In February The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina, which was hosting the annual three-day South Eastern Regional International Relations Club meeting, asked the British embassy for a speaker. Burgess, the only spare official with the necessary expertise, was sent after the designated speaker had to drop out. He left by car on the morning of Wednesday 28 February for the journey of just over five hundred miles. Accompanying him was a young black homosexual in his late twenties called James Turck. Having formerly served in the Air Force, Turck was a drifter of no fixed address, who sometimes worked for a used-car dealer in New Jersey and whom Burgess already knew.1
Twenty miles out of Washington at Woodbridge, Virginia, Burgess was stopped by the police for driving at 90 mph. Pleading diplomatic immunity, he was let off with a warning. A further sixty miles on and the car was stopped again, just north of Richmond at Ashland, Virginia, for driving at 80 mph whilst trying to pass an entire Army convoy. Again no ticket was issued. After Richmond, where they had stopped for thirty minutes to make minor repairs to the brakes, Turck took over the driving, because Burgess had drunk a few beers at lunch. Burgess told Turck he was authorised by him to drive over the speed limit, as he was late for his engagement in Charleston. Five miles south of Petersburg, the car was stopped a third time for speeding – this time doing 80 mph in a 60 mph zone. As Turck handed across his licence to the traffic officer, Burgess intervened. ‘I am a diplomat,’ he said, passing his passport and driver’s licence through the window, ‘and Mr Turck is my chauffeur; we are both protected by diplomatic immunity.’2
The patrolman, Sam Mellichamp of the Virginia State Police, was not persuaded that a diplomat’s ‘chauffeur’ was protected by diplomatic immunity, nor was the local justice of the peace in Petersburg, David Lyon, who set bail of $55. After ninety minutes at the police station, Burgess was forced to find a bank or hotel in St Petersburg that would cash a cheque, the fine was duly paid, and the pair continued their journey, spending the night in a seedy motel outside Charleston before Burgess put the young black man on a bus to Richmond, where he was going to a car auction. Turck recalled how Burgess had brought several cameras – ‘one was a camera similar to those used by newspaper photographers and the other was a movie camera’ – that Burgess claimed he needed to take some pictures near Charleston, ‘where the United States had purchased a tract of land for the purpose of building the H-Bomb’. He noticed, too, that he ‘carried a British-made pistol in the glove compartment of his car’.3
That should have been the end of the matter but, whilst Burgess had been raising money for the fine, Turck had given an affidavit that this was, in fact, the third speeding offence of the day and Burgess had encouraged him to speed. The affidavit eventually found its way to the Governor of Virginia and subsequently to the British ambassador. Meanwhile, unaware of the train of events that had been set in motion, Burgess checked into the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston’s historic downtown area, and proceeded to make the most of his trip south.
Emily Roosevelt had provided Burgess with various introductions to local worthies, who immediately took him in hand. Benjamin Kittredge, a relative of hers, gave him a personal tour of the hundred-and-sixty-three-acre swamp garden he had spent forty years creating. Burgess responded by passing out drunk on the floor of his boat, and he had still not fully sobered up by the time he arrived for dinner at 5.30 p.m. in the Citadel’s mess hall, where he was seated at the head table with a State Department official, professors from Duke and Princeton, and diplomats from other embassies.4
In front of over some two hundred listeners, at 7.15 p.m. Burgess then launched into his talk, ‘Britain: Partner for Peace’, in which he defended Britain’s recognition of Communist China. ‘We feel that by continuing relations, at least one Western foot can be kept in the Chinese door. We are not sufficiently mobilised to run the risk of breaking with China and possibly precipitating World War III. We are fighting a delaying action.’5 Loma Allen, a young cadet, remembered how enthusiastic the cadets had been to hear a British diplomat but how disappointed they had been when he appeared. ‘He was totally dishevelled and his suit looked like he had slept in it for several days. His speech was laughable and one of the most inept presentations I have ever heard. His delivery was stammered, there were long pauses between sentences and it was incoherent’.6
Allen was part of a group discussion with Burgess after the talk and found the diplomat continued to be ‘unresponsive, mumbling and very anti-American’. Though Allen did not see Burgess again, Burgess returned to Charleston several times over the next few months and cadets often saw him in a downtown bar.
Much of the speech was a diatribe on the failures of American foreign policy, and especially its refusal to recognise Red China. ‘How Red is the Yellow Peril, tell me that?’ he supposedly kept asking. The speech was received with polite applause. As the next speaker began his presentation, Burgess put his head back and went to sleep.7
The next day Emily Fishburne Whaley, the niece of Emily Roosevelt, gave him a tour of Charleston, which included a long lunch at one of its finest restaurants. She found him both charming and erudite and couldn’t wait to introduce him to her husband, but when she rushed up to him at the cocktail party held in his honour that night by another local dignitary, Burgess looked at her blankly. He couldn’t remember who she was. The next day she showed him the one-hundred-and-seventy-acre Cypress Gardens, which included some eighty acres of blackwater swamp, ‘paddling him through that black shiny water and explaining to him what had been done in the garden. She noticed his head was sinking and in no time at all he was asleep right under her nose … They left him on the island in the bateau sleeping.’8
Burgess’s path of self-destruction, not helped by his diabetes and inability to hold his drink, continued. Through Philby, Burgess was invited to a cocktail party on 16 March at the home of Kermit Roosevelt, a senior CIA official and grandson of the US President Theodore Roosevelt. Amongst those there were Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr, son of FDR, the British military attaché, and the wife of Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA. Burgess quickly got into an argument with Roosevelt over the Korean War, which became so heated that the two men had to be separated. So enraged was Roosevelt that he recounted the episode to Allen Dulles, deputy director of the CIA, the next morning. Dulles had already heard it from his boss, Bedell Smith.
Meanwhile John Battle, the Governor of Virginia, had written to John Simmons, the State Department’s chief of protocol, enclosing Turck’s affidavit and complaining about Burgess’s ‘flagrant violation of our traffic laws, which might very well have resulted in a disastrous accident … Mr Burgess claimed diplomatic immunity for himself and his driver, even going so far as to threaten the arresting officers in the event the case was prosecuted.’9 As Oliver Franks, the ambassador, was in London until 28 March, the State Department did not bother to forward the letter to the embassy until 30 March. Franks immediately consulted with the Foreign Office.
Burgess, in Charleston on a week’s holiday with his mother to celebrate his fortieth birthday, was oblivious to the course of events. He was on his best behaviour and ‘exceedingly judicious in his drinking’, partly through mortification at his behaviour on his previous trip, and partly because of the presence of his mother. Mrs Roosevelt found him ‘calm and serene, was cheerful, looked well, and exhibited no signs of tension. He told her that he had applied to the Foreign Office for release from his present assignment.’10
On Saturday 14 April, Burgess returned to Washington and was immediately summoned to Oliver Franks’s office. On Wednesday 18 April the embassy notified the State Department that Burgess was being recalled. He had been suspended and was due to appear before a disciplinary board with a view to his resignation or dismissal. Franks reported to the Foreign Office that his ‘work had been unsatisfactory, that his routine work lacked thoroughness and balance, and that he had had to be reprimanded for carelessness in leaving confidential papers unattended’.11
If Burgess had deliberately planned this recall, as many accounts claim, he put up a good front, storming into Greenhill’s office ‘boiling with rage’. Greenhill wrote, ‘Later he tried to make light of it to me, saying his only regret was that he would find it hard to explain to his friends in London … To report failure would, he said, be embarrassing.’12
Contrary to the accepted wisdom that Burgess had deliberately engineered his return, it was only the chance remark by Turck, of which Burgess had been unaware, about the previous traffic violations that had been the nail in his coffin. The speeding episode was also the final straw for his colleagues in the embassy. Burgess’s poor record had finally caught up with him. As Robert Cecil put it, ‘… although Burgess may have collected more tickets than usual on that particular day, neither his speeding, nor his tendency to pick up stray homosexuals was in any way a novelty; it just happened to be his unlucky day’.13
One morning in spring 1951, according to one of the varying accounts of the episode he later gave, Michael Straight was coming out of the embassy in his car, when he saw a man ‘waving vainly at the taxis as they rushed past down the hill’. It was Burgess. ‘He climbed in beside me. “Can you drop me downtown?” he asked. “I’ve lost my car, or rather, it’s been taken from me.”’ Straight claimed to be surprised and appalled to learn his Cambridge contemporary had been in Washington since October. ‘“You told me in 1949 that you were going to leave the Foreign Office. You gave me your word.” “Did I say that? Perhaps I did.”’14
Straight was even more concerned to discover that Burgess was responsible for Far Eastern affairs at the embassy. In October, South Korean and American troops had crossed the 38th parallel and advanced to the Yalu River, where they had been ambushed by a massive Chinese force. He put it to Burgess that he had been aware of the plans to advance into North Korea and would have sent the information to Moscow, who would have passed it to Peking. If so, Burgess had caused the deaths of many American soldiers. Burgess defended himself by saying that everyone knew about the plans, including the Chinese. Straight wasn’t convinced:
‘“We’re at war now. If you aren’t out of the government within a month from now, I swear to you, I’ll turn you in.” Guy looked back, smiling, as he climbed out of the car. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m about to sail for England and as soon as I return, I’m going to resign.”’15
Clearly this meeting could only have taken place after Burgess’s dismissal in April. Straight claimed that he had been unaware that his fellow Apostle and recruit had even been in Washington until that ‘chance’ meeting in the spring of 1951. There had, however, been a Straight meeting in March, not with Burgess, but with a boyfriend of Blunt’s called John Blamey. He was coming to Washington and Blunt took the opportunity of the visit to pass on to Burgess a copy of his latest book, The Nation’s Pictures. Burgess claimed to Blamey that he didn’t have time to meet him, so Michael Straight had dined with Blamey instead and the book was duly passed across.16 ‘There is little doubt, according to Yuri Modin, that there would have been a message in the book for Burgess – a warning for him to get out of the United States.’17
For his last few weeks in the embassy, Burgess was given the most tedious tasks, including having to respond to the flood of outraged letters to the embassy after Truman dismissed General MacArthur on 11 April, supposedly under British influence. ‘He sat, brooding amidst overflowing ash trays’, wrote Greenhill. ‘After many days, he drafted a private letter to Donald Maclean, head of the American Department in the Foreign Office, analysing the correspondence.’18
However, much of Burgess’s day was spent dropping into the offices of colleagues to pour out his woes or pacing up and down the embassy library. The security officer Francis Thompson ‘kept as much casual observation on him as I could, and formed the impression that he was under great mental strain, and possibly a little mad, so eccentric was his behaviour – though at no time had he shown any very normal behavior, for he had always appeared to lack even the most elementary social graces’.19
There was a brief trip to New York, the third week of April, where he saw W.H. Auden and then, on Saturday 28 April, Burgess left Washington for good. That night he wrote to Pollock on Mrs Nicholas Roosevelt’s Gippy Plantation notepaper:
Whatever may be the reason for yr silence you must have a letter on this notepaper. I am thank God returning to England immediately and leave on the Queen Mary on May 1st. I don’t know when it arrives, but you can look it up. I think it terrifyingly possible that there will be a war and if so very soon. So it’s wonderful to be coming back … This place stinks.20
Over a meal in the noisy Peking Restaurant, the night before, he and Philby went over the escape plan to exfiltrate Maclean. ‘Burgess did not look too happy, and I must have had an inkling of what was on his mind.’
‘Don’t you go, too,’ said Philby, as he drove Burgess to Union Station the next morning.21
Burgess spent the few days in New York, in a state of semipermanent intoxication, staying with Alan Maclean. On the night before he sailed, a leaving party was held with some friends including Norman Luker, now working for the BBC in the Rockefeller Center. Luker later remembered:
On that evening, the greater part of which was spent in making music for our guests, present-day politics were not discussed – except that long after midnight, one significant remark was made to me by Burgess. It was that the memory of such an evening of music-making among friends would never be forgotten. He felt that war was imminent and that it probably would take place within ten days. As he was slightly under the influence of drink, his remark made no impression on me – but in view of his disappearance, he obviously felt that there was significance in the remark, which he repeated in the sober light of the following morning.22
Burgess was drunk, but also in reflective mood, and asked Luker if he could borrow his ‘sound mirror’, as tape recorders were known at the time, as he wanted to record his impressions of Churchill for posterity. David Brynley, a friend of Burgess, later recalled, ‘He began telling us about an interview he said he had with Churchill. He imitated Churchill’s voice, and it was screamingly funny … He went on for more than half an hour. Then he began singing. He was mellow, but not drunk – oh dear, no.’23
Luker was surprised when Burgess, who had only left the party at 2.30 a.m., appeared just before lunch the next day, as the Queen Mary was due to sail at just before 3 p.m., asking to listen again to the tape, which had taken three takes to record, ‘in case there is anything incriminating in it’. When it was finished, Burgess said, ‘That’s okay. It’s an interesting story and a jolly good recording. I wish you’d send me a copy of it,’ and caught his waiting taxi.
Was this a treasured memory of an important moment in his life or did the tape have greater significance – a discreet reminder, should it surface, of Burgess’s high-level connections?24