*
The next alarm came from closer to home in more than one sense. Elizabeth Bentley, an American, was variously described as a “svelte and striking blonde” and a “Nutmeg Mata Hari.” Her code-name was “Helen”; given the inventive Russian humour in nomenclature, maybe the model was Helen of Troy, whose sexuality was the most notable feature in her life choices, as it was for Bentley. Bentley’s family had come over on the Mayflower and she herself was an alumna of Vassar, Columbia University and the University of Florence, where she had abandoned her membership of the Gruppo Universitario Fascista and moved to the other side of the political spectrum after an affair with her anti-fascist faculty adviser. She joined the Communist Party of America in 1935, and started to give information to the Party after getting a job in the Italian Library of Information, which was in effect the Italian fascists’ outlet in the US. In 1938 she met and became the lover of Jacob Golos, a Russian-American Jew two decades older who was also one of the key Soviet controllers in the US, running dozens of agents in New York and Washington, including Kitty Harris’s ex-husband, Earl Browder, the former head of the American Communist Party. In her memoir Out of Bondage, Bentley described her seduction in poetic terms, when “time and space seemed to stand still” until she floated “away into an ecstasy that seemed to have no beginning and no end.” Golos rather lowered the high-flown tone by saying, “You and I have no right, under Communist discipline, to feel the way we do about each other.” Bentley described Golos meeting American spies on street corners; she often answered the telephone to them herself to arrange their rendezvous with her lover.
In 1940, the same year that Golos’s planning for the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico bore fruit, he was forced to register as an emissary of the Soviet government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in order to take up his cover job with the United States Shipping and Service Corporation, a Comintern front organisation. This registration would have endangered his agents, so he needed a courier to act as go-between. His mistress moved her work to the same company. She was given the inept code-name of “Wise Girl,” and became the key courier, often bringing back forty rolls of microfilm a fortnight in her knitting bag. After Barbarossa, Golos became increasingly anti-American and grew to dislike the NKVD operatives he was working with; he even talked about leaving the country to fight alongside his son in the Soviet army, while his masters showered him with medals to keep him in place. Any hint of espionage activities would have brought the FBI into the heart of their network. But his struggles came to an end when, after lunching with Bentley at the London Terrace restaurant in New York in November 1943, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
Bentley was now in the position of knowing more (and caring more—she used to buy agents Christmas gifts, a practice that was very much not in the manuals) about the US networks than Moscow, and this, coupled with her increased drinking, led her to a conflict with her new controller, Itzhak Akhmerov, who noted that “she doesn’t have any interests beyond her work, and that she loves our country more than anything else . . .” Her emotional restlessness meant Gorsky was sent to meet her to instil some balance, one of his special skills. The involvement of Maclean’s controller, essential to his stability and sense of self-worth, could well have brought the diplomat’s career to an end.
The meeting between Henry and Wise Girl was, predictably, a fiasco. Bentley turned up drunk and informed Gorsky that he reminded her of Golos and that she was feeling “the lack of a male friend to satisfy her natural needs.” Gorsky cabled Moscow urgently that it was imperative to find her a husband. Early in 1945 she announced that she had a new lover, Peter Heller, whose description as a lawyer, former government investigator and Russian-speaker rang deafening bells in Moscow even if Bentley herself appeared not to notice her predicament They considered taking her to the Soviet Union, or even liquidating her, but the day after her last, friendly meeting with Gorsky (at which she told him she had given up Heller anyway after discovering that he had a wife and children) she walked into the FBI offices in New York and informed them of the real work of the United States Service and Shipping Corporation and its offshoot, Global Tourist. On 20 November 1945, Philby broke the bad news to Moscow that Hoover had consulted William Stephenson, head of the British Security Co-ordination in New York, and told him the investigation had “revealed that Golos’s agents penetrated into government circles . . . It succeeded in spotting 30 Soviet agents at present, whose names the FBI [have] not given Stephenson.” One of these later turned out to be Alger (though Bentley thought he was called Eugene) Hiss, the star of the State Department.
The effect of the Bentley news on top of Volkov, Gouzenko and Nunn May was panic in Moscow Centre about the possible exposure of Maclean when he was performing so well. Gorsky might have been photographed at his last meeting with Bentley, and was now being followed. Fitin recalled Akhmerov and Pravdin, and Gorsky was called back on “vacation leave,” while a 26 November cable made clear that meetings with and material from Homer should be stopped, and new passwords and “conditions of a future meeting” put in place. It was a bad moment for the Kremlin to risk an intelligence gap, but Fitin was determined to take a longer-term view and “deactivated” his “minor agents” while ensuring Maclean was “safeguarded from failure.”
Meanwhile, there was much discussion about how to assassinate Bentley, and one of Gorsky’s last memos before he left the US ran through and dismissed various options: shooting would be too noisy, a car accident too risky and a fake suicide tricky as the victim is “a strong, tall, healthy woman and X [Joseph Katz, the assassin who was to carry out the deed] has not been feeling too well lately.” As the years passed, and Bentley gave evidence to various committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee on several occasions, there were other plans to remove her from the scene, but Cold War necessities changed and she died of natural causes in 1983 having done well out of her memoirs and on the lecture circuit. On his return from Russia, Gorsky spared Maclean the details of his narrow escape, but it was a forcible underlining of the new perils and the sharpening of security wits.
*
Unaware of and therefore unshaken by these developments, and protected by Philby and Gorsky, Maclean emerged from the war as a diplomat entrusted with some big secrets and important work. When his former landlord, Michael Wright, was posted elsewhere, Maclean was soon appointed acting head of Chancery. As an American diplomat neighbour put it, “there was virtually nothing in the way of transactions in an Embassy that both the Ambassador and the head of the Chancery were not aware of with the exception of particular matters that, for example, the King of England might have the Ambassador look into.” His duties involved overseeing all cable traffic and Embassy security, even renovation of the cable room. William Clark, the Embassy Press Secretary, was summoned by him for a security briefing. Clark “had not been so excited since, a dozen years earlier, my housemaster had given me (similarly belatedly) my obligatory talk on sex.” Maclean must have enjoyed the irony when he asked Clark to sign the Official Secrets Act’s brief declaration, and then censoriously told him:
Of course you should talk to good journalists. It’s not them we’re after, it’s people who might make use of the information. For instance [as he disconnected the telephone on his desk] I always disconnect the phone when talking to businessmen, because of course our phones are tapped by the US government, and we don’t want them to get all our trade plans. And . . . don’t ever tell secrets to the French, they leak like sieves.
One of the important tasks Maclean was entrusted with was to handle the negotiations for British bases in the Atlantic and Pacific that were to be leased to America as part of the massive war debts Britain had incurred. He and Melinda (five months pregnant again and happy to spend time on the beach) went to Bermuda in February 1946 for a week where he was the lead negotiator on the subject which was to preoccupy him for the next three months. His deftness in the negotiations opposite Hickerso
n of the State Department (who had chosen not to make anything of Joe Alsop’s complaint the previous year) was notable, although one puzzle went unsolved. How could the Russian press on 20 May publish a totally accurate list of every base under negotiation? They claimed to have received the information from the British press, but only the merest outline had been handed out. When he realised in the years to come how the Russians had got there first, the ebullient and optimistic Hickerson said with sadness of his former friend: “He hurt us in more ways than one. After that, I found myself involuntarily being more suspicious about foreign diplomats, sometimes even my own colleagues.”
*
At the same time that these arrests, defections and discoveries of the winter of 1945–6 were rumbling in the background of Maclean’s worlds, the man who would make the difference was signing up at Arlington Hall.
By late 1943 the first five groups of the numbers encoded using one-time pads from 10,000 of the messages lodged with the cable companies had been transferred on to punch cards. These messages were about trade to and from Russia, and when sorted by an IBM computing machine it was discovered that there were seven pairs of matching messages—the odds against that being somewhere in the region of 1,000 million to one. The Arlington cryptographers also had the plain-language cargo manifests produced in the US for many of the ships leaving for Russia carrying supplies being sent under Lend-Lease. By comparing these manifests with the Russian messages they were able to spot some patterns: there were only so many variations possible in cargo and sailing details, with cross-checks against tide tables and shipping schedules always possible as back-up. For words which did not have codes assigned to them the “Spell” code before the word in question (which was then spelt out in letters), and the “Endspell” code after it, had been used, so the repeats of the Spell/Endspell formula were valuable in introducing repetition into the telegrams. Once the code-breakers had begun to identify some of the words (such as times of arrival), they could then begin to strip away one layer of coding and spot where the duplicate one-time pads had come into play. It was into this tiny chink in the daunting mass of encryption that Meredith Gardner stepped early in 1946.
Gardner was gangling, shy and reserved, with a long face and intelligent eyes. He was born eight months before Maclean, in Okolona, Mississippi, and was an exceptional linguist. He was fluent (and often self-taught) in French, German (Old and Middle High), Greek, Italian, Latin, Lithuanian, Spanish and Old Church Slavonic, as well as Sanskrit (which very few in the West could even begin to read); at the time of Pearl Harbor he was Professor of German at the University of Akron, Ohio. Once the US entered the war he was quickly recruited by the US Signal Intelligence Service to work on breaking German codes. He astonished his colleagues by mastering Japanese in three months and took over decoding that traffic as well. Now that the war was over, the critical work was in Russian decryption, so Gardner quickly learned the language and joined those pulled off the Japanese desk to start studying the old cables at Arlington Hall. It was not expected that anything of importance would be discovered from them: Colonel Carter Clarke of the US Army’s Special Branch had set up the separate operation in February 1943 to look at diplomatic cables to see if the Soviets, as was rumoured, were negotiating their own peace with Berlin. The surprise factor of the Nazi–Soviet Pact still rankled at that tricky stage of the war. But when the telegrams proved so much harder to crack than had at first been hoped, the best approach was to look for clues to the current codes in the past.
Using the trade-messages breakthrough, as well as Gouzenko’s first-hand knowledge of the workings of the Ottawa cipher room, Gardner and his team were now able to start examining NKVD/NKGB as well as trade telegrams. It was painfully slow work, with often as little as 1 per cent of each telegram decipherable. Yet by the middle of 1946 they had cracked enough groups and text to realise, shockingly, that many of the cables reeked of espionage. On 20 December 1946, the breakthrough came when Gardner was able to read part of a message from 1944 that contained a list of names of leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project, the atomic-bomb programme in Los Alamos—or “Enormoz,” as the Russians had code-named this most secret of all wartime ventures.
By August 1947, at the time of Gardner’s first report in what became code-named the “Venona” operation,‡ he had found a number of agents all referred to by their code-names. One, “Liberal,” appeared in six separate messages, but the only way he was eventually identified was by one of the more prosaic insights that often only real genius is capable of: later messages made plain that the Soviet clerk had spelt out the name of Liberal’s wife in single letters, but in three groups, the first being “Spell” and the letter “E” and the last “L” before “Endspell”; in the middle was a much used code for a three-letter word. Gardner “had never come across a three letter meaning in the spell code . . . Then I said: ah, but they anticipate sending a lot of English text, and the most common word in the English language is ‘the.’ ” The name was therefore “Ethel,” which led to Ethel Rosenberg. Liberal was Julius Rosenberg. They were both sent to the electric chair in 1953, much to Gardner’s distress as he was confident that “those people at least believed in what they were doing.” § Before Venona was to home in on Homer, there were many more people who also “believed in what they were doing” that it would ensnare.
However, for now, the operation was highly classified: not even the Director of the FBI knew of its existence, let alone America’s British allies. The progress through the mass of material was slow and unproductive—1944 was the year when most of the duplicate pads were being used and 49 per cent of the Moscow Centre messages were eventually decoded; but for 1945, when Maclean was seeing extraordinarily valuable material, a mere 1.5 per cent was cracked.¶ The odds against Maclean being caught were long once he had survived the evidence given by Krivitsky and Volkov and suffered no fall-out from Gouzenko and Bentley. Had he even known of Arlington Hall’s work, he might well have felt safe from discovery.
*
Maclean’s fingerprints were to be found on one of the earliest flashpoints of the post-war era. The Turkish Straits—the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles—link Russia’s land mass and Europe’s, providing the sea path from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, straddled inconveniently by Turkey and fought over since the Trojan Wars. The waterways had been a major topic at the Potsdam Conference where Truman observed after another fruitless debate that “Stalin wants the Black Sea Straits for Russia, as have all the Tsars before him.” The British and Americans wanted different outcomes themselves: the British were most concerned to protect the route to the Suez Canal through to the Indian Ocean and their dwindling Empire; Truman had said at Potsdam that he believed waterways should be international to prevent wars. Stalin did not have anything like the measure of President Truman’s resolve yet and, crucially, he needed to test the West’s underlying willingness to go to war over the Straits in order to strategise future politics. So Homer, the chief British negotiator once more, with direct access to all that was going on in Washington and Ankara as well as in London, was ideally placed to help.
On 21 October 1945 the State Department’s Loy W. Henderson sent Maclean the American proposals for government of the Straits by an international commission, in the spirit of the post-war founding of the United Nations. They were despatched on the tacit understanding that they were for British Embassy eyes only. Two days later an article appeared in the New York Times, datelined London, in which the journalist reported learning “on excellent authority” that the British and American governments were collaborating on a proposal for the Straits under which they could, with Turkish support, confront the Soviets. The following day, Molotov must have enjoyed himself in his meeting with the American Ambassador in Moscow as he “pretended to throw a fit about this double-cross” and demanded an explanation for the anti-Soviet collusion. The allies professed themselves completely baffled by the leak, the repercussions of
which escalated through the week as Stalin sent three Red Army divisions to Romania and Bulgaria to watch over Turkey’s borders, and the Turks sent troops to their borders with Bulgaria and Georgia. The first great game of Cold War bluff was under way, with the Russians, thanks to Homer, able to see both hands.
A rattled Secretary of State Byrnes gave a press conference on 30 October in which he was economical with the truth when he said “it was a mistake to suppose that the US government and His Majesty’s Government had put forward a joint proposal” and lied outright when he went on to deny that there had been “joint consultations with the British.” He then immediately called a shaken Halifax to accuse his team of giving Molotov a golden opportunity; the apologetic British Ambassador took the time-honoured line of promising a full investigation into the leak.
On the very same day that this high-level frost was developing, Maclean was summoned to the State Department to a meeting with George Allen of the Near East Bureau. Allen reiterated that the leak was “very unfortunate” and had occurred only because of “the British request to see our proposals in advance.” Maclean brazenly declared that it “could not have occurred in the Foreign Office” as it was British “policy to not give the Russians any basis for feeling that they are being confronted by a united Anglo-American position.” He followed this with a dismissive non sequitur which passed unnoticed by Allen when he said that if the leak had indeed come from the Foreign Office, which of course he had just said it did not, “strong disciplinary action would be taken.”
With this out of the way, Allen went on to tell Maclean that State had conceded “Principle 3,” dealing with naval access by non-Soviet and Turkish ships to the Straits in the event of war and on which the two allies had differed, and had now adopted the British position. From the Russian point of view, Principle 3 enabled the British and Americans to have standing navies in the area. On Saturday 3 November, with tensions running high as more Soviet troops were deployed from Czechoslovakia to the borders, the US Ambassador to Turkey Edwin C. Wilson was told to present the new proposals to the Russian Ambassador Sergei Vinogradov. It looked as if the next world war was going to start just months after the close of the last on the visible boundary between Europe and Asia.
A Spy Named Orphan Page 20