Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Accounts of the next few days by its chief protagonists are confusing: people later lied in self-defence, misremembered in wishful thinking, were too upset to be consistent, enjoyed a chance for malice or were inherently untrustworthy. Many of the details of this phase hold biographical but not general historical interest. The important points are these.

  Andrew Boyle stated in 1979 that Herbert Morrison, Bevin’s successor as Foreign Secretary, ‘quashed the delaying tactics of his senior officials’ and upheld MI5’s proposal for an immediate interrogation of Maclean. This untruth is particularly objectionable, because it fosters the suspicion that diplomats were trying to protect a fellow member of the old-boy network. There was no advantage for the Foreign Office in delay: indeed, it was positively awkward to ensure that ultra-sensitive material did not go to the American Department where Maclean might see it. Some officials, notably the Deputy Under Secretary of State, Roger Makins, were impatient for a confrontation after months of insecurity. Strang, PUS, found the Security Service slow-moving, and in particular faulted its delay in interrogating Maclean once it was certain that he was a traitor. On 25 May Morrison was asked for authorization to interrogate Maclean on Monday 28 May and gave it. The interrogation was set for the Monday because, in accordance with the undertaking given to the FBI, Hoover had first to be told.28

  Much about the running of agents and incriminating of spies is a matter of fine timing. ‘Think of all this Burgess and Maclean stuff we’re always reading about,’ J. C. Masterman wrote in 1956. ‘They were allowed to run on after suspicion had been aroused, and a fine mess everyone made of it. Of course if they’d not got away, but had been quietly picked up at a convenient moment, everyone would have said how efficient our security was and how skilfully it worked; but as things turned out it proved a blunder.’29

  In the light of warnings from Philby in Washington, the MGB’s man in London, Yuri Modin, urged both Blunt and Maclean to defect. Reared in a culture of torture, purges and executions, it was unthinkable for him that a traitor might take the risk of exposure and arrest: yet Blunt refused outright, while Maclean prevaricated because of his wife’s difficult pregnancy. Finally a plan was concocted (possibly by Blunt) for Burgess to accompany Maclean on to a ship, the Falaise, which was leaving Southampton late on the Friday night of 25 May for a weekend pleasure cruise to French seaside towns. Maclean’s name was on a border control checklist, and a Southampton passport officer telephoned MI5 in London to report his departure for France. SIS officers in western European capitals were immediately alerted, but the Sûreté in Paris was not informed, for fear of leakages to journalists: a well-founded fear, since the Daily Express bureau in Paris received a tip-off after the French counter-espionage service, known as the SDECE, became involved. At Saint Malo, after breakfast on Saturday morning, Burgess and Maclean went ashore, leaving their luggage behind, and fled to Berne, where they collected false passports. On Sunday 27 May they reached safety behind the Iron Curtain in Prague.

  For an Eton and Cambridge man of his generation, Burgess was a poor letter-writer. His incoherent, rambling screeds, with their self-contradictions and diffuse irrelevancies, show that he seldom stopped to think before starting to write a sentence, never knew what he was going to say in it or how he would finish it. His pen skimmed across the paper in a spree of ink without thought of consequences or endings. One example is a letter to Liddell of February 1950 after his disgrace in Gibraltar and Tangier:

  my career appears ruined on present form. However I feel like Foch (my left retreats, my right ceded, my centre crumbles, j’attaque) and Churchill (Disaster? Unutterable. I feel 20 years younger) combined and am meditating a gigantic spring campaign, but don’t yet know whether to launch it in the political stratosphere or the official heavy side layer. Or whether to resign, or not launch it at all. The whole balloon really is Robinson Vivian plus whoever is the Heath of your office. Sorry to waste time – tho’ when the campaign opens I fear I’ll waste more (but not yours).30

  The thinking behind Burgess’s jaunt on the Falaise seems equally confused. The MGB, via Modin, may have misled him into thinking that he would be free to return to England from Switzerland, but their intention was probably always to retain him. Although he was not yet suspected in London of treachery, he would certainly be interviewed, for he had been seen in London recently with Maclean, had previously lived with Philby, who was one of the few people indoctrinated into the HOMER investigation, and was therefore in a position to forewarn Maclean; and the trio had been contemporaries at Cambridge. Once Burgess came under scrutiny, he was too rackety to survive questions about his undeniable, inexplicable and incriminating associations.

  One sure sign of the hectic events in London, after the Southampton passport officer’s report, is that Guy Liddell’s office diary went out of kilter. The entry for Sunday is entirely redacted, but misdated as if it was Monday. The Monday entry is dated for Tuesday. MI5 and SIS were working at full pelt to find Maclean. All the SIS officers in Berlin were summoned to their headquarters in the Olympic stadium on Saturday 26 May, given photographs and spent a sleepless weekend scrutinizing everyone passing the security checkpoints into the Soviet sector of the city. One of these officers, Anthony Cavendish, recalled being handed photographs of both Burgess and Maclean, although it is often stated that Burgess’s disappearance was not realized until the Monday, 28 May.31

  Certainly it was not until after the weekend of 26–27 May that William Manser, a trade attaché at the legation in Berne who knew Burgess by sight, was visited by ‘the resident cloak-and-dagger man’ in Berne. The SIS station head told him that Burgess and Maclean were ‘defecting’ and, when Manser showed that he didn’t grasp the meaning of the word, half shouted in exasperation, ‘They’re going to Russia!’ Manser was told to hurry to Ascona on the shores of Lake Maggiore, where intelligence reports suggested the absconders now were. ‘Pick a fight,’ ordered the SIS man. ‘Get yourselves arrested. The Swiss police are au fait. Do anything!’ Manser found these instructions hard to take seriously (‘members of the Foreign Office’, he mused, ‘did not betray their country’), and asked: ‘Do you want me to kill him?’ The head of station stayed mute. Manser spent some days searching Ascona for Burgess: by then the fugitives were far away.32

  When Burgess did not return on Sunday evening to Old Bond Street, a puzzled Hewit telephoned Blunt, who advised him not to worry. Hewit, against Blunt’s advice, next telephoned Rees. Blunt and Footman were then contacted by Rees saying that he suspected that Burgess had debunked to Moscow. At about eleven on Monday morning Footman reported Burgess’s absence to Liddell. On Monday afternoon, Melinda Maclean (having waited the weekend, as arranged) reported to Carey-Foster that her husband was missing. It seems that neither SIS nor MI5 had informed the Office of this fact which the security services had known all weekend. Carey-Foster and Reilly informed Strang, and were joined by Sillitoe and White from MI5. Blunt meanwhile visited Rees to try to persuade him to keep quiet. He also searched the Old Bond Street flat for incriminating material, but missed a guitar case containing, among other documents, letters from Blunt, a postcard from Philby and a bundle of Treasury documents which were identified by MI5’s Evelyn McBarnet and Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville as prepared by John Cairncross. Liddell tried to contact Blunt during the day, but could reach him only in the evening. White flew to Paris to try to concert action: he and Liddell were dismayed by the way that the Sûreté and SDECE turned every particle of French intelligence work into ammunition for the crossfire in their skirmishing for primacy. MI5 officers began interviewing the men and women who they hoped had crucial evidence. Blunt was regularly consulted by Liddell. Tommy Harris, Goronwy Rees, Victor and Tess Rothschild and others were asked what they knew or could suggest. It is impossible to overstate how shocked and incredulous every official was.

  The two defectors had months of arduous debriefing. In October 1951 they were granted Soviet citizenship, awarde
d hefty salaries and allotted spacious apartments in distant Kuibishev (this Stalinist substitution for the old place-name of Samara commemorated a communist engineer). As an industrial conurbation, full of munitions works and strategic factories, Kuibishev was a ‘closed city’ which no one could legally visit without authorization – still less could anyone stay overnight. Burgess and Maclean were thus, in effect, kept in a cordoned area. The inability to stay quiet, and the fidgety need to act, were two of Burgess’s conspicuous failings. Maclean’s sense of his own dignity depended upon showing his efficiency at work: inactivity and aimless time-filling were for him akin to suspended animation. Maclean briskly learnt Russian, and was given work teaching English to apparatchiks: Burgess, who never gained more than a rudimentary knowledge of key Russian words, prowled and drank and smoked. The two Englishmen’s anonymity was safe in Kuibishev, standing on a bend of the River Volga, with its drab modern buildings rising from the surrounding plain like a cluster of stalagmites; but the lack of purpose made for burdensome days. They were not seen by westerners for more than five years: yet during their durance as non-persons in Kuibishev, they were never forgotten. The ‘missing diplomats’ were a pervasive cultural force in the 1950s, who had disappeared but never went away.33

  PART THREE

  Settling the Score

  CHAPTER 16

  The Missing Diplomats

  ‘All agog about the two Missing Diplomats’

  Lady Maclean tried to convince Skardon that her son had disappeared because he was dreading the arrival in England of his brash American mother-in-law. Nigel Burgess thought his brother had gone on a deliberately mystifying holiday so that he could pretend when he returned that he had been on a secret mission for Churchill. The story spread in White’s that Burgess and Maclean had gone to France to bugger one another, that Burgess had murdered Maclean during a tiff and had dumped the corpse in a river. At All Souls the story was that the pair had absconded with an unnamed MP. Humphrey Slater suggested that the Russians feared that Maclean was backsliding from his creed and might denounce ex-comrades as Bentley and Chambers had done, and had exfiltrated him with the object of liquidation. David Footman convinced himself that Maclean was being blackmailed in une affaire de moeurs in Paris, that Burgess tried to help in extracting him from the imbroglio and that the extortionists had murdered them in the French capital. Many people suggested that in a quixotic gesture the two diplomats were ‘trying to do a Hess’ – making a unilateral peace mission to Russia comparable to the flight by Hitler’s deputy to Scotland in 1941. Bob Stewart of the CPGB suggested that the missing diplomats were pretending to be hunted refugees so that they could reach Moscow and spy there for London. The chairman of the Wine Society, Edmund Penning-Rowsell, on whom MI5 kept a file and who was known as ‘the Bollinger Bolshevist’ because of his politics, told Nigel Burgess that the missing diplomats had been kidnapped by American agents for interrogation so as to give the State Department an edge over the Foreign Office in security matters. When Nigel Burgess demurred, Penning-Rowsell shook his head sagely and said such things happened all the time. As late as August, T. S. Eliot believed what he read in the News of the World: ‘the mystery of Maclean and Burgess, the missing diplomats, will soon be solved. The dénouement will be undramatic and quite unconnected with anything to do with Communism or the Iron Curtain.’1

  MI5’s apprehensions about the leakiness of the French police were confirmed on 6 June by the Paris office of the Daily Express receiving a telephone tip-off from a police source that two British diplomats had vanished. Next day Beaverbrook’s newspaper broke the story on its front page. ‘The news of their disappearance exploded with megaton impact in Whitehall,’ one of its journalists later crowed. Over the next ten years Beaverbrook’s nationalistic newspaper spent nearly £100,000 chasing ‘missing diplomat’ stories. Like its rivals, it offered bribes for catchy quotes or vivid stories that could be passed off as true. A young babysitter was offered £100 to purloin Maclean family photographs from Beacon Shaw. Jack Hewit was taken to Paris by the Express in a stunt to search for the missing diplomats, and was remunerated for making various sensational but useless remarks. The financial rewards were such that Hewit even forged an incriminating letter from the young diplomat Fred Warner to Burgess. Scores of people with connections to Burgess or Maclean were pestered by Daily Express reporters protesting ‘we are only doing our job’. Its editor sent handsome young Don Seaman to Ischia to interview W. H. Auden, who had known Burgess in New York: Seaman (best known as a racetrack sprinter) was an inexperienced interviewer who garbled what he heard and reported that Burgess knew Nunn May (in fact it was Maclean who had been at Trinity Hall with the atomic spy). Journalists’ cars blocked Rees’s driveway so that he could not leave home; the doorbell and telephone rang without cease; his children were tempted with chocolates and half-crowns to make quotable remarks; one reporter tried to lure Margaret Rees into admissions with the disarming remark, ‘It’s all right to talk to me, Mrs Rees, I’m bisexual myself.’2

  On 11 June Sillitoe flew to Washington, where he was to placate and update Hoover. The trip was meant to be secret, but the Daily Express published a photograph of Sillitoe emplaning – a security breach that prolonged American displeasure with MI5. Beaverbrook’s hacks took the line that Burgess, like Maclean, came from a rich, privileged family and that accordingly the authorities were trying ‘to paper over the scandal’. The Daily Express was proud that its tenacity in pursuing the missing diplomats, and in investigating their social sets, discomfited Whitehall and aroused official displeasure. The newspaper was so strenuous and noisy that for a few days MI5’s Courtenay Young was able to pooh-pooh the rumours by saying ‘the whole thing was an Express scare’.3

  The animosity of Beaverbrook’s newspapers was such that Sillitoe sought an off-the-record lunch, on 24 July, with E. J. (‘Robbie’) Robertson, editor-in-chief of the group, John Gordon, the harsh bigot who edited the Sunday Express, and Percy Elland, editor of the Evening Standard. Robertson had first come to Beaverbrook’s attention as a Toronto hotel bellhop carrying the future press lord’s suitcases. He continued to do his master’s bidding, and was a master of po-faced humbug, as when he testified to the Royal Commission on the Press in 1948 that the walls of the Daily Express news-room were plastered with notices insisting to staff that accuracy was indispensable. ‘We cannot look anywhere without seeing them,’ he said, without adding that they were there as a reminder not to get caught in inaccuracies or inventions. Sillitoe complained that the Beaverbrook press had blackguarded the authorities for not preventing the defection to Russia of the Harwell atomic scientist Bruno Pontecorvo in September 1950, but denounced ‘Star Chamber’ tyranny when the same authorities withdrew the passport of Eric Burhop, a nuclear physicist who wanted to visit Moscow. ‘Was their policy to pick up any old stick and beat the Government?’ Sillitoe asked. Robertson, Gordon and Elland gave evasive replies. Sillitoe then objected to the onslaught on MI5, which he suspected was on orders from ‘the Beaver’. Sillitoe reminded the three editors that these attacks ‘did not come very well from that quarter, seeing that it was Beaverbrook who was raking the internment camps during the war and filling up our research with people of the type of FUCHS. Moreover, in doing so he was going directly against the advice of the Security authorities.’4

  Beaverbrook’s editors took revenge on Sillitoe for criticizing their boss. As a signal that they would damage him personally if he continued to censure the Beaver, the Daily Express soon splashed a rancorous story headlined, ‘M.I.5 SILLITOE TAKES A (Burgess–Maclean) HOLIDAY’. It reported that the Director General and his seventeen-year-old son were staying at the Hôtel Cécil in the French seaside resort of La Baule. ‘Sir Percy insists that he is on holiday, that all he is hunting is sunshine,’ the newspaper reported with another disrespectful photograph. ‘Sir Percy also insisted that he knew nothing new about the missing diplomats. The place to look for them, he said, was behind the Iron Curtain.’ Sil
litoe was travelling without a bodyguard, they added: ‘the local police are a little peeved with Sir Percy’, as they had not been forewarned of his arrival. Given the semi-Stalinist tradition of vindictive character attacks in the Express newspapers, it is understandable that the modernist Fleet Street building that housed their offices was nicknamed the Black Lubianka.5

  The information reaching Whitehall from Washington, from European capitals, from Gargoyle habitués and from other social sources was too confused, disturbing and anomalous to be absorbed, ordered and publicly acknowledged. On the night that Beaverbrook’s presses rolled with the first public reports of the missing diplomats there came the first fatality: Philip Jordan, Attlee’s press secretary, died of a heart attack aged forty-eight. He was an exceptional man, educated at the Royal Naval College with the intention of becoming an officer, but had swerved into journalism after being hired as the Chicago Tribune’s tennis correspondent on the French Riviera. He was converted to militant socialism in 1927 when he saw the brutality of the Paris police in dealing with marchers protesting at the frying of the Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair. He at once set up a first-aid station in the lobby of the Paris office of the Daily Mail. The Mail’s chief correspondent in Paris, who had just sent a telegram to the London paper declaring that the French capital was overrun by ‘Asiatic Jews’ making razor attacks on gendarmes, started yelling from a staircase about ‘Bolsheviks’ and kept shrieking ‘bastards’ at the wounded. ‘I decided that I would never buy the Mail again,’ recalled Jordan, ‘and it is one of the few good resolutions that I have ever kept.’6