The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  Although Wolfenden, like the other correspondents, relied on Reuters for his daily stories, he made some headway on his own. His most notable contact was with Guy Burgess, by then near the end of his life. The KGB had provided Burgess with a guitar-playing boyfriend and a pleasant flat near Novodevichy monastery where, in blue silk pyjamas from Fortnum and Mason, he was drinking himself to death on Armenian brandy. Wolfenden was the only person who appeared to have a real rapport with Burgess. Sometimes the old traitor would come to the Ukraina hotel where Wolfenden had now been moved to the Siberia of the twenty-seventh floor, with no fire escapes but a mass of bugging equipment. The two would put on their Old Etonian ties and get drunk together. When Burgess decided to give a full interview about his feelings for England and about his life, it was Wolfenden he summoned to his flat. Wolfenden asked John Miller of Reuters to go with him and his great exclusive thus went round the world as an agency story on the Reuter wire. He may have asked Miller just because he needed a lift, but he may also have been anxious about intelligence repercussions: he was not sure how friendly he was supposed to be with Burgess.

  The British Embassy, itself involved in the longest of games, encouraged Wolfenden to keep in touch with Guy Burgess, and at his worst moments Wolfenden had much in common with the pathetic spy. ‘In his own disreputable way Guy Burgess is very amusing,’ he wrote, ‘but he has to be taken in small quantities… apart from anything else, to spend 48 hours with him would involve being drunk for at least 47. He has a totally bizarre, and often completely perverse [idea] of the way in which the outside world works; but he makes up for this with a whole range of very funny, though libellous and patently untrue, stories about Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra and Wystan Auden.’

  One morning in the summer of 1961, quite soon after he had arrived in Moscow, Wolfenden was standing at the bookstall in the lobby of the Ukraina, smoking furiously and hitching up his trousers, which didn’t fit properly. He was approached by a pretty nineteen-year-old English girl called Martina Browne. She thought he looked English and vulnerable; she thought he needed cherishing and feeding up. They fell into conversation and she found herself at once captivated by the Wolfenden charm. They went off together and ate ice-cream; presumably this was what Wolfenden thought what he called ‘teen-ager girls’ liked to do.

  Martina Browne was a mother’s help to Roderick (known as Ruari) and Janet Chisholm and their three small children. Ruari Chisholm was from a working-class Scottish Catholic family and was Visa Officer at the British Embassy. He spoke German and Russian and had begun his career by doing translations at the trials in Berlin after the War; he had been in the Far East before being posted to Moscow. Janet Chisholm came from a refined English family and had also worked as a diplomat. She was a Russian speaker who had previously been in Hungary; she had met her husband in the service and it was in every sense a diplomatic marriage. Ruari Chisholm was worried that the children would not receive a proper Catholic upbringing in Communist Moscow; before they left England he and his wife advertised for a mother’s help at the Roman Catholic Challoner Club in Pont Street in Knightsbridge. Diplomatic staff in Moscow was supplied by UpDK, a domestic agency run by the KGB; it was not unusual for a diplomat to tolerate UpDK drivers and handymen, but no one wanted to live with a Russian nanny. Many therefore recruited adventurous nineteen-year-olds from various parts of Britain and Western Europe. These pleasure-loving young women arranged their baby-sitting duties so the greatest possible number could be free for any given party; they were known to Wolfenden as the Corps of Moscow Nannies.

  Martina Browne successfully applied for the Chisholms’ job and began work in July 1960. One of her duties in Moscow was to take the children to services conducted by an American priest in the apartments of other Catholic families in the diplomatic blocks. It was not a case of being a formal nanny and having sole charge of the children; Martina was supposed to help the family in all its domestic life and be a friend and support to Janet Chisholm. She also had a whole day and two mornings of free time each week. Ruari Chisholm’s other job, as Martina Browne slowly discovered, involved rather more than visas: he was the Secret Intelligence Service officer in Moscow.

  Martina Browne herself came from a poor family in Greenford, Middlesex. Her Irish father, when employed, was a sheet-metal worker; at home he was a drunk and a tyrant who used to beat his wife. Martina left her convent school at fifteen and did a variety of jobs, including tracing in a draughtsman’s office. She wanted to escape from her parents’ home, where she still lived; she wanted ‘to travel’. It did not occur to her that Moscow might be a complicated place to live at this time in its history; there were different parties to go to every night and she enjoyed the gossip and intrigue of the small diplomatic community. Once she had met Wolfenden it was easy to keep in touch; in this closed world she could barely avoid meeting him two or three times a day. Sometimes he would go over to the Chisholms’ apartment in Sadovo Samotechnaya and would often end up staying the night, drunk, on the sofa.

  Wolfenden enjoyed Martina’s company. ‘I am being aided, but confused,’ he wrote, ‘by a nice “nature girl” who has, lunatically, got herself employed as a nanny to one of the diplomats here and seems to be in a state of rebellion against the diplomatic world (not surprising) and in fact almost everyone except me … it all looks rather sweet and fills a gap.’

  Meanwhile, there was drink. The drinking was prodigious and the alcohol itself was dangerously, disastrously cheap. Whisky could be bought for about four shillings and sixpence a bottle; Stolichnaya vodka was so cheap that some official drivers would put it in their radiators in place of anti-freeze. There were endless national days and cocktail parties; as a journalist you could cruise from one embassy reception to another: you could drink for free all day, and if you wanted more you could get it dirt-cheap from the commissary of the British Embassy on Fridays. Jeremy Wolfenden was drunk from midday to midnight every day. There was no social stigma attached to being a drunk in Russia, he pointed out to his press colleagues, and, so far as the Russians were concerned, he was right.

  Lunch would often be at the first floor restaurant of the National Hotel, overlooking the old Tsarist Cavalry School. It would habitually take at least two hours. First there was vodka, then smoked salmon; then there might be crab in cheese sauce and a main course of shashlik, chicken Kiev or baked sturgeon. It was a little like Colonel Narishkin’s establishment in Paris in the 1920s, but was patronised by foreigners, not Russians. Wolfenden’s order seldom varied: 100 grams of vodka to still the shaking hand, some clear chicken soup to soothe the stomach and then a skirmish with an omelette. The food was not as important as the drink. Georgian wine would follow the vodka, and Armenian brandy was served with the coffee; Wolfenden drank wine only as a sluice between spirits.

  In the late afternoon he would have to book a telephone call to the office in Fleet Street. The line was always bad and was frequently lost in mid-flow; the copy-taker at the other end would ask ‘How are you spelling Khrushchev?’ twenty times in each story. The Telegraph demanded mat news stories be written in a flat, bald style, shorn of adjectival decoration or fancy punctuation marks. Full stops, and plenty of them, were advised; commas were permitted; semi-colons were banned. The style was based on an original idea that a newspaper reader might be struck down, or have to get off his train, in mid-story. If this should happen, it was thought, he ought still to know what the story said. Therefore all the important facts went into the first paragraph, or ‘nose’; subsequent paragraphs supplied further, but subsidiary, information and ‘quotes’ from people involved. Skilled reporters could turn this odd form into a minor art; in less adroit hands it became an inferior concerto, with the later paragraphs no more than rococo variations on what had been said at the beginning. It was a long way from All Souls. Wolfenden was easily able to adapt to the demands of the style: because he could write well, he could write any way they wanted. His account of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space fligh
t – which took place only one day after he arrived in Moscow – read like the work of a veteran Telegraph man.

  In the evening there was sometimes a visit to John and Brenda Miller’s flat in Sadovo Samotechnaya (‘Sad Sam’ to the British), one of the foreigners’ compounds where Wolfenden was at least provided with a proper meal and some ordinary human contact. He was good at playing games with the Millers’ three small children. The eldest, David or ‘Dodik’, regarded his young twin siblings with caution and was particularly demanding of the vodka-breathing visitor he called ‘Wuff. Wolfenden in turn was genuinely amused by the Miller children. Sometimes there would be a game of ‘Moscow Mexican’, a crude variation of poker. The house rule said a player could only lose ten roubles before he had to retire, but the Uruguayan ambassador, Leslie Close-Pozo, who occasionally joined the games in his MCC tie, asked to be allowed to lose as much as he liked.

  The journalists had so little idea of what Muscovites were talking about that they discussed the London stock market; Wolfenden and Keith Morfett of the Daily Mail even dealt on it. Wolfenden did not take to Morfett in the way that he had to his predecessor, John Mossman – ‘Mossy’, a man of small culture but colossal drinking capacity. Another favoured topic of conversation at poker evenings was the ideal foreign posting. It was not Moscow. Peking and Washington were favourites, though there was a feeling that London would be a good place to be. All of them assumed that an incoming Labour government would usher in a long future of social democracy and that England would be a place of refreshing intellectual ferment while this benign revolution took place.

  At night Wolfenden would return to his incarceration in the Hotel Ukraina. In good weather he could see over the gold domes of the Kremlin right across Moscow to the Komsomolskaya skyscrapers; the huge shadow of the Ukraina was cast across the river and on to the further bank, where it appeared to move no more slowly than the barges that nosed through the broken ice on their way upstream – or was it down? He never could make out which way the river flowed. But in bad weather, you could see nothing: he would look from his window and see only fog; he couldn’t even make out the ground below.

  He was lonely. Susie Burchardt was by now his more-or-less formal financée, but she was in Oxford. There was the mother’s help from Greenford to think about, but he told her, ‘I can’t be in love with you. You’re too young… you’re just a teen-ager.’ She was also a Catholic virgin who had no intention of sleeping with anyone until she was married. For him there were no ‘dishes’, none of the romantic or intellectual intrigue that had previously helped him keep the killing tide of tedium at bay. As he wrote to Robin Hope: ‘There are one or two dishes among the British students here in Moscow, which is more practical good to me personally, or rather might be if they knew the facts of life and I didn’t know only too well the facts of Moscow hotel life [ie bugging].’ What there was, in vast inexhaustible quantities, was liquor. Sometimes in the morning Wolfenden would sheepishly admit to one of his colleagues, ‘I’m afraid I did a bad thing last night. I must have lit a cigarette when I got into bed. I fell asleep and …’ More than once he woke up in flames.

  Even his hardest-drinking colleagues, in awe of Wolfenden’s intellect, humour and fluent Russian, were embarrassed by these pathetic lapses. In the dismal tension of the Ukraina hotel, kept at a constant pitch by the apparatus of the totalitarian state, the exuberant brilliance of his life was starting to fail.

  In July 1962 Ruari and Janet Chisholm left Moscow in a hurry. Janet managed to get two of the children out with her, but the youngest, Alistair (‘Ali-boy’) was put on to Martina Browne’s passport and came out with her on a later flight. The couple’s activities had led them into deep trouble with the Soviet authorities. The extent of the damage was not apparent until the following year, and their departure did not cause undue comment at the time: it was quite common to see people from the Western diplomatic community heading speedily to the airport with no explanation. As Wolfenden himself remarked in a later newspaper article (for the New York Times): ‘There is only one airport for international flights, and if an embassy employee is sighted there leaving out of turn, it is guessed at once that he has been compromised and is being hastily shipped out.’

  On her return to England Martina Browne was no longer required by the Chisholms and took a job in a Mexican restaurant in Knightsbridge. She moved to New York in March 1963 and found work with an advertising agency; she continued to write to Jeremy Wolfenden in Moscow throughout this period.

  Then on 2 November 1962, in an incident connected to the Chisholms’ departure, a British electrical goods salesman called Greville Wynne was arrested in Budapest by Soviet counter-intelligence officers. He was taken to Moscow where he was charged in December with receiving military secrets from Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence. It was a case that bore powerfully on Jeremy Wolfenden’s life.

  Wynne was a stocky, dapper man with a pencil-line moustache who liked to wear a curly-brimmed Alpine trilby, a sheepskin car coat and a bow tie. He liked to claim (and did, at length, in a book called The Man from Moscow) that he had worked for military security during the war and had then been reactivated in 1957 with the task of making contact with Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence. In fact Wynne was recruited as part of the SIS ‘directed travellers’ scheme. For a couple of years he pottered round the Balkans in his car coat with a caravan full of electrical gadgets in tow. Eventually he found himself in the Soviet Union, which he thought a thoroughly disagreeable and backward place: the petrol stations were infrequent and the restaurants were grubby; the women wore no make-up and, Wynne complained, had yet to discover the brassiere.

  In late 1960, at a meeting of the Scientific Research Committee which he attended as British trade delegate, Wynne spotted a Russian who was quite different from the other Soviets, with their unshaven, blackheaded complexions, their nylon shirts and their nicotine-stained coalminer’s hands. This man wore a silk shirt, he had manicured fingers and a plain, dark tie; he seemed – like Yuri Krutikov on Wolfenden’s NUS trip in 1956 – to be of a different pedigree. His name was Oleg Penkovsky and he asked Wynne to pass a message to the CIA.

  Back in London Wynne reported the meeting to the head of the SIS station, Dickie Franks. SIS set up a joint operation with the CIA, who at that stage had no one in Moscow. It was agreed that Wynne should act as the go-between because he was not, like Ruari Chisholm, obviously a suspect. In the spring of 1961 he befriended Penkovsky and acted as his courier; he brought back large quantities of information and eventually, on an April trade mission, he brought back Penkovsky himself. In room 360 of the Mount Royal Hotel near Marble Arch in central London, Penkovsky was pumped up with benzedrine and ravenously debriefed by two SIS and two CIA officers. There was a direct line to Washington so that the Americans could simultaneously share the spoils that tumbled out into the spinning tape-recorders. The CIA had initially rebuffed an approach from Penkovsky because they thought he might be a plant; he was too good to be true. This time they were convinced; and their difficulty was in dealing with the demands of Penkovsky, who was disappointed not to be introduced to the Queen. His SIS interrogators thought he was deranged by vanity and by the hugeness of what he had done.

  It was certainly important. The United States had been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; Gagarin had been the first man in space; the West believed the ‘missile gap’ was in the Soviet Union’s favour. Now there was this excitable Russian colonel telling them that Khrushchev had been bluffing; that the West had more weapons and that many of those the Soviet Union did possess were unusable. They gave him a Minnox camera and sent him back to Moscow, telling him to concentrate on what mattered: ‘Only the top-secret stuff, Oleg, forget the plain secret material.’

  Further meetings between Wynne and Penkovsky took place in the autumn at a trade fair in Paris; also on leave in Paris were Ruari and Janet Chisholm. Janet was to work with Penkovsky in Moscow wh
en Wynne could find no plausible ‘trade’ reason to be there. Although all the operational procedures were gone through carefully, Wynne believed Penkovsky was uneasy about the change of contact by which Janet Chisholm became the main recipient of his largesse. SIS in London was also worried about the Chisholm connection: Janet and Ruari had both known George Blake in Berlin and their files were accordingly marked. Dick White, the head of SIS, chivalrously believed that the KGB would not suspect a lady: he could not use Ruari Chisholm because, thanks to Philby and his friends, the Russians could always work out who the SIS officer was.

  SIS decided to get Wynne back into the Soviet Union with instructions to bring Penkovsky out with him for the final time in one of his caravans. Luckily the vogue for ‘trade fairs’ – which seemed to exist principally for the benefit of frenzied espionage activity – was still on: the next was to be in Helsinki in September 1962, and the idea was that Wynne would slip along to Leningrad for a private exhibition soon afterwards.

  Through the summer of 1962 Penkovsky continued to cooperate with the Chisholms. He used dead-drop boxes, but also passed film concealed in boxes of sweets, which he gave to Janet Chisholm and even to her children in the park. It was appallingly risky. Wynne, meanwhile, was having trouble with the chassis for his new mobile caravan: various British industrial relations problems and restrictive practices meant that they were out of stock. Wynne wanted to have the thing made in Europe; but SIS patriotically insisted that it be made in Britain – no Soviet defector was coming out beneath the floorboards of any foreign-built rubbish.

  Then on 2 July Wynne flew to Moscow, ostensibly to smooth the official way for his Leningrad visit. He was by this time under suspicion: he had not been sufficiently well documented about his forthcoming ‘trade delegations’. Penkovsky had also become disenchanted with Wynne: he drank too much and boasted of his affairs with women.