In the 1920s, barely after the birth of modern tradecraft during the First World War, both signals intelligence and human intelligence came to affect the conduct of British foreign policy towards the Soviet Union and vice versa. The context in which the art and science of spying evolved began immediately to shape its development as well. External affairs and foreign policy, as well as domestic politics, all played a role in changing the craft of surveillance. So did administrative and bureaucratic wrangling.

After the UK and USSR emerged from the hostilities that accompanied the Soviet withdrawal from the Great War and separate peace with Germany, the context created by the Russian Civil War and the early years of the new revolutionary state created a situation in which the two nations struggled towards an uneasy and incomplete rapprochement. As a piece of this awkward diplomatic dance, they worked to seal a bilateral trade agreement. Yet even as they did so, domestic trade disputes buffeted consecutive British Governments, administrations that were also moving from one domestic political crisis to another. It was hard for many to separate in their minds the fear of Soviet Bolshevism and the concern about socialists and communists within the British population. For some, the British labour movement became a kind of domestic parallel to foreign Bolshevism – all of it threatening.

Nikolai Klishko, secretary to the Russian Trade Delegation, became the focus of British security concerns as soon as the delegation arrived. He may not have been a Cheka officer, as recent research has revealed, but he was certainly central to the Cheka’s London mission. He stood at the nexus of Bolshevik covert operations and effectively served as a prototype for the ‘legal resident’ – Soviet intelligence officers operating under official cover. The Klishko case foreshadowed the story of British counter-espionage and surveillance of later KGB residents.

Soviet funding of the British Communist Party also complicated the trade negotiations. Never before had a foreign power subsidised a British political party, and revelations about Soviet funding of domestic communists had a frosty effect on the trade talks. Klishko’s involvement in two networks offers insight into how that funding may have occurred.