CHAPTER 20

The Mole Hunts

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

In his Sword of Honour trilogy Evelyn Waugh devised a character named Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole. This laughable, damnable spook sits at his desk amassing and scouring files reporting garbled hearsay, spurious facts and ludicrous suspicions of subversion or treachery. With rapturous self-importance he sets out to find the hidden connections between individuals and sects, to discover the arcane sense inside random jumbles and to unravel the conspiracies that no one else has the courage to face. Grace-Groundling-Marchpole’s dossiers were, Waugh recounts, ‘micro-filmed and multiplied and dispersed into a dozen indexes in all the Counter-Espionage Headquarters of the Free World and became a permanent part of the Most Secret archives of the Second World War’. The conspiracy-hunter becomes one of England’s great conspirators: he hoards his information; he operates in such sacrosanct isolation that government ministers know nothing of him; to his relief, they never ask to see his material. ‘Premature examination of his files might ruin his private, undefined Plan. Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war.’¹

Graham Greene, a sometime SIS officer and longer-term SIS Friend, understood that Philby’s defection in 1963 stimulated a new generation of Grace-Groundling-Marchpoles with fantasies of intricate conspiracies. ‘How right SIS was to defend Philby and how wrong MI5 to force him into the open,’ wrote Greene. ‘The West suffered more from his flight than from his espionage.’ Institutional caution developed into fierce suspicions of ramified conspiracy, and then into rampant paranoia. The MI5 officers Arthur Martin and Peter Wright began a lamentable hunt for non-existent traitors: leaks about their activities induced an equally deplorable outburst of bad books. The United States, too, had its Grace-Groundling-Marchpole in the form of James Angleton of the CIA. Angleton never recovered the balance of his judgement after discovering that he had been hoodwinked by Philby in Washington during 1949–51. The embroidered intricacy of Angleton’s counter-espionage notions grew increasingly unreal. He became so obsessed by Soviet penetration and disinformation that he was duped by the delusional Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsyn into affirming that the Sino-Soviet ideological split of 1960 was a stunt intended to fool the capitalist powers. The curlicues of Angleton’s mind filled with certainty that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China had agreed a plot whereby they faked hostility while conspiring together in underhand alliance. Angleton’s absurdities were the ultimate travesty of intelligence analysis.²

The last-recruited of Philby’s ring of five had been John Cairncross. He was teaching at the Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio when, after an approach from Arthur Martin in 1964, he admitted that he been a Soviet spy until 1951. Over the next few years he underwent a series of MI5 interviews, during which his replies were often vague or inconclusive. As Cairncross had an exact and clarifying intelligence, with a scholar’s neat and retentive memory, it is likely that he was bamboozling his interrogators. Certainly his memoirs contain defensive untruths and a lot of fudge.

Blunt had been interviewed eleven times by MI5 before the clinching moment came in April 1964. Arthur Martin visited his flat atop the Courtauld Institute and asked what he knew about Michael Straight. This was the American banking heir whom Blunt had recruited at Cambridge, and who had recently divulged his espionage history while undergoing vetting in the US for a cultural post to which he had been nominated by the Kennedy administration. Martin assured Blunt that no action would be taken against him if he now told the truth. Blunt sat gazing at him in silence for a minute. Martin told him that this silence told all that he needed to know. He added that he had been through a similar scene a few weeks earlier with Cairncross, who had said afterwards that he felt eased by his confession. Blunt fixed himself a stiff gin, and stood for several minutes, with his back to the room, gazing into the darkness of Portman Square. Then he sat in a chair, and began the first of many informative interviews which he gave to MI5. He remained as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures at Buckingham Palace until 1972, when he turned sixty-five, for an early retirement would have been seen in Moscow as a sign that his guilt had been established.³

Because Straight’s evidence could not be used in open court, Blunt was given immunity from prosecution in return for his full cooperation. The Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was not apprised of these events, although Queen Elizabeth was told in general terms of the position. Among other ex-associates Blunt mentioned Leo Long, whom he had recruited for Arnold Deutsch in 1937. After Long had been investigated, and his connections traced, he was interviewed by MI5 officers, to whom he gave a full statement later in 1964. Long admitted supplying Soviet Russia with GC&CS’s decryptions of German communications – the high-quality SIGINT codenamed ULTRA – and other military secrets both during the war and after the Nazi defeat, when he was deputy head of intelligence at the British Control Commission in Germany. He had remained active as a Soviet agent until 1952, but in return for his cooperation he was neither arrested nor charged.

An officer inside one secret service who betrays its secrets to another ‘appals and enthrals’ his colleagues, according to Markus Wolf of the East German Stasi. ‘The psychological culture of an espionage service resembles that of a clan or tribe, in which individuals are united by some greater goal and a shared sense of identity,’ Wolf explained. A defection or the discovery of long-term treachery resembled a septic wound which spreads the poison of distrust throughout the body system. Even field agents who were unconnected to the sphere of work where the betrayal occurred felt more vulnerable when next they approached a dead drop. It became harder to recruit new agents following a major defection.⁴

Toxic distrust spread in MI5 after Philby’s disappearance from Beirut in 1963. The Service received reports that in the preceding summer he had begun drinking even more heavily than usual to assuage his nerves. The obvious conclusion that he had been alarmed by the dangers posed to him by Golitsyn’s debriefings was discounted. ‘Conspiracy theory’, as Christopher Andrew writes, ‘triumphed over common sense in explaining Philby’s anxiety.’ There developed in some MI5 minds the suspicion that a member of the Security Service had warned him of revived interest in him and of the imminent resumption of his interrogation. Five members of the Service knew of these plans: only two of them, the Director General Sir Roger Hollis and his deputy Graham Mitchell, ‘had long enough service and good enough access to classified information to fit the profile of a long-term penetration agent’. A tortuously complicated interpretation of a simply explained fact thus started the most harrowing and unnecessary phase of the Service’s Cold War history of 1945–91. Its initiator was the head of MI5’s Soviet counter-espionage section Arthur Martin, who had been brought into the Service on Philby’s recommendation in 1946. An internal assessment of him, made by John Marriott, had noted that despite ‘his undeniable critical and analytical gifts and powers of lucid expression on paper’, he was ‘a rather small-minded man, and I doubt he will much increase in stature as he grows older’. By 1963 he was ominously under the sway of Golitsyn, whose paranoid ebullitions were increasingly unsettling American and British intelligence agencies.⁵

In March 1963, two months after Philby had vanished from Beirut, Martin took his concerns about Mitchell to Hollis, although he did not voice his related doubts about Hollis himself. Hollis had joined MI5 in 1938 after being invalided home with tuberculosis following eight years working for the British American Tobacco Company in China. In the Security Service his desk-work was calm, fair-minded, equable and conscientious. He specialized in monitoring international communism. Even in 1941–5, when MI5 was under political direction to treat the Soviet Union as an ally, he husbanded small resources to ensure that threatening trends in Soviet Russian policy were evaluated and understood. He was thus centrally placed in the Security Service when what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War was followed by the Cold War. He succeeded White as Director General in 1956.

In May 1963, in a mood of hysterical suspicion, Mitchell was put under surveillance. Following the admissions of Blunt and Cairncross in 1964, Martin began to consult a colleague in MI5’s Science Directorate named Peter Wright about his mistrust of Mitchell and Hollis. Wright, too, was susceptible to Golitsyn’s unreliable material, and therefore prone to weak thinking and false deductions about high-level penetration of the Service. During 1964 Martin became so disruptive an influence that he was transferred from the Soviet counter-espionage section to other responsibilities. It was ‘tragic’, to use Christopher Andrew’s words, that the lead roles as Blunt’s interviewer and as the Security Service ‘witch-finder general’ then passed to Wright, whose conspiracy theories soon proved a worse menace than Martin’s and ultimately damaged the Service as much as Blunt’s treachery. After Mitchell’s planned retirement in September 1964, attention shifted to Hollis. In November a joint Security Service–SIS working party codenamed FLUENCY was established with Wright in the chair to investigate the suspicions generated by Martin. It is easier to propose that a conspiracy may exist than to disprove its existence: imaginary suspicions, like primitive fears, have an irrational tenacity that is hard to eradicate. When, in May 1965, FLUENCY reported that both Services had been penetrated, Hollis was confronted with the accusations against him. He retired, as previously agreed, at the time of his sixtieth birthday in December 1965, but the case against him was pursued by Wright until 1971 (Mitchell had been cleared of Wright’s suspicions a year earlier). By then the ‘witch-finder general’ was shunned within the Security Service, where his poor judgement and snaky methods were compared to those of the Gestapo. He did not retire until 1976, however, and continued with an ally to make trouble. As a result of their agitation, Lord Trend, who as Burke Trend had been Cabinet Secretary until 1973, reviewed the investigation and reported in 1975 that he found no evidence that either Mitchell or Hollis had been a Soviet penetration agent.⁶

Wright was an unfortunate. In boyhood he had rickets and a disabling stutter. As a pupil at Bishop’s Stortford College, he expected to go to an ancient university, but instead left school at fifteen when his father was sacked by Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company in 1931 and descended into alcoholism. He became a farm-worker in Scotland and then spent fourteen years as an Admiralty scientist before his recruitment in 1949 as external scientific adviser to MI5. His technical cleverness and mechanical improvisations misled him into feeling that he was equally sharp in understanding human affinities. He was stubborn, prosaic and self-satisfied, and cherished grudges: one influence on his obsessive mole-hunting was his grouch that ‘the well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to communism in the 1930s … had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me’.⁷

In 1964 the Security Service realized neither that Blunt was the Fourth Man nor Cairncross the Fifth in the Cambridge ring of five. This was one reason for assuring Blunt that he would not be prosecuted: MI5 officers had no wish for criminal trials and press storms that might hinder their search for associates of Philby and Maclean who were not yet apprehended. A dire mistake was made in taking literally Golitsyn’s report that all of the group had been at Cambridge together. Neither Blunt nor Cairncross fitted Golitsyn’s loose impression of the ring of five as exact Cambridge contemporaries. Blunt was seven or so years older than the others, and had not been recruited by Burgess until after Philby and Maclean had left Cambridge. Cairncross was discounted because he had reached Trinity two years after Philby left. MI5 began to accept that Blunt was the Fourth Man in 1974. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB rezident in the Soviet embassy in London in 1982–5, who had been working for SIS since 1974, identified Cairncross as the last of the ring of five in 1982, and publicly named him in 1990. Although Cairncross surpassed Blunt in importance as a spy, English newspapers were little interested in a shopkeeper’s son, who was a gangly-looking swot. Cairncross could not be made into a crowd-pleasing hate-figure, for he was untitled, looked drab rather than patrician, and was neither a connoisseur nor bisexual.

In the quarter-century between Cairncross’s confession to Martin and public identification by Gordievsky there were expensive distractions. The FBI in 1966 gave Michael Straight a list of eighty-five US citizens who had attended Cambridge University in 1930–4, from which he identified two or three men who had seemed fellow-travellers or been members of the Trinity cell. Subsequently the FBI shouldered the burden of investigating nearly 600 Americans who had attended the two ancient English universities during the 1930s. In 1967 MI5 started the University Research Group, which worked to identify CPGB members and communist sympathizers at all English universities between 1929 and 1954, and to establish their employment history. Five years of investigations yielded not a single Soviet spy.

Many journalist-commentators wanted levels of relentless persecution and brutal threats that MI5 knew to be unproductive of worthwhile material. Fleet Street sought the good copy that came from the rough methods and dramatic outcomes associated with the interrogation of two Canadian ambassadors, Herbert Norman and John Watkins. Norman had been recruited to the Cambridge communist cell by John Cornford and James Klugmann around 1934. After being named by Elizabeth Bentley in testimony to the US Senate sub-committee on internal security, and despite his admission under interrogation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he had been a communist at Cambridge, he was protected by Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester Pearson, who suppressed investigations into his affiliations and possible espionage. The interventions on Norman’s behalf by Pearson, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1957 and became Prime Minister of the dominion in 1963, seem startling in retrospect. Norman was appointed High Commissioner in New Zealand and then Ambassador to Egypt. When the US Senate sub-committee renewed its accusatory investigations of him, he jumped to his death from the top of a Swedish embassy building in Cairo in 1957. John Watkins, Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1954–6, suffered similar treatment. In 1964 he died in a Montreal hotel bedroom where he was being questioned by the CIA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police about accusations that he had acted as a Soviet agent of influence. These were good press stories with minimal intelligence yield.

After decades of anti-Establishment rhetoric, and in an epoch when respect for the duties and attainments of public intellectuals was being quenched by angry populism, journalists gratified the mass appetite for discrediting highbrows. Innocent Cambridge dons, notably Donald Beves and A.S.F. Gow of Trinity, and Frank Birch and Arthur Pigou of King’s, were brought under public suspicion as Soviet spies. There was a competitive scramble to identify an Oxford ring: three eminent academics – Jenifer Hart, Stuart Hampshire and Robin Zaehner – were among those investigated. Isaiah Berlin told Hart, after she had been caught in a Sunday Times sting in 1983, that newspapers in the 1980s wanted to ‘throw intellectuals to the lions of the political pornography-hunger public’. Men who had died years earlier, notably Guy Liddell and Tomás Harris, were grabbed in the maw of suspicion. Dick White characterized this epoch as that of ‘the spy torment’.⁸

Around 1962 MI5 officers had interviewed Jenifer Hart, who had been an official at the Home Office and CPGB member in the 1930s, about her party contacts. She was candid in her replies, because she felt that she had nothing to hide. She was reinterviewed in 1966 by Wright. By her account, their meeting was ‘a long and rather nasty affair’, during which she was quizzed about a long list of friends and acquaintances (none of whom she knew to be communists). ‘Jennifer [sic] Hart’, Wright wrote in his ghosted memoirs Spycatcher, ‘was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt and white net stockings she was wearing.’ Hart was a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she was tutor in modern history and in politics, philosophy and economics, and thus unusually a member of two university faculties; she had written a path-breaking treatise, The British Police; and yet Wright saw her as a post-menopausal woman who ought to accept desexualization. He admitted that she was straightforward in her replies, but did not feel that she was sufficiently impressed by his questions: she had, he complained, ‘a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies’ skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and ungentlemanly.’⁹

Wright pursued targets connected to Hart, notably Bernard Floud, Phoebe Pool and Andrew Cohen. Floud had attended the universities of Oxford, Berlin, Grenoble and Toronto. He served in the Intelligence Corps in 1939–42 and then the Ministry of Information. In peacetime he farmed in Essex before becoming personnel manager at Granada Television and his election as a Labour MP in 1964. When Harold Wilson nominated him for junior ministerial office, MI5 registered a security objection, and Floud was called for an interview with Wright on Monday 9 October 1967. To his children on the preceding Sunday he had seemed downcast, and Wright at the Monday interview found him as off-hand as Hart. He appeared uninterested in Wright’s questions, to many of which he replied that he had no memory of the answers – no doubt truly as he was badly depressed. ‘I was tough on him,’ Wright boasted. ‘I knew that his wife, an agoraphobic depressive, had recently committed suicide … I explained to him in unmistakable terms that, since it was my responsibility to advise on his security clearance, I could not possibly clear him until he gave a satisfactory explanation of the Hart story.’ Wright asked him to attend a second interview next day: Floud returned to his home in the Regent’s Park in a distressed state. He was a teetotaller, but that evening took a large amount of alcohol, swallowed barbiturates and went to his children’s playroom in the basement where he locked the door, turned on but did not light the gas fire and swaddled his head in a blanket. Wright’s victim was fifty-two.¹⁰

Sir Andrew Cohen was described by Wright in Spycatcher as a diplomat, but in fact he had been an official in the Colonial Office, where he had proven indispensable in managing British political withdrawal from Africa. He served as Governor of Uganda in 1952–7, and was known in Whitehall as the sturdy advocate of financial aid to ex-colonial developing economies. As such he was selected as the first PUS of the Ministry of Overseas Development on its inauguration by the incoming Labour government in 1964. He was imposing in his outlook, ambitions and physical bulk: he died of a heart attack, apparently before Wright could interview him, in 1968.

Phoebe Pool, whose father was a meat-trader in Smithfield market, had phenomenal intellect and artistic discrimination, but from childhood was an insomniac depressive. She was a long-term associate of Blunt’s at the Courtauld Institute, collaborated with him in a book about Picasso and acted as his courier during the 1930s. When Wright turned his attention to her, she was a patient in the psychiatric wing of Middlesex Hospital: accordingly Wright instructed Blunt to manipulate another Courtauld scholar, Anita Brookner, to act as an unwitting cut-out providing material from Pool. Pool hurled herself under a tube train in 1971. ‘All these suicides,’ his boss Martin Furnival Jones supposedly told Wright, ‘they’ll ruin our image. We’re just not that sort of Service.’ Wright compressed his account of these events: in fact there were four years between the deaths of Floud and Pool; the chronology and detail of his widely quoted recollections cannot be right. His procedure throughout these investigations typified his method: putting together broken shards of knowledge in the wrong contiguities and producing perversely misshapen intelligence.¹¹

Another object of suspicion was the ex-MI5 officer Tomás Harris, who had been killed in a drunken car smash some years earlier. After the bruiting of his name in 1979, his reputation was defended by Ewen Montagu, on behalf of Harris’s surviving sisters: ‘they are all most distressed and feel alone and helpless as they all worshipped Tommy – one has become almost hysterical’. Montagu could not forgive ‘the crooked (and the stupid) writers … cashing in to get publicity for their books … by flinging accusations against safely dead men’, he told Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1980. Dick White also gave his judgement to Trevor-Roper. ‘I do not believe Tomás Harris was a Soviet spy but my conviction is not of the hand in the fire type. He was an international art dealer with contacts on both sides during the Civil War. If he got caught up in anything it would have been in these circumstances & would not connect him with the Cambridge conspirators. He has been closely investigated & I believe cleared.’¹²

Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire

The cases of Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire show the stupidity of Wright’s fixations. Goronwy Rees had suggested to MI5 in 1951 that both men had been Soviet spies. One oddity of this accusation was that all three of them were associated with the same Oxford college. Rees had won a fellowship at All Souls in 1931, and was appointed the college’s estates bursar in 1951. Hampshire was elected Fellow in 1936, and re-elected in 1955 with the additional post of domestic bursar. Zaehner became a Fellow of the college in 1952, on his appointment as Oxford’s Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. ‘The idea of Zaehner as a Soviet agent was grotesque,’ said Rees’s stalwart friend and All Souls colleague Isaiah Berlin. ‘Similarly Stuart Hampshire … was perfectly innocent, and a perfect patriot.’¹³

Rees’s accusation against Zaehner matched the story of the Russian defector betrayed by Philby in 1945, Konstantin Volkov, who had spoken of a Soviet spy embedded in SIS operations in the Middle East. By Wright’s account, Zaehner had run MI6’s wartime counter-intelligence operations in Iran. His initial task was to protect the railways into Russia, on which vital military supplies were transported, from German sabotage. Later, when the Russians were striving for control of the railway, he had to work to defeat their aims. Zaehner, who spoke local dialects fluently, first worked undercover, ‘operating in the murky and cut-throat world of counter-sabotage’ to borrow a cliché from Wright, and latterly behind Russian lines. In the first phase he was at constant risk of betrayal and murder by pro-German Arabs and in the second phase by pro-Russian Arabs. ‘On the face of it,’ declared Wright, ‘the very fact that Zaehner survived gave a touch of credibility to Rees’ allegations.’ After the war, Zaehner served for two years as Press Attaché in the Tehran embassy bribing editors and trying to alter public opinion to favour English interests. Then he returned to academic work in Oxford, although this was twice interrupted by affairs of state. In 1949 he was seconded to Malta, where he trained the Albanian insurgents whose part in the Anglo-American operation against Enver Hoxha’s regime was betrayed by Philby. It took Zaehner only three months to master the Albanian language. He accompanied some of his trainees on their fatal journey to their homeland. In 1951–2 he returned to Tehran as acting Counsellor in the embassy trying to foment opposition to the Iranian Prime Minister Musaddiq after his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Zaehner wrote in 1970 that he was relieved to be elected to a chair at Oxford in 1952, because pure scholarship was ‘a single-minded search for truth’, and he was weary after ten years abroad in a branch of government service ‘in which truth is seen as the last of the virtues, and to lie comes to be second nature’.¹⁴

Zaehner’s inaugural lecture as Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics was ferocious, witty and deliberately offensive to its audience. He was a Catholic convert who complained of Anglicans that, ‘rather than be thought unfashionable or even “reactionary” – titles of which they might well have been proud – they have progressively abandoned the mysteries of their faith and reduced their religion to a meaningless benevolence’. He believed that irrationality was a violent force that could not be suppressed, should not be ignored and was integral to much intelligence work. If excessive rationality and prudentialism had not denied and debased primitive and necessary passions, Zaehner believed,

we might, perhaps, have been spared at least the worst excesses of twentieth-century barbarism: we might have been spared the sanguinary claptrap of blood and soil which for a moment became the religion of a great nation: we might even have been spared the moronic cult of lunacy preached by the Surrealists. If the twentieth century has taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that there is an element in man other than reason, and that if this element is neglected, it is liable to fester and to erupt into something monstrously evil.

Zaehner deplored ‘the conversion of the American ideal of liberty into the most crassly materialist, soulless civilisation the world has ever seen’, but equally despised Soviet Russia ‘under the leadership of a Directoire of gloomy mediocrity’.¹⁵

Spycatcher recounts Wright talking for hours in Zaehner’s All Souls rooms as the shadow of the college spires faded across the lawn outside (Zaehner’s set overlooked a paved quadrangle where there was not a blade of grass). ‘I’m sorry, Robin,’ Wright began, ‘a problem has come up. We’re following up some old allegations. I’m afraid there’s one that points at you.’ He then recounted Volkov’s reference to a Soviet spy in Persia. Zaehner was so hurt by the accusation that he dabbed tears from his eyes. ‘I spent six years in the desert,’ Wright remembered him replying. ‘I stayed behind two years after Yalta, when everybody else went home. I got no honours, but I thought at least I had earned a degree of trust.’ Zaehner felt sure that Volkov’s spy, if he existed, was not English. ‘There weren’t many of us, and I’d vouch for everyone.’ He suggested that the spy was an SIS agent rather than an officer, and suggested Rudolf (‘Rudi’) Hamburger, the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski @ SONIA. Wright left his interview with Zaehner feeling that ‘Rees had been terribly, vindictively mistaken.’¹⁶

Rees had also fingered Stuart Hampshire, an Oxford philosopher who had joined Trevor-Roper’s Radio Security Service in 1940. Hampshire’s kinks especially suited intelligence work. ‘I am capable of great dissimulation – that is one of my vanities,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I am extremely vain about my capacity to perceive the moods and motives of other people.’ He disclaimed deep loyalties: ‘I find it very pleasant and easy to be pleasant and sympathetic to people, but there are only three or four people whose death would cause me the slightest pain; I like friends as a periodical source of pleasure, but their disappearance does not affect me.’ Violence distressed him. ‘I like gentleness, or the possibility of gentleness, above all other human qualities. I am prejudiced against successful and effective people.’ All of these traits enhanced his official work. They were less valued by Wright, who would have been on high alert if he had known that Hampshire had once told Trevor-Roper, ‘I like elaborate good manners and sophistication, and all forms of perversion.’¹⁷

During the war Hampshire specialized in analysing the activities of the central command of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) and gained expert knowledge of SS atrocities across Europe and in Russia. After the war, he interrogated several Nazi leaders in captivity. This experience transformed his attitude to politics and philosophy. ‘I learnt how easy it had been to organise the vast enterprises of torture and murder, and to enrol willing workers in this field,’ he recalled. ‘Unmitigated evil and nastiness are as natural, it seemed, in educated human beings as generosity and sympathy: no more, and no less, natural, a fact that was obvious to Shakespeare, but not previously evident to me.’¹⁸

Hampshire’s intelligence work gave him a lifelong interest in the ‘processes of deception, intrigue, treachery, and mystification’, he wrote later. ‘The deception and intrigue sometimes go so far that any normal interest in literal truth is lost along the way, because the truth is buried beneath layer after layer of corrupt intention.’ After the war, he worked, probably for MI5, in San Francisco during the opening session of the United Nations and in Paris for the implementation of the Marshall Plan. These experiences left him with ‘difficulty in imagining that purity of intention and undivided purposes can be the normal case in politics. I believe that very many people feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience; and, outside politics, they often find themselves divided between love and hatred of their own homes and of their own habits.’ At the suggestion of Dick White, Hampshire was asked in 1966 by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, to review the activities of GCHQ at Cheltenham, the costs of gathering SIGINT and the future extent of Anglo-American cooperation. Shortly afterwards, Wright turned to leading an investigation of him. Despite doubts about his friendship with Burgess, who may have made a tentative attempt to recruit him to the cause in 1937, Hampshire was exonerated in 1967. Wright was perhaps in mind when Hampshire later wrote: ‘there is a black hole of duplicity and intrigue into which the plans of politicians and intelligence officers may altogether disappear, because they may forget what they are supposed to be doing, lost in the intricacies of political manoeuvre’.¹⁹

For fourteen years Hampshire was then left in peace until a Saturday in 1981 when a journalist from the Observer showed him the draft of an article, which was due to be published next day, insinuating that he was under plausible suspicion of having been a Soviet agent. Like so many such pieces, it dramatized and made false links with little regard for truth or probability. Hampshire appealed for help to the formidable lawyer Lord Goodman, then Master of University College, Oxford and former chairman of the Observer Trust and of the Newspaper Publishers Association. A telephone call was made to the acting editor of the paper: eight words were enough to convince the Observer not to run the story. ‘Arnold Goodman here: Stuart Hampshire is with me,’ he said before replacing the receiver. In a letter to The Times, which was drafted with Goodman’s help, Hampshire protested against the twisting methods used in pursuit of espionage press stunts. There had been ‘one or two definitely false and defamatory statements’ in the spiked Observer attack on him.

But most of the article was innuendo. For example, it was rightly stated that I had been interrogated in the early sixties about my relations with Professor Blunt and with others in wartime intelligence. But the writer had omitted to say that nearly everyone who had been associated with secret military intelligence in the war, and with Professor Blunt, had been interrogated at that time, and this was a very large class.

The method of the proposed article was genteel British McCarthyism, playing on guilt by association and with dark allusions to sources in the secret service. I remonstrated with the journalist, a persuasive friend remonstrated with the acting editor, and after an interval we were told that the article would not appear. The editor of the newspaper later expressed his regret.

This episode raises questions. Ought not this selling of newspapers with the aid of speculative spy stories to come to an end now? Ought we not to question the cant about public service when the methods of investigative journalism are applied to people who are obliged by the original conditions of their service to conceal much of what they know? Ought not former members of the security service to be discouraged from hawking stories around Fleet Street …?

Do we want a demoralised intelligence service and demoralised security services?²⁰

Anthony Blunt and Andrew Boyle

From 10 September until 22 October 1979 a television serialization of John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was broadcast on English television. Le Carré had used some traits of the MI5 officer John Bingham @ Lord Clanmorris for the character of George Smiley in his novels; but Alec Guinness, who played the part of Smiley on television, aped the mannerisms of Maurice Oldfield. On 6 November, fifteen years after Blunt’s confession in Portman Square, Andrew Boyle published The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia. In the book Boyle dropped hints about Blunt’s identity without naming him. Private Eye however published a parody Spectator article headlined ‘The Fourth Man’ under the byline of ‘Sir Anthony Blunt’. ‘The simultaneous appearance of the Tinker Tailor T.V. series & Boyle’s Climate of Treason has created a somewhat feverish public opinion which the Press is trying to serve,’ Dick White wrote in January 1980. ‘“Moles” are of course Le Carré’s invention & there is no doubt that his gruesome imagination has caught on.’ He regretted that Boyle’s book had not been indicted by reviewers for ‘its many inaccuracies & misinterpretations’, but had instead been endorsed by glib ‘pundits’ such as Malcolm Muggeridge.²¹

Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister in May 1979. She felt that as Blunt had betrayed his country, there was no reason to protect him unless his exposure would jeopardize national security or embarrass the Crown. On 15 November, in a written answer to a parliamentary question, she confirmed that he had been recruited to work for Russian intelligence before the war, had acted as a talent-spotter while a don at Cambridge and had passed official secrets to Moscow while employed in the Security Service in 1940–5. She called him ‘contemptible and repugnant’. Blunt’s knighthood was annulled. All night the BBC reported this news in sombre, stilted tones as if a head of state had died. The weekend, to judge from the tone of broadcasts, was spent in astounded mourning. In retrospect, Thatcher’s ‘outing’ of Blunt seems the opening salvo of her campaign against Whitehall traditions and old-guard hierarchy. It was the end of the six-month honeymoon opening of her premiership and the start of serious business rather as the anti-monarchical upsurge after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 was the defining moment that ended Tony Blair’s honeymoon as Prime Minister.

The Sunday Telegraph on 18 November rushed into a story that Blunt’s treachery had been responsible for the deaths of forty-nine wartime SOE agents behind enemy lines in the Netherlands. There was not a jot of truth in the report, which the Telegraph refused to retract, on the basis that traitors do not deserve apologies and can have any dirt chucked at them with impunity. Tales proliferated that Blunt had seduced and then blackmailed Cambridge undergraduates, that he was a paedophile who preyed on children, that he had connived in selling fake pictures by authenticating forgeries and that he had an ill-gotten fortune stashed offshore. The Sunday Express editor John Junor, who believed ‘only poofs drink rosé’ and that ‘AIDS was a fair punishment for buggery’, called Blunt ‘a treacherous communist poof’. Muggeridge, in Time magazine, began with false premises – ‘homosexuals tend to sympathize with revolutionary causes, and to find in espionage a congenial occupation’ – and continued with spurious generalizations. ‘The same gifts which make homosexuals often accomplished actors equip them for spying, which is a kind of acting, while their inevitable exclusion from the satisfaction of parenthood gives them a grudge against society, and therefore an instinctive sympathy with efforts to overthrow it.’²²

On 20 November Blunt held a press conference in the offices of The Times. Only journalists from that newspaper, the Guardian and television newsrooms were admitted. Resentful of their exclusion, other newspapers burst into puritanical indignation that Blunt had been served white wine with smoked trout over lunch with the newspaper’s deputy editor: they thought he should have been served crusts and gruel. The next day’s front-page headlines included ‘DAMN YOUR CONSCIENCE! The British deserve better than this load of phoney humbug, Blunt’ (Daily Express – the voice of Britain, 21 November) and ‘THE SPY WITH NO SHAME – A performance of supreme insolence’ (Daily Mail, 21 November). The Daily Mail editorial raged with vindictive threats that:

the Establishment … cannot any longer continue to deceive the nation. The time for the truth is now. And we must have it.

If we do not, let them be warned: The truth will eventually be discovered, and then, no parade of consciences, however high-born, however mighty, will protect the Establishment from the rightful wrath of the British people.²³

Two contrary voices were juxtaposed on the letters page of The Times. Sir Michael Howard, then Chichele Professor in the History of War at Oxford, decried ‘the witch-hunt in Westminster and elsewhere’. As the author of an official but suppressed Strategic Deception in the Second World War, he gave a temperate explanation: ‘When an enemy agent is discovered, the natural instinct of the security authorities is not to expose but to use him, and the greater his importance the stronger this instinct will be. Not only is he a mine of useful information, but if his employers are unaware that he has been “blown”, they will keep in contact with him. He can then be used as a double agent, feeding them misinformation.’ For MI5, Howard reminded readers, ‘the value of keeping Professor Blunt as a card in their hands rather than discarding him by handing him over to justice must have been a major factor in the minds of those who made the decision’. He doubted if ‘the country would really have been better off if Professor Blunt had been made to stand trial for treason in 1964’. The letter beneath Howard’s came from a pompous dunce named Russell Burlingham, well known as the club bore of the Reform and as the bane of staff at the nearby London Library. ‘Never has Mrs Thatcher shown her political resolution to better advantage than in her spontaneous decision to drag this shabby little history into the light of day. In doing so she has struck her shrewdest blow for British liberty and exposed spurious “liberal” values; and the moral impact will be quite as decisive in its effect, and as far-reaching, as any of her radical economic initiatives.’²⁴

Blunt’s intellectual gifts, homosexuality and bodily posture were pilloried. He was attacked as snobbish, cold, imperious and sexually predatory in a hate campaign that gave a propaganda victory to Moscow. Commentators never paused in their diatribes against the old school tie, Cambridge and homosexuality to recall the triumphs at Bletchley, where public schoolboys had abounded, where Cambridge graduates had led its inaugural phase and where Alan Turing was genius loci. Chapman Pincher in the Beaverbrook press’s London evening newspaper called Blunt a ‘revolting individual’, and inveighed against the Foreign Office ‘as a natural home for homosexuals, drunks and unstable weirdoes in general’. Between hard covers, too, Pincher abused Blunt as toffee-nosed, spiteful and – a deadly charge in an increasingly anti-elitist age – ‘widely disliked for his intellectual arrogance, holding those whom he considered lesser mortals in contempt’. No admiration was permitted for Blunt’s brilliant mind and scholarship, although it is reductive to think of him primarily as a spy. ‘Blunt was only really happy when he was doing research,’ wrote his Courtauld colleague Peter Kidson. ‘He was one of those true intellectuals for whom there is no experience to compare with the eureka moment, when an obsessive problem finally dissolves into a pattern of intelligible connections.’²⁵

What of Boyle and his book? ‘The Climate of Treason is riveting but not very intelligent,’ Frederic Raphael wrote at the time. It might be faulted, but it could not be ignored. It had, if not a bias, at least an entrenched basis to its ideas and procedures which is usually overlooked. Boyle was a devout Catholic: his brother was a Catholic priest; he corresponded with Cardinal Heenan and other Catholic clergy; he sent his son to the great Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, Stonyhurst. The Catholic influence is marked in Boyle’s references to sex. He referred to the ‘abnormal sexual proclivities’ of Burgess, who (he claimed without substantiation) ‘introduced Maclean … to the sad pleasures of sodomy’ at Cambridge: ‘boasting about it as if he had thereby earned the Victoria Cross for valour beyond the call of duty’. Boyle’s tone implied that the western world had been degrading itself since the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 or since Martin Luther’s protest at Wittenberg in 1517. Boyle approached the book, so he told George Carey-Foster when seeking an interview in 1978, with curiosity about the ‘spiritual distemper that prevailed among resentful, guilt-laden young men and women at our Universities, and which the Comintern and other Soviet agencies capitalised on brilliantly’. He was enterprising in using the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain CIA and FBI documents, although he sometimes misunderstood or perhaps was swamped by them. He interviewed hundreds of witnesses, took impressionistic handwritten notes rather than recordings, and was overwhelmed not only by his proliferating material but by the din of conflicting voices. One can only be impressed at how hard he worked to meet his deadlines.²⁶

Some of the reviews were informed. ‘After the lapse of a generation, the mechanics of petty treachery become unimportant,’ wrote Trevor-Roper in the Spectator. He judged that Boyle ‘reveals nothing that was not known – perhaps more accurately known – to authority, and merely gives occasion for belated public persecution.’ Histories of espionage that answered general questions about human tendencies, institutional development and social systems had more value than those that presented an accretion of irrelevant and distracting factual detail. In the London Review of Books Neal Ascherson found The Climate of Treason too unforgiving: ‘Boyle is a bit of a prig. Nobody gets away with anything. Political hindsight dominates.’ He noted that Boyle dismissed Maclean’s book on British Foreign Policy since Suez as ‘ponderous’ whereas, wrote Ascherson, it is ‘penetrating and very readable’: he wondered whether Boyle had actually read it.²⁷

Isaiah Berlin was surprised to be quoted in The Climate of Treason – sometimes inaccurately – because he had understood that his talk with Boyle at the Athenaeum had been on a non-attributable basis. In his complaint to Boyle, he noted factual errors, such as the statement that he and Burgess had flown on ‘a VIP flight’ to the USA in September 1940 when they had in truth travelled by a Cunard liner from Liverpool to Quebec in July of that year. Berlin rebutted Boyle’s statement that, after meeting Maclean in wartime Washington, he had thought him ‘abnormal and unhealthy’ – a phrase of Boyle’s that indicated his Catholic distaste for homosexuality. He also denied Boyle’s story that Maclean had cast a recruiting fly over Berlin by asking him in Washington, ‘why don’t you join us?’²⁸

Patrick Reilly thought that Boyle had little idea how either the Foreign Office or an embassy worked. He skewered some of Boyle’s errors, such as the claim that Burgess had learnt about the VENONA-inspired investigation into the Washington leakages of 1944, and had warned Maclean when the latter was passing through London, from his old post in the US capital on his way to Cairo, in the autumn of 1948. But the first information about the 1944 leak did not reach London until January 1949. It is inconceivable that Burgess, who was then wasting time in the Office’s Far Eastern Department, would have had access to VENONA material. Reilly denied crucial details of Boyle’s account of the FO handling of Maclean’s case.

Dick White had no respect for Boyle or The Climate of Treason. ‘The first edition is crammed with inaccuracies & yet … he remains complacently satisfied that he is now accepted as the greatest authority on the subject of “moles”,’ White briefed Trevor-Roper in 1980. The worst mistakes were made, said White, when Boyle became entangled by his American material. Boyle’s obstinacy in insisting that Wilfrid Mann, whom White knew to be a double agent turned by the Americans, was the Fifth Man also vexed White. ‘I think it is important to debunk Boyle once & for all. His Climate of Treason has to some extent created a climate of opinion which is dangerously provocative of a witch-hunt. His only bull’s eye was Blunt. Rees gave him that but it was already widely known in Fleet Street before Climate was published.’ White was altogether dismissive of Boyle’s efforts: ‘I don’t think the book has power at all, only luck that it was published in the wake of the showing on T.V. of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which created a feverish public interest in “moles”.’ The real misfortune of the publicity whirlwind aroused by Thatcher’s parliamentary statement was that it convinced critics of the Establishment that ‘there have been a whole bucket full of pardons issued to cover up numberless moles in Government. This is not so.’²⁹

Thoughtless and banal over-simplifications about the English class system permeated Boyle’s text (neither Scotland nor Wales had any part). Burgess was described as belonging to ‘the vulgarly ostentatious Pitt Club, a decadent right-wing group, as well as to the élitist and secretive Apostles’, although the Pitt was boisterous rather than decadent and fogeyish rather than vulgar. The two Cambridge spies who confessed in 1964 received the equivalent of ‘Royal Pardons’, wrote Boyle, ‘exonerated at the discretion of the two secret services concerned, partly for the sake of expediency and partly as a reward for the important light they were able to shed on the pattern of treachery inside the British Establishment’. Boyle’s gloss on the episode in which Burgess revealed his and Blunt’s secrets to Rees, who disclosed them to Rosamond Lehmann, runs: ‘Thanks to the narrow, tightly enmeshed relationships which still characterized the structure of the British ruling class, whether at the centre of power or on the outer fringes, the gossip about Burgess did not spread beyond his intellectual friends.’ But Lehmann’s father was a rentier living in a pleasure villa on the banks of the Thames while Rees’s father was a nonconformist clergyman: neither was remotely ‘ruling class’. And outside totalitarian states, which class – rich, poor, middling, learned, outdoorsy – blabs like police informers? The experiences, for example, of France and the Netherlands under German occupation in the 1940s and during the unsettled period after their liberation suggest that informers were envious or vindictive neighbours, quarrelsome in-laws, disgruntled employees or other despicable types. It is hard to know what Boyle expected of Lehmann: it is hard to think what she could, with decency, have done.³⁰

Wright had retired to a stud farm in Tasmania in 1976. He was embittered not only by the dismissal of his conspiracy theories, but also by the refusal of the Security Service to take account of his fifteen years at the Admiralty when computing the amount of his pension. The lucrative fame of The Climate of Treason must have unsettled his jealous spirit. He took his grudges to Lord Rothschild, who bought him air tickets back to England so that they could discuss Wright’s hopes of writing his memoirs. In 1980 he arrived at Rothschild’s home with a ten-page typescript about Soviet penetration, to which he gave the hackneyed title ‘The Cancer in our Midst’. Rothschild was hyper-sensitive about his reputation and perplexed by insinuations that as a friend of Blunt and Burgess he must have been a Soviet spy. He evidently hoped that he would be exonerated if Wright brought his experiences into the public domain. He invited Pincher to meet Wright; the two men collaborated; and Pincher wrote his hasty, shoddy book, Their Trade is Treachery.

Their Trade is Treachery, published in 1981, publicly revealed for the first time the investigation of Hollis, who had died in 1973, and suggested that Hollis had been guilty. Wright’s secret help was indispensable to Pincher, who had a second informant – a mischievous wretch, with confidential access, who had once leaked to the Sunday Times the fact that Sir Geoffrey Harrison had been forced to retire as Ambassador in Moscow in 1968 after sexual entrapment by a Russian woman domestic. Pincher opened Their Trade with a series of falsehoods. He said that Lord Trend’s inquiry of 1974–5 indicated that in addition to Blunt ‘there had been at least one “Super-mole”, and possibly two, with unrestricted opportunity for burrowing into secrets’. Readers could be excused for believing Pincher when he declared with such firmness, ‘Lord Trend concluded that there was a strong prima facie case that MI5 had been deeply penetrated over many years by someone who was not Blunt. He named Hollis as the likeliest suspect.’ It was Trend’s view, so Pincher avowed, that ‘Hollis had not cleared himself during his interrogation. His answers to searching questions had been unconvincing, and his memory had been at fault only when it suited him.’ Moreover, the former Cabinet Secretary supposedly concluded, ‘Hollis had consistently frustrated attempts by loyal MI5 officers to investigate the obvious penetration of their service.’ In fact, Trend had said nothing resembling this. Pincher also indulged in the obligatory cant about class conspiracy: he called Trend ‘the epitome of the Establishment’, and a stalwart of ‘the old boys’ network’, which was untrue if it meant that Trend was partial, socially discriminatory or nepotistic.³¹

In 1987 came Wright’s ghosted and scrappily edited memoirs Spycatcher, full of animus and confusion, to reanimate the attack-dogs on Hollis. ‘When I read Wright’s book, with its paranoid self-righteousness, its gloating record of persecution,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘I was reminded of that other half-crazed witch-hunter in our history, Titus Oates, who also could not be totally refuted, for the Popish Plot was not a complete myth: a small nucleus of truth lay buried under the unscrupulously manufactured hysteria.’ Spycatcher was published in Australia, to evade prosecution in London under the Official Secrets Act, and received an inordinate marketing boost from an ill-fated attempt by the British government in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to prevent its publication there. The luckless Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was sent to Sydney to testify on behalf of the Thatcher administration: he found himself in an impossible situation, and was drenched in the spittle of journalistic mockery. Many London newspapers treated Wright as a rebel-hero against authority, as a brave maverick, as a lone fighter against long odds. There was little criticism of his irresponsibility, fixations, vindictiveness, elisions, errors and conceit. One of Whitehall’s great objections to Spycatcher was its references to GCHQ – ‘the last really secret aspect of British government’, as the historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac say. At this time even Cabinet ministers did not know that it was twice the size of MI5 and SIS combined.³²

Thatcher, whose autobiography seldom alludes to intelligence matters, presided over a vigilant and even aggressive regime – probably incited by Maurice Oldfield’s hard-line successors at SIS – to protect official secrets. She vetoed publication of Michael Howard’s officially commissioned history of wartime deception operations (finally published in 1990), while the Cabinet Office forbade publication of Howard’s essay on the double agent GARBO, who had been discussed in previous books by Masterman and Montagu. During the first five years of Thatcher’s administration, the Official Secrets Act was invoked once every eighteen weeks. The blanket of official silence on security matters created opportunities for the sensationalists and fabricators among writers of espionage history.

A renewed internal security investigation in 1988 concluded that the case against Hollis, which culminated in two interviews with him, was so meagre that it should not have been pursued. The prolongation of the divisive hunt for MI5 traitors was attributable to Wright’s dishonesty and invention of evidence, his leading of witnesses (including Blunt) during questioning, ‘His tendency to select a solution, then tailor the evidence to fit it’, and ‘His standard manoeuvre when worsted in argument of taking refuge in mystery (“If you knew what I know”)’. To this indictment by Christopher Andrew must be added the weak analysis by investigators associated with Wright and the bias derived from Golitsyn’s baneful delusions. The case against Hollis, White wrote in 1988, was ‘highly contrived & purely circumstantial’. Wright’s conspiracy theories were, he said, deceptions.³³

‘Only out for the money’

Even if one or two fingers had been amputated it would be easy to count on one hand the number of authors of espionage histories who practised scrupulous exactitude as they added to the heap of books responsible for what White called ‘the spy torment’. This section will examine the motives, methods and plausibility of other leaders of the genre, which has excited newspaper stories and the public mind since 1979. The first of these was Donald McCormick, who was foreign manager of the Sunday Times in 1963–73 and a prolific author under his own name and using the alias of Richard Deacon. The others were John Costello and Anthony Cave Brown.

The books of McCormick @ Deacon included The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959) and Erotic Literature: A Connoisseur’s Guide (1992). Cannibalism, Unidentified Flying Objects, libertarian economics and apartheid were among his enthusiasms. Fantasists, tricksters, escapists and impostors intrigued him. He wrote a biography of the arms dealer and champion self-mythologizer Sir Basil Zaharoff, and an admiring study Taken for a Ride: The History of Cons and Con-Men (1976). He enjoyed hoaxing readers, invented anonymous sources, fabricated documents and described himself with a wink as ‘a very clever man, who enjoys his quiet fun’. He had a canny sense of what would ring true and what would sell. One academic critic called him ‘a charlatan, who took a dishonest, mischievous approach to gathering evidence’, and whose books are ‘riddled with inaccuracy, misrepresentation, poorly supported judgements that are far away from reality … and cognitive conceit’. Even an admirer conceded, ‘I suppose his exactitude is not that of a scholar, but of a journalist.’³⁴

McCormick @ Deacon profited by denigrating the ancient universities to his credulous readers. In The British Connection (1979) he claimed that ‘sodomy and communism’ were both ‘popular’ in Oxford and Cambridge universities before 1939, ‘especially among those of the upper strata of society’. At Oxford, he maintained, for he was always brazen in extrapolating minority examples into a mass movement, ‘homosexuality was so much the “in” thing that many heteros posed as homos’, while Cambridge, he claimed risibly, ‘had a preponderance of homosexual dons’.³⁵

One of his targets was the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou. He depicted Pigou as gun-running for Russian revolutionaries, and recording his activities in an enciphered diary. According to Deacon’s remunerative fantasies, Pigou ranked with Klugmann as a secret Cambridge recruiter, masterminded the stealing of the keys to Philip Noel-Baker’s dispatch box and cultivated drunken, jumpy and unsporting Burgess by taking him rock-climbing in Wales. Noël Annan asked White about Pigou’s supposed Soviet spy work. ‘We looked into the matter of Deacon’s allegations & had nothing to corroborate them,’ White replied. There was a monosyllable that White always mistrusted unless it was accompanied by the tightest evidence, ‘link’. Deacon had written of ‘a link’ between Pigou and the triple agent Theodore Rothstein: ‘one can only ask what sort of “link”? The word may only be emotively used for the purposes of a purely circumstantial case.’ Elsewhere in The British Connection similarly feeble ‘links’ were used to imply that Guy Liddell of MI5 and the atomic scientist Sir Rudolf Peierls had been Soviet spies.³⁶

Trails of guilt by association were also laid by John Costello. Costello was pertinacious in tracking sources and indefatigable in producing bestsellers. His driving energy and intensity of temperament could seem attractive. But a histrionic element in the myth he created about himself, his dramatic sense of his activities and influence, and an underlying suspicious hostility were on the debit side. His bitterness against the Cambridge academic Christopher Andrew, whose painstaking research and careful conclusions belied the conspiracy theorists, showed the animus of someone whose world felt threatened by studious calm. Costello’s big book about the wider context of the Blunt case, Mask of Treachery (1988), tapped rich veins of documentary material, but was flawed by its methods and assumptions. After a survey of the setbacks of Liddell’s career, starting with the ARCOS raid in 1927, Costello concluded: ‘Either Liddell suffered from a bad run of luck that was so disastrous as to be incomprehensible; or he was incompetent to the point of criminal negligence; or he was the grand-daddy Soviet mole in the British intelligence services.’ After two pages of bullet points listing circumstantial facts as if they were tight evidential links, Costello deployed mixed metaphors (‘the mechanism of intellectual treachery is woven from subtle deceits’), psycho-babble (‘his connoisseurship grew in defiance of his stern military father and was nourished by a doting musical mother’) and clichés about the English class system that together are a sure indicator of woolly thinking. ‘The Liddells – like the Blunts – were a family with aristocratic connexions dropping down the social scale. The backbiting cynicism of the homosexual milieu which he enjoyed may have fed a deep-seated resentment against the Establishment … Liddell’s artistic temperament, like Blunt’s, shaped by similar adolescent resentments against the underlying philistinism of British society, may well have sown the seeds of later treachery.’ These half-baked suppositions and callow prejudices were the flimsy foundations for the pillorying of Liddell in the 1980s.³⁷

‘There never has been & never could be any suspicion of Guy Liddell,’ White insisted to Trevor-Roper in 1980. ‘Only unscrupulous & malicious people … could possibly suggest it.’ Accusers relied on ‘completely futile’ tales of ‘friendship with Burgess & Blunt, Guy as the man who warned Burgess & Maclean to escape, suppression of an item of evidence warning of Pearl Harbour [sic]’. Liddell was even blamed by Costello and ‘the awful Deacon’ for the failure of the ARCOS raid. It was all ‘so silly’, especially as Liddell certainly ‘detested Burgess’. White knew as a fact that when Blunt recommended Burgess to the Security Service, ‘it was Guy who blocked his recruitment or any form of access to MI5’. In White’s mind Deacon was twinned with Costello, who telephoned him in 1989 seeking information on a pre-war American case which White would not give him. ‘He said that he was due to give a lecture to the CIA at Langley that day,’ White told Noël Annan. ‘I wonder what that will do for the so-called Special Relationship!’ Costello was ‘only out for the money’, White thought. ‘He may be industrious in reading everything but is totally indiscriminate in evaluating source material.’³⁸

Among the common preoccupations of Costello and Deacon was the Cambridge discussion-group the Apostles, of which Blunt and Burgess had been members. This innocuous society, with its private slang and rituals, its strict search for truth and its pitiless testing of false propositions was hated by Fleet Street hacks to whom its values were a standing reproach. The disputations of the Apostles were based, according to Christopher Brooke, who joined in the 1940s, on ‘a belief that we can learn, and a determination that we will learn, from people of the most opposite opinions’. The latitude of their outlook was antithetical to the enraged over-simplifications beloved by reporters and editors alike. The linguistic precision, the empathy with opponents, the tolerance of irregularities were equally alien to Fleet Street: journalists represented the group as a nexus of treason and an example of all that was rotten about highly educated, over-sophisticated, offensively urbane men. The Apostles, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge (former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph), ‘combined culture, Communism and the love that nowadays all too readily dares to speak its name’. Men like Maynard Keynes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy were ‘dreadful people’, the News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt insisted. Deacon, who was a devotee of the News of the World, wrote a whole insalubrious book about the Apostles. The ‘homosexual faction within the Apostles’ was ‘mafia-like’ in its enlistment of young dupes, he claimed. ‘As history has shown over two thousand years or more, a homosexual mafia is by far the most dangerous’ of recruiting bodies.³⁹

Anthony Cave Brown was another of the authors who seized the chances made by the secret services’ ultra-reticence about their operational history. ‘He is a monster: gross, loud, aggressive, vulgar,’ Trevor-Roper told Annan in 1994. ‘He accumulates material but is very unreliable in his use of it, laying on his social prejudices and circumstantial colour quite irresponsibly, pretending to have met and known people whom, at most, he has only trapped into a telephone conversation. I am told that his only contact with Menzies was one telephone call in the course of which Menzies only uttered one world, viz: “No”. But in his book he appears as a welcome guest at Menzies’ country house – the evening shadows lengthening as his host uncorked another bottle of Krug.’ Cave Brown was a dipsomaniac: Fred Winterbotham, the RAF officer charged with circulating ULTRA intelligence during the war, once returned home after Sunday-morning church to find that Cave Brown had in the meantime arrived to quiz him, climbed through a window, found a bottle of his whisky and drunk it. Cave Brown had the knack of turning his verbose, turgid books into bestsellers. In one he depicted the Apostles as ‘bound together by that queer trinity of the thirties, communism, Catholicism and sodomy. Hence the need for … secrecy, for the Establishment had outlawed all three.’ It is true that the majority view of the Apostles was anti-Christian, and that a minority were anti-capitalist, but false to claim that they treated Stalin’s purges as ‘trivial compared to the sufferings of millions who were unemployed’. The Apostles were not Stalinists any more than ‘the Establishment’ had proscribed either communism or Catholicism. Journalists were, however, enthralled by such caricatures: more sober writers than Cave Brown have deprecated the Apostles as ‘a self-appointed, secret group of cultural elitists’, harbouring ‘unusual sexual relationships’ and with tentacles requiring ‘nothing less than an investigation into Britain’s ruling class’.⁴⁰

Alister Watson and Dennis Proctor were the first professed communists to be elected to the Apostles in 1927. This was at a time when Marxism-Leninism had made negligible inroads into the university, and was therefore not a factor in considering ‘embryos’, as candidates for the Apostles were called. Blunt was neither a communist nor politically aware when elected in 1928: after his conversion to communism, he seldom attended. ‘Embryos’ with doctrinaire minds were unwelcome in a society that was speculative, sceptical and fluid in its ideas. John Cornford was rejected as a candidate because, as Proctor told MI5 twenty years later, ‘his overt membership of the Communist Party meant that he had not got an open mind. Possession of an open mind was a condition of membership.’ Fellow-travellers without a party card were eligible, for Burgess was elected in 1932; but according to Victor Rothschild, who was elected on the same day as Burgess, endless discussions on communist themes were considered dull.⁴¹

What was it that made journalists feel threatened by the Apostles and virulent in their attacks? Elevated thinking, privileged emotions and the cultivation of sensibilities stuck in their gorge. ‘I believe in aristocracy,’ the archetypal Apostle E. M. Forster had written in his credo of 1939:

Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.

This sort of thinking was abominated by the populist journalism of the 1980s. Men like Ray (‘Dark Satanic’) Mills, the self-styled ‘Angry Voice’ of the Daily Star, who declared his ‘political philosophy’ as ‘hang ’em, flog ’em, castrate ’em, send ’em back’ and who enjoyed the office nickname of Biffo (Big ignorant fucker from Oldham), hated intellectuals and their ‘cretinous students’. In a decade of panic about AIDS, Mills decried ‘wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers’ and wished ‘a blight on them all’. The preference of the Apostles had been for ‘less chastity and more delicacy’, as Forster wrote. ‘I do not feel my aristocracy are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world.’ English demotic journalists, by contrast, attacked other people’s sexual pleasures unless they were conducted at the emotional level of a television sitcom.⁴²

Maurice Oldfield and Chapman Pincher

One of the cruellest cases of money-grubbing victimization involved Maurice Oldfield. Born on a kitchen table in Derbyshire’s Peak District in 1915, he was the eldest of eleven children of a tenant farmer. As a boy he lived in a two-up, two-down cottage, and laboured on his family’s remote sheep-farm. He won a scholarship to Manchester University, where he graduated with a first-class degree and was elected to a fellowship in history. Not enough people thought it wrong that at Manchester there were sexually segregated students unions, one for men and the other for women, until the 1950s. In Manchester he had a love affair with a fellow student, Jimmy Crompton: he did not mention this, and possibly some other early experiences, when he underwent vetting as an intelligence officer. Altogether his career belied the stereotype of the Establishment as an impermeably class-bound congeries of inefficient snobs. After showing his talents while working for SIME in the 1940s, he was posted in 1950 to the SIS station in Singapore, with a remit covering south-east Asia and the east. He remained peripatetic when he became head of station in Singapore in 1956. He had particular success in using unofficial agents, or Friends, among airline crews. The International Olympic Committee was another source of Friends. In 1959 he was chosen as SIS representative in Washington, and was seventh Chief of the Service in 1973–8.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, who knew Oldfield, ‘thought him likeable but … rather a bumbler. I could only reconcile his reputation with my impression by assuming that he deliberately simulated stupidity to conceal Machiavellian cunning: but I don’t myself believe this rationalisation’, Oldfield was the first chief of SIS to give formal briefings to the leader of the opposition, in this case Margaret Thatcher. Mutual admiration developed between the two of them. Pincher later claimed to have been Oldfield’s conduit to Thatcher: in fact Oldfield already had a direct route through James Scott-Hopkins, a former SIS officer who was Tory MP for the Derbyshire constituency containing Oldfield’s family farm.⁴³

After retiring from SIS in 1978, Oldfield went to Oxford as a visiting Fellow at All Souls; but in 1979 Thatcher recalled him as coordinator of security intelligence in Northern Ireland. In March 1980 – four months after Thatcher’s public naming of Blunt and in the thick of the toxic clouds of homophobia – a rumour was circulated that Oldfield had evaded his twenty-four-hour Special Branch protection team in Belfast and had visited the Highwayman public house at Comber where he propositioned another man in the urinals. Although this seems unlikely on several counts, the tales were repeated in London, and Sir Robert Armstrong, who was Thatcher’s security adviser as well as Cabinet Secretary, summoned Oldfield for interview in Whitehall. ‘I was utterly aghast to be having to question Maurice on such matters – he was the ultimate loyal civil servant,’ Armstrong recalled thirty years later. He thought it strange that although the allegations originated from Northern Ireland, no material from this phase of Oldfield’s career was put before him. There were only reports of ‘questionable friendships’ during overseas postings. ‘There were no suggestions of impropriety in the physical sense,’ to use the stilted euphemisms of the 1980s, but ‘incontrovertible evidence that he preferred the company of men’, Armstrong said. ‘Maurice made no attempt to deny it; he just sat, sad and broken, and apologized for having lied on his positive vetting forms when they homed in on sexuality.’⁴⁴

Oldfield tendered his resignation, and had his vetting clearance withdrawn. He underwent two interrogations by MI5’s Cecil Shipp, whom he assured that his sexual exchanges with young men had ended when he was in his mid-twenties. His flat was besieged by reporters hoping to intercept a rent boy whom they could bribe into lubricious extravagances. Oldfield soon fell mortally ill with stomach cancer. In March 1981 he was in his hospital room, surrounded by brothers and sisters, when two policemen ushered in Thatcher. The siblings stood to leave, but she said, ‘No, stay, stay,’ and talked with them agreeably for some time. Then she asked for some moments alone with the dying man. When the Oldfields trooped back after her departure, they found their brother, hitherto calm about his illness, distraught and weeping. It was the first time that any of them had seen him tearful. In answer to their question what was wrong, he replied: ‘Mrs Thatcher asked if I was homosexual. I had to tell her.’ It was the first time that he had mentioned his sexuality to any of his family. He died a few days later.⁴⁵

The 1980s was a time of vile prejudice against both people with AIDS and male homosexuality. ‘The homosexuals who brought this plague upon us should be locked up,’ an editorial in Pincher’s newspaper the Daily Express approvingly quoted a Solihull grandmother as saying in 1986. ‘Burning is too good for them. Bury them in a pit, and pour on quick-lime.’ Pincher certainly dragged sexual aspersions into his writings whenever he could. Herbert Norman, whom Cornford and Klugmann had converted to communism when he was at Trinity in the 1930s and who killed himself while Canadian Ambassador in Cairo in 1957, is stigmatized as ‘a known homosexual’ in Pincher’s Too Secret Too Long (1984) – an ill-made, misleading, self-confident book. Pincher cited as a source Norman’s biographer James Barros, who however treats this allegation as a slur which originated obscurely and for which there is no evidence except its repetition.⁴⁶

‘I have to look after my old age,’ Chapman Pincher said in 1986. Though his personal myth was that he was a man of the world, he had narrow sexual prejudices. In his potboiler Traitors, published in 1987, for example, he called Blunt, Burgess, Driberg and Maclean ‘gay deceivers’, and Blunt’s brother Wilfrid ‘a self-confessed homosexual’, as if homosexuality was still a crime to be confessed. He cited unnamed psychiatrists as authorities for his belief that ‘what are referred to as “disturbed” homosexuals, like Burgess, feel themselves driven to take revenge on authority, of which the state is an obvious embodiment. Freudians further suggest that this is often the result of upbringing by a hostile or uncaring father and that traitors are hitting back at paternalistic authority.’ Pincher condemned Vassall’s ‘sexual abnormality’, and judged the appointment to Moscow of a man so ‘obvious’ in his ‘perversions’ as ‘a severe indictment of our security services’. He explained: ‘homosexuality is often so compulsive that those addicted to it are driven to take fearful risks to find partners. The risks are compounded by the strange need of many homosexuals to indulge themselves with … guttersnipes … called in the homosexual fraternity “rough trade”.’ Pincher had a new and lucrative target in Oldfield: ‘a surreptitious homosexual’ of ‘staggering duplicity’, who held ‘the highest secret-service position in the land’, but had been unable ‘to control his compulsion’ for ‘rough trade’. The danger was that ‘compulsive homosexuality is easily recognized by others of the fraternity’, which therefore exacerbated ‘the blackmail danger’. Pincher’s obsession with Oldfield’s ‘unfortunate sexual habits’ led him to tell impossible tales of foreign waiters and rent boys being taken to a Westminster flat which was under guard by Scotland Yard protection officers and covered throughout by listening devices.⁴⁷

Pincher’s so-called ‘scoop’ was to find a security officer who believed that a young oriental man, whom he had seen at Oldfield’s flat in Westminster in 1978, had been a sex-worker. Encouraged by Pincher’s publicity, newspapers reported as an agreed fact that Oldfield was, in the Daily Telegraph’s stilted circumlocution, ‘a man with a known penchant for what is colloquially described as “rough trade”’. In response to this press storm, Margaret Thatcher stated in April 1987 that Oldfield’s homosexuality had been a potential although not an actual security risk. Labour’s former Foreign Secretary David Owen said with absurd over-statement that this admission was ‘a devastating blow to the credibility of the security services’, and aggressively referred to the former SIS chief as ‘Maurice Oldfield’ as if, like Blunt, he deserved to be stripped of his knighthood. The Labour backbencher whose parliamentary question had led to Blunt’s naming eight years earlier chimed in to say that if the tales of Oldfield’s ‘disgusting behaviour’ were true, it disgraced the whole country.⁴⁸

Martin Pearce, Oldfield’s biographer, has shown that the slinking youth was in fact a thirty-eight-year-old paediatrician named Michael Chan, whose family Oldfield had befriended in Singapore a quarter of a century earlier. Chan, who became a Commissioner for Racial Equality in the 1990s and a member of the Press Complaints Commission, received a life peerage in 2001. Such was the reality of the ‘trade’ with whom Pincher imagined Oldfield to be having sex. When Oldfield’s friend Anthony Cavendish challenged Pincher about including the dead man in a book entitled Traitors, and using such tosh, Pincher replied with a wink: ‘You may have a pension, Tony. I need to look after mine.’ George Kennedy Young, Vice Chief of SIS in 1959–61, told the Daily Telegraph of this bestselling book, ‘Chapman Pincher has done the KGB’s work for them.’ The historian Alistair Horne, ex-MI5/SIME, called Pincher ‘a self-serving, disreputable man’. Margaret Thatcher was tetchy when her toady Woodrow Wyatt told her, on the basis of Traitors, that Oldfield was ‘a homosexual who went in for the rough trade’. A few days later Wyatt discussed ‘the Oldfield revelations’ with Rupert Murdoch, who laughed with pride at the recent Sun headline, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Poofter, Spy’.⁴⁹

The personal history that took Oldfield from some early fun in bed with Jimmy Crompton to the misery of Margaret Thatcher’s well-meant bedside visit had a security risk of zero. Spurious allegations, wild guesses and grubby innuendo continue to fester three decades after Pincher’s Traitors. The facts are forgotten or ignored by journalists who still invoke Oldfield’s name whenever an ‘Establishment sex scandal’ is thought to have occurred. The internet has empowered conspiracy theorists to spread mindless conjectures and nasty fantasies as if they are hard facts. Baseless ‘links’ even connect him to child abuse.⁵⁰

Chapman Pincher lived to the age of a hundred, trying to the end to sully the truth about Soviet penetration agents or, as the Daily Mail preferred to say, ‘still working away to find proof absolute about Hollis’s betrayal, which many people now accept’. With people like Pincher, said an MI5 officer’s wife Lady Clanmorris, ‘the KGB does not need a disinformation department’. M. R. D. Foot, former intelligence officer and official historian of SOE, was quoted in one obituary: ‘My view of the man would be sulphuric. The stuff he produced on the intelligence services was almost totally inaccurate.’⁵¹

Few writers brought ‘a calming sense of reality into the mad world of journalistic spy writing’, regretted Dick White in 1989. ‘In the massive destruction that the journalists have wrought, several worthy people who are dead have lost their reputations. But the reputation of individuals is only one aspect of the matter.’ Costello, among others, ‘feeds the Americans with the sort of stuff they like to read & to believe, the condemnation of the entire British ruling class. One has to say that the damage he has done is worth comparing with the damage done by the spies themselves. As to the Services wh. have been so unmercifully battered I fear for the morale of their members & the effect on future security.’ A year later, when Cairncross was publicly identified by Gordievsky as the Fifth Man, Trevor-Roper recapitulated the aims and achievements of the Cambridge ring of five. ‘Their intention was to destroy Western civilisation, which they held to be doomed, and to replace it by Stalinist communism, which they supposed to be perfect, or at least perfectible.’ Their faith in the historic inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat proved ‘totally, diametrically and for themselves tragically wrong’, continued Trevor-Roper. ‘The system which they idealised, and to which they sold themselves, is bankrupt. The West, of which they despaired as irreformable, is reformed.’ The enduring legacy of the ring of five in Britain ‘was a poison of suspicion which, for a generation, has infected the already enclosed and stifling atmosphere of secret intelligence’.⁵²

The deceptive publicity that began with The Climate of Treason gulled millions of readers in Britain and abroad, and demeaned the men and women of intelligence and moral purpose who had joined the secret services. The mole-hunters of the 1980s were foul-minded, mercenary and pernicious. Their besmirching of individuals and institutions changed the political culture and electoral moods of Britain far beyond any achievement of Moscow agents or agencies.