If a trusting office culture in London and Washington facilitated security failures, the Stalinist environment of distrust was disabling to Soviet espionage. Of all the available sources for Russia’s global intelligence during the People’s War, the Cambridge ring of five – as desk officers in the intelligence services or the Foreign Office – were the best. Yet the purges of 1936–8 had degraded intelligence analysis in Moscow and disrupted the running of foreign agents. The first-class material provided by the Cambridge spies did not seem threatening enough to convince Stalinist paranoiacs. Moscow’s analysts mistook intelligence of unparalleled quality received from London as cunning misdirection by British intelligence. They rejected the evidence supplied by Philby that SIS had no agent network in Russia. They refused to believe that SIS had not possessed a pre-war Moscow station. They never accepted that the Soviet Union was a far lower intelligence priority for London than Britain was for Moscow. (The paranoia of Stalin’s bureaucracy similarly led Moscow intelligence analysts to mistrust Duncan Lee, the most highly placed Soviet informant within OSS. Given his traceable communist sympathies, it seemed incomprehensible to Moscow that he had first been hired in Washington, and then heavily promoted within OSS; they suspected him of being a double agent duping them with misdirections.)
The morbidly suspicious young head of the NKVD’s British department Elena Modrzhinskaya was a doctrinaire who so little understood England, although she spoke English, that she thought the ring of five were ‘aristocrats’. Her obstinate misjudgement and repeated bad decisions exemplified Robert Conquest’s observation that every organization behaves as if it is run by the secret agents of its opponents. Her paranoid doubts put an onerous burden on Anatoli Gorsky, né Gromov @ HENRI @ KAP @ VADIM, a dour, rigid, irritable Stalinist who had come to London in 1936 as assistant to the rezident and as cipher clerk. One after another his chiefs were recalled for liquidation or purging, so that in the critical eighteen months from September 1938 until March 1940 he had to run, as a solo operation, fourteen agents (including the Cambridge spies), take his own photographs, encrypt or decrypt messages, translate and type. In February 1940 he was abruptly recalled to Moscow because the NKVD, and particularly Modrzhinskaya, feared that it was receiving misinformation. Not until November that year did Gorsky return to London, where he remained until 1942, when Boris Kreshin @ BOB replaced him. During the ten months of 1940 when the Cambridge spies lost contact with Gorsky and the rezidentura, Philby, Burgess and Blunt (but not Cairncross or Maclean) gave their material to Edith Tudor-Hart, who ensured that it reached Moscow through Bob Stewart of the CPGB. Talking of Russian spy rings in 1943, Stewart boasted: ‘I know more about this bloody job than most people. For years I saw every bloody man that come on the job … I might have been caught quite easy, because I carried the stuff.’1
Modrzhinskaya and her colleagues felt sure that the ring of five could have exposed British agents in the Soviet Union or in the Soviet embassy in London if they had been sincere; and thus thought them falsifiers and shams. She also attacked the ring of five for trying to recruit Footman of SIS and other dubious candidates. In October 1943 Moscow reiterated to Kreshin that, after analysis of the voluminous intelligence received, they were sure that the five were double agents, working on the instructions of SIS and MI5. As far back as their years at Cambridge, Philby, Maclean and Burgess had probably been acting on instructions from British counter-espionage to infiltrate socialist or communist activism in Cambridge. This was the only possible explanation for why both SIS and MI5 were employing known Cambridge communists in confidential positions in the secret state. Modrzhinskaya thought herself hyper-vigilant, and reiterated a nagging question: why had no British agent been exposed in Russia?
The Great Patriotic War was the Soviet Union’s title for the conflict that from a different perspective Americans and western Europeans called the Second World War. The ring of five were active on Moscow’s behalf throughout the conflict, taking fearful risks, seizing initiatives and enduring secret tensions that could not be shared or mitigated by alcohol. Yet (with the partial exception of Maclean) they were ill-appreciated, and were handled with a maladroitness that was inherent under Stalinism. The similar obtuseness in the NKGB’s mishandling of Elizabeth Bentley in New York and Washington had immensely damaging repercussions on all sides: the NKGB network in the USA was compromised and for a time defunct; agents’ lives were ruined; some were convicted of perjury, although there was generally insufficient evidence for treason charges. Vice-President Henry Wallace, whom Maclean admired, had recently proclaimed the Century of the Common Man, and brutal, thoughtless populism gained political legitimacy in the republic. In turn better modulated voices opposed Stalinist-like purges or Gestapo-type round-ups in the government departments of the English-speaking powers.
In 1944 Anatoli Gorsky was transferred from London to serve as NKGB chief in the USA with legal cover at the Washington embassy. He disliked Bentley’s recalcitrant independence and lack of formal indoctrination in tradecraft, and was worried by the potential for incriminating discoveries by the FBI because many of her sources knew one another or worked together. Over the course of a year Gorsky supplanted her in running the Washington networks, isolated her from her friends, kept her in solitude in a hotel bedroom, where her alcoholism deteriorated, and urged her to embark for the Soviet Union without legal documentation. She rightly saw this plan as the preliminary to her liquidation, and felt mounting fears for her life (Juliet Poyntz, the Nebraska-born communist responsible for recruiting Bentley, had been abducted in New York in 1937 and was never seen again).
There is little doubt that Gorsky urged that she should be killed. Her life was threatened to her face by Lement (‘Lem’) Harris, disinherited heir to a fortune derived from Texaco oil, Chicago commodity-dealing and Wall Street brokerage, who had joined the CPUSA in order to champion the cause of poor agricultural workers. Feeling thoroughly endangered, Bentley went on 8 November 1945 to FBI offices in New York, where she volunteered a long statement with names. Hoover’s agency gave a summary of her accusations to Sir William Stephenson, the shady Canadian financier who was the liaison between SIS and the FBI. Stephenson’s report to SIS in London was soon seen by Philby, who warned Moscow of what was pending. Gorsky, who left the US once it was known that Bentley had compromised him, urged that she should be poisoned or shoved under a subway train.
In 1940 Philby began living with Aileen Furse, a store detective in Marks and Spencer’s Oxford Street branch. They had three children before he divorced Litzi Friedmann and married Furse in September 1946: Josephine (1941); John (1942); Dudley (1943). Two further children were born after the marriage, Miranda (1946) and Harry (1950). Philby reported on his common-law wife to Moscow: ‘Her political views are socialistic, but like the majority of the wealthy middle class, she has an almost ineradicable tendency towards a definite form of philistinism (petite bourgeoise), namely: she believes in upbringing, the British navy, personal freedom, democracy, the constitutional system, honour, etc.’ He assured the NKVD that he could ‘cure her of these confusions, although of course I haven’t yet attempted to do so; I hope the revolutionary situation will give her the necessary shake-up, and cause a correct revolutionary response.’2
Philby was in France as a war correspondent of The Times when the French armies surrendered and the Third Republic fell in 1940. During the ensuing evacuation of British subjects, Philby met Hester Marsden-Smedley, who worked for SIS under the cover of the Daily Express correspondent in Belgium and Luxembourg. On her recommendation he was invited to meet Leslie Sheridan, former night-editor of the Daily Mirror, who ran an SIS section disseminating false rumours and black propaganda, and had perhaps been given Philby’s name by Burgess. Both Marsden-Smedley and Sheridan recommended Philby to Marjorie Maxse, formerly a propaganda organizer at Conservative Central Office, who was wartime chief of staff of SIS Section D charged with sabotage and covert activities. Valentine Vivian recalled in old age that during lunch with St John Philby, whom he had first met before 1914, he asked about Kim, who was on a list of potential SIS recruits. ‘He was a bit of a Communist at Cambridge, wasn’t he?’ asked Vivian. ‘Oh,’ replied St John Philby, ‘that was all schoolboy nonsense. He’s a reformed character now.’ This senescent reminiscence should be treated charily. There is no evidence that any SIS officer involved in Kim Philby’s recruitment in 1940 knew of his allegiances at Trinity or his activities in Vienna. What got him into ‘the pool’ – the list of potential SIS recruits – was that he was an active and ambitious young man, who had shown courage under bombardment in Spain, who had been decorated with a medal by Generalissimo Franco and who had won acceptance at fascist military headquarters. There had been palpable bias against the left in his reports on the civil war for The Times. During the French collapse he had shown self-mastery and self-reliance. Vivian admitted that he had given a vague security endorsement to the young Philby: ‘I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people.’ But it was not family connections or the Westminster School tie that got Philby into SIS: it was his stupendously convincing cover story from Spain.3
Some junior intelligence officers, who knew of Philby’s communist past, were ‘rather cheered than depressed by this unusual recruitment’, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was one of them. ‘My own view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.’4
When Philby joined SIS in June 1940, the memory of its late Chief Admiral Sinclair was omnipresent, not least because his successor Sir Stewart Menzies and other pre-war staff kept photographs of ‘Quex’ in their rooms. There was little for Philby to do at his desk in Section D. After SOE had absorbed Section D, Philby was sent in the autumn of 1940 to instil techniques of underground propaganda into the trainee saboteurs of many nationalities who were billeted by SOE on Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s estate in Hampshire. With his Beaulieu pupils he developed the idea of the ‘subversive rumour’, which had to be plausible if it was to undermine morale: subversive rumours were to abound in post-war England, for the benefit of Soviet Russia, after the defections of Burgess, Maclean and himself. ‘Truth is a technical advantage,’ he told his students while instructing in the composition of convincing subversive leaflets. Many of his pupils, especially those from Poland, Mitteleuropa and the Balkans, were adamant anti-communists. ‘Gentlemen, I have no wish to stop you blowing up the Russians, but I would beg you, for the sake of the Allied war effort, to blow up the Germans first.’ Moscow’s agent inside Beaulieu coined an effective slogan for his trainees: ‘Germany is the main enemy.’5
With much of Europe occupied by Nazi forces, the neutral capitals of the continent – Stockholm, Madrid and Lisbon – were the only common ground on which the Abwehr and SIS vied on equal terms. In the summer of 1941 Tómas (‘Tommy’) Harris and Dick Brooman-White, head of SIS operations in Iberia, both cognizant of Philby’s previous experiences in Spain, recommended him as the head of the new, expanded SIS Sub-section 5d covering Spain and Portugal. Philby in his memoirs My Secret War attributed this opportunity to ‘the Old Boy network’, and harped on the ‘mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the Establishment could do such things’ as spy for Russia. My Secret War is an exercise in spreading Philby’s old speciality, subversive rumours. He wrote it under Soviet direction, with the purpose of damaging confidence in SIS – partly by deploying the language of class suspicion and antagonism. Trust was not the exclusive frailty of the supposed ruling class: the success of confidence-tricksters in cheating people at every social level shows that individuals seldom expect to be told lies, to hear falsified personal histories or for cruel betrayals to be meticulously planned.6
Philby began his new Iberian work in September 1941. His efficiency, his patience, his calm under pressure, his inordinately long working hours were immediately distinctive, and soon made him seem near-indispensable. Favourable judgements of him owe nothing to ‘the Old Boy network’: everything to the fact that he was superb at his job. ‘Kim was not an intellectual in the All Souls sense; he was not drawn to abstract ideas at a high level of generality,’ began an assessment of 1973 drawing on numerous off-the-record sources. ‘The aptitude required for counter-espionage is a minute study of the subject on which one is working. His desk was deluged with telegrams from his men in the field, with pressing requests for tip-offs from MI5, with situation reports on Abwehr strength … and … the vital raw material of the radio intercepts from GC&CS.’ To clarify this mass of material, to trace the significant patterns in it and to keep its ingredients in due proportion required a kind of all-absorbing scholarship. Ever since 1934 he had been training his brain and his emotions to compartmentalize his activities. He disallowed any room for overlapping mental clutter. At his desk he dictated lucid reports, gave clear briefings and wrote minutes in a small, neat, legible handwriting which seemed to signify all his virtues.7
In a novel by J. C. Masterman published in 1956, one of the chief protagonists is a blackmailer who spent the war as an SIS double agent in Portugal and has since betrayed his closest friends. Masterman never said or did anything by chance: it is hard to believe that the resemblance of the fictional Evelyn Bannister to the real-life Kim Philby is accidental. ‘Lisbon became a kind of international clearing-ground, a busy ant-heap of spies and agents, where political and military secrets and information – true and false, but mainly false – were bought and sold, and where men’s brains were pitted against each other,’ Masterman wrote of Bannister @ Philby. ‘I believe that if he had dined with the Borgias and been faced with two glasses of wine one of which was probably poisoned, he could have lifted and drained one of them without a tremor of the hand. I believe, too, that he would have been quicker than any other man to note the smallest indication which might suggest that one glass was more likely to be safe than the other. And the very risks of his life were meat and drink to him.’ His further description of Bannister applies equally to Philby. ‘Calculated, steel-cold courage he had, and yet he shrank from physical violence, and that, I fancy, was his heel of Achilles.’ Masterman’s character could order, without a tremor, the killing of an inconvenient agent, ‘but if, as an officer, it had been his duty to draw his revolver and shoot, let us say, a man for cowardice, I can see him flinching and going to any lengths to escape the task’.8
Philby’s staff appreciated him. ‘If one made an error of judgement he was sure to minimize it and cover it up, without criticism, with a halting stammered witticism,’ recalled Graham Greene in his foreword to My Silent War. ‘He had all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to us.’ His super-efficiency was ubiquitous. He did not fawn on the chiefs of SIS: nor did he chafe with impatience at their methods or allow himself disrespectful jokes. In 1943 Trevor-Roper predicted that the organizational problems of SIS would solve themselves. ‘As each area becomes really important, it will have to be given to Philby, and thus, in the end, he will control all, and Cowgill and Vivian and the rest will drop uselessly from the tree, like over-ripe plums.’ Philby received his extra energy and motivation from what Trevor-Roper later called ‘the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power’.9
Trevor-Roper, who was told in 1952 by White of MI5 about the suspicions of Philby, grew fascinated by the psychological problem of his former SIS colleague. After lunching with White in 1967, Trevor-Roper asked himself apropos Philby: ‘How can any man, being an intelligent man, devote his whole life to so negative a satisfaction as the secret destruction not merely of the impersonal system around him, but of all the personal relations – relations of friendship, dependence, trust – which have been built up, in good faith, around him?’ But then Trevor-Roper wondered about the degree of Philby’s intelligence. ‘Sharp, shrewd, superficially sophisticated – yes; but is (or was) he in any sense intellectual? By contrast with the other members of the Firm he did of course seem to be an intellectual; but did he in fact read, could he in fact think?’ He never mentioned a book to Trevor-Roper, except a single reference to Marx. ‘Nor could I ever get him to talk on serious topics: he would always keep conversation on a superficial plane, in ironic, Aesopian language, as if he knew of the differences which would divide us should we break the surface on which, till then, we could happily and elegantly skate.’10
Philby resumed contact with the Viennese Marxist with whom he had collaborated in 1934–5, Peter Smolka @ Smollett. After Smolka had been put in charge of the Russian Section of the Ministry of Information, Philby asked him to provide items of interest for remittance to Moscow. They agreed that when Smolka wished to convey material, he would take two cigarettes from a pack, holding them in the shape of the letter ‘V’, and give Philby one while he smoked the other. Under the codename ABO, Smolka funnelled good material to Philby and was introduced by him to Burgess. When Gorsky forbade further use of ABO in 1941, Blunt, Burgess and Philby privately agreed that Blunt would check Smolka’s MI5 file, that Burgess would handle him and pass his material to the rezidentura as his own. Gorsky was infuriated when in 1943 he discovered from Burgess’s indiscretions and Blunt’s admission that his instructions to drop ABO had been ignored. He went so far as to recommend that Moscow Centre should break contact with the Cambridge trio.
Some of Smolka’s secret notes, which he passed to Burgess with the intention that they go to Moscow, were later found by MI5 secreted in Burgess’s belongings. From the Ministry of Information he peddled the line to officials in other departments that the Soviet Union had no need of territorial expansion for economic strength, was less interested in ideological expansion than it had been in the 1920s and would only seize buffer zones necessary for its strategic defence. Smolka recommended a passive British policy towards the Soviet Union. Freed from military dangers, its citizens would develop a taste for the comforts of bourgeois consumerism, and Russia accordingly drift from communism to capitalism. He advised his fellow Whitehall officials that they should ‘persuade our high-ups’ to try pursuing policies that gave the Russians no cause for feeling insecure. Given the possibility of Soviet communism evolving towards democracy, ‘The ruling class of Russia must therefore be free of fear from foreign intervention. In order to free the Russians from this fear and allow them to become democratic, we must show them that we intend to leave them alone and trust them. In fact, we want to initiate a virtuous circle.’ Amid other material, Smolka provided Burgess in May 1942 with a résumé of remarks by William Ridsdale, the waspish but trusting head of the Foreign Office’s News Department. ‘The talks with Molotov are one long sweat,’ ‘Rids’ said of the Anglo-Soviet treaty negotiations. ‘These bastards are absolute shits to deal with. The trouble is they know they are shits, they know we know they are shits, and they don’t seem to care a damn what we think of them … You make a little concession to them and being an English gentleman you instinctively expect that the other fellow will make some decent countermove or at least acknowledge that you have been trying to be decent to him – not pushing, they go straight on to their next demand.’11
Patrick Reilly became the Foreign Office liaison in SIS in 1942: his influence was resented by Valentine Vivian, who spoke of ‘the unfair advantage of the All Souls style’. Reilly acknowledged that the Service had been underfunded and understaffed before 1939, and that some of its officers were intellectually nondescript. He however spurned the fashion for discounting the pre-war SIS as a collection of retired Indian Army officers and Anglo-Indian policemen jumbled with ‘“metropolitan young gentlemen whose education had been more expensive than profound”, rich playboys recruited from White’s and Boodle’s, failed stockbrokers and the like’. This myth confused the pre-war Service with the wartime recruits, and relied on excessive generalization taken from a few examples of St James’s Street clubmen. Reilly emphasized that SIS officers were in aggregate ‘a devoted body of men, loyal, discreet, with a strong esprit de corps, content to work hard in obscurity for little reward’.12
The wartime masterstroke of Philby was to jockey his way to promotion in 1944 to be head of SIS Section IX, which was charged with collecting and analysing material on communist espionage and subversion. In his memoirs, he dates the preliminaries for the reactivation of Section IX as occurring in 1943, so as to mislead readers into believing that SIS, with Foreign Office connivance, was preparing to turn against the Soviet Union two years before the Hitler war had been won. Felix Cowgill had joined SIS as an anti-communist expert, in the expectation that he would be put in charge of an expanded Section IX. Instead, his wartime efforts had been directed against the Nazis. He made many enemies, especially among temporary wartime recruits to the intelligence community. These included the classicist Denys Page and the historian Trevor-Roper, both Christ Church associates of Masterman, and the Bletchley Park code-breaker Leonard Palmer, an academic philologist who after the war became a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, where Masterman was Provost. This trio were outspoken critics of Cowgill’s mismanagement and hogging of deciphered radio traffic.
Cowgill returned to London after establishing Special Counter-Intelligence Units in liberated Europe to find that in his absence Philby had been named to take charge of Section IX with effect from November 1944. Section V was taken over by Philby’s friend, nominee and semi-stooge Tim Milne – a fact that is notable for its omission from Philby’s memoirs. In usurping Cowgill, Philby got rid of a staunch anti-communist and ensured that Britain’s counter-communist efforts would be accessible to Moscow. His mischievous claim in his memoirs that the Foreign Office helped the intrigue by which he ousted Cowgill was denied by Reilly. Philby’s appointment to lead Section IX convinced Trevor-Roper and others that he was being groomed to succeed as ‘C’, the Chief of SIS, some time in the 1950s.
Maclean was confronted in January 1940 by his NKVD handler in Paris, Kitty Harris, who was his illicit lover, about changes in his behaviour. He admitted to her that he was in love with a young American, Melinda Marling, to whom he had confided his communist allegiance and espionage activities. He had been compelled to these indiscretions, he explained, after Marling had halted their affair with the explanation that she found him intolerably evasive and erratic. When he explained that he had a double life, as a communist penetration agent, she made the capital mistake of reconciling with him. On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded France. Just over a fortnight later the British Expeditionary Force began its evacuation from Dunkirk. Marshal Pétain set out on his quest to save France from what he called ‘Polonization’, meaning ultra-brutal Nazi occupation. On 10 June, the French government declared Paris an open city, Italy declared war on Britain, and Maclean married Melinda Marling in a hasty ceremony in a mairie in Paris. Owen Wansbrough-Jones, Maclean’s senior tutor at Trinity Hall, later volunteered to MI5 that having met her, he thought her a typical ‘intellectual Communist’.13
Back in London, Maclean worked in the Foreign Office’s prosaic General Department, where he handled shipping and contraband matters. The Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie recorded a visit to the Office in the week that France fell to find ‘three or four pleasantly satirical and studiedly casual young [diplomats] draped about the room drinking their tea and eating strawberry shortcake’. These men knew as well as anyone what was at stake for Europe: their afternoon tea and ironic jokes were their deliberated response to totalitarianism, said Ritchie, and a symbolic expression of ‘What We Are Fighting For.’ Maclean was more earnest and perhaps more self-obsessed than these sane, amusing youngsters. In December 1940, he assured Moscow Centre of his relentless commitment to espionage: ‘it is my life’, he told them, ‘I live for it’. He undertook not to endanger his position. ‘I can’t say that I like my work. But I admit that it is one of the uses in our great struggle to which I am most suited, and I intend to stand by it until I am relieved of it.’ This zealotry and subterfuge set him apart from his contemporaries in the Office, who upheld and epitomized a gentler system. He fostered an impression that his fellow-travelling sympathies had been jettisoned, but he did not convince all of his contemporaries. To Fitzroy Maclean, who was no relation but had read history and classics at Cambridge and joined the Diplomatic Service a year ahead of him, he admitted being a communist in 1935. When they met again four years later, possibly in a Foreign Office corridor, Fitzroy Maclean challenged him to say if he was still a communist and received a feeble reply, but did not report his suspicions. Nor did the author Christopher Sykes, when Maclean admitted being a communist to him around 1943.14
In April 1944 Maclean was transferred to the Washington embassy. His eldest son Fergus was born there in September of that year. A second son Donald followed in 1946. His daughter Melinda was born soon after his defection in 1951. Maclean’s reaction to his new surroundings doubtless resembled those of the diplomat-politician David Eccles on an official mission to Washington in 1941: ‘I was stupefied by the number and size of the cars, four lanes on each road bowling along head to tail at 40 m.p.h. For the first time I realized we were not the richest people. This revelation gives a new edge to patriotism, it is better and purer to love the second-rate.’ Eccles found American officials ‘frisky and foolish’, because they were too impatient to listen to the answers to their own questions. ‘They love themselves ecstatically, and gape at the world in a trance of self-satisfaction … with a million Buicks on the road and the President going to church.’15
Lord Halifax was the Ambassador under whom Maclean initially served in the Washington embassy. In 1946 Halifax was succeeded by the newly created Lord Inverchapel, who as Archie Clark Kerr had been many things, including Harold Nicolson’s Edwardian lover and Ambassador in Moscow during 1942–6. Since the 1980s Inverchapel’s success in handling Stalin has been used not as evidence of his diplomatic aptitude, but as a reason to blackguard him as a traitor. As his biographer Donald Gillies declares, ‘These baseless smears are invariably encountered in the more sensational and hysterical outpourings of right-wing molehunters, whose methods too often involve exaggeration and misrepresentation.’ Inverchapel was a complicated man. In Guatemala, early in his career, he had been supervising the erection of a marquee for a garden party to mark George V’s birthday when some urchins, mistaking the tent for a circus, asked when the animals were arriving: thereafter he referred to diplomatic colleagues as ‘the zoo’. He was witty, expressive and fearlessly candid, as shown by his description of Churchill’s visit to Moscow in 1942: he envied, so he wrote, Churchill’s ‘ability to transform his face from the rosiest, happiest, the most laughing, dimpled and mischievous baby’s bottom into the face of an angry and outraged bullfrog!’16
Inverchapel was a raunchy bisexual. When he received his peerage, he took three heraldic mottoes: ‘Blast!’; ‘Late but Hungry’; and ‘Concussus Surgo’, meaning ‘Having been shaken, I rise’, which was given its meaning by the heraldic supporters, two naked, full-frontal and promisingly unaroused male athletes. He was attracted to cheerful, straightforward young men, but married a beautiful Chilean heiress in 1929, was divorced by her in 1945 and remarried her three years later. On relinquishing the Moscow embassy he was presented by Stalin with an inscribed photograph, two bottles of brandy, a huge pot of caviar, a panther-skin rug and (what was far rarer than any of these) an exit visa and valid passport for a Volga German youth named Evgeni Yost. The visa had been his special request to Stalin: Yost, a former embassy footman promoted to be the Ambassador’s valet-masseur, had been accused of ‘hooliganism’ and was at risk of hard labour or execution. Stalin had released Yost in the manner of a tsar liberating a serf, and in Washington Inverchapel liked to tease po-faced Americans by saying, ‘I have a Russian slave at the embassy given to me by Stalin.’ Maclean first met Yost when he arrived in Washington with Inverchapel, and showed his disapproval by hostile glares. Possibly he suspected that Yost was a watchdog set on him by the NKVD. Probably he feared that the interloper Yost would bring American surveillance on the embassy and therefore complicate his own arrangements. Inverchapel used to lie in hot baths reading telegrams and official papers, and hand each item, when he had finished his scrutiny, to Yost, who was standing by. Yost would then carry them to the Ambassador’s private secretary. There would have been ample chances for chicanery if Yost was a spy; but he was an abused Volga German, not a Russian, and hated the Soviet system. He remained with his saviour until Inverchapel’s death.17
The prudes in the FBI were also appalled by Inverchapel going to stay in Eagle Grove, Iowa with Roger Newburn, an energetic, dark-haired, twenty-year-old farm-boy whom he had met at a Washington bus stop. ‘I have to confess to a vast natural capacity for love,’ Inverchapel admitted complacently in 1948. ‘It has always been my trouble and here and there it has got me into trouble.’18
In Washington Maclean drank too much, but never let his work suffer from hangovers. There was never a hint of sexual interest in other men. His Washington colleague Jock Balfour said that no one in the embassy had any reason to suspect Maclean. ‘To all appearances he was the pattern, the almost too-perfect pattern, of the trained diplomatist – efficient and conscientious at his work, amiable to meet, imperturbably good-tempered, elegant, exceedingly self-possessed, and with a rather cynical outlook which betrayed no particular ideological bias.’ Throughout his four years in Washington, Maclean reported regularly to his ‘control’ in the Russian consulate general in New York, providing intelligence intended to ensure Soviet communist hegemony rather than US capitalist victory in the post-war era. This included material on Anglo-American atomic research. His Washington embassy colleagues trusted him. ‘I always considered Maclean to be a particularly good example of the public-minded, educated, selfless person this country so often produces,’ George Middleton stated in 1952. ‘He was patient, even-tempered, sometimes rather sleepy and lack-a-daisical in manner.’ To Middleton, Maclean’s politics seemed ‘“liberal”, i.e. social-democratic or labour or whatever one cares to call it’.19
He kept his guard with close embassy colleagues such as Balfour and Middleton. Those who worked at a distance from him saw a more difficult, tense and excitable man. After he had asked Isaiah Berlin to introduce him to some New Dealers, the two men went for dinner at the house of Katharine (‘Kay’) Graham, whose family owned the Washington Post. The evening proved disastrous. Berlin’s appreciative remarks about the shrewd and funny Republican hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth made Maclean erupt. ‘He said that persons who called themselves liberals had no business knowing reactionaries of her type,’ Berlin recorded. ‘All life was a battle, and one … must be clear which side of the barricades one was on: relations with the enemy were not permissible – at this point he became exceedingly abusive.’ Thirty years later Berlin reflected that he should have realized from this outburst that Maclean was ‘some sort of a political extremist, e.g. a Communist … but the thought never entered my head’.20
As to Burgess, he spent the early months of the war in the Foreign Division Directorate of the Ministry of Information, working alongside Smolka, producing a propaganda bulletin for BBC broadcast overseas. When Philby returned to London after the Fall of France, Burgess, who was by then working for Laurence Grand in SIS, recommended his recruitment to the Service. He also resolved to make direct contact in Moscow with the NKVD. As cover for his journey to Russia, he concocted a scheme in June 1940 for Isaiah Berlin of All Souls, a Russian-speaker, to be posted to Moscow as Press Attaché, and for himself to accompany Berlin as an induction courier. Burgess mustered some official support for this scheme, and embarked with Berlin on a tortuous journey via Washington DC and Vladivostok towards Moscow. They had reached the US capital when informal protests from Miriam Rothschild, who deplored Burgess’s influence on her brother Victor and their mother, and from John Foster, an All Souls lawyer who was temporarily First Secretary at the British embassy in Washington, raised doubts about the project, which was quashed after further objections from Fitzroy Maclean at the Foreign Office. Burgess was ordered back to England.
Burgess, like Philby, then became an instructor in an SOE training camp. The two spies gave their foreknowledge of future SOE operations to Soviet Russia, which was then still party to a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and therefore may have remitted details of Burgess and Philby’s material to the Germans. Burgess’s career as an SIS officer petered out in 1941 after a corporal on one of his courses complained that he tried ‘to muck about with him’. He had another spell at the BBC, where he achieved the remarkable coup of arranging a radio broadcast by the NKVD agent Ernst Henri. He also arranged for broadcasts by the communist MP Willie Gallacher and by Clark Kerr, who praised Stalin’s Russia. Despite Burgess’s dismissal from SIS for importuning the corporal, Blunt convinced Liddell to recruit him as an agent (not an officer) codenamed VAUXHALL running two informants, Eric Kessler (Press Attaché in the Swiss embassy) and Andrew Revai (a journalist, and president of the Free Hungarian Association in London). Both Kessler and Revai were possibly intermittent sexual partners of Burgess. Liddell accepted from Blunt the line that had earlier fooled Footman and Vivian: that Burgess’s Cambridge dalliance with communism gave him an insider’s understanding of the CPGB. MI5’s counter-subversion expert John (‘Jack’) Curry was unconvinced of the sincerity of Burgess’s renunciation, and declined to employ him in F Division. When Curry was seconded in 1943 to an SIS unit monitoring communist penetration in foreign countries, he was unfairly mocked: sending telegrams to Curry, the Oxford don and wartime intelligence officer Gilbert Ryle told Trevor-Roper, was like ‘posting love letters up the arse-hole of a camel’. Yet Curry was right about Burgess, when cleverer men were not.21
By July 1943 Burgess was so anxious about his error in recruiting Goronwy Rees as a pre-war All Souls informant, and fearful of a denunciation by Rees of him and Blunt, that he suggested Rees’s liquidation, and offered to commit the murder himself. Moscow and the London rezidentura suspected this might be a provocation devised by MI5 or SIS. This was not the only threat of violence. James Pope-Hennessy was introduced to Burgess by Harold Nicolson in 1940. Pope-Hennessy became besotted during an affair lasting a year or eighteen months: after stormy rows, he threatened to shoot Burgess. Thirteen years later he claimed that he had broken with Burgess ‘because he was destroying … all one’s beliefs in life’, as Skardon summarized it after an interview in 1954, ‘though I suspect that he was thinking more in terms of moral destruction’. Pope-Hennessy understood that Burgess was a communist, and told Skardon that Burgess’s associates – he named Blunt, and Victor and Tess Rothschild – behaved like communists. Subsequently Pope-Hennessy became a lover of James Lees-Milne. One night in 1943 Pope-Hennessy, Lees-Milne, Burgess and Charles Fletcher-Cooke (an officer in naval intelligence who had been on a tour of Russia arranged for Cambridge undergraduate communists in 1935) embarked together on urban black-out adventures. They met at the Ritz bar, moved on to the smart, louche Gargoyle Club in Soho, dined at the White Tower restaurant in Fitzrovia, visited sleazy pubs and drank beer and gin. The party was joined by the Prime Minister’s daughter Mary Churchill: ‘Guy and Mary got on a treat, which was a relief, & very bizarre,’ said Fletcher-Cooke, who noted Burgess’s ineradicable name-dropping about Beneš and other European leaders. Burgess struck Lees-Milne as a truculent drunk, dangerously indiscreet, and boring in his ‘depravity’.22
During 1943 the News Department of the Foreign Office, under Sir William Ridsdale, had begun trying to moderate the pro-Soviet material issued by the Ministry of Information, where Smolka headed the Russian Section. Moscow decided to graft Burgess on to the News Department to resist this tendency. After various manoeuvres, and with support from Harold Nicolson, Burgess left the BBC and started full-time work at the FO in June 1944. Ridsdale, who had his career ruined by employing Burgess and speaking unguardedly to Smolka, later said of Burgess: ‘He was slovenly and irresponsible, and it was never possible to assign to him any task of importance.’ When he rebuked Burgess, as he did on several occasions, for his soiled appearance and poor manners, Burgess’s reaction was ‘to cringe and be most apologetic’. His undesirable traits had to be weighed against the fact that ‘he was a Double First at Cambridge and could be amusing at times’.23
Both in the News Department and in his later Foreign Office activities Burgess was suspected of leakages to Freddy Kuh, the communistic London correspondent of violently anti-English Chicago newspapers and renowned for his scoops and mischief-making. Kuh began one of his destructive reports, ‘A Foreign Office spokesman gazed dreamily out of the windows across Horse Guards Parade and murmured, “Of course, one of the troubles with America is that it has no government.”’ Burgess was the official in question. The ensuing rumpus added ‘new lustre to his reputation as an enfant terrible’, wrote Alan Maclean, who joined the News Department in 1945. ‘Guy took both pride and pleasure in annoying establishments … and “being in trouble” was a matter for glee.’24
The opportunities for espionage were immense. Burgess provided the Soviets with over 4,000 documents in the last year of the war alone. ‘It really was very challenging to one’s sanity’, Dick White recalled in 1985, ‘to suppose that a man of Burgess’s type could be a secret agent of anybody’s.’ His alcoholism, his scruffy, stained clothes, his bad breath, his filthy fingernails, his boastful indiscretions and his unbuttoned sexuality made a perfect cover, as was doubtless intended by the arch-deceiver of Soho and Fitzrovia.25
Blunt had been dormant as a Soviet helpmate since June 1937, but Gorsky resumed contact in August 1939 and urged Blunt, with his proficiency in French, German and Italian, to apply to join the Intelligence Corps. After the outbreak of war, the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence at the War Office ordered him to report on 16 September to Minley Manor, near Camberley in Surrey, for an intelligence course. After little more than a week, Blunt was peremptorily withdrawn from the course on security grounds and summoned for interview by Kevin Martin, former Military Attaché in Warsaw and Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. ‘I want you to realize that we have to be very careful indeed in intelligence,’ Brigadier Martin told him. ‘What has been done was probably done in excessive zeal, and I hope therefore that you will not feel that you have a grievance.’ They discussed Marxist doctrine and the Nazi–Soviet pact. Blunt let drop that his father had been chaplain at ‘the embassy church’ in Paris for ten years. ‘I am sure’, Martin said, ‘he would turn in his grave if he thought you were doing subversive work or perhaps I am a little traditional in this way, I mean about respect for one’s forebears.’ Martin closed the interview on a note of friendly caution: ‘I should like a little time to think over the impressions of you I have formed, which I may say are favourable, and I hope you won’t mind perhaps coming here again for another talk.’ Burgess arranged for Dennis Proctor to call on Martin and convince him that ‘all decent people have if not left-wing views, then at least left-wing friends’.26
Blunt was reinstated on the intelligence course at Minley Manor in mid-October 1939. He was able to compile a report on the structure of British military intelligence, dated 17 November, for an appreciative Moscow Centre. Subsequently, his Cambridge admirer Victor Rothschild (by then the Security Service’s head of counter-sabotage) recommended him to Liddell, who appointed him in June 1940 to a job in MI5’s St James’s Street office. Liddell was not the sole target of Blunt’s charm. He seems to have cultivated MI5 officers with responsibilities for Russia or communism. He began to sit with Dick White in the canteen, discussing art and advising White on contemplated purchases of prints. White, who was working at full pelt on matters of higher policy, cannot be expected to have read Blunt’s file or to have known of his earlier suspension from the Minley Manor course. Blunt at this time shared an office with the secretary of Courtenay Young. ‘My God, he was a charmer!’ she recalled. ‘We were all a bit in love with Anthony … He used to wander around with his cod-liver oil and malt, saying “That’s what Tiggers like for breakfast.” He knew Winnie the Pooh very well. He had a Leslie Howard face – a matinée idol.’ When she was informed in the mid-1960s that Blunt had admitted spying, ‘It was exactly like being … on a quicksand, I couldn’t believe it. I really, truly, couldn’t believe it … You started thinking, “Who else? What about me? Was I one too?”’27
Modrzhinskaya was suspicious when Blunt reported that MI5 took little interest in Soviet citizens in Britain. She and her Moscow colleagues could not believe the assurances of Blunt in MI5 and Philby in SIS that no serious anti-Soviet operations were under way. The fact that the surveillance material supplied by Blunt never once included any Soviet intelligence officer, his report that MI5 had no agents inside the Soviet embassy and that surveillance of visitors to the embassy had halted – all this was enough to discredit his authenticity. Blunt reported that only telephone tapping and penetration of the CPGB were continued. For most of 1940 Blunt received no guidance from the NKVD, because Modrzhinskaya’s mistrust had caused the closure of the London rezidentura and Gorsky’s recall to Moscow. Among the first tranche of papers supplied to him by Blunt in January 1941, after the resumption of the two men’s contacts, was Jane Archer’s report on debriefing the defector Walter Krivitsky. He may have been the source inside MI5 who warned the CPGB in 1941 that Tom Driberg was Maxwell Knight’s prized agent M/8 informing on party activities: a denunciation that resulted in Driberg’s expulsion from the party. Modrzhinskaya complained in 1943 that Blunt, in addition to supplying 327 rolls of film in the last year, had brought about a hundred documents to each weekly meeting, which she found unforgivable for compromising security.28
Blunt’s Sub-division B2 distributed deciphered diplomatic telegrams, analysed intercepted diplomatic correspondence and telephone intercepts, monitored the movements of foreign diplomats, separated couriers from their diplomatic bags for just long enough to scrutinize their contents and worked with Mrs Gladstone, who ran the Ellen Hunt employment agency in Marylebone High Street, which was controlled by the security services and placed domestic spies in foreign diplomatic buildings. Blunt supplied Boris Kreshin, who succeeded Gorsky in 1942, with MI5 internal documents, files on people targeted for cultivation, GC&CS intercepts, diplomatic telegrams, German intelligence reports, copies of illicitly opened diplomatic mail, weekly summaries of German intelligence radio intercepts, telephone intercepts and surveillance reports. In 1941–5, according to KGB records, Blunt supplied a total of 1,771 documents (compared with Burgess supplying over 4,000 documents in the last twelve months of the war). ‘Usually at meetings TONY is very apathetic, he comes very tired and forgetful,’ Kreshin reported in 1943. ‘When he is nervous, he drinks.’29
Blunt was involved in the surveillance of the diplomatic missions in London of neutral states. He proved deft in the tricky, speedy work of receiving and assessing material, and disseminating his conclusions to colleagues. He attended a few meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He also ran his former pupil Leo Long, who was working in military intelligence, as a sub-agent betraying official secrets to Moscow. When diplomatic privileges were suspended in April 1944, ahead of the Normandy landings, Blunt was assigned to Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), where he worked on deception. In May 1944 Blunt provided a complete copy of the deception plan for the D-Day landings, Operation OVERLORD, scheduled for June 1944. Thereafter, Moscow Centre accepted the honesty of material supplied by Philby and the others. This was because it was being corroborated by material from other sources: probably the American OSS.
The Blitz affected MI5 officers and their families as much as it did other Londoners. Roger Hollis, who had been recruited to MI5 in 1938, lived at 18 Elsham Road, Kensington, close to Glading’s former safe-house in Holland Road and within easy reach of MI5’s temporary headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs. His pregnant wife left London in 1940 for the safety of rural Somerset. Similarly Victor Rothschild, whose wife was also pregnant, decided that they should take refuge from the Blitz in Cambridge. He leased their home at 5 Bentinck Street, Marylebone – a minute’s walk from the Langham Hotel, where Krivitsky had been debriefed earlier that year – to two young women, Teresa (‘Tess’) Mayor and Patricia Rawdon-Smith, who had just been blitzed out of their shared flat. Mayor was his secretary at MI5 and future second wife. Blunt joined the women to help with the rent, and six months later Burgess took the remaining bedroom after the lease of his flat had expired.
Distorted legends have flourished about this household. Malcolm Muggeridge, who visited Bentinck Street once, left an artful account of Burgess manipulating the political and cultural notabilities grouped there around him. ‘There was not so much a conspiracy gathered around him as just decay and dissolution. It was the end of a class, of a way of life; something that would be written about in history books, like Gibbon on Heliogabalus, with wonder and perhaps hilarity.’ The force of Muggeridge’s dramatization set the tone for subsequent comment. Dick White has been faulted for being neither suspicious nor disapproving when he visited ‘Bentinck Street’s den of decay and dissolution’. John Costello memorably described the household as ‘a homosexual bordello serving as a viperous nest for Soviet spies’, before showing in more forgettable language that this was not the reality. Stephen Koch claimed that in Bentinck Street ‘Burgess gathered the homosexual underworld of London together with some of the most devious and despicable operatives then at work.’30
Anthony Blunt resented these lurid descriptions of the Bentinck Street arrangements as ‘an alternation of sexual orgies and conspiratorial conversations designed to hinder the war effort’. It is true that he probably had a sexual affair with Rawdon-Smith, that Burgess claimed less reliably to have gone to bed with her, and that both men were involved with Jack Hewit, a sparky working-class man who had previously been Christopher Isherwood’s boyfriend; but there is nothing remarkable about this bedroom-hopping among young people in a flat-share. Blunt maintained that he and his co-tenants were working too hard on onerous jobs to spend their nights disporting riotously. London was a beleaguered city: there was little chance of a hotel bedroom unless it had been booked weeks in advance. The Bentinck Street tenants therefore sheltered friends who visited London on leave or were stranded there overnight by train cancellations. People who did not live in London during the Blitz had no idea, said Blunt, how casually sleeping-arrangements were improvised. Flats became dormitories, and on nights of heavy bombing so did basements, in which people bedded down together on lilos and mattresses on the floor. There were many such communal households in wartime London. Blunt’s MI5 colleague Herbert Hart lived in an Oxford-orientated group with his ex-communist wife Jenifer, Douglas Jay, the Balliol economist Thomas Balogh, Patrick Reilly of the Foreign Office and Francis Graham-Harrison of the Home Office. Hugh Gaitskell of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and his wife Dora lived with Evan Durbin of the War Cabinet secretariat’s economic section, the moral philosopher Oliver Franks of the Ministry of Supply and the music critic William Glock.31
Goronwy Rees was an occasional overnight visitor to Mayor and Rawdon-Smith’s rented home: he was notable for being drunk at breakfast. In his memoirs he described Burgess filling Bentinck Street with ‘a series of boys, young men, soldiers, sailors, airmen, whom he had picked up among the thousands who thronged the streets of London at that time’. Strenuous couplings and political mysteries abounded, he suggested. ‘Bedroom doors opened and shut; strange faces appeared and disappeared down the stairs, where they passed some new visitor on his way up; civil servants, politicians, visitors to London, friends and colleagues of Guy’s, popped in and out of bed, and then continued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue [or] the progress of the war.’ Blunt counters – convincingly – that there was a house rule in Bentinck Street forbidding the bringing home of any ‘casual pick-up’ for the night: they were too unpredictable, and might be noisy or disruptive when other tenants needed their sleep; Burgess had lovers who spent the night, including James Pope-Hennessy, Peter Pollock and Jack Hewit, but no ‘boys’ or ‘rent’. Rees said that the only subject on which he believed that Burgess told the invariable truth was on the subject of his sexual conquests; but Burgess would be unique among men if his sexual brags were true, and we know that his mendacity on other matters was appalling. The only reason to believe Burgess’s accounts of his performances with other men is a desire for lubricious sensationalism.32
Early in the war Cairncross was instructed to seek work with Lord Hankey, who had been brought into the War Cabinet in September 1939 as Minister without Portfolio and was pursuing a roving strategic brief. As Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence in the 1930s, Hankey had been conspicuously security-conscious: he ordered that papers must never be left on desks overnight, prowled round the offices in Whitehall Gardens to check that his rule was being kept, and was unforgiving when in 1933 he spotted ‘a sheet from THE most secret of documents which had just been issued to THE most secret of committees’ lying in a fire-grate, where it had been placed as a grate-screen by a charwoman. Yet even Hankey was vulnerable. He was a devout vegetarian, who often ate at the Vega restaurant near Leicester Square. Cairncross made a show of becoming vegetarian, sat demurely by himself at a table in the Vega when Hankey was there, and was finally introduced to the great man by his son Henry Hankey, who had been one of the few colleagues who liked Cairncross at the Foreign Office. In due course, Lord Hankey asked the Treasury to release Cairncross to act as his private secretary.33
All official papers and much personal correspondence came to Cairncross’s desk before they reached Hankey’s. His job was to skim and assess them, and order them on the minister’s desk with the most urgent files on top. He monitored Hankey’s telephone calls, was sometimes expected to listen on an extension, controlled the minister’s visitors and held the keys to his safe. BOSS was the codename bestowed on Hankey by Moscow. When Chamberlain’s government fell in May 1940, the new Prime Minister Churchill demoted Hankey from the War Cabinet, but gave him the solace of a ministerial post, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which had Cabinet rank outside the War Cabinet and came with offices off the Strand. In July 1941 Hankey was shifted again, to the post of Paymaster General, with rooms in the Privy Council Office. Churchill finally shunted him out of the government in March 1942. This progressive loss of favour owed much to the bitter antipathy between him and the more powerful minister, Beaverbrook; something also to the fact that from 1941 onwards Hankey engaged in open but ineffective intrigues against Churchill’s exuberant and idiosyncratic leadership.34
Cairncross claimed in his memoirs that between the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 and the German invasion of Russia in 1941, he supplied no documents to Moscow. In truth, the London rezidentura complained that the secret material supplied by him in that period was too profuse to encipher for telegrams to Moscow. Hankey prepared authoritative ‘War Appreciations’ at six-monthly intervals, which summarized such matters as the strategic views of the Chiefs of Staff, enemy strategy, problems of inter-allied cooperation and likely developments in the actual fighting. Hankey was involved in preparations for biological warfare, in disrupting the supply of Romanian oil to Germany and in planning military assistance to Turkey in the event of an attack by Russia. As the supervising minister for SIS, MI5 and GC&CS, Hankey prepared two elaborate reports on the secret services in the spring of 1940: Cairncross duly supplied copies to Moscow. Cairncross remitted 3,449 intelligence items during 1941 (a figure exceeded only by Maclean’s 4,419). These included secret Cabinet papers, Foreign Office cryptograms, weekly bulletins from SIS, the FO and the Imperial General Staff and Scientific Advisory Committee documents.
As chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Hankey had a leading part in the atomic-bomb programme in 1940–1. Although, after his public naming by Oleg Gordievsky as ‘the Fifth Man’ in 1990, Cairncross denied that he had supplied atomic intelligence to the Soviet Union, there is no doubt from the Moscow archives that he was the first of Britain’s atomic spies. In September 1941 he reported that the so-called Uranium Committee, chaired by Hankey, had endorsed an Anglo-American cooperative project to build an atom bomb. In October he provided the text of a crucial policy memorandum prepared by Hankey. Stalin was thus informed from the outset of the Anglo-American work to develop a super-weapon, and knew that the Soviet Union was excluded by its ostensible allies from any knowledge of the project. Cairncross’s first-rate material was nevertheless mistrusted as possible disinformation, especially by Modrzhinskaya, who had no insight into Whitehall procedure. The NKVD could not understand why Hankey, after his removal from ministerial office by Churchill in 1942, continued to receive secret documents: dismissed ministers in Stalin’s Russia were ostracized if they were lucky, liquidated if they were not, and certainly not kept on circulation lists of top secrets.
Following Hankey’s political retirement, Cairncross went to work at GC&CS as an editor and translator in the section handling Luftwaffe decrypts. He continued to supply material to his Russian handlers. Although in 1943 he transmitted only ninety-four documents, these included Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park, which were crucial in Russia’s victory in the battle of Kursk. Using decrypts supplied by Cairncross, and backed by other sources, the Red Air Force bombed German airfields and destroyed over 500 Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground. Although this was a turning point in Russia’s war against Germany, the NKVD continued to suspect Cairncross of supplying disinformation. In August 1944 he was transferred to the political branch of SIS. The 794 documents that he sent to Moscow that year included a new SIS survey of Soviet intentions; but fears of British disinformation and inadequate analysis and appraisal of his material meant that it was put to limited use. Altogether, from his several desks, Cairncross supplied 5,832 documents to Moscow during 1941–5.
It is not surprising that none of the ring of five was suspected or caught, for there are worlds of difference between detecting a murderer and detecting a spy. The murderer, usually acting alone, kills his victim; the body is found, the crime is known, and law-abiding people come forward with their accidental knowledge of the crime. A railway clerk remembers selling an incriminating ticket, a postmistress hears everyone’s gossip, a gardener glances over a fence, a dog-walker notices a smashed headlight, a barmaid recalls a stained overcoat: all these innocent witnesses understand from newspaper headlines that they are needed to contribute their little piece to the jigsaw of truth. The spy, though, acts in secret, and keeps his crime unknown except from an equally clandestine accomplice. There is no outcry for justice to be done. Various individuals may hold incriminating knowledge of the traitor, but probably are unaware that treason has been committed. No one expects their colleagues to be secret outlaws. It is never easy to accept that a dangerous minority of people make promises for the satisfaction of breaking their word and humiliating their dupes; that setting snares to catch clever men is exciting, and the pride feels almighty when the trap springs on the prey; and that deception-artists and confidence-tricksters enjoy the havoc that they stir up.