The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  Much of MI5’s information about Moura came from the shipping magnate Sir Lionel Fletcher whose Russian wife, Liuba, had previously been married to Captain William Hicks, Bruce Lockhart’s right-hand man when they were all arrested in Moscow over the Lenin assassination plot. Fletcher described her as an attractive person to meet though by no means good looking. He added:

  She is intimate with the Duff Coopers at whose house she meets, inter alia, our Foreign Secretary [Anthony Eden]. My wife warned me at the very outset that the Baroness was not really a clever woman, but she liked to be considered the best-informed woman in Europe; that she talked a great deal, knew an immense number of people, and I was advised to watch my step when talking to her. The Baroness has certainly heard things which should not have been repeated in her presence by ministers.310

  Moura’s character was further damned by the First Secretary at the French embassy in Moscow, Maurice Dayet, who assured Conrad Collier, the British air attaché, that Moura had three meetings with Stalin while in Russia to attend Gorky’s funeral, and took him an accordion as a present. Many years later the Russian newspaper Pravda claimed that Moura had poisoned Gorky while working for British intelligence and many years after that a former KGB agent claimed she poisoned him on Stalin’s orders; two stories that even by the standards of Moura’s extraordinary life seem equally preposterous.

  MI6, as usual, was playing devious games. When Moura’s daughter Tania applied for a job with the Hungarian travel bureau in London in 1934 and needed security clearance, MI6 spoke up on her behalf, pointing out that MI5’s head of counter-espionage, Guy Liddell, knew the family well. The manager of the travel bureau was under observation and MI5 went to considerable trouble to ensure Tania got the job; the implication being that either she, or perhaps Moura, would be a source of information about him. A year later, after Maurice Dayet’s claims that Moura was ‘a letter box in the Russian interest’ and possibly a German agent as well, Liddell himself contacted MI6 and was reassured by Valentine Vivian, their Russian expert, that the stories were ‘the result of spite and vindictiveness on the part of monarchist White Russians’.311

  Vivian sent Liddell some notes on Moura compiled by one of his agents, probably Ernest Boyce who had been with Bruce Lockhart in Moscow in 1918 and was then appointed head of station in Helsinki and Tallinn from 1920.

  During the war, the suspicions of Russian espionage continued to be voiced by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, based on surveillance which showed Moura in frequent contact with the gregarious Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky. Yet her social circle extended to Winston Churchill and his personal assistant and propaganda minister Brendan Bracken. Duff Cooper described her as ‘a tiresome old woman’ who was nevertheless a prominent person in official circles.312

  Despite the rumours, Moura was recruited at the start of the war to a secret radio propaganda unit, the Joint Broadcasting Committee, run by the former BBC director of talks, Hilda Matheson. She found herself working alongside Guy Burgess. Special Branch reports claiming that she was a Soviet agent, who had meetings with Communist agitators, led to her being disbarred from this work, yet she somehow managed to act as an adviser to the BBC on its Russian coverage. MI5 asked Klop to keep an eye on his old friend and report regularly. Within weeks he wrote a supportive note saying that Moura was highly intelligent, shared H. G. Wells’s political views, and that both had been dumbfounded by the Russian pact with Hitler. It was out of the question that she would be pro-Nazi. Late in 1940 she went to work for the left-wing journalist André Labarthe, on his magazine La France Libre, which was financed by the intelligence services. Robert Bruce Lockhart had a hand in the appointment and required Moura to be the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office inside Labarthe’s organisation.313 He and his comrades were the driving force of a rival faction to General de Gaulle’s leadership of the Free French, regarding de Gaulle as right-wing almost to the point of fascism. Among the magazine’s contributors were Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Military articles were written by Stacho Shimonchek, a Pole married to Marthe Lecoutre. Among the financial backers were Cecil and Marie-Alixe Michaelis of Rycote Park, Thame, friends who lived close to Moura’s daughter Tania in Oxfordshire.314

  The rivalry between the left- and right-wing factions of the Free French led to a series of farcical confrontations which sucked in MI5 and MI6 and caused ever deepening rifts between de Gaulle and Churchill. The left’s rallying point was Admiral Emile Muselier, leader of the French naval forces. Late in 1940 MI5 obtained documents from members of his staff which appeared to show that he had betrayed plans for the unsuccessful Free French raid on Dakar in West Africa in September to the Vichy regime, puppets of the Nazis, who held the port. According to Guy Liddell of MI5, he personally took the evidence to Churchill’s security adviser Desmond Morton while warning him that it was not conclusive. But on Morton’s advice Churchill ordered the immediate arrest of Muselier and his entourage and intended to have Muselier executed. In the police raids that followed, two women were found in bed with their lovers. One, celebrating his birthday by sleeping with her for the first time, ended the night in police cells; the other claimed diplomatic privilege and was released. The admiral was also entertaining a lady friend, somewhere out of town, and could not be arrested until the following morning.315 De Gaulle had also been out of town – on official business – and was outraged that the action had been taken behind his back, quickly denouncing the evidence as fake and accusing British intelligence of planting it. MI5’s source, a disgruntled member of Muselier’s staff, admitted soon after that he had forged the documents. Churchill was forced into a humiliating apology and MI5 had to take the blame for the precipitate arrests. That did not stop Muselier’s supporters, André Labarthe, Marthe Lecoutre and Moura among them, plotting to supplant de Gaulle with their man. They had a good deal of British sympathy. Harold Nicolson recorded in his diary a dinner with Juliet Duff in December 1941 at which the guests were Moura Budberg and André Labarthe. He felt that Labarthe was a passionate and brilliant man, loved by the French people and representing their country far better than de Gaulle.316

  Churchill’s security adviser Desmond Morton, the man who had come close to getting Muselier executed at the beginning of 1941, had been paying close attention to the Muselier-Labarthe machinations, to the extent of attending a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in September 1941 where Muselier, Labarthe and others discussed how de Gaulle might remain as a figurehead while they democratised the Free French movement. Muselier had already handed de Gaulle a note to that effect. Churchill had been urging de Gaulle for some time to agree to a ruling council and was in favour of Muselier’s move. De Gaulle was not, and effectively scotched it. Muselier, however, did not give up and in March 1942 tried again to form a breakaway movement, once more with support from the Labarthe faction and from the British. De Gaulle sacked him, placed him under house arrest, and denounced him to the British as ‘morally unbalanced’, accusing him of ‘indulging in drugs’.317 The latter was no surprise to MI5 who had found opium-smoking equipment in his flat when they arrested him.

  MI5 was aware of Moura’s involvement in this latest escapade but do not seem to have thought any the worse of her for it. One MI5 officer, Kenneth Younger, commented that there were half a dozen women and scores of men who deserved a reprimand for their part in the quarrel but he did not believe Moura would deliberately do Britain harm.

  Downing Street was less sanguine. Without alluding to his own role in the previous conspiracy, Desmond Morton wrote to MI5 director Sir David Petrie complaining about ‘this appalling woman’ who was a perfect terror at intrigue in Free French affairs and a violent enemy of de Gaulle. Lord Winster, private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, had complained to Morton that Moura had tried to involve him in the Muselier conspiracy, having accosted him at a dinner party. Winster remarked that Moura was a friend of Victor Cazalet, the Conservative MP who had fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia in 1919 and became liaison of
ficer, the Polish leader General Wladyslaw Sikorski, and of Lady Ravensdale, daughter of the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. Her extraordinary range of social contacts also included the veteran MI6 officer Sir Leonard Woolley who had run agents throughout the Middle East during the First World War, worked with Lawrence of Arabia and directed archaeological excavations of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.

  Others, including Harold Nicolson, retained their admiration for Muselier and Labarthe. In the space of a week in April 1942, immediately after de Gaulle had sacked his naval commander, Nicolson lunched with Muselier and then Labarthe, whom he found brilliant and difficult to disagree with when he complained that de Gaulle was untruthful, treacherous and unbalanced yet still treated as the embodiment of France. He held further talks with Muselier in June of that year but by then de Gaulle had fully asserted his authority.

  It only emerged long after the war that Labarthe’s group at La France Libre had been working for Russian intelligence as early as 1940, at a time when the Soviet Union was still observing its peace pact with Hitler. The Venona transcripts were the result of a joint American and British project to decipher Soviet secret messages from the Second World War. Although the results started to flow in the 1950s, and were instrumental in unmasking many of the KGB’s best agents, their existence was kept secret from the general public until the 1990s. Among the decoded traffic from London to Moscow in 1940 is a series of messages from an unknown agent describing his (or her) work with André Labarthe and Marthe Lecoutre. They in turn were putting together a network of agents and among the intelligence they supplied was news of the planned Dakar raid a month before it happened; details of a conversation with Churchill’s private secretary; and figures for RAF aircraft production and losses. At one point Labarthe and Lecoutre proposed trying to steer de Gaulle into Leftists politics and were warned by their Soviet handler to leave de Gaulle alone and concentrate on keeping up the flow of intelligence.318

  The novelist Rebecca West, who worked for MI6, insisted that Moura was working for the Russians while pretending to help the British, and that H. G. Wells and his family knew it. Her opinion may not have been entirely objective, since she had been H. G.’s lover, and had a son by him, before being supplanted by Moura. Her doubts about Moura’s loyalty were not universal. When she applied in 1947 for British citizenship her proposers were Robert Bruce Lockhart and the former Labour Lord Chancellor Lord Jowitt.

  Guy Liddell, head of counter-intelligence at MI5, took a passing interest in Moura in October 1946. Over drinks at his London club, the Travellers, he took the opportunity to ask Count Constantin Benckendorff, whose father had been Russian ambassador in London before the Revolution, what he knew of Moura, ‘whose true colour has always been a matter of some speculation in this office’. Benckendorff, who had remained in Russia until 1924 before settling in Britain, does not seem to have been able to enlighten him. The real irony of this inquiry, though, is that it was prompted by Guy Burgess, who had mentioned to Liddell that he often met Constantin at Moura’s cocktail parties. Very soon the real question would become apparent – what was Burgess doing mixing in such company?

  The suspicions intensified as the Cold War gradually engendered a kind of paranoia against all Communist sympathisers and fellow travellers. It would take decades to show how much of that paranoia was justified but at the time MI5 resorted to telephone taps, bugging devices and the bonhomie of Klop the little bedbug at Moura’s soirées. They learned more than enough to cause alarm, and yet surprisingly, with hindsight, reacted not with panic but almost casual indifference.

  In August 1950, at a time when questions were being asked about Guy Burgess, he was seen by Klop at one of Moura’s parties, in company with the publisher James MacGibbon. In a report to their legal adviser Bernard Hill, MI5 referred to the frequent accusations that Moura was a Soviet agent and made the point that while they had never been proved, it was fair to say that she was ‘a dangerous woman and a born intrigante’. The report continued:

  There is no evidence that Burgess was in any way indiscreet at this party, or that he notably exceeded the standard of conviviality common at such an occasion. On the other hand I am inclined to think that Budberg is not a desirable acquaintance for someone of his character and in his position and you may therefore like to have this note for your information.319

  MacGibbon was already under investigation by MI5, who were certain he had been engaged in espionage for the Russians. He was another Communist recruited to the intelligence services during the war and both he and Burgess had been stationed in New York at a time when secret telegrams were known to have been leaked. An MI5 telephone tap on the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, Hammersmith, had revealed that MacGibbon had performed such valuable service for the Russians that they had secretly rewarded him with a high military honour. A bug planted at his home produced further evidence that he was still under pressure from his Russian handler to provide further intelligence in the post-war period and that his wife Jean was begging him to drop the contact.

  MI5 unleashed its best interrogator, Jim Skardon, on MacGibbon in 1950 but despite catching the suspect unawares, turning up at his home at 8:15 a.m. while MacGibbon was taking a bath, he could not extract a confession. He reported:

  During the interview he maintained a pose of carefree abandon, but he was in reality more than a little worried. However, he made no attempt to disguise his enthusiasm for Communism. Midway through the interview Mrs MacGibbon entered the room looking very much like my conception of Lady Macbeth, and in a very tense manner produced coffee for our refreshment.320

  After Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951, Moura told Klop that Burgess had on occasions met Soviets in company with MacGibbon. She added: ‘MacGibbon could tell you more about Burgess than almost any other person.’ MacGibbon stayed on the suspects list and was questioned at least once more but apparently maintained his innocence.321 His firm was suspected of being subsidised by the KGB and published Kim Philby’s memoirs, after he defected. It was noted that an American director of the firm had been linked to a KGB spy ring which infiltrated the US Treasury.

  Shortly after the heavily censored MI5 files on MacGibbon were released in 2004, four years after his death, his friend Magnus Linklater revealed that he had made a deathbed confession.322 It has since been claimed that among the secrets he handed over was the entire order of battle for the Normandy landings.323

  Klop’s observations also revealed Burgess’s close friendship with the Russian refugee Salomea Halpern, who was considered to have pro-Soviet sympathies. She and her husband Alexander were often among Moura’s guests. Alexander Halpern was a Russian-born lawyer who had been Alexander Kerensky’s private secretary before the revolution and served with British Security Coordination – MI6’s intelligence and propaganda arm in New York – during the war.

  At the end of August 1951, Klop questioned Moura further about her knowledge of the defection of Burgess and Maclean and reported back:

  The most startling thing Moura told me was that Anthony Blunt, to whom Guy Burgess was most devoted, is a member of the Communist Party. When I said: I only know about him that he looks after the King’s pictures; Moura retorted: Such things only happen in England.324

  An unidentified senior MI5 officer issued orders that this information was not to be added to Blunt’s file. A month earlier, a secret source had told MI5 that Blunt was even closer to Moura than Burgess. Blunt was questioned repeatedly over the ensuing twelve months but only confessed in 1964, in return for immunity from prosecution, after MI5 had already confirmed his guilt by the admission of one of his recruits, the American Michael Straight. He was only publicly unmasked by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979.

  Blunt seems to have known rather more about Klop than Klop knew about Blunt. He had reported on his wartime activities to his Soviet controllers, in particular an investigation into a Czech intelligence officer named ‘Brochbauer’. The investiga
tion was done in conjunction with another of Blunt’s contacts, Susan Maxwell, widow of the Tory MP Lt Col. Somerset Maxwell who had been killed in the fighting at El Alamein. She had obtained a job as a secretary at the Swedish embassy in London and kept Blunt informed of any pro-Nazi activity that went on there. Brochbauer appears to be a misspelling for Karl Bloch-Bauer who was the son of a wealthy Czech businessman who owned sugar refineries in Austria and had been one of the great patrons of the arts in the turn-of-the-century Vienna. Karl had been Swedish consul there until 1938 when he and many of his Jewish family were forced to flee, losing most of their possessions. He maintained his Swedish diplomatic connections during the war both in Paris and in London, where he joined the Czech resistance army. There were question marks over his attempts to rescue some of the family fortune, but the most likely reason for MI5’s suspicions was that he had fallen head-over-heels in love with the glamorous German film and cabaret star Rita Georg. According to Blunt he was being utterly indiscreet and using methods which were ‘quite impossible’. Bloch-Bauer later married Rita and they settled in Canada. In 2006 the Bloch-Bauer family finally recovered the most precious part of their fortune – five paintings by Gustav Klimt, including two portraits of Karl’s aunt Adele. The first of them later fetched a world record price for a painting of $136 million.