 1921–48
(London: MacMillan, 1999), 12. See also David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance
1937–41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1981), 1–3, 7–36.
⁷ Moser, Twisting the Lion’s Tail, 21–3.
   :  ..     75

subversives, “Reds” contrasted with the “100 per cent Americanism” of the war
era, during which time the American Protective League alerted Americans to the
dangers of sabotage and sedition and the Woodrow Wilson administration set up
the Committee on Public Information to preach strict patriotism. The Wilson
administration, with the reliable support of the U.S. Congress, ensured loyalty
through extensive sedition and espionage legislation and, in October 1918, broad-
ened immigration law to allow the government to exclude and deport aliens who
were either anarchists or merely proponents of the violent overthrow of the
American government. As Bolshevik-inspired revolutions erupted in central and
east Europe—including the People’s State of Bavaria and the Hungarian Soviet
Republic—communism emerged as the great threat facing the American home-
land. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks created the Third International to carry
forward the revolution; by September 1919 two domestic communist groups
inside the United States raised the red banner. As strikes, riots, and bombs
exploded across the nation, government officials and patriotic groups mobilized
to stamp out radicalism and defeat the revolutionary enemy within.⁸
A series of spectacular bombings ushered in the Red Scare. In April 1919, a mail
bomb exploded in the house of former Georgia senator Thomas Hardwick, co-
author of the Immigration Act of 1918, injuring his wife and their maid. Federal
postal authorities subsequently found thirty-six package bombs intended for
prominent politicians, judges, and industrialists. New York police officials imme-
diately claimed that an IWW-Bolshevik plot was behind the attack. Two months
later, on June 2, 1919, coordinated attacks rocked eight American cities, as bombs
exploded simultaneously in New York, Boston, Newtonville (Massachusetts),
Philadelphia, Paterson (New Jersey), Washington, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.
Littering the ground of the bomb sites were identical fliers printed on pink
paper and signed “The Anarchist Fighters.” The most “politically powerful” of
the bombs exploded on R Street in Washington, D.C., killing the bomber and
blowing away the front part of the town house of Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer, who escaped with his family unhurt but deeply shaken.⁹
In the wake of the attacks, Congress appropriated $500,000 to the Bureau of
Investigation (BI), forerunner to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to deal
with the “terrorist menace.” Palmer reorganized the Justice Department to catch
the bombers and stifle foreign left-wing activities, and deployed a staff carried
over from the wartime effort with experience in ferreting out domestic enemies.
Palmer added a new assistant attorney general, Francis P. Garvan, a former chief

⁸ Robert Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919–1920 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1955), 12–17; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism,
1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 204.
⁹ Stanley Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer: Politician (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 204;
Schmidt, Red Scare, 26; Charles McCormick, Seeing Reds: Federal Surveillance of Radicals in the
Pittsburgh Mill District, 1917–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 102.
76    

investigator of the Alien Property Bureau, and appointed as director of the

Bureau of Investigation William J. Flynn, a well-known detective and former
Secret Service chief. In mid-June, a twenty-four-year-old lawyer, J. Edgar
Hoover, took over the General Intelligence Division (GID)—better known as
the Radical Division—after his position as an attorney in the Alien Enemy
Registration Section had been abolished.¹⁰
Reporting to Garvin and Palmer, Hoover became responsible for tracking and
gauging the strength of American radical organizations.¹¹ His General Intelligence
Division oversaw investigations of radicals and collected all available information
concerning subversive groups. Hoover himself set up an index file of over 200,000
cards on radical leaders, publications, and organizations, while the GID combed
through 625 radical newspapers, including 251 “ultra-radical” publications, and
paid special attention to the distribution of works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and
Trotsky. Although the Radical Division had been stood up to investigate the
bombings, Hoover reached beyond strictly criminal cases and established close
ties with the Department of Labor. Since the vast majority of members of
American communist and anarchist organizations hailed from foreign lands—
some 90 percent, by its estimate, and those mostly from southern and central
Europe—Hoover instructed his Washington staff of thirty and some sixty special
agents in the field to focus on deportation cases.¹²
Support from the Department of Labor was necessary to advance exclusionary
immigration legislation to allow the Justice Department to act on Hoover’s
orders.¹³ Yet the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Immigration lacked the
manpower for large-scale investigations. By the terms of Hoover’s arrangement,
the Immigration Bureau provided warrants and special funds, while the
Department of Justice’s BI investigated, captured, and questioned alien radicals.
Immigration officials then completed the deportation proceedings.¹⁴ Deportation
cases turned on the wartime Immigration Act of 1918, which made membership in
an anarchist organization a deportable offense. Anarchism was defined as advocat-
ing the overthrow of government by force and violence. In 1920, Congress broad-
ened the law to include possession of radical literature or financial contributions
toward anarchist organizations. The deportation provisions of immigration law,

¹⁰ McCormick, Seeing Reds, 103, 110, 148; Edwin Hoyt, The Palmer Raids, 1919–1920: An Attempt
To Suppress Dissent (New York: The Seabury Press, 1963), 37; Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man
and the Secrets (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 79; Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 207.
¹¹ Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 207; Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 166–8.
¹² Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 217; Higham, Strangers in the Land, 227.
¹³ Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 223.
¹⁴ McCormick, Seeing Reds, 110, 148; J.E. Hoover, Special Assistant to the Attorney General to
Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner-General of Immigration, October 24, 1919; Anthony Caminetti,
Commissioner-General of Immigration to J.E. Hoover, Special Assistant to the Attorney General,
October 31, 1919, Box 2803, Record Group 85: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(hereinafter RG 85), U.S. National Archives (hereinafter NARA).
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however, remained under the sole jurisdiction of the Labor Department’s

Immigration Bureau.¹⁵
In other words, the Justice Department had scant legal basis for launching the
infamous Palmer raids, which commenced on November 7, 1919, when federal
agents arrested hundreds of Russian immigrants connected to the Union of
Russian Workers. Deportation hearings quickly followed. On December 21,
1919, the USS Buford—nicknamed the “Soviet Arc”—left New York harbor
carrying 249 alien residents, including the unreconstructed anarchists Emma
Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had served prison sentences for their
1892 “propaganda by deed,” the attempted assassination of U.S. industrialist
Henry Clay Frick. Goldman and Berkman were “terrorists at heart” who “would
not hesitate to resort to force and violence,” as Palmer put it to Congress.¹⁶ Among
radical groups, in most instances, the Communist and the Communist Labor
parties were the Justice Department’s primary targets. On January 2, 1920, the
Justice Department raided the homes and offices of alleged communists in over
thirty cities, arresting thousands (estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000).
Meanwhile, as Palmer lobbied Congress for the passage of peacetime sedition
bill, the New York State Senate refused to sit five duly-elected socialists.¹⁷
Until the spring of 1920, the Bureau of Immigration’s top administrators went
along with the Justice Department. With Secretary of Labor William Wilson’s
blessing, then Acting Secretary of Labor Louis Post voided thousands of deport-
ation warrants against communist alien radicals arrested that January. Palmer had
Post arraigned on impeachment charges for hindering the deportation cases.
In the spring of 1920, the Radical Division issued warnings about impending
general strikes, assassinations, and bombings scheduled for May 1, 1920. Major
cities mobilized their police forces for an emergency. In New York, a police force
of 11,000 remained on duty the whole night with extra security forces stationed
outside public buildings and the homes of public officials. In Boston, the police
posted several automobiles armed with machine guns around the city. May Day
came and went without incident. “No bombs, no riots, no assassinations. Not even
a noisy meeting,” admonished a later historian.¹⁸ On May 28, 1920, members of
the National Popular Government League, aided by Post’s lawyer Jackson
H. Ralston, published To the American People: Report Upon the Illegal Practices
of the United States Department of Justice. Signed by twelve respected legal

¹⁵ E.P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 444–5; Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 218.
¹⁶ U.S. Congress, House Committee on Rules, “Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer on Charges
Made Against the Department of Justice by Louis F. Post and Others, on June 1, 1920,” Investigation of
Charges Against the Department of Justice (66th Cong., 2d Sess., 1920), 10.
¹⁷ Schmidt, Red Scare, 26–7; U.S. Congress, House Committee on Rules, Hearings on H.Res. 522,
Investigation of the Administration of Louis F. Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor, in the Matter of the
Deportation of Aliens (66th Cong., 2d. Sess., 1920), 35.
¹⁸ McCormick, Seeing Reds, 148–9, 176; Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer, 235.
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professionals, the sixty-seven-page report charged the Justice Department with

conducting arrests and searches without warrants, holding aliens incommuni-
cado, forging evidence, using agents provocateurs, and distributing political
propaganda.¹⁹
While the Red Scare effectively ended with the non-attack of May Day 1920, the
prospect of violence remained. On September 16, 1920, a man drove a wagon filled
with a large dynamite bomb equipped with a timer and packed with cast-iron
slugs to the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in the financial center of New York.
As the bells of Trinity Church chimed the noon hour, the bomb exploded, killing
thirty-eight people and wounding hundreds more. Property damage exceeded
$2 million. An official investigation lasted three years, but like the 1919 bombing
cases, produced no convictions.²⁰ While both Hoover and Director of the Bureau
of Investigation William Burns believed at the time that a Soviet or American
communist plot was behind the bombing, historians have since pointed to Mario
Buda, an anarchist follower of Luigi Galleani and a close friend of Nicola Sacco
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, as the chief suspect in the attack.²¹
Ultimately, the Wall Street bombing did not lead to a restoration of the pre-
May level of government-directed anti-radicalism. Industrialists turned against
the deportations as employers feared that the anti-radical campaign would per-
manently stigmatize alien workers as dangerous and lead to immigration restric-
tions that would cut off the flow of cheap labor. And press outlets such as the New
York Times, fearful that Congress would enact a federal sedition law that might be
used against them, began to call into question the effectiveness of the govern-
ment’s policies.²² From January 19 to March 3, 1921, a sub-committee of the
Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings into whether the Justice Department
had engaged in activities beyond the scope of constitutional authority. Partisan
gridlock in these and subsequent hearings lasted until January 1923, when the
Senate Judiciary Committee washed its hands of the matter. Only in 1924, on the

¹⁹ McCormick, Seeing Reds, 176; Kenneth Ackerman, Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the
Assault on Civil Liberties (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007), 355; Coben, A. Mitchell Palmer,
238–9.
²⁰ Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: The Story of America in its First Age of Terror (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1; Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 205–6.
²¹ An immigrant from Italy, Galleani had built up a small group of militant anarchists prior to his
deportation from the United States, in January 1919, and urged them to seek revenge against the federal
government. Revolutionaries from his group most likely sent the mail package bombs in April 1919 and
carried out the dynamite attacks in June 1919. Buda’s bombing of Wall Street in September 1920
foreshadowed a number of domestic and foreign bombings that occurred in protest of the trial and
execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which became a cause célèbre for the international left. Richard Bach
Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014), 360; Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded, 207–11; Avrich, Sacco
and Vanzetti, 205–6; Moshik Tempkin, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009).
²² Schmidt, Red Scare, 39; Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, eds., The Secret World of American
Communism, 7.
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heels of extensive corruption charges made against the Warren Harding admin-
istration, did President Coolidge, who succeeded Harding after his death, appoint
Harlan Fiske Stone as his attorney general and task him with cleaning up the BI
and ceasing its unrestrained political surveillance.²³
Following his appointment, Attorney General Stone made it clear that the
Bureau of Investigation would be completely “divorced from the vagaries of
political influence.”²⁴ He announced a series of reforms that included prohibiting
wiretaps, dissolving the GID, ending the Bureau’s ties with private detective
agencies, and stopping the dissemination of anti-radical propaganda. These
changes were intended to regulate the Bureau’s unregulated domestic intelligence
investigations and refurbish the Justice Department’s reputation after the Teapot
Dome scandal.²⁵
In the immediate aftermath of the Red Scare, political surveillance shifted to the
Department of State where officials monitored the political activities of Americans
abroad and intercepted letters to and from foreign and domestic radical organ-
izations. The most-watched organizations tended to be communist parties, and,
by the end of 1920, most countries had one. While the Comintern publicized
many of its activities, the deliberations of its leading bodies, including the
Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), remained secret.
In particular, the organization sought to obscure the connections between the
Communist International and domestic communist groups, as the political and
financial dependence of the latter on the former might elicit the (oftentimes
legitimate) charge that these groups followed directions from Moscow.²⁶
By the end of the Red Scare, most Americans associated terrorist activity with
communists and the radical left. This assumption built off older stereotypes about
militant anarchists, Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), and Russian
social revolutionaries, and was given new life with the creation of the Communist
International and the domestic terror bombings of 1919–20. Arrests and deport-
ations of the Red Scare notwithstanding, the federal government continued to
worry about Soviet influence abroad and in the United States especially.
Authorities turned to immigration law to safeguard the homeland and sought to

²³ Schmidt, Red Scare, 314–24.

²⁴ The Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, History, 1933–35, Box
191, Papers of Homer S. Cummings (HSC), Special Collections Department, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA; Memorandum for the Attorney General, June 23, 1933, Box 174, HSC.
²⁵ Kenneth O’Reilly, Hoover and the Un-Americans: The FBI, HUA, and the Red Menace
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 13–23. In May 1938, the House of Representatives
established a Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities which revived the FBI’s
surveillance machinery and allowed the Bureau to disseminate political information acquired through
domestic intelligence investigations.
²⁶ Memorandum for the Attorney General, June 23, 1933, Box 174, HSC; Schmidt, Red Scare, 327;
Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, eds., International Communism and the Communist International,
1919–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 1; Firsov, Klehr, and Haynes, eds., Secret
Cables of the Comintern, 1933–43, 13, 18.
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upgrade foreign intelligence to monitor the Soviet threat. The Immigration Acts of
1921 and 1924 put a cap on the number of foreigners from outside the Western
Hemisphere allowed to settle in the United States. Intended in part to preserve
America’s ethnic composition, the legislation allowed in immigrants from Britain
and Germany while keeping out alleged Italian anarchists and Russian
Bolsheviks—often portrayed as Jewish—and their revolutionary doctrines.²⁷
Throughout this period, the State Department was monitoring the activities of
the Communist International from its missions abroad.

Intelligence and the State Department

After the Second World War, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the Central Intelligence
Agency, which was created by the National Security Act of 1947, presided over the
handling of domestic and foreign intelligence. After the First World War, how-
ever, responsibilities for domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering were trans-
ferred to the Department of State. Two offices in the State, War, and Navy
Building—later renamed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (more com-
monly known today as the Old Executive Office Building)—oversaw the collec-
tion, analysis, and interpretation of intelligence pertaining to the Soviet Union and
the Communist International.
The first office, the newly established Office of the Under Secretary of State,
replaced the Office of the Counselor and inherited its portfolio all under the
continued direction of Frank L. Polk. During the Great War, then Counselor Polk
had served as the State Department’s chief intelligence coordinator, liaising with
the British and French embassies to run counter-intelligence operations. Now,
hoping to institutionalize intelligence as the under secretary—a position created in
1919 to be the second-ranking State Department official (the precursor to deputy
secretary of state, which was established in 1972)—Polk created a special unit to
sustain wartime intelligence liaisons with foreign governments.
The second office, the Office of the Chief Special Agent, was created to assist
that of the Under Secretary of State. Leland Harrison, who had assisted Polk and
Secretary of State Robert Lansing on intelligence matters during the war, served as
the diplomatic secretary for both offices, overseeing investigations of organiza-
tions and individuals suspected of subversive activity in the United States and
abroad.
The State Department retained its intelligence functions even after Post
returned to private legal practice in the summer of 1920. Staffed by a cohort of

²⁷ Heale, American Anticommunism, 88; Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration

Policy, 211; David Fogleson, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian
Civil War, 1917–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 33, 41–2.
   :  ..     81

men who had attended Ivy League schools and worked together in the State
Department fighting German subversion and espionage during the First World
War, the Office of the Under Secretary of State continued to collect foreign and
domestic intelligence for another seven years.²⁸ In addition to the work of the
Office of the Under Secretary of State and Chief Special Agent, the Division of
Eastern European Affairs and its longstanding bureau chief, Robert Kelley, inter-
cepted and analyzed Moscow’s instructions to the communist parties of the world.
The Communist International was target number one, in other words, and the
majority of information about it came from the U.S. Legation at Riga, Latvia,
which was established in 1922 and served as the U.S. eyes and ears on the Soviet
Union prior to the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union,
in November 1933, and the reopening of U.S. Embassy Moscow in 1934.²⁹ The
Division of Eastern European Affairs, which Robert Kelley took over in 1926,
remained in operation until 1937, when Secretary of State Cordell Hull merged it
with the Division of Western European Affairs to create the Division of European
Affairs. Opposing this consolidation was U.S. Ambassador to France, William
Bullitt, Jr., who had served as the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, from
1933–36, and was by that point deeply suspicious of Soviet intentions. The
“division built up by Kelley in our Department of State was by far the most
efficient agency in any government of the appraisal of the activities of the Third
International [the Communist International],” as Bullitt put it to Hull—“to say
nothing of the situation within the Soviet Union.”³⁰ Unpersuaded by Bullitt,
Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles abolished the Division of Eastern
European Affairs and sent Kelley off to Ankara, Turkey.³¹ After the Second
World War, the State Department’s involvement in clandestine work declined,
but from the First World War through the early 1930s it stood at the center of
America’s burgeoning intelligence apparatus.

²⁸ Letters sent by the U.S. Embassy in London to the Office of the Counselor, 1924–28, Department
of State Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the Chief Special Agent, Record Group 59:
General Records of the Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), NARA; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones,
American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 128–9.
²⁹ The work of the Division of Eastern European Affairs is perhaps better known than the Office of
the Under Secretary of State and Chief Special Agent. Many officials in the Division of East European
also published memoirs about their experiences working with Kelley and serving in Riga and Moscow.
See, for example, Joseph Davies, Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1941); George
Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Charles Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–
1969 (New York: Norton, 1973); George Baer, ed., A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet
Diplomatic Relations: The Memoirs of Loy W. Henderson (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986).
See also Natalie Grant, “The Russian Section: A Window on the Soviet Union,” Diplomatic History 2
(1978): 107–15.
³⁰ William C. Bullitt to Cordell Hull, July 19, 1937, Reel No. 15, Cordell Hull Papers, Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress (LC), Washington, D.C., U.S.A.
³¹ O’Toole, Honorable Treachery, 326–7.
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Dispatches from London

Like the Americans, the British government focused on internal “subversive”

threats after the First World War. As described in Chapter 2, London regarded
the Bolshevik Revolution as a danger both to the country and its empire. In 1919,
the War Cabinet and Home Secretary established a new department, the
Directorate of Intelligence, for “collecting and dealing with intelligence relating
to disturbances (whether arising out of labor troubles or otherwise), seditious
meetings and conspiracies, and revolutionary movements both at home and
abroad.” Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was
put in charge of the agency. In this position, he issued daily reports on labor unrest
and prepared “periodical digests of home and foreign intelligence as to seditious
propaganda and revolutionary movements.”³² In addition, both the Special
Branch of the Metropolitan Police and the Security Service (MI5) produced
surveys on revolutionary movements that played up any indications of foreign
support for communist agitators inside the United Kingdom. The Secret
Intelligence Service (SIS)—known during the Second World War and thereafter
as MI6—provided foreign intelligence, while the Cipher School (GC&CS, which,
during the Second World War, was based in Bletchley Park, and since 1946 has
been called GCHQ) analyzed intercepted messages from Comintern headquarters
in Moscow to clandestine radio stations abroad.³³
The United Kingdom and the United States had kept a close intelligence
relationship throughout the First World War. Before the United States entered
the war, British Naval Intelligence provided information about German espionage
and subversion to Edward Bell, the second secretary of the American embassy in
London, who passed it on to Frank Polk and the Office of the Counselor. With the
approval of President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing,
Polk worked with Sir William Wiseman and the Secret Intelligence Service to run
covert operations, including one in Russia using the British writer W. Somerset
Maugham.³⁴

³² Edward Troup to B.B. Cubitt, April 1919, The National Archives of the United Kingdom
(hereinafter TNA), London, England, WO 32/21382; Edward Troup to Winston Churchill, April
1919, TNA, WO 32/21382.
³³ Christopher Andrew, Her Majesty’s Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence
Community (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 259; Firsov, Klehr, and Haynes, eds., Secret Cables of
the Comintern, 1933–43, 20. Signals intelligence collected by GC&CS allowed the security services to
identify secret members of the British Communist Party, couriers traveling from Moscow, and the
names of British and colonial communists studying at the Lenin School in the USSR.
³⁴ Norman Thwaites to William Wiseman, November 22, 1918, Wiseman William George Eden
Papers, MS 666, Series I, Box 3, Folder 84, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library, New
Haven, CT; O’Toole, Honorable Treachery, 241–63; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History
of American Secret Intelligence, 2nd ed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 60–80. In 1928,
W. Somerset Maugham published Ashenden: The British Agent, a series of fictional short stories based
on his spy days in Russia when he attempted to help the Russian provisional government defeat the
Bolsheviks.
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Anglo-American information sharing during wartime was jeopardized by the

bureaucratic infighting of peacetime. Fear among MI5 and SIS leadership that
Whitehall would seek to merge (or scrap) these organizations as a cost-cutting
measure led to turf battles. As the Home Office’s Director of Intelligence,
Thomson and his agency kept the responsibility for dealing with civil subversion
and domestic revolutionary movements until 1921. MI5 was “only concerned with
Communism as it affects the Armed Forces of the Crown,” according to long-
standing director of MI5 Vernon Kell.³⁵ Yet the Security Service’s responsibility
for military counter-subversion entitled it to monitor civilian pro-Bolshevik
movements, again according to Kell, as these groups were attempting to subvert
the armed forces.³⁶
Circumstances brought on by the Red Scare demonstrated the continued need
for Anglo-American information sharing, beginning with the deportation of
alleged radicals. In July 1919, the Department of Labor requested that the
British Embassy and U.S. Department of State keep it apprised of all cases in
which the British government proposed to “deport to this country American
citizens connected with the Industrial Workers of the World or with Bolshevist
or anarchist propaganda.”³⁷ As a gesture of good will—if, indeed, the term applies
here—the Department of Labor notified the British Embassy when U.S. officials
deported British subjects for advocating the unlawful destruction of property.
Meanwhile, Scotland Yard provided information to the State Department on an
ad hoc basis. In September 1920, the police agency informed U.S. officials that
Moscow planned to establish a Comintern headquarters in Mexico for the dis-
semination of Soviet propaganda in North and South America. A Soviet agent was
en route from Moscow, it reported, with the intention of fomenting a revolution
on America’s southern border.³⁸ From foreign attachés and private individuals
connected to companies working in Mexico—especially in the petroleum
industry—the State Department received additional reports that the Mexican
government and Comintern were attempting to “undermine American capitalism

³⁵ Quoted in Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (New York:
Knopf, 2009), 140.
³⁶ Keith Jeffrey, The Secret History of MI6 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 141–5;
Christopher Andrew, The Defense of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin
Group, 2009), 140–2; and Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 243; Donald Cameron Watt, “British
Intelligence and the Coming of the Second World War in Europe,” in Ernest May, ed., Knowing
One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 241–6.
³⁷ John W. Abercrombie, acting secretary of state to secretary of labor, July 12, 1919, Box 2803, RG
85, NARA.
³⁸ Scotland Yard to Special Agent in Charge, September 20, 1920, Box 1, The Murphy Collection on
International Communism, 1917–58, Record Group 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency
(hereinafter RG 263), NARA.
84    

and to annihilate its influence in Mexico,” and make Mexico the center of
communist activities inside the United States.³⁹
A key moment in the peacetime establishment of the special intelligence
relationship was the appointment to the U.S. Embassy in London of a Boston
lawyer and Harvard graduate, Boylston Adams Beal, “a typical Bostonian as
evidenced by his name—a Boylston, an Adams, and a Beal.”⁴⁰ Indeed, Beal’s
ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower, and his family tree included
John Adams and John Quincy Adams as well as philanthropist Ward Nicholas
Boylston, the namesake of Boston’s Boylston Street and Harvard University’s
Boylston Hall. In 1914, Beal volunteered at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, where he
became a special assistant to Ambassador James Gerard overseeing wartime
efforts to protect British citizens and property in Germany and its territories.⁴¹
In January 1916, Secretary of State Robert Lansing transferred Beal to London and
appointed him a special agent of the Department of State at $2,000 (around
$37,500 today) a year plus travel expenses. Beal remained in this position, after
the war, and later became an uncompensated honorary counselor, retiring from
government in 1928.⁴²
By 1917, Beal had become honorary secretary of the London Chapter of the
American Red Cross and grown close to Ambassador of the United States to the
Court of St James’s, Walter Page, who alienated President Woodrow Wilson with
his fervent pro-British stances prior to U.S. entrance into the war as an Associated
Power on the side of the Allies in April 1917. Through Page, Beal dined with other
important wartime figures on both sides of the Atlantic, including Admiral
William Benson, the first chief of U.S. naval operations, who oversaw the massive
transport of the American Expeditionary Forces to France.⁴³ Beal also witnessed
Ambassador Page’s close relationship with his British counterparts and his estab-
lishment of a precedent of information sharing at his embassy. The most import-
ant information passed would be the January 1917 “Zimmermann Telegram,” in

³⁹ John Dyneley Prince, from Commandant St. Denis, the French Military Attaché in Copenhagen,
to secretary of state, December 23, 1924, Box 1, The Murphy Collection on International Communism,
1917–58, RG 263, NARA; A.C. Frost, American Consul to Secretary of State, May 14, 1926, in ibid.
⁴⁰ Harvard College Class of 1886, Sixtieth Anniversary Report (Anchor Linotype Printing Co.,
1946).
⁴¹ Kenneth Steuer, “Chapter 3 The U.S. Government and Prisoner-of-War Responsibilities,” in
Pursuit of an “Unparalleled Opportunity:” The American YMCA and Prisoner of War Diplomacy
among the Central Power Nations during World War I, 1914–1923 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005).
⁴² Robert Lansing to Boylston Beal, January 27, 1916, Letters From Various Correspondents to
Boylston Adams Beal, 1871–1940 (MS Am 1214). Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereinafter
Beal Letters, Harvard); Mary S. Barton, “Special Attaché Boylston Beal and the Origins of the US-UK
Intelligence Relationship.” Studies in Intelligence 63 (June 2019): 7–17.
⁴³ Walter Page to Boylston Beal, November 9, 1917, Beal Letters, Harvard.
   :  ..     85

which Germany proposed a military alliance with Mexico, and which the British
deciphered and passed on to the Americans.⁴⁴
As personalized by Beal (shown in Figure 3.1)—he would characterize his
sources as “our friends”—the relationship between transatlantic intelligence
elites reflected not only shared interests and common enemies but also genuine
friendship. In reports to the Office of the Under Secretary of State and the Chief
Special Agent in Washington D.C., Beal shared information on the Communist
International, American and British communists, and Soviet counterfeiting oper-
ations. Under the direction of Frank Polk and, later, career diplomats Arthur Lane
and Alexander Kirk, as described above, these offices oversaw the investigations
into those organizations and individuals—inside and outside the United States—
who were suspected of subversive activity.⁴⁵
However, the close relationship had its limits. Requests from Beal and his
“friends” in British intelligence that the State Department investigate Indian and
Irish revolutionaries in the United States met with limited success. In particular,
the British desired information about individuals and organizations that financed
and armed militant groups in India and Ireland. ⁴⁶
London found a more receptive audience in Washington when it shared confi-
dential information regarding the activities of the Communist International.

Figure 3.1 Boylston A. Beal, upon his graduation from Harvard, in 1886 (left), and
twenty-five years later, in 1911 (right). (Harvard University Archive)

⁴⁴ See Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry
into World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2012).
⁴⁵ Office of the Counselor and the Chief Special Agent, 1915–28, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁶ Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar, 64–8.
86    

Throughout the mid-1920s, Beal sent back to Washington reports on American

citizens traveling in Europe who were in contact with anarchists and communists,
especially in the United Kingdom; the dossiers on members of the Comintern’s
Anglo-American Section; details of Soviet counterfeit operations; and the names
and addresses of American radicals who were seeking connections in the
Philippines and China, upon receiving instructions from the Red International
Labor Union (or “Profintern,” as it was commonly known, after profsoyuzov, the
Russian plural of trade union), which the Comintern had established to infiltrate
international trade unions. Beal also supplied the State Department with copies of
secret reports prepared by the Home Office, MI5, and the Special Branch.⁴⁷ These
reports described revolutionary groups operating inside the United Kingdom,
along with information about the organizational structure of the Soviet government
and the Communist International. Beal made sure to include charts of the
Executive Committee of the Third International, the names of American represen-
tatives on the Executive Committee, and information on the Society for the
Promotion of Cultural Relations with Soviet Russia and its connections to subver-
sive activities.⁴⁸
British intelligence officers tailored the information they shared with Beal so
that British security concerns were harmonized with U.S. homeland security
concerns. International communism threatened empire and democracy in equal
measure by the British depictions of the threat. In May 1926, they passed on
information that Lovett Fort-Whiteman, an African American activist, would be
in Europe meeting with the Communist Party in Great Britain and hoping to
organize a World Congress of Negro Peoples. With equal parts concern about the
spread of anticolonial and communist movements, the police in Britain requested
that the State Department supplement its own efforts to track Whiteman’s
movements.⁴⁹
“Our friends tell me that it has come to their knowledge that one Kamal Hamud
at the American University, Beirut, Syria [sic], is proposing to place an order with
the Communists here [in the United Kingdom] for a quantity of literature,” Beal
wrote State Department officials, also that month. He proposed that the State
Department warn university authorities in that city; following a conversation with
the chief of the Near East division, Allen Dulles, he transmitted the British report

⁴⁷ Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, April 11, 1924; Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, April 23,
1924; Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, May 21, 1924, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁸ Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, April 1, 1924; Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, April 23,
1924; Frederick P. Hibbard to Arthur Lane, September 29, 1924; Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, July
27, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the Chief Special Agent, RG 59,
NARA. Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, October 28, 1925, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary
and the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA. Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, October 10, 1925, Office of
the Counselor/Under Secretary and the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁹ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, May 27, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
   :  ..     87

to the American consulate in Beirut.⁵⁰ Beal also relayed reports on Latin America,
supplying U.S. officials in Washington with updates on the Chilean government’s
crackdown on the Chilean Communist Party, which was forced to go under-
ground.⁵¹ In 1927, after British authorities raided the headquarters of the Soviet
trade delegation and ARCOS (the All Russian Co-operative Society) in London,
Beal provided the State Department with secret documents found on British
communists about Comintern agents operating throughout South America.⁵²
Anglo-American information sharing could not transcend fundamental polit-
ical disagreements, however. British officials could not abide U.S. refuge to
militant Irish republicans. As Beal reported to the State Department, one of his
most prominent “friends” had called on him to say that British intelligence
suspected that the Irish Republican Army, which refused to recognize the 1921
Anglo-Irish Treaty that kept Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom and
established the Irish Free State (“Ireland,” after 1937), was establishing a base of
operations in the United States. “My friend told me that he felt there were schemes
[afoot] in the United States for giving help and assistance to those in Ireland
who were unfavorable to the present Free State by either raising money for that
purpose or by sending arms and ammunition to Ireland,” he wrote. Beal
expressed frustration that the State Department was supplying information on
only those Irish groups in the United States who acted under the “order of the
‘Reds’ and were plotting for the overthrow of established government in Ireland
and elsewhere.”⁵³ In this example and elsewhere, there was not much daylight
between Beal’s professional assessment and the policy advocated by the British
government.
British officials sought as much information as possible about Indian groups in
the United States that they had long believed were financing revolutionary ter-
rorists. During the war years British intelligence stressed the German sympathies
and contacts of Indian revolutionaries in the United States, particularly the leaders
of the Ghadar (“Mutiny”) party.⁵⁴ After the war, the British stressed the com-
munist affiliations of Indian nationalists, while Beal kept U.S. officials abreast of

⁵⁰ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, May 12, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵¹ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, March 31, 1927, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵² Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, June 18, 1927, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵³ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, March 25, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁴ In May 1918, a federal jury in San Francisco convicted twenty-nine members of the Ghadr Party
for conspiring to foment revolution in India in violation of U.S. neutrality. The “Hindu conspiracy”
trial resulted in prison sentences for most of the defendants. The government, however, did not arrest
Indian revolutionaries who steered clear of German connections and rejected revolutionary methods.
See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of
Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 85.
88    

communism’s encroachment in India and the activities of Indian revolutionaries

in the United States.⁵⁵
In 1924, Beal reported back on a case in which Indians in Mexico were
transmitting funds through the United State to India, and relayed a request
from “our friends” to have the State Department quietly ascertain how much
money had been moved to India.⁵⁶ He also relayed requests from the British police
to learn more about Indian revolutionaries who either traveled or resided in the
United States as well as the Indo-American Information Bureau and the National
League of India, which were supporting “Indian extremists.”⁵⁷ In May 1925, Beal
asked Arthur Lane at the State Department to conduct a background search on an
American citizen, Evelyn Roy, the wife of the Indian revolutionary M.N. Roy,
sending a copy of an article in The Times alleging that Roy used a Mexican
passport, promoted anti-British and pro-communist publications, and financially
supported her husband, who, as described in Chapter 2, was a leading member of
the Communist International in the 1920s. According to the article, Mrs. Roy was
subsidizing a literary salon in France—a “Comité pro-Hindu”—whose members
strongly criticized the deportation of communists from India and the policies of
French colonial authorities in India. “The lease of the committee’s office stands in
the name of a French anarchist but Mrs. Roy pays the rent,” it concluded.⁵⁸
Unsurprisingly, British officials expressed concern about the small arms trade
in conversations with Beal, who conveyed to Washington their warnings that
revolvers were “irregularly imported into India” and “got into the hands of Bengal
revolutionists.” “Our friends would be most grateful if any inquiry might be made
of the manufacturers of these revolvers, as to the hands through which they passed
until they left America.”⁵⁹ Discomfited by the use of the State Department to
conduct investigations of Indian revolutionaries inside the United States, Lane
responded that this type of work fell outside the State Department’s province.⁶⁰
The next year, Beal, who was undeterred, petitioned Alexander Kirk, his new
contact at the State Department, for more information about an Indian national
living in California. “I remember having a talk with Arthur Lane about these East

⁵⁵ Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, April 29, 1924, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁶ Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, August 5, 1924, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁷ Frederick Hibbard to Arthur Lane, October 3, 1924; Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, January 12,
1925; Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, January 31, 1925; Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, February 20, 1925;
Frederick P. Hibbard to Arthur Lane, October 3, 1925, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁸ Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, May 29, 1925, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁹ Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, September 17, 1925, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁶⁰ Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, June 13, 1925, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
   :  ..     89

Indians in America and his telling me that the feeling was that he could not go too
far on Indian lines,” as he put it. “Still I cannot help feeling that there are strong
indications of Bolshevik influence in India, and I feel sure that, if it seemed right
and proper to send information from time to time (I rather think that they
appreciate our feeling and so very seldom ask for information), it would be
appreciated.”⁶¹
Occasionally the close relationship between Beal and British intelligence caused
the State Department trouble, as when authorities in India kept two American
women under surveillance for their alleged connections to Indian revolutionaries
and searched their belongings on departure. After this incident, Lane wrote Beal
that “under the circumstances you may wish to consider the advisability of asking
your friends to use great caution in investigating the activities of and keeping
under surveillance American citizens abroad. Otherwise, as in the present case,
unpleasant reactions are bound to ensue and we will have no end of difficulty in
getting ourselves out of hot water.” Lane also warned that if “any publicity comes
of this case it will not help the well-known cause of Anglo-American relations.”⁶²
Beal similarly relayed information from the State Department to British offi-
cials and law enforcement. He provided British intelligence with copies of the
Senate’s hearings on the Soviet Union and additional notes from the Committee
on Foreign Relations.⁶³ When Captain Guy M. Liddell of the Special Branch and
later MI5—“one of the cleverest and most intelligent,” of Beal’s friends—planned
to travel to Washington, D.C. for his honeymoon, Beal requested that “some of the
men in the Department who are interested in the same sort of work” meet with
Liddell. Beal relayed that Liddell desired to discuss a special report prepared by the
Special Branch on the Soviet trade delegation and other revolutionary organiza-
tions in the United Kingdom, along with the use of sailors to transmit revolu-
tionary material between European and American ports.⁶⁴
As British and American officials learned, revolutionaries in the United States
and United Kingdom also coordinated their activities. The I.W.W. headquarters
in Chicago kept in touch with the Independent Labor Party in the United
Kingdom and held joint protests over the arrest and deportation of individuals
for political offenses.⁶⁵ The case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two
Italian immigrants and anarchists found guilty of murdering a paymaster and his

⁶¹ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, January 11, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁶² Arthur Lane to Boylston Beal, May 5, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁶³ Boylston Beal to Arthur Lane, June 3, 1924, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁶⁴ Boylston Beal to Alexander Kirk, March 29, 1926, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and
the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁶⁵ Boylston Beal to Norman Armour, May 3, 1924, Office of the Counselor/Under Secretary and the
Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
90    

guard during a robbery of a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts,

produced a large outcry in the United Kingdom. The rejection of their appeals
sparked further demonstrations in the summer of 1927, as many in Britain wrote
and visited the American embassy in London to protest the impending execution
of the two men. In May 1927, the Department of State wrote the American
embassy in London to be vigilant in view of the threats of violence against
American missions, including a recent attempt to blow up the embassy at
Buenos Aires and allegations that bombs were en route to U.S. embassies at
Montevideo and Berne.⁶⁶ Protests against the Sacco and Vanzetti case and exe-
cution led to bombings in three different American cities in August 1927, and
attacks on American consulates, embassies, and banks in France, Bulgaria, and
Argentina. Sporadic revenge attacks occurred until September 1932 when a
dynamite explosion destroyed the home of Judge Webster Thayer, the man who
had presided over the trial.⁶⁷
The U.S. Embassy in London received a large number of bomb threats in
regards to the Sacco and Vanzetti case.⁶⁸ No bombings occurred, but British
sympathizers and communists held a number of anti-American demonstrations,
about which the Special Branch kept U.S. officials apprised.⁶⁹ The close relation-
ship between the British police and American embassy officials during the Sacco
and Vanzetti demonstrations reflected a decade of information sharing about
militant and revolutionary groups. Beal’s personal contacts in the Special
Branch and British intelligence provided him and the State Department with
information on the Communist International and reinforced a belief that com-
munism’s expansion threatened American interests at home and abroad.
However, even allied governments disagreed over labeling revolutionaries as
terrorists, as the State Department limited the information it provided Beal and
the United Kingdom about the activities of Irish and Indian nationalists operating
inside the United States.

Dispatches from Riga

At the end of the 1920s the Division of Eastern European Affairs eclipsed the
Office of the Under Secretary of State as the main channel for receiving formal and
informal information on the Communist International. Under Robert Kelley’s
tenure the division grappled with the intellectual origins of terrorism in Russia
and the Comintern’s use of terrorist tactics to achieve policy goals. Kelley, a

⁶⁶ Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti, 3–4; Boylston Beal to Captain G.M. Liddell, July 22, 1927, TNA,
MEPO 38/97.
⁶⁷ Heale, American Anticommunism, 94; Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism, 360–4.
⁶⁸ Ray Atherton to Lt. Col. J.F.C. Carter, New Scotland Yard, August 8, 1927, TNA, MEPO 38/97.
⁶⁹ Inspector, Special Branch, Metropolitan Police, August 11, 1927, TNA, MEPO 38/97.
   :  ..     91

graduate of Harvard and the Sorbonne, had served as a military attaché in

Denmark, Finland, and the Baltic States before resigning from the army and
joining the State Department in 1922. After four years he was appointed chief of
the division. Kelley established a departmental training program for foreign
service officers to study Russian language, culture, and history in Europe.
Kelley’s colleague, Robert Murphy, maintained detailed files on Soviet propaganda
and subversion within the United States, which the division housed in its extensive
library on the Soviet Union.⁷⁰
The Division of Eastern European Affairs was the youngest politico-geographic
division in the State Department. The division’s name reflected the official recog-
nition by the United States in July 1922 of the new states of Estonia, Latvia, and
Lithuania, and the continued non-recognition of the Soviet Union. De Witt Poole,
formerly the chief of the Division of Russian Affairs, was appointed the first chief
of the Division of Eastern European Affairs. Poole had tracked the progress of
radicalism in the United States and abroad since the end of the First World War,
and he directed his division to produce regular summaries on radicalism for
the secretary of state, assistant secretaries, division chiefs, and other department
officers of similar rank.⁷¹
Only two men succeeded Poole as chief of the Division of Eastern European
Affairs: Evan Young (1923–25), a former commissioner to the Baltic provinces,
and Kelley (1925–37). Almost all of the officers appointed to the division had
previous military or diplomatic experience in eastern European countries. The
division’s work fell into two categories: American relations with the new postwar
states of Eastern Europe and American relations with the unrecognized Soviet
government.⁷²
The U.S. Legation at Riga, Latvia opened in 1922 and represented the single
U.S. diplomatic mission for the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania and
unofficially the Soviet Union. The Legation at Riga was the largest and most
important mission in northeastern Europe. Its staff, which is shown in Figure 3.2,
consisted of a minister, two regular diplomatic secretaries, a consular officer
detailed for special work in the legation, an interpreter who was an intelligence
officer during the war, a disbursing officer, two American clerks, (one of whom
was an experienced business expert and an economic expert in Russian matters),
and an array of translators and messengers. As with the Division of Eastern
European Affairs, the work of the legation fell into two divisions: Baltic work
and Russian work. The minister supervised both sections, but the staff was

⁷⁰ O’Toole, Honorable Treachery, 326–7.

⁷¹ De Witt Poole, Division of Russian Affairs to Secretary of State, December 4, 1919, 840.00B/
4–840.4061, Box 8678, 1910–29 Central Decimal File, RG 59, NARA.
⁷² Division of Eastern European Affairs, History and Personnel, The American Foreign Service
Journal, February 1933, Robert F. Kelly Papers (hereinafter RFK), Georgetown University
Manuscripts, Georgetown University Library.
92    

Figure 3.2 The U.S. Legation at Riga, 1922 (Library of Congress)

organized accordingly. Translators and interpreters who established relation-

ships with local officials and other information services (IS) provided the bulk of
confidential material that reached the State Department.⁷³
George F. Kennan, who handled economic matters in the Russian section
during the period 1931–33, described the section as a “small research unit” of
“careful, scholarly analysis of information.” He denied that the section was
engaged in clandestine intelligence, remarking that the “suspicious Soviet mind
at once stamped this little research bureau as a sinister espionage center,” but to
the contrary, he and others delighted in puncturing, “on the basis of demonstrable
fact, the absurdities of the lurid reports about conditions in Russia received by
various Western governments from secret intelligence sources and sent to us for
comment.”⁷⁴
The reports from Riga portrayed the Communist International as an interven-
ing and violent force attempting to change domestic affairs in foreign countries.
This information primed officials in the Division of Eastern European Affairs to

⁷³ Inspector F.R. Dolbeare, General Report, Legation at Riga, August 8, 1925, Box 128, Inspection
Reports on Foreign Service Posts 1906–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁴ George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 47–8.
   :  ..     93

view the Communist International and Soviet government as inciting militant

revolutionaries to carry out terrorist acts. In 1923, Riga officers wrote State
Department officials about events in Bulgaria and the Soviet government’s desire
to spread communist propaganda in European countries. Officials in Riga
informed Washington that after the downfall of the government of Aleksandar
Stamboliiski in Bulgaria, the Communist International had issued proclamations
calling on the Bulgarian proletariat to rise up and overthrow the new government.
Previously, the Soviet government had viewed Stamboliiski’s Bulgaria as Russia’s
“secret ally in the Balkans.”⁷⁵
The reports of the Legation at Riga indicate that American foreign service
officers were deeply suspicious of the involvement of the Soviet Union in the
work of the International Committee of the Red Cross. U.S. Ambassador to
Bulgaria Charles Wilson informed the State Department that the “only Soviet
organization in Bulgaria has been the so-called Soviet Red Cross, which at the
request of Dr. Nansen and the International Red Cross of Geneva was allowed to
come to this country for the purpose of repatriating Russian refugees, although it
was a secret to nobody that its work was chiefly political.” After the fall of
Stamboliiski’s government, all of the members of the Red Cross were arrested
and deported from Bulgaria. Wilson reported that the new Bulgarian government
had “discovered absolute proof” that Red Cross officials were “collecting infor-
mation concerning the adversaries of Bolshevism in Bulgaria, both Russians and
Bulgarians; were entertaining close relations with the Bulgarian Communist Party;
and were centralizing information concerning Bolshevik propaganda in all the
Balkan states.”⁷⁶
The Soviets were also suspicious of the Red Cross. In September 1923, officials
in Riga informed the State Department that “It would appear that greater care is
being exercised by the Bolsheviks in granting visas to enter Soviet Russia and that
foreigners in the country are being closely watched.” A translation of a circular of
the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to diplomatic representatives of the USSR
revealed that “no further visas are to be granted to persons connected with the
International Red Cross Committee.”⁷⁷ The legation obtained documents from
the chief of Petrograd Section and People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs that
detailed the fear among Soviet officials that representatives of the International
Red Cross Committee were “taking advantage of their presence in Russia and their

⁷⁵ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State Washington, July 31, 1923, Box 24, Natalie Grant Wraga
Papers (NGW), Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
⁷⁶ Charles S. Wilson, Sofia, Bulgaria to Secretary of State, Washington, August 13, 1923, Records of
The Department of State Relating To Political Relations Between Russia And The Soviet Union And
Other States, 1910–1929, NARA. Available on National Archives Microfilm Publication M340, Roll 2.
⁷⁷ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, September 28, 1923, Box 24, NGW.
94    

exterritorial rights to carry out secret duties assigned them by foreign information
organizations.”⁷⁸
Officials in Riga also reported that the Comintern was disseminating propa-
ganda among European armies—particularly to French, Italian, and Polish
troops—and that the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern) had decided
to combat fascism by means of “arming detachments of workmen in all coun-
tries.” The Profintern voted to supply the workmen with arms and ammunition
and dispatch the supplies through unions of metal workers and seamen. Agents
working for the Riga Legation also noted that the precautionary measures adopted
by the Executive Committee of Communist International made it more difficult to
obtain “fully detailed and checked information regarding the more important
branches of work of the Comintern.”⁷⁹
By the mid-1920, reports from Riga stressed that the Communist International
was expanding its reach and interference in foreign governments. The legation
provided the State Department with confidential reports on Bolshevik plans for
the destruction of military stores abroad; Communist propaganda activities in
Eastern Countries; the formation of Bolshevik sabotage organizations in foreign
countries; and the plans of the G.P.U. (secret police) to extend its work in the
Middle East, increase propaganda in Central Asia, and use the Soviet Trade
representative in Persia for political purposes.⁸⁰ In April 1924, the Riga Legation
reported that Grigori Voitinsky, a Comintern official, proposed creating special
“shock” groups to move systematically through foreign countries spreading
propaganda. Nominally under the direction of the Executive Committee of the
Communist International, these groups would operate independently of the
regional Communist Party committees. The legation’s report also documented
Voitinsky’s suggestion to employ propaganda agents as “Red commercial travel-
ers” in Persia and Afghanistan.⁸¹
U.S. officials at the Riga Legation established strategic relationships with the
Estonian and Latvian Foreign Offices. When the Latvian Secret Service provided
the Riga Legation with a report on espionage and propaganda campaigns
launched by the Soviet Mission, in September 1923, the State Department shared
the information with the Justice Department while protecting its source.⁸² “It has
not been our policy in the past in sending material of this nature to Justice, ever to
give the channel through which it has been received, in other words, not to bring
the Legation into the matter at all,” wrote State Department official Norman

⁷⁸ Ibid. ⁷⁹ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, July 31, 1923, Box 24, NGW.
⁸⁰ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, April 11, 1924; J.C. White to Secretary of State, September
23, 1924; F.W. B. Coleman to Secretary of State, February 29, 1924, Latvia, Record Group 84: Records of
Foreign Service Posts (hereinafter RG 84), NARA.
⁸¹ F.W. B. Coleman to Secretary of State, April 28, 1924, Latvia, RG 84, NARA.
⁸² Evan Young to Norman Armour, September 21, 1923, Records of The Department of State
Relating To Political Relations Between Russia And The Soviet Union And Other States, 1910–29,
NARA. M340, R 2.
   :  ..     95

Armour, who submitted only the report prepared by the Latvian police.⁸³ The Riga
Legation, however, refrained from requesting the same information from the
Lithuanian Foreign Office. A dispute with Poland over the city then known as
Vilna (Vilnius, the capital of present-day Lithuania) meant “that the Lithuanian
Government is obviously very anxious to enlist the support of the Soviet
Government.”⁸⁴
State Department intelligence in the late 1920s also indicated that the
Comintern continued to send its agents to the United States. In April 1928, the
Division of Eastern European Affairs learned that the Comintern “ordered the
dispatch of six agitators from the Far East to the United States, with instructions to
work among employees in textile industries and in important centres.” The
information supplied to Kelley and the Division of Eastern European Affairs
stated that the Comintern would supply the agents with American passports
and that the “agitators” would be selected from graduates of the Lenin Institute
for Propaganda. The necessary funds would be paid through Mexican banks, and
the agents would take different routes to reach the United States, leaving from
Shanghai, Kobe, Hong Kong, and Manila.⁸⁵

Soviet Sponsorship of Terror

The Division of Eastern European Affairs grappled with understanding the

relationship between terrorism and the Communist International, along with
Soviet attitudes toward the use of violence. “The main thing is ends,” a fellow
Marxist in St. Petersburg named Vasily Starkov later described a twenty-three-
year-old Lenin’s attitude toward terrorism, “and every means of struggle, includ-
ing terror, is good or bad depending on whether, in the given circumstances, it
conduces to the attainment of those or, on the contrary, diverts from them.”⁸⁶ “He
built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was
justified for a greater end,” as historian Victor Sebestyen would put it a century
after the Bolshevik leader’s arrival at the Finland Station in April 1917. “It was
perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin’s.”⁸⁷
By the early 1920s, the Soviet foreign commissariat pursued “peaceful coexist-
ence” with other governments through traditional trade and diplomatic agreements,

⁸³ Norman Armour to Evan Young, September 25, 1923, Records Of The Department Of State
Relating To Political Relations Between Russia And The Soviet Union And Other States, 1910–29,
NARA. M340, R 2.
⁸⁴ Louis Sussdorff, Jr. to Secretary of State, October 18, 1928, Latvia, RG 84, NARA.
⁸⁵ Ray Atherton to Robert Kelley, Division of Eastern European Affairs, April 20, 1928, Office of the
Counselor/Under Secretary and the Chief Special Agent, RG 59, NARA.
⁸⁶ Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1964), 21.
⁸⁷ Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror (New York: Pantheon
Books, 2017).
96    

while the Communist International sponsored revolution in Europe and Asia.⁸⁸

The American missions in London and Riga reported on the Comintern’s
intervention in the domestic affairs of other nations, depicting the Communist
International as a network of communist cells directed from Moscow to carry out
acts of terrorism. The Comintern’s instigation of foreign revolutions had been
one of the prime reasons that President Wilson and his new secretary of state,
Bainbridge Colby, had refused to recognize the Bolsheviks in August 1920.⁸⁹
Throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Kelley and the Division of
Eastern European Affairs maintained that the United States should not recognize
the Soviet government because of the interference of the Comintern in world
affairs and in the United States specifically.⁹⁰
Foreign intelligence received by Kelley and the Division of Eastern European
Affairs indicated that the Soviet government and Comintern supported commun-
ist groups that employed violence in attempts to overthrow an established gov-
ernment. In October 1923, officials in Riga transmitted to Washington two
enclosures with translations of secret orders seized by the Estonian secret police
during a raid of the Estonian Section of the Communist International. The
documents revealed the extent to which the Comintern had assisted illegal
communist organizations in Estonia intending to overthrow the government.
According to the first enclosure, the Communist International and Soviet mission
at Tallinn had assured Estonian communists that if they were arrested the Soviet
government would demand their release on the grounds that they were Russian
citizens. However, the Comintern stressed that communists in Estonia needed to
shield the activities of the Soviet Mission and ensure that weapons would not be
traced back to Russia. It promised: “The Communist Party of Estonia can entirely
depend on the help of Russia and continue to work in order to establish in the near
future a free Soviet Republic. As to that there cannot be any doubts or delays.”
The second enclosure focused on the failed attempts of communists in Estonia
to overthrow the government in 1922. According to the secret orders, during the
“May Day procession, three Communist terrorists [had] fired upon the Estonian
police.” One of the terrorists was captured and stated that he “had been sent to
Estonia by the Foreign Section of the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary
Commission; now called the State Political Administration) with instructions to
commit terroristic acts against members of the Estonian Government and the
police force.” He confessed that thirty-eight communist terrorists with similar

⁸⁸ Tim Rees and Andrew Thorpe, “Introduction,” in Tim Rees and Andre Thorpe, eds.,
International Communism and the Communist International 1919–1943 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998), 1–3; Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, 7, 16–19,
28–31, 44–5, 51, 120.
⁸⁹ Leffler, The Specter of Communism, 16.
⁹⁰ Robert Kelley to Secretary of State, December 16, 1926, Box 3, Folder 4, RFK, Georgetown
University.
   :  ..     97

orders had been sent before him to Estonia. In addition, the Estonian secret police
had evidence that the Foreign Section of the Cheka had sent a communist spy to
Estonia.
The legation also reported on the 1922 execution for treason of Estonian
communist Viktor Kingissepp. According to the Estonian police, Kingissepp
directed “scores of organizers, spies, and terrorists, who were operating through-
out the country with a view of overthrowing the Government by force.” The Riga
Legation reported that the Soviet commissariat for foreign affairs had approached
the Estonian representative at Moscow and “verbally threatened that, in the event
of Kingissepp’s execution, Soviet Russia would divert its transit trade from Estonia
to other countries.” The Soviet Union carried out this threat for several months
after Kingissepp’s execution and draped the Soviet Mission in mourning.⁹¹
In April 1924, F.W.B. Coleman provided the State Department with a confi-
dential report concerning Bolshevik plans to form a terrorist group in Romania.
Coleman reported that the Commission for Combatting Fascism had decided “to
organize a terrorist group among the secret workers who are being sent to
Bessarabia and the local communists for the purpose of carrying out terrorist
acts against persons at the head of the Romanian Government.” The Commission
emphasized that members of the terrorist group should be natives of Bessarabia
and not Soviet citizens, and that a Bessarabian communist should lead the group.
The Commission promised to provide financial subsidies to members of the
terrorist organization and to give their families shelter in Soviet Russia.
A supplementary amount of 200,000 gold rubles, over and above the allowance
to the Romanian Communist Party, had been allotted for that purpose.⁹²
In May 1925, the Comintern’s general instructions for carrying out terrorist
acts in foreign countries came into the possession of the Riga Legation. The
translated documents indicated that the instructions originated with the Balkan
Section of the Communist International, but had been approved by the Executive
Committee during its April 1925 meeting. The Comintern’s Executive Committee
decided that the most important instructions for terrorist activity would be
drafted in the form of fundamental regulations and divided into two categories:
“(a) Individual terrorist acts directed against individual persons and groups” and
“(b) Acts having as their object the paralyzing of military and other aggressive, or
defensive forces in any state.”
The Executive Committee also stressed that terrorist acts should only be
directed against definite categories of persons, namely members of government
political parties, high-ranking military officials, and administrators. Furthermore,

⁹¹ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, October 1, 1923, Records of The Department Of State
Relating To Political Relations Between Russia And The Soviet Union And Other States, 1910–29,
NARA, M340, R 2.
⁹² F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, April 26, 1924, Records of Foreign Service Posts,
Diplomatic Posts, Latvia, RG 84, NARA.
98    

attacks should be limited and only carried out when absolutely necessary. The
Executive Committee recommended that communist parties draft a detailed plan
of terrorist activity. The plan should specify targets, including individuals and
organizations. The Comintern emphasized that communists needed to determine
public opinion before carrying out an attack and that targets should not include
“persons enjoying popularity among the wide masses of the population, as this
may arouse feeling in the country.” Instead, an assassination should meet with
“tacit approval of the population or at least indifference.”
The instructions also suggested that attacks target all members of specific
government departments or administrations, as this would make it difficult to
fill government posts and “lead to demoralization and disorganization of the
government and administrative apparatus.” In addition to removing persons or
groups at the head of the government or occupying prominent administrative
posts, the Executive Committee recommended organizing attacks on junior offi-
cials of the administration or army, including rank and file police, militia, and
soldiers. It reasoned: “Removal of this category of persons would produce demor-
alization among the lower ranks, incite them against their officers, and, if syn-
chronized with well-organized active anti-government propaganda, would
introduce final disintegration into the bulwarks of every government—the army
and police.” The Executive Committee of the Communist International decided to
send the instructions on terrorism to all sections. However, unlike general litera-
ture published by the Comintern, the instructions were to be printed at a private
typography selected by the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party
and sent abroad through special agents.⁹³
The Comintern’s general instructions on terrorism reveal a great deal about the
definition and objective of terrorist acts in the 1920s. According to this document,
the Communist International stressed that communists should target not only top
government officials but also the rank and file to demoralize the police and
security forces of a country. Moreover, communists needed to ensure that they
assassinated only unpopular government figures to avoid sparking an anti-
communist backlash. From these instructions, it appeared to the Riga Legation
and officials in Washington that terrorism was an established tool of the
Communist International.
In September 1925, however, the Legation at Riga came into possession of cipher
tables found on an agent of the Communist International arrested inside the city.
The agent also carried an article that described the “clumsy lies about the
Communist International’s tactics of individual terrorism” and included a message
from the secretary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International,
Otto V. Kuusinen, stating that the “notorious lie factory of the white guard Russian

⁹³ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, May 28, 1925, Box 24, NGW.
   :  ..     99

émigrés has again produced an unusually crude forgery.” Responding to an article

published in an émigré newspaper in Riga reporting on the last Enlarged Executive
Committee of the Communist International, which had purportedly decided to
adopt a policy of “individual terrorism,” Kuusinen claimed that the émigré press
was peddling a forgery to the “bourgeois press” in France and England.
The Enlarged Executive Committee had indeed adopted a definite decision in
regard to individual terrorism, according to Kuusinen, but “one which was quite
the reverse of that expected by the counter-revolutionary émigrés in Riga and
Paris.” “In some sections of the Communist International (Bulgaria, Poland),
there recently arose the danger of a terroristic ‘derailment,’ ” Kuusinen went on
to say, quoting Comrade Grigory Zinoviev. “As a result of the regime established
by the hangman Zankow, the Bulgarian workers were seized with a certain
enthusiasm for a terroristic defense, such as found expression, for example, in
blowing up the Sophia church, despite the sharply adverse attitude which the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Bulgaria displayed with regard to
individual terrorism.” The Communist International “most decidedly rejects
individual terrorism,” for reasons “guided exclusively by principles of revolution-
ary expediency.” “The Communist International, however, has nothing in com-
mon with the bourgeois attitude toward the question of using revolutionary
violence,” for every “class conscious proletarian knows that without the use of
revolutionary violence the bourgeoisie cannot be overthrown and the world
cannot be freed from the yoke of [capitalism]. Only as an armed power can the
working class free humanity from the disgrace of capitalism. For precisely this
reason, however, the Communist rejects individual terrorism, as individual acts
[when] attempted to substitute for mass combat, can only demoralize our move-
ment, divide our forces, and reduce our dynamic power.”⁹⁴
The article recovered on the arrested Communist agent in Riga contrasted with
the general instructions on terrorism the Riga Legation translated in May 1925,
suggesting that while Soviet officials continued to advocate revolutionary violence
they did not condone individual terrorism. Instead, Zinoviev’s statements cau-
tioned against individual acts of terrorism because they threatened to discredit
and divide the Communist International. Zinoviev’s position echoed earlier sen-
timents made by Leon Trotsky, who also opposed individual terrorism and called
for collective action to overthrow capitalist governments, a lesson learned from
the failed 1905 revolution.⁹⁵ These nuances were not easily discernible to govern-
ment officials attempting to assess and prioritize threats during the era of peace-
time that followed the Great War.

⁹⁴ Comintern Ciphers, Riga, Latvia, September 24, 1925, Box 45, Records of the Central Intelligence
Agency, The Murphy Collection on International Communism, 1917–58, Russia and Communist
International, RG 263, NARA.
⁹⁵ Trotsky’s writing on the subject includes “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism” (1911)
and Terrorism and Communism [Dictatorship versus Democracy]: A Reply to Karl Kautsky (1920).
100    

Information received by State Department officials regarding the Third

International and its sponsorship of foreign terrorist groups was often contradict-
ory. Sometimes it was fabricated. Indeed, Soviet intelligence had created a ficti-
tious Monarchist Association of Central Russia—better known as “the Trust”—to
disseminate false information and infiltrate the organizations of Russian political
émigrés in Paris.⁹⁶ By the end of the 1920s, State Department analysts had received
numerous reports from British intelligence and American embassies and consul-
ates portraying the Soviet Union as a sponsor of international terrorism, and were
inclined to believe them. For Robert Kelley, that view did not change, even after
the Franklin Roosevelt administration recognized the Soviet Union in 1933 and
shut down the Division of Eastern European Affairs four years later.⁹⁷

Conclusion

The first Red Scare had two profound legacies. First, it entrenched a belief that
radical aliens posed a threat to American society and that exclusionary immigra-
tion legislation, with its exclusion and deportation provisions, would protect the
homeland. Second, the backlash against the Justice Department for violating the
civil liberties of American citizens shifted political surveillance operations to the
State Department. During the 1920s, the State Department possessed a monopoly
over the accumulation and interpretation of foreign and domestic intelligence
regarding the Communist International and the Soviet Union. Two offices over-
saw this work: the Office of the Under Secretary of State and the Division of
Eastern European Affairs. The former relied on its wartime connections with
British intelligence for information, while the latter gleaned most of its informa-
tion from American embassies and consulates on the European continent.
Assessments produced by the Division of Eastern European Affairs helped
shape the U.S. government’s understanding of terrorism in the years before the
Second World War. State Department officials viewed terrorist violence as covert,
targeted attacks against state officials, often intended to foment disorder and
topple governments. This understanding derived from reported Comintern activ-
ities, particularly in Europe and Asia, although Soviet attitudes toward revolu-
tionary violence were more nuanced and complex than generally acknowledged
by State Department officials.

⁹⁶ Douglas Porch, The French Secret Services: From the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War (New York:
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1995), 118–19.
⁹⁷ Broader American opinion about the Soviet Union changed over time. The historian Peter Filene
argues that Americans were “fickle” and “self-contradictory” in their understanding of the Soviet
Union. See Peter Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1967), 275.
   :  ..     101

The British police and secret services shared the perception of the Comintern
and Soviet Union as sponsors of international terrorism. The emergence of a
common enemy was an important factor in the postwar intelligence relationship
between the British and American governments even as their peacetime policies
differed in other areas. Chapter 4 will elucidate some of these differences in
regards to the small arms trade as well as the important role of the Office of the
Under Secretary of State in the accumulation and interpretation of intelligence for
the U.S. government in the 1920s.
 4
The Arms Traffic Conference of 1925

In May 1925, the League of Nations convened the Conference for the Supervision
of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War
in Geneva, Switzerland. Former Prime Minister of Belgium Count Henri Carton
de Wiart presided over the gathering of forty-four delegations, which included
those from non-member states such as the United States, Germany, Egypt, and
Turkey (and excluded the Soviet Union, which was the only major power and
arms producer missing). Six weeks of negotiations resulted in a new international
treaty: the Convention for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and
Ammunition and in Implements of War, which representatives from eighteen
countries—including the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan—signed
on June 17, 1925.¹
The reorientation of U.S. Republican presidential administrations toward
international arms limitations, subsequent to the 1921–22 Washington Naval
Conference, spurred the other major arms-producing nations to come to the
table (though not all of them signed the treaty). However, the treaty, which lacked
robust enforcement mechanisms, languished in national legislatures and never
entered into force. Meanwhile, the arms trade—both licit and illicit—flourished.
End users included irredentist and ultra-nationalist terrorist organizations in
Europe and revolutionary nationalists in the Middle East and Asia. Not until
July 1936 did Washington send final ratification to Paris, by which time it was
too late.
Even so, the failed treaty did have a constructive legacy: the compilation and
publication of statistics on gun-running. The U.S. government’s participation in
the Arms Traffic Conference led the State Department to undertake a global study
of arms trafficking that highlighted the movement of weapons in Europe, Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East, and the involvement of old allies and new foes in
supplying military material. U.S. efforts ran parallel with those of the League.
From 1926 onward, the Disarmament Section of the League put out information
on the global arms trade in an annual Statistical Year-Book of the Trade in Arms
and Ammunition. Publicity was meant to name and shame those countries in

¹ David Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty: The League of Nations’ Drive to Control the Global
Arms Trade,” Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 2 (2000): 221–2. See Andrew Webster, “Making
Disarmament Work: The Implementation of the International Disarmament Provisions in the League
of Nations Covenant, 1919–1925,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 16, no. 3 (2006): 569, fn 70; “Arms Sale
Parley opens in Geneva,” The New York Times, May 5, 1925.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
       103

violation of their agreements, and narrow the range between net export and net
import of arms. The 1938 edition—which would be the last—charted data from
sixty countries and sixty-four colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories.²
Intelligence based on open and closed sources collected for, and resulting from,
the Arms Traffic Conference, indicated systematic violations of the European
peace settlements and revealed a world awash in guns.
While it was in the long-term interests of each of the signatories to the 1925
agreement to enforce the convention, concerns about security, sovereignty, and
the vitality of economic trade conspired to undermine the treaty. Uncertainty over
whether the United States would ratify a treaty it had crafted led other countries to
withhold or condition their ratifications. The arms traffic conference’s failure to
impose international controls over the arms trade allowed governments to con-
tinue supporting militant groups during the mid- and late 1920s. The direct
consequence of that support was a revival of political assassinations and inter-
national terrorism in the early 1930s. This chapter demonstrates the ways in
which former allies stubbornly protected their national and imperial interests
even as covert and open intelligence revealed an undeterred movement of weap-
ons around the world that redounded to few—if any—of their long-term interests.

Bringing the Americans to the Table

As described in Chapter 1, the Convention for the Control of Trade in Arms and
Ammunition, signed at St. Germain-en-Laye on September 10, 1919, failed to
curtail the small arms proliferation that resulted from the Great War and the rest
of the peace settlements of 1919–20. Signatory countries violated the treaty and its
protocol by granting export licenses for firearms and ammunition headed to the
prohibited zone. To the annoyance of the British, fellow imperial powers circum-
vented the convention’s provisions by claiming that their firearms and ammuni-
tion exports were not “arms and munitions of war.”³ To their particular
annoyance, neither the Woodrow Wilson administration nor that of Warren
Harding or Calvin Coolidge had attempted to gain Senate ratification of the
1919 agreement. As London shifted its emphasis away from multilateral agree-
ments and toward bilateral negotiations, the League of Nations took up the cause
of international arms control.
In December 1923, the League Council recommended that the Temporary
Mixed Commission draft a new convention in “such a form that they might be
accepted by the Governments of all countries which produce arms or munitions of

² Webster, “Making Disarmament Work,” 563–4.

³ Simon Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth
Century,” Journal of Contemporary History 47, no. 4 (2012): 823.
104    

war.”⁴ The new treaty needed to avoid “any clause which might render it difficult
for the Government of the United States to ratify the Convention,” while also
being permissible to the other arms-producing countries in case the United States
refused to sign it.⁵
“You may inform Secretariat in reply that you will attend the meeting of the
Temporary Mixed Commission on February 4th for the purpose of being fully
advised as to proposals and particularly to receive information respecting the draft
convention which it is understood will be considered by the Commission,”
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes instructed U.S. Ambassador to
Switzerland Joseph Grew on February 1, 1924.⁶ If, while in attendance, Grew
should be asked to express the views of the administration, Hughes went on to say
in a telegram the following day, he should reiterate that it was U.S. policy “not to
encourage the sale of military supplies or the shipment of war material to the
troubled areas of the world.”⁷ At the same time, however, the United States “would
not be willing to restrict its entire freedom of action respecting the shipment of
military supplies to countries of Latin America.”
According to Hughes—the once and future Supreme Court Justice—the 1919
Convention was “a political arrangement for the protection of existing govern-
ments, leaving them free to make and supply all the arms they wish as between
themselves, and that it does not represent a bona fide effort to restrict the arms
traffic.” He asserted: “Congress cannot be expected to pass legislation limiting the
manufacture of arms in this country in the interest of any arrangement like that of
Saint Germain.” Moreover, the United States was not actually a cause of the
problem. Hughes provided statistics on U.S. exports to each of the territories
listed in Article Six of 1919 Convention. These objections aside, Hughes main-
tained that it was in the interest of the United States to proceed. “Should it be
the real intention of the Governments represented in the Temporary Mixed
Commission to place a substantial restriction upon the production of and traffic
in arms with the purpose of bringing about a reduction in the weapons of war, this
Government will take any arrangement with that objective under most careful
consideration and will find out as soon as possible whether Congress would pass
such legislation as would be necessary to make it effective.”⁸

⁴ Letter to the Government of the United States of America, December 14, 1923, R229, 1919–27,
Classification 8; Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments, Memorandum,
Private Manufacture of Arms and Munitions, January 5, 1924, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8, League
of Nations Archives (hereinafter LNA), Geneva, Switzerland.
⁵ Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments, International Control of the
Traffic in Arms and Munitions, January 21, 1924, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁶ The Secretary of State to the Minister in Switzerland (Grew), February 1, 1924, in Papers Relating
to the Foreign Relations of the United States (hereinafter FRUS), 1924, vol. I, 18.
⁷ The Secretary of State to the Minister in Switzerland (Grew), February 2, 1924, in ibid.
⁸ The Secretary of State to the Minister in Switzerland (Grew), February 2, 1924, in ibid., 19–20.
       105

The bottom line was that the U.S. State Department would assist in the crafting
of a new convention and send observers to meetings to be held in Geneva and
Paris in 1924, as Grew conveyed to Secretary General Eric Drummond on
February 2.⁹ Yet it would be a delicate process with surreal moments. With the
death of Woodrow Wilson, on February 3, Grew spent much of the February 4
plenary session of the Temporary Mixed Commission listening to eulogies for the
late president. He went on to convey the points laid out by Secretary of State
Hughes, who had been defeated by Wilson in the 1916 presidential election, in
support of a convention that only the League could initiate and the finished
version of which only the U.S. Congress could uphold.¹⁰ As Hughes put it to
Grew a few days later, “It has not been my intention to suggest that only control of
traffic in arms should be covered by the convention . . . [it] is that the American
Government would not feel free to enter into any convention for the control of
either the manufacture of or traffic in arms or both, without being reasonable sure
that Congress would pass the necessary legislation.” And it was “quite evident”
that Congress would not pass another version of St. Germain.¹¹
Hughes went on to instruct Grew to be present at the TMC meetings for the
drafting of the convention and to offer the U.S. position, if and when asked; yet he
was not to “participate” in the drafting. “Draft convention for the control of the
traffic in arms and munitions has been revised substantially to meet the views
expressed in the Department’s several instructions,” read a March 28 telegram
from Grew in Paris, following eight meetings of the TMC sub-committee.¹² “The
draft as approved by the Commission seems to be in harmony with the
Department’s views as indicated by its instructions,” Grew’s successor in Berne,
Hugh Gibson, reported back to Hughes in July.¹³ With a draft convention in hand,
the September meeting of the League Assembly set plans for a conference to take
place in the late spring of 1925, to which Drummond invited the Americans in
October 1924.¹⁴ On December 9, Hughes announced publicly the U.S. intent to
participate.¹⁵
Leading the preparation for the Geneva conference was Secretary of State Frank
Kellogg, who replaced Charles Evans Hughes in March 1925. Previously a senator
from Minnesota and the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom—where his

⁹ Joseph C. Grew to Eric Drummond, February 2, 1924, R229, 1919–27, Classification 8; Hugh
Gibson to Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments, June 27, 1924, R229,
1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
¹⁰ The Minister in Switzerland (Grew) to the Secretary of State, February 4, 1924, in FRUS, 1924, vol.
I, 20.
¹¹ The Secretary of State to the Consul at Geneva (Haskell), February 7, 1924, in ibid., 27–8.
¹² The Ambassador in France (Herrick) to the Secretary of State, March 28, 1924, in ibid., 32.
¹³ The Minister in Switzerland (Gibson) to the Secretary of State, July 23, 1924, in ibid., 55.
¹⁴ The Secretary General of the League of Nations (Drummond) to the Secretary of State, in ibid.,
76–7.
¹⁵ “Hughes Gives Out Note Accepting Invitation to Take Part in Arms Traffic Conference,” New
York Times, December 10, 1924, 1.
106    

subordinates included Boylston Beal—Kellogg would go on to receive the Nobel

Peace Prize for the 1929 Kellogg–Briand Pact outlawing war. Along with President
Calvin Coolidge, who was keen to avoid Woodrow Wilson’s mistake of not
ensuring congressional support prior to negotiations at the Paris Peace
Conference in 1919, Kellogg reached out to key congressmen, private arms
manufacturers, and the military services to establish a baseline consensus prior
to negotiations on an arms trafficking treaty. “It seemed particularly important . . .
that before any further convention on Arms Traffic was signed by any American
representative every effort should be made to ascertain what the attitude of
Congress would be,” as Director of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs Allen
Dulles put it in a meeting with Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee William Borah, who had strongly opposed the Versailles
Treaty.¹⁶
The response was tepid. “I do not feel I can be of any service in that matter . . .
[and] am perfectly clear in my own mind that no sincere effort is going to be made
along this line at this time and under present conditions in Europe,” Senator
Borah wrote Kellogg after telling Dulles as much following a joint invitation from
the president and secretary of state to lead the U.S. delegation.¹⁷ Private arms
manufacturers flatly opposed the convention, while the War and Navy
Departments remained apathetic to the idea of a comprehensive system to control
arms traffic.¹⁸ Representatives from private industry argued that a licensing
system would constitute government interference with legitimate private trade,
and pose an undue burden on foreign governments to identify end use prior to
export from the United States. In addition, Army and Navy officials opposed
restricting sales to recognized governments and belligerents, as this might prevent
shipments to authorities in self-governing dominions, colonies, or revolutionary
nationalists opposing dictatorial rule.¹⁹
The Coolidge administration engaged with its critics and sought to allay their
concerns. In April 1925, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover convened the
first of a series of conferences set up to allow representatives from private
munitions and arms manufacturers to present their objections. They were
attended by Dulles, who also held individual talks with representatives from the
Winchester Arms Company, DuPont, and the Colt Company. In these fora,

¹⁶ Allen Dulles, Memorandum of Conversation with Senator Borah, March 28, 1925, 500.A14/
67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, Central Decimal File 1910–29, Record Group 59: General Records of the
Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), U.S. National Archives (hereinafter NARA).
¹⁷ Frank Kellogg, Secretary of State to William Borah, United States Senate, March 27, 1925, 500.
A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; William Borah to Secretary of State,
March 28, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
¹⁸ Frank Kellogg to American Legation, Berne, Switzerland, April 8, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225,
Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
¹⁹ Frank Kellogg to Hugh Gibson, April 4, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29,
RG 59, NARA.
       107

private arms manufacturers aired their grievances at the Coolidge administration

for restricting their ability to secure foreign arms contracts and casting aspersions
on their industry.
“They asked me quite frankly whether from the point of view of the State
Department they were engaged in any illicit or improper line of business in
endeavoring to secure orders abroad for the sale of American made munitions,”
according to Dulles, who dictated a memorandum of conversation shortly after
one of these meetings. As Aitken Simons of DuPont put it: “the State Department
regarded [himself and his colleagues] as possibly a little better than white slavers,
but certainly with more suspicion than rum runners.”²⁰ Simons—who professed to
keep in close contact with officials in the War Department’s Military Intelligence
Division—was skeptical that other nations would adhere to the provisions of a
new treaty, believing that the United States alone would “conscientiously” observe
them.²¹
In response, Dulles cited the administration’s policy—as inherited from the
Warren Harding administration—prohibiting the export of government war
material. Indeed, Harding had “taken a strong attitude against the sale of govern-
ment war material abroad,” as Dulles put it, and had disagreed with providing
diplomatic assistance to help private American companies sell military material
overseas. The U.S. delegation would certainly bear in mind the concerns of private
manufacturers, Dulles went on to say; yet it remained the longstanding policy of
the U.S. government to deny contracts for the sale of war material to countries that
the Coolidge administration labeled the “troubled areas of the world.”²² Dulles’s
logic failed to dissuade his critics. “[W]e have, since 1919, made extra efforts to
secure business, some of it most attractive in volume, from foreign governments,
friendly governments, recognized governments,” the Vice President of Colt’s
Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company wrote to Dulles. “In this we met and
will continue to meet severest competition for, as you know, 100% of our
competitors are located in countries where we are endeavoring to market.” In
such countries, “without exception,” Colt’s “competitors receive most active and
earnest assistance from their respective governments, while there is accorded to us
by our government an attitude readily construed by the purchasing powers as one
discouraging the placing of contracts in this country.”²³

²⁰ Allen Dulles, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State, Memorandum of

Conversation, April 15, 1925, 500.A14/314–500.A14/356, Box 5195, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA;
Vice President, Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Co. to A.W. Dulles, Near Eastern Division,
Department of State, 1925, 500.A14/357–500.A14/402, Box 5196, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
²¹ Allen Dulles, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State, Conversation with Mr.
Aitken Simons, DuPont Company, June 1925, 500.A14/357–500.A14/402, Box 5196, CDF 1910–29,
RG 59, NARA.
²² Allen Dulles, Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State, Memorandum of
Conversation, April 15, 1925, 500.A14/314–500.A14/356, Box 5195, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
²³ Letter to Dulles, Department of State, 500.A14/37–500.A14/402, Box 5196, CDF 1910–29, RG
59, NARA.
108    

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Kellogg worked with the Congress as well as the
Secretary of War John Weeks, Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur, and Secretary
of Commerce Hoover to prepare for the Geneva arms conference.²⁴ U.S.
Ambassador to Switzerland Hugh Gibson, who had succeeded Grew in April
1924, when the latter was appointed Under Secretary of State, hesitated at first
because American officials had recently walked out of an opium conference at
Geneva, incurring international criticism and suspicion about U.S. credibility in
leading an effort under League auspices.²⁵ Gibson—whom the New York Times
would later profile as “America’s Youngest Ambassador” who had “astonished the
Elder Statesmen” in Geneva—worried that his participation at the conference
“might prejudice my position in future dealings with League matters which
constitute an important part of the Legation’s work.”²⁶ Kellogg assured him that
the Department’s instructions would not “endanger the successful conclusion of
the conference,” and that Gibson’s participation in the conference, which the
Department considered most important, would not embarrass him in future
work.²⁷ In this vein, the Department withdrew its criticisms of the “prohibited
zones,” acknowledging that League officials had made every effort to meet
American objections and had only called a conference once it was known that
the U.S. government would participate.²⁸ In April 1925, Kellogg appointed a
delegation chaired by U.S. Representative Theodore Burton of Ohio that included
Rear Admiral Andrew Long, Director of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs
Allen Dulles, Brigadier General Colden Ruggles, and Gibson as the vice chair.

U.S. Foreign Intelligence and the Global Arms Trade

Commanding an arms control agreement to Congress required accurate foreign

intelligence, which meant sustaining an effective intelligence apparatus even in
peacetime. In February 1925, in preparation for the upcoming conference, the
State Department directed U.S. diplomatic missions abroad to gather information

²⁴ “Kellogg in Conference on arms sales policy,” The Washington Post, March 31, 1925.
²⁵ William McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (New
York: Routledge, 2000), 76; Hugh Gibson to Secretary of State, April 7, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225,
Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; see also The Secretary of State to the American Delegation,
April 16, 1925, in FRUS, 1925, vol. I, 27–50.
²⁶ Wythe Williams, “Gibson Emerges As a Fencer-Diplomat,” New York Times, July 10, 1927, SM5;
Hugh Gibson to Secretary of State, April 7,1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29,
RG 59, NARA.
²⁷ Frank Kellogg to American Legation, Berne, Switzerland, April 8, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225,
Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
²⁸ The State Department believed that the draft convention should be divided into two sections: (1)
dealing with publicity and the licensing of shipments to certain specified areas and (2) dealing with the
measure of control in prohibited zones. The latter did not directly concern the United States and
American adherence would probably be undesirable. See Hugh Gibson to Secretary of State, April 7,
1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
       109

on the global arms trade. An intelligence-coordinating unit in the Office of the

Under Secretary of State, which had subsumed the Office of the Counselor and its
foreign intelligence section following the end of the Great War, oversaw the
operation. Information was also routed to Dulles, who would go on to lead the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operations in Berne during the Second World
War and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after that. As described in
Chapter 3, Assistant Secretary of State Leland Harrison, who had been the war-
time “diplomatic secretary” in the Office of the Counselor, retained his portfolio to
centralize and interpret information gathered from the Departments of Justice,
Army, and the Navy. Diplomats as well as naval and military attachés representing
the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the Army’s Military Information
Division (MID) were instructed to seek out information about arms exports and
imports through informal conversations and inquiries, and to promise that
information would not be shared with other governments or delegations.²⁹
State Department officials had initially expressed skepticism of European
intentions when Hughes instructed Grew to attend TMC meetings in February
1924. “The end which they have in view” was indeed “to protect existing govern-
ments while leaving them free as between themselves to make and supply” arms,
Hornbeck wrote Harrison on February 8, quoting Hughes’s cable of February 2.
Hornbeck went on to say: “The real object throughout is to enhance and
strengthen the authority of the major European powers in various regions of the
world in which political conditions are unstable—particularly in Africa and in
Asia; the method envisaged is that of overcoming political opposition by render-
ing physical opposition impossible.”³⁰
In the spring of 1925, however, State Department officials described a world
awash in guns, and a free flow of arms and military equipment across nations and
continents. These weapons may not have been generating interstate conflict, but
they were aiding ultra-nationalist and irredentist terrorist organizations, encour-
aging ethnic and political violence, and inciting clashes between communist and
anti-communist factions. Information from U.S. foreign missions alerted the
State Department about Soviet Russia’s military rearmament, which was aided
by German firms and expertise, and the threat this posed to the fragile order of
east-central Europe. According to an American military attaché stationed in
London, the Soviet government operated aircraft factories, artillery works, and
chemical warfare plants in numerous cities, all of which were “under the direction”

²⁹ Albert Washburn, Vienna, to Secretary of State, Washington, April 4, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/

225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; Leland Harrison, Division of Near Eastern Affairs to
American consuls at Jerusalem, Aden, Algiers, Bagdad, Beirut and Tangier, Draft Instructions, March
1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59; Embassy of the United States of
America, Paris to Secretary of State, Washington, March 9, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193,
CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
³⁰ Hornbeck to Harrison, February 8, 1924, Department of State, 500.A 14/403–500A15/5, Box
5197, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
110    

of Germans. Moscow was “actively preparing in a military way more than any other
country in Europe,” according to the attaché. He reported that some fifty tons of
war materials were shipped from Germany to Russia during 1924.³¹ Rumors of a
secret military agreement had followed the restoration of diplomatic relations
through the April 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, yet the German government had
officially denied the allegations. Western governments—with the exception of
France—generally accepted these denials.³² State Department records strongly
suggest that American officials knew about the military cooperation between the
Germans and Russians. Given the close relationship between the British secret
services and the U.S. Embassy in London, the information was likely derived
from British intelligence.
The Soviet government was also supplying arms and military supplies to
communist insurgencies, moving weapons openly and clandestinely through the
Moscow-directed Third Communist International. As stated in the previous
chapter, Soviet leadership pursued “peaceful coexistence” and “revolution” during
the 1920s, a dual policy that meant restoring diplomatic relations with capitalist
states while continuing to promote the international proletarian revolution.³³ The
Department of State received information that the Comintern was supplying a
“steady stream” of machine guns and munitions to Feng Yuxiang (Feng Yü-
hsiang) in China despite the arms embargo in place, and that the Soviet govern-
ment made little effort to conceal it.³⁴ The Soviets provided military aid to
Yuxiang, a northern Christian warlord, as a means of developing as many contacts
in China as possible. The Soviets remained close to the Guomindang (GMD, or
National People’s Party), the nascent Chinese Communist Party, while establish-
ing diplomatic relations with China’s nominal government in Beijing. China was
one of four neighboring states that received substantial military equipment and
arms from Soviet Russia. (The others were Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan.) The
arms exports were intended to draw foreign governments away from capitalist
powers and toward the Soviet Union. In cases of civil conflict they were intended
to help pro-Soviet factions. The Soviets sent guns taken from Red Army stocks
and took the opportunity to offload leftover material from the Russo-Japanese
War, First World War, and Russian Civil War.³⁵

³¹ Memorandum for the Ambassador from the Military Attaché, American Embassy, London to
Secretary of State, April 2, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
³² “Says Pact with Reds Military: German-Russian Treaty has Secret Agreement, Charges Briton in
House,” Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1922; Gordon Mueller, “Rapallo Reexamined: A New Look at
Germany’s Secret Military Collaboration with Russia in 1922,” Military Affairs 40, no. 3 (1976): 109.
³³ Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 134, 153–4.
³⁴ Mayer, Peking, China to Secretary of State, May 2, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194,
CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
³⁵ David Stone, “Soviet Arms Exports in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History 48, no. 1
(2012): 57–8.
       111

The Soviets behaved similarly in Eastern Europe, where U.S. officials attempted
to gather support for a concerted effort to stop the flow of weapons. After “infor-
mally questioning” Romania’s foreign minister, Ion Duca, U.S. Ambassador to
Romania Peter Augustus Jay doubted that he was “familiar with the subject [of
the upcoming International Arms Traffic Conference] and [suspected] that, as I had
anticipated, the Romanian Government has taken little interest” in the confer-
ence. Duca denied that Romania imported arms “except by the Government for
purposes of national defense”—although “he admitted [that] Soviet agencies
were desirous of clandestinely supplying arms to subversive groups in
Romania.”³⁶ Jay also heard from a French colleague, who remarked that the
“Soviet Central Agency in Vienna is endeavoring with some success to run arms
to their Communist adherents in the various Balkan States, especially Bulgaria.”
Jay relayed this information back to Washington, expressing surprise that his
British counterparts were not attempting to influence the “attitude” of Romania
given their “gun-running” troubles in Northwest India. “Indeed neither my British
Colleague nor the Military Attaché appear to have been informed of the
forthcoming conference.”³⁷
The rearming of Russia and interference of the Comintern in the domestic
politics of other countries influenced the military stance of states situated in close
proximity to the Soviet Union. According to U.S. official reporting, the govern-
ments of east-central Europe “fear Russia” and were “arming or planning to arm
against her, and, incidentally, against one another.” Military experts in Europe
predicted that they would sign munition contracts once able to finance them.³⁸
The Riga Legation professed justifiable skepticism on the part of the Latvian
and Estonian governments when it came to the limitation of the arms trade. The
continued existence of their countries depended upon “preventing a successful
invasion on the part of Soviet Russia, whether organized from within or without.”
Because the “principal characteristic” of Soviet foreign policy was its “utter
untrustworthiness,” the border states needed to prepare for the worst, regardless
of “whatever verbal promises or paper provisions Soviet Russia might make for
disarmament.”³⁹ Romania was moving closer to the Baltic States and Poland for
defensive purposes, according to U.S. sources, as the Little Entente appeared
defenseless against Soviet Russia.⁴⁰

³⁶ Eight years later Duca would be the victim of terrorist violence, but it would be at the hands of the
fascist Iron Guard, not those of Soviet communists.
³⁷ Peter A. Jay, American Legation, Bucharest, to Secretary of State, Washington, March 13, 1925,
500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
³⁸ Memorandum for the Ambassador from the Military Attaché, American Embassy, London to
Secretary of State, April 2, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
³⁹ F.W.B. Coleman, American Legation, Latvia to secretary of state, Washington, March 19, 1925,
500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁰ F.W.B. Coleman to Secretary of State, April 2, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF
1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
112    

Yet, other information showed that the governments of the Little Entente—
Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and supported by France—hid weap-
ons with weaker neighbors such as Austria. U.S. officials in Vienna reported that
the Austrian government connived with firms and private individuals engaged in
arms trafficking and granted export licenses without adequate assurances. In
addition, the number of potential munition plants in Austria were unusually
large and their “running to capacity would go far to ensure industrial prosperity.”
The American minister indicated that Austrian firms manufactured and trans-
ported war material across the border to Czechoslovakia, and most of the material
made its way to Poland, Romania, Greece, and Turkey. He reported that none of
these powers had made public loans to Austria, but he believed “some of them,
especially Romania, [had] made large advances to private factories.”⁴¹ Already by
the mid-1920s, the Austrian government was violating the terms of its peace
treaty, as inspections of military depots revealed a quantity of war material that
far exceeded the amount allotted for an Austrian army of 30,000 men.
In the low countries, State Department inquiries revealed that former allies
supplied military material to embargoed states. The Belgian government exercised
no control over munitions traffic, according to Embassy Brussels, and allowed
shipments of weapons destined for Canton to leave her ports, in clear violation of
the Chinese arms embargo that it had signed. As per the Department’s instruc-
tions, Ambassador to Belgium William Philips reminded the Foreign Office of
their obligation to prevent the shipment of arms and ammunition to China. From
the perspective of Washington, Belgian firms might next ship military arms to El
Salvador or elsewhere in Central America.⁴²
Meanwhile, it was determined that France and Italy were supplying weapons to
countries in Africa and the Middle East. In March 1925, Leland Harrison reached
out to the American consuls in Jerusalem, Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Beirut, and
Tangier to ask them to provide State Department officials with any available
information on the traffic in arms and munitions in Palestine, Transjordan, and
Arabia. He indicated that consul officials should describe the controls in place to
regulate arms imports, the extent of the illicit trade, and any subsidies, sales, or
gifts of arms which may have been made to authorities. Leland also advised that
consular reports include the nationality of the principal importers and the ultim-
ate destination and use of imported arms.⁴³

⁴¹ Albert Washburn, Vienna, to Secretary of State, Washington, April 4, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/

225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴² William Phillips, Brussels, to Secretary of State, March 24, 1925, Department of State, 500.A14/
67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴³ Leland Harrison, Division of Near Eastern Affairs to American Consuls at Jerusalem, Aden,
Algiers, Bagdad, Beirut and Tangier, Draft Instructions, March 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box
5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
       113

The American Consulate in Beirut reported that the French had supplied large
quantities of arms and munitions to Turkey in 1922 during the Turkey–Greece
war, and that France had more recently sold airplanes to Turkey. He also passed
on allegations that in 1923 the French had supplied a large quantity of arms and
munitions to Ibn Saud, then the Sultan of Nejd. In Syria and Lebanon, French
authorities had made a serious effort to disarm the population by confiscating a
large number of rifles. However, arms smugglers had moved weapons back into
Syria and Lebanon, relying on transit routes along the coast and frontiers.⁴⁴
French-manufactured hand grenades and bombs also circulated widely in
Morocco, with the Algerian border serving as the main corridor for the illicit
trade in arms and munitions with the secessionist Republic of the Riff.⁴⁵
From Jerusalem, the American Consul reported that Italian firms supplied arms
to the Yemen District, and described a general proliferation throughout Palestine
and Transjordan. Weapons were generally smuggled into Palestine via ships
traveling between Beirut and Egypt. American consular officers believed that a
“greater part of the boatmen of Haifa and Jaffa” engaged in this traffic, and that
“all of them do not confine themselves to the traffic in arms, but undertake other
articles of contraband, such as cocaine, tobacco, etc.” The Director of Customs of
the Government of Palestine had recently appointed a special body of punitive
police under the supervision of the District Commandant of Police to deter the
smuggling of arms, hashish, tobacco, and other contraband.⁴⁶
Conversations with British Foreign Office officials demonstrated that Britain
prioritized preventing “the distribution of arms in unsettled areas.”⁴⁷ Disarming
Europe remained secondary to making sure that insurgencies and anticolonial
terrorist groups did not threaten the empire. In addition, Britain’s “gun-running
troubles” in Northwest India and North Africa meant that British policymakers
would demand that Persia stay within the prohibited zones, a requirement that
caused much grievance at the arms traffic conference.⁴⁸ In contrast, France
required the disarmament of Germany and a continuation of the European status
quo. For commercial and political reasons, however, French officials and firms
had no qualms about selling military material to countries in Asia, the Middle

⁴⁴ P. Knabenshue, Consul in Charge, American Consulate, Beirut, Syria (present-day Lebanon),

May 16, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁵ J. Lee Murphy, American Consul in Charge, American Agency and Consulate General, Tangier,
Morocco to secretary of state, Washington, April 13, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF
1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁶ Oscar S. Heizer, American Consulate, Jerusalem, Palestine to Secretary of State, April 30, 1925,
General Records of the Department of State, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG
59, NARA.
⁴⁷ F.A. Sterling, American Embassy, London to Secretary of State, March 17, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.
A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁴⁸ Peter A. Jay, American Legation, Bucharest, to Secretary of State, Washington, March 13, 1925,
500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
114    

East, and Africa. As described in Chapter 1, Britain and France took fundamen-
tally different approaches to arms trafficking from 1919 onward.
Policymakers in the Office of the Under Secretary of State and the Division of
Near Eastern Affairs poring over reports in 1925 would have found a disturbing
situation in which an active military build-up in Europe was already underway.
The forthcoming arms trafficking conference held the prospect of major arms
manufacturing countries reaching a consensus on regulation. The hope was that
greater transparency and publicizing of arms exports would convince states of the
folly of unrestrained proliferation that undermined the established international
order.
U.S. official reporting expressed the magnitude of the challenge of achieving
international cooperation when profit, politics, and security incentivized govern-
ments to continue supplying allies with weapons. Washington’s position going
into the negotiations reflected unique national security interests based on ideo-
logical traditions and the reluctance of Congress to enter into binding peacetime
commitments.
In his directive to the delegation, Kellogg went through the draft convention
and provided the negotiators with maximum and minimum demands. He stressed
two overarching points. First, domestic security precluded the United States from
acquiescing in “any measure which would be directed against private munitions
factories while leaving government-owned or controlled factories in other coun-
tries free to continue their trade or production.” This was because the United
States did not maintain large government arsenals for the supply of weapons in
the event of war or a national emergency as other nations did. The United States
depended on private industry for the manufacture of supply of war material. The
capacity of private industry needed to be sustained, in peacetime, through the
ability of firms to export goods.
Kellogg’s second priority was that representatives needed to bear in mind that
subsequent congressional action would be necessary to control the arms trade. It
would be useless for “this Government to conclude a convention unless there were
reasonable grounds to believe that it was of a character to command itself to
Congress and that the necessary legislation to make it effective could be obtained,”
the secretary wrote.⁴⁹ While in Geneva, the delegation would need to protect
American interests beyond a shadow of a doubt.
U.S. interests included some regulation of arms trafficking. Unlike those of the
British, American concerns about terrorism had less to do with specific areas it
controlled than the broader nexus of communism, guns, and political destabiliza-
tion. Reports to Washington about the proliferation of arms demonstrated that

⁴⁹ Frank Kellogg to Theodore Burton, Chairman; Hugh Gibson, Chairman; Rear Admiral Andrew
Long; Allen Dulles, Brigadier General Colden Ruggles, April 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193,
CDF1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
       115

multiple regions outside North America were at risk to communist penetration.

As described in the previous chapter, the threat of communism hit home in
America during the first Red Scare, yet fears of impending attack temporarily
receded. Unlike the British, the Americans lacked a far-flung empire to oversee—
although, as an editorial in the Journal de Genève pointed out in September 1924,
the United States had stationed troops in six out of twenty Latin American
republics.⁵⁰
“The United States has no territorial possessions in the general region (i.e.,
Africa, South Western Asia, etc.) which have in the past been considered as
possible prohibited areas,” Kellogg wrote in his instructions of April 1925. Nor
were the U.S. government or U.S. firms engaged in traffic in arms in these areas.
“The question of the measure of control to be exercised in any such ‘prohibited
zones’ is largely a matter for determination by the Powers which have colonies or
mandates in this region, provided, however, that no restrictions are imposed
which would impair the principle of most-favored-nation treatment.”⁵¹ The
curtailment of the shipment of arms to these zones accorded with U.S. interests;
yet it was also not worth a high political cost.

Geneva, May–June 1925

The Arms Traffic Conference convened in Geneva from May 4 to June 17, 1925.
“One state, Norway, which first of all refused the invitation has since reversed the
decision, owing to the number of other states which have signified their intention
of attending,” wrote the Christian Science Monitor leading up to the conference.⁵²
“Abyssinia, which was admitted to the League at the last Assembly is making its
first appearance at such a gathering and has written to the League complaining
that at present it is unable even to get sufficient arms for its own protection,” it
went on to say. British delegates representing India reported that of the forty-
four nations in attendance, the “pride of place” went to the American delega-
tion. Representative Thomas E. Burton of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
led the delegation and was assisted by Hugh S. Gibson, the American Minister
to Switzerland. The delegates for British India reported to London that Burton,
a large man with quick intelligence and a surplus of energy, dominated the
conference, while the urbane Gibson coaxed other delegates to come around to
American positions.⁵³

⁵⁰ Quoted in “Count on America, Germany and Russia to Aid Arms Parley,” New York Times,
September 22, 1924, 1.
⁵¹ The Secretary of State to the American Delegation, April 16, 1925, in FRUS, 1925, vol. I, 32.
⁵² “Many to Attend Arms Parley,” Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 1925, 3.
⁵³ League of Nations, Conference for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and
Ammunition and in Implements of War, Geneva, June 17, 1925, Report of the Delegates for India–
116    

In Washington, Secretary of State Kellogg carefully monitored international

press coverage of the conference, directing all U.S. consular officers to forward
daily clippings with translations from newspapers in their respective posts to
include “all shades of political opinion in the country to which you are accredited,
avoiding duplication, commencing with your receipt of this instruction and
continuing until the termination of the conference.” Consuls were instructed to
send translated versions of articles and editorial comments by end of the day of
publication, so that they could be compiled, culled, and sent on to the delegation
in Geneva in near real-time.⁵⁴ It was an early test of the 1924 Foreign Service Act
(or “Rogers Act”), which combined the Diplomatic and Consular Services and
established the professionalized State Department structure that exists to this day.
Press coverage of the arms traffic conference was skeptical. In the lead-up to the
conference, the Journal de Genève, a daily Swiss newspaper, noted the discrepancy
between imports and exports in the published statistics on the arms trade. “We
showed in this newspaper on the basis of publications of the League of Nations,
that in 1920, $140,000,000 worth of various arms were exported, but only
$32,000,000 worth were imported,” wrote correspondent William Martin. “No
one knows what happened to the difference.”⁵⁵ The Washington Post reported that
“the preliminary activities of the Geneva delegates lend color . . . to the prevailing
belief that the whole traffic in arms conference is a sham, that no real results are
desired or expected by the majority of the delegates, and that the chief concern at
Geneva is to pave the way for some excuse for not obtaining real results.”⁵⁶ As the
conference got underway, the New York Times questioned whether “there was any
nation which positively wanted to control the commerce in arms.”⁵⁷
Such skepticism was well founded. Following a splashy opening, the Great
Powers protected their national and colonial interests at the expense of a strong
and enforceable treaty, and they acted along the same lines of division as described
in Chapter 1. Because the Americans prioritized their freedom of action in
shipping arms to the Western Hemisphere, the treaty allowed for the shipment

Major-General Sir P.Z. Cox and Colonel W.E. Wilson-Johnston to the Earl of Birkenhead, secretary of
state for India, IOR/R/15/1/748, British Library (hereinafter BL), London, England; Stone,
“Imperialism and Sovereignty,” 221.

⁵⁴ Secretary of State to Diplomatic Missions in Europe, Morocco, Turkey, Egypt and Persia [April
1925], 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; J. Arett, American Legation,
Panama City to Secretary of State, Washington, May 8, 1925, RG 59, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box
5194, CDF 1910–29, RG 59 NARA; Willis C. Cook, American Legation, Caracas, Venezuela to
Secretary of State, May 16, 1926, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG
59, NARA.
⁵⁵ William Martin, “The Manufacture of Arms,” Journal de Genève, February 17, 1925, reported in
American Foreign Service Report, Berne, Switzerland, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF
1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁵⁶ Albert Fox, “Attacks on Borah held to discredit arms conference,” The Washington Post, May
7, 1925.
⁵⁷ “Arms Conference Weakens Protocol,” New York Times, May 25, 1925.
       117

of arms to unrecognized foreign governments in peacetime.⁵⁸ Moreover, the

French ensured that the treaty did not touch upon the arms provisions of the
treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Trianon, and Neuilly, which prohibited the
importation of war material by Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria.⁵⁹ British
policymakers adhered to requests by the Board to Trade to protect chemical
exports and to ensure that the government could continue to move arms, ammu-
nition, and other implements of war within the empire. Britain further safeguarded
her imperial interests by winning an exemption to supply arms to troops stationed
abroad, despite vigorous Turkish and Chinese objections.⁶⁰
While the conference was intended to cover all weapons—not just small arms,
as in 1919—a debate broke out between the British and Belgian delegations. The
Belgian representative, Léon Dupriez, a member of the TMC and professor of
comparative constitutional government at the University of Louvain, spoke out
strongly against small arms trade limitations, which, he insisted, would dispro-
portionately harm Belgium. Indeed, in 1922, FN Herstal (Fabrique Nationale
d’Herstal), a leading Belgium firearms manufacturer, had begun producing exact
replicas of Imperial Germany’s Mauser, and by the time of the conference the FN
Model 1924 (shown in Figure 4.1) was in great in demand abroad. Dupriez used
his position as rapporteur of the conference to argue that small arms were not

Figure 4.1 The FN Model 1924 rifle, produced for the Yugoslav Army by Belgian
Fabrique Nationale (FN) (Wikimedia Commons)

⁵⁸ Department of State to American Mission, Geneva, May 14, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313,

Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; “U.S. carries point in arms sales to New Government,” The
Washington Post, May 15, 1925.
⁵⁹ Theodore Burton to Secretary of State, May 13, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF
1910–29, RG 59, NARA; The Chairman of the American Delegation (Burton) to the Secretary of State,
May 13, 1925, in FRUS, 1925, vol. I, 50.
⁶⁰ Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty,” 222; Cabinet, Proceedings and Memoranda of Cabinet
Committee on Arms Traffic Convention 1925, April 30, 1925, The National Archives of the United
Kingdom (hereinafter TNA), London, England, CAB 27/274.
118    

actually implements of war, but rather items used for sporting purposes or
personal defense. In fact, no difference in design existed between the military
and sporting versions of the Belgian Mauser rifle. The British opposed Dupriez’s
attempt to remove sub-machine-guns along with pistols and revolvers of larger
caliber from the convention’s purview. British and Belgian representatives argued
for days over categorization, which Dupriez made more difficult by conflating the
issue with mandatory licenses for the import and export of weapons.⁶¹
Despite these differences, the Great Powers agreed that arms imports and
exports should be licensed and sales publicized. Nevertheless, U.S. representatives
blocked the creation of a Central Office of Information under League control,
opting instead for a mutual pledge among signatories of the convention to publish
statistical information regarding arms imports and exports.⁶² This compromise
may have suited U.S. policy but it undercut the entire enterprise. For their part,
smaller states represented at Geneva opposed publicizing export licenses, leading
to division between producer and non-producer states. Non-producer states
argued that the publication of arms imports would reveal sensitive information
about their nation’s defenses; meanwhile, without a central office under the
League, armament figures in manufacturing states would effectively remain secret.
States bordering the Soviet Union were particularly reluctant to publicize their
munitions trade. Although it was actively importing and exporting arms, Moscow
had declined to send a representative to the arms traffic conference.⁶³ By unilat-
erally publishing their armament figures, border states would reveal their military
strength (or lack thereof) to the Soviet Union. In order to avoid what military
strategists regarded as an “unmitigated intelligence disaster,” the convention
contained an article that allowed for Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and
Romania to opt out of the treaty’s publicity clauses.⁶⁴ Other governments
requested the same right, but Burton and the American delegation rallied against
this, arguing that too many exceptions would make the treaty ineffective.⁶⁵
The continuation of prohibited land and sea zones—renamed “special zones”—
for arms transfers in Africa and the Middle East caused further rancor. The
governments of Ethiopia and Persia attacked the application of “special zones,”
arguing that their governments had the right to import weapons and to regulate
the arms trade within their territory and maritime ports. Prince Arfa-ed-Dowleh
of Persia declared that designated special zones went against the “inauguration of
a fresh era of justice and equality among the members of the League of Nations,”

⁶¹ Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth
Century,” 825–7; Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (New
York: Penguin Press, 2018), 391.
⁶² “The Arms Traffic Conference: A Difficulty Solved,” The Times [London, England], May 19, 1925.
⁶³ Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty,” 223. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 228.
⁶⁵ Theodore Burton to Secretary of State, June 4, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF
1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
       119

while Tafari Makonnen (the future Haile Selassie) of Ethiopia argued that his
country’s need to procure arms and munitions “cannot differ from that of the
other sovereign States Members of the League.”⁶⁶ In the end, Ethiopia was
excluded from the prohibited zone, yet Makonnen had to sign a declaration
stating that Ethiopia would not export or re-export arms to other African coun-
tries within the prohibited zone.⁶⁷
British representatives refused to remove the Persian Gulf from the treaty’s
maritime zone, and had clear reasons not to do so. British intelligence indicated
that a key route in the transit of small arms from Soviet Russia to India ran
through Persia. As Moscow would not be a party to the convention (and may not
have been a reliable partner if it had), London sought to patrol the Persian Gulf
and South Persia. British military and diplomatic elites simply did not trust the
Persian government to stop the arms trade to groups they deemed to be Indian
revolutionary terrorists.⁶⁸ Sir Percy Cox, the delegate for the British Government
of India, declared that the Indian government had been forced to wage an eleven-
year war against small distributers on the Persian Gulf, at a cost of half a million
pounds, because they “had not the right to search ships which were suspected of
carrying illicit cargoes of arms destined to hill tribes of the Indian frontier.”⁶⁹ As a
result of the massive illicit arms trade in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman,
Cox and the British delegate, Lord Onslow, could not accede to the Persian request
that vessels flying the Persian flag in the maritime zone be exempted from
supervision. “One of the main objects of the convention is to suppress or control
the illicit traffic in arms, especially rifles and revolvers,” as Cox summed up the
matter, “in those parts of the world where their possession by local inhabitants
constitute a menace to peace and order.”⁷⁰ In the cases of the Persian Gulf and
Gulf of Oman, Cox reminded his counterparts, 12,000 rifles, 290 pistols, and 2
million rounds of ammunition had been seized over a recent period of six
months.⁷¹
The Persian government had already reached out to the U.S. State Department
for support in its protests against the special zones.⁷² In April 1925, U.S. Embassy
officials in Teheran reported back to Washington a request by Persia’s prime
minister that the American delegates in Geneva support Persia’s demand to be

⁶⁶ Tafari Makonnen to Secretary-General, April 22, 1925, Document No. 43334, Dossier No. 4407,
R 186, 1919–27, Classification 8; Prince Arfa-ed-Dowleh to the President of the Commission, Geneva,
July 7, 1924, R230, 1919–27, Classification 8, LNA.
⁶⁷ “Zone Ban Arguments Stir Arms Conference,” New York Times, June 12, 1925.
⁶⁸ Foreign Office to Sir P. Loraine, April 7, 1925, TNA, ADM 1/8699/113.
⁶⁹ “Arms Sale Parley hits a League Snag,” New York Times, May 15, 1925.
⁷⁰ “Verbatim Report of the 26th meeting of the General Committee, held on Monday, June 15, 1925,
FO 428/22,” 360.
⁷¹ Ibid.
⁷² Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation with Mr.
Kazemi, Persian Charge, March 19, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG
59, NARA.
120    

excluded from the prohibited zone. A refusal of Persia’s demand, he intimated,

might necessitate an agreement with Soviet Russia for the supply of arms and
munitions.⁷³ The Division of Near Eastern Affairs responded with a telegram to
Teheran informing embassy officials that the State Department would support
Persia’s position at the arms traffic conference. Officials in the Division of Near
Eastern Affairs believed that the Department of State “might just as well take
credit for this work with the Persian Government.”⁷⁴ However, when the Persian
government forced a vote on whether to include the Persian Gulf and the Sea of
Oman in the maritime zone, the United States backed the British by abstaining,
and the Persian government promptly withdrew from the conference.⁷⁵
Questions of security and sovereignty remained unresolved when the final
version of the Arms Traffic Convention was signed on June 17, 1925. While
British representatives succeeded in keeping the “special zones” in Africa and
the Middle East, they failed to convince the other delegates to support searching
ships suspected of carrying illicit arms. The United States led the fight against the
right of search during transit, and the article was dropped from the treaty.⁷⁶ Even
as the treaty threatened to publicize the military strength of non-producing states,
while tightly restricting arms exports to certain “special zones” in Africa and the
Middle East, licensing requirements further empowered exporting governments at
the expense of smaller states that depended on the purchase of weapons from
private manufacturers and government firms. Leaving the enforcement of the
treaty up to publicity rather than sanctions made for inadequate enforcement, as
the reporting of the Journal de Genève and other outlets had already demonstrated
the gross difference between publicized arms exports and imports.⁷⁷
American leadership spurred eighteen delegations to sign the Arms Traffic
Convention on the spot, with other representatives promising to sign on to it
shortly. With the exception of Czechoslovakia and Belgium, all of the major arms-
producing countries in attendance signed the convention. The absence of a
binding mechanism, however, played into the hands of skeptics and ensured
that the Arms Traffic Convention of 1925 never entered into force. The
League’s Assembly did itself no subsequent favors by pushing for immediate
control over the private manufacture of arms. After a few failed attempts to
assemble a conference on private manufacture, the League shifted its focus to

⁷³ W. Smith Murray, Teheran to Secretary of State, April 11, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box
5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁴ Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State, April 24, 1925, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225,
Box 5193, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁵ “Zone Ban Arguments Stir Arms Conference,” New York Times, June 12, 1925; “Arms Traffic
Conference: Persian Delegate Withdraws,” The Times [London, England], June 16, 1925.
⁷⁶ “America Wins Point on Arms in Transit,” New York Times, May 20, 1925.
⁷⁷ William Martin, “General attitude toward International Problems,” Journal de Genève, February
17, 1925, American Foreign Service Report, Berne, Switzerland, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193,
CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
       121

general disarmament and the World Disarmament Conference of 1932–34. Small

arms played no significant role as arms control increasingly shifted to larger
weapons systems.⁷⁸
The conference also produced a second treaty, on poison gas, following a
proposal by the U.S. delegation.⁷⁹ American representatives had initially suggested
that the arms trafficking convention should prohibit the export of materials and
implements intended for chemical warfare. Figuring that this was impractical,
participants proposed an absolute ban on the use of poison gas, which had been
used with devastating effect during the First World War. Consequently, Burton
suggested a separate protocol, which the Polish delegation expanded, to include
bacteriological warfare, reflecting Germany’s development of a covert biological
warfare program in the First World War. In particular, the Germans had
attempted to infect the horses and cattle of enemy countries with Bacillus anthra-
cis (anthrax) and Pseudomonas pseudomallei (glanders).⁸⁰ The Protocol for the
Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of
Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, also known as the Geneva Protocol, was
signed by thirty states at the conference’s conclusion on June 17, 1925.⁸¹
In October 1925, diplomats from the victorious European Powers met their
German counterparts in Locarno, Switzerland to finalize the withdrawal of French
and Belgian forces from the Ruhr, agree upon borders, and clear the way for
Germany to join the League of Nations the following year. For their efforts, British
Foreign Secretary Austen Chamberlain, French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand,
and German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann would receive or share the
Nobel Peace Prize. (In 1925, Chamberlain shared it with Charles Dawes, the
Chicago banker who the previous year had come up with the rationalization of
German war debts supported by Wall Street loans.) Locarno demonstrated the

⁷⁸ Stone, “Imperialism and Sovereignty,” 229–30; Webster, “Making Disarmament Work,” 556–7;
Ball, “Britain and the Decline of the International Control of Small Arms in the Twentieth Century,”
828; Satia, Empire of Guns, 399.
⁷⁹ League of Nations, Conference for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and
Ammunition and in Implements of War, Geneva, June 17, 1925, Report of the Delegates for India–
Major-General Sir P.Z. Cox and Colonel W.E. Wilson-Johnston To the Earl of Birkenhead, Secretary of
State for India, IOR/R/15/1/748, BL; Theodore Burton to secretary of state, Washington, May 20, 1925,
500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA; Frank Kellogg to American
Mission, Geneva, May 21, 1925, 500.A14/226–500.A14/313, Box 5194, CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁸⁰ Stefan Riedel, “Biological Warfare and Bioterrorism: A Historical Review,” Baylor University
Medical Center Proceedings 17:4 (2004): 400–6.
⁸¹ Webster, “Making Disarmament Work,” 562. The Geneva Protocol entered into force after
France and Venezuela submitted ratifications in May 1926 and February 1928. Thirty-six states,
including Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Britain, ratified the protocol by the end of 1932. In
the United States, Congress strongly opposed the treaty, despite its recommendation by Senator
William Borah and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Borah withdrew the protocol from
consideration in December 1926. The United States did not enter into the 1925 Geneva Protocol
until January 1975, when President Gerald Ford signed instruments of ratification both for it and the
1972 Biological Weapons Convention. For an overview of the U.S. approach to these conventions, see
Thomas Graham Jr., and Damien J. LaVera, eds., Cornerstones of Security: Arms Control Treaties in the
Nuclear Era (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2003), 7–11, 292–6.
122    

potential for the Great Powers to bind up the festering wounds of the Great War.
The reputation of the League had also improved by the mid-1920s, prompting the
U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom to declare that the “League of Nations is
now a formidable political machine.”⁸²
Five months earlier, however, on topics far less fraught with emotion, they
could not transcend national and colonial interests. At the Arms Traffic
Conference of 1925, the British wanted the arms trafficking treaty to keep small
arms from reaching insurgencies and anticolonial terrorists. The French, in turn,
wanted to arm their allies in Europe and keep Germany disarmed. The U.S. State
Department sought to prohibit arms shipments to “troubled areas of the world,”
but faced difficulty in enforcing this standpoint as private arms manufacturers
argued that the government’s policy hurt American businesses. Meanwhile,
Congress continued to take a dim view of the League of Nations. Ultimately,
Republican internationalists in the Executive Branch failed to muster the same
creativity that led to the Dawes Plan (and that of industrialist Owen Young three
years later) to restructure German reparations to relax tensions on the European
continent. Absent harmonization among Washington, London, and Paris, no
other governments would jeopardize their liberty of commerce, expose secrets
of national defense, or cede power to an inter-governmental body.⁸³
It was not only concerns about commerce, sovereignty, and security that
doomed the arms traffic conference. There was also a pervasive lack of trust. In
1925, the British minister of labor rhetorically asked his colleagues whether they
would be willing to risk Britain’s national safety on the presumption that other
foreign powers would loyally abide by an international treaty. The answer was
no.⁸⁴ Private and public intelligence indicated that the illicit trade in arms and
munitions continued to flourish, and that its enablers included allies and adver-
saries alike. As a result, the 1925 League of Nations Convention for the
Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in
Implements of War proved to be as ineffective as the 1919 Convention for the
Control of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition.

Consequences

Events following the 1925 Arms Traffic Conference in Geneva had severe impli-
cations for Europe’s rearmament. After signing the Locarno treaties, Germany

⁸² The Ambassador in Great Britain (Houghton) to the Secretary of State, October 29, 1925, in
FRUS, 1925, vol. I, 15.
⁸³ William Martin, “General Attitude toward International Problems,” Journal de Genève, February
17, 1925, American Foreign Service Report, Berne, Switzerland, 500.A14/67–500.A14/225, Box 5193,
CDF 1910–29, RG 59, NARA.
⁸⁴ A. S-M, Memorandum by the Minister of Labor, Control of the Private Manufacture of Arms,
Munitions and Implements of War, [February 1925] TNA, CAB 16/59.
       123

joined the League of Nations in September 1926, leading to the removal of the
Inter-Allied Commission of Control. Fear that communism would gain a foothold
in Germany if the Weimar Republic remained weak and the sense that the IMCC
had served its purpose motivated British policymakers to support the withdrawal
of international weapons inspectors. In sanctifying the end of the IMCC, Foreign
Secretary Austen Chamberlain decided that restoring a balance of power on the
Continent superseded Germany’s known arms violations.⁸⁵ On January 31, 1927,
the League disbanded the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control in
Germany.
The removal of the IMCC in Germany increased the flow of arms from the port
of Hamburg that eventually reached revolutionaries in India. The arms trade
followed the drug trade, in which smugglers moved opium from Calcutta,
Bombay, and other Indian ports to exchange for cocaine in Singapore, Hong
Kong, Hamburg, Antwerp, New York, and other European and American ports.
Information supplied to an Intelligence Bureau agent by an informant in 1926
indicated that for the last few years most smugglers had trafficked arms and
ammunition instead of cocaine because they “were getting four to five times
more profit than the cocaine.”⁸⁶ Moreover, smugglers stayed attuned to legal
repercussions. When customs officials and the police in Calcutta cracked down
on arms smuggling and imposed hefty jail sentences, smugglers reoriented their
operations to Bombay where officials rarely checked cargo or enforced anti-
smuggling laws.⁸⁷
More has been written about the Inter-Allied Commission of Control in
Germany than those in the other defeated nations—the removal of the IMCC
has often been seen as a precursor to Germany’s rearmament under Adolf Hitler
and part of the policy of appeasement that permitted Nazi aggression. Yet the
failure to disarm was not limited to Germany. In January 1928, the IMCC in
Bulgaria became the last one to abandon its mission. In the final report of the
commission’s liquidation board to the secretary-general of the League, French
Minister of Foreign Affairs Aristide Briand emphasized Bulgaria’s continued
violations of the military clauses imposed by the Treaty of Neuilly (as he did
with the final report of the Control Commission in Hungary in August 1927).
Briand reminded the secretary-general that because of the Neuilly Treaty Bulgaria
was bound to submit to any investigation which a majority of the League Council
deemed necessary.⁸⁸

⁸⁵ John Fox, “Britain and the Inter-Allied Military Commission of Control, 1925–26,” Journal of
Contemporary History 4 (1969): 156, 158.
⁸⁶ Deputy Commissioner of Police, Special Branch, Calcutta to Director, Intelligence Bureau, Delhi,
January 22, 1926, L/PJ/12/81, BL.
⁸⁷ Intelligence Bureau to IPI, August 11, 1927, L/P&J/12/93, BL.
⁸⁸ “Military Service in Bulgaria,” The Times [London, England], January 17, 1928, SDN 1050, MAE.
124    

The countries of the Little Entente twice considered invoking the privileges of
the peace treaties that would enable the League of Nations to investigate arms
violations. The same month that the IMCC in Bulgaria was disbanded, the
governments of Romania, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and
Czechoslovakia requested that the League of Nations investigate a large consign-
ment of machine guns sent from an Italian firm to Hungary that Austrian officials
had failed to interdict. Austen Chamberlain requested that the French government
pressure the Little Entente governments to keep the case out of the League of
Nations, stating that the League’s right to investigate was a “weapon of a very
brittle nature and might easily break in the hands of its users if not wielded with
the utmost care.”⁸⁹
British officials warned the governments of the Little Entente that if the
investigation failed in its purpose then the whole procedure would be greatly
discredited and more difficult to use in an emergency. Moreover, the British
government asserted that in this case it would be difficult to collect sufficient
evidence to convict the Hungarian government of violating the Trianon treaty.
The Little Entente pressed ahead with the case, arguing that it brought the matter
before the League Council so that more “serious incidents” would not occur in the
future. As the British predicted, the case was found to be inconclusive, and no
parties were punished.⁹⁰
In March 1933, the Little Entente once again considered bringing a case to the
League of Nations concerning the shipment of rifles and machine-guns from Italy
to a cartridge factory at Hirtenberg (in Lower Austria). The governments of the
Little Entente contended that the large consignment of arms violated the treaty of
St. Germain and that the League of Nations should exercise its right to investigate
as provided for in Article 159 of the treaty. The U.K. and French governments
offered to use their good offices to settle the matter through diplomatic channels.
The Little Entente accepted the offer, and the case was resolved after Austria
agreed to return the arms to Italy.⁹¹
The interference of major powers like Britain and France hindered the efforts of
the League of Nations to investigate whether the ex-enemy states were violating
the arms statutes of the peace treaties. As a result, militant groups remained armed
and national grievances spurred on domestic and international terrorist attacks.
This was especially true in the Balkans, where ultra-nationalist terrorism and
irredentist violence escalated in the subsequent decade.

⁸⁹ British Embassy, Paris to Minister for Foreign Affairs, January 14, 1928, SDN 1054, MAE.
⁹⁰ Permanent Advisory Commission for Military, Naval and Air Questions, Request by the govern-
ments of Romania, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Czechoslovakia, February 2,
1928, C.P.C. 249.1928.IX, SDN 1054, MAE.
⁹¹ Secretariat of the Permanent Council of the Little Entente to Eric Drummond, secretary-general,
League of Nations, March 1, 1933; Paul-Boncour, Political Department, ministry of foreign affairs to
Bogoljub Jevtić, minister for foreign affairs of Yugoslavia, February 26, 1933, R4199, Section 7A, LNA.
       125

By the end of 1932, thirteen states had ratified the 1925 Arms Traffic
Convention, one short of the fourteen needed for the treaty to come into
force.⁹² Meanwhile, President Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover, declined to
make a priority of Senate ratification of the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention. Not
until January 1933—two months after he had been defeated by Franklin
Roosevelt—did the president send a note to Congress asking for advice and
consent to ratify the convention, which had remained before the Foreign
Relations since Coolidge submitted it in January 1926. “This convention has
been adhered to by a large number of the other important nations and is
practically stopped through failure of the United States to adhere to it,” Hoover
wrote. “Its ratification would contribute to the ends being sought by the entire
world for the prevention and limitation of war.”⁹³
In April 1934, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had served in the Senate
during several of the years in which it failed to act on the Arms Traffic
Convention, wrote Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee Key Pittman,
commencing a new effort to obtain advice and consent. “Enlightened public
opinion throughout the world has, for many years, urged the adoption on the
international plane of measures of supervision and control of the international
traffic in arms,” as Hull put it.⁹⁴ The initiative soon turned into a fiasco for the
Roosevelt administration. In an audacious move, Persian Ambassador to the
United States Ghaffar Djalal went over Hull’s head and approached Senator
William King of Utah to reiterate Tehran’s objections, which had led its delegation
to depart from the Geneva conference in 1925. “The Persian Government’s
expectation of the United States, which has neither political nor naval interest in
the matter, and in doing justice toward small nations has gone so far as to
renounce its own treaty rights over certain countries, is to show the Persian
Government full justice in this case and render them active support, but not as
in the present manner,” Djalal forewarned Hull in May.⁹⁵
On June 15, 1934, the U.S. Senate gave advice and consent to the 1925 Arms
Traffic Convention “subject to the reservation that the said convention shall not
come into force so far as the United States is concerned until it shall have come
into force in respect to Belgium, the British Empire, Czechoslovakia, France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the Union of Soviet Socialistic Republics,
and with the further understanding that such adherence to this treaty shall not be
construed as denying any right of sovereignty which the Kingdom of Persia may

⁹² Webster, “Making Disarmament Work,” 563, fn. 70; Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International
Affairs, 1932 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 295–6, fn. 3.
⁹³ Public Papers of the President: Herbert Hoover, 1932–33 (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1977), 446.
⁹⁴ The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Pittman),
April 12, 1934, in FRUS, 1934, vol. I, 449.
⁹⁵ The Persian Minister (Djalal) to the Secretary of State, May 26, 1934, in ibid., 456.
126    

have in and to the Persian Gulf or to the waters thereof.”⁹⁶ These terms marked a
capitulation from the efforts of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes ten years
earlier, and the failure of presidential leadership in the interim period.
The final chapter of the U.S. role in the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention dragged
on for another year. After finally overcoming the objections of Senator King, who
in December 1934 told the State Department that “it must be as offensive to Persia
to have British gunboats running up and down the Persian Gulf as it would be to
us if British gunboats were running up and down Lake Michigan,” President
Roosevelt eventually ratified the convention on June 21, 1935, having received
Senate advice and consent along with the withdrawal of the King amendment.⁹⁷
Persia, which the United States called Iran after March of that year, registered its
objection to what it now regarded as a free British hand over its sovereignty in the
Persian Gulf.⁹⁸ The British and French balked at the remaining U.S. reservation:
the convention would not come into force as far as the United States was
concerned until it was ratified by the major exporting states, including Germany
and Japan, which had withdrawn from the League of Nations in 1933, and the
Soviet Union, which had not been part of the 1925 conference.⁹⁹

Conclusion

The United States ratified the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention a decade after it
would have mattered. Public outrage at the munitions industry—which took
center stage in the Nye Committee hearings during 1934–35—came too late to
be helpful to President Coolidge, who engaged with critics of arms control but was
reluctant to run afoul of small arms manufacturers. Information collected by the
State Department in the spring of 1925 alerted the U.S. government and American
delegation in Geneva to the flourishing global arms trade. Yet the State
Department, then housed in the State, War, and Navy Building (currently the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building), failed to muster presidential support.
The State Department failed to retain ownership of intelligence, which, as
described here and in the previous chapter, was becoming essential to the conduct
of foreign policy—and which, only a few years later, would be lodged in the heart
of the U.S. national security apparatus. Secretary of State Kellogg, who had
authorized the State Department to gather information on gun-running in 1925,

⁹⁶ The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the American Delegation (Davis), June 20, 1934, in
ibid., 462.
⁹⁷ Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Western European, Affairs (Moffat), December 15,
1934, in ibid., 486–7.
⁹⁸ The Secretary of State to the Minister in Persia (Hornibrook), March 12, 1935, in FRUS, 1935, vol.
I, 454–5.
⁹⁹ Ibid., 455.
       127

oversaw intelligence reforms of June 1927 that included shutting down the
intelligence units of the Office of the Under Secretary of State. In so doing,
Kellogg hoped to streamline the flow of information about international problems
such as communism directly to the secretary of state, and to disempower the
“Harvard clique” that staffed the Office of the Under Secretary of State.¹⁰⁰
Kellogg’s successors did not make up for his mistakes. “Gentlemen do not read
each other’s mail,” as Secretary of State Henry Stimson later quipped in justifying
his October 1929 closure of the Black Chamber, the cryptanalytic unit founded in
May 1919 that had deciphered Japanese cables during the Washington Naval
Conference.¹⁰¹ Eight years later, under President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hull
abolished the other foreign intelligence section of the State Department, the
Division of Eastern European Affairs, folding it into the newly-created Division
of European Affairs in 1937.
These closures ended the centralization of secret intelligence within the State
Department, a responsibility that emerged in the Great War yet ultimately eroded
during the interwar period. In 1927, the same year that Kellogg ended the Office of
the Under Secretary of State’s role in foreign intelligence, the British eliminated
the Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest (IDCEU), the inter-agency
commission created to analyze the various terrorist threats facing the empire after
the war. By the end of the 1920s, both the United States and United Kingdom had
shuttered their principal intelligence clearinghouses, leading to a decline in Anglo-
American information sharing just as the industrialized world sank into the Great
Depression, which precipitated economic and political nationalism on the
European continent and in East Asia. Intelligence was crucial in the effort to
curtail the proliferation of guns and terror through diplomatic means. Publicizing
statistics on the arms trade was meant to demonstrate the extent of the problem.
As with statistics on child labor or conditions of the working poor, it was meant to
jolt an enlightened public to come to its senses. Yet it was no substitute for the will
of individual leaders to take decisive action.
An unexpected development at the 1925 Geneva Arms Traffic Conference was
the Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical and biological weapons. While
the protocol deterred no bad actors in the Second World War, it went on to
become a cornerstone of an international arms regime that continues even to this
day. When it came to the main agenda of the conference in May–June 1925,
however, participant states who were net exporters of arms could not agree to curb
their output of munitions. Meanwhile, states that were net importers challenged
global regulations that undermined their rights to secure weapons necessary for
self-defense. These questions were not merely in the abstract—they stood to lose

¹⁰⁰ Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2002), 79–80.
¹⁰¹ Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century, 77.
128    

from both potential outcomes. Revanchist governments, revolutionary national-

ists, communists, anticommunists, and ethnic separatist groups all struggled to
acquire small arms. Governments and private manufactures—legally or illegally—
met that demand. As Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 will demonstrate, the unregulated
small arms trade of the 1920s fueled terrorism in the 1930s, as terrorist groups
found an increasing number of state sponsors, and the League of Nations strug-
gled to secure the international cooperation necessary for stopping gun-running
and suppressing terrorism.
 5
Counterterrorism in British India

On the night of April 18, 1930, close to 100 armed revolutionaries calling
themselves the “Indian Republican Army” mobilized in Chittagong, a seaport
city in East Bengal near the Burmese border, just prior to launching multiple raids
on British colonial sites. Led by Surja Sen, a thirty-six-year-old former school
teacher, the armed revolutionaries cut telephone and telegraph lines, attacked the
Assam-Bengal Railway headquarters, and stormed the police and Auxiliary Force
armories. The attackers killed seven and wounded several others before taking the
rifles from the armories, which they set on fire. An additional raid on the local
European club was less deadly, since its members had stayed home for the Easter
holiday.¹ By midnight, the revolutionaries had cut off telephone communication
and routed the local police before retreating into the hills north of town.²
The next day, authorities in Chittagong tracked down a wireless telegraph on a
ship docked in the harbor. British officials sent word that a “terrorist gang” had
raided the armories, killed the sentries, and called for immediate assistance.³
Reinforcements arrived on April 20. After a clash on Jalalabad Hill that left twelve
raiders dead, sunset allowed them to disappear into the hills and villages around
Chittagong. Locals hid the remaining insurgents, including Surja Sen, while the
government sent in the military and reimposed anti-terrorism measures. It would
be almost a year before Sen was located and arrested. Other leaders of the Indian
Republican Army fled to the French settlement of Chandernagore. After an
internal disagreement between the revolutionaries led to the disclosure of their
position, British police under Police Commissioner of Calcutta Charles Tegart
stormed their hideout in late August, arresting three and killing one. By October
1930, the police had arrested 162 persons connected to the attacks.⁴

¹ Indian Political Intelligence, Revolutionary activities in Bengal, January 1930, L/PJ/12/396, British
Library (hereinafter BL), London, England. Durba Ghosh puts the number of revolutionaries at sixty in
Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2017), 139.
² H.W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh Publications, 1974 [Simla,
1937]), 17–21. The Home Department’s Intelligence Bureau commissioned Hale of the Indian police to
write this study of political trouble in India from the years 1917–37, expanding an earlier study by
James Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917. Ker served in the Indian Civil Service and as a
personal assistant to the Director of Criminal Intelligence.
³ Wedgwood Benn, The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance (Secret), July 28, 1930, The
National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereinafter TNA), London, United Kingdom, CAB 24/214/23.
⁴ Indian Political Intelligence, Revolutionary activities in Bengal, January 1930, L/PJ/12/396, BL;
Secretary of state for India, Confidential Appreciation of the Political Situation in India, December 19,

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
130    

The Chittagong Armory Raid of 1930 commenced a period of renewed terrorist

activity in Bengal. It followed the expiration of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1925, which, as described in Chapter 2, had empowered the
government to arrest and imprison revolutionary leaders. The movement drew
support from the bhadralok (upper caste, educated elite) classes—especially that
of young men at schools and universities.⁵ Bengali terrorism in the 1930s differed
from earlier campaigns in that it involved female assassins and created an
interconnected “violence movement” capable of carrying out coordinated bomb-
ing attacks in multiple provinces. While Bengal remained the center of revolu-
tionary activity, local chapters connected to the militant Anusilan and Jugantar
parties and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association established terrorist
cells in Punjab, the United Provinces, and Assam.⁶
The British government responded with a multipronged approach to coun-
terterrorism. The Government of India empowered local governments with
preventive and precautionary “legislative weapons” to suppress the revolution-
ary movement. Local governments relied on special powers enacted through
temporary legislative ordinances and criminal law acts. Bengal’s emergency laws
served as a model for anti-terrorism legislation in other provinces. As the British
learned, reliance on temporary ordinances to suppress terrorism had its limits.
While the laws kept attacks from occurring by enabling the police to intern
without trial hundreds of alleged terrorists in detention camps, militant groups
continued to recruit, rearm, and plot strategy. The expiration of the special
powers, in turn, undermined police morale, disrupted intelligence gathering,
and set the stage for a recrudescence of terrorism.
The Government of India and India Office also pursued imperial and inter-
national arms controls to keep small arms from reaching parties they considered
revolutionary terrorists. In 1932, the Government of India and India Office held
conferences in Simla and London in which British officials sought to coordinate
anti-smuggling efforts among law enforcement, intelligence services, customs
officials, and policymakers. The dual objective was to check the supply of weapons
at their source in Europe and prevent their dissemination at Indian ports.
Afterward, British officials made diplomatic overtures to governments of

1931, TNA, CAB 24/225/29; Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the
Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 146–9; Hale, Political Trouble in India, 17–23;
Michael Silvestri, “ ‘The Sinn Fein of India’: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary
Terrorism in Bengal,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 4 (2000): 479–82.

⁵ Marcus Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 7–8;
Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the Interwar Years,” in Durba Ghosh and
Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi:
Orient Longman, 2006), 273–4.
⁶ Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal, 16; Secretary of State for India, Terrorism in India, Joint
Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform, 1933, L/P&J/12/397; Director of Intelligence Bureau
(DIB), Revolutionary and Terrorist Activities, April 1929–December 1930, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
     131

countries where arms smuggling occurred most frequently, and requested that
shipping companies increase their surveillance and searches of “native” Indian
crew members. Additionally, the Government of India increased its customs and
police staffs border security at Indian ports. Such was the context in which the
British were confounded by Tehran’s approach to U.S. Senator William King, in
1934, to exclude the Persian Gulf from the special zones during the Senate’s
consideration of the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention.
While marginally effective in the short term, these initiatives failed to curb the
shipment of arms and bombs to revolutionary terrorists. Consequently, British
India officials began advocating for an international treaty to enhance govern-
mental cooperation in licensing weapons and stopping illegal exports. This
approach found little support among London officials. In 1933, Whitehall refused
to support the Government of India’s suggestion that the British should propose a
new arms trafficking treaty under the auspices of the League of Nations. A year
later, European terrorism would enable the Government of India to insert arms
control protocols into an international anti-terrorism treaty and circumvent
London’s control over its security strategy. The revival of terrorism in the 1930s,
along with Delhi’s limited recourse to temporary ordinances and emergency
powers, had renewed the Government of India’s focus on preventing gun-
running. While government officials in India liaised with shipping companies
and Whitehall to coordinate their anti-smuggling efforts, the mass availability of
small arms in European cities and ports posed an enduring problem.

Repeal of Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act

With most revolutionary leaders either in jail or exile, terrorism decreased sig-
nificantly under the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925. According to
colonial police records, only one murder by “terrorists” occurred between its
issuance and the end of 1928. By September 1928, those who had been arrested
under the legislation had either been set free or seen their sentence reduced to
house arrest. While the law curbed political violence in Bengal, authorities sur-
mised that terrorist cells were emerging in other provinces.⁷ Many militant
revolutionaries in the 1920s either went underground or fled to Burma to regroup
beyond the sights of Bengal police surveillance. There, as well, the Rangoon
Jugantar Party oversaw the smuggling of arms from Singapore, Japan, and
China, recruited new members for the armed struggle, provided shelter to
absconders, and publicized the nationalist movement. Burma would provide
refuge to Surja Sen and other prominent revolutionary leaders who, even in

⁷ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 10–11; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 281; Government of Bengal
to the Home Department, Government of India, January 16, 1930, TNA, CAB 24/210/50.
132    

exile, preserved connections with nationalist branches in the Bengal cities of

Chittagong, Dakshineswar, and Bhowanipore.⁸
Even with violence declining, authorities in Bengal remained vigilant. In April
1929, following an incident in New Delhi where two revolutionaries threw bombs
into the Central Legislative Assembly, the Director of the Intelligence Bureau of
the Government of India reported that the men were “well-known suspects of the
Punjab and the United Provinces, respectively,” and that typed leaflets thrown
into the assembly along with the bombs bore the heading “Hindustan Socialist
Republican Association.” The word “Socialist” had recently been added, it went on
to say, as “various members of the Revolutionary party—of which the Hindustan
Republican Association was one section—have joined the Workers’ and Peasants’
Party, and have been engaged in the organization of Labor as well as in revolu-
tionary organization.”⁹
The following week, the Director followed up with a report that mixed meta-
phors and issued stark warnings. While the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act
of 1925 had initially thwarted the revolutionaries in Bengal, it stated, “all past
experience goes to show that the revolutionary movement is hydra-headed, and it
will be surprising if fresh outcrops in the Provinces already infected do not occur.”
Indeed, “the revolutionary leaders are known to be recruiting, and to be collecting
arms and bombs, with a view to a campaign of violence in the future.” While the
Intelligence Bureau had figured that revolutionaries were waiting out the emer-
gency act, which was set to expire in 1930, “recent information shows that the
younger revolutionaries in Bengal do not like the limelight being switched off
them, and directed, as it is at present, on to revolutionaries elsewhere.”¹⁰ The
nature of the explosives found in the possession of the Punjab Party, following the
April blast in New Delhi, showed a “close connection” with Bengal revolutionaries.
“Thus, there are the present time dangerous revolutionary parties in Bengal, the
United Provinces and the Punjab, all of which are inter-connected, while some
members of these parties are active outside their own Provinces,” the report warned.
The previous month saw the murder of a police inspector in Barisal, Bengal, the
report went on to say, by a student who “was not actually a member of a
revolutionary party, but rather a youth who had been worked up to commit the
crime by means of rabidly heated propaganda.” Such was the result of a concerted
campaign directed at Indian youths. “They are being inoculated with the virus of
hatred of everything British which is undoubtedly seriously affecting and altering
their whole outlook on life.” Were the 1925 emergency to be lifted in 1930, the
report strongly suggested, those not yet affiliated with a radical cause soon would

⁸ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 282.

⁹ Director of Intelligence Bureau, Revolutionary and Terrorist Activities, April 1929–December
1930, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
¹⁰ Weekly report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, April
25, 1929, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
     133

be. “The ground is being prepared for a national Civil Disobedience movement,” it
warned, “without the saving qualification of non-violence; while the probability of
a renewal of revolutionary activity with the commission of further outrages,
cannot be ignored.”¹¹
In January 1930, the Government of Bengal reiterated its warning to the
Government of India that the expiration of the 1925 act would jeopardize police
morale, shatter the government’s intelligence apparatus, and allow terrorist organ-
izations to recruit from “the discontented intelligentsia among the student com-
munity, whose minds have been consistently poisoned by propaganda in the Press
and on public platforms.”¹² Authorities had begun arresting revolutionaries based
on tangential evidence linking them to the New Violence Party, an association of
revolutionaries in the United Provinces, Punjab, and Bengal. One of them,
Niranjan Sengupta, “seemed to be determined to revert to crime before the
Bengal Criminal Law [Amendment] Act, 1925, expired, and there is excellent
reason to believe that he had contemplated not only the murder of police officers,
but also bomb attacks on Europeans collected together at public functions.” The
New Violence Party was actively planning a campaign of terror to occur in several
districts, according to the Bengal Intelligence Bureau, and that these attacks would
target government officials, police officers, and European civilians in Bakarganj,
Chittagong, and Calcutta.¹³
More momentous to India, Britain, and the world that month were the actions
of Mohandas Gandhi. Following the January 26 proclamation of Indian inde-
pendence by the Indian National Congress, Gandhi launched the Salt March that
spring, leading a trek of some 240 miles in one of the most renowned and
enduring acts of non-violent protest. In this context, the Government of India
was walking a tightrope. Intelligence reports were clearly stating that violent
revolutionaries were plotting attacks. At the same time, extending the emergency
legislation from 1925 would only play into the hands of Gandhi. On March 25,
1930, the Bengal Legislative Council amended the Criminal Act, which was set to
expire the following month, and revoked the government’s ability to intern
revolutionary terrorists without trial. The Bengal government lost its anti-
terrorism powers at the same time that police were engaged in controlling mass
protests connected to the civil disobedience movement. It was at this moment that
revolutionaries stormed the armories in Chittagong.¹⁴

¹¹ Ibid.
¹² W.D.R. Prentice, Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal to the Government of India, Home
Department, January 16, 1930, Bill to provide for the continuance of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925, TNA, CAB 24/210/50.
¹³ Weekly report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India,
January 2, 1930, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
¹⁴ Secretary of State for India, The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance, TNA, CAB 24/
214/23; Secretary of state for India, The Question of the Renewal of the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act, 1925, TNA, CAB 24/210/50; Hale, Political Trouble in India, 24.
134    

The leaders of the Chittagong Armory Raid in April—Ananta Singh, Ganesh

Ghosh, and Surja Sen—had all been arrested previously under the Bengal
Criminal Law Act of 1925. During their nearly three years in prison, Singh,
Ghosh, and Sen contemplated the failure of earlier revolutionary campaigns in
Bengal and contrasted it with the apparent success of Irish republicans. Younger
members of the two major Bengali terrorist groups—the Anushilan Samiti and
Jugantar—read works by Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the April 1916 Easter
Rising against British rule in Ireland, and Dan Breen, a key figure in the Irish
Republican Army (IRA).¹⁵
Inspired by stories of action and martyrdom, the young revolutionaries planned
the Chittagong Armory Raid hoping that it would instigate open armed conflict
throughout India. They purposefully chose to launch the attack on Good Friday
(before Easter Sunday) to coincide with the anniversary of the 1916 uprising in
Ireland. Before and after the attack, the group distributed printed leaflets at
schools in Chittagong, Rangoon, Barisal, and Calcutta, announcing that the
Indian Republican Army was fighting to free India and urging students and
youths to join the fight. Other leaflets called on the people of Chittagong to
show their support.¹⁶
The Chittagong Armory Raid electrified the revolutionary terrorist movement
in India. Recruits poured into the various militant groups and included women
and young girls. Women assisted revolutionary groups by serving as housekeep-
ers, messengers, custodians of arms, and assassins. A month after the Chittagong
Armory Raid, revolutionaries launched attacks on police officers in provinces
across the Raj. “A powerful bomb was thrown into the compound of the Chenab
Club, Lyallpur, on the night of the 6th June,” the Intelligence Branch reported.
“The attack was undoubtedly directed against the lives of Europeans.” The
director of the Home Department’s Intelligence Bureau believed that the attacks
indicated that “The party of violence—the real revolutionary element—has never
bowed the knee to Mr. Gandhi.”¹⁷ Revolutionary propaganda, uncovered by the
Intelligence Bureau and circulated widely in Bombay and Bengal, confirmed his
assessment: “Government denies us liberty, country and humanity, so we have to
fight as long as life lasts, fight always, fight every weapon, face all from death to
ridicule, face hatred and contempt, work on because it is our duty, for no other
reason.”¹⁸

¹⁵ Kalpana Dutt, Chittagong Armory Raiders: Reminiscences (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1945, 1979), 1–6; Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 146–7; Silvestri, “ ‘The Sinn Fein of India,’ ” 467.
¹⁶ I. Mallikarjuna Sharma, Easter Rebellion in India: The Chittagong Uprising (Hyderabad: Marxist
Study Forum, 1993), 1; Dutt, Chittagong Armory Raiders, ii–xiii, 1–9; Ghosh, “Terrorism in
Bengal,” 285.
¹⁷ Weekly Report of Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, May
22, 1930 and June 12, 1930, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
¹⁸ “In Sacred and Inspiring Memory of Jatindra Nath Das,” Intelligence Bureau, Home Department,
Government of India to Indian Political Intelligence, October 7, 1930, L/P&J/12/389, BL.
     135

The next month, the Bengal government requested that the expired Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1925 not only be reactivated but replaced with
permanent legislation. The Legislative Council demurred, and the resulting Bengal
Act VI of 1930 was again limited to five years. In March 1931, Lord Irwin, who
had replaced Reading as viceroy of India, reached a settlement with Gandhi to
scale back the activities of the civil disobedience movement. Yet this agreement
also suggested that the British government was relinquishing its authority. Tasked
with carrying out orders, Indian police officers faced the decision of whether to
stay loyal to a weakened colonial power or fall in with groups clamoring for the
increasingly-likely Indian independence. The Intelligence Bureau correctly
assessed that revolutionaries were forming cells within police units in order to
dismantle the organization from within. Having cut the intelligence service’s staff
and budget when the terrorist movement seemed quiescent, the government now
found itself unprepared to combat political violence and internal subversion.¹⁹
By the summer of 1931, the Government of India viewed public security as
endangered. Sixty-seven terrorist incidents were tallied for that year, including
nine murders. In December, two female students assassinated the District
Magistrate of Tippera. The next year, during which the government recorded
seventy-five terrorist incidents, Bina Das, a female student at the University of
Calcutta, attempted to murder the highest-ranking member of the British gov-
ernment in Bengal, Governor Stanley Jackson.²⁰ The “sinister” emergence of
female assassins compounded the policing problems for the British. Almost all
of the intelligence and surveillance work had focused on young men. Officials and
police hesitated to raid the houses of prominent Bengalis to interrogate their
daughters and wives. The involvement of elite women in the revolutionary cause
also provided a powerful propaganda tool for revolutionary leaders and inspired
other women to take action.²¹
The Chittagong uprising encouraged bolder initiatives such as the Jugantar
Party’s killing of Europeans in hotels, clubs, and cinemas. British officials in
Bengal believed that revolutionaries considered political violence to be a viable
means of ending British rule in India.²² Convinced that the renewed Bengal
Criminal Law Amendment Act was “insufficient to cope with the menace,” as

¹⁹ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 31–2; Director of Intelligence Bureau, Home Department,
Government of India, Revolutionary activities in India, July 10, 1930, L/P&J/12/389; Intelligence
Bureau, Home Department, Government of India to Indian Political Intelligence, May 4, 1933,
Report by C.E. Fairweather, DIG of Police, on the work of the Central and District Intelligence
Branches in Bengal from 1930–32, March 10, 1933, L/PJ/12/466, BL; Townshend, Britain’s Civil
Wars, 146–9.
²⁰ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 23–4; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 286.
²¹ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 286–7; Secretary of State for India, Confidential appreciation of the
Political Situation in India, December 19, 1931, TNA, CAB 24/225/29.
²² Government of India to Secretary of State for India, The Bengal Criminal Law Amendment
Ordinance, July 25, 1930, TNA, CAB 24/214/23; Secretary of state for India, The Situation in India,
February 3, 1934, TNA, CAB 24/247/28; Hale, Political Trouble in India, 25, 31–2.
136    

Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare later summed up post-Chittagong

efforts, the Government of India conferred new emergency powers to the
Bengal government.²³ These included a Press Act, which prohibited incitement
to murder or violence in the public press, and an additional Bengal Emergency
Powers Ordinance, which extended to the District Magistrate of Chittagong the
powers of commandeering property, imposing collective fines, and regulating
traffic and transport. The law also expanded the definition of “absconders” to
include anyone who evaded internment or refused to provide information to
authorities. In 1932, the Legislative Council passed two more pieces of emergency
legislation: the Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act, 1932; and the
Bengal Criminal Law (Arms and Explosives) Act, 1932.²⁴
In addition to taking legal measures to combat terrorism, the Government of
Bengal deployed force. Immediately after the Chittagong attacks, authorities
posted punitive police in fifty-two villages in the Chittagong district and assem-
bled a mobile police striking force comprised of ninety-six men. Assisted by the
military, police conducted one hundred house-to-house searches a month.²⁵
Fear of full-blown insurrection led the provincial government to appoint
Sir John Anderson as Governor of Bengal in 1932. Anderson had served as
under secretary of state in Ireland, where he trained and supervised the Royal
Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence. Drawing on this
experience, Anderson applied counterterrorism tactics, including the develop-
ment of Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs) who served as plainclothes inspec-
tors in the Intelligence Branch and coordinated the use of military forces in
search operations for alleged terrorists. The police also set curfews and collected
fines, while the military was deployed to assist the police in search and seizure
operations.²⁶
Terrorism gradually declined in Bengal because of the large-scale military
assistance provided to the police and the refinement of intelligence and search
efforts in “disaffected villages.” According to police records, from 1932 to 1933,
terrorist attacks in Bengal declined by over 30 percent, and by over 60 percent
from 1933 to 1934. In 1933, an average of eight crimes had occurred each month;
by September 1934 the average for the year had dropped to 1.5 a month. This
improvement led to a withdrawal of punitive police and repeal of collective fines.
In a speech to policemen in July 1935, however, Governor Anderson reminded his
audience that even though the situation had improved, the “terrorist menace”
remained a threat to the “whole future welfare of the Province”; he advocated the

²³ Secretary of State for India, The Situation in India, February 3, 1934, TNA, CAB 24/247/28.
²⁴ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 34–5; Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 146–9; Secretary of State
for India, The Situation in India, February 3, 1934, TNA, CAB 24/247/28.
²⁵ Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 146–9.
²⁶ Silvestri, “ ‘The Sinn Fein of India,’ ” 479–82; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 289.
     137

hardening of attitudes “into a practical determination to show definitely, by deed

as well as by word, that the terrorist is regarded as a public enemy.”²⁷
By 1936, terrorist incidents in Bengal fell to a mere four cases, and the
government pronounced the insurgency defeated. The Bengal police, however,
warned that Bengal terrorist groups had “not abandoned terrorism” and were
merely awaiting the release of their leaders from internment while continuing to
recruit members. The police maintained that District Intelligence Officers should
“keep in touch with reliable agents and obtain accurate information regarding the
progress made by the Anushilan Samiti and the Jugantar Party in their districts.”²⁸
The dual legacy of the Chittagong Armory Raid was to convince police and
intelligence officials that the terrorist groups would carry out attacks as soon as
the emergency anti-terrorism legislation expired and that the government needed
to remain vigilant even during periods of calm.
In March 1934, the Government of India assessed that the “principal Bengal
terrorist organizations now have branches in the districts of Assam [in the north-
east] adjacent to Bengal and there is reason to believe that other outrages have
been and are being planned.” Unless further steps were taken “to deal with
terrorists who cross the border into Assam,” government officials warned, all of
the police work in Bengal would prove futile.²⁹ That same month, Assam’s
legislative assembly enacted a Criminal Law Amendment Bill that bestowed on
the police powers to arrest terrorist suspects without trials and to try terrorist
offenders in special courts. This came two years after Punjab officials enacted
similar legislation—the 1932 Special Powers Ordinance and the Punjab Criminal
Law (Amendment) Act of November 1932—and after the Criminal Investigation
Department had compiled a list of over 3,000 persons considered terrorists or
terrorist sympathizers and organizers. As with Bengal and Punjab, from the
perspective of the police and intelligence bureaus in British India, it took the
introduction of special powers and emergency law in Assam to bring about a
decline in terrorist violence.³⁰

Consequences

The Bengal model of counterterrorism generated a number of problems, not the

least of which was the huge detention camp system it created. By 1934, the police

²⁷ Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 148; Hale, Political Trouble in India, 47–9; Government of
India, Appreciation of the Political Situation, August 16, 1935, TNA, CAB 24/256/25.
²⁸ Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 148; Extract from Bengal Police Weekly Review, December 9,
1937, L/P&J/12/395, BL.
²⁹ Secretary of State for India, Proposals of the Government of India for the Extension of Special
Powers for dealing with Terrorists to Assam (Secret), March 3, 1934, TNA, CAB 24/247/51.
³⁰ Hale, Political Trouble in India, 77.
138    

had arrested 3,110 persons for terrorist crimes. The majority of these were
detained in camps and prisons within Bengal at Buxa, Hijli, and Deoli.³¹
Prisoners frequently staged hunger strikes. In 1931, British guards opened fire
on unarmed detainees during an uprising at the Hijli detention camp (Figure 5.1),
killing two prisoners and wounding three. The riots at Hijli drew national and
international scrutiny to prison conditions in India and the government’s mass
imprisonment of individuals without trial—attention that increased sympathy for
the revolutionaries and made the prison system a focus of anti-government
sentiment.³² The director of the Intelligence Bureau complained that “terrorist
prisoners managed . . . to keep themselves very much in the public eye.” By the
mid-1930s, the release of “terrorist convicts” emerged as a major political issue.³³
Massive hunger strikes by political prisoners at the Andaman jail and the prom-
ulgation of the new Government of India Act led British officials to accede to
demands that detainees gradually be released.³⁴
Protests against the camps led John Anderson to realize that detaining large
numbers of men and women was an untenable solution. Even as terrorism

Figure 5.1 The administrative building of the Hijli detention camp (Wikimedia
Commons)

³¹ Ibid., 31–2, 47–9.

³² Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 287–9; Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department,
Government of India, Confidential Review of the Terrorist Situation in India during the year, 1937,
February 1938, L/P&J/12/395, BL; Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 146–9.
³³ Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, Confidential
Review of the Terrorist Situation in India during the year, 1937, February 1938, L/P&J/12/395, BL.
³⁴ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 290.
     139

decreased in Bengal, “preventive police pressure” based on force and coercion

would not end anticolonial sentiment. Consequently, Anderson advocated social
and economic reform that would alleviate unemployment among youths most
susceptible to joining the terrorist movement. The Great Depression hit India
hard. In 1933, Anderson appointed an Economic Commission to develop a long-
term economic strategy that would create jobs and provide young Bengalis with an
“outlet” other than terrorist crime.³⁵
The Government of Bengal was also motivated to advocate social and economic
reform because of communism’s inroads in the region dating back to 1921, as
described in Chapter 2, when a number of Bengalis established working relations
with the Communist International (Comintern). In the late 1920s, Secretary of
State for India Lord Birkenhead again called for passport reform to prevent British
communists from traveling to India. Yet again, Whitehall failed to take decisive
action. As passport initiatives languished, the Communist Party of India (CPI)
launched a recruitment drive in the jails of Bengal that won over a large number of
bhadralok terrorists. After it sponsored mass strikes in the textile industry, and
amidst the British Communist Party’s call for revolution in India, the CPI was
banned by the Government of India in 1934.³⁶ Nonetheless, the Communist Party
grew from thirty-seven members in 1934 to more than 1,000 members in 1942
and almost 20,000 members by 1947.³⁷ In 1938, the deputy director of the Home
Department’s Intelligence Bureau warned that “terrorists everywhere seem to be
intrigued with the Communist program of mass violence.”³⁸
The detention camp system unintentionally expanded communism’s reach by
allowing the CPI to introduce prisoners to the writings of Marx and Lenin.
Upward of a thousand imprisoned terrorists joined the CPI during the “com-
munist consolidation movement” in the jails of Bengal during the 1930s.³⁹ The
confluence between communism and Bengali nationalism would lead the Home
Department, by the end of the decade, to conclude: “the aim of the new school of
Bengal revolutionaries is mass revolution; it is an economic as well as a political
movement and is of course inspired by the ideas of communism.”⁴⁰ Meanwhile,
the rash of political assassinations, coupled with the fear that individual terrorism
would evolve into mass revolution, led the Government of India to prioritize

³⁵ Secretary of State for India, Review of the Indian Situation, February 3, 1934, TNA, CAB 24/247/28.
³⁶ Secretary of State for India, Proposed Legislation to Deal with Communism in India (Secret),
April 1934, TNA, CAB 24/248/34; see also Peter Heehs, India’s Freedom Struggle, 1857–1947 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 131; John Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy
and Comintern Policy, 1920–1939 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 209.
³⁷ Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal, 13. The partition of Bengal in 1947 created West Bengal
in India and East Bengal (now Bangladesh). West Bengal is one of two states in the Indian Union where
communist parties have been elected to form coalition governments.
³⁸ Deputy Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India, Confidential
Review of the Terrorist Situation in India during the year, 1937, February 1938, L/P&J/12/395, BL.
³⁹ Franda, Radical Politics in West Bengal, 19–27.
⁴⁰ Home Department to A. Dibbin, India Office, May 19, 1939, L/P&J/12/395, BL.
140    

disarming the Indian public and prevent international gun-running, the problem
that continued to bedevil British authorities and diplomats.

Arms Control Conferences in Simla and London, 1932

With the upsurge in terrorism in India following the Chittagong Armory Raid
in April 1930, the Intelligence Bureau of the Government of India’s Home
Department and officers in Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) returned to the
“old question of arms smuggling into India.” In May 1932, the Intelligence
Bureau concluded: “one of the most important factors in the terrorist situation
in Bengal is the number of firearms in the hands of terrorists, and naturally the
Bengal Government as well as the police, are very anxious that it should be made
as difficult as possible for terrorists to acquire arms.”⁴¹ In response, the govern-
ment created a special police staff to combat the smuggling of firearms through
the port of Calcutta and convened an arms smuggling conference in Simla.
In June 1932, the India Office held an arms conference in London and organ-
ized a special committee with two objectives: (1) stop arms from getting on board
ships bound for India and (2) prevent any arms that were on ships from being
unloaded in India. The committee consisted of government officials, police offi-
cers, and members of the intelligence services.⁴² Malcom Seton of the India Office
and Stewart Menzies of SIS briefed the attendees about the problem of arms traffic
to India and the steps the government had taken in 1924–25 to curb it. Menzies
contended that large shipments of arms were “practically all destined for China,”
while arms traffic to India was on a “small scale” and not conducted through “big
international smuggling organizations.” The committee first considered how to
“prevent lascars [sailors from South Asia who were employed on European ships]
from purchasing arms while on shore in Continental ports,” deciding that the
India Office should approach British lines and the Hansa Line (German
Steamship Company), semi-officially on the subject, “pointing out the dangers
and asking for co-operation.”
As described in Chapter 2, police cooperation at continental ports was uneven.
Studies by the government’s intelligence services, the Indian Political Intelligence
(IPI) and the Home Department’s Intelligence Bureau, revealed that the majority
of weapons smuggled into India came from the European ports of Hamburg,

⁴¹ Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India to Indian Political Intelligence,

May 3, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁴² Attendees at the July 12, 1932 meeting at the India Office included: Malcom Seton, India Office
(Chairman); E.J. Foley, Board of Trade, Mercantile Marine; J.S. Sutton, H.M. Customs; W.H. Webster,
Commissioner of Police, Port of London Authority; G.M. Liddell, Home Intelligence; Stewart Menzies,
SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) (MI1c), War Office; Valentine Vivian, Director of Passport Control; Sir
Charles Tegart, India Office; R.T. Peel, India Office; M.J. Clauson, India Office; J. Nott-Bower, India
Office; and Indian Political Intelligence (IPI).
     141

Antwerp, and Marseilles. In addition, the agents of Rash Behari Bose in Japan
supplied a small amount of weapons to revolutionary groups.⁴³ The Home
Department concluded that at least “one well-known agency for the export of
arms illicitly [exists] in Hamburg and that port is the largest market for the trade
and some of its police are credibly reported to be in the pay of the arms
traffickers.”⁴⁴ Anti-smuggling and intelligence operations decreased in the late
1920s, as domestic anti-terrorism legislation kept the revolutionary movement
quiescent. While certain restrictions on the sale of arms existed in Hamburg,
Major Valentine Vivian reported, the police were “very slack” in enforcing the law,
and that “it was easy for foreign, and particularly colored, seamen to purchase
arms.” A preventive system existed, however, and the local police assisted in
individual cases when asked to do so.⁴⁵ Rotterdam did not “present a serious
problem”; Dutch authorities controlled the sale of arms and encouraged cooper-
ation with the British in order to stop the illicit export of arms to the Dutch East
Indies.
Belgian ports were another matter. Antwerp, in particular, continued to be a
hub for international arms smuggling. As noted in Chapter 4, after the First World
War, Belgian firearms manufacturers had begun producing exact replicas of
Imperial Germany’s Mauser. Menzies, Vivian, and IPI all discussed the situation
in Belgium, noting that at that point, no restrictions existed to control the sale or
export of arms, and that a large proportion of the inhabitants depended on the
trade for their livelihood. While Belgian authorities were willing to provide
information regarding “purchases by colored seamen,” in general, they failed “to
stop the export of arms to India.” The committee decided that recent gun violence
in Belgium offered an opportunity to alert authorities about the number of Belgian
pistols found on “Indian terrorists.”⁴⁶
The arms conference in London concluded with a recommendation by Charles
Tegart that Criminal Investigation Departments should be expanded throughout
British India and that local governments should expel known arms smugglers
from their territories. Tegart had found these police tactics successful in Ireland.⁴⁷
After the meeting, the India Office reached out to the Foreign Office to address
arms smuggling with foreign governments. Secretary of State for India Samuel

⁴³ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Memorandum on the Situation in Bengal and

the arms traffic, October 29, 1924, L/PJ/12/91, BL; J.A. Wallinger, Indian Political Intelligence to David
Petrie, Intelligence Bureau, March 4, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL. Deputy Inspector General of Police for
Railways and Criminal Investigation, Burma, August 30, 1935, L/P&J/12/93, BL.
⁴⁴ Government of Bengal, February 4, 1925 and April 6, 1925, Home Department, Government of
India to Under Secretary of State for India, India Office, April 16, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
⁴⁵ Arms Conference, India Office, July 12, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL. ⁴⁶ Ibid.
⁴⁷ Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India to Indian Political Intelligence,
May 3, 1932, L/PJ/12/91; Deputy Inspector General of Police for Railways and Criminal Investigation,
Burma, August 30, 1935, L/P&J/12/93; Government of Burma to the Home Department, Government
of India, May 9, 1935, L/P&J/12/93, BL. Arms conference, India Office, July 12, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
142    

Hoare reported to Foreign Secretary John Simon that “firearms and ammunition
of foreign manufacture have figured in several recent terrorist outrages.” Small
arms were generally “smuggled in by seamen landing from ships touching at
Indian ports,” rather than being imported in large consignments. Hoare requested
the Foreign Office’s assistance in securing the cooperation of European
governments—starting with that of Belgium—in combating gun-running.⁴⁸
Over the summer of 1932, British officials in Brussels worked to secure Belgian
cooperation in prohibiting the sale of revolvers to crew members of ships plying
between Antwerp and Indian ports.⁴⁹ Lord Granville at the British embassy in
Brussels oversaw the appeal to Paul Hymans, the Belgian minister for foreign
affairs. He first had to address a miscommunication with the Belgian minister,
clarifying that he “was not referring to the ordinary traffic in arms and ammuni-
tion,” but to the “infiltration of arms and ammunition of Belgian origin into
India.”⁵⁰ “The seamen who come ashore at Antwerp, and other Belgian ports and
who are often themselves of Indian or colored origin, find it extremely easy to
purchase in the Belgian ports, and subsequently to smuggle on board ships sailing
for India, pistols and similar weapons and ammunition for them.” Granville went
on to say, “I understand that the seamen usually purchase these weapons in shops
and cafes where they can be sold without any license whatever. The weapons are
then resold by the seamen in Indian ports and thus pass into the hands of
terrorists who use them for political assassination.”⁵¹
Lord Granville requested that the Belgian government promulgate the arms
legislation under consideration as it would help to “check such promiscuous sales
of weapons” by making it “impossible for a Lascar seamen to purchase an arm
except from a registered shop where he would have to give his name and address
and produce a permit.” British diplomats in Belgium emphasized that it was of
“the highest possible interest” to the Government of India that the arms legislation
be enacted and strictly enforced.⁵²

Enhanced Security Measures at the Borders

The arms conference of July 1932 reinvigorated India’s efforts to strengthen

cooperation with shipping companies and customs officials. Authorities alerted
shipping companies that “the prevalence at the present time of terrorist crime in
India [made] it particularly desirable to use every endeavor to prevent potential

⁴⁸ R.T. Peel to the Under Secretary of State, Foreign Office, July 19, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁴⁹ Nevile Bland, British Embassy, Brussels to Sir John Simon, July 6, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁵⁰ Lord Granville, British Embassy, Brussels to Monsieur Paul Hymans, minister for foreign affairs,
August 17, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁵¹ Ibid. ⁵² Ibid.
     143

terrorists from acquiring weapons.” Police searches at Indian ports and the markings
of weapons found on “the persons of terrorist assailants when arrested” indicated
that arms were still coming from European ports.⁵³
Secretary Hoare and the India Office responded by requesting that shipping
companies plying to India exercise “rigorous control” over the “entry of hawkers
and peddlers on board your vessel.” In view of the “anarchist activities prevalent in
Bengal,” the India Office requested that shipping companies advise the masters of
their vessels trading to the East and India to “carry out systematic searches of their
ships, and possibly also of their crews, before the opportunity arose of secreting
fire arms in places where they would ordinarily not be looked for.”⁵⁴ Shipping
companies like Bibby Bros. & Co and the Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Company focused on the Indian members of their crew even though
past arrests for arms smuggling into Rangoon had implicated European crew-
members.⁵⁵ The companies responded that they had instructed their agents to “see
that every native member of the crew on returning from [Marseilles and other
European ports] to the ship is searched for arms and ammunition, and this is
being done in every case.”⁵⁶
The Government of India also followed through on the suggestions of the
London arms conference to enhance coordination among local governments.
Government officials advocated for better intelligence and border controls in
ports close to Bengal, and additional intelligence sharing among police officials
in Bengal, Burma, Madras, and Bombay. The Government of India also requested
that the courts of local governments impose harsh penalties for convicted arms
smugglers, contending that harsh sentences would deter them.⁵⁷
British officials in India also focused on French possessions in India, which
served as propaganda centers and safe havens for terrorists. During the First
World War, French colonial administrators had allowed British police officers
to operate in the French colony of Chandernagore and expel from it British Indian
subjects whom the Bengal government accused of engaging in revolutionary
violence, yet this collaboration had foundered in peacetime. After the revival of
terrorism in the 1930s, Bengal officials hoped to reconstitute this arrangement. In
March 1933, government officials in Bengal requested that the Government of
India negotiate a new treaty with French authorities in Chandernagore that would

⁵³ R.T. Peel for the secretary of state for India to shipping companies, September 12, 1932, L/PJ/12/
91, BL.
⁵⁴ India Office to British India Steam Navigation Co., London, July 1, 1932, L/PJ/12/91, BL.
⁵⁵ Bibby Bros. & Co, Liverpool to India Office, January 30, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁵⁶ Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), London to India Office, January 31,
1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁵⁷ Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, to the Secretaries to the Governments
of Madras and Bombay, Home Department, and the Chief Secretaries to the Governments of Bengal
and Burma, July 13, 1925, L/P&J/12/79, BL.
144    

end asylum for Indian terrorists and mandate extradition for British subjects
facing terrorism charges.⁵⁸ The police in Bengal desired this arrangement because
revolutionaries routinely absconded to Chandernagore in order to escape British
police surveillance.⁵⁹
“I have the honor to inform your Excellency that my Government have recently
devoted considerable attention to the question as to how fire-arms, particularly
revolvers and automatic pistols, are acquired by persons in British India engaged
in revolutionary and terrorist activities,” Viceroy Lord Willingdon wrote the
Governor of the French Settlements in India in April 1933. “They have been led
to conclude that, apart from other sources such as the theft of licensed weapons
and smuggling through sea-ports in British India, there is a considerable traffic
in such weapons from the French Settlements in India,” he went on to say—in
particular, from areas bordering Madras.⁶⁰ Yet again, the governments of Britain
and France failed to work together to prevent revolutionaries and weapons from
crossing their imperial borders.
French officials did not respond to British requests for cooperation until a
Bengali revolutionary terrorist assassinated a French official in Chandernagore
in June 1933. It was the first political murder in the French settlement perpet-
rated by a Bengal revolutionary. The British responded by declaring that such
acts were likely as long as Chandernagore remained a center for revolutionary
conspiracy and safe haven for terrorists.⁶¹ The next month the Government of
India began working with local French authorities to improve arrangements in
Chandernagore. However, local French authorities proceeded cautiously, as a
strong contingent of public opinion in France opposed helping the British on
the grounds that such assistance infringed upon the rights of political refugees
and French sovereignty in Indian Settlements.⁶²
In July 1933, French authorities in Chandernagore enacted a law to regulate the
introduction, possession, and use of firearms in French territory in India. British
policymakers and police officials, such as Charles Tegart, however, believed that
the French regulations were not strict enough and that weapons continued to
move through the French postal service into British India.⁶³ The French governor
refrained from taking additional steps, and declined to negotiate a new extradition

⁵⁸ Government of Bengal to the Home Department, Government of India, March 21, 1933, L/PJ/12/
6, BL.
⁵⁹ Ibid.
⁶⁰ Lord Willingdon, Viceroy to the Governor of the French Settlements in India, Pondicherry, April
10, 1933, L/PJ/12/6, BL.
⁶¹ Hugh Molson, India Office to R.A. Butler, India Office, June 2, 1933, L/PJ/12/6, BL.
⁶² R.A. Butler, India Office to Hugh Molson, India Office, July 1, 1933, L/PJ/12/6, BL.
⁶³ Government of India, Home Department (Police) to R. T. Peel, secretary, Public and Judicial
Department, India Office, April 10, 1934, L/P&J/12/93; Governor of French Settlements in India to
Viceroy, January 11, 1934, L/PJ/12/6, BL.
     145

treaty for the French settlements.⁶⁴ As a result, French settlements continued to

provide arms for revolutionary terrorists in British India.⁶⁵
A year after the arms conference in London, Indian revolutionaries continued
to receive small arms from lascars and sailors on ships sailing from European
ports. The Government of India once again requested that the India Office help
secure the cooperation of foreign governments to help restrict the arms trade.⁶⁶
This time, however, Government of India officials suggested working with the
League of Nations. Colonial administrators argued that without “some sort of
international co-operation” steps taken in India to curb the arms traffic would
fail.⁶⁷
C.M. Trivedi, who would become the governor of East Punjab following
independence in 1947, proposed a number of possibilities for bringing the ques-
tion of arms smuggling to the League, including raising the subject at the
Disarmament Conference, amending the 1925 Arms Traffic Convention, and
proposing a new treaty altogether. Colonial administrators argued that since
“[t]he League of Nations have tackled subjects such as illicit traffic in drugs and
traffic in women and children . . . , they may well take up the question of illicit
traffic in arms, which affects many countries.”⁶⁸ The Government of India
emphasized that the “ease at which revolvers and pistols, essentially weapons for
taking life, can be obtained and concealed,” and the increasing frequency with which
they were smuggled, raised a problem “not peculiar to India though its solution
is of special importance here.” The government, however, was “gravely handi-
capped by the absence of information as to the history of unlicensed weapons
which come into the possession of the police.”⁶⁹
Consequently, Indian colonial officials argued that greater government control
was required and that governments of countries that manufactured arms needed
“some system of licenses, combined with governmental inspection, for (i) manu-
factures of firearms, (ii) arms dealers and gunsmiths, (iii) members of the public
who possess firearms.” By not knowing the “full history of every revolver and pistol”
in India, the police believed they were hindered in investigating and deterring

⁶⁴ Government of India, Home Department (Police) to R. T. Peel, secretary, Public and Judicial
Department, India Office, April 10, 1934, L/P&J/12/93; Governor of French Settlements in India to
Viceroy, January 11, 1934, L/PJ/12/6; Foreign Office to R.T. Peel, Secretary, Public and Judicial
Department, September 11, 1934, L/PJ/12/6, BL; Richard Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial
Defense: British Intelligence and the Defense of the Indian Empire 1904–1924 (London: Frank Cass,
1995), 114–16.
⁶⁵ Government of Madras to the Home Department, Government of India, October 27, 1933,
L/P&J/12/93, BL.
⁶⁶ J.G. Laithwaite, India Office to Major N.G. Hind, Committee of Imperial Defense, May 21, 1933,
L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁶⁷ C.W. Gwynne, Deputy Secretary, Home Department, Government of India, January 16, 1933, to
R.T. Peel, Secretary, Public and Judicial Department, India Office, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁶⁸ Ibid. ⁶⁹ Ibid.
146    

terrorist crime. At this time, however, Government of India officials felt “some
diffidence in putting forward any specific proposal as they are not fully conversant
with the measures taken in other countries to regulate the possession of arms by
the public nor are they familiar with the procedure which should be adopted in
a case such as this.” The government requested the help of the India Office in
drafting a proposal to place before the League of Nations.⁷⁰
The India Office and Foreign Office, however, opposed all three recommenda-
tions. Based on intelligence reporting, the British government acknowledged that
most of the weapons smuggled into India consisted of small arms, revolvers, and
automatic pistols, and were loaded from the European ports of Antwerp,
Hamburg, and Marseilles and shipped along sea routes from Singapore and
Japan.⁷¹ Yet London had little inclination for going back to Geneva to craft yet
another treaty. Bilateral agreements, not League conventions, was the India
Office’s preferred choice of action by this point. It submitted a proposal stating
as much to the Foreign Office, which agreed that the Government of India should
apply “diplomatic pressure” on the governments of Belgium, Germany, and
France to secure cooperation.⁷² In March 1933, the Foreign Office concurred
that direct negotiations would yield better results than an international arrange-
ment under the auspices of the League of Nations.⁷³ While it had been the lead
advocate of a multilateral arms trafficking treaty in 1919 and 1925, London now
viewed the League as a hindrance to protecting the British Empire.
The India Office and Foreign Office approached the French and Belgian
governments directly and indicated their “desirability of a system of registration
and licensing which would give greater control, at Marseilles and Antwerp, over
the sale or disposal of revolvers and pistols.” By the spring of 1933, conditions at
Hamburg had improved, and the India Office believed that “no smuggling is likely
to be possible from there for some time to come.”⁷⁴ In May 1933, the British
ambassador in Brussels approached the Belgian foreign minister about the illicit
importation of arms into India and the delayed enforcement of domestic arms
control legislation. Monsieur Hymans of the Foreign Ministry responded that the
Belgian government was waiting to see if the Disarmament Conference would
enact any general instrument to deal internationally with arms traffic. The British
ambassador, consequently, formed the impression that “in the absence of any such
joint action based on international agreement, the Belgian Government would not

⁷⁰ Ibid.
⁷¹ J.A. Wallinger, Indian Political Intelligence to David Petrie, Intelligence Bureau, March 4, 1925,
L/P&J/12/79, BL; Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 281–3.
⁷² R.T. Peel, India Office to C. Howard Smith, Foreign Office, March 9, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁷³ C. Howard Smith, Foreign Office to R.T. Peel, India Office, March 24, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁷⁴ G.R. Shepherd, India Office to C.W. Gwynne, Secretary, Home Department, Government of
India, May 11, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
     147

be anxious to take independent action on their own initiative, and that in any case,
no early entry into operation of the relevant law could be expected.”⁷⁵
The British government, however, continued to press the Belgian government,
as the “absence of a registration and licensing system for manufactures, sellers,
bearers and exporters of arms in maritime countries makes it easy for lascars and
sailors to obtain revolvers and pistols which may be smuggled into India and sold
to terrorists.” Moreover, without a registration and licensing system the customs
authorities and police in India could not trace the origins of smuggled weapons.
The British requested to be notified immediately when the Belgian parliament
promulgated the new law prohibiting the sale or carrying of revolvers and other
firearms without permits.⁷⁶
The British Foreign Office also requested that its ambassador in Paris, Lord
Tyrrell, approach French authorities about arms smuggling in Marseilles. Lord
Tyrrell noted that after a careful study of many years the Government of India was
of the opinion that the “lack of any effective police supervision in continental
ports not only makes it easy for Lascars and sailors to obtain revolvers and pistols
which can be smuggled into India and sold to terrorists, but also that the absence
of a registration and licensing system for manufactures, sellers, bearers and
exporters of arms makes it impossible to trace the origin of such smuggled
weapons as the vigilance of the customs authorities and police in India enables
them to recover.” While, formerly, Antwerp was a principal center of this traffic,
representations made to the Belgian government by British officials had led to the
promulgation of a law on the subject by the Belgian parliament.⁷⁷ Lord Tyrrell
requested that French authorities consider “the possibility of instituting regula-
tions, perhaps on the lines of the Belgian law already referred to, with a view to
making it illegal for any unregistered arms dealer to sell, or a person without
official license to buy, a revolver or pistol.” The system inaugurated by the Belgian
legislation appeared to be “admirably suited” to limiting the illicit arms traffic into
India.⁷⁸
Despite the overtures made to foreign governments, the India Office considered
that the primary responsibility for countering arms smuggling lay with the
Government of India. India Office officials believed that “no practical results
could be expected from an appeal to the League of Nations” and only “slight
improvement might be effected by a diplomatic approach to individual foreign
Governments.” Requests that shipping companies cooperate with British officials
had met with limited success. Shipping companies assisted authorities in order to

⁷⁵ D. MacKillop for the Ambassador, British Embassy, Brussels to Sir John Simon, May 22, 1933, L/
PJ/12/92, BL.
⁷⁶ Aide-Mémoire, Confidential, British Embassy, Brussels, May 20, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁷⁷ Ambassador, British Embassy, Paris to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Ministry for Foreign
Affairs, Paris, July 7, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁷⁸ Ibid.
148    

avoid their ships being rummaged and delayed in embarking. However, it did not
seem that captains had accomplished much; they also tended to throw confiscated
revolvers overboard in order to avoid being delayed by legal proceedings. British
Customs officials were instructed to pay special attention to vessels docking in
Britain on their way to India from continental ports, but they did not always have
the time to make thorough searches.⁷⁹
The India Office argued that it would never be possible, “in view of the almost
unlimited source of supply, to trace down the channels through which smuggled
weapons reach Indian ports, however much efforts are intensified at this end.” As
a result, the “only real hope of stopping this traffic lies in the narrow end of the
funnel, namely the Indian ports.” London officials suggested that the police and
intelligence services should be strengthened at “all maritime ports of importance”
and that the government needed to encourage greater cooperation among the
police and customs officials. Customs officers, in turn, should be encouraged to
make thorough searches, while local governments should be “urged to seek and
adopt any possible further means for improving their defense.” The Government
of India should not leave “any moveable stone unturned.”⁸⁰
In the fall of 1933, the Government of India initiated the recommendations of
the India Office. Delhi requested that local governments remain in close contact
with the masters of vessels docking in India—especially those of the Hansa line, a
German shipping firm that hauled goods from Europe to Asia—and keep them-
selves informed of the results of any special steps undertaken by the companies.
The government advised that local governments inspect all ships in Indian ports if
weapons were found on one of them. British officials prioritized improving police
counter-measures in Chittagong, Bombay, Karachi, Madras, and Calcutta. Special
actions needed to be undertaken in these cities so that local police and intelligence
officers could “combat the evil” of gun-running and terrorism.⁸¹ The Government
of India, however, continued to believe that international cooperation was neces-
sary to end arms smuggling to terrorist groups in India. While Indian Political
Intelligence maintained a vigilant eye on arms trafficking in Europe, colonial
administrators waited for the opportune moment to advocate a global arms treaty
and licensing system.

Conclusion

After the Chittagong Armory Raid, the Government of India initially responded
to a resurgence of terrorism using tactics from the 1920s that it believed had been

⁷⁹ G.R. Shepherd, India Office to C.W. Gwynne, Joint Secretary to the Government of India, Home
Department, May 11, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, BL.
⁸⁰ Ibid.
⁸¹ Government of India to the Maritime Local Governments, September 15, 1933, L/P&J/12/93, BL.
     149

successful: arms controls, passport restrictions, and domestic anti-terrorism legis-

lation. The third wave of political violence, however, led colonial administrators to
apply greater force. It also convinced them of the necessity of coordinating with
foreign governments to keep small arms from reaching Indian revolutionaries.
This was a recapitulation of the basic problem that Lord Islington had foreseen,
back in the early months of 1917, when he warned about the consequences that
the accumulated stockpiles from the Great War might have on the British Empire.
Almost two decades later the issue was no longer simply about leftover stocks.
Moreover, London had attempted and failed, in 1919 and 1925, to address the
problem of international arms trafficking.
Authorities in Bengal had been combating terrorist violence on and off for
thirty years. Hard lines of divisions emerged, and the outlook was bleak. “[I]n the
case of the terrorists, nothing can be hoped from a policy of conciliation,” as
Secretary of State for India Samuel Hoare put it.⁸² The general amnesty of 1920
and lifting of the Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act, in 1930, had brought on
a recrudescence of violence. “With these experiences as warning,” he concluded,
“it is clear that any change in our present policy towards terrorism would be
fraught with disaster.”⁸³
Reinforcing this belief were the conclusions of an internal history written by
members of the Bengal police and the Home Department’s Intelligence Bureau,
under the authority of H.J. Twynam and R.E.A. Ray, who were asked in 1935 to
“review the main features of the revolutionary movement in Bengal and also the
measures taken by Government to cope with it.”⁸⁴ Intended to inform a decision
about whether the government should maintain temporary forces employed for
anti-terrorism work in the Central and District Intelligence Branches, the final
report was published in 1936.⁸⁵
Terrorism was more than a police problem, according to Twynam and Ray; it
was “an economic problem, [a] social problem, and a political problem of grave
magnitude.” They attributed bhadralok terrorism to poor economic conditions,
limited employment opportunities, the growth of Indian nationalism, and a
“prolonged” campaign of anti-British propaganda, warning that “a lull in terrorist
outrages is by no means the same thing as a cessation of terrorist activities.” After
interviewing seventeen district superintendents of police, Twynam and Ray con-
cluded that the terrorist conspiracy had not been suppressed and that recruitment

⁸² Secretary of state for India, memorandum, A Note on Terrorism in India, Joint Committee on
Indian Constitutional Reform, 1933, L/P&J/12/397, BL.
⁸³ Ibid.
⁸⁴ See, for example, H.W. Hale, Political Trouble in India, 1917–1937 (Allahabad: Chugh
Publications, 1974 [Simla, 1937]); James Campbell Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917
(Calcutta, India: Superintendent Government Printing, 1917).
⁸⁵ H.J. Twynam and R.E.A. Ray, Enquiry into Temporary Establishments of the Central and District
Intelligence Branches of the Bengal Police (Alipore: Bengal Government Press, 1936), 1.
150    

efforts to secure arms, ammunition, and money continued.⁸⁶ Even with a decrease
in the number of terrorist incidents, vigilance was needed. Twynam and Ray
recommended that the Government of India maintain its existing staff for both
the District Intelligence Branches and the Central Intelligence Branch. The
authors declined to consider whether or not anti-British agitation was a direct
consequence of colonial policies that systemized a racial divide and excluded
Indians from the highest echelons of military and civil service.
Meanwhile, the Government of India continued to search for ways to control
the small arms trade. It was a daunting task, to be sure—yet one not quite as
impossible as fixing the underlying conditions behind the motivations that led
Indians to aspire to shape their own destinies. A consensus existed among
intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and other government institutions that
Bengal terrorism would reemerge in the future and that each campaign of
terrorism had been more violent and dangerous than the one before.
Lessons learned from combating terrorism in India were especially applicable
to the British Empire as anticolonial violence escalated during the mid-1930s.
Mandatory Palestine saw the emergence of Zionist terrorist groups and the Arab
Revolt of 1936–39.⁸⁷ In Egypt, the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, which allowed
for continued British control of the Suez Canal, sparked protests from the Arab
Socialist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood. Irish Republican Army (IRA)-
sponsored terrorism in the United Kingdom would soon revive with the onset
of the Second World War.
In their responses to unrest outside of India, British authorities instituted many
of the same anti-terrorism techniques—domestic legislation, border controls, and
arms interdiction—as they had in what Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had
famously called the “brightest jewel in the crown.” However, the ability of British
officials to almost unilaterally disarm a population, as they had done in India
beginning with the British Arms Act of 1878, would prove impossible.
While British colonial administrators in India never felt safe from the potential
of a massive revolutionary movement, their own intelligence services indicated
that preventive measures had more or less stopped large shipments of weapons
from reaching the subcontinent. Smaller shipments of guns, bombs, and ammu-
nition, however, were being smuggled into India either on ships or through
French territorial possessions. Officials in the British Raj also knew that these
weapons came from Europe. Easy access to small arms there was aided and

⁸⁶ Ibid., 12, 77.

⁸⁷ Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2008), 14–21; Donald Bloxham, Martin Conway, Robert Gerwarth, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus
Weinhauer, “Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence,” in David Bloxham and
Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 23–4.
     151

abetted by governments and led to a resurgence of terrorist violence in the 1930s.

In October 1934, a double political assassination in Marseilles carried out by
Croatian and Macedonian separatists would bring to Geneva a disparate set of
countries with the shared objective of countering terrorism in their own backyards
and neighborhoods.
 6
State-Sponsored Terror, 1934–37

On the Canebière in Marseilles, France, during the early afternoon of October 9,

1934, a member of the Croatian Revolutionary Organization (Ustaša), a state-
sponsored terrorist organization, assassinated King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and
French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou, who had been riding in the car with
the visiting monarch. The murders caused a panic in Europe. Newsreel footage of
the moments surrounding the attack, captured by a cameraman standing a few
feet away, provided ghastly images to audiences far and wide.¹ The regional blocs
dividing Europe conjured up memories of the conflagration of 1914. On one side
now stood the revisionist powers of Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria backed by
Italy, which, along with Hungary, had provided safe haven and assistance to the
plotters. Opposed to this group was the Little Entente consisting of Yugoslavia,
Romania, and Czechoslovakia backed by France.²
In November 1934, Yugoslavian Foreign Minister Bogoljub Jevtić announced
that his country would bring to the League of Nations formal charges against those
states that had assisted the international terrorists responsible for the murder of its
sovereign. France and Great Britain responded with haste and apprehension. The
new French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, who had been and remained prime
minister, and Great Britain’s Minister for League of Nations Affairs, Anthony
Eden, both feared the ramifications of Yugoslavia’s accusing Italy of complicity in
the assassinations of Alexander and Barthou. “[T]he dangers were clear enough,
all the ingredients of the fatal weeks before the first world war were there again,”
Eden later wrote in his memoirs; “it seemed that events were developing after the
fashion of 1914 and there was an obvious parallel with the murders at Sarajevo.”³
The League of Nations convened an extraordinary session in Geneva in
December 1934 to address the Yugoslav case. There Eden and Laval scored two
short-term victories. The first was that the Yugoslav memorandum pointed the
finger only at Hungary, while omitting Italy’s role in arming and harboring the
terrorists. This was important because the governments of the United Kingdom
and France were attempting to reach some accommodation with Italian Prime

¹ “Filmer of Slaying Dead: Newsreel Cameraman Escaped Assassin’s Bull,” New York Times,
October 14, 1934, 28.
² Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2007), 494–523; Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators: The Memoirs of
Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962), 119.
³ Eden, Facing the Dictators, 120, 124.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
 - , – 153

Minister Benito Mussolini, who resented the Nazis’ role in the assassination of
Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss five months earlier and had not yet
thrown in his lot with German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. Six months prior to
that, in January 1934, Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with France’s
ally, Poland, ushering in what historian William Keylor calls “a diplomatic
revolution in Europe.”⁴ For Barthou, uncertainty over Poland was reason enough
to reach out to the Soviet Union. For Laval, who was skeptical about trusting
Moscow (at least, until Germany’s declaration of rearmament in March 1935), it
meant continuing efforts to patch up relations between Paris and Rome—
notwithstanding the real possibility that Mussolini was supporting the forces
that murdered his predecessor.
The second diplomatic success was that the foreign ministers guided the League
Council debates toward a universal condemnation of international terrorism. In
its final resolution, the League Council put aside the specifics of the Marseilles
assassinations and applied international law as a panacea for the growing phe-
nomenon of political murder in Europe, which threatened to disrupt the delicate
web that Barthou and his successor Laval were attempting to cast in the states
neighboring Nazi Germany. “[T]he rules of international law concerning the
repression of terrorist activity are not at present sufficiently precise to guarantee
efficiently international cooperation,” the Council declared on December 10,
1934. League officials appointed a committee of experts to draft an international
convention to assure “the repression of conspiracies or crimes committed with a
political and terrorist purpose.”⁵
In November 1937, three years after the double assassination of Alexander and
Barthou, the League of Nations adopted two treaties: the Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the Creation
of an International Criminal Court. The former designated international terror-
ism as an international crime; the latter instituted an international penal court to
try alleged terrorists. By 1938, twenty-three governments had signed the terrorism
convention and twelve had signed the treaty establishing the International
Criminal Court.⁶ Neither of the treaties had entered into force by the time of
the September 1938 Munich Conference in which the Great Powers ceded the
Czech Sudetenland to Hitler and placed the fate of peacetime Europe in the hands
of the Führer.

⁴ William Keylor, The Twentieth-Century World: An International History, 4th ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 142.
⁵ Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, Registry Files 1934–39, Boxes R3758
and R3759, League of Nations Doc C.546(I).M.383 (I).1937, V (1938), League of Nations Archives
(hereinafter LNA), United Nations Office at Geneva Library, Geneva, Switzerland.
⁶ Charles Townshend, “ ‘Methods Which All Civilized Opinion Must Condemn’: The League of
Nations and International Action against Terrorism,” in An International History of Terrorism:
Western and Non-Western Experiences, eds. Jussi M. Hanhimäki and Bernhard Blumenau (New
York: Routledge, 2013), 46.
154    

The Yugoslav-Hungarian Crisis Part 1

The path to violence in Marseilles, on October 9, 1934, can be traced back to

January 6, 1929, when King Alexander seized power, suspended the constitution,
and transformed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes into the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia.⁷ As Alexander’s royal dictatorship moved in a pro-Serbian direction,
separatists fled the country. These included the Croat lawyer and leader, Ante
Pavelić, who found refuge in Italy where he built up a terrorist organization
known as the UHRO, the Croatian Revolutionary Organization, or Ustaša
(Insurgents/Rebels) for short. Modeling this paramilitary unit on the older
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), whose origins and
activities are described in Chapter 1, Pavelić intended the UHRO to carry out
terrorist operations against the Yugoslav regime and eventually lead a Croatian
army that would liberate Croatia from Serbian rule.⁸
Assistance came to the anti-Yugoslav IMRO and Ustaša from the governments
of Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria. By the early 1930s, two competing blocs
divided the Balkans. The “revisionist” powers of Hungary, Austria, and Bulgaria
remained opposed to the postwar settlements that ended the First World War and
committed to regaining lost territories. Prime Minister Benito Mussolini backed
the revisionist bloc, with an eye to expanding Italian influence in southeast Europe
and the Mediterranean. Mussolini opposed the French alliance with the Little
Entente—Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia—and its commitment to
maintaining the Versailles system that preserved territorial boundaries as estab-
lished by the peace treaties that ended the war. The February 1934 Balkan pact
(between Greece, Turkey, Romania, and Yugoslavia) and March 1934 Rome
protocols (between Italy, Austria, and Hungary) would solidify the division
between revisionist and status quo powers in the region.⁹
In April 1929, Pavelić and another leader of the Ustaša, Gustav Perčec, traveled
to Sofia, Bulgaria, where they met with representatives of the IMRO and con-
cluded a pact of mutual assistance between the two terrorist organizations. The
pact provided that the IMRO would supply the Ustaša with instructors in “ter-
rorist methods”; soon after it, IMRO members traveled to the Ustaša’s terrorist

⁷ Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804–1999 (New York:
Penguin Books, 1999), 412.
⁸ Glenny, The Balkans, 185, 438; Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2001), 13. The IMRO dated from to the 1890s when young Macedonian
nationalists formed a revolutionary committee to oppose Ottoman rule. By the 1920s, the IMRO
served the interests of the Bulgarian state from its headquarters and shadow state in Petrich in south-
western Bulgaria. Its operatives carried out assassinations and terrorist attacks in Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia, which had received the bulk of Macedonia at the Paris Peace Conference. In the late
1920s and early 1930s, IMRO violence reached its peak in Sofia, as competing revolutionary factions
attacked one another in deadly internecine struggles.
⁹ Steiner, The Lights that Failed, 494–523.
 - , – 155

training camps in Hungary and Italy. In 1931, Pavelić and Perčec acquired a farm
near the Yugoslav frontier, Janka Puszta, where they provided paramilitary train-
ing for Ustaša operatives. Other training camps were also established in Hungary,
all within 20 kilometers of the Yugoslav border.¹⁰ In addition to offering asylum to
Croatian émigrés, Hungarian officials worked with Italian authorities to coordin-
ate support for the terrorists in their agitation against Alexander’s regime.¹¹
The Great Depression, which began in 1929 and lasted throughout the 1930s,
was a boon to terrorist organizations. Pavelic and the Ustaša leadership recruited
Croatian emigrants, who had worked in German and French factories, or in
Belgium mines, and were now unemployed. The prospect of a decent salary was
just as appealing as extreme nationalism; both made the austere conditions within
the military camp seem tolerable. The UHRO also published newspapers for
Croatian emigrant communities in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, South
Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, drumming up support for Croatian nation-
alism and raising funds for the organization’s activities closer to home.¹²
Ustaša activities included conducting raids in Yugoslavia from their outposts in
Italy and Hungary and bombing railways. Perčec and his men targeted passenger
trains, the Paris-Belgrade Express in particular. Terrorists would board in Austria,
plant bombs under the seats, and get off at Rosenbach, the last stop before the
train exited Austria.¹³ Ustaša bomb squads blew up public buildings, Greek
Orthodox churches, and the military barracks in Zagreb. Terrorists carried out
assassinations or attempted murders of police officers, newspaper editors, and
politicians. Ustaša agents also smuggled arms, ammunition, explosives, and hand
grenades into Yugoslavia. Guns, bombs, and other weapons were also transported
along the Drave River using flat-bottomed boats that evaded attempts of Yugoslav
border and river patrols to stop the traffic in arms.¹⁴
The Yugoslav government responded to the terrorist attacks using various
methods. Diplomatic requests that Hungary and Austria control the émigrés
and stop assisting their endeavors yielded few results. Since Yugoslav officials
could not force foreign authorities to take action against the Croats, the regime
turned to counter-intelligence operations and incendiary newspaper articles.

¹⁰ Yugoslav Government to Council of the League of Nations, “Organization of the Terrorist

Movement in Hungarian Territory with the Assistance of Yugoslav Emigres,” League of Nations
Official Journal, December 1934, 1772–4.
¹¹ Pino Adriano and Giorgio Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror: Ante Pavelić and Ustasha
Terrorism from Fascism to the Cold War (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2018), 75;
Bennett Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation: The Resolution of the Marseilles Crisis, October 1934 to
May 1935,” The Historical Journal 19, no. 1 (1976): 195.
¹² Adriano and Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, 69, 83.
¹³ Allen Roberts, The Turning Point: The Assassination of Louis Barthou and King Alexander I of
Yugoslavia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 42.
¹⁴ Roberts, The Turning Point, 44; Yugoslav Government to Council of the League of Nations
“Results of the Terrorist Action Before the Marseilles Crime,” League of Nations Official Journal,
December 1934, 1787–8.
156    

Yugoslav intelligence officers infiltrated Ustaša bases along the Adriatic coast in
Zara, Fiume, and Trieste. The Yugoslav secret police scored a propaganda success
when a spurned lover of Perčec, Jelka Pogorelec, revealed to a Serbian newspaper
reporter everything she knew about the camp in Janka Puszta.¹⁵ Yugoslav agents
were less successful in Vienna, which had become a hotbed of espionage and
intrigue. After a failed attempt to take out Perčec, in 1931, Austrian authorities
expelled the Yugoslav network of agents en masse.¹⁶ Internal Yugoslav anti-
terrorist measures included brutal police tactics in areas populated by
Macedonians, Bulgarians, Croatians, and other non-Serbian groups.
Government brutality generated more distrust and refugees. Diaspora and
nationalist groups appealed to the League of Nations and submitted minority
petitions. The Yugoslav government was seeking to create—if not recreate—“one
Serbian nation with Serbian religion, language, customs, and traditions,” wrote the
Central Committee of the Macedonian Political Organization of the United States
and Canada to the League of Nations in one such report. Yugoslavia was now a
“huge military camp,” the petition alleged, where the prisons were “filled beyond
capacity with Bulgarians, Croatians, Slovenes and other nationalities.”¹⁷ Supporters
of the IMRO and Ustaša endorsed the groups’ revolutionary activities as merited by
the harsh conditions inside Yugoslavia, while appealing to European powers for
assistance. They believed that the Ustaša and IMRO turned to full-scale terrorism
only after apprising outsiders of the facts and failing to elicit a response from either
the League of Nations or the Great Powers.¹⁸ The next phase would be dark. “Knife,
pistol, automatic shotgun, and time bomb,” as Pavelic put it: “these are the bells that
will announce the dawn and birth of the independent Croatian state.”¹⁹
Meanwhile, the clandestine war between Yugoslavia and Italy escalated. By the
late 1920s, the Italian Military Intelligence Service was supplying Croats and
Macedonians with weapons and ammunition. In March 1933, Italy was caught
sending rifles and machine-guns to a cartridge factory in Hirtenberg, Austria, with
Hungary as the intended final destination.²⁰ Contending that the “Hirtenberg

¹⁵ Adriano and Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, 84.

¹⁶ James Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 1927–1937 (New York: Garland, 1987),
163–4, 180–1.
¹⁷ Central Committee of the Macedonian Political Organization of the United States and Canada,
New York, USA to Aristide Briand, The League of Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, May 8, 1930, SDN
537; League of Nations, Petition by Dr. Leon de Deak, Protection of Minorities in Yugoslavia,
September 4, 1933, SDN 536, The Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Archives du Ministère
des Affaires Etrangères] (hereinafter MAE), La Courneuve, Paris, France.
¹⁸ Central Committee of the Macedonian Political Organization of the United States and Canada,
New York, USA to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Paris, France, September 27, 1930, Declaration of
the Ninth Annual Convention of the Macedonian Political Organization of the United States of
America and Canada, held at Youngstown, Ohio, from August 31 to September 4, 1930, SDN 537,
MAE; Sadkovich, Italian Support for Croatian Separatism, 157.
¹⁹ Adriano and Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, 77.
²⁰ Hugh Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe Between the Wars, 1918–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1945), 376; Adriano and Congolani, Nationalism and Terror, 60.
 - , – 157

Affair” violated the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain, the governments of the Little
Entente wanted to bring the case to the League of Nations, which they hoped
would exercise its right of investigation, as provided for in the treaty’s disarma-
ment clauses. The U.K. and French governments, however, offered their good
offices to settle the matter through diplomatic channels.²¹ The Little Entente
accepted the offer, and the matter was resolved when Austria agreed to ship the
arms back to Italy.²²
The reprieve would be short-lived. In Zagreb in December 1933, Ustaša opera-
tives bungled an attempt on Alexander’s life. Soon afterward, the Yugoslav
government obtained evidence that the failed assassination plot had been planned
with the assistance of the Italian Military Information Service. At the urging of
France—which was already regarding Mussolini as a possible counterweight to the
new German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler—Alexander declined to protest to Italy.²³
As the Western powers limited Yugoslavia’s options with respect to Italy,
Alexander attempted to curtail Hungarian support for Croatian terrorism. In
March 1934, the Yugoslav government sent a formal note to Hungary protesting
the Janka Puszta terrorist training camp and the forays of terrorists across the
border. Yugoslav authorities demanded that the Hungarian government break up
the camp and take measures to end the criminal activities of the Ustaša.²⁴ A month
later the Hungarian government made a partial admission of the existence of
terrorists on Hungarian territory. While it evicted certain terrorists from Janka
Puszta, the government took no further action and did not shut down the camp.²⁵

The Yugoslav-Hungarian Crisis Part 2

On May 12, 1934, Hungary brought its own case to the Council of the League of
Nations, accusing Yugoslav frontier guards of killing fifteen Hungarian citizens in

²¹ Secretariat of the Permanent Council of the Little Entente to Eric Drummond, Secretary-General,
League of Nations, March 1, 1933, R4199, Section 7A, LNA.
²² Paul-Boncour, Political Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Bogoljub Jevtić, Minister for
Foreign Affairs of Yugoslavia, February 26, 1933, R4199, Section 7A, LNA. A similar scandal had
occurred in 1928 when an Italian firm had tried to send a large consignment of machine guns through
Austria to Hungary in violation of the Versailles peace treaties. The governments of the Little Entente
invoked the League’s right to investigate despite British and French pressure not to bring the issue to
the League of Nations. The case, however, proved inconclusive; see British Embassy, Paris to minister
for foreign affairs, January 14, 1928, SDN 1054, MAE; Permanent Advisory Commission for Military,
Naval and Air Questions, Request by the Governments of Romania, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes and Czechoslovakia, February 2, 1928, SDN 1054, MAE.
²³ Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation,” 193–4; Gaetano Salvemini, Prelude to World War II (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1954), 150.
²⁴ Yugoslav Government to Council of the League of Nations, “Responsibility Incurred for the
Marseilles Crime,” League of Nations Official Journal, December 1934, 1791; Eden, Facing the Dictators,
120–1.
²⁵ Yugoslav Government to Council of the League of Nations, “Responsibility Incurred for the
Marseilles Crime,” League of Nations Official Journal, December 1934, 1791.
158    

a series of deadly border incidents. The request called on the League Council to set
up a joint commission of inquiry into Yugoslav border controls. When the
Council reconvened in June 1934, the Yugoslav delegate lobbed a verbal counter-
attack. Yugoslavia’s frontier controls were severe, he explained, because
Hungarian authorities had allowed Croat terrorists to set up camp a few miles
from the border. This enabled militants to make illegal entries into Yugoslavia,
commit violent crimes, and escape back to Hungary. The Janka Puszta camp,
which remained a center for recruitment and training by the terrorist leaders, was
again cited as the fundamental problem. During the debate, M. de Eckhardt, the
Hungarian representative, promised that his government would punish perpet-
rators of atrocities committed in Yugoslavia by refugees based in Hungary. As it
had done in March, diplomacy temporarily prevailed. A modus vivendi was
negotiated on the border question in July 1934, and relations between the two
countries improved.²⁶
Despite the increase in terrorist attacks directed against Yugoslavia between
1930 and 1934, most League members dismissed Yugoslav protests. Officials
believed that both Yugoslavia and Hungary were aiming to discredit one another.
Yet the rise in political violence in Yugoslavia and the Balkans coincided with a
spate of political murders in Europe during the period 1933–34. Most of these
attacks were carried out by authoritarian and right-wing groups, as in the case of
the murder of Romanian Prime Minister Ion Duca by members of the fascist Iron
Guard, in December 1933, and the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor
Engelbert Dollfuss by Austrian Nazis in July 1934.²⁷
In the fall of 1934, Pavelić hatched a plan to murder King Alexander during an
upcoming state visit to France, selecting a team of assassins from the men trained
at the Janka Puszta terrorist camp in Hungary. To lead the group of Croatian
political émigrés, Pavelić designated his bodyguard, the Bulgarian Veličko Kerin—
nicknamed “Vlada the Chauffeur”—a former IMRO assassin and a terrorist
instructor at the camp.²⁸ The would-be assassins traveled first to Switzerland,
where they traded authentic Hungarian passports for forged Czechoslovak ones
before continuing on to France, where they split up.²⁹ Some of the men stayed in
Paris, while others journeyed to the port of Marseilles.
In the early afternoon of October 9, 1934, King Alexander disembarked the
light cruiser Dubrovnik at the port of Marseilles. He was greeted by the French

²⁶ Eden, Facing the Dictators, 120–1; F.P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London:
Oxford University Press, 1952), 601–2; Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation,” 195.
²⁷ Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the Wars, 378.
²⁸ Veličko Kerin used a variety of alias, such as Vlado Georgiev Čhernozemski, Vlado
Tchernozemski, Peter Kelemen, among others. His nickname is also sometimes rendered as “Vlado
the Chauffeur.”
²⁹ “Evidence as to Passports: An Anti-Terrorism Proposal,” The Times [London, England],
November 25, 1934; Roberts, The Turning Point, 129–35.
 - , – 159

minister for foreign affairs, Jean Louis Barthou, who escorted him to a waiting
motorcade. As the car carrying the King and foreign minister turned past the
Palais de la Bourse on the Canebière, en route to the Prefecture, Kerin dodged his
way through the French security forces, and, positioning himself on the running-
board, fired his German-made submachine pistol before being cut down by the
sword of a French policeman. As the assassin fell into the crowd, his pistol
continued to fire, killing two bystanders. King Alexander died almost immedi-
ately, but Barthou, left unattended in the confusion of the attack, bled to death.
The crowd turned on Kerin—as captured in the photograph at Figure 6.1—fatally
wounding him.³⁰
Panic gripped European statesmen, who could never forget the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, in Sarajevo on
June 28, 1914, by a young Bosnian nationalist. Afraid that the Marseilles assas-
sinations might also lead to a conflagration, the French and British pressured the
Yugoslavs to indict only the government of Hungary in their appeal to the League
of Nations for justice, despite the well-known connections between the Ustaša and
the Italian government. In his later memoirs, Edvard Beneš, who was then
Czechoslovakia’s minister of foreign affairs (and, later, its ill-fated president),
claimed that “the real author of that double assassination was Mussolini,” but
that the “political situation” led the French and British to omit his role.³¹ Indeed,
by the mid-1930s Hungarian policy had evolved away from directly supporting
the Ustaša and IMRO, leaving Italy the burden of financing and counseling the
terrorist organizations.³²
On November 22, 1934, the Yugoslav government submitted to Secretary
General of the League of Nations Joseph Avenol a request to examine Hungarian
complicity in the assassinations of King Alexander and Foreign Minister Barthou.
Hungary’s role in the assassinations violated international law under Article II
of the League of Nations Covenant, it charged. “This is not a case of a political
murder which is the work of an isolated individual, nor of shelter given to
political emigrants,” the Yugoslav representative declared: “the question involved
is that of the drilling and training on the territory of a foreign State of profes-
sional criminals intending to commit a series of outrages and assassinations for a

³⁰ “Slays King; Europe Stunned: Fear Assassin’s Shots Peril Balance of Peace,” Chicago Daily
Tribune, October 10, 1934, 1; P.J. Philip, “Gunman fires into car: Shoots General as well as
Alexander and the French Minister,” New York Times, 1; George Clerk to John Simon, October 11,
1934 in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential
Print, Part II, From the First to the Second World War, Series F, Europe, 1919–1939 (hereinafter BDFA),
vol. 10, 1934, 197–8; George Clerk to Anthony Eden, February 18, 1936 in BDFA, vol. 12, 1936, 291–2.
³¹ Compton MacKenzie, Dr. Beneš (London: George G. Harrap, 1946), 332; Eduard Beneš, Memoirs
of Dr. Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory, trans. Godfrey Lias (London: George
Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1954), 11.
³² Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation,” 195.
160    

Figure 6.1 Veličko Kerin following the assassination of King Alexander I of

Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou (Colin Waters/Alamy
Stock Photo)

specific political purpose.”³³ Yugoslav authorities held the Hungarians respon-

sible for Alexander’s death since they had neither prosecuted nor expelled anti-
Yugoslav militants from their territory.
In early December, the League Council held an extraordinary session to address
the Yugoslav complaint. The Yugoslav government presented a dossier that
included photographs of the Hungarian passports used by the men to cross into
Switzerland, and a memorandum describing the Marseilles assassinations as the
culmination of a “long series of outrages” inspired and directed by Hungary.
Yugoslavian Foreign Minister Jevtić reiterated that Croatian separatists received
“systematic terrorist training in special camps in Hungary.”³⁴
In response, Hungarian Foreign Minister Tibor Eckhardt blamed the assassin-
ations on the domestic situation in Yugoslavia and the “revolutionary bitterness”
among political refugees toward the royal dictatorship. The terrorists were not

³³ “Request by the Yugoslav Government under Article II, Paragraph 2, of the Covenant,” Doc.
C.506.M.225.1934.VII, November 22, 1934, in League of Nations Official Journal (1934): Annex
1523, 1766.
³⁴ “Yugoslav Case at Geneva,” The Times [London, England], December 8, 1934.
 - , – 161

Hungarians, he reminded the League Council, but rather Croatian and

Macedonian émigrés. Eckhardt also took the opportunity to criticize the peace
treaties and territorial settlements following the end of the Great War. In their
own responses to this testimony, the foreign ministers of the Little Entente noted
that this obsession with revising the terms of 1918–19 was largely responsible for
the perpetuation of acts of terror in the Balkans.³⁵
The Yugoslav case would be “undoubtedly determined by European political
considerations,” U.S. Consul at Geneva Prentiss Gilbert reported back to
Washington that month.³⁶ While public meetings were supposed to be the
centerpiece of the Geneva system, upon its creation in 1919, key interactions
still occurred behind closed doors. Although the French investigators possessed
evidence that left no doubt as to the complicity of Hungarian and Italian author-
ities, the French prime minister reassured the Italian ambassador in Paris that his
government was “firmly determined to pour oil over troubled water.” The French
position was supported by the British cabinet.³⁷ Rapporteur Anthony Eden met
individually with the Hungarian and Yugoslav representatives before huddling
with representatives of the “major partners,” France and Italy. The “less public
discussion we had the better,” Eden would later recall; the large Geneva press
corps meant that “many politicians treated League events as a chance to play the
international statesman before a domestic audience.”³⁸
Tensions ran high during this extraordinary session. Citing an 1870 treaty
between France and Italy that excluded extradition based on alleged political
crimes, Mussolini had just denied the extradition of the two masterminds of the
Marseilles assassinations: Ante Pavelić, head of the Ustaša, and his young accom-
plice Eugen Kvaternik. French authorities, who had already arrested three of the
Croatian accomplices, were desperately searching for others, including a “mys-
terious blond woman” suspected of having smuggled arms to France for Vlada the
Chauffeur.³⁹
Meanwhile, Yugoslavia had instigated mass deportations of ethnic Hungarians
and was mobilizing troops on the Yugoslav-Hungarian border, leading Hungary

³⁵ Ibid.; Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 604.

³⁶ Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State, “Contemplated Yugoslav Demarche re Terrorist
Activities—Question of League Action,” November 17, 1934, American Consulate Geneva,
Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly Confidential, 1934, Volume VI, League of Nations Political
(International Terrorism), Record Group 84, Records of Foreign Service Posts (hereinafter RG 84),
U.S. National Archives (hereinafter NARA).
³⁷ Adriano and Cingolani, Nationalism and Terror, 4.
³⁸ Eden, Facing the Dictators, 125, 129; Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” American
Historical Review 112, no. 4 (2007): 1096.
³⁹ Sigrid Schultz, “Germany Traces Mystery Woman in Assassin Plot: Father of Gun-girl says she
was disowned,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 13; Ben Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to
Terrorism,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 4, no. 1 (2006): 79; Roberts, The Turning Point,
159–71.
162    

to follow suit.⁴⁰ The British government strongly opposed the Yugoslav expul-
sions. Fearful that Eden’s public condemnation of the expulsions would damage
the negotiations, the British minister in Belgrade hastily dispatched a note to the
U.K. delegation in Geneva. Deportations of Hungarians from Yugoslavia may be
“stupid, uncivilized, inhuman or almost any other adjective one may select for the
purpose,” he acknowledged. “But they cannot be really linked up on the same
footing with the encouragement of terrorist organizations.”⁴¹
British government officials had little sympathy for Yugoslavia, whose gen-
darmes now went after Croatians and Macedonians. British Foreign Secretary
John Simon recommended establishing an international police bureau to verify
Yugoslav claims. International outcry and British diplomatic pressure eventually
persuaded the Yugoslav government to halt the Hungarian deportations. Still, the
prospect remained that Yugoslav would eventually withdraw its case from the
League Council and take independent action against Hungary and Italy.⁴²
Gilbert kept on top of these developments from the American consulate and
wrote the U.S. State Department that the “efforts of the Continental States to make
political capital in Geneva out of the present situation is . . . a moral strain on the
League system.” Moscow remained an “unknown factor,” according to Gilbert;
meanwhile, London and Paris were attempting to “hold the situation within
careful bounds.”⁴³ In the early days of December, a solution materialized: the
Great Powers decided to submit the whole affair to judicial channels and call for a
general consideration of the problem of international terrorism writ large.⁴⁴
Negotiations came to a head at a Council meeting of December 8 where Prime
Minister Laval and Minister for League of Nations Affairs Eden coordinated their
efforts. Those nations expected to take partisan positions spoke first. Delegates
then turned from specific grievances to the general problem of terrorism, after
which the Chilean representative closed the meeting by recommending that the
League appoint a commission to draft an anti-terrorism treaty.⁴⁵ On December 10,

⁴⁰ “The Yugoslav Charges,” The Times [London, England], December 10, 1934.
⁴¹ Nevile Henderson to John Simon, Belgrade, December 18, 1934 in BDFA, vol. 10, 1934, 409–10.
⁴² “Yugoslav Threat To ‘Act on Own’ Agitates Geneva,” The Washington Post, December 10, 1934;
Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation,” 209–11; Foreign Office to Secretary of State for the Home
Department, February 13, 1935, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereinafter TNA),
London, United Kingdom, HO 45/18080.
⁴³ Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State, “International Terrorism—Council Meeting,”
December 7, 1934, American Consulate Geneva, Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly Confidential,
1934, Volume VI, League of Nations Political (International Terrorism), RG 84, NARA.
⁴⁴ Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State, “Yugoslav Demarche re International Terrorism –
Political Implications on the Approach of the Council Sessions” December 3, 1934, American
Consulate Geneva, Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly Confidential, 1934, Volume VI, League of
Nations Political (International Terrorism), RG 84, NARA.
⁴⁵ Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State, “Yugoslav-Hungarian Controversy—Council Meeting
of December 8—Positions of France, Italy, Russia, England, Poland, Spain, Mexico, Argentina and
Chile,” December 8, 1934, American Consulate Geneva, Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly
Confidential, 1934, Volume VI, League of Nations Political (International Terrorism), RG
84, NARA.
 - , – 163

1934, after private assurances that all interested parties would support it, Eden
assembled the League Council for a midnight vote on a resolution declaring that
no member state should “tolerate on its territory terrorist activity with a political
purpose.” Certain Hungarian authorities—perhaps as a result of “negligence”—
had failed to prevent the incident in Marseilles, the resolution also stated. It called
upon the governments of Belgium, the United Kingdom, France, Hungary, Italy,
Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, and Chile to appoint representatives
to a committee of experts tasked with drafting an “international convention to
assure the repression of conspiracies or crimes committed with a political or
terrorist purpose.”⁴⁶
The Council unanimously adopted the resolution. The following month, the
Hungarian government reported that it had punished authorities that had not
properly supervised certain Croatian refugees. While the Yugoslav government
and other Entente representatives found the actions inadequate, Eden’s May 1935
final report to the League Council indicated that the original agreement remained
in force. The League did not address the issue again.⁴⁷
“Things were on a knife edge all the time,” remarked Ferdinand Mayer, an
adviser to the U.S. delegation at the Disarmament Conference. “The settlement
was obtained in circumstances of the greatest delicacy,” as he put it following the
extraordinary session. “Italy was probably more guilty than Hungary with respect
to terrorist activities against Yugoslavia.” Moreover, “French negligence at
Marseilles in regard to the protection of King Alexander was the proximate
cause of the tragedy. Both France and Italy knowing these facts had to act
accordingly at the Council and with greatest circumspection.” Mayer believed
that the Little Entente “knew this and took due advantage,” while the “Russians
had just resumed their own international terrorist methods.” In contrast, “the only
principal participant at the Council with really clean hands was England, who
made a magnificent use of this position.”⁴⁸
Eden, who would be appointed foreign secretary in December, received high
accolades for his role in diffusing the crisis. The British Section of the Women’s
International League and members of the League of Nations Union wrote to thank
him for the “magnificent way in which [he had] handled the dispute between
Yugoslavia and Hungary at Geneva.”⁴⁹ As U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Charles

⁴⁶ Prentiss B. Gilbert to Department of State, “International Terrorism – Report and Resolution

Presented by Rapporteur Adopted by the Council,” December 11, 1934, American Consulate Geneva,
Switzerland, Political Section, Strictly Confidential, 1934, Volume VI, League of Nations Political
(International Terrorism), RG 84, NARA.
⁴⁷ Eden, Facing the Dictators, 131; Kovrig, “Mediation by Obfuscation,” 217–18.
⁴⁸ Ferdinand Mayer to Secretary of State, December 13, 1934, U.S. Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1934, Vol. I, General, the British Commonwealth, eds.
Rogers P. Churchill, Matilda F. Axton, Shirley L. Landau, Newton O. Sappington, and Kieran J. Carrol
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951), 204.
⁴⁹ League of Nations Union, Hampstead Branch to Anthony Eden, 20 December 1934, AP/14/1/330,
The Avon Papers, Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham; Women’s
164    

Wilson put it, “without the attitude adopted at Geneva by England, and the
cleverness of Mr. Eden in discovering a formula which both parties to the dispute
could accept, the situation would have become extremely grave.”⁵⁰ Unlike after
the Sarajevo assassinations that had sparked the First World War, Eden wrote
in his memoirs, Britain had intervened quickly and decisively and exercised
her “restraining influence from the start.” The result was mediation and a legal
solution for a political crisis.⁵¹

The Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism

With its resolution of December 10, 1934, the League of Nations created an expert
Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism (CIRT) comprised of
delegates from eleven states.⁵² The CIRT met from April until May 1935, and
again in January 1936 and April 1937. A number of the leading European jurists
participated in the work of the CIRT, including Vespasian Pella of Romania,
Henri Carton de Wiart of Belgium (who had presided over the Arms Traffic
Conference of 1925), Jules Basdevant of France, and John Fischer Williams of the
United Kingdom. Carton de Wiart chaired the committee of experts, while Pella
served as rapporteur and became the primary architect of the anti-terrorism
conventions.⁵³
European criminal jurists considered terrorism to be a serious problem, and
advocated for international anti-terrorism laws in response to ultra-nationalist
bombings and assassinations, communist attacks, and the rise of armed separatist
groups supported by outside states. The League was slow to take action. Romania
had suggested that the League draft a treaty to punish terrorism back in 1926,
while Pella had been advocating for an international criminal court since 1919.
The International Association of Penal Law had held a series of conferences (in
Brussels 1930; Paris 1931; Madrid 1933; and Copenhagen 1935) to study the question
of terrorism. Leading legal scholars, such as Raphael Lemkin—who would go on to
coin the term “genocide,” which led to the 1948 Genocide Convention—debated

International League, British Section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom to
Anthony Eden, 12 December 1934, AP/14/1/388, The Avon Papers.

⁵⁰ Charles Stetson Wilson, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary (Yugoslavia) to

Department of State, “The Hungarian-Yugoslav Dispute and the League of Nations,” December 18,
1934, Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Political Section, Strictly Confidential, 1934, Vol. VI, League of Nations
Political (International Terrorism), RG 84, NARA.
⁵¹ Eden, Facing the Dictators, 132, 125.
⁵² The CIRT consisted of representatives from Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Hungary, Italy,
Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the Soviet Union. Italy and Chile had withdrawn from the
CIRT by mid-1936.
⁵³ See Martin David Dubin, “Great Britain and the Anti-Terrorist Conventions of 1937,” Terrorism
and Political Violence 5, no. 1 (1993): 8.
 - , – 165

criminalizing international terrorism during this period.⁵⁴ For the European

members of the CIRT, the aftermath of the assassinations in Marseilles in 1934
provided an opportunity to bring to fruition legal concepts long championed by
the International Association of Penal Law and the International Bureau for the
Unification of Criminal Law.⁵⁵
The CIRT began its work with a list of proposals submitted by the French
government, which included a ban on the manufacture of false identity cards and
the creation of an international criminal court that would serve as a penal court
for terrorist offenses. The French foreign minister recommended that the com-
mittee use the Convention for the Suppression of Counterfeiting Currency, which
had been signed in Geneva on April 20, 1929 (the same year as the laying of the
first stone for the Palace of Nations, as seen in Figure 6.2), as a model for the anti-
terrorism treaty. French jurists (seconded by Italian ones) pointed to domestic
anti-anarchist laws that might serve as a model. Passed in the 1890s to prevent
anarchist bombings, French legislation allowed the government to prosecute
instigation and incitement (and were derided by French anarchists and socialists
as les lois scélérates, or “villainous” laws).⁵⁶
Sixteen governments—including those of China, Cuba, the United States, and
Egypt—responded to the committee’s invitation to submit observations on the
French proposals, and offered their views on international terrorism more
broadly.⁵⁷ The committee also received memoranda and draft conventions from
the Executive Bureau of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC),
based in Vienna, and the International Penal and Penitentiary Commission (IPPC),
which was affiliated with the League. The ICPC desired to participate in the League’s
anti-terrorism committee and serve as an international clearing house for the
sharing of information about terrorism. Distrustful of the Austrian leadership
after the Ustaša assassinations, however, the League Secretariat and its committee

⁵⁴ See Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 80; M.K. Nawaz and
Gurdip Singh, “Legal Controls of International Terrorism,” Indian Journal of International Law 17
(1977): 66; Dubin, “The Anti-Terrorist Conventions of 1937,” 8, 15; Mark Lewis, The Birth of the New
Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 123.
⁵⁵ Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 80; Dubin, “The Anti-Terrorist
Conventions of 1937,” 6–9; Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 122–3.
⁵⁶ “France and Terrorism,” The Times [London, England], December 11, 1934; Committee for the
International Repression of Terrorism, April 10, 1935, Registry Files 1934–39, Box R3758, Section: 3A,
Series: 13944, 15085, Files: 38194, 20521, C.R.T. 1, LNA; “Proposed Bases of an International
Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism. Communication from the French Government,” in
League of Nations Official Journal (1934): 1739, Annex 1524, 1839–40; Lewis, The Birth of the New
Justice, 134.
⁵⁷ Carton de Wiart, Opening Speech for Diplomatic Conference, November 1–16, 1937, Registry
Files 1937–40, Box R3766, Section: No. 3A, Series 22707, Files: 22707, 30459, Registry No.: 3A/31355/
22707, LNA; The following governments submitted observations: Austria, China, Cuba, Denmark,
Estonia, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Latvia, Romania, Turkey, United States of America, Yugoslavia,
Argentina, Egypt, and the Netherlands.
166    

Figure 6.2 The laying of the first stone of the Palace of Nations (Photo 12/Alamy
Stock Photo)

of experts declined this request. The British Howard League for Penal Reform, a
charitable organization, sent the CIRT and the British government a petition against
the weakening of the right of asylum and for the protection of political prisoners
from inhumane treatment.⁵⁸

⁵⁸ Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, April 11–13, 1935, Registry Files
1935–37, Box R3760, Section: No. 3A, Series: 15244, Files: 15244, 22081, Registry No. 3A/16786/
15244, LNA; Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 142–3.
 - , – 167

Britain’s strong stance against the proposal for what became the International
Criminal Court led the committee to draft two separate treaties. In language that
got to the heart of the matter, the Foreign Office conveyed the British position to
the Committee of Experts, writing that “the time has not yet arrived for the
creation of the proposed Court” and “harm . . . is done to international institutions
generally by the establishment of an institution which is not supported by the
general assent of public opinion.”⁵⁹ The British position was not unique; Italian
representatives also opposed the formation of an international court on the grounds
that it would “constitute a derogation of state sovereignty.”⁶⁰ Ultimately, the
committee of experts decided that states could sign one treaty or both of them,
but that they first had to sign the terrorism convention in order to sign the
Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court.
Following its second meeting, the CIRT circulated copies of the two draft
conventions to all members of the League for consideration before the question
was placed on the agenda of the General League Assembly in October 1936. In an
exhaustive examination, the First Committee of the Assembly devoted four
meetings to discussing the various criticisms and proposals submitted by nineteen
governments. The Assembly also adopted a second resolution reaffirming that it
was the “duty of every State to abstain from any intervention in the political life of
a foreign State,” and that they ought to “prohibit any form of preparation or
execution of terrorist outrages upon the life or liberty of persons taking part in
the work of foreign public authorities or services.”⁶¹ In May 1937, the Council
directed the secretary-general to invite the members of the League and certain
non-member states, including Brazil, Germany, Japan, and the United States, to be
represented at a diplomatic conference to consider the two draft treaties.
The anti-terrorism convention, however, faced deep opposition from the
United Kingdom and United States on legal and political grounds. Criticisms
raised by Anglo-American policymakers reflected their sense that terrorism was
tied to European politics, and accorded with long-standing concerns about the
peace treaties that ended the First World War. Officials in the United Kingdom
and United States argued that their countries did not actually face a terrorist
threat, and that their legal systems precluded them from following the treaty’s
statutes. Both countries would need the approval of their legislatures to ratify the

⁵⁹ Foreign Office to the Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, August 13, 1936,
Registry Files 1933–40, Section: No. 3A, Series 18673 to 22660, Files 18673 to 28312, Registry No. 3A/
25207/22660, LNA.
⁶⁰ Prentiss B. Gilbert, American Consul, Geneva, Switzerland, to Secretary of State, June 17, 1935,
510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44, Box No. 2555, Central Decimal File 1930–39, Record Group 59: General
Records of the Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), NARA.
⁶¹ League of Nations, Conference on the International Repression of Terrorism, Conf.R.T./P.V.I,
Provisional Minute, First Meeting (Public), November 1, 1937, Opening of the Conference by President
Count Carton de Wiart, LNA; Townshend, “ ‘Methods Which All Civilized Opinion Must Condemn,’ ”
35; Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 80.
168    

convention, and then would be obligated to follow the letter of the law. In the
opinions of the Americans and British, terrorism was a European problem; anti-
terrorism treaties drafted by the League of Nations ought to be considered
European solutions. The Home Office, thus, instructed its delegation to tread
carefully, as there were no domestic circumstances or practical need in the United
Kingdom “for such changes in the criminal law,” and it would be “extremely
difficult for His Majesty’s Government to ask Parliament to approve the necessary
legislation.”⁶²
British officials disagreed with the convention’s expansion of the definition of
terrorism to include rebellions, insurrections, and coup d’états. “If all States were
at all times decently governed, presumably anyone who attempted by force to
overthrow an existing government should be a hostis humani generis [enemy of
mankind],” wrote Leslie Stuart Brass, the Home Office deputy legal adviser, in an
internal memorandum—“but when the government is itself a terrorist govern-
ment, I think a person who endeavors to overthrow it by the only means available
is not necessarily to be so regarded.”⁶³ This was a curious line of argument given
Indian nationalist protests against the colonial government and anti-British pro-
tests in Ireland, Mandatory Palestine, and other parts of the empire.
Stiff opposition from the Home Office did not keep Great Britain from attend-
ing the conferences. The Foreign Office worried that non-involvement would
offend the French and “very likely to bring the whole thing to a ground, [and]
would be felt in Yugoslavia and perhaps elsewhere as a running-away from a sort
of gentlemen’s understanding to make the way of the terrorists, so tragically
successful at Marseilles, a little more dangerous and difficult.”⁶⁴ Indeed, the
British representatives on the Committee of Experts contributed to the drafting
of the conventions, even as they kept Britain free from any commitments to them.
The absence of domestic terrorism in the United Kingdom led Home Office
officials to believe that Parliament would not change British criminal law or enact
legislation that threatened cherished traditions such as free speech.⁶⁵ The Assistant
Commissioner of the Special Branch, the division within the Metropolitan Police
responsible for domestic surveillance, also opposed the treaties, on the grounds
that “we shall have to do a great deal more work for other countries than we
shall be able to ask them to do for us. It would help us I suppose to get rid of an
odd undesirable alien and cause us a great deal of difficulty in cases where

⁶² Instructions for United Kingdom Delegation at Diplomatic Conference, October 25, 1937, TNA,
CO 323/1466/11; Attorney general to secretary of state, September 21, 1937, 510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44,
Box 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁶³ L.S. Brass, Home Office, March 20, 1935, TNA, MEPO 3/2048.
⁶⁴ John Fisher Williams to Alexander Maxwell, Home Office, September 15, 1937, TNA, HO 45/
18081.
⁶⁵ Instructions for United Kingdom Delegation at Diplomatic Conference, October 25, 1937, TNA,
CO 323/1466/11.
 - , – 169

political asylum is claimed.”⁶⁶ As a British official in the Home Office summed it

up: “[the] existing system provided all that was necessary for public safety in this
country, and we had no evidence of terrorists operating here to justify amend-
ment of the law.”⁶⁷
Meanwhile, the Franklin Roosevelt administration declined to participate in the
League’s anti-terrorism conferences. In contrast to the independent internation-
alism of the Republican administrations of the 1920s, an isolationist mood
descended on Washington in the 1930s. During the June–July 1933 London
Economic Conference to coordinate the fight against the Great Depression,
Roosevelt famously shot down a French and British plan to stabilize the dollar,
indicating that America was prepared to go it alone. By 1934, Cordell Hull’s State
Department took it as “a cardinal principle that the United States should not
become involved in European political questions.”⁶⁸ Epitomized by the Neutrality
Acts passed by Congress, beginning in 1935, U.S. isolationism was a response not
only to the Great Depression but also the growing militarism of Italy, Germany,
and Japan. Following Senator Gerald Nye’s investigations into the munitions
industry, his peers enacted safeguards against interventionism. Drawing lessons
from the history of America’s entry into the First World War, Congress intended
the Neutrality Acts to prevent U.S. embroilment in another European conflict.⁶⁹
The Executive Branch was skeptical of the anti-terrorism conventions from the
start. In January 1935, State Department official Jay Moffat (who served in the
American Legation in Berne in the late 1920s and was also the son-in-law of
Joseph Grew) described the terrorism convention as part of the “salve applied to
Yugoslavian injuries in the Hungarian-Yugoslav controversy.” No one took “the
proposed convention very seriously, probably not even the French,” he was sure.⁷⁰
The U.S. Justice Department was also wary about intelligence cooperation with
the French. After the assassinations of King Alexander and Louis Barthou in
Marseilles, the French government authorized its national police force, the Sûreté
Nationale, to undertake a “systematic effort to identify persons suspected of engaging
in terrorist activities in France.” A July 1937 request by Mr. P. Mondanel, controller

⁶⁶ Norman Kendal, Special Branch, Metropolitan Police to L.S. Brass, Home Office, June 18, 1937,
TNA, MEPO 3/2048.
⁶⁷ Home Office, October 11, 1937, TNA, HO 45/18081.
⁶⁸ Norman Davis to Cordell Hull, October 9, 1934, Reel No. 11, Papers of Cordell Hull 36–7,
U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
⁶⁹ Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (New York: John
Wiley & Sons, 1965), 2; Wayne Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932–1945 (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1983), 163–222; Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1966); Melvyn P. Leffler, “Political Isolationism, Economic Expansionism, or
Diplomatic Realism: American Policy toward Western Europe 1923–1933,” Perspectives in American
History VII (1974): 413–61; George Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since
1776 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 484.
⁷⁰ Jay Moffat, Division of Western European Affairs, Department of State, January 25, 1935,
510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44, Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
170    

general of the Sûreté Nationale, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to supply
any available information, including the exact identity and judicial antecedents
of individuals alleged to be involved in “acts of terrorism,” reached the upper
echelons of government because of the international “political ramifications”
involved.⁷¹
The investigation resulted in the compilation of a long list of names of potential
terrorists, many of whom were Italian, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, and Romanian in
origin. The Sûreté Nationale then circulated the list of names to central police
authorities in a number of countries, including the United States, with the intent
of further identifying the persons in question.⁷²
J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Justice
Department, stonewalled attempts in the United States to gain more information,
as he believed that most of the requests involved persons of Italian origin. He told
the attorney general that the inquiries possessed “some political significance,
which, in view of the general existing unrest in European countries, might possibly
be based upon political rather than criminal interests.” Hoover again made the
case that U.S. law enforcement should only supply information for use in criminal
proceedings, not for political purposes.⁷³ He wanted the Justice Department to be
associated with objectivity and technological superiority, having learned from the
backlash against the first Red Scare its vulnerability to charges of political pan-
dering. In public statements, Hoover was careful to distance the Department from
domestic surveillance on political grounds.
Justice Department officials believed that terrorism in Europe was highly
political, and that the convention would have little practical benefit for the
United States. The American government would not be able to meet the require-
ments of the treaty, as the U.S. legal system hindered deporting foreigners charged
with crimes in foreign countries.⁷⁴ The conference, however, stimulated interest
among some Justice Department officials, who requested that the League Secretariat
supply information regarding the conference “in an informal way with the pertinent

⁷¹ John Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice,
October 27, 1937, Memorandum for the Attorney General, 084.83/250–092.1155/6, Box 76, CDF
1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷² Edwin C. Wilson, Counselor of Embassy, for the Ambassador, Paris Embassy of the United States
of America, December 21, 1937, Request for Information from the Sûreté Nationale, 084.83/
250–092.1155/6, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷³ John Edgar Hoover, Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice,
October 27, 1937, Memorandum for the Attorney General, 084.83/250–092.1155/6, Box 76, CDF
1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁴ W.R.V., Legal Adviser, Department of State, Memorandum, July 30, 1937, 510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/
44, Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA. The Department of Justice, however, was very active in
the area of non-political crime. J. Edgar Hoover promoted the international exchange of information
regarding criminal activities, the field of criminology, and “scientific” crime detection. See John Edgar
Hoover, Address before the meeting of the International World Police at Montreal, Canada, October
26, 1937, Box 192, Papers of Homer S. Cummings, 1870–1956, Alderman Library, University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
 - , – 171

documentation.”⁷⁵ Yet it was “highly undesirable for the United States to send
representatives to this conference,” as Attorney General Homer Cummings put
it to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. “The subject matter of the suggested
Conventions relates in such a pronounced degree to a matter involving political
elements that participation in the conference would appear ultimately to be sure
to result in charges and counter-charges of favoritism and political connivance,”
he went on to say. “We are not a haven for terroristic activities, and where
crimes are committed the principles of treaties for extradition apply.”⁷⁶
Still, the attorney general and State Department would later coordinate an
informal discussion with Mondanel and a representative of the U.S. Embassy in
Paris. There Mondanel insisted that the request for information pertained only to
a criminal investigation and was not politically motivated. He stated that France
intended to “eliminate from its territory persons engaged in the business of
assassination, regardless of all political considerations.” The request was “simply
a police measure designed to track down a dangerous criminal element.”
Mondanel substantiated this claim by pointing out that France was traditionally
a country of political refuge. U.S. officials concluded that Mondanel’s statements
could be trusted, highlighting France’s treatment of a large number of Spanish
Civil War refugees as an example of the nation’s commitment to political asy-
lum.⁷⁷ It is not clear if Hoover and the Justice Department reached the same
conclusion or provided the information requested.
By 1937, the State Department was divided over whether to attend the confer-
ence. The Division of Western European Affairs reasoned that the Senate would
oppose the International Criminal Court on the same grounds as it had the World
Court.⁷⁸ Other voices urged participation. “The suppression of efforts to assassin-
ate high officials, and otherwise to interfere with orderly government, is of
concern here no less than in other countries,” argued Wallace McClure of the
Treaty Division. He elaborated: the “provision of judicial machinery for trying
criminals whose offenses are international in their character and scope would
seem to have some elements of merit.” In the end, the Department did not act on
his proposal to send one of the U.S. representatives already in Geneva to attend
the conference.

⁷⁵ Dr. McClure to Mr. Barnes, Memorandum, Treaty Division, Department of State, July 21, 1937,
510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44, Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA; Prentiss B. Gilbert, American
Consul, Geneva, Switzerland to State Department, June 17, 1935, International Terrorism-Settlement
of the Political Controversy—Report of the Committee of Experts on its First Session, 510.8B1/
1–511.1C 1/44, Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁶ Attorney general to secretary of state, September 21, 1937, General Records of the Department of
State, 510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44, Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁷ Edwin C. Wilson, Counselor of Embassy, for the Ambassador, Paris Embassy of the United States
of America, December 21, 1937, Request for Information from the Sûreté Nationale, 1930–39, 084.83/
250–092.1155/6, Box 76, CDF, RG 59, NARA.
⁷⁸ Division of Western European Affairs, State Department, July 29, 1937, 510.8B1/1–511.1C 1/44,
Box No. 2555, CDF 1930–39, RG 59, NARA.
172    

Despite Anglo-American apathy, representatives from thirty-five countries

attended the International Conference for the Repression of Terrorism in
Geneva from November 1–16, 1937. The Final Act of the conference adopted
the two treaties.⁷⁹ By the end of 1938, twenty-four states had signed the
Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, including twelve
European states, seven Caribbean, Central and South American states, and five
other states from various regions, including the Soviet Union and Turkey.⁸⁰ Twelve
governments had signed the Convention for the Creation of an International
Criminal Court.⁸¹ However, the major powers of the day—including the United
Kingdom, Japan, the United States as well as Germany, which withdrew from the
League in 1933, and Italy, which did so in 1937—signed neither treaty.
The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism contained
twenty-nine articles and defined “acts of terrorism” as “criminal acts directed
against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in the minds of
particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.” The treaty
required states to prevent and punish terrorist acts of an international character
and refrain from encouraging “terrorist activities directed against another State.”
It addressed the specific intelligence failures that had permitted the Marseilles
assassinations, by outlawing conspiracy and incitement to commit terrorist acts
as well as the fraudulent manufacture of identity cards and alteration of pass-
ports. In addition, the treaty contained a proposal by the British Indian gov-
ernment to require arms manufacturers to mark firearms with serial numbers
and regulate the carrying, possession, and distribution of firearms, ammunition,
and explosives. The supplying of arms, explosives, or harmful substances in the
commission of a terrorist crime was also considered an act of terrorism.⁸² Over
two decades of police and intelligence work against revolutionary movements
convinced officials in British India that the illicit trade in small arms directly

⁷⁹ The governments of the following countries participated in the conference: Afghanistan, Albania,
Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt,
Estonia, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Haiti, Hungary, India, Latvia, Mexico, Monaco,
Norway, The Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, San Marino, Soviet Union, Spain, Switzerland,
Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. Brazil sent an observer. See Committee for the
International Repression of Terrorism, Final Act of Conference, November 16, 1937, Registry Files
1937–1940, Box R3766, Section: No. 3A, Series 22707, Files: 22707, 30459, Doc. C548.M385.1937.
V, LNA.
⁸⁰ Albania, Argentina, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt,
Estonia, France, Greece, Haiti, India, Mexico, Monaco, The Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Romania, the
Soviet Union, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia signed the Convention for the Prevention and
Punishment of Terrorism.
⁸¹ Belgium, Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Monaco, The Netherlands, Romania, the Soviet
Union, Spain, Turkey, and Yugoslavia signed the Convention for the Creation of an International
Criminal Court.
⁸² “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, Opened for Signature at Geneva
on November 16, 1937,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni, ed., International Terrorism and Political Crimes
(Springfield: Thomas, 1975), 546–56.
 - , – 173

benefited terrorism.⁸³ The Raj’s representative added the weapons clause as part
of the government’s attempt to bypass London, believing that the convention
offered a unique opportunity to stop small arms from entering India.
The Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court estab-
lished a permanent body at The Hague to try persons accused of offenses
enumerated in the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment. The court,
which would sit only when it had cases before it, consisted of five regular judges
and five deputy judges chosen from jurists who were “acknowledged authorities
on criminal law” or had been members of courts of criminal jurisdiction. The
convention directed the court to apply the substantive criminal law that was “least
severe,” and to consider “the law of the territory on which the offence was
committed and the law of the country which committed the accused to it for
trial.”⁸⁴ The Belgian, Spanish, French, and Romanian delegates, and especially the
Romanian jurist Vespasian Pella, worked tirelessly for the establishment of an
international penal court for terrorist crimes, and they considered its creation a
“bold innovation” in criminal jurisdiction.⁸⁵
The anti-terrorism treaty received the greatest support from Eastern European
countries, France, the Soviet Union, and India. Again, the reasons were both
political and practical, as most of these nations had endured terrorist attacks,
and in some cases, domestic terrorist campaigns after the First World War. The
anti-terrorism conventions also fit into broader security strategies.
Each member of the Balkan Pact and Little Entente signed the Convention for
the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, as did Bulgaria, which had moved
closer to Yugoslavia following Sofia’s suppression of the IMRO after 1934.
These governments signed the treaties largely as symbolic measures to demon-
strated unified opposition toward the increasingly militant foreign policies of
Germany and Italy. As stated by the Greek delegate, the Balkan Entente viewed
the treaties as a “posthumous tribute to the memory of the Martyr King of
Yugoslavia and to the victims of an odious crime.”⁸⁶ All of these countries—
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey—had either

⁸³ Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern Unrest, Memorandum on the Situation in Bengal and

the Arms Traffic, October 29, 1924, L/PJ/12/91; Arms Conference, India Office, July 12, 1932, L/PJ/12/
91; C.W. Gwynne, deputy secretary, Home Department, Government of India to R.T. Peel, secretary,
Public and Judicial Department, India Office, January 16, 1933, L/PJ/12/92, British Library (henceforth
BL), London, United Kingdom.
⁸⁴ Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court, November 16, 1937, Signatures
received by May 31, 1938, Registry Files 1937–40, Section: No. 3A, Series 22707, Files: 22707, 30459,
Registry No.: 3A/31355/22707, LNA.
⁸⁵ Jules Basdevant, French Delegation, Draft Conventions for the Prevention and Punishment of
Terrorism and for the Creation of an International Criminal Court: General Discussion, November 1,
1937, Registry Files 1937–40, Section: No. 3A, Series 22707, Files: 22707, 30459, Registry No.: 3A/
31355/22707, LNA.
⁸⁶ Spiro Polychroniadis, Delegate of Greece, Conference on the International Repression of
Terrorism, Provisional Minutes, Eighteenth Meeting, November 16, 1937, Conf. R.T./P.V. 18,
Speeches and Declarations on the Close of the Conference, LNA.
174    

minority problems, political opponents who were plotting against their govern-
ment from outside their borders, or both. The anti-terrorism treaties offered new
tools for the state to employ against such groups.⁸⁷
While French policymakers and jurists viewed terrorism on the European
continent as a pressing security problem, they saw no reason to apply the anti-
terrorism convention to French colonies, protectorates, and mandates.⁸⁸ The
British Home Office regretted this stance, as it meant that the terrorism treaty
would not apply to Pondicherry, Chandernagore, or Syria; India and Palestine
would thus not derive “any direct advantage from French participation.”⁸⁹ In
November 1937, the Colonial Office had opposed bringing Palestine or the
colonies into the scope of the convention, although Colonial Office officials
conceded that a convention of this kind might be of future value in that region.⁹⁰
Soviet involvement in the terrorism conferences stemmed from apprehension
in Moscow that terrorists posed a threat to the state, and also the ability of Foreign
Secretary Maxim Litvinov to work with Western governments. Litvinov’s diplo-
matic skills had facilitated the landmark agreements with FDR in 1933 whereby
the United States recognized the Soviet Union. The following year, he spearheaded
the Soviet Union’s joining the League of Nations and commenced work on a
number of bilateral treaties that Moscow would eventually sign with members of
the Little Entente. As with FDR, the deals Litvinov struck preached “non-
interference” in the internal affairs of other countries—in this case, suppressing
terrorism by agreeing not to harbor foreign terrorists or provide assistance to their
military or propaganda campaigns.⁹¹
Litvinov’s boss, Josef Stalin, practiced Realpolitik. Stalin hoped that the treaties
would allow for the extradition of White Russians involved in anti-Soviet con-
spiracies, passport violations, and weapons distribution. “We do not always and in
all conditions take a negative attitude toward the League,” he told the sympathetic
Anglo-American reporter Walter Duranty in December 1933.⁹² In March 1935,
responding to Anthony Eden’s professed confidence in that institution, he stated:
“I think the situation now is worse than in 1913 . . . because in 1913 there was only

⁸⁷ Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice, 143–5.

⁸⁸ Antoine Sottile, Le Terrorisme International, in 65 Recueil des Cours 89, 91 (1938) in Reuven
Young, “Defining Terrorism: The Evolution of Terrorism as a Legal Concept in International Law and
Its Influence on Definitions in Domestic Legislation,” Boston College International and Comparative
Law Review 29 (2006): 24.
⁸⁹ Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, Final Acts of Conference, November
16, 1937, Registry Files 1937–40, Box R3766, Section: No. 3A, Series 22707, Registry No.: 3A/31355/
22707, C.94.M.47.1938.V, LNA; Home Office, Diplomatic Conference for the International Repression
of Terrorism, December 10, 1937, The Brass Papers, TNA, HO 189/8.
⁹⁰ J.G. Hibbert, Colonial Office to Oscar Dowson, Legal Adviser, Home Office, November 1937,
TNA, CO 323/1466/11.
⁹¹ Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933–39
(London: MacMillan, 1984); “Recognition of Russia,” The Times [London, England], June 11, 1934.
⁹² Quoted in Stephen Kotkin¸ Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York: Penguin Press,
2017), 146.
 - , – 175

one center of military danger—Germany—and now there are two: Germany and
Japan.”⁹³ Stalin went on to launch the Great Terror—though he did not call it
that—the following year, at home. While the anti-terrorism conventions were
being negotiated, the Soviets were holding show trials against “Trotskyist-
Terrorists.” In October 1936 and March 1938, Leon Trotsky, then in exile in
Mexico City, wrote to the League secretariat requesting that Stalin be tried for
political murders committed by the Soviet secret police. He asked that the
International Criminal Court review Stalin’s case against him for his alleged role
in the assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. The secretariat declined
to go down that road.

Back to India

Only one government that had signed the treaty on preventing and punishing
terrorism ended up ratifying it. The Government of India was able to take an
independent path from Britain because of its separate membership in the League.
India’s contribution to the Allies’ war effort and admission to the Imperial
Conference in the spring of 1917 enabled the Raj, along with the dominions, to
send independent plenipotentiaries to the Paris Peace Conference and sign the
peace treaties and Covenant of the League of Nations. India remained the inter-
national organization’s only non-self-governing member state throughout the
interwar era.⁹⁴ For members of the British Empire, the League of Nations provided
a venue for gaining international recognition and greater autonomy from the
government of London.⁹⁵ India’s foreign policy remained under the control of the
India Office and the secretary of state for India in London, while its delegation at
Geneva generally followed the United Kingdom. By the 1930s, however, the
colonial administration used the League of Nations to influence imperial policy
to protect the Raj from revolutionary movements inside British India and their
connections abroad.⁹⁶

⁹³ Quoted in ibid., 243.

⁹⁴ See David Miller, The Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928),
492–3 and D.N. Verma, India and the League of Nations (Patna: Bharati Bhawan, 1968), 1–44. See also
V. Shiva Ram and Brij Mohan Sharma, India and the League of Nations (Lucknow: The Upper India
Publishing House, 1932) and J.C. Coyajee, India and the League of Nations (Madras: Thompson and
Co., 1932).
⁹⁵ This was especially true for the Irish Free State, which became a dominion by the 1921 Anglo-
Irish Treaty. See Michael Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 1919–1946: International
Relations, Diplomacy and Politics (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996).
⁹⁶ S.R. Mehrotra, Towards India’s Freedom and Partition (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1979),
260–1; Verma, India and the League of Nations, 82–83, 108–9; Mary S. Barton, “The British Empire and
International Terrorism: India’s Separate Path at the League of Nations, 1934–1937,” Journal of British
Studies (2017): 351–73.
176    

Concerns about domestic security motivated the colonial government of India

to sign the anti-terrorism convention. In the 1930s, as described in Chapter 5,
colonial officials faced a “recrudescence” of terrorism and worried especially about
two developments: the infusion of communism into Indian nationalism—
especially if supported by the Communist International (Comintern)—and the
increasing number of female revolutionaries.⁹⁷ Colonial administrators main-
tained that anticolonial terrorism in India had “very little connection” with
terrorism in Europe, and that the British government already possessed public
emergency powers enabling it to deal with political violence.⁹⁸ Despite successes at
suppressing the revolutionary movement, Governor of Bengal John Anderson
continued to worry about the ability of arms smugglers to access the sea routes
from Singapore and Japan, and the increasing volume of arms and bomb-making
material making their way into India.⁹⁹ In addition, colonial administrators
worried about the smuggling of arms through the French postal service in
French territories in India.¹⁰⁰
Following the failures of the 1919 and 1925 arms control conventions, the
Government of India regarded the League’s anti-terrorism convention as a de
facto arms trafficking treaty.¹⁰¹ Consequently, the Government of India worked
with the London-based India Office to ensure that the British representative on
the CIRT included a provision that carefully controlled “the manufacture and sale
of easily concealed firearms, such as sub-machine guns, revolvers and pistols.”¹⁰²
Despite London’s rejection of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment
of Terrorism, Delhi instructed its representative at Geneva, Denys Bray, to sign the
convention as a solution to the “long-standing problem of arms smuggling.”¹⁰³
Among the twenty-four signatories of the convention, India alone ratified it.
India’s adherence to the anti-terrorism treaty marked the first time the govern-
ment became a party to a multilateral diplomatic convention not supported by any
other member of the British Commonwealth.¹⁰⁴ Membership in the League

⁹⁷ Proposed Legislation to deal with Communism in India (Secret), April 1934, TNA, CAB
24/248/34.
⁹⁸ Committee for the International Repression of Terrorism, Draft Convention for the Prevention
and Punishment of Terrorism, Draft Convention for the Creation of an International Criminal Court,
V.Legal.1936.V.6, Series 1, A.24.1936.V., Observations by Governments, India, LNA; Saul, “The Legal
Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 78–102, 88.
⁹⁹ Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal,” 270–92.
¹⁰⁰ Government of India, Home Department to Under-Secretary of State for India, India Office,
March 2, 1935, TNA, HO 45/18080.
¹⁰¹ Jozef Goldblat, Arms Control (London: Sage, 2002), 22; David R. Stone, “Imperialism and
Sovereignty: The League of Nations’ Drive to Control the Global Arms Trade,” Journal of
Contemporary History 35 (2000): 213.
¹⁰² Government of India, Home Department to Under Secretary of State for India, India Office,
March 2, 1935, PRO, HO 45/18080; India Office to Home Office, April 16, 1935, TNA, HO 45/18080.
¹⁰³ C.M. Trivedi, Home Department, Government of India to Under-Secretary of State for India,
India Office, March 2, 1935, TNA, HO 45/18080.
¹⁰⁴ League of Nations, Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism, Ratification by
India, C.L.164.1938.V, September 22, 1938, TNA, HO 45/18081; J.G. Starke, “The Convention for the
 - , – 177

allowed the Government of India to ratify legislation considered necessary for

regional and domestic security. World events made this a hollow victory. By the
time of India’s ratification, in January 1941, Hitler had overrun France but had not
yet attacked the Soviet Union, Japan was in control of East Asia but had not yet
attacked the United States, and Great Britain was fighting for its survival.

Conclusion

After the end of the First World War, European jurists attempted to use inter-
national law to preserve peace among nations.¹⁰⁵ As described in Chapters 1 and
4, these efforts ranged from the narrowly-defined Arms Traffic Convention of
1919 and the 1925 Convention for the Supervision of the International Trade in
Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War to the ambitious 1928 Kellogg-
Briand Pact, which outlawed war, and the failed World Disarmament Conference
in Geneva, which lasted from 1932 until 1934. In October 1933, Hitler withdrew
Germany from the League of Nations. Poland’s non-aggression accord with
Nazi Germany in 1934 expedited the French need to reconsider its diplomatic
strategy. Absolving Mussolini from any blame for the double assassination in
Marseilles led to the April 1935 declaration in Stresa, Italy, in which France,
Great Britain, and Italy projected a united front that quickly collapsed in October,
when Italy invaded Ethiopia, a fellow member of the League of Nations. When
Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland and defense-oriented France did nothing, in
March 1936, it was clear to the countries of the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia,
Romania and Yugoslavia—that Paris would not deter any outside aggression
against them.
This is hardly to say that a robust anti-terrorism treaty or series of treaties could
have substituted for the lack of political will on the part of the British and French
(and Americans) to confront Hitler. Yet part of the absence of will was in standing
up to state-sponsored terror. Moreover, the political costs of treaties seeking to
curtail the small arms trade and support for terrorism were relatively low, and the
violence that played out in the colonies and Balkans was about to be reimported to
the major cities of Europe. In July 1936, General Francisco Franco, a veteran of
the Riff War, gathered his forces in Morocco to march northward in what became
the first phase of the Spanish Civil War. Support from Germany and Italy to the

Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism,” The British Year Book of International Law (London, 1938),
214–16; M.K. Nawaz and Gurdip Singh, “Legal Controls of International Terrorism,” Indian Journal of
International Law 17 (1977): 66–82; V.S. Mani, “International Terrorism—Is a Definition Possible?”
Indian Journal of International Law 18 (1978): 206–12.

¹⁰⁵ Hans Köchler, Global Justice or Global Revenge? International Criminal Justice at the Crossroad
(Vienna: Springer-Verlag Wien, 2003), 1.
178    

Nationalists—and from the Soviet Union (and France to a lesser degree) to the
Republicans—further deepened the geopolitical fault lines of Europe. The anti-
Comintern Pact between German and Japan in November of that year (to which
Italy would sign on in 1937) expanded the axis to Asia.
When representatives from thirty-five countries gathered in Geneva in
November 1937 for the International Conference of the Repression of Terrorism,
it was not to stop Hitler—who in four months would execute the Anschluss with
Austria and set about destroying Czechoslovakia—but rather to address the
consequences of problems that the Great Powers had acknowledged since 1919
yet failed to overcome. The continuing arms trade and availability of weapons
enabled the violence of the 1930s and crisis of democracy that followed the Great
Depression.¹⁰⁶ The League of Nations, which had failed to remedy the matter up
to this point, shared in the collective failure. When it finally produced a treaty,
conflicting national, colonial, and ideological interests once again thwarted a
unified approach under League auspices to disrupt and dismantle the organiza-
tions employing guns and terror to achieve political ends.

¹⁰⁶ Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
 Conclusion

Following Émile Cottin’s attempted assassination of Georges Clemenceau in

February 1919, the victors in the First World War reassembled at the Paris
Peace Conference and enacted protocols to prevent surplus stocks of weapons
from being distributed “to persons and states who are not fitted to possess them.”¹
The arms control regime that emerged was meant to counter the twin perils of
terrorism and small arms proliferation by employing intelligence monitoring and
analysis as well as inter-allied cooperation facilitated by the League of Nations. It
proved to be insufficient and inadequate. By the time of the successful assassin-
ation of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis
Barthou, in October 1934, the Great Power cooperation responsible for the
counterterrorism initiatives at Paris in 1919 had fractured along individual states’
conceptions of security. The two treaties signed in November 1937—the Convention
for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism and the Convention for the
Creation of an International Criminal Court—came too late to address the problem
of state-sponsored terrorism, which expanded across the globe during the rise and
fall of the post-Great War order.

Terror and Arms

The United Kingdom, France, and the United States failed to stop the combustible
mix of terror and arms. The main ideologies of the interwar era—Soviet com-
munism, fascism, and ultra-nationalism—inspired acts of terror by various polit-
ical and religious groups. In Europe, which had been the epicenter of anarchist
violence in the late nineteenth century, militant groups active during the interwar
years found state backers; this would provide the disruptive model for future
proxy wars. As described in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5, imperial governments
labeled revolutionary nationalists as “terrorists,” and their policies of counter-
terrorism were premised on that conception. Colonial administrators turned to
temporary ordinances and extraordinary powers to detain alleged agitators,

¹ Permanent Advisory Commission for Military, Naval and Air Questions to the Council, June 12,
1922, C.T.A. 76.1922.IX, R217, Doc. No. 21283, Dossier 16267, R217, 1919–27, Classification 8, League
of Nations Archives (LNA), Geneva, Switzerland.

Counterterrorism Between the Wars: An International History, 1919–1937. Mary S. Barton, Oxford University Press (2020).
© Mary S. Barton
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864042.001.0001
180    

constructing a legal regime that would be rediscovered and adapted following

independence and partition in 1947.²
Even as the potency of the revolutionary movement was declining in British
India, its government was the only signatory to the League’s November 1937
Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism that ratified the
treaty. However, public opinion in India and Britain was turning against the Raj’s
detention camps and emergency legislation. Indian politicians and the Howard
League for Penal Reform demanded that the Bengal government repeal its anti-
terrorism laws. Between the end of 1937 and beginning of 1939, the Government
of India closed detention centers and released political prisoners if they disavowed
violent activity. Intelligence officials continued to monitor the terrorist movement
and remained fearful that the campaign would reignite. After 1941, their attention
shifted to combating Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army.³
While “revolutionary terrorism” decreased in India after the International
Conference for the Repression of Terrorism, it increased in Ireland and
Palestine. At the end of 1937, the British Colonial Office requested that Charles
Tegart, a former commissioner of the Calcutta police with extensive anti-
terrorism experience in India, relocate to Palestine, where terrorism was “intensive
and widespread.” Tegart brought with him David Petrie, a former director of the
Indian Intelligence Bureau, and G.D. Sanderson, a former Indian police officer, to
help defeat insurgents. Tegart’s recommendations included building a frontier
fence to prevent raiders from traveling back and forth between Palestine and Syria,
and updating police barracks. He returned to England in May 1939, four months
before Nazi Germany invaded Poland.⁴
The technology behind small arms did not change dramatically during the
interwar years, but the usage of the words “terrorism” and “terrorist” did. While
nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries had proudly called themselves terror-
ists, imperial governments’ blanket labeling of nationalist groups as terrorists led
revolutionaries to eschew the term. The 1937 Convention defined terrorism to
enhance state security and punish non-state actors who were violently challenging
government rule. Thereafter, paramilitary organizations embraced the phrase
“freedom fighters” to justify campaigns against a “terrorist” state. Following the
Second World War, wars of national liberation reinvigorated the debate over

² Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 244–5.
³ Ben Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” Journal of International
Criminal Justice 4, no. 1 (2006): 82; Durba Ghosh, “Terrorism in Bengal: Political Violence in the
Interwar Years,” in Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, eds. Durba Ghosh
and Dane Kennedy (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006), 290; The Howard League for Penal Reform,
League of Nations, IV.Social.1936.IV.4, Penal and Penitentiary Questions, Report by the secretary-
general to the assembly, A.25.1936.IV., LNA.
⁴ J.C. Curry, Tegart of the Indian Police (Kent: Courier Co., 1960), 7, 32–5.
  181

the use of violence to achieve self-determination, rendering the League’s successor,

the United Nations, unable to codify “terrorism” in international law or treaties.
To this day, few other words are as contentious.
“International terrorism” was splashed across the headlines in the 1970s, during
the rash of airline hijackings and other acts of violence ostensibly carried out to
forward political causes. The phenomenon would have been familiar to govern-
ments waging counterterrorism—whether through law, intelligence, publicity, or
force—in the 1920s and 1930s. Terrorism and counterterrorism following the
Great War were later forgotten, in part, because the calamity of the Second World
War overwhelmed the living memory of nearly everything else. To many histor-
ians writing about a period through which they lived, anything other than that
which failed to stop the realization of Hitler’s ambitions, from 1933 to 1939, must
have seemed minor.
Temporarily forgotten as well was the havoc wreaked by the global small arms
trade, for which the Great Powers had failed to create durable institutions and
norms of control. Belligerent nations produced even more munitions during the
years 1939–45 than in 1914–18. Unlike after the First World War, governments
did not attempt to destroy and regulate small arms on an international scale
following the end of the Second World War. These weapons were available to
anticolonial groups who were challenging empires in Palestine, Cyprus, Aden, and
Indochina. The armed uprisings of nationalist groups during the period of
decolonization were often successful terrorist campaigns, as imperial powers
retreated in the face of militancy and onetime colonies gained independence.
This development reflected the discrediting of racial ideologies during the
Second World War, economic imperatives for imperial powers, and organiza-
tional and strategic decision making by national liberation groups. The mass
production and availability of weapons also contributed to the end of empire.
The superpower interventions and proxy conflicts of the Cold War sustained an
enormous illegal arms market, created the ultimate icon of armed resistance—the
AK-47 Kalashnikov—and paved the way for many of the geopolitical hotspots of
the twenty-first century.⁵ Mass availability of weapons, in turn, led to more
financially independent and autonomous terrorist groups.⁶ In recent years, a
multilateral treaty regulating the trade of conventional weapons has once again
found favor among Western governments and the United Nations. In April 2013,
the United Nations adopted an Arms Trade Treaty, with the world’s largest exporter

⁵ James Adams, Engines of War: Merchants of Death and the New Arms Race (New York: The
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 67–70, 128, 149; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–3, 396.
⁶ Jeanne K. Giraldo and Harold A. Trinkunas, “The Political Economy of Terrorism Financing,” in
Jeanne K. Girlado and Harold A. Trinkunas, eds., Terrorism Financing and State Responses (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2007), 7–8.
182    

of conventional weapons, the United States, also a signatory.⁷ Like its interwar
antecedents, however, the treaty does not contain clear enforcement mechanisms or
the automatic imposition of economic or political sanctions against states that
violate its statutes. The danger remains that states’ interests will continue to
trump international cooperation and hinder what has the potential to be an effective
counterterrorism strategy. In contrast, the most successful arms control treaties
of the Cold War—similar to the Washington Naval treaties that limited the
production of large battleships during the interwar years—have focused on the
most destructive weapons: long-range ballistic missiles mated with nuclear war-
heads. Small arms have been much more difficult to regulate because of their
massive number, ability to be kept hidden from police, and the lack of domestic
and international political will. Since the First World War unleashed the flood
gates, small arms have been readily available and used in a variety of asymmet-
rical conflicts.
As stated above and throughout this book, effective counterterrorism does not
necessarily require the use of military force. In the post-1945 years, Western
governments also turned to international law to deter international terrorism,
albeit in a slightly different fashion than during the interwar period. Effective use
of the law, however, has been stymied by the perennially contentious question of
how terrorism is defined. Prior to the 1937 Terrorism Convention, revolutionaries
and governments differentiated terrorist violence from ordinary crime. At the
dawn of the anarchist era, perpetrators embraced the term. In 1878, a young
Russian revolutionary, Vera Zasulich, had attempted to kill General Fyodor
Trepov, the governor of St. Petersburg, in retaliation for his brutal policies,
proclaiming that her actions were those of a “terrorist not a killer.”⁸ During the
interim period, colonial law enforcement officials in British India used “terrorist”
to describe seditious crimes, as opposed to an “ordinary crime” committed by
“common” criminals.⁹ The League’s treaty defined “acts of terrorism” as “criminal
acts directed against a State and intended or calculated to create a state of terror in
the minds of particular persons, or a group of persons or the general public.”
Since 1963 the international community (under the auspices of the United
Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency) has criminalized specific
components of terrorism—such as hijacking or hostage taking—in nineteen
international legal instruments. As noted by the legal scholar Ben Saul, the UN
General Assembly could not agree to a common definition for terrorism because

⁷ Jennifer Erickson, “Saint or Sinner? Human Rights and U.S. Support for the Arms Trade Treaty,”
Political Science Quarterly 130, no. 3 (2015): 449; Jennifer Erickson, Dangerous Trade: Arms Exports,
Human Rights, and International Reputation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5.
⁸ Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer, “Terrorism and the State,” in David Bloxham and
Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), 180.
⁹ Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 7.
  183

of Cold War politics, questions regarding the legal status of “freedom fighters,”
and ideological and political disputes about the use of revolutionary violence to
achieve self-determination. Regional organizations have, however, defined terror-
ism generically in legal instruments, as demonstrated by the European Union’s
2002 Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism.¹⁰
The United Nations—the successor to the League of Nations—has also avoided
criminalizing state-sponsored terrorism, a subject that had been of great import-
ance to the League’s efforts in Geneva. As shown in this book, terrorist groups
received massive assistance from foreign governments in the 1920s and 1930s.
Anticolonial and communist terrorists received aid from the Communist
International headquartered in Moscow, while ethnic separatists in Europe
accepted safe haven, weapons, and logistical help from governments opposing
the peace treaties of the First World War. The danger that proxy wars in Europe
would spill over into another continent-wide conflict led European jurists and
League officials to establish an international body of anti-terrorism law in the
1930s. The League’s 1937 terrorism convention specified international norms
against state-sponsorship; the United Nations, by contrast, has only been able to
produce a non-binding resolution.¹¹

Arms and Diplomacy

In countering terror between the First and Second World Wars, the Great Powers
pursued a diplomatic solution to arrest the movement of arms. As described in
Chapter 1, the peacemakers in Paris responded to the uptick of anticolonial and
European terrorism by constructing an arms control architecture that would
regulate the global armaments trade and standardize the destruction of weapons
and munitions manufactured during the Great War. The international arms
control regime consisted of peace treaties with vanquished states and a new
arms trafficking treaty intended to be applied everywhere. Peace treaties with
the defeated nations of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria contained
provisions that established the first international weapons inspectors, who worked
for the Inter-Allied Commissions of Control, and empowered the League of
Nations to investigate allegations of rearmament. In September 1919, the wartime
coalition of Allied and Associated Powers concluded the Convention for the
Control of the Trade in Arms, known as the Convention of St. Germain or the
Arms Traffic Convention of 1919. This treaty supervised the trade of arms over land

¹⁰ Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 98–9.

¹¹ United Nations General Assembly, “Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning
Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United
Nations (1970),” in Geoffrey Levitt, Democracies Against Terror: The Western Response to State-
Supported Terrorism (New York: Praeger, 1988), 20.
184    

and sea, and at Britain’s urging was applied most forcefully in Africa, the Middle
East, and Asia, to keep weapons from reaching anticolonial revolutionaries.
By 1925, it was clear that national governments were violating the treaties and
that the arms control system under the League of Nations was broken. The
defeated powers of the war violated the peace treaties by rearming and providing
safe haven and weapons for terrorist organizations despite the presence of inter-
national weapons inspectors. They were helped in this endeavor by the fascist
government of Italy and the two pariah states of the international system,
Germany and Russia, who had been excluded from Versailles. Secret military
transfers followed the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo that restored relations between the
two great powers at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Meanwhile, even the
principal architects of the arms control regime violated its tenets. Britain, France,
and the United States selectively followed the international laws governing the
arms trade and only took action against weapons violations when it suited their
security imperatives. The League of Nations responded by calling for another
arms trafficking conference. In June 1925, eighteen governments, including those
of the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan signed the Convention for
the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in
Implements of War. As discussed in Chapter 4, the second multilateral arms
trafficking treaty proved no more effective than the first.
In 1932, the Government of India and India Office held arms conferences in
Simla and London to find a solution to the longstanding problem of gun-running.
As intelligence and police reports indicated, the conventional arms smuggled into
India went directly into the hands of revolutionary terrorists. Government and
law enforcement attendees at the arms conferences acknowledged that Europe was
the source of the arms traffic, but that counterterrorism was also impeded by
inefficient information sharing among law enforcement, intelligence services, and
customs officials in India. The Government of India worked to standardize anti-
terrorism procedures among local governments, while also attempting to revive
interest in another multilateral arms accord. In October 1934, Ustaša militants,
clandestinely supported by Italian and Hungarian authorities, assassinated King
Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou. The
political murders prompted the League of Nations to stand up the Committee for
the International Repression of Terrorism, which resulted in two anti-terrorism
treaties, as described in Chapter 6.
The Geneva gatherings and multilateral diplomacy of the interwar years high-
light the unprecedented scale of diplomatic aspirations of the era. Most of the
League’s grand security projects failed. However, when it came to more discrete
projects, such as arms trafficking, it demonstrated great potential, which was
then thwarted—in part by the grandiose projects to outlaw war and disarm
completely. By the mid-1930s, most of the important political debates occurred
outside the League, as the major powers secretly negotiated security agreements
  185

to deal with economic and political crises brought on by the Great Depression
and the rise of fascism.
In London, policymakers’ disillusionment with the League was palpable from
the start. Whitehall had championed a treaty to regulate small arms as the Great
War came to an end, yet it shifted to negotiating bilateral treaties in the 1920s;
in the lead-up to League’s anti-terrorism convention of 1937, British delegates
attempted to limit its scope. “To steer a successful course between the risk of
committing our Government to legislation that would have run contrary to our
traditions and the risk of appearing unsympathetic towards measures for the
repression of terrorism cannot have been easy and I feel that we are all much
indebted to you,” British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare wrote John Fisher
Williams in praise of his work as the British delegate at the International
Conference for the Repression of Terrorism in November 1937.¹² As indicated
by Hoare, the United Kingdom did not want the League of Nations to dictate its
domestic legislation.
Two years later, however, Hoare shepherded through Parliament the
Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions) Act. Drawing upon many of the
same practices of the Bengal ordinances, the law gave the government and police
“exceptional powers” to check terrorism sponsored by the Irish Republican Army.
As in India, the government relied on its intelligence and security forces, particu-
larly the Special Branch, to monitor agitators and detain subjects suspected of
plotting violence.¹³ Despite the Home Office’s earlier rhetoric about the need to
protect civil liberties, the Home Secretary and legal advisers in the Home Office
readily called for repressive anti-terrorism laws when militants targeted British
officials in the United Kingdom.

Arms, Terror, and Modern Intelligence

London’s increasing reliance on the Special Branch, along with its imperial secret
services, illustrates how intelligence innovations developed by governments dur-
ing the First World War equipped them with unprecedented tools for monitoring
foreign adversaries as well as internal enemies (real and perceived). Bureaucratic
and technical advances led to highly streamlined and efficient intelligence organ-
izations staffed by individuals well trained in obtaining secret information by

¹² Samuel Hoare to John Fisher Williams, December 1937, the National Archives of the United
Kingdom (TNA), London, England, HO 45/18081.
¹³ Our Parliamentary Correspondent. “Check To The I.R.A.” The Times [London, England], July 20,
1939; Laura K. Donohue, “Britain’s Counterterrorism Policy,” in Doran Zimmermann and Andreas
Wenger, eds., How States Fight Terrorism: Policy Dynamics in the West (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2007),
17–58.
186    

means of espionage, cryptanalysis, and covert action.¹⁴ Intelligence reports from

Indian Political Intelligence and the British secret services indicated that Indian
revolutionaries continued to receive weapons from European ports. The records
of the Office of the Under Secretary of State of the U.S. State Department
confirmed a world awash in guns, even in those countries subjected to inter-
national weapons inspectors. While much of the information regarding the arms
trade and weapon stockpiles derived from clandestine sources and methods, open-
source material published by the League of Nations bolstered the analysis of
individual governments. Although the League’s failures are better known, statis-
tical information published in the Armaments Yearbook, Statistical Year-Book of
the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, and other works illuminated information
once protected and kept secret by governments. The large Geneva press corps
helped to disseminate this material around the world.
As described in Chapter 3, transatlantic information sharing increased after
1919. Policy elites and intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic viewed
the revolutionary regime in Russia as a common enemy. For these officials, the
activities of the Communist International justified the continuation of an infor-
mation sharing partnership. The special relationship in intelligence that existed
between the United Kingdom and United States stood in contrast to a general drift
in postwar Anglo-American relations. A transatlantic rivalry marked the interwar
years, as the former Allies competed in a naval build-up and disagreed about
tackling war debts and reparations. The common cause of identifying and coun-
tering the activities of the Comintern in the 1920s, however, led to a compart-
mentalization of the relationship between U.S. officials and the British secret
services and the Special Branch. After the Second World War, the United
Kingdom and United States would refocus their attention on Soviet support of
revolutionary movements. Formalized as Five Eyes, to include the former British
dominions of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, this intelligence alliance
outlasted the Cold War and was rejuvenated in the Global War on Terror that
followed September 11, 2001. The closeness of the Anglo-American world not-
withstanding, policymakers in London and Washington clashed over when and
where to apply the label “terrorist” in ways that would have appeared familiar to
their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s.

Arms, Terror, and Modern Peace

Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939 shattered all illusions of

peace on the European continent. After the fall of France in 1940, the Vichy

¹⁴ Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 14–15; Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann
Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute
Press, 2012), 234, 248.
  187

regime released the men convicted of complicity in the murders of Alexander and
Barthou. Ante Pavelić, founder of the Ustaša, resided in Italy before establishing a
Croatian puppet state (1941–45) under Axis protection.¹⁵ Terrorist activity per-
petrated by non-state and state actors thrived throughout much of the Second
World War. Prior to that, Europe and much of the world was hardly at peace in
the period that later became known as the interwar years.
The postwar periods—whether in the years after 1918, 1945, or 1991—have
been defined in relation to the wars that proceeded them. They were not periods of
idyllic stability and international security, however. Ongoing hostilities simmered,
and were often aided and abetted by the Great Powers. As historian Paul
Chamberlin has recently chronicled, the “long peace” of Europe during the Cold
War coincided with a half-century of mass killing in East Asia.¹⁶ For many, each of
the postwar eras of the past century have been illusions of peace.
One hundred years since the efforts of the Great Powers and the League of
Nations to construct an international architecture to combat terrorism, many of
the basic concepts and institutions have been rebuilt to counter asymmetrical
threats. However, as was the case in 1919, conflicting national priorities and
security imperatives continue to hinder international cooperation. The United
States has replaced the British Empire as the Great Power leading the charge
against international terrorism. As the nature of “terrorism” has evolved—
particularly with respect to the targeting of civilians—and the capacity of one
individual to hurt has multiplied, the difficulty of achieving victory in irregular
warfare has remained constant. “Small wars of empire” remain costly endeavors,
as the U.S.-led coalition has found since the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Peripheral conflicts, waged outside the line of sight of the general eye, can
nonetheless alter the body politic and relations among states. This book has
attempted to bring these changes to light by focusing on campaigns to counter
terrorism between the First and Second World Wars.

¹⁵ Saul, “The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism,” 79; Allen Roberts, The Turning
Point: The Assassination of Louis Barthou and King Alexander I of Yugoslavia (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1970), 159–71.
¹⁶ Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (New York:
HarperCollins, 2019).
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United States
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 Index

Note: Figures are indicated by an italic “f ”, and notes are indicated by “n”, following the page number.
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

Abd el-Krim 31–2 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) 150

Abyssinia see Ethiopia Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) 87
Adee, Alvey 19–20 Anglo-Japanese alliance 30
Aden 181 Anglo-Ottoman Society see Anglo-Turkish
Admirality, The (United Kingdom) 29 Society
Afghanistan Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British
arms control 15, 60 Petroleum) 54
arms trafficking 61 Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) 50
British Empire 44, 50, 70–1 Anglo-Turkish Society (formerly Anglo-
Soviet Union 43, 52–8 Ottoman Society) 59
Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) 42–3, 50, anticolonialism 59–60, 86
70–1 arms control 18, 31, 36–7, 40–1, 113–14, 181,
Africa 12–13, 22, 25, 31–2 183–4
arms trafficking 16–18, 112–14, 118–20 British Empire 51–2, 60
aircraft technology 24 British India 66–70, 149–50, 168
Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia 179, 187 communism and 43, 48–52
aftermath of assassination 164–5, 168–70, see also colonialism
172–4, 177 anti-European fanaticism 48–9
assassination of 152–4, 158–9, 184 anti-terrorism legislation and measures 7, 156,
Yugoslav-Hungarian Crisis 154–5, 157, 162–3
159–60, 163 British India 44, 66–71, 131–7, 140–2,
Algeria 113 148–9, 182
Allied and Associated Powers (World United States 72–7, 79–80
War I) 38–9 Anushilan Samity (Bengal) 134, 137
arms control 11–13, 16, 20–1, 32–7, “Arab Revolt” (1916–1918; 1936–1939) 23, 150
183–4 Arab Socialist Party 150
disarmament 3–9 ARCOS see All Russian Co-operative Society
All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) Arfa-ed-Dowleh, Prince 118–19
86–7 Argentina 18–19
Amanullah (Amir of Afghanistan) 52 Armaments Yearbook, Statistical Year-Book
American Armament Corporation 28 of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition
American Commission to Negotiate Peace (League of Nations) 185–6
15–16 Armour, Norman 94–5
American Federation of Labor 74 arms control 21–5, 179–85
American Protective League 72, 74–5 British India 60–3, 70–1, 148–9
Amritsar Massacre (1919) 42n.3, 67–8, 70–1 Central and Eastern Europe 37–9
“Anarchist Fighters, The” 75 France 12–13, 21–5
anarchist terrorism 1–4, 2f, 6–7, 165, 179–80 Inter-Allied Military Commissions of Control
United States 72–3, 75–80, 83 (IMCCs) 32–7
Anatolia 47 League of Nations 25–32
Anderson, Sir John 136–9, 176 surplus weapons 27–9
200 
arms control (cont.)
United Kingdom 12, 21–5, 41, 49
World War I 3–5, 7–11, 36–7, 179
see also Arms Traffic Convention (1919)
Arms Control Conference (Simla; London)
(1932) 130–1, 140–2, 140n.42, 184
Arms Trade Treaty (2013) 181–2
Arms Traffic Convention, The (1919) 12–21,
17f, 25, 40–1, 44, 176–7
colonialism and 22–5, 29, 32
United States 25–6, 131
see also arms control
Arms Traffic Convention, The (1925) 102–3,
115–22, 126–8, 176–7
foreign intelligence and global arms
trade 108–15
implications of 122–6
United States 108n.28
arms trafficking 48, 181–2
Afghanistan 61
British Empire 54–6, 61–2
British India 88–9, 130–1, 140–2, 148–51
China 60–1
Soviet Russia 109–11, 118
state-sponsored terror 155, 172–3, 176–7
United States 61, 108–15
see also gun-running
Asia 113–14, 187
arms control 12–13, 16–17, 24–5, 31–2
British Empire 47, 50, 58
Assam 137
assassination and political murder 46, 150–1,
179, 182, 186–7
British India 66–9, 130, 135, 139–40, 144
Croatia 152, 165–6
Soviet Union 97–8, 174–5
state-sponsored terror 164–5, 168–74, 177
United States 72–3, 77–8
World War I 1–4, 2f, 6, 13–14, 38
Yugoslavia 152–3, 155, 157–60, 163
Assize of Arms (Morgan) 37
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 10, 42–3, 45–6, 50, 54–7
Attolico, Professor Bernardo 29
Australia 5, 44, 74, 186
Austria 3–4
arms trafficking 112, 116–17, 124, 183–4
3–4, 34–5, 37–8, 40–1
state-sponsored terror 152, 154–7, 165–6, 178
Austro-Hungarian empire 3–4, 10, 13–14,
16, 33
automatic pistol 13–14
Avenol, Joseph 159–60
Azerbaijan 54, 56–60, 70–1
Azerbaijan Communist Party 56–7, 70–1
Baku Council of Action and Propaganda
(Azerbaijan) 56–60
Balfour, Lord Arthur (foreign secretary, United
Kingdom) 1, 16
Balkan pact (1934) 154, 173–4
Ball, Captain John 28n.66
Ball, Simon 18
Baltic States 81, 91–5, 92f, 111
BANU see Bulgarian Agrarian National Union
Barthou, Jean Louis 159–60
aftermath of assassination 164–5, 168–70,
172–3, 177
assassination 152–3, 158–9, 179, 184, 186–7
Basdevant, Jules 164
Bavaria see People’s State of Bavaria
Beal, Boylston Adams 84–90, 85f
Beer, George Louis 15–16
Belgium 23
arms control 112, 117–18, 120–1
British India 32, 141–2, 146–7, 173
Bell, Edward 82
Benes, Edvard 159
Bengal 46
British anti-terrorism strategy 130–7, 143–4,
149–50, 180
British Empire 52–4, 62–3, 66–71
detention camps 130, 137–40, 138f
domestic legislation 131–7
Bengal Congress party 69
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Act
(1925) 70, 130–7, 149
Bengal Criminal Law Amendment Ordinance
(1924) 69–70
Bengal Criminal Law (Arms and Explosives) Act
(1932) 135–6
Bengal Emergency Powers Ordinance
(1931) 135–6
Bengal Intelligence Bureau 133–4, 149
Bengal Legislative Council 70
Bengal Provincial Congress Committee 68–9
Bengal Provincial Council 70
Bengal Regulation III (1818) 67
Bengal Suppression of Terrorist Outrages Act
(1932) 135–6
Bengal Volunteer Group 69
Berkman, Alexander 77
Bethmann-Hollweg, Chancellor Theobald von 8
bhadralok (Hindu movement) 66, 68, 130, 139,
149–50
Bhattacharya, Narendra Nath see Roy,
Manabendra Nath
Bibby Bros. & Co. 143
Birkenhead, Lord see Smith, Frederick Edwin,
Lord Birkenhead

Black Chamber 127
Blackwell, Sir Ernley 14
Bolsheviks 1
British India 4, 9–12, 33, 45–6, 51–2,
55–6, 64
colonialism and 43, 50, 82
United States 74–5, 93–6
bombing tactics
arms control 6–7, 14–15, 39, 40f, 46
Bengal 130, 132–4
state-sponsored tactics 155, 164–5
United States 72–3, 75, 77–80, 78n.21
Borah, William 29–30, 105–6
Borodin, Mikhail 52–3
Bose, Rash Behari 141
Bose, Subhas Chandra 69, 180
Brass, Leslie Stuart 168
Bray, Denys 176–7
Brazil 18–20, 167
Breen, Dan 69, 134
Brest-Litovsk see Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918)
Briand, Aristide 121–3
Bricker, Colonel Edwin 27–8
Britain see British Empire; United Kingdom
Britain–United States of America agreement
(BRUSA) (1943) 5
British Arms Act (1878) 66–7, 150–1
British Communist Party 139
British Consulate-General (Afghanistan) 83
British Embassy (United States) 83
British Empire 42–5, 187
Azerbaijan 56–60, 70–1
arms trafficking 116–17, 119–20, 122,
124, 126
interwar intelligence gathering 46–7,
49–54, 74
North Africa/Middle East 47–9
policy responses 60–3, 71
post-World War I world and 45–7
threat perception and 42, 45–6, 54–6
United States 47, 73–4, 82–90, 101, 127
see also United Kingdom
British India 6, 180
arms control 36–7, 60–3, 71, 115, 140–2
arms trafficking 60–1, 88–9, 113–14, 119,
130–1, 141–2, 172–3, 184–6
anti-terrorism strategy 42–5, 129–40,
142–51
communism and 50–9
domestic legislation 44, 66–71, 130–7,
148–9
‘Eastern Unrest’ 47–9
intelligence and intelligence agencies 37,
46n.13, 48, 54–5, 60
 201
passports 63–6, 71
state-sponsored terror 168, 173–4
United States 74, 85, 87–90
see also Republic of India
British Naval Intelligence 82
BRUSA see Britain–United States of America
agreement
Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference (1889–90) 14
Brussels Conference Act (1890) (Convention
Relative to the Slave Trade and Importation
into Africa of Firearms, Ammunition, and
Spiritous Liquors) 14, 16–17
Buda, Mario 78
Bukhara (Uzbekistan) 54–5
Bulgaria 3–4, 6, 34–5, 37–41
arms trafficking 111, 116–17, 124, 183–4
state-sponsored terror 152, 154, 173–4
United States and 92–3, 99
Bulgarian Agrarian National Union
(BANU) 38–9
Bulgarian Communist Party 93, 99
Bullitt Jr, William 81
Bureau of Investigation (later Federal Bureau
of Investigation) (United States) 72–3,
75–7, 79
Burma 62–3, 68, 131–2
Burns, William 78
Burton, Theodore 108
Burton, Thomas E. 115, 118, 121
Cabinet, The (United Kingdom) 44, 48, 69
Canada 5, 18–19, 44, 74, 186
Cartel des Gauches (France) 30
Carton de Wiart, Count Henri 102, 164
Cecil, Robert 29
Central America 14–15
Central Asiatic Bureau of the Comintern 52
Central Board of Revenue (British India) 61
Central and Eastern Europe 37–40, 40f
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 80
Central Intelligence Branch (Bengal) 149–50
Chamberlain, Austen 48, 65–6, 121–4
Chamberlin, Paul 187
Chelmsford, Lord 67
chemical warfare 121n.81, 127–8
Chilean Communist Party 86–7
Chile 162–3
China 12–13
arms control 19–21, 24
arms trafficking 60–1, 110, 112
communism 52–3, 57
Chinese Communist Party 110
Chittagong Armory Raid (1930) (Bengal)
129–30, 133–7, 140, 148–9
202 
Christian Science Monitor 115
CIA see Central Intelligence Agency
CID see Criminal Investigation Department
Cipher School (GC&CS, later GCHQ) 82n.33
CIRT see Committee for the International
Repression of Terrorism
civil disobedience 67–8, 132–3, 135
civil wars 2–4, 9–10, 38, 42, 110, 171, 177–8
Clemenceau, Georges 1–4, 2f, 6–8, 21, 179
Colby, Bainbridge 95–6
Cold War 181–3, 186–7
Coleman, F.W.B. 97
colonialism
arms control and 22–5, 29, 32, 179–80
arms trafficking 116–17
communism and 51–3, 51f
disarmament 3, 6, 12–13, 21
see also anticolonialism
Colonial Office (United Kingdom) 45–6, 48,
174, 180
Colt Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing
Company 106–7
Comintern see Communist International
Comintern Pact (1936) 177–8
“comitadji” (irregular soldiers/resistance fighters)
(Bulgaria) 39
Commission for Combatting Fascism
(Romania) 97
Commission to Negotiate Peace (United
States) 19–20
Committee of Imperial Defense (Sub-Committee
on Arms Traffic) (United Kingdom) 9,
12–14, 48
Committee for the International Repression
of Terrorism (CIRT) 164n.52,
166f, 184
Committee on Public Information (United
States) 74–5
Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)
(Turkey) 47
communism 3–4, 6–7, 164–5, 183
British India 50–9, 65–6, 70–1
Bulgaria 39
colonialism and 51–3, 51f, 70–1
pan-Islamic movements 54–7
Russia/Soviet Union 48–54, 179–80
United States 72–80, 114–15
Communist International (Comintern) 4,
50, 183
arms trafficking 110–11
Azerbaijan 56–9
Baltic States 81, 91–5, 92f
Bengal 52–3, 70–1, 73, 139, 176, 186
British Empire 11–12, 51–5, 51f, 64–5, 82
Red Scare 74–5, 79–80
South America 86–7
sponsorship of terror 95–100, 176
United States 72, 73n.4, 81, 83–6, 90–1,
95, 100
Communist Labor Party (United States) 73, 77
Communist Party of America 73, 77
Communist Party of India 52–3, 139n.37,
139–40
Communist Party of the United States of
America (CPUSA) 73n.4
“Communist University of Toilers of the
East” 52
Conference for the Supervision of the
International Trade in Arms and
Ammunition and in Implements of War see
Arms Traffic Conference (1925)
“Congress of Peoples of the East” (1920) 51–2
Convention for the Control of Trade in Arms
and Ammunition (1919) see Treaty of
Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Convention for the Control of the Trade in Arms
and Ammunition see Arms Traffic
Convention, The (1919)
Convention for the Creation of an International
Criminal Court (1937) 153, 167, 172–3, 179
Convention for the Supervision of the
International Trade in Arms and
Ammunition and in Implements of War
(1925) 102–3, 177, 184
Convention for the Prevention and Punishment
of Terrorism (1937) 6–7, 153, 175–7,
179–82, 185
adoption of 172–4
Convention for the Suppression of
Counterfeiting Currency (1929) 165
Coolidge, Calvin 78–9, 103, 105–7, 125–6
Cottin, Émile 1–4, 2f, 179
covert operations 6–7
Cox, Sir Percy 23, 119
CPUSA see Communist Party of the United
States of America
Crewe, Lord 18n.21, 22–4
Criminal Investigation Department (CID)
(India) 53, 141–2
Criminal Law Amendment Bill (1934)
(Assam) 137
Criminal Law, International Bureau for the
Unification of see International Bureau for
the Unification of Criminal Law 6–7
Croatia 6, 37–8, 150–1, 154–5, 163, 187
Croatian Revolutionary Organization (UHRO)
(Ustaša) 37–8, 184, 186–7
state-sponsored terror 152, 154–9, 161, 165–6
  203

Cummings, Homer 171 DuPont (arms manufacture) 106–7

CUP see Committee of Union and Progress Dupriez, Léon 117–18
Curzon, Lord 15–16, 22, 44, 47 Duranty, Walter 174–5
Curzon Wyllie, Sir William 46
Cyprus 181 Eastern Commission of the Executive Committee
Czechoslovakia 4, 10, 16, 37–8 of the Communist International (ECCI) 52
arms control 111–12, 120–1, 124 Eastern Europe 90–5, 92f, 111, 173
state-sponsored terror 153, 156–7, 163, 173–4, East-West Circle 59
177–8 Ebert, Friedrich 32–3
ECCI see Executive Committee of the
d’Abernon, Lord 34n.93 Communist International
dacoits (armed robbery) 66–8 Eckhardt, Tibor 160–1
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 3–4 Economic Commission (1933) (Bengal) 139
Darwin, John 44 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The
Das, Bina 135 (Keynes) 35
Das, C.R. 69–70 Eden, Anthony 152–3, 161–4, 174–5
Davis, Norman 26 Egypt 6n.13, 15, 45–7, 113, 150
de Eckhardt, M. 157–8 Estonia 10, 91, 96–7, 111, 118
Defense of India Act (1915) 43, 66–8, 67n.102 Etherton, Colonel Percy 53
Department of Justice (United States) 5 Ethiopia 12–15, 22–3, 40–1, 115, 177
Department of Labor (United States) 76–7, 83 European Union 182–3
deportation 42–3, 54, 65, 83 Europe 6–7, 47
United States 72–80 Executive Committee of the Communist
detention camps 137–40, 138f, 180 International (ECCI) 79, 85–6, 94, 97–9
Dhingra, Madan Lal 46 export licenses 18–19, 23, 25–6, 131, 147
Directorate of Intelligence (United Kingdom) 82 arms trafficking 103, 106, 112, 117–18, 120
disarmament 4–5, 39–41
arms control 33–4, 102–3, 113–14, 123 Fabrique Nationale d’Herstal (FN Herstal)
League of Nations 28–30 117–18, 117f
“Disarmament of Germany and After, The” Faisal, King of Iraq 23–4, 43, 45–6
(Morgan) 36–7 Far East see Asia
District Intelligence Branches (Bengal) 137, fascism 3–4, 6–7, 37–8, 94, 179–80, 184–5
149–50 Federal Bureau of Investigation (formerly Bureau
Division of Eastern European Affairs (United of Investigation) (FBI) (United States)
States) 75–6, 80, 169–71
arms control 106, 126–7 Feng Yuxiang (Feng Yühsiang) 110
Latvia 90–3 Ferard, J.E. 64
Soviet Russia 74, 95–6 Field, Arthur 59
Division of European Affairs (United States) Filene, Peter 100n.97
81, 95 Final Declaration of the Stresa Conference
Division of Near Eastern Affairs (United (1935) 177
States) 114, 119–20 Finland 10, 118
Division of Eastern European Affairs First World War see World War I
(United States) 74, 80–1, 81n.29, First World War, Volume I: To Arms, The
100n.97, 100 (Strachan) 9
Division of Western European Affairs (United Five Eyes (intelligence alliance) 5, 74, 186
States) 81, 171 Five-Power Treaty (1922) 30
Djalal, Ghaffar 125 Flynn, William J. 75–6
Dollfuss, Engelbert 158 Foreigners Act (1927) (British India)
drug trafficking 123 Foreign Office (United Kingdom) 14, 65, 113–14
Drummond, Sir Eric 26, 29, 105 arms control 14–15, 18–19, 25–6, 29, 34n.93
Duca, Ion 111n.36, 158 British Empire 44–9
Dudziak, Mary 6n.11 British India 141–2, 146–7
Dulles, Allen 86–7, 105–9 state-sponsored terror 167–8
204 

Foreign Service Act (“Rogers Act”) (1924) 116 Government of India see British India
Fort-Whiteman, Lovett 86 Government of India Act (1935) 46n.13, 67
Fourteen Points (Woodrow Wilson) 11 Granville, Lord 142
Fox, John 34 Great Depression (1929) 155, 178, 184–5
Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism Great Terror (1936–38) (Soviet Union) 7,
(European Union) (2002) 182–3 174–5
France 1, 33, 186–7 Great War see World War I
arms control 12–16, 20–5, 60 Greece 39, 42–3, 112, 173–4
arms trafficking 60–1, 116–17, 122, 124, 126 Grew, Joseph 104–5, 109, 169–70
Bengal 143–5 Gulf of Aden 17–18
British India 146–7, 150–1 gun-running
disarmament 34–7 arms control 14–15, 28, 32, 102–3, 113–14,
League of Nations 25, 27–32 126–7, 184
repression of terrorism 163–5, 168 British India 131, 139–42, 148
Rif War (1925–1926) 31–2, 59 see also arms trafficking
state-sponsored terror 171–4, 176–7, 179, 184 Guomindang (GMD, National People’s Party)
United States 112–14 (China) 110
World War I 1, 4–6, 8, 10
Yugoslav-Hungary Crisis 152–4, 158–9, 161, Habsburg empire 11, 38
169–70 Hankey, Maurice 48
Franco, General Francisco 177–8 Hardinge, Charles 22
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke 1, 13–14, 159 Harding, Senator Warren 6, 26–7, 30, 78–9,
Freikorps (Germany) 32–3 103, 107
French North/West Africa 14–15 Hardwick, Senator Thomas 75
French Revolution 6–7 Harrison, Leland 80, 108–9, 112
Frick, Henry Clay 77 Hashemites 18n.21, 23–4, 43
Herriot, Édouard 30
Galleani, Luigi 78n.21 Hindenburg, Field Marshal Paul von 8
Gandhi, Mohandas 43, 67–9, 133, 135 Hindenburg Programme (1916) 18, 33–4
Garvan, Francis P. 75–6 Hindustan Socialist Republican Association
gas (weapon of war) 8–9 130, 132
General Intelligence Division (GID) (United Hirtenberg Affair (1933) 157n.22
States) 72–3, 75–9 Hitler, Adolf 152–3, 157, 176–8
Genocide Convention (1948) 164–5 Hoare, Samuel 135–6, 141–3, 149, 185
Germany 12–13, 27–9, 32–41, 45–6, 113–14, Hohenzollern Empire 11, 38
186–7 Home Department (Government of India) 36–7,
arms trafficking 116–17, 121–3, 126, 183–4 46, 61, 63–4
British India and 87n.54, 140–1, 146, 148 Home Office (United Kingdom) 14
Middle East 60 British Empire 48, 65–6, 185
passports 63–4 state-sponsored terror 167–9, 174
Soviet Russia 109–10 United States 82, 85–6
state-sponsored terror 152–3, 167, 169, 172–8 Hong Kong 64–5
World War I 3–4, 7–9, 42 Hoover, Herbert 106–8, 125
Ghadar (“Mutiny”) Party 46, 87n.54 Hoover, J. Edgar 170–1
Ghosh, Durba 47, 68 communism 72–3, 75–6, 78, 80
Ghosh, Ganesh 134 Hornbeck, Stanley 25, 109
Gibson, Hugh S. 105, 108, 115 House, Colonel Edward M. 1, 15–16
Gilbert, Prentiss 161–2 Howard League for Penal Reform (United
Gitlow, Benjamin 73 Kingdom) 165, 180
Global War on Terror (2001–) 186–7 Hughes, Charles Evans 26–7, 30, 104–6, 109,
GMD see Guomindang (National People’s Party) 125–6
(China) Hull, Cordell 125–7, 169–71
Goldman, Emma 77 Hungary 3–4, 10, 74–5, 170
Gompers, Samuel 74 arms control 34–5, 37–8, 40–1

arms trafficking 116–17, 124, 183–4
Yugoslavian Crisis (1934) 154–64, 169–70
Hunter Commission 42n.3
Hussein, King 23–4
Hymans, Paul 142, 146–7
Ibn Saud, King (Saudi Arabia) 23–4, 113
ICPC see International Criminal Police
Commission
IDCEU see Inter-Departmental Committee on
Eastern Unrest
IMCCs see Inter-Allied Military Commissions of
Control
Immigration Act (1918; 1921; 1924) (United
States) 75–7, 79–80
Imperial Russia 18–19, 21, 28–9, 48
Revolution (1917) 3–4, 6, 9–14, 38
IMRO see Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization
Independent Labour Party (United
Kingdom) 89–90
Independent Territory (India) 55
India see British India; Republic of India
Indian Military School (Tashkent) 52
Indian National Army 180
Indian National Congress 42n.3, 43, 50,
68, 133
Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) 185–6
arms control 140–1, 148
British Empire 46n.13, 46–8, 54–5, 60–2
“Indian Republican Army” (Bengal) 129, 134
India Office (United Kingdom) 15, 37, 175
arms trafficking 60–2, 123, 184
British Empire 45–6, 48, 59, 69
British India 130–1, 140–3, 147–8
communism 64, 66
Indo-American Information Bureau 88
Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies)
79–80, 83, 89–90
intelligence and intelligence agencies
arms control and 185–6
arms trafficking 108–15
British Empire 44, 46–7, 49–55, 66, 70–1
British India 36–7, 43, 47–9, 67–8, 71, 180
establishment of 4–6
United States 74–80, 82–90
Intelligence Bureau of India 37, 46n.13, 60, 64,
123, 180
Bengal 132, 134–41
Inter-Allied Military Commissions of Control
(IMCCs) 32–7, 39–41, 122–4, 183–4
Inter-Departmental Committee on Eastern
Unrest (IDCEU) 47–9, 56–62,
62nn.79, 81, 127
 205
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization (IMRO) 37–9, 154n.8, 154–6,
159, 173–4
International Anarchist Brigade 1
International Association of Penal Law 6–7,
164–5
International Atomic Energy Agency 182–3
International Bureau for the Unification of
Criminal Law 6–7, 164–5
International Committee of the Red Cross
93–4
International Conference for the Repression of
Terrorism (1937) 172nn.79,81, 178, 180
International Criminal Court 153, 165–6, 171,
174–5
International Criminal Police Commission
(ICPC) 165–6
International Penal and Penitentiary
Commission (IPPC) 165–6
“international terrorism” 180–1
IPI see Indian Political Intelligence
IPPC see International Penal and Penitentiary
Commission
IRA see Irish Republican Army
Iran see Persia
Iraq 23, 42–3, 54, 59, 70–1
Ireland 46, 69, 74, 85, 87, 90, 168, 180
Irish Free State 43, 87
Irish Republican Army (IRA) 69, 87, 134,
150, 185
Iron Guard 158
Irwin, Lord 135
Islington, Lord 12–15, 148–9
Italian Military Intelligence Service 156–7
Italy 3–4, 6, 60, 89–90
arms control 16, 21–5, 29–30, 32
arms trafficking 112–13, 124, 152–3, 184
state-sponsored terror 152, 167, 169–70,
177–8
Yugoslav-Hungarian Crisis 154, 156–7, 159,
161, 163
Japan
arms control 6n.13, 16, 23–4, 30, 32, 126,
140–1
state-sponsored terror 167, 169, 172,
174–7
Jay, Peter Augustus 111
Jevtić, Bogoljub 152
Journal de Genève 114–16, 119–20
Ju(a)gantar Party (Bengal) 134–7
Justice Department (United States)
communism 72–3, 75–9, 79n.25, 94–5, 100
state-sponsored terror 169–71
206 

Kelley, Robert 80–1, 90–1, 95–6, 100
Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) 4–5, 105–6, 177
Kellogg, Frank 105–6, 108, 114–16, 126–7
Kell, Vernon 83
Kennan, George F. 92
Kenworthy, Joseph 24
Kerin, Velicko (“Vlada the Chauffeur”) 158n.28,
158–9, 160f, 161
Keylor, William 152–3
Keynes, John Maynard 35
Khan, Khushal (businessman) 56
Khilafat movement 50, 52–4, 56, 70–1
Kingissepp, Viktor 97
King, William 125–6, 130–1
Kirk, Alexander 85, 88–9
Kirov, Sergei 56–7, 174–5
Kuusinen, Otto V. 98–9
Kuwait 23
Kvaternik, Eugen 161
labour strikes 32–3, 57, 72, 74–5, 77–8, 139
Lane, Arthur 85, 88–9
Lansing, Robert 19–20, 80, 82, 84
Latin America 18–19, 21, 26–7, 104
Latvia 10, 91, 111, 118
Latvian Secret Service 94–5
Lausanne see Treaty of Lausanne (1923)
Laval, Pierre 152–3, 162–3
League of Nations 44–5, 63, 179, 182, 184–6
arms control 5–7, 17–19, 21–3, 25–32, 34–6,
40–1, 184
arms trafficking 102–5, 108, 120–4, 183–4
British India 145–8, 175–7
Central and Eastern Europe 38–9
France 25, 27–30, 34
state-sponsored terror 152–3, 164–75,
177–8
United States 25–6, 28–9
Yugoslav-Hungarian Crisis 156–64
Lebanon 113
Lemkin, Raphael 164–5
Lenin Institute for Propaganda 95
Lenin, Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov 4–5, 11–12, 43,
50, 52, 72, 95
Levant, The 13
Libya 22
Liddell, Captain Guy M. 59
Lindsay, Ronald 19–20
Lithuania 10, 91, 94–5
Little Entente see Czechoslovakia; Romania;
Yugoslavia
Litvinov, Maxim 174
Lloyd George, David 1, 8, 21, 44, 50
Locarno agreements (1925) 36, 121–3
Loewe Broomhandle Mauser (1896 automatic
pistol) 13–14
London Economic Conference (1933) 169
Long, Rear Admiral Andrew 108
Ludendorff, General Erich 8
McClure, Wallace 171
Macedonia 6, 37–9, 150–1
Macedonian Political Organization of the United
States and Canada 156
McKinley, William 72–3
Malleson, General Sir Wilfrid 53
Mandatory Palestine 10, 16, 42–3, 113, 150, 168,
174, 180–1
Martin, William 116
Maskat see Muscat; Oman
Matin, Le (newspaper) 1
Maugham, W. Somerset 82n.34
May Day (1920) (United States) 77–8
Mayer, Ferdinand 163
Menzies, Colonel Stewart 62, 140–1
Mesopotamia 13
Metropolitan Police Service (United
Kingdom) 13–14, 59, 64–5, 82, 168–9,
185–6
Mexico 19–21, 83–4, 88
MI5 see Security Service
MI6 see Secret Intelligence Service
MID see Military Information Division
Middle East 16–18, 24
arms trafficking 112–14, 118–20
British Empire 43, 45–7, 56, 58–9
Military Information Division (MID) (United
States Army) 108–9
Military Intelligence Directorate/Operations
Directorate (War Office) (United
Kingdom) 48
Military Intelligence Officers (MIOs)
(Bengal) 136
Military League (Bulgaria) 39
Ministry of Munitions (United Kingdom) 8, 15
Moffat, Jay 169–70
Monarchist Association of Central Russia (“the
Trust”) 100
Mondanel, Mr P. 169–71
Monroe Doctrine 18–19
Montagu, Edwin 44, 47, 67
Morgan, John H. 32, 36–7
Morocco 31–2, 59, 113
Murphy, Robert 90–1
Muscat 12–13
Muslim Brotherhood 6n.13, 150
Muslim Committee for the Defense of the Riff 59
Mussolini, Benito 22, 152–4, 157, 159, 161, 177

National League of India 88
National Popular Government League 77–8
National Security Act (1947) 80
Nehru, Jawaharlal 43
Netherlands 37, 140–1
Neuilly-sur-Seine see Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine
Neutrality Acts (1935–) (United States) 169
Newfoundland 44
New Violence Party (Bengal) 69, 133
New York Times 78–9, 116
New Zealand 5, 44, 74, 186
Niranjan Sengupta 133
non-cooperation movement (British India) 67–9
Norris, Lt. Col. 37
North Africa 47, 113–14
Northern Oil Concession 54
“Nye Committee” see Special Committee on
Investigation of the Munitions Industry
Office of the Chief Special Agent (United
States) 74, 80–1
Office of the Counselor (United States) 80, 82
Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) (United
States) 108–9
Office of the Under Secretary of State (United
States) 74, 108–9, 185–6
arms control 108–9, 114, 126–7
communism 74, 80–1, 90–1, 100–1
Oliver, Lord 69–70
Oman 12–13
ONI see Office of Naval Intelligence
Onslow, Lord 119
open source intelligence 5, 41
Oriental Alliance 54–5
Orlando, Vittorio 21
Ottoman empire 3–4, 9–10, 13, 23–4, 38–9,
42–3, 49–50
PAC see Permanent Advisory Committee on
Military, Naval and Air Questions
Page, Walter 84–5
Palace of Nations 165, 166f
Palestine see Mandatory Palestine
Palmer, A. Mitchell 72–3, 75–7
pan-Islamic movements 44–7, 49–50, 59–60,
70–1
arms trafficking 61–3
communism 54–7
Paris Peace Conference (1919) 4–5, 44, 105–6,
175, 179, 183–4
arms control 11–12, 14–15, 20, 32–3, 35, 38–9
Parmoor, Lord 35
Passport (Entry into India) Act (1920) 63
passports 49, 54n.43, 63–6, 71, 139, 148–9
 207
Passports and Customs Formalities and Through
Tickets conference (League of Nations) 63
Pavelić, Ante 154–6, 158, 161, 186–7
Pearse, Patrick 69, 134
Pedersen, Susan 31
Pella, Vespasian 164–5, 173
Penal Law, International Association of see
International Association of Penal Law
Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation
Company 143
People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Soviet
Union) 93–4
People’s State of Bavaria 74–5
Perčec, Gustav 154–6
Permanent Advisory Committee on Military,
Naval and Air Questions (PAC) 25–7,
34–5
Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) 31
Persia (Iran) 12–15
arms trafficking 118–20, 125–6
British Empire and 43–4, 52–5, 57,
59, 70–1
Persian Gulf 12–13, 17–18
Pétain, Marshal 31–2
Petrie, David 180
Philips, William 112
Pichon, Stéphen 16
Pittman, Key 125
PMC see Permanent Mandates Commission
Poincaré, Raymond 1, 18n.21, 22
Poland 10, 111–12, 118, 121, 152–3, 177, 186–7
Polk, Frank 20–1, 80, 82, 85
Poole, De Witt 91
Post, Louis 77, 80–1
Press Act (1931) (Bengal) 135–6
Prevention of Violence (Temporary Provisions)
Act (1939) (United Kingdom) 185
Priestland, David 51–2
Princip, Gavrilo 13–14
“Profintern” see Red International Labor Union
“propaganda by deed” 6–7, 77
propaganda 56–60
British India 132–3, 143–4, 149–50
United States 83–4, 93–5, 98
Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War
of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other
Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of
Warfare (Geneva Protocol) (1925) 121n.81,
127–8
Punjab Criminal Law (Amendment) Act of
November (1932) 137
Punjab Party 132
Punjab region (India) 42–3, 46, 50, 61, 67, 70–1,
132, 137
208 

Radical Division see General Intelligence Division Sacco, Nicola 78n.21, 89–90
(GID) (United States) safe havens 4, 7, 37–8, 60–1, 143–4, 152, 183–4
radicalism/radical political ideologies 3, 74–80 Saint-Germain-en-Laye see Treaty of
United States 73–7, 79, 85–6, 91 Saint-Germain-en-Laye
Ralston, Jackson H. 77–8 Salt March (1930) (British India) 133
Rangoon Jugantar Party 131–2 Sanderson, G.D. 180
Ray, R.E.A. 149–50 Satia, Priya 14n.7
Read, Herbert 15–16 Saudi Arabia 23–4
Reading, Lord 69 Saul, Ben 182–3
rearmament 34–6, 109–10, 122–3, 152–3, Schanzer, Signor 29
183–4 Schuker, Stephen 35
Red Army (Soviet Union) 9–10 Scotland Yard (United Kingdom) 48, 59, 62,
Red Cross see International Committee of the 64–5, 83–4
Red Cross Sebestyen, Victor 95
Red International Labor Union Second World War see World War II
(“Profintern”) 85–6, 94 Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, later MI6)
Red Scare 5, 73–80, 83, 100, 114–15, 170 (United Kingdom) 37, 140
Red Sea 14, 17–18 British Empire 46–8, 60, 62, 71
Reed, John 73 communism 82–3
Reichswehr (German military) 32–3 security policies 46, 111
Report of Sub-Committee on Arms Traffic France 30, 39–41
(Committee of Imperial Defense) (1917) United Kingdom 39–45, 71
(United Kingdom) 12n.4, 12–14 United States 39–41, 114
Republic of India Security Service (MI5) (United Kingdom) 46–8,
see also British India 59, 62, 71, 82–3, 85–6
Revolutionary and Anarchical Crimes Act Selassie, Emperor Haile (Ras Tafari
(Rowlatt Act) (1919) 67–8, 71 Makonnen) 22, 118–19
revolutionary terrorism 4–5 Senate Judiciary Committee (1921) (United
Bengal 131–2, 135–6 States) 78–9
British India 15, 43, 67–71 Sen, Surja 129, 131–2, 134
Russia 3–4, 6, 9–14, 38, 52 Seton, Malcolm 48, 140
Rif(f), Republic of 113 Shell Crisis (1915) 15
War (1925–1926) 31–2, 59 Sherry, Michael 24
right-wing groups 6n.13, 32–3, 38, 158 Shuster, Richard 37
“Rogers Act” see Foreign Service Act (“Rogers Sidney Street siege (1911) 13–14
Act”) (1924) signals intelligence (SIGINT) 5, 46–7
Romania 4, 37–9, 97, 169–70 Simon, John 141–2, 162
arms trafficking 111–12, 118, 124 Simons, Aitken 107
state-sponsored terror 152, 156–7, 163–5, Sinclair Oil 54
173–4, 177 Singh, Ananta 134
Romanian Communist Party 97 Singh, Mota (Sikh revolutionary) 55–6
Romanov empire 11, 38 Sinha, Satyendra Prasanna, 1st Baron Sinha 44
Rome protocols (1934) 154 SIS see Secret Intelligence Service
Roosevelt, Franklin 100, 125–7, 169 Smith, Frederick Edwin, Lord Birkenhead 48, 59,
Rowlatt, Mr S.A.T. 67–8 65–6, 139
Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of Smith, Hubert Llewellyn 29
and Trading in Arms (United Kingdom) 28 Society for the Promotion of Cultural Relations
Roy, Evelyn 88 with Soviet Russia 85–6
Roy, Manabendra Nath 51–3, 51f, 60–1 South Africa 44
Ruggles, Brigadier General Colden 108 South America 14–15, 86–7, 112
Russia see Imperial Russia; Soviet Russia Soviet Russia 7, 9–10, 42, 173–5, 177–8, 186
Russian Civil War (1918–1921) 4 arms control 19–20, 39–40
Russian Communist Party 98 arms trafficking 109–11, 118–20, 184
Ruthenberg, Charles 73 British Empire and 42–3

British India and 50–2, 61
colonialism and 51–3, 51f
Middle East 54–60
pan-Islamic movements 54–7
United States 91–2, 95–100
Spain 173
Civil War (1936) 1, 171, 177–8
Rif(f) War (1925–1926) 31–2, 59
Spanish flu (1919) 9
Special Branch (Metropolitan Police) (United
Kingdom) 46, 85–6, 89–90, 168–9, 185–6
Special Committee on Investigation of the
Munitions Industry (“Nye Committee”)
(United States) 28, 169
Special Committee to Investigate Un-American
Activities (1938) (United States) 79n.25
Special Powers Ordinance (1932) (Punjab) 137
Spenser, Daniela 51–2
Stalin, Joseph 7, 95, 174–5
Stamboliiski, Aleksandar 38–9, 92–3
Standard Oil (later ExxonMobil) 45–6, 54
Starkov, Vasily 95
State Department (United States) 5, 71, 93
arms control 19–20, 25, 39–40, 125–7
arms trafficking 102–3, 105, 107, 116, 119–20,
122, 186
Baltic States 81, 91–5, 92f, 97, 100
British India 87–9
communism 73–4, 79–82, 89
foreign intelligence 108–10, 112
Ireland 87
Sacco and Vanzetti case 89–90
state-sponsored terror 169–71
United Kingdom 83–7
State (Kingdom of) of the Serbs, Croats, and
Slovenes see Yugoslavia
State Political Administration (Cheka) (Soviet
Union) 96–7
State Political Directorate (GPU) (Soviet
Union) 94
state-sponsored terror 3–4, 7, 12, 41, 177–8
British India 152–3, 175–7, 179, 183
Central and Eastern Europe 37–40, 40f
international anti-terrorism laws 164–75, 166f
Soviet Union 73–4, 95–100
Yugoslavia and Hungary 154–64, 160f
Statistical Information on the Trade in Arms,
Ammunition and Material of War (League
of Nations) 18–19
Statistical Year-Book of the Trade in Arms and
Ammunition (League of Nations) 5, 102–3
Stevenson, David 33
Stimson, Henry 126–7
 209
Stone, Harlan F. 78–9
Strachan, Hew 9, 33
Stresemann, Gustav 36, 121–2
Sudan 43
Sûreté Nationale (France) 169–70
Sveta Nedelya Cathedral (Sofia, Bulgaria) 39, 40f
Swadeshi movement (British India) 68
Swaraj (political party) (British India) 69–70
Sweden 34–5
Switzerland 34–5, 63–4
Sykes, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Mark 9, 12n.4,
12–14, 14n.7
Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) 13, 24
Syria 31–2, 113, 180
Tafari Makonnen see Selassie, Emperor Haile
Teapot Dome scandal (1938) (United
States) 79n.25
Tegart, Charles 141–2, 144–5, 180
Temporary Mixed Commission on Armaments
(TMC) 27–9, 103–5, 109
terrorist tactics see assassination tactics; bombing
tactics; labour strikes; propaganda
Thayer, Judge Webster 89–90
Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919) 42–3, 50
Thomson, Basil 82–3
TMC see Temporary Mixed Commission on
Armaments
To the American People: Report Upon the Illegal
Practices of the United States Department of
Justice (National Popular Government
League) 77–8
Torpey, John 54n.43
training camps 36–8, 52
state-sponsored terror 154–8, 160
Transjordan 13, 24, 43, 113
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) 10, 33, 50
Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 38, 56n.55
Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine (1919) 38–9,
116–17, 123
Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye 3–4
arms control 12, 16n.18, 17f, 16–17, 18n.21
Treaty of Rapallo (1922) 109–10, 184
Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye 3–4, 156–7,
183–4
arms trafficking 103–5, 116–17, 124
Treaty of Sèvres (1920) 42–3, 50
Treaty of Trianon 3–4, 116–17
Treaty of Versailles 3–4, 6, 116–17, 154, 184
arms control 11–12, 18–19, 29–30, 32n.83, 34
Trepov, General Fyodor 182
Trianon see Treaty of Trianon
Trivedi, C.M. 145
210 
Trotsky, Leon 50, 99, 174–5
Turkestan 57
Turkey, Republic of 10, 173–4
arms control 60, 110, 112–13
British Empire 42–7, 49–50, 54–6
Soviet Union 56–7, 59
Twynam, H.J. 149–50
Tyrrell, Lord 147
Ukraine 10
UKUSA Agreement (1946) 5
ultra-nationalism 3–4, 6–7, 72, 102, 124, 164–5,
179–80
Union of Russian Workers 77
United Kingdom
arms and ammunition manufacture 12–13,
15–16, 18–25
arms control 12–16, 34, 36–7, 110, 185–6
imperialism and 41, 47, 150
League of Nations 25–6, 28–30, 32, 185
passports 63–4
state-sponsored terror 152–3, 159, 161–9,
172, 176–7
United States and 73–4, 82–90, 186
World War I 1, 4–5, 8–10
see also British Empire
United Nations 180–3
United States 187
arms control 14–16, 18–20, 25, 27–8, 32
arms trafficking 61, 108–15, 181–2
Baltic States 81, 91–5, 92f
British Empire and 47, 73–4, 82–90,
127, 186
communism 72–4, 114–15, 174
Eastern Europe 90–5, 92f
intelligence and intelligence agencies
80–90
League of Nations 25–6, 30
Red Scare 73–80, 100, 114–15, 170
state-sponsored terror 95–100, 161, 163,
167–9, 172
World War I 1, 4–5, 8
U(O)beidullah Sindhi 52
U.S. Legation (Riga, Latvia) 81, 91–9, 92f, 111
USS Buford (“Soviet Arc”) 77
Uzbekistan 54–5, 57
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 78n.21, 89–90
Versailles see Treaty of Versailles
Vickers (British armaments manufacturer) 24
Viviani, René 28–9
Vivian, Major Valentine 140–1
Voitinsky, Grigori 94
Vŭlkov, General Ivan 39
Wallinger, Major 62
Wall Street bombing (1920) 78n.21, 78–9
War Cabinet (United Kingdom) 82
War Department (United States) 107
War Office (Prussia) 33–4
War Office (United Kingdom) 28, 37, 48, 62
War Trade Board (United States) 19
Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922)
29–30, 102
Washington Post 116
Weeks, John 108
Welles, Sumner 81
“white terror” regime (1923) (Bulgaria) 39
Wilbur, Curtis 108
Wilhelm II, Kaiser 8, 32–3
Williams, John Fischer 164, 185
Willingdon, Lord 144
Wilson, Charles 93, 163–4
Wilson, Field Marshal Sir Henry 42, 45–6
Wilson, William 77
Wilson, Woodrow 1
arms control 11–12, 21, 26
arms trafficking 103, 105–6
communism 74–5, 82, 84–5, 95–6
Winchester Arms Company 106–7
Wiseman, Sir William 82
Wobblies see Industrial Workers of the World
Women’s International League 163–4
Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (Bengal) 132
World Congress of Negro Peoples 86
World Disarmament Conference
(1932–1934) 4–5, 120–1, 177
World War I 1–4, 6–9, 38, 42
defeated nations 3–4, 37–8, 41, 123, 183–4
Yemen 113
Young Egypt 6n.13
Young, Evan 87
Yugoslavia 4, 10, 37–9, 179, 184
arms trafficking 111–12, 124
Hungarian Crisis (1934) 154–64, 168–70
state-sponsored terror 170, 173–4, 177
Zaghloul, Saad 42–3
Zasulich, Vera 182
“Zimmermann Telegram” (1917) 84–5
Zinoviev, Grigory 52–3, 99