When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  BBC recruit

  Burgess joined the BBC’s training reserve at the beginning of October 1936.246 His friend Denis Proctor, a principal at the Treasury, and Captain Macnamara vouchsafed for him. For the next three months Burgess would learn basic studio and production skills.

  On 1 January 1937 he became an assistant in the Talks Department, earning £260 per year, but he would not do any talks himself. He was consigned to production rather than presentation or announcing because the BBC had noticed that his diction was bad. He would be firmly positioned on the other side of the microphone.

  Burgess was to spend two spells at the BBC: 1937–38, in which he helped to produce talks, and 1940–44, when he returned for a second stint in a similar role on programmes such as The Week in Westminster.

  ‘Talks’ was an important department in the BBC, accounting for much of the factual programming on the corporation’s only domestic radio station, the BBC National Programme. It was to be a perfect home for Burgess and there to make him feel at home was the senior producer George Barnes, who Burgess just happened to know from his time in Cambridge when he lodged at Barnes’s home. The new recruit seemed to start well. He was asked to help produce programmes such as Keep Fit with Miss Quigley and How Things are Made.

  ‘Brilliantly able, widely-read and with a keen sense of humour he’s delightful company,’ said one of his first appraisals. ‘Has produced some admirable programmes and is always likely to do so when interested.’

  Guy Burgess worked hard on behalf of his various masters. His first year at the BBC provided him with ample opportunities to produce programmes which would expand his circle of influential friends and acquaintances. He produced talks on art given by his friend Anthony Blunt and by personalities such as Professor Hugh Seton-Watson, who taught Russian History at London University, E. H. Carr, the Marxist historian and former diplomat, and Lord Elton, the Oxford historian.

  But, in March 1938 Guy Burgess’s BBC career came to a sudden, if temporary halt when a medical certificate arrived from a doctor in Mayfair.

  ‘Mr Guy Burgess has been to see me this afternoon and I suggest he should have a holiday considering the state of his nerves.’ A BBC official added the note, ‘Mr Burgess is away today. It is not known when he will return.’247

  Three weeks later the same doctor wrote to the BBC requesting a further week off for Burgess. He reported a visit from Burgess’s mother, who had been looking after him in the south of France. ‘She informs me that he is better, but that she did not think him well enough to return just yet. He is still in a very nervous state and suffering from insomnia.’

  Significantly Burgess’s mother wanted to reassure the doctor that ‘he is very sensible and does not go out or touch any alcohol’.

  Burgess’s drinking caused increasing concern to his friends as the years passed. One was Harold Nicolson, a former Foreign Office diplomat, an MP, a writer, a broadcaster and a noted expert on foreign affairs. He was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West.

  Nicolson later confided to his diary, ‘I dined with Guy Burgess. Oh my dear, what a sad, sad thing this constant drinking is! Guy used to have one of the most rapid and active minds I knew.’

  Nicolson knew of Burgess’s active and presumably more sober mind from the time when they first met in the mid-1930s – they were already dining companions by March 1936 when they had shared a dinner with John Maynard Keynes. A study of Nicolson’s unpublished diaries reveals the extent to which the two men enjoyed one another’s company. It paints a very different picture to the infrequent meetings and social occasions hinted at by the published ones. Some friends believed the Burgess–Nicolson relationship was also sexual – it was even suggested that Burgess ‘procured friends’ for Nicolson. Hints from the unpublished diaries suggest that they were correct.

  There are other accounts of gay gatherings in Whitehall, some of them hosted by Tom Wylie, the private secretary to the Minister at the War Office, that show their close social acquaintance. In what seem to have been remarkably risky circumstances, Burgess and Nicolson attended one of these on the night in 1936 when Burgess first met the person who would soon become his most regular lover, Jack Hewit.

  Professional relationship

  The professional relationship between Harold Nicolson and Guy Burgess began to develop at the BBC in 1938, when they worked closely together on a series of weekly talks called The Past Week.

  For the month of September 1938, which led up to the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler, the programme was to be the cause of a polite but nonetheless intense battle between the BBC and Nicolson, as they tried to agree on what should and could be said on the air about Hitler, Nazi Germany and the prospects of war. The BBC, aware that the government was keeping a very close eye on its programmes, reflected the dominant media mood of the time, which was that war with Germany was to be avoided at all cost.248 Nicolson was one of the MPs arguing for a more resolute response to Hitler. Burgess seems to have stayed out of it, leaving his BBC boss and former landlord George Barnes to do battle with his friend and ‘lover’ Harold Nicolson over the broadcast of The Past Week. The talk scheduled for 5 September 1938 was particularly problematic. The Foreign Office were not happy with what Nicolson was proposing to say.

  George Barnes decided that the script which Nicolson had submitted should be passed on to a senior official at the Foreign Office, the head of its News Department, Rex Leeper. He was so concerned about what happened next that he wrote a note for the file, setting out an hour-by-hour account. An extract from the note gives a flavour of what transpired:

  3.30 p.m. Mr Leaper [sic] telephoned to say that ‘the Foreign Office cannot take any responsibility for Mr Nicolson’s script as submitted and that in the view of the gravity of the situation, and of the pace at which it is changing, the Foreign Office would prefer no talk at all on that subject was broadcast tonight’. I asked if this was an instruction. He replied that the Foreign Office could not instruct the BBC on a matter like this, but that the recommendation was very strong.249

  Nicolson himself was angry at the cuts Barnes was suggesting under pressure from the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. He initially suggested the whole talk be cancelled, which alarmed Barnes. But then he agreed to re-write it.

  Barnes’s note for the file recorded, ‘I returned to Broadcasting House and arranged with the announcer and Mr Lidell, who was on duty, to be ready to fade out Mr Nicolson’s talk if in my opinion, he departed too far from his script.

  ‘I met Mr Nicolson at 9.30 and he produced a third script which was, in my opinion, innocuous. As he did not wish me to remain I left him at 9.55 p.m.’

  Modern-day producers handling a sensitive programme would find it extraordinary that a producer would not be present for a live broadcast because the presenter ‘did not wish me to remain’. Perhaps even more extraordinary is that at one point the producer planned to leave it to an announcer, even one as experienced as Alvar Lidell, to fade out the speaker if he didn’t keep to the script.

  The broadcast went ahead, but BBC executives later admitted to themselves that it sounded as if it had been censored. However, like true English gentlemen Barnes and Nicolson set about trying to restore relations in time for the next programme.

  Nicolson wrote, ‘My dear Barnes, I feel I owe you an apology for having been so ill-tempered last night. The fact is that I had been working on that beastly talk all afternoon and that I was appalled at the thought of having to do it all over again.’

  For Guy Burgess it must have been something of a relief that this battle between his two friends seemed to have been resolved so politely without The Past Week ever going off the air. But soon he was involved in a new row at Broadcasting House.

  At the end of November 1938 he told Nicolson that he was incensed that following a request from the Chamberlain government the BBC had cancelled a talk due to be given by a serving admiral in a series which Burgess was producing about the Mediterranean. When Bu
rgess told Nicolson that he was going to resign from the BBC, Nicolson tried to calm him down and advocated reflection, but Burgess went ahead and resigned anyway.

  Career change

  However, the reason given for his departure from the BBC in the corporation’s files is that ‘MI’, Military Intelligence, had asked for Burgess to be seconded to work on propaganda at the War Office but the BBC refused so he resigned and left the corporation. This looks to be the more likely explanation. Working at the BBC Talks Department had been a good career move for Burgess and an opportunity to meet a range of important people across public life and gather information that was of potential use to both the programme-makers at the BBC and the spymasters at the KGB, as well as his informal contacts at MI5 and MI6.

  Just before he left the BBC he had met Winston Churchill for the first time to ask him to do a talk for the Mediterranean series.250 Churchill was then a Conservative backbencher and the leading opponent of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. He told Burgess he had been ‘muzzled’ by the BBC before and he imagined he would be even more muzzled as the BBC seemed to be under the control of the government. Burgess sought to reassure him that the Foreign Office merely saw the scripts in advance.251 Nothing came of Burgess’s programme proposal but he committed brief details to a BBC memorandum soon afterwards.252

  The meeting was one that clearly made an impact on him, as he later made a tape recording about it, of which a transcript was finally released a few years ago. It reveals that an intellectually restless Burgess could occasionally jump ahead of his own narrative:

  Anyhow, having finished discussing Munich Week with Mr Churchill I left his house and got into my car outside, and I have forgotten to mention that before doing that he had trotted out of the room and he said: ‘I’ll leave you but I’ll return’, and he did return in about a minute and a half bearing a volume, and he said, ‘Mr Burgess … before you leave me I would wish that you accept this – my speeches.’253

  But useful as his work at the BBC had been in providing opportunities for Burgess to meet leading politicians like Churchill and collect books of their speeches, his Soviet controllers must have thought that as the prospect of war between Britain and Germany grew there must be organisations that would be even more fruitful places of work.

  Coming at such a crucial time in international politics, and undoubtedly helped by his efforts on behalf of the British intelligence services, a move to ‘MI’ (Military Intelligence) could be his entry into a network of much greater interest to Burgess’s colleagues in Moscow than the BBC. It was his – and their – reader’s ticket to secret official documents and his passport to gatherings at which important secret information would be exchanged.

  The KGB files record that from December 1938 Burgess had managed to get himself into Section D of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, which is confirmed by files in the National Archives.254 Section D had been established early in 1938 by a military swashbuckling type, Major Lawrence Grand, to devise dirty tricks and to develop psychological warfare.255 An internal history says that recruitment ‘was on a personal basis … and was not altogether inappropriate for a small organisation working in extreme secrecy’.256

  Some sources say that Burgess was recruited by MI6 via one of its senior officers, David Footman. Again it appeared that a BBC connection had been useful. The two men had first met in 1937 when Burgess produced a talk on Albania given by Footman, who was then the deputy head of MI6’s political intelligence department. It has also been suggested that Burgess had performed some clandestine intelligence work for Footman while still working for the BBC during the months leading up to the 1938 Munich crisis;257 and at the same time KGB files reveal that he was also performing valuable clandestine work for his friends in Moscow.

  One of Section D’s great wartime successes came during the German invasion on the Netherlands in 1940 when its operatives managed to seize ‘the bulk of Amsterdam’s industrial diamond stocks’ and spirit them to England.258

  During Burgess’s time in Section D he acted as an MI6 representative on something called the Joint Broadcasting Committee (JBC), which was based at 71 Chester Square in London. This was conveniently located since it was a matter of yards from the flat in which he was living at the time. Here in rather tense meetings BBC executives, jealously protecting their role as the nation’s only broadcaster, met the MI6 officials who were transmitting their own anti-Hitler broadcasts to Germany from radio stations in mainland Europe, including Radio Luxembourg, which the British government secretly owned. They were aiming to extend their network of radio stations into Liechtenstein and former BBC producer Guy Burgess now found himself involved in trying to set this up. And there at the JBC to offer advice was its director, the former BBC director of talks Hilda Matheson, and among the other board members, the ubiquitous Harold Nicolson.

  In the symmetry which seems such a constant characteristic of the whole Burgess saga, Matheson had been instrumental in launching Harold Nicolson’s career as a broadcaster in 1930 and went on to have a lesbian relationship with his wife Vita Sackville-West. So it is just possible that two JBC board members, Burgess and Nicolson, were sleeping together, while another, Hilda Matheson, was sleeping with Nicolson’s wife.

  Among Burgess’s other work he devised and ran a course at a training establishment at Brickendonbury in Hertfordshire, where sabotage was taught.

  Burgess had also been involved in abortive sabotage plans against the Germans. He was told to travel to Moscow to organise things with Soviet organisations. As a cover the Foreign Office and MI6 organised for him and an Oxford friend, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, to travel as couriers carrying diplomatic bags. Foreign Office diplomat Gladwyn Jebb and Harold Nicolson, who was by then a junior minister in the Ministry of Information, had helped with the arrangements. The safer long way round via America and Japan had been advised. But Berlin and Burgess never got to Russia. They got as far as Washington when the plan was scrapped and Burgess was ordered home. Berlin was left to make his own way back. Berlin ‘later believed that someone in British Intelligence, perhaps Victor Rothschild, decided that Burgess was too unreliable … to be trusted and had him recalled’. But apparently it was Victor’s sister, Miriam Rothschild, then in Washington, horrified to find Burgess on such a mission, who warned Frederick Hoyer Millar, a senior diplomat at the British embassy. He cabled London and Burgess was recalled.259 A couple of weeks after returning Burgess saw Harold Nicolson, who recorded in his diary, ‘He is still determined to get in touch with the Comintern and use them to create disorders in occupied territory.’260

  But there was trouble ahead for Burgess in MI6.

  In the autumn of 1940 Section D of MI6 was merged with SOE, the Special Operations Executive, which was created to conduct guerrilla operations against the enemy, often through local resistance fighters.

  By the end of 1940 Burgess had apparently been sacked just a few months short of his thirtieth birthday for ‘irreverence’, or what is more likely to have been insubordination. Gladwyn Jebb (later, Lord Gladwyn) later took credit for weeding Burgess out, feeling ‘he was quite extraordinarily dissolute and indiscreet and certainly unfitted for any kind of confidential work’.261 But it did not appear to prevent Jebb and Burgess from meeting socially during the war.

  Burgess’s departure from Section D is confirmed by an oblique reference in an SOE file in the National Archives, which has been found by Jeff Hulbert. There is a list of people who had ‘been given their conge [sic; the sack]’. It continues, ‘There will be others to come – probably two or three more, including one BURGESS, who is now employed in the school.’262

  Having got the congé from MI6 and with no regular remuneration from Moscow for his work for the KGB, and moreover no position that could be useful to them, Burgess desperately needed a job.

  A new job…

  He headed back to the only other place which had ever employed him, the BBC. But he needed a story to expla
in why he had suddenly become available. The BBC bureaucracy seemed to swallow it.

  I understand that there has been some re-organisation in the M.I. branch where he was employed, and that by agreement with his chief Burgess can be – in fact has been – released from his duties and is free to start work with the ‘Corporation’.

  Mr W. R. Baker of the BBC’s ‘General Establishment Office’ could hardly believe his luck.

  It seems that an experienced member of the BBC Talks Department in London had been transferred to the Midland Region and Baker had to help fill the vacancy ‘at the first possible moment’. Burgess had

  considerable and successful experience with us previously on the preparation and production of Talks and it will be a very great advantage indeed to us to retain his services indefinitely on the same type of work.263

  Once again he seems to have found an opening that he could exploit for the benefit of all of his masters. There was just the small problem of avoiding Burgess being called up for military service. Baker pulled out all the stops in a letter to the Ministry of Information.

  We are extremely fortunate in finding that Burgess is available to resume his previous occupation with us, subject to our being able to secure his reservation from military service … We shall be extremely grateful for any steps you can take to enable us to retain the services of Burgess.264

  The authorities were soon to get another request that Burgess should not be called up. Burgess may have been let go by MI6 but he had friends in MI5, Britain’s counter-espionage agency, and they gave him the code-name VAUXHALL.265 MI5’s recruiting sergeant was none other than Anthony Blunt, whom Burgess had helped recruit as a Soviet spy, whose broadcasting career Burgess had launched, and whose flatmate he was about to become. We are told that in the security service archives is a document in which Blunt wrote, ‘Burgess has been working for us and has done extremely valuable work – principally the running of two very important agents who he discovered and took on. It would therefore be a great pity if he were called up.’266 It is not hard to imagine that Burgess and Blunt had cooked up this request.