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
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.)
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.’”
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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?’)
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.
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.
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
The Murder of Dollfuß: Having banned the Austrian Nazi party, Dollfuss, the Chancellor Austria was assassinated in July 1934 by Nazi agents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fortification of the Western Wall: Soon after the militarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler started a project to fortify the old Siegfried Line.
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.
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.
The Anschluß: On March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed into Germany, a process forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.
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.
The Munich Pact: On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the pact with Hitler, effectively handing over Czechoslovakia to the Germans.
Kristallnacht: On November 9-10, 1938, The Germans oppressed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, killing about a hundred Jews throughout Germany.
The Invasion of Czechoslovakia: The Germans invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact: Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a pact of non-aggression on August 23, 1939.
Invasion of Poland: The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus triggering a declaration of war by Britain.
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:
Complete agreement with Nazi policies (Mosley; Londonderry)
Sympathy for fascism, but essentially patriotic (Dawson)
Universal Christian pacifism (Lansbury)
Pious abdication of leadership (Baldwin)
Labour distaste for Nazi policies, but essentially pacifist
(Attlee)
Liberal admiration for Hitler’s reconstruction of Germany, but
opportunistic and hypocritical over the Soviet Union (Lloyd George)
Labour distaste for totalitarianism, and stressing rearmament
(Bevin)
Tory disdain for Hitlerism, sympathy to German grievances, but
confident it can be stopped via good will (Chamberlain)
Vague impressionable Tory piety (Halifax)
Realistic abhorrence of Hitlerism (and Communism), and urging
re-armament (Churchill)
Distaste for Hitlerism, and unwilling to negotiate with dictators
(Eden)
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
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.”
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.
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.”
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
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 asuspected 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
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.)
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:
Agree
new material most important. Leakage enquiry now being pursued on presumption
HOMER equals G.
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.
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:
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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 . . .)
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.
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.
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
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.”
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.
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:
“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.
“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.”
“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.
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.
You cannot rely on
authorised histories. Their sweep is to great, their sources too random, and
they are works of public relations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.”
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.
A few years after I became an analyst/consultant at the Gartner Group, I was introduced by one of the DBMS vendors to the thoughts of Geoffrey Moore, who had some original ideas about the challenges of high-tech companies in introducing their disruptive products to mainstream buyers. His book, ‘Crossing the Chasm’ (1991) quickly became a classic in technology circles (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm), and I adopted his ideas in evaluating and guiding the strategies of companies in my bailiwick. Some CEOs claimed to be familiar with the theories, and even to putting them into practice, but since the distinct message in the early years of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle was ‘focus’, they understandably struggled to keep their companies in line. ‘Chasm’ thinking requires a proper marketing perspective, but independent VPs of Marketing in technological start-ups are a bit of a luxury, and VPs of Sales always think of Marketing as something that supports their Sales Plan, rather than of their Sales Plan as something which realizes the Marketing Plan. Trying to close a deal to unqualified and unsuitable prospects is frequently an exciting challenge for such types.
As my career at Gartner wound down, and I considered retirement, I chose to move to a small software company in Connecticut. I was quickly brought down to earth: as a Gartner consultant, I had earlier been engaged by the company for a day’s work, at quite high fees, during which the managers attending dutifully wrote down all I said, and nodded appreciatively. When I became an employee, however, and started suggesting (as VP of Strategic Planning) to the CEO how she might want to change some of the processes (such as not having the R & D plan changed each month after the latest visit by a customer or prospect to the development facility in Florida), I was swiftly told: ‘You don’t understand how we do things around here, Tony’. That was not a good sign. So I picked up my thinking about Chasm Crossing, tried to talk my CEO out of an acquisition strategy (devised to show muscle to the Wall Street analysts, but in fact disastrous), and reflected on how financial analysts misled investors about markets. I had learned a lot from the first software CEO I worked for, back in the early 1980s, but he was another who didn’t understand the growth challenge. ‘Entrepreneurial Critical Mass’ was the term he had used to persuade his owners to invest in an acquisition strategy that was equally misguided: I had had to pick up the pieces and try to make it work. (This gentleman was also responsible for bringing to the world the expression ‘active and passive integrity in and of itself’ to describe the first release of a new feature, which presumably meant that it worked perfectly so long as you didn’t try to use it.) My renewed deliberations now resulted in an article, titled ‘The Myth of Buying Market Share’, which explained how completely bogus estimates of ‘market size’ misled CEOs and investors into thinking that all they had to do to be successful was to pick up a portion of a fast-growing ‘market’. I believe it was published somewhere, but I cannot recall where.
I reproduce the article here. I have not changed a word: it could benefit from some tightening up in a few places, and some fresher examples, but otherwise I would not change a thing, even though it is now sixteen years old. At the time I wrote it, I contacted Geoffrey Moore, and sent him the piece. We spoke on the phone: he was very complimentary about my ideas, and we arranged to meet for dinner in San Francisco, where I was shortly to be attending a conference. I vaguely thought that I might spend my last few years actually putting into practice some of the notions that had been most useful to me in my analyst role, and wanted to ask Moore about opportunities at the Chasm Group. So, after the day’s sessions were over, I approached him, introduced myself, and said how much I was looking forward to dinner. He was brusque – dinner was off. Obviously something better, somebody more useful, had come along. I was for a few minutes crestfallen, but then realized that I would never want to work for someone who behaved that rudely. I resigned from the software company a month later and began my retirement a bit earlier than planned. Since then I have never touched the industry again, apart from one day’s work for another small software company in New Jersey that desperately needed help, and wanted to hire me as VP of Marketing after I did a day’s consulting for them. North Carolina beckoned, and I have never regretted getting out when I did.
After receiving a fascinating observation from a reader (via Nigel Rees), I have posted an update to my piece on ‘The Enchantment’. The normal set of Commonplace items can be found here. (January 31, 2016)
In our first visit to the movies for several years, Sylvia and I went to see The Imitation Game a few days ago. (What was the last film we went to see: Lawrence of Arabia? Brief Encounter?? I forget.) We enjoyed it very much: I could forgive most of the liberties taken with history, although the decision to introduce the spy John Cairncross in a case of double-blackmail, with the claim that MI6 had installed him deliberately so that he could leak secrets to the Russians, was palpably absurd and unnecessary. I have a special enthusiasm for Alan Turing, as readers of this site will recall from my posting here at the end of last November, and Sylvia was better able to understand the links between crosswords, cryptography and espionage that occupy the dark side of my character.
Yet you may not have noticed a brief annotation I made in July 2012, when I commented that the Times had published, on the exact centenary of Turing’s birth (June 26, 2012) a Listener Crossword Puzzle (’SUM’ – geddit?) that celebrated his achievements in imagining a universal computing machine. I was a little muted about this event, because the puzzle contained a blatant error, about which I am still sorely embarrassed. Both the Puzzle Editor and I had overlooked a tiny calculation error in the encoding of one of the answers.
Now, in my more thoughtful moments, I reflect on the phenomenon of ‘deliberate’ errors introduced as a means of communicating to the receiver that something is wrong. When the Nazis turned round captured SOE agents, dropped by parachute into the Netherlands in WWII, the radio operators ignored the lack of messages that would have confirmed they were safe, because SOE staff in London did not want to believe that their efforts had been sabotaged. Thus the famous Englandspiel, in which several agents died. A similar mistake happened when the CIA tried to infiltrate agents into Albania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (See Operation Valuable Fiend, by Albert Lulushi.) And I have always wondered whether Kim Philby’s identification of the Secret Intelligence Service as MI5 (instead of the correct MI6) in My Secret War (p 32) represented a plaintive cry to his old mates that they should recognize that the whole memoir was being ghosted – or, at least, controlled – by the KGB. Lastly, when I noticed in the National Archive at Kew that a Report on the Communist Party written by the MI5 officer Jane Sissmore in 1935 was titled ‘Investigation by SS into Activities of the CPGB and Indentification [sic] of its Members 1935’, it occurred to me that this very capable and literate person may have inserted that error to indicate that she was very unhappy about compiling such a report. So maybe the error I made could be interpreted as saying ‘I am a Prisoner in a Listener Crossword Construction Factory and Cannot Get Out’. No, it was just a really clumsy boner.
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One of the books I read in January was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land. It was rather sad. Sad, because Tony Judt, who must have been a delightful man, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at the age of 52, in 2010. But also sad, because the book is an elegy to the decline of The Left and all its aspirations, at the same time betraying all the hopeless impracticality of the so-called social-democrat Left. (I have never been a member of The Left.) It is as if Judt and his kin think that we can all have secure jobs, and nice houses, and travel to work in environmentally-friendly transport, and enjoy free childcare and expert healthcare until we retire and enjoy safe inflation-proof pensions – all without having to worry about the sordid business of actually creating any wealth. The book is scattered with a number of unexplained clichéd terms: ‘social democracy’, ‘market failure’, ‘financial stability’, ‘social market’, ‘rational market management’, ‘endemic inequality’, ‘social justice’, and is liberally strewn with a host of semi-rhetorical questions suggesting that ‘we’ have to do something. It appears to emphasise the role of the nation-state, but says hardly anything about the European Community. Etc. etc.
I think I shall have to return to this subject next month. I am no economist, but I don’t think that matters, as economists disagree about all this stuff anyway. All I know is that I hope my financial portfolio does not hold any Greek debt. When I ponder over the question of how those poor Hellenes are going to pay back their 240 billion Euro debt, I think of Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and what he said about economic slavery. (Is there a deliberate mistake here?) So, as an educational antidote to the maunderings of The Left, I borrowed David Stockman’s The Great Deformation; The Corruption of Capitalism in America from the Public Library, but, after reading one chapter, I decided life was too short for me to read 700 pages on economics, and took it back. And maybe we need Sir Stafford Cripps to remind us what Austerity really means. He was the authentic ‘Left’.
The normal set of Commonplace items appears for the month here. (January 31, 2015)
I don’t normally add late notes to my monthly post, but an odd thing happened today. I was reading in the New York Times about Podemos, the left-wing Spanish Political party, and a march it was holding in Madrid. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, was accusing Prime Minster Rajoy of ‘wanting to humiliate our country with this scam they call austerity’. (Heigh-ho . . .) Furthermore, Rubén Aguilar, a Spanish telecom technician, was described as waving a Greek flag ‘out of solidarity’, and was quoted as saying: ‘We’re better off economically than our Greek friends, but we share their determinatiom to put the interests of people back ahead of economic goals like debt repayment.’ Yet this hardly inflammatory paragraph does not appear in the on-line version of the piece! What is going on? Is it now not allowed to suggest that debts to the EU and central banks may not be repaid?
I have sent a message to the Public Editor at the NYT to find out what is going on. (February 1, 2015)