by Peter Wright
I explained to Marcel that we had obtained new information which indicated the true roles of Cot and Labarthe, and showed him the relevant VENONA decrypts. He was astonished by the material, and immediately pledged a full investigation.
"You don't think they are too old, then?" I asked. Marcel fixed me with a withering glance.
"Until you see a French politician turning green in his coffin, you cannot say he is too old!"
Unfortunately Labarthe died of a heart attack as Marcel interrogated him, and Cot was left to die in peace, but the exchange of information did much to ease tension between the DST and MI5, and made Marcel and me friends for the rest of our careers.
The night before I left Paris he took me out to dinner. The restaurant was discreet, but the food was excellent. Marcel was an attentive host, providing bottles of the best claret, and regaling me with a string of waspish anecdotes about the perils of Gallic intelligence work. We discussed VENONA, and he was fascinated to learn about the scale of our success.
"They had some success with us recently," he told me, and described how in Washington they had discovered a fuse in the French Embassy cipher room modified to act as a transmitter.
"It was non-Western specification, and the range was perfect for the Russian Military Attache's house across the road," he said, noisily tucking into his plate of oysters in typical French style. My ears pricked up. The STOCKADE operation against the French Embassy ciphers in London and Washington had recently ended precipitately, when teams of French technicians went into both embassies with sheets of metal and copper tubes, and began screening the cipher rooms. Obviously the Russians, too, had realized that radiations could be picked up from poorly screened machines. Still, I thought, at least the French had not discovered our operation.
Chalet obviously found the whole affair amusing, and even offered to send the fuse over to Leconfield House, so that we could examine it. Still smiling, he casually dropped a question below the belt.
"And you, my dear Peter, have you had any luck with radiations... ?"
I choked momentarily on my claret.
"Not much," I replied.
Marcel filled my glass, patently disbelieving my every word. Like true professionals, we turned to other things, and never discussed the matter again.
But for all the enjoyment of the French interlude, research into the Ring of Five was the most pressing task facing D3. I asked Hollis for the 8D branch interrogators to be placed inside D3, so that I could use them for an extensive program of interviews with every known acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross. Hollis agreed, but instructed that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive, which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, a politician, a top civil servant, or a spy suspect.
In all, I saw more than a hundred people. Labor politicians like Christopher Mayhew and Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defense, who refused even to meet me, were unwilling to discuss their memories of the Communist Party in the 1930s. But others, like historian Isaiah Berlin and writer Arthur Marshall, were wonderfully helpful, and met me regularly to discuss their contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge. Berlin insisted we meet at the Reform Club. He thought it appropriate to discuss Guy Burgess at the scene of his greatest triumphs. He had a keen eye for Burgess' social circle, particularly those whose views appeared to have changed over the years. He also gave me sound advice on how to proceed with my inquiries.
"Don't go to see Bowra," he told me, referring to Maurice Bowra, the distinguished Professor of Literature at Oxford University. Bowra was a homosexual as well as a close friend of Guy Burgess, and was close to the top of my list of those who I thought could help me. "Why not?" I asked.
"Because he'll have it all around every high table in Oxford if you do," he said.
I took Berlin's advice and gave Bowra a wide berth. Marshall, or "Artie" as he was known to everyone, knew practically everyone in Cambridge in the 1930s, particularly the secret network of homosexuals at King's and Trinity. Artie had a prodigious memory for gossip, intrigue, and scandal, and, most important of all, he knew who was sleeping with whom in the Burgess and Blunt circles. Blunt, too, loved to discuss the scandalous side of Cambridge life in the 1930s. He relished gossip, and never tired of telling me of the time he blackballed Sir Edward Playfair, in later life Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defense, for the Apostles Society. Blunt thought Playfair crushingly dull, and, having met the man, I could not disagree with his judgment. His funniest story concerned Guy Burgess and Churchill's niece Clarissa Churchill. Apparently Burgess was asked by his Soviet controllers to wed Clarissa Churchill, to ensure him perfect cover for his espionage activities. Burgess was appalled by the task. For one thing, he was an inveterate homosexual; for another, Clarissa Churchill was scarcely better-looking than her uncle; and lastly, it was known that James Pope-Hennessy, later to become a distinguished writer, had become infatuated with her.
But Burgess was nothing if not game. Within a month he was pursuing Clarissa Churchill, causing upset and outrage in equal measure. James Pope-Hennessy was desperately upset by Burgess' attentions to her. One evening he arrived at Burgess' flat with a revolver, threatening to shoot them both before attempting to commit suicide. Blunt loved the story, and it was made all the better, in his eyes and mine, by the fact that, shortly afterward, Clarissa Churchill married Anthony Eden and later became Lady Avon.
I soon realized that the Ring of Five stood at the center of a series of other concentric rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect its secrets from outsiders. There was the secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode all other obligations; there was the secret world of the Apostles, where ties to fellow Apostles remained strong throughout life; and then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt and Burgess who were not themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what was going on. They shared the secret, and worked to protect them for many years. Each ring supported the others, and made the task of identifying the inner core that much more difficult.
It was hard not to dislike many of those I interviewed. Funnily enough, I did not mind the spies so much; they had made their choice, and followed it to the best of their abilities. But those on the periphery were different. When I saw them they were clothed in the respectability of later life. But their arrogance and their cultured voices masked guilt and fear. It was I who was wrong to raise the issue, not they; it ought to be left alone, they would tell me. I was being McCarthyite. Things were different then. Of course, spying was wrong, but there were reasons. They were a Lotus Generation, following political fashions as if they were a clothes catalogue, still pledged in the 1960s to vows of silence they made thirty years before. They in turn disliked me. I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.
One of the first D3 tasks was to reexamine a lead which had lain uninvestigated in the files since Burgess and Maclean's defection in 1951. It was given by Goronwy Rees, a friend of both Burgess and Blunt. He first met them at Oxford in the 1930s, and during the war, while serving in Military Intelligence, was a regular visitor to Bentinck Street. Shortly after the defections he approached Dick White, then the head of Counterespionage, and told him that he knew Burgess to have been a longtime Soviet agent. Burgess, he claimed, had tried to recruit him before the war, but Rees, disillusioned after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact, refused to continue any clandestine relationship. Rees also claimed that Blunt, Guy Liddell, a former MI6 officer named Robin Zaehner, and Stuart Hampshire, a brilliant RSS officer, were all fellow accomplices. But whereas Blunt was undoubtedly a Soviet spy, the accusations against the other three individuals were later proved groundless.
Dick White disliked Rees intensely, and thought he was making malicious accusations in order to court attention, if not publicity. The four men were all close friends, and it was for this
reason that he found it hard to share Arthur Martin's suspicions about Blunt. Dick's view of Rees seemed confirmed when, in 1956, Rees wrote an anonymous series of articles for a popular newspaper. Orgies and espionage made as good copy in the 1950s as they do today, and the Rees articles, detailing some of the salacious activities of Burgess and those close to him, caused a sensation.
But when Blunt confessed, the color of Rees' 1951 testimony changed. I thought it at least prudent to reexamine it, if only to satisfy myself that Rees had not been lying when he claimed to have given up all thoughts of the Soviet cause before the war. At first he was reluctant to talk to me, and his wife accused me of Gestapo-style tactics in trying to resurrect the past after so many years. They had both suffered grievously for the newspaper articles. Rees' authorship became known, and he was sacked from academic life. Since 1956 they had eked out a miserable existence, shunned by the Establishment. Eventually Rees agreed to see me, and went through his story again. He had no proof that any of those he named were fellow conspirators. But all, he said, had been close friends of Burgess in that crucial prewar period.
The accusation against Guy Liddell was palpably absurd. Everyone who knew him, or of him, inside MI5 was convinced that Liddell was completely loyal. He had left his diaries, known as "Wallflower," when he left MI5. Reading those, nobody could believe that he was a spy. But the accusation against Robin Zaehner, who had served for MI6 in the Middle East, cross-checked with Volkov's spy in the Middle East.
I studied Zaehner's Personal File. He was responsible for MI6 counterintelligence in Persia during the war. It was difficult and dangerous work. The railway lines into Russia, carrying vital military supplies, were key targets for German sabotage. Zaehner was perfectly equipped for the job, speaking the local dialects fluently, and much of his time was spent undercover, operating in the murky and cutthroat world of countersabotage. By the end of the war his task was even more fraught. The Russians themselves were trying to gain control of the railway, and Zaehner had to work behind Russian lines, constantly at risk of betrayal and murder by pro-German or pro-Russian Arabs. On the face of it, the very fact that Zaehner survived gave a touch of credibility to Rees' allegation.
After the war Zaehner left intelligence work, and became Professor of Ancient Persian at Oxford University. I made an appointment to see him at All Souls. The cords which bind Oxford and British Intelligence together are strong, and it was the first of many trips I was to make to that city during the next five years.
Zaehner was a small, wiry-looking man, clothed in the distracted charm of erudition. He poured me a drink and chatted easily about old colleagues in the secret world. I wondered, as he chatted, how I could broach the subject of my visit in a tactful way. I decided there was none.
"I'm sorry, Robin," I began, "a problem has come up. We're following up some old allegations. I'm afraid there's one that points at you...''
At first he rallied. Pointed at him? he protested. Of course, I must be mistaken. Had I checked his record? Which allegation?
I told him about Volkov, and the spy in Persia.
He crumpled. I knew then, from his reaction, that Rees had been terribly, vindictively mistaken.
"I spent six years in the desert," he said limply. "I stayed behind two years after Yalta, when everyone else went home. I got no honors, but I thought at least I had earned a degree of trust."
Zaehner spoke quite without rancor; just a kind of sadness. After all that he had done, all that he had risked, to be accused of this, years later, wounded him to the quick. He dabbed tears from his eyes. I felt a heel, like a policeman who breaks bad news to parents in the night.
When Zaehner composed himself he was a paragon of professionalism. Of course, he understood why I had to come see him. He went through his career at MI6 and searched his memory for a clue as to the identity of Volkov's spy. We talked for hours as the shadow of the spires of All Souls faded across the lawns.
"I cannot think of an Englishman who could be this spy," he said, tapping his foot on the floor as if to trigger his memory. "There weren't many of us, and I'd vouch for every one."
He thought it was likely to be an agent, rather than an officer. Agents were often shared between MI6 and the KGB in the latter stages of the war, and the possibility of a plant was obvious. One name fitted perfectly, a man called Rudi Hamburger. After MI6 recruited him, he was arrested by the Russians, then turned loose, before being reemployed by MI6 again. The dates tallied perfectly with the time Volkov had access to files in Moscow, and it seemed obvious that Hamburger had simply been turned in prison, and tasked to find out whatever he could about his British employers. (Rudi Hamburger was the first husband of "Sonia," who later was an illegal in Switzerland and England.) Zaehner and I parted friends, but I felt bitter at the ease with which the accusation had been made, and anger at those who had left such an accusation lying in the files for so many years before clearing it up. Driving back to London I began to wonder about the cost of clearing up "loose ends." Was it fair, I thought, to drag these things up? Perhaps, after all, it was better to leave them in the files undisturbed and unresolved.
That Christmas Zaehner sent me a friendly Christmas card, and not too many years later he died. I sent a wreath, anxious to make amends; but I could never forget the look on his face when I asked him if he was a spy. In that moment the civilized cradle of Oxford disintegrated around him; he was back behind the lines again, surrounded by enemies, alone and double-crossed.
The last name Rees gave me was that of Sir Stuart Hampshire. Hampshire was a brilliant wartime codebreaker and analyst for the Radio Security Service, one of the elite team who broke the ISOS Abwehr codes, and laid the foundations for the Double Cross System. After the war he pursued a career in the Foreign Office, before leaving for a distinguished academic career as a philosopher at Oxford and Princeton. Rees had no evidence whatsoever for the charge he made in 1951; it was based solely on the fact that Hampshire had been extremely close to Burgess during the 1930s. I knew from my own interviews that Hampshire was considered by contemporaries to have been strongly left wing, although non-Communist, and I was amazed to find that no one had even bothered to interview him on what he knew about Guy Burgess.
However, there was an extraordinary complication with the Hampshire case. Although long since retired from the secret world, he had been invited by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, to conduct a major review of the future of GCHQ. Concern about the escalating cost of SIGINT had been growing ever since NSA moved into the satellite age. The Americans were pressing GCHQ to share the costs of spy satellites. The incoming Labor Government was already faced with annual bills in excess of 100 million pounds, and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, instructed Trend to conduct a review to see if such costs were justified. Trend consulted Dick White, who suggested Hampshire for the review in the light of his previous RSS work. When I looked at Hampshire's file I was amazed to find that despite Rees' allegation, Hampshire had not been vetted. Dick White, who had known Hampshire for years, simply wrote Hollis a letter for the file, and that was it.
Hampshire's inquiry lasted the best part of a year, during which time he had full access to GCHQ, as well as a six-week visit to NSA. There were a number of fundamental issues raised in Hampshire's report. The first was whether, in light of the growing costs, Britain could afford to maintain its share of the UKUSA agreement, which guaranteed us so much exchanged information from the Americans. The second, more immediate issue was whether Britain should opt in with the Americans on a new generation of spy satellites; and the third area was how far GCHQ should support the Counterclan activities.
The answers in short were Yes, No, and Yes. We could not possibly afford to lose the UKUSA exchange, but on the other hand, we could remain in without necessarily funding every technical development pound for dollar. As for Counterclan, Hampshire endorsed it strongly. The only major change he requested was a termination of airborne RAFTER on the grounds that it was not cost effe
ctive. I opposed this at the time, but with hindsight it was a sensible economy, and the RAF were, in any case, beginning to resent the demands we were making on them. Hampshire and I spent a good deal of time discussing MI5's relationship with GCHQ. I pressed strongly for him to recommend the creation of a new Radio Security Service, an organization independent of GCHQ, which would be controlled by MI5, and responsible solely for the detection of domestic spy radios. I thought Hampshire, given his background, would welcome such an idea, and I told him that it was the only way that we would ensure the facilities that we needed. Hampshire disagreed, not, I think, with the principle, but more with the practicalities. He concluded, probably rightly, that such an initiative would be fought tooth and nail by both GCHQ and MI6, and would, therefore, be very unlikely to succeed.
Interviewing Hampshire about the Rees allegation was obviously out of the question until his review was complete, but in 1967 I obtained permission, and traveled to Princeton University in the USA, where Hampshire was the Visiting Professor. I knew Princeton well. I had often visited there in my days as a scientist. Rudi Kompfner, the man who invented the traveling wave tube (the radio valve used in most microwave links), gave me the best description of its bizarre architecture. He called it "pseudo-Gothic-Cotswold."
I talked to Hampshire for some time about his memories of Guy Burgess. He told me that he now thought in retrospect that perhaps he himself had been the target of a recruitment approach by Burgess, though he had not realized it at the time. He described how in 1935 he and Anthony Blunt had traveled to Paris together, and one evening they had dinner with James Klugman and the artist Ben Nicholson. After dinner Klugman took the lead in a lengthy session in which Hampshire was quizzed as to his political beliefs.