Shortly before the Semipalatinsk detonation in August 1949, it was decided to move Philby from Istanbul to Washington, where he was to serve as SIS representative and chief contact with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which had replaced OSS two years earlier. This was such a plum job that Philby did not consult Moscow before accepting it. Soon he was meeting the agency’s officers on a daily basis and betraying its activities to Moscow. His reports on the agency’s personnel, developing ideas, tactical plans and preconceptions enabled Moscow’s deception planners to incorporate existing CIA assumptions into their misdirections and thus make misinformation more credible.
In September, shortly before Philby’s departure to Washington, the CIA informed SIS that recent VENONA decryption had established that there had been intelligence leakages from the British embassy in Washington in 1944–5. Maurice Oldfield knew the advantages of fostering insecurity in a suspect against whom nothing could be proved, and was expert in turning agents after catching them. Just before Philby embarked for the United States, Oldfield gave him a counter-espionage briefing in which he described the VENONA material. This information, as Philby later admitted, worried him. It was obvious to him that the leaks which had been revealed by VENONA and were under active investigation had emanated from Maclean, whom he had recommended for communist recruitment as a penetration agent fifteen years earlier. Once he reached Washington, he saw each new batch of VENONA decrypts and reported to Moscow the encroaching threat to the security of the ring of five.
The progressive VENONA advances put pressure on Philby, Maclean and Burgess, and to a lesser extent Blunt, that sent them lurching into alcoholic debauches that were intended to quieten their anxiety and fear. (Cairncross was the exception in this, as in much else.) After the identification of Klaus Fuchs as an atomic spy in 1949, there was an intensifying effort to identify a Soviet spy who had been active in the British embassy in Washington under the codename HOMER and whom Philby knew to be Maclean. Philby learnt in June 1950 that VENONA decrypts mentioned an important spy – codenamed STANLEY – working for the Russians in 1945: he knew that he was STANLEY. More than ever, during 1949–51, Burgess spoke and behaved with destructive alcoholic bravado. Maclean tried to quell conscience and worry by drinking himself insensate. Philby had heavy binges. Blunt drank steadily, especially when under stress, although his behaviour and efficiency were unimpaired. This was the impalpable background to Philby’s posting in Washington.
The mounting menace did not disempower his ability to do harm. His baneful duplicity reached as far as the Adriatic. In November 1945 the governments in London, Moscow and Washington had recognized Enver Hoxha’s communist government of the most impoverished and vulnerable of Balkan states, Albania. As Hoxha owed his position to the support provided by Britain in the closing stages of the war, it seemed irrational to deny recognition to his regime. Four years later, however, London and Washington were keen to shake the communist hold on Albania. Joint operations were therefore devised in 1949 with the aims of inciting insurgency against Hoxha’s regime, of detaching Albania from Moscow’s orbit and of helping the CIA and SIS to bond by running a joint project. The idea was to recruit exiled Albanians, who were marooned in displaced-persons camps in Italy, Greece and Turkey, and train them in Malta and later Heidelberg to act as infiltration agents to provoke local uprisings. A joint Anglo-American group, the Special Policy Committee, was formed in Washington with oversight of the enterprise; but divergences between the approaches of Washington and London were soon evident. The Americans spent freely, prepared intricate organizational charts and made formal presentations to large planning meetings as if they were launching a foreign sales drive for a mass-market consumer product. They seldom used the word ‘Albania’ or considered local conditions and susceptibilities. Menzies at SIS was unenthusiastic about the Albanian scheme, but agreed to participate as a way of gratifying ex-SOE ‘stinks and bangs people’ who knew the country from earlier operations. One participant recalled a planning session at SIS headquarters which remained desultory until someone said, ‘I say, why don’t we get old Henry up here? He knows about this.’ A day or two later ‘old Henry’ arrived from Sussex, and when the challenge was put to him, agreed with the right touch of self-deprecation to meet it. ‘This will wreak havoc with the garden,’ he said. ‘Just getting it into trim.’1
The FO representative on the Special Policy Committee was a dashing young veteran of SOE operations in Greece, Lord Jellicoe, while SIS was represented by Philby. ‘Kim was the one who made all the operational decisions,’ Jellicoe recalled. ‘He was intelligent, professional and hard-working. How on earth he found time to do a job for the Russians, I just don’t know.’ Philby exercised the secret ruthlessness that he had first learnt in Vienna in 1934 was essential to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat. The numbers, movements, instructions and timings of the guerrilla landings were all betrayed by him. The twenty-four men in the first British contingent went ashore at night, in small groups, along the southern Albanian coast and were ambushed by Albanian troops when they went inland: four of the raiders were killed, while the others escaped to Greece. The Americans’ infiltration agents, dropped by parachute in northern Albania, were caught by waiting security police, who either put them before a firing-squad or subjected them to show-trials that were broadcast by Radio Tirana.2
Philby, in his later public account written in Moscow, exaggerated the importance of his betrayal as a way of denigrating the Anglo-American authorities. The poverty of the Albanian peasantry, rather than his treachery or indiscretions from ex-King Zog of Albania’s entourage, was the chief cause of failure. Very poor people are sharp risk-assessors and disinclined to risk losing what little they possess. In remote districts of Albania, the impoverished peasantry would not jeopardize their lives and property, or endanger their neighbours by provoking reprisal raids, without definite proof that the men inciting them were supported by the wealth and might of the USA rather than optimistic freelances or worst of all Hoxha agents trying to entrap them. As the US was committed to ‘plausible deniability’, this proof could not be given.3
Washington ran on dry martinis at this time. Philby and Angleton of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations had a weekly liaison lunch either at Harvey’s Seafood House or at the Army and Navy Club. They had cocktails before lunch, wine with the food and brandy afterwards. Philby had a strong head for alcohol, and lured Angleton into shattering and calamitous indiscretions as they sat boozing. Philby kept a clear enough head to report what he heard to Moscow. Philby is described by Angleton’s biographer as ‘a product of the privileged old-boy system, one of the foundations of the self-protecting world of the British upper-class’. Angleton succumbed to Philby’s ‘upper-class plausibility’, it is said, ‘as did nearly everyone else in the Washington and London intelligence communities’. This is to miss all the points. Philby duped his fellow spooks because he was infallibly and unostentatiously efficient: he seemed to do his duties exceptionally well; his plausibility derived from his super-competence; it had nothing to do with upper-class manners, for Philby was a representative of the middle classes, disavowed the old school tie, refused to look spruce in or out of the office, despised church-going, was a militant atheist and was known to have lived with the mother of his children for years before marrying her.4
Philby was involved in settling the terms of CIA–SIS cooperation in the event of the Atlantic powers going to war with Russia. He helped Soviet deception planners by reporting CIA responses to the misdirection that he helped to fashion. All the time he seemed to his SIS chiefs to be an excellent officer. He had no enemies to obstruct him. He never showed impatience or disrespect towards slower but senior minds. His successive responsibilities had given him a wide understanding of SIS’s varied branches, and equipped him well to take command of it. Few people noticed that he was drinking too much, or knew of his grievous marital troubles with a wife who felt rejected and contrived physical injuries to gain his attention. Maurice Oldfield had kept his doubts to himself. John Reed had resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 1948, and was engaged in forestry in Shropshire. In the summer of 1950 Menzies and his designated successor ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair agreed that they must fix the SIS succession so as to exclude the appointment of an unsympathetic or blundering outsider, as had happened with Sillitoe at MI5. Menzies’s apprehensions were well judged, because the government indeed forced an unwelcome outsider, Dick White of MI5, on SIS when Sinclair was replaced in 1956 well before his sixtieth birthday. In the succession plan envisaged by Menzies and Sinclair, James (‘Jack’) Easton was the front runner. Easton was a former air commodore who had succeeded General Marshall-Cornwall as Assistant Chief of SIS in 1945. His assumed air of fumbling haziness masked a shrewd, subtle and decisive mind which Philby, at least, reckoned hard to fool. Philby was identified as a conscientious and effective officer who should be groomed to follow in the Sinclair–Easton sequence.
Menzies and Sinclair explained their plan to the Foreign Office, which had oversight of SIS. Reilly, as the Office’s liaison with SIS, was asked to interview and assess Philby. ‘I just did not like the smell,’ as he later told William Waldegrave (both men were Fellows of All Souls). After his near-exposure by Volkov, Philby had become a heavier social drinker: the VENONA threat had him swilling more booze than ever. Yet it was not only that Philby’s suffused and bleary face convinced Reilly that he was a drunkard. In other ways he made a poor impression on the FO’s intelligence expert. ‘There was something about the whole man which made me think that … he had gone completely to pieces,’ recalled Reilly. ‘The impression was overwhelming. I had never experienced anything like it in my life.’ The FO vetoed the Philby succession plan ostensibly on the grounds of his alcoholism.5
Although SIS officers later shuddered to think that – without Reilly’s veto – Philby might have become ‘C’, his friend Tim Milne disagreed that the higher Philby rose in the Service, the greater his value to the Russians in misdirecting its actions to serve Soviet interests. Milne thought that Philby as Chief of SIS would have lost close contact with detail. He would have known the broad lines but not the operational details of current or future operations, because he would always be working through and relying on subordinates. His actions would be accountable to Whitehall committees, to the Prime Minister and to Cabinet ministers. It would have been impossible for him to take zigzag journeys by bus, tube trains and taxi to rendezvous. To signal the need for an emergency meeting, he could not amble through Kew and chuck a copy of Men Only into Charles Moody’s front garden. Nor could he – without observation – make chalk marks on walls or lamp-posts under cover of stooping to tie a shoelace or halting to light a cigarette. Moreover, how could Moscow act on information from such a highly placed source without betraying him? The only advantage for Moscow in having Philby as ‘C’ would have been if the communists took power in Britain or western Europe.
In December 1946 Burgess was appointed personal assistant to the Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Hector McNeil. He thus became an established member of the Diplomatic Service: it should be emphasized that he was not absorbed into the permanent government machinery through the influence of his family, fellow Etonians, sexual partners, members of the Reform or mandarin officialdom; straightforward political influence, exerted by a Labour MP, who was the son of a journeyman shipwright, did it. The Service’s Personnel Department refused to admit him into the senior branch A, but kept him in the secondary branch B. McNeil had been a journalist on Beaverbrook’s Scottish newspapers before his election as a Labour MP in a by-election of 1941. His recent promotion to be Minister of State was in the place of his former mentor Francis Noel-Baker, who bored the Cabinet (‘’E talks too much, this chap’, said Ernie Bevin) and infuriated Cadogan, who thought him a ‘silly baby’. McNeil had earlier proven himself by going to Athens during a constitutional crisis: ‘he found himself landed in a position’, wrote the British Ambassador, ‘which would have been perplexing and discouraging even to the most hardened and experienced. He was in a strange land amongst very strange people at a very strange time. His quick grasp of essentials, his initiative and resourcefulness saved the situation.’ McNeil, it was said, ‘worshipped the ground Bevin trod’. His generous spirit, respect for justice and trenchant vocabulary were exemplified by an incident at a session of the United Nations. When Vyshinsky made a vitriolic attack on Churchill, McNeil replied with unstinting praise of the Conservative leader: ‘it was not in his nature to keep silent when Sir Winston was traduced’, commented the Manchester Guardian, ‘and by a Russian, too. It was handsome and British.’6
Liddell thought Burgess unsuitable for posting in the Minister of State’s private office, and Footman had misgivings; but the appointment proceeded. Burgess imagined himself on his way to high-altitude influence, for he predicted that McNeil would be the next Prime Minister but two. Like Cairncross when he had been Hankey’s private secretary, Burgess saw policy memoranda, telegrams, Cabinet papers and private correspondence with ambassadors. He monitored telephone calls and visitors. At night he took away documents in his briefcase, either surreptitiously or with Office consent, on the implausible pretext that he would work on them at home. In time, Burgess’s alcoholism, seediness, disruptions and indiscretion determined McNeil to transfer him to the Office’s new Information Research Department (IRD).
This propaganda unit had originated with a memorandum of April 1946 circulated by Christopher Warner, who was then in charge of the Foreign Office’s Northern and Southern departments, and entitled ‘The Soviet campaign against this country’. Recent speeches by Stalin and other Soviet leaders signalled ‘the return to the pure doctrine of Marx-Lenin-Stalinism’, ‘the glorification of Communism as the inevitable religion of the future’ and ‘the revival of the bogey of external danger to the Soviet Union’, Warner cautioned. ‘We should be very unwise not to take the Russians at their word, just as we should have been wise to take Mein Kampf at its face value.’ In the eleven months since the collapse of Nazi Germany, Russia had been ‘despoiling foreign countries in her sphere’ – in eastern Europe, the Balkans and the communist zone of Germany – ‘harnessing them to the Soviet system, and at the same time posing as their only benefactors’. Communism must be treated, Warner argued, ‘not merely as a political creed, but as a religious dogma and faith which can inspire such fanaticism and self-sacrifice as we associate with the early Christians and the rise of Islam, and which in the minds of believers transcends all lesser loyalties to family, class or even country’. He urged the need to attack and expose the myths which the Soviets were generating to justify their actions: ‘the myth of the encirclement of Russia by the capitalist powers, the myth that a new Germany is to be built up for use against Russia, the myth that Russia alone gives disinterested support to subject races against their continued enslavement and exploitation by the colonial and capitalist powers’. Warner’s close arguments resulted in the formation of the Information Research Department, headed by a Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, who had previously been an outstanding administrator in SOE and had in 1935 visited Russia in a travelling party including Blunt, Michael Straight, Charles Fletcher-Cooke, Charles Rycroft and Michael Young. Mayhew’s new outfit was charged with providing factual briefings about communism to overseas embassies and legations. McNeil tried to stow Burgess in the hold of the IRD, but Burgess proved an unstable weight during a trial period of employment, and Mayhew would not confirm his appointment. He would have been invaluable to Moscow in the IRD if only he had controlled his behaviour.7
In November 1948 Burgess – a counterfeit coin in the circulating currency of the Foreign Office – was slotted into the Far Eastern Department. He told his Soviet handler that he intended to provide bigger bundles than hitherto, and asked to be given a suitcase for this purpose. Dennis Proctor, who had known him since Cambridge days and had proposed him for membership of the Reform Club, had watched his operations in pre-war Pall Mall and wartime Whitehall with amused toleration: ‘he had a profound love of intrigue, of being in the know and of dabbling in cloak-and-dagger projects’. But after 1945 Burgess grew ‘more and more intolerable with drink … drugs and general degeneration’, Proctor later told MI5: ‘his conduct was so disreputable’ that their meetings ‘became fewer and less welcome’. Yet Burgess remained efficient for Moscow’s purposes: on 7 December 1949, for example, he gave 168 documents, totalling 660 pages, to his Soviet handler Yuri Modin.8
Burgess’s former sexual partners, including Harold Nicolson and Micky Burn, were dismayed by his messy appearance, diminished charm, intellectual enfeeblement and reckless impulses. Burn had been captured during the Commando raid on Saint Nazaire in 1942, and then incarcerated in Colditz. One night, back in post-war London, he saw Burgess looking conspicuous in a camelhair coat, cruising the ‘meat-rack’ under the archways of the County Insurance office at Piccadilly Circus. It was notorious that police agents provocateurs entrapped men there, so Burn accosted his friend, saying, ‘Don’t be such a fool.’ Burgess let Burn lead him away: they went to the Reform Club for triple sherbets. By then Burn was a foreign correspondent of The Times, roaming in Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia (Victor Rothschild’s insinuation that he had been a Nazi sympathizer was nonsense). In 1947 he married a remarkable divorcee named Mary Booker, who was twice his age. When Burgess visited the newly married couple, he suddenly told Burn, ‘I want to speak to you alone,’ took him into a corridor, tried to kiss him and importuned him to resume their affair. ‘You don’t understand, I’m married,’ Burn protested, at which Burgess snapped back, ‘Don’t be so pompous.’ Burgess then said, as a way to keep some control over the man who had spurned him, that if ever Burn wanted a room for sexual assignations, he could use one in Burgess’s flat in Old Bond Street. ‘I remember thinking’, Burn later said, ‘that if I ever did, and I did now and then, it would not be anywhere of his. I had ceased to trust him.’9
Blunt continued to collect titbits from friendly conversation with ex-colleagues at MI5. He was able, for example, to warn Moscow in March 1948 that MI5 had increased its surveillance of Soviet officials in London: a microphone had been inserted into the Military Attaché’s telephone; other handsets were bugged. Some MI5 officers were more unbending and impermeable than others. ‘Dick White is too correct in his manner, and will never gossip on matters connected with work like Guy Liddell,’ Blunt reported. ‘Hollis is also correct and almost hostile. John Marriott sometimes talks, but he isn’t overfond of me.’ In fact Hollis had the distinction of being the only MI5 officer to show suspicion of Blunt, whom he disliked. He teased him in 1945 by calling him ELLI, the codename of a Soviet spy revealed by Gouzenko and only many years later identified as Blunt’s sub-agent Leo Long.10
Cairncross returned to the Treasury a month after the end of the war. Moscow severed contact with him after Gouzenko’s defection. Under the codename KAREL he resumed passing documents in July 1948. He was in a department authorizing expenditure on research in atomic weapons, guided missiles, microbiology and chemical and underwater warfare. His job gave him legitimate reasons to collect research data from aviation, radar, submarine detection, signals intelligence and eavesdropping. His utility for Moscow increased in 1950 with the development of NATO, the outbreak of the Korean war and increased expenditure on armaments and personnel.
In 1949 Burgess and his mother went for winter sun in Gibraltar and Tangier. He carried letters of introduction from David Footman and from a more recent figure in his life, Robin Maugham. The latter was a decorated young army officer who had saved the lives of a score of soldiers trapped in burning tanks, and joked that a head wound sustained in North Africa qualified him for a job in intelligence. He was already an eminent travel-writer and was beginning to publish interesting novels: Somerset Maugham was his uncle. He was candid about his sexual preference for men, which led him to live abroad, and to become a barfly who drifted into alcoholism because of the sexual environment in which he lived. As a member of the House of Lords, Maugham was later a pioneer campaigner against human trafficking. These were the sort of well-placed men whose goodwill Burgess exploited.
In Gibraltar Burgess went on a prolonged binge, irritated officials by importuning them to cash his travellers’ cheques, boasted of his friendships with Footman, Philby and Dick White, and committed fearful indiscretions. Kenneth Mills of MI5, who had broken a journey from Tanganyika in Gibraltar, and Teddy Dunlop, the local SIS head of station, were outraged by his misconduct and complained to London. In Tangier Burgess continued to pester British officials, gatecrashed drinks parties and luncheons, made himself unpopular by stealing the boyfriend of a popular expatriate and talked airily of secret services. Burgess’s prosecution under the Official Secrets Act was considered for his loose talk about SIS, but this idea was dropped, perhaps because it was feared that his defence in court would reveal his earlier work for MI5 and SIS. After Burgess’s return to London, Footman warned him that Vivian of SIS was gunning for him, but in fact Vivian gave his qualified approval in a report to the FO’s Security Department in January 1950. ‘His knowledge both of MI5 and S.I.S., where he has numerous friends, is, though perfectly legitimate, quite extensive,’ Vivian told Carey-Foster. ‘He has influential friends on high levels in the Foreign Office. His unnatural proclivities are, I understand, well known, but are not regarded as having caused any anxiety in official matters, and, as far as his friends are concerned, are more than balanced by his quick and alert mind, his other obvious intellectual qualities and a certain charm of conversation.’11
On 4 June 1950 Burgess had a long talk in a suburban London park with Nikolai Korovin. He conveyed his worries, and those of Philby and Blunt, about the VENONA decryptions. They had an idea that Litzi Friedmann, Philby’s ex-wife, was involved with Fuchs, and that he might compromise her under interrogation. It would be easy to trace her connections to her Viennese contemporary Edith Tudor-Hart, who had instigated Philby’s recruitment in 1934 and handled the Cambridge ring’s material when Gorsky was absent in Moscow for ten months of 1940. Korovin’s attempts to allay the Cambridge men’s fears were unsuccessful.
In August 1950 Burgess was confirmed as Second Secretary at the Washington embassy. As he was known to want to remain in London, it may be that the Personnel Department wished to provoke him into resignation. The Minister in Washington, Derick Hoyer Millar (Lord Inchyra), the Head of Chancery, Bernard Burrows, and the Security Officer all knew his bad reputation and resisted his appointment, but never suspected him of being a spy. Before his departure Burgess likened himself at a London party to Sir Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who had been hanged for treason in 1916. He was so haphazard that when he vacated his room in the Office to leave for Washington, he emptied the entire contents of his desk into a briefcase without any sorting. In the Washington embassy he was foisted on Denis Greenhill, afterwards Lord Greenhill of Harrow.12
Greenhill found Burgess unprepossessing. ‘Deep nicotine stains on his fingers and a cigarette drooping from his lips,’ Greenhill recalled. ‘Ash dropped everywhere. I took an instant dislike, and made up my mind that he would play no part in my official duties. It took little longer to find out that he was a drunken name-dropper, and totally useless to me in my work.’ He was open about his homosexuality, ‘but’, said Greenhill, ‘at that time there was no link in official minds with security’. Greenhill refused when Burgess asked to see classified telegrams that were not his concern, because he expected that his boastful subordinate would show off by talking about their contents; but had no inkling that he might be a spy.13
Philby was doubtless aghast at Burgess’s posting to Washington. Burgess invited himself to stay in Philby’s family home at 4110 Nebraska Avenue. It was against procedure for two Soviet spies to share accommodation in a foreign city, but Philby probably accepted Burgess as a house-guest in the hope of restraining his alcoholic delinquency and reckless chatter. It was a grievous mistake, which soon compromised his standing with Washington officials and visitors. When Lord Cairns, a listener at GCHQ (as GC&CS had become after the war), visited Washington to consult with the National Security Agency, the Philbys invited him to dinner: Cairns was ‘very annoyed’ by Burgess quizzing him in ‘the most searching and unpleasant manner … about GCHQ stuff’. In January 1951 Philby and his wife held a dinner party for James Angleton of the CIA, the FBI’s Robert Lamphere, the ex-FBI man William King Harvey, who was now a CIA man investigating Soviet spy rings, and Wilfrid Mann, the liaison with the CIA on atomic matters. The four guests came with their wives. Sir Robert Mackenzie, an SIS baronet in the Washington embassy, was also present. Late in the evening, when everyone was rat-arsed, Burgess blundered in drunk. Libby Harvey knew of his talents as a caricaturist and asked him to draw a sketch of her. He retaliated with an insulting cartoon which showed her dress hitched up to her waist and her chin resembling a warship’s jutting underwater battering-ram. Her husband tried to punch Burgess, Aileen Philby wept in mortification, and the party ended in furious disarray. This fiasco occurred three days after Fuchs had confessed to Skardon, and a few hours before Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. The simmering heat was moving closer to boiling point.14
As to Maclean, his Washington colleague Nicholas Henderson believed that his manner changed, and he began drinking more heavily, after Alger Hiss had been unmasked in the midsummer of 1948. Patrick Reilly thought that the Hiss case had intensified anxieties which began a slow escalation after the conviction of Nunn May. Another Washington colleague, Jock Balfour, dated the deterioration to the months after Maclean had been posted to Cairo as counsellor and Head of Chancery in September 1948. For a man whose hero was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the anti-imperialist campaigner against the British military occupation of Egypt, the post was an ideological strain. For the past seventy years no British diplomatic mission had wielded more brute imperial force than the British embassy in Cairo. The Egyptian proconsuls Lord Cromer, Lord Allenby, Lord Lloyd and Lord Killearn were great figures of imperial history. During the recent war, Cairo had been the military capital of the British Empire with up to 120,000 British and Dominion troops garrisoned there at one time. Chic visitors from Mayfair, imposing grandees from Belgravia and racy members of the Chelsea set enlivened the most densely populated city in Africa, with its degraded fellahin and epidemic disease. Ten years earlier it had been visited by Burgess’s friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. ‘Cairo,’ they wrote, ‘that immense and sinister Woolworth’s, where everything is for sale – love, lottery tickets, clothes hangers, honor, justice, indecent postcards, bootlaces, disease – as much and as cheap as you like, till the buyer goes mad with boredom and guilt.’15
The Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Cairo, Sir Ronald Campbell, had been Minister at the Washington embassy during Maclean’s time there, and expected well of him. Maclean’s unease in Cairo was obvious, though. His embassy colleague Lees Mayall saw that the discrepancies between the standards of living of Europeans and of Egyptians distressed him. Maclean expressed ‘great sympathy for the working man and indeed for any under-dog’, and supported the Jewish side in the Palestine troubles. Mayall regarded him at the time (not unsympathetically) as ‘a Left-wing intellectual’ and only with hindsight realized that he was ‘exactly the sort of person who could be a communist’. Maclean was bold in excusing traitors. He shocked the wife of a Dutch diplomat in Cairo by saying at dinner: ‘If Alger Hiss felt as he did about communism, he was quite right to betray his country.’16
In Cairo, Maclean drank deep. He broke Mayall’s leg in a drunken fracas. It has been repeatedly said that when drunk, and to alleviate stress, Maclean started having rough, perfunctory sex with male pick-ups. His wife Melinda is the one person who definitely stated this: she did so to another diplomatic wife, Kathleen Cecil, whose husband had succeeded Patrick Reilly as the FO’s liaison with SIS; she uttered the confidence only after her husband’s disappearance, during a period when she was giving misdirection so that his tracks could be lost and his activities misunderstood. There is not a jot of evidence of this in the official archives or from contemporary eyewitness accounts in other sources. A former military attaché in Cairo is said to have reported that Maclean was ‘carousing openly with promiscuous young men he picked up while cruising through town’; but these oft-repeated, unsubstantiated tales are suspect. The interest lies in the purpose of these sexual anecdotes. The intention of the nuclear scientist Wilfrid Mann’s story, that he found Burgess and Philby in bed together in Washington, drinking champagne, at ten in the morning, was to distract attention from the fact that Mann had also supplied Moscow with classified material, although he was later turned and run against the Russians.17
In December 1949 Maclean included a note asking to be relieved of Soviet intelligence work in a bundle of classified documents which he gave to the Soviet rezident in Cairo. This individual did not read this plea before forwarding it to Moscow Centre, where it was also unread. It was noticed by his controllers only in April 1950, when Maclean sent a renewed request for release from his obligation to spy for them. Meanwhile his disintegration continued apace. Robin Hooper, newly installed as head of the FO’s Personnel Department, minuted on 8 January 1950 that at a recent drunken party, during a ‘rather silly alcoholic argument, Donald Maclean stung to fury by some very silly remarks of [an] ex-Communist, said “of course you know I’m a party member – have been for years!”’ Hooper commented, in a minute that went to MI5, ‘Obviously this is not to be taken seriously, but it is evidence that D. is still hitting it up and that he is apt to be irresponsible in his cups.’18
The disaffected communist was the painter and novelist Humphrey Slater, who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain, but turned against communism and took up the bottle instead. On a later occasion, in November 1950, Slater and his second wife Moyra met Maclean by chance in a Soho street, had dinner with him, went to the Gargoyle Club afterwards and ended in a drinking session in Mark Culme-Seymour’s flat: as Maclean got drunker, he spouted ‘the Party line’ with diminishing inhibition. Humphrey Slater told several people at the Office that he thought Maclean was a party member. His novel about a Soviet spy, The Conspirator (published in 1948 by Sir Ronald Campbell’s cousin John Lehmann), was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor. In the novel Slater depicted the quandary of an intelligent young woman who has been told by her favourite cousin, under a solemn vow of secrecy, that the cousin’s husband is spying for Soviet Russia. She feels that she should warn the authorities of his treason: ‘but then, she thought, one of the most disgustingly unpleasant things about communist regimes was the obligation they put upon people to betray their dissident friends or relatives’. She decides that if she were to break her promise of secrecy, ‘she would be behaving in exactly the same inhuman way as any contemptible informer of the Gestapo or the Soviet secret police. Decent human relations were impossible, she thought, unless individual friends could trust one another and promises given as seriously as she had given hers could be expected to be honestly kept.’ Moyra Slater, talking at a drinks party with John Lehmann’s sister Rosamond Lehmann in 1950, agreed that Maclean had been a communist for years, was probably a spy and was so indiscreet that the security services must already know. The two women decided that it was not their job to denounce Maclean to the authorities explicitly, but decided to gossip widely so as to ensure that his communist allegiance was known to everybody, including the authorities.19
Maclean’s position deteriorated after his friend Philip Toynbee, a repentant ex-member of CPGB, arrived in Cairo in April 1950. They went on a succession of violent binges: Maclean struck his wife, hit an effete English aristocrat called Edward Gathorne-Hardy, threw glasses against walls and raved. As Toynbee wrote from Cairo on 9 May to Julia Mount, who fifteen years earlier had gone skiing with Maclean, ‘Poor Donald has engaged in a wild crescendo of drunken, self-destructive, plain destructive episodes.’ Melinda Maclean blamed Toynbee’s influence but, as he protested, ‘actually, I’ve done my honest best to control him’. A diplomatic incident had occurred when the two English drunks ‘smashed to pieces the flat of the American ambassador’s secretary (God knows why)’.20
It does not need God to give explanations. Maclean had twice besought Moscow to be released from his spying commitment, but had received no response. As a result of smashing the American’s apartment, he was returned post-haste to England for detoxification, which accomplished his object of escaping the immediate stress of his double life in Cairo. It is further possible that, in attacking American property, he hoped that the outcry raised by US officials would be such that Moscow would decide that his cover had been impaired and would therefore release him, as he had twice requested, from the intolerable strain of his Cairo duplicity. But the US protest was unexpectedly muted, and Sir Ronald Campbell was determined not to ruin the career of a member of his staff. Campbell had a record of feeling responsible for people in difficulty. When Yugoslavia had been overrun by the Italians in 1941, the Belgrade legation staff, under his unruffled leadership, made a cross-country trek to Kotor, where Campbell’s persuasive tenacity enabled 100 vulnerable people, not only the legation staff, to leave Yugoslavia and escape Italian clutches. His protective empathy during Maclean’s disgrace may have been influenced by another matter. Campbell was a bachelor who was accompanied in his overseas postings by a devoted manservant whom Campbell had in the past defended from prurient criticisms. Like anyone of sense and experience, he disliked people’s private habits being held against them if they were good at their work.
Edwin Chapman-Andrews of the Cairo embassy reported Maclean’s breakdown to the FO’s Personnel Department on 10 May 1950 in gendered language: ‘He is a very good man, fundamentally, and well worth making a very special effort for.’ Melinda Maclean was blamed for her husband’s collapse. ‘She is a vivacious and no doubt attractive person and the whole build-up of her character is so definitely American and can never become anything else that I think there has been some maladjustment.’ Through her hard-drinking compatriots on the US embassy staff her husband had fallen in with ‘a fast set keen on sitting up late at night or all night and assing about a bit’. This had brought him to an alcoholic breakdown. ‘He has become thoroughly ashamed and disgusted with himself,’ reported Chapman-Andrews. ‘What he needs is quietness and green fields and a little good companionship.’ He recommended Maclean’s transfer to the Foreign Office, ‘where his wife would at least have a chance to become a little anglicized’.21
For Campbell and Chapman-Andrews, as for any able diplomat, tolerance was a hallmark of civilization. ‘The British upper-class code encourages variation,’ reported Crane Brinton of OSS, ‘once a few essentials are complied with.’ When in 1948 it had been reported to Sir Alexander Cadogan, head of the British delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, that Burgess had provoked outrage by attending a meeting of the Balkan sub-committee drunk with cosmetics on his face, Cadogan replied ‘that the Foreign Office traditionally tolerated innocent eccentricity’.22
In London Maclean lived first in the Mascot Hotel, off Baker Street, and later moved to 41 York Street, Marylebone. He declined to go for treatment by the Office’s Harley Street physician and insisted on becoming the patient of Dr Erna Rosenbaum in Wimpole Street. Her consulting-rooms were a few minutes’ walk from the Mascot Hotel and York Street. It is unclear how he knew of Rosenbaum after seven years abroad in Washington and Cairo; unclear, too, why the Office agreed to his insistence. Middleton and Carey-Foster became suspicious of Rosenbaum after her patient absconded, but MI5 could find no material against her. Any chance of success for her treatment was dashed when, in August 1950, Mark Culme-Seymour (who had introduced Maclean to Melinda Marling and had been best man at their wedding) arranged for him to become a member of the Gargoyle Club at 69 Dean Street, Soho. The Gargoyle was open to members only, and thus circumvented the regulations, first introduced under the Defence of the Realm Act during the First World War, which limited the hours when licensed premises could serve the public with alcohol from noon to 2.40 p.m. and 6.30 to 9.30 p.m.
Maclean had for sixteen years kept a cordon sanitaire between him and the other two Cambridge spies recruited in 1934, but this was breached by joining the Gargoyle. Philby had been a pre-war regular, and Burgess a habitué since 1943. Maclean, who kept control of himself at the Office, could discard all inhibitions at the Gargoyle, which was blasé about rowdy scenes. He got hugely drunk night after night, accosting other Gargoyle habitués with admissions such as ‘I work for Uncle Joe’ or ‘I’m the Hiss of England, you know that!’ One night, seeing Goronwy Rees in the Gargoyle, he snarled, ‘I know all about you, you bastard: you used to be one of us, but you ratted!’ Culme-Seymour considered whether to report Maclean’s startling avowals to the Foreign Office, but decided that as they were being broadcast to all and sundry at the Gargoyle, the authorities would already have heard. It was not only in the Gargoyle that Maclean had furious outbursts. Over lunch in the Travellers with his colleague Sir Anthony Rumbold he became so vehement in denouncing American policy in Korea that Rumbold had to work hard to avoid a dining-room scene.23
Maclean resumed work in November 1950 as head of the FO’s American Department. He commuted from the family home, a modern house called Beacon Shaw, on the edge of the village of Tatsfield, near Sevenoaks in Kent. During the intensified freeze in the Cold War, which followed China’s intervention in the Korean war in October, he continued to purvey valuable material for Moscow. In December that year Attlee hastened to Washington to discourage President Truman from deploying atomic bombs in Korea. A copy of the Prime Minister’s report to the Cabinet on his visit to Washington lay among the secret papers found in Maclean’s steel filing cabinet at the Office after his disappearance. Another copy will have gone to Moscow. Neither Burgess nor Maclean had access to operational decisions, however: the claim of General Douglas MacArthur, commander-in-chief of US forces in the Far East and of UN forces in Korea, that his strategy had been foiled by their forewarning of the enemy is a self-serving absurdity. Cyril Connolly, who encountered Maclean at the Gargoyle in this period, thought his appearance was frightening. ‘His hands would tremble, his face was usually a vivid yellow, and he looked as if he had spent the night sitting up in a tunnel.’ One evening a man got into a taxi outside a nightclub only to find Maclean asleep in the back with a rug and furious at being woken: he had hired the cab for the night as his bedroom. ‘Though he remained detached and amiable as ever, it was clear to us that he was miserable,’ wrote Connolly. ‘In conversation a kind of shutter would fall as if he had returned to some basic and incommunicable anxiety.’24
On 18 March 1951 the Observer published Toynbee’s article ‘Alger Hiss and his Friends’ in which he criticized liberals who wanted to whitewash Hiss by blackguarding Whittaker Chambers (he did not deign to mention Elizabeth Bentley). Correctly but unfashionably Toynbee called Chambers’s conduct ‘reasonable and decent’, before declaring: ‘It is now established beyond reasonable doubt that Alger Hiss had at one time divulged State Department secrets to the Communists. And this must surely have given them an unbreakable hold on him.’ Talk of unbreakable holds upset Maclean, who had failed in Cairo to break free from Moscow’s grip. He may have convinced himself that world peace depended upon preserving an even balance between the United States and the Soviet Union, which required him to supply Moscow with material on, for example, Anglo-American policy towards Korea; but most of all he felt semi-captive to the MGB, which held the means to compel him. A few nights later, blind-drunk in the Gargoyle, he chanced upon Toynbee. ‘You are a Judas, and I am the English Alger Hiss,’ he proclaimed before shoving Toynbee backwards into the band.25
In March 1951 a new VENONA decrypt of a message to Moscow in 1944 stated that HOMER had visited New York to see his pregnant American wife. It was easily established that Maclean had done just this. He was put under close investigation by MI5, which gave him the codename CURZON. The Security Service advised the Foreign Office that in order to obtain a confession from Maclean, it was better to muster and collate evidence before interrogating him. The cryptographic evidence against him was conclusive, but could not be used in an open criminal trial or even in the questioning of him. MI5’s aims were twofold: to extract the evidence for a prosecution from the sort of confessional debriefing that had cornered Nunn May and Fuchs; and also to collect information and understand the background far beyond Maclean’s individual case. This could not be achieved hurriedly. Sillitoe was anxious to conciliate Hoover, who had been enraged by the Nunn May and Fuchs cases. He informed and consulted the FBI at every stage after HOMER had been identified as Maclean; but every message to Hoover crossed Philby’s desk.
The Foreign Office did not expect the MI5 investigation, which was run by Arthur Martin, to last nearly three months. Special Branch and the MI5 watchers decided that it would be impossible to keep the isolated Tatsfield house under surveillance without being spotted. Maclean seems to have chosen the house with care: it stood on its own, back from the road; he could leave it in four different directions; any car waiting near the house for more than a few hours would be conspicuous. Watchers followed him in London only as far as the ticket barrier at Charing Cross station, but said that they lacked the resources to cover him beyond there. Carey-Foster once glimpsed him in Pall Mall, near the Travellers, with the watchers following too closely behind. Patrick Reilly, too, saw him returning to the Office after lunch, crossing from St James’s Park to the Clive Steps, walking fast with his head down and looking disarrayed. The man following him was obvious. Maclean’s face was ravaged by drink, Reilly recalled, yet his office work remained impeccable. In mid-April he lunched at the Travellers with Wayland Young, a young diplomat who was chafing at Office life and asked the older man in all innocence how to cope with frustration. Maclean may have thought that he was being tested, or enticed towards admissions, for his responses were stolid and cagey. His meetings with his Soviet control, Yuri Modin, will have been halted as soon as Philby’s reports on HOMER reached Moscow or whenever Maclean spotted his watchers – whichever was sooner.
Every update from MI5 to the FBI crossed Philby’s Washington desk. Hitherto he had used Burgess as his courier to the illegal rezident in New York, Valerii Makayev, but the threat to Maclean was so grave that Philby took the risk of meeting Makayev to give a face-to-face report. Of all the Cambridge spies, Maclean was held in the highest esteem by the Soviets: his reports were reliable and his loyalty seemed unimpeachable, despite his requests to be released from his onerous Cairo duties. They also understood that his nerves were too frail to withstand interrogation, and feared that he would reveal Philby’s part in his recruitment.
There were many ways to forewarn Maclean in London, where he had an effective handler in the person of Modin. There was no need to involve Burgess in alerting Maclean to his looming danger of interrogation. But Burgess’s situation in the United States rapidly became untenable. On 28 February he drove at headlong pace from Washington to Charleston and picked up a young black hitchhiker and gas-station loafer, James Turck, whose appearance may have suggested his exciting history. Turck had been arrested by police in Richmond, Virginia, under puritanical morality laws, for living with a married woman, was later sentenced to a year’s probation for aggravated sexual assault and was suspected of petty theft. The FBI later interviewed him in an intimidating way, and got the responses that they wanted: Turck said that Burgess had made sexual overtures to him during the journey to Charleston and renewed his advances during the night that they spent in a motel. Probably Turck was not as averse to such advances on the right terms as he claimed to the FBI.
Burgess’s car was stopped for excessive speeding three times within a few hours. He was obstreperous with policemen, claimed diplomatic immunity and was disgracefully provocative. In Charleston, where he was due to speak at a military academy, he was drunk and contentious. On 16 March, at a cocktail party given by Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA, he rowed with his host about the Korean war, and other guests had to intervene to stop a brawl. In early April, at the time when the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death by electrocution, Burgess went on holiday with his mother Eve Bassett to Charleston. On 18 April, after returning to Washington, Burgess was rebuked by the Ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, for his motoring offences, for his rudeness at the military academy and for the Roosevelt scrimmage. He was ordered to return in disgrace to England.
Burgess reached London on 7 May, and returned to his flat in Old Bond Street which he continued to share with Jack Hewit, the working-class former boyfriend of Christopher Isherwood. In the three weeks that followed he combined colossal alcohol intake with Nembutal (barbiturates) at night to sleep and Benzedrine (amphetamines) to revive his daytime mind. The Benzedrine will have rendered him prone to making ingenious, quasi-paranoid connections between incidents and people that were in truth unconnected. References to an Old Bond Street flat suggest Mayfair luxury, which was belied by the dirty brickwork, tired pointing and chipped and faded paint on the window-frames of the building. Burgess’s roof-top rooms, with their poky, grimy dormer windows, were far from a penthouse. The downstairs premises were occupied by a textiles and garments merchant.
Burgess conferred with Blunt, and then visited Rees. He repented trusting the latter as a source on All Souls appeasers in 1938–9, and wanted to assess if Rees was likely to inform MI5 of what he knew of the activities of Burgess and Blunt for the NKVD. Next he lunched at the Royal Automobile Club with Maclean, whom he had not seen for years. Maclean had already spotted that he was being watched, had noticed that since 17 April files with high-security classification had been withheld from him, assumed that his mail and telephone communications were being intercepted and expected that there were bugging devices inside Beacon Shaw. Maclean was reluctant to defect, however, as his wife was scheduled for a Caesarean birth in mid-June. Perhaps as a fumbled misdirection to MI5, which did not hear of the incident until later, Burgess visited Victor Rothschild’s sister Miriam and said that he wished to lease her expensive Mayfair flat. He consulted the Eton headmaster, Robert Birley, about a project to write a biography of the Victorian statesman Lord Salisbury, and discussed the same idea with Quentin Bell, whom he met at the Reform, and James Pope-Hennessy. He telephoned the poet Stephen Spender in the hope of reaching W. H. Auden, who was visiting London from New York. Tomás Harris’s wife had barred Burgess from their house; but two or so days before his disappearance he was allowed a visit. When Harris asked after Philby, Burgess put his head in his hands, said, ‘Don’t speak to me of Kim – nobody could have been more wonderful to me,’ and burst into tears.26
On 19 May he attended the Apostles’ annual dinner in Cambridge, where the youngest guest was Peter Marris, who had read philosophy and psychology at Cambridge, served as a soldier in the British occupying forces in Japan shortly after the dropping of the nuclear bombs and then spent two years as a colonial district officer in Kenya: he resigned because he decided that sound administration was no substitute for self-government, and had been ashamed at his inaction when a policeman shot dead an unarmed schoolboy standing a yard from him. Marris represented a new generation, both hardened and compassionate, which felt moral disgust about colonial injustice and cruelty, but was averse to political theories that proclaimed their historical inevitability and excused the mass murders of Stalinism. Burgess pressed Marris to accept a lift back to London, and then treated the ex-colonial district officer as if he was indistinguishable from the American drifter James Turck: he was so ‘aggressive and insinuating’ in the car that Marris asked to be let out when it reached Whitestone Pond atop Hampstead Heath.27
Accounts of the next few days by its chief protagonists are confusing: people later lied in self-defence, misremembered in wishful thinking, were too upset to be consistent, enjoyed a chance for malice or were inherently untrustworthy. Many of the details of this phase hold biographical but not general historical interest. The important points are these.
Andrew Boyle stated in 1979 that Herbert Morrison, Bevin’s successor as Foreign Secretary, ‘quashed the delaying tactics of his senior officials’ and upheld MI5’s proposal for an immediate interrogation of Maclean. This untruth is particularly objectionable, because it fosters the suspicion that diplomats were trying to protect a fellow member of the old-boy network. There was no advantage for the Foreign Office in delay: indeed, it was positively awkward to ensure that ultra-sensitive material did not go to the American Department where Maclean might see it. Some officials, notably the Deputy Under Secretary of State, Roger Makins, were impatient for a confrontation after months of insecurity. Strang, PUS, found the Security Service slow-moving, and in particular faulted its delay in interrogating Maclean once it was certain that he was a traitor. On 25 May Morrison was asked for authorization to interrogate Maclean on Monday 28 May and gave it. The interrogation was set for the Monday because, in accordance with the undertaking given to the FBI, Hoover had first to be told.28
Much about the running of agents and incriminating of spies is a matter of fine timing. ‘Think of all this Burgess and Maclean stuff we’re always reading about,’ J. C. Masterman wrote in 1956. ‘They were allowed to run on after suspicion had been aroused, and a fine mess everyone made of it. Of course if they’d not got away, but had been quietly picked up at a convenient moment, everyone would have said how efficient our security was and how skilfully it worked; but as things turned out it proved a blunder.’29
In the light of warnings from Philby in Washington, the MGB’s man in London, Yuri Modin, urged both Blunt and Maclean to defect. Reared in a culture of torture, purges and executions, it was unthinkable for him that a traitor might take the risk of exposure and arrest: yet Blunt refused outright, while Maclean prevaricated because of his wife’s difficult pregnancy. Finally a plan was concocted (possibly by Blunt) for Burgess to accompany Maclean on to a ship, the Falaise, which was leaving Southampton late on the Friday night of 25 May for a weekend pleasure cruise to French seaside towns. Maclean’s name was on a border control checklist, and a Southampton passport officer telephoned MI5 in London to report his departure for France. SIS officers in western European capitals were immediately alerted, but the Sûreté in Paris was not informed, for fear of leakages to journalists: a well-founded fear, since the Daily Express bureau in Paris received a tip-off after the French counter-espionage service, known as the SDECE, became involved. At Saint Malo, after breakfast on Saturday morning, Burgess and Maclean went ashore, leaving their luggage behind, and fled to Berne, where they collected false passports. On Sunday 27 May they reached safety behind the Iron Curtain in Prague.
For an Eton and Cambridge man of his generation, Burgess was a poor letter-writer. His incoherent, rambling screeds, with their self-contradictions and diffuse irrelevancies, show that he seldom stopped to think before starting to write a sentence, never knew what he was going to say in it or how he would finish it. His pen skimmed across the paper in a spree of ink without thought of consequences or endings. One example is a letter to Liddell of February 1950 after his disgrace in Gibraltar and Tangier:
my career appears ruined on present form. However I feel like Foch (my left retreats, my right ceded, my centre crumbles, j’attaque) and Churchill (Disaster? Unutterable. I feel 20 years younger) combined and am meditating a gigantic spring campaign, but don’t yet know whether to launch it in the political stratosphere or the official heavy side layer. Or whether to resign, or not launch it at all. The whole balloon really is Robinson Vivian plus whoever is the Heath of your office. Sorry to waste time – tho’ when the campaign opens I fear I’ll waste more (but not yours).30
The thinking behind Burgess’s jaunt on the Falaise seems equally confused. The MGB, via Modin, may have misled him into thinking that he would be free to return to England from Switzerland, but their intention was probably always to retain him. Although he was not yet suspected in London of treachery, he would certainly be interviewed, for he had been seen in London recently with Maclean, had previously lived with Philby, who was one of the few people indoctrinated into the HOMER investigation, and was therefore in a position to forewarn Maclean; and the trio had been contemporaries at Cambridge. Once Burgess came under scrutiny, he was too rackety to survive questions about his undeniable, inexplicable and incriminating associations.
One sure sign of the hectic events in London, after the Southampton passport officer’s report, is that Guy Liddell’s office diary went out of kilter. The entry for Sunday is entirely redacted, but misdated as if it was Monday. The Monday entry is dated for Tuesday. MI5 and SIS were working at full pelt to find Maclean. All the SIS officers in Berlin were summoned to their headquarters in the Olympic stadium on Saturday 26 May, given photographs and spent a sleepless weekend scrutinizing everyone passing the security checkpoints into the Soviet sector of the city. One of these officers, Anthony Cavendish, recalled being handed photographs of both Burgess and Maclean, although it is often stated that Burgess’s disappearance was not realized until the Monday, 28 May.31
Certainly it was not until after the weekend of 26–27 May that William Manser, a trade attaché at the legation in Berne who knew Burgess by sight, was visited by ‘the resident cloak-and-dagger man’ in Berne. The SIS station head told him that Burgess and Maclean were ‘defecting’ and, when Manser showed that he didn’t grasp the meaning of the word, half shouted in exasperation, ‘They’re going to Russia!’ Manser was told to hurry to Ascona on the shores of Lake Maggiore, where intelligence reports suggested the absconders now were. ‘Pick a fight,’ ordered the SIS man. ‘Get yourselves arrested. The Swiss police are au fait. Do anything!’ Manser found these instructions hard to take seriously (‘members of the Foreign Office’, he mused, ‘did not betray their country’), and asked: ‘Do you want me to kill him?’ The head of station stayed mute. Manser spent some days searching Ascona for Burgess: by then the fugitives were far away.32
When Burgess did not return on Sunday evening to Old Bond Street, a puzzled Hewit telephoned Blunt, who advised him not to worry. Hewit, against Blunt’s advice, next telephoned Rees. Blunt and Footman were then contacted by Rees saying that he suspected that Burgess had debunked to Moscow. At about eleven on Monday morning Footman reported Burgess’s absence to Liddell. On Monday afternoon, Melinda Maclean (having waited the weekend, as arranged) reported to Carey-Foster that her husband was missing. It seems that neither SIS nor MI5 had informed the Office of this fact which the security services had known all weekend. Carey-Foster and Reilly informed Strang, and were joined by Sillitoe and White from MI5. Blunt meanwhile visited Rees to try to persuade him to keep quiet. He also searched the Old Bond Street flat for incriminating material, but missed a guitar case containing, among other documents, letters from Blunt, a postcard from Philby and a bundle of Treasury documents which were identified by MI5’s Evelyn McBarnet and Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville as prepared by John Cairncross. Liddell tried to contact Blunt during the day, but could reach him only in the evening. White flew to Paris to try to concert action: he and Liddell were dismayed by the way that the Sûreté and SDECE turned every particle of French intelligence work into ammunition for the crossfire in their skirmishing for primacy. MI5 officers began interviewing the men and women who they hoped had crucial evidence. Blunt was regularly consulted by Liddell. Tommy Harris, Goronwy Rees, Victor and Tess Rothschild and others were asked what they knew or could suggest. It is impossible to overstate how shocked and incredulous every official was.
The two defectors had months of arduous debriefing. In October 1951 they were granted Soviet citizenship, awarded hefty salaries and allotted spacious apartments in distant Kuibishev (this Stalinist substitution for the old place-name of Samara commemorated a communist engineer). As an industrial conurbation, full of munitions works and strategic factories, Kuibishev was a ‘closed city’ which no one could legally visit without authorization – still less could anyone stay overnight. Burgess and Maclean were thus, in effect, kept in a cordoned area. The inability to stay quiet, and the fidgety need to act, were two of Burgess’s conspicuous failings. Maclean’s sense of his own dignity depended upon showing his efficiency at work: inactivity and aimless time-filling were for him akin to suspended animation. Maclean briskly learnt Russian, and was given work teaching English to apparatchiks: Burgess, who never gained more than a rudimentary knowledge of key Russian words, prowled and drank and smoked. The two Englishmen’s anonymity was safe in Kuibishev, standing on a bend of the River Volga, with its drab modern buildings rising from the surrounding plain like a cluster of stalagmites; but the lack of purpose made for burdensome days. They were not seen by westerners for more than five years: yet during their durance as non-persons in Kuibishev, they were never forgotten. The ‘missing diplomats’ were a pervasive cultural force in the 1950s, who had disappeared but never went away.33