by Adam Sisman
‘It’s time you met my superior,’ said Leggett, and at their next lunch he introduced David to Maxwell Knight, a famous figure within intelligence circles: the inspiration, it is claimed, for Ian Fleming’s ‘M’. After joining MI5 in 1931, ‘Max’ Knight had recruited and run agents to infiltrate extremist organisations on both right and left, favouring attractive young women from ‘good families’. At the end of the war Knight wrote a paper on agent-running, in which he had condemned the ‘longstanding and ill-founded prejudice against the employment of women as agents’. Operating from a flat in Dolphin Square, Knight maintained a lively social life as professional cover. He had written two thrillers, and would meet his agents over dinner at the Authors’ Club. In the inter-war years he had scored a number of notable successes, breaking the Communist spy ring in the Woolwich Arsenal and entrapping the American Nazi spy Tyler Kent in 1940; but his subsequent mishandling of the case of a pacifist accused of conspiring with the enemy had caused his judgement to be questioned. By the early 1950s he was a peripheral influence within MI5; he continued to run the agents whom he had recruited in the past, but the burden of agent-running and recruitment had fallen on his deputy, John Bingham. For David, however, Maxwell Knight remained the ‘Pied Piper’, a romantic and heroic figure, the inspiration for the character of Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy. David himself has been named as ‘one of Knight’s protégés’.24
Soon after arriving in Oxford, David had become friendly with Newton Garver, an American exchange student at Lincoln reading for a postgraduate degree in philosophy. He invited Garver to Tunmers for the weekend. Garver had heard much from David of his ambivalent feelings towards his father, so he was fascinated to meet Ronnie. He was impressed by the ‘posh set-up’ at Tunmers, but was less taken with Ronnie himself, whom he found both ‘right and wrong socially’, a braggart who boasted that he could get tickets for any sporting event one might want to attend. Tony was at Tunmers that weekend too, and Garver observed Ronnie urging his eldest son to make a career in the RAF, promising ‘I will get you promoted.’ Afterwards, he deduced that David had taken him to Tunmers with a motive: he wanted Garver to meet his father so that he might understand him better.
Garver was a Quaker, with a strong social conscience. Like David, he had joined the Canning Club, though he never felt that he belonged there, as he was too critical of the established order. In debates at the Oxford Union, he expressed his horror at the prospect of nuclear war and his strong desire for reconciliation between the peoples of the world. He had been involved in the peace movement since 1947, when at the age of nineteen he had burned his draft card in San Francisco. In the following year he had written to President Truman to inform him that, ‘as a carefully considered and conscious act of civil disobedience’, he had refused to register for the draft as he was required to do by law. This was a symbolic gesture; but Garver’s act of defiance in writing to the President had drawn attention to the case, and a federal judge had deemed it necessary to sentence the idealistic young Quaker to a year’s imprisonment. Almost a decade after leaving Oxford, Garver would again be involved in peaceful protest, when he refused to sign a ‘loyalty oath’,* though threatened with dismissal from his post as a philosophy instructor at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Buffalo. Having served a jail sentence for his religious principles, Garver was not about to compromise himself by signing the oath. Several other professors joined Garver in refusing, and the case became a cause célèbre, being taken all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the requirement to sign the loyalty oath was an unconstitutional infringement of academic freedom.
In his reports to MI5 on left-wing student activity David had mentioned Garver, whose name may have been forwarded to the FBI. Privately he wondered whether Garver might not be a CIA ‘plant’. He searched Garver’s rooms for evidence without finding anything incriminating, and suspected that Garver might have done the same to him. Years later David dimly recalled meeting a friend of Garver’s at the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, who struck him as ‘decidedly fishy’.25
Garver would be in intermittent contact with David after leaving Oxford. He believed that though unwilling to exhibit himself as a rebel, his young English friend shared many of his own ideals. And he observed how, in later life, David shed some of his inhibition and espoused progressive causes. So it was a shock when, more than half a century later, David confessed to having spied on him. Though startled, Garver did not allow this revelation to affect their longstanding friendship. In a 2007 letter, David applauded Garver’s ‘long, hard-fought campaign for sanity’. He continued: ‘I’m almost ashamed I didn’t fight it with you; but, of course, I secretly believe I did.’26
David shared French tutorials with Stanley Mitchell, a grammar school boy from Finchley who had won a scholarship to read modern languages at Lincoln. Mitchell enjoyed David’s irreverent sense of humour, and they became close friends, close enough to undertake a walking holiday together along the Dorset coast. Like David, Mitchell had suffered at the hands of his father, a Yiddish-speaking immigrant from Russia. Mitchell noted David’s ‘flawless’ German accent and his interest in people on the margins, Jews in particular. He formed the conclusion that David was ill at ease in his own culture, and that he had immersed himself in German as a form of escape. A member of the Communist Party, Mitchell was impressed by David’s anti-American sentiments, especially when he reacted passionately to the execution of the Rosenbergs.* It was Mitchell to whom David had explained his premature departure from Sherborne by claiming that his housemaster had tried to kiss him – or so Mitchell later said, though David has no memory of telling him this. Mitchell noticed that his friend recoiled when a visiting Communist lecturer, Arnold Kettle, took his arm. ‘He’s homosexual,’ David explained. At the time, Kettle’s homosexuality was secret, unknown even to his family; on the other hand his membership of the executive committee of the Communist Party was public knowledge. ‘It has been suggested from a somewhat doubtful source that Dr Kettle may have homosexual tendencies,’ Kettle’s MI5 file noted in 1953. Perhaps David was that ‘somewhat doubtful source’.27
After Mitchell became editor of a publication called Oxford Left in 1953 he persuaded his friend to contribute. David’s first illustration for it was a cartoon that could easily be mistaken for the crudest of Soviet propaganda, showing a phalanx of hideous American soldiers marching past a crucified Jesus. His cartoons in the next issue, illustrating an article by the Oxford University Labour Club chairman Anthony Howard (later a much admired journalist, editor, broadcaster and political commentator), were subtler, though still satirical. He also contributed a story of his own, the whimsical tale of a socially self-satisfied mouse who inhabited the Oxford Union.
Towards the end of 1953 Mitchell co-produced a performance of The Duchess of Malfi, which took place in a panelled room within the college, and (like the play David had put on the previous year) was broadcast on the radio. Mitchell cast David in the leading part of Bosola, a malcontent and a cynic, a critic of Renaissance society. Though Mitchell rated his acting skills highly, it never occurred to him that David might be playing a role in real life. Evidently the anonymous Imp critic thought well of David’s performance, since he mentioned him, together with the co-opted Somerville undergraduate who played the part of the Duchess, as worthy of special praise. The newly formed Lincoln Players, the critic suggested, ‘clearly have a valuable asset in Mr David Cornwell, both as an actor and as a painter of striking posters …’28
In Trinity term 1954 Oxford Left brought out a ‘Special Peace Issue’, reflecting a wider concern about the new thermonuclear weapons then being developed. The Americans had tested a hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok Atoll eighteen months earlier; the Russians were not far behind; and in 1954 a British programme had begun. An Oxford campaign calling for disarmament and the complete abolition of the ‘H-Bomb’ attracted support from the University branches of all the main political parties; indeed, the text of the ca
mpaign’s founding statement was proposed by the young Michael Heseltine,* then a prominent member of OUCA, the Oxford University Conservative Association. One of David’s illustrations appeared on the opening page of the ‘Special Peace Issue’ of Oxford Left, a grim cartoon showing wounded figures stumbling across a devastated landscape. In a letter to Ann, David mentioned a ‘rather good’ radio talk by the Methodist preacher Donald Soper, in which the speaker had urged British unilateral disarmament as a prelude to universal disarmament. On the previous evening he had been with Mitchell to hear the evangelist Billy Graham – ‘also good, but dangerously dramatic’.29
Visiting David in his rooms, Mitchell came across Hugh Peppiatt, and felt slightly surprised to find David in such company; he observed that their host seemed uncomfortable at this social juxtaposition. David was leading a double life, mixing with Stanley Mitchell and other left-wingers, while continuing to associate with much more conservative undergraduates. On 1 May 1954, for example, he attended a political demonstration with Mitchell during the day, and then in the evening had Robin Cooke, Colin Simpson and another friend, Sandy Llewellyn, round for drinks to his digs off the Abingdon Road. At tea with Llewellyn a few weeks later he became involved in ‘a heated discussion about the Soviet Union’, as he reported to Ann. ‘It ended with one of Sandy’s guests being very rude to me, and me getting very angry and leaving in a huff, which I suppose was silly. I’m afraid my friends are getting rather fed up with me,’ he continued. ‘Darling, is it so awfully wrong to be Socialist?’30
It is difficult to assess the sincerity of such remarks. Perhaps he was simply playing a part, or perhaps, as is often true of agents, David had absorbed some of the qualities of the person he was pretending to be. Even if this were so, it is probably fair to say that his political commitment did not run very deep. ‘Talked much politics with Stanley M and Garver N and others you don’t know,’ he wrote to Ann at the beginning of the Trinity Term 1954, ‘but ended by drinking beer, which is the answer to most political problems.’31 It is worth noting that David possessed at least some of the characteristics that the KGB recruiter Arnold Deutsch had identified in Philby, Maclean and others, and had listed as attributes of a successful spy – an inherent class resentfulness, a predilection for secretiveness and a yearning to belong.
Looking back on this period almost half a century afterwards, David denied to an interviewer that he had ever been drawn into deceitful behaviour that would trouble his conscience.
I don’t know that it’s such a disgraceful thing to have done, if you look at the record of people who were recruited at university from the ranks of Communist sympathisers and later turned traitors to their country … Largely the justification for what we did was one I accepted and still accept. That doesn’t mean the work was pleasant. It could often be quite disgusting in the sense that you had to penetrate a settled organisation of people who trusted each other … but somebody has to clean the drains, and I found that I did do things that, although they were in some way morally repugnant, I felt at the time, and still feel, to have been necessary.32
During the Cold War there were others willing to supply information to the intelligence services about their fellow undergraduates – Neil Gow, for example, later a QC, who had done National Service in the Intelligence Corps and had known David at Maresfield Camp. Gow went on to Glasgow University, where he became secretary of the students’ union; when approached by MI5 and asked to provide information about left-wing students who might be considered subversives, he was happy to do so. ‘I thought my duty to my country was higher than my duty to my fellow students,’ he told a journalist many years later.33
But no amount of rationalisation can disguise the unpleasant taste left by such acts. Schoolboys dislike a ‘sneak’; people shrink from informers. Some never forgave those who chose to ‘name names’ to the House Un-American Activities Committee, but at least that was public; David’s reports were clandestine, and potentially more damaging because they remained secret. There is something especially troubling about informing on those one knows personally; it feels like a betrayal of the trust implicit in friendship. And befriending somebody in order to betray him is perhaps even more so.
After Stanley Mitchell’s death in 2011, David reflected on their relations, in a letter of commiseration to his family. It seemed to him ironic that, as a Communist, Mitchell had nevertheless always insisted on placing personal friendship above political conviction. ‘Was he really imagining that a bourgeois society would not spy on a revolutionary movement?’34
One could of course reverse David’s paradox in assessing his own behaviour. Though perhaps not an ideologue, he had chosen loyalty to his country over loyalty to his friends. The dilemma continued to trouble him; it was a theme that would recur repeatedly in his fiction.
* The University calendar consists of three eight-week terms, called Michaelmas (autumn), Hilary (spring) and Trinity (summer).
* Edward Lear’s Jumblies ‘went to sea in a sieve’ and ‘sailed to the western sea’.
* David cannot remember whether or not he did inform on Magee, and anyway thinks it unlikely that his word alone would have been enough to sway the selectors.
* This was the notorious ‘Feinberg Certificate’, a relic of the anti-Communist fervour of the McCarthyite era.
* Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, an American couple convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. They were executed by electric chair in June 1953, despite worldwide protests, including an appeal for clemency to President Eisenhower from Pope Pius XII.
* Though on different sides politically, Michael Heseltine and Anthony Howard were lifelong friends.
7
‘This really is the end’
Ronnie was in the habit of opening his sons’ post as it arrived at Tunmers. One morning he read a letter on Foreign Office notepaper from a vice-admiral, writing from an address in Buckingham Gate, inviting David to lunch with him at the Travellers Club in Pall Mall. A puzzled Ronnie telephoned his pal Sir James Barnes, who informed him that the Admiral was a representative of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6). Confused and upset, Ronnie confronted his son: ‘What the hell are you doing with SIS?’ David tried to placate his father, whose ambitions for his boys were fading. Over lunch the Admiral hinted at intelligence work without ever discussing it openly. ‘I’ve been up to the Foreign Office for odd interviews preliminary to trying to get into the Diplomatic Corps,’ David informed Ann in a letter written in June 1953. ‘They were quite pleasant and things seemed to go well enough.’1
Later in the year, his tutor W. D. Williams submitted a confidential report in response to a ‘vetting’ enquiry. ‘David Cornwell has given evidence of ability above the average,’ he wrote. ‘He has a discriminating mind with some power and subtlety and a good deal of imagination.’ In this respect Williams rated him β+. For his character and general suitability to represent his country abroad, Williams rated him higher, α–. ‘He speaks faultless English and has charm and poise,’ Williams continued. ‘He is a thoroughly likeable person and I should think would get on well with all with whom he came in contact.’
There is, though, one point which perhaps should be borne in mind. He is of a somewhat unstable disposition, very much inclined to be swept off his feet for a time by some passing enthusiasm, inclined to let generous and idealistic impulses cloud the clarity of his thinking. He had, some time ago, considerable difficulty with his father when the latter learnt that he was associating with undergraduates of left-wing political views, and he eventually undertook to give up all activity on behalf of socialist groups. He is a man of integrity and has kept his undertaking, I think. Nor do I think that there is much danger of his succumbing to the blandishments of Communism on the continent, but he might be tempted to some equally silly course of action.2
The authorities at MI6 were aware of David’s undercover work for their sister service, and discounted his tutor’s warning accordingly. Indeed, had
David really converted to Communism, his record of work for both services would have provided perfect cover. David’s letters to Ann express confidence that he would join MI6 in due course; they contain several references to ‘my future employer’ and often allude to matters that could not be elaborated in writing, especially once she had returned to England and he had been able to put her in the picture. In one of the letters, for example, he refers to going ‘on business’ to Basel and Zurich ‘for some “friends” of mine, who will pay my fare’, during the University vacation: ‘this is one of those things I warned you about’.3
While in Washington with her family, Ann had been working as a secretary at the British Embassy. The prevalent anti-Communist zealotry in America had scared her: actors and directors were being blacklisted, public servants smeared and books removed from library shelves, or even burned. To her it seemed like a witch-hunt, with disturbing echoes of what had happened in Germany in the 1930s. She sailed back to England with her sister at the end of August 1953, a week after her twenty-first birthday. Her mother would follow a few months later, having separated from her husband, weary of his philandering.
Meanwhile David undertook the regulation two weeks’ training with the army at Maresfield, as did Gerald Peacocke. As members of the ‘supplementary reserve’, they were automatically given the worst jobs. Some senior officers present in the camp for a course invited the two personable young National Servicemen to join them for a drink in the officers’ mess. The next morning they were summoned to the Adjutant’s office and given a dressing-down. ‘You behaved disgracefully,’ the Adjutant bawled. ‘You crowded the bar.’ As punishment they were put on drill duty. Peacocke was upset, but David shrugged it off.