Goronwy Rees was an occasional overnight visitor to Mayor and Rawdon-Smith’s rented home: he was notable for being drunk at breakfast. In his memoirs he described Burgess filling Bentinck Street with ‘a series of boys, young men, soldiers, sailors, airmen, whom he had picked up among the thousands who thronged the streets of London at that time’. Strenuous couplings and political mysteries abounded, he suggested. ‘Bedroom doors opened and shut; strange faces appeared and disappeared down the stairs, where they passed some new visitor on his way up; civil servants, politicians, visitors to London, friends and colleagues of Guy’s, popped in and out of bed, and then continued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue [or] the progress of the war.’ Blunt counters – convincingly – that there was a house rule in Bentinck Street forbidding the bringing home of any ‘casual pick-up’ for the night: they were too unpredictable, and might be noisy or disruptive when other tenants needed their sleep; Burgess had lovers who spent the night, including James Pope-Hennessy, Peter Pollock and Jack Hewit, but no ‘boys’ or ‘rent’. Rees said that the only subject on which he believed that Burgess told the invariable truth was on the subject of his sexual conquests; but Burgess would be unique among men if his sexual brags were true, and we know that his mendacity on other matters was appalling. The only reason to believe Burgess’s accounts of his performances with other men is a desire for lubricious sensationalism.32
Cairncross hooks BOSS
Early in the war Cairncross was instructed to seek work with Lord Hankey, who had been brought into the War Cabinet in September 1939 as Minister without Portfolio and was pursuing a roving strategic brief. As Cabinet Secretary and Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence in the 1930s, Hankey had been conspicuously security-conscious: he ordered that papers must never be left on desks overnight, prowled round the offices in Whitehall Gardens to check that his rule was being kept, and was unforgiving when in 1933 he spotted ‘a sheet from THE most secret of documents which had just been issued to THE most secret of committees’ lying in a fire-grate, where it had been placed as a grate-screen by a charwoman. Yet even Hankey was vulnerable. He was a devout vegetarian, who often ate at the Vega restaurant near Leicester Square. Cairncross made a show of becoming vegetarian, sat demurely by himself at a table in the Vega when Hankey was there, and was finally introduced to the great man by his son Henry Hankey, who had been one of the few colleagues who liked Cairncross at the Foreign Office. In due course, Lord Hankey asked the Treasury to release Cairncross to act as his private secretary.33
All official papers and much personal correspondence came to Cairncross’s desk before they reached Hankey’s. His job was to skim and assess them, and order them on the minister’s desk with the most urgent files on top. He monitored Hankey’s telephone calls, was sometimes expected to listen on an extension, controlled the minister’s visitors and held the keys to his safe. BOSS was the codename bestowed on Hankey by Moscow. When Chamberlain’s government fell in May 1940, the new Prime Minister Churchill demoted Hankey from the War Cabinet, but gave him the solace of a ministerial post, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which had Cabinet rank outside the War Cabinet and came with offices off the Strand. In July 1941 Hankey was shifted again, to the post of Paymaster General, with rooms in the Privy Council Office. Churchill finally shunted him out of the government in March 1942. This progressive loss of favour owed much to the bitter antipathy between him and the more powerful minister, Beaverbrook; something also to the fact that from 1941 onwards Hankey engaged in open but ineffective intrigues against Churchill’s exuberant and idiosyncratic leadership.34
Cairncross claimed in his memoirs that between the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939 and the German invasion of Russia in 1941, he supplied no documents to Moscow. In truth, the London rezidentura complained that the secret material supplied by him in that period was too profuse to encipher for telegrams to Moscow. Hankey prepared authoritative ‘War Appreciations’ at six-monthly intervals, which summarized such matters as the strategic views of the Chiefs of Staff, enemy strategy, problems of inter-allied cooperation and likely developments in the actual fighting. Hankey was involved in preparations for biological warfare, in disrupting the supply of Romanian oil to Germany and in planning military assistance to Turkey in the event of an attack by Russia. As the supervising minister for SIS, MI5 and GC&CS, Hankey prepared two elaborate reports on the secret services in the spring of 1940: Cairncross duly supplied copies to Moscow. Cairncross remitted 3,449 intelligence items during 1941 (a figure exceeded only by Maclean’s 4,419). These included secret Cabinet papers, Foreign Office cryptograms, weekly bulletins from SIS, the FO and the Imperial General Staff and Scientific Advisory Committee documents.
As chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee, Hankey had a leading part in the atomic-bomb programme in 1940–1. Although, after his public naming by Oleg Gordievsky as ‘the Fifth Man’ in 1990, Cairncross denied that he had supplied atomic intelligence to the Soviet Union, there is no doubt from the Moscow archives that he was the first of Britain’s atomic spies. In September 1941 he reported that the so-called Uranium Committee, chaired by Hankey, had endorsed an Anglo-American cooperative project to build an atom bomb. In October he provided the text of a crucial policy memorandum prepared by Hankey. Stalin was thus informed from the outset of the Anglo-American work to develop a super-weapon, and knew that the Soviet Union was excluded by its ostensible allies from any knowledge of the project. Cairncross’s first-rate material was nevertheless mistrusted as possible disinformation, especially by Modrzhinskaya, who had no insight into Whitehall procedure. The NKVD could not understand why Hankey, after his removal from ministerial office by Churchill in 1942, continued to receive secret documents: dismissed ministers in Stalin’s Russia were ostracized if they were lucky, liquidated if they were not, and certainly not kept on circulation lists of top secrets.
Following Hankey’s political retirement, Cairncross went to work at GC&CS as an editor and translator in the section handling Luftwaffe decrypts. He continued to supply material to his Russian handlers. Although in 1943 he transmitted only ninety-four documents, these included Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park, which were crucial in Russia’s victory in the battle of Kursk. Using decrypts supplied by Cairncross, and backed by other sources, the Red Air Force bombed German airfields and destroyed over 500 Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground. Although this was a turning point in Russia’s war against Germany, the NKVD continued to suspect Cairncross of supplying disinformation. In August 1944 he was transferred to the political branch of SIS. The 794 documents that he sent to Moscow that year included a new SIS survey of Soviet intentions; but fears of British disinformation and inadequate analysis and appraisal of his material meant that it was put to limited use. Altogether, from his several desks, Cairncross supplied 5,832 documents to Moscow during 1941–5.
It is not surprising that none of the ring of five was suspected or caught, for there are worlds of difference between detecting a murderer and detecting a spy. The murderer, usually acting alone, kills his victim; the body is found, the crime is known, and law-abiding people come forward with their accidental knowledge of the crime. A railway clerk remembers selling an incriminating ticket, a postmistress hears everyone’s gossip, a gardener glances over a fence, a dog-walker notices a smashed headlight, a barmaid recalls a stained overcoat: all these innocent witnesses understand from newspaper headlines that they are needed to contribute their little piece to the jigsaw of truth. The spy, though, acts in secret, and keeps his crime unknown except from an equally clandestine accomplice. There is no outcry for justice to be done. Various individuals may hold incriminating knowledge of the traitor, but probably are unaware that treason has been committed. No one expects their colleagues to be secret outlaws. It is never easy to accept that a dangerous minority of people make promises for the satisfaction of breaking their word and humiliating their dupes; that setting snares to catch clever men is exciting, and the pride feels almighty wh
en the trap springs on the prey; and that deception-artists and confidence-tricksters enjoy the havoc that they stir up.
CHAPTER 13
The Atomic Spies
Alan Nunn May
‘Fear is a demoralising emotion,’ as David Footman knew. The cruel, bloodthirsty hunt for imaginary traitors during the Stalinist purges of 1936–8 daunted the next generation of Soviet intelligence officers. They used cloddish methods, shrank from responsibilities, wanted quick results in order to deflect criticism from Moscow and violated simple precautions. Ivan Ilichyov, who took effective control of Soviet military intelligence in 1942, had made his career on pre-emptive denunciations of colleagues: he regarded all established intelligence officers as potential ‘enemies of the people’, said another member of the GRU directorate, ‘and the agent network created by them as wholly hostile and therefore subject to liquidation’. All Soviet officials sought authority from Moscow before taking even minor decisions, Alan Roger, MI5’s Defence Security Officer (DSO) in Tehran, reported in 1944 during wartime cooperation with them. ‘Throughout our dealings so far we have found a complete unwillingness on the part of any Soviet department or authority to act in concert with another locally, even when some of the persons live inside the same Embassy compound.’ Instead of the Poles, Latvians and Germans who had predominated in successful Soviet espionage before the purges, Moscow in the 1940s sent Russians, who were functionaries rather than ideologues, and had been chosen because they left families in the Soviet Union who were hostage-guarantors of their mindless loyalty. They knew few foreigners, and were untutored in western languages, attitudes and practices.1
Sometimes, in a literal sense, they did not know where they were going. Igor Gouzenko, the young Ukrainian who was posted as a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1943, thought, when he was sent abroad, that he was destined for south-east Asia until he arrived in Canada. Two years later, grateful for western comforts and resentful of his boorish bosses, he decided to defect. The Cold War began on 5 September 1945, when Gouzenko stashed 109 documents on Soviet espionage in Europe and America and fled. His defection nearly failed, for embassy thugs tried to snatch him with his wife and baby from their apartment; but Canadian neighbours showed unshakeable decency in protecting them from abduction.
By the time that Canadian politicians had agreed to Gouzenko being protected and debriefed, Cyril Mills, who had been (in his words) ‘a sort of one-man miniature MI5 in Canada’ since 1942, had embarked on a trans-Atlantic ship with two members of the royal family, the Earl and Countess of Athlone, on their return to England after the Earl’s five years as Governor General of Canada. Unknown to Mills, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wished to recall the ship to Canada, so that he could disembark and handle Gouzenko; but the rank and priority of the Athlones made this impossible. It was only when Mills reached London that he heard about Gouzenko. Hollis had meanwhile been flown to Canada to manage the debriefing that would otherwise have been Mills’s responsibility. Mills regretted missing the excitement.2
Gouzenko was codenamed CORBY. He revealed wartime Soviet espionage, spies in the atomic-bomb programme and a Soviet spy codenamed ELLI in London counter-espionage headquarters. Attlee and Bevin, Labour’s Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary since July 1945, wanted an immediate confrontation with Moscow on these espionage activities, but the need to conciliate the Americans, and to concert a united Anglo-American response, slowed this process. Menzies passed the ELLI warning to his chief of security, Vivian, who delegated it to the chief of SIS counter-espionage and real-life ELLI, Philby. Moscow was therefore kept informed of CORBY developments throughout. Tim Milne, whom Philby asked to handle ELLI inquiries, decided with Menzies that ELLI was inside MI5 rather than in SIS.3
Among the ring of five the CORBY ramifications had most impact on John Cairncross, who had in June 1945 been appointed Principal in the Treasury section handling War Office estimates. This gave him access to confidential material, and made him the recipient of indiscretions: ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale of SIS told him, for example, that the Soviet air force ciphers had been broken by exiled Poles, and that the British knew of the Soviets’ atom-bomb testing-site north of Yakutsk. But this flow of information halted after three months: following Gouzenko’s defection, Moscow severed all contact with Cairncross until 1948.
The Canadian government appointed a Royal Commission to investigate the betrayal of state secrets to foreign agents by persons in positions of trust. Its interim report in March 1946, and final report in August, were highly informative about Soviet espionage, which had been running a member of the Canadian parliament and nearly twenty officials as informants or agents. Sir Peter Clutterbuck, the High Commissioner in Ottawa, reported that sixteen members of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa had been withdrawn at Canada’s request, while the Ambassador and Military Attaché were summoned to Moscow, where the latter was believed to have been liquidated. ‘Many people see little difference between the Russian methods of today and the German methods we have fought two wars to eradicate,’ Clutterbuck continued. ‘Though there is a general hope that the Russians merely want educating and will settle down in time, a deep disquiet inevitably remains.’ When Cabinet ministers in London mooted giving official publicity to the Royal Commission’s findings, including Gouzenko’s statement that the Soviet Union was preparing for a third world war, Denis Healey, the pre-war Oxford communist who was running the International Department of the Labour party, gave decisive advice that ‘it would be damaging to the Party’ for the government to criticize Russia ‘at a moment when for the first time the Russians appear to the public to be making concessions’. Healey recoiled from offending public opinion by correcting its ignorance.4
‘All communists, from the top to the bottom, have a conception of the outside world based upon the works of Marx, Lenin and Stalin,’ Sir Frank Roberts wrote from the Moscow embassy at this time. Inconvenient incidents were squeezed into orthodox ideological interpretations. In an international crisis such as the Gouzenko case, ‘a small group of high communists or N.K.V.D. officials might cover up their own clumsiness by convincing Stalin that what appeared like Soviet espionage was in fact only a further example of the determination of the outside capitalist world to stage a major anti-Soviet demonstration’.5
Gouzenko’s material revealed that Soviet intelligence had received atomic secrets from Maclean’s Trinity Hall communist contemporary Alan Nunn May. Nunn May had in 1942 joined the Cambridge-based, French-led team of Hans von Halban and Lew Kowarski, which had shipped 185 kilograms of heavy water from France to England ahead of the German invaders. Halban had been born in Leipzig; his ancestors were Polish Jews, Vienna civil servants and Bohemian soldiers; his doctorate was from Zurich; and he was a French citizen. Kowarski had been born in St Petersburg, spent his adolescence in Vilnius (the Lithuanian capital, which was then in Poland), had his scientific training in Paris and was also a naturalized French citizen. ‘Too many damned foreigners’, Sir George Thomson, the Nobel laureate physicist, barked as he contemplated this research team. Nunn May was supposed to keep a patriotic watch on them as well as developing measurement techniques and improving the handling of experimental errors.6
Sir James Chadwick, a Nobel laureate physicist who had discovered the neutron in 1932, was leading research and development in England’s secret atomic-bomb project, which was codenamed TUBE ALLOYS. Once, in 1942, Chadwick put an abrupt question to Nunn May: ‘Do you know Nahum?’ Ephraim (‘Ram’) Nahum, who was killed that year by one of the few German bombs that fell on Cambridge, was the son of a rich textile merchant from Manchester: Eric Hobsbawm called him ‘a squat, dark natural scientist with a big nose, radiating physical strength, energy and authority … and … the ablest of all communist student leaders of my generation’. At the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge (where Chadwick had worked until he obtained the chair of physics at Liverpool) everyone knew Nahum as the CPGB organizer of science students. When Nunn May admitted to knowin
g Nahum, Chadwick continued: ‘We tried to get him for work on the project, but the security people made objections, on very silly grounds.’ He then gave Nunn May a pointed look. Chadwick was indicating that he knew Nunn May, like other Cavendish scientists, to have been a party member, and did not regard this as a bar to recruitment to the Halban–Kowarski project; but as security officers were unlikely to show latitude, Nunn May should be discreet about his past or present beliefs. ‘Chadwick’s attitude was at the time perfectly normal,’ Nunn May judged. ‘This was a war against Fascism in which Russia was our ally, so a history of resisting Fascism and of support for Russia was no bar to recruitment, [it was] even a positive recommendation.’ There were few suitable scientists available for the work: if Chadwick had followed the security officers’ criteria he would have been chronically short-staffed. It is also arguable that MI5 were keener to keep communists out of development work on such important projects as radar that promised imminent tangible success. Atomic weapons at this stage were a remote and less understood possibility.7
Enemies Within Page 43