CHAPTER 11

The People’s War

Emergency recruitment

‘If the balloon goes up, can you lay on a few chaps?’ was a question asked during the summer of 1939. The phraseology was flippant, for the speakers came from a generation that disliked grandstanding: as Crane Brinton, wartime chief of research and analysis in the London outpost of the US Office of Strategic Services, reported, ‘British self-assurance takes the (to us) odd form of an incurable addiction to understatement.’ The slang conveyed the certainty that Whitehall on a war footing needed to recruit active-minded men (women were not considered) who would take responsibility, appraise situations and suggest initiatives in the expanded government apparatus needed to wage war against Nazi Germany. Haste and wartime volatility brought topsy-turvy recruitment, affiliations, promotions and demotions. The Oxford don Maurice Bowra, who shirked official work, said in 1940: ‘War is a) very dull and b) brings all the crooks to the top.’ The motley backgrounds of the emergency recruits brought a perception that the People’s War, in Evelyn Waugh’s words, filled government ministries with ‘experts, charlatans, plain lunatics and every unemployed member of the British Communist Party’. How reasonable are these evaluations?¹

The government budgeted £93,000 to fund MI5 in 1939–40. The service was chronically understaffed, with 83 officers (almost entirely men), 253 support staff (almost entirely women) and only 36 watchers in Harry Hunter’s B6 surveillance section. Subsequently Jasper Harker and Guy Liddell recruited another 570 officers and staff. In June 1940 Churchill sacked the Service’s Director, Sir Vernon Kell, and his deputy Eric Holt-Wilson: Kell’s successor, Sir David Petrie, who used the title Director General, had been a police chief in India. ‘No Security Service could have had … a better chief,’ J. C. Masterman believed. ‘He was a rock of integrity, the type of Scot whose reliability in all conditions was beyond question, with strong and independent judgement, but ready and willing to delegate and trust.’ Petrie erred by being too considerate. Unlike Sir Stewart Menzies, his counterpart at SIS, he decided not to trouble Churchill with briefings on the Security Service’s wartime work. Not only would the Prime Minister have enjoyed Petrie’s briefings: they might have proofed him against the views of Sir Desmond Morton, his confidential security adviser, who as a former SIS officer felt antipathy to MI5.²

In September 1939, when Germany and Russia invaded Poland, Maclean was a member of the Paris embassy and Cairncross already a government official. Burgess was employed by the BBC, but had an anomalous involvement with an SIS section that was the forerunner of SOE. The subsequent admission of Blunt, Philby and Burgess into MI5, SIS and the Foreign Office respectively has led to unforgiving criticism of lax security. The trio’s easy absorption into secret intelligence systems has been contrasted with the objections raised against, for example, Douglas Jay, the City editor of the Daily Herald, before his appointment to the Ministry of Supply. Jay’s blacklisting in 1939–40 was apparently because he had once attended a communist meeting in Paris, and believed that confiscation of inherited personal income was a better form of socialism than the nationalization of the means of production. Temporary recruits to MI5, with education and experience of the world, thought that Special Branch was unreasonable in treating attendance at fringe meetings as suspicious. They chortled when they investigated old files and found absurd misappraisals expressed in Special Branch’s costive, stilted reports. In free-spirited reaction to the obtuse alarmism of Special Branch, MI5 officers tended to imprudence in some of the recruits whom they accepted on trust. Jay’s MI5 file was destroyed by a friend who read it and found it unfair.

‘Before the war there were no resources with which to check on undergraduate activities,’ Dick White recalled forty years later. ‘Consequently I guess there were quite a number of former Communists & Marxists around in the wartime Int[elligence] services including Bletchley … but my equally strong guess is that few of these were spies & that for many of them the war brought enlightenment. On balance it was not such a bad bet to fight the war as a united front.’ The debit, he told Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1980, was to have Blunt inside MI5, Philby in MI6 and Burgess and Maclean in the FO, but on the credit side there was ‘a massive intake of brains & abilities from the Universities which set entirely new standards of intellectual achievement. What I am getting at is you can’t expect to understand individual cases or events of thirty years ago without being fully aware of how we fought the war.’ The purpose of this chapter is to give a fuller context of how the war of 1939–45 was fought.³

Castigators of the recruitment of Blunt, Burgess and Philby rely on the benefits of hindsight. They treat Britain as distinctive from other western democracies, overlook the reality that no government apparatus on either side of the Atlantic had yet introduced the costly, time-consuming system of positive vetting, and discount the simple truth that MI5’s advice to exclude suspect individuals from certain posts was routinely rejected by its political masters. It was impossible to appraise people with consistency in the conditions of 1939–40: some traits that are regrettable in peacetime civilians become useful in wartime; ethical criteria and risk assessment change in times of war; permanent mental transformations may occur in combatants whether they are fighting on battlefields or sitting at desks. ‘There are degrees of moral obliquity,’ wrote Masterman: ‘it is sometimes hard to determine when shrewdness and the ability to make the most of an opportunity end, and when the commission of crime and pursuit of evil begin.’ Critics such as Andrew Boyle, who described wartime MI5 officers as ‘often mediocre’, undervalue the prowess of many emergency wartime recruits. A quartet plucked from a sample of dozens – the circus master Cyril Mills, the lawyer Herbert Hart, the banking heir Victor Rothschild and the art dealer Tomás Harris – make the point.⁴

Cyril Mills’s father Bertram Mills was the son of an undertaker, embalmer and pioneer of cremation: Bertram’s work with funeral cortèges, and love of thoroughbred horses, led him to start a coach-building and harness business. With its profits he gentrified his elder son Cyril (born in 1902) by sending him to Harrow School. Cyril was one of the first post-war generation of undergraduates at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After obtaining an engineering degree, he worked in the oilfields of Burma: he survived an explosion in which he was drenched in burning oil, and saved himself by rolling in filth to extinguish the flames. As a substitute for the declining coach-building business, Bertram Mills began importing American automobiles, opened a circus in 1920 and diversified into dance halls. After Cyril Mills’s return from Burma in 1925, he became assistant manager of his father’s Covent Garden dance hall, and then assistant manager of the Christmas circus at Olympia. His first challenge was to transport a pride of seventy lions from Paris to London in 1926. As a good linguist and keen aviator he flew himself across Europe seeking talented new performers, especially from the big German circuses. He hired a female ‘fakir’ who hypnotized crocodiles, jugglers, clowns, trick unicyclists, high-wire walkers, human cannonballs, wall-of-death motorcyclists, ‘Borra’, King of the Pickpockets and a trapeze family called the Flying Gaonas. His side-show amusements included a Burmese troupe of giraffe-necked women and Major Horace Ridler @ the Great Omi, the most tattooed man in the world. Mills was embarrassed when in old age, on the television programme This is Your Life, an American admirer called him ‘a typical English aristocrat’. He was as bourgeois as Philby or Burgess.

In his eighties Mills confided some of his memories to a former MI5 colleague. ‘At this stage there is no harm in my telling you, although I do not tell anyone else, that for 21 years I had a single engine aircraft and from 1933 onwards I did all my talent-spotting in Europe flying myself and this involved going to Germany eight or ten times every year,’ he informed Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1985. Flying over Germany in his De Havilland Hornet Moth in 1936, Mills noticed a railway disappearing into remote mountains, which suggested to him a covert installation. On returning to England, he asked the passport officer at Lympne aerodrome to put him in touch with someone to whom he could describe his observations. He was contacted by MI5, which introduced him to Frederick Winterbotham, head of the Air Section of SIS, who used him as a source for the next three years. On aerial trips over Germany Mills flew off course, near factories or aerodromes, used his circus man’s eye for subterfuge and reported what he saw: ‘when working for Winterbotham before the war I was not paid a cent even for expenses’. He provided the first reports of the existence of the Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bomber, constructed in a secret new factory which he found by flying over a prohibited area near Ravensburg. In September 1939 he tried to enlist in the RAF, but at thirty-eight years of age was wanted only as ground staff; so he telephoned his MI5 contact and started work a week later at MI5’s wartime headquarters in Wormwood Scrubs prison. He was night duty officer on 29 September 1940 when the prison was bombed. Later, Mills and Richard (‘Dick’) Brooman-White advised the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on improvements in subterfuge. Mills’s office nickname was ‘the old dog’. He controlled the double-cross agent Juan Pujol Garcia @ GARBO, and was crucial in turning a colleague’s idea for deceiving the Germans about allied plans for the invasion of France in 1944 into the practical reality of Operation MINCEMEAT. ‘Perhaps,’ he mused to Trevor-Roper, ‘it was because I had taken a few risks in a difficult business that I adapted to the XX game.’ Mills was shrewd, amusing, urbane and proud; a tough disciplinarian; capable of either plain-speaking or careful discretion as necessary; a sharp-eyed showman with plenty of initiative, adaptive ingenuity and energy.⁵

Herbert Hart, son of a Jewish tailor and furrier in Harrogate, had been mortified at failing to gain a Prize Fellowship at All Souls in 1930 and took up practice at the Chancery bar. ‘His great quality’, in the estimate of his intimate friend Richard Wilberforce, ‘was intense curiosity about all varieties of life – the more special, or even comic, the better – and he was wonderfully good at getting specialists and “characters” to talk about their niches.’ He had ‘vast tenacity in pursuit of the truth’, judged Wilberforce, who became one of the great law lords of their generation. Hart was chaotic in desk-work, but superb at mental synthesis. Having failed on medical grounds to join the Military Police after the outbreak of war, he was brought into MI5 at the instigation of his future wife, the Home Office high-flier Jenifer Williams, who claimed to have left the CPGB by 1939. Williams had several meetings with Harker about her lover’s recruitment into MI5: at one of them, Harker asked, ‘you were a communist, weren’t you?’, and seemed satisfied by her quick response, ‘Oh, we were all red in our youth.’ Hart’s introduction to MI5 by his ex-communist wife excited hostile newspaper coverage when it emerged in 1983. There is not a jot of evidence that he betrayed his employers. ‘Everybody in the world of intelligence adored Herbert: he was the perfect intelligence officer,’ recalled his colleague Stuart Hampshire. ‘He was absolutely accurate and reliable, but not very intuitive. He was also very sensible in a crazy world: he was perpetually amazed at … human folly.’⁶

In 1941 Hart was put in charge of MI5’s B1B Division, which (writes his biographer Nicola Lacey) ‘amassed a treasure-trove of highly sensitive intelligence material’, and thus gained masterful knowledge of German intelligence’s attack on Britain. ‘His lawyer’s capacity to assimilate and master a brief, his ancient historian’s skill in marshalling and evaluating evidence, and his philosopher’s taste for precision’ enabled Hart, when in charge of B1B, ‘to assimilate, interpret, and organize this information so that it could be used to maximum effect by … double agents, police forces, immigration authorities, coast guards, military personnel’. Isaiah Berlin remembered his friend in terms that might be wished on all counter-espionage officers: ‘always moderate, just, understanding, sane … he was a man who could not tolerate obscurantism, oppression, injustice, all that he regarded as reactionary’.⁷

Victor Rothschild was brought into MI5 by Liddell. A banking millionaire, a member from the age of twenty-six of the House of Lords (where for a time he sat on the Labour benches), a zoologist, jazz pianist, cricketer, art collector and bibliophile, Rothschild was a man of intellect, wealth and taste, with a mind that liked to classify and rule. He was as autocratic as any spoilt child, but too disciplined and productive to waste time. He had a taste for going incognito, wore an open-necked shirt and carried a workman’s satchel so as to be mistaken for a plumber. In Cambridge during the 1930s he knew Burgess, Maclean and especially Blunt, whom he considered saintly. Rothschild ran MI5’s first counter-sabotage department (B1C). Using skills that he had learnt when dissecting frogs’ spawn and sea urchins, he proved his courage in defusing German bombs. He was exceptional in describing his every bomb-disposal move into a field telephone as he worked, so that if he was blown up other bomb-disposal men would learn from his mistake. Churchill nominated him for the George Medal after he had defused a device secreted in a crate of Spanish onions and timed to explode in an English seaport. As Churchill’s poison-taster, he smoked Havana cigars, ate Virginia hams and drank vintage Armagnac. Indeed, he was a consumer with gusto. ‘I like him very much and admire his physical energy and more-than-life-size qualities, and an enormous appetite for self-improvement,’ Stuart Hampshire wrote after several months of official work in Paris with Rothschild in 1945. William Waldegrave, a Fellow of All Souls who was recruited by Rothschild into the Cabinet Office’s Central Policy Review Staff in 1971, described him as ‘one of the most complex and difficult men of his age’. The fable that he was a Soviet spy – trying perhaps to protect his wealth by conciliating Stalinists – depends, says Waldegrave, on wishful thinking, envy and anti-semitic conspiracy fantasies. This delusion has been refuted by Dick White, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, but still festers in some minds.⁸

Another MI5 recruit was Tomás Harris. Born in 1908, he was the son of Lionel Harris, Jewish owner of the Spanish Art Gallery in Mayfair, and his Spanish wife, Enriqueta Rodríguez. In 1923, at the age of fifteen, he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art. He was a pianist, saxophonist, sculptor, engraver and ceramicist, and a culinary artist, too. During the 1930s, from his gallery in Bruton Street, he sold the works of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, medieval tapestries, oriental carpets, Renaissance jewellery and other artefacts acquired from Spanish palaces and religious houses. Harris was thought illiterate by Philby: certainly his abilities were visual, tactile and sensual; he had subtle, astute intuitions when reading people as well as images. Harris’s knack for discovering lost works of art in unlikely places was admired by Blunt, who appreciated his exuberant generosity of spirit. After the outbreak of war, Harris and his wife Hilda Webb became the cook-housekeepers at Brickendonbury Hall, the SOE training school in Hertfordshire. Later he handled the double agent Pujol @ GARBO. The Germans, he believed, could be duped by elaborate deception operations because their minds rejected the irrational: rationalists were easier to mislead. Harris was an enthusiast in his connoisseurship, in his hospitality and (like many of his generation) in his drinking. His death in a car smash in 1964 was due to drunk driving: the innuendoes that he was killed by the security services, midway between Philby’s defection and Blunt’s confession, are silly fancies.

Mills and Harris were brought into full-time secret service after showing their suitability in other roles; Hart and Rothschild came on recommendation; none of the quartet underwent vetting. The difficulties in being just and consistent in this process were shown by the cases of Arthur Reade, Dudley Collard, Wilfrid Vernon and Peter Smolka. The fact that Britain and Russia were allies from June 1941, and were bound by a treaty of May 1942 that was a primary guide to London’s subsequent wartime decisions, provides the ruling context for all that happened.

Reade had been sent packing from his Oxford college in 1921 for sedition, but gave convincing signs of being disillusioned with communism by the late 1920s. He became a barrister, was elected to the Travellers Club and stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate. When, in October 1939, he sought a job in military intelligence, MI5 blocked him. Ten months later, when MI5 discovered that he was a lance-corporal in the Field Security Police at Belfast, they had him dismissed. The Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, who interviewed Reade in 1940, ‘considered him a he-man and just the sort of fellow they want’. Harold Nicolson, Under Secretary at the Ministry of Information (‘futile and self-satisfied’ as Cuthbert Headlam called him), provided a further testimonial for Reade. MI5 relented, but in 1942 Reade was repatriated to England from the Intelligence Corps in Cairo following a complaint of drunken verbal indiscretions. Loftus Browne of MI5, who met Reade during the war, thought him ‘an insufferably self-important ass’, but Dick White expressed unease about the case in 1948. The adverse vetting reports had not been evaluated, he minuted. On the basis of untested information, ‘outside bodies were ten times warned against READE. What makes it much worse is that there are in this file ten testimonials in favour of READE … our obstinacy in this case must have gained us a bad reputation in many different quarters.’⁹

Similarly Dudley Collard, the communist barrister who had defended Percy Glading in 1938, found his way blocked. His applications were spurned for an intelligence job (‘I can speak almost perfect French, reasonably good German and Russian, and I can read with ease Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Spanish, and to some extent also Italian and Dutch’). The Ministry of Information declined his overture. Collard finally became an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy in 1941, and next year was commissioned as a naval officer despite MI5 telling the Naval Intelligence Department that it was ‘strongly opposed’ to Collard’s ‘particularly dangerous’ type of communist becoming officers: ‘well-educated men of good social position, frequently members of the legal profession, who place their services at the disposal of the Executive of the Communist Party, and work for the latter secretly, so far as possible without disclosing their membership’. Once a man of this type succeeds in joining one of the armed forces, they refrain from ‘subversive propaganda amongst their fellows, or, at any rate, are so careful and clever over it that it is extremely difficult as a C.O. [commanding officer] to detect them. Their aim is to behave well outwardly in order to qualify for commissions, and after that to continue satisfactory outward behaviour.’ In this ploy educated communist servicemen were aiding ‘the long-term policy of the Communist Party, which is directed to turning National War into Civil War when the right moment arrives – probably during the demobilisation period, when they hope to reproduce what happened in 1919 with much greater chances of success’.¹⁰

Wilfrid Vernon, who had escaped so lightly when prosecuted without much earnest in 1937 for stealing aviation secrets, was vetoed by MI5 for any form of employment at the Air Ministry in 1939. The Security Service ensured that he was refused a commission in 1941, and withheld his vetting certificate in 1943. Together with Tom Wintringham, who had been expelled from the CPGB in 1938 on the grounds that his wife was a Trotskyite spy, he ran the wartime Home Guard in Osterley Park.

Where Reade, Collard and Vernon were sieved out, Philby’s former partner in the London Continental News Agency, Peter Smolka, squeezed in. Smolka had anglicized his surname to Smollett in 1938, and was naturalized as a British subject with the sponsorship of Sir Harry Brittain, founder of the Empire Press Union and former Tory MP, and Iverach McDonald of The Times. He ingratiated himself with Lord Astor (who considered installing him as editor of the Observer). At the time of the Nazi–Soviet pact, MI5 opposed Smolka’s appointment to the Ministry of Information; but their qualms were allayed by the Foreign Office’s Rex Leeper, and Smolka/Smollett took charge of the ministry’s propaganda news service to Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium on 1 September 1939. The Directorate of Military Intelligence soon complained to Kell of the scandal that Smolka/Smollett had access to secret material. An MI5 report of February 1940 depicted him as ‘an unpleasant but brilliantly clever little Jew’. Dick White attributed the hostile tales about Smolka to temperamental failings: ‘he has a most unattractive personality and is a pushing type’. Roger Hollis of MI5, after reading Smolka’s burgeoning files, concluded that he was ‘too closely concerned with his own prosperity to commit himself to any side until he is sure that is the winning side’. In sum, the justified doubts raised against Smolka were couched in anti-semitic terms which provoked other officials who read his file to compensate for the racial prejudice against him by under-evaluating his suitability for confidential work. Smolka penetrated the Ministry of Information without needing a slot in the English class system.¹¹

Despite the prevalent mistrust of Smolka, he took charge of the Soviet Section of the Ministry of Information in 1941. His influence and tentacles were extensive. He was not merely a Soviet informer, but a master at misdirection by hints, distractions, suppressions and diversions. He had his part in the toadying of official information and propaganda, and hence in inducing unofficial civilian obsequiousness, towards Stalinism. The Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archie Clark Kerr, wished that there was franker criticism of Soviet policy in Britain. ‘We should put a stop to the gush of propaganda at home,’ he urged in March 1945, ‘in praise not only of the Soviet war effort, but also of the whole Soviet system, which can only have convinced the realists at the Kremlin that there is a complex of fear and inferiority in Great Britain where the Soviet Union is concerned.’¹²

MI5 continued to hold Smolka in suspicion after Russia had joined the western allies to fight the Axis powers, and its officer Roger Fulford asked Brooman-White to consult the latter’s SIS colleague Philby about the London Continental News Agency which he and Smolka had formed together. Philby characterized Smolka as ‘extremely clever’, Brooman-White reported. ‘Commercially he is rather a pusher but has nevertheless rather a timid character and a feeling of inferiority largely due to his somewhat repulsive appearance. He is a physical coward and was petrified when the air-raids began. Philby considered his politics to be mildly left-wing but had no knowledge of the C.P. link-up. His personal opinion is that SMOLLETT is clever and harmless. He adds that in any case the man would be far too scared to become involved in anything really sinister.’ Philby’s comments fed the racial prejudice against his former associate: his suggestion that Smolka, who had gone by aircraft to the North Pole and explored the freezing wastes of Siberia, was too self-concerned and nervy for risks worked with Brooman-White and Fulford only because of general assumptions about Jewish milksops.¹³

The United States

Evaluations must have a supra-national comparative element if they are not to be hopelessly insular. How did Britain’s chief western ally perform in the wartime rush to recruit expert advisers and versatile freelances? Were the choices of recruits, the security checks and the receptivity to warning signs better or worse in Washington than in London?

The United States had not been a primary adversary of Moscow in the 1930s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was excitable about communist infiltration of factory workers, but otherwise Washington was lax in its attitude to Soviet agents. Perhaps the most significant operative was the journalist Whittaker Chambers, who had been instructed to break overt contact with CPUSA in 1932, went to Moscow for intelligence-training in 1933 and thereafter acted as a courier between underground cells and Soviet intelligence. The leading figure among the Washington officials run by Chambers was Alger Hiss, who progressed from harrying armaments manufacturers as legal assistant to Senator Gerald Nye’s investigation to posts at the Justice Department and State Department. In 1935 Chambers told Hiss to start another intelligence apparatus, which was joined by further well-placed Washington officials including Harry Dexter White @ JURIST of the Treasury Department. By the late 1930s Washington was riddled with penetration agents in the Treasury, State Department, Justice Department, Labor Department and other federal bodies. The infiltration was more extensive than in Whitehall.

In 1937 Moscow threatened the security of its penetration agents in Washington by summoning Chambers to Moscow. He realized that he had been targeted for purging, prevaricated about making the journey and in 1938 broke with the NKVD and went into hiding. After meeting Krivitsky in 1939, he tried to denounce the Soviet penetration of Washington, but the FBI took no interest in his stories, which were also discounted by the Roosevelt administration. Every democratic state had grave security failures caused by inexperience rather than by complacence. Washington was exposed to security breaches after it entered the war in 1941, alongside Russia and Britain, against Germany and Japan, because of the hectic, urgent improvisations of wartime recruitment and by the traditional assumptions of trust that were integral to the departmental culture of democracies.

Until 1938 the CPUSA ran a secret apparatus for procuring phoney American passports for the use of American communists travelling abroad and for Soviet espionage agents. US passports were prized by Moscow’s illegals because the heavy migration to America from central and eastern Europe and from tsarist Russia meant that a US citizen with broken English or an obtrusive accent was not necessarily suspect. The former Oxford communist Peter Rhodes lent his US passport to a fugitive German, who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain and was on Nazi death-lists, so as to enable him to gain safety by entering the USA illegally. Rhodes was a war correspondent in Norway during 1940, and then served as an officer of the Foreign Broadcasting Monitoring Service in Washington. This brought a posting to London, where he had a desk in the US embassy and liaised with the BBC. He was a regular contact of Jacob Golos @ Yakov Raisin @ ZVUK @ SOUND, a Ukrainian who had been naturalized as a US citizen in 1915 and was the NKVD’s chief contact at the CPUSA; but, among Rhodes’s falsehoods when interviewed by the FBI in 1947, he denied having met him. Rhodes remained a sufficiently loyal Stalinist to give a stout defence of the Nazi–Soviet pact during this interrogation. There were strong suspicions, including references to him in intercepted and deciphered Soviet wireless messages, but no evidence that was usable in court.¹⁴

In July 1941 President Roosevelt – alias CAPTAIN in NKVD secret messages – appointed William (‘Bill’) Donovan, a Wall Street attorney who had been a military hero in the European fighting of 1917–18, to head the Office of Co-ordination of Information (COI) with the remit to bring order and qualitative consistency to the chaos of American intelligence-gathering, subversive activities and political warfare. In June 1942 the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan was forbidden to poach staff from the FBI, the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence, but this did not incommode him, for he preferred to fill his department from unofficial sources. He approached men whom he knew and trusted, or who had been recommended by people whom he knew and trusted. Lawyers, bankers, manufacturers, amateur sportsmen, university professors and the former commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, which had fought for the Reds in the Spanish civil war, joined COI and then OSS. Donovan’s approach seemed admirably direct, informal and pragmatic at the time, but with hindsight resembles careless innocence. David Bruce, wartime chief of OSS in London, later said of Donovan: ‘His country right or wrong was his primary impulse, but his boys right or wrong came a close second.’¹⁵

It was inconceivable to Donovan that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, from prosperous and socially secure backgrounds, would choose to betray the United States. ‘He built his new organization on trust,’ in the summary of a later CIA intelligence officer Mark Bradley, who quotes him saying, ‘I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would defeat Hitler.’ Donovan thus kept Donald Wheeler (the NKGB agent IZRA) at OSS, despite an FBI warning in 1942 that the former Oxford Rhodes scholar was at best a communist sympathizer, because three OSS officers vouched for Wheeler’s assiduity in monitoring German manpower. The leading Soviet illegal in the USA, Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov @ Michael Greene @ Michael Adamec @ Bill Greinke @ YUNG @ MER @ ALBERT, who worked under cover as a New York furrier and had married Earl Browder’s niece, reported of Wheeler in 1944: ‘He says it makes no sense to be afraid: a man only dies once.’ Wheeler despised his OSS colleagues, Akhmerov continued, and regarded them as vacuous. Donovan similarly promised protection to his subordinate Maurice (‘Maury’) Halperin, who had been fired from an academic job on suspicions of communism. ‘You’re a brave soldier,’ Donovan told Halperin in 1942, ‘and if ever you get into trouble, remember that you’ve got one of the top lawyers of Wall Street to defend you.’ There was a nonchalance about departmental security in wartime Washington.¹⁶

COI and OSS were not complacent, clannish, self-protecting outposts of Ivy League fraternity. Woodrow Borah, an eminent historian of Mexico who served in OSS in 1942–7, was shocked by the personal and jurisdictional in-fighting within Donovan’s agency, and between Washington government agencies. The ‘Harvard-Yale-Princeton people’ were ruthless in their mutual disloyalty, Borah recalled; they played football together, but were smilers with knives under their cloaks, who ‘would cut each other’s throat … without a moment’s hesitation. A Harvard man would knife another Harvard man, his own bosom pal, for a little advantage. I came from California, and was really startled by it.’¹⁷

There were over fifty and perhaps as many as a hundred members of CPUSA within OSS. At least twenty-two of these supplied secrets to Moscow. Foremost among them was Duncan Lee, a young lawyer in Donovan’s firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Lumbard. Born in 1913 in an American church mission in a remote port on the Yangtse river, Lee proved his academic and sporting prowess as a student at Yale. A testimonial from a professor there affirmed that he was a ‘thorough gentleman, earnest, high-minded, tactful, clean, and honorable’. He seemed politically quiescent, but may have been misled by the Oxford Union ‘King and Country’ vote of 1933 into thinking Oxford to be a hotbed of anti-militarism. He went as a Rhodes scholar to Christ Church, Oxford in 1935–8. At Oxford Lee began to doubt his Christian missionary upbringing, and like Blunt and Maclean sought a substitute secular faith. During 1936 he was moved by reports from the Spanish civil war, but above all was radicalized after meeting Ishbel Gibb, the daughter of a Scottish official in India, a history graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, who was then working in Selfridge’s department store in London. They became lovers, and in euphoric gratitude for sexual pleasure he emulated her radical activism. In August 1937 they went on a group tour to Russia led by Dudley Collard. The communist MP Willie Gallacher was another member of the touring party.¹⁸

Gibb and Lee married in 1938, and after leaving Europe joined the CPUSA in 1939. In Lee’s final year at Yale Law School, a New Haven neighbour denounced the couple to the FBI as communists; but at that time in 1940 the FBI was deluged with reports of suspected fifth columnists, whether communist or Nazis, and the brief report on this obscure law student was filed away. After the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941, he became legal adviser to Russian War Relief, and in 1942 joined the executive board of the communistic China Aid Council. In 1942 he was also recruited to OSS, where he became one of Donovan’s closest aides, and began spying for Moscow, after an approach from Mary Price @ DIR, an NKVD agent who was personal secretary to the pontifical Washington newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann and adept at rifling Lippmann’s desk for confidential material.

KOCH, as Lee was codenamed, controlled the risks that he took in ways that the ring of five never sought to impose on their handlers. He refused to purloin secret material overnight or photograph it in the office, but recited from memory the gist of documents to Price, who became his lover rather as Kitty Harris had become Maclean’s. He would give material only to US citizens, in the feeble self-deception that it would be passed to Earl Browder of CPUSA and not to Soviet Russia. Early in 1943 Lee was Donovan’s representative at secret meetings in Geneva and Berne between Prince Max Egon Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Himmler’s peace emissary, and the local OSS chief, Allen Dulles. As assistant chief of the OSS secretariat from 1943, and chief of OSS’s Japan–China section from 1944, Lee gained access to material of utmost secrecy. When Price broke down under the strain of her duplicity, she was replaced as Lee’s handler by Elizabeth Bentley @ Elizabeth Sherman @ CLEVER GIRL @ MISS WISE @ MYRNA.

Elizabeth Bentley deserves a corrective digression. She was an individual of considerable abilities, intelligence, initiative and courage who has been disparaged by most writers on espionage history with sexist condescension. They cannot agree whether she was a slut or a neurotic spinster, a dummy or an arch-manipulator, a confused incompetent or a wily Mata Hari. The earliest vilification came from liberals who were her contemporaries, and could not forgive her unsettling testimony about American communist organization, but later generations, unfettered by ideological alliances, have proved equally unsympathetic. Bentley’s supposed inadequacy and ineptitude are belied by her success in managing a busy travel agency, and in running a large Washington spy ring. She showed courage in turning FBI informant, and was an impressively self-possessed witness, under great pressure, when she testified to HUAC. The substance of what she said was true, although in some matters she dramatized or misled. Her fear that Soviet agents wished to murder her was accurate, not fantastic. She suffered astounding abuse after becoming a public figure, she was ostracized and found herself unemployable. It is time to salute her brains, fortitude and resilience rather than to repeat demeaning clichés.¹⁹

Bentley won a scholarship to Vassar College aged eighteen in 1926. After graduating in English, French and Italian, she studied at the University of Perugia, and in 1933 won a fellowship at the University of Florence. She became a member of the Columbia University cell of CPUSA in 1935, and an underground agent in 1938. She reported to Golos, who became her lover. After the outbreak of the European war in 1939, the US authorities seized the records of a travel agency named World Tourists run by Golos, and convicted Browder for his part in the procurement of false American passports. When World Tourists had been ruined as a cover, Golos opened a new front, the US Service and Shipping Corporation, with Bentley as office manager. She took over managing his Washington spy rings when he had a fatal heart attack while taking an after-dinner nap on the sofa of her Brooklyn apartment in 1943. Initially she answered to Akhmerov.

One of the sources from whom Bentley collected material was the academic turned Washington functionary named Maurice Halperin @ HARE. Halperin had been born in Boston in 1906 to Jewish parents who had emigrated a few years earlier from a shtetl on the Polish–Ukrainian border. The family were supported by a small store selling cigars. He studied Romance languages at Harvard in 1923–6, married at the age of twenty, got a job teaching French and Spanish in Ranger, Texas and then moved to Norman, Oklahoma, where he worked in the modern languages department of the university. He gained a doctorate from the Sorbonne during a long sabbatical. Das Kapital proved incomprehensible when he tried to read it, but he understood and was attracted by commentaries on Marxist historical dialectic. He came to see the communist front as the best resistance to the Nazis, and was by 1936–7 at least a fellow-traveller. In 1941 Halperin was fired from his academic post in Oklahoma on the supposition that he was a communist. A few months later, days before the Pearl Harbor attack, he was recruited by the Harvard historian William Langer to work in COI. By 1943 Halperin was head of the Latin America Division of OSS. According to Bentley, he was a secret CPUSA member and, under the alias of HARE, an assiduous supplier of material to her and Mary Price until 1945. After the war he gained a post in the State Department, despite having been named by Bentley to the FBI.²⁰

Another notable source for Bentley was Gregory Silvermaster @ Nathan Masters @ PAL @ ROBERT, who had been born in Odessa in 1898. He became fluent in English while living with his Jewish parents in China. He moved to the USA in 1914, gained a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley with a thesis on Lenin’s early economic thought, became a US citizen in 1926, and from 1935 worked as a labour economist for a succession of New Deal government agencies. Silvermaster was an early member of the CPUSA who, after the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, developed an important Washington espionage network with some two dozen informants in government offices. Using clandestine communist influence he obtained an appointment at the Board of Economic Warfare in 1942. Both the Office of Naval Intelligence and the War Department considered him to be a potential security risk, and tried to block this appointment. Both agencies held back from accusing him without evidence of espionage: neither had been trusted by the FBI with the knowledge of Silvermaster’s contacts with Soviet spy networks in the US. To counter the military and naval intelligence veto on him, Silvermaster mustered support from senior government officials, Harry Dexter White @ LAWYER @ REED, Lauchlin Currie @ PAGE and Calvin Baldwin, who lobbied the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, insisting that an injustice was being done. Patterson trusted and wished to accommodate his colleagues in other departments, and therefore nullified military intelligence’s ban on Silvermaster. Patterson had no way of knowing that White and Currie were Soviet spies, and Baldwin a secret communist sympathizer. His naive susceptibility to their approaches was typical of both London and Washington at this time. After a year with the Board of Economic Warfare Silvermaster gained a transfer to the War Production Board, where he remained until 1946. He provided Moscow with classified material on US armaments output, which was collected from him in microfilm form by Bentley.²¹

Despite being denounced by Bentley and others, Silvermaster was never prosecuted. Like scores of other communist infiltrators he escaped prosecution for lack of evidence that could be used in court. He flourished after the war as a building contractor in New Jersey. His chief coadjutor, William Ullmann @ DONALD, a graduate of Harvard Business School and sometime assistant to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, lived in Silvermaster’s Washington home, ran a basement darkroom there to photograph the network’s secret material, became the lover of Silvermaster’s wife and from 1942 supplied secret material on the United States Army Air Force which he obtained while working in the Pentagon. Ullmann, too, was never prosecuted, became a New Jersey real-estate developer and was a multi-millionaire when he died in 1993. Rhodes prospered as a public relations consultant, dividing his time between a Kensington flat and a Paris apartment until his death in 1966. Halperin lost his job at Boston University in 1953, after pleading the Fifth Amendment before a Senate inquiry into espionage, and thereafter had a peripatetic life in Mexico City, Moscow, Havana and Vancouver.

As the feeble federal response to the CPUSA–Soviet passport frauds showed, the experience and techniques of American counter-intelligence were rudimentary. There was a random element in the definition of official secrets and in the rules to protect them. Washington officials engaged in endless vitiating skirmishes that failed to settle which agencies held responsibility for the protection of such material. The security criteria for Washington personnel with access to sensitive information were indistinct: there was little or no vetting of pre-war or wartime appointees. Warnings about such appointees, whether from neighbours, the FBI or high-quality informants such as Chambers and Bentley, were discounted. There was excessive trust not only in personal recommendations, but in personal exonerations. Suspicious characters were protected by powerful mentors who explained away their defects. Sometimes these mentors were playing great inter-agency power games, with little responsible consideration of national security. Inter-departmental rivalries, notably between the FBI, service intelligence officers and OSS, made US counter-espionage ill concerted. The USA failed to exclude doubtful individuals such as Akhmerov, secured few convictions for passport fraud, and for political reasons commuted Browder’s prison sentence for passport crimes. Though overwhelming suspicions and evidence were in time accumulated against Moscow’s agents in Washington, there was a lack of evidence that could be used in court.

Security Service vetting

During the war MI5 gave priority to catching German parachutists, Nazi sympathizers and fifth-column subversives, but its efforts to enhance national security were hindered by powerful challengers. In the 1950s Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express was (like its proprietor) furiously indignant about MI5’s previous failure to vet officials and catch spies. As Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940–1, however, Beaverbrook was equally angry with MI5 for using what he called Gestapo techniques to limit his access to expert manpower. On one occasion, in August 1940, Victor Rothschild was summoned to Beaverbrook’s ministerial room. The outer office resembled the antechamber of a capricious sultan, with a dozen supplicants and aides talking in undertones in separate huddles, while Beaverbrook left them waiting. Sir Cuthbert Headlam noted of Beaverbrook in 1941, ‘money is a great asset to success in this world – money, cheek, cunning and bounce’: the press lord was resentful that in the matter of millions Rothschild was the bigger man, and set out to cut him down to size.²²

After keeping the MI5 officer waiting for more than an hour, he commandeered Rothschild to accompany him to 10 Downing Street, where he left his millionaire appanage waiting outside in the car for another ninety minutes. Once Beaverbrook had returned from seeing Churchill, he spent ten minutes browbeating Rothschild about some Germans, employed in a factory of strategic importance, whom MI5 had interned as possible Nazi informants or saboteurs. Beaverbrook repeatedly claimed that the eight detainees were Jews who deserved consideration. ‘They are not,’ Rothschild answered each time, ‘they are what is known as Aryan.’ Beaverbrook insisted, however, that he knew better than Rothschild in matters of Judaism. They also discussed John Archer of MI5: ‘I fired him because he said a terrible thing to me,’ declared Beaverbrook. ‘He said that if those poor Jews [the suspect Aryan businessmen] were let out, the public would hang them on every lamp-post. Anybody who says that to me gets fired at once.’ Beaverbrook told Rothschild, ‘you should not be involved in this persecution and you should not be in MI5 witch-hunting. You should be leading your people out of the concentration camps.’ He presented himself as the protector of Jewry: ‘I have not always been pro-Semitic, but … I am the only liberal member of the Cabinet, and I am sticking up for them everywhere.’ MI5, he told Rothschild, ‘ought to be abolished. I do not think there is any danger from Nazi spies in this country. I do not think it matters if they are at large.’²³

Sir Alan Brooke, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1941 and head of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, reflected in 1943, ‘Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry it out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.’ Hardy Amies, who continued to design dresses for his Mayfair couturier shop while an officer in the Intelligence Corps and in the Belgian Section of SOE, said that by the end of the war he realized that ‘there was no more intriguing, cunning and touchy person than a high-ranking officer’ in ‘the more secret departments’ of the government. The dissensions and rivalries between MI5 and SIS are undeniable; but they have been given undue prominence, either by vocal retired officers with embittered memories or by historian-journalists trying to make a good story. There was a reasonable level of respect and cooperation, despite the distracting snipers on both sides.²⁴

On 11 May 1940 the Home Office declined to act on MI5’s recommendation that 500 members of the British Union of Fascists should be detained, but a fortnight later, as Operation DYNAMO (the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the Dunkirk beaches) got under way, there was panic reaching from xenophobic newspapers and chief constables upwards to the Cabinet about German women masquerading as Czech refugees, Jewish exiles succumbing to bribes or threats, and alien fifth columnists ready to welcome German parachutists and to begin work as saboteurs. ‘The essence of sound security policy is wise discrimination,’ insisted the Home Office under its remarkable PUS, Sir Alexander Maxwell. ‘A violent policy fitfully administered is not nearly as effective as a more moderate policy firmly and consistently applied.’ The Home Office warned that the general internment of aliens would gratify public opinion in the short run, but would soon bring misgivings.²⁵

This sane approach was overwhelmed after Italy had entered the war on Germany’s side on 11 June 1940. There was large-scale internment of Austrians, Germans and Italians while the CPGB and its sympathizers were largely left alone. As early as mid-July, after interrogating internees and other intensive inquiries, MI5 accepted that there was no evidence of a fifth column of Nazi sympathizers primed for sabotage or espionage. Given the Russian Oil Products organization for which thousands of CPGB members worked, it is likely that a different conclusion would have emerged from investigations of communist sympathizers. MI5 advised that anti-communist measures would arouse the resentment of non-Marxist factory workers and trade unionists, and thus impair social cohesion and armaments production. ‘The Communist problem’, MI5 advised, ‘will be as urgent, or even more urgent, at the end of the War, and suppressive action now would sow the seeds of future ill-feeling.’²⁶

Defence Regulation 18B suspended the right of suspected Nazi sympathizers to test the evidence against them before a judge and jury. Instead detainees could appeal to a Home Office advisory committee chaired by the eminent barrister Norman Birkett (afterwards Lord Birkett). According to this committee’s secretary, Jenifer Hart, Birkett regarded MI5 as ‘illiberal, disorganized and incompetent’. To Lord Hankey, a Cabinet minister inquiring into the wartime security services, he complained of MI5’s ‘pathological stupidities’. To MI5 it seemed that Birkett’s approach was sometimes contemptible, with MI5 witnesses being browbeaten as if they were petty criminals. The other committee members were the barrister John Morris (afterwards Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest), whom Hart described as ‘patient, humane and vigilant to protect the freedom of the individual’, and a common-sense landowner and committee man Sir Arthur Hazlerigg (afterwards Lord Hazlerigg). Liddell thought that Birkett’s committee induced the Home Office to think of MI5 as unbalanced and narrow in its views.²⁷

‘MI5’, Churchill’s adviser Desmond Morton said in 1943, ‘tends to see dangerous men too freely and to lack that knowledge of the world and sense of perspective which the Home Secretary rightly considers essential.’ This comment followed the assembly by MI5 officers of evidence that fifty-seven members of the CPGB were working in secret installations, actually or potentially remitting to Moscow secret material on armaments, aircraft production, anti-radar devices, jet engines and other strategic matters. The Home Office recommended that the fifty-seven should be moved to non-classified work, but Morton convinced Churchill to establish a Whitehall panel to consider on a case-by-case basis reports tendered by MI5 on communists in confidential positions. This panel had nugatory effect.²⁸

At MI5 White and Liddell developed a plan to run double agents by letting Germans land in Britain, detaining them and turning them so that they supplied misdirection to Germany. The German agents who reached Britain after September 1940 were recognized by the Security Service as potential assets who could be used to deceive and manipulate their controllers in Germany. The politicians, however, wanted to make propaganda by publicizing the capture and execution of German agents. In October 1940 Churchill badgered Lord Swinton, the ex-Cabinet minister whom he had recently appointed as head of the wartime Home Defence (Security) Executive and who regarded himself as head of MI5 and to some extent of SIS, to explain why more captured German spies had not been shot. Liddell advised Swinton that painstaking interrogation and turning of such agents should be MI5’s priority. In Dick White’s words, ‘Intelligence should have precedence over blood-letting.’²⁹

The Security Service strove – in its home territories, at least – never to stoop to Nazi or Stalinist methods: colonial field operations were another matter. Liddell’s comment was pragmatic and principled when, in 1940, a colonel from military intelligence was found punching a German parachutist who was under interrogation and being appraised for turning as a double agent: ‘we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run.’ He was keen in 1942 to avoid embedding an informant in the War Registry to watch for possible leakages of information: ‘we should be laying ourselves open to accusation that we were employing Gestapo methods in the civil service’. The Home Office had strong objections to the use by MI5 of agents provocateurs.³⁰

In 1942 Helenus (‘Buster’) Milmo, a barrister seconded to MI5, consulted Philby about Juan Gómez de Lecube, a Spanish footballer, greyhound-breeder and Abwehr agent, who had been arrested earlier that year in Trinidad on his way from Spain to Panama and been brought to MI5’s wartime interrogation centre, Camp 020, at Latchmere House in Surrey. At the time, London and other cities were recovering from an aerial bombing campaign that had killed 42,000 civilians and destroyed 130,000 houses. About fifty British merchant ships were being sunk each month. Millions of civilians were being subjugated, slaughtered or enslaved in mainland Europe. The British had no certainty of winning the war. But Camp 020 did not torture or psychologically disorientate its suspected adversaries, as in the twenty-first century was done at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Milmo devised a delicate scheme, ‘Plan Squealer’, whereby Lecube was told that another informant had betrayed him and that it was better to make a full disclosure. ‘This ingenious plan to trap LECUBE’, Philby agreed, ‘is undoubtedly worth trying.’ Lecube did not fall for ‘Plan Squealer’; but he was never subjected to what his captors called Gestapo methods. As Robin (‘Tin-Eye’) Stephens, the polyglot who ran Camp 020, wrote in his internal manual for running detention centres, ‘Violence is taboo, for not only does it produce answers to please, but it lowers the standard of information.’ He forbade the hitting of prisoners. ‘For one thing it is the act of a coward. For another, it is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise.’ He preferred to apply pressure rather than to punch. ‘Pressure is attained by personality, tone, and rapidity of question,’ Stephens said: it allowed ‘no respite, no time to recover, no time to plan’.³¹

Wartime London

After Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, he was given the alias of BOAR in NKVD wireless traffic. Whitehall was converted into a war zone, with barbed-wire entanglements and machine-gun posts to prevent ministries being raided by enemy parachutists. The camouflage of one machine-gun redoubt in Parliament Square as a newspaper kiosk was compromised by the vendor, who was not the usual runt with a fag in the corner of his mouth and a muffler round his neck, but a spruce, erect young Hercules primed for armed combat. Sandbags were piled high in front of buildings, shops and monuments. Bomb-shelters and anti-aircraft batteries filled parks and squares. Anti-aircraft balloons, resembling fat porpoises with silver scales that sparkled in sunlight, floated in the sky. The evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk began on 26 May. ‘If we lose our empire, we shall become not a second-rank, but a tenth-rank power,’ the new Prime Minister’s son Randolph Churchill told Maisky. ‘We have nothing … So, there is nothing for it but to fight to the end.’ Maisky however thought that many Conservative leaders still hoped to divert Germany to attack Russia. This group was, he recognized, ‘scared stiff about the social and political consequences of the war, and is ready to conclude a “rotten peace” … in order to retain its capitalist privileges’. Soviet penetration agents in Whitehall could not relent in their espionage.³²

German aerial bombing raids, known in England as the Blitz, began in London on 7 September 1940. Officers of the security services, like other Londoners, were placed under maddening strain on bombing-nights, and took daytime decisions when enervated by sleep deprivation. Norman Mott, who was head of security at the London headquarters of wartime SOE and peacetime SIS, kept his colleagues sane during bad air-raids with his imitations of Donald Duck. ‘Mott was a much liked, laconic pipe-smoker who was never seen to be anything less than cool and controlled,’ wrote an SIS colleague, before mentioning that prized virtue of Whitehall officials of his generation: ‘his sense of humour was always capable of relieving tension’.³³

The clubs of St James’s Street and Pall Mall were so close to the prime targets of Whitehall, the Palace of Westminster and Buckingham Palace that bombs rained down on them. Late at night on 24 September Liddell left the Reform Club in Pall Mall, where he had dined with Burgess and Blunt, just after ‘a Molotov breadbasket’ (a high-explosive bomb, which scattered a cluster of incendiary bombs as it fell) dispersed its fiery load around him: ‘people were rushing about in dressing-gowns with bags of sand. When I got into the Mall the whole of St James’s Park was lit up as if by Roman candles.’ Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, both wartime SIS operatives, sometimes ventured out in the Blitz together. ‘This was not out of bravado or a wish to be killed; just an instinctive movement towards where the noise was loudest, as people on a seaside beach gather where the throng is greatest,’ Muggeridge recalled. ‘There was something rather wonderful about London in the Blitz, with no street lights, no traffic and no pedestrians to speak of; just an empty, dark city, torn with great explosions, racked with ack-ack fire, lit with lurid flames, acrid smoke, its air full of the dust of fallen buildings.’³⁴

Hostile voices have long protested that the secret services were recruited to an excessive extent from the privileged class who were members of such clubs as White’s, Brooks’s, Boodle’s, the Athenaeum and the Travellers. Criticism focuses on the class exclusivity of the clubs, not on their gender exclusivity (the Reform first admitted women members in 1981, while the Oxford and Cambridge Club delayed admitting women graduates until 1996). In fact, many of the wartime recruits to SOE, SIS and MI5 were encouraged to join such clubs after their enlistment precisely because (unlike restaurants or public houses) it was impossible for outsiders to keep watch inside a club, and much harder to be overheard in a compromising way. Even so, Hugh Dalton, successively Minister of Economic Warfare and head of SOE, was ‘appalled at the amount of quack quack which goes on in West End Clubs’, he said in 1940. ‘Some tell me … that the Athenaeum is a little safer than some other Clubs, but I doubt even this. It is always observed, I say, who is with whom, and intelligent guesses are then made as to why they are together.’ This was also the view of Dick White who, as Chief of SIS in 1967 invited Hugh Trevor-Roper to lunch at the Garrick Club to discuss recent publicity about Philby, but then changed the venue to a French restaurant in Northumberland Avenue, off Whitehall. If they were seen together in the Garrick, White explained, speculation would be rife.³⁵

Dennis Wheatley, the novelist of black magic who was recruited in 1941 to Whitehall’s efforts to deceive the German enemy, gave a rollicking account of lunching with intelligence officers in a St James’s club. With a novelist’s imagination, he claimed – and others believed – that the officers consumed two or three glasses of Pimm’s in the club bar, a shot of spirits laced with absinthe, then a meal of smoked salmon or potted shrimps, Dover sole, jugged hare or game, ending with a Welsh rarebit savoury, washed down by red and white wines, finished with port or Kümmel. The drab reality is that rich, lengthy lunches were rarities preserved by Victor Rothschild. A major in the Intelligence Corps, Rupert Speir, when he lunched with MI5 colleagues at his club Brooks’s, had hasty meals: ‘I merely flash in and out.’ At Philby’s club, the Athenaeum, there was no cocktail bar serving Pimm’s or absinthe. The rationed meals comprised snoek, whale-meat, frozen cod-fish, processed tinned meat, powdered potatoes and margarine. On three days every week no wines were served at meals. On other days there was a limit of one glass of sherry before the meal and one glass of port after. The wine served had the alarming description of ‘Algerian burgundy’. Sir John Sinclair, post-war head of SIS and like Speir a member of Brooks’s, had an identical lunch every day: a grilled herring and a glass of water.³⁶

‘Better Communism than Nazism’

In the opening months of the war Churchill (newly appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty) had several talks with Stalin’s Ambassador, Maisky. ‘Your non-aggression pact with Germany triggered the war, but I bear you no grudge,’ Churchill told him. The jolt had been necessary to get the fighting started. ‘I’m all for war to the end,’ Churchill declared. ‘Let Germany become Bolshevik … Better Communism than Nazism.’ (This contrasted with Beaverbrook’s message to Maisky. ‘What concerns me is the fate of the British Empire!’ he exclaimed. ‘To hell with that man Hitler! If the Germans want him, I happily concede them this treasure and make my bow. Poland? Czechoslovakia? What are they to do with us?’)³⁷

For most of September 1939 the CPGB supported, in an equivocal way, the war against Germany. Early in October, however, under Comintern directions, and at the remorseless urging of the Marxist-Leninist theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt, it resolved to treat the fighting as an imperialist war waged in the interests of the ruling classes rather than a proletarian anti-fascist war. The three leading opponents of Moscow’s line, Harry Pollitt, Willie Gallacher and J. R. Campbell, subsequently recanted, and submitted to party discipline. The CPGB abased itself in repentance of its ‘vulgar liberal democrat conceptions’ in September 1939, and ‘blurring of the distinction between the national interest of the British people and the imperial interest of the British ruling-class’. The Home Office successfully opposed the suppression of the CPGB in 1940 when the Daily Worker was shut on government orders. Palme Dutt’s orthodoxy imposed after the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact led to over a quarter of CPGB members leaving the party. Membership was at a low of 15,000 when Germany launched Operation BARBAROSSA against the Soviet Union in June 1941.³⁸

Throughout 1941 Blunt was running his sub-agent Leo Long, who supplied sound British military intelligence analyses of German intentions towards the Soviet Union. Vladimir Dekanozov, Stalin’s Ambassador in Berlin, sent confirmatory reports on the tendency of events. When Philby also supplied early warnings of German divisions being mustered near the Russian frontier, the chief of Soviet military intelligence speculated that with the Luftwaffe daily blitzing London, the English secret services were using Philby to deceive the Kremlin. In April 1941 Sir Stafford Cripps, Ambassador in Moscow, made an unauthorized threat to Stalin that if the Anglo-German war was protracted by Soviet supplies to Germany, ‘we might be tempted to make peace with Germany at Russian expense’. The crazy peace mission of Rudolf Hess, who flew to Scotland in May, intensified Stalin’s distrust of perfidious Albion. Fearing an Anglo-German united front against Russia, he dismissed as ‘disinformation’ more than a hundred warnings of Hitler’s preparations for Operation BARBAROSSA as an English conspiracy to jockey Russia into war with Germany. Then, in Jonathan Haslam’s words, ‘Beria, utterly inexperienced but inebriated by overweening self-confidence, proved [himself] to be the most disastrous head of intelligence the Soviet Union ever had.’ On 21 June, the eve of BARBAROSSA, he toadied to Stalin by demanding Dekanozov’s recall from Berlin and punishment for bombarding Moscow with misdirection about German invasion plans: ‘surely the nadir of Moscow’s intelligence assessment’, says Haslam.³⁹

Once Russia had joined the war on Nazi Germany, Lord Swinton of the Security Executive ordained that MI5 must concentrate all its efforts on Nazis and their fifth columnists. The Soviet Union became an ally rather than an adversary, and was reduced more than ever as a counter-espionage priority. The CPGB adjusted its criterion so that an unjust imperialist war became a righteous People’s War. As Swinton observed in October 1941, ‘the Communist game is still the same, but it is being played on a much better wicket’. CPGB membership revived to about 50,000 by December 1942. Registered membership settled at about 46,000 for most of 1944–5.⁴⁰

Visitors from London began to arrive in the beleaguered Soviet Union. The earliest journalist to arrive there, Philip Jordan, who spent seven months reporting the Eastern Front fighting from July 1941, assured English readers that the Russian army was a stronger fighting force for having been ‘purged of its incompetents and its traitors’, although he conceded that the purges may have ‘sheared a little too closely to the bone’. He only wished that generals had been purged in other armies. ‘Had the Spanish Government behaved as drastically as the Russian Government did in the middle thirties, there would have been no civil war in Spain; for the traitors would have been dead. Had we applied a purge to our own Army, it would have been a more efficient fighting force when this war broke out.’ Moscow had jettisoned the Trotskyite theory of world revolution, he reported. In Stalin’s entourage the Comintern was considered ‘one of the great historic failures of our age’.⁴¹

In December that year Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, visited Moscow to confer with Stalin at a time when German troops were only 20 miles from the city. He travelled by destroyer to Murmansk, where Maisky visited his cabin clutching a black bag packed with rubles which he asked Eden to feel free to use without reservation. ‘I was agape at so much wealth,’ said Eden, who did not pocket the bribe. Stalin impressed Eden in conference as prudent, well informed and an unexpectedly good listener. At the final banquet of caviar, sturgeon and suckling pig, after swilling vodka, champagne and Georgian wines, Marshal K. Y. Voroshilov fell across Stalin’s knees in a stupor. The feasting was a morbid and grotesque experience for Eden because, he said, ‘where one man rules all others fear’.⁴²

The Anglo-Soviet alliance agreed in May 1942 committed both signatories to safeguarding and strengthening the economic and political independence of all European nations, and disavowed future territorial aggrandizement by either party. It had no more value than earlier scraps of paper. In the month of the treaty’s signature the English diplomat Roger Makins noted that the Soviet aim was ‘exclusive Russian influence over the whole of Eastern Europe, to be effected by the occupation of Finland, the Baltic States and Romania, the closest possible association with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the crushing of Hungary and the encirclement of Poland’. The future PUS William Strang minuted on Makins’s comments: ‘I do not think that we can counter the establishment of Russian predominance in Eastern Europe if Germany is crushed and disarmed and Russia participates in the final victory.’ Sir Archie Clark Kerr, Cripps’s successor as Ambassador in Moscow, expected the Soviet Union to make post-war territorial claims in the Baltic and Bessarabia, and to assert a protectorate over the Slav nations of Europe, but did not expect the spirit of the Anglo-Soviet treaty to be broken. ‘One thing can be said: Soviet Russia, after the war, will probably be prepared to take things quietly for a considerable period of time. There will … be a general desire for a greater degree of comfort and happiness than was granted them before the war.’ Articles by E. H. Carr in The Times urged that Britain should resile from central Europe and the Balkans, and accept those parts of the continent as Russia’s exclusive sphere of interest.⁴³

In April 1943, shortly before the first anniversary of the Anglo-Soviet treaty, central European leaders exiled in London tried to rouse British resistance to Stalin by invoking the spurious arguments of national exceptionalism. ‘We are immensely powerful, and may be more powerful at the conclusion of the war,’ argued O’Malley, who was the British Ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile. ‘We shall have the opportunity to exert moral authority on the continent of Europe, because we are the only European Great Power that has no wish to annex or dominate or even create a new “sphere of influence”, because we alone are feared by none except those with whom we are at war, because we alone can hold the balance between despotism and chaos, and because, without us, nothing can ensure freedom, justice and security to all.’ Commenting on O’Malley’s attempt to rally Britain against Soviet intrigues, Strang wrote: ‘Unless the 80,000,000 aggressive Germans can be contained or tamed, our very existence, not only as a world power, but as an independent state, will again be threatened. In order to contain Germany we need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet treaty last year marks our decision that this must be our policy now and after the war … There is a respectable and well-informed opinion that Russia will not, either now or for some years after the war, aim at the Bolshevisation of Eastern and Central Europe.’ Even if it did, ‘I should not like to say that this would be to our disadvantage,’ Strang admitted. ‘It is better that Russia should dominate Eastern Europe than that Germany should dominate Western Europe.’⁴⁴

London believed that it was working in concert with Moscow, and showing its trust of Soviet intentions. It had meagre intelligence sources on the intentions of the Kremlin, and was following hunches based more or less on optimism. Moscow, however, had no trust in London. It knew from its various spies that the British were not sharing either their progress with the Americans in developing nuclear weaponry nor their success in deciphering the Abwehr’s wireless traffic. The British intervention in the Russian civil war of 1918, the anti-Bolshevik propaganda of the inter-war period, the exaggerated fear of British spies, the slowness of Anglo-American armies to open a second front in the west, and suspicions that the Americans and British would make a separate peace with Germany were all reasons for Soviet hostility. ‘Spectacular Russian victories continue,’ noted the Foreign Office’s Oliver Harvey in February 1943. ‘The Russians are very tiresome allies, importunate, graceless, ungrateful, secretive, suspicious, ever asking for more, but they are delivering the goods.’ Churchill, meanwhile, gave policy guidance to Clark Kerr in Moscow: ‘I don’t mind kissing Stalin’s bum, but I’m damned if I’ll lick his arse.’⁴⁵

Inside SIS, among its younger officers, there was a feeling that the pre-war service had been obsessed by Bolsheviks but insufficiently concerned by Nazis. They began thinking of the Russians as allies after June 1941. ‘Chapman Pincher is quite wrong to see Oxbridge intellectuals as responsible for this sort of view,’ a retired SIS officer told Anthony Glees in the 1980s. ‘The Daily Mirror and [its columnist] Cassandra were far more significant: it was an anti-upper-class populism that made us so pro-Russian. Everybody who was intelligent and powerful underestimated Soviet long-term plans in the intelligence sphere.’⁴⁶

In an episode that would have astounded the pre-war anti-Bolshevik Conservative leaders – Churchill himself, Curzon, Birkenhead, Joynson-Hicks – the twenty-fifth anniversary of the creation of the Red Army was celebrated with mass enthusiasm across England on 21 February 1943. William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury appointed the date as a day for special prayer for Russia and Soviet comrades. Eden addressed a ‘Red Army’ demonstration in the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington. There a gigantic hammer-and-sickle flag was raised above the stage, whereon stood a solitary Red Army soldier with his rifle. Government ministers spoke at solidarity meetings in twelve industrial cities. Attlee in Cardiff compared the Red Army overthrowing the corrupt tsarist regime to Cromwell’s New Model Army defeating the obsolete Royalist forces of the 1640s. Sir Stafford Cripps in Sheffield extolled the Red Army and ‘the unruffled steel-like purpose of their supreme commander, Stalin’, to whom ‘the world owe[d] the deepest debt of gratitude. In the dark days of retreat his leadership of the Soviet Union was as inspiring as was that of our own Prime Minister in the days of Dunkirk. I could pay no higher tribute than that to any man.’ At the demonstration in Newcastle City Hall, Sir Charles Trevelyan, a former Labour Minister of Education, assured the audience that every second man in the Red Army had received a secondary education. ‘On the platform were all the swells – generals, admirals, air marshals, M.P.s, the nobility and gentry,’ reported Sir Cuthbert Headlam. ‘The audience was mainly composed of sailors, merchant seamen, soldiers, airmen, representatives of trades and industries, A.R.P., Fire Service, etc. with of course a large attendance of extremists in the galleries for whom the whole thing was a political demonstration.’⁴⁷

London became gripped by pro-Soviet enthusiasm. The Red Flag was flown over Selfridge’s. Young women emulated by the cut of their clothes the Soviet comrade type. Russian songs and films came into vogue. Seventy thousand copies of a booklet of the war speeches of Stalin and Molotov were sold in a few weeks. Beaverbrook kept a photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece. The Athenaeum and St James’s clubs both elected Maisky to membership; the mayor of Kensington gave a reception in his honour with 500 eminent guests. The Hollywood film of Joseph Davies’s ambassadorial memoirs, Mission to Moscow, was released in England: with its deceptive documentary format and rousing music, it hailed Soviet military prowess, upheld the integrity of Kremlin statesmanship, belauded the efficiency of state planning and shamed those who had residual doubts about Russia’s recent pact with Germany. The defendants in the show-trials of the Great Terror were portrayed as fifth columnists serving Germany and Japan. Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Director General of the Political Warfare Executive in 1942–5, warned that press adulation might convince Stalin that British public opinion was so pro-Soviet that he could do what he liked in Europe. ‘Moreover,’ warned Bruce Lockhart, who had been imprisoned in the Kremlin in 1918 while on a mission to Trotsky, ‘to Bolsheviks hardened in the school, first of revolution and then of social ostracism, bourgeois flattery is a certain sign of bourgeois weakness.’⁴⁸

There was unstinted admiration for the Red Army in England, noted Maisky: ‘Everywhere – among the masses and in the army. To fight this wave would have been dangerous.’ As part of the ideological capitulation, King George VI announced a gift to Stalinist Russia, the Sword of Stalingrad. This was a ceremonial sword 4 feet long, with a steel blade sharp enough to behead a man and sufficiently ductile to bend into a crescent moon. When finished it was exhibited at Goldsmiths’ Hall and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and then taken on a triumphal tour of provincial cities, where it attracted huge, appreciative crowds. Evelyn Waugh, in Unconditional Surrender, described the scenes in October 1943 when the Sword reached Westminster Abbey, where it was displayed near the shrine of Edward the Confessor. There were long queues outside the abbey, where Philby as a schoolboy had spent so many frustrating hours at services. The populace shuffled forward in a mood of devotion, said Waugh, every civilian looking shabby and grubby, each carrying a respirator against a gas attack, some munching Woolton pies while others sucked on cigarettes pieced together from the sweepings of butts on canteen floors. ‘Every day the wireless announced great Russian victories while the British advance in Italy was coming to a halt. The people were suffused with gratitude to their remote allies … They knew no formal act of veneration. They paused, gazed, breathed and passed on.’ Any member of the crowd who tried to linger in front of the Sword was pressed forward, Waugh wrote, ‘not jostled resentfully, but silently conscribed into the unseeing, inarticulate procession who were asserting their right to the fair share of everything which they believed the weapon symbolized’. Churchill presented the Sword to Stalin during the Tehran conference in November 1943, and toasted the Generalissimo as ‘Stalin the Great’.⁴⁹

This atmosphere of Anglo-Russian unity gladdened the Cambridge spies, and helped the atomic spies Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs to feel that they were doing right by giving official secrets to Britain’s Soviet allies. Similarly, Ormond Uren saw no harm in his meetings with Douglas Springhall of the CPGB. Uren, a young Australian-born, Quaker-educated and intellectually powerful SOE officer, who was fluent in French, Spanish, Hungarian and Russian, met Springhall in order to expedite his application for party membership. Among other indiscretions, he provided a written account of SOE activities, which he did not think betrayed any useful secrets. For this misjudgement, Uren was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude in October 1943: after his release in 1947 he was blacklisted from academic posts for years before finally receiving a lectureship in linguistics at the University of London.

Stalin was sacrosanct. In 1944 London publishers refused to handle George Orwell’s new novel, Animal Farm, after being warned by Smolka that it insulted Stalin and would afflict Anglo-Soviet relations. Orwell was told that the novel might seem less offensive in an age of Stalin-worship if a species other than pigs was used. He later included Smolka in a list of crypto-communists with the comment: ‘some kind of Russian agent. Very slimy.’ Churchill, though, had another animal in mind when two months after the Tehran conference Pravda claimed that England was negotiating a separate peace with Germany. ‘Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile,’ he told the Cabinet, ‘you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or to beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.’⁵⁰

‘Softening the oaken heart of England’

From the 1920s the Czech leader Edvard Beneš worked for the ‘Europeanization’ of the Soviet Union and urged western governments to accommodate it among the comity of European nations. In 1948, during the final months of his life, as the Stalinists took control in Prague and wrecked his hopes, he could only curse them: ‘Liars! Frauds! Scum!’ The Beneš-like hope that Stalinists might be made into good social democratic Europeans underlay the tactics of Churchill and Roosevelt when they conferred with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in 1944–5. By courtesy of the Cambridge spies Stalin knew in advance the contents of British policy papers. Roosevelt was a dying man while Churchill was often verbose or contrary at this stage of the war. ‘P.M. still pursuing savage vendetta against France,’ Oliver Harvey recorded in April 1945. ‘He is now very definitely on the side of fallen royalty: Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns or Glücksburgs.’⁵¹

Russia was kept as an ally against Germany with the bribe of a free run in eastern Europe. The English-speaking allies gambled that if Stalin was enabled to recover the territories of tsarist Russia in Bessarabia, eastern Poland, Finnish Karelia and the Baltic states, his forces would refrain from communist militancy and territorial aggression elsewhere. Churchill’s conciliation of his ally Stalin, to whom he was bound by the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1942, was required by Britain’s diminishing international power. ‘Make no mistake, all the Balkans, except Greece, are going to be Bolshevised; and there is nothing I can do to prevent it,’ Churchill told his private secretary in January 1945. ‘There is nothing I can do for poor Poland either.’⁵²

Some opinion-formers in London felt that Chamberlain’s insularity had lost Britain the trust of mainland Europe. ‘Englishmen do not yet realize the intense and enduring bitterness, hatred and mistrust that Chamberlain sowed in Europe,’ Philip Jordan, who was appointed First Secretary at the Washington embassy in 1946, wrote in the year of the Anglo-Russian treaty. ‘Europe attributes, and rightly, her own present miseries to the British Conservative Party. Until we can oust that party from its place of power, Europe will not trust us again – whatever the Ministry of Information may tell us about the success of our broadcasts.’ Some of Churchill’s finest hours were spent in reducing Europe’s mistrust of the offshore kingdom where he was the paramount war leader.⁵³

In 1945 Russia won its first victory in a major war since 1812. This triumph put the federated socialist republics in a ‘rough and boisterous mood’, reported Clark Kerr from Moscow. ‘The Soviet Union tends to disport itself like a wet retriever puppy in someone else’s drawing-room, shaking herself and swishing her tail in adolescent disregard for all except herself. We must expect her thus to rampage until she feels that she is secure from any unpleasant surprises in neighbouring countries.’ Only then would the Soviet Union ‘settle down to the serious and respectable business of … her relationship with Great Britain under the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, a commitment by which she sets great store’.⁵⁴

Rather as the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 arose from Russian participation in the European war and not from a Marxian crisis of capitalism, so the continent-wide destruction of 1939–45 enabled Stalinist Russia to impose communism in eastern and central Europe. It was by the conquests of Soviet troops that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finnish Karelia, Carpathian Ruthenia, a quarter of Austria and one-third of Germany were swallowed in the Soviet maw by the end of the European fighting. The decision of the supreme allied commander General Dwight Eisenhower not to push eastwards hard and fast had momentous and enduring consequences. The settlement at Yalta signified less than the demarcation lines between east and west on VE Day in May 1945, and the brute fact of Soviet armies of occupation. The Russians’ military advances westward in the spring of 1945 were the necessary precursor to the political scheming and constitutional malpractices whereby, during the next few years, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia became Soviet satellite states. The solidarity of the Soviet bloc was ensured by the Warsaw Pact of 1955, which was not dissolved until 1991.

Owen O’Malley, as ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, was aghast at the concessions made to Stalinist domination of Europe. His Polish contacts understood that ‘British public opinion needed tactful handling, having been misled for many years into wishfully thinking that Stalin & Co., though a bit rough in their methods, were not bad fellows at bottom.’ The Poles were however astounded by Churchill’s courting of Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, and by the false hopes that led the western powers to yield to Russian pretensions. O’Malley’s contacts were shocked that government ministries, newspapers, the BBC, the Army Education Department and the Political Warfare Executive had all expressed trust in Soviet intentions. The Poles were dismayed, he said, that these bodies employed foreigners, some like Smolka/Smollett with anglicized surnames, ‘of multiple allegiances, self-appointed saviours of society, bitter little Messiahs, do-gooders, cranky professors, recognizable fellow-travellers and numberless camp-followers from among the frustrated and ambitious intellectual proletariat – all burrowing like wood-beetles, corrupting and softening with their saliva and excrement the oaken heart of England’. The Soviet occupation of Poland was brutal. ‘The Russians really control nearly everything,’ the young diplomat Robert Hankey reported from Warsaw in August 1945. ‘People disappear (in driblets not masses) all the time, and the police have a foul habit of sitting in a house and picking up anyone who comes to it.’ The captives taken in these household ‘blockades’ were kept starving in cellars for weeks. ‘This is essentially a polizeistaat,’ Hankey informed the FO of Stalinist Poland. He found common ground, though, in the gender of the outright Polish leaders who avowed their communism: ‘They are real men, and one can get on with them.’⁵⁵

Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, newly installed as Ambassador in Warsaw, summarized a speech by the communist Vice-Minister of Justice complaining that the Polish judiciary was defying the will of the people. ‘The courts of justice must state decisively on whose side they will be in their everyday work,’ declared the minister. ‘They must understand that there is no room for courts of justice that have regard for formal truth.’ If judges did not support ‘the interests of the vital matters of the nation, then Polish democracy will be compelled to establish new forms of courts of law at the cost of resigning from the worship of the professional skill of Polish courts of justice’. This was the reality of the Soviet bloc.⁵⁶

Until the publication in 1998 of Sir Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, the patriotic, indoctrinating bias of Anglophone history focused attention on Anglo-American campaigns in Italy, France, the Low Countries and Germany. It discounted the fact that the principal theatre of war in Europe had been in the east, where the Red Army had bested the Nazis. Losses in the region were appalling: 6 million Jews were exterminated there; Poland lost 17 per cent of its population (5.7 million people), Lithuania 14 per cent (370,000) and Yugoslavia 11 per cent (1.7 million). England was largely indifferent to the national oppression, local barbarities and individual cruelty visited by Red forces on the European mainland. Just two instances need be given of the nature of the new enemy. In 1945 a German field hospital, which had been installed in a school at Gorizia, an elegant town on the Italian–Slovenian border, was captured by communist partisans. The sixty-four patients were tied to their beds, with a detonator taped in their mouths. Slow fuses attached to the detonators were wound over chairs so that all could watch the progress of their deaths. When the Grenadier Guards reached the hospital later, sixty-three of the Germans were dead in bed without their lower jaws. One wounded German had survived because the detonator in his mouth failed to explode. Count István Bethlen, the elderly Transylvanian liberal who had kept fascism from power in Hungary when he was Prime Minister, was seized at this time, and soon perished in a Moscow prison. His widow was bound to a post and used as a living scarecrow on a Hungarian farm, with branches tied to her arms and feathers stuck in her hair.⁵⁷

The truth of the times was enunciated by Sir Victor Wellesley in 1944: ‘Europe can be saved only if the nations which compose it can free themselves from pre-war prejudices and conceptions and bring themselves to think on broader lines than in terms of nationalism and sovereignty. They must come to visualize the continent and not the nation as the economic unit of the future.’ Wellesley included his own country in the continental revisionism: ‘We must all begin by being good Europeans rather than good nationalists, and then follow on by being good world citizens.’ It was in a similar temper that Labour’s Ernest Bevin started as the first post-war Foreign Secretary. He proved one of the greatest holders of that office. The primary objective of his foreign policy, he declared in 1945, was to be able to go down to Victoria station for the boat train and buy a ticket to where the hell he liked without a passport.⁵⁸