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

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He was thereafter briefly known for portraits of those involved in the Second World War – including many who were casualties of it – often working from photographs. The watchers failed to pick up Maclean since his departure for the country on Friday and we now learn from the Foreign Office that he was given a day's leave on Saturday. In 1919 Liddell joined Scotland Yard as a subordinate to Basil Thompson in the directorate of intelligence.

He died of heart failure aged 66 in 1958 at his home, 18 Richmond Court, Sloane Street, London, and was buried at Putney Vale Cemetery.bibliography two other books by Deacon (including the pulped British Connection), but ignores The Greatest Treason. Early entries paint a picture of near panic and chaos, as MI5 struggled to cope with an avalanche of intelligence at the outbreak of war. I said that I knew he had been sent home by the Foreign Office on account of three motoring offences for speeding, which had caused the embassy embarrassment.

White seems to have been quite naive and unwordly particularly with regard to the homosexual world and risks and secrecy therein. He joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a private, a unit his brothers David Liddell MC and Cecil served with. Although showing Tedder in civilian dress it is probably derived from a Cecil Beaton photograph taken of him in uniform in 1942, when he was AOC in Cairo. He was such a key figure in the pre-war days and the days during the war when our security services took their eye totally off the ball of communist penetration. A portrait by him of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder (1st Baron Tedder) in the Shetland Museum was accepted there as a gift from a donor who had received it from Liddell’s widow, for reasons of Tedder’s Shetland background.One of these was Percy Glading, a former member of the CP Central Committee who worked at Woolwich Arsenal. In the spring of 1938 he visited the USA and determined that both the military authorities and the FBI were more than anxious to establish a liaison with us, which could cover not only Soviet, German and Italian activities, but also those of the Japanese. This included secret assurances that the United States would support France if it was invaded by the German Army.

Unwilling to waste his talents, the CP and the Comintern agreed that he should spend his enforced idleness at the Lenin School in Moscow. This led in 1944 to the most extraordinary operation of all, when the German high command was fooled into thinking the main invasion of Europe would be around Calais rather than on the Normandy beaches. Was this not the same Liddell who recruited Anthony Blunt and Victor Rothschild into his organisation, and then wanted to bring in Guy Burgess, only being talked out of it by John Curry? Fourth, if Attlee had really listened carefully to her, and found her arguments persuasive, he would hardly have allowed Liddell to continue on in MI5 without even an investigation, and to be promoted to Deputy Director-General as some kind of designate. When she began to help Percy Glading with a scheme to convey plans of a British gun to the Soviet Union, she found herself liking the man.

Even making allowances for the rhetorical flourish of granting Liddell a ‘mythical’ status, I have always been a little sceptical of this judgment. WALLFLOWERS is the codename given to one of the Security Service's most treasured possessions, the daily journal dictated from August 1939 to June 1945 by MI5's Director of Counter Espionage, Guy Liddell, to his secretary, Margo Huggins. This week, for the first time, the 12 volumes of Liddell's detailed daily journal will be released to the public.