left-wing publications. He was an early opponent of Trotsky, and may have followed instructions from Moscow. According to Madeira writing in 2003, Ewer was an active Soviet agent from the early 1920s. He ran a ring from the London offices of the Federated Press of America (FPA), called a Comintern front. It contained George Slocombe in Paris, Walter Dale, and Arthur Lakey. MI5 kept Ewer under surveillance. From 1925 to 1927, according to Bennett, MI5 and the SIS jointly monitored the Ewer group's activities. Following the MI5 raid on the All Russian Co-operative Society in May 1927, the group pulled in its horns. Lakey, a former police officer by then using the surname Allen, became an MI5 informer in 1928, giving details of two Special Branch officers who had been suborned by Ewer into passing information from at latest 1922. Callaghan and Morgan in a paper of 2006 criticised aspects of Madeira's interpretation, in particular with respect to the characterisation of the FPA, founded in 1919 as a press agency, and in his acceptance of the MI5 narrative. In his own defence, Ewer stated that he was not a spy, engaged in espionage: his work was "purely counter", involving only counter-espionage. This distinction was dismissed by Maxwell Knight. Ewer has been mentioned in connection with Clare Sheridan (1885–1970), writer and sculptor, who passed on comments of Winston Churchill, her relative. MI5 chose in 1929 not to prosecute him, possibly to avoid embarrassment on the government side, and there was no wish to revive the Zinoviev letter farrago of 1924. They did arrest Dale and the two Special Branch officers who had leaked operational details, Inspector Hubert van Ginhoven and Sergeant Charles Jane. Again there were no prosecutions, and it is suggested that the reason was to keep secret the methods of the security services. Post-war propaganda Around the beginning of 1930 Ewer left the CPGB in a public way. He disagreed with the direction of the Comintern, and the requirement of adherence to the party line, to the detriment of critical thinking. His reasoning was roughly handled by Rajani Palme Dutt of the CPGB. Ewer wrote in May 1947 a series of articles critical of life in Russia, and debated with the Stalinist D. N. Pritt. He continued to write on foreign affairs into the Cold War years, taking an anti-Soviet line. Declassified archives show that Ewer's anti-communist works were