Meanwhile Burgess had seen Maclean and was worried that, despite (or because of) his nervous exhaustion, he might refuse to defect. He reported to Modin and the London resident, Nikolai Rodin, that Maclean could not bring himself to leave his wife Melinda, who was expecting their third child in a few weeks’ time. When Rodin reported Maclean’s hesitations to Moscow, the Centre telegraphed, “HOMER must agree to defect.” Melinda Maclean, who had been aware that her husband was a Soviet spy ever since he had asked her to marry him, agreed that, for his own safety, he should leave for Moscow without delay.143 It was clear, however, that Maclean would need an escort. On May 17 the Centre instructed the London residency that Burgess was to accompany him to Moscow. Burgess initially refused to go, recalling his promise to Philby not to defect, and seemed to Modin “close to hysteria.” Rodin, however, seems to have persuaded Burgess to go by giving the impression that he would not need to accompany Maclean all the way, and would in any case be free to return to London. In reality, the Centre believed that Burgess had become a liability and was determined to get him to Moscow—by deception, if necessary—and keep him there. “As long as he agreed to go with Maclean,” wrote Modin later, “the rest mattered precious little. Cynically enough, the Centre had… concluded that we had not one but two burnt-out agents on our hands.”144
Though the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, had secretly authorized the interrogation of Maclean, no date had been decided for it to begin.145 The London residency, however, mistakenly believed that Maclean was to be arrested on Monday, May 28, and made plans for his exfiltration with Burgess during the previous weekend. It reported to the Centre that surveillance of Maclean by MI5 and Special Branch ceased at 8 p.m. each day and at weekends. (It may not have realized that there was no surveillance at all of Maclean at his home at Tatsfield on the Kent-Surrey border.) The residency also discovered that the pleasure boat Falaise made weekend round-trip cruises from Southampton, calling in at French ports, which did not require passports. Burgess was instructed to buy tickets for himself and Maclean under assumed names for the cruise leaving at midnight on Friday, May 25. That evening Burgess arrived at Tatsfield in a hired car, had dinner with the Macleans, then drove off with Donald to Southampton where they were just in time to board the Falaise before it set sail. The next morning they left the boat at St. Malo, made their way to Rennes and caught the train to Paris. From Paris they took another train to Switzerland, where they were issued false passports by the Soviet embassy in Berne. In Zurich they bought air tickets to Stockholm via Prague, but left the plane at Prague, where they were met by Soviet intelligence officers.146 By the time Melinda Maclean had reported that her husband had not returned home after the weekend, Burgess and Maclean were behind the Iron Curtain.147
Once in the Soviet Union, Burgess was told that he would not be allowed back to Britain but would receive an annual pension of 2,000 roubles.148 Modin later complained that his talents were wasted by the Centre: “He read a lot, walked and occasionally picked up another man for sex… He might have been very useful to [the KGB]; but instead he did nothing because nothing was asked of him, and it was not in his nature to solicit work.”149 Maclean was rather better treated than Burgess. He settled in Kuibyshev, took Soviet citizenship under the name Mark Petrovich Fraser, was awarded an annual pension twice that of Burgess and taught for the next two years at the Kuibyshev Pedagogical Institute. In September 1953, in an operation codenamed SIRA, his wife and three children were exfiltrated from Britain to join him in Kuibyshev.150
THE CENTRE CONGRATULATED itself that the successful exfiltration of Burgess and Maclean had “raised the authority of the Soviet intelligence service in the eyes of Soviet agents.”151 That, however, was not Philby’s view. At a meeting on May 24, Makayev had found him “alarmed and concerned for his own security” and insistent that he would be put “in jeopardy” if Burgess as well as Maclean fled to Moscow.152 The first that Philby learned of Burgess’s defection with Maclean was during a briefing about five days later by the MI5 liaison officer in Washington. “My consternation [at the news],” wrote Philby later, “was no pretense.” Later that day he drove into the Virginia countryside and buried the photographic equipment with which he had copied documents for Soviet intelligence in a forest—an action he had mentally rehearsed many times since arriving in Washington two years earlier.153 Just when Philby most needed his controller’s assistance, however, Makayev let him down. The New York legal residency left a message and 2,000 dollars in a dead letter-box for HARRY to deliver to Philby. Makayev failed to find them and Philby never received them.154
An inquiry by the Centre into Makayev’s conduct in New York, prompted by his failure to help Philby, was highly critical. It found him guilty of “lack of discipline,” “violations of the Centre’s orders” and “crude manners”—a defect blamed on his neglected childhood. Plans for Makayev to found a new illegal residency in the United States were canceled and he was transferred to Fisher’s residency so that he could receive expert supervision. His performance, however, failed to improve. While returning to New York from leave in Moscow, he lost a hollow imitation Swiss coin which contained secret operational instructions on microfilm. After a further inquiry at the Centre, Makayev was recalled and his career as an illegal terminated. Attempts to recover 9,000 dollars allotted to him in New York (2,000 dollars in bank accounts and 7,000 dollars in stocks) were unsuccessful and the whole sum had to be written off.155
The Centre calculated that since their recruitment in 1934-5, Philby, Burgess and Maclean had supplied more than 20,000 pages of “valuable” classified documents and agent reports.156 As Philby had feared, however, the defection of Burgess and Maclean did severe, though not quite terminal, damage to the careers in Soviet intelligence of the other members of the Magnificent Five. Immediately after the defection, Blunt went through Burgess’s flat, searching for and destroying incriminating documents. He failed, however, to notice a series of unsigned notes describing confidential discussions in Whitehall in 1939. In the course of a lengthy MI5 investigation, Sir John Colville, one of those mentioned in the notes, was able to identify the author as Cairncross. MI5 began surveillance of Cairncross and followed him to a hurriedly arranged meeting with his controller, Modin. Just in time, Modin noticed the surveillance and returned home without meeting Cairncross. At a subsequent interrogation by MI5, Cairncross admitted passing information to the Russians but denied being a spy. Shortly afterwards he received “a large sum of money” at a farewell meeting with Modin, resigned from the Treasury and went to live abroad.157
Immediately after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, the Centre instructed Modin to press Blunt to follow them to Moscow. Unwilling to exchange the prestigious, congenial surroundings of the Courtauld Institute for the bleak socialist realism of Stalin’s Russia, Blunt refused. “I know perfectly well how your people live,” Blunt told his controller, “and I can assure you it would be very hard, almost unbearable, for me to do likewise.” Modin, by his own account, was left speechless. Blunt was rightly confident that MI5 would have no hard evidence against him. Soviet intelligence had few further dealings with him.158
As Philby had feared, the defection of his friend and former lodger, Burgess, placed him under immediate suspicion. The Director of Central Intelligence, General Walter Bedell Smith, promptly informed SIS that he was no longer acceptable as its liaison officer in Washington. On his return to London, Philby was officially retired from SIS. In December 1951 he was summoned to a “judicial inquiry” at MI5 headquarters—in effect an informal trial, of which he later gave a misleading account in his memoirs. According to one of those present, “There was not a single officer who sat through the proceedings who came away not totally convinced of Philby’s guilt.” Contrary to the impression Philby sought to create in Moscow after his defection twelve years later, many of his own former colleagues in SIS shared the opinion of MI5. But the “judicial inquiry” concluded that it would probably never be
possible to find the evidence for a successful prosecution. Within SIS Philby retained the support of a loyal group of friends to whom he cleverly presented himself as the innocent victim of a McCarthyite witch-hunt. Soviet intelligence had no further contact with him until 1954.159
Philby seems never to have realized that Burgess’s sudden defection was the result not of his own loss of nerve but of a cynical deception by the Centre, and never forgave Burgess for putting him in jeopardy. By the time Philby himself finally defected to Moscow in 1963, Burgess was on his death bed. He asked his old friend to visit him at the KGB hospital in Pekhotnaya Street. Philby refused to go.160 His sense of grievance was increased by his own reception in Moscow. Philby had long believed that he was an officer in the Soviet foreign intelligence service and was shocked to discover that, as a foreign agent, he would never be awarded officer rank. Worse still, he was not fully trusted by the leadership either of the KGB or its First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate. Not until the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, fourteen years after his arrival in Moscow, was the KGB’s most celebrated Western agent at last allowed to enter its headquarters.161
TEN
THE MAIN ADVERSARY
Part 1: North American Illegals in the 1950s
One of the most remarkable public appearances ever made by a Soviet illegal took place on November 6, 1951, when “Teodoro B. Castro” attended the opening in Paris of the Sixth Session of the United Nations General Assembly as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation. Castro was, in reality, Iosif Romualdovich Grigulevich (variously codenamed MAKS, ARTUR and DAKS),1 a Lithuanian Jew whose main previous expertise had been in sabotage and assassination. He had trained saboteurs during the Spanish Civil War, taken a leading role in the operations to kill Trotsky in Mexico and had run a wartime illegal residency in Argentina which specialized in the sabotage of ships and cargoes bound for Germany.2 While in Argentina, Grigulevich had begun to develop an elaborate Latin American legend for use after the war.3
Late in 1949, Grigulevich and his wife, Laura Araujo Aguilar (a Mexican illegal agent codenamed LUIZA), set up an illegal residency in Rome. Posing as Teodoro Castro, the illegitimate son of a dead (and childless) Costa Rican notable, Grigulevich established a small import-export business to provide cover for his intelligence work. In the autumn of 1950 he made the acquaintance of a visiting delegation from Costa Rica which included the leading Costa Rican politician of his generation, José Figueres Ferrer, head of the founding junta of the Second Republic which had restored constitutional government and later President of the Republic in 1953-8 and 1970-4. Grigulevich’s success in winning Figueres’s confidence must have exceeded his wildest expectations. Hoodwinked by Grigulevich’s fraudulent account of his illegitimate birth, Figueres told him they were distant relatives. Thereafter, according to Grigulevich’s file, he became the friend and confidant of the future president, using the Centre’s money to invest with him in an Italian firm importing Costa Rican coffee.4
In October 1951, under his cover name Teodoro Castro, Grigulevich was appointed Costa Rica’s chargé d’affaires in Rome. A month later he was chosen as an adviser to the Costa Rican delegation to the Sixth Session of the UN General Assembly at its meeting in Paris. During the assembly he was introduced to the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, and the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden—but not, apparently, to the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Vyshinsky.5 Vyshinsky’s usual oratorical style at international gatherings was tedious and longwinded. On this occasion, however, he arrived with a caged dove, intended to represent the innocent victims of imperialist aggression, then proceeded to speak with the brutal sarcasm for which he had been infamous as prosecutor during the show trials of the Great Terror. Referring to a speech by President Truman on arms limitation, Vyshinsky declared in the course of a lengthy diatribe, “I could hardly sleep all night last night having read that speech. I could not sleep because I kept laughing.”6
Among the other targets for Vyshinsky’s sarcasm was the Costa Rican delegation. One of the motions debated by the General Assembly was the call by the Greek delegation for the return to Greece of the children evacuated to the Soviet Bloc during the Greek civil war. At Acheson’s request, the Costa Rican delegation agreed to support the motion. Doubtless to his extreme embarrassment, Grigulevich was chosen to draft a speech in favor of it to be delivered by Jorge Martínez Moreno. He did his best to limit the offense to the Soviet delegation by somewhat vacuous rhetoric which emphasized “the anxiety and the interest with which [the Costa Rican] delegation had always considered any threat liable to endanger the peace of the world,” and congratulated the UN Special Committee on the Balkans “for its work of observation and conciliation, thanks to which… although the Balkans remained a danger, at least world peace had been safeguarded.” The Soviet delegation was unimpressed. Probably unaware of Castro’s real identity, Vyshinsky condemned the speech as the ramblings of a diplomatic clown.7
Vyshinsky’s denunciation, however, did nothing to damage Grigulevich’s diplomatic career. On May 14, 1952 he presented his letters of credence as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Costa Rica in Rome to the Italian president, Luigi Einaudi. According to his file, Grigulevich was on good terms with the American ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker, and his successor, Claire Boothe Luce, and successfully cultivated the Costa Rican nuncio to the Vatican, Prince Giulio Pacelli, a nephew of Pope Pius XII. Grigulevich had a total of fifteen audiences with the Pope. He also made friends with one of Italy’s leading post-war politicians, the Christian Democrat Alcide de Gasperi (Prime Minister, 1945-53), who gave him a camera inscribed “In token of our friendship.”8
Grigulevich’s astonishing transformation from Soviet saboteur and assassin into a popular and successful Latin American diplomat, combined with the initial success of “Willie” Fisher’s illegal residency in providing “supersecret” nuclear intelligence from the United States,9 seemed to vindicate the Centre’s early Cold War strategy of attempting to recreate the age of the Great Illegals. The role of the post-war illegals was considered to be potentially even more important than that of their illustrious predecessors. If the Cold War turned into hot war, as the Centre thought quite possible, Soviet embassies and the legal residencies they contained would have to be withdrawn from NATO countries, leaving the illegals to run wartime intelligence operations.
DESPITE THE EARLY Cold War success of Grigulevich and Fisher, the mood in the Centre at the beginning of the 1950s was anything but triumphalist. As a result of the identification of Soviet spies in the VENONA decrypts, following the earlier revelations by Bentley, Chambers and Gouzenko, the Centre had to set about rebuilding almost its entire American agent network while operating under far closer FBI surveillance than ever before.10 It could no longer count on significant help from the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), which during the Second World War had assisted Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration, the intelligence community and the MANHATTAN project.11 In 1949 Gene Dennis, the CPUSA general secretary, and ten other party leaders were tried on charges of advocating the forcible overthrow of the federal government. Dennis and nine of the defendants were sentenced to five years in jail, the eleventh was jailed for three years, and all the defense attorneys were found in contempt of court. After the Supreme Court upheld the sentences in 1951, more than a hundred other leading Communists were convicted on similar charges. For most of the decade the Party was forced into a largely underground existence.12
The Centre was also greatly exercised by the unprecedented publicity given to Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. On January 24, 1950 Klaus Fuchs began confessing his wartime espionage at Los Alamos to his British interrogators. The next day, in New York, Alger Hiss was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for perjury in denying espionage charges before a Grand Jury. On February 2 Fuchs was formally charged in London, and the menace of Soviet atomic espionage burst on to the fro
nt pages of the American press. A week later the previously little-known Wisconsin senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, falsely claimed to have the names of 205 State Department Communists who were “shaping” American foreign policy. Despite his outrageous inventions and exaggerations, McCarthy rapidly won a mass following. He did so because he succeeded in striking a popular chord. To many Americans the idea of an “enemy within,” given plausibility by the convictions of Hiss and Fuchs (followed a year later by those of the Rosenbergs), helped to explain why the United States, despite its immense power, seemed unable to prevent the onward march of world Communism and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a nuclear superpower. As late as January 1954 opinion polls found 50 percent of Americans with a favorable opinion of McCarthy and only 29 percent opposed to him.
President Truman’s claim in 1951 that “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy” was, in the long run, to be proved right. McCarthy ultimately did more for the Soviet cause than any agent of influence the KGB ever had. His preposterous self-serving crusade against the “Red Menace” made liberal opinion around the world skeptical of the reality of Moscow’s secret intelligence offensive against the Main Adversary. Even Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed one after the other in the same electric chair at New York’s Sing Sing Prison in 1953, were widely believed to have been framed. It took some years, however, for the Centre to grasp the enormous propaganda advantages of McCarthyism. At the time the Centre was chiefly concerned by the increased difficulties created by “spy mania” in the United States for its attempts to recruit and run new American agents.
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