In April 1954, Vladimir Petrov, a lieutenant colonel in Soviet intelligence, had defected in Australia along with his wife, also a KGB intelligence officer. For the British, they were the most important defections since Gouzenko in 1945, showing the full extent of Soviet espionage in Australia, but also revealing that Maclean and Burgess had been Soviet agents. Part of Petrov’s material came from an NKVD colleague in Australia, Filip Kislytsin, who had been a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy in London from 1945-8, and who had then been put in charge of a new one-man section at Moscow Centre that housed files of documents supplied by Burgess and Maclean – so many that most remained untranslated or were not distributed to the ministries concerned. It was Kislytsin’s information that confirmed to the intelligence community that Burgess and Maclean had been recruited as Soviet agents at Cambridge, that Soviet intelligence had exfiltrated them, and that they were alive and living in Kuybyshev.
A Royal Commission was set up, producing a final report in August 1955. That and the publication and newspaper serialisation of Petrov’s memoir Empire of Fear in People magazine between 18 and 25 September 1954 raised the question of the Missing Diplomats again. In his book, Petrov claimed Burgess had handed over ‘briefcases full of Foreign Office documents, which were photographed in the Soviet embassy and quickly returned to him. Kislytsin used to encipher the more urgent information and send it to Moscow by cable; the rest he prepared for dispatch by courier in the diplomatic bag.’1
The government’s hand had been forced. On 19 September, the Foreign Office reluctantly announced a White Paper on Burgess and Maclean, which had been held ready ‘against the contingency that the Petrov disclosures would make it necessary for us to say something’.2
On 21 September the Cabinet discussed the White Paper ‘Report Concerning the Disappearance of Two Former Foreign Office Officials’ in a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, which was published two days later. It suggested Maclean had only come under suspicion shortly before the flight, when in fact he had been on the shortlist for weeks, his flight had been triggered not by a tip-off but because he had detected the surveillance, and that the authorities had acted immediately, rather than the several days it took them in reality to swing into action. It understated the traitors’ access to important secrets, notably Maclean’s special access to atomic affairs and Burgess’s role as an agent runner in MI5, and pretended that the authorities had no legal power to prevent the men from absconding. It even got the name of Maclean’s college at Cambridge wrong.3
It had been carefully crafted by Graham Mitchell, an MI5 officer then in charge of counter-espionage, himself later to come under suspicion of being a Russian agent, with instructions to limit the damage to the reputations of MI5, the Foreign Office and the British and American governments. It simply fanned the flames and it was quickly christened the ‘Whitewash Paper’.
A Times editorial entitled ‘Too Late and Too Little’ concluded, ‘The White Paper does little to remove doubts about the security authorities’ handling of the matter’,4 whilst an article in the Spectator by Henry Fairlie coined the phrase ‘The Establishment’. Fairlie noted:
What I call the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised … No one whose job it was to be interested in the Burgess-Maclean affair from the very beginning will forget the subtle but powerful pressures which were brought to bear by those who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men.
In short, how Britain’s elite were still interconnected and protecting their own.5
On 12 October a Conservative MP and former MI6 officer, Henry Kirby, called for a public inquiry, because ‘Maclean and Burgess were known as drunks and sex perverts for years’. It was clear something needed to be done. A week later, Harold Macmillan, the Foreign Secretary, sent a memo to the Cabinet concerning the forthcoming debate on the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, making clear that the terms of reference would be prescribed. He proposed that any inquiry be limited to what could be done in the future, rather than what had happened in the past.
The advantages he saw in holding such an inquiry were that the public would feel that something was being done and ‘that the public will be brought up against the dilemma of security in a free society. Almost all of the accusations of the press against the laxity of the authorities are really demands for changing the English common law.’6
On 25 October a Labour MP, Marcus Lipton, used a parliamentary question to name Philby as a Soviet agent. Hoover, the head of the FBI, had already tipped off a few American journalists and Philby had been named openly two days before in the New York Daily News. Repeating the claim under parliamentary privilege allowed the British press to report the allegation and a parliamentary debate was called, but there was still insufficient proof for a court of law. Macmillan was forced to admit at the close of the debate, ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country or to identify him with the so-called third man, if indeed there was one.’
The next day Philby called a press conference at his mother’s flat in Drayton Gardens, parried questions by hiding behind the Official Secrets Act and then served beer and sherry to the assembled press corps, amongst whom was a young Alan Whicker. Instead of smoking him out, Hoover’s actions had cleared his name.
Writing in the Express a few days later, Osbert Lancaster, with whom Burgess had served in the News Department, put the likely damage of Burgess’s treachery in context:
With the inside knowledge of one who worked for more than a year with Burgess in the same department, I do not hesitate to maintain that if the Russians have taken him on their payroll, they’re going to have their biggest headache since the Berlin air lift. For among his many exceptional qualities was an ability developed to a degree which I have never encountered elsewhere, to answer at length any and every question except that one put to him.7
The Burgess and Maclean story was not going away. On 5 November a Times leader thundered, ‘Successive governments added greatly to the public anxiety by declining for so long to give reasonable information to parliament and the people … Even the shamefully belated White Paper, touched off by the results of the Petrov inquiry, does not do a great deal more than confirm reports that have appeared in the press either here or abroad.’8
The government’s next initiative was a committee chaired by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, with Herbert Morrison, Edward Bridges, and Earl Jowitt among its seven members. It met eight times, starting at the beginning of December 1955, to look at practical problems of vetting, given the large numbers of people involved and that they were continually changing jobs, and took evidence from the Foreign Office, Admiralty, Treasury and Ministry of Supply.9
On 7 November, the White Paper was debated in the House of Commons. Macmillan claimed that nine hundred Foreign Office officials had now been checked since 1951, with four asked to leave and six moved or resigned. He explained why a watch had not been put on Maclean beyond London, and discussed the security and vetting arrangements that had been made since the two diplomats disappeared, memorably concluding that Burgess ‘had been indiscreet, but then, indiscretion is not generally the characteristic of a secret agent’.10
At the end of December it was the turn of the House of Lords to debate the scandal. Some of the attitudes of the time can be seen in the speech by Lord Astor, later to figure as a central character in the Profumo scandal. ‘I am one of the few people who never knew Guy Burgess, and apparently I missed a lot. By all accounts, he was one of the most amusing and clever conversationalists there was, who charmed a great many people.’ He continued:
But he was a drunk, dirty, and a sexual pervert. He had been ever since his school days. He made no pretence about it, either in his conversation or his conduct. Now the question I ask is: Did the Foreign Office know about his peculiarities and tolerate them, or were they the only people who did not know about them? … I am not one of those who takes the view that the homosexual is a criminal. Those of us who are lucky enough to be normal should, I think, have nothing but pity for people in that situation. But when it is a crime, and when it brings a country into disrepute or lays a person open to blackmail, surely it should be laid down quite clearly that people of those characteristics should not be used in the Foreign Service …11
The publication in December 1955 of yet another book on the case, The Great Spy Scandal, added little not already revealed in the press or in previous published accounts. Published by the Daily Express, it was simply a compilation of reports by the various Express reporters who had been covering the case, including the chief European correspondent, Sefton Delmer. What few readers knew was that Delmer had a particular knowledge of Burgess. He had worked with him in black propaganda during the war and he now volunteered to pass on to MI5 everything he found during his journalistic investigation.
Claims about the whereabouts of the spies continued to appear throughout 1955, with a security officer at the American embassy in London reporting in July that an informant had told him that Burgess had committed suicide in or near Moscow. The world was shortly to discover exactly what had happened to them.