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

by Deborah McDonald

  In February 1951, two weeks after their interview with Rebecca West, MI5 reviewed Moura’s status once more, and came to a critical decision. Commenting that it was a shame that she had not been thoroughly interrogated at the time of her application for naturalisation, they decided to make good the omission now, partly to justify the huge cost of keeping her under surveillance. ‘As she is in contact with so many of our major suspects,’ her minute sheet noted, ‘there seems no other choice for us but to interrogate her in the hope of getting further information.’19

  Rather than bringing her in for a formal interrogation it was decided to make use of Klop Ustinov again. His wartime service as a secret agent had made him even more highly valued by the intelligence services. The rationale was the same as in 1940 – as Moura knew both him and his wife it would be easy for him to investigate her without her becoming suspicious (or so they assumed). Klop was briefed to gain access to Moura’s inner circle of friends, obtain her trust, and discover once and for all exactly where her loyalties lay. On top of this, if it should prove viable, he was authorised to recruit her as a double agent. He arranged meetings and meals, ensuring that he was regularly invited to her parties, at which he would often come face to face with Burgess and her other crypto-Communist friends. Some of them were coming close to exposure.

  Suddenly, in May 1951, a crisis occurred which took everyone by surprise and pushed Moura’s case to a turning point.

  Donald Maclean was under investigation by MI5, and the KGB believed that if he were put under heavy interrogation he would crack and reveal his fellow spies. The KGB, guessing what was about to happen, decided to yank the iron out of the fire, and recalled Maclean to Moscow; at the last minute it was decided that Burgess should leave with him. On 25 May 1951, three days before the date MI5 had set to begin Maclean’s interrogation, Burgess collected him from his home and drove him to Southampton. They took a ferry to Saint-Malo in Brittany, then travelled on false passports to Moscow. Their ‘disappearance’ sparked an international panic. No one in the West knew where they had gone, and the media speculated wildly.

  Moura was immediately put back on a Home Office warrant. The bugs in her flat picked up conversations among her guests speculating about where the missing men could have gone. In June Moura gave a party to which she invited Klop. The other guests included a couple of publishers, a woman from the British Council and Vera Traill, a Russian who was also under MI5 investigation. The conversation turned to the subject of Guy Burgess. Everyone there had known and loved him despite his alcohol problem and self-centredness. One of the publishers believed that he must have defected. Moura suggested that he might have been kidnapped or had an accident while on the Continent. Whatever the case, everyone was convinced he must have been a spy of some sort rather than merely a Foreign Office functionary.

  Moura was aware that she was being watched and probably guessed that the situation was about to get extremely uncomfortable for Soviet agents and sympathisers in England. And with her long experience of detecting changes in the wind and bending with them, she had an ulterior purpose in throwing that party.

  When the other guests left, Moura asked Klop to stay behind. She explained that she had invited the others especially for his benefit – she thought it would interest him to hear what people who were friends of Burgess thought about the affair. One of the publishers, she said, had a Communist sister who had been in touch with MacGibbon; he had told her that he had only met Burgess at Moura’s parties. The lady did not believe him.

  In his report on the evening, Klop expressed his surprise at how helpful Moura had been, and thought it was now up to MI5 to exploit the situation.20

  He fixed another appointment with her. Her next soirée was on 28 June. The guests included George Weidenfeld, who speculated that Burgess and Maclean might be in Germany. He had known Burgess for seven years, he said, and didn’t think he was in any position to be able to obtain secrets from the Foreign Office that the Russians would find of interest.21

  A few days later Klop and Moura dined at the Sherry Bar in Pelham Street. When it closed at nine they went back to his flat, where they talked until the early hours. They discussed James MacGibbon, Burgess and Maclean and another of Moura’s visitors – Alexander Halpern and his wife Salomea. Halpern was an associate from the old days – a lawyer who had served as private secretary to Kerensky in 1917. Migrating to Britain, he had joined the SIS and during the Second World War had worked for British Security Coordination in New York – the same organisation with which Alexander Korda had liaised.22 Salomea, a former Vogue model, had openly expressed Communist sympathies.

  During their conversation Moura said that as she had so many left-wing friends she was surprised that she had never been interrogated. Klop suggested that the reason was probably her friendship with him. ‘Ever since the war started,’ he told her, ‘there has been a lively interest in your activities. Every time I’ve been asked about you my answer was: This woman is much too intelligent to do anything foolish.’

  Moura played innocent. ‘Even if I’d wanted to divulge information to the Soviets,’ she said, ‘what information do I have that would be of interest to them?’

  ‘In this field there are tasks that you would be admirably suited to perform,’ he told her. ‘Talent-spotting, for one.’

  It had come to the moment of truth – the moment Klop’s superiors had authorised him to take advantage of. But it had to be handled correctly – it wasn’t done to put ideas in a potential agent’s head.

  Moura told him that she liked left-wingers because they seemed more intelligent than other people. Anyway, in her opinion the whole world would eventually be Communist – even though it would not happen for a long time.

  It was as if she were giving her flag one last loyal wave before submitting.

  MacGibbon, she told Klop, had not so far confessed anything of interest to her, other than crying on her shoulder about his business partner Kee’s attempted suicides, but if she heard anything of interest she would certainly let Klop know.

  It was two o’clock in the morning when Moura said goodnight. In parting, she invited Klop to help her mix the drinks for two large parties she had coming up. She was planning to invite fifty guests to each. With this invitation hanging in the air, she set out through the London night towards Ennismore Gardens.23

  Over the following weeks and months, while the newspapers continued to speculate over the ‘missing diplomatists’ Burgess and Maclean (traitors? kidnap victims?), Moura edged her way out of the searchlight and closer to Klop. She told him that she was out of favour with the Soviets – none of her letters to Gorky’s family were being delivered, and none sent back to her. Klop came to her parties, at which she offered up her guests as a buffet of suspects – ‘Here are people who may be of interest to you, help yourself,’ as Klop expressed it in his report.24

  Most of Moura’s offerings were British. There were few Russian émigrés in her circle. Many of them had never trusted her, and shunned her. One who did come to her parties was Kyril Zinovieff, a writer and translator who went by the pen-name FitzLyon (taken from his wife, the author April FitzLyon). He had known Moura since the 1920s in Berlin, when he was a teenage student; as an acquaintance of the former Hetman Skoropadskyi, he knew about her spying in the Ukraine in 1918. He remained in her circle because he was fascinated by her, but felt that he ‘could never respect or trust her’; he believed that her covert activities had ‘led to the deaths of several people’.25 If some of the more outlandish rumours had any truth in them, Moura was implicated in the deaths of considerably more than ‘several’.

  Moura went on meeting regularly with Klop Ustinov. She passed on the latest gossip about Burgess and Maclean. Some people were saying that they were lovers and had gone to the Mediterranean on a yachting trip together. No ‘iron curtain’ was involved, she said.

  If Moura was mistaken about Burgess and Maclean (or deliberately feeding Klop misinformation), her next rev
elation was the real thing. Anthony Blunt, she said, to whom Guy Burgess had been ‘most devoted’ and who had been an occasional guest at her soirées, was a member of the Communist Party.

  Klop was astonished. ‘All I know about him is that he looks after the King’s pictures,’ he said.

  Moura said sourly, ‘Such things happen only in England.’26

  Klop probably knew more about Blunt than he admitted; they had both served in the counter-intelligence section of MI5 during the war. At the end of the war Blunt had returned to his first love – art history. By 1947 he held a professorship at the University of London, was Director of the Courtauld Institute, and had been appointed Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. When Moura spoke to Klop, Blunt was already under suspicion because of his closeness to Burgess. Between 1951 and 1952 he was interrogated eleven times by Jim Skardon, but like Philby, he couldn’t be broken. Baroness Budberg’s information was deemed ‘insufficiently reliable’ and was never added to his file. Although he was never entirely free from MI5’s suspicions, Blunt went on with his life, and a few years later was knighted for his services to the Crown.

  By October 1951, when Moura dined with Klop again at his flat, she was pledging herself to report every person moving in her sphere whom she suspected of being a traitor to Britain – ‘actual or potential’. In return, Klop offered the possibility of being put on the MI5 payroll. Moura mentioned a couple of names which caught his interest. Singling out one of them – ‘an important member of the Soviet Embassy’ – he told her, ‘If you can bring this man and his wife on our side, it might have a wholesome effect on your finances.’

  Moura had told him over dinner that her financial situation was precarious and needed ‘straightening out’. Klop added, ‘Smaller fry will also do if you can manage to establish contacts in time.’

  Money was always welcome, but for Moura the real incentive was the same as it had always been – safety, security and survival. And the thrill of it all.

  Klop Ustinov, under his codename U35, submitted his report on this conversation on Monday 25 October 1951.27 It was processed and placed in Moura’s file, which now ran to three copious volumes. The file was closed, deactivated and placed in an archive. It would never be reopened.

  Baroness Moura Budberg had been successfully recruited as a British spy. Again.

  To a woman who had served several dangerous masters during the revolutions of 1917 and the Red Terror, who had crossed borders in secret as a roving agent, liaised directly with Stalin, and seen the inside of several Cheka prisons, this was nothing very remarkable. In a sense, Moura had come full circle, back to the beginning of her career in espionage, when ‘Madame B’ had kept her salon in Petrograd for pro-German Russians and spied on them for Kerensky and her friend George Hill of the SIS.

  Her soirées at Ennismore Gardens continued as they had before. The range of guests was the same eclectic mix of ‘pansy young men’, film and literary stars, Foreign Office types and ‘grand friends’. But now there was a new and invisible underlying purpose. But if Moura ever passed information on any of her guests – and she must have done – it remains hidden by secrecy. Her own file had been closed, and her presence continued only in other people’s files, where she would exist only as a number, a yet-unidentified agent codename.

  Meanwhile, up on the surface, in the daylight, life went on.

  Moura loved her bed. She had grown to love it with a special fondness in that first week at Kallijärv in 1921, after her release by the police in Tallinn.

  Having a job tended to interfere with her love of bed. Moura’s working life – in its ideal state – resembled her social life: travelling, negotiating, meeting new and fascinating people, and making herself the indispensable nexus between them. She found working for Korda arduous because it required her to rise each day, go to the offices of London Films at 146 Piccadilly and do a day’s toil in the Korda script-mill. That didn’t suit her at all – especially now that age was slowly eroding her ability to shake off the effects of the previous night’s overindulgence – so she came to an arrangement with her secretary. If the phone rang and it was anyone of importance – particularly Sir Alex himself – the secretary would explain that Baroness Budberg had just popped out for a moment. Then she would ring Moura, who would haul herself out of bed, throw on her clothes (she had lost the habit of dressing with any care decades ago) and hail a taxi.

  In all likelihood Korda knew what she was doing, but saw no harm in it. Moura had lost none of her ability to charm and inveigle. Twenty years earlier she would certainly have made Korda her lover, as she had Wells, Gorky, and many better and greater men. But that side of her had died with H. G. and the onset of age. Instead she did the deed by proxy, setting herself the task of finding him a woman to sustain him in his autumnal years.

  He had been keeping a mistress for a while. Christine Norden was a flighty, aspiring young actress who had suddenly flown off with an American air force sergeant. Sir Alex had begged her to stay and marry him, but to no avail.28 There was a vacancy to be filled, and Moura decided to find a candidate.

  Korda had been married twice before, to the actress Maria Corda, and then in 1939 to British film star Merle Oberon, who was eighteen years his junior. Their marriage had lasted six years. As he aged, his brides grew younger. The woman Moura found for him in 1953 was just twenty-four, whereas Korda was sixty. Her name was Alexandra Boycun; she was a Canadian of Ukrainian parentage, a budding singer, and exquisitely beautiful. She had no ambition to be an actress, and neither did she seem to be a fortune-seeker. Korda had confided in Moura that he was through with actresses; he wanted a stay-at-home wife who could minister to his every whim in his old age.

  In other words, he wanted exactly what H. G. had hoped for from Moura. And like Wells, his chances of gaining it were fairly slim. Alexa might not be a fortune hunter, but she was a free spirit.

  To everyone’s surprise, in June 1953, after a short courtship, the mismatched couple married. Moura was a witness. Alexa’s father sent a telegram saying, ‘Sir Alexander is too old for my daughter.’29 The whole thing was a mistake; not necessarily for Korda or Alexa, but for Moura. Once Alexa became the woman in the Korda household and no longer needed to be Moura’s protégée, she began asserting herself, and elbowed Moura away. Moura’s attempts to steer or advise her began to be seen as pushiness. She was still on the guest list for Korda’s dinner parties, but not as frequently or as warmly welcomed as she had been.30

  Korda paid the regular price for involving himself with a much younger woman – the same price that Gorky had paid with Moura. Alexa sometimes grew tired of her old and by now unwell husband, and flitted off on escapades of her own. She grew close to his young nephew Michael. The thirteen-year-old boy who had been so stunned by Moura in 1947 was now in his early twenties, close in age to Alexa, and they became attached to each other, despite Michael’s father warning him against it. There was no sexual relationship between them; they were intimate friends, and Michael covered for Alexa’s absences. Korda was jealous, and the two were forbidden to see each other.

  The marriage survived for as long as it needed to, which turned out to be three years. In late January 1956 Sir Alexander Korda died, finished off by a heart problem that been troubling him for years.

  26

  . . . The End of Everything

  1956–1974

  May 1963, London

  Moura parted the heavy curtain and looked out into the evening dark, moving close to the glass to see through the lamplit reflection of her own glittering eyes. The bloom of early summer lay over Kensington, turning the late evening deep blue and hazing the smoke that hovered above the rooftops. Below her window, taxis flitted by and the night buses heaved their way down the arrow-straight gorge of the Cromwell Road, whining down through the gears as they slowed for the Earls Court junction.

  Countryside was all very well, but Moura needed the city as she needed breath. There was life here. It was a good night fo
r a party; a good night to live and be one with the world.

  She hummed happily to herself. The reflection in the glass smiled back. Such a changed face. The lines were deep, the features thickened, and the hair grey, pinned and lacquered in a coronet of silver waves flowing back from her forehead. But the eyes were still the same shining, feline jewels that had looked out on the snows of Yendel under the moonlight of a different age.

  Her breath hazed the cool glass. A good night for a party indeed.

  Behind her, the clink of glasses and babble of voices suddenly erupted in gales of laughter, and Moura came out of her dream. She let the curtain fall back into place and turned back to the room. The laughter had been caused by Peter Ustinov – he was on his knees, acting the part of Queen Victoria praying for victory in the Boer War; it was part of a charade based on the Nazi film Ohm Krüger; an amazing mimic, he switched effortlessly into the ranting title part and back again.1 Snapping up another gin and setting light to another cigar, Moura waded in among the throng; it parted for her, and she resumed her place at its heart.

  They were all here – all her best friends. Klop Ustinov’s darling boy Peter, becoming quite the film star these days, and one of Moura’s dearest friends. Hamish Hamilton and his wife Yvonne were regular guests, as was George Weidenfeld. Baron Bob Boothby, the scandalous Tory peer, was another. A tower of flesh surmounted by two glowering eyes, Boothby had a prodigious sexual appetite. He swung both ways and had eclectic tastes; his lovers including Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Prime Minister, and more recently (if gossip was to be believed) Ronnie Kray, the gangster.2 Boothby considered Moura ‘one of the most remarkable and discerning women I have ever known, as well as the best friend’.3