In October 1936 Donald Maclean had reported that an MI6 officer, David Footman, had come to see him, and Burgess was asked to befriend him through his literary activities. After some delays, on 25 May 1937, Burgess, having just read Footman’s Balkan Holiday, wrote to him at his literary agents, Cristy & Moore, inviting him ‘to give some travel talks of a rather personal nature, in the style of – though, of course, not out of – your book’.1
The two met at what is now the Langham Hotel, but was then an annexe of the BBC. Reporting to Moscow Centre afterwards, Burgess wrote:
He’s an intelligent, quiet man of the English type, but quick, smart and elegant … I learned something of his past. Approximately in 1920-24 he was a vice-consul in Egypt. Then he was doing the same job in Belgrade. Later he left the consular service and was a representative of a number of large companies in the Balkans. He was doing this for some years, and then again joined the Civil Service, where he is working now, that is in the Passport Control Office. We talked for a while about this organisation. The Passport Control Office, according to him, keeps watch over foreigners and complications in the passport service. I’ve checked that through another civil servant, Proctor. F[ootman] is always on his guard. But I think he liked me, and this is what I was after.2
Not content with his report, Burgess enclosed a pencil sketch and the MI6 officer’s home address, written on the notepaper of a Mayfair car dealer, which remains in the Foreign Intelligence Service Archive to this day. Burgess was not yet fully trusted by Moscow Centre and another of their agents, Kitty Harris, was brought in to observe Burgess’s meeting with Footman – the first serious operation by a Soviet agent to penetrate MI6 – and corroborate his version of events, which it did.3
Several lunches followed and the two men became friends, with Footman giving several radio talks, beginning on 17 June with ‘They Came to England’. Burgess now found himself ‘off the books’, working for Joseph Ball on behalf of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, but also for MI6 and the Foreign Office, who wanted to know what Chamberlain and his merry men were doing behind their backs.
Ball had served as an officer in MI5 from 1915 to 1926, before joining Conservative Central Office where, though ostensibly the party’s research director, he had a shadowy intelligence and propaganda role. He was close to Chamberlain – they went fishing together – and had his own direct lines with the Italian ambassador in London, Count Grandi, through the Anglo-German Fellowship. He was the point man for Burgess in his new role as a secret courier between No. 10 Downing Street and the French government, via Edouard Pfeiffer.
Chamberlain thought his Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, was a hard-line anti-fascist and preferred to bypass him in favour of his foreign affairs adviser, Sir Horace Wilson, as they secretly tried to appease Hitler. But ‘neither the principals nor Pfeiffer and his opposite number knew that, on the way, Guy would call at a flat in the St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster and meet there a man who took photostatic pictures of the letters while he waited’.4 That man was Burgess’s MI6 contact, David Footman, who then passed the exchanges to Vansittart. The secret exchanges were also going to Burgess’s Russian masters, concerned about any appeasement that might allow Hitler to turn his full energies on them.
Burgess was to be of service to David Footman again only weeks later in May 1938, when he learnt from Jack Hewit, then working as a switchboard operator at the Goring Hotel, that Konrad Henlein, the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans, was staying at the Goring Hotel for discussions with the British government about Hitler’s claims to northern Czechoslovakia. Jack Hewit later wrote:
I happened to mention this to Guy, because Henlein had been having rather strange telephone calls from quite a lot of well-known people, who wanted to see him but would not come to the hotel. For instance, Randolph Churchill made an appointment to meet him in a taxi outside the Victoria Palace. Brendan Bracken made an appointment to see him in a remote riverside pub. When I told Guy about these appointments, he was very interested. He made a telephone call to someone and made an appointment with the person he had called to meet us for a drink. We went to a pub behind St James’s Park station, near Broadway, and we met the man who was introduced to me as David … I worked from 8 a.m. to midnight for the next three days and logged all the numbers called by Henlein … Guy was very pleased, which pleased me. The following week, he handed me an envelope containing four five-pound notes and a slip of paper on which was written ‘Thanks’. My first payment for ‘Services Rendered’.5
British monitoring of Henlein continued. On 13 May Nicolson threw a tea party for Henlein at 4 King’s Bench Walk – ostensibly at the behest of Vansittart, but possibly also that of Guy – with various MPs, including Jack Macnamara. Henlein repeated his desire for greater autonomy from Czechoslovakia and in turn received assurances that Britain would not interfere by supporting Czechoslovakia – information of great interest to the Russians.6 That month Burgess learnt through Footman that there ‘was a job’ in the Passport Control Office and was introduced, at a lunch at the RAC club, to Commodore E.P.G. Norman, the former MI6 head of station in Prague, one of the key centres of British intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. ‘During the lunch it emerged that Norman was sizing up Burgess for a mission to Italy. His task would be to discover what Mussolini’s attitude to Spain would be, now that Franco’s forces appeared to be winning the Spanish Civil War.’7
Burgess suggested he ask Victor Rothschild to give him a cover job working for the Italian branch of the family bank in Rome, which appealed to Norman, who revealed that Rothschild was already working on a secret scientific project for the War Office in Cambridge. Footman told Burgess he had made a good impression, but his cover as a banker might not be convincing, and Burgess then suggested he pretend to be an academic. Adopting, he told his Soviet control officer, a ‘casual matter-of-fact manner’, he then confessed to Footman that he had been a communist at university.
Far from putting Norman off, he felt it offered other possibilities and he promised to arrange a meeting with the head of the MI6 counter-intelligence section. Shortly afterwards, Burgess was introduced to Major Valentine Vivian, the chief of Section V, who impressed him with his greater knowledge of Marxist theory and Comintern politics. ‘It was unpleasant for me,’ Burgess reported back embarrassingly to his Soviet masters, ‘that, with the exception of the account of the Seventh Comintern Congress, I had read very little about the current trends in Marxist theory since 1934, when I left the Party.’8
Burgess was now tasked by MI6 with improving his knowledge of Marxist theory and then cultivating people such as the publisher Victor Gollancz, who were considered ‘very important and very dangerous’. Vivian told Burgess that ‘both in Oxford and Cambridge there is a secret party membership that has to be uncovered’ and ‘in the BBC there was an underground communist organisation’ and instructed, ‘You will have to find out who its members are.’ Burgess relished the irony of the situation, especially when he was told he should penetrate the party and arrange to obtain a Communist Party post in Moscow connected with cultural affairs.9
‘Does F[ootman] suspect me? I think he doesn’t,’ Burgess asked rhetorically. ‘Why? Class blinkers – Eton, my family, an intellectual. I must stress that I have always told you: “Avoid people like me. We are suspect for historical reasons.” Now I say, “Only people like me are beyond suspicion.”’10
Though Burgess now found himself as a British intelligence operative, he was still not entirely trusted by Moscow. With all the ‘Great Illegals’ liquidated, imprisoned in the gulags or in hiding, there was no one to approve Burgess’s coup, which Centre thought too risky for the mercurial Burgess and a distraction from the main target of penetrating British intelligence. Burgess dutifully complied, explaining that he had excused himself with MI6 arguing that the communists would distrust him too much, given he had ‘very successfully in the last five years built up a reputation for myself as a drunk, trouble-maker, an intellectual and a fascist renegade.’11
Burgess now presented another idea to his Russian controllers, ostensibly from Vivian, that he approach the Russian embassy in London seeking help from Ambassador Maisky in writing a book on Russian terrorism. ‘Then I could go to Moscow, if the British wish and the Russians invite me, to go on with my work.’12
Moscow had the measure of their man, as Deutsch’s psychological profile of Burgess in his file demonstrates:
At first he dissipated his activity, often acting on his own initiative without asking us, and because he was inexperienced he made mistakes. We tried to slow him down and therefore it seemed to him that he was doing very little. If he does something wrong in his work for us, he will come and tell us everything. There was such a case. Until November 1935 I was on holiday in the USSR. He has a very good friend, an American comrade [unidentified], who at that time came to London for his holiday and he [Burgess] told him that he was doing special work. When MADCHEN met me he told me about that and was in very low spirits, because he was tortured by remorse for what he had done. First he tried to explain what he did by the despair that he experienced because of the lack of contact with us. But later he acknowledged that he had done it because of his desire to boast.
Deutsch concluded with the observation:
MADCHEN is a hypochondriac individual and always thinks that we do not trust him completely. That can be accounted for by a principal feature in his make-up – internal instability. It should be stated that in the time he has been working for us he has improved immensely in this regard. He has repeatedly tried to persuade me that we are his saviours. Hence his alertness and fear of making a mistake that could bring his dismissal from our work. I demonstrated my trust to him by the fact that I do not consider him a stranger, but our comrade.13