A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

by Deborah McDonald

  At the commencement of hostilities, MI5 grew concerned about Hilda’s use of so many unchecked aliens. Some of the names rung alarm bells, and searching questions were soon being asked about Baroness Budberg’s employment. At the end of February 1940 MI5 briefed one of its agents, codenamed U35, to investigate her.

  U35 was Jona ‘Klop’ Ustinov, a Russian émigré with German connections. Klop’s father had fled Tsarist Russia as a religious refugee, settling in Palestine, where Klop was born in 1892. Being born in the same year was not the only thing he had in common with Moura. He had an intricate connection with Germany, having received most of his schooling there and having served in the German army in the First World War. After returning to Russia, in 1920 he met Nadia Benois, a theatrical set designer and artist. Nadia was involved with the House of Arts in Petrograd, one of the institutions Maxim Gorky had helped set up.5 Moura was also involved in this work – both through Gorky and Maria Andreyeva, and through her work in Korney Chukovsky’s Art Theatre studio in 1919.6 Almost certainly she and Nadia would have been acquainted, and Moura might even have met Ustinov during their engagement.

  The couple married, left Russia the same year and moved first to Berlin; but with the rise of the Nazis, they travelled on to London, where Ustinov worked as a press attaché at the German Embassy and as a journalist for a German news agency. In 1935, upon being required to prove his Aryan descent, Ustinov left the employment of the German Embassy, and soon after was recruited into the private network of foreign informants run by Sir Robin Vansittart at the Foreign Office. He proved invaluable, and through Vansittart’s influence he was granted British citizenship and employed by MI5. Klop Ustinov became one of their most prized and effective agents.7

  How he came to know Moura is unclear, but by the start of the war they were good friends.8 As her friend and a trusted counter-intelligence agent, Klop was the perfect person to report on her. According to his son, the actor Peter Ustinov, Klop ‘seemed to fancy himself as something he was really not, a man of mystery, at least not in the way he understood it’.9 A neat, precise gentleman who sported a monocle, he seems to have been fundamentally honest and open, despite being a successful undercover agent.

  He dined with Moura, attended her parties, met her alone for drinks at her flat, and submitted regular reports on who her friends were, her movements and her activities. In March 1940 he reported that Moura was ‘extremely difficult to sum up. She is very intelligent indeed and approaches all political questions from a highbrow standpoint’. He judged her to be pro-Soviet, but knew for a fact that she had been badly shaken by the Russian annexation of Poland and the Baltic states (he had been with her and H. G. when they heard the news about Poland). ‘I consider it quite out of the question that Baroness Budberg should be pro-Nazi,’ Klop stated. ‘As far as I know she is au fond anti-German.’10

  Klop even succeeded in using Moura as a source of intelligence – or rather she succeeded, as was her wont, in making herself valuable as a source. She told him that a man called Yates-Brown, who had a Russian wife, had invited her to dinner. During the meal the entire conversation had been pro-Nazi and Fifth Column; Moura told Klop that she had been horrified by their opinion that Britain needed a Hitler of its own. Klop reported this, and a watch was put on the couple.

  Anti-Nazi she might be, but Moura remained a loyal Russian and a suspicious character. In June 1940 she was dismissed from the JBC. The permit entitling her to work for the organisation was revoked, and a ‘red refusal’ was marked on her police registration certificate – the licence to live which most foreigners staying in Britain had to have.11 The mark would bar her from doing any work that might be of a sensitive nature. There was even talk of her being interned, but it came to nothing.

  Moura probably benefited from her friendly relations with members of the intelligence agencies – including Klop Ustinov himself, who liked her. She also became friendly with a tall, willowy young man called Anthony Blunt, who had been recruited by MI5 in May 1940 and rose rapidly in the service. And there was Commander Ernest Boyce, her old friend and employer from the Petrograd and Helsingfors SIS stations. Following Moura’s ejection from the JBC, Boyce wrote a strong letter of support. ‘Although she seems to have a flair for getting herself into all sorts of apparently compromising situations,’ he wrote, ‘I can personally vouch for her as being a staunch upholder of all the British Empire stands for.’ He suggested that she be reinstated, but in a position where use could be made of her fluency in English, Russian, French, German, Italian and Polish, but where there was no need for secrecy.12

  Given the possibility that Boyce might have been a double agent employed by the Soviet Union, he could have had an interest in securing Moura’s position. Alternatively, she might have possessed compromising information about him. He had been her boss in 1918; the SIS Petrograd station had been notably lax about security, and Moura had allowed no snippet of inside information to evade her attention. The same applied to Anthony Blunt, who had already been working for the NKVD for several years when he joined MI5.

  But the red refusal mark remained on her papers, and Moura was locked out of the JBC. Hilda Matheson wasn’t able to help – she fell ill with a thyroid problem and died during an operation in October 1940.

  While MI5 watched her every move, Moura went about her life – packing H. G. off on his travels, keeping him company when he was at home, staying with Paul or Tania, making her constant round of social occasions, and going on with the task that would occupy her intermittently through most of her life – collating and translating into English the works of Maxim Gorky.

  Almost exactly a year after Moura had been barred from working at the JBC, Germany declared war on the USSR. The BBC, which had taken over the responsibilities of the JBC, was asked to arrange a Russian propaganda service and Moura’s name was once again put forward. The Aliens War Service Department, which was in charge of issuing work permits for foreigners, was approached by the BBC, but a heavy black No was returned. Baroness Budberg should not be allowed to cross the BBC’s threshold and should not be employed by the BBC in any capacity. One anonymous MI5 operative was surprised by this brusque dismissal, as he knew that the Baroness was a friend of Duff Cooper, Harold Nicolson, Brendan Bracken and ‘probably the Prime Minister’.13

  The British government had not reckoned with Moura’s blasé tenacity. Despite the ban on her working for the BBC, they had been using her as a source of opinion and advice on Russian matters for some time. When this was discovered, a tart note was added to the MI5 minute sheet saying, ‘Whatever our view upon the reliability of the Baroness, it is not encouraging to learn that much of the information gathered by the BBC about present conditions in Russia is drawn from her.’14

  In the end neither Boyce nor Moura’s other admirers managed to overturn the decision that had been made. She was still considered too great a security risk to be allowed near the BBC. Nonetheless, they couldn’t keep her away. On 24 June 1941, a year after her official dismissal, Moura met Lockhart for dinner. Germany had invaded the USSR two days earlier, inspiring a rush of sympathy in Britain. Moura told Lockhart that the BBC people were ‘all very pro-Russian and full of wishful thinking’.15

  The troubled love affair between Moura and the BBC ran and ran. In 1942 she met the writer and diplomat John Lawrence, who had set up the BBC World Service European section in 1939, and was now being posted to Moscow to set up a Russian section. (He was an adventurous sort – when his ship was torpedoed off the north Russian coast, he swam the rest of the way to Murmansk.) On being given the posting, he immediately sought Moura’s guidance. ‘I wanted to ask her advice on what to do, what to avoid, whom to see and whom not to see. She gave me good advice.’16

  Moura persuaded people from ‘various high quarters’ to write on her behalf to the security services. The result was that in August 1941 the red stamp was removed from her police certificate. But as the person conveying the decision to the Home Office said, ‘This w
as really rather a distinction without a difference and the only practical result is the removal of the formal stigma represented by the endorsement of the red refusal’.17 The Baroness would still not be allowed to do work connected with the war effort, and MI5 kept a close eye on her.

  And yet it was proving impossible for MI5 to stop her meddling in affairs concerning the BBC. They could have arrested and interned her, but shied away from doing so; she was too well connected.

  It was still officially believed that she was a potential threat to national security, and as the war progressed, the interest in Moura moved up a gear. The hard men of British intelligence were getting involved. In August 1941 the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of Special Branch, R. Pilkington, reported to MI5: ‘The activities of a certain Baroness Budberg are inimical to the best interests of the Allied war effort’. He noted her close friendships with Lockhart, former Minister of Information Duff Cooper and H. G. Wells. He reported that ‘Baroness Budberg used to see Mr Duff Cooper at least three times a week’. She had denied knowing Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, ‘but she is in fact secretly in touch with him’, and both she and Maisky gave separate but similar reports to Duff Cooper in such a way as to make it appear that they came from different sources ‘in order to influence his decisions’. The Assistant Commissioner concluded: ‘It would appear that the Baroness is secretly working for the Russians.’18

  The recipient of the report was Colonel Edward Hinchley-Cooke, a seasoned MI5 interrogator, spy and bloodhound. He didn’t take it lightly. He was particularly bothered by Moura’s connection with Maisky and wanted more information about how they had met. Hinchley-Cooke discovered that Moura was close to Madame Maisky and regularly met with her and her husband socially at ‘musical parties’ and other events.

  MI5 had plenty of circumstantial evidence that Moura was spying, but they needed something more concrete before they could expel or intern her. Her high-profile contacts and friends could roast any MI5 officer who made a mistake.

  In 1943 word reached Duff Cooper that MI5 were interested in Moura, and probably that his name had been mentioned. No doubt aware that he had said indiscreet things in front of her, in May 1943 he asked MI5 officer Richard Butler what information they held on her. The situation was getting serious; Butler’s report on the query went directly to David Petrie, the Director General of MI5.

  Duff Cooper distanced himself from Moura and played down her significance, describing her as an ‘excessively tiresome old woman’ who was ‘probably harmless’, but pressed Butler for information about her.19 He was evidently worried. The year before, he had been appointed by Churchill as head of the Security Executive, the government’s supreme domestic security committee. But in September 1943 he was removed from the post and demoted to a role as liaison with the Free French government in Algeria.20

  In spite of everything, Moura retained his friendship, and that of his wife, Lady Diana Cooper, who called her ‘my very dear Moura’ and testified that Lord Beaverbrook, Maurice Baring and Raymond Asquith all liked her, as did her husband.21

  Decades earlier, when Moura was young and trapped in Russia, desperate to be allowed to come to England, she had despaired of the constant rumours about her. Now, older, wiser and happily secure in her deceits, she laughed them off. She told H. G.’s friend Martha Gellhorn about a famous palmist who had given her a reading, on the prompting of Aldous Huxley. Studying her elegant hand (everyone remarked how fine Moura’s hands were, even if they were sometimes grubby) the woman had declared, ‘Your life is more interesting than you are.’22 Moura was amused – ‘she had a splendid laugh,’ Gellhorn recalled – and was intrigued enough to study palmistry herself, with a view to taking it up professionally. She certainly had the bluff and charm to carry it off, but it came to nothing.23

  While MI5 investigated and the government tried to keep her away from the BBC, Moura pursued other interests.

  Lockhart, now working for the Political Warfare Executive, had introduced her to the French exile André Labarthe, who ran a London-based propaganda magazine, La France Libre. Intended as the official voice of the Free French movement, it was hugely successful. Labarthe had formerly been a favoured member of General de Gaulle’s staff, advising him on all things, including armaments. He was brilliant, a schemer and an adventurer, and his acquaintances found it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in him.24 He had a lot in common with Moura.

  It soon became apparent that the magazine needed the services of an additional staff member with a good knowledge of the French language and of French politics. Moura’s name was suggested, and she joined their team, helping with fund-raising by appealing to the Ministry of Information, a task no doubt made easier by her contact with Lockhart. She wrote and edited articles and opened La France Libre to her literary contacts, including George Bernard Shaw, J. B. Priestley and of course H. G. They all wrote for the magazine.

  Although de Gaulle had originally given La France Libre his blessing, its failure to lend itself to his cult of personality displeased him. Eventually he fell out with Labarthe over the Muselier affair. Émile Muselier had been commander of the Free French Navy but became concerned about de Gaulle’s growing megalomania and suggested the formation of an executive in which he would be the head and de Gaulle the figurehead. Churchill stepped in to mediate and a French National Committee was formed with de Gaulle at the head and Muselier in a subordinate post. Labarthe sided with Muselier, and La France Libre took on an anti-Gaullist position.25

  Moura shared this feeling. She detested de Gaulle’s autocratic style, and her anti-Gaullism became a part of her political and social stock in trade. At his house in Hanover Terrace H. G. glued a blown-up portrait of de Gaulle into the bowl of the toilet. Moura thoroughly approved. ‘It’s the place for him,’ she said.26

  MI5 tolerated her work for the magazine. The head of the Aliens section said it was ‘obvious from her entire history that she is interested in political intrigue and I should be very surprised if she is not being used to some extent by the Russians, though probably in a fairly open manner’. Her work with La France Libre was to the Allies’ advantage, he said, and there was no need to take any further action, other than to give her a watch-it lecture. ‘If anyone is to warn her I think it should be the Foreign Office, though I suspect she would make rings round whoever tried to interview her.’27

  The editorial staff of La France Libre became part of Moura’s social world, and she would often take them – sometimes with H. G. in tow – down to Oxfordshire to stay at Tania’s house and escape from the Blitz for a few days. They would write the magazine during the day and in the evening play bridge. They pooled their rations, supplemented by fresh vegetables from the garden, and ate well. H. G., who had grown fond of Tania during family holidays at Kallijärv, liked being there, and sometimes stayed on after Moura had returned to London.

  Despite all these distractions, Moura had not let go of her own publishing work. In 1939, with the expiry of the standard three-year term since Gorky’s death, she had lost her power of attorney over his translation rights, and therefore her income from them. In 1940 she published a new translation of his Fragments from My Diary, and so brought to an end one of the most important phases of her life. She continued working on translations of Gorky and other Russians throughout her life, but she was no longer in control of his legacy (except for the remaining papers hidden in that elusive suitcase).

  She needed all the work she could get, in order to subsidise her lifestyle: quartered in one of the smartest areas in London, taking trips abroad, throwing parties, eating out; it all added up.

  On 6 March 1942 Moura celebrated her fiftieth birthday. H. G. was reminded that it had been over twenty years since their first sexual encounter. She had been ‘a tall and slender young woman’ in those days, but ‘now I told her she was like a Vatican cherub, three times life size but still delightful’. He thought her ‘an ample woman; she is very grey but that queer sub-dropsy that
attacks so many women of her age, and thickens their ankles, has spared hers altogether’.28

  That same day, Moura lunched with Lockhart; he passed no comment on her appearance. Rather he remarked that ‘She is full of the de Gaulle-Muselier quarrel’ and was insisting that it was time to remove the troublesome General from power. Lockhart noted that her opinion corresponded with the private views of Anthony Eden and the Cabinet.29

  By 1944 H. G.’s health was deteriorating. In August Moura confided to Lockhart that he had cirrhosis of the liver and dementia. He continued to write, but ‘his mind is gone’ and the writing had become ‘mechanical’; also he had grown ‘arrogant and intolerant of any contradiction’. In Lockhart’s opinion this was no change. ‘He has written a new and savage indictment of humanity in general for not following his advice.’ (This was indeed no change; back in 1941, in a preface to a new edition of his prophetic 1908 novel The War in the Air, Wells had said that his epitaph should be ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’)

  Their conversation took place at the Carlton Grill, on the corner of Pall Mall and the Haymarket, where Lockhart treated Moura to lunch. ‘Good conversation,’ he recorded, ‘but she is expensive to feed or, rather, to water. Today she drank only beer with luncheon, but she had an apéritif of three double gins at eight shillings apiece and with her coffee a double brandy at twelve shillings!’30