The KGB was humiliated that none of its sources had given forewarning of Operation FOOT. ‘For all their resources and efficiency,’ Wilson’s successor as Ambassador in Moscow, Sir John Killick, reported in November 1971, the KGB leadership were ‘out of their minds’ with anger and frustration that the Kremlin did not retaliate against Britain to anything like the extent that Moscow Centre wanted. The Soviet system ossified in the late 1970s, at a time when British admission to the EEC and Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 were renewing the influence and confidence of the London government. Sir Curtis Keeble (the product of Clacton County High School, and the son of a clerk on Bethnal Green Council), who was Ambassador in Moscow in 1976–82, surveyed the condition of the Soviet people as seen in that period. ‘They have inflicted upon themselves a governmental system which combines lofty principle with evil application and monumental dullness. They have built themselves a military superpower. To run it, they have a group of old men, mediocre in spirit, who view the Western World with a malevolence, sometimes timorous, sometimes vengeful, always suspicious.’ The Soviet Union was no longer ‘a revolutionary power bent on world domination’, confident that capitalism would crumble under the inexorable logic of Marxism-Leninism, but a sclerotic administration of diverse territories held together by force.53
CHAPTER 20
The Mole Hunts
Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole
In his Sword of Honour trilogy Evelyn Waugh devised a character named Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole. This laughable, damnable spook sits at his desk amassing and scouring files reporting garbled hearsay, spurious facts and ludicrous suspicions of subversion or treachery. With rapturous self-importance he sets out to find the hidden connections between individuals and sects, to discover the arcane sense inside random jumbles and to unravel the conspiracies that no one else has the courage to face. Grace-Groundling-Marchpole’s dossiers were, Waugh recounts, ‘micro-filmed and multiplied and dispersed into a dozen indexes in all the Counter-Espionage Headquarters of the Free World and became a permanent part of the Most Secret archives of the Second World War’. The conspiracy-hunter becomes one of England’s great conspirators: he hoards his information; he operates in such sacrosanct isolation that government ministers know nothing of him; to his relief, they never ask to see his material. ‘Premature examination of his files might ruin his private, undefined Plan. Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war.’1
Graham Greene, a sometime SIS officer and longer-term SIS Friend, understood that Philby’s defection in 1963 stimulated a new generation of Grace-Groundling-Marchpoles with fantasies of intricate conspiracies. ‘How right SIS was to defend Philby and how wrong MI5 to force him into the open,’ wrote Greene. ‘The West suffered more from his flight than from his espionage.’ Institutional caution developed into fierce suspicions of ramified conspiracy, and then into rampant paranoia. The MI5 officers Arthur Martin and Peter Wright began a lamentable hunt for non-existent traitors: leaks about their activities induced an equally deplorable outburst of bad books. The United States, too, had its Grace-Groundling-Marchpole in the form of James Angleton of the CIA. Angleton never recovered the balance of his judgement after discovering that he had been hoodwinked by Philby in Washington during 1949–51. The embroidered intricacy of Angleton’s counter-espionage notions grew increasingly unreal. He became so obsessed by Soviet penetration and disinformation that he was duped by the delusional Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsyn into affirming that the Sino-Soviet ideological split of 1960 was a stunt intended to fool the capitalist powers. The curlicues of Angleton’s mind filled with certainty that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China had agreed a plot whereby they faked hostility while conspiring together in underhand alliance. Angleton’s absurdities were the ultimate travesty of intelligence analysis.2
The last-recruited of Philby’s ring of five had been John Cairncross. He was teaching at the Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio when, after an approach from Arthur Martin in 1964, he admitted that he been a Soviet spy until 1951. Over the next few years he underwent a series of MI5 interviews, during which his replies were often vague or inconclusive. As Cairncross had an exact and clarifying intelligence, with a scholar’s neat and retentive memory, it is likely that he was bamboozling his interrogators. Certainly his memoirs contain defensive untruths and a lot of fudge.
Blunt had been interviewed eleven times by MI5 before the clinching moment came in April 1964. Arthur Martin visited his flat atop the Courtauld Institute and asked what he knew about Michael Straight. This was the American banking heir whom Blunt had recruited at Cambridge, and who had recently divulged his espionage history while undergoing vetting in the US for a cultural post to which he had been nominated by the Kennedy administration. Martin assured Blunt that no action would be taken against him if he now told the truth. Blunt sat gazing at him in silence for a minute. Martin told him that this silence told all that he needed to know. He added that he had been through a similar scene a few weeks earlier with Cairncross, who had said afterwards that he felt eased by his confession. Blunt fixed himself a stiff gin, and stood for several minutes, with his back to the room, gazing into the darkness of Portman Square. Then he sat in a chair, and began the first of many informative interviews which he gave to MI5. He remained as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures at Buckingham Palace until 1972, when he turned sixty-five, for an early retirement would have been seen in Moscow as a sign that his guilt had been established.3
Because Straight’s evidence could not be used in open court, Blunt was given immunity from prosecution in return for his full cooperation. The Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, was not apprised of these events, although Queen Elizabeth was told in general terms of the position. Among other ex-associates Blunt mentioned Leo Long, whom he had recruited for Arnold Deutsch in 1937. After Long had been investigated, and his connections traced, he was interviewed by MI5 officers, to whom he gave a full statement later in 1964. Long admitted supplying Soviet Russia with GC&CS’s decryptions of German communications – the high-quality SIGINT codenamed ULTRA – and other military secrets both during the war and after the Nazi defeat, when he was deputy head of intelligence at the British Control Commission in Germany. He had remained active as a Soviet agent until 1952, but in return for his cooperation he was neither arrested nor charged.
An officer inside one secret service who betrays its secrets to another ‘appals and enthrals’ his colleagues, according to Markus Wolf of the East German Stasi. ‘The psychological culture of an espionage service resembles that of a clan or tribe, in which individuals are united by some greater goal and a shared sense of identity,’ Wolf explained. A defection or the discovery of long-term treachery resembled a septic wound which spreads the poison of distrust throughout the body system. Even field agents who were unconnected to the sphere of work where the betrayal occurred felt more vulnerable when next they approached a dead drop. It became harder to recruit new agents following a major defection.4
Toxic distrust spread in MI5 after Philby’s disappearance from Beirut in 1963. The Service received reports that in the preceding summer he had begun drinking even more heavily than usual to assuage his nerves. The obvious conclusion that he had been alarmed by the dangers posed to him by Golitsyn’s debriefings was discounted. ‘Conspiracy theory’, as Christopher Andrew writes, ‘triumphed over common sense in explaining Philby’s anxiety.’ There developed in some MI5 minds the suspicion that a member of the Security Service had warned him of revived interest in him and of the imminent resumption of his interrogation. Five members of the Service knew of these plans: only two of them, the Director General Sir Roger Hollis and his deputy Graham Mitchell, ‘had l
ong enough service and good enough access to classified information to fit the profile of a long-term penetration agent’. A tortuously complicated interpretation of a simply explained fact thus started the most harrowing and unnecessary phase of the Service’s Cold War history of 1945–91. Its initiator was the head of MI5’s Soviet counter-espionage section Arthur Martin, who had been brought into the Service on Philby’s recommendation in 1946. An internal assessment of him, made by John Marriott, had noted that despite ‘his undeniable critical and analytical gifts and powers of lucid expression on paper’, he was ‘a rather small-minded man, and I doubt he will much increase in stature as he grows older’. By 1963 he was ominously under the sway of Golitsyn, whose paranoid ebullitions were increasingly unsettling American and British intelligence agencies.5
In March 1963, two months after Philby had vanished from Beirut, Martin took his concerns about Mitchell to Hollis, although he did not voice his related doubts about Hollis himself. Hollis had joined MI5 in 1938 after being invalided home with tuberculosis following eight years working for the British American Tobacco Company in China. In the Security Service his desk-work was calm, fair-minded, equable and conscientious. He specialized in monitoring international communism. Even in 1941–5, when MI5 was under political direction to treat the Soviet Union as an ally, he husbanded small resources to ensure that threatening trends in Soviet Russian policy were evaluated and understood. He was thus centrally placed in the Security Service when what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War was followed by the Cold War. He succeeded White as Director General in 1956.
In May 1963, in a mood of hysterical suspicion, Mitchell was put under surveillance. Following the admissions of Blunt and Cairncross in 1964, Martin began to consult a colleague in MI5’s Science Directorate named Peter Wright about his mistrust of Mitchell and Hollis. Wright, too, was susceptible to Golitsyn’s unreliable material, and therefore prone to weak thinking and false deductions about high-level penetration of the Service. During 1964 Martin became so disruptive an influence that he was transferred from the Soviet counter-espionage section to other responsibilities. It was ‘tragic’, to use Christopher Andrew’s words, that the lead roles as Blunt’s interviewer and as the Security Service ‘witch-finder general’ then passed to Wright, whose conspiracy theories soon proved a worse menace than Martin’s and ultimately damaged the Service as much as Blunt’s treachery. After Mitchell’s planned retirement in September 1964, attention shifted to Hollis. In November a joint Security Service–SIS working party codenamed FLUENCY was established with Wright in the chair to investigate the suspicions generated by Martin. It is easier to propose that a conspiracy may exist than to disprove its existence: imaginary suspicions, like primitive fears, have an irrational tenacity that is hard to eradicate. When, in May 1965, FLUENCY reported that both Services had been penetrated, Hollis was confronted with the accusations against him. He retired, as previously agreed, at the time of his sixtieth birthday in December 1965, but the case against him was pursued by Wright until 1971 (Mitchell had been cleared of Wright’s suspicions a year earlier). By then the ‘witch-finder general’ was shunned within the Security Service, where his poor judgement and snaky methods were compared to those of the Gestapo. He did not retire until 1976, however, and continued with an ally to make trouble. As a result of their agitation, Lord Trend, who as Burke Trend had been Cabinet Secretary until 1973, reviewed the investigation and reported in 1975 that he found no evidence that either Mitchell or Hollis had been a Soviet penetration agent.6
Wright was an unfortunate. In boyhood he had rickets and a disabling stutter. As a pupil at Bishop’s Stortford College, he expected to go to an ancient university, but instead left school at fifteen when his father was sacked by Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company in 1931 and descended into alcoholism. He became a farm-worker in Scotland and then spent fourteen years as an Admiralty scientist before his recruitment in 1949 as external scientific adviser to MI5. His technical cleverness and mechanical improvisations misled him into feeling that he was equally sharp in understanding human affinities. He was stubborn, prosaic and self-satisfied, and cherished grudges: one influence on his obsessive mole-hunting was his grouch that ‘the well-born Englishmen who had become addicted to communism in the 1930s … had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied to me’.7
In 1964 the Security Service realized neither that Blunt was the Fourth Man nor Cairncross the Fifth in the Cambridge ring of five. This was one reason for assuring Blunt that he would not be prosecuted: MI5 officers had no wish for criminal trials and press storms that might hinder their search for associates of Philby and Maclean who were not yet apprehended. A dire mistake was made in taking literally Golitsyn’s report that all of the group had been at Cambridge together. Neither Blunt nor Cairncross fitted Golitsyn’s loose impression of the ring of five as exact Cambridge contemporaries. Blunt was seven or so years older than the others, and had not been recruited by Burgess until after Philby and Maclean had left Cambridge. Cairncross was discounted because he had reached Trinity two years after Philby left. MI5 began to accept that Blunt was the Fourth Man in 1974. Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB rezident in the Soviet embassy in London in 1982–5, who had been working for SIS since 1974, identified Cairncross as the last of the ring of five in 1982, and publicly named him in 1990. Although Cairncross surpassed Blunt in importance as a spy, English newspapers were little interested in a shopkeeper’s son, who was a gangly-looking swot. Cairncross could not be made into a crowd-pleasing hate-figure, for he was untitled, looked drab rather than patrician, and was neither a connoisseur nor bisexual.
In the quarter-century between Cairncross’s confession to Martin and public identification by Gordievsky there were expensive distractions. The FBI in 1966 gave Michael Straight a list of eighty-five US citizens who had attended Cambridge University in 1930–4, from which he identified two or three men who had seemed fellow-travellers or been members of the Trinity cell. Subsequently the FBI shouldered the burden of investigating nearly 600 Americans who had attended the two ancient English universities during the 1930s. In 1967 MI5 started the University Research Group, which worked to identify CPGB members and communist sympathizers at all English universities between 1929 and 1954, and to establish their employment history. Five years of investigations yielded not a single Soviet spy.
Many journalist-commentators wanted levels of relentless persecution and brutal threats that MI5 knew to be unproductive of worthwhile material. Fleet Street sought the good copy that came from the rough methods and dramatic outcomes associated with the interrogation of two Canadian ambassadors, Herbert Norman and John Watkins. Norman had been recruited to the Cambridge communist cell by John Cornford and James Klugmann around 1934. After being named by Elizabeth Bentley in testimony to the US Senate sub-committee on internal security, and despite his admission under interrogation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that he had been a communist at Cambridge, he was protected by Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester Pearson, who suppressed investigations into his affiliations and possible espionage. The interventions on Norman’s behalf by Pearson, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1957 and became Prime Minister of the dominion in 1963, seem startling in retrospect. Norman was appointed High Commissioner in New Zealand and then Ambassador to Egypt. When the US Senate sub-committee renewed its accusatory investigations of him, he jumped to his death from the top of a Swedish embassy building in Cairo in 1957. John Watkins, Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1954–6, suffered similar treatment. In 1964 he died in a Montreal hotel bedroom where he was being questioned by the CIA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police about accusations that he had acted as a Soviet agent of influence. These were good press stories with minimal intelligence yield.
After decades of anti-Establishment rhetoric, and in an epoch when respect for the duties and attainments of public intellectuals was being quenched by angry populism, journalists gratified
the mass appetite for discrediting highbrows. Innocent Cambridge dons, notably Donald Beves and A.S.F. Gow of Trinity, and Frank Birch and Arthur Pigou of King’s, were brought under public suspicion as Soviet spies. There was a competitive scramble to identify an Oxford ring: three eminent academics – Jenifer Hart, Stuart Hampshire and Robin Zaehner – were among those investigated. Isaiah Berlin told Hart, after she had been caught in a Sunday Times sting in 1983, that newspapers in the 1980s wanted to ‘throw intellectuals to the lions of the political pornography-hunger public’. Men who had died years earlier, notably Guy Liddell and Tomás Harris, were grabbed in the maw of suspicion. Dick White characterized this epoch as that of ‘the spy torment’.8
Around 1962 MI5 officers had interviewed Jenifer Hart, who had been an official at the Home Office and CPGB member in the 1930s, about her party contacts. She was candid in her replies, because she felt that she had nothing to hide. She was reinterviewed in 1966 by Wright. By her account, their meeting was ‘a long and rather nasty affair’, during which she was quizzed about a long list of friends and acquaintances (none of whom she knew to be communists). ‘Jennifer [sic] Hart’, Wright wrote in his ghosted memoirs Spycatcher, ‘was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt and white net stockings she was wearing.’ Hart was a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she was tutor in modern history and in politics, philosophy and economics, and thus unusually a member of two university faculties; she had written a path-breaking treatise, The British Police; and yet Wright saw her as a post-menopausal woman who ought to accept desexualization. He admitted that she was straightforward in her replies, but did not feel that she was sufficiently impressed by his questions: she had, he complained, ‘a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies’ skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and ungentlemanly.’9
Enemies Within Page 66