When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Given such unusual circumstances as the BBC and MI6 both applying to the War Office to keep Burgess in London, it is perhaps understandable that in Moscow Centre they sometimes wondered if all this was too good to be true. The information coming back from Burgess, Blunt and Philby was so voluminous, so good and so consistent that it seemed highly plausible that they were in fact double agents and the KGB was the victim of a massive plant by the British. It seems that Moscow’s strong suspicions endured for a couple of years, although it is likely that the Cambridge Five themselves never realised that they were under suspicion. But whatever Moscow’s suspicions the ‘Cambridge Spies’ carried on spying.267

  When he re-joined BBC radio in 1940 Guy Burgess became a producer on the weekly political discussion programme The Week in Westminster. He was responsible for timing the scripts, editing them, nominating, preparing and evaluating speakers as well as being knowledgeable about parliamentary activities and issues.

  He realised the broadcasting potential of politicians such as Douglas Houghton, John Strachey and Hector McNeil, for whom he was later to work at the FO. Sixty-five years later, Stella Rimington, a former head of MI5, described a list of the programme’s participants while Burgess was the producer, with more than a hint of incredulity in her voice, as containing ‘everyone under the sun’.

  As a part of his work on The Week in Westminster Burgess was required to develop his political contacts within Parliament, part of which had decamped to Church House after the Palace of Westminster had been damaged by bombing. But it was not all his own work. Burgess was able to call on the support and assistance of his friend Harold Nicolson, particularly after the latter left the Ministry of Information and became a governor of the BBC.

  Burgess produced over a hundred Week in Westminster programmes between 1941 and 1944. He drew on a relatively small pool of MPs, a number of who appeared several times. The MPs were selected in consultation with Burgess’s bosses at the BBC, the party whips and the Ministry of Information. But Harold Nicolson’s unpublished diaries reveal that the pair sometimes discussed the programme and potential speakers during Nicolson’s visits to Broadcasting House for governors’ meetings, or over a drink after they had finished.

  For instance, Nicolson and Burgess discussed recommending the only Communist MP, Willie Gallacher, as a speaker.268 When proposed, the other parties agreed because Gallacher was a good speaker, knew the rules and played the game.

  Megan Lloyd George MP (Independent Liberal) topped the list with sixteen appearances and was considered to be one of the best performers. Lord Hailsham later recalled from his five appearances as Quintin Hogg MP that Burgess was ‘a brisk, intelligent and professional producer. If he was a little given to drink and plying his customers with drink, well that was all right.’269 Lord Thorneycroft told the House of Lords in 1989 that during his four appearances as Captain Thorneycroft MP he got to know Burgess ‘very well’. He said Burgess ‘was employed to collect young men from both parties in Parliament … He knew everyone very well … He was considered ideal in that particular world.’270

  But Burgess was not only a busy producer. Word got around that he was someone who had views that were worth hearing. In June 1942 the Leader of the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Cripps, who was an early advocate of planning for the post-war world, invited several BBC producers, MPs and others to dinner so that he could hear their views. Guy Burgess joined his BBC colleagues Eric Blair (George Orwell) and William Empson, together with Harold Nicolson, and Labour peer Lord Winster.

  It may not have been quite the sparkling occasion that Burgess was used to, however. Orwell recorded in his diary: ‘Spent a long evening with Cripps (who had expressed a desire to meet some literary people) … About 2½ hours of it, with nothing to drink. The usual inconclusive discussion. Cripps, however, very human and willing to listen.’271

  Burgess’s gregarious nature helped him establish good relations with MPs. But there were other avenues open to him as well. Over three-quarters of the way through his stint on the programme he told the BBC that he had access to a private dining club and asked his boss and old friend, George Barnes, whether the BBC would foot the bill for him and his guests, who might be fellow producers: £2 a head, 10 shillings for food and 30 shillings for drink. Barnes managed to suppress his alarm and dampened it down by insisting on a drinks bill of a few shillings. Wine would be off the menu.272

  As well as producing The Week in Westminster Burgess was responsible for around 250 other radio programmes, including one that was a prototype for a genre that became known as ‘consumer affairs’. Called Can I Help You?, and fronted by Professor John Hilton, the weekly programme aired many public issues but also helped publicise government advice and information campaigns including, crucially, how to fill out daunting and unfamiliar official forms. Its ‘Kitchen Front’ features were presented by Aileen Furse, who went on to become the second Mrs Kim Philby. Working on the programme seems to have given Guy Burgess ready access to the many ministers and their civil servants who were actively battling on the home front. But potentially just as significantly the programme attracted thousands of letters from listeners seeking the solutions to problems in their daily wartime lives. In the early days of opinion polls and mass observation surveys it would have given Burgess and Moscow an unrivalled independent insight into British civilian morale. A sister programme for the armed forces prompted a similarly valuable postbag, this time from the military front line.

  Sometimes Burgess’s ideas would be intended to please both his masters – the BBC and the KGB – and maybe his friends in MI5 as well. David Graham, a BBC colleague, later recalled how in 1941 Burgess proposed that the corporation should have

  an informed diplomatic correspondent who would have an office with, of course, a locked door in Broadcasting House; and the Foreign Office would then send diplomatic telegrams so that the diplomatic correspondent could be properly informed and tell the responsible news people and comments people within the BBC what was going on.

  With hindsight Graham realised Burgess’s real motives:

  The implication was quite clearly that Burgess would be the man. Now if, of course, he had been the diplomatic correspondent and had had a locked room inside Broadcasting House which he could have stayed in after office hours and maybe photographed (if he had been taught how) or certainly written down the words of transcribed cipher telegrams, this, as we now know, would have been of first class use to some other people he was in touch with outside office hours at the Soviet embassy.273

  Nothing came of this proposal from Burgess but other ideas were embraced enthusiastically.

  In June 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and within days the British Empire and the USSR were allies. Sir Richard Maconachie, the director of talks, invited suggestions from talks producers for programmes that would support the new alliance. Soon afterwards Burgess wrote a memo entitled ‘Draft Suggestions for Talks on Russia’. In it he recommended Dr Anthony Blunt for talks on Soviet art, noting that he was not a Communist, but also suggested talks by Dr Christopher Hill, the expert on Russian history, who, he acknowledged, was a Communist.

  Helpfully, Burgess knew Peter Smollett, the head of the Ministry of Information’s Soviet Department and an occasional BBC broadcaster himself. During the war Smollett’s team at the ministry helped to organise official British government pro-Russia rallies – including one in the Royal Albert Hall. They also had a hand in BBC radio programmes about Russian themes. Thirty such programmes were broadcast to British listeners in October 1943 alone.

  Burgess and Smollett seemed to work well together in the cause of promoting partnership with the Soviets, which may partly be explained by the fact that Smollett was later revealed to be a Soviet spy as well.274 He had been watched by Special Branch since the late 1930s but was never prosecuted and continued to work for the Ministry of Information as the head of its Russian Department until mid-1945, when he returned to journalism.

 
The Smollett connection may also have been involved in helping with what sounds like an unusual challenge which Burgess had been set by his Moscow masters. According to Anthony Blunt, Moscow had at one time tasked Burgess with wooing Clarissa Churchill, the Prime Minister’s niece, so that he could get close to Winston Churchill. As Blunt told it, Burgess was initially horrified, but then declared himself ready for the challenge.275

  Jeff Hulbert has discovered that for a time Clarissa Churchill worked as a research assistant for Smollett at the Ministry of Information. Each month Smollett’s department produced a glossy newsletter for Russia called Britanskiy Soyuznik. One very brief memorandum, dated 2 August 1942, refers to the departure of a member of the staff: ‘Miss Clarissa Churchill will not come back and we shall therefore be grateful if you can recommend another research assistant to work in Britanskiy Soyuznik,’ Smollett wrote.276 There is no mention of this episode in Clarissa Churchill’s memoirs.

  According to intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, probably Burgess’s most remarkable coup within the BBC, on behalf of the NKVD, was to arrange for a talk on the Eastern Front in January 1942 by a man called Ernst Henri, who was later revealed as another Soviet spy. Henri told listeners that the Soviet armed forces would triumph and used the occasion to reassure everyone, including Soviet moles, that the Soviet intelligence services were ‘among the best in the world’.277

  Warning signs

  Burgess was clearly having some success on both fronts – the BBC and the KGB. But, perhaps inevitably given Burgess’s complicated life, the staff files at Broadcasting House in London and KGB headquarters in Moscow began to fill up with warning signs.

  The first followed an incident just across the road from Broadcasting House at the Langham Hotel. Burgess had wanted to collect some papers from his room, but had found the way barred by a locked door. So he tried to smash it open. In May 1941 a security official wrote,

  I found that the door of Room 316 had been damaged in an attempt to force it open by using a fire extinguisher, the contents of which were spread all over the carpet outside … The whole incident was most unsatisfactory, and I must add uncalled for.

  Burgess was, perhaps, a little the worse for wear and had the distinct scent of alcohol on his breath. He had become angry with the security staff, had been arrogant and somewhat abusive.

  Four days later Burgess wrote a fulsome, if pompous and sarcastic, report about the incident. ‘I am extremely sorry that any individual should feel injured by the manner in which I raised the question of getting into my room at the Langham Hotel to remove some urgently necessary papers last Thursday. Also that the Department should in any way be injured by this.’278

  In January 1943 it was his expenses that began to catch the eye of BBC administrators. A Mr O. Thompson felt unable to certify Burgess’s expenses sheet. ‘His office hours are very flexible – he is rarely here before 10.45 a.m. since he reads his papers and Hansards at home and spends most of the day out of the office making contacts.’

  Then it was the issue of why Burgess always travelled first class. He argued he had ‘successfully established the principle’ and saw no reason why he ‘should alter my practice when on BBC business particularly when I am in my best clothes to attend a Service’. Dragged into the row the head of the department, his old friend the long-suffering George Barnes, decided ‘there is no case for Mr Burgess travelling first class’.

  On 20 April 1943 the administrative officer (Home) at the BBC, G. J. B. Allport, wrote a memo to the controller of the Home Service headed ‘Guy Burgess and the Week in Westminster’. His main concern was the money Burgess was spending in the parliamentary bar and his practice of lending out BBC secretaries to do typing for MPs. ‘We shall soon get a bad name at the Treasury.’

  I cannot believe that it is not possible to do business with responsible MPs except at the bar. You will notice that the same names crop up fairly frequently, Quintin Hogg, D R Grenfell etc., while there is almost continual entertaining to Lobby correspondents.

  Allport concluded, ‘I do not know whether it is my business to say this, but I feel someone will be asking before long whether it would be better to have a rather older person in charge of this series.’279

  Meanwhile the KGB’s files show the pressure getting to Burgess in increasingly alarming ways, culminating in his plan to become Burgess the assassin.

  Sometime in 1938 he had been instrumental in recruiting a friend, a former Oxford fellow and author, Goronwy Rees. According to records later released by the KGB Rees was a relatively short-lived agent. However, Rees knew that Burgess had been a KGB agent and also knew, through Burgess, about one of the other members of the Cambridge Five, Anthony Blunt. In Burgess’s view this made Rees a serious risk to him. Over succeeding years Rees – by then serving in Military Intelligence – and Burgess remained good friends. But suspicion seems to have continued to gnaw at Burgess. Four years later – 1943 – Burgess twice raised the issue with his KGB controller, on one occasion asking for permission to have Rees assassinated; and on another, offering to do the job himself as he had been responsible for the predicament in the first place. Moscow sought to calm Burgess’s anxieties and concluded that an assassination was not necessary.280 Rees, a wartime intelligence officer, only confided his knowledge about Burgess to MI5 after Burgess had fled in 1951.281 Rees never knew that his friend had wanted to have him assassinated and continued to see Burgess socially until the latter’s defection. The assassination plans didn’t prevent Burgess enjoying dinner with Rees and Harold Nicolson one evening in January 1944.282

  Even though Burgess was working six days a week, twelve hours a day in his day job, he still managed to find such opportunities to relax with friends in convivial company when not engaged in spare-time MI5 work. Apart from dinners with Harold Nicolson in fashionable places such as the Café Royal he also met friends in less salubrious places, the West End clubs and drinking dens. One favourite haunt was the Gargoyle Club, described by the art collector and aesthete Harold Acton as ‘a dinner and dance-club with paintings by Matisse hung on the walls’. The habitués included Acton, Noel Coward, Augustus John, Harold Nicolson and Guy Burgess. Several times in the summer of 1942 Harold Nicolson, Guy Burgess and others went on to the club after first dining elsewhere. One evening, so the club’s historian records, Burgess asked the painter John Craxton if he would like to go back with him to his flat. ‘Would you like to be whipped – a wild thrashing? Wine thrown in?’ The painter, reportedly terrified, was saved by the writer Philip Toynbee.283 Acton wrote waspishly about Burgess, whom he loosely described as one of the ‘parlour pinks who talked as if nothing could be worse than the freedom they enjoyed to damn the government and the old order who had given them that freedom’. Of these he singled out Burgess:

  The most vindictive of these was Guy Burgess … though nobody could have been less diplomatic. Brian [Howard]284 confided to me that his equipment was gargantuan – ‘what is known as a whopper, my dear’ – which might account for his success in certain ambiguous quarters.285

  Recruitment

  27 March 1944 must have been a busy time in the office of the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan. Apart from running the Foreign Office, which was at full stretch with a global war, he was a highly regarded diplomat who travelled with Churchill to meet Stalin and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But on the 27th Sir Alexander found time to write to the director-general of the BBC, R.W. Foot, with a request for the transfer of a relatively junior member of the BBC’s staff.

  Dear Foot,

  I am writing to ask if you would be good enough to consider the release from employment in your Corporation of Mr Guy Burgess, for service in our News Department.

  Cadogan explained that the calls on this department were becoming extremely heavy, that they’d recently had to release two members to other work and he wanted to fill the vacancies.

  I understand that Mr Burgess of your Talks Department
is interested in this vacancy and from our point of view he would be well qualified to fill it. I fully appreciate that he is doing most valuable work with the British Broadcasting Corporation and I fear that his release may inconvenience you. But as I have said our own need is great, and we should therefore be most grateful if you could see your way to facilitate his transfer to us.

  This was the letter that set in train a series of events that culminated in one of the most embarrassing episodes in the history of the British Foreign Office. As Lady Bracknell might have observed in an Oscar Wilde play, ‘To lose one diplomat defecting to the Russians may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’

  Cadogan’s letter seemed to us to merit further investigation. For instance, given that Burgess was not a senior figure in the BBC hierarchy and Sir Alexander Cadogan was very senior in the Foreign Office, was it really necessary to make such a high level intervention as a personal letter to the director-general of the BBC? By contrast we found other examples of transfers between the two organisations resolved at a much lower level.

  We drew up a list of questions and Jeff Hulbert set to work in the archives.

  Why the hurry to hire Burgess?

  Why did it require a request from ‘Perm Sec F.O’ to ‘D.G. B.B.C’?

  And perhaps, most significantly, why Burgess in particular?

  It was relatively easy to establish why someone extra was needed in the Foreign Office News Department. With a war waging in Europe and the Far East there were incessant enquiries from the world’s press who were eager for news and keen to check facts. As Cadogan explained in the letter, the News Department were two people down because of transfers out, and so needed replacements.