ONE OF THE MI5 agents whom Blunt confessed to have ‘blown’ early in his career in the security service could hardly be more surprising either to the public or to Parliament. It was Tom Driberg, at the time a journalist on the Daily Express, later an MP, chairman of the Labour Party and, finally, as Lord Bradwell, a Labour peer.
The true facts about Driberg, who, in his autobiography Ruling Passions, confirmed his homosexuality but never mentioned his life as a spy, are a startling reminder that in the world of espionage nothing is ever what it seems.
Driberg was recruited for service in MI5 when he was still a schoolboy at Lancing College, an Anglo–Catholic foundation near Worthing in Sussex. He was drawn into espionage there by the late Maxwell Knight, well known for his BBC talks on natural history. Knight was employed by MI5 as what is called an ‘agent-runner’, a person who runs a group of agents and, to avoid suspicion, stays well away from headquarters, communicating the information that his agents produce by other means. His codename was ‘M’.
On Knight’s instructions, Driberg joined the Brighton branch of the Communist Party, becoming wholehearted in his overt support. He continued this at Christ Church, Oxford, and later, when he joined the Daily Express in 1928. His mission was to infiltrate the party and report regularly on its activities and members to MI5. Through his considerable charm and intelligence, he achieved this, becoming a close friend of Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and of Douglas Springhall, leader of the Young Communist League, who was eventually convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union in 1943.
In 1941, reports from an outside MI5 agent crossed the desk of Anthony Blunt, who knew the agent only by the codename ‘M8’. As Blunt later confessed, he passed a copy of one of these reports to ‘Henry’ because it concerned information about a secret aeroplane. Driberg, alias ‘M8’, then writing for the Daily Express as ‘William Hickey’, believed the information to have come from Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of aircraft production. His report also revealed that the Communist Party knew about the machine and that this must surely be dangerous.
Blunt was asked by ‘Henry’ to discover the identity of ‘M8’, but, after trying for six months, he failed. ‘Henry’ then informed him that Soviet intelligence had discovered that ‘M8’ was Driberg. With unusual clumsiness, the Russians immediately alerted Harry Pollitt, who summarily expelled ‘M8’ from the party. In his autobiography, Driberg records how he was shattered when the news was conveyed to him, without any reason, by another Fleet Street comrade. As a good agent should, he continued to protest until he died that he never discovered why he had been thrown out, claiming that friends like Springhall were so embarrassed by the event that their lips were sealed.
Blunt told his MI5 interrogators in 1964 that the mode of Driberg’s expulsion had infuriated him because it had touched off another internal inquiry in MI5, during which he was closely questioned, though he felt sure that he had managed to brazen his way through by lying persuasively. Blunt had told ‘Henry’ that Pollitt should have been instructed to wait for a decent interval to elapse and then to have found some excuse for parting close company with Driberg. (Though Pollitt never knew it, there was another MI5 agent much closer to him in the form of a woman who had been recruited by Maxwell Knight as a schoolgirl!)
Driberg’s value to MI5 soared when he entered Parliament and was able to report, with steadily increasing penetration, on the activities of other members, both inside and outside the House of Commons. But the further exploits of this extraordinary character in the field of espionage form a story in themselves and, as they do not involve Blunt, will be reserved for Chapter 21.
In Blunt’s uninformative, and sometimes misleading, public confession to The Times, he stressed the work that he did for MI5 in running ‘a small subsection connected with neutral diplomatic missions’. The truth about his efforts there will also surprise even those who have good reason to consider themselves knowledgeable about the Ring of Five.
The neutral countries, which continued to maintain embassies in London during the war, included not only genuine neutrals, like Sweden and Switzerland, but pro-Nazi Spain and Portugal as well as, during the early months, the pro-British United States. Under wartime regulations MI5 had access to their diplomatic bags and made full use of it, devising ingenious ways of releasing the seals and refurbishing them. Their diplomatic and intelligence radio traffic was also carefully monitored. Blunt, who also dealt with signals intelligence (Sigint), had access to all the items of security and intelligence interest relevant to his work. As he told his interrogators repeatedly and without remorse, ‘You may assume that if I came across anything which could be remotely of interest to the Russians, I passed it on.’ Among such material were the names of neutral diplomats with character weaknesses, or a liking for money, who might be recruited by the Soviet Union as spies, as some of them were.
In his extremely valuable service to the Russians, Blunt was assisted day by day by none other than the man who had recruited him, Guy Burgess, whose main activities in this field have been covered up with astonishing success, considering the reams that have been written about him.
It had been repeatedly stated that Blunt tried to get Burgess into MI5 and failed. The truth is that Burgess joined MI5 as a wartime supernumerary around about the same time as Blunt did in 1940. Having renounced his overt communism and behaved as though he was right wing, as Philby had, he had been recruited in good faith through his friendship with Sir Joseph Ball, a director of the Conservative research department, who was an influential figure behind the scenes in Whitehall. As luck always seemed to have it for British traitors, Ball became temporarily involved with the reorganisation of the security service after the departure of Sir Vernon Kell in the summer of 1940. Burgess used this friendly contact to infiltrate his way into MI5.
Like Maxwell Knight, who had recruited Driberg and several others, Burgess was an agent-runner with the codename ‘Orange’, operating a string of sources outside and rarely visiting MI5 headquarters. So, though somewhat on the periphery, he had fulfilled the Russians’ top-priority requirement, and his various wartime jobs in the BBC and the Foreign Office were largely cover for his work for MI5.
Whether by coincidence or clever design, the agents whom Burgess was required to run were mainly recruited from the embassies of the neutral countries represented in London. This meant that he had to pass the information he received from them to Blunt, who was the ‘head agent’ inside MI5 headquarters for intelligence exercises penetrating the neutral embassies. This was reckoned to be a highly satisfactory arrangement by MI5 because the two were well known to be close friends and their regular meetings could arouse nobody’s suspicions. And, during their evening meetings at Blunt’s room in the Courtauld Institute or elsewhere, Burgess could pass on his agents’ reports to Blunt, who could take them to headquarters the following morning. As will be seen, it was an even more satisfactory arrangement for the KGB.
While intellectually scintillating, Guy Burgess was dishevelled, riotous in his behaviour, frequently drunk and a pouncing homosexual, much given to shocking strangers, as well as friends, by his remarks. ‘I can never travel comfortably by train because I am always feeling that I ought to be having the engine driver’ was the type of comment with which he sought to attract attention to himself. So how could such an outrageous character ever be a spy for anybody?
In fact, he was a highly successful spy both for MI5 and the KGB. Both regarded his behaviour as excellent cover on the principle that anyone who talked and acted so recklessly could not possibly be a spy. Burgess could be discreet when it was essential to be so, as he had already shown by useful work as a freelance supplier of information about Nazi Germany to the secret service before the outbreak of war. He also had access to a remarkable range of influential and talkative contacts, including politicians.
Burgess recruited valuable agents for MI5 from the neutral embassies, the Swedish, Swiss and Spanish in particular, and was not without success from the US diplomatic missions. While his prime loyalty was always to the KGB, he had no objection to also helping MI5 once Russia was in the war and it served the Kremlin’s interests.
From the start, the KGB knew all about Burgess’s work for MI5, but MI5 never got wind of his much greater effort for the KGB until he defected in 1951. There was no suspect file on Burgess in the records of MI5, only an account of his good work there. This, of course, was a major reason why the top management of MI5 was so determined to stop Burgess from ever returning to Britain. They did not want it known that he had been another Soviet spy inside the security and intelligence organisations.
As Blunt explained with some relish, his official MI5 partnership with Burgess suited them both perfectly for their really important assignments. Twice a week, Blunt would take out an attaché case of specially selected secret documents as ‘homework’, which was permitted during the war when pressure of work was so great and transport difficulties were being created by the Blitz. He took his spoils to his room at the Courtauld Institute, and there Burgess contributed voluminous reports on his own activities. One of them then handed over the suitcase to ‘Henry’, or some other Soviet officer, at a prearranged point. The documents were taken to the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, photographed and returned in time for Blunt to take them back to the office next morning.
Blunt told his interrogators how he had been almost caught by a policeman who demanded to see inside his case while he was on the way to a meeting with ‘Henry’. The police were making a search in connection with some criminal matter, but, by giving a certain telephone number, Blunt managed to convince the constable that he worked for MI5. It had been a frightening experience, for he would have had difficulty, if reported to his employers, in explaining away some of the documents as ‘homework’.
The Russians became so concerned about the enormous amount of documentary material that Blunt and Burgess were providing, particularly after the close brush with the police, that ‘Henry’ provided them with special cameras so that they could photograph the documents in miniature and hand over only the cassettes. They did this for a while at the Courtauld Institute until they found themselves so short of sleep that they rebelled and told the Russians that they were reverting to the old system.
Blunt could remember only one other occasion when Burgess had refused to obey Soviet orders. Though his Russian masters knew that Burgess was a homosexual, they were keen for him to marry a young woman who had high-level social-political connections, but so peculiar were her sexual requirements that even Burgess found them ‘too wildly extravagant’. To Burgess’s amusement, the lady eventually became the wife of an eminent politician.
Burgess’s notable work for MI5 against the Germans explains why he was never suspected as a spy, any more than Blunt was, until he defected. It also accounts for his close social connection with the then deputy director of MI5, Guy Liddell, and the freedom of their conversational exchanges. This has been held against Liddell by people who did not know that Burgess was an MI5 agent.
Referring to Liddell, Blunt recalled how he would occasionally remark to him, when dealing with an interesting document in the office, ‘What a pity we can’t give this to the Russians.’ Then he would laugh inwardly because that was exactly what he would shortly be doing. When asked if he had ever experienced any pangs of conscience about being a traitor to his own country, all Blunt would admit was that he and Burgess ‘felt better about things’ once the Russians were in the war.
As with Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy who thought it was unforgiveable that the Russians were not being told British–American atomic secrets, Blunt considered it irrelevant that the Russians declined to tell their allies anything at all. Alexander Foote, the Briton who did so much valuable espionage work for Russia as a member of the Swiss Lucy Ring and later defected back to Britain in 1947 when he found his Soviet masters to be ungrateful, told MI5 that, on strict orders from the Moscow Centre, any information of no value to Russia was to be destroyed and on no account should be passed to any other ally.
This attitude was particularly heinous in view of what is almost certainly the truth about the Lucy Ring, though it has never been officially revealed. The Lucy Ring consisted of three main agents, which is why the Swiss knew it as ‘Rote Drei’ (Red Three). Foote was the radio operator; Alexander Rado, a Hungarian, was the nominal chief; and the main informant was Rudolf Roessler, a Bavarian exiled to Switzerland because of his anti-Nazi stance. Roessler’s codename was ‘Lucy’, and, because his contribution was of such outstanding importance in the Red Army’s defeat of Germany, the ring has been called after him. Roessler provided continuing details of the German battle order, troop movements and tactical plans from before the Nazi attack on Russia in June 1941 until November 1943.
Roessler never revealed his source, though Foote, Rado and others since were led to believe that it came from about ten dissident German officers in the high command structure. But it is inconceivable that such a group would have been prepared to see their own forces destroyed and their country invaded and demolished by Russia, however much they hated Hitler. Even more unlikely is the possibility that, in securing and transmitting such a mass of information to Roessler over more than two years, they would not have been detected and caught. There is only one credible source of the information: the British code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which, through the counter-intelligence operation codenamed ‘Ultra’, was in continuous receipt of Germany’s war plans and intentions. Recently, I have secured confirmation of this from secret intelligence sources.
It was in Britain’s interests to help the Russians to defeat the German onslaught, but at the same time it was essential that the fact that Bletchley was breaking the German codes produced by an ‘unbreakable’ cypher machine should never leak. An official channel was established whereby some of this information was relayed to Moscow after it had been doctored to look as though it had been obtained from spies and other more conventional means. With the war on the Russian front being waged on such a scale, so much information needed to be passed on almost daily that this could not be done without arousing Soviet suspicions of a massive code break, and there was the further problem that the Russians tended to disbelieve it, especially after one batch proved to be incorrect. With insight, it was argued that the Russians would be much more likely to accept the information and act on it if it came from their own trusted sources. My information is that most of it was therefore relayed to Roessler through intermediaries, probably located in the British diplomatic offices in Switzerland, and he gave the impression that he was receiving it directly from German sources, which were, in fact, mythical. The Russians may well have seen through the subterfuge because of the information being given to them surreptitiously from Bletchley by John Cairncross and possibly by other Soviet spies there, as I shall describe in Chapter 16.
Under pressure from Germany, the Swiss were driven to break up the Lucy Ring in November 1943, but by that time the German defeat in Russia was assured. Roessler, who died in 1962, continued to refuse to reveal his sources, and when Foote was questioned by British intelligence in 1947 he told the story of the nest of German traitors in the high command, which he still believed.
It has been suggested that Foote was really a British agent working for the Russians as a double, but I can find no evidence for this. Throughout the war, he failed to pass any intelligence to Britain, including the fact that Ursula Beurton had been transferred to Oxford in 1940.
The fate of Alexander Rado, head of the Lucy Ring, illustrates very dramatically the totally selfish attitude of the Russians. He was later censured, among other ‘crimes’, for passing to Britain information about Hitler’s V2 rockets, which were being developed to destroy London. This information, which Rado had somehow obtained from the rocket station at Peenemünde, was of no value to Russia because of the short range of the V2, but the Kremlin disapproved of giving Britain any assistance that would help to lessen the bombardment of London.
After the Lucy Ring was shut down by the Swiss authorities, Rado found his way to Paris and approached the Russian embassy there for further work. He was flown to Cairo en route for Moscow, and, fearing that he would be blamed for the closure of the ring rather than praised for its previous successes, he toyed with the idea of defecting to Britain. A British security officer in Cairo, Maurice Oldfield, later to become a most able head of the secret service, talked with him and telegraphed secret service headquarters in London to seek guidance. Once again, through the luck that seemed to favour the KGB, the telegram was handled by Philby, who, after taking instruction from his Soviet controller, instructed Oldfield to ensure that Rado went on to Moscow. There he was awarded ten years’ imprisonment for his magnificent efforts, after a secret ‘trial’.
After serving his sentence, he moved to Budapest, where he became chairman of the Hungarian Geographical Society, cartography, in which he was genuinely expert, having been his cover in Switzerland. He wrote his memoirs but judiciously omitted mention of his experiences in the Soviet labour camp.
Blunt, Fuchs and others like them were totally unmoved by the sacrifices made by British sailors and seamen in convoying war material to Russia, with great loss of ships and life. There is reason to believe that Blunt knew of the circumstances surrounding the loss of HMS Edinburgh, a cruiser that had been crippled while on convoy duty in Russia. On the eve of May Day 1942, two powerful Russian destroyers, which had been part of the escort sent out from the Kola Inlet, returned to harbour pleading fuel shortage. Instead of returning, they remained in harbour over the May Day celebrations, during which time German destroyers found the Edinburgh and torpedoed her. I am told that Blunt was not prepared to be moved by any such events if they implied criticism of his beloved Russia.
Blunt had left MI5 before it received the details of the wartime KGB radio messages that American cypher experts were later able to decode. One of them, from the Centre in Moscow, had been addressed to the Polish communist underground movement, warning its members to lie low, as the Red Army had been instructed to halt its offensive on Warsaw to give the retreating Germans time to clean up the Jews and other undesirable Poles there. It is considered unlikely by those who interrogated Blunt that this message would have disconcerted him.