Lady Maclean tried to convince Skardon that her son had disappeared because he was dreading the arrival in England of his brash American mother-in-law. Nigel Burgess thought his brother had gone on a deliberately mystifying holiday so that he could pretend when he returned that he had been on a secret mission for Churchill. The story spread in White’s that Burgess and Maclean had gone to France to bugger one another, that Burgess had murdered Maclean during a tiff and had dumped the corpse in a river. At All Souls the story was that the pair had absconded with an unnamed MP. Humphrey Slater suggested that the Russians feared that Maclean was backsliding from his creed and might denounce ex-comrades as Bentley and Chambers had done, and had exfiltrated him with the object of liquidation. David Footman convinced himself that Maclean was being blackmailed in une affaire de moeurs in Paris, that Burgess tried to help in extracting him from the imbroglio and that the extortionists had murdered them in the French capital. Many people suggested that in a quixotic gesture the two diplomats were ‘trying to do a Hess’ – making a unilateral peace mission to Russia comparable to the flight by Hitler’s deputy to Scotland in 1941. Bob Stewart of the CPGB suggested that the missing diplomats were pretending to be hunted refugees so that they could reach Moscow and spy there for London. The chairman of the Wine Society, Edmund Penning-Rowsell, on whom MI5 kept a file and who was known as ‘the Bollinger Bolshevist’ because of his politics, told Nigel Burgess that the missing diplomats had been kidnapped by American agents for interrogation so as to give the State Department an edge over the Foreign Office in security matters. When Nigel Burgess demurred, Penning-Rowsell shook his head sagely and said such things happened all the time. As late as August, T. S. Eliot believed what he read in the News of the World: ‘the mystery of Maclean and Burgess, the missing diplomats, will soon be solved. The dénouement will be undramatic and quite unconnected with anything to do with Communism or the Iron Curtain.’1
MI5’s apprehensions about the leakiness of the French police were confirmed on 6 June by the Paris office of the Daily Express receiving a telephone tip-off from a police source that two British diplomats had vanished. Next day Beaverbrook’s newspaper broke the story on its front page. ‘The news of their disappearance exploded with megaton impact in Whitehall,’ one of its journalists later crowed. Over the next ten years Beaverbrook’s nationalistic newspaper spent nearly £100,000 chasing ‘missing diplomat’ stories. Like its rivals, it offered bribes for catchy quotes or vivid stories that could be passed off as true. A young babysitter was offered £100 to purloin Maclean family photographs from Beacon Shaw. Jack Hewit was taken to Paris by the Express in a stunt to search for the missing diplomats, and was remunerated for making various sensational but useless remarks. The financial rewards were such that Hewit even forged an incriminating letter from the young diplomat Fred Warner to Burgess. Scores of people with connections to Burgess or Maclean were pestered by Daily Express reporters protesting ‘we are only doing our job’. Its editor sent handsome young Don Seaman to Ischia to interview W. H. Auden, who had known Burgess in New York: Seaman (best known as a racetrack sprinter) was an inexperienced interviewer who garbled what he heard and reported that Burgess knew Nunn May (in fact it was Maclean who had been at Trinity Hall with the atomic spy). Journalists’ cars blocked Rees’s driveway so that he could not leave home; the doorbell and telephone rang without cease; his children were tempted with chocolates and half-crowns to make quotable remarks; one reporter tried to lure Margaret Rees into admissions with the disarming remark, ‘It’s all right to talk to me, Mrs Rees, I’m bisexual myself.’2
On 11 June Sillitoe flew to Washington, where he was to placate and update Hoover. The trip was meant to be secret, but the Daily Express published a photograph of Sillitoe emplaning – a security breach that prolonged American displeasure with MI5. Beaverbrook’s hacks took the line that Burgess, like Maclean, came from a rich, privileged family and that accordingly the authorities were trying ‘to paper over the scandal’. The Daily Express was proud that its tenacity in pursuing the missing diplomats, and in investigating their social sets, discomfited Whitehall and aroused official displeasure. The newspaper was so strenuous and noisy that for a few days MI5’s Courtenay Young was able to pooh-pooh the rumours by saying ‘the whole thing was an Express scare’.3
The animosity of Beaverbrook’s newspapers was such that Sillitoe sought an off-the-record lunch, on 24 July, with E. J. (‘Robbie’) Robertson, editor-in-chief of the group, John Gordon, the harsh bigot who edited the Sunday Express, and Percy Elland, editor of the Evening Standard. Robertson had first come to Beaverbrook’s attention as a Toronto hotel bellhop carrying the future press lord’s suitcases. He continued to do his master’s bidding, and was a master of po-faced humbug, as when he testified to the Royal Commission on the Press in 1948 that the walls of the Daily Express news-room were plastered with notices insisting to staff that accuracy was indispensable. ‘We cannot look anywhere without seeing them,’ he said, without adding that they were there as a reminder not to get caught in inaccuracies or inventions. Sillitoe complained that the Beaverbrook press had blackguarded the authorities for not preventing the defection to Russia of the Harwell atomic scientist Bruno Pontecorvo in September 1950, but denounced ‘Star Chamber’ tyranny when the same authorities withdrew the passport of Eric Burhop, a nuclear physicist who wanted to visit Moscow. ‘Was their policy to pick up any old stick and beat the Government?’ Sillitoe asked. Robertson, Gordon and Elland gave evasive replies. Sillitoe then objected to the onslaught on MI5, which he suspected was on orders from ‘the Beaver’. Sillitoe reminded the three editors that these attacks ‘did not come very well from that quarter, seeing that it was Beaverbrook who was raking the internment camps during the war and filling up our research with people of the type of FUCHS. Moreover, in doing so he was going directly against the advice of the Security authorities.’4
Beaverbrook’s editors took revenge on Sillitoe for criticizing their boss. As a signal that they would damage him personally if he continued to censure the Beaver, the Daily Express soon splashed a rancorous story headlined, ‘M.I.5 SILLITOE TAKES A (Burgess–Maclean) HOLIDAY’. It reported that the Director General and his seventeen-year-old son were staying at the Hôtel Cécil in the French seaside resort of La Baule. ‘Sir Percy insists that he is on holiday, that all he is hunting is sunshine,’ the newspaper reported with another disrespectful photograph. ‘Sir Percy also insisted that he knew nothing new about the missing diplomats. The place to look for them, he said, was behind the Iron Curtain.’ Sillitoe was travelling without a bodyguard, they added: ‘the local police are a little peeved with Sir Percy’, as they had not been forewarned of his arrival. Given the semi-Stalinist tradition of vindictive character attacks in the Express newspapers, it is understandable that the modernist Fleet Street building that housed their offices was nicknamed the Black Lubianka.5
The information reaching Whitehall from Washington, from European capitals, from Gargoyle habitués and from other social sources was too confused, disturbing and anomalous to be absorbed, ordered and publicly acknowledged. On the night that Beaverbrook’s presses rolled with the first public reports of the missing diplomats there came the first fatality: Philip Jordan, Attlee’s press secretary, died of a heart attack aged forty-eight. He was an exceptional man, educated at the Royal Naval College with the intention of becoming an officer, but had swerved into journalism after being hired as the Chicago Tribune’s tennis correspondent on the French Riviera. He was converted to militant socialism in 1927 when he saw the brutality of the Paris police in dealing with marchers protesting at the frying of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair. He at once set up a first-aid station in the lobby of the Paris office of the Daily Mail. The Mail’s chief correspondent in Paris, who had just sent a telegram to the London paper declaring that the French capital was overrun by ‘Asiatic Jews’ making razor attacks on gendarmes, started yelling from a staircase about ‘Bolsheviks’ and kept shrieking ‘bastards’ at the wounded. ‘I decided that I would never buy the Mail again,’ recalled Jordan, ‘and it is one of the few good resolutions that I have ever kept.’6
Jordan was intrepid, with superb connections across the world. With a beautiful Swedish wife (who had managed a beauty parlour on the Champs-Elysées) and a house overlooking the Regent’s Park, and as someone who believed with a passion in ‘fair deals for extremists’, Jordan was the sort of man whom populists and conspiracy theorists like to denigrate. The facts that he had published a book entitled Russian Glory in 1942, that he had served as press secretary at the Washington embassy when Maclean was also working there, that like Maclean he was a member of the Travellers, that Francis Meynell the Daily Herald jewels-smuggler wrote his obituary tribute in The Times, and that the government did not grant a pension to his widow were adduced, after the publication in 1979 of Andrew Boyle’s The Climate of Treason, as signs that he too was a suspected spy. Malcolm Muggeridge gained publicity in 1979 by claiming to Andrew Boyle that he had organized Jordan’s Fleet Street memorial service and that Attlee had refused to attend. The truth is that Mr and Mrs Attlee headed the list of those attending the church.7
MI5’s treatment of Melinda Maclean was gentler than Fleet Street’s. When Skardon first interviewed her on 30 May, he found her calm and self-contained. Knowing that she was due for a Caesarean birth within a fortnight, he was solicitous in not adding to her stress. By contrast, the press showed no mercy in besieging Beacon Shaw. The driveway gates had to be padlocked and the curtains drawn so as to deter the journalists shouting boorish questions and the photographers snapping intrusive shots. In retrospect, there is no doubt that Melinda Maclean knew about her husband’s secret work for Moscow before they married in 1940. She was aware of his continuing commitment in Washington, Cairo and the Office. She was complicit in his weekend dash for safety, understood what was planned with Burgess and delayed reporting that he was missing until he was far away. Her children were overheard making such remarks as ‘My Daddy works to stop all wars.’ Yet MI5 were considerate, attentive and even fatherly in protecting her. Skardon, who worked to keep the trust of all the Maclean family, determined to treat her account as credible until he had evidence that it was false. Ronnie Reed of MI5, who interviewed her with her mother on 10 August, regretted that she was still being vexed by ‘newspaper hounds’. At the Foreign Office Patrick Reilly believed that ‘the Maclean family have every motive to help us’ if they could be protected from the ‘hullabaloo’ of press stunts. ‘I wish something cd be done to stop Mrs Maclean from being molested,’ minuted the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, after a Daily Mirror story in September. ‘She is having a rough time.’8
For many people the strain after the Daily Express broke the story was intolerable. Inverchapel’s death on 5 July was hastened by his devastation at the betrayal that had occurred in his Washington embassy. June and July of 1951 passed in ‘a nightmarish blur’ for Reilly. One evening he read a minute in which Carey-Foster urged him to implement a recommendation over which he had been hesitating. ‘This entirely justified reproach touched off a violent nerve storm,’ Reilly recorded. ‘Within seconds I demolished the solid wooden chair in which I had been sitting. I stood for a long time looking aghast at its ruins. Then I collected the debris together, put my papers away in my safe, and went off to bed, deeply shaken and ashamed.’9
In Whitehall there was extreme concern about Washington reactions to these defections, which came so soon after Fuchs’s trial and Pontecorvo’s defection. On 5 June Milo Talbot de Malahide forwarded to Dick White an emphatic message from the Washington Ambassador, Sir Oliver Franks, to the effect that ‘our best chance of securing cooperation and secrecy on the American side is that we keep them continually informed and never let them feel that we are holding back from them. If this latter feeling ever grew up I should fear efforts of public self-defence by Hoover of the FBI who can be, and sometimes is, very unreasonable.’ Whitehall did not dare to follow this good counsel. All the training and habits of the security services were against following a precept of Churchill’s. ‘In politics,’ said the war leader, ‘if you have something good to give, give a little at a time, but if you have something bad to get rid of, give it all together and brace the recipients to receive it.’ MI5 and SIS did not dare to tell their American counterparts that Maclean had been under observation at the time of his disappearance. Whitehall press officers were told to keep their mouths clenched shut, which made journalists suspect that the missing diplomats were being protected by ex-colleagues, whereas it was confidential sources of top-grade information – such as VENONA – that were being protected. On 9 June a watch list including the names of Goronwy Rees, James Klugmann, Philip Toynbee and Anthony Blunt was issued to passport officers at ports. By the end of June Philby, Footman and Blunt were under intense investigations. Acquaintances of the missing men were methodically interviewed. None of these developments could be briefed off the record to any Fleet Street journalist.10
The veteran statesman Lord Simon interrupted work on his memoirs on 11 June to prepare a memorandum ‘The Mystery of Maclean and Burgess’. As Foreign Secretary, and as a friend of his parents, he had welcomed Maclean into the Diplomatic Service in 1934. He suspected that the two diplomats had been kidnapped at Saint Malo by Soviet agents in order to arouse tensions and intensify mistrust between the United States and the United Kingdom. ‘What better means’, Simon asked, of bringing Whitehall, and especially the Office, ‘under sharp reproach from the other side of the Atlantic’ than by engineering ‘another instance of apparent slackness plus treachery à la Fuchs’? He supposed that Burgess and Maclean had already been killed. ‘The men would be of no value to the Government in Moscow, for I do not suppose they have any material secrets to disclose. They are not like a man of science who possesses the secret of our atom-bomb experiments. The value of their capture is merely that it creates a mystery which will prompt many people on both sides of the Atlantic to think that this is another case of inadequate screening and of cold-blooded treachery.’11
Alan Maclean, then personal secretary to Gladwyn Jebb at the United Nations, was summoned back from New York. When his aircraft landed at Prestwick, the passport inspectors at border control isolated him in a small room, where they questioned him with insolent contempt before permitting him to continue to London. There he was whisked by Daimler to the Foreign Office’s Personnel Department in Carlton House Terrace. On the drive he was treated with such ominous civility that he thought, ‘they’re not arresting me: they’re going to kill me’. In the event, he received blandishments rather than threats when he began his series of interviews with Skardon, whom he likened to a convivial stoat. ‘We became friends of a working sort. He was a nice, unpretentious and even cosy man, who got on famously with my mother. They made each other laugh, and he never said a nasty thing about Donald to her – or to me for that matter. He was considerate in many small ways, and made her path through the woods less thorny.’ The defections meant, so Harold Nicolson predicted on 11 June, that ‘the old easy-going confidence of the FO … will be destroyed and henceforth everybody with begin to distrust everybody else. I do hate that. It is the loss of one more element of civilization. We used to trust our colleagues absolutely. Now we cannot any more.’ The truth of this prophecy was soon shown. Herbert Morrison, as Foreign Secretary, judged Alan Maclean guilty by fraternity, and insisted that he must leave his United Nations post and resign from the Diplomatic Service. This was not the only such travesty: in the same month, after Morrison removed the semi-retired ‘Old China hand’ Sir John Pratt from an official committee because of his sympathies with North Korea, the Daily Mail, supporting Pratt’s dismissal, traduced him as villainous on the basis that his younger brother was Boris Karloff, the Hollywood actor who played evil monsters.12
‘We are all agog about the two Missing Diplomats,’ the novelist Rose Macaulay told an American friend. Literary London was intrigued by their escapade, she said, as ‘most of us knew them’. Her fellow novelist Nancy Mitford was Parisian by adoption. ‘We eat & drink & breathe Burgess & nobody thinks of anything else,’ she wrote from the French capital on 11 June. ‘The frog papers are quite sure it is sex,’ although she supposed that ‘if they were just bouncing about on some double bed they would have been found by now. Oh the fascination.’ She had discussed the missing diplomats with her brother-in-law Sir Oswald Mosley, who suspected that ‘Burgess was probably always communisant & Maclean horrified by the trend towards war, & both together thought out some Hess-like mission.’ Another novelist, Rosamond Lehmann, Rees’s ex-lover who knew of Burgess’s recruitment approach to him, telephoned Stewart Menzies of SIS, who showed no interest in her information. She was then put in touch with MI5 by Harold Nicolson, with whom Burgess had almost certainly had vanilla sex during 1936. It was, however, not until October that she was interviewed by Skardon in a safe-house in Mayfair.13
Goronwy Rees’s reaction to the disappearance was tragic for himself and destructive for others. He was in a funk: afraid of being unmasked as a Soviet informer on All Souls opinion before the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939; fearful, too, of jeopardizing his relations with the college and SIS (for which he did part-time work at headquarters). Apart from the possibility of criminal prosecution, he was married with small children and short of money. He was drinking heavily, excitable and fuddled, and harmed himself by his agitated and unconvincing behaviour. He gave an absurd interview about Burgess to the Daily Mail. ‘He was in some ways one of the most patriotic Englishmen I have ever known and was entirely free from the kind of denigration of British social life and political policy which is typical of most Communists. He was absurdly sentimental about England.’14
Rees was interviewed by both Liddell and White, and gave a garbled account of Burgess’s recruitment overtures which he claimed to have resisted. He implicated Blunt, towards whom he evinced a strong and burgeoning antipathy. Sensing the dislike of him by White and Liddell, he became panicky and widened his denunciations of Burgess and Blunt into accusations against innocent men, notably Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire. Zaehner had run SIS counter-intelligence operations in Iran in 1943–5, had served as Press Attaché and SIS representative in the Tehran embassy until 1947, had trained anti-communist Albanians who were later betrayed by Philby in 1949, and was to be elected alongside Rees as a Fellow of All Souls in 1952. ‘The idea of Zaehner as a Soviet agent was grotesque,’ Isaiah Berlin judged. Rees’s accusations against Zaehner were all the sadder because the ex-SIS man’s ‘loyalty to him was beyond words’: when Rees became ostracized in Oxford, and suffered crushing misfortunes in his career, Zaehner ‘stood by him through thick and thin’.15
Rees’s other wrong-headed Oxford target was the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who had been a wartime intelligence officer and later conducted a security review at GCHQ. MI5 investigations discredited both accusations. ‘Goronwy is an utterly changed character,’ Hampshire wrote of him early in 1952, ‘he seems invalid, uncertain, almost apologetic and somehow broken … the physical basis of his vitality has collapsed, and he simply asks for kindness.’ In time Rees began to besmirch Liddell, who had tried to persuade him to keep quiet and minimize disturbance. He aroused doubts that harmed Liddell’s standing in his lifetime and posthumously. White was incensed that it had taken Rees thirteen years to tell MI5 that he knew Burgess to be working for Moscow. ‘I thought he was a four-letter man. If he knew these things, why hadn’t he come forward? Then he went into this spiel that he assumed we knew it all. So I said, “You assumed we knew! Burgess was working for the Russians, and we did nothing about it! What can you mean?”’16
Other denunciations were made: Rebecca West told Sir Toby Mathew, the Director of Public Prosecutions, that Footman was a Soviet spy, and later spoke of Inverchapel as a communist. She suspected that the missing diplomats had been spirited to Moscow ‘simply to weaken public confidence and make mischief between America and England’. She also badgered her publisher Harold Macmillan, who was a Conservative frontbencher in the Commons, with her suspicions. Lists of names, which might become suspect names, were accumulated day by day. Tomás Harris’s telephone was tapped as the result of a stray remark by Aileen Philby to Nicholas Elliott of SIS. Doubts about Footman were pervasive: talking with Dick White, Robert Cecil asked, ‘What about David Footman? He is not necessarily in the clear.’ White replied: ‘You can say that again.’ Hector McNeil, who regarded the missing diplomats as ‘two sad unbalanced creatures who took a hysterical jump’, named Burgess’s ‘chief friends’ as Blunt, Footman and Philby. His political career was ruined by his association with Burgess. He lost favour with his party’s leader Attlee, put his energies into promoting the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Britain and died at the age of forty-eight after suffering a stroke on an Atlantic liner taking him to New York.17
Under instructions from Moscow, Yuri Modin of the MGB urged Blunt to follow Burgess and Maclean in defecting. Modin was dumbfounded when Blunt refused. For Blunt the intellectual fulfilment of directing the Courtauld Institute would not be matched by the dour ideological confinement of Soviet cultural bureaucracy. He was confident that there was no evidence that could be brought against him in court, and perhaps little evidence altogether. He may have been buoyed by his tacit standing with Liddell and White. They and Roger Hollis used him as an informal consultant. He explained the milieux of the missing men, provided guidance on personal histories and connections between Cambridge and London, and helped MI5 to manage Burgess’s bewildered mother. To distance himself from past associates and previous convictions, Blunt resigned from the Reform Club, which he had joined together with Burgess in 1937. Miranda Carter reported a tentative notion of Stuart Hampshire’s that Blunt made limited, informal admissions to Liddell and White in June 1951, and thereafter was accepted by them, without explicit discussion, as someone who had made a limited transfer of allegiance to their side. It is curious that although White was soon convinced of Philby’s guilt, and obtained his recall to London in July, he made no move against Blunt. When MI5 turned to question Blunt, it was done gently, first by Courtenay Young and then by Skardon.
Skardon found grim amusement in his dealings with the Burgess and Maclean families. Eve Bassett, Burgess’s doting mother, was, he reported, ‘a very stupid woman, and made a great many suggestions to account for his disappearance, most of them being slightly comic. These suggestions were greeted by her spouse with derogatory snorts.’ Later Skardon showed his sardonic humour by arranging a charade at Waterloo station. ‘One morning Jim rang up very jolly, to say that I could now collect Donald’s belongings which he had left on the cross-Channel ferry,’ as Alan Maclean recalled. ‘He mentioned, a shade too casually, that as all their belongings were mixed up, it would be sensible if Colonel Bassett, Guy’s step-father, and I went together to Waterloo Station and picked out our respective family treasures.’ An official car collected both men. ‘The Colonel was dressed for war – impeccably pin-striped, complete with bowler and rolled umbrella and just a whiff of expensive aftershave.’ Skardon joined them, ‘silent and smiling … bent on enjoying the outing’. They were met at Waterloo by an imposing station master in top hat and tails who, seeming both excited and embarrassed, led the trio to his gloomy office where sad-looking objects and clothes were piled. ‘You go first, Colonel,’ young Maclean said respectfully. ‘No,’ the Colonel replied. ‘We’ll do it fair. Turn and turn about.’ Both men decided to get the business over at top speed. They chose items entirely at random, without a moment’s thought, one after another, until only two items remained: a pair of filthy, torn black pyjamas and a revolting pair of socks which were stiff with dried sweat and had holes in heels and toes. Alan Maclean felt sure that they were both Burgess’s, and said so. The Colonel disagreed, and snorted, ‘Your chap’s.’ Maclean had an inspired reply. ‘Donald never wore pyjamas’, he said. ‘A sin against Nature, he once told me.’ The Colonel paused for a moment, shut his eyes, tried to find an excuse, opened them and accepted defeat. ‘Right,’ he said, hooking the pyjamas into his bag with the handle of his umbrella, ‘but you’re having those bloody socks.’ As they crossed the station concourse, Maclean saw a big, wire-meshed rubbish bin. ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘look!’ ‘Good man,’ he said, and both pyjamas and socks were binned. MI5’s car dropped Bassett at the United Services Club (‘the Senior’) in Pall Mall. He shook hands with Alan Maclean, nearly smiled, but thought better of it. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed your morning, Jim,’ Maclean told his remaining companion. Skardon sighed: ‘I’ve had a lovely time.’18
In the weeks immediately after the two men had vanished, White kept insisting to MI5 officers: ‘We must trust everyone unless there is proof to the contrary.’ He knew how mistrust can damage organizations. Everybody of sense and responsibility understood the destructiveness of paranoid accusations. When the defections came to be debated in the House of Commons in 1955, it is noticeable that two Tory MPs with intelligence backgrounds, Dick Brooman-White and Rupert Speir, both supported positive vetting, but decried any outbreak of McCarthy-style witch-hunts in England. There had once been too much reliance on ‘the old-boy network’ in vetting intelligence officers, White told an SIS conference in 1961, ‘but we can’t tolerate Gestapo-style coverage’.19
Sir David Kelly, Ambassador in Moscow, struggled to save Fred Warner, his First Secretary in the embassy, from having his career wrecked by the associative guilt of his friendship with Burgess. Warner was ‘sincerely horrified’ by the turn of events, Kelly reported; but he strove in vain to protect Warner, who was soon posted from the fast lane of Moscow to the dead-end of Rangoon. At Kelly’s suggestion, Warner submitted a long handwritten report on his knowledge of Burgess, which was passed by Carey-Foster to MI5. He listed Burgess’s respectable circle as comprising himself, Hector McNeil and his wife, Kenneth Younger, ‘Isaiah Berlin of All Souls’, Charles Fletcher-Cooke, ‘Mr David Footman of Broadway’, Arthur Marshall, a camp and comic housemaster at Oundle School, the Cambridge don Noël Annan, Goronwy Rees, Ellis Waterhouse, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, Harold Nicolson and his son Benedict, and Hester Marsden-Smedley, who eleven years earlier had first recommended Philby to her colleagues in SIS as a possible recruit. ‘His best friend’, Warner judged, ‘was Professor Blunt, the Keeper of the King’s Pictures. On all these people he would rely for support, and he was such a loyal friend in intention that they generally felt ashamed of withholding it, although his friendship might have become only burdensome.’ This list of friends, commented Kelly to Carey-Foster, ‘is as impressive as it is to me astonishing’.20
Warner was targeted for attention by the Daily Express. In August 1952 its prize reporter Sefton (‘Tom’) Delmer obtained Hollis’s private telephone number from Bill Cavendish-Bentinck and sought a meeting with an MI5 officer. When J. C. Robertson saw him at the Lansdowne Club, he said that he was handling Burgess–Maclean investigations for Beaverbrook’s newspaper, which intended to shadow Warner during his upcoming summer holiday in mainland Europe. When Delmer hinted at the possibility of his paper collaborating with MI5, Robertson replied that if the Daily Express chose to ‘trail’ Warner abroad, this would not be harmful, and that MI5 would be glad to hear of any results. ‘He is a worldly, shrewd, suave individual with considerable charm,’ Robertson reported of Delmer. ‘Treated cautiously, I think he might on occasion prove a very useful contact for the office.’21
The first anniversary of the disappearances revived press interest in June 1952. Press photographers took shots of the Maclean children at their school, made a mob at the Beacon Shaw gateway and on 6 June Ernest Ashwick @ Ascheri filed a false Daily Express story from Zurich that Maclean was living in Prague sustained by illicit Swiss bank accounts. MI5’s Anthony Simkins minuted on 10 July: ‘many people (and perhaps most women) would say that the Security Services have taken a very naïve attitude to Melinda MACLEAN’. She must have heard versions of the drunken admissions that her husband had thrown at Culme-Seymour, Slater, Toynbee and others at the Gargoyle: moreover, Simkins argued, ‘even if she was not a party to Donald’s escape, she knew at once what was behind it’.22
Melinda Maclean was helped in her purposes by official distaste for Beaverbrook’s vendetta. A Daily Express story of 16 July contained quotes from her, which she could prove were fabricated. Lady Violet Bonham Carter complained in The Times on 21 July about the harassment of this lone woman stuck at Beacon Shaw with her small children. Sympathy for her intensified: with the prior consent of MI5, she took her children to live in the relative anonymity of Geneva in September 1952. There she misled friends by saying that she was contemplating divorce. Nora Beloff, the Paris correspondent of the Observer, was sent by her editor David Astor to report the harassment to which Melinda Maclean had been subjected by reporters and photographers. ‘She was dishonestly demure,’ Beloff recalled, ‘behaving like a bereaved widow who knew nothing of how, why or where her husband had vanished.’ A year later, in September 1953, newspaper headlines blazoned Melinda Maclean’s disappearance with her children behind the Iron Curtain to join her husband. ‘The Express is especially enjoying it!’ noted Harold Macmillan. ‘She may have been in it from the beginning,’ Aileen Philby told Moyra Slater in a bugged telephone call after the news had broken. ‘She was very Red at one period … but on the other hand, she swore she knew nothing about it.’23
There remained in London another Maclean woman to harass. Some years later the spitefulness of journalists was such that they prompted the porter of Lady Maclean’s block of flats in Kensington to report her to the ground landlords for taking a paying-guest against the terms of her flat’s lease. She needed the money of her lodger and, as an old woman living alone, welcomed the companionship. But it was thought that there was the making of a good story if the spy’s aged titled mother was put out on the street. The landlords had more sense.
It took only a few days for MI5 to suspect Philby and give him the codename PEACH. He rejected the possibility of emulating Maclean’s desperate flight. In mid-June an SIS expert in the fabrication of deception material arrived in Washington bearing a handwritten letter from Jack Easton of SIS forewarning him to expect ‘a most immediate, personal, decipher-yourself telegram from the Chief’ summoning him to London. ‘Why should Easton warn me of the impending summons and why in his own handwriting if the order was to reach me through the normal telegraphic channels anyway?’ Philby wondered. He concluded that Easton’s letter was intended to prompt him to flee, if he was guilty, and thus to save SIS from the awkwardness of confronting a traitor.24
According to Philby, Easton was surprised when he appeared at SIS headquarters in Broadway. They proceeded together to MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House, where (with Easton in attendance) Philby underwent the first of two interrogations by White. His published account of these interviews was prepared in 1967–8, when White was still Chief of SIS, and was designed to diminish White and damage SIS. It is clever but untrustworthy. White, who was hampered in his questioning by his inability to use confidentially obtained incriminating material, had no doubt of Philby’s guilt. The Volkov affair, viewed in retrospect from 1951, convinced him. Reilly and Carey-Foster at the Foreign Office were of the same mind as White. What they felt sure to be true, and what they could prove, were far apart: they might have exclaimed ‘As if evidence were the test of truth!’, Cardinal Newman’s indignant retort when someone expressed doubt about reports that St Winifred had walked about after her decapitation. Philby’s friends and colleagues in SIS were however loath to believe the calumnies spread by non-SIS men such as White of MI5 and Reilly and Carey-Foster of the FO. This has been represented – notably by John le Carré – as a matter of class bias; but it is understandable that any department would doubt that one of its most efficient, successful and admired officers had been working all along for the enemy. The loyalty of colleagues working together should preclude such a thought.
Washington meanwhile declared Philby persona non grata. He went to see Menzies, ‘C’, to whom his opening remark was reportedly: ‘I’m no good to you now, and never will be again. I’ll put in my resignation. I think you’d better let me go.’ This manly self-sacrifice was thought admirably unselfish at SIS, although of course it meant that he resigned before any question of dismissal was raised. Philby, however, maintained that he had been dismissed, and instead of a pension was given a gratuity of £2,000 with another £2,000 coming in instalments over two years. An unconvincing gang of workmen began many weeks’ digging the road outside his temporary English home, The Sun Box, at Rickmansworth. On 10 July an incoming call to The Sun Box, from ‘Bunny’ in Rugby, was recorded. Aileen Philby was alone in The Sun Box with the children, who were ‘making a hell of a row’. She railed against Burgess. ‘You know our escapist lived in our house in Washington?’ she asked. ‘This is absolutely on the Q.T. [hush-hush] … It’s mucked Kim. It’s the most wicked thing that ever happened.’ She avoided naming Burgess on the telephone: ‘one of Kim’s oldest friends’, she called him, ‘the unmarried one … you’ve met him, ducky.’ Aileen Philby told ‘Bunny’ that they had twice asked him to vacate his room in their Washington house, but he did not leave until Franks ordered his return to London. After he had left, Aileen Philby asked, ‘Kim, have I really got to have him back in my house?’ and was reassured by the reply: ‘No, he’s worn out all the friendship I ever had.’ It was ‘an absolute stinker’ that ‘the Americans won’t play as far as Kim is concerned’. Although his colleagues, she said, ‘backed him 100% … it was impossible to fight the crazy outlook which the Americans had on things. The individuals with whom he had worked were all for him and she knew of one who was fighting like mad for him … It had all been rather a pity because Kim was being coached for a big job.’25
In November, after careful preparation, the barrister and wartime MI5 officer Helenus Milmo (flanked by Arthur Martin) interrogated Philby. Like White, Milmo was handicapped by having intelligent conjecture, but not evidence, to arm his attack on Philby. All Philby needed to do was to avoid contradicting what he had said previously, and to concede nothing in answering Milmo’s questions and accusations. There was no need for cleverness or subtlety: exaggerating his stutter so as to pace his responses carefully, it was easy to evade awkward questions from a team that had no evidence. It did not matter that he was unconvincing. So long as he continued his denials, however implausible, he could not be touched. Accounts of this interrogation by Milmo are partisan and contradictory: ‘some felt that he was perhaps too much of a gentleman for that daunting task – though a first-class cross-examiner’. Others say that, after failing to lure Philby into inconsistencies or admissions, Milmo resorted to bluster and shouted accusations without intimidating or ruffling Philby.26
Skardon accompanied Philby to The Sun Box, after the final Milmo interview, to collect the suspect’s passport, which was temporarily impounded. During the journey to Hertfordshire, ‘Skardon wasted his breath sermonizing on the Advisability of Co-operating with the Authorities,’ recalled Philby, who was too relieved at surviving the Milmo ordeal to listen. Skardon continued interrogations at intervals over several weeks. ‘He was scrupulously courteous, his manner verging on the exquisite,’ said Philby: ‘nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions’; yet he had no more success than White or Milmo.27
Denial is part of what it means to be human. Individuals, households and institutions all require ‘a blind zone of blocked attention and self-deception’, as the South African-born sociologist Stan Cohen has shown. The preservative silences, false alibis and ‘vital lies’ inside families about violence, sexual abuse, emotional deformity, bullying, adultery, alcoholism, gambling addiction and disappointment have their equivalents in official life. ‘Government bureaucracies, political parties, professional associations, religions, armies and police all have their own forms of cover-up,’ says Cohen. ‘Such collective denial results from professional ethics, traditions of loyalty and secrecy, mutual reciprocity and codes of silence.’ Denial may not be intentional lying: individuals, groups and societies can reach states of mind in which they simultaneously know a situation and don’t know it.28
Philby’s allies in SIS were in fervent denial of his guilt. White and others in MI5 were equally set on denial of his innocence. SIS opinion preferred to suspect Liddell: after years of hard work and shrewd service in Special Branch and MI5, he became a dubious object whose hopes of succeeding Sillitoe as Director General were dashed by the protracted sequels to the defections of 1951. Liddell was slow to accept the possibility of Burgess’s guilt, and was friendly with Blunt. His tolerant urbanity, which meant that he was on easy terms with gay men without feeling a need to avoid their company or make a show of repudiating their behaviour, made him suddenly suspect among unimaginative he-men. Quite apart from the personal issues involving Philby and Liddell, the friction between SIS and MI5 over suspicions and culpability in the case of the missing diplomats, the shock and wider departmental skirmishing within Whitehall, Washington’s exasperation and London’s discomfiture were bonuses for the MGB.
Only one member of the ring of five had a clean cut-loose. Weeks before Burgess and Maclean decamped Cairncross had once again undergone an inter-departmental transfer after alienating his superior: in May he had been shifted from the Treasury to the Ministry of Supply. He had been recruited to spy by Blunt and Burgess, and had known Maclean remotely at the Foreign Office and the Travellers, but it is unclear how well he knew Philby. On 23 June Modin advised that the defections should not endanger his position, but that he should leave England if he seemed close to arrest. Modin also primed him on handling counter-intelligence interrogations, which the NKGB/MGB had failed to do with Nunn May and Fuchs. On 23 June, and at a later meeting in July, Cairncross supplied parcels of secret documents totalling 1,339 pages. Material about weaponry, military equipment and rearmament was considered so important that it was reported direct to Stalin. Cairncross brought further documents to a meeting on 20 August.
After Evelyn McBarnet and Jock Colville had identified Cairncross as the author of the unsigned aides-memoires describing confidential Whitehall discussions, he was put under surveillance. A telephone tap revealed that he had arranged to meet Modin in Gunnersbury Park; but Modin spotted the watchers. In September Cairncross was summoned for interrogation by Arthur Martin, whose aggressive questions were along expected lines and for which Cairncross had rehearsed answers. He said that he had known Burgess somewhat, but had not seen him since 1943. He and Maclean knew one another slightly, as fellow members of the Travellers, but had never eaten a meal together there. He conceded that he had sympathized with communist views on Nazi Germany, but insisted that he had never joined the CPGB. He was suspended from the civil service, required to resign and encouraged to live overseas.
Philby’s other contacts were pursued by MI5. The discovery in Burgess’s papers of detailed and revealing summaries made by Peter Smolka of informal discussions among wartime officials led to a round of interviews with people who had known Philby’s former business partner. Alan Roger was asked for his memories of Smolka’s journey from Russia through the Caucasus to Tehran in 1944. Roger recalled him as ‘filled with open admiration for Russia and things Russian, but many people were then’. Nothing was said or done to make Roger suspect his visitor of being a communist. Investigation by Skardon and others led to a re-evaluation of Smolka. The earlier view, which Philby had helped to form, that Smolka was too cowardly and lazy to be a sincere communist or an effective agent changed. It was realized that he had always been a bold and irredeemable believer in Marxist doctrine: indeed in 1952 he had been an active member of the Vienna communist party. By then he was out of reach in the Soviet sector of Vienna, where he lived in a comfortable villa and ran his father’s factory making metal kitchenware, buckles, locks, shoehorns and shoe-trees.29
Another historic contact of Philby’s, Edith Tudor-Hart, had been suspect for years. As a young Viennese visitor she had joined the CPGB in 1927, and had been expelled from Britain soon afterwards. She had been enabled to return by a marriage that entitled her to a British passport. Unknown to MI5, she had made the first recruitment approach to Philby in 1934. A year later MI5 watchers saw her being visited by the London illegals’ courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle. She was known to have sought contact in 1937 with Wilfred Macartney, who had previously been imprisoned for attempted RAF espionage. It was established in 1938 that she had supplied Percy Glading with a Leica camera and other photographic equipment. In 1946 she was heard soliciting work as a CPGB courier at a bugged meeting in a London hotel with Bob Stewart and Willie Gallacher, the communist MP for West Fife.
In 1951 Tudor-Hart still held a CPGB membership card under the alias of Betty Grey. She was evidently alarmed by the Burgess–Maclean defections, for in August 1951 (speaking to a friend who was an MI5 informant) she expressed anxiety about a police raid on her flat, and destroyed photographic negatives which might harm her if found by the police. These included posed portraits of Glading’s barrister Denis Pritt and of Philby, whom she called ‘an ace man in MI5’ (sic). An MI5 officer prepared an evaluation in advance of her interview: a ‘rather typical emotional, introspective and somewhat intellectual Viennese Jewess’, he called her, with ‘a morbid interest in psychology and psychiatry’. In October 1951 she was heard to say in a bugged conversation that party membership was of paramount importance to her; if she lost faith in the party, she would have nothing left. An MI5 source described her that autumn as ‘a sick woman, highly neurotic and suffering from a persecution mania’.30
MI5 watchers were set on her, preparatory to the interrogation of Philby, but it was found that efficient observation of her flat at 12 Grove End Court in St John’s Wood could not be maintained by fewer than eight men. Tudor-Hart had a mentally impaired son, Tommy, who was boarded at the Rudolf Steiner School in Aberdeen. The boy had previously been treated by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was eminent for his work on true and false selves. MI5 understood that Winnicott and Tudor-Hart were or had been lovers. If so, she will have been stricken by Winnicott’s curt typewritten letter of 2 January 1952, acknowledging one from her about Tommy’s treatment, with the handwritten postscript reading, ‘I think that you would like to know from me that I have remarried.’31
Certainly she was prostrate when Skardon and his colleague A. F. Burbidge, calling himself Mr Burlington, went unannounced to her flat on 8 January 1952. ‘A woman came to the door in response to our ring,’ Skardon reported: ‘we had some difficulty in penetrating to the bedroom and having got there even more difficulty in getting rid of the unwanted woman before starting the interrogation of Mrs TUDOR-HART. The latter was lying in bed, a low divan, and proved for various reasons to be a difficult person to interview.’ In answer to their questions about Litzi Friedmann and her family, Tudor-Hart ‘sheltered not only behind a faulty memory but also behind the fact that for some years she has been much distracted by caring for an invalid boy … She was quite indecisive in her replies and always unhelpful.’ For an hour Tudor-Hart prevaricated with Skardon and Burbidge: ‘she was completely composed and answered questions in the manner of a person well trained to resist an interrogation’. But in the days that followed she became paranoid, and had to be hospitalized at Epsom.32
Skardon made a sweep of old cases. The extent of the espionage by Frederick Meredith and Major Wilfrid Vernon, who had been run by Ernst Weiss and HARRY II, had become clearer to MI5 after 1945. They gained Meredith’s cooperation, but did not approach Vernon, who was by then a Labour MP, so as not to embarrass Attlee’s socialist government: the Security Service was as chary of seeming to attack Labour politicians as it had been with Jack Hayes in 1929. This inhibition was released after Vernon’s defeat in the general election of October 1951. Skardon reread the files and prepared tactics before interviewing Vernon at his Beckenham house in February 1952.
The interview began by Skardon telling the Major that the Security Service knew that he had worked for Moscow’s agents, Weiss and HARRY II, in association with Meredith. ‘VERNON was completely deflated,’ Skardon reported. ‘He had commenced the interview by taking a seat at his table and adopting something of an “elder statesman” pose. There was no doubt at all that he was completely shattered by the allegations I had made, and for a time was unable to orientate his thoughts.’ Skardon stressed that neither Weiss nor Meredith had been detained despite MI5’s knowledge of the conspiracy. ‘I asked him to assume from these facts that I was not there in an offensive or belligerent way, and told him that the authorities were not anxious to embark upon a prosecution. We desired to fill in gaps in our knowledge and since this particular conspiracy had existed undetected for three years, we were concerned to-day to find out as much about it as possible, simply so that we might arm ourselves against present enemies of the Service.’ Vernon temporized. He talked with anxious flummery about the Left Book Club, Chamberlain’s coquetting with Hitler and his duty to his country, but told Skardon nothing that he did not already know. ‘Over and over again he would bring himself to the point of telling me exactly what he had done in his illicit association with MEREDITH, WEISS and HARRY II, but would check himself before making the actual disclosures,’ Skardon reported. His overall assessment shows a generosity which one cannot imagine in an FBI or KGB interrogator. ‘VERNON is a straightforward and upright person according to the dictates of his own conscience,’ about which he was somewhat vain. ‘It is unlikely that he would be guilty of any petty meanness’: he was not a liar, and preferred evasive silence to deceit. He had almost the ‘simplicity’ of a Russian holy fool: ‘not particularly intelligent’; ‘he has probably been a pretty honest but not very brilliant Member of Parliament’.33
Smolka was out of reach of interrogators. Tudor-Hart’s fearful disintegration was conclusive evidence of her guilt. The undertaking not to prosecute Meredith or Vernon – the preference to collect precise knowledge of their activities and connections rather than to put defunct spies in the dock – left the Major free to continue as a figure of ineffectual conscientiousness on Camberwell borough council. But as the next two chapters will show, that most destructive of maelstroms, a moral panic, had been gathering apace from the moment in June 1951 that the diplomats disappeared. The phrase ‘moral panic’ was not coined until 1972, when Stan Cohen used it in his sociological study of the Mods v. Rockers culture clashes. Cohen defined such a panic as occurring when an episode, an individual or group of people suddenly become defined as weakening society’s aims and values and as threatening prevailing statuses, interests, ideologies and values. The nature of the threat is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media so as to raise alarm and dread. Moral barricades are manned by editors, columnists, politicians, public moralists, accredited experts and unlicensed mischief-makers. When Burgess and Maclean vanished from the Falaise at Saint Malo, they started an inextinguishable moral panic about the arcane mysteries of the class system and the instabilities of sexuality. From this public consternation ensued the follies, abasements and fanaticism of their compatriots’ deepening obsession with spy rings. In 1951 the defecting diplomats launched a new national hobby of taunting and debasing government service. Their most enduring damage was just begun.34