So it seems that the account of the Plough meeting given by Pyke to Smollett was delivered to Burgess who then passed it off as his own to his Soviet handler, before it continued down the chain to Moscow.
The question remains: did Pyke realise when he spoke to Smollett that he was being pumped for information by a Soviet agent?
It seems likely. The length and precision of the report indicate that Smollett was taking notes, which must have raised Pyke’s suspicions. Then there is the line: ‘No other specific operations were mentioned in Pyke’s presence at the conference on March 19th at Combined Operations Headquarters though Mountbatten said something like “. . . of course we have so many other earlier schemes in hand . . .”’ This sounds very much like a response to a question such as: were there any other specific operations mentioned in your presence? Hardly chit-chat.
More revealing still, Pyke told Smollett that he sought ‘cooperation with the Russians because he wanted them to know about all this so that none of these tactical innovations could ever be used against them if there were after all to be a conflict between Britain and Russia at the end of this war. He [Pyke] implied that in such a conflict he would be on the side of the Russians.’ What is so revealing here is not that Pyke was pro-Soviet by this stage of the war – we know that – but that he was prepared to say so in these terms to Smollett.
Apart from this report, there are hints that Smollett and Pyke had an understanding which belied their formal relationship. Between them, in 1942, they found a temporary job for Heinz Kamnitzer, the German refugee and suspected NKVD agent, in which he was paid by Combined Operations while being employed at the Ministry of Information. There was also a David Astor connection. Just before Pyke left for the US, Astor decided that Smollett should become the next editor of the Observer. At the time Pyke was in contact with two of Astor’s secretaries, which raises the possibility that Pyke had been asked to steer Astor towards choosing Smollett.
Even if Pyke had not been told that Smollett was working for Moscow, he might have guessed it. This slightly overweight Austrian gave George Orwell the ‘strong impression of being some kind of Russian agent’ and otherwise being a ‘very slimy person’ – words he wrote without knowing that it was Smollett who had persuaded T. S. Eliot at Faber to reject on political grounds his manuscript for Animal Farm.
But how does Pyke’s decision to pass intelligence to Smollett belong to his broader political evolution? Was Milicent Bagot right to suspect him of being both ‘Professor P.’ and the man in charge of British communist ‘action propaganda’? ‘Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real,’ wrote John le Carré in A Perfect Spy. For much of his life Geoffrey Pyke wore a disguise and here, at last, it can removed.
Geoffrey Pyke did not visit Berlin during the late 1920s or early 1930s; he was not Professor P., the senior Comintern official. Nor did he ever join the Comintern. But in late 1934, as he wrestled with the question of how to end Nazi anti-Semitism, he underwent a powerful political conversion. He became an anti-fascist. This did not involve joining a party, it was a purely personal transformation, and yet it would inform every political decision that followed and ultimately brought him into the orbit of the Party.
After two years spent trying to set up his institute to explode the myth of anti-Semitism, Pyke created Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain (VIAS), another anti-fascist venture, after which his affiliations became more complex. This was the age of the Popular Front in which the barriers between those on the Left had been either lowered or brought down altogether. Pyke had always felt a strong affinity for the Fabians, and even they were now talking up the ‘economic miracle’ of Stalin’s Russia. So there was nothing unusual about a Fabian like him, one who had voted Labour all his life, recruiting several Party members to VIAS.
He found these men reliable and determined. He was attracted by their internationalism, their political conviction and their European connections (which made it easier to get VIAS ampoules, microscopes, trucks and motorbikes into the hands of the Spanish Republicans). Their links to the American Communist Party might have helped to secure the fleet of second-hand Harley Davidsons that was shipped over from the US.
But to what extent did he allow his charity to be used by the Party? We know that VIAS assisted at least one agent of Moscow, for buried in its records is a note which says: ‘Received one packet for Mr Otto Katz’.
Katz was a Communist ‘super-agent’ with nine cover names. He was an NKVD illegal, a senior Comintern official and a charismatic and talented propagandist who later inspired the Victor Laszlo character in the film Casablanca. One of Katz’s many poste restantes, it seems, was Pyke’s flat.
But this does not make VIAS a communist organisation. Instead, with ties to an array of left-leaning groups, from the CPGB to the Co-Operative Movement, it seems to have been a child of the Popular Front. In spite of what the insurance agent overheard before going to the police – when Pyke spoke to an empty room about ‘attacking’ Negretti and Zambra (he was almost certainly speaking into his Dictaphone) – VIAS was not a front organisation and there is no evidence that it was used to obtain industrial or technological intelligence.
Note found among VIAS papers referring to Otto Katz
Nonetheless, it was around this time that Pyke adjusted his outlook. He read John Strachey’s Theory and Practice of Socialism, and described its account of the common ground between psychoanalysis and Marxism as ‘all that I require’. Over the following months he became convinced, as his idol Shaw had put it, that it was no more possible to produce socialism using the British political machine than it was to get a sewing machine to make a fried egg, and in 1938, having been rebuffed again by the TUC, he decided to abandon the British Labour movement. He felt that its leadership was interested in nothing more than pushing for higher wages and, once these had been won, guarding them ‘with caution and jealousy’. ‘I became clear that any further ideas that came into my head must not be fed to them.’
So, having decided to carry out a Gallup-style survey of German public opinion, he resolved to work with ‘a body of people selected for their political and personal reliability’. This was code for his decision in 1939 to approach the Party for help with his undercover poll, a move born of his anger with the Labour movement as much as his belief that the Party would fight harder in the struggle against fascism.
Over that summer, Pyke was put in touch with senior members of the German Communist Party (KPD). He flew out to Paris to meet Jürgen Kuczynski, and asked him for the support of the KPD.
‘I made a report about the matter to our Party leadership in Paris,’ wrote Kuczynski. They then sent a message to London instructing KPD cadre Rolf Rünkel to help Pyke, and over the next few weeks Rünkel vetted each of the young conversationalists, none of whom travelled to Germany until either Rünkel or his boss, Wilhelm Koenen, leader of the KPD in exile, was satisfied.
Some of those involved in the survey either belonged to the Party or stood close to it, such as Kenneth Spencer, Fred Fuller and Marjory Watson, who had started out as a Nazi but had since undergone a dramatic political conversion. Eva Webber, the woman in Golders Green whose remark about working with the Secret Service came to the attention of MI5, merely imagined that Pyke’s connections to the likes of Vansittart was evidence that this survey was controlled by MI5. It was not. But as a result of Vansittart’s connection the crucial survey results were brought out of the country by diplomatic bag. Or, to put it another way, the Foreign Office unwittingly helped the German Communist Party to gather intelligence from Nazi Germany.
Pyke relished that initial experience of working with the KPD. His new friends were serious, politically committed and anti-fascist to the core. He began to inhabit a more communist milieu, until his life was dominated by ‘my foreign Communist friends’ such as Rünkel, Koenen and Kuczynski. ‘I learn more from these German Communists than I do from anybody.’ Otherwise he spent time with ‘my English Communist friends’,
who were ‘very young members of the Party’, and in the wake of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreed with them that there would be no war because Chamberlain’s ‘class interest’ was so strong that he was bound to make a deal with Hitler. Karl Kneschke – older, wiser and like Rünkel and Koenen a German Communist who had fled Prague – took a more sanguine line. Pyke recalled him saying ‘that Hitler and Chamberlain were both in a situation which they could not get out of except by war. I remember asking him, “What do your Moscow friends think?” Elbows on knees, staring at the floor between his feet as if he would find there the words he was looking for, slowly shaking his large head, bald in front but for the wisps of greying hair that had been carefully brushed across the dome in the morning, but which now stood up like Einstein’s in a disordered halo, at last he got the words out. “It is coming this time.”’
Here is evidence, at least, that Pyke recognised the connection between these German Communists and the USSR. But by then he had made the decision to join them in the fight against fascism and would stand by it. The communist networks to which he now had access provided him with personnel and expertise, and they might have helped with the funding of his survey. The cost of sending his conversationalists to Germany was more than £550, of which £500 came from his friend Leo Myers. Whether or not Myers was given a nudge by the Party is unclear. Much easier to trace is the seismic shift in Pyke’s outlook during those heady days just after the outbreak of war and what he did in response.
‘I had for many years been convinced that Capitalist civilisation in Western Europe was decaying,’ wrote Pyke. ‘I took it for granted that the next convulsion was however a decade or two ahead.’ Now that war had broken out he began to think that it might come sooner – much sooner. ‘We are, I think, approaching one of the greatest and most beneficial crises the species has been through in the last 5,000 years. And everyone should get clear as soon as possible which side he is on. For everyone, as judged by his activities, will in fact have to be on one side or the other, whether he likes it or not.’ In September 1939 he saw the new conflict with Germany as a prelude to ‘the real war, the war against nature, the war to master our environment and the purposeful evolution of the human species. [. . .] We are within easy sight of overcoming the absurd preliminary problem of mere physical want not merely for the upper and middle classes, but for everyone [. . .]. Then we stand a chance of giving science its head.’
Pyke’s vision of the future was socialist and anti-capitalist, yet it had virtually nothing in common with the bloody reality of Soviet Russia. He did not long for gulags, purges and a tyrannical secret police. His utopian state was not the architect of aggressive territorial expansion; nor did it tolerate an inefficient economy, wastage, famine, shortages or the stasis of a paranoid and murderous dictatorship.
Instead he envisaged a world in which scientists were given their head, a rational, egalitarian and meritocratic society in which the future was embraced like an old friend. Humans would live without want. The new enemies would be complacency, vested interest and our unthinking resistance to new ideas. Empire, inequality and war would become historical artefacts. Nations would pull together towards a more productive, peaceful and judicious future, all of which, he maintained, could be achieved through socialist revolution.
Here was a worldview anchored so completely in the political idealism of the late 1930s – a period which is, as the biographer Peter Conradi has put it, ‘as remote from us as the Romantic Revival two centuries earlier’ – that it can be hard to understand today. While none of the individual components of this outlook are either alien or outdated, indeed many have since passed into the political mainstream, what has gone is the sense that all this could be achieved through revolution.
Yet the real tragedy of Pyke’s beliefs, at the time he held them, was that he imagined them to be shared by Stalin. He was not alone in willing himself to see the USSR as an embryonic version of a scientific and futuristic utopia. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, for example, felt the same way. When he read that the Russian national income had doubled every six years, he believed it, and was convinced that it was only a matter of time before they overcame ‘the absurd preliminary problem of mere physical want’. Pyke now dared himself to believe that he would live to see this new world, and soon after the outbreak of war he resolved to do everything he could to bring this forward. His weapon would be propaganda. ‘It is everyone’s duty to live as usefully as possible. There is no merit in being shot. But it will be necessary to be ready to be shot, and worse. When the future is only just round the corner, it is worthwhile to sacrifice the present.’ The advent of war had had a powerful effect on him, making him more impulsive than ever before.
In the days after the outbreak of war Pyke decided to create a news agency with a hidden communist agenda. Letters written to Kuczynski, which for decades have lain hidden in East German archives, show that this agency was to provide two services. One was a survey of the foreign press to be called Uncensored News, inspired by his work with the Cambridge Magazine during the previous war. He planned to recruit a team of refugee communists to select foreign-language articles and broadcasts for translation. While the articles were genuine, the choice of which to translate would be partisan.
The other arm of Pyke’s agency was to provide reports on public opinion in Germany and other European countries. This was what he was overheard discussing on the telephone with Marjory Watson in May 1940. Men and women from neutral countries such as the US would conduct undercover opinion polls, as Pyke’s conversationalists had done the summer before, but now the phrasing of the questions would be geared towards drawing out responses to back the Party line.
These plans faced an array of setbacks. During the Blitz the warehouse in which he had stored twenty-five tons of newsprint for his proposed publication Uncensored News went up in flames. He was not given permission to import German newspapers, and in the days when America remained neutral he was unable to get a permit to travel to the US where he hoped to train up conversationalists. But his efforts to get things moving do at least tell us something about the flow of secret information within hidden communist networks at that time.
One of the men Pyke had gone to for help with his news agency was Sir Campbell Stuart, at Department EH, who had looked so unfavourably on Raleigh and Smith before the outbreak of war. This time Pyke told him about his plan to send Americans into Europe. Stuart gave ‘every sign of being favourably impressed, but rather distrait’, largely because he was off to Paris (to check up on Noël Coward’s British Bureau of Propaganda). On his return, Stuart relayed Pyke’s plan to the Director of SIS, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, saying ‘it might be that some useful information would be gained’ and that among others ‘Vansittart has commended it warmly’.
‘The idea is interesting,’ came the reply from SIS, ‘and, if properly carried out, might prove very informative.’ Neither had any inkling of its hidden communist agenda.
Yet by canvassing political support for his scheme Pyke had destroyed its secrecy and ultimately Stuart rejected it on the grounds that too many people had been informed. He also suggested that this work should only be carried out by professional intelligence agents. The irony here was that Pyke had successfully got his amateurs into and out of Nazi Germany at a time when SIS felt it was safer to watch from the sidelines.
The only reason we know that Sir Campbell Stuart wrote to SIS is because copies of this correspondence were found among Burgess’s papers in 1951. When Stuart wrote to ‘C’, Burgess was working at SIS. Presumably, then, it was Burgess who copied this material. There is also an intriguing possibility that Pyke might have seen it.
Several months after these letters were sent, Pyke mentioned that he had ‘excellent reason for believing that’ Department EH was ‘in favour of the proposal’ but that they had had to submit the idea to another department, which he believed to be the Security Service, who had turned it down. It seems that either Burgess had showed the
correspondence to Pyke, or it was given to an intermediary who then told him about it, all of which strengthens the idea that Pyke had access to high-powered communist networks during that first year of the war.
We also know that he had a degree of success in running a press-cutting office. For a short period he had installed in his flat a team of refugees and linguists who transcribed and translated foreign radio broadcasts – which explains the strange noises heard on Great Ormond Street in early 1940. Around this time, possibly for no more than a few months, they gathered material from foreign radio broadcasts and a handful of international publications, and at least one of their bulletins was passed on to Tommy Bell, the Comintern agent who administered the Inter-States Committee of foreign communists.
Pyke’s propaganda work was not restricted to this news agency. During the early stages of the war he frequently met with Sidney Elliott at Reynolds News, badgering him to keep his editorial line to the left. Harry Pollitt once described Pyke as ‘working’ at the paper with Elliott and ‘giving him all his stunt ideas’.
Yet by the summer of 1940, as the threat of Nazi invasion grew, a curious thing happened. Pyke’s propaganda work lost its intensity and his position appeared to shift. He confided in a friend ‘his terror at the thought of a successful Nazi invasion of Britain’, given that he was a left-wing Jew, and began to off-load his political literature. It was also around this time that Pyke had the idea for Plough and set about promoting it with characteristic ardour. In the context of what he had been doing until then, this makes almost no sense.
The Party line was clear: Britain and Germany were engaged in an imperialist war; the British proletariat should rise up against the British bourgeoisie rather than fight the Germans. Pyke’s Plough idea flew in the face of this. It was a solution to a military problem faced by the British Army. So why did Pyke press it upon senior political and military figures with such enthusiasm?
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