In February 1956 Richard Hughes, a Sunday Times correspondent with links to MI6 – he is Old Craw in Le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy – was staying at the National Hotel in Moscow to interview Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister. He left with him a memorandum, stating that Soviet reluctance to explain the fate of Maclean and Burgess was preventing better Anglo-Soviet relations, and gave him a deadline of 5 p.m. on Saturday 11 February to reveal the whereabouts of the missing diplomats. The deadline passed and Hughes, resigned to the fact his request had failed, booked a Sunday afternoon plane to Stockholm.
At 7.30 p.m. the phone rang, asking him to come to Room 101.1 Assuming it was the manager suggesting a farewell drink, he ignored it and carried on packing. The phone rang again. ‘“Mr Hoojus” – a touch of impatience – “please come now. Urgent.”’ Hughes abandoned his packing and walked down the corridor to Room 101. Entering it, he found ‘five men sitting at a white-clothed table, surrounded by late Victorian bric-à-brac, a marble clock above the fireplace, and antimacassars. Drifting snow partly obscured the view of the lights in the Kremlin and Red Square. A tall man in a blue suit and red bow tie stood up and extended his hand. “I am Donald Maclean,” he said with a wooden smile. “I am Guy Burgess,” said the shorter man in a blue suit and an Old Etonian tie, with a bubbling smile …’2
Already there were Sidney Weiland, the Reuter correspondent, and the Russian representatives of Tass and Pravda. From a leather valise Burgess produced, with a flourish, four copies of a signed, typewritten, three-page, thousand-word ‘Statement by G. Burgess and D. Maclean’ and handed a copy to each man, giving the last one to Hughes with a swift wink and a slightly stressed, ‘And this one for The Sunday Times.’3
Part of the statement read, ‘We both of us came to the Soviet Union to work for the aim of better understanding between the Soviet Union and the West, having both of us become convinced from official knowledge in our possession that neither the British nor, still more, the American government was at that time seriously working for this aim … We neither of us have ever been communist agents … As the result of living in the USSR we both of us are convinced that we were right in doing what we did.’4
Weiland wanted to ask questions, but laughing, Burgess stood up jauntily, followed by Maclean. ‘I have given out too many statements to the world press in my time not to know what a story I am giving you fellows tonight.’ The interview had lasted five minutes.5
Weiland remembered how both men ‘were very nervous. They had been instructed to keep it as short as possible’ and he thought they might only have just been brought to Moscow. As he left to file his story at the Central Telegraph Office, Burgess followed him and asked him to send a message to his mother.6
A few days after the press conference, Burgess called Peter Pollock, the first of what would become weekly Thursday-morning calls, much to Pollock’s discomfort, with Burgess asking for the latest gossip about their friends and requesting books to be sent out. Burgess also wrote an upbeat letter to Peter’s sister Sheila from his two-acre dacha, an hour from the centre of Moscow. He explained he was commuting to Moscow daily, though he actually had a flat in the city, was drinking less but was partial to Russian champagne, and hadn’t got much to write about ‘unless I were to write a book’. His only regret was too little Bach and Mozart. ‘I really am in good form – whether you think I deserve it or not.’7
Following their appearance, the two men were allowed to take a more public profile. In mid-February, Burgess wrote an eight-hundred-word article for the Sunday Express, saying nothing about himself, but denouncing American foreign policy and offering his fee to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who refused it.8 The following week Maclean penned a similar piece for the Daily Herald.
Though the embassy staff in Moscow were told to avoid any social contact with the two men and to leave any function they attended immediately, and that their passports were not to be renewed nor any travel facilities offered to them, the British authorities monitored the situation closely. Sir William Hayter, the ambassador in Moscow, produced a briefing paper for the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, ‘The Effect of the Reappearance of Burgess and Maclean on Anglo-Soviet Relations’, surmising that the timing was partly to cause fresh discord in Anglo-American relations after the Prime Minister’s recent visit to Washington, but also to clear the air ahead of the visit by the Soviet prime minister Nikolai Bulganin and the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, to the UK in April. He called their statement ‘unconvincing and ill-drafted’ and felt with its odd phrasing that it was probably not written by the two men. He concluded the two men were likely ‘attached to some kind of research unit, where they prepare long memoranda on Western policy to which little attention is probably paid’.9
On 11 March The People, a mass-circulation Sunday newspaper, began a five-part series sensationally headlined, ‘Guy Burgess Stripped Bare: His Closest Friend Speaks at Last’. Described as disclosures ‘from the one man in a position to know the complete story’, it promised to ‘reveal the full depth of corruption that lay behind Guy Burgess’s treachery’. This was the fullest portrait yet of Burgess and covered in graphic detail his dissolute private life and his admission to having been a Comintern agent. It revealed how he kept every letter he received in case they could be used for blackmail, named many in Burgess’s circle, and made oblique references to Anthony Blunt. It even revealed that a drunken Donald Maclean had confronted the author in the Gargoyle Club saying, ‘I know all about you. You used to be one of us, but you ratted.’
It concluded by warning the public that there had been a cover-up. ‘I believe that Burgess and Maclean staged their recent public appearance in Moscow as a warning to those remaining traitors – a warning that they can be exposed if they do not continue in the service of Russia. The traitors must be rooted out before the long-range blackmail begins to work. Only then will Britain be saved from another Burgess and Maclean scandal.’ Though anonymous, it was apparent that the author was Goronwy Rees and he was quickly named in a Daily Telegraph gossip column.10
What had possessed Rees to write the articles? Partly the £2,700 he was paid, which came in useful to pay off some debts, but money was only part of it. Rees was later to claim that Burgess’s reappearance had forced him to reassess his relationship and the articles, which had been rewritten by staff writers, were a half-confession, an attempt to explain why he had befriended and not betrayed Burgess.
According to Isaiah Berlin, ‘It was a kind of insurance policy. I think it was because he was afraid of Burgess spreading disinformation and telling terrible stories about him and everyone else and he had to get in first … I think Goronwy was frightened. I think he thought that anything could happen and he panicked.’11 Perhaps, too, it was another warning shot across the bows of Anthony Blunt.
The consequences for Rees were catastrophic, costing him his recent job as the principal of the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth and ostracising him from his friends. A letter from Roy Harrod was typical. ‘Guy was such a charming, cultivated, civilised and loveable person. I cannot bear to think of that memory of him being sullied. Your account presents him as half drunk, half sex debauchee. Could anything be further from the truth? It is really too bad of you.’12
What had upset people was it had been done anonymously, the choice of paper, the hypocrisy of claiming there were more traitors but doing nothing about them, and the smearing of easily identifiable people in public life. Burgess, himself, was unperturbed – ‘poor chap … he probably needed the money badly’. What offended him most was the suggestion he and Maclean had been lovers. ‘It would have been like going to bed with a great white woman!’ he exclaimed.13
But Joseph Ball, who was named in the articles, successfully issued a writ against Rees and The People seeking an apology and damages, saying that he had ‘never met Guy Burgess in his life and had never heard of him until he fled the country’.14 MI5, who hitherto had not taken Rees entirely seriously, immediately now sent two officers to interview him in Aberystwyth and read the original version of the manuscript.
A few days after the first of The People articles appeared, Burgess wrote to Tom Driberg, who had written a sympathetic article in the left-wing Reynold’s News, agreeing to meet. ‘I don’t want to go here into a long screed about not having been an agent. There is no evidence that I was: in fact I wasn’t and that’s that.’15 The two men had known each other during the war when Driberg was a contributor to The Week in Westminster. Driberg had felt that Burgess had not been dealt with fairly and had written shortly after the Moscow appearance, asking if he could come and see him.
Burgess, annoyed at the way he had been depicted in the media – particularly the suggestion he had been expelled from Dartmouth for theft – may have felt the need to set the record straight, and invited him to visit. The two men shared an appetite for alcohol, ‘rough trade’ – Francis Wheen suggests Driberg saw much of himself in Burgess and hoped to understand himself better by talking to Burgess16 – and had both worked for British Intelligence. Driberg had been an MI5 informant since entering parliament in 1942 and now became part of an unwitting sting operation on behalf of MI5, who were interested to see what Burgess would confess to in a memoir.17
Another visitor was also on her way. In March, Eve Bassett had written to Sir William Hayter at the embassy in Moscow, seeking permission to see her son after Burgess had requested a visit. ‘Would it be troublesome if I came? And could I be prevented from returning for propaganda purposes?’ she wrote. ‘And could my presence be used in any way by the Russian authorities to put pressure on Guy? I do not want to be the cause of any fresh trouble to the British authorities, but naturally I long to see my son again. I am not very well and getting old.’18
At the beginning of July she came out for a month and the two holidayed at a government sanatorium in Sochi with a private beach, ‘mixing freely with other holidaymakers, sunbathing, riding in speedboats, and walking through the palm-lined streets. People who have been at the sanatorium said Mrs Bassett had taught the cooks to make her son’s favourite English dishes.’19
A few days after she left, Driberg arrived in Moscow for a two-week stay and installed himself at the National Hotel to await his instructions. The next day Burgess called him, asking him to go to the Moskva Hotel some fifty yards away, where Burgess claimed he had a suite. ‘Guy Burgess was standing outside the hotel entrance. He was instantly recognisable despite a slight greying of his dark hair. His bird-bright, ragamuffin face was tanned by the Caucasian sun’, Driberg later wrote. ‘He came forward to meet me and we shook hands. I felt a little like Stanley discovering Livingstone.’20
Over the next two weeks Driberg took down the details of Guy Burgess’s life as Burgess chose to remember them – not always accurately. In turn, Burgess introduced him to his new social circle, which was rather less glittering than the one he had frequented in London. They spent ‘a pleasant evening of serious talk’ with two British communists, and another with Ralph Parker, who had been the Moscow correspondent of The Times and Daily Worker and whom Burgess distrusted. ‘We all think he’s an agent, but we can’t make out whose side he’s on.’21
Driberg also spent a weekend at Burgess’s dacha, driven there in an official pool car. The dacha was the largest in the village and was guarded constantly by four secret policemen, who lived in a cottage in a corner of the extensive grounds, and reported on his conduct, movements and visitors. All the rooms were ‘miked’ except, as a friendly guard confided, the study.
‘The village of Guy’s dacha was a small and pretty one, with an English-looking duck pond and a typical onion-domed Orthodox church. Walking round it on the Saturday afternoon, I asked if there wasn’t a bar we could go to in the evening, as one would go to a pub in England. Guy looked worried. “There is one,” he said, “but I can’t go there now. Donald was staying here, and he had one of his drunken fits and wrecked the bar. There was a hell of a row about it. That was before he had his last cure.”’22
Driberg noticed that whilst in Moscow Burgess was generally drunk on vodka by evening, he was much more abstemious at the dacha, where he only kept wine – usually a Georgian white wine. His days were quite solitary, with only the company of a guard or his elderly housekeeper Dusa, and he spent most of his time reading English literature, biography and current affairs. Driberg had brought him a copy of the English Hymnal and sometimes Burgess would pick out tunes with two fingers on a decrepit upright piano.
There were two immediate consequences of the visit. Driberg, a compulsive ‘cottager’ in public lavatories, introduced Burgess to the large underground urinal behind the Hotel Metropol, tended by an elderly female cleaner who seemed oblivious to the mating signals of the hundreds of homosexuals standing in rigid line. There Burgess met Tolya Chishekov, then in his late twenties, an attractive young electrician in a state factory with a keen interest in music, who supposedly came from Tolstoy’s estate and whose grandmother had been one of Tolstoy’s lovers – Burgess liked to claim he was Tolstoy’s illegitimate grandson. John Miller remembered him as ‘short, cheerful and broad-shouldered’.23 He was to become Guy Burgess’s lover, amanuensis, servant – and inform on him – until Burgess’s death.
Whether Burgess had lovers in Russia before Tolya is unclear. According to Modin, when Burgess arrived:
as a homosexual he needed a companion. Eventually he found one and the counter-intelligence people called him in to see the bosses. They said, ‘We don’t care what you got up to in London, but with us this kind of thing is punishable by law. We will punish you if you continue.’ So he stopped. But you can imagine the feelings of someone deprived of the possibility of fulfilling his physical needs. He was angry.24
Driberg’s good turn did not go unpunished after he was caught in a KGB sting operation at the urinal. Confronted with photographs of his sexual encounter, he agreed to work as a Soviet agent and was given the codename Lepage. For the next twelve years Driberg was used as a source within the Labour National Executive, reporting back on the evolution of Labour policy and the rivalries within the party leadership.25
In the autumn he returned, to go through the proofs, bringing with him some items that Eve had asked if he would take to Burgess, including some prints, a pair of shoes, some new socks and a leather bottle case, which ‘he took everywhere with him as he had a great affection for it’.26
Driberg’s publisher had asked him to supply some pictures for the book, so Burgess arranged the photographer and said he would bring him to Driberg’s hotel that afternoon. When he did so, arriving late, Driberg realised he was drunk, ‘reeling and chortling idiotically and then, when the photographer tried to do his job, making silly faces at the camera’.27
The shoot had to be rearranged for the following morning. ‘At eight next morning he rang me, sounding his usual bright and brisk self. “I’m afraid I shall be late again this morning,” he said. “I’ve been ‘sent for’ … about yesterday afternoon.” He explained he had been given a talking-to by Russian minders. He had been “extremely nice” about it, said Guy, “which of course made one feel all the more of a shit.” In short, he summed it up, his chief had behaved “exactly like the best type of English public school housemaster”.’28 When Driberg recounted the episode to Eve, whom he occasionally visited on behalf of Burgess, her response was, ‘You know … I think that Soviet discipline is good for Guy.’29
Burgess was happy with Driberg’s account and used his influence, which appeared considerable, to secure an introduction to Khrushchev that led to an interview appearing in Reynold’s News.
Driberg’s book, bought by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and published on 30 November 1956, was a huge publishing event, with the Daily Mail buying the serial rights for £5,000 and ITV’s This Week producing a story with footage of Driberg and Burgess visiting various public monuments in Moscow.30
Days before the serial was due to run, the D-notice committee had requested the deletion of a paragraph about a post-war operation against Albania, on the grounds of security – though as it had come from Burgess, the Russians clearly already knew about it. This provided an opportunity for MI5 to fire a warning shot across Burgess’s bows. Using the journalist Chapman Pincher, a story was planted that Burgess had breached the Official Secrets Act and would be arrested if he ever returned to Britain.31 Then Joseph Ball, again through solicitors, insisted any references to him be deleted.32
The serial ran over seven days the following week, with the Mail taking one of their customary positions. ‘His Burgess story is a frankly partisan work. With many of his opinions the Daily Mail disagrees … but prints it none-the-less uncensored. Differing opinions cannot obscure the fact that it is the major news scoop of the decade.’33
They were right. Driberg had simply not bothered to challenge Burgess’s accounts of events, which claimed he had never been a spy, had stopped drinking, and loved being in Russia. Though panned by the critics, it made Driberg a huge amount of money. This was an authorised version of equal delight to Burgess, the KGB and MI5.
Reviews were mixed. In Tribune, Claud Cockburn, who had been part of Otto Katz’s circle, described it as ‘one of the major political and journalistic events of the decade’,34 whilst Alan Moorehead in the New Statesman thought it ‘a credible picture of Burgess … even though it leaves us in the end with a sense of the futility and the littleness of this life … One looks back through these brief pages thinking that somewhere something must have been left out. After all, Burgess was an interesting man, and one feels that he can scarcely have been as trivial as all this.’35
John Connell in Time & Tide began, ‘This is a bad, unpleasant book about a bad, unpleasant man … What kind of people does Mr Driberg, who continues to live and work in our midst, think we are, to be deceived by this packet of glibness and plausible triviality?’ adding it was ‘thoroughly badly written, ill-constructed and repetitive …’36 Whilst in the Spectator, John Davenport, who had known Burgess since Cambridge, called it ‘this brilliantly boring pamphlet seems to me altogether too much of a whitewash of its subject … We cannot make a hero of our time out of such an ass.’37
According to Driberg’s book, there had been no escape plan beyond catching the boat. ‘Donald had suggested that we ought to make for Prague, because there was a trade fair on, which would make it easy to get visas.’38 They had caught the Paris express from Rennes and taken an overnight train to Berne, where they collected visas at the Czech embassy. ‘We knew that nobody would start doing anything about it till some time on Monday’ but had a shock to discover there wasn’t a flight from Zurich to Prague until Tuesday, so Burgess ‘went and looked at motor-cars’, whilst Maclean ‘lay on his bed reading Jane Austen. We were both rather in a Jane Austen mood.’ Turning up at the Soviet embassy in Prague, the reaction was ‘deadpan. You know the sort of thing: “Very interesting, but we must get instructions.”’ The two men waited a week, expecting news of their disappearance any day on the wireless, ‘looked at various palaces and read Jane Austen’.39
It was the news breaking on 7 June whilst they were still in Prague, according to Burgess, that ‘decided me to go to Moscow with Donald at once. Up to that moment I’d still got a faint idea that I might first go on to Italy for a holiday. After all, I’d done my part for Donald – I’d delivered him safely, as it were, behind the “Iron Curtain”.’40
Arriving in Moscow they ‘were taken to a hotel for a day or two’ then lent a flat, where three days later they were interviewed and then sent to ‘a dreary provincial town’ for ‘about six months. We had beautiful flats, looking out over the river, but I was very unhappy there; it was permanently like Glasgow on a Saturday night in the nineteenth century.’41
Burgess took a job in the Foreign Languages Publishing House, ‘making suggestions and trying to get them to translate and publish more good English books of all kinds’, worked for ‘the Anti-Fascist Committee’, which collected ‘information on post-war fascist trends in various parts of the world’, and the World Peace Movement, sometimes consulting on ‘anything from Somerset Maugham to British policy in Trinidad. You might call me an expert Englishman with a roving commission.’42
He confessed to missing London, New York and friends. ‘But I have become used to the ways of solitude, and on the whole I like it. I read an enormous lot – I’ve read most of the Everyman library. I lead a very quiet life.’ In London his ‘main expenditure was on drink and cigarettes’ and both were cheap in the USSR. ‘I only drink wine – this Caucasian white wine, whenever I can get it. Hardly ever vodka, unless I’m sick. It’s the best cure for an upset stomach.’43
And he maintained that he still admired Russia. ‘Sometimes, yes I am lonely. I’d like to have a good gossip with some old friends. But here I’m lonely for the unimportant things. In London I was lonely for the important things – I was lonely for Socialism.’44
His published account was, however, only part of the story.