The Bedbug

by Peter Day

  Blunt would have certainly known of the family. He explained to his Soviet handlers that he had not seen much of Klop since the Bloch-Bauer investigation. He had already filed a full report on him and would get an opportunity to update it when Klop’s boss, Dick White, went away for a few weeks. He could, he said, always see him on personal grounds – a reference, presumably, to Klop’s interest in art dealing since Blunt went on to reveal Klop’s link to the Dutch art dealer and secret agent Daan Cevat.325

  In October 1950, under Klop’s insistent questioning, Moura had pledged ‘to report everyone moving in her sphere whom she suspects of being a traitor to this country – actual or potential’. She duly regurgitated every piece of tittle-tattle which came her way at cocktail parties. They talked about the celebrated war photographer Lee Miller, employed at Vogue by Klop’s friend Harry Yoxall, her Communist sympathies and relationship with the surrealist painter Roland Penrose, a friend and biographer of Picasso.

  At the meeting where she denounced Blunt, Moura also passed on to Klop some gossip from the historian Philip Toynbee suggesting that Burgess and Maclean were lovers, who had sneaked away on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that no Iron Curtain country was involved. A telephone tap also revealed that she was trying to contact Dick Ellis on behalf of a Russian friend, three months after Burgess disappeared. He was identified as a Russian mole within MI6 by Peter Wright when he reinvestigated the Cambridge spy ring of Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Maclean and John Cairncross twenty years later.

  Klop and Moura became a kind of cocktail-hour double act, she playing the hostess and he mixing the drinks. Moura could, by all accounts, consume prodigious quantities of gin without impairing her mental faculties. She went out of her way to invite guests she thought might be of interest to Klop and enable him to tell his superiors how helpful she had been. He maintained that it was only his gallant assurance of her integrity that saved her from a security service grilling. The defections of Burgess and Maclean did not deter her guests from attending her salon or being indiscreet. In one week in July 1951, guests included the MI5 man Kenneth Younger, whom she described as her ‘special pet’, the scientist Julian Huxley, magazine editor Kingsley Martin, film director Carol Reed, author Rose Macauley, actress Vera Poliakoff, and Sir Christopher Warner, Soviet specialist and Foreign Office under-secretary, who apparently assured Moura that Burgess and Maclean had fled to escape prison for homosexual offences and not for political reasons. As an expert in anti-Soviet propaganda he presumably relished the opportunity to spread a little personal disinformation.

  Confusingly, another of Moura’s guests was Fred Warner, also of the Foreign Office, who had worked with Burgess when they were both in the private office of junior minister Hector McNeil and with whom he had become drinking buddies. He was regarded with deep suspicion when Burgess disappeared and took years to live down the association.

  Moura was more than capable of catching Klop unawares. He attended one of her soirées in August 1951 where, apart from the usual suspects, like Communist sympathisers Alexander and Salomea Halpern, he discovered an ‘old friend’ George Simunek. He was a Czech diplomat who had been seconded to the United Nations in Geneva and had helped Klop arrange the defection of a fellow Czech to the West. He revealed enough of this story to his fellow guests to make Klop feel very uncomfortable.326

  While Klop took a benign and indulgent interest in Moura, he was far less tolerant of one of her frequent party guests, fellow Russian Vera Traill. She was the daughter of a minister in the short-lived Kerensky government of 1917 who had fled to Paris after the Revolution. She married Robert Traill, a committed British Communist who died fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Traill came from a ‘respectable’ British family who knew nothing of the marriage, or the birth of a daughter, until after his death when Vera came to claim her inheritance, a small annual income. They strongly suspected it had been a marriage of convenience, enabling Vera to claim British nationality. Vera latched on to Klop at one of Moura’s parties, explaining that her Russian first husband had worked for Sergei Diaghilev and therefore knew Alexander Benois, Nadia’s uncle. She invited herself round to drinks with Klop and Nadia. But when Klop studied a Special Branch report on Vera he found that she was associated with Roland Abbiate, a Russian secret service assassin responsible for the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss in 1937. Reiss had been one of Stalin’s best agents until he turned against the Russian dictator, denouncing his murderous purges and defecting to the West. What horrified Klop was that Vera Traill, despite this severe doubt about her character, had been assigned as interpreter to a more recent Russian defector, Victor Kravchenko, who had sought asylum in the United States in 1944. Shortly before Klop and Vera met, Kravchenko had launched a highly publicised libel action against a French Communist magazine and the Soviet government had despatched a host of party-faithful as witnesses to try to discredit him. How had Vera been put in such a position of trust, Klop wondered. Did no one fear another assassination? MI5 appears to have been dumbfounded by the question, apparently unaware of the risk that had been taken.

  Opinions about Moura’s own loyalty remained divided. Her daughter, Tania Alexander, who scarcely saw her while she was growing up in Estonia but formed a closer bond after she moved to London in her late teens, says of her:

  Those who knew Moura testify at once to her courage, her charm, and her self-confidence: even her sharpest detractors do not deny her good humour, her warmth and her affection. And yet at the same time they also acknowledge the lack of scruple, the disregard for truth, the insatiable need for admiration and attention.327

  She defended her mother against allegations that she betrayed Gorky to the secret police or that she had made some of kind of deal with the Cheka to act as their informant in return for Lockhart’s freedom. Tania had visited Gorky’s family shortly after he died in 1936 and met Genrick Yagoda, who was by then head of Stalin’s secret police and responsible for engineering the show trials and executions that purged the Russian hierarchy of Stalin’s perceived enemies.

  But it was only in 2010 that Moura’s great-great-nephew, Dimitri Collingridge, discovered that the suspicions had been well-founded. With the help of Colonel Igor Prelin, a former member of the KGB, he got access to secret police files from the 1930s which showed that Moura had been Yagoda’s informant. Prelin told Collingridge:

  As a former KGB operative I know how these things work. Of course Moura was asked to do certain things – to report about what was happening in Gorky’s circle, to exert some influence over Gorky at the request of the Soviet authorities. Naturally she couldn’t say no. She was compromised in connection with the Lockhart plot and could be arrested at any time. If Moura had refused she would have been denied permission to come to the USSR or she may have been prevented from leaving it and she was intent on seeing Gorky … She was an informant for the secret service.328

  Moura and Nadia Benois remained friends right up to Moura’s death in 1974. They had already known each other for many years when Nadia asked her, in 1939, to help her translate a play by Alexander Blok from Russian into English. It helped to launch Peter Ustinov in his career as a theatre director.329 He later gave her a walk-on part as Kiva the cook in the film version of his play Romanoff and Juliet.

  Although Moura worked as a translator she was not hugely successful and often needed the help of friends to tidy up her work. So it was something of a coup in the 1950s when Nadia again turned to her for help and asked her to translate Alexandre Benois’s autobiography. Moura’s daughter regarded it as the most interesting and successful of the some twenty titles her mother worked on.330

  Peter Ustinov remembered the indomitable Moura with special affection. She was, he said a great intangible influence and when he was with her he felt ‘deeply and serenely Russian.’331

  Klop, having devoted the latter stages of his life to becoming most decidedly English, and trying to coax Moura along with him, might have fou
nd his son’s spiritual association unsettling.

  CHAPTER 16: DEFECTORS

  One of Klop’s post-war tasks was to keep an eye on Czechs in London. There had been a close relationship between British and Czech intelligence during the war and some of Klop’s best contacts, including Josef Bartik and Vaclav Slama, chose to return home in 1945-46 to the support the government of Edvard Beneš.

  Beneš, who had led the Czech government in exile in London, returned as President in 1945, a position he held until 1948. He awarded Klop the Czechoslovak medal of merit, first class, and also gave a plethora of other awards, including the Order of the White Lion for Dick White, Guy Liddell and the directors of MI5 and MI6, Sir David Petrie and Sir Stewart Menzies.332

  From 1947 Klop made a habit of spending Saturday afternoons with his old friends at the Czech Deuxieme Bureau office at 42 Wilton Crescent, Belgravia picking up the gossip on the exiles in Britain and the progress of the regime in Prague.

  Czech refugees from the Nazi invasion had begun to arrive in Britain en masse in 1938-9 and been catered for by the Czech Refugee Trust, set up by Sir Walter Layton, chairman of the Liberal-leaning News Chronicle. It quickly became a matter of concern to MI5 that this organisation was being controlled from within by Communists, both British and exiles. They struggled to convince Sir Henry Bunbury, the retired civil servant responsible for administering the Trust, that Communists were taking on positions of responsibility within the organisation with the intention of controlling it. Klop was drawn into this controversy and began working closely with Vaclav Slama who warned that nearly 90 per cent of the refugees taken in by the Trust were socialists and Communists of German ethnic origin and therefore potential spies and infiltrators. He offered to draw up a list of the chief suspects. The director general of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, warned the Home Office of this on at least two occasions and Klop’s boss Dick White lamented:

  We estimate that we have here at least 100 Communists with long records of political activity in Central Europe in fully organised groups and still under the direct instructions of Moscow.333

  One known Communist whose name cropped up in this connection was an American architect, Hermann Field, who married an English Communist supporter, Kate Thorneycroft. MI5 noted that he had been in Poland in 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union both invaded under the aegis of their joint non-aggression treaty. Field had shown outstanding qualities of leadership and personal courage in bringing hundreds of refugees to the West. But he was known to have spent part of the 1930s on a collective farm in Russia and was believed to have trained as a Comintern agent for the purpose of infiltrating Western society and promulgating the Soviet creed. He was a known associate of William Koenen, the German Communist responsible for the London branch of the Comintern. His brother Noel, who shared his political convictions, worked during the war for the League of Nations in Geneva. These two brothers, and the Czech Refugee Trust, would now feature prominently in Stalin’s Cold War purges of Eastern Europe.

  As Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania fell increasingly under Soviet domination in the immediate post-war period, Czechoslovakia held out a glimmer of hope that an independent, reforming government, under President Beneš, might survive by negotiating a careful path between the might of the dominant power in Eastern Europe and the desire to benefit from the modernising influence of the Western Allies. Britain was anxious to see it succeed, feeling under some obligation for its abandonment of Czech interests at Munich in 1938 and the subsequent contribution that the government in exile in London and its armed forces had made to defeating Hitler. It was not to be. After elections in 1948, Communists increasingly controlled the main offices of state. Their influence, dictated by Stalin, led the country to reject American aid under the Marshall Plan. The Americans blamed the snub on the failure of President Beneš and his Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk to be sufficiently robust in their resistance to Stalin. Within weeks Masaryk died in a fall from a Foreign Ministry window; whether he committed suicide, fell accidentally, or was pushed, has never been finally established. But it marked the end of any pretence that Czechoslovakia was anything other than a Soviet satellite.334

  Into this new regime in October 1948 stepped Noel Field, aged forty-four, British-born of an English mother and an American father. He was a committed Communist who had taken it into his head that his future lay in a career as a university lecturer in Prague. In his pursuit of this objective he would plunge his family into the nightmare world of secret police, incarceration without charge and treason trials where the verdict was inevitable and the death sentence a probability. The British-based Czech Refugee Trust would feature in the evidence as an alleged MI6 front operation.

  Noel Field had worked as a senior economic adviser for the US State Department before taking a job in 1936 with the League of Nations in Geneva. When the Second World War broke out he stayed on in Switzerland as a member of the Unitarian Service Committee formed to offer relief to refugees from Nazi persecution. It was particularly active in Czechoslovakia where the Unitarian Church had many adherents. Noel Field was introduced to Allan Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Studies in Berne, who realised that Field’s refugee contacts were potential sources for US intelligence. As the war progressed, Field was also able to supply Dulles with contacts, many of them Communist sympathisers, in occupied Germany. It was never entirely clear in whose interests Field was working, Moscow’s or Washington’s, and in post-war years Dulles came to believe he had been duped. Equally, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe regarded the Unitarians as a CIA front.

  When the new Communist government in Prague came to carry out security checks in connection with Noel Field’s application for a position at the Charles University, what they found was a man with many contacts, not only in Czechoslovakia but among members of the politburo throughout the Eastern Bloc; plus a highly suspicious association with Allan Dulles. As inquiries broadened, it became apparent that his younger brother Hermann had equally extensive contacts in Poland – pre-war he had been based in Katowice near the Czech border working for the Czech Refugee Trust.

  In May 1949 Noel Field returned to Prague believing he was on the verge of getting his coveted university appointment. Instead, he simply disappeared. His German wife Herta, living in Geneva, chose not to mention this to the American authorities. In August she and Hermann went to Prague to look for him. They drew a blank and Hermann flew on to Warsaw … and vanished. Herta decided it was time to visit the US authorities in Prague. Twenty-four hours later she too had gone missing. The following year Erica Glaser Wallach, whom Noel and Herta Field treated as their daughter, also travelled behind the Iron Curtain in the hope of picking up the trail. She was neither seen nor heard of for many years.

  Then the purges and the trials began. Klop’s wartime contact in London, Josef Bartik, who had been promoted to the rank of general and head of Czech military intelligence in 1945, had already lost his job on the strength of forged documents.

  Noel Field had been handed over by Czech security to their Hungarian counterparts. In September 1949 the trial began in Budapest of the former Foreign Minister László Rajk and accomplices. They pleaded guilty to belonging to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the state. They had been recruited, it was alleged, by Allan Dulles, Noel Field and British intelligence agents in Switzerland. This was the first acknowledgement that Field was in Hungarian custody. Similar trials followed in Czechoslovakia and Poland. These Communist enemies within the state were often accused of being Titoists, supporters of the Yugoslav Communist leader who had broken away from Soviet constriction. Stalin was purging potential dissenters.

  MI6 did not officially exist in those days and since none of the missing individuals was British it was not too difficult for the Foreign Office to adopt the policy that serves them well so often: they sat back and awaited developments. The Americans made the obligatory inquiries about their absent citizens but did not quite raise the hullabaloo that might hav
e been expected.

  After Stalin died, on 5 March 1953, the gulags slowly began to give up their secrets. The following December, Lt Col. Józef Światło, deputy head of internal security in Poland, defected and began to reveal how the terror trials had taken place and how the Fields, and their East European friends, had been set up by the security police, including Światło himself, to satiate Stalin’s lust for power and paranoia that he was being betrayed. He divulged some of the details on Radio Free Europe, the US-sponsored propaganda station whose broadcasts reached behind the Iron Curtain.

  Extraordinarily, in October 1954 Hermann Field was freed from his Polish jail, given $40,000 compensation, and allowed to return to the US and his architects’ practice, taking his English wife with him. While Hermann was en route, Noel and Herta Field quietly emerged from their separate prisons, were reunited and astonished everyone by accepting the Hungarian authorities’ apologetic offer of a villa on the outskirts of Budapest where they could live out their lives in a Communist sanctuary of which they apparently approved. It took another twelve months for Erica Glaser Wallach to find her way out of a Russian labour camp but she too returned to the West. Between them they offered little by way of explanation but the impression lingered that they had been part of a CIA mission which had been exposed and for which retribution had been taken. Britain was in no position to criticise: this was the era of Philby, Burgess and Maclean when any number of agents behind the Iron Curtain had been betrayed.

  Klop, with his keen interest in Czech intelligence matters, must have followed it with interest. He may even have been involved but there is very little information in the public domain to address that point. It was not until twelve years after his death that a different interpretation began to be put on these events. It was argued that the whole thing had been an elaborate CIA charade, implemented by Jozef Światło himself, on the instructions of Allan Dulles, who was by that time head of the CIA. Światło had been a double agent since 1948 when he had been recruited by MI6 and handed over to an American controller. The operation was codenamed Splinter Factor and its purpose was to win the Cold War by provoking antagonism between the nationalist sympathisers of the individual east European and the unflinching Soviet idealogues in their midst, laying the blame firmly at Stalin’s door. Dulles, it was said, set out to alienate every East European country from the Soviet dictator and bring about the collapse of the Soviet bloc from within.335