Fletcher-Cooke noticed women’s clothes but was deaf to their speech. ‘Can anyone think of anything said by a Lady Member during this Session?’ he asked after his first year in the Commons. ‘I remember vividly what they look like, but not a word that they have said … First prize for turn-out is shared by Mrs Castle, whose dazzling yellows draw every eye, and by Lady Tweedsmuir, the exponent of that dying cult, Good Style.’ He was a connoisseur of the performing arts: in 1946 he contributed an ironical yet stirring report in the Observer of the first post-war Salzburg Music Festival, at which the cast of Der Rosenkavalier threatened a sit-down strike between acts because they were so hungry, while other performers lamented the European-wide shortage of catgut; in 1953 he complained in parliament that a work permit had been refused to the New Jersey actress Yolande Donlan to enable her to take the part of Peter Pan in a Christmas run, a Ministry of Labour official having told the theatre management that the part was ‘not suitable to be played by an American’.36
As a backbencher in the 1950s Fletcher-Cooke pressed for repeal of the criminal sanctions still visited so traumatically on people who survived suicide attempts. He had crisp nicknames for people, for example calling his bombastic ministerial colleague Lord Hailsham ‘the Pathetic Fallacy’. In 1960 he was one of only twenty-two Tory MPs to vote in favour of the partial decriminalization of homosexuality (174 voted against): he was brave enough to denounce the vote publicly as a ‘fiasco’. He grieved at the birth of a stillborn child from his short-lived marriage to an ex-actress. In 1961 he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Home Office, where he proved adept at speaking strongly against crime while supporting less brutal treatment of criminals. He also achieved the passing of the Suicide Act. In the Commons his terse wit was an antidote to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, who (in Macmillan’s description) ‘answers questions with a portentous & often risible solemnity’.37
Then, in 1962, Burgess’s tipsy friend Lord Maugham introduced Fletcher-Cooke to a teenager named Anthony Turner, who was both an ex-borstal inmate and a policeman’s son. Early in 1963 Fleet Street reporters were tipped off that Turner was living in Fletcher-Cooke’s flat in Great Peter Street, near the Palace of Westminster. Shortly afterwards Turner was stopped by Stepney police while exceeding the speed limit in Fletcher-Cooke’s Austin Princess. ‘I have had to deal with a sad case of Fletcher-Cooke (Under Sec. Home Office) who has got into trouble,’ Harold Macmillan noted on 21 February. ‘I fear he will have to resign.’ (Macmillan was dealing at the time with the repercussions of Philby’s disappearance from Beirut, and had Richard Llewellyn’s Burgess-and-Maclean-inspired novel, Mr Hamish Gleave, as his bedtime reading.) Ten days later Turner was convicted at Bow Street magistrates’ court of driving while unlicensed and uninsured. Fletcher-Cooke’s ministerial career was over.38
Fletcher-Cooke’s Darwen constituents supported him, so that he remained their MP until the constituency was abolished twenty years later. Within MI5, however, his Cambridge and recent friendships prompted the idea of giving renewed scrutiny to former contacts of Burgess who were or might be homosexuals. The object was to discover if any of them were vulnerable to blackmail while holding positions, as Fletcher-Cooke had done until recently, where they had access to classified information. ‘We must reckon’, urged an MI5 officer, ‘that the Russians will have been interested in learning from BURGESS the names of his homosexual friends and that they will subsequently have made it their business to discover if any of these people were worth blackmailing.’39
The versatility, altruism, deprecating wit and sense of duty that characterized Fletcher-Cooke are always in short supply in parliament. Yet the whole nature of the man was now suspect. For the rest of the century there would be no respite in the official rejection of sexual variety that had been started as a sop to J. Edgar Hoover.
CHAPTER 19
The Exiles
Burgess and Maclean in Moscow
In exile the Cambridge spies continued to make trouble. After nearly five years of invisibility and silence, Burgess and Maclean reappeared on 11 February 1956 at a hastily improvised press conference held in a suite in Moscow’s National Hotel. In a sitting-room dominated by a giant mirror framed in porcelain, with cupids and gold fittings, written statements were handed to the four journalists present. There was an uninformative question-and-answer session that lasted about five minutes. ‘For a foreigner in the Soviet Union,’ as a later Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Duncan Wilson, noted, ‘there are no degrees of knowledge, only degrees of ignorance.’1
There were two reasons for the sudden disclosure of the missing diplomats. Anthony Eden had recently returned from a successful prime ministerial visit to Washington: any revival of the Burgess–Maclean story chafed Anglo-American unity at a sore spot. Moreover, the post-Stalinist Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, were due to pay a state visit to the young Queen Elizabeth in April. The Kremlin had belatedly accepted that, unless doubts about the whereabouts of the missing diplomats were dispelled, the visit would be marred by endless distracting press questions. As it was, there were disharmonious passages during the state visit. At a dinner for the Soviet and Labour parliamentary leaders, George Brown cracked an ill-appreciated joke that the Soviet Union was a breakaway movement from the Transport & General Workers’ Union. He later toasted Khrushchev with noisy semi-mockery, ‘Here’s to the big boss,’ to which Khrushchev raised his glass in reply and said, ‘You look like a little boss yourself.’2
The great fiasco of the visit occurred underwater. SIS sent a heavy-smoking, hard-drinking frogman named Lionel (‘Buster’) Crabb diving into Portsmouth waters to spy on the cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had brought the Soviet leaders to England. He never resurfaced. Fleet Street ran amok speculating whether he had defected, been kidnapped or drowned by misadventure. Inevitably, given Fleet Street’s lubricity, some hinted without evidence or relevance that he was bisexual. The speculation was not stilled when a headless corpse, wearing Crabb’s diver’s costume, appeared fourteen months later on a sandbank in Chichester harbour. This botched Ordzhonikidze venture resulted in the dismissal of ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair as ‘C’ of SIS and his replacement by Dick White, who had previously succeeded Sillitoe as Director General of MI5 in 1953.
The curt press conference in the National Hotel started a news storm raging across the English-speaking world. A few days later the Sunday Express asked Burgess to send a message for publication. He responded with a 789-word cable which resembled Delmer’s Moscow-line reports in the Daily Express on the threat of German militarism. ‘To give unlimited backing to, and to rearm, precisely the same expansionist social forces in Germany which have created two wars in this century, is a wild and dangerous gamble,’ wrote Burgess. ‘The Hitlers of the future, like the Hitlers of the past, can be easily dealt with if there is Anglo-Soviet collaboration.’ He attacked US foreign policy while praising Mao Tse-tung’s regime: ‘The Chinese People’s Government is a Government of the Chinese people by the Chinese people for the Chinese people.’ His article was flanked by a Sunday Express editorial berating the Kremlin for ‘putting up a drunken traitor like Burgess to soft-talk the people of Britain’. Beaverbrook’s hirelings, who had sought Burgess’s views, declared with their usual grace: ‘Deeds will win friendship. Not the propaganda of a pervert.’3
On 25 February Driberg wrote to Burgess asking if he might interview him in Moscow and enclosing a column that he had contributed to that day’s Reynolds News. Petrov (the source of the first sure confirmation that Burgess was a long-term Soviet spy rather than Maclean’s impulsive, muddle-headed travel companion) was dismissed in Driberg’s article as ‘a paid nark’. Driberg praised Burgess as ‘whimsical and erudite’, decried ‘the Morrison–Macmillan witch-hunt’ against the defected diplomats and concluded, ‘if it be true they have been advising the Kremlin on relations with the West, and so are to some extent responsible for easing East–West tension, they may yet be hailed as benefactors of
the human race’. Burgess replied on 15 March with standard KGB disinformation: ‘what you say about Petrov is true – he was a “paid nark” … he gave his original information C.O.D. [cash on delivery] and subsequently added to it – in different and self-contradictory forms in England and America – on the hire-purchase system. They always do – and the Foreign Office and Intelligence services should know that perfectly well.’ Defectors like Petrov and Krivitsky ‘invent to earn their keep … but I don’t want to go here into a long screed about not having been an agent. There is no evidence that I was: in fact I wasn’t, and that’s that.’4
Burgess’s first visitor in July 1956 was his mother, with whom he spent a month’s seaside holiday at Sochi. They stayed in an enclave for privileged members of the Soviet bureaucracy rather than in the proletarian resort where loudspeakers boomed martial music interspersed with propaganda about communist triumphs and capitalist villainy. The Daily Express falsely reported that Eve Bassett had travelled under an alias. Her return journey proved an ordeal that half killed her: aggressive journalists swarmed around the tired old lady during a stopover at Stockholm airport; ‘I had an hour & a half of 3rd degree, no escape from them’; the Daily Express was so avid for Burgess relics that its reporter collected her cigarette stubs.5
Driberg was Burgess’s next visitor from London. During his August fortnight in Moscow, he was photographed by the KGB fellating a man in a urinal, and was cajoled into becoming a KGB informant codenamed LEPAGE. LEPAGE reported on the dynamics of the Labour national executive and parliamentary Labour party, and retold gossip about the foibles and frailties of Labour leaders. Although the Soviets overestimated the influence that Driberg could exert as chairman of the Labour party in 1957, he peddled their line during the nuclear disarmament rows that rent the party. He cut contacts with the KGB in 1968 when they increased pressure on him while he was recovering from a heart attack. Driberg had been one of Maxwell Knight’s MI5 sources inside the CPGB for nearly twenty years until 1941. He also supplied the Czech intelligence services with parliamentary assessments during the 1960s. MI5’s relations with him remained cagey but cordial throughout.
Driberg’s first task for the KGB was to write a hurried, obsequious book entitled Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background. He netted £5,000 by selling its serialization rights to the Daily Mail, which ran his paltry pieces in October under the billing ‘News that even MI5 could not get’. These represented Maclean as the dominant partner in the escape and as a devout communist; Burgess was treated as his subordinate, and painted as no worse than an extreme socialist. MI5 judged that Burgess hoped that this ‘white-wash’ would be the enabling preliminary to his return to London if the Labour party won the next general election: ‘he might even hope to have a friend in Ministerial circles in the form of DRIBERG himself’.6
Driberg’s book had the misfortune to be published in November 1956 when Europe was reeling from the ruthlessness with which the Soviet Union had suppressed the Hungarian uprising. His presentation of Burgess and Maclean as heralds of peaceful coexistence, with the moral equivalency of pacifist pro-Boer campaigners of 1899–1902, was belied by the nationalist aggression of Moscow’s actions against Budapest. ‘Hungary has put a new gloss on tales of individual conscience and loyalties above country,’ declared a Manchester Guardian editorial. ‘The Burgesses of this world … belong to the past. It is doubly unimportant whether they now strum the Eton boating song in Moscow or in Mayfair.’ While members of the CPGB and other European communists recanted their faith, Burgess in Moscow could not forswear the old creed.7
Edward Crankshaw of the London School of Economics reviewed Driberg’s corrupt propaganda in the Observer under the headline ‘Unbelievable’. He later admitted to Patrick Reilly that he found the little book so ill-written that he could only skim its pages. His review identified its hub as the chapter giving Burgess’s explanation of his flight in 1951: ‘if one does not believe it, then the book has no value at all’, Crankshaw judged. ‘The actual account of the escape is an insult to the intelligence, full of improbabilities and inconsistencies.’ Portrait with Background denied that Burgess had been a Soviet spy, and depicted him as a lofty idealist wrestling with his fine conscience. Alan Pryce-Jones, a reviewer who had known Burgess well, teased him as a mix between ‘Meddlesome Matty’, the irritating fidget in a Victorian nursery homily, and Lupin Pooter, the brash, silly chancer in The Diary of a Nobody. Burgess was quintessentially frivolous, wrote Pryce-Jones, ‘for the essence of frivolity is to be unable to perceive any necessary connexion between cause and effect, to treat every act and every passing idea as though they could, at will, be made self-sufficient’. Driberg’s book, despite the scornful reviews, showed the sales-value of Burgess and Maclean: thereafter journalists telephoned Burgess for topical quotes, or visited him in Moscow for headline-grabbing interviews, which pleased the Kremlin because constant references to him discomfited Whitehall.8
Besides Driberg’s book, Burgess was eager to read acclaimed new biographies, histories and novels as they were published in London, and advised on English-language books that might safely be translated and circulated to the Soviet policy elite. He told Nora Beloff that the great aim of his life was to persuade the Russian authorities to commission a translation of Proust. He parroted Moscow’s denigration of Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago. ‘I don’t consider that the Soviet Government will penalise Pasternak,’ he told an English journalist who telephoned him. ‘I don’t think there is any possibility of his losing his house or suffering any other penalty.’ He had abandoned reading the book after ten pages, he claimed: ‘There is no objection here to reading anti-Soviet literature, but I found it boring. I cannot understand why the quislings of the West have praised this book and compared it to War and Peace.’9
Anthony Blunt acted as an intermediary between MI5 and Eve Bassett, advised the old lady on parrying press attention, steered her contacts with her son and helped MI5 in quelling his hopes of returning to London. ‘He enjoyed knowing that he could do something terribly well,’ Neil MacGregor, one of Blunt’s protégés and a future director of the National Gallery, told Miranda Carter. His success depended upon the impermeable compartmentalization of his connoisseurship and espionage so that neither could leak into the other. ‘I suspect’, said MacGregor, ‘that he got a great deal of enjoyment out of keeping the two bits separate and not tripping up. You have to be terribly clever to carry it off, and he knew that he was terribly clever. There was a delight in the game, in being able to do it so completely, and to live completely differently in the two worlds must have been quite exhilarating. My hunch would be that that was what really kept it going: the intoxication of playing this wonderfully complex game.’10
There was little affinity between Burgess and Maclean, although they made similar jokes about the twinning of their names like those of department stores for middle-class Londoners. ‘So awful and boring being chained to poor Donald like Marshall to Snelgrove,’ Burgess complained to the actress Coral Browne. Maclean wrote to his fellow roisterer Philip Toynbee: ‘Burgess and Maclean! We have become like Swan and Edgar, or Debenham and Freebody; yet I neither know Guy very well nor like him very much.’11
Maclean and his old boon companion Philip Toynbee tried to revive their old friendship, despite the orthodox Marxism-Leninism of the first and the other being a repentant communist who had grown to loathe totalitarianism. ‘The central point is whether there would have been fascism in Hungary if the Soviet army had not intervened,’ Maclean insisted to Toynbee after the Soviet aggression of 1956. Without Russian military occupation, would the Hungarian people ‘have had a better life – freer, with more food, clothes, housing, schools, books, hospitals, holiday places – all the things that make the basis for the happiness of a man and his family? Or would they have had a worse one, ruled in effect by capitalists, the Church and the landlords, with some sort of fascist front and permanent witch-hunts to keep down the enemies of such people – in short
a sort of Franco Spain?’ Maclean argued that Hungary would have become a vassal state serving American capitalism if there had not been Russian armed intervention. ‘We should have seen repeated in Europe, with European modifications, the sort of real horror which the Americans in rather similar circumstances have created in South Viet-Nam and South Korea.’ He promised Toynbee that ‘the nightmare’ of Stalinist purges was over in the Soviet Union. ‘The enemy you think you are fighting – Stalinism, brutality, firing-squads – isn’t there any more.’ The Maclean–Toynbee friendship foundered after this.12
Free to resume contact with his mother and brother, Maclean rhapsodized about the reality of a socialist state. ‘It’s neither a bronzed youth looking towards the sunrise nor a plain-clothes socialist official coldly ordering everybody about, but a great swarming mass of human beings going about the business of living,’ he informed Lady Maclean in August 1956 in a letter that he knew would be intercepted and read by officials in Moscow and London. Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, ‘it doesn’t take long to realise that they are all going in a good direction, having burst the bonds of capitalism which hold everything back or, even worse, force whole peoples with [sic] war’. In private conversation he was more critical. The former Soviet spy inside OSS, Maurice Halperin, settled in Moscow in 1958, and befriended an Englishman named Mark Frazer without realizing at first that this was the Moscow alias of Maclean. The men talked with reasonable openness about their disappointment with Khrushchev’s regime. Maclean divided the Soviet leadership into two distinct camps, ‘the Progressives and the Black Hundreds’. He abominated the latter die-hard group, and despised one of its leaders, Andrei Gromyko as, in his words, ‘a jumped-up peasant’. Maclean was also said to be ‘deeply wounded by his treatment in the Western press, and by his portrayal as a homosexual’.13
Enemies Within Page 62