When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  It took nearly twenty years after his death for the studies of his role in the famine to emerge. In his final syndicated column, the veteran American political columnist and Cold War hawk Joe Alsop wrote about the condition of the Fourth Estate from which he was retiring. He wrote,

  Duranty, an agreeable man who was a friend of mine, was the foreign correspondent most admired in his time, except by those who had some real ideas of the horrors Joseph Stalin was perpetrating in Russia. Those who seriously reported the horrors, as William Stoneman reported the hideous government-created famine in the Ukraine, did not last very long in Moscow.

  Duranty instead covered up the horrors and deluded an entire generation by prettifying Soviet realities. Hence he was showered with the adulation of American intellectuals who did not want the truth. He was given a Pulitzer Prize. He lived uncommonly comfortably in Moscow, too, by courtesy of the KGB. By deluding an entire American generation, Duranty also did much harm. It makes me angry to remember him, although I liked him.229

  Alsop later remarked to Harrison Salisbury, ‘Duranty was a great KGB agent and lying like a trooper.’230

  Periodically, Duranty’s story has resurfaced, each time with a slightly different angle, and as more information emerged from archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall.231 It has been kept alive by Ukrainian émigré groups which focused attention on the famine; many arguing that it was in fact a genocide, or Holodomor. The story may also have played a part in undermining the evil empire, by focusing attention on past Soviet misdeeds, and showing its leaders’ capacity for ruthless policies and wilful disregard for human suffering.232

  Duranty never completely recanted.

  Is it possible that Soviet officials had a hold over him that ensured his compliance for years afterwards, as some have wondered? Were Katya and their son that pressure point? This seems unlikely as Duranty is not known to have had any contact with either beyond the 1940s; and he was no doting father, by all accounts.

  Or was it simply that he didn’t like being upstaged by a young upstart? Did Jones simply upset the great doyen because he got the story that Duranty missed? It was probably not so simple, as we have seen.

  Yet was the famine cover-up or denial really so unusual? Was it a peculiar creature of its time and circumstances? Many critics would say it was. After all, American journalism prides itself on fearlessly battling for the truth and has uncovered stories like My Lai, Watergate, Iran–Contra and many others that prove it. Its practitioners will not hesitate to reveal stories that are as uncomfortable for US administrations as the Ukrainian famine story would have been for Stalin. Even allowing for the qualifications sometimes made by Project Censored, which claims to be ‘the oldest media watchdog research group in the US with a specific focus on education and media literacy’ and aims to ‘tell the News That Didn’t Make the News and Why’, it is how US journalism likes to see itself.233 But in early February 2013 news broke that the CIA was running a drone base in Saudi Arabia from where it mounted operations against targets in the Arabian Peninsula including Yemen. The news was not so much about the base; after all a base was widely suspected to be located somewhere in the region. Rather the news was that it had been kept secret for two years in a willing collusion between the US media and the US government.234 That came soon after former President Jimmy Carter revealed in the short feature accompanying the DVD release of the Oscar-winning film Argo how he had ‘prevailed’ on editors not to reveal the story of how several American diplomats were rescued from Iran by the CIA.235 The story only became known when President Bill Clinton declassified the files eighteen years later. So, eight decades later the US media may sometimes not report stories which it knows to be accurate, just like Walter Duranty did from Moscow in spring 1933.

  Around the Millennium moves were made to have Duranty posthumously stripped of his Pulitzer Prize, but the prize’s management committee declined, because it said the award had been made for the quality of his 1931 journalism, which predated his famine denials. In November 2006 the Ukrainian Parliament passed a resolution declaring the famine to have been an act of genocide against its people.236 In 2010 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a draft resolution that acknowledged that the famine had been man-made, but did not consider that it was an act of genocide.

  There is a postscript to this story. The West, in 1933 still suffering itself from the effects of the Great Depression – high unemployment, poverty, hunger – had its own problems and they were closer to home; the story was forgotten. But it is the case that Western mouths ate some of the grain that had been taken from the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and elsewhere and exported by Stalin’s Russia – grain that had been sold to earn the precious foreign currency that was needed to buy the machines that would drive forward Russia’s industrial modernisation. To that extent the West was a part of the problem, not just an impartial observer.237

  4

  GUY BURGESS

  For several weeks in May 1944 Guy Burgess set something of a gold standard for conflicts of interest. For most of each working day he was a producer for the BBC, but for two hours a day he was a propagandist for the Foreign Office and he also spied for the Soviet Union.

  The man described by his BBC boss as ‘lazy’ and ‘slipshod’, but with a ‘fertile’ brain, had three different roles and three different employers.

  Two of the employers did at least know about each other. The BBC and the Foreign Office agreed to this unusual combination of journalism and propaganda as part of his transfer from one to the other. Our new research reveals that Burgess got his new job because of his time at the BBC and with the help of a BBC governor who knew about Burgess’s Russian connections and was probably also one of his lovers. Burgess was always living with the risk of arrest for having sex with male friends and strangers. He was also a prodigiously heavy drinker. Yet this was a man whose friends, contacts and sexual partners included some of the most powerful people in the land. Once he settled in at the Foreign Office Burgess would be taking home as many secret documents as he could carry and arranging for them to be photographed for the Russians.

  On 1 May 1944 – the first day of Burgess’s unusual transition – the weather was sunny in London so he would probably have walked from his flat at 5 Bentinck Street to Broadcasting House, a journey of seven minutes. The flat was owned by Victor (later Lord) Rothschild and Burgess shared it with his lover Jack Hewit and his friend and fellow spy Anthony Blunt.238 Victor Rothschild’s future wife Tess, who was also living there when Burgess moved in, had expressed the hope that he wouldn’t ‘bring pick-ups back’ but that was too much to hope.

  As Burgess walked to Broadcasting House passers-by might have noticed a rather ‘dirty and unkempt’ figure and an aroma that combined yesterday’s sweat, last night’s alcohol and this morning’s chewed garlic cloves. At just a shade under six foot and weighing in at twelve stone he would have stood out a little above the average Londoner.

  John Green, one of Burgess’s BBC colleagues, later recalled that he often looked like an eccentric university don or a ‘dirty don’ with ‘filthy habits’. Occasionally taken to task about this, more than once he had agreed to ‘grow up’ and keep his workplace clean, but never seemed to manage it. Something always got in the way.

  Burgess’s time as a journalist is often overlooked and his years at the BBC can appear to be a small career step on the road from Cambridge University to the Foreign Office. But research in the BBC and government files suggests it was much more than that; and information released to us under the Freedom of Information Act shows how. The BBC was his entry point into networks of British society as varied as the political class and the gay underground. It was his invitation to important parties, his passport to official events, his safe haven when other jobs didn’t work out and ultimately the Foreign Office’s rationale for hiring him. Put simply, it was a great way of meeting useful people; and Burgess was good – very good – at meeting useful people.

&
nbsp; It was his time at the BBC which allowed him access to senior politicians such as Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. Some MPs, such as Harold Nicolson and Tom Driberg, became close friends, and many others became close acquaintances. And his circle also included senior civil servants and diplomats, security and intelligence service officials, academics, bankers and journalists. In short, he knew nearly everyone who was ‘anyone’.

  They became key people in his journalism, his espionage and his life. They helped provide insights into official thinking, corroboration of information gained elsewhere, or simply interesting tittle-tattle, much of which he passed around. While this would undoubtedly have been useful for Guy Burgess in developing his career, it would also have been useful for his colleagues in Moscow, who were trying to understand what threat Britain posed to them and their international interests. While some of Guy Burgess’s friends would later desert him after he had defected, a surprising number would remain loyal.

  Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess spent a lifetime making contacts. Born in 1911, the son of a naval commander, he got a head start by being educated with the privileged at the Royal Naval College Dartmouth and later at Eton College before winning a scholarship to read History at Trinity College, Cambridge.

  In 1934, while at Cambridge, Burgess was recruited by the Soviet NKVD – the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – which later became the KGB. Burgess, and his fellow spies Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross, became known as the five ‘Cambridge Spies’.

  The five all came from privileged backgrounds, having attended the best public schools and Cambridge University. All were recruited by the Russians in the mid-1930s and all went on to work within the very heart of the British government machine. Maclean was a high-flying Foreign Office diplomat, Philby became a senior MI6 officer, Cairncross worked first for the Foreign Office and then the Treasury, and Blunt worked for MI5 before becoming the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and an internationally acclaimed art expert. None of the five men was ever arrested or punished; and many of the government’s files on them are still closed.

  The damage which they did lay partly in the sheer volume of secret documents and information that they passed to their friends in Moscow, for their spying careers spanned decades. But part of their significance also lay in the fact that they shook the very foundations of the British Establishment by showing that simply being a member of a socially exclusive class did not mean embracing its values and keeping its secrets. They betrayed not only their country, but also their class.

  In 1951 the deception ended when Burgess, by then a junior British diplomat, and his colleague Donald Maclean fled to Moscow to avoid being arrested as Russian spies. The legacy of those stressful and personally chaotic years was the alcoholism which killed Burgess at the age of fifty-three.

  Dying to volunteer

  Most accounts say that back at Cambridge in 1934, the KGB’s recruiting sergeant at the university had been Dr Arnold Deutsch, a London-based academic who doubled as a Soviet spy. He recruited Philby and, allegedly, twenty-seven other agents in the UK.

  The intelligence historian Christopher Andrew put it rather differently. He wrote that Burgess and his colleagues ‘weren’t so much recruited as dying to volunteer’. In Burgess’s case the eagerness and excitement seems to have been particularly acute.

  Ill health prevented Burgess from taking his final exams and he was awarded what’s known as an aegrotat – an honours degree without classification. So although Burgess’s reputation as a ‘brilliant’ student nearly always preceded him it was never actually tested in an examination. However, Burgess did carry out several months of postgraduate research at Cambridge and this helped to establish his academic reputation.

  Of other work he did after his degree, he was at Conservative Central Office for a time, gave some financial advice to his friend Victor Rothschild’s mother and spent a short period writing articles and practising sub-editing for The Times, for which they thanked him but offered no prospects. In between he worked for an MP, Captain Jack Macnamara, which helped throw up a smokescreen around Burgess’s real politics. The right-wing Conservative MP had good contacts in Nazi Germany and one of Burgess’s friends described him as ‘so far to the right of the Conservative Party that it was quite reasonable to call him a fascist’.239 Working for Macnamara gave Burgess the opportunity to see parliamentary and political papers – including confidential ones – that passed across his desk. It is not difficult to imagine where some of them would end up.

  To say Burgess set about leading a double life in these early years hardly does justice to the multiple layers he created around his persona.

  He worked for the secret service of the Soviet Union, but also ran errands for the secret services of Great Britain, MI5 and MI6. At times he appeared to be a left-winger who visited Russia, and he attended at least one rally in Paris organised by a Communist front. At other times he was a right-winger who had joined the pro-Nazi group the Anglo-German Fellowship, as did his friend Kim Philby.240 The bottom line was that these networks gave him opportunities to meet useful and powerful people who were at the heart of British and European society; and in the process to sparkle.

  Of the many official and unofficial networks he belonged to, two of the most secretive took priority in his life. One was the Comintern, an organisation originally set up in an effort to co-ordinate the activities of Communist parties worldwide and in the process to sustain the Bolshevik revolution. It used a range of aggressive propaganda and espionage activities to achieve its ends.

  The other was what became known as the ‘Homintern’, a nickname given by Sir Maurice Bowra to a homosexual subculture whose members during the 1920s and 1930s were drawn from the rich and powerful of Europe and whose politics embraced all shades of opinion from the far right to the far left.241 Burgess and Captain Macnamara MP were active members of the Homintern. The members developed a lingua franca that enabled them quickly to identify themselves, and were experienced in furtiveness, because their sexual encounters were at that time illegal and, if exposed, completely ruinous to themselves and their families.

  The historian and former diplomat Robert Cecil knew four of the Cambridge spies. Of Burgess he wrote,

  He had been a homosexual, of course, ever since his years at Eton; but he had no feeling of being an outcast, because he lacked all sense of shame. He had no particular wish to change the law on homosexuality; so long as he succeeded in defying it, the risk involved gave an added frisson to his exploits. He fitted excellently into the interlocking circles on the fringes of politics, art, letters and intellectual debate, in which as a younger man he had shone.242

  None of these intriguing activities amounted to a proper job with career prospects.

  In the year or so after leaving Cambridge Burgess’s career had, to say the least, lacked direction, and was hardly what someone with his intellectual gifts might have expected. Whereas some of his contemporaries had seen the great offices of state as suitable targets for their future careers, he seems to have realised that a career in the media would be more fitting to his talents. In November 1935 he got help from the Cambridge University Appointments Board, which recommended him for a job in the BBC Talks Department. Burgess was a man of ‘quite first-rate ability’ who had been ‘through the communist phase’. One of the board’s staff wrote, ‘I do not think he has any particular politics now but I expect they are rather towards the left … He is a somewhat highly-strung fellow, too, but gets on uncommonly well with people, including being notably successful with a number of stupid pupils whom he supervised for his College.’243

  The next month the renowned Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan followed up with a letter to Sir Cecil G. Graves (then the BBC’s controller of programmes), recommending someone who he said ‘would be a great addition to your staff’.

  ‘I believe a young friend of mine, Guy Burgess, late a scholar of Trinity, is applying for a post at the BBC.’ H
e explained that Burgess had been in the running to become a fellow in History but had decided instead, correctly in Trevelyan’s view, that ‘his bent was for the great world – politics, journalism etc etc’.

  Trevelyan’s letter went on, ‘He is a first-rate man, and I advise you if you can to try him. He has passed through the communist measles that so many of our clever young men go through, and is well out of it.’244

  When the BBC took up a reference from Burgess’s tutor at Trinity, J. Barnaby, he too thought Burgess had travelled through Communism to what he called ‘a form of left-wing conservatism’, but significantly, he added, ‘How long that will last I should be sorry to predict’. He found Burgess exceptionally able but highlighted character defects as ‘the faults of a nervy and mercurial temperament’. He concluded that by hiring Burgess the BBC ‘would be taking risks’ but ‘if I were in your place I should think it was worth taking them’.

  Professor George Macaulay Trevelyan may have been the Regius Professor of Modern History but he and his colleagues’ judgement on Burgess’s recovery from an outbreak of ‘communist measles’ could not have been more wrong. Burgess had been a left-wing activist in his final undergraduate year, but his left-wing activism was not some passing student fad.245

  It was to be a year, however, before Burgess would finally enter through the hallowed portals of Broadcasting House. The Cambridge letter-writing campaign finally seemed to have worked.