On 14 February 1949, Harold Nicolson wrote to Robin Maugham:
Everything here is the same except for an event. The event was that Guy Burgess, leaving a Night Club at midnight, fell down two flights of stone stairs, broke his elbow, slightly cracked his skull and dislocated three ribs. He was in the company of Mr Fred Warner at the time who pushed him into a taxi, bleeding profusely, and took him back to his rooms. Guy was scarcely conscious and Fred (who seems to have been in a very night club mood) telephoned without avail, to every doctor whom he knew by name or repute. He received no reply, and remained there all night with Guy groaning on the bed. In the early dawn he got hold of Jackie and in the end they found a doctor who took Guy off to the Middlesex Hospital where he is now lying in the observation ward, perfectly all right and immensely patient and courageous. Now you and I, if a similar event happened to either of us, would ring up a hospital and ask for an ambulance. This does not seem to have occurred to Fred who has ever since been going about clouded by a mist of guilt and incompetence.1
The club was the Romilly Club, the renamed Le Boeuf sur le Toit, and Burgess had fallen after a drunken wrestle with Warner. Some rest and recuperation was advised and, after ten days in hospital in London, Burgess went with his mother, with whom he often holidayed, first to Wicklow in Ireland and then for a few days to the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin.
It was then that writer Terence de Vere White met Burgess:
He was travelling with his mother, a quiet lady. He took the centre of the stage. He was dark and bright-eyed and was either an old-looking young man or a young-looking middle-aged man, I was not quite certain which … He was in the Foreign Office and was taking a rest in Ireland on account of an accident in the Reform Club, where he had fallen and bashed his head on the stairs. As a result of this, he was under doctor’s orders to keep off alcohol and if he disobeyed the rule, the result was a complete blackout, lasting for more than a day. I noticed that he drank tomato juice, which seemed out of character.2
The two men parted after an hour as Burgess was off to see a play at the Abbey Theatre. Shortly afterwards, on 4 March, de Vere White was rung asking if he would give evidence for Burgess in the Dublin District Court. Burgess had been charged with ‘driving a car while drunk, driving without reasonable consideration, and dangerous driving’ two days before in Grafton Street. ‘Confronted with the most positive medical evidence of a shaky walk and alcoholic breath, Burgess was invited by the Justice … to explain how he reconciled this with his story of complete teetotalism.’3 He responded ‘with a most affable air’ suggesting his tomato juice might have been doctored and pointed at de Vere White who was forced to give an account of the evening.
Burgess’s old school-friend Dermot McGillycuddy had been brought in as his defence solicitor and he seems to have worked his magic. The case was dismissed, with the judge describing Burgess as ‘a man of brilliance who appeared overwrought and nervous … a man of cultivated tastes’ – he had been returning from seeing a play at the Abbey Theatre when the accident took place.4
According to the doctor, a friend of McGillycuddy, who examined Burgess at the police station, ‘There was no smell of drink which witnesses could detect from his breath. He was smoking continuously, his speech was confused and when witnesses asked him to walk in a line, he was definitely unsteady and limp.’ It appeared the head injury was more serious than previously thought.5
The fall left Burgess with bad headaches and insomnia that he treated with Nembutal to put him to sleep and Benzedrine to wake him up, obtaining his supplies from Peter’s vet sister, Sheila. The dosage was as for a horse and Rees later wrote, ‘Drugs, combined with alcohol made him more or less insensible for considerable periods in which, when he was not silent and morose, his speech was rambling and incoherent’ to the extent he ‘seemed, hardly capable of taking in whatever it was one was saying to him’.6
In November 1949, Burgess went on a fortnight’s holiday with his mother to North Africa, staying at the Rock Hotel on Gibraltar en route. Here he ran into Dil Rohan, who was also staying with her lover, Mary Oliver. ‘We met in the bar before dinner and a young man bounded effusively up to us’, Dil Rohan later wrote. ‘It was Guy Burgess, with whom I had worked during the war, now better known as the missing diplomat or what I call the missing dipsomaniac … I felt rather sorry for his mother Mrs Basset, who was trying to look after him, she was typically English-County, although Bassett is French for Dachshund.’
After dinner Mrs Bassett went to bed and Dil Rohan, Oliver and Burgess adjourned upstairs. ‘Guy liked to drink and to talk, now he did both, he talked and talked, sometimes brilliantly, but often with an indiscretion that angered me … The main subject of his conversation concerned the merits or otherwise of the British intelligence service; after that he dealt with the future of China and Russia, and was fiercely critical of our foreign office policy.’
The next morning, as Dil Rohan and Mary Oliver were having breakfast, ‘Guy burst in, he and his mother with George Greaves were leaving for Tangiers and in a rush to catch the plane.’ Taking one of their cups, he filled it ‘to the brim with neat whisky, which he tossed down and rushed out’.7
David Herbert, an Eton contemporary, meeting him in a Tangier bar, was shocked by his drunkenness and indiscretion, not least by his open espousal of Marxism. By noon each day, Burgess had ensconced himself at the bar of the Café de Paris where he’d recite, ‘Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.’ The final straw for the local gay community came when Burgess started making approaches to their local Arab boys.
Through Robin Maugham, Burgess had obtained introductions to Kenneth Mills and Teddy Dunlop, the local British intelligence representatives in Gibraltar and Tangier. Whilst drinking on the Rock, the three had got into an argument over Franco, whose regime the two intelligence officers supported. Infuriated by his behaviour, which included criticising the Americans, expressing admiration for Mao Tse-tung, revealing that the British had used the Swiss diplomatic bag to smuggle information out of Switzerland, and disclosing the identities of intelligence officers, Dunlop had complained to the Foreign Office about Burgess’s ‘extremely indiscreet’ behaviour: ‘Burgess appears to be a complete alcoholic and I do not think that even in Gibraltar have I seen anyone put away so much hard liquor in so short a time as he did.’8
MI6 had held Burgess in their sights for a while, after he had commandeered a source, Alexander Halpern, who had been with British Security Co-ordination in New York during the war. Tipped off by Goronwy Rees that he was visiting London, Burgess had taken him to lunch, and then circulated a memo throughout the Foreign Office drawing on their discussions and identifying Halpern. Annoyed by the compromise and identification of their man and the Tangier episode, MI6 now saw their opportunity to strike.
On his return, Burgess was called in by the Foreign Office personnel department. Apart from the incidents in Gibraltar and Tangiers, Burgess was also accused of passing sensitive material to an American journalist with close links to Soviet intelligence, Freddie Kuh. The subject of a Special Branch file since 1920, Kuh had been the United Press correspondent in Berlin before coming to London in 1933. He had first met Burgess at the BBC during the war and the two men had traded in their favourite currency – information. In March 1943, for example, Kuh had told Burgess that he had learnt from the Swedish minister in London, Prytz, that a Swede had arrived with details from the Finns of ‘conditions under which they were prepared to make a separate peace’, information that Burgess duly reported back to Moscow, as well as MI5.9
It looked like Burgess might have to resign or be dismissed. In January, Guy Liddell reported in his diary that George Carey-Foster had been to see him, seeking his views about Burgess, and that he was speaking to Ashley Clarke, the head of the personnel department. Advice from Bernard Hill, the MI5 legal adviser, was that prosecution would be unwise, as it would only lead to publicity about SIS. ‘My own view’, Liddell confided to his diary:
was that GUY BURGESS was not the sort of person who would deliberately pass confidential information to unauthorised parties, he was, however, extremely keen and enthusiastic in matters which interested him and would be easily induced by a man such as Freddie KUH to say more than he ought to. So far as his drinking was concerned, I had gained the impression that owing to a severe warning from a doctor, he had more or less gone on the wagon. I did not think he often got wholly out of control, but there was no doubt that drink loosened his tongue. Personally I should have thought a severe reprimand from somebody he respected might be the answer to the present situation.10
That was not the end of the matter. Three weeks later, Liddell saw Kenneth Mills, who recounted how he had met Burgess for a drink in Gibraltar – Mills had a beer, Burgess three double brandies – and how Mills had taken Burgess and his mother to the yacht-club, in order that they might be introduced to various local residents. A day or two later, Burgess had called on Mills and his wife when he had consumed quite a lot of whisky, and then just before leaving for Tangier, Burgess had rung up Mills ‘and said he was not really sure about de Rohan or Mrs Oliver and that they might, in fact, be up to anything’.
Ten days later, Mills continued, when he was in Tangier, he met Burgess at a hotel where Mills was having a drink with one of his contacts. Burgess, in a somewhat inebriated state, insisted on joining the party. Eventually Mills had to tell him to go away. The same thing happened when Mills was lunching with the American vice-consul and his wife. ‘On this occasion he had to go outside with Burgess, who apparently resented being asked to go away. Burgess was clearly drunk at the time and apologised later for having been a nuisance.’11
Liddell continued to try and protect Burgess, suspecting that Mills had a personal animus against him, and was reluctant to pass the complaint to the Foreign Office, but Bernard Hill insisted the complaint should be taken seriously. ‘The charges were fully investigated by a disciplinary board, and he was severely reprimanded, informed that he would be transferred and that his prospects of promotion would be diminished.’12 Burgess’s response was to tell Liddell that Mills was running a currency racket.13
On 17 May Burgess was officially notified that the enquiry conducted into MI6’s complaint had been terminated and he was in the clear. He recognised he had survived ‘because my friends proved to be stronger than my enemies’, but he knew many were gunning for him, not least Carey-Foster, who had recommended that Burgess be sacked. ‘His loyalty was not in question’, Carey-Foster later wrote. ‘It was his behaviour on holiday. Against my advice it was decided to give him one more chance.’14
At the beginning of February 1950 Dr Klaus Fuchs had been arrested at Shell Mex House in the Strand. Burgess learnt of the arrest just over a week later, when he had one of his regular meetings with Modin. He reacted with ‘calm and composure’ to the news of the nuclear physicist’s arrest, but was clearly rattled, failing to turn up at the next scheduled rendezvous on 20 March 1950 – the Centre had suspended contact with both Burgess and Blunt for six weeks as a result of the arrest – nor to the back-up meetings.15 There was extra reason for his discomfort. The previous September, Philby had actually tipped him off that the Venona decrypts had identified a scientist codenamed CHARLES. Burgess thought he had reported this to Modin, but it became clear he’d forgotten to do so. The warning had never reached Moscow Centre. If he had, CHARLES, who was Fuchs, might have been exfiltrated. Instead he was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment on 1 March.16
Donald Maclean had recently returned to London after suffering a nervous breakdown in Cairo, where he had smashed up the room of a young female embassy secretary. Burgess, too, was beginning to crack up under the strain of the Fuchs trial and the progression of the Venona investigation. Harold Nicolson noted in his diary on 24 January, ‘I then go to the Reform to dine with Guy Burgess. He is sitting with Alan Maclean of the FO. He is not in one of his most clear-headed moods. I fear he has ruined his life and his career by this incessant soaking. His mind, once so acute, seems to have lost all cutting edge owing to the demon alcohol.’17 The following day he recorded a similar entry about Burgess. ‘Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is!’18
On 4 June, Burgess had a six-and-a-half-hour meeting in a suburban park with one of his Russian handlers, Korovin, discussing his worries that he was about to be blown by Venona, that Rees might betray him, even though the two men remained on friendly terms, and that Blunt, who was no longer making his meetings with the Soviets, might commit suicide if caught.19
Burgess also seemed to have run into debt, which was strange given his Foreign Office salary was £700 a year, he had a private income of about £500, and the Russians were paying him generously. He was borrowing money from a friend, probably Peter Pollock, according to another friend, almost certainly Jack Hewit. ‘I was surprised, because I could not see any change in his circumstances to account for this, and it marked so great a change from a pattern of behaviour that had persisted for so long that I could not help being puzzled by it.’20
One night ‘Dickie’ Leven was in the Reform discussing with two High Court judges the Russian defector Victor Kravchenko’s bestselling exposé of Stalinism, I Chose Freedom, which had just been published. ‘Burgess stopped at our table on the balcony and noticed the book in my lap. He was clearly drunk and took the book from me and harangued the judges and myself about the iniquity of the Americans and how much he hated their way of life. Burgess told us all the book was false and he threw it down from the balcony.’21
Though living with Jack Hewit, Burgess continued to have casual affairs with other men. Fanny Carby remembered a much younger boyfriend he had met at Buxtons, a club behind the Haymarket Theatre, ‘ravishing though a bit daft. He was an actor and layabout, a German called George Mikell’ and also ‘an Irish boy called Michael, with a double-barrelled name, whom he met through the director Brian Desmond Hurst’.22
On 9 May, shortly before he was formally cleared by the Foreign Office disciplinary panel, Burgess was told he was being posted to Washington as a second secretary, with the role of co-ordinating the affairs of the Far East Department in anticipation of opening an embassy in Peking, a development that would require the transfer of a diplomat with first-secretary rank from the embassy in Washington.23 Given Burgess’s increasing anti-Americanism, the decision to appoint him to an important embassy such as Washington may seem strange. Certainly MI5 were against it.’ There is certainly more opportunity for drinking and for saying the wrong thing in Washington than almost any other capital in the world!’ minuted Guy Liddell on 1st May whilst two days later MI5’s legal adviser had noted that rather than be ‘transferred to a post where he would have less access to secret information. It seems likely that in the Embassy at Washington he will have access to a large amount of secret information.’
Suggestions that the Foreign Office hoped that Burgess, given his anti-Americanism, might not accept are fanciful. As the government later admitted, simply, ‘It was decided to try him in a large post like Washington, because there it would be both easier to control and judge him, and less conspicuous to remove him (if need be) than in a smaller post.’24
Burgess had been posted to the United States to give him wider experience, but he was reluctant to go. He didn’t want to leave Britain and his friends and tried to get himself back into the News Department instead. He spoke of resigning from the Foreign Office, an indication that he wanted out of his double life, just as Rees had a decade earlier, and Blunt had tried at the end of the Second World War. But with no immediate prospects of another job and short of money, with bad grace, after pressure from McNeil, and presumably the Russians, he gave in. Ominously, he told Hewit he would try to get himself recalled.25
Neither was Washington enamoured of the idea of the new second secretary. Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, the minister, balked at the Foreign Office’s proposal, exclaiming, ‘We can’t have that man. He has filthy fingernails.’ The refusal produced a sharp rebuke from London, to the effect that Burgess was now an established member of the Foreign Service and it was not for the embassy to refuse to accept him. Bernard Burrows, a first secretary at the embassy, claims he and the minister, Christopher Steel, tried to prevent Burgess’s appointment, ‘not because we suspected him as a spy, but simply because his unruly way of life and untidy habits of work seemed likely to be disruptive in the workings of our office … I had to exert myself to find work for him to do that would not be upset for his irresponsible attitudes and indiscretion.’26
Robert Mackenzie, head of security at the embassy, and who had previously been Carey-Foster’s deputy in the security department, was given a briefing on the new appointment:
George Carey-Foster explained crisply why Burgess was getting this last chance to make good, and the character description that followed was withering. He left out nothing that mattered and listed some of Burgess’s more glaring peculiarities, including his homosexual habits. I showed the letter to Philby. We agreed it was unusually explicit, then I remember asking Philby what Carey-Foster could possibly mean by hinting that we’d better take care, as Burgess was capable of worse things: ‘Surely he can’t mean goats?’27
At the end of June, Burgess reported to the Russians:
As instructed, I have given ‘Fred’ the most important documents I had before my departure. I am leaving in two days’ time and today (midnight from 25th to 26th) was the most convenient time for me to organise this (he was also ready) … I have carried out instructions on using secure code in correspondence with Fred, which I have agreed with him. However, I would once again press you in writing on what I asked at our last meeting, namely that in the present situation every possible secure attempt should be made for there to be contact in the USA between me and Kim. Events could develop very rapidly and we need to know a great deal. It would be a pity not to make use of past efforts in the current crisis. We are all, of course, sure that you will do all you can. We will all do the same. Jim.28
The next evening he was at one of Moura Budberg’s parties at Ennismore Gardens with several other suspected Soviet agents, including the publisher James MacGibbon, who was then being watched. The watcher duly reported he ‘was inclined to think that Budberg is not a desirable acquaintance for someone of [Burgess’s] character and in his position and you may therefore like to have this note for your information’.29
On Friday 21 July – ‘7.30 for a farewell drink’ – Hewit arranged a leaving party at Burgess’s second-floor flat in New Bond Street. ‘For the party, we decided that we would have only champagne to drink and Brie with country butter and pumpernickel’, Hewit later wrote. Among the guests were Hector McNeil, Fred Warner, Anthony Blunt, Guy Liddell, James Pope-Hennessy, Wolfgang von Putlitz, Dennis Proctor, Tessa Mayor, Pat Llewellyn Davies, Peter Pollock, David Footman, Baroness Moira Budberg and Goronwy Rees.30
It was a snapshot of Burgess’s circle, from spies and spy hunters to senior politicians, diplomats and Cambridge friends. Goronwy Rees couldn’t come, but that didn’t prevent him from leaving several different accounts of the evening, suggesting it was a more raucous affair than it actually was. According to Rees, ‘There were two very tough working-class young men, who had very obviously been picked up off the streets … drink flowed faster, one of the young men hit another over the head with a bottle, another left with the distinguished writer, who woke up in the morning to find his flat stripped of all its valuables.’31 But Jack Hewit remembered that ‘the party was restrained and very respectable. I certainly do not remember two “street boys” being present’.32
Hewit later wrote that:
Guy Liddell and Hector McNeil were among the first to leave and I am told that David Footman overheard one of them say to Guy as they were leaving, ‘For God’s sake, Guy, remember three things when you get to the States. Don’t be too aggressively communist. Don’t get involved in race relations, and above all make sure there aren’t any homosexual incidents which might cause trouble.’ ‘I understand,’ said Guy, looking his most mischievous. ‘What you mean is, I mustn’t make a pass at Paul Robeson.’33