Sir Rupert Grayson, who underwent four security vettings during his work as an Admiralty courier and Foreign Office King’s Messenger, asked his interrogators on each occasion what weakness they considered to be the greatest security risk. He expected to be told homosexuality or alcoholic excess, and was surprised by the unanimity of their response: though the vetting interviews were years apart, ‘they all four opted for vanity’. The conceit of Hayes, Ewer, Slocombe, Oldham, King, Glading, Vernon and other communist agents, and the self-regard with which they played their duplicitous roles, exemplify the power of vanity to draw men into treachery.1
The next greatest security risk was alcohol. Officers in SIS, MI5, the KGB and CIA, journalists employed by Fleet Street newspapers, many parliamentarians and some diplomatists shared one characteristic with the Cambridge ring of five: they drenched themselves in alcohol. Many protagonists in this book were often soused: lead characters such as Oldham, Goronwy Rees, Elizabeth Bentley and Duncan Lee; secondary players including Tomás Harris, James Pope-Hennessy, Philip Toynbee, Joseph McCarthy and James Angleton. Drunkenness was a ceaseless threat to security, judgement and discretion on every side. Blunt, Philby, Maclean and Burgess (but not Cairncross) were all alcoholics: Blunt controlled the outward signs of his drinking, and was seldom seen the worse for his lashings of gin; but the other three were problem drinkers. Yet dipsomania only bordered the narrative that was spun to explain the security lapses discovered in 1951. Too many of the men apportioning blame were themselves heavy drinkers, who were unlikely to start a campaign against the mistakes, omissions, truancy and hangovers associated with boozy colleagues.
Still less were officials likely to fault the joke-filled, masculine sociability which kept their departments working agreeably. Instead, after Burgess and Maclean’s vanishing act, male homosexuality was brought to the fore of security assessments: same-sex contacts became more publicized, policed, politicized and punished; indeed they were treated as a national menace. The worst damage wrought by the missing diplomats was to the administrative leadership of the nation that they betrayed; but indirectly, through the official reactions to their treachery, they were the pretext for a sexual intolerance that marred hundreds of thousands of lives. The harmful repercussions of the security inquest of 1951 endured into the twenty-first century.
Sexual acts between men were criminal offences until 1967, when legal sanctions were partially repealed. These illegal pleasures were obnoxious to some people, but insignificant to others. The Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences had reported in 1926 that ‘sometimes juries are loth to convict, even when the evidence is clear, and that this may be due to the fact that in some cases they find it hard to accept as true the shocking facts submitted for their verdict, or it may be due to an insufficient appreciation of the gravity of the offence’. A Liverpool wool-broker who sat on a jury which acquitted a man charged with sodomy explained afterwards that although the accused had been guilty, ‘half the jury didn’t think it was possible, and the rest of us didn’t think it mattered’.2
Among diplomats opinion was divided between those who thought the subject too sordid for notice, those who reckoned it to be unimportant and a few like Vansittart who had a neurotic hatred of homosexuality, which he identified with Germans. Van’s views were at odds with those of some of his colleagues. As young attachés Harold Nicolson and Archie Clark Kerr (the future Lord Inverchapel) had been lovers. ‘Dear warm gentle Arch,’ Nicolson wrote in 1911, ‘either one dislikes you, or finds you a darling’; and in 1912, recommending a novel with ‘an attractive bugger’ and a woman ‘rather like you’ as central characters, he wrote, ‘Dear Arch I want you so … How careless we were to let it slip away!’ After dinner at the Carlton Grill in 1916, Gerald Villiers made advances to his departmental junior, Duff Cooper, in the misplaced hope that any man as highly sexed as Cooper, even though a womanizer, might lend a hand. ‘I parried his advances as best I could,’ Cooper recorded, ‘but as I was opening the front door to let him out, he caught hold of me and kissed me which was very unpleasant.’ Sir Louis Mallet, after his retirement as Ambassador in Constantinople, lived in the inter-war years in Park Lane and Port Lympne, overlooking the Kent coast, with his fellow bachelor Sir Philip Sassoon.3
Jock Balfour, who spent four years interned in Ruhleben, the imperial trotting course at Spandau where thousands of British subjects were confined in 1914, accepted that the complete absence of women led many prisoners to join ‘the gay brigade … on a temporary basis’. He served in two embassies, Moscow and Washington, where Inverchapel was Ambassador, and doubtless sensed his chief’s vigorous bisexuality. It was no secret that Inverchapel left a big enough legacy to his valet Evgeni Yost for the young man to start a catering business on the Isle of Bute (Yost learnt to speak English with a Glasgow accent, made money from fish-and-chip shops, jukeboxes and ice-cream, fathered nine children, voted Conservative and admired Margaret Thatcher). When Sir Maurice Peterson, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1913 and served as Ambassador in Baghdad, Madrid, Ankara and Moscow, came to write his memoirs, he dropped unmissable hints about the pugnacious, stealthy and insecure Lord Lloyd. ‘His courage, both physical and moral, was of a high order: the very suggestion of a menace, from whatever quarter, was for him but an incentive to further effort,’ Peterson wrote of Lloyd, who began as an unpaid attaché in the Constantinople embassy and ended as High Commissioner in Egypt. ‘He had a keen, almost feminine intuition, which was a real asset in the East where most things happen underground … His mind was, above everything, suspicious. The hidden motive was what he always sought.’4
Perhaps the majority of members of the Diplomatic Service thought it silly and unpleasant to be prejudiced against an activity which might not attract them, but should not be illegal. Sir John Dashwood, the Office’s wartime deputy adviser on security, welcomed gay men to his Buckinghamshire home. ‘Staying there’, Charles Ritchie noted in 1941, ‘was one of these aesthetic intellectuals or intellectual aesthetes who leave their London flats, their left-wing politics and their rather common “boy-friends” at the week-ends for the more decorative and well-heated English country houses.’ It may have been Burgess or Blunt described by Ritchie ‘peering at old family letters in pillared libraries or adjudicating the origin of rugs … or else … simply sitting on the sofa before the fire with their legs curled up having a good gossip with the wife of their host’.5
Hardy Amies, the couturier who joined the Intelligence Corps in 1939 after completing an application form in which he claimed boxing and shooting as his hobbies, liked the joke that the Tudor-rose motif on the Intelligence Corps badge represented ‘a pansy resting on his laurels’. Among some university-educated wartime officers there was a reflective curiosity about the range of sexual possibilities. ‘I am not naturally monogamous, and slightly homosexual,’ Stuart Hampshire wrote in a self-analysis of 1942; ‘I wish I were more homosexual, because I very much prefer the society of men to the society of women.’ On a walk Maurice Oldfield once asked his SIS colleague Anthony Cavendish if he had had any homosexual experiences. ‘I admitted that I remembered one occasion with other boys in a shepherd’s hut in the Swiss mountains,’ Cavendish recalled. ‘Maurice just nodded.’6
Patient, resourceful and perceptive men with criminalized sexual tastes undertook sterling intelligence work in every theatre of war. To give one example, Alan Roger, the notably successful Defence Security Officer (DSO) in Tehran, was a cheerful, comfortable and shrewd bachelor who after the war was posted to Hong Kong before becoming a director of Cable & Wireless. He lived in London with his Japanese majordomo, popularized bonsai gardening, operated as an SIS Friend and left much of his fortune to his companion’s children. One of Roger’s successful operations arose from an Iranian living in Berlin who had been allowed to return to his homeland on the understanding that he would remit wireless reports to the Abwehr and answer strategic questions. This Iranian, who was codenamed KISS, had no intention of spying for anyone. He was detained by the British after his return to Tehran, where he refused when asked to act as a double agent feeding misinformation on Iraq and Iran to the Abwehr. He would rather spend the war in custody, he said, than get involved in such dangerous duplicity. He was eventually released, and spent the next three years oblivious of the fact that during his detention his style on the Morse key was emulated to perfection, his misuse of German grammar and vocabulary were imitated and his mental traits were studied so that a counterfeit KISS could send wireless traffic. By this ruse, Berlin was misled on many crucial points. The British, in order to sustain the deception, had to confide particulars of the KISS deception to their Russian counterparts in Tehran and sought their help in providing material on Russian troop movements. ‘To work in contact with Russian Intelligence with proper reserve and eyes well open seems to me to afford far better opportunities for learning all about it than by peering through key-holes or relying entirely on “delicate” and highly placed sources which must not be compromised and which are therefore often uncheckable,’ reported Roger.7
Another intelligence officer with criminalized sexual tastes was Roger’s brilliant and brave SIS colleague in Iran, Robin Zaehner. In appearance Zaehner was likened to one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, with thick pebble spectacles to adjust his myopia: this made it hard for him to find men who would reciprocate his lusts, which were vigorous when young. He later had a succession of obsessive interests including a Czech lover, Charles Manson (whom he believed to be the reincarnation of ancient savage gods), Californian hippies (whom he saw as a prelapsarian race of angels) and motorcyclist Hell’s Angels (who thrilled him). He combined an esoteric brilliance of intellect with a childish bent: on a visit in the 1950s to Goronwy Rees’s seaside house in Wales he consumed sherbet and lollipops galore, and was found screaming with fear in the drawing-room after, he said, meeting a ghost on the stairs. These eccentricities never compromised his work or reduced his value. Sir Alistair Horne, who had been an intelligence officer based in Cairo, noted that his two ablest bosses, Claude Dewhurst and Maurice Oldfield, were both homosexual. The campaign to identify and exclude such men, Horne reckoned, ‘caused a loss of talent to the secret services comparable to Louis XIV’s ill-conceived expulsion of the Huguenots from France’.8
In these matters newspapers, like church pulpits, were ‘half a generation at least behind the times’, admitted the editor of the Sunday Dispatch (Rothermere’s forerunner of the Mail on Sunday). ‘Fleet Street morality was that of the saloon bar,’ recalled Peter Wildeblood who was appointed diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail in 1953: ‘every sexual excess was talked about and tolerated, provided it was “normal”’. Otherwise pressmen shrank from the abnormal. The Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer recalled his first meeting with the German master-spy Otto John, who became a valued source for him. It occurred in 1944 at Delmer’s old school, St Paul’s in Hammersmith, which was being used as an interrogation centre for incoming aliens. John had dyed his hair and eyebrows while hiding from the Gestapo in Spain: Delmer’s first reaction to the resultant peroxide brightness was hostile. ‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘I do hope he is not another one of those!’9
On 10 June 1951 – three days after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean had been publicly admitted – a notable article appeared in the Sunday Dispatch. Its author, Alastair (‘Ali’) Forbes, was an American of bounding self-confidence and histrionically anglicized manners. He was also a gossip with a love of showing that he knew the inside dirt; a voluptuary who was censorious of other people’s pleasures; and a provocateur who liked to embroil people in denunciations, calumny and feuds. Forbes claimed that he had long suspected that Burgess was a secret member of the CPGB: ‘if he has defected now it must either be on superior orders or because he believes that war is imminent’. He said little about male homosexuality in the Sunday Dispatch, other than to enjoin that ‘the case for weeding out [from the Foreign Office] both sexual and political perverts seems unanswerable’; but his dig was made clear by the headline to his article, ‘Whitehall in Queer Street’. Next day, in the Commons, the Labour MP George Wigg asked Morrison, as Foreign Secretary, to investigate Forbes’s account of ‘widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office’ (although ‘Whitehall in Queer Street’ had not made any such sweeping allegation). Wigg added the absurd suggestion that, if these allegations were disproved, Forbes and the newspaper’s editor Charles Eade should be prosecuted by the Crown for criminal libel. Morrison did nothing to defend his officials from obloquy, but instead gave the shocking reply, ‘I have not been long enough at the Foreign Office to express an opinion.’ As Harold Macmillan noted of Morrison’s speeches as Foreign Secretary, he appeared ‘to know nothing whatever about matters of the highest importance’. Conscious that he was ‘quite out of his depth’, his reaction to parliamentary challenges was ‘bad-tempered, rude & silly’.10
There were class distinctions in MI5’s approach to interviewing Burgess’s sexual partners after he had vanished. James Pope-Hennessy and Peter Pollock were treated perhaps as curiosities but certainly with courtesy. Maxwell Knight, on 12 June 1951, was politely condescending about working-class Jack Hewit (‘the “cosy one of the two who does the cooking”’), but Skardon, who had interviewed him a week earlier, had begun his report with a single-sentence paragraph: ‘He is a loathsome creature.’ It ended just as tersely, ‘I was glad when the interview was over.’ When Commander Leonard Burt of Special Branch (the officer who had arrested Nunn May and Fuchs) was asked to interview Hewit, Sir Harold Scott, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, enjoined upon him the extreme delicacy of the inquiries. Burt assumed from this that Hewit was of ‘the same social class as the principals in this enquiry’. Skardon corrected this misunderstanding by recounting Hewit’s ‘immoral background’. In Skardon’s words, once Burt understood that Hewit was ‘just an unpleasant working-class man, he did not feel that there should be any particular difficulty in handling him’.11
On 29 June Sir William Strang, PUS of the FO, asked Sir Alexander Cadogan to chair an inquiry into the Diplomatic Service’s security checks on staff: the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Normanbrook, and the retired Ambassador Sir Nevile Bland were the two other members of the committee. Cadogan would arrive less than a minute before the due time, and start organizing his papers for the meeting. Brook would hustle in a couple of minutes late with his papers neatly arranged in a folder. ‘Ah, there you are, Norman,’ Cadogan would say, as if they had been waiting for a long time. He enjoyed teasing Brook, whom he thought a zealot, and liked to pretend to miss the point of what Brook was saying. Andrew Boyle, in The Climate of Treason, stated that the committee was chaired by Brook and thought Cadogan was a peer. He aspersed it as part of ‘the Whitehall “Club”’ and as sitting as ‘judge and jury in its own cause’. This suggests partiality in the committee’s work and inadequacy in their findings: neither charge is justified.12
Because Cadogan’s remit specified the Diplomatic Service, he did not seek evidence from other Whitehall ministries or from the Civil Service Commission. Over the course of thirteen meetings, Cadogan, Bland and Brook heard evidence from six members of the Office: the PUS, Strang; the Deputy Under Secretary, Ashley Clarke; the intelligence expert Patrick Reilly; Carey-Foster of Security; Roderick Barclay, former head of the Personnel Department; and his successor Robin Hooper. Four external officials were seen: John Winnifrith, the Treasury official who had been involved in the extension of positive vetting; Menzies of SIS; White of MI5; and Sir Ronald Howe, who was Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. The Cadogan report confirmed the policy of positive vetting, which had been instituted before Burgess and Maclean disappeared, but which, through manpower shortages, had not yet been applied to them. Its conclusions were calm and serviceable: if their lack of razzamatazz displeased men like Boyle and Chapman Pincher, it was apt for the circumstances.
The most notable part of the Cadogan deliberations concerned a memorandum submitted by the Office on the subject of homosexuality in the Diplomatic Service. It was based on the certainty that Burgess had been homosexual, and on the dubious assumption that Maclean had been bisexual, although there is no available evidence of the latter having male sexual partners after he left Cambridge. Maclean, it seems, was being lumped together with Burgess in this respect for tidiness’s sake. Rather as happened in the trials of Glading, Nunn May and Fuchs, an explanatory narrative was being devised that seemed coherent and convincing, although in truth it was unsupported by evidence and probably untrue. This FO memorandum has not been fully quoted before, although its consequences were far reaching. Its preliminaries were fair and sound:
Homosexual and heterosexual tendencies are present to a varying extent in all human beings. There is no hard and fast dividing line between normality and abnormality. Many people indulge in homosexual practices in adolescence who subsequently lead an entirely normal sexual life. Some authorities indeed would say that it was unsafe to diagnose permanent inversion in an individual until the age of 25. All that can be said is that an individual is abnormal when homosexual tendencies predominate … The propensity to homosexuality is innate. In cases of ‘true inversion’ there is nothing that the individual, the doctor or the psychiatrist can do to remove it. Marriage affords no guarantee that the homosexual will not relapse into his old ways. The individual can curb or sublimate his tendencies; but the attempt to do so inevitably sets up stresses and involves problems which are not those of the ordinary run of mankind … So far, very little evidence has come to light that homosexuality has caused disloyalty, though there may be some connection between the homosexual and the other aspects of the Maclean–Burgess case.
This summary was followed by some negative riders. A homosexual man was ‘subject to greater psychological stresses than the normal individual, even if he sublimates or restrains his natural inclinations. Restraint may add to the psychological tension.’ Moreover, ‘abnormality in one direction is often symptomatic of instability in others; and it may be that homosexuals have a greater tendency to extreme and unbalanced political views than normal persons. Their feeling that they are different from others may lead to a feeling of rejection by society, and give them a grudge against it.’ The Office posited ‘a solidarity between homosexuals which may in certain circumstances override other loyalties’. Certainly this type of man was potentially ‘open to blackmail’ and to pressure by hostile intelligence agents.
Then the Office reached the crunch. ‘By far the most important problem is that of the United States. American public opinion is strongly anti-homosexual: the American security authorities are convinced that homosexuals are a security risk; and the State Department are peculiarly sensitive to the charges that are sometimes levelled against them that the U.S. Foreign Service is a refuge for expatriates and perverts.’ As the State Department was determined to purge itself of homosexuals, ‘the relationship of mutual trust and confidence between ourselves and the State Department may be endangered if they get the impression that we are ignoring the problem’. Chiefly in order to satisfy the Americans, the Office concluded that ‘our policy should aim at eliminating homosexuals from the Foreign Service’. Already, in a circular letter sent to all heads of missions by the PUS, Strang, on 10 July, ‘sexual abnormality’ had been described as a ‘danger signal’. Henceforth heads of overseas missions or of Foreign Office departments should report ‘whenever they have genuine reasons to suspect that a member of their staff is so afflicted’. The Office in its evidence to Cadogan nevertheless disavowed McCarthy-style methods. ‘Anything in the nature of a witch-hunt would not only be repugnant to our traditions but, by breeding an atmosphere of delation [denunciation] and distrust, would seriously affect the morale of the Service.’13
The Cadogan report, dated 1 November, tempered the departmental advice to exclude male homosexuals. It recommended a policy of surveillance, with leeway for personal discretion and the judging of cases on individual merits. ‘We are now living in a state of international tension when a deliberate and skilfully directed attack is being made upon the minds and loyalties of our people and in particular of public officials and those handling highly confidential matters,’ Cadogan’s committee reported. It therefore recommended that ‘any member of the Foreign Service who is suspected of indulging homosexual tendencies should be carefully watched, even though his conduct has not occasioned any public scandal, and that his appointment within the service should take account of this risk’. The employment of such men should not be ‘a matter for hard and fast rules: we think it preferable to leave it to the discretion of those responsible for the reputation and efficiency of the Service’. Colleagues needed to treat one another with trust and respect. ‘It would be distasteful to encourage the notion that it is the duty of every member of the Service to watch the behaviour of his colleagues and, in school parlance, to “blab” about them to the “Head”. Spying and delation would be contrary to all the traditions of the Service and would gravely jeopardise its morale and efficiency.’14
The question of blackmail was irrelevant in the case of Burgess. He was a man who, as it were, faced the world with his flies undone. As Valentine Vivian of SIS had noted in 1950, he was too open about his habits to need to hush anyone into keeping them secret. Similarly, a Balkans expert who had joined SIS’s Section D under Burgess’s sponsorship doubted that someone so ‘blatant’ would be vulnerable to blackmail. Yet there was a big prohibitive jump in the years after the Cadogan report. Milo Talbot de Malahide was appointed as Carey-Foster’s successor as the Office’s head of security in July 1953, but was prematurely retired from that post in January 1954 – probably because of American suspicions of his elegant bachelorhood. It took nine months to find him a new post, as Envoy Extraordinary in the Laotian capital, Vientiane; but despite the face-saving sop of promotion to the rank of ambassador there, he was marked en disponibilité on the Foreign Office list in August 1956. The likely reason for this early end to an interesting career is implicit in a statement by the Marquess of Reading, Foreign Office spokesman in the House of Lords, in 1955. Burgess had been ‘addicted’ to ‘homosexual practices’, declared Reading, and a lesson had been learnt in the Office: ‘anybody who is thought to be disposed to homosexual practices is thereby laying himself open to blackmail to an extent which makes him an unacceptable security risk’. Reading did not mention Maclean in this context.15
Whitehall, which was already committed to introducing positive vetting, was thus set by the Cadogan committee on a policy of a calm compromise. The Americans were to be placated, but Office systems were to be flexible and porous rather than rigid and impermeable. Whitehall disclaimed any wish for Gestapo methods or McCarthy-style loyalty purges. They had not reckoned, however, with the moral panic and vindictive cruelty of a free press. The practice of positive vetting, as it developed in the second half of the century, grew increasingly severe: apparently intensifying after the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967. In particular, higher levels of security clearance were withheld.
Like many of his colleagues, Robert Cecil did not submit to the indiscriminate new sexual regime, but preferred to use his own judgement. After his appointment as Consul General in Hanover in 1955, he noticed that a colleague who had previously been en poste there was continuing to visit the city at intervals and to be seen in the company of a pretty, blonde German telephone operator who worked in the British mission. When he teased the girl about her admirer, she replied, ‘Oh, it’s not me he comes to see! It’s my young brother.’ Although the Englishman, who held an important post at a contact-point between western Europe and the Soviet bloc, would have been ‘a valuable scalp for the KGB’, Cecil thought him too level-headed to submit to blackmail and decided that he was therefore not a security risk. Cecil was glad that he took no action on his discovery, for the Englishman prospered in his career and eventually reached the rank of ambassador. Civilization rests on mutual trust.16
Newspapers and Washington officials incited one another in voicing alarm at sexually based national insecurity. In August 1952, for example, Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express told John Cimperman of the FBI that his newspaper held letters from Burgess identifying homosexuals in the Foreign Office. If it did, these may have been forgeries, for it was known that the Beaverbrook press paid well for anything that might be represented as a new lead. Cimperman hastened to MI5, where he asked if there was evidence of serving diplomats having been sexual partners of Burgess. ‘I am afraid’, A. F. Burbidge noted, ‘I was extremely non-committal to Cimperman throughout the interview.’ (The FBI’s inquisition against same-sex heretics was made demented by the fact that its Torquemada, J. Edgar Hoover, was a ferocious closet-case himself.)17
In England in 1938 there had been 134 prosecutions for sodomy, 822 for attempted sodomy and 320 for gross indecency – a low rate reflecting juries’ reluctance to convict on such charges. In 1952, after the Burgess and Maclean publicity, these figures stood at 670, 3,087 and 1,686 respectively. The following year a police commander from Scotland Yard was sent for three months to the USA to learn FBI techniques for purging government departments of male homosexuals. There then followed the notorious trials of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. During the August bank holiday weekend of 1953 a camera was stolen from his bathing hut on the Solent. When he complained to the police, the thief countered that he had been sexually assaulted by Montagu. The young peer’s adamant denial was discounted by the police. ‘While the Director of Public Prosecutions was dithering about whether or not to bring his case, his mind was made up for him’, recalled Montagu, ‘by a threat of exposure from the Beaverbrook press. I was always led to believe that this came from the top – from Lord Beaverbrook himself.’ While Montagu was taking refuge in Paris, two men visited his hotel and offered to arrange for him to take the same route to Russia as Burgess and Maclean. He reported this overture to MI5, although he suspected that it was an attempted Fleet Street entrapment. His first prosecution at Winchester Assizes on charges of committing an unnatural offence and indecent assault was discredited when it became clear that the police had tampered with the evidence.18
In January 1954 the DPP launched a new prosecution on different charges. ‘I see the police are determined to have Lord Montagu!’ Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote. ‘They are obviously piqued by their failure at Winchester. I suppose a new ripple of apprehension is now running through the upper-class Homintern.’ In the second case, Montagu had two co-defendants, a Dorset landowner named Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood of the Daily Mail. As a diplomatic correspondent Wildeblood was treated as a security risk, and had his telephone tapped: a ‘routine watch’ was reportedly kept on his line until 1957. The principal prosecution witnesses were two RAF conscripts, Edward McNally and John Reynolds – described by prosecuting counsel as ‘perverts’ who ‘cheerfully accepted corruption’ and committed ‘unnatural offences … under the seductive influence of lavish hospitality’. McNally’s evidence was especially vague, but he had been schooled to repeat one solid affirmation whenever he became confused. ‘Mr Wildeblood committed an offence against me,’ he insisted, with wooden-top phraseology that showed his police coaching clearly enough. Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were convicted and imprisoned.19
The Admiralty issued new Fleet Orders in 1954 stressing ‘the horrible nature of unnatural vice’ and instructing naval officers ‘to stamp out the evil’. In grotesquely specific detail, officers were told how to inspect sailors’ underwear for seminal or faecal stains, and jars of Vaseline or Brylcreem for pubic hairs. Fearing that these new initiatives would be a cause for mirth, the Admiralty ordered officers to enlist ‘the help of the steadier and more reliable men on the Lower Deck’ to quell the deplorable tendency ‘to treat these matters with levity’. The War Office, frightened of the ‘essentially secret nature’ of male homosexuality and apprehensive of ‘contamination by civilian sources’, introduced new regulations. The Air Ministry, however, were sure that because aircrews were all ‘selected individuals with a paramount interest in flying’, they were immune to ‘corrupting influence’, and that male homosexuality was ‘almost entirely confined to ground trades’.20
Vansittart’s loathing of male homosexuality drove him to make a vehement speech in a House of Lords debate in May 1954. He referred to Burgess and Maclean without naming them:
on the day when the news broke, I met a man – healthy-minded, all fresh air and exercise, and happily married – who said to me that by an extraordinary coincidence he happened to know all about one of those involved, and he poured out a horrified tale. When he had finished, I said, ‘But did you also suspect that there was any question of disloyalty?’ And this was his answer, which I think it would pay us all to ponder. He was immediately smitten with the prevalent modern fear of going too far and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no! I did not suspect anything of that kind. None of us did. We knew about the drink. We thought there was something else. But otherwise he seemed a decent enough fellow.’ I think the ‘otherwise’ contains a tremendous lot of history. ‘Otherwise this’ and ‘otherwise that’ – half of it comes from the fear of seeming intolerant, which may in the end prove our undoing.21
In David Footman’s favourite Belgrade bar of the 1930s there had been a sly, ignorant barman whom he nicknamed ‘Rothermere’, because the man knew nothing but had an answer for everything. The difference between the Rothermere Mail group and Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers was pithily put by Harold Macmillan: ‘Lord Rothermere … like all the Harmsworths … only care[s] about money … Ld B (to be fair) cares more for spite & mischief than money.’ While the Daily Mail reported the Lords debate under the headline ‘SEX VICE’, John Gordon in the Sunday Express warned against enemies of the people who wished ‘to legalize perversion, and even to sanctify perverts … STUFF AND NONSENSE. Perversion is very largely a practice of the too idle and too rich. It does not flourish in lands where men work hard and brows sweat with honest labour. It is a wicked mischief, destructive not only of men but of nations.’ Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, told Beaverbrook that he had identified a ‘notorious homosexual’ on the Foreign Office Selection Board.22
After Petrov’s revelations about Burgess and Maclean in 1955, Fleet Street became strident. The front page of the Sunday Pictorial special ‘EVIL MEN’ issue of 25 September thundered that the ‘sordid secret’ and ‘wretched, squalid truth about Burgess and Maclean is that they were sex perverts’. It asserted that ‘there has for years existed inside the Foreign Office service a chain or clique of perverted men’ who by their machinations had ‘protected’ the duo and were still ‘hoodwinking’ public morality. Under the headline ‘Danger to Britain’, the story continued: ‘Homosexuals – men who indulge in “unnatural” love for one another – are known to be bad security risks. They are easily won over as traitors. Foreign agents seek them out as spies.’ Seven years later, preening himself on the ‘EVIL MEN’ articles, Hugh Cudlipp of the Sunday Pictorial noted with satisfaction: ‘doctors, social workers and the wretched homosexuals themselves recognized this as a sincere attempt to get at the root of a spreading fungus’; he regretted, though, ‘that nothing practical was done to solve the worst aspect of the problem – the protection of children from the perverts’.23
A Tory MP called Captain Henry Kerby had been elected in a recent by-election. Kerby, who had been born in Russia, spoke its language so fluently that he translated for Khrushchev and Bulganin during their state visit to England, for dignitaries who visited the Commons and as a member of parliamentary delegations to the Soviet Union in 1957 and 1959. He was an utter snake, who leaked party confidences to the lobby correspondent of the Daily Express, and served as MI5’s informant in the Commons. When an all-party Civil Liberties group was inaugurated by MPs, he insinuated himself into the post of vice-chairman and acted as MI5’s mole. After being dropped by MI5 in 1966, he became a Labour party informant of confidential Tory discussions and sought a knighthood from his opponents. Kerby, who had served in wartime military intelligence, gave a front-page interview in the Sunday Pictorial’s ‘EVIL MEN’ issue under the headline ‘Who is Hiding the Man Who Tipped Off These Sex Perverts?’ He decried ‘the “brotherhood” of perverted men’ responsible for the cover-up of ‘flagrant homosexuality’ among diplomatists: ‘there are still many people of this ilk today in the Foreign Service’. The will of the people was being frustrated by withholding ‘the names of those Foreign Office officials who shielded both traitors during their service’. Kerby wanted politicians to provide their officials as the quarry in a witch-hunt: ‘The archaic tradition of Ministers manfully shouldering and shielding Civil Servants at the Foreign Office is ABSURD and DANGEROUS.’24
Burgess and Maclean’s public re-emergence in Moscow in February 1956 prepared the way for another onslaught. On 11 March the People, which had published the Petrov revelations six months earlier, began to run a series of weekly articles on the Burgess and Maclean scandal. The pieces were anonymous, but an influential minority knew the identity of the author. The young historian Keith Thomas had recently received a kind letter from Goronwy Rees congratulating him as a fellow Welshman on his election as a Fellow of All Souls. Sixty years later Thomas still remembered seeing a copy of the People article, illustrated by a pair of sinister, peering eyes, lying on the central table in the college coffee-room and being discussed. Everyone realized that Rees was the author. His decision to sell his story to a Sunday scandal-sheet, and to let its hacks sensationalize the more temperate memoir that he had prepared, was an act of tragic self-spoliation. Rees was finding himself, in George Herbert’s phrase, ‘no star, but a quick coal of mortal fire’: a bright but unstable force, who was burning out, his judgement unbalanced by an alcoholic intake that was ruining his health as well as disappointing his hopes of himself. The articles were intended by him as pre-emptive of any damage that Burgess might do him by revelations of their association before 1939; but his complex character included a liability to harm his own interests.
Rees let the People journalists attribute destructive exaggerations to him. ‘Guy Burgess is the greatest traitor in our history,’ stated the opening article. ‘He was a Communist of the deepest Red.’ At the time Rees was the most compassionate and enlightened member of the government inquiry into homosexuality and prostitution under the chairmanship of Sir John Wolfenden, so it is extraordinary that he let himself be used as a ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing populist bigotry. ‘For 20 years one incredibly vicious man used blackmail and corruption on a colossal scale to worm out Britain’s most precious secrets for the rulers of Russia. That is the truth … that even today the men whose duty is to protect us from foreign spies dare not admit.’ The ersatz Rees in the People warned, ‘men like Burgess are only able to escape detection because THEY HAVE FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES’. Wolfenden and the Home Office agreed that Rees must retire from the committee after such utterances.25
A subsequent issue of the People reverted to this prurient theme:
THE MOST PAINFUL PART OF THE ENTIRE GUY BURGESS AFFAIR IS THE STORY OF HIS INCREDIBLY DEPRAVED PRIVATE LIFE.
For this man who was the greatest traitor Britain has ever known – and who for a long time was my closest friend – indulged in practices that repel all normal people.
Yet I must place the facts before you because they disclose a state of affairs in high places that remains to this day a terrible danger to Britain’s security.
Guy Burgess was not only guilty of practising unnatural vices. He also had, among his numerous friends, many who shared his abnormal tastes.
And he was in a position to blackmail some of them – including men in influential positions – to get information for his Russian masters.
Without naming Hewit or Footman, Rees gave a garbled account of Burgess’s help to SIS in monitoring Henlein’s telephone conversations at the Goring Hotel: ‘he made use of a young man he had corrupted. He actually got this perverted lad installed as a telephone operator in Henlein’s hotel.’ Without naming Blunt, he referred to ‘a distinguished academic’ as ‘ONE OF BURGESS’ BOON SEX COMPANIONS AND HE HOLDS A HIGH POSITION IN PUBLIC LIFE TODAY’. At All Souls it was clear, as it was to the cognoscenti elsewhere, that Rees meant Blunt. Isaiah Berlin, an All Souls friend who remained devoted to Rees malgré tout, said that no one except fellow-travellers objected to the attack on Burgess, and few people minded ‘the anti-homosexual tone of the piece’. What was found unforgivable was the ‘hysterical McCarthyism’ of the accusations that the Foreign Office was full of homosexual communists. Rees was ostracized by many friends: among former intelligence officers Hampshire sent him an indignant letter, but A. J. Ayer, F. W. Deakin, Footman and Zaehner did not waver in their affection for him.26
The prejudices of the Sunday Pictorial’s ‘EVIL MEN’ articles and of the People’s ‘Guy Burgess Stripped Bare’ series were assimilated by institutions that ought to have been wiser. Thus the memorandum of evidence submitted by the British Medical Association to the Wolfenden committee began by declaring: ‘The proper use of sex, the primary purpose of which is procreative, is related to the individual’s responsibility to himself and the nation.’ Physicians were pained to ‘observe their patients in an environment favourable to sexual indulgence, and surrounded by irresponsibility, selfishness and a preoccupation with immediate materialistic satisfaction’. The BMA deplored licentious advertisements, suggestive articles and photographs in Sunday newspapers, cheap novels with lurid covers and the eroticism of the cinema, all of which ‘tends to increase heterosexual over-activity, while, for homosexuals, it fans the fire of resentment at the latitude allowed to heterosexual indulgence’. There was a national threat, the BMA judged. ‘Homosexual practices tend to spread by contact, and from time to time they insidiously invade certain groups of the community.’ Male homosexuals aroused public hostility by placing ‘loyalty to one another above their loyalty to the institution or government they serve’. Such outcasts, when in positions of authority, gave preferential treatment to their kind or required ‘homosexual subjection as an expedient for promotion. The existence of practising homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, Civil Service, Forces, Press, radio, stage and other institutions constitutes a special problem.’ If the BMA words meant anything, the Association wanted a purge of sexual deviancy undreamt of by J. Edgar Hoover.27
The psychiatrists of the National Health Service’s famous Tavistock Clinic in London also submitted evidence to Wolfenden. ‘The staff of this Clinic are unanimously of the opinion that homosexuality is a disorder of the personality and as such to be regarded as an illness.’ They discerned in the majority of homosexuals ‘a lack of capacity to form lasting affectionate relationships (of a non-sexual character) towards any other persons, with a correlated morbid degree of self-centredness which may take the form of self-admiration or self-abasement.’ Tavistock psychiatry deplored any sexual act ‘which offends public decency or decorum, or which tends to flaunt or glorify this mental illness as if it were a superior social cult’. For this reason it favoured ‘strict legislation in relation to the offences of importuning, corrupting, soliciting or the establishment and maintenance of clubs or “maisons de rendezvous” for homosexual purposes’. The Tavistock reiterated: ‘abnormal sexual behaviour should be regarded basically as a public health problem. The homosexual should be thought of and proclaimed in the public mind as an immature, sick and potentially “infectious” person, and the whole subject divested of the glamour of wickedness as well as the aesthetic of superiority.’28
It is too much to say that the BMA and Tavistock prejudices were engendered by Burgess and Maclean; but certainly such views were escalated by them.
In Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger (1959) James Bond meets a lesbian couple whose names, Pussy Galore and Tilly Masterson, indicate which of them plays the feminine role and which the butch. ‘Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not completely homosexual, but confused,’ Bond reflects. ‘He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.’ The fear that ‘unhappy sexual misfits’, as Bond called them, were growing ubiquitous had entered the national psyche since 1951. This anxiety was to be invigorated three years after Goldfinger by the Admiralty spy case.29
In April 1962 the Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsyn gave information which led to the detection of a junior Admiralty official who was a communist spy. John Vassall had been born in 1924, the son of an impecunious clergyman, and was educated at a boarding school in Monmouth, where his sex life began with his fellow pupils. After conscription into the Royal Air Force in 1943, he became expert at handling Leica cameras, developing pictures and making prints. Following demobilization in 1947, he became a clerical officer in the Admiralty. He was a sexually confident young Londoner who attracted prosperous and amusing men. ‘He was very successful in this sphere,’ wrote Rebecca West, and ‘could hold his own in an outlaw world where tact, toughness and vigilance had to be constantly on the draw’.30
By his own account, Vassall applied on impulse for a post as a clerk on the Naval Attaché’s staff at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. The likelier truth – as in Marshall’s case – is that he was induced by a prior Soviet contact to apply for a Moscow posting with espionage in mind. Like Marshall again, Vassall claimed that he had been driven to espionage by the snobbery of embassy life. He described, or invented, rebuffs and snubs supposedly delivered by the Ambassador and his wife, Sir William and Lady Hayter, by the Naval Attaché for whom he worked and by other diplomats. After his arrest in 1962, his fluent rigmarole of complaints about the aloofness of the Hayters, the rigidity of the embassy hierarchy and the inexorable protocol was uncannily like Marshall’s. It seems to have been a KGB instruction for English spies, if caught, to parrot tales of class stigma and subjugation.31
Vassall claimed that one evening in Moscow he was dosed with a drug that made him extra-suggestible, and induced him to strip naked and disport with three men while being photographed under harsh lights. In later public self-exculpations Vassall spoke of crying out with pain; but at the age of thirty, after multiple experiences, he can hardly have been a novice at being buggered, and this is just one of several unbelievable flourishes in his account of his entrapment. According to his later narrative, he agreed to spy after being confronted by compromising photographs and threatened with gaol. Only an inexperienced, helpless man would have submitted to KGB threats of exposure, and Vassall was hardy, smart and resourceful. A man who had the nerves for years of high-level espionage would not have been so timid with blackmailers.
Vassall began taking documents from the Naval Attaché’s office, giving them to Soviet agents for photographing and returning them. After resuming work in the Naval Intelligence Department in London in 1956, he regularly photographed material. After a year he was appointed assistant secretary in the private office of the Civil Lord of the Admiralty. In 1959 he was posted to the Fleet section, where he had access to secret documents. He suspended spying when the Portland spy scandal broke, but resumed in December 1961 and continued until his arrest in September 1962.
Vassall’s Old Bailey trial in October was held partly in camera. The prosecution accepted his story of the compromising photographs as the reason for supplying his Soviet controllers with documents. It was no truer than the prosecution arguments at the trials of Glading, Nunn May and Marshall. The judge endorsed this tale in his summing-up. After Vassall had been sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment, MPs debated his activities without anyone questioning the official line. A subsequent tribunal of investigation led by the law lord Lord Radcliffe did not challenge the legend. Radcliffe’s report enforced the view that Vassall was flighty, malleable and submissive, which seemed less threatening than the reality that he was a resilient and abundant source of secrets for Moscow.
In order to pay for his defence, Vassall sold his memoirs to the Sunday Pictorial for £7,000. The first instalment appeared on the first weekend after his conviction, and was full of the archness and salacious guilt that the newspaper required for its money. The stifling class discrimination of the Moscow embassy and Vassall’s bracing lack of snobbery were stressed. The front-page lead in that issue parroted the new conventional wisdom – unknown before the FBI’s pressure on Whitehall in 1951 – that ‘civil servants with homosexual tendencies were especially vulnerable as security risks’. Detectives were tracking such men and expunging them from influential government posts. A week later, the Sunday Pictorial reported Vassall urging the need for an inquiry into ‘sex blackmail’ of officials ‘to weed out homosexuals and bisexuals in high office’. Many of them, Vassall was made to say, appeared to be ‘respectable married men’ beyond suspicion of ‘abnormal sexual practices’. The News of the World had to vie with the Sunday Pictorial exclusive serialization as best it could. On 28 October it moved into its customary mode of scaremongering about ‘twilight people working in places where they can betray their country to indulge their perverted pleasures’. It pretended that Burgess was the spymaster who had recruited and run Vassall: ‘BURGESS SITS IN MOSCOW LIKE A PATIENT TOAD AWAITING HIS NEXT WILLING VICTIM.’32
Vassall was paroled from prison in 1972, and three years later published his self-serving memoirs which made him, for a few months, a celebrity spy. Before publication of the memoirs he holidayed in Brighton with the former Labour MP Thomas Skeffington-Lodge, who (in the words of the novelist Francis King) took him incognito to a bar, where he introduced him to ‘a male tart’ who was brought back to the house and paid after giving satisfaction. Some time later, when Vassall’s memoirs were being promoted by the publisher, an outraged rent boy returned to Skeffington-Lodge’s front door. ‘He had been watching the telly and had seen his former client on it. How dare S-L get him to go to bed with a spy?’33
The FBI’s obsession with hunting perverts, the Cadogan committee’s focus on male homosexuality rather than alcoholism as the primary ‘danger signal’, the misdirection about Maclean’s sexual tastes, the spurious evidence of motives adduced at Vassall’s trial, the prejudice of journalists and Fleet Street’s appetite for personalizing issues and making scapegoats created an unpleasant national atmosphere.
One forgotten casualty is the politician-barrister Charles Fletcher-Cooke. Born in 1914, he was an undergraduate at Peterhouse, a small, reactionary Cambridge college containing few fellow-travellers. In the summer of 1935 he joined a group of young CPGB members or sympathizers which visited Russia. Apart from Fletcher-Cooke, these included Blunt, John Madge, Charles Rycroft, Brian Simon, Michael Straight and Michael Young, all of whom made dutiful visits to showpiece factories and collective farms. Fletcher-Cooke’s special interest, however, was the Moscow theatre festival. ‘We worried that we were squandering the resources of the Worker’s State if we put two lumps of sugar in our tea,’ recalled Straight. ‘We tried not to see the poverty, the squalor, the primitiveness that surrounded us wherever we went.’34
Fletcher-Cooke edited Granta, was president of the Cambridge Union and got a first in his finals. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1938, entered the chambers of the Labour lawyer Sir William Jowitt, co-authored a textbook on monopolies and restrictive practices and later took silk. He joined naval intelligence in 1940, and was posted to Washington in 1943 with the rank of lieutenant commander charged with liaison with US naval intelligence. ‘I am quite hopeless to fight our battles here,’ he admitted to Noël Annan. ‘I succumb to the charm of the American navy immediately. And it’s very difficult to explain … when I come back having bartered our whole case for a smile!’ His posting back to London, where he was to work on the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence staff, left him with ‘a broken heart’, he told Annan. On paper he left the gender of his lovers unspecified – ‘they are so beautiful, so gentle, so affectionate’ – but admitted that his experiences left him ‘near tears continually. It’s just as well to part.’ Before leaving the US, Fletcher-Cooke had ‘an eight cylinder orgy in New York – the Metropolitan, “Oklahoma”, the Navy yards at Brooklyn, and some squandering of dollars in the stores’.35
At the general election of 1945 Fletcher-Cooke contested East Dorset as Labour candidate. He was legal adviser to the Foreign Office at the Danube River conference held at Belgrade in 1948. Vyshinsky’s negotiating brutality – the Russians opposed unrestricted Danube navigation as they did any measure that smacked of the American pet project of internationalized European waterways, and refused compensation for nationalized property – led Fletcher-Cooke to resign from the Labour party. He had transferred his political allegiance by 1951, when he was elected as Conservative MP for the Lancashire cotton town of Darwen. Fred Warner listed him to MI5 in June 1951 as one of Burgess’s closest friends.
Fletcher-Cooke noticed women’s clothes but was deaf to their speech. ‘Can anyone think of anything said by a Lady Member during this Session?’ he asked after his first year in the Commons. ‘I remember vividly what they look like, but not a word that they have said … First prize for turn-out is shared by Mrs Castle, whose dazzling yellows draw every eye, and by Lady Tweedsmuir, the exponent of that dying cult, Good Style.’ He was a connoisseur of the performing arts: in 1946 he contributed an ironical yet stirring report in the Observer of the first post-war Salzburg Music Festival, at which the cast of Der Rosenkavalier threatened a sit-down strike between acts because they were so hungry, while other performers lamented the European-wide shortage of catgut; in 1953 he complained in parliament that a work permit had been refused to the New Jersey actress Yolande Donlan to enable her to take the part of Peter Pan in a Christmas run, a Ministry of Labour official having told the theatre management that the part was ‘not suitable to be played by an American’.36
As a backbencher in the 1950s Fletcher-Cooke pressed for repeal of the criminal sanctions still visited so traumatically on people who survived suicide attempts. He had crisp nicknames for people, for example calling his bombastic ministerial colleague Lord Hailsham ‘the Pathetic Fallacy’. In 1960 he was one of only twenty-two Tory MPs to vote in favour of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality (174 voted against): he was brave enough to denounce the vote publicly as a ‘fiasco’. He grieved at the birth of a stillborn child from his short-lived marriage to an ex-actress. In 1961 he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Home Office, where he proved adept at speaking strongly against crime while supporting less brutal treatment of criminals. He also achieved the passing of the Suicide Act. In the Commons his terse wit was an antidote to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, who (in Macmillan’s description) ‘answers questions with a portentous & often risible solemnity’.37
Then, in 1962, Burgess’s tipsy friend Lord Maugham introduced Fletcher-Cooke to a teenager named Anthony Turner, who was both an ex-borstal inmate and a policeman’s son. Early in 1963 Fleet Street reporters were tipped off that Turner was living in Fletcher-Cooke’s flat in Great Peter Street, near the Palace of Westminster. Shortly afterwards Turner was stopped by Stepney police while exceeding the speed limit in Fletcher-Cooke’s Austin Princess. ‘I have had to deal with a sad case of Fletcher-Cooke (Under Sec. Home Office) who has got into trouble,’ Harold Macmillan noted on 21 February. ‘I fear he will have to resign.’ (Macmillan was dealing at the time with the repercussions of Philby’s disappearance from Beirut, and had Richard Llewellyn’s Burgess-and-Maclean-inspired novel, Mr Hamish Gleave, as his bedtime reading.) Ten days later Turner was convicted at Bow Street magistrates’ court of driving while unlicensed and uninsured. Fletcher-Cooke’s ministerial career was over.38
Fletcher-Cooke’s Darwen constituents supported him, so that he remained their MP until the constituency was abolished twenty years later. Within MI5, however, his Cambridge and recent friendships prompted the idea of giving renewed scrutiny to former contacts of Burgess who were or might be homosexuals. The object was to discover if any of them were vulnerable to blackmail while holding positions, as Fletcher-Cooke had done until recently, where they had access to classified information. ‘We must reckon’, urged an MI5 officer, ‘that the Russians will have been interested in learning from BURGESS the names of his homosexual friends and that they will subsequently have made it their business to discover if any of these people were worth blackmailing.’39
The versatility, altruism, deprecating wit and sense of duty that characterized Fletcher-Cooke are always in short supply in parliament. Yet the whole nature of the man was now suspect. For the rest of the century there would be no respite in the official rejection of sexual variety that had been started as a sop to J. Edgar Hoover.