McCormick @ Deacon profited by denigrating the ancient universities to his credulous readers. In The British Connection (1979) he claimed that ‘sodomy and communism’ were both ‘popular’ in Oxford and Cambridge universities before 1939, ‘especially among those of the upper strata of society’. At Oxford, he maintained, for he was always brazen in extrapolating minority examples into a mass movement, ‘homosexuality was so much the “in” thing that many heteros posed as homos’, while Cambridge, he claimed risibly, ‘had a preponderance of homosexual dons’.35
One of his targets was the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou. He depicted Pigou as gun-running for Russian revolutionaries, and recording his activities in an enciphered diary. According to Deacon’s remunerative fantasies, Pigou ranked with Klugmann as a secret Cambridge recruiter, masterminded the stealing of the keys to Philip Noel-Baker’s dispatch box and cultivated drunken, jumpy and unsporting Burgess by taking him rock-climbing in Wales. Noël Annan asked White about Pigou’s supposed Soviet spy work. ‘We looked into the matter of Deacon’s allegations & had nothing to corroborate them,’ White replied. There was a monosyllable that White always mistrusted unless it was accompanied by the tightest evidence, ‘link’. Deacon had written of ‘a link’ between Pigou and the triple agent Theodore Rothstein: ‘one can only ask what sort of “link”? The word may only be emotively used for the purposes of a purely circumstantial case.’ Elsewhere in The British Connection similarly feeble ‘links’ were used to imply that Guy Liddell of MI5 and the atomic scientist Sir Rudolf Peierls had been Soviet spies.36
Trails of guilt by association were also laid by John Costello. Costello was pertinacious in tracking sources and indefatigable in producing bestsellers. His driving energy and intensity of temperament could seem attractive. But a histrionic element in the myth he created about himself, his dramatic sense of his activities and influence, and an underlying suspicious hostility were on the debit side. His bitterness against the Cambridge academic Christopher Andrew, whose painstaking research and careful conclusions belied the conspiracy theorists, showed the animus of someone whose world felt threatened by studious calm. Costello’s big book about the wider context of the Blunt case, Mask of Treachery (1988), tapped rich veins of documentary material, but was flawed by its methods and assumptions. After a survey of the setbacks of Liddell’s career, starting with the ARCOS raid in 1927, Costello concluded: ‘Either Liddell suffered from a bad run of luck that was so disastrous as to be incomprehensible; or he was incompetent to the point of criminal negligence; or he was the grand-daddy Soviet mole in the British intelligence services.’ After two pages of bullet points listing circumstantial facts as if they were tight evidential links, Costello deployed mixed metaphors (‘the mechanism of intellectual treachery is woven from subtle deceits’), psycho-babble (‘his connoisseurship grew in defiance of his stern military father and was nourished by a doting musical mother’) and clichés about the English class system that together are a sure indicator of woolly thinking. ‘The Liddells – like the Blunts – were a family with aristocratic connexions dropping down the social scale. The backbiting cynicism of the homosexual milieu which he enjoyed may have fed a deep-seated resentment against the Establishment … Liddell’s artistic temperament, like Blunt’s, shaped by similar adolescent resentments against the underlying philistinism of British society, may well have sown the seeds of later treachery.’ These half-baked suppositions and callow prejudices were the flimsy foundations for the pillorying of Liddell in the 1980s.37
‘There never has been & never could be any suspicion of Guy Liddell,’ White insisted to Trevor-Roper in 1980. ‘Only unscrupulous & malicious people … could possibly suggest it.’ Accusers relied on ‘completely futile’ tales of ‘friendship with Burgess & Blunt, Guy as the man who warned Burgess & Maclean to escape, suppression of an item of evidence warning of Pearl Harbour [sic]’. Liddell was even blamed by Costello and ‘the awful Deacon’ for the failure of the ARCOS raid. It was all ‘so silly’, especially as Liddell certainly ‘detested Burgess’. White knew as a fact that when Blunt recommended Burgess to the Security Service, ‘it was Guy who blocked his recruitment or any form of access to MI5’. In White’s mind Deacon was twinned with Costello, who telephoned him in 1989 seeking information on a pre-war American case which White would not give him. ‘He said that he was due to give a lecture to the CIA at Langley that day,’ White told Noël Annan. ‘I wonder what that will do for the so-called Special Relationship!’ Costello was ‘only out for the money’, White thought. ‘He may be industrious in reading everything but is totally indiscriminate in evaluating source material.’38
Among the common preoccupations of Costello and Deacon was the Cambridge discussion-group the Apostles, of which Blunt and Burgess had been members. This innocuous society, with its private slang and rituals, its strict search for truth and its pitiless testing of false propositions was hated by Fleet Street hacks to whom its values were a standing reproach. The disputations of the Apostles were based, according to Christopher Brooke, who joined in the 1940s, on ‘a belief that we can learn, and a determination that we will learn, from people of the most opposite opinions’. The latitude of their outlook was antithetical to the enraged over-simplifications beloved by reporters and editors alike. The linguistic precision, the empathy with opponents, the tolerance of irregularities were equally alien to Fleet Street: journalists represented the group as a nexus of treason and an example of all that was rotten about highly educated, over-sophisticated, offensively urbane men. The Apostles, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge (former deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph), ‘combined culture, Communism and the love that nowadays all too readily dares to speak its name’. Men like Maynard Keynes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy were ‘dreadful people’, the News of the World columnist Woodrow Wyatt insisted. Deacon, who was a devotee of the News of the World, wrote a whole insalubrious book about the Apostles. The ‘homosexual faction within the Apostles’ was ‘mafia-like’ in its enlistment of young dupes, he claimed. ‘As history has shown over two thousand years or more, a homosexual mafia is by far the most dangerous’ of recruiting bodies.39
Anthony Cave Brown was another of the authors who seized the chances made by the secret services’ ultra-reticence about their operational history. ‘He is a monster: gross, loud, aggressive, vulgar,’ Trevor-Roper told Annan in 1994. ‘He accumulates material but is very unreliable in his use of it, laying on his social prejudices and circumstantial colour quite irresponsibly, pretending to have met and known people whom, at most, he has only trapped into a telephone conversation. I am told that his only contact with Menzies was one telephone call in the course of which Menzies only uttered one world, viz: “No”. But in his book he appears as a welcome guest at Menzies’ country house – the evening shadows lengthening as his host uncorked another bottle of Krug.’ Cave Brown was a dipsomaniac: Fred Winterbotham, the RAF officer charged with circulating ULTRA intelligence during the war, once returned home after Sunday-morning church to find that Cave Brown had in the meantime arrived to quiz him, climbed through a window, found a bottle of his whisky and drunk it. Cave Brown had the knack of turning his verbose, turgid books into bestsellers. In one he depicted the Apostles as ‘bound together by that queer trinity of the thirties, communism, Catholicism and sodomy. Hence the need for … secrecy, for the Establishment had outlawed all three.’ It is true that the majority view of the Apostles was anti-Christian, and that a minority were anti-capitalist, but false to claim that they treated Stalin’s purges as ‘trivial compared to the sufferings of millions who were unemployed’. The Apostles were not Stalinists any more than ‘the Establishment’ had proscribed either communism or Catholicism. Journalists were, however, enthralled by such caricatures: more sober writers than Cave Brown have deprecated the Apostles as ‘a self-appointed, secret group of cultural elitists’, harbouring ‘unusual sexual relationships’ and with tentacles requiring ‘nothing less than an investigation
into Britain’s ruling class’.40
Alister Watson and Dennis Proctor were the first professed communists to be elected to the Apostles in 1927. This was at a time when Marxism-Leninism had made negligible inroads into the university, and was therefore not a factor in considering ‘embryos’, as candidates for the Apostles were called. Blunt was neither a communist nor politically aware when elected in 1928: after his conversion to communism, he seldom attended. ‘Embryos’ with doctrinaire minds were unwelcome in a society that was speculative, sceptical and fluid in its ideas. John Cornford was rejected as a candidate because, as Proctor told MI5 twenty years later, ‘his overt membership of the Communist Party meant that he had not got an open mind. Possession of an open mind was a condition of membership.’ Fellow-travellers without a party card were eligible, for Burgess was elected in 1932; but according to Victor Rothschild, who was elected on the same day as Burgess, endless discussions on communist themes were considered dull.41
What was it that made journalists feel threatened by the Apostles and virulent in their attacks? Elevated thinking, privileged emotions and the cultivation of sensibilities stuck in their gorge. ‘I believe in aristocracy,’ the archetypal Apostle E. M. Forster had written in his credo of 1939:
Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure, and they can take a joke.
This sort of thinking was abominated by the populist journalism of the 1980s. Men like Ray (‘Dark Satanic’) Mills, the self-styled ‘Angry Voice’ of the Daily Star, who declared his ‘political philosophy’ as ‘hang ’em, flog ’em, castrate ’em, send ’em back’ and who enjoyed the office nickname of Biffo (Big ignorant fucker from Oldham), hated intellectuals and their ‘cretinous students’. In a decade of panic about AIDS, Mills decried ‘wooftahs, pooftahs, nancy boys, queers’ and wished ‘a blight on them all’. The preference of the Apostles had been for ‘less chastity and more delicacy’, as Forster wrote. ‘I do not feel my aristocracy are a real aristocracy if they thwart their bodies, since bodies are the instruments through which we register and enjoy the world.’ English demotic journalists, by contrast, attacked other people’s sexual pleasures unless they were conducted at the emotional level of a television sitcom.42
Maurice Oldfield and Chapman Pincher
One of the cruellest cases of money-grubbing victimization involved Maurice Oldfield. Born on a kitchen table in Derbyshire’s Peak District in 1915, he was the eldest of eleven children of a tenant farmer. As a boy he lived in a two-up, two-down cottage, and laboured on his family’s remote sheep-farm. He won a scholarship to Manchester University, where he graduated with a first-class degree and was elected to a fellowship in history. Not enough people thought it wrong that at Manchester there were sexually segregated students unions, one for men and the other for women, until the 1950s. In Manchester he had a love affair with a fellow student, Jimmy Crompton: he did not mention this, and possibly some other early experiences, when he underwent vetting as an intelligence officer. Altogether his career belied the stereotype of the Establishment as an impermeably class-bound congeries of inefficient snobs. After showing his talents while working for SIME in the 1940s, he was posted in 1950 to the SIS station in Singapore, with a remit covering south-east Asia and the east. He remained peripatetic when he became head of station in Singapore in 1956. He had particular success in using unofficial agents, or Friends, among airline crews. The International Olympic Committee was another source of Friends. In 1959 he was chosen as SIS representative in Washington, and was seventh Chief of the Service in 1973–8.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who knew Oldfield, ‘thought him likeable but … rather a bumbler. I could only reconcile his reputation with my impression by assuming that he deliberately simulated stupidity to conceal Machiavellian cunning: but I don’t myself believe this rationalisation’, Oldfield was the first chief of SIS to give formal briefings to the leader of the opposition, in this case Margaret Thatcher. Mutual admiration developed between the two of them. Pincher later claimed to have been Oldfield’s conduit to Thatcher: in fact Oldfield already had a direct route through James Scott-Hopkins, a former SIS officer who was Tory MP for the Derbyshire constituency containing Oldfield’s family farm.43
After retiring from SIS in 1978, Oldfield went to Oxford as a visiting Fellow at All Souls; but in 1979 Thatcher recalled him as coordinator of security intelligence in Northern Ireland. In March 1980 – four months after Thatcher’s public naming of Blunt and in the thick of the toxic clouds of homophobia – a rumour was circulated that Oldfield had evaded his twenty-four-hour Special Branch protection team in Belfast and had visited the Highwayman public house at Comber where he propositioned another man in the urinals. Although this seems unlikely on several counts, the tales were repeated in London, and Sir Robert Armstrong, who was Thatcher’s security adviser as well as Cabinet Secretary, summoned Oldfield for interview in Whitehall. ‘I was utterly aghast to be having to question Maurice on such matters – he was the ultimate loyal civil servant,’ Armstrong recalled thirty years later. He thought it strange that although the allegations originated from Northern Ireland, no material from this phase of Oldfield’s career was put before him. There were only reports of ‘questionable friendships’ during overseas postings. ‘There were no suggestions of impropriety in the physical sense,’ to use the stilted euphemisms of the 1980s, but ‘incontrovertible evidence that he preferred the company of men’, Armstrong said. ‘Maurice made no attempt to deny it; he just sat, sad and broken, and apologized for having lied on his positive vetting forms when they homed in on sexuality.’44
Oldfield tendered his resignation, and had his vetting clearance withdrawn. He underwent two interrogations by MI5’s Cecil Shipp, whom he assured that his sexual exchanges with young men had ended when he was in his mid-twenties. His flat was besieged by reporters hoping to intercept a rent boy whom they could bribe into lubricious extravagances. Oldfield soon fell mortally ill with stomach cancer. In March 1981 he was in his hospital room, surrounded by brothers and sisters, when two policemen ushered in Thatcher. The siblings stood to leave, but she said, ‘No, stay, stay,’ and talked with them agreeably for some time. Then she asked for some moments alone with the dying man. When the Oldfields trooped back after her departure, they found their brother, hitherto calm about his illness, distraught and weeping. It was the first time that any of them had seen him tearful. In answer to their question what was wrong, he replied: ‘Mrs Thatcher asked if I was homosexual. I had to tell her.’ It was the first time that he had mentioned his sexuality to any of his family. He died a few days later.45
The 1980s was a time of vile prejudice against both people with AIDS and male homosexuality. ‘The homosexuals who brought this plague upon us should be locked up,’ an editorial in Pincher’s newspaper the Daily Express approvingly quoted a Solihull grandmother as saying in 1986. ‘Burning is too good for them. Bury them in a pit, and pour on quick-lime.’ Pincher certainly dragged sexual aspersions into his writings whenever he could. Herbert Norman, whom Cornford and Klugmann had converted to communism when he was at Trinity in the 1930s and who killed himself while Canadian Ambassador in Cairo in 1957, is stigmatized as ‘a known homosexual’ in Pincher’s Too Secret Too Long (1984) – an ill-made, misleading, self-confident book. Pincher cited as a source Norman’s biographer James Barros, who however treats this allegation as a slur which originated obscurely and for which there is no evidence except its repetition.46
‘I have to look after my old age,’ Chapman Pinch
er said in 1986. Though his personal myth was that he was a man of the world, he had narrow sexual prejudices. In his potboiler Traitors, published in 1987, for example, he called Blunt, Burgess, Driberg and Maclean ‘gay deceivers’, and Blunt’s brother Wilfrid ‘a self-confessed homosexual’, as if homosexuality was still a crime to be confessed. He cited unnamed psychiatrists as authorities for his belief that ‘what are referred to as “disturbed” homosexuals, like Burgess, feel themselves driven to take revenge on authority, of which the state is an obvious embodiment. Freudians further suggest that this is often the result of upbringing by a hostile or uncaring father and that traitors are hitting back at paternalistic authority.’ Pincher condemned Vassall’s ‘sexual abnormality’, and judged the appointment to Moscow of a man so ‘obvious’ in his ‘perversions’ as ‘a severe indictment of our security services’. He explained: ‘homosexuality is often so compulsive that those addicted to it are driven to take fearful risks to find partners. The risks are compounded by the strange need of many homosexuals to indulge themselves with … guttersnipes … called in the homosexual fraternity “rough trade”.’ Pincher had a new and lucrative target in Oldfield: ‘a surreptitious homosexual’ of ‘staggering duplicity’, who held ‘the highest secret-service position in the land’, but had been unable ‘to control his compulsion’ for ‘rough trade’. The danger was that ‘compulsive homosexuality is easily recognized by others of the fraternity’, which therefore exacerbated ‘the blackmail danger’. Pincher’s obsession with Oldfield’s ‘unfortunate sexual habits’ led him to tell impossible tales of foreign waiters and rent boys being taken to a Westminster flat which was under guard by Scotland Yard protection officers and covered throughout by listening devices.47
Enemies Within Page 69