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

by Deborah McDonald

  Michael Korda, who came to know her well after he grew up, recognised that Moura had never lost her love of Russia, but believed that her loyalty to Britain was strong. She had not changed with the passage of the decades. Michael was fascinated by her ability to hold people’s attention, especially if the guests were men of fame, power and influence. She regaled them with incredible stories laden with embellishment and garnished with lies. Michael felt that she was less interested in women than men, and was something of a saloniste or courtesan. ‘She was a kind, fascinating, brilliant woman on the outside but inside she had a core of stainless steel.’15

  Moura was a saloniste in the fullest sense, although she had shed her role as a courtesan. And her salon, whose regular home was at Ennismore Gardens, she took with her wherever she went.

  Moura’s loyalty to Britain came under scrutiny in 1947. All three of the children had become British years ago – Tania and Kira through marriage, and Paul through naturalisation. Moura, apparently realising only now, after more than a decade, that London would always be her home, finally decided to apply.

  She was interviewed by Special Branch as part of the process.16 She took the meeting only slightly more seriously than she took her social conversations. Unable to produce either a birth or a marriage certificate, she gave an account of her life in which facts were spiced up with lies. On this occasion, the untruths were slight. She had gone to stay with her sister in Berlin at the age of sixteen, where she had met her first husband, which was true. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, she had been arrested and remained in prison for ten months because of her association with Lockhart, which was a mixture of truth and outrageous fiction. She described her life with Gorky, and her move to Estonia in 1921, where she claimed to have worked for ‘a Dutchman’ selling diamonds and gold. This was the only time in Moura’s life she admitted to the role she had been tasked with by Maria Andreyeva and the valiuta programme.

  At the time of her application, Moura was still working for La France Libre. She received £400 a year for this, and made a further £300 from her literary agency. Her bank account was overdrawn by £600. She omitted to mention her earnings from Korda. MI5’s investigation eventually uncovered information from a ‘reputable person’ that Baroness Budberg was being paid a good salary of over £2,000 per annum by him. As the recording agent noted, it would more than ‘cover the flow of gin’.17 Socially Moura kept her financial situation secret, giving the impression of genteel poverty. Even Tania was under the impression that she received only a small weekly wage from Korda, despite the fact that she had her own office and a secretary.18

  On politics, Moura told Special Branch that she had no interest in subversive politics and that she was not a member of the Communist Party, although she did not deny that many of her friends were left-wing, or that the Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky and his wife were friends of hers. No, she said when prompted, she did not despise the Soviet regime.

  MI5 and Special Branch had continued to monitor the Baroness throughout the war, and in 1944 had stated, ‘There is not the slightest doubt that this clever woman is working in an underground capacity for the Russians.’19 And yet not only was she never arrested, interned or deported, she was never even formally interrogated by MI5, other than the naturalisation interview. Her application was investigated, and a five-page document produced, mostly consisting of reasons not to approve the application. Nonetheless, in June her Certificate of Naturalisation was approved.20 Moura had achieved the status she had been hoping for ever since 1919. She was a British subject.

  But still MI5 kept an eye on her.

  Towards the end of 1947, with her new passport in hand, Moura made her first trip to the United States. La France Libre had just been wound up and Moura needed something to fill the gap in her life and her income.

  The fact that she was issued a US visa must suggest that either MI5 had not informed the FBI, the CIA or the State Department that she was suspected of being a Soviet spy, or that they were informed but decided that it was worth letting her into the country and watching what she did.

  Her prime contact in America was Henry Regnery, a well-known publisher of conservative books by authors such as Wyndham Lewis, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer. Regnery was a controversial figure who published provocative essays and until 1941 had been a member of the isolationist America First Committee. He had just set up Regnery Publishing when Moura visited; he was interested in publishing European books with European ideas, especially those with a German slant.

  On Regnery’s staff was Paul Scheffer, Moura’s old lover from Berlin. Following his resignation from Berliner Tageblatt due to Nazi interference he had left Germany and ended up in America, where he was interned as a suspected Nazi spy. The allegations against him in the 1938 Moscow trials in connection with the alleged Goebbels/Chernov conspiracy to cause famine in the Ukraine had pursued him. The US government changed its mind about Scheffer and took him into its intelligence and special operations division, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. At the end of the war he became a prosecution adviser at the Nuremberg trials. He’d begun working for Regnery on an informal basis, reading manuscripts and suggesting projects. It was almost certainly at his suggestion that Moura visited the embryonic company. She became Regnery’s British agent and made suggestions about what she believed he ought to publish.

  Soon after her return to England, Regnery wrote with the good news that at her suggestion a translation of Max Picard’s Hitler in uns selbst (Hitler In Our Selves) had been published. He also told her that Scheffer would soon be contacting her about finding European publishers for a number of books Regnery was bringing out the next year.21 They included The German Resistance to Hitler by Hans Rothfels, The Treaty of Versailles and the Present by Leonard von Muralt and The Peace by Ernst Junger. In return, Moura told him that she would also look out for a European ‘masterpiece’ for him. She also brought Regnery together with Victor Gollancz, the British publisher.22 Politically, the socialist Gollancz was the antithesis of Regnery, but his strong sympathy with the plight of Germany gave him an affinity with Regnery Publishing’s list.

  If MI5 or the CIA were keeping watch, they would have taken note of Moura’s contact with Scheffer, his Soviet connections, and the connection with the socialist Gollancz.23

  While her publishing business regained the vitality it had achieved before the war, Moura went on working for Korda. Although she liked the social mêlée, she often complained that the work wasn’t always much fun.

  One evening in August 1948 Lockhart took her out for dinner at the Ivy restaurant in the West End. (It was popular with Moura’s film and theatre crowd.) She was in a subdued mood and, unusually, drank very little. She told him she found working for Korda difficult – a friend of Lockhart’s had said, ‘Korda is an interesting man to know but impossible to work for’, and Moura couldn’t disagree.24 She worked hard for her £2,000 a year – or at least she found it hard to fit the work in between her escalating publishing interests.

  That evening, Moura, in a black mood, complained about everyone – the small size of the legacy H. G. had left her, the mean-spiritedness and vanity of George Bernard Shaw (still hanging on in his nineties), and above all the egotistical meanness of Somerset Maugham. He was a friend of hers but she thought him the ‘king of snobs’ who was a ‘good but vicious writer’. What irked her most was his abominable treatment of his female lovers; one poor woman he had kept dangling ‘because she was very smart’, only to cut her off publicly with cruel abruptness. Moura and Lockhart discussed the various ‘practising homosexualists’ they knew, including Maugham and their old Russian friend Hugh Walpole (whom Maugham despised and never spoke about ‘without venom, hate and jealousy’). Lockhart was entertained by Moura’s sour commentaries – ‘She certainly made a sad mess of our famous writers,’ he recorded. ‘It is a great mistake for the reader ever to get to know his favourite authors. Every writer must
be in some sort an exhibitionist, and exhibitionists are not attractive types.’25

  But even in her darkest mood she was loyal to H. G.’s memory, which touched and impressed Lockhart. Moura’s loves were precious to her, even when they had been troubled.

  25

  A Russian Patriot

  1948–1956

  Suspicions about Moura extended into her salons. MI5, continuing their watch on her after her naturalisation, kept a particularly close eye on this side of her life.

  People looked forward to receiving invitations to Baroness Budberg’s parties. At her quieter soirées she played hostess to twelve to fifteen guests, but whenever her finances permitted she would throw dinner or drinks parties for as many as fifty. Part of the attraction was Moura herself; part was the eclectic mix of fellow guests who congregated in the incongruously shabby flat with its heavy old furniture, religious icons and drab paintings of Russia and Italy on the walls.

  In those days, there were four distinct groups of acquaintances, summed up in October 1950 by MI5 Section B2a.1 First there were her friends from the Foreign Office. Then there was the ‘circle of pansy young men’ (B2a believed them all to be ‘interior decorators’, but most were writers and actors). Of greatest interest to MI5 was her circle of foreign friends, including ‘many Russians and known Soviet supporters’. Finally there were her ‘grand friends’, including people such as Lady Diana Cooper and her husband Duff Cooper, Laurence Olivier and Lady Ottoline Morrell, together with many of her old friends from H. G.’s day.

  Moura was a strong social draw. In a conversation at Harold Nicolson’s house between George Weidenfeld and his publishing partner Nigel Nicolson (Harold’s son) on the subject of the ideal dinner guest, Moura came out top of their list.2 Indeed, Harold, who had known her since Berlin in the 1920s, considered her ‘the cleverest woman of her day in London’.3 He ought to know – over the years he had seen her in action at parties holding her own with some of the brightest and most arrogant intellects of their day – H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Arthur Koestler and dozens of others.

  Her soirées were divided among the different sets, and few people crossed between them. George Weidenfeld, who was grouped with the boisterous literary and artistic set, once mistook his dates and arrived to find her drawing room filled with ‘greying men of military bearing, many of them with moustaches and monocles’. Moura was embarrassed. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you have come a day early.’ And he was graciously shepherded out, to return the next evening, when the familiar set of writers, publishers and artists were gathered.4

  One of the most frequent guests at her salon was civil servant Guy Burgess. Moura had known him during her time at the Joint Broadcasting Committee at the start of the war. He probably came into her social circle through mutual friends such as Harold Nicolson and Isaiah Berlin.5 Section B2a probably classed him with the Foreign Office group rather than the ‘pansy young men’, and regarded him as less interesting than the ‘known Soviet supporters’. George Weidenfeld, who as an Austrian Jewish émigré was one of the ‘foreign’ contingent at Moura’s parties, didn’t like Burgess. He thought him a vain attention-seeker who had a habit of breaking into conversations and ‘bursting into a soliloquy without regard to the people present’.6 At one of Moura’s evenings, Burgess accused Weidenfeld of supporting a pro-European policy. In his view, the only powers that counted were the United States and the Soviet Union, and one must choose between those two.

  Moura liked Burgess a great deal and he was often at her parties. She seemed to see a kindred spirit in him. Anthony Blunt described Burgess as ‘not only one of the most intellectually stimulating people I have ever known but also had great charm and tremendous vivacity’, and although Burgess was ‘perverse in many ways, there was no subject which one could discuss with him without his expressing some interesting and worthwhile views’.7 Also, Moura and Burgess both enjoyed drinking more than was good for them.

  Most of the regular salonistes had opinions on whether Moura was a spy. The rumours about her had been gossiped over many times. George Weidenfeld considered her a Russian patriot; ‘but those among her social circle who were politically tolerant and benevolently inclined towards her might have conceded that she could have been a double agent, leaving to individual guesswork the question as to which side Moura was more likely to have favoured’.8

  In July 1950 a new development occurred which heightened MI5’s concerns about Baroness Budberg. Moura threw a very small party to which she had invited her old friend Scottish publisher James MacGibbon (co-founder of MacGibbon & Kee); he had a background in wartime intelligence, was a known Communist and was also being watched by MI5. Guy Burgess was a guest that evening too, along with four others. After several hours, a surveillance team watched them leaving. ‘Each of the six was somewhat the worse for drink,’ the agent reported, with the Baroness leading by example, ‘as no doubt a hostess should’.9 Burgess was still considered a trustworthy Foreign Office employee, if not entirely respectable. In B2a’s opinion, Baroness Budberg was ‘not a desirable acquaintance’ for a man with Burgess’s doubtful character and in his position. She might prove a bad influence.10

  Rather than scrutinising Burgess, who had secretly been working for the Soviet Union since the 1930s, MI5 focused on MacGibbon. During the war he had worked for MI3, which was responsible for the intelligence side of the plans for D-Day. Concerned by how much better the Western Allies’ military intelligence was than that of the Soviets, MacGibbon had passed information about German forces to the NKVD. In doing so, he believed he was helping the Soviet war effort, and therefore also the war effort as a whole. At the end of the war, he was offered £2,000 by the Soviet Embassy in gratitude, and several anonymous Russians had tried to persuade him to continue as their informant, but he declined. The war was won, his job was over, and he had no intention of making a career of spying.11 But MI5 had been told about his activities, and watched him closely.

  It is possible that Moura was one of the Russians who tried to steer him towards Soviet service. On one occasion in 1950 she asked him to come and see her on an urgent and personal matter. MacGibbon, expecting a private meeting, was not happy to find a party in full swing rather than his expected solitary tête-à-tête. The guests included the ‘curious chap from the FO’ called Burgess, whom MacGibbon didn’t like. Later that night the MI5 operatives who were bugging his house heard him complain to his wife that ‘Moura was an absolute devil’ for deceiving him.12 MacGibbon’s telephone was also tapped, and his watchers recorded Moura telling his wife that the Russians would ‘rather James did it than somebody else’.13 Exactly what ‘it’ was couldn’t be discerned.

  MacGibbon was taken in and questioned by Jim Skardon, MI5’s star interrogator. Skardon had become legendary for his soft-spoken, gentle-mannered but inexhaustible and irresistible probes into suspects’ minds. It was Skardon who had broken Klaus Fuchs, the ‘atomic spy’ who had passed inside information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Those who were subjected to Skardon’s interrogations were simultaneously seduced by his warm, flattering manner and terrified by his reputation. His technique was to exhaust the subject with his patient persistence, disorient them with rapid changes of subject, and lay subtle traps.

  Eventually Skardon cleared MacGibbon, and he was taken off the list of suspected Soviet agents. He wasn’t the only man to survive Skardon’s probing. MI6 operative Kim Philby, who had also come under suspicion, sweated through a long series of interrogations at his hands; he too was taken off the list. Skardon failed to break him, and concluded that he was probably innocent, but MI5 disagreed and kept Philby under surveillance.14 James MacGibbon was luckier; off the hook for the time being, he continued his career in publishing and his friendship with Moura.

  One of Jim Skardon’s contacts suggested that Moura could be useful to MI5 as an informant. With her access to Soviet diplomats, she could be a valuable source. Section B2a, running the in
vestigation, added the opinion that Moura was an extremely intelligent woman who was very self-centred and had little integrity and no loyalty other than to herself. Also, as a result of a recent breast cancer diagnosis she had become frightened of falling ill and losing her income. It was noted by B2a that she was a brilliant literary critic and a very good conversationalist; men found her entrancing to listen to.15

  MI5 could not decide what to do – recruit her for their use or keep going after her as a spy? One report ended by saying, ‘As to Moura – I am no further than before – somewhere between doubt and benefit of the doubt.’16

  Shortly after this report, fresh testimony about Baroness Budberg arrived on the desk of an MI5 official. The novelist Rebecca West, H. G. Wells’ former lover, had recently seen Moura at a party given by their mutual friend, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson. Like Moura she had an interest in publishing foreign literature and had worked in Berlin in the 1930s. Other guests at the party, according to Rebecca, included ‘a most unsavoury crowd of Communist sympathisers judging by their adulation of Baroness Budberg’.17 She added that H. G. Wells’ family had always considered Budberg to be a Soviet agent.

  Retrospective jealousy or patriotic concern? It could have been a little of both. H. G. had confided to his and Rebecca’s son Anthony that Moura had confessed to being a Soviet spy, and Anthony had believed the claim, and presumably passed it on to his mother. Rebecca had cause to be jealous on that count too, as Anthony was almost as smitten by Moura as his father had been.18

  Evidence like Rebecca West’s had trickled into MI5’s files regularly over the thirty-year course of their inquiries. Sometimes it would prompt another Home Office warrant and Moura’s phone would be tapped, her house bugged, her mail opened and her whereabouts checked. Moura knew she was the subject of an investigation and mentioned it to Klop Ustinov, saying that she was being followed. She might even have been aware that he was one of the agents watching her.