Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Liddell thought Burgess unsuitable for posting in the Minister of State’s private office, and Footman had misgivings; but the appointment proceeded. Burgess imagined himself on his way to high-altitude influence, for he predicted that McNeil would be the next Prime Minister but two. Like Cairncross when he had been Hankey’s private secretary, Burgess saw policy memoranda, telegrams, Cabinet papers and private correspondence with ambassadors. He monitored telephone calls and visitors. At night he took away documents in his briefcase, either surreptitiously or with Office consent, on the implausible pretext that he would work on them at home. In time, Burgess’s alcoholism, seediness, disruptions and indiscretion determined McNeil to transfer him to the Office’s new Information Research Department (IRD).

  This propaganda unit had originated with a memorandum of April 1946 circulated by Christopher Warner, who was then in charge of the Foreign Office’s Northern and Southern departments, and entitled ‘The Soviet campaign against this country’. Recent speeches by Stalin and other Soviet leaders signalled ‘the return to the pure doctrine of Marx-Lenin-Stalinism’, ‘the glorification of Communism as the inevitable religion of the future’ and ‘the revival of the bogey of external danger to the Soviet Union’, Warner cautioned. ‘We should be very unwise not to take the Russians at their word, just as we should have been wise to take Mein Kampf at its face value.’ In the eleven months since the collapse of Nazi Germany, Russia had been ‘despoiling foreign countries in her sphere’ – in eastern Europe, the Balkans and the communist zone of Germany – ‘harnessing them to the Soviet system, and at the same time posing as their only benefactors’. Communism must be treated, Warner argued, ‘not merely as a political creed, but as a religious dogma and faith which can inspire such fanaticism and self-sacrifice as we associate with the early Christians and the rise of Islam, and which in the minds of believers transcends all lesser loyalties to family, class or even country’. He urged the need to attack and expose the myths which the Soviets were generating to justify their actions: ‘the myth of the encirclement of Russia by the capitalist powers, the myth that a new Germany is to be built up for use against Russia, the myth that Russia alone gives disinterested support to subject races against their continued enslavement and exploitation by the colonial and capitalist powers’. Warner’s close arguments resulted in the formation of the Information Research Department, headed by a Labour MP, Christopher Mayhew, who had previously been an outstanding administrator in SOE and had in 1935 visited Russia in a travelling party including Blunt, Michael Straight, Charles Fletcher-Cooke, Charles Rycroft and Michael Young. Mayhew’s new outfit was charged with providing factual briefings about communism to overseas embassies and legations. McNeil tried to stow Burgess in the hold of the IRD, but Burgess proved an unstable weight during a trial period of employment, and Mayhew would not confirm his appointment. He would have been invaluable to Moscow in the IRD if only he had controlled his behaviour.7

  In November 1948 Burgess – a counterfeit coin in the circulating currency of the Foreign Office – was slotted into the Far Eastern Department. He told his Soviet handler that he intended to provide bigger bundles than hitherto, and asked to be given a suitcase for this purpose. Dennis Proctor, who had known him since Cambridge days and had proposed him for membership of the Reform Club, had watched his operations in pre-war Pall Mall and wartime Whitehall with amused toleration: ‘he had a profound love of intrigue, of being in the know and of dabbling in cloak-and-dagger projects’. But after 1945 Burgess grew ‘more and more intolerable with drink … drugs and general degeneration’, Proctor later told MI5: ‘his conduct was so disreputable’ that their meetings ‘became fewer and less welcome’. Yet Burgess remained efficient for Moscow’s purposes: on 7 December 1949, for example, he gave 168 documents, totalling 660 pages, to his Soviet handler Yuri Modin.8

  Burgess’s former sexual partners, including Harold Nicolson and Micky Burn, were dismayed by his messy appearance, diminished charm, intellectual enfeeblement and reckless impulses. Burn had been captured during the Commando raid on Saint Nazaire in 1942, and then incarcerated in Colditz. One night, back in post-war London, he saw Burgess looking conspicuous in a camelhair coat, cruising the ‘meat-rack’ under the archways of the County Insurance office at Piccadilly Circus. It was notorious that police agents provocateurs entrapped men there, so Burn accosted his friend, saying, ‘Don’t be such a fool.’ Burgess let Burn lead him away: they went to the Reform Club for triple sherbets. By then Burn was a foreign correspondent of The Times, roaming in Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia (Victor Rothschild’s insinuation that he had been a Nazi sympathizer was nonsense). In 1947 he married a remarkable divorcee named Mary Booker, who was twice his age. When Burgess visited the newly married couple, he suddenly told Burn, ‘I want to speak to you alone,’ took him into a corridor, tried to kiss him and importuned him to resume their affair. ‘You don’t understand, I’m married,’ Burn protested, at which Burgess snapped back, ‘Don’t be so pompous.’ Burgess then said, as a way to keep some control over the man who had spurned him, that if ever Burn wanted a room for sexual assignations, he could use one in Burgess’s flat in Old Bond Street. ‘I remember thinking’, Burn later said, ‘that if I ever did, and I did now and then, it would not be anywhere of his. I had ceased to trust him.’9

  Blunt continued to collect titbits from friendly conversation with ex-colleagues at MI5. He was able, for example, to warn Moscow in March 1948 that MI5 had increased its surveillance of Soviet officials in London: a microphone had been inserted into the Military Attaché’s telephone; other handsets were bugged. Some MI5 officers were more unbending and impermeable than others. ‘Dick White is too correct in his manner, and will never gossip on matters connected with work like Guy Liddell,’ Blunt reported. ‘Hollis is also correct and almost hostile. John Marriott sometimes talks, but he isn’t overfond of me.’ In fact Hollis had the distinction of being the only MI5 officer to show suspicion of Blunt, whom he disliked. He teased him in 1945 by calling him ELLI, the codename of a Soviet spy revealed by Gouzenko and only many years later identified as Blunt’s sub-agent Leo Long.10

  Cairncross returned to the Treasury a month after the end of the war. Moscow severed contact with him after Gouzenko’s defection. Under the codename KAREL he resumed passing documents in July 1948. He was in a department authorizing expenditure on research in atomic weapons, guided missiles, microbiology and chemical and underwater warfare. His job gave him legitimate reasons to collect research data from aviation, radar, submarine detection, signals intelligence and eavesdropping. His utility for Moscow increased in 1950 with the development of NATO, the outbreak of the Korean war and increased expenditure on armaments and personnel.

  In 1949 Burgess and his mother went for winter sun in Gibraltar and Tangier. He carried letters of introduction from David Footman and from a more recent figure in his life, Robin Maugham. The latter was a decorated young army officer who had saved the lives of a score of soldiers trapped in burning tanks, and joked that a head wound sustained in North Africa qualified him for a job in intelligence. He was already an eminent travel-writer and was beginning to publish interesting novels: Somerset Maugham was his uncle. He was candid about his sexual preference for men, which led him to live abroad, and to become a barfly who drifted into alcoholism because of the sexual environment in which he lived. As a member of the House of Lords, Maugham was later a pioneer campaigner against human trafficking. These were the sort of well-placed men whose goodwill Burgess exploited.

  In Gibraltar Burgess went on a prolonged binge, irritated officials by importuning them to cash his travellers’ cheques, boasted of his friendships with Footman, Philby and Dick White, and committed fearful indiscretions. Kenneth Mills of MI5, who had broken a journey from Tanganyika in Gibraltar, and Teddy Dunlop, the local SIS head of station, were outraged by his misconduct and complained to London. In Tangier Burgess continued to pester British officials, gatecrashed drinks parties and luncheons,
made himself unpopular by stealing the boyfriend of a popular expatriate and talked airily of secret services. Burgess’s prosecution under the Official Secrets Act was considered for his loose talk about SIS, but this idea was dropped, perhaps because it was feared that his defence in court would reveal his earlier work for MI5 and SIS. After Burgess’s return to London, Footman warned him that Vivian of SIS was gunning for him, but in fact Vivian gave his qualified approval in a report to the FO’s Security Department in January 1950. ‘His knowledge both of MI5 and S.I.S., where he has numerous friends, is, though perfectly legitimate, quite extensive,’ Vivian told Carey-Foster. ‘He has influential friends on high levels in the Foreign Office. His unnatural proclivities are, I understand, well known, but are not regarded as having caused any anxiety in official matters, and, as far as his friends are concerned, are more than balanced by his quick and alert mind, his other obvious intellectual qualities and a certain charm of conversation.’11

  On 4 June 1950 Burgess had a long talk in a suburban London park with Nikolai Korovin. He conveyed his worries, and those of Philby and Blunt, about the VENONA decryptions. They had an idea that Litzi Friedmann, Philby’s ex-wife, was involved with Fuchs, and that he might compromise her under interrogation. It would be easy to trace her connections to her Viennese contemporary Edith Tudor-Hart, who had instigated Philby’s recruitment in 1934 and handled the Cambridge ring’s material when Gorsky was absent in Moscow for ten months of 1940. Korovin’s attempts to allay the Cambridge men’s fears were unsuccessful.

  In August 1950 Burgess was confirmed as Second Secretary at the Washington embassy. As he was known to want to remain in London, it may be that the Personnel Department wished to provoke him into resignation. The Minister in Washington, Derick Hoyer Millar (Lord Inchyra), the Head of Chancery, Bernard Burrows, and the Security Officer all knew his bad reputation and resisted his appointment, but never suspected him of being a spy. Before his departure Burgess likened himself at a London party to Sir Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist who had been hanged for treason in 1916. He was so haphazard that when he vacated his room in the Office to leave for Washington, he emptied the entire contents of his desk into a briefcase without any sorting. In the Washington embassy he was foisted on Denis Greenhill, afterwards Lord Greenhill of Harrow.12

  Greenhill found Burgess unprepossessing. ‘Deep nicotine stains on his fingers and a cigarette drooping from his lips,’ Greenhill recalled. ‘Ash dropped everywhere. I took an instant dislike, and made up my mind that he would play no part in my official duties. It took little longer to find out that he was a drunken name-dropper, and totally useless to me in my work.’ He was open about his homosexuality, ‘but’, said Greenhill, ‘at that time there was no link in official minds with security’. Greenhill refused when Burgess asked to see classified telegrams that were not his concern, because he expected that his boastful subordinate would show off by talking about their contents; but had no inkling that he might be a spy.13

  Philby was doubtless aghast at Burgess’s posting to Washington. Burgess invited himself to stay in Philby’s family home at 4110 Nebraska Avenue. It was against procedure for two Soviet spies to share accommodation in a foreign city, but Philby probably accepted Burgess as a house-guest in the hope of restraining his alcoholic delinquency and reckless chatter. It was a grievous mistake, which soon compromised his standing with Washington officials and visitors. When Lord Cairns, a listener at GCHQ (as GC&CS had become after the war), visited Washington to consult with the National Security Agency, the Philbys invited him to dinner: Cairns was ‘very annoyed’ by Burgess quizzing him in ‘the most searching and unpleasant manner … about GCHQ stuff’. In January 1951 Philby and his wife held a dinner party for James Angleton of the CIA, the FBI’s Robert Lamphere, the ex-FBI man William King Harvey, who was now a CIA man investigating Soviet spy rings, and Wilfrid Mann, the liaison with the CIA on atomic matters. The four guests came with their wives. Sir Robert Mackenzie, an SIS baronet in the Washington embassy, was also present. Late in the evening, when everyone was rat-arsed, Burgess blundered in drunk. Libby Harvey knew of his talents as a caricaturist and asked him to draw a sketch of her. He retaliated with an insulting cartoon which showed her dress hitched up to her waist and her chin resembling a warship’s jutting underwater battering-ram. Her husband tried to punch Burgess, Aileen Philby wept in mortification, and the party ended in furious disarray. This fiasco occurred three days after Fuchs had confessed to Skardon, and a few hours before Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. The simmering heat was moving closer to boiling point.14

  Maclean’s breakdowns

  As to Maclean, his Washington colleague Nicholas Henderson believed that his manner changed, and he began drinking more heavily, after Alger Hiss had been unmasked in the midsummer of 1948. Patrick Reilly thought that the Hiss case had intensified anxieties which began a slow escalation after the conviction of Nunn May. Another Washington colleague, Jock Balfour, dated the deterioration to the months after Maclean had been posted to Cairo as counsellor and Head of Chancery in September 1948. For a man whose hero was Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the anti-imperialist campaigner against the British military occupation of Egypt, the post was an ideological strain. For the past seventy years no British diplomatic mission had wielded more brute imperial force than the British embassy in Cairo. The Egyptian proconsuls Lord Cromer, Lord Allenby, Lord Lloyd and Lord Killearn were great figures of imperial history. During the recent war, Cairo had been the military capital of the British Empire with up to 120,000 British and Dominion troops garrisoned there at one time. Chic visitors from Mayfair, imposing grandees from Belgravia and racy members of the Chelsea set enlivened the most densely populated city in Africa, with its degraded fellahin and epidemic disease. Ten years earlier it had been visited by Burgess’s friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. ‘Cairo,’ they wrote, ‘that immense and sinister Woolworth’s, where everything is for sale – love, lottery tickets, clothes hangers, honor, justice, indecent postcards, bootlaces, disease – as much and as cheap as you like, till the buyer goes mad with boredom and guilt.’15

  The Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Cairo, Sir Ronald Campbell, had been Minister at the Washington embassy during Maclean’s time there, and expected well of him. Maclean’s unease in Cairo was obvious, though. His embassy colleague Lees Mayall saw that the discrepancies between the standards of living of Europeans and of Egyptians distressed him. Maclean expressed ‘great sympathy for the working man and indeed for any under-dog’, and supported the Jewish side in the Palestine troubles. Mayall regarded him at the time (not unsympathetically) as ‘a Left-wing intellectual’ and only with hindsight realized that he was ‘exactly the sort of person who could be a communist’. Maclean was bold in excusing traitors. He shocked the wife of a Dutch diplomat in Cairo by saying at dinner: ‘If Alger Hiss felt as he did about communism, he was quite right to betray his country.’16

  In Cairo, Maclean drank deep. He broke Mayall’s leg in a drunken fracas. It has been repeatedly said that when drunk, and to alleviate stress, Maclean started having rough, perfunctory sex with male pick-ups. His wife Melinda is the one person who definitely stated this: she did so to another diplomatic wife, Kathleen Cecil, whose husband had succeeded Patrick Reilly as the FO’s liaison with SIS; she uttered the confidence only after her husband’s disappearance, during a period when she was giving misdirection so that his tracks could be lost and his activities misunderstood. There is not a jot of evidence of this in the official archives or from contemporary eyewitness accounts in other sources. A former military attaché in Cairo is said to have reported that Maclean was ‘carousing openly with promiscuous young men he picked up while cruising through town’; but these oft-repeated, unsubstantiated tales are suspect. The interest lies in the purpose of these sexual anecdotes. The intention of the nuclear scientist Wilfrid Mann’s story, that he found Burgess and Philby in bed together in Washington, drinking champagne, at ten in the morning, was to distract
attention from the fact that Mann had also supplied Moscow with classified material, although he was later turned and run against the Russians.17

  In December 1949 Maclean included a note asking to be relieved of Soviet intelligence work in a bundle of classified documents which he gave to the Soviet rezident in Cairo. This individual did not read this plea before forwarding it to Moscow Centre, where it was also unread. It was noticed by his controllers only in April 1950, when Maclean sent a renewed request for release from his obligation to spy for them. Meanwhile his disintegration continued apace. Robin Hooper, newly installed as head of the FO’s Personnel Department, minuted on 8 January 1950 that at a recent drunken party, during a ‘rather silly alcoholic argument, Donald Maclean stung to fury by some very silly remarks of [an] ex-Communist, said “of course you know I’m a party member – have been for years!”’ Hooper commented, in a minute that went to MI5, ‘Obviously this is not to be taken seriously, but it is evidence that D. is still hitting it up and that he is apt to be irresponsible in his cups.’18

  The disaffected communist was the painter and novelist Humphrey Slater, who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain, but turned against communism and took up the bottle instead. On a later occasion, in November 1950, Slater and his second wife Moyra met Maclean by chance in a Soho street, had dinner with him, went to the Gargoyle Club afterwards and ended in a drinking session in Mark Culme-Seymour’s flat: as Maclean got drunker, he spouted ‘the Party line’ with diminishing inhibition. Humphrey Slater told several people at the Office that he thought Maclean was a party member. His novel about a Soviet spy, The Conspirator (published in 1948 by Sir Ronald Campbell’s cousin John Lehmann), was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor. In the novel Slater depicted the quandary of an intelligent young woman who has been told by her favourite cousin, under a solemn vow of secrecy, that the cousin’s husband is spying for Soviet Russia. She feels that she should warn the authorities of his treason: ‘but then, she thought, one of the most disgustingly unpleasant things about communist regimes was the obligation they put upon people to betray their dissident friends or relatives’. She decides that if she were to break her promise of secrecy, ‘she would be behaving in exactly the same inhuman way as any contemptible informer of the Gestapo or the Soviet secret police. Decent human relations were impossible, she thought, unless individual friends could trust one another and promises given as seriously as she had given hers could be expected to be honestly kept.’ Moyra Slater, talking at a drinks party with John Lehmann’s sister Rosamond Lehmann in 1950, agreed that Maclean had been a communist for years, was probably a spy and was so indiscreet that the security services must already know. The two women decided that it was not their job to denounce Maclean to the authorities explicitly, but decided to gossip widely so as to ensure that his communist allegiance was known to everybody, including the authorities.19