Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  An MI5 officer forgets to renew his passport

  For those people whose work takes them to foreign shores from time to time, forgetting to renew a passport is a minor occupational hazard, albeit one that should only arise once every ten years. When the would-be traveller arrives at the airport, ferry terminal or border only for a customs official to skewer them with a steely glance and a response that starts, ‘I’m sorry, sir/madam, but this passport…’ one imagines that in most cases the damage is slight: perhaps a meeting will have to be rescheduled or a conference missed. However, it’s not the sort of thing one can ever imagine happening to James Bond – or for that matter, a real spy like Mata Hari.

  So, when you’re a senior MI5 (domestic intelligence agency) officer ordered to fly to France to intercept two suspected spies who appear to be on their way to defect to the other side, turning up at the airport with an out-of-date passport is, in the language one imagines is used nowadays in such circles, suboptimal. When those two turn out to represent a possible 40 per cent of the most notorious spy ring in British history, that little error becomes very suboptimal indeed.

  Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were both signed up as Soviet agents either while studying at Cambridge University in the 1930s or shortly afterwards. They may have been recruited by Trinity College graduate Anthony Blunt or (as Blunt attested later), Burgess may have been approached by a third party (and then recruited Blunt himself). Like the rest of the members of what became known as the Cambridge Spy Ring or the Cambridge Five, they came from affluent families who moved in rarified social circles.

  Burgess was handsome, charming and more than fond of a drink. As a gay man living at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, he had learnt from an early age how to operate below the radar – a skill he would employ to good effect as a spy. He had joined a Tory-supporting society at Trinity College but was influenced by Marxist members of a secret and extremely elitist discussion group at the university called the Cambridge Apostles.

  After graduation, Burgess worked as an assistant to a Conservative MP and later as a radio producer at the BBC, where he oversaw Week in Westminster, a programme that still airs on Radio 4. In the latter stages of World War II he moved over to the Foreign Office to work in its news department, and after the conflict he became assistant to Labour’s minister of state in the Foreign Office. He remained at the government department in various rôles until 1950. During his time there he was able to pass on thousands of documents to his handlers at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD. This was the Soviet spy agency that had been known as the NKVD from 1934–46 and whose work was assumed by the KGB in 1954.

  Meanwhile, Burgess’ drinking – which had spiralled out of control – was becoming increasingly problematic for his employers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He had come close to being sacked from the Foreign Office in 1949 and the following year he was shunted off to the British Embassy in Washington. However, his behaviour continued to be erratic as his alcoholism continued unabated. On 28 February 1951, while on a trip through the state of Virginia, he was stopped no fewer than three times for speeding. Burgess pleaded diplomatic immunity. He had become an embarrassment to the embassy and was sent back to London. There is some debate as to whether he had deliberately sought a way of being posted back to Britain and had engineered this situation, or had merely shown an arrogant disregard for the speed limit that day. Whichever the case, back in London there was an urgent job his Soviet handlers wanted him to carry out.

  Twenty years beforehand, Liberal politician’s son Donald Maclean had gone up to Cambridge to start his first term at Trinity Hall college. His leftist outlook developed rapidly during his time there and he became well known at the university as a member of the Communist Party. In his final year he was recruited as a Soviet spy by Theodore Maly, a Hungarian-born Roman Catholic priest-turned-Soviet intelligence officer. Maclean was told to give an outward show of disillusionment with Communism and make a career in the Civil Service, where he might prove a useful plant for the newly formed NKVD. He entered the service having passed his exams with first-class honours – his life as a spy had got off to the best possible start.

  Like Burgess, he too secured a post at the Foreign Office, where he dealt with the affairs of western European countries and, in 1936, helped scrutinise the policies of the major international players in the Spanish Civil War. The following year, his NKVD contact, Theodore Maly, disappeared (he was probably a victim of the purge Stalin was carrying out at the time) and was replaced by a woman called Kitty Harris, to whom he passed innumerable classified documents.

  In 1938, he was promoted to the position of third secretary at the British Embassy in Paris, where he was able to pass on more information to the Soviets regarding the frenetic diplomatic manœuvres Britain was carrying out in the lead-up to World War II. In the French capital he met and married Melinda Marling, the Sorbonne-educated daughter of an American oil executive, and fellow convinced communist. In 1940, the two made a dramatic escape back to England as the Nazi blitzkrieg enveloped northern France. After a period in the Foreign Office, he became second secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, where he was privy to secret information about atomic weapons programmes. He went on to fill an important diplomatic post in Egypt – where he became something of a drunkard – before returning to the Foreign Office in London to lead the American department.

  By 1951, the net was closing in on Maclean. US and British security officials had discovered that a dozen coded messages had been sent to Moscow from New York and Washington in the last year of the war by someone code-named Gomer (the Russian spelling of Homer). Maclean was named on a list of nine men who were suspected of being the agent.

  Kim Philby, who was later to be revealed as the ‘Third Man’ of the Cambridge Five, was at the British Embassy in Washington working for MI6 on security matters at the time and was kept informed about the investigations into Gomer. Realising that the agent must be Maclean, he became nervous lest the Foreign Office’s American department head be unmasked, an anxiety shared by the Soviets, who feared he might talk and bring other agents down with him. Burgess had just been posted back to Britain after the affair of the speeding offences, and so was instructed to persuade Maclean to pack his bags.

  There is some disagreement over whether Burgess intended to defect with Maclean or was tricked into doing so by an MVD keen to pull out not just one but both of their damaged assets. Whichever is the case, Burgess and Maclean planned their flight from Britain and chose Friday 25 May 1951 – Maclean’s 38th birthday – as the day on which to do it. Maclean was due to be interviewed by MI5 officers on the following Monday. The encounter might well have proved calamitous for the spy ring, and it was imperative that he be got out of the country before it could take place.

  On the evening of 25th, Guy Burgess went to the Maclean family home in Tatsfield, Surrey. Donald said goodbye to Melinda, who was eight months pregnant with the couple’s fourth child (the first of whom had died shortly after birth). He and Burgess drove to Southampton and boarded a ferry to Saint-Malo in Brittany.

  In 2016, a huge raft of documents on the case was made public in a joint release by the Foreign Office and MI5. The files abound with countless redactions and there are still many more that have been held back by the two agencies, but they do at least put some flesh on the bare bones of this particular defection story.

  The official line taken by the British authorities (then and now) is that the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean only came to the attention of the security services on 28 May when Maclean failed to turn up for his grilling by MI5. Thanks to the 2016 release, we now know for certain that this was not true. On account of suspicions arising over the Gomer affair, Maclean had been put on a watch list and an immigration officer at Southampton had alerted MI5 as soon as the diplomat had passed through customs at the port.

  A state of panic ensued. Dick White, a senior MI5 officer, was immediately given the task
of intercepting the two men when they reached Saint-Malo. He rushed home, grabbed his passport, and raced off to Croydon Airport. It was only on arriving that he discovered that his passport had expired. Perhaps nowadays this would lead to a few phone calls being made and things would be smoothed over so that he could board the plane. Back in 1951, rules were rules, even if you claimed to work for MI5 and needed to apprehend a couple of suspected spies. White was denied permission to fly. Both Burgess and Maclean made it safely to the Soviet Union (though it would be another five years before President Khrushchev conceded that they were living there).

  As a result of Dick White’s unfortunate oversight, MI5 lost the opportunity to interrogate Burgess and Maclean about their activities and, even more importantly, about who else they knew to be spying for the Soviet Union. Kim Philby was thus able to continue working for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), supplying classified information to the Soviets for another 12 years until he too defected in January 1963. Anthony Blunt, who was a third cousin of the Queen Mother and was knighted in 1956 (the honour was later rescinded), had drifted into the genteel rôle of surveyor of the Queen’s pictures by 1964. Although suspicions had hung around him for years, he was only definitively exposed as a spy that year, when he was betrayed by a fellow Soviet agent, Michael Straight.

  John Cairncross, the fifth member of the Cambridge Five, only came clean about his work as a spy in 1964. There may even have been a ‘Sixth Man’ – a physicist called Wilfrid Mann, who worked at MI6 and who was named by the author Andrew Lownie in a 2015 book on Burgess. Although known to both Maclean and Burgess, he was never unmasked (if indeed he was an agent for the Soviets).

  A spy ring whose true scope and membership may never be fully known, and whose activities proved exceptionally damaging both to Britain and the US, could have been broken up in 1951. Instead, it continued unhindered for over a decade longer. Burgess and Maclean settled down in Russia, the latter rather more successfully than the former. Maclean learnt Russian, was elevated to the rank of colonel and worked for the Soviets as an expert on British affairs. He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of Combat. Guy Burgess carried on drinking and died of acute liver failure in a Moscow hospital in 1963 at the age of 52.

  The capacity of the old-boy network to forgive one of its own is almost limitless. Dick White, who was a friend of Anthony Blunt, became director-general of MI5 in 1953, a knight in 1955, chief of MI6 in 1956, and a Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 1960. However, it’s unlikely he ever forgot to renew his passport again.

  The BBC postpones Steptoe and Son and David Coleman has an unlikely interviewee

  It was the satirist Juvenal who famously declared that the only two things his fellow Roman citizens longed for were panem et circenses – ‘bread and circuses’. As long as those in power kept them fed and entertained, he opined, his countrymen would never get around to examining their lives or, the gods forbid, rise up against their emperor. It’s a cynical viewpoint but it does perhaps offer a more astute insight into human nature than we would care to admit.

  In 21st-century Britain, where a public poll on a television talent show can generate more excitement and passion than a vote in a parliamentary election, the observation seems to have lost none of its relevance. It also lends credence to a rather extraordinary story about a decision that looks likely to have changed the result of the 1964 general election. It involves a would-be prime minister, the director-general of the BBC, and a cup of tea in a kitchen.

  In 1947, at the age of 31, Harold Wilson had been drafted into Clement Atlee’s Cabinet as president of the Board of Trade, making him the youngest Cabinet minister since William Pitt the Younger. Sixteen years later, after the death of Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson was elected to head the party. The Conservatives had been in power since 1951 and the still relatively youthful Wilson was keen to end their reign.

  He was aided by the fact that his opponent in the general election of October 1964 was Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, an aristocrat rather lacking in charisma who, like Wilson, had taken over the leadership of his party in 1963 (from Sir Harold Macmillan).The Conservatives had also been struck by a series of very public scandals, including the Profumo affair, in which the eponymous member of parliament had been discovered to be in a relationship with a woman – Christine Keeler – who was also entangled with a Russian diplomat.

  However, the Tories had successfully styled themselves as the natural party of government and Wilson knew that despite their ill-advised choice of leader and the air of sleaze about them, they would be difficult to beat and that he would need everything to go his way if Labour were to win. Perusing the television schedules for the evening of the general election, he noticed something that filled him with dread. At 8P.M., the BBC was showing a repeat of an episode of Steptoe and Son.

  Over 50 years later it’s difficult to imagine how this could have seemed such a devastating blow to the Labour leader. However, in those halcyon days before the internet, before video recorders, and when there were only three channels to choose from – BBC One, the newly launched BBC Two, and ITV – television programmes could accrue massive ratings. In 1962, the comedy-writing team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson launched Steptoe and Son onto an unsuspecting British public. The tale of two impoverished West London rag-and-bone men, played by Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett, was an instant success, frequently drawing 14 million viewers and sometimes up to 20 million. This is all the more remarkable when one considers that the total population was not quite 54 million at the time.

  Back in 1964 the polls closed an hour earlier than they do today. In an interview given to the BBC in 1981, Wilson told of his fears that Labour voters might have been sorely tempted not to turn out to cast their vote if the alternative was half an hour in the company of the nation’s favourite scrap collectors. ‘Polling then ended at 9 o’clock,’ he pointed out, ‘and a lot of our people – my people – working in Liverpool, long journey out, perhaps then a high tea and so on… It was getting late, especially if they wanted to have a pint first.’

  Not one to beat about the bush, Wilson called at the home of Sir Hugh Greene, the director-general of the BBC, in order to discuss the matter over a cup of tea.

  Greene gave an interview to the BBC in 1982 explaining what happened next:

  Harold Wilson that evening began by accusing the BBC of plotting against him. I told him that he must really know in his heart of hearts that that was untrue, and unless he withdrew that remark there was no point in our discussing anything – we could just have a drink and that could be that. He did withdraw and we talked about the Steptoe and Son problem.

  The next day I discussed the matter further with the controller of BBC One and we thought a good idea would be to nudge it from early in the evening until 9 o’clock, when at that time the polls closed. I rang up Harold Wilson and told him about this decision and he said to me he was very grateful – it might make a difference of about 20 seats to him.

  As it happened, Labour won 317 of the House of Commons’ 630 seats, an extremely narrow victory that gave Wilson the smallest parliamentary majority since Lord Stanley’s Conservative win in 1847.

  The episode of Steptoe and Son that was moved to 9P.M. that night was ‘The Bonds That Bind Us’ (featuring June Whitfield), in which Albert wins £1,000 on the Premium Bonds. There’s a pleasing symmetry in old man Steptoe’s windfall and the bonanza that the shifting of the programme by an hour delivered to Harold Wilson. The prime minister was able to call a snap election two years later and increase his majority to nearly 100, securing him a further four years as the leader of the nation (he won a further two from 1974–76).

  During those six years, Wilson was socially very liberal, abolishing capital punishment and easing laws on abortion, censorship and homosexuality, while bringing in laws to help in the fight against discrimination on the grounds of sex or race. He kept
Britain out of the Vietnam War but was forced to devalue the pound. He also applied for membership of the European Economic Community (EEC) but was turned down. Under his premiership Britain also saw the expansion of higher education, including the establishment of the Open University which the Wilson government legislated for (it opened in 1971, by which time Labour had been swept from power). Its model of teaching has been imitated all over the world.

  It’s worth noting that, to a great extent, Harold Wilson’s undoing in the 1970 general election can be laid at the door of another television show that also had nothing to do with politics. When the deeply unpopular leader of the Conservative Party, Edward Heath, won the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race in December 1969, he was interviewed by David Coleman on a programme called Sportsnight.

  The appearance suddenly showed Heath in a completely new light – until then he had been generally viewed by the public as a posh, stiff and emotionless man who was hopelessly out of touch with the concerns of the average Briton. Although he doubtless remained all of these things, his new image as a successful sportsman gave the party a more appealing veneer, and Wilson – who was reportedly angered by his opponent’s Sportsnight slot – crashed to unexpected defeat at the polls just six months later.

  As a result of Heath’s win, Britain experienced the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 and the consequent three-day week caused by electricity rationing. An ardent Europhile, Heath succeeded where Wilson had failed, signing the treaty of accession that sealed the UK’s entry into the EEC on 1 January 1973. He also introduced Value Added Tax (VAT). This quickly became the Conservative Party’s stealth tax of choice, with subsequent Tory governments raising it from Heath’s initial 10 per cent on most products (some were subject to a higher rate) to 15 per cent, 17.5 per cent and now to 20 per cent. This, one of the most enduring elements of Heath’s legacy (even more enduring than Britain’s membership of the European single market, it would seem), affects the life of every Briton pretty much daily, particularly those at the poorer end of society who spend a greater percentage of their income on goods that attract VAT.