Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  The experiments being conducted in 1940 were part of the preparations for the design and construction of a new class of 16-meter three-man attack submarines, the X-class or “midget” submarines. The midget submarines were still in the conceptual stage and needed an escape chamber with a watertight compartment, which had been mocked up. After initial testing (presumably at Siebe Gorman) the mock-up was tested at Portsmouth in the torpedo-testing tank, which was 60 feet deep. Testing there seems to have been conducted by Haldane himself and navy personnel only: Captain Godfrey Herbert, Commander C. H. Varley, and Colonel Millis Rowland Jefferis.21 Colonel Jefferis was in charge of the top-secret MD1 unit known as “Winston Churchill’s Toyshop,” which would soon develop the limpet mine. Commander Cromwell Hanford Varley (1890–1949), a retired veteran of the First World War and a talented inventor, would go on to design the prototype X-3 sub, assisted by a Commander Bell. Limpet mines would be deployed from the midget subs during the war. The X-3 prototype craft was developed in a yard near Portsmouth.

  The testing crew used here may have been different because of a lack of security clearance for the current crop of Haldane’s (perhaps exclusively) communist helpers. Those included Kahle (before his deportation), Edwin Martin Case (from Cambridge days), Helen Spurway, Elizabeth Jermyn, and, later, Juan Negrín, the exiled prime minister of Republican Spain. The experiments were harrowing and often produced hallucinations and severe convulsions, with Haldane and Spurway the main victims of these. JBS badly injured his spinal cord in one episode and carried the injury for the rest of his life.22

  The X-craft midget subs proved to be a partial success. They inflicted serious damage on the German battleship Tirpitz as part of Operation Source, by slipping under defenses and laying mines with timed detonators under the ship. They were also used to sink the floating dock at Bergen in April 1944, and formed part of the surveying preparations for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Several of the submarines were scuttled during missions to prevent their discovery. However, Haldane’s role in this work was curtailed in 1943 when the Admiralty decided that the security risk he posed, given his cell of communist assistants, was no longer tolerable.23 But Haldane worked on several other projects for the military during the war, including a study of how stick-bombing techniques affected the distribution of bomb hits.24

  Kahle returned to the UK from Canada on January 22, 1941, after he was again offered as a “rabbit” for Haldane’s submarine research, at Haldane’s repeated initiative. The Admiralty had put in a word.25 Haldane had also given MI5 a written undertaking that Kahle was not a security risk. While Charlotte Haldane was abroad in the Soviet Union for the latter half of 1941, Kahle occupied her apartment in Hampstead.26 His fellow internee and recruit Klaus Fuchs had also returned to the UK, finding a position in the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. During the remainder of the war, Kahle worked officially as a military correspondent for the Daily Worker, Labour Monthly, and the American Life magazine. He frequently addressed public meetings, duly reported by the major newspapers, and wrote pamphlets extolling Stalin’s virtues as a military commander.27 MI5 dutifully added copies of these to his file.

  Kahle kept up regular contact with Haldane throughout this period, addressing him familiarly as “JBS” and closing his letters “fraternally,” requesting, among other things, contributions by JBS to pamphlets on the “scientific” aspects of race and anti-Semitism.28 Kahle’s active assistance at this time in conducting Soviet espionage was later confirmed by Ursula Kuczynski (sister of Jürgen), who had been the resident Soviet handler of Klaus Fuchs and Allan Foote from her home in Oxford.29 Kahle supplied Ursula with what she called “useful reports” and undoubtedly enabled contact between the Kuczynski espionage clan and Klaus Fuchs. Ernest Hemingway, fraternal comrade to both Kahle and Haldane in Spain and later, had also tried to sign up with the “neighbours,” i.e., the KGB, in 1941. Despite repeated contact and receipt of a code name (“Argo”) he was never able to supply them with anything interesting, and the KGB considered him a failure.30 Fuchs was more successful and was convicted in 1950 of passing atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Russians.31

  Kahle went back home to the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany (later East Germany) in February 1946, undertaking not to return to the UK. MI5 were finally paying close attention to him and noticed that he was escorted to Germany by Bill Rust of the CPGB. Kahle was appointed “Police President” of Mecklenburg by March 1946. By the following year, he directed the Information Service of the Police with the assistance of Soviet MVD officers, but died while undergoing a stomach operation on September 8, 1947. MI5 had information that shortly before his death he was in the running for head of the Stasi. In 1966, East Germany issued a postage stamp in his honor.

  In Haldane’s later career, the subject of scientific espionage often cropped up in public, with the uncovering of atomic spies like Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, and Bruno Pontecorvo. Haldane retained his security clearance until 1950 and proved to be remarkably brazen. Questions had been asked about this clearance in Parliament in 1948—“In view of the fact that the Prime Minister has announced his purge of the Civil Service, is he not aware that purges, to be effective, must apply to people like Professor Haldane and the B.B.C.?”—but Attlee’s undertaking to remove known communists from security-sensitive work had not been applied to Haldane—“I am aware that Professor Haldane is working on two committees of the Medical Research Council. The Government’s attitude towards the employment of Communists upon work which is vital to the security of the State was announced in my statement of 15th March, to which I have nothing to add.”32 This was the policy that action would only be taken against communists who posed a definite security risk because they had access to secret government information, construed narrowly; merely being a communist was not cause enough for exclusion from government work.

  When Fuchs was arrested in February 1950, belated action was taken. In March, Clement Attlee contacted MI5 and was advised that Haldane was a security risk.33 The Admiralty refused to pass on classified information to the committees Haldane worked on, and he was asked to resign. A protest followed—“the Board of Admiralty has been misinformed concerning me”—and a challenge—“If the Board has any other reason to suppose that I would divulge secret information imparted to me, I should be interested to learn it.”34

  Note from M. B. Towndrow to H. A. R. “Kim” Philby about Haldane, October 22, 1946. From National Archives, KV 2-1832.

  In his resignation letter to the Admiralty, Haldane dropped nonspecific hints about other scientists who had been careless with information and were probable “sources of leakage.” By November 1951, he added more details in public. In September 1950, the nuclear physicist Bruno Pontecorvo (1913–1993) had fled to the Soviet Union, never to return; he had become alarmed after being questioned by MI5, who had finally realized after a tip-off from a Swedish source that Pontecorvo was a communist. The “Brothers Pontecorvo” had arrived in the UK in 1938 as communist refugees from Mussolini. Bruno was a nuclear physicist who had studied under Enrico Fermi and would later work on the British contribution to the Manhattan Project at Montreal; Guido Pontecorvo (1907–1999) was a geneticist who had worked with Hermann Muller in Edinburgh; Paolo the engineer worked on radar during the war; and Gillo, the youngest, became a radical filmmaker. Haldane knew Guido Pontecorvo well and, through him, Bruno.

  At a public meeting on “Science for Peace” held at Holborn in London on November 21, 1951, Haldane argued that Bruno Pontecorvo was the victim in this affair. An MI5 source in the audience reported that, according to Haldane, “there was no evidence that he had breached any law of this country. The newspapers had, however, made him the spy of spies, and if he ever returned to this country, which even Professor Haldane doubted, he could make a million pounds out of Press libel actions.” A second source reported hearing that “he (HALDANE) would not be surprised at all to learn that the United Kingdom had secret agents in the
USSR trying to spy out Russian scientific achievements. Conversely, it was quite possible that the USSR had a few such persons in the United Kingdom (Laughter).” Working the audience, he said that the problem with Alan Nunn May was that he had been so “stupid” as to believe Churchill’s “promises” in 1942 to share intelligence with the Russians, and so deserved to be in jail. “He assured the audience from personal observation and experiences over a period of years of association with classified government projects that the procedures and investigative methods of government agencies such as MI5 (in this country and elsewhere) are not really capable of uncovering really clever people.”35

  Revelations were again hinted at. “The people who are really responsible for so-called breaches of security are people in high places who whisper things to their friends to impress the latter. He illustrated this point with alleged examples from his own experiences during World War II, but did not specifically name the scientists who ‘had confided in him’ things which they should have retained.” The first MI5 source was more expansive: “in one instance a high ranking Government Official had informed him, although aware of his political opinions, of the development of radar, another when he had been informed of top secret Cabinet decisions, and one man, who only because he wanted to swank, had told him of the Government expenditure in a special electronic sphere nuclear fission.” Haldane, he reported, then hung out more bait. “If there was a representative of MI5 in the audience who wanted these three names and addresses, Professor Haldane would be pleased to give him them after the meeting.”36

  This promised information would perhaps have placed MI5 on a level footing with the X Group. Curiously, MI5, who as we have seen really did have agents in the audience, were greatly interested in Haldane’s promise to reveal his sources and for over a week debated internally whether they ought to approach him for help. In the end, they thought better of it.37 Meanwhile, Pontecorvo pursued atomic physics in the Soviet Union until his death there in 1993; for many years he enjoyed support from scientists and others in the West, who resolutely maintained the fiction that he had gone there merely to escape persecution.38

  Some additional hints about X Group–like underground activities were dropped by Charlotte Haldane after she defected from the Communist Party in 1942. In her confessional Truth Will Out (1949), she recalled that Haldane was involved in a curious sub-group within the Party that she was not allowed access to.

  The Communist Party . . . organized an A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions] Bureau, of which J.B.S. was the head. For some reason unknown to me, I was not invited to be a member of this Bureau, although it used to meet in my house. One afternoon, feeling slightly unwell, I was resting in the front sitting-room. The Bureau was meeting in the back sitting room behind closed folding doors. I could not help overhearing its deliberations. At one point it was clearly in a difficulty. Knowing the answer to the problem under discussion, I knocked at the door, asked if I might be allowed to speak, and gave the comrades the information they lacked. The only reward I received for my unsolicited help was a terrific wigging, afterwards, from my spouse, who accused me of ‘eavesdropping’ on a secret Party meeting.39

  Was this the X Group or some other clandestine operation? It could hardly have been about the humdrum ARP, which Haldane thundered about from every platform across the land, and it is hard to understand why Charlotte would have been excluded from “secret” meetings unless there were far-reaching security implications. The Party were not happy with her disclosures. MI5 recorded a conversation at the King Street premises in which Harry Pollitt and JBS debated what they could do about it.

  PETER KERRIGAN heard talking to HARRY POLLITT about something which had been published. HARRY heard to call out “Come in, JACK”. Told V. to take the easy chair. Previous visitor (SAM) left almost immediately. HARRY then turned to JACK (? HALDANE) and asked him what he could do. V. did not think HARRY could do very much. . . . Comrades now appeared to be discussing some article (probably written by CHARLOTTE HALDANE). HARRY very indignant about this, and said that had it not been for the fact that HALDANE was in the Party, he would have advised libel action, because the passages which related to him (HARRY) were just awful lies. He, however, thought that when everything came out it would be a “pale glory”; everything would be against them.40

  These rumblings drew the attention of MI5, but only briefly. A note in J. B. S. Haldane’s file records that “Charlotte HALDANE has not been interviewed by us, nor have we hitherto thought it worthwhile to make an approach to her, since any information not already publicly disclosed by her is necessarily some years out of date.”41 A cursory review of her book shows that she left a great deal out and was well connected to a network of which many members were probably still active. Basic intelligence work would have led to an interview at the very least. But clarification about whether this was ever followed up on awaits the release of Charlotte Haldane’s own MI5 file, which is still embargoed.

  MI5 never got very far analyzing the X Group after its exposure in the 1960s. “We have not established what the X Group represents. It is not the Communist Party as such, but it is probably some fraction or undercover group of the C.P. Moscow obviously visualised it as a source of military intelligence but it is difficult to trace the connection between Ivor Montagu (whose interests were largely in Film Production, Jewish affairs, International Table Tennis etc.), a Colonel in the R[oyal] A[rtillery], a girl in a Government Department and NOBILITY, a journalist.”42 On the contrary, MI5’s bulging Personal File on Montagu was packed with leads still relevant in the 1960s when this note was written and he was still alive and active—very little of it concerns Ping-Pong. Little wonder, then, that the KGB was dumbfounded by the internal collapse of the Soviet Union decades later—the World was going our way!43

  7. THE FATE OF VAVILOV

  By the time that Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Charlotte had been supplanted in Haldane’s affections by his pupil Dr. Helen Spurway, but they remained officially married. Though she had not worked as a journalist since her marriage, she managed to land an assignment to Russia as a correspondent for the Daily Sketch, hoping that she might get a personal interview with Stalin. She left Liverpool on August 16, 1941, on the Llanstephan Castle, which formed part of the Dervish convoy to Archangel via Iceland, arriving on August 31.1 But before she left, JBS asked her to make some urgent enquiries on his behalf. The first concerned unpaid book royalties he was owed for his publications in the Soviet Union. The second was about his old friend, the plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, whose fate Haldane was privately worried about. He asked Charlotte to try to contact Vavilov when she was in the USSR, or find out what had happened to him. Vavilov had been expected to attend the International Congress of Genetics in Edinburgh in 1939 but failed to turn up. Officially, Vavilov communicated that research in the USSR proceeded normally, but privately he wrote to a Western colleague at the conference that the opposite was true. This letter had been forwarded to Haldane, who was therefore privately aware that there was trouble, at least by this date but probably even prior to that.2

  After her arrival in Moscow in September 1941, Charlotte duly made inquiries about Vavilov. Definite information proved hard to find, until she learned to read the signals that had long ruled Soviet life. She asked to be put in touch with Lydia Bach, a daughter of the director of the Institute for Biochemistry in Moscow, Professor Aleksei Nicolaevich Bach, an acquaintance from her 1928 trip. The Bachs were Old Bolsheviks. Lydia, with multiple books to her name, was well integrated into the Soviet establishment. It was more than a month before she arrived unannounced at Charlotte’s hotel room. Charlotte later guessed that her request had been delayed by the required NKVD approval.

  As soon as I met Lydia Bach, and we began to talk of old friends, I asked after Vavilov. During our 1928 visit to Moscow there had never been the slightest difficulty with regard to meeting individual scientists and many other Russians, even of the former bourgeoisie. In re
ply to my present inquiry, however, Miss Bach, who had in the meantime become a member of the Party, and secretary of the biological section of the Academy of Sciences, raised her eyebrows and remarked thoughtfully: ‘Vavilov? Vavilov? I do not remember what he is doing now. One has not heard of him for a very long time’. . . . Even so dull a scholar as I then was learned fairly rapidly when not to press a point.3

  The trip proved disillusioning for Charlotte. The publishing rubles due to JBS led her on a long tour through the Soviet bureaucracy, only to be told, eventually, that the organization owing the money had supposedly gone bankrupt. She discovered that Soviet air-raid precautions were rudimentary and far worse than those in England so bitterly complained about by her own Communist Party. The authorities in Moscow did not care. And the Russians were surprised to be told by her that the Germans had bombed London. The censors had made the Blitz a nonevent during the Nazi-Soviet Pact years. Then she saw processions of forced laborers in miserable condition. The NKVD arrived to arrest a man who had vomited in her presence. She was told he would probably be shot. Throughout her journey, the NKVD continually intruded. She was refused access to factories, and staged displays of “captured German equipment” insulted her intelligence. Evacuees were starved to death through official indifference. Religion was now openly permitted. The sight of an evacuee with a baby fallen victim to starvation proved the breaking point for her former faith. Her “masochistic devotion” to the Communist Party was over, leaving her with “a deep and strong sense of guilt” for deserting it, mixed with “pure rage.”4

  On her return to London in late November 1941, Charlotte met with JBS to convey the news about Vavilov and to share her disillusionment. “My reports caused him, undoubtedly, considerable surprise and mental uneasiness.” Soon, she heard from Bill Rust, the head of the Communist Party, who had been tipped off by JBS. Rust concluded that she had been “got at” and, when told that she planned to write a book about her trip, asked if she would accept “Party collaboration” in writing it. She refused.5