During the 1930s two Jewish comedians from the East End of London, calling themselves the Western Brothers, raised their laughs by wearing Old Harrovian ties, sporting monocles and singing such satirical ditties as ‘We’re Frightfully BBC’ and ‘Play the Game, You Cads’. Above all they mocked traditional deference in ‘The Old School Tie’, with its feebly rhymed refrain ‘Don’t forget Marlborough, remember St Paul’s and Dulwich and Harrow and how! /And Wormwood and Dartmoor and Pentonville too and Doctor Barnado’s says thou.’ Despite Burgess’s stereotypically Marxist assurances to Moscow about class blinkers, eyes were opening wider, the public school spirit was increasingly seen as risible and institutions were becoming more socially diverse.
The appointment in 1935 of MI5’s thirtieth officer, Dick White, was an indicator of change. His father was an ironmonger with a shop in Tonbridge High Street, who deserted his family and became a hopeless drunk. His mother was able to send him to a boarding school at Bishops Stortford with a nonconformist religious tradition. White’s athletics prowess, intelligence and conservatism (his reaction to his disturbed childhood) made him a thorough success reading history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a protégé of Masterman. In early manhood he hankered after being a novelist in the Proustian mould. In 1932, after extensive travels, he got a job teaching history, English, French and German at a school in Croydon. At Easter of 1935 he escorted fifteen pupils from his school on a Mediterranean cruise aboard a White Star liner. He struck up a shipboard friendship with a young soldier, Malcolm Cumming, who unknown to him had been sent on the cruise by MI5 to assess his suitability for recruitment (Masterman having recommended him for secret service). In July White was called for interview by Liddell, who offered him a tax-free salary of £350 a year, which was half his pay as a schoolmaster. He was intrigued by his exchanges with Liddell, but affronted by the money. ‘They were rather secretive, so I wasn’t quite sure what they were trying to say,’ he recalled to his biographer Tom Bower. ‘Everything was by way of hints. I left it that they would have to say something direct.’ In praising White (‘He did not talk too much … he looked and sounded a good committee man’), Bower also slurred his colleagues with catchy alliteration: ‘Unlike other intelligence officers, White was neither fruity nor florid.’26
The officers of MI5 in the mid-1930s – Holt-Wilson, Haldane, Harker, Boddington, Robertson, Cumming, Miller and Liddell – had heterogeneous backgrounds, thoughtful opinions and versatile minds. They were neither infallible nor (as sometimes caricatured) snobbish, insular, smug and prejudiced. Although at the end of the working day they might gather for fireside drinks together in a collegiate way, as a group they were neither fruity nor florid. They were shrewd, patient, watchful, self-sufficient and empathetic: it is wrong to depict them as wooden-tops just because they respected military discipline and felt patriotic.27
With the exception of Rebecca West, the formative commentators on British espionage and counter-espionage were all men, and were imbued with their generations’ unquestioned assumptions. Among later scholars of intelligence history, Gill Bennett has shining rarity as a woman. They have been blind to a more important discrimination than class in Whitehall – gender. What united the officers as they gathered in collegiate fashion for a fireside drink was not their class prejudices and allegiances, which were mixed, but their gender, which was unmixed. When Vivian was introduced by Footman to Burgess, he appraised the young man, and enlisted him as an SIS freelance, on the basis of affirmative manly recognition, confidence in the tight bonds of right-thinking men and the secure comforts that came from the caparison of regular office life. What mattered was not that Vivian had been educated at St Paul’s, Footman at Marlborough and Burgess at Eton, with fathers who were an artist, a vicar and a naval officer. The dynamic was of three men together, reacting as men, with little thought of women beyond domestic settings. The great government departments, the Foreign Office, SIS and MI5 were masculine in their controls and procedures. With few exceptions, women were underlings, who had low influence in or out of the workplace.
The recruitment of Blunt and Cairncross
In January 1937 Burgess introduced Deutsch to Anthony Blunt. Blunt then held a research fellowship at Trinity and was a member of the French department of the university: his postgraduate thesis had investigated Italian literary influences on Poussin’s art, he was converting himself into an art historian, and he was due to leave Trinity in June 1937 for a post at the Warburg Institute in London to pursue his studies of French and Italian art of the Renaissance and seventeenth century. He had been a theoretical Marxist since 1934, but the Spanish civil war, which raged from July 1936 and in which his ex-lover Julian Bell was killed in July 1937, was (as he told his Courtauld colleague Peter Kidson in 1962), ‘the moment of truth’ for him. Kidson, in a shrewd essay on Blunt, depicts the art historian changing from a scholar who used Marxist ideas as a provocation and discipline in art criticism to a politically aroused citizen who thought that Britain’s status as a world power was unsustainable, that its foreign policy was ‘pussy-footing with pious hopes’, that its leaders were philistine capitalists who thought only of protecting their investment dividends and that ‘the only great power with the will and the means to take on the fascists was Soviet Russia’. Kidson speculates that in the late 1930s Blunt may have imagined the possibility of becoming Commissar of Culture if ever a Marxist government was installed in London. Whatever the truth of this, Blunt agreed to talent-spot for Deutsch during his remaining six months in Cambridge. Deutsch found Blunt super-intelligent, high-flown in his spoken English, self-controlled, and effeminate.28
Two undergraduates, Leo Long and Michael Straight, were recruited by Blunt for Deutsch in his last months working in Cambridge. Long was a carpenter’s son, had been educated at Holloway County School in north London and was a Trinity linguist. Straight was an American banking heir whose mother and stepfather ran the experimental Dartington Hall School in Devonshire. He was ‘very melodramatic’, the poet Gavin Ewart told Miranda Carter. ‘You felt he was in a deep conspiracy all the time.’ Charles Rycroft, who went to Russia with Straight, judged him ‘an attitudinizer’. In Moscow Straight bought some local clothes, and asked, ‘Do I look like a proletarian?’ Rycroft answered: ‘No, you look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.’29
By 1937 Deutsch needed to induct another Cambridge spy inside the Foreign Office: the Office posted all third secretaries to overseas embassies after two years’ experience of Whitehall; and Deutsch knew that Maclean was due to leave London. Blunt was therefore asked by Burgess to approach John Cairncross, whom he had supervised in French literature at Trinity. After graduating with first-class honours at Cambridge, Cairncross had passed head of the list in the civil service examinations, and had joined the American Department of the Foreign Office in October 1936.30
Blunt invited Cairncross to spend the last weekend of February 1937 as his guest at Trinity: Burgess came by arrangement to meet the possible recruit there on the Sunday. ‘He comes from a lower middle class family,’ Burgess reported, ‘he speaks with a strong Scottish accent and one cannot call him a gentleman.’ Although he professed theoretical Marxism, Cairncross was not a partisan in the class war, Burgess continued, but a ‘petit bourgeois who is intoxicated with his own success, with the fact that he could raise himself to the level of the British ruling class and has the possibility of enjoying the luxury and delights of bourgeois life’. Cairncross had worked for six years without holidays or leisure: ‘it was his dream to get into the Foreign Office at any price’. Burgess concluded that it might be possible to enlist Cairncross if he could be convinced that he could combine careers in both the party and the Foreign Office. (It is notable – given the later false emphasis put on the homosexuality of the Cambridge spies – that Cairncross and Long were exclusively attracted to women. Straight was, like Cairncross, highly sexed, and it is beyond doubt that his predominant interest was always for women. It has
been suggested that when his hormones were raging at Cambridge he had some pleasures faute de mieux with another man – said to be Blunt. This is easy to say, impossible to prove or disprove and on balance doubtful.)31
There was concern that the illegals might be exposed if Cairncross rejected the NKVD’s overtures. Accordingly the first approach was delegated to Klugmann, who was then working in Paris for the International Students’ Organization against War and Fascism. Klugmann would not agree to meet Maly and Deutsch until they had been endorsed by a CPGB member whom he trusted, Percy Glading. Thus reassured, Klugmann persuaded Cairncross to work for the two Soviet spies. As a linguist Cairncross was faultless in French, German, Spanish and Italian: he later acquired a reading knowledge of Russian, Norwegian and Swedish. Yet his workplace skills proved defective: Office colleagues found him verbose and graceless. During his two years there he was shunted through the American, League of Nations, Western and Central departments. Shortly after providing documents during the Munich crisis of September 1938 (the material was delivered through Klugmann), Cairncross was transferred to a section in the Treasury supervising the Post Office and Stationery Office. Although this sounds humdrum, he sometimes had access to important material. In June 1939, for example, when his departmental head was on leave, he supplied reports on Germany circulated by the Committee of Imperial Defence, and material on wartime propaganda plans including the creation of a Ministry of Information. In July he provided documents on SIS, MI5, GC&CS and a chain of secret radio interception stations. In August he supplied documents needing nine rolls of film to be photographed, including minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence, documents on raw material reserves and wartime evacuation plans.
One key to understanding Cairncross is that he was an expert on Molière, and was indeed given the codename MOLIÈRE. His chosen subject was the most protean of playwrights, a comic genius, a satirical moralist, a flatterer of bourgeois values, a toady to the nobility. Cairncross was equally loath to hold any line or to conform to any orthodoxy. His dissident nature was both political and personal: he had an inner pride which needed praise and craved status, but his prickly, conceited and resentful temperament discouraged people from giving him what he wanted. He was proud of the powerful analytical orderliness of his mind, but got into scrapes, had a reputation for untidiness and disorganization and made himself unpopular. His scrutiny of human foibles was sometimes sour and condescending: of Maclean @ WAISE he told Maly, ‘He knows from his Cambridge days that WAISE also was a Party member and he says that although WAISE has become a complete snob, he nevertheless maintains a “healthy line” in his work which shows that he has retained Marxist principles in his subconscious.’ Deutsch in parallel reported Maclean’s view of Cairncross: ‘intelligent, but works badly and is careless … because he considers himself cleverer and better than all the others’.32
Maclean in Paris
Maly, who remained London rezident until August 1937, wished his prize source to have a handler of his own. Accordingly, in 1937, Maclean was allotted to a dark, attractive NKVD officer, Kitty Harris @ GYPSY @ NORMA @ ADA @ Elizabeth Dreyfus @ Alice Read @ Elizaveta Stein. A Jewess who had been born in Belorussia in 1899, she lived in Winnipeg in 1908–23 before moving to Chicago. In 1926 she married the communist Earl Browder, with whom she undertook secret work in Asia. After they had separated in 1931, Browder became leader of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), with the NKVD codenames of HELMSMAN and SHAMAN, until dethroned from his position on Moscow’s orders in 1945. Harris meanwhile returned to Europe, where she served as a courier of undeveloped films obtained by the vorón Fyodor Paparov from the Foreign Ministry in Berlin and was trained to run agents. In 1937 she was transferred to London, where at her first rendezvous with the London rezident in a Leicester Square cinema she carried a copy of A. J. Cronin’s novel The Citadel for identification. Harris photographed the documents that Maclean had brought overnight from the Office: he had been hoping for some years to find a woman comrade; she was headstrong and oddly gullible; and despite the difference in their age, they soon became lovers.
When Maclean was posted as Third Secretary to the Paris embassy in September 1938, Harris followed him to the French capital. After a few months there, still his lover as well as his handler, she reported to Moscow: ‘While in London he could act as he liked. He had his friends and lots of time to read.’ But in Paris he was constricted by formal responsibilities. ‘He must attend dinners and receptions. His whole life is centred on the embassy. He hates this atmosphere, but at the same time must work in it.’ There were few chances to scout in bookshops or loiter beside the news kiosks in the boulevards. He seldom had the time to go drinking and smoking in Left Bank bars frequented by writers, artists and the left intelligentsia.33
Maclean did not appreciate Sir Eric Phipps, the Paris Ambassador under whom he served. Phipps was a shrewd opportunist and cynical wit, although inwardly a man of conviction. He had been schooled in Dresden and Vienna, and after a year at King’s College, Cambridge had graduated bachelier ès lettres at the University of Paris. As Ambassador in Dollfuss’s Vienna he had been popular, but in Berlin he was more refractory: ‘a complete thug, Sir Phipps’, Hitler called him. ‘The rapidly growing monster of German militarism will not be placated by mere cooings,’ Phipps warned in 1935: Hitler could be charming, ‘but there is the other side – the tiger side – and when it shows itself, oh Weh!’ He offered no hope that the overthrow or death of Hitler would bring ‘the emergence of a benevolent, carpet-slipper régime’. He was exasperated by the unrealism of ‘England’s bleating pacifists’, and from 1936 onwards advocated rearmament. When appointed to the Paris embassy in 1937, he said that he regarded ‘the Ville Lumière as the hub of civilization’. After the Nazi annexation of Austria in March 1938, he felt sure that war would come.34
Whereas Maclean was appalled in 1938 by the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler at Munich, which freed the Nazis to annex part of Czechoslovakia, Phipps supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement as prolonging peace and providing an opportunity for rearmament before the inevitable war. Maclean was disgusted by his reading of secret messages that passed between Chamberlain and Daladier, and it is likely that he saw Phipps’s telegram of 24 September upholding capitulation. ‘Unless German aggression were so brutal, bloody and prolonged (through the gallantry of Czechoslovak resistance) as to infuriate French public opinion to the extent of making it lose its reason, war would now be most unpopular in France,’ he telegraphed. ‘All that is best in France is against war, almost at any price (hence the deep and really pathetic gratitude shown to our Prime Minister).’ For good measure Phipps characterized French opponents of German belligerence as a ‘small, but noisy & corrupt war group’. Two months later Phipps wrote that ‘Bolshevism’ remained just ‘a bogey in our still relatively happy island’, whereas on the European mainland it posed a substantial threat. Soviet Russia had been fomenting strikes to disable France since 1936. ‘In Spain thousands of people have been murdered, in Russia millions. In Italy Fascism would seem to have been directly due to Communism. In Germany Naziism was certainly due to Communism.’ It was incomprehensible to Phipps ‘why, if we hate all these horrors that Communism has caused or produced, we should imagine that an alliance with it is going to benefit us in any way’.35
Con O’Neill, a young law Fellow at All Souls, resigned as Third Secretary at the Berlin embassy in 1939 because he found unbearable the propitiating of the Nazis by his Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson: it was eight years before he could resume his diplomatic career. Maclean, by contrast, remained in the Phipps embassy, chafed at his circumstances, felt sorry for himself, drew his salary, rose in the hierarchy and betrayed his colleagues’ trust.
Maclean and his fellow Third Secretary in the Paris embassy, Valentine Lawford, saw incoming and outgoing telegrams and dispatches as well as Phipps’s personal letters to Cadogan and Sir Orme (‘Moley’) Sargent at the Foreign Office. The two young men s
hared a Chancery office, swapped quips about their work and bonded by laughing together. Maclean pleased Lawford by undertaking the duller tasks and by staying late in the office to finish their duties singlehandedly, when Lawford, a charmer who enjoyed a glamorous social life in the French capital, had divertissements to attend. Lawford, who later renounced his diplomatic career to become the life partner of the German-American photographer Horst P. Horst (they adopted a son together), seems not to have thought of Maclean as sharing his sexual preferences. He enjoyed Maclean’s company, and never suspected that he was being used to facilitate espionage for Moscow. Maclean said that he missed the laughter when Lawford was replaced by the dour Henry Hankey in 1940, but he must have missed Lawford’s carefree way with papers and office hours more.
Philby in Spain: Burgess in Section D
Early in 1937 Maly gave Philby instructions from Moscow to proceed to the area of Spain controlled by the Nationalists, under cover of a freelance journalist, both to collect political and military intelligence from Franco’s forces and to build a legend as an intrepid right-wing reporter on the Spanish battlefields. When he was interrogated by Dick White of MI5 in 1951, he was stumped by one direct question: who paid for his trip to Spain in 1937? The answer, which he could not give with impunity, was that the Spanish assignment was set up and financed by Moscow. The NKVD instructed him to penetrate Franco’s entourage, report on the habits, schedules, affinities and vulnerability of his staff and guards, and thus facilitate the General’s assassination. Moscow indeed ordered Philby to kill Franco himself, but the youngster had no aptitude as a hitman. After inundating The Times with unsolicited reports, he was appointed in May 1937 as one of that newspaper’s two correspondents attached to Franco’s armies. His accounts of Nationalist victories over the Republicans solaced those readers of The Times who admired Franco’s crusade against Bolshevism.
Enemies Within Page 34