Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Kim Philby reached Trinity three years after Blunt, at the early age of seventeen, in 1929. During his first Cambridge terms his chief avocation was music: he listened to Beethoven records, and played the French horn. Scores of his college contemporaries were strenuous outdoor types who ran with the Trinity Foot Beagles, competed in point-to-points at Cottenham and raced at Newmarket. Philby developed a hardy wanderlust which showed that he was tougher than the swaggerers. For three successive years he forayed into the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire and its Balkan hinterlands. In 1930 he bought a second-hand motorcycle with side-car, and visited Budapest and Vienna with Tim Milne and another friend Michael Stewart (British Ambassador in Athens, 1967–71). Bosnia in 1931 and Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Serbia in 1932 were added to his tally. He chose the worst hovels to sleep in overnight, and bought the cheapest train tickets (he supposedly made his passage through Bosnia in the cattle trucks). He became proficient in German, and gained passable knowledge of Hungarian and Serbo-Croat.

  Ignoring the reservations of The Plebs, Cambridge had taken half a dozen former coal-miners on scholarships from the Workers’ Education Association, including Harry Dawes and Jim Lees. In both these men Philby found a rare and invigorating authenticity. It was possibly under the influence of Dawes that Philby switched from history to economics in his third academic year. Years later Lees recalled Philby as dour, austere and abstemious about alcohol. Other contemporaries remembered him as earnest, virtuous and unassuming.

  Guy Burgess entered Trinity as a scholar in 1930. James Klugmann followed him there a year later. Klugmann’s Gresham’s clansman Maclean went in the same month to Trinity Hall – a pretty college wedged into a small site adjacent to the much grander Trinity. During the summer vacation of 1931, Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government disintegrated in financial crisis, and was replaced by a coalition government. In October, as Klugmann and Maclean settled into their colleges, the Labour party was annihilated at the polls in the general election by an alliance of Tories, Liberals and the rump of MacDonald’s supporters. The omens of convulsive breakdown seemed unprecedented to Klugmann, Maclean and Burgess, and the possibilities of change looked illimitable. ‘Life seemed to demonstrate’, said Klugmann over forty years later, ‘the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and shouted aloud for some sort of quick, rational, simple alternative. There was in this period a very strong feeling of doom, doom that was not very far off.’19

  Philby was a strenuous Labour canvasser in that general election in the rural constituency of Cambridgeshire. He was joined on the rounds by Denis ‘Jakes’ Ewer, the only son of Norman Ewer and afterwards an invertebrate zoologist; but their activism was unavailing. The Conservative candidate in Cambridgeshire, Captain Richard Briscoe, trounced his Labour opponent, and later told the Birmingham Post that if only Hitler and Mussolini could relax with a good game of bowls once a week, European peace would be untroubled.

  The triumph of the National Government over socialism aroused bitter fury among the radical intelligentsia, who felt betrayed by the Labour old guard and by social democracy. The Cambridge University Labour Club collapsed. Dawes then organized the Cambridge University Socialist Society as its radical new replacement. Philby joined CUSS at the instigation of Dawes, attended its meetings, became more politicized and finally served as its treasurer in 1932–3. Another CUSS activist recalled Philby at this time: ‘you would not have picked him out for distinction. He seemed then a useful bureaucrat, the sort who would have made a good career in Unilever.’20

  Around the time of the 1931 election Maurice Cornforth married Klugmann’s sister Kitty, a Girton graduate and communist. In the Cornforths’ rented rooms above a pawnbroker’s shop, or at tables in the Lyons Corner House tea-shop, Guest, Cornforth and their acolytes plotted their revolutionary work. Guest had a puritan’s dislike of what Dobb called perfumed, wanton prosperity. He would have preferred a paper bag of prunes to a glass bowl of ripe peaches. In his Trinity room, which was bare except for a bookcase, a piano and a picture of Lenin, Guest instilled a select group of susceptible acquaintances with iron, Marxist discipline and held tireless tactical planning sessions. He insisted that it was the duty of communist students to excel at their work in the university just as much as if they were communist proletarians working in factories. Disciples had to read Das Kapital chapter by chapter. Marxist jargon such as ‘the negation of the negation’ or ‘the transmutation of quantity into quality’ was bandied during sessions which might last all night. ‘We did not understand half what was said, but were stimulated to go on reading,’ one of the study-group recalled. Members of the cell sold copies of the Daily Worker on street corners and canvassed support in working-class districts. The Cambridge Marxists were as puffed up with spiritual pride as the Weimar communist Leonhard Frank, who had coined the slogan ‘Left, where the heart is’. Their embrace of virtuous causes, such as ‘humanity’, ‘peace’ and ‘progress’, inflated them with the exhilarant gas of their own rectitude. If they were always right, others must be wrong.21

  Guest’s group – many of them Dobb’s disciples – hailed the Soviet Union as a great socialist nation, albeit flawed by Russian national character. The cruelty of Stalin’s dictatorship – its enforced agricultural collectivization, its liquidation of the intelligentsia – was treated as a necessity to protect the great socialist experiment. Guest’s friend M. Y. Lang recalled the prevalent mood:

  The philosophy student, led by the sophistry of a Whitehead or Wittgenstein to despair of the possibility of even interpreting reality, was electrified by the discovery that over in Russia they were actually applying a philosophy which claimed to change the world. The thrill of discovery gave way to the white heat of indignation. We felt ourselves surrounded by a wall of intellectual dishonesty, ivory-tower escapism, and apologetic accommodation. We felt in duty bound to smash that wall … we became inspired missionaries for a new integration of thought and action, a new science of life.22

  Party members ambushed targets in Trinity Great Court or took them captive by unheralded visits at tea-time. They indicated their disposition by code-phrases such as ‘Old Herrick was a status quo poet’ or by saying of the film The Private Life of Henry VIII, ‘Propaganda for the National Government, isn’t it?’ Then they could nudge conversation towards their eternal subject, class-struggle, and the victorious inevitability of proletarian dictatorship. The creed that class war was the motor and throttle of progress was irreconcilable with belief in government by consent. Devout communist undergraduates upheld the mechanical fallacy that twentieth-century beauty inhered in immensity and functionalism: towering grain silos, hydro-electric dams, airship hangars, gasometers were the new abbeys. To renegade communists, Guest and his comrades were no better than political pimps. ‘The Comintern’, as Arthur Koestler said, ‘carried on a white-slave traffic whose victims were young idealists flirting with violence.’23

  Philby tried to convert some unlikely men to Marxism. He approached his Trinity tutor John Burnaby, who had survived grim military service in Gallipoli and Flanders, and was Europe’s leading expert on the theology of St Augustine. Burnaby had an officer’s trim moustache, an ascetic’s stern lines, and was an eloquent Christian preacher, who later took holy orders and became Regius Professor of Divinity. Philby tried to convert this upright man – the author of such works as Amor Dei and The Belief of Christendom – to dialectical materialism. Interviewed by Courtenay Young of MI5 in 1951, Burnaby called Philby ‘a militant Communist’ who had in his view converted Burgess to Marxism. Young reported, using the codename PEACH for Philby, that of the pair, Burnaby ‘regarded PEACH as the dominant factor’. Philby did not apply for membership of the CPGB until 1934, a year after his graduation from Cambridge, and never received a party card; but Burnaby assumed that his pupil was a card-carrying partisan. ‘I would be surprised’, he told Young, ‘if PEACH had not been a Party member as his Communism was so deep-seated that it would be inconsistent with the sinc
erity of his character if he were not also a Party member.’ Burnaby’s account of Philby’s impact on Burgess is convincing. Burgess in turn told Harold Nicolson that he had been primed for the anti-colonial struggle by reading William Shuster’s The Strangling of Persia (1912), an account of Edwardian English and tsarist Russian diplomatic intrigues which had ‘a seminal effect’ on him as an undergraduate.24

  Oxford compared to Cambridge

  On the extreme left, there was no one in Oxford as fervent, patient, timely and well placed as Dobb was in Cambridge in 1931–2. Philip Toynbee, who was a CPGB activist in Oxford, said that his comrades there showed ‘ruinous insensitivity’ in trying to convert undergraduates. Their proselytizers appeared in college rooms ‘grinning and rinsing their hands like very bad salesmen’. The Oxford party’s ruling cohort were dishonest almost as a principle, Toynbee added. Robert Conquest, who read politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) at Magdalen from 1937 and like many of his friends joined the CPGB from motives that were compassionate and unselfish, later estimated that there were about 30 overt and 170 clandestine party members in the university. ‘But’, he added, ‘when you have a party that was headed by Philip Toynbee, it’s not very serious.’25

  A weightier figure was Arthur Wynn. The son of a professor of medicine, Wynn had read mathematics and natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, joined the CPGB and was living in Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933. There he married Lieschen Ostrowski in order to give her the protection of a British passport. After bringing his bride to England, they were watched and evaluated by the NKVD talent-spotter Edith Tudor-Hart, who had recently approached Philby to spy for Moscow. Similarly, in October 1934, Tudor-Hart and Maly recruited Wynn as agent SCOTT. Wynn pursued postgraduate studies in Oxford, where he became a busy NKVD recruiter in 1935–8. There he met a fellow party member Margaret (‘Peggy’) Moxon whom, after divorcing Ostrowski, he married in 1938. In the same year, using the joint alias of Simon Haxey, the couple published an influential book, Tory M.P., arguing that parliament was dominated by employers who oppressed the workers, suggesting that bank directors and arms manufacturers should be ineligible as parliamentary candidates, reiterating that there was a capitalist conspiracy to foment war for the profit of munitions makers, and noting that Conservative leaders by their investments were financially benefiting from rearmament. This bestselling polemic by Wynn and Moxon was an indignant and oddly pompous piece of class warfare, which drew innuendoes from a mass of conscientiously researched facts.26

  Wynn entered the recruiting-grounds some seven years after Dobb’s cell was formed. His contacts were less entrenched in their party commitment by the time of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact in August 1939, after which their activism mostly ceased. Toynbee renounced communism in December 1939 following Russia’s invasion of Finland. The Oxford-undergraduate communism of Denis Healey did not prevent him from becoming a major in the Royal Engineers, Secretary of State for Defence in 1964 and deputy leader of the Labour party. Wynn’s tally of short-term recruits included a future Labour politician Bernard Floud and a future colonial governor Andrew Cohen, but they did not amount to a ring of Oxford spies. The young Americans who came to Oxford as Rhodes scholars however did.27

  Crane Brinton, who was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the late 1920s, and later did wartime service as chief of research and analysis at the London outpost of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA, said that most American Rhodes scholars were ‘disappointed with Oxford and disappointed with their achievement after their return’. They were, explained Brinton, ‘horrified by its preciousness, by the free and easy habits of the undergraduates, and especially by their intellectual and moral irreverence’. One event changed all this: the Oxford Union debate of 1933 which resolved by 275 votes to 123 that the house would in no circumstances fight for its King and Country. Most of those voting were loyal citizens of a country that was then committed by the Kellogg–Briand pact of 1928 to the outlawing of war: few of them were, as Beaverbrook’s Daily Express fulminated, ‘woozy-minded Communists and sexual indeterminates’. The Oxford undergraduate memory moves in cycles of three years: its enthusiasms are ephemeral; the King and Country vote did not matter long in Oxford. But in the United States ‘the Oxford Oath’ became the focal point of a student peace movement. Thereafter, on Armistice Days, hundreds of thousands of American students boycotted classes and attended anti-war meetings. Inspired by the Union’s pacifist vote, the brightest of them applied for Rhodes scholarships at England’s oldest university. By 1936 the Warden of Rhodes House, Carleton Allen, was lamenting that an increasing number of American Rhodes scholars were communist sympathizers: ‘It is not a circumstance which is palatable to oneself, but clearly we can do nothing and ought to do nothing about it.’ He accepted that many of the best youngsters of their generation wanted to prove their social conscience, modernity and capacity for faith by communist displays, and trusted that this might prove, like most Oxford trends, transient.28

  Mary McCarthy wrote of a Yale graduate in the early years of the New Deal, ‘Marxism was to become for Jim’s generation what an actress had been for the youths of the Gilded Age’: an exciting, furtive rite of passage into manhood. American Rhodes scholars who took to Marxism in the mid-1930s included Daniel Boorstin, Duncan Lee, Peter Rhodes and Donald Wheeler. Boorstin and Lee were hoodwinked by their experiences on a visit to Soviet Russia organized by the Stalinist barrister Dudley Collard in 1937, but neither sought party membership in Oxford. Boorstin joined the CPUSA after returning to Harvard in 1938, and Lee on his return to Yale in 1939. Boorstin left the CPUSA following the Nazi–Soviet pact, and became an eminent opponent of doctrinaire politics and the historian of American consensus. Lee, however, became the best-placed communist agent to infiltrate wartime American intelligence in the form of the OSS. In a memoir later prepared for the NKGB in 1945, Wheeler described himself as a member of the agrarian proletariat, born on a primitive farm in Washington state, and as having joined the CPGB while at Oxford in 1935. After leaving Oxford, he worked for communist-front bodies involved in the Spanish civil war, then returned to the USA as a union organizer in government agencies. He joined the OSS on its formation, and was immediately an important Soviet source.29

  Rhodes, who had been born in Manila with the patronymic of Beutinger, had taken a new surname after his mother shot and killed his father at Caldwell, New Jersey in 1916. This name-change long predated his arrival as a Rhodes scholar at Oriel College, Oxford. He joined the CPGB, and organized a proselytizing summer camp for the unemployed at the Thames village of Clifton Hampden in 1935. Gordon Fagg, landlord of the village’s Barley Mow pub, complained to the police that the campers sang ‘The Red Flag’ in his bar and spoke disloyally of the royal family. In 1936 Oxford police questioned Rhodes after he had shouted abuse at a fascist meeting. Although he was obviously a middle-class American, Rhodes claimed to the police that he was an English proletarian who worked as an assembler at the Pressed Steel works at Cowley. After the expiry of his Rhodes scholarship, he became a Paris-based journalist, visited Spain in 1937 (ostensibly to investigate the plight of refugee children) and returned to London in 1941 as a member of the Foreign Monitoring Service, with a desk in the US embassy.

  Aside from the Rhodes scholars, one of Wynn’s recruits – Jenifer Williams, who read history at Somerville – needs attention. Her father was a former Liberal parliamentary candidate for Oxford and a judge at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. Rebelling against the high-minded and salubrious idealism of her parents, she volunteered to work in Rhodes’s communist-front summer camp for the unemployed in 1935. Her experiences there, including an affair with an unemployed milkman, induced her to join the CPGB. In doing so, she replaced the ample latitudinarianism of north Oxford with the rigid, cramping doctrines of Marxism. Her feelings in 1935–6 were conditioned by erotic pleasure and the fact that every party member was assigned a role and made to feel signifi
cant. Her first assignment, which was given to her by the Balliol historian Christopher Hill, was to recruit her friend Isaiah Berlin to the CPGB; but she knew this to be impossible. Like her friends Floud and Toynbee, she was exasperated by the ineptitude of the Labour party, and its hapless responses to regional unemployment and to the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. She was aware of the cruelties of Stalinism, but took comfort from a letter sent to her in 1936 by an intellectual Englishman who had just returned from Russia: ‘all the things that one is inclined to be worried about, restrictions on liberty, a failure to reach our standards of taste in something or other – all the things, in fact, which don’t fit in with our oh so well-educated lives – simply don’t seem to a genuine worker as sources of trouble’. Her rationalization in old age of her party membership was based on the balance of evil: ‘Hitler’s march into Austria in March 1938 seemed more important than Bukharin’s execution three days later.’30

  Williams was placed third out of 493 civil service candidates in 1936 and entered the Home Office, which was the recommendation of both the Civil Service Commission and her CPGB contacts. She was handled by Arnold Deutsch @ OTTO, who groomed her as a penetration agent. One of the attractions of party membership had been the camaraderie, but she was deprived of this as a secret member, from whom even a party card was withheld. Her Home Office work on juvenile delinquency, children’s homes and reformatories held little interest for Moscow. Under the influence of Herbert Hart, whom she married, she turned against Stalinist totalitarianism and towards Labour constitutionalism. Her party activism had petered out, she said, by 1939.