The inquest on the missing diplomats turned into a frontal attack on the governing cadre in Whitehall, on metropolitan elites, on trained expertise and on the Foreign Office in particular. The heavy guns used in this onslaught were the problems of social exclusion and class divisions. While teaching underground propaganda to SOE’s trainee saboteurs in 1940–1, Philby and Burgess had both studied the craft of spreading stories intended to arouse divisive suspicion among one’s opponents and to lower their morale. This chapter shows the successful deployment, after Burgess and Maclean had absconded, of injurious and subversive half-truths which destabilized the London government and are still reverberating more than sixty-five years later. The rhetoric against ‘the Establishment’ that overwhelmed Britain in 2016, and overturned its place in the world order, first began as a Moscow-serving refrain after the two diplomats had vanished behind the Iron Curtain.
The Foreign Office had been a Marxist target since the 1920s. It typified and represented ‘the British ruling-class’, and was therefore inimical to the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Norman Ewer wrote in Labour Monthly in 1927. ‘Hard fact forbids peace between a caste determined to cling to its privileges and to its power of exploitation, and an aroused working class determined to abolish that privilege and to free itself from that exploitation.’ Maisky, as Ambassador in London, took a similar line in moments of party orthodoxy. Vansittart, he said, was ‘flesh of the flesh of the ruling class of Great Britain’ and hell-bent on ‘resisting the forces of historical progress’.1
After September 1939, the Office was blamed by some for failing to avert war. When the Labour MP Hugh Dalton told Daily Herald readers that British diplomats were ‘tired and elderly, too traditional and too gentlemanly to be a match for Hitler’s gangsters’, no one asked if Dalton wanted a civil service that was the equal of the Nazis. The ‘Red Clydesider’ MP David Kirkwood denounced ‘the old school tie’ predominance in the Diplomatic Service and denied the benefits of having an elite of carefully chosen men. Morgan Price, Labour MP for a mining constituency, decried the Diplomatic Service as ‘a closed caste’ of privileged, out-of-touch idlers, and insisted that ‘there is a greater air of reality in the atmosphere of a Consulate than that of an Embassy’ as if commercial travellers, wayward tourists and stamped visas were more important in the world than bilateral negotiations, confidential talks, the sifting of opinion among traders, soldiers and newspaper prophets, the measurement of popular moods and movements, and official démenti. W. J. (‘Bill’) Brown, the trade unionist MP for Rugby, objected that staffing reforms introduced in 1943 assumed ‘a necessary connection between education and diplomatic ability’. These reforms, said Brown, were ‘undemocratic’ because they excluded non-university men: they failed to make ‘the Diplomatic Service safe for democracy’, but instead ensured that ‘the Diplomatic Service [stayed] safe for the old gang … safe for the boys of the governing class of this country’.2
Sir Eric Phipps, Maclean’s former chief in the Paris embassy, posed the right question in this controversy: ‘Diplomatists are being accused of living too sheltered lives; but was it not rather the public that was allowed to live in a sheltered world of illusions while HM representatives abroad struggled with grim realities?’ The fatal errors of the 1930s had arisen from politicians pandering to an electorate with strong but uninformed views rather than giving corrective leadership. Without politicians who were trusted by voters when they told unwelcome truths, Phipps continued, ‘no great results will come from merely divesting the diplomat of his old school tie’. Self-seeking politicians who misrepresented the national interests to gullible or scared voters did more danger than the envoys and plenipotentiaries, patriots but not small-islander nationalists, murmuring cautions or delivering protests in the coulisses of power.3
Burgess liked to report to Moscow that he was surrounded in the Office by Etonians, who wrapped him in tendrils of trust on the basis of his OE tie; but his class analysis was stereotypically Marxist rather than accurate. Small independent schools in the smaller provincial cities gave the educational grounding of many of them. William Ridsdale, his chief in the News Department, had been educated at Sir Thomas Rich’s School, also known as the Blue Coat School, in Gloucester. Ridsdale’s deputy Norman Nash originated in Geelong, Australia. Another member of the department, William (‘Bertie’) Hesmondhalgh, had been a pupil at St Edward’s School in the Oxford suburb of Summertown. Burgess’s closest colleague in the Far Eastern Department, Frank (‘Tommy’) Tomlinson, had been educated at High Pavement School in Nottingham. What united such men was a dislike of closed systems and totalitarian states.
The Foreign Office was no more of a closed caste than the Quai d’Orsay in Paris or equivalent ministries in European capitals. In 1949, for example, the Italian Ambassador to the Court of St James’s was Duca Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, the Portuguese Ambassador was the Duque de Palmela, the acting Spanish Ambassador was the Duque de Sanlúcar la Mayor, the Danish Ambassador was Count Eduard Reventlow, the Belgian Ambassador in London was Vicomte Alain Obert de Thieusies, and the Dutch Ambassador was Jonkheer Michiels van Verduynen. Baron Geoffroy Chodron de Courcel, French Ambassador in London during 1962–72, was the grandson of Baron Alphonse Chodron de Courcel, who had held the same post during the 1890s. Courcel’s successor in 1972 was Jacques Delarüe-Caron de Beaumarchais, descendant of the diplomat used by Louis XVI of France to supply munitions to the rebel colonialists in the American War of Independence. Patricians like Carel-Godfried (‘Pim’), Baron van Boetzelaer van Oosterhout, successively Dutch diplomatic representative in London, Ambassador in Washington and Minister of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, suggest that most western European countries found advantages in using adaptive survivors of anciens régimes to represent them internationally. Many organizations are strengthened by evolving an aristocratic cadre. ‘The carefully nurtured feeling of belonging to a nobility in the KGB’ was a source of strength, judged the East German Stasi’s spymaster Markus Wolf.4
The Burgess and Maclean scandal broke at a time when England’s traditional ruling classes were experiencing unprecedented domestic misfortune. Sir Alexander Cadogan had been brought up on a Suffolk estate, Culford, with 400 acres of parkland amid an additional 11,000 acres: his father, who also owned Chelsea House in London, had enlarged Culford to contain fifty-one bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms and eleven reception rooms; there was indoor and outdoor staff in abundance. Cadogan’s diaries, which during his five years as British representative at the United Nations Security Council in New York had chronicled the va et vient, poste et riposte of world statesmanship, degenerated after his return to London in 1951 into a lament about workshy cleaners, a ‘Swiss slut cook … on the verge of a nervous breakdown’, ‘a lazy liar’ of a housemaid, ‘the useless old daily hag’, forty-five-minute queues to buy groceries, and a brand new Rootes motor-car that kept breaking down. For the first time in his life Cadogan lacked a reliable supply of clean shirts, attempted housework and made breakfasts for himself and his wife. ‘These domestic crises are really a curse,’ he noted in 1951. ‘I don’t know what will happen to civilisation if all educated people are condemned to spend the whole of their time in domestic chores.’ Similarly when Harold Macmillan and his wife went on a summer holiday in Scotland in 1953, visiting aristocratic in-laws and cousins, they found Cabinet ministers’ wives cooking for their own dinner parties. The Macmillans stayed in hotels so as to avoid ‘putting too much strain on them. One can only stay nowadays in the few remaining houses of the very rich.’ It is easy to overlook the sapping of energy and confidence that these social changes brought on England, a depletion that persisted until the 1980s. Before leaving for Whitehall each morning, senior officials had, in Zola’s phrase, to swallow their daily toad of failure and disgust.5
Lord Inverchapel, while Ambassador in Moscow, had described British journalists as ‘obscure people without honour in their own country’. During the 1950s, particularly after the advent of commercial television in 1955, sales of mass-circulation newspapers fell, and advertising revenues followed. Editors and proprietors felt commercial pressure to grab attention. They hoped to profit by belittling their targets. Stories became more aggressive, more irresponsible, more unforgiving, more careless of accuracy and more unfair to individuals. Privileges were attacked, but also weakness. ‘The humblest and poorest names in the land often feel the scourge of the whip of the gutter press,’ as Randolph Churchill noted in 1958. If a plumber’s daughter in Balham killed herself, or a Birmingham carpenter’s wife was raped, their homes were besieged by a horde of reporters trying to bully or bribe the family into providing ‘human-interest stories’, and faced a battery of photographers, who did not scruple to set ladders against walls and snap pictures through upstairs windows. Fleet Street exploited the squalid recesses of tragic stories, and fought reader apathy by conjuring outbursts of rabid hostility.6
The Foreign Office was believed by Fleet Street to be stonewalling. It would neither confirm nor deny major leads or irrelevant titbits obtained by reporters. There was a sound but unavowable reason and strong prompting for these sealed lips: Maclean had been identified and put under surveillance entirely because of the ultra-secret VENONA decrypts (known in the Office as BRIDE). ‘It is most important to conceal from the Russians our knowledge of Bride material,’ was Milo Talbot de Malahide’s summary in 1953. ‘This is really an MI5 point, but we have felt bound to accept it and our policy of silence is built upon it.’ If the Russians knew that London was extracting material from their encrypted wireless traffic of the mid-1940s, ‘they could take defensive action, which would probably ruin any chance we still have of making use of the knowledge we obtain this way’. In reality, both Philby and Soviet agents in the United States had given early alerts to Moscow of the ongoing decryptions, but this betrayal was not known in London for many years. It was to protect the intelligence advantage bestowed by VENONA, as Talbot de Malahide explained, that the Office concealed the fact that Maclean had been under investigation before he disappeared. ‘I know that MI5 attach very great importance to our doing so.’7
The existence of SIS was not officially admitted until the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, and much of its activities were subject to the D-notice security system and could not be reported. The Foreign Office was therefore a massive, visible target for snipers, while SIS was not. The obscure people without honour, in Inverchapel’s formulation, who ran Beaverbrook’s newspapers led the way in maligning the Office. Nancy Mitford, in her novel about the Paris embassy, fictionalized the Daily Express as a rag ‘once considered suitable for schoolroom reading’ called the Daily Post, which ‘fed on scandal, grief and all forms of human misery, exposing them with a sort of spiteful glee which the public evidently relished, since the more cruelly the Daily Post tortured its victims the higher its circulation rose. Its policy, if it could be said to have one, was to be against foreign countries, cultural bodies and … above all it abominated the Foreign Office.’8
Rebecca West wrote in 1954 to Charles Curran, a journalist who had worked on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard: ‘more and more do I feel that the Old Man is under the influence of someone who presses the Communist line on him’. West, who had been Beaverbrook’s mistress, thought ‘few people realize quite how stupid the Old Man is about anything and everything except making money’. He could master a balance sheet in a trice, but was easily duped on other matters. His anti-German obsession, ‘mania about Burgess and Maclean’ and ‘passionate desire to go on hounding the F.O. about them’ suited Soviet purposes.9
In her complaint to Curran, West mentioned Sefton (‘Tom’) Delmer, the Daily Express chief foreign reporter. Delmer had been a correspondent in Berlin during the Weimar and Hitler years. In 1939 he made a failed attempt to join MI5, found work in the BBC, and then ran SOE’s subversive political warfare section spreading destructive rumours and false stories in war propaganda directed against Nazi Germany. Delmer showed ruthless hostility to those surviving leaders of the German Social Democratic party who were exiled in wartime London and were anathema to Moscow. He had projected a clandestine European Revolutionary Radio Station, which was to beam messages of revolutionary socialism at the German proletariat, but emasculated his scheme once German democratic socialists offered to help. He prevented them from broadcasting under their own names, and gave Moscow a monopoly of effective broadcasts to German workers. He seemed almost to discourage the German internal opposition to Hitler. Views of him were mixed. The German writer and broadcaster Karl Otten despised him as a cynic who mocked ideals, a coward who toadied to bullies, and a hoaxer who cared for snappy headlines rather than truth; but Peter Ramsbotham, a wartime intelligence officer and future Ambassador in Washington, who was usually a sound judge, trusted him. Of Delmer’s two closest collaborators in PWE, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who had been a crucial source of German diplomatic secrets to SIS in 1935–9, became a British subject in 1948, but defected to Soviet bloc Germany in 1952. Delmer’s other nearest coadjutor, Otto John, was inveigled into East Berlin in 1954, where his detention enabled the Russians to spread propaganda that he had defected too. Despite the self-promotion of his memoirs, Delmer failed on many fronts to make hard-hitting subversive propaganda. To his many enemies, this sinister, self-important, selectively ingratiating man seemed to act as if to please Moscow.10
The Truman administration in the USA had in 1950 urged that West Germany should be permitted to rearm so as to help meet the increasing threat to Europe from the Soviet Union and its satellite states. This resulted in the signature in 1952 of a treaty whereby West Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands agreed to form the European Defence Community (EDC) in parallel with the nascent European Economic Community. This plan foundered in 1954, when it was rejected by French legislators – some of whom dismissed it in accordance with Moscow’s line, some of whom feared German remilitarization and some of whom held out for British participation in the EDC. This impediment to the formation of the EDC led to West Germany’s admission into NATO in 1955. Communist parties in Europe, nationalists and xenophobes in Britain and notably the Beaverbrook newspapers opposed German membership of both the EDC and NATO. Scare stories, for Delmer and his Express colleagues, were what their contemporary black-market spivs called nice little earners.
Beaverbrook’s journalists included Ian Colvin, whose unauthorized book The Unknown Courier, published in 1953, first publicly told the story of Operation MINCEMEAT. Colvin had previously written a biography of Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr until deposed and killed on Hitler’s orders after the Vermehren leak (which Oldfield attributed to Philby). In March 1954 Colvin filed a Sunday Express story based on an interview with ‘a mystery man of Harwell’ warning that West Germany was starting atomic research and development. ‘Within the foreseeable future she will have the means and knowledge for making the atom bomb – if allowed,’ Colvin wrote: West Germany might even become Europe’s leading atomic nation. He doubted if the Bonn government’s intentions were peaceable: ‘Germany’s atomic plans should be known to the people of Britain.’ Michael Palliser, one of the rising talents in the Foreign Office, linked Colvin’s report with recent Pravda attacks on resurgent German militarism and atomic research: ‘This is not the first time that we have been struck by the picture of Communist propagandists and Lord Beaverbrook walking hand in hand down the primrose path towards a neutralized Germany.’11
Delmer visited Germany at the same time as Colvin to gather material for stories suggesting that Bonn militarists were preparing for future wars. In Cologne he interviewed Putlitz, who told Express readers that he had ‘decided to get out [of West Germany] and go over to the Russians’ because only the Soviet Union had sound policies to enforce Germany’s demilitarization and deNazification. The Putlitz–Delmer exchanges included mischief-making about the missing diplomats. In Delmer’s words, ‘The baron is quite ready to chat. “You know,” he said to me, pensively sipping his Moselle, “I may have been the indirect inspiration of Guy Burgess’s decision to come over to us.” He smiled and quickly added: “Of course I cannot be certain that Maclean and Burgess are with us … such things are secret.”’ Putlitz told Delmer that he had been ‘an intimate friend’ of Burgess since 1934. ‘He was immensely impressed with what I had done. He kept telling everyone we met he thought I was the bravest man he ever met. It was most embarrassing. Probably he made up his mind to follow my example.”’ Their last meeting had been at a party in the Old Bond Street flat before Burgess left for Washington. ‘It was a terribly wild evening,’ said Putlitz. ‘Everyone was there. Even Guy Liddle [sic] and Blunt of M.I.5.’12
Michael Palliser was roused by Delmer’s hotchpotch of denial, misdirection and propaganda as he had been by Colvin’s tale of resurgent German militarists assembling atomic weaponry. ‘One is struck once again by the almost unbelievably naïve – or unscrupulous – way in which the Beaverbrook Press follows the Communist line on Germany,’ Palliser commented. The main source for Delmer’s warnings on the rebirth of German militarism was a communist pamphlet. As to the Putlitz interview, Delmer ‘admits that an avowed Communist has come to the West to preach what he describes as “the propaganda line”. He does not point out that this communist “propaganda line” is identical with the Beaverbrook “propaganda line”.’ A senior colleague endorsed Palliser’s minute: ‘Exactly. One is sometimes tempted to wonder if some Communist moles are not at work in the Express office.’13
In September 1954 Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, lunched with the newly appointed editor of the Sunday Express, John Junor. In answer to a question about Delmer, Junor admitted that he had been worried by evidence suggesting that ‘Delmer was Left-wing to an extent that might perhaps even be dangerous’. Churchill endorsed ‘Yes’ in red ink to Colville’s recommendation that ‘C’s organisation might ask M.I.5 to keep a close watch on Sefton Delmer and see whether he has any Communist affiliations.’ Downing Street was informed that neither SIS nor MI5 could substantiate rumours of Delmer’s covert Marxism. Anthony Eden, as Foreign Secretary, was relieved when Churchill abandoned his notion of bearding Beaverbrook about Delmer over lunch.14
In March 1955 Delmer launched a new scarifying series for Daily Express readers under such headlines as ‘How Dead is Hitler?’ and ‘Jobs for the Gestapo Boys – They’re Back at the Old Game’. ‘The rush to re-arm Germany, prompted by the war in Korea, has already given back enormous clandestine power to the same militarists’ and industrialists’ clan that was behind the disastrous wars of aggression of Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler,’ Delmer reported. ‘These men, despite their smooth protestations of “Europeanism” and devotion to the western ideals of democracy, are out for themselves and their clique only.’ Their object was control of Europe. Delmer presaged ‘the revival of Hitlerism’, for ‘the Nazi type of officer’ was ascendant in the new German army, ‘the old terroristic herd discipline’ was reviving among civilians, and ‘the germs of democratic freedom are already being extinguished’. In the Foreign Office Delmer’s reporting was deplored. Sir Frank Roberts, a future Ambassador in Moscow and Bonn, noted the damage inflicted on the cause of democracy in Germany by such untruths: ‘That however would hardly weigh with Lord Beaverbrook.’ Sir Anthony Nutting, Minister of State, minuted: ‘From such a scurrilous source I shd not have expected anything different … the more Delmers, the more Hitlers & the fewer Adenauers.’ There was an urgent need, wrote Nutting, to get the EDC operating with West Germany as a member, and to ‘give German democracy a chance to prove itself free of the suspicions sown so liberally and joyously by Mr Delmer and his unscrupulous boss’.15
This spirit of class suspicion aroused after June 1951 crystallized in the Marshall case of June 1952. William Marshall had been born in 1927. His father drove a bus, his mother worked in a newspaper shop and they lived together in Wandsworth. He trained at the British School of Telegraphy before attesting for military service in 1945. After military service in Palestine and Egypt, he was released from the army in 1948 and joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which posted him to SIS’s wireless station at the strategic Suez Canal port of Ismailia. It is likely that in Ismailia he was solicited by the Russians, who flattered him into believing that his low-grade leaks would be valued. After his Ismailia posting he made persistent applications (perhaps at the instigation of a Soviet handler) for transfer to the Moscow embassy, which he finally reached in 1950. Marshall proved so morose among his Moscow colleagues that after a year he was transferred to the SIS Communications Department at Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. There he had access only to low-grade secrets.16
In April 1952 MI5 watchers monitoring Pavel Kuznetsov, Second Secretary at the Soviet embassy, saw him meet a tall, pallid, graceless young man at a cinema in Kingston-upon-Thames. The pair lunched together in a restaurant with wide plate-glass windows opening on to the street, facilitating observation, and then strolled to a riverside park where in open view the youth showed papers and drew maps for Kuznetsov. The youth was soon identified as Marshall. Instead of designating dismal public houses and suburban parks as their meeting-places, Kuznetsov made assignations in smart restaurants in Mayfair and Chelsea, where Marshall’s cheap tailoring was conspicuous. Kuznetsov evidently wanted to be seen and remembered with Marshall. His conduct makes sense if Moscow wished to provoke a public spy trial to capitalize on the embarrassments caused by Burgess and Maclean. On 13 June, Kuznetsov and Marshall were detained at an oddly visible rendezvous in Wandsworth. In a search of Marshall’s billet after his arrest, a locked attaché case on top of his wardrobe was found to contain copies of What is Marxism? by the CPGB’s Emile Burns, Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito and High Treason: A Plot against the People by Albert Kahn, who had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of Jacob Golos’s sources.
Marshall seems to have been primed by his Marxist handlers to express class grievances under interrogation. The British embassy in Moscow had been a snob-centre, he said. ‘The people there were not in my class of people.’ It is true that Lady Kelly, the Ambassador’s wife, had excessive pride of caste, and used to recommend her sons to debutantes by saying that they had ‘the blood of the de Vaux’; but for all Marshall’s claims that the unkindliness, snobbery and pettiness of embassy life had made him appreciate the striving egalitarian ideals of the Russian people, the truth was that the embassy had some hundred staff, including technicians, typists, cipher clerks, radio operators and other clerical employees: the diplomatists –Ambassador, First Secretary and attachés – were in a minority.17
As Glading’s trial demonstrated in 1938, the prosecuting and defence counsel in such cases like to agree a coherent and simplified narrative which the jury can understand and believe. Complicating facts are omitted by agreement, so that awkward questions are not raised in the minds of the jury or public, as Nunn May’s trial had shown in 1946. There was scant mention during Marshall’s trial of his contacts in Ismailia or of his duties at Hanslope. Instead, the case heard by the court depicted an anti-social introvert who felt estranged by the luxurious pride and icy haughtiness of embassy life, until in lonely humiliation he agreed to spy. This explanation, which exculpated the bus driver’s son but incriminated the high-ups, came just a year after the initial Burgess–Maclean revelations had brought discredit on the Diplomatic Service. It made Marshall rare among traitors in receiving public sympathy. The jury convicted him, but recommended mercy in the sentencing. The judge sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment, instead of the maximum possible of fourteen.
Sir Alvary (‘Joe’) Gascoigne, who succeeded Kelly as Ambassador soon after the Burgess–Maclean defections, reported that his predecessor had instructed senior staff that troubles in the embassy ‘had nearly always been traceable to a lack of balance in the private life or judgement of the person concerned, and sometimes directly to the fact that he or she was unhappy or discontented, or a bad mixer, or even had an unhappy home background’. He and Kelly both insisted that the primary consideration in choosing members of the Moscow embassy staff, from the most senior to the most junior, must be stable character. Marshall’s case had vindicated this standpoint: ‘while Whitehall cannot be certain that they will never appoint a secret communist here, they can ensure that no one is sent here who is in any way abnormal’. When that case broke in 1952, Gascoigne stressed to his section heads that ‘it was their duty to keep a sympathetic eye on their juniors. I equally insisted that they should avoid any appearance of spying: for the moral effect on the staff if they thought they were being suspected or watched would be deplorable.’18
Six months after Marshall’s conviction Skardon interrogated him at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Again there was an outpouring of Marxist-instilled complaints of class discrimination. Skardon could not stem the ‘flow of muddled abuse of the capitalist world, as Marshall sees it through the jaundiced eyes of an embittered young Communist. All the ideas to which he gave expression are heard from the lips of Communists at Spouter’s Corner.’ With a mass of collaborative detail Marshall inveighed against the conditions whereby ‘the common people are oppressed by the middle and upper classes. The ideas simply tumbled from his lips in no sort of order.’ Skardon showed sympathy in assessing the prisoner: ‘There is no doubt that he suffers from an inferiority complex, and through a natural shyness has found difficulty in living with people, with the result that gradually he has formed the view that it is MARSHALL against the world.’ He was sure that Marshall had discussed his job in general terms with Kuznetsov, but felt that he may have been arrested before he had disclosed any ‘serious Top Secret information’.19
In April 1954 Vladimir Petrov, the KGB chief in Australia, who had a taste for the red-light districts of Australian cities and feared that as a protégé of Beria he was due for liquidation, defected. He had been drawn into doing this by Michael Bialoguski, a Polish-born physician and refugee from communism, who acted on his own initiative. There was minimal involvement from the Australian security services, which had stalled in the conventions of MI5 a quarter of a century earlier, when defectors were discounted as creeps ranking on the social scale between a pimp and a bookie’s runner. The social status of the Cambridge spies had not yet transformed Canberra’s perceptions.
Petrov hoped that his defection would permanently separate him from his wife Evdokia, another Soviet intelligence operative; but when the aircraft on which she was being forcibly returned to Russia halted for refuelling at Darwin, she was rescued by Australian police. The couple were granted political asylum: like Gouzenko nine years earlier, Petrov proved a rich source of intelligence revelations. A Royal Commission on Espionage was appointed by the Australian government and proved as informative as its Canadian predecessor, although it was misrepresented by Australia’s Labor opposition as a conspiracy of the Zinoviev-letter type intended to bias the upcoming general election campaign. Yuri Modin made his first contact since 1951 with Blunt and Philby in order to reassure the latter that Petrov knew nothing about him, and that there was no danger of him being named in the Australian hearings. Modin also provided £5,000 in cash for Philby.
Sefton Delmer attended the Petrov hearings in Canberra. ‘I’ve been getting’, he informed Daily Express readers, ‘an insight into the minds of Russia’s rulers; the kind of orders they are giving their agents; the methods they use to build a Fifth Column network of spies, saboteurs and underground guerrillas; the grim professional humour of their code words; the psychology with which they woo their operatives, then terrorise them into obedience.’ But where, he demanded, were Whitehall’s spy hunters ‘who are supposed to be following up the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean?’ He affected to believe that the British security services were not monitoring the Canberra revelations.20
Dick White, now Chief of MI5, was set on another close interrogation of Philby. He proposed to seize the initiative by pre-emptive publication of Petrov’s disclosures. ‘It will undermine Philby,’ he told the Foreign Secretary, Eden. ‘We’ll lure him into a new interview, and try again to get a confession.’ But Churchill’s retirement as Prime Minister was imminent, and Eden discountenanced any disturbance that might unsettle his succession. ‘It’ll look like a cover-up if it comes out in any other way,’ White supposedly warned Eden. In April 1955, newly installed as Prime Minister, Eden appointed Macmillan to succeed him at the Foreign Office. White meanwhile heard that Eden had been advised by his officials that SIS felt that he was pursuing an inter-departmental vendetta against Philby. Indeed in July Sinclair of SIS stated in a letter to White that Milmo’s hostile interrogation had victimized Philby whose enforced retirement from SIS had been unjust.21
The Australian Royal Commission’s final report was published on 14 September 1955. Bialoguski’s account of his dealings with Petrov had appeared in book form a few days earlier. Neither source mentioned Burgess or Maclean. But Petrov had sold his own revelations for simultaneous publication in Sydney, New York and London. On Sunday 18 September the People ran Petrov’s story. In it he described the missing duo as ‘long-term Soviet agents’, recruited at Cambridge, who ‘regularly supplied the Kremlin with all the information they could lay their hands on as trusted servants of the Foreign Office’. The Petrov exclusive – headlined ‘Empire of Fear’ in the People – made clear that Maclean but not Burgess had been under investigation when they absconded, and that a tip-off could be assumed. The Office’s News Department knew what was coming, and confirmed to the Press Association that the People story was accurate. This marked the end of the Office’s stonewalling, which had never convinced Fleet Street.22
Press comment was generally misleading. ‘It was careless talk by Guy Burgess at Washington cocktail parties’, opined Norman Ewer in the Daily Herald on 19 September, ‘that first aroused suspicions of him and Donald Maclean. Until then they had played very cleverly.’ Burgess was known to have been communistic at Cambridge, ‘but everyone – including myself – who knew him thought he had been cured’. No one, Ewer continued with monstrous inaccuracy, had any suspicions about Maclean: ‘Maclean, I believe but cannot be sure, was tipped off by a friend in the Foreign Office that he was under investigation.’ Although both men ‘knew that trouble was coming and that the game was up … they did not know that it had been decided not to prosecute’. But no such decision had been taken: far from it.23
Partly because of resentment at Whitehall’s perceived earlier stonewalling, and partly in the spirit of class resentment, the lead story in the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror on 20 September 1955 was headlined ‘Foreign Office Scandal’:
The British public have been treated in a shabby manner by the British Foreign Office.
Officials in that particular department of the Government have always regarded themselves as far above the level of the intelligence of ordinary people.
But ordinary people now know that the behaviour of the Foreign Office over the traitors Burgess and Maclean is an example of monstrous stupidity.
Donald Maclean was allowed to continue working in the Foreign Office AFTER he was suspected of spying for Russia. That is stupid enough.
Even more stupid is the Foreign Office attempt to conceal their stupidity from the people who pay their wages – YOU – until the facts were revealed by a Russian renegade.
The British Foreign Office – crammed with intellectuals, the Old School Tie brigade, long-haired experts and the-people-who-know-the-best-people – have taken a mighty drop in the estimation of the very ordinary men and women of Britain.24
On 22 September Henry Fairlie published an article in the Spectator attacking ‘the pattern of social relationships which so powerfully controls the exercise of power in this country’ – which he called ‘the Establishment’. Although the left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor and the young diplomat Hugh Thomas had both previously used this phrase, it was Fairlie’s article that popularized it. He specified that he was considering the exercise of power in England – Scotland and Wales were different cases – and that the Foreign Office stood at the centre of ‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’. The Office’s traditions ensured that ‘members of the Foreign Service will be men (and the Foreign Service is one of the bastions of masculine English society) who, to use a phrase which has been used a lot in the past few days, “know all the right people”’. All journalists interested in the Burgess–Maclean affair resented ‘the subtle but powerful pressures which were brought to bear by those who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men’. Fairlie indicted the two Astor newspapers as the leading practitioners of the ‘Establishment’ suppression. The Times – owned by Lord Astor of Hever – allowed only three references to Burgess–Maclean throughout 1951. There were hardly more (under the editorship of David Astor) in the Observer.25
On 25 September there was another development: Burgess and Maclean were discussed on British television for the first time. Until 1957 there was a universal ban on any matters that were to be discussed in parliament within the next fortnight being examined on radio or television, but as parliament was not then sitting the maverick Conservative MP Sir Robert Boothby, the left-wing Labour MP Michael Foot, the trade unionist ex-MP W. J. (‘Bill’) Brown and A. J. P. Taylor discussed the missing spies for the first time openly. Foot dismissed Petrov as ‘a renegade’ whose information was ‘not worth the paper it was written on’. Boothby and Brown called for tightened security procedures. Taylor volunteered that he had met Maclean in 1950, thought him a dipsomaniac, and claimed ‘it stuck out a mile’ that he was a Soviet agent. He said that it was ‘crazy’ to introduce witch-hunt procedures ‘just because some chap in Australia has said all this’. As a diplomatic historian he denied that the Foreign Office held any secrets worth having: ‘It is a gigantic build-up for leaders of the aristocracy, so that they can go all over Europe and people will call them “Your Excellency”.’ The four members of the panel began shouting interruptions at one another, and the discussion was terminated. Shortly afterwards Taylor was recruited as a highly paid Beaverbrook columnist, and began his career there by denouncing in vile terms the imminent state visit by the President of West Germany (who had spent the war years hiding for his life from the Nazis).26
Every more obnoxious than Taylor was George Brown. In the early 1950s Evelyn Shuckburgh, private secretary at the Office to Morrison and Eden, gave a small party in London to introduce FO officials to younger Labour MPs. Brown took the opportunity to tell the diplomatists that both the Office and overseas embassies were redundant: individual ministries in Whitehall should each deal directly with the corresponding ministries in foreign capitals; he pooh-poohed warnings that this would create chaos. As a Labour frontbencher, he continued to take pride in being disruptive and unpleasant. ‘This is the jet age. The era of moving damn fast,’ Brown declared in a Sunday Pictorial onslaught on 25 September headlined ‘FO Flops: Spies Are Not the Only Trouble’. Diplomats, Brown said, were ‘cynical, long-haired young gentlemen toddling from one cocktail party to another, never meeting ordinary people, and proclaiming a belief in nothing at all’. It is odd that he thought cynicism and scepticism were undesirable traits in diplomacy: did he prefer naivety and credulity? Brown was frustrated by his experience of a Buenos Aires embassy dinner in 1954. ‘Every attempt I made to discuss Argentina and British prospects there was met with levity’ (possibly because he was drunk). ‘The final curtain was pretty fine disorder, as I lost my temper and displayed how unsuitable I would be for the appointment to the cynical, ineffectual, prattling body we call our diplomatic service.’27
The mood for guillotining aristocrats was abroad. Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express was memorably described by the historian E. P. Thompson as ‘a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, Sea Lords, Permanent Under-Secretaries, Lord George-Brown, Lord Wigg stand patiently leaking in the public interest’. Adapting his metaphor, Thompson presented Pincher’s prolific journalism and sensationalist books as ‘excreta’ of secrets sometimes ‘still warm from the bowels of the State’. Pincher was ‘too self-important’ to notice how often he was manipulated by his sources, Thompson said, always saw himself in virile posture and used manly phrases about his deep penetration of departments. During a convivial lunch in September 1955 with the admiral in charge of the government’s D-notice press censorship apparatus, Pincher mentioned that although he had originally been tipped off that Philby was the abettor of the missing diplomats, his newspaper no longer suspected Philby. Pincher, who was abstinent but never stinted on another bottle for his guests, had heard from a former Tory MP that Lord Talbot de Malahide had ‘tipped the wink to BURGESS to tell MACLEAN to clear out’. Talbot had the attraction as a scapegoat for the Beaverbrook press of being a bachelor, a nobleman with an effete title, and a Cambridge graduate.28
Parliamentary democracy was tawdry in its handling of the Cambridge spies post-mortem. Blunt, Burgess and Philby had got their government jobs, and done their worst work, when the country was being ruled by a Tory–Labour–Liberal coalition government. No party was exempt from indirect responsibility. Yet when Burgess and Maclean disappeared in 1951 under a Labour government, Tory frontbenchers such as Duncan Sandys and backbenchers such as Waldron Smithers led a partisan attack. During the parliamentary exchanges about Philby in 1955, when the Tories were in power, Labour spokesmen exploited their chances without scruple. At no stage did any politician state that the Cambridge spies were relics of the special conditions and relaxed security of 1941–5, when the Soviet Union and British Empire were allied against Germany and Japan.
Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had spent so many years as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, and the current Foreign Secretary, Macmillan, were shaken by the Petrov publicity: to visitors arriving at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country home, Clarissa Eden stage-whispered a warning, ‘Don’t mention Burgess or Maclean.’ It was ‘a terribly shaming story’, Macmillan noted privately. ‘The gutter press (esp. Mirror and Sketch) have violent attacks on me today,’ he noted on 19 September 1955. He minded this personal abuse less than ‘the disgraceful interview’ given by Herbert Morrison, Foreign Secretary when Burgess and Maclean deserted, to the Daily Herald. ‘He has the impudence to say that when he was Foreign Minister (and the worst in history, except perhaps John Simon) he had a poor opinion of the Office.’29
Morrison was an envious, grudge-ridden egotist who objected to intellect. He was devoid of self-insight: when appointed Home Secretary in 1940, and asked by Sir Alexander Maxwell if there was anything that he particularly wished to learn about his new department’s responsibilities, he affirmed that he would like to watch a woman being hanged for murder. Morrison’s memoirs published in 1960 disavowed any wish for power or fame, but made clear that he felt cheated out of his right to succeed Attlee as leader of the Labour party. He attributed this mortification to his exclusion from ‘the close-knit coterie of cocktail parties’ in affluent homes ‘and similar social delights so beloved of the intellectuals’. His antipathy to the Foreign Office was undisguised. ‘High officials are prone to address one another by Christian name in the presence of their Minister,’ which he thought deplorable. ‘This easy-going familiarity … exists among all ranks, and crosses the usual barriers between seniors and juniors. Even Secretaries of State have been known to address Foreign Office civil servants by their Christian names.’ Burgess, he wrote, was ‘an intelligent and rather bumptious young man – a typical young career diplomat’.30
Macmillan resented Fleet Street’s irresponsible approach to the tricky balance of national security and civil liberty. ‘Almost all of the accusations of the Press against the laxity of the authorities are really demands for changing English Common Law,’ he noted on 19 October. Newspaper editors and proprietors seemed to want to empower the government to arrest individuals without legal evidence, to suspend habeas corpus and to fire civil servants on the basis of their rumoured beliefs. Such procedures would have been arbitrary and unjust, although for sure the resultant outcry would have sold newspapers. It was against this background that Eden and Macmillan agreed to publish a white paper on the missing diplomats. This was drafted by Graham Mitchell of MI5, who worked under awkward constraints. Many of the most crucial facts were highly classified and could not be printed. Mitchell could not state that Maclean had been under investigation for months because of the ultra-secret VENONA deciphering, and therefore suggested that he had only come under suspicion shortly before he vanished. The white paper did not admit that Maclean had spotted the surveillance team, and understandably but ineffectually tried to minimize the importance of the official secrets that had been betrayed. The government was keen to reduce a raging tempest to the level of a local gusty squall: false accusations, innuendo, character assassination and McCarthy-style witch-hunts were to be discouraged. Unfortunately, the white paper was so opaque and bland that it intensified suspicions of a cover-up and provoked more questions.31
One needs to remember that the cult of official secrecy demanded stifling loyalty from its votaries. When the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd mentioned the wartime Special Operations Executive in the Commons in 1956, he described SOE as a body supplying wartime propaganda to neutral countries. When in 1966 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, asked the Director General of MI5, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, for an information summary on the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn @ KAGO and for cognate material on the Cambridge ring of five, Furnival Jones asked that Jenkins did not share the secrets in his report with the Prime Minister, Wilson. The Dictionary of National Biography account of Alan Turing, which was published in 1971, limited itself to an obscure half-sentence which did not mention Bletchley or code-breaking: all that was permissible to say was that Turing’s Cambridge research was interrupted during the war, when he worked for the Foreign Office’s Communications Department.
In this publicity crisis Macmillan agreed that Philby should be reinterviewed by his ex-colleagues at SIS. The MI5 representative and transcribers who attended the three interrogations on 7, 10 and 11 October recorded on file that Philby was never pressed hard: indeed one of the SIS officers repeatedly fed him pat answers to awkward questions. To White’s incredulity, and J. Edgar Hoover’s fury, SIS concluded by exonerating Philby. The upshot was that the FBI leaked stories to Sunday newspapers in New York naming Philby as ‘the Third Man’. These were published on 25 October 1955.
Marcus Lipton, a Labour MP who was a catspaw of Fleet Street newspapers, asked Eden in parliament whether the government was determined ‘to cover up at all costs the dubious Third Man activities of Mr Harold Philby’. Macmillan as Foreign Secretary gave a formal answer on 7 November, after consulting Dick Brooman-White, a Tory MP who had served in SIS alongside Philby and was close to Nicholas Elliott and Philby’s other SIS defenders. Macmillan admitted that ‘Mr Philby had communist associates during and after his university days,’ but said with technical accuracy but disingenuously that there was no evidence that he had forewarned Burgess and Maclean. ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called “third man”, if indeed there is one.’ Macmillan had little choice other than to exonerate Philby in the Commons: there was no evidence on which to convict him, and it seemed wrong to make, under protection of parliamentary privilege, an unsubstantiated accusation in the House of Commons which he did not dare to repeat outside the Commons for fear of a defamation action. This public exoneration infuriated the CIA, which was convinced of Philby’s guilt.
The Commons had a full debate on the missing spies on 7 November. There were no momentous revelations, but some significant premonitory signs of the mounting attack on Whitehall. The Oxford don turned Labour MP Richard Crossman made a notable onslaught. Back in 1945, when Herbert Hart had returned from MI5 to an Oxford fellowship at New College, Crossman had jeered at him, ‘Still worrying about the truth, I suppose.’ Hart retorted: ‘I’m sure you’re not.’ Denying Crossman a ministerial appointment, Attlee had said: ‘Nothing to do with your ability, Dick; strictly character.’ The Cambridge fellow-traveller turned Tory MP Charles Fletcher-Cooke had described Crossman in 1952 as ‘the biggest draw’ among Labour backbench speakers in the Commons. ‘Can it be because the House likes to be bullied?’ Fletcher-Cooke wondered, ‘for he is the School Bully in excelsis’. Crossman was a ruthless propagandist who would say anything for the main chance. He was to congratulate himself in 1963 on having spent twelve years, ‘since the Burgess and Maclean episode, exposing the effects on the British ruling class of this deep inner laxity which is constantly mistaken for genuine freedom and tolerance’.32
As a Daily Mirror columnist Crossman had recently suggested that there had been ‘a deliberate attempt to cover up the criminal activities of two young men who went to the right schools and knew far too many of the right people’. In the Commons, two months later, his language was more circumspect.
Maclean belonged to the élite of the élite; he was one of the inner group of really gifted men, one of the half-dozen stars for top promotion; an intimate friend, a confidant, a man who spent long evenings with half-a-dozen people who are now in key positions. I am not blaming anyone. I am only saying that if a man has been desperately misjudged, if risks are taken for him – and, of course, risks were taken for Maclean; if a risk is taken and it does not come off, then certain people are not very anxious to have the extent of the risk they took on his behalf exposed.
As to Burgess, ‘pushing his way up by means of somewhat unsavoury personal connections’, his case showed the Office’s toleration of eccentricity as ‘curious perverted liberalism’. Crossman decried the Office’s privileged character and assumptions of infallibility. ‘The Foreign Office was too high and mighty. It was infra dig for the Foreign Office to abide by the common laws of security.’ The real problem of the Office was not security, said Crossman, but the selectiveness of its recruits. The wartime recruitment reforms which had tried to draw ‘boys from lesser grammar schools’ and thus reduce the preponderance of major public schools had not brought democratization, because grammar school boys were often careerist toadies or social chameleons: ‘a person who comes up from below and enters the Foreign Office, with its august position, in order to obtain the protective colouring required, becomes more Foreign Office than the rest’. Crossman’s experience of visiting embassies had convinced him that ‘the man from the smaller grammar school is even more Foreign Office than those who came from the kind of school from which I come’.33
Herbert Morrison, who had been Foreign Secretary when Burgess and Maclean fled, also intervened in the Commons debate: ‘There have been some working-class cases [of espionage], but the funny thing about the middle and upper classes, the well-to-do class, is that if they go wrong in this fashion they are, if anything, worse than other people.’ Morrison was mistrustful of the effects of higher education: ‘I never studied at a university. I am a product of the elementary schools, and I am not ashamed of the fact. All sorts of things happen at the universities. Abnormal ideas are evolved.’ He doubted if it was necessary or beneficial for the higher reaches of Whitehall, including the Foreign Office, to be peopled by ‘largely university men’.34
On 8 November, the day after the debate, in his alcoholic mother’s flat in Kensington, Philby gave a press conference to American and English newspaper and newsreel reporters. The film of this question-and-answer session is available on YouTube. Philby could not look more devious, smirking or unbelievable: he is the picture of a cornered liar; and yet his handler Modin, his SIS supporters and many commentators somehow find his curt denials sincere and effective. Even within MI5 the guilt of PEACH felt less sure.
Three weeks later Ronnie Reed circulated an MI5 discussion paper entitled ‘The Disappearance of Burgess and Maclean’. He recalled that in May 1951, although the Security Service had considered that Maclean might try to leave England if he was alerted to its suspicions, no one thought this was likely, especially in the light of observation reports. ‘None of us believed for one moment that Guy BURGESS would act as a prime mover in the escape.’ During the shock of June 1951 it was agreed that Maclean and/or Burgess had been tipped off by someone privy to the investigation, and that Philby’s evasions made him the natural suspect. But after the parliamentary debate and Philby’s press conference, Reed thought it was time to re-examine settled assumptions about the tip-off. He listed five FO men who might have learnt that the security services were investigating Maclean and warned him: Ridsdale (‘a high priority’), Lord Talbot de Malahide (‘a close second’), Sir Michael Wright (then Ambassador in Iraq), George Middleton (the former head of the FO Personnel Department) and Nicholas Henderson. Reed recommended that they should be reinterviewed.35
After Christmas, on 29 December, Courtenay Young amplified: ‘we have been perhaps turning and re-turning the PEACH stone, without pushing far enough down the various avenues available both in the Foreign Service, as regards a possible tip-off, or our own Service’. He recommended that Blunt should be reinterviewed ‘fairly toughly’ as ‘the conscious source of the wartime leakage from the Security Service’. Young summarized the case against Blunt: ‘He has been left fairly untouched since the early days of the enquiry, when for a variety of obvious reasons it was necessary to handle him, as indeed the whole enquiry, with kid gloves. If he is guilty, he should now have lulled himself into a state of comparative calm. He has hardly been contacted by the Office since 1951; various debates on B. and M. have left him unscathed; the various articles and books on the subject have also treated him with the utmost decorum.’ A tough interview might jolt his self-control. Three fears must haunt him, Young suggested: ‘the first, his guilt as a spy, if he is one; secondly his left-wing background before the war; and thirdly his private life. Any one of these, or any combination of these three, could, were they ever made public, ruin him. I am not, of course, suggesting that this proves a blackmail motive in the interrogation, but if the matter is put to him plainly and bluntly, it might show him that he is in a bigger pickle than he thought.’36
In 1956 the Eden government’s folly led it to collude with France and Israel in bombing and invading Egypt in a bid to retake control of the Suez Canal. The failure at Suez led to Eden’s supersession as Prime Minister by Harold Macmillan, and to a mood of national demoralization. ‘A people zealous in imposing themselves, their beliefs and their institutions upon others, as the British were in the last century, may lose heart when they can impose themselves no longer,’ Michael Young wrote four years after the Suez affair. ‘In such a situation a whole people may freeze into insularity, like a melancholic who has withdrawn into himself.’ In the altered mood after 1956, Young recognized, ‘Britain needs Europe even more than Europe needs Britain. It is out of the dialectic relationship between discontent in Britain, and union with Europe, that progress will come, towards a more lively country.’ The preference of older generations, the less educated and the xenophobes for ‘wooden-headed jingoism’ seemed to Young ‘suicidal as well as morally disgraceful’.37
It was against this national background that the case of the SIS turncoat George Blake @ Behar developed. The public narrative that was promoted at the time of his trial and reiterated in his memoirs tells how he was captured by the communists in North Korea in 1950 and spent three years in captivity, during which he was indoctrinated with Marxist theories and was shocked, he said, by the relentless bombing of Korean villages by American Flying Fortresses. He converted to communism, and worked as a Soviet spy after his return to SIS in 1953. For some two years he used a German miniature camera to take about 200 exposures of documents that crossed his desk. In 1955 he was posted to the SIS station in West Berlin. There he filched details of American, British and West German spy networks in East Germany. On the basis of his material some 500 agents in East Germany were detained in April 1955: some forty of them were killed as a result of Blake’s betrayals. He had previously betrayed the Anglo-American tunnel in Berlin, which began tapping East German official telephone conversations in May of that year. Some 368,000 telephone conversations were recorded before the East Germans staged an accidental discovery of the tapping system in April 1956. It took until 1958 for all these recordings to be transcribed in offices at Clarence Gate in the Regent’s Park. In 1959 Blake was posted to an SIS section from where he recruited British businessmen, students and tourists travelling to the Soviet bloc, placed interpreters, microphones and bugged telephones in targeted situations and solicited diplomats from Warsaw Pact countries. All these activities he betrayed. Every document of significance that crossed his desk was photographed by him and sent onwards to Moscow.
A class-bound rigmarole was spun as an explanatory narrative for Blake. His memoirs, written in Russian retirement, put his objection to class distinctions foremost among the reasons that made him receptive to his reading of Marx’s Das Kapital and Lenin’s The State and Revolution while in captivity in Korea. He professed to loathe individual competitiveness, whether in sports or beauty contests, as well as the ‘sheer snobbishness’ of the English. His complaints about the ‘class consciousness’ of his official surroundings signify no more than the Marxist fixation with class analysis at all costs. It sounds as if Blake was parroting similar lines, learnt by rote, to those instilled into that infinitely less important spy, Marshall. Historians have followed his explanations too credulously, as if his professed discomfort with SIS’s pride of caste excused his espionage and as if there was not comparable pride in counterpart Soviet organizations. Blake supposedly hoped to marry Iris Peake, daughter of the Minister of Pensions, Lord Ingleby, and granddaughter of the Earl of Essex. She is described as ‘upper-crust’, their relationship is said to have splintered when it hit ‘the immovable British class-system’, and Blake’s rejection as a suitor ‘sharpened his resentment of the British establishment’.38
Probably the true narrative is completely different. Born in Rotterdam in 1922, with a Dutch mother and an eminent Egyptian communist as an admired cousin, Blake worked for the Dutch resistance as a courier after the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. The Dutch resistance was riven with communists, and the likeliest story is that when he came to England in 1942 he had already discussed working for Moscow. In 1944 he became a junior member of the Dutch Section of SIS. Why and when he was activated by Moscow to spy on SIS is not yet clear. It is unlikely to be in the circumstances or at the date that have hitherto been given.
The Polish intelligence officer and triple agent Michael Goleniewski, codenamed SNIPER in Washington and LAVINIA in London, defected to the USA in January 1961, and provided evidence that led to the arrest in England of the Portland spy ring and of Blake. For five days in April 1961 Blake was interrogated by a team of three: Harold (‘Harry’) Shergold, Terence Lecky and a former police officer, Ben Johnson. Shergold had been educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before working as an assistant master at Cheltenham Grammar School in 1937–40. He had served as an officer in SIME in 1941–6 and as an SIS officer in Germany monitoring Soviet Russia in 1947–54. Lecky had been educated at Winchester and Clare College, Cambridge (where he was a modern languages scholar) before SIS postings in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. These were not the class-bound dunderheads or clubland boobies imagined by Whitehall’s critics.
Blake was allowed to return to his mother’s flat at Radlett, when the first day’s interview was suspended at six in the evening, and asked to return next morning at ten. His interrogation remained courteous and unthreatening, but he had no doubt that SIS knew that he was working for the Soviets. After lunch on the third day, Thursday 6 April, Shergold’s team told Blake that they believed that he had confessed under torture, when he was a prisoner in Korea, to being a British intelligence officer and had then been blackmailed into espionage. ‘I felt an upsurge of indignation,’ Blake claimed in his memoirs. ‘I wanted my interrogators and everyone else to know that I had acted out of conviction, out of a belief in communism, and not under duress or for financial gain. This feeling was so strong that without thinking what I was doing, I burst out, “No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets, and offered my services to them!”’ On Friday 7 April Blake was taken into informal custody for the weekend. He was driven in a car with Ben Johnson and John Quine, head of SIS counter-espionage (formerly posted in Tokyo and Warsaw), with Shergold in a second car and police escort cars before and aft, to a Hampshire village where Shergold’s mother had a cottage. Shergold’s wife Bevis (who had been an intelligence servicewoman in the war and competed as a shot-putter and discus-thrower at the Olympic Games of 1948) received them. In the evening Blake made pancakes for his Special Branch guards. He shared a bedroom with Quine, the cottage was ringed by Special Branch officers, and a police car drove slowly behind when he went for walks with Shergold or Quine. This bizarre situation struck the captive as ‘endearingly English’.39
Dick White, who had been moved from Director General of MI5 to Chief of SIS in 1956, thought Blake’s admissions to Shergold, Lecky and Quine showed instability and self-importance: he judged Blake to be more a ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasist than a master-spy. Quine, who had known Blake for years, thought him too unbalanced to merit prosecution. Nevertheless, on Sunday afternoon he was driven to an SIS safe-house at East Sheen, and on Monday 10 April he was taken to Scotland Yard for arrest. White was concerned that Blake might withdraw his admissions and force the open testing of the evidence against him. ‘We can’t go through the agony of our operations being presented in court,’ he told his SIS staff. ‘If he isn’t prepared to plead guilty, we’ll just put him on a plane to Moscow.’40
A month later Blake became the first SIS officer to be tried for treason. He appeared before Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice, who had been privately told of the forty-odd executions attributed to Blake’s betrayals. The public were shocked and uncomprehending when Parker passed what seemed a savage sentence of forty-two years in prison. ‘Naturally, we can say nothing,’ Harold Macmillan noted on 4 May. ‘The public do not know & cannot be told that he belonged to MI6 – an organisation which does not technically exist. So I had rather a rough passage in the H of C.’ He invited the leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, to a confidential briefing together with three Labour Privy Councillors, Earl Alexander of Hillsborough, Emanuel Shinwell and George Brown: ‘I only hope the last one will not chatter too much in his cups.’ Ten days later Macmillan noted of the Blake case, ‘The Press has been terrible, without any sense of responsibility. They want sensation. Also, since the Press is tired of me & the Govt, and since I refuse to run after the Press Lords, they are all attacking me. We are said to be exhausted, ageing, & practically in articulo mortis.’ At his meeting with Gaitskell and the Labour Privy Councillors, Brown ‘was sober (it was 11.30 a.m.) but had clearly been pretty bad the night before. I told them the facts of the Blake case & that I intended to appoint a small committee to enquire into the whole question.’41
The committee appointed to report on security procedures and communist penetration in the civil service was chaired by the jurist Lord Radcliffe. After Radcliffe had submitted his final report to Downing Street, but before its publication, Macmillan again briefed Alexander, Brown and Shinwell on terms of sworn Privy Council confidentiality on the established facts. Brown, who, noted Macmillan, ‘was so rude that I could have kicked him out of the room’, promptly broke his Privy Councillor’s oath and leaked all he heard to Pincher of the Daily Express. He complained to Pincher of an Establishment ‘cover-up’ which had to be exposed, and added that his duty to the Labour party, which was using real or factitious security concerns to injure the Conservative government, overrode his duty as a Privy Councillor. Pincher however attributed Brown’s betrayal to ‘hunger for personal power’. The Labour party began calling for the appointment of a minister of security, regardless of the totalitarian connotations which other people heard in such a job title. The Tories countered privately that no politician of any ability would take such a benighted post: his only purpose would be to deflect the blame from the Prime Minister on to himself whenever a security scandal broke; he would be a lightning-conductor or fall-guy putting his hopes of political promotion at risk.42
The parliamentary performances of George Brown were bent on damaging the Office and diplomats against whom he nursed tormented prejudices. As Foreign Secretary in 1966–8, he evinced an obsessive resentment of the phrase ‘Her Majesty’s Ambassador’ as applied to dignify people whom he regarded as his subordinates. ‘He’s my man,’ Brown used to say both contemptuously and possessively of ambassadors. He was so sexually suggestive when drunk that Martine de Courcel, Claude Pompidou and Jacqueline Couve de Murville would not sit next to him at Paris banquets. One of Brown’s nastiest traits was his public humiliation of his admirable wife Sophie Levene with such shouts as ‘Shut up! You’re nothing but an East End Yid.’ In a generation of alcoholic frontbenchers he and the Tories’ lazy, emollient Reginald Maudling were the most blatant. ‘Man for man, most people would, I imagine, prefer to entrust the Foreign Office to, say, Maudling than George Brown,’ Donald Maclean wrote in exile.43
After Radcliffe’s report had been published in 1962, Burgess telephoned Driberg, who obligingly regaled the Moscow line to newspaper readers. ‘All that I read of what is going on in England now and the letters that I get from friends in the Establishment’ – Burgess emphasized these words to Driberg – ‘make me delighted to be here. These letters show me what a ghastly state of collective neurosis people in Britain are living in.’ He was discouraged from thoughts of returning to England, he told Driberg, by ‘this new outbreak of McCarthyism in England – the Radcliffe Report and all that’.44
Blake was sprung from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 with the help of a ladder made of knitting needles. The escape was organized by an alcoholic Irish labourer and two Committee of Nuclear Disarmament campaigners who thought his forty-two-year sentence was inhumane. The KGB had no part in the plot. According to Markus Wolf, Blake’s peculiar sadness, which Maclean and Philby were spared, was to outlive the Soviet Union. After 1990 he was marooned in an adopted homeland which had discarded the cause to which – perhaps from the age of eighteen – he had dedicated his life.
Philby in his insincere, scheming memoirs denigrated the security services as a posse of placemen, parasites, mediocrities, cretins and snobs. Other writers have been keen to follow him in depicting SIS as an ‘upper-class preserve, effete, riddled with class prejudice, only too ready to cover up when one of their members came under suspicion’. Tim Milne commented on such caricatures, ‘Well, it makes more interesting reading than the truth, which is that in Section V [of SIS] at any rate we were a mixed but mostly middle-class lot.’ Overseas agents included journalists, commercial representatives of English businesses in foreign capitals, bank and shipping clerks: usually they had military or naval experience simply because most men of their generation did after the war of 1914–18. Often they were recruited because they were good linguists or had lived abroad and knew foreign countries.45
‘The Old Boy Network came under heavier fire, following the Burgess and Philby affairs,’ wrote David Footman. He conceded that the old system permitted abuses, ‘but at least it gave to many of us a code which we valued’ and ‘enabled the British Empire to be run, on the whole successfully, for a great many years, with far less personnel and far less talent than would otherwise have been needed’. Such still, small voices of calm were not much heard in the 1960s. The excitable clamour of such men as John le Carré was all too audible (it was always men who raised the din against the Establishment: women knew that there were more basic structural prejudices, more offensive social and economic and legal inequities and more impenetrable workplace barriers than class). In 1968 le Carré, in an influential essay on Philby, depicted ‘the Establishment’ as ‘stupid, credulous, smug and torpid’, as behaving with ‘grotesque ineptitude’, and thus ‘a microcosm of that “great capitalist class” now in the process of internal disintegration’. For him vain, murderous Philby was ‘the spy and catalyst whom the Establishment deserved’.46
Moscow scored a huge success in the decades after 1951 in discrediting the government apparatus of London. Forty years of well-spun revelations about the Cambridge spies, the propaganda element in the Marshall, Vassall and Blake cases, contributed to a Marxist presentation of a ruling class in retreat, taking the wrong decisions, preferring the wrong people. This was accentuated in the Profumo affair. The Secretary of State for War had enjoyed a short affair in 1961 with a young woman named Christine Keeler. In January 1963 she was induced to say, by journalists who had bought her story and wanted value for money, that she had simultaneously been the lover of a naval attaché at the Soviet embassy named Eugene Ivanov. The sex with Ivanov was a male journalists’ fantasy; but the story was virile enough to be used by Macmillan’s political enemies to belabour his government and the civil service.47
Thus the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Normanbrook, ‘a real old Establishment figure’ standing at the acme of Whitehall, was the target of the Sunday Mirror’s front-page headline ‘Who Runs This Country, Anyhow?’ at the height of the Profumo press stunt in June 1963. It attacked ‘Lord Normanbrook of Chelsea’, as he had become earlier that year, for his supposed inadequacies in responding to the (non-existent) security risks of Profumo’s involvement with Keeler. Normanbrook was damned for being accountable neither to parliament nor to the people. ‘Is it safe for the Mandarins of Whitehall, who know so little of life outside their own narrow world, to wield such influence?’ Elsewhere in the ‘Who Runs This Country?’ issue of the Sunday Mirror the ubiquitous Crossman claimed that the British people were stuck with ‘an Establishment still dominated by the mandarin mind which despises the expert and the technician and relies on a genteel amateurism out of date even in Edwardian Britain’. This class-bound dilettantism was the cause of the successive ‘security scandals which have disgraced Macmillan’s regime’. The journalist and former SIS officer Malcolm Muggeridge, who loved making mischief, revelled in the Profumo affair. He saw its indignities as the culmination of a series of episodes that had begun with Burgess and Maclean – ‘all calculated to undermine the repute, not just of Upper Class individuals and circles, but of the class system’. Muggeridge was both puritanical and sexually vain: his middle age had been full of serial adulteries; his juices were now drying, and within a few years he became sexually abstinent, a Catholic convert and a shrill opponent of the Permissive Society. His disapproval of other people’s pleasures was already evident by 1963: ‘the Upper Classes’, he told Sunday Mirror readers, ‘have always been given to lying, fornication, corrupt practices and, doubtless as a result of the public school system, sodomy’. He had a particular dislike of male homosexuality, and on another occasion called Inverchapel ‘a well-known paederast’.48
Diplomats were anti-democratic conspirators in the Century of the Common Man, the foreign correspondent James Cameron explained to Sunday Mirror readers. ‘Every man jack of our Foreign Service abroad is a creature not of the Government of the day, but of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, owing allegiance not to any popular administration but to the Machine.’ Cameron wanted populism rather than non-partisanship from diplomats, and apparently valued bad manners and ill-education, for he faulted the present Diplomatic Service for employing ‘gentlemen of impeccable tastes and great civility; they are always excellently educated, and usually well-born’. He recalled that in the 1940s there had been promises that the Service would ‘be revolutionised, democratised, disinfected of its almost total adherence to the upper-class myth, purged of its insistence on the Public School and Oxbridge’. Instead Britain would be represented abroad by ‘technicians, businessmen, trade unionists’. Instead, ‘the great crushing irresistible weight of the Establishment overlaid the plan … and left the FO exactly as it was: the pasture of the public school, the grazing-ground of the upper-class intellectual, above all the haven of the play-safe’.49
This publicity offensive had a crucial part in the election of a Labour government, with Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, in 1964. Wilson affirmed that the fumbling, privileged ancien régime was retarding Britain, and that his new brand of managerial professionalism would be a panacea. He convinced his supporters that if only the government apparatus had efficient managers, with slide-rules in their pockets and technical jargon on their tongues, the country would be able to afford its global military burdens and its high defence expenditure as well as expanding social services, cutting unemployment and eradicating poverty. After his promises began to be broken in the years from 1967, the Labour party, as Nora Beloff of the Observer wrote in 1973, ‘developed a mood of “anti-elitism” and “anti-intellectualism” repudiating any confidence in expertise or superior knowledge, and coming round to feeling that it was just as unfair for the clever as for the rich to have all the advantages’. A new stage in the undermining of experienced authority had begun. Young adherents to the Alternative Society, and the student revolts of 1968–72, received immense publicity in this period. They diverted attention from the more enduring and significant fact that it was becoming unacceptable, as the historian G. M. Young had earlier lamented, to tell voters that ‘a man has no more right to an opinion for which he cannot account than to a pint of beer for which he cannot pay’.50
Donald McLachlan, a wartime naval intelligence officer, who had recently retired as editor of the Sunday Telegraph to write Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action, 1939–45, published a convincing defence of the secret services in October 1967. ‘The revival of the Philby affair has provoked a fresh wave of anti-gentleman, down-with-the-old-boy-ring, let’s expose the Establishment fervour, of which the Labour Party has been in the past such a beneficiary. The implication is that the Secret Service is a closed circle which should be “exposed”; that it is probably decadent and inefficient; that it should be “cleaned up” and released from its “class loyalties”.’ He regretted that most newspaper readers did not realize that this was ‘one of the favourite lines of Communist propaganda’, which had developed ‘most conspicuously during the Burgess and Maclean episode’. A secret service had to be an exclusive body, which co-opted its officers, rather than openly recruited by competitive examination. ‘Its members must be highly educated, loyal, intelligent, ruthless, secretive and ready to be lonely. The field is at once greatly restricted; it must, in fact, be an old-boy net, like its Soviet, French and American counterparts. If it has shown a partiality for gentlemen, that is on a par with the Soviet preference for good party members.’ He reminded readers that Britain’s record of defections, traitors and long-undetected spies was no worse than that of the United States. He gave a litany of American spies that sounded like a list of New York delicatessens: Hiss, Soble, Soblen, Gold, Rosenberg, Slack, Greenglass, Brothman, Moskowitz, Abel, Coplon, Haynahen, Scarbeck, Bucar, Cascio, Verber, Dorey, Sobell, Boeckenhaupt, Martin and Mitchell. He overlooked Duggan, Halperin, Lee, Rhodes, Silvermaster and others.51
The Cambridge spies failed in their aim to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, but by the 1960s they had helped to discredit and destabilize the government apparatus of Russia’s historic adversary. SIS, MI5 and the Foreign Office were all weakened. The wrecking of the Establishment was a gift to the Kremlin.