Basil Thomson - Metropolitan Police

Metropolitan Police

In June 1913, Thomson was appointed Assistant Commissioner "C" (Crime) of London's Metropolitan Police, which made him the head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at New Scotland Yard. When World War I broke out in 1914, the CID found itself acting as the enforcement arm for Britain's military intelligence apparatus: while the newly-formed Secret Service Bureau (later known as MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service), and the intelligence arms of the War Office and the Admiralty, collected intelligence on suspected spies in Britain, they had no arrest powers. As head of CID, Thomson was involved in the arrests in several high-profile espionage cases, including Lieutenant Carl Hans Lody and establishing himself a reputation as a "spycatcher". Thomson worked closely with the MI5, especially the MI5(g) headed by Vernon Kell and his works at the was key in dealing with the Indian nationalist movement in Europe. However, since the existence of the latter organisation was not acknowledged at the time, Thomson controversially claimed a large proportion of the credit in the successful British counter-espionage operations. In his memoirs, The Scene Changes, Thomson acknowledges only the works of Robert Nathan, who worked closely with him, and was involved in the interrogation of a number of Indian revolutionaries who worked with German Intelligence during the war. Thomson and Nathan's work at the time was key in identifying the plans by Ghadar Party and the Indian Independence Committee to assassinate Lord Kitchener in 1915 through an associate of Har Dayal, Gobind Behari Lal, as well as identifying the outlines of the Indian revolutionary conspiracy. Their efforts at the time also resulted in the capture of Harish Chandra (who was associated with the Berlin committee), and he was successfully turned into a double agent. Thomson's efforts were also key in uncovering the first concrete evidence of Turco-German agents operating in the middle east and attempting to destabillise Afghanistan and British India.

One who he interrogated was ‘Mata Hari’ the Dutch exotic dancer later to be executed by the French as a spy. In 1916 she was taken off a ship sailing from Spain to the Netherlands at Falmouth as a suspicious person and brought to London where she was interrogated at length by Thomson. Eventually she claimed to be doing some work for French Intelligence. (A full transcript of this is in Britain’s National Archives and Thomson himself refers to it in his 1922 book Queer People).

Thomson's work as Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard had its darker side. His natural conservatism was given full throttle against suffragettes, then against spies from Imperial Germany and its allies, then against Irish nationalists, and finally against British Marxists. Thomson was involved with the spreading of the "Black Diaries" used against Sir Roger Casement to prevent public support for a reduction of Casement's death sentence for high treason in 1916. He equated Bolsheviks only with Jews, and even wrote anti-Semitic articles about Jews for a newspaper, the Whitechapel Gazette, owned by the highly questionable social figure Maundy Gregory. One of Thomson agents John Charles Byrnes was a double agent within the IRA who identified Michael Collins (Irish Leader) but who was executed by the IRA in March 1920

Thomson was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1916 and Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1919.

In 1919, while remaining Assistant Commissioner (Crime), he was appointed Director of Intelligence at the Home Office, in overall charge of every intelligence agency in the country, but in 1921 he fell out with Lloyd George and was asked to resign. The reasons for this remain mysterious.