Category Archives: Economics/Business

2021 Year-end Roundup

Joyous New Year Wishes to all coldspur readers from the entire Editorial Team!

Contents:

1. The Future of coldspur

2. On the Archives

3. The Biography of Ter Braak

4. George Graham & “The Spies’ Spy”

5. Paperback Editions

6. The Non-Communicants

7. Guy Liddell’s Diaries: TWIST and Scout

8. In Memoriam: Geoffrey Elliott (1939-2021)

9. Philbymania

10. Letters to the Editor

1. The Future of coldspur

In headlining this section, I am not raising questions about the future of coldspur the blogger, but coldspur the website. Having just achieved my seventy-fifth birthday, I believe that I shall remain in control of my faculties for a few more years before I prepare to join the ranks of the great conspiracy theorists in the sky. Moreover, I have plenty of material to keep me occupied at least through 2022, and am looking forward to several more years of doughty research and spirited writing. And the publishing model will not change. Readers will not be asked for donations; coldspur will not carry advertisements; I shall not be moving coldspur to Substack. This is my hobby, and I shall carry on my practice of publishing monthly bulletins on intelligence matters, with the occasional self-indulgent foray into personal memoir, without worrying about revenues, popularity ratings, or commentary in the Twittersphere.

Yet what will happen to www.coldspur.com? I know that there are mechanisms on the Internet that store all content in some dark place, but I should like the coldspur archive to be available for future researchers even if I am not around to husband it. As new files are released to Kew, and younger students assume a role in reconsidering MI5’s history, I should like them to be able to tap in to my hypotheses and conclusions, which will presumably not be published anywhere else. To begin with, it presumably means that the domain name has to be maintained, through annual payments to GoDaddy. For the url to be active, it has to have a paid-up agreement with a hosting site, as I have arranged with a company down the road in Ocean Isle. That sounds minimally satisfactory, even if I make testatory arrangements for payments to continue for a number of years. I would much prefer some respectable institution to take coldspur under its wing, and make it available via its native directories, such as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, or the Bodleian, or Churchill College, Cambridge. Does any reader have experience with any such arrangements, and would he or she be able to advise me?

And then there all my personal files – and my library. I am no longer confident that the Ethel Hays Memorial Library at the University of Eastern Montana in Billings (see https://coldspur.com/homo-sovieticus ) will be a suitable repository for my collection, and it would probably be too far off the beaten track for all but the most intrepid researchers. I have files of electronic correspondence, notes taken from hundreds of books, chronologies, etc. etc. which I am not keen to share without constraints while I am still active but should, I believe, be most useful to posterity. Added to that are numerous articles and clippings that I have collected, in paper format, as well as a library of about 7,500 books, primarily on intelligence matters, general history, and biography, but also comprising a rich set of rare titles in poetry, literature, humour, language and reference. I would guess that the section on intelligence matters is unmatched in any private – or even institutional – collection. I should hate to see it split up and dispersed. My obvious choice would be to donate it to the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, NC (about thirty-five miles away), since that institution has connections with the CIA, and I have used its facilities over the past twenty years. I understand that I would have to set up an endowment to house and maintain the library. I started to approach the University on this topic a few years ago, but my contact moved on. I shall retry in 2022, conscious of the following: “  . . . no one cares about a library collection as much as the person who has assembled it  . . . one man’s passion project would be nothing but a burden to whom the responsibility of curation was passed on.” (Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, in The Library)

Meanwhile, I am considering a number of projects for 2022. I have several more episodes in the Déricourt saga to unroll. I need to report on my discoveries concerning the life and career of the SOE officer George Graham, aka Serge Leontiev. I hear the call to follow-up on my investigations into ELLI, and explore the indications of treachery in MI5 that so excited Peter Wright and Chapman Pincher, and later Nigel West. I still have to study the records concerning the post-war activities of Roger Hollis, how close he was to the functions of counter-intelligence against the Soviets, and how MI5 evolved its organization during those years. I want to return to Alexander Foote, the peculiar interest he showed in the Gouzenko trial, and the links between Canada and Switzerland in passing money to the Rote Drei. There is further research to be performed on Claude Dansey and his attempt to make contact with anti-Hitler factions in the Wehrmacht and the Sicherheitsdienst. I recall numerous loose ends such as my investigation into Donald Maclean and his photographer, and the matter of Peter Wright and HASP (and my communications with the Swedish Professor Agrell). I have to study the Petrov files in depth. There remains more to be told about the struggles of RSS during and after the war, and its role in tracking illicit wireless usage. I am interested in studying in detail the records concerning the evolution of SOE in France, and how the authorities succeeded in stifling accurate analysis for decades. I want to investigate more deeply the phenomenon of disinformation through controlled (or ‘probably controlled’) agents, and what the legacy of the Double-Cross System was. Lastly, in collaboration with another remote coldspur contact, I am engaged in a highly secret project involving the RAF, SOE and the NKVD in World War II.

So what is my objective in all this? I am not seeking any fame or awards – or even an invitation to tea by Christopher Andrew. I should indeed like greater recognition of my efforts, but I am not sure where such a statement would derive, and the overall unimaginative (as I see it) state of intelligence scholarship in the UK is reinforced by a mutual admiration society of persons not willing to take risks and challenge the establishment. What continues to drive me is frustration over the secretive policies of government institutions, not willing to release archival material that has long passed its expiry date under the guise of a probably imaginary security exposure, and despair over the arrogant attitudes of bureaucrats who believe that the public should not be trusted with information that may show less than perfect credit on the way the intelligence services executed their mission. I am also in a perpetual philosophical tussle with the ‘authorized’ historians, and those who seem to accept that, since an official historian has covered a topic or department, there cannot be anything else to be said about the topic. And I get very irritated by the appearance of lazy or deceptive books on intelligence matters that get absurdly hyped in the media by critics who should know better.

(Given my recent diatribes over the shenanigans of the authorised historians and Foreign Office advisers concerning SOE, I was amused – and saddened – to read the following item from Guy Liddell’s Diaries, entered after a Joint Intelligence Committee meeting on January 2, 1946: “We also took the paper about the publication of information relating to SOE. The Deputy Chiefs of Staff had reversed the decision of the JIC and had ordered that a revised version of the SOE memo should be given to the press. They thought that if some official publication went out it would damp down some unauthorised publications. I confined myself to saying that it would be almost impossible to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act if an official release was made, and I suggested that when making the handout something might perhaps be said to the press to the effect that the Official release did not authorise them to publish all sorts of stories that they might have already got written up in their lockers.”

I was also dismayed to learn, from a letter published in History Today of November 2021, that the historian E. P. Thompson had been cruelly frustrated in his attempts to discover more about the SOE mission of his brother Frank, who had been executed for working with Bulgarian partisans in 1944. Thompson went to consult the records in 1974, believing that they would be declassified under the thirty-year rule, but was peremptorily advised that the records had been reclassified for fifty years. He died in 1993, just before his planned return to the archives. I note that the file, HS 9/1463, was made available on February 18, 2003.)

I should like to recognize here all readers of coldspur who have got in touch with me – a group that I shall resolutely refuse to call ‘the coldspur community’. I have no idea how many regular readers of coldspur there are, but each year there are dozens of persons with whom I communicate solely because of something they have read on the site, none of whom I have ever met. (I have spoken to a few on the telephone, and some have warned me that I should be using something called ‘WhatsApp’ or ‘Skype’, but I have resisted, as no one really needs to see my face, and I am comfortable working my PC while the speakerphone is on.) I thank you all for your interest, hints, and advice, and earnestly encourage anyone to email me, or post a comment on the website, if he or she has a comment or question. I respond to every message, as promptly as I can, and, while I know I have not followed up religiously on all tips and leads, I hope that I have tidied up each thread of correspondence politely and adequately. (I admit that I occasionally overlook aspects of an earlier exchange with a correspondent.) Thank goodness for the software on WordPress that traps nearly all junk posts: at the last count I had a total of 6,437,245 messages rejected, which means that I don’t have to go and inspect and delete more than a handful each day (which task I did have to perform in the early days before the special software was introduced). If you have tried to post a comment, and have been ignored, please use my personal email address instead. And do stay in touch.

2. On the Archives

For the past three or four years, I have performed my research exclusively from my home in the North Carolina boondocks, supplied constantly by the invaluable services of abebooks, and my chief photographer in London, Dr Kevin Jones. Yet I have missed visiting the archives, and the excitement of leafing through original documents, and encountering unexpected clues. Most of my time amongst the repositories has been spent at Kew, but I have also visited The Bodleian Library, and Balliol College Library, in Oxford, as well as the excellent resource at Churchill College in Cambridge. Many years ago I visited the Stanford University Library in Palo Alto, but that was when I was researching the life of Gordon Kaufmann, architect, for my ODNB entry, and I have not visited any other home of archives in the United States. The University of North Carolina in nearby Wilmington does not even carry a useful subscription to JSTOR material. Since I am not a faculty member, I cannot, moreover, access any material (such as the ODNB) on-line from home.

I have, however, occasionally requested digital information from such institutions. Many years ago I acquired photocopies of some of David Dallin’s papers on Alexander Foote from the New York Public Library – and wish now that I had ordered far more than I did. I did commission some marginally useful photographs of the E. H. Cookridge files on Guy Liddell from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Earlier this year I requested information on Stephen Alley’s biography from Glasgow University, but Covid had prevented any action, and I shall try again in the New Year. I never heard back from St. Edmund Hall in Oxford about information on the mysterious Mr. Snelling who featured in the Portland Spy case (see ‘Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away’ at https://coldspur.com/year-end-wrap-up-2020 ). Dr. Chris Smith (see below) introduced me to some material from the John Cairncross archive at the Special Collections Department of Cambridge University Library.

Hoover Institution Library & Archive

A visit to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California would be very rewarding, what with the archives of such as George Hill, Kenneth de Courcy, Robert Conquest, and many more available for inspection. The Library is located just down the road from where our son and his family live, in Los Altos, and in theory should be the most convenient facility to visit when next we voyage out west. Yet, after two years of separation, I can hardly see myself happily absenting myself from son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughters for days at a time, however fruitful such a visit might be. I would prefer to have a round of golf with Sylvia, James and Ashley (now 10, and very keen on the game) instead. There will not be many more such opportunities.

Yet I did recently bring part of a fascinating archive to my home. This summer I acquired, via an on-line auction, a portion of the papers of Donald McCormick, aka Richard Deacon, who wrote several books on intelligence (such as the notorious British Connection). It comprises a mixed set of letters to McCormick (but none written by him) from such luminaries in the intelligence world as Natalie Wraga, Arden Winch, Isaiah Berlin, Nigel West, and Steven Dedijer, as well as a copy of Lord Inverchapel’s last Will and Testament, and a typed statement by Alexander Foote, complaining about the quality of his interrogation by MI5 officers. Perhaps the most unusual of the items is a long handwritten letter, in German, by Karl Friedman to his sister Lizzy (Kim Philby’s first wife), written to her from the Afikim kibbutz in December 1967. It is accompanied by a few photographs, including one of Lizzy herself (below). I have no idea how these pieces arrived in McCormick’s hands, but the whole package cries out for comprehensive analysis and reproduction at some time.

Lizzy, Karl, Rina, Denny (Rifikim, 1967)

3. The Biography of Ter Braak

I wrote about my communications with Jan-Willem van den Braak in February 2019, when I indicated that his biography of the Abwehr spy, Willem Ter Braak, whose real name was Engelbertus Fukken, was going to be translated from the Dutch, and published soon thereafter in English. Well, that did not happen, but I believe a much better outcome has now been arranged. Mr. van den Braak and I had several fruitful discussions, and he embarked upon a project of deeper research that resulted in considerable changes and extensions to the original text.

I became very excited about Mr van den Braak’s discoveries, and the outcome was that I very happily agreed to part-underwrite the translation exercise. Jan-Willem worked very diligently on delving further into the sources of Ter Braak’s life, and the events leading up to his being parachuted into the English countryside in October 1940. Consequently, the new edition of his book will be available in the spring of 1922, published by Pen and Sword.  I believe that he has performed some brilliant research, and done an outstanding job in explaining the complex environment in which the spy was brought up, and how he was eventually recruited by the Abwehr. What is more, the author invited me to contribute an Afterword to his book: in it I express my great enthusiasm about his account while reserving the admission that he and I may draw slightly different conclusions from the circumstances of Ter Braak’s apparent suicide. Moreover, I was also able to review the translation, and offer my own idiosyncratic comments on the text. The translator selected, while showing great skill with the English language, was not a native English speaker, and I thought that showed on occasions. I was happy to apply my own standards of English style, grammar and composition (hidebound and antiquated as they may be) in order to prepare a story that, in my opinion anyway, would provide a more fluid narrative.

The Dutch book, which appeared in 2017, was titled Spion tegen Churchill (‘Spy against Churchill’), and I pointed out to Jan-Willem that I did not think it was a very accurate, or even compelling, choice. After all, every Abwehr spy sent to the United Kingdom clearly had a mission of undermining Churchill’s campaign, and the case that Ter Braak might have been sent on a mission to assassinate the Prime Minister was tenuous at best. Spies did not normally engage in such violent acts, which might have had unexpected consequences. About a year ago, we agreed that The Spy Who Died Out in the Cold (which Jan-Willem had selected from a newspaper headline) was a more accurate and engaging title, and would provide a scenario that succinctly described Ter Braak’s unique fate – dying alone on a cold winter night in an air-raid shelter in Cambridge.

‘Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill’

Yet the publisher unfortunately has decided otherwise – as the picture shows. She overruled our submission, based on some ‘market research’, that Pen and Sword had undertaken, where the word ‘Churchill’ is believed to be a big draw in attracting prospective buyers to a book. What it means is that the cover of the book is in my opinion a little cluttered, as the preferred title has been included as a nominal subtitle. The density of information is increased by the fact that Jan-Willem generously requested that ‘with an afterword by Antony Percy’ appear on the cover as well. That slogan does not have the appeal of a ‘Nigel West’ endorsement, but I am happy to receive a little publicity. On the other hand, the style editor at Pen and Sword was mercifully quite impressed with the fluency and drive of the text, which means that, apart from such whims that may arise from the application of the corporate ‘house style’, we should not expect too many unpleasant surprises when the book is eventually released. (It seems nearly ready to go, but I have not found an announcement on the company’s website, even though over 250 books ‘coming soon’ are listed for publication up to August 2023. We received the proofs from the publisher as I was putting this month’s coldspur to bed, with my editorial team generously giving up some of their holidays to accomplish the task.) I shall post further news of the book’s availability as soon as I receive it. It has been a great pleasure working with Mr van den Braak, who has made a major contribution to the history of espionage.

4. George Graham & “The Spies’ Spy”

I recently wrote about the strange case of George Graham, the SOE officer deputed to accompany George Hill as his cipher-clerk when Hill was sent out to Moscow in November 1941 to set up the SOE mission. The diaries of Guy Liddell had revealed that Archie Boyle, the SOE Security Officer, had informed the head of MI5’s B Division, during the investigation into the Gouzenko disclosures in October 1945, and the quest for ‘ELLI’, that Graham’s real name was Serge Leontiev. That news had in turn provoked Liddell to carry out a thorough investigation into the man’s background, and to determine what security exposures might have been raised.

I expressed my amazement that any intelligence officer worth his salt would have recommended the son of a White Russian officer for such a sensitive post in the nest of the NKVD. The Soviet intelligence service would surely have wanted to find out the man’s background and credentials, and whether he had any relatives living in the Soviet Union, and, even if they had not closely tracked the Leontiev family, would have been prompted by the man’s native speaking of Russian to take a very close interest. And, in my initial investigation into Graham’s immigration, naturalisation and matrimonial records, I discovered some rather challenging anomalies.

Since then, I have engaged a couple of London-based researchers to perform a much deeper inspection of Graham’s life and career, one from a general genealogical and biographical perspective, the other approaching the topic from more of an intelligence and military angle. That exercise is now almost concluded, and I am ready to present a startling account of Leontiev’s rise and fall in the United Kingdom, which starts with a connection to Sir Paul Dukes, and ends with a stumbling post-war role with BBC Foreign Broadcasts. I also succeeded in making contact with the family of George Graham’s uncle, Alexander Briger, whose grandson of the same name is an illustrious Australian conductor, and they have shared some remarkable reminiscences about George. I shall dedicate my January 2022 coldspur bulletin to his story.

At the same time that I wrote about Graham, I mentioned the fact that Stephen Alley (an officer in MI5, and a possible candidate for ‘ELLI’) had made a claim that he was fired from MI6 because he refused to assassinate Joseph Stalin, an assertion that appears in Michael Smith’s Six. The source of this statement lay in his archive deposited at Glasgow University, but, because of Covid, the librarians there had not been able to access the records for me. I was just considering inquiring again when I received my package from the McCormick archive, and I was bowled over to find a confirmation of the story within.

It appeared in a letter written by Arden Winch, dated June 7, 1979. Now Arden Winch (1928-1991) was not a name I knew, but I have discovered that he was a prominent writer and director of crime and intelligence TV series, such as ‘Cold Warrior’, in the 1970s and 1980s. Having just read McCormick’s (Deacon’s) history of the British Secret Service, Winch wrote to offer a couple of anecdotes. He had been performing research for a film on Sidney Reilly, which project never came to fruition, and after mentioning George Hill and Robin Bruce Lockhart, he came to Stephen Alley. The next paragraph runs as follows:

Anyway, I eventually met Stephen Alley, then retired to Bray. All the previous agents I had met had been in awe of Alley obviously the spies’ spy. I don’t know if you knew him. He was, in appearance, the classic retired gentleman. He treated his wife with splendid old-world courtesy, which, in a way is a pity in that he carefully avoided telling her much about his work, partly because it would be dangerous for her, partly because he believed that you didn’t involve the Fair Sex in these sordid matters. He remarked that he had never risen far in the Service as he should have done. I happened to know his position, and there wasn’t much further he could have gone, and asked, why. I didn’t always obey orders, he explained. What sort of orders? He glanced, to make sure his wife couldn’t overhear, then said, “Well, it’s a little confidential. But like the time I was ordered to murder Stalin. Never liked the chap much, but he regarded me as a friend, and the idea of walking into his office and killing him no, I said, I wouldn’t do it.” Then he lowered his voice still further. “Anyway, I wasn’t at all satisfied with the arrangements for getting out afterwards.”

Stephen Alley

The lessons from this anecdote must be 1) that spies indeed are not reliable assassins, and 2) that, if you want a long and successful marriage, you should never tell your spouse that you were once ordered to kill a foreign despot. (Although she might, of course, rebuke you for not sacrificing yourself for the greater good of humanity, and then remind you to take out the garbage.) But I liked that bit about the Exit Strategy. And, even if an admission of ‘not liking much’ someone who was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens is a troubling example of British litotes (and, after all, Churchill did go on about how much he liked Stalin), it all throws some revealing light on the Mystery that Stephen Alley became. You will not read about that in Jeffery.

5. Paperback Editions

An exercise that always intrigues me is checking what changes have been made in the paperback (or any second) edition of any book on intelligence. As I have documented before, it is well-nigh impossible to release a book on this subject that contains no errors, but the implications of fixing them are highly problematic. Of course, if egregious mistakes are discovered when it is too late to change the galley-proofs, errata slips can be inserted, but that can be very messy, and just draw attention to the oversights and misrepresentations. I made a few stupid errors in compiling Misdefending the Realm, but, in my own defence, I was editor, fact-checker and proof-reader, and one can read one’s own outpourings for only so long before succumbing to ennui and somnolence. And it is unlikely that a second edition will come out, although, for a few months a couple of years ago, an editor at the company that took over the University of Buckingham Press did express to me interest in bringing out a new edition. Nothing came of it, however.

One of the challenges is that any dramatic change to the text – apart from the correction of minor facts – will probably require changes to the Index, and that is not a task to be assumed lightly. I notice that the 1968 version of M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France managed to maintain the same Index from the 1966 first edition verbatim. The changes demanded by the threat of lawsuits were able to be accommodated by replacing paragraphs with new text of the same length. When Patrick Marnham informed me of the upcoming paperback version of War in the Shadows, I became temporarily excited at the prospect of a radically new account of Henri Déricourt’s recruitment, based on my discussions with him. Yet, while Marnham was able to provide a fascinating new Afterword (which did not affect the Index), the text appears to be completely unchanged from that of the original hardback version.

I understand that substantial changes to a text conventionally require a new edition to be identified, and a new ISBN to be allocated. In 1968, there were no ISBNs, and SOE in France was presented as a ‘second impression with amendments’, while the reader had to work out him- or her-self exactly what had changed. By virtue of allowing more text on each page of his Preface, Foot was able to add commentary that summarized his changes, including the need to ‘modify a number of passages which gave some quite unintended personal offense’, and to respond to reviewers’ critiques. In 2002, with a wholesale re-drafting, Foot was able to supplement his 1968 Preface with a couple more pages of explanation for changes made to what the Publishers vaguely identify as ‘this edition’. It does have an ISBN now, of course, but, again, exactly what textual amendments have been made can only be determined by painstaking analysis that I have not yet undertaken. Moreover, it is astounding, to me, that, after all that passage of time, Foot did not make wholesale changes to his narrative. Yet there were surely political reasons for that.

Patrick Marnham’s paperback edition of War in the Shadows is described purely as that – ‘the paperback edition’ of the 2020 hardback version, with no obvious indication that the Postscript is new. I am grateful for it, since it refers to coldspur, and my joint research with Professor Glees, but the Postscript is undated. Nevertheless, a new ISBN has been granted: 978-0-86154-058-7, as opposed to 978-1-78607-809-4, which strikes me as an odd system, with a completely fresh set of numbers, while the ebook ISBN (978-1-78607-810-0) remains unchanged. What does that mean? That the Postscript does not appear in the current e-book version? I have no idea. What is going on here? Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

And then there is Andrew Lownie’s Stalin’s Englishman. Again, perceptive and dedicated readers will recall that, a few years ago, I had to rebuke Mr. Lownie strongly in person when, after I had supplied corrections to his first edition of the book, he incorporated the changes without giving me any credit at all. The publication of these two editions presents further paradoxes. (Both were British versions: the republication of such works in the USA, often with different titles and Americanization of spelling, is a topic that I shall not venture to explore here.) The original (2015) edition came in three formats: the hardback (ISBN 978 1 473 62736 9); the Trade paperback (978 1 473 62737 6); and ebook (978 1 473 62739 0). The 2016 paperback edition is described blandly as ‘first published in paperback in 2016’, and is given an ISBN of 978 1 473 62738 3, with the fact that a ‘trade paperback’ has already been issued apparently irrelevant. The wording does not indicate that any textual amendments have taken place. Lownie, however, made some substantive additions to his text, starting in Chapter 29, which means that the ensuing chapters start on higher page numbers, and the Index has had to be re-drafted. Some very subtle adjustments to the very lengthy Acknowledgements have been made, but without including my name (which was what really galled me!). Apart from the reproduction of extracts from some very flattering reviews, inserted as a Frontispiece, Lownie gives no indication, however, that his text has changed. That strikes me as irresponsible. It is all very strange.

Dr. Chris Smith, on the other hand, behaved impeccably. In 2019 he published The Last Cambridge Spy, a biography of John Cairncross. I tactfully pointed out to him a few chronological and logical errors concerning Arthur Martin’s visit to the USA, and Cairncross’s ‘confession’ there. Smith was very professional and thorough in his replies: we both understand the challenges of working through what can be very deceptive memoirs or archives, and he thought my published criticisms were fair. He committed to incorporating some changes for the paperback edition, but, when we were last in contact in May of this year, Dr. Smith expressed uncertainty as to whether the publisher was going ahead with the paperback edition.

This all leads up to Trevor Barnes and Helen Fry. I purchased Helen Fry’s Spymaster: The Secret Life of Kendrick, her biography of Thomas Kendrick, in 2014, the year in which Marranos Press published it. Its ISBN-13 is given as 978-1500418830. I recall it as an amateurish production, strewn with errors, and delivering little new of any substance. When the book was re-issued this summer, as Spymaster: The Man Who Saved MI6, I expressed mild interest, with no real desire to re-inspect it, but was persuaded by one or two correspondents to acquire it, as it reportedly has a brand new chapter on Kim Philby (see below). Thus I now possess a volume with a totally new identifier: ISBN 978-0-300-25595-9. Yet neither the frontispiece nor the author gives any indication that this is a new edition of a previously published book, or what changes have been incorporated. It is not clear whether the blurbs refer to this new edition, or the original. It is all highly irregular and deceptive, in my opinion. Andrew Lownie is Fry’s agent, and presumably managed the whole affair.

Helen Fry’s ‘Spymaster’

As for Trevor Barnes’s Dead Doubles, I own it in the First U.S. Edition (978–0-06-285699-9). I had submitted a number of comments (and corrections) to the author after reading the book a couple of years ago (see https://coldspur.com/five-books-on-espionage-intelligence ). I enjoyed, for a while, a productive exchange with Barnes, from which I gathered that he was overall in sympathy with my observations. And then he suddenly closed up, perhaps after I publicized on coldspur revelations that tended to overshadow his rather coy attempt to keep an identity a secret. Ever since then, I have been waiting for the new paperback edition to come out, in order to discover whether he incorporated any of my recommendations – and gave me credit! Well I read recently that it has been published, but I really do not want to have to purchase it just to verify those facts. Does anyone out there in coldspur-land have a copy, and have you managed to notice what changes and acknowledgments have been made? Please let me know if you have. (But I suspect most readers are not very concerned about these details. . . . )

6. The Non-Communicants

I do not intend to discuss here those persons who have declined to participate in the rites of the Church, but instead to indulge in some curmudgeonly and unseasonal complaints about those members of academia and journalism who maintain a stand-offish stance when approached on matters of intelligence. I have enjoyed mixed success in trying to engage prominent ‘experts’ in the field – some very fruitful, not the least of which must be the warm and detailed response from Professor Glees when I wrote to him about Isaiah Berlin and Jenifer Hart many years ago, an exchange that brought me down this long path of research. Yet I have experienced several blank responses, of which the behaviours of Christopher Murphy and Dónal O’Sullivan were the most egregious in 2021.

Earlier this year, I underwent an extraordinary series of experiences with The Journal of Intelligence and National Security. After my review of Agent Sonya was published (incidentally nominated as ‘Book Review of the Year’ by Lady Gaga), I thought that I would not offer my services again. It is a rewarding exercise if one needs the publicity, or feels a charitable need to enlighten the world, but it is very time-consuming. The Journal does not pay reviewers, it works very slowly, and makes strenuous demands on the identification of sources (a practice I heartily endorse). Thus, if I have something to say, I can more speedily distribute any commentary or critique on coldspur. Moreover, it is not as if the Journal enjoys broad readership: the institution resolutely shows that it targets it product at universities, and it is supremely expensive for an independent or retired researcher to acquire individual reports that it publishes.  Its owner Taylor & Francis also publishes enhanced extracts from intelligence files at the National Archives (see http://www.secretintelligencefiles.com/unauthenticated). Professor Glees himself promotes the collection by writing here that “Few resources can be of greater use to the student of 20th century history than easy access to the original documentary evidence of how Britain’s foreign policy was shaped by secret intelligence”. But it is hardly ‘easy’ if a student is not a member of a subscribing library.

Earlier this year, however, the Journal (through the University of Aberystwyth) approached me to inquire whether I might want to review David Burke’s Family Betrayal: Agent Sonya, MI5 and the Kuczynski Network? If there was one subject that could grab my attention, this was it, and I wondered what new material Burke (who wrote The Lawn Road Flats, and The Spy Who Came in from the Co-Op, about Melita Norwood) had managed to dig up. I thus agreed – on the basis that the publisher would supply me with a hard copy, as I do not review e-books – to deliver a review for the periodical. I then waited, and waited, for the book to arrive. After about six weeks, nothing had happened, so I emailed my contact at Aberystwyth, and he promised to harass the History Press. A week or so later the book arrived, and I set to work.

I was not very much impressed. Burke did not have much new to say, repeated some erroneous claims from Co-Op, padded out his story with much familiar material, and elided even the yarns that Ben Macintyre had spun. So I wrote up my review, but, before performing the task of adding all the references required, thought I should pass my 1600-word offering by the editors in order to verify that it met their needs. But I never heard back – not even an acknowledgment. That was in August. A couple of weeks ago, however, another copy of Family Betrayal arrived in my mail-box – presumably the original dispatch, although I could not espy a date anywhere. So now I have two copies of the book, and an unpublished critique that I can surely use when I next decide to have a set of book reviews as a coldspur offering. And that will definitely be my last venture with The Journal of Intelligence and National Security.

Another academic whom I tried to contact was Calder Walton. I had rather enjoyed his 2013 book, Empire of Secrets, and noticed that he had taken up a position as Assistant Director of the Belfer Center’s Applied History Project and Intelligence Project at the Harvard Kennedy School in Boston (see https://www.belfercenter.org/person/calder-walton). Walton’s bio indicates his association with Christopher Andrew, and ‘for six years, privileged access to the archives of MI5’, a provocative claim in its own right. But what really grabbed my attention was the following: “Calder is currently undertaking two major research projects: he is general editor of the multi-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence to be published by Cambridge University Press. Over three volumes, with ninety chapters by leading scholars, this project will be a landmark study of intelligence, exploring its use and abuse in statecraft and warfare from the ancient world to the present day.”

It occurred to me that Dr. Walton (with his very WASPish-sounding name: it is said that you can tell a true WASP if, by transposing Christian name and surname, no noticeable jarring occurs, such as with Winthrop Rutherfurd or Hudson Swafford) might not be familiar with Misdefending the Realm, or with my subsequent work on coldspur, and that the Cambridge History might be needlessly impoverished without someone in authority taking stock of some of the latest research. I thus wrote a very warm email to him, welcoming him to New England (where I used to live), and encouraging him to read a few essays on coldspur, highlighting the one concerning Dick White,that I thought would be of particular interest. And I never heard back. I notice now that I also sent him a flattering message, accompanied by a series of questions, back in 2014 after I had read Empire of Secrets, and did not receive any response then. Walton Calder – another of the Great Non-Communicants.

7.  Guy Liddell’s Diaries: TWIST and Scout

I have been revisiting the full digitized version of Guy Liddell’s Diaries, this time with the objective of picking up everything he wrote about GILBERT (Henri Déricourt), Nicolas Bodington, and SOE in general. Each time I return to the journals I discover something new, since, in previous projects, I have been focused on other persons and operations, and have had to close my mind to much of the wealth of information that resides there. What I may have overlooked as insignificant when I first passed through them can appear highly important on a later project: for example, I have just discovered several nuggets involving (primarily) Liddell, Frost, Maltby and Gambier-Parry on the severe deficiencies of RSS in 1942. I wish I had used in The Mystery of the Undetected Radios this gem from September 24, 1942, when Liddell is trying to convince his boss, Petrie, about the need for more efficient mobile units to track down new spies arriving. It confirms my analysis precisely (and Liddell does not even mention the fact that the operator might move his or her location):

If he transmitted three times a week for about 10 minutes or quarter of an hour at a time we might reasonably expect to pick him up in due course. We should then have an area of some 60 miles in which to operate the M.U.s. These units were not however particularly satisfactory since unless we happen to be fairly near at the time of transmission and searching on the direct frequency we should not pick up the transmission. If the man only came up occasionally on the call sign and changed his frequency and time it was on the whole improbable that we should pick him up at all. The technical tool was not therefore a particularly efficient one. If we were called upon to operate on the Second Front we should find ourselves singularly ill-equipped.

Moreover, a major item that I had completely ignored beforehand now seems to be a pointer to the creation of the highly secret TWIST Committee (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-lets-twist-again/). On August 15, 1942, Liddell wrote: “I saw Archie Boyle with T.A.R. [Robertson], Senter and Lionel Hale. We agreed that on matters of deception it was desirable to persuade the Controller to set up a small committee consisting of T.A.R., Lionel Hale for S.O.E., Montagu for the services and someone from S.I.S.  T.A.R. will take this up with Bevan.” What I find remarkable about this observation is the fact that SOE, which was of course responsible for sabotage, appeared to be driving the intensified deception plans. Liddell does not explain in this entry why the London Controlling Section was not itself adequate for this role, or why the XX Committee was also considered inappropriate. Soon afterwards, however, he took pains to explain to Rear-Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence (who wanted Bevan to chair the XX Committee) that that Committee’s prime role was viewed at that time as counter-espionage, not deception, a claim that is borne out by other evidence.  In addition, I suspect that the group wanted a more private cabal away from the prying eyes of the LCS’s American partner (the Joint Security Control). The timing from this record looks far more accurate than the two claims that have appeared in print.

The document passed on to the Soviets by Anthony Blunt (reproduced in Nigel West’s Triplex) claimed that the Committee was set up in September 1941: that seems improbably early, as Bevan was not appointed as Controller (replacing Stanley) until May 1942. On the other hand, Roger Hesketh placed its creation as late as April 1943, which would now appear to be a deliberate ploy to minimize its operation and influence by representing it as a short-lived phenomenon taking place after the controversial events. Moreover, August 15, 1942 happened to be the exact day on which Déricourt and Doulet escaped from southern France on the trawler Tarana, which would mean that the small meeting convened by Liddell constituted a timely intervention to authorize the role of SIS/SOE in managing agents in the cause of deception. The essential members are the same as listed in the Blunt document, which makes clear that the scope and opportunities for sowing disinformation transcended the functions of the so-called ‘double agents’ working under MI5’s B1A. What is also intriguing is that Liddell describes Hale as representing SOE: Hale in fact joined SOE as Press Adviser that very same month, but it sounds as if he had a more important role if he was already having meetings with the head of MI5’s Counter-Espionage section. It also shows that Liddell was quite au fait with what was going on, and knew about SOE’s strong presence behind the scenes. In essence, this brief episode represents another shocking and important lead to follow up, with its strong evidence that the TWIST sub-committee constituted the true deception agency before the XX Committee had matured, and provided authorization for SOE’s plots. The disastrous results all originated in this initiative.

[I plan to return to this business in February 2022. I have recently read Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s excellent Churchill’s Shadow, which is predictably scathing about Churchill’s ventures with SOE, but offers little detail. More interesting is David Stafford’s Churchill & Secret Service, from which I took copious notes several years ago. At that time, however, I paid little attention to what he wrote about the Déricourt period. I shall include consideration of his treatment in my coming analysis.]

But back to the Diaries in general. They are, in my opinion, an immensely rich and largely untapped source for the study of World War II and its aftermath. Liddell reveals an extraordinary capacity for tracking any number of complex events around the world, and combines an excellent memory with attention to detail. Yet, at the same time, they disclose the weaknesses of the man, both in the way he spent his time, and in the confessional way he entrusted his true opinions to the apparently temporary secrecy of his regular record. For he must certainly have expected that they would see the light of day some time.

Nigel West’s publication of portions of the Diaries, in two volumes, is useful up to a point. Eunan O’Halpin has written a cool and incisive criticism of West’s rather erratic approach to the selection and editorial process in Volume 1 (1939-1942) – see Intelligence and National Security (2005), “The Liddell Diaries and British Intelligence History” – and I shall not try to embellish his observations here. Moreover, the published version presents extracts only from the years 1939 to 1945 – less than half of the total coverage – and many of the most controversial episodes in MI5 counter-intelligence and counter-espionage occurred in the post-war years up to Liddell’s retirement in 1953. It is a shame that nobody has commissioned a highly capable expert to edit and publish the lot: they are replete with all manner of abbreviations, acronyms, nicknames, and operations and projects apparently unnamed elsewhere that require some deep knowledge and even powerful imagination to work out. Liddell will refer to such as ‘Buster’, ‘RJ’, ‘Anthony’ in quick succession, while mostly referring to subordinates by their surnames. Many names are usually redacted (such as Jane Archer and Kim Philby), although both have escaped the censor’s blue pencil on occasions. Whole entries and paragraphs have been blanked out. Overall the Diaries range from the ordinariness of Mrs. Dale’s Diary (“I am a bit worried about J.C. [Curry]” to the high politics of the Maisky or Lord Alanbrooke Diaries. And that is one reason why they are so compelling.

What perpetually astonishes me is the amount of time that Liddell spent dictating his record, with accounts of long meetings that have taken place, or summaries of reports that he has read, or discussions he has had with civil servants, other intelligence officers (especially those in MI6, such as Menzies and Vivian and Philby), military men, or politicians, as well, of course with the regular meetings he has with his boss Petrie and with his subordinates such as Dick White, ‘Tar’ Robertson, Herbert Hart, Anthony Blunt, John Curry, Stephen Alley, etc., etc. And then there are the numerous lunches, the dinners at his club with, say, visitors from the USA such as William Stephenson, and the parties he attends that are held for departing FBI or OSS officers, or even the Soviet NKVD contingent. Moreover, MI5 officers seem to be regularly going on leave, as well as taking lengthy time off for colds and ‘flu. One would hardly conclude there was a war on, given the way that social life went on, and leave arrangements were considered sacrosanct. (see also: https://coldspur.com/the-diary-of-a-counter-espionage-officer/) I have been reminded that their equivalents in SOE worked seven-day weeks, and sixteen-hour days. It does not sound just.

And that time usage gets reflected in Liddell’s effectiveness. He did not manage B Division well. He admitted, in the run-up to the succession question as Petrie spun out his day of retirement, that he was not a good administrator, not a solid delegator, and allowed a very flat organization to operate that resulted in a good deal of confusion. Moreover, he was not a strong champion and salesman of ideas, reluctant to take an issue by the throat. His diary entries are liberally scattered with the expression ‘I personally think’, as if his private being and his professional role, and how they tackled the urgent matters of policy and practice, could be separated, and in that way he betrayed the fact that he was not forthright and persuasive enough to promote and defend what he thought should happen. It is no surprise to me that he was not seriously considered for the Director-General job –  twice.

In addition, he was a poor judge of character. He was quick to criticize those in other agencies who, out of incompetence or malevolence, frustrated him, such as Vivian, Cowgill, Gambier-Parry and Maltby, but was hoodwinked, like so many others, by Philby. Yet he surrounded himself with shady characters and hollow men like Hart, Rothschild, Blunt, and Hollis – even Guy Burgess, who crops up frequently in his journals although he was not directly employed by MI5. Capel-Dunn, the model for Anthony Powell’s ghastly Widmerpool, makes some brief appearances. Meanwhile, a cast of solid, dependable characters moves around in the background – Sclater, Moreton-Evans, Cimperman, Mills, ‘Tar’ Robertson, Brooman-White, Bagot, Jane Archer and Loxley (tragically killed in an aircraft accident on his way to Yalta). Lurking continuously is the ambiguous figure of Dick White, who would outmanœuvre his boss on the path to the Director-Generalship. The whole saga would make an excellent TV series – ‘MI5 at War’, first at war with the Nazis, then with MI6, next with the Soviets, and lastly with itself. Just an idea.

So we are left with the rich insights of a highly intelligent but flawed individual, too cerebral, and not tough or political enough even for his job as Director of Counter-Espionage, let alone MI5 Director-General. Dick White outwitted him with his sharp elbows, and cool manner. Yet MI5 was betrayed overall by a ponderous government bureaucracy, and continually had to deal with the competitive wiles of MI6, which appeared to have more clout through its relationships with the Foreign Office, and through Menzies’ direct contact with Churchill. It astonishes me how, in the midst of war, so much time and energy was spent by so many persons considering the overlap of counter-intelligence activity in MI5 and MI6, and whether amalgamation of the two services should occur. Throughout the war, the debate about combining the two services, or parts of them, is ponderously engaged upon, and in the last year Findlater Stewart’s ‘terms of reference’ for investigating the two services are a constant theme.

Liddell, moreover, never came to grips with the Communist threat, always assuming that the only subversive risk would come from the Communist Party. His trust of characters like Anthony Blunt (who appears regularly in the Diaries), is quite remarkable. An article, or coldspur bulletin, on the Liddell-Blunt relationship and exchanges alone could be framed quite easily. This month I picked out a few observations from 1944 that I had overlooked before. On June 28 he wrote: “For example at the moment at any rate Russian espionage could not possibly be carried out except in the background of the CPGB”. On October 21 he cited his friend Peter Loxley, who had just returned from a discussion with Kim Philby: “Peter said he thought that Section IX were perhaps going a bit wide. He had had a talk with Kim about this. Anything in the nature of pursuing prominent communists all over the world was, he thought, a waste of time. The sort of thing should be done on a more selective basis. In other words in areas where the Soviet Govt. had vital interests.” Quite so. Thank you, Kim. Lastly, on November 27, Blunt tried to take control of Soviet counter-espionage: “Anthony came to see me about the possibility of getting assistance from Shillito. He thought the latter might bring his Russian espionage up to London and do part time in B1B. I am rather doubtful as to whether this would be a satisfactory arrangement, but I will have a talk with Roger.” Hollis would no doubt have some firm ideas.

8. In Memoriam: Geoffrey Elliott (1939-2021)

Apart from a brief conversation with Mark Seaman at Lancaster House, I believe I have ever met or corresponded with only two acknowledged alumni of MI6 (or MI5). The senior of the two was Geoffrey Elliott, who died in Bermuda earlier this year. The reason that I may have gained an entrée was that he had been taught by my father, at Whitgift School (the same institution that I attended), after the war. I gathered from reading his memoir about his father, Kavan, who was an SOE agent dropped into Czechoslovakia, that his memories of the school were not wholly negative – an impression that surprised me a little, given his exotic background and later enterprises. I thus got in touch with him through St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and we spoke once or twice by telephone, and communicated more by email. He turned out to be a very helpful supplier of insights to me during the time I was researching my thesis, and maintained a caustic and engaging sense of humour in the confidences he shared with me.

His memoir, I Spy; The Secret Life of a British Agent is perhaps his best book. He wrote another fascinating study (Secret Classrooms), co-authored with Harold Shukman, of the Joint Services School for Linguists, where he learned Russian, and he also collaborated with Igor Damaskin on a valuable biography of Donald Maclean’s mistress, Kitty Harris: The Spy With Seventeen Names. His brief profile of ‘Tar’ Robertson, Gentleman Spymaster, is no doubt his weakest book, as he admitted to me, full of anecdotal information, much of which is irrelevant to the story. He was also a very busy translator. He is listed as the translator of Rufina Philby’s Private Life of Kim Philby, and is also credited, by Nigel West, in his Acknowledgements to Triplex, as the co-translator (alongside Didna Goebbel) of the Russian documents that the NKVD itself translated from English sources when they were passed on by such as Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby. This achievement has a singular historical significance, as the British Government has not seen fit to release the English originals (if they still exist, of course). We owe it to Soviet espionage to be able to inspect valuable historical records that should be part of our documentary heritage.

When I heard about Geoffrey’s death, I sought out his other family memoir, From Siberia, With Love, published in 2004, which tells of the adventures of his grandparents’ (on his mother’s side), and which I had completely overlooked beforehand. They brought him up in London when his father was on some of his many absences. Having once escaped from Irkutsk to the United Kingdom in 1907, they somewhat improbably returned to the area, only having to flee again when the Bolsheviks took over, thus proving life’s contingency on very slender threads. I was somewhat startled to read a sentence in Elliott’s book which directly echoes (or anticipates) what I wrote in my piece A Rootless Cosmopolitan:

            There is really no comparison between my grandparents’ iron-spiked experiences and my marshmallow life. They could never go back to where they were born. I can; though when I do, I feel ever more disconnected, déraciné, what Stalin called a ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, while at the same time till the day I die I shall be seen as a foreigner in the place I now regard as home.

Of all the books I have read in 2021 this is the one I have enjoyed the most. It is well-researched (although it includes a certain amount of speculation concerning his grandfather’s experiences), rich in its description of life in Odessa and in Siberia – and in London – at the beginning of the last century, and occasionally very amusing. Elliott shows a very dry wit, and a deep sense of history. I regret that I never made the hop over to Bermuda to shake his hand. St. Antony’s College offers him a tribute at https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/about/news/geoffrey-elliott-22-april-1939-%E2%80%93-1-may-2021.

9. Philbymania

Nikolay Dolgopolov’s ‘Kim Philby’

I am astonished by the number of books on Kim Philby that continue to be published. I have been gathering some volumes on intelligence by the Russian Nikolay Dolgopolov, including a biography of Philby. It is a rather unsatisfactory composition, lacking an index or any kind of sources (indexes and footnotes are so bourgeois, don’t you agree?), with the Contents placed at the back, in the conventional Russian manner. I was hoping to find some original inclusion of documents that Philby had passed on to his masters, but they do not seem to be there. No telegrams from the period between June 1941 and May 1948 are reproduced. Instead, I read some extraneous padding in chapters dedicated to each of his comrades in the Cambridge 5, and one dedicated to possible members beyond the Five. It seems that Dolgopolov does not even mention ELLI, and dismisses the idea of Hollis’s guilt with a snort. But I shall persevere with the text in the hope of gleaning something new.

Then there is Helen Fry’s book. I have not yet read it cover to cover, but the chapter on Philby seems to suggest that Philby and Hugh Gaitskell may have been working unofficially for MI6 when they were in Vienna in 1933 and 1934, a hypothesis provoked by the fact that Kendrick did not call Philby out for his aid to the communists. It sounds a bit unlikely to me (Would Philby really have taken all those risks, including marrying Litzi Friedman? What about Maurice Dobb, and his advice to Philby? What was all that subterfuge with the Anglo-German Friendship Society for? And how come Kendrick was The Man Who Saved MI6 if he was hoodwinked by Philby?), but I shall have to read the whole work, and come to some carefully considered judgment. [Postscript, December 30: I have now read the book. Much of it is practically unreadable: the author has no analytical sense, writes clunky prose, and makes all manner of unverifiable assertions, dismal errors of fact, and sophomoric observations about the war and intelligence. I am amazed that Yale University Press has put its name to it. Maybe I shall return to it at some other time.]

This summer saw the appearance of two more volumes, Kim and Jim, by Michael Holzman, which explores the linkage and conflict between Philby and James Angleton, his counterpart at the CIA, who was (according to Holzman) heavily influenced by the MI6 officer in World War 2, and then Love and Deception, by James Hanning, which analyses Philby’s time in Beirut, and the circumstances leading up to his escape to Moscow in January 1963. I have affectionately dubbed this book Kim and Tim, after his longstanding friend from Westminster School, Tim Milne, who features prominently.

I have been in contact with both authors over time, and I even get a mention in the Acknowledgments of Hanning’s work, but what I say should come as no surprise to either of them. While there may be aspects of Philby’s life on which new light can be directed (such as his journalism, as Holzman claims), I wonder whether it is worth anyone’s time packaging such insights into a new publication where so much familiar material has to be trotted out to pad the story.

Michael Holzman’s book makes much of the influence that Philby was assumed to have exerted on Angleton during World War II, but this evidence is tenuous. The intersection of their careers, moreover, appears to be focused on double-cross operations, and in this arena Holzman seems to be unfortunately at sea, since he continually misrepresents the dynamics of what ‘double agents’ involve, and their role in disinformation campaigns. Thus his book relates some very familiar accounts of Philby’s activities, complemented by a large amount of material of some historical interest that is irrelevant to the main thread. Holzman appears not to have read or internalised what I have written in Misdefending the Realm, or on coldspur, and acknowledges no references to my researches. Moreover, the book has been compiled in a bizarre way: the chapters are unnumbered, and the sources are even more inscrutable than in most such works, with no easy indication to which passages the references relate. What Holzman has shown, however, is an enterprising inspection of the work of Dolgopolov.

Likewise, Hanning (who, I know, has seen my pieces on Blunt) does not appear to have read Misdefending the Realm, and does not consider any of my evidence about Blunt’s culpability. (I am relegated to a minor footnote, with an inaccurate url, on page 299, where I have to share space with that erratic potboiler, Roland Perry, which is not very comforting.) Hanning’s highly speculative book does admittedly contain some mildly absorbing details about Lebanese politics, but they really reveal no fresh insights on the enigma of Philby’s tip-off. The enthusiastic blurbs that bedeck the cover do not seem justified to me. His text appears to consist of a long series of rhetorical questions about Philby’s motivations and behaviour, and his discoveries (such as they are) do not shed much fresh light on his subject. Inexplicably, the author William Boyd selected it as his Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement.

Yet the spate of books on Philby continues, all claiming to display a new angle on the enigmatic personality of the traitor. I select here a gamut of titles exploiting Philbymania that I have spotted in the publishers’ lists for 2022:

Barbara Pym

Kim and Pym: The whimsical novelist Barbara Pym met Kim at an Anglo-German Friendship dinner in 1937, and was instantly smitten. Her passion was not fully reciprocated, but the couple carried on a brief tempestuous relationship, and the trove of their correspondence was discovered –  and then authenticated –  by Hugh Trevor-Roper shortly before the patrician historian’s death. Kim and Pym analyzes what was one of the most intriguing romances of the twentieth century. Philby has been declared by some to be the model for Francis Cleveland in Pym’s Crampton Hodnet. Others say: ‘No way’.

The Brothers Grimm

Kim and Grimm: Philby accompanied his friend Tim Milne on a trip to Germany in 1933, about which we know little. In his book Stalin’s Agent, Boris Volodarsky reveals the existence of agent GRIMM, hitherto unidentified, who was recruited by Arnold Deutsch in Berlin, and became active in London in 1934. This book closes the circle, explaining Philby’s recruitment much earlier than has been supposed to date, and describing how the master-spy was given the cryptonym of the Nazis’ favourite folk-tale authors, whose work was compulsory reading in schools. It also had a serious influence on Philby’s internal tussles with Good and Evil.

Kim Il-Sung

Kim and Kim: In the early days of his premiership, the North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung was considering breaking away from Soviet hegemony, but his advisers convinced him to engage Philby as a consultant, to remind him of the righteousness of the communist cause. Kim1 persuaded Kim2 not to ‘go wobbly’, and millions of North Koreans have subsequently had reason to thank the Westminster School Old Boy for their country’s happy development, celebrating their hero’s birthday every January 1 with fireworks, singing of the school song, and fan-dancing.

Cardinal Richelieu & Inspector Dim

Kim and Dim: The inspiration for Monty Python’s Inspector Dim (who exposed Ron Higgins as a professional Cardinal Richelieu impersonator) was none other than MI5’s Roger Hollis, who was known not to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Yet he had a more subtle side. Kim and Dim exposes the ploys that Philby and Hollis engineered to subvert British intelligence, including the mythology of ELLI that confused their colleagues so much, and brought much fame and fortune to Chapman Pincher.

Wim Duisenberg

Kim and Wim: When bouffant-haired Dutch Labour Party minister Wim Duisenberg retired suddenly from politics in 1978, no one suspected that he was being groomed to be President of the Central Bank. This was a scheme contrived by the KGB and Philby to undermine Dutch finances, and Kim and Wim had several furtive meetings on neutral territory to prepare for the coup. With a Foreword by Margrethe Vestager.

Slim Whitman

Kim and Slim: One of Kim’s private passions was a love of country-music, and listening to the Greatest Hits of Slim Whitman in the evenings with a bottle or two of brandy gave him much solace in those bleak last days in Beirut. Yet, when he escaped to Moscow, and tried to have Whitman invited on a concert-tour, the Soviet authorities refused to grant a visa to the Smilin’ Starduster, thus contributing largely to Kim’s growing malaise in the Workers’ Paradise.

Alastair Sim

Kim and Sim: Philby was a keen aficionado of stage and screen, and had been very impressed by the performances of Alastair Sim. The oyster-eyed thespian from Edinburgh was introduced to him, and then educated him in how to control the stage. Thus Philby was able to take the entourage of reporters for a dance when he denied his role as the ‘Third Man’ at his mother’s flat in 1955. Judi Dench, citing the assessment of that performance by her husband, Michael Williams, has described it as ‘a complete lesson in acting’.

The ZIm12

Kim and Zim: When Philby arrived in Moscow in 1963, one of his first requests was to be given a ZIM-12 limousine as a mark of his membership of the nomenklatura. He was immediately rebuked as a dangerous ‘capitalist-roadster’, since the ZIM, named after the sometime Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, had been rebranded after Molotov’s fall from favour in 1957. The two forged a bond from this episode, and Kim and ‘Stonearse’ would regularly get together to drink Molotov cocktails, listen to Slim Whitman, and read the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen to each other until Molotov’s death in 1986.

Vyacheslav Molotov

Kim and Nym: [That’s enough ‘Kim’ books. Ed.]

10. Letters to the Editor

One of these days, when I am behind in my research, I shall fill my monthly column with a selection of (mostly unpublished) Letters to the Editor of various publications. I am frequently provoked to spend the time on such exercises when I am troubled by some error, occasionally a matter of simple fact, but more frequently the expression of a misguided opinion by someone who ought to know better. One of my pet peeves is the attribution of purposefulness to the process of evolution, and I noticed that Anna Katharina Schaffner, described as Professor of Cultural History at the University of Kent and Director of Perspectiva’s Emerge project (don’t ask) had committed this error in her review of Charles Foster’s Being a Human in the Times Literary Supplement of October 15. I was thus happy that the periodical printed my letter on November 12. It read as follows:

Could Professor Schaffner be a bit more precise about her categories (review of Being a Human, October 15)? She states that ‘our woes started in the Neolithic period’, and that ‘we traded awe for convenience and control’. But then she goes on to write: “How can we ever truly understand people whose sense of self was so different from our own?” If the Professor is evidently so confused about who ‘we’ are, it does not help the rest of us in sorting out these vexing questions. Furthermore, she appears to misunderstand how evolution works, writing that our ancestors’ “brains grew in size to help them navigate ever more complex relationships”. Such relationships would have foundered irretrievably by the time such changes occurred, and, if evolution were driven by need, waiters and mothers would presumably have acquired two pairs of hands by now.

Professor Schaffner displayed that annoying manner of the preachy journalist, namely using the term ‘we’ when it is not clear whether the writer means ‘you and I’, ‘all right-thinking persons’, ‘the whole of the human race’ or any entity in between. Thus we may read of what ‘we’ have to do to achieve certain goals (e.g. ‘saving the planet’, ‘eradicating world poverty’, ‘delivering racial justice’, ‘shutting out Greta Thunberg’) without having any idea as to what the plan of action is. I noticed that Martin Vander Weyer, the financial correspondent for the Spectator, had written a book titled The Good, the Bad and the Greedy: Why We’ve Lost Faith in Capitalism. Since I regarded him as a champion of free enterprise, I wrote to ask him in what way he belonged to the ‘We’ of the title, wondering, perhaps, whether he was planning to move to North Korea. He replied: “You’ll find the book is in fact a vigorous defence of the good aspects of capitalism”, which is encouraging, I suppose, but merely shows that the choice of title was supremely silly and misleading.

On a slightly less serious note, Literary Review runs a series of modest cartoons titled ‘Illustrations to Unwritten Books’, and the example given in the October edition was ‘How Green Was My Valet’, showing a manservant suffering from severe dyspepsia. Now I very clearly recalled Kenneth Williams treating Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 classic in a similar fashion in a segment of Beyond our Ken on the BBC Light Programme about sixty years ago, only on this occasion the ’greenness’ that the valet displayed was a tint of envy rather than of biliousness. I was gratified to see that the magazine printed my correction.

I suppose this response was unique. After all, one had to be old enough to be a radio-listener from those days, one had to be an avid Kenneth Horne fan, one had to remember the episode clearly, one had to be a contemporary Literary Review reader, and one had to be eccentric enough to believe that it was worth spending a few minutes writing up the observation.  Step forward, coldspur! My brother Michael came closest, reminding me of the following: “That was an excerpt from How Green Was My Valley, another in our series of a film worth remembering, which is more than can be said for the next half-hooouur”, but for some inexplicable reason he is not a Literary Review subscriber.

Christmas Cards from ‘Prospect’: 2020 & 2021

Lastly, those Christmas cards from Prospect magazine. I gave the Editor, Tom Clark, a very hard time a year ago for signing a card to me that included the horrible phrase ‘Myself and the whole team wish you a very happy Christmas’. Well, someone must have taken notice, as the curse of coldspur fell upon him, and he is no longer Editor. I see that Clark has been appointed a Fellow at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation: I am not sure what these chaps do at such institutions, but I hope he learns to write good English there, and gets lots of free chocolate. In his final editorial at Prospect, Clark stated that he would now ‘pass the reins to the legendary former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger’. Now I had long imagined that Rusbridger was not a mythical being, however, but a real person, and my suspicions were confirmed when I received a Christmas card from the piano-playing ex-principal of Lady Margaret Hall, this time addressed to ‘Mr Percy’, not ‘Richard’. As you can see, Mr. R has improved the syntax, although it appears that Guardian journalists are still not quite sure that ‘the team and I’ (or ‘the team, including me’) would be an appropriate way of identifying themselves. Or perhaps, simply ‘we all’, like the Gang I introduced at the beginning of this post?

This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.

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Filed under Economics/Business, Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Literature/Academia, Management/Leadership, Personal, Politics

Four Books on MI5

MI5, the Cold War, and the Rule of Law by K. D. Ewing, Joan Mahoney, and Andrew Moretta

Security and Special Operations: SOE and MI5 during the Second World War by Christopher J. Murphy

Intelligence, Security and the Attlee Governments, 1945-51: An uneasy relationship? by Daniel W. B. Lomas

How Spies Think by David Omand

In fact three of the books reviewed this month are about MI5. The fourth relates more to general intelligence, but it is a noteworthy addition, and marginally concerns MI5, and I wanted to keep the title of the piece simple. ‘Three Books About MI5 – and One Not’ didn’t seem very catchy.

Regular readers will recognize that the main focus of my research into intelligence agencies has been MI5, with occasional ventures into MI6, GCHQ, and SOE. If ever I were to attempt a second book, it would be called The Authoritative But Unauthorised History of MI5 (hereafter referred to as TABU). Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 is a monumental work, very readable, and a valuable companion, but I have consistently maintained that it is too ambitious in its scope, flawed in its methodology, unscholarly in its references to sources, and far too delicate in its avoidance of controversy. That last aspect may have been forced upon its author, but then he should not have succumbed to such pressures if he wanted to preserve his academic prestige.

Above all, there is a wealth of information that needs to be incorporated in any comprehensive history of MI5, with hundreds of files released to the National Archives that require a concentrated and disciplined amount of cross-referencing, a process that would then shed much light on the activities of MI5 officers. I could start TABU with my research into Fuchs, Peierls, Pontecorvo, Philby, Maclean, Blunt, Ursula Kuczynski, Gouzenko, etc. etc. and package the stories into a book on its own. Then there are the figures who have not been properly covered: for example, Alexander Foote, Oliver Green, Dave Springhall, Guy Liddell, Roger Hollis, and Jane Archer.

A more serious approach would carve MI5’s history up into more manageable sections. Thomas Hennessey and Claire Thomas attempted something similar in their three-volume ‘Unofficial History of MI5’, titled Spooks (2009-2011), but their compilation inexplicably lacks an index, which is a fatal flaw. It provides a measure of useful chronicling, but contains numerous errors, and is overall unusable. Another project is required, perhaps covering separately the era of each MI5 director-general. Thus Volume 1 would take us to 1940 with Kell (1909-1940), with perhaps a chapter on Harker’s interregnum, Volume 2 with Petrie (1940 to 1946), Volume 3 with Sillitoe (1946 to 1953), Volume 4 with White (1953-1956), Volume 5 with Hollis (1956-1965), and Volume 6 with Furnival-Jones (1965-1972) – furnished perhaps with an appendix on Hanley’s molehunts, while the remaining Volumes would await further release of archival material. Whoever is charged with managing this enterprise, I hope that he or she has access to the TABU sources available on coldspur.

Meanwhile, some potentially valuable books exploring lesser-known aspects of MI5’s history continue to appear – some absurdly priced – and it is my allotted task this month to analyse what I found in them.

MI5, the Cold War, and the Rule of Law by K. D. Ewing, Joan Mahoney, and Andrew Moretta (Oxford University Press, 2020)

This hefty volume is described in the following terms:  “[It] is concerned with the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 principally in the period from 1945 to 1964. It was a body without statutory authority, with no statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources.”

This is all very stirring stuff, in the tradition (it would appear) of that overlooked classic of counter-intelligence analysis, Misdefending the Realm, which the authors unaccountably do not list in their Bibliography, while giving ample recognition to those renowned chroniclers of the truth, Chapman Pincher, Kim Philby and Peter Wright. Since my attention was focussed on the period 1939-1941, with some projection into 1949 and 1950 on account of the Klaus Fuchs case, one might expect a smooth transition from MTR into the post-war challenges posed by Gouzenko, Nunn May, Fuchs and Pontecorvo, followed by the growing controversies surrounding Burgess and Maclean up to Philby’s disappearance in 1963.

Yet this is not a conventional study. Ewing, Mahoney and Moretta are lawyers – and their book is therefore a ‘lawyerly’ approach to the mission of MI5, with an emphasis on rights, and discrimination and surveillance. Readers should thus not be surprised when they encounter sentences such as: “That said, it must also be recognized that the consequence of vetting was to discriminate against individuals, either on grounds of their political affiliations or beliefs, or on the ground of their lifestyle.” (p 303)

To an audience in 2021, ‘discrimination’ is clearly a highly negative term. After all, MI5 recently put out a press release stating that ‘in the interests of diversity’, and ‘to ensure that our personnel accurately reflect the community they serve’, the agency would ‘begin a recruiting campaign to hire all manner of riff-raff, ne’er-do-wells, losers, and subversives to its counter-intelligence staff’. [That was intended as a joke. I do not believe any such statement has been made – yet.] In 1950, however, such a policy of ‘discrimination’ should have been seen as eminently sensible, as it should be now. Why on earth should a government department, or a company with governmental contracts engaged on secret work, not discriminate against persons whose avowed objective was to destroy the whole liberal democracy? For we are talking about Communists (Party members), and communists (fellow-travellers), here.

Be that as it may, the authors start off by providing a very useful and detailed inspection of the movements between the electoral success of Clement Attlee in July 1945, flushed with the recent victory between the western allies and their counterpart, the Soviet Union, and Attlee’s recognition, a few years later, after detection of spies and warlike impulses from Stalin, that communist influence in government needed to be stamped out. Attlee was suddenly not beholden to his Left Wing any more. This period was well summarized by Christopher Andrew in Defend the Realm (pp 382-386), and Ewing and Co. exploit the rich archival sources now available to track the important contributions of civil servants like Findlater Stewart and Edward Bridges (neither of whom appear in Andrew’s book), and the efforts by MI5 to resist any controls over its independence.

The focus of the authors is very much on the constitutional authority of MI5, and especially its involvement in ‘surveillance’. Indeed, the word ‘Surveillance’ appears in six of the fifteen chapters’ headings, and is a dominant theme throughout. This expressed dislike of ‘surveillance’ concerns these lawyers the most. It even leads them into some unfortunate misconceptions. As early as page 7, in the Introduction, they write: “Yet we too had a secret police . . .” While MI5 operated secretly, however, it was not a police force with powers of arrest and prosecution, and suggestions that it was somehow akin to the Gestapo and the NKVD are irresponsible. The motif is picked up later, on page 51, where the following interpretation appears: “Quite apart from the form of words used, further evidence that MI5 was being authorized to act as a secret political police force rather than a counter-espionage agency is to be found  . . .”.

These lawyers admit to sympathies for ‘progressive’ views. “Lawyers had no immunity from MI5 surveillance during the Cold War, and progressive lawyers had even less”, they write (p 168). They hail ‘the progressive National Unemployed Workers Movement “ (p 11). They lament how certain presumably ‘advanced’ members of parliament were treated: “In terms of MI5’s mandate (defence of the realm, as threatened by subversion and espionage), what we have here is a situation in which progressive MPs were the subject of fairly intrusive MI5 and Special Branch surveillance on two grounds.” (p 150)

Now, I am not certain what distinguishes a ‘progressive’ lawyer from a ‘regressive’ one (after all, should they not simply be interpreting the law?), but if they are borrowing from the world of economics and politics, they are entering dangerous ground. I could just about accept that ‘progressive’ taxation has an accepted definition concerning the increasing confiscation of wealth from those who either earn a lot or possess substantial assets, but the idea of a ‘progressive’ politician (as espoused by the New York Times and its Nobelist idol of American academia, Paul Krugman) in fact indicates someone on the loony Left who wants the government to pay for free childcare, fund reparations for slavery, forgive all student loans, distribute a universal minimum wage, offer free healthcare, community college tuition, etc. etc. with monies that it does not have, and will never have a chance of collecting.

I do not believe that historians or lawyers should ever start classifying people as ‘progressives’, as they end up sounding like a Pravda editorial, or a functionary from the Politburo. For example, here is Molotov speaking on the new Soviet constitution in 1937, quoting Stalin: “We are entirely on the side of those who have at heart the interests of ‘the whole of advanced and progressive humanity’”. Thus one has to question exactly what sort of world Ewing, Mahoney, and Moretta are progressing towards when they champion the protection of subversive elements whom the government is funding, and analyze the poorly-named ‘Purge’ Procedures. With some apparent sense of regret, they write (p 248): “Although in practice most civil servants at the time [1948] enjoyed secure tenure and relatively good conditions of service, they could nevertheless be hired and fired at will, with no remedy in the event of a transfer or termination on security grounds”. This is a commentary on Attlee’s statement to the Cabinet of March 25, where he essentially expressed exactly that policy. (And Attlee went so far as to include the shocking statement: ‘Even promotion does not come of right’. The injustice! The iniquity!)  If it was good enough for the socialist Attlee in 1948, why question it now?

The authors are on much stronger ground when they analyze MI5’s policies being carried out in practice against the broader public. I have commented before on the colossal waste of time, and the occupation of yards and yards of filing space, that was driven by MI5’s vague and all-encompassing policy of ‘keeping an eye on’ possibly disruptive elements. Literally hundreds of intellectuals, academics, union leaders and CP members were at large, spreading falsehoods about the phenomenon of Soviet Russia, and denigrating what they viewed as the oppressive, exploitative nature of western democratic society. There was thus a continuous hum that abetted Soviet propaganda, and apologists for the relatively free and enlightened United Kingdom struggled to find the right voice and outlet. The ‘scandal’ that erupted when Encounter magazine was found to have been funded by the CIA was typical of this: why on earth should a government organisation not assist a publication that promoted western values?

Nearly all these dubious characters were never going to be caught in any illegal act, such as bomb-throwing, or passing state secrets to a Soviet contact. Dave Springhall was a notable exception, and his arrest caused alarm and dismay in Moscow. As the authors point out, the most dangerous activity was taking place under the noses of MI5’s and MI6’s senior officers, by traitors who had concealed their ideological loyalties. Thus most of the surveillance energy was a wasted effort. As the authors conclude (p 424): “True, we have become accustomed to MI5 – a counter-espionage agency – being over-obsessed with fears of subversion and ill-informed about espionage threats, going back to Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, and of course to ‘Sonya’.” (‘Of course’?)

On more prosecutorial issues, Ewing, Mahoney and Moretta proceed painstakingly through the 1950s and early 1960s, albeit with some confusing jumping around in time, explaining in detail the ramifications of such overlooked but much cherished phenomena as The Radcliffe Report on Positive Vetting, the Maxwell Fyffe Directive and the George Wigg Codicil. With their published concern about the fashionable leftist bogey of ‘witch hunts’, they offer a barbed criticism of Lord Denning as the Grand Inquisitor, but cover the Vassall case well, and are very incisive and accurate in their criticism of the government’s performance in the Profumo case. One probably long-forgotten grievance they document is the case of one John Lang, a solicitor with ICI who had lost the confidence of its board because he had, in 1951, married a woman who had been a member of the Communist Party, and has thus appeared on MI5’s radar trail. The authors fail to make any comparison with the romantic affairs of Dick White, the director-general of MI5 a couple of years later, who had himself married a communist at the end of the war.

One highly useful component of the volume is the Appendix on the Post-War Structure of MI5. (This was the feature that introduced me to the book, when I was conducting a Google search.) The neglect by Christopher Andrew of this important facet of MI5’s operations is one of the severest failings of Defend the Realm, and I had been strenuously trying to establish (for instance) exactly the extent to which Roger Hollis was working in Soviet counter-espionage after the war. His rump Division F became reconstituted into the new B Division at the end of 1946, after which Hollis headed B1 for a couple of years. The preliminary conclusions from this narrative indicate that Hollis became Director of C Division in December 1948, and was for some years involved in relatively inconsequential vetting procedures away from the main spy-fighting unit when the Fuchs and Pontecorvo cases were rumbling, a fact that I have since confirmed from a closer inspection of Liddell’s Diaries. The authors’ analysis of the records that source their inquiry (KV 4/162 and KV 4/166, primarily) is close and detailed, but patchy and error-prone. I have ordered photocopies of the relevant material, and plan to provide a fuller account on coldspur at some time, as a follow-up to my piece from November 2018, B2B or Not B2B?.

The standard of copy-editing in this book from the venerated Oxford University Press is sadly lamentable. Thus we read of ‘invetigations’, ‘a corrigenda’, and ‘enior judiciary’. One sub-chapter is headed ‘The Expulcation of MI5’. Persons’ names are mis-spelled: ‘Gielgud’ appears as ‘Gilguid’; ‘Beurton’ as ‘Buerton’; on a single page (219) Evelyn McBarnet appears as ‘McBarnet’ and ‘Barnet’. Sir Burke (later Lord) Trend is introduced as ‘Sir Burke’ on page 302 (without a respective index entry), and referred to thereafter as ‘Sir Burke’.  One or two incomprehensible sentences obtrude, such as the verbless creature on p 369: “It is disappointing, nevertheless, that the official trade union structures co-operative in both the development of the Radcliffe exclusion policy and its extension and implementation.” Percy Sillitoe is described as being the director-general of MI5 in September 1945 (p 236), when he did not accede to the position until the following April. A similar mistake is made over Roger Hollis, when he is presented as being the director-general in November 1952 (p 320). The authors make several mistakes about Soviet espionage, such as asserting that Dave Springhall ran the Cambridge Five (p 233), and a puzzling judgment about the need for secrecy at GCHQ (p 352). They claim that the trials of Nunn May and Fuchs were both held in camera, when in fact both were public.

In conclusion, this is a bit of a clunker; a useful compendium for the earnest scholar of constitutional law, with hundreds of valuable references to archival material that might otherwise have been overlooked, but a bit laborious in its repeated plaints about MI5 as a secret police force, and its obvious bias in favour of (disputable) rights and entitlements for the left-wing cause. Nevertheless, it properly raises some important points about the constitutional and legal basis on which MI5’s surveillance powers are based, which never go away.

Security and Special Operations: SOE and MI5 during the Second World War by Christopher J. Murphy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006)

I had to make a further raid on my wife’s gardening budget to acquire this volume, which had somehow lain undetected by me since its release fifteen years ago. I cannot recall where I encountered it, but its title beckoned unavoidably, since earlier this year I was earnestly trying to hunt down information on the decision to send the enigmatic George Graham (né Leontieff) to Moscow as George Hill’s special assistant and cipher-clerk in 1941. Murphy is described as ‘an independent scholar . . . formerly Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary British History at the Institute of Historical Research’. I was not familiar with that institution, which is apparently celebrating its centenary this year. Unfortunately, its resources seem designed for research libraries and universities through a subscription service, and, like Taylor and Francis, offers no flexible subscription package for a retiree like me.

The book arrived, and I re-inspected the blurb: “The first comprehensive account of the work of the Security Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War,  . . .”, and Richard Thurlow, of the University of Sheffield, added his commendation: “Security and Special Operations is a significant addition to the burgeoning literature of the history of the Special Operations Executive.” Thurlow, I see, wrote a book titled The Secret State, published in 1994, that I should perhaps read. So I turned eagerly to the Contents and Index, to discover what Murphy had written about the Russian Section of SOE in his ‘comprehensive’ account.

The answer was – not one word. That was a colossal disappointment. How could this be a ‘comprehensive’ account if it neglected to cover the most controversial of all of SOE’s undertakings – its attempt to ‘co-operate’ with the NKVD, the most suspicious, unyielding, aggressive and demanding ‘intelligence’ organisation in the world? And how did Murphy’s sponsors (“The archival research on which this book is based was made possible by a Leverhulme Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for British History at the Institute of Historical Research”) not supervise adequately Murphy’s project to ensure that it delivered the goods? Leaving the Russian Section out was like recounting the tale of Harry Potter without mentioning Voldemort. [Is this correct, Thelma? I was going to write ‘Hamlet without the Prince’, but I wanted an analogy that today’s readers would understand  . . .  Please emend as necessary. Tony].

What is notable is the fact that Murphy also thanks one Duncan Stuart (‘former SOE Adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’) for his help, ‘pointing me in the right direction with a single sheet of paper’. Is it not strange that the F&CO would need an ‘adviser’ for a unit that was dissolved in January 1946? Was he perhaps appointed in 1943, and kept his position for several decades, forgotten and untroubled? His status sounds rather like that of Peter Simple’s Dr. Heinz Kiosk, ‘chief psychiatric adviser to the National Meringue and Profiterole Authority’. Yet it is an important position, and was in fact designed to ‘help’ historians, not the Foreign Office itself.  E. G. Boxshall was the first appointee, in 1959, but for much of the period my record is bare. Christopher Woods occupied the post from 1983 to 1988, and Gervase Cowell (of Oleg Penkovsky/Greville Wynne fame) followed him until 1996, with Duncan Stuart, the last Adviser, succeeding him, and retiring in 2002. Thus to Dr. Murphy I would say: ‘I am sure Stuart did indeed orient you, squire, and pointed you away from the files on the Russian Section, which you were not capable of finding by yourself.’ The last thing an SOE Adviser would want is someone digging around in files he did not understand, whose revelations might be embarrassing, and which the Adviser was trying to get withdrawn, in any case . . .

Despite its obvious oversights, I of course read the book. As the image above shows, the cover displays the determined visage of the ‘double agent’ Henri Déricourt, taken in November 1946. When I read the volume several months ago, I had only a very hazy idea of who Déricourt was, but, now that I have become involved with Patrick Marnham and War in the Shadows, he is a subject of immense interest to me. Murphy dedicates ten dense pages to the aspects of the Déricourt affair which intrigue him, but it is symptomatic of his methods that he completely misses the point, starting his investigation only with the events of November 1943, when all the damage had been done in the preceding twelve months. I shall return to this analysis later.

Murphy has clearly applied some serious delving into the archives to put a story together. He lists an impressive Bibliography, but his detailed and very useful Endnotes are almost exclusively from files at the National Archives, and they thus for some reason ignore the published sources. Concerning the establishment of the Security Section of SOE – a unit that was much resented by the Country Sections – Murphy painstakingly explains the struggles that Air Commodore Archie Boyle experienced after he was appointed Director of Intelligence and Security in July 1941. There was ‘physical’ security (maintaining the secrecy of what went on in SOE’s various establishments), and ‘esoteric’ security, which former SOE security officer Peter Lee described as work ‘including the double cross system, running double agents [and] the very high grade interrogation of people coming out of occupied territories.’ The latter were the functions that the country sections resented, as they felt their judgments were being questioned, and the bureaucrats were putting obstacles in the way of their achieving results.

While Murphy understands well the question of how relationships between SOE and MI5 (what he calls, in the familiar jargon of our time, ‘adequate liaison machinery’) should work, he is somewhat ponderous in explaining its ramifications. He really gets going with the MI5 connections only in Chapter 4, when Geoffrey Wethered was appointed in early 1943 as the SOE Liaison Officer. The need for such had intensified. As Murphy writes: “MI5 had good reason to be concerned over the security of SOE agents in the field. Fears about the extent of undetected German penetration of SOE networks in Belgium, raised during the winter of 1942-1943, were compounded by the ‘increasing number of cases’ of agents returning to the UK having been captured by the German and ‘turned’, a staged escape preceding their return to the UK with a German mission’” In other words, MI5 had every reason to be petrified about the influx of such persons, and their not being vetted stringently enough as they passed through the London Reception Centre in Wandsworth, and how secrets about the Double-Cross Operation might be inadvertently revealed.

Yet Murphy struggles to discriminate clearly between the insignificant and the important episodes. His narrative attempts to pick up every detail of who said what to whom, and how Wethered groped through his difficult task, and the responses by SOE security officer John Senter to Wethered’s recommendations and intrusions. Murphy describes the tensions as the two organisations grappled. The Country Sections continued to act in a blasé fashion. MI5 warned SOE about its ‘shockingly irresponsible’ conduct in sending a dubious character, Barry Knight, to France, and the dispute almost reached the level of Lord Selborne, the minister responsible for SOE, but Duff Cooper backed off. Guy Liddell wanted a softer approach, by talking with Senter’s boss, Archie Boyle.

Thus Murphy introduces the Déricourt story only with the investigations in late 1943, when allegations were made against him, by Jacques Frager (another SOE agent), that he was working for the Germans. Murphy painstakingly goes through the records of the discussions over Déricourt, logging the testimonies of various witness, and the plans to bring Déricourt back to the United Kingdom for interrogation. He thereby ignores all the fracas about Déricourt going back to 1942, when he had been snapped up by Dansey’s henchman, Bodington, in SOE and bypassed all the recommended investigations into his biography that MI5 tried to insist upon. His shady past was suspected then and confirmed in early 1943: Murphy misses all the nuances and sub-plots of this investigation.  As with nearly all other historians of this period, he also does not seem to be familiar with the TWIST committee, and the way that MI6 was managing SOE’s ’double agents’ for them. That is understandable (given that the revelations on TWIST appeared only in 2009), but Murphy displays a lack of imagination in not providing the well-documented background material to Déricourt that did exist at the time, and not putting the events of 1946 and after into context.

There is more, on the Double Cross System and the plans for OVERLORD, which the enterprising reader may wish to follow up him- or herself, but overall my judgment is that this book was an opportunity missed. Too much of ‘what one clerk said to another’, in the immortal words of A. J. P. Taylor, and not enough imaginative synthesizing investigation. No risks were taken in the creation of this work, and no endangered species harmed. Murphy draws no integrative conclusions from his study, and the book ends very abruptly, with a Chapter he titles ‘Unfinished Business’. He covers some of the post-mortems, especially the ‘Nordpol’ operation in the Netherlands, and a fruitless interrogation of Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr at Camp 020, in an attempt to learn more about Déricourt, but his only conclusion is to suggest that MI5’s interest in SOE soon waned after the war, ‘as the new security priorities of the Cold War emerged’.

I suspect the reality is more complex than that. For example, the failure to even consider the Russian Section is unpardonable, in my opinion. I of course wrote to Murphy about this oversight, and then, failing to gain any response from his email address, tried to call him on the telephone, leaving him a message on his answering machine. He never responded, and I thus add him to my list of appalling academics who advertise an email address, but never want to engage with any of the public who read their books. As Ko-Ko might have sung:

The reclusive annalist, I’ve got him on my list.         
I don’t think he’d be missed! I’m sure he’d not be missed!

[What do you think, Thelma? Will my readers recognise The Mikado?]

Intelligence, Security and the Attlee Governments, 1945-51: An uneasy relationship? by Daniel W. B. Lomas (Manchester University Press, 2017)

I do not think it is a sensible idea to introduce a question in the title of a serious book on intelligence: it makes it sound like a conference presentation where you want to keep your audience in suspense. But, if you haven’t made up your mind by the time you have completed writing its 250-plus pages, you have probably chosen the wrong topic. It is not as if the eager reading public is walking around thinking: ‘Gee, I wonder whether the relationship between Intelligence and Security during Attlee’s premiership was uncomfortable in any way, and I wish some capable academic would sort it all out for me’, partly because ‘Intelligence’ and ‘Security’ are merely abstract nouns, and do not have relationships with governments, and I do not believe that anyone has made the claim that the Attlee administration was exceptional in that dimension. So not a good start. Yet, according to his biographical profile at Salford, Lomas’s book was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize for first academic monograph.

Dr. Lomas is described as Lecturer in International History at the University of Salford, and an early warning signal is communicated in the second sentence of his ‘Acknowledgements’, where he thanks his colleague, Dr. Christopher J. Murphy, of renown in this parish above, for ‘his cherished advice and support’ throughout his research. And here is another academic who manages to gain sponsorship from a charitable institution – this time the Arts and Humanities Research Council. How do these guys do it? All that money flowing around, simply to spend some hours in the dusty archives? Moreover, he lists a whole stream of eminent persons who gave him ‘valuable advice’, such as Countess Attlee, Professor Richard Aldrich, Dr Gill Bennett, Tom Bower, Professor Keith Jeffery, Dr Christopher Moran, Professor the Lord (Kenneth) Morgan, etc. etc. (I did not see David Hare, John le Carré or Ben Macintyre on the list.) What did they tell him?: ‘Go West, young man’? ‘Don’t forget to floss’? And how does one handle all that advice, and what happens if their advice clashes? To whom would one turn? It beats me. Perhaps Lomas would have won that Whitfield Prize if he had used fewer advisers.

In fact the book starts out promisingly, with an Introduction that offers an insightful tour d’horizon of the state of play in historiography of the Labour Party and MI5 and MI6. He suggests that the phenomenon of ‘the missing dimension’, first formulated by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, is still at work in writings about political history, although he lets off certain biographers (including one of his advisers) because they did not have access to relevant archival material at the time. He crisply describes the effect of the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, and how its good intentions are often hindered by bureaucratic trudgery. And he sensibly reminds his readers of the large number of other sources, including private papers, that need to be mined to cover the era properly. He provides a rich bibliography, comprising a wide array of papers from various Ministries, as well as MI5 records, although his ‘primary’ source documents are dominated by possibly dubious memoirs from notable participants, with presumably more objective accounts from eminent (and not so eminent) historians relegated to ‘secondary’ level.

He then provides a brief history of the British Labour party’s relationship with ‘intelligence’, in which he unfortunately deploys the 21st-century cliché of ‘the intelligence community’, as well as that misplaced metaphor of ‘the machinery’.  (If historians want to refer to ‘intelligence agencies’, they should do so: classifying them, alongside GCHQ, as a ‘community’ distorts the battles and rivalries that flourished then, and still do, just as with the FBI and the CIA. If they were a ‘community’, they would not be separate units.) Lomas highlights the background to the Labour Party’s electoral victory in 1945, and the historical reasons why socialist politicians might have had cause to be suspicious of more ‘reactionary’ intelligence organisations, going back to the Zinoviev Letter affair of 1924, a fake stage-managed by the Tory Joseph Ball. Yet his conclusion is tentative: “The legacy of the Zinoviev Latter meant that relations between ministers and the intelligence community may have suffered during the initial stages of the second MacDonald government, elected in June 129.” That ‘may’ demands a lot more analysis.

Yet Lomas effectively destroys his straw man at the outset. The concluding clause of this section runs:  “ . . . the legacy of Zinoviev was not as damaging as popularly [by whom?] suggested, showing that Labour-intelligent relations were on the mend”. His synopsis of Chapter 1 reinforces this idea by stating that, since Labour ministers in Churchill’s coalition government had access to, and use of, intelligence, ‘the experience ended any lingering animosity that remained from the Zinoviev Letter affair.” So the notion of debunking the rumour of ‘an uneasy relationship’ quickly appears to be an artificial one. And, if the reader jumps forward to Lomas’s conclusion, one reads: “Rather than intelligence novices, many senior figures in the Attlee government were experienced intelligence committee consumers, having used intelligence products in office.” (p 259). So what was the whole controversy about?

Another example of how Lomas attempts to present his argument as innovative is in his treatment of Attlee. “While it has been argued that Attlee, a committed internationalist, was opposed to any hostility towards the Soviet Union”, he writes, “the chapter shows that he was kept fully aware of Soviet interests and intentions despite his commitment to renewed Anglo-Soviet relations.” But of course he was kept informed. There is no conflict there. Moreover, Lomas introduces his Chapter 6 (‘Defending the Realm: Labour Ministers, vetting and subversion’) with a quote from Attlee expressed as early as 1940: “The Communists have no right to the name of socialists or Communists. They are Stalinists. Whatever Stalin says is right for them . . .” The antithesis of ‘internationalism’ and ‘anti-communism’ is a false one. Attlee saw through Stalin from the start, as did his Foreign Minister, Bevin. It would have been more interesting if Lomas had focused on why the Edenic Tory policy of ‘co-operation’ with the Soviet Union had been forged in the first place, and if he had explored why a Labour administration had had to undo the appeasement strategies of Attlee’s Conservative predecessors.

Thus what Lomas has compiled is a very readable, well-sourced, integrative study of the fascinating few post-war years where any illusions about Stalin were quickly dispelled. It is overall well-edited (although the U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes appears several times in Chapter 5 as ‘Brynes’, and is not indexed). If the reader is new to this subject, he or she can gain a well-written and widely-sourced account of the Gouzenko affair, the Soviet threats with the atomic bomb, the espionage of Fuchs, Nunn May, and Pontecorvo, the Foreign Office’s propaganda offensive, the disastrous operations against Albania, relations with the USA and the Commonwealth, Attlee’s policy of ‘positive vetting’, and the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Lomas has gathered many fascinating accounts of politicians and intelligence, such as Christopher Mayhew’s discussions with Attlee about setting a middle way between American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. Topics like these could well have been extended into a novel analysis, but immediately an opportunity seems to appear to develop an innovative study, the text returns to the more platitudinous generalisations. The author tries to wrap it all in a message that is simply not invigorating or imaginative.

Thus for any reader who has performed even only occasional study of these topics, there will be little new to be found here, apart from some incidental minutes and observations from ministers and diplomats, and Lomas misses many of the darker undercurrents that affected the surface appearance of many events. Another example: if the relationship between ministers and MI6 was so good, how was it that Attlee, Bevin and Strang approved the calamitous incursions into Albania? Lomas simply concludes: “The results were far from positive”, and reports that Bevin and Strang then decided to suspend any such activities. These episodes could have provided a stirring stretch of useful analysis, but Lomas simply moves on. At the Conclusion, one reads: “It [this book] has shown that, contrary to existing views of the relationship, ministers enjoyed what could be described as an excellent working relationship with the intelligence community  . . .”. Not much of a breakthrough, that, and not really true, anyway.

It is not that the subject of his ‘monograph’ is unworthy of study. Attlee and his period certainly deserve attention, as he was probably the finest British premier of the century, skilled in both management and leadership. The reality otherwise was that ministers came and went, and some were good, and some were duds, while civil servants and the intelligence services went on for ever (with the exception of SOE, of course, which was absorbed by MI6). The intelligence ‘community’ had its rivalries, just as the individual agencies had their internal plots, conspiracies, and competition. Their bosses sometimes lied to their political masters, and intelligence was frequently concealed from those who should have received it – both outside and within the service, such as frequently happened with MI5, where senior officers withheld vital information from the grunts. Lomas seems to want us to believe that everything was hunky-dory, and that the Whitehall ‘machinery’ acted according to well-oiled routines, with politicians and intelligence officers all executing their roles in an exemplary manner. But that was not the case. Unfortunately, his book reads very much as if it had been written by a committee, and maybe that court of advisers helped bring about that result.

The bland monographist, I’ve got him on my list.

He never will be missed! He never will be missed!

How Spies Think by David Omand (Penguin Viking, 2020)

When I first saw this title, I imagined that it might sit handily on my shelf next to the SOE handbook How To Become a Spy, and that I could learn more about what made Anthony Blunt and Richard Sorge tick. Yet it all seemed a little unlikely that a book could be written about such a subject: would not spies be simply concentrating on the topic of ‘How can I get this document to my controller without being spotted?’ But then, inspecting further, I discovered that the book is not really about Spies at all. The subtitle is Ten Lessons in Intelligence: the PR boys must have got hold of it, and told their bosses that the author would never get invitations to the late-night TV shows unless they sexed up the title a bit.

For the author is the distinguished Former Director of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), and more recently ‘the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible for the professional health of the intelligence community [yes, that dread word again], national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”’. (Why that last phrase appears in inverted commas, I have no idea.) And Omand’s book focuses on how seasoned intelligence analysts think, how they sort out fact from fiction, and thus build a reliable picture of the world. Espionage (or ‘Spying) may play a part in that process, but the fact that GCHQ has traditionally picked up electronic signals from the ether that have been transmitted with the awareness that adversaries will intercept them, and attempt to decrypt them, is not indicative that spying went on. Intercepting citizens’ private telephone calls or email messages without legal authority would be another matter, however.

How Spies Think turns out to be a very practical, and riveting, tutorial in how (good) intelligence analysts process information, and the author presents his analysis as a guide to how the rules for sound decision-making can be applied to everyday life. He outlines a four-step process, the SEES model, as a method for developing confident judgments about uncertain intelligence that may be arriving in a variety of forms. It consists of the following levels (and I quote directly):

* Situational awareness of what is happening and what we face now.

* Explanation of why we are seeing what we do and the motivations of those involved.

* Estimates and forecasts of how events may unfold under different assumptions.

* Strategic notice of future issues that may come to challenge us in the longer term.

All his explanations are liberally illustrated with examples from military and intelligence history, such as the D-Day landings, the Iraq War, the Falklands War, the Invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I must confess a personal fascination with these ideas. I spent the most important part of my career as an analyst at the Gartner Group, where we were charged with assessing the situation in our area of interest and expertise, and presenting forecasts for a five-year time period based on our analysis of trends, technologies, vendor capabilities, market dynamics, and buyer preferences and profiles. (The acid test of such processes occurred when a five-year cycle was completed, and one’s forecasts from the past were dredged up for review.) I was always intrigued as to why so many smart persons would have contrary opinions as to what outcomes would be, and it turned out that a certain hard-headedness, even cynicism, and a good dose of practical experience in the field, were required to cut through much of the idealistic waffle that attached itself to many technological initiatives. Thus the analysts who believed they could change the world, or who imagined vendors to operate against their own interests (as opposed to the emissaries they sent to industry consortia), who were simplistically influenced by the more skillful of the vendor marketing campaigns, or who ignored the dynamics of buyer politics, were essentially lost. The most serious defect they displayed was viewing the world as they hoped it could be rather than as it was.

Furthermore, my last job, as VP of Strategy for a small software company, showed me how even skilled executives can ignore intelligence if it gets in the way of their personal agenda and use of power. As part of the strategic planning process, I developed a simple scheme for separating Facts about the market and technology from Assumptions about such matters as competitive threats and future innovations, and started to determine why different executives in the company sometimes maintained conflicting ideas about the unknowns we were addressing. It turned out that the CEO was really not enthusiastic about a formal strategy, as she regarded it as possibly inhibiting her desire to act spontaneously and whimsically: moreover, she paid too much attention to Wall Street, where the analysts looked to her to be a ‘deal-maker” (i.e. engage in precarious acquisition strategies), as it would enhance her reputation (and maybe the stock-price in the short run). The VP of Research and Development (who worked 1500 miles away from Head Office) believed, as creator of the product, that she had a unique insight into what features the product needed, but would change the schedule according to which large customer walked into her office. The VP of Sales did not want his creative energies to be limited by being told what market segments he should pursue to make his numbers. Thus cool assessments can always be undermined by personality traits and private ambitions.

But back to Omand. His text is studded with accurate and useful observations. He offers a clear-headed analysis of how Bayesian approaches of conditional probability can help develop alternative hypotheses to explain events, and how new evidence thus enables new situational awareness, such as in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He presents some cogent insights on topics relevant to historians as well as intelligence analysts, such as the following, on the reliability of a source: “Like the historian who discovers a previously unknown manuscript describing some famous event in a new way, the intelligence officer has to ask searching questions about who wrote the report and when, and whether they did from first-hand knowledge, or from a sub-source, or even from a sub-sub-source with potential uncertainty, malicious motives or exaggeration being introduced at every step of the chain.” (p 27) He offers a provocative section on ‘Reluctance to act on intelligence warnings’, although he fails to delineate a clear linkage about general intelligence about inhuman crimes (e.g. genocide in Bosnia: ‘something has to be done’), and how that intelligence is converted into political action. He laments the communal ‘magical thinking’ at the time of the Falklands crisis that prevented anticipatory action in time – a clear echo of my point about self-delusion over realities.

Since the four SEES items comprise Lessons 1-4, the rest of the book covers Lessons 5-10. Again, Omand offers a very lively lecture, almost impossible to simplify. I thus recapitulate these Lessons for the eager reader, the first three grouped under the heading of ‘Checking our Reasonimg’:

5. It is our own demons that are most likely to mislead us

6. We are all susceptible to obsessive states of mind

7. Seeing is not always believing: beware manipulation, deception and faking

The final three are characterized under ‘Making Intelligent Use of Intelligence’:

8. Imagine yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side

9. Trustworthiness creates lasting partnerships

10. Subversion and sedition are now digital.

This section includes several insightful passages, such as his coverage of conspiracy theories, where he cites Peter Wright as noted delusionist. He provides (on pages 142-143) a useful checklist of memes that characterize a conspiracy narrative, and admits that today’s world of social media makes it much more difficult to debunk or dismantle such theories. He adds, somewhat beguilingly, that his experience ‘is certainly that even in the world of secret intelligence cockups outnumber conspiracies by a large margin’. He recommends a number of steps that an analytic team should perform to check their models in the light of new information, since even such disciplined teams can fall in love with their own theories. I found all this accurate and hard-hitting advice.

I thought, however, that Omand’s arguments became a little slack, the further on he went, and even presented some contradictions. For instance, I considered a phenomenon of Number 8 that Omand does not cover: the appeasement of Stalin in the belief that he would behave like a decent English gentleman after sitting in meetings with the likes of Anthony Eden, and the completely misguided strategy of ‘co-operation’ that the Foreign Office tried to forge as the Soviet Union and the Western Allies fought together against the common enemy. It was the inability to imagine that Stalin was an irredeemably ruthless individual, an autocrat who did not have to listen to ‘the hard men in the Kremlin’ (or even to his own people, as he claimed) that resulted in a disastrous misjudgment of his intentions.

And, as for 8 and 9, whom should one trust? Should the USA and Great Britain really have sat down at the conference table with the amorphous and undisciplined Taliban, for instance, knowing that that body was utterly untrustworthy? Would one of Omand’s ‘negotiated agreements’ have meant anything? On Lesson 9, Omand concentrates on ‘trust’ between natural affiliated allies, such as the USA and Great Britain, and the long-term value that such strategic alliances can bring. But how enduring are they? Are they institutional, or too dependent on personalities? Can President Trump, or a Brexit, disrupt them in both directions? Do the FBI and the CIA, or MI5 and MI6 trust each other? Do members of NATO trust each other over controversial issues like Afghanistan? Does the public trust the government? It is in this section that Omand’s advice tends to become a bit preachy and idealistic, and I should have liked to read more on when and why the process of intelligence analysis fails.

Moreover, even if the analytical process is correct, the problem will be one of political will, made all the more difficult by the fact that everyone and his sister will be out there on a public platform criticising policy, or recommending populist change. The recent withdrawal from Afghanistan is turning out to be disastrous: one expert stated on television that the USA had given the Afghan government the materials, the training, and the intelligence, but that it lacked the political will to resist. Yet an assessment of the integrity and fortitude of the Afghan administration should have been one of the factors in intelligence-gathering before planning the withdrawal. (Bayesian reasoning does not appear to have helped here.) On the other hand, from intelligence gained, China’s intentions regarding territorial expansion and authoritarian control seem evident enough, what with the suppression of the Uighurs, the closing down of democracy in Hong Kong, and its claims on Taiwan, but does President Xi’s policy represent an existential threat to the West, and how can it be resisted given how economies are interlocked?

Omand’s argument disappointingly starts to get mushier in lesson 10 (‘Subversion and sedition are now digital’), where, after covering the dangers from cyber-crime and -espionage, he tries to summarise: “Finally, in Part Three I have wanted to persuade you that to manage our future sensibly we all need effective partnerships based on trust and the ability to establish constructive relationships with those with whom we have to deal.” Who is that ‘we’? – the familiar plea of the journalist with his or her heart on the sleeve, appealing to an undefined audience. And a page later, he follows with: “We are on notice that there are further developments in information warfare capabilities over the horizon that will further damage us, unless we start to prepare now.” All very vague and unspecific, more like an article by the Archbishop of Canterbury: not a useful call to action.

In a more puzzling denouement, Omand appears to discard his own Lessons in his final chapter 11: ‘A final lesson in optimism’. It is as if his Editors told him that he had to leave his readers with some hope among the chaos. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the rules of today’s digital byways, and the author then rather fancifully projects forward to ‘a warm spring day in Trafalgar Square in 2028’. After welcoming a return to representative democracy, Omand attributes the success to three schemes. The first was a major five-year programme in schools to teach critical thinking for the digital world; the second was ‘a marked reduction in the vulnerability of the public to online manipulation and disinformation’. He illustrates it as follows: “There was praise for the leadership of the new US President in calling a 2025 global conference on internet norms that had brought together democratic governments, civil society groups, the major internet companies and the global advertising industry.” (p 291) This is pure Kumbaya wish-fulfilment: maybe Osman’s own demons trying to mislead him, his own ‘magical thinking’. The third scheme was a stronger defence against cyber-coercion. However realistic that third plank may be, the chapter constitutes a weak ending to an otherwise strong book.

As a coda, I offer this suggestion. In a recent LRB review of Scott Anderson’s book on the CIA, The Quiet Americans, Charles Glass presented a long list of US intelligence failures, including many of Omand’s examples, from the Soviet atom bomb to 9/11, which he tantalisingly attributed to a ‘neglect of intelligence gathering’, rather than to a failure of analysis. So perhaps a broader study is required: how ‘spies’ collect information, whether they all cogitate over it according to Omandian principles, what happens when they disagree, and what occurs when they present their conclusions to their political masters. ‘How Politicians Think’ would be a valuable follow-up. All politicians who set out to ‘change the world’ should be interrogated to determine why they think they know best what ‘the world’ needs, and why their enterprises will necessarily make it better, not worse.

Finally, I noted a few questionable assessments in the text overall.

P 139   “The paranoia even crossed the Atlantic. Under the charismatic influence of Angleton, a small group of MI5 officers in London led by Peter Wright caught the obsession with long-term Soviet penetration. Angleton sent the defector Golitsyn to London to brief them and help them uncover the Soviet weevils presumed also to be burrowing away within the British intelligence agencies.” They did? What ‘weevils’ were those? ‘Presumed’ or ‘real’? If ‘uncovered’, presumably the latter. But who? I think we should be told.

P 141   “We now know that he [Hollis] was cleared by high-level British government inquiries, confirmed by evidence from later KGB defectors.” Well, actually not quite true. And who are ‘we’, again? The question was very much left open: Gordievsky may have pooh-poohed the idea, but his and Christopher Andrew’s explanations about ELLI muddied the waters. If it were only that simple.

P 174   “The Cabinet Secretary would have been all too aware that the incoming Prime Minister [Wilson] had been, as we saw in the previous chapter, the subject of unofficial inquiries by a clique of MI5 officers in response to the CIA’s Angleton into whether Wilson was a KGB agent of influence.” A clique? Who, in particular? Is that intelligence or rumour? That claim deserved greater detail. Was it an example of ‘How Spies Think’?

P 175   “Eric Hobsbawm knew he had been discriminated against  . . .” Of course, Hobsbawm should have been discriminated against! See my comments under MI5, the Cold War, and the Rule of Law, above.

P 215   “That led to the uncovering of the Russian spies Donald Maclean  . . . and Klaus Fuchs.” Maclean and Fuchs were British citizens, but Soviet spies.

P 243   “We all carry, for example, unconscious fear about others who appear different. This instinctive xenophobia is the result of our evolutionary history as a species.” This is a very risky and debatable generalization, a dangerous step into the domains of anthropology and biology.

P 275   “The individual Western citizen is thus already, and will be for the foreseeable future, the recipient of digital information of all kinds  . . .” Both a statement of the obvious, as well as a feeble prediction: ‘the foreseeable future’ (like ‘only time will tell’) represents a vague prognostication that should NEVER be used by any reputable intelligence analyst, let alone an officer of Omand’s stature. The period could be five minutes or fifty years.  I forbad my team at Gartner Group to use either of the two phrases.

But definitely the best book of the four. The ‘wise cryptanalyst’ is not on my list.

(New Commonplace entries can be found here.)

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Year-End Wrap-up – 2020

At the end of this dreadful year, I use this bulletin to provide an update on some of the projects that have occupied my time since my last Round-Up. I shall make no other reference to Covid-19, but I was astounded by a report in the Science Section of the New York Times of December 29, which described how some victims of the virus had experienced psychotic symptoms of alarming ferocity. Is there a case for investigating whether traditional paranoiacs may have been affected by similar viral attacks, harmed by neurotoxins which formed as reactions to immune activation, and crossed the blood-brain barrier?

The Contents of this bulletin are as follows:

  1. ‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out
  2. The John le Carré I Never Knew
  3. The Dead Ends of HASP
  4. Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld
  5. Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away
  6. Bandwidth versus Frequency
  7. ‘History Today’ and Eric Hobsbawm
  8. Puzzles at Kew
  9. Trouble at RAE Farnborough
  10. End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes

‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out

Kati Marton

Ben Macintyre’s biography of Sonia/Sonya received an overall very favourable response in the press, and it predictably irked me that it was reviewed by persons who were clearly unfamiliar with the subject and background. I posted one or two comments on-line, but grew weary of hammering away unproductively. Then Kati Marton, a respectable journalist who has written a book about one of Stalin’s spies, offered a laudatory review in the New York Times (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/agent-sonya-ben-macintyre.html?searchResultPosition=1)  I accordingly wrote the following letter to the Editor of the Book Review:

Re: ‘The Housewife Who Was A Spy’

Even before Ben Macintyre’s book appears, enough is known about Agent Sonya to rebuff many of the claims that Kati Marton echoes from it.

Sonya was neither a spy, nor a spymaster (or spymistress): she was a courier. She did not blow up any railways in England: the most daring thing she did was probably to cycle home from Banbury to Oxford with documents from Klaus Fuchs in her basket.

A ‘woman just like the rest of us’? Well, she had three children with three different men. Her second marriage, in Switzerland, was bigamous, abetted by MI6, whose agent, Alexander Foote, provided perjurious evidence about her husband’s adultery. As a dedicated communist, she went in for nannies, and boarding-schools for her kids (not with her own money, of course). Just like the rest of us.

She eluded British secret services? Hardly. MI5 and MI6 officers arranged her passport and visa, then aided her installation in Britain, knowing that she came from a dangerous communist family, and even suspected that she might be a ‘spy’. The rat was smelled: they just failed to tail it.

Her husband in the dark? Not at all. He had performed work for MI6 in Switzerland, was trained as a wireless operator by Sonya, and as a Soviet agent carried out transmissions on her behalf from a bungalow in Kidlington, while her decoy apparatus was checked out by the cops in Oxford.

Living in a placid Cotswold hamlet? Not during the war, where her wireless was installed on the premises of Neville Laski, a prominent lawyer, in Summertown, Oxford. Useful to have a landlord with influence and prestige.

A real-life heroine? Not one’s normal image of a heroine. A Stalinist to the death, she ignored the horror of the Soviet Union’s prison-camp and praised its installation in East Germany after the war. Here Ms. Marton gets it right.

It appears that Mr. Macintyre has relied too closely on Sonya’s mendacious memoir, Sonjas Rapport, published in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, in 1977, under her nom de plume Ruth Werner. And he has done a poor job of inspecting the British National Archives.

(For verification of the true story about Sonya, see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html and https://coldspur.com/sonia-mi6s-hidden-hand/ )

My letter was not published.

As I declared in my Special Bulletin of December 8, I was, however, able to make my point. Professor Glees had introduced me to the Journal of Intelligence and National Security, recommending me as a reviewer of Macintyre’s book. Agent Sonya arrived (courtesy of the author) on October 8. By October 16, I had read the book and supplied a 6,000-word review for the attention of the Journal’s books editor in Canada. He accepted my text enthusiastically, and passed it on to his team in the UK. Apart from some minor editorial changes, and the addition of several new references, it constituted the review as it was published on-line almost two months later. It will appear in the next print edition of the Journal.

The team at the Journal were all a pleasure to work with, and they added some considerable value in preparing the article for publication, and providing some useful references that I had thought might be extraneous. But the process took a long time! Meanwhile, Claire Mulley had written an enthusiastic review of the book in the Spectator, and picked it as one of her ‘Books of the Year’. Similarly, the Sunday Times rewarded Macintyre by picking the production of one of their in-house journalists as one of the Books of the Year. I have to complement Macintyre on his ability to tell a rattling good yarn, but I wish that the literary world were not quite so cozy, and that, if books on complicated intelligence matters are going to be sent out to review, they could be sent to qualified persons who knew enough about the subject to be able to give them a serious critique.

Finally, I have to report on two book acquisitions from afar. It took four months for my copy of Superfrau iz GRU to arrive from Moscow, but in time for me to inspect the relevant chapters, and prepare my review of Agent Sonya. The other item that caught my eye was Macintyre’s information about the details of Rudolf Hamburger’s departure from Marseilles in the spring of 1939. I imagined this must have come from the latter’s Zehn Jahre Lager, Hamburger’s memoir of his ten years in the Gulag, after his arrest by the British in Tehran, and his being handed over to the Soviets. This was apparently not published until 2013. I thus ordered a copy from Germany, and it arrived in late November. Yet Hamburger’s story does not start until 1943: he has nothing to say about his time in Switzerland.

His son Maik edited the book, and provided a revealing profile of his father. Of his parents’ time in China, when Sonia started her conspiratorial work with Richard Sorge, he wrote: “Als sie nicht umhinkann, ihn einzuweihen, ist er ausser sich. Nicht nur, dass er sich hintergangen fühlt – sie hat die Familie aufs Spiel gesetzt.“ (“Since she could not prevent herself from entangling him, he is beside himself. Not just that he feels deceived – she has put the whole family at stake.”) When Sonia decided to return to Moscow for training, the marriage was over. And when she published her memoir in 1977 Maik noted: “Hamburger ist über diese Publikation und die Darstellung seiner Person darin hochgradig verärgert.“ (“Hamburger is considerably annoyed by this publication, and the representation of his character in it.”) Indeed, Maik. Your father suffered much on her account.

The John le Carré I Never Knew

John Le Carre

I noted with great sadness the death of John le Carré this month. I imagine I was one of many who, during their university years, read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and was blown over by this very unromantic view of the world of espionage. Perhaps it was that experience that led me into a lifelong fascination with that realm. He was a brilliant writer, especially in the sphere of vocal registers. I wrote an extensive assessment of him back in 2016 (see Revisiting Smiley & Co.), and do not believe I have much to add – apart from the inevitable factor of Sonia.

In our article in the Mail on Sunday (see: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html , Professor Glees and I had characterized Sonia’s story as real-life confirmation of le Carré’s verdict that ‘betrayal is always the handmaiden of espionage’ , and I concluded my detailed explanation of the saga (see: https://coldspur.com/sonia-mi6s-hidden-hand/ ) with the following words: “What it boils down to is that the truth is indeed stranger than anything that the ex-MI6 officer John le Carré, master of espionage fiction, could have dreamed up. If he ever devised a plot whereby the service that recruited him had embarked on such a flimsy and outrageous project, and tried to cover it up in the ham-fisted way that the real archive shows, while all the time believing that the opposition did not know what was going on, his publisher would have sent him back to the drawing-board.”

I had rather whimsically hoped that Mr. le Carré would have found these articles, and perhaps reached out to comment somewhere. But my hopes were dashed when I read Ben Macintyre’s tribute in the Times (see: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-le-carre-the-spy-who-was-my-friend-svr8tgv82 ). This is a typical item of Macintyrean self-promotion, as he encourages the glamour of le Carré to flow over him (‘Oh what prize boozers we were! How we joked and joshed each other!’), while the journalist attempts to put himself in a more serious class than his famous friend: “We shared a fascination with the murky, complex world of espionage: he from the vantage point of fiction and lived experience, whereas I stuck to historical fact and research.” Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

And then there was that coy plug for his book on Philby, A Spy Among Friends. “On another long ramble, between books and stuck for a new subject, I asked him what he thought was the best untold spy story of the Cold War. ‘That is easy,’ he said. ‘It is the relationship between Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott,’ the MI6 officer who worked alongside the KGB spy for two decades and was comprehensively betrayed by him.’ That led to another book, ostensibly about the greatest spy scandal of the century, but also an exploration of male friendship, the bonds of education, class and secrecy, and the most intimate duplicity. Le Carré wrote the afterword, refusing payment.” Did ELLI not even touch the Great Man’s consciousness? What a load of boloney.

Thus, if le Carré really believed that the Philby-Elliott relationship was the best untold story of the Cold War, I knew we were on shaky ground. And, sure enough, a discussion on Sonya followed. “We met for the last time in October, on one of those medical toots, in the Hampstead house. A single table lamp dimly illuminated the old sitting room, unchanged over the years. Having read my latest book [‘Agent Sonya,’ for those of you who haven’t been paying attention], he had sent an enthusiastic note and a suggestion we meet: “You made us over time love and admire Sonya herself, and pity her final disillusionment, which in some ways mirrors our own. What guts, and what nerve. And the men wimps or misfits beside her.”

Hallo!! What were you thinking, old boy? Macintyre had hoodwinked the Old Master himself, who had been taken in by Macintyre’s picaresque ramblings, and even spouted the tired old nonsense that Sonya’s disillusionment ‘in some ways mirrors our own’. Who are you speaking for, chum, and what gives you the right to assume you know how the rest of us feel? What business have you projecting your own anxieties and disappointments on the rest of us? ‘Loving and admiring’ that destructive and woefully misguided creature? What came over you?

It must be the permanent challenge of every novelist as to how far he or she can go in projecting his or her own emotional turmoils into the world of outside, and claiming they are universal. As le Carré aged, I think he dealt with this aspect of his experiences less and less convincingly. And there have been some very portentous statements made about his contribution to understanding human affairs. Thus, Phillipe Sands, in the New York Times: “David [not King Edward VIII, by the way, but oh, what a giveaway!] was uniquely able to draw the connections between the human and historical, the personal and the political, pulling on the seamless thread that is the human condition.” (Outside Hampstead intellectuals, people don’t really talk like that still, do they?) With le Carré, one was never sure if he believed that the intelligence services, with their duplicities, deceits, and betrayals, caused their operatives to adopt the same traits, or whether those services naturally attracted persons whose character was already shaped by such erosive activities.

I believe the truth was far more prosaic. MI5, for example, was very similar to any other bureaucratic institution. In the war years, recruits were not subjected to any kind of personality or ideological test. They received no formal training, and picked up the job as they went along. Rivalries developed. Officers had affairs with their secretaries (or the secretaries of other officers), and sometimes they married them. Plots were hatched for personal advancement or survival. (White eased out Liddell in the same way that Philby outmanoeuvred Cowgill.) What was important was the survival of the institution, and warding off the enemy (MI6), and, if necessary, lying to their political masters. The fact is that, as soon as they let rogues like Blunt in, did nothing when they discovered him red-handed, and then tried to manipulate him to their advantage, White and Hollis were trapped, as trapped as Philby and his cronies were when they signed their own pact with the devil. Only in MI5’s case, these were essentially decent men who did not understand the nature of the conflict they had been drawn into.

On one aspect, however, Macintyre was absolutely right – the question of le Carré’s moral equivalence. With his large pile in Cornwall, and his opulent lunches, and royalties surging in, le Carré continued to rant about ‘capitalism’, as if all extravagant or immoral behaviour by enterprises, large or small, irrevocably damned the whole shooting-match. Would he have railed against ‘free enterprise’ or ‘pluralist democracy’? He reminded me of A. J. P. Taylor, fuming about capitalism during the day, and tracking his stock prices and dividends in the evenings. And le Carré’s political instincts took on a very hectoring and incongruous tone in his later years, with George Smiley brought out of retirement to champion the EU in A Legacy of Spies, and, a couple of years ago, Agent Running In The Field being used as a propaganda vehicle against the Brexiteers. (While my friend and ex-supervisor, Professor Anthony Glees, thinks highly of this book, I thought it was weak, with unconvincing characters, unlikely backgrounds and encounters, and an implausible plot.)

I could imagine myself sitting down in the author’s Hampstead sitting-room, where we open a second bottle of Muscadet, and get down to serious talk. He tells me how he feels he has been betrayed by the shabby and corrupt British political establishment. It is time for me to speak up.

“What are you talking about, squire? Why do you think you’re that important? You win a few, you lose a few. Sure, democracy is a mess, but it’s better than the alternative! And look at that European Union you are so ga-ga about? Hardly a democratic institution, is it? Those Eurocrats continue to give the Brits a hard time, even though the two are ideological allies, and the UK at least exercised a popular vote to leave, while those rogue states, Hungary and Poland, blackmail the EU into a shady and slimy deal over sovereignty, and weasel some more euros out of Brussels! Talk about moral dilemmas and sleaziness! Why don’t you write about that instead?  Aren’t you more nostalgic, in your admiration for the ‘European Project’, than all those Brexiteers you believe to be Empire Loyalists?”

But I notice he is no longer listening. I catch him whispering to one of his minions: “Who is this nutter? Get him out of here!”

I slip a few uneaten quails’ eggs into my pocket, and leave.

(A product of coldspur Syndications Inc. Not to be reproduced without permission.)

The Dead Ends of HASP

Professor Wilhelm Agrell

I had been relying on two trails to help resolve the outstanding mysteries of the so-called HASP messages that GCHQ had acquired from Swedish intelligence, and which reputedly gave them breakthroughs on decrypting some elusive VENONA traffic. (see Hasp & Spycatcher). One was a Swedish academic to whom Denis Lenihan had introduced me, Professor Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at the University of Lund in Sweden. Professor Agrell had delivered a speech on Swedish VENONA a decade ago, and had prepared a paper in English that outlined what he had published in a book in Swedish, unfortunately not (yet) translated into English. The other was the arrival of the authorised history of GCHQ by the Canadian academic, Professor John Ferris. It was perhaps reasonable to expect that the VENONA project would undergo a sustained analysis in this work, which was published in October of this year.

Professor Agrell’s work looked promising. His paper, titled ‘The Stockholm Venona – Cryptanalysis, intelligence liaison and the limits of counter-intelligence’, had been presented at the 2009 Cryptologic History Symposium, October 15 and 16, 2009, at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, MD. His annotations indicated that he had enjoyed extensive access to Swedish Security Police files, as well as some documents from the military intelligence and security services. Moreover, his analysis had benefitted from declassified American, German and British intelligence, along with some recently declassified Swedish files. His references included two useful-sounding books written in English, Swedish Signal Intelligence 1900-1945, byC.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman, and the same McKay’s From Information to Intrigue. Studies in Secret Service based on the Swedish Experience, 1939-1945. I acquired and read both volumes.

The experience was very disappointing. The two books were very poorly written, and danced around paradoxical issues. I prepared some questions for the Professor, to which he eventually gave me some brief answers, and I responded with some more detailed inquiries, to which he replied. He had never heard of HASP outside Wright’s book. He was unable to provide convincing responses over passages in his paper that I found puzzling. Towards the end of our exchange, I asked him about his assertion that ‘GCHQ has released agent-network VENONA traffic to the National Archives’, since I imagined that this might refer to some of the missing SONIA transmissions that Wright believed existed. His response was that he was referring to the ‘so called ISCOT material from 1944-45’. Well, I knew about that, and have written about it. It has nothing to do with VENONA, but contains communications between Moscow and guerilla armies in Eastern Europe, decrypted by Denniston’s group at Berkeley Street. At this stage I gave up.

In a future bulletin, I shall lay out the total Agrell-Percy correspondence, and annotate which parts of the exchange are, in my opinion, highly important, but I do not think we are going to learn much more from the Swedish end of things. The Swedes seem to be fairly tight-lipped about these matters.

I completed John Ferris’s Behind the Enigma on November 30, and put its 823 pages down with a heavy thud and a heavy sigh. This book must, in many ways, be an embarrassment to GCHQ. It is poorly written, repetitive, jargon-filled, and frequently circumlocutory. The author is poor at defining terms, and the work lacks a Glossary and Bibliography. Ferris has an annoying habit of describing historical events with modern-day terminology, and darts around from period to period in a bewilderingly undisciplined manner. He includes a lot of tedious sociological analysis of employment patterns at Bletchley Park and Cheltenham. One can find some very useful insights amongst all the dense analysis, but it is a hard slog tracking them down. And he is elliptical or superficial about the matters that interest me most, that is the interception and decipherment of Soviet wireless traffic.

One receives a dispiriting message straight away, on page 4. “This history could not discuss diplomatic Sigint after 1945, nor any technicalities of collection which remained current.” Yet this stipulation does not prevent Ferris from making multiple claims about GCHQ’s penetration of Soviet high-grade systems, and promoting the successes of other apparent diplomatic projects, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Cuba. For example, he refers to Dick White’s recommendation in 1968 that more Soviet tasks be handed over to the US’s NSA (p 311), but, not many pages later, he writes of the Americans’ desire not to fall behind British Sigint, and their need to maintain the benefit they received from GCHQ’s ‘power against Russia’ (p 340). On page 355 we learn that GCHQ ‘ravaged Soviet civil and machine traffic’. I do not know what all this means.

It seems that Ferris does not really understand VENONA. His coverage of MASK (the 1930s collection of Comintern traffic with agents in Britain) is trivial, he ignores ISCOT completely, and he characterizes VENONA in a similarly superficial fashion: “It [GCHQ] began an attack on Soviet systems. Between 1946 and 1948, it produced Britain’s best intelligence, which consumers rated equal to Ultra.” (p 279). He fails to explain how the project attacked traffic that had been stored from 1943 onwards, and does not explain the relationship between the USA efforts and the British (let alone the Swedes). His statement about the peak of UK/USA performance against Soviet traffic as occurring between 1945 and 1953 (p 503) is simply wrong. VENONA has just four entries in the Index, and the longest passage concerns itself with the leakage in Australia. He offers no explanation of how the problem of reused one-time-pads occurred, or how the British and American cryptologists made progress, how they approached the problem, and what was left unsolved. Of HASP, there is not a sign.

It is evident that GCHQ, for whatever reason, wants VENONA (and HASP) to remain not only secrets, but to be forgotten. All my appeals to its Press Office have gone unacknowledged, and the issue of Ferris’s History shows that it has no intention of unveiling anything more. Why these events of sixty years and more ago should be subject to such confidentiality restrictions, I have no idea. It is difficult to imagine how the techniques of one-time pads, and directories, and codebooks could form an exposure in cryptological defences of 2020, unless the process would reveal some other embarrassing situation. Yet I know how sensitive it is. A month or two back, I had the privilege of completing a short exchange with a gentleman who had worked for GCHQ for over thirty years, in the Russian division. He said he had never heard of HASP. Well, even if he had, that was what he had been instructed to say. But we know better: ‘HASP’ appears on that RSS record.

Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld

Anthony Blunt
Anthony Blunt

Every schoolboy knows who murdered Atahualpa, and how in April 1964 the MI5 officer Arthur Martin elicited a confession of Soviet espionage from Anthony Blunt. Yet I have been rapidly coming to the conclusion that the whole episode at Blunt’s apartment at the Courtauld Institute was a fiction, a sham event conceived by Roger Hollis and Dick White, in order to conceal Blunt’s earlier confession, and to divert responsibility for the disclosure on to an apparently recent meeting between MI5 officer Arthur Martin and the American Michael Straight, after the latter’s confession to the FBI in the summer of 1963. By building a careful chronology of all the historical sources, but especially those of British Cabinet archives, the FBI, and the CIA, a more accurate picture of the extraordinary exchanges MI5 had with Blunt, Straight and the fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, can be constructed.

The dominant fact about the timing of Blunt’s confession is that all accounts (except one) use Penrose and Freeman’s Conspiracy of Silence as their source, which, in turn, refers to a correspondence between the authors and the MI5 officer Arthur Martin in 1985. Only Christopher Andrew claims that an archival report exists describing the events, but it is identified solely in Andrew’s customarily unacademic vernacular of ‘Security Service Archives’. The details are vaguely the same. On the other hand, several commentators and authors, from Andrew Boyle to Dame Stella Rimington, suggest that Blunt made his confession earlier, though biographers and historians struggle with the way that the ‘official’ account has pervaded the debate, and even use it as a reason to reject all the rumours that Blunt had made his compact some time beforehand.

This project has been several months in the making. I was provoked by Wright’s nonsense in Spycatcher to take a fresh look at the whole search for Soviet moles in MI5. I re-read Nigel West’s Molehunt, this time with a more critical eye. Denis Lenihan and I collaborated on a detailed chronology for the whole period. I reinspected the evidence that the defector Anatoli Golitsyn was supposed to have provided that helped nail Philby. The journalist James Hanning alerted me to some passages in Climate of Treason that I had not studied seriously. I was intrigued by David Cannadine’s rather lavish A Question of Retribution (published earlier this year), which examined the furore over Blunt’s ousting from the British Academy after his role as a spy had been revealed, and I pondered over Richard Davenport-Hines’s misleading review of Cannadine’s book in the Times Literary Supplement a few months ago. I went back to the source works by Boyle, Andrew, West, Costello, Pincher, Penrose and Freeman, Wright, Bower, Straight, Cairncross, Perry, Rimington, and Smith to unravel the incongruous and conflicting tales they spun, and acquired Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross. I inspected carefully two files at the National Archives, declassified in the past five years, that appeared to have been misunderstood by recent biographers.

The dominant narrative runs as follows: Golitsyn created interest in the notion of the ‘Cambridge 5’, and helped to identify Philby as the Third Man; Michael Straight confessed to the FBI that he had been recruited by Blunt at Cambridge; the FBI notified MI5; MI5 interviewed Straight; MI5 could not move against Blunt (the Fourth Man) simply because of Straight’s evidence; MI5 concocted a deal whereby Blunt would essentially receive a pardon if he provided information that led to the ‘Fifth Man’; Blunt revealed that he had recruited John Cairncross; at some stage, MI5 interrogated Cairncross who, on similar terms, confessed; Cairncross’s evasions deflected suspicions that he could have been the ‘Fifth Man’; other candidates were investigated. Blunt’s culpability, and the fact of a deal, remained a secret until, in 1979, Andrew Boyle revealed the role of ‘Maurice’ in Climate of Treason, Private Eye outed ‘Maurice’ as Blunt, and Margaret Thatcher admitted the unwritten compact that had been agreed with Blunt. Yet a muddle endured.

The archives show that this was not the actual sequence of events. The timing does not make sense. And it all revolves around Arthur Martin’s two interrogations of Cairncross in Cleveland, Ohio, in February and March 1964, i.e. before the date claimed for Blunt’s confession to Arthur Martin. Wright’s Spycatcher is perhaps the most egregious example of a work where the chronology is hopelessly distorted or misunderstood, and the author is shown to be carrying on a project of utter disinformation. All other accounts show some manner of delusion, or laziness in ignoring obvious anomalies. The fact is that Hollis, White, Trend & co. all hoodwinked the Foreign Office, and withheld information from the new Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home.  In my report at the end of January 2021 I shall reveal (almost) all. In the meantime, consider these priceless quotations (from a FO archive):

“It is desirable that we should be seen to be doing everything possible to bring him [Cairncross] to justice.’  (Sir Bernard Burrows, Chairman of the JIC, February 20, 1964)

“At the same time I am bound to say I think MI5 are taking a lot on themselves in deciding without any reference not to pursue such cases at some time (in this instance in Rome, Bangkok, and U.K.) and then to go ahead at others (here in USA). The political implication of this decision do not appear to have been weighed: only those of the mystery of spy-catching. However effective this may now have been proved, it is apt to leave us with a number of difficult questions to answer.” (Howard Caccia, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, February 20, 1964)

“It is essential that I should be able to convince the F.B.I. that we are not trying to find a way out of taking action but, on the contrary, that we are anxious to prosecute if this proves possible.” (Roger Hollis to Burke Trend, February 25, 1964)

“We must not appear reluctant to take any measures which might secure Cairncross’s return to the United Kingdom.” (Burke Trend to the Cabinet, February 28, 1964)

The tradition of Sir Humphrey Appleby was in full flow.

Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away

Trevor Barnes

Regular Coldspur readers will have spotted that I frequently attempt to get in touch with authors whose books I have read, sometimes to dispute facts, but normally to try to move the investigations forward. It is not an easy task: the more famous an author is, the more he or she tends to hide behind his or her publisher, or press agent. Some approaches have drawn a complete blank. I often end up writing emails to the publisher: in the case of Ben Macintyre, it got ‘lost’. When Ivan Vassiliev’s publisher invited me to contact him by sending a letter for him to their office, and promised to forward it to his secret address in the UK, I did so, but then heard nothing.

With a little digging, however, especially around university websites, one can often find email addresses for academics, and write in the belief that, if an address is displayed publicly, one’s messages will at least not fall into a spam folder. I am always very respectful, even subservient, on my first approach, and try to gain the author’s confidence that I am a voice worth listening to. And I have had some excellent dialogues with some prominent writers and historians – until they get tired of me, or when I begin to challenge some of their conclusions, or, perhaps, when they start to think that I am treading on ‘their’ turf. (Yes, historians can be very territorial.). For I have found that many writers – qualified professional historians, or competent amateurs – seem to prefer to draw a veil of silence over anything that might be interpreted as a threat to their reputation, or a challenge to what they have published beforehand, in a manner that makes clams all over the world drop their jaws at the speed of such tergiversation.

In this business, however, once you lose your inquisitiveness, I believe, you are lost. And if it means more to you to defend a position that you have previously taken, and on which you may have staked your reputation, than to accept that new facts may shake your previous hypotheses and conclusions, it is time to retire. If I put together a theory about some mysterious, previously unexplained event, and then learn that there is a massive hole in it, I want to abandon it, and start afresh. (But I need to hear solid arguments, not just ‘I don’t agree with you’, or ‘read what Chapman Pincher says’, which is what happens sometimes.)

Regrettably, Trevor Barnes has fallen into that form of stubborn denial. When I first contacted him over Dead Doubles, he was communicative, grateful, open-minded. He accepted that the paperback edition of his book would need to reflect some corrections, and agreed that the several points of controversy that I listed in my review were all substantive. But when I started to quiz him on the matter of the disgraced MI5 officer (see Dead Doubles review), he declined to respond to, or even acknowledge, my messages. (And maybe he found my review of his book on coldspur, since I did take the trouble to point it out to him.) The question in his case revolves around a rather clumsy Endnote in his book, which, instead of achieving the intended goal of burying the topic, merely serves to provoke additional interest.

Note 8, to Part One, on page 250, runs as follows:

“Private information. James Craggs is a pseudonym. The name of the case officer is redacted from the released MI5 files. The author discovered his real identity but was requested by MI5 sources not to name him to avoid potential distress to his family.”

The passage referred to is a brief one where Barnes describes how David Whyte (the head of D2 in MI5), swung into action against Houghton. I reproduce it here:

“He chose two officers to join him on the case. One was George Leggatt, half-Polish and a friend, with whom he had worked on Soviet counter-espionage cases in the 1950s. The case officer was James Craggs, a sociable bachelor in his late thirties.”

That’s it. But so many questions raised! ‘Private information’ that ‘Craggs’ was ‘a sociable bachelor’, which could well have been a substitute for ‘confirmed bachelor’ in those unenlightened days, perhaps? (But then he has a family.) What else could have been ‘private’ about this factoid? And why would a pseudonym have to be used? Did ‘Craggs’ perform something massively discreditable to warrant such wariness after sixty years? Barnes draws to our attention the fact that the officer’s name is redacted in the released file. But how many readers would have bothered to inspect the files if Barnes has simply used his real name, but not mentioned the attempts to conceal it, or the suggestion of high crimes and misdemeanours? By signalling his own powers as a sleuth, all Barnes has done is invite analysis of what ‘Craggs’ might have been up to, something that would have lain dormant if he had not highlighted it.

For ‘Craggs’’s real name is quite clear from KV 2/4380. Denis Lenihan pointed out to me that the name was apparent (without actually identifying it for me), and I confirmed it from my own inspection. The MI5 weeders performed a very poor job of censorship. Indeed, ‘Craggs’s’ name has been redacted in several places, in memoranda and letters that he wrote, and in items referring to him, but it is easy to determine what his real name was. On one report, dated May 25, 1960, Leggatt has headed his report: “Note on a Visit by Messrs. Snelling and Leggatt  . . .”. Moreover, on some of the reports written by Snelling himself, the initials of the author and his secretary/typist have been left intact in the bottom left-hand corner: JWES/LMM.

So, J. W. E. Snelling, who were you, and what were you up to? As I suggested in my review of Dead Doubles, the most obvious cause of his disgrace is his probable leaking to the Daily Mail journalist Artur Tietjen the details of Captain Austen’s testimony on Houghton’s behaviour in Warsaw. Yet it seems to me quite extraordinary that the institutional memory of his corruption could endure so sharply after sixty years. If there is no other record of what he did, the weeders would have done much better simply to leave his name in place. I can’t imagine that anyone would otherwise have started to raise questions.

Snelling is not a very common name, although, in an extraordinary coincidence, a ‘Freddie Snelling’ also appears in Dead Doubles. He was an antiquarian book-seller friend of the Krogers. From an inspection of genealogical records, however, it does not appear that the two could have been related. I performed some searches on ‘J. W. E. Snelling’, and came up with a couple of intriguing items. The name appears in the St. Edmund Hall Magazine of 1951-52 (see https://issuu.com/stedmundhall/docs/st_edmund_hall_magazine_1951) , and the Statesman’s Yearbook of 1966-67 shows that he was a First Secretary in the British Embassy to South Africa (see https://books.google.com/books?id=DdfMDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1412&lpg=PA1412&dq=j+w+e+snelling&source=bl&ots=8Pd9Dd0J97&sig=ACfU3U3DEgUt_KnJ2KZn_gbi9MbtoEjL8Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxjsmI06rtAhXFjVkKHf6pAmoQ6AEwCHoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=j%20w%20e%20snelling&f=false).  I wrote to the Librarian at St. Edmund Hall, asking for further details on Snelling. She acknowledged my request, but after several weeks the Archivist has not been able to respond.

Can any reader help? Though perhaps it is over to Trevor Barnes, now that he has opened up this can of worms, to bring us up to date. Moreover, I do not understand why Barnes was working so closely with MI5 on this book. Was he not aware that he would be pointed in directions they wanted him to go, and steered away from sensitive areas? In this case, it rather backfired, which has a humorous angle, I must admit. Intelligence historians, however, should hide themselves away – probably in some remote spot like North Carolina – never interview anybody, and stay well clear of the spooks. Just download the archives that are available, arrange for others to be photographed, have all the relevant books at hand and put on your thinking-cap. I admit the remoteness of so many valuable libraries, such as the Bodleian and that of Churchill College, Cambridge, represents a massive inconvenience, but the show must go on.

Bandwidth versus Frequency

Dr. Brian Austin

My Chief Radiological Adviser, Dr. Brian Austin, has been of inestimable value in helping me get things straight in matters of the transmission, reception and interception of wireless signals. Sometime in early 2021 I shall be concluding my analysis of the claims made concerning SONIA’s extraordinary accomplishments with radio transmissions from the Cotswolds, guided by Dr. Austin’s expert insights. In the meantime, I want to give him space here to correct a miscomprehension I had of wireless terminology. A few weeks ago, he wrote to me as follows:

Reading your July 31st “Sonia and MI6’s Hidden Hand”, I came across this statement:


“Since her messages needed to reach Moscow, she would have had to use a higher band-width (probably over 1000 kcs) than would have been used by postulated Nazi agents trying to reach . . . ”

This requires some modification, as I’ll now explain.  The term bandwidth (for which the symbol B is often used) implies the width of a communications channel necessary to accommodate a particular type of transmitted signal. In essence, the more complicated the message (in terms of its mathematical structure not its philological content) the wider the bandwidth required. The simplest of all signals is on-off keying such as hand-sent Morse Code. The faster it is sent, the more bandwidth it requires. However, for all typical hand-sent Morse transmissions the bandwidth needed will always be less than 1000 Hz.   On the other hand, if one wishes to transmit speech, whether by radio or by telephone, then the bandwidth needed is typically 3000 Hz (or 3 kHz).  Thus, all standard landline telephones are designed to handle a 3 kHz bandwidth in order to faithfully reproduce the human voice which, generally speaking, involves frequencies from about 300 Hz to 3300 Hz meaning the bandwidth is B = 3300 – 300 = 3000 Hz or 3 kHz.

By contrast, TV signals, and especially colour TV signals, are far more complicated than speech since even the old B&W TV had to convey movement as well as black, white and grey tones. To do that required at least a MHz or so of bandwidth. These days, a whole spectrum of colours as well as extremely rapid movement has to be transmitted and so the typical colour TV bandwidth for good quality reproduction in our British Pal (Phase Alternating Line) system is several MHz wide.  As an aside, the North American system is called NTSC. When Pal and NTSC were competing with each other in the 1960s for world dominance, NTSC was known disparagingly by ourselves as meaning Never Twice the Same Colour!

So your use of the term band-width above is incorrect. What you mean is frequency.  It is related to wavelength simply as frequency = speed of light / wavelength.  And it is also more common, and more accurate, to specify a transmitter’s frequency rather than its wavelength. All quartz crystals are marked in units of frequency. The only occasion Macintyre took a leap into such complexities in “Agent Sonya” was on p.151 where he indicated that her transmitter operated on a frequency of 6.1182 MHz. That sounds entirely feasible and it would have been the frequency marked on the particular crystal issued to her (and not purchased in the nearby hardware shop as BM would have us believe).

You are quite correct in saying that to communicate with Moscow required a higher frequency than would have been needed for contact with Germany, say. But it would have been considerably higher than the 1000 kcs you mentioned. 1000 kcs (or kHz in today’s parlance) is just 1 Mcs (MHz) and actually lies within the Medium Wave broadcast band. Such low frequencies only propagate via the ground wave whereas to reach Moscow, and indeed anywhere in Europe from England, will have necessitated signals of some good few MHz.

In general the greater the distance the higher the frequency but that is rather simplistic because it all depends on the state of the ionosphere which varies diurnally, with the seasons and over the 11-year sunspot cycle. Choosing the best frequency for a particular communications link is a pretty complex task and would never be left to the wireless operator. His or her masters would have experts doing just that and then the agent would be supplied with the correct crystals depending on whether the skeds were to be during daylight hours or at night and, also, taking into account the distance between the transmitting station and the receiving station. In my reading about the WW2 spy networks I have not come across any agent being required to operate over a period of years which might require a frequency change to accommodate the change in sunspot cycle that will have taken place.

An example from the world of international broadcasting illustrates all this rather nicely.  The BBC World Service used to operate on two specific frequencies for its Africa service. Throughout the day it was 15.4 MHz (or 15 400 kHz) while at night they would switch to 6.915 MHz (or 6 915 kHz). The bandwidth they used was about 10 kHz because they transmitted music as well as speech and music being more structurally complicated than speech needs a greater bandwidth than 3 kHz.

Thank you for your patient explanation, Brian.

Puzzles at Kew

The National Archives at Kew

I have written much about the bizarre practices at the National Archives at Kew, and especially of the withdrawal of files that had previously been made available, and had been exploited by historians. The most famous case is the that of files on Fuchs and Peierls: in the past three years, Frank Close and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan have written biographies of Klaus Fuchs that freely used files that have since been withdrawn. Then, in my August 31 piece about Liverpool University, I noted that, over a period of a couple of days where I was inspecting the records of a few little-known scientists, the descriptions were being changed in real-time, and some of the records I had looked at suddenly moved into ‘Retained’ mode.

My first reaction to this event was that my usage of Kew records was perhaps being monitored on-line, and decisions were being made to stop the leakage before any more damage was done. I thus decided to contact one of my Kew ‘insider’ friends, and describe to him what happened. He admitted to similar perplexity, but, after making some discrete inquiries, learned that there was an ongoing project under way to review catalogue entries, and attempt to make them more accurate to aid better on-line searchability. Apparently, I had hit upon an obscure group of records that was undergoing such treatment at the time. It was simply coincidence. (Although I have to point out that this exercise did not appear to be undertaken with strict professional guidelines: several spelling errors had in the meantime been introduced.)

A short time ago, however, another irritating anomaly came to light. I had been re-reading parts of Chris Smith’s The Last Cambridge Spy, when I noticed that he had enjoyed access to some files on John Cairncross which showed up as being ‘Retained’, namely HO 532/4, ‘Espionage activities by individuals: John Cairncross’. This sounded like a very important resource, and I discovered from Smith’s Introduction that, among the few documents on Cairncross released to the National Archives was ‘a Home Office file, heavily redacted’, which he ‘obtained via a freedom of information request.’ I asked myself why, if a file has been declassified by such a request, it should not be made available to all. It was difficult to determine whether Smith had capably exploited his find, since I found his approach to intelligence matters very tentative and incurious. I have thus asked my London-based researcher to follow up with Kew, and have provided him with all the details.

Incidentally, Denis Lenihan has informed me that his freedom of information request for the files of Renate Stephenie SIMPSON nee KUCZYNSKI and Arthur Cecil SIMPSON (namely, one of Sonia’s sisters and her husband), KV 2/2889-2993 has been successful. The response to Denis a few weeks ago contained the following passage: “Further to my email of 14 October 2020 informing you of the decision taken that the above records can all be released, I am very pleased to report that, at long last, these records are now available to view, albeit with a few redactions made under Section 40(2) (personal information) of the FOI Act 2000. The delay since my last correspondence has been because digitised versions of the files needed to be created by our Documents Online team and due to The National Archives’ restricted service because of the Coronavirus pandemic, this has taken the team longer to complete than it normally would. However the work is now compete [sic].”

This is doubly interesting, since I had been one of the beneficiaries of a previous policy, and had acquired the digitised version of KV 2/2889 back in 2017. So why that item would have to be re-digitised is not clear. And yes, all the files are listed in the Kew Catalogue as being available – and, by mid-December, they were all digitised, and available for free download.

Lastly, some business with the Cambridge University Library. On reading Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross, Agent Moliere, I was taken with some passages where he made claims about the activities of the FBI over Cairncross’s interrogations in Cleveland in early 1964. I could not see any references in his Endnotes, and my search on ‘Cairncross’ in the FBI Vault had drawn a blank. By inspecting Andrews’s Notes more carefully, however, I was able to determine that the information about the FBI came from a box in the John Cairncross papers held at Cambridge University Manuscripts Collection (CULMC) under ref. Add.10042. I thus performed a search on those arguments at the CULMC website, but came up with nothing.

My next step was thus to send a simple email to the Librarian at Cambridge, asking for verification of the archival material’s existence, whether any index of the boxes was available, and what it might cost to have some of them photographed. I very quickly received an automated reply acknowledging my request, giving me a ticket number, and informing me that they would reply to my inquiry ‘as soon as they can’. A very pleasant gentleman contacted me after a few days, explaining that the Cairncross boxes had not been indexed, but that he would inspect them if I could give him a closer idea of what I was looking for. I responded on December 17. Since then, nothing.

Trouble at RAE Farnborough

RAE Farnborough

Readers will recall my recent description of the remarkable career of Boris Davison (see Liverpool University: Home for Distressed Spies), who managed to gain a position at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough, shortly after he arrived in the UK, in 1938. I wondered whether there was anything furtive about this appointment, and my interest was piqued by a passage I read in Simon Ball’s Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services (2020). As I have suggested before, this is a very strange and oddly-constructed book, but it does contain a few nuggets of insider information.

On page 199, Ball introduces a report on Russian (i.e. ‘Soviet’) intelligence written in 1955 by Cedric Cliffe, former assistant to Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Its title was ‘Survey of Russian Espionage in Britain, 1935-1955’, and was filed as KV 3/417 at the National Archives. Ball explains how Britain suffered from penetration problems well before the Burgess and Maclean case, and writes: “The most notable UK-based agents of the ‘illegal’ [Henri Robinson] were two technicians employed at the time of their recruitment in 1935 at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, Farnborough. They had been identified after the war on the basis of German evidence, but no action was taken because one was still working usefully on classified weapons and the other one was a Labour MP.”  But Ball does not identify the two employees, nor comment on the astonishing fact that a spy’s role as a Labour MP presumably protected him from prosecution. Who were these agents?

Then I remembered that I had KV 3/417 on my desktop. Only I had not recognized it as the ‘Cliffe Report’: the author’s name does not appear on it. (That is where Ball’s insider knowledge comes into play.) And in paragraph 96, on page 24, Cliffe has this to say:

‘Wilfred Foulston VERNON was also [alongside one William MEREDITH] an aircraft designer employed at Farnborough. He was active in C.P.G.B. activities from about 1934 onwards and visited Russia twice, in 1935 and 1936. From 1936 onwards he was, like MEREDITH, passing secret information through WEISS, first to HARRY II and later to Henri Robinson. He was probably present when MEREDITH was introduced to WEISS by HARRY II. In August 1937, a burglary at VERNON’s residence led to the discovery there of many secret documents. As a result, VERNON was suspended from the R.A.E., charged under the Official Secrets Acts, and fined £50 – for the improper possession of these documents, it should be noted, and not for espionage, which was not at this time suspected.’

Cliffe’s report goes on to state that, when Vernon’s espionage activities first became known, he was the Member of Parliament for Dulwich, which seat he won in 1945 and retained in 1950, losing it the following year. It was thought ‘impracticable to prosecute him’, though why this was so (parliamentary immunity? not wanting to upset the unions? opening the floodgates?) is not stated. Cliffe closes his account by saying that Vernon ‘admitted, under interrogation, that he had been recruited by Meredith and had committed espionage, but he told little else.’ An irritating paragraph has then been redacted before Cliffe turns to Vernon’s controller, Weiss.

This man was clearly Ball’s ‘Labour MP’. So what about his confession? MI5’s chunky set of files on Vernon can be inspected at KV 2/992-996, and they show that, once he lost his parliamentary seat in October 1951, MI5 was free to interrogate him, and he was somewhat ‘deflated’ by Skardon’s approach. After consulting with his sidekick, Meredith, he confessed to spying for the Soviets, and giving information to his controller. In 1948, Prime Minster Attlee had been ‘surprised and shocked’ to hear that MI5 had evidence against Vernon. Now that the Labour Party had lost the election, the case of Vernon & Meredith seemed to die a slow death. Vernon became a member of the London County Council. He died in 1975.

Little appears to have been written about the Weiss spy-ring. (Nigel West has noted them.) Andrew’s Defending the Realm has no reference to Cliffe, Weiss, Meredith, Vernon, or even the RAE. The Royal Aeronautical Establishment was obviously a security disaster, and a fuller tale about its subversion by Soviet agents, and the role of Boris Davison, remains to be told.

Eric Hobsbawm and ‘History Today’

Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm

Over the past six months History Today has published some provocative items about the historian Eric Hobsbawm. It started in May, when Jesus Casquete, Professor of the History of Political Thought and the History of Social Movements at the University of the Basque Country, provided an illuminating article about Hobsbawm’s activities as a Communist in Berlin in 1933, but concluded, in opposition to a somewhat benevolent appraisal by Niall Ferguson quoted at the beginning of his piece, that ‘Hobsbawm ignored entirely the shades of grey between his personal choice of loyalty and became blind to genocide and invasion, and the other extreme.’

The following month, a letter from Professor Sir Roderick Floud headed the correspondence. “As Eric’s closest colleague for 13 years and a friend for much longer”, he wrote, “I can testify to the fact that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is a travesty.” Floud then went on to make the claim that Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party because of his belief in fighting fascism, and claimed that Hobsbawm ‘did not betray his youthful – and ever-lasting – ideals’. Yet the threat from fascism was defunct immediately World War II ended. What was he talking about?

I thought that this argument was hogwash, and recalled that Sir Roderick must be the son of the Soviet agent Bernard Floud, M.P., who committed suicide in October 1967. I sympathize with Sir Roderick in the light of his tragic experience, but it seemed that the son had rather enigmatically inherited some of the misjudgments of the father. And, indeed, I was so provoked by the space given to Sir Roderick’s views that I instantly wrote a letter to Paul Lay, the Editor. I was gratified to learn from his speedy acknowledgment that he was very sympathetic to my views, and would seriously consider publishing my letter.

And then further ‘arguments’ in Hobsbawm’s defence came to the fore. In the August issue, Lay dedicated the whole of his Letters page to rebuttals from his widow, Marlene, and from a Denis Fitzgerald, in Sydney, Australia. Marlene Hobsbawm considered it an ‘abuse’ to claim that her late husband was ‘an orthodox communist who adhered faithfully to Stalinist crimes’, and felt obligated to make a correction. He did not want to leave the Party as he did not want to harm it, she asserted. Fitzgerald raised the McCarthyite flag, and somehow believed that Hobsbawm’s remaining a member of the Communist Party was an essential feature of his being able to contribute to ‘progressive developments’. “He was not to be bullied or silenced by Cold Warriors” – unlike what happened to intellectuals in Soviet Russia, of course.

So what had happened to my letter? Why were the correspondence pages so one-side? Was I a lone voice in this debate? Then, next month, my letter appeared. My original text ran as follows:

“I was astonished that you dedicated so much space to the bizarre and ahistorical defence of Eric Hobsbawm by Professor Sir Roderick Floud.

Floud writes that Hobsbawm ‘stayed in the Communist Party’ after 1956 ‘because of his belief in fighting fascism and promoting the world revolution, by means of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front’. Yet fascism was no longer a threat in 1956; the Popular Front had been dissolved in 1938, to be followed soon by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which Hobsbawm and Floud conveniently overlook. Even though Stalin was dead by 1956, Khrushchev was still threatening ‘We shall bury you!’

Floud concludes his letter by referring to Hobsbawm’s ‘youthful – and ever-lasting ideals’, having earlier described the statement that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is ‘a travesty’. Some contradiction, surely.

Like his unfortunate father before him, who was unmasked as a recruiter of spies for the Soviet Union, and then committed suicide, Floud seems to forget that communist revolutions tend to be very messy affairs, involving the persecution and slaughter of thousands, sometimes millions. If Hobsbawm’s dreams had been fulfilled, he, as a devout Stalinist, might have survived, but certainly academics like Floud himself would have been among the first to be sent to the Gulag.”

Lay made some minor changes to my submission (removing references to the suicide of Floud’s father, for instance), but the message was essentially left intact. And there the correspondence appears to have closed. (I have not yet received the November issue.) I was thus heartened to read the following sentence in a review by Andrew Roberts of Laurence Rees’s Hitler and Stalin in the Times Literary Supplement of November 20: “That these two [Hitler and Stalin] should be seen as anything other than the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of totalitarianism might seem obvious to anyone beyond the late Eric Hobsbawm, but it does need to be restated occasionally, and Rees does so eloquently.”  Hobsbawm no doubt welcomed George Blake on the latter’s recent arrival at the Other Place, and they immediately started discussing the Communist utopia.

End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes

Tom Clark

Towards the end of November I received a Christmas Card signed by the editor of Prospect magazine, Tom Clark. The message ran as follows: “Thank you for your support of Prospect this year. Myself and the whole team here wish you a very happy Christmas.” I suppose it would be churlish to criticize such goodwill, but I was shocked. “Myself and the whole team  .  .” – what kind of English is that? What was wrong with “The whole team and I”? If the editor of a literary-political magazine does not even know when to use a reflexive pronoun, should we trust him with anything else?

I have just been reading Clive James’s Fire of Joy, subtitled Roughly Eight Poems to Get By Heart and Say Aloud. I was looking forward to seeing James’s choices, and his commentary. It has been a little disappointing, with several odd selections, and some often shallow appreciations by the Great Man. For instance, he reproduces a speech by Ferrara from My Last Duchess, by Robert Browning, which contains the horrible couplet:

            But to myself they turned (since none puts by

            The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

This is not verse that should be learned by heart. To any lover of the language, the phrase ‘They turned to me’, not ‘to myself’, should come to mind, and, since ‘but’ is a preposition, it needs to be followed by the accusative or dative case, i.e. ‘but me’. How could James’s ear be so wooden? Yet syntax turs out to be his weakness: in a later commentary on Vita Sackville-West’s Craftsmen, he writes: ‘. . . it was a particular focal point of hatred for those younger than he who had been left out of the anthology.’. ‘Him’, not ‘he’, after ‘for those’, Clive.

Of course, another famous ugly line is often overlooked. T.S. Eliot started The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock with the following couplet:

                Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

It should be ‘Let us go then, you and me’, since the pair is in apposition to the ‘us’ of ‘Let us go’. Rhyme gets in the way, again. What a way to start a poem! What was going through TSE’s mind? So how about this instead?

Let us go then, you and me,

When the evening is spread out above the sea

But then that business about ‘a patient etherized upon a table’ doesn’t work so well, does it? Poetry is hard.

It’s ROMANES EUNT DOMUS all over again.

Returning to Clark and Prospect, however, what is this ‘support’ business? Does Clark think that his enterprise is some kind of charity for which his subscribers shell out their valuable shekels? I recall our very capable and inspiring CEO at the Gartner Group offering similar messages of gratitude to our customers, as if he were not really convinced that the product we offered was of justifiable value to them. I shall ‘support’ Prospect only so long as it provides insightful and innovative analysis, and shall drop it otherwise. Moreover, if Clark persists with such silly and pretentious features as ‘the world’s top 50 thinkers’ (Bong-Joon Ho? Igor Levit?, but mercifully no Greta Thunberg this year), it may happen sooner rather than later. I was pleased to see a letter published in the October issue, as a reaction to the dopey ’50 top thinkers’, where the author pointed out that there are billions of people on the planet whose thinking capabilities are probably unknown to the editors. The letter concluded as follows: “I know it’s a ‘bit of fun’, but it’s the province of the pseudo-intellectual pub bore to assert a right to tell us who the 50 greatest thinkers are.”

I wrote to Clark, thanking him, but also asked him how many people were involved in constructing his garbled syntax. I received no reply. Probably no Christmas card for me next year.

I wish a Happy New Year to all my readers, and thank you for your ‘support’.

December Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Late Spring Round-Up

‘Dave’ Springhall’s Headstone

Dum spiro, conspiro

I was intending to publish this month the final chapter in the series The Mystery of the Undetected Radios, but was inhibited from doing so by the closure of the National Archives at Kew. I had performed 90% of the research, but needed to inspect one critical file to complete my story. Since my doughty researcher, Dr. Kevin Jones, will not be able to photograph it until we get the ‘All Clear’, the story will have to remain on hold. Instead, I use this month’s bulletin to sum up progress on a number of other projects.

Contents:

  • Sonia and Len Beurton
  • Ben Macintyre
  • Prodding Comrade Stalin
  • The National Archives and Freedom of Information
  • Professor Frank Close at the Bodleian
  • The BBC and Professor Andrew
  • Nigel West’s new publications, and a look at ELLI
  • The Survival of Gösta Caroli
  • Dave Springhall and the GRU
  • ‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp Tycoon Romance Drama!’ (exclusive)
  • China and the Rhineland Moment

Sonia and Len Beurton

I published the recent bulletin, The Letter from Geneva, because I believed it was important to get this story out before Ben MacIntyre’s book on Sonia appears. The fact that Len Beurton, Sonia’s bigamous husband, had acted as an agent-cum-informant for SIS in Switzerland seemed to me to be of immense importance for Sonia’s story, and the way that she was treated in the United Kingdom. Sonia herself wrote in her memoir that, when Skardon and Serpell came to interview her in 1947, they treated Len as if he were opposed to communism, rather than being an agent for it, abetting his wife as a recognized but possibly reformed spy or courier for Moscow, and the contents of the letter helped to explain why.

I wanted to have my conclusions published in a respectable medium, so as to have a more serious stake placed in the ground. I could not afford to wait for the more obscure journals on intelligence matters (and then perhaps get a rejection), and instead considered that the London Review of Books might be suitable. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, could conceivably have a personal interest in the story (she is an Eitingon, and has written about her grandfather’s cousin Leon, who managed the project to kill Trotsky). The LRB frequently runs long articles on off-beat subjects (in fact, it runs so many earnest leftish political pieces that one sometimes forgets what its mission is supposed to be), and it could presumably turn round my piece quickly. I thus sent my bulletin, as an exclusive, to Ms. Wilmers, with a covering letter explaining the appeal it could have to her readers, the opportunity for a scoop, and describing how I would re-work my article to make it a suitable contribution for her periodical.

After a week, I had heard nothing – not even an acknowledgment. (Coldspur 0 : The Establishment 1) So I made a similar approach to the Times Literary Supplement, with obviously different wording in the cover letter. The Editor, Stig Abell (who had, after all, commissioned a review of Misdefending the Realm a couple of years ago), responded very promptly, and informed me he was passing my piece to a sub-editor to review. A couple of days later, I received a very polite and appreciative email from the sub-editor, who offered me his regrets that he did not think it was suitable for the periodical. That was it. I thus decided to self-publish, on coldspur. (Coldspur 1 : The Establishment 1)

I have since been in contact with a few experts on this aspect of Sonia’s and Len’s case, and have discussed the puzzling circumstances of the letter, why Farrell chose that method of communication, and how he must have expected its passage to be intercepted. Why did he choose private mail instead of the diplomatic bag? Would the diplomatic bag have taken the same route as airmail, and would the German have opened that, too? Why did he not send an encrypted message over cable (although the consulate had probably run out of one-time pads by then), or wireless to SIS in London? Presumably because he did not want Head Office to see it: yet this method was just as risky. And what kind of relationship did he possibly think he could nurture with Len in those circumstances? No convincing explanation has yet appeared.

Ben Macintyre

Meanwhile, what about Ben Macintyre’s forthcoming book on Sonia, Agent Sonya, subtitled variously as Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, or as Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy? The publisher indicates that it is ‘expected on September 15, 2020’, yet Mr. Macintyre himself seems to be lagging a bit. His US website (to which I was directed at http://benmacintyre.com/US/ ) shouts at us in the following terms: ‘The Spy and the Traitor Arriving September 2018’, but even his UK website needs some refreshment, as it informs us that the paperback edition of his book on Gordievsky will be published on May 30, 2019 (http://benmacintyre.com/about-the-author/ ), and lists events in 2019 where the author will be signing copies of the same book. Wake up, Benny boy! This is 2020.

So, back to the publisher of Agent Sonya, where we can find information at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612487/agent-sonya-by-ben-macintyre/ . The promotional material includes the following passage: “In 1942, in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign accent.” This is all rather disturbing, however. Sonia’s husband, Len, returned from Switzerland only in July 1942, and they lived in Kidlington for a short time before moving to Summertown, in Oxford. Her third child, Peter, was not born until 1943. Len did not work as a machinist at that time, since he was unemployed until called up by the R.A.F. in November 1943. And their name was not ‘Burton’ but ‘Beurton’. Still, ‘thin’ and ‘elegant’ might, with a little imagination, conceivably be accurate, and she surely spoke English with a foreign accent. Not a promising start, however.

Macintyre has updated his blurb, apparently. The Waterstone’s site (https://www.waterstones.com/book/agent-sonya/ben-macintyre/2928377041403?utm_source=wsnfpreorderA230520&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=preorders ) tells a different story. The year has been corrected to 1944, where Sonia is pedalling her bicycle to ‘gather secrets from a nuclear physicist’. The only problem with this scenario is that Klaus Fuchs had left for the United States in December 1943.

So what is ailing our intrepid journalist? I hope things improve from here onwards. I shall place my advance order, and await the book’s arrival, as expectantly as the publisher itself. In fact, I heard from my sources earlier this month that Macintyre has started ‘tweeting’ about his new book. Meanwhile, I believe I have taken the necessary initiative by posting my analysis first. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 1)

Prodding Comrade Stalin

Neo-Keynesian Stalin?

It continues to dismay me how Stalin’s pernicious influence casts a depressing and inaccurate shadow over the history of the twentieth century. We can now read how President Putin attempts to resuscitate the days of the Great Patriotic War, emphasising Stalin’s role as a leader, and minimising events such as the Nazi-Soviet pact or the massacres of the Katyn Forest. At the end of last month, the New York Times carried a story that described how the Russian authorities have tried to discredit an amateur historian who discovered mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh in Karelia, near the White Sea. The State Military society is arguing that ‘thousands of people buried at Sandarmokh are not all Stalin’s victims but also include Soviet soldiers executed by the Finnish Army during World War II’, which is palpable nonsense.

Thus my disgust was intense when I read an article by one Lionel Barber in the Spectator of April 4. It included the following passage:

“Covid-19 is indeed the Great Leveller. Conventional wisdoms have been shattered. But crises offer opportunities. Wise heads should be planning ahead. FDR, Churchill, and, yes, Stalin lifted their sights in 1942-43 as the war against Nazi Germany began to turn. Prodded by gifted public servants like Keynes and others, these leaders thought about the future of Europe, the balance of power and the institutions of the post-war world.”

The idea that Stalin could have been ‘prodded’ by ‘gifted public servants’ is a topic to which perhaps only Michael Wharton (Peter Simple of the Daily Telegraph) could have done justice. I can alternatively imagine a canvas by Repin, perhaps, where the wise Stalin strokes his chin as he listens to a deputation from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, as if saying: ‘You make a strong point there, Alexey Dimitrovich. Maybe world revolution is no longer necessary. I shall change my plans immediately.’ I was propelled into sending a letter to the Editor of the magazine, which ran (in part) as follows:

“I wonder whether the Stalin Mr. Barber refers to is the same Joseph Stalin who incarcerated and killed millions of his own people, and then, after the war, enslaved eastern Europe, killing many of its democratic leaders and thousands of those who defied him, as he prepared for the inevitable collision with the ‘capitalist’ west? I doubt whether the despot Stalin was ‘prodded’ by anyone, except possibly by a distorted reading of Marx and Lenin, and certainly not by ‘gifted public servants’, whether they were Keynesian or not. The ‘future of Europe’, especially that of Poland, was a topic that, after Yalta, caused a sharp rift between the Allies, and led to the Cold War. Where did Mr. Barber learn his history?”

The Editor did not see fit to publish my letter. I do not know what is the saddest episode of this exercise: 1) The fact that Lionel Barber, who was Editor of the Financial Times from 2005 until January of this year, and is thus presumably an educated person, could be so desperately wrong about the character and objectives of Stalin; 2) The fact that the Editor of the Spectator was not stopped in his tracks when he read this passage, and did not require Mr. Barber to modify it; 3) The fact that no other Spectator reader apparently noticed the distortion, or bothered to write to the Editor about it; or 4) The fact that the Editor, having read my letter, determined that the solecism was so trivial that no attention needed to be drawn to it. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 2)

To remind myself of the piercing insights of Michael Wharton, I turned to my treasured copy of The Stretchford Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, and quickly alighted on the following text, from 1968:

                                                            Poor old has-beens

“The Soviet Government,” said a Times leader writer the other day, “has become hopelessly outdated and out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.”

So the Soviet Government is hopelessly outdated, is it? It has just imposed its will on the Czechs and Slovaks by force. And this is supposed to be hopelessly outdated in an age which, thanks to perverted science (a highly contemporary movement if there ever was one), has seen and will see force repeatedly and successfully applied on a scale undreamed of by the conquerors of the past.

So force is outdated. Treachery is outdated. War is outdated. Pain is out dated. Death is outdated. Evil itself is not only outdated but out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.

That a writer, presumably intelligent, certainly literate and possibly able to influence the opinions of others, can believe these things is positively terrifying. If the Russian Communist leaders, as we are told day in day out, are now cowering in the Kremlin in a state of extreme terror here is some little comfort for them.

When Soviet tanks are on the Channel Coast, shall we still be telling ourselves that the Soviet Government is outdated and out of touch? As we are herded into camps for political re-education or worse, shall we still go on saying to each other, with a superior smile: ‘This is really too ridiculously outdated for words. I mean, it’s quite pathetically out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.’?”

There was as much chance of Brezhnev and his cronies paying heed to ‘contemporary movements at home and abroad’ in 1968 as there was of Stalin being prodded ‘by gifted public servants’ in 1946. Pfui!

As a final commentary on this calamity, a few weeks ago I read Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe, published last year, which explained how duplicitous Stalin was in his dealings with western political entities, and how he restrained European communist parties until the Soviet Union successfully tested the bomb in August 1949. One of the books cited by Naimark was Grigory Tokaev’s Stalin Means War, published in 1951. I acquired a copy, and read how, in 1947, Colonel Tokaev had been commissioned by Stalin to acquire German aeronautical secrets, by any means necessary, including the kidnapping of scientists, to enable the Soviet Union to construct planes that could swiftly carry atomic bombs to New York. Thus would Stalin’s plans for world revolution be enforced.

‘Stalin Means War’

I do not think this book is a hoax. Tokaev managed to escape, with his wife and young daughter, to the United Kingdom at the end of 1947, where he had a distinguished academic career, and managed to avoid Moscow’s assassins. He died in 2003, in Cheam, in leafy Surrey, just a few miles from where I was born and grew up. I wish I had had the honour of shaking his hand. His book provides undeniable evidence that Stalin was not listening to gifted civil servants, and musing about the peaceful organisation of the world’s institutions. He wanted war.

The National Archives and Freedom of Information

In my recent piece on Rudolf Peierls (The Mysterious Affair  . . . Part 2) I drew attention to the increasing trend for archival material that had previously been released to be withdrawn and ‘retained’. Further inspection, prompted by a deeper search by Dr. Kevin Jones, reveals that an enormous amount of material is no longer available, especially in the ‘AB’ (records of the Atomic Energy Authority) category. I have counted 43 files alone in AB 1, 2, 3, & 4, mainly on Rudolf Peierls, including his correspondence, as well as multiple reports on Pontecorvo, and including Fuchs’s interview by Perrin. For instance, if you look up AB 1/572, you will find a tantalising introduction to the papers of Professor Peierls, described as ‘Correspondence with Akers, Arms, Blackman [Honor?], Blok, Bosanquet [Reginald?], Brown . . .’, from the period 1940-1947: yet the rubric informs us that ‘This record is closed while access is under review’.

I suspect some of these files may never have been made available, but it is hard to tell unless one has been keeping a very close watch on things. For example, the file on Perrin’s interviews with Fuchs (AB 1/695) has been well mined by other researchers, and the fact that the statement ‘Opening Date: 16 July 2001’ appears below the standard message would suggest that this file has indeed been withdrawn after a period of availability. But does the lack of any such date indicate that the file was never released, or is the absence merely the inconsistent application of policy? Several months ago, I referred to another provocative file, HO 532/3 (‘Espionage activities by individuals: Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls’),which has a different status of ‘Closed or Retained Document: Open Description’, where the rubric reads ‘This record is retained by a government department’, and has never been sent to the National Archives. It puzzles me somewhat as to why the Home Office would even acknowledge the existence of such a controversial file, as an open description without delivery just encourages speculation, but I suppose that is how bureaucracy works, sometimes.

Dr. Jones (who has made it his speciality to find his way among prominent archives) offered me his personal interpretation, which may be very useful for other researchers. He wrote to me as follows:

  • “Where a file is stated to be ‘closed while access is under review’, but has ‘Open Document’ in the ‘Closure status’ field (e.g. AB 1/572), then the file has always been available, until its ‘disappearance’.
  • Similarly, as with AB 1/695, if there is a specific ‘Record opening date’ the previously retained file was made available from that date, again until its ‘disappearance’.
  • With the likes of HO 532/3, where it is stated ‘Retained by Department under Section 3.’”, the file has indeed never been available.
  • Many of these ‘Retained’ files do reveal the file’s title (the ‘Open Description’) to tantalise the researcher, but many such files are listed in the catalogue with no title/description.
  • Where a specific government department is named in a retained file entry (e.g. FO, MOD, etc.), it is obliged to process a FoI request, though don’t expect a quick response, especially if they are composing various forms of waffle to justify not releasing the file! When the ‘government department’ is not named (as with HO 532/3), there is good chance it is retained by MI5/MI6, both of which are exempt from the FoI Act (well, certainly the latter, which also holds the retained SOE files; not 100% sure about MI5). In any instance, click the ‘Contact Us’ button and the TNA’s FoI team will inform you of the good/bad news.”

Occasionally, therefore, the researcher is invited to submit an FoI (Freedom of Information) request, as an attempt to challenge the status of the censored file. I performed this over the above Espionage file, on the grounds that no conceivable reason could be justified for withholding it now that the subjects (and their offspring) are all dead, but received just an acknowledgment. My colleague Denis Lenihan had approached GCHQ concerning the HASP file (referred to by Nigel West and Peter Wright), which was claimed to contain transcripts of Soviet wireless messages intercepted in Sweden during WW II. Denis requested its release, as no conceivable aspect of British security could be damaged through its publication, but his request was rejected by the GCHQ Press Office (as if it were simply a matter of PR).

Denis then brought my attention to another statutory body whither appeals could be sent – the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. I had just read an article in the Historical Journal of March 2014, by Christopher J. Murphy and Daniel W. B. Lomas (‘Return to Neverland? Freedom of Information and the History of British Intelligence’), which very quickly explained that ‘the intelligence and security services fall outside its provisions, in marked contrast to the comparable legislation in the United States  . . .’ I thus wondered why we bothered, and under what circumstances any of the security services (MI5, SIS, GCHQ) would feel they should have to even consider such requests. But, after all, Kew does advertise the facility: is it an exercise in futility?

Denis wrote to me as follows: “While they’re right about the FOI legislation, the security agencies react in odd but sometimes helpful ways. I remember Pincher saying somewhere that the Romer Report (re the Houghton/Molody/Kroger case) was obtained from MI5 by someone who applied under FOI. I once sought a document from MI5 and got the classic Sir Humphrey response: ‘while MI5 is not subject to the FOI Act, it has been decided to treat your application under that Act. It has been unsuccessful’.” That was rich – so generous! Then Denis went on to say that the authors of the article appeared not to be aware of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to which he had turned with the HASP material. (On his recommendation, I made a companion request, referring to the fact that a reference to HASP was evident on some of the RSS records, and that it was thus in the public interest to make the material available. I have since conducted some deep research into the HASP phenomenon: I shall report in full in next month’s coldspur.)

I followed up Denis’s valuable lead to Chapman Pincher’s Dangerous to Know. Pincher’s account of the application, and its rejection, can be seen in the chapter ‘The Elli Riddle’, on pages 318 and 319. An official of the Intelligence and Security Committee suggested that Pincher complain to the Tribunal about MI5’s lack of action on a ‘missing’ report on Gouzenko made by Roger Hollis. The Tribunal had been set up in 2000, under the Human Rights Act, to consider complaints about the public authorities, but Pincher had, surprisingly, never heard of it. It took notice of Pincher’s request (would it have paid heed to submissions by those of lesser standing, without a platform in the media?), and required MI5 to respond on the status of the Hollis report.

MI5 sent two items of correspondence to Pincher, stating that ‘despite an extensive search of the Service’s archives ‘it had to conclude that no record of the important interview was ever made’. And that appeared to be the end of the affair – until William Tyrer, through an astonishing display of terrier-like determination, managed to extract a copy from MI5, having first discovered a reference to a vital telegram in the Cleveland Cram archive. Tyrer wrote up his conclusions in 2016, in an article in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2016.1177404), and Denis Lenihan has analysed Tyrer’s findings in Roger Redux: Why the Roger Hollis Case Won’t Go Away.

As the Tribunal’s website (https://www.ipt-uk.com/ ) explains, the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 did strengthen provisions for the public to make appeals, but it is not clear to me that the withholding of files really fits into what the IPT declares its mission, namely ‘a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques’. That sounds more like heavy-handed surveillance techniques, or officers and agents masquerading as person they were not in order to infiltrate possibly dissident groups. And the organisation has a very bureaucratic and legalistic methodology, as the recent decision on an MI5 case shows (see: https://www.ipt-uk.com/judgments.asp, and note that the Tribunal cannot spell ‘Between’). It is difficult to see how the body could sensibly process a slew of failed FoI requests. And what about the Home Office, retaining aged documents? That doesn’t come under the grouping of security services.

Yet all of this fails to grapple with the main question: why has the Government suddenly become so defensive and concerned about records dealing with matters of atomic power and energy, most of them over seventy years old, and many of which have already been dissected in serious books? In the articles to which I provided links beforehand, Michael Holzman and Robert Booth say it all. The lack of a proper explanation is astounding, and the blunderbuss approach just draws even more attention to the fact that the civil service is out of control. Did Peierls’s letters to Blok and others betray some secrets that would be dangerous for the country’s foes to get hold of? I cannot imagine it. Maybe all will be revealed soon, but the furtive and uncommunicative way in which these files are being withheld just induces more distrust of the authorities, and their condescending attitude to the public. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 3)

Professor Frank Close at the Bodleian

Professor Frank Close

My status as Friend of the Bodleian entitles me to attend events staged by that institution, and a couple of months ago I received the following invitation: “Our first video by Professor Frank Close, available exclusively to the Friends, can be viewed here. In this talk, ‘Trinity: Klaus Fuchs and the Bodleian Library’, Professor Close uses the Bodleian’s collections to describe an extraordinary tale of Communist spies and atomic bombs.” I viewed the presentation on YouTube, but I don’t believe that it is available solely through subscription, as the above link appears to function properly.

It does not appear that Klaus Fuchs ever visited the Bodleian Library, but Professor Close uses Bodleian resources, such as the correspondence of Rudolf Peierls, and the photographic collection of Tony Skyrme, another Trinity College, Cambridge man, and contributor to the Manhattan Project (see https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3424 ) to weave a fascinating story about Fuchs. Skyrme accompanied Fuchs and the Peierls family on a ski-ing holiday in Switzerland in 1947, and produced a riveting set of photographs of that adventure, some of which Close reproduces in Trinity, his biography of Fuchs. Close also makes some fascinating linkages between the dates that Fuchs claimed vacation days from his work at Birmingham, and the timings of wireless messages to Moscow reporting on the communication of his latest secrets. He does, however, avoid any possible hint of controversy over Peierls’s career, ignoring what I have written about him, even though his final message was a very pertinent one about the relationship between Fuchs and those who ‘adopted’ him, and how he eventually betrayed them.

Since I have read Close’s book, and am familiar with the overall story, the pace of his presentation was a little slow for me. Yet I could see that Close is a very gifted lecturer, and must have truly energized his students when he was a working physics don. I accordingly sent an email congratulating him on his performance, at the same time asking a question about the source of some of his data. I never received a reply. Apparently I have fallen out of favour with the learned professor, who was so eager to communicate with me a few years ago. (Coldspur 2: The Establishment 4)

The BBC and Professor Andrew

Readers may recall my last Round-up, in November 2019, where I left with the optimistic projection that, having been able to speak to Mr Brennan’s Personal Assistant, and hearing from her that she would commit to follow up on my letter, I might be able to make some progress on my complaint about Professor Andrew’s high-handed, even contemptuous, behaviour towards the listeners to the ‘Today’ show. (This concerns a letter written by Eric Roberts to a friend which Andrew categorized as ‘the most extraordinary intelligence document’ that he had ever seen, but of which he later claimed to have no memory.)

Well, I heard nothing. So, early in January, I tried to call the lady at Broadcasting House. (I had to explain who I was to get past the switchboard.) And there was no reply. I thus tried asking the switchboard operator if he could give me her email address, telling him, quite truthfully, that I was following up a previous conversation with her. And, believe it or not, in what was probably a gross breach of institutional policy, he gave it to me. I was thus able to write to her, as follows:

Dear Xxxxxxxx,

You may recall that we spoke several weeks ago about my correspondence with the BBC, specifically with Bob Shennan. You were familiar with my letter, and told me that it had been passed to Audience Services. You also said that you would personally ensure that I received follow-up.

Well, I have heard nothing since, and felt it was time to make contact again. Could you please explain to me what is happening, and why I have not yet received a reply to my letters?

Thank you.

Sincerely, Tony Percy.

Six days later, I received the following reply:

Good evening Mr Percy,

I am very sorry I have just picked up this email, which was sitting in my Junk inbox.   I will again try and find out where your original correspondence is and why it hasn’t been responded to, I know you offered to resend me a copy, may I please take you up on this.

Apologies again for the non response and I will come back to you as soon as I can.

Regards,

Xxxxxxxx

EA to Group Managing Director.

‘Be patient now  . . .’  I thus responded:

Thanks for your reply, Xxxxxxxx.

The reason I was not able to send you the letters beforehand was that I never received any email from you giving me your address! Only when the kind switchboard operator offered it to me when I called last week (explaining that I had spoken to you before: otherwise he probably would not have handed it out), was I able to contact you.

Anyway, here are the two letters we discussed. I would really appreciate your tracking down whoever is tasked with giving me a response. You will notice that it is now over three months since my original letter  . . .

Best wishes, Tony.

I didn’t hear from Xxxxxxx again, but on January 21st, I received the following message:

Dear Antony Percy,

Reference CAS-5759257-M8M4X9


Thank you for your letters and we apologise for the time it has taken to respond.

I have discussed your request with Sanchia Berg whose report you refer to on the Today Programme. While we appreciate your frustration, the decision whether or not to release the document rests with the family and not with the BBC. Sanchia has confirmed that this was a private family document which Eric Roberts’ family shared with her and later with Rob Hutton. The family did not want to publish it in full but agreed to certain extracts being made public. It was only with their consent that she shared it with Christopher Andrew. I understand Sanchia did suggest that you look at Rob Hutton’s book, as he’d published more of the letter than Sanchia had made available in her reports. Nor is it the case that Sanchia was being evasive. Rather she was respecting the family’s wishes.

I am afraid too that we can’t really comment on what Christopher Andrew has said. He obviously views an awful lot of documents, so it’s not that surprising he cannot remember in detail a long document he read four years ago. He is not the only historian the BBC talks to about MI5 – but he is their official historian, so it’s logical that we should go to him fairly frequently.

I have asked Sanchia to contact the family on your behalf and will let you know if she is successful. However, we would make it clear there is no guarantee they will be back in touch. I am sorry I am not able to give you any further help and once again I apologise for the time it has taken to respond to your concerns.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah Nelson
Editorial Adviser, BBC News


BBC Complaints Team 
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

I tried one last gasp:

Dear Sarah,

Thank you for your reply. It was worth waiting for.

I appreciate your asking Sanchia to approach the family on my behalf. Since the family approved her showing the document to Christopher Andrew and Rob Hutton, I assume that they were comfortable with greater publicity. (Rob Hutton did not reply to my inquiry.) I await the outcome with great interest.

But I must admit that I do not find your distancing the BBC from Andrew acceptable. After all, it is on the BBC website that his comments still appear (see https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358). Do you not accept some responsibility for this highly provocative opinion, and do you not agree that it would be appropriate for the BBC to contact him, remind him of what he said, point out the information on the website, and request a clarification from him, instead of members of the public (like me) having to chase around for months trying to gain an explanation from the corporation? Why does Andrew’s role as MI5’s ‘official historian’ allow him to use the BBC to promote himself and to provoke public interest, but then to evade his professional responsibilities by concealing facts concerning MI5?

Sincerely,

Tony Percy.

But that was it. I heard no more.  The BBC is in such disarray, and the ‘Today’ editors have now moved on. I am not going to gain anything else. For a moment, I thought I might score a goal, but I suppose it is a draw of some sorts. (Coldspur 2 – The Establishment 4)

Nigel West’s New Publications

As I was flicking through one of the book catalogues that I receive through the mail, I noticed two startling entries, one advertising a new edition of Nigel West’s MI5 (originally published in 1981), the other his MI6 (1983), published by Frontline. Now this was exciting news, as I needed to learn what the “Experts’ Expert” (Observer, 1989) was now writing about the two intelligence services after an interval of over thirty years. I was half-minded to order them immediately at the discounted prices of $37.95 and $26.95, but thought I should check them out on-line first. Thus Casemate Publishers can be seen to promote the books, at https://www.casematepublishers.com/mi5-british-security-service-operations-1909-1945.html#.XrLLhSN_OUk , and the overview for MI5 includes the following: “In this new and revised edition, Nigel West details the organizational charts which show the structure of the wartime security apparatus, in what is regarded as the most accurate and informative account ever written of MI5 before and during the Second World War.”

This was encouraging, and I thought I might get a glimpse of the new Contents by gaining a Google Snippet view, before committing myself. Yet the text, as displayed by that feature, indicated that the Contents of the book had not changed, and the number of pages had not increased. Was that perhaps merely a procedural mistake, where Google had not replaced the former text? I decide that the only way to find out was to ask the author himself. Now, I have not been in touch with Nigel for a few years. I have since tweaked his nose a bit on coldspur, especially over his superficial yet contradictory treatment of Guy Liddell, and I wondered whether he would reply. Maybe he had not seen what I had written, but, if he had, he might not want to communicate with me.

Anyway, I sent a very polite message to him, in which I explained how excited I was at the prospect of reading his new versions, and the very next morning he replied very warmly, and included the following revelation: “The four wartime titles recently republished (MI5; MI6; The Secret War: The Story of SOE and The Secret Wireless War: GCHQ 1900 -1986) are simply corrected new editions of the four books previously published.”

Is this not shocking, even a gross misrepresentation of goods sold? Apart from the fact that, if I were a historian with a chance to revise an earlier book in these circumstances, I would take the opportunity to refresh it with all the research uncovered in the meantime, such as a host of files from the National Archives, and Christopher Andrew’s authorised history, I would be very careful in arranging how the book was presented to the public. But not just one! Four titles? I think this is highly irregular, and I hereby warn anyone who was thinking of acquiring any of these four volumes that the information they get will be very outdated, and that I doubt that all the multiple errors in them have all been addressed. (Coldspur 3 : The Establishment 4)

Meanwhile, I have been scouring other Nigel West books. His latest, Churchill’s Spy Files: MI5’s Top Secret Wartime Reports (2018), exploits the KV 4/83 file at Kew (although the reader is pushed to find the source, since it does not appear until a footnote to the very last sentence of the book). Beginning in April 1943, Director-General Petrie of MI5 sent a regular summary report, delivered to Churchill and for his eyes only (the copy was taken by the emissary), outlining the activities and achievements of MI5. It seems that West produces the reports in full, although I cannot yet verify that, as the files have not been digitized, and he adds some very useful (as well as some very dense and impenetrable) commentary gained from study of the relevant MI5 files at Kew, such as on the Double-Cross System, and on MI5’s major success against Soviet espionage in World War 2, the successful prosecution of Dave Springhall.

Yet it is another weird West concoction, akin to his recent book on Liddell (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/ ), on which my colleague Denis Lenihan has recently posted an invigorating article (see https://www.academia.edu/43150722/Another_Look_At_Nigel_West_s_Cold_War_Spymaster_The_Legacy_of_Guy_Liddell_Deputy_Director_of_MI5 ). The author’s sense of chronology is wayward, he copies out sheaves of material from the archives, the relevance of which is not always clear, and he overwhelms the reader with a host of names and schemes that lack any proper exegesis. Moreover, the Index is cluttered, and highly inaccurate. I saw my friend General von Falkenhausen with a single entry, but then discovered that he ranges over several pages. Indeed, West describes, through rather fragmentarily, the SIS scheme to invoke Falkenhausen in 1942-43, which is very relevant to my discoveries about Len Beurton. I immediately downloaded from Kew the relevant files on the very provocative HAMLET, taking advantage of the current free offer. I shall return to comment on this volume when I have completed my reading of it.

West does highlight the role of Anthony Blunt in editing the reports for Churchill, which brings me back, inevitably I suppose, to ELLI, the spy within MI5 (or SIS) called out by the defector Gouzenko in 1945. I have studiously avoided making any statement on ELLI in my reports so far, but Denis Lenihan has been writing some provocative pieces, and I must catch up with him eventually. I had happened to notice, in Chapman Pincher’s Treachery (2012 edition, p 78), that the author quoted the file KV 3/417 as confirming that ELLI was a spy working for the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) in London in 1940. He gave the source as the GRU defector, Ismail Akhmedov, whose work In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, I had quoted in Misdefending the Realm. So I went back to that file, resident on my PC, and found the reference, in paragraph 104. The writer indeed states that Akhmedov was indeed the source, but that the defector claimed that ELLI was a woman! Why did Pincher not include that in his account – was that not rather dumb? And how come nobody else has referred to this anomaly? Professor Glees has pointed out to me that no male given a cryptonym by Soviet Intelligence ever received a female name. Apart from Roessler (LUCY, after Lucerne, which is a special case) and DORA (an anagram of Alexander RADÓ), I think he is overall correct, although I have to add the somewhat ambiguous IRIS, who was Leo Aptekar, a ‘chauffeur’, Sonia’s handler at the Soviet Embassy.

I have thus started a fresh project on digging out the various sources on ELLI. First of all, I re-read Molehunt, Nigel West’s account of the hunt for Soviet spies in MI5. This is a very confusing world, what with Pincher staking his reputation and career on Hollis’s culpability, based on what Peter Wright told him, John Costello pointing the finger at Guy Liddell (before succumbing to a mysterious and untimely death himself), Nigel West, using the substance of Arthur Martin’s convictions behind the scenes, making the case that Graham Mitchell was the offender, and Christopher Andrew pooh-poohing the lot of them as a crew of conspiracy theorists while allowing himself to be swayed by Gordievsky’s assertion that ELLI was, improbably, Leo Long. West’s book is very appealingly written, but his approach to chronology is utterly haphazard, he is very arch in concealing his whole involvement in the process, and he makes so many unverifiable assertions that one has to be very careful not to be caught up in the sweep of his narrative. For instance, he identifies the failure of British double-agent manoeuvres with Soviet spies as a major item of evidence for stating that MI5 had been infiltrated. But he never explores this, or explains what these projects were. Apart from the attempt to manipulate Sonia (and Len) I know of no documented case of such activity, and, as I have repeatedly written, such projects are doomed to fail as, in order to be successful, they rely both on discipline by a very small and secure team as well as exclusive control of the double agent’s communications.

Ismail Akhmedov

I also went back to Akhmedov, to re-acquaint myself with how he described his lengthy interviews with Philby in Ankara in 1948. His conclusion was that, even though a stenographer was present, and he suspected the safe-house had been bugged, Philby reported only a small amount of the material that he passed on, which certainly included a description of the GRU’s set-up in London. (He does not mention ELLI here.) But he also wrote that he knew this because of his contacts with American intelligence afterwards.  “Many years later I learned that Philby had submitted only a small part of the reams of material obtained from me to the British and American intelligence services”.  That indicated to me that a fuller record exists somewhere, and that Akhmedov was shown Philby’s report. Akhmedov also said that, a year later (in 1949) he was thoroughly debriefed by the FBI, CIA and Pentagon officials in Istanbul. So I assumed that CIA records were a good place to look.

And, indeed, the CIA archives display quite a lot of information that Akhmedov supplied them about GRU techniques and organisation, but in secondary reports. (I have not yet found transcripts of the original interviews.) Moreover, literature produced more recently points to a critical role that Akhmedov played in unmasking Philby. One account (Tales from Langley by Peter Kross) even states that Akhmedov informed the CIA in 1949 that Philby was a Soviet spy (how Akhmedov discovered that is not clear, since he obviously did not know that for a fact in 1948, although he claimed he partly saw through Philby’s charade at the time), and that Philby was presented with Akhmedov’s testimony when he was recalled from Washington immediately after the Burgess-Maclean escapade. Unfortunately, Kross provides no reference for this assertion, but Akhmedov’s informing the CIA at that stage would be an astonishing revelation: it would put Philby’s presence in Washington under a harsh new light, frame White’s ‘devilish plot’ in a dramatic new context, and even explain why Eric Roberts was faced with an astonishing new reality when he spoke to Liddell in 1949. Is that what Andrew was hinting at? I am going to claim an early goal, before VAR gets in. (Coldspur 4 : The Establishment 4)

Another anomaly I have noticed is the famed reference to ELLI (actually ‘ELLY’) in the Vassiliev papers. (These were transcripts of files created by Alexander Vassiliev from the KGB archives, containing information on the GRU as well, and available on the Internet at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks .) Chapman Pincher presented the assertion that Gouzenko had betrayed the existence of ELLI in British intelligence as appearing in a report from Merkulov to Stalin in November 1945, and William Tyrer has echoed Pincher’s claim in his article about ELLI.

Yet the published archive states no such thing. The comment that “Gouzenko reported on the GRU source in British intel. ‘ELLY’” is not in the selected highlights of Merkulov’s report, but appears as an introduction in a separate pair of parentheses, looking as if it had been added by Vassiliev as editorial commentary, after the statement that informs us that what follows is a summarization of what Philby has given them. If it is intended to also reflect the information received from ‘S’ [STANLEY = Philby] that immediately precedes it, it is worth noting that Philby’s report likewise includes nothing about ELLI.

Pincher cites the comment as coming from Merkulov’s report, but uses the on-line version as his source. He is wrong. Tyrer reproduces the whole introduction in his article, but removes the parentheses. He is careless. Of course, it is very possible that Merkulov did write to Stalin about Gouzenko and ELLI, and that needs to be verified. Merkulov was, however, in the NKVD/KGB, not the GRU, and it seems implausible that he would want to lay any bad news concerning the GRU on Stalin’s plate. I cannot quickly see any other reference to the GRU in Merkulov’s communications, and Allen Weinstein and Vassiliev himself, in The Haunted Wood, suggest (note, p 105) that any reference to the GRU by Merkulov was an attempt to pass off some of the responsibility for Elizabeth Bentley’s defection to the GRU, who recruited her originally in 1936, and for whom she worked until 1938, when she was transferred to the NKVD.

Thus one might ask: if Vassiliev thought that the reference to ELLI was important enough to be highlighted, why did he not publish the original text that contained it? (I have checked the original Russian manuscript on the Wilson Center website: the texts are the same. Yet some pages are missing in all versions: original scan of manuscript, Russian transcription, and English translation). We should recall, also, that Vassiliev was not transcribing the texts surreptitiously: he had been given permission from the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers (KGB alumni) to inspect them, was well-briefed in western intelligence interests, and under no pressure. So I decided to try to ask him what the import of his commentary was. I know he is hiding somewhere in England (maybe holed up with Oleg Gordievsky in an especially leafy part of foliate Surrey), so on May 18 I sent a message to his publisher to inquire whether they could pass on a question to him. I was brushed off with a message saying I should look on Vassiliev’s social media, or write a letter to the publisher. I doubt whether Vassiliev is seeking any attention, or wanting to give clues to his whereabouts, so I shall take the latter course.

There is no doubt ELLI existed. But ELLI was almost certainly a woman, and the information on her is so sparse that she was probably a minor player, and was not an informant for long. Thus the quest for identifying ELLI has to be separated from the generic search for traitors within MI5. If there was evidence of leakage on certain projects, MI5 should have investigated it, traced it back to those officers who were privy to the information, and then tried to discern how they might have passed it to a member of Soviet intelligence. Instead, they listened to the emotional appeals of Angleton and Golitsyn, and started examining (and sometime interrogating) Mitchell, Hollis, Liddell, Hanley, even White.

In Spycatcher, Peter Wright tried to list the strongest reasons for suspecting a major source of treachery within MI5, narrowing his search for ELLI to Hollis and Mitchell.  I noticed that, after the Gouzenko revelations broke out, he even consulted Akhmedov to discuss the arrival of ‘ELLI’s telegrams’ [sic] in Moscow. But the two of them apparently did not discuss ELLI’s gender! It is all very mystifying. And if there was an endemic failure to protect against communist subversion (as L’Affaire Sonia shows), it makes even less sense to pretend that the rather dim Roger Hollis had the power and influence to stop all his smarter colleagues from performing their jobs properly. Every time I go back to Pincher, I am stunned by the ham-handed way he overstates his case against Hollis. Any decent defence-lawyer would submerge his case within minutes. Nevertheless, I am not yet ready to claim the winning goal.

The Survival of Gösta Caroli

Gosta Caroli

When I wrote about Jan Willem ter Braak, the German agent who apparently escaped undetected for several months in Cambridge in the winter of 1940-1941 (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-3/  and https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-2/ ), I referred to the claim that Nicholas Mosley had made about another agent parachuted in, Gösta Caroli, in his book The Druid. Mosley reported that Caroli had in fact been hanged in Birmingham prison, contrary to Nigel West’s reports that he had been repatriated to Sweden after the war.

Now, if that were true, it would have been an alarming course of events, with the Security Service arranging an extra-judicial killing, given that there was no account of a trial, even in camera, to be found. The biography of Caroli’s colleague Wolf Schmidt (TATE) was written by two Swedes, and mentioned Caroli, but it apparently gave no details about his incarceration and subsequent return to Sweden. So I left the issue hanging.

Now I can report that the intrepid Giselle Jakobs (the grand-daughter of Josef Jakobs, who was indeed executed as a spy) has tracked down the biography of Caroli, written by the same two authors, in Swedish, which they self-published in 2015. She has arranged for enough portions of it translated to prove that Caroli, while his health had been damaged by the fall on his landing in England, did recuperate enough to live for thirty more years. It includes a photograph of Caroli after his marriage. Giselle’s extraordinary account of his life, and of her admirable efforts to present the information for posterity, can be found at https://www.josefjakobs.info/2020/04/the-apres-espionage-career-of-gosta.html and at http://www.josefjakobs.info/.

While this is good news, removing one black mark against the occasionally dubious application of the law by the British authorities when under stress in 1940 and 1941, it does not materially change anything of my suggestion that the death of ter Braak was not a suicide. I expect this matter to be resuscitated before long. My on-line colleague Jan-Willem van den Braak (actually no relation, as Ter Braak’s real name was Fukken) has written a biography of Ter Braak, in Dutch. It is now being translated into English for publication next year, and Mr. van den Braak has invited me to offer an Afterword to present my research and theories.

Dave Springhall and the GRU

In April last year, I was investigating hints provided by Andrew Boyle about the possible recruitment of Kim Philby by the Communist Douglas (‘Dave’) Springhall, and wrote as follows:

“Springhall is problematical. On my desktop computer, I have twenty-seven bulky PDFs from his files at the National Archives, which I have not yet inspected properly. They provide a fairly exhaustive account of his movements, but Special Branch did not appear to track him having a meeting with members of the Soviet Embassy in 1933. (Springhall did make a request to visit Cambridge in March of that year, however.) I suppose it is possible that Liddell had an interview with the communist activist at the time of his conviction in 1943, but it is improbable that a record of such a conversation has lain undiscovered. Somewhere in that archive (according to Springhall’s Wikipedia entry) is a suggestion that Springhall was working for the GRU from 1932 onwards, but locating that record is a task that will have to wait – unless any alert reader is already familiar with the whole of KV 2/2063-2065 & KV 2/1594-1598 . . .”

Douglas ('Dave') Springhall
Douglas (‘Dave’) Springhall

Well, I have at last had enough time on my hands to go through the whole of that archive, and take notes. The evidence of a strong connection between ‘Springy’ (the comrades referred to each other thus, with Len Beurton responding to his MI5 interviewers about ‘Footie’ – Alexander Foote – as if they were members of the England cricket team) and Soviet military intelligence is thin. It derives from an SIS report concerning a translation of a Russian request for information on Indian Army capabilities from the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff R.K.K.A. to the Military Attaché in Berlin, in which Springhall’s name is brought up (KV 2/1594-2, p 40, August 20, 1931).

Yet Springhall was very much a naval/military figure. Even though he missed the Invergordon Mutiny (he was occupied in Moscow at the time), he was a regular commentator on military affairs. He was head of anti-military propaganda in England, he gave eulogistic descriptions of life in the Red Army, and busied himself with secret work at Woolwich Arsenal. And his eventual arrest, in 1943, for extracting secrets on radar defensive measures (WINDOW) from Olive Sheehan, was obviously for trying to transfer facts to Soviet military experts. MI5 never determined, however, who his courier was, despite the close watch that was kept on him. I noticed in his MI5 that Nigel West suggested that Gorsky of the KGB was his contact at the Soviet Embassy, but in the same author’s recent Churchill’s Spy Files, he indicates that it was a GRU officer, and that the courier was someone called Peppin. (Somewhere in the Springhall archive, I got the impression that the courier might have been Andrew Rothstein.) So I wrote to West about it, and he confirmed that it must have been a GRU contact, but he could no more about the courier.

This is a vast archive: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is writing a book about Springhall at the moment. West’s book provides a good introduction, but there is so much more to be explored, and I shall certainly return to the archive when I come to write about Slater and Wintringham. I shall thus say little more here, but merely make a few important observations on three aspects: 1) The role of Anthony Blunt (as introduced above); 2) The immensity of the surveillance of Springhall; and 3) Springhall’s trial.

One of the remarkable features of the monthly reports to Churchill on MI5’s activities, starting in March 1943, was that Guy Liddell, to whom the task was delegated by Petrie, in turn brought in Anthony Blunt to perform much of the editorial work. Thus here was additional proof that most of the service’s ‘secrets’ were being passed on to Moscow before you could say ‘Andrew Rothstein’. Thus one has to interpret the prosecution and sentencing of Springhall (conducted in camera) in a completely new light. The CPGB (the head office of which, in King Street, had been bugged comprehensively by Special Branch) was shocked and disgusted at the fact that Comrade Springhall had been involved in espionage, and thus was guilty of bringing the Communist Party into disrepute. Moscow was, of course ‘appalled’, and denied anything untoward had taken place.

Yet, if Moscow had known what was going on throughout the Springhall investigation because of Blunt, they would not have been surprised at the outcome. They would have to make the necessary melodramatic denials, but were perhaps not completely unhappy that all the attention was being paid on an expendable, somewhat irresponsible, open member of the Communist Party, while their unmasked agents were gathering information on the atomic bomb. In that way, MI5 would continue to imagine that the Party was the major source for subversive activity (with Ray Milne in MI6, and Desmond Uren in SOE being minor casualties dragged in by Springhall), and their moles in the intelligence services would be able to carry on unhindered. ‘Springy’ was not sprung.

The second noteworthy aspect is the sheer volume of material that was collected about Springhall, hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on his career in the Navy, his visits to the Soviet Union, his published articles in the Daily Worker, his girl-friends, his associates and friends, his meetings at Communist Party headquarters, his speeches exhorting revolution at rallies – and of course on his espionage, his arrest, his trial, his sentencing, his time in prison, and his release before dying in Moscow of cancer in 1953. MI5 and Special Branch must have an expended an enormous amount of time trailing and surveilling him, yet the service was mostly powerless in doing anything at all – until Springhall so clumsily tried to extract the secrets from the communist flatmate of a loyal citizen, Norah Bond, who shared what she overheard with her RAF boyfriend, Wing-Commander Norman Blackie.

In a way, I suppose, Springhall’s being caught red-handed justified all the effort, and it enabled MI5 to move the traitor Ray Milne quietly out of SIS, and Raymond Uren out of SOE. Yet so much other surveillance was going on that one has to conclude that it was all rather wasted energy. ‘Keeping an eye’ on suspicious characters became a literal watchword, in the vain hope that such an activity would lead to larger networks of subversive ne’er-do-wells. But what next? So long as the Communist Party was a licit institution, its members could make calls for revolution, even during wartime, without any fear of prosecution, and the Home Office seemed far too timid as to how the factories might be adversely affected if too energetic moves were made against the comrades of our gallant ally, the Russians. Meanwhile, most government institutions were infected with Communist moles, agents of influence, and fellow-travellers who separated themselves from links with the Communist Party itself.

Lastly, the Trial itself. Files KV 2/1598-2 & -3 from Kew contain a full record of ‘Rex v Douglas Frank Springhall, at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, 20th July Sessions, 1943’, before Mr Justice Oliver. It represents a transcript of the shorthand notes of George Walpole & Co. (Shorthand Writers to the Court). The Solicitor-General, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, K.C. and Mr L. A. Byrne appeared on behalf of the Prosecution, with Mr J. F. F. Platts-Mills appearing on behalf of the Defence. I think it is an extraordinary document.

From the first lines of the transcript, where the portentous Justice Oliver rather patronisingly puts the Rumpolean Maxwell-Fyfe in his place, and the Solicitor-General deferentially responds ‘If your Lordship pleases’, we can see a classical court-room drama take place. Oliver then treats Platts-Mills in the same peremptory manner, and, when the prosecuting council start their questioning of Olive Sheehan (who had passed on to Springhall secrets about ‘WINDOW’), Oliver interrupts them freely, as I am sure he was entitled to. He rebukes Platts-Mills, rather pettily, for referring to the Air Ministry as Sheehan’s ‘employers’: “Now, Mr Platts-Mills, this court has not become a theatre of politics.”  Platts-Mills has to adapt to his Lordship’s pleasure.

I shall comment no more now than to remark how different this court was from those administered by Roland Freisler or Andrey Vyshinsky. Yes, it was in camera, but this was not a show-trial where the defendants knew they were already guilty and were facing inevitable execution. Britain was at war, and had caught a spy declaring allegiance to a foreign power, stealing secrets that could have seriously harmed the war effort if they had passed into the wrong hands, and calling for revolution, but Springhall received a fair trial. It concludes with Springhall making a rather eloquent but disingenuous speech about wanting ‘to arouse the country behind the government headed by Mr Winston Churchill’. The jury took fifteen minutes to consider the evidence before returning a verdict of ‘Guilty’ on almost all counts, and Springhall was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude.  A very British trial.

‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp Tycoon Romance Drama!’

(“I wanted to marry him”, confesses distraught schoolgirl)

‘I am the Daughter’

A while back, I acquired a slim volume titled ‘Die Tochter bin ich’ (‘I am the Daughter’), by one Janina Blankenfeld. It was published in Berlin in 1985, and is a brief memoir by a schoolteacher who was the daughter of someone who will be familiar to all readers of this website – Ursula née Kuczynski, aka SONIA. Janina was actually Sonia’s daughter by her lover, Johannes Patra (cryptonym ERNST), conceived in China, born in Warsaw in 1936, and spending much of her childhood years in Switzerland and England. Janina did not learn who her real father was until 1955, when Sonia’s first husband, Rolf, returned to Berlin, and Sonia felt she ought to break the news to her. I bought the book because I thought it might shed some light on Sonia’s movements in the UK, and even explain how Janina was able to attend an expensive boarding-school in Epping.

Unfortunately, it gives little away, sheltering under her mother’s memoir, published a few years beforehand. Janina gives the impression that money was very tight, and she says nothing about the private school. For a while, the idea of a holiday was impossible, but Janina wrote that, six months after her grandmother’s death (which occurred in June 1947), Sonia found an inexpensive room on the Welsh coast, in Criccieth, which was a revelation for Janina, as she enjoyed the coastline and the ruined castles. (Criccieth is a bit too close to the University of Aberystwyth, to my liking.) But “Das schönste Erlebnis für mich war unser Bummel durch Butlins Holiday Camp.” (‘The best experience for me was our stroll through Butlin’s Holiday Camp’.) She revelled in the string of bungalows, and the loudspeakers playing all day, and the dances and merry-go-rounds in the evenings. “Der Glanzpunkt war die Wahl der schönsten Urlauberin. Schöne Beine and ein hübsches Gesicht – mehr war nicht gefragt.“  (“The climax was the election of the most beautiful holidaymaker. Fine legs and a pretty face – nothing more was asked for.”)

I am not sure what the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation leaders would have thought of all this frivolity, with no time spent on propaganda lessons and correct ideological thinking, and far too much attention paid to superficial bourgeois pastimes like beauty contests, but Janina’s memoir managed to get through the censors. And it all made a strong impression on the twelve-year-old girl. “Seit diesem Besuch hatte ich neue Träume – ich wollte so gern Herrn Butlin heiraten, ganz reich sein and jedes Jahr meinen Urlaub in solch einem Feriencamp verbringen. ” (Ever since this visit I had fresh dreams – I wanted to marry Mr Butlin so much, to become quite rich, and to spend my holiday every year in such a Holiday Camp.”) Instead, eighteen months later, she had to leave for good her idyllic life in the Cotswolds and Wales, exchanging it for Walter Ulbricht’s holiday-camp of East Germany.

China and the Rhineland Moment

I have been thinking recently of China’s gradual expansion, and reactions to threats to its growing power (e.g. concerning Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Uighurs, industrial espionage, Hong Kong), and reminded myself that, if the first response to a bully is to refrain from challenging him, and biffing him on the nose, he will continue in the knowledge that his adversaries are really too cowardly, afraid of ‘provoking’ him more, and that he can thus continue unimpeded with his aggressive moves. I thought of the piece I wrote on Appeasement a few months ago, and how I judged that Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 was the incident marking the opportunity for the dictator to have been stopped.

Then, on May 30, Bret Stevens wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times titled ‘China and the Rhineland Moment’ (at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/china-hong-kong.html, inside the paywall). His piece started off as follows: “Great struggles between great powers tend to have a tipping point. It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differences becomes obvious to nearly everyone. In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisis when it sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston Churchill wrote in his history of the First World War, ‘all the alarm bells throughout Europe began immediately to quiver.’ In 1936 Germany provoked another crisis when it marched troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of its treaty obligations. In 1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had no intention of honoring democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchill was left to warn that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.”  After making some recommendations as to what the USA and Great Britain should do, Stevens concluded: “If all this and more were announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back from the brink. In the meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with China — and remember what happened the last time the free world looked aggression in the eye, and blinked.”

This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.

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Filed under Economics/Business, Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Geography, Literature/Academia, Politics

Border Crossings: Coldspur & Stalin

NIHIL ARCANUM MIHI ALIENUM EST

Immigration Problems

One of the most stressful days of my life occurred at the end of July 1980. I had been spending the previous few months commuting between the UK and the USA, courtesy of Freddy Laker, spending three weeks in Connecticut before a break of a week at home in Coulsdon with Sylvia and the infant James, and then flying back to the USA for another sojourn. For some months, we had been trying to sell the house, while I looked for a place to live in Norwalk, CT., and began to learn about US customs, banking practices, documentary requirements for applying for a mortgage, etc. etc.. Meanwhile, I started implementing the changes to the Technical Services division of the software company I was working for, believing that some new methods in the procedures for testing and improving the product with field enhancements, as well as in the communications with the worldwide offices and distributors, were necessary. Sylvia successfully sold the house. I had to arrange for our possessions to be transported and stored, and decide when and how we should eventually leave the UK. On the last decision, Sylvia and I decided that using the QEII for the relocation would be a sound choice, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, perhaps, and one that would be less stressful for the three of us. We thought we would stay in the USA for a few years before returning home.

And then, three days before we were due to sail, I discovered that our visas had still not come through. I had been told by my boss (the CEO of the company) that an attorney who specialised in such matters would apply for an L-1 visa (a training visa, of limited duration), and that it would later be upgraded to a resident alien’s visa. I had met the attorney, and given him all the details, and he had promised me that I would be able to pick it up at the American Embassy in London. But when I went there, the officials knew nothing about it. Some frantic phone-calls across the Atlantic followed, and I was eventually able to pick up the visas the day before we left Southampton. Such was the panic that I cannot recall how we travelled from home to Southampton, or how we packed for the week’s cruise with a ten-month old son, but we made it. The cruise itself turned out to have its own nightmares, as my wallet was stolen (probably by a professional pickpocket who funded his trips by such activities), and I spent the last three days on the ship desperately looking for it, since it contained my driving licence (necessary for applying for a US driver’s license), as well as a few other vital items. It was not a comfortable start to our new life.

Fortunately, we still had our passports and visas intact. We were picked up in New York, and I was able to show Sylvia her new house (which, of course, she had never seen before). If she had any qualms, she was very diplomatic in suppressing them. We settled in: the neighbours were kind. They were Jews originally from Galicia, Bill and Lorraine Landesberg. I recall that Bill named ‘Lemberg’ as his place of birth – what is now known as Lvov, in Ukraine. (Incidentally, I recall a school colleague named Roy Lemberger. I conclude now that his forefathers must have moved from Lemberg some generations before in order for his ancestor to be given the name ‘the man from Lemberg’.) I suspect that the Landesbergs found us a bit exotic, even quaint.

I recall also that my boss had encouraged me to rent, not buy (‘Interest rates will come down in a couple of years’), but I had thought that he was probably trying to cut down on relocation expenses. That conclusion was solidified by another incident. During the summer, he had succeeded in selling his outfit to a local timesharing company (‘timesharing’ being what was not called ‘cloud computing’ at the time). I obtained a copy of the parent company’s Personnel Policies, and discovered that it offered a more generous overseas relocation allowance, and presented my findings to my boss. He was taken by surprise, and somewhat crestfallen, as he knew nothing of the policy, and the expenses had to come out of his budget.

In any case, this windfall helped with the acquisition of new appliances, required because of the voltage change. I must have applied for a re-issue of my UK licence, and soon we acquired two cars. We chose General Motors models, a decision that my colleagues at work also found quaint, as they were buying German or Swedish automobiles, and stated that no-one would buy an American car those days. Gradually, we found a pace and rhythm to life, a reliable baby-sitter, and the changes I had made at the company seemed to have been received well – especially by the support personnel I had left behind in Europe. My parents were coming out to visit us that Christmas.

Indeed, I was next recommended (by my predecessor) to host and speak at the key product Users’ Group being held that autumn/fall. I later learned that relationships between the company management and the Users’ Group were very strained, because of failed promises and indifferent support, and I was thus a useful replacement to address the group – a fresh face, with a British accent, an expert in the product, with no corporate baggage. I thus quite eagerly accepted the assignment, prepared my speeches, and set out for Toronto, where the meeting was being held. It all went very well: the group seemed to appreciate the changes I was making, and I was able to offer several tips on how to diagnose the system expertly, and improve its performance.

Thus I made my way back through Toronto airport with some glow and feeling of success. Until I approached the US customs post, after check-in. There I was told that I was not going to be allowed to re-enter the United States, as I was in possession of an L-1 visa, and as such, had committed an offence in leaving the country, and could not be re-admitted. (My visa had not been checked on leaving the US, or on entry to Canada, where my British passport would have been adequate.) I was marched off to a small room to await my fate. Again, the experience must have been so traumatic that I don’t recall the details, but I believe that I pleaded, and used my selling skills, to the effect that it had all been a harmless mistake, and Canada was really part of the North-American-GB alliance, and it wouldn’t happen again, and it was not my fault, but that of my employer, and I had a young family awaiting me, so please let me through. The outcome was that a sympathetic officer eventually let me off with an admonishment, but I could not help but conclude that a tougher individual might not have been so indulgent. What was the alternative? To have put me in a hotel, awaiting a judicial inquiry? This could not have been the first time such a mistake occurred, but maybe they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. And I looked and sounded harmless, I suppose.

I eventually acquired the much cherished ‘Green Card’, which gave me permanent resident status, and the ability to change jobs. (That became important soon afterwards, but that is another story.) This was an arduous process, with more interviews, forms to fill out, travelling to remote offices to wait in line before being interrogated by grumpy immigration officials. Many years later, we repeated the process when we applied for citizenship. It was something we should have done before James reached eighteen, as he had to go through the process as well on reaching that age. One reason for the delay was that, for a period in the 1990s, adopting US citizenship meant a careful rejection of any other allegiance, and we were not yet prepared to abandon out UK nationality. At the end of the decade, however, we were allowed to retain both, so long as we declared our primary allegiance to the USA. (Julia was born here, so is a true American citizen, as she constantly reminds us.) More questions, visits to Hartford, CT., citizenship tests on the US constitution and history, and then the final ceremony. I noticed a change: when I returned from a visit abroad, and went through the ‘US Citizens’ line, the customs official would look at my passport, smile and say ‘Welcome Home’.

Illegal Immigration

All this serves as a lengthy introduction to my main theme: what is it about ‘illegal immigration’ that the Democratic Party does not understand? I know that I am not alone in thinking, as someone who has been through the whole process of gaining citizenship, that such a firm endorsement of an illegal act is subversive of the notion of law, and the judicial process itself. When, at one of the early Democratic Presidential Candidate debates held on television, all the speakers called not only for ‘open borders’ but also for providing free healthcare to all illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, I was aghast. Did they really think that was a vote-winner, or were they all simply parading their compassionate consciences on their sleeves, hoping to pick up the ‘progressive’ or the ‘Hispanic’ vote? For many congresspersons seem to believe that all ‘Hispanics’ must be in favour of allowing unrestricted entry to their brethren and sisterhood attempting to come here from ‘Latin’ America. (Let us put aside for now the whole nonsense of what ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ means, in relation to those inhabitants of Mexico and South America who speak Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, Zapotec, German, Portuguese, etc. etc.) Many ‘Hispanic’ citizens who are here legally likewise resent the entitlements that others from south of the border claim, suggesting that it is somehow their ‘right’ to cross the border illegally, and set up home somewhere in the USA. There should either be a firmer effort to enforce the law, as it is, or to change it.

Moreover, the problem is by no means exclusively one of illegal immigration. It concerns authorized visitors with temporary visas who outstay their welcome. Almost half of the undocumented immigrants in the USA entered the country with a visa, passed inspection at the airport (probably), and then remained. According to figures compiled by the Center for Migration Studies, ‘of the roughly 3.5. million undocumented immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017, 65% arrived with full permission stamped in their passports.’ The government departments responsible can apparently not identify or track such persons. I read this week that an estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants reside in Britain.

The problem of mass migration, of refugees, of asylum-seekers affects most of the world, in an environment where asylum was conceived as a process affecting the occasional dissident or victim of persecution, not thousands trying to escape from poverty or gang violence. But we do not hear of throngs of people trying to enter Russia, China, or Venezuela. It is always the liberal democracies. Yet even the most open and generous societies are feeling the strain, as the struggles of EU countries trying to seal their borders shows. It is not a question of being ‘Pro’ or ‘Anti’ immigration, but more a recognition that the process of assimilation has to be more gradual. A country has to take control of its own immigration policy.

I was reminded that this cannot be made an issue of morality, instead of political pragmatism, when I recently read the obituary of the Japanese Sadako Ogata, the first woman to lead the U.N. Refugee Agency. She was quoted as saying: “I am not saying Japan should accept all of them [people escaping from Syria]. But if Japan doesn’t open a door for people with particular reasons and needs, it’s against human rights.” The statement contained the essence of the dilemma: Ogata recognised presumably inalienable human ‘rights’ to move from one country to another, but then immediately qualified it by suggesting that only ‘particular reasons and needs’ could justify their acceptance. And who is to decide, therefore, which reasons and needs are legitimate? Not an Open Borders policy, but some form of judicial investigation, presumably.

. . . and Healthcare

The Democratic candidates then compounded their confusion by their demonstration of ‘compassion’ for claiming that they would allow such illegal immigrants free access to healthcare. Now here is another controversial example of the clash between ‘rights’ and pragmatism. Heaven knows, the healthcare ‘system’ in this country is defective and ‘broken’, but then I suspect that it is in any other country where, alternatively, medical treatment is largely controlled by the state. I read last week that Britain’s National Health Service has 100,000 vacancies, and that 4.4 million persons are now on waiting lists. (We have the antithesis of the problem over here. While a patient needing a knee-replacement has to wait six months or more in the UK, when I was referred to a knee specialist a few months ago, within ten minutes, without even calling for an MRI, the doctor recommended, because of arthritis showing up on X-Rays, that I needed a knee-replacement, and, before you could say ‘Denis Compton’, he would probably have fitted me in for the operation the following week if I had pursued it. His prosperity relies on his doing as many operations as possible. I am successfully undertaking more conservative treatments. Moreover, the American insurance system is littered with incidents where insurance companies pay absurd sums for processes that never happened.) France, I read, is having similar problems as the UK: is Finland the current model for how welfare and enterprise coexist successively? Maybe we should all migrate to Finland.

‘Medicare for all’. Apart from the fact that such a program is estimated by its champions to cost about $30 trillion over the next ten years, where will all the doctors and medical practitioners come from to satisfy the new demands? Will they be raided from ‘developing’ nations, who would surely ill afford the loss? Again, this matter is often represented as an ‘entitlement’ issue, one of ‘basic human rights’.  Consider what the UN says. Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.’ Well, one can regret the obviously sexist language here – what about ‘every person and his or her wife or husband, and members of their blended or rainbow family, including members of the LGBQT community’ – but let that pass. It also did not state that subscribing nations should appoint a Minister for Loneliness. This was 1948, after all.

Reflect also on what the Declaration does not say: “Every individual should have access to healthcare, including the ability to gain, in a matter of four weeks, an appointment with a reputable gastro-enterologist whose practice is within twenty miles of where he or she lives.” “Every individual has the right to be treated by a qualified shaman who can recite the appropriate incantations over the invalid for an affordable fee.” “Every individual has the right to decline approved immunization processes for their children out of religious conviction.” I do not make these points as a frivolous interjection, but again to point out how the provision of healthcare in any country has to be based on pragmatics and economics, and will often clash with religious opposition and superstitions.

It is bewildering how many of the electorate in the USA appear to have swallowed the financial projections of Senators Warren and Sanders for their expansive plans. To suggest that such money can be raised by taxing what are mostly illiquid assets, and that such government programs could presumably be permanently funded by the continuance of such policies, is economic madness. Some commentators have pointed out that wealthy individuals would find ways of avoiding such confiscation, yet I have noticed very little analysis of the effect on asset prices themselves in a continued forced sale. The value of many assets cannot be determined until they are sold; they would have to be sold in order to raise cash for tax purposes; if they are to be sold, there have to be cash-owning buyers available; if a buyers’ market evolves, asset values will decline. (One renowned economist suggested that the government could accept stocks and shares, for instance, and then sell them on the open market  . .  . . !) The unintended consequences in the areas of business investment and pension values would be extraordinary. Yet the Democratic extremists are now claiming that such a transfer of wealth will provoke economic growth, quickly forgetting the lessons of a hundred years of socialism, and also, incidentally, undermining what some of them declare concerning the deceleration of climate change.

In summary, we are approaching an election year with a Democratic Party desperate to oust Donald Trump, but in disarray. The candidates for Presidential nominee are a combination of the hopelessly idealistic, the superannuated and confused, and the economically illiterate. I believe that those who stress the principles of Open Borders and a revolutionary Medicare for All program seriously misjudge the mood and inclinations of what I suppose has to be called ‘Middle America’. But now Michael Bloomberg has stepped into the ring. As [identity alert] ‘an Independent of libertarian convictions with no particular axe to grind’, I have found it practically impossible to vote for either a Republican or a Democratic Presidential candidate since being granted the vote, but here comes someone of proven leadership quality, a pragmatist (for the most part), and one who has changed his political affiliations – just like Winston Churchill. In a recent interview, he described himself as ‘a social liberal, fiscal moderate, who is basically nonpartisan’. I could vote for him. But Michael – you will be 78 next February! Another old fogey, like Biden and Sanders! Why didn’t you stand four years ago?

The Kremlin Letters

‘The Kremlin Letters’

I started this bulletin by referring to experiences from thirty-nine years ago, and conclude by describing events thirty-nine years before that, in 1941. This month I started reading The Kremlin Letters, subtitled Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, which was published last year. It is proving to be an engrossing compilation, since it exploits some previously undisclosed Russian archives. The Acknowledgements inform readers that ‘a carefully researched Russian text was revised and rewritten for an Anglophone audience’. The core material is therefore what historians prefer to base their interpretations on – original source documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which can probably not be denied. A blurb by Gabriel Gorodetsky on the cover, moreover, makes the challenging assertion that the book ‘rewrites the history of the war as we knew it.’ ‘We’? I wondered to whom he was referring in that evasive and vaguely identified group.

Did it live up to the challenge? A crucial part of the editing process is providing context and background to the subjects covered in the letters. After reading only one chapter, I started to have my doubts about the accuracy of the whole process. David Reynolds is a very accomplished historian: I very much enjoyed his In Command of History, which analysed Winston Churchill’s questionable process of writing history as well as making it. I must confess to finding some of Reynolds’s judgments in The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century a little dubious, as he seemed (for example) to understate what I saw as many of Stalin’s crimes.

What caught my attention was a reference to the Diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London for much of WWII. I have previously explained that I think Maisky’s Diaries are unreliable as a record of what actually transpired in his conversations with Churchill and Eden, in particular, and regretted the fact that certain historians (such as Andrew Roberts) have grabbed on to the very same Gabriel Gorodetsky’s edition of the Diaries (2015) as a vital new resource in interpreting the evolution of Anglo-Soviet relations. (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/) Now David Reynolds appears to have joined the throng. Is this another mutual admiration society?

The controversy (as I see it) starts with Stalin’s initial letter to Churchill, dated July 18, 1941, a few weeks after Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany), following Churchill’s two messages of support communicated via Ambassador Cripps. Stalin’s message included the following paragraph:

“It is easy to imagine that the position of the German forces would have been many times more favourable had the Soviet troops had to face the attack of the German forces not in the region of Kishinev, Lwow, Brest, Kaunas and Viborg, but in the region of Odessa, Kamenets Podolski, Minsk and the environs of Leningrad”. He cleverly indicated the change of borders without referring to the now embarrassing phenomenon of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Stalin then went on to request, absurdly and impertinently, that Great Britain establish ‘fronts’ against Germany in northern France and the Arctic.)

What is this geographical lesson about? Reynolds introduces the letter by writing: “And he sought to justify the USSR’s westward expansion in 1939 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a life-saver in 1941, because it had given the Red Army more space within which to contain Hitler’s ‘sudden attack’.” My reaction, however, was that, while Stalin wanted to move very quickly on justifying the borders defined by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, his military analysis for Churchill’s benefit was poppycock. For what had been a strong defensive border built up during the 1930s, known as the Stalin Line, had effectively been dismantled, and was being replaced by the Molotov Line, which existed as a result of aggressive tactics, namely the shared carve-up of Poland and the Baltic States by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. (See diagrams below. In all the historical atlases I possess, I have not been able to find a single map that shows the Stalin and Molotov Lines, and the intervening territory, clearly, and have thus taken a chart from Read’s and Fisher’s Deadly Embrace, which does not include the border with Finland, extended it, and added the locations Stalin listed.)

The Stalin Line
The Molotov Line
The Area Between the Stalin Line and the Molotov Line

I was confident, from my reading of the histories, that the Soviet Union’s annexation of the limitrophe states (as Hitler himself referred to them) had weakened the country’s ability to defend itself. After all, if the ‘buffer’ states’ that Stalin had invaded (under the guise of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) had been allowed to remain relatively undisturbed, Hitler’s invasion of them on the way to Russia in the spring of 1941 would have warned the Soviet Union that Hitler was encroaching on the Soviet Union’s ‘sphere of influence’ and that its traditional, internationally recognised border would soon be under attack. ‘More space’ was not a benefit, in other words. Thus the analysis of this period must address how seriously Stalin believed that forcing the buffer states to come under the control of the Soviet army would impede a possible invasion (which Stalin expressly still feared) rather than facilitate it. Reynolds does not enter this debate.

Ambassador Maisky delivered this message from Stalin to Churchill at Chequers. Reynolds then echoes from Maisky’s diary the fact that Churchill was very pleased at receiving this ‘personal message’, and then goes on to cite Maisky’s impression of Churchill’s reaction to the border claims. “Churchill also expressed diplomatic approval of Stalin’s defence of shifting Soviet borders west in 1939-40: ‘Quite right! I’ve always understood and sought to justify the policy of “limited expansion” which Stalin has pursued in the last two years’.”

Now, my first reaction was that Churchill, as a military historian and as a politician, could surely not have expressed such opinions. I seemed to recall that he had been highly critical of both the Nazi invasion of Poland as well as the Soviet Union’s cruel takeover of the Baltic States, where it had terrorized and executed thousands, as well as its disastrous war against Finland in the winter of 1940. (Lithuania was initially assigned to Germany, according to the Pact, but was later transferred to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.) Churchill must also have known that dismantling a strong defensive wall, and trying to establish a new one, under pressure, in countries where Stalin had menaced and antagonised the local citizenry, would have been a disastrous mistake as preparation for the onslaught that Hitler had long before advertised in Mein Kampf. Did he really make that statement to Maisky? Had these assertions of Maisky’s been confirmed from other sources?

Then I turned the page to read Churchill’s response to Stalin, dated July 20. Here was the evidence in black and white: “I fully realise the military advantage you have gained by forcing the enemy to deploy and engage on forward Western fronts, thus exhausting the force of his initial effort.” This was astonishing! What was Churchill thinking? Either I was completely wrong in my recollection of how historians had interpreted the events of Barbarossa, or Churchill had been woefully ignorant of what was going on, and insensitive to the implications of his message, or the British Prime Minister had been tactfully concealing his real beliefs about the annexations in an attempt to curry favour with Generalissimo Stalin. Which was it? In any case, he was shamelessly and gratuitously expressing to Stalin approval of the brutal invasion of the territory of sovereign states, the cause he had gone to war over. Churchill’s message consisted of an unnecessary and cynical response to Stalin’s gambit, which must have caused many recriminations in negotiations later on. As for ‘exhausting the force of his initial effort’, Churchill was clutching at Stalin’s straws. Where was the evidence?

I decided to look up evidence from sources in my private library to start with. First, Maisky’s Diaries. Indeed, the details are there. Maisky indicates that he translated (and typed up) the message himself, and that, since he told Anthony Eden that it dealt with ‘military-strategic issues’, the Foreign Secretary did not request that he be in attendance when it was read. Maisky adds that ‘the prime minister started reading the communiqué ‘slowly, attentively, now and then consulting a geographical map that was close at hand’. (Those placenames would certainly have not been intimately familiar.) Maisky singles out, rather implausibly, Churchill’s reaction to the ‘expansion’ policy. When Churchill had finished reading the message, however, Maisky asked him what he thought of it, and Churchill ‘replied that first he had to consult HQ’. One thus wonders whether he would have given anything away so enthusiastically in mid-stream, and why he would have concentrated on the geographical details when the substance of the message related to more critical matters.

What other records of this visit exist? I turned to John Colville’s Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries,1939-1955. Colville records the meeting, albeit briefly. “At tea-time the Soviet Ambassador arrived, bringing a telegram for the P.M. from Stalin who asks for diversions in various places by English forces. It is hard for the Russians to understand how unprepared we still are to take the offensive. I was present while the P.M. explained the whole situation very clearly to poor, uninformed Maisky.”  Maisky records Churchill’s protestations about the futility of trying to invade mainland Europe without admitting his own miserable ignorance: Colville makes no reference to the exchange over the Baltic States.

Did Churchill or Eden make any relevant observation at this time? I have only my notes from Eden’s The Reckoning, which refer to Maisky’s demands for the Second Front, but indicate nothing about the Baltic States at this time. (The matter would surface ominously later in the year, when joint ‘war aims’ were discussed.). I own only the abridgment of Churchill’s war memoirs, which contains no description of the meeting with Maisky. And what about the biographies? The Last Lion, by William Manchester and Paul Reid, while spending several paragraphs on Stalin’s demands for a second front, makes no mention of the telegram and the Maisky meeting, or the contentious issue of Soviet borders. Roy Jenkins’s Churchill is of little use: ‘Maisky’ appears only once in the Index, and there are no entries for ‘Barbarossa’ or ‘Baltic States’. I shall have to make a visit to the UNCW Library in the New Year, in order to check the details.

Next, the military aspects of the case. Roger Moorhouse, in The Devil’s Alliance, provides a recent, in-depth assessment. “Since the mid-1920s, the USSR had been constructing a network of defenses along its western border: the ukreplinnye raiony, or ‘fortified areas,’ known colloquially as the ‘Stalin Line.’ However, with the addition of the territories gained in collaboration with the Germans in 1939 and 1940, those incomplete defenses now lay some three hundred or so kilometers east of the new Soviet frontier. Consequently, in the summer of 1940, a new network of defenses was begun further west, snaking through the newly gained territories from Telŝiai in Lithuania, via eastern Poland, to the mouth of the Danube in Bessarabia. It would later be unofficially named the ‘Molotov Line’.” These were the two boundaries to which Stalin referred, obliquely, in his telegram.

Moorhouse explains how the Soviets were overwhelmed in the first days of the invasion, partly because of Stalin’s insistence that his forces do nothing to ‘provoke’ Hitler, but also because his airfields and troops were massively exposed. “After two days, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, Vilnius, fell to the Germans; a week after that, the Latvian capital, Riga, the Byelorussian capital, Minsk, and the western Ukrainian city of L’vov (the former Polish Lwów) had also fallen. By that time, some German units had already advanced over 250 miles from their starting position. Already, almost all the lands gained under the pact had been lost.” The Red Air Force had been annihilated on the ground, with thousands of aircraft destroyed because they sat in airfield in rows, unprotected and unguarded. “Facing the full force of the blitzkrieg, the Red Army was in disarray, with surviving troops often fleeing eastward alongside columns of similarly leaderless refugees. In some cases, officers attempting to stem the panic and restore order were shot by their own troops.”

This account is echoed by Antony Beevor, in The Second World War: “The Red Army had been caught almost completely unprepared. In the months before the invasion, the Soviet leader had forced it to advance from the Stalin Line inside the old frontier and establish a forward defence along the Molotov-Ribbentrop border. Not enough had been done to prepare the new positions, despite Zhukhov’s energetic attempts. Less than half of the strongpoints had any heavy weapons. Artillery regiments lacked their tractors, which had been sent to help with the harvest. And Soviet aviation was caught on the ground, its aircraft lined up in rows, presenting easy targets for the Luftwaffe’s pre-emptive strikes on sixty-six airfields. Some 1,800 fighters and bombers were said to have been destroyed on the first day of the attack, the majority on the ground. The Luftwaffe lost just thirty-five aircraft.” Michael Burleigh, in his outstanding Moral Combat, reinforces the notion of Soviet disarray: “On 22 June three million troops, 3,350 tanks, 71.146 artillery pieces and 2,713 aircraft unleashed a storm of destruction on an opponent whose defences were in total disarray, and whose forces were deployed far forward in line with a doctrinaire belief in immediate counter-attack.”

Yet I struggled to find detailed analysis of the effect of the moved defensive line in accounts of the battles. Christer Bergstrom’s Operation Barbarossa 1941: Hitler Against Stalin, offers a detailed account of the makeup of the opposing forces, and the outcomes of the initial dogfights and assaults, but no analysis on the effect on communications and supply lines that the extended frontier caused. Certainly, owing to persecutions of local populations, the Soviet armies and airforce were operating under hostile local conditions, but it is difficult to judge how inferior the Soviet Union’s response was because of the quality of the outposts defending the frontier, as opposed to, say, the fact that the military’s officers had been largely executed during the Great Purge. The Soviet airfields were massively exposed because German reconnaissance planes were allowed to penetrate deep into the newly-gained territory to take photographs – something they surely would not have been permitted to perform beyond the traditional boundaries. On the other hand, I have found no evidence that the Soviet Union was better able to defend itself in Operation Barbarossa because of the movement of its western border, as Stalin claimed in his telegram.

I have also started to inspect biographies of Stalin. Dmitri Volkogonov’s Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (1998, English translation 1991) is quick to list several causes for the disaster of Barbarossa: Stalin’s hubris in wanting to restore the old imperial borders too quickly, the lack of attention to defensive strategies, the fact that, in January 1941, General Zhukov recommended unsuccessfully that the ‘unfavourable system of fortified districts’ be moved back 100 kilometres from the new border, the overall zeal in meeting production quotas resulting in too many defective aircraft, and high crash rates, and their poor protection on exposed airfields. But while criticising Stalin, Volkogonov appears the inveterate Communist, claiming equivocally that  ‘while the moral aspect of the annexation of the Baltic states was distinctly negative, the act itself was a positive [sic!] one’, that ‘the overwhelming majority of the Baltic population were favourable to their countries’ incorporation into the Soviet Union in August 1940’, and even that ‘the decision to take over Western Ukraine and Byelorussia  . . . was broadly in accord with the desire of the local working class population’. These statements are highly controversial, and further study is called for. Meanwhile, Marshall Zhukov in his Memoirs (1969) offers a mostly propagandist account of the tribulations of 1941, but does provide the scandalous information that German saboteurs had cut the telegraph cables in all of the Western Frontier Districts, and that most units had no radio back-up facilities.

How did Churchill’s attitudes over the Baltic States evolve over time? Anthony Read’s and David Fisher’s Deadly Embrace contains an indication of Churchill’s early opinions cited from the latter’s Gathering Storm: “The British people  . . . have a right, in conjunction with the French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a common cause. Not only must the full co-operation of Russia be accepted, but the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, must also be brought into the association  . .  There is no means of maintaining an eastern front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia. Russian interests are deeply concerned in preventing Herr Hitler’s designs on Eastern Europe.” Yet that was said in April 1939, well before the pact was signed. Churchill at that time was surely not considering that the Baltic States had to be occupied by the Soviet Union in order to provide a bulwark against the Germans. In any case, the States (and Poland) were more in fear of the Bolsheviks than they were of the Nazis.

I turned to Robert Rhodes James’s edition of his speeches, Churchill Speaks 1897-1963, and was rather astonished by what I found. On October 1, 1939, after war had been declared, and after the dismemberment of Poland, Churchill referred to ‘Russia’s’ interests without referring to the fate of the Baltic States. “What is the second event of this first month? It is, of course, the assertion of the power of Russia. Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian armies should stand on the line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” A highly inflammatory and cynical opinion expressed by the future Prime Minister, who quickly turned his attention to the Balkans in his ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ oration.

A few months later, Churchill picked up his analysis with commentary on the Finnish war, where the Soviet invasion (part of the exercise to create a buffer zone between Leningrad and hostile forces) had provoked a robust reaction in Britain, and even calls to send troops to help the Finns. Again, Churchill evinced more rhetoric than substance. “Only Finland – superb, nay sublime – in the jaws of peril – Finland shows what fine men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is magnificent. They have exposed, for all to see, the military incapacity of the Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been dispelled in these fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can see how Communism rots the soul of a nation: how it makes it abject and hungry in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war. We cannot tell what the fate of Finland may be, but no more mournful spectacle could be presented to what is left to civilized mankind than this splendid Northern race should be at last worn down and reduced to servitude by the dull brutish force of overwhelming numbers.” Well, it surely did not take the invasion of Finland to show how a nation subjugated by Communism could be ruined, as the famines of the Ukraine and Stalin’s Gulag had showed.

On March 30, 1940, Churchill was again critical of the two totalitarian states. “What a frightful fate has overtaken Poland! Here was a community of nearly thirty-five millions of people, with all the organization of a modern government, and all the traditions of an ancient state, which in a few weeks was dashed out of civilized existence to become an incoherent multitude of tortured and starving men, women and children, ground beneath the heel of two rival forms of withering and blasting tyranny.” Indeed, sir. Yet Churchill could be remarkably selective in identifying the places suffering under extremist cruelty: Britain was at war with Germany, not with the Soviet Union, and he would come to soften his criticism of Stalin’s variety of tyranny.

For the year after his appointment as Prime Minister, Churchill was concentrated primarily on the war in western Europe, and the threats of invasion, and his speeches reflect those concerns. All that time, however, he was welcoming the time when the Soviet Union would be forced to join the Allies. In February, 1941, he reminded his audience that Hitler was already at the Black Sea, and that he ‘might tear great provinces out of Russia.’ In April, he said that the war ‘may spread eastward to Turkey and Russia’, and that ‘the Huns may lay their hands for a time upon the granaries of the Ukraine and the oil-wells of the Caucasus.” By this time he was warning Stalin of the coming German invasion, advice that the dictator chose to ignore.

When the invasion occurred, Churchill immediately declared his support for the Soviet Union. This was the occasion (June 22, 1941) when he professed that ‘no one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the past twenty-five years’. But then he dipped into his most sentimental and cloying prose: “I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. [Actually, not. Millions of peasants had been killed and persecuted by Stalin, whether by famine or deportation. Their fields had been disastrously collectivised.] I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray – ah yes, for there are times when all pray – for the safety of their loved ones, the return of their bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.”

This is all romantic tosh, of course. Stalin had so monstrously oppressed his own citizens and those in the countries he invaded that the Nazis, from Estonia to Ukraine, were initially welcomed as liberators by thousands who had seen family members shot or incarcerated, simply because they were bourgeois or ‘rich peasants’, who had seen their churches destroyed and their faith oppressed, and who had experienced their independent livelihood being crushed. As Christopher Bellamy writes, in the Oxford Companion to Military History. “The next biggest contribution [to Soviet victory] was made by Hitler, who failed to recognize the importance of the fact that his armies were initially greeted as liberators in Belorussia and the Ukraine.” Some maidens did indeed start laughing when the Germans arrived, as Georgio Geddes’s extraordinary account of Ukraine in 1941 to 1943, Nichivó: Life, Love and Death on the Russian Front, informs us.

Moorhouse and others have written of the dreadful purges and deportations that took place after the Soviets invaded the Baltic States, and the portion of Poland awarded to it through the Pact. From The Devils’ Alliance, again: “In the former Polish eastern regions, annexed by Stalin in 1939, at least 40,000 prisoners – Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorusians, and Jews – were confined in overcrowded NKVD prisons by June 1941. As elsewhere, some were released or evacuated, but around half would not survive. The worst massacres were in L’vov, where around 3,500 prisoners were killed across three prison sites, and at Lutsk (the former Polish Ĺuck), where 2,000 were murdered. But almost every NKVD prison or outpost saw a similar action – from Sambor (600 killed) to Czortkov (Czortków) (890), from Tarnopol (574) to Dubno (550).” Moorhouse continues: “Latvia had scarcely any history of anti-Semitism prior to the trauma of 1939 to 1941; it had even been a destination for some Jews fleeing the Third Reich, including Russian-born scholar Simon Dubnow. Yet, in 1941 and beyond, it became the scene – like its Baltic neighbors – of some of the most hideous atrocities, in which local units, such as the infamous Arajs Kommando, played a significant role. It seems that the Soviet occupation – with its informers, collaborators, denunciators, and persecutions – had so poisoned already fragile community relations that, even without Nazi encouragement, some sort of bloody reckoning became inevitable.”

These facts were all revealed with the benefit of hindsight, and access to archives. I need to inspect diplomatic and intelligence reports to determine exactly how much Churchill knew of these atrocities at the time. After all, the deportation and execution of thousands of Polish ‘class enemies’ was concealed from Western eyes, and the Katyn massacre of April-May 1940 remained a secret until April 1943, to the extent that Stalin claimed that the Germans were responsible. By then, his British and American allies were too craven to challenge him, even though they knew the truth. Yet Churchill’s previous comments showed he was under no illusions about Soviet persecution of even nominal opposition. If ‘communism rots the soul of a nation’, it presumably rotted the Baltic States, too.

I started this exercise in the belief that I would be uncovering further mendacity by Maisky, and soon reached the stage where I was astonished at Churchill’s obsequious response to Stalin. Stalin laid a trap for Churchill, and he walked right into it. One cannot ascribe his appeasement of Stalin solely to his desire to encourage the Soviet leader to continue the fight against Hitler, and his need to rally the British public behind a regime that he had condemned for so long. Churchill acted meanly, impulsively, and independently. In his recent biography of Churchill, Andrew Roberts writes: “Churchill announced this full-scale alliance with Soviet Russia after minimal consultation with his colleagues. Even Eden had precious little input into the decision. Nor had he consulted the Russians themselves. Over dinner at Chequers that evening Eden and Cranborne argued from the Tory point of view that the alliance ‘should be confined to the pure military aspect, as politically Russia was as bad as Germany and half the country would object to being associated with her too closely’. Yet Churchill’s view ‘was that Russia was now at war; innocent peasants were being slaughtered; and that we should forget about Soviet systems or the Comintern and extend our hand to fellow human beings in distress’. Colville recalled that this argument ‘was extremely vehement’.” He does not mention whether anyone brought up the fact that Stalin himself was responsible for the deaths of millions of peasants in his own homeland.

Throughout, Churchill showed as much disdain for the fate of the Baltic States as Chamberlain had done over the rape of Czechoslovakia. I believe that it is a topic that cries out for re-assessment. Churchill certainly did not know the extent of the disaster in the Soviet Union’s defences in July 1941, but, knowing so little, he did not need to go overboard in agreeing with Stalin’s claims. We thus have to face the possibilities: either a) Churchill knew all along about the cruelty of Soviet oppression in the areas between the Stalin Line and the Molotov Line, and chose to suppress them in his desire to rally Stalin to the cause of fighting Hitler, or b) he had managed to remain ignorant of what persecutions were occurring in these buffer states, sandwiched between the infernal machines of Nazism and Bolshevism. And, whichever explanation is correct, he omitted to explain why he, a military man, believed that the Soviet Union had managed to contain better the onslaught of the Nazi war machine by choosing to defend remote boundaries created in a campaign of aggression.

It is hard to accept the second thesis. The famous cartoon by Low, published in Punch in September 1939, where Hitler and Stalin rendezvous over dead bodies, with Hitler saying ‘The scum of the earth, I believe?’, and Stalin responding ‘The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?’, reflected well the mood and knowledge of the times. In the USA, Sumner Welles was much more hard-nosed about the menace represented by the Soviets. As the excellent Moorhouse again writes: “Nonetheless, in British government circles the idea of de facto recognition of the annexations was soon floated as a possible sop to bring Stalin onside. The American reaction was more principled. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles issued a formal statement – the Welles Declaration – condemning Soviet Aggression and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Soviet control in the region, citing ‘the rule of reason, of justice and of law,’ without which, he said, ‘civilization itself cannot be preserved.’ In private he was even more forthright, and when the Soviet ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, opined that the United States should applaud Soviet action in the Baltic, as it meant that the Baltic peoples could enjoy ‘the blessings of liberal and social government,’ his response was withering. ‘The US government,’ Welles explained, ‘sees no difference in principle between the Russian domination of the Baltic peoples and the occupation by Germany of other small European nations.’”

David Low’s Cartoon on the Nazi-Soviet Pact

The research will continue. I believe an opportunity for re-interpretation has been missed, contrary to Gorodetsky’s bubbly endorsement. (And I have read only one chapter of The Kremlin Letters so far. What fresh questions will it provoke?) Can any reader out there point me to a book that carefully dissects the implications of the defence against Barbarossa from the Molotov line, and maybe a study of virtual history that imagines what would have happened had Stalin been able to restrain himself from moving his defensive line westwards? Did Basil Liddell Hart ever write about it? In the meantime, I echo what I wrote about the Appeasement of Stalin a few months ago (see coldspurappeasement), except that I admit that I may have been too generous to Churchill in that piece. What was really going on in his mind, apart from the sentimentality, and the desire to capture some moving sentences in his oratory? It seems to me that Hitler inveigled Stalin into exposing his armies where they would be more vulnerable to his attack, that Stalin hoodwinked Churchill into making a calamitous and unnecessary compliment to Stalin’s generalship, and that Churchill let down the Baltic States by mismanaging Stalin’s expectations.

The last point to be made is to draw parallels with these times. The question of borders is all very poignant in view of current geopolitics. NATO was designed to provide concerted defence against westward extensions of the Soviet Empire. When communism died, NATO’s mission became questionable. Then Putin annexed the Crimea, supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, and this month forged a tight embrace with Belarus. Largely because of the reoccupation by the Soviet Empire after World War II, both Estonia and Latvia have 25% Russian ethnicity. Could Putin, in his desire to ‘make Russia great again’, possibly have designs on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?

I wish all coldspur readers the compliments of the season. I leave for two weeks in Los Altos, CA on December 17.

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On Appeasement

‘Appeasement’ (‘Appeasing Hitler’ in the UK)

The New York Times chose to present the following as its leading letter in the Book Review dated August 4, 2019:

“In her review of Tim Bouverie’s ‘Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War’ (July 20), Lynne Olson gives a number of reasons for what happened at the Munich conference, among them Chamberlain’s ignorance of foreign policy. However, she omits an underlying motive for that sordid episode, namely anti-Communism.

Throughout the 1930s, Conservative political opinion in Britain mostly saw Nazi Germany as a buffer against Marxism. Such views played as much of a role in ‘appeasement’ as did Chamberlain’s limitations and naivete. That anticommunism was a key component of European fascism, alas, is a truth that has been long forgotten.”

(Gene H. Bell-Villada, Williamstown, Mass.: August 2, 2019)

What is the message the letter-writer is trying to leave us? It was not immediately clear (to me), and the text thus needs to be parsed carefully. ‘Alas’: that suggests regret, regret that some unnamed persons have forgotten that ‘anticommunism was a key component of European fascism’. Well, that may not be correct, in two senses. It may not be correct that the ‘truth’ has been forgotten (by whom?), but it is also possible that the ‘truth’ itself is debatable. Hitler’s brand of fascism, according to most accounts, singled out the communists as the prime threat to his ambitions for nationalist vigour, and he persecuted them immediately he gained power in 1933. On the other hand, Mussolini’s brand of European fascism evolved from socialist roots. One might conclude, however, from the way Stalin propagandized antifascism in the 1930s, that antifascism was a more vibrant component of communism than the other way around. After all, countless deluded intellectuals ran to his banner in the belief that only communism could resist fascism. That all changed, of course, in August 1939, when Stalin decided to change the rules.

Bell-Villada’s contention is thus not without its sceptics. I read in this September’s History Today that Brendan Simms has just published a book, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough, in which he claims that Hitler has been misunderstood as a ‘far-right’ anti-communist. The reviewer Nigel Jones wrote that “Simms argues forcefully that his primary motivation was fear that Germany would be crushed by the Anglo-Saxon capitalism epitomised by the US and the British Empire.” (Please check it out, Mr. Bell-Villada.) Moreover, many years ago, A. J. P. Taylor remarked that Hitler’s anti-communism was soon dampened after his assumption of power, being replaced by antisemitism. Perhaps the mutual loathing disappeared when Hitler and Stalin realised that they had more in common with each other than their ideologies superficially suggested: despite his rallying-calls to anti-fascists, Stalin was a secret admirer of Hitler’s tactics for increasing power. Or, more probably, Hitler’s anti-communism weakened because all the active communists in Germany had either been murdered, or had fled the country. Quite simply, Hitler and Stalin both wanted to obliterate everyone who disagreed with them, or did not declare loyalty to them, or simply who did not fit in their perverse sociological tribes.

Yet the author seems to be suggesting two further ideas. The first is the subtle insinuation that ‘anti-communism’ is the nadir of political depravity, and that, by expressing opposition to communism, Chamberlain and his team were essentially fascists themselves, and had more in common with Hitler than the history-books have shown. Apart from the illogical and careless temporal connection that Bell-Villada makes between the 1930s and Chamberlain (Chamberlain did not become Prime Minister until May 1937), the assertion is absurd. While there were certainly many fascist sympathisers in government during the late 1930s, the Conservative Party was defending a pluralist liberal democracy against the pressures of the two totalitarian adversaries. It was a flawed democracy, no doubt, with too much of an aristocratic influence, unsuitable delusions about the Empire, and an inherent disregard for equality of opportunity, but it was as good as any of the time, and capable of evolution. It was worth defending. The expression of both anti-fascist and anti-communist sentiments was a healthy and necessary part of the political stance.

The second suggestion is that the failure of British political opinion to sympathise with communism, and thus form a speedy alliance with Stalin, was one of the main reasons why Hitler was allowed to pursue his imperial ambitions unchecked. I believe the writer here discloses a colossal naivety about the Soviet Union in the 1930s. It was a vast prison-camp, where Stalin had been responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens in the name of Leninism-Marxism and the Communist Experiment. The historian Richard Evans, in his recent Gresham’s College Provost lecture, pointed out that the German middle classes, before Hitler established his one-party state in July 1933, were ‘terrified of communism, whose supporters had put 100 deputies into the Reichstag in November 1932’. They were therefore much more familiar than their British equivalents were with what had happened to the bourgeoise in Russia. Fear of communism was clearly not a specifically fascist characteristic, even in Germany.

It would thus have been absurd for Great Britain and France to pretend that they had goals in common with Stalin for the setting up of some stable political order in Europe at a time even before the horrors of Hitler’s own programmes of mass murder had been initiated, and it would have been impossible to sell such ideas to the British electorate, or even to the nation’s allies in eastern Europe. As one historian. Larry Fuchser, has written: “To Chamberlain, reaching agreement with the dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] was a supremely important goal in its own right, and he did not need the additional ideological factor of Germany as a bulwark against communism to convince him that such agreements would be worthwhile.” Chamberlain’s policy was desperately naïve – to satisfy any demand of Hitler’s in order to avert war. But Hitler’s hatred of communism had nothing to do with it.

A common theme in historical writing, however, is that, if Britain had adopted serious talks with the Soviet Union, Germany might have been encircled and intimidated, and the Third Reich quashed before war broke out. Indeed, some Russian and Western historians even today lament the failure of the Western powers to have sent a serious negotiating team to Moscow in the summer of 1939: this is a prominent theme of Bouverie’s. Yet Chamberlain rightly detested Stalin and Communism, and found it impossible to consider personal parleys with the Soviet leader. And when the Soviet Union wanted a guarantee from Poland to provide a path for its army to pass through in the event of hostilities, it did not approach Poland for permission, but requested Britain and France to intervene! The fact was that Poland’s government feared Stalin more than it feared Hitler, and would have nothing to do with any accommodation with the Communists. Had Britain come to some agreement with the Soviet Union, would it have had to connive at Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic States and Poland? Such a pact would have meant the replacement of the appeasement of Hitler by a similar grovelling position towards Stalin. As George Orwell later wrote: “. . . all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.” (London Letter to Partisan Review, April 17, 1944)

Molotov Signing the Pact (with Ribbentrop over his shoulder)

In any case, what happened next blows a hole in Mr. Bell-Villada’s thesis. In August 1939 the determined anti-fascists and the resolute anti-communists got together to sign a non-aggression pact, and the Soviet Union started providing matériel to help Hitler wage his war against the West, including, of course, the Battle of Britain. The conflict joined was now a battle against imperialism, not fascism. Alas, the truth that Molotov and Ribbentrop came together to sign a pact that immediately turned the remnants of a Popular Front into a Highly Unpopular Devils’ Alliance has long been forgotten by many eager armchair observers.

So what was the Times Book Editor thinking? I suspect he (or she) didn’t really take it all in: the apparent message rang a bell in his head that Communism would have defeated Fascism, and that war would have been averted, and Europe would have been a better place for it if only the West had reached out to Stalin. The vague regret about the implosion of communism that imbues the Times editors must have overtaken him. That is a common opinion of the American Leftist intelligentsia. After all, this is the newspaper that instructs its journalists to report the catastrophe of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela as his ‘mismanagement of the economy’, carefully avoiding the ‘S-word’ of ‘socialism’ (which might turn out to embarrass Bernie Sanders), as if the moustachioed Marxist caudillo were merely an incompetent version of John Major.

And it does not appear that Mr. Bell-Villada has even read the book. He is allowed to assume that Lynne Olson’s review offers a comprehensive summary of Bouverie’s account. The nature of Mr. Bell-Villada’s credentials for offering an opinion on this matter is not clear, however: he offers a suitable Massachusetts address, but his Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘an American literary critic, novelist, translator and memoirist, with strong interests in Latin American Writing, Modernism, and magic Realism’. Bell-Villada (the entry goes on to say) has been a professor at the private liberal arts Williams College since 1975. No apparent degree in modern history is evident in his curriculum vitae, although he does hold a mysterious doctorate from Harvard.

Analysis

It happened that I had read both Lynne Olson’s review and Bouverie’s book. Bell-Villada is correct about Olson: the Soviet Union and Communism get nary a mention in her review. Yet Bouverie is hardly expansive in his coverage either. He repeatedly refers to Chamberlain’s ‘distrust’ of the Russians, but discusses the antipathy for Bolshevism in mainly impersonal terms: “ . . . the western Powers needed to reach an understanding with Soviet Russia, a nation widely distrusted and against which Nazi Germany had originally been conceived as a bulwark.” (p 334). (Note the evasive passive voice.) Yet, on the following page, Bouverie undermines the nature of what such an ‘understanding’ might have taken, referring to events as late as April 1939: “The Foreign Policy Committee could see no advantages in an alliance with Russia – on the contrary, such a move was likely to perturb allies in eastern Europe – and, although Chamberlain had assured the Labour leadership that he had ‘no ideological objection to an agreement with Russia,’ he admitted privately to being deeply suspicious of her.”

‘No ideological objection’? ‘Suspicious?’, when the state that Lenin founded was pursuing the extermination of capitalists like him? This shows another gutless aspect of Chamberlain, who believed that dictators could be transformed to behave like English gentlemen. Was he more suspicious of Stalin than he was of Hitler? In that case, why not respond more robustly? Neville Chamberlain was not known for his intellectual stature, but that sounds more like a move to ‘appease’, or reconcile with, his Parliamentary opposition rather than the reflection of any political principles. Nevertheless, if Chamberlain had been prepared to discard Czechoslovakia because of ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’, he would have been unlikely to want to establish an association with the even more mysterious and inscrutable Russians, and explain it to his electorate. If he had found it difficult to find a common level of discourse with Hitler, and had been betrayed by him, it would have been an even worse struggle with Stalin. Chamberlain was out of his depth. If he and Stalin had abandoned parleys, and resorted to an arm-wrestling match, I would have instantly put my money on the Gremlin from the Kremlin rather than on the Birmingham Bruiser.

Unfortunately, Bouverie offers only a very superficial analysis of Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union, in an Epilogue titled ‘Guilty Men’.  But he gives a hint to where his unsubstantiated opinion resides, in a paragraph that might put some air behind Bell-Villada’s sails (p 415): “The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failure – the failure to rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet Union), the failure to project British power, and the failure to educate public opinion – stemmed. For defenders of appeasement, this is an exercise in ahistoricism. It was not until after Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement and marched into Prague, they argue, that he demonstrated his mendacity, while the full horrors of the Nazi regime only became apparent after the end of the war.”

Yet Bouverie does not substantiate this claim. Does he think that Chamberlain ‘failed to perceive the true nature of the Soviet regime’, as well? He does not say. Bouverie cites three paragraphs from Sir Warren Fisher’s ‘damning survey’ of British foreign policy, delivered in 1948, but Fisher omitted the Soviet Union in his castigation of the failure of ‘the British Empire, the United States and France’ to face the facts in unison. Earlier, Bouverie explained that the Chiefs of Staff had made an about-turn about the role of the Soviet Union when Molotov replaced Litvinov as Foreign Minister, and feared a rapprochement between the Germans and the Soviets, and that such arguments swayed Halifax and most of the Cabinet into responding to Soviet overtures. Yet this was probably too late, and largely a bluff. In a well-written book on Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement by Larry Williams Fuchser (a 1982 volume strangely missing from Bouverie’s bibliography), the author shows his opinion of how unimportant negotiations with the Soviet Union were. He spends only two brief sentences on the topic. Fuchser indicates that it was the pliable Halifax, at the bidding of Cadogan and the Foreign Office, who pushed for this approach, but then enigmatically adds: “Chamberlain was forced into these negotiations quite against his will, and it is clear that in this respect at least, he had lost control over British foreign policy.”

This does not make complete sense, however, as the remainder of Fuchser’s thesis is that Chamberlain maintained tight control over a sycophantic inner Cabinet, a compliant Foreign Policy Committee, and a loyal party apparatus. Thus we have to return to Chamberlain’s sudden lack of resolve: if he was not able to stand up to his Labour opposition, the Foreign Office, and his Chiefs of Staff, what hope did he have of standing up to Hitler or Stalin? Why did he simply not veto any attempt to reach out to the Soviets? It was not as if Halifax was going to resign in a flash of pique (as if that mattered), as Eden had done. It is true that Chamberlain felt handicapped by the French, because of her agreements with the Poles and the Soviet Union, but he was overall prepared to reject the French implorations. Fuchser and Bouverie both point out that Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote in his diary that Chamberlain ‘would rather resign than sign alliance with Soviet’. ‘Appeasement’ is sometimes domestic political compromise – and not always a necessary act. 

Thus it would have been better to have sent no mission at all rather than the underpowered and underauthorised Slow Boat to Leningrad that resulted, and which failed to impress Voroshilov and company. That misguided venture encourages Bouverie, however, to make his dubious conclusion: “Unlike his successor, he [Chamberlain] treated the United States with frigid disdain, while his failure to secure a deal with the Soviet Union stands out as among the greatest blunders in that calamitous decade.” But it wasn’t ‘failure’: Chamberlain was never serious. And what kind of a deal with the unscrupulous Stalin would have made sense? The independence of the Baltic States was a major bone of contention. And what would happen if Stalin had still invaded Finland, for instance? Again, Bouverie does not explain.

A J P Taylor

One of the historians with whom I am familiar is A. J. P. Taylor. Taylor studied this period in his much-cited 1961 work, The Origins of the Second World War. This is a book that needs to be used cautiously, however, since Taylor notoriously came up with some bizarre and controversial judgments. For example, he presented some equivocal and provocative opinions, such as: “The blame for war can be put on Hitler’s Nihilism instead of on the faults and failures of European statesmen – faults and failures which their public shared. Human blunders, however, usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.” Such vague attributions of guilt and responsibility are highly dubious and unconvincing. In addition, Taylor could be infuriating when he made lofty generalisations about ‘the British’ and their assumed intentions, when in the next sentence he would analyse the differences of opinion that existed in various politicians and diplomats, and which thus contributed to indecision. (Taylor deployed too much use of the passive voice for my liking.)

Yet Taylor could provide trenchant and pithy insights as well, worthy of essay-type ‘Discussions’.  “Both sides wanted agreement, but not the same agreement. The British wanted a moral demonstration which would enable them to reach a settlement with Hitler on more favourable terms. The Russians wanted a precise military alliance for mutual assistance, which would either deter Hitler, or secure his defeat”, he wrote, in the relevant Chapter Ten of Origins. And his conclusion to this chapter ran as follows: “Alliances are worth while when they put into words a real community of interests; otherwise they lead only to confusion and disaster, as the French alliances did. It was inconceivable, in the circumstances of 1939, that the British should commit themselves, irretrievably and decisively, in favour of Soviet Russia as against Germany; and equally inconceivable that the Russians should commit themselves to defence of the status quo.” That judgment is sound and clear, notably so, given Taylor’s own communist sympathies.

Later, in 1965, in English History 1914-1945, Taylor gave a more guarded explanation of what happened. He suggested that the Soviet Union made demands for reciprocity in its approaches to France and Germany, and that Chamberlain dithered, not only because of distaste of communism, but owing to the pressure of public opinion, and the appeals of such as Lloyd George – a now familiar refrain. In addition, Taylor raised the important spectre of the Soviet Union’s invading Poland and the Baltic States under the mantle of an agreement with the democracies, which would have been a bitter pill for Chamberlain to have swallowed and explained to his constituents. Taylor significantly repeated his earlier conclusion that the Soviet Union was as unenthusiastic about an alliance with the United Kingdom and France as the latter were themselves.

How has historical research advanced in the past fifty years? The theme of a missed opportunity has been picked up since by many other historians, some of whom have had access to Russian archives. For instance, in 1999, Michael Jabara Carley wrote 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (a work apparently uninspected by Bouverie) and in 2018 followed up with a paper in International History Review titled Fiasco: The Anglo-Franco-Soviet Agreement That Never Was, and the Unpublished British White Paper, 1939-1940, The latter explores these events in great depth, and points to rifts between France and Britain in the response to the Soviet approach, and describes a White Paper on the failed negotiations that was suppressed by Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, Carley’s work is representative of the fashionable academic left (including, no doubt, Mr. Bell-Villada), emphasizing the themes of ‘co-operation’ with the Soviet Union, attributing the distaste for communism to Britain’s ‘elites’, and ignoring the fact of how unreliable a signer to an agreement Stalin would have been.  Chamberlain and other conservatives are classified as ‘hard-core Sovietophobes’, as if their distaste were a dire medical condition rather than a serious and justified ideological opposition. Carley supposes the existence of Soviet ‘views’ towards Britain and France, as if the country had vigorous parliamentary debates, a free press, and public opinion polls. He appears to think that Soviet military ‘assistance’ to adjoining countries from the Black Sea to the Baltic would have been welcomed, and somehow beneficial. He reports that the Soviet Union had one hundred divisions to deploy, while Britain and France had only two, but treats seriously Stalin’s suggestion that he did not want be ‘left in the lurch to face Nazi Germany alone’. Carley is far more trusting of Stalin’s objectives in a military alliance than he is of Chamberlain’s justified scepticism about it. Stalin’s replacement of Litvinov (a Jew) by Molotov at the end of April is attributed to British ‘stalling’ to Stalin’s offer of a couple of weeks before rather than interpreted as a signal that Stalin meant at that point to do business with the Germans (as has been pointed out by other historians). He says nothing about Stalin’s access to Britain’s diplomatic thinking by virtue of spies in the Foreign Office (notably John Herbert King). In summary, according to Carley, the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was all Chamberlain’s fault.

If this is the current state of research on the crisis of the late 1930s, it is highly regrettable. The controversy over the missed opportunity would have been a highly profitable avenue for a contemporary historian to pursue, perhaps investigating the counterfactual history that would have evolved if a Soviet-Franco-British alliance had had any teeth. Would they have had to declare war on Germany in September 1939? And, since the retrospective judgment of the Soviet Union is that it signed the pact in order to gain time and rebuild its armed forces, would it really have wanted to engage Germany on foreign soil in 1939? Threatening joint hostilities would surely have not deterred Hitler, or brought Europe to peace. Hitler would not have abandoned his plans for Lebensraum. What would the Poles have done if the Red Army invaded its territory? How would a land assault on Germany by French and British forces have fared? Would Hitler have had to conduct a war on two fronts, or would he have been able to reverse his strategy, fighting the Soviet Union first before invading France and Belgium? Life would still have been made intolerable for millions of innocent civilians from Finland to Bessarabia, and Hitler would certainly not have stayed his hand over Dunkirk when he had the chance to eliminate the British Expeditionary Force. (I expect some military historian has already explored such scenarios.)

Tim Bouverie

In summary, Appeasement is a very readable, and imaginatively composed, book. The author is a fresh-faced young journalist who was educated at my alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford, gaining a degree in history. He has exploited a rich range of sources – works of history, both familiar and obscure, private and public archives, memoirs, articles and dissertations (though almost exclusively written in English) to write a fascinating account of a still controversial period in the nation’s history. Yet debates continue about responsibilities and blame for what was a very complex challenge in allowing Hitler to advance his plans as he did, and I do not think Bouverie sheds any fresh light on the matter, and does not provide support for his conclusions. Despite the extraordinary parade of puffs from distinguished historians on the back-cover (Kershaw, Frankopan, Moorehead, Hastings, Macmillan, Beevor and Fraser), I do not regard Appeasement as a major work of history bringing innovative research to the table. But it prompts me to inspect now one or two aspects in more detail.

Lewis Namier

As an example, I quote again from Bouverie’s Epilogue, where he cites several leading figures (e.g. Boothby, Churchill, Warren Fisher) who apparently held the opinion that, with greater diplomatic skills, war could have been averted (p 410). Among these he lists the historian Lewis Namier, who (he says) believed that ‘at several junctures it could have been stopped without excessive effort or sacrifice’. Well, this sounded to me a point at which a book should begin, not end. I knew of Namier (mainly through my study of Isaiah Berlin), but had not read any of his books. This statement came from Diplomatic Preludes: I thought it might address several questions on my mind, so I obtained the volume from the local university library.

Lewis Namier

The Introduction and Outline of Namier’s book contains the following passage (which I recorded in my August Commonplace file): “The issue of a crisis depends not so much on its magnitude as on the courage and resolution with which it is met. The second German bid for world dominion found Europe weak and divided. At several junctures it could have been stopped without excessive effort or sacrifice, but was not: a failure of European statesmanship. Behind the German drive were passionate forces, sustained by obsessionist, sadistic hatreds and by a cruel ideology; to these the Germans, whom defeat had deprived of their routine of life, showed even more than their usual receptivity, while the rest of Europe had neither the faith, nor the will, nor even sufficient repugnance, to offer timely, effective resistance. Some imitated Hitler and hyena-like followed in his track; some tolerated him, hoping that his advance would reach its term – by saturation, exhaustion, the resistance of others, or the mere chapter of accidents – before it attained them; and some, while beholding his handiwork, would praise him of  having ‘restored the self-respect of the Germans’. Janissaries and appeasers aided Hitler’s work: a failure of European morality.”

And that’s it. There was nothing else in the book to back it up – just these windy, abstract statements about ‘European statesmanship’ and ‘European morality’. (I do not know what is meant by those entities. History is made by individual agents contributing to events.) I found the rest of the book, which describes only the events of 1938 and 1939, practically unreadable, and utterly useless in illustrating the claims that Namier made in his Introduction. So why would Bouverie choose to extract such a vague and unsupported assertion to bolster the rather thin conclusion to his book? Exploring this idea might have led to something valuable.

Maybe Namier wrote about appeasement in more depth elsewhere. (Bouverie lists In the Margin of History as a primary source, but I have not been able to inspect it.). So I dug around. In his essay on Namier, published in Personal Impressions, Isaiah Berlin gives a glimpse of how his friend really thought:

“He spoke bitterly about the policy of appeasement. He felt that their sense of reality and their empiricism had evidently deserted the ruling classes in England: not to understand that Hitler meant everything he said – that Mein Kampf was to be taken literally, that Hitler had a plan for a war of conquest – was self-deception worthy of German or Jews. The Cecils were ‘all right’; they understood reality, they stood for what was most characteristic of England. So was Winston Churchill. The men who opposed Zionism were the same as those who were against Churchill and the policy of national resistance – Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, Chamberlain, Halifax, Toynbee, the officials of the Foreign Office, Archbishop Lang, the bulk of the Conservative Party, most trade unionists. The Cecils, Churchill, true aristocracy, pride, respect for human dignity, traditional virtues, resistance, Zionism, personal grandeur, no-nonsense realism, these were fused into one amalgam in his mind. Pro-Germans and pro-Arabs were one gang.”

This was progress, at least, the recognition that in a pluralist society, many different standpoints contribute to eventual policy-making, rather than ascribing causation to the abstraction of ‘European morality’. Namier identified some of these agents. Yet I found it too stereotyped: ‘the ruling classes’ – who are they? Why should a hesitation about the merits of Zionism automatically be assumed to indicate a sympathy for Hitler? Surely opinions were more complex than this? Indeed, Berlin mentions that Namier used to harangue ‘pen-pushers of the Foreign Office’ and ‘the hypocritical idiots of the Colonial Office’ at his club, the Athenaeum, and do more harm than good by his supplications. And did Namier really understand the various aspects of what ‘appeasement’ meant?

Interestingly, elsewhere in this essay, Berlin draws attention to Namier’s failings as a historian. “He believed that objective truth could be discovered, and that he had found a method of doing so in history; that this method consisted in a sort of pointillisme, ‘the microscopic method’, the splitting up of social facts into details of individual lives – atomic entities, the careers of which could be precisely verified; and that these atoms could then be integrated into greater wholes. This was the nearest to scientific method that was attainable in history, and he would adhere to it at whatever cost, in spite of all criticism, until and unless he became convinced by internal criteria of its inadequacy, because it had failed to produce results verified by research.” Berlin then concludes that Namier then integrated his atomic facts ‘with a marvellous power of imaginative generalisation’, lacking the skills of a narrative historian.

Is ‘imaginative generalisation’ a feature to be admired in historians? Maybe not so much these days, Sir Isaiah. (Berlin was rather good at that stuff himself, as was Taylor.) As another example of Namier’s shortcomings, in his memoir Bird of Passage, Rudolf Peierls reinforced the impression that Namier gave of theatrical vagueness when he wrote: “He was very fond of saying ‘we’. And you had to be very alert in following the course of the conversation to know whether at the given point this meant the University of Manchester, All Souls College, Oxford, the Jews, the Foreign Office, or Poland.” Such ways of thinking do not lead to historical precision. I do not believe Namier is a productive and reliable source. But very shrewd on Peierls’ part.

An Alternative Approach

My first exposure, therefore, to one of Bouverie’s influences was not positive. Moreover, I think Bouverie overlooks the fact that ‘appeasement’ (like ‘remembrance’, which can mean both ‘recalling from experience’ and ‘commemoration’) carried two clear meanings in the 1930s – ‘pacification’, and later ‘conciliation’. (This is a point that David Dilks made: “The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else’s expense.”) The ambivalence is shown in the fact that the book, titled Appeasing Hitler in the UK (which does not do justice to the policy as pursued), was re-titled Appeasement in the USA (when it is not a study of appeasement in general), with an odd subtitle (Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War) that suggests that Churchill was party to the process. Thus the fact that much of Baldwin’s and Chamberlain’s policy, spurred by their deep desire to avert a repeat of the WWI carnage, was motivated by an honourable desire to bring a stable peace to Europe, and only later sharply criticised as a shabby propitiation of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s demands, is overlooked by Bouverie.

Chamberlain and Hitler

I have read only a handful of the book in Bouverie’s Bibliography, but, if I were striving for a methodological approach to the challenge of defining when the policy of appeasement might have taken a different course (Namier’s ‘junctures’), I would need to bring some structure to the environment, along two axes. The first would offer a time-line, listing the critical events by which Hitler’s growing belligerent moves became more obvious and threatening. The second would attempt to profile the varieties of opinion that existed in influencers and policy-makers in Britain’s pluralist society. Indeed, from studying materials such as Bouverie’s, one can track how the opinions of individual factions did evolve in the light of events on the Continent. (Some historian may have already analysed the period under such a structure, and I apologise if I have overlooked such a study.)

I would start with Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 – a grab, but performed with some democratic authority. At that stage, observers should have sat up to take the Austrian more seriously. Here follow what I would classify as the main events that western politicians should have addressed and analysed:

  1. The Publication of Mein Kampf: Hitler’s book was published in Germany in 1925 and 1926, but did not appear in English until 1933, in a heavily abridged version. As Bouverie relates, the Ambassador to Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, immediately after Hitler’s accession, warned the Foreign Office of the threats inherent in Mein Kampf, but he was largely ignored. Indeed, many politicians did not even read the English version until too late (see ‘Who read Mein Kampf?’)
  2. German Rearmament (1): Brigadier Temperley, who had attended the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932, pointed out in 1933 that Germany’s development of over a hundred fighter airplanes was in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.
  3. Withdrawal from the League of Nations: Germany withdrew in October 1933, in protest against its members’ refusal to allow the country to achieve military parity.
  4. The Night of the Long Knives: In June-July 1934, Hitler showed his ruthlessness by purging Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung, seeing it as threat to his own power
  5. The Murder of Dollfuß: Having banned the Austrian Nazi party, Dollfuss, the Chancellor Austria was assassinated in July 1934 by Nazi agents.
  6. German Rearmament (2): On March 16, 1935, Hitler openly announced that Germany would build an airforce, and begin conscription, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
  7. Anglo-German Naval Agreement: This agreement was signed on June 18, 1935, and set out to regulate the size of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine in relation to the Royal Navy.
  8. Italian Invasion of Ethiopia: On October 3, 1935, Hitler’s fascist ally Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, showing his imperial ambitions. The inability of the League of Nations to respond emphasised its hollowness.
  9. German Reoccupation of the Rhineland: In violation of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno, Hitler’s forces remilitiarised the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, including a considerable swath of land on the right bank.
  10. Fortification of the Western Wall: Soon after the militarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler started a project to fortify the old Siegfried Line.
  11. Aid to Franco in Spanish Civil War: Immediately the war started, in July 1936, Hitler sent in troops, aircraft and material to aid the Nationalist effort.
  12. Hitler’s Assumption of Control of Army: With the sacking of Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch in January 1938, Hitler made himself Supreme Commander of the Army.
  13. The Anschluß: On March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed into Germany, a process forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.
  14. The Expropriation of the Sudetenland: In October 1938, the Sudetenland (a primarily German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia that had once been part of Austria) was assigned to Germany.
  15. The Munich Pact: On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the pact with Hitler, effectively handing over Czechoslovakia to the Germans.
  16. Kristallnacht: On November 9-10, 1938, The Germans oppressed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, killing about a hundred Jews throughout Germany.
  17. The Invasion of Czechoslovakia: The Germans invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939.
  18. The Nazi-Soviet Pact: Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a pact of non-aggression on August 23, 1939.
  19. Invasion of Poland: The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus triggering a declaration of war by Britain.
  20. Extermination of Jews: On December 16, 1939, The Times made its first report on the mass execution of Jews, in Lublin.

Next, the profiles of political figures. One must remember that the United Kingdom, in trying to forge policy, had to consider the opinions of the leaders of its Dominions, as well as those of its allies in Europe. In addition, Roosevelt started to poke in his oar at the beginning of 1938.  I shall restrict myself here to the spectrum of opinion within Britain itself.  I would classify it as follows, with examples of the main adherents:

  1. Complete agreement with Nazi policies (Mosley; Londonderry)
  2. Sympathy for fascism, but essentially patriotic (Dawson)
  3. Universal Christian pacifism (Lansbury)
  4. Pious abdication of leadership (Baldwin)
  5. Labour distaste for Nazi policies, but essentially pacifist (Attlee)
  6. Liberal admiration for Hitler’s reconstruction of Germany, but opportunistic and hypocritical over the Soviet Union (Lloyd George)
  7. Labour distaste for totalitarianism, and stressing rearmament (Bevin)
  8. Tory disdain for Hitlerism, sympathy to German grievances, but confident it can be stopped via good will (Chamberlain)
  9. Vague impressionable Tory piety (Halifax)
  10. Realistic abhorrence of Hitlerism (and Communism), and urging re-armament (Churchill)
  11. Distaste for Hitlerism, and unwilling to negotiate with dictators (Eden)
  12. Belief in Communism as only valid anti-fascist force (Pollitt)

This segmentation is necessarily simplistic, but serves to show how fragmented political opinion was. (I hope it carries enough ‘imaginative generalisation’ to satisfy Berlinian requirements. It may attribute a depth of political thinking to such flabby figures as Halifax and Eden that they perhaps do not merit.) Moreover, opinions evolved. Attlee became more militaristic after the Sudetenland episode; Lord Londonderry, a diehard fascist supporter, was revolted by Kristallnacht; Chamberlain had to swallow his previous idealistic notions after the Munich agreement was shown to be empty; Lloyd George suddenly switched his affiliations to Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and made personal remonstrations to Chamberlain about an agreement with the Soviet Union, as did Churchill, supported by Vansittart; all but Halifax and the diehard corps of the Conservative Party rallied to Chamberlain after war was declared; several prominent Communists (such as Goronwy Rees) abandoned the Party when the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed; Mosley was interned, but renounced support for Hitler when he understood the nature of Hitler’s aggression; Churchill remarkably overlooked his hatred of Communism when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. What should also be remembered, however, is that before the war Chamberlain used his authority to apply great pressure on the media to support his policy of trying to contain Hitler, which helped to stifle any oppositionist communications to the mases.

Nevertheless, one can accept that, at a certain stage, opinion might have consolidated around a strategy of deterrence of Hitler, of sending him a message that continued infractions of international treaties would not be tolerated, of showing a degree of force before the dictator had been able to assemble any comparable military strength of his own, of pointing out to the German people that a resurgence of imperial aggression across Europe would not be tolerated. For Hitler was a bully: and bullies will continue to flex their muscles until they meet resistance. Indeed, they will interpret a failure to resist as a sign of weakness, and an encouragement of the policies that brought them to where they are.

I would select the remilitarisation of the Rhineland as the critical event that should have turned the tables. Hitler had been given enough benefit of the doubt by then, and the seriousness of his aggressive ambitions was clear. This was a territorial push, the first implementation of his objectives for Lebensraum. Yet Hitler’s military strength was poor: he had not yet built a competent and extensive army. The French forces were larger and stronger. Hitler did not yet have access to the munitions factories of Czechoslovakia. And when the French army moved, Hitler blinked. Repulsing this German incursion would not necessarily have meant war. Yet nothing happened. The entry of Hitler’s troops into the Rhineland, and the failure of France and Britain to take action, removed the last obstacle to the defence of the west. The Treaty of Locarno in 1925 had committed Britain, France (and Italy) to guaranteeing the Franco-German border against ‘flagrant violations’. It is difficult to imagine what could constitute a more flagrant violation than this move of Hitler’s. William Shirer was one journalist who at the time recognized the pivotal chance that had been allowed to escape.

As Bouverie explains, the Rhineland exploit had not come as a surprise. The instincts of the newly appointed Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, were to honour the Locarno Treaty arrangements, and come to France’s aid if she requested help. But he dithered, despite hawkish views from such as Vansittart in the Foreign Office, and spoke against any action by France against Germany. As Bouverie writes: “Despite stating in a memorandum to the Cabinet on March 8 – the day after the invasion – that Hitler could no longer be trusted to abide by treaties even when they had been freely entered into, he nevertheless, and contradictorily, argued that the Government should use this opportunity ‘as far-reaching and enduring a settlement as possible whilst Herr Hitler is still in the mood to do so.” (p 87)

Moreover, the public had not been prepared. Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace was still an influential book, arguing that the cost of reparations on the German people was too punitive, and they could not be expected to provide such wealth in an effective state of slavery. His book was misunderstood, and criticised at the time. The problem was that politicians such as Chamberlain and Baldwin were not imaginative enough to recognize that, while the scale of reparations may have been a mistake, it did not mean that Germany should be allowed to break other treaty-defined obligations, rearm itself as an aggressive power, and make incursions into the territories of its neighbours. Such subtleties were thus lost on the British public: Bouverie records that the Dean of Chichester believed that ‘the ordinary man almost breathed a sigh of relief when he heard that Hitler had entered the Zone.’ Hitler gained further confirmation of the pusillanimity of the British and French.

The crux of the matter is that Chamberlain has come to be defined by Appeasement, as Eden was by Suez, and Cameron will be by the Referendum. The man they called the ‘Coroner’ has borne the brunt of the failed policy. In his tenure as Prime Minster, Chamberlain tried to impose his will by creating a Cabinet dominated by sycophants, and undermined those who stood up to him, such as Duff Cooper and Eden. But at least he had a policy, however misguided it was, unlike Baldwin. In a recent Literary Review article, Professor Cornwall observed that Chamberlain ‘believed that a European war should be avoided because Sudeten German grievances were basically credible’. That may have been so, but the damage had been done long before. Again, it must be remembered that Chamberlain did not become Prime Minister until May 1937. The failures went back many years.

Thus an innovative and scholarly approach might investigate whether and why Chamberlain was able to exert such an influence on foreign policy when he held only the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. For example, did his control of the purse-strings allow him to hinder or help the cause for re-armament? A recent book by Lord Lexden, Redressing the Balance, tries to restore Chamberlain’s reputation by inspecting the many reforms that he helped implement before the dire days of Munich for which he is remembered, and even claims that his delaying tactics actually helped prepare the British Empire for the inevitable conflict. A fresh inspection of Chamberlain’s influence before he became Prime Minister, and of his timidity over the Soviet Union in the face of the War and Foreign Office pressure in the summer of 1939 might have provided a dramatic new addition to the historical record.

Dealing with Stalin

‘Judgment in Moscow’

Moreover, Britain would have had to deal with Stalin eventually. I have recently been reading Vladimir Bukovsky’s penetrating study of the Politburo’s manipulation of western opinion, Judgment in Moscow, which explores how the intellectual dupes of the western democracies were taken in by the siren songs of ‘co-operation’, ‘peace’ and ‘détente’, all designed to be implemented on the Kremlin’s terms. Written over twenty years ago, it has only just been published in English. It is an absolutely indispensable volume to be read by anybody who wants to understand the sham of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’, and the fraudulent behaviour of Gorbachev, leading to the resurgence of kleptocratic communists in the control of Russia. My only regret about this work is that its detailed analysis picks up only around 1970, whereas the propaganda campaign went back to the Second World War. In any case, Bukovsky writes: “Ironically, the architects of Ostpolitik are being touted as heroes and are claiming that the downfall of communism in the East was a product of their ‘delicate’ games with Moscow. This is shameless beyond belief. According to such criteria. Neville Chamberlain could have declared himself the victor in 1945, as peace with Germany was finally reached.”

Vladimir Bukovsky

Of course, poor Chamberlain died in November 1940 of stomach cancer, so did not live to see that irony played out. Yet the analogy is clear – a clear case of post hoc non propter hoc. Bukovsky explains how the shameful policy of détente needlessly prolonged the lives of the communist regimes, and echoed the decades-long practice of the West’s attempts to come to grips with its adversary by taking its implorations for ‘peace’ seriously.

Stalin and Churchill

I have written before about the futility of trying to build a culture of ‘co-operation’ with an agency whose objectives are in fact to help the tide of history in trying to destroy you. (See https://coldspur.com/krivitsky-churchill-and-the-cold-war/) Yet immediately the Soviet Union became an ally in the war against Germany, Britain (and then the United States) had to deal with Stalin’s untrustworthiness, duplicity, and propagandizing, and her representatives seemed incapable of countering the Generalissimo’s demands for fear of upsetting him, performing damage to the war effort, and even possibly pushing him back into Hitler’s arms. (Such negotiations did in fact happen later, through Switzerland and Sweden, but they were initiated by the Nazis through third parties when they had effectively seen the writing on the wall.)

Stalin was ungracious about Churchill’s offer of material aid (which the nation could not afford) after Barbarossa, and immediately (July 1941) started making demands for a ‘Second Front’, ignoring the fact that the British Empire was engaged on several fronts already. Beaverbrook and Harriman made lavish promises to Stalin in person, in October 1941. Despite informing Churchill in September that the Soviet Union was ‘on the point of collapse’, Stalin arrogantly insisted on a statement of ‘war aims’ in November, to which Churchill meekly offered ‘co-operation’. Stalin threatened Ambassador Clark Kerr that he might seek peace with the Germans if the Allies did not help him more. He asked for (and received) legitimisation of the Soviet Union’s extended borders in the Baltics. He made incessant and offensively-worded demands for the highly dangerous convoy system to be resumed. He ferociously placed the guilt for the Katyn massacre on to the Germans: Churchill knew that was a lie, but did nothing. Stalin was insincere about the exchange of intelligence, demanding much, but revealing little. He undermined the Polish government-in-exile, and captured their representatives in Warsaw. To Churchill he expressed ‘shock’ on hearing of the Warsaw uprising, and his forces stood by. He used his spies in the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States to undermine his allies’ negotiating tactics over the future of the central states of Europe shortly to be ‘liberated’ by the Soviets. He was ruthless over the return of prisoners-of-war to the Soviet Union. And the Iron Curtain fell.

Indeed, on July 18, 1943, Anthony Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, warned that the appeasement of Stalin closely resembled the previous attitude to Hitler. But by then, it was again too late. British influence was diminished by then, with the resources of the United States influencing the outcome of the war. The vain, ingenuous and sickly Roosevelt was calling the shots, sometimes influenced by his mischievous wife. He undermined Churchill, believing that he alone knew how to manage Stalin. Shortly before he died in April 1945, Roosevelt acknowledged that Stalin had betrayed all his Yalta promises, and that he was not a man he could do business with any longer.

Yet I believe that Churchill must be held largely responsible. When Barbarossa occurred in June 1941, he immediately sent a message of support to Stalin, without consulting his Chiefs of Staff. That was fine as a gesture, indicating the shared campaign against Naziism – which Churchill rightly rated as a direr threat than Communism at the time. But I wonder, if he had visited the Kremlin soon after, whether a speech along the following lines might have set expectations a little straighter without damaging the war effort:

“Marshall Stalin: You may recall that, on June 22, when ‘the monster of wickedness’ invaded your country, I stated to the House of Commons that ‘the Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism’, and I declared that I, as the most consistent opponent of Communism for twenty-five years, would unsay no word that I have spoken about it. Yet I then reached out to the long-suffering Russian people, and offered them ‘any technical or economic assistance which is in our power’.

Let me now explain further. We have watched your experiment with communism with the gravest dismay. We are highly suspicious of its cruel ideology, and its determination to eradicate the freedoms of western democracy that we treasure. We have seen how you have murdered your opponents, and condemned millions to starvation in your fruitless quest to eliminate any private endeavours in agriculture. You have established a prison-camp of monstrous dimensions in which to incarcerate those who oppose your regime. We have observed your purges and show-trials with amazement and disgust, as apparently loyal members of your political and military administrations have been condemned to death on the flimsiest of pretexts. We know that you have infiltrated spies into our offices of government, intent on stealing secrets of state in order to abet your political cause. We were astonished that, having chastised the organs of German Fascism, you then made a partnership with the Devil himself, and then provided war matériel that has helped Hitler wage his aerial assault on Britain, causing thousands of lives to be lost. We were shocked by your invasion of innocent Finland, and your enslavement of the Baltic States, where you have again murdered anyone who might be considered an opponent of your proletarian dictatorship. We repeatedly warned you of Hitler’s plans to turn his aggressive impulses away from Western Europe to the Soviet Union, but you ignored our advice, or treated it as provocation.

Yet, for all this, as Hitler moves his armies across your borders, we again offer you our moral support, and the few military supplies that we can spare. Jointly, and with the hoped-for involvement of the United States ere long, we will force Hitler and his minions into defeat and submission. Yet our determination to resist the forces of communist tyranny will not fade away after the deed is done, and we hope that your involvement with us will help persuade you that your version of socialism is an insult to our common humanity.”

Would that have been over the top, and have been interrupted before Churchill was able to finish? Quite possibly. (Would the interpreter have had the guts to complete the translation?) But Stalin preferred tough talk from military officers to the appeasing noises he received from milquetoast Foreign Office men, and he might have been impressed. At some stage, of course, Churchill would have had to convince Roosevelt of the correctness of his opinions, but at least he would have made the most of his opportunity to tell Stalin what he really thought. Instead, Stalin started to make demands, and intimidate his allies. It is a failing of many democratic political leaders overendowed with vanity that they believe they can ‘do business’ with despots (Chamberlain with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin, Thatcher with Gorbachev, Trump with Kim). Yet they forget that, while they themselves have to be re-elected, the tyrants endure. And as Vladimir Bukovsky said to Margaret Thatcher: “The difficulty of ‘doing business’ with communists is that they have the disgusting habit of lying while looking you in the face.”

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Dick White’s Devilish Plot

Dick White

The Time: March to June 1951

The Places: London and Washington

GCHQ Eastcote
Arlington Hall

The Organisations: In the UK, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), operating out of Eastcote, in the London suburbs; the Foreign Office (FO), the Security Service (MI5), and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) – all based in Central London. (GCHQ, which during the war, as the Government Code and Cypher School, had reported to SIS, broke free at the end of 1945, and was then responsible to the Foreign Office.) In or around Washington, D.C. in the USA, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA, which in 1952 became the National Security Agency, working out of Arlington Hall), the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The organisations are paired, in function and in primary communications, as follows: GCHQ and AFSA; the FO and the State Department; MI5 and the FBI; and SIS and the CIA.

The Personnel:

Edward Travis is head of GCHQ. The leading cryptanalysts at GCHQ working on VENONA are Wilfred Bodsworth and Jeffrey Northbury.

The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the ministerial head of the Foreign Office, Herbert Morrison, is new to his post, having succeeded the deceased Ernest Bevin in March 1951. At the FO, William Strang is Permanent Under-Secretary, Roger Makins is his Deputy Under-Secretary, while Patrick Reilly serves as Assistant Secretary, and acts as liaison with SIS. Reilly served as Secretary to the head of SIS, Stewart Menzies, during the war, and has also chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee since 1950. George Carey-Foster is Security Officer for the FO, while Robert Mackenzie fulfils an equivalent role in the Embassy in Washington, under the Ambassador, Oliver Franks. Christopher Steel is Franks’ deputy.

Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS, is a shadowy figure in the background. His deputy, Valentine Vivian, is responsible for security in SIS. (According to Nigel West, Vivian retired in March 1951, but his name appears in the archives as an SIS officer after that date.) At some stage in this spring, Vivian is replaced as Menzies’s deputy by Jack Easton. Kim Philby, who was recruited to SIS by Vivian in 1941, was transferred to Washington in 1949 as SIS’s representative, replacing Peter Dwyer, primarily to liaise with the CIA on special subversive operations, but with an additional mission to assist the FBI (but not the CIA) in identifying possible spies hinted at by the VENONA project. Maurice Oldfield headed the counter-intelligence section, R.5., for a while, but moved to South-East Asia in 1950.

Percy Sillitoe has been Director-General of MI5 since 1946, but gains little respect from his subordinates because of his police background. His deputy, Guy Liddell, previously headed B Division, responsible for counter-espionage, which is now led by Dick White, whom Liddell mentored. (Dick White worked in intelligence under General Walter Bedell Smith – see below – between 1943 and 1945.) Arthur Martin, who acts as liaison with GCHQ, and James Robertson are B Division officers knowledgeable about Soviet espionage. MI5’s Liaison Officer in Washington is Geoffrey Patterson, who replaced Dick Thistlethwaite in the summer of 1949.

J. Edgar Hoover is chief of the FBI, Mickey Ladd is his Director of Domestic Investigations, and Robert J. Lamphere is the agent working with AFSA on the VENONA project. John Cimperman is the FBI’s legal attaché in London.

Walter Bedell Smith has been Director of the CIA since 1950.  He is an ex-army general who has also served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1946-1948). He appointed Allen Dulles as Deputy Director for Plans in February 1951. His leading officer on Soviet counter-espionage is William Harvey. Harvey is unusual in that he joined the CIA from the FBI, and maintains a close relationship with Robert Lamphere. James Angleton (who built a close association with Kim Philby) works at this time in the Office of Special Relations.

Rear-Admiral Earl Stone is the head of AFSA. Meredith Gardner is his chief cryptanalyst working on VENONA. The senior British liaison officer at AFSA is Brigadier John Tiltman, at some stage replaced as SUKLO (Senior UK Liaison Officer) by Patrick Marr-Johnson. (Accessible records show them both present in Washington in 1951.) Philip Howse and Geoffrey Sudbury are cryptanalysts from GCHQ assigned to AFSA. William Weisband is a Soviet spy in AFSA who has worked in Signals Intelligence since 1942.

The Thesis:  That Dick White devised a plan to draw attention away from MI5’s own security failures towards Kim Philby, bringing the CIA in as an apparently imaginative source to cast aspersions on Philby’s loyalty without MI5 having to challenge Stewart Menzies and SIS directly.

VENONA – the Background

The Two Gentlemen of VENONA

John Tiltman
Meredith Gardner (on left)

Keith Jeffery concluded his authorised history of SIS on a celebratory note. In May of 1949, Menzies’s Principal Staff Officer (probably Jack Easton) and William Hayter, who was Foreign Office Liaison Officer, had visited Admiral Hillenkoetter, the head of the CIA, in Washington, and enjoyed the ‘very cordial’ tenor of the negotiations as they discussed Cold War initiatives. At the same time, Maurice Oldfield, who headed the R.5 counter-intelligence section, was gratified by the goodwill he encountered when visiting the CIA and the FBI. Hillenkoetter wrote to Menzies in June to speak glowingly of the organisations’ common purpose, and of the close working relationship they enjoyed. Jeffery pointed to this mutual enthusiasm as indicative of the special nature of the transatlantic intelligence relationship. Oldfield would in 1977 write to William Harvey’s widow that he had enjoyed knowing her husband since 1949, so the two must have met during this visit. Hillenkoetter was, however, a failure, and on the way out, unsuitable by temperament and experience to be a leading intelligence officer.

Maybe Sir John Scarlett, chief of SIS, who commissioned the history, was adroitly trying to define a positive legacy and avoid the more disturbing events. “Full details of our history after 1949 are still too sensitive to place in the public domain,” his successor, Sir John Sawers, wrote in his Forward to the 2011 publication. Indeed. But the lid of the seething cauldron could not be completely sealed. In late September 1949, Oldfield briefed the officer who had occupied the same post that he, Oldfield, currently held, before being posted to Ankara, Turkey at the end of 1946. The officer, Kim Philby, was about to be posted as Counsellor attached to the Embassy in Washington, with responsibility for liaising with the CIA, replacing Peter Dwyer, who, according to Anthony Cave-Brown, was being recalled at his own request. Yet memoirs indicate that Philby was brought in specifically to liaise with the Americans over the joint SIS-CIA operation to infiltrate exiles into Albania in an attempt to overthrow Enver Hoxha’s communist government. For instance, Queen Geraldine of Albania recalls that she and her husband, King Zog, met Philby in 1949, and both instantly ‘hated him’, the King refusing to have the SIS officer in the room with him again. [P.S. Neil ‘Billy’ Maclean, in a separate interview, claimed that Queen Geraldine was mistaken, and that the Englishmen they met was either Harold Perkins, or maybe Julian or Alan Hare, but not Philby.]

Alongside the briefings on Albania, Oldfield explained to Philby that a project that had been able to decrypt intercepted Soviet cables had identified a spy in the heart of the Foreign Office, working in the Washington Embassy in 1944 and 1945, who had passed on highly confidential communications to the Soviets. His cryptonym was HOMER, an identity that Dwyer had noted as early as March 1949 (but which had surfaced some time before, as I explain later). It would be an important part of Philby’s job to help his counterparts apply a name to the traitor who had betrayed these communications between the Foreign Office and the Moscow Embassy, and between Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, on negotiations with Stalin as the war was running down. But the mutual trust and confidence that characterised the relations between Washington and London were about to break down.

The project was known as VENONA (initially as BRIDE in the UK). Its success lent itself to a procedural mistake by the Soviet authorities, who carelessly reused a set of one-time-pads for diplomatic and intelligence transmissions during the period 1943-1948. (One-time-pads were regarded as an almost unbreakable technique for encrypting messages.) These messages were sent both by cable (in the USA, where commercial carriers provided a copy of all such traffic to the US Government), or by wireless – between London and Moscow and between Canberra and Moscow, and later between (primarily) Washington and Moscow. An intense decryption exercise was initiated by the AFSA, who then brought in the GC&CS (who may well have had a parallel operation in play already) as partners in the exercise. One important aspect of the project is that, while the Soviets changed their procedures in 1948 once they had learned via spies of the breakthroughs, the task of message decryption carried on until 1980, and the whole programme was not officially revealed until 1995.

Yet the process of decryption, namely the timing at which (portions of) certain messages were resolved has not been revealed – apart from the survival of the occasional exchange of messages between cryptanalysts, and the evidence of critical breakthroughs that forced intelligence organisations to take action. This lack of archival evidence has made it very difficult for historians to assess the reactions and intentions of the persons directing the investigation. What is also important to recognize is that the process of translation required a lot of help from political and diplomatic sources, to help identify the source messages stolen by the Soviets, since the original texts were invaluable as ‘cribs’, and the contexts were vital in helping identify the thieves. This was especially true in Australia, where the richness of the cribs meant that traffic was being digested almost in real-time by the beginning of 1948. The search for original texts did, however, run the risk of alerting a broader audience to the highly secret VENONA project itself.

That the group of intelligence officers and Foreign Office officials stalled in passing on to their own teams and their American partners their conclusions about VENONA ‘recoveries’ (as the evolving messages were called) is indisputable. But was such behaviour caused by institutional embarrassment, or was it guided by high politics? Some analysts have interpreted such dilatoriness as a pattern of the latter dimension – that it was a high-level strategy ordered by the British prime minister Attlee to protect a fragile Anglo-American agreement over the sharing of atomic weapons technology. Negotiations on resuming the wartime agreement had begun only in September 1949, and, as Aldrich and Cormac inform us in The Black Door, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had recently explained (maybe insincerely) to the British Ambassador that Congress would probably be able to roll back the embargo that the 1946 McMahon Act had imposed on any technology-sharing.

Some authors, such as Anthony Cave-Brown, in his biography of Menzies, “C”, even hint at a ‘double-agent’ game (actually a misnomer) arranged by Menzies and Hoover (FBI) to use Philby as a medium for disinformation to the Soviets (with Angleton, of the CIA) – an unlikely collaboration. Cave-Brown’s case, however, is woolly and muddled, with a haphazard chronology. The delusion of such endeavours, moreover, lay in thinking that an intelligence unit could control what an agent handed over to the target when the unit had not comprehensively ‘turned’ that agent, and did not manage exclusively his medium of communication. Even if such a dubious programme had been entertained, the selection of an agent for such deception when that agent had been indoctrinated into the secret VENONA programme, which demanded the highest security precautions, would have simply been absurd.

Despite that obvious paradox, the legend lives on. The prime promoter of such a theory is C. J. Hamrick, who, in his 2004 book Deceiving the Deceivers, makes a number of claims about the deception that the British intelligence agencies planted on the public during this exercise. His book contains many ingenious passages of analysis, offers a remarkably insightful account of the controversies surrounding the CIA in its initial years, reflects some painstaking research into the evolution of cables processed at Arlington and Eastcote, and contains a fascinating array of valuable insights and facts concerning the relationship of intelligence to politics. Unfortunately, however, Hamrick makes some huge leaps of imagination in putting his theory together. His book constitutes overall a poorly constructed and frequently dense narrative, full of circumlocutions, non sequiturs, vague hypotheses, unsupported assertions and simple errors that make it difficult to determine a verifiable thread.

If I can discern Hamrick’s argument correctly, I would say that it runs as follows: Under the authority of Lord Tedder, Air Marshall Robb, and General Hollis, Dick White masterminded, with his co-conspirator Roger Makins, a counter-intelligence scheme that none of his immediate colleagues or superiors knew about. What Hamrick suggests is that, after the discovery of purloined ‘Churchill’ telegrams, the VENONA decryption exercise became a predominantly British affair, that the authorities knew about the existence and identity of HOMER as early as 1947 (and that Oldfield was able to give this information to Philby in 1949), and that White contrived to conceal the results of the Eastcote decryption exercises from his peers. Moreover, Percy Sillitoe (who was White’s boss) reputedly kept Hoover up to date on the progress of the investigation using something called an ‘MI6 cipher’, to which Philby had access, and from which Philby thus gained his knowledge of VENONA decrypts, and the progress of the investigation. The proposed goal of all these machinations was for White to exploit Maclean, Philby and Burgess (even though they did not work for him) as unwitting tools to mislead the Soviet Union about the West’s nuclear capability, a project, incidentally, that should presumably have been carried out by SIS, not by MI5.

The germ of this idea came from a General Edwin L. Sibert, who communicated his beliefs in such a deception operation to the author on intelligence matters Anthony Cave-Brown. According to Hamrick, Cave-Brown misunderstood the message, and garbled it in his Treason in the Blood. (Cave-Brown reprised the idea in “C”, adding the testimony of William R. Corson, from the latter’s Armies of Ignorance, but then cited severe doubts emanating from Reilly and Easton that apparently quashed the story.) Sibert had in fact retired eighteen months before Philby arrived in Washington, but Hamrick was impressed enough by Sibert’s story to write: “A strategic deception operation using Anglo-American war plans and bombers as a deterrent to Soviet aggression in Western Europe required a suspected or known Soviet agent of proven credibility whose long loyalty to Moscow and unique access to official secrets [my italics] amounted to verification. Was one available? Evidently he was.” It was if Britain had dozens of such persons waiting in the wings, proven Soviet spies, of many years’ vintage, allowed to flourish and remain unpunished, and all the authorities had to do was to select one with the best profile, and plant information on him. And that it made sense to post the candidate to Washington to perform his duplicity, even though a project that had been initiated to help unmask such spies had been underway in the same capital for over a year.

It does not make sense. There are too many anomalies in this thesis for me to list them here. A full dismantling of Hamrick’s exposition, which ascribes some superhuman sleights to White, as if he were in total charge of GCHQ, and was able to hoodwink his colleagues, including Patrick Reilly (who was, after all, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee), will have to be undertaken on another occasion. I present just a few comments. While it is true that senior officials probably concluded that Maclean was HOMER well before they communicated this fact to their subordinates, it does not mean that Dick White (and he is incongruously given the credit for being able to manage the whole charivari from his position as B Division chief in MI5) was successfully controlling the output from GCHQ, and running the trio of Burgess, Maclean and Philby as disinformation agents to the Soviets. Hamrick’s repeated referral to a frequent series of messages from Sillitoe to Hoover on the progress of the investigation, using ‘Philby’s secret MI6 cipher’, by which Philby gained his information, is simply absurd. Philby gained his information from Patterson, and Admiral Stone, the head of AFSA, knew about Philby’s clearance, because on June 8, 1951, he sent a message to the FBI to ascertain whether Burgess had also had access.

So much of what Hamrick asserts is contradicted by the evidence of the archival records (the KV 6/140 to 6/145 series) released in October 2015 that one must conclude either that the archive itself has been handsomely faked, or that Mr Hamrick has written a work more of fiction than of history. As Hamrick himself wrote: “Ignoring the fact that not one shred of documentary evidence has been found nor is ever likely to be found to support it [General Sibert’s deception plan], its probability can be considered by asking how such an operation could have successfully escaped disclosure.” Ipse dixit.

According to some analysts, the Fuchs case (see below: he was found guilty of espionage in February 1950) killed cooperation on atomic technology sharing between the USA and the UK for good. M.S. Goodman wrote an article in The Journal of Cold War Studies in 2005, quoting a US diplomat who said: ‘We were getting very close to getting into bed with the British, with a new agreement. Then the Fuchs affair hit the fan, and that was the end of it’. Goodman then commented: “The case destroyed any British hopes for a resumption of the wartime nuclear partnership, and even Attlee’s artful performance before Parliament could not rescue it.” The reality is rather more complicated. A research colleague (and biographer of both Guy Burgess and Donald and Melinda Maclean) Michael Holzman has drawn my attention to the recently issued Documents on British Policy Overseas, which include records of negotiations in 1950 between Makins, Bevin and Attlee, accompanied by Canadian Secretary of State Lester Pearson, and Dean Acheson of the State Department. Makins attributed the lack of progress on overturning the McMahon Act to allow exchange of atomic power and weaponry technology between Canada, the USA and Britain on the dampener that Fuchs’s arrest gave to harmonious relations, and tried to appeal to Acheson, through Bevin, that the discovery of one spy (although he forgot about Nunn May) should not be considered cause enough to break off plans.

I have been able to inspect these documents, and to verify from Volume 2 of Margaret Gowing’s authorised history of Britain and Atomic Energy (1974) that the author used the same sources in researching her account. According to Gowing, Acheson temporized and prevaricated, as he knew that Congress would not move quickly on the issue. There was an election coming up in November, and thus prospects for new legislation were slim, especially with the Korean War underway. The flight of another Harwell scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo, to Moscow in September 1950 did not help matters. Britain would have to go it alone, and did so, with a story about its decision published in the New York Times in March 1951. Aldrich and Cormac strongly suggest that Attlee’s attention quickly moved elsewhere, to covert operations in Europe by SIS, and that he left the boffins to produce Britain’s weaponry independently. Thus, while Makins’ concerns may have put a temporary brake on the project to unmask HOMER in April-May 1950, such sensitivities quickly became irrelevant. That summer, the American spies Harry Gold and the Rosenbergs were arrested (Gold as a result of Lamphere’s interrogation of Fuchs in London), so the one-sidedness of Britain’s exposure to treachery was quickly removed. Gowing’s conclusion was that ‘the negotiations would have failed even if there had been no Fuchs, Pontecorvo, Burgess or Maclean’ (p 320).

Moreover, more recent releases to the National Archives, in 2007, indicate that Attlee, when he was informed, on June 11, 1951, of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, had been completely unaware of their errant behavior, let alone of any suspicions of espionage. Foreign Secretary Morrison stoutly came to the defence of Maclean and of the Foreign Office. At the time of the Fuchs case, Attlee had been briefed on the VENONA investigation, but it appears he was not given comprehensive updates on the project thereafter. Thus there appears to have been little scope for political interference into what the Embassy Spy investigations were uncovering.

Kim Philby and VENONA

Kim Philby

Why was Kim Philby being brought into this web? The story contains multiple anomalies, and a number of unlikely twists and turns.

First of all, from the UK side, the investigation into the Embassy leaks was supposed to be an MI5 responsibility, not one for SIS. Dick White pressed hard for this at the beginning of 1949, and believed he had the support of Menzies and Carey Foster. He soon found, however, that it was not the case with GCHQ, and then learned that he could not rely on the compliance of SIS and the Foreign Office, with the latter starting to playing a much more inquisitive role. White’s representative in Washington, Dick Thistlethwaite, felt he was being undermined by Travis’s and Carey Foster’s officers in Washington, Marr Johnson and Mackenzie, respectively. Thistlethwaite therefore complained to White, who was not only his boss but a close friend as well. The fact was that every department felt it had  a proprietary interest: GC&CS, because it was in charge of the intercepted material, the Foreign Office, because the leak had occurred on its own territory, and SIS, because the initial prime suspect was Alexander Halpern, of British Security Coordination (BSC, the wartime British intelligence service in the USA), which had reported to SIS. Peter Dwyer, Thistlethwaite’s counterpart from SIS, had worked for BSC during the war, so could contribute very usefully to the investigation.

What was especially poignant, moreover, was the fact that FBI maintained domestically a very jealous hold over the VENONA product: not only did Hoover intensely dislike the CIA, and regretted it had ever been created, he also believed that both it and the State Department were riddled with Soviet spies. (He had a point.) While a few CIA officers were introduced to VENONA earlier, the CIA would learn about the programme officially only in 1952, ironically after a controlled leak to Bedell Smith by the British forced Hoover’s hand. Thus bringing in a senior officer like Philby primarily as the SIS-CIA liaison officer (he had developed a great relationship with James Angleton during the war) would, given the sensitivity of the VENONA enterprise, on the surface appear to be a highly risky and unnecessary move that could only ruffle feathers more. White’s failure to maintain intellectual and practical leadership of the project points, however, to a developing malaise.

For some reason, MI5’s representative in Washington was replaced at about the same time. No official explanation has been offered for the change in the team. A large gap in the record for the summer of 1949 can be seen at KV 6/140, but the authorised history states that Geoffrey Patterson took over from Dick Thistlethwaite in June 1949. These moves would have unbalanced the arrangement, as Thistlethwaite was a senior campaigner, on first-name terms with Dick White. Patterson seems to have been a keen but inexperienced officer, while Philby was clearly a man on the move, identified by some as a future head of the service. It could have been coincidental, of course, but the fact that Philby was heavily briefed by Oldfield before he left could suggest that Menzies was keen that SIS take a stronger hold of the investigations. On the other hand, the author Ben Macintyre suggests, in A Spy Among Friends, that Philby’s appointment arose from the high-level discussions in the USA, and that Philby was a name preferred by some of the CIA officers whose opinion was sought. Macintyre offers no source for that statement, but it would make sense for the presence of Philby to be desired primarily in the light of the plans for joint CIA-SIS operations in Eastern Europe, where the help of an experienced heavyweight would be necessary.  Philby would however have been instructed to stay silent about VENONA before CIA officers, but no doubt became extremely curious once he learned of the dangerous project. Menzies – who viewed Philby as his blue-eyed boy – would not have thought twice about the appointment.

Yet how much did SIS and MI5 suspect about Philby’s possible career as a spy at that time, and should he have been excluded from any sensitive post in Washington? Maurice Oldfield later informed his biographers that, having inspected Philby’s profile, and the records concerning Volkov, the Soviet diplomat who tried to defect from Turkey in 1945, but who was betrayed and killed, he had suspected Philby of treachery, and he even confided his thoughts to his friend Alistair Horne at the time. Yet, even though he was only four years younger than Philby, Oldfield had been in SIS for only three years, and Philby, with his allies high up, was not a figure he could easily challenge. Moreover, Richard Deacon, in his biography of Oldfield, “C”, suggests that Philby’s contacts with the Soviets that he made in Turkey were approved by Menzies, as some kind of disinformation scheme.  “Whenever MI5, or anyone else, raised the issue of treachery, the SIS would come to Philby’s defence and indignantly reject such pleas, explaining that what he was doing in Istanbul, and elsewhere for that matter, was carried out with their full approval”, wrote Deacon. That would explain, if it were true, why Philby was regarded as untouchable.

That account of Philby’s inviolability might also help explain the Guy Liddell discomfort. The information recently distributed about Eric Roberts, as I described in the April coldspur, indicates that Liddell in MI5 also had nourished suspicions about a senior member of the SIS in 1947, but had obviously been told to suppress them by the time Roberts returned from Vienna in 1949. [The BBC has so far not responded to our request for the 14-page document that Christopher Andrew described as ‘the most extraordinary intelligence document I have ever seen’, so the historian must be charged with irresponsible grandstanding until he helps facilitate the release of this document to the public.] Dick White was lower on the totem-pole than Liddell, but was a more dominant character, yet between them, with their own skeletons in the cupboard, they must have concluded that speaking out against Philby at that juncture would not help their careers, or the reputation of MI5.

Soon after Philby’s arrival in Washington, however, an extraordinary event occurred: he completely changed the tone of the investigation by pointing the inquisitors towards Krivitsky and his 1940 testimony. (Krivitsky had warned of a spy on the ‘Imperial Council’, but his hints had not been strenuously followed up.) Throughout 1949 the project had taken a desultory course, involving the collection of staff lists and checking the background of, almost exclusively, secretaries and members of the Cypher Department. (Halpern and Cedric Belfrage were also suspected, but the latter, who later confessed to being a spy, was discounted early since he was not in Washington when the cables were stolen.) As early as November 19, 1949, however, Philby wrote a memorandum to Robert Mackenzie which crisply summarized the advice that Krivitsky had given about a spy in the Foreign Office, advice that Patterson enthusiastically picked up on. Somewhat surprisingly, Patterson received a rather lukewarm response when Martin and Carey Foster received the message in London, as if to say that of course they had considered a link between the two cases. Carey Foster did, however, produce a shortlist of six diplomats who could fit the Krivitsky/Washington profile, namely Balfour, Makins, Hadow, Wright, Gore-Booth and Maclean.

This bravado from Philby surely suggests that he realised that the evidence against Maclean was so substantial that his goose was essentially cooked, and that Philby’s best course of action was therefore to distance himself as sharply as possible from his comrade in espionage, and boost his counter-Soviet credentials. Yet his action raises further questions: did he have access to pointers that were available to other investigators, and, if so, why did the latter not come to similar conclusions? Otherwise, was it not a bit premature to risk changing the direction of the probe so dramatically, and risk additional attention on himself, and his associations with Maclean?

The Search Takes Time

On reflection, it might seem highly negligent for the multiple leads to Maclean as the source of the Foreign Office leakage not to have been assimilated and acted upon sooner. That was the sentiment that Robert Lamphere expressed in late 1948, a few months after he had been informed by his colleague Ladd of the first VENONA breakthroughs. As he waited for a more urgent response from his British counterparts, he recorded that the counter-intelligence machinery in the USA would surely have moved into top gear in such circumstances. After all, if, following the creation of the shortlist, a notice had been taken of Maclean’s leftist opinions at Cambridge, and his less than outright rejection of them at his diplomatic service interview, and his nervous breakdown after consorting with Philip Toynbee, a ‘known Communist’ (as MI5 considered him) in Cairo, one might have expected him to rise quickly on the list of suspects.  Yet MI5 appeared to be overwhelmed by the list of possible offenders, knowing also that it would be very difficult to elicit a confession from any of them on such circumstantial evidence, and that the best chance of gaining a conviction would be to catch him or her in the act of passing information to the Soviet contact. For the VENONA transcripts would be inadmissible in court: apart from the fact that all intelligence agencies did not want to reveal the extent of their decryption efforts, the nature of the translations and interpretations would mean that their veracity would be able to be picked apart by any capable defence lawyer. And MI5 was not certain, even when the information about the visits to the spy’s wife in New York were revealed in early March 1951, that Maclean was the only Foreign Office staff member who fitted that profile. (Or so it claimed, as long as was possible.)

Donald Maclean

Dick White then made, in February 1950, a shocking and irresponsible suggestion. He had been in Australia when Philby’s memorandum came through, but must have been made aware of the resulting exchange. He held a meeting on January 31, attended by Reilly, Carey Foster, Vivian, Oldfield, Marriott & Martin, at which he floated the idea that the whole investigation should be called off, at least until dramatic new evidence arrived, because of the overwhelming staff lists to be combed through. At this stage, it appeared that he had high-level agreement from the attendees. Carey Foster agreed the field was wide, but wanted MI5 to continue to pursue traces in some way. Vivian was still interested in Halpern. MI5 was charged with providing a formal report, which White duly provided on February 16, laying out the reasons for abandoning the quest, and suggesting that the project be handed over to the FBI.

This reckless initiative must be seen in the context of what else White and MI5 were occupied with at the time. On February 2, Klaus Fuchs (whose role as a spy had also been confirmed by VENONA transcripts) had been arrested, and was sentenced a month later to fourteen years’ imprisonment. White was heavily involved in the project to cover up MI5’s negligence and incompetence over Fuchs, during which Sillitoe vented his fury at White and Liddell for their lack of thoroughness. As Tom Bower, White’s biographer, put it: “There were good reasons to hold MI5 responsible. Not least was White’s failure, in the chain of responsibility, to adopt Suppell’s [Serpell’s] suggestion of investigating Fuchs.” The outcome was that Sillitoe and White had an uncomfortable meeting with Attlee where they lied to the Prime Minister in order to protect the institution. Moreover, Guy Burgess had come under suspicion at this time. On January 23, Liddell noted in his diary that Burgess had probably passed on secrets to Freddie Kuh, a Soviet spy, and three days later was discussing with his colleagues whether Burgess should be prosecuted for Official Secrets Act offences. The last thing White wanted was a fresh revelation that MI5 failures to follow up the Krivitsky testimony had allowed another spy – and a homegrown Briton, at that – to escape the net. White simply wanted the problem to go away: the remedy preferred by him and Liddell was for unmasked spies to fade quietly into the backwaters, and promise not to misbehave again, with no fuss and no publicity involved. Whether in this case he was acting on his own, or was being guided by political considerations, say by Attlee, or possibly Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, is not clear. The 2007 archival information referred to earlier strongly suggests that Attlee was not involved.

Perhaps White overlooked the fact that the Eastcote/Arlington decryption exercises were going to continue no matter how hard he tried to stifle the investigation. For a while, however, he appeared to have been successful. On February 22, Carey Foster (who like many emerges from this whole farrago as a weak character, far too defensive of the organisation he is supposed to be auditing) expressed support for White’s move, although he reserved the right to interview one Samuel Barron, one on the longlist of suspects. The archive is somewhat confused at this point, with memoranda and letters being split into separate files, but a couple of weeks later, it seems that Carey Foster had been spurred into reaction, probably at the behest of his boss, William Strang. On March 9, Carey Foster wrote a determined riposte to White’s suggestion, which was followed up by a similar outpouring from Strang himself, effectively pouring cold water on White’s plan, and suggesting that the Foreign Office would take over the investigation itself, if necessary. It is clear that White was not happy about Strang’s offensive, but he had to clamber down. Yet this rapid volte-face suggests that there was probably no higher-level political direction at work.

So the project continued all through 1950. In August, new material did turn up, primarily about references to the spy’s wife in Washington, and, more dramatically, showing that highly critical correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt had been compromised. MI5’s desire for secrecy enveloped the officers even more deeply in a mire of subterfuge. Part of the new intelligence-sharing agreement between the USA and the UK commanded full disclosure of information, and, indeed, Eastcote and Arlington would continue to share findings irrespective of MI5’s fears. The responsibility for decrypting the exclusively British telegrams of 1944 was passed to GCHQ in the summer of 1950, which meant that Arlington officially had to rely on Eastcote for the latest decryptions. As the search narrowed, it touched tricky ground in dealing with the FBI. MI5 could not afford any premature disclosure of suspicions, or plans to interrogate, to be communicated to Hoover and his cohorts, lest leaks occur and jeopardise the inquiry. At the same time, Lamphere in the FBI was pursuing a similar line, and MI5 had to stay a step ahead of what his progress might be. If Hoover, who was not sympathetic to Great Britain and its intelligence apparatus (he had considered BSC a gross infringement of his territorial rights) learned of the fruits of the inquiry from another source, he would be apoplectic. Thus the mandarins gradually switched from a policy of measured indolence to one of nervous deceit, which resulted in a ‘real’ inquiry being accompanied by a ‘notional’ one, which had to lag a bit behind so that the FBI could be stalled.

A Breakthrough?

How quickly should MI5 have started the quest for HOMER? The records are bewilderingly opaque. There is much controversy about the first appearance of the cryptonym ‘HOMER’ (or ‘GOMER’, sometimes ‘GOMMER’: since the Cyrillic alphabet has no letter for ‘H’, ‘HOMER’ was represented as ‘GOMER’, and frequently abbreviated to ‘G’.)   The folder HW 15/38 at Kew includes a report by Meredith Gardner that shows that HOMER had been identified as a source as early as 26 September, 1947, providing information about the upcoming meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill in Quebec in September 1944. One might judge that the amount of information contained in this message should surely have prompted a well-focussed search on qualified individuals with access to such information. Yet an anonymous post-mortem report written in October 1951 appears to bury this fact, stating: “The resumé mentioned was transmitted 7 September 1944, but the opening (which contained the name ‘HOMER’) was not solved until much later (probably 1951). [handwritten note – ‘not until just before May 1951’: coldspur] The resumé concerned chiefly occupation policies, mentioning both American and British plans.” It is difficult to interpret what this could mean: is the ‘opening’ something different, but, if so, why does it matter, since HOMER was so clearly identified elsewhere in the text? Very oddly, Nigel West (in Cold War Spymaster) ignores the Gardner evidence, and echoes this conclusion that the ‘opening’ was not solved until May 1951.

The investigators were waiting for a stronger clue to the identity of HOMER, facts with which they could confront Maclean. If MI5 and the Foreign Office leaders still had any doubts that their prime suspect was Donald Maclean, they were apparently dispelled on March 31, 1951, when (according to the prime chronicler, Nigel West) the team of Wilfred Bodsworth and Jeffrey Northbury at Eastcote decrypted enough of a message from Stepan Apresyan in June 28, 1944 to identify Maclean by ‘HOMER’s visit to Tyre [New York] where his wife is living with her mother awaiting confinement’. (Nigel West states that this was the first cable, chronologically, that referred to HOMER [GOMER], rather than just ‘G’.) Yet even the exact process of transcription is not clear: in Venona, West provides the text of the above message, not released until 1973, but does not present this cable as the one that provided the breakthrough. In Cold War Spymaster, however, the same author specifically names this Apresyan cable as the one that succumbed to Bodsworth and Northbury at the end of March, and thus allowed Maclean to be confidently identified, presumably because of the ‘wife in New York’ reference. In any case, the news was sent to MI5, and also to Arlington, where Bodsworth’s counterparts congratulated him on the achievement. Thus we know that AFSA experts knew about its content, although what they did with the information has not been recorded by the historians.

Yet it is difficult to trust West’s updated account of what happened. The archives at KV 6/142 reveal a very startling alternative sequence of events, however. On March 31, that is the same day on which the above information was reputedly passed by GCHQ to MI5 in London, Geoffrey Patterson wrote a long letter to the Director-General (nominally to Sillitoe: Harrison’s cables are normally addressed that way, although it is more likely that Martin, Robertson, or sometimes White was first to read them), in which he declared that ‘PH’ (unidentified) ‘has sent to his Headquarters a letter  . . . and enclosures  . . . which are of considerable interest and may take us another step forward in our search  . . .’.  He added: “PH despatched these documents to London on March 30.” The primary suggestion in PH’s conclusions is that ‘HOMER may be identical with G’. (Patterson then added, rather alarmingly, that he and Kim Philby ‘have discussed these latest developments with Bob Lamphere’.)

‘PH’ was undoubtedly Philip Howse, a member of GCHQ, as the October 1951 report cited above explicitly recognises. In his Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence, under ‘BRIDE’, Nigel West writes: “Although Philip Howse had been assigned to Arlington in a general liaison capacity, the Canberra-Moscow channel revealed the need for a British input into BRIDE, and he was integrated into the JADE team to look after British interests, which were also focused on the leakage attributed to HOMER in the British Embassy.”(JADE was the name assigned to the technique by which VENONA messages identified which page of the one-time-pad to use.) S. J. Hamrick states that Howse was assigned to Arlington Hall from 1944 to 1946, pointing out that the National Archives records on VENONA do not name the 1951 contributor. Howse clearly returned, however, and Patterson’s weak effort at concealing his identity failed to confuse posterity.

For some reason it had taken a long time for the equation to be made that GOMER represented the same source as ‘G’, a shorthand that was frequently found in Soviet cables. Hamrick reports, without comment, that Meredith Gardner, who must have been one of the smartest cryptanalysts in the world, was not able to work out that ‘G’ and ‘GOMMER’ were the same as ‘HOMER’ before the Embassy telegrams were passed over to GCHQ for further decryption and analysis in 1949. The correspondence between ‘Source G’ and ‘G’ was confirmed, however, as having been made by Mrs. Gray of AFSA in August 1950, and the fact was immediately communicated to the British. It was given to Marr-Johnson, the GCHQ representative, and presumably passed on to Eastcote. The August 1950 memorandum continues “These recoveries were communicated to the British 11 August 1950, who thereupon set up work-sheets for further recovery work. The suspicion that ‘G’ was the source of material ‘G’ occurred to people at AFSA immediately upon seeing Mrs. Gray’s work, and this suspicion was suggested to the British at the same time.” HW 15/38 goes on to report: “On 30 March 1951, Mr Howse transmitted to England the suggestion that G. was Homer and GOMMER. . . . This identification, if true, allowed the placing of G. in New York in June 1944.”  

Yet what is not explained is why Howse’s insight, the correspondence of ‘G’ and ‘GOMER’, was necessary to make the breakthrough. As we can see, ‘HOMER’ – not just ‘G’ –  appears in the Apresyan cable of 28 June 1944, which referred to the agent’s wife in New York. (The cable can be seen at https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/dated/1944/28jun_kgb_mtg_donald_maclean.pdf) Yes, ‘G’’s communications would have provided supportive evidence, but Bodsworth did not need Howse’s analysis to make his breakthrough reconstruction of the text, and, in any case, Howse’s message would not have arrived in time for Bodsworth to apply it, and then make his report. So what was going on here? If the ‘breakthrough’ did indeed occur at GCHQ, maybe Bodsworth informed his American colleagues well before he let MI5 know, and Howse then tried to claim the credit, presenting a different, but maybe equally important, conclusion to Philby and Patterson as if it had been his own. Howse’s action in sending a package to Eastcote probably negates that, however, and if Howse despatched the documents only on March 30, they would not have arrived at Eastcote in time for Bodsworth to make his report. Was this just a coincidental timing of independent threads? Or was Howse instructed to report the ‘non-breakthrough’ to indicate for posterity that London had had no inkling about HOMER’s identity until he provided the insight?

Given the intensity of this effort, and its being undertaken by cryptanalysts highly skilled at the task, the time it took for these correspondences to be made defies belief. The name HOMER was decrypted on September 26, 1947.  Messages also emanating from the British Embassy, ascribed to ‘Source G’, were known by some time in 1949. The equivalence of ‘Source G’ and ‘G’ was worked out in August 1950. On March 31, 1951, a suggestion was made that perhaps ‘G’ and HOMER were the same person, at which time Eastcote announced it had solved the puzzle.  It took three-and-half years for Maclean’s identity as HOMER to be recognized and admitted: a period longer than that between the USA’s entry into the war and VE-Day. (Anthony Cave-Brown very provocatively, and without comment, wrote, in “C”: “Homer’s identity and nationality remained unknown to the State Department and Foreign Office until 1949.”) So why was the ‘breakthrough’ announced at that juncture?  It should perhaps be noted that the America spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been convicted on March 29: did that event perhaps prompt the investigators to conclude that it was now politically safe to step into the daylight?

The evidence bequeathed us superficially makes no sense at all. Yet the historians generally have stepped away from trying to analyse the conflicts in front of them. C. J. Hamrick, however, on pages 45-48 of Deceiving the Deceivers, offers a fascinating analysis of the conundrum, concluding that Arlington Hall had been out of the picture on the British Embassy cables since the summer of 1950, and that Eastcote had been sitting on the solved cable for some time. That is one of Hamrick’s conclusions that holds together well. In any case, the scribes creating what turned out to be the HW 15/38 archive then entered some disinformation to help breed confusion. The whole imbroglio demands some more detailed analysis.

We can, nevertheless, make some striking conclusions: i) both Patterson and his colleagues in London were in on the act, since they reciprocally referred to Howse as ‘PH’, and obviously recognized that concealment and subterfuge were necessary; ii) MI5 had an independent back-channel into the AFSA organisation, and might therefore have gained information on the progress of VENONA decryption even before the FBI learned of it; iii) GCHQ in Eastcote was probably not aware that Howse was leaking information to Patterson; and iv) an immense security exposure occurred, since Patterson did not just share the confidences with Lamphere (whom MI5 apparently accepted as a justifiable recipient) but also Philby, which meant that the information would surely be passed on to SIS – and the KGB.

Patterson certainly had not been briefed by London, since he makes some creative suggestions about the identity of HOMER. Indeed, he follows up with another letter (presumably also sent by diplomatic bag) in which, having also discussed the material with Mackenzie, he expands on his analysis, and, somewhat impatiently, but justifiably, looks for a response. On April 4, Robertson responds by cable, apparently quite unconcerned that Patterson has seen the material before the officers of MI5. His main advice runs as follows:

  1. Agree new material most important. Leakage enquiry now being pursued on presumption HOMER equals G.
  2. Collateral for G.C.H.Q. being collected here and, unless we ask specifically, consider it safer you do not repeat not draw subject files from Embassy.

His response does not make sense if Bodsworth’s solving of the Apresyan telegram had provided the ‘breakthrough’. Robertson then asks Patterson to work with Mackenzie in inspecting travel documents that might help clarify the New York visits made by HOMER.

Apart from the anomaly of the ‘HOMER=G’ equivalence, and what relevance it had to the Bodsworth exercise, at least four aspects of this exchange are breathtaking for the interpretation of the decisions for the handling of Maclean, confirming the conclusions outlined earlier. The first is the total lack of surprise shown by MI5 at the fact that its Washington outpost has worked out the HOMER=G breakthrough before London has. The second is that London intelligence (by which I mean MI5 and the Foreign Office, with fragmented attendance by SIS) should have realised that, once the information about ‘the latest recovery’ (as it came to be called) floated around Washington, anyone over there could have been privy to the supposed secret. The third is that Patterson’s and Philby’s access to cryptographic sources, and thus awareness of what was going on, meant that they could not be hoodwinked in any way about the progress of the inquiry. The fourth was the news that Lamphere was right in the thick of things, and could thus presumably come to the same conclusions as MI5’s detectives: moreover, much of the evidence required to seal the deal was to be found in the United States.

Yet MI5 proceeded as if they knew none of this. Indeed, Robertson followed up by trying to dampen Patterson’s enthusiasm: ‘ . . at this stage consider enquiries  . . . should not be confined to preconceived theories but cover all Chancery, cipher and registry staff. Feel sure you agree and will exercise moderating influence on premature speculations’. It was as if dozens of Embassy staff had pregnant wives in New York whom they visited in New York occasionally, and were thus under suspicion. Indeed, Mackenzie in Washington was keen to look for other culprits, and, partly on the grounds that Krivitsky had said that the Foreign Office source had attended Eton and Oxford, pointed the finger at Paul Gore-Booth, who had the disadvantage that his name more closely resembled the letters of ‘GOMER’. It was then, on April 2, that Philby made an even more persuasive case that HOMER was the Imperial Council spy. In a telegram to his boss, Menzies (in the archive at KV 6/142-2, unsigned, and with its first paragraph redacted) he refines the analysis discussed with Patterson and Mackenzie, and adds helpful information about Gromov (Gorsky) and Paul Hardt, who had also been mentioned by Krivitsky. The letter is a masterful exhibition of subterfuge, with Philby trying to protect his reputation and deflect possible criticism. And it apparently worked with Menzies.

What is also extraordinary is the lack of archival evidence of how MI5 received the critical information from GCHQ, and the lack of any initiative to let the Washington representatives know formally of the results. The final entry in the KV 6/141 folder is a note whereby Robertson, Martin and Carey Foster have a meeting at the Foreign Office on March 28, 1951, where they discuss a long report that lists several dozen Embassy employees, including junior staff, in order to whittle down the suspects. The report focuses on Messrs. Pares, Middleton, King and Payne. It is an exercise in self-delusion, probably written by Carey Foster, as if the writer thought the problem would go away if the authorities sat on it for long enough.

The Great Deception

As soon as the British authorities accepted internally that Maclean was indeed HOMER, on April 17, 1951, according to its formal chronology, they started to dither. Martin had told Patterson on April 12 that Maclean was the top suspect, but the MI5 and Foreign Office mandarins suddenly realised the implications of their conclusion. They would eventually have to interrogate Maclean. But if they informed the FBI of their suspicions and plans, the news might leak in a horribly prejudicial way. Lamphere might, however, also come to the same conclusion, which could make them look very foolish if they had not confided in the FBI as they were supposed to. Thus they concocted all sorts of strategies to pretend that they were less well advanced in creating the recent ‘recoveries’ than they actually were, that there were still six suspects they had to investigate. MI5 wanted to tell the FBI more, but the Foreign Office held back, as it did not want the Department of State to hear of it before the FO was ready. Patterson was squeezed: he was again encouraged to let Lamphere harbour his suspicions about ‘Fisher’ (actually Belfrage), even though Belfrage had been eliminated from the inquiry long before.  Mackenzie therefore pressed for continued deception of the FBI: Patterson and Philby disagreed.

By May 15, a tentative timetable had been arranged, whereby Maclean (who was now under surveillance, and had had secret papers withheld from him, so had a strong suspicion of what was going on) would be interrogated on June 8, and the FBI would be informed of that event the day before. On May 17, the KGB sent instructions to London for the escape of Burgess and Maclean, deeming that Maclean was in such a nervous state that he needed accompaniment. Martin prepared for the interrogation, and wrote up his detailed case against Maclean, which he sent to White (but not the Foreign office) on May 19. Sillitoe intervened to insist that no action on Maclean could be taken unless the FBI were informed. The interrogation date was then pushed back to June 18 (because of Mrs. Maclean’s imminent confinement), and Sillitoe planned to be in Washington at that time to explain things, and soothe Hoover. On May 25, Foreign Minister Morrison signed off on the interrogation warrant. That same evening, Burgess and Maclean absconded via Southampton.

The events following the disappearance have been described in multiple books, and I shall not go over them in full here. Instead, I shall concentrate on two aspects of the case: White’s ploy to unmask Philby, and the puzzling use of Anthony Blunt as some kind of witness/consultant in the investigation. Menzies realised immediately that Philby was compromised, because of his close association with Burgess in Washington. In fact, Verne Newton, in The Cambridge Spies, even wrote that Vivian had been sent out to Washington in March to warn Philby about the unsuitability of his boarding Burgess, an account that Cave-Brown also reports, having interviewed Easton. Philby had written another memorandum, on June 4, in which he tried to distance himself from Burgess by providing hints to his suspicious behaviour. Cave-Brown represents this message as a key trigger for Martin to confirm his suspicions about Philby. Martin then tells White, who conveniently presents a damning report on Philby written by Millicent Bagot, and then convinces Menzies that Philby must be recalled. Any complacency Philby had was shattered when John Drew, an experienced and trustworthy officer who had worked for the London Controlling Section in World War II, who happened to be on a visit to Washington, was on June 6 able to hand Philby a letter from Jack Easton, Menzies’s deputy, which alerted him to the fact that he would shortly be formally recalled. He duly arrived in London on June 10, and was immediately summoned by Dick White ‘to help with our inquiries’.

White had meanwhile been very busy, making sure Sillitoe was properly briefed for his meeting with Hoover, and also preparing Patterson for the line of deceit to take. In a letter of May 25, he introduced the concept of the ‘real and notional aspects of the case’, emphasizing how the wool had to be pulled over the eyes of Lamphere and Hoover so that they would not guess that the authorities had concluded that Maclean was their man well before the day he absconded. It would have been disastrous if the FBI learned that Maclean had been at large for several weeks since being identified, and been able to escape the nation’s security forces. (On June 2, Patterson was even instructed to tell Hoover that Sillitoe believed that Maclean’s disappearance was a coincidence.) White decided that Sillitoe should be accompanied by the impish and devious Martin, as Sillitoe needed someone who understood what was going on (which Sillitoe clearly did not) and could plausibly lie about the situation. Sillitoe would work at the high level, and Martin would brief Lamphere. But this is where the story diverges: in the account that he gave his potential biographer, Andrew Boyle (whose notes were inherited by Tom Bower after Boyle’s death) greatly distorted the sequence of events in order to disguise his plot.

Robert Lamphere divulged what happened next in The FBI-KGB War. While Sillitoe met with Hoover, on June 13, Martin engaged Lamphere, and handed over the famous seven-point memorandum (which I described in the April coldspur). This report sharply described several aspects of Philby’s ostensibly communist background, and Martin then passed it on to Lamphere’s old friend William Harvey in the CIA.  The Cleveland Cram archive shows that, on June 15, Harvey then presented his scathing report to Bedell Smith, actually derived from the Martin memorandum, but claimed by Harvey (with encouragement by Martin, no doubt) as resulting from his own inspiration. The next day, Sillitoe met with Allen Dulles of the CIA, who passed ‘Harvey’s’ memorandum to him, Sillitoe of course being completely unaware of what the source was. Sillitoe cabled back home on June 17 to say that he had also had a very satisfactory meeting with Bedell Smith (see Guy Liddell’s Diaries), Bedell Smith telling him he would rather deal with MI5 than SIS in the future. On June 18, Sillitoe and Martin flew back to London. The same day, Hoover told Admiral Sidney Souers, special consultant to the President, about Burgess’s habitation with Philby while in Washington, and that Philby’s first wife had been a Communist. Aldrich and Cormac show this as evidence that ‘Truman was getting better information on the British moles than Attlee’. If that were true, it was because MI5 was not providing the intelligence they gave to the FBI and CIA to their own Prime Minister, not because the US organisations were more efficient.

General Bedell Smith in Moscow

Many of the accounts of this period (including Andrew’s authorised history of MI5) have Bedell Smith banishing Philby from Washington at this time, but, as the archival chronology clearly shows, Philby was back in London by the time Sillitoe and Martin left for Washington. Meanwhile, David Martin, in Wilderness of Mirrors, incorrectly amplified the story about Harvey’s heroic insights into Philby’s background, a story that has been picked up by innumerable chroniclers. I described this in the April coldspur, and also showed that Guy Liddell was completely unaware of what was going on.

Bedell Smith may well have stated that he did not want to see Philby in Washington again, but the record shows that the chief of the CIA was much more annoyed at Hoover’s withholding information about VENONA from him than he was at either Sillitoe’s deception or even possible treachery by Philby. After acting Ambassador Steel visited Bedell Smith in October of 1951, Steel wrote to Reilly about Bedell Smith’s mood, quoting him as follows: “Of course Percy Sillitoe lied to me like a trooper but I appreciate he had to do it on account of your understandings with Hoover and it was not his fault.” Steel went on to write: “Bedell’s principal worry is concerned with how much Burgess may have learned casually from Philby and in his house about his, Bedell’s, organization. He was very anxious to be reassured that we had not had any previous cause for suspicion of Burgess as we had of Donald Maclean and that we had let him know about Burgess as soon as our suspicions were aroused. He is naturally not very happy about what Burgess may have picked up but appeared much more interested in a vindication of our own bona fides towards himself.” That did not sound like the voice of a man greatly offended by rumours about Kim Philby.

As for White, his version of the story, as related in The Perfect English Spy, was a gross distortion of the truth. First of all, he represented Martin’s conversations with the CIA as ‘focused on Burgess’, concealing the Philby memorandum. He then claimed that the long message from Philby that hinted at Burgess’s possible flirtation with espionage arrived on June 18, when that message had actually been seen two weeks earlier. Next White asserted that at only at that stage did Jack Easton send the letter to Philby warning him of the cable to call him home, when that had happened on June 6. He then told his biographer that it was only then that he and Martin started to compile a record of Philby’s work, as preparation for the interrogation of Philby to which John Sinclair had given his grudging approval. Lamphere’s report makes it abundantly clear that the research had been completed well before Sillitoe and Martin left on June 11. Cave-Brown reported that White immediately produced a dossier compiled by Milicent Bagot on Philby. David Martin then contributed to the White caprice, however, by adding that it was at this stage, on June 20, that MI5 compiled the dossier on Philby, listing the seven points so ingeniously provided by Harvey! White also made sure that his harsh opinion of Rees was articulated (‘why did he not come to us earlier’?), and he left a very clear impression that Liddell was irreparably tainted by his association with Blunt.

‘Old Men Forget’. Was this just a misremembrance by White in his declining years? That is very unlikely: his account is a tissue of lies. What he was trying to do is show that he and Martin had nothing to do with the plot to bring Philby down, and were simply following up doggedly on their investigation, since Burgess’s friend from Washington had been brought to them on a platter. Yet it was imperative for White to show that the creation of the dossier on Philby had been prompted by outside investigations, and that it had not occurred until after Burgess’s escape. That was a somewhat risky line to take, as it indicated a fair amount of naivety about Philby’s past, a track-record which, if William Harvey could work out from so far away (from the planted evidence), MI5 should have been able to conclude themselves, as any objective observer might suggest. Philby was in SIS, not MI5, of course, which ameliorated their responsibility. As seems much clearer now – especially if the Liddell-Roberts anecdote is shown to have substance – White had very probably already made that calculation, but he had enough problems on his hands without taking credit for identifying another skeleton in the closet whom he should have called out a long time before. And, if Philby’s guilt could swiftly be acknowledged, though perhaps not proven or admitted, it would help his cause. Yet his old ally Bedell Smith did not respond with the degree of specific outrage that he had hoped for. And, in a clumsy interrogation carried out by White himself immediately Philby returned to Britain, the master-spy resisted the attempts to make him confess, despite the damning evidence.

The ghastly secret that haunted White was as follows: if it could ever be shown that he had harboured serious doubts about Philby before he was sent to Washington, or while he was there, and done nothing about it, he (White) would have to be regarded as putting the whole VENONA project in jeopardy. White would therefore continue to dissemble over the years (see, for example, what he said to Nicholas Bethell over the Albanian incidents, as recorded in Bethell’s book The Albanian Operation of the CIA & MI6) – highlighting his own insights into Philby’s culpability, but not saying exactly when he came to any individual conclusion about a certain activity, or with whom he shared it. #  Meanwhile he concealed from his interviewers the plant that was placed with Harvey and Bedell Smith that listed the fuller indictment. In summary, he distorted the truth to indicate that he had no suspicions of Philby before Burgess absconded. When Burgess and Maclean disappeared, however, he could not hold back any longer. He needed to punish the old foe, SIS, without drawing attention on himself. The fact that he went behind Menzies’s back to attempt to unmask Philby proves that Menzies was not aware of the plan. And White could not have masterminded a deception project using Philby without Menzies’ and Easton’s participation. But was White working alone? Who else knew what was going on?

# For example, in his comments to Bethell, the historian manqué attempted to excuse MI5’s tolerance of communists in 1940, the year in which Philby was recruited by SIS, by telling his interlocutor that at that time ‘the Russians were our allies’, when of course they were then allies of the Nazis, providing matériel to the Germans for the prosecution of the Battle of Britain.

Philby as the Third Man?

What would have been convenient for White would be evidence that Philby had been the agent who had warned Maclean about the net closing in on him, and let him and Burgess know about the imminent arrest. Was Philby thus the Third Man? That question is one of many that surround the eighteen months that Philby spent in Washington, and it is probably educational to list the main conundrums about the man’s activity at this time, and attach some tentative answers to the riddles:

  1. Why did Menzies send Philby to Washington in 1949? (He seriously had no doubts about Philby’s loyalties.  In his Forward to The Philby Conspiracy, John le Carré points out that Menzies had appointed him head of Soviet counter-espionage in 1944 despite knowing his past, and was not apparently disturbed by the Volkov incident in 1945.  According to Cave-Brown, based on interviews with Easton, Reilly was similarly not aware of the questions surrounding Philby, as he was party to the discussions on Philby’s possible promotion in early 1951.  Whether Menzies entrusted a mission of deception and disinformation to Philby cannot be verified.)
  2. Why did Philby so quickly help point the finger at Maclean? (Philby immediately realised from what Oldfield told him that Maclean was probably doomed, and he had to save his own skin.)
  3. Why was Burgess sent to Washington in 1950, despite his malfeasance? (It was typical FO incompetence, as reinforced by its treatment of Maclean after his riotous behaviour in Cairo. The Foreign Office was absurdly indulgent to its senior employees: Attlee was shocked when he later learned of the continued employment of Burgess and Maclean, despite their transgressions.)
  4. Why did Philby take on Burgess as a boarder? (He genuinely thought Burgess’s reputation was safe, needed him as a convenient courier to New York, and believed he could control Burgess’s aberrant behaviour better by keeping a close eye on him.  It was, however, appalling tradecraft.)
  5. Why was White not concerned about Philby’s close collaboration with Patterson? (He probably was concerned, but could do nothing about it without incurring Menzies’s ire.  If White truly had concluded much earlier that Maclean was HOMER, he may have even believed the situation would resolve itself without MI5’s being tainted.)
  6. Why did SIS only warn Philby about his association with Burgess in March 1951? (Menzies and his lieutenants – apart, possibly, from Jack Easton – were so out of touch that they genuinely did not know Burgess was a threat until his outrageous behaviour that month.)
  7. Why did SIS immediately recall Philby in May 1951 if it regarded him as a loyal officer? (Given that Burgess had absconded with Maclean, it accepted that Philby would be contaminated in Hoover’s and Bedell Smith’s eyes.  Cave-Brown claims that Menzies acted only after White had informed him of Martin’s suspicions, provoked by his reading Philby’s awkward letter about Burgess)
  8. Why did Menzies agree to White’s interrogation of Philby immediately he returned? (The political pressure was intense, but Menzies was confident that Philby would be exonerated.  Thus he instructed Easton to agree to the trial, grudgingly. In July, Easton would travel to Washington to tell Winston Scott of the CIA that SIS believed Philby was innocent.)
  9. Why was Lamphere not more shocked when he was told about Philby’s probable culpability? (He had never liked Philby, but was overwhelmed by the implications of Maclean’s treachery. He wrote that he did not believe Philby was an active spy since he had spent so little time trying to woo him, Lamphere.)
  10. Why did Philby later promote himself as the Third Man, despite the obvious logistical difficulties? (It distracted attention from the real facilitator in the bowels of MI5 and magnified his reputation as a fixer extraordinaire.)
Guy Burgess

In his notoriously unreliable memoir, My Silent War, Philby wrote, of the plan to use Burgess to help Maclean escape: “In somebody’s mind – I do not know whose – the two ideas merged: Burgess’s return to London and the rescue of Maclean.” From this emerged an extraordinary series of events that involved Burgess’ s being booked for speeding three times in one day in the state of Virginia, and thus arrested, a project that Burgess ‘brought off  . . . in the simplest possible way’, according to Philby’s account. Burgess was accordingly reprimanded by the Ambassador and sent home, where he then successfully met his Soviet contact, and informed Maclean of the escape plan.

This flight of fancy does not stand up to serious analysis, on the following grounds:

  1. Risk: To require Burgess to engage in dangerous driving, an activity that might have resulted in death, was irresponsible. The desired outcome of having Burgess recalled to London was by no means certain.
  2. Speed: The process was extraordinarily laborious. Burgess’s driving escapade happened on March 1: Ambassador Franks received the letter of complaint from the Governor of Virginia on March 14, and told Burgess he was seeking FO approval for his recall. On April 14, he was ordered home, but did not leave on the boat from New York until May 2, arriving in the UK on May 7. If Burgess had been serious, he could voluntarily have returned home earlier without suspicion.
  3. Necessity: As the Mitrokhin archive informs us (probably reliably, in this case), Philby had a Soviet handler in New York named Makeyev, and Burgess was used as a courier to take messages to him. Makeyev could have had messages passed on to Moscow and London much more easily – and no doubt did so. (While in New York, Burgess stayed with Maclean’s younger brother Alan, who was working as Gladwyn Jebb’s private secretary at the time – a series of visits, including Alan’s unrecorded role as a prison visitor to another traitor, George Blake –  that the Macmillan publisher unaccountably omitted from his jocular memoir, No I Tell a Lie, It Was the Tuesday  . . .)
  4. Logistics: It would have been impossible and irregular for Philby and Makeyev (or Philby and a claimed contact in Washington) to make arrangements for Maclean’s escape from so far away, a claim made by both Modin and Philby. Moscow Centre would have had to approve and organize the whole project.
  5. Timing: While Philby did not make the claim, critics have pointed to the fact that Burgess and Maclean absconded on the very day that Foreign Secretary Morrison signed the order for interrogation, suggesting that the Third Man was able to tip off the traitors immediately that decision was known. That would have been impossible for Philby to accomplish: the timing was probably coincidental.
  6. Pragmatics: The Soviets did not have to wait until the date of interrogation was determined to initiate the escape, which must have been planned for weeks ahead. Once Maclean had been confidently identified, his extraction would have occurred as soon as all the pieces were in place.

The fact that Philby was not aware of the timetable, or what the plans were for Maclean’s escape, is shown by a message from Makeyev that even Hamrick quotes, one ‘verifiable’ (although that word should always be used carefully when dealing with Soviet archives) from the Mitrokhin papers. Makeyev met Philby on May 24, and Hamrick comments on it, without dating it, as follows: “In one or only two of Philby’s documented face-to-face meetings with his KGB illegal, Makayev found him distraught: STANLEY, he reported, ‘demanded HOMER’s immediate exfiltration to the USSR, so that he himself would not be compromised.” Thus, the deception was a tactic to draw attention away from a real source close to the centre of power: and that process helped MI5 as well. Despite its obvious flaws, the account of Philby as the Third Man who warned Burgess and Maclean became a political catchphrase, and has been picked up by numerous writers. It suited Philby to deny it when under fire in 1955, and it suited him to confirm it when writing his memoir.

The Strange Case of Anthony Blunt

Anthony Blunt

When Guy Burgess arrived at Southampton on May 7, he was picked up by Anthony Blunt at the Ocean Terminal. The descriptions of Blunt’s role in helping the Soviet cause in the next two-and-a-half weeks before the May 25 departure of Burgess and Maclean are notably unreliable. The account by Yuri Modin (who was the KGB handler of Blunt and Maclean at the time) in My 5 Cambridge Friends is notoriously wrong on many points, such as Philby’s access to VENONA information and the timing of his suspicions concerning HOMER, Philby’s passing hints to the investigation in London, his own failure to recognize Makeyev, and the details of Krivitsky’s interrogation. He adopts the fiction of the Burgess mission undertaken to alert Modin and company of the imminent threat to Maclean, and that Philby and Burgess planned the details of the escape (for Maclean only, of course) while others (such as John Costello) have reported, by access to the Petrov papers, that the decision to exfiltrate Maclean had been taken months before. Somewhat puzzlingly, Miranda Carter in her biography of Blunt, Anthony Blunt: His Lives, despite acknowledging Modin’s flaws, cites him repeatedly. What is certain, however, is that Blunt acted as a go-between, communicating with Modin and Burgess about what shape the plans would take.

In his 1987 book, The Secrets of the Service, Anthony Glees quoted the testimony that Blunt provided to the Times in an interview published on November 21, 1979. It is an awkward and deceitful explanation in which Blunt gave away his continuing relationship with the Soviets, while denying that he had had any involvement in warning Burgess and Maclean. Thus Blunt supported the story that it was Philby who provided the hints that were based on VENONA. “Philby warned them, as has been publicly stated and I could not have had any knowledge of this.” Glees points out the anomalies, reminds us that Hugh Cecil and Andrew Boyle echoed the same line of reasoning, and cites Robert Lamphere’s account of the obstructive MI5 inquiry. But Glees’s argument focuses on the notion that the escape was provoked by the decision to interrogate Maclean in the week beginning May 21 (actually made on May 24), thus absolving Philby of the ability to communicate a warning from Washington.  If Blunt had been the source, however, he would have had to rely on another insider in MI5, since he had left the service in 1945. That conclusion would point to the existence of another mole, as Chapman Pincher strongly asserted, naming Hollis. Glees, sceptical of the case against Hollis, then turned to the evidence of Patrick Reilly, which I shall analyse soon. Yet if the timing of the abscondence had been coincidental, it would not have required the constant refreshment of the investigation’s progress to Blunt, or to anyone else, in those heady days of May 1951.

In my February posting of coldspur, I laid out the bizarre chain of events which led to Goronwy Rees arriving to have an interview with Guy Liddell, on June 7, only to find Anthony Blunt in the room. The source for the timing of this event comes from Jennifer Rees and John Costello, yet there must be some doubt about it. Liddell’s Diaries (which contain many redactions over Burgess and Maclean) are interrupted for the period between June 2, when he met with Blunt to discuss Burgess’s travel patterns, and June 12, when he indicates that he had just returned from Wales – presumably on holiday. His first entry on his return is to deflect the discussion to Dick White: “Dick had had a talk with Anthony and Garonwy [sic] Rees, which seems to indicate that Burgess had in 1937 been fairly closely implicated in Communist activities.” Thus it seems likely that the Rees/Liddell/Blunt encounter probably occurred earlier. Jennifer Rees provides no source for the date: Costello cites Nigel West’s MI5 and Chapman Pincher’s Too Secret Too Long, but neither of those works gives a date for the meeting. Maybe Rees’s hazy memory imagined a delay that did not occur. In any case, Liddell either tried to minimise the event, and reduce his involvement.

In The Perfect English Spy, however, the timetable changes. White told his biographer that Liddell’s meeting occurred on June 1 – but did not mention Blunt’s presence – and that he, White, interviewed Rees on June 6, i.e. while Liddell was away, which would grant more sense to Liddell’s comment. Yet there is no mention of a previous meeting between Liddell and Rees, and certainly no reference to Blunt’s presence. Was that ‘second’ meeting part of Rees’s imagination? The evidence of White and Liddell might suggest that it was: perhaps it was part of Rees’s fevered campaign of denunciation of Liddell. While White’s recollections are frequently dubious, and he might have had good reason for suppressing Blunt’s involvement, Liddell’s diurnal records were less sensitive, and occasionally very ingenuous. As Liddell wrote in that same careful June 12 entry, after dining with a very perturbed Blunt: “No new facts emerged, except that I feel certain that Anthony was never a conscious collaborator with Burgess in any activities that he may have conducted on behalf of the Comintern.”

Guy Liddell

Liddell’s contribution to the investigation was certainly unusual. He had headed B Division before White, and was now Deputy Director-General, but his Diaries show that White introduced him to the leakage case only on April 11, 1951! He does not appear to be surprised or upset about this, but does become more involved after May 25. A note to file by Robertson on May 29 states tersely: “Mr Anthony Blunt is being contacted by DD [Deputy-Director, i.e. Liddell].”  At this stage the whereabouts of Burgess and Maclean were not known, and most of the investigators would claim that they had no inkling that Burgess might come under the same suspicions that surrounded Maclean, so Liddell must have volunteered the information that Blunt, as a friend of Burgess, might be able to shed more light on him. Again, the lead-up to this invitation is ambiguous: both White and Costello reported that Liddell had received a telephone call from Rees on May 26, but had not been able to make sense of it. Rees said that he had tried to contact Liddell unsuccessfully that day, and thus contacted Blunt. Yet Liddell’s diary entry for May 29 (after a large redacted segment for the previous day) indicates that Burgess’s absence came as a complete surprise. He (Liddell) knew about Maclean’s departure, but not that he had been accompanied. It was Blunt who informed him: it is either an enormous bluff, or he was for some reason being kept out of the picture.

In any case, the outcome was that Blunt turned out to be the main witness for the prosecution. The archive at KV 6/143 contains an entry (June 6) where Blunt’s testimony that Burgess worked for the Comintern is used as the primary background material in the briefing-book prepared for Sillitoe for his coming meeting with Hoover. (Reilly’s and White’s knowledge that Guy Burgess had eagerly shown he had contacts inside the Comintern in June 1940 was conveniently overlooked.) At the same time, it is clear that Rees tried to exonerate his friend somewhat: he told the investigators that in 1939 Blunt had echoed his (Rees’s) protestations at the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. That was not true, but Rees no doubt felt some obligation to a man he admired for dragging him into the controversy. And this whole exercise aroused the excitement of MI5’s B2 section. On June 11, Robertson was minded to declare: “Blunt has been named in Goronwy Rees’s statement as a person who was understood by Rees to have been one of Burgess’s source of information, at the time when Burgess was working for the Russians. Blunt has given every appearance of co-operating with M.I.5 in the present investigation but, by reason of his employment in this office during the war, must be regarded as under some suspicion.”

The irony was that the junior ranks in MI5 had just learned of Blunt’s possible treacherousness, while Liddell and White had known about it since 1944. After all, Blunt had made no secret of his Communist pretensions, he had written about them in the Spectator, he had been recalled from a Military Intelligence course in 1940 because of his dubious background (and somehow had been exonerated), and had then been recruited by MI5. As I also showed (conclusively, I would say: I have not received any rebuttal) in Misdefending the Realm, Blunt was caught red-handed accepting purloined secrets from his sidekick Leo Long, then working for MI14, which he then passed on to the Soviets. No doubt Blunt apologised, saying it was a one-off event, to which he was inspired by a deep sympathy for our struggling ally. He probably added that he believed Stalin was not receiving the richness of intelligence from Britain that he deserved, and felt entitled to show such initiative – an action, we should remember, with which Valentine Vivian expressed sympathy in another context. Long was suspended for a while, and Blunt was no doubt given a slap on the wrists, and continued with his perfidy.

Thus it might have come with a sudden and dreadful shock when White came to the realisation that, if apparently reformed Communist sympathisers like Maclean, and then Philby, and most recent of all, Burgess, could turn out to be red-blooded traitors and snakes in the grass, there was no reason why Blunt might not be in the same category, too. And here Blunt was, pretending to help the cause in nailing Burgess, just as Philby had gone out of his way to help incriminate Maclean. The final irony was that that, immediately White concluded that Philby’s guilt was proven – because of Burgess’s escape – he must have known that the fact of VENONA would have been leaked to the Russians, and thus there was no harm in confronting Maclean with the cables to cause him to confess. That would have been dangerous if Maclean had brazened out his interrogation (though that was unlikely, given his psychological condition), but it would no longer have mattered. By now, however, he had flown the coop.

Reilly and the Hollis Mystery

While Kim Philby had certainly acted as a ‘Second Man’ in warning Moscow of the net closing in on Maclean, many commentators and historians have picked up this unauthentic issue of a Third Man – an intelligence insider – warning Burgess and Maclean of the imminent plan to interrogate HOMER. Several have alighted on Liddell as the prime suspect, among them Costello, Lamphere, Oldfield, Deacon and Rees, as I listed in the April coldspur. An alternative theory has been strongly promoted by Chapman Pincher. Indeed, it was his life’s work to prove that the man behind all the counter-espionage disasters was Roger Hollis, who succeeded Dick White as Director-General of MI5 in 1956.

One of Anthony Glees’s objectives, in The Secrets of the Service, was to inspect Pincher’s claims, and I recommend the Professor’s book to anyone interested in the controversy. [I should declare that Professor Glees was my doctoral supervisor.] Glees analysed some of Pincher’s assertions about Hollis, and then reviewed them in the light of the Burgess-Maclean case. I have to say that I think Glees may have been influenced a little too much by some of the prominent politicians and officers whom he interviewed, among them Lord Sherfield (previously Roger Makins in our cast), Sir Patrick Reilly and Dick White. For instance, Lord Sherfield diminished the harm that Maclean had been able to cause, focusing on the matter of nuclear weaponry, when we now know that Maclean’s betrayal of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s plans for negotiations at Yalta resulted in untold death and misery for much of eastern Europe, especially Poland. It is the post-mortem of the Burgess-Maclean affair, where Reilly contributed several comments in writing to Glees, that is even more provocative, I believe, and bears some close relationship to my inquiry.

Patrick Reilly

Glees introduces Reilly by citing Lamphere’s recently published FBI-KGB War, where its author complains about the way that the FBI were ‘misled and repeatedly lied to’ about the events that led up to the identification of Maclean. Lamphere stated that the Americans were told nothing about Maclean until after the escape, and he quoted Arthur Martin as ‘telling him that MI5 had insisted the FBI not be told about Maclean’. Glees then goes on to write: “As Chapman Pincher rightly observes, if this is true then Philby cannot have tipped off Maclean, since Philby would have known about Maclean and the date of interrogations only in his capacity as MI5’s postman to the FBI. But is this true? The answer must be ‘no’.” One might point out that, irrespective of Philby’s briefing by Oldfield in 1949, there is a solid difference between Maclean’s being identified as one of the suspects – a fact that was communicated to Lamphere, by Patterson – and the fact that he alone was about to be hauled in for questioning. In any case, Glees then called on one of the main participants in the investigation, Patrick Reilly, for his opinion.

To Glees, Reilly is a figure who instantly commands respect. “For against these allegations we must set the far more authoritative testimony of Sir Patrick Reilly . . .  His first concern now is that the full story of Maclean’s identification be told.” Reilly was generous enough to write letters to Glees on the topic, and I reproduce some of his statements here, adding my own commentary:

  1. “In the circumstances of the time, someone who was a member of the Communist Party might not have been acting dishonourably in not disclosing his political sympathies, provided, of course, he was not acting as a Soviet or a Communist agent.”

This is an extraordinarily ingenuous and weaselly policy to defend. First of all, it reflects the regrettable but all too real belief that there were ‘academic’ Communists who were harmless (probably British), and ‘practical’ Communists whose mission was to overthrow liberal democracy (probably foreigners), and that it was therefore quite acceptable to hire the former, even though they concealed their affiliations, while persecuting the latter. Did Sir Patrick not understand that the CPGB took its orders from Moscow, and that agents were known to engage in subterfuge, and thus conceal any illicit activity?

  • “One important stage in the investigation has, however, been overlooked. This is that at a fairly late stage a message became available that Homer was being consulted by the Russians  . . . The new message however showed that the spy was someone of some importance and we were then able to produce what was a relatively short list, about 9, I think. But we still had nothing special pointing to Maclean and indeed I remember clearly that we thought someone else was a more likely suspect.”

This is probably the only occasion in the history of intelligence where the treachery of leaking secret information has been described as a ‘consulting’ exercise. As KV 6/142 shows, Martin informed Patterson on April 12 that Maclean was then ‘the top suspect’. Reilly’s colleague in the Foreign Office, Carey-Foster, may have hoped otherwise, but the Washington Embassy was informed ‘at this fairly late stage’ of HOMER’s probable identity.

  • “The other part of the story quoted by Pincher is pure fabrication; it is totally untrue that the Foreign Office told MI5 not to inform the FBI that Maclean had been identified. On the contrary, Sir Percy Sillitoe [head of MI5] was absolutely determined not to put a foot wrong with Hoover since he had had such a lot of trouble with the latter over the Fuchs and Nunn May cases. He kept Hoover informed with messages which were sent over for special security through MI6 and therefore, of course, through Philby. And there is not the slightest doubt that it was Philby who was thus able to set Maclean’s escape in train. Indeed, I remember that when we in the FO were getting impatient about the delay in interrogating Maclean we were told that Sillitoe wanted to be quite sure we were in step with the FBI before the interrogation took place.”

There is no evidence that Sillitoe, who was out of touch with the details of the investigation, maintained regular communications with Hoover on the subject. (Hamrick makes much of the ‘special MI6 link’ accessed by Philby). K 6/142 shows that Reilly reported at a meeting on April 17 that ‘Strang wants no information passed to the Americans’. Martin passed that message on to Patterson on April 18. On May 10 Mackenzie suggested: ‘If Maclean breaks under interrogation, we should tell the FBI we intend to question him and very shortly afterwards give them the results’.  K 6/142 offers, from a meeting on May 15, that the Foreign Office ‘was anxious that nothing be disclosed to the State Department’, and thus nothing should be sent to Hoover (for fear of leaks). On the same date, Makins and Mackenize pressed for Hoover not to be informed until after Maclean’s interrogation had taken place.

  • “The allegation that Maclean was not going to be prosecuted is also totally untrue. The long delay in interrogating him was due to the fact that it was considered that the evidence from the deciphered telegrams could not be used in court.”

This is partly true. Unless Maclean could be encouraged to confess, or had been caught red-handed passing over information (which was then unlikely, given the obvious surveillance imposed on him), he could not be tried in court based on VENONA evidence. Thus there was no certainty that he was going to be prosecuted, but also no decision made in advance not to prosecute.

  • “MI5 therefore considered that a conviction could only be obtained by a confession and in order to obtain a conviction their star interrogator, Skardon, needed much more information about Maclean. Hence the long delay which proved disastrous, especially as MI5 did not have enough men to keep Maclean under continuous observation.”

On May 15, a meeting between Reilly, Carey Foster, Mackenzie, White, Robertson and Martin agreed to go ahead with the interrogation, but keep silent about it to Washington for up to 3-4 weeks. Reilly did have a point, however. MI5’s report of May 18 stated that the service needed three months to prepare for the interrogation: that was partly because they wanted the FBI to make further investigations about Maclean’s wife, but Lamphere was very nervous about leakages to the State Department.

  • “Morrison would certainly have had before him a written submission, certainly already signed and approved by Strang, drafted by me or Carey Foster.  That submission would have certainly have been the result of prior discussion and the Home Secretary’s concurrence would have been obtained.”

The use of the conditional tense shows evasiveness. Could Reilly, so anxious to set the historical record straight, not recall what papers he signed?

  • “All Sillitoe’s messages to Hoover went through Philby who was thus able to arrange for Burgess to get himself sent home to alert Maclean without the latter’s contact in the UK having to contact him. Philby would of course have been on the alert for information about the date of the interrogation. He could have telephoned to Burgess who was not then suspected or under observation. But it is surely much more likely that he would have used the safe channel of his Soviet contacts in Washington who would have informed their colleagues in London who must have told Burgess by the morning of the 25th since the latter spent the day preparing for the escape.”

Communications on the progress of the BRIDE/VENONA investigation were sent variously by Robertson, Martin or White to Patterson, who then shared the results, as guided, with Philby and Lamphere. There is no evidence of secret traffic between Sillitoe and Hoover. The existence of safe contacts in Washington is highly dubious: Philby used Burgess to contact Makeyev in New York, but does claim he made contact once or twice with handlers in Washington. In any case, Philby would not have had time to act. The decision to go ahead with interrogation (for June 18-25) was taken on May 24, the day before the abscondence.

  • “At last, towards the end of May, MI5 declared themselves ready to interrogate. Full details of the plan were telegraphed to Washington (via Philby). I seem to remember that some hitch with the FBI caused a last-minute delay.”

On May 25, White informed Patterson of the recent meetings, and the schedule. He claimed that the discovery of Maclean’s wife in New York was ‘very recent’, and introduced ‘the real and notional aspects of the case’. The same day, Sillitoe sent copies of the instructions to Menzies, adding that they would be available to Philby, too (via Patterson). The FBI was not party to the decision.

  • “In the FO we had no conceivable motive for further delay. We were longing for the end of three months of intense suspense.”

On the contrary, the Foreign Office was trying to stretch the process out.  For example, reluctant to admit that Maclean could actually be a traitor, Mackenzie continually sought to investigate Gore-Booth.

  1.  “Our service had the tradition of a closely knit family. That one of us, the son of a Cabinet Minister, should be a Soviet spy was something quite horrible and we had been living with this knowledge for months.”

Apart from the fact that the Foreign Office, like any normal family, had its black sheep, rivalries, jealousies, misfits and idlers (as is clear from memoirs and archives), if Reilly had known this fact ‘for months’ (and the description pointed solely to Maclean), how could he pretend that, ‘at a fairly late stage’, the shortlist of suspects had been reduced to nine? And had he already forgotten about the conviction of John King, and Krivitsky’s warnings about the ‘Imperial Council’ spy?  What is more, Maclean had confessed to a secretary, while in Cairo, that he was ‘the English Alger Hiss’, and the secretary had written a letter that eventually landed in Maclean’s personnel file – a file which Sir William Strang refused access by MI5, on the grounds that the notion of traitors inside the Diplomatic Service was inconceivable. On the issue of ‘family’, Richard Deacon informs us that George Wigg, who had been the intermediary between Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the intelligence services, told him that esprit de corps was the bane of the Foreign Office.  Deacon wrote: “Wigg himself said that Morrison, when he left office, ‘still persisted in the view that Foreign Office esprit de corps was in part responsible for the affair [the failure to apprehend Burgess and Maclean before they defected]. Esprit de corps, apparently, had kept Morrison ignorant of information implicating Maclean which had been given to the Foreign Office by Stalin’s former agent, Walter Krivitsky, in 1940; it had also kept him ignorant of the Volkov revelations, made through the British Embassy in Turkey.”

  1.  “What is of course impossible to understand is that Arthur Martin should have told Lamphere (if he really did) that the FO told MI5 not to keep the FBI informed. . . If he is concerned to incriminate Hollis and therefore wants to minimize Philby’s part, he is being deliberately untruthful. I am absolutely astonished that it is possible for any doubt to be cast on the fact that it was Philby who warned the Russians of the investigation of Maclean and thus enabled them to plan his escape. The statement that the FO had told MI5 not to inform the FBI is false. I say that with complete certainty.”

As I have shown above, Reilly’s statement is simply untrue. There is not necessarily a logical link between the desire of the Foreign Office to keep information from the FBI (because of the risk of leakage, and the discomfort of having an announcement of Maclean’s interrogation pre-empted by the Americans) and the casting of doubt on the assertion that Philby could not have been responsible for all that Reilly (and others) claimed he did. Philby no doubt did warn the Soviets of the investigation into Maclean, but he would not have been able to alert them to the imminent interrogation. Indeed, no one may have done so.

Professor Glees’s conclusion from Reilly’s contribution was that ‘the full truth about the defection of Burgess and Maclean serves to incriminate Philby and to exonerate Roger Hollis in particular”. Apart from the fact that Philby was incriminated anyway (if not by the last-minute disclosure), if Reilly’s testimony can now be shown to be untruthful, would that incriminate Hollis? Not necessarily, but that is the topic of a completely different discussion. (Hollis hardly features in all the archival reports about the Embassy Spy investigation, but that was because he was intensely involved with the Australians in investigating their VENONA leaks, travelling to the Dominion frequently in 1948 and 1949, and helping to establish the ASIO organisation.) The major point here is: what was Reilly trying to hide?

The first declaration to be made is that, like White, he wanted to divert all attention away from any potential mole in MI5 (or a further one in the Foreign Office). This would likewise minimise the highly irregular relationship with Anthony Blunt, which must have also embarrassed Reilly enormously when the truth came out in 1963. If one maintained the stance that Burgess and Maclean had really been alerted at the last minute, but then Philby was eliminated from the line-up, fingers would have to point at another source close to the discussions. Blunt was later shown to be an intermediary for the Soviets, but he was not close enough to the action – unless Liddell had been keeping him constantly updated. But Liddell was largely out of the picture, too. The subsidiary point was that he wanted to clarify that MI5, not the Foreign Office, had been the main stumbling-block in the move to interrogation. That was perhaps petty (and White was still alive when he wrote to Glees), but it presumably meant a lot to Reilly.

Reilly thus remains something of a paradox. Why, after all that time, did he not simply admit that Philby had known about Maclean for a long time, and that the timing of the escape was probably coincidental? He would not have constructed such a web of deception around himself. Moreover, his professional contribution to intelligence matters appears very flimsy. His period as Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a position he held from November 1950 to April 1953, is treated with complete lack of interest by Michael S. Goodman in his official history of the Committee (2014). Goodman grants Reilly and his specific tenure only two uninformative paragraphs. (The sole fact that Michael Goodman vouchsafes us, about Reilly’s term as Chairman of that body, is that he destroyed a chair when he heard the news about Burgess and Maclean – a highly symbolic gesture of Chekhovian, or even Dostoyevskian, proportions.) Goodman does comment, however, on the JIC’s general abrogation of responsibility over VENONA and Soviet espionage, whether out of ignorance or indifference: “The JIC’s failure to probe the strategic implications of the damage caused by Soviet espionage is even harder to understand, despite the fact that administrative responsibility for security and counter-intelligence lay with MI5”, he writes. Goodman might have added that Reilly was in close cahoots with White at the time, but clearly concealed everything from the JIC itself. The real mystery is why such an unimpressive character as Reilly was not only appointed Chairman of the JIC, but lasted there three years.

Summary and Conclusions

Jorge Luis Borges likened the Falklands War to two bald men fighting over a comb. Here were two old-age pensioners claiming that neither of them, when schoolboys, broke the window. In 1951, Dick White, when he realised that Philby was blown, executed a crafty move to plant the responsibility for MI5 lapses on his rival organisation, SIS. Thirty-five years later, he distorted the real sequence of events when he described the happenings of that spring to his biographer, not wanting to reveal that he had suspected Philby long before. Back then, Patrick Reilly, embarrassed and enraged by the leakiness of the Foreign Office, had tried to stave off the inevitable. Thirty-five years later, under no pressure at all, he volunteered to document for Anthony Glees ‘the full story of what occurred’, and tried to turn the reading public’s attention away from the rottenness of MI5 and towards the comprehensive culpability of Philby. He could quite plausibly have simply debunked the ‘Third Man’ concept without practising to deceive.

Why did they do it? Because they could get away with it, and they knew that, even if the archive were opened, they would not be around to see it. This was the 1980s, however. The decade had kicked off with Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason, and the unmasking of Blunt. Chapman Pincher had followed in 1982 with his searing Too Secret Too Long. The secret of VENONA was starting to leak out, from David Harvey and Nigel West, and then Robert Lamphere’s FBI-KGB War in 1986. It does not appear that either White or Reilly read Lamphere’s account, but Glees’s reading of it prompted his approach to Reilly. Peter Wright’s controversial and revealing Spycatcher came out in the same year (1987) that Glees’s book was published, at the same time when Tom Bower started interviewing White. The mandarins needed to move on to the offensive, and try to protect the reputations of themselves and their institutions. Dick White’s deep plotting shows a hitherto undocumented side of his character as he elbowed and intrigued his way to the Director-Generalship of MI5.

The last point to be made is on the rather romantic notion of ‘intelligence sharing’, with which this piece started. The practice has a humorous aspect, in that Britain was invited by the Americans to join an exercise that would turn out to embarrass its intelligence circles. MI5 (for a while) shared the fruits of the Embassy Spy investigation with the FBI, but the FBI did not share them with the CIA, who did not even know about VENONA. And it has its darker side, too. It appears that Dick White, to meet his own political objectives, shared his inner suspicions with the CIA in order to spite his real rival, SIS, while concealing what he was doing from his boss, Sillitoe (a policeman) and his political master, Attlee (a Socialist). All the time, the real enemy, Stalin, learned more about VENONA (from Philby, and the American spy, William Weisband, uncovered in 1950) than either Truman or Attlee.

The research is never over. While I am relatively happy that my explanation in this piece is as solid as possible, given the sources available, further questions remain to be answered: For example:

When did White seriously begin to suspect Philby? In 1945? In 1947? In 1949?

Was there anything devious in Philby’s posting to Washington in 1949?

Did Menzies apply pressure on White to remain silent between 1945 and 1951?

Was there any outside political pressure on White & Reilly?

Was the Embassy leakage investigation extenuated for reasons other than embarrassment?

How much did Liddell tell Blunt?

Why was Menzies so tacit in the whole project?

Why did Reilly feel he had to lie so poorly?

Did Eastcote truly delay or conceal some of the VENONA decipherments?

Readers may think of others. Please let me know.

And lastly, what historiographical lessons can be learned from this? They are familiar.

  1. Luminaries will say anything to protect their legacy if they believe the archival record will not be released. Do not trust interviews of ‘The Great and the Good’ for historical exactitude.
  2. You cannot rely on authorised histories. Their sweep is to great, their sources too random, and they are works of public relations.
  3. Too many accounts pluck indiscriminately from semi-reliable sources, and lack a research methodology, as if an accurate story can be enticed from a volume of facts both reliable and unreliable, or from a succession of interviews with persons loosely connected with the drama.
  4. A methodology is thus essential, containing a rigorous chronology, knowledge of the roles, ambitions and objectives of the participants, and the background in which they worked. The historian has continually to ask: Why should we trust certain sources? What does redacted information in the archive tell us? How can conflicts in the record be resolved? Why would a participant in the drama want to make such falsifiable claims?

Sources Used

I list the following, in a hierarchy of those most reliable downwards.

Level One comprises mostly official archives. The series KV 6/140-145 at the National Archives at Kew is the primary source, even though it is selective and has been redacted. Publicly available CIA & FBI records have been used, although they are likewise often heavily redacted. I am grateful to an anonymous colleague for showing me excerpts from the Cleveland Cram archive. KGB records should always be viewed with some suspicion, but the Mitrokhin Archive contains some items that most critics have judged reliable. The VENONA transcripts are trustworthy (despite what some leftist apologists have claimed in recent years). Guy Liddell’s Diaries have also been a useful source, as they mostly bear the aroma of immediacy, but they have also been heavily redacted in places, and Liddell was not above inserting the occasional deceptive entry.

Level Two consists mostly of serious, primarily academic, histories. It must be remembered that all of these were published before much of the relevant archival material was released. They are thus highly reliant on what little ‘authorised’ history had been published, on other secondary sources, on the press, sometimes on controlled access to archives, on testimonies from participants through interviews, even on leaked documents. They are characterised (mostly) by a seriousness and objectivity of approach, with some governing methodology apparent, but not always a sound approach to the resolution of conflicts in evidence. (If you challenge interviewees too closely, they will cut off the oxygen from you.) Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason (1979) clearly broke new ground. Robert J. Lamphere’s FBI-KGB War (1986) adds some well-supported facts, although the author is very loose on dates. Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service (1987) offers a painstaking analysis of the affair, but unfortunately is too trusting of the evidence of Reilly, Makins and White. John Costello’s Mask of Treachery (1988) is a compendious but more journalistic volume, suffering from the author’s apparent desire to cram every ‘fact’ he could find about the case in the hope that a consistent story would emerge from the exercise. Verne Newton’s Cambridge Spies (1991) provides a thorough US-centric view of the spies’ activity, although it uses some dubious sources a little too indiscriminately.  The accounts of VENONA are generally solid: the official publication VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957 (1996), edited by Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, Nigel West’s VENONA: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (1999), John Earl Haynes’ & Harvey Klehr’s VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999), and Herbert Romerstein’s and Eric Breindel’s VENONA Secrets (2001), but they are all weak on the exact process of message collection and decryption, and contain errors.

Level Three displays a broad range of more specialised works, biographies mainly, by such as (but not restricted to) Miranda Carter, Jennifer Rees, Andrew Lownie, Michael Holzman, Ben Macintyre, Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, and Roland Phillips. They all bring something to the table, but are for the sake of this exercise a little too narrowly focussed, or are acts of homage, or rely too much on oral evidence and memoir. I would place in this category the very readable works of Chapman Pincher, who rewards his readers with some tireless excavation of ‘facts’, but provides no sources, is too easily impressed by insiders who may be stringing him a line, and whose methodology is flawed by his objective of having all evidence point to Roger Hollis as a traitor. Nigel West’s Molehunt is also useful, but has been carelessly put together, and requires caution. Anthony Cave-Brown’s Treason in the Blood (1984) has some valuable material, but is undisciplined, as is his biography of Stewart Menzies, “C” (1987), which throws out some will-o’-the-wisp stories about Philby in the course of reporting interviews the author arranged with contemporaries.

Level Four includes a number of unreliable works that need to be listed, since they are so frequently cited by books in Categories 2, 3 and 5. The comparison of misleading stories appearing in memoirs with new archival sources does however often result in new syntheses. David Martin’s Wilderness of Mirrors (1980) is perhaps the most dangerous because it has been so widely quoted, a journalistic creation lacking sources. I have covered S. J. Hamrick’s fascinating but irresponsible Deceiving the Deceivers (2004) in my text. Kim Philby’s My Silent War (1968) needs to be approached with great scepticism, as do most books about Philby, including Patrick Seale’s and Maureen McConville’s Philby: The Long Road to Moscow (1973), a work completely devoid of sources but apparently reflecting a belief that a plausible story could be woven from interviews with about one hundred-and-fifty persons, and The Philby Conspiracy (1968) by Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley. The biography of Dick White, The Perfect English Spy (1995), by Tom Bower, is a classic example of how a prominent intelligence officer manipulated the media and distorted the truth. Goronwy Rees’s memoir, A Chapter of Accidents (1972) is highly unreliable. Dozens of works, by authors from such as Richard Deacon to Yuri Modin, could be included in this category.

Level Five includes the official or authorised histories. In normal circumstances such would at least appear in Category 2, but for this subject, they add nothing, and, moreover, frequently cite items from Level Four for their authority. Keith Jeffery’s Secret History of MI6 (2010) stops in 1949. Christopher Andrew’s Defend the Realm (2009), the authorised history of MI5, has solid coverage of VENONA in general, but is weak on the Burgess and Maclean case, and uses Wilderness of Mirrors as a source. No authorised history of the FBI exists, but John Ranelagh’s The Agency (1986), which comes closest, shows the same defects as Andrew.

Lastly, as part of my background reading for this project, I read Robert Littell’s The Company (2002), a semi-fictional account of the life of the CIA. It is an epic work in many ways (900 pages), a complement perhaps to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and a real page-turner. It has the disquieting feature, however, of mixing in historical figures (e.g. Kim Philby, James Angleton, Richard Helms, J. F. Kennedy) with invented characters, which may give the work some measure of authenticity, but is bound to lead to disillusion among the cognoscenti. The figure of William Harvey of the CIA, who fulfils a minor, but very important, role in the story of Dick White’s deception, is thinly masked by Littell’s giving him the name of Harvey Torriti. The reason for this is, I think, simple. The author needed his hero to be alive when Communism collapsed (the real Harvey died in 1976), and he also wanted to describe Torriti’s experience in dealing with a botched defection in Germany – which he ascribed to Philby’s mischief – by the time he wrote his report to Bedell Smith condemning the British traitor. In real life, however, Harvey was not sent to Germany until after the 1951 incident. The facts would have impaired a good story.

This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Guy Liddell: A Re-Assessment

Guy Liddell

Guy Liddell’s ‘Guardian’ – Nigel West

I have met Nigel West, the pen name adopted by Rupert Allason, the undisputed doyen of British writers on intelligence matters, on three occasions, as I have recorded in previous blogs. I met him first at a conference on wartime Governments-in-Exile at Lancaster House several years back, and he kindly agreed to come and listen to the seminar on Isaiah Berlin that I was giving at the University of Buckingham the following week. We exchanged emails occasionally: he has always been an informative and encouraging advisor to researchers into the world of espionage and counter-espionage, like me. A couple of years ago, I visited him at his house outside Canterbury, where I enjoyed a very congenial lunch.

Nigel West

Shortly before Misdefending the Realm appeared, my publisher and I decided to send Mr. West a review copy, in the hope that he might provide a blurb to help promote the book. Unfortunately, Mr. West was so perturbed by the errors in the text that he recommended that we withdraw it in order to correct them. This was not a tactic that either of us was in favour of, and I resorted to quoting Robin Winks to cloak my embarrassment: “If intelligence officers dislike a book, for its tone, revelations, or simply because the find that one or two facts in it may prove compromising (for which, also read embarrassing), they may let it be known that the book is ‘riddled with errors,’ customarily pointing out a few. Any book on intelligence will contain errors, given the nature and origin of the documentation, and these errors may then be used to discredit quite valid judgments and conclusions which do not turn on the facts in question.”  (Robin W. Winks, in Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961, p 479) Since then, therefore, I have not dared to approach Mr. West on questions of intelligence where I might otherwise have sought his opinion.

I would still describe myself as being on friendly terms with Mr. West, though would not describe us as ‘friends’.  (No collector like Denis Healey or Michael Caine am I.  I count my friends in this world as a few dozen: most of them live in England, however, which makes maintenance of the relationship somewhat difficult. On my infrequent returns to the UK, however, I pick up with them as if I had last seen them only the previous week. What they say about the matter is probably better left unrecorded.) And I remain an enthusiastic reader of Mr. West’s books. I have about twenty-five of his publication on my shelves, which I frequently consult. I have to say that they are not uniformly reliable, but I suspect that Mr. West might say the same thing himself.

His latest work, Cold War Spymaster, subtitled The Legacy of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5, is a puzzling creation, as I shall soon explain. Two of Mr. West’s works on my bookshelf are his editions of Guy Liddell’s Diaries – Volume 1, 1939-1942, and Volume 2, 1942-1945. In a way, these items are superfluous to my research needs, as I have the full set of Liddell’s Diaries on my desktop, downloaded from the National Archives website. Mr. West told me that he would have dearly liked to publish more of Liddell’s chronicle, but it was not considered economically viable. Yet I still find it useful to consult his editions since he frequently provides valuable guides to identities of redacted names, or cryptonyms used: it is also important for me to know what appears in print (which is the record that most historians exploit), as opposed to the largely untapped resource that the original diaries represent. Cold War Spymaster seems to reflect a desire to fill in the overlooked years in the Liddell chronicle.

Guy Liddell, the Diaries and MI5

As West [I shall, with no lack of respect, drop the ‘Mr.’ hereon] points out, Liddell’s Diaries consist an extraordinary record of MI5’s activities during the war, and afterwards, and I do not believe they have been adequately exploited by historians. It is true that a certain amount of caution is always required when treating such testimony: I have been amazed, for example, at the attention that Andrew Roberts’s recent biography of Churchill has received owing to the claim that the recent publication of the Maisky Diaries has required some revisionist assessment. The Soviet ambassador was a mendacious and manipulative individual, and I do not believe that half the things that Maisky ascribed to Churchill and Anthony Eden were ever said by those two politicians. Thus (for example), Churchill’s opinions on the Soviet Union’s ‘rights’ to control the Baltic States have become distorted. Similarly, though to a lesser degree, Stephen Kotkin takes the claims of Maisky far too seriously in Volume 2 of his biography of Stalin.

Diaries, it is true, have the advantage of immediacy over memoirs, but one still has to bear in mind for whose benefit they are written. Liddell locked his away each night, and probably never expected them to be published, believing (as West states) that only the senior management in MI5 would have the privilege of reading them. Yet a careful reading of the text shows some embarrassments, contradictions, and attempts to cover up unpleasantries. Even in 2002, fifty years later, when they were declassified, multiple passages were redacted because some events were still considered too sensitive. Overall, however, Liddell’s record provides unmatched insights into the mission of MI5 and indeed the prosecution of the war. I used them extensively when researching my thesis, and made copious notes, but now, each time I go back to them on some new intelligence topic, I discover new gems, the significance of which I had overlooked on earlier passes.

Describing Liddell’s roles during the time of his Diaries (1939-1952) is important in assessing his record. When war broke out, he was Assistant-Director, under Jasper Harker, of B Division, responsible for counter-intelligence and counter-espionage. B Division included the somewhat maverick section led by Maxwell Knight, B1F, which was responsible for planting agents within subversive organisations such as the Communist Party and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. When Churchill sacked the Director-General, Vernon Kell, in May 1940, and introduced the layer of the Security Executive under Lord Swinton to manage domestic intelligence, Liddell was promoted to Director of B Division, although he had to share the office with an inappropriate political insertion, William Crocker, for some months. As chaos mounted during 1940, and Harker was judged to be ill-equipped for leadership, David Petrie was brought in to head the organisation, and in July 1941 he instituted a new structure in which counter-intelligence against communist subversion was hived off into a new F Division, initially under John Curry. Thus Liddell, while maintaining an interest, was not nominally responsible for handling Soviet espionage during most of the war.

David Petrie

Petrie, an effective administrator appointed to produce order, and a clear definition of roles, was considered a success, and respected by those who worked for him. He retired (in somewhat mysterious circumstances) in 1946, and was replaced by another outsider whose credentials were superficially less impressive, the ex-policeman, Percy Sillitoe – an appointment that Liddell resented on two counts. Petrie was a solid administrator and planner: he had been in his position about a year-and-a-half when he produced, in November 1942, a paper that outlined his ideas about the future of MI5, how it should report, and what the ideal characteristics of officers and the Director-General should be. His recommendations were a little eccentric, stressing that an ideal D-G should come from the Services or Police, and have much experience overseas. Thus Liddell, who probably did not see the report, would have been chagrined at the way that career intelligence officers would have been overlooked. In the same file at Kew (KV 4/448) can be seen Liddell’s pleas for improving career-paths for officers, including the establishment of a permanent civilian intelligence corps in the services.

Petrie was reported to have kept a diary during his years in office, but destroyed it. The authorised historian, Christopher Andrew, glides over his retirement. In a very provocative sentence in his ODNB entry for Petrie, Jason Tomes writes: “In retrospect, this triumph [the double cross system] had to be set alongside a serious failure: inadequate surveillance of Soviet spies. Petrie sensed that the Russian espionage which MI5 uncovered was the tip of an iceberg, but the Foreign Office urged restraint and MI5 had itself been penetrated (by Anthony Blunt).” What Soviet espionage had MI5 uncovered by 1945? Green, Uren and Springhall were convicted in 1942, 1943 and 1944, respectively, but it is not clear why Petrie suspected an ‘iceberg’ of Communist penetration, or what sources Tomes is relying on when he claims that Petrie had evidence of it, and that he and the Foreign Office had a major disagreement over policy, and how the Director-General was overruled. Did he resign over it? That would be a major addition to the history of MI5. The defector Gouzenko led the British authorities to Nunn May, but he was not arrested until March 1946. Could Petrie have been disgusted by the discovery of Leo Long and his accomplice Blunt in 1944? See Misdefending the Realm for more details. I have attempted to contact Tomes through his publisher, the History Press, but he has not responded.

Like several other officers, including Dick White, who considered resigning over the intrusion, Liddell did not think the Labour Party’s appointing of a policeman showed good judgment. Sillitoe had worked in East Africa as a young man, but since 1923 as a domestic police officer, so he hardly met Petrie’s criteria, either.  Astonishingly, Petrie’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography asserts that Petrie had recommended Liddell for the post, but had been overruled by Attlee – an item of advice that would have been a complete volte-face in light of his memorandum three years earlier. On the other hand, it might be said that Sillitoe could have well riposted to his critics, after the Fuchs affair, that the established officers in MI5 did not understand counter-intelligence either. And in another of those enigmatic twists that bedevil attempts to work out what really happened here, Richard Deacon (whose role I shall inspect later in this piece), wrote about Sillitoe in The Greatest Treason: “The picture which has most unfortunately been portrayed since Sillitoe’s departure from MI5 has been that of a policeman totally out of place in a service which called for highly intellectual talents. This is total balderdash: someone like Sillitoe was desperately needed to put MI5 on the right track and to get rid of the devious amateurs who held power.” One might ask: was that not what Petrie had been doing for the past five years?

Percy Sillitoe

In any case, Liddell also thought that he deserved the job himself. Yet he did receive some recognition, and moved nearer to the seat of leadership. In October 1946 he replaced Harker as Deputy Director-General, and frequently stood in for his new boss, who had a rough time trying to deal with ‘subversive’ MI5 officers, and reportedly liked to travel to get away from the frustrations of the office climate.  What is puzzling, however, about the post-war period is that, despite the fact that the Nazi threat was over, and that a Labour government was (initially) far more sympathetic to the Soviet cause, B Division did not immediately take back control of communist subversion. A strong leader would have made this case immediately.

The histories of MI5 (by Christopher Andrew, and West himself) are deplorably vague about responsibilities in the post-war years. We can rely on John Curry’s internal history, written in 1945, for the clear evidence that, after Petrie’s reorganization in the summer of 1941, F Division was responsible for ‘Communism and Left-Wing Movements’ (F2, under Hollis), which was in turn split into F2A (Policy Activities of CPGB in UK), under Mr Clarke, F2B (Comintern Activities generally, including Communist Refugees), and F2C (Russian Intelligence), under Mr. Pilkington. Petrie had followed Lord Swinton’s advice in splitting up B Division, which was evidently now focused on Nazi Espionage (B1A through B1H). Dick White has been placed in charge of a small section simply named ‘Espionage’, with the mission of B4A described as ‘Suspected cases of Espionage by Individuals domiciled in United Kingdom’, and ‘Review of Espionage cases’. Presumably that allowed Liddell and White to keep their hand in with communist subversion and the machinations of the Comintern.

Yet that agreement (if indeed it was one) is undermined by the organisation chart for August 1943, where White has been promoted to Deputy Director to Liddell, and B4A has been set a new mission of ‘Escaped Prisoners of War and Evaders’. F Division, now under the promoted Roger Hollis, since Curry has been moved into a ‘Research’ position under Petrie, still maintains F2, with the same structure, although Mr Shillito is now responsible for F2B and F2C. With the Soviet Union now an ally, the intensity of concerns about Communist espionage appears to have diminished even more. (In 1943, Stalin announced the dissolution of the Comintern, although that gesture was a fraudulent one.) One might have expected that the conclusion of hostilities, and the awareness within MI5, and even the Foreign Office, that the Soviet Union was now the major threat (again), would provoke a reallocation of forces and a new mission. And, indeed, this appears to be what happened – but in a quiet, unannounced fashion, perhaps because it took a while for Attlee to be able to stand up to the Bevanite and Crippsian influences in his Party. A close inspection of certain archives (in this case, the Pieck files) shows that in September 1946, Michael Serpell identified himself as F2C, but by the following January was known as B1C. This is an important indicator that White’s B Division was taking back some responsibility for Soviet espionage in the light of the new threat, and especially the Gouzenko revelations of 1945. Yet who made the decision, and exactly what happened, seems to be unrecorded.

According to Andrew, after the war, B Division was highly focused on Zionist revolts in Palestine, for which the United Kingdom still held the mandate. Yet he (like West) has nothing to say about F Division between Petrie’s resignation in 1946 and Dick White’s reorganisation in 1953. The whole of the Sillitoe era is a blank. Thus we have to conclude that, from 1947 onwards, Hollis’s F Division was restricted to covering overt subversive organisations (such as the Communist Party), while B Division assumed its traditional role in counter-espionage activities, such as the tracking of Klaus Fuchs and Nunn May, the case of Alexander Foote, and the interpretation of the VENONA transcripts. The artificial split again betrayed the traditional weaknesses in MI5 policies, namely its age-old belief that communist subversion could come only through the agencies of the CPGB, and that domestically-educated ‘intellectual’ communists would still have loyalty to Great Britain. White held on to this thesis for far too long. Gouzenko’s warnings – and the resumption of the Pieck inquiry – had aroused a recognition that an ‘illegal’ network of subversion needed to be investigated. Yet it was not until the Communist takeover in Czechoslovakia, with the subsequent executions, and the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, that Attlee’s policy toward the Soviets hardened, and B Division’s new charter was accepted.

I return to West and Liddell. On the inside cover of each volume of the published Diaries appear the following words: “Although reclusive, and dependent on a small circle of trusted friends, he (Liddell) was unquestionably one of the most remarkable and accomplished professionals of his generation, and a legend within his own organisation.” Even making allowances for the rhetorical flourish of granting Liddell a ‘mythical’ status, I have always been a little sceptical of this judgment. Was this not the same Liddell who recruited Anthony Blunt and Victor Rothschild into his organisation, and then wanted to bring in Guy Burgess, only being talked out of it by John Curry? Was this the same officer who had allowed Fuchs to be accepted into atomic weapons research, despite his known track-record as a CP member, and who allowed SONIA to carry on untouched in her Oxfordshire hideaway? Was this the same officer whom John Costello, David Mure, Goronwy Rees, Richard Deacon and SIS chief Maurice Oldfield all * thought so poorly of that they named him as a probable Soviet mole? Moreover, in his 1987 book, Molehunt, even West had described Liddell as ‘unquestionably a very odd character’. Can these two assessments comfortably co-exist?

* John Costello in Mask of Treachery (1988); David Mure in Master of Deception (1980); Goronwy Rees in the Observer (1980); Richard Deacon in The Greatest Treason (1989); Maurice Oldfield in The Age, and to US intelligence, quoted by Costello.

To balance this catalogue of errors, Liddell surely had some achievements to his credit. He was overall responsible for conceiving the Double-Cross Operation (despite White’s claims to his biographer of his taking the leading role himself, and ‘Tar’ Robertson receiving acclaim from some as being the mastermind of the operation), and basked in the glory that this strategic deception was said to have played in ensuring the success of OVERLORD, the invasion of France. He supervised Maxwell Knight’s infiltration of the Right Club, which led to the arrest and incarceration of Anna Wolkoff and Tyler Kent. He somehow kept B Division together during the turmoil of 1940 and the ‘Fifth Column’ scare. His Diaries reveal a sharp and inquiring mind that was capable of keeping track of myriads of projects across the whole of the British Empire. Thus I opened Cold War Spymaster in the hope that I might find a detailed re-assessment of this somewhat sad figure.

‘Cold War Spymaster’

First, the title. Why West chose this, I have no idea, as he normally claims to be so precise about functions and organisation. (He upbraided me for getting ‘Branches’ and ‘Divisions’ mixed up in Misdefending the Realm, although Christopher Andrew informs us that the terms were used practically interchangeably: it was a mess.) When Geoffrey Elliott wrote about Tommy (‘Tar’) Robertson in Gentleman Spymaster, he was somewhat justified, because Robertson’s main claim to fame was the handling of the German double-agents in World War II. When Martin Pearce chose Spymaster for his biography of Maurice Oldfield, he had right on his side because Oldfield headed SIS, which is primarily an espionage organisation. Helen Fry used it for her profile of the SIS officer, Charles Kendrick, and Charles Whiting wrote a book titled Spymasters for his account of GCHQ’s manipulation of the Germans. But Liddell headed a counter-espionage and counter-intelligence unit: he was not a master of spies.

Second, the subject. Subtitled The Legacy of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5, the book ‘is intended to examine Liddell’s involvement in some important counter-espionage cases’. Thus some enticing-looking chapters appear on The Duke of Windsor, CORBY (Gouzenko), Klaus Fuchs, Konstantin Volkov (the would-be defector from Turkey who almost unveiled Philby), BARCLAY and CURZON (in fact, Burgess and Maclean, but why not name them so? : BARCLAY does not appear until the final page of a ninety-page chapter), PEACH (the codename given to the investigation of Philby from 1951), and Exposure. One might therefore look forward to a fresh analysis of some of the most intriguing cases of the post-war period.

Third, the sources. Like any decent self-respecting author of average vanity, the first thing I did on opening the book was to search for my name in the Acknowledgments or Sources. But no mention. I might have thought that my analysis, in Misdefending the Realm, of Liddell’s flaws in not taking the warnings of Krivitsky seriously enough, in not insisting on a follow-up to the hint of the ‘Imperial Council’ source, worthy of inclusion. I saw such characters as Tommy Robertson, Dick White, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Yuri Modin and even Jürgen Kuczynski listed there, which did not fill my bosom with excitement, as I thought their contributions would have been exhausted and stale by now. The Bibliography is largely a familiar list of books of various repute, going back to the 1950s, with an occasional entry of something newer, such as the unavoidable and inevitable Ben Macintyre, from more recent years. It also, not very usefully, includes Richard Deacon’s British Connection, a volume that was withdrawn and pulped for legal reasons, and is thus not generally available  So what was this all about?

It turns out that the content of the book is about 80% reproduction of public documents, either excerpts from Liddell’s Diaries from the time 1945 to his resignation in 1953, or from files available at the National Archives. (It is very difficult to distinguish quickly what is commentary and what is quoted sources, as all appear in the same typeface, with many excerpts continuing on for several pages, even though such citations are indented.  And not all his authoritative statements are sourced.) The story West tells is not new, and can be largely gleaned from other places. Moreover, he offers very little fresh or penetrating analysis. Thus it appears that West, his project on publishing excerpts from the Diaries forced to a premature halt, decided to resuscitate the endeavour under a new cover.

So what is Liddell’s ‘legacy’? The author comes to the less than startling conclusion that ‘with the benefit of hindsight, access to recently declassified documents and a more relaxed attitude to the publication of memoirs [what does this mean? Ed.], we can now see how Liddell was betrayed by Burgess, Blunt and Philby.’ Is that news? And does West intend to imply that it was not Liddell’s fault? He offers no analysis of exactly how this happened, and it is a strain to pretend that Liddell, whose object in life was to guard against the threats from such lowlifes, somehow maintained his professional reputation while at the same time failing calamitously to protect himself or the Realm. What caused the fall from grace of ‘unquestionably one of the most remarkable and accomplished professionals of his generation’? Moreover, the exploration of such a betrayal could constitute a poignant counterpoint to the sometime fashionable notion – espoused by Lord Annan and others –  that Goronwy Rees had been the greater sinner by betraying, through his criticisms of Burgess and Maclean in his People articles, the higher cause of friendship. Cold War Spymaster thus represents a massive opportunity missed, avoided, or perhaps deferred.

Expert, Administrator or Leader?

In Misdefending the Realm, my analysis of Liddell concluded that he was an essentially decent man who was not tough enough for the climate and position he was in. Maybe someone will soon attempt a proper biography of him, as he deserves. His earlier years with Special Branch and the formative years in the 1930s are not really significant, I think. West starts his Chronology with January 1940, when Krivitsky was interrogated, and I agree that that period (which coincides closely with the start of the period studied in Misdefending the Realm) is the appropriate place to begin.

I have always been puzzled by the treatment of Jane Archer, whom Liddell essentially started to move out at the end of 1939. Why he would want to banish his sharpest counter-espionage officer, and replace her with the second-rate Roger Hollis – not the move of a ‘remarkable and accomplished professional’ – is something that defies logic. Yet the circumstances of Archer’s demise are puzzling. We have it solely on Liddell’s word that Archer was fired, in November 1940, at Jasper Harker’s behest, because she had reputedly mocked the rather pompous Deputy Director-General once too much. (She did not leave the intelligence world, but moved to SIS, so her behaviour cannot have been that subversive.  Incidentally, a scan of various memoranda and reports written by Harker, scattered around MI5 files, shows a rather shrewd and pragmatic intelligence officer: I suspect that he may have received a poor press.) I should not be surprised to discover that there was more going on: I am so disappointed that no one appears to have tried to interview this gallant woman before her death in 1982.

Kathleen (aka ‘Jane’) Archer, nee Sissmore, MI5’s most capable counter-espionage officer

It would be naïve to imagine that MI5 would be different from any other organisation and be immune from the complications of office politics – and office romance. If I were writing a fictionalized account of this period, I would have Guy Liddell showing an interest in the highly personable, intelligent, humorous and attractive Jane Sissmore (as she was until September 1939). Liddell’s marriage had fallen on rocky ground: in Molehunt, Nigel West stated that his wife Calypso née Baring (the daughter of the third Baron Revelstoke) had left him before the start of the war.  John Costello, in Mask of Treachery, related, having interviewed Liddell himself, that Calypso had absconded as early as 1938, and that Liddell had travelled to Miami in December of that year, and surprisingly won a successful custody battle. Yet contemporary newspapers prove that Calypso had left her husband, taking their children to Florida as early as July 1935, in the company of her half-brother, an association that raised some eyebrows as well as questions in court. Liddell followed them there, and was able, by the peculiarities of British Chancery Law, to make the children wards of court in August. In December, Calypso publicly called her husband ‘an unmitigated snob’ (something the Revelstokes would have known about, I imagine), but agreed to return to England with the offspring, at least temporarily. At the outbreak of war, however, Calypso had managed to overturn the decision because of the dangers of the Blitz, and eventually spirited their children away again. West informs us that, ‘for the first year of the war Liddell’s daughters lived with his widowed cousin Mary Wollaston in Winchester, and Peter at his prep school in Surrey, and then they moved to live with their mother in California’. (Advice to ambitious intelligence officers: do not marry a girl named ‘Calypso’ or ‘Clothilde’.)

The day before war broke out, Jane Sissmore married another MI5 officer, Joe Archer. In those days, it would have been civil service policy for a female employee getting married to have to resign for the sake of childbearing and home, but maybe the exigences of war encouraged a more tolerant approach. Perhaps the Archers even delayed their wedding for that reason. In any case, relationships in the office must have changed. There is not a shred of evidence behind my hypothesis that Liddell might have wooed Sissmore in the first part of 1939, but then there is not a shred of evidence that he maintained a contact in Soviet intelligence to whom he passed secrets, as has been the implication by such as Costello. Yet it would have been very strange if, his marriage irretrievably broken, he had been unappreciative of Sissmore’s qualities, and not perhaps sought a closer relationship with her. It might also explain why Liddell felt uncomfortable having Jane continue to work directly for him. Despite her solid performance on the Krivitsky case, she was appointed supremo of the Regional Security Liaison Officers organisation in April 1940. In this role she quickly gained respect from the hard-boiled intelligence officers, solicitors, stockbrokers and former King’s Messengers who worked for her, until she and Liddell in late October 1940 had another clash (as I reported in the Mystery of the Undetected Radios: Part 3). She was fired shortly after.

Liddell’s life was complicated by the insertion, in August 1940, of William Crocker as his co-director of B Division, at Lord Swinton’s insistence, and no doubt with the advice of Sir Joseph Ball. It is not clear what the exact sequence of events was, but Crocker, who was a solicitor, and Ball’s personal one to boot, had acted for Liddell in trying to maintain custody of the three children he had with Calypso. While the initial attempt had been successful, it was evidently overturned in 1939, and Liddell and his wife were legally separated in 1943. Crocker did not last long in MI5, and he resigned in September of 1940. While David Petrie brought some structure and discipline to the whole service by mid-1941, Liddell had buried himself in his work (and in the task of writing up his Diaries each night), and had found social company in circles that were not quite appropriate for his position. The personal stress in his life, alone and separated from his four children, must have been enormous.

Such contacts would come back to haunt Liddell. When Petrie retired from the Director-Generalship of MI5 in 1946, Liddell was overlooked as replacement, some accounts suggesting that a word in Attlee’s ear by the leftwing firebrand, ‘Red’ Ellen Wilkinson, had doomed his chances. The most recent description of this initiative appears in Michael Jago’s 2014 work, Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister, where he describes Liddell’s rejection despite the support for him from within MI5. Wilkinson had apparently told her lover, Herbert Morrison, who was Home Secretary in the postwar Labour administration, that Liddell had in 1940 betrayed the communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg, who had entered Stalin’s hitlist and been assassinated in France.

Several aspects of such an assertion are extremely illogical, however. It is true that the suspicions that Attlee and his ministers had about the anti-socialist tendencies of MI5 coloured the Prime Minister’s perspectives on security matters, but this narrative does not bear up to examination. First, for a leftist agitator like Wilkinson (who had also been the lover of Münzenberg’s henchman, Otto Katz) to confirm her close association with Münzenberg, and take up Münzenberg’s cause against Stalin, was quixotic, to say the least, even if her convictions about the communist cause had softened. Second, for her to believe that the democratically-minded Attlee would look upon Münzenberg’s demise as a cause for outrage reflected a serious misjudgment. He would not have been surprised that MI5, and Liddell in particular, would have taken such a stance against Communist subversion, especially when he (Attlee) learned about the activities of the Comintern a decade before. Third, for Wilkinson to think that Attlee could be persuaded that Liddell had abetted the NKVD in eliminating Münzenberg, showed some remarkable imagination. Fourth, if Attlee had really listened carefully to her, and found her arguments persuasive, he would hardly have allowed Liddell to continue on in MI5 without even an investigation, and to be promoted to Deputy Director-General as some kind of designate. (Churchill was back in power when Sillitoe resigned.) Thus Wilkinson’s personification of Liddell as an agent of Stalinism has the ring of black comedy.

Donald McCormick (aka Richard Deacon)

I have discussed this with the very congenial Mr. Jago, who, it turns out, was at Oxford University at exactly the same time as I, and like me, relocated to the USA in 1980. (We worked out that we must have played cricket against each other in opposing school teams in 1958.) He identifies his source for the Wilkinson anecdote as that figure with whom readers of this column are now very familiar, the rather problematical Richard Deacon. Indeed, in The Greatest Treason, Deacon outlined Wilkinson’s machinations behind the scenes, attributing her reservations about Liddell to what Münzenberg had personally told her about his ‘enemy in British counter-espionage’ before he was killed. Deacon had first introduced this theory in his 1982 memoir With My Little Eye, attributing the source of the story to the suffragette Lady Rhondda, who had apparently written to Deacon about the matter before she died in 1958, also suggesting that Liddell ‘was trying to trap Arthur Koestler’. Yet Deacon qualified his report in The Greatest Treason: “Whether Ellen Wilkinson linked the Münzenberg comments with Guy Liddell is not clear, but she certainly remembered Münzenberg’s warning and as a result expressed her doubts about him. Morrison concurred and it was then that Attlee decided to bring an outsider in as chief of MI5.” I rest my case: in 1940, with Nazi Germany an ally of Soviet Russia, Liddell should have done all he could to stifle such menaces as Münzenberg. Of course Münzenberg would have ‘an enemy in MI5’. I cannot see Attlee falling for it, and this particular urban legend should be buried until stronger independent evidence emerges.

The rumour probably first appeared in David Mure’s extraordinary Last Temptation, a faux memoir in which he uses the Guy/Alice Liddell connection to concoct a veiled dramatization of Liddell’s life and career. This work, published in 1980, which I have analysed in depth in Misdefending the Realm, exploits a parade of characters from Alice in Wonderland to depict the intrigues of MI5 and MI6, and specifically the transgressions of Guy Liddell. If anyone comes to write a proper biography of Liddell, that person will have to unravel the clues that Mure left behind in this ‘novel of treason’ in order to determine what Mure’s sources were, and how reliable they were. Mure describes his informant for the Ellen Wilkinson story as an old friend of Liddell’s mother’s, ‘the widow of a food controller in the First World War’, which does not quite fit the profile of Sir Humphrey Mackworth, whom Viscountess Rhondda had divorced in 1922. A task for some researcher: to discover whether Mure and Deacon shared the same source, and what that person’s relationship with Ellen Wilkinson was.

‘The Greatest Treason’

Regardless of these intrigues, Nigel West suggested, in A Matter of Trust, his history of MI5 between 1945 and 1972, quite reasonably that an ‘insider’ appointment would have been impossible in the political climate of 1945-1946, what with a rampant Labour Party in power, harbouring resentment about the role that MI5 had played in anti-socialist endeavours going back to the Zinoviev Letter incident of 1924. Yet West, while choosing to list some of Liddell’s drawbacks (see below) at this stage of the narrative, still judged that Liddell could well have been selected for the post had Churchill won the election. The fact was that Churchill returned, and Liddell again lost.

Another Chance

When Sillitoe’s time was over in 1953, Liddell still considered himself a candidate for Director-General, and faced the Appointments Board in the Cabinet Office on April 14. (West reproduces his Diary entry from that evening.) It appears that our hero had not prepared himself well for the ordeal. Perhaps he should have been alarmed that a selection process was under way, rather than a simple appointment, and that one of his subordinates was also being encouraged to present himself. When the Chairman, Sir Edward Bridges, asked him what qualifications he thought were appropriate for the directorship, Liddell recorded: “I said while this was a little difficult to answer, I felt strongly somebody was need who had a fairly intimate knowledge of the workings of the machine.” That was the tentative response of an Administrator, not a Leader. Later: “Bridges asked me at the end whether I had any other points which had not been covered, and on reflection I rather regret that I did not say something about the morale of the staff and the importance of making people feel that it was possible for them to rise to the top.” He regretted not saying other things, but his half hour was up. He had blown his opportunity to impress.

Even his latest sally probably misread how his officers thought. Few of them nursed such ambitions, I imagine, but no doubt wanted some better reward for doing a job they loved well. For example, Michael Jago (the same) in his biography of John Bingham, The Spy Who Was George Smiley, relates how Maxwell Knight tried to convince Bingham to replace him as head of the agent-runners. Jago writes: “He strenuously resisted promotion, pointing out that his skills lay as an agent runner, not as a manager of agent runners. The administrative nature of such a job did not appeal to him; his agents were loyal to him and he reciprocated that loyalty.” This is the dilemma of the Expert that can be found in any business, and is one I encountered myself: should he or she take on managerial duties in order to gain promotion and higher pay, or can the mature expert, with his specialist skills more usefully employed, enjoy the same status as those elevated to management roles?

Dick White

Liddell was devastated when he did not get the job, especially since his underling, Dick White, whom he had trained, was indeed appointed, thus contradicting the fact of White’s ‘despondent’ mood after his interview, which he had communicated to Liddell. The authorised historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, reported the judgment of the selection committee, which acknowledged that Liddell had ‘unrivalled experience of the type of intelligence dealt with in MI5, knowledge of contemporary Communist mentality and tactics and an intuitive capacity to handle the difficult problems involved’. But ‘It has been said [‘by whom?’: coldspur] that he is not a good organiser and lacks forcefulness. And doubts have been expressed as to whether he would be successful in dealing with Ministers, with heads of department and with delegates of other countries.’ This was a rather damning – though bureaucratically anonymous – indictment, which classified Liddell as not only an unsuitable Leader, but as a poor Administrator/Manager as well, which would tend to belie the claim that he had much support from within MI5’s ranks.

(Incidentally, Andrew’s chronology is at fault: he bizarrely has Liddell retiring in 1952, White replacing him as Deputy Director-General and then jousting with Sillitoe, before the above-described interviews in May 1953. The introduction to the Diaries on the National Archives repeats the error of Liddell’s ‘finally retiring’ in 1952. West repeats this mistake on p 185 of A Matter of Trust, as well as in Molehunt, on pp 35-36, but corrects it in the latter on p 123. Tom Bower presents exactly the same self-contradiction in his 1995 The Perfect English Spy. West’s ODNB entry for Liddell states that “  . . . , in 1953, embarrassed by the defection of his friend Guy Burgess, he took early retirement to become security officer to the Atomic Energy Authority”, thus completely ignoring the competition for promotion. It is a puzzling and alarming pattern, as if all authors had been reading off the same faulty press release, one that attempted to conceal Liddell’s embarrassing finale. In his 2005 Introduction to the published Diaries, West likewise presents the date of Liddell’s retirement correctly, but does not discuss his failed interview with the Appointments Board. The Introduction otherwise serves as an excellent survey of the counter-intelligence dynamics of the Liddell period, and their aftermath.)

Liddell’s being overlooked in 1946 cannot have helped his cause, either. West wrote, of the competition for D-G that year, that Liddell’s intelligence and war record had been ‘exceptional’, and continued: “He was without question a brilliant intelligence officer, and he had recruited a number of outstanding brains into the office during his first twelve months of the war. But he had a regrettable choice in friends and was known to prefer the company of homosexuals, although he himself was not one. [This was written in 1982!] Long after the war he invariably spent Friday evenings at the Chelsea Palace, a well-known haunt of homosexuals.” West updated his account for 1953, stating that Liddell ‘might have at first glance have seemed the most likely candidate for the post, but he had already been passed over by Attlee and was known to have counted Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess amongst his friends.’ In the light of Burgess’s recent decampment with Maclean, that observation strikes an inappropriate chord, as if Burgess’s homosexuality rather than his involvement in Soviet espionage had been the aspect that tarnished Liddell’s judgment, and that Liddell’s now recognized professional failings were somehow not relevant. After all, Burgess’s homosexuality was known to every government officer who ever recruited him.

Moreover, if associating with the Bentinck Street crowd that assembled at Victor Rothschild’s place cast a cloud over Liddell’s reputation, Dick White may have been as much at fault as was Liddell. It is somewhat difficult to find hard evidence of how close the associations at the Rothschild flat were, and exactly what went on. Certainly, Rothschild rented it to Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Goronwy Rees’ posthumous evidence, as retold by Andrew Boyle, was melodramatic. The Observer article of Sunday, January 20, 1980 was titled ‘The Brotherhood of Bentinck Street’, with Rees explaining how ‘Burgess and Blunt entangled top MI5 man Guy Liddell in their treachery’. Rees went on to say that Liddell was one of Burgess’s ‘predatory conquests’, and that Burgess’s ‘main source’ must have been Liddell. Rees certainly overstated the degree of sordidness that could be discovered there. White, meanwhile, still a bachelor, was reported, according to his biographer, Tom Bower, to attend wartime parties in Chesterfield Street, Mayfair, hosted by Tomas ‘Tommy’ Harris, where he mixed with such as Blunt, Philby, Burgess, Rothschild, Rees and Liddell himself. White, however, was not a ‘confirmed bachelor’ and married the communist novelist Kate Bellamy in November 1945.

Yet none of this would have been known about in 1953, or, if it had, would have been considered quite harmless. After all, the top brass in Whitehall was unaware at this time of Blunt’s treachery (although I contend that White and Liddell, and maybe Petrie, knew about it), and Burgess had mixed and worked with all manner of prominent persons – all of whom rapidly tried to distance themselves from any possible contamination by the renegade and rake. Moreover, Liddell had not recruited Burgess to MI5, even though he had wanted to, but been talked out of it by John Curry. John Costello, in his multipage assault on Liddell in Mask of Treachery, lists a number of ‘errors’ in Liddell’s behavior that raise ‘serious questions about Liddell’s competency, bad luck, or treachery’, but most of these would not have been known by the members of the Appointments Board, and the obvious mistakes (such as oversights in vetting for Klaus Fuchs) were not the responsibility of Liddell alone. He simply was not strong enough to have acted independently in protecting such persons.

Thus it is safe to assume that Liddell was rightly overlooked in 1953 because he was not leadership material, not because of his questionable associations. White was, on the other hand, a smoother operator. He had enjoyed a more enterprising career, having been posted to SHAEF at the end of 1944, and spent the best part of eighteen months in counter-intelligence in Germany, under General Eisenhower and Major-General Kenneth Strong, before touring the Commonwealth. (Strong was in fact another candidate for the MI5 leadership: White told his biographer that he noted Strong’s lack of interest in non-military intelligence.) He knew how to handle the mandarins, and sold himself well. As Bower wrote, in his biography of White, The Perfect English Spy: “The qualities required of an intelligence chief were evident: balance, clarity, judgment, credibility, honesty, cool management in the face of crisis, and the ability to convey to his political superiors in a relaxed manner the facts which demonstrated the importance of intelligence.” Malcolm Muggeridge was less impressed: “Dear old Dick White”, he said to Andrew Boyle, “‘the schoolmaster’. I just can’t believe it.”

White was thus able to bury the embarrassments of two years before, when he and Liddell had convinced Sillitoe to lie to Premier Attlee over the Fuchs fiasco, and he had also somehow persuaded the Appointments Committee that he was not to blame for the Burgess/Maclean disaster. This was an astounding performance, as only eighteen months earlier, in a very detailed memorandum, White had called for the Philby inquiry to be called off, only to face a strong criticism from Sir William Strang, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office since 1949, who was also on the Selection Committee. Yet White had previously clashed with Strang when the latter held back secret personal files. They shared similar convictions of misplaced institutional loyalty: Strang could not believe that there could be spies in the Diplomatic Service, while White refused to accept that there could be such among the officers of the intelligence corps.

White had also benefitted from Liddell’s promotion. He had returned from abroad in early 1946, and had been appointed head of B Division, since Liddell had been promoted to Deputy Director-General under Sillitoe, with Harker pushed into early retirement. Thus White took over centre-stage as the Cold War intensified, and was in obvious control of the meetings about Fuchs (1949-50), and then Burgess and Maclean (1951), with Liddell left somewhat out of the main picture. White was then able to manipulate the mandarins to suggest that the obvious mistakes had either not occurred on his watch, or had else been unavoidable, while Liddell was left in a relatively powerless no-man’s-land. It would appear that White out-manoeuvred his boss: how genuine was his display of ‘despondency’ to Liddell after the interview, one wonders?

White was probably also a better Leader than a Manager. He was somewhat bland, and smoothness was well-received in Whitehall: he had the annoying habit of agreeing with the last person who made a case to him – a feature that I came across frequently in business. There can be nothing more annoying than going in to see a senior manager, and making a well-prepared argument, and see a head nodding vigorously the other side of the desk, with its owner not challenging any of your conclusions or recommendations. Yet nothing happens, because the next person who has won an audience may put forward a completely different set of ideas, and still gain the nodding head. That is a sign of lack of backbone. R. A. (later Lord) Butler ascribed the same deficiency to his boss, Lord Halifax, and Franklin Roosevelt was said to exhibit the same tendency, preferring to manipulate people through his personal agencies and contacts, and commit little in writing. But White dealt well with the politicians, who considered him a ‘safe pair of hands’, and his career thrived after that.

Re-Assessing Liddell

When Kim Philby was being investigated as the possible ‘Third Man’ in the latter part of 1951, George Carey-Foster, the Security Officer in the Foreign Office, wrote to Dick White about their suspect’s possible escape: “Are you at any stage proposing to warn the ports, because even that may leak and bring in the Foreign Office? For these reasons as well as for those referred to in my previous letter I think we ought to know how we are to act before we are overtaken by events.” That was one of the main failings of Liddell’s that I identified in Misdefending the Realm: “Liddell was very reactive: he did not appear to prepare his team for any eventuality that came along” (p 284). How should MI5 respond if its recommendations over vetting were overruled? What policies were in place should a defector like Gouzenko or Volkov turn up? How should MI5 proceed if it came about that one of its officers was indeed a Soviet spy, yet the evidence came through secret channels? Who should conduct interrogations? Under what circumstances could a prosecution take place? There was no procedure in place. Events were allowed to overtake MI5.

The task of a regular counter-espionage officer was quite straightforward. It required some native intelligence, patience and attention to detail, stubbornness, curiosity, empathy, a knowledge of law and psychology, unflappability (the attributes of George Smiley, in fact). As it happens, I compiled this list before reading how Vernon Kell, the first Director of MI5 had described the ideal characteristics of a Defence Security Officer: ‘Freedom from strong personal or political prejudices or interest; an accurate and sympathetic judgment of human character, motives and psychology, and of the relative significance, importance and urgency of current events and duties in their bearing on major British interests’. They still make sense. Yet, if an officer performed his job of surveillance industriously, and identified a subversive, not much more could be recommended than ‘keeping an eye on him (or her)’. MI5 had no powers of arrest, so it just had to wait until the suspect was caught red-handed planting the bomb in the factory or handing over the papers before Special Branch could be called in. That process would sometimes require handling ‘agents’ who would penetrate such institutions as the Communist Party HQ, for example Olga Gray and her work leading to the capture and prosecution of Percy Glading. That was a function that Maxwell Knight was excellent at handling.

With the various ‘illegals’ and other aliens floating around, however, officers were often left powerless. They had to deal with busybody politicians interfering in immigration bans and detention orders, civil servant poohbahs overriding recommendations on non-employment, cautious ministers worried about the unions, inefficient security processes at sea- and air-ports, leaders cowed by their political masters, Foreign Office diplomats nervous about upsetting Uncle Joe Stalin in the cause of ‘cooperation’, or simple laziness and inattention in other departments – even absurd personnel policies. Thus Brandes and Maly and Pieck were allowed to escape the country, Krivitsky’s hints were allowed to fade away, Fuchs was recruited by Tube Alloys, and Burgess and Maclean were not fired from their positions in the Foreign Office but instead moved around or given sick leave, and then allowed to escape as the interrogation process ground into motion. These were problems of management and of leadership.

If a new manager asks his or her boss: “What do I have to do to perform a good job?”, and the boss responds: “Keep out of trouble, don’t rock the boat, and send your status reports in on time”, the manager will wisely not ruffle feathers, but concentrate on good recruitment, training, and skills development, following the procedures, and getting the job done. The problem will however arise that, after a while when the ship is running smoothly, the manager may be seen as superfluous to requirements, while his or her technical skills may have fallen by the wayside. That may lead to a loss of job (in the competitive commercial world anyway: probably not in government institutions.) If, however, the boss says: “I want you to reshape this unit, and set a few things on fire”, the candidate may have to develop some sharp elbows, lead some perhaps reluctant underlings into an uncertain future, and probably upset other departments along the way. That implies taking risks, putting one’s head above the parapet, and maybe getting metaphorically shot at. In a very political organisation – especially where one’s mentor/boss may not be very secure – that rough-and-tumble could be equally disastrous for a career. I am familiar with both of these situations from experience.

So where does that leave ‘probably the single most influential British intelligence officer of his era’ (West)? We have to evaluate him in terms of the various roles expected of him. He was indubitably a smart and intelligent man, imaginative and insightful. But what were his achievements, again following what West lists? ‘His knowledge of Communist influence dated back to the Sidney Street siege of January 1911’ – but that did not stop him recruiting Anthony Blunt, and allowing Communists to be inserted into important positions during his watch. ‘He had been on the scene when the Arcos headquarters in Moorgate had been raided’, but that operation was something of a shambles. ‘He had personally debriefed the GRU illegal rezident Walter Krivitsky in January 1940’, but that had been only an occasional involvement, he stifled Jane Archer’s enterprise, and he did not put in place a methodological follow-up. ‘He was the genius behind the introduction of the now famous wartime Double Cross system which effectively took control of the enemy’s networks in Great Britain’, but that was a claim that White also made, the effort was managed by ‘Tar’ Robertson, and the skill of its execution is now seriously in question. As indicated above, West alludes to Liddell’s rapid recruitment of ‘brains’ in 1940, but Liddell failed to provide the structure or training to make the most of them. These ‘achievements’ are more ‘experiences’: Liddell’s Diaries contain many instances of decisions being made, but it is not clear that they had his personal stamp on them.

Regrettably, the cause of accuracy is not furthered by West’s entry for Liddell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Again, vaguely referring to his subject’s ‘supervision’ of projects, and ‘key role’ in recruiting such as White and Blunt, West goes on to make the following extraordinary claim: “Thus Liddell was closely associated with two of MI5’s most spectacular accomplishments, the interception and decryption of German intelligence signals by the Radio Security Service, and the famed ‘double cross system’. The Radio Security Service had grown, under Liddell’s supervision, from an inter-service liaison committee known as the Wireless Board into a sophisticated cryptographic organisation that operated in tandem with Bletchley Park, concentrating on Abwehr communications, and enabling MI5 case officers to monitor the progress made by their double agents through the reports submitted by their enemy controllers to Berlin.” Yet this is a travesty of what occurred. As I showed in an earlier posting, the Radio Security Service (RSS) was a separate unit, part of MI8. MI5 rejected taking it over, with the result that it found its home within SIS. It had nothing organisationally to do with the Wireless Board, which was a cross-departmental group, set up in January 1941, that supervised the work of the XX Committee. RSS was an interception service, not a cryptological one. It was the lack of any MI5 control that partly contributed to what historian John Curry called the eventual ‘tragedy’. Thus West founds a large part of what he characterizes as a ‘remarkable’ career on a misunderstanding: Liddell’s lifework was one dominated by missed opportunities.

Moreover, West cites one of his sources for his bibliographic entry on Liddell as Richard Deacon’s Greatest Treason. This seems to me an error of judgment on at least three counts, and raises some serious questions of scholarship. While Deacon’s work contains the most complete account of Liddell’s earlier life, it is largely a potboiler, having as its central thesis the claim that Liddell was an agent of Soviet espionage, and may even have been the elusive ELLI over whose identity many commentators have puzzled. (The lesser-known subtitle of Deacon’s book is The Bizarre Story of Hollis, Liddell and Mountbatten.) Yet this is a position with which West is clearly not in sympathy, as is shown by his repeated encomia to Liddell’s performance. The Editors at the ODNB should have shown much more caution in allowing such a book to be listed as an authoritative source without qualification. Lastly, a fact that Deacon did not acknowledge when his book was published in 1989, West had himself been a researcher for Richard Deacon, as West explains in a short chapter in Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, edited by Robert Leeson, and published in 2018. Here he declares that Deacon was ‘exceptionally well-informed’, but he finesses the controversy over Liddell completely. Somewhere, he should have explained in more detail what lay behind his research role, and surely should have done more to clarify how his source contributed to his summarization of Liddell’s life, and why and where he, West, diverged from Deacon’s conclusions.

Something else with which West does not deal is Liddell’s supposed relationship with one of the first women members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Joyce Whyte. David Mure, in The Last Temptation, had hinted at this lady’s identity, but not named her, giving her the codename ‘Alice’. In With My Little Eye, however, Richard Deacon went much further, providing us with the following insight (which can be found in a pagenote on p 194 of Misdefending the Realm): “In the early 1920s, when Liddell was working at Scotland Yard, supposed to be keeping a watch on communists, his mistress was Miss Joyce Wallace Whyte of Trinity College, Cambridge, and at that time one of the first women members of the Cambridge Communist Party. In 1927 she married Sir Cuthbert Ackroyd, who later became Lord Mayor of London.” For what it is worth, Deacon has Whyte’s family living in Chislehurst, Kent: Mure indicates that the influential lady lived nearby, in Sidcup.

It is not as if Liddell were outshone by his colleagues, however. To an extent, he was unlucky: unfortunate that there was another ‘able’ candidate available in White when a preference for an insider existed, and perhaps unfairly done by, from a historical standpoint, when the even less impressive Hollis succeeded White later. A survey of other candidates and successes does not depict a parade of standouts. Jasper Harker was regarded by all (maybe unjustly) as ineffectual, but was allowed to languish as Deputy Director-General for years. Dick White was not intellectually sharper than Liddell, but was likewise impressionable, and equally bamboozled. He managed the politics better, however, had broader experience, and was more decisive. Hollis was certainly less distinguished than Liddell in every way. Petrie was an excellent administrator, and occasionally showed signs of imaginative leadership, sharpening up MI5’s mission, but he was not a career intelligence officer. Sillitoe did not earn the respect of his subordinates, and had a hazy idea of what counter-intelligence was. Liddell’s equivalent in SIS, Valentine Vivian, comes across as something of a buffoon, clueless about the tasks that were confronting him, and how he should go about them, and Vivian’s arch-enemy within SIS, Claude Dansey (whose highly unusual behavior may perhaps be partially explained by his being involved, in 1893, in a scandalous affair with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Robbie Ross), was regarded as poisonous by most who encountered him. Kim Philby outwitted them all. (If his head had been screwed on the right way, he would have made an excellent Director-General.) So, with a track-record of being only a mediocre man-manager, it should come as no surprise that the very decent and intellectually curious Liddell should have been rejected for the task of leading Britain’s Security Service. The tragedy was that MI5 had no process for identifying and developing interior talent.

When Liddell resigned, he was appointed security adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission, an irony in that AERE Harwell was the place where Fuchs had worked until his investigation by Henry Arnold, the adviser at the time. The introduction to Liddell’s Diaries at the National Archives suggests that he was in fact quite fortunate to gain this post, considering his links to Burgess, Rothschild and Philby. (The inclusion of Rothschild in these dubious links is quite impish on the behalf of the authorities.) Liddell died five years later. The verdict on him should be that he was an honest, intelligent and imaginative officer who did not have the guts or insight to come to grips with the real challenges of ‘Defending the Realm’, or to promote a vision of his own. He was betrayed – by Calypso, by Blunt, Burgess and Philby, by White, and maybe by Petrie. In a way, he was betrayed by his bosses, who did not give him the guidance or tutoring for him to execute a stronger mandate. But he was also soft – and thus open to manipulation. Not a real leader of men, nor an effective manager. By no means a ‘Spymaster’, but certainly not a Soviet supermole either.

What it boils down to is that, as with so many of these intelligence matters, you cannot trust the authorised histories. You cannot trust the memoirists. You cannot trust the experts. You cannot always trust the archives. And you cannot even trust the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is sometimes less reliable than Wikipedia. All you can trust is coldspur, whose ‘relentless curiosity and Smileyesque doggedness blow away the clouds of obfuscation that bedevil the world of intelligence’ [Clive James, attrib.].

In summary, we are left with the following paradoxical chain of events:

  • During the 1970s and 1980s, Nigel West performs research for Richard Deacon.
  • In 1987, West publishes Molehunt, where he describes Liddell as ‘a brilliantly intuitive intelligence officer’.
  • In 1989, Deacon publishes The Greatest Treason, which claims Guy Liddell was a Soviet mole.
  • In 2004, West writes a biographical entry for Liddell in the ODNB, which praises him, but carelessly misrepresents his achievements, and lists The Greatest Treason as one of the few sources.
  • In 2005, West edits the Liddell Diaries, and provides a glowing Introduction for his subject.
  • In 2015, West provides a chapter to a book on Hayek, praises Deacon for his knowledge, but debunks him for relying on two dubious sources. He does not mention Liddell.
  • In 2018, West writes a new book on Liddell, which generally endorses the writer’s previous positive opinion of him, but rejects the opportunity to provide a re-assessment of Liddell’s career, merely concluding that Liddell, despite being’ the consummate professional’, had been ‘betrayed’ by Burgess, Blunt and Philby. West lists in his bibliography two other books by Deacon (including the pulped British Connection), but ignores The Greatest Treason.

So, Nigel, my friend, where do you stand? Why would you claim, on the one hand, that Liddell was a brilliant counter-espionage officer while on the other pointing your readers towards Richard Deacon, who thought he was a communist mole?  What do you say next?

This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Filed under Economics/Business, Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Management/Leadership, Personal, Politics

Homo Sovieticus

Aeroflot Advertisement, New York Times, 2017

A few months ago, I noticed an advertisement that Aeroflot, the Russian carrier, had placed in the New York Times. The appearance reminded me of an approach I had made to the airline over forty-five years ago, in England, when, obviously with not enough serious things to do at the time, and maybe overtaken by some temporary lovelorn Weltschmerz, I had written a letter to its Publicity Manager, suggesting a slogan that it might profitably use to help promote its brand.

Miraculously, this letter recently came to light as I was sorting out some old files. I keep telling my wife, Sylvia, that she need not worry about the clutter that I have accumulated and taken with me over the years – from England to Connecticut, to New Jersey and to Pennsylvania, and then back to Connecticut before our retirement transplantation to North Carolina in 2001. The University of Eastern Montana has generously committed to purchasing the whole Percy archive, so that it will eventually be boxed up and sent to the Ethel Hays Memorial Library in Billings for careful and patient inspection by students of mid-twentieth century social life in suburban Surrey, England.

I reproduce the letter here:

Letter to Aeroflot, March 1972

It reads:

“Dear Sir,

I notice that you have started advertising on London buses. I have for some time thought that a good slogan for Aeroflot would be: ‘Happiness is just an Ilyushin’, which is a pretty awful pun, but a fairly Russian sentiment. E.G.

. . .В себя ли заглянешь, там прошлого нет и следа;

И радость, и муки, и всё там ничтожно . . .  (Lermontov)

Yours faithfully, R. A. Percy”

[Dimitri Obolensky, in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse, translates this fragment of an untitled poem as follows: “If you look within yourself, there is not a trace of the past there; the joys and the torments – everything there is worthless  . . .”]

I am not sure why Aeroflot was advertising on London Transport vehicles at the time, since the Man on the Clapham Omnibus was probably not considering then a holiday in Sochi or Stalingrad, and anyone who did not have to use the airline would surely choose the western equivalent. Nevertheless, I thought my sally quite witty at the time, though I did not receive the favour of a reply. Did homo sovieticus, with his known frail sense of humour, not deem my proposal worthy of merit? After all, humour was a dangerous commodity in Soviet times: repeating a joke about Stalin might get you denounced by a work colleague or neighbour and sent to the Gulag, while Stalin himself derived his variety of laughs from ordering Khrushchev to dance the gopak late at night, and forcing his drinking-pals on the Politburo to watch him.

I think it unlikely that the state-controlled entity would have hired a Briton as its publicity manager, but of course it may not have had a publicity manager at all. Maybe my letter did not reach the right person, or maybe it did, but he or she could not be bothered to reply to some eccentric Briton. Or maybe the letter was taken seriously, but then the manager thought about Jimmy Ruffin’s massive 1966 hit What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQywZYoGB1g) , and considered that its vibrant phrase ‘Happiness is just an illusion/filled with darkness and confusion’ might not communicate the appropriate atmosphere as Aeroflot’s passengers prepared to board the 11:40 flight from Heathrow to Minsk. We shall never know.

The Stalin-Class S. S. Baltika

My first real encounter with homo sovieticus had occurred when I was a member of a school party to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1965. As we went through customs after disembarking from the good ship Baltika, I recall the officer asking me, in all seriousness, whether I was bringing in ‘veppons’ with me. After verifying what he had asked, I was able to deny such an attempt at contrabandage. I had conceived of no plans to abet an armed uprising in the Land of the Proletariat, as I thought it might deleteriously affect my prospects of taking up the place offered me at Christ Church, Oxford, the following October. Moreover, it seemed a rather pointless question to pose, as I am sure the commissars would have inspected all baggage anyway, but perhaps they would have doubled my sentence if they had caught me lying to them, as well as smuggling in arms. Yet it showed the absurd protocol-oriented thinking of the security organs: ‘Be sure to ask members of English school groups whether they are smuggling in weapons to assist a Troyskyist insurrection against the glorious motherland’.

At least it was not as naïve as the question that the US customs officer asked me, when I visited that country for the first time about eleven years later: ‘Do you have any intentions to overthrow the government of the United States?’. Did he really expect a straight answer? When H. G. Wells asked his mistress, Moura Budberg, whether she was a spy, she told him very precisely that, whether she was a spy or not, the answer would have to be ‘No’. That’s what spies do: lies and subterfuge. If I really did have plans for subversion in the United States, the first thing I would have done when I eventually immigrated here would be to plant a large Stars and Stripes on my front lawn, and wear one of those little pins that US politicians choose to place in their lapels, in the manner that Guy Burgess always sported his Old Etonian tie, to prove their patriotism. So the answer in Washington, as in Leningrad, was ‘No’. That was, incidentally, what Isaiah Berlin meant when he wrote to his parents in July 1940 that Americans were ‘open, vigorous, 2 x 2 = 4 sort of people, who want yes or no for an answer. No nuances’. These same people who nailed Al Capone for tax evasion, and Alger Hiss for perjury, would have to work to convict Tony Percy for the lesser charge of deceiving a customs official.

H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky & Moura Budberg

I did not manage to speak to many homines sovietici during my time in the Soviet Union, but I did have one or two furtive meetings with a young man who was obviously dead scared of the KGB, but even keener to acquire nylon shirts and ballpoint pens from me, which I handed over at a night-time assignation in some park in Leningrad. That was clearly very foolish on my part, but it gave me an early indication that, despite the several decades of Leninist, Stalinist, Khruschevian and Brezhnevian indoctrination and oppression, the Communist Experiment had not succeeded in eliminating the free human spirit completely. Moreover, despite the ‘command economy’, the Soviets could not provide its citizens with even basic goods. When the Soviet troops invaded eastern Europe in 1944, among other violations, they cleared the shelves, grabbed watches, and marvelled at flush toilets that worked. As Clive James wrote in his essay on Coco Chanel: “It was the most sordid trick that communism played. Killing people by the millions at least had the merit of a tragic dimension. But making the common people queue endlessly for goods barely worth having was a bad joke.”

Piata-Victoriei Square, Bucharest

My only other direct experience with life behind the Iron Curtain was in Bucharest, in 1980. In an assignment on which I now look back on with some shame, I was chartered with flying to Romania to install a software package that turned out to be for the benefit of the Ministry of Home Affairs, probably for the Securitate. I changed planes in Zürich, and took a TAROM flight (not in an Ilyushin, I think, but in a BAC-111) to reach Ceausescu’s version of a workers’ paradise. The flight crew was surly, for they had surely glimpsed the delights of Zürich once more, but knew that they were trapped in Romania, and had probably been spied upon as they walked round one of the most glittering of the foreign cities. And yet: I had been briefed beforehand to bring in some good whisky and a stack of ‘male magazines’ to please my contacts among the party loyalists. This time, I was able to bypass customs as a VIP: my host escorted me past the lines directly to the car waiting for us, where I was driven to my hotel, and handed over my copies of The Cricketer and Church Times for the enjoyment of the Romanian nomenklatura. I spent the Sunday walking around the city. The population was mostly cowed and nervous: there was a crude attempt to entrap me in the main square. During my project, I was able to watch at close hand the dynamics of the work environment in the Ministry, where the leader (obviously a carefully selected Party apparatchik) was quick to quash any independence of thought, or attempts at humour, in the cadre that he managed. A true homo sovieticus daciensis.

The fantasy that occupied Lenin’s mind was that a new breed of mankind could be created, based on solid proletariat lineage, and communist instruction. The New Man would be obedient, loyal, malleable, unimaginative, unselfish, unthinking. Universal literacy meant universal indoctrination. The assumption was accompanied by the belief that, while such characteristics could be inculcated in captive youth, inherited traits of the ‘bourgeoisie’ would have to be eradicated. The easiest way of achieving that was to kill them off, if they did not escape first. There were almost as many executions in the Red Terror of 1918 as there had been death sentences in Russian courts between 1815 and 1917, as Stephen Kotkin reminds us in Volume 1 of his epic new biography of Joseph Stalin. Kotkin also recounts the following: “Still, Lenin personally also forced through the deportation in fall 1922 of theologians, linguists, historians, mathematicians, and other intellectuals on two chartered German ships, dubbed the Philosophers’ Steamers. GPU notes on them recorded ‘knows a foreign language,’ ‘uses irony’.” Irony was not an attribute that homo sovieticus could easily deploy. What was going on had nevertheless been clear to some right from the start. In its issue of June 2, 2018, the Spectator magazine reprinted an item from ‘News of the Week’ a century ago, where Lenin and Trotsky were called out as charlatans and despots, and the revolution a cruel sham.

The trouble was that, once all the persons with education or talent had been eliminated or exiled, there were left only hooligans, psychopaths, or clodpolls to run the country. Kotkin again: “A regime created by confiscation had begun to confiscate itself, and never stopped. The authors of Red Moscow, an urban handbook published at the conclusion of the civil war, observed that ‘each revolution has its one unsightly, although transient, trait: the appearance on the stage of all kinds of rogues, deceivers, adventurists, and simple criminals, attaching themselves to power with one kind of criminal goal or another. Their danger to the revolution is colossal.’” This hatred of any intellectual pretensions – and thus presumptions about independent thinking – would lead straight to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, with their execution of persons wearing eyeglasses, as they latter could obviously read, and thus might harbour ideas subversive to agrarian levelling.

Oleg Gordievsky

Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB officer who defected to Britain in 1985, crystallized the issue in his memoir Next Stop Execution. “Until the early 1970s I clung to the hope that the Soviet Union might still reject the Communist yoke and progress to freedom and democracy. Until then I had continued to meet people who had grown up before the revolution or during the 1920s, when the Soviet system was still not omnipotent. They were nice, normal Russians – like some distant relatives of my father who were engineers: not intellectuals or ideologues, but practical, decent people, embodying many of the old Russian engineer characteristics so well described by Solzhenitsyn. But then the last of these types died out, and the nation that emerged was composed purely of Homo sovieticuses: a new type had been created, of inadequate people, lacking initiative or the will to work, formed by Soviet society.” [The author acknowledged the ungrammatical plural form he used.] Thus Gordievsky classified both the common citizenry intimidated into submission and the apparatchiks themselves as homines sovietici. He also pointed out that what he found refreshing in English people generally was their capability for spontaneity, their discretion, their politeness, all qualities that had been practically eliminated in Russia under Communism. He may have been moving in sequestered circles, but the message is clear.

I sometimes reflect on what the life of a Soviet citizen, living perhaps from around 1922 to 1985, must have been like, if he or she survived that long. Growing up among famine and terror, informing against family members, with relatives perhaps disappearing into the Gulag because of the whisperings of a jealous neighbor, or the repeating of a dubious joke against Stalin, witnessing the show-trials and their ghastly verdicts, surviving the Nazi invasion and the horrors of serving in the Soviet armed forces, and then dealing with the long post-war deprivation and propaganda, dying before the curtain was pulled back, and the whole horrible mess was shown to be rotten. Yet some citizens had been taken in: they believed that all the suffering was worthwhile in the cause of Communism. In Secondhand Time, the nobelist Svetlana Alexievich offers searing portraits of such persons, as well as of those few who kept their independence of thought alive. Some beaten down by the oppression, some claiming that those who challenged Stalin were guilty, some merely accepting that it was a society based upon murder, some who willingly made all the sacrifices called for. Perhaps it was a close-run thing: the Communist Experiment, which cast its shadow over all of Eastern Europe after the battle against Fascism was won, almost succeeded in snuffing out the light.

(Incidentally, in connection with this, I recommend Omer Bartov’s searing Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, published this year. Its title is unfortunate, as it is not about genocide. It tells of the citizens of a town in Galicia in the twentieth century, eventually caught between the monsters of Nazism and Communism. It shows how individuals of any background, whether they were Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, or Jews, when provoked by pernicious demagogues or poisonous dogmas, could all behave cruelly to betray or murder people – neighbours – who had formerly been harmless to them. All it took was being taken in by the rants of perceived victimhood and revenge, or believing that they might thus be able to save their own skins for a little longer by denouncing or eliminating someone else.)

I was prompted to write this piece, and dredge out some old memories, by my reading of Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War a few months ago. In many ways, this is an extraordinary book, broad in its compass, and reflecting some deep and insightful research. But I think it is also a very immoral work. It starts off by suggesting, in hoary Leninist terminology, that the battle was between ‘communism’ and ‘capitalism’ – a false contrast, as it was essentially between totalitarianism and liberal, pluralist democracy. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, please read Chapter 10 of Misdefending the Realm.) Westad goes on to suggest that the Cold War’s intensity could have been averted if the West had cooperated with the Soviet Union more – a position that ranks of sheer appeasement, and neglects the lessons of ‘cooperation’ that dramatically failed in World War II. (see  https://coldspur.com/krivitsky-churchill-and-the-cold-war/)  But what really inflamed me was the following sentence: “There were of course dissidents to this ameliorated view of the Cold War. In the Soviet Union and eastern Europe some people opposed the authoritarian rule of Communist bosses.” On reading that, I felt like hurling the volume from a high window upon the place beneath, being stopped solely by the fact that it was a library book, and that it might also have fallen on one of the peasants tending to the estate, or even damaged the azaleas.

Some people opposed the . . .  rule’? Is that what the Gulag and the Great Terror and the Ukrainian Famine were about, and the samizdat literature of the refuseniks, and the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam and Yevgenia Ginzburg, and the novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and many many more? Did these people protest noisily in the streets, and then go home to their private dwellings, resume their work, perhaps writing letters to the editors of progressive magazines about the ‘wicked Tories’ (sorry, I mean ‘Communists’)? How on earth could a respectable academic be so tone-deaf to the sufferings and struggles of the twentieth century? Only if he himself had been indoctrinated and propagandized by the left-wing cant that declares that Stalin was misunderstood, that he had to eliminate real enemies of his revolution, that the problem with Communism was not its goals but its execution, that capitalism is essentially bad, and must be dismantled in the name of Equality, and all that has been gradually built with liberal democracy should be abandoned. Roland Philipps, who recently published a biography of Donald Maclean (‘A Spy Named Orphan’), and who boasts both the diplomat Roger Makins (the last mandarin to see Maclean before he absconded to Moscow) and Wogan (‘Rockfist’) Phillips (who served as an ambulance-driver with the Republicans in Spain) as his grandfathers, asked Wogan, shortly before he died in 1993, where he stood on the durability of Communism. “He said that Stalin had been a disaster for the cause but that the system was still inherently right, would come round again, and next time be successful.” Ah, me. Wogan Phillips, like Donald Maclean, was a classic homo sovieticus to the end.

Wogan (‘Rockfist’) Phillips

As we consider the popularity of such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, it is as if all the horrors of socialism have been forgotten. A few months ago, the New York Times ran a full-page report on the disaster of Venezuela without mentioning the word ‘socialism’ once: it was apparently Chávez’s and Maduro’s ‘populism’ that put them in power. A generation is growing up in China that will not remember Tiananmen Square, and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution will not be found in the history books. Maybe there is an analogy to the fashion that, as a schoolboy, I was given a rosy view of the British Empire, and was not told of the 1943 famine in India, or the post-war atrocities in Kenya. But I soon concluded that imperialism was an expensive, immoral and pointless anachronism, and had no interlocking relationship with liberal democracy, or even capitalism, despite what the Marxists said. This endemic blindness to history is ten times worse.

So why did my generation of teachers not point out the horrors of communism? Was it because they had participated in WWII, and still saw the Soviet Union as a gallant ally against Hitler?  Were they really taken in by the marxisant nonsense that emerged from the Left Bank and the London School of Economics? Or were they simply trying to ratchet down the hostility of the Cold War, out of sympathy for the long-suffering Soviet citizenry? I cannot recall a single mentor of mine who called out the giant prison-camp for what it really was. Not the historians, not the Russian teachers. The latter may have been a bit too enamoured with the culture to make the necessary distinction. Even Ronald Hingley, one of my dons at Oxford, who was banned from ever revisiting the Soviet Union after his criticisms of it, did not encourage debate. I had to sort it out myself, and from reading works like Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Marchenko’s My Testimony, Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, and Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind. On the other hand, under the snooker-table in my library rests a complete set of the Purnell History of the Twentieth Century, issued in 96 weekly parts in the 1960s. (Yes, you Billings librarians: soon they too shall be yours.) In part 37, that glittering historian, TV showman, hypocrite and Soviet stooge A. J. P. Taylor wrote: “Lenin was a very great man and even, despite his faults, a very good man.” For a whole generation, perhaps, the rot started here. That’s what we mostly heard in the 1960s. But Lenin was vicious, and terror was his avowed method of domination.

President Putin is now trying to restore Stalin’s reputation, as a generation that witnessed the horrors of his dictatorship is now disappearing. So is Putin then a homo sovieticus? Well, I’d say ‘No’. Maybe he was once, but he is more a secret policeman who enjoys power. The appellation should be used more to describe those cowed and indoctrinated by the regime rather than those who command it. Putin’s restoration of Stalin is more a call to national pride than a desire to re-implement the totalitarian state. Communism is over in Russia: mostly they accept that the Great Experiment failed, and they don’t want to try it again. More like state capitalism on Chinese lines, with similar tight media and information control, but with less entrepreneurialism. As several observers have noted, Putin is more of a fascist now than a communist, and fascism is not an international movement. Maybe there was a chance for the West to reach out (‘cooperate’!) after the fall of communism, but the extension of NATO to the Baltic States was what probably pushed Putin over the edge. The Crimea and Ukraine have different histories from those in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and I would doubt whether Putin has designs on re-invading what Kotkin calls Russia’s ‘limitrophe’ again. He is happier selectively cosying up to individual nations of Europe, especially to those countries (e.g. Poland, Hungary, and now maybe Italy and Austria, and even Turkey) whose current leaders express sympathy for his type of nationalism, while trying to undermine the structure of the European Union itself, and the NATO alliance.

So whom to fear now – outside Islamoterrorism? Maybe homo europaensis? I suspect that the affection that many Remainers have for the European Union is the fact that it is a softer version of the Socialist State, taking care of us all, trying to achieve ‘stability’ by paying lip-service to global capitalism while trying to rein it in at the same time, and handing out other people’s money to good causes. And it is that same unresponsive and self-regarding bureaucracy that antagonizes the Brexiteers, infuriated at losing democratic control to a body that really does not allow any contrariness in its hallways. (Where is the Opposition Party in Brussels?) I did not vote in the Referendum, but, if I had known then of all the legal complexities, I might have voted ‘Remain’, and fought for reform from inside. But my instincts were for ‘Leave’. If the European Project means tighter integration, political and economic, then the UK would do best to get out as soon as possible, a conclusion other countries may come to. The more oppressive and inflexible the European Union’s demands are (to discourage any other defectors), the more vigorously should the UK push against its increasing stranglehold. That does not mean goodbye to Goethe and Verdi, or those comforting ’cultural exchanges’, but it does require a bold stance on trade agreements, and limitations on migration of labour. We should beware of all high-faluting political projects that are experimental, and which remove the responsibility of politicians to their local constituents, as real human beings will be used (and maybe destroyed) in the process. A journalist in the New York Times wrote a few weeks ago that he was ‘passionate’ about the European Union. That is a dangerous sign: never become passionate over mega-political institutions. No Communist Experiment. No New Deal. No Great Society. No European Project. (And, of course, no Third Reich or Cultural Revolution.) Better simply to embrace the glorious muddle that is liberal democracy, and continue to try to make it work. Clive James again: “It is now part of the definition of a modern liberal democracy that it is under constant satirical attack from within. Unless this fact is seen as a virtue, however, liberal democracy is bound to be left looking weak vis-à-vis any totalitarian impulse.”  (I wish I had been aware of that quotation earlier: I would have used it as one of the headliners to Chapter 10 of Misdefending the Realm.)

I close with a riposte to A. J. P. Taylor, extracted from one of the great books of the twentieth century, The Stretchford Chronicles, a selection of the best pieces from Michael Wharton’s Peter Simple columns in the Daily Telegraph, from 1955 to 1980. These pieces are magnificent, daft, absurd, hilarious, and even prescient, where Life can be seen to imitate Art, as Wharton dismantles all the clichéd cant of the times, and anticipates many of the self-appointed spokespersons of loony causes and champions of exaggerated entitlement and victimisation who followed in the decades to come. Occasionally he is simply serious, in an old-fashioned way, as (for example) where he takes down the unflinching leftist Professor G. D. H. Cole, who in 1956 was trying to rally the comrades by reminding them that ‘while much has been done badly in the Soviet Union, the Soviet worker enjoys in most matters an immensely enlarged freedom’, adding that ‘to throw away Socialism because it can be “perverted” to serve totalitarian ends is to throw out the baby with the dirty bath-water’. Writes Wharton:

“This is familiar and most manifest nonsense. What has gone ‘amiss’ in Socialist countries is no mere chance disfigurement, like a false moustache scrawled by a madman on a masterpiece. It is Socialism itself, taken to its logical conclusion.

The death of freedom, the enslavement of the masses, the withering of art and culture, the restless, ruthless hunt for scapegoats, the aggressive folie de grandeur of Socialist dictators – these are no mere ‘perversions’ of Socialism. They are Socialism unperverted, an integral and predictable part of any truly Socialist system.

We are not faced here with so much dirty bath-water surrounding a perfectly healthy, wholesome Socialist baby. The dirty bathwater is Socialism, and the baby was drowned in it at birth.”

New Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Economists’ Follies

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At Ashley’s school in San Jose, CA. October 2016

(James, Alyssa, Ashley, Coldspur, Julia, Alexis & Sylvia)

In my Commonplace Book of 2008, I recorded the following nugget: “There is no greater nonsense than that uttered by a Nobel prize-winning economist in a mood of moral indignation”, attributing the apothegm to ‘Anon.’. But that was pure invention: I had actually come up with the saying myself, and indulged in a bit of subterfuge to give it a bit more authority. If the World watched, however, it said nothing.

I can’t recall what particular speech or article had prompted my expostulation, but the trend goes back a long way, with Karl Marx the obvious prototype, even though not all economists’ absurdities are expressed in a mood of moral indignation. John Maynard Keynes died before the Nobel Prize for Economics was instituted, but his contribution: “In the long run, we are all dead” is a good place to start. It was either an unimaginative truism, or else a colossal lie, in that, while he and all his Bloomsburyites would indeed be dead within a decade or two, the heritage that he and his acolytes would leave behind would dog future generations, and there is nothing easier for politicians to do than leave a legacy of debt to posterity. One notorious example who did catch my attention was the 1992 Nobelist, Gary Becker. He once wrote a piece for Business Week (I have it somewhere in my clippings files), which recommended that housewives  ̶  he may have called them ‘homemakers’  ̶  should be paid for the work they did. It must have been utterances like this that caused the New York Times to dub Becker ‘the most important social scientist of the past fifty years’, as it reflects a tragic confusion in the economist’s brain between Effort and Value. Moreover, who would check whether the housework was done properly? If the government were to pay housewives for their contributions, it would need a Bureau of Domestic Affairs to be set up, with supervisory rights, inspection capabilities, a system of fines, as well as all the trappings of equal opportunity hiring, overtime pay, health care benefits, proper vacations and pensions for all its employees. Who would be paying for all this? One might as well suggest that I should be paid to do the gardening or the yardwork.

And then there’s Paul Krugman, whose ‘progressive’ rants (yes, that’s how he classifies himself, as if everyone who disagrees with him is some regressive Neanderthal – not that I have any bias against the Neanderthal community, I hasten to add, as most of them were upstanding characters, with reliable opinions on such matters as free childcare and climate change, and actually passed on some of their genes to me), appear regularly in the New York Times. Krugman  ̶  the 2008 laureate  ̶  once famously said that the US National Debt (now standing at about $19 trillion), is not a major problem, ‘as we owe it to ourselves’. In which case, one might suggest: ‘why don’t we just write it off’? I am sure we wouldn’t mind. Krugman lives in a Keynesian haze of 1930, and is continually arguing against austerity, and recommending that now is the time to increase the debt even further by ‘investing’ (note the leftist economist’s language: government spending is always ‘investing’, not ‘spending’) in infrastructure and education in the belief that this will get the economy ‘moving’ again, and foster wealth-creation, not just consumption. Keynes in fact recommended increasing government spending during times of recession, and putting it away when times were good, when the rules of national and global economics were very different from what they are today. The policy of today’s leftist economists seems to be to encourage governments to spend a lot when times are good, and even more when times are bad, criticizing any restraints on spending as ‘the deficit fetish’ (see Labour MP Chris Mullin in the Spectator this month).

So next comes along Joseph E. Stiglitz, the 2001 Prize recipient.  Earlier this year he published “The Euro: How A Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe”, which I think is an absolutely muddle-headed and irresponsible project. Not that he doesn’t bring an honest concern to bear on the perils of the euro, but a) sensible persons (including me) have been pointing out for ages that financial integration is impossible without political integration, so the overall message is nothing new; and b) it is not clear whether he is talking about the future of the European Union or Europe itself, or why the health of ‘Europe’ is tied to a shared currency. Worry not: the flyleaf informs us that the guru ‘dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent – and the world – from further devastation.’ Apart from the fact that, if there is a ‘consensus’ about what ails Europe, his would be a lone voice in the wilderness, one can only marvel at his hubris.

Stiglitz shows he does not understand what he calls ‘neoliberalism’, the belief in the efficacy of free markets, at all. He characterizes neoliberalism as ‘ideas about the efficiency and stability of free and unfettered markets’, and wants to bring the power of the regulator – him who knows best – to address the instability of markets. ‘With advances in economic science [sic], aren’t we supposed to understand better how to manage the economy?’, he inquires in his Preface, without specifying what he regards as ‘the economy’ – the total output of all the countries of Europe?   ̶  or why he claims economics is a ‘science’. And, if he is a Nobelist, shouldn’t he be answering such questions, not posing them rhetorically?  (This month, Janet Yellen, the chairwoman of the US Federal Reserve, expressed the following alarming concern: “The events of the past few years have revealed limits in economists’ understanding of the economy and suggest several important questions I hope the profession will try to answer.” From his recent see-sawing, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, appears to be similarly bewildered. Over to you, Joseph.)  But markets are inherently unstable: that is why they are markets. Joseph Schumpeter was the economist who introduced the notion of ‘creative destruction’ to explain how previously dominant players can be swept away by innovation and organizational sclerosis. Such ideas disturb econometric regulators like Stiglitz: they would prefer to have a clearly defined number of players in a market, allow them to make enough profit to keep their investors happy, but ensure that there should be enough competition for each to keep on its toes, but not so much that any individual company should actually fail. Yet such a set-up quickly drifts into crony capitalism, like the US health insurance ‘market’, where supporters of President Obama’s disastrous Affordable Care Act admit that the role of the regulators is to keep insurance companies solvent. Or politicians meet with ‘business leaders’ in the belief that they are discovering what ‘business’ wants; today’s ‘business leaders’ know very well that they do not represent the interests of a competitive market, but gladly go along with the pretence, and look for favours to protect them from the upstarts. Be very wary when journalists (or politicians) start talking about ‘the business community’: it proves they don’t get it.

What is more, Stiglitz demonises his intellectual foes. Even though their ideas have been ‘discredited’, ‘they are held with such conviction and power, immune to new contrary evidence, that these beliefs are rightly described as an ideology’. (p 10) Unlike his own ideas, of course, which are naturally ‘scientific’. “Modern scientific [sic!] economics has refuted the Hooverite economics I discussed in the last chapter.” (p 54)  “Doctrines and policies that were fashionable a quarter century ago are ill suited for the 21st century”, he continues (p 269), but he quickly adopts the Keynesian doctrines of eighty-five years ago, without distinguishing what is fashion and what is durable. (Keynes made some notoriously wrong predictions, especially about automation and leisure.) People who disagree with Stiglitz are madmen: “Today, except among a lunatic fringe, the question is not whether there should be government intervention but how and where the government should act, taking account of market imperfections.” (p 86: his italics) Yet it is clear that, while he denigrates the designers of the Euro for applying free-market economics to the reconstruction of Europe’s economies, categorising them as ‘market fundamentalists’ is utterly wrong. Those architects may have believed, as Stiglitz claims, that ‘if only the government would ensure that inflation was low and stable, markets would ensure growth and prosperity for all’, but such an opinion merely expresses a different variation on the corporatist notion that governments can actually control what entrepreneurialism occurs within its own borders. After all, as Stiglitz admits, the chief architect of the European Union and the euro was Jacques Delors, a French socialist.

The paradoxes and contradictions in Stiglitz’s account are many: I group the dominant examples as follows:

1) Globalisation: For someone who wrote “Globalization and its Discontents”, Stiglitz is remarkably coy about the phenomenon in this book. The topic merits only three entries in the index, much of which is dedicated to some waffle about ‘the global community’. For, if globalization is an unstoppable trend, it must require, in Stiglitz’s eyes, political integration to make it work, on the basis of the advice he gives to the European Union. “The experiences of the eurozone have one further important lesson for the rest of the world: be careful not to let economic integration outpace political integration.” (p 322) Are you listening, ‘the rest of the world’, whoever you are? Yet the idea of ‘World Government’ is as absurd as it was when H. G. Wells suggested it a century ago. By the same token, however, if Europe believes it can seclude itself from globalization effects by building a tight Customs Union, it must be whistling in the dark. Stiglitz never addresses this paradox. Nor does he recommend the alternative – a return to aurtarkic economies, which would be an unpalatable solution for someone who has to admit the benefits of trade. No: he resorts, as in his proffered ‘solution’ for the Euro crisis, to tinkering and regulation.

2) Austerity: On the other hand, Stiglitz has much to say about ‘austerity’. Unsurprisingly, he is against it, defined as ‘cutbacks in expenditure designed to lower the deficit.’ But he then goes on to make some astounding claims about it: “Austerity has always and everywhere had the contractionary effects observed in Europe: the greater the austerity, the greater the economic contraction.”  (p 18) “Almost as surprising as the Troika’s not learning from history – that such private and public austerity virtually always brings recession and depression – is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned from the experiences within Europe.” (p 312)  No evidence is brought forward to support such assertions. Is he not familiar with the austerity of the Labour Chancellor Stafford Cripps between 1947-1950, which was necessary in order to foster an export effort, and was seen as successful? Or Reynaud’s austerity policies in France in the 1930s, which led to economic recovery? Unfortunately, ‘austerity’ has come to imply meanness of politicians unwilling to hand out entitlements with funds they don’t have (the belief of those who concur with that definition being  that such spending will inexorably lead to wealth creation), rather than signifying a well-designed good-housekeeping move to protect the currency. Yes, austerity will not work as a policy for Greece: debts will have to be forgiven in some measure, since (as Keynes told us in The Economic Consequences of the Peace), people reduced to slavery will never create enough wealth to hand a portion over to others. But a large part of the problem there was government overspending and poor tax collection – a lack of ‘austerity’.

3: Confidence: Stiglitz is dismissive of any softer aspects of economic decision-making that may get in the way of his ‘scientific’ thinking. ‘Confidence theory’ is another of his bugbears. “The confidence theory dates back to Herbert Hoover and his secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, and it has become a staple among financiers. How this happens has never been explained. Out in the real world, the confidence theory has been repeatedly tested and failed. Paul Krugman has coined the term confidence fairy in response.” (p 95) Stiglitz never explains how anybody was able to conduct ‘scientific’ experiments on something as vague as ‘confidence’ in the real world. Moreover, Paul Krugman is a good mate of Stiglitz, and they clearly belong to a Mutual Admiration Society. “Joseph Stiglitz is an insanely great economist”, puffs Klugman on the back-cover. But then, there must be different types of confidence, since Stiglitz later states: “Indeed, Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank since 2011, may have saved the eurozone, with his famous speech that the ECB would do whatever it takes to preserve the euro – and in saying that, restoring confidence in the bonds of the countries under attack.”  (p 145) But ‘confidence theory’ never works! Shome mishtake shurely? Absent-mindeness? Or sophistry?

4: Productivity: Stiglitz seems as muddled by productivity as do most economic journalists. He appears to share the popular opinion that increased productivity is important, as it leads to greater prosperity. That was one of the goals of the Eurozone, after all, with its free flow of labour and capital. (p 70) But common-sense tells us normal people that productivity can be applied only to a certain task. If it takes fewer employees, and less capital, to make 1000 widgets, than it did before, the benefits will accrue to the owners of capital (and in turn the pension funds) rather than to the general working populace (as Piketty has pointed out). Only if the displaced employees can find alternative similarly well-paid employment will overall prosperity increase. Stiglitz, somewhat reluctantly, seems to accept this viewpoint, but gets there in a devious way: “In the eurozone, across-the-board average hours worked per worker have declined – implying an even worse performance.” (Would fewer hours worked not suggest better productivity? Britain is reported to have lower productivity – and lower wages – than most European rivals, but less unemployment. Is that good or bad?) And then: “But most of the advanced countries will have to restructure themselves away from manufacturing towards new sectors, like the more dynamic [= ‘unstable’?] service sectors.” (p 224) But what is required to make this happen? Yes, government intervention. The market does not perform this task very well, so what is needed is ‘concerted government effort’. By individual nations? By the EU? Stiglitz is not sure, as he knows such policies are largely precluded within the eurozone. And it is not clear whether everyone will fall over themselves trying to provide services to a declining manufacturing sector – especially when those services are moving overseas as well. What is to be done? What will people do to earn a decent living? That is the perennial problem.

5: Markets: Stiglitz does not understand how markets work. In reality, they are not ‘designed’, as he claims. They do not pretend to lend themselves to stability. Their members compete, and sometimes fail. Yet he severely criticises those who he claims do not understand his view of them, for example as in the following observation about distortions: “But, of course, in the ideology of market fundamentalism, markets do not create bubbles.” (p 25) What market fundamentalists would say is that markets will make corrections to bubbles in due course, so that overpriced (or underpriced) assets will return to their ‘correct’ value once information is made available, or emotions are constrained. Moreover, failure is an inevitable outcome of the dynamism of markets, and, in order to keep trust in those entities who behave properly, mismanagement and misdemeanours of those who break such trust must be seen to fail. (An enormous slush of capital – primarily Oriental – is currently looking for safe havens in Western countries, and is almost certain to create another bubble.) In addition, there is no ‘banking system’: banks are no different from any other corporation. A loose and dynamic range of institutions provides various financial services: they will lend as they see fit, and, if they miss an opportunity, a competitor should pick it up. The answer to the recent errors of Wells Fargo on the US, for instance, is not more regulation, but a massive exodus of its customers to other banks, and visible punishment for the executives who let it happen. Bailouts lead to moral hazard: investment is always a risk. Yet the Stiglitzes of this world close their eyes to reality, seeing a business environment where established companies should be entitled to survive, making enough profit to satisfy the pension funds and their investors, but not so much that they would appear greedy and exploitative, and should try to maintain ‘stability’ to contribute to ‘full employment’. ‘Stability’ is the watchword of Stiglitz and his kind (like the Chinese government trying to maintain the ‘stability’ of the stock-market), but it is impossible to achieve.

Enough already. There are some other oddball things, such as his dabbling with referenda when the going gets tough: “There could be a requirement, too, that, except when the economy is in recession, any increase in debt over a certain level be subject to a referendum within the country.” (p 243) Surely not! And I don’t claim to understand his remedy for fixing the euro without dismantling the eurozone itself, something that apparently involves carving it up into different sectors. But Stiglitz has really written a political pamphlet: the eurozone is for some reason important to him, as it is to those who think that only political integration will prevent a reoccurrence of the dreadful world wars that originated there. “A common currency is threatening the future of Europe. Muddling through will not work. And the European project is too important to be sacrificed on the cross of the euro. Europe – the world – deserves better.” (p 326) That belief in ‘the European project’, and the disdain for those who would question it, is what divided Britain in its recent referendum.

Yet I can’t help concluding that Stiglitz and his colleagues are much closer to the architects of the euro, and thus part of the problem, than he would ever admit. The belief that expert economists, with their mathematical models and their Nobel prizes, can somehow understand how an ‘economy’ works, and possess the expertise to fine-tune it for the benefit of everybody, and somehow regulate out of the way all the unpredictable missteps that will happen, is one of the famous modern illusions. When separate decisions are made by millions of individuals, and companies and firms devise any number of strategies for new technologies, new markets, some whimsical, some wise, to suppose that all such activity can be modeled and projected, in order to supply enough taxable revenue to fund any number of favourite programmes, is simply nonsense. It is as if such experts had never worked in the real world, managed a start-up, struggled to make a payroll, had to lay off good people, dealt with a sudden competitive threat, faced an embarrassing product recall or an employee rebellion, or wrestled to bring a new product successfully to market. Yes, of course, capitalism is flawed, some executives are absurdly overpaid, compensation committees are largely a joke, and corporate boards are frequently useless, risktakers should not be generously rewarded for playing recklessly with other peoples’ money (and being rewarded for failure as well as success), and the notion that ‘aligning executive goals with those of shareholders’ does not magically solve anything if the former get away like bandits just once because of cheap stock options, while the latter who wanted to be there for the long haul simply watch from afar . . .  When all is said and done, common prosperity still relies on private enterprise and profit.

Those who believe in expert management of ‘the economy’ simply have it all wrong. Except under war conditions, governments of liberal democracies cannot control the wealth-creation processes of their populace. They can spend money cautiously, knowing how unpredictable private wealth-creation is, and simply try to foster the conditions that encourage entrepreneurialism. Alternatively, they can put the currency at risk by running massive deficits, and they can plunge the place into the depths through socialism (see Venezuela), or abet a death spiral like that of Greece or Puerto Rico. But the one thing they should not do is carelessly engage Nobel Prize-winning economists to give them advice. As a postscript to the self-indulgent advice from Keynes that I quoted earlier, two prominent economists, Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Peter G. Peterson, former secretary of commerce, jointly offered the following observation concerning the National Debt in the New York Times this month: “Take some advice from two observers who have been around for a while: The long term gets here before you know it.”  But neither of them has won the Nobel Prize.

P.S. A few hours after I completed this piece, I read a feature encompassing an interview with Stiglitz by the editor of Prospect, Tom Clark, in the October issue of the magazine. The article quoted Keynes’s biographer, Robert Skidelsky, as saying: ‘the likes of Stiglitz and Krugman have got their Nobel prizes, then given up developing the economic ideas, and drifted into radical political commentary instead.’ Too true. If Stiglitz is not a charlatan, he is hopelessly confused. I would not change a word of what I wrote.

P.P.S. After the publication of last month’s installment of ‘Sonia’s Radio’, three items have come to light. A reader sent me some provocative statements concerning Sonia from Soviet archives, a 2014 book I read about WWII counter-espionage has inspired some fresh observations about Trevor-Roper and the Double-Cross System, and my attention has been drawn to an archive freshly published (by the NSA) on German wartime intelligence. I shall report more, and make some textual amendments, next month – probably in the omnibus version only, to keep the integrity of the monthly posts whole.

This month’s Commonplace entries appear here.

tony3girls

With Alyssa, Alexis and Ashley

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