Enemies Within
Page 33
After their recruitment, both Philby and Maclean were instructed to cease left-wing activism and make a somersault in their politics. Philby joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, and began reporting to Moscow on British capitalists who were lobbying for conciliation with Nazi Germany and for resistance to Soviet Russia. Maclean emulated Philby’s pretend-conversion, but failed to convince Guy Burgess. ‘Burgess would not have been Burgess’, Philby told Borovik, ‘if he had believed Maclean’s switch.’ Burgess pursued the neophyte diplomat with outrageous persistence. ‘Do you think that I believe even for one jot that you have stopped being a Communist?’ he would demand in front of other people. ‘You’re simply up to something! I know you, you old liar and sneak. You expect me to believe that you would betray yourself? Never in your life!’ This mockery jeopardized Maclean’s cover as well as exasperating him: finally he erupted when they were alone together, ‘Listen, shut up, damn you! All right, I am still who I was. But I can say no more, I don’t have the right.’ Philby and Maclean agreed with Deutsch that it was essential to stop Burgess yacking among fellow communists. They could imagine Burgess showing off, averring with winks and nudges that Maclean was not lost to the party and confiding in trusted friends until everyone knew.12
Burgess was the seventh man – with ‘????’ marked against his name – on the list of potential Cambridge recruits that Philby had given to Deutsch. Only a few months earlier, in March 1934, male homosexuality had been criminalized in Russia, with a penalty of three to five years in a correctional labour camp, mainly because the Stalinist authorities feared that same-sex parties were a cloak for politically malcontent talk. Nikolai Krylenko, the People’s Commissar of Justice who believed that socialist judges should convict prisoners in accordance with political priorities rather than footling individual guilt or innocence, warned a party congress that male homosexuality was seditious: ‘under this cover, in the foul dens and dives, another sort of activity takes place – counter-revolutionary activity’. Orlov believed that men ‘tainted with homosexual perversion’ were ‘unstable individuals’, but in December 1934, when Maclean arranged for him to meet Burgess, Deutsch had the imagination to see that the louche name-dropper might be an asset as a contacts-man.13
Orlov compiled a psychological portrait of Burgess @ MÄDCHEN in 1939, by which time his agent was working for SIS. It contains some misjudgements, such as that Burgess’s homosexuality had been instilled by experiences at Eton where, Orlov falsely stated, pupils slept together in dormitories and were seduced by masters. Altogether Orlov’s assessment reflected Burgess’s own strenuously promoted myth-image and was less acute than those of Philby and Maclean. ‘He grew up in an atmosphere of cynicism, opulence, hypocrisy and superficiality,’ Orlov reported. ‘The Party was for him a saviour. It gave him above all an opportunity to satisfy his intellectual needs.’ Burgess’s ‘abhorrence of bourgeois morality’ and pleasure in feeling estranged from conventional society led him to cultivate a wide network of sexual outsiders ‘ranging from the famous liberal economist Keynes and extending to the very trash of society’. Another interpretation of Burgess would be as an adventurer who liked to pit himself against the odds, and enjoyed the thrill of pushing his luck. He had an appetite for aberrations that needed to be fed in increasing doses. Deutsch’s assessment of Burgess differed from Orlov’s: ‘MÄDCHEN has imagination and is full of plans and initiative, but he has no internal brakes. He is, therefore, prone to panic easily and he is also prone to desperation. He takes up any task willingly, but he is too unstable to take it to its conclusion. His will is often paralysed by the most insignificant of difficulties. Sometimes he lies, not maliciously, but because of fear of admitting some minor error.’ Over the course of time, Deutsch reported, as Burgess realized that he was trusted as a comrade, his self-confidence improved. He repeatedly told Deutsch that he thought his handlers were ‘his saviours’.14
The Marxist ideology of Philby, Maclean and Burgess was a mixture of quasi-religious faith with quasi-scientific certainty. Religions deal in prophecy rather than reliable predictions: the historical determinism of Marxism delivers misplaced conviction. As a consequence, ideologues like these three young Cambridge graduates were hopeless at predicting the consequences of their decisions and actions. Like other spies, they were most vulnerable in the months after their recruitment, because they were not at first taught how to evade watchers. As Krivitsky told Jane Archer during his debriefing in 1940: ‘the greatest care was taken not to impress upon a new recruit the dangers of what he was doing. As time went on and the recruit became more hardened, then he would be given the fullest instructions.’ Krivitsky thought that it was only in the first weeks after enlistment that an agent might be monitored effectively by counter-espionage. Trained Soviet agents were, he said, so adept at evading surveillance that little or nothing could be gained by watching them. Only recently recruited novices were vulnerable to tracking and monitoring.15
Philby learnt that when he met new contacts, he should not ask personal questions, but should memorize faces and voices. When he was introduced in 1937 to a new handler, he asked her to walk about, so that he could memorize her gait. The instructions for making first contact with Maclean, which were given to Grigory Grafpen, the legal NKVD rezident who took over the networks of Deutsch and Maly after their recall to Moscow, show the precautionary complexities of tradecraft. He was to telephone Maclean at home, before 9.30 a.m. or after 10.30 p.m., saying: ‘Hello, it’s Bill here, wouldn’t you like to go to the theatre?’ This meant that they would meet at a prearranged time next day at Charing Cross Underground station. Grafpen, carrying a copy of the Manchester Guardian, would say, ‘I have not seen you for a long time, Donald.’ Maclean, armed with a copy of Esquire, would reply, ‘Have you got any news of Theodore?’16
The Spanish civil war veteran Alexander Foote was surprised when asked in 1938 to work under cover in Switzerland: ‘Speaking only inferior French, a little kitchen Spanish, and elementary German, I was not exactly qualified for work on the Continent.’ He had no training in wireless transmission, microphotography, secret inks or sabotage, and did not know which organization was using him. His instructions to meet his handler Ursula (‘Ruth’) Kuczynski @ SONYA were elaborate. He was to loiter at the General Post Office in Geneva wearing a white scarf and holding a leather belt in his right hand. At noon he would be approached by a woman carrying a string shopping-bag containing a green parcel, and holding an orange in her hand. The woman would ask in English where Foote had bought the belt. After replying that it came from a Paris ironmonger’s shop, he would inquire where he might buy an orange and she would answer that he could have hers for a penny. Half a century later she recalled their rendezvous: ‘I took note of everything, every word, cadence, gesture, facial expression.’17
The Cambridge spies focused on the feeble response of English parliamentarians to right-wing totalitarianism. ‘Fascism is naked capitalism,’ J. D. Bernal had pronounced in Cambridge Left. The ring of five were riled by class prejudice, regional unemployment and the funk of the Labour leaders who had betrayed socialism in 1931. It was less obvious in 1934 than in 1945 that communism was the ideology deployed by the Stalinist nation state to make its push to become a world super-power. The quintet comforted themselves with the notion that they were aiding the Comintern’s underground war against fascism, and that the Comintern was merely an international link between national communist parties, rather than serving Stalin’s Russia. The ring may have believed that when the dictatorship of the proletariat took control in other European countries, without Russia’s cruel despotic traditions, it would be less degrading of its citizens. In any case, they had not been immunized against the infectious belief of the 1930s vanguard that the Soviet Union constituted one of the wonders of the age. Progressive clergymen, pacifists and town planners visited Russia, and revered its atheism, the tanks in Red Square and the slums. Above all, Dobb, Guest and Cornford had instilled in young Cambridge communists
the belief that, in Bernal’s words, ‘the whole tradition of the intellectual is to do nothing until it is too late’.18
Philby, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were priggish about commerce and consumers. Burgess disliked American culture, voices and influence. Living in London in the mid-1930s they found reasons enough to feel alienated. The capital of the British Empire seemed every year to pay closer cultural obeisance to Hollywood and more to resemble Chicago. On his release from Parkhurst prison in 1935, Wilfred Macartney was overwhelmed by the changes in eight years: ‘everything was speeded up … Whitehall, Regent Street, Piccadilly, Baker Street – new, new, new, new, all new! Hard lines where soft curves had shown; sheer walls; huge blocks of flats.’ He baulked at neon signs flashing from the front of buildings, gaudy snack-bars, movie palaces and new super-luxury hotels. He was astounded by the change in men’s appearances: ‘all wearing straight-striped patterns, loud shirts, and hectic ties. I got an impression of general pansification from the men.’ His greatest shock was when he visited the once fusty offices of his solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and found that they had adapted to the brash new competitive environment. Brisk youngsters had replaced the Dickensian clerks. Modern office-machinery meant that ‘everything went with a click’. Traditions had yielded to capitalist imperatives: peers from historic families were turning their agricultural and urban estates into limited companies so as to minimize taxation and maximize income. After returning to London after years in the Balkans, David Footman in 1935 felt equally estranged from the encroaching materialism which increased the tempo of the times: ‘What we want now is salesmanship, energy, machine-made idealism directed with an eye on practicalities, and that form of public-school spirit which finds its practical expression in the insincere bonhomie of a Rotarian Congress.’19
London was the traitors’ terrain. Ewer’s network made Fleet Street, Holborn and the Temple their sector of secret operations. Oldham lived south of Kensington High Street while Glading rented his photographic lair just north. The illegals leased flats in Marylebone. Pieck’s business front was near Victoria station. The drinking-clubs of Soho and bottle-parties in Chelsea were pleasure resorts for Burgess and Maclean. Another compact historic district was added to the spy topography: St James’s, bounded by Piccadilly to the north, Haymarket to the east, St James’s Park to the south, Green Park to the west. Systematically, after their enlistment to work for Moscow in 1934, and doubtless under instruction, Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt sought election to clubs in St James’s: moreover, to adjacent clubs, with frontage side by side along Pall Mall and with rear access to the private gardens of Carlton House Terrace. Maclean was elected to the Travellers at 106 Pall Mall in 1936. The following year, at the nomination of Dennis Proctor, Burgess and Blunt were both elected to the Reform next door at 104–105 Pall Mall: Burgess thereafter had his personal letters sent to the Reform, and was a devoted, conspicuous member. Philby also became a clubman in 1937, with his election to the third club in the row, the Athenaeum, at 107 Pall Mall. This club vicinity was not by chance. It gave the quartet parallel but unduplicated ranges of contact; they saw and heard different men, and collated opinions; they had easy, casual access to one another in adjacent premises.
Philip Jordan, who was a devoted member of the Travellers, wrote a novel in 1939 in which the narrator gives a malcontented account of his fellow members: ‘I used to despise their narrow, class outlook; their failure, particularly that of the diplomats, to go out into the world beyond their little circle and discover what was happening and what was important; their belief in their own infallibility and their unuttered hope of ultimate honours from the hands of a puppet king who did as they told him.’ One can fancy that Maclean’s inner thoughts were similar. Jordan’s narrator was heading for the Spanish civil war, and felt abject in relation to the Travellers’ diplomats: ‘they and their rolled umbrellas and their spare-time academic hobbies were now far above me … they seemed to me to dwell in heaven and to have earned the right to do so’.20
Francis Graham-Harrison, who was described by one Home Secretary addressing the House of Commons as having a Rolls-Royce brain, told an MI5 interviewer in 1963 that it had been impossible to move among the London intelligentsia of the late 1930s without meeting Burgess. Rosamond Lehmann, who first met Burgess about the time of his enlistment by Moscow, was sixteen years later to describe him to Skardon of MI5 as ‘an avid, belligerent and bawling left-winger’, ‘a noisy drunkard … with extremely shocking conversation’, and ‘ambitious … to be a power behind the throne’. Her husband Wogan Philipps (later, as Lord Milford, the first CPGB member in the House of Lords) ‘despised BURGESS, and wrote him off as no value to man or beast’.21
In 1935, on Orlov’s instructions, Burgess took a Russian-language course at the School of Slavonic Studies in London, where SIS officers were taught foreign languages. He failed however in his object of making SIS contacts or inveigling his way into the trust of its officers. He was personal secretary for some months to a Tory MP who had once been detained for spying in Tunisia and whose German sympathies owed something to his pleasure in embracing young Aryan manhood. In 1936 Burgess hooked a job in the Talks Department of the BBC. He secured this post with help from an impressive referee, the Trinity historian G. M. Trevelyan, who offered reassurance: ‘he has passed through the communist measles that so many of our clever young men go through’. Burgess commissioned and produced radio talks: he got the Comintern agent Ernst Henri on the airwaves as well as Blunt and less subversive speakers. The National Labour MP Harold Nicolson became his patron: Nicolson’s sexual partner James Lees-Milne recalled that Burgess ‘had the look of an inquisitive rodent emerging into daylight from a drain’.22
David Footman and Dick White
In July 1937 Burgess was instructed to cultivate David Footman. The only child of a country clergyman, and describing himself as an Anglo-Catholic in the 1930s, Footman survived combat as a teenage army officer on the Western Front. In 1927 he married his twenty-year-old cousin Jane Footman, who was an aspiring actress under the stage-name Joan Clement-Scott, but there have been hints of unknown reliability that he was bisexual. After consular postings in Egypt and Macedonia, he left the Consular Service in 1929 to manage a gramophone company in Vienna (he later wrote a story about a man who leaves his job in the Balkans to manage a gramophone company in Vienna in an attempt to revive a failing marriage). Footman moved in 1932 to Belgrade (then ‘the boom town of the Balkans’) as representative of the London bank Glyn Mills. He was the sort of self-sufficient, ironical Englishman who, when he toured Albania, packed an odd volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson and two packs of patience cards. Yugoslavia he described as ‘the land of unlimited impossibilities’. One of his haunts was Kalemegdan Park, beside the Belgrade fortress, with its maze of paths and underground passages popular with loving couples after dark. It was at a rendezvous in Kalemegdan Park that Footman was recruited to SIS in 1935 by Edwin (‘Eddy’) Boxshall, the Vickers agent in Bucharest. Footman took the cover of a passport control officer, in which he cannot have been convincing: he was an animal-lover who found human faces harder to recognize individually than those of dumb beasts. Government service taught him ‘that vested interests are very important, and that little personal vanities are even more so’. He measured a country’s political sophistication by its efficiency in handling its card-indexes of suspicious foreigners.23
In 1935 – as well as joining SIS – Footman published a volume of short stories about seedy English expatriates in the Balkans, Half-Way East, reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s stories, but with a playful touch of Hemingway. A few months later there came an acclaimed travel book, Balkan Holiday, which provoked the jealousy of Rebecca West. In 1936 Footman published his first novel, Pig and Pepper, with a Balkan diplomatic setting. His next volume of stories, Better Forgotten, evinced ‘an urbane scepticism, a gentlemanly doubt’ about human significance, judged The Times reviewer,
and was ‘modern, in the cool, concise style’. Burgess, as a member of the BBC Talks Department, invited Footman to dinner in 1937 and convinced him (although a man on SIS payroll) to give a broadcast talk, ‘Albania, Fish and a Motor-Car’, in August. A second broadcast talk followed in November. Thereafter the two men met occasionally. Footman found Burgess ‘a highly entertaining partner for a drink or a meal’, whose harangues on dialectical materialism seemed no more significant than an intellectual parlour game.24
In May 1938 Konrad Henlein, the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans, stayed at the Goring Hotel on a visit to London. Burgess convinced his boyfriend Jack Hewit, who was a telephone switchboard operator at the Goring, to eavesdrop on Henlein’s calls and report the scraps that he heard for Footman’s benefit. Burgess undertook other freelance SIS work for Footman, who recommended him to an SIS colleague as someone who might report on Mussolini’s responses to Franco’s recent victories in Spain. While the possibility of sending Burgess to Italy was under consideration, he mentioned in a casual way to Footman that he had been a communist at Cambridge. In that case, Footman responded trustingly, Burgess might be useful to the anti-communist section of SIS, and he took Burgess to lunch with Valentine Vivian, chief of Section V. The three men had a frank talk. Burgess later reported to Moscow that neither SIS man seemed to suspect him. ‘Why? Class blinkers – Eton, my family, an intellectual … people like me are beyond suspicion.’ Although Vivian is often represented as obtuse, crabbed and blimpish (certainly as a result of stomach ulcers he looked dyspeptic), he impressed Burgess with his understanding of Comintern operations and Marxist dialectic. Vivian’s obiter dicta to Burgess at this lunch were canny. ‘Theory is necessary for action,’ he reportedly said. ‘Legal Party members are not dangerous.’25