Enemies Within
Page 23
Stalin wanted battleships with heavy guns to establish Soviet Russia as a naval super-power with an intimidating ocean fleet. In an epoch before atomic bombs, battleships symbolized world power for him; but although Soviet shipyards had the capacity to build shipyard hulls, they were forced to import armour plate and heavy guns. The Washington and London disarmament treaties of 1922 and 1930 had set a maximum of 13 inches on naval guns, but Germany, Japan and Italy began to break this settlement after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933. In order to evade the tonnage restrictions which limited the size of warships, German naval constructors substituted welding for riveting when building new vessels. This gave them battle-cruisers, with the capacities of battleships and the tonnage of cruisers, which could fire 14-inch shells without breaching the terms of the London treaty. The Russians had been dogged by fears of naval disaster ever since Japan’s pre-emptive strike at Port Arthur in 1904. They were determined that other naval powers, especially Germany and the British Empire, should not steal an advantage. Accordingly they laid meticulous plans for Deutsch, Maly and Borovoy to obtain blueprints of the latest technology on 14-inch guns for the Royal Navy.
On 21 October 1937 ‘Mrs Stevens’ arrived at 82 Holland Road with the 14-inch naval gun mounting plans. Only five copies of the plan existed: Woolwich had received its copy only a few days earlier; Glading was both well informed about its arrival and prompt in obtaining it. ‘Mrs Stevens’ photographed the blueprint in sections requiring forty-two exposures. Gray brewed a pot of tea while the films were hung in the bathroom to dry. At 10.35 p.m. ‘Mrs Stevens’ left Holland Road with the plan secreted in a bundle of rolled-up newspapers. MI5 watchers tracked her to Hyde Park Corner, where she met her husband and George Whomack, a gun examiner at Woolwich Arsenal, to whom she returned the plan. Whomack had smuggled it past the guards at the end of his evening shift some hours earlier, and was to return it the following morning. Next evening, on 22 October, Glading collected the naval gun mounting negatives from Holland Road.
MI5 decided to delay the arrest of Glading and his network until they had finished tracing all its tentacles. Hunter’s watchers were present at Victoria station on 6 November when ‘Mr and Mrs Stevens’ boarded the boat train. They did not stop them, or search their luggage which probably contained the copied plans for the 14-inch gun. (Some espionage historians have pounced on the failure to detain or search the illegals involved with Glading: their criticisms rest on factual errors or retrospective wisdom; the allegation that Borovoy was warned or protected by MI5’s Guy Liddell is absurd.)27
Five months earlier Gray had reported a drunken visit by Glading to Holland Road. He was probably upset because Edith Tudor-Hart had lost a diary which Deutsch had given her for safe-keeping together with a folder containing his itemized expenses, including payment to agents. Subsequently Tudor-Hart found the folder secreted beneath the cushions of her sofa. But after this alarm Moscow considered the network compromised: Deutsch was accordingly recalled as a security measure. Stalin’s purges were under way, and Borovoy was summoned in the same month for liquidation. Finally Maly was ordered to return to Moscow, where he was shot for Trotskyism. Such horrors seemed remote to Glading. ‘These blokes’, he told Gray by way of explanation for the disappearances from Holland Road, ‘live on a volcano the whole time they are over here, and when they do go home you do not know if they will ever come back.’28
Much of what civilians describe as leadership qualities is simply masculine vanity. ‘Most persons set themselves a part and overplay it,’ as Vansittart said. Glading found it hard to relinquish his leading role in the Woolwich shadow-play. He did not accept that in obtaining the naval gun mounting plans he had accomplished all that Moscow wanted of him. In November, when Deutsch and Borovoy left for Moscow, he received instructions from the CPGB to sever his connections with the ‘secret’ party (that is, to cease underground activities) and to resume open party activism. Instead, he began a solo spying spree. He decided, without authority, to use his contacts to obtain more material from Woolwich Arsenal. Some years later the French resistance organizer Pierre (‘Guillain’) de Bénouville wrote a memorandum listing the fatal temptations for a secret agent. ‘He is keyed up and treats himself too well … He believes that he is important, and hates to be utterly obscure.’ These were the failings of Glading, who objected to receding into obscurity and wanted to show his sponsors what he could achieve by himself.29
Glading did not last long. Acting on information from Gray, he was arrested at Charing Cross station on 21 January 1938, while a Woolwich employee, Albert Williams, was handing him a brown-paper package. This parcel contained blueprints of a pressure bar apparatus for testing the detonators of anti-submarine bombs. Williams was arrested with Glading, and Whomack shortly afterwards. All of Moscow’s illegals who were relevant to the case had left London months before: none could be detained, questioned or involved in court proceedings. This met the desires of the Chamberlain government, which wanted nothing to exacerbate Anglo-Soviet relations at a time of mounting Nazi pugnacity. That government did not want the Woolwich spy case to turn into a rerun of the ARCOS raid of 1927, when Russians had been expelled and diplomatic relations had been severed between London and Moscow. At a time when Hitler was courting a general European war, an outright breach in March 1938 would have been destructive.
The trial of Glading
At their committal proceedings on 29 January, Glading, Williams and Whomack pleaded not guilty. Olga Gray testified under the soubriquet of ‘Miss X’. There was not as much melodrama as at the trial in 1927 of Wilfred Macartney and Georg Hansen, when the Attorney General, Sir Douglas Hogg, had asked Major General Charles Bonham Carter of the War Office if reading aloud exhibits of evidence in open court would be ‘prejudicial to the safety of the court’. The General replied with categorical absurdity, ‘Yes, certainly,’ whereupon Lord Chief Justice Hewart ruled that the case should be heard in camera. The intention in 1927, thought Compton Mackenzie, was ‘to make the flesh of the public creep by letting down the black curtain of in camera’, and to impress the public with the notion that ‘nothing except the vigilance and acumen of a Secret Service, [and] the devotion and patriotism of a Conservative Cabinet’ had saved the nation from being overrun by Reds. Politicians ‘would not hesitate to work up popular feeling by staging political trials in camera’, continued Mackenzie, ‘and the spoon-fed public would presumably accept such an attack on liberty’.30
Glading, Williams and Whomack probably thought themselves lucky when the CPGB arranged for two eminent barristers, Denis Pritt and Dudley Collard, to be briefed for their defence. In fact both lawyers were happy to subordinate justice to party needs. Pritt was a staunch admirer of the Soviet legal and penal systems, in which (as he had reported in 1932) cells were decorated with flowers and labour camps provided ‘the quiet encouragement to reform that comes from decent surroundings’.31
Collard had been born in 1907, in Chestnut Grove, New Malden, a middle-class commuter suburb: his father was a managing clerk in a wool warehouse and scraped the money to send him for a boarding-school education at Cheltenham College. Collard provided legal advice to ROP, the front company for Soviet saboteurs, in 1932; he represented the Union of Democratic Control in anti-capitalist testimony to the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of Armaments in 1935; and was an appreciative tourist in the Soviet Union in 1933, 1936 and 1937. After this last visit he had written (for the Left Book Club) a volume entitled Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek. ‘To assert that Stalin finds it necessary to bump anyone off, besides betraying complete ignorance of conditions in the Soviet Union, is in my view a malicious slander,’ he averred. Some defendants in the Moscow trials were ‘mere gangsters’: others ‘through their lack of confidence in the creative power of the working class, [were] genuinely apprehensive of the policy that was being adopted, and started engaging in sabotage and terrorism’. After an ‘eloquent appeal’ by that model prosecutor Vyshinsky for d
eath sentences for those guilty of these ‘appalling crimes’, ‘there was enthusiastic applause for about two minutes’, which for Collard clinched the impeccable justice of the trials. Collard had a ‘one-track mind on political subjects’, according to Maxwell Knight’s undercover informant M/7. M/7 was the MI5 designation of Vivian Hancock-Nunn, legal adviser and libel reader of the Daily Worker, who was thoroughly trusted by Collard and the CPGB despite being a scion of Tory squires. ‘An utterly ambitious man who sees himself as a legal leader under some socialist regime,’ reported Hancock-Nunn in 1938, ‘COLLARD is very obviously extremely jealous of D. N. PRITT.’32
The Attorney General, Sir Donald Somervell, who led for the Crown in the Woolwich case, was a Conservative MP and member of the Chamberlain government. He had reflected in his journal a year earlier: ‘In our curious & admirable system the prosecution very often helps the defence.’ He was describing his pre-trial arrangements in the case of the Security Service informant George McMahon @ Jerome Bannigan, who had pulled a loaded revolver on King Edward VIII as he rode down Constitution Hill and claimed to have been instigated by German Nazis. Somervell, who thought that the defendant was more a communist, suggested to defence counsel in private conference ‘that we might leave the foreign power unnamed’, and undertook in return that he would not probe McMahon’s story in cross-examination.33
Similarly, Somervell discussed the Woolwich case before trial with Collard and Pritt, who gave Glading, Whomack and Williams instructions from the CPGB to rescind their pleas of not guilty, and to plead guilty when they reached the Old Bailey. This was at Moscow’s behest to avoid publicity about their espionage. Disclosures in court were minimized so as to reduce this risk. The trial on 14 March took only a few hours. There were addresses from counsel, and questions from the judge, Sir Anthony Hawke, but none of the defendants uttered a word in their own defence. Because of the guilty pleas, it was unnecessary to hear any evidence in court. After the men had been sentenced, Collard told Hancock-Nunn that he and Pritt had bargained with Somervell over the guilty pleas and were relieved that Somervell ‘had refrained from bringing in the Communist Party as such’; he added that ‘the Party are exceedingly thankful that the Moscow aspect was kept fairly dark’. All sides wished to protect the susceptibilities of Stalin’s Russia.34
In addressing the court, Somervell listed Glading as the chief instigator, Williams next in culpability and Whomack third. The prosecution did not compromise secret sources by revealing that Whomack had been put under surveillance by Special Branch in 1927, when he was chairman of Bexley communist party, or that his denial to Woolwich Arsenal authorities in 1929 that he was a communist had been discounted at the time by MI5. Somervell’s speech concentrated on the material supplied to Glading by Williams, although these documents were not classified as secret, and indeed had not been sought by Moscow. The only classified secret document had been the naval gun mounting plan which had been photographed by ‘Mrs Stevens’ on her Leica. It could have been proved that the supplier of the blueprint, Whomack, had had direct dealings with her and her husband, who were obvious foreign agents. Yet, in answer to a direct question from the judge, Somervell stated that the naval gun was less important or secret than the pressure bar apparatus. This absolute misdirection was intended to dupe court reporters. Pritt assured the court that the defendants’ actions were ‘almost ludicrously unimportant’.35
Mr Justice Hawke was the senior judge of the King’s Bench Division, a former Conservative MP and trusted with delicate cases. It was in his court at Ipswich Assizes two years earlier that Mrs Wallis Simpson had been granted the divorce that prefigured King Edward VIII’s abdication (Stalin at the time wondered why she was not liquidated: as a law officer Somervell had worked to limit the repercussions of that court hearing). Hawke believed in differentiating between right and wrong, and in public service. It was not humbug, but a sincere expression of the values of their generation, when Lord Caldecote, the Lord Chancellor in Chamberlain’s Cabinet, said of Hawke: ‘No mere technicality appealed to him if it stood in the way of justice, and he sought at all times to carry out his duties in the sight of God and of men.’36
Hawke followed Somervell in minimizing the truthful technicalities. Both men underplayed the Moscow connection and the communist affiliations of Glading and Whomack, which were the factors that Pritt and Collard had been briefed to suppress too. In sentencing Glading to six years’ imprisonment Hawke said: ‘I am satisfied that this was done with the sole and vulgar motive of obtaining money.’ The monetary pickings of his work for Moscow were welcome to Glading, but he had begun as an ideologue in the 1920s and had found fulfilling self-importance in his secretive wire-pulling during the 1930s. When sentencing Williams to four years Hawke declared, ‘I do not see a great deal of difference between you and Glading. You obviously made great preparations to help him, and took a greater part in the matter than the other man in the dock.’ Whomack was a worse culprit than Williams, but received a sentence of three years. ‘You are the only one about whom I feel in difficulty, having regard to the comparatively small part you took in this case,’ Hawke told him. The light sentences given to Glading, Williams and Whomack may have been rewards for pleading guilty, and thus keeping the secrets of Moscow and London from revelation in open court. Newspaper readers received an inaccurate sense of Glading’s activities. Journalists were steered so that their reports avoided public accusations of Russian involvement.37
Investigations into the network continued. Special Branch officers visited Edith Tudor-Hart in June asking about the Leica camera which she had left at Holland Road. But MI5 had only twenty-six officers in 1938, and was too stretched to discover the illegals’ connections to Melita Norwood or to the Cambridge penetration agents. Jane Archer visited Glading in Maidstone prison in October 1939, pursuing information from the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky about agents in Whitehall run by Maly. ‘When interviewed Glading was rather stuffy at first but gradually, under a good deal of flattery, his own conceit got the better of him,’ noted Liddell. ‘He did not say anything very useful.’38
As to Somervell, he admired Neville Chamberlain (‘He can build up a bomb-proof argumentative structure with no fuss’) and remained staunch in upholding his government’s appeasement of Nazi Germany. When Chamberlain flew to Munich in September 1938 in an attempt to prolong peace with Hitler, Somervell was one of millions of British applauders. He was not forgiven for this by Churchill who, when forming his first peacetime Cabinet in 1951, defied expectations and did not appoint him to the supreme legal post of Lord Chancellor. Somervell took this grumpy retribution with crisp stoicism, and said a true thing: ‘Better to be a man of Munich than a man of Yalta.’39
PART TWO
Asking for Trouble
CHAPTER 7
The Little Clans
School influences stronger than parental examples
‘England’, wrote Sir David Kelly, who was British Ambassador in Moscow in the year that Burgess and Maclean absconded, was the only country in the world in which ‘the privileged classes asked of a young man not, “Who was his father?” but “Where was he at?”’ Boarding schools placed a boy more definitively than his paternity. They were intended to be character-building: they institutionalized their pupils’ loyalties, they sought to harden boys’ feelings and to minimize the softening influences of home. The answer to the question ‘Where was he at?’ told the exact means whereby the boy’s temperament had been disciplined and remade. When the teenaged Julian Amery went to Spain as a nationalist sympathizer in 1938, and jumping into a ditch to escape gunfire found himself crouched beside an effete-looking youth in the uniform of a monarchist volunteer, he greeted the stranger in French, German and Spanish without getting any response. Then the young officer amazed him by saying: ‘Kemp. Wellington and Trinity. How d’you do?’ Amery replied: ‘How d’you do? Amery. Eton and Balliol.’ They did not think of parents or family status: they did not say, ‘Peter Kemp, my father
is Legal Adviser at the India Office, we live in Wimbledon’ or ‘Julian Amery, my father is Secretary of State for India, we live in Eaton Square.’1
The conventional wisdom about the formative influences on the Cambridge traitors needs adjustment. Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby grew to maturity surrounded by a Stonehenge circle of frowning, stony faces: headmasters, housemasters, clergymen and family solicitors. These non-parental elders shaped the youths’ priorities, choices and resolve. Institutional influences – the boarding schools in which three of the quartet lived from the age of seven – counted for more than home in developing their characters. It was a commonplace that pupils should be hardened at school if they were to achieve anything memorable. The Victorians had, after all, redevised the English public schools to breed men who, as Cardinal Manning told the Irish, ‘have made England what it is, – able to subdue the earth’. As Derek Walker-Smith, afterwards a Conservative government minister and Lord Broxbourne, ex-pupil at a Victorian-foundation school called Rossall, said in 1931, the public schools were ‘based on the assumption that anything sufficiently unpleasant is sure to be good for a boy’.2
Each year boys isolated together at these boarding schools formed little clans. There were distinct fraternities for athletes, swots, clowns, duffers, arty types, devout Christians and those who knew themselves to be irredeemably average. The clansmen made defensive pacts together, scorned other clans and were primed for pre-emptive aggression. Fellow clansmen avoided solemn exchanges of innermost thoughts, recalled David Footman of SIS, who attended Marlborough a few years before Anthony Blunt; ‘but we liked each other, we were allies, united in our impatience of the nonsense that seemed to make so much of school life’. All children are susceptible to the influence of their schoolfellows: none more so than teenagers, and few teenagers more than English public schoolboys of the 1920s.3