Late in 1963, President Kennedy, shortly before he was assassinated, asked Straight to be chairman of the National Council for the Arts. ‘This brought the issue of my past to the surface of my mind,’ Straight told me. ‘It was hardly a classified post, and my record would not, I think, have turned up in a security check.’ Straight decided against taking the job, but went to see Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, then Attorney General, who called in the deputy chief of the FBI.
Among the admissions he made was a statement that he had been recruited to the KGB cause by Anthony Blunt, whom he knew to have been a Soviet agent. He said that he would be prepared to give evidence against Blunt in court if necessary. This was MI5’s first hard evidence against the traitor who, on the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1952, had become surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. It has been widely assumed that the incident in 1964, which, according to Blunt, ‘freed him from loyalty to his friends’, was the death of Tomas Harris, his art-dealer friend who had managed to get him into MI5 in 1940. Harris did die in 1964 under suspicious circumstances, but the incident that brought about Blunt’s confession was the one I have described.
After receiving the information, the MI5 chiefs, then led by Sir Roger Hollis, who was close to retirement, discussed the situation for several weeks before taking any action. It was decided that, even with the new evidence, there was little chance of prosecuting Blunt successfully if he continued to deny everything, as he probably would.
There was also the embarrassing difficulty of the royal connection over so many years and the general objection to another public scandal that might have adverse effects on the interchange of intelligence secrets with the United States. The CIA and the FBI knew about Blunt, but Congress and the American people did not.
It was agreed inside MI5 that the main purpose of confronting Blunt with the evidence was to induce him to talk in the hope that he would give a lead to the still unknown Fifth Man, to others he and his friends might have recruited, and to the identities and methods of the Soviet intelligence officers who had been involved.
Arthur Martin, the case officer who was to handle Blunt and who had unsuccessfully interrogated him before, suggested that the only way to secure his cooperation was to offer him immunity from prosecution, if this could be legally obtained. Hollis was diffident about the idea but later concurred when he realised that the immunity could be offered in such a way as to ensure that there should never be any publicity, adverse to MI5, about Blunt’s treachery.
The Attorney General, the late Sir John Hobson, was then approached, and, after careful consideration of the delicate royal connection, he agreed that Blunt could be offered immunity from prosecution if he agreed to confess and to continue to assist the security authorities in their further investigations. Because the recent offer of immunity to Philby had been followed by his swift defection, the possibility that Blunt might react in the same way was briefly discussed but rejected on the grounds that 56-year-old Sir Anthony, as he then was, had too much to lose.
After further reflection inside MI5, a meeting was arranged in April 1964 at the Home Office, which is responsible for MI5. Present were the Home Office permanent secretary, Sir Charles Cunningham, Sir Roger Hollis and Sir Michael Adeane (now Lord), the Queen’s private secretary.
Adeane was informed that Blunt was suspected of having been an agent for Russian intelligence but was to be offered immunity. He asked what action the authorities would like the Queen to take regarding Blunt’s royal appointment if Blunt agreed to confess. He was told that it would be advisable for the Queen to take no action whatsoever because, otherwise, traitors to whom Blunt might point could take evasive action. The security authorities would also be deprived of the element of surprise in approaching these people.
As Blunt had no access whatever to any information of interest to Russia as a result of his work for the royal household, Adeane raised no objections. He then alerted the Queen to the distasteful circumstances and related MI5’s plan for using Blunt as a counter-agent if he made a genuine confession. In the interest of national security, the Queen agreed to take the official advice, and this was made known to the security authorities. The attitude that should be adopted toward Blunt if he failed to confess was left in abeyance.
On 23 April, Blunt was interviewed by a case officer who was not Jim Skardon, as has been suggested, but the more senior and very experienced head of an MI5 counter-espionage section, Arthur Martin, selected because he was then the top specialist in inducing difficult subjects to talk. Blunt, who was interviewed in his flat, was first told of the American’s statement to the FBI, which he completely denied, as had been expected. He was then given to understand that this lead had been successfully followed up so that there was further evidence available.
While Blunt was wondering whether this was a bluff – which it was – the case officer told him of the Attorney General’s offer of immunity from prosecution. As had previously been agreed with Hollis, this was phrased in such a way that it was clear to Blunt that the offer also meant that there would be no publicity and that he would be able to continue with his royal appointment, retain his knighthood and pursue his life and career normally.
Blunt then poured himself a stiff gin (he was a heavy gin drinker), sipped it for a few minutes while appreciating his situation and then confessed that he had indeed been a long-serving agent of the KGB. Blunt never made a written confession. He was interrogated at intervals until 1972, the total adding up to more than 200 hours of close questioning, which was tape-recorded.
Martin prepared a brief of the statement Blunt had made on 23 April, which constituted his confession, for the Queen’s private secretary, who received it in June.
Normally, writers do not really know what the Queen does or says, but because of a fluke circumstance I know that the Queen was properly alerted to the Blunt situation by Adeane as soon as he had received the brief of the confession. She merely asked what the official advice was and, on being told, agreed to accept it in the national interest. Presumably, the Queen experienced some distaste, but she rarely had occasion to meet Blunt. This was perhaps as well, considering that the regime to which he had been dedicated had murdered her relatives and detested monarchs on principle.
The brief that had been passed to Adeane contained none of the details disclosed in this book as they were considered unnecessary for the purpose. The Queen is on record as having expressed no interest in the sordid details of such matters. In his Diaries, Richard Crossman recorded how, while staying with the Queen in 1967, he had started to discuss the Philby story, then running in the Sunday newspapers. The Queen dismissed the subject by saying that she did not read ‘that sort of thing’.
I have already described the extraordinary behaviour of the MI5 director general, Sir Roger Hollis, in suspending Blunt’s case officer from duty almost immediately after he had secured the confession. This gave Blunt a completely free run for a fortnight, allowing him to recover his composure and possibly consult with the Soviet embassy, destroy any documentary evidence and make any other dispositions.
Later, due attention was also focused on the fact that, once again, Hollis had chosen to keep his Prime Minister in ignorance of a most sensitive matter of great potential political embarrassment. Just as he had failed to alert Harold Macmillan personally about the dangers surrounding the Profumo affair, so he failed to alert Sir Alec Douglas-Home about the immunity granted to Blunt, though he did tell the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke.
When the case officer was permitted to begin the interrogations, to which Blunt was required to submit as part of the immunity deal, they were carried out mainly in Blunt’s flat at the Courtauld Institute. In spite of the spy’s increasing requirement of gin, his memory proved to be excellent except when asked for information that implicated possible fellow agents still holding eminent positions in the civil service and elsewhere. It was noticed that he had an eye twitch, and this became more acute when the discussion turne
d to any of his friends who were suspect.
Among the first questions posed to him was ‘What did the Russians tell you to do if you were ever interrogated?’ The answer came out pat. ‘Deny everything, volunteer nothing, but keep on talking because then you will find out what they know.’
By and large, the talks were ‘comfortable’, but, in the hope of breaking Blunt concerning the missing member of the Ring of Five, it was decided to mount a hostile attack. ‘You realise that people have died and been tortured as a result of what you have done?’ he was told with sudden sternness. ‘Now come on, who else is there?’ For a moment, Blunt appeared to lose his composure, then smiled as he realised that his interrogators had no new information. ‘There was nobody else,’ he said quietly.
This was almost certainly a lie, as an incident staged in Brown’s Hotel, in Dover Street near Piccadilly, and described in Chapter 17, demonstrates.
At no time did Blunt express remorse or repentance about the men he had betrayed.
At one point Michael Straight visited London and agreed to a confrontation. The two met cordially, and Blunt did not appear to be angry about the way he had been ‘shopped’. Perhaps, having been freed from the nagging fear that some defector might suddenly expose him, he had reason to be grateful to his old friend. Straight remains haunted by the fact that he waited so long in going to the FBI because, had he done so before the war, Blunt would have been caught before he did so much damage, as might Burgess. He says that he thought of exposing Blunt after the war but could not face the prospect of a confrontation with Senator McCarthy in Washington or with Blunt in an English court.
In 1972, with Blunt producing less and less, it was decided to end his interrogations unless something specific turned up from a defector or some other source. This followed an analysis by an independent officer, a woman, who concluded that Blunt had told about most of the people who had been communists and about some who had been spies but would not deliberately point a finger at any of his former friends, who might still be in important positions. He was prepared to talk only about those who, through age or retirement, were no longer vulnerable.
It was concluded that during his interrogations he had lied and misled MI5 over some of his dealings with the Russians. It was suspected that he had met with his Russian friends on more occasions after the war than he had admitted. Furthermore, he had not changed ideologically and was proud of what he had done. Nevertheless, if some of the highly productive leads he had given had been unwitting, the MI5 men congratulated themselves on having bluffed such a tough and unrepentant communist into confessing anything at all.
Nothing further concerning Blunt transpired until later in 1972 when he was rushed to hospital for a major operation for cancer, which it was thought he was unlikely to survive. There has been much conjecture as to why, at that stage, the Attorney General, then Sir Peter Rawlinson (now Lord), and the Prime Minister, then Edward Heath, should have been informed of the truth concerning Blunt. I can clarify the situation.
The security authorities, who never trusted Blunt after his halfhearted confession, feared that he might leave a statement with his solicitor for posthumous publication, either detailing his full activities or continuing to serve the Soviet interest with a mass of misinformation possibly drafted by the KGB. Sudden publication of either statement by a newspaper could have been damaging to a government not informed of the truth in advance.
In addition, there were fears that a former friend of Blunt and Burgess, the late Goronwy Rees, a professional writer, was poised to reveal Blunt’s treachery as soon as the traitor was safely dead. Rees, who had known that Burgess was a spy for many years before he defected, was hoping to salve his social conscience for failing to warn the security authorities concerning his suspicions about Blunt, though he had made a belated statement about Burgess, much against Blunt’s advice.
Alerted by MI5, the Prime Minister and his advisers considered what action they should take to forestall such a predicament, and to this end they had to be given all the details so that a counter-document could be prepared. This document, which was prepared by the Home Office and bore the title ‘If Blunt dies…’ also gave some information about the other members of the Ring of Five. It also contained two lists of names – those of people found to have been Soviet agents or believed to have been, following the interrogation of Blunt, and those of people still under investigation.
A copy of the counter-document was passed to Sir Michael Adeane, who was in his last year as private secretary to the Queen. It is not known whether he showed it to the Queen or not. Knowing Lord Adeane, as he now is, I suspect that he would have spared her the details, especially as none of the people in the lists had any connection with the royal household, save for the various honours they had received. In the result, Blunt proved to be as tough physically as mentally, and he survived his ordeal, so that the detailed document has still never been published.
The hundreds of hours of tape recordings covering the Blunt interrogations had been transcribed and then summarised. As I have recorded, the tapes and transcripts were destroyed on Hollis’s orders before he left MI5 in 1965, so the document had to be compiled from the summaries.
I have already described most of the information that Blunt revealed as the payoff for the immunity. I now propose to deal, as openly as libel laws permit, with the identities of those Britons whom he named as agents or for whom he gave productive leads either deliberately or when off his guard. Several of the most important are still alive, their reputations and honours intact.
CHAPTER 16
THE TRUTH ABOUT JOHN CAIRNCROSS
WHEN GUY BURGESS’S flat was searched in 1951, security men found a bundle of handwritten notes confirming affairs inside the Treasury. There were also pen portraits of various officials written as though by a talent scout giving information about character weaknesses and other features that might be exploited. The notes dated from the early ’40s, and their continued existence was evidence of the carelessness and slovenliness in Burgess’s character, so atypical of a highly successful spy, as he undoubtedly was. The papers were not signed, and their author might never have been traced but for a fluke occurrence. An MI5 case officer, who had acquired a new secretary from Whitehall, sent for the file in which the papers happened to have been placed. She recognised the handwriting as that of her previous superior, a young civil servant called John Cairncross, who had been on the Treasury staff in Whitehall in 1940.
As it already seemed certain that Burgess had been a Soviet recruiter and active spy, it seemed likely that the Treasury information, which could have been of value to the Russians, had been provided as an espionage service.
It was known that Cairncross had been a scholarship boy from a poorly off home in Glasgow who had gone to Cambridge, where he had done brilliantly in modern languages. It was soon discovered that he had been an overt communist in 1935 when, though intending to pursue an academic career, he had suddenly changed course to enter the Foreign Office.
When confronted with the notes early in 1952 by MI5’s Arthur Martin, Cairncross denied being a spy or any kind of Soviet agent. He admitted having supplied the notes at Burgess’s request but said that he had no knowledge that Burgess was a Soviet agent and did not believe it could possibly be true.
As Cairncross had to concede that he had written the notes and that they contained some classified information, which could have been of value to a foreign power, and particularly to the Russians in their political negotiations with the Germans in 1940, he offered to resign. His resignation was accepted, and he obtained a post with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.
The public heard nothing of this until after Blunt’s exposure in 1979, when Cairncross openly acknowledged his former communism and his unfortunate association with Burgess and Blunt. When questioned by journalists in Rome, he admitted that he had given Burgess the offending notes and had resigned as a consequence without a pension but, understandably,
volunteered nothing further. He has, therefore, since been dismissed from the haul of known Soviet agents as ‘small fry’.
The truth is very different. As an active spy throughout the war, in highly sensitive positions, Cairncross was a ‘big fish’ and did great damage to his country.
While Blunt always attempted to cover his close friends during his interrogations, he was open about Cairncross, whom he seemed to dislike. He admitted having talent-spotted him as a potential spy while teaching him at Cambridge and having alerted Burgess to this effect, though the actual recruitment had been achieved by an even more sinister communist agent, James Klugman.
An MI5 officer therefore travelled to Rome to interrogate Cairncross, who, knowing that he was outside the jurisdiction of the British Official Secrets Act, made a complete and contrite confession of his treachery.
He admitted what the MI5 men already knew about his recruitment to the service of the KGB, explaining that he had experienced poverty and had concluded that Soviet-style communism was the only way of securing social justice, though he claimed that he had since realised he had been hopelessly misled in this respect by other Marxists.
He disclosed that Klugman had introduced him to the ubiquitous ‘Otto’ on a special visit to Regent’s Park, where they were unlikely to be seen. In accordance with the usual practice, ‘Otto’, who was also running Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt, had instructed him to reject his open communism, go ‘underground’ and get himself into the Foreign Office instead of pursuing an academic career, as he would have preferred. Cairncross officially quit the Communist Party in late 1936.
Their Trade Is Treachery Page 18