Wright pursued targets connected to Hart, notably Bernard Floud, Phoebe Pool and Andrew Cohen. Floud had attended the universities of Oxford, Berlin, Grenoble and Toronto. He served in the Intelligence Corps in 1939–42 and then the Ministry of Information. In peacetime he farmed in Essex before becoming personnel manager at Granada Television and his election as a Labour MP in 1964. When Harold Wilson nominated him for junior ministerial office, MI5 registered a security objection, and Floud was called for an interview with Wright on Monday 9 October 1967. To his children on the preceding Sunday he had seemed downcast, and Wright at the Monday interview found him as off-hand as Hart. He appeared uninterested in Wright’s questions, to many of which he replied that he had no memory of the answers – no doubt truly as he was badly depressed. ‘I was tough on him,’ Wright boasted. ‘I knew that his wife, an agoraphobic depressive, had recently committed suicide … I explained to him in unmistakable terms that, since it was my responsibility to advise on his security clearance, I could not possibly clear him until he gave a satisfactory explanation of the Hart story.’ Wright asked him to attend a second interview next day: Floud returned to his home in the Regent’s Park in a distressed state. He was a teetotaller, but that evening took a large amount of alcohol, swallowed barbiturates and went to his children’s playroom in the basement where he locked the door, turned on but did not light the gas fire and swaddled his head in a blanket. Wright’s victim was fifty-two.10
Sir Andrew Cohen was described by Wright in Spycatcher as a diplomat, but in fact he had been an official in the Colonial Office, where he had proven indispensable in managing British political withdrawal from Africa. He served as Governor of Uganda in 1952–7, and was known in Whitehall as the sturdy advocate of financial aid to ex-colonial developing economies. As such he was selected as the first PUS of the Ministry of Overseas Development on its inauguration by the incoming Labour government in 1964. He was imposing in his outlook, ambitions and physical bulk: he died of a heart attack, apparently before Wright could interview him, in 1968.
Phoebe Pool, whose father was a meat-trader in Smithfield market, had phenomenal intellect and artistic discrimination, but from childhood was an insomniac depressive. She was a long-term associate of Blunt’s at the Courtauld Institute, collaborated with him in a book about Picasso and acted as his courier during the 1930s. When Wright turned his attention to her, she was a patient in the psychiatric wing of Middlesex Hospital: accordingly Wright instructed Blunt to manipulate another Courtauld scholar, Anita Brookner, to act as an unwitting cut-out providing material from Pool. Pool hurled herself under a tube train in 1971. ‘All these suicides,’ his boss Martin Furnival Jones supposedly told Wright, ‘they’ll ruin our image. We’re just not that sort of Service.’ Wright compressed his account of these events: in fact there were four years between the deaths of Floud and Pool; the chronology and detail of his widely quoted recollections cannot be right. His procedure throughout these investigations typified his method: putting together broken shards of knowledge in the wrong contiguities and producing perversely misshapen intelligence.11
Another object of suspicion was the ex-MI5 officer Tomás Harris, who had been killed in a drunken car smash some years earlier. After the bruiting of his name in 1979, his reputation was defended by Ewen Montagu, on behalf of Harris’s surviving sisters: ‘they are all most distressed and feel alone and helpless as they all worshipped Tommy – one has become almost hysterical’. Montagu could not forgive ‘the crooked (and the stupid) writers … cashing in to get publicity for their books … by flinging accusations against safely dead men’, he told Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1980. Dick White also gave his judgement to Trevor-Roper. ‘I do not believe Tomás Harris was a Soviet spy but my conviction is not of the hand in the fire type. He was an international art dealer with contacts on both sides during the Civil War. If he got caught up in anything it would have been in these circumstances & would not connect him with the Cambridge conspirators. He has been closely investigated & I believe cleared.’12
Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire
The cases of Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire show the stupidity of Wright’s fixations. Goronwy Rees had suggested to MI5 in 1951 that both men had been Soviet spies. One oddity of this accusation was that all three of them were associated with the same Oxford college. Rees had won a fellowship at All Souls in 1931, and was appointed the college’s estates bursar in 1951. Hampshire was elected Fellow in 1936, and re-elected in 1955 with the additional post of domestic bursar. Zaehner became a Fellow of the college in 1952, on his appointment as Oxford’s Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics. ‘The idea of Zaehner as a Soviet agent was grotesque,’ said Rees’s stalwart friend and All Souls colleague Isaiah Berlin. ‘Similarly Stuart Hampshire … was perfectly innocent, and a perfect patriot.’13
Rees’s accusation against Zaehner matched the story of the Russian defector betrayed by Philby in 1945, Konstantin Volkov, who had spoken of a Soviet spy embedded in SIS operations in the Middle East. By Wright’s account, Zaehner had run MI6’s wartime counter-intelligence operations in Iran. His initial task was to protect the railways into Russia, on which vital military supplies were transported, from German sabotage. Later, when the Russians were striving for control of the railway, he had to work to defeat their aims. Zaehner, who spoke local dialects fluently, first worked undercover, ‘operating in the murky and cut-throat world of counter-sabotage’ to borrow a cliché from Wright, and latterly behind Russian lines. In the first phase he was at constant risk of betrayal and murder by pro-German Arabs and in the second phase by pro-Russian Arabs. ‘On the face of it,’ declared Wright, ‘the very fact that Zaehner survived gave a touch of credibility to Rees’ allegations.’ After the war, Zaehner served for two years as Press Attaché in the Tehran embassy bribing editors and trying to alter public opinion to favour English interests. Then he returned to academic work in Oxford, although this was twice interrupted by affairs of state. In 1949 he was seconded to Malta, where he trained the Albanian insurgents whose part in the Anglo-American operation against Enver Hoxha’s regime was betrayed by Philby. It took Zaehner only three months to master the Albanian language. He accompanied some of his trainees on their fatal journey to their homeland. In 1951–2 he returned to Tehran as acting Counsellor in the embassy trying to foment opposition to the Iranian Prime Minister Musaddiq after his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Zaehner wrote in 1970 that he was relieved to be elected to a chair at Oxford in 1952, because pure scholarship was ‘a single-minded search for truth’, and he was weary after ten years abroad in a branch of government service ‘in which truth is seen as the last of the virtues, and to lie comes to be second nature’.14
Zaehner’s inaugural lecture as Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics was ferocious, witty and deliberately offensive to its audience. He was a Catholic convert who complained of Anglicans that, ‘rather than be thought unfashionable or even “reactionary” – titles of which they might well have been proud – they have progressively abandoned the mysteries of their faith and reduced their religion to a meaningless benevolence’. He believed that irrationality was a violent force that could not be suppressed, should not be ignored and was integral to much intelligence work. If excessive rationality and prudentialism had not denied and debased primitive and necessary passions, Zaehner believed,
we might, perhaps, have been spared at least the worst excesses of twentieth-century barbarism: we might have been spared the sanguinary claptrap of blood and soil which for a moment became the religion of a great nation: we might even have been spared the moronic cult of lunacy preached by the Surrealists. If the twentieth century has taught us nothing else, it should have taught us that there is an element in man other than reason, and that if this element is neglected, it is liable to fester and to erupt into something monstrously evil.
Zaehner deplored ‘the conversion of the American ideal of liberty into the most crassly material
ist, soulless civilisation the world has ever seen’, but equally despised Soviet Russia ‘under the leadership of a Directoire of gloomy mediocrity’.15
Spycatcher recounts Wright talking for hours in Zaehner’s All Souls rooms as the shadow of the college spires faded across the lawn outside (Zaehner’s set overlooked a paved quadrangle where there was not a blade of grass). ‘I’m sorry, Robin,’ Wright began, ‘a problem has come up. We’re following up some old allegations. I’m afraid there’s one that points at you.’ He then recounted Volkov’s reference to a Soviet spy in Persia. Zaehner was so hurt by the accusation that he dabbed tears from his eyes. ‘I spent six years in the desert,’ Wright remembered him replying. ‘I stayed behind two years after Yalta, when everybody else went home. I got no honours, but I thought at least I had earned a degree of trust.’ Zaehner felt sure that Volkov’s spy, if he existed, was not English. ‘There weren’t many of us, and I’d vouch for everyone.’ He suggested that the spy was an SIS agent rather than an officer, and suggested Rudolf (‘Rudi’) Hamburger, the first husband of Ursula Kuczynski @ SONIA. Wright left his interview with Zaehner feeling that ‘Rees had been terribly, vindictively mistaken.’16
Rees had also fingered Stuart Hampshire, an Oxford philosopher who had joined Trevor-Roper’s Radio Security Service in 1940. Hampshire’s kinks especially suited intelligence work. ‘I am capable of great dissimulation – that is one of my vanities,’ he wrote in 1942. ‘I am extremely vain about my capacity to perceive the moods and motives of other people.’ He disclaimed deep loyalties: ‘I find it very pleasant and easy to be pleasant and sympathetic to people, but there are only three or four people whose death would cause me the slightest pain; I like friends as a periodical source of pleasure, but their disappearance does not affect me.’ Violence distressed him. ‘I like gentleness, or the possibility of gentleness, above all other human qualities. I am prejudiced against successful and effective people.’ All of these traits enhanced his official work. They were less valued by Wright, who would have been on high alert if he had known that Hampshire had once told Trevor-Roper, ‘I like elaborate good manners and sophistication, and all forms of perversion.’17
During the war Hampshire specialized in analysing the activities of the central command of Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (SS) and gained expert knowledge of SS atrocities across Europe and in Russia. After the war, he interrogated several Nazi leaders in captivity. This experience transformed his attitude to politics and philosophy. ‘I learnt how easy it had been to organise the vast enterprises of torture and murder, and to enrol willing workers in this field,’ he recalled. ‘Unmitigated evil and nastiness are as natural, it seemed, in educated human beings as generosity and sympathy: no more, and no less, natural, a fact that was obvious to Shakespeare, but not previously evident to me.’18
Hampshire’s intelligence work gave him a lifelong interest in the ‘processes of deception, intrigue, treachery, and mystification’, he wrote later. ‘The deception and intrigue sometimes go so far that any normal interest in literal truth is lost along the way, because the truth is buried beneath layer after layer of corrupt intention.’ After the war, he worked, probably for MI5, in San Francisco during the opening session of the United Nations and in Paris for the implementation of the Marshall Plan. These experiences left him with ‘difficulty in imagining that purity of intention and undivided purposes can be the normal case in politics. I believe that very many people feel divided between openness and concealment, between innocence and experience; and, outside politics, they often find themselves divided between love and hatred of their own homes and of their own habits.’ At the suggestion of Dick White, Hampshire was asked in 1966 by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, to review the activities of GCHQ at Cheltenham, the costs of gathering SIGINT and the future extent of Anglo-American cooperation. Shortly afterwards, Wright turned to leading an investigation of him. Despite doubts about his friendship with Burgess, who may have made a tentative attempt to recruit him to the cause in 1937, Hampshire was exonerated in 1967. Wright was perhaps in mind when Hampshire later wrote: ‘there is a black hole of duplicity and intrigue into which the plans of politicians and intelligence officers may altogether disappear, because they may forget what they are supposed to be doing, lost in the intricacies of political manoeuvre’.19
For fourteen years Hampshire was then left in peace until a Saturday in 1981 when a journalist from the Observer showed him the draft of an article, which was due to be published next day, insinuating that he was under plausible suspicion of having been a Soviet agent. Like so many such pieces, it dramatized and made false links with little regard for truth or probability. Hampshire appealed for help to the formidable lawyer Lord Goodman, then Master of University College, Oxford and former chairman of the Observer Trust and of the Newspaper Publishers Association. A telephone call was made to the acting editor of the paper: eight words were enough to convince the Observer not to run the story. ‘Arnold Goodman here: Stuart Hampshire is with me,’ he said before replacing the receiver. In a letter to The Times, which was drafted with Goodman’s help, Hampshire protested against the twisting methods used in pursuit of espionage press stunts. There had been ‘one or two definitely false and defamatory statements’ in the spiked Observer attack on him.
But most of the article was innuendo. For example, it was rightly stated that I had been interrogated in the early sixties about my relations with Professor Blunt and with others in wartime intelligence. But the writer had omitted to say that nearly everyone who had been associated with secret military intelligence in the war, and with Professor Blunt, had been interrogated at that time, and this was a very large class.
The method of the proposed article was genteel British McCarthyism, playing on guilt by association and with dark allusions to sources in the secret service. I remonstrated with the journalist, a persuasive friend remonstrated with the acting editor, and after an interval we were told that the article would not appear. The editor of the newspaper later expressed his regret.
This episode raises questions. Ought not this selling of newspapers with the aid of speculative spy stories to come to an end now? Ought we not to question the cant about public service when the methods of investigative journalism are applied to people who are obliged by the original conditions of their service to conceal much of what they know? Ought not former members of the security service to be discouraged from hawking stories around Fleet Street …?
Do we want a demoralised intelligence service and demoralised security services?20
Anthony Blunt and Andrew Boyle
From 10 September until 22 October 1979 a television serialization of John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was broadcast on English television. Le Carré had used some traits of the MI5 officer John Bingham @ Lord Clanmorris for the character of George Smiley in his novels; but Alec Guinness, who played the part of Smiley on television, aped the mannerisms of Maurice Oldfield. On 6 November, fifteen years after Blunt’s confession in Portman Square, Andrew Boyle published The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia. In the book Boyle dropped hints about Blunt’s identity without naming him. Private Eye however published a parody Spectator article headlined ‘The Fourth Man’ under the byline of ‘Sir Anthony Blunt’. ‘The simultaneous appearance of the Tinker Tailor T.V. series & Boyle’s Climate of Treason has created a somewhat feverish public opinion which the Press is trying to serve,’ Dick White wrote in January 1980. ‘“Moles” are of course Le Carré’s invention & there is no doubt that his gruesome imagination has caught on.’ He regretted that Boyle’s book had not been indicted by reviewers for ‘its many inaccuracies & misinterpretations’, but had instead been endorsed by glib ‘pundits’ such as Malcolm Muggeridge.21
Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister in May 1979. She felt that as Blunt had betrayed his country, there was no reason to protect him unless his exposure would jeopardize national security or embarrass the Crown. On 15 November, in a wri
tten answer to a parliamentary question, she confirmed that he had been recruited to work for Russian intelligence before the war, had acted as a talent-spotter while a don at Cambridge and had passed official secrets to Moscow while employed in the Security Service in 1940–5. She called him ‘contemptible and repugnant’. Blunt’s knighthood was annulled. All night the BBC reported this news in sombre, stilted tones as if a head of state had died. The weekend, to judge from the tone of broadcasts, was spent in astounded mourning. In retrospect, Thatcher’s ‘outing’ of Blunt seems the opening salvo of her campaign against Whitehall traditions and old-guard hierarchy. It was the end of the six-month honeymoon opening of her premiership and the start of serious business rather as the anti-monarchical upsurge after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 was the defining moment that ended Tony Blair’s honeymoon as Prime Minister.
The Sunday Telegraph on 18 November rushed into a story that Blunt’s treachery had been responsible for the deaths of forty-nine wartime SOE agents behind enemy lines in the Netherlands. There was not a jot of truth in the report, which the Telegraph refused to retract, on the basis that traitors do not deserve apologies and can have any dirt chucked at them with impunity. Tales proliferated that Blunt had seduced and then blackmailed Cambridge undergraduates, that he was a paedophile who preyed on children, that he had connived in selling fake pictures by authenticating forgeries and that he had an ill-gotten fortune stashed offshore. The Sunday Express editor John Junor, who believed ‘only poofs drink rosé’ and that ‘AIDS was a fair punishment for buggery’, called Blunt ‘a treacherous communist poof’. Muggeridge, in Time magazine, began with false premises – ‘homosexuals tend to sympathize with revolutionary causes, and to find in espionage a congenial occupation’ – and continued with spurious generalizations. ‘The same gifts which make homosexuals often accomplished actors equip them for spying, which is a kind of acting, while their inevitable exclusion from the satisfaction of parenthood gives them a grudge against society, and therefore an instinctive sympathy with efforts to overthrow it.’22
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