Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

by Mike Ripley

  Terence Young had been right about it being the right film in the right year. The breezy energy of Dr. No was proving infectious and set a fashion for spy fantasy fiction (and film) which was to dominate the rest of the decade, encouraging several hundred authors – some experienced, some novice, some who should have known better – to take up their typewriters and attempt to board what was thought to be a gravy train. Much of their work did not survive the Sixties.

  But it was fun while it lasted.

  Chapter 8:

  THE SPIES HAVE IT, 1963–70

  It must have been difficult in the early Sixties to tell where the newspaper stories ended and the film scripts began. Spies were everywhere.

  If it only read thrillers, the British public would have been unaware that the reputation of Britain’s security and intelligence services – MI5 and MI6 – was pretty dire within the murky world of espionage. Distrusted by its American allies and seemingly infiltrated at will by Russia and its allies, Britain’s secret services were mere shadows of the code-breaking, daredevil elite which had outwitted the Nazis.

  But if the public read their newspapers, it was clear that the rot had set in with the defection to Russia in 1951 of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who had been recruited as Soviet ‘moles’ whilst at Cambridge University in the 1930s. For several years the official government position was that the pair were ‘missing diplomats’ rather than spies on the run, but speculation had been rife that there was a ‘third man’ – if not a fourth, fifth or even sixth – involved in the Cambridge spy ring. And Cambridge wasn’t the only ring.

  In 1961 the Portland Spy Ring hit the headlines following the arrest of five professional spies, rather than gifted amateurs, involved in long-term espionage around the Admiralty’s Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland in Dorset. Central to the leaking of the Admiralty’s secrets was former Royal Navy Master-At-Arms Henry Houghton, who had been on the staff of the British naval attaché in Warsaw in 1951.1 Whilst there, Houghton was recruited by the Polish Ministry of Public Security (the MBP) as a spy, and on his return to England he began working at Portland, supported by his mistress Ethel Gee and American communists (and Soviet agents) Peter and Helen Kroger (actually Morris and Lona Cohen), along with a KGB case officer known as Gordon Lonsdale. Their objective was to pass on information about the development of a British nuclear submarine to Moscow. All five were arrested, tried, and imprisoned, with ‘Lonsdale’ (actually a Russian, Konon Molody, as it was revealed later) receiving a 25-year sentence. The whole affair was dramatized in the film Ring of Spies with Bernard Lee – already starring as James Bond’s boss ‘M’ – as Houghton but the headlines kept on coming.

  A month after the release of Ring of Spies in March 1964, Gordon Lonsdale had another moment of fame when he was ‘swapped’ for the detained British ‘businessman’ (actually a captured MI6 operative) Greville Wynne. The exchange of these two spies naturally took place in Berlin, which was no doubt a boost for the publishers of Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin that year; but in fact that famously divided city had already played host to the high-profile swap of Russian spy Rudolf Abel for shot-down American pilot Gary Powers two years earlier.2

  Some captured Russian ‘moles’ did not wait to be ex-changed. When MI6 officer George Blake was uncovered as a double agent in 1961 he was tried in camera – presumably due to the sensitivity of his crimes – and sentenced to forty-two years’ imprisonment, a quite staggering sentence then or now. He served only a small proportion of it, escaping from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and making his way to East Germany and then Russia. George Blake was to make the news again when he celebrated his ninetieth birthday at his house outside Moscow in 2012.

  Then there was the case of John Vassall, a case which provided innuendo-heavy sketches for the satirical programme That Was the Week That Was and plenty of scurrilous copy for the magazine Private Eye. A fairly low-level Admiralty clerk, John Vassall, had been assigned to the staff of the British Naval Attaché in Moscow in 1952, where he was lured into a homosexual ‘honey trap’ at which compromising photographs were taken and blackmail ensued. Vassall passed hundreds of secret naval documents to his blackmailers and continued to do so after his return to the Admiralty in London in 1956, by which time he had become a paid KGB agent. His colleagues began to get suspicious as to how he could afford the lifestyle he enjoyed on a clerk’s salary, but it was only after a tip-off from the CIA that he was arrested by MI5 and he quickly confessed. His trial, in October 1962 – the month of Dr. No and the Cuban Missile Crisis – at which he was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment, proved a great embarrassment to the government of Harold Macmillan, but a worse scandal was about to break.

  It seemed as if there was a whiff of espionage about everything, even the extra-marital affair between Secretary of State for War John Profumo and a 19-year-old model called Christine Keeler. The ‘Profumo affair’ had been rumbling on since 1961, but had been taken out of the sphere of the usual MP-behaving-badly ‘scandal sheet’ story by the fact that Christine Keeler had also been conducting an affair with Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet naval attaché in London, who was known by MI5 to be an officer in the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence). There was, according to the subsequent official inquiry, no evidence of an espionage connection between Profumo and Ivanov, and when the Daily Express gleefully splashed the headline ‘Profumo Quits: I Lied’ across its front page on 6 June 1963, it was because the ‘Minister for War’ had lied to the House of Commons about his affair with Keeler, not because he had been a spy. The scandal was, however, a mortal blow to the failing Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.

  A month later, more printers’ ink was expended to confirm a story which everyone in the security services (and many in Fleet Street) already knew and many in the thriller-writing community certainly suspected, when it was announced that Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was now resident in Moscow and had been granted Soviet citizenship.

  Philby, a senior MI6 officer and long-time double agent for the KGB, had been suspected of being one of the ‘Cambridge spies’ since the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 and, in the mind of the British public, he was to become the poster boy for the spy-as-traitor, just as James Bond was to be the ultimate spy-as-patriotic-hero.

  Forced to resign from MI6 with a ‘severance’ payment after the Burgess/Maclean defection, Philby was not mentioned publicly until he was accused in American newspapers (almost certainly the work of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) and then in the House of Commons in 1955, of being ‘the third man’ who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean, allowing them to escape before being arrested. The furore which followed included a front-page lead in London’s Evening Standard reporting on the ‘Dubious Third Man Activities of Mr Harold Philby’. The then Foreign Secretary, Harold Macmillan, told the House of Commons (following an internal enquiry by MI6) that he had ‘no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country, or to identify him with the so-called ‘Third Man’ if, indeed, there was one.’

  Despite mutterings of ‘whitewash’ and ‘old boys’ network cover-up’ from Opposition MPs and cynical shrugs from many in MI5 and the CIA who suspected the truth, Philby was cheekily confident enough to call a press conference for the day after Macmillan’s announcement. In front of a crowd of journalists and film cameras, Philby flatly denied he was the ‘third man’ and maintained that ‘the last time I spoke to a communist, knowing him to be a communist, was in 1934’.3

  Although officially exonerated, Philby was surely unemployable now by British Intelligence, wasn’t he? It appeared not. Thanks to the ‘old boys’ network’ within the security services, Philby found employment as a journalist in Beirut, working for The Observer and The Economist – the perfect job for a new career as an MI6 field agent (rather than an MI6 officer) covering the turbulent Middle East. It was not long before the MI6 agent contacted his old Russian bosses and also became a KGB agent (again).

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p; The spy hunters in MI5 had not, however, forgotten Kim Philby and towards the end of 1962 new evidence emerged confirming suspicions that Philby had been a communist double agent since his Cambridge days in the Thirties. An MI6 officer, ironically (or perhaps not) one of Philby’s closest friends, was sent to Beirut on 12 January 1963 to confront him. Realising the game was finally up, Philby made a partial confession and then, amazingly, was left to his own devices and on 23 January, boarded a Soviet freighter bound for Odessa. Whether he had fled or been allowed to escape is still debated in spy-watcher circles. The British government remained tight-lipped only acknowledging, under severe pressure from the media, that Philby was ‘missing’ in March and that summer the Lord Privy Seal, future Prime Minister Edward Heath, had to make a reassuring statement to the effect that Philby had not had access to ‘any official information’ since his ‘resignation’ from MI6 in 1951.

  It was then that the story broke that Philby was alive, seemingly well, and living in Moscow. He remained in Russia until his death in 1988, having received the Order of Lenin and had his face put on postage stamps. He wrote an ‘autobiography’, probably with a little help from his KGB hosts, My Silent War, which was published in 1968. In the same year a memoir by his third wife, Eleanor, appeared under the title The Spy I Loved and in 1999, a second book, by his fourth (Russian) wife Rufina, The Private Life of Kim Philby: The Moscow Years added to the legend.

  Spy Fever

  Not that Philby was in any danger of being forgotten. There have been dozens if not hundreds of books about Philby and the ‘Cambridge spies’ and for newspapers it is the story which keeps on giving.4 Although he had actually confessed to MI5 interrogators in 1964, Sir Anthony Blunt, a celebrated art historian and Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was only publicly revealed as one of the original ‘Cambridge Ring of Five’ by the then brand-new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In December of that year, the ‘Fifth Man’, John Cairncross, who had worked at the secret code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park during the war, was finally exposed by a journalist.

  Despite the suffocating blanket of official secrecy – the first mention of MI6 in a Queen’s Speech was not until 1992 and John Vassall’s confession, made in September 1962, was only released to the public at the National Archives in June 2006 – Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Lonsdale, Greville Wynne5, Blake and Vassall were all household names in Britain by 1963, at least in every household which had a television or took a newspaper – especially one of the most salacious Sunday papers. The British public, devouring these true life spy stories over their tea and breakfast Corn Flakes may not have been quite sure exactly what these double agents had been spying on, or exactly why some seemed to have been suspected for over a decade and yet allowed to live freely. (Public outrage reached fever pitch in 1979 when Sir Anthony Blunt – a knight of the realm, no less – was revealed as a traitor, and a traitor who had regular access to Her Majesty the Queen!). But where life showed the way, art – or at least fiction – followed.

  Kim Philby was to step out of the record of espionage fact and on to the pages of spy fiction, taking a leading role in Alan Williams’ thriller Gentleman Traitor in 1974. A World War II version of Philby (referred to by the code-name ‘Mowgli’ to maintain the Jungle Book connection with ‘Kim’) appeared in Black Camelot by Duncan Kyle in 19786 and he plays a key part in Frederick Forsyth’s The Fourth Protocol in 1984. In 2012, Philby’s early life and formative years as a spy in the Twenties and Thirties was expertly fictionalised by the American novelist Robert Littell in Young Philby. Other members of Cambridge’s famous five were to be immortalised on page, stage and television, including by playwright Alan Bennett: Guy Burgess in his An Englishman Abroad and Anthony Blunt in A Question of Attribution. Blunt was also a central character in the impressive 2012 thriller The Girl in Berlin by Elizabeth Wilson, and John Cairncross was portrayed in the 2014 film The Imitation Game. Indeed, the continuing fascination with the Cambridge ring – who all studied and were recruited at Trinity College – tempted thriller writer Charles Cumming7 to speculate on their expansion into The Trinity Six, his 2010 novel.

  Gentleman Traitor, Panther, 1976

  Most bizarrely of all, in the year before his death, Philby himself attempted to meet a well-known British novelist who was visiting Moscow. Perhaps he had some plot to suggest or was volunteering himself for a role in the novelist’s next book. We will never know as the novelist in question, John Le Carré, wisely refused to meet him.

  Newspaper stories, the now familiar television image of the Berlin Wall, and a flood of espionage ‘memoirs’ (Gordon Lonsdale became, like Philby, an author from his Moscow retreat while Greville Wynne, who had travelled the other way, published The Man from Moscow in 1967) laid the factual groundwork for thriller writers to build on.

  Perhaps the most commercially successful of these spy-and-tell-not-quite-all volumes was The Penkovsky Papers, first published in 1965, serialised in a Sunday newspaper and a big-selling Fontana paperback in 1967, although the ‘author’ was not available to promote the book.

  Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky was a Colonel in Soviet Military Intelligence (the GRU) who, from 1960 began to pass information to MI6, with Greville Wynne as his ‘courier’, and thence to the American CIA. He was to become known as ‘the Russian who spied for the West’ and provided advance warning of Russian missiles being placed in Cuba, but he was arrested (possibly betrayed by a Soviet ‘mole’ inside MI6), tried for treason, sentenced to death, and executed in May 1963. The Penkovsky Papers were therefore published posthumously with, it was said, considerable help from CIA analysts which raised concerns about their accuracy as did the constant accusation that Penkovsky had been a double agent and providing disinformation rather than worthwhile intelligence. Doubts over The Penkovsky Papers persisted for decades and as early as 1965, the Sunday Telegraph carried a cartoon by Nicolas Bentley of a little girl offering up a copy of the book to her father saying: ‘Daddy, will you read me a fairy story?’

  The book even ruffled a few ermines in the House of Lords when, in February 1966, one noble Lord asked if The Penkovsky Papers had been submitted, prior to publication, for vetting by the security services. (It had not.) The current official position, at least that given on the official CIA website – a portal unthinkable back in 1965 even in the wildest spy fantasy – is that: ‘The Colonel’s information was immensely valuable, helping dispel concerns about Soviet strategic superiority and showing that the US had the advantage in missile systems.’

  The reading public was becoming steeped in an espionage culture where clandestine operators were often betrayed by their own organisations or at the very least working against agents supposedly on their ‘side’. In earlier times, life for the fictional spy appeared much more straightforward. The enemy was the enemy – ideologically, geo-politically or in o pen warfare – and often state supported. The Cheka, OGPU, NKVD and then KGB for Soviet Russia and the Gestapo and the SS for Nazi Germany, were clearly the organs of an enemy state, although the enemy could be (as James Bond was finding) a rogue offshoot of such an organ, a branch of organised crime usually headed by a megalomaniac, or indeed any combination of evil-doers seeking world domination, preferably with their own nuclear weapons. In either case, the enemy was clearly ‘out there’ and identifiable usually by being distinctly foreign and un-British.

  By the mid-Sixties, that scenario now seemed untenable given the number of double agents, spy rings, and traitors tumbling from the pages of the newspapers on a weekly basis. Patriotism had become almost a dirty word and a spy’s deadliest enemies often came from within his own organisation. That much was clear in fact, and was quickly reflected in fiction.

  Indeed, so familiar were the exploits of real spies that they quickly found their way into contemporary thrillers. In The Double Agent by John Bingham (a senior officer in British Intelligence and often regarded as a model for John Le Carré’s George Smiley), which was published in 1966, Gordon Lonsda
le and Oleg Penkovsky are referenced without any need for elaboration. There is also a cameo role in the plot, in a scene in Moscow, for a famous (‘it was in all the papers’) British defector now working for the KGB. Although called ‘James Crawley’ in the novel, this is clearly a portrait of a rather shabby Kim Philby. Similarly, in his All Men Are Lonely Now (1967) thriller about a ‘mole’ in a secret weapons research centre, Francis Clifford refers to the ‘cases of Blake and Vassall’ and neither his characters nor his readers require any further explanation.

  The Double Agent, Panther, 1969

  The fictional spy of the Sixties was coming to suspect his colleagues as much as he had to know his enemy, have sharp elbows at the committee room table, and one eye permanently watching his back. He would be more likely to survive if he was paranoid rather than heroic and if he ordered a vodka Martini, whether shaken or stirred, he made sure he got a receipt for his expenses claim. The stage was set perfectly for the new school of spy thriller and writers such as Len Deighton and John Le Carré, with novels such as The Ipcress File, Horse Under Water, Funeral in Berlin, the tour-de-force that was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and then The Looking Glass War were first out of the blocks.

  Perhaps surprisingly, looking back, Deighton and Le Carré seemed the only runners in that race and had few direct imitators, at least in the Sixties. Their novels were critically acclaimed and bestsellers internationally, many being successfully adapted for film or television and for their readers they became synonymous with the term ‘spy thriller’. They were, however, clearly different from Ian Fleming’s adventures of James Bond; this was realistic spy fiction as opposed to spy fantasy.

  Yet the fantasy school of spy writing had been given a huge boost by the release of Dr. No and the popularity of television shows such as Danger Man and The Avengers. The continuing success of big screen outings for James Bond, the imported US series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (of which there were several feature-length film versions), and the fantastical, if slightly pretentious, The Prisoner, all helped to push that branch of spy fiction into orbit in the years 1963–6. It was only in 1967 that British television audiences were brought back down to earth by James Mitchell’s gritty and unglamorous Callan.