Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  On 29 June Sir William Strang, PUS of the FO, asked Sir Alexander Cadogan to chair an inquiry into the Diplomatic Service’s security checks on staff: the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Normanbrook, and the retired Ambassador Sir Nevile Bland were the two other members of the committee. Cadogan would arrive less than a minute before the due time, and start organizing his papers for the meeting. Brook would hustle in a couple of minutes late with his papers neatly arranged in a folder. ‘Ah, there you are, Norman,’ Cadogan would say, as if they had been waiting for a long time. He enjoyed teasing Brook, whom he thought a zealot, and liked to pretend to miss the point of what Brook was saying. Andrew Boyle, in The Climate of Treason, stated that the committee was chaired by Brook and thought Cadogan was a peer. He aspersed it as part of ‘the Whitehall “Club”’ and as sitting as ‘judge and jury in its own cause’. This suggests partiality in the committee’s work and inadequacy in their findings: neither charge is justified.12

  Because Cadogan’s remit specified the Diplomatic Service, he did not seek evidence from other Whitehall ministries or from the Civil Service Commission. Over the course of thirteen meetings, Cadogan, Bland and Brook heard evidence from six members of the Office: the PUS, Strang; the Deputy Under Secretary, Ashley Clarke; the intelligence expert Patrick Reilly; Carey-Foster of Security; Roderick Barclay, former head of the Personnel Department; and his successor Robin Hooper. Four external officials were seen: John Winnifrith, the Treasury official who had been involved in the extension of positive vetting; Menzies of SIS; White of MI5; and Sir Ronald Howe, who was Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. The Cadogan report confirmed the policy of positive vetting, which had been instituted before Burgess and Maclean disappeared, but which, through manpower shortages, had not yet been applied to them. Its conclusions were calm and serviceable: if their lack of razzamatazz displeased men like Boyle and Chapman Pincher, it was apt for the circumstances.

  The most notable part of the Cadogan deliberations concerned a memorandum submitted by the Office on the subject of homosexuality in the Diplomatic Service. It was based on the certainty that Burgess had been homosexual, and on the dubious assumption that Maclean had been bisexual, although there is no available evidence of the latter having male sexual partners after he left Cambridge. Maclean, it seems, was being lumped together with Burgess in this respect for tidiness’s sake. Rather as happened in the trials of Glading, Nunn May and Fuchs, an explanatory narrative was being devised that seemed coherent and convincing, although in truth it was unsupported by evidence and probably untrue. This FO memorandum has not been fully quoted before, although its consequences were far reaching. Its preliminaries were fair and sound:

  Homosexual and heterosexual tendencies are present to a varying extent in all human beings. There is no hard and fast dividing line between normality and abnormality. Many people indulge in homosexual practices in adolescence who subsequently lead an entirely normal sexual life. Some authorities indeed would say that it was unsafe to diagnose permanent inversion in an individual until the age of 25. All that can be said is that an individual is abnormal when homosexual tendencies predominate … The propensity to homosexuality is innate. In cases of ‘true inversion’ there is nothing that the individual, the doctor or the psychiatrist can do to remove it. Marriage affords no guarantee that the homosexual will not relapse into his old ways. The individual can curb or sublimate his tendencies; but the attempt to do so inevitably sets up stresses and involves problems which are not those of the ordinary run of mankind … So far, very little evidence has come to light that homosexuality has caused disloyalty, though there may be some connection between the homosexual and the other aspects of the Maclean–Burgess case.

  This summary was followed by some negative riders. A homosexual man was ‘subject to greater psychological stresses than the normal individual, even if he sublimates or restrains his natural inclinations. Restraint may add to the psychological tension.’ Moreover, ‘abnormality in one direction is often symptomatic of instability in others; and it may be that homosexuals have a greater tendency to extreme and unbalanced political views than normal persons. Their feeling that they are different from others may lead to a feeling of rejection by society, and give them a grudge against it.’ The Office posited ‘a solidarity between homosexuals which may in certain circumstances override other loyalties’. Certainly this type of man was potentially ‘open to blackmail’ and to pressure by hostile intelligence agents.

  Then the Office reached the crunch. ‘By far the most important problem is that of the United States. American public opinion is strongly anti-homosexual: the American security authorities are convinced that homosexuals are a security risk; and the State Department are peculiarly sensitive to the charges that are sometimes levelled against them that the U.S. Foreign Service is a refuge for expatriates and perverts.’ As the State Department was determined to purge itself of homosexuals, ‘the relationship of mutual trust and confidence between ourselves and the State Department may be endangered if they get the impression that we are ignoring the problem’. Chiefly in order to satisfy the Americans, the Office concluded that ‘our policy should aim at eliminating homosexuals from the Foreign Service’. Already, in a circular letter sent to all heads of missions by the PUS, Strang, on 10 July, ‘sexual abnormality’ had been described as a ‘danger signal’. Henceforth heads of overseas missions or of Foreign Office departments should report ‘whenever they have genuine reasons to suspect that a member of their staff is so afflicted’. The Office in its evidence to Cadogan nevertheless disavowed McCarthy-style methods. ‘Anything in the nature of a witch-hunt would not only be repugnant to our traditions but, by breeding an atmosphere of delation [denunciation] and distrust, would seriously affect the morale of the Service.’13

  The Cadogan report, dated 1 November, tempered the departmental advice to exclude male homosexuals. It recommended a policy of surveillance, with leeway for personal discretion and the judging of cases on individual merits. ‘We are now living in a state of international tension when a deliberate and skilfully directed attack is being made upon the minds and loyalties of our people and in particular of public officials and those handling highly confidential matters,’ Cadogan’s committee reported. It therefore recommended that ‘any member of the Foreign Service who is suspected of indulging homosexual tendencies should be carefully watched, even though his conduct has not occasioned any public scandal, and that his appointment within the service should take account of this risk’. The employment of such men should not be ‘a matter for hard and fast rules: we think it preferable to leave it to the discretion of those responsible for the reputation and efficiency of the Service’. Colleagues needed to treat one another with trust and respect. ‘It would be distasteful to encourage the notion that it is the duty of every member of the Service to watch the behaviour of his colleagues and, in school parlance, to “blab” about them to the “Head”. Spying and delation would be contrary to all the traditions of the Service and would gravely jeopardise its morale and efficiency.’14

  The question of blackmail was irrelevant in the case of Burgess. He was a man who, as it were, faced the world with his flies undone. As Valentine Vivian of SIS had noted in 1950, he was too open about his habits to need to hush anyone into keeping them secret. Similarly, a Balkans expert who had joined SIS’s Section D under Burgess’s sponsorship doubted that someone so ‘blatant’ would be vulnerable to blackmail. Yet there was a big prohibitive jump in the years after the Cadogan report. Milo Talbot de Malahide was appointed as Carey-Foster’s successor as the Office’s head of security in July 1953, but was prematurely retired from that post in January 1954 – probably because of American suspicions of his elegant bachelorhood. It took nine months to find him a new post, as Envoy Extraordinary in the Laotian capital, Vientiane; but despite the face-saving sop of promotion to the rank of ambassador there, he was marked en disponibilité on the Foreign Office
list in August 1956. The likely reason for this early end to an interesting career is implicit in a statement by the Marquess of Reading, Foreign Office spokesman in the House of Lords, in 1955. Burgess had been ‘addicted’ to ‘homosexual practices’, declared Reading, and a lesson had been learnt in the Office: ‘anybody who is thought to be disposed to homosexual practices is thereby laying himself open to blackmail to an extent which makes him an unacceptable security risk’. Reading did not mention Maclean in this context.15

  Whitehall, which was already committed to introducing positive vetting, was thus set by the Cadogan committee on a policy of a calm compromise. The Americans were to be placated, but Office systems were to be flexible and porous rather than rigid and impermeable. Whitehall disclaimed any wish for Gestapo methods or McCarthy-style loyalty purges. They had not reckoned, however, with the moral panic and vindictive cruelty of a free press. The practice of positive vetting, as it developed in the second half of the century, grew increasingly severe: apparently intensifying after the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967. In particular, higher levels of security clearance were withheld.

  Like many of his colleagues, Robert Cecil did not submit to the indiscriminate new sexual regime, but preferred to use his own judgement. After his appointment as Consul General in Hanover in 1955, he noticed that a colleague who had previously been en poste there was continuing to visit the city at intervals and to be seen in the company of a pretty, blonde German telephone operator who worked in the British mission. When he teased the girl about her admirer, she replied, ‘Oh, it’s not me he comes to see! It’s my young brother.’ Although the Englishman, who held an important post at a contact-point between western Europe and the Soviet bloc, would have been ‘a valuable scalp for the KGB’, Cecil thought him too level-headed to submit to blackmail and decided that he was therefore not a security risk. Cecil was glad that he took no action on his discovery, for the Englishman prospered in his career and eventually reached the rank of ambassador. Civilization rests on mutual trust.16

  ‘Friends in high places’

  Newspapers and Washington officials incited one another in voicing alarm at sexually based national insecurity. In August 1952, for example, Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express told John Cimperman of the FBI that his newspaper held letters from Burgess identifying homosexuals in the Foreign Office. If it did, these may have been forgeries, for it was known that the Beaverbrook press paid well for anything that might be represented as a new lead. Cimperman hastened to MI5, where he asked if there was evidence of serving diplomats having been sexual partners of Burgess. ‘I am afraid’, A. F. Burbidge noted, ‘I was extremely non-committal to Cimperman throughout the interview.’ (The FBI’s inquisition against same-sex heretics was made demented by the fact that its Torquemada, J. Edgar Hoover, was a ferocious closet-case himself.)17

  In England in 1938 there had been 134 prosecutions for sodomy, 822 for attempted sodomy and 320 for gross indecency – a low rate reflecting juries’ reluctance to convict on such charges. In 1952, after the Burgess and Maclean publicity, these figures stood at 670, 3,087 and 1,686 respectively. The following year a police commander from Scotland Yard was sent for three months to the USA to learn FBI techniques for purging government departments of male homosexuals. There then followed the notorious trials of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. During the August bank holiday weekend of 1953 a camera was stolen from his bathing hut on the Solent. When he complained to the police, the thief countered that he had been sexually assaulted by Montagu. The young peer’s adamant denial was discounted by the police. ‘While the Director of Public Prosecutions was dithering about whether or not to bring his case, his mind was made up for him’, recalled Montagu, ‘by a threat of exposure from the Beaverbrook press. I was always led to believe that this came from the top – from Lord Beaverbrook himself.’ While Montagu was taking refuge in Paris, two men visited his hotel and offered to arrange for him to take the same route to Russia as Burgess and Maclean. He reported this overture to MI5, although he suspected that it was an attempted Fleet Street entrapment. His first prosecution at Winchester Assizes on charges of committing an unnatural offence and indecent assault was discredited when it became clear that the police had tampered with the evidence.18

  In January 1954 the DPP launched a new prosecution on different charges. ‘I see the police are determined to have Lord Montagu!’ Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote. ‘They are obviously piqued by their failure at Winchester. I suppose a new ripple of apprehension is now running through the upper-class Homintern.’ In the second case, Montagu had two co-defendants, a Dorset landowner named Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood of the Daily Mail. As a diplomatic correspondent Wildeblood was treated as a security risk, and had his telephone tapped: a ‘routine watch’ was reportedly kept on his line until 1957. The principal prosecution witnesses were two RAF conscripts, Edward McNally and John Reynolds – described by prosecuting counsel as ‘perverts’ who ‘cheerfully accepted corruption’ and committed ‘unnatural offences … under the seductive influence of lavish hospitality’. McNally’s evidence was especially vague, but he had been schooled to repeat one solid affirmation whenever he became confused. ‘Mr Wildeblood committed an offence against me,’ he insisted, with wooden-top phraseology that showed his police coaching clearly enough. Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were convicted and imprisoned.19

  The Admiralty issued new Fleet Orders in 1954 stressing ‘the horrible nature of unnatural vice’ and instructing naval officers ‘to stamp out the evil’. In grotesquely specific detail, officers were told how to inspect sailors’ underwear for seminal or faecal stains, and jars of Vaseline or Brylcreem for pubic hairs. Fearing that these new initiatives would be a cause for mirth, the Admiralty ordered officers to enlist ‘the help of the steadier and more reliable men on the Lower Deck’ to quell the deplorable tendency ‘to treat these matters with levity’. The War Office, frightened of the ‘essentially secret nature’ of male homosexuality and apprehensive of ‘contamination by civilian sources’, introduced new regulations. The Air Ministry, however, were sure that because aircrews were all ‘selected individuals with a paramount interest in flying’, they were immune to ‘corrupting influence’, and that male homosexuality was ‘almost entirely confined to ground trades’.20

  Vansittart’s loathing of male homosexuality drove him to make a vehement speech in a House of Lords debate in May 1954. He referred to Burgess and Maclean without naming them:

  on the day when the news broke, I met a man – healthy-minded, all fresh air and exercise, and happily married – who said to me that by an extraordinary coincidence he happened to know all about one of those involved, and he poured out a horrified tale. When he had finished, I said, ‘But did you also suspect that there was any question of disloyalty?’ And this was his answer, which I think it would pay us all to ponder. He was immediately smitten with the prevalent modern fear of going too far and said, ‘Oh, no, no, no! I did not suspect anything of that kind. None of us did. We knew about the drink. We thought there was something else. But otherwise he seemed a decent enough fellow.’ I think the ‘otherwise’ contains a tremendous lot of history. ‘Otherwise this’ and ‘otherwise that’ – half of it comes from the fear of seeming intolerant, which may in the end prove our undoing.21

  In David Footman’s favourite Belgrade bar of the 1930s there had been a sly, ignorant barman whom he nicknamed ‘Rothermere’, because the man knew nothing but had an answer for everything. The difference between the Rothermere Mail group and Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers was pithily put by Harold Macmillan: ‘Lord Rothermere … like all the Harmsworths … only care[s] about money … Ld B (to be fair) cares more for spite & mischief than money.’ While the Daily Mail reported the Lords debate under the headline ‘SEX VICE’, John Gordon in the Sunday Express warned against enemies of the people who wished ‘to legalize perversion, and even to sanctify perverts … STUFF AND NONSENSE. Perversion is very largely a practic
e of the too idle and too rich. It does not flourish in lands where men work hard and brows sweat with honest labour. It is a wicked mischief, destructive not only of men but of nations.’ Arthur Christiansen, editor of the Daily Express, told Beaverbrook that he had identified a ‘notorious homosexual’ on the Foreign Office Selection Board.22

  After Petrov’s revelations about Burgess and Maclean in 1955, Fleet Street became strident. The front page of the Sunday Pictorial special ‘EVIL MEN’ issue of 25 September thundered that the ‘sordid secret’ and ‘wretched, squalid truth about Burgess and Maclean is that they were sex perverts’. It asserted that ‘there has for years existed inside the Foreign Office service a chain or clique of perverted men’ who by their machinations had ‘protected’ the duo and were still ‘hoodwinking’ public morality. Under the headline ‘Danger to Britain’, the story continued: ‘Homosexuals – men who indulge in “unnatural” love for one another – are known to be bad security risks. They are easily won over as traitors. Foreign agents seek them out as spies.’ Seven years later, preening himself on the ‘EVIL MEN’ articles, Hugh Cudlipp of the Sunday Pictorial noted with satisfaction: ‘doctors, social workers and the wretched homosexuals themselves recognized this as a sincere attempt to get at the root of a spreading fungus’; he regretted, though, ‘that nothing practical was done to solve the worst aspect of the problem – the protection of children from the perverts’.23