Donald Maclean perched on Jock Balfour’s desk at the Washington embassy, with Nicholas Henderson and Denis Greenhill.
Special Branch’s Jim Skardon (left; on his way to testify at Klaus Fuchs’s trial) was the prime interrogator of Soviet spies, and of their associates, office colleagues and families.
Lord Inverchapel, as ambassador in Washington, appreciating young American manhood.
A carefree family without a secret in the world: Melinda and Donald Maclean.
Dora Philby and her son in her Kensington flat after he had been exonerated in parliament from being the Third Man.
Many people fell for Philby’s charm. None felt more betrayed or broken by his duplicity than his wife Aileen – here facing prying journalists at her front door.
The betrayer of atomic secrets Alan Nunn May, after his release from prison, enjoys the benefits of the Affluent Society.
The exiled Guy Burgess lies festering beside the Black Sea.
John Vassall was a pert, wily urban survivor whom the official story misrepresented as an inexperienced, vulnerable man open to blackmail.
George Blake returns from his incarceration in North Korea bursting with energy and primed to spy and betray within SIS.
Despite George Brown’s scorn for diplomats, he was appointed Foreign Secretary. The job’s burdens and refreshments made him stumble.
Although Richard Crossman was a master propagandist against the Establishment, he was not a populist at ease with the Common Man.
The Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer was thought in the Foreign Office to be doing Moscow’s dirty work.
Maurice Oldfield of SIS – here with his mother and sister outside Buckingham Palace – became in retirement the object of calumny
NOTES
Chapter 1: The Moscow Apparatus
1. Sir John Balfour, Not Too Correct an Aureole: The Recollections of a Diplomat (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1983), p. 89; Documents on British Policy Overseas (hereafter DBPO), series 1, vol. 6 (London: HMSO, 1991), p. 324.
2. In this paragraph and throughout this chapter I have followed the ideas and even the phrases of an indispensable guide, Stephen A. Smith’s Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
3. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 1–2.
4. Victor Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), p. 99.
5. The preceding paragraphs follow Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
6. R. C. Zaehner, Concordant Discord: The Interdependence of Faiths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 418.
7. Stephen A. Smith, ‘Towards a Global History of Communism’, in Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 7; Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), pp. 339, 342.
8. Smith, ‘Towards a Global History of Communism’, pp. 6–7.
9. Giles Ury, Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left (London: Backbite, 2017), p. 163.
10. Smith, Russia in Revolution, pp. 183–7.
11. Sebestyen, Lenin the Dictator, pp. 348, 387–8.
12. Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Holmes–Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr Justice Holmes and Harold Laski, 1916–1935, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 829–30.
13. Lars T. Lih, ‘Lenin and Bolshevism’, in Smith, ed., Oxford Handbook of History of Communism, p. 68.
14. Cambridge University Library, Vickers microfilm R346, Emile Cohn to Sir Vincent Caillard, 15 September 1922.
15. Georges Agabekov, OGPU: The Russian Secret Terror (New York: Brentano, 1931), pp. ix, 266.
16. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 38; Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (London: Collins, 1971), pp. 14, 79–80.
17. Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 1 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929), pp. 312–13.
18. The National Archives (hereafter NA) FO 371/10495, N2488/2140/38, Sir Eyre Crowe, minute of 22 March 1924; Smith, Russia in Revolution, pp. 164, 188, 383–4.
19. George Slocombe, The Tumult and the Shouting (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 266; Sir Reader Bullard, The Camels Must Go (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 159; Julian and Margaret Bullard, eds, Inside Stalin’s Russia: The Diaries of Reader Bullard 1930–1934 (Charlbury: Day Books, 2000), p. 15; Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 174n.; Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. xv.
20. Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, ‘Bulgarian Terrors’, Manchester Guardian, 24 April 1925, p. 12.
21. Alexander Vatlin, ‘The Evolution of the Comintern, 1919–1943’, in Smith, ed., Oxford Handbook of History of Communism, pp. 188, 190; Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied for Russia (London: Hutchinson, 1979), p. 100.
22. Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 361.
23. Documents on British Foreign Policy, series 1A, vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1966), p. 728.
24. Kevin McDermott, ‘Stalin and Stalinism’, in Smith, ed., Oxford Handbook of History of Communism, pp. 73–4, 77.
25. Smith, Russia in Revolution, p. 389.
26. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, series 2, vol. 7 (London: HMSO, 1958), pp. 97, 123, 138.
27. House of Commons debates, vol. 114, cols 2940 & 2942, 16 April 1919; W. N. Ewer, ‘After the Break’, Labour Monthly, 9 (July 1927), p. 414.
28. NA KV 2/2670, serial 54a, minute from Paris, 10 December 1929.
29. Cambridge, Wren Library, Trinity College, Dobb papers DD/4, Dobb, ‘The Russian Revolution’, paper to Pembroke College’s Martlet Society, 1920.
30. Sir Owen O’Malley, The Phantom Caravan (London: John Murray, 1954), pp. 70, 72, 86, 214; Bullard, Inside Stalin’s Russia, p. 19.
31. Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, p. 39.
32. Boris Volodarsky, Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 163-5; Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbours, p. 57.
33. Elizabeth Poretsky, Our Own People: A Memoir of ‘Ignace Reiss’ and his Friends (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 74.
34. Ibid., pp. 102–3.
35. Ibid., pp. 69, 71.
36. Peter Holquist, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Context’, Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), p. 415; Poretsky, Our Own People, p. 109.
37. Boris Volodarsky, ‘Unknown Agabekov’, Intelligence and National Security, 28 (2013), p. 893; ‘OGPU Deserter Mystery: Story of his Work against Britain’, Morning Post, 3 July 1930; NA KV 2/2398.
38. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 179–80.
39. NA FO 371/10495, N6941/2140/38, despatches 787 & 812 of R. M. Hodgson, Moscow, 22 & 30 August 1924; Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 3 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930), pp. 190–1.
40. Andrew and Mitrokhin, Mitrokhin Archive, p. 47.
41. George Slocombe, A Mirror to Geneva: Its Growth, Grandeur and Decay (New York: Henry Holt, 1938), p. 5.
42. NA FO 850/2, Y775/775/650, report of Valentine Vivian dated 20 February 1937, and undated minute of Sir Robert Vansittart.
43. Basil Liddell Hart, Europe in Arms (London: Faber & Faber, 1937), p. 13; Cambridge, Churchill College archives, ACAD 1/9, diary of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 26 January 1940; NA FO 371/21198, R1687/224/92, minutes of Sir Owen O’Malley, Sir Orme Sargent and Sir Alexander Cadogan, 11 March 1937.
44. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, pp. 180–2.
45. DBPO, series 1, vol. 2 (London: HMSO, 1985),
pp. 650–1.
46. Balfour, Not Too Correct, pp. 89, 92; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 205–6.
47. Balfour, Not Too Correct, pp. 89, 92.
48. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Red Tsar, pp. 168–76.
49. Ibid., pp. 176, 196, 287–8.
50. D. N. Pritt, The Zinoviev Trial (London: Gollancz, 1936), pp. 4, 20, 21, 29; Pritt, ‘How the trial struck a British lawyer’, News Chronicle, 3 September 1936, reproduced in Anon., The Moscow Trial (1936) (London: Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, 1936), pp. 10–11.
51. Balfour, Not Too Correct, pp. 96–7; Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: Red Tsar, pp. 422–3.
52. DBPO, series 1, vol. 11 (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 16; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mss Eng c 6888, f. 90, Hugh Trevor-Roper to Sir Patrick Reilly, undated [mid-December 1959]; Mandelstam, Hope against Hope, p. 34.
53. J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 557; David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 273.
Chapter 2: The Intelligence Division
1. William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth … (London: Harper & Amery, 1675 edition), book 3, p. 364.
2. Sir Victor Wellesley, Diplomacy in Fetters (London: Hutchinson, 1944), p. 16.
3. See John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993 edition).
4. Andrew Lang, Pickle the Spy, or the incognito of Prince Charles (London: Longman, 1897), pp. 5–6, 194, 285; Jacqueline Riding, Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 223, 230, 321. See also Lesley Lewis, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth-Century Italy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).
5. Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty, 1789–1848 (London: Collins, 2014), p. 150.
6. George Augustus Sala, Gaslight and Daylight with some London scenes they shine upon (London: Chapman & Hall, 1859), pp. 88-91; Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), pp. 315, 317, 321.
7. Brian Stewart and Samantha Newbery, Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence (London: Hurst, 2015), pp. 67, 100; Viscount Mersey, A Picture of Life, 1872–1940 (London: John Murray, 1941), p. 362.
8. William Beaver, Under Every Leaf: How Britain Played the Greater Game from Afghanistan to Asia (London: Biteback, 2012), p. 1.
9. Ibid., p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 44.
11. Major General Lord Edward Gleichen, A Guardsman’s Memories: A Book of Recollections (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1932), p. 176.
12. Andrew Gailey, The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (London: John Murray, 2015), p. 231.
13. Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 194; Beaver, Under Every Leaf, p. 63.
14. Gleichen, Guardsman’s Memories, p. 78; Beaver, Under Every Leaf, p. 4; J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 103.
15. See generally Richard Davenport-Hines, Dudley Docker: The Life and Times of a Trade Warrior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Davenport-Hines, ‘The Ottoman Empire in Decline: The Business Imperialism of Sir Vincent Caillard, 1883-1898’, in Robert Turrell and Jean-Jacques van Helten, eds, The City and the Empire (London: Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1985).
16. Beaver, Under Every Leaf, p. 293; Gleichen, Guardsman’s Memories, p. 188.
17. Sir Henry Hozier, The Seven Weeks’ War: Its Antecedents and its Incidents (London: Macmillan, 1867), pp. 113–14.
18. Mersey, Picture of Life, pp. 185-6.
19. Gailey, Lost Imperialist, pp. 229-30; Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring Rice, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1929), p. 301.
20. I follow in this paragraph and elsewhere an informative source: Matthew Seligmann, Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
21. Sir Kenneth Strong, Intelligence at the Top: The Recollections of an Intelligence Officer (London: Cassell, 1968), p. 220; Donald Lindsay, Forgotten General: A Life of Andrew Thorne (Wilton: Michael Russell, 1987), pp. 103–13.
22. Lord Eustace Percy, Some Memories (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), p. 11.
23. A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896–1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 107-8, 156–7; J. Lee Thompson, Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865–1922 (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 134; Beaver, Under Every Leaf, pp. 290–1.
24. Vansittart, Mist Procession, p. 109; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Inverchapel papers, box 19, Lord Eustace Percy to Archie Clark Kerr, 3 October 1913.
25. Percy Savage, Savage of Scotland Yard (London: Hutchinson, 1934), quoted in ‘German Spy Organisation Smashed’, in Dennis Wheatley, ed., A Century of Spy Stories (London: Hutchinson, 1938), pp. 93–5.
26. John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (London: Quercus, 2016), pp. 105–6.
Chapter 3: The Whitehall Frame of Mind
1. Cambridge University Library, Templewood papers 2/37, memorandum by Sir Basil Thomson, 1918.
2. Stuart Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics in the Age of Baldwin and MacDonald: The Headlam Diaries, 1923–1935 (London: The Historians’ Press, 1992), p. 121.
3. Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939 (London: Hogarth Press, 1967), pp. 18–20.
4. Durham Cathedral Library, diary of Herbert Hensley Henson, 7 May 1919.
5. Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 1 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1929), pp. 20, 22.
6. ‘Lenin’s courier sentenced’, The Times, 3 November 1920, p. 5; ‘Letters for Lenin’, Manchester Guardian, 3 November 1920, p. 9; Giles Ury, Labour and the Gulag: Russia and the Seduction of the British Left (London: Backbite, 2017), pp. 53–5.
7. ‘M.P. to Meet Sedition Charge’, Manchester Guardian, 13 November 1920, p. 10.
8. ‘Mr. Malone Held to be a Dangerous Person’, Manchester Guardian, 20 November 1920, p. 12; NA KV 2/1905, minute 57 of 6 March 1934; NA KV 2/1907, minute 793, Courtenay Young to Roger Fulford, 5 April 1942.
9. Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (London: Heinemann, 1932), p. 132; NA FO 371/10478, N3844/104/38, Comintern to CPGB, 7 April 1924.
10. Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 43; Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Wartime Journals, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 149; Brian Stewart and Samantha Newbery, Why Spy? The Art of Intelligence (London: Hurst, 2015), p. 7.
11. Stuart Ball, ed., Conservative Politics in National and Imperial Crisis: Letters from Britain to the Viceroy of India, 1926–31 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 127; Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 10.
12. NA KV 2/997, no serial, unsigned report ‘James McGuirk Hughes’, December 1925, and serial 39a, A. W. G. Tomlins, ‘McGuirk Hughes’, 16 February 1926.
13. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mss Eng c 6565, journal of Sir Donald Somervell, 1937, ‘The Macmahon [sic] case’.
14. Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery, pp. 76-7.
15. Lady Donaldson of Kingsbridge, The British Council: The First Fifty Years (London: Cape, 1984), p. 44.
16. Documents on British Foreign Policy, series 2, vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1946), pp. 478–9.
17. Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Holmes–Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr Justice Holmes and Harold Laski, 1916–1935, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 1200.
18. Kenneth Young, ed., The Diaries of Sir Robert B
ruce Lockhart, 1915–1938 (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 204, 355–6; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mss Eng c 6918, unpublished memoirs of Sir Patrick Reilly, f. 206.
19. Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery, p. 58.
20. Cambridge, Churchill College archives, ACAD 1/8, diary of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 16 November 1939; Anthony Reed and David Fisher, Colonel Z: The Life and Times of a Master of Spies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984).
21. Nigel West, ed., The Guy Liddell Diaries: MI5’s Director of Counter-Espionage in World War II, vol. 1: 1939–1942 (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 68, 77.
22. Lord D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace, vol. 3 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930), p. 59; Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), p. 144.
23. D’Abernon, Ambassador of Peace, vol. 3, p. 31; Sir Owen O’Malley, The Phantom Caravan (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 45; Cambridge, Churchill College archives, Phipps papers 3/3, Sir Maurice Hankey to Sir Eric Phipps, 11 January 1938.
24. Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 44; Ball, Conservative Politics, p. 132.
25. James Ramsden, ed., George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book (Settrington: Stone Trough, 2002), p. 63.
26. Vansittart, Mist Procession, p. 369; Sir Victor Wellesley, Diplomacy in Fetters (London: Hutchinson, 1944), pp. 178–80, 183. These themes are explored in Julie Gottlieb, ‘Guilty Women’, Foreign Policy, and Appeasement in Inter-War Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Enemies Within Page 71