The Sword and the Shield

by Christopher Andrew

  In October 1935, as a new member of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, Maclean became the first of the Magnificent Five to penetrate the corridors of power.

  Burgess went about burying his Communist past with characteristic flamboyance. Late in 1935 he became personal assistant to the young rightwing gay Conservative MP Captain “Jack” Macnamara. Together they went on fact-finding missions to Nazi Germany which, according to Burgess, consisted largely of homosexual escapades with like-minded members of the Hitler Youth. Burgess built up a remarkable range of contacts among the continental “Homintern.” Chief among them was Edouard Pfeiffer, chef de cabinet to Edouard Daladier, French war minister from January 1936 to May 1940 and prime minister from April 1938 to March 1940. Burgess boasted to friends that, “He and Pfeiffer and two members of the French cabinet… had spent an evening together at a male brothel in Paris. Singing and dancing, they had danced around a table, lashing a naked boy, who was strapped to it, with leather whips.”42

  In February 1935 there was a security alert at the London illegal residency. Reif, operating under the alias “Max Wolisch,” was summoned for an interview at the Home Office and observed a large file in the name of Wolisch on his interviewer’s desk. Orlov reported to the Centre that the British authorities appeared to have been “digging around but could not come up with anything and decided to get rid of him.” Reif obeyed Home Office instructions to arrange for his prompt departure. Orlov feared that MI5 might also be on the trail of Deutsch and announced that as a precaution he was taking personal control of Philby, Maclean and Burgess, by now sometimes referred to as the “Three Musketeers.” Orlov believed that his own cover as an American businessman selling imported refrigerators from an office in Regent Street was still secure. In October, however, there was another security alert when he accidentally encountered a man who, some years earlier, had given him English lessons in Vienna and knew his real identity. Orlov made a hasty exit from London, never to return, leaving Deutsch to resume the running of the Cambridge recruits.43

  Under Deutsch’s control, Philby, Maclean and Burgess rapidly graduated as fully fledged Soviet agents. They may not have been told explicitly that they were working for the NKVD rather than assisting Comintern in its underground struggle against fascism, but they no longer needed formal notification. As Deutsch wrote later in a report for the Centre, “They all know that they are working for the Soviet Union. This was absolutely understood by them. My relations with them were based upon our Party membership.” In other words, Deutsch treated them not as subordinate agents but as comrades working under his guidance in a common cause and for the same ideals. Later, less flexible controllers than Deutsch were unhappy that Philby, Burgess and Maclean appeared to consider themselves as officers, rather than agents, of Soviet intelligence.44 It came as a considerable shock to Philby after his defection to Moscow in 1963 to discover that, like other foreign agents, he did not possess, and would never be allowed to acquire, officer rank—hence his various attempts to mislead Western journalists into believing that he was Colonel, or even General, Philby of the KGB.45 In his memoirs, published in 1968, Philby repeated the lie that he had “been a Soviet intelligence officer for some thirty-odd years.”46

  AFTER THE SECURITY scares of 1935, Deutsch and the illegal residency took increased precautions to evade MI5 and Special Branch surveillance. Before preparing for a meeting with an agent, usually in London, Deutsch would be driven out of town, watching carefully to see if the car was being followed. Once satisfied that he was not being tailed, he returned to London by public transport, changing several times en route. During his travels Deutsch concealed film of secret documents inside hairbrushes, travel requisites and household utensils. Reports to the Centre were usually sent in secret ink to an address in Copenhagen for forwarding to Moscow.47

  Though the KGB and SVR released interesting material in the early 1990s on the “Three Musketeers,” they avoided any reference to Norman John (“James”) Klugmann, recruited by Deutsch in 1936.48 Klugmann and the young Marxist poet John Cornford, “James and John,” were the two most prominent Communist Party activists in Cambridge. Though Cornford was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, just after his twenty-first birthday, Klugmann went on to become head of the Party’s Propaganda and Education Department, a member of the political committee (in effect its Politburo) and the Party’s official historian. He had become a Communist at Gresham’s School, Holt, where he had been a friend and contemporary of Donald Maclean. Klugmann won an open scholarship in modern languages to Trinity College, Maclean a slightly less prestigious exhibition to the neighboring Trinity Hall. Both graduated with first-class honors. Like Maclean, Anthony Blunt’s conversion to Communism owed something to Klugmann’s influence. Blunt found him “an extremely good political theorist” who “ran the administration of the Party with great skill and energy… It was primarily he who decided what organizations and societies in Cambridge were worth penetrating [by the Communists].”49 Klugmann had an unshakable conviction that British capitalism was close to collapse. “We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand,” he later recalled. “If anyone had suggested it wouldn’t happen in Britain for say thirty years, I’d have laughed myself sick.”50

  Since Klugmann was one of Britain’s most active young Communists, there was little prospect that, like the Five, he could convincingly distance himself from the Party and penetrate the “bourgeois apparatus.” Deutsch saw another role for Klugmann: as a talent-spotter for the NKVD, capable, when necessary, of persuading Communist students to engage in underground work rather than conventional Party militancy. Before Deutsch recruited Klugmann, the NKVD obtained the approval of the British Party leadership. There was never any likelihood that the British general secretary, Harry Pollitt, would object. Like most Western Communist leaders he believed that the interests of the Communist International required unconditional support for the Soviet Union, whatever the twists of policy in the Kremlin. With Pollitt’s consent, Klugmann was recruited by Deutsch as agent MER.51 The refusal by the SVR until 1998 to admit Klugmann’s recruitment was due to the involvement of the British Communist Party.52 One of the KGB’s most closely guarded secrets was the extent to which, as late as the 1980s, it expected the leaders of “fraternal parties” in the West to assist in the recruitment of agents and the fabrication of “legends” for its illegals.53

  IN THE SPRING of 1936 the Centre appointed another of the Great Illegals, Teodor Maly (codenamed MANN), head of the illegal London residency.54 Like Deutsch, Maly was later included among the intelligence immortals whose portraits hung on the walls of the First Chief Directorate Memory Room. Hungarian by birth, Maly had entered a Catholic monastic order before the First World War but had volunteered for military service in 1914.55 He was taken prisoner while serving as second lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front in 1916, and spent the rest of the war in a series of POW camps. Maly later told one of his agents:

  I saw all the horrors, young men with frozen limbs dying in the trenches… I lost my faith in God and when the Revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I broke with my past completely… I became a Communist and have always remained one.56

  Maly was originally posted to London in January 1936 to run the Foreign Office with cipher clerk Captain King (previously controlled by Pieck), to whom he introduced himself as an executive of the fictitious Dutch bank which King believed was paying him for classified documents. In April Maly was appointed illegal resident and henceforth shared with Deutsch in the running of the Cambridge agents. Like Deutsch, he impressed them with both his human sympathy and his visionary faith in the Communist millennium.57

  During the early months of 1937 Deutsch and Maly completed the recruitment of the Magnificent Five. At the beginning of the year, Burgess, by then a producer at the BBC, arranged a first meeting between Deutsch and Anthony Blunt, French linguist, art historian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.58 Though the title of
“Fourth Man” later accorded Blunt was a media invention rather than a KGB sobriquet, he was both the fourth of the Five to be recruited and, over forty years later, the fourth to be publicly exposed. Until the war Blunt’s chief role for the NKVD was that of talent-spotter. His first recruit, by agreement with Deutsch, was a wealthy young American Communist undergraduate at Trinity, Michael Straight (codenamed NIGEL).59 Shortly after his own first meeting with Deutsch, Blunt invited Straight to his elegant rooms in Trinity. Straight was still shattered by the news a fortnight earlier that his close friend, John Cornford, had died a hero’s death in the Spanish Civil War. “Our friends,” Blunt told him, had been giving much thought to his future. “They have instructed me to tell you… what you must do.” “What friends?” Straight asked. “Our friends in the International, the Communist International,” Blunt replied. The “friends” had decided that Straight’s duty was to break all overt connection with the Party, get a job in Wall Street after his graduation later that year and provide Comintern with inside information. Straight protested. Cornford had given his life for the International. “Remember that,” Blunt told him. A few days later, Straight agreed. “In the course of a week,” Straight wrote later, “I had moved out of the noisy, crowded world of Cambridge into a world of shadows and echoes.” His only meeting with Deutsch, whom he mistook for a Russian, took place in London just after his graduation. Deutsch asked him for some personal documents. Straight gave him a drawing. Deutsch tore it in two, gave him one halfback and told him the other half would be returned to him by a man who would contact him in New York. 60

  The last of the Magnificent Five to be recruited, and later the last to be publicly exposed, was the “Fifth Man,” John Cairncross, a brilliant Scot who in 1934 had entered Trinity at the age of twenty-one with a scholarship in modern languages, having already studied for two years at Glasgow University and gained a licence ès lettres at the Sorbonne.61 His passionate Marxism led the Trinity Magazine to give him the nickname “The Fiery Cross,” while his remarkable facility as a linguist led the same magazine to complain, “Cairncross… learns a new language every fortnight.” 62 Among his college teachers in French literature was Anthony Blunt, though Cairncross later claimed that they never discussed Communism.63 In 1936, after graduating with first-class honors, Cairncross passed top of the Foreign Office entrance examinations, one hundred marks ahead of the next candidate (though he did less well at the interview).64

  After Blunt had acted as talent-spotter, the initial approach to Cairncross early in 1937 was entrusted by Deutsch to Burgess65—much as Philby had made the first recruitment overture to Maclean in 1934. The actual recruitment of Cairncross shortly afterwards was entrusted to James Klugmann.66 On April 9 Maly informed the Centre that Cairncross had been formally recruited and given the codename MOLIÈRE.67 Had Cairncross known his codename, he might well have objected to its transparency but would undoubtedly have found appropriate the choice of his favorite French writer, on whom he later published two scholarly studies in French. For reasons not recorded in KGB files, the codename MOLIÈRE was later replaced by that of LISZT.68 In May Klugmann arranged Cairncross’s first rendezvous with Deutsch. According to Cairncross’s admittedly unreliable memoirs, the meeting took place one evening in Regent’s Park:

  Suddenly there emerged from behind the trees a short, stocky figure aged around forty, whom Klugmann introduced to me as Otto. Thereupon, Klugmann promptly disappeared…69

  Deutsch reported to Moscow that Cairncross “was very happy that we had established contact with him and was ready to start working for us at once.”70

  Among the pre-Second World War Foreign Office documents available to both Maclean and Cairncross, and thus to the NKVD, were what Cairncross described as “a wealth of valuable information on the progress of the Civil War in Spain.”71 Only in a few cases, however, is it possible to identify individual documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which the Centre forwarded to Stalin, probably in the form of edited extracts.72 One such document, which seems to have made a particular impression on Stalin, is the record of talks with Hitler in November 1937 by Lord Halifax, Lord President of the Council (who, three months later, was to succeed Eden as Foreign Secretary).73 Halifax’s visit to Hitler’s mountain lair, the “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden, got off to a farcical start. As the aristocratic Halifax stepped from his car, he mistook Hitler for a footman and was about to hand him his hat and coat when a German minister hissed in his ear, “Der Führer! Der Führer! 74 The Centre, however, saw the whole meeting as deeply sinister. The extracts from Halifax’s record of his talks with Hitler, tailored to fit Stalin’s profound distrust of British policy, emphasized that Britain viewed Nazi Germany as “the bastion of the West against Bolshevism” and would take a sympathetic view of German expansion to the east.75 Though Halifax’s assessment of Hitler, whom he regarded as “very sincere,” was lamentably naive, his record of his comments on Germany’s role in defending the West against Communism were much more qualified than the Centre’s version of them. He told Hitler:

  Although there was much in the Nazi system that offended British opinion (treatment of the Church; to a perhaps lesser extent, the treatment of Jews; treatment of Trade Unions), I was not blind to what he had done for Germany and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping Communism out of his country and, as he would feel, of blocking its passage West.

  Halifax also said nothing to support German aggression in eastern Europe. His aim—unrealistic though it was—was to turn Hitler into “a good European” by offering him colonial concessions in order to persuade him to limit his European ambitions to those he could achieve peacefully. Halifax made clear, however, that Britain was prepared to contemplate the peaceful revision of Versailles:

  I said that there were no doubt… questions arising out of the Versailles settlement which seemed to us capable of causing trouble if they were unwisely handled, e.g. Danzig, Austria, Czechoslovakia. On all these matters we were not necessarily concerned to stand for the status quo as today, but we were concerned to avoid such trouble of them as would be likely to cause trouble. If reasonable settlements could be reached with the free assent and goodwill of those primarily concerned we certainly had no desire to block them.

  Such statements were music to Hitler’s ears—not because he was interested in the peaceful revision of Versailles, but because he interpreted Halifax’s rather feeble attempt at conciliation as evidence that Britain lacked the nerve to fight when the time came for him to begin a war of conquest.76 Stalin, characteristically, saw a much more sinister purpose behind Halifax’s remarks and persuaded himself that Britain had deliberately given the green light to Nazi aggression in the east. The Foreign Office documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which recorded British attempts to appease Hitler were used by the Centre to provide the evidence which Stalin demanded of a deep-laid British plot to turn Hitler on the Soviet Union.

  THOUGH KIM PHILBY ultimately became the most important of the Magnificent Five, his career took off more slowly than those of the other four. He abandoned an attempt to join the civil service after both his referees (his Trinity director of studies and a family friend) warned him that, while they admired his energy and intelligence, they would feel bound to add that his “sense of political injustice might well unfit him for administrative work.” His only minor successes before 1937 were to gain a job on an uninfluential liberal monthly, the Review of Reviews, and become a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, contemptuously described by Churchill as the “Heil Hitler Brigade.” As Philby later acknowledged, he would often turn up for meetings with Deutsch “with nothing to offer” and in need of reassurance. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave him his first important intelligence mission. He eventually persuaded a London news agency to give him a letter of accreditation as a freelance war correspondent and arrived in Spain in February 1937. “My immediate assignment,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “was to get first-hand info
rmation on all aspects of the fascist war effort.” As usual, his memoirs fail to tell the whole truth.77

  A few weeks after Philby’s departure, the London illegal residency received instructions, undoubtedly approved by Stalin himself, to order Philby to assassinate General Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist forces.78 Maly duly passed on the order but made clear to the Centre that he did not believe Philby capable of fulfilling it.79 Philby arrived back in London in May without even having set eyes on Franco and, Maly told the Centre, “in a very depressed state.” Philby’s fortunes improved, however, after he was taken on by The Times as one of its two correspondents in nationalist Spain.80 At the end of the year he became a minor war hero. Three journalists sitting in a car in which he had been traveling were fatally injured by an artillery shell. Philby himself was slightly wounded. He reported modestly to Times readers, “Your correspondent… was taken to a first aid station where light head injuries were speedily treated.” “My wounding in Spain,” wrote Philby later, “helped my work—both journalism and intelligence—no end.” For the first time he gained access to Franco, who on March 2, 1938 pinned on his breast the Red Cross of Military Merit. Then, as Philby reported, “all sorts of doors opened for me.”81

  The doors, however, opened too late. By the time Philby gained access to Franco, the NKVD assassination plot had been abandoned. Since the spring of 1937 the Centre had been increasingly diverted from the war against Franco by what became known as the civil war within the Civil War. The destruction of Trotskyists became a higher priority than the liquidation of Franco. By the end of 1937 the hunt for “enemies of the people” abroad took precedence over intelligence collection. The remarkable talents of the Magnificent Five had yet to be fully exploited. INO was in turmoil, caught up in the paranoia of the Great Terror, with most of its officers abroad suspected of plotting with the enemy. The age of the Great Illegals was rapidly drawing to a brutal close.