Blunt confirmed what MI5 already believed, that neither Maurice Dobb nor any other Cambridge don was involved in actual recruitment to the KGB. Their role in the case histories of the Ring of Five, which was quickly swollen to a larger number, was to promote Soviet-style communism among the undergraduates, creating a situation that the KGB could exploit.
Soon after Blunt had been recruited, Burgess told him that he himself had been ordered to appear to have turned against communism and to get into the mainstream of life, where he might insinuate himself into an organisation where he could be of best service to ‘the Comintern’. As Blunt confirmed to MI5, a young high-grade recruit to Soviet intelligence was – and may still be – urged to get himself on to the staff of MI5, the secret service, GCHQ, The Times, the BBC, the Foreign Office or the Home Office in that order of priority. As will be seen, both Blunt and Burgess fulfilled the requirement admirably, but Burgess was angry at being ordered out of university life because he loved Cambridge and wished to remain there for postgraduate work, being academically exceptionally able.
Burgess explained that, as orders would have to be obeyed, he would have to hand over his role as chief talent spotter to Blunt. Blunt was to fulfil the task ably, recruiting several important spies before he himself left Cambridge for London to take up an art appointment with the Warburg Institute.
By that time, Blunt knew that Philby was an active member of the Ring, and he was able to tell his interrogators how Maclean had been netted. Some time before the spring of 1935, Philby passed on Soviet orders to Burgess instructing him without delay to recruit Donald Maclean, an ardent and overt communist. With some emotion, Blunt recalled how he had invited Maclean to stay with him to facilitate the operation by Burgess, a fellow guest. (In his statement to The Times, Blunt said that he did not learn that Philby and Maclean were spies until during the war. This was either a lie or a lapse of memory.)
At the outbreak of the war in 1939, Blunt took on the more prestigious post of deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square. He had a room there, of which he was to make interesting use, though he did not live in it.
He volunteered for war service and, prompted by his Russian controller, applied to attend a five-week military intelligence course at Minley Manor, Camberley, in Surrey, and was accepted. Almost immediately, the commandant, Brig. John Shearer, received information from the War Office revealing that Blunt had a Marxist past. He was therefore rejected, as Blunt recalled, ‘by the same post’. It has been alleged that the evidence about Blunt’s links with communism came from MI5, but I am informed that there was no such information on Blunt’s file in MI5. Either some friend or fellow spy had eliminated the reference or the War Office had a source that was better informed.
Whatever the truth, Blunt was recommended for a post inside MI5 itself, which, in 1940, was having to expand rapidly and was looking for likely officers. The normal mode of entry was through personal recommendation, and the person who suggested the appointment of Blunt was only a recent recruit himself, an art dealer called Tomas Harris – the spelling of his Christian name denoting his half Spanish origin. Blunt later confirmed that Harris had known of his Marxist views and former outspoken support for communism but insisted that Tomas had never been a Soviet agent, so far as he knew. Within five years of his recruitment, when he was a university teacher, seemingly destined for an academic life, Blunt had achieved the top target set for him by ‘Otto’ – membership of the most secret British security service, MI5. From the moment of his entry to the London headquarters, his new Soviet controller took command of him and worked him relentlessly in the KGB’s interest until the end of the war.
The most extraordinary aspect of the Russians’ recruitment of young spies was their success in intruding them into positions where they achieved access to intelligence information of the highest value. They owed much to the talent spotters, who selected young people intellectually suited and socially equipped to gain entry to sensitive government departments.
The new controller, whom Blunt knew only as ‘Henry’, has been positively identified as Anatoli Gorski, sometimes known as Gromov and, eventually, as ‘Professor’ Nikitin of the Moscow Institute of History. After the liquidation of the ‘illegals’, the Russians reverted to the use of ‘legals’, and Gorski worked from the Soviet embassy in London from 1939 to 1944.
From the start, ‘Henry’ found that he had a star performer in ‘Johnson’, as he called Blunt in his secret dispatches to the Centre in Moscow, though Blunt himself denies ever knowing this cryptonym, which is almost certainly the truth. One of Blunt’s first jobs was in the Secretariat assisting the director general of MI5, then Sir David Petrie. Important documents therefore crossed his desk, and he never failed to report on their contents or even to take them out of the office so that the Russians could photocopy them.
One of the earliest documents Blunt saw resulted in the betrayal and death of one of the very few senior Russian officials ever to have been in a position to alert the British about the Kremlin’s intentions.
Before the war, there was an officer in MI5, the late Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, who had been brought up as a child in Russia and been at school there prior to the Revolution. Later, he met an old school friend, a Russian who had become totally disenchanted with communism and was working in the private office of Anastas Mikoyan, the long-surviving member of the Politburo. This Russian had also been working as an MI5 source-in-place for seven years, providing information of the greatest political value to the West. Blunt confessed that in 1940 – well before Russia was in the war and was, in fact, assisting Hitler through a nonaggression pact and other means, including some interchange of intelligence – he handed a copy of one of the Russian’s reports to ‘Henry’. A few weeks later, ‘Henry’ told him that the source had been eliminated. Certainly, no further reports were received from him.
Later, for many months, Blunt was the MI5 officer in charge of the ‘watchers’, the men and women who carried out surveillance of hostile agents. Each week, he was responsible for allotting their various tasks to them, so he had to be told of every counter-espionage operation in which they were involved and just where and how they would be working. He confessed that he regularly gave all this information to the Russians so that Soviet intelligence could operate against Britain in safety. It also enabled him and his fellow traitors to meet their own Soviet contacts without fear of being seen. With a thin smile, he recalled how the Russians had warned him against overdoing this particular service, as it could so easily arouse suspicion. In fact, on that issue, he never had been suspected.
Blunt also warned the Russians that the Communist Party headquarters in London was being bugged by MI5 and how it had been done. The Russians warned the party, and a frantic search of its headquarters near Covent Garden was made by party officials. This led to an inquiry in MI5 to find out whether there had been a leak there, and Blunt, as one of the people who knew about the bugs, was interrogated. He lied with coolness and charm.
One of Blunt’s most damaging services to the Russians was to keep them regularly informed about the personnel in MI5, where they were and what they were doing – what is referred to professionally as ‘the order of battle’. As a result, the entire outfit was ‘blown’ for the whole time that he was there.
In the registry of MI5, each file on its members is labelled ‘Sovbloc Green’, in the case of those believed to be unknown to the KGB; ‘Sovbloc Amber’ for those who might be known; and ‘Sovbloc Red’ for those definitely known. As a result of Blunt’s activities alone, apart from those of other spies in the organisation, every member was really ‘Sovbloc Red’ for a period of five years. This may not have been so important once Russia had been forced into the war against Germany, but, when Russia became the main adversary after the war, it greatly assisted the KGB in its anti-British operations, for many of the wartime members stayed on and reached top executive positions.
In similar ways, Blunt a
lso prejudiced many American operations and endangered their personnel because he informed the Russians about the American intelligence organisation, the Office of Strategic Services, whose members worked alongside MI5 in a joint endeavour from 1942 onward.
CHAPTER 12
AGENT ‘ORANGE’
ONE OF THE MI5 agents whom Blunt confessed to have ‘blown’ early in his career in the security service could hardly be more surprising either to the public or to Parliament. It was Tom Driberg, at the time a journalist on the Daily Express, later an MP, chairman of the Labour Party and, finally, as Lord Bradwell, a Labour peer.
The true facts about Driberg, who, in his autobiography Ruling Passions, confirmed his homosexuality but never mentioned his life as a spy, are a startling reminder that in the world of espionage nothing is ever what it seems.
Driberg was recruited for service in MI5 when he was still a schoolboy at Lancing College, an Anglo–Catholic foundation near Worthing in Sussex. He was drawn into espionage there by the late Maxwell Knight, well known for his BBC talks on natural history. Knight was employed by MI5 as what is called an ‘agent-runner’, a person who runs a group of agents and, to avoid suspicion, stays well away from headquarters, communicating the information that his agents produce by other means. His codename was ‘M’.
On Knight’s instructions, Driberg joined the Brighton branch of the Communist Party, becoming wholehearted in his overt support. He continued this at Christ Church, Oxford, and later, when he joined the Daily Express in 1928. His mission was to infiltrate the party and report regularly on its activities and members to MI5. Through his considerable charm and intelligence, he achieved this, becoming a close friend of Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party, and of Douglas Springhall, leader of the Young Communist League, who was eventually convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union in 1943.
In 1941, reports from an outside MI5 agent crossed the desk of Anthony Blunt, who knew the agent only by the codename ‘M8’. As Blunt later confessed, he passed a copy of one of these reports to ‘Henry’ because it concerned information about a secret aeroplane. Driberg, alias ‘M8’, then writing for the Daily Express as ‘William Hickey’, believed the information to have come from Lord Beaverbrook, the minister of aircraft production. His report also revealed that the Communist Party knew about the machine and that this must surely be dangerous.
Blunt was asked by ‘Henry’ to discover the identity of ‘M8’, but, after trying for six months, he failed. ‘Henry’ then informed him that Soviet intelligence had discovered that ‘M8’ was Driberg. With unusual clumsiness, the Russians immediately alerted Harry Pollitt, who summarily expelled ‘M8’ from the party. In his autobiography, Driberg records how he was shattered when the news was conveyed to him, without any reason, by another Fleet Street comrade. As a good agent should, he continued to protest until he died that he never discovered why he had been thrown out, claiming that friends like Springhall were so embarrassed by the event that their lips were sealed.
Blunt told his MI5 interrogators in 1964 that the mode of Driberg’s expulsion had infuriated him because it had touched off another internal inquiry in MI5, during which he was closely questioned, though he felt sure that he had managed to brazen his way through by lying persuasively. Blunt had told ‘Henry’ that Pollitt should have been instructed to wait for a decent interval to elapse and then to have found some excuse for parting close company with Driberg. (Though Pollitt never knew it, there was another MI5 agent much closer to him in the form of a woman who had been recruited by Maxwell Knight as a schoolgirl!)
Driberg’s value to MI5 soared when he entered Parliament and was able to report, with steadily increasing penetration, on the activities of other members, both inside and outside the House of Commons. But the further exploits of this extraordinary character in the field of espionage form a story in themselves and, as they do not involve Blunt, will be reserved for Chapter 21.
In Blunt’s uninformative, and sometimes misleading, public confession to The Times, he stressed the work that he did for MI5 in running ‘a small subsection connected with neutral diplomatic missions’. The truth about his efforts there will also surprise even those who have good reason to consider themselves knowledgeable about the Ring of Five.
The neutral countries, which continued to maintain embassies in London during the war, included not only genuine neutrals, like Sweden and Switzerland, but pro-Nazi Spain and Portugal as well as, during the early months, the pro-British United States. Under wartime regulations MI5 had access to their diplomatic bags and made full use of it, devising ingenious ways of releasing the seals and refurbishing them. Their diplomatic and intelligence radio traffic was also carefully monitored. Blunt, who also dealt with signals intelligence (Sigint), had access to all the items of security and intelligence interest relevant to his work. As he told his interrogators repeatedly and without remorse, ‘You may assume that if I came across anything which could be remotely of interest to the Russians, I passed it on.’ Among such material were the names of neutral diplomats with character weaknesses, or a liking for money, who might be recruited by the Soviet Union as spies, as some of them were.
In his extremely valuable service to the Russians, Blunt was assisted day by day by none other than the man who had recruited him, Guy Burgess, whose main activities in this field have been covered up with astonishing success, considering the reams that have been written about him.
It had been repeatedly stated that Blunt tried to get Burgess into MI5 and failed. The truth is that Burgess joined MI5 as a wartime supernumerary around about the same time as Blunt did in 1940. Having renounced his overt communism and behaved as though he was right wing, as Philby had, he had been recruited in good faith through his friendship with Sir Joseph Ball, a director of the Conservative research department, who was an influential figure behind the scenes in Whitehall. As luck always seemed to have it for British traitors, Ball became temporarily involved with the reorganisation of the security service after the departure of Sir Vernon Kell in the summer of 1940. Burgess used this friendly contact to infiltrate his way into MI5.
Like Maxwell Knight, who had recruited Driberg and several others, Burgess was an agent-runner with the codename ‘Orange’, operating a string of sources outside and rarely visiting MI5 headquarters. So, though somewhat on the periphery, he had fulfilled the Russians’ top-priority requirement, and his various wartime jobs in the BBC and the Foreign Office were largely cover for his work for MI5.
Whether by coincidence or clever design, the agents whom Burgess was required to run were mainly recruited from the embassies of the neutral countries represented in London. This meant that he had to pass the information he received from them to Blunt, who was the ‘head agent’ inside MI5 headquarters for intelligence exercises penetrating the neutral embassies. This was reckoned to be a highly satisfactory arrangement by MI5 because the two were well known to be close friends and their regular meetings could arouse nobody’s suspicions. And, during their evening meetings at Blunt’s room in the Courtauld Institute or elsewhere, Burgess could pass on his agents’ reports to Blunt, who could take them to headquarters the following morning. As will be seen, it was an even more satisfactory arrangement for the KGB.
While intellectually scintillating, Guy Burgess was dishevelled, riotous in his behaviour, frequently drunk and a pouncing homosexual, much given to shocking strangers, as well as friends, by his remarks. ‘I can never travel comfortably by train because I am always feeling that I ought to be having the engine driver’ was the type of comment with which he sought to attract attention to himself. So how could such an outrageous character ever be a spy for anybody?
In fact, he was a highly successful spy both for MI5 and the KGB. Both regarded his behaviour as excellent cover on the principle that anyone who talked and acted so recklessly could not possibly be a spy. Burgess could be discreet when it was essential to be so, as he had already shown by useful work as a free
lance supplier of information about Nazi Germany to the secret service before the outbreak of war. He also had access to a remarkable range of influential and talkative contacts, including politicians.
Burgess recruited valuable agents for MI5 from the neutral embassies, the Swedish, Swiss and Spanish in particular, and was not without success from the US diplomatic missions. While his prime loyalty was always to the KGB, he had no objection to also helping MI5 once Russia was in the war and it served the Kremlin’s interests.
From the start, the KGB knew all about Burgess’s work for MI5, but MI5 never got wind of his much greater effort for the KGB until he defected in 1951. There was no suspect file on Burgess in the records of MI5, only an account of his good work there. This, of course, was a major reason why the top management of MI5 was so determined to stop Burgess from ever returning to Britain. They did not want it known that he had been another Soviet spy inside the security and intelligence organisations.
As Blunt explained with some relish, his official MI5 partnership with Burgess suited them both perfectly for their really important assignments. Twice a week, Blunt would take out an attaché case of specially selected secret documents as ‘homework’, which was permitted during the war when pressure of work was so great and transport difficulties were being created by the Blitz. He took his spoils to his room at the Courtauld Institute, and there Burgess contributed voluminous reports on his own activities. One of them then handed over the suitcase to ‘Henry’, or some other Soviet officer, at a prearranged point. The documents were taken to the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, photographed and returned in time for Blunt to take them back to the office next morning.
Blunt told his interrogators how he had been almost caught by a policeman who demanded to see inside his case while he was on the way to a meeting with ‘Henry’. The police were making a search in connection with some criminal matter, but, by giving a certain telephone number, Blunt managed to convince the constable that he worked for MI5. It had been a frightening experience, for he would have had difficulty, if reported to his employers, in explaining away some of the documents as ‘homework’.
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 14