Spycatcher

by Peter Wright

  "Would it change your story," Watson was asked, "if we were to offer you immunity?"

  But Watson was too far gone. He seemed unable even to understand the offer that was made to him, and the interrogation was suspended.

  No one who listened to the interrogation or studied the transcripts was in any doubt that Watson had been a spy, probably since 1938. Given his access to antisubmarine-detection research, he was, in my view, probably the most damaging of all the Cambridge spies. One detail, in particular, clinched the case. Watson told a long story about Kondrashev. He had met him, but did not care for him. He described Kondrashev in great detail. He was too bourgeois, claimed Watson.

  He wore flannel trousers and a blue blazer, and walked a poodle. They had a row and they stopped meeting.

  This clicked exactly with one of Golitsin's early serials. He said Kondrashev was sent to Britain to run two very important spies - one in the Navy and one in MI6. The M16 spy was definitely George Blake, and we always assumed the Naval spy to be Blake too, since he served in the Navy before joining MI6. Golitsin had one more fragment. He said Kondrashev fell out with the Naval spy. The spy objected to his bourgeois habits, and refused to meet him. Golitsin recalled that as a result Korovin, the former London KGB resident, was forced to return to London to replace Kondrashev as the Naval spy's controller. It was obviously Watson.

  At MI5's insistence, Watson was removed from secret access overnight, and transferred to the Oceanographic Institute, where he worked on until retirement. In the absence of a confession, we relied for our legal justification on Watson's failure to declare his Communist background, and those of his wife and daughter, on his vetting forms. He made no protest.

  After Watson's interrogation I decided to have one more try at breaking him. I arranged for him to meet Blunt at a neutral venue - Brown's Hotel in London. There were two reasons for this, firstly, I was not at all sure that Watson understood the meaning of our immunity offer, and I wanted Blunt to explain it. Secondly, I wanted to resolve, if possible, the question of whether or not Watson was a member of the Ring of Five. Golitsin said the members of the Ring all knew each other, and all knew they were all spies. As far as Blunt was concerned, he claimed it was only ever a Ring of Four - himself, Burgess, Philby, and Maclean, with other recruits like Cairncross and Long existing independently of the central Ring members. Watson seemed by far the best starter for the fifth.

  Blunt was very reluctant at first to go along with the plan.

  "Alister has suffered enough," he pleaded, when I first raised it.

  I had arranged meetings between Blunt and previous conspirators on a number of occasions. The sessions with Long and Straight were mild encounters, Blunt even told Straight that exposing him was the best thing he ever did. But when I suggested he contact Baron zu Putlitz, Klop Ustinov's wartime spy, who had returned to East Germany, he became distinctly agitated. Zu Putliz and Blunt were lovers during the war, after Klop Ustinov brought zu Putlitz out of Holland and back to London. In 1945 Blunt accompanied zu Putlitz back to East Germany, and they had remained in touch ever since. Zu Putlitz had also been working for the Russians before and after the war, in order to smooth his return East, and I was interested to see if he could be turned our way again. I asked Blunt to write him a letter asking him if he would be prepared to meet me in Helsinki or Berlin.

  "That's not fair, Peter, that's dirty. He's done enough for this country."

  But Blunt knew he could not refuse. He wrote the letter, although much to his relief zu Putlitz turned my offer down.

  Watson was like zu Putlitz. There was something about acknowledging the relationship which caused Blunt deep unease, in a way that did not occur with Long or Straight or others. It was a deep-seated desire to protect them, to deny us any knowledge of their activities, and also a desire to hide his confession. He dreaded being seen by them, I think, as an informer.

  I picked Blunt up from the Courtauld one evening and we drove over to Brown's Hotel, where Patrick Stewart had booked a room for us all. He and Watson were waiting. Blunt was desperately anxious.

  "I hope you've got something to drink," he said when we arrived at the hotel.

  He and Watson greeted each other nervously, afraid to show any warmth in front of either Patrick or me. Watson was frail, like a man just out of hospital, but eventually we coaxed him into telling the story of his dealings with the Russians again. It was a pathetic story in the interrogation room, but it looked even more ridiculous in front of Blunt.

  They both talked about Cambridge most of the time, and Otto, and the move to the left in the 1930s. It struck me as an odd way for the idealism and activism of the 1930s to end: in a small hotel suite, with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of gin. They wanted to change the world, but ended up changing only themselves.

  "I'm through with it now, Alister," said Blunt. "I've confessed," he kept saying, "and I'm still here. You've got nothing to worry about."

  But Watson scarcely listened to Blunt's entreaties. They were talking at cross-purposes. Watson was overpoweringly jealous of Blunt and clearly always had been for thirty years. It came to the surface in a drunken attack on his friend. Treachery, for him, seemed almost the secondary issue. He was much more interested in talking, now that his life had failed, about where it went wrong.

  "You've been such a success, Anthony, and yet it was I who was the great hope at Cambridge. Cambridge was my whole life," he said, practically in tears, "but I had to go into secret work, and now it has ruined my life..."

  Blunt left the table, upset and embarrassed. He walked over to the drinks cabinet on the other side of the room. He had drunk almost a complete bottle of gin, but still needed more. I walked over to him.

  "Well...?" I asked.

  Blunt stood, his shoulders sagging with strain.

  "I suppose you're right," he said, his eyes gleaming with emotion. "I suppose he must be one of us, but I never recruited him, and Guy never told me he had."

  There was no gin left, so Blunt poured himself a tumbler full of sherry and added soda water. He gulped it down.

  "Sometimes," he said, "I think it would have been easier to go to prison."

  Victor and Tess Rothschild were a constant help during the D3 inquiries into the 1930s. Both knew so much about the personalities and the hidden relationships of the period, and were often able to prevail upon otherwise reluctant inhabitants of the Ring of Five's menagerie to meet me. Victor was also able to make a number of vital introductions for me. For instance, one of the questions which fascinated me after the Watson case was the degree to which other scientists besides Watson had been targets for recruitment. Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Maclean were all classically educated, but I wondered whether rings had been recruited at, for instance, the world-famous Cambridge University Cavendish Laboratory.

  My suspicions fell on the renowned Soviet scientist Peter Kapitza, father of the Russian atomic bomb. Kapitza came to Cambridge in the 1920s, financed by the British Royal Society, where he built the Mond Law temperature laboratory attached to the Cavendish. Kapitza remained close to the Soviet Government, and on several occasions was observed receiving Russian intelligence officers in his rooms. In the 1930s the Soviet Government, alarmed by growing international tension, insisted Kapitza return to work in Russia, and he was allowed to take all his machinery back with him. But both before and after the war he remained in touch with British scientists, often receiving those who visited Russia in his well-appointed dacha outside Moscow. For years it was rumored inside MI5 that Kapitza had talent-spotted potential recruits inside the Cavendish. But no one had ever really traced through the story. No one knew who, or how many, or whether Kapitza was ever successful. It was just another loose end, left in the files, seeping doubt and suspicion.

  The one man who was in a position to know more about Kapitza, who he was friendly with, who his contacts were during his time at Cambridge, was Lord Adrian, who knew Kapitza when he was in Britain, and in the 1960s was Chan
cellor of the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Society. Victor promptly arranged a dinner party at which I was able to meet Adrian, and from there guide him gently onto the subject of the Russian scientist.

  Adrian was entirely cooperative, and could well understand the suspicions we had about Kapitza, even though he admired his achievements tremendously. He began to reel off names of those who had been especially close to Kapitza. More names for my black books. More names to be checked in the Registry. More names to be traced, interviewed, assessed, cleared, and in one or two cases, removed from access. All to be sure, finally, that no one had slipped through the net.

  The most important help Victor gave was persuading Flora Solomon to meet MI5 again. I knew from her session with Arthur that she knew far more than she was saying. She had obviously been in the thick of things in the mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow accomplice, and part courier for the fledgling Ring of Five along with her friends Litzi Philby and Edith Tudor Hart. After her meeting with Arthur she refused to meet MI5 again. She had a typically Russian paranoia about conspiracy and treachery. She was convinced we would double-cross her, and put her in prison, or that she would be assassinated by the Russians, as she believed had happened to Tomas Harris. I asked Victor if he could intercede on my behalf, and eventually, in mid-1965, she agreed to see me.

  "Does the name Dennis Proctor mean anything to you?" she growled.

  It did indeed. Dennis Proctor was then the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Fuel and Power, having joined the Civil Service in the 1930s, when he had served as Stanley Baldwin's private secretary. In my travels around Cambridge and Oxford nearly a dozen people had picked out Proctor as a notable left-winger, although not a Communist, during his undergraduate days. He had the classic Cambridge Comintern recruit's profile - he was a close friend of Burgess, Blunt, Philby, and Watson and a member of the Apostles.

  There was one other odd thing about Proctor which had puzzled me. Shortly before the 1951 defections he suddenly left the Civil Service for no apparent reason to take a job with a shipping company in Copenhagen. In 1953, just as suddenly, he reappeared in London and resumed his Civil Service career.

  I asked Flora why she mentioned Proctor.

  "Kim used to bring people to see me," she said. "He valued my opinion. I would never join, but I used to tell him what I thought of his recruits."

  "And what did you tell him about Proctor...?"

  "Kim brought him around for dinner one night. I didn't like him. I told Kim he was no good. He had no backbone. 'How will he stand up to stress?' I asked him."

  Proctor was another name which Blunt had clearly deliberately avoided giving to me. I went to Hollis and requested permission to interview Proctor, but he refused. It would cause too much fuss in Whitehall, he said, and there were enough problems there as it was. I would have to wait until he retired. After all, said Hollis, it's only a few months.

  Proctor retired to a delightful rustic French farmhouse in the rolling countryside outside Avignon with his second wife and children, and in February 1966 I traveled to France to visit him.

  Proctor was a distinguished-looking man, with a hook nose, receding hairline, and just a touch of the cleric about him. He greeted me with the easy charm and familiarity which upper-class Englishmen use to set their visitors at a distance. I explained that MI5 were looking back into the 1930s.

  "We're just tying up loose ends, you know, that sort of thing..."

  Proctor talked about the period in crisp civil servant's shorthand. He rarely mentioned himself at first. Like the model civil servant, he was the modest observer of other people's lives and decisions. But beneath his reserve, I could detect an enthusiasm, as if he were recalling a better world.

  "And how did you feel about things then yourself?" I asked.

  "You mean what were my politics?" he countered, smiling at my euphemism. "Well, you presumably know I have been left-wing all my life."

  "Really?"

  "Oh yes," he went on, "but never Communist. I wanted to go into Government service too much to join the Party, and besides I didn't have the courage of people like Guy Burgess, who did it openly."

  I asked him if Guy had ever approached him to work for peace, or for the Comintern, or anything like that.

  He shook his head.

  "No, I don't think so... No, I don't remember anything like that at all."

  "But Guy knew what your political views were?"

  "Why, yes. We were very close. Guy, myself, Anthony. The Apostles, you know..."

  "Don't you think it's odd he never tried to recruit you?"

  He paused for thought.

  "I suppose it is, now you come to mention it. In fact, I'm really rather insulted he didn't..."

  He laughed. I laughed too, and he suggested we take a walk before dinner. It was still just winter, but the earth was thawing, as if spring lay just beneath the surface. We talked about other things - about England, and the Civil Service, and the way things had changed.

  "Most of us, you know, have spent our lives escaping from the thirties," he told me, as we looked back down the valley toward his house.

  "We were all so exquisitely happy then. It was our world. But we lost it in 1939, and we've been looking to escape ever since."

  He pointed to the farmhouse, shrouded in late-afternoon mist.

  "That's my escape..." he said.

  That evening we had a splendid dinner, and afterward retired to his study with the port. Proctor was drunk, and I could see he was finding my visit a strain. He knew that sooner or later I would return to Burgess.

  For a while he seemed to doze off over his port, and woke up perspiring heavily. He began to dab his forehead nervously with his handkerchief.

  "Why do you think it was Guy never bothered to approach you?" I asked as I filled his glass again.

  Proctor gulped his down, and poured himself another.

  "I admired Guy very much," he said, after a pause. "People forget, you know, just how gifted Guy was. They don't remember how he was before the war. The looks, the vitality, the intellect. They just think of him afterward."

  I said nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence.

  He began again, talking more urgently.

  "You see, I had no secrets from him. Whenever I had a problem, no matter how secret, I used to discuss it with him, and his advice was always sound. I think the real truth of the matter is that Guy had no need to recruit me. He could get to know anything he wanted. All he had to do was ask."

  "What about 1951?" I asked, anxious to press him while he was talking.

  "No, no, no," he clucked, "you've got that all wrong. I left in 1950 for personal reasons, nothing to do with this - to do with Varda, my first wife. She committed suicide, you know, in 1951."

  "Did you see Guy before he went?"

  "No - but my wife did, about six weeks before. She and her father were very close to him. I was in Copenhagen at the time."

  "And she killed herself afterward?"

  "Not long after, yes..."

  He sat up and looked at me, suddenly sober.

  "I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind. But there's no connection, I promise you."

  He slumped back again in the chair, disheveled like a defrocked priest.

  "They were both terrible, shocking events," he said quietly. "A year or two later, when I recovered, Edward Bridges invited me back into the Civil Service, and I came back to England." (Edward Bridges was then Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service.)

  I never did discover why Proctor's first wife, Varda, committed suicide, or what she and Guy Burgess discussed. The truth about Proctor was difficult to judge. I was inclined to believe his claim that he was never formally recruited, while disbelieving his assertion that Burgess had nothing to do with his departure to Denmark in 1950. But whatever the case, I am absolutely sure that during the time he was Baldwin's private secretary, and probably right up until 1950,
he shared with Guy every secret which crossed his desk.

  The next time I saw Blunt I told him about my discussion with Proctor.

  "You didn't tell us about him, Anthony," I said, reproachful rather than angry. It always upset Blunt more if he felt the deceit was a matter between friends.

  "You kept quiet again - to protect him."

  He got up and went to the window, and gazed through it as if he could see back into the past.

  "What about Dennis?" I asked again.

  "All I can say is he must have been the best source Guy ever had. But I didn't know what role he was playing," he said finally. "All I knew was that he was still in Government..."