Hearing of Duggan’s death, Karl Mundt, a Republican congressman from South Dakota who was acting head of HUAC (its chairman being under indictment for fraud), rushed into action. A few years earlier the Foreign Office had received a character sketch of Mundt from the Washington embassy. ‘An ignorant man, gifted with a somewhat slow intelligence, but sincere and constantly baffled by problems largely outside his mental scope,’ Isaiah Berlin had reported. ‘His appetite for facts is, unfortunately, much greater than his ability to grasp and evaluate them. (Until quite recently, he was under the impression that Canada “paid tribute” to Britain!)’ Mundt rushed to convene a press conference before midnight. Flanked by another HUAC member, Richard Nixon, he revealed Isaac Don Levine’s testimony that Duggan’s name had been among those given in 1939 by Chambers as a member of the communist apparatus within the State Department. Mundt regaled journalists with loose hearsay, and made a cheap wisecrack that the identity of other State Department communists would be disclosed when they jumped from high windows. The Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and radio broadcasters criticized Mundt for publicizing unverified hearsay. Eleanor Roosevelt writing in a New York newspaper on Christmas Eve denounced Mundt for an ‘irresponsible, cruel’ publicity stunt perpetrated ‘without real proof in his hands’.25
In a memorial volume to Duggan published in 1949, the Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles referred to Mundt and Nixon as ‘fanatical or unscrupulous slanderers’. He honoured Duggan ‘as one of the very first to instill an element of social conscience into United States foreign policy’. He deplored ‘the wave of hysteria that had swept over the United States as the result of the tactics employed by the Soviet Union since the end of the Second World War’. From London, Harold Laski praised Duggan as ‘one of the most upright and devoted people I had ever known, with a mind vividly conscious of public obligation’. A memorial to ‘dear Larry Duggan’ was read at the annual general meeting of his New York club, the Century, after his death: ‘a sensitive, sincere and good man, loyal in all his bones to our country and to the principles of democracy in which live the hope of the world. Those of us who wept at his passing, wept of course from deep sorrow, but we also wept from cold anger.’26
These were patrician voices, speaking on behalf of justice, unimpaired legal process and the objective testing of truth by calm and honest rationalists rather than by fanatics and opportunists. They saw the value in resisting snap populist judgements engineered by crooked editors and self-seeking politicians. ‘Personally, I am going to believe in Alger Hiss’ integrity until he is proved guilty,’ Eleanor Roosevelt told a New York newspaper after Duggan’s death. ‘I know only too well how circumstantial evidence can be built up, and it is my conviction that the word of a man who for many years has had a good record of service to his government should not be too quickly disbelieved.’ She feared that as a result of the prevalent search for spies, ‘the great gift of curiosity, which makes men safe and secure in a really democratic society, is going to be shortly discredited among us. There would be no development, there would be no people who understood what had built the Communist movement in this country, unless there were among us some few who were interested enough to find out how other young people think, and, in addition, to study opposing regimes.’ American liberty, continued Eleanor Roosevelt, rested on the principle that citizens must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. ‘Insinuations should not be made unless proof is in hand. A man’s job may be jeopardized and his whole life may be wrecked before his innocence is proved.’27
Eleanor Roosevelt’s principles seemed right for her generation: not least her belief in trusting people until they were proven to have betrayed their colleagues or their country. Her grounding and values were similar to those of Whitehall during the 1940s. The dominant mood was against political tests of officials or policing of their ideas. Responsible men detested the mentality of the lynch-mob. They disliked alarmism, bans, black-lists, snoopers and scapegoating. The possibilities for malicious denunciations were shown in 1949 when a postal intercept revealed an application to join the CPGB from the zoologist Solly Zuckerman, afterwards Lord Zuckerman, an authority on the effects of bomb-blast, who was in line to become the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Investigations suggested that the application was a mischievous forgery by a jealous, hard-drinking colleague of Zuckerman’s named Lancelot Hogben. Generally there were qualms at building an apparatus of suspicion and risk-assessment. Mistrust was known to be politically contaminating. Trust was one of the elements that distinguished liberal democracies from despotisms. All this was understandable in the state of security knowledge in the 1940s, although men’s confidence in their colleagues let Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Duncan Lee and the Cambridge ring of five leach official secrets from their different spheres.28
Roger Hollis of MI5 noted in 1945 that the civil service had hitherto ‘shown an extreme and understandable reluctance to have its intake vetted by us’. One reason for this is implied in a passage – perhaps intended to disarm interrogators, but also sincere – in Klaus Fuchs’s confession of 1950. ‘Since coming to Harwell, I have met English people of all kinds,’ Fuchs said. ‘I have come to see in many of them a deep-rooted firmness which enables them to lead a decent way of life. I do not know where this springs from, and I don’t think they do, but it is there.’ Trust and self-respect were obvious and integral parts of this deep-rooted firmness: the notion of vetting seemed to poison those springs.29
The resistance to positive vetting was helped by the dismay among intelligent people at the stupidity both of the headline-stealing witch-hunts in America and of the most vocal English proponent of ‘loyalty tests’, Sir Waldron Smithers, Tory MP for a constituency of commuters and market gardeners in Kent. Smithers was a lugubrious, boneheaded stockbroker with a love of figuring in newspaper headlines, and neither a man of marked ability nor one insensitive to the consoling effect of alcohol. Once in the Commons he challenged the Attlee government to prove the sincerity of its anti-communism by prosecuting Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury. He further demanded that, if and when Johnson was convicted, the government should ensure that his hanging was public. Smithers’s advocacy of a ‘Civil Service Purge’, ‘Security Tests for Ministers’ and the institution of a House of Commons Select Committee on Un-British Activities aroused contemptuous distaste.30
Gouzenko’s revelations and the Nunn May trial reinforced MI5’s growing suspicions that the greatest threat to official secrets did not lie with open CPGB members. On the contrary, the NKVD (and its successor agencies) discouraged its major informants from joining the party, partly to avert mistrust of their political views among their colleagues, but also to foster an exciting air of conspiracy which would accentuate their self-importance and make them amenable to performing special tasks. In May 1947, as a delayed response to the Canadian analysis and under pressure from Washington, Attlee formed a secret Cabinet committee on subversion known as GEN-183. Its members included Cabinet ministers, high officials and Sillitoe. Committee papers reporting their deliberations always referred to ‘subversives’, not ‘communists’, although communists were their target. In March 1948 Attlee announced procedures to purge government departments of both communists and fascists with access to sensitive material. This was to be done by negative vetting: checking Security Service card-indexes against the names of those with access to official secrets and confidential material.
MI5 was unhappy with these developments. It would have preferred to keep the current informal vetting system, while making it more systematically targeted; it was appalled by the extra workload. It feared that a purge based on negative vetting would complicate or spoil its interaction with secret sources within the CPGB: it worried about its effect on such a case as Graham Pollard’s. By 1948 Pollard was a senior official at the Board of Trade, where he specialized in reorganizing the machinery of government, dismantling wartime controls and revising tariff
regulations. He was known to many people as a former member of the CPGB; but no MI5 index-card will have existed to explain that he had joined the party at the prompting of Maxwell Knight and had been an invaluable long-term informant on the CPGB for MI5. Liddell and other senior Security Service officers resented the way that Labour ministers, who had instigated the extension of the vetting system, deflected blame from their supporters and civil libertarians by implying that the impetus for the civil service ‘purge’ came from MI5. Liddell remonstrated with Attlee as Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison as Deputy Prime Minister, protesting that the Security Service was being used as a scapegoat for political decisions: MI5 appeared to the press and the public as ‘a bunch of irresponsible autocrats’ and ‘black reactionaries’ who were engrossing powers ‘to victimise unfortunate Civil Servants’.31
GEN-183 (and Whitehall generally) dismissed Smithers and his kind. The US Federal Employee Loyalty Program, whereby the FBI made far from perfunctory, although not necessarily efficient, security checks on some four million government staff, was thought disproportionate. The Westminster parliament resisted pressure from Washington to emulate HUAC tactics. The political settlement that had been enshrined in the fulfilment of parliamentary democracy in 1929 rested on trust and attempted inclusiveness, not paranoia and exclusion; but the detonation at Semipalatinsk in August and Mao Tse-tung’s victory in September 1949 increased tensions and risks immeasurably.
In April 1950, after the Fuchs case had discredited reliance on negative vetting, Attlee appointed a committee on positive vetting (PV) which comprised John Winnifrith of the Treasury, Roger Hollis of MI5 and Graham Mitchell, who had joined MI5 at Philby’s recommendation soon after the war. Hard on the appointment of Winnifrith’s committee came the unexpected outbreak of war in Korea in June 1950, and alarms about Harwell security breaches involving the nuclear scientists Bruno Pontecorvo and Boris Davison. In November the Cabinet committee on subversion recommended the adoption of PV. The Attlee government’s precarious parliamentary position meant that it did not wish to alienate its more liberty-loving supporters by a public announcement of the new policy. The practice of PV was implemented – slowly and secretly – during the early months of 1951 before receiving massive propulsion from the defection of Burgess and Maclean. A much expanded PV programme was agreed in principle in July 1951 in the hope of appeasing American anger at the Fuchs, Burgess and Maclean cases; but the Attlee government felt too weak to implement this decision, which was not announced until January 1952, when a more confident Tory government, under Churchill, was in power. MI5 and GEN-183 preferred to move suspects in a discreet way to less delicate posts rather than expel them. In the Home Civil Service between 1948 and 1982, twenty-five officials were dismissed for security reasons, twenty-five resigned, eighty-three were shifted to non-sensitive work and thirty-three were reinstated after further investigation. None was publicly named. In the USA over a comparable period, 9,500 federal civil servants had been purged, another 15,000 resigned while under investigation as communists, and all were named.
A seizure in Istanbul
In the same month – September 1945 – that Gouzenko defected in Ottawa and supplied the chilling disclosures that began the Cold War, a Soviet official called Konstantin Volkov, who had recently been transferred from NKGB headquarters in Moscow to a post under consular cover in Istanbul, made contact with John Reed, acting Head of Chancery at the British embassy in Ankara, which transplanted itself during the summer heat to the Istanbul consulate. Reed, who had been a Cambridge undergraduate at the same time as Philby, entered the Foreign Office in the same batch as Maclean, and served in Bucharest, Washington and Moscow. As a Russian-speaker, he interpreted at secret meetings with Volkov, who sought political asylum for himself and his wife, as well as £27,500, and offered in return to tell all that he knew of NKGB headquarters and overseas networks, and to name Soviet agents in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Volkov, who provided a selection of his wares for transmission to London, insisted that a handwritten account of his offer must be sent as a personal letter, by diplomatic bag, to a senior official at the Foreign Office. Nothing could be trusted to radio signals or typists, because two Soviet agents were embedded in the Foreign Office, while another headed a counter-espionage organization in London. Reed reported Volkov’s walk-in to Sir Maurice Peterson, an ambassador who regretted secret service activities. ‘No one’s going to turn my embassy into a nest of spies,’ Peterson told Reed: ‘if you must go ahead with this business, do it through London.’ Peterson’s decision excluded the SIS head of station from involvement. Peterson reluctantly forwarded the Volkov papers to the Foreign Office, signing a covering letter to Sir Orme Sargent, who was also chary of intelligence work, rather than to Cadogan, who was responsible for FO liaison with SIS.32
‘Moley’ Sargent referred the Volkov material to Menzies, who passed the dossier to Philby and told him to handle the Russian’s defection and debriefing. Within hours of reading Volkov’s offer, on 20 September 1945, Philby breached tradecraft by hastening to see Burgess at the Foreign Office and pressing on him an envelope with instructions to give it to his Soviet handler that same evening. Burgess did so. The envelope contained Philby’s news of Volkov’s intended defection. The Radio Security Service, which monitored London–Moscow wireless traffic, noticed that on 20 September there was a sharp rise in wireless traffic from the Soviet embassy in London to the Moscow headquarters of the NKGB. The length of such traffic could be measured in milliseconds, and it was found that there had been an identical upsurge of wireless traffic between Moscow and Istanbul of precisely the same duration as the London–Moscow messages. The London–Moscow messages had been repeated to Istanbul. It was a dead certainty that the Volkov leak had happened in London.
Philby knew that once SIS in London accepted Volkov’s offer and agreed to exfiltrate him, the operation would be run by the SIS station head in Istanbul. He therefore tarried for three weeks before flying to Turkey. During that interval Volkov vanished: strapped to a stretcher and swaddled in facial bandages to hide his identity, he was hustled aboard a Soviet military aircraft and flown to his doom. When Reed asked why someone from SIS had not come from London sooner, Philby gave the irritating reply, ‘Sorry, old man, it would have interfered with leave arrangements.’ Philby broke his return journey to London in Rome, where he visited James Angleton, the US chief of counter-espionage there. He recounted the story of Volkov’s disappearance with a show of candour intended to disarm any later suspicions about the case. SIS surmised that an unguarded telephone call between British officials in Istanbul and Ankara might have betrayed Volkov’s intentions. Philby was not blamed for his inexplicable dilatoriness – except by Reed, who retired from the Diplomatic Service in 1948, after marrying the daughter of the director of the champ de courses at Nice. When interviewed in 1967, by then High Sheriff-designate of Shropshire, Reed said that he had long before settled in his mind ‘that either Philby was criminally incompetent or he was a Soviet agent’.33
In October 1946, following the Gouzenko and Volkov cases, Sargent circularized heads of missions in Ankara, Tehran, Nanking, Athens, Rome, Berne, Paris, eastern Europe and South America with instructions on the handling of renegade members of Soviet missions seeking asylum in exchange for betraying secrets. Such defectors ‘have reached a state of depression in which their life and work seemed intolerable, and the possibility of escape, at whatever cost, became the only prospect of relief’. Perhaps mindful of the mistrust with which Agabekov, Bessedovsky and Krivitsky had been treated before 1939, Sargent stressed that recent defectors had been ‘sincere’: in one case (Gouzenko was not named) the material yielded had been of utmost value. Without specifying Volkov’s abduction, Sargent warned that Soviet missions were ‘ready to act with speed and ruthlessness as soon as any propensity to disloyalty is observed’. Overtures from a renegade must be handled speedily, ‘as even a short delay will almost certainly involve the removal
of the official concerned and the loss of the information which he is able to provide’. Contrary to Peterson’s decision in Volkov’s case, the SIS representative attached to the mission should be involved. Reports should be sent by telegram marked ‘personal for Sir O. Sargent to be deciphered by Private Secretary’. Lessons had been learnt from the Volkov bungle, although Philby’s basic betrayal was unknown.34
Around the time of the Volkov episode, Philby sought a personal interview with Vivian, gave a sanitized account of his marriage to Litzi Friedmann, described his involvement with Aileen Furse and explained the bastardy of their three children. Vivian approved his intention of seeking a divorce, asked MI5 to check on Friedmann and was soon told that she was a suspected Soviet agent, living in East Berlin with Georg Honigmann, who was known as a definite Soviet agent. About a year later, on 25 September 1946, at Chelsea Registry Office, Philby married Furse: their two witnesses were Tomás Harris and a businesswoman named Flora Solomon (who had introduced the couple, knew that Philby had been working under Moscow’s orders in the 1930s, but did not denounce him until 1962). In the year of his second marriage, Philby was transferred from Soviet counter-espionage to be head of the SIS station in Istanbul, with the rank of First Secretary. Given the tension between Turkey and the USSR, this was an understandable posting for a former head of Section IX. It also accorded with a new SIS policy of encouraging officers to circulate between both Service sections and overseas postings so as to prevent narrow specialization. Disquiet over the Friedmann–Honigmann connection may also have contributed to the decision to shift him from headquarters.
Enemies Within Page 48