When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  Documents in the BBC’s Written Archive and others released to us by the Foreign Office under the Freedom of Information Act show that Burgess was on three months’ notice and the Foreign Office badly wanted him to begin working for them sooner. Cadogan said as much to Foot when he wrote about staff shortages; and he was a big enough gun to convince Foot that he really meant business.

  But why Burgess? How did Cadogan even know he existed? This is where the story gets more interesting and intriguing. Not surprisingly, the Foreign Office has never been very keen to reveal why they were so eager to hire a Russian spy from the BBC. They have told us that their file on Cadogan’s letter and related matters can no longer be found and may have been lost or destroyed at some point.

  So we took a twin-track approach, searching archives which were already in the public domain, but also requesting the release of other secret Foreign Office papers under the Freedom of Information Act.

  The first route took Jeff Hulbert to the private papers of the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. There he found that the name Guy Burgess cropped up within the innermost circles of the Foreign Office. So too did Harold Nicolson’s. In addition, the head of the Foreign Office News Department, by then William Ridsdale, was familiar because he had been a member of the small team since 1919.

  What lay behind these documents in the Eden archive was a debate which his officials were already having in 1943 with an eye to a post-war world. One area that was considered especially important was a future strategy for Britain’s public relations and propaganda needs. Sir Alexander Cadogan asked his senior staff for ideas and William Ridsdale put forward some first thoughts.286 A while later he wrote to his bosses that ‘the BBC feel – quite properly in my view – that they are not catering adequately in the Home Service for that large section of their public who are interested in international affairs…’287 He suggested that the BBC should broadcast regular talks on foreign affairs using a small panel of ‘expert’ speakers who would prepare the British and Empire audiences for the return to peacetime politics and international diplomacy. Among the names he suggested was W. N. Ewer of the Daily Herald (see Chapter 2).

  Two days after his memo was sent, a handwritten comment appeared on the manuscript: ‘I think this is a good plan. But see the marginal notes and please speak.’ It is initialled AE (Anthony Eden) and dated 9 May 1943. Soon afterwards Eden’s principal private secretary, Oliver Harvey, added a comment about ensuring a fair balance between the political right and left.

  A few days later Ridsdale wrote back to Harvey, revealing that Eden’s office had suggested that Harold Nicolson would be an ideal figure for handling the job.288 However, Ridsdale told Harvey there was a slight problem: namely that BBC governors didn’t broadcast, under what he termed a ‘self-denying ordinance’. But moves were soon made to get the BBC’s wartime boss, Minister of Information Brendan Bracken, to agree to waive the restriction.

  Harold Nicolson must have seemed an obvious name for Eden’s office to put forward. He was essentially an insider who was a safe pair of hands: a former Foreign Office diplomat, an MP, a former junior minister, a writer, a broadcaster and a noted expert on foreign affairs. But he was also an insider known to Eden himself. Nicolson’s wartime diaries record how closely he worked and associated with Eden’s inner circle and in April 1943, at Eden’s behest, he agreed to help reduce the department’s workload and later became one-third of a Foreign Office retirement board that was tasked with helping rid the department of unwanted diplomats. So Nicolson had all the qualities that Ridsdale’s plan required. Between May and November little more seems to have happened to take the proposal forward, but late in December 1943 Ridsdale wrote a memorandum suggesting that with the end of the war now looking a little more certain, perhaps it was time to dust off his plan and move it forward. At the turn of the year, and with Cadogan’s approval, Ridsdale invited the BBC to lunch to discuss how the proposal could be brought back to life. His note of that meeting, which is dated 10 January 1944, includes the sentence ‘I saw Mr George Barnes, Director of Talks, and his colleague Mr Guy Burgess.’289

  ‘I like these ideas’

  A manuscript note initialled by Cadogan shows that he read it on 11 January 1944 and Eden wrote, ‘I like these ideas,’ signing off Ridsdale’s note, with its mention of Guy Burgess, on 15 January.290

  On 26 January 1944 Ridsdale had telephoned Nicolson about the proposal for him to begin educating the British public about post-war foreign affairs. A week later, on 2 February 1944, Nicolson’s unpublished diary records that Ridsdale and Nicolson met over lunch at the Moulin d’Or restaurant to discuss the proposal in more detail.291

  Crucially, Guy Burgess was also at the lunch. We know from Nicolson’s unpublished diaries that in the eighteen months before Burgess started working at the Foreign Office the pair had met at least twenty-six times socially – either for drinks after BBC meetings, or for lunch or dinner.

  Reviewing the evidence so far showed that it was Eden’s office that had suggested Nicolson for a job; was it now Nicolson who in turn suggested Burgess for a job over lunch with the F.O?

  Nicolson’s role in Burgess’s appointment was indeed confirmed by files released to us by the Foreign Office in the spring of 2013. One secret internal document says:

  In March 1944, Burgess was invited by Mr Ridsdale, then head of the News Department in the Foreign Office, to fill a vacancy in that department. He had apparently been recommended to Mr Ridsdale by Mr Harold Nicolson, among others.292

  So when Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote to the BBC asking for Burgess it was not just some letter that he had been asked to sign as Permanent Secretary. It was a request for someone whose name and potential usefulness he already knew about from internal documents. After all the man had been recommended by someone close to the Foreign Secretary himself.

  It is not easy to overstate the importance of the decision to recruit Burgess, given what is now known about the scale of damage that Burgess the spy wreaked once he got into the Foreign Office. One of Cadogan’s successors later compounded that mistake by engineering a permanent post for Burgess.293 There was no attempt to vet him. At least two very senior diplomats, Frederick Hoyer Millar and Gladwyn Jebb, had previously acted to get rid of Burgess in 1940: once when he was stopped from travelling to Moscow, and the other when he was sacked from Section D. Yet when he got into the Foreign Office in 1944 they kept quiet about him. Vetting might have revealed that Burgess had also applied for a job with MI5, but had been turned down. That service was at least suspicious of his reliability but the reservations do not seem to have been passed on to the Foreign Office. This was a pity, because at the time MI5 reported personally to Anthony Eden, the minister responsible for the organisation.294

  Having received Burgess’s resignation from the BBC, his boss there, George Barnes, tried to persuade him to stay by offering him the chance to produce a new Foreign Affairs series.295 This didn’t work and the BBC formally accepted his resignation with one small note of protest from an official who handwrote, ‘If he has resigned there is nothing more to be done but FO ought not to have offered him a post without our agreement.’

  There then began a negotiation about when Burgess could leave. Burgess came up with the idea that ‘it should be possible for me to continue to do work for both departments while I am learning my job at the Foreign Office’. How convenient.

  So on 1 May 1944, with both parties agreed, Guy Burgess stepped out of his flat and into the London sunshine to make his way to the BBC, to do a morning’s work, secure in the knowledge that he would be able to keep every one of his many employers happy.

  Within weeks of arriving in Whitehall Burgess ‘regularly filled a large holdall with Foreign Office documents, some of them highly classified, and took them to be photographed by the NKVD’, according to one Russian archive. One KGB officer, Yuri Modin, complained that there were only three KGB officers available to handle the top-secret intelligence that was ‘pouri
ng in’ from the Cambridge spies and other agents in Britain.

  It would ultimately have been either Ridsdale or his boss, Ivo Mallet, who gave Burgess permission to take Foreign Office documents home just a few weeks after he joined the staff. Ostensibly intended to help him cope with his new and heavy burden, the decision led to a vast increase in the KGB’s workload. But it was not entirely secret because on at least one occasion Harold Nicolson’s diary records that he was shown a number of confidential Foreign Office telegrams ‘exchanged with Moscow’ while having dinner with Guy Burgess. Nicolson never raised an eyebrow.296

  The KGB’s files reveal that within eighteen months of joining the Foreign Office Burgess had passed over 4,400 files to his Soviet colleagues. Memoirs also record the newest recruit to the News Department ‘gazing dreamily out of the window across the Horse Guards Parade…’

  The first chill winds of the Cold War were making themselves felt and it was the start of a lacklustre career inside the Foreign Office which culminated in his appointment in 1950 as a temporary second secretary at the British embassy in Washington.

  In 1951 Burgess was sacked for drunkenness and insulting behaviour. One final straw was his involvement in a chain of driving incidents in Virginia in which he claimed diplomatic immunity both for himself and his American companion. Once the state Governor had reported the details to the British ambassador, Burgess was sent home to London in disgrace, although he found time to spend almost two weeks in farewell visits and then sailing home on the Queen Mary. Within a matter of days of his return he and fellow Cambridge spy Donald Maclean had absconded to Moscow fearing arrest as Russian spies.

  Five years later, in February 1956, Burgess and Maclean made their first public appearance in Moscow, confirming that they had been in Russia since their disappearance. They issued a joint statement which denied in remarkably bald and unconvincing terms that they had ever been spies. Specifically it said of Burgess that ‘neither in the BBC nor in the Foreign Office nor during the period that he was associated with the secret service did he make any secret from his friends or his colleagues either of his views or of the fact that he had been a Communist’.297

  The statement prompted letters from MPs to the Foreign Office about how they had recruited him from the BBC if he was such an open Communist. One MP asked, ‘Was he taken on by the Foreign Office without reference or recommendation from the BBC?’

  Civil servants were put to work drafting a reply.

  We now know from the files that the honest answer to that question was that Burgess was never checked out by the Foreign Office. The drafters could hardly say that, so they tried to pass some of the blame to the BBC. The men from the F.O. talked on the phone to the men from the BBC and said they were ‘anxious to include’ in their statement a line from the BBC director-general’s reply to the request for Burgess. This said that the release of the producer ‘would be a serious loss’ to the corporation. Including this line in a Foreign Office statement would clearly imply there had been a BBC endorsement of Burgess’s character. The BBC was resistant but the two sides compromised by agreeing that the DG had ‘made it clear that in the circumstances then obtaining his [Burgess’s] departure would be a loss to the Talks Department’.298

  What the BBC really thought about the ‘loss’ of Burgess is probably best set out in a note which George Barnes wrote at the time.

  He is very clever, full of ideas, well informed, with a large circle of acquaintances and is good at getting up a subject quickly. His office work is slipshod and he needs a good secretary to be efficient. He is lazy and has not learned to express himself exactly when writing; he is not conscientious and takes a very liberal view of his duties.299

  ‘Burgess’, wrote Barnes, ‘does not suffer fools.’

  There’s another interesting footnote to Burgess’s time at the BBC. When he absconded with Maclean on 25 May 1951 no one was quite sure where they had gone, although the assumption was always that they were in Russia.

  In September 1951 a BBC official reported a most unusual event. Several years before Burgess had borrowed a number of books from the BBC library. In classic Burgess style he had never returned them.

  But at four o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday 15 September someone handed the books in to the commissionaire at the reception desk at Broadcasting House.

  The report didn’t say who the ‘someone’ was. Surely it couldn’t have been Burgess himself; maybe it was a friend. It concluded, ‘You may wish to pursue this as I understand that the Foreign Office are anxious to ascertain the whereabouts of Mr Burgess and it might be helpful to them.’

  5

  JOHN PEET

  As the Berlin press corps arrived at a news conference given by the East German government on Monday 12 June 1950 only one of them knew in advance why they had been invited and what the story would be. There was a simple reason for that. The story would be him.

  Berlin had been Hitler’s capital and the pride of Nazi Germany until just five years before but now it was divided up into four sectors, all under foreign occupation. The victorious wartime allies, America, the Soviet Union and Britain plus France, divided up not just the country into their own zones but its capital into their own sectors. The border lines between the three Western sectors in the west of the city and the Soviet sector in the east symbolised the divisions within Germany and the wider division of Europe between Western democracies and Soviet satellite states. It made Berlin the de facto capital of the Cold War. Armies that had once fought together in a common cause now faced each other across barbed wire and barricades representing the colliding ideologies of capitalism and communism.

  In this city of symbolic boundaries, a British journalist was about to make a very personal crossing of a line. It was to happen in a building which had once housed Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry but had, rather appropriately, become the Government Information Office of the Soviet Union’s fledgling East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR).300 The room where Josef Goebbels had once briefed the Nazi press was full of reporters. They had been invited to this news conference a few days before but had not been told what it would be about. Some of the journalists were from the GDR or other countries in the Soviet bloc. Others were correspondents from the Western media who, before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, regularly crossed in and out of the Russian sector to attend events.

  ‘I am standing here today…’

  The head of the GDR Information Department was a veteran German Communist called Gerhart Eisler who had spent the Second World War in America and had then returned to Germany as a propagandist for the new Communist state. He opened the press conference in his usual way but told the reporters that on this occasion it would be one of them who would be speaking from the podium.

  To the surprise of the Western media, the reporter who stepped forward to speak did not come from the Communist press corps in the room but was one of their very own, the much-respected and well-connected chief correspondent of the Reuters international news agency in Berlin.

  John Peet, aged thirty-four, was tall and very thin. His first job at Reuters had been as a correspondent in post-war Vienna where he had been congratulated by the agency on his ‘excellent news file’. He was then posted to Germany and such was Reuters’ confidence in him that Peet was soon promoted to bureau chief.301

  Now his colleagues in the Berlin press corps watched as he rose from his seat among them, walked forward a few yards to the GDR podium and turned to face them.302 In those few steps Peet had crossed a symbolic line.

  He spoke to the assembled journalists in fluent German with an upper-class English accent. ‘I am standing here today because I am no longer willing to serve those who propagate war. As a Western journalist, chief correspondent in Berlin for Reuters News Agency, I have become, without wanting to, a tool for the war machinery directed by America.’303

  He set out his argument in more detail and then declared, ‘This is why I have decided to lea
ve my position in the west and move to East Berlin, whatever the personal consequences for me may be.’304

  The correspondent of the New York Times, Kathleen McLaughlin, wrote of the reaction among Western journalists: ‘His action stunned not only his British and United States colleagues, but also German correspondents who had worked with him on news coverage in Berlin.’ She explained that Peet had become widely known for his ‘frequent and disgusted criticisms following press conferences staged by Herr Eisler’, the very man who was now stage-managing Peet’s presentation to the world as a supporter of the East Germans.305

  The correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda (meaning Truth) also observed the shock among Peet’s former colleagues. Yuri Korolkov wrote, ‘The correspondents of the Western papers remained dejectedly in their seats, stunned by the exposures of John Peet.’ In contrast, ‘the correspondents of the democratic press greeted this statement with storms of approving applause’. Peet’s statement had ‘made an immense impression on all those present at the press conference’.306 Korolkov reported that the Western press ‘were so confused that at first they could not even ask a single question. Then someone asked, “When did Mr John Peet join the Communist Party?” The reply caused still greater confusion – “John Peet was never a member of the Communist Party and is now non-party.”’

  The questions continued: was Peet seeking asylum in the GDR? No, just moving there for the time being. What would his future job be? No idea.307

  Peet hadn’t forgotten his own instincts as a Reuters man. After answering questions he went to a phone and filed a despatch about what he had just done. It was the first Reuters heard about it.

  He dictated his story:

  By John Peet, Reuters correspondent, Berlin, June 12 – Reuters chief correspondent in Berlin, 34-year-old John Peet, today made a public declaration that he ‘could no longer serve the Anglo-American war-mongers’. Mr Peet made the declaration to more than 200 German and foreign correspondents at a press conference in the East German Information Department.308