Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

Skardon made a sweep of old cases. The extent of the espionage by Frederick Meredith and Major Wilfrid Vernon, who had been run by Ernst Weiss and HARRY II, had become clearer to MI5 after 1945. They gained Meredith’s cooperation, but did not approach Vernon, who was by then a Labour MP, so as not to embarrass Attlee’s socialist government: the Security Service was as chary of seeming to attack Labour politicians as it had been with Jack Hayes in 1929. This inhibition was released after Vernon’s defeat in the general election of October 1951. Skardon reread the files and prepared tactics before interviewing Vernon at his Beckenham house in February 1952.

  The interview began by Skardon telling the Major that the Security Service knew that he had worked for Moscow’s agents, Weiss and HARRY II, in association with Meredith. ‘VERNON was completely deflated,’ Skardon reported. ‘He had commenced the interview by taking a seat at his table and adopting something of an “elder statesman” pose. There was no doubt at all that he was completely shattered by the allegations I had made, and for a time was unable to orientate his thoughts.’ Skardon stressed that neither Weiss nor Meredith had been detained despite MI5’s knowledge of the conspiracy. ‘I asked him to assume from these facts that I was not there in an offensive or belligerent way, and told him that the authorities were not anxious to embark upon a prosecution. We desired to fill in gaps in our knowledge and since this particular conspiracy had existed undetected for three years, we were concerned to-day to find out as much about it as possible, simply so that we might arm ourselves against present enemies of the Service.’ Vernon temporized. He talked with anxious flummery about the Left Book Club, Chamberlain’s coquetting with Hitler and his duty to his country, but told Skardon nothing that he did not already know. ‘Over and over again he would bring himself to the point of telling me exactly what he had done in his illicit association with MEREDITH, WEISS and HARRY II, but would check himself before making the actual disclosures,’ Skardon reported. His overall assessment shows a generosity which one cannot imagine in an FBI or KGB interrogator. ‘VERNON is a straightforward and upright person according to the dictates of his own conscience,’ about which he was somewhat vain. ‘It is unlikely that he would be guilty of any petty meanness’: he was not a liar, and preferred evasive silence to deceit. He had almost the ‘simplicity’ of a Russian holy fool: ‘not particularly intelligent’; ‘he has probably been a pretty honest but not very brilliant Member of Parliament’.33

  Smolka was out of reach of interrogators. Tudor-Hart’s fearful disintegration was conclusive evidence of her guilt. The undertaking not to prosecute Meredith or Vernon – the preference to collect precise knowledge of their activities and connections rather than to put defunct spies in the dock – left the Major free to continue as a figure of ineffectual conscientiousness on Camberwell borough council. But as the next two chapters will show, that most destructive of maelstroms, a moral panic, had been gathering apace from the moment in June 1951 that the diplomats disappeared. The phrase ‘moral panic’ was not coined until 1972, when Stan Cohen used it in his sociological study of the Mods v. Rockers culture clashes. Cohen defined such a panic as occurring when an episode, an individual or group of people suddenly become defined as weakening society’s aims and values and as threatening prevailing statuses, interests, ideologies and values. The nature of the threat is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media so as to raise alarm and dread. Moral barricades are manned by editors, columnists, politicians, public moralists, accredited experts and unlicensed mischief-makers. When Burgess and Maclean vanished from the Falaise at Saint Malo, they started an inextinguishable moral panic about the arcane mysteries of the class system and the instabilities of sexuality. From this public consternation ensued the follies, abasements and fanaticism of their compatriots’ deepening obsession with spy rings. In 1951 the defecting diplomats launched a new national hobby of taunting and debasing government service. Their most enduring damage was just begun.34

  CHAPTER 17

  The Establishment

  Subversive rumours

  The inquest on the missing diplomats turned into a frontal attack on the governing cadre in Whitehall, on metropolitan elites, on trained expertise and on the Foreign Office in particular. The heavy guns used in this onslaught were the problems of social exclusion and class divisions. While teaching underground propaganda to SOE’s trainee saboteurs in 1940–1, Philby and Burgess had both studied the craft of spreading stories intended to arouse divisive suspicion among one’s opponents and to lower their morale. This chapter shows the successful deployment, after Burgess and Maclean had absconded, of injurious and subversive half-truths which destabilized the London government and are still reverberating more than sixty-five years later. The rhetoric against ‘the Establishment’ that overwhelmed Britain in 2016, and overturned its place in the world order, first began as a Moscow-serving refrain after the two diplomats had vanished behind the Iron Curtain.

  The Foreign Office had been a Marxist target since the 1920s. It typified and represented ‘the British ruling-class’, and was therefore inimical to the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Norman Ewer wrote in Labour Monthly in 1927. ‘Hard fact forbids peace between a caste determined to cling to its privileges and to its power of exploitation, and an aroused working class determined to abolish that privilege and to free itself from that exploitation.’ Maisky, as Ambassador in London, took a similar line in moments of party orthodoxy. Vansittart, he said, was ‘flesh of the flesh of the ruling class of Great Britain’ and hell-bent on ‘resisting the forces of historical progress’.1

  After September 1939, the Office was blamed by some for failing to avert war. When the Labour MP Hugh Dalton told Daily Herald readers that British diplomats were ‘tired and elderly, too traditional and too gentlemanly to be a match for Hitler’s gangsters’, no one asked if Dalton wanted a civil service that was the equal of the Nazis. The ‘Red Clydesider’ MP David Kirkwood denounced ‘the old school tie’ predominance in the Diplomatic Service and denied the benefits of having an elite of carefully chosen men. Morgan Price, Labour MP for a mining constituency, decried the Diplomatic Service as ‘a closed caste’ of privileged, out-of-touch idlers, and insisted that ‘there is a greater air of reality in the atmosphere of a Consulate than that of an Embassy’ as if commercial travellers, wayward tourists and stamped visas were more important in the world than bilateral negotiations, confidential talks, the sifting of opinion among traders, soldiers and newspaper prophets, the measurement of popular moods and movements, and official démenti. W. J. (‘Bill’) Brown, the trade unionist MP for Rugby, objected that staffing reforms introduced in 1943 assumed ‘a necessary connection between education and diplomatic ability’. These reforms, said Brown, were ‘undemocratic’ because they excluded non-university men: they failed to make ‘the Diplomatic Service safe for democracy’, but instead ensured that ‘the Diplomatic Service [stayed] safe for the old gang … safe for the boys of the governing class of this country’.2

  Sir Eric Phipps, Maclean’s former chief in the Paris embassy, posed the right question in this controversy: ‘Diplomatists are being accused of living too sheltered lives; but was it not rather the public that was allowed to live in a sheltered world of illusions while HM representatives abroad struggled with grim realities?’ The fatal errors of the 1930s had arisen from politicians pandering to an electorate with strong but uninformed views rather than giving corrective leadership. Without politicians who were trusted by voters when they told unwelcome truths, Phipps continued, ‘no great results will come from merely divesting the diplomat of his old school tie’. Self-seeking politicians who misrepresented the national interests to gullible or scared voters did more danger than the envoys and plenipotentiaries, patriots but not small-islander nationalists, murmuring cautions or delivering protests in the coulisses of power.3

  Burgess liked to report to Moscow that he was surrounded in the Office by Etonians, who wrapped him in tendrils of trust on the basis of
his OE tie; but his class analysis was stereotypically Marxist rather than accurate. Small independent schools in the smaller provincial cities gave the educational grounding of many of them. William Ridsdale, his chief in the News Department, had been educated at Sir Thomas Rich’s School, also known as the Blue Coat School, in Gloucester. Ridsdale’s deputy Norman Nash originated in Geelong, Australia. Another member of the department, William (‘Bertie’) Hesmondhalgh, had been a pupil at St Edward’s School in the Oxford suburb of Summertown. Burgess’s closest colleague in the Far Eastern Department, Frank (‘Tommy’) Tomlinson, had been educated at High Pavement School in Nottingham. What united such men was a dislike of closed systems and totalitarian states.

  The Foreign Office was no more of a closed caste than the Quai d’Orsay in Paris or equivalent ministries in European capitals. In 1949, for example, the Italian Ambassador to the Court of St James’s was Duca Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, the Portuguese Ambassador was the Duque de Palmela, the acting Spanish Ambassador was the Duque de Sanlúcar la Mayor, the Danish Ambassador was Count Eduard Reventlow, the Belgian Ambassador in London was Vicomte Alain Obert de Thieusies, and the Dutch Ambassador was Jonkheer Michiels van Verduynen. Baron Geoffroy Chodron de Courcel, French Ambassador in London during 1962–72, was the grandson of Baron Alphonse Chodron de Courcel, who had held the same post during the 1890s. Courcel’s successor in 1972 was Jacques Delarüe-Caron de Beaumarchais, descendant of the diplomat used by Louis XVI of France to supply munitions to the rebel colonialists in the American War of Independence. Patricians like Carel-Godfried (‘Pim’), Baron van Boetzelaer van Oosterhout, successively Dutch diplomatic representative in London, Ambassador in Washington and Minister of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, suggest that most western European countries found advantages in using adaptive survivors of anciens régimes to represent them internationally. Many organizations are strengthened by evolving an aristocratic cadre. ‘The carefully nurtured feeling of belonging to a nobility in the KGB’ was a source of strength, judged the East German Stasi’s spymaster Markus Wolf.4

  The Burgess and Maclean scandal broke at a time when England’s traditional ruling classes were experiencing unprecedented domestic misfortune. Sir Alexander Cadogan had been brought up on a Suffolk estate, Culford, with 400 acres of parkland amid an additional 11,000 acres: his father, who also owned Chelsea House in London, had enlarged Culford to contain fifty-one bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms and eleven reception rooms; there was indoor and outdoor staff in abundance. Cadogan’s diaries, which during his five years as British representative at the United Nations Security Council in New York had chronicled the va et vient, poste et riposte of world statesmanship, degenerated after his return to London in 1951 into a lament about workshy cleaners, a ‘Swiss slut cook … on the verge of a nervous breakdown’, ‘a lazy liar’ of a housemaid, ‘the useless old daily hag’, forty-five-minute queues to buy groceries, and a brand new Rootes motor-car that kept breaking down. For the first time in his life Cadogan lacked a reliable supply of clean shirts, attempted housework and made breakfasts for himself and his wife. ‘These domestic crises are really a curse,’ he noted in 1951. ‘I don’t know what will happen to civilisation if all educated people are condemned to spend the whole of their time in domestic chores.’ Similarly when Harold Macmillan and his wife went on a summer holiday in Scotland in 1953, visiting aristocratic in-laws and cousins, they found Cabinet ministers’ wives cooking for their own dinner parties. The Macmillans stayed in hotels so as to avoid ‘putting too much strain on them. One can only stay nowadays in the few remaining houses of the very rich.’ It is easy to overlook the sapping of energy and confidence that these social changes brought on England, a depletion that persisted until the 1980s. Before leaving for Whitehall each morning, senior officials had, in Zola’s phrase, to swallow their daily toad of failure and disgust.5

  Lord Inverchapel, while Ambassador in Moscow, had described British journalists as ‘obscure people without honour in their own country’. During the 1950s, particularly after the advent of commercial television in 1955, sales of mass-circulation newspapers fell, and advertising revenues followed. Editors and proprietors felt commercial pressure to grab attention. They hoped to profit by belittling their targets. Stories became more aggressive, more irresponsible, more unforgiving, more careless of accuracy and more unfair to individuals. Privileges were attacked, but also weakness. ‘The humblest and poorest names in the land often feel the scourge of the whip of the gutter press,’ as Randolph Churchill noted in 1958. If a plumber’s daughter in Balham killed herself, or a Birmingham carpenter’s wife was raped, their homes were besieged by a horde of reporters trying to bully or bribe the family into providing ‘human-interest stories’, and faced a battery of photographers, who did not scruple to set ladders against walls and snap pictures through upstairs windows. Fleet Street exploited the squalid recesses of tragic stories, and fought reader apathy by conjuring outbursts of rabid hostility.6

  The Foreign Office was believed by Fleet Street to be stonewalling. It would neither confirm nor deny major leads or irrelevant titbits obtained by reporters. There was a sound but unavowable reason and strong prompting for these sealed lips: Maclean had been identified and put under surveillance entirely because of the ultra-secret VENONA decrypts (known in the Office as BRIDE). ‘It is most important to conceal from the Russians our knowledge of Bride material,’ was Milo Talbot de Malahide’s summary in 1953. ‘This is really an MI5 point, but we have felt bound to accept it and our policy of silence is built upon it.’ If the Russians knew that London was extracting material from their encrypted wireless traffic of the mid-1940s, ‘they could take defensive action, which would probably ruin any chance we still have of making use of the knowledge we obtain this way’. In reality, both Philby and Soviet agents in the United States had given early alerts to Moscow of the ongoing decryptions, but this betrayal was not known in London for many years. It was to protect the intelligence advantage bestowed by VENONA, as Talbot de Malahide explained, that the Office concealed the fact that Maclean had been under investigation before he disappeared. ‘I know that MI5 attach very great importance to our doing so.’7

  The existence of SIS was not officially admitted until the Intelligence Services Act of 1994, and much of its activities were subject to the D-notice security system and could not be reported. The Foreign Office was therefore a massive, visible target for snipers, while SIS was not. The obscure people without honour, in Inverchapel’s formulation, who ran Beaverbrook’s newspapers led the way in maligning the Office. Nancy Mitford, in her novel about the Paris embassy, fictionalized the Daily Express as a rag ‘once considered suitable for schoolroom reading’ called the Daily Post, which ‘fed on scandal, grief and all forms of human misery, exposing them with a sort of spiteful glee which the public evidently relished, since the more cruelly the Daily Post tortured its victims the higher its circulation rose. Its policy, if it could be said to have one, was to be against foreign countries, cultural bodies and … above all it abominated the Foreign Office.’8

  Rebecca West wrote in 1954 to Charles Curran, a journalist who had worked on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard: ‘more and more do I feel that the Old Man is under the influence of someone who presses the Communist line on him’. West, who had been Beaverbrook’s mistress, thought ‘few people realize quite how stupid the Old Man is about anything and everything except making money’. He could master a balance sheet in a trice, but was easily duped on other matters. His anti-German obsession, ‘mania about Burgess and Maclean’ and ‘passionate desire to go on hounding the F.O. about them’ suited Soviet purposes.9

  In her complaint to Curran, West mentioned Sefton (‘Tom’) Delmer, the Daily Express chief foreign reporter. Delmer had been a correspondent in Berlin during the Weimar and Hitler years. In 1939 he made a failed attempt to join MI5, found work in the BBC, and then ran SOE’s subversive political warfare section spreading destructive rumours and false stories in war propagan
da directed against Nazi Germany. Delmer showed ruthless hostility to those surviving leaders of the German Social Democratic party who were exiled in wartime London and were anathema to Moscow. He had projected a clandestine European Revolutionary Radio Station, which was to beam messages of revolutionary socialism at the German proletariat, but emasculated his scheme once German democratic socialists offered to help. He prevented them from broadcasting under their own names, and gave Moscow a monopoly of effective broadcasts to German workers. He seemed almost to discourage the German internal opposition to Hitler. Views of him were mixed. The German writer and broadcaster Karl Otten despised him as a cynic who mocked ideals, a coward who toadied to bullies, and a hoaxer who cared for snappy headlines rather than truth; but Peter Ramsbotham, a wartime intelligence officer and future Ambassador in Washington, who was usually a sound judge, trusted him. Of Delmer’s two closest collaborators in PWE, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who had been a crucial source of German diplomatic secrets to SIS in 1935–9, became a British subject in 1948, but defected to Soviet bloc Germany in 1952. Delmer’s other nearest coadjutor, Otto John, was inveigled into East Berlin in 1954, where his detention enabled the Russians to spread propaganda that he had defected too. Despite the self-promotion of his memoirs, Delmer failed on many fronts to make hard-hitting subversive propaganda. To his many enemies, this sinister, self-important, selectively ingratiating man seemed to act as if to please Moscow.10

  The Truman administration in the USA had in 1950 urged that West Germany should be permitted to rearm so as to help meet the increasing threat to Europe from the Soviet Union and its satellite states. This resulted in the signature in 1952 of a treaty whereby West Germany, Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands agreed to form the European Defence Community (EDC) in parallel with the nascent European Economic Community. This plan foundered in 1954, when it was rejected by French legislators – some of whom dismissed it in accordance with Moscow’s line, some of whom feared German remilitarization and some of whom held out for British participation in the EDC. This impediment to the formation of the EDC led to West Germany’s admission into NATO in 1955. Communist parties in Europe, nationalists and xenophobes in Britain and notably the Beaverbrook newspapers opposed German membership of both the EDC and NATO. Scare stories, for Delmer and his Express colleagues, were what their contemporary black-market spivs called nice little earners.