It is possible that the KGB fooled Burgess into believing that, as soon as he had seen Maclean safely onto some aeroplane or boat bound for Soviet bloc territory, he could return home. That would account for the details of his departure that strongly suggested that he believed he would be returning within a day or two. In the result, he was required to travel all the way to Moscow and to remain there. The KGB was wise to do this in the view of MI5 officers who studied the many facets of the case. Burgess had not only been drinking to wild excess but had also been taking drugs, and his general behaviour was thought to be symptomatic of such a deterioration that he, too, might easily crack under interrogation.
There can be little doubt that Burgess remained behind the Iron Curtain with extreme reluctance. His loathing of Russia as a place to live and his longing for London may well have accounted for his eventual fallout with Maclean in Moscow, as reported by a friend, the late John Mossman. It was Maclean’s fault that he was there. Had Maclean been man enough to flee on his own, he and Philby might have remained unsuspected for many more years.
Burgess’s yearning for the home country he betrayed so systematically expressed itself pathetically. A former friend, the late Whitney Straight, elder brother of Michael Straight, who looked him up while visiting Moscow, reported, ‘Burgess was wearing his Old Etonian tie and I found him very patriotic. Whatever he has done, I think he has retained his fundamental interest in England and he loves the old country.’
As Blunt recalled when questioned about Burgess, the renegade Old Etonian had led such a lush life that MI5 should have queried the source of his income. For years he had run what amounted to a private dining club at the Dorchester Hotel, with influential politicians, diplomats and businessmen attending and talking freely as they enjoyed the good food and wine for which the Russians paid. Despite Burgess’s scruffiness and reputation for deliberately shocking conduct, there were many distinguished people who could not resist his company, including several who must have known that he was a Russian spy because he had tried to recruit them. When his treachery became apparent by his defection, they still kept his secret until interrogated themselves after the unmasking of Anthony Blunt.
Recourse to old MI5 records during the debriefing of Blunt recalled that suspicion had been slightly aroused when Burgess had arranged a meeting between Lord Inverchapel (formerly Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr) and Anatoli Gorski, the Soviet spymaster who was later found to have controlled Blunt and others under the codename ‘Henry’. Inverchapel, who was then on leave in London, was the British ambassador in Moscow and on such close terms with Stalin that the Russian dictator allowed him to take his Russian valet with him when he left the Soviet Union. The meeting had been arranged by Burgess at the request of another man who turned out to be a KGB agent, an Austrian journalist working under the name Peter Smollett but whose real name was Peter Smolka.
Blunt confirmed, as had long been suspected, that Smollett, who worked in the Russian department of the Ministry of Information during the war, was a professional KGB agent. MI5 had been disinclined to question Inverchapel, who could easily have fabricated an excuse for meeting a Russian ‘diplomat’ in line of duty while on leave. They expected that he would put in a report about the meeting to the Foreign Office, but he never did so. Burgess, when questioned, had shrugged off the conversation as being of no consequence, and MI5 never discovered what had transpired. Many doubts have since been raised about Inverchapel, who had once worked in China, where he had been associated with the KGB recruiter Agnes Smedley.
Mr Gordon W. Creighton, who was first secretary under Inverchapel in Chungking, has told me how Guenther Stein, a member of the Soviet spy ring run by Richard Sorge, had secured British nationality and journalistic cover jobs through Inverchapel’s influence.
Immediately after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, Blunt received an urgent message to meet Modin, which he duly did in London. Modin warned him that, because of his known friendship with Burgess and their professional relationship in MI5, he was bound to come under deep suspicion himself. In the inevitable interrogation, likely to be hostile, it was felt in Moscow that he also might talk too freely and give leads to other British-born agents still active for the Soviets. Modin told him that the KGB Centre had decided that the safest way out of the situation was for Blunt to defect as well. It was a clear order, and Modin stressed that he had the escape arrangements all prepared and that there was little time for argument.
Nevertheless, Blunt insisted that he did need time to think, particularly in view of his royal appointment. Sitting in the comfortable splendour of the beautifully appointed director’s flat in the Courtauld Institute, surrounded by his valuable art collection – including the big Poussin oil painting that he had picked up for £80 in Paris and, currently worth a fortune, was tastefully framed above his mantelpiece – he decided that he could not bear to leave the country he had consistently betrayed for the grimness of a meagre apartment in Moscow.
To Modin’s surprise, Blunt told him that he intended to remain because he was confident that he could handle the situation. He was sure that MI5 had never entertained serious suspicion of him before and therefore could have no hard evidence against him. As for being able to lie his way through any interrogation, however harsh, he reminded Modin that he had applied the KGB advice successfully before – admit nothing, deny everything, but keep on talking to discover how much your interrogators know.
Furthermore, Blunt argued, whatever MI5 might eventually discover, the government would not sanction any prosecution against a personal servant of the monarch. Presumably, when balancing the pros and cons of the defection, the KGB Centre had taken into account the extra damage to Anglo–American relations through the additional publicity that the involvement of a royally appointed knight would occasion. So Modin must have been concerned for his own position following his failure to induce Blunt to obey orders. His success in getting Maclean and Burgess away must have stood him in sufficiently good stead for him to have been given responsibility twelve years later for the Philby defection.
Soon after it was established that Maclean and Burgess had been spirited out by the Russians, the security authorities became confident that they knew the identities of the three KGB spies referred to in the Moscow–London radio traffic as ‘Hicks’, ‘Stanley’ and ‘Johnson’. They knew that Burgess was ‘Hicks’ and felt sure that ‘Stanley’ was Philby. Believing that ‘Johnson’ was Blunt, they subjected him to the interrogation that Modin and the Centre had feared.
When Mrs Thatcher made her statement on Blunt to Parliament in 1979, she said that he had originally been questioned after a witness had belatedly reported that he had heard Burgess remark, back in 1937, that he was a secret Comintern agent. That was true, but the prime reason for Blunt’s quick interrogation after the disappearance of Burgess was their previous association inside MI5.
Much has been made of the fact that Blunt was interrogated eleven times between 1951 and 1964, when he eventually confessed. Those grillings, carried out by Helenus Milmo, the barrister, and Jim Skardon, who had broken Fuchs, were tough, but, as Blunt has confirmed, most of the interrogation sessions were ‘comfortable conversations’ simply because the interrogators had no hard information with which to confront him. They were relying on admissions he might make, and, as Blunt had predicted so confidently to Yuri Modin, he was able to handle the situation by consistent lying.
Most of the sessions were held in the months following the double defection, and just how comfortable they were can be judged from the following extraordinary episode. As one of the first moves in the investigation of Burgess’s disappearance, MI5 needed to search his flat in New Bond Street. Blunt was found to have a set of keys to it, so he opened it up, entered it with a team of MI5 men and offered to help in the search. Though he was under suspicion himself, his help was accepted.
In the untidy three-room flat, there were stacks of letters from friends, some of them homosexuals, w
ho were furious when they were eventually interviewed by the security authorities. Most of the letters were in shoeboxes, which Burgess also used for storing the hundreds of bank notes he received at intervals from his Russian controller.
None of the letters read by the MI5 men over the ensuing days produced any definite lead about the escape, but there had, in fact, been one letter in the flat containing a vital clue to the Ring of Five, and after his confession thirteen years later Blunt revealed with some amusement how he had managed to remove it.
Burgess was a great reader, and the flat was full of books, each of which had to be shaken for possible hidden documents. Only one document was found, and it chanced to be in the section of the shelves being searched by Blunt. It was a letter to Burgess from Philby, and it told him that, if ever he were in desperate straits, there was a certain woman living in London to whom he could go for help, as this woman knew about Philby’s secret life. It was, in fact, Flora Solomon, whose evidence finally enabled the security authorities to induce Philby to admit that he was a spy, in 1963. Had they seen the letter then, in 1951, they would certainly have interviewed Mrs Solomon and she might have given them the evidence they needed. Unfortunately for MI5 but in line with the usual luck of the Ring of Five, Blunt realised the importance of the letter when he glanced at it and put it, unnoticed, in his pocket.
When eventually recounting this story to MI5, Blunt showed no remorse at having enabled Philby to escape. Apart from the fact that in 1951 he was still an ardent communist, prepared to help the KGB, if asked, he feared that the lead in the letter might loop back on himself. Furthermore, he retained great admiration for Philby: ‘Ah, Kim was a real professional. Kim never faltered; never had doubts.’
Blunt also described how he and Philby used to meet frequently after the 1951 crisis, when Philby had been forced to resign from the secret service because of deep suspicion against him in the CIA and in MI5, and how they would discuss their chances of continuing to survive exposure.
He revealed that he had paid a visit to the Middle East in 1961 and had seen Philby in Beirut, meeting him in the British embassy, where he should have been persona non grata. Philby was then working as a journalist for The Observer and The Economist, but, as nobody in the secret service thought he was anything but loyal, he had been taken back on the payroll as an agent-runner. Blunt had gone around to Philby’s flat in Beirut where his host had said, ‘I have been asked by our friends to make contact with you, Anthony, but I told them that you are not in a position to do anything useful.’ Blunt said that he had answered, ‘That is so, Kim.’
This admission is proof enough that, though Blunt claims that he greatly regrets what he did to his country, he had firm evidence that Philby was still an active KGB agent in 1961 and kept quiet about it.
When exposing Blunt in Parliament, Mrs Thatcher revealed that on one occasion between 1951 and 1956 Blunt helped Philby to recontact Russian intelligence. Blunt’s detailed account of this episode is even more like spy fiction, though unquestionably true.
In 1954, Blunt was delivering a public lecture on the history of art and, when it ended, a group of enthusiasts clustered around him to ask questions. Among the upturned faces, he was astonished to see that of his old controller ‘Peter’ – Yuri Modin, the man who organised the defection of Burgess and Maclean and instructed him to go, too. Modin handed him a picture postcard of a painting and asked his opinion. Written in a semicircle, in what Blunt recognised as Guy Burgess’s handwriting, was the message ‘Meet me at 8 o’clock tomorrow night, Angel, Caledonian Road.’
This instruction referred to a standard rendezvous of the past, but when Blunt attended it, there was no Burgess, only Modin, who asked him to set up a clandestine meeting with Philby. Presumably, Modin had induced Burgess to write the message in Moscow in the belief that Blunt would be unable to resist going to meet him, while he might decline a straightforward contact with Russian intelligence.
Blunt accomplished Modin’s modest request by writing to Philby, who was then in England, and he believes that this was the occasion to which Philby referred in his book, My Silent War, in the passage describing how ‘through the most ingenious of routes’ he had received a message from his Soviet friends ‘conjuring him to be of good cheer’.
Blunt may be mistaken and the ‘route’ may have been very different, as I shall describe in a later chapter. Nevertheless, a backtrack of MI5 showed that Modin had returned specially to Britain by surreptitious means because he was not supposed to be in the country for any official purpose.
Recently I have been able to establish why the KGB resumed contact with Philby after severing it in 1951. Peter Smolka, who by that time was running a toy factory in Austria, was an old friend of Philby, having shared a journalistic enterprise with him before the war. The KGB feared that Philby might have been ‘turned’ by British intelligence after his dismissal from the secret service so Smolka, whose loyalty to the Russians was never in doubt, was closely questioned about him for several days. He convinced the KGB that Philby would never work against the Soviet Union. Philby was therefore reactivated for future use.
CHAPTER 15
AN UNLIKELY INFORMER
THROUGHOUT THE YEARS after the defection of Maclean and Burgess in 1951, Blunt, for all his bland composure, must have been haunted by the fear that some communist defector might expose him. As I have outlined, this is exactly what happened in 1964, though by an individual who was probably not on Blunt’s list as a likely informer.
The Prime Minister chose not to disclose the details during her exposure of Blunt. I appreciate her reasons, but I can describe the incident and its consequences in sufficient detail to demonstrate the truth of them.
Among several overseas students talent-spotted and cultivated by the Ring of Five at Cambridge and then recruited by Soviet intelligence was Michael Whitney Straight, a young American who was exceptionally talented and politically minded. He was an open communist and had visited Russia. A contemporary, T. E. B. Howarth, has described him as ‘the most glamorous figure of the Cambridge far left. With the prestige of a double first in economics to add to his reputation as Cambridge’s leading socialite, Straight was a very potent influence on his generation.’
Straight has described to me how Blunt, then a young tutor at Cambridge, had recruited him to work secretly for the Comintern in 1937:
While I was at Cambridge, my best friend, John Cornford, was killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War against the Franco forces. Blunt said that it was up to me to make a similar sacrifice by going underground to provide information for the ‘International’.
Straight was a member of a student Marxist circle centred on The Apostles, and Blunt had seized his opportunity while he was in an emotionally charged state, ideal for recruitment. My informants say that Blunt then introduced him to the mysterious Soviet controller called ‘Otto’, but Straight tells me that he cannot recall him. He does remember, however, being taken by Blunt out of London to a roadhouse on the Great West Road to be introduced to one of his ‘friends’ in June 1937 and suggests that this might have been ‘Otto’. Because of his family’s banking background, Straight was asked to provide financial and commercial assessments for ‘the party’, and it all seemed harmless enough. Once he was in the net, Blunt told him that the Russians wanted him to return to the United States and join the J. P. Morgan Company where his father, Willard Straight, had been a partner. Straight says that he refused and asked to be left alone. Blunt, who appeared to be sympathetic, told him that his plea would be ‘carefully considered’.
When Straight returned to Washington, he became a speech writer for President Roosevelt and his Cabinet in the Interior Department and later worked briefly in the State Department. He was soon approached by a Soviet controller who called himself Michael Green. This Russian approached Straight about a dozen times over the subsequent eighteen months. Straight recalls:
Some of these occasions were social, such as the one on whi
ch I had dinner with him and his Kansas-born wife in a restaurant in New York. On six to eight occasions I gave him written appraisals of my own opinions concerning the issues facing America. I remember only one of these, in which I argued that the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which I abhorred, should not be extended from a military pact to a political alliance. I have great remorse about it, but I don’t think it either served the Russians or damaged the United States.
There is no doubt that Straight underwent a change of heart and decided to distance himself from the KGB and communism in general. He resigned from the government service early in 1941 to write articles for the New Republic and to help organise an interventionist movement called Fight for Freedom. ‘Green’ occasionally telephoned him but with no result, and Straight says that the Russian made no attempt to threaten him when he told him that he was leaving government service. He saw ‘Green’ for the last time in 1942, after which he volunteered for military duty, joining the army air corps and training as a bomber pilot.
In 1948, Straight returned to England to attend the annual dinner of The Apostles, the exclusive Cambridge club, and found that Burgess was presiding and that Blunt was also there. Straight had a row with another communist member, and Blunt and Burgess demanded to see him the following morning, when they accused him of deserting the cause. Straight says that for the first time he learned that Blunt had been in MI5 during the war and that Burgess had joined the Foreign Office. There was a stormy session, and Straight says that he threatened to report Burgess to the security authorities unless he left government service. Burgess obviated this by assuring him that he was about to leave and return to the BBC, anyway. As Blunt had left MI5 and was full time in the art world, Straight decided that no action was necessary in his case.
Their Trade Is Treachery Page 17