Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  Arthur was just as upset as I. He had handpicked many of the staff in D1, and resented any attempt to move them, especially at this time of maximum activity in the Soviet counterespionage field. Arthur stormed into Cumming's office, believing he should have opposed the move. The row filtered down the corridor, as months of pent-up resentment poured out. Cumming accused Arthur of riding roughshod over the Branch, and exceeding his authority. Arthur, for his part, made little secret of his belief that the Branch was being badly handled. Inevitably, the argument focused on the recent Mitchell case. Cumming accused Arthur of being obsessed with what was, in his opinion, a dead case, and, moreover, one which had done enormous damage to the morale of the Service. Arthur responded by indicating that, so far as he was concerned, the case still had a very long way to go. Cumming reported the row to Hollis, who promptly requested a full written report on the matter. The following day Cumming sent Arthur a draft copy of the report he intended submitting to Hollis.

  Arthur was appalled by what he read. Cumming's report made no mention of the implications for the CIA visit of Doyne Ditmass' removal from the Movements Analysis program. It was an explicit attack on Arthur, culminating in the suggestion that Arthur harbored suspicions about the identity of the spy inside MI5 which he was not willing to share with his Director.

  Arthur was by now at breaking point with Cumming.

  "Not bloody true!" he scrawled in the margin, and continued to deface every line of Cumming's report, before sending it back from whence it came. Cumming, sensing his chance for a decisive victory, promptly sent the copy as it stood to Hollis, who summarily suspended Arthur for a fortnight for indiscipline.

  I was in a hopeless position: I had twenty CIA technicians arriving at Leconfield House any day, expecting to enter important negotiations with Hal Doyne Ditmass, me, and Arthur Martin, and as things stood, there would only be me on the MI5 side of the table. I went to see Hollis privately and explained, with as little rancor as I could, the nature of the problem. I reminded Hollis that the approach to the CIA had been done in his name, and he agreed to reinstate Doyne Ditmass for another year.

  "But what about Arthur?" I asked, hoping that Hollis might change his mind on that too.

  "I am not prepared to discuss the matter," he retorted.

  "But what about Blunt?" I pleaded. "We can't just leave him out in the cold when we've just broken him..."

  "It's about time Arthur learned that he's not the DG yet," said Hollis grimly. "When he's sitting in this chair, he can make the decisions. Until then, I do!"

  When Arthur returned, we began the debriefing in earnest, systematically identifying his every controller and recruitment, and checking every item of intelligence that he handed over to the Russians. Arthur met Blunt regularly and questioned him on the basis of detailed research briefs which D3 and Evelyn drew up. Each session was taped, and the transcripts processed by D3 to check for inaccuracies and points which needed further questioning.

  Blunt swiftly named as fellow spies Leo Long, a former officer in British Military Intelligence, and John Cairncross, who had served in the Treasury in 1940, before joining the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley with access to ENIGMA SIGINT material, and, in 1944, MI6. Long, informed by Arthur that a prosecution was most unlikely provided he cooperated with MI5, swiftly confessed, as did Cairncross, who was seen by Arthur in Rome.

  But after his initial leads, Blunt ran out of things to say. He sat and listened to Arthur's questions, helped where he could, but there was nothing like the wealth of detail we expected. Arthur and I decided to confront him together. The plan was to introduce me as the officer analyzing Blunt's confession. I would then play nasty to Arthur's nice, and tell Blunt I had serious doubts about the veracity of his confession. It was an old interrogation trick, but it had worked before. There was one further twist. We set the meeting up in Maurice Oldfield's flat in Chandos Court, Caxton Street, Westminster, which had a concealed taping system. Usually when Blunt and Arthur met, Arthur recorded the conversation openly on a hand tape recorder. We decided that we would turn off the visible tape recorder when I went for Blunt, to give him additional security. Hollis was extremely reluctant about the plan. From the beginning he instructed that no pressure was to be applied to Blunt, in case he should defect. But we managed to persuade him that on this one occasion the risk was worth taking.

  We met Blunt several nights later. He was tall and extremely thin, wearing a tweed suit with a large bow tie. He looked distinguished, if slightly effeminate. He was friendly but guarded, especially toward Arthur. I could tell there was a tension between them; neither man could forget that they had sat down together ten years before, and Blunt had lied through his teeth. They talked in a businesslike fashion for half an hour, mainly about documents which Blunt removed from the Registry. Every now and then Blunt snatched a look across at me. I could tell he knew what was coming. Finally, Arthur brought me into the conversation.

  "Peter has been doing the analysis, Anthony. I think he has something to say..."

  I switched off the tape recorder and paused for effect.

  "It's quite clear to me, reading the transcripts, that you have not been telling us the full truth..."

  Blunt flinched as if I had struck him. He was sitting in an easy chair with his pencil-thin legs crossed. His outstretched leg kicked involuntarily.

  "I have told you everything which you have asked," he replied, looking me straight in the eye.

  "That's nonsense, and you know it is, too. You say you only know about Long and Cairncross, those were the only ones. I don't believe you!"

  He purpled, and a tic began to flicker on his right cheek. He poured himself another gin, playing for time.

  "We've been very fair with you," I went on. "We've been polite, and we've kept our side of the bargain like gentlemen. But you have not kept yours..."

  He listened intently as I made my play. Where was he not telling the truth? he wanted to know. I pointed out areas where we felt he was holding back. I knew he was trying to gauge whether I had fresh evidence or information which could put him on the spot, or whether we were just working from gut feelings. After a few minutes' discomfort, he began to resume his poise. The tic began to settle down. He knew we had nothing to throw at him.

  "I've already told you, Peter," he muttered, "there was nobody else!"

  I switched tack, and began to press his conscience.

  "Have you ever thought about the people who died?"

  Blunt feigned ignorance.

  "There were no deaths," he said smoothly, "I never had access to that type of thing..."

  "What about Gibby's spy?" I flashed, referring to an agent run inside the Kremlin by an MI6 officer named Harold Gibson. "Gibby's spy" provided MI6 with Politburo documents before the war, until he was betrayed by Blunt and subsequently executed.

  "He was a spy," said Blunt harshly, momentarily dropping his guard to reveal the KGB professional. "He knew the game; he knew the risks."

  Blunt knew he had been caught in a lie, and the tic started up again with a vengeance. We wrestled for an hour, but the longer it went on, the more he realized the strength of his position. The session broke up with ill-concealed temper.

  "The truth is, given the choice, you wouldn't betray anyone you thought was vulnerable, would you?" I asked, as Blunt prepared to leave.

  "That's true," he said, standing to his full height, "but I've already told you. There are no more names..."

  He said it with such intensity that I felt he almost believed it himself.

  There had been an incident which was perturbing. The tape recorder which we overtly had in the room decided to scramble up its tape. I knelt on the floor and proceeded to straighten the tape out and get it going again. While I was doing this, Blunt said to Arthur, "Isn't it fascinating to watch a technical expert do his stuff?"

  Now, Blunt had not been told by either Arthur or me that I was a scientist. I had been introduced as the man proc
essing what he, Blunt, had told us. I looked Blunt straight in the eye and he blushed purple. Somebody had told him who I really was.

  "You take him on," snapped Arthur when Blunt had left. "He's played out..."

  Arthur was keen to strip the bones of his other carcasses, Long and Cairncross.

  Long was in the Apostles Society at Cambridge, a self-regarding elite club of intellectuals, many of whom were left-wing and homosexual. When war broke out he joined Military Intelligence, where he was posted to MI14, responsible for assessing Oberkommando Wehrmacht SIGINT and hence military strength. Throughout the war he met clandestinely with Blunt and handed over any intelligence he could lay his hands on. After the war he moved to the British Control Commission in Germany, where he eventually rose to become deputy head of Military Intelligence before leaving in 1952 to pursue a career in commerce. He left Intelligence because he was getting married and did not wish to have to tell his wife that he had been a spy.

  I met Long several times with Arthur, and disliked him intensely. Unlike the other members of the Ring, he lacked class, and I often wondered how on earth he was accepted into the Apostles. He was an officious, fussy man with a face like a motor mechanic's, and seemed still to regard himself as a superior Army officer, despite his treachery. Far from being helpful in his debriefing, his attitude, when challenged on a point, was invariably to say that we would just have to take his word for it. He went through his story with us briskly. No, he knew of no other spies, and claimed that he gave up all espionage activities in 1945. This failed to tally with what Blunt had told us. He said that in 1946 he went to Germany to persuade Long to apply for a post inside MI5. Long agreed, and Blunt, then a trusted and well-respected recent departure from the Service, wrote a recommendation for him. Luckily for MI5, Guy Liddell had a marked prejudice against uniformed military officers, and blackballed him at the Board, even though Dick White supported him, much to his later embarrassment. But despite this attempt to join MI5, and Long's continuing secret work in Germany, he denied all further contact with the Russians, which was clearly rubbish.

  Cairncross was a different character entirely. He was a clever, rather frail-looking Scotsman with a shock of red hair and a broad accent. He came from a humble working-class background but, possessed of a brilliant intellect, he made his way to Cambridge in the 1930s, becoming an open Communist before dropping out on the instructions of the Russians and applying to join the Foreign Office.

  Cairncross was one of Arthur's original suspects in 1951, after papers containing Treasury information were found in Burgess' flat after the defection. Evelyn McBarnet recognized the handwriting as that of John Cairncross. He was placed under continuous surveillance, but although he went to a rendezvous with his controller, the Russian never turned up. When Arthur confronted Cairncross in 1952 he denied being a spy, claiming that he had supplied information to Burgess as a friend, without realizing that he was a spy. Shortly afterward, Cairncross left Britain and did not return until 1967.

  After Cairncross confessed, Arthur and I traveled to Paris to meet him again for a further debriefing in a neutral venue. He had already told Arthur the details of his recruitment by the veteran Communist James Klugman, and the intelligence from GCHQ and MI6 which he had passed to the Russians, and we were anxious to find out if he had any other information which might lead to further spies. Cairncross was an engaging man. Where Long floated with the tide, Communist when it was fashionable, and anxious to save his neck thereafter, Cairncross remained a committed Communist. They were his beliefs, and with characteristic Scottish tenacity, he clung to them. Unlike Long, too, Cairncross tried his best to help. He was anxious to come home, and thought that cooperation was the best way to earn his ticket.

  Cairncross said he had no firm evidence against anyone, but was able to identify two senior civil servants who had been fellow Communists with him at Cambridge. One was subsequently required to resign, while the other was denied access to defense-related secrets. We were particularly interested in what Cairncross could tell us about GCHQ, which thus far had apparently escaped the attentions of the Russian intelligence services in a way which made us distinctly suspicious, especially given the far greater numbers of people employed there.

  Cairncross told us about four men from GCHQ who he thought might repay further investigation. One of these worked with him in the Air Section of GCHQ, and had talked about the desirability of enabling British SIGINT material to reach the Soviet Union. Cairncross, although amused by the irony of the man's approach, was in no position to judge his seriousness, so he kept quiet about his own role. The second man, according to Cairncross, had been sacked after returning to Oxford and telling his former tutor full details of his work inside GCHQ. The tutor, appalled by the indiscretion, reported him to GCHQ, and he was sacked. A third man named by Cairncross, like the first, had long since left GCHQ for an academic career, so effort was concentrated on the fourth, a senior GCHQ official in the technical section. After a full investigation he was completely cleared.

  GCHQ became highly agitated by the D Branch inquiries resulting from Cairncross' information, as did C Branch, both protected their respective empires jealously, and resented what they saw as interference, particularly when I made some caustic comments about how they could improve their vetting.

  As my D3 section pursued these leads, I wrestled with the problem of how to handle Blunt, now that he was my responsibility. Before I began meeting Blunt I had to attend a briefing by Michael Adeane, the Queen's Private Secretary. We met at his office in the Palace. He was punctilious and correct, and assured me that the Palace was willing to cooperate in any inquiries the Service thought fit. He spoke in the detached manner of someone who wishes not to know very much more about the matter.

  "The Queen," he said, "has been fully informed about Sir Anthony, and is quite content for him to be dealt with in any way which gets at the truth."

  There was only one caveat.

  "From time to time," said Adeane, "you may find Blunt referring to an assignment he undertook on behalf of the Palace -a visit to Germany at the end of the war. Please do not pursue this matter. Strictly speaking, it is not relevant to considerations of national security."

  Adeane carefully ushered me to the door. I could not help reflecting on the difference between his delicate touch and the hysterical way MI5 had handled Blunt, terrified that he might defect, or that somehow the scandal might leak. Although I spent hundreds of hours with Blunt, I never did learn the secret of his mission to Germany. But then, the Palace had had several centuries to learn the difficult art of scandal burying. MI5 have only been in the business since 1909!

  When I took over Blunt I stopped all meetings with him while I considered a new policy. Confrontation was clearly never going to work, firstly because Hollis was vehemently opposed to anything which might provoke a defection, or a public statement from Blunt, and secondly because Blunt himself knew that our hand was essentially a weak one, that we were still groping in the dark and interrogating him from a position of ignorance rather than strength. I decided that we had to adopt a subtle approach, in an attempt to play on his character. I could tell that Blunt wanted to be thought helpful, even where it was clear that he was not. Moreover, he disliked intensely being caught in a lie. We had to extract the intelligence from him by a slow process of cumulative pressure, advancing on small fronts, rather than on any large one. To do that we needed a far more profound knowledge of the 1930s than MI5 at the time possessed.

  I decided, too, that we had to move the interviews onto his patch. He always came to Maurice Oldfield's flat in a confrontational mood, defensive, on edge, sharpened up, and aware that he was being recorded. I felt moving to his place would lessen the tension, and enable us to develop something of a relationship.

  Every month or so for the next six years Blunt and I met in his study at the Courtauld Institute. Blunt's study was a large room decorated in magnificent baroque style, with gold-leaf cornicework pain
ted by his students at the Courtauld. On every wall hung exquisite paintings, including a Poussin above the fireplace, bought in Paris in the 1930s with 80 pounds lent to him by Victor Rothschild. (He was supposed to have left this painting to Victor's oldest daughter, Emma, but he failed to do this. The picture was valued at 500,000 pounds for his estate and went to the nation.) It was the perfect setting to discuss treachery. For every meeting we sat in the same place: around the fireplace, underneath the Poussin. Sometimes we took tea, with finely cut sandwiches; more often we drank, he gin and I Scotch; always we talked, about the 1930s, about the KGB, about espionage and friendship, love and betrayal. They remain for me among the most vivid encounters of my life.

  Blunt was one of the most elegant, charming, and cultivated men I have met. He could speak five languages, and the range and depth of his knowledge was profoundly impressive. It was not limited solely to the arts; in fact, as he was proud of telling me, his first degree at Cambridge was in mathematics, and he retained a lifelong fascination with the philosophy of science.

  The most striking thing about Blunt was the contradiction between his evident strength of character and his curious vulnerability. It was this contradiction which caused people of both sexes to fall in love with him. He was obviously homosexual, but in fact, as I learned from him, he had had at least two love affairs with women, who remained close to him throughout his life. Blunt was capable of slipping from art historian and scholar one minute, to intelligence bureaucrat the next, to spy, to waspish homosexual, to languid establishmentarian. But the roles took their toll on him as a man. I realized soon after we began meeting that Blunt, far from being liberated by the immunity offer, continued to carry a heavy burden. It was not a burden of guilt, for he felt none. He felt pain for deceiving Tess Rothschild, and other close friends like Dick White and Guy Liddell (he was in tears at Guy's funeral), but it was the pain of what had to be done, rather than the pain of what might have been avoided. His burden was the weight of obligation placed on him by those friends, accomplices, and lovers whose secrets he knew, and which he felt himself bound to keep.