‘The British as a people are still self-assured, serene in their national sense of superiority’ and did not yet understand that they were no longer ‘top nation’, OSS’s Crane Brinton wrote in an assessment of the future of Anglo-American relations in 1945. This complacence proved unsustainable in a country where income tax averaged 50 per cent of earnings, where the top earners paid 97.5 per cent (19½ shillings in a currency when 20 shillings equalled a pound) and where it seemed impossible to save enough money to retire on. Despite the victory over Germany, domestic demoralization began within months, and soon saw the onset of four decades of national inferiority complex. In 1948 Angela Thirkell, the chronicler of mid-twentieth-century English county society, recorded the state of the nation in her novel Love among the Ruins. She pictured a nation burdened by dead glories and reduced to meagre hope by its manifest international disempowerment: ‘people who had taken six years of war with uncomplaining courage and were now being starved, regimented and ground down by their present rulers, besides the deep hidden shame of feeling that England’s name had been lowered in the eyes of all lesser breeds’. Sleepless nights did not refresh the English. They queued for unpalatable food, plain clothes and scarce fuel, their savings depreciated, they chain-smoked to kill time, they were squashed on overcrowded trains, they were annoyed by inquisitorial officials and prying questionnaires, and they felt shouldered aside by surging crowds of foreigners everywhere: ‘the lesser breeds, who although by their own account penniless expatriates, mysteriously had huge sums of money’. In Love among the Ruins these privations are lamented by the organizers of a charity garden-party until a naval officer half jokes: ‘I daresay there is a dictaphone behind the wainscot, and whoever is in charge of liquidating land-owners taking it all down in shorthand.’ The secret services were neither understood nor trusted.1
Only a few political leaders and officials, who had been indoctrinated into Masterman’s Double-Cross System, knew that the Security Service had perpetrated the most successful wartime deception since the Trojan horse. Masterman’s historical monograph, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–45, was suppressed until 1972 in compliance with the wishes of the security services, the Cabinet Office and other stakeholders. These departments feared that counter-espionage revelations would ‘boomerang’, in the words of Lord Normanbrook, Cabinet Secretary from 1947 until 1962. They expected journalists to stress that Masterman was an Oxford historian, who had been temporarily engaged in wartime counter-espionage, and that full-time career Security Service staff were of lower calibre. Dick White in 1967 thought it would be detrimental to public trust of the two security services to know that the XX System had relied on ‘an immense amount of talent [seconded] from the outside world, particularly the Universities, during the war’. Both Normanbrook and White were advising in the context of press stories which had besmirched Whitehall and the security services as incompetent and untrustworthy after the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and of Philby in 1963.2
Not a hint of XX was heard by the public or by hundreds of new MPs who were elected in the Labour landslide at the general election in 1945. Socialist parliamentarians knew nothing of the pre-war Vigilance spy network manned by the nominees of their former whip Jack Hayes. Instead they blamed MI5 for the spurious Zinoviev letter, which had lost their party the general election of 1924. Many of them mistrusted Special Branch. The former SIS officer ‘Rex’ Fletcher, who had been created Lord Winster, was ousted from his post as Labour’s Minister of Civil Aviation in 1946, because socialist MPs suspected his antecedents. At least a dozen Labour MPs were either secret CPGB members or pro-Soviet crypto-communists. In addition to Driberg, at least one had spied for Russia: Wilfrid Vernon, after being elected MP for Dulwich in 1945, acted as parliamentary spokesman of the far-left Association of Scientific Workers and was included on a list compiled by the general secretary of the Labour party of fifteen subversively pro-Soviet MPs. Two of his closer parliamentary associates, John Platts-Mills and Konni Zilliacus, were expelled from the parliamentary party in 1948. Some socialist leaders vied to excuse past excesses. Cecil L’Estrange Malone, who had sat in turn as a Liberal, Leninist and Labour MP, was recommended by socialist friends for a peerage in 1945. After losing his Commons seat in 1931, he had become Tokyo’s paid lackey during the Sino-Japanese war, and ran the propagandist East Asia News Service until Pearl Harbor in 1941. Attlee dismissed the suggestion that Malone should receive a barony with one of his crisp understatements: ‘hardly suitable’.3
The incoming Labour government wanted to curb MI5’s powers of surveillance. Proposals in the autumn of 1945 either to bring the Security Service under the Home Secretary’s direct control or to subordinate it to SIS were defeated by Sir David Petrie, who was due to retire early in 1946. Petrie’s preferred successor, Guy Liddell, was discounted by Labour ministers who had doubted the political impartiality of MI5 insiders since the Zinoviev and ARCOS incidents in 1924–7. An impressive shortlist was drawn up, including two major generals, Sir Ronald Penney, recently retired as Director of Military Intelligence in south-east Asia, and Eisenhower’s intelligence chief Sir Kenneth Strong. ‘Latter the better, but didn’t much plunge for either of them,’ noted Cadogan. The selection process demonstrated that the candidate who shines at interview may not be the best person for the job. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Chief Constable of Kent, who made a strong show before the appointment board, was unanimously chosen. ‘He certainly seemed v. good’ to Cadogan; Attlee liked him as ‘an honest policeman’; but MI5 officers complained that he never understood that the security services differ from the police, not least because their best evidence cannot be aired in court. In the constabulary Sillitoe had received automatic obedience to rules and unquestioning subordination to discipline, but he complained that in MI5 he met evasion and insolence.4
Labour’s suspicions of MI5, and ingratitude for its achievements, were ill timed. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reported in September 1946 that the global spread of communism under Moscow’s direction was the primary threat to the British Isles, British colonies, western democracies, eastern Europe and eastern Asia. ‘The appeal of Communism is based on an all-embracing ideology, to which Communists adhere with religious fervour, and on the promise of a better world free from exploitation and war. The Communist Parties are led by nuclei of able, experienced and devoted men, capable of directing mass movements, and firm in the belief that they are assisting in an inexorable historical process.’ Under direction from Moscow, ‘Communists will use any instrument in any way, provided that the cause of Communism is furthered thereby, and are prepared to execute sudden and complete reversals of policy to meet a changed situation.’ In one respect the JIC analysis was misguided. It emphasized the role of the CPGB, and communist parties in other parliamentary democracies, in providing from their membership individuals willing to spy and subvert. Open party members, rather than penetration agents without current party allegiances, were put in the foreground of concern.5
At the Foreign Office, from which the security officers William Codrington and Sir John Dashwood retired with the coming of peace, a former RAF group captain, George Carey-Foster, was appointed to head a Security Department in October 1946. Harold Caccia, the quick and able Chief Clerk, rejected Carey-Foster’s recommendation that all members of the Diplomatic Service should undergo positive vetting – not just new entrants. Officials felt that positive vetting (particularly of existing staff) sapped the tradition of trust upon which department loyalty had hitherto relied. It was too similar to the raucous injustice of loyalty testing in the USA and to barbarous purges in Soviet Russia. Yet positive vetting was little more than a systematic, comprehensive version of the checks that had been in place in the intelligence agencies for years: when someone was contemplated for a confidential appointment, their associates had long been asked about their family, their affiliations, their character and their frailties. The principle did not change, even if the methodical intensity increased. Carey-Foster installed regional security officers in New York, Cairo and a few other cities, but found successive heads of the FO’s Personnel Department to be obstructive. He was hugely overworked: it took three years for funds to be allotted for him to have an assistant, in the elegant form of Milo Talbot, who had recently inherited the Irish barony of Talbot de Malahide.
The Office’s Personnel Department was described as ‘the most paper-logged Department in this paper-logged office!’ It was understaffed and sometimes overwhelmed, but found time to obstruct Carey-Foster by maintaining that the purview of the Security Department was limited to buildings, safes, locks and couriers’ bags, with human insecurity excluded. This resistance continued until Burgess and Maclean absconded in 1951.6
As successor to Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’ at SIS, Cadogan wished to appoint a civilian, Victor (‘Bill’) Cavendish-Bentinck, who had been wartime chairman of the JIC and first post-war Ambassador to Poland. Cavendish-Bentinck had been rejected on medical grounds for military service in the first European war in which many of his contemporaries had died, and in expiation worked with formidable concentration, beyond the strength of most people, to master immense quantities of paperwork. He was sceptical, unprejudiced and amid tragedy could savour the human comedy. From the ‘eerie and awesome’ ruins of war-devastated Warsaw in August 1945, Cavendish-Bentinck relished the challenge: ‘Despite squalor etc., this is more amusing and interesting than the JIC … now that the war is over.’ Cadogan’s plan was however baulked when his candidate became embroiled in a squalid divorce, and was ejected from the Diplomatic Service, with loss of pension rights, on the personal decision of the Foreign Secretary, ex-trade union leader Ernest Bevin, who knew that Cavendish-Bentinck was heir-in-line to the dukedom of Portland (which he inherited at the age of eighty-two some thirty years later). ‘I could have saved him if his name had been Smith,’ Bevin said.7
Once Cadogan’s excellent candidate had fallen, Menzies, who opposed SIS being led by a civilian, obtained the appointment as his successor-designate of Major General John (‘Sinbad’) Sinclair, former Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. Menzies’s friend General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, whom he had appointed as Assistant Chief of SIS in 1943, retired in 1945. Philby in his untrustworthy memoirs is slyly misleading about many MI5 and SIS personnel, including Marshall-Cornwall (whom Reilly thought ‘brought to Broadway long experience in Intelligence and a much needed intellectual distinction’). His estimate of Sinclair, however, was fair: ‘Sinclair, though not overloaded with mental gifts (he never claimed them), was humane, energetic and so obviously upright that it was impossible to withhold admiration.’8
George Blake, who served SIS in The Hague and Hamburg before his posting to Seoul in 1948, felt that the pre-war service had resembled a club of amateur enthusiasts, ruled by an autocratic Chief who hired, fired and paid them as he wished, without regard to civil service rules. But in the first months of peace Cadogan instigated a committee to settle the post-war future of SIS, and Menzies soon reorganized the Service into, said Blake, ‘a properly established Government Department with a personnel department, grading, regular promotions, pension schemes and annual increments’.9
A further point must be stressed about Whitehall after 1945. It was appallingly overworked. Its officials at every level were exhausted by the extra duties, the heavy responsibilities, the emergency pressure, insomnia, the meagre rations and the accumulative stress of the war years. With the exception of the end of night-time bombing, there was little peacetime alleviation. Indeed, the continuing shortages and inefficiencies of peacetime seemed more frustrating. When Sir James Chadwick, the atomic physicist whose trust had been betrayed by Nunn May, returned from his planet-transformative work in the United States in 1946, he and his wife were met at Southampton docks by a driver and car from the Ministry of Supply. The car ran out of petrol before they reached London. The chauffeur had no petrol coupons with which to refuel. Lugging their suitcases on a hot summer’s day the Chadwicks finished their journey to the capital on a series of jolting buses.
Overwork caused the death in 1946 of the master-negotiator and trans-Atlantic commuter Lord Keynes, and devitalized almost everyone in government administration. There was a grave shortage of competence for all the big tasks that needed to be done. Having failed to become chief of MI5, Penney was appointed Director of the London Communications Security Agency, which advised on cipher security and was the forerunner of GCHQ’s Communications Electronic Security Group. Churchill’s man in SIS, Desmond Morton, proved unwelcome there to Bevin, but was soon redeployed as the Treasury’s representative on the Inter-Allied Reparation Agency, and on the Tripartite Gold Commission in Brussels. Everywhere tired, hungry, uncomfortable officials were doing two simultaneous jobs. During 1950, as the VENONA-inspired investigations into the Foreign Office espionage intensified, Reilly was too busy to participate in inquiries for which he was specially fitted. With the continuing freeze of the Cold War, and especially after North Korea’s surprise attack on South Korea in June 1950, Reilly gave priority to preparing JIC advice for the Chiefs of Staff and government ministers on the danger of a new world war.10
Hostility to the British Empire was the common ground of the United States and Soviet Russia before and after the defeat of Germany and Japan. ‘Traditional American dislike and suspicion of anything that savours of selfish British imperialism coincides with one of the major themes of Soviet anti-British propaganda,’ Jock Balfour and Archie Inverchapel (who had both served in the wartime Moscow embassy) reported from the Washington embassy in 1946. Yet until the 1970s MI5 was deeply, necessarily committed to activities that bore the stamp, or at least the residual marks, of the British Empire. This hindered good relations between London and Washington, and at MI5 entailed overwork and information overload.11
‘Intelligence requirements: prune these vigorously as no service can cover every subject’ – so Brian Stewart of SIS urged in his handbook for security agencies. The demands on MI5 were insupportable during the late 1940s: there was no surplus growth that could be trimmed, even if there had been time to wield the secateurs. Throughout the Cold War, MI5 bore heavy responsibilities for security and counter-espionage in Britain’s colonies as well as in the homeland. Intelligence was crucial to the process of decolonization in several territories. MI5 officers reformed local security procedure, trained colonial intelligence officials and posted security liaison officers (SLOs) in all the major colonies and dependencies that were given independence. Newly independent governments, without major exception, asked these SLOs to stay in place and continue to act as advisers. Intelligence was crucial to the decolonization programme of the 1950s and 1960s.12
Attlee’s decision in 1946 that Britain should resume its rule in Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation, rather than relinquish control to the Chinese, had far-reaching consequences. The colony became the sentinel outpost of the western powers in a communist-dominated region. Sillitoe visited Hong Kong in 1948 and advised on its security. Wilfrid Vernon was a mouthpiece of the communist-front China Campaign Committee, and was vocal in support of Mao Tse-tung’s ‘efficient, humane and democratic’ forces in what he called ‘the Liberated Area’ of China: whereas Russia had ‘refrained most meticulously from interfering in China’, the US had (in Vernon’s view) intervened with ‘absolute shamelessness’. After Mao’s victory in 1949, the encircled colony of Hong Kong became Asia’s equivalent of Berlin.13
Britain’s decision to cede independence to India, Burma and Ceylon was an unmatched devolution of imperial power. Three-quarters of the British Empire’s subjects were removed with the loss of the Raj, which took place at midnight on 14–15 August 1947. Nine months later, in May 1948, the British began to withdraw their forces from the Palestine mandate. Despite these withdrawals, 7.1 per cent of gross national product was spent on the euphemism of ‘defence spending’ in 1948; the figure grew to 9.8 per cent in 1952 (during the Korean war) and still exceeded 6 per cent in 1963.14
The British commitment in Greece was an important part of the resistance to communism. Sir Daniel Lascelles summarized the position, as seen from the Athens embassy, in November 1945. ‘During the occupation period we officially backed an unpopular and ostentatiously non-Greek monarch,’ King George II of the Hellenes, ‘who made no secret of the fact that he disliked the Greeks and preferred to live in England.’ This preference was intensified by his devotion to his gentle and intelligent mistress, Joyce Brittain-Jones, who later married Eddy Boxshall, the former SIS officer in Bucharest. ‘What was still more unfortunate’, continued Lascelles, ‘was the fact that, simultaneously, certain British organizations which were grossly ill-informed about Greece and which ought to have been under the control of the Foreign Office but notoriously were not, backed and armed the King’s bitterest enemies of the extreme Left, whose resistance included the attempted liquidation, more sovietico, of all their internal political opponents.’ The Greek National Liberation Front, ‘loudly encouraged by that contemptible section of public opinion which believes any group labelled “Left” to be incapable of sin, committed a long series of really ghastly atrocities in the name of democracy’, Lascelles reported. These London-based groups included the League for Democracy in Greece, which had the support of eighty-six Labour MPs, including Driberg, Platts-Mills, Vernon and the winner of the Stalin peace prize, Pritt.15
In January 1947 Attlee proposed the assuagement of competitive tensions with Stalinist Russia by offering Moscow the economizing policy of withdrawing costly British forces stationed in the Balkans and Middle East. His plan was quashed by the Foreign Office. ‘It would be Munich over again, only on a world scale, with Greece, Turkey and Persia as the first victims in place of Czechoslovakia,’ Bevin warned. ‘Russia would certainly fill the gap we leave empty, whatever her promises.’ Middle Eastern regimes might seem unsavoury, but they all valued their national independence. ‘If we speak to Stalin as you propose, he is as likely to respect their independence as Hitler was to respect Czechoslovakia’s, and we should get as much of Stalin’s goodwill as we got of Hitler’s after Munich.’ The world would see retreat from the Middle East ‘after our abandonment of India and Burma … as the abdication of our position as a world power’.16
The following month, in February 1947, the Attlee government informed Washington that it could no longer afford to give financial aid to Greece or to maintain troops there. Britain had intervened there by force of arms, so as to prevent ‘the establishment by terrorism of a Communist minority regime which would have turned Greece, like the other Balkan states, into another Soviet Satellite State’. But the cost was no longer supportable. This renunciation gave a violent jolt to Washington. Within days President Truman had declared his resolve that the US would uphold the integrity of free states against armed minorities or outside intervention. The Truman Doctrine, which was adopted with rare unanimity in Washington, proved as momentous as the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine: it ended American isolationism for seventy years, and led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. ‘The missionary strain in the character of Americans’, reported Inverchapel, ‘leads many of them to feel that they have now received a call to extend to other countries the blessings with which the Almighty has endowed their own.’17
A dominant fear in Whitehall was that Britain’s withdrawals from its colonies would leave a power vacuum that the Soviet Union would hasten to fill: that, in Calder Walton’s phrase, ‘the red on British imperial maps would be replaced by the red of communism’. In response to these concerns, the Security Service formed its Overseas Department in 1948. During 1946–50 Sillitoe made twelve major tours of British overseas territories: Canada, Palestine, Egypt, Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, Australia and New Zealand were inspected and assessed by him. Sir Roger Hollis, MI5’s Director General during 1956–65, was also an inveterate traveller, who made a priority of security in the colonies as much as in the British Isles.18
The primary threat to British internal security in 1946–7 came not from the Soviet Union but from a radicalized Middle Eastern minority. In July 1946 the Zionist group Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, a future prime minister of Israel and co-winner of the Nobel peace prize, arranged for six men disguised as Arabs to carry milk-churns containing 500 pounds of explosives into La Régence, the basement restaurant of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The secretariat of the British mandatory authority for Palestine as well as the MI5 and SIS stations were housed immediately above La Régence. The explosives were a combination of gelignite and TNT designed by the Irgun’s bomb expert, Isser Nathanson @ Gideon, later a physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The detonated churns killed ninety-one people. A photograph from the scene shows a typewriter atop some rubble with severed fingers still resting on the keys. A day after the blast a corporal heard a faint voice from deep in the rubble. He knelt and shouted, ‘Is that a wog down there?’ A dying man who had kept his humour called back, ‘Yes, a wog named Thompson, Assistant Secretary.’19
The terror campaign was then taken to the capitals of Europe. In August 1946 Sillitoe briefed Attlee that he and all his Cabinet were targets of Zionist terrorist cells operating in London. In October two suitcases left by the Irgun wrecked the British embassy in Rome, where Francesco Constantini @ DUNCAN had stolen pre-war secrets for Moscow. British military headquarters in Vienna were bombed. In March 1947 the British Colonial Club, used by servicemen and students from the West Indies, off St Martin’s Lane in London, was bombed. In April Betty Knouth @ Gilberte Lazarus walked into the Colonial Office, which shared the same block in Whitehall as the Foreign Office, and asked a guard for a moment’s respite from the cold outside. She then went to a basement lavatory, where she left twenty-four sticks of dynamite wrapped in newspapers. The timer on the bomb broke, but if the device had exploded it would have caused carnage on the scale of the King David massacre. Knouth, who had received the dynamite from a Frenchman who smuggled it into England inside his prosthetic leg, subsequently opened a nightclub in Beersheba.
In June 1947 twenty-one lethal packages containing letter-bombs were posted from Italy to politicians in London. Sir Stafford Cripps was saved by a secretary who put the fizzing packet in a bucket of water. The shadow Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, carried a letter-bomb in his briefcase all day, thinking that it was a boring circular that he could wait to read in the evening. A death threat was issued against Hugh Trevor-Roper for his qualified magnanimity about Germans in The Last Days of Hitler. Yaacov Eliav, who ran the Colonial Office plot, planned to contaminate London’s water supplies with cholera cultures procured from Zionist sympathizers in the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Attlee’s decision to withdraw from the Palestine mandate and to pass responsibility to the United Nations averted the execution of this attack.
Sillitoe, Liddell and their senior staff were too busy with crisis interventions to refresh old training procedures or revitalize organizational management. Observation rather than new initiatives was the order of the day. MI5 watchers followed Soviet officials through London streets, surreptitious photographs were taken, old files were reread, and reams of transcripts of bugged telephone calls were translated by elderly émigrés. Surveillance of suspects in secret installations and blacklisting were forbidden by the Attlee government until 1948, when the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia, fomented unrest in Italy and France and blockaded Berlin. Then the numbers of watchers were increased, but they were inexperienced, and their reports of plodding about London had limited value.
The United States had extended a massive loan, with onerous conditions attached, to save Attlee’s Britain from economic ruin. This enabled the Labour government to introduce the welfare state, to persist in its global pretensions and to embark on its misguided nationalization of coal-mines, railways, civil aviation, road haulage, canals, electricity and gas supplies, the Bank of England, Cable and Wireless and steel manufacturing. Washington’s money did more than pay for deleterious socialism. ‘The American loan opened the way to a silent infiltration of American influence into almost every walk of British public life,’ E. H. Carr noted in 1948. It became obligatory for anyone appointed to an important official post, whether civilian or military, to be acceptable to their US counterparts. ‘To be known as anti-American is a bar to promotion to a responsible position in any walk of life.’20
By an agreement of 1947, SIS and MI5 sent liaison officers to work in the Washington embassy. A London liaison office for the FBI and CIA was opened at 71 Grosvenor Street above a shop selling beds and mattresses. Every morning SIS delivered summary reports and analyses to Grosvenor Street, and received a deciphered message from Washington containing equivalent material. The ‘scrambler’ telephone at Grosvenor Street was linked to MI5’s headquarters, Leconfield House in nearby Curzon Street, and to SIS’s Broadway Buildings.
Attlee wrote in March 1947 to Inverchapel of the feeling that the Special Relationship was one-sided, and that Britain was being used by Washington as ‘a mere breakwater between the United States and Russia’. Three months later, in June, the FO’s Sir Oliver Harvey speculated that if required ‘to choose between Communist Russia and Capitalist America the Western Europeans might hesitate, for Western Europe has now quite outlived capitalism and free enterprise in the United States sense, which is but 19th century Liberalism. The Western democracies, including Great Britain, now stand for progressive Socialism and controlled economy.’ Mass opinion in Britain was ‘mildly Left’, Harvey judged. ‘Some may have doubts about Socialist planning, but all have greater doubt, if not complete disbelief, in the United States system, with its total lack of plan, its primitive labour laws and tariffs and above all its congressional government.’ Harvey warned that if Americans pressed unregulated capitalism too hard on Europe and Britain, they would lose influence on the corporatist-minded continent.21
Mass opinion in the United States was not veering towards Europe’s regulated capitalism. Instead it was being whipped up against Red enemies in the nation’s midst. Extensive investigations of Elizabeth Bentley’s denunciations began in 1945–6, but made limited headway in obtaining evidence of espionage that could be used in court to obtain convictions. Bentley and Whittaker Chambers might name their former associates, but their assertions were a long way from clinching incrimination. When evaluating allegations of espionage cover-ups by the London government, and accompanying complaints that traitors were not brought to trial, one must compare the record of MI5 with that of the FBI. Bringing spies to book was tricky on both sides of the Atlantic.
When interviewed by the FBI, Gregory Silvermaster @ PAL @ ROBERT, Helen Silvermaster @ DORA, William Ullmann @ POLO @ PILOT, Mary Price @ DIR, Ishbel and Duncan Lee, and Peter Rhodes (all of whom had been named by Bentley) stalled rather than cracked. An FBI lawyer who analysed the evidence collected as of January 1947 concluded: ‘What we know to be true in this case is a far cry from what we are in a position to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.’ A Grand Jury, which heard forty-seven witnesses between June 1947 and April 1948, failed to indict Lee for treason or perjury. To protect the FBI from accusations of incompetence, Hoover determined to give Bentley’s material to HUAC. He did this against the advice of Milton (‘Mickey’) Ladd, head of the Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division: ‘I doubt whether it could be handled without them playing a great deal of politics, and resulting in its being grief for everybody involved.’22
On 30 July 1948 Bentley, who had sunk to a secretarial job with the Pacific Molasses Company of New York, testified to legislators who were more interested in embarrassing President Truman than in eliciting her full story. In terms that might have been used by Cairncross or Nunn May, she declared that her sources were ‘a bunch of misguided idealists’ who felt that the Russians were America’s allies, believed ‘that Russia was bearing the brunt of the war’ and resented the fact that Washington was not sharing with Moscow all the information and material support with which it provided London. ‘They felt it was their duty, actually, to get this stuff to Russia, because she was hard-pressed and weakening.’ Bentley called Browder and his CPUSA associates ‘cheap little men pulled on strings from Moscow’.23
In December 1948, as the VENONA decrypts accumulated and Chambers and Bentley testified to HUAC, the FBI interviewed Laurence (‘Larry’) Duggan, an official of the State Department in 1930–44, at his suburban home. Duggan was an optimist, an altruist and a constructive idealist who believed in taking action on his own responsibility and knew that he was more intelligent than most people. In a cocksure mood, with the encouragement of his wife Helen Boyd, he had started supplying official secrets to Soviet Russia in 1936. The couple were just two of the ‘bonanza of anti-fascist romantics’ who started working at this time for the NKVD. He nearly broke off contact in dismay at the Moscow purges of 1937, but continued to supply material until he received a semi-official State Department warning after Chambers, in September 1939, named him as a Soviet source. Despite believing that FBI investigators were like ‘boys lost in a forest’, Duggan insisted that the risks were too high for his spy work to continue. The NKVD forcefully renewed contact during 1942, and pressed him to divulge further official secrets at a time when State Department security officials were also giving him renewed trouble. He solved this double bind by leaving the State Department in July 1944 to become diplomatic adviser to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. On 11 December 1948, under FBI questioning, he denied espionage, looked uneasy and cut short the interview. Four days later, by coincidence, he was telephoned by a Soviet operative codenamed SAUSHKIN seeking to convince him to resume work for Moscow. Duggan must have felt beset on both sides. During the early evening of 20 December, he fell to his death from the window of his sixteenth-floor Manhattan office. It is likely that he jumped, conceivable that he fell in a weird accident while trying to put on a snow-boot, but some prefer to think that he was pushed.24
Hearing of Duggan’s death, Karl Mundt, a Republican congressman from South Dakota who was acting head of HUAC (its chairman being under indictment for fraud), rushed into action. A few years earlier the Foreign Office had received a character sketch of Mundt from the Washington embassy. ‘An ignorant man, gifted with a somewhat slow intelligence, but sincere and constantly baffled by problems largely outside his mental scope,’ Isaiah Berlin had reported. ‘His appetite for facts is, unfortunately, much greater than his ability to grasp and evaluate them. (Until quite recently, he was under the impression that Canada “paid tribute” to Britain!)’ Mundt rushed to convene a press conference before midnight. Flanked by another HUAC member, Richard Nixon, he revealed Isaac Don Levine’s testimony that Duggan’s name had been among those given in 1939 by Chambers as a member of the communist apparatus within the State Department. Mundt regaled journalists with loose hearsay, and made a cheap wisecrack that the identity of other State Department communists would be disclosed when they jumped from high windows. The Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and radio broadcasters criticized Mundt for publicizing unverified hearsay. Eleanor Roosevelt writing in a New York newspaper on Christmas Eve denounced Mundt for an ‘irresponsible, cruel’ publicity stunt perpetrated ‘without real proof in his hands’.25
In a memorial volume to Duggan published in 1949, the Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles referred to Mundt and Nixon as ‘fanatical or unscrupulous slanderers’. He honoured Duggan ‘as one of the very first to instill an element of social conscience into United States foreign policy’. He deplored ‘the wave of hysteria that had swept over the United States as the result of the tactics employed by the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War’. From London, Harold Laski praised Duggan as ‘one of the most upright and devoted people I had ever known, with a mind vividly conscious of public obligation’. A memorial to ‘dear Larry Duggan’ was read at the annual general meeting of his New York club, the Century, after his death: ‘a sensitive, sincere and good man, loyal in all his bones to our country and to the principles of democracy in which live the hope of the world. Those of us who wept at his passing, wept of course from deep sorrow, but we also wept from cold anger.’26
These were patrician voices, speaking on behalf of justice, unimpaired legal process and the objective testing of truth by calm and honest rationalists rather than by fanatics and opportunists. They saw the value in resisting snap populist judgements engineered by crooked editors and self-seeking politicians. ‘Personally, I am going to believe in Alger Hiss’ integrity until he is proved guilty,’ Eleanor Roosevelt told a New York newspaper after Duggan’s death. ‘I know only too well how circumstantial evidence can be built up, and it is my conviction that the word of a man who for many years has had a good record of service to his government should not be too quickly disbelieved.’ She feared that as a result of the prevalent search for spies, ‘the great gift of curiosity, which makes men safe and secure in a really democratic society, is going to be shortly discredited among us. There would be no development, there would be no people who understood what had built the Communist movement in this country, unless there were among us some few who were interested enough to find out how other young people think, and, in addition, to study opposing regimes.’ American liberty, continued Eleanor Roosevelt, rested on the principle that citizens must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. ‘Insinuations should not be made unless proof is in hand. A man’s job may be jeopardized and his whole life may be wrecked before his innocence is proved.’27
Eleanor Roosevelt’s principles seemed right for her generation: not least her belief in trusting people until they were proven to have betrayed their colleagues or their country. Her grounding and values were similar to those of Whitehall during the 1940s. The dominant mood was against political tests of officials or policing of their ideas. Responsible men detested the mentality of the lynch-mob. They disliked alarmism, bans, black-lists, snoopers and scapegoating. The possibilities for malicious denunciations were shown in 1949 when a postal intercept revealed an application to join the CPGB from the zoologist Solly Zuckerman, afterwards Lord Zuckerman, an authority on the effects of bomb-blast, who was in line to become the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Investigations suggested that the application was a mischievous forgery by a jealous, hard-drinking colleague of Zuckerman’s named Lancelot Hogben. Generally there were qualms at building an apparatus of suspicion and risk-assessment. Mistrust was known to be politically contaminating. Trust was one of the elements that distinguished liberal democracies from despotisms. All this was understandable in the state of security knowledge in the 1940s, although men’s confidence in their colleagues let Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Duncan Lee and the Cambridge ring of five leach official secrets from their different spheres.28
Roger Hollis of MI5 noted in 1945 that the civil service had hitherto ‘shown an extreme and understandable reluctance to have its intake vetted by us’. One reason for this is implied in a passage – perhaps intended to disarm interrogators, but also sincere – in Klaus Fuchs’s confession of 1950. ‘Since coming to Harwell, I have met English people of all kinds,’ Fuchs said. ‘I have come to see in many of them a deep-rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from, and I don’t think they do, but it is there.’ Trust and self-respect were obvious and integral parts of this deep-rooted firmness: the notion of vetting seemed to poison those springs.29
The resistance to positive vetting was helped by the dismay among intelligent people at the stupidity both of the headline-stealing witch-hunts in America and of the most vocal English proponent of ‘loyalty tests’, Sir Waldron Smithers, Tory MP for a constituency of commuters and market gardeners in Kent. Smithers was a lugubrious, boneheaded stockbroker with a love of figuring in newspaper headlines, and neither a man of marked ability nor one insensitive to the consoling effect of alcohol. Once in the Commons he challenged the Attlee government to prove the sincerity of its anti-communism by prosecuting Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury. He further demanded that, if and when Johnson was convicted, the government should ensure that his hanging was public. Smithers’s advocacy of a ‘Civil Service Purge’, ‘Security Tests for Ministers’ and the institution of a House of Commons Select Committee on Un-British Activities aroused contemptuous distaste.30
Gouzenko’s revelations and the Nunn May trial reinforced MI5’s growing suspicions that the greatest threat to official secrets did not lie with open CPGB members. On the contrary, the NKVD (and its successor agencies) discouraged its major informants from joining the party, partly to avert mistrust of their political views among their colleagues, but also to foster an exciting air of conspiracy which would accentuate their self-importance and make them amenable to performing special tasks. In May 1947, as a delayed response to the Canadian analysis and under pressure from Washington, Attlee formed a secret Cabinet committee on subversion known as GEN-183. Its members included Cabinet ministers, high officials and Sillitoe. Committee papers reporting their deliberations always referred to ‘subversives’, not ‘communists’, although communists were their target. In March 1948 Attlee announced procedures to purge government departments of both communists and fascists with access to sensitive material. This was to be done by negative vetting: checking Security Service card-indexes against the names of those with access to official secrets and confidential material.
MI5 was unhappy with these developments. It would have preferred to keep the current informal vetting system, while making it more systematically targeted; it was appalled by the extra workload. It feared that a purge based on negative vetting would complicate or spoil its interaction with secret sources within the CPGB: it worried about its effect on such a case as Graham Pollard’s. By 1948 Pollard was a senior official at the Board of Trade, where he specialized in reorganizing the machinery of government, dismantling wartime controls and revising tariff regulations. He was known to many people as a former member of the CPGB; but no MI5 index-card will have existed to explain that he had joined the party at the prompting of Maxwell Knight and had been an invaluable long-term informant on the CPGB for MI5. Liddell and other senior Security Service officers resented the way that Labour ministers, who had instigated the extension of the vetting system, deflected blame from their supporters and civil libertarians by implying that the impetus for the civil service ‘purge’ came from MI5. Liddell remonstrated with Attlee as Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison as Deputy Prime Minister, protesting that the Security Service was being used as a scapegoat for political decisions: MI5 appeared to the press and the public as ‘a bunch of irresponsible autocrats’ and ‘black reactionaries’ who were engrossing powers ‘to victimise unfortunate Civil Servants’.31
GEN-183 (and Whitehall generally) dismissed Smithers and his kind. The US Federal Employee Loyalty Program, whereby the FBI made far from perfunctory, although not necessarily efficient, security checks on some four million government staff, was thought disproportionate. The Westminster parliament resisted pressure from Washington to emulate HUAC tactics. The political settlement that had been enshrined in the fulfilment of parliamentary democracy in 1929 rested on trust and attempted inclusiveness, not paranoia and exclusion; but the detonation at Semipalatinsk in August and Mao Tse-tung’s victory in September 1949 increased tensions and risks immeasurably.
In April 1950, after the Fuchs case had discredited reliance on negative vetting, Attlee appointed a committee on positive vetting (PV) which comprised John Winnifrith of the Treasury, Roger Hollis of MI5 and Graham Mitchell, who had joined MI5 at Philby’s recommendation soon after the war. Hard on the appointment of Winnifrith’s committee came the unexpected outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950, and alarms about Harwell security breaches involving the nuclear scientists Bruno Pontecorvo and Boris Davison. In November the Cabinet committee on subversion recommended the adoption of PV. The Attlee government’s precarious parliamentary position meant that it did not wish to alienate its more liberty-loving supporters by a public announcement of the new policy. The practice of PV was implemented – slowly and secretly – during the early months of 1951 before receiving massive propulsion from the defection of Burgess and Maclean. A much expanded PV programme was agreed in principle in July 1951 in the hope of appeasing American anger at the Fuchs, Burgess and Maclean cases; but the Attlee government felt too weak to implement this decision, which was not announced until January 1952, when a more confident Tory government, under Churchill, was in power. MI5 and GEN-183 preferred to move suspects in a discreet way to less delicate posts rather than expel them. In the Home Civil Service between 1948 and 1982, twenty-five officials were dismissed for security reasons, twenty-five resigned, eighty-three were shifted to non-sensitive work and thirty-three were reinstated after further investigation. None was publicly named. In the USA over a comparable period, 9,500 federal civil servants had been purged, another 15,000 resigned while under investigation as communists, and all were named.
In the same month – September 1945 – that Gouzenko defected in Ottawa and supplied the chilling disclosures that began the Cold War, a Soviet official called Konstantin Volkov, who had recently been transferred from NKGB headquarters in Moscow to a post under consular cover in Istanbul, made contact with John Reed, acting Head of Chancery at the British embassy in Ankara, which transplanted itself during the summer heat to the Istanbul consulate. Reed, who had been a Cambridge undergraduate at the same time as Philby, entered the Foreign Office in the same batch as Maclean, and served in Bucharest, Washington and Moscow. As a Russian-speaker, he interpreted at secret meetings with Volkov, who sought political asylum for himself and his wife, as well as £27,500, and offered in return to tell all that he knew of NKGB headquarters and overseas networks, and to name Soviet agents in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Volkov, who provided a selection of his wares for transmission to London, insisted that a handwritten account of his offer must be sent as a personal letter, by diplomatic bag, to a senior official at the Foreign Office. Nothing could be trusted to radio signals or typists, because two Soviet agents were embedded in the Foreign Office, while another headed a counter-espionage organization in London. Reed reported Volkov’s walk-in to Sir Maurice Peterson, an ambassador who regretted secret service activities. ‘No one’s going to turn my embassy into a nest of spies,’ Peterson told Reed: ‘if you must go ahead with this business, do it through London.’ Peterson’s decision excluded the SIS head of station from involvement. Peterson reluctantly forwarded the Volkov papers to the Foreign Office, signing a covering letter to Sir Orme Sargent, who was also chary of intelligence work, rather than to Cadogan, who was responsible for FO liaison with SIS.32
‘Moley’ Sargent referred the Volkov material to Menzies, who passed the dossier to Philby and told him to handle the Russian’s defection and debriefing. Within hours of reading Volkov’s offer, on 20 September 1945, Philby breached tradecraft by hastening to see Burgess at the Foreign Office and pressing on him an envelope with instructions to give it to his Soviet handler that same evening. Burgess did so. The envelope contained Philby’s news of Volkov’s intended defection. The Radio Security Service, which monitored London–Moscow wireless traffic, noticed that on 20 September there was a sharp rise in wireless traffic from the Soviet embassy in London to the Moscow headquarters of the NKGB. The length of such traffic could be measured in milliseconds, and it was found that there had been an identical upsurge of wireless traffic between Moscow and Istanbul of precisely the same duration as the London–Moscow messages. The London–Moscow messages had been repeated to Istanbul. It was a dead certainty that the Volkov leak had happened in London.
Philby knew that once SIS in London accepted Volkov’s offer and agreed to exfiltrate him, the operation would be run by the SIS station head in Istanbul. He therefore tarried for three weeks before flying to Turkey. During that interval Volkov vanished: strapped to a stretcher and swaddled in facial bandages to hide his identity, he was hustled aboard a Soviet military aircraft and flown to his doom. When Reed asked why someone from SIS had not come from London sooner, Philby gave the irritating reply, ‘Sorry, old man, it would have interfered with leave arrangements.’ Philby broke his return journey to London in Rome, where he visited James Angleton, the US chief of counter-espionage there. He recounted the story of Volkov’s disappearance with a show of candour intended to disarm any later suspicions about the case. SIS surmised that an unguarded telephone call between British officials in Istanbul and Ankara might have betrayed Volkov’s intentions. Philby was not blamed for his inexplicable dilatoriness – except by Reed, who retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1948, after marrying the daughter of the director of the champ de courses at Nice. When interviewed in 1967, by then High Sheriff-designate of Shropshire, Reed said that he had long before settled in his mind ‘that either Philby was criminally incompetent or he was a Soviet agent’.33
In October 1946, following the Gouzenko and Volkov cases, Sargent circularized heads of missions in Ankara, Tehran, Nanking, Athens, Rome, Berne, Paris, eastern Europe and South America with instructions on the handling of renegade members of Soviet missions seeking asylum in exchange for betraying secrets. Such defectors ‘have reached a state of depression in which their life and work seemed intolerable, and the possibility of escape, at whatever cost, became the only prospect of relief’. Perhaps mindful of the mistrust with which Agabekov, Bessedovsky and Krivitsky had been treated before 1939, Sargent stressed that recent defectors had been ‘sincere’: in one case (Gouzenko was not named) the material yielded had been of utmost value. Without specifying Volkov’s abduction, Sargent warned that Soviet missions were ‘ready to act with speed and ruthlessness as soon as any propensity to disloyalty is observed’. Overtures from a renegade must be handled speedily, ‘as even a short delay will almost certainly involve the removal of the official concerned and the loss of the information which he is able to provide’. Contrary to Peterson’s decision in Volkov’s case, the SIS representative attached to the mission should be involved. Reports should be sent by telegram marked ‘personal for Sir O. Sargent to be deciphered by Private Secretary’. Lessons had been learnt from the Volkov bungle, although Philby’s basic betrayal was unknown.34
Around the time of the Volkov episode, Philby sought a personal interview with Vivian, gave a sanitized account of his marriage to Litzi Friedmann, described his involvement with Aileen Furse and explained the bastardy of their three children. Vivian approved his intention of seeking a divorce, asked MI5 to check on Friedmann and was soon told that she was a suspected Soviet agent, living in East Berlin with Georg Honigmann, who was known as a definite Soviet agent. About a year later, on 25 September 1946, at Chelsea Registry Office, Philby married Furse: their two witnesses were Tomás Harris and a businesswoman named Flora Solomon (who had introduced the couple, knew that Philby had been working under Moscow’s orders in the 1930s, but did not denounce him until 1962). In the year of his second marriage, Philby was transferred from Soviet counter-espionage to be head of the SIS station in Istanbul, with the rank of First Secretary. Given the tension between Turkey and the USSR, this was an understandable posting for a former head of Section IX. It also accorded with a new SIS policy of encouraging officers to circulate between both Service sections and overseas postings so as to prevent narrow specialization. Disquiet over the Friedmann–Honigmann connection may also have contributed to the decision to shift him from headquarters.
Blunt left MI5 soon after the war to become Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (in charge of the royal art collection) and in 1947 was installed as Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square. He acted as an intermediary between Burgess and Philby for a period after the Volkov affair, and again from June to October 1947, and took photographs for them. Philby had no regular controller while he was head of station in Turkey, and used Burgess to communicate with Moscow. SIS developed a strategy of training exiled Armenians and Georgians from outlying districts on the edge of the Russian empire, and sending them over the frontier as spies or fomenters of unrest. Philby was involved in organizing several such ventures, including Operation CLIMBER of 1948, whereby two men were sent over the border from north-eastern Turkey into a mountainous district of Georgia with orders to infiltrate local communities. They vanished immediately: it is beyond doubt that Philby had betrayed them.
The true index of a man’s character, Cyril Connolly used to say, was the state of his wife’s health. During Philby’s posting in Istanbul, his wife began to harm herself. On one occasion she claimed to have been ambushed by a robber who hit her on the head with a rock. Her wounds, whether self-inflicted or the work of a real assailant, were certainly reinfected by her during her hospitalization. For the remaining ten years of her life, she was a recurrent self-injurer. The consequent domestic strain aggravated Philby’s drinking, which had intensified after the Volkov crisis.
Philby’s trail also began to be stalked by Maurice Oldfield. Like many effective intelligence officers, Oldfield had a historian’s mentality. He had envisaged a career as an academic historian before his mentor at Manchester University, Sir Lewis Namier, got him involved in intelligence work in European university cities during 1937–8. Installed from 1947 as deputy head of R5 counter-espionage section at SIS headquarters, Oldfield began studying a case that had disturbed him when he was in wartime Cairo with Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME). It concerned Alexander Rado, a cartographer who had joined the Hungarian communist party in 1918 and been recruited by the GRU while a refugee in Geneva in 1935. Rado was short, stout and foxy as well as fluent in six languages. Under the anagrammatic codename of DORA, and with the cover of a map business called Geopress, he ran a network spying on Germany. Alexander Foote was its radio operator. After the network had been compromised, Rado and Foote underwent separate tribulations before converging on Paris in November 1944. On 6 January 1945 they were both passengers on the first Soviet aircraft to leave the French capital since its liberation. Rado had been lured on to the flight with the promise of $80,000 and a guarantee that he would be permitted to return to Paris after a fortnight. But when the aircraft halted in Cairo, Rado fled from his hotel after an alarming night-time talk with Foote. He appealed to the British authorities for asylum and was interviewed by Oldfield, who saw that his defection could yield useful material.
When the Russians requested Rado’s extradition (as he was Hungarian it could not be called repatriation), his Cairo internment camp sought guidance from SIS. An unsigned reply came promptly from Broadway: ‘Release the subject to Egyptian police for onward transit to Moscow.’ When Rado heard this news, he cut his throat and resisted the guards who saved his life: ‘Let me die! Let me die!’ he cried. Meanwhile Foote, who was undergoing harsh debriefing in Moscow, was assured that Rado would be returned to Moscow by force. ‘Very soon there will be no place in the world where it will be possible to hide from the Centre,’ Foote was told. Oldfield and the camp commandant repeatedly queried the instructions from London, but always received the unsigned response: ‘Release the subject to Egyptian police for onward transit to Moscow.’ As late as June 1945 Cairo received an inquiry from London: ‘Please telegraph present position RADO case. Is he still in hands of Egyptian police?’ Rado was returned to Moscow, where he was condemned without trial to ten years in Siberia for negligence in allowing his cipher to be taken by the Swiss police. He went, said Foote, ‘to the living death of an NKVD [NKGB] labour camp’. (Foote was sent to the Soviet sector of Berlin under the alias of Granatov with instructions to establish a new identity as a German called Albert Müller; but conditions were so objectionable that in 1947 he defected to the British sector.)35
In rescrutinizing Rado’s case and while evaluating leakages about Erich Vermehren, an Abwehr agent in Istanbul who had defected in 1944, Oldfield noted that Philby had been a desk officer on duty at SIS at the time of the anonymous telegrams dismissing Rado and that Vermehren had been lodged in London in the flat of Philby’s mother. He recalled the Volkov debacle. By 1949, at the latest, Oldfield suspected Philby, although he had not a jot of evidence to support a denunciation. Indeed, it would have wrecked his career to attack a man with a golden reputation who was in line to become Chief of SIS. ‘Nowadays it is not what you do that counts,’ as Evelyn Waugh wrote in Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947), ‘but who informs against you.’36