Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  As soon as we began our meetings at the Courtauld I could see Blunt relax. He remained canny, however, and since he knew all about SF, I soon noticed that the telephone was placed discreetly at the far end of the hall. On the first afternoon we met there I noticed it as he went out to fetch some tea.

  "Bring the tea cozy to put on the telephone," I shouted.

  He laughed.

  "Oh no, Peter, you'll never be able to hear us down there with that thing."

  At first I took notes in a small notebook, but it became difficult to take everything down, so I had to plan a way of obtaining clandestine coverage of the meetings. Eventually the premises next to the Courtauld were modernized, and I arranged for a probe microphone to be inserted through the wall into Blunt's study. It was a ticklish job. The measurements needed to be perfect to ensure that the probe emerged at the right spot on Blunt's side of the fireplace close to where we sat. A2 arranged for an artist friend of Blunt's to telephone him at a prearranged time when I was visiting him. and while he was out in the hall talking, I produced my tape measure and made all the necessary measurements for the microphone, which was successfully installed and working beautifully until the end. For all I know, it is probably still there now.

  For our first sessions I relaxed things. I tried not to press him too hard, content simply to run through the old memories. He talked of how he had joined the Soviet cause, recruited by the then youthful, brilliant Guy Burgess. Guy was still a painful subject for Blunt; he had just died in Moscow, alone, his once virile body broken by years of abuse.

  "You probably find this impossible to believe," he told me as he poured the tea, "but anyone who knew Guy well, really well, will tell you that he was a great patriot."

  "Oh, I can believe that," I said. "He only wanted Britain to be Communist! Did you hear from him, before he died?"

  Blunt sipped his tea nervously, the cup and saucer shaking slightly in his hand. Then he went to his desk and fetched me a letter.

  "This was the last one," he said. "You didn't miss it; it was hand delivered..." He left the room.

  It was a pathetic letter, rambling and full of flaccid sentimental observations. Burgess talked of Moscow life, and tried to make it sound as if it was still as good as ever. Now and again he referred to the old days, and the Reform Club, and people they both knew. At the end he talked of his feelings for Blunt, and the love they shared thirty years before. He knew he was dying, but was whistling to the end. Blunt came back into the room after I finished reading the letter. He was upset, more I suspect because he knew I could see that Burgess still meant something to him. I had won a crucial first victory. He had lifted the veil for the first time, and allowed me a glimpse into the secret world which bound the Ring of Five together.

  Blunt joined the Russian Intelligence Service in the heyday of the period now known in Western counterintelligence circles as "the time of the great illegals." After the ARCOS raid in London in 1928, where MI5 smashed a large part of the Russian espionage apparatus in a police raid, the Russians concluded that their legal residences, the embassies, consulates, and the like, were unsafe as centers for agent running. From then onward their agents were controlled by the "great illegals," men like Theodore Maly, Deutsch, "Otto," Richard Sorge, Alexander Rado, "Sonia," Leopold Trepper, the Kecks, the Poretskys, and Krivitsky. They were often not Russians at all, although they held Russian citizenship. They were Trotskyist Communists who believed in international Communism and the Comintern, They worked undercover, often at great personal risk, and traveled throughout the world in search of potential recruits. They were the best recruiters and controllers the Russian Intelligence Service ever had. They all knew each other, and between them they recruited and built high-grade spy rings like the "Ring of Five" in Britain, Sorge's rings in China and Japan, the Rote Drei in Switzerland, and the Rote Kapelle in German-occupied Europe - the finest espionage rings history has ever known, and which contributed enormously to Russian survival and success in World War II.

  Unlike Philby and Burgess, Blunt never met "Theo," their first controller, a former Hungarian priest named Theodore Maly. Maly understood the idealism of people like Philby and Burgess, and their desire for political action. He became a captivating tutor in international politics, and his students worshipped him. In 1936-37 Maly was replaced by "Otto," and it was he who orchestrated Blunt's recruitment by Burgess. Like Theo, ''Otto" was a middle-class East European, probably Czech, who was able to make the Soviet cause appealing not simply for political reasons but because he shared with his young recruits the same cultured European background. Blunt admitted to me on many occasions that he doubted he would ever have joined had the approach come from a Russian.

  For some reason, we were never able to identify "Otto." Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross all claimed they never knew his real name, although Philby in his confession told Nicholas Elliott that while in Washington he recognized "Otto" from a photograph in the FBI files as a Comintern agent named Arnold Deutsch. But when we checked we found that no picture of Deutsch existed in FBI files during Philby's time in Washington. Moreover, Deutsch had fair curly hair. I used to bring Blunt volume after volume of the MI5 Russian intelligence officer files in the hope that he might recognize him. Blunt treated the books as if they were catalogues from the National Gallery. He would study them carefully through his half-moon spectacles, pausing to admire a particularly striking face, or an elegantly captured figure on a street corner. But we never identified "Otto" or discovered the reason why the Ring were so desperate to conceal his identity so many years later. In 1938 Stalin purged all his great illegals. They were Trotskyists and non-Russians and he was convinced they were plotting against him, along with elements in the Red Army. One by one they were recalled to Moscow and murdered. Most went willingly, fully aware of the fate that awaited them, perhaps hoping that they could persuade the demented tyrant of the great services they had rendered him in the West.

  Some, like Krivitsky, decided to defect, although even he was almost certainly eventually murdered by a Russian assassin in Washington in 1941.

  For over a year after "Otto's" departure, the Ring remained in limbo, out of touch and apparently abandoned. Then Guy Burgess and Kim Philby reestablished contact with the Russians through Philby's first wife, Litzi Friedman, a long-time European Comintern agent. According to Blunt, the Ring was run through a complex chain of couriers: from Litzi Friedman messages passed to her close friend and fellow Comintern agent, Edith Tudor Hart, and thence to Bob Stewart, the CPGB official responsible for liaison with the Russian Embassy, and thence on to Moscow. Until Blunt confessed we were entirely unaware of this chain, and it had enormous implications. Each member of the chain almost certainly knew the identities of the Ring, claimed Blunt, and it had always puzzled him that the Ring was not detected at this point by MI5. We had always assumed the Ring had been kept entirely separate from the CPGB apparatus, which was thoroughly penetrated in the 1930s by agents run by Maxwell Knight. But now it appeared that we had missed the greatest CPGB secret of all. In 1938 MI5 were basking in the success of the Woolwich Arsenal case, where evidence from Maxwell Knight's best agent, Joan Gray (Miss X), secured the conviction of senior CPGB officials for espionage in the Woolwich Arsenal Munitions Factory. Had we run the case on longer, we might well have captured the most damaging spies in British history before they began.

  At the end of 1940, the Russians finally reestablished contact with the Ring, and from this period onward they were directed into the intelligence world. Their controller during this period was "Henry," a Russian intelligence officer named Anatoli Gromov, or Gorski, who was working under diplomatic cover. Gromov ran all the spies in the Ring, almost certainly the eight whose cryptonyms appear in the VENONA traffic, until he left for Washington in 1944 to run Donald Maclean, who was posted to the British Embassy. Those who were left in London were taken over by Boris Krotov, the KGB officer whose VENONA messages revealed the existence of the eight spies. Blunt said he
had a great respect for the professionalism of his KGB controllers, but they never really stimulated him in the way that "Otto" had. Gromov and Krotov were technocrats of the modern Russian intelligence machine, whereas to Blunt, the talented European controllers of the 1930s were artists.

  "Was that why you left MI5?" I asked.

  "Oh, that partly," he said. "I was tempted to stay. But they didn't need me. Kim would serve them well. He was rising to the top, I knew that. And I needed my art. After all, if they had wanted me, they could so easily have blackmailed me to stay."

  The onset of the Cold War and the spread of McCarthyism reinforced Blunt's conviction that he had made the right choice in the 1930s, and he continued to be totally loyal to those who remained in the game. In 1951 he opted to stay and brazen it out, rather than defect with Burgess and Maclean. He was pressured to defect at this time by Modin ("Peter"). He told me a life of exile in Moscow would have been intolerable for him. He had visited Russia in the 1930s. It was a fine and admirable tragic country, but the place which appealed to him most was the Hermitage, Leningrad's magnificent gallery.

  After 1951 Blunt was left alone with Philby. He was much less close to him than to Burgess. Philby was a strong, dominant personality, yet he needed Blunt desperately. Blunt still had the ear of his former friends in MI5, and was able to glean scraps for Philby of how the case against him was developing. They used to meet to discuss their chances of survival. Philby seemed bereft without his career in MI6, and had little understanding of the importance of art and scholarship to Blunt, even while the net closed on them both.

  "Kim and I had different outlooks on life," Blunt told me. "He only ever had one ambition in life - to be a spy. I had other things in mine..."

  Blunt admired Philby, but there was a part of him that was frightened by his utter conviction, his ruthlessly one-dimensional view of life. Blunt needed love and art and, in the end, the comfort of life in the Establishment. Philby, on the other hand, lived his life from bed to bed; he had an Arabian attitude to women, needing only the thrill of espionage to sustain him. Isaiah Berlin once said to me, "Anthony's trouble is that he wants to hunt with society's hounds and run with the Communist hares!"

  "Kim never wavered," he said. "He always remained loyal, right to the end."

  By late 1964 I was submerged by the weight of material emanating from the Long, Cairncross, and Blunt confessions, as well as the enormous task of collating and systematically reexamining all the material which had reached MI5 since 1960 from the various defectors. It was at this point that Symonds' second report on the Mitchell case finally reached me.

  One morning, about a fortnight before the October 1964 general election, Hollis' secretary handed me a thick file, and told me to report to the DG's office that afternoon to discuss it. There was precious little time to read the report, let alone study it. Symonds had followed Hollis' instructions zealously, and during the eight months it took him to prepare the document, he never discussed its contents with either Arthur or me. But its thrust was clear enough. Symonds reassessed the Mitchell case in the light of the Blunt confession, which, of course, we had not possessed at the time of the first report. According to Symonds, the case against Mitchell was not strong. Symonds was not prepared to rule out the possibility of a more recent penetration, but he felt the likelihood was considerably diminished.

  Arthur also received Symonds' report that morning; he knew he was being outflanked, and that the decision to circulate the report at such a late stage was a deliberate device to prevent any counterattack. He told me that he intended at the meeting to take the line that he could not comment until he was given adequate time to study it. For the first part of the meeting he was a silent, smoldering presence at one side of the conference table.

  Hollis opened briskly.

  "I don't propose to waste too much time," he began. "I have read this paper, which strikes me as most convincing. I would like your views before reaching a decision. As you know, gentlemen, an election is due very soon, and I feel it is much better for the Service if we can resolve this case now, so that I do not have to brief any incoming Prime Minister."

  Everyone knew what he meant. He did not want to brief Harold Wilson, the Labor leader, who looked increasingly likely to beat the Tories at the forthcoming contest. Hollis' attitude was quite simple: Blunt, Long, and Cairncross tied up some useful loose ends, the Mitchell case fell, and everything was neatly resolved. He wanted to close the case and minute the file that the question of penetration had been dismissed.

  Hollis asked for opinions around the table. There was surprisingly little comment at first. The Mitchell inquiry had been so badly botched on all sides that few of us felt it a strong wicket to defend, particularly since Arthur and I both now had strong suspicions that Hollis was the culprit. I said simply that if Symonds' first report was the case for the prosecution, then this latest was the case for the defense, and that without an interrogation I could not accept a verdict of "not guilty," and wanted my views recorded in the minutes. Hollis made a small note on the pad in front of him, and turned to Cumming. Cumming delivered a lecture on the lack of discipline exhibited during the Mitchell investigation. It was clear to all of us that the decision to exclude him from the indoctrination had shattered his self-esteem. F.J. said only that the best that could be said for the Mitchell case was that it was nonproven.

  "And you, Arthur...?" asked Hollis.

  Arthur looked up from the report.

  "Well," he said, "there is a third possibility. Someone could be running Mitchell as their stalking horse."

  There was silence around the table. He and Hollis stared at each other for a brief moment. Everyone in the room knew exactly what Arthur meant.

  "I should like that remark clarified," said Cumming from the other end of the table. Symonds flicked anxiously through his report, as if he were looking to see if somehow Arthur's hypothesis had crept into it undetected.

  Hollis merely picked up where he left off, ignoring Arthur's comment as if he had not heard it.

  "Well, we have to make a decision," he said, "and therefore I propose to close this case down, and minute the file to that effect..."

  His pen paused above the file. Arthur could contain himself no longer

  "Intellectually, you simply cannot do this," he burst out in his most precise manner. "You're neglecting virtually all the Golitsin allegations about penetration. There's the question of the leak about the Crabbe operation. There's the Technics Document - we don't even know yet which document Golitsin is referring to. Whatever the status of the Mitchell case, it cannot be right to ignore them."

  Hollis tried to deflect the attack, but Arthur pressed forward. He knew Hollis had overreached himself. Symonds admitted he knew too little about the Golitsin material to present an authoritative opinion. F.J. was inclined to agree that further work on Golitsin would be prudent. Hollis could feel the meeting ebb away from him. He threw down his pen in exasperation and instructed Patrick Stewart to conduct a final review of all Golitsin serials outstanding. In the meantime, he ordered the Mitchell case was closed.

  After the meeting I approached F.J. It was intolerable, I said, for the DG to assign a research task to an officer without consulting me, the head of Research, when I was already wrestling with the mass of material pouring in from Blunt, Long, and Cairncross, as well as from defectors in Washington.

  "Things are difficult enough as it is," I said, "but if we start splitting the work up, there will be chaos!"

  F.J. could see the problem. The system was approaching overload, and he agreed with me that more coordination was needed, not less. I suggested that we try to establish some kind of inter-Service working party to research the entire range of material concerning the penetrations of British Intelligence reaching us from confessions or defectors. F. J. said he would see what he could do.

  Shortly afterward he called me into his office and said that he had discussed the whole matter with Dick White, who agreed
that such a committee should be established. Dick prevailed upon Hollis, who finally gave his reluctant agreement. The committee would be formed jointly from D Branch staff of MI5, and the Counterintelligence Division of MI6. It would report to the Director, D Branch, and the head of MI6 Counterintelligence, and I was to be its working chairman. The committee was given a code name: FLUENCY.

  Hollis used the row over the Symonds report as the pretext for clipping Arthur's wings. He divided the now burgeoning D1 empire into two sections: D1, to handle order of battle and operations; and a new D1 (Investigations) Section, to handle the investigations side of counterespionage. Arthur was left in charge of the truncated D1, and Ronnie Symonds was promoted alongside him as an assistant director in charge of D1 (Investigations).