Pincher’s so-called ‘scoop’ was to find a security officer who believed that a young oriental man, whom he had seen at Oldfield’s flat in Westminster in 1978, had been a sex-worker. Encouraged by Pincher’s publicity, newspapers reported as an agreed fact that Oldfield was, in the Daily Telegraph’s stilted circumlocution, ‘a man with a known penchant for what is colloquially described as “rough trade”’. In response to this press storm, Margaret Thatcher stated in April 1987 that Oldfield’s homosexuality had been a potential although not an actual security risk. Labour’s former Foreign Secretary David Owen said with absurd over-statement that this admission was ‘a devastating blow to the credibility of the security services’, and aggressively referred to the former SIS chief as ‘Maurice Oldfield’ as if, like Blunt, he deserved to be stripped of his knighthood. The Labour backbencher whose parliamentary question had led to Blunt’s naming eight years earlier chimed in to say that if the tales of Oldfield’s ‘disgusting behaviour’ were true, it disgraced the whole country.48
Martin Pearce, Oldfield’s biographer, has shown that the slinking youth was in fact a thirty-eight-year-old paediatrician named Michael Chan, whose family Oldfield had befriended in Singapore a quarter of a century earlier. Chan, who became a Commissioner for Racial Equality in the 1990s and a member of the Press Complaints Commission, received a life peerage in 2001. Such was the reality of the ‘trade’ with whom Pincher imagined Oldfield to be having sex. When Oldfield’s friend Anthony Cavendish challenged Pincher about including the dead man in a book entitled Traitors, and using such tosh, Pincher replied with a wink: ‘You may have a pension, Tony. I need to look after mine.’ George Kennedy Young, Vice Chief of SIS in 1959–61, told the Daily Telegraph of this bestselling book, ‘Chapman Pincher has done the KGB’s work for them.’ The historian Alistair Horne, ex-MI5/SIME, called Pincher ‘a self-serving, disreputable man’. Margaret Thatcher was tetchy when her toady Woodrow Wyatt told her, on the basis of Traitors, that Oldfield was ‘a homosexual who went in for the rough trade’. A few days later Wyatt discussed ‘the Oldfield revelations’ with Rupert Murdoch, who laughed with pride at the recent Sun headline, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Poofter, Spy’.49
The personal history that took Oldfield from some early fun in bed with Jimmy Crompton to the misery of Margaret Thatcher’s well-meant bedside visit had a security risk of zero. Spurious allegations, wild guesses and grubby innuendo continue to fester three decades after Pincher’s Traitors. The facts are forgotten or ignored by journalists who still invoke Oldfield’s name whenever an ‘Establishment sex scandal’ is thought to have occurred. The internet has empowered conspiracy theorists to spread mindless conjectures and nasty fantasies as if they are hard facts. Baseless ‘links’ even connect him to child abuse.50
Chapman Pincher lived to the age of a hundred, trying to the end to sully the truth about Soviet penetration agents or, as the Daily Mail preferred to say, ‘still working away to find proof absolute about Hollis’s betrayal, which many people now accept’. With people like Pincher, said an MI5 officer’s wife Lady Clanmorris, ‘the KGB does not need a disinformation department’. M. R. D. Foot, former intelligence officer and official historian of SOE, was quoted in one obituary: ‘My view of the man would be sulphuric. The stuff he produced on the intelligence services was almost totally inaccurate.’51
Few writers brought ‘a calming sense of reality into the mad world of journalistic spy writing’, regretted Dick White in 1989. ‘In the massive destruction that the journalists have wrought, several worthy people who are dead have lost their reputations. But the reputation of individuals is only one aspect of the matter.’ Costello, among others, ‘feeds the Americans with the sort of stuff they like to read & to believe, the condemnation of the entire British ruling class. One has to say that the damage he has done is worth comparing with the damage done by the spies themselves. As to the Services wh. have been so unmercifully battered I fear for the morale of their members & the effect on future security.’ A year later, when Cairncross was publicly identified by Gordievsky as the Fifth Man, Trevor-Roper recapitulated the aims and achievements of the Cambridge ring of five. ‘Their intention was to destroy Western civilisation, which they held to be doomed, and to replace it by Stalinist communism, which they supposed to be perfect, or at least perfectible.’ Their faith in the historic inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat proved ‘totally, diametrically and for themselves tragically wrong’, continued Trevor-Roper. ‘The system which they idealised, and to which they sold themselves, is bankrupt. The West, of which they despaired as irreformable, is reformed.’ The enduring legacy of the ring of five in Britain ‘was a poison of suspicion which, for a generation, has infected the already enclosed and stifling atmosphere of secret intelligence’.52
The deceptive publicity that began with The Climate of Treason gulled millions of readers in Britain and abroad, and demeaned the men and women of intelligence and moral purpose who had joined the secret services. The mole-hunters of the 1980s were foul-minded, mercenary and pernicious. Their besmirching of individuals and institutions changed the political culture and electoral moods of Britain far beyond any achievement of Moscow agents or agencies.
Envoi
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United Kingdom coexisted as rival powers for over seventy years. For four of those years they were allies in a global war which extended the power of the USSR into the satellite states of eastern Europe just as the UK began its unprecedented programme of decolonization; but for most of the period between 1917 and 1991 there was a deadly antagonism between them. The two conglomerated states were bound together by their hostile preoccupations with one another: their ideologies, armaments, diplomacy, propaganda and secret services vied for the same prizes. In espionage and counter-espionage they paced and marked one another: Moscow watched and learnt from London in the 1920s, by courtesy of the Ewer–Hayes espionage network, just as London learnt its counter-espionage from watching and turning Moscow’s agents and sub-agents. During the short spell of Anglo-Soviet intelligence cooperation in Iran during 1944–5 this mutual education was explicit. Western commentators often dwell on Moscow’s successes with such agents as Blake and Philby, but understate the maladroitness of the KGB and its anterior agencies, and seldom mention the irrecuperable setback to communist espionage caused by the mass expulsion from London of Soviet representatives in 1971.
A primary intention of this book is to test the entrenched assumptions about upper-class corruption and Establishment cover-ups that began with the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, intensified after Philby’s defection in 1963 and became unassailable after Blunt’s public shaming in 1979. As avowed Marxists, the Cambridge spies justified their espionage activities in the language of class struggle. Their propagandist explanations were magnified and distorted by journalists who wanted to profit from angry headlines and indignant columns. The notions prevailed that Burgess and Maclean had got their jobs in the Foreign Office by exploiting the old-school-tie network; that they had been shielded from exposure as communist spies by the class loyalties of other diplomats; that in 1962–3 Philby had been allowed to avoid arrest by fleeing to the Soviet Union as part of a class-bound Establishment cover-up; that when clinching evidence forced Anthony Blunt’s confession of espionage in 1964, his knighthood and post in the Royal Household had saved him from criminal trial.
This book has shown that none of the Cambridge five was upper class or descended from the traditional ruling orders. The immunity from prosecution given to Blunt and Cairncross showed no more favouritism than did the authorities’ handling of the largely working-class Ewer–Hayes network of the 1920s or the lower-middle-class Meredith–Vernon network of the 1930s. The Soviet handlers of Percy Glading and Klaus Fuchs, among others, were moreover enabled to leave the country rather than detained to testify as potentially uncontrollable witnesses in criminal trials. Indeed spy trials – those of Glading, Nunn May, Fuchs, Marshall,
Blake and Vassall among others – were carefully managed in their evidence, and are a poor guide to the facts behind the cases. Prosecutions and jury trials were avoided not in order to protect members of privileged classes, but because the clinching evidence – such as VENONA decrypts or material from defectors – could not be aired in open court. Juries in any case were chary of state prosecutions of the leakers of official secrets. ‘The difficulty’, said the Attorney General Sir Michael Havers in 1985, ‘is getting a jury willing to convict on the facts in Official Secrets cases.’ The standards of proof needed in anything but show-trials and kangaroo courts are more exacting than those needed by editors to justify inflammatory headlines.1
The advantages for the security services of cultivating and developing a spy as an informant should be obvious, even if some journalists denounce the authorities for doing so. Barack Obama’s administration was reviled by right-wing Americans after Umar Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to explode an aircraft flying from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009, was given a Miranda warning, indicating his right to keep silent in police custody. This upholding of legal rights and civil liberties proved to be an intelligence success. Abdulmutallab volunteered information after being informed of his right to avoid self-incrimination.
Other conventional interpretations are challenged in this book. I argue that the security lapses in the recruitment of wartime officials in London during 1939–41 were less grievous or numerous than those in Washington after 1941. I show that the culture of departmental trust, and the mild vetting system used in London until 1951, seemed preferable at the time to Gestapo methods, Stalinist purges, American loyalty tests or HUAC scapegoating. I suggest that the preoccupation with class loyalties and social exclusion, which has dominated histories of communist espionage in Britain, is a species of self-serving Marxism which relies on illusory or falsified readings of the English class system (social identities in Ireland, Scotland and Wales have no part in this narrative). Burgess lied about the protection of his career by fellow Old Etonians, and much of the other class analysis is factually unsound. My belief is that the dynamics of departments in government ministries and agency were gender-bound more than class-bound. The monopoly of power and influence by men, and the exclusion of all but a few women from anything other than secretarial services, was dominant in the nature of both their management and the complicity and cooperation among colleagues. This new insight will seem self-evident to some readers, while others will not relinquish their primary loyalty to class analysis.
What else must be said of the whips and scourges which have belaboured England’s Establishment since the 1950s? They have been wielded by journalists, by fantasists and by others worming their way to political power. Governing institutions, notably the Security Service and the Foreign Office, have been subjected to ill-informed or malicious attacks. This book however demonstrates that MI5 was not the resting-place of inflexible blimps, superannuated Indian policemen, expensively educated silly asses or obtuse reactionaries. The Security Service’s officers were generally subtle, patient, responsive and astute, although never super-human or infallible. They preferred to play long games rather than to score quick results. Their achievements, as recounted in this book, are as considerable as could reasonably be expected. It needs to be stressed, though, that there is an irreconcilable antagonism between the intelligence services and populists. The former are concerned with risk assessment, with calibrations of possibilities and likelihoods, and with managing future difficulties. The latter believe that the future cannot be predicted with rational precision, that imprudence is a form of moral courage, that thoughtless subjectivity is a valid mode in risk assessment, and that anyone who pretends to make expert forecasts is manipulating opinion for discreditable purposes.
The quiet intelligence of diplomacy, like the desk-work of counter-espionage officers, is often less respected than the emotive noise of parliamentarians. ‘There is nothing dramatic about the success of a diplomatist,’ said the nineteenth-century Foreign Secretary Lord Salisbury. ‘His virtues are composed of a series of microscopic advantages: of a judicious suggestion here, an opportune civility there, a wise concession at one moment and a far-sighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness, unshakeable patience.’ These virtues are seldom understood or admired by the populace. The attacks on the Diplomatic Service beginning in the 1950s by George Brown, Richard Crossman and others were intentionally crowd-pleasing and destructive. Vituperation of political opponents was not new; but systematic denigration of an administrative cadre was historically unprecedented. This onslaught was intended to neutralize, subdue and weaken government departments for the benefit of socialist programmes. The aim was to force civil servants into submission to the will of politicians claiming to represent the will of the people: to curb officials in their guidance of policy-thinking, in their dispelling of false hopes and in their predictions of coming snares.2
Government by the knowledgeable – epistocracy – has been superseded in most of the English-speaking world by a version of democracy that elevates opinion above knowledge. When Michael Gove, a Cabinet minister campaigning for Brexit during the European referendum of 2016, made his unforgivable remark, ‘People in this country have had enough of experts,’ he was parroting attitudes that had first arisen in political discourse after the defections of 1951. He was stoking the attack on knowledge and informed judgement, fostering the populist delusion that one person’s opinion is as good as any other, and pretending that it is improper to value trained minds and rational expertise higher than instincts, inklings, hunches and over-emotional fudge. The process whereby public leaders and experienced minds began to capitulate to people less informed than themselves started when Burgess and Maclean hurried aboard the night boat to Saint Malo.3
In Anthony Powell’s words, ‘The intellectual arrogance of clever people, intolerable though it often is, is nothing to the intellectual arrogance of ignorant people.’ It is a democratic illusion that the voters of a democracy are more immune than those of totalitarian states from the distortion of reality. Democracy is a volatile system with which to direct and empower international policy. Citizens in any nation state can lose their sense of proportion or their aversion to conflict under the impetus of patriotism. Aggression is the outcome of national pride and of an overriding belief in the value of national sovereignty.4
There is a good reason for the expertise of MI5 to be called ‘intelligence work’. It requires brainwork as well as desk-work: it requires checking, reassessing and constant thought. These proficiencies do not always fit with the national temper. Intelligence, whether individual or departmental, together with official competence, can be unwelcome to those who prefer to face risks with stubborn denial of their existence or with a roulette player’s ruinous trust in luck. ‘The British always think that they have something in hand,’ Lord Vansittart wrote in retirement in the 1950s. ‘At first it was vague superiority: “one Briton can beat three foreigners”.’ When that failed in 1914–18, Vansittart continued, ‘they banked on geographical detachment and, when that failed too, they stopped thinking’.5
Picture Section
Sir Robert Vansittart was the first head of the Foreign Office to give his full trust to intelligence material.
Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Leninist MP for Leyton East, was later an agent of influence for imperial Japan.
Jack Hayes, the MP whose Vigilance Detective Agency was manned by aggrieved ex-policemen who spied for Moscow.
MI5’s agent M/1, Graham Pollard, may have been first cultivated at a Putney school sports event.
Agent M/12, Olga Gray, was first approached while playing clock golf at a Birmingham garden party.
Percy Glading, leader of the Woolwich Arsenal and Holland Road spy ring, which M/12 penetrated for Knight.
Wilfrid Vernon, the MP who filched aviation secrets for Stalinist Russia and admired Maoist China.
The Cambridge economist Maurice Dobb w
as a dedicated communist proselytizer among undergraduates of the 1930s.
‘A. Blunt was the life and soul of the party,’ said Lytton Strachey, who took this snap of a boating party on the River Ouse in 1930.
Moscow’s talent-scout Edith Tudor-Hart first spotted Philby’s potential, and later worked with Glading.
Cambridge spies and MI5 officers alike endured the Blitz in London. This scene in Pall Mall is yards from the Athenaeum, Reform and Travellers clubs, of which the Cambridge quintet were members.
Andrew Cohen was a pre-war Oxford communist who later came under Peter Wright’s indiscriminate suspicion. Here, as Governor of Uganda, he shares a dais with the Kabaka of Buganda.
Philby’s early associate Peter Smolka, who (as Peter Smollett) worked for Moscow in the wartime Ministry of Information.
Alexander Foote – author of A Handbook for Spies – spied for Moscow before defecting to the British in Berlin and cooperating with MI5.
The revelations of Igor Gouzenko, the Russian cipher clerk who defected in 1945, signalled the start of the Cold War. Previous Soviet defectors had been killed on Moscow’s orders, so when he met American reporters he had to make himself unrecognizable to Soviet informers.
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