Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  The prudes in the FBI were also appalled by Inverchapel going to stay in Eagle Grove, Iowa with Roger Newburn, an energetic, dark-haired, twenty-year-old farm-boy whom he had met at a Washington bus stop. ‘I have to confess to a vast natural capacity for love,’ Inverchapel admitted complacently in 1948. ‘It has always been my trouble and here and there it has got me into trouble.’18

  In Washington Maclean drank too much, but never let his work suffer from hangovers. There was never a hint of sexual interest in other men. His Washington colleague Jock Balfour said that no one in the embassy had any reason to suspect Maclean. ‘To all appearances he was the pattern, the almost too-perfect pattern, of the trained diplomatist – efficient and conscientious at his work, amiable to meet, imperturbably good-tempered, elegant, exceedingly self-possessed, and with a rather cynical outlook which betrayed no particular ideological bias.’ Throughout his four years in Washington, Maclean reported regularly to his ‘control’ in the Russian consulate general in New York, providing intelligence intended to ensure Soviet communist hegemony rather than US capitalist victory in the post-war era. This included material on Anglo-American atomic research. His Washington embassy colleagues trusted him. ‘I always considered Maclean to be a particularly good example of the public-minded, educated, selfless person this country so often produces,’ George Middleton stated in 1952. ‘He was patient, even-tempered, sometimes rather sleepy and lack-a-daisical in manner.’ To Middleton, Maclean’s politics seemed ‘“liberal”, i.e. social-democratic or labour or whatever one cares to call it’.19

  He kept his guard with close embassy colleagues such as Balfour and Middleton. Those who worked at a distance from him saw a more difficult, tense and excitable man. After he had asked Isaiah Berlin to introduce him to some New Dealers, the two men went for dinner at the house of Katharine (‘Kay’) Graham, whose family owned the Washington Post. The evening proved disastrous. Berlin’s appreciative remarks about the shrewd and funny Republican hostess Alice Roosevelt Longworth made Maclean erupt. ‘He said that persons who called themselves liberals had no business knowing reactionaries of her type,’ Berlin recorded. ‘All life was a battle, and one … must be clear which side of the barricades one was on: relations with the enemy were not permissible – at this point he became exceedingly abusive.’ Thirty years later Berlin reflected that he should have realized from this outburst that Maclean was ‘some sort of a political extremist, e.g. a Communist … but the thought never entered my head’.20

  Burgess desk-hopping

  As to Burgess, he spent the early months of the war in the Foreign Division Directorate of the Ministry of Information, working alongside Smolka, producing a propaganda bulletin for BBC broadcast overseas. When Philby returned to London after the Fall of France, Burgess, who was by then working for Laurence Grand in SIS, recommended his recruitment to the Service. He also resolved to make direct contact in Moscow with the NKVD. As cover for his journey to Russia, he concocted a scheme in June 1940 for Isaiah Berlin of All Souls, a Russian-speaker, to be posted to Moscow as Press Attaché, and for himself to accompany Berlin as an induction courier. Burgess mustered some official support for this scheme, and embarked with Berlin on a tortuous journey via Washington DC and Vladivostok towards Moscow. They had reached the US capital when informal protests from Miriam Rothschild, who deplored Burgess’s influence on her brother Victor and their mother, and from John Foster, an All Souls lawyer who was temporarily First Secretary at the British embassy in Washington, raised doubts about the project, which was quashed after further objections from Fitzroy Maclean at the Foreign Office. Burgess was ordered back to England.

  Burgess, like Philby, then became an instructor in an SOE training camp. The two spies gave their foreknowledge of future SOE operations to Soviet Russia, which was then still party to a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and therefore may have remitted details of Burgess and Philby’s material to the Germans. Burgess’s career as an SIS officer petered out in 1941 after a corporal on one of his courses complained that he tried ‘to muck about with him’. He had another spell at the BBC, where he achieved the remarkable coup of arranging a radio broadcast by the NKVD agent Ernst Henri. He also arranged for broadcasts by the communist MP Willie Gallacher and by Clark Kerr, who praised Stalin’s Russia. Despite Burgess’s dismissal from SIS for importuning the corporal, Blunt convinced Liddell to recruit him as an agent (not an officer) codenamed VAUXHALL running two informants, Eric Kessler (Press Attaché in the Swiss embassy) and Andrew Revai (a journalist, and president of the Free Hungarian Association in London). Both Kessler and Revai were possibly intermittent sexual partners of Burgess. Liddell accepted from Blunt the line that had earlier fooled Footman and Vivian: that Burgess’s Cambridge dalliance with communism gave him an insider’s understanding of the CPGB. MI5’s counter-subversion expert John (‘Jack’) Curry was unconvinced of the sincerity of Burgess’s renunciation, and declined to employ him in F Division. When Curry was seconded in 1943 to an SIS unit monitoring communist penetration in foreign countries, he was unfairly mocked: sending telegrams to Curry, the Oxford don and wartime intelligence officer Gilbert Ryle told Trevor-Roper, was like ‘posting love letters up the arse-hole of a camel’. Yet Curry was right about Burgess, when cleverer men were not.21

  By July 1943 Burgess was so anxious about his error in recruiting Goronwy Rees as a pre-war All Souls informant, and fearful of a denunciation by Rees of him and Blunt, that he suggested Rees’s liquidation, and offered to commit the murder himself. Moscow and the London rezidentura suspected this might be a provocation devised by MI5 or SIS. This was not the only threat of violence. James Pope-Hennessy was introduced to Burgess by Harold Nicolson in 1940. Pope-Hennessy became besotted during an affair lasting a year or eighteen months: after stormy rows, he threatened to shoot Burgess. Thirteen years later he claimed that he had broken with Burgess ‘because he was destroying … all one’s beliefs in life’, as Skardon summarized it after an interview in 1954, ‘though I suspect that he was thinking more in terms of moral destruction’. Pope-Hennessy understood that Burgess was a communist, and told Skardon that Burgess’s associates – he named Blunt, and Victor and Tess Rothschild – behaved like communists. Subsequently Pope-Hennessy became a lover of James Lees-Milne. One night in 1943 Pope-Hennessy, Lees-Milne, Burgess and Charles Fletcher-Cooke (an officer in naval intelligence who had been on a tour of Russia arranged for Cambridge undergraduate communists in 1935) embarked together on urban black-out adventures. They met at the Ritz bar, moved on to the smart, louche Gargoyle Club in Soho, dined at the White Tower restaurant in Fitzrovia, visited sleazy pubs and drank beer and gin. The party was joined by the Prime Minister’s daughter Mary Churchill: ‘Guy and Mary got on a treat, which was a relief, & very bizarre,’ said Fletcher-Cooke, who noted Burgess’s ineradicable name-dropping about Beneš and other European leaders. Burgess struck Lees-Milne as a truculent drunk, dangerously indiscreet, and boring in his ‘depravity’.22

  During 1943 the News Department of the Foreign Office, under Sir William Ridsdale, had begun trying to moderate the pro-Soviet material issued by the Ministry of Information, where Smolka headed the Russian Section. Moscow decided to graft Burgess on to the News Department to resist this tendency. After various manoeuvres, and with support from Harold Nicolson, Burgess left the BBC and started full-time work at the FO in June 1944. Ridsdale, who had his career ruined by employing Burgess and speaking unguardedly to Smolka, later said of Burgess: ‘He was slovenly and irresponsible, and it was never possible to assign to him any task of importance.’ When he rebuked Burgess, as he did on several occasions, for his soiled appearance and poor manners, Burgess’s reaction was ‘to cringe and be most apologetic’. His undesirable traits had to be weighed against the fact that ‘he was a Double First at Cambridge and could be amusing at times’.23

  Both in the News Department and in his later Foreign Office activities Burgess was suspected of leakages to Freddy Kuh, the communistic Lond
on correspondent of violently anti-English Chicago newspapers and renowned for his scoops and mischief-making. Kuh began one of his destructive reports, ‘A Foreign Office spokesman gazed dreamily out of the windows across Horse Guards Parade and murmured, “Of course, one of the troubles with America is that it has no government.”’ Burgess was the official in question. The ensuing rumpus added ‘new lustre to his reputation as an enfant terrible’, wrote Alan Maclean, who joined the News Department in 1945. ‘Guy took both pride and pleasure in annoying establishments … and “being in trouble” was a matter for glee.’24

  The opportunities for espionage were immense. Burgess provided the Soviets with over 4,000 documents in the last year of the war alone. ‘It really was very challenging to one’s sanity’, Dick White recalled in 1985, ‘to suppose that a man of Burgess’s type could be a secret agent of anybody’s.’ His alcoholism, his scruffy, stained clothes, his bad breath, his filthy fingernails, his boastful indiscretions and his unbuttoned sexuality made a perfect cover, as was doubtless intended by the arch-deceiver of Soho and Fitzrovia.25

  Blunt in MI5

  Blunt had been dormant as a Soviet helpmate since June 1937, but Gorsky resumed contact in August 1939 and urged Blunt, with his proficiency in French, German and Italian, to apply to join the Intelligence Corps. After the outbreak of war, the Director of Military Operations and Intelligence at the War Office ordered him to report on 16 September to Minley Manor, near Camberley in Surrey, for an intelligence course. After little more than a week, Blunt was peremptorily withdrawn from the course on security grounds and summoned for interview by Kevin Martin, former Military Attaché in Warsaw and Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. ‘I want you to realize that we have to be very careful indeed in intelligence,’ Brigadier Martin told him. ‘What has been done was probably done in excessive zeal, and I hope therefore that you will not feel that you have a grievance.’ They discussed Marxist doctrine and the Nazi–Soviet pact. Blunt let drop that his father had been chaplain at ‘the embassy church’ in Paris for ten years. ‘I am sure’, Martin said, ‘he would turn in his grave if he thought you were doing subversive work or perhaps I am a little traditional in this way, I mean about respect for one’s forebears.’ Martin closed the interview on a note of friendly caution: ‘I should like a little time to think over the impressions of you I have formed, which I may say are favourable, and I hope you won’t mind perhaps coming here again for another talk.’ Burgess arranged for Dennis Proctor to call on Martin and convince him that ‘all decent people have if not left-wing views, then at least left-wing friends’.26

  Blunt was reinstated on the intelligence course at Minley Manor in mid-October 1939. He was able to compile a report on the structure of British military intelligence, dated 17 November, for an appreciative Moscow Centre. Subsequently, his Cambridge admirer Victor Rothschild (by then the Security Service’s head of counter-sabotage) recommended him to Liddell, who appointed him in June 1940 to a job in MI5’s St James’s Street office. Liddell was not the sole target of Blunt’s charm. He seems to have cultivated MI5 officers with responsibilities for Russia or communism. He began to sit with Dick White in the canteen, discussing art and advising White on contemplated purchases of prints. White, who was working at full pelt on matters of higher policy, cannot be expected to have read Blunt’s file or to have known of his earlier suspension from the Minley Manor course. Blunt at this time shared an office with the secretary of Courtenay Young. ‘My God, he was a charmer!’ she recalled. ‘We were all a bit in love with Anthony … He used to wander around with his cod-liver oil and malt, saying “That’s what Tiggers like for breakfast.” He knew Winnie the Pooh very well. He had a Leslie Howard face – a matinée idol.’ When she was informed in the mid-1960s that Blunt had admitted spying, ‘It was exactly like being … on a quicksand, I couldn’t believe it. I really, truly, couldn’t believe it … You started thinking, “Who else? What about me? Was I one too?”’27

  Modrzhinskaya was suspicious when Blunt reported that MI5 took little interest in Soviet citizens in Britain. She and her Moscow colleagues could not believe the assurances of Blunt in MI5 and Philby in SIS that no serious anti-Soviet operations were under way. The fact that the surveillance material supplied by Blunt never once included any Soviet intelligence officer, his report that MI5 had no agents inside the Soviet embassy and that surveillance of visitors to the embassy had halted – all this was enough to discredit his authenticity. Blunt reported that only telephone tapping and penetration of the CPGB were continued. For most of 1940 Blunt received no guidance from the NKVD, because Modrzhinskaya’s mistrust had caused the closure of the London rezidentura and Gorsky’s recall to Moscow. Among the first tranche of papers supplied to him by Blunt in January 1941, after the resumption of the two men’s contacts, was Jane Archer’s report on debriefing the defector Walter Krivitsky. He may have been the source inside MI5 who warned the CPGB in 1941 that Tom Driberg was Maxwell Knight’s prized agent M/8 informing on party activities: a denunciation that resulted in Driberg’s expulsion from the party. Modrzhinskaya complained in 1943 that Blunt, in addition to supplying 327 rolls of film in the last year, had brought about a hundred documents to each weekly meeting, which she found unforgivable for compromising security.28

  Blunt’s Sub-division B2 distributed deciphered diplomatic telegrams, analysed intercepted diplomatic correspondence and telephone intercepts, monitored the movements of foreign diplomats, separated couriers from their diplomatic bags for just long enough to scrutinize their contents and worked with Mrs Gladstone, who ran the Ellen Hunt employment agency in Marylebone High Street, which was controlled by the security services and placed domestic spies in foreign diplomatic buildings. Blunt supplied Boris Kreshin, who succeeded Gorsky in 1942, with MI5 internal documents, files on people targeted for cultivation, GC&CS intercepts, diplomatic telegrams, German intelligence reports, copies of illicitly opened diplomatic mail, weekly summaries of German intelligence radio intercepts, telephone intercepts and surveillance reports. In 1941–5, according to KGB records, Blunt supplied a total of 1,771 documents (compared with Burgess supplying over 4,000 documents in the last twelve months of the war). ‘Usually at meetings TONY is very apathetic, he comes very tired and forgetful,’ Kreshin reported in 1943. ‘When he is nervous, he drinks.’29

  Blunt was involved in the surveillance of the diplomatic missions in London of neutral states. He proved deft in the tricky, speedy work of receiving and assessing material, and disseminating his conclusions to colleagues. He attended a few meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He also ran his former pupil Leo Long, who was working in military intelligence, as a sub-agent betraying official secrets to Moscow. When diplomatic privileges were suspended in April 1944, ahead of the Normandy landings, Blunt was assigned to Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), where he worked on deception. In May 1944 Blunt provided a complete copy of the deception plan for the D-Day landings, Operation OVERLORD, scheduled for June 1944. Thereafter, Moscow Centre accepted the honesty of material supplied by Philby and the others. This was because it was being corroborated by material from other sources: probably the American OSS.

  The Blitz affected MI5 officers and their families as much as it did other Londoners. Roger Hollis, who had been recruited to MI5 in 1938, lived at 18 Elsham Road, Kensington, close to Glading’s former safe-house in Holland Road and within easy reach of MI5’s temporary headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs. His pregnant wife left London in 1940 for the safety of rural Somerset. Similarly Victor Rothschild, whose wife was also pregnant, decided that they should take refuge from the Blitz in Cambridge. He leased their home at 5 Bentinck Street, Marylebone – a minute’s walk from the Langham Hotel, where Krivitsky had been debriefed earlier that year – to two young women, Teresa (‘Tess’) Mayor and Patricia Rawdon-Smith, who had just been blitzed out of their shared flat. Mayor was his secretary at MI5 and future second wife. Blunt joined the women to help with the rent,
and six months later Burgess took the remaining bedroom after the lease of his flat had expired.

  Distorted legends have flourished about this household. Malcolm Muggeridge, who visited Bentinck Street once, left an artful account of Burgess manipulating the political and cultural notabilities grouped there around him. ‘There was not so much a conspiracy gathered around him as just decay and dissolution. It was the end of a class, of a way of life; something that would be written about in history books, like Gibbon on Heliogabalus, with wonder and perhaps hilarity.’ The force of Muggeridge’s dramatization set the tone for subsequent comment. Dick White has been faulted for being neither suspicious nor disapproving when he visited ‘Bentinck Street’s den of decay and dissolution’. John Costello memorably described the household as ‘a homosexual bordello serving as a viperous nest for Soviet spies’, before showing in more forgettable language that this was not the reality. Stephen Koch claimed that in Bentinck Street ‘Burgess gathered the homosexual underworld of London together with some of the most devious and despicable operatives then at work.’30

  Anthony Blunt resented these lurid descriptions of the Bentinck Street arrangements as ‘an alternation of sexual orgies and conspiratorial conversations designed to hinder the war effort’. It is true that he probably had a sexual affair with Rawdon-Smith, that Burgess claimed less reliably to have gone to bed with her, and that both men were involved with Jack Hewit, a sparky working-class man who had previously been Christopher Isherwood’s boyfriend; but there is nothing remarkable about this bedroom-hopping among young people in a flat-share. Blunt maintained that he and his co-tenants were working too hard on onerous jobs to spend their nights disporting riotously. London was a beleaguered city: there was little chance of a hotel bedroom unless it had been booked weeks in advance. The Bentinck Street tenants therefore sheltered friends who visited London on leave or were stranded there overnight by train cancellations. People who did not live in London during the Blitz had no idea, said Blunt, how casually sleeping-arrangements were improvised. Flats became dormitories, and on nights of heavy bombing so did basements, in which people bedded down together on lilos and mattresses on the floor. There were many such communal households in wartime London. Blunt’s MI5 colleague Herbert Hart lived in an Oxford-orientated group with his ex-communist wife Jenifer, Douglas Jay, the Balliol economist Thomas Balogh, Patrick Reilly of the Foreign Office and Francis Graham-Harrison of the Home Office. Hugh Gaitskell of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and his wife Dora lived with Evan Durbin of the War Cabinet secretariat’s economic section, the moral philosopher Oliver Franks of the Ministry of Supply and the music critic William Glock.31