On 22 September Henry Fairlie published an article in the Spectator attacking ‘the pattern of social relationships which so powerfully controls the exercise of power in this country’ – which he called ‘the Establishment’. Although the left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor and the young diplomat Hugh Thomas had both previously used this phrase, it was Fairlie’s article that popularized it. He specified that he was considering the exercise of power in England – Scotland and Wales were different cases – and that the Foreign Office stood at the centre of ‘the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’. The Office’s traditions ensured that ‘members of the Foreign Service will be men (and the Foreign Service is one of the bastions of masculine English society) who, to use a phrase which has been used a lot in the past few days, “know all the right people”’. All journalists interested in the Burgess–Maclean affair resented ‘the subtle but powerful pressures which were brought to bear by those who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men’. Fairlie indicted the two Astor newspapers as the leading practitioners of the ‘Establishment’ suppression. The Times – owned by Lord Astor of Hever – allowed only three references to Burgess–Maclean throughout 1951. There were hardly more (under the editorship of David Astor) in the Observer.25
On 25 September there was another development: Burgess and Maclean were discussed on British television for the first time. Until 1957 there was a universal ban on any matters that were to be discussed in parliament within the next fortnight being examined on radio or television, but as parliament was not then sitting the maverick Conservative MP Sir Robert Boothby, the left-wing Labour MP Michael Foot, the trade unionist ex-MP W. J. (‘Bill’) Brown and A. J. P. Taylor discussed the missing spies for the first time openly. Foot dismissed Petrov as ‘a renegade’ whose information was ‘not worth the paper it was written on’. Boothby and Brown called for tightened security procedures. Taylor volunteered that he had met Maclean in 1950, thought him a dipsomaniac, and claimed ‘it stuck out a mile’ that he was a Soviet agent. He said that it was ‘crazy’ to introduce witch-hunt procedures ‘just because some chap in Australia has said all this’. As a diplomatic historian he denied that the Foreign Office held any secrets worth having: ‘It is a gigantic build-up for leaders of the aristocracy, so that they can go all over Europe and people will call them “Your Excellency”.’ The four members of the panel began shouting interruptions at one another, and the discussion was terminated. Shortly afterwards Taylor was recruited as a highly paid Beaverbrook columnist, and began his career there by denouncing in vile terms the imminent state visit by the President of West Germany (who had spent the war years hiding for his life from the Nazis).26
Every more obnoxious than Taylor was George Brown. In the early 1950s Evelyn Shuckburgh, private secretary at the Office to Morrison and Eden, gave a small party in London to introduce FO officials to younger Labour MPs. Brown took the opportunity to tell the diplomatists that both the Office and overseas embassies were redundant: individual ministries in Whitehall should each deal directly with the corresponding ministries in foreign capitals; he pooh-poohed warnings that this would create chaos. As a Labour frontbencher, he continued to take pride in being disruptive and unpleasant. ‘This is the jet age. The era of moving damn fast,’ Brown declared in a Sunday Pictorial onslaught on 25 September headlined ‘FO Flops: Spies Are Not the Only Trouble’. Diplomats, Brown said, were ‘cynical, long-haired young gentlemen toddling from one cocktail party to another, never meeting ordinary people, and proclaiming a belief in nothing at all’. It is odd that he thought cynicism and scepticism were undesirable traits in diplomacy: did he prefer naivety and credulity? Brown was frustrated by his experience of a Buenos Aires embassy dinner in 1954. ‘Every attempt I made to discuss Argentina and British prospects there was met with levity’ (possibly because he was drunk). ‘The final curtain was pretty fine disorder, as I lost my temper and displayed how unsuitable I would be for the appointment to the cynical, ineffectual, prattling body we call our diplomatic service.’27
The mood for guillotining aristocrats was abroad. Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express was memorably described by the historian E. P. Thompson as ‘a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, Sea Lords, Permanent Under-Secretaries, Lord George-Brown, Lord Wigg stand patiently leaking in the public interest’. Adapting his metaphor, Thompson presented Pincher’s prolific journalism and sensationalist books as ‘excreta’ of secrets sometimes ‘still warm from the bowels of the State’. Pincher was ‘too self-important’ to notice how often he was manipulated by his sources, Thompson said, always saw himself in virile posture and used manly phrases about his deep penetration of departments. During a convivial lunch in September 1955 with the admiral in charge of the government’s D-notice press censorship apparatus, Pincher mentioned that although he had originally been tipped off that Philby was the abettor of the missing diplomats, his newspaper no longer suspected Philby. Pincher, who was abstinent but never stinted on another bottle for his guests, had heard from a former Tory MP that Lord Talbot de Malahide had ‘tipped the wink to BURGESS to tell MACLEAN to clear out’. Talbot had the attraction as a scapegoat for the Beaverbrook press of being a bachelor, a nobleman with an effete title, and a Cambridge graduate.28
Parliamentary democracy was tawdry in its handling of the Cambridge spies post-mortem. Blunt, Burgess and Philby had got their government jobs, and done their worst work, when the country was being ruled by a Tory–Labour–Liberal coalition government. No party was exempt from indirect responsibility. Yet when Burgess and Maclean disappeared in 1951 under a Labour government, Tory frontbenchers such as Duncan Sandys and backbenchers such as Waldron Smithers led a partisan attack. During the parliamentary exchanges about Philby in 1955, when the Tories were in power, Labour spokesmen exploited their chances without scruple. At no stage did any politician state that the Cambridge spies were relics of the special conditions and relaxed security of 1941–5, when the Soviet Union and British Empire were allied against Germany and Japan.
Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had spent so many years as Churchill’s Foreign Secretary, and the current Foreign Secretary, Macmillan, were shaken by the Petrov publicity: to visitors arriving at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country home, Clarissa Eden stage-whispered a warning, ‘Don’t mention Burgess or Maclean.’ It was ‘a terribly shaming story’, Macmillan noted privately. ‘The gutter press (esp. Mirror and Sketch) have violent attacks on me today,’ he noted on 19 September 1955. He minded this personal abuse less than ‘the disgraceful interview’ given by Herbert Morrison, Foreign Secretary when Burgess and Maclean deserted, to the Daily Herald. ‘He has the impudence to say that when he was Foreign Minister (and the worst in history, except perhaps John Simon) he had a poor opinion of the Office.’29
Morrison was an envious, grudge-ridden egotist who objected to intellect. He was devoid of self-insight: when appointed Home Secretary in 1940, and asked by Sir Alexander Maxwell if there was anything that he particularly wished to learn about his new department’s responsibilities, he affirmed that he would like to watch a woman being hanged for murder. Morrison’s memoirs published in 1960 disavowed any wish for power or fame, but made clear that he felt cheated out of his right to succeed Attlee as leader of the Labour party. He attributed this mortification to his exclusion from ‘the close-knit coterie of cocktail parties’ in affluent homes ‘and similar social delights so beloved of the intellectuals’. His antipathy to the Foreign Office was undisguised. ‘High officials are prone to address one another by Christian name in the presence of their Minister,’ which he thought deplorable. ‘This easy-going familiarity … exists among all ranks, and crosses the usual barriers between seniors and juniors. Even Secretaries of State have been known to address Foreign Office civil servants by their Christian names.’ Burgess, he wrote, was ‘an intelligent and rather bumptious young man – a typical young career dipl
omat’.30
Macmillan resented Fleet Street’s irresponsible approach to the tricky balance of national security and civil liberty. ‘Almost all of the accusations of the Press against the laxity of the authorities are really demands for changing English Common Law,’ he noted on 19 October. Newspaper editors and proprietors seemed to want to empower the government to arrest individuals without legal evidence, to suspend habeas corpus and to fire civil servants on the basis of their rumoured beliefs. Such procedures would have been arbitrary and unjust, although for sure the resultant outcry would have sold newspapers. It was against this background that Eden and Macmillan agreed to publish a white paper on the missing diplomats. This was drafted by Graham Mitchell of MI5, who worked under awkward constraints. Many of the most crucial facts were highly classified and could not be printed. Mitchell could not state that Maclean had been under investigation for months because of the ultra-secret VENONA deciphering, and therefore suggested that he had only come under suspicion shortly before he vanished. The white paper did not admit that Maclean had spotted the surveillance team, and understandably but ineffectually tried to minimize the importance of the official secrets that had been betrayed. The government was keen to reduce a raging tempest to the level of a local gusty squall: false accusations, innuendo, character assassination and McCarthy-style witch-hunts were to be discouraged. Unfortunately, the white paper was so opaque and bland that it intensified suspicions of a cover-up and provoked more questions.31
One needs to remember that the cult of official secrecy demanded stifling loyalty from its votaries. When the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd mentioned the wartime Special Operations Executive in the Commons in 1956, he described SOE as a body supplying wartime propaganda to neutral countries. When in 1966 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, asked the Director General of MI5, Sir Martin Furnival Jones, for an information summary on the KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn @ KAGO and for cognate material on the Cambridge ring of five, Furnival Jones asked that Jenkins did not share the secrets in his report with the Prime Minister, Wilson. The Dictionary of National Biography account of Alan Turing, which was published in 1971, limited itself to an obscure half-sentence which did not mention Bletchley or code-breaking: all that was permissible to say was that Turing’s Cambridge research was interrupted during the war, when he worked for the Foreign Office’s Communications Department.
In this publicity crisis Macmillan agreed that Philby should be reinterviewed by his ex-colleagues at SIS. The MI5 representative and transcribers who attended the three interrogations on 7, 10 and 11 October recorded on file that Philby was never pressed hard: indeed one of the SIS officers repeatedly fed him pat answers to awkward questions. To White’s incredulity, and J. Edgar Hoover’s fury, SIS concluded by exonerating Philby. The upshot was that the FBI leaked stories to Sunday newspapers in New York naming Philby as ‘the Third Man’. These were published on 25 October 1955.
Marcus Lipton, a Labour MP who was a catspaw of Fleet Street newspapers, asked Eden in parliament whether the government was determined ‘to cover up at all costs the dubious Third Man activities of Mr Harold Philby’. Macmillan as Foreign Secretary gave a formal answer on 7 November, after consulting Dick Brooman-White, a Tory MP who had served in SIS alongside Philby and was close to Nicholas Elliott and Philby’s other SIS defenders. Macmillan admitted that ‘Mr Philby had communist associates during and after his university days,’ but said with technical accuracy but disingenuously that there was no evidence that he had forewarned Burgess and Maclean. ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called “third man”, if indeed there is one.’ Macmillan had little choice other than to exonerate Philby in the Commons: there was no evidence on which to convict him, and it seemed wrong to make, under protection of parliamentary privilege, an unsubstantiated accusation in the House of Commons which he did not dare to repeat outside the Commons for fear of a defamation action. This public exoneration infuriated the CIA, which was convinced of Philby’s guilt.
The Commons had a full debate on the missing spies on 7 November. There were no momentous revelations, but some significant premonitory signs of the mounting attack on Whitehall. The Oxford don turned Labour MP Richard Crossman made a notable onslaught. Back in 1945, when Herbert Hart had returned from MI5 to an Oxford fellowship at New College, Crossman had jeered at him, ‘Still worrying about the truth, I suppose.’ Hart retorted: ‘I’m sure you’re not.’ Denying Crossman a ministerial appointment, Attlee had said: ‘Nothing to do with your ability, Dick; strictly character.’ The Cambridge fellow-traveller turned Tory MP Charles Fletcher-Cooke had described Crossman in 1952 as ‘the biggest draw’ among Labour backbench speakers in the Commons. ‘Can it be because the House likes to be bullied?’ Fletcher-Cooke wondered, ‘for he is the School Bully in excelsis’. Crossman was a ruthless propagandist who would say anything for the main chance. He was to congratulate himself in 1963 on having spent twelve years, ‘since the Burgess and Maclean episode, exposing the effects on the British ruling class of this deep inner laxity which is constantly mistaken for genuine freedom and tolerance’.32
As a Daily Mirror columnist Crossman had recently suggested that there had been ‘a deliberate attempt to cover up the criminal activities of two young men who went to the right schools and knew far too many of the right people’. In the Commons, two months later, his language was more circumspect.
Maclean belonged to the élite of the élite; he was one of the inner group of really gifted men, one of the half-dozen stars for top promotion; an intimate friend, a confidant, a man who spent long evenings with half-a-dozen people who are now in key positions. I am not blaming anyone. I am only saying that if a man has been desperately misjudged, if risks are taken for him – and, of course, risks were taken for Maclean; if a risk is taken and it does not come off, then certain people are not very anxious to have the extent of the risk they took on his behalf exposed.
As to Burgess, ‘pushing his way up by means of somewhat unsavoury personal connections’, his case showed the Office’s toleration of eccentricity as ‘curious perverted liberalism’. Crossman decried the Office’s privileged character and assumptions of infallibility. ‘The Foreign Office was too high and mighty. It was infra dig for the Foreign Office to abide by the common laws of security.’ The real problem of the Office was not security, said Crossman, but the selectiveness of its recruits. The wartime recruitment reforms which had tried to draw ‘boys from lesser grammar schools’ and thus reduce the preponderance of major public schools had not brought democratization, because grammar school boys were often careerist toadies or social chameleons: ‘a person who comes up from below and enters the Foreign Office, with its august position, in order to obtain the protective colouring required, becomes more Foreign Office than the rest’. Crossman’s experience of visiting embassies had convinced him that ‘the man from the smaller grammar school is even more Foreign Office than those who came from the kind of school from which I come’.33
Herbert Morrison, who had been Foreign Secretary when Burgess and Maclean fled, also intervened in the Commons debate: ‘There have been some working-class cases [of espionage], but the funny thing about the middle and upper classes, the well-to-do class, is that if they go wrong in this fashion they are, if anything, worse than other people.’ Morrison was mistrustful of the effects of higher education: ‘I never studied at a university. I am a product of the elementary schools, and I am not ashamed of the fact. All sorts of things happen at the universities. Abnormal ideas are evolved.’ He doubted if it was necessary or beneficial for the higher reaches of Whitehall, including the Foreign Office, to be peopled by ‘largely university men’.34
On 8 November, the day after the debate, in his alcoholic mother’s flat in Kensington, Philby gave a press conference to American and English newspaper and newsreel reporters. The film of this question-and-answer session is available on YouTube. Philby
could not look more devious, smirking or unbelievable: he is the picture of a cornered liar; and yet his handler Modin, his SIS supporters and many commentators somehow find his curt denials sincere and effective. Even within MI5 the guilt of PEACH felt less sure.
Three weeks later Ronnie Reed circulated an MI5 discussion paper entitled ‘The Disappearance of Burgess and Maclean’. He recalled that in May 1951, although the Security Service had considered that Maclean might try to leave England if he was alerted to its suspicions, no one thought this was likely, especially in the light of observation reports. ‘None of us believed for one moment that Guy BURGESS would act as a prime mover in the escape.’ During the shock of June 1951 it was agreed that Maclean and/or Burgess had been tipped off by someone privy to the investigation, and that Philby’s evasions made him the natural suspect. But after the parliamentary debate and Philby’s press conference, Reed thought it was time to re-examine settled assumptions about the tip-off. He listed five FO men who might have learnt that the security services were investigating Maclean and warned him: Ridsdale (‘a high priority’), Lord Talbot de Malahide (‘a close second’), Sir Michael Wright (then Ambassador in Iraq), George Middleton (the former head of the FO Personnel Department) and Nicholas Henderson. Reed recommended that they should be reinterviewed.35
After Christmas, on 29 December, Courtenay Young amplified: ‘we have been perhaps turning and re-turning the PEACH stone, without pushing far enough down the various avenues available both in the Foreign Service, as regards a possible tip-off, or our own Service’. He recommended that Blunt should be reinterviewed ‘fairly toughly’ as ‘the conscious source of the wartime leakage from the Security Service’. Young summarized the case against Blunt: ‘He has been left fairly untouched since the early days of the enquiry, when for a variety of obvious reasons it was necessary to handle him, as indeed the whole enquiry, with kid gloves. If he is guilty, he should now have lulled himself into a state of comparative calm. He has hardly been contacted by the Office since 1951; various debates on B. and M. have left him unscathed; the various articles and books on the subject have also treated him with the utmost decorum.’ A tough interview might jolt his self-control. Three fears must haunt him, Young suggested: ‘the first, his guilt as a spy, if he is one; secondly his left-wing background before the war; and thirdly his private life. Any one of these, or any combination of these three, could, were they ever made public, ruin him. I am not, of course, suggesting that this proves a blackmail motive in the interrogation, but if the matter is put to him plainly and bluntly, it might show him that he is in a bigger pickle than he thought.’36
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