I’m not God-fearing, I’ve probably broken all the Commandments over the years, but if I were invited to preach to my black and folded town now I would say, ‘Do you know your neighbour? Can you trust him?’
In the last few hours I have been taken to a place where nothing is what it is because everything is what it isn’t. I know my head is thick with drink and fatigue, but Philby, you bastard, what have you unleashed on us all?
1964
17
6 March 1964
AND NOW I am fifty I’m surprised by how little it bothers me. I have a new wife, a new home, and a table this evening at Kettner’s to celebrate both, and my birthday. We will meet at the York Minster first, where I’ll attempt a recital of a Dylan Thomas poem from memory and fail, and Elsa will tease me about my declining powers. Perhaps I’ll promise to prove my youthful vigour later, and she will scoff that I’m vain and deluded, which is perfectly true.
I proposed to her again on a windy heather top in Wales a month after my visit to Washington, and with enough élan to secure her acceptance. Two days later, on 18 October, Macmillan stood down as prime minister and another Old Etonian took his place. We broke the news of our engagement to Elsa’s parents and to my daughters on 21 November. The following day President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. (Is his killer a Communist or a madman? Angleton is in charge of the CIA investigation.) We married at Christmas – a simple register office ceremony – and the girls returned to their mother a little tipsy. Honeymoon in France, and on 1 February we moved into a red-brick terrace house in Gayfere Street, just a stone’s throw from Parliament and Whitehall. One of my juniors in Vienna has ruffled a few feathers at Six by writing a spy thriller; Bethan says the Beatles are the best popular music group ever; and Cassius Clay knocked out Sonny Liston on the twenty-fifth and has announced to the world that he’s ‘the greatest’.
Peter Wright rang me on the twenty-sixth and we met to catch up. For some reason Hollis has made him head of Counter-intelligence Research at Five. He should know his people better. ‘It’s a chance to b-blow the dust off the files,’ Peter said, with relish. ‘Nothing official, you understand. Ch-check we haven’t missed anything. Any money you care to wager, the spies we catch in the next ten years are in there already – we just have to look for them.’ His D3 team is sifting through old Gestapo records because ‘The Nazis knew how to run a counter-espionage service. There are thousands of old C-C-Communists in their files.’ He claims to have the names of forty suspects on this side of the English Channel already.
His new role will give him carte blanche to grub about in all our pasts. That is real power. ‘The Cavaliers have had their day, Harry,’ he declared, as we were leaving the pub. ‘The old-school-ties are beaten, or will be – soon.’ The tone of his voice and his sly glance suggested a great storm over the Service. When I pressed him to say more he lied: ‘No, no, you’ve g-got the wrong end of the stick.’
In the same spirit of frankness, I have made no mention of my conversation with Angleton. Peter will have heard the Gaitskell murder story from Arthur Martin, but neither of them has spoken of the OATSHEAF investigation to me. I was ready to challenge Dick White with it when I came back from Washington, but at the last minute I backed away. I think he trusts me and I want it to stay that way. The climate, my situation, it isn’t the time, and for the same reason I’ve decided to keep it from Elsa. If I tell her we’re investigating the leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, that he may be a Communist agent of influence, she will laugh at me and call me a liar, then take it to her minister at the expense of what’s left of my career. For now OATSHEAF is filed in my imaginary drawer, Self-preservation, for the use of, while I walk abroad on my birthday in a happy shower of all my days, grateful for the new order of my life.
‘The chief wants to see you.’
His secretary, Miss Dora Edwards is on the telephone.
‘It’s my birthday.’
‘Penblwydd hapus,’ she says. ‘At once, Mr Vaughan. At once.’
‘Am I in trouble, cariad?’
Sir Dick is at the window smoking one of his Senior Service cigarettes. He turns to greet me with a funeral face. ‘Your birthday, Harry …’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you.’ I’m going to joke about fifty, but think better of it: he’s in a black mood.
‘It’s Anthony Blunt. He was their man inside the Security Service – or one of them.’ He pulls on his cigarette as if he’s trying to suck the nicotine from it in a single drag, then waves what’s left at a chair. ‘Blunt! The duplicitous shit.’
‘There’s no doubt?’
‘None whatsoever.’
I can see he expects me to be as shocked as he is, but the instant I know for sure it seems obvious, and strange that we didn’t unmask him years ago. Awkward and embarrassing too, and I say so, because Sir Dick used to be very thick with Sir Anthony.
The FBI came by the truth, he says. An American called Straight claims Blunt recruited him at Cambridge University in the thirties. He was a member of the same Cambridge ring as Philby, Burgess and Maclean, and as a senior officer in MI5 during the war he passed intelligence to the Soviet controller they shared.
‘And Goronwy Rees warned me,’ says Dick. ‘Rees! I should have … but you know what a hopeless liar he is, and we questioned Blunt eleven times but we couldn’t make anything stick, so …’
So, arise Sir Anthony, Surveyor of Her Majesty’s Pictures, director of the Courtauld Institute of Art; notable expert on Poussin; notable aesthete; notable homosexual; and now a notable traitor.
‘I don’t know him well,’ I say. ‘He was part of the furniture in Bentinck Street during the war. The sober one. Very protective of Guy.’
‘So it seems,’ Dick observes. ‘They were members of one of those elite Cambridge societies – the Apostles.’
‘Yes.’
I remember Guy telling me it used to have its own liturgy, and I expect it still does. Members in waiting were known as ‘embryos’ and they were sponsored by a ‘father’. When they took their oath of allegiance they joined the other ‘brothers’. It was another of those circles beloved of the most privileged in this damned country of ours.
‘Has anyone spoken to Blunt?’
‘Not yet,’ says Dick. ‘There’s the question of who needs to know first. The prime minister’s a stickler for proprieties and would insist on telling the Queen. Roger wants to offer Blunt a deal – sweep it under the carpet.’
There’s a light knock at the door and Dora Edwards ushers in a girl from the Secretariat with some coffee. I light one of my cigarettes, Dick lights one of his, and we wait in silence until she glides out again. ‘Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt make four.’ Dick dabs the ash from his cigarette. ‘Golitsyn says there are five – a Ring of Five. Blunt left us after the war, so who’s inside? Who tipped off Philby?’
I want to say, ‘It isn’t clear he was tipped off.’ I want to say, ‘Not Graham Mitchell,’ but he isn’t in the mood to debate with me. I watch him rise and step over to the fireplace, where he shows his hands to a bar heater. For the first time I’m struck by the shadow of his age and not the old athlete.
‘Arthur’s going to do the approach to Blunt – best man for the job – but I want you to keep across things for us. This has happened on our watch, Harry, so it’s our responsibility to clean it up.’
‘Of course, sir.’
Poor Dick, what will they say in Whitehall? He used to be their favourite, now he’s fighting for his good name.
The interview is over and he shepherds me to his door, but as he’s reaching for its shiny brass handle he checks and turns with an expression of hurt and bewilderment, like a small boy smacked by his father for the first time. ‘Is it because he’s homosexual? Is that why? You knew Burgess?’
‘I imagine it was a number of things.’
Dick leans closer, his clear blue gaze fixed on my face. ‘T
ell me.’
‘Before the war, before we knew what Stalin was like, it would have been an adventure.’
‘We knew by ’thirty-nine. We knew, and Blunt persisted.’
‘Loyalty to a tight circle of comrades? He must have believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, too.’
Dick looks so incredulous I want to laugh. The Party cares nothing for the painter Poussin, and the monumental art of the proletariat is shit. Blunt must know. Well, Dick, I expect he does, but turning his back on Communism would be to acknowledge the last thirty years a lie. I don’t know Blunt well (does anyone?), but I know his type. He is intellectually pure enough to justify the murder of millions. I have seen the shadow of the fanatic. But he has paintings to consider too, in particular his Poussins, and in the interests of his art he might be willing to forget the proletariat and come to an understanding with the Service.
‘I’ll be glad to leave this place.’ Dick steps back from the door to let me pass. ‘I want to blow away the cobwebs.’
For just a moment I wonder if he’s telling me he’s going to retire. But, no, he means the impending move to the wilderness he’s chosen for the Secret Intelligence Service south of the river where, in the spirit of the age, we are to occupy a new twenty-two-storey concrete and glass box. Those who know predict it will be stifling in summer and freezing in winter, very like life in the gulag.
‘It’s about restoring trust,’ he says. ‘A junior minister had the damn cheek to ask me yesterday if we’re all drunks and traitors – he’s been reading John le Carré. I told him, “Fewer traitors than adulterers in your government, Minister.” The trouble is, Harry, I’m not sure that’s true any more, not now, not after Blunt.’
So, dinner isn’t quite what I hoped it would be. Anthony Blunt is the ghost at our feast. Elsa says, ‘Cheer up or I’ll divorce you.’
I say, ‘Then I’m keeping the house.’
We’ve drained the bottle and coffee is on the way when I decide the time is right to ask her if she is still in touch with Phoebe Pool. She wants to know why, of course: she knows me so well she can detect the berg of meaning beneath the surface. I say that someone mentioned Anthony Blunt at the office, and I remembered he’s a friend of Phoebe’s, too. Elsa’s cup hovers at her lips. ‘I’m not going to ask you again,’ she says, ‘in case you’re tempted to tell another lie.’
‘Cariad, really …’
She lowers her chin and gazes up at me from beneath her dark brow. ‘You might try to.’
I look pained. ‘We’ve spoken of this. You know how it is in the Service.’
‘Yes, I do.’
Phoebe Pool, it seems, is recovering from another nervous breakdown. Elsa says she haunts the Courtauld Institute of Art, a bundle of bags and rags, teetering on the edge of despair. Blunt has taken her under his wing. She loves him, he’s decent to her, and they’ve written a book on Picasso together. ‘But I haven’t seen her for a while. It’s Jenifer who keeps in touch.’
‘Right,’ I say, signalling to a waiter for the bill. ‘Jenifer who?’
‘Jenifer Hart. Another friend from Oxford days.’
‘Somerville College coven?’
‘I wouldn’t put it like that.’ Elsa picks up her cup again and inspects the dregs of her coffee. ‘We’ve kept in touch. I used to see Jenifer in Whitehall – she worked at the Home Office.’
The waiter comes with our reckoning and because I didn’t manage a poem I must pay. ‘I still have time to prove I’m a good husband,’ I say, helping her into her coat. I expect her to smile but she isn’t listening. I know she’s turning our conversation over in her mind, and as we walk towards the restaurant door I hear a sharp intake of breath and her step falters, but I don’t look back to find her until we’re standing in the rain-drenched street.
‘All right, go on.’
‘Blunt!’ she whispers. ‘It’s him!’
It would be futile to deny it now. I thought she would get there but not so quickly. ‘I’ll be shot.’
She touches my arm. ‘I know how to keep a secret – I’m your wife.’
18
10 March 1964
I’M TO HAVE an office in Leconfield House, the better to carry out my charge. A pompous old soldier who’s working out his pension in Personnel shows me to a stuffy box two floors above Arthur Martin’s team in D Branch. ‘It won’t do, Major,’ I say, and threaten to pick up the phone to the DG.
In the end, he finds me something more suitable on the third floor, with a view into Curzon Street and of the flat we used as an OP for surveillance of Graham Mitchell. Two junior officers are obliged to make way for me, and a large green combination safe. Wright and his D3 research team are along the corridor and Martin is round the next corner in Soviet Counter-espionage. He’s set up an investigation room there, with his research officer and oldest ally in charge.
‘Our little Welsh boy,’ she says, when I put my head round the door. ‘I suppose you’re here to spy on us.’
‘To bring a smile to your face, Evelyn,’ I reply. ‘Young Harry Vaughan never walks away from a challenge.’
Who is Evelyn? What is she, if not the dowdy and malevolent queen of the files? Maude Evelyn Pierrepont McBarnet. Evelyn haunts this place day and night and I’m sure she’ll continue to do so when they’ve driven a stake through her heart and pronounced her dead at last. I guess she’s in her late fifties, although it’s hard to tell because she’s just as I remember her at our first encounter thirteen years ago. Purple birthmark from a temple to her chin, small almond-shaped eyes (like all the children of the night) and she’s wearing a navy suit jacket with what must be the same tatty crocheted shawl about her shoulders. She sits with a neat stack of duck-egg-blue files on the desk in front of her and a lockable Y Box open in her plump lap. The name on the label is Anthony Blunt, and I guess it’s the new evidence from the FBI.
‘You were a member of the Bentinck Street gang too, weren’t you, dear?’ she says, following my gaze. ‘You, Guy and Kim, Anthony, Donald Maclean and that handsome Welsh friend of yours, Goronwy Rees.’
I raise my hands to confess. ‘The fifth man! Or is it the sixth, or even the seventh now?’
She squints at me suspiciously. ‘Do you think it’s funny?’
‘I think you said the same at my interrogation, Evelyn. And I said, “There is nothing …”’
‘“… you can’t laugh about,”’ she says, recalling my words from thirteen years ago precisely. ‘You had that in common with Guy, didn’t you, dear?’
I sigh. ‘He’s gone, Evelyn, cariad. But I’m here, your still small voice of calm.’
‘Poor Dick is such a terrible judge of character,’ she says.
And on we go, shuffling about the ring, like old sparring partners. Did I know Blunt was working for Moscow Centre? Did she? Yes, she says, but only Arthur Martin would listen to her. Blunt did the housekeeping when Burgess ran away with Maclean in ’51. The DDG, in his wisdom, sent good old Anthony to check on his friend Guy, presenting him with the perfect opportunity to bag and burn any evidence that might incriminate the other three members of the ring. ‘And I was called home for a grilling by you,’ I say, and for once I do raise a small smile.
‘Silly boy.’ Her reply. ‘That wasn’t a grilling.’
‘No?’
I’ll never forget Evelyn watching me from across the table that day with a face like granite. I used to think she was the most morbidly suspicious person I knew – until I met Angleton. For now we can pretend it’s a game.
‘You’ve come for the FBI files.’ She hands me the Y Box then turns to pinch more from the pile on her desk, and I wonder whether there’s a buff one there with my name on the cover. ‘You will bring them back, won’t you, dear?’ she says.
I sign for the files and carry them to my office, where the major’s maintenance man is fixing my nameplate to the door. I protest I’m passing through but I have no more say in the matter than I’ll have when they screw the plate down
on my coffin. So, I light a cigarette, plonk my feet on the desk and open the FBI file.
It’s a sorry tale, and painfully familiar. The hero is an impressionable young man from the New World who goes by the Dickensian name of Michael Straight. He’s New York patrician and a student at Cambridge, so naturally he thinks very well of himself. It’s the 1930s, Communists are at war with Fascists in Spain, and our hero’s best friend dies fighting the good socialist fight. Grief-stricken and hungry for meaning, he turns to his lover, a university don called Anthony Blunt, who introduces him to a social circle, the Apostles, then to a political one, the Communist Party, and finally to the most exclusive circle of all: a ring of spies. Poor old Straight, by the time he leaves Cambridge he’s bent completely out of shape.
Back at home, he takes tea with the president and the first lady, and because he’s a sincere and patriotic young man a post is found for him at the heart of government. There is great rejoicing in Moscow, because young Michael is now able to slip secret papers to his controller. But with the coming of war he turns his back on Communism to fight the Nazis. ‘Are you still with us?’ Guy Burgess enquires, at an Apostles Club reunion in 1947.
‘You know I’m not,’ our hero replies.
Nevertheless, he kept your secret for twenty years, Guy. Guy’s dead, Kim and Donald have fled, and Tony Blunt is the one left without a refuge when the music stops.
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