The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  In a room in the Hotel Ukraina Penkovsky and Wynne exchanged a large quantity of film and talked about plans for Penkovsky’s escape. By now Wynne was being followed; after dinner one night he found his room in the Ukraina had been searched. SIS had been greedy. Although both men had been willing to carry on, they should have stopped the operation at least six months earlier. At this stage Ruari and Janet Chisholm made their undignified exit, with Martina Browne following close behind.

  In late September Greville Wynne’s giant Mobile Exhibition hit the road. The chassis problems meant he had missed the private trade fair in Leningrad, but luckily there was one in Bucharest. In the plains of Rumania Wynne saw vast mobilisations of troops with long wobbling columns of tanks and armoured vehicles. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its perilous height and the Soviet bloc was preparing for world war. What Wynne did not fully understand was that the information he had carried out in the pocket of his sheepskin car coat was enabling Kennedy to win the staring match. Ray Cline, then deputy director of the CIA, said Penkovsky’s intelligence ‘allowed the CIA to follow the progress of the Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba by the hour.’ K also helped Washington grasp the extent of America’s strategic advantage in nuclear missiles.

  Wynne was arrested by Soviet counter-intelligence officers in Budapest, where he had driven from Rumania, on 2 November. He was taken to Moscow and imprisoned in the Lubyanka to await trial the following May. Penkovsky was arrested in Moscow. The KGB had recordings of their conversations in the Ukraina, they had tapes and photographs; they had everything they needed.

  The KGB initially acted only on suspicion in following Penkovsky; they had no evidence of his treachery until they found the Minnox camera in his apartment. Once he was arrested, SIS made no attempt to rescue or exchange him. This enraged Joe Bulik, the CIA case officer, who suggested that the British release the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, then in prison in London, in a swap. SIS refused, and in the end Penkovsky was left to the mercy of the gentlemen in the Lubyanka.

  Life in the press corps continued in its bizarre, anxious, drunken way. Once Chisholm had gone, those who had had anything to do with him came under increased scrutiny. Wolfenden was watched more closely than ever by the KGB: he had been a friend of the Chisholms; he had liked playing with their children; he had been close to their young mother’s help. He had also met Greville Wynne at various parties and was more vulnerable than any other Western correspondent. Martin Page was also single, but he was clearly heterosexual; he lived in his own flat and was given protection from the KGB by virtue of working for the Daily Express. Lord Beaverbrook was favourably regarded in Moscow because of his support for two Germanies; he had procured British warplanes for the Soviet Union and his correspondents received favours in return.

  The Telegraph, on the other hand, was implacably anti-Soviet. Its managing editor S.R. Pawley was believed by many people to be friendly to, if not actively involved with, SIS. During the General Strike in 1926 Pawley helped produce the anti-union British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill; in the Second World War he served with the Buffs before being appointed Public Relations Officer to General Eisenhower. He was given an OBE and awarded the Croix de Guerre and the United States Bronze Star. In 1945 he returned to the Telegraph to organise its foreign news department, which was to be a separate entity for the first time. He visited eighty-two countries in twelve years and used up five passports.

  In December 1968 John Miller, Wolfenden’s successor for the Telegraph in Moscow, reported that the Russian weekly newspaper Nedelya had published an exposé of the connections between the British press and the intelligence services. Among those journalists it said were linked to Intelligence were the two Telegraph men who had hired Wolfenden: its proprietor Lord Hartwell and its managing editor S.R. Pawley.

  This in itself proved nothing; but the Russians were always good at knowing who the spies were. Dick White, head of SIS, did not even consider it worth trying to conceal the fact that Ruari Chisholm was the SIS officer in Moscow because, as he told a colleague, ‘they have our complete order of battle.’ SIS had been so often and so comprehensively betrayed from inside that Ted Heath, then a junior foreign office minister, told White in the wake of the George Blake case that he might as well start again on the grounds that the Russians knew the identity of every single SIS officer. Although the various diplomatic expulsions from Moscow over the next twenty-five years contained some innocent people (including a subsequent Telegraph correspondent), the real spooks were always in there too.

  During the Second World War there was a close liaison between SIS and senior newspapermen. The connections sprang from a patriotic desire to help the Allies and give no inadvertent comfort to the enemy. The links, however, survived the change of conditions: an unspoken assumption of a common interest and a greater good underlay dealings between SIS and some editors for at least twenty-five years after 1945. The egregious example is David Astor, the liberal-minded editor of the Observer, who was persuaded to offer cover for the SIS agent Kim Philby as a journalist in Beirut. (Neither Astor nor the SIS then knew that Philby was also working for the KGB). Sometimes a ‘journalist’ would ask an editor for a foreign job without revealing what his true purpose was. Frank Giles, Wolfenden’s former boss in Paris and a man with impeccable training in diplomatic and intelligence ways, helped Harold Evans, the editor, sniff out one such bogus applicant at the Sunday Times. The role of ‘stringer’ (a part-time, non-staff overseas reporter) was a cover much favoured by SIS. A whole section of SIS – the BAQ department – was given over to cultivating these contacts, and another to giving regular off-the-record briefings to correspondents close to the front line of the Cold War. The ethics of these briefings were unclear. The journalists were free to discount what they were told, but their independence was tarnished. As a correspondent in Germany, Neal Ascherson believed it was a duty to treat all information emanating from the West as sceptically as that which came from the other side. He found Jeremy Wolfenden’s failure to do so one of several reasons why his journalism was disappointing.

  Even without such complications the pressure on a journalist was intense. No one could leave the Soviet Union without an exit visa, which might be denied at an official’s whim. A Swedish correspondent and his wife suffered nervous breakdowns because they could not make love beneath the hidden gaze of the KGB camera. Martin Page’s successor for the Express took an overdose within a week of arriving; Page, who was still in Moscow, complained to the Foreign Ministry that he was having difficulty getting his man home. They replied that a Soviet Embassy chauffeur in London had developed schizophrenia and was still in an English hospital after eighteen months: the British press took this to be a warning that if they cracked up they would be sent to a Soviet mental institution.

  The ‘Moscow twitch’ was a common phenomenon in the reserved diplomatic blocks in which Western journalists lived. The Western press was continuously denigrated in Soviet newspapers, and the lives of Soviet citizens who talked to any foreign correspondents were made unbearable. The cleverest instrument of anxiety developed by the Russians was their legal definition of ‘intelligence’, which was not restricted to the obtaining or relaying of secrets, but included any systematic analysis of printed matter. Thus a background feature article that innocently drew, for instance, on figures of agricultural production to try to give an overall picture of farming life in the Soviet Union could be termed espionage. All reporters lived with the knowledge that if the Cold War took a wrong turning, the Soviet authorities could legally arrest and convict them. The legitimate sentence for carrying out their jobs could be years of hard labour.

  There were also provocations. An official might leave a file marked ‘Secret’ on a table while he left the room. The telephone would ring and a female voice would offer herself for company. Frequently such women operated in threes. A reporter for an American newspaper was unwisely tempted; within an hour he found himself with three naked Russian women dancing
in his flat and three men in raincoats hammering on the door, saying they believed he was ill-treating Soviet citizens.

  Drunk, lonely and banged up in the Ukraina hotel, Jeremy Wolfenden was an absurdly easy prey. In his life, sex had played not just a prominent part, but a part that was associated with laughter, romance and intrigue. He still also had the conviction that he knew how far he could go; his self-confidence and judgement had never previously deserted him.

  Although Wolfenden was regarded by others of his generation as a leader and a man of distinct individualism, it is possible to argue that his life was excessively influenced by fashionable writers. He and Neal Ascherson had clearly been thrilled while at school by the outsiderism of Camus and Sartre; Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, which took it all a step further by discussing suicide as a rational option, appeared in 1955, when Wolfenden was at Oxford, and was enthusiastically received by him. By this time Ionesco’s plays and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot were also widely known, giving further moral respectability to an absurdist or nihilist point of view. In 1962 Allan Sillitoe published The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the story of a Borstal boy who refuses to win a cross-country race against another institution because to do so would be to accept the terms of the authorities who have imprisoned him. This tale also interested Wolfenden, who for some time had been developing the idea of deliberate under-achievement as the only honest response to a society whose own idea of ‘achievement’ he believed to be false. While all these writers in their way gave intellectual credibility to pessimism, a fellow-old Etonian, Cyril Connolly, had given sloth and despair a modish justification in Enemies of Promise, on which Wolfenden had been pretty well suckled, while the baleful influence of Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, with its angoisse des gares, scholarship Latin and afternoon cafards, also surfaced in Wolfenden’s letters from Paris. Guy Burgess offered the worst living example of degenerate old Etonianism, but was a unique and patently inimitable disaster; Cyril Connolly, on the other hand, preaching privileged gloom from within the pale, may well have been an actively damaging influence.

  There are several versions of what happened next, but they all mean the same thing in the end.

  One day Wolfenden took up to his room in the Hotel Ukraina a waiter from the Praga restaurant, and in the middle of their love-making two men sprang from the wardrobe with flash cameras …Wolfenden had fallen for the barber at the Ukraina and it was with him – or perhaps with his son – that he was compromised … Wolfenden came back one night to find a Polish boy sitting naked in his armchair, but was too drunk to do anything … Wolfenden was set up with a Polish boy called Jan and they went to bed. ‘He was gorgeous,’ Wolfenden claimed, but he was so drunk he could not remember whether he had done anything or not. Nothing happened for a few days … He was immediately taken to a KGB office situated, conveniently, within the Ukraina.

  Given Wolfenden’s vulnerable situation and the remorseless methods of the KGB it is possible that these are not all versions of the same story but in fact versions of two different incidents: first, a Polish boy followed by a functional failure through drink, then a more successful encounter with an employee of the Ukraina. Whatever happened, he was trapped. Next came the blackmail. Wolfenden tried to pass it off in Wildean style (he was so pleased with the prints that he asked for enlargements); but he knew that if the truth of his activities were made public he would lose his job. A man of his talents could easily have found other employment, but that was not really the point. Being a foreign correspondent, travelling light ‘with a typewriter and a revolver’, was something he had thought of for himself; he didn’t want to be a civil servant, a lawyer or a university teacher: he didn’t want to do one of those things his father might have advised or had already done himself.

  Homosexuality was not embarrassing to Jeremy Wolfenden, but it was illegal. The Soviet penal code decreed a lengthy prison sentence, and although it was unlikely that the courts would imprison a British journalist, it was a worrying prospect. Meanwhile, the reason that the law had not been repealed in Britain was that Jack Wolfenden’s report was still lying in a fat, explosive bundle somewhere in the Home Office. If it were to emerge that its author’s son was homosexual the credibility of the report would be destroyed; the liberal reforms it proposed would be set back by a decade or more. Jeremy Wolfenden was open to blackmail not only on his own account but on behalf of the civil liberties of millions of British men. The KGB may have been slovenly, cynical and tired; but they were not that stupid.

  Nor was the Secret Intelligence Service. Wolfenden’s relationship with the service was informal: he did not want to do anything that would compromise his work, but he was intrigued enough to keep a line open. After the incident in the Hotel Ukraina his position was considerably weakened.

  He decided to report what had happened to the Embassy, and their response was soothing. They told him to do nothing: to go along with what the KGB asked him. Then, when he was on leave in London, he could call at the address in Whitehall and have a chat with Ml5. And so it was that both British Intelligence and Security were able to use the man they wanted. He had been delivered to them by the KGB. It was almost too good to be true.

  And probably it wasn’t. SIS, especially after the Vassall case, was aware of the vulnerability of homosexual men to blackmail. The only reasonable inference is that they wanted Wolfenden to be set up, and in S.R. Pawley they had the man to help. He was prepared to send Wolfenden where The Times would not because he was doing what he was told. SIS hoped to learn more about the KGB by having someone on the inside, like Wolfenden, than through their own officers. They wanted him to tell them what the KGB was thinking, even though all the KGB was thinking, as it turned out, was: how can we embarrass more Western visitors?

  Wolfenden’s colleagues, visitors and friends were surprised that the Embassy let him stay. David Shapiro, who visited Wolfenden in Moscow, discovered a sense of shock, of outrage, as though something unfair were being done. The standard procedure when someone had been compromised was to tell them to leave at once, but SIS believed Wolfenden could be of more use to them if he stayed. They gambled that any information he gave to the Soviets could only be of trifling use because he had no access to military or other secrets – unless they gave him some for the purpose of disinformation.

  Wolfenden did some work for the KGB. He wrote articles for the Novosti Press Agency on the nature of British Institutions. This was standard low-level stuff. Wolfenden told John Miller that he was writing the articles and Miller told him he must be out of his mind. Wolfenden ignored Miller’s advice and did what he called ‘a few bits’. The main task the KGB asked of Wolfenden was to inform on his colleagues in the press. In an emotional meeting in Martin Page’s apartment, Wolfenden warned Page never to tell him anything that he would not want the KGB to know. When Page escorted Wolfenden to the lift he was weeping; as the lift came, he said goodbye and kissed Martin Page on the lips.

  A British journalist called Douglas Botting, who was in Russia making a film for the BBC, had to leave Moscow to go on location. He discovered on his return that Wolfenden had been reading his mail. Botting also saw the payment that Wolfenden received from the KGB: he was told such things as the composition of the new Politburo before it had been announced and would discuss diem loudly over vodka with his colleagues. They were embarrassed by this evidence of his situation but had too much affection for him to make anything of it.

  It was the end of an era, but even what had gone before had not been simple. Both Wolfenden and Page were used to operating with the Soviet authorities for their day-to-day business. Wolfenden had a minder called Vladimir Pozner and Page was looked after by Yuri Vinogradov. Their role was to tell the English correspondents about Soviet foreign policy, or a version of it, and to portray the domestic situation in an optimistic light.

  Pozner and Vinogradov were both cultured men, like Yuri Krutikov and Oleg Penkovsky; Pozner was in fact part Jewish and had been brought up in
the United States. He had had an affair with an Anglo-American writer called Sally Belfrage and had told her many things about the Soviet Union that she subsequently used in a book called A Room in Moscow. Although Pozner may not have been a serving officer, this indiscretion put him in hock to the KGB. He was in any case a believing Communist who went on to become one of the great propagandists of the Brezhnev era. In one of the remarkable transformations of the late twentieth century he went on to present a talk show on American television.

  Other more crude KGB types occasionally tried to bully the correspondents, and Wolfenden was by this time so trapped that he was unable to fend off pressure of any kind from any side. All he had left with which to defend himself was his wit and his arrogance. These now became not social manners but qualities on which he depended for survival.

  In the autumn of 1962 Wolfenden was on leave in London and saw a good deal of Susie Burchardt, to whom he was supposed to be engaged. Things did not run smoothly between them. Wolfenden’s drinking had reached colossal proportions and his fiancée found the brandy at breakfast increasingly hard to tolerate. However, she was still enchanted by his exuberance and by the fact that he seemed to understand how difficult the relationship must be for her. The engagement went off and on, according to the high spirits and optimism of both parties. He told her that he was ‘debriefed by the Foreign Office’ when he was in London, but she assumed that all correspondents went through a similar experience.

  Then, on 7 May 1963, Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were put on trial. It was an astonishing story of microdots, dead-drop boxes, photographs taken with the smuggled Minnox camera, bugs, recordings, double-bluff, fear, farce and appalling drama. For all the inclination of journalists to mock the dreary men of the intelligence services and the ‘games’ they played, the information that Wynne took out from Penkovsky did change the course of the Cold War. At the intelligence level it enabled Britain to regain a little of the reputation it had so disastrously lost in American eyes with the Philby, Burgess and Maclean affair; more importantly, it helped the West face down the Russian threat in the knowledge that Khrushchev had fewer weapons than they did. Though some, including Wolfenden, feigned apathy, only those who believed that Soviet totalitarianism was morally the equal of Western capitalism could be quite indifferent to the outcome of such events.