M

by Henry Hemming

  The Office had a leak. M launched an investigation to find out who it was, and although this was formally inconclusive he reached his own verdict.

  The following year another of M’s agents, Norman Himsworth, was accused of working for MI5 by a senior Communist who read back to him sections of a report that he had written for M. This confirmed that the Communist Party had access to some MI5 files. In July 1943, Celia Luke, then employed in the MI5 Registry, confessed to passing on classified information to the Party. She had taken the place of another MI5 secretary who had also been leaking information to the Party before her. So there had been two consecutive Communist moles inside the Office. The more recent of these, Luke, claimed to have identified Driberg – but M thought she was lying.

  In 1940, there had been a change in MI5’s overall approach to recruitment. Previously suspicious of intellectuals, MI5 had begun to take on talented lawyers and academic high-flyers, including an erudite art historian called Anthony Blunt.

  ‘He was convinced that it was Blunt who had exposed Driberg,’ recalled M’s nephew, Harry Smith, who lived with his uncle for much of his childhood.4 Indeed M was not the only one to suspect Blunt of being an agent. Eric Roberts suspected that Tony, as he was known (also Blunt’s NKVD codename), was an agent, except he thought Blunt was working for the Germans. Roger Hollis was also suspicious of Blunt.

  ‘But he did not have any evidence,’ said Smith of his uncle, ‘otherwise he would have had Blunt prosecuted.’ Instead, M’s suspicion of Blunt was based on little more than an instinctive feeling that this man was hiding something more than his sexuality. M had by then spent most of his adult life honing his ability to get the measure of people, be they prospective agents or officers. Although he could sometimes get too close to them, as he had done with Joyce, M was usually a wise judge of character and could tell when someone was not what he or she claimed to be.

  We know now that Blunt was the only Soviet agent inside MI5. Celia Luke and the other female secretary were passing information to the British Communist Party, but it was Blunt who was working for the NKVD and who had identified Driberg, as he later explained in an interview with Nigel West.

  In the same month that Celia Luke was dismissed from MI5, the senior Communist Douglas Springhall was convicted under the Official Secrets Act. This came in the wake of Moscow’s announcement that the Comintern had been disbanded.

  M’s response was to write a report titled ‘The Comintern Is Not Dead’. This document has never been released, but we can guess what its underlying message may have been. M was increasingly worried that his fellow MI5 officers had failed to recognise the continued threat of international Communism. He sent copies of his paper to senior colleagues, including Guy Liddell and Roger Hollis. Both were broadly in agreement. ‘Neither Hollis nor I think that there is any evidence to show that the policy of the Soviet Government and the Comintern has changed one iota,’ wrote Liddell.5 ‘Whether the instructions come by courier or through the Embassy makes no difference. There is no doubt that the Russians are taking every possible advantage of the present situation to dig themselves in and that they will cause us a great deal of trouble when the war is over.’ Yet Liddell did not bring himself to imagine that one of Moscow’s most valued agents might be his former assistant and close friend Anthony Blunt.

  Although Guy Liddell recognised the danger of Soviet espionage, he understood that little could be done until after the war. MI5’s resources were concentrated on defeating Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union had become a vital wartime ally and there was no appetite in government for headline-grabbing convictions of Soviet spies.

  Others were more sceptical when they read ‘The Comintern Is Not Dead’. M was renowned within the Office for his dislike of Communism. By this stage in his life he could sometimes come across as increasingly wary of the new-fangled, left-leaning world in which he found himself. Some of his colleagues in MI5 thought ‘The Comintern Is Not Dead’ was merely an expression of M’s pre-war prejudice against the Soviet Union.

  Indeed, by the end of the Second World War few British intelligence officers believed that Moscow Centre had either the desire or the capability to penetrate the upper reaches of Whitehall, let alone MI5 and MI6. ‘In our insularity,’ wrote the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, then serving in MI6, ‘we had not yet caught up with the ideologies of the Continent or appreciated their distorting effects on the minds of men.’6 Most of M’s colleagues found it difficult to believe that any reasonable, intelligent Englishman could be persuaded by the dry precepts of Marxism to betray his country. MI5’s press officer, Derek Tangye, described the Office at that time as an organisation that was ‘bewildered when faced by the naughty deceit of the Russians’, except for ‘one, small, ignored corner of the organisation’.7 That was M Section.

  Following the Labour Party’s landslide victory of 1945, the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, installed an outsider as Director General of MI5, a former police chief constable called Percy Sillitoe. He did not flood left-wing organisations with long-term agents, nor did he treat Communist subversion and Soviet espionage as a priority. Instead, MI5 concentrated on the threat posed by two Zionist terrorist groups, Irgun and the Stern Gang, as there were indications after the attacks on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and the British embassy in Rome that these groups would be targeting the British mainland next. Nor could MI5 ignore the possibility that Fascism might one day rise from the dead.

  M’s section continued to be responsible for running MI5 agents inside left-wing organisations, but his outfit became leaner in these postwar years and it began to lose some of its prized independence. M was increasingly desk-bound, which was difficult for someone who so relished being outside. He was in his late forties now, the point in his career when he might have begun to angle for one of the top jobs. Yet he was in no position to do so. M had never mastered the internal politics of MI5, whether it was lobbying for a new job or for more resources. He was listened to, and he commanded respect on account of his record, but he did not have a network of trusted allies in senior positions from whom he could now call in favours.

  The price to pay for those years of glorious isolation on Sloane Street, followed by Dolphin Square, was that M would never make it to the top of MI5 – but there is nothing to suggest that he had ever wanted this. Instead, he aspired to keep doing what he did best: spotting, recruiting and running agents. He gloried in the craft of his profession and the knowledge that he and his stable of informants were helping to protect the country from the Soviet Union.

  What did M believe in by this stage in his life? He wanted to save Britain from Communism, but what had changed over the last few years, the painful journey that he had been required to take, was his understanding that it was possible to take this too far.

  If some of M’s younger colleagues thought his obsession with Moscow was old-fashioned, others felt his methods were out-of-date. Following the success of wartime Ultra signals from Bletchley Park, there was a new feeling that the future lay with signals intelligence rather than what Liddell called ‘the old cloak and dagger’ of human intelligence, that is, taking on and running agents.8 MI5 now had four microphones inside the Communist Party headquarters on King Street, codenamed ‘Table’, ‘North’, ‘King’ and ‘Lascar’, which produced reams of accurate intelligence from deep inside the Party. Relying on agents to gather information was more labour-intensive than using a hidden listening device and, of course, riskier. Its product had to be fed through another layer of subjective interpretation. But the need to run human sources against left-wing targets did not disappear in the years after the war, and it would soon be more pressing than ever.

  Three years after the British scientist Alan Nunn May was convicted under the Official Secrets Act of passing atomic secrets to Moscow, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb. This was a near-replica of the American bomb which had been detonated at Los Alamos in 1945. Another British atomic scientist, Klaus Fuch
s, was revealed to be a Soviet agent, and shortly after that Bruno Pontecorvo, a colleague of Fuchs, disappeared, only to resurface later in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, China became a Communist republic and Communist North Korea invaded its southern neighbour. The threat from both the Soviet Union and Communism, having been briefly eclipsed by Nazi Germany, had come back stronger than ever. Yet it was only after the defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, and the Conservative election victory in the same year, that Soviet espionage and Communist subversion formally became MI5’s main priority once again.

  M must have felt a wave of vindication. His overall sense of the threat posed by Moscow had proved to be accurate, as had his more specific concern about British sleeper agents recruited at university. He was in demand once more as a flotilla of new government agents was launched at British trade unions, student unions, left-wing charities, protest groups, the Labour Party and, of course, the Communist Party itself. The threat posed by the Party was no longer political – the Communist share of the vote was almost non-existent – but industrial, and it concerned the Party’s ability to stage strikes. M was also called upon for his intimate historical understanding of the Communist Party as MI5 hastily raked over the pre-war activities of Burgess, Maclean and others to find evidence of any other Soviet moles.

  One of M’s most able recruits during this period has been described by Christopher Andrew, formerly the official MI5 historian, as probably ‘the most successful penetration agent in the early Cold War’.9 Like Mona Maund, Olga Gray and M/C, this female agent of M’s was a quick-witted typist who made herself ‘part of the furniture’ at the Communist Party headquarters on King Street.10 Perhaps she worked occasionally at the same desk that had been occupied by Olga or Mona. She devoted herself to her task, living the life of an impoverished secretary, taking few holidays and seeing few of her friends outside the movement, until she could stand it no more. For her own well-being, M agreed to end her agent career.

  Another new recruit to M Section was David Cornwell, better known today as the novelist John Le Carré. He began to work as an officer under M in the late 1950s and, according to his biographer, Adam Sisman, looked up to M as ‘the “Pied Piper”, a romantic and heroic figure’, and of course later used M as the inspiration for Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy.11

  It is curious that a left-leaning young man like Cornwell should have been so taken by M, a person who had, after all, been a prominent member of the British Fascists in his youth. But this was M’s great skill. Throughout his career a succession of young people, from a variety of backgrounds, were won over either by the force of M’s personality, the romantic appeal of his exploits in MI5 or else they were looking for a father-figure and felt that in M they had found one.

  Le Carré memorably described M’s fictional alter ego as ‘a tweedy, unscalable English mountain’12 and ‘a handsome English warlord who served sherry on Boxing Day and had never had a doubt in his life’.13 He ‘was country stock.14 His forebears were gypsies and clergymen, gamekeepers and poachers and pirates.’ ‘He was as broad as an old blockhouse and, when he wanted to be, as rough.’15 Brotherhood was angry about the changes inside ‘the Firm’ since the end of the war, ‘its retreat into bureaucracy and semi-diplomacy, its pandering to American methods and example.16 By comparison his own hand-picked staff had only looked better to him.’ He had little time for the ‘desk jockeys’ outside his section.17 ‘Brotherhood was hardier than all of them and more or less they knew it.’

  There is silence when Brotherhood speaks at meetings – which he presides over ‘like an old grey bird glowering down on his prey’.18 He is ‘the grand old man of covert operations’,19 as M obviously was, ‘with his reputation and his anger and his connections and with his section’s record, in the modern jargon that he loathed, of low cost and high productivity’.20 ‘The Firm should have retired him ten years ago,’ one character says, which was possibly true of M by the late 1950s, yet he still had time for at least one final outing with his most long-serving agent.21

  On 11 February, 1956, a Sunday Times correspondent staying in the National Hotel in Moscow was summoned unexpectedly to Room 101 where he was introduced to Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. This was the first time that any Western journalist had been allowed to see the two British defectors. It would not be the last.

  Over the weeks that followed, both men took on more public roles, and the possibility loomed that one of them – Burgess, who missed his mother back in Britain – might try to come home. A number of their friends and relatives wrote to Maclean and Burgess after it was revealed that they were at the National Hotel, including a man who had been a presenter on the BBC radio programme The Week in Westminster during the war, when Guy Burgess had been a producer. Now Tom Driberg had a favour to ask.

  Guy Burgess and Tom Driberg had a great deal in common, and not only that they were both gay and went for the same type of man (which ruled out their going for each other). ‘They shared a contempt for the bourgeoisie, and a romantic fondness for the aristocracy and the working class,’ wrote Driberg’s biographer, Francis Wheen.22 ‘They were congenitally and self-destructively indiscreet, yet agile at eluding the retribution which their indiscretion seemed certain to provoke: Burgess had glided effortlessly through the Foreign Office and the secret service even though he seldom bothered to conceal his political sympathies, just as Tom’s sexual adventures, of which he boasted so recklessly, never led to the nemesis that colleagues feared and predicted.’

  Shortly after his dismissal from the Communist Party, in 1941, Tom Driberg had become a member of Parliament. After thirteen years in the House of Commons, most of them as a Labour MP, he had left to concentrate on journalism, as he explained to Burgess in his letter. Now he wanted to interview the former NKVD agent in Moscow.

  For eighteen days there was no reply. Then a telegram arrived. Burgess had agreed to an exclusive interview. Driberg was delighted, and so was M.

  Although it is unclear whether sending this letter had been Driberg’s idea or M’s, newly released papers show that Driberg coordinated with MI5 from the start. After Guy Burgess made a telephone call to him, in June, to discuss his forthcoming trip, M immediately filed a summary of their conversation. Because Driberg’s phone was not being tapped, this information could only have come to him from Driberg himself. An MI5 officer later confirmed that Driberg had received ‘some preliminary briefing by us’ before setting off for Moscow, which he did in August of that year.23

  Tom Driberg spent the next two weeks in the Russian capital with Burgess, interviewing him at length, plying him with gossip from London and, at one point, pointing out the best spots to pick up men despite having never been to Moscow before. ‘When it came to “cottages”,’24 wrote Francis Wheen, Driberg ‘had the directional sense of a homing pigeon.’ He also found time to carry out in Moscow the principal task he had been given by MI5.

  Over the next few months Driberg wrote up his material into a book, and after another visit to Moscow to check several details with Burgess, and deliver socks and a leather bottle case, the manuscript was finished. The book was set to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The Daily Mail paid £5,000 for the serial. One of the advertisements for the forthcoming scoop declared: ‘News that even MI5 could not get!’ No doubt Driberg came up with that.25

  Tom Driberg’s mission to Moscow had been a success. As well as earning him enough money to pay off his many debts, it provided MI5 with useful intelligence on Burgess’s circle and a solution to a knotty problem. Shortly before Driberg had first gone to Moscow, MI5 had put together a summary of the legal case against the two defectors. Neither man had confessed to espionage and, as feared, there was not enough evidence to mount a successful prosecution if one or the other returned to Britain. Their defection had been embarrassing enough, yet this would be nothing next to the compound humiliation of the police being unable to arrest them if they returned.

  This was where Driberg came in
. During the course of their interviews, Guy Burgess did not confess to being a spy, yet by passing on details he had acquired during his government employment, he had committed an offence under the Official Secrets Act. MI5’s legal adviser also pointed out, rather worryingly, that ‘Driberg has committed another offence by receiving the information willingly.’26 Yet neither the Director of Public Prosecutions nor the Attorney General, he went on, was likely to authorise a prosecution against this MI5 agent.

  Several weeks after the publication of Tom Driberg’s book about Guy Burgess, an article appeared in the Daily Express by Chapman Pincher, a journalist famously described by the historian E. P. Thompson as ‘a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6’, among others, ‘stand patiently leaking in the public interest’.27 On this occasion it was MI5’s turn.

  ‘BURGESS BURNS HIS BOATS,’ ran the headline, ‘NOW – AND ONLY NOW – THEY’VE GOT HIM.’28

  Inadvertently, they had also got one of their own agents. But it never came to that. Burgess did not attempt to return to Britain. Instead, he continued to invite Driberg to see him in Moscow, and over the months and years that followed M would file many more reports on Burgess based on what he had said to Driberg. Most of this intelligence was useful, some of it less so, like the fact that Burgess ‘has a dog and a cat at his dacha.29 The dog is called Joe after Stalin.’ This stream of intelligence did not change the course of the Cold War, but it was a small triumph for MI5 and M at a time when victories against Moscow were rare.

  By the end of the 1950s, M was spending much less time running his MI5 section. Indeed, his interests seemed to be gravitating away from the world of intelligence and the more suspicious and close atmosphere that had taken hold within the Office. The foundations of British intelligence had been rocked by the exposure of so many Soviet moles. The punishment for those in MI5 and MI6, it seemed, was to live in a world without coincidence. M had joined the service in 1931, hoping, perhaps, to step into the pages of a novel by John Buchan. By 1961, the year that he retired, it had become more reminiscent of a book by his officer John Le Carré. It was time for M to step into the other life he had been carefully building for himself over the last decade.