The Imperial Calendar and Civil List for 1940 shows G. Burgess as a specialist in the Ministry of Information’s Foreign Division Directorate, working in the Broadcasting section. He was based on two floors of the Institute of Education, beside the Senate House, and reported first to E.H. Carr and then to Ivone Kirkpatrick, as part of the Foreign Publicity Division. One of his responsibilities, together with a colleague, Peter Smollett, was an overseas propaganda radio bulletin to be produced alongside the BBC’s overseas press bulletin. ‘Roughly the first quarter of the bulletin will be a survey of the German radio … The remaining three-quarters will be a survey of neutral opinion, with particular reference to political questions of the day and to the American broadcasts from Germany.’1
Division A, in which Burgess worked, dealt with neutral countries, but also had a Russian section in which Smollett, whose real name was Smolka, was attached. Smollett had been born in 1912 in Vienna, into a wealthy Jewish family who had made their money from manufacturing an early ski binding. A friend of Litzi Friedman, he had arrived in London in 1933 as the representative of the paper Neue Frei Presse, and in the autumn of 1934 had briefly been involved with Kim Philby in setting up a small press agency, London Continental News.
He had made his reputation in the summer of 1936 with a series of travel articles in The Times, which he turned into a book, Forty Thousand against the Artic: Russia’s Artic Empire. Two years later he had become a naturalised British subject under the name Harry Peter Smollett. Philby had recruited Smollett at the end of 1939 – his NKVD cover name was ABO – but had lost touch with him while he was in France, resuming contact only upon his return in 1940. Burgess now worked with him as an agent of influence, to help shape public opinion in favour of the Soviet Union.2
Another colleague at the Ministry of Information, whom Burgess cultivated, was the Princess Dilkusha de Rohan, who headed the Swiss desk. This was an influential job, given Switzerland’s neutrality and the ability of its papers to reach readers in Germany, France, Italy and the Balkans. She herself had an excellent network of European contacts, including Georges Scapini, the Vichy ‘ambassador’ to Berlin.
Born Alis Wrench in India in 1899, she had gained her title through marriage to an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Carlos de Rohan. After he was killed in a motor accident in 1931, she had moved from Berlin, first to Paris and then London. Here she had set up as a dress designer, ‘Dilkusha de Rohan Ready-To-Wear-de-Luxe’, at 4 Savile Row, with Nancy Mitford as a director. Dil Rohan lived with her new lover, Mary Oliver, and the art collector Douglas Cooper in a wing of Pembroke Lodge, a fifty-two-roomed Georgian mansion in Richmond Park, another part of which was used as the mess for the ‘Phantom’ reconnaissance unit, and here Burgess would often go for parties with Anthony Blunt and Moura Budberg.
Burgess’s principal role was liaison between the Ministry of Information, now based in Senate House in Central London, and the Joint Broadcasting Committee, which was now operating from two locations in Sussex: Renby Grange, the farmhouse home of Roger Eckersley, and Rook’s Farm, Hilda Matheson’s cottage. The latter was in the grounds of Penns in the Rocks, her lover Dorothy Wellesley’s estate near Tunbridge Wells, originally the home of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania. Peter Eckersley’s son, Miles, remembers seeing Burgess there and being told he was making programmes for South America.3
He seems also to have been the liaison with the BBC, because in May 1940 J.M. Rose-Troup from the BBC had complained to SOE about his unreliability. Burgess was hurt by the accusation and took it up with Maconachie, claiming his unpopularity with the BBC was ‘through attacking departments from the Ministry of Information’.4 It’s likely, too, he continued to liaise with the black ops organisation Electra House, which received ‘a great deal of intelligence from secret, diplomatic, military and service sources’,5 and continued to have a roving commission for Section D, including acting, under the name Mr Francis, in an MI6 plan to enlist Labour Party support for fomenting a Swedish miners’ strike, to deprive Germany of coal supplies.6
By the beginning of 1940, the JBC employed about forty people including seven agents abroad, and was sending regular programmes, ranging from a history of the Irish Guards to a dramatisation of one of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden spy stories, to more than a dozen countries from Bulgaria in Eastern Europe to Uruguay in South America.7
In March 1940 Burgess took Rosamond Lehmann, one of the few contemporary English writers well-known in France, to Paris, ostensibly to broadcast on behalf of JBC from a radio station in Paris. When she arrived, she found the staff at the radio station had no idea who she was or why she was there, and Burgess turned up only briefly, muttered a quick apology and disappeared. She spent most of her stay in the cellars of the Hotel Crillon awaiting an air raid, before returning home. It looked as if Burgess had simply used his friend as cover to meet some of his old contacts, most probably Pfeiffer and members of the Communist Underground.8
In mid-May 1940 Burgess moved from liaising with the Ministry of Information to work full-time for Grand at a salary of £600 p.a. His new title from 15 June was Temporary Civil Servant, Civilian Assistant, War Office, MI6.9 He was now based on the fifth and sixth floors of 2 Caxton Street, just around the corner from SIS headquarter at Broadway Buildings. It meant he was back at the heart of Section D, which had grown enormously since the outbreak of war and not only had access to highly secret exfiles but was also able to discover ‘the names of the agents who were sent abroad and establishing contacts with the officers of SIS and MI5’.10
Burgess now lobbied for a job in Section D for his old Cambridge friend Kim Philby, just back from France, where he had been a Times correspondent attached to the British Army HQ. Burgess tipped off a colleague, Leslie Sheridan, a former night editor of the Daily Mirror, who ran a section known as D/Q responsible for black propaganda. The intelligence services were needing to recruit quickly and Philby, as a journalist with foreign experience and good German, fitted the bill admirably. As one of the senior SIS officers, Valentine Vivian, had known Philby’s father, only perfunctory checks were made. Nothing Recorded Against was the laconic response from MI5. Moscow Centre, six months after the declaration of war, now had two of its agents in a branch of British intelligence.11
One of the ironies is that just as Burgess and Philby were in key positions to reveal the inner workings of government, the London rezidentura – the base for Soviet spy operations – closed. After the purges in Russia, which had claimed the life of one resident Adolph Chapsky (alias second secretary ‘Anton Shuster’) and sent his successor Grigori Grafpen (alias Attaché ‘Gregory Blank’) to a labour camp, there were few people who knew much about the agent network. Following the trials of the Percy Glading spy ring, Arnold Deutsch had returned to Moscow. The only remaining officer was Anatoli Gorsky, who was poorly briefed about the Cambridge Ring, and who had only taken over from Leonard Eitingon in running Burgess in March 1939.
Moscow Centre remained distrustful of their star agents, worried they might be agents provocateurs, whilst Litzi Philby (MARY) and Edith Tudor Hart (EDITH), who were used by Burgess and the others to make contact with the NKVD in the period immediately before the war, complained that their expenses were not being paid. In February 1940 the London residency was temporarily shut down and Gorski recalled to Moscow. The Cambridge Ring were left to fend for themselves.
One reason was the defection of a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, Walter Krivitsky, shortly before the outbreak of war, bringing details of Soviet intelligence’s Western European network, including the London rezidentura, and several spies within the Foreign Office. John King, a cipher clerk in the Communications Department, was quickly arrested, but Krivitsky remained vague about the other spy, suggesting he was an aristocrat, a young man, probably under thirty, who had been educated at Eton and Oxford and was ‘the secretary or son of one of the chiefs of the Foreign Office’. To the good fortune of Donald Maclean and John Cairncross, there were countless young men in the Foreign Office at the time who fitted that description more closely than them.12
*
The reasons behind Burgess’s attempted trip to Moscow in the summer of 1940 have generated all sorts of theories. His role, according to his own later account, was an extension of his Section D brief to organise underground resistance. His idea was to persuade the Russians to provide arms and supplies to non-communist guerrillas in Eastern Europe, whilst in return the British would assist communist-led units in Western Europe. Burgess wanted to put the idea to the Russians and help co-ordinate it. However, according to one Russian source, it wasn’t Burgess’s idea but that of Valentine Vivian in SIS, who thought it might be useful to have Burgess work under diplomatic cover at the British embassy. In fact, far from being his idea, Burgess was not keen, saying he preferred to go abroad only on short holidays and to warmer climates such as Tangier and Spain.13
Whatever the truth, Burgess left at the beginning of July for Vladivostok, via America, accompanied by Isaiah Berlin, now a member of Section D. Burgess appears to have lobbied Gladwyn Jebb at the Foreign Office for Berlin, who spoke Russian, to be appointed a press attaché at the British embassy in Moscow and Burgess had wangled to join him, travelling as a diplomatic courier.
At Foreign Office expense in first-class cabins, the two men crossed the Atlantic on the SS Antonia, crowded with child evacuees. After a nerve-racking journey, with escort destroyers, they arrived in Quebec on 20 July. They caught a train to Montreal and then flew to New York, where they remained for two days, before going on to Washington. There they stayed with John Foster, legal adviser at the British embassy, and met the journalist Joseph Alsop, who took an immediate dislike to Burgess ‘because he wasn’t wearing socks’.14
Burgess arranged to see his old Cambridge friend Michael Straight, perhaps the primary purpose of his trip. After regaling him with such diverse topics as how ‘he and Pfeiffer and two members of the French Cabinet … had spent an evening together at a male brothel in Paris, dancing “around a table, lashing a naked boy, who was strapped to it, with leather whips” ’, and in the same breath reminiscing about the Apostles, Burgess came to the point telling Straight ‘I am completely out of touch with my friends. Could you put me in touch’, and that Straight needed to get back into the State Department to monitor Krivitsky, who continued to reveal further details of the Russian espionage network in Europe.15
On 27 July, Fitzroy Maclean, Burgess’s schoolboy rival, now a junior diplomat, cabled Lord Lothian, the British ambassador, that ‘it is not desired that either Berlin or Burgess should proceed to Moscow. Burgess should return to the United Kingdom immediately. Berlin, who is not in the employ of His Majesty’s Government, must do what he thinks best.’16
According to Miriam Rothschild, then living in Washington, the trip was stopped by Foster, who ‘considered Burgess a totally undesirable and untrustworthy character but did not suspect him as a spy’.17 Burgess returned by air on 30 July and Nicolson noted in his diary after dining with him at the Wyndham Club, ‘He is just back from America. He is still determined to get in touch with the Comintern and use them to create disorders in occupied territory.’18
Burgess’s responsibilities in Section D for 1939 and 1940 remain unclear. There were sightings of him by Kenneth Younger, dealing with regional security in Kent. He later claimed he organised ‘underground resistance to Hitler through the international trade union movement’ recruiting ‘the famous seamen’s leader, Edo Fimmen, for this work’ and gave ‘valuable help in organising the transport of anti-Nazi agents and refugees’. Fimmen had played a key role in organising international courier services for the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence.19 Now, possibly through Burgess’s intervention, he found himself working for the British as well.20
One of Burgess’s responsibilities was running the training section DU in Section D, which Philby later wrote he turned into ‘a sort of ideas factory. He regarded himself as a wheel, throwing off ideas like sparks as it revolved. Where the sparks fell he did not seem to care.’21 Another colleague in Section D, Bickham Sweet-Escott, remembered him at various inter-departmental meetings on propaganda in the summer of 1940 at Caxton Street chaired by Grand, with representatives from the Joint Broadcasting Committee and Ministry of Information, but with no agenda and minutes, and thought he might be working for Electra House. At one meeting he ‘nearly convinced the meeting that the way to end the war was to wait for a westerly wind and then send large numbers of balloons in the direction of central Europe, hoping that incendiary bombs attached to them would set the cornfields of the Hungarian puszta on fire and starve the Germans out’.22
The previous year he had, however, come up with another idea which was taken up – a school for training agents and saboteurs, which he jokingly christened Guy Fawkes College. Brickendonbury Manor, a seventeenth-century mansion and former school, some twenty miles north of London, had been requisitioned by the War Office in late 1939. ‘The object of the school was to train men of different nationalities as instructors and recruiters, who would be equipped and returned to their own countries, in order to raise organisations to counter enemy interests and commit specific acts of sabotage. In addition, the establishment acted as a general-purpose school and undertook the special operational training of raiding parties.’23
He brought in Philby, who had been a Times correspondent in the Spanish Civil War and then with the British Expaditionary force, and together they produced a series of memos on the components of the course, which was to include organisation of subversive cells, the art of spreading rumour and propaganda, the use of arms and explosives, wireless telegraphy, security, and counter-espionage.
The commandant of the school was a highly-decorated Naval commander, Frederick Peters, who had known Burgess’s father, and Philby remembered how ‘He often took Guy and me to dinner at the Hungaria, to listen to our views on the new project … Against all the odds, he took a great and immediate fancy to Guy, who ruthlessly swiped the cigarettes off his desk.’24 Peters was supported by an adjutant, Major J. Barcroft, and four teaching staff: Burgess, Philby, George Hill – a veteran SIS officer, who had worked in Russia during the First World War and had just returned from France, where he had been supplying the Belgian resistance with explosives and detonators – and E.J. Paterson, an academic in adult education, who had somehow become an expert on codes, ciphers and secret inks.25
Burgess had also brought in a friend, Tomas ‘Tommy’ Harris, and his wife Hilda, as housekeepers. Harris was a painter and dealer specialising in Spanish art and, through his sister Enriqueta, who taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art, was a friend of Anthony Blunt. He had worked for Burgess in Section D – one of his duties had included escorting Benes – and now he also had a role in looking after the welfare of the agents at the camp.26
There were about twenty-five students at Brickendonbury including ‘Norwegian seamen and Breton onion-sellers, fishermen and ex-servicemen from several European countries, a Belgian cavalry officer, and at least one intellectual.’27 These men were to be sent into Occupied Europe against the Germans and set Europe ablaze. With Philby and Burgess as instructors, details of all of them were probably passed back to their Russian masters and henceforth possibly to her ally Germany.
What actually happened at Brickendonbury was vague. ‘Perhaps they picked up some useful tips at Brickendonbury, but I doubt it’, Philby later wrote. ‘We had no idea what tasks they were supposed to perform, and neither Guy nor I had any success in digging the necessary information out of London headquarters. Otherwise, we had little to do, except talk to the Commander and help him draft memoranda for headquarters, which seldom vouchsafed a reply.’28
It was something that R.T.B. Cowan, teaching volunteers at Brickendonbury ways of disrupting telecommunications, noticed, ‘… of all the “instructors”, the strangest were Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. What they did I don’t know, but it was probably instruction in political incitement. Philby seemed to be quite respectable, but Burgess was of scruffy appearance and rather fond of the bottle.’29
For security reasons the instructors did not use their real names, so Peters was Thornley, Hill was Dale, and Burgess, for some reason, simply D/U. Philby should have been D/U1, but as Philby later noted, ‘Guy explained, with heavy delicacy, that the symbol DU1 might have implied some subordination of myself to him; he wanted us to be regarded as equals. He solved the dilemma by giving me a third letter instead of a final numeral, and he chose the letter D. Thus he launched me on my secret service career branded with the symbol DUD.’30
The first of the six-week courses ran from 29 August to 12 October. Burgess was the school’s political adviser and lectured on how to collaborate with subversive parties and militant trade unions, though his style wasn’t always to the tastes of his senior officer. ‘To the distress of the Commandant, who had the traditional naval officer’s horror of the very idea of mutiny anywhere, he showed the students the Soviet film of the revolt of the cruiser Potemkin.’31
Within the first few weeks Burgess was in trouble, when a corporal complained that he had been ‘trying to muck about with him’.32 The corporal was transferred to another unit and, shortly afterwards, Burgess himself was transferred. Perhaps this was as a result of the corporal incident, or some disciplinary trouble in the French section, where ‘a member of the staff was removed’ and ‘The Commandant made a specific request for a better type of man to carry out the underground political warfare.’33
Philby recounts in his memoirs how, after reports came in of German parachutists in the area, a machine gun had been set up in the French window. Peters instructed Burgess to ascertain the exact facts of the case, and then to telephone the result to the duty officer in London. ‘Guy went about the business with a wicked conscientiousness. I heard snatches of his subsequent telephone report. “No, I cannot add to what I have said … You wouldn’t want me to falsify evidence, would you? Shall I repeat? … Parachutes have been seen dropping in the neighbourhood of Hertford in numbers varying from eighty to none …”’ The alarm went up the chain of command through Eastern Command to the War Office, with troops roused from their beds. Burgess was gleeful at the upset he had created. In reality, a single land mine attached to a parachute had fallen and draped itself harmlessly round a tree.34
J. McCaffery, then serving at Brickendonbury, remembered a match between staff and trainees, where he was:
Confronted with one of the most polished pairs of full-backs I had ever played against. On and off the field, these two men were complementary, because they were so different. One very controlled, clear-headed, elegant, the other aggressive, almost wild in a cheerful sort of way, the sort who could not drive a car without flattening the accelerator onto the floor. I realise how ridiculous this is, but to this day it is their brilliant football which for me makes their treason seem so hard to accept. Their names were Kim Philby and Guy Burgess.35
In September 1940 Burgess was charged at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, in his absence, with driving a War Office car under the influence of drink. Driving a friend home from Grand’s flat, he had been stopped and arrested because of his condition. The charge was dismissed on payment of costs, after the defence solicitor said, ‘I do not want to introduce too much hush-hush, but the accused is doing rather confidential work, which necessitates travelling to a station thirty miles out of London. He has been working fourteen hours a day and he had just been in an air-raid.’36 Burgess was ordered to pay five guineas costs. ‘Judging by the rank of your chief,’ said the magistrate, ‘he is an older man than you; and it was very wrong of him to send a young man out with a car, having given him more drink than was advisable.’37
When Rees met him the following year, Guy admitted the drunken driving, ‘… as to the War Office, he fell impressively silent and said he could tell me nothing, because matters of the highest security were involved. Somehow I began to feel that the war and Guy were on a converging course, towards a point at which the distinction between fantasy and reality totally disappeared.’38
Following the surrender of France and the Netherlands in the summer of 1940, there was a growing recognition that a larger single organisation was needed to take the fight into Occupied Europe, reporting directly to a Cabinet minister. As a result, the Special Operations Executive was formed in July 1940, under Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, and the decision taken to fold Section D into the new organisation.
Shortly afterwards, Grand was dismissed, Philby was moved to Beaulieu, SOE’s ‘Finishing School’ in the New Forest as an instructor in propaganda, and Harris was recruited to MI5’s Iberian section. Burgess continued within the new organisation until the end of the year but thereafter there was to be no role for him. Conveniently forgetting his recent court case, he claimed he had fallen ‘victim to a bureaucratic intrigue’.39