In exile the Cambridge spies continued to make trouble. After nearly five years of invisibility and silence, Burgess and Maclean reappeared on 11 February 1956 at a hastily improvised press conference held in a suite in Moscow’s National Hotel. In a sitting-room dominated by a giant mirror framed in porcelain, with cupids and gold fittings, written statements were handed to the four journalists present. There was an uninformative question-and-answer session that lasted about five minutes. ‘For a foreigner in the Soviet Union,’ as a later Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Duncan Wilson, noted, ‘there are no degrees of knowledge, only degrees of ignorance.’1
There were two reasons for the sudden disclosure of the missing diplomats. Anthony Eden had recently returned from a successful prime ministerial visit to Washington: any revival of the Burgess–Maclean story chafed Anglo-American unity at a sore spot. Moreover, the post-Stalinist Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, were due to pay a state visit to the young Queen Elizabeth in April. The Kremlin had belatedly accepted that, unless doubts about the whereabouts of the missing diplomats were dispelled, the visit would be marred by endless distracting press questions. As it was, there were disharmonious passages during the state visit. At a dinner for the Soviet and Labour parliamentary leaders, George Brown cracked an ill-appreciated joke that the Soviet Union was a breakaway movement from the Transport & General Workers’ Union. He later toasted Khrushchev with noisy semi-mockery, ‘Here’s to the big boss,’ to which Khrushchev raised his glass in reply and said, ‘You look like a little boss yourself.’2
The great fiasco of the visit occurred underwater. SIS sent a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking frogman named Lionel (‘Buster’) Crabb diving into Portsmouth waters to spy on the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had brought the Soviet leaders to England. He never resurfaced. Fleet Street ran amok speculating whether he had defected, been kidnapped or drowned by misadventure. Inevitably, given Fleet Street’s lubricity, some hinted without evidence or relevance that he was bisexual. The speculation was not stilled when a headless corpse, wearing Crabb’s diver’s costume, appeared fourteen months later on a sandbank in Chichester harbour. This botched Ordzhonikidze venture resulted in the dismissal of ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair as ‘C’ of SIS and his replacement by Dick White, who had previously succeeded Sillitoe as Director General of MI5 in 1953.
The curt press conference in the National Hotel started a news storm raging across the English-speaking world. A few days later the Sunday Express asked Burgess to send a message for publication. He responded with a 789-word cable which resembled Delmer’s Moscow-line reports in the Daily Express on the threat of German militarism. ‘To give unlimited backing to, and to rearm, precisely the same expansionist social forces in Germany which have created two wars in this century, is a wild and dangerous gamble,’ wrote Burgess. ‘The Hitlers of the future, like the Hitlers of the past, can be easily dealt with if there is Anglo-Soviet collaboration.’ He attacked US foreign policy while praising Mao Tse-tung’s regime: ‘The Chinese People’s Government is a Government of the Chinese people by the Chinese people for the Chinese people.’ His article was flanked by a Sunday Express editorial berating the Kremlin for ‘putting up a drunken traitor like Burgess to soft-talk the people of Britain’. Beaverbrook’s hirelings, who had sought Burgess’s views, declared with their usual grace: ‘Deeds will win friendship. Not the propaganda of a pervert.’3
On 25 February Driberg wrote to Burgess asking if he might interview him in Moscow and enclosing a column that he had contributed to that day’s Reynolds News. Petrov (the source of the first sure confirmation that Burgess was a long-term Soviet spy rather than Maclean’s impulsive, muddle-headed travel companion) was dismissed in Driberg’s article as ‘a paid nark’. Driberg praised Burgess as ‘whimsical and erudite’, decried ‘the Morrison–Macmillan witch-hunt’ against the defected diplomats and concluded, ‘if it be true they have been advising the Kremlin on relations with the West, and so are to some extent responsible for easing East–West tension, they may yet be hailed as benefactors of the human race’. Burgess replied on 15 March with standard KGB disinformation: ‘what you say about Petrov is true – he was a “paid nark” … he gave his original information C.O.D. [cash on delivery] and subsequently added to it – in different and self-contradictory forms in England and America – on the hire-purchase system. They always do – and the Foreign Office and Intelligence services should know that perfectly well.’ Defectors like Petrov and Krivitsky ‘invent to earn their keep … but I don’t want to go here into a long screed about not having been an agent. There is no evidence that I was: in fact I wasn’t, and that’s that.’4
Burgess’s first visitor in July 1956 was his mother, with whom he spent a month’s seaside holiday at Sochi. They stayed in an enclave for privileged members of the Soviet bureaucracy rather than in the proletarian resort where loudspeakers boomed martial music interspersed with propaganda about communist triumphs and capitalist villainy. The Daily Express falsely reported that Eve Bassett had travelled under an alias. Her return journey proved an ordeal that half killed her: aggressive journalists swarmed around the tired old lady during a stopover at Stockholm airport; ‘I had an hour & a half of 3rd degree, no escape from them’; the Daily Express was so avid for Burgess relics that its reporter collected her cigarette stubs.5
Driberg was Burgess’s next visitor from London. During his August fortnight in Moscow, he was photographed by the KGB fellating a man in a urinal, and was cajoled into becoming a KGB informant codenamed LEPAGE. LEPAGE reported on the dynamics of the Labour national executive and parliamentary Labour party, and retold gossip about the foibles and frailties of Labour leaders. Although the Soviets overestimated the influence that Driberg could exert as chairman of the Labour party in 1957, he peddled their line during the nuclear disarmament rows that rent the party. He cut contacts with the KGB in 1968 when they increased pressure on him while he was recovering from a heart attack. Driberg had been one of Maxwell Knight’s MI5 sources inside the CPGB for nearly twenty years until 1941. He also supplied the Czech intelligence services with parliamentary assessments during the 1960s. MI5’s relations with him remained cagey but cordial throughout.
Driberg’s first task for the KGB was to write a hurried, obsequious book entitled Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background. He netted £5,000 by selling its serialization rights to the Daily Mail, which ran his paltry pieces in October under the billing ‘News that even MI5 could not get’. These represented Maclean as the dominant partner in the escape and as a devout communist; Burgess was treated as his subordinate, and painted as no worse than an extreme socialist. MI5 judged that Burgess hoped that this ‘white-wash’ would be the enabling preliminary to his return to London if the Labour party won the next general election: ‘he might even hope to have a friend in Ministerial circles in the form of DRIBERG himself’.6
Driberg’s book had the misfortune to be published in November 1956 when Europe was reeling from the ruthlessness with which the Soviet Union had suppressed the Hungarian uprising. His presentation of Burgess and Maclean as heralds of peaceful coexistence, with the moral equivalency of pacifist pro-Boer campaigners of 1899–1902, was belied by the nationalist aggression of Moscow’s actions against Budapest. ‘Hungary has put a new gloss on tales of individual conscience and loyalties above country,’ declared a Manchester Guardian editorial. ‘The Burgesses of this world … belong to the past. It is doubly unimportant whether they now strum the Eton boating song in Moscow or in Mayfair.’ While members of the CPGB and other European communists recanted their faith, Burgess in Moscow could not forswear the old creed.7
Edward Crankshaw of the London School of Economics reviewed Driberg’s corrupt propaganda in the Observer under the headline ‘Unbelievable’. He later admitted to Patrick Reilly that he found the little book so ill-written that he could only skim its pages. His review identified its hub as the chapter giving Burgess’s explanation of his flight in 1951: ‘if one does not believe it, then the book has no value at all’, Crankshaw judged. ‘The actual account of the escape is an insult to the intelligence, full of improbabilities and inconsistencies.’ Portrait with Background denied that Burgess had been a Soviet spy, and depicted him as a lofty idealist wrestling with his fine conscience. Alan Pryce-Jones, a reviewer who had known Burgess well, teased him as a mix between ‘Meddlesome Matty’, the irritating fidget in a Victorian nursery homily, and Lupin Pooter, the brash, silly chancer in The Diary of a Nobody. Burgess was quintessentially frivolous, wrote Pryce-Jones, ‘for the essence of frivolity is to be unable to perceive any necessary connexion between cause and effect, to treat every act and every passing idea as though they could, at will, be made self-sufficient’. Driberg’s book, despite the scornful reviews, showed the sales-value of Burgess and Maclean: thereafter journalists telephoned Burgess for topical quotes, or visited him in Moscow for headline-grabbing interviews, which pleased the Kremlin because constant references to him discomfited Whitehall.8
Besides Driberg’s book, Burgess was eager to read acclaimed new biographies, histories and novels as they were published in London, and advised on English-language books that might safely be translated and circulated to the Soviet policy elite. He told Nora Beloff that the great aim of his life was to persuade the Russian authorities to commission a translation of Proust. He parroted Moscow’s denigration of Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago. ‘I don’t consider that the Soviet Government will penalise Pasternak,’ he told an English journalist who telephoned him. ‘I don’t think there is any possibility of his losing his house or suffering any other penalty.’ He had abandoned reading the book after ten pages, he claimed: ‘There is no objection here to reading anti-Soviet literature, but I found it boring. I cannot understand why the quislings of the West have praised this book and compared it to War and Peace.’9
Anthony Blunt acted as an intermediary between MI5 and Eve Bassett, advised the old lady on parrying press attention, steered her contacts with her son and helped MI5 in quelling his hopes of returning to London. ‘He enjoyed knowing that he could do something terribly well,’ Neil MacGregor, one of Blunt’s protégés and a future director of the National Gallery, told Miranda Carter. His success depended upon the impermeable compartmentalization of his connoisseurship and espionage so that neither could leak into the other. ‘I suspect’, said MacGregor, ‘that he got a great deal of enjoyment out of keeping the two bits separate and not tripping up. You have to be terribly clever to carry it off, and he knew that he was terribly clever. There was a delight in the game, in being able to do it so completely, and to live completely differently in the two worlds must have been quite exhilarating. My hunch would be that that was what really kept it going: the intoxication of playing this wonderfully complex game.’10
There was little affinity between Burgess and Maclean, although they made similar jokes about the twinning of their names like those of department stores for middle-class Londoners. ‘So awful and boring being chained to poor Donald like Marshall to Snelgrove,’ Burgess complained to the actress Coral Browne. Maclean wrote to his fellow roisterer Philip Toynbee: ‘Burgess and Maclean! We have become like Swan and Edgar, or Debenham and Freebody; yet I neither know Guy very well nor like him very much.’11
Maclean and his old boon companion Philip Toynbee tried to revive their old friendship, despite the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the first and the other being a repentant communist who had grown to loathe totalitarianism. ‘The central point is whether there would have been fascism in Hungary if the Soviet army had not intervened,’ Maclean insisted to Toynbee after the Soviet aggression of 1956. Without Russian military occupation, would the Hungarian people ‘have had a better life – freer, with more food, clothes, housing, schools, books, hospitals, holiday places – all the things that make the basis for the happiness of a man and his family? Or would they have had a worse one, ruled in effect by capitalists, the Church and the landlords, with some sort of fascist front and permanent witch-hunts to keep down the enemies of such people – in short a sort of Franco Spain?’ Maclean argued that Hungary would have become a vassal state serving American capitalism if there had not been Russian armed intervention. ‘We should have seen repeated in Europe, with European modifications, the sort of real horror which the Americans in rather similar circumstances have created in South Viet-Nam and South Korea.’ He promised Toynbee that ‘the nightmare’ of Stalinist purges was over in the Soviet Union. ‘The enemy you think you are fighting – Stalinism, brutality, firing-squads – isn’t there any more.’ The Maclean–Toynbee friendship foundered after this.12
Free to resume contact with his mother and brother, Maclean rhapsodized about the reality of a socialist state. ‘It’s neither a bronzed youth looking towards the sunrise nor a plain-clothes socialist official coldly ordering everybody about, but a great swarming mass of human beings going about the business of living,’ he informed Lady Maclean in August 1956 in a letter that he knew would be intercepted and read by officials in Moscow and London. Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, ‘it doesn’t take long to realise that they are all going in a good direction, having burst the bonds of capitalism which hold everything back or, even worse, force whole peoples with [sic] war’. In private conversation he was more critical. The former Soviet spy inside OSS, Maurice Halperin, settled in Moscow in 1958, and befriended an Englishman named Mark Frazer without realizing at first that this was the Moscow alias of Maclean. The men talked with reasonable openness about their disappointment with Khrushchev’s regime. Maclean divided the Soviet leadership into two distinct camps, ‘the Progressives and the Black Hundreds’. He abominated the latter die-hard group, and despised one of its leaders, Andrei Gromyko as, in his words, ‘a jumped-up peasant’. Maclean was also said to be ‘deeply wounded by his treatment in the Western press, and by his portrayal as a homosexual’.13
As a forcibly retired social networker Burgess was frustrated by the limited scope in Moscow for regenerative gossip. He longed for well-connected, informative visitors from London. ‘You will have heard that I normally prefer boys,’ he told Nora Beloff, ‘but I will make an exception in your case.’ He advised her on survival in Moscow: in negotiations with bureaucrats, bang fists on tables and shout them down; storm at hotel servants in order to get good service. Members of the British embassy were instructed to leave any gathering attended by Burgess or Maclean; but they had indirect contact through the many reports that English visitors to Moscow provided of Burgess, who craved meetings, and the scarcer accounts of Maclean, who avoided them.14
Patrick Reilly, who was Ambassador in Moscow in 1957–60, remitted to London an account received in 1959 from Edward Crankshaw of three recent meetings with Burgess. ‘We exchanged some quite hard words, calling spades spades, but quietly and reasonably,’ Crankshaw wrote in his invaluably unbiased appraisal. ‘I had never known anyone who flaunted his homosexuality so openly: whether he did this in England others will know. But he neither bullied one nor bored one with it. And once I got accustomed to this strange atmosphere I liked him very much and finished up by being deeply sorry for him, although at no time did he exhibit self-pity.’ Burgess, said Crankshaw, was avid ‘for the opportunity to talk and talk and talk with someone who, sex apart, could speak his language’. Tonya, ‘his “boy friend” who lives with him, is a young factory mechanic who plays the concertina beautifully, keeps up an incessant moan about living conditions and the regime, and is intelligent, unsqualid, and pleasant in a pansy way. B also has a “boy friend” who is a priest at the Novo Devichi church. Over 6 foot tall, youngish and wholly repellent – v. handsome in a horrible way – and corrupt to the core. B is quite obviously head over heels in love with this monster.’ Crankshaw watched Burgess gazing at the priest during a service: ‘B’s face was radiant and he was clearly transported with delight. One could have wept.’ Crankshaw assessed Burgess’s political views as at the level of ‘intelligent junior Party members … He said he could not live now anywhere but in the USSR, so long as the cold war continued. His anti-Americanism is as strong as ever, and he said he would be stifled in a non-socialist country, in spite of the many sins and defaults of this one. At the same time he talked incessantly and with delight of Eton and Oxford [sic] and mutual friends.’ Crankshaw’s companion Doreen Marston asked Burgess to telephone Maclean to arrange a meeting. ‘Melinda wanted to meet us but Donald would not hear of it. Burgess got angry and called him in effect a stuffed shirt. Donald got angry back.’ Burgess said that Maclean ‘liked laughing at himself, but could not bear it when others laughed at him’, whereas he, Burgess, ‘found it almost impossible to laugh at himself, though he tried very earnestly, but he did not mind being laughed at by others’. Burgess agreed with Crankshaw’s strictures on ‘the atavistic methods of repression and treachery’ used to repress the Hungarian uprising of 1956, ‘but insisted that, although there was a genuine and reasonable revolt among the factory workers and the intelligentsia, the Soviet Govt. had sufficient evidence of American efforts to support such a rising … to make it necessary for them to use extreme measures’. As he talked, Burgess paced incessantly up and down the room, and seemed ‘full of almost incoherent impulses’. He was desperate to visit his seventy-seven-year-old mother: ‘He expresses conviction that he cannot be nabbed on an official secrets or treason charge, though he thinks M.I.5 might nobble him and rig a trial in camera; he was a little lurid about that. He also thought he might be taken on a charge of homosexual conduct and put away for a bit and was interested in the workings of the statute of limitations.’ Crankshaw’s conclusion was compassionate but fatalistic: ‘The man is half dotty, not actively vicious’; trapped in ‘the sort of personal tragedy that can only be ended by death. It is a terrible waste, but the waste is absolute.’15
The England to which Burgess wished to return was changing fast. ‘Macmillan has captured the hearts of the great British public,’ Harold Nicolson warned him in 1959. ‘The proletariat is becoming bourgeois, or so close to the middle classes that they are beginning to feel themselves budding capitalists. Thus they regard extreme socialism as a relic of their impoverished youth and aspire to be among those who stand by the established order.’ Next year a writer in the Spectator mused on ‘this fascinating, frightening, trembling moment of time’ in which the working class was revelling in its new-found ‘selfish solidarity, its mass-produced culture, its cheerful apathy’. The pool of potential Labour votes was notable for ‘its reluctance to enrol in crusades, its obsession with trivial, sentimental injustices, its old-fashioned affection for capital punishment, bad food, derelict transport, hypocritical laws, hideous architecture, and sensational newspapers, its sudden outbursts of pointless and ineffectual violence’. Michael Young, the sociologist who had accompanied Blunt on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935, wrote his seminal pamphlet The Chipped White Cups of Dover in 1960: ‘More people than ever before recognise that Britain is inferior in many ways it should not be to other countries in Europe and America. More people than ever before recognise that in certain respects Britain is superior in many ways it should not be to other countries in Asia and Africa. Britain is too drab in relation to Europe, and too selfish in relation to Asia and Africa.’ With the exception of the Iberian despotisms, Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, almost every western European country excelled Britain in the quality of their public amenities: town planning, architecture, transport and the scope for enjoying leisure. Young found Britain’s complacent insularity to be pitiful. ‘We go on arrogantly refusing to learn the languages of Europe,’ said Young, and ‘go on making ourselves ridiculous by talking English a little louder when we get to Orly [airport]’.16
Macmillan described the Soviet Union in 1961 as ‘this strange system, half Orwellite & half Byzantine’, but its pioneering technological feats, notably the orbiting of the planet by the satellite Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s outer-space flight in 1961, increased anxieties that Britain was technologically retarded and economically failing. After two years of guerrilla warfare, Fidel Castro announced his seizure of power in Cuba on 1 January 1959, and was joined a day later in Havana by his deputy commander, a Marxist physician from Argentina named Ernesto (‘Che’) Guevara. Castro was an innovator in class warfare, who had the unprecedented notion of expelling the bourgeoisie from his nation, so the middle classes were sent packing to the United States. Guevara’s advocacy of rural guerrilla warfare across Latin America incited a decade of revolutionary turbulence in that continent. A few weeks later, the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s central committee avowed to the 21st Party Congress: ‘the ideas of communism have become the ruling ideas across the entire world, no borders or barriers impede them, they conquer peoples by their life-affirming strengths and truth’. Little wonder that, as the Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart was to write in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, ‘The Soviet leaders continue to have a deep-rooted and dogmatic belief in the eventual universal triumph of their model of Marxist-Leninism.’17
Burgess kept rousing himself to sound grateful. ‘I love living in this country,’ he told Stephen Spender, who visited him in 1960. ‘It’s solid and expanding like England in 1860, my favourite time in history, and no one feels frightened.’ Yet a few minutes later he gestured at the wall and said: ‘I suppose they’re listening to everything we’re saying.’ He seemed a figure of Whitehall un peu passé, with ‘a seedy, slightly shame-faced air, and shambling walk: like some ex-consular official you meet in a bar at Singapore and who puzzles you by his references to the days when he knew the great, and helped determine policy’. Burgess gave no sign of reluctant allegiance to a lost cause when, having donned his Old Etonian tie, he met a Daily Herald interviewer in 1962. ‘I like living in the Soviet Union under Socialism,’ he insisted. ‘I would not like to live in expense-account England.’ He regarded Macmillan as an American stooge. ‘He will do what he is told, just as he has always done. He would take out a warrant against me like a shot if Kennedy asked him.’18
Philby’s domestic life was destroyed in 1951. In the months after his abrupt recall from Washington, he would return home in the evenings sodden with drink, and demanding more alcohol. At a dinner party with neighbours he lost his temper with his wife, went outside in a fury, punched through the windscreen of their car and was left standing there when she sped off. He began an affair with a middle-aged civil servant. For the next few years he repeatedly went on alcoholic ‘blinders’. Money from Aileen Philby’s aunt enabled them to buy a spacious, gloomy, decrepit Edwardian house near the Sussex dormitory town of Crowborough. Aileen came to realize that he was a spy, and blurted out drunken, panicky remarks on the subject. She was horror-struck by her belated recognition of his deep, inscrutable secrecy. Mistrust of everyone and every surface appearance ruined her mind. He began to hate her, as someone to whom he had done irremediable harm, and to fear that she might betray him as he had done her. He seldom went to Crowborough except to see his children at weekends: when there he preferred to sleep in a tent in the garden; he discouraged potential visitors by telling them that she was mad and aggressive. Looking neglected, unwashed and frantic, she sank into alcoholic isolation, once crashed her car into a shop-window in Crowborough and more than once was hospitalized. In December 1957, after four years of increasingly secluded struggle, Aileen Philby was found by her young daughter dead in bed, aged forty-seven, having succumbed to heart failure (her heart was weakened by alcoholism), tuberculosis and a respiratory infection. Her mother-in-law, Dora Philby, had been drinking more than a bottle of gin a day before her death earlier that same year.19
As Chief of SIS Stewart Menzies remained non-committal about Philby’s guilt or innocence. After his retirement in 1952 he suffered a recurrent nightmare in which a Russian defector was flown above the English Channel in a helicopter and given the choice to reveal what he knew of Philby or be chucked into the sea: the ordeal always ended with the defector being thrown to his death. Jack Easton, Deputy Director of SIS, felt sure of Philby’s guilt and shunned approaches from Nicholas Elliott and other SIS officers seeking their friend’s rehabilitation. In August 1956 Philby was enabled to escape from the morass of his life in Crowborough, when SIS, acting through the Foreign Office, arranged for him to go to Beirut as the correspondent of the Observer and the Economist. The compassionate wish to help an ex-employee who was down and out, and had been exonerated months earlier in the House of Commons, was mixed with continuing suspicion of him. His Beirut posting enabled SIS to preserve working contacts with him, and to monitor his working environment, in case – as happened in 1962 – new evidence emerged which would justify a renewed bout of close questioning. From Beirut Philby reported on developments in the Arab but not the communist world. The expenses claims that he submitted to his London employers were said to be ‘staggering’.20
Hugh Trevor-Roper once asked Dick White why, when he became Chief of SIS in 1956, he left Philby on the strength in Beirut. White replied that he had been dismayed to find that Philby had resumed work for SIS, but decided on reflection that ‘it was safest to leave him there because if he were brought back to London it would be impossible to convict him or to prevent him from seeing his old colleagues in SIS and picking up old threads’. In his Middle East years Philby was wary of official associations. Perhaps fearing a verbal ambush or tricky darting questions, he exaggerated his stutter when he went to stay in Amman with Julian and Margaret Bullard. This gave him time to think of the best answer to any remark ventured in this quick-thinking diplomatic household. During his Beirut evenings, he was helpless with drink: he found a fellow drunkard – Eleanor Brewer, divorced wife of the Middle East correspondent of the New York Times – whom he married in London in 1959.21
Blake’s arrest in April 1961 doubtless shook Philby. The defection in December that year of Anatoli Golitsyn resulted in closer tracking of him. Probably he heard that MI5 interviewing of his old associates had been resumed. The most interesting approach was to his former news agency partner, Peter Smolka. After the war Smolka had moved to Vienna at a time when the conurbation was divided into four sectors of occupation, Russian, American, French and British, with the inner city administered by each power for a month at a time. Smolka chose to live in the Russian sector. When E. H. Carr lectured in Vienna in 1947, he stayed with Smolka. Carr’s lecture, with its denigration of US capitalist imperialism and emphasis on British political and economic decline, will have gratified Smolka, although it pained British officials. A year later Graham Greene visited Vienna in search of ideas for a film-script. As a former SIS officer and continuing SIS Friend, he lunched with Charles Beauclerk, a colonel in the Intelligence Corps based in Austria and afterwards Duke of St Albans. Beauclerk filled Greene with lashings of pink champagne and gave him the idea of putting the murderous trade in black-market penicillin at the centre of the plot of The Third Man. After lunch, dressed in heavy boots and mackintoshes, Beauclerk guided him through the extensive system of Viennese sewers that also feature in the film. Smolka was also at hand proffering advice. He persuaded the film director, Carol Reed, to cut a scene from the shooting-script in which Russians kidnapped a woman: he could not claim that the scene was unrealistic, but warned that it smacked of facile anti-Soviet propaganda. Greene accordingly inserted into the script a knowing joke in which a Beauclerk-figure offers a shot of vodka to an American visitor. The vodka is Russian, and its brand-name is Smolka.22
An intermittent watch was kept on Smolka in Vienna during the 1950s. He developed creeping paralysis, which deprived him of the use of his legs, and by 1958 depended on a wheelchair. He avoided London until September 1961, when he returned for the first time in fifteen years and took rooms in the Savoy Hotel. MI5’s Arthur Martin arranged to interview him at the War Office on 2 October. He arrived in a wheelchair with a rucksack tied to the back, chain-smoked and exploited his disabilities. Whenever he needed time to think of the safe reply to a tricky question, he fumbled with lighting a new cigarette and sometimes distracted Martin by asking him to hold the lighter. Loud street noises from pneumatic drills also put Martin at a disadvantage.
Smolka won most of the tricks in the interview. He was quick, wily and forceful. He claimed that after being introduced to Philby and opening a news agency with him in 1934–5, his business partner, as the son of the Arabist St John Philby, was ‘anti-Jewish’ and had shunned him. He called Burgess ‘a colourful and attractive nut’ and ‘a very vain busybody’, who asked him to supply reports on conversations and opinions that he heard. Believing, so he said, that Burgess was attached to MI5, he supplied notes on discussions with Ridsdale, Fletcher-Cooke and others, which were later found among Burgess’s belongings. He admitted to having met Blunt in the Bentinck Street flat, and pretended to have forgotten whether it was owned by a Sassoon or a Rothschild. As to his own politics, he described himself as a fellow-traveller during his years as a Ministry of Information official, and as a member of the Vienna communist party from 1946 until the anti-semitic show-trial in 1952 of the Czech communist leader Rudolf Slánský and his associates who were accused of a Trotskyite–Titoist–Zionist conspiracy. Eleven men, including Slánský, were executed. Since 1952 Smolka, although he stayed in the Savoy Hotel, counted himself as a Titoist. Nothing that he said was demonstrably false, but most of his statements were untrue. He presented himself as an enfeebled man, near to death, but in fact survived until 1980.23
Philby was put in jeopardy by denunciation from an unexpected source. Flora Solomon was the Marks & Spencer executive who had introduced him to Aileen Furse in 1940 and had together with Tomás Harris been a witness at their wedding in 1946. Solomon had known of his communist affiliations and services to Moscow since a lunch in 1938 when he tried to recruit her to the Soviet cause; but she took no action until October 1962. Then, irritated by what she considered to be the anti-Zionist tone of Philby’s reports in the Observer, she told Victor Rothschild – at a meeting at the Weizmann Institute in Israel – that Philby had tried to enlist her as a Soviet agent. How could David Astor, she asked, employ at the Observer a known communist who had surely worked for Moscow? After Rothschild reported these remarks, she was interviewed by Martin in Rothschild’s London flat, with Martin’s MI5 ally Peter Wright listening. Wright thought her an untrustworthy, vindictive, screechy, rambling witness. ‘I guessed from listening to her that she and Philby must have been lovers in the 1930s,’ he later said. ‘She was having her revenge for the rejection she felt when he moved into a new pair of sheets.’ This is typical of Wright’s false links: there is no evidence for it; she was sixteen years older than Philby.24
When Lord Carrington, First Lord of the Admiralty, first discussed Vassall’s arrest with Macmillan in 1962, the Prime Minister supposedly exclaimed: ‘Very bad news! You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.’ Already dismayed by the Portland, Blake and Vassall cases, Macmillan had indicated to White that it was preferable to avoid further sensational espionage publicity. It was agreed with Macmillan that Philby should be confronted in Beirut. Instead of Martin of MI5, Nicholas Elliott of SIS was sent to the Lebanese capital early in January 1963. Elliott had been Philby’s stoutest defender within SIS, but was now convinced of his guilt. He was widely known to be ‘a poop’, but White thought that in Beirut, outside British jurisdiction, Philby might disclose in full his activities to his former ally in return for an offer of immunity from prosecution. There was no advantage for the intelligence services, or for any Whitehall department, in giving the Soviet Union the propaganda gift of another spectacular treason trial so soon after Blake and Vassall had rocked public opinion and shaken the Macmillan government. A meeting was arranged whereby Philby went to an embassy flat in Beirut, ostensibly to meet the SIS head of station Peter Lunn to discuss possible future work. When Elliott rather than the local man opened the flat door, Philby said, ‘I rather thought it might be you.’25
In offering Philby immunity from prosecution, Elliott threatened that without a deal he would be harassed until his living arrangements became intolerable. It was apparently suggested that his bank account could be frozen, that the Observer and other potential employers would be warned against using his stories and that his residence permit in Beirut might be rescinded. It is likely that Philby was tempted by the immunity-from-prosecution deal. He admitted working for Soviet Russia from 1936 until 1946, and to tipping off Maclean in 1951, but did not admit to his Cold War activities. Transcripts of the taped and drunken talk between Elliott and Philby are not publicly available. We do not know whether Elliott said that London had new information that incriminated Philby. Did he mention Flora Solomon, or leave Philby to think that the source was Golitsyn or Blake? The accounts of these discussions given by Philby to the KGB were self-servingly inaccurate.
Hollis and White were relieved by Elliott’s account of Philby’s attitude, and reported to Edgar Hoover that the damage to US interests of Philby’s espionage had been limited to the war years – for four of which the Soviet Union and the United States had been allies. The Nunn May precedent, in which the British security services had chosen to investigate spying over a truncated period, and had ignored a longer, more untidy time-span, was being followed. Philby, however, was either fooling Elliott when he seemed receptive to the immunity deal or had second thoughts. Perhaps there was also a calculation in London that if Philby was allowed to make an easy escape, Moscow Centre might suspect his loyalty, doubt his material and treat him as a disinformant. Elliott left Beirut, with responsibility for monitoring Philby devolved to Peter Lunn. On the night of 23 January 1963 Philby seems to have tramped through the streets of Beirut to check that he was not being tracked, to have donned the disguise of a Russian merchant seaman and then to have boarded the freighter Dolmatova, which unexpectedly weighed anchor without loading its cargo and steamed to a Soviet port. From Moscow he sent White a message: ‘You have won this round, but I assure you that I will win the last.’26
White was exasperated by misrepresentations of this episode. Criticizing John le Carré’s essay of 1968, for example, he wrote that the novelist showed ‘his longing for Br. Intelligence to match the K.G.B. in ruthlessness & cunning – & ends to justify all means’. Le Carré had suggested that SIS should have kidnapped or murdered Philby in Beirut in 1962. ‘But’, wrote White, ‘corpses of already famous 3rd men are more easily disposed of in novels than among Br. Diplomats & Home Office officials. Moreover in terms of legal evidence it could still quite easily have been said that the wrong man had been disposed of. Who in our democracy accepts responsibilities of this kind?’27
The handling of Philby’s Beirut interrogation, and the ease with which he fled, convinced the paranoiacs – Angleton in the CIA, Wright and Martin in MI5 – that there had been betrayal within the British intelligence services. Angleton was traumatized by the defection of his once trusted friend. He felt humiliated and fractured by having been outwitted and out-drunk. He lost objectivity in assessing people as he developed a malignant obsession with conspiracies. One of Philby’s greatest achievements was to tip Angleton into clinical paranoia after 1963. Angleton sat at his desk in Langley, Virginia, chain-smoking behind drawn curtains, scouring old files and spreading crazy, destructive suspicions within the CIA.28
For six months the fires of the story of Philby’s disappearance were banked: Whitehall wished to avoid yet another scorching of the government and the civil service, and made no public admission; and journalists feared getting burnt in a libel action if they reported the defection and Philby then reappeared in the west. (SIS was known to encourage its agents, such as Greville Wynne, who was imprisoned for spying by the Soviets in 1963–4, to supplement their pensions by suing newspapers which called them spies: there was never any evidence that the newspapers could use in justification.) Then, on 1 July 1963, a Cabinet minister, Edward Heath, surprised the House of Commons with a statement that Philby had defected to Russia and was the Third Man in the Burgess–Maclean case. Once again the press went berserk. New fusillades were launched at the Establishment. As the Daily Mirror editorialized,
Hardly a day goes by without some fresh revelation of how the Old Boys work in high places to keep the Old Boys in high places.
Don’t worry, Old Boy, if you’re found out – there are buckets and buckets of surplus whitewash in Whitehall, and your friends will see you through …
Look at what happened to Maclean. Working for the Foreign Office in Cairo he was as soused as a herring, involved in wild and disgraceful episodes which no business concern would tolerate for a second in its messenger-boys.
Fired? Not on your life, Old Boy. Dear old Donald was given a rest until his hangovers cleared up, and then he was given another Foreign Office top job.
…
It is beginning to look as if the whole of the Tory Party approves of the cover-up, hush-up, keep-it-dark, Old Boys technique of getting in power and staying in power – and to hell with what the country thinks.29
Two months later, on 30 August, Burgess died of acute liver failure. Norman Ewer, under the byline ‘Britain’s most experienced diplomatic correspondent’, wrote an assessment of his fellow Soviet spy for the Daily Herald. ‘All his life he was a highly talented, deeply unhappy misfit. Whether a misfit because he was homosexual or homosexual because he was a misfit is a matter for psychologists.’ Following Driberg’s artful misdirection, Ewer doubted that Burgess had ever been a communist of Maclean’s sincerity. He was a mere escapist whose disappearance had been no more significant than ‘a flight from a society in which he could find no place’. Burgess’s death terminated those mischievous, plausible, distorting press interviews which for seven years he had lobbed into the west as mini-projectiles of propaganda. But with Philby in Moscow a new phase of disinformation could begin. A weightier means than telephone calls to Driberg, namely the Anglophone world’s hunger for spy stories and publishers’ avidity for proven bestsellers, was available for KGB manipulation.30
The era of the spy bestseller began in 1956 with the publication as a Pan cheap paperback of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale, which had received little attention when issued in hardback as the earliest James Bond adventure in 1953. Fiction prepared the way for the ostensibly non-fiction works that prolonged and loudened the impact of the Cambridge spies. Fleming’s thrillers, Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965) preceded the investigations by the Sunday Times researchers known as the Insight Team and Philby’s memoirs. Their commercial success was an incentive for the works of Andrew Boyle, Anthony Cave Brown, John Costello, Richard Deacon and Chapman Pincher. Already in 1968 Dick White regretted that ‘the rational aspects of the intelligence function [were] distorted as they so often are in the public mind by the melodramas of the fiction writers’. He nevertheless recommended to Hugh Trevor-Roper an American bestseller of 1967, Topaz by Leon Uris: ‘a rather badly written novel’, but ‘worth reading because partly based on authentic inside information’. Generally, though, the smudged and crooked lines of fiction-writers and journalists made the truth ever more illegible.31
If the James Bond phenomenon was launched by the Pan paperback of Casino Royale, it was blasted skyward in 1957 when the Daily Express ran a comic serial adaptation of From Russia with Love and it became unstoppable after the film version of Dr No had been released in 1962. Fleming’s James Bond, as distinct from the cinema version, had unimpeachable upper-middle-class antecedents. He was the son of a senior manager of the Vickers armaments company, an Old Etonian, honoured as a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, at ease in St James’s clubs but disappointed in post-war England. He relished his privileges, drove a Bentley, bought groceries from Fortnum & Mason, drank coffee from a Queen Anne silver pot and impersonated a herald from the College of Arms. For readers, he fulfilled a reassuring fantasy of Britain’s endurance as a world power by besting not only Soviet agents but foreigners such as the Albanian money-launderer known as Le Chiffre, the Polish-Greek master-criminal Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Italian racketeer Emilio Largo, the Latvian metallurgist Auric Goldfinger and the Aryan supremacist Hugo Drax.
Fleming had little respect for the charades of parliamentary government. He attended a debate in the House of Commons only once, in 1938, when the Chamberlain government’s policy towards Mussolini’s Italy was under discussion. ‘I found the hollowness and futility of the speeches degrading and infantile, and the well-fed, deep-throated “Hear Hears” for each mendacious platitude verging on the obscene,’ he recalled in 1959. Asked what he would do if he was Prime Minister, he replied that he would try to ‘stop people being ashamed of themselves’ and to raise individual self-respect. ‘The fact that taxation, controls and certain features of the Welfare State have turned the majority of us into petty criminals, liars and work-dodgers is … having a very bad effect on the psyche of the kingdom.’ He understood that just as rationing created the opportunities for black-market spivs, and the prohibition of narcotics provided a profit incentive for drug-smuggling, so high taxation induced tax evasion. The psyche of the United Kingdom, Fleming thought, was increasingly banal, childishly petulant and (as he showed by his preoccupation with luxury brand names) pretentiously consumerist. ‘You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands,’ a Japanese master-spy says in You Only Live Twice (1964). ‘When you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world.’ Successive governments had ceded control of economic matters to collective bargaining and strikes. ‘This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so admired. In its place, we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers after pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family and of your so-called aristocracy in the pages of the most debased newspapers in the world.’32
The big profits from Deighton, Fleming and le Carré novels induced publishers to diversify into espionage memoirs and popular spy histories. This occurred at a time when respect for Whitehall was being weakened even as the mandarins’ freedom to explain their decisions and recount their careers to the public was being circumscribed. Sir George Mallaby’s memoirs From My Level (1965) provoked Sir Laurence Helsby, head of the civil service, to circularize permanent secretaries and heads of overseas missions insisting that ministers must have ‘full confidence that they can speak their minds plainly in front of their official advisers without any fear that unguarded remarks may be stored up for publication’. Helsby condemned officials who abused positions of trust by keeping diaries or private records that could later be exploited ‘for personal profit or acclaim’. Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, UK representative to NATO, who twenty years later published his FO diary covering the Suez crisis, retorted to Helsby that this instruction marked ‘a serious step in the downgrading and devitalisation of civil servants’. Ministers could not expect advisers of any intelligence to be nullities ‘without memory or judgement, in whose presence the talk and behaviour of the Ministers are to be as if they had never been. A man is responsible for his acts and his statements wherever he makes them and must learn to judge what confidence he can place in others and to use discretion. Politicians surely cannot be given a kind of blanket exemption from this human condition. There is also History to consider and the claims of truth.’ Shuckburgh concluded with a prescient warning for Helsby: ‘If we are not careful we shall turn ourselves, the civil servants, into intellectual eunuchs and un-men, and create in our politicians a wholly erroneous idea of their immunity from the normal human responsibilities.’33
Shuckburgh’s remark had sharper point in a period when officials were receiving abuse in a way that had previously been restricted to politicians. The Sunday Times Insight Team’s compilation Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation was an unforgiving exercise which spared no one in Whitehall. ‘The Philby stuff in the Sunday papers has been very tiresome,’ Dick White wrote in October 1967 after the book’s publication. ‘My present service [SIS] is criticised in every possible way for their handling of the matter. My previous service [MI5] comes out of it fairly well.’ The position taken by both the Observer and Sunday Times was, in White’s words, that ‘the brilliant work of the war was sacrificed and nullified in the years immediately after peace by the traitors in our entrails’. White particularly resented the Insight Team’s accusation that ‘successive British governments have allowed the public to believe that Philby was a defecting journalist of minor importance – and have tried to deny the state of grotesque dilapidation (now belatedly remedied) that allowed him to do what he did’. As J. C. Masterman commented of the Insight publicity, ‘the generality of people do not discriminate between the work of different parts of the service. I doubt whether they have any idea of the difference in the function of M.I.5 and M.I.6. What they feel is a mistrust of the “Secret Service” – they feel this, I am sure, because the failures are broadcast everywhere & the successes entirely concealed.’34
Hugh Trevor-Roper, as a former intelligence officer, had been asked to provide an authoritative introduction to the Sunday Times book, but it was perhaps thought that his temperance, precision and irony were too selective a taste for commercial success. Trevor-Roper was usurped in this role by the suspense novelist le Carré. Writing in commiseration to Trevor-Roper, White averred that the ‘high-pitched hysterical denunciations [in le Carré’s introduction] are quite ridiculous & will merely cause laughter among the younger members of my service’. The blame was not entirely le Carré’s, he thought. There was ‘a substratum of truth’ to the Insight Team’s presentation of the Philby case, but overall it was ‘full of misconceptions, gaps in knowledge & sheer prejudice’. The journalists were ‘sickeningly self-righteous’, procedurally flawed and factually incomplete. For them the story had to be presented as ‘a public scandal, the revelation of which puts the authors into the role of knights in shining armour’. They seemed unaware ‘that you cannot hope to write a sound historical piece about an event in the continuous secret struggle between intelligence services when both sides are only going to reveal the facts that suit them. In our case there is the need to live to fight another day.’ The Insight Team never ‘stopped to think that the background against which we had to handle the Philby case was very different from their own gleanings from published material. It was enriched from the study of many similar not less important cases in the western world & from the revelations of some 30 or so defectors from the K.G.B. The experience of the Philby case is of course a part & an important part of our knowledge of what the western world is faced by in the K.G.B.’35
A Sunday Times foreign correspondent, Murray Sayle, had several interviews with Philby during 1967. He concluded, in the summary of his colleague Bruce Page, that ‘Philby was more Soviet loyalist than Communist,’ well grounded in Marxist-Leninist doctrines, but with attitudes to China, Africa and Latin America that were ‘vehemently those of a Russian national Communist’. Philby expressed, for example, ‘puzzled indignation about the Maoists. (“These people have got the sauce to say that we are in Asia as a colonial power!”)’. Sayle found him polite, worldly and arrogant: ‘although his allegiance to, and admiration for, the Soviet elite (of which he counts himself a member) is complete, it is accompanied by a certain genial contempt for the Russians’. ‘Communism’, Philby told Sayle, ‘must be a pretty good system if even these Russians can run it.’36
In 1968, under KGB auspices, Philby published a memoir of the period before 1956 entitled My Silent War. It was a medley of fact and fiction, history and disinformation, intended to serve Soviet aims by damaging the British security services. It received an astonishing measure of credence from reviewers and journalists meeting deadlines: the fact is that it was the literary equivalent of a prisoner’s evidence from the dock about his movements on the night of the crime. When a sound historian such as Angleton’s biographer Michael Holzman refers to White as ‘a man of impeccably bad judgment’, it is under the influence of Philby’s hostile memoirs.37
Moscow’s negative propaganda about Whitehall was not countered by positive news about the successes of MI5 and SIS. Lord Normanbrook, the former Cabinet Secretary, told Masterman that it was impossible to permit publication of his historical treatise on the XX System because of the stories generated by or concerning the Cambridge spies and cognate scandals. ‘Many people know that the Service was greatly strengthened during the war by the recruitment of people, like yourself, who would never be found within it in peace time,’ wrote Normanbrook, ‘and part of the newspaper case against the Service is that it is not now what it was: its glories have departed.’ That being so, the Cabinet Office feared that readers of Masterman’s book would doubt that MI5 was still as efficient as a counter-espionage organization as it had been in the war years. The secret services fully appreciated the importance of ‘public image’ and knew that they had a low rating with the public. ‘The difficulty is to do something about it without damaging ourselves still further,’ White explained to Masterman. ‘We don’t like getting into a public “answer back” position when we know that we can really only use a fraction of the evidence.’38
One instance when there was no official correction of a gross injustice concerns Donald McCormick @ Richard Deacon’s History of the British Secret Service (1969). ‘Very few Secret Service chiefs in modern times have been able to go against the Foreign Office,’ Deacon proclaimed. ‘Even if Menzies had wished to get rid of Philby, all the evidence suggests that the powerful pro-Philby body of opinion in the Foreign Office would still probably have overruled him and insisted on hushing the matter up and allowing Philby to continue in a minor role.’ This is rubbish. Menzies did rid SIS of Philby, as early as July 1951. There was no ‘pro-Philby body of opinion’ in the Foreign Office, powerful or otherwise. Few people knew him in the Office. The official who knew him best was Reilly, who had recently prevented him from being designated a future ‘C’. It is untrue to say that SIS in any generation was domineered or overruled by the FO. It is doubtful that the Office was consulted before Sinclair reattached Philby to SIS in 1956.39
Masterman was full of sympathy for the intelligence services’ predicament after 1967. The public were only interested in espionage ‘when any set-back or scandal crops up’, he told White. ‘Then books and articles proliferate, and all, or nearly all, of these are dangerously slanted against the two Services.’ In consequence the public was misled into believing that ‘the “Secret Service” is and always has been inefficient and out-matched by the Secret Services of other countries’. The partial disclosures of the Philby books had ‘undermine[d] British institutions’, as was their purpose, and this at a time when he was forbidden from publishing his history of the XX System. ‘To control the whole German espionage system throughout the war, as we did, is surely a much greater contribution to the credit side than Philby’s treachery is to the debit.’ Masterman’s book The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 45, when finally published in 1972, proved salutary. He stressed the obstacles to peacetime counter-espionage: ‘it is immensely hard to secure proof; it is impossible to act on suspicion however strong; the whole tenor of life in this country is antagonistic to over-regimentation and to rigid classification; it is better to let many spies “run” rather than to risk one mistake’.40
Defection was not all on one side. The last section of this chapter considers Soviet bloc activities in London, and gives a wider view than that of Philby or journalistic mercenaries. Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact countries seemed immutable and unchallengeable in the 1960s. Neither policies nor rhetoric had moderated. The Bratislava Declaration of August 1968, following a conference of the Bulgarian, Czech, East German, Hungarian, Polish and Soviet communist parties, was described by Sir William Barker, the Ambassador in Prague, as ‘a hotch-potch of old-fashioned Soviet hate slogans combined with a re-pledging of socialist solidarity’. Power in the USSR rested less with the Soviet government and more with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as the Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home summarized the position in 1970. The party leadership still regarded ‘the foreign policy of the Soviet Government as only one part, and neither the major nor the determining part, of a world-wide historical and political progress which follows the laws of the class-struggle as formulated by Marxism-Leninism’. The ruling generation of Soviet leaders were, according to the then Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Duncan Wilson, ‘guilty men, guilty towards their own peoples and towards the world outside, who can best maintain their position by positing a Manichean world-struggle between good and evil’.41
To serve the cause of class struggle there was a large concentrated Soviet intelligence attack on Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Over a hundred agents were at work, but their efforts were often ineffective, not least because the interpretation of the material they remitted to Moscow was poor: the top levels of bureaucracy were given analyses that fitted their presuppositions and did not challenge their expectations. Espionage by Soviet officials was the subject of occasional protests. Vladimir Drozdov, who had trained as a nuclear physicist, was expelled from Britain in 1968 after being caught collecting secret material from a dead drop. In December that year the PUS, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, remonstrated with the Soviet Ambassador, Mikhail Smirnovsky, about two embassy officials, I. A. Kulikov, whose expertise lay in chemical radiation, and Alexander Benyaminov, afterwards head of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency, both of whom sought to collect confidential information by illicit means: Smirnovsky received this oral communication with half a minute’s gloomy silence. In 1970 Sir Denis Greenhill (Gore-Booth’s successor as PUS, and Burgess’s former departmental chief in the Washington embassy) noted Britain’s unwitting slide into a position where high levels of Soviet intelligence activity were accepted. ‘This’, Greenhill said, ‘was not good enough.’ But the Labour government led by Harold Wilson did not act on Greenhill’s prompt. The parliamentary Labour party’s mistrust of the security services, which had begun with the Zinoviev letter of 1924, was entrenched. Labour leaders had an ambivalent attitude to the Soviet leadership: they behaved, said Greenhill, ‘as if they were nonconformists meeting the Pope’.42
A new phase began in the spring of 1971 when MI5 recruited a member of the London rezidentura, Oleg Lyalin, as an agent-in-place. First he was debriefed at a safe-house, 24 Collingham Gardens, in Earls Court. It was learnt that Lyalin, an expert in marksmanship and unarmed combat, had previously been used to monitor shipping off the Lithuanian coast. Now the KGB had installed him under the cover of the director of a Russian import-export firm based in Regent Street: among other tasks he ran a small spy network in London of Armenian Cypriots. Ostensibly he served a KGB section preparing for the sabotage of foreign public services, transport, communications and ‘nerve centres’ in the event of war or crises short of war. Lyalin wanted to start a new life with his Russian secretary-mistress, and began providing information on Soviet sabotage plans in London, Washington, Paris, Bonn and other European capitals, including the selection and monitoring of key individuals who would be targeted for assassination in a crisis. The flooding of the London Underground system and the destruction of the missile early-warning system were among the sabotage plans provided by Lyalin. Another was for Soviet agents posing as messengers or couriers to drop in Whitehall corridors capsules containing deadly toxins which would kill any official who trod on them.43
Probably as a result of Lyalin’s revelations, an inter-departmental conference was held on 25 May 1971 to discuss how best to counteract Soviet clandestine activities. Julian Bullard was surprised at the number of officials in attendance who seemed oblivious to the threat to national security posed by the relentless intrigues of Soviet representatives in London. Sir Antony Part of the Department of Trade and Industry asked how much actual harm was done by the Russians. Sir Martin Furnival Jones of MI5 replied that there was evidence of continuous penetration of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence, the army, navy and air force, the Labour party, trade unions and the Board of Trade. ‘It was difficult to say how much damage was being done,’ Furnival Jones said, ‘but it was equally difficult to believe that the Russians maintained such a large establishment for no profit.’ He estimated, and Sir John Rennie of SIS agreed, that thirty or forty Soviet intelligence officers were running agents in government organizations or in technical industries concerned with the Concorde supersonic jet aircraft, the Bristol Olympus 593 aero-engine, nuclear energy and computer electronics. Sir Thomas Brimelow of the FCO confirmed that recent cases differed from those of Philby and Blake, ‘and involved the cultivation of commercial or defence officials’.44
Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Foreign Secretary in the Heath government of 1970–4, ranks with Bevin as one of the great post-war holders of that post. His steady, strong and shrewd approach was indicated by an axiom that he sent to Duncan Wilson in Moscow in 1971: ‘A forthcoming style, accompanied by strict attention to our own self-interest on matters of substance, is a dictate of common sense.’ His excellent manners hid his ruthlessness, which he had displayed most decisively in 1963 when he encouraged Harold Macmillan to resign as Prime Minister in a fit of morbid hypochondria about a non-existent cancer, hastened to announce the resignation before Macmillan’s entourage could dissuade him and then positioned himself, with the killer determination of a usurping duke in the Wars of the Roses, to snatch Macmillan’s crown. Home as Foreign Secretary took Greenhill’s point that the blatancy of Soviet espionage was too insulting to be tolerated.45
For the previous quarter-century Britain had been the sick man of Europe, rather as Ottoman Turkey had been in the nineteenth century, but in the course of 1971 its institutions began a phase of invigorating renewal and rebounding confidence. In June the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) were concluded, and in October the terms were approved by parliament. Eight years earlier, as a dutiful Soviet citizen, Burgess had opposed European unity and regarded the EEC as a conspiratorial power bloc run by France and Germany. ‘Pleased by collapse of menacing Common Market negotiations,’ he wrote a few months before his death. He equated European economic strength with exploitation, poverty and ‘frightful beastliness … for undeveloped countries’. Macmillan, Gladwyn Jebb and other British diplomatists involved in the European negotiations had all ‘lied like an American division of marines’.46
That had been the Moscow line. The Kremlin had watched the dissolution of the British Empire and saw the rump of the United Kingdom as a medium-sized, developed European country possessing special, if diminishing, capabilities in international finance and some useful technology. Russian leaders felt apprehension that a European community including Britain might disrupt their plans. Among the pro-Europeans in Britain there were opposing apprehensions about the country staying out of the EEC. ‘If’, said the economist-businessman Lord Crowther in July 1971, ‘we are left in isolation, then we shall get more and more inbred, and I have no doubt that we shall go on telling ourselves every day how British is best, how good we are, and how the world looks to our leadership, as we wait in the queue for our daily bread ration.’ Three months later, as chairman of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, Crowther told the House of Lords: ‘It is a great mistake to believe that there is only one level upon which sovereignty and decision-making can operate. We would never have slipped into this mistake if we did not live in such a compact island, and if we were not served by such an efficient civil service; we would never have slipped into the delusion that it is possible to take all important decisions in one place, here.’ Old diplomatic prohibitions and political inhibitions were being jettisoned: there was a sense of abundant new possibilities.47
The confidence that came from imminent EEC membership emboldened the British government’s handling of Soviet espionage. On 30 July Douglas-Home and the Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, briefed the Prime Minister, Edward Heath: between 120 and 200 Soviet spies were operating in Britain; altogether 517 Soviet officials had pretexts to operate in the country, including 189 members of the Soviet embassy, 121 members of the Soviet trade delegation, 73 contract inspectors and 134 individuals working for the Soviet press agency TASS, the state airline Aeroflot, the travel agency Intourist or the Moscow Narodny Bank. Although Maudling had treated previous MI5 reports of Soviet espionage as exaggerated, he joined Douglas-Home in convincing Heath that the numbers of Soviet officials were unacceptable. Heath was nervous of any incidents that might distract his government from his primary aim of gaining British admission to the EEC, but he was also rattled by Chapman Pincher’s mischievous pieces in the Daily Express under such headlines as ‘Give our spies cloaks and daggers again’, claiming that SIS had been ‘downgraded below the safe limit’. It was settled that the bulk of the Soviet agents must be booted out in Operation FOOT.48
Only the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Burke Trend, knew the extent to which resources were being diverted – in the paranoia engendered by the defection of three of the Cambridge spies – into internal ‘mole’ hunts for Soviet penetration agents within the Security Service. No Cabinet minister was aware of this consuming obsession indulged by Peter Wright and his fellow inquisitors. In accordance with the zealots’ insistence, MI5 believed that there must be KGB moles within the Service, despite Lyalin’s assurance that the KGB regarded it as impenetrable. The Service therefore welcomed Douglas-Home’s proposal of drastic action because it could not cope with all the Soviet agents in England while it was being undermined by internal mole hunts.49
Neither the Soviet embassy nor the KGB had any inkling of what was afoot. If there were Soviet penetration agents in government departments, they were either junior or in the wrong sections. On 30 August there were two coincidental events. A junior naval officer, David Bingham, admitted supplying material on submarines to the Soviets in order to raise money for his wife’s shopping expeditions. That same day Lyalin was arrested for drunk driving in Tottenham Court Road by a police constable who had no idea of the events he was setting in train. Knowing that he would be repatriated in disgrace by his chiefs, Lyalin defected immediately and was hurried to an MI5 safe-house. Preparations for Operation FOOT were accelerated. On 24 September Greenhill, as PUS, informed the Soviet embassy that ninety named officials must leave the country within a fortnight, and that another fifteen with re-entry visas would not be let back within its borders. A rump of some forty intelligence officers was allowed to remain. ‘Moscow Centre was stunned,’ as Oleg Gordievsky recorded in the major history of the KGB of which he was co-author. ‘In 1971 the golden age of KGB operations [in Britain] came to an end. The London residency never recovered from the expulsions. Contrary to the popular myths generated by the “media” revelations about Soviet moles, during the next fourteen years, up to Gordievsky’s defection, the KGB found it more difficult to collect high-grade intelligence in London than in almost any other western capital.’50
Press analysis of Lyalin’s defection and Operation FOOT was low-grade. Right-wing newspapers banged their hollow nationalist drums. The coverage by Patrick Keatley, diplomatic correspondent of the Guardian, veered into the slipstream of the Soviet embassy’s propaganda counter-offensive. He traduced Lyalin as a ‘playboy spy’, indulging in ‘a steady round of expense-account dinners’, spending up to £100 a night on ‘vodka and caviar’ sessions. Whitehall was embarrassed, ‘with officials silent on orders from 10 Downing Street’, when Lyalin’s drunk driving and statuesque girlfriend were publicized, because – according to Keatley – these infractions were enough to discredit him as a trustworthy source. Keatley predicted that Heath would ‘come under fire’ from MPs ‘for his deliberate technique of a block expulsion of more than a hundred officials – the first time that this has been used by Britain against any Power’. Keatley’s slant was that Lyalin had made the government vulnerable: ‘the sharpest criticism is likely to centre on the character of the KGB defector’, who had been the informant in preparing the expulsion lists and ‘is now seen as a person of considerable instability’. This character assassination was a tried Stalinist technique. As a KGB diversionary tactic during Operation FOOT, Philby in Moscow named SIS officers in the Arab world and accused Britain of espionage and disinformation against the Brandt government in West Germany.51
In view of the resounding success of Operation FOOT, the reaction of some MPs was shocking. The Labour MP Arthur Lewis used an adjournment debate to vilify Lyalin as ‘a traitor’, ‘a member of a murder-squad’, ‘a self-confessed spy and saboteur’, ‘having some liaison with a beautiful Russian blonde’ and soiled by ‘escapades in night-clubs’. Lyalin had not been prosecuted for drunk driving because the security services claimed that a court appearance would endanger his life. ‘The general public do not believe it,’ Lewis protested. If Lyalin’s life was truly at risk, ‘he would not need a driving licence because he cannot travel around’. How unjust that this scandal-ridden foreigner should escape scot-free when ‘many fine British citizens, with fine records in the Services and medals for gallantry, are sometimes pulled up after military reunions for driving under the influence of drink’!52
The Soviet bloc had realized that it would be easier to extract confidences from politicians and other informants if they were approached by representatives of supposedly Soviet satellite states such as Czechoslovakia: sources could salve their uneasy consciences by saying that they were not actually helping the Russians. The Czechs in 1971 had four Labour MPs on their payroll, the money-grubbing Will Owen @ LEE (who was nicknamed ‘Greedy Bastard’ by his Czech handlers), the fantasist John Stonehouse (subsequently imprisoned for fraud), the delinquent Tom Driberg @ CROCODILE, and another codenamed GUSTAV, whose identity has not been settled. They also used and paid Ray Mawby, who had made a short-term stir when, as a state-educated electrician, he had been elected in 1955 as Tory MP for the safe seat of Totnes. Mawby was a bovine, inarticulate drudge, who appreciated the low prices in the Commons bars and liked gambling in glitzy casinos. For some ten years he provided the Czechs with information on Commons security, informed on his fellow MPs and leaked documents, at £100 a meeting, but contacts were broken after the expulsions of 1971. Mawby appeared on television in 1967, while he was on the Czech payroll, with the false claim that most British spies who had spied for the communists were homosexual, and urging that homosexual acts should remain illegal for people covered by the Official Secrets Act even if such acts were partially decriminalized for the civilian population of England and Wales. (Men serving in the army, navy, RAF and merchant navy, or living in Scotland and Northern Ireland, were exempt from the Sexual Offences Act of 1967.)
The KGB was humiliated that none of its sources had given forewarning of Operation FOOT. ‘For all their resources and efficiency,’ Wilson’s successor as Ambassador in Moscow, Sir John Killick, reported in November 1971, the KGB leadership were ‘out of their minds’ with anger and frustration that the Kremlin did not retaliate against Britain to anything like the extent that Moscow Centre wanted. The Soviet system ossified in the late 1970s, at a time when British admission to the EEC and Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 were renewing the influence and confidence of the London government. Sir Curtis Keeble (the product of Clacton County High School, and the son of a clerk on Bethnal Green Council), who was Ambassador in Moscow in 1976–82, surveyed the condition of the Soviet people as seen in that period. ‘They have inflicted upon themselves a governmental system which combines lofty principle with evil application and monumental dullness. They have built themselves a military superpower. To run it, they have a group of old men, mediocre in spirit, who view the Western World with a malevolence, sometimes timorous, sometimes vengeful, always suspicious.’ The Soviet Union was no longer ‘a revolutionary power bent on world domination’, confident that capitalism would crumble under the inexorable logic of Marxism-Leninism, but a sclerotic administration of diverse territories held together by force.53