In September 1939, Blunt, who had joined up as soon as war broke out, had been withdrawn from the intelligence course at Minley because his communism had come to light. Burgess came to his rescue and arranged for Dennis Proctor to visit Brigadier Martin, deputy director of military intelligence at the War Office, to intervene. Blunt was accepted and was posted to military intelligence, returning from France in the summer of 1940. At the suggestion of Victor Rothschild, he was then successfully taken on by MI5.1
At the beginning of 1941, to save Burgess from being called up, Blunt repaid the favour and suggested to Guy Liddell, for whom he was working, that Burgess should join MI5. Liddell agreed, but was vetoed by a colleague, Jack Curry, who thought Burgess too unstable, promiscuous, and was ‘not satisfied that his claim to have abandoned Communism could be accepted at its face value’.2
Burgess, whose brother Nigel had joined MI5 and was working in F Branch monitoring the activities of the Communist Party, managed to wangle his way into MI5, however, not as an officer but as an agent and was given the codename ‘Vauxhall’, reporting to Blunt and a Trinity contemporary, Kemball Johnston.3 ‘Burgess has been working for us for some time and has done extremely valuable work – principally the running of two very important agents, whom he discovered and took on,’ noted Blunt. The two agents were Eric Kessler and Andrew Revai.4
Kessler, whom Burgess had met in 1938 had been the London correspondent of the Swiss paper Neue Zurcher Zeutung and, though married, was one of Burgess’s lovers. Now a press attaché in the Swiss embassy, he proved a valuable source, with useful political and diplomatic gossip from the various London embassies and, in particular, German dealings with the Swiss. He also supplied information to both the Russians and British from Marian Kukiel, who had been the vice-minister of war in the Polish government in exile until 1940, was then the general officer commanding the First Polish Corps, and from 1943 was minister of war of the Polish government in exile.
Kemball Johnston later remembered:
Guy was a very good source for me of rather useful agents – I used to look after the neutrals, the Swiss and the Swedes. He produced a very high-ranking agent, who was a Swiss diplomat – can’t divulge his name, known as Orange – he was frightfully good at telling one if some top Swiss chap was coming over, if he was any good or if he was making a separate peace. Orange was absolutely marvellous, he knew exactly what they had done: he once wrote a report which was absolutely lauded to the skies. He said that if by hook or by crook you keep up some sort of relationship with your new allies, the Russians, you needn’t become a communist country, but it would be the clever thing to do – if you don’t, you will be kicked around by the Americans, and that is precisely what has happened.5
Burgess had supposedly met Kessler whilst trying to set up a radio station in Liechtenstein, though it’s likely they had met before – it’s thought Kessler had lent Burgess his Ford V8 to visit Churchill in October 1938. According to Hewit, Kessler was ‘very nice and very bright … I was given to him by Guy … I think Eric was helping Guy because of his (K’s) anti-Nazism before the war.’6 What Burgess had failed to tell MI5 was that Kessler had already been recruited by him in 1938 on behalf of the Russians and given the codenames OREND and SHVEYTSARETS (Swiss).7 All the material he collected served two masters.
In November 1942 Burgess had also recruited, on behalf of MI5, another journalist and former lover, who reported back on foreign journalists, particularly Hungarians and Swedes. Andrew Revai, sometimes known as Revoi, had been the London correspondent of the Hungarian paper Pester Loyd and from 1942, under the name Canidus, an occasional commentator for BBC’s Hungarian Service. He was active within the various Hungarian exile groups and in 1941, following the breaking off of Anglo-Hungarian diplomatic relations, he and a group of other exiled compatriots had formed the National Federation of Hungarians (later Free Hungarians), of which he became president in 1943. Burgess, who had met him whilst working at the Ministry of Information, had also previously recruited him to work for the Russians and he had been given the codename TAFFY (Toffee).8
Burgess was therefore simultaneously running agents for both British and Soviet intelligence, but his loyalties always remained ultimately to the Soviet Union. During 1941 London was easily the NKVD’s most productive legal residency and, according to Moscow Centre’s records, during this period the residency forwarded to Moscow 7,867 classified political and diplomatic documents, 715 on military matters, 127 on economic affairs and 51 on British intelligence.9
Burgess’s Soviet handlers had a good measure of his strengths and weaknesses. They noted he had a wide circle of contacts and made friends easily. ‘But his initiative must be contained almost all the time and he must be controlled very rigidly. Every assignment which is given to him should be defined in every minor detail.’ There were also concerns about his private life. ‘He understands that we must know this and willingly tells us about that … He needs unconditional discipline, authority and adherence to principles. It is necessary to teach him all the time the rules of security.’10
Boris Kreshin, also known as Krotov, who had taken over from Gorsky as Burgess’s Russian case officer, reported that Burgess was better than expected but, ‘His distinguishing feature in comparison with other agents I meet is bohemianism in its most unattractive form. He is a young, interesting, clever enough, cultured, inquisitive, shrewd person, reads much and knows much. But at the same time with these qualities he is untidy, goes about dirty, drinks much, and leads the so-called life of the gilded youth.’ But he accepted that Burgess was ‘well-grounded politically and theoretically’ and ‘in conversation quotes Marx, Lenin and Stalin’.11
A new friend was Adam de Hegedus, whom he would often meet at the Ritz Bar. Born into a wealthy family in Budapest in 1906, de Hegedus had worked as a journalist and writer in Hungary and France, where he was a friend of André Gide, until settling in Britain and becoming naturalised in 1935.12 Burgess had met him whilst the two were working at the Ministry of Information, and Pollock had been instructed to get close to him as part of Burgess’s MI5 remit, given Hungary was allied with Germany, of keeping an eye on Hungarians in London. Pollock’s new job was to befriend mildly suspect, usually gay, Hungarians, watch the contacts they made, introduce carefully planned questions into the lunchtime conversation, and see if he could persuade them to send messages to Germany. ‘He was one of the first men I was supposed to watch while I was doing my various MI5 stints,’ Pollock later remembered. ‘He fell in love with me and was rather a nuisance, but quite a nice man.’13
Jack Hewit had also been kept from active service by being taken onto the books of MI5, where he worked for Blunt on Triplex – this was material taken illicitly from the diplomatic pouches of neutral missions – seducing the couriers on the train from King’s Cross. He was also used to collect gossip from an informer, the landlady of the Dover Castle in Portland Place, just around the corner from the Swedish embassy.
In October 1942, the London rezidentura asked Moscow permission for Burgess to try again and recruit his Cambridge friend Dennis Proctor, now at the Treasury. Proctor had already unwittingly supplied political and financial information to Burgess on the Bank for International Settlements. He now in ‘all innocence, revealed details of the secret talks between Roosevelt and Churchill during the January 1943 Casablanca conference, supplying one priceless nugget of information, that the Allies were definitely planning a landing in Sicily in June of that year, but had postponed any major invasion of France until 1944’.14
It’s unlikely that Burgess did try again – though Jenifer Hart when questioned about her spying named Proctor, subsequently chairman of the Tate Gallery and Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Power, but there was a good reason. Interviewed by MI5 in 1966 in retirement in Provence, Proctor admitted, ‘He didn’t need to. I held no secrets from him,’ which Blunt in his MI5 interviews confirmed. ‘I can tell you that Dennis was the best source Guy ever had for the Russians.’15
The extraordinary amount of intelligence supplied by the Cambridge Five rather than pleasing the Centre, however, only fed into their paranoia. A young intelligence officer, Elena Modrzhinskaya, was asked to evaluate the information provided and determine its reliability. She knew through Blunt of the Double Cross system, whereby Britain had played back agents against Germany, and concluded by November 1942 that a similar deception was being undertaken against the Soviet Union by the Five acting as double agents. How possibly, given their communist past, could the Cambridge Spy Ring have been allowed to work for British Intelligence? The only conclusion she could come to was ‘that SÖNCHEN and MADCHEN, even before their contact with us, were sent by the British Intelligence Services to work among students with left-wing sympathies in Cambridge’.16
The Centre couldn’t believe the Five’s access and how much secret material was being supplied, nor could they believe that British intelligence were not targeting the Soviet Union. ‘Not a single valuable British agent in the USSR or in the Soviet embassy in Britain has been exposed with the help of this group, in spite of the fact that if they had been sincere in their co-operation they could easily have done’, one report noted.17 The explanation was much simpler. The Foreign Office had banned covert activity against Britain’s new ally, and all intelligence energies were being focused against Nazi Germany and winning the war. There were no secret agents to report.
So suspicious was Moscow Centre about their star agents that the London residency was ordered to create a separate independent agent network. An eight-man surveillance team, none of whom spoke English and all dressed in conspicuously Russian clothes, was sent to try and catch the Cambridge Spies meeting their non-existent MI5 case officers. Failing to discover any such contact, the surveillance team simply reported various innocent visitors to the Soviet embassy in London as suspected MI5 agents provocateurs.18
Distrust of the Cambridge Ring continued through 1943, with concern over the recruitment of Peter Smollett. Philby had originally been advised against recruiting him by Gorsky, who was furious to learn his advice had been ignored and suggested to Moscow Centre that all contact be broken with the Ring. Worried that Burgess might turn up at the Russian embassy or seek help at the offices of the CPGB, it was decided to let events play themselves out and find new ways of supervising the Ring, but Burgess was severely reprimanded by Gorsky.
Philby was then judged to have held back what was perceived to be an important part of a telegram from the Japanese ambassador to Berlin, though in fact Bletchley had simply failed to decipher that part, which prompted a seven-page memorandum addressed to the head of the NKVD. In it Modrzhinskaya argued that since both fathers of Burgess and Philby had a background in intelligence – St John Philby had briefly served in the Indian Intelligence Bureau, whilst John Bassett had been an army intelligence officer in the Middle East during the First World War – then it was likely that both agents had been long-time British agents directed to penetrate Soviet intelligence. The fact that Burgess had suggested recruiting both David Footman and Kemball Johnston was seen as further evidence of an attempt to introduce further penetration agents against the Russians.
Theirs was not the only paranoia. Burgess had continued to be terrified that Rees might go to the British authorities. On 20 July 1943, at a meeting with Gorsky, he had explained that Rees was an ‘hysterical and unbalanced person’, who in spite of ‘personal friendship and attachment’ could ‘at any moment’ betray them. In Burgess’s opinion ‘the only way out of the situation was the physical liquidation of FLIT’ and, as the person who had recruited him, he was prepared to carry out the task himself.19
Such behaviour raised further worries in Moscow Centre about Burgess’s rationality. Already in October 1942 the London rezidentura had concluded that ‘Madchen is a very peculiar person and to apply ordinary standards to him would be the roughest mistake’.