Churchill's Iceman_The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke_Genius, Fugitive, Spy

by Henry Hemming

  Your loving Daddy.

  The third was to Elsie Myers, whose husband Leo had killed himself in 1944, also with an overdose of barbiturates.

  Dear Elsie,

  I have had to go the same way as Leo. – I can’t help myself – I’ve been robbed of my ideas by Dr Cohen at the last moment. This – I am already about dead – is to beg you in the name of our deep friendship – to leave David in your will what you can so that he may be able to have children more and sooner, in memory of me.

  Best, best wishes to you.

  Yours

  Geoff.

  He wrote so quickly that there was time for more. Pyke’s last words, more revealing than the other notes, were to his son:

  The thing to do is to be as detached as you can about my death. This may seem a strange thing to say, but I’ve taken the poison and in the ½ hour or so left am trying to find things to say of use. You will feel I’ve deserted you. It is true, but it’s beyond me to endure more. This last blow has been more than I can stand. Mummy does not know how much I have loved her and how faithful my heart has always been to her. But I have been of no use to her and she should for her own well being, which is what I care about, forget me as soon as possible. It is easier for a wife than a son to do this. But you will be able to do it in time. Do your best for your own sake. It is over negative feelings to me which are perhaps buried and which death tends to bury deeper.

  The all-important thing is children. I beg you do not call any of them, I hope there will be many, after me – I’d like everything concerning me to be destroyed and to be forgotten as if I’d never lived. I shall live in all the children I’ve had to do with, and shall fade away as they grow up and shed (to the extent they do) their early experiences.

  I hesitate even now to interfere – and fear I have done so too much – but keep left. Let me advise you to read Shaw several times. You can short-circuit the job of buying the wisdom of experience – I’ve only a few minutes left – and obtain generalities for which life is not long enough to do by observation.

  I’m now going under . . .

  I find great difficulty in thinking and . . .

  . . . love you and good wishes for you and Mummy. Remember, take your children as serious as you do grown-ups – and beware your social inheritance – the . . . assumptions, indecisively imbibed from environment. [. . .] Don’t attend my funeral – silly business, no fuss or ceremony. As I say below have me cremated. I found my mother’s funeral a shock, that’s why. I’ve forgotten so much I wanted to say. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

  Pyke’s writing deteriorated and his pen fell to the floor.

  Mrs Hopkins, the daily help, was the first to find the corpse, while it was Mrs Mendelsohn, the landlady, who called the police. The operator at the local exchange must have put a call through to the press, for there were reporters at Steele’s Road before anyone else arrived. The next day news of Pyke’s death appeared in the Evening Standard, the Daily Express and the Daily Graphic.

  ‘Pyke of the Back-room’ had taken his own life. Elsewhere he was referred to as ‘one of the most famous “back-room boys”’. There followed articles in the New York Times, the magazines Time and Discovery, and fuller obituaries in The Times and Manchester Guardian. Death became him; the superlatives flowed. Pyke was a ‘genius’, a ‘pioneer’, an ‘organiser of thought’ and for Max Perutz ‘one of the most original characters in this country’. He had an ‘almost overdeveloped sense of social responsibility’ and an intellectual approach which was ‘not only free from accretions of ordinary human prejudice but disregarded their existence’. Later that year the BBC would broadcast an appreciation of Pyke in which Lancelot Law Whyte compared him favourably with Frank Whittle and Albert Einstein.

  Yet none of these accounts dwelled on the reasons why he might have killed himself, for they remained something of a mystery. The Coroner, Bentley Purchase, ruled that Pyke had committed suicide while of ‘unsound mind’. At the time suicide was a criminal act, so coroners frequently arrived at this verdict on the basis of scant evidence. Most obituaries alluded to his depression; some suggested he had been overcome by work. A biography of Pyke published nine years later, by the American military historian David Lampe, described his suicide as ‘an act of intellectual frustration’. Yet a letter subsequently written to Lampe challenged this. It seemed that there might have been another factor in his death, one that was unknown even to Pyke.

  The letter had come from a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital who had read Lampe’s book and noticed that Pyke had appeared to display almost every symptom of Addison’s Disease, right down to a fondness for fried chicken and sardines – low sodium levels brought on by Addison’s will often result in salt cravings. By causing him so much pain during his life, this chronic condition would have certainly played a significant part in his decision to kill himself.

  Addison’s Disease is a rare adrenal disorder that reduces the sufferer’s ability to produce the steroid hormones cortisol and aldosterone, making it harder to fight inflammation, move nutrients around the body and regulate blood-flow. It can lead to prolonged periods of lethargy and long-term pain. Those afflicted will also find it hard to deal with stress, either physical or mental, and may produce less of the sex hormone DHEA, thus lowering their sex drive. Addison’s usually follows on from an initial failure of the adrenal glands caused by an illness such as tuberculosis. Again this feature of the disease matches Pyke’s history. In the freezing loft of the Jewish barrack in Ruhleben he was said to have experienced ‘pneumonia’ in both lungs, which might have been tuberculosis pneumonia. The onset of Addison’s is insidious, so Pyke would not have been aware of his condition immediately and, even then, relatively little was known about this disease during his lifetime – which would explain why it was not spotted by the doctors at the Mayo Clinic. It is certainly possible that Pyke suffered from a mild form of Addison’s and, as Lampe replied to the endocrinologist at Middlesex Hospital: ‘If all of Pyke can be explained by Addison’s disease, then we must all revise our theories.’

  Yet the consensus among modern-day specialists in the disease as to whether Pyke had this illness is less conclusive. ‘I cannot say that Pyke did not have Addison’s,’ says Professor John Monson, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Endocrinology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. ‘It is conceivable, but by no means probable.’ This is a view shared by fellow endocrinologists at Charing Cross Hospital in London.

  Much easier to establish is that Pyke suffered from frequent depressive episodes. By his own admission, if each of us experiences variations in mood, or cyclothymic tendencies, ‘I was more subject to them than most.’ The music of his life takes us from all-conquering crescendos in which it seemed for him that anything was possible – that he could prevent a war, end anti-Semitism, earn a fortune, rewrite the rules of education or win the war with a single invention – down to those muffled, more subdued passages during which he found it hard to get out of bed. It is tempting to take this further and reach for a modern term such as bipolar disorder. There were certainly intense, near-manic periods in his life when he seemed to understand the world with mystic clarity and could think exceptionally fast. But ideas often appear to have come to him whether or not he was ‘up’, and in none of the many descriptions of Pyke are there clear suggestions that his speech was manic or frenzied; nor were there repeated spending sprees or bouts of hypersexuality. Then again, these symptoms are rooted in a modern understanding of this condition, so it is probably best to avoid this term and instead repeat his own analysis: that while we all experience variations in moods, he was much more prone to these than most.

  The extent to which he suffered from depression, Addison’s, or both – and whether the two compounded each other – will always be unclear. But we can be sure that during the last years of his life he was in pain, both mental and physical.

  Unaware of the source of this discomfort, knowing only that it was starting to overpower him, he appears to have tackle
d this problem as he would do any other some six months before his suicide. In his diary for August 1947 he described a physical ‘trough’ which lasted two days and left him feeling ‘very empty, exhausted “post sick”’ and unable ‘to get the machine going’. After this he applied himself to ‘the way out’, or ‘the working out of the D. Problem’. ‘D’ might have been ‘Depression’ or just ‘Death’.

  Although he did not spell out his conclusion, we know that he felt ‘shock, relief, almost happiness’ at the thought of it, sensations which were ‘those of a man relieved of a thematic condemnation. And that of course is what has happened.’ While intellectual frustration and the pressure of work certainly played a part in his suicide, this entry suggests that he had made the decision to kill himself long before his death and that his suicide had more to do with the nagging, persistent pain he had lived with for so long than the frustration of not being able to finish the nursing report.

  There remains another loose end: the question of whether Pyke was working for Moscow. He described himself after the war as a Marxist who had lost faith in the Soviet Union. ‘None of us can be trusted with victory,’ he had written earlier, and ‘Communist Russia has not yet been tested in this respect.’ By 1948 it had – and had failed, the iron curtain having descended across Europe.

  Was his sense of despair deepened by the failure of the USSR to live up to the ideals he had once invested in it? Or had he really been, as MI5 and Special Branch suspected, a senior Comintern figure? For if so, he would have been living in fear of exposure, which again casts his suicide in a different light.

  PYKE HUNT, PART 6

  ON A FRIDAY evening in May 1951 two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, abandoned their car by a Southampton dock and raced to the ferry, one of them shouting over his shoulder ‘We’ll be back on Monday!’ They never returned. From France they were escorted to the Soviet Union where they spent the rest of their lives. Both were NKVD agents who for years had supplied high-grade intelligence to Moscow in prodigious quantities: between 1941 and the end of the war Burgess alone passed on 4,605 documents.

  This defection marked the first instalment of the ‘Cambridge Spies’ espionage saga, which would go on to scandalise British society and undermine some of the foundations of trust within MI5, MI6 and the Foreign Office. For many this was evidence of the worst kind of complacency: a clubbish lack of imagination in which a man who appeared to be ‘one of us’ was incapable of either treachery on this scale or political radicalisation in the service of what Orwell had once called ‘that un-English thing, an idea’. But it would be years before the extent of this deception emerged. In the days after Maclean and Burgess’s defection very few people knew what had happened, and MI5 wanted to keep it that way.

  Rather than obtain a warrant to search Burgess’s flat, MI5’s Guy Liddell contacted Anthony Blunt, the former intelligence officer who had since become Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute, and asked him to track down a set of keys to Burgess’s flat. Liddell knew that Blunt was a close friend of Burgess – but had no inkling then that he might also be a Soviet agent. Before his sudden departure Burgess had been seeing Jackie Hewit, a chorus boy from Gateshead who had also had an affair with Blunt before the war. Blunt borrowed a set of keys from Hewit and accompanied two MI5 officers to Burgess’s flat.

  Blunt later claimed that as the three of them moved through Burgess’s rooms he managed to remove any incriminating papers from under the noses of the MI5 men, yet this is unlikely. Calm and quick-fingered as he might have been, it seems that Blunt had given the flat a quick sweep beforehand. But he did not look everywhere.

  Beneath Burgess’s bed was a guitar case that contained a treasure trove of letters and papers which cast suspicion on Blunt, Kim Philby and John Cairncross, all NKVD agents, as well as on Peter Astbury, who had passed information to Moscow via Dave Springhall, a CPGB member jailed in 1943 for offences under the Official Secrets Act. Burgess’s guitar case also contained documents relating to Geoffrey Pyke. In November of that year more of Burgess’s correspondence was found at the Courtauld Institute and again there were references to Pyke.

  For more than half a century these papers would remain classified – until 2009 when MI5 released most of its material on Pyke. Four of the documents that were made public then had been found either under Burgess’s bed or at the Courtauld. They are the most important pieces in the puzzle of Geoffrey Pyke and his political loyalties.

  Two of the four documents were extracts from longer reports – not official government papers but chatty, informal accounts of political gossip including profiles of key political figures. The emphasis throughout was on developments that might concern the USSR. One had been written in late April 1942, the other a month before.

  The earlier extract began with a detailed biographical sketch of Pyke before telling of a secret meeting in Richmond Terrace to discuss the Plough scheme. It provided a full account of the project, the role envisaged for Russia, its military impact vis-à-vis a second front and Pyke’s attempts to push for more Russian involvement. The fact that Mountbatten was initially sceptical about reaching out to the USSR was also mentioned. Pyke, it went on, urged him to push for direct liaison with the Soviets and to send British troops to participate in Russian guerrilla warfare. ‘Mountbatten showed keen interest and sympathy for this idea, said he would raise it with the P.M.’

  From the wording of this report it was almost certainly the result of a long conversation with Pyke. Less clear is whether he knew that what he was saying might end up in Moscow: did he understand that the man or woman he was speaking to might be a Soviet agent, or had he been gulled into giving this information?

  It is impossible to say without identifying his interlocutor. The obvious candidate is Guy Burgess, given that these reports were found among his papers. Burgess was, as the historian Nigel West has written, ‘assiduous in cultivating sources’. By early 1942 Burgess was passing vast quantities of intelligence on to Moscow. Even so, we can rule him out, largely because of Milicent Bagot’s fortunate decision in March 1942 to have Pyke shadowed around London.

  One of the Pyke reports found among Burgess’s correspondence was dated 22 March and described a meeting held on 19 March. Since this report was based on a verbal account, and the fact that no Soviet agent would gather this kind of intelligence over the telephone, we can be reasonably sure that Pyke must have spoken to the author of this report in person at some point between 19 and 22 March. By then Bagot had Pyke under MI5 observation, so we know where he was for most of this period, as well as when he ate, what he wore, how long he spent in particular buildings and, crucially, the people he spoke to.

  Because it was such a long report, we can discount anyone whom he saw only briefly. This leaves us with just three names (if we disregard those he spoke to inside Richmond Terrace). One was Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Brigadier Wildman-Lushington. Another was an RAF officer, Squadron Leader Dudeney, then at the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The third was Peter Smollett, who had recently become Head of Soviet Relations at the Ministry of Information.

  Of these three, one was revealed after his death in 1980 to have been a Soviet mole code-named ‘ABO’ and later described by a KGB defector as more ‘significant’ to Moscow than any of the Cambridge Spies. This man was not unmasked during his lifetime, and instead enjoyed a successful post-war career as a respected Times correspondent and was even awarded an OBE. His name was Peter Smollett and he was almost certainly the Soviet agent to whom Pyke supplied details of the meeting in Richmond Terrace.

  Smollett was held in high regard by Moscow not only because of the intelligence he provided but also because of his propaganda work in the Ministry of Information. It constituted what KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky called ‘the NKVD’s most remarkable “active measures” coup’. Smollett would exaggerate Soviet concerns, refuse to give in to them and then suggest as a quid pro quo a more Soviet-friendly
stance on other issues. He maintained, for example, that the Soviets were exceptionally thin-skinned and, as such, no stories about Stalinist persecution could be broadcast. Smollett encouraged the BBC to run stories that exaggerated the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR and to have these translated and broadcast to Eastern Europe – a major coup, given the anti-religious reputation of the Soviet regime and the high standing of the BBC in Europe. Elsewhere Smollett pushed the idea that after the war the USSR would be too weak to do anything other than rebuild. He organised the legendary 1943 Albert Hall meeting to celebrate the Red Army’s twenty-fifth anniversary and, in one month alone, September 1943, as Christopher Andrew has shown, under Smollett ‘the Ministry of Information organised meetings on the Soviet Union for 34 public venues, 35 factories, 100 voluntary societies, 28 civil defence groups, 9 schools and a prison; the BBC in the same month broadcast thirty programmes with a substantial Soviet content’.

  It worked. Even British communists were taken aback by the ‘red haze’ which swept across Britain after the entry of the USSR into the war. None of this of course would have been possible without the heroism of the Russian people. This sympathy was inspired by much more than Smollett’s propaganda. Yet he helped to blur the line between the heroic Russians and the brutal Soviet regime. It was, as the historian Steven Merritt Miner has written, ‘propaganda beyond price’.

  At the same time Smollett was busy passing intelligence to Moscow – as he had been doing since the start of the war and perhaps earlier. Initially he had reported to the Soviet agent Kim Philby, but after he joined SIS Philby began to distance himself from Smollett, feeling that he had become, as the BBC’s Gordon Corera has put it, like ‘the embarrassing friend from school who followed you to university and knew you were not quite what you pretended to be’. Instead Philby handed Smollett over to Burgess, who was impressed by his new sub-agent and mentioned him to the illegal NKVD resident in London, Anatoli Gorsky – who was furious. By taking on a sub-agent without clearing it first with Moscow Burgess had again broken protocol. He was told to drop Smollett. He chose not to. Instead Philby, Blunt and Burgess decided among themselves that Smollett should report to Burgess, who could pass off his material as his own work.