Burgess intended his chief talent-spotter at Oxford to be Goronwy Rees, a young Welsh Fellow of All Souls and assistant editor of the Spectator. Rees had first met Burgess in 1932 and, though resisting Burgess’s attempt to seduce him, had none the less been deeply impressed by him: “It seemed to me that there was something deeply original, something which was, as it were, his very own in everything he had to say.”61 It was probably a book review by Rees late in 1937 which persuaded Burgess that he was ready for recruitment. The misery of mass unemployment in south Wales, wrote Rees, was
misery of a special and peculiar kind… and to many people it implies a final condemnation of the society which has produced it… If you tell men and women, already inclined by temperament and tradition to revolutionary opinions, that their sufferings are caused by an impersonal economic system, you leave them but one choice. Lenin could not do better.
One evening, probably at the beginning of 1938, sitting in Rees’s flat with, as usual, a bottle of whiskey between them, Burgess told him that his Spectator review showed that he had “the heart of the matter in him.” Then, according to Rees, he added with unusual solemnity, “I am a Comintern agent and have been ever since I came down from Cambridge.”62 In later years Rees was to try to give the impression that he did not agree to become an agent. His KGB file makes clear that he was recruited—though it confirms that Burgess asked him not to work for the NKVD but “to help the Party.”63 As an NKVD case officer with whom Burgess made contact later in the year reported to the Centre, he regarded Rees (henceforth codenamed FLEET or GROSS) as a key part of his Oxbridge recruitment strategy:
The kind of work which he would do with great moral satisfaction and with absolute confidence in its success and effectiveness is the recruitment by us of young people graduating from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and preparing them to enter the civil service. For this kind of work he has such assistants as TONY [Blunt] in Cambridge and GROSS [Rees] in Oxford. MÄDCHEN [Burgess] always returns to this idea at every meeting…64
Though unhappy with Burgess’s undisciplined recruiting methods, the Centre regarded Rees as potentially an important agent. Three of Britain’s leading appeasers—Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary; Sir John Simon, then Home Secretary; and Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times—were nonresident Fellows of All Souls. The Center attached exaggerated importance to the fact that Rees met all three from time to time on high table. It also overestimated the influence of Rees’s friend Sir Ernest Swinton, a retired major-general who had been Chichele Professor of Military History since 1925 and was referred to by the Centre as “General Swinton.”65
WHILE BURGESS WAS pressing ahead enthusiastically with his Oxbridge recruitment strategy, INO was in turmoil. On February 17, 1938 its head, Abram Slutsky, was found dead in his office, allegedly from a heart attack. But at his lying in state in the NKVD officers’ club, his senior staff noticed on his face the tell-tale signs of cyanide poisoning.66 Yagoda, meanwhile, was confessing at his trial to working for the German, Japanese and Polish intelligence services, to poisoning his predecessor, Menzhinsky, and to attempting to poison his successor, Yezhov.67 By the end of the year, Slutsky’s two immediate successors as head of INO, Zelman Pasov and Mikhail Shpigelglas, had also been shot as enemies of the people.68 INO collapsed into such confusion during 1938 that for 127 consecutive days not a single foreign intelligence report was forwarded to Stalin.69 In December Yezhov was replaced as head of the NKVD by Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria; a few months later he was accused of treasonable conspiracy with Britain, Germany, Japan and Poland.70 As NKVD officers went home in the evening, each one must have wondered whether the knock at the door in the early hours would signal that his own doom was nigh.
Most of the INO officers who were interrogated and brutally tortured during the late 1930s in the name of the vast conspiracy theories of Stalin and his NKVD chiefs did not live to tell the tale. One of the few who did was the first of the Great Illegals, Dmitri Bystroletov. In 1937 Bystroletov had been sent on a mission to Berlin to contact a Soviet agent on the Reichswehr general staff. He later claimed that, before he left, he was embraced by Yezhov. “Be proud that we have given you one of our best sources,” Yezhov told him. “Stalin and your fatherland will not forget you.”71 Early in 1938, however, Bystroletov was suspended from duty and transferred to the Moscow Chamber of Commerce, where he worked until his arrest in September.72 During Bystroletov’s interrogation by Colonel Solovyev, Yezhov entered the room and asked what he was accused of. When told he was charged with spying for four foreign powers, Yezhov replied “Too few!”, turned on his heels and left.73
When Bystroletov refused to confess to his imaginary crimes, Solovyev and his assistant, Pushkin, beat him with a ball-bearing on the end of an iron rope, breaking two of his ribs and penetrating a lung. His skull was fractured by one of the other instruments of torture, a hammer wrapped in cotton wool and bandages, and his stomach muscles torn by repeated kicks from his interrogators. Convinced that he would die if the beating continued, Bystroletov signed a confession dictated to him by Solovyev. For most INO officers, torture and confession to imaginary crimes were followed by a short walk to an execution chamber and a bullet in the back of the head. Bystroletov, however, survived to write an account of his interrogation. Though sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in 1939, he was rehabilitated during the Second World War. By the time he was released, his wife, Shelmatova, sent to the gulag as the spouse of an enemy of the people, had killed herself by cutting her throat with a kitchen knife. His elderly mother poisoned herself.74
AFTER THE DISINTEGRATION of the London illegal residency following the liquidation of Maly and the recall of Deutsch, the Centre planned to hand over the running of its main British agents to the legal residency at the Soviet embassy in Kensington. In April 1938 a new resident, Grigori Grafpen (codenamed SAM), arrived to take charge.75 The massacre of many of the most experienced INO officers had a dramatic effect on the quality of NKVD tradecraft. Deutsch, Orlov and Maly had taken elaborate precautions to avoid surveillance before meeting their agents. But an inexperienced emissary from the Centre who came to inspect Grafpen’s residency had so little idea about tradecraft that he assumed it was safe to operate in the immediate environs of the embassy. He reported naively to Moscow, “Next to the Embassy there is a park [Kensington Gardens] which is convenient… for holding meetings with agents, as one can simply give the appearance of having gone out for a walk in this park.”76
Grafpen’s first priority was to renew contact with Donald Maclean, then the most productive of the Cambridge Five and able to smuggle large numbers of classified documents out of the Foreign Office. On April 10 a young and apparently inexperienced female NKVD officer, codenamed NORMA, met Maclean in the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. A few days later Maclean came to NORMA’s flat with a large bundle of Foreign Office documents which she photographed, before giving the undeveloped film to Grafpen for shipment to Moscow. Either on that occasion or soon afterwards, the young British agent and his Soviet case officer followed the photography session by going to bed together. In defiance of her instructions, NORMA also told Maclean, probably in bed, that his current codename (which he was not supposed to know) was LYRIC.77
In September 1938 Maclean left for his first foreign posting as third secretary in the Paris embassy, preceded by an effusive testimonial from the Foreign Office personnel department:
Maclean, who is the son of the late Sir Donald Maclean… has done extremely well during his first two years here and is one of the mainstays of the Western Department. He is a very nice individual indeed and has plenty of brains and keenness. He is, too, nice-looking and ought, we think, to be a success in Paris from the social as well as the work point of view.78
As Maclean was leaving for Paris, the Munich crisis was reaching its humiliating climax with the surrender of the Czech Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. On September 30 the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, returned to a hero
’s welcome in London, brandishing the worthless piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature which, he claimed, meant not only “peace with honor” but “peace for our time.” For the Cambridge Five, incapable of imagining that less than a year later Stalin would sign a pact with Hitler, Munich was further confirmation of the justice of their cause.
During the Munich crisis Cairncross had access to Foreign Office files containing what Burgess described as “the very best information imaginable” on British policy, which he passed to the NKVD via Klugmann and Burgess.79 Cairncross’s documents on the attempted appeasement of Germany, which reached its nadir with the Munich agreement, were used by the Centre to provide further evidence for the conspiracy theory that the secret aim of British foreign policy, supported by the French, was “to lure Germany into an attack on Russia.” Though the chief advocate of this theory was Stalin, it was also fervently espoused by INO. Throughout the Cold War, the claim that Britain’s aim at Munich had been not merely to appease Hitler but also to drive him into a conflict with the Soviet Union remained unchallenged orthodoxy among KGB historians. As late as the mid-1990s, Yuri Modin, the post-war controller of the Five, was still insisting that, “This claim was neither propaganda nor disinformation but the unvarnished truth, proven by the documents obtained for us by Burgess” (chiefly, no doubt, from Cairncross).80
After Maclean’s posting to Paris during the Munich crisis, Cairncross was intended by the Centre to succeed him as its chief source within the Foreign Office. The London resident, Grafpen, bungled the transition. Cairncross’s prickly personality and lack of social graces had not won the same encomiums from his colleagues or the Foreign Office personnel department as Maclean’s more patrician manner. In December 1938 he moved to the Treasury.81 At almost the same moment as Cairncross’s departure for the Treasury, though for unconnected reasons, Grafpen was recalled to Moscow. Given the atmosphere of the time, he may actually have been relieved, after being “unmasked” as a Trotskyist on his arrival, to be sentenced to only five years in a labor camp rather than being led to an execution cellar in the Lubyanka basement.82 En route for Moscow in December 1938, Grafpen accompanied NORMA (renamed ADA since her earlier indiscretion) to Paris where she was due to resume contact with Maclean. ADA reported that Maclean was having an affair with an American student at the Sorbonne, Melinda Marling, whom he was later to marry. She also discovered that Maclean, now drinking heavily, had admitted that while drunk he had told both his mistress and his brother that he was working for Soviet intelligence.83 ADA remained in Paris, filming the documents provided by Maclean from embassy files, then passing the film to an illegal codenamed FORD for transmission to the Centre.84
The news in December 1938 of Maclean’s drunken security lapse was balanced by a spectacular success. In the same month Burgess reported, probably via Paris, that he had succeeded in joining the Secret Intelligence Service. He had been taken on by SIS’s newest branch, Section D, founded earlier in the year to devise dirty tricks ranging from sabotage to psychological warfare (delicately described as ways of “attacking potential enemies by means other than the operations of military force”) for use in a future war.85 Instead of being elated by the news, however, the Centre appeared almost paralyzed by fear and suspicion.
THE EXPOSURE OF two London illegal residents, Reif and Maly, and the legal resident, Grafpen, as imaginary enemy agents, combined with the defection of Orlov, put the entire future of intelligence operations in Britain in doubt. The illegal residency had been wound up and, with one exception, the staff of the legal residency were recalled to Moscow.86 The only remaining INO officer in London, Anatoli Veniaminovich Gorsky, was poorly briefed about even the most important British agents. In the summer of 1939, when Philby was due to return to London after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Gorsky told the Centre, “When you give us orders on what to do with SÖHNCHEN, we would appreciate some orientation on him, for he is known to us only in the most general terms.”87
An assessment in the Centre concluded that intelligence work in Britain “was based on doubtful sources, on an agent network acquired at the time when it was controlled by enemies of the people and was therefore extremely dangerous.” It concluded with a recommendation to break contact with all British agents—the Five included.88 Though contact was not yet broken, the Five seem to have been held at arm’s length for most of 1939. Intelligence from them was accepted, often without any visible interest in it, while the Centre continued to debate the possibility that some or all were agents provocateurs. ADA reported that Philby “frequently” complained to Maclean about the NKVD’s lack of contact with, and interest in, him.89 Litzi Philby (MARY) and Edith Tudor Hart (EDITH), who were used by Burgess and others as couriers to make contact with the NKVD in Paris in 1938-9, grumbled that their expenses were not being paid. Gorsky reported to the Centre in July 1939:
MARY announced that, as a result of a four-month hiatus in communications with her, we owe her and MÄDCHEN £65. I promised to check at home [the Centre] and gave him £30 in advance, since she said they were in material need… MARY continues to live in [France] and for some reason, she says on our orders, maintains a large flat and so on there.
The Centre replied:
At one time, when it was necessary, MARY was given orders to keep a flat in Paris. That is no longer necessary. Have her get rid of the flat and live more modestly, since we will not pay. MARY should not be paid £65, since we do not feel that we owe her, for anything. We confirm the payment of £30. Tell her that we will pay no more.90
To a remarkable degree, however, the ideological commitment of the main British agents survived the turmoil in the Centre. In 1938 Burgess recruited one of his lovers, Eric Kessler, a Swiss journalist turned diplomat on the staff of the Swiss embassy in London. Later codenamed OREND and SHVEYTSARETS (“Swiss”), Kessler proved a valuable source on Swiss-German relations.91 Probably in 1939, Burgess recruited another foreign lover, the Hungarian Andrew Revoi, later leader of the exiled Free Hungarians in wartime London. Codenamed TAFFY (“Toffee”), he was described in his KGB file as a pederast; the same source also claimed that he had “had homosexual relations with a Foreign Office official.” Ironically, in 1942 Burgess was also to recruit Revoi as an MI5 source.92
Kim and Litzi Philby, still good comrades according to KGB files though they both now had different partners, made a probably even more important recruitment in 1939: that of the Austrian journalist H. P. Smolka, whom Litzi had known in Vienna. Soon after the Nazi Anschluss, which united Austria with Germany in 1938, Smolka became a naturalized British subject with the name of Peter Smollett. Codenamed ABO by the Centre, Smollett later succeeded in becoming head of the Russian section in the wartime Ministry of Information.93
The signature of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow on August 23, 1939 was an even bigger blow to the morale of the NKVD’s British agents than the turmoil in the Centre. Exchanging toasts with Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Stalin told him, “I can guarantee, on my word of honor, that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.” The ideological agents recruited during the 1930s had been motivated, at least in part, by the desire to fight fascism. Most, after varying degrees of inner turmoil, overcame their sense of shocked surprise at the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Over the previous few years, they had become sufficiently indoctrinated, often self-indoctrinated, in Stalinist double-think to perform the intellectual somersaults required to sustain their commitment to the vision of the Soviet Union as the world’s first worker-peasant state, the hope of progressive mankind.
A minority of the ideological agents in the West, however, were so sickened by the Nazi-Soviet Pact that they ended their connection with the NKVD. The most important of those who broke contact in Britain was FLEET, Goronwy Rees. During a visit to Moscow in 1993, Rees’s daughter Jenny was informed, accurately, during a briefing by an SVR representative that Rees had refused to cooperate after the Pact: “We hear no more of
him after that.” At the end of the briefing, Jenny Rees asked perceptively: “You know something else, do you, about Rees that you are not going to tell me?”94 The SVR did indeed. The most important of the secrets that the SVR was unwilling to reveal was that Burgess, by now an SIS officer, panicked when Rees decided to break away, sent an urgent message to the Centre warning that Rees might betray both himself and Blunt, and asked for Rees to be assassinated. The Centre refused. Rees’s KGB file, however, records that he did not betray Burgess and Blunt because of his “old friendship” with Burgess. In an attempt to make betrayal less likely, Burgess told Rees that he too had been disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and had ended illegal work for the Communist Party.95 Maclean was also deeply worried by Rees’s “defection.” Years later, as he was beginning to crack under the strain of his double life as British diplomat and Soviet agent, he spat at Rees: “You used to be one of us, but you ratted!”96
The doubts about Moscow felt by some of the NKVD’s British agents after the Nazi-Soviet Pact were more than matched by the Centre’s doubts about its agents. The Center launched an investigation into the possibility that Philby was either a German or a British agent.97 Since Philby had provided the original leads which led to the recruitment of Burgess and Maclean, and ultimately to all the Cambridge recruits, doubts about him reflected on the whole British agent network. The lowest point in the history of NKVD operations in Britain came at the beginning of 1940 when Gorsky, the last member of the London legal residency, was withdrawn to Moscow, leaving not a single NKVD officer active in Britain. A file in the KGB archives records, “The residency was disbanded on the instruction of Beria [head of the NKVD].”98 Beria’s reasons are not recorded, at least in the files examined by Mitrokhin, but chief among them was undoubtedly the recurrent fear that the British agent network was deeply suspect. In February 1940 the Centre issued orders for all contact with Philby to be broken off.99 Contact with Burgess was terminated at about the same time.100
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