Category Archives: Geography

The ‘Third Man’ Cover-Up . . . And More

I pick up the remaining nineteen questions prompted by my analysis of the literature on the ‘Missing Diplomats’, last month’s report having been dedicated to Question 1. Reading this will be a slog! No further illustrations to distract you. But it will be worth it, I promise you. Pour yourself a cup of coffee, and bite off three or four sections each day for a week. Take plenty of notes, as you will be tested on this stuff later.

  • 2. Maclean as HOMER: When was Maclean first suspected of being HOMER? Why did it take so long to identify him confidently? Did this process have any effect on the project?

On the other hand, we do still wish to avoid any official confirmation of the story that Maclean was being investigated before he disappeared. If this was once established, it might become exceedingly difficult to avoid letting out the whole story, including the source of our knowledge, which it is of the highest importance to protect. (in letter from Patrick Reilly to Sir Christopher Steel in Washington, January 28, 1953; sn. 335 in FCO 158/6)

The struggles to match Maclean to HOMER, and the timorousness shown by MI5 and the Foreign Office in sharing the fruits of their investigations with the FBI, constitute a problematic and important aspect of the case. As I wrote several years ago: “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.”

Part of the dilatoriness was probably due to the hope that the leaker of secrets would turn out to be an American, or at least a person with lower standing in the Embassy, so that the Foreign Office would not turn out to have been shamed by one of its high-flyers. (As late as 1955, when preparing responses to probable parliamentary questions, a Foreign Office employee wrote, absurdly, that six thousand suspects had had to be assessed, and hence eliminated, one by one. This process had taken place while the Fuchs and Pontecorvo incidents were taking place: yet it was a highly restricted document that had been passed to the Soviets, which must have restricted its circulation.) If the investigators had been more attentive to the testimony of Walter Krivitsky, however, and his references to the ‘Imperial Council’ spy, they might have focussed their attentions on Maclean a little sooner, instead of pretending to themselves that one of their ‘family’ could not possibly be a traitor, or that a minor clerk or typist had conceivably been HOMER.

I remind readers that Roger Makins had informed Anthony Glees that he was asked to keep an eye on Maclean when he rejoined the Foreign Office in November 1950. Why would that be? If Maclean had simply been rebuked for irresponsible behaviour, and diagnosed as requiring psychiatric treatment, that would have been an internal Foreign Office matter of discipline. It suggests that White harboured other suspicions about Maclean, and the timing of it would indicate that Maclean fitted the profile of the HOMER spy, and that the investigating team had turned its sights on Maclean far earlier than the archival material suggests. After all, if Philby had been able to discern the equivalence, MI5 should perhaps have been able to perform the same exercise.

It comes back to the ‘Imperial Council’ reference that Krivitsky had so precisely nailed. When the investigation into Embassy staff was in full swing, Philby boldly drew attention, on November 19, 1949, to Walter Krivitsky’s description of a spy in the Foreign Office, and reminded Sir Robert Mackenzie of the parallels between Krivitsky’s revelations in 1939 (actually, early 1940) and the leakage from the Embassy in 1945. Philby did not want ‘this disquieting possibility’ to be overlooked. Apart from the fact that Philby was already willing to sacrifice Maclean to save himself, this should have been an alarm-call to accelerate the project. Yet Carey-Foster was unimpressed. Beside a few disturbing reactions in the pursuant correspondence, and an indication that MI5 was not being told all, Carey-Foster deflected any further inquiry, replying on December 9: “I think it right to say at this stage that there is absolutely no evidence to connect the Washington case with the ‘Imperial Council’ story contained in Krevitsky’s [sic] interrogation report.” Nevertheless, he did provide a list of potential diplomats who might have been contemporary and suitably located, including Maclean, before claiming boldly: “There is, however, no other connexion at all.”

These events are remarkable, for several reasons. First, Philby obviously felt confident enough in his guise as apostate-KGB agent turned MI6-loyalist to be able to risk reminding the authorities that he was the probable Times journalist who had been in Spain with Franco – also mentioned by Krivitsky. Second, if he had included some of his cohorts (i.e. Burgess, Blunt, Rees) in his blanket volte-face (a topic I shall visit next month), he had never named Maclean as one of the troupe, since he was here making a pre-emptive strike towards the latter’s unmasking. Third, he must have been sure that Maclean knew so little about his activities that he would not betray him even under intense interrogation.  Fourth, the greenhorn Carey-Foster showed extraordinary naivety (or disingenuousness) in dismissing the possible connection purely on the basis of no obvious superficial evidence. Fifth, despite Carey-Foster’s insouciance, MI5 did get excited about the tip, with Geoffrey Patterson in Washington urging a closer inspection of diplomatic records, and this response was obviously fed to Dick White. Sixth, it was immediately after this disclosure that Maclean reputedly requested to be released from his espionage duties (and was turned down), and then, in the first half of 1950 had his mental breakdown in Cairo. Hamrick claimed that White would have established Maclean’s identity as HOMER by January 1949: that may have been premature, but he could well have done by the end of the year. For what it is worth, Maclean’s friend Nicholas Henderson told investigators that Maclean started drinking more heavily in 1948.

The reason that the drawn-out investigation is important is that it leads to questions as to why Maclean was so calmly reinstated at the American desk of the Foreign Office in November 1950. (Burgess’s Personal File shows that a few ‘diplomats’ interviewed after the escape expressed their amazement that Maclean had been appointed to such a prominent position so soon after his apparent ‘breakdown’.) This is where Hamrick’s theory that Maclean and Burgess were deliberately appointed to prominent positions, despite their erratic behaviour, comes in. One does not have to accept Hamrick’s more extreme hypothesis that they were part of an ingenious scheme to send disinformation to the Soviets, and thus the fact of their detection had to remain concealed. It may have been that the restoration of their careers reflected a need to gain solid evidence of their treachery with a hope, perhaps, for Burgess to entrap Philby through his proximity in Washington, and for Maclean to make fresh contact with his Soviet controllers in London. The evidence from VENONA would be unavailable in any prosecution, because of the security implications, and the cryptographic aspects would mean that it would not, in any case, hold up in a court of law.

One has to wonder at the possible dangers of knowingly implanting such viruses in the heart of the US capital, but the idea is not completely absurd. I record again that Roger Makins was asked to keep an eye on Maclean when he rejoined the Foreign Office in November 1950, and that he admitted that he had had to find a job for Maclean that was important enough not to raise his suspicions. The recent release of the record of interviews carried out by Dick White with Philby in June 1951 proves that Burgess was also under suspicion when he left for the USA in the autumn of 1950. As I showed in last month’s report, Philby had been considered guilty by de la Mare in the Home Office, and Dick White’s dossier compiled for the FBI in June of 1951 very quickly added the seventh point that Philby was suspected of assisting in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.

Makins admitted in writing that he had withheld top-secret documents from Maclean on his re-installation (see sn. 613 in FCO 158/9), which was a bizarre move. If the Foreign Office thought that his placement might be a danger, they should never have approved his appointment. If Maclean detected that he was not being shown memoranda that he would customarily have seen, it would have put him on his guard. If a serious attempt to entrap him was being considered, however, he should have been fed with spurious (i.e. authentic, but not genuine, memoranda), crafted to include apparently vital information that would actually be harmless, so that Maclean might have considered pausing his passivity, and reaching out to Modin. Yet the whole exercise achieved nothing, and turned out to be pointless. Moreover, Makins showed a typical bureaucrat’s evasiveness in his testimony, confirming that he had been withholding ‘papers with an important security rating from him’ since Maclean’s appointment (as he told Glees and others), but then disavowing responsibility ‘as soon as Maclean became the suspect’ – a date he does not identify, but was presumably, for purposes of maintaining the fiction, in April 1951.

Thus MI5 and the Foreign Office may have wanted to keep a lid on the HOMER discovery as long as possible, since they would eventually be pushed into conducting an intensive interrogation. That exercise would either fail to get a confession, and the prosecution would have to be abandoned (as later happened with Philby), or would be successful, and the authorities would be forced to go to a messy trial that would bring all manner of nasty skeletons out of the closet. That was something that Philby had internalized, and which he later explained to his masters in Moscow. It is this background that encourages the notion that the group of insiders managing the project may have viewed the abscondment of its three suspects to Moscow as the cleanest exit strategy. After all, Dick White had even suggested to Andrew Boyle that Guy Liddell might have been involved with such a scheme.

It is as if the decision to have Morrison sign the paperwork to detain and interrogate Maclean was taken only when the escape plans had been finalized, rather than vice versa.

  • 3. Guy Burgess’s Recall: Was it part of the plan to facilitate the escape? Or was Burgess’s return to London merely a fortuitous event that worked in Moscow’s favour?

It is extraordinary how many commentators have continued to assert that Philby managed to effectuate Burgess’s return to London – in a hasty, manner, moreover – when the following facts conspire against such an account. First of all, the timing: Burgess’s speeding offences occurred at the beginning of March, before the HOMER shortlist had officially been reduced. If Philby had been serious about wanting Maclean exfiltrated, he would have acted much earlier, and he would have found some way to get a message, through Makayev, to his Moscow bosses – as indeed he did. Yet the events moved so slowly that the initiative would have been flawed, in any case. The Ambassador was away, and did not return until the end of March, by which time Philby was already documenting further pointers towards Maclean in an attempt to save himself. Second, Burgess’s behaviour was not that of a man on a mission. He was not ordered home until April 14, but, even then, after vigorously protesting his punishment, he did not hurry. In early April, he had found time to greet his mother who was paying him a visit: one might imagine that, if he had really wanted to return to London quickly, he would have taken leave and accompanied her back to the UK. If the pair wanted to grasp at an opportunity for urgency, they spectacularly missed it.

The Foreign Office archival material (FCO 158/182) shows that Ambassador Franks had just returned from the UK when he announced to Burgess that he was being sent home. This was not presented as a serious disciplinary matter, however, and the incidents of the speeding offences were given as only of secondary importance in the recommendation that Franks had made to the Chief Clerk in the Foreign Office. Burgess was described as a poor fit in the office, and criticized for putting in shoddy and superficial work, which represents a rather bizarre explanation for his effectively being sacked, given his notorious examples of gross misbehaviour both before he was sent to Washington, and thereafter. Material in FCO 158/189 proves that Burgess was moved to Washington despite having been subject to a disciplinary hearing already, so that he would be able to work less conspicuously in a larger environment, and an eye could be kept on him. The indulgence shown towards him is dumbfounding. I do not exclude the possibility that Burgess’s future was discussed by Franks and his Foreign Office colleagues during the Ambassador’s fortnight in London at the end of March.

When Burgess did arrive, at the beginning of May, he immediately came under MI5’s eye. The Security Service was ready and waiting for him.  This surveillance intensified when he determined Maclean’s address, contacted him, and started meeting him. An outwardly innocent acquaintanceship between two FO colleagues could pass muster, and it allowed Modin to restrict his clandestine contacts with Blunt, who obviously did not want to be seen hobnobbing with Maclean. Burgess thus became a natural middleman for negotiations between, on the one hand, the residency and Blunt, and, on the other, Maclean. His presence therefore allowed for a slightly more careful approach to developing an exfiltration plan: at the same time, however, his reckless and ostentatious behaviour over the two weeks leading up to May 25 could have jeopardized the exercise.

This portion of the project has been treated very superficially in the literature. For instance, the most thorough study of Burgess, The Spy Who Knew Everyone, by Purvis and Hulbert, relying mainly on what Burgess told Driberg, and what Philby wrote, has Philby and Burgess planning the details in New York the night before he set sail (April 30). They echo Philby’s statement that Burgess ‘was to meet a Soviet contact on arrival and give him a full briefing’, without any indication as to how such a meeting could be set up, or assessing how risky such an undertaking might be. Yet they go on, incongruously, to say that Burgess would then make contact with Maclean, who was expected to be under surveillance, and that Burgess concluded that a go-between should deliver the warning, and that he chose Blunt. But that is nonsensical. Blunt needed Burgess because he did not want to be seen in the company of Maclean, and Burgess had valid reasons for seeking Maclean out. Blunt was the go-between between Maclean and Modin, since he was not under surveillance. Blunt’s telephone number was discovered in Maclean’s office address-book after he disappeared, but Blunt probably did not know how to contact Maclean after his return from Cairo. Burgess had to track Maclean down on his arrival.

The authors then compound their mess by quoting from Blunt’s unpublished memoir held by the British Library. Now Blunt reports on ‘the first meeting between Guy and his Russian contact’, where discussions focused purely on Maclean’s escape. Blunt then follows up: “  . .  at a later stage I remember Guy coming to see me at Portman Square . . . those in control of his contact had decided that he should go with Donald . . .”. It is an utterly sophistical display by Blunt, and Purvis and Hulbert have been taken in by it. At least Andrew Lownie accepted that it was Blunt who met Modin regularly to supervise the project, although he also records that Burgess had the meeting with Modin where he was informed that he would be joining his friend in the exfiltration. (That must be the occasion described by Modin, where he, Blunt and Burgess met – an event that the Watchers somehow managed to miss, which is disturbing in itself.)

In fact Carey-Foster, the Foreign Office’s Security Officer, later (in February 1956) admitted to Patrick Dean, the new deputy Under-Secretary of State, that he had been remiss in not taking Burgess more seriously in May 1951 (sn. 619z, KV 2/4112). He said that he had a hunch that Burgess had decided that he had better get back to London ‘to be on the spot when the time came’, as if he had gained an early insight that the project was ‘getting hot’. MI5 had informed him that Burgess and Maclean were in constant contact, but he did nothing (an observation that clashes with what Reilly later claimed: see Item 6 below). Yet there can be seen a high degree of ingenuousness in his self-flagellation. He added that he did not know whether Philby had been involved, and told Dean that he should have pressed for surveillance on Burgess. By then Philby had been clearly implicated, and Burgess had indeed come under surveillance as soon as he landed in 1951. Carey-Foster also claimed to Dean that MI5 ‘continued to deny that he had warned them’. It appears to me that Carey-Foster was trying to conceal the true story from Dean.

When Burgess and Maclean at last made their public statement in Moscow in February 1956, part of Maclean’s text ran as follows: “His [DM’s] telephones in his office and private house were used as microphones. Plain clothes policemen followed him wherever he went, and one of his colleagues was put up to act as provocateur. Maclean therefore decided to come to the Soviet Union to do whatever he could to further understanding between East and West, from there. The difficulty of leaving the country while being tailed by the police was solved by a meeting with Burgess shortly after the latter’s return from the Washington Embassy to London. The latter not only agreed to make arrangements for the journey but to come too.”

The bottom line? Writers can pluck anecdotes from the highly unreliable memoirs of Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Modin, Rees and others and hope that they somehow hang together, but it simply does not work. Burgess’s presence enabled the MVD’s plans to be communicated regularly to Maclean, which circumvented what would otherwise have been a fascinating challenge for Modin and Blunt. Yet Burgess’s exaggerated behaviour inevitably made him an accomplice and fellow-absconder, and his connection with Philby should have defined a similar fate for his friend.

  • 4. Communications with Moscow: Was Philby able to update his masters in Moscow, and receive instructions from them? When was Maclean in contact with Modin in London?

Philby was without direct contact with any Moscow representative for most of his time in Washington. Macintyre’s account is not reliable. We know that Makayev arrived in New York in the spring of 1950, and that Burgess, after his arrival in September of that year, had occasional meetings with Makayev, acting as a courier for Philby. For a while, I believed that we had no precise dates for his visits to New York, but Donald’s younger brother, Alan, proved very helpful in Jim Skardon’s inquiries. Burgess’s pretext for going to New York was to visit Alan, so that might also have been a hitherto undeclared channel for messages to get to Donald, since communications from Alan to his brother would not have been intercepted. Alan gave a detailed list of Burgess’s visits (visible at KV 2/4104, sn. 195z), declaring that Burgess ‘spent at least two weekends in August or early September 1950, the weekend of November 11/12th or 4/5th, and a few weekends in October, November and December.’ In 1951 Alan thought that Burgess made about five visits to New York during January, February and March. We might assume that most, if not all, of Burgess’s visits to New York during this period (September 1950-April 1951) included a meeting with Makayev. Thus it would seem reasonable to conclude that Moscow, and the London residency, received warnings about the net closing in on Maclean in early 1951. Makayev was an unreliable agent, however, and slipped up badly when tasked with leaving information and cash at a dead-drop to aid Philby’s possible escape.

The fact that Maclean had no contact with his handler in London appears to be reliable. He had requested to be relieved of his espionage duties after his breakdown, and Modin does not seem to have made any further approach. Modin’s claims that Maclean provided much useful information after his return to the UK in the early summer of 1950, and used Burgess as a courier when he returned to work in November, are obviously bogus, since Burgess was in Washington by then. Maclean’s lack of utility as a spy since his return to work would tend to undermine Philby’s claim that Moscow deemed that he was too valuable to be exfiltrated, and that it wanted to keep him in place for a while. The suggestion that Moscow did not want Modin to reach out to him indicates that it was regarded as too dangerous. When Maclean had his first meeting with Burgess, after Burgess discovered where he lived, and then contacted him at the Foreign Office, Maclean claimed that he was being watched, but it appears that Maclean was not informed of the immediate threat to him until then.

Yet he may have been on tenterhooks ever since returning from Cairo, if Philby had managed to alert him to the overall threat, and his irresponsible and erratic behaviour in Cairo would bear a more rational explanation. That would also explain his resolve not to pass on any more secrets when he returned to the Foreign Office. I raise again the obvious question: why would Philby and Burgess not have used the safe channel of Alan Maclean in New York to send messages to Donald? It was obviously more difficult for Philby to use Alan Maclean as a (probably innocent) intermediary until Burgess arrived, but in late 1949 or early 1950 he could have written to Alan with an enclosure to be passed on, perhaps in code. Tom Bower (White’s biographer) claims that Maclean’s mail would have been intercepted, but that sounds absurd. No British authority would have been able to have private mail sent from New York to Cairo opened and read, and such surveillance on Maclean did not start in England until April 1951.

  • 5. Burgess’s Visit to Sonning: When was it set up? Was its purpose to discuss Burgess’ future journalistic career? Was it to verify that he would not betray Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean? Or was it something else?

Even though Goronwy Rees is the only major witness to Burgess’s visit, and he tried to use it to his advantage in his memoir, there is no doubt that it did take place. The Watchers were ready to observe Blunt and Hewit meeting Burgess at Waterloo Station on May 7, and while their records show that their knowledge of Burgess’s visiting Sonning the same day, after lunch with Blunt, is dependent on Rees’s signed statement, we have confirmation from Rees’s daughter, Jenny. She is the eldest of the Rees children, and remembers the visit clearly, a girl of nine at the time. Furthermore, her recall was abetted by what her aunt Mary told her, Margie Rees’s sister having been present when the Burgess visit occurred. She had been instructed to watch Rees and Burgess surreptitiously, and eavesdrop on their conversations, since Goronwy and Margie, after receiving Guy’s letters of self-invitation from the USA, had awaited his arrival with some trepidation. Margie was worried that Guy would lead her husband into excessive drinking (a rather vacuous concern, one might say, as Goronwy was quite capable of overindulging without any external stimulus).

Rees’s explanation of the visit was that Burgess wanted to discuss his forced change of career into journalism, and that he had an article for Rees to review. This seems a very artificial scenario, and it hardly warranted the priority and importance that Burgess had obviously granted it. From what Burgess and Philby themselves wrote, his first task – after exchanging news with Blunt – was to contact Maclean. Nor was it probable, in the fashion that Chapman proposed, that Burgess’s mission was to gain Rees’s agreement to keep silent over the planned exfiltration of Maclean. Arousing Rees’s interest at a time when Maclean’s state of mind had not been determined, and no specific plan for his escape was in the offing, would have been a reckless move of endangerment. What would have happened if Rees had bluntly deplored the conspiracy and proposed manœuvres, and declared his resolve to inform the authorities? Burgess could hardly have bumped off his pal on the spot. He would have done better to carry out his project without bringing in Rees at all.

Peter Wright interviewed David Footman in 1965, then in comfortable retirement at St Antony’s College, (sn. 385z in KV 2/4608), alongside an officer whose name has been redacted, but is almost certainly Evelyn McBarnet. Wright had recently been told by Mrs Rees that Goronwy considered Footman a more dangerous spy than Kim Philby, even, which makes the format of this interrogation even more bizarre. Wright explained his puzzlement at Burgess’s haste in seeing Rees before he even contacted Maclean, and he tried to draw Footman out on the matter of the Burgess visit to Sonning, and the subsequent phone calls:

            It makes you think that he went to see GORONWY to enlist GORONWY’s aid, maybe GORONWY refused it and – mavbe GORONWY and MARGIE between them refused it and are denying the story ever since simply because he defected afterwards and they feel, you know, that they could have stopped it if they’d come clean, or , something like that – or, that GUY told them about DONALD this time and  –  

Wright was groping towards the right questions, but overlooked the fact that Burgess had set up the Sonning visit well ahead of time. Moreover, between them, McBarnet and Wright botch the interrogation, talking too much, interrupting each other, and not staying silent when Footman should have been encouraged to explain himself more fully as to why Rees had called him to unload his thoughts on Burgess. Footman even poses the question himself: ‘Why did he ring me up’? It constitutes a feeble show of tradecraft.

One reason why such an approach by Burgess would have been risky is that Rees was at that time working, if only part-time, for MI6, under his friend Footman. Thus, unless he was still [?] a penetration agent, he would be working for the opposition. Moreover, Burgess would have known about Rees’s employment. We learn from Guy Liddell’s Diaries that in 1948 Liddell had been engaged with Rees, Burgess – and Blunt, even – in an unlikely cabal for discussions on Borodin and bacteriological warfare secrets (see https://coldspur.com/biological-espionage-the-hidden-dimension/ ). A more recent inspection of the Rees archive that I have undertaken shows that, in March-April 1949, Rees behaved in a disreputable fashion, without authorization revealing to his fellow director at Bennetts and Shears the fact that Borodin had defected. The firm wanted to recruit Borodin (on whose behalf MI5 was undertaking efforts to have him relocated for safety purposes to Canada) to assist in developing penicillin plant facilities abroad, since Borodin’s mentor Ernest Chain had turned out to be unreliable and very expensive. Robertson of MI5 (B2a) was more cautious than Deputy Director-General Liddell about the opportunity. An item in the Burgess file (sn. 123b, KV 2/4102) reports that an MP named Edelmann had written to the Foreign Office claiming that Rees had set up a trading concern with Russia soon after the war.

Moreover, at a conference held for MI5 and MI6 officers at Worcester College, Oxford, as late as August 1949, Burgess (despite not being a member of either service) was a speaker alongside Borodin, and Rees and Footman were also in attendance (as Burgess’s letter from Moscow, and notes written by MI5 officers in his Personal file KV 2/4116 confirm). Since the Provost of Worcester College was John Masterman, the supervisor of the wartime Double-Cross operation, it is probable that one of the themes of the conference was the management of passing disinformation to the enemy. The fact that Burgess was invited to attend such a sensitive and confidential gathering suggests that he was in good standing at the time. (He was, in fact, invited by Footman.) While it is astonishing, given the security considerations, that Borodin was put on display in this manner, another remarkable aspect of this gathering was that Rees, Footman and Burgess were all noted as heckling the unfortunate Borodin, which represents another signal of Rees’s hypocrisy and questionable loyalties. I reported recently on the fact that Robertson had accused Rees, in June 1951, of helping the Soviets with their penicillin projects: that may have been a ‘legitimate’ disinformation exercise, into which Robertson had not been indoctrinated, but Rees was obviously following a rather precarious line.

The conclusion I come to is that Burgess still trusted Rees implicitly. He could have been using him as a source of information on the status of the HOMER investigation, and, specifically, what interest the security services had in him. In this respect, the previous connection to Liddell, when Burgess had worked with Rees and Blunt on the Borodin project, is very pertinent. Of course, Blunt, with his ready access to Liddell, could have told him more than Rees ever knew, but Burgess would not have known that at the time he wrote to Rees. Yet Burgess met Rees again (though Rees denied it), and was in telephone contact with him, so there must have been something more that his friend could provide him with. It is superficially difficult to imagine that Rees’s dealings with Burgess could have been approved by the authorities, which is why Rees had to offer an alternative explanation, fudge the facts, and highlight his own breakthrough conclusions in an attempt to save his own skin. His involvement with Burgess before his friend left for Washington at the end of July, 1950 belies how he described the relationship in his memoir. A more sinister interpretation, given that we now know that Burgess was under suspicion before he arrived in the UK [see below], is that Rees’s bosses were using him as an intermediary and informant to learn more about Burgess’s plans, which would have imposed additional mental strain on the weak-willed Rees.

  • 6. Surveillance of Burgess and Maclean: Was Burgess also under suspicion? What was the nature of the surveillance of Maclean? Why was it so obvious, and what were its goals? What was the reality of the telephone surveillance installed in his house?

Dick White twice indicated to his biographer that Burgess had not been under any suspicion until he absconded, and thus there would have been no reason to watch him. In his Diaries, Liddell iterated this belief when he briefed Director-General Sillitoe on May 30, claiming that there was no special reason why Burgess’s meetings with Maclean should have been deemed suspicious. Yet that opinion is not supported by later minutes provided by Talbot de Malahide *, as recorded by Purvis and Hulbert, which indicate that Burgess had been under suspicion before his arrival. In Too Secret Too Long Chapman Pincher asserted that Burgess was ‘under such deep suspicion’ before he even went to Washington that an officer was sent out to keep an eye on him. A statement made by White to Philby on June 16, 1951 – only recently made available at KV 2/4723 – would appear to confirm that Burgess was under suspicion before he went to the USA, because of a garbled reference to Frederick Kuh, the American journalist to whom Burgess had been passing information that Kuh forwarded to the Soviets. Memoranda posted in the FCO archive (sn. 656, FCO 158/9) indicate that several important members of Chancery (Marten, Jellicoe, Greenhill) in the Washington Embassy deemed Burgess’s behaviour so outrageous that they sought an opportunity to pool their thoughts with the MI5 representative, but were ignored. That suggests again that Burgess was being tolerated for deeper reasons.

[* I covered some questions concerning de Malahide in my February analysis. In Undercover: Two Secret Lives, by Tony Scotland, issued in October 2024, the author states that de Malahide, in the Foreign Office, may have been a spy alongside his friends Burgess and Maclean. The book is not yet available in the United States, and amazon.uk informed me that the distributor in the UK could not send it here. Thanks to my enterprising colleague Andrew Malec, I have been able to arrange direct shipment. I thus have not yet inspected Scotland’s assertions, but I shall do as soon as the book arrives. It may provide a useful pointer to the identity of a ‘Sixth Man’ – or alternative ‘Third Man’: see illustration at the head of this piece – in the Foreign Office.]

This contrary theory is also borne out by the fact that the Watchers obviously knew about Burgess’s arrival time at Southampton (White also declaring, very absurdly, that he had not even been aware that Burgess was on his way), and that they were ready to see Blunt and Hewit greet him at Waterloo Station. That encounter is probably a more reliable event than that of Blunt’s welcoming him at Southampton Docks. Yet it immediately poses the question: how did the Watchers learn of Burgess’s itinerary, and why were they already keeping an eye on him when he met Blunt and Hewit? That scenario undermines the account provided by Carey-Foster that he advised MI5, a few days after his arrival, that it should surveil Burgess as well, after he was seen in Maclean’s company. (Lownie cites this observation from Patrick Reilly’s unpublished memoir at the Bodleian, but Reilly is not a trustworthy witness.) Had Blunt informed Liddell of the particulars of Burgess’s homecoming? It is difficult to identify anyone else who had the knowledge and the opportunity.

The surveillance of Burgess thus poses something of a mystery. In his confusing chapter ‘BARCLAY and CURZON’, in Cold War Spymaster, Nigel West asserts that, because Burgess ‘had never been a suspect’ (a fact we know now to be untrue), reconstructing Burgess’s movements posed more of a challenge. He writes that Burgess had been spotted meeting Maclean ‘several times in Pall Mall’ by the Watchers, but that MI5 had had to resort to rely on interviews of Burgess’s circle to re-create his movements. I doubt whether that tells the whole story: when Burgess travelled into the country, the Watchers would not have followed him, but it seems they kept a closer eye on him in London. Since Maclean was closely watched, encounters between Burgess and Maclean would have been recorded: KV 6/145 indicates that they met solely on May 15, 22, 23 and 24 (which could barely count as ‘several’). Burgess’s movements independent of Maclean are sometimes recorded, even when he was alone, which could not have been derived from third parties. KV 6/145 provides an excellent summary of these activities. My assumption is that these are by default first-hand observations, since alternative sources (e.g. Rees, Cyril Connolly) are annotated in the notes of the file. Thus Burgess’s booking of his rental car, and his reservation of the berths on the Falaise, on the morning of May 25, are provocatively presented as being noticed at the time. That has enormous implications, as far as the indolence of MI5 in following the trail is concerned.

Philby’s alleged instruction to Burgess, before the latter left for the United Kingdom, that he should not ‘go too’, indicates that Philby did not believe that Burgess was under suspicion at the time, and that he would be able to contact Maclean without becoming included in the investigation. If Maclean alone were exfiltrated, Philby might have remained intact, but his close associations with Burgess would immediately draw deeper suspicions on him. This was a serious misjudgment.

As for Maclean, we have a very comprehensive account of the level of surveillance in the KV 2/4140 series. It was very intensive, and must have been quite obvious to the subject. What is more, despite the claims made by some accounts that it did not extend beyond the London railway termini, they are not true. Donald and Melinda are observed driving to the station on May 11, and Donald is recorded at arriving at Warlingham Station [sic: actually ‘Woldingham’] at 5.55 pm later that day (indicating that he took the slow train, and was picked up at the station). On another occasion, Maclean’s parking of his car at Oxted station is noted, as well as shopping expeditions to that town with Melinda (May 12). One of his travelling companions was traced to the Sussex town of Hayward’s Heath when Maclean wanted to buy a new car. Furthermore, one report even records the exact time he arrived at his home in Tatsfield, which debunks the claim that surveillance would have been too obvious in the countryside.

What was the purpose of such surveillance? Ostensibly, it must have been to ascertain who Maclean’s contacts were, with the hope, perhaps, of catching him red-handed passing over some document to a cut-out, or even directly to a member of the Soviet residency, as that would solely provide the evidence that would be needed for a conviction if no confession were extractable. Yet the Watchers were so heavy-handed and obvious that Maclean quickly realized what was going on. In any event, he had not been in touch with any Soviet controller since rejoining the Foreign Office after his convalescence. A more likely explanation is that it constituted more of a campaign of fear-induction – to exploit his already tortured existence to provoke him to perform something desperate, and maybe to conclude that he should confess to get the whole torment out of his system. Or perhaps even to make him think he should abscond  . . . .

The telephone surveillance began on April 23, although Maclean’s name had already come up in calls made by Peter Floud, and monitored by the General Post Office, earlier that month. The archive indicates that a special telephone was installed on May 11 at the Macleans’ house, so that conversations taking place could be relayed and recorded. Again, Donald and Melinda must have realized what was happening when the technicians arrived, no doubt needing to ‘inspect a fault’. Thus they would have been guarded – or deliberately misleading – in their talk thereafter, whether on the phone or when inactive. That did not prevent Maclean from calling Burgess from home on Monday May 14 (Whit Monday, and thus a public holiday). Their conversation should have been very revealing – but maybe it was a ruse. That would play into the scenario suggested by Nigel West, who described Burgess’s inventive countermeasures to frustrate the Watchers.

One vital aspect of the surveillance concerns the leaking of the news, via the defector Petrov, in April 1954, that Burgess and Maclean had been able to inform their handlers at the Soviet Embassy that they were being watched. This revelation may not have seemed very striking to the general public, or even to the Press, but it must have been highly alarming to MI5. Since close surveillance had been kept on the pair since Burgess’s arrival (and before that, on Maclean), the Watchers would have picked up any contact with members of the Embassy. So how had they communicated? Through an intermediary? They had a long list of characters with whom Burgess had socialized, including Anthony Blunt, who by some accounts was the ‘tall figure’ seen with Burgess in the early evening of May 25. (Later, in February 1952, MI5 believed that the figure was Bernard Miller, who had since been interrogated by the FBI.) Dick White had already suggested, in August 1951, that Blunt be given immunity from prosecution for a full confession. His meetings with Burgess in May 1951 (especially since he convened regularly with Guy Liddell at that time) must have given White & Co. some severe headaches.

Of course, the fresh disclosures from Tony Scotland [see above] may throw further tasty ingredients into the mix. (Readers may recall, from last February’s coldspur, a somewhat enigmatic reference by Richard Davenport-Hines to an anecdote from Chapman Pincher indicating that de Malahide had alerted Burgess.) If de Malahide had been aware of what was happening with Maclean, even if he were only a Soviet sympathizer (i.e. an ‘agent of influence’ rather than a penetration agent) might he have warned him? And did Maclean know of de Malahide’s role? Was de Malahide in touch with the Soviet Embassy at any time? (Modin did not name him.) Furthermore, Scotland has informed me that de Malahide was investigated and interviewed shortly after the abscondment, but that the transcript of that interview has not been released, despite Andrew Lownie’s application through a Freedom of Information request to have it declassified. Why was de Malahide investigated? And why, unlike Footman, was he kept on? It constitutes a fascinating project to pursue. The continued secrecy over these seventy-year-old goings-on is absurd, and very incriminating.

In any event, the various accounts of these encounters pose further challenges. As I described in Section 3 above, Purvis and Hulbert get into knots presenting unreconciled versions of the meetings arranged with Modin. Burgess claimed that he decided to deal with Modin directly, bypassing Blunt. Modin said he met Burgess and Blunt on May 10. Blunt in his memoir claims that Burgess had at least two meetings with ‘his contact’, to which Blunt was not invited, as Burgess updated him afterwards. Moreover, Burgess’s meetings with Modin were unobserved by the Watchers. That is what caused the later ado in MI5 in 1954, when Petrov reported that Burgess and Maclean had alerted their contacts, as Robertson and Mitchell could not imagine that either of them would have succeeded in keeping unnoticed a clandestine meeting with a Soviet official, even if they had dared to. After all, that was the key objective of the surveillance – to catch them in flagrante. Either they were all lying to some extent, or the Watchers were carrying out a very selective observation on Burgess, astutely being around when he arrived at Waterloo Station, and when he had his meetings with Maclean, but overlooking some other activities. A third explanation is that Robertson in MI5 assumed that the surveillance of Burgess was comprehensive in London, but that he had not been told the full story by Dick White.

In that respect, I note one final highly controversial item. Much later, after the ‘Third Man’ debacle, on November 11, 1955, Skardon (now in A4) send a note to Reed (now D1a) concerning the surveillance of Burgess and Maclean on May 24, 1951 (sn. 612a, in KV 2/4112). Burgess had been noticed as being in an ‘agitated state’, and Skardon completes his memorandum with the following cryptic observation (including an errant comma):

            It is not felt that we should elaborate further on this unhappy demeanor of BURGESS or illustrate the circumstances which existed then, as all A.4. officers engaged on this case, realised this condition of BURGESS’s but had been instructed to take no further interest in him.

Seriously? That is not what the comprehensive record at sn. 607a in KV 6/145 states. I have no idea what that entry means, but might surveillance have been passed over to an elite team for the final twenty-four hours? Had some of Burgess’s activities been condoned, like Blunt’s, perhaps? Was it a very selective surveillance?

  • 7. The Defection of Burgess: Why did Burgess have to accompany Maclean? Was it his own decision? Or was he ordered to?

“To hell with the Foreign Office, Moscow is the place where I would like to be!” (Guy Burgess, at dinner hosted by Moura Budberg, May 13, 1951)

The notion that Burgess at the outset made a sober, voluntary decision to accompany Maclean (as declared by Burgess himself, and echoed by Modin) barely merits consideration. It is much more likely that he became sucked into a maelstrom from which he could not escape. He was probably misled by the Soviets, who encouraged his assistance in helping Maclean on his path by promising him that he could return at some stage during the journey, or even after he had arrived in Moscow. But the idea that he might be a stable guide for Maclean in Paris, where (so Modin claimed) Maclean feared that he might be tempted by nostalgia to hang around, exploring his old haunts, is plainly ludicrous. The MVD would not have allowed that to happen, and for anyone to think that Burgess was the appropriate figure to keep Maclean on the straight and narrow would be a serious delusion. Moreover, if Burgess had been able to return, he would have to face the inevitable music, and he might have betrayed further members of the network. How Burgess, even under stress, could have contemplated that he could accomplish a graceful re-landing on British soil, and continue his sybaritic life there, is hard to imagine.

There is also evidence that Maclean was by now the more level-headed of the pair. The reports of his mental turmoil may have been overstated. Once the die was cast, he may have calmly resigned himself to the inevitability of spending his remaining years in Moscow, and simply prepared himself as coolly as possible for the departure day. Certainly his demeanour in his last social engagements, especially that with Anthony Blake at the Reform Club on May 24, as reported by Aldrich and Philipps, indicate that he was able to conceal any turmoil that may have been oppressing his mind. Moreover, he had his wife and family to consider, and the effect it would have on Melinda’s confinement, and his sons’ morale. Thus it was Burgess who was more likely than a ‘desperate’ Maclean to put the whole project at risk.

Such a theory is reinforced by a remarkable item that the FBI has placed on its electronic archive. It constitutes a letter from an ‘old friend’ of Maclean’s, sent to the American Ambassador. The text is a message from Maclean about his intentions of fulfilling his duties to his country by taking a message directly to Stalin, and that he has convinced his friend Burgess of the correctness of his decision. By June 6, he writes, they will ‘have crossed the Iron Curtain unto the Free World’. A vital hint to the identity of the old friend is given by the information that Maclean passed the message on May 24. The only engagement Maclean is noted as having on that day was with his friend of long standing, Anthony Blake. Roland Phillips records, using KV 2/4150, that Blake told his MI5 interlocutors that Maclean was in good spirits that day, and had expressed no intentions of running away. The first claim was true, but Blake out of loyalty obviously deceived MI5 on the second point. The letter was forwarded to the FBI on June 12, 1951.

It is much more probable that Moscow decided, once that Burgess was abetting the project and carrying out some of the main initiatives, that they had better ‘rescue’ both their agents. Maclean was busted, and of no further use. Burgess was emotionally stressed, and addicted to medication and alcohol, so had thus also lost any value. His erratic behaviour no longer served as a cover for reprehensible activity, and thus he had to be exfiltrated as well. Philby needed to be protected: as we know, Blunt was also ordered to defect, but declined, and got away with it, although Moscow could not have been happy with his decision. Their orders were not normally defied. Moreover, there had been a possibility that Philby would defect as well, as if Moscow feared that he would inevitably be linked with the others. As it happened, Makayev erred by failing to provide Philby with the cash to fund his escape. For whatever reason, Philby decided to brazen it out.

If, however, it was part of the plan by Dick White and his cabal to abet the escape of MacLean, and discreetly encourage it, packaging Burgess in the arrangement as well would have been a very obvious requirement. Burgess may have been pushed.

  • 8. Burgess’s Behaviour: Why did Burgess socialize so promiscuously in the weeks before his defection? Why did he draw attention to the crisis so ostentatiously, to so many?

If the defectors had wanted to keep their activities discreet in the ten days before they departed, Burgess’s behaviour would clearly have undermined such an objective. Apart from all his noted social gatherings, lunches, dinners, country visits, etc. with such as Peter Pollock, the Harrises, David Footman, even the Headmaster of Eton, Robert Birley, he went out of his way to draw attention that something was afoot. He introduced his friend Bernard Miller to the talkative and immoral Hewit, and he then told Hewit that he was going away for the weekend to help a friend in need. He openly purchased tickets on the Falaise (either on the 24th or the morning of the 25th), presumably in the knowledge that his activity might be monitored. He flamboyantly hired a car on the Friday, rather weakly trying to drop hints that he was driving north, when a more subtle way of making the journey could have been to use Maclean’s Humber for the getaway. He made the absurd late call to Margie Rees from the Reform Club, announcing his intentions of doing something dramatic, dismissing any need for privacy, and then did not pay for the call, thus having his failure published for all club members (and journalists) to see. Instead of arriving at Southampton Docks in good time, and leaving the car in a secluded spot, he left it in full view, and gave a melodramatic shout as he and Maclean boarded at the last minute.

Apart from the fact that one might have expected MI5 and the Watchers to suspect that something untoward was afoot (after all, preventing the escape of the duo was presumably part of their mission, and, as we now know, Burgess was also under strong suspicion at this time), Burgess’s behaviour might indicate that he nurtured a half-realized wish to make the project fail. After all, what was there to lose, and he might have been able to brazen it out because of what he knew, and how he had been let off beforehand. Another motivation might have been to cause as much embarrassment as possible to all those left behind – not only those whom he saw as enemies of his cause, such as the security officers in MI5, but those with whom he had some sympathies, such as Rees, Blunt, Footman, and Liddell, even. The only thing that may have held him back from blowing the operation completely might have been the fear that, if he let down the MVD, and disobeyed its orders, he might be disposed of in the conventional murderous ways of the RIS.

  • 9. The Role of the MVD: How authoritative was the MVD in making decisions? How much was left to Blunt and Burgess?

One would expect the MVD, when apprised of the facts, to act decisively and quickly. That Maclean needed to be exfiltrated was a decision it surely made soon after Burgess arrived in London. As soon as Burgess had his significant meeting with Maclean on May 15, and Moscow was alerted to the crisis, the order was given to Maclean that he had to defect. According to the Mitrokhin archive, Burgess was ordered to accompany him to Moscow, although, at this stage, the planners did not have any clear idea how the exfiltration would take place. Anything from deploying submarines off the coast of England to drugging their victims and smuggling them overseas was surely considered, as Kislitsyn suggested. According to Modin, it was Blunt who came up with the idea of a weekend cruise ship to France, a week before the eventual date, and Moscow then approved the plan. (Philipps gives it as late as May 23, which would have made sharing logistics with Moscow rather difficult.) That option could thus not have been invoked any earlier. At that stage, Moscow Centre must have deployed its full resources to arrange visas and passports, and the necessary couriers to help the pair get from St. Malo to Prague.

Given that Burgess must have protested at first about his forced abscondment, Moscow used deception, knowing perhaps that they had no other choice. Yet promising Burgess that he might at some stage during the journey simply turn round required a measure of gullibility in the reluctant escapee. It must have become obvious to him during the last week that there was no way back. All through this, Blunt played a minor role as deliverer of messages – far from the authoritative organizer who belittled his minder as portrayed by Chapman. He may well have had the idea of the Falaise cruise (that idea has been ascribed to Modin, even), but the suggestion that Modin came to it by spotting an advertisement in a travel agent’s window, as Bower reported in The Perfect English Spy, seems a little too coincidental. Even the booking of the tickets by Burgess as late as the Thursday, May 24, (as reported by Modin and Lownie) seems cutting it fine, but maybe he feared detection if a delay were built in to the system. Yet the Watchers confidently reported that he acquired them only on the morning of May 25, the day of the escape.

  • 10. The Interrogation: Why did the authorities dither and delay? On what date was it planned to haul Maclean in? Did this event change? Why were Foreign Office mandarins so insistent that it was about to happen on May 28?

Irrespective of the months, even years, behind the narrowing-down of the identity of HOMER to a confident belief that it was Maclean, the final weeks were riddled with hesitations, and some unconvincing displays of sensitivities concerning security – mostly involving concerns about the FBI.  If one can trust the documents of the case as deposited in KV 6/140-145 (and it is possible that false records may have been inserted), the sequence of events after Gore-Booth was eliminated from the reckoning on April 19 through the verification of the suspect’s visits to New York appears to be as follows:

April 23: Surveillance of Maclean starts. Carey-Foster of FO & Robertson of MI5 inform Vivian of MI6.

May 1: Patterson in Washington reports demands for action from FBI.

May 4: FO & MI5 discuss whether to inform NSA at Arlington & FBI of suspicions.

May 4: Meeting resolves that Maclean should be interrogated within a fortnight.

May 5: FO expresses concern that FBI will leak information to other US departments (such as State). Robertson advises Patterson to keep silent.

May 7: FBI is still thinking in terms of other candidates.

May 9: FO is torn over waiting for Maclean’s arrest before telling the FBI.

May 15: Schedule sets June 4 as day for informing FBI. Makins and Mackenzie in Washington want to inform Hoover after the interrogation. Interrogation is then set for June 8. GCHQ promises not to tell NSA of latest decrypt until May 28.

May 18: Timetable of May 15 confirmed for FO & MI6.

May 24: FO & MI5 decide Maclean cannot be interviewed until June 18.

May 25: Morrison signs off on interrogation for the following month.

While a cynical interpretation might suggest that the decision to interrogate Maclean was taken only when the escape plan was properly hatched and about to be executed, a more conventional analysis would declare MI5 and the FO were torn between a preference for waiting until Maclean was arrested before informing the FBI and a desire to move quickly to satisfy critics like Mackenzie. They dreaded the story getting out through other channels, and they accepted that it was essentially a breach of trust not to keep their counterparts at the FBI informed. Behind all this were the circumstances of Melinda Maclean’s pregnancy, and a natural, humane consideration to wait until after her confinement. In addition, MI5 reputedly needed time – three weeks –  to prepare for the interrogation, as has been suggested by Nigel West. It would be senseless to suppose that a decision could be passed down on the Friday for a proper session to be started the following Monday. As a sidenote, Dick White’s reminiscences, given to his biographer, again need to be treated sparingly: he claimed that Sillitoe ruled that no action could be taken until Hoover were informed.

Thus the remonstrations that the interrogation was scheduled for May 28, echoed so frequently in the literature, represent a shocking display of deception. The prime culprits for this grotesque disinformation were Carey-Foster and Patrick Reilly, with the latter being particularly egregious (see Glees). Carey-Foster fed Andrew Boyle a similar, but less expansive, message. MI5 and the Foreign Office were in horror of the public relations disaster that would occur (primarily for the FO, as MI5’s mission and organization were not well-understood by the public) should the facts come out that the surveillance of the pair had been lacklustre and ineffective, thereby pointing to operational incompetence  They thus had to create the phantom of an alerter, ‘the tipoff man’, who had managed to warn the miscreants of the imminent arrest. It was nonsense, and they knew it, but they thought that they could get away with it. And, for a long time, since the politicians themselves were either misinformed or confused, they did so. The ‘Third Man’ myth took off.

  • 11. Maclean’s Leave: Who granted leave to Maclean for May 26? Why was the fact not broadly known? Why did Makins and Carey-Foster even think that he might have been granted leave on May 28 as well?

The fact that Maclean was able to take leave on Saturday May 26 (even though he was not around to enjoy it) is a matter of great concern. If he was under close surveillance, and in danger of absconding, one might expect that the antennae of the authorities would have been optimally sensitized to detect any unusual behaviour or movements. The circumstances of his request are indeed very puzzling. The primary source is Roger Makins’ unpublished memoir held at the Bodleian Library (which I have not inspected, but which Philipps uses freely): one would not expect Makins to record anything self-incriminating in such an account, but Makins comes across generally as a rather naïve soul. Maclean apparently bumped into Makins on his way out of the Foreign Office, and he reminded him that he ‘would not be in in the morning as he had his sister staying with him’. Makins thought little of it immediately, but, after reflection, went into the office the next day to see if Carey-Foster was still there. Yet the office was empty. Since Makins was running late for his social engagements, he did nothing, assuming that, since Maclean was being monitored, there was no point in raising the alarm.

This is an extraordinary testimony. Makins openly writes about being ‘reminded’. Why did he not challenge that claim? Had he forgotten? If Saturday was a workday, why would Makins not have attended the office that day, anyway? And why would Carey-Foster ‘still’ be there, as opposed to being required to be present? Why did Makins have social engagements on a Saturday morning? Could Makins not have telephoned Carey-Foster or White? Moreover, Philipps offers two accounts of Maclean’s requesting colleagues to stand in for him on the Saturday – a call to Geoffrey Jackson from the Travellers Club at lunchtime, and an in-person request to his subordinate, Margaret Anstee, during the afternoon. If these two had compared notes, might it have struck them as odd? Should Makins perhaps have checked in Maclean’s office to see who was holding the fort, and then perhaps attempted to verify their stories?

Maclean’s excuses for absence, to Makins and Jackson, were lies, as could have been verified on that same day. Yet the situation became even more absurd. When Maclean did not turn up at the office on Monday, either, Carey-Foster was informed that the telechecks, and a call by Lady Maclean, indicated that Maclean had been away for the weekend. Carey-Foster then confirmed to MI5 that Maclean had not come in, but that he was not alarmed since Maclean had asked for a day off. Carey-Foster then confirmed this understanding with Makins, who was also under the belief that he must have given him the Monday off as well! Thus did the brilliant mind of the future Lord Sherfield work: on Friday, somewhat perturbed by the suspect’s taking an impromptu Saturday off, and on Monday leading himself to believe that he had given him leave of absence on the Saturday and the Monday.

The incompetence shown by Makins and Carey-Foster was rightly castigated in the Press.

  • 12. Foreign Office Response: Why was the response to Maclean’s absence on May 28 so sluggish? Why did no official immediately call the Maclean household to determine his whereabouts?

We should recall that these shenanigans were supposedly taking place on the day when Maclean was going to be brought in for interrogation, as Makins, Carey-Foster and Reilly earnestly informed the journalists later. Whereas, if that had been true, a feverish response would have been expected, we should certainly disregard that notion, and simply ascribe lowly and dishonourable motives to the distinguished Foreign Office civil servants. Yet one might have expected a more urgent response, given the general surveillance, and the warnings suggested by the provocative events of Friday evening. By all accounts, however, Carey-Foster did not jump into action until Melinda Maclean called some time after 10 o’clock in the morning (Melinda knowing, of course, the somewhat leisurely hours maintained by the Foreign Office).

Unfortunately, the archival record is probably wrong here, which has led some analysts (Philipps included) to suggest that Melinda did not call in until the Tuesday. The Concordance of Events at KV 2/4140, which includes Mrs Grist’s record of telechecks, declares that Mrs Maclean called the Foreign Office at 10:58 am on May 29 [sic], and it lists other happenings, such as David Footman’s call to Liddell, as also occurring on that day. While the delayed reaction by Footman is probably true, the logging of the other events must be a mistake. Melinda would not have waited another day for reporting her husband’s absence, and Carey-Foster would surely have reached out to the Maclean residence before then. Indeed, Carey-Foster confirmed to Dick White that he had received Melinda’s call on the morning of May 28, although he dissembled somewhat, stating that the call arrived at 10:15 am, presumably before he had settled in his chair properly, thus giving the Director of B Division the impression that he not been twiddling his thumbs. (The official Grist report stated that she called at 10:58 am.) One might, however, expect that the Watchers would already have alerted White to the fact that Maclean had not arrived on his usual train at Victoria Station that morning, rather than waiting to enter a daily formal report. White, however, apparently did nothing. And then the urgent meetings began.

Yet the whole performance is one of incredible insouciance. If the objectives of the surveillance had clearly been to keep a very close eye on Maclean’s movements, and to prevent him skipping the country, such abnormal and suspicious events as his taking the Saturday off, and not turning up for work on Monday, should have rung alarm-bells immediately.

  • 13. Telephone Intercepts: What did the telephone intercepts over the weekend tell the authorities about Maclean’s movements? Why were they ignored?

Again, the formal record is intriguing. The Concordance is sparse: it records only two events – on Saturday, “Telechecks on Tatsfield and Lady MACLEAN’s flat gave the impression that Donald MACLEAN was at home”, and on Sunday, “No calls were made or received at Tatsfield and the telephone of Lady MACLEAN still gave the impression that Donald MACLEAN was at home.” Presumably Melinda and her mother-in-law made oblique references to Donald’s proximity. Yet, apart from implying that Donald’s mother may have been involved in the conspiracy, without explaining what was said to relay that impression, this is a highly sanitized and incorrect account. Roland Philipps has been enterprising enough to study KV 2/4143 (one of the Maclean files, which I have not yet seen), and reports that a call was received at 8:00 pm on Sunday 27, when Nancy Oetking, Donald’s sister, ‘rang to say they were at Ashford on their journey from Dover and would arrive at about 9:30.’ Philipps goes on to write that Melinda told her visitors that Donald had since rung ‘to say he would be back late and they were not to delay dinner for him’.

We are thus faced with the paradoxical situation in which Melinda, conscious of her non-telephone conversations being overheard, invents a call from her husband which her surveillers would know did not occur. Yet the Watchers did nothing, and she was never challenged on it. At 10:09, Lady Maclean called to discuss arrangements for the next day, and, tellingly, asked Nancy to check with Donald while she was on the line. After talking to her husband, Nancy told Lady Maclean that she had conferred with Melinda rather than Donald. Philips does not, however, quote the report from May 28, which states that ‘it was learned from the telechecks on Tatsfield and Lady MACLEAN that Donald MACLEAN had in fact been away at the weekend and was not yet back’ –  an item noted by Nigel West.

Philipps ignores the anomalies explicit in these anecdotes. He does not remark on the discrepancy between the detailed records and the Concordance –  with which he has already shown familiarity. He does not point out that, if Donald had indeed called home to speak to Melinda, that call would have been picked up by the telechecks. The Concordance comes to this conclusion without reporting how it gained that insight: the Oetking call must have been registered, but then quietly dropped. Also, if Melinda had claimed that she had spoken to him, one might wonder why she did not ask him about his whereabouts, and when she might see him again. It was an extraordinary oversight by MI5 and the Foreign Office not to pick up on this subterfuge, but, since the official record shows that they wanted to bury the complete Oetking business, it is perhaps no surprise. I look forward to exploring the whole of KV 2/4143 before too long.

  • 14. Role of Jackie Hewit: Why did he act so hysterically? Why are there conflicting stories of whom he called? Which can be trusted?

Hewit should potentially be a vital part of the transactional record. He was Burgess’s residential partner and factotum; he had been the lover of Blunt as well as Burgess; he was in the middle of the business with Bernard Miller, the American who had been the placeholder for the berth on the Falaise; he sounded the alarm when Burgess did not return; he knew most of Burgess’s friends and contacts. He called the Rees household at the peak of the events, and called Goronwy ‘Gonny’, indicating that they were on very friendly terms. Indeed, he leveraged this unique position to sell his story to the Daily Express, its coverage of the Missing Diplomats relying mostly on what he told the newspaper in the early days. Unfortunately he was an established liar, thief, and blackmailer, and we should be very cautious about accepting his testimony. This hesitancy should especially be applied to his ‘unpublished memoirs’, which Lownie relies on quite extensively. What Lownie quotes includes some anecdotes that show a degree of verisimilitude, but they also show some violent contradictions that help to undermine anything factual that he may have reported.

In fact, Hewit had a special relationship with Blunt. He had been employed by him in WWII as an agent for Blunt’s TRIPLEX operation in MI5, and for performing general spying on people. His cryptonym was DUMBO, and he was spectacularly inefficient. Thus Blunt knew he had a potentially dangerous element on his hands, and that is how it turned out. Hewit showed his volatility when describing how Burgess presented his plans for the weekend. He was interviewed by Jim Skardon on June 5, Skardon blatantly describing him as a ‘loathsome creature’. Hewit went over his long career with Burgess, including his role in the overheard telephone conversations of the Sudeten politician Henlein in 1938. Yet the most important of his assertions was his describing the events of May 25. Guy Liddell later reported that Blunt told him that Hewit had called Blunt on May 26 to tell him that Burgess had not returned that day, as expected. Hewit also called Miller that day with the news. He also called the Reeses. Yet in his memoir, Hewit wrote that Burgess had told him that he would not be back until the Monday. The subsequent hue and cry were thus all a melodramatic stunt. He also claimed that he guessed that the colleague in the Foreign Office, who, Burgess told him, needed help, and would be accompanying him in place of Miller, was Maclean.

There is no doubt that Hewit’s frantic telephone calls over the weekend rather disturbed the illusion that Burgess’s disappearance was not detected until Tuesday, when an apparently shocked David Footman broke the news to Guy Liddell (having committed to Rees that he would call him immediately on the Sunday). Thereafter Liddell learned from Blunt what Hewit had told him. All in all, it reflected badly on Blunt, because of his closeness to the affairs, and his lack of openness. Hewit would later use this to his advantage when he successfully blackmailed Blunt into paying off an amount of money that he had stolen from his employer. All this sits in the Hewit files at KV 4526-4529.

  • 15. Role of Goronwy Rees: How can his reactions to the news of Burgess’s call be interpreted? How did he really follow up? When was he telling the truth?

Where were Rees’s loyalties? It is difficult to gauge the true allegiances of this slippery character. As I have indicated above, the two given agendas for Burgess’s long-planned self-invitation to Sonning do not make sense. Moreover, Rees lied about his contacts with Burgess after the visit. His written report on the events, after his second interview, that can be found in KV 2/4104, is stilted and artificial – too precise on some matters, too vague on others, and suggests that the whole episode was designed to give Rees cover. For a recent analysis of Rees’s activities at the time, please turn to https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/.  

Yet a closer inspection of the files shows that major discrepancies appeared in the timing of the events immediately after the disappearances. I believe that they were due to a) Rees’s deviousness in trying to exonerate himself; b) Liddell’s need to conceal the fact that he met with Rees on June 1; c) MI5’s inattention to detail when its officers (particularly Peter Wright) returned to the investigation; d) Rees’s failing memory; and e) Rees’s desire to rectify the chronicle when he came to write his book.

When Reed set out to capture the sequence of events in March 1956 (see KV 2/4605), he recorded Rees calling Footman, and then Blunt, on the morning of Monday May 28, with Footman not reacting until 11:00 am on the following day, when he called Liddell. On May 30, Blunt and Harris came to see Liddell, who confirmed to them, in confidence, that Burgess had accompanied Maclean. The record then has Liddell reporting, on Friday June, that he had received a message from Rees describing his wife’s bizarre conversation with Burgess, and that he had asked Rees to re-construct the conversation in writing, which Rees subsequently did, passing it, for some reason, via Footman on June 2. Footman then handed it to White on June 6, just before Rees’s meeting – alongside Blunt – with White.

Liddell’s diary, however, tells otherwise. He declared very plainly that he had had a meeting with Rees on June 1, at which he no doubt persuaded Rees to hold back his accusations, because of the specially sensitive relationship with Blunt (see https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/), either because Liddell convinced Rees that Blunt was working undercover for him, or alternatively because he suspected Blunt, and already had him under close surveillance. (Rees would later inform Andrew Boyle about the lunch meeting with Liddell, and it is described both in Climate of Treason and The Perfect English Spy.) Liddell reinforced this fact by placing a note on file on June 1 (sn. 94b, KV 2/4102) that [name redacted] ‘told me about a conversation that his wife had had with BURGESS before the latter’s departure’, implying (but not guaranteeing) a face-to-face meeting. Whether out of ignorance or complicity, Reed introduced Rees’s report of the conversation by posting a careful note to Rees’s file on June 6 (sn. 7b in KV 2/4603), stating that ‘Geronwy [sic] REES telephoned [sic!] Captain Liddell last week’ to inform him of the ‘alarming’ conversation. Thus a new mythology was created in which Rees did not meet any MI5 officers until June 6.

Much later, when Reed interrogated Rees in the wake of the People articles in March 1956, he challenged Rees’s account of the timetable. In his report (sn. 177a in KV 2/4605) he wrote:

            REES claimed to have come to the Security Services within 48 hours of his return to his home at Sonning and that he had seen BLUNT in the intervening period, In fact REES had not given to us the information about BURGESS’s Comintern work until 10 days after his disappearance.

This would suggest that Liddell had not told Reed about the face-to-face encounter on June 1. Reed went on to challenge Rees about his account of the facts. Rees stuck to his story that he had spoken to both Footman and Blunt on May 28, and had thus expected a call from MI5. Reed suggested to him that it was the lack of response that prompted him to telephone Liddell on June 1.  (One might ask why, if Rees was able to telephone Liddell directly on Friday June 1, he had not been able to do so on May 28, instead of using Footman as a go-between.) Rees responded that he presumed it was so, but that he could not remember making the call. Of course: he had visited instead, but he needed to conceal the fact of that personal visit from his inquisitors. Whatever occurred, Reed’s accusation that Rees had delayed ten days before alerting the Security authorities of Burgess’s Comintern connection was unfair, but justified in Reed’s eyes, and not something that Rees could have easily refuted.

Peter Wright took up the cause, too, in May 1965, when he and another officer interviewed Mr and Mrs Rees (sn. 377a, KV 2/4608). Again, confusion appeared to exist between i) the fact of Rees’s attempt to contact MI5 and alert it to the possibility of Burgess’s escape to Moscow, and ii) his knowledge that Burgess had worked for the Comintern, and slowness in passing on that insight. At the beginning of the interview, both Goronwy and Margie insisted that Goronwy had ‘not knowingly concealed his knowledge of BURGESS’s pre-War espionage’, and that he had come forward after ‘a lapse of only 48 hours’. What delimited this two-day period is not at first clear, but Margie Rees, later in the interview, changed her mind about the timetable. Wright noted that, if only forty-eight hours had elapsed between the time that Rees contacted Footman (either May 27 pm or May 28 am) and Rees’s subsequent visit to MI5 with Blunt, Rees would have had no cause to complain. Yet the latter took place on June 6: Margie then accepted the fact that ‘there had been an interval of ten days between Guy’s defection and the MI5 interview’. She – like Reed and Wright, and several others –  obviously had not been told about her husband’s luncheon meeting with Liddell on June 1. Goronwy had to bite his lip, and move on.

So when it came to writing Chapter of Accidents, Goronwy set out to correct the account, clearly describing a meeting with an (unnamed) MI5 officer as occurring soon after the escape, but in the process mangling the chronology so badly (adding the premature flourish about the newspaper placard) that he should have lost credibility immediately. Yet no one knew enough to untangle the lies.

My supplementary conclusions are as follows:

  1. In May 1951, Rees was much closer to Burgess, Blunt and Footman than he made out. He concealed the fact that he had recently worked with Burgess and Blunt on the Borodin case, and MI5 reported that Burgess, Rees and Footman had been energetically criticizing Borodin after his appearance at the 1949 Conference in Oxford. Rees was still working (part-time) under Footman at MI6 when the diplomats disappeared.
  2. Rees had been briefed by Burgess about the coming escape plan. His surprise, and then breakthrough conclusion about Burgess’s escape to Moscow, after he listened to his wife on May 27, were feigned. It was a ruse to allow him to claim integrity and loyalty to his bosses when the knowledge was already too late to have any effect, or it had already been carefully exploited.
  3. Rees’s using Footman as a back-channel to Liddell was clumsy and devious. He no doubt wanted to implicate Footman in his wiles, knowing that he was as guilty as Rees himself, and he thereby also inserted a built-in delay into the process. Since he arranged a meeting with Liddell on the Friday, and Liddell acknowledged that Rees had been able to telephone him, Rees could have called Liddell directly on the Monday morning. (He also sent to Footman, on June 2, his summary for Liddell of the conversation they had, asking Footman to send it on, which seems an unnecessarily bureaucratic procedure.)
  4. Despite what has been written about Rees’s conveniently being away from the scene, at Oxford, when the abscondment occurred, I judge that it must be a coincidence. His attendance at All Souls seems to have been required before the timing of the Falaise booking was determined.
  5. I suspect that Rees was being used by MI5/MI6 in some way as a back-channel to Burgess, in a way that suggests that senior officials at MI5 and the Foreign Office would not have been unhappy if the escape plan succeeded.
  6. Rees clearly expected a different outcome, and that his accusations against Blunt would be followed up. He showed some political naivety in misjudging the relationship between Liddell and Blunt and the general nervousness about letting MI5 skeletons out of the cupboard, as well as the reactions of Liddell and White to his own chequered past.
  7. Rees’s failure to alert Liddell to his suspicions about Burgess and Blunt at the time of the Borodin episode is a major new insight that has come to light only in the context of the revealed Borodin archival material. It was a major faux pas by Rees, the whole project being conveniently left out of his memoir, and Liddell  must have chastised him vehemently over it when the two met on June 1.
  8. Margie Rees was probably far more deeply implicated than Goronwy suggested. In his letter to Liddell, Rees claimed that Burgess called to speak to her because engaging Goronwy would only have led to arguments, but the whole sequence of events sounds bogus, and Margie was in touch with Jackie Hewit on the fateful weekend. She also called Barbara Kimpton (David Footman’s girl-friend, who worked as a secretary at MI5) on May 27 or May 28 to ask whether she or Footman had heard anything of Burgess – an action showing an excess of zeal. She later told Elaine Finlay (one of Maxwell Knight’s agents) that she had told no one about Burgess’s abscondment until she read about it in the newspapers – an obvious lie.

Burgess’s Personal Files show that Rees, alongside Blunt and Footman, was regarded with the deepest suspicion by Robertson’s team in B2 at MI5. Robertson recorded also, on June 19: ‘He will bear in mind the suspicion that xxxxxxx [redacted, but incontrovertibly Rees], when leaving Government employment for business, may have played a part in assisting the Russians to obtain penicillin equipment from America, of which the Americans were at the time anxious to ban the export to the Soviet Union’. As I have explained, not only Rees, but Burgess and Blunt – and Liddell – were involved in this exercise, proving that one half of MI5 did not know what the other was doing. It was probably a disinformation project designed to push the Soviets into unproductive manufacturing ventures, but it turned out to be a disaster.

  • 16. Role of Anthony Blunt: Who informed him of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean? How did he communicate with Guy Liddell thereafter?

For a richer analysis of Blunt’s predicament, I refer readers again to my posting at https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/. My researches since have uncovered his more sinister relationships with Jackie Hewit, including the experiences from World War II, as well as Hewit’s subsequent attempts to blackmail Blunt. Blunt acted primarily as an emissary after Burgess’s arrival: he may well have been the one who came up with the Falaise idea, which suited his Moscow bosses admirably. After the disappearances on May 25, Blunt was severely alarmed by Hewit’s melodramatic outburst on May 26 lamenting Burgess’s absence, and tried to convince him to remain silent, but Hewit defied him. Hewit later implicated Burgess’s Foreign Office colleague, Frederick Warner, in the scandal, and in the spring of 1952, after stealing money from his employer, successfully blackmailed Blunt, an event of which MI5 was aware.

Blunt’s trajectory during the events is very provocative. He obviously felt invulnerable while consorting with Burgess and Maclean, while knowing that they were under surveillance. In this regard, he knew he had the protection and support of Guy Liddell, who continued to use him as a consultant. Blunt must have realized that, after Burgess and Maclean disappeared, he would inevitably come under suspicion as well. That fear was intensified by Rees’s denunciation of him, but Liddell continued to come to Blunt’s defence, and managed to deflect Rees’s attack during the vital meeting on June 1. Meanwhile, White and Robertson soon came to be convinced of his probable guilt. His responses when interviewed were so evasive, and frequently contradicted details of the timeline provided by others (such as his visits to Sonning), that he was immediately put on the ‘high-suspicion’ list alongside Rees himself and Footman.

After Rees denounced him, Blunt was obviously able to exploit his long-time relationship as a ‘consultant’ to Liddell to forestall Rees’s accusations. If we can trust Liddell’s Diaries, and his written testimony on file, it was Footman who informed him that Burgess had disappeared, on May 29. Blunt happened to call Liddell, and feigned astonishment when Liddell told him what had happened, later claiming that he ‘guessed’ that Maclean had been with Burgess. Even the suspicions of White and Robertson, and the desire to give Blunt a pardon if he confessed all, came to nothing. The evidence that Blunt was able to search Burgess’s rooms, and remove incriminating items, is very thin. The archives show that MI5’s visit took place on June 7: one of the items retrieved was an embarrassing letter from Esther Whitfield, Philby’s secretary in Washington, to whom Burgess was supposed to be engaged. It was dated May 18, and bore the urgent instruction: ‘Destroy it!’. Blunt failed to salvage it. (Burgess told Peter Pollock, shortly before he absconded, that he had broken off with her.)

The most significant aspect of Blunt’s role is his apparent invulnerability. There is a vast difference between relying on the confidence of a senior MI5 officer and openly consorting with two suspected spies, and risk being seen with a contact from the Soviet Embassy. Even if he assumed extreme caution when arranging his meetings with Modin, it would have constituted an enormous risk. Since Blunt was eminently noticeable in his engagements with Burgess from the day he arrived in Southampton, the apparent lack of interest in his movements on the part of the HOMER investigation team points to the suggestion that his role was acknowledged, and even condoned.

Yet Dick White very quickly came to the conclusion that his friend was guilty. He was prepared, on the basis of the interviews with Rees and Blunt undertaken by Robertson and Marti in July 1951, that the art historian should be offered immunity for a full confession. Robertson and Martin had seen too many contradictions in Blunt’s story, and they believed that he and Rees had been colluding in a tale to deceive MI5. On July 31 Robertson made to White a strong recommendation for granting Blunt some sort of immunity if he revealed ‘with complete frankness’ all of his knowledge of Burgess’s espionage. White must have by then been convinced of Blunt’s role as the fabled Fourth Man, and that he had deceived his former colleagues in MI5. Either White knew of Blunt’s role as an intermediary, but had considered it up until then as a valid ruse, and was now disenchanted – partly by Goronwy Rees’s accusations – or he simply had not been involved in what Blunt had been up to. The latter option seems highly unlikely. What is astonishing is how that initiative concerning the pardon was allowed to peter out as Liddell and White avoided each other in the autumn of 1951.

I make a late additional point here (thanks to an insightful comment posted by Keith Ellison on coldspur on April 28). The counter-intelligence officer identified, but not named, by Razin in his communications with Kislitzyn as being a useful source in London in the 1943-1944 time-frame was surely Blunt. In 1954, White would surely have matched the profile of the source to Blunt, about whom he had had serious doubts since 1951. Yet Mitchell was allowed to declare that the officer responsible had been Philby, dump further accusations against him, and thus deflect attention away from Blunt. It further confirms Mitchell’s ignorance (and maybe indolence) as well as White’s duplicity. All fodder for later, more detailed, investigation.

  • 17. Role of Guy Liddell: When did he first learn of the defections? Do his reactions make sense?

Guy Liddell showed a professional, though not intense, interest in the HOMER case before it blew up. On May 1, he had complained about the Watchers, both in the number that Storrier had recruited, as well as their quality. He judged (following Robertson’s advice) that they played  a vital part in the detection of spies, although one might opine, given the experience of the Nunn May case, for instance, that they were too obvious, and that leakers sometimes alerted suspects to the process. At that stage, Liddell declared that MI5 was still trying to get telephone checks [the name of the facility actually redacted] on Maclean, and they were thus reliant on Watchers. While some relevant passages may have been redacted, Liddell’s next entry is from May 18, where he confirms the interrogation plans, and points out that Maclean had met Peter Flood [actually ‘Floud’], ‘who is known member of the underground Berger Group’. (Nigel West describes that entity in Cold War Spymaster.)

The same day, he made a quite remarkable statement to an old friend, Barty Bouverie, formerly of SOE. He tells him ‘that they have been looking, since the beginning of the war for someone in FO circles who had been leaking info to the Russians, and that considerable suspicion rested on Donald MACLEAN’. The intensity of this search since the days of Krivitsky may have eluded not only me, but other historians as well. What is even more astonishing is that Bouverie gives Liddell tips about Maclean’s movements from Washington, which would heavily confirm what the HOMER investigation had recently concluded concerning Maclean’s visits to his pregnant wife in New York. The fact that the project team had apparently not used a source like this much earlier is shocking: it would have been valuable information to use in the planned interrogation.

Of related events on May 24 and May 25, Liddell writes nothing. Nor are there any redactions. May 28 entries have been almost exclusively wiped out, and thus the first visible mention is Liddell’s registering the fact, on the morning of May 29, of Maclean’s disappearance. Yet he displays alarming ignorance: “The Watchers failed to pick up MACLEAN since his departure for the country on Friday”, as if all he knew was that Maclean had not been seen since he caught his train to Oxted on Friday evening. My first reaction was that this must surely be a classic inauthentic entry, designed to nonplus, and thus not redacted. Liddell does not even mention Burgess, when he must certainly by now have read the reports from Southampton. He continues his deception by noting the call from Footman [name also redacted] who asks him whether he has heard about Burgess. Liddell ingenuously states that all he knew was that Burgess had been sent home for speeding. Can Liddell really have been so removed from the action, and the joint surveillance, to want to record his absence for posterity?

Yet he then continues to document what Footman told him, namely about the hire of the car, and Hewit’s report of Burgess’s acquiring a good deal of money, as if he had heard all this for the first time. It is difficult to see Liddell being that ingenuous if he really knew the facts already. His final conclusion? “In view of the past association between BURGESS and MACLEAN observed by the Watchers it seems pretty clear that the pair of them have gone off.” Had Liddell really been kept out of the picture, like Sillitoe and Morrison, or was he simply rather slow in some respects?

Thereafter, the deputy director-general moves into middle gear, accompanying Dick White to a meeting with Burt of Special Branch in an effort to get the suspects trapped at the ports of exit. He mentions a further discussion with Ruck of the Immigration Service, and a plan to impound passports! And then, in the evening, he speaks to Blunt (who initiated the call is not stated), and he asks him what he knew about Burgess’s disappearance. Blunt relates to him the whole sordid tale gained from Hewit, from Saturday evening onwards, revealing the knowledge that Burgess had hired a car, and was going away on a holiday, and that he had cancelled his planned trip with an American friend as he was helping out another friend in need. Did Liddell remonstrate with his friend: “ Why did you not tell me all this on Saturday, Anthony?” No, he apparently did not.

Lastly, Liddell decides to relay the whole story to his boss Sillitoe, who was presumably in the same state of ignorance, and they agreed he should come up the next day. Later, however, he writes that ‘we’ received a message from Immigration announcing the arrival of Burgess and Macean at St. Malo, where they broke their excursion terms. This message had not been deposited until the return of the Falaise to Southampton – on the Monday morning. What happened with communications? Something, for sure, as Liddell then records White will leave the next day for France to stimulate the activities of the Sûreté, ‘who had already been alerted through XXXXXXX’. So who had been calling the shots, if the best minds in MI5 had all been out of the picture?

The whole imbroglio is only marginally undermined by the first report that appears in the PEACH inquiry file at KV 6/143. It is dated May 29, and has been compiled by J. D. Robertson. It is a ‘Note of Action in Hand’ and clearly refers to meetings held earlier that day. The salient points are as follows: i) The authorities are still searching for car numbers, passports and reservations; ii) Liddell has provided information that Hewit should be interviewed concerning Burgess’ car booking; iii) Melinda Maclean should be interviewed over Roger Stiles; iv) Liddell will contact Blunt; v) Ports should be alerted; vi) Telephone checks continue to be maintained. The outstanding anomaly in this list is the fact that Liddell has already been informed of Hewit’s testimony to Blunt. So why did Liddell dissemble, in his Diary, that Blunt had revealed all to him only that evening? Moreover, Liddell betrayed his objectivity very plainly: in a status report of June 1, he is stated to have said that there was no point in interviewing Pollock, or Hewit, or even Burgess’s mother, as all the information could be gained through Blunt.

There are thus obvious anomalies in the record, which may never be cleared up, but which prove that Liddell and White were able to dissemble in front of their peers from the Foreign Office, and to leave some false trails for their subordinates and colleagues. Liddell’s Diary is tantalizing. The redacted May 28 entry shows that he must have revealed much that was far too embarrassing to be published years on. His following entries are deceptive, yet he could not have judged, at the time, that only portions of his log would survive. How did he operate? Occasionally he gives an indication that an entry had been written sometime after the event: for example, he writes in his May 29 entry that White left his home at 1:00 am (on May 30) with an outdated passport. If the pair had known that at the time, White would surely not have set off! Despite these enigmas, the problem was that, in their effort to show that they had not received intelligence in time, Liddell and White opened themselves up to charges of negligence. It all worked better for White, who was able to outmaneuver his rival. On the other hand, Liddell’s close collaboration with Blunt, especially, ruined his career. At one of Robertson’s progress meetings, Liddell even spoke out against interrogating certain candidates: it was unnecessary, he claimed, since Blunt was on top of things!

The last bewildering aspect of Liddell’s behaviour is his exchanges with Rees. After having the clandestine luncheon meeting with him, Liddell asked Rees to write up Burgess’s conversation with Margie of May 24. This Rees did, but send his letter, on All Souls notepaper, to David Footman, dated June 2, saying that he did not know where to send the letter, and asking Footman to ‘show the enclosure [substance of which is unknown] to him, and also this letter’. Yet Liddell went on leave on June 3: he must have known this when he spoke to Rees two days earlier. Why did he not give instructions as to what to do with his report, and why did Rees not recognize that Liddell would be away? Moreover, Footman did not pass it to White until 2:30 pm on June 6 – why the delay?

  • 18. Role of David Footman: Why, since he dined with Burgess earlier in the week, was he not immediately interviewed? How quickly did he react to Rees’s call, and what did he say?

One of Burgess’s closest friends was David Footman of the Foreign Office, and I suppose we ought to confine ourselves to saying just this and no more.” (Ronald Reed, June 27, 1951)

David Footman is another enigmatic character. He had worked for MI6 since the mid-1930s, and in 1951 headed its Information Division. Yet his ideology, that of a fellow-traveller, was obviously suspect: a successful novelist, he had in 1937 been recruited by Burgess to give talks on the BBC. Soon after, Burgess suggested recruiting him to the NKVD. He frequently socialized with Burgess and Guy Liddell, especially at the music-hall. During the war, Footman had encouraged John Curry to recruit Burgess to MI5, but Curry correctly judged Burgess utterly unsuitable.  Yet Footman continued to promote Burgess’s interests. It was he who gained an invitation for Burgess to speak at the infamous conference at Worcester College in 1949, at which Footman, Rees and Burgess joined forces to attack the defector Borodin. He foolishly came to Burgess’s defence after the latter’s outrageous behaviour in Gibraltar in late 1949, and in March 1950, Dennis Bristow of MI6 challenged Footman on not forwarding his report on Spanish communism to the Foreign Office. He was also godfather to the Reeses’ son. The incidents of May 1951, and his known close association with Burgess, eventually forced him to resign, and he found a home at St Antony’s College in 1953. He had a file opened on him (PF 604589) at the time of the PEACH inquiry, but it has not been declassified.

What is extraordinary is any examination of his frequent meetings and conversations with Burgess during those frenzied weeks in May has largely escaped the archival record. He lunched with him on May 8, and dined with on May 11 and May 21. Burgess called him on the telephone on the morning of May 25, attempting to set up a dinner the following week. It was all part of the alibi. All this is recorded in the Concordance. One might imagine that the purpose of those engagements, and what was discussed, would have been of vital interest to the investigators. Yet I have not yet found a record of any sustained interview with him. Fragments appear: I have worked out that Footman was identified as FLANAGAN, in an attempt to disguise him. The deception was all very clumsy, since I noticed that the PF number for both FOOTMAN and FLANAGAN, where the snippets had to be recorded, bore the same number, PF 604589.  (Philby was PEACH, Blunt was BLUNDEN, Rees was RALEIGH, and Maclean was CURZON. Burgess for a while carried BARCLAY, but it was soon dropped, probably because of the clash with Sir Roderick Barclay, and the pseudonym is rarely found in the archives.) The overall record, however, is woefully sparse.

Then there is the question of his reaction to the appeal by Rees on the evening of May 27 (Sunday) to contact MI5. He must have been grossly discomforted by Rees’ approach. White declared that Liddell received the call that night, but that he could not understand it. Footman told Rees the next morning that MI5 would be contacting him. Liddell claimed that he did not hear from Footman until the morning of May 29, at 11:00 am. In his diary entry, he describes how he learned from Footman about the Rees events over the weekend, and that Hewit had informed Footman of the car rental and Burgess’s stash of money. But Liddell does not ask Footman when he learned those facts, or why Hewit had called him, or why Footman had waited so long to pass on such vital intelligence. Footman’s name has clumsily been redacted from the diary entry. Collusion is in the air.

I am sure that further intense interviews with Footman were held. He is constantly listed as one of the prime suspects in the realm of Burgess’ friends, alongside Rees, Blunt, and Klugmann. Footman immediately came under suspicion, and he began to be listed under his cover-name FLANAGAN alongside Rees (RALEIGH) in charts of the prime suspects. Rebecca West volunteered to the Director of Public Prosecutions the wisdom that Footman and [name redacted] were Soviet agents associated with Burgess. Maxwell Knight (of B4c, agents) reported on June 12 that one of his informants, Elaine Finlay, a friend of Footman’s, divulged that Footman had confided in her that he knew that Burgess was ‘up to something’ ever since his return from the United States. Footman soon started promoting his belief that both Burgess and Maclean had probably been murdered, since Maclean was being blackmailed. Alternatively, he told Barbara Kimpton (his girl-friend) that they had ‘done a Hess’, i.e. embarked on a desperate peace mission to Moscow. (Maclean must be the only man in history who was said to have mimicked the actions of both Hess and Hiss.) Whatever evidence MI5 found, it was conclusive, and Footman was required to resign over the Burgess business, as Ronnie Reed’s annotations confirm.

When Reed attended a weekend course at Oxford in September 1951, he had a few interesting conversations, and was moved to post the following comment on file: “I was also told that David Footman was in Paris a day or two after the news of the Burgess/Maclean disappearance had been announced, and that a friend of my informant who saw him there said that he has never seen a man closer to the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

  • 19. Intelligence from Southampton: Did Immigration Officers really report Maclean’s presence on the Falaise to MI5 on the night of May 25-26? If so, why was nothing done?

The only source for this phenomenon appears to be Nigel West, who gained it from his traditional insider source, Arthur Martin. Martin had apparently been present with the Night Duty Officer at Leconfield House when Maclean’s departure at Southampton had been reported, at midnight. Sadly, this testimony is tainted by the immediate observation that led Dick White to try to fly out that same night on an interception project, only to find out that his passport was out of date. The absurdity of a message being received by White at that time of night, and the availability of a commercial flight that required a passport, suggests that two separate events may have become garbled in the fertile mind of Martin. Yet, if the first part were true, how confidently could any identification of Maclean have been made by an Immigration Officer, since passports were not required, and Maclean’s berth had been booked in the name of Miller? Had someone been pre-warned to report when the miscreants arrived? An Appendix ‘E’ to the Report to be handed to Sillitoe and Hoover in KV 6/143, from early June, claims that Burgess told the ship’s crew that Maclean had replaced Miller as his companion.

In his June 8 report, ‘The Maclean Story’ (sn. 11a in KV 2/4102), however, Reed reported that Maclean himself had told the Immigration Officer that he was taking Miller’s place, although how Reed derived this nugget is not stated. There would thus appear to be some substance to the story that Maclean’s identity could have been picked up the night he left. I remind readers that John Costello wrote that the Immigration Officers had picked up Maclean’s name from a watch-list. If, indeed, MI5 had done its job, and warned the port authorities, one would imagine that Maclean’s identifying himself to them would have prompted an immediate reaction, and a message sent to London informing MI5 that their precautions had been rewarded. After all, the mysterious call to Leconfield House from Southampton, as reported by Arthur Martin to Nigel West, remains a controversial and unverifiable loose end in the saga.

Irrespective of that particular conundrum, the incident of the very flamboyant parking of a car at the dockyard might have aroused the interest of the local constabulary, and, even in 1951, a search for the owner/driver could presumably have been achieved in a matter of hours. Liddell’s diary entry for May 29 suggested a more tardy response from Immigration. When Burgess and Maclean – confirmed as such when they left on Saturday night – had reached St Malo, they had breached the terms of their excursion agreement by disembarking, and the captain of the ship had reported such when the Falaise arrived back at Southampton on the morning of May 28. Again, the report has apparently specified Maclean by name: it is not clear how the captain ascertained that the name of the missing passenger accompanying Mr Burgess was Maclean, not Miller, unless he learned it from the Immigration Officer.

The final paradoxical aspect of this business concerns the actions that were not taken, or perhaps could not have been taken. One of the questions in the House of Commons debate in November 1955 queried whether Burgess and Maclean could have been detained at Southampton, and the Foreign Office prepared a response that emphasized that subjects could not be prevented from leaving the country, unless there had been a warrant issued for their arrest (see sn. 666, FCO 187/9). While that throws into confusion the entire policy of issuing Watches to be kept at all Ports, since presumably no action could be taken apart from informing MI5 of the whereabouts of any miscreants, it leaves behind two critical questions: 1) If the pair had at least been detected, why were the authorities not informed immediately, especially if they had been on a Watch List? And 2) What on earth did MI5 and the Foreign Office expect any continental police department to do with such persons, since they had left the country legally and could not be arrested or repatriated under any judiciary pretext?

If the ‘Missing Diplomats’ had been found, what would have happened next? (“We are not ‘Missing Diplomats’”, Burgess and Maclean would have said. “We are friends enjoying a weekend off.”) Why did White and co. fly into such a frenzy? It just throws into clear perspective the muddled thinking behind the whole exercise. Surveillance had not been designed to prevent Burgess and Maclean from skipping the country, but for the purpose of catching them when they had meetings with their contacts. (In the archival material, the ‘flight’ of Burgess and Macean is often described simply as their ‘departure’, indicating the legal nature of their egress.) But the surveillance could not be called off simply because no evidence of meetings had been seen. And the cabal was left struggling with how to handle the accusation that it had been lax and inefficient in letting the duo get away. The British Public did not understand the subtle distinction.

  • 20. Behaviour of Melinda Maclean: How much did she know? When did she really contact the Foreign Office? Did they believe her?

Recent biographers and historians all agree that Melinda Maclean was party to her husband’s escape, had approved it, and planned to join him as soon as was practical. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, Donald had confided to her his affiliation and spying activity in December 1938, and she had lived ever since with the frequent torments that his life of subterfuge provoked. Her eventual eluding of her surveillers, and flight to Moscow, in September 1953, with their children, essentially confirmed her loyalty to her husband and his cause.

The record is predictably fuzzy as to what degree MI5 inquisitors believed the story she told after Donald’s disappearance. Again, the confusion over the dates expressed in the Concordance had misled even Philipps, who trusts what the transcripts of Mrs Grist’s intercepts tell, namely that Melinda did not call the Foreign Office until 10:58 am on Tuesday May 29 – a delay that would only have brought sharper light on her subterfuge. Cecil claimed that she made two calls on the Monday, and that she did not reach Carey-Foster until the afternoon. That makes sense, although, if she had to call a second time, that would cast even greater doubts on the integrity of the Foreign Office’s Chief Security Officer, as one might imagine that the absence of the Prime Suspect on such a critical morning might have prompted a call to the Maclean residence.

Very soon afterwards, on May 30, Jim Skardon interviewed Melinda at her mother-in-law’s flat. Melinda then gave the now familiar explanation of the visit of Roger Stiles, stating that Donald called her on May 25 to say that he was bringing a friend home for dinner. When she learned that the pair would be leaving, and might be away overnight, she described the action as ‘outrageous’, but described her emotions as ‘puzzlement’ rather than anger. She pointed out that they had been expecting Donald’s sister and brother-in-law to visit the next day. Intriguingly, Lady Maclean chimed in with the remarkable insight that she was not very surprised by the news, as ‘it had crossed her mind more than one that he might make a journey over the Channel’. The next day Skardon reported to White that the two ladies ‘gave no useful information’, but he also reported that he would be seeing ‘Mrs CURZON’ again to question her on the identity of Roger Stiles. Later that day he confirmed that he had shown a photograph of Burgess to Melinda: she recognized him immediately.

At a meeting on June 5, Skardon stated that a further interview with Melinda and Lady Maclean was scheduled for June 7. One of the object[ive]s was “of checking Mrs. MACLEAN’s information about the last appearance and movements of her husband on the evening of 25.5.51, about which it is considered that she may not have been wholly truthful” (KV 6/143, sn. 439a). The meeting took place at Beaconshaw, after a fake telegram purporting to have been sent by Donald had arrived. Skardon now described her as ‘worried’ rather than ‘angered’. Melinda went over familiar ground, but corrected her previous recollection, saying that she now believed that Donald had told her about the Roger Stiles invitation on Thursday, May 24. (Skardon did not appear to have asked whether it had been in person, or by telephone.) She also adjusted her estimate for when the pair left, stating that it could have been at 9:30 rather than 10. Whether Skardon’s assessment of Melinda truthfulness had been modified is not stated.

What is surprising is the lack of detailed follow-up on the telephone calls. Using the material at KV 2/4143 (which I have not yet inspected) Phillips trusts the records of the Grist team explicitly, referring to the supposed call from Donald: “But this call, we now know, was not registered by the Beaconshaw tap nor by Donald’s office telephone intercept, so he in fact must have told her in person earlier in the week”, he writes. And there lies the rub of Melinda’s dilemma: it would have been expected of her to make telephone calls in view of her husband’s continued absence, but, if she had done, the interceptors would have immediately been alerted. Moreover, her discussions would have been picked up as well. If Melinda and Lady Maclean did not communicate, and they were both alone (aside from Melinda’s two sons) at their respective homes, how could the listeners conclude from the telechecks that Donald was still at home? It is utterly illogical. If Melinda had not been aware of the telechecks, she would surely have said something about Donald’s absence. If she had been aware of them, her failure to mention it would have been regarded as suspicious. The report from Mrs Grist and her team that ‘there was nothing  . . . on the 26th to indicate Maclean was not at Tatsfield’ does not make sense.

Conclusion

So many loose ends and conflicting information to tidy up. I shall present my analysis next month.

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‘The Missing Diplomats’: Literature Since 1987

U.S. News & World Report, January 3, 1953

Contents:

Introduction

Analysis of Works Since 1987

            Phase 1: Academics and Overseas

            Phase 2: The Soviet Influence

            Phase 3: Authorized History

            Phase 4: The Release of the Archives

            Phase 5: Post-Archival Exploitation

            Phase 6: Further Archival Releases

Conclusions: Paradoxes, Contradictions and Conundrums

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Introduction

In last month’s report, I summarized the accounts of the events surrounding the ‘Missing Diplomats’ in the summer of 1951, focussing on the period up to the release of the TV movie The Fourth Man in 1987. The accounts during this period were largely anecdotal, and based on rumour or possibly unreliable sources who had some ulterior motive. There was one major official pronouncement (from the Home Office in 1955), and it was received with a great deal of scepticism. The appearance of the defectors Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in Australia in 1954, and their contribution to the debate, had reminded some writers that British sources alone could not tell the whole story. Leaks arrived from disgruntled insiders, who were dismayed that the Government was not telling the whole story, but such insights were inevitably intermingled with the distracting tales from those in authority who probably had some objective in covering up the true facts. It was in their interest that confusion remained as the state of the game.

The participants themselves also had something to gain by distorting the truth, either because they had something to hide (Melinda Maclean), or wanted to aggrandize their own contribution (Kim Philby), or to minimize their culpability (Guy Burgess). Goronwy Rees was far more influential than he deserved to be. After his disastrous attempt to open the veil of secrecy in The People in 1956, his memoir published sixteen years later was implicitly trusted (and quoted) much more than it merited. Rees provided much of the material to Andrew Boyle that the latter exploited in The Climate of Treason, but also set some false hares racing in its pages, since he also wanted to minimize the role he had played in collaboration with the Cambridge Spies.  Now it is time to leave the fancies of Robin Chapman behind, and analyze the literature published since 1987. My goal? To present a fresh account of what really happened in the Case of the Missing Diplomats.

As a prelude to my detailed study of the period, I organize it into six rough, but not watertight, segments: 1) Academics and Overseas (1987 to 1994); 2) The Soviet Influence (1994 to 1999); 3) Authorized History (1999 to 2015); 4) The Release of the Archives (2015); 5) Post-archival Exploitation (2015-2018); and 6) Further Archival Releases (2022-2025). I do not believe anything significant has been published since the flurry in 2018.

  1. Academics and Overseas: A more disciplined approach to the material was attempted by Glees (1987) and Cecil (1988), the latter expanding on his brief flurry from 1984, although both projects were flawed by a less than rigorous exploitation of the material at hand, and a susceptibility to being misled by insiders. This period also enjoyed a renewed journalistic offering by Costello (1988), who provided a rather chaotic analysis while bringing some useful insights from an American perspective. A deeper, more sceptical, and serious evaluation was then provided by Newton (1991), who used American source material very carefully.
  2. The Soviet Influence: Startling new testimony came from Modin (1994) and Borovik (1994). While the KGB account contained some probably reliable facts, the opportunity for propaganda was strong, and a degree of wariness in treating their work is essential. Borovik was not an insider, but someone who had to interpret what he was told by Philby and Modin. West and Tsarev collaborated on a work that exploited KGB archives (1998), although the independence of their work must now be questioned. Cave-Brown also made a brief and melodramatic insertion in 1994, while two examples of memoir/biography appeared in this period. Jenny Rees (1994) expanded on her father’s dubious memoir with some personal observations, while Dick White offered his unreliable and occasionally scandalous comments to his biographer, Bower (1995).
  3. Authorized History: Andrew and Mitrokhin, taking advantage of Mitrokhin’s painstaking copying of Soviet archives, were able to publish a breakthrough work in 1999, the assertions of which are probably more reliable than Modin’s. This decade was otherwise quite barren: Carter provided a rich biography of Blunt (2001), which was skillfully compiled, but obviously suffered from having no access to any official archive. After Aldrich provided a brief but informative section in a broader work (2002), the next major study to appear was Andrew’s authorized history of MI5 (2009). This was a colossal disappointment, as Andrew largely just reproduced chunks from his Mitrokhin Archive volume, and he had obviously been steered clear of the critical material, most of which was not housed in MI5 files, but in Foreign and Colonial Office folders. The arrival of Andrew’s work suggested perhaps that the ‘final word’ on the saga had been written, which was a major misapprehension.
  4. The Release of the Archives: Maybe the delay in declassifying so much critical material was deliberate: the authorities may have judged that the public was stunned by now, that individual memory was severely weakened, and that the official account could stand unchallenged. And the method of release was very fragmented, complicating the task for any researcher to apply a disciplined investigation. Yet there were gems to be found in the release of (partial) MI5 files on Burgess and Maclean, on the MI5 view of the Molehunt, as well as on Foreign Office investigations into the leakage of telegrams, the ‘PEACH” (i.e. Philby) inquiry, and assorted related material. A few biographies had preceded these releases, no doubt to the chagrin of the authors. Holzman offered two self-published biographies of Burgess (2012) and the Macleans (2014), both of which dredged up some useful new facts, but skated away from any novel or bold conclusions. Macintyre delivered an engaging but unreliable profile of Philby (2014), while Lownie performed much the same task with his biography of Burgess (2015).
  5. Post-Archival Exploitation: the first work to exploit the recent archival declassification was by Purvis and Hubert (2016), although they had to make hasty revisions to their book just before publication, and had clearly not enjoyed any intensive study of the material. Some of their insights were nevertheless impressive. West’s analysis of the events, focusing on the role of Guy Liddell (2018), was a very erratic work, containing large chunks of extracted material, but ignoring much of the historical evidence, and drawing back when anything controversial cropped up. The same year, Philipps’s biography of Maclean appeared, but he very selectively exploited the fresh archives, and again showed an absence of interest or wonderment at many of the blatant paradoxes that his research threw up. The third major publication in 2018 was Davenport-Hines’s study of the ‘Enemies Within’. It was a hugely entertaining volume, but inconsistent in its use of sources, and boundless in the confidence of its conclusions. It likewise offered no hard, comprehensive analysis of the confusion of ‘facts’ that were still laid out for those prepared to look closely.
  6. Further Archival Releases: In 2022 more Personal Files were released by the National Archives, with those on Victor and Teresa Rothschild, Tomás Harris, Goronwy and Margery Rees, and Jackie Hewit being significant items. While only one potentially significant book has been published since then (Calder Walton’s Spies), a vast new set of material was declassified in January 2025, including MI5’s Personal Files on Philby, Blunt and Cairncross.

Yet the state of the 2015 issuance remains very problematical: as I have described before (see ‘Guy Burgess at Kew’, in https://coldspur.com/summer-2024-round-up/), the records on Burgess are unnecessarily fragmented across scores of files. Nearly all of them are undigitized, and thus not downloadable. For a researcher based in London, that may not be so much of a problem, as they can be scoured for interesting tidbits (and that is the approach that recent writers appear to have taken). It presents a severe problem for me, however. I cannot gauge the relevance or size of most of the files merely by reading their descriptions, and thus giving instructions to my local researcher to photograph what is important can be an expensive and perhaps wasteful process. I shall accomplish what I can.

I predictably believe that the contents of those files are crying out for a serious integrated analysis to include what has gone before, but the energy and dedication required to perform that task may be beyond the bounds of today’s commercially-oriented authors. The various doyens of the industry appear to have lost some of their enthusiasm, or perhaps are reluctant to re-tread ground they have stepped over before. Yet I suspect that the public’s interest in stories about the Cambridge Five, and its latent desire to know what lies behind the durable rumours, and the permanent contradictions, are still strong.

I next offer detailed analysis of all the works listed above.

Phase 1: Academics and Overseas

The Secrets of the Service by Anthony Glees (1987)

Professor Glees is an academic who has specialized in security and intelligence matters. (For the record, I should declare that it was my reading of The Secrets of the Service that prompted me to contact the Professor, which eventually resulted in his acting as supervisor on my doctoral thesis.) He had been fascinated by the apparent secrecy behind the story of the Missing Diplomats: in his words “Those who knew did not want to say; those who did not know were not going to be told”. He was also perturbed by Chapman Pincher’s campaign against Roger Hollis, in which the journalist presented the one-time head of MI5 as a Soviet mole. Glees knew Hollis, and knew his family, and judged that Hollis was very unlikely to have been recruited for such a role, and to have been able to sustain it. He also picked up the accusation that Robert Cecil had openly made against Roger Makins (the future Baron Sherfield), where Cecil appeared to blame Makins for not acting on the fact that Maclean had asked for leave on the half-day of Saturday May 26, namely by not pursuing it aggressively enough with Carey-Foster, the Foreign Office Security Officer. Glees noted that some MI5 and MI6 officers to whom he spoke still argued that Maclean could have been arrested, but for Makins’ indolence. On what grounds he could have been arrested and detained – as opposed to being required to attend an interrogative interview –was not stated.

The main conundrum Glees identified was stated thus: “Why had the two men defected immediately after the decision was made to arrest and interrogate them?”. Glees heroically tried to decode all the messages he was getting, but overall turned out to be a bit too deferential to, and trusting of, what the ‘Great and the Good’ pronounced, or privately told him, from Harold Macmillan (who claimed that Burgess had not been under any suspicion) to the highly deceitful Patrick Reilly, who had been close to the action, and had wanted to conceal what really happened. Glees also appeared to trust the public statements that Anthony Blunt made about his own involvement. In this way, he stumbled somewhat around the key events.  He swallowed whole the notion that there was a Third Man who gave a late tip-off to the miscreants, and that there had indeed been a plan to interrogate Maclean on the morning of May 28. He trusted what Boyle wrote (Boyle having in turn been fed by the awkward and mendacious Carey-Foster) that Philby had been the probable leaker, although he did not seriously inspect the chronology, or attempt to identify the mechanism whereby Philby had both learned of the plan and been able to send a speedy alert to Burgess. He echoed Makins’ assertion that Burgess had ‘decided’ to defect only at the last minute.

Makins did, however, bequeath a very important insight to Glees. He told the author in 1985 that he had been asked (presumably by Dick White) to employ Maclean again in Whitehall ‘in order to keep an eye on what he did’. Makins (then Lord Sherfield) admitted that he had known for several months of the suspicions against Maclean, and that putting him in charge of the American desk was the least sensitive post he could find without raising Maclean’s suspicions. Furthermore, MI5 had told him that Maclean was being trailed only in London, as if that somehow lessened the furtiveness of Makins’ contribution. This was not a very auspicious performance by Makins (who had also came under criticism for his laxity in the matter of Maclean’s Saturday leave), and he was criticized for it.

Glees showed far too much deference to Patrick Reilly, who corresponded with him, Reilly perhaps thinking that the exchange would be forgotten or overlooked. Reilly insisted that the FBI had been kept informed (wrong), that there was no doubt that it was Philby who set Maclean’s escape in train (correct only in a very narrow sense), that Philby was able to engineer Burgess’s recall to organize the escape without any involvement from the Soviet control (wrong), that Philby used contacts in Washington to get a message to Burgess by the morning of May 25 (wrong), and that Maclean was about to be interrogated on May 28 (wrong). What Glees failed to do was to challenge Reilly on any of his points, even to remind his correspondent that the official Home Office pronouncement of 1955 declared that there was no immediate plan to interrogate Maclean. How would Reilly have responded to that? Overall, I judge Glees’s contribution as an opportunity missed, with not enough rigorous preparation carried out before he set himself up to make his inquiries.

A Divided Life by Robert Cecil (1988)

Robert Cecil followed up his 1984 segment [see last month’s posting] with a fuller study of Maclean in 1988. Cecil was in a curious position: he was a career diplomat who had been a close friend and colleague of Maclean’s, both at Cambridge and in the Foreign Office, and was due to replace him at the American desk in London. That association probably stalled his career, and in 1986 he moved to an academic position at the University of Reading. He had also worked for Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6 during the war (a post also enjoyed by Patrick Reilly), and so regarded himself as somewhat of an intelligence insider. He thus brought some unique insights to the inspection of the saga of Burgess and Maclean, but displayed some muddled thinking over the evidence, which resulted in a very equivocal conclusion.

Cecil took great offence at Anthony Glees’s representation of his charges against Makins, characterizing Glees as an ‘ill-informed academic writer’ who had presented Cecil as stating that Makins was essentially responsible for the defections. This was a hypersensitive attack by Cecil, and was possibly prompted by a degree of academic jealousy (after all, Cecil was himself an ‘academic writer’ by then): in fact, casting blame towards Makins was exactly what he had done. Perhaps to compensate for his past institutional disloyalty, he took pains to declare that any allegations that had been voiced that the Foreign Office had been glad to see the back of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were baseless.

His analysis is a mixture of close insights, and woolly thinking. He had some personal experience of the immediate aftermath: he was in Paris on the evening of May 29 (Tuesday), and witnessed the Sûreté carrying out traffic stops in an attempt to find the escapees. On the other hand, he made some odd judgments. He claimed that there was evidence ‘pinpointing’ Maclean as HOMER in late 1950 or early 1951, which was an unfortunate choice of metaphor for that stage of the investigation. He was misguided about Maclean’s status with his controller in London. He wrote that it was implausible that Burgess was essential to the task of abetting the escape, since the NKVD was active in London, and that Maclean decided to break off contact with his control only when he realized that he was being surveilled – pure guesswork on Cecil’s part. He also claimed that Burgess was not being watched, and that there had been no dossier maintained on him at the time. It sounds as if he were merely parroting the party line.

His representation of the final days is also messy and lazy. He did correctly state that there was no decisive meeting on May 25, the day of the escape, but that a decision had been made the previous day to interrogate Maclean some time after May 28. The coincidence, however, did not allow him to dispel the notion that a leakage had occurred, either in Washington or in London, and he imputed some significance to Philby’s ability to send an emergency airmail to Burgess, without any indication of spelling out what he learned when, how quickly the letter arrived, and how Burgess responded to it. He did, however, appear to eliminate Hollis from the list of suspects, informing his readers that the future chief of MI5 never attended any of the meetings held by Sir William Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. He trusted Blunt when the latter asserted that the tickets for the Falaise had been bought some days before, thus undermining the theory of the last-minute alert.

The Oxted Line: Roads and Rail

Cecil gets himself in a tangle over Maclean’s last movements. He wrote that Maclean sometimes varied his commuter routine by travelling to Victoria rather than Charing Cross. On the contrary, Maclean normally travelled from Oxted to Victoria (and back) because it was a fast train, even though the walk from Victoria to the Foreign Office was longer than that from Charing Cross. The 6:10 pm down train split at East Croydon, with the rear four carriages becoming a slow train, halting at stations such as Upper Warlingham and Woldingham, which was closer to the Maclean house in Tatsfield. The drive home from either station avoided the long and steep Titsey Hill, which defined the climb back to the North Downs from Oxted. (For further background on this part of North-East Surrey, please see https://coldspur.com/reviews/some-reflections-on-the-north-downs/.) Thus Maclean could preserve some options by taking the 6:10 train. On the other hand, the Charing Cross train would require a connection at East Croydon. Moreover, Maclean normally left his car at Oxted Station, so he would have to pick it up in the evenings. This misunderstanding, however, leads Cecil to claim that Maclean missed his regular 5:19 pm train from Charing Cross on Friday, May 25, and switched to Victoria.

The Train Timetable: 1951

Matters became out of hand the next morning (Saturday, with half-day working). Cecil writes that when Maclean’s ‘usual train’ arrived (the terminus undefined) without the emergence of Maclean, ‘phones began to ring’. It was then that the Foreign Office and MI5 learned that Maclean had gained leave for that morning (with Makins being regarded as lax), but no one seemed to have raised any red flags. On the Monday, however, events took on a preposterous character. Cecil observes that Melinda Maclean made two calls to the Foreign Office on Monday May 29 [sic!], notifying them of her concern over her husband’s absence. Cecil thus appears to make a slight correction to what he wrote in The Cambridge Comintern, where he gave the date as May 28. This conflict will resurge later in this analysis. The error probably reflects a mis-statement in one of the archival notes, to which Cecil presumably had early and privileged access. Others made the same mistake.

Cecil must be referring to the Monday, however, since he next confirms that Carey-Foster received the call from Melinda, and then verified from the watchers that Maclean had not appeared on the Monday morning train either. That was an astonishing piece of behaviour from Carey-Foster, especially since the Saturday incident should have placed the security officer on guard. Why was the Foreign Office, and Carey-Foster in particular, not informed of Maclean’s absence first thing on Monday morning? After all, Andrew Boyle had strongly implied that Carey-Foster and Makins had told him that Maclean was due to be interrogated that day! Cecil was surely negligent in not following up Carey-Foster’s studied inattention. Lastly, Cecil reports that Robert McKenzie, Carey-Foster’s deputy, who had recently passed through London on his way from Washington to Paris, was invoked in the French capital, and he passed on the information that the Sûreté was already involved in the hunt on the Monday evening. Overall, it is a very ingenuous piece of work by Cecil.

Mask of Treachery by John Costello (1988)

Another, more journalistic, work appeared in 1988. Costello was an ‘encyclopaedist’ in the Cave-Brown tradition, who seemed to hope that, if he recorded in one place all the ‘facts’ that he could assemble, his readers would be able to work out what really happened. Mask of Treachery is thus a rather indigestible mixture, although it does bring some fresh insights from across the Atlantic. The author does not organize his material well, and, each time he appears to be coming to a penetrating insight, he backs off and goes off on a different tangent.

Costello was probably the first to debunk the yarn of the engineered recall of Burgess, pointing out the delays in Burgess’s homecoming, and indicating that Burgess’s mother came out to visit him for a week in April 1951, and that he saw her off on a plane (on which he surely could have accompanied her if he had been in a rush), before returning to Washington and New York. Yet most of his observations are erratic: he states that FBI files show that Burgess knew about his flight to Moscow when he was in Washington, and that it was the FBI that secured a delay in the interrogation of Maclean. He cannot make up his mind as to whether the escape on May 25 was a coincidence, although he skillfully debunks the possibility that Philby could have been an informant to the interrogation which Costello assumes was to take place on May 28. (In this he incidentally attributes the Philby myth directly to what Patrick Reilly told him.) He thus points the finger at a ‘high-ranking mole in MI5’, who tipped off Burgess. He also declares that MI5 lied to the FBI in stating that the interrogation had been put back a fortnight from May 28.

He rightly dismisses the importance of Bernard Miller (Burgess’s friend from the Queen Mary), whose role was merely a placeholder for the berth to be occupied by Maclean on the Falaise. Yet he indulges in fantasy concerning Burgess’s visit to Sonning to see the Reeses, claiming that it was at Moscow’s behest, since the MVD was worried that Rees might ‘rat’ once he learned that Burgess was safe in Moscow. Since Burgess had set up the invitation before he even set foot again in Britain, and had spoken to Rees before he even met Modin in mid-May, that does not make sense. Then Costello suddenly suggests that the submission of papers was calculated ‘to give the birds two days to fly the coop’ – a truly shocking declaration. He fails to follow up on this, but does provocatively announce that officials in Southampton noticed Maclean’s name from a watch-list. Did they do anything, or report it? Costello does not appear to be interested.

The author gets into an unholy muddle over the events of the weekend, and the actions of Rees, Liddell and Blunt thereafter. His lack of methodology is obvious. His final flourish is to assert that Blunt had a clear day to scour Burgess’s flat, and he adds that Rosamond Lehmann in 1970 told him that Rees had helped him. That is probably not a trustworthy piece of input. There were enough leads in Costello’s piece for others to follow up, but anyone interested probably got lost in the morass.

The Cambridge Spies by Verne Newton (1991)

Verne Newton was an American historian who tried to bring a disciplined and methodical approach to the study of the Cambridge Spies in America. He closely inspected the chronology of Burgess’s movements, and he concluded that Philby’s account of the ruse to get Burgess sent back to the UK was a complete fabrication, while offering the opinion that it was absurd to suggest that Moscow needed help from two men three thousand miles away from the action. The claim of manipulating US officials over Burgess’s speeding was ‘absurd’. He explained the delay in Burgess’s being sent home to the fact that Ambassador Franks was in London from March 10 to March 28, and thus did not read the scathing letter from Governor Batlle of Virginia until the end of the month. On April 7, the State Department was told that Franks was consulting with the Foreign Office over what action to take with Burgess. By that time, however, Burgess’s mother had arrived, and she and her son went to Charleston on April 5. That was not the behaviour of someone in a hurry to return to the UK, and Newton reports also that Burgess ‘raged’ when he was told the news about his recall around April 18, which did not give the impression of someone racing to salvage matters in London.

Newton was also, I believe, the first person to report that Burgess bumped into Michael Straight before he left Washington, where Straight gave him a warning about exiting the business. Overall, Newton was dumbfounded about the apparent way that the MVD had sacrificed Philby by insisting that Burgess accompany Maclean, and he suggested that, if Maclean had escaped with a Soviet agent, Philby would at least have not been compromised. That was the main failure of Newton’s analysis: he regrettably had only a hazy idea about what was happening in the UK in those summer months of 1951, and did not appear to have studied the British sources that were available at the time he wrote. Yet he made one startling disclosure, namely that Valentine Vivian flew out to Washington in late March to advise Philby that he should get Burgess moved out. That was surely an extravagant gesture, and also one that indicated that the authorities recognized Burgess as an ominous figure early in the cycle.

Thus Newton’s observations concerning the education of the Americans were shallow. They did not seem to have received proper updates from the British: it was a June 7 wire service that alerted them that Burgess and Maclean were missing. Roger Lamphere of the FBI claimed that he had immediately had a hunch that Phiby had been involved, but no indication of a tip-off was given from London at this time. (In an Endnote, Newton reports that the innocent American student Bernard Miller was first referred to as the possible ‘Third Man’ in the Daily Express of June 21, 1951, but this concept was not pursued. When Percy Hoskins wrote a long article on ‘The Missing Diplomats’ for Argosy in January 1953, he made no mention of tip-offs apart from claiming that Burgess returned to the UK with premonitions of an investigation into Maclean.) The State Department received the ambiguous message from London that Morrison had authorized the interrogation of Maclean on May 25, but that it would not take place ‘until May 28 at the earliest’ – not a very convincing statement, given that May 28 was the next full working day. Despite the fact that Roger Lamphere continued to assert that Philby had tipped off Maclean, Newton countered that Philby could not possibly have learned about the date on which Maclean was to be confronted in time to do anything about it. For some unexplained reason, Newton declared that Burgess never thought that he was leaving Britain for ever. His last thought? Why did the Soviets not simply kill Burgess? By not doing so, they sacrificed Philby.

Newton’s book has some value in its perspective from America, but it was a shame that he could not have applied his fresh and more objective methods to a proper investigation of the stories circulating about the Cambridge Five in London. He was ignorant of Dick White’s scheme with the dossier planted on Harvey, and thus exaggerated Harvey’s role. Solving the overall mystery was not the task he set himself, and he closed out his book with a subset of the conundrums that I list below, but he inevitably waded into that water while missing some of the most problematic aspects of the case.

Phase 2: The Soviet Influence

My Five Cambridge Friends by Yuri Modin (1994)

‘My Five Cambridge Friends’

Any volume published in the name of a KGB officer must be treated with scepticism, even if it did appear after the fall of Communism. Thus the account by Modin, the officer (‘Peter’) who controlled the operation in London in 1951, needs to be treated as an item of propaganda, probably magnifying the ingenuity of Soviet intelligence, and minimizing the contributions of lesser-known figures. It also contains some rather obvious contradictions and errors. For instance, Modin was hopelessly wrong about the interactions of Maclean and Burgess in 1950. He had Burgess working in partnership with Maclean in June 1950, after which Maclean had six months’ rest before returning to work at the Foreign Office, where he sent information to Burgess, not dealing with Modin personally. He then asserted that Burgess and Maclean had been ‘more active than ever’ on June 25, 1950, when North Korea invaded the South. Yet Burgess was posted to Washington in August 1950. Maclean was out of action from the end of May until November. Burgess did not return to the UK until May 1951.

Modin’s first tactic was to erase any notion of a KGB (MVD) controller for Philby in the USA, claiming that, for eighteen months he spent in the USA (August 1949 to February 1951, presumably) he ‘never had the least contact with any KGB agent in the USA’, implying, perhaps that he could have done so from March through May, although Makayev was never mentioned. Yet he claimed, without explaining the medium, that Philby was able to send messages to the London residency as early as autumn of 1949 (before Burgess was available as an emissary), and that Modin and his boss, Korovin, were thus able to forward Philby’s reports (such as on Ukraine parachutists, and those concerning the VENONA programme) to Moscow. Meanwhile, he claimed that Blunt had taken over from Burgess as Maclean’s intermediary to the KGB after Burgess was sent to the USA in August 1950, all of which would tend to indicate that Maclean was not isolated, that the London Residency knew what was going on, and that Burgess was not needed to facilitate the escape.

Nevertheless, Modin boosted the story of Philby’s involvement. He granted Philby and Burgess the benefit for taking the initiative when the HOMER short-list was reduced to three in January, and with deciding that both Maclean and the residency should be warned. He next appeared to forget about the established link to London, and accepted that the speeding ruse of February was genuine, since Philby had decided that Burgess needed to go to London to give the alert. He skipped to April 16, when he noted that Burgess had received his notice, and was told that he would leave Washington ‘at the earliest opportunity’. Philby apparently told Burgess just before he left that he was to arrange the defection, but that he must not abscond with Maclean. According to what Modin had already written, Burgess’s involvement was all very unnecessary, and his account sounds very bogus.

After Burgess’s return, his presence did help to take the attention off Blunt, since, if Blunt had been in Maclean’s presence that late in the investigation, it would have endangered him. Even so, Modin had Blunt telling Modin that the arrest would take place in a matter of days, even hours, but that Maclean was at breaking-point, and would not survive interrogation. Thereafter, Modin had Burgess playing a leading role in the conspiracy. After meeting Modin and Korovin, he was ordered to contact Maclean and to persuade (?) him that there was no alternative to defection. At this stage, no suggestion of Burgess’s accompanying Maclean was made. Maclean, however, got sentimental, and claimed that, because of his past affection for Paris, he would never be able to move past the French capital on the road to Moscow. (As if that would stop the KGB, with its ability to anaesthetize and smuggle bodies.) Meanwhile, Maclean was told to involve his wife in the facts of the exfiltration.

Matters then took a strange turn, which confounded Modin. Moscow ordered Burgess to accompany Maclean as a travelling companion, with the pretext that he would be able to return at some stage during the journey to Moscow. Burgess doubted that he would ever make it back, and Modin could not understand why Burgess had agreed to flee without any guarantee of return: his disappearance would immediately incriminate Philby. Modin was puzzled that Moscow could not design some other mechanism for guiding Maclean through France. The Centre, however, showed no concern about Burgess, since he had lost his value. One might conclude (although Modin did not say so) that Moscow had therefore given up on Philby, too. Thus the final stages of the plan were put into motion.

Modin offered a conventional account of the escape: the identification of the Falaise (which Modin claimed he did himself); the purchase of the tickets, with Miller as a false trail; the rented car; the rush to Southampton; the calls from Melinda on Monday morning; the removal by Blunt of items in Burgess’s flat. Modin did nevertheless seem to accept that a decision had been made on May 25 to interrogate Maclean on May 28, while indicating that there had been no leakage, and that it had all been coincidence and good fortune. He still questioned why Burgess had not turned back at Prague, but his return to the UK would immediately have put him under a barrage of questions. And – even though Modin did not state it – that was something that neither Moscow, nor the Foreign Office and MI5, would have wanted.

Modin’s account received a withering review in Hamrick’s Deceiving the Deceivers. Appendix B of that work offers a lively and incisive critique of the feeble attempt by Modin to weave a coherent story from the soup of Philby deceptions, KGB disinformation, and rumours from third parties, of which Modin knew little. It is essential reading.

Treason in the Blood by Anthony Cave-Brown (1994)

Cave-Brown made a brief, awkward insertion in 1994. He somehow interpreted Burgess’s ‘dawdling’ in South Carolina after the motoring offence, and complaint to the Ambassador, as ‘giving Donald Maclean more time’, which was not an asset that he needed. He accepted that Morrison agreed that the interrogation should start on May 28, and noted that Modin did not explain how he learned about that ‘fact’. Cave-Brown also remarked that Maclean’s disappearance was noticed on Monday morning, when he did not appear for work, and yet the remarkable thing about other testimony is that Maclean’s absence was not openly admitted until Melinda Maclean rang the Foreign Office. Sensing darker goings-on, Cave-Brown observed that, in view of Melinda’s story, the Foreign Office was in ‘damage control’, but the writer did not have the nous to pursue this thought.

The Philby Files by Genrikh Borovik (1994)

Hard on the heels of Modin’s contribution arrived Borovik’s expanded account. Borovik was a journalist who conducted interviews with Philby, and claimed that the KGB had shown him excerpts from Philby’s file. He also had conversations with Modin. Borovik showed that he could get out of his depth in the sea of disinformation that naturally swamps these affairs, but he did offer some useful insights.

Contrary to what Modin wrote, Borovik stated that Philby did have vicarious consultations with his Soviet controllers in the winter of 1950-1951, but that Maclean had not had contact for two years, ever since his return from Cairo. Probably because of that, he trusted what Philby told him, namely that the only certain way to warn Maclean was to send Burgess over, and that Philby, Burgess and the intermediary in the USA (unnamed, but the ‘illegal’ Makayev) had agreed that Maclean had to defect. Why Borovik chose to ignore Modin’s testimony that Blunt had been able to act as go-between between Modin and Maclean is not clear. He added that Philby was concerned about Maclean’s ability to stand up to interrogation, although, as he had not seen Maclean since 1940, the reasoning behind that supposition was also fuzzy, and he contradicted his own evidence when he later added that Philby said that it was a mistake to dispatch Maclean then, as he could have rejected all the charges, and slipped away later. Philby apparently was confident that he could withstand interrogation, although he realized that his career would probably be over if the escape were successful.

Thereafter Borovik echoes most of the Modin story, namely about Maclean’s frailty and sentimentality, the decision made by London (or Moscow) that Burgess was safer in Moscow, too, and the bogus offer to have Burgess accompany Maclean before turning back. Borovik blames the KGB for betraying both Burgess and Philby, while he reports Philby’s bitterness over Burgess, believing that it had been Burgess’s decision to accompany Maclean, despite Philby’s strong plea in Washington that he should not do so. Philby harboured that resentment until Burgess died, never even visiting him in hospital on his deathbed. Yet Borovik had one last cracker in his bag: he wrote that Jack Easton, the assistant chief of MI6, in early June 1951 sent a hand-written letter to Philby alerting him to an imminent telegram from London the content of which would be to demand his recall. Philby interpreted this as a possible hint that defection might be appropriate. He did in fact have a plan to do so, through Mexico, but judged that circumstances were not dire enough to warrant such a move at that juncture. If this is reliable information, it bolsters considerably the theory that the British authorities would have rather seen all the spies (and suspected spies) conveniently shoved off to Moscow.

Looking for Mr. Nobody by Jenny Rees (1994, rev. 2000)

‘Looking for Mr. Nobody’

Goronwy Rees’s daughter Jenny (who, as a young girl, had been entertained by Burgess in Sonning on that May day in 1951) offered some fresh insights based primarily on what her aunt Mary had witnessed during Burgess’s visit. Overall, Jenny was orthodox in following what her father had written. She writes that Goronwy received two letters from Burgess ‘in the spring of 1951’ – a vague qualification, of course, but reinforcing the importance that Burgess assigned to speaking to Rees as one of his more urgent tasks. Mary told Jenny that Burgess had insisted to Rees that he had got into trouble with the car on purpose – but that may have been part of the deception. Mary also learned that, after Burgess left, Goronwy told his wife, Marge, that he, Burgess, was still a spy, a disclosure that rather undermines the message that Burgess had successfully persuaded Rees to keep silent about his activities.

As far as the important phone calls of the weekend are concerned, the author reinforces the somewhat strained sequence of events. Rees was at All Souls, of course, and on the morning of May 26 (the Saturday) Marge telephoned him to ask, first of all, whether Guy had gone to see him there, as she had received a call from Burgess’s flat-mate (Jackie Hewit, but unnamed), who had called her, and seemed rather hysterical about Guy’s absence. Why Hewit would call the Rees household is not explained: perhaps he had been put up to it, but Burgess knew that Rees was going to be away that weekend. Only after she had relayed that message did Marge go on to explain to her husband that she had received a very strange telephone call from Burgess the previous day, in which Guy was almost completely incoherent. She claimed that she had not paid much attention to what he was saying, but one wonders why she simply did not put the telephone down. Yet the fact of Burgess’s incomprehensible call should probably have been the first thing to report to her husband.

Despite having paid little attention, Marge was able to recall some of what Burgess had said when Goronwy arrived back in Sonning on Sunday evening, and that led to his leaping to the conclusion that Guy had departed for Moscow, setting in train the series of calls that Rees made to Footman and Blunt. It is noteworthy that Jenny writes of Footman ‘with whom he worked at MI6’ – not ‘had worked’ – appearing to confirm that Rees was still working for MI6 during this period, if only part-time. She then adds little to the version of events provided by her father, although she does report that Goronwy, in a very distraught state, very soon afterwards met Stuart Hampshire at a party, and Hampshire told him to do nothing about what he wanted to disclose, and instead to wait it out – advice that he later considered was poor. Lastly, she informs us that Burgess’s telephone call from the Reform Club to the Rees household on May 25 had not been paid for, and that the fact of non-payment was put up on a notice-board for members and inquisitive journalists to see. That was surely another example of Burgess’s flamboyant behaviour in trying to draw attention to his strangled appeals for help in his predicament. It immediately brough unwished-for publicity to the Rees family, and embroiled Goronwy in the saga even more tightly.

The Perfect English Spy by Tom Bower (1995)

The journalist Tom Bower picked up the project of writing a biography of Dick White from Andrew Boyle, who had died in 1991 at the age of seventy-one. He thus assembled his story from inherited notes as well as fresh conversations with White and other participants in the saga of the Missing Diplomats. White gave him a very cagey and deceptive account of events: it is difficult to divine a coherent story from the fragments he provided.

White’s first point is that MI5 had vetoed surveillance at the Maclean house in Tatsfield, presumably because it was too exposed. Yet he hints at the fact that the dwelling was bugged (it was), by indicating that MI5 recorded Burgess’s initial call to Maclean. Amazingly, White claims that he was unaware that Burgess had been ordered home, and he blames Geoffrey Patterson, the representative in Washington, for being remiss. He states, also, that Modin was also unaware of Burgess’s arrival, and learned the fact when he had his regular meeting with Blunt the day after the landing. On the other hand, he blandly echoes the story that Philby and Burgess had engineered the latter’s return to the UK. What is also important is the fact that White twice told Bower that Burgess, before the escape, was not suspected of any complicity, and that he did not believe that Burgess was a spy ‘at the beginning’ (of the investigation, presumably). (As I explained in the Special Bulletin earlier this month, the recently-released PEACH archive proves that Burgess was under suspicion already.)

Modin instructed Burgess to contact Maclean, and White was of the opinion that it was Korovin’s plan that Maclean should flee as soon as possible. Moscow approved the plan, and, since the KGB could not provide an officer to meet Maclean in France (‘leave arrangements, old man’?), Burgess was ordered to accompany Maclean to France, and then to return. Burgess declined this offer, but Korovin apparently convinced him he would be able to get back in time. On the timing of the interrogation, White shows some confusion. He claims that Carey-Foster had sent a message to the FBI indicating that Maclean would be handed over on May 28, and that this happened the same day that Philby wrote to Burgess about the ‘heat’ in Washington. Yet that date, May 21, is impossibly early for the confirmation of Morrison’s decision, and, in any case, as the archives will show, no such information was passed to the FBI at that time, as the Foreign Office and MI5 wished to keep them in the dark still.

White blames Carey-Foster (rather than Makins) for not letting MI5 know that Maclean had taken leave on May 26 – another contradiction, but he does confirm that Carey-Foster received a call from Melinda Maclean at 10:15 on Monday morning. He skates around the hectic communications following that discovery, although he points out (without explaining how the news was received) that Burgess was shown to have been the renter of the car found abandoned in Southampton docks. Liddell informs him and Carey-Foster of the Goronwy Rees episodes (the calls to Footman and Blunt), but White omits to mention that, when he tried to leave for Paris the next morning, he was turned back at the airport since his passport had expired.

The account finishes with a typical Whitean flourish. He asserts that Blunt did indeed manage to check out Burgess’s flat for incriminating papers when Liddell asked him for the keys, and he then describes the various meetings between Rees and Liddell, and Rees and himself. With Liddell conveniently long dead by now, he judges that Liddell himself may have been party to the conspiracy, thus explicitly suggesting that there was some sort of collaboration between MI5-MI6 and the escapees, but one that White himself was nobly detached from. It is a shabby performance. For further analysis of White’s machinations at this time – concerning his planting evidence with the FBI to incriminate Philby – please read  https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/ and https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-tangled-web/.  

The Crown Jewels by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev (1998)

The collaboration between Tsarev and West, abetted by some co-operation from the KGB, shed little light on the events of May 1951, but did disclose some revealing facts about Goronwy Rees, whose connections with the Cambridge Five were perhaps more ominous than he made out. Despite Burgess’s claiming that public opposition to the Nazi-Soviet Pact in September 1939 provided solid justification for severing the relationship between the Comintern and Rees, the KGB archives showed that, as late as 1943, Burgess was still talking about disconnecting him. Moreover, Rees had been given a new cryptonym, FLIT, in place of GROSS, that suggested he was still considered an asset by Moscow Centre. It was at this stage that Burgess raised the question of having Rees eliminated.

In November 1944, Burgess informed his controller Kreshin that Rees had been offered a job by David Footman in MI6, but, a few months later, in March 1945, Burgess claimed that he had talked Footman out of recruiting him, suggesting that the Footman-Burgess relationship was also tighter than it should have been. As we have learned elsewhere, Rees did in fact join MI6 soon afterwards. Nevertheless, Rees was still working furtively with Burgess, as he had tipped him off in 1949 of the imminent arrival of Alex Halpern from the USA. Burgess feared that Rees had Valentine Vivian’s ear, and that Rees might thereby betray him, although he sensed that Rees would do no more than hint, because of his lucrative position with MI6. Anthony Blunt, meanwhile, was very aware of the fact that Burgess had briefly passed Rees on to him in 1939, and that he was clearly in a position where he (Rees) could compromise him. Yet Rees’s darker secrets would perhaps always constitute an inhibitor.

Phase 3: Authorized History

The Sword and the Shield by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (1999)

The painstaking exercise undertaken by Vladimir Mitrokhin in copying and secreting a vast number of KGB papers during their transfer to a new vault has provided us with an authentic lode, although not all the items may be genuine. In other words, documents with false information may have been inserted into the files. The process of allowing Andrew exclusive access to, and interpretation of, the file under Secret Service supervision has been criticized, too. For example, David Caute, in Red List, has drawn attention to Andrew’s appointment by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, and has pointed out ‘the dangers of granting unique access to one pair of eyes reflecting one perspective, exempt from alternative scrutiny’. Nevertheless, The Sword and the Shield indeed sheds some valuable light. It confirms some important details about Philby’s cut-out, Makayev, indicating that he carried a false Polish passport in the name of Kovalik, and that he left Gdynia on March 5, 1950 with the purpose of his mission to serve Philby. After Burgess’s arrival, Guy acted as an intermediary to Makayev, seeing him in New York on the pretext of visiting Maclean’s brother Alan. At some stage Philby started meeting Makayev in person.

Mitrokhin is a bit sluggish in representing the pace of the HOMER inquiry, but appears to echo the Modin thesis that the credit should be given to Philby and Burgess for coming up with the plan to warn Maclean, finessing the circumstances of Burgess’s recall. According to the files, when Burgess was sent to Maclean to instruct him to defect, Burgess judged that he might decline, because of the need to abandon Melinda: this spravka may have been inserted to protect Melinda’s knowledge and collaboration. On May 17, the London residency was told that Burgess had to accompany Maclean, and Burgess, because of the promise he had made to Philby, became hysterical when he was given the order. The rezident, Rodin, then promised Burgess that he would be free to return: Burgess presumably believed him.

The chronology, characteristically for many of these accounts, then goes a little awry. Moscow Centre was under the impression that Morrison had secretly authorized the interrogation, while the residency believed it would be on May 28, and accordingly made plans for the escape the previous weekend. (The impression is that this was based on an earlier statement of intention by the Foreign Office and MI5, and not any sudden late change on May 24 or May 25.) Burgess was thus instructed to buy tickets on the Falaise. A stock description of the abscondment follows, until Burgess is told in Moscow that he will not be allowed to return. A few loose ends finalize the account: Makayev found Philby very alarmed on May 24, although Philby did not learn the truth until five days later. Makayev let Philby down over a dead-letter box, and was punished for it. Blunt was reported as clearing Burgess’s flat, but he overlooked the Cairncross notes that Colville recognized. Lastly, the book states that Philby never realized that Burgess’s defection was not due to a loss of nerve, but was instead caused by a cynical deception by the KGB.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter (2001)

‘Anthony Blunt: his lives’

Carter struggles valiantly with a host of conflicting inputs. (She interviewed well over a hundred persons during her research: whether that process leads to clarity or contradiction I cannot say.) She uses her base date as March 30, 1951, when Maclean was solidly identified, but then asserts that MI5 decided to delay a search of the Maclean home until June, because of Melinda’s pregnancy – an odd observation, as if a trawl through the house at that stage would unearth anything incriminating. She accepts the ruse of Burgess’s motoring offences, at the same time stating that Modin’s account cannot be trusted. She has Hewit meeting Burgess and Miller at Southampton, whereafter Burgess went straight to Blunt, who became the go-between to Modin. She judges that Burgess’s hasty visit to Rees (now a ‘zealous anti-communist’) was to gauge whether Rees would tell his secret if the Maclean business blew up.

The days leading up to the escape are fairly conventionally described: Maclean wanted a companion, but Burgess resisted, until he was pressured by Modin to go part of the way. Burgess buys the tickets on the Falaise earlier in the week, but then behaves ‘waywardly’. Carter records Burgess’s call to Margery Rees, and then jumps to Hewit, who reputedly called Blunt on Sunday evening in despair over Burgess’s absence. Against Blunt’s advice, Hewit then called Rees (an event not recorded by him), and Rees went on to call David Footman (‘an old MI6 contact’, but probably still such) and Blunt. When Blunt tried to persuade Rees to keep silent, Carter observes that it was already too late, as Footman had been in touch with Liddell. She has Blunt calling Liddell on May 29, whereupon Liddell gave him the news. It was then, when Liddell asked for the keys to Burgess’s flat, that Blunt was able to get in early and scoop up some items.

Overall, Carter was misled on several counts: the biography is not very enlightening, although the tabulation of the weekend’s telephone-calls will prove useful in a later assessment.

The Hidden Hand by Richard J. Aldrich (2002)

Aldrich does not write much about the Missing Diplomats, but his passages in The Hidden Hand are significant because of his presumed authority as an expert, and the fact that Christopher Andrew cites them in his authorized history of MI5. He starts off with a very casual and confident claim, namely that it was Philby’s tip-off that allowed Burgess and Maclean to ‘evade surveillance and flee eastwards’ – an utterly irresponsible assertion. Yet Aldrich (Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick) is quick to point out that much of the writing on the case has been anecdotal biography, ‘from the Hello! Magazine school of intelligence history’. He has Strang breaking the news about Maclean to Morrison on April 17, when he suggests that MI5 delve into the suspect’s background (as if that had not already been undertaken quite thoroughly already), and on May 25 the Foreign Office proposes that Maclean should be interviewed between June 18 and June 25 – thus apparently scotching the popular story that Maclean was due to be hauled in on May 28. Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison did not know about the VENONA transcripts, and the problem of evidence, and was thus puzzled why MI5 needed to wait four weeks. He was not told that the pair had disappeared until May 29.  Aldrich concludes by noting that the Foreign Office conceded that Morrison had not been told of the suspicions of Philby as the tipoff man.

Aldrich does offer, however, a valuable insight into the way that Morrison (who had only recently replaced Ernest Bevin) was kept in the dark by his Foreign Office bureaucrats. Late in 1955 (after the White Paper had been published) Morrison made some discreet inquiries among his friends, and he discovered that Maclean had lunched with Anthony Blake the day before he escaped. In October he spoke to Blake, who told him that Maclean had been very relaxed, adding that he was sure ‘that he had been tipped off some time after and at very short notice’. That sounds more like a post hoc rationalization, but Blake added that Maclean had always been a fervent Communist, that the White Paper had been misleading about the longevity of his commitments, and that he himself had been shocked to learn that Maclean had gained entry to the Foreign Office with such a background. Aldrich used the Morrison papers as the authority for this story.

Deceiving the Deceivers by S. J. Hamrick (2004)

‘Deceiving the Deceivers’

Certainly out of place in a section titled ‘Authorized Histories’ is S. J. Hamrick’s convoluted and very weird extended hypothesis about MI5 counter-espionage, Deceiving the Deceivers. I include it primarily because of the way it abuses the facts of early 1951, but also for what may turn out to be more valuable insights about the use of VENONA, and the possibility that Maclean had been identified as HOMER as early as 1949. For a fuller critique of the book, and for my interpretation of Hamrick’s theory, I strongly encourage readers to turn to my 2019 story about Dick White’s plotting to plant accusatory information on the FBI, at https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/. There you will learn that (according to Hamrick’s fertile imagination) Philby was sent out Washington in 1949, Burgess was retrieved from ignominy to join him in the summer of the next year, and Maclean was re-instated at the American desk in London, after his destructive behaviour in Cairo, in November 1950, all for the purposes of providing disinformation about US/GB nuclear weapons – at a time when both Philby and Maclean had no direct contact with the MGB, by the way. This was all Dick White’s scheme, apparently, whereby he also hoped to entrap all three of the known (or suspected) Soviet agents.

What Hamrick did bring to the table was a close inspection of the VENONA records, concluding that GCHQ concealed the results of its early decryptions. He thus managed to indicate that the official identification of Maclean as HOMER in April 1951 occurred two years later than the date on which it actually was resolved, and that the institution was caught on the back foot by the US revelations concerning VENONA in 1995. It will be worth inspecting the supportive detail for these claims, especially since we now have a paper-trail of the (supposed) investigations into HOMER that took place in 1950 and 1951 – on the sluggishness of which I have myself remarked. It may well be that White was able to delay the fruits of Eastcote’s labours for some purpose. Yet Hamrick is hopelessly confused and contradictory when it comes to the timetable for Philby’s sending Burgess back to London (a ‘fact’ he accepts). For example, he describes Philby as having known since September 1949 that Maclean was under suspicion, but a few lines later has him meeting Makayev in May 1951 for help in removing Maclean from England. Moreover, Philby had sent Burgess home as late as April (!), having learned about the critical VENONA decryption: Hamrick ignores all the shenanigans with Burgess and the Embassy. One of the many problems with Hamrick’s narrative is that it is never clear when he is just re-presenting established wisdom and when he is promoting one of his crackpot theories.

Defend the Realm [US title] by Christopher Andrew (2009)

A few years passed before the long-awaited authorized history of MI5 appeared. One might have expected the Professor (now Emeritus Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cambridge) to have been able to exploit some relevant MI5 and Foreign Office files. Yet, for the critical period leading up to May 25 he offers only three items from ‘Security Service Archives’ – all unidentified, of course – and none at all from Foreign Office, or Foreign and Colonial Office files. The three are all fairly inconsequential items to do with surveillance, or the lack of it, and it appears that Andrew was not allowed to inspect the whole file on the surveillance. He thus relies primarily on Philby, Modin, Aldrich and Mitrokhin for his sources, with a couple of references to Borovik and Costello-Tsarev.

Andrew’s account turns out to be primarily a rehash of what he wrote in The Sword and the Shield: the role of Makayev, the plan hatched by Philby and Burgess, the insistence that Burgess accompany Maclean, and Burgess’s resistance, the plans made the previous weekend; the residency’s discovering the Falaise opportunity, and Burgess being commanded to book the tickets. Most of the details between Burgess’s arrival and the escape day of May 25 are skipped over: Andrew relies on Aldrich for the proposal to interrogate Maclean in June, but claims that the London residency believed that Maclean was going to be arrested on May 28 (but he does not explain how it gained this insight). Yet he ignores what Aldrich wrote about Philby’s tip-off. Why Andrew should be so reliant on a secondary source, but then selectively use what that source wrote without exploring the contradictions is an enigma in its own right.

Yet the issuance of an ‘authorized’ account was presumably designed to quash any inquisitive minds, as if the last word on the episode had been written. MI5 and the Foreign Office must have felt fairly pleased with themselves, and, after a few years of letting the dust settle, showed their generosity by releasing a shaft of files that undermined what their chosen historian had written. I do not know what was Andrew’s reaction to inspecting the 2015 batch (I assume that he has done so). Defend the Realm definitely needs a revision.

The Petrov Files (2011)

In 2011 an enormous trove of records, designated as the Personal File on Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who defected in Australia in 1954, was released to the National Archives in Kew. It contains not only the complete transcripts of the Australian Royal Commission Investigation into Soviet Espionage, and its final Report, but a very rich record of exchanges between MI5 and its Security Liaison Officer in Canberra in the years 1954, 1955, and 1956, including some very revealing memoranda about Burgess and Maclean. I do not believe that anyone has performed justice to it yet. (I shall present my initial analysis next month.)

Treachery by Chapman Pincher (2011 & 2012)

I include this volume only because it is the book that probably has been read the most, while it has had an influence completely disproportionate to its value.  Pincher covered the saga of the Missing Diplomats without providing any references, and he was exceedingly neglectful of the need to provide proper dating of the events. He clearly had access to some Security Service records not yet released, and was undoubtedly assisted by Peter Wright. He clumsily inserted Roger Hollis as a regular accomplice to Dick White, since his objective was to prove that Hollis was a Soviet mole. He accepted that Burgess’s trip home was engineered by Philby, and he declared that Maclean was indeed about to be hauled in on May 28, just after he disappeared. He made many other mistakes.

Guy Liddell’s Diaries

In 2012, Guy Liddell’s Diaries were declassified, and released to the National Archives. The entries for 1951 appeared as KV 4/473. They are an indispensable resource for understanding the events of this year – or for any of the other years when Liddell was active. Overall, they are probably very reliable, although Liddell was guilty of some occasional dissimulation. And they have been redacted – severely, in some places. Many of the individual names redacted can be confidently assessed, from context and from other sources, but large chunks of text have been irretrievably lost. The act of censorship itself points to the fact that what Liddell wrote must have been far too sensitive to be revealed, and a variety of ‘traffic analysis’ can constitute an important part of the intellectual process of interpreting such passages.

Phase 4: The Release of the Archives

In the hiatus before the critical archives were declassified, a few relevant biographies appeared. Michael Holzman, an American described simply as a ‘writer’, supplied two of them, both self-published. Guy Burgess: Revolutionary in an Old School Tie (2012) displays his approach of digging around in obscure places to reveal fresh facts, but Holzman never applies any rigorous methodology to the treatment of his material. Thus he discovers that Wilfred Mann (listed by Boyle as a possible conspirator) echoes the story of Philby’s ruse in getting Burgess home, and ascribes to Philby the foresight to have made plans well before the reduction of the short-list of suspects in mid-April. He sheds some fresh light on Burgess’s movements that spring, including a visit to W. H. Auden in New York on March 17. Holzman has inspected Blunt’s memoir at the British Library, and appears to trust what the spy wrote, for instance that it was Burgess’s own decision that he should defect, even though Burgess told him he had been ordered to do so. He also adds that Burgess visited Blunt at Portman Square on the afternoon of May 25 to say ‘goodbye’. He reinforces the notion that Bernard Miller was a ‘pick-up’ on the Queen Mary, and that Hewit, having been introduced to Miller when the latter arrived from Paris on May 21, called him in the morning of May 26 in an attempt to discover where Burgess was. All in all, it is a flat and uninspiring account.

Holzman took up his pen again in a treatment of the Macleans in 2014, namely Donald and Melinda Maclean: Idealism and Espionage. The work is even less enthralling than his book on Burgess. He informs us that Tatsfield could be reached by train and taxi via Oxted, perhaps a journey of two hours, which is both overstated and irrelevant, and writes that Maclean was receiving highest-classification papers as late as April 5. Thereafter he muses about the possible motives and intentions of the Soviets without ever coming off the fence, while reinforcing the notion that Miller was ‘Burgess’s last lover’. Lastly, he throws in the notion that a decision was taken to interrogate Maclean on the morning of May 28, but lazily does not explore this newly-found datum.

A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre (2014)

Macintyre brought his celebrated journalistic flair to his 2014 study of Philby. It contains some shrewd insights, quite a few unsupported assumptions, as well as many careless mistakes. He has little to say on the escape, but the build-up at Philby’s end should have revealed useful information. He describes Philby’s briefing on the HOMER investigation before he leaves for Washington – but oddly does not mention Maurice Oldfield. He introduces Makayev by claiming that the Soviet illegal managed to inform Philby that he had arrived, and that they would ‘rendezvous at different points between New York and Washington, in Baltimore or Philadelphia’, but Macintyre provides no source for this startling tale. Furthermore, he then explains that Burgess was able to act as a courier soon after he arrived, taking information to Makayev in New York. In June 1950, Philby learned that the VENONA project had identified an important spy active in 1945 in the British network with the cryptonym STANLEY – himself.

It was only when Philby heard of the critical decryption involving Melinda Maclean in New York that he apparently ‘demanded’ that Maclean be extracted before interrogation, and Macintyre echoes the dubious story that Philby’s delay was occasioned by Moscow’s insistence that Maclean stay in place. Here Macintyre correctly interprets the Burgess recall as an item of luck, an opportunity to warn Maclean, yet puts an odd spin on the saga. Maclean would be warned by ‘a third party who would not arouse suspicion’, a rather naïve observation given Burgess’s recent track-record.  He further slips up by saying that the plan would involve Burgess’s contacting the Soviets in London: of course he did no such thing, using Blunt as go-between. Thereafter, Macintyre trots out aspects of the error-prone familiar story (Tatsfield in Kent, Miller the ‘boyfriend’), and echoes the claim that Modin thought Maclean would be interrogated on Monday, May 28, without commenting on whether that belief had any relevance to the escape plan. He adds that the escape plan ‘swung into action’ only on May 25, but it had been in the works for some days. Lastly, he has Modin insisting that Burgess accompany Maclean, but later acknowledging that ‘allowing’ Burgess to leave had been an error. He provides the information that Special Branch reported that a car hired by Guy Burgess had been abandoned at Southampton, but does not provide any timing for this important event. Overall, it is a gripping but rather shallow story.

Stalin’s Englishman by Andrew Lownie (2015)

‘Stalin’s Englishman’

Andrew Lownie, perhaps better known as a literary agent, outdid Miranda Carter in the number of persons he acknowledged for helping him in his biography of Burgess, with a cast of over two hundred listed. A writer needs good discriminatory powers to separate the gold from the dross when treating input from so many sources. While that exercise may have enabled Lownie to provide a rich scrapbook of his subject’s activities, it did not lead to any greater clarity on the escape. He recapitulates the summons of Burgess to Ambassador Franks’ office, but then interjects that Burgess went over the ‘escape plan’ with Philby on April 30 – surely a premature assessment. He then has Blunt meeting Burgess at Southampton, where they immediately discuss plans for Maclean’s exfiltration – another item of inaccurate chronology. For Burgess’s return to the flat in new Bond Street, and his reunion with Hewit on May 9 (thus contradicting other accounts that have Hewit welcoming Burgess at Waterloo Station), he relies on Hewit’s ‘unpublished memoir’. The provenance of this work does not appear to be acknowledged anywhere else, and its reliability (let alone its existence) should probably not be trusted very implicitly. It is here, however, that Hewit discloses the ‘wads of money’ he found in Burgess’s suitcase.

Lownie’s mingled yarn then borrows from Modin, Roland Perry, Andrew, Costello/Tsarev, and what Patrick Reilly told him. Reilly told him that Carey-Foster had recommended that Burgess be surveilled, too (probably correct), but Lownie next oddly remarks that Maclean was tailed to and from Victoria and [sic] Charing Cross each day to the ‘little station at Tatsfield’ (there was, of course, no such edifice). Before Moscow sent detailed plans for the escape on May 17, the final plans for interrogation were drawn up on May 15 (Reilly), and the group met in Strang’s office again on May 21, where Dick White pressed for a delay in informing the FBI, in case Maclean happened to crack and incriminate himself soon. Somehow, the plans were telegraphed to Philby on May 24: Reilly told Lownie that the interrogation was due to begin the week of May 28, and Lownie notes that Reilly’s papers at the Bodleian Library indicate that it would probably take place on the Monday.

The author offers some fascinating details about the fateful week that culminated in the escape. Bernard Miller arrived from Paris on May 21, and was introduced to Hewit and others. Hewit was then told that Burgess and Miller were going away for a weekend together: this may not have pleased Burgess’s housemate, but it throws into a cocked hat the notion that Hewit would have been ‘hysterical’ when Burgess did not return by Saturday morning. Hewit also recalled (in his notorious memoir) that Burgess told him that he was helping a friend from the Foreign Office, and that he would be back on Monday, at which Hewit outrageously claimed that he guessed that the friend was Donald Maclean. Meanwhile, Burgess had booked the berth on the Falaise in the names of himself and Miller, and was laying the false trails about his intended itinerary.

Suddenly, Lownie inserts a valuable archival reference, from the Security Conference of Privy Counsellors (CAB 134/1325, declassified in December 2006), in which Morrison’s decision of May 25 to interrogate Maclean the following month is made explicit. (Lownie overlooks the clash with Reilly’s testimony.) He records Burgess’s visit to Blunt on May 25 (probably from Hewit, again), and then relates the awkwardness of Roger Makins when he bumped into Maclean in the Foreign Office courtyard around 6:00 pm and learned about Maclean’s day off, but could not find Carey-Foster to verify that leave had been granted. Maclean then caught the ‘usual train’ from Charing Cross: not only was it the wrong terminus, but Maclean would not have been able to catch the 6:10 from Victoria if Makins’s timetable is correct. Whatever the circumstances, Burgess arrived at the Tatsfield house shortly after Maclean arrived.

The plot is lost completely after that. Lownie relies on West’s Molehunt (see above) to report that an immigration official at Southampton had noticed Maclean’s name on a watch list, and that he ‘immediately rang MI5’s operational headquarters in London, Leconfield House, where a number of officers were still planning the Monday interview’. So much for Morrison’s approval for a June interrogation. The inability to cross-check one’s own facts (and for Nigel West, who is thanked for checking the script, not to notice the anomaly) is unforgiveable. Lownie then adds a provocative flourish: Winston Churchill was reportedly informed of the abscondment at Chartwell on the Saturday, May 26.

It was not the last of the contradictions, however. Lownie writes that Hewit called Blunt on the evening of May 26 to tell him that Burgess had not returned from his ‘overnight trip’ (when it was for the weekend). Yet Lownie also cites Freeman & Penrose (Conspiracy of Silence), who actually wrote (based on an interview with Hewit in 1985) that Hewit was perturbed at the fact that Burgess had not returned on Sunday evening, and thought he might have stayed with Blunt that night. Hewit did not call Blunt immediately, however: he instead called Rees on Monday morning, and only then Blunt, who told him not to do anything. And then the search of the flat occurred. He also reproduces Rees’s testimony about the frenzied telephone calls. Finally, he asserts (using Reilly) that Makins thought that Maclean might have taken the Monday off as well – an extraordinary suggestion, although, as I shall show, that claim came also from Carey-Foster. Lownie then describes Blunt’s attempts to hush up Hewit, and then relates how Blunt acquired the key to the Burgess premises on May 30, sent Hewit away, and searched the flat with MI5’s Ronnie Reed, when he was able to retrieve some incriminating love letters.

Stalin’s Englishman was well-received by the critics, and it won several prizes (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin%27s_Englishman). It is quite astounding to me that its multiple flaws were overlooked.

The 2015 Archival Releases

For the purposes of examining the events leading up to, and occurring immediately after, the defection of Burgess and Maclean, I consider the following the most important:

MI5’s Personal Files on Burgess (especially the series KV 2/4102 through KV 2/4116). This set is not exclusive: there are many others in the range from 4101 to 4139, but I suspect that this core represents the most valuable material. While the record does not start until after the defection, the interviews with Burgess’s friends and associates frequently bring up valuable refinements of the received wisdom, including (but by no means limited to) interviews with Anthony Blunt, whose testimony of course cannot be relied upon. The files named above extend to 1956, when Driberg interviewed Burgess in Moscow, and when Goronwy Rees’s articles in the People appeared, thus offering an important perspective, and sometimes a correction, to the established interpretation of events.

MI5 also released a rich file on the surveillance of Donald Maclean (and his mother) in KV 2/4140, digitized for general availability, an item that also reaches back to 1949 in some detail, and includes an account of Liddell’s interviews with Blunt and Tomás Harris. This is an extremely important file, since it shows that MI5’s watchers were in fact more persistent and mobile than has been presented before, and it also confirms the startling information (hinted at in some works) that MI5 inserted telephone bugs in several properties, including the Macleans’ house in Tatsfield and the residence of Donald’s mother in London. It gives a day-by-day analysis of Maclean’s movements in May, including his meetings with Burgess and others, except when, for a few incidents, the watchers lost track of him. A larger tranche of files on Maclean has also been released, namely KV 2/4141-4164, but unfortunately not digitized. These must constitute a critical source, but I do not believe anyone has mined them properly yet. I have yet to inspect them.

Another MI5 series, KV 6/140-145, described as the ‘Investigation into leakage of telegrams’ is a vital account of the VENONA exercise, starting in January 1945, and ending in February 1956, with the most intense scrutiny taking place between April 2 and June 7, 1951 (KV 6/142 & 143). (I used these files in my examination of Dick White’s role in https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/, from June 2019.)

The remainder of my selection comes from the Foreign and Colonial Office files, series FCO 158. FCO 158/1-16 provide a valuable series concerning the leaks and investigations after the disappearance, but some are still closed. The set FCO 158/24 through 158/28 deals with the initial inquiry into the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, with the last two dedicated to the PEACH inquiry, namely the possible role that Philby had played in the affair. FCO 158/133 investigates the possible continuance of Soviet Agents in the Foreign Service, and Philby as the ‘Third Man’ is importantly covered in a file from 1955, FCO 158/175. The Investigation continues in FCO 158/176 & 177, with a draft statement from 1954 recorded in FCO 158/180. Burgess has his own FCO file in FCO 158/181 & 182, while Goronwy Rees’s profile on ‘Burgess’ is maintained at FCO 158/184. Finally, the Foreign and Colonial office kept its own file on the defector Vladimir Petrov (distinct from Petrov’s extensive files in MI5’s KV 2 series) at FCO 158/198 & 199.

I have so far studied few of these files, but am attempting to work my way through them.

Phase 5: Post-Archival Exploitation

‘The Spy Who Knew Everyone’

Guy Burgess: The Spy Who Knew Everyone, by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert (2016) is a more measured and thoughtful study of Burgess’s life, again broad and detailed in its sweep, but more selective and less impressionable. The authors start their ‘Acknowledgements’ by stating that ‘much of the content of this book is based on files which were only made available at the end of October 2015’. Their editor thus had the unenviable task of getting their work to the printers within six weeks. Exactly how much time they were able to spend perusing the masses of files is not clear, but they made some judicious choices. From the sources given, the authors appear to have spent more time investigating the post-mortems on Burgess’s disappearance, and his previous career, than the flight itself, and the account of the events of May is therefore somewhat incurious and vague.

The authors shed no opinion on Burgess’s recall home, but suggest that the KGB estimated that it was not safe for their agents in London to contact Maclean, and that it was up to Philby and Burgess to develop a plan using Blunt. They echo the story that Burgess ‘picked up’ Miller on the Queen Mary, but add (echoing Seaman and Mather) that Blunt had already been in touch with Maclean, and sensed that he was ‘falling to pieces’. They later provide the breakthrough insight that it was Jackie Hewit who had been feeding the Daily Express with its stories, but they are probably too trusting of what Hewit passed on. They elide over Burgess’s visit to Sonning in a single sentence, presumably regarding it as unimportant. They seem to be impressed with Blunt’s and Burgess’s contentions that Burgess volunteered to accompany Maclean all the way. Thereafter their tale takes on a similarly cautious course, using the archive to provide a more accurate account of the movements of May 25. They echo MI5’s rather alarming estimate that it took Burgess only thirty minutes to drive from central London to Tatsfield. No comment on the timing of the planned interrogation is offered, nor any analysis of the reactions of Foreign Office personnel on May 28 when Maclean was not seen at his desk.

They write that the Home Secretary did not alert the Immigration authorities until the evening of May 29, only for the message to come through that the missing diplomats had already been seen boarding the Falaise. Yet the sources are not given: the bizarre sequence of events not discussed. Purvis and Hulbert do, however, provide some useful input from Lord Talbot de Malahide, a member of the Foreign Office who had been a contemporary of Burgess’s at Trinity. They culled from FCO 158/3 and 158/26 Malahide’s confirmation of Maclean’s communism at Cambridge (an insight that should certainly have been offered earlier), and, perhaps more importantly, Malahide’s statement in September 1953 that both Maclean and Burgess had been under investigation at the time they disappeared, which has been a point of contention. This was vaguely echoed, a couple of months later, in a rather imprecise minute by Malahide to Ivone Fitzpatrick (Strang’s successor as Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office), where he declared that Burgess ‘had been a long-term spy’.

Yet the authors become lost in a sea of ancillary material: there is no entry for ‘Third Man’ in a very weak index, and they introduce the concept vaguely only when treating Milmo’s interrogation of Philby in December 1951, before jumping to the questions in the House of Commons in 1955. In summary, it is a rather tame accomplishment by the authors: admittedly they did not have much time to inspect and reflect on the new material, but, as with nearly all the other writers, they were too trusting, and they lacked the methodology and drive to distinguish misinformation and resolve paradoxes. In gathering as much material from obscure sources as they could, they lost sight of the bigger picture.

Cold War Spymaster by Nigel West (2018)

Nigel West returned to the fray in 2018, focusing on the career of Guy Liddell, and setting out to exploit the recently released archives selectively in a chapter titled BARCLAY and CURZON (Burgess and Maclean). He specifically identifies KV 6/143, KV 2/4140 and FCO 158/27 as his sources. The chapter is an extraordinary, rambling account, in ninety pages, of the quest to identify HOMER, and Liddell’s subsequent activities in 1951 after the pair fled. It contains enormous chunks of archival material, as well as extracts from Liddell’s diaries, but little incisive analysis: immediately West starts to isolate a controversial matter, he goes off on some historical tangent.

The author’s access to the MI5 file on Maclean allows him to describe a more accurate picture of Maclean’s movements in the final days than he had offered in Molehunt. His study of the HOMER investigation enables him to deliver a more realistic, though still error-prone, timetable. Thus he describes how the clearly articulated plans dating from May 15 that specified how the interrogation of Maclean would not start before June 7, and how the FBI would be notified of ‘strong suspicions’ about him not until June 4. One of the documents that he cites in toto contains the vital information that the later date would allow MI5 a valuable period of three weeks’ more to prepare for the interrogation – a startling refutation of the claim that the team was waiting anxiously in Leconfield House to get going on May 28 (see Molehunt). Yet West echoes the articulated belief by MI6 officers that Philby must somehow have missed this communication, and that he was led to thinking that the arrest and interrogation would occur soon after May 23. Thus West writes, without offering any evidence: “That was the day that Philby intervened and initiated the defections.” The activities of Burgess, Blunt, and the London residency are almost completely outside his purview.

Maclean’s surveillance and movements are overall described accurately, with a few exceptions. West writes that physical surveillance could not be extended beyond London: that was not in fact true, since the Watchers noticed Maclean’s car at Oxted Station, and even tracked one of his travelling companions to Hayward’s Heath. West states that Maclean usually travelled from Victoria to Oxted, Woldingham or Upper Woldingham (he means Upper Warlingham), and sometimes took the Greenline bus from Eccleston Bridge (but that was only on half-day Saturdays, when the down train service was less frequent). Yet, because of the obviousness of surveillance in Tatsfield, telephone checks were installed at the Maclean residence (Beaconshaw), as well as in his mother’s house, and in that of his psychiatrist. Whether they worked reliably at Beaconshaw has been questioned, as Liddell’s diary entry for May 1 indicates, but that may have been an excuse, and indications are that they were working soon after.

West’s coverage of the weekend’s events is, nevertheless, remarkably loose and confused. His first observation is that Liddell recorded in his diary entry for May 29 (Tuesday) that the Watchers ‘had failed to spot him [Maclean] on his arrival from his home in Tatsfield’. This would imply that Liddell did not hear anything about the escape until Tuesday morning, but that intuitively seems like a wrong assumption. Why had the observations of the Watchers taken so long to be communicated? The implications of all this apparently held little interest for West, since, after noting David Footman’s calls to Liddell on that same day, Tuesday (Footman’s name redacted in the diary), he switches to September 1940, when Liddell first met Burgess. It takes another eight pages for him to return to the current events, and the first thing he claims is that Burgess was never a suspect.

He then astutely registers the conflicting signals concerning Maclean’s presence, given by the telechecks. After that, however, he gets in a muddle: first he repeats the citation of Liddell’s diary entry of May 29 concerning the Watchers. He next states that the first time that MI5 learned of Maclean’s disappearance was on the morning of May 29, when Melinda called the Foreign Office. But that is again probably based on a literal reading of a false reconstruction of the Concordance by the Foreign Office, when May 29 was inscribed instead of May 28. West then stumbles by stating that Liddell had already written about the pair taking off in his previous day’s entry (which would be May 28). That observation appears, however, in the long, unredacted, May 29 entry.

The fact is that Liddell’s diary entry for May 28 has almost entirely been redacted, which West fails to observe. It is intriguing, however, that the sole remaining item, clearly at the beginning, describes a lunch with ‘Ahmed’. While that suggests that Liddell had not been informed about the non-appearance of Maclean on Saturday, or on Monday by lunchtime, several paragraphs must have been dedicated to an embarrassing description of events on the Monday afternoon. Liddell’s Tuesday entry, including the words ‘we now learn from the Foreign Office that he was given a day’s leave on Saturday’ must refer to a revisiting of the events with his colleagues at the Foreign Office on Tuesday morning. For some reason West ascribes this entry to Monday May 28 (where there is no information at all).

West carries on in this vein for some time, making careful note of the conflicting stories about the effectiveness of the telephone checks, but offering further careless mistakes about dates. He makes the important point that the telephone checks should have picked up the arrival of Roger Stiles, and if Melinda (who, West states, knew Burgess already) made no obvious statement, she should have been interrogated over it! One vital aspect of the investigation that he does cover is the reports from Southampton and the captain of the Falaise, and he starts to get excited about the contradictions in the intelligence received. In his May 29 diary entry, Liddell describes how he and Petrie, on the evening of May 29, received a message from Immigration ‘to say that MACLEAN and BURGESS had left Southampton on Friday night for St. Malo’, and that the captain of the Falaise, when his ship returned to Southampton (presumably on the Sunday) had reported that the pair had disembarked ‘contrary to their excursion terms’. Yet no dates were given. One might expect Immigration to have made its report immediately, and West hints that it was indeed so.

Without providing a source, West interjects the startling observation that Arthur Martin and the Night Duty Officer at Leconfield House on May 25 claimed that Maclean’s departure at Southampton had been reported to MI5 at midnight, and claims, rather wildly, that it was that report that had prompted Dick White to try to fly out the same night (after midnight?) to France to try to intercept Maclean in St Malo. That makes no sense. Liddell records that White was dispatched first thing on May 30, when he left Liddell’s residence at 1:00 am with an outdated passport. All that West can say about these puzzles and paradoxes is that if MI5 had been informed of Maclean’s departure on Friday evening, ‘the events of the following three days are open to a rather different interpretation’. But he does not venture any further.

I am perplexed by West’s lack of enterprise in this matter. Whether he was not confident of his insider sources, or had been warded off any close analysis, or was embarrassed by his previous false steps in the story, or was simply just confused, I cannot tell. Overall, it seems to me an opportunity sadly missed, since the fans of the doyen were probably entitled to a better explanation and interpretation.

A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps (2018)

Roland Philipps can claim Rosamond Lehmann, Wogan Philipps and Roger Makins among his grandparents, so he maintains multiple connections to the participants in the saga of the Missing Diplomats. His focus is, of course, on Maclean, and since HOMER was the most passive of the participants at this time, Philipps follows a conventional line, without surprises, in his narration of the events. He reinforces the message that Maclean had been out of touch with any Soviet handler since his return from Cairo, treats the dispatch of Burgess back to the UK by Franks as a convenient happenstance, and recounts Maclean’s rather routine movements solidly, although not with complete precision. His account of the escape plans follows quite closely the Modin formula, although he does resuscitate the observation first made by Hoare that Donald told Jay Sheers, the new husband of his sister-in-law, Harriet, that he wanted desperately to be ‘cut adrift’.

The description of Burgess’s evolving role, and his being trapped to accompany Maclean, is made, Philipps observing that Moscow realized that it had two burnt-out cases on its hands. He also reproduces the incident of Maclean’s calling Geoffrey Jackson from the Travellers Club at lunchtime on May 25, asking him to ‘hold the fort’ for him on the Saturday, offering his reason for being absent the lie that he had to pick up his sister at the docks. Thus the granting of leave was probably never official: Philipps was resourceful enough to track down a memoir by Maclean’s Third Secretary, Margaret Anstee, published in 2004. Apparently, Ms. Anstee was flattered when her boss asked her on Friday afternoon to stand in for him the next morning. The telephone intercepts did not pick up a message from Donald’s sister, Nancy Oetking, until the evening of May 26, saying that she and her husband would be arriving at about 8:30. Maclean could have performed his Saturday stint at the office.

Another useful contribution made by Philipps is his description of Maclean’s meeting with Anthony Blake at the Reform Club on May 24. Blake was an old friend who had been Secretary of the Cambridge University Socialist Club: the rendezvous was noted by the Watchers (and confirmed by Maclean’s office diary). Philipps uses KV 2/4150 (a file that I have not yet seen) to state that Maclean seemed very calm and composed, and talked about forthcoming holiday plans. That assessment would appear to go against the grain of other opinions that have pointed to Maclean’s anguished emotional state at this time.

Yet Philipps has a last flourish of his own to add to the melting-pot. Melinda Maclean was apparently stirred into action by a call from Maclean’s mother on the morning of May 28, when she expressed her regret to her daughter-in-law that Donald had not yet returned. Philipps writes that ‘the news was immediately reported to the Foreign Office’, but does not say who made the call. There Carey-Foster was able to confirm that Maclean had not appeared yet, but Carey-Foster himself believed that there was no cause for alarm, since Maclean had asked for a day off (verifiable in KV 2/4140). Then Philipps adds (based on ‘private information’ – thus presumably not the unpublished Makins memoirs held at the Bodleian, which Philipps elsewhere exploits) that Roger Makins thought that he might have given Maclean the Monday off as well. This is an extraordinary revelation, given how surprised Makins had been on learning, late on Friday, that Maclean had just been granted the morning off on Saturday. Philipps then adds a further disturbing fact, namely that Mrs Grist, who supervised the telephone-checking, did not record Melinda’s call to the Foreign Office until 10:58 on May 29. Was that a transcription error? Or was the Foreign Office really so slothful and unconcerned that it did nothing, not even calling the Maclean home, for the whole of Monday, and the first hour of Tuesday? It is unthinkable. Yet Philipps, like so many of such chroniclers, is unimpressed, and leaves the datum uninspected.

Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines (2018)

‘Enemies Within’

The final book from this period to be considered is Enemies Within by the irrepressible Richard Davenport-Hines. It is a vastly entertaining offering, and the author bounces around with supreme self-confidence and sense of authority, plucking ripe plums from the archives when appropriate. Yet he can also be magnificently wrong over some of the basic elements of the story, and he makes some bold claims without providing any references to back them up.

His coverage of the events does not start well. He discusses the difficulties of surveillance of the Maclean house, and states that the Watchers followed Maclean ‘only as far as the ticket-barrier at Charing Cross station’. He assumes that Maclean must have been having regular meetings with Modin, but declares that they ‘will have been halted’ as soon as Philby’s reports reached the residency. He recognizes the role of Makayev, but then asserts that there were multiple ways for Moscow to forewarn Maclean. This serves to diminish any need to involve Burgess in alerting Maclean, but Davenport-Hines confuses the notions of the objective and the opportunity. He presents Burgess’s visit to Rees as coming from a need for Burgess to assess whether Rees would inform MI5 of his and Blunt’s connections with the NKVD. Again, no source is offered for this insight, and he ignores what Rees wrote. He is simply guessing.

The author’s style can be exemplified by what he writes as he approaches the week of May 21: “Accounts of the next few days by its chief protagonists are confusing: people later lied in self-defence, misremembered in wishful thinking, were too upset to be consistent, enjoyed a chance for malice or were inherently untrustworthy. Many of the details of this phase hold biographical but not general historical interest. The important points are these.” Presumably Davenport-Hines is the only chronicler not to be confused.  Yet one of his first assertions is that Morrison, on May 25, ‘was asked for authorization to interrogate Maclean on Monday 28 May and gave it’. He then makes the utterly illogical claim that ‘the interrogation was set for the Monday because, in accordance with the undertaking given to the FBI, Hoover had first to be told.’ The author’s source for this nonsense is one of the Maclean files, KV 2/4153. I have not yet inspected this series, but for Davenport-Hines to pluck out this erroneous item amid all the countervailing evidence is simply bizarre.

After judging that the NKVD probably misled Burgess about his ability to return, fearing what might happen under interrogation, Davenport-Hines then turns to Guy Liddell’s diary, and makes some further odd claims, stating that that the diary went out of kilter. “The entry for the Sunday is entirely redacted, but misdated as if it was Monday,” he writes, continuing: “The Monday entry is dated for Tuesday. MI5 and SIS were working at full pelt to find Maclean.” He is quite wrong. Liddell did not write diary entries over the weekend. A slim – and largely redacted – entry for May 28 appears, and the entry for May 29 is almost entirely whole. It may be that Davenport-Hins, in a rush, tried to reconcile Liddell’s entries with the timetable offered in Maclean’s file at KV 2/4140, but he ends up being as confused as anyone else.

Davenport-Hines’s account becomes less melodramatic after that, although he offers another list of unsubstantiated happenings, which will provide interesting fodder when I later try to sort out the facts. Hewit called Blunt on Sunday evening, when Burgess had not returned (suggesting that he waited until the weekend jaunt were over); Blunt told him not to worry, but he then called Rees, against Blunt’s advice; Rees then contacted Blunt and Footman; Footman contacted Liddell at about eleven o’clock on Monday morning (this item presumably being given from Davenport-Hines’s assessment that Liddell had intended to record the events of May 29 as all occurring on May 28); on Monday afternoon, Melinda Maclean reported to Carey-Foster that her husband was missing (thus going against the grain of what the KV 2/4140 report stated, where the approach is dated as May 29). The author then shows all the following events occurring on the Monday: Carey-Foster and Reilly inform Strang, and are joined by Sillitoe and White; Blunt visits Rees to try and still his voice; Blunt searches the Old Bond Street flat, and salvages some incriminating material. It is another mess.

One final gem imparted by Davenport-Hines is an anecdote from Chapman Pincher, namely that the latter had been told by a former Tory MP that Lord Talbot de Malahide had ‘tipped the wink to BURGESS to tell MACLEAN to clear out’. While a further investigation into Malahide may be fruitful, this story would appear to be without merit. Burgess was no longer persona grata in the Foreign Office, but he had already come to that conclusion before he arrived in the UK. Moreover, since Malahide also worked in the Foreign Office, he could presumably have alerted Maclean himself.

Phase 6: Fresh Archival Items

The last stage is the release of further Personal Files in 2022 – with more in 2025. Four sets from the 2022 batch in particular grabbed my attention. I have covered partially the files on Goronwy and Margery Rees (KV 2/4603-4608), at https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/, but my analysis has so far taken me up to August 1951 only, and I need to study the remaining years thoroughly. (I suspect that some revisionist thinking from Rees appears in the later files.) Likewise, I have reported in depth on the files of Victor and Tessa Rothschild (KV 2/4531-4534) at https://coldspur.com/the-still-elusive-victor-rothschild/. I have yet to study the files on Tomás Harris and his wife at KV 2/4636-4637, which are intriguingly titled ‘Rupert Honey’. The last, of Jackie Hewit, at KV 2/4526-4529, may be equally as compelling. A quick survey shows that Hewit had been employed in Victor Rothschild’s anti-Nazi project within MI5 in World War II, where his cryptonym was the unappealing DUMBO. He was a failure. Thereafter, the record shows him to have been a crook, a thief and a blackmailer. His closeness to Guy Burgess had the potential to shed much light on the events of May 1951, but I believe that his testimony has to be very cautiously used, as he was a liar as well. In fact, under pressure, when Hewit was threatening to disclose names of Burgess’s conspirators in the Foreign Office. MI5 claimed that he had recanted all his former accusations. I wonder, however, whether Hewit had been bought off with a tidy sum of money, and had been told to keep quite. I shall report further in due course.

Spies by Calder Walton (2023)

If Calder Walton’s effort (‘A masterpiece!!” – Christopher Andrew; ‘the definitive compendium’ – Paul Kolbe; ‘pioneering use of MI5’s imperial security files’ – Peter Hennessy) is supposed to reflect the authoritative judgment of intelligence experts in the third decade of the century, we the public are in deep trouble, and there is a lot of work still to be done. Walton treads a worn and errant path over the Missing Diplomats, while also bringing some bizarre fresh ideas to the narrative.

The author first echoes what his mentor, Andrew, wrote, in claiming that the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, ‘agreed to place Maclean under MI5 surveillance’. Yet there is no evidence of that. R. T. Reed made the application for telephone surveillance directly to the Post Office on April 18. Walton then breezes over Burgess’s recall, and simply remarks that there was nothing suspicious about Burgess and Maclean meeting in a pub on May 25 (i.e. the day of the escape, as Walton reminds us). Walton’s report is seen as simply sloppy when he adds that the MI5 report filed the next day [!] reported that Burgess was ‘worried’, and that there was ‘an air of conspiracy between the two’. The meeting had taken place on May 22.

Next, Walton writes that Modin orchestrated an escape as the net tightened, but in the next paragraph, after backtracking to describe how Philby and Burgess exploited the latter’s recall to send a message to Maclean in London, he comments that ‘Philby and Burgess worked out their plan without involving the KGB rezidentura or the Center’. (He later does describe, however, the rendezvous with Makayev.) He then takes up the Moscow line, that, since Burgess was in an equally dire mental state as that of Maclean, the KGB decided to extract the pair of them, and he reminds his readers that Burgess’s last promise to his colleague was that he would not accompany Maclean in the defection.

Walton’s analysis then shifts to accusing Philby of betraying Burgess and Maclean, a secret that he believes Putin’s Kremlin does not want published. “Philby lied to everyone to save himself”, he writes. This insight derives from his judgment that, when Burgess and Maclean were safely behind the Iron Curtain in Moscow, Philby ‘threw both Burgess and Maclean under the bus’, by suggesting that the two of them might well have been conspirators since their time at Cambridge! Since this was the conclusion at which MI5 and the Foreign Office had already arrived, Philby’s ‘betrayal’ might better be interpreted as a creative, though also clumsy, piece of subterfuge exercised in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. By this time, Burgess and Maclean had been securely fastened to the underside of a charabanc destined for a one-way trip to Moscow. In fact, Philby, reconciled to the idea that Maclean was doomed, had already performed this maneuver, and helped ‘throw him under the bus’ in April 1951 by writing a report implicating his friend.

Enough said. Walton’s effort is a dismal attempt at exploiting the latest archival material, and the mutual admiration society of other ‘experts’ performs its wretched work.

In January 2025 a large number of Personal Files were released by MI5, all digitized, and thus universally available, of which the most significant, for the purpose of shedding more light on the ‘Missing Diplomats’, were the long-awaited Kim Philby series (KV 2/4723-4743), and his first wife, Lizy [sic] Friedmann (KV 2/4664-4666). I point out, however, that the Philby PF 604584 is the one created when Philby emerged as PEACH: it is not his exclusive PF, although it borrows a few items from his father’s file, PF 40408, created in 1933. I had referred to PF 68261 a few months ago, suggesting that it was perhaps a shared file for Kim and Litzy, but PF 68261 has now been released as KV 2/4664-4666, and is described as a file for Lizy Philby only – see above. These are complemented by the files on Anthony Blunt (identified by his very arch codename ‘Blunden’), at KV 2/4700-4722, which will presumably contain a full set of his ‘confessions’. Of close interest will be the files on Llewelyn-Davies (KV 2/4668-4671) and those on Constantin Volkov, whom Philby betrayed in Ankara (KV 2/4674-4676). A surprisingly massive tranche of files for John Cairncross has also been declassified, at KV 2/4678-4699. I posted in mid-February a preliminary analysis of the PEACH file, and I shall embark on a further inspection of the critical items concerning Philby and Blunt in bulletins that I plan to deliver in the next few months. My first priority, however, is to process the largely undigitized files on Burgess and Maclean from 2015, for which I have made private arrangements for photographing.

Conclusions: Paradoxes, Contradictions and Conundrums

Readers who have followed me thus far will probably have concluded that I do not believe that the chroniclers of these events have done justice to them. One might claim that the objectives of most of the writers had not been to resolve paradoxes in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, but, since any clarification immediately rebounds on all the actors, from Philby to Reilly, from White to Hewit, I do not see how any biographer or historian can justify a refusal to engage with the conundrums head-on.

I list here twenty controversial topics that merit close inspection:

  1. ‘The Third Man’: Was the Third Man the leaker who first gave the warnings about HOMER? Or was he the person who supposedly precipitated the escape at the last minute? Did the UK authorities deliberately make the question ambiguous? Did the question help to divert attention from Blunt’s true ‘third man’ role?
  2. Maclean as HOMER: When was Maclean first suspected of being HOMER? Why did it take so long to identify him confidently? Did this process have any effect on the project?
  3. Guy Burgess’s Recall: Was it part of the plan to facilitate the escape? Or was Burgess’s return to London merely a fortuitous event that worked in Moscow’s favour?
  4. Communications with Moscow: Was Philby able to update his masters in Moscow, and receive instructions from them? When was Maclean in contact with Modin in London?
  5. Burgess’s Visit to Sonning: When was it set up? Was its purpose to discuss Burgess’ future journalistic career? Was it to verify that he would not betray Burgess, Blunt, and Maclean? Or was it something else?
  6. Surveillance of Burgess and Maclean: Was Burgess also under suspicion? What was the nature of the surveillance of Maclean? Why was it so obvious, and what were its goals? What was the reality of the telephone surveillance installed in his house?
  7. The Defection of Burgess: Why did Burgess have to accompany Maclean? Was it his own decision? Or was he ordered to?
  8. Burgess’s Behaviour: Why did Burgess socialize so promiscuously in the weeks before his defection? Why did he draw attention to the crisis so ostentatiously, to so many?
  9. The Role of the MVD: How authoritative was the MVD in making decisions? How much was left to Blunt and Burgess?
  10. The Interrogation: Why did the authorities dither and delay? On what date was it planned to haul Maclean in? Did this event change? Why were Foreign Office mandarins so insistent that it was about to happen on May 28?
  11. Maclean’s Leave: Who granted leave to Maclean for May 26? Why was the fact not broadly known? Why did Makins and Carey-Foster even think that he might have been granted leave on May 28 as well?
  12. Foreign Office Response: Why was the response to Maclean’s absence on May 28 so sluggish? Why did no official immediately call the Maclean household to determine his whereabouts?
  13. Telephone Intercepts: What did the telephone intercepts over the weekend tell the authorities about Maclean’s movements? Why were they ignored?
  14. Role of Jackie Hewit: Why did he act so hysterically? Why are there conflicting stories of whom he called? Which can be trusted?
  15. Role of Goronwy Rees: How can his reactions to the news of Burgess’s call be interpreted? How did he really follow up? When was he telling the truth?
  16. Role of Anthony Blunt: Who informed him of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean? How did he communicate with Guy Liddell thereafter?
  17. Role of Guy Liddell: When did he first learn of the defections? Do his reactions make sense?
  18. Role of David Footman: Why, since he dined with Burgess earlier in the week, was he not immediately interviewed? How quickly did he react to Rees’s call, and what did he say?
  19. Intelligence from Southampton: Did Immigration Officers really report Maclean’s presence on the Falaise to MI5 on the night of May 25-26? If so, why was nothing done?
  20. Behaviour of Melinda Maclean: How much did she know? When did she really contact the Foreign Office? Did they believe her?

I shall analyze these questions in depth over the next two months. Because of the emerging size of the output of that investigation, and the substance of my analysis of the overwhelmingly important first question, the April coldspur will address that question only, with analysis of the remaining questions coming in May. Meanwhile, I invite coldspur readers to contact me in order to make the exercise as fulfilling as possible. Specifically, please advise me:

  1. Are there any works that I have overlooked?
  2. Are there aspects of the puzzle that need to be added to the above list?
  3. Do you have observations on the questions that I should know about?
  4. What interpretation do you put on the course of events?

I look forward to hearing from you at antonypercy@aol.com

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The Legend of Edith Tudor-Hart

Edith Tudor-Hart

[A warning: the narrative in this bulletin is quite complicated. So many competing accounts of the events leading up to Kim Philby’s recruitment by the Soviets trip over each other: untangling them is a challenge. I have no wish to oversimplify the story, and I consider it imperative that I leave as full an analysis as possible for posterity.]

Contents:

Introduction

Sources and Method

Edith’s Movements

Acquaintances in Vienna

Recruitment

Kim’s Recruitment

Interim Conclusions

Jungk’s Quest

Russian Archives

The Legendary Edith

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Introduction

I use ‘legend’ here not in the Westian sense of ‘someone who was occasionally famous or notorious’, but as a way of suggesting that the familiar story of the role of Edith Tudor-Hart as a queenpin in Soviet espionage is largely mythical. Of course, in intelligence lore the word has a secondary meaning. The ‘legend’, a false biography created by the OGPU/NKVD and GRU for agents (primary ‘illegals’, not necessarily using false identities, but without diplomatic cover) in foreign countries was an important part of the deception process, and the Russian Intelligence Service (RIS) generally created false stories in order to confuse the enemy – and, perhaps unwittingly, its own successor officers.

In this bulletin I inspect the assertion that Edith Tudor-Hart was the vital agent responsible for the recruitment of the Cambridge Five – one notably made by Anthony Blunt, who, under interrogation, described her as ‘the grandmother of us all’, despite the fact that Edith was born a year after him. (I would encourage readers to turn back to the June coldspur, at https://coldspur.com/summer-2024-round-up/ for my prologue to this investigation.) The dominant event in this scenario was the reputed recommendation by Edith to Arnold Deutsch, in May 1934, that he, on behalf of Soviet intelligence, recruit Kim Philby. Edith declared that Kim’s potential and reliability could be assured because of her close friendship with Litzi, Philby’s new wife, who could presumably be trusted to have made an ideologically proper marital alliance. This proposal resulted – according to the infamous narrative supplied by Philby himself – in Kim’s meeting the anonymous Deutsch for the first time on a bench in Regent’s Park. Deutsch was impressed, and the ominous relationship and expansion of the group of penetration agents, began. But can this story be trusted?

Arnold Deutsch

I believe that it is best tested through the analysis of the behaviour of the four main actors (Kim and Litzi, Edith and Arnold) in two critical periods, namely in the summer and early autumn of 1933 in Vienna, and in London in May and early June of 1934. Some of the questions that strike me as important are: Did Arnold know Kim from those days in Vienna, or was Kim a stranger to him in Regent’s Park? Did Edith really have an opportunity to meet Kim after her rapid marriage to Alexander Tudor-Hart in August 1933 and before her departure for England a few weeks later? Had Kim already been recruited by Soviet Intelligence when he was in Vienna? What was Litzi’s standing as an agent before she left for England with Kim in the spring of 1934? Which aspects of Kim’s account of the events of that summer are verifiable? I refresh my previous research on this matter with an analysis of Edith’s files at the National Archives (released in 2015), a closer inspection of important works that appeared in the 1990s, as well as a study of other books published in English, German and Russian during the past couple of decades.

Sources and Method

I covered some of the anomalies and contradictions in the tales of Kim’s recruitment in Misdefending the Realm, but only skimmed the surface of the puzzle, since my intention then had been solely to point out the chaotic nature of the accounts of subversive activity in the 1930s, and the danger of relying on the memoirs of untrustworthy persons as a guide to the facts. At that time I barely touched on the role of Edith Tudor-Hart. For those readers who do not have a copy of my book close at hand, I here reproduce the relevant section (pp 37-39):

“One of Philby’s main assertions is that he was recruited by Arnold Deutsch, known as Otto, on his return from Vienna with his new bride, Litzi Friedmann, in the summer of 1934, and only then committed himself to supporting the communist cause. That story has been distorted and misrepresented repeatedly over the years, as the following analysis shows:

  • In My Silent War (1968), Philby elides over his recruitment, merely stating that when he left Cambridge in the summer of 1933, he was convinced his life would be dedicated to Communism. [i]
  • In Deadly Illusions, Costello and Tsarev claim that Alexander Orlov supervised and was ultimately responsible for directing Philby as agent. Because of Soviet attempts to get Orlov back (who had defected and made a deal with Stalin), Philby was not permitted by the KGB to even hint at how he was recruited.)  [ii]
  • In The Third Man (1968), Cookridge says that Philby did not return to London until the end of summer, 1934, where he was recruited by Simon Kremer at the Soviet Embassy. [iii]
  • In The Philby Conspiracy (1968), Page, Leitch and Knightley (who interviewed Philby’s children in Moscow), reported that Philby told his offspring that ‘I was recruited in 1933, given the job of penetrating British intelligence, and told it did not matter how long I took to do the job.’  [iv]
  • In Philby: The Long Road to Moscow (1973), Seale and McConville report an earlier return to London, in early April, but that Philby was not recruited for some months, and still only on probation, the first steps being ‘directed by intelligence officer on the staff of the Soviet Embassy’. [v]
  • In The Fourth Man (1979), Andrew Boyle indicates that Philby was already a novice agent on probation when he went to Vienna in September 1933.  [vi]
  • In The British Connection, (1979), Richard Deacon suggests that Deutsch probably recruited Philby when the latter was visiting Vienna.  [vii] [This actually makes the most sense, as will be explored later.]
  • In The Master Spy (1988), Phillip Knightley introduces the idea of the obvious lie: ‘Litzi said that KP took no part in Communist activities in Vienna – a cover story that KP confirmed to Knightley that they had planned she would say.’ He adds that the Philbys did not leave Vienna until May 1934, and stopped off in Paris on their way back to London.  When he interviewed Philby in Moscow, he was told: ‘My work in Vienna must have caught the attention of the people who are now my colleagues in Moscow because almost immediately on my return to Britain I was approached by a man who asked me if I would like to join the Russian intelligence service. For operational reasons I don’t propose to name this man, but I can say that he was not a Russian although he was working for the Russians.’ [viii]
  • John Costello, in Mask of Treachery (1988) observes that Philby’s expressed intention to sit Civil Service exams (as he told his tutor at Cambridge) reflects Soviet determination to press moles into government, adding ‘That Philby would even consider a Whitehall career after deciding to become a Communist agent suggests that he too had come under cultivation by the Soviets before he left Cambridge.’ [ix]
  • Deadly Illusions (1993), by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, gives the impression that Soviet Intelligence had successfully stirred the pot. Litzi is reported as not receiving her passport until late April, and the Philbys set off for Paris via Germany. ‘That Philby had approached the CPGB before his first meeting with Reif is itself confirmation that he had not, as previously believed, been recruited in Vienna. This is corroborated by NKVD archival records, and by KPO’s 239-page deposition.’ The authors add that, in the spring of 1934, Philby went to CPGB HQ, to renew [sic] links with the CP before he was approached by Reif, but received a frosty reception at CPGB headquarters. Litzi Philby invited her friend, Edith Tudor Hart to tea, and Edith was impressed by Philby, and thus reported his candidacy to Deutsch, who consulted with Reif. Reif approved Philby’s recruitment in June 1934.  ‘My decision to go to Austria was taken before I had decided to join the Communist movement,’ Philby is quoted as saying.  [x] But Costello and Tsarev are far too trusting of the reliability of Philby’s memoir, and they attribute to ‘faulty memory’ many of the contradictions between Moscow’s and Philby’s account that occur in their flawed narrative.
  • Treason in the Blood (1994), by Anthony Cave-Brown, has the couple leaving Vienna on May 2, and spending a holiday in Paris before arriving in London in mid-May. Philby celebrated June 1 as the day he was approached by Deutsch. [xi]
  • The chronology shifts in The Philby Files (1994) by Genrikh Borovik. Philby decides to continue Party work with Litzi in England, and is back there in time to participate in the May Day parade in London. Again, Philby seeks out contacts at the Soviet Embassy, but this time a man [i.e not Edith Tudor Hart] he met in Austria sought him out, to introduce him to Deutsch. Philby considered ‘it very lucky this chance happening occurred’. [xii]
  • Yuri Modin (the handler of the ‘Cambridge Five’ after the war), admits, in My Five Cambridge Friends (1994) to all the confusion, but clarifies it all for us by saying that the NKVD was not involved, and that, ‘from 1934 to 1940, the Soviet secret service was the last thing on their minds.  What he means, of course, it was the innocent Comintern that was involved: he confirms the meetings with Deutsch, but claims it was another unknown NKVD officer [sic] who directed his work. [xiii]
  • The Crown Jewels (1998), by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, has some interesting things to say about Deutsch, but merely repeats the June 1934 recruitment. [xiv]
  • In A Time For Spies (1999), William E. Duff follows the Costello/Tsarev account, but points out the contradictions between Costello and Tsarev, indicates that Costello gives too much credit to Orlov, and observes that Tsarev’s original source material has not been examined. [xv]
  • The Mitrokhin Archive (1999) by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin suggests that the Tudor Harts had been recruited by Deutsch in London, and given the codename STRELA. The authors cite Deadly Illusions as their main source for the recruitment of Philby. [xvi]
  • Now the unpublished memoirs of Philby are revealed by his fourth wife, Rufina Philby, with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov, in The Private Life of Kim Philby (2000). Here again, the Philbys are able to enjoy the May Day march in Camden Town, and then they are visited by a male friend, whom Philby had seen two or three times since returning from Vienna. This friend introduces Philby to Deutsch (i.e. there is no Edith Tudor Hart in this variation). [xvii]
  • Almost a decade later, Christopher Andrew changes his tune, owing to the discovery of an ‘untitled memorandum in Security Service archives’. Thus the official history of MI5, Defending The Realm (2009), allows Andrew to reveal ‘the truth’ about Philby’s recruitment, deposited on the eve of his defecting to Moscow in 1963. “Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a ‘man of decisive importance. …. Otto spoke at great length, arguing that a person with my family background could do far more for Communism than the run-of-the-mill Party member or sympathizer.” [xviii]

[I have omitted listing the endnote references, as they caused havoc when I tried to copy them in. Please refer to my book for details.]

Nevertheless, I continued my narrative by pointing out that Deutsch himself (whom I shall hereafter simply refer to as ‘Arnold’), in the autobiography he provided to his bosses in Moscow in 1938, claimed that he had recruited STRELA and JOHN in Vienna before moving on to London, where he recruited Edith Tudor-Hart, whom he ‘had already known in Vienna’. Since the heading of the Tudor-Harts’ (i.e. Alexander’s and Edith’s) file at the National Archives confidently states – assuredly based on the evidence of Andrew and Mitrokhin – that STRELA was the cryptonym of the Tudor-Harts, I see a conflict. At least one person is mistaken. I also wrote at that time that, if Arnold had been familiar with John Lehmann and the Tudor-Harts in Vienna, he would surely have encountered Kim Philby there, and thus the story of the first meeting in Regent’s Park was probably inauthentic. That may have been a clumsy conclusion, because of the chronology, as I shall soon explain, but it may have been correct for other reasons.

Even a casual study of the source material copied from my book, above, leads to some serious scepticism and confusion over what happened when. For example, Cookridge places Kim’s return to England at the end of summer 1934. Borovik even gets the year of Kim’s return to Britain wrong. Page, Leitch and Knightley, and then Boyle, refer to Kim’s recruitment of some sort in Vienna, or even earlier, as do Deacon and Pincher. Costello and Tsarev place considerable strains on the chronology by recording Kim’s and Litzi’s passage through Europe, thus requiring a number of events to occur before the park-bench meeting on June 1, a troubling time-line echoed by Cave Brown, who implied that he had inspected the police form in Vienna that gave their date of egress and their destination. Reinforcing Arnold’s claims, Andrew and Mitrokhin apply tight constraints by indicating that Edith was not recruited until Arnold came to London, which would tend to cast doubts on the experience and reputation she was claimed to own when she picked out Kim as a prospect. If, as Cave Brown asserted (and, incidentally, as Andrew and Mitrokhin repeated), Kim and Litzi left Vienna on May 2, they would have struggled to witness the May Day celebrations in Camden Town on May 1, an experience that Borovik, Parker and Lyubimov felt fit to record. As my re-inspection of A Time of Spies reveals, Duff even claims that the newlyweds left Vienna in March for Paris, ‘where they remained for more than a month before Kim brought his new bride in May of that year’. And so forth. My goal now is to unravel these – and other – contradictions and paradoxes.

My primary sources are, in chronological order:

  • Deadly Illusions, by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev (1993). This is the first account that claims access to KGB archival material, and has been the most influential. Yet it should be remembered that this work was provoked by a desire by the FSB (the Федеральная Служба Безопасности, or Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB for internal security matters, created in 1995) to put a more positive spin on the KGB’s achievements after the disclosures that Gordievsky provided, and that Tsarev’s access may have been carefully controlled – perhaps by the Russian equivalent of a ‘Foreign Office Adviser’. Later in this report I shall examine in detail the authenticity of the sources on which the book relies.
  • The Philby Files, by Genrikh Borovik (1994). This account relies heavily on what Kim told Borovik, and is not enhanced by Borovik’s lack of method, and his rather shaky understanding of intelligence and counter-intelligence matters.
  • Treason in the Blood, by Anthony Cave Brown (1994). Cave Brown’s book tends towards encyclopædism, and his management of dates is disorderly. He has a few fresh insights.
  • The Crown Jewels, by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev (1998), which applied some further spin, through Tsarev, based on access to KGB files, but also included some erratic observations. It suffers from the same dubious provenance as Deadly Illusions.
  • The Private Life of Kim Philby, by Rufina Philby, with Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov (1999), which contains two missing chapters from Kim’s autobiography (but not the postulated one that would describe his time in Vienna).
  • The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (1999), based on the transcriptions taken out of Russia by Mitrokhin.
  • Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben [‘A Chapter from my Life’], by Barbara Honigmann, the daughter of Litzi and Georg Honigmann (2004).
  • The Young Kim Philby by Edward Harrison (2012), which contains some very shrewd insights but accepts many familiar narratives unquestioningly.
  • The Lawn Road Flats by David Burke (2014), a rather discursive work that presents some revealing research – especially on Edith.
  • Stalin’s Agent: The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov, by Boris Volodarsky (2015), a somewhat chaotic compilation by the ex-GRU officer, which nevertheless contains many useful nuggets.
  • The Tudor-Hart files, released to the National Archives in 2015 (KV 2/1012-1014; KV 2/1603-1604; KV 2/4091-4092).
  • Die Dunkelkammern der Edith Tudor-Hart [‘The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart’], by Peter Stefan Jungk (2017). Edith’s relative (second cousin once removed) had access to a wide and fascinating range of family letters and memories, but his account relies almost exclusively on works already mentioned for his analysis of Edith’s career in intelligence and espionage.
  • Ким Филби by Николай Долгополов [‘Kim Philby’, by Nikolai Dolgopolov] (2018). Dolgopolov presents some fresh archival material from the Lubyanka.
  • Кембриджская  Пятерка by Владимир Антонов  [‘The Cambridge Five’, by Vladimir Antonov] (2022). A slightly different perspective on the careers of the Cambridge Five.

The method I decided to deploy is to address the primary questions by starting with the key assertions made in Deadly Illusions, and to test and compare them with statements made elsewhere.

Edith and Alexander (probably before marriage)

Edith’s Movements

What were Edith’s exact movements? According to Deadly Illusions: “Edith. . . . arrived in London after escaping prosecution for her illegal Party activities. Like her friend Litzi Friedman, she had sought refuge by marrying an English medical doctor named Alex Tudor Hart [sic], who sympathized with the Comintern. . . .  Her file discloses that she had been active in the Communist underground in Vienna in 1929 and served as one of the trusted ‘cultivation officers’ of the London ‘illegal’ rezidentura. Her job was to spot sympathizers who were potential candidates for recruitment, like Philby. Although short-sighted, which led to her being criticized for not being careful enough, she established a reputation as a very loyal and resourceful comrade who carried out important assignments for Moscow.” The authors add, in Endnote 47: “Precisely when Edith Tudor Hart arrived in Britain is not clear from her NKVD file, but it was 1933 and almost certainly May, the year before Philby set out for Austria.”

This is a complete mess. It strongly suggests that Edith first crossed Britain’s shores only in 1933, when her MI5 file shows that she had resided there on multiple occasions in the 1920s until she was expelled early in 1931. The month of May is ridiculous: that was the month in which she was arrested. It implies that Edith imitated the matrimonial plan of her friend by marrying an Englishman, when she had in fact married Alexander on August 16, 1933, before Kim had first set foot in Austria. Her MI5 file (which is curiously very silent about the movements of Alex and Edith in 1933) indicates, in a Special Branch Report to MI5, that the marriage took place at the Embassy in Vienna, and that the couple left for England a few weeks later. Kim did not set out for Austria in 1934: he arrived in the autumn of 1933, and left the country with his new bride in April (or May) of 1934. The gap between 1929, when Edith had reputedly been active in the Communist underground, and her stated role as a ‘cultivation officer’ is ludicrous. (The suggestion that Edith was only one of many such ‘cultivation officers’ raises the question of who the others were, and why they have not been celebrated.) Edith had been imprisoned in Vienna in the early summer of 1933 for suspicious activity, having been expelled from the UK two-and-a-half years earlier. The idea that she might in 1933 have been a talent-spotter, and the suggestion that she might even have chosen Kim as a potential agent at that time, are palpably absurd. Costello and Tsarev cite the KGB TUDOR HART file, No 8230 Vol. 1, for this, including a profile of her supplied by Arnold, but much of it must be the work of a vivid imagination.

Tsarev and Costello must have been fed this information, since they provide no source documents for her admitted activity in Vienna in 1929. Similarly, the claims about ‘a very loyal and resourceful comrade’ carrying out important assignments lacks documentary support. In fact, the only document cited (the profile by Arnold, in Endnote 47) draws attention to her deficiencies in general, especially her carelessness, although it does not describe the famous occasion in 1937 when she temporarily lost an address book with the names of comrades in it. That would not have endeared her to Moscow Centre. In KGB, Andrew and Gordievsky state that she was used mainly as a courier, and it would appear that the claim about ‘important assignments’ was an exaggeration.

What is astonishing is the lack of surveillance reports by British counter-intelligence on Alex and Edith during this period. Between an MI6 report from Vienna, dated July 8, 1931, which reveals that Edith is working for TASS (the Soviet news agency) and a note on April 23, 1935, indicating that she is running a photography business at Haverstock Hill, there is nothing apart from the Special Branch report of February 21, 1934, which covers Alex’s recent career, and records their marriage in Vienna in August 1933. What it does indicate, however, is that Dr. Tudor-Hart took up a position at St. Mary Abbott’s Hospital in Kensington in June 1933. Given the intense interest in the pair of them, the fact that no reports on their correspondence and movements (such as Edith’s presumed letter of appeal to him to come and rescue her, or his travel to Vienna, or their joint return as a married couple) were submitted to the file, both beforehand and afterwards, is a highly provocative phenomenon.

Dr. Tudor-Hart

Yet evidence elsewhere confirms that MI5 was indeed intercepting correspondence at this time. A report from December 1, 1951, (in KV 2/1604) states that “Alexander paid another visit to Vienna to see Edith in early April 1931, Edith maintaining contact with him by letter until August 1933, when he returned to Vienna to marry her.” (An item in KV2/1603 indicates that Tudor-Hart left in August, but the exact date is obscured, as is the date appending a note indicating that he was a member of the Hampstead Anti-War Committee at some time in September.) Further: “Edith’s letters from this period show that there were certain legal complications and obstructions to her (Edith’s) marriage to TUDOR-HART at this time.” Why were these intercepts not filed?

These observations serve to contradict a later source – Jungk’s account of Edith’s tribulations. For some reason, Jungk has Alexander Tudor-Hart coming to Vienna in the spring of 1932, whereupon Edith moves in with him, although she ‘does not love him in the same way she loved Arnold’. Thus Alex is around at the time Edith is arrested, in May 1933, and is ‘shocked’, like all her friends, who include Litzi Friedmann, long separated from her husband. Yet Jungk’s tale then gets more absurd: he claims that Edith was released one month later, and that she then repaired to Litzi’s flat, where she met a new lodger who had been there a few days, namely Kim. Moreover, she is so taken with him that she confessed that ‘if she hadn’t been so tied to Alexander, she could have fallen in love with him’. The problem is that when such anecdotes so gravely break the rules of time and space, one has to wonder how much of the rest of the cavalcade of reminiscences is delusionary. (I emailed Mr. Jungk about these anomalies: he has not replied.)

I would judge that MI5’s record of Alex’s hospital service, and of his presence in England, is more accurate: the testimony of his son, Julian (also a doctor, the offspring of Tudor-Hart’s relationship with Alison Macbeth, b. 1927, d. 2018) confirms his father’s appointment at St. Mary Abbots Hospital. Yet the willingness of the British authorities to sanction the marriage between a suspected communist and a known agitator who had already been expelled from the United Kingdom, and to allow the solemnization of that ritual within the British Embassy in Vienna, suggests some possibly darker objectives at hand, and might explain why all records of the negotiations thereto – such as the letters identified above – have not appeared in the archive.

Acquaintances in Vienna

How well did Arnold, Edith, Litzi and Kim know each other in Vienna? Two passages from Deadly Illusions provide some background: “It was Edith Tudor Hart, who had also known Litzi Friedman in Vienna, who invited her old comrade to tea shortly after the Philbys had returned to London in May 1934. Litzi brought along her husband, since he was at a loose end while waiting impatiently to hear whether he would be accepted into the Communist Party. Over the teacups the couple gave vivid first-hand accounts of action on the Vienna barricades. Philby announced that the experience had made him more determined than ever to find some way of continuing to work for the Party in England, despite, as he told it, the off-hand way he had been treated at CPGB headquarters. Philby’s ardor and the cool manner with which the pipe-smoking young Englishman recounted his missions impressed Tudor Hart”; and “She [Edith] did not tell him at the time, but as an undercover Soviet agent she saw at once that Kim, rather than Litzi, could be turned into a valuable asset for the Soviet underground network to which she belonged.”

But where does this come from? No source is given. Edith had apparently only just been recruited. How would she know anything about the ‘Soviet underground network to which she belonged’? (Individual agents were supposed to be isolated.) If she had only just met Philby, how could she quickly form the judgment that he could be turned into a valuable asset? Was the utterly irrelevant, and hardly unusual, fact that he smoked a pipe a powerful indicator? One could interpret this passage in two ways: i) that Edith was indeed a deeply placed expert recruiter, with shrewd powers of observation, and that her legend was well-earned, or ii) that this was a clumsy item of invention passed on to Tsarev. Given Edith’s very recent return to the UK, and recruitment by Arnold, I would strongly favour the latter, reflecting an official policy of switching the attention from Litzi, who is explicitly presented here as being a strong candidate for espionage, to Edith. (The characterization of Kim has all the hallmarks of having been written by Philby himself.)

Moreover, this is another sloppily crafted excerpt. Previously, Litzi had been described as Edith’s ‘friend’. Now the authors state that she ‘had also known Litzi Friedmann in Vienna’. Well, of course she had. They were not strangers, striking up a friendship in London, since Edith had invited ‘her old comrade’ to tea. Comradeship signified a much closer bond than ‘acquaintance’ or even ‘friendship’. And what does that ‘also’ mean? In addition to Kim? Surely not, if Litzi introduced her husband to Edith. To Arnold? He is not featured in the preceding paragraphs. Certainly the impression given here is that Litzi and Edith had been active agitators in Vienna for quite a while, but that this was Edith’s first encounter with Kim. This flies in the face of what Jungk wrote about Edith’s being bowled over by him when she met him in Vienna. On the other hand, why meet at Edith’s residence? Given the previous surveillance of Edith, and her track-record of having to flee Vienna because of communist agitation, having Litzi and Kim visit her on her domestic territory was highly irregular, in violation of defined tradecraft, and potentially very dangerous. She knew she was under surveillance!

As for the relationship between Arnold and Edith, Deadly Illusions records (using Deutsch’s file 32826 in the Russian Intelligence Service Archive, RISA) that Arnold had known Edith since 1926, and that he had worked with her in the Vienna underground. What it does not report (if Jungk’s account can be trusted) is the torrid affair that they had had back in 1926, and that, when it was broken off by the discovery by Arnold’s fiancée, Josefina (Fini), of love-letters written by Edith to Arnold, the heartbroken Edith fled to England to become a kindergarten schoolteacher. It seems that Arnold thus dangerously lied in the curriculum vitae that he provided to the NKVD in December 1938 (which can be read in toto in The Crown Jewels, pp 104-107). Here he states that he married Fini in 1924, when she would have been sixteen or seventeen years old. Elsewhere in his bio, he wrote that he lived with his parents until he was 24, i.e. in 1927 – a dangerously contradictory disclosure! Other accounts indicate that they did not get married until 1929: Volodarsky even traced the marriage record to March 12, 1929, although he rather ingenuously remarked (p 691) that the statement cited in The Crown Jewels should be considered a ‘slip of memory’. Astute husbands (and wives) do not get wrong the date of their wedding a decade ago – let alone by five years – unless they have a goal of deception.

Arnold’s coyness about his marriage reflects a deep uneasiness concerning his relationship with Edith. His first affair with her (which he fails to mention in his c.v.) occurred while he was engaged, perhaps unofficially, to Fini. Thus Arnold’s statement that he recruited EDITH ‘whom I already knew in Vienna’, was delightfully vague. If he arrived in Vienna in October 1933 (as he claimed), the acquaintanceship to which he referred must have been between January 1931 (when Edith arrived after her expulsion) and January 1932 (when Arnold’s work for the Comintern had been discovered, and he was summoned to Moscow, where he was soon after appointed to the Foreign Department, OMS). He deftly elides over their relationship from the previous decade.

I shall investigate the questions about the recruitment of each to Soviet intelligence in the next section, but note here that Kim made an important observation in the testimony (‘memoir’) that he provided to the KGB in 1985. Costello and Tsarev write (p 135): “Philby, apparently through lapse of memory, alluded to his having met Tudor Hart in Vienna, which the NKVD reports show as another case of his memory being in conflict with the records.” But, of course, the records could not prove a non-event, namely that he had not met Edith in Vienna. All they could do is show that the file on Edith indicated that she claimed that the tea gathering was the occasion on which she had been introduced to Kim. But perhaps that assertion was untrue, since Kim’s testimony is confirmed by Jungk? Sadly, the National Archives reinforce the confusion through a vague and unverifiable statement that appears on the announcement of the release of the Tudor-Hart archive: “Edith was close friends with Litzi Friedmann, who would become Philby’s first wife, and MI5 believed it was through this connection that Philby came to know Tudor Hart [sic] in the early 1930s.” A couple of weeks in August-September 1933 is expanded to a number of years. And whoever wrote this discounts the evidence that Litzi introduced Kim to Edith in London, or else has overlooked it.

What is also astonishing is the translated text of the message that Ignaty Reif (MAR), the illegal rezident, sent to Moscow in June, announcing the positive meeting between Arnold and Kim, and identifying the potential new candidate for cultivation. It is a clumsy and muddled statement: “In future Philby will be called SYNOK [Russian for ‘SONNY’]. Through Edith, who is known to you, who had worked for some time under ZIGMUND in Vienna, we have established that the former Austrian Party member, who had been recommended to Edith by our former Party comrades, has arrived in Britain from Vienna, together with her husband, an Englishman. He is also known to Arnold. Edith has checked their credentials and has received recommendations from her Vienna friends. I have decided to recruit the fellow without delay – not for ‘the organization’, it is too early for that, but for antifascist work [emphasis added]. Together with Arnold and Edith, I worked out a plan to meet with SÖHNCHEN [German for ‘SONNY’] before SÖHNCHEN moved to his father’s flat. Arnold Deutsch’s meeting with SÖHNCHEN took place with all precautions. The result was his full readiness to work for us.”

I note that Costello and Tsarev state that this cryptogram was ‘undated’. That is not surprising, as it shows all the signs of having been faked. The flow is illogical. Reif introduces Philby and his cryptonym first, without explaining the background. Why, having stated that Philby will be called SYNOK, does Reif quickly switch to SÖHNCHEN ? He then suggests that ‘the former Austrian Party member’ (i.e. Litzi) had somehow been recommended to Edith (the implied Big Cheese of the operation) by our former Vienna comrades (why ‘former’?). Yet how had this recommendation been received, and why would it not have been considered by Reif first? Reif then mentions that the unnamed person’s husband is an Englishman, as if Moscow had no idea of what Kim and Litzi had been up to, and were ignorant of the circumstances of their marriage. Moreover, since Party comrades in Austria had already recommended Litzi to Edith, and Edith was prepared to recommend Kim on the basis of his being known by the reliable Litzi, why on earth did she need to check the credentials of both of them?

Furthermore, Kim ‘is also known to Arnold’. Why is Arnold not referred to by his cryptonym, ‘OTTO’? And what does that statement mean? That he has met him, and is acquainted with him? Why would Reif insert that if Arnold has supposedly just met Kim for the first time? Does it not sound as if Arnold had encountered Kim in Vienna? Or could it mean simply that his name is known to Arnold? But again, that makes no sense given the recent encounter between the two. Kim told Borovik that ‘a man he had known in Austria sought him out’, suggesting that Arnold had met Kim in Vienna, and had instigated the meeting. That would tend to undermine any leading role ascribed to Edith. In any case, Edith no longer needed to be protected by the time Philby gave his testimony to Borovik: she died in 1973. (One longs to see the original Russian.)

Tracking Arnold’s movements at this time is difficult. Some sources suggest that he was in Vienna in August 1933, and it was then that he recruited STRELA. At some time after that he moved to Paris, and was told that he would be sent to England for his next assignment. Yet Arnold’s own biography, reproduced in The Crown Jewels, tells a different story, indicating that he was informed in October 1933 that he was going to be assigned to work in Britain, at which time he moved from Paris to Vienna, where he recruited STRELA and JOHN. (I note here that Boris Volodarsky has confidently identified STRELA as Charlotte Moos, who was in England at the time.) If that is true, he would have arrived too late to recruit Alexander Tudor-Hart. Yet, since the MI5 file confirms that Tudor-Hart visited Edith in Vienna in April 1931, Arnold probably met him at that time, and could have recruited him then.

In any event, by the early part of 1934 Arnold had indeed moved to London, ahead of the Philbys. Costello and Tsarev, referring to Arnold’s bio in his KGB file, indicate that he arrived in February; Cave Brown states it was in April (but adds that his wife was with him then, which is wrong); Burke offers May. I referred earlier to my conclusion that Arnold probably met Kim in Vienna because of his acquaintance with Lehmann and the Tudor-Harts. If we trust Arnold’s timeline, the encounter with the latter now seems impossible, given Alex’s short visit to rescue Edith, but Arnold was clearly moving in those same circles after the Tudor-Harts left for Britain in early September 1933, and had ample opportunity to get to know Kim.

The same telegram is introduced in The Philby Files, however, and the paraphrase/transcription generates further confusion. Borovik is, however, a bit more precise about dates and formats, and offers some observations about the text itself. He annotates that ‘documents are presented with the original style intact. The only changes are to orthographic mistakes and typographical errors’. He states that telegram No. 2696 was sent by Reif to Moscow the day after the Regent’s Park meeting, briefly informing the NKVD, rather bizarrely, that ‘the son of an Anglo agent, advisor of Ibn-Saud, Philby, has been recruited’. Later, a long letter was sent to Moscow with the details, dated June 22 (incidentally sent via courier, probably Reif himself, to Copenhagen before routing).

I present the first few sentences of the text, so that a close comparison can be made: “Philby. From now on we will call him ‘Sonny’ or ‘Söhnchen’. Through ‘Edith’, whom you know and who worked at one time for Siegmund in Vienna, we established that an Austrian Party member with recommendations from Viennese comrades to ‘Edith’ arrived on the island with her English husband from Vienna. She is also known to Arnold. ‘Edith’ checked the recommendation and got confirmation from all our Viennese friends. In Vienna the press reported on the happy marriage of a young Viennese woman with a prince of the court of Ibn-Saud (clippings will follow). According to the Viennese friends of Edith and the ‘newlyweds’ themselves no one knows about their sympathies and work for the Party either in Vienna or on the island (with a few exceptions). Sonny was never a member of the Party and tried to hide his sympathies for the Party, since he was planning a diplomatic career after Cambridge. Edith’s references on Sonny are highly positive.”

It is hard to decide who is being deluded here. The first astonishing difference is that Arnold’s acquaintance with a member of the happy couple has shifted to Litzi (‘she is also known’). But here the ‘also’ makes even less sense, as it cannot sensibly be as juxtaposition to Edith, and to claim that Arnold knew Litzi as well as Kim at this stage would suggest that, in Vienna, Arnold had been more closely acquainted with Kim than Litzi! Again, the lack of the original text in Russian is enormously frustrating: it is difficult to imagine how either Tsarev or Borovik could have misconstrued this simple sentence. If there is one thing the Russian language is precise about, it is the gender and declension of personal pronouns. Thereafter the anomalies concern the business of the marriage, and the political sympathies of Litzi and Kim. Why a rezident in London would be informing Moscow of Viennese press reports, and promising to send clippings, when the NKVD was surely digesting them itself, is illogical. Furthermore, the notion that Kim and Litzi had been able to escape attention, and keep their sympathies private, is absurd, given that the whole point of the marriage had been to allow Litzi to escape before she was arrested, and that Litzi had used her new British passport to perform missions to Czechoslovakia in March and April 1934. (This knowledge was revealed by Helenus Milmo to Philby when he interrogated him in December 1951.) Lastly, the idea that they could possibly have undertaken work for the Party ‘on the island’ (i.e. in Britain) is ridiculous, given that they arrived only a few weeks beforehand. And what about those ‘exceptions’? Would Moscow not have demanded an instant explanation? It is all a charivari.

Recruitment

Given that all four could conceivably have known each other, in the short time between Edith’s release from prison and her departure with Alex that overlapped with Kim’s first few weeks in Vienna, when was each recruited by the Soviets?

‘Recruitment’ is a nuanced notion. A candidate could be watched performing useful assistance (perhaps as Kim was when he started aiding Litzi) before being signed up. Various couriers and helpers were used without stringent testing of their loyalty. In Stalin’s Agent, Volodarsky comments on Arnold’s claim of recruiting Edith in London, as reported in The Crown Jewels (p 106). Arnold had written: “In February 1934 I went to London where I recruited Edith, whom I already knew in Vienna.” (Was that a deliberately vague statement, since it must have referred to an earlier period, as Edith had left Vienna before he arrived? And why does Arnold completely overlook the critical encounter with Kim in his biography?) In an Endnote (p 545), Volodarsky writes: “Regarding her [Edith’s] recruitment at the time, it was perhaps a pun rather than an error or slip of memory. In Russian, the expression privlekat k cotrudnichestvu (to co-opt an individual) and verbovat (to recruit) can often substitute one another. Edith was indeed co-opted to carry out Soviet intelligence assignments while in Vienna but was formally recruited as an agent much later (see Appendix II).” This is not all that helpful, especially since Volodarsky in the Appendix clumsily writes that EDITH ‘was recruited by Deutsch in 193? [sic]’. He finesses the whole troubled saga of Edith’s recruitment, suspension, and re-activation.

Be that as it may, and irrespective of whether those two terms were really used interchangeably, any approach concerning a firmer commitment would have been made carefully, normally through ‘false-flag’ manœuvres (for example, Guy Burgess suggesting ‘working for peace’, without mentioning the Comintern; Reif referring to ‘anti-fascist’ activity), and the critical assessment made by someone who will not easily be harmed (e.g. Arnold taking precautions over the interview with Kim). [Costello and Tsarev offer a useful summary of the process in Note 14 on p 451 of Deadly Illusions.] But once a commitment was made, there was no going back. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced, giving an opportunity for hirees like Goronwy Rees to falter, Burgess wanted him killed, lest he betray them all. If they did not receive explicit warnings about apostasy, agents would have been well aware of how Stalin’s organs chased down and killed defectors or traitors.

It seems certain that Edith had become a serious agent during her relationship with Arnold, and before she came to England. Borovik writes that Arnold recruited her in 1929. The Crown Jewels, using Arnold’s KGB file, states that in 1930-31 a girl he knew introduced him to an officer in the (O)GPU [see below], who entrusted him with a few tasks. “Deutsch in his turn introduced the Soviet intelligence officer to EDITH, who later went to Britain.” Arnold should perhaps have presented that information in his c.v., but again may have wanted to suppress any connections because of his affair with her. In any case, that evidence would seem proof that Edith was a fully signed-up member of the Soviet Intelligence Service when she was sent to Britain in 1930. (This reference to EDITH is maddeningly absent from the Index to The Crown Jewels, which also erroneously lists her there under ‘Hart’.)

The comments that Edith expressed in her letters, especially those concerning Maurice Dobb, indicate that she indeed had an important subversive role to play at that time. David Burke has revealed that Edith kept up a correspondence in 1930 with Trevor Blewitt, who was having an affair with Phyllis, the wife of Maurice Dobb, and who eventually married her in 1934. He states that it was MI5’s interest in Blewitt, and in his friendship with Edith, that led to her arrest at the Trafalgar Square demonstration in late October 1930. Yet the clumsy and visible actions of protest in which she and Alex took part in indicate that she was either poorly-trained, or was disobeying instructions. Her being expelled as a known agitator should have prompted Moscow to consider her a permanent liability, since she would obviously be surveilled if she ever returned to the United Kingdom. (Volodarsky provides the link between Arnold’s statement and the Reif telegram by informing us that the officer to whom Arnold introduced Edith in Vienna, namely Siegmund [ZIGMUND], was one Igor Lebedinsky, the legal rezident, who also went under the name of Igor Vorobyov.) One would assume that Arnold knew about Edith’s past problems with the British authorities, and that he was simply recommending her for work in Austria.

Thus Arnold’s claim that he ‘met’ Edith soon after his arrival in Britain, and that she ‘immediately agreed to work for us’ sounds very bogus. Moreover, Edith’s claim about the ‘secret network to which she belonged’ can be seen to be mendacious in the context of her recruitment. It would again have been poor tradecraft for her to know of the existence of a network and its members – and certainly so just after Deutsch brought her in. The arrangement of the rendezvous also reflected poor judgment on the part of this ace subversive. Nevertheless, if he really had been intent on recruiting Edith, he would presumably have had to gain permission from Moscow before re-engaging such a volatile property. I return to the texts: the references to her suggest some subtle distinctions. Costello and Tsarev introduce her as follows: “Through Edith, who is known to you, who had worked for some time under ZIGMUND in Vienna, . . .”, while Borovik offers a slightly different spin: “Through ‘Edith’, whom you know and who worked at one time for Siegmund in Vienna . . .” Yet the original text seems tentative. If Edith is known to Moscow, why does that have to be spelled out? Perhaps it is a suggestion that Edith had been made dormant, but has now just been resuscitated, reinforcing the comment made by Arnold.

Memorial to Deutsch

Given that uncertainty, the attention given to Edith’s prestige and influence is quite remarkable. It is she who checks the recommendation (although the translators differ over ‘credentials’ and ‘recommendation’) and receives confirmation about the genuineness of the two new candidates from her Viennese friends, a fact that both commentators agree on. The charade is maintained that Edith’s friends in Vienna are recommending both ‘the former Austrian Party member’ and her husband as candidates for recruitment, but it is not clear why Litzi cannot be named, unless the custodians of the archive thought that in some way they could disguise her identity, and regarded her anonymity as paramount. Moreover, it would appear strange that, having received written testimonials, Edith would then have to verify them with her erstwhile comrades.

Exactly how Edith managed to communicate with these people in such short order is never explained – as if letters could be safely entrusted to the mails without interception, let alone the fact that the events all took place quite speedily in that hectic May/June period. Telephone calls? Highly unlikely, I would say. Moreover, the telegram asserts that the anonymous Party member (Litzi) had arrived with recommendations for Edith. Again, apart from the fact that we know that they had been acquainted for some time, and had agitated together, it would have been quite extraordinary for such endorsements to be sent to Edith, presumably as ‘letters of credit’ that Litzi brought with her, if Edith had only just been re-recruited by Arnold. What may be significant is that Peter Smolka paid a visit to Vienna that summer, leaving London in early July and returning a month later, so he may have been used as a courier to verify the references.

And then Edith makes an independent decision that Kim is a superior candidate over Litzi for the undercover Soviet network to which she (Edith) already belongs. Was that selection within her authority, or is the narrative an attempt to bury the potential for Litzi to have any role at all? As I have written before, the NKVD considered Litzi a far more important prospect than Kim at this time. This seems to me to be a classic example of disinformation, a rather disingenuous attempt to draw attention away from Litzi to Kim at a time when Litzi was established, and Kim represented a very speculative venture. Again, I refer to Kim’s statement to Borovik that Arnold knew him already and had sought him out – probably a foolish claim designed to amplify his own importance that undermined the whole shaky edifice of the Legend of Edith Tudor-Hart. In KGB: The Inside Story, Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, exploiting the latter’s insights, even declare, shockingly, that ‘Deutsch arrived in England with instructions to make contact with Burgess as well as Philby’. That has alarming possibilities, since Burgess had not yet visited the Soviet Union, and his name could hardly be known by the OGPU/NKVD.  Overall, however, it is another sorry mess.

But when did Litzi become a recognized Soviet asset in the West? And when did she become MARY? References are few. Volodarsky writes: “As mentioned, in February 1934 Deutsch went to London alone and Reif joined him there in April. They worked together until June, when Reif left for Copenhagen again. By the summer their network of agents, helpers, talent-spotters, and couriers included Edith Suschitzky (alias ‘Betty Grey’); her husband Alexander Ethel [sic] Tudor-Hart (alias ‘Harold White’); Alice ‘Litzi’ Friedmann, the first wife of Philby, later recruited as agent MARY; Kim Philby himself, then only a candidate for recruitment; agents PFEIL (also GERTA or HERTA, in Russian STRELA, unidentified, . . .”. I should also mention that Christopher Andrew, in his history of MI5, exploiting yet another unidentifiable source in the Security Service archives, cites (p 169) a statement that Kim made ‘on the eve of defecting to Moscow’ – a bizarre construction given that Philby was in Beirut, far away from MI5, at that time: “. . . Lizzy came home one evening and told me that she had arranged for me to meet a “man of decisive importance”. So much for tea and sandwiches at Edith’s place: MARY had been hard at work.

Volodarsky regrettably does not offer here a date for Litzi’s ‘later’ promotion to MARY, although in an Appendix he states that MARY was recruited in 1935 by Deutsch with the help of Edith Tudor-Hart – another illogical observation. On the other hand he implies that a whole bevy of hangers-on could be entrusted with important roles without yet being ‘recruited’. It may or not be notable that he does not credit Edith with being EDITH, yet he confirms that Edith and Alex were ‘recruited’ in some way. (It is simply difficult to imagine Alex as anything but a fully committed agent.) Yet in an endnote he denies that the pair were STRELA: “In both The Mitrokhin Archive and TNA: PRO KV2/1603, Edith Tudor-Hart is said to be sharing a joint code name STRELA/PFEIL with her husband Alexander. However, further research revealed that PFEIL and EDITH were recruited at different times and in different places; besides, in the balance sheet of the London NKVD station of June-July 1935 both PFEIL and EDITH are mentioned as receiving payments for their foreign travel.” What to make of this? Was PFEIL perhaps simply Alex, recruited in Vienna? And did Edith really travel abroad in this period? I can find no record of such movements, either in her MI5 file, or in Jungk’s narrative. And the problem with Volodarsky’s accounts is that he appears sometimes to be as reliant on unidentified sources as do Costello and Tsarev.

Borovik puts his own spin on the process, again showing his haphazard grasp of chronology and geography. On page 301 he writes: “It was she [Edith] who brought him [Kim] to a bench in Regent’s Park. . . . It was that woman who helped form their entire group. Austrian by birth, she had emigrated to England and married an Englishman. Philby thought that Edith had started working with the OGPU either in England or in Austria [a safe guess!].” And Borovik added a note: “From the archives, it seems that Edith Tudor-Hart was recruited by Deutsch (‘Stefan’) in 1929. In 1934 she recruited Litzi Friedmann (‘Mary’) and recommended Philby for recruitment.” Apart from the fact that Litzi had married her Englishman in Vienna, and thus was no longer ‘Friedmann’, and that elsewhere (in Deadly Illusions) Edith had supposedly rejected Litzi as an inferior candidate for agent work, and that there seems to be no other suggestion that Edith had the authority to recruit Litzi (let alone before she recommended Kim), who, as the senior partner, would not have needed recruiting by Edith, this seems an utterly convincing example of NKVD propaganda.

I have previously pointed out a reference to MARY, in my piece from last March, at https://coldspur.com/litzi-philby-under-the-covers/. The British intercepted a message sent on November 7, 1934, from a Soviet agent in the London suburbs to Moscow that reports on MARY’s ‘safe arrival’, suggesting perhaps that the cryptonym MARY had been applied to Litzi when she was in Vienna. Yet the message carries some ambiguity: was six months an inordinately long time to report the ‘safe arrival’ of an agent when the rezidentura had already described her arrival several months before? Moreover, the context and the content of the message, referring to Litzi’s ‘artist friend’, do not appear to make a lot of sense. Nevertheless, I stick to my previous conclusion that Litzi was regarded at this time as much more important than Kim, and that the marriage had been encouraged as a way of facilitating her entry into the country.

Kim’s Recruitment

As for Kim, the story of his recruitment is inevitably riddled with contradictions. Costello and Tsarev point to Kim’s visit to the CPGB HQ, immediately after his return, as proof that he had not been recruited by then, as it would have been a foolhardy venture for any new recruit to be seen near King Street. But of course we cannot be sure that Kim’s account of that visit has any veracity, no matter how colourfully he related it to Borovik. We have the evidence from Knightley that Kim told his offspring that he had been recruited in 1933, and Pincher recorded that Kim had told Nicholas Elliott in Beirut that Deutsch had recruited him in Vienna early in 1934. Moreover, the timeline of Kim’s movements in London in May 1934, as described in the chapter of his biography supplied in The Private Life of Kim Philby needs to come under close scrutiny.

Within a day or two of the couple’s arrival (so Kim wrote), they [sic] visited the CPGB HQ, introducing themselves to Willie Gallacher and Isobel Brown of the communist elite, who were presumably fortuitously both present and available for the encounter. (In a careless, throwaway line, Kim told Borovik: ‘One of my friends, I don’t remember who, warned them that I was coming, and they let me in.’ He thereby indicates that he went to the Embassy alone!) Having been given the brush-off, and told to come back in six weeks, Kim applied himself to completing the forms for his Civil Service application – another couple of days, perhaps. Seale and McConville indicate that he then sent off letters to potential referees in Cambridge, and a flurry of correspondence occurred. The authors are very prodigal with supplying dates, however: it is not clear whether all this happened before the supposed meeting with Arnold – an event of which the authors were totally ignorant. Cave Brown claims it occurred after the meeting with Deutsch.

Then, ‘after a few days with my parents’ (a lie, as his father was absent in Saudi Arabia at this time), he and Litzi moved into a furnished room in East End Lane. He does not state how long it took to find this abode. Here appears another conflict, since Reif’s telegram reported that he had ‘worked out a plan for Arnold to meet with SÖHNCHEN before SÖHNCHEN moved to his father’s flat’. Cave Brown introduces a possibly important factoid here, having apparently had access to the archive of Kim’s father, St. John. He writes (p 182) that St. John had asked his mother, May, to ‘inspect’ Alice, and that she found the couple ‘pigging it’ in a scruffy unfurnished room which they shared with a Hungarian, possibly Peter Gabor, ‘who had introduced Kim to Alice’. Yet Cave Brown cannot be relied upon easily: he backs this anecdote up with the claim that Dora Philby was ‘still on the high seas’ at this time, with St. John present in London, when the situation was in fact reversed.

In any case, Kim resumed his studies in his new accommodation and renewed contacts with old friends – perhaps another week? He visited Cambridge to meet with pals from the Cambridge University Socialist Society. Seale and McConville are again the source for this, but are still distressingly vague about dates. (We do know that Guy Burgess wrote to Isaiah Berlin in May, informing him that Kim had just returned from ‘fighting in Vienna’, so the Cambridge visit must have preceded the Regent’s Park business.) Lastly, Kim claimed that he and Litzi on May 1 went to Camden Town to join the annual May Day march. This is either a sloppy sequence of chronology, or a clumsy invention. If taken literally and logically, Kim’s narrative would indicate that they had been in the country two or three weeks by then, leading to a projected arrival date of about April 10.

Yet Milmo (as I explained in my March 2023 piece at https://coldspur.com/litzi-philby-under-the-covers/ ) had confronted Kim with the fact that Litzi had used her new passport to travel to Czechoslovakia as late as April 14, 1934. (Costello and Tsarev wrote that she had to wait two months after the marriage on February 14 to receive her passport, which obviously cannot be right.) Given that she had to return to Vienna, and that the couple then travelled by motorcycle across Europe, stopping in Paris for sightseeing purposes, the chronology can instantly be seen as utterly impossible. Even if we can trust the statement in the Smolka archive that the Philbys left Vienna on April 28, and that Kim’s account of his activities was not related in chronological order, the key event of May 1 makes the whole edifice crumble. Philby must have concocted a complete fantasy, and presented the sequence of events utterly carelessly. Edward Harrison is right in suggesting that Kim wanted to protect the Tudor-Harts since they had been ‘the central link joining activists from Cambridge, Vienna and London in an international communist conspiracy’. But what he does not state is that the ruse itself must have been fuelled by his Moscow bosses.

Moreover, we have Kim’s inconsistent accounts of the set-up with Arnold to deal with. I referred earlier to the mysterious note in the MI5 files where Kim explained that Litzi came home one evening and told him that she had set up a meeting with the man ‘of decisive importance’. In his autobiography, Kim switches the activity to a male friend whom he had seen two or three times since returning from Vienna. (The implication is that the friend was English.) This friend confided in him that he had been approached by a man who had heard of his Viennese exploits, and was interested in talking to him. He was told not to say anything to Litzi yet, and Litzi was fittingly ‘too disciplined to ask questions’ when he returned home. By the time Kim speaks to Borovik, he casually mentions that ‘a man whom I had met in Austria sought me out’: now it is ‘a very serious person’ who could help with Kim’s career supporting the cause that his acquaintance wants him to meet. When the rendezvous is made, the person who led him there is more explicitly identified as an ‘Austrian friend’. The former ‘man he had met’ has been transformed into a ‘friend’. Kim eventually informed Borovik that this person was Edith Tudor-Hart.

And what about the view from Moscow? Nikolai Dolgopolov claims to have had access to the Russian intelligence archives at Yasenevo, but there are no footnotes or endnotes in his narrative, and his book conventionally does not carry an index. He includes some official telegrams in an Appendix, but none earlier than 1941. He provides a rather shaky chronology, showing that Deutsch arrived in Britain in 1933, not 1934. He does declare that Kim worked as a courier in 1933, but was not recruited until June 1934 – in fact, a somewhat premature assessment. Thus it is not possible to determine whether Dolgopolov is simply using the same sources as conventional western historians and journalists, or whether he had access to some original documents. As an aside, in describing Litzi’s escape to England, he rather coyly introduces the maybe gratuitous comment that ‘Kim did not like working with women. He preferred to socialize with them in other ventures, and different situations’. One can understand the implications of the second part, but the first assertion is not borne out by the facts.

His account of Arnold’s and Edith’s roles in the recommendation of Kim is thus familiar and humdrum. He provides a sketch of Edith, but it is very spotty, and does not perform justice to her complex background. He makes out that it was Arnold who laid before Edith her anointed role as a talent-spotter, but he provides no insight into her connections with Maurice Dobb from some years before, and overlooks completely the story of Edith’s expulsion. His overall message is to attribute to Edith a major role in determining Kim’s destiny as a spy. He assumes that Litzi introduced Kim to her, but allocates Litzi overall a very minor role, perhaps taking on a function parallel to her husband. He records the meeting with Deutsch, but does not quote or discuss any of the infamous Reif telegram. It is all very bland.

Surprisingly, Vladimir Antonov gives a more lively account of Kim’s recruitment than does Dolgopolov. He provides more historical and biographical background information, and declares that he has actually studied the Tudor-Hart archive. Yet his story is very conventional. He does mention one or two western sources (such as Seale’s and McConville’s Long Road to Moscow), but overall follows Philby’s narrative line. He offers more background information on Edith and her hasty marriage to an ‘aristocrat’, and he echoes the familiar claim that she and Kim became acquainted in Vienna, where she was able to assess his potential. He provides one or two clues on chronology, stating that Litzi and Kim left Vienna in May, travelling to London via Paris by motorcycle, without realizing that that assertion drives a coach-and-horses through Kim’s claim that he attended the May Day parade. Antonov allocates an imaginative role for Edith in London, confirming that she quickly met up with Deutsch, was given the task of talent-spotting, and, when she learned of Kim’s visit to the CPGB HQ, she quickly had to set up the meeting. Antonov expresses surprise that the British authorities never arrested Edith, after its intense surveillance, but never explores the paradox of why the NKVD continued to use such a vulnerable and obvious subversive. It seems he is following the Party line.

Interim Conclusions

I draw two major observations from this analysis: 1) that Kim Philby’s mendacious testimony has been accepted and promulgated by too many writers who ought to know better; and 2) that the archival material concerning the events of 1933 and 1934 is distressingly frail.

Philby’s accounts of his activities, in his memoir, in the recovered chapter that was omitted from My Silent War, in the biography he submitted to the KGB, in the interviews he gave to various journalists, from Knightley to Borovik, and in what he told his own family, are notoriously unreliable. I say that because of the obvious chronological impossibilities, but also because of the blatant contradictions. For example, he said he went to the Embassy with Litzi: he also stated that he alone was let in. He identified Litzi as the person who introduced him to Deutsch; he also claimed that it was a male he had known in Vienna; he finally admitted that it was Edith. He claimed that he stayed with his parents in Hampstead – but his father was away in Saudi Arabia. He said he had been recruited in Vienna in 1933. He said he had known Deutsch in Vienna: he presents the Regent’s Park encounter as a first exposure to him.

What surprises me is not that he lied and dissembled so much: that was his métier as a spy. The astonishing aspect for me is that he has been allowed to get away with it. Good agents are supposed to be meticulous in representing the details of their life. All it takes is a careful comparison of his claims, and the construction of a solid timeline, complemented by a correct geographical context, to identify the holes in his story. Of course, analysts can state that, yes, he dissimulated (about Edith, for example), as he needed to protect her. But then one cannot simply accept everything else he wrote simply because it sounds plausible, and adds some romantic glow to his adventures. For there are no third-party confirmations of the claims he made – of the date he and Litzi arrived in the UK, of the visit to the CPGB, of the May Day parade, of his visit to Cambridge (apart from the valuable Burgess-Berlin exchange), of the park-bench meeting with Deutsch. Yet these stories are echoed and solemnly sourced in the biographies and ‘histories’ of the period.

And that leads on to my second observation – that the archival material is very bizarrely silent about these crucial events. Why were there no documents placed in M5’s Tudor-Hart file at the time, reflecting Edith’s anguished letter of appeal for Alex to come and rescue her, Alex’s reply, Alex’s travel to Austria, the procedural challenges to the marriage before it actually took place at the Embassy in Vienna, or their arrival at customs in the United Kingdom? Either side of the critical period, both Alex and Edith were being closely surveilled. Yet interest seemed for some reason to evaporate between 1931 and 1935. That information was being maintained on their activities can be verified by later posts in their files, but the gaping hole in the records for the most critical time in their careers is simply inexplicable according to most norms. For instance, the later posts refer to complications and obstructions concerning their marriage: how were these overcome, who intervened, and why? It is so clumsy that it provokes most searching doubts about the policies and objectives of the intelligence services.

Oleg Tsarev (from ‘Looking for Mr. Nobody’)

And what about the Russian archives that were opened for a few vital years? Costello and Tsarev identify a Tudor-Hart file alongside the multiple extracts from the Deutsch and Orlov files. In Note 48 to Chapter 5, they refer to a profile of her submitted by Deutsch, which can be found in ‘File no. 8230 Vol. 1, p. 52’. Yet this is the only extract that I could find in their book! Surely a file that contains at least one volume, and several dozen pages, should have more useful revelations to disclose? The authors astonishingly note: “Precisely when Edith Tudor-Hart arrived in Britain is not clear from her file, but it was 1933 and almost certainly May, the year before Philby set out for Austria.” If the NKVD/KGB did not keep track of her movements, and were dismally wrong about the timing of her escape to Great Britain, yet dedicated that many pages to her, how important could she have been, and what nuggets could have been found there? The lack of interest displayed by the authors is almost shameful, but unfortunately both are now dead.

Moreover, West and Tsarev failed to grasp the nettle a few years later. Their coverage of Edith is remarkably patchy, and they make some egregious mistakes. In a Postscript, they boost her reputation by crediting her with establishing the Oxford ring through ‘the mysterious’ SCOTT (Arthur Wynn, whom they do not identify), but their evidence is thin, citing a report to Moscow in October 1936 where Edith was simply attributed with the opinion that SCOTT had even more potential than SÖHNCHEN. The biographical information on her relates mostly to her photographical career in England, and uses no fresh material from her KGB file. Moreover, the authors clumsily state that the only link that MI5 was able to establish between Kim and Edith was that her former husband had been a contemporary of Kim’s at Cambridge. But Alex Tudor-Hart attended the university with Maurice Dobb, not with Philby.

Jungk’s Quest

The possibilities of unearthing fresh secrets about his controversial relative consumed Peter Jungk. He wrote to the Moscow authorities. After first receiving a brush-off, and being referred to the Swiss Red Cross for information in Edith, he gained an introduction from a Professor K., at Graz University, to Sergey Ivanov, the director-general of the FSB Archive. The written reply he received stated that the institute had no information to give him, that the public was not allowed access to its archive, and he instead pointed Jungk towards Deadly Illusions! Undeterred, and without speaking Russians, Jungk decided to visit Moscow to seek his fortune.

Peter Stephan Jungk

Quite extraordinarily, he was able to gain access to the Comintern Archive building and present his question, aided in translation by a young American who happened to be undertaking research on Zinoviev. He asked about any files on Edith Suschitzky/Tudor-Hart. The archivist disappeared, returning after twenty minutes to inform Jungk that they had no files on Edith. Jungk could not believe it. He thus contacted by telephone Nikolai Dolgopolov, who had just published his book on Philby. (That dates the events as around 2019, by which time Putin had severely tightened the screws on the availability of intelligence secrets.) When Dolgopolov understood his relationship with Edith, he happily agreed to a meeting: he spoke English perfectly.

The encounter with Dolgopolov was a touch bizarre. Dolgopolov claimed that he had had access to the Philby files in the archive for the purpose of writing his biography, which Jungk describes as ‘durch und durch űberraschende’ (‘utterly startling’ – although how he could make that judgment is not clear). As Dolgopolov read passages from his book, translating as he went along, it occurred to Jungk that they reminded him of what Borovik, who had been able in 1988 to exploit the KGB archives shortly before his death, had written. But Borovik’s book was available only in English. Jungk thus asked him whether he was familiar with The Philby Files, to which he received the slightly uncomfortable reply from Dolgopolov that he had never been influenced by Borovik, attributing the fact that the texts sounded similar to his acquaintance with Kim’s widow, Rufina.

The meeting ended awkwardly. Dolgopolov poured water on any notion that Jungk might be able to gain access to Rufina, or the files, and then made some discourteous comments about Jungk’s father when he realized that his visitor was the son of Robert Jungk. He made some arrogant and tactless remarks about his own residence in Paris in the 1980s: Jungk realized that his interlocutor had been a KGB officer. Moreover, Jungk concluded that even the expert biographer had nothing more to reveal than what could be found in Borovik’s book. He tried to see Borovik, but the latter was too ill to have visitors – or even to discuss Dolgopolov’s biography and research over the telephone. His friend Petrov reminded him how protective and insular the Putin regime had become, and how the group Memorial had been policed and constrained.

In the last chapter of the saga, Jungk was introduced to a former Colonel in the KGB, Igor Prelin, who was a close friend of Sergey Ivanov. Prelin explained to Jungk that, in the early 1960s, he had personally been involved with transferring the files on Edith from the less secure Comintern building to the highly secret KGB archive. If Jungk wrote a letter to him outlining his needs, he would ensure that he received Ivanov’s attention. He even pointed out to Jungk the building where the records of the FSB (domestic intelligence) and the SVR (foreign intelligence) were kept. Jungk thus wrote a simple letter, and handed it to the unreconstituted KGB loyalist (who regarded the break-up of the Soviet Union as a tragedy). Jungk’s spirits were raised: he had to leave Moscow, but eagerly awaited the outcome.

After a few days, he heard from Prelin that his request had been acknowledged. Prelin was optimistic. Jungk then had to wait another three months before he received his answer, again transmitted via Prelin: “Can you get hold of the book Deadly Illusions by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, which was published by Verlag Crown in 1993? This book contains on pages 133-139, 142, 154, 207 all information on this foreigner that the SVR Archive has released and passed to O. Tsarev.” Jungk decided that he should better laugh than cry, and thanked Ivanov for his efforts.

Russian Archives

So where do things stand? Can these Russian archives be trusted?

First, just because the Russian authorities claim that highly confidential records were transferred to more secure facilities in the 1960s, it does not necessarily mean that files on Edith Tudor-Hart were among them. After all, Ivanov did voluntarily recommend that Jungk inspect Deadly Illusions to ascertain what research was available. Moreover, if the files had been made even less accessible, how was it that Tsarev was able to study any of them? Furthermore, if he did access them, how come that the only item of interest concerning Edith that he reproduced was a very anodyne and equivocal biographical sketch of her by Arnold Deutsch? If Edith had been an agent of some substance and achievement, it would have been far more probable that, during the last few years before the Soviet system fell, the KGB would have highlighted her achievements, as they did with Ursula Beurton (née Kuzcynski), Melita Norwood, and Kim Philby himself.

It seems to me more likely that the NKVD/KGB had very little information on Edith, and did not know much about her career. She was someone whose name occasionally cropped up in telegrams, but did not merit special attention. Indeed, since the only known entry is the biographical detail by Deutsch that disparages her reliability, one might imagine that they discouraged using her at all. Yet that hypothesis immediately has to deal with the paradox of the apparent size of the ‘Tudor-Hart file’, No. 8320, of which Volume 1, with at least fifty pages, is identified. Why, if Tsarev was able to get his hands on it, did he not reveal more of its contents? If it had been filled with junk entries, why did he not draw attention to that fact? Moreover, since Jungk should have been aware of its identity, why did he not describe it accurately in the letter he sent to Ivanov via Prelin?

We must remember that Costello’s and Tsarev’s work was undertaken with the guidance of the KGB, as a propaganda exercise to improve its image. The Chairman of the KGB, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, had made that decision in 1990, as a means of countering what Andrew and Gordievsky had recently published in KGB. The focus of Deadly Illusions was to provide a very positive account of Alexander Orlov, the defector who had challenged and defied Stalin, but who had remained loyal to the mission of the Soviet Union and the KGB by not betraying any of the penetration agents still active in the West. John Costello wrote that Kryuchkov ‘approved the policy of making selected historical records public’, but that careless and inaccurate statement distorts the means by which Tsarev (and he alone) was able to inspect the archives of the KGB. The process of ‘publication’, or ‘declassification’, of archival material normally implies that any researcher can inspect it, and verify sources.

Boris Volodarsky has been quite scathing about the reliability of The Deadly Illusions. In his 2023 book, The Birth of the Soviet Secret Police, he points out that Tsarev had been a KGB operative working in London, until he was expelled in the early 1980s, whereupon he was employed by the Press and Public Relations office of the KGB. Volodarsky also questions Costello’s competence as a historian, suggesting he accepted whatever documents he was given at face value, because of the monetary reward. Volodarsky’s conclusion? “Nevertheless, it became an international bestseller and is still being quoted as an indisputable source by many intelligence writers although it has long been exposed as a fake history, a KGB deception.” Volodarsky’s comments would have been more useful if he had translated that last passive clause into a more active explanation.

Tsarev gives the impression that he was allowed fairly free rein among the rather chaotic sets of documents in the First Chief Directorate headquarters at Yasenevo. (He admitted that the collections could hardly be classified as ‘archives’ in the western sense of the word.) He describes speculative paper-chases that involved looking at much irrelevant material before possibly coming up with reports of value. He writes that many of the documents were undated, or had wrong dates, and that ‘some of the reports in the files are not even stitched into the bound volumes in chronological order’. Thus an immediate paradox appears: if the documents were so chaotic, how come his text and Endnotes regularly include apparently precise identification – such as with the ORLOV, DEUTSCH, PHILBY, MACLEAN et al. files? And that goes for TUDOR-HART as well. Is it possible that these identifiers were created retroactively, in order to offer a stronger impression of authenticity? In these circumstances, the existence of a tidy operational file dedicated to Edith Tudor-Hart seems very bizarre. On the other hand, if the sole identifiable reference was for No. 8320, it may have been because that was the only document on Tudor-Hart that was given to him – or on which he alighted serendipitously, and he (or his minders) decided that it should be given a number.

At a high level, Christopher Andrew described this tortuous process in the first chapter of The Sword and the Shield, the compilation based on documents smuggled out by Vasiliev Mitrokhin, which was published in 1999. These revelations greatly irritated the SVR (the Foreign Intelligence Service), which must have believed that it had been in control of the whole release process. It was, however, very disingenuous of Ivanov to pretend, when responding to Jungk, that these disclosures had never occurred, since a secondary swipe at the material had obviously taken place – without authorization. For some reason, Jungk does not appear to be aware of the Mitrokhin exercise or of this volume: else he would surely have mentioned them, or commented that Prelin’s claims that all highly secret documents had been moved to inaccessible storage some decades before, never to be seen by Westerners, were a hollow sham.

The process is even more mysterious by the time that Tsarev teams up with Nigel West in 1995 (after Costello’s death). In The Crown Jewels West does not offer much insight on the evolution of events, merely stating in his Acknowledgments, with a touch of both naivety and ingratiation: “We are also indebted to the late John Costello for persuading [sic!] the Russian Federation Intelligence Service to open its archives, and to Yuri Kobalaze for supervising our access. Also our gratitude is due to the Chief of the SVR archives, Aleksandr P. Byelozyorov, and his staff for their patient support, and to the members of the SVR Declassification Board.” This had the appearance of being a carefully controlled exercise, initiated to boost the achievements of the KGB and to embarrass the British government. The archives were never ‘opened’ for general public access in the way visitors at Kew might interpret the claim.

Yet West places a different spin on the arrangement in Chapter 17 of his recent book Classified! (reviewed here in May of this year: see https://coldspur.com/some-problems-with-westy/ ). After Costello’s enigmatic death in 1995, it appeared that an unidentified project – that of continuing where Deadly Illusions left off, presumably the coverage in the FCD files of the London rezidentura up until 1960, but West is vague – was in jeopardy. Oddly, however, it is the American publishers who became anxious about the schedule of the project, and expressed concern whether the KGB was supplying genuine texts. West was invited in, with the objective of sending him to Moscow to assess the project, but he was then informed that Random House had cancelled the whole enterprise. Tsarev had not been informed of this decision, and was angry, but also puzzled, as both the SVR and a sestet of authors had already been paid an advance fee. He proposed (by phone) to West that he take over “Costello’s current book, Deadly Illusions”.

This was an odd way of describing a publication that had come out in 1993, with one of its co-authors now dead. West then describes how, over the next couple of years, he made several trips to Moscow, in order to ‘sift through the material already selected from the KGB files by Costello and to look at the huge quantity of papers that had to be assessed’. How Costello, who knew no Russian, had been able to ‘sift through’ such material is not explained: nor does West, who also lacks competence in Russian, describe how he was able to add value to this process. Moreover, the whole exercise has an air of farce, since West claimed that he was able to secrete original documents out of the office he shared with Tsarev so that he could photocopy them at the Marriott Hotel, and then return them furtively back into the office. He then later smuggled the copies out at the airport. To think that such shenanigans could be carried on clandestinely, without the SVR knowing what was going on, defies belief. It surely must have approved the process – or at least condoned it. This is pure melodrama, designed no doubt to boost West’s reputation as a buccaneer.

When The Crown Jewels (and other books reliant on the project, such as Weinstein’s and Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood) were published, some critics complained. Amy Knight expressed the opinion that the authors had become ‘KGB [sic] dupes, peddling a pro-Soviet perspective’. West responded to this by writing: “While it is true that the KGB management only allowed us to see the documents that had already been scrutinized by the KGB, who obviously had an agenda, propaganda was not one of the organisation’s motives – they were rather more motivated by the money”. Whether these revenues derived from further down-payments, or royalties from the sale of the books, is not stated. The problem is that the whole exercise was unscholarly, a sordid commercial business of backroom deals, with files pre-screened and selected by the SVR, Costello making further extracts before he died, and West and Tsarev vaguely inspecting large quantities of documents that are not precisely described. No one else was allowed to have similar access, and no one can verify the sources or attempt to confirm the accuracy of the published conclusions. Moreover, Tsarev was an employee of the SVR.

Nevertheless, in his memoir West makes ambitious claims about the book that emerged. “The Crown Jewels represented a major step forward in understanding the traitors of the 1930s and 1940s”, he writes, “and explained the crucial talent-spotting and recruiting roles of the illegal residents Alexander Orlov and Arnold Deutsch. It also revealed the contribution made by the NKVD recruiter Edith Suschitzky.” On the recruitment chain started by Philby, with the recommendations to pursue his cronies, that statement is probably true. But, as I have shown in this piece, the claims over the exact roles of Deutsch and Suschitzky (correctly, Tudor-Hart) are very contestable. Indeed, in the relevant chapter from his memoir, West makes no reference to the assertion articulated strongly in The Crown Jewels that it was Edith who was responsible for recruiting the ‘Oxford Ring’. Perhaps he has changed his mind. And, after all, in his letter to Jungk, Ivanov did not mention The Crown Jewels, which made the claim about Edith and the Ring.

Thus one might have expected the SVR, if it had wanted to boost its expertise and achievements through Costello and Tsarev, and considered Edith a noteworthy asset, to have provided a more robust account of her role than it did. Merely allowing the Deutsch biographical sketch to slip through was not an overwhelming endorsement of the Edith legend. To reinforce that supposition, I note that there simply is very little about Edith in the Mitrokhin archive either. (She does not merit an Index entry.) Indeed, the authors show such little interest in her that they resort simply, in an endnote, to pointing out that Deadly Illusions failed to note that EDITH had been recruited by Deutsch. The narrative by Andrew and Mitrokhin is in any case sloppy: for example, it implies that Edith had married Alex ‘after she had taken residence up in London’, which is either an obtuse or grossly careless assertion. Intriguingly, the authors do however remark that Kim and Litzi ‘returned to London’ [not actually accurate, as it was Litzi’s first encounter with the British Isles] in May 1934, thus incidentally exploding the anecdote about the May Day celebrations. It is not an anomaly they pick up on. This work is assuredly not about a valuable lost trove concerning a very special agent.

The Legendary Edith

So what is the true story about Edith?

I once imagined that stories of espionage unrolled in a predictable way. Accurate reports were maintained at the time, but remained secret because of national security concerns, and to protect the living and still active. Careful memoirs might start to emerge, with names concealed. Eventually, archival material would come to be declassified, and authorized historians could get to work, exploiting resources that would be available to less qualified researchers. The public would thus learn the facts about clandestine operations and espionage cases.

Of course, it is nothing like this at all. The records that were created by intelligence organizations (from SOE to the KGB) were frequently deficient, or wrong, and were carefully weeded by the authorities before release (if they were properly declassified at all). Irresponsible participants (such as Buckmaster) were allowed to peddle their own versions of events if it suited those responsible for maintaining the reputation of a service. Independent journalists, speaking to participants who owned a different perspective, would leak stories, and often romanticize them. MI5 and MI6 would assist or ghost-write memoirs (such as Alexander Foote’s Handbook for Spies) and facilitate ‘independent’ histories (such as Alan Moorhead’s Traitors), in order to embellish their reputation. Likewise, opposing intelligence services would sponsor memoirs (e.g. My Silent War, Sonjas Rapport) as a propaganda exercise, and a further response in kind was called for.

The British authorities also realized that they did not have exclusive control of the records, the USA having a less restrictive sense of secrecy in some quarters, and they started engaging in controlled leaks themselves. The administration of ‘authorized’ histories was a useful public relations exercise, but was woefully mismanaged, with historians like Christopher Andrew ignoring professional standards of accreditation, and carelessly treating such creations as My Silent War and Spycatcher as fact. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the successors to the KGB exploited the eagerness for fresh archival material by manipulating foreign journalists, and their low-quality pap was lapped up by a fresh wave of writers unfamiliar with the tortuous history.

In that way has the fog around Edith Tudor-Hart been created, to the extent that even the grand-daughter of Kim Philby has been taken in by it. My belief is that Edith was a relatively insignificant contributor to the Soviet cause, but that she occupied a useful role as a consumer of MI5 attention and time to distract the surveillance organization from more worthy subjects. On Austrian soil she might have been able to execute a more effective function as a courier and agitator, perhaps, but with the more intense scrutiny there, and Edith’s tendency to be less than discreet in her activities, she became a quick prey, and thus had to be salvaged. Earlier, in Britain, her dealings with the Alexander Tudor-Hart/Maurice Dobb axis suggest that she could have been a potentially successful deeply-placed subversive, but, once she had been arrested as an agitator, her cover was completely blown.

The NKVD, knowing of her expulsion, must have concluded that, once she returned to the United Kingdom, her utility would be very constrained, as she would surely be subject to close and constant surveillance. And that is what happened – apart from the very strange interlude before 1935. If, as I have explained elsewhere, the NKVD considered Litzi Friedman a much more important agent, the Edith-Kim association was a sideshow to divert attention, and that is how the archival material in Moscow was framed. Kim Philby was himself tainted by his activities in Vienna, and any attempt to build him up as a deep penetration agent was a long shot. (It took six years for him to obtain an important post in intelligence – much longer than his colleagues Maclean and Burgess.) Later on, at the end of the war, when Litzi’s use was winding down – and she even came under suspicion in Berlin as a Jewish ‘cosmopolitanist’ who had been tainted by Western influences – Kim’s star rose, and the myth-making about his stellar career started to be manufactured.

It was not that Edith was completely inactive. She was watched socializing with known Communists, and she acted as a courier. In particular, she became very intimate with Engelbert Broda, who, while working at the Cavendish Laboratory, provided highly important nuclear secrets that Edith passed on. Moscow Centre must have considered that the use of Edith as a courier carried with it severe risks, but must also have either believed that the link was safe, and that Edith was by then not deemed suspicious, or that they had so many other sources on hand (e.g. Fuchs, Nunn-May, Norwood) that they could afford to sacrifice one pair, if that is what it came to.

Thus I would tend to discount most of the farrago about Edith’s introductions, the serpentine trip to Regent’s Park, the portentous chat on the bench, and the wealth of the recruitments carried out by Reif and Deutsch that summer. The various details offered in memoirs and archival material simply do not add up. For some reason, observers seem to want to pick up these romanticized episodes, forgetting that the descriptions have been offered by notorious liars – including even that great charlatan Anthony Blunt, with his nonsense about ‘the grandmother of us all’.


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Special Bulletin: ‘Two Russians’ – The PB416 Casualty File

PB416 at Saupeset

I reported earlier this month that I was awaiting the Casualty File for Flight PB416 from the Ministry of Defence. PB416 was the Lancaster bomber that crashed near Saupeset in Norway on September 17, 1944, with the loss of life of all on board – the subject of my articles on ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’: see https://coldspur.com/the-airmen-who-died-twice-synopsis/ for the synopsis of them. The official historian of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had encouraged me to make an application under the Freedom of Information Act, and, on July 11, the package arrived by email.

It consisted of two PDFs. The first was a standard letter, pointing out some of the security concerns that had occasioned redactions, primarily to disguise the names of relatives. Letters to such persons had also been omitted. It also described what actions I should undertake if I had any complaints about the procedure. The second was a 93-page file containing a variety of documents and photographs. What surprised me was that no restrictions on the use of the material were imposed upon me, so I judge I am free to quote, or even reproduce, freely from the material provided.

The file is very poignant – but also disturbing. It comes home to me that the registration processes shown here, which seemed very singular in relation to my quest over the individual flight that took place almost eighty years ago, must have become a sad routine for the RAF personnel who constantly had to record such mishaps. Yet the collection is also very alarming: it is fragmented, and inconclusive, and is in no way comprehensive. It complements rather the other archival information that I (benefitting largely from Nigel Austin’s predecessor activity) have revealed in my essay on the disaster. I conclude that the Squadron617 ‘historian’ has either never inspected this file, or has chosen to ignore some of its more provocative segments.

The last entry in the file is dated March 31, 1980, in which the author attempts to close out the story once and for all, while ignoring much of the archival record. (I shall return to that item later.) Perhaps a generation of interested contemporaries was dying out. The story was lost, and was relegated to a footnote. It has taken another forty-four years for the investigation to be resuscitated. My impression is that some institutional memory has endured over the decades, and enough knowledge has survived to foster the need for the incident to remain buried. My knowledge of RAF terminology and abbreviations is poor, but I hereby attempt to interpret the various reports contained.

The file starts with a very plain Air Ministry statement, dated the day of the crash (17/9/1944), and simply recording the names of those airmen missing. As a foundation for the evolving story, I list their names here:

F/O Levy, F.

Sgt. Groom, P. W.

F/O Fox, C. L.

F/Sgt. Peck, E. E. S.

F/Sgt. McGuire, G. M.

P/O McNally, H. C.

F/Sgt. Thomas, H. D.

F/O Shea, D. G.

P/O Naylor, J. F.

‘Passenger’ is written under this list, reflecting the knowledge that the standard crew of seven had been complemented by two others, the result of the inability of damaged Lancasters to return from Yagodnik, with their crews consequently allocated to other planes.

An unenciphered telegram, dated September 17, at 4:45 pm, from the Squadron to the Air Ministry follows, recording that the flight was missing, ‘returning to base after an operational sortie’ – an ambiguous phrase with severe implications, as I shall explore later. It provides more details of the crew, listing next of kin (although, surprisingly, only four such connections have been redacted). It states that Levy and Fox were Jewish, a fact that has repercussions later, and confirms that Shea and Naylor were passengers. The next day, the Squadron Leader writes a formal letter to the Air Ministry, confirming the details, but classifying the incident as a ‘battle casualty’, which it surely was not. He adds that a wireless-telegraph message was received at 2:27 am BST, but does not offer the co-ordinates, merely adding that it was ‘over Norway’.

The next item is startling. It comprises a translation of a letter received via the Norwegian legation, in which a Norwegian describes how a local party of citizens was assembled to provide a ceremony for the dead airmen, and how they prevailed upon the Germans to allow them to lay a wreath on the rude grave that the local (Quisling) police had dug in the mountains, by arrangement of the Nazis. The writer describes the location of the crash, and then adds: “The entire crew, consisting of two Russian, two Australian and seven British airmen, was killed, and their identity plates were found.” He ends his script by asking whether the Red Cross could provide them with the names of the airmen’s mothers so that they might learn that some Norwegians tried to give them their last honours.

The Grave on the Mountain

I found this astonishing – for the confidence that the writer expressed in the identification process, as well as for the insouciance over the presence of Russians among the crew. Yet it is also puzzling: if all identity plates were found (presumably the only way to determine that two were Russians), why did the local authorities conclude that two of the crewmen were Australian? A photograph of Shea’s ID-tag provided later in the file, in which all information is clearly visible, indicates name, rank (OFFR), number, and religion (C E), but no clue towards nationality. (It happens that one member was Canadian, and one Rhodesian, which leads me to believe that perhaps their status as a ‘colonial’ was included: perhaps the Germans assumed that all colonials were Australian. I seek guidance.) Nevertheless, the uncompromising assertion that there were eleven identifiable bodies, and two of them were Soviet citizens, supports my hypothesis about these authorized ‘stowaways’.

The Report from Stockholm

On October 30, the Air Attaché in Stockholm formally presented in a letter the same information to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence), and he requested that a copy of his report be sent to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Attaché bewilderingly expressed no surprise that a pair of Russians could have been companions of the RAF airmen. Yet he went further: he was, however, explicit that the tally of the crew, seven British, two Australian, and two Russian, was derived from the identity discs found. This provocative report prompted a stern message from the Director of Personal Services at the Air Ministry, in a letter to the Commanding Officer at Woodhall Spa, dated December 4. He cites the report from Norway, adds some details about items recovered at the scene, but also shows a large degree of disingenuousness in his attempt at detective work.

The most surprising aspect is that he had up till then not recognized or confirmed the identity of the crashed plane. He lists a few scraps of clothing that the Germans had left behind, and uses the fact that one item marked ‘511 Peck’ leads to the conclusion that ‘despite certain discrepancies, it is thought that the crash is that of Lancaster P.B. 416’. How such bureaucratic stodginess could occur when a confident statement about the identity of the sole missing plane had been made the day of the disaster is incredible. Moreover, he refers to the squadron’s report about the crew of seven, and two passengers, so he must have been familiar with the details. He highlights the anomaly of the recorded eleven victims, stating: “The reference to Russian occupants may be due to the fact that the aircraft had taken off from Archangel and might have been carrying some Russian souvenirs.” He leaves unexamined the evidence (though not verifiable) from the Germans that two Russian identity discs had been found, or how the presence of a few souvenirs could have caused the Germans to lead the Germans to identify two corpses as Russian.

The officer adds a couple of perplexing details. He writes that the Germans removed everything of value from the site, leaving only four items. Apart from the Peck item (and an anonymous clothing tab), he lists ‘a clothing label in marking ink marked 544 T (?) Smith’, and ‘the remains of a pocket book marked 225/2 marked Ormestad or Ormestond’. His final request is for the Commanding Officer to verify that the co-ordinates received by W/T concerning the location of the aircraft correspond to the site of the crash, and for the mystery of the Smith/Ormestad clothing to be resolved. “Possibly one of the occupants was wearing someone else’s flying clothing.” Indeed. But the overall impression is of someone not overdosed with intelligence, concentrating on exactly the right protocol so that the office can inform the next of kin.

In his reply, dated December 12, the Wing Commander crisply tries to dispense with any anomalies. He confirms the coordinates, and echoes the vague conclusions about the challenges of identification, and the probability of the existence of souvenirs, while using the passive voice (‘it is believed’), rather than admitting to a formal judgment. Yet he completely ignores, or tacitly views as irrelevant, any suggestion that there could have been more than nine persons on the crashed plane.

The fragmented and discontinuous nature of the file is shown by the next item. It appears to be an internal memo within P.4.CAS, dated December 19, 1944, and makes it official that the Canadian member of the crew, McNally, was on the flight. In recording the burial ceremony, however, the anonymous writer concludes: “The next of kin of the R.A.F. occupants have been informed.” That strikes me as a very bizarre form of words, implying that not all of the occupants were members of the R.A.F. Otherwise, why qualify the statement with ‘R.A.F.’?

The next letter, apparently by the same writer in P.4.CAS, with the same date, is also revealing. It is directed to A.I.1, presumably Air Intelligence. It records the facts of the flight of PB416, but carelessly notes that the plane took off from Archangel ‘to return to base after having carried out an operational sortie’. This is the first occasion in which a report has openly stated that the sortie was scheduled after the plane had left Archangel, and it directly contradicts the claims that I have listed elsewhere that the plane had probably been blown off-course. I believe this statement constitutes further proof (alongside the unsurprised checking of co-ordinates) that PB 416 was on a mission to southern Norway. The writer then dismisses any notion that there could have been more than nine persons on the plane, and he lists the nine, as given above. He judges that souvenirs must have been taken as identity discs, thus pretending to counter the assertion of eleven passengers.

On December 19, the Director of Personal Services felt comfortable enough with the investigation to inform the Director General, Graves Registration and Inquiries that, indeed, there were only nine members in the crew, not eleven, and he attached the previous letter for details. On January 11, 1945, a ‘Missing Memorandum’ (no 5889) was issued, in which the status of the nine was changed from ‘Missing’ to ‘Missing believed Killed’ (MBK). The Air Ministry passed on this decision to the HQ of 5 Group, 617 Squadron. On January 8, the RAF Casualties Officer had challenged this reclassification to MBK (and to WBK – the meaning of which is not spelled out), however, and awaited further justification in a letter.

Another letter from a Group Captain, acting for the Director of Personal Services, and dated February 6, confirms the status of the dead, but allows a separate process for the presumption of death to be taken by the Canadian section in the case of McNally. This letter extraordinarily still records that ‘The entire crew, believed to comprise eleven personnel, were all killed’, without making any commentary on this enduring enigma. The letter confirms the reality of the operational sortie. Following the letter, photographs of fragments of clothing, of the cross constructed at the crash-site, and of the airplane itself, are provided.

A new twist is next provided by an undated memorandum from an address in Oslo (the identity of its owner redacted). It repeats familiar information, but comments: “Eleven men were buried accoring [sic: ‘according] to the Germans, but the Norwegians say it was only ten.” This development may reflect the testimony of a Norwegian present at the time, who was reported on social media over a decade ago as saying that he had seen a body transported from the site. The file then reverts to October 28, where the Air Attaché in Stockholm writes to RAF Intelligence that the crew was believed to consist of eleven or twelve men! Where the twelfth person came from is not explained.

German list of Booty

The file takes another sharp turn when some German documents are revealed. It is not clear when these were discovered, but it must surely have been after the war. The first is dated as early as September 21, 1944, and consists of a list of ‘loot’, or ‘booty’ retrieved from the site. Notable among the effects are a ‘Zettel mit russicher Schrift’ [scrap of paper with Russian writing on it], ‘2 sojwetische Sterne und 1 Ankerabzeichen’, [2 Soviet stars and 1 Anchor medallion] as well as ‘4 russiche Geldscheine’ [4 Russian banknotes]. While the latter two items could conceivably be interpreted as being souvenirs (although foreigners taking Soviet money out of the country was strictly forbidden), the scrap of paper would point indisputably to the presence of a Soviet citizen on board. The anchor medallions would suggest that at least one of the pair was a member of the Soviet navy.

A brief report from an Oberleutnant, dated September 27, refers to the fact that the personal papers of seven crew members of the Lancaster will be handed over soon to the Air Command. It is followed by the shocking first revelation of the phantom members of the crew, Wynes [sic: ‘Wyness’] and Williams. On an official form for reporting British airplane crashes, dated January 24, 1945, ten crew members are listed, comprising the standard roster (but without McGuire), but including Squadron Leader Wyness and Flight Lieutenant Williams. Yet the latter two, as well as Fox, are listed without their ID-tag number, which is a surprising phenomenon, given that earlier reports had indicated that all the IDs had been found. This report appears to have been picked up on November 2, 1945, and is reproduced, with no apparent challenge. Yet the absence of McGuire is not noted, while two crosses appear against the names of Wynes [sic: unchanged, as if the writer is not familiar with the real Wyness] and Williams.

German report of crewmen found

The Director of Graves Registration and Inquiries is confused. On October 16, 1945, he writes to the Under-Secretary of State, Air Ministry (Casualty Branch), informing him that ‘the Graves Registration Service, Norway, have been alerted to visit the location and register the grave of the nine members of the crew’, who have been interred at the top of the mountain. Yet he adds that the names of Wynes and Williams have been included, without declaring the anomaly in count, or even checking his own records, where he would have found that the two airmen were already deceased. He ends his letter by asking if the two might be correctly identified, and their ‘full Service particulars furnished’.

Wynes [sic] and Williams from German records

The request for clarification is echoed in a letter from the Squadron Leader in Oslo, the officer commanding Section 6 in 88 Group. He is addressing the Casualty Department of the Air Ministry, and requests full information so that he may supply the Graves Registration Unit with accurate information. The quota of the crew has been restored to eleven, with McGuire present again, and Wynes and Williams still in view. He adds that the GRU wants the graves to remain where they are for the time being.

This causes a flutter with the Director of Personal Services. Without offering any evidence, in a letter back to Norway, dated January 2, 1946, he asserts that the aircraft carried only nine men, and notes that ‘the inclusion of Squadron Leader Wyness and Flight Lieutenant would appear to be an error on the part of the German authorities’. I notice that this is the first time that Wyness has been spelled correctly, and the Director has obviously done his homework, as he relates how the pair went missing in October 1944. His proffered explanation is that other members of the crew had somehow been carrying some of Wyness’s and Williams’s effects with them, as if that resolved all the issues. He then sends a shorter letter conveying the same message to the Under-Secretary at the War Ministry. Meanwhile, the Director of Graves Registration is getting impatient. On January 3, 1946, he reminds the War Office that he is still awaiting a response to his October 16 letter. If he received a reply, it has not been filed.

The scene then switches back to Norway, and the gravesite. An undated report explains how the bodies have been re-interred in the graveyard at Nesbyen Church, probably in April 1946. “Local reports say that eleven bodies were buried but only the remains of ten could be found,” it runs, continuing: “These were badly burned and mutilated and in all cases only parts of each body were found.” The evidence from the ground would tend to reinforce the notion that one body had been removed, while it fairly conclusively indicates that ten separate bodies could be recorded, though not confidently matched to the known crew members. The result is that some guesses had to be made.

I show below the summary of the allocation of graves to victims. One extraordinary supporting note for the body placed in Row H, Grave 1, states that one of its markers was ‘part of collar bearing the number 1435510.’ Someone has inserted the name of the airman holding this number, but it has been redacted. Next to it appears the rubric: ‘Not a casualty’. A quick search on the Web reveals that Pilot Reg Payne of the same Squadron held that number, but his name does not appear in the Operations Book of the PARAVANE mission. Why his id-tag should appear in the remains is yet another mystery. What the summary does tell us, however, is that only Levy, Groom, Thomas, Fox, McNally and Shea could be confidently identified, leaving Peck, Naylor and McGuire perhaps incorrectly identified on the eventual tombstones, with the possibility (not evident to the authorities) that McGuire’s body had been removed, and that one of the Russians had taken his place. And, of course, the tenth man is the extra whose existence could not be recognized by the R.A.F.

First Analysis of Gravesites

The details concerning the body interred at G2 are fascinating: “This body was very badly burned and only part of civilian type [missing] with blue and white stripes could be found.” Whether the pattern of this clothing could lead to clearer identification was apparently never investigated, but was it perhaps a Soviet prison uniform? Why would the authorities choose to ignore this unusual but discomforting factoid?

In any event, on May 2, 1946, the Squadron Leader of the Oslo RAF mission passed on the report to the Casualty Department at the Air Ministry, pointing out the discrepancy between the ten bodies and the nine names supplied, and asking for the Ministry’s findings on the matter. The Director of Personal Services replied on July 27, seeking to close out the business. He concurred with the identification of the six above, and then wrote: “It is not possible to identify the occupant of grave 2, row G, from the civilian wearing apparel, and it is suggested [that passive voice again!] that the remains be concentrated [sic: ‘consecrated’?] to one of the unidentified graves.” Further, he recommended that the unidentified graves be registered collectively in the names of Peck, McGuire, and Naylor. He finally attempted to wipe away all controversy about the number of bodies found by referring to the general state of mutilation, which must have made counting difficult, and requested the Graves Registration Unit to accept what he had decreed.

Initial Internment at Nesbyen

There then follow a number of identical photographs of the graves and their markers, on which the names can be clearly viewed. These were taken in October 1946 by an unnamed tourist from Leeds who happened to be in the area. There are two St. David’s Stars (for Levy and Fox), eight Christian crosses, and, very curiously, an unmarked grave to the left. That is provocative, because photographs taken recently at Nesbyen Church, with new granite headstones provided, indicate that the number of graves has been reduced to ten. This anomaly caught the eye of the officer in CAS, and he wrote to the submitter, on February 18, 1947, that ‘the arrangement of the graves shown thereon does not tally with the arrangement quoted in the exhumation reports’, and that he would not be able to forward the photographs to the next of kin until the discrepancies were cleared. The fact that these sixteen photographs still sit in the file suggests that those discrepancies remained unresolved.

There were several problems, and the officer had to send a sharp note to Oslo the same day, pointing out that the location of the graves as displayed by the private photographer contradicted the findings issued by his office. He did not describe the conflicts in detail, but it is obvious that the presence of not only a tenth, but an eleventh, grave disturbed him, and the locations of the named victims had been moved as well. “In these circumstances”, he writes, “can it be stated please on whose authority the crosses shown in the photograph were erected and inscribed?”.

He was not to receive any useful answer. On March 1, the Air Attaché in Oslo wrote back that the addressee, ‘No 14. M.R.E.S’, had left Norway five months earlier, taking all his files with him, and he routed the inquiry to Headquarters, No. 3. M.R.E.U. In Karlsruhe, Germany. Thus the investigation was tactfully allowed to grind to a halt. The officer issued his final official burial records, all nine of which appear on file, as follows, with precise data about Row and Grave No.:

Levy G1

Groom H3

Fox H2

Peck H4

McGuire G3

McNally G4

Thomas H5

Shea H1

Naylor G5.

His instructions were followed, in the main, except for the fact that a headstone existed at G2, dedicated to an ‘Unknown Airman’ – someone that the Air Ministry did not want to recognize, although the gap would have stood out like a missing tooth. And, of course, the remains described as McGuire probably belong to the second Russian citizen.

Nesbyen Cemetery Today

Nevertheless, the officer received confirmation on November 26, 1947, that the graves had been shifted according to instructions, and that the registrations were correct. Oslo declined to remove the remains of the ‘Unknown Airman’, and London remained in ignorance of their durability. And that was effectively that. Apart from corrections to the named rank of Naylor and Fox, the case was closed on December 7, 1950, with the list of the dead stubbornly remaining at nine. The last entry, dated March 31, 1980, shows that one inquisitive private sleuth was trying to decipher the mystery, having seen the grave for the Unknown Airman at Nesbyen. A letter to him from the Ministry of Defence confirms that there were only nine passengers on board the flight, and the author observes: “Unfortunately we have no knowledge of the identity of the airman who occupies the grave in the churchyard which is marked ‘Known Unto God’”. That in itself reinforces the paradox: if there were only nine on board, how is it that a real but unidentifiable tenth airman could be implicitly acknowledged?

Conclusions:

This was a sad and ignoble project. The file, while straining to provide its own narrative, omits many other significant items, such as those I have displayed in my analysis. It desperately cries out for an integrated assessment of all intelligence. It is characterized by a petty, bureaucratic lack of imagination and curiosity, and a failure of anyone to take proper responsibility for resolving the many conflicts. The question cries out for attention: Why was a Special Inquiry into this tragedy not carried out at the time?

Of course, that may have been the intention – to maintain the investigation in such a state of confusion that the bureaucrats would eventually tire of its twists and turns. Someone in authority surely knew the whole story, and how volatile it would be if the truth came out, and issued clear instructions that the anomalies were not to be pursued with any diligence. And the obstruction was successful.

Yet, some irrefutable clues persist as to the nature of the deception. The last flight of PB416 is more than once described as an operational sortie over Norway, and its unorthodox course can thus not be attributed to the weather. The Germans were able to identify two of the bodies as Russians (although their technique for doing so is not clear), and the markers erected on site (which the Report does not reproduce) clearly indicate the presence of the remains of airmen bearing the markers of Wyness and Williams. Effects showing Russian heritage, including handwritten notes, which could not have been created by any of the R.A.F. crewmen, and banknotes to the tune of 70 rubles, were recorded by the Germans. Unexplained anchor medallions and ‘civilian clothing’ were found. A suggestion remains that not all occupants were R.A.F. members. The count of eleven corpses endured, despite all the efforts of the Air Ministry to quash it. It is time for the Ministry of Defence to acknowledge the patent errors and oversights that characterized the investigation of its predecessor Ministry, conduct a proper inquiry that considers all the evidence, and prepare to apologize to the relatives of all those who died.

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Summer 2024 Round-Up

Los Altos, CA

Contents:

Introduction

‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’

The coldspur Archive

Helen Fry’s ‘Women in Intelligence’ (2023)

The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart

‘Nothing Short of a Scandal!’

Guy Burgess at Kew

A Death in Nuremberg

Holiday Reading: Volodarsky et al.

Coldspur under stress

News from Academia

Similarity and Identity

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Introduction

Readers can probably imagine the flurry that takes place in the days just before the publication of the monthly coldspur. After I have submitted my copy, my team of fact-checkers goes over it, verifying names, dates, titles, and professional positions. Thelma, my lead grammarian and Sensitivity Reader, goes over my text with a toothcomb, looking for dangling participles and ensuring that the subjunctive mood is deployed properly, checking nounal and verbal agreements, and verifying that colons and semicolons have been used correctly. She also has an eye out for any offensive remarks I may have made concerning disadvantaged minorities. (She is not certain whether the category of ‘authorized historians’ comes under that rubric.) My Editor next reviews the overall style of my piece, and analyzes it for any opinions or assertions that may have legal implications: we discuss them, and make any necessary changes. Meanwhile, my Graphics Editor has been scouring the Web for suitable images to decorate my pallid prose. Lastly, cross-referenced urls have to be reconciled and verified, and the posting properly indexed for optimization by search engines. On the last day of the month, before breakfast my time, the piece goes into Production status, and eager readers, from Memphis to Murmansk, from Montevideo to Melbourne, can pick up their monthly fix.

Thus my absence in California at the end of June, accompanied by my wife and daughter to visit our son and his family, caused a fair measure of disruption at coldspur HQ. We did not return until the early morning of July 3, and the staff had to interrupt their Independence Day plans in order to meet the new deadline. I thank everyone for their sacrifices and noble efforts. Life will be so much easier when Conspirobot© takes over completely.

‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’

Memorial Panel

I was relieved to have completed writing the saga of the 1944 crash at Saupeset, and to be able to publish it, by the end of March. I have had several complimentary messages from coldspur readers around the world, and it has been my intent to drum up interest in the story in time for the eightieth anniversary of the incident in September of this year. I strongly believe that the relatives of the sacrificed airmen deserve a full explanation and apology from the Ministry of Defence. I also believe that my story is strong, and very defensible, with incontrovertible evidence about the impersonated airmen and their subsequent tragic deaths, even if the documentation behind the conspiracy is sadly missing. I also feel it is appropriate, among all the celebrations surrounding the liberation of 1944, that honest appraisals of mistakes be made as well. For example, several recent books have disclosed the massive French civilian casualties that were caused by RAF and USAAF bombing after the D-Day landings, in places like le Havre, and the manner in which such slaughter was given justification, in the context of the objective of destroying German units, is receiving fresh attention from historians.

One of the early converts to my story was Professor Torgrim Titlestad, who has a very special interest in Peter Furubotn, the Norwegian Communist who defied Stalin. He has spent a large amount of time in updating a biography of Furubotn, one first published in Norwegian in 1997, but not yet published in English (A synopsis of his life is available through his website at https://furubotnarkivene.no/en/about_peder_furubotn/index.html). The Professor believed that what I wrote shed fresh light on Furubotn’s career – and on his avoidance of an early grave. Moreover, he had a close connection with Furubotn, as his father had been Furubotn’s security officer in 1944, and had accompanied him in his escape from the Gestapo. If any academic were to be sceptical about theories of assassination plots via RAF aircraft, it would have been the Professor.

At one stage earlier this year, Professor Titlestad even invited me to speak on the subject at a conference in Oslo later this year. I jumped at the opportunity, and started planning possible speaking events in the United Kingdom to leverage my presence in Europe, believing that I had interesting stories on such as Philby and Smolka to relate, as well as the ‘Airmen’ saga. I very much enjoy public speaking, and dug out my passport to see if it needed renewing. The Professor even asked about my expenses, and how I thought they should be met. I responded promptly –and generously, I think – but then the Professor went quiet. I did not go begging to him to determine what happened, but am dismayed by his behaviour. I do not know whether a political dispute interfered with the invitation (the Norwegians are still at loggerheads over some aspects of the wartime resistance), or whether the Professor decided he did not care for my revisionist views of Furubotn. As the conclusion of my piece clearly states, I am dismissive of the Professor’s attempt to present Furubotn as some kind of ‘Eurocommunist’ liberal, and found the references to Bukharin ill-advised. In any event, I had to withdraw my preliminary approaches for other speaking events, which was very annoying.

I thus turned my attention to media outlets who I considered might be interested in the story. My on-line colleague Keith Ellison had kindly converted the web pages of the story into PDFs, so I now had a version I could distribute rather than simply referring addressees to coldspur. I saw two classes of outlet – a) institutions with some responsibility for, or ownership of, the case, and b) investigative journalists with a penchant for uncovering breakthrough stories. In the first category, I picked the Squadron 617 Association and the magazine RAF News (‘the official voice of the Royal Air Force’). Neither entity even acknowledged my email. As for the second, I wrote to Private Eye and the Mail on Sunday (who had used material by Anthony Glees and me on Sonia a few years ago). Again, neither even acknowledged my message.

I had to change tack, obviously, and approach individual names. Having exchanged emails with the historian Andrew Roberts a few years ago (before he became Baron Roberts of Belgravia), I had joined his distribution list for updates on his new books. I thus tried to invoke his help. He responded very promptly, said the domain was however outside his sphere of interest, but immediately copied in a journalist at the Daily Mail, one Andrew Yates. I never heard back from him, either. I contacted a couple of historians with whom I had become acquainted via the SOE chat-site: they were both very enthusiastic about my research, but they could not offer any leads to further promotion. At about this time (early May) I also reached out to the journalist Mark Hollingsworth, with whom I had created a friendly rapport after I had reviewed his book Agents of Influence on coldspur.

Mark was very supportive (he was impressed with my research on Smolka), and he suggested that I create a synopsis of the material, in order to enable easier assimilation of the rather complicated story, and that I contact historians and journalists with expertise or interest in the war in Norway. I thus boiled the story down to 2000 words (see https://coldspur.com/the-airmen-who-died-twice-synopsis/) , and prepared to search out a list of likely candidates. I disagreed, however, with part of Mark’s guidance. He felt that no journalist or historian would touch the story without documentary evidence of the major plank in the story – that Churchill and Stalin must have exchanged messages of some kind in order for the flight and impersonations to have occurred. As my conclusion boldly stated, I felt it extremely unlikely that anything would appear, given the extraordinary circumstances of the enterprise. I could quickly list multiple events from World War II that have been discussed in serious terms when primary documentary material was not available. The authorized historians Foot, Hinsley and Andrew had all made categorical statements about events that had no documentary back-up. There were enough established facts about the case to warrant its broader promulgation. Besides, everyone likes an aspect of mystery. So I continued.

I picked out the names of six prominent historians whose books related to the subject I had read: Tony Insall, Ian Herrington, Richard Petrow, Patrick Salmon, Olivier Wieworka, and Max Hastings. Sadly, Petrow has died. I then tried to find email addresses for them, but such figures normally hide behind their agents and publishers. Apart from Insall, this was the case, so I had to craft individualized messages to those who represented them, asking for my package of synopsis and PDFs, with a brief explanation of what I was trying to achieve, to be forwarded to the relevant author. That was on May 16. The same day I made a separate approach to the Chairman of the Squadron 617 Association. Soon after, I sent personalized emails to journalists Ben Macintyre (of the Times), and Ben Lazarus (of the Spectator), both of whom I had exchanged messages with – concerning Sonia, of course – a few years ago, and suggested that they might be interested in promulgating the story. I never heard back from either of them. At the end of the month I posted a piece on FaceBook that drew attention to the new Synopsis now available on coldspur.

And then, at the end of May, I had two glimmers of light. None of the other historians responded to my approach, but Professor Patrick Salmon, who had edited Britain & Norway in the Second World War, published almost thirty years ago, responded with interest. He regretted that he was no longer close to Norwegian affairs, but he would try to help. He is now Chief Historian at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, which sounds like an influential position. Shortly afterwards, I received a long email from Dr. Robert Owen, Official Historian, 617 Squadron Association, to whom my message had been routed. A few days later I responded in kind, with a polite and thorough analysis of his points. The outcome was, however, tremendously disappointing. I felt that our communications deserved greater publicity, and I accordingly posted the exchange as a Special Bulletin on coldspur on June 11 (see https://coldspur.com/the-617-squadron-association-historian/).  

Professor Salmon, meanwhile, has continued to be very helpful. He recommended that I contact the Air Historical Branch of the RAF, and make a request for the Casualty File for Flight PB416 under the Freedom of Information Act. This I performed on June 13: Professor Salmon told me that the Branch has to provide a reply within twenty business days. On June 15, I received a confirmation of my request, and an indication that I should receive a reply by July 15. On the other hand, disappointments still occur. Mark Hollingsworth recommended that I contact a prominent historian of RAF matters, Paul Beaver. Through his publisher, I made contact, and he responded promptly, and with apparent interest in my story. After ten days, I had heard nothing, so I emailed him again, and he disappointingly wrote that he had been too busy to read it . . . And Nigel Austin, the man who initiated this whole project because he had a relative who was killed in the crash, expressed great enthusiasm when I completed the project, and vowed to promote the story. Yet he has now disappeared from the scene, and no longer responds to my emails.

I am finding this tepid response not only demoralizing, but also a little eerie. As one of my coldspur colleagues wrote to me, my story would make a great documentary. It has everything: mystery, disaster and tragedy, war, Nazism and communism, institutional confusion and cover-up – as well as a very timely anniversary. Yet several experts do not even show any interest in its potential or topicality, let alone engage in debate to challenge my hypothesis. It is almost as if a celestial D-Notice has been placed on my research. My mission at coldspur has been to reveal when government institutions – in my domain of interest, primarily MI5, MI6, the Home Office and the Foreign Office – have covered up the facts out of a desire to protect themselves, in the belief that the British public cannot be trusted to know the truth. Thus my investigations into (for example) the concealment of knowledge over Klaus Fuchs, the cover-up over Kim Philby, the refusal to divulge the clumsy attempt to manipulate Agent Sonia, the colossal mis-steps over Peter Smolka, the censorship of activities behind the demise of the PROSPER network, and the improper release of rumours to journalists to discredit officers like Hollis were all prelude to my research into the shenanigans with the disaster of PB416.

In the past few months there have been resounding echoes of such governmental misbehaviour in the willful mishandling of the Post Office HORIZON project, the revelations concerning the tainted blood fiascos of the 1970s (of which my sister was a victim, I believe), and, very recently, the investigation into the cover-up of Nazi crimes on Alderney. Not solely in the world of intelligence and military history are the issues too important to be left to the authorized and official historians to analyze and report on, and I shall continue to plough my furrow without concerning myself about upsetting anybody in authority, or the repercussions therefrom.

The coldspur Archive

As I reported a few months ago, I successfully arranged a home for my library of books and archival material (see the press release from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington at  https://giving.uncw.edu/stories/new-special-collection-to-make-randall-library-a-destination-for-researchers-worldwide.). This is an important agreement, since it relieves me of the distress of fearing that my collection might be dispersed or even destroyed when I go to meet the Great Archivist in the Sky. (By the way, I shall not ‘pass’: I shall die.) I believe the value of the complete set, and its availability for researchers from near and far, greatly exceed the usefulness of the individual volumes. I suspect that, as an assemblage of books on intelligence and twentieth-century history and literature, primarily British but also American, it may be unmatched by even the most learned institutions. The University, as part of our deal, has committed to providing administrative support to catalog properly the whole collection, and to provide enhanced capabilities for an electronic portal to all my coldspur research, and the documents and systems that have supported it, such as my epic 400-page Chronology (my Crown Jewels and secret sauce), and notes made on a vast number of books and archival material.

The transfer of books will probably start at the end of this year. This will be a wrench, as I dread the idea of losing direct access to all the volumes that I have become accustomed to exploiting each time I create a coldspur posting. The Library at UNCW is about forty miles away, so I shall have to plan my visits very carefully if I am going to continue with my conventional research. I suspect, however, that I shall have to cut back the depth of my investigations, and gradually wind down to a more routine and less dramatic series of postings. Thus I shall spend the remainder of this year reviewing what important commitments I still have, and identifying what files I have on my desktop that have not been processed properly. I also have a lot of work to do in cleaning up electronic files and references, as well as documenting carefully the various paper items (letters, printed reports, sets of old magazines, many of which contain important articles, clippings, etc.) that will constitute an important part of the archive.

Meanwhile, the project to register all the books continues. Every Sunday morning I allocate a couple of hours to entering another hundred items on LibraryThing. I am now approaching 5,000 volumes recorded in my private on-line library, with a lot still to be processed. This can be an easy task, if the book contains an accurate ISBN, but the older volumes require some digging around to find the correct year and publisher, and some of the more antique items have to be entered completely manually. It has turned out to be a revelatory exercise, in which I have encountered books I had forgotten about – or even lost. (Some have been retrieved from obscure niches, having fallen down behind others.) There have been some duplicates, some deliberate, as I had purchased newer editions, but others by mistake, such as when I had acquired an item in a second-hand book-shop, and did not recall that I owned it already. Some I bought because the title was different – as often happens when a publication appears under a different name when it is released in the USA.

And there have been several interesting finds. Titles that I only skimmed, and shall probably never read cover to cover. (I am sure no other bibliophile has this problem.) Some classics that I should have read years ago: I think that, in my declining years, I would prefer to re-read Raymond Chandler or Kingsley Amis than tackle Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And all those Trollopes! I enjoy him, but they simply take too long. Items that I had carelessly overlooked, and should have read long ago, such as E. P. Thompson’s account of his brother Frank’s death in Bulgaria on an SOE mission – which oversight was remedied last month. A few gems revealed, such as a very old guide to Oxford bequeathed to me by my father, in which he has written ‘1775?’ in the margin. And a few books that I had thought lost, such as the paperback of Raymond Williams’s Keywords, which I had been searching for a few months back. (It had been woefully misplaced in the Travel and Mountaineering section: members of staff have received a reprimand.) This had been a useful, though very earnest and cautious, guide for me back in the late 1970s, and had comprehensive entries on such concepts as ‘Class’, ‘Progressive’, ‘Status’, and ‘Imperialism’ (but not ‘Colonialism’). But it had no room for ‘Equity’, ‘Diversity’, ‘Inclusion’, ‘Identity’, or even ‘Populism’, ‘Race’ or ‘Ethnicity’– let alone ‘Intersectionality’! How did we manage to interpret social trends accurately and engage in intelligent discourse in those days, I wonder? [I was not aware that you tried, coldspur. I thought you were too busy playing cricket and having a thrilling social life. Ed.]

Helen Fry’s ‘Women in Intelligence’ (2023)

I did not have high hopes with this book, published last year, as I have found Fry’s approach to writing history lacking in discernible method and suffering from a very sloppy style. Yet I considered this item a necessary part of my reading agenda. As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised in some ways. Fry has performed her usual diligent research, reveals a host of new facts, and someone has obviously given her some guidance on how to write more crisply and less elliptically. (In one of the blurbs, Kate Vigurs writes that ‘all is told in her usual inimitable style’. It occurred to me that the comment might not have been intended as a compliment, but I shall instead conclude that perhaps Ms. Vigurs has not been paying close attention.) I must question the whole endeavour, however: while it is important that the contributions from women be given their proper credit (as Jackson Lamb said somewhere: “You won’t find a more ardent feminist than me”), a description of exercises and operations that focuses almost exclusively on the achievements of the fair sex [is that expression still allowed, Thelma?] will be bound to distort the picture.

And so it turns out. Fry offers no explanation of how she approached the subject, or how she made her choices. (She mercifully does not engage in a debate about what ‘woman’ means in this decade, and how that term should be applied retrospectively to simpler days.) The blurb on the cover merely states: ‘The first full history of women in British intelligence across two world wars’. In many aspects, Fry’s work is a remarkable achievement. She has excavated some fascinating stories about women in the various intelligence services that had evaded this particular reader, and we should be very grateful to her. Unfortunately, the text reveals itself as a rather relentless catalogue of female success, and frequently distorts the broader picture, and misrepresents the facts. Along the way, a vast amount of familiar material has to be regurgitated to give the unwary reader context. Moreover, there is little room for records of failure, as one glorious contribution follows another. We are told, for instance (p 265) that ‘Hodgson and Holmes were the “brains” behind all operations into Austria, Yugoslavia and Hungary’, and (p 272) that ‘women such as Holmes, Stamper and Hodgson were the driving-force behind SOE’s success’, yet the incursions into those countries were largely disasters, and the unqualified trumpeting of SOE’s success when it clearly made a large number of mistakes does not contribute to valid and objective scholarship. Fry is also a little too trusting of what Vera Atkins’s personal file states.

Moreover, the history is not ‘full’, or consistently accurate. The author is strangely errant over the career of one of the most impressive of intelligence officers, Kathleen (Jane) Sissmore, who married John Archer (of MI5’s RAF liaison, a fact she does not mention) on the eve of the war. She mistakenly says that Archer was killed in 1943: it was his son who perished. Fry claims that Archer was fired because of her disrespectful comments on the previous MI5 director, Vernon Kell, when it was the acting director Jasper Harker who had been the subject of her derision. She overlooks Archer’s transfer to lead the group of Regional Security Liaison Officers, which task she performed very creditably for several months in the summer of 1940, and she suddenly places her with Philby’s counter-intelligence group in MI6. Archer did indeed move to MI6, but did not work for Philby until his new section was created in 1944. Fry says nothing about Archer’s subsequent return to MI5 at the end of the war, and what projects she was involved with, although the archives mention her occasionally. Nevertheless, Fry is confident enough to assert that Archer ‘would have made a brilliant director-general of MI5’.

And there are some notable omissions and mistakes. Fry writes nothing about the highly important Freya Stark, or Ann (Nancy) Lambton, who both played important roles in propaganda and intelligence-gathering in the Middle East. Since Fry does include a section on post-war activities, one might have expected her to mention MI5’s Evelyn McBarnet, who played a prominent part in the molehunts of the 1960s and 1970s, and had earlier worked on the Robinson papers of the Red Orchestra. (Peter Wright wrote that she had had many years more experience in counter-espionage than he or Arthur Martin, which suggests she was active in the war years.) Fry also neglects Anne Last (actually ‘Glass’), who had a very significant career in MI5, having joined in May 1940, and who later married Charles Elwell, an MI5 officer. Fry’s sketch of Joan Miller fails to mention a vitally significant episode of her career, when she detected the Major (probably but not incontrovertibly Leo Long) stealing information and passing notes to his communist contact in 1944. Ray Milne, the communist agent inside MI6, who was detected and forced to resign, is overlooked (perhaps because she was a baddie).

(I should also mention that, in the September 2023 issue of Magna, the Magazine of the Friends of the National Archives, appears an article by Phil Tomaselli, titled ‘MI5 women spies during WW2’. It is not a very accurate title, since MI5’s charter was counter-espionage rather than espionage –  although it did maintain ‘agents’ who spied on subversive groups – and much of Tomaselli’s text is taken up by women who served during World War I. Nevertheless, Tomaselli lists a number of names who should be added to the roster, including Mary George, and Hilda Matheson of the Joint Broadcasting Committee.)

Fry briefly covers the five years that the highly dubious Tess Rothschild (née Mayor) worked in B18, the anti-sabotage section of MI5, but she presents a very odd interpretation of MI5’s suspicions of her after the Blunt confession. The failure to recognize the important pair of MI6 agents in Bern in WWII, Elizabeth Wiskemann and her sidekick Elizabeth Montagu (aka Scott-Montagu), is particularly egregious. Wiskemann received a prominent biographical treatment by Geoffrey Field last year (see https://academic.oup.com/book/44709/chapter-abstract/378977699?redirectedFrom=fulltext), and I have referred to Montagu in my writings on Smolka. The novelists Sarah Gainham, married to MI6’s Antony Terry, and Helen MacInness, married to another MI6 officer, Gilbert Highet, should perhaps have been covered as well, to give some variety and useful perspective. Of course there were some other notable British subjects, naturalized through marriage, working in intelligence such as Ursula Beurton, Edith Tudor-Hart, and Litzi Philby aka Feabre – and at least two native-born, Jenifer Hart, married to the MI5 officer Herbert Hart, and Melita Norwood – but since they were communist agents working against the interests of the United Kingdom they presumably fell outside her purview. Nevertheless, Nigel West returns the compliment that Fry recently granted him on his recent book: “A fascinating, minutely researched study of women in the espionage business.”

Thus the reader has to wade through a lot of extraneous material to pick out some splendid nuggets about meritorious heroines whose careers have very creditably been brought to light at last. The relentless feminist propaganda begins to chafe. Moreover, Fry can be both very risk-averse and highly provocative. At critical points, she steps back from providing any analysis of controversial incidents. For example, in wrapping up her section on SOE, she writes: “Exactly why Buckmaster and Atkins continued to send their agents into Europe remains the subject of debate.” That is a very cautious insertion that screams out for a more incisive inspection, and invites an examination of the dynamics of the situation, and whether there was any male-female dimension to the disastrous decisions that were made by the managers of F Section. On the other hand (as I pointed out in last month’s bulletin), she can lob a grenade over the parapet, as she does when she gratuitously reports (p 92) that, in 1933, the MI6 head of station in Vienna, Thomas Kendrick, alongside his agents and secretaries was tracking the movements of communist spies and activists ‘through journalists like Eric Gedye and a young graduate, Kim Philby’. This is a much more assertive and provocative statement than she allowed herself in Spymaster, and represents the claim that brought my female academic contact into apoplexy when I mentioned it to her a couple of months ago. So what say you, Westy? Did you spot that?

Because of the repetition, and the lack of valuable new insights, the volume should in my opinion have been better compiled as a biographical dictionary rather than a conventional narrative. It would in that way have been more usable, more concise, and more easily maintained. New histories of SOE, for example – focussing on country campaigns, rather than conventional broad-brushed approaches – are certainly desirable, and in such works the successes and failures of men and women should be clearly explained, as opposed to the romanticized and gung-ho narratives that are so frequently found. I entered in last month’s Commonplace collection what I considered a pertinent observation by a woman called Imogen West-Knights: “Perhaps I am letting feminism down to say it, but just because a group of women organised something, this does not mean that the organisation of that thing is naturally interesting.” Indeed. There should be no ‘feminist’ history – just history that gives comprehensive credit to the contributions of women and men equally.

The Darkrooms of Edith Tudor-Hart

I have always been prepared to admit to erroneous analysis and faulty conclusions displayed in my research. As Keith Ellison has pointed out to me, the Major observed by Joan Miller secreting notes may not have been Leo Long, as I claimed in Misdefending the Realm, and one of these days I am going to have to return to the records to verify the place, the time, and the institution, in order to confirm what was going on. Likewise with Edith Tudor-Hart: I have constantly expressed my amazement that such a transparently subversive, neurotic and muddle-headed woman could have played a major role in Soviet espionage, and I have treated Anthony Blunt’s claim that she was ‘the grandmother of us all’ (when she was in fact born a year later than the art historian) as a sour joke designed to disguise someone else. (Of course, similar doubts and objections were raised over the outrageous Guy Burgess.) And yet the attention swells, what with Charlotte Philby’s very bizarre Edith and Kim, and Edith’s great-nephew (or second-cousin once-removed) Peter Stephan Jungk contributing a biography in German, Die Dunklekammern der Edith Tudor-Hart (2015), which reinforces the myth that she not only led a parallel life to Kim Philby, but was as significant as he was, and that it was really she who was astute enough to identify Philby as a worthy candidate for Soviet Intelligence, and introduce him to Arnold Deutsch. I recently read Jungk’s book very carefully.

Thus I continue to inspect the evidence to check whether I am wrong. (Care is need when treating sources such as Wikipedia and Spartacus, which are very cavalier with dates, and the accounts of Tudor-Hart’s activity in Deadly Illusions and The Crown Jewels, both of which boast Oleg Tsarev as a contributing author, are so riddled with errors, contradictions and anomalies than I am inclined to treat them as disinformation.) What I find extraordinary is that MI5 opened a file on her (as Edith Suschitzky) in 1930, when she was noticed mixing with known communists at a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and she was expelled from the country. From Vienna, she immediately wrote to Tudor-Hart, asking him to testify that she was a solid communist, as the local cadres mistrusted her! Thus, while the evidence undermined any official authority she might have had, she stupidly drew attention to her subversive objectives.

MI5 (and MI6, when she was in Austria) thereafter kept a close watch on her for over twenty years. She was known to be a communist, she married her lover Alexander Tudor-Hart in Vienna in August 1933 when she got into trouble with the law there, and consequently was able to flee to Britain as a subject through her marriage. She was allowed to have her mother join her in 1937 (her father having committed suicide). In 1938, she was interrogated by MI5 over her undeniable involvement in the Percy Glading case, since a receipt for her Leica camera had been found on Glading’s premises, but the authorities did nothing. Despite the constant surveillance, she was allowed to continue her associations with subversive groups in exile unhindered. MI5 devoted an enormous amount of time tracking her activities – all to no avail. Perhaps it was because they thought that she would lead them to bigger and more dangerous fish, but maybe, since they could not haul her in on any charge, they just wanted her to know that she was under constant watch, in order to frighten her. Yet they overlooked some of her most obvious activities, such as her affair with Engelbert Broda, the atom spy, and her role as a courier.

Yet the burning question remains: Why would the NKVD entrust any clandestine role to a person who so obviously was a communist agitator? She was expelled by the British early in 1931 for that reason. From Vienna she appealed for help from her lover to confirm her communist credentials, she was imprisoned for suspected subversive activity in May 1933 (when another lover Arpad Haasz, left the country in a hurry), and Tudor-Hart, who had at last divorced his wife, arranged their marriage in August 1933 so that she could escape to the UK. Agents of the NKVD normally took instructions from their bosses concerning their marital arrangements, but, if the agency had serious plans for Edith, it surely would have forced her to provide a better cover story than this, and it would have been very wary about the British authorities’ picking up where they left off when Edith had been banished in 1931.

And, indeed, her romantic entanglements were a mess. The management of her affairs tended to be clumsy, and she was often mistreated and manipulated by the men in her life. She fell in love with Arnold Deutsch in the late 1920s, but his girl-friend Josefina, absent from Vienna for much of the time, discovered her love-letters to him, and Deutsch soon married ‘Fini’ in 1929, and then left with her for Moscow. Jungk says that Edith had several other meaningless affairs during this time. When she returned to England, she picked up with the still married Tudor-Hart. After her expulsion to Vienna, she took up with Arpad Haasz, a fellow-conspirator, who fled when the going got hot. After Edith’s marriage to Alexander, he mistreated her, and abandoned her and her young son when he went to work as a doctor helping the Republicans in Spain. During the war, she developed a relationship with Engelbert Broda, but he also left her, in 1945, telling her that he was going back to Austria to marry his girl-friend (a decade older), from whom he soon separated. Edith then fell in love with the psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Winnicott, who was treating her severely autistic son, and they had a very unprofessional relationship. But Winnicott would not leave his wife, and tired of Edith’s clinginess. Edith developed a crush on the architect Baron Holford of Kemp Town, but he had to reprimand her in writing for stalking him.

I shall be writing further when I have completed a deeper analysis of her files, and the stories built around her, but here I simply want to mention two items that caught my eye recently. In his 2012 profile of Philby, Young Kim, Edward Harrison made a very shrewd observation over some text in a letter (in German) that he found in Edith’s file, sent to Tudor-Hart on June 22, 1933, and intercepted by Special Branch. It makes a reference to students at Cambridge, and the need to convert intellectuals to the cause, and asks the question: ‘What is M.D. doing?’. At the time, Special Branch interpreted ‘M.D.’ as referring to Alison Macbeth, who was a doctor, and then married to Tudor-Hart. It was not until December 1951 (in the heat of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby investigations) that MI5 went over the passage again, and decided that ‘M.D.’ stood for Maurice Dobb. So Edith had been acquainted with Philby’s tutor at Cambridge.

This should perhaps not have come as any surprise, since Dobb had written to Alexander Tudor-Hart in December 1930, in dismay, offering sympathy at the detention of Edith after the Trafalgar Square incident, and the subsequent report of her expulsion order. (All letters to Tudor-Hart were being intercepted.) Thus an immediate link between Soviet conspiracy, and the planned contributions of a Cambridge academic, are visible three years before Philby was sent on his way to Paris/Vienna by Dobb. And there is even an attempt by Edith to mask Dobb’s identity – a successful one, of course. What had the three of them discussed, one wonders? Tudor-Hart was a contemporary of Dobb’s, and both had studied under Keynes at Cambridge, so they were natural communist allies. Tudor-Hart had also studied orthopaedics in Vienna in the 1920s, so may have encountered Edith there. 1930 would obviously have been an early date for Philby’s potential to have been recognized (he did not enter the university until October 1929), but Dobb’s interactions with Edith are undeniable.

The other item of interest to me is Edith’s exposure to Philby, and her supposed role in recommending him to her former lover, Deutsch, in May 1934. I find it difficult to pin down the exact relevant dates of the early autumn of 1933, as even Jungk’s account is vague, but the other accounts (which claim to be based on KGB archives) are divided as to whether Edith became impressed with Philby’s potential when she knew him in Vienna, or whether she came to that conclusion when her friend Litzy introduced her to him in May 1934, soon after the Philbys arrived in London. Jungk first tells us that Edith married Alexander on August 16, and that they left for the UK a few weeks later. Yet, later in his book, he informs us that, on her release one month after her imprisonment in May, she went immediately to the apartment of her best friend, Litzy Friedmann, and discovered that Litzy had a lodger named ‘Kim’, who had been there just a few days. This is, of course, nonsense, as Kim did not arrive in Vienna until late August, at the earliest. Moreover, The Crown Jewels asserts that Edith’s famous photograph of the pipe-smoking Philby was taken in Vienna during those precious few days before she left with her new bridegroom, while Jungk asserts that it was taken in Hampstead the day after Philby met Arnold Deutsch in Regent’s Park. It is all an inglorious muddle.

The irony is that Jungk, in his eagerness to find out the truth about Edith, went to Moscow in the 1990s, and tried to chase down historians and archivists to let him see the secret files on her. He was devastated when the officials (including Dolgopolov, the biographer of Philby) directed him solely to Deadly Illusions and Borovik’s Philby Files. Whether they had more which they were not prepared to reveal cannot be determined. But the implication is that the mess that has accumulated and been carelessly echoed over the decades in the western media may be all that there is. There are too many competing narratives tripping over each other, of which I have shown here only a sample. I shall explore all the paradoxes and conflicts of 1933 and 1934 in my end-of-July posting.

‘Nothing Short of a Scandal!’

In my February bulletin I reported that I had located an article by Charmian Brinson on Peter Smolka, titled ‘Nothing Short of a Scandal’, but had been frustrated in my attempts to read it, as neither Professor Brinson nor the Austrian periodical that published it had acknowledged my emails. Thanks to Andrew Malec, I was able to find the complete text at academia.edu (of which I am a member), and, as promised, I am now offering a summary of what Brinson brought to the table. (She is not, incidentally, the mystery female academic who behaved so ill-manneredly to me in the email exchange on which I reported in March.)

I have to characterize Brinson’s contribution as ‘workwomanlike’, but not very imaginative. She has performed a vast amount of relevant research: she has read (almost) all the right books, memoirs and histories, British and German, and gone deep into the archives, from those of MI5 and the Home Office, to the records of Czechoslovakia’s show-trials. She has dug our articles in remote places, located papers from obscure universities, accessed old items from newspapers such as the Times in the 1930s, and recovered interviews with Smolka’s sons. And yet her conclusion is simply the rather bland: “So Smolka was and remains a man of contradictions”, as if that could not be said of countless other persons in intelligence who have left a confusing trail behind them. It is as if Brinson wants to serve up all she can find and leave it to the reader to make a judgment. Each time that she appears to be about to explore a fascinating aspect of his life – such as the confirmation that Smolka was a spy, with the cryptonym ABO – she steps back from providing any penetrating analysis. I believe historians – as opposed to chroniclers –  should go farther than that.

So I simply note here some of the information that was fresh to me, and some observations on her commentary. She exploits the memoirs of Bruno Kreisky, who was the Austrian Chancellor from, and those of Hilda Spiel, the novelist. Both were close to Smolka in his teens. Brinson supplies the background to Smolka’s highly biased view of Siberia evident from his reports in the Times, and his subsequent book, but shows no interest in trying to discover why he received so much good publicity. She does not attempt to explain why he received the degree of support from the Foreign Office in the late 1930, or what the oily Rex Leeper was up to. She leaves the ‘nothing short of a scandal’ incident undeveloped, treating Smolka’s apparent redemption as routine.

On the other hand, her coverage of Smolka’s work for the Ministry of Information during the war is very thorough, although she doesn’t attempt to adjudicate on the tricky question of when Smolka was recruited to Soviet intelligence, and by whom (a topic which I dismantled a few months ago.) She highlights some important questions about Smolka’s energetic pro-Soviet stance, raised by MPs and others, but offers only a lukewarm explanation as to how he was able to get away with it, before moving calmly on to the discovery of papers produced on his typewriter that were found in Guy Burgess’s flat. And then she suddenly jumps from 1951 to 1961, where she briefly covers the Arthur Martin interview, without astonishment. She does, however, offer an insightful anecdote about the extent of Smolka’s anglicisation, sourced from Hilda Spiel, who also expressed surprise that Smolka would want to return to war-damaged Vienna with his young family once he had had a taken up British citizenship. Brinson also offers useful evidence of Smolka’s pro-communist reportage in Vienna after the war, and describes his relationship with Ernst Fischer, the Minister of Education.

One thing that caught my eye was the statement, again from Spiel, that one George Knepler, a musician, had been living in Smolka’s house at this time (1948). Knepler was a name I knew, as it was he to whom Kim Philby had been directed in 1933. Knepler described the lavish parties that Smolka held for leftish acquaintances and public figures. What did surprise me, however, was the fact that Brinson dedicated only one sentence to the complex ‘Third Man’ business, apparently trusting the story that Smolka provided Greene with his anecdotes. She does not explore any of the contradictions of this bizarre chain of events. On the other hand, she does provide more substantive details on the accusations against Smolka at the Slansky trials, made by an unfortunate liar, Eugen Loebl, who had probably been tortured.

Brinson accurately covers the stories of MI5’s vain hopes to convince emigres like Smolka to ‘defect’, but without any attempt to explore the sense or stupidity of such ventures. She appears to trust the accounts of Smolka’s deteriorating health, which did not prevent him from founding and editing, in the 1970s, the journal Austria Today, at Kreisky’s request. Both Kreisky and the Times gave him a generous obituary when Smolka died in 1980, which leads to Brinson closing her piece with the radically different opinions of Siegfried Beer, who deemed Smolka a Superspy, and those of Smolka’s widow and elder son, who perversely continued to claim that he had never been a spy at all. Thus, for the Smolka devotee who wants to hoover up all the bare facts about his life, Brinson’s article will be a valuable contribution, but as a work of historical analysis it is disappointingly sterile.

Guy Burgess at Kew

I have previously drawn attention to the scandalous state of records pertaining to Guy Burgess at Kew. My detailed analysis of the FCO 158 series (“Foreign Office and Foreign and Colonial Office: Record Relating to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (known KGB spies) and subsequent investigations and security arrangements”) shows that nearly three hundred separate files are listed, most of which have not been digitized. Many of these are needlessly fragmented: thus we can see, for instance, FCO 158/111, ‘Correspondence with member of the public on Burgess & Maclean’, followed by FCO 158/112, ‘Question from member of the public’. There is no reason why several of such items could not have been collected into one file. The objective must be to make it more onerous for anyone to order these files and trail through them.

Moreover, a large number are closed, without proper justification. For example, FCO 158/15, ‘Guy Burgess Private Papers’ is simply listed as ‘Closed and retained by FCO’, with no release date, as are a variety of other papers on topics such as ‘Foreign Office Key Points 1951’, ‘Security Recommendations at DWS’, ‘Correspondence with Irene Ward’, and dozens of records of individual vetting operations from the 1950s that are described only in terms of ‘Vetting of “name withheld”’, with the relevant year following. A file on Petrov, the defector from Australia, is similarly marked.

Others indicate a release date, sometimes with highly spurious reasons for the retention period. Thus some extracts from the contact of Burgess and Maclean with Foreign Office officials under the PEACH inquiry (FCO 158/30/1) – which sounds very bizarre – has been declared ‘closed for security reasons: open January 1, 2035’). One vetting of ‘name withheld 1951-80’ will be made open on January 1, 2073 [should any of us live that long . . .  And will left-wing academics still be railing against ‘late-stage capitalism’ in the London Review of Books at that time?]. A file titled ‘Allegations against “name withheld” 1948-1955’ has been ‘closed for Health and Personal info’, but will be available the same date. A closed extract from the Cadogan Inquiry (FCO 158/206) will be opened on January 2032. There are many others of similar characteristics: a minute of September 5, 1952 (FCO 158/254/1) has been closed ‘for health reasons, and will be opened on January 1, 2073’. Maybe the frail subject of that inquiry will have recovered by then.

I believe this is all shameful and scandalous. Why the public cannot be trusted with seeing these records of seventy years or so ago, or why the Foreign Office believes that the disclosure of such items would harm national security, is beyond belief. It must point only to an enormous institutional embarrassment, or simply a loss of any expertise with any incumbent officials to know how to make proper judgments about the material. It is just simpler to pretend that no problem exists, and to hope it goes away. Yet the registration of all these incriminating morsels, and the sensitivity of the Foreign Office about them, points to the existence of highly disturbing testimony to the foibles of British intelligence at the time.

What should happen, of course, is that Freedom of Information requests should be made over all these files. I am advised, however, that block requests are unlikely to have the desired effect, which means that individual files would have to be selected. But where to start, and who has the time to do that? Can some sort of mass public protest be mounted? Come on, ye doyens, get weaving!

Lastly, I was intrigued to read, amongst the Rothschild papers (KV 2/4533-1), in a report dated January 27, 1971, that Guy Burgess’s file was created only in 1942! (That note suggests to me that the writer thought it should have been created earlier.) Of course, MI5 has never admitted that it existed, and his Personal File 604529 (one of dozens created during the PEACH investigations of 1951) is the only one recognized in the various letters, notes, reports and memoranda that emerged during the interrogations of Blunt and the inquiries with the Rothschilds. What prompted that 1942 event is something worth considering. It was a fairly quiet year for Burgess, since he was working for the BBC in the Talks Department, arranging pro-Soviet speakers. Was it perhaps his selection of the Soviet agent Ernst Henri, masquerading as a journalist, that triggered MI5’s fresh interest in him?

A Death in Nuremberg

After an important reference somewhere, I was prompted to acquire Francine Hirsch’s 2020 book Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, since it claimed to provide fresh information on the trials derived from an analysis of Russian government files. I was especially interested because I wanted to know more about Nikolai Zorya, one of the Soviet prosecutors, who was found dead in his hotel room during the trial. This had been judged by Western participants as very suspicious: the Soviets claimed that it had been an accident that occurred as he was cleaning his rifle, but others considered that his mishandling of the episode of the Katyn Massacre had been the event that led to his demise.

I have long been interested in cataloguing the deaths, in mysterious circumstances, of western civilians with possible past ties to Soviet intelligence. While Boris Volodarsky’s 2009 book The KGB Poison Factory provided a solid guide to many prominent cases, I do not believe that enough attention has been paid to other questionable deaths or accidents that occurred when no one was around to witness exactly what happened. (I have just acquired Volodarsky’s follow-up book, Assassins, and shall be writing about it at some stage.) Any occasion in which someone died of a heart attack in a remote hotel room should especially have been investigated with utmost urgency. The unresolved cases of Tomás Harris and Hugh Gaitskell are quite familiar, but what caused Alexander Foote’s early demise (1956)? Has Herbert Skinner’s premature death in a Geneva hotel (1960) been explained? Or Archie Gibson’s death by shooting in his Rome apartment (1960)? What had happened to Hugh Slater when his body was discovered in Spain (1958)? Did Victor Serge really have a sudden heart attack in Mexico (1947)? Was the event that killed Georg Graham’s son truly an accident? Was Paul Dukes’ car crash purely providential? Did John Costello really die from food-poisoning?

Zorya was of course not the only Soviet citizen to be targeted since the war. (The death of Konon Molody, aka Gordon Lonsdale, from eating poisonous mushrooms, has been laid at the door of the KGB.) But the openness of his probable murder was shocking. As Hirsch writes: “It would have been more typical for Stalin to call someone back to Moscow and then have him arrested and shot.” She goes on to write that Zorya’s son maintained that ‘his father had grown uneasy about the Katyn case and had asked to return to Moscow to talk to Vyshinsky about flaws in the Soviet evidence’. In that case, the NKVD might have been concerned enough to decide that no time should be wasted, lest Zorya share his thoughts with members of the American and British delegations – something he may already have done.

The obstinacy of the Soviet prosecutors in highlighting the Katyn Massacre as an example of Nazi war crimes was really obtuse. Stalin had gone to enormous lengths to show that the killings of 22,000 members of the Polish military and intelligentsia had taken place when the Germans had occupied Belarussia rather than in the summer of 1940, when it was under the control of the Soviet Union. Churchill and Roosevelt were confident that it had been a Soviet crime, but were shabbily reluctant to challenge Stalin over it. When it came to Nuremberg, Moscow naively believed that the trials would be held like those from the 1930s Purges, with defendants tortured and trained what to say, no proper defence counsel offered, guilty verdicts pre-arranged, and summary executions carried out. The Soviets were then surprised that principles of western democratic justice were to be applied to the Nazi criminals, and the prosecutors struggled to adjust to the process. They somehow wriggled out of the embarrassing situation.  Zorya was the victim: it was not until 1990 that Moscow admitted that the wartime communist government had been responsible for the massacre.

Holiday Reading: Volodarsky et al.

‘The Birth of the Soviet Secret Police’

As my primary serious reading during our holiday/vacation in California, I packed Boris Volodarsky’s recent book, The Birth of the Soviet Secret Police: Lenin and History’s Greatest Heist 1917-1927. Like Volodarsky’s other works, I found it both utterly fascinating and extremely annoying. I had submitted several pages of corrections (mainly typographical) to Volodarsky when his Stalin’s Agent appeared in 2014 – a submission that he eventually thanked me for about two years later. His latest book is very similar, jam-packed with stories of subversion, and profiles of those who carried it out in Europe (mainly), but it desperately needed an editor. Volodarsky has no sense of historical narrative, and owns what I suspect is the inability of someone with a photographic memory to exclude any related facts from his story, which means that he has presented a largely indigestible set of mini-biographies, a compilation of acronyms, aliases, birthplaces, marriages, mistresses, etc. – with the dominant outcome for the participants being a bullet in the head, in the Lubyanka cellars, in 1937 or 1938. Moreover, the text has a woefully large number of typographical and grammatical mistakes, many the mis-spellings of proper names, but also some blunders and direly botched edits that indicate that no one read the final electronic version carefully.

It is not that Volodarsky has the wrong intentions. Halfway through his screed he offers the very sensible guidance: “An absolute sine qua non is that all sources, even primary, must be checked, double-checked and rechecked again. There’s a lot of stuff in the archives that got there by chance, like a forgery accepted as a genuine document, or a report based on a biased interpretation or opinion but nevertheless duly filed. Sometimes a testimony, even of a seemingly credible witness or reliable defector, or a source described as ‘a subject of undoubted loyalty’, may be completely invented and include false claims which later leak into the books and articles. There, as it happens, they are sometimes further misinterpreted or misrepresented.” He uses this method to pass out some harsh words on some of his fellow-historians, such as Helen Fry, whom he chastises for swallowing whole the reputation the SIS representative in Vienna, Thomas Kendrick, had acquired for his provision to his bosses of alleged valuable information, when Volodarsky believed it was totally the invention of money-seeking phoneys. He also has harsh words for dupes like John Costello and Nigel West, being taken in by the wiles of the KGB and its stooge, Oleg Tsarev. Intriguingly, he keeps some of his choicest words of disparagement for Christopher Andrew, whom, while he praises some of the latter’s work (Volodarsky was, after all, a member of Andrew’s intelligence seminar), he criticizes for his naivety in such matters as the Zinoviev Letter, and for his credulity over what Gordievsky fed him.

Yet Volodarsky himself commits similar sins. I was enormously impressed with the author’s encyclopædic grasp of the literature, in books and obscure articles, in multiple European languages, which allowed him to integrate an enormous amount of information. Yet a process of verification must allow not only the primary author to ‘check, double-check and re-check again’ his or her sources: third-party researchers must also have the opportunity to inspect them. Volodarsky frequently refers to (O)GPU (i.e. emergent KGB) files without identifying them. His Endnotes contain acronyms presumably defining Russian archives (e.g. GASPI, GA RF) that are never explained. He cites such sources as the State Military Historical Archives of Bulgaria (an institution probably beyond the reach of most enthusiasts) without explaining why they can be trusted. He refers to documents that exist only in his personal archive, and ‘secret’ files of MI5. (If they have been declassified, they are not ‘secret’). It is as if the rules do not strictly apply to him.

As an example of his style, I quote two passages concerning a subject and period that I have been focussing on recently: “A quick recap: in February 1934 Deutsch went to London and Reif joined him there in April. They worked together until June when Reif left for Copenhagen again. By that time, they already had under Soviet control a considerably large network of sources; agents (in today’s terms – intelligence agents, facilities agents and agents of influence) as well as talent-spotters, confidential contacts, couriers, and so on. In August or September Glading (GOT) introduced Deutsch to an important source whom Deutsch immediately named ATTILA. He usually gave codename to his assets by association . . .” Elsewhere he writes: “Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that Arthur Willert had evolved from a major source of information inside the Foreign Office in the early 1920s into a fully-fledged Soviet agent named ATTILA while his son was recruited as agent NACHFOLER [sic], translated from German as successor, follower, or replacement. All three definitions pass perfectly. This unsophisticated but quite appropriate code name was given by Dr Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of Philby and two dozen other Soviet agents in London in the 1930s.”

Apart from the typical misprint (‘NACHFOLER’ should be ‘NACHFOLGER’), I find these assertions about a ‘considerably large network’, developed in such a short time (February-June 1934), utterly preposterous. Philby was interviewed (if his account can be trusted) only in June, and he was not formally recruited until months later. Volodarsky claims that Deutsch recruited two dozen other agents in the 1930s: nowhere does he explain how he is sure of this fact. Nor is the significance of ‘London’, as opposed to Oxford and Cambridge, made explicit. (Moreover, it is not clear why a volume that is supposed to take us up to 1927 dabbles in these events, in any case.) The agent ATTILA, whom Volodarsky in one section confidently identifies as Sir Arthur Willert, is much more tentatively described as unknown in another passage. I find it highly unlikely that Percy Glading, an open member of the CPGB who worked as an engineer at the Royal Arsenal, would move in the same circles as Sir Arthur Willert, or that, if the latter had been a potential agent, he would risk being seen in the company of such a character. Volodarsky suggests that Willert was named ATTILA because he reminded Deutsch of an Austrian actor he knew: it sounds to me as if it were just a simple contraction of ArThurwILLERt’s name.

Amidst all the complexities and muddle one can find many useful insights. Volodarsky performs a solid demolition of the accounts of the Zinoviev Letter. He brings the overhyped Sidney Reilly (‘Ace of Spies’) down to size. He makes an intriguing and provocative identification of PFEIL (‘ARROW’ or ‘STRELA’) as Margarete Moos (who had visited Krivitsky in New York after his story in the New York Post appeared in April 1939). Deutsch wrote, however, that he had recruited STRELA in Vienna, at a time when Moos apparently was in London: more research is needed. Volodarsky offers some very useful notations about the highly suspicious (in my mind) Rex Leeper, who was Willert’s deputy, and later helped Peter Smolka (a story that Volodarsky has not reached yet.) He is rightfully scathing about the propaganda ruse executed against the British in the KGB-controlled Oleg Tsarev collaborations with Costello and West. There are innumerable fascinating leads to be followed up.

Yet he seems so wrong on many points – for instance, in his assessment of Krivitsky, whom he savagely debunks, resurfacing his criticisms from Stalin’s Agent, and in his throwaway claim that GC&CS was able to start decrypting Soviet traffic at the outbreak of war in 1939, a highly controversial assertion for which he offers no evidence. The merciless display of sometimes trivial facts about a host of dubious characters wore this particular reader down. Some day I hope to give the book a more thorough treatment. And incidentally, why the ‘Secret Police’? Policing is a task for internal security forces, not active subversion undertaken in foreign countries. The KGB did both, but the title is inaccurate. A volume for the diehards only.

While I was away, I read five books borrowed from the excellent Los Altos Public Library. Mary Kathryn Barbier’s Spies, Lies, and Citizenship was a weak, unimaginative and poorly-written account of what the Office of Special Investigations did concerning the hunt for Nazi criminals who had been allowed to escape (C+); Scott Miller’s Agent 110, about Allen Dulles’s attempts to go beyond gathering intelligence to forging deals with the Germans in Switzerland was a respectable and restrained integration of several key stories, but revealed little new, and could have benefitted from more rigour in background history (B); Howard Blum’s Night of the Assassins addressed a potentially gripping and important topic, namely the German plot to kill FDR, WSC and Stalin in Teheran in 1943, but Ben Macintyre would have done a better job. Despite an impressive list of primary sources, and a pragmatic approach to truth-telling, Blum provided a long-winded and cliché-ridden concoction – replete with ‘doe-eyed, raven-haired’ mistresses, ‘lantern-jawed, broad-shouldered’ intelligence officers, and too many incidences of ‘Jawohl, Herr Obergruppenführer’ (C+). Sleeper Agent, by Ann Hagerdorn was excellent. The story of how George Koval, born in the USA, went with his parents to their birthplace, the Soviet Union, in 1932, and then was infiltrated back in 1940 to become one of the most important atomic spies for the GRU, was very compelling. He absconded back to the Soviet Union in 1948, just in time to experience Stalin’s renewed persecution of the Jews, but he was not identified by the FBI until decades later, partly because of Solzhenitsyn. A remarkable piece of investigative research by Hagerdorn, free of rhetoric, padding, and cliché, although it is diminished somewhat by the fact that her Acknowledgments list hundreds of persons who helped her (was she a project manager or an author?). The lack of identification of GRU archival material is also a letdown, since she relies too much on Vladimir Lota (A-). Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia, an essay by Masha Geesen with photographs by Misha Friedman, is a poignant description of how Putin has undone all the revelatory work that Memorial performed to bring home the horror of the Gulag.

While in Silicon Valley I bought Jason Bell’s Cracking the Nazi Code, a volume that I had ordered some weeks ago from the History Book Club, who informed me, just before we set out for California, that it had no copies left. It’s a misleading title, since it refers to the achievements of Winthrop Bell, the Canadian philosophy professor who was recruited by MI6 at the end of WWI to advise on how to handle a defeated Germany, in interpreting various German political initiatives. It is an extraordinary book in many ways, since the author (no relation) was able to exploit the Bell archive, opened in 2012, to discover how Bell had alerted the British and Canadians to the dangers of nazism well before Hitler’s arrival, in the activities of Ludendorff and the Freikorps in 1919. He echoed these warnings in 1939, when he pointed to the coming mass murders of non-Aryans. I do not believe this story has been told before: I would have given it a higher marking had the author, in the last third of the book, not become so repetitive, or distracted by the story of radar, and not indulged in so many observations about phenomenology. He overall provides decent context, but is a little too consumed with the excellence of his biographical subject (B+).

Coldspur under stress

My friend of many years, Nigel Platts, recently informed me that, while he was on holiday in Cumbria, he was unable to access coldspur, the browsing of which must be a highly desirable diversion in those wild and occasionally bleak parts of the United Kingdom. Sky, his broadband provider, informed him that its ‘shield’ had blocked the site on the grounds that it was associated with ‘hate, gore, and violence’ (or similar wording), which came as a bit of a surprise to us both. Even my invectives against charlatan historians could hardly be described as inflammatory, so I wondered whether my descriptions of Cheka outrages over a century ago could somehow have engaged the censor’s attention. (Of course the exclusion could have been performed by some AI-enhanced mechanism, which would explain a lot).

Yet this was not the first occasion of blocking that I have come across. A long-time correspondent in the Liverpool area used to tell me that he had to deploy some devious tricks to get round a similar prohibition. I recall also that, when I was working at the National Archives in Kew, coldspur was permanently unavailable, which perhaps hints at some more deliberate attempt at security, and at preventing pollution of correct thinking among the country’s elite researchers. Could browsers who have had similar experiences perhaps inform me of them? I shall need to maintain a dossier to provide evidence if and when I take this further.

And then I had to deal with the Chinese. I received a strange email from a businessman in Shanghai, who claimed that one of his clients wanted to use coldspur.cn and coldspur.com.cn for their business. The fellow claimed that he had tried to talk his clients out of it, but they were insistent, and he invited me to register the names myself, so that my ‘business’ could be protected. Of course, I didn’t believe a word of it. He was just trying to collect registration fees from me. According to that logic, I would have to register coldspur with every other national suffix to prevent my hordes of eager browsers from being misdirected.

Oh, the trials of being a website administrator  . . .

News from Academia

In the middle of May I received the following message from the University of Oxford American Office:

Dear Tony, June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the US, and this month we are celebrating by highlighting the exciting work being done to teach LGBTQ+ history at Oxford and how you as an alumnus can help. There is an enormous appetite for LGBTQ+ History among graduate students, and scholarships associated with the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexualities, the UK’s first permanently endowed Professorship in LGBTQ+ History, will allow these students to pursue their interests and become future thought leaders. 
The Jonathan Cooper Chair   Named after Jonathan Cooper OBE, an expert in international human rights law and activist for LGBTQ+ rights across the globe, the Cooper Chair, held by Professor Matthew Cook since 2023, explores histories of sexual diversity in all their variations, exploring their intersection with categories such as race, class, generation, occupation, education (dis)ability, nationality and community. Professor Cook is the first postholder of the Cooper Chair, made possible by the generosity of philanthropists.   There followed a message from Professor Cook:   “This work matters not only to LGBTQ+ individuals and communities but to us all: histories that look from the margins provide fresh perspectives on shifting norms and enhance our understanding of wider social, cultural and political realms. Scholarships are key to this mission: I see so many talented students diverting away from further study because they lack the funds – an issue especially for those who lack family support. Underpinning their further study is an investment in their talent and in histories which play a key part in the drive for social justice.”    – Professor Matthew Cook

I was astonished, and a couple of days later, responded as follows:

I thought at first that this message must be a spoof, but I then realized you are utterly serious. How can you pretend to any academic excellence when you ascribe such importance to this non-subject?

Whatever “LGBTQ+” means, it is a ragbag of genetic dispositions and behavioural choices (most of which should probably be kept private), a creature of the media and phony academics kowtowing to fashionable notions of ‘exclusion’, ‘victimisation’ and ‘identity’. What about adulterers, asexuals and foot-fetishists? Why are they excluded? How could anyone claim to be able to study ‘histories of sexual diversity in all their variations’?

‘Exciting work’, ‘enormous appetite’, ‘future thought leaders’, ‘LGBTQ individuals and communities’, ‘drive for social justice’, ‘constructs that disempower historically marginalized groups’ – what a lot of pretentious nonsense. It reads like a parody of an old ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph. How anything useful or insightful could come out of such ‘research’ is beyond me. But I do know that the University has forfeited all chances of my making any further donation to any of its causes, however worthy.

Sincerely, Tony Percy (Christ Church, 1965)

Then, from the other end of the spectrum, on June 14, I noticed that Christ Church Development had posted an announcement on Facebook. It read:

 His Majesty the King has approved the appointment of two new Regius professorships at Christ Church.

We look forward to welcoming Professor Luke Bretherton as Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, and the Revd Professor Andrew Dawson as Regius Professor of Divinity in the coming months!

Ye gods! What possible fresh revelations could these two gentlemen come up with? I can understand the study of religion as a topic of interest under Anthropology, perhaps, but Chairs in Gods [and Goddesses? Please verify. Thelma.] and Godliness? I learn, however, that the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology was established by an Act of Parliament in 1840, and the show must therefore go on. But is it not time for a repeal? I also read that Professor Bretherton arrives from Duke University in North Carolina, where he has been Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology. His latest book ‘provides a new, constructive framework for what it means to live a good life amid the difficulties of everyday life and the catastrophes and injustices that afflict so many today’. His role sounds more like a preacher or social worker, to me, rather than an independent and disciplined academic. I hope he will adjust quickly from the difficulties of living in Durham, NC to those of provincial England. I would also suggest Bretherton ought to get together with Professor Cook and work on the ‘social justice’ goals. Dr. Spacely-Trellis, where are you?

But then others will say: a doctorate in Security and Intelligence Studies? Can that really be an academic discipline? Seriously?? Maybe if it took up the ‘social justice’ cause  . . .

Similarity and Identity

The primary objective of our spell in Los Altos, California, was to re-engage with our three grand-daughters, whom we hadn’t seen for a couple of years. The twins, Alyssa and Alexis, celebrated their eleventh birthday just before we arrived, and the photo above shows them with the gifts we had given them. I was struck by the resemblance of Alexis (on the right) to (a younger version of) Emma Raducanu, who represents England – by way of Canada – as a tennis-star. Now I note that Ms. Raducanu has a Romanian father and a Chinese mother. Alexis is 50% Vietnamese, 25% English (whatever that means, with Huguenots, Germans and possibly the Perskys from Minsk in the running), 12.5% Irish (probably), and 12.5% ‘Black’ West Indian (more likely African than Black Carib, the descendants of the original islanders who still live on St. Vincent). Is the similarity not a bit uncanny?

Emma Raducanu

I write this just to show how absurd all tribal identities can be. When I fill out government forms, I am always dismayed by the long list of entries under ‘race’, one of which I am required to fill out (although I can actually cross the ‘Decline’ box). I recall checking ‘South Pacific Islander’ on one fanciful and courageous occasion during my recent Tahiti phase, and, some time afterwards, I received a visit from a Census Bureau officer. He confronted me by suggesting that I had offered an untruth on a government form – rather like Hunter Biden denying that he was a drug user when he applied for a firearms license, or von Bolschwing omitting his membership of the Nazi party in his naturalization application, I imagine. I protested that I sincerely believed, with the current focus on ‘identity’, that a citizen was entitled to make any choice that he or she wanted to. If I could choose my own pronouns, why shouldn’t I pick my own ethnicity? After all, I didn’t see why an indigenous Quechua from Peru, whose forbears had been the victims of the Spanish Conquest, should be encouraged to enter the meaningless term ‘Hispanic’ when he or she applied for food stamps, or a passport renewal, or whatever. As proof of my ethnicity (or denial of any), I could now show any such official the photograph of Alexis. “Doesn’t she have the Percy chin, officer?”

(Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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The 617 Squadron Association ‘Historian’

I am posting this Special Bulletin to record a recent email exchange between Dr. Robert Owen, the official historian of the 617 Squadron Association, and me. As part of my campaign to elevate awareness of the saga of ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, I had tried to contact the Squadron through various means, without success. Then, in the middle of May, I found a different email address, and sent my Synopsis (see https://coldspur.com/the-airmen-who-died-twice-synopsis/ ), as well as the supporting PDFs, to it. At the end of the month I received an email from Dr. Owen, and the following brief correspondence ensued.

Dr. Owen to me, May 29:

“Dear Mr Percy,

Your analysis of the crash of Lancaster PB416 has been passed to me for comment.

There are certainly a lot of unanswered questions in respect of the loss of this aircraft, not least the actual number of bodies found at the crash site and subsequently interred.

 In analysing your hypothesis I have also consulted with my counterpart in the IX Sqn Association (an ex RAF Tornado navigator) who has also looked into this incident, hence my rather delayed reply.

My own reading of this work is that it tells two separate stories – Operation Paravane with the loss of PB416 and, if I have understood it correctly, an alleged plot (the explanation of the Soviet/Norwegian element is not easy to follow) for Soviet agents to assassinate Peder Furubotn

 The link between these two lines of enquiry is ascribed to the crash of PB416 in Norway, and the continuing mystery surrounding the number of bodies aboard the aircraft and their identities.

 The difficulty in reconciling the number of bodies is not disputed. Their identities are confused by the initial reports listing personnel allegedly aboard PB416 who are definitely known not to have been on the flight.  This issue of identity can be explained by an administrative error.

The claim that there were more than nine bodies (the official crew/passenger number) cannot be explained with any certainty, but again administrative error, combined with the later exhumation and re-burial might be a contributory factor.  Without exhumation of the remains of the “unknown airman” in Nesbyen cemetery (which seems an impossible scenario) and formal identification by forensic methods this mystery seems likely to remain unresolved.

 It was suggested for a long time that the additional casualty might have been a member of ground staff – but this can be categorically refuted since all RAF members on Paravane – less those known to have been officially on board PB416 are known to have returned safely – including all of the ground contingent.

 The idea that there was a stowaway has also been discounted.  The question was discussed amongst a number of Paravane veterans and they were all adamant that It would have been impossible for a stowaway to conceal themselves aboard the Lancaster without the connivance of the crew.

 Thus the presence of any addition personnel on board would have to have been with the knowledge of the crew.  If this was the case how might this presence be explained?  If, as is suggested the additional personnel were Soviet agents who were to be parachuted out over Norway, how could this action be explained to the crew?

The key to keeping anything a secret is limiting the number “in the know” and, ideally that those “in the know” are of sufficient rank/status to be entrusted with such information. If this is the case (and surely any alleged plan for the despatch of Soviet agents into Norway for an assassination would be seen as having the highest security rating) then why was a relatively junior crew selected for the task.  Frank  Levy was a Flying Officer.  Furthermore, why were these Soviet agents placed aboard an aircraft that was carrying not only its normal crew complement of seven, but an additional two passengers – thus increasing the number of personnel who would have knowledge of the operation?

 It would have been far more logical for any such agents – assuming that there were such – to have been carried aboard a senior officer’s aircraft.  In this case this would be that of W/Cdr Tait, with his aircraft carrying only his normal crew of seven.

 If W/Cdr Tait and his crew were not to be involved, and if these personnel were to be dropped at night over unfamiliar territory, with terrain that by its nature had limited features to assist navigation, then another sensible assumption might be that the aircraft/crew chosen contained an experienced / senior navigator.  The most obvious choice in such an instance would have been the crew of S/Ldr Fawke, a more senior captain, whose navigator, F/Lt Bennett was the Squadron Navigation Officer.

 So why would Levy, relatively junior, whose aircraft was already carrying two additional passengers, be selected for such a task if indeed the scenario is correct? Who might have selected him?  Presumably the Squadron Commander – W/Cdr Tait.

In his later years Tom Bennett, Gerry Fawke’s navigator, became the No. 617 Squadron Association historian  – my predecessor.  I knew Tom well.  As might be expected of a navigator, he was a man of detail, conscientious and diligent.  One of his areas of enquiry was the loss of PB416 and the mystery of the identification of its casualties. He pursued many avenues including Air Historical Branch, the British Embassy in Oslo, the Norwegian War Graves Service and local Norwegians. He also discussed the episode with W/Cdr Tait.

 As Squadron Navigation Officer, he was responsible to W/Cdr Tait for all matters concerning navigation.  He was closely involved with the final navigation preparations for Paravane, to the extent that before the operation he was sent personally to collect the required charts of Scandinavian and Soviet territory from RAF Northolt under conditions of the greatest security.

 Likewise, as Navigation Officer he would have been involved in post-operational navigational analysis – including consideration of possible reasons for the loss of PB416.

 This being so, it seems inconceivable that Tom would not have gained some knowledge (even if only a hint/suspicion) of any covert circumstances, had there been any, relating to this flight, either at the time, or in later conversation with W/Cdr Tait.

 The results of his investigations failed to establish any definitive answer to the mystery of the identification of crew members.  They did however, suggest that there had been several layers of compounded administrative error which can be explained by a number of reasonable factors –the fog of war, poor record keeping or lost documentation.

As for as the reason for the aircraft’s loss:  The location of PB416’s crash clearly places it off the planned route back to Woodhall Spa.  This is sometimes attributed to a navigation error – which might include the “blown off course” explanation quoted.

However, the crash location might also be accounted for if the the aircraft was on an intended route for it to make a landfall in Northern Scotland.  There might be several explanations for this:

 Airfields in the Moray region were acceptable as diversionary airfields. The aircraft may have been making a diversion to Lossiemouth, as did a number of aircraft returning the following night.

 John Sweetman’s “Tirpitz – Hunting the Beast”, p. 116 cites the instance of F/O Watts of 617 Sqn,:

 “..Watts in KC-N hit ‘a huge occluded frontal system’ over Sweden, lost his pitot head and ‘all indicated air speed’, then discovered that fog had closed in over Woodhall causing him to divert to Lossiemouth.”    A number of other aircraft also diverted to Lossiemouth.

 Admittedly, the weather does not appear to have been an issue in the night of 16/17 September.

Levy’s aircraft may have experienced a technical problem which resulted in the crew deciding on a shorter route, with a shorter sea crossing to a diversionary airfield such as Lossiemouth or Kinloss.  There are uncorroborated reports that before the crash an aircraft was heard which sounded as if in trouble / with rough running engines.

 There is no conclusive proof that this was PB416, but it might suggest that the aircraft was experiencing technical issues.  It is known that engine problems were experienced on account of the low grade Russian aviation fuel and that one IX Sqn aircraft was forced to abort its return flight for this reason and return to Yagodnik.

Another consideration is that the aircraft may have been fired upon by flak as they transited across Finland, Sweden or Norway.  This again is given credence by Sweetman (p114):

 “Iveson’s log book shows that KC-F was fired on over Finland”  and on p. 116: “Three 9 (N flown by Harris with a JW bomb load, W & V) and two 617 (E & Z) Squadron Lancasters left on 18 September. Flying in Knilans’ KC-W 17 September, Bell the navigator recalled that ‘our aircraft had a bent frame, was difficult to control, and the starboard outer engine needed a major overhaul’. He failed to mention three extra passengers from a crashed aircraft. Off course near Stockholm, the Lancaster attracted the hostile attention of Swedish anti-aircraft guns. (Hell, I thought these guys were supposed to be neutral’, hollered Knilans.) Like Watts, they found Woodhall fog-bound and diverted to Lossiemouth.”

A Norwegian account attributed to one of the first to reach the crash site states that the wreckage of PB416 showed evidence of battle damage and that the fuel tanks were “torn and empty”.

 If this is correct, then the possibility of PB416 receiving battle damage necessitating a diversion should be factored into the debate.

The question of an additional crew member, or members on board remains enigmatic, but here again the waters are muddied by lack of conclusive evidence. If we accept that there were other(s) on board the aircraft, there is still no proof positive to link them to the alleged Soviet assassination plot. It would make as much sense, to suggest that they may have been additional personnel who were being ferried to the UK.  If so, then unless their origin/identity/purpose can be determined no conclusion can be drawn.

“The work is a hypothesis lacking firm proofs, but offering enough credible evidence to provide as watertight an argument as can be expected.”   Though each separate line of enquiry has been well researched, there is no firm indication of any conclusive link between the Paravane force and a Soviet assassination attempt, or even suggests any such connection. Any hypothesis based on such a claim must be at best conjecture based upon supposition and circumstantial evidence.

 Gaps and inconsistencies in documentary evidence, are not unusual.  Often it is a case of human/administrative error, or the loss of records with the passage of time.  Such omission/inconsistency does not necessarily indicate subterfuge or conspiracy.   Absence of evidence is just that… absence of evidence.

 Without further evidence to link the two directly the enigma must surely remain?

With all good wishes, 

 Rob

Dr Robert Owen

Official Historian, 617 Sqn Association”

I immediately sent a message of thanks, as follows:

“Dear Rob,

Many thanks for your patient and comprehensive reply.

What gratifies me most is that I see at last an admission that the crash at Saupeset represents an ‘enigma’ that clearly needs an explanation. In my investigations, I was dismayed by the lack of any recognition that anything untoward had happened, which led me to believe that the authorities wanted to bury the episode.

Over the weekend, I shall study very carefully your message, and respond with appropriate seriousness in a few days’ time. I am by no means a dogmatist, and developed my theory after intense study of much archival and biographical material. As I am sure you will agree, the final word on any historical event is never written, and I look forward to exploring with you the possible circumstances that led to this extraordinary disaster. 

With thanks again for the considerable time you must have spent on this,

Best wishes, 

Tony.”

On June 2, I sent Dr. Owen my full response:

“Dear Robert,

I am replying to your very thoughtful message, which I very much appreciated.

I have a few general comments, and I shall then attempt to address your more detailed points.

1)      Anonymity and Secrecy: I was puzzled by the apparent secrecy behind the investigations of historians before you. You state that ‘it was suggested for a long time . . ’, and ‘the idea that there was a stowaway has also been discounted’. Yet you give no indication as to who made these assessments, or where and when they appeared. It seems astonishing – even shocking to me – that no proper investigation was undertaken soon after the events at the end of the war, when witnesses were available. (Perhaps it was, but the report was suppressed . . . ) What happened to Tom Bennett’s report (if he wrote one)? Were the results of these investigations ever promulgated so that the public or other historians could discuss them? If not, why not? Why is there nothing on the website that refers to the tragedy?

2)      Administrative Errors: Likewise, you state that ‘the issue of identity can be explained by administrative error’. Who has made that judgment? And how can such an unfortunate  series of circumstances all be laid at the feet of some careless administrator? After all, fifteen Lancasters made it home that night, with a full complement of aircrew and passengers correctly recorded. Thus the error to which you ascribe the identification problem affected the sole aircraft that went off course, resulting in a confusion over who was killed that went on for two years. Surely it was the responsibility of the flight supervisors to be absolutely accurate over the composition of crews of airplanes, so that next of kin could be confidently informed when incidents of this nature occurred? Was the problem characterized as an administrative error at the time, and was remedial action taken?

3)      Breadth and Depth of Research:  You mention that Tom Bennett ‘pursued many avenues of research, including Air Historical Branch (= what?), the British Embassy in Oslo, the Norwegian War Graves Service and local Norwegians’. But when did this happen? And what was he told? Did he have communications with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission? Or the Air Ministry, or its successor, the Ministry of Defence? Do you believe that Wing Commander Tait had been completely open with him? Do you not agree that the investigations that I have carried out concerning SOE and Operation PICKAXE, the military mission in Moscow, the NKVD, Milorg, the Norwegian Communist Party, the Americans at Poltava, etc. etc. are relevant to a proper analysis of the case?

To address your other points:

·         I am surprised that you say that an exhumation of the remains the unknown airman at Nesbyen seems an ‘impossible scenario’. If he is indeed ‘unknown’, no one should be offended, and DNA analysis should reveal vital clues to his identity.

·         It is important that the idea of a ‘stowaway’ be discarded. I have never suggested that any agent could have secreted himself on the Lancaster without his presence being detected, even if in British uniform camouflage! The crew must have known that some special operation was under way. It might have been explained to them as another PICKAXE operation, where RAF bombers were used to drop Soviet agents in occupied territories as part of the SOE-NKVD collaborative project. And the fact that PARAVANE veterans discussed this possibility proves that the idea had been considered. But how was the mystery introduced to these veterans? Were they told about the Wyness/Williams debacle? Did they discuss whether agents might have been infiltrated on board with the approval of the authorities?

·         I would regard the minor distinction between exposing the secret to nine rather than seven, as a risk, as minimally relevant. After all, was not each of the fifteen Lancasters returning that night carrying extra passengers, because of the damaged craft left behind as not being airworthy?

·         I have no insights on the suitability for such a mission of Wing Commander Tait versus Flight Officer Levy, or how Levy was selected. But maybe Tait’s role was to lead the squadron in its loose information, and the chosen plane had to be last in line, so that it could peel off without its deviation being noticed by the crew of any other craft. I agree with you that Tait must have selected Levy for the operation, and again wonder how much he told Bennett. (One could surmise, perhaps cynically, that the least experienced crew was chosen to undertake such a dangerous mission, and that Churchill would not have been too chagrined had it failed.)

·         You suggest that it seems ‘inconceivable’ that Tom Bennett would not have picked up any hint of covert operations, had there been any. Yet the issue of ‘stowaways’ had been raised, which truly suggests some clandestine activity had been suspected. And, if he had indeed picked up such suspicions, might he perhaps have been strongly instructed not to disclose them?

·         You refer to the ‘fog of war, poor record-keeping, and lost documentation’ as possible causes of the mystery of the identification, and treat them as ‘reasonable’ factors. (Though how ‘lost documentation’ could be a predecessor phenomenon in this incident seems hard to believe.) Yet again, I reinforce the fact of the peculiar circumstances whereby these ‘administrative errors’ affected solely one plane out of sixteen – one that had a large number of enigmatic aspects to its flight crew, its adjusted flightpath, and the troubling circumstances of its demise.

·         You again use the passive voice: the location of the crash ‘is sometimes attributed to a navigation error – which might include the “blown off course” explanation offered’. (How could a ‘navigation error’ take place when the aircraft were flying in formation? How easily could a Lancaster be ‘blown off course’ without making a correction, or communicating the problem? And how come no other plane underwent the experience?) Who has submitted these explanations and judgments? Why does no one take responsibility? Moreover, the Flight Loss Card indicates that PB416’s destination was ‘Norway’, and it records the crash site as being near Nesbyen. The plane was reported as having circled the area for some time. Moreover, there was no apparent surprise when the navigator asked Dyce for a QDF reading! Why do you ignore this clearly documented evidence?

·         As for making landfall in Northern Scotland, as I understand it, some of the Lancasters were rerouted to land at Lossiemouth, because of fog at Woodhall Spa, and did in fact land there (as Flight Officer Watts recorded). The maps indicate that the safest route was still to fly over Sweden and north of Denmark, and then make progress towards Lincolnshire or Northern Scotland. Taking that sharp turn to the west across occupied Norway offered no advantage whatsoever. You admit that weather does not appear to have been an issue that night – at least not over Sweden.

·         Could Levy have decided on a shorter route without informing his controllers, or without the controllers noticing that he had diverted? Why, if the aircraft was experiencing technical issues, would it remove itself from the formation, and pass over hostile territory? Moreover, if you look at the map of the route, once a plane reached the Skagerrak in the North Sea, Lossiemouth is actually closer than Lincolnshire.

·         If low-grade Russian fuel was to blame, how come that PB416 was again the sole victim of this misfortune? Presumably all sixteen planes were fuelled from the same source, and fifteen made it back without incident. By the way, you quote Iveson’s log (mentioned by Sweetman) that stated that his crew, ‘like Watts’, found Woodhall fog-bound, and the plane thus diverted to Lossiemouth. Is that Sweetman’s interpretation? Was it really left to the officer to make that determination? If so, how could it have been that Levy, in PB416, knew about the needed diversion when he was over Sweden?

·         Where is the Norwegian account of the crash site held? Can it be inspected? I am not surprised that, if PB416 flew into a mountain, the craft ‘showed evidence of battle damage and that the fuel tanks were “torn and empty”’! Did anyone really expect that they would survive the impact intact? Should we really treat this information seriously?

·         The evolution of the ‘identified’ members of the crew  – and passengers – of PB416 merits special attention, as shown in the following phases:

i)  The September Operations Record Book, showing the original seven listed from the departure on September 11 (without Naylor and Shea), and recording the disappearance of the aircraft on September 18, with an assumption that the crew was the same;

ii) the roster (‘nominal roll’) of those that left Yagodnik on PB416, compiled by Squadron Leader Harman (unavailable, but apparently adding only Shea as passenger);

iii) the recognition on the Flight Loss Report made out at Woodhall Spa the day after the accident that Naylor and Shea had both been passengers;

iv) the numeration of bodies on the ground, made by local Norwegians;

v) the listing of names on the crude memorial in August 1945 (including Wyness and Williams),

vi) the initial Graves Registration Report from August 1945 (which omitted McNally, but included Wyness and Williams);  

vii) the ‘final’ War Graves Commission report in December 1946 (with McNally restored, and Williams and Wyness removed); and  

viii) the ten headstones in Nesbyen Churchyard, including an unknown airman.

·         The public deserves to know about this. While I, in my articles, have done my best to describe and interpret the sequence of events that drove the confusion, I see no evidence that the Squadron has performed any rigorous analysis of the debacle. Yet the fact remains: there is an unknown airman lying in rest in the Churchyard, and neither you nor the Ministry of Defence can explain who it might be, as there is no British (or Canadian) officer missing to be accounted for. I agree that I can offer no solid evidence of the conspiracy, but my hypothesis is much more plausible than the vague claims of human and administrative error that you propose. (The ‘fog of war’ is an inadequate explanation.) Professor Titlestad (whose father was Peder Furubotn’s security officer) is one of several who accept my conclusions. It will remain an enigma only so long as you keep it under wraps, and show no resolve to explore it further. I hope that my endeavours will encourage you to open up, publish your findings, and engage in a further debate about the events. Also, that the Squadron and the Ministry will be ready to offer an apology when the eightieth anniversary of the crash comes up this September.

I respectfully await learning what your next steps will be.

Sincerely,
Tony.”

Dr. Owen’s reply of June 5 was disappointingly terse:

“Dear Tony

I have spent a considerable amount of time considering your hypothesis, and commented as requested.  

I have nothing further to add.

Rob”

This failure to engage was extremely depressing. I am sure that Dr. Owen is a fine man, dedicated to serving the Squadron Association for whom he works, but his behaviour does not display the attributes that a serious historian should regard as essential to his or her craft. It was incurious, unimaginative, obscurantist, selective, insular, and proprietary. It reinforces my belief that history is too important to be delegated to ‘official historians’. To ignore the evidence and resort to identifying causes such as ‘the fog of war’ is simply unprofessional. I therefore issue this posting in the hope that someone else may pick it up and gain the attention of more independent and resourceful analysts.

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Special Bulletin: ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’ – Part 4

Peder Furubotn

[I present the final segment in my series ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, offering a bold but confident hypothesis concerning Stalin’s objectives for the mission of sending agents to Norway disguised as British RAF officers. I have added a page containing the whole report in PDF format at ‘Airmen Who Died Twice’ (PDF), which may make the experience easier. This process is something of an experiment for me. I hope to improve the presentation soon. Feedback and tips appreciated!]

Chapter 7: Resistance in Norway

The overwhelming questions to be answered regarding the Soviet Union’s ability to stow two agents on a British plane, dressed in RAF uniforms, to parachute into southern Norway in September 1944 are: What possible objective could such a mission have had? And why would the RAF agree to such a foolhardy and potentially embarrassing adventure? The assumption must be that, for the mission to be successful, the agents, probably incapable of speaking fluent and unaccented English, would have been deemed capable of carrying out the impersonation of legitimate British officers, and thus of gaining access to the circle of a communist leader in whom Joseph Stalin had a particular interest. His name was Peder Furubotn, and he had for some time been incurring Stalin’s acute displeasure. Yet, if anything went wrong – or, equally astounding, even if the project were successful – the agents’ costume would immediately have implicated the RAF, with highly embarrassing implications.

In the analysis of these conundrums, it is useful to recapitulate the role of Norway in the war, its occupation by German forces, the collaboration or competition between various sabotage organizations and the nation’s governments at home and in exile, and the tenuous and contradictory relationship it held with the Soviet Union, a nominal ally. Norway was separated from Stalin’s fortress only by a thin section of the Finnish Petsamo region, an area rich in minerals, however, and thus bearing strategic importance.

The country had been ill-equipped to resist the German invasion of April 9, 1940. Hitler had designs on Norway’s natural resources, including its hydro-electric power, but he also needed to control the flow of iron-ore from neutral Sweden across the natural land-route. Great Britain and France had been aware of the threat, and they had prepared to send an Expeditionary Force to gain control of the valuable port of Narvik. This was conceived during the war between Finland and the Soviet Union, which started in September 1939. At that time, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were signatories to a joint non-aggression pact, and control of Finland had been granted to Stalin for purposes of national self-defence. Any communist-inspired resistance movements against the Germans were forbidden – until, of course, the Barbarossa invasion of Russia in June 1941 changed all the rules.

Britain in fact had had to beat a hasty retreat, assisting with the escape of the Norwegian royal family to London to create a government-in-exile in June 1940. It had overestimated the power of its own navy and misread the intentions of the Wehrmacht. Thus Norway fell into the category of occupied territory, and a cowed population had to decide what form resistance to the German invaders should take. In fact, the Nazis were overall more indulgent with the Norwegians than they were with other conquered nations: they regarded the Nordic race as Aryan brothers, and hoped to integrate the populace into the New Order when the war was won. That favouritism, however, did not extend to mercy when violence was exacted against their police and military forces, with some harsh reprisals enacted, and this tension played a major role in the following years.

Routes of Arctic Convoys

Soon after Barbarossa, however, Norway took on fresh significance when Churchill and Roosevelt resolved, in August 1941, to assist the Soviet Union by sending supplies through the Arctic convoy system. This required ships to navigate the dangerous Norwegian and Barents seas to reach, primarily, the ports of Murmansk and Archangel, skirting the northern coasts of Norway, and thus becoming potential prey to German craft berthed in Norwegian ports and inlets, such as the battleship Tirpitz. The convoys continued (with some interruptions) until the end of the war. Stalin kept a close eye on Norway, and he evolved his strategy as the war progressed.

The accounts of resistance in Norway present a contradictory picture: some display ignorance, others practice concealment, and others distort (for political reasons). It is consequently often difficult to pin down the details of events – both their motivations and their outcomes. It seems to me that both London (in the guise of the government-in-exile and SOE) and Moscow (the NKGB) believed that they were controlling the strings, when in fact the agencies on the ground often pursued unlikely alliances to further their goals. I here try to concentrate on the less controversial facts, identifying the main motifs in the plotline.

The British Special Operations Executive trained and prepared a vigorous Norwegian section to carry out sabotage within Norway, which became more intense when the British suspected the Nazis of creating ‘heavy water’ as an important part of the project to build an atomic bomb. Yet fierce reprisals in response to SOE raids alarmed the major resistance organization in place, Milorg, and it resolved instead on a more passive approach, and to focus on preparation to assist invading forces for the time when the Nazis began to lose the war. Milorg was led by a lawyer, Jens Hauge, an enigmatic and controversial figure, who had sought a medical discharge from military service in 1939. He joined in early 1942. The tensions between SOE and Milorg were then resolved by the creation of the Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee in the spring of 1942, and SOE’s independent course was officially halted by October of that year. Yet Milorg did not halt its own sabotage activities, and it pursued a course of assassinations of known traitors.

There was, however, another resistance group, Osvald, which evolved out of the pre-war antifascist Wollweber League, and was led by the more aggressive Asbjorn Sunde. He invoked the assistance of the Communist Party (now strictly underground), and established training centres around the country. Sunde was a tougher character, a sailor who had learned sabotage and assassination in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the Communists for the Republican movement against Franco’s Nationalists, and he was a loyal Stalinist. Thus a pattern familiar elsewhere in occupied Europe emerged: certain resistance groups were set on restoring the pre-war political configuration (such as SOE collaborating with the royalist/social democratic government-in-exile), while others were being directed by Moscow in preparation for a post-war communist takeover. Sunde was ordered to minimize sabotage activity, and to concentrate instead on providing intelligence to his NKGB bosses. Yet the relationships appear to have been very complex: the government-in-exile sometimes gave directions to the Stalinist Osvald group on sabotage projects, and it appears that even Milorg collaborated with it, engaging Sunde’s hitmen to carry out its targeted assassinations.

Added to this recipe was the afore-mentioned Peder Furubotn, leader of the Communist Party in Norway. Furubotn’s organizational skills and connections allowed him to sponsor resistance groups in Oslo, Bergen, and Hallingdal. He was also a controversial figure, known for his independence of thought: he was an outlier, a provincial, with his power-base in Bergen away from the capital centre of Oslo. But he was also a dedicated patriot who desired to bring a domestic Communist regime to Norway after the war through democratic processes, not under the thrall of the Soviet Union (rather like an unauthoritarian Tito). He had in fact spent the years 1930-1938 in Moscow, an experience that included the witnessing of the Great Purge and the execution of some of his friends, which assuredly made him deviate from the solid Stalinist line he had taken up in the 1920s.

Professor Titlestad

According to his biographer, Professor Torgrim Titlestad, who has uniquely been able to inspect Russian archives, Furubotn had long been under the threat of execution, since in Moscow he had aligned himself closely with Bukharin, the executed ‘traitor’, and had refused to declare his public support for the outcome of the show-trials in 1938. Before Barbarossa, the Norwegian Communist party had tried to have Furubotn, who had from Bergen independently undertaken resistance in that period, removed from the Party, but the tables were turned when the Soviet Union became an enemy of the Nazi occupiers. At the time most other important Norwegian communists had either been killed, were in the hands of the Germans, or were refugees in Sweden, and Furubotn was elected General Secretary at the end of 1941. This was in defiance of Stalin’s orders of 1938 (when Furubotn was banished back to Norway from Moscow), that he should hold no senior position in the Party.

Furubotn was able to work independently for many years. He was a survivor. In spite of frequent unsuccessful attempts to bring him in line, during the war Moscow lacked local resources or the military reach to change his behaviour, or to remove him from office. At first glance, the need to have him out of the picture should have appeared less urgent as the war progressed, since Norway (apart from the strategic Petsamo region) did not feature strongly in Stalin’s plans for territorial control of Europe. It was not a conventional ‘buffer state’, hardly a threat to his ambitions, and Stalin accepted that it was part of the ‘western’ sphere of influence. The Soviet dictator did not want to waste resources in trying to control it, although he supported British-American desires to prevent valuable troops from being transferred from Norway to the battle zones in Germany, and he did collaborate with the British and Americans in the plan to oust the Nazis from the Finnmark (the North-east Norwegian territory abutting the Soviet Union).

Sunde’s Osvald group – perhaps surprisingly, given Sunde’s Stalinist aims – gained his funds primarily from the government-in-exile in London, supplemented occasionally by Moscow (through the agency of the Soviet legation in Stockholm, as the VENONA transcripts show). Yet Sunde looked to his rival, Furubotn, for funds, too. In September 1942 he agreed to supply guards at Furubotn’s central camp of the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) in Hemsedal, in exchange for a continuing supply of money and materiel from the NKP leader. Furubotn had tried to make Sunde sabotage-leader for the NKP, but on the condition that he break his ties with Moscow – something Sunde refused to do, which strained the relationship, and led to severe friction by the end of 1943. Sunde established a training centre in Rukkekdalen in the winter of 1942, and recruited a network of saboteurs in the Torpo-Gol and Nesbyen areas, in the Hallingdal valley. This was the same area used by Milorg to establish its ‘Elg’ base in the early summer of 1944.

Reichskommissar Terboven

Yet the decreasing effectiveness of sabotage, and the costs of maintaining the subversive units, prompted a change of plan. By February 1944, Milorg, alongside the Foreign Office, SOE, and the OSS, had openly disparaged the Communist sabotage efforts, and had applied pressure on Osvald to reduce its aid for Furubotn. The feud between Sunde and Furubotn (which had sharpened when Furubotn had threatened to kill Sunde if he followed through on a plan to assassinate the Nazi Commissar Terboven) intensified. A month later, Sunde did indeed withdraw protection for Furubotn and his network, and he turned his attention to Norwegian exile groups in Sweden. The British increased their operations in support of eventually ousting the Germans: Operation FIRECREST was launched by sea in April 1944, a four-man team landing and then starting to give weapons training. In May, Moscow, through Pavel Sudoplatov (of Special Tasks), ordered Sunde to wind up his organization, and refrain from any further sabotage, Stalin explicitly admitting that the British were in charge in southern Norway, and that the theatre was too far away from Moscow for it to exert any influence. In June, however, Sunde’s network, including Furubotn’s group, came under fresh attack from the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht in Operation ALMENRAUSCH.

Furubotn did not respond well to these moves, and he was increasingly isolated: he had enemies in Hauge and Sunde already, but now, with his autonomous subversion efforts, became an irritant to the British to compound the enmity to him maintained by Stalin. That may have been a fresh pretext for Stalin to want to have him eliminated – as a proven ‘Trotskyist’ defying the policy of the vozhd – and a move against him could represent a useful gesture to his allies. Furubotn had incurred Stalin’s anger by defying his order to stay out of the Party organization when he had returned to Norway, by executing subversive campaigns during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact (which he had openly criticized), by refusing orders to move to Sweden (where he feared he might be killed), by expressing support for the Norwegian government-in-exile in London, for attempting to wean Sunde away from the NKGB, and for openly publishing anti-Stalinist tracts in the summer of 1944. Others had been killed for less, and Furubotn believed that attempts would be made on his life on his home territory. Professor Titlestad has suggested that Moscow may have recommended to Sunde that he remove his security details from Furubuton’s hideout, thus perhaps allowing the Gestapo to infiltrate the NKP, and to take on the task of eliminating Furubotn. Yet Furubotn had escaped the ALMENRAUSCH assault, despite Sunde’s apparent betrayal, and may thereby have come afresh in Stalin’s sights.

The circumstances of the ALMENRAUSCH operation are puzzling. If a sizeable force assembled by the Wehrmacht with the help of the State Police (the Statspolitiet) did in fact conduct a punitive operation against Norwegian resistance forces (including Milorg, and the two factions of the KPN) on June 13, 1944, it is astonishing how little loss of life there was. The Wikipedia entry (the only account in English, I believe) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Almenrausch indicates that a force of eight-hundred was deployed, but that the operation was largely unsuccessful, even though it attacked a ‘secret’ hideout. Eight communists were arrested, but only one was executed. That does not sound like a typical Nazi response. Professor Titlestad explains it as a combination of the Nazis not wanting to kill a large number of fellow-Aryans, as well as a degree of nervousness about the chances of survival of the members of this punitive force in a hostile rural region. Yet the Professor also writes that Furubotn had been the Gestapo’s most wanted man, and that it had tortured and killed Norwegians in an attempt to track him down. The decisive outcome for Stalin, however, was that, in July 1944, Furubotn was still alive.

If an agreement solely for the infiltration by air by NKGB agents to Furubotn’s camp, without any explicit goal of assassination, did take place between Stalin and Churchill (which must be the least alarming hypothesis), it occurred at a time when relationships between Great Britain and the Soviet Union were rapidly deteriorating. SOE had grown frustrated with the lack of co-operation in Moscow, and the Foreign Office was infuriated by Stalin’s abuse of its Military Mission there. The Warsaw Uprising, when Stalin refused to allow Allied planes to refuel on Soviet territory, and the Red Army watched what was happening from across the Vistula, contributed to the discord. In addition, the pressure on the War Cabinet to return to the Soviet Union all POWs they had been liberating, and the lack of co-operation from the Russians over the efforts to attack the Tirpitz, conspired largely to an atmosphere of utter distrust. On August 18, Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Orme Sargent even declared that the Soviet Union was the future Enemy Number 1.

What is certain that some intense discussions took place in London towards the end of August, with Milorg’s chief, Hauge, visiting for four weeks, having been authorized to use the ‘bearing ball’ run by Mosquito from Stockholm to Leuchars. One outcome of that visit was that Milorg now became known as ‘Home Forces’. According to one account, sensing that victory was in sight, the ANCC in January had authorized the provision of a large amount of weaponry to Milorg, and in June SHAEF (now having taken charge of SOE projects) approved of attacks on Nazi industries and lines of communication. Professor Færøy, on the other hand, has stated very confidently that these increased shipments did not take place until ‘the autumn’. The scope of military coordination debated then included measures to counter German scorched earth policy, the capture of Gestapo documents, the destruction of the Gestapo HQ in Oslo and (perhaps most provocatively) a list of agreed assassination targets. Hauge’s meetings in Britain to determine these policies were held at senior level with the Norwegian Government in exile, with Special Forces Headquarters, with the Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee, and with Viscount Selborne, the Minister of Economic Warfare in London, as well as with General Thorne in Edinburgh. Thorne was responsible for the deception plan of FORTITUDE NORTH, as well as for the preparation for the liberation of Norway. Yet, because of the sensitivity of the conspiracy, it is hard not to conclude that the meetings in the United Kingdom must have been entirely coincidental to the plot against Furubotn.

More reliable wireless communications were now being established between SOE and Milorg, and, in Operation GOLDEN EAGLE, two more agents were dropped directly in the Hallingdal area on August 28, to help establish the Elg base with improved radio contact, and to enable preparation for further intensive and frequent drops of supplies over the following months. And then, as Britain started to consolidate its hold over subversive operations in southern Norway, in early September 1944 the very sudden and highly momentous intelligence arrived that Stalin had approved the launching of attacks on the Tirpitz from Soviet territory, which caused a sudden flurry of changes to the PARAVANE project.

Whether the planned assassination of Furubotn (which is posited here as the motivation for the infiltration into southern Norway of Stalin’s agents) was related to the permission Stalin gave for British bombers to fly from Soviet airfields is probably unverifiable. The British must have had something important to gain from the arrangement, but any decision taken must have occurred at the highest levels of command. It is possible that Churchill did not know what Stalin’s precise plan for his agents was, but his agreement in allowing them to assume the identities of live RAF officers is extremely incriminating. If any knowledge of the details of the conspiracy did exist, it must surely have been restricted to Churchill and Gubbins, the head of SOE. SOE/MI6 had a direct – but highly insecure –  line to Moscow through its representative George Hill, who was on good terms with Stalin, so negotiations could have been carried on through that medium. The relevant archival material shows some intense exchanges between London and Moscow in August and early September of 1944, but nothing obviously attributable to the Furubotn plot.

As for the RAF, it would obviously have known that it was being ordered to mount a highly irregular operation, but the leaders (i.e. Portal, Harris, Cochrane, McMullen, and Bottomley at the Air Ministry) would not have been aware that the objective of the mission was in fact assassination. They were probably informed that the subterfuge was simply part of an extended PICKAXE operation (i.e. one in a series of co-operative ventures between SOE and the NKGB), where Soviet agents had to be infiltrated in disguise in order that they would be welcomed properly by Hauge’s Milorg network. They would not have known that Sunde (probably) would then lead the twosome to Furubotn’s lair.

Stalin and Churchill

On the other hand, it was a low-risk undertaking for Stalin: he did not care about the fate of agents sent abroad on sabotage missions; their lives were expendable, and, since they would be wearing RAF uniforms, it would be difficult to trace anything to him, in any case. But for the British, it was a highly dangerous operation, involving deceit, not just with RAF crewmen, but with the Norwegian government, who, if its members learned of the plot, would not have taken kindly to the phenomenon of murder missions by foreign Communist infiltrators being abetted by their close wartime ally. Even if the mission had been successful, and the perpetrators had in some way been removed without their masquerade being detected, word might have leaked out, because of the packed Lancaster, the airmen who made it back safely, and the knowledge of the impersonated officers returning home. But if it failed – and in such a disastrous and spectacular fashion, as it did – the repercussions could have been tragic and far-reaching. Yet the destruction of the plane, and all inside it, managed to impose an eighty-year silence that has succeeded in exculpating all the perpetrators.

[I thank Professors Titlestad and Færøy for their advice on this chapter. The opinions represented here are of course my own, and I likewise take responsibility for any errors. coldspur]

Chapter 8: Conclusions

No documentation to prove that Churchill and Stalin conspired to launch the operation to Hallingdal has appeared, and it probably never will. Yet such a decision, to have NKGB agents dressed up in the uniforms of living RAF officers, and be equipped with their ID-tags, can have been authorized only at the very top. It was assuredly not an SOE operation (although SOE radios and servicemen were certainly employed); nor was it an idea of Bomber Command, which would have been fiercely resistant to the subterfuges and risks associated with such an enterprise. Churchill’s irrational and misguided desires to placate Stalin must have convinced him that the Generalissimo’s demands were worth acceding to. The opportunity to carry out an attack on the Tirpitz from Soviet territory, with a presumed greater chance of success than flying directly from Scotland, must have been irresistible to him.

Lancaster at Yagodnik

One can imagine the strained atmosphere when Lancaster PB416 prepared for take-off at Yagodnik on September 17, 1944. Because of the damaged and unusable planes left behind, their crews had to be allotted to the remaining flightworthy aircraft, resulting in crowded conditions. The mood would probably have been very positive, however, given the (modest) degree of success of PARAVANE, and the prospect of returning home with no loss of squadron life. And yet two Soviet citizens were foisted on this particular team, and the members must have been informed that the couple, equipped with parachutes, was to be dropped somewhere along the flightpath. They might not have known that the agents were masquerading as British fellow-airmen underneath their jackets, but they were probably disconcerted about this irregular deviation from the plans.

Etnedal

PB416 was never blown off course by inclement weather, as RAF reports later claimed. As the last plane in loose formation, it peeled off from the chain ahead of it off the coast of Sweden, and made a course for southern Norway. We know it was expected, because the navigator radioed his co-ordinates over Oystogo in Etnedal when the plane arrived there soon after one o’clock in the morning of September 17. These measures were recorded without alarm, even though the location was over three hundred miles to the north-west of the path on which the rest of the sixteen Lancasters were cruising home.

What went wrong? One can perhaps imagine that the NKGB agents had second thoughts – not that they probably had any first thoughts of their own volition over the exploit. Threats had probably been made concerning their families. They knew that they must be on a suicide mission: even if they were successful in finding Furubotn, and assassinating him, they would not survive long in their British greatcoats, with their British ID-tags, but probably owning only a smattering of English, if any. Furthermore, they had to survive the parachute drop itself. It is highly unlikely that they had had parachute training, let alone from a British bomber, and the prospect of landing correctly on hard ground uninjured, and then meeting up with a friendly reception committee, must have seemed distant.

One could conjecture that they perhaps tried to convince the pilot that he should abandon the drop, and take his ‘stowaways’ onwards to Scotland. But Squadron-Leader Levy had his orders, and he would not have wanted to present himself at Lossiemouth with two illegal NKGB agents in his complement of passengers, with much explaining to do, and no doubt flak to be received from the high-ups. The agents were probably armed. Perhaps some sort of skirmish took place, and the plane circled while attempts to resolve the issue, with Levy trying to convince the agents of their duty, took place. The dangers of the terrain went unnoticed, and the plane hit a treetop on the mountain in the Saupeset valley above the town of Nesbyen.

RAF at Dyce, Aberdeen, which had been tracking the movements of PB416, must have known of the mission, and soon assumed that the plane was lost without any survivors. Yet the details appear, strangely, to have escaped their notice. If the Milorg reception-party, aided by SOE agents recently arrived (and maybe attended by Sunde), were in wireless contact (which they surely were, to have been able to finalize the arrangements), they would have transmitted the facts about the horrific collision with the mountain, and presumably have added that there could have been no survivors. Local civilians quickly erected a cross to indicate the ten bodies discovered, which they promptly buried. And yet this news never reached Bomber Command, or, if it did, was ignored. After the defeat of the Germans in May 1945 locals remembered the dead airmen with a hand-painted plaque in Norwegian.

The fact was that it was more convenient for the full list of crew members to remain unknown and unknowable. The story about NKGB ‘stowaways’ could thus remain a secret for a while: the facts buried in red tape and obfuscation – the fog of war. Yet that calm was disturbed when the initial Graves Report was issued in July 1945, and then altered the following month, after an on-site inspection of the markers in Nesbyen revealed the names of Wyness and Williams among the casualties. By then, of course, Wyness and Williams were dead, and could tell no tales. Some coughing, and shuffling of papers resulted, and by the end of December 1946 the final report was able to declare that one unknown airman (of undefined nationality, but perhaps that need not be explicitly stated) had perished alongside the nine certain casualties. No one seemed to want to pose the question: how could the RAF not know who had boarded PB416 in Yagodnik?

Even in this decade an incurious listlessness governs the attitudes of the War Graves Commission in England. Its representative acknowledges the paradoxes articulated in the records, but he shows no interest in taking the matter further. One could assume, perhaps, that corporate memory in the RAF (and in other departments of the UK government) endures to the extent that its employees and associates are firmly cautioned not to encourage any members of the public to press too hard on certain matters. One can admire the dedication that such civil servants (and volunteers) apply to maintaining histories and records while at the same time one has to challenge their lack of resolve.

617 Squadron Badge

As another example, in 2021, the painstaking Nigel Austin posed a question to the Official Historian of the 617 Squadron Association about the procedures involved in compiling a Flight Loss Card. (There is no mention of the loss of Lancaster PB416 on the Association’s web-page.) Dr Owen patiently explained the roles of the Air Ministry, Bomber Command, and the International Red Cross, and suggested that lines of communication became tangled during the investigations. He implied that the initial reports were confused because it seemed that items of clothing belonging to Wyness and Williams had presumably been borrowed, but he overlooked the issue of ID-tags. It was as if this were the first time that anyone associated with the Squadron has investigate the enigma, and Owen concluded his response as follows: “The more one looks, more gaps and unanswered/unanswerable questions emerge with regard to this loss”. Is the word ‘unanswerable’ telling – a sign of policy? In any case, no follow-up occurs.

Even today, almost eighty years after the events, it would be politically highly embarrassing for the truth to be conceded. First is the fact of the cover-up itself – a betrayal of openness, a disgraceful lack of admission of responsibility to the relatives of those who died in the crash, and a promotion of lies about its cause. Second is the damage it performs to the reputations of those involved – the institutions themselves, of course, but also those who led them, and in particular Winston Churchill, with his sentimental behaviour towards Stalin, and his unforgivable tendency to relish picaresque adventures, and to become too involved in them. That is an aspect that his biographers have touched on, but – alongside his interventions in the betrayal of SOE ‘F’ circuits in France in the summer of 1943 – it merits much greater attention.

Churchill had conflicting motives: to make a bold enough gesture to appease Stalin, but to keep it so secret that he would not offend the Norwegian government. Sadly, his obsession over Tirpitz was misguided: he did not know how sparse were its fuel supplies; he did not realize how cautious Hitler’s plans were for deploying the battleship, in his anxiety to protect his Nordic fleet; and he was unaware of utterly low the morale of the Tirpitz crew had sunk, frustrated by inactivity and the barrenness of northern Norway. Yet he surely could not have imagined that the destruction of the Lancaster aircraft, and all on board, could have been a possible outcome of his reckless agreement. The plane having reached Oystogo, it could have continued its flight, taking the Soviet agents to Scotland, where they would never have been heard of again, without Stalin being any the wiser. Whether the impersonators were anguished that the mission had been abandoned, or whether they pressured the pilot to cancel the drop, and save them, will almost certainly never be known. Yet the ineluctable fact that nothing about the operation ever seems to have leaked out from Norwegian sources who were involved on the ground is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of this tragic event.

As for Stalin, it should come as no surprise that he would pursue such an adventure. He was ruthless, exploited weaknesses in his allies (both Churchill and Roosevelt), and single-mindedly hunted down anyone who challenged his authority. Furubotn would have been just another victim in the line of such as Ignace Reiss, Juliet Poyntz, Walter Krivitsky, Leon Trotsky, and a whole lot more. The opportunity arose, Stalin grabbed it, and he formulated the plot in a way that it could not be easily traced to any of his decisions, whether it succeeded or not. Not that any attribution to his scheming would have worried him: everything would have simply been denied.

Peder Furubotn probably never knew about the exploit, or that he had avoided yet another attempt on his life. Did he really deserve the fate that Stalin had decreed for him? Professor Titlestad has devoted a large part of his career to investigating Furubotn, and he has written a biography of him, unfortunately not yet published. The Professor has created, however, a website dedicated to his researches, at https://furubotnarkivene.no/, and the ‘English’ tab introduces the visitor to a very useful article on his subject. What is startling to this writer is that the Professor sets out to rehabilitate Furubotn, describing him as ‘one of Norway’s most colorful and charismatic political leaders of the 20th century’ and that ‘for five years, he fought a life-and-death battle to avoid being killed by the Gestapo in Norway and became a role model for surviving the illegal struggle against the overwhelmingly powerful German occupation and its Norwegian collaborators in the NS [the Nasjonal Samling, the only legal party in Norway from 1942 to 1945]’. That was not how I had initially interpreted his role, but Furubotn’s daring example was converted into significant success for the Communist Party after the war.

Professor Titlestad present some fascinating insights into Furubotn’s post-war career, when he even returned to Moscow and remained unscathed, describing him as a more constitutionally sensitive Communist, perhaps a ‘Euro-communist’ of the kind that excited leftist politicians in the western democracies in the 1950s. While I am in any case unqualified to comment on such analysis, this article focusses on the war years alone, and it seems that the record of Furubotn’s activities between 1940 and 1945 is very hazy. It is difficult to track at what time the revolutionary Communist morphed into the simpler and rather sentimental left-winger that the post-war record shows. What is clear, however, is that Furubotn defied Stalin too many times, and his enemies within the KPN made sure that accounts of his misconduct got back to the vozhd.

I thus have to express some reservations about Furubotn’s heroism and reputation. Furubotn seems rather a sorry figure to me: a man lacking formal education who learned about Marxism only when he went to Moscow, and who, after the war, drifted into a vague socialism that invoked the Bible as often as it brought in The Communist Manifesto. If Furubotn had been a Communist during the war, whether Stalinist or not, the mission of a communist was class warfare, authoritarian control (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, of course, which was a ridiculous slogan). The institution of Communist power always ended in the incarceration or execution of class enemies, and the abandonment of any constitutional safeguards. The senior resistance organization, Milorg, detested the Communist Party, whether it was Sunde’s or Furubotn’s, and Milorg became the official voice of the people representing the government-in-exile. Yet the Communist message still resonated strongly among major sectors of Norway’s population.

I thus maintain a few doubts about the Professor’s assessment of the integrity of Furubotn and his motives. He writes, also, that the Oslo Harbour sabotage operation orchestrated by Furubotn in the autumn of 1944 was an epochal event. “This activity, which carried the death penalty from the German side, greatly contributed to keeping the hope of liberation alive among Norwegians”,  he writes. Yet such an attack went entirely against the grain of what Milorg (and, reportedly the Stalinist rump group led by Sunde) was trying to achieve, and the reprisals could have been severe. Most Norwegians must have realized by then that the Nazis were on the run, and that the Allies were moving inexorably into occupied countries, including Norway. Which Norwegians would have been excited about the destruction of the capital’s port by a subversive revolutionary at that stage of the war?

One last aspect of what appears to me to be a controversy lies in the Professor’s account of Furubotn’s time in Moscow before the war. He somewhat mysteriously writes that ‘Stalin reluctantly allowed him to return to Norway in the autumn of 1938 after 8 years in Moscow’, adding that Stalin kept the family of his son, Gilbert, in the Soviet Union as hostages. I was not aware that Stalin undertook any action ‘reluctantly’, which suggests unrealistically that the vozhd would actually listen to advice from his ministers – and that that group would actually proffer advice to him rather than simply await instructions. (The Black Book of Communism states that Furubotn ‘escaped’ from Moscow.) Elsewhere, Professor Titlestad notes that Furubotn was sent back and essentially demoted to serve a minor role in the Party in his hometown of Bergen, and the Professor has explained to me, having inspected KGB archives in Moscow, that Stalin let him go because he believed that the Gestapo would perform the murderous job for him. Yet Stalin’s ability to recall that he had let Furubotn slip through his fingers would give him additional incentive to extinguish the rebel: the PARAVANE episode of September 1944 was not the first attempt to silence Furubotn for good.

Nikolai Bukharin

The other observation that I found incongruous was the categorization of Nikolai Bukharin, whom Furubotn admired, and whom Sunde had apparently invoked alongside Genrikh Yagoda in denouncing Furubotn. Professor Titlestad writes: “Bukharin had long been one of the leading liberal Soviet leaders after the revolution in 1917, and his trial attracted significant international attention.” I believe that this is a serious misconception. Bukharin was innocent of most of the crimes he was accused of (but perhaps not that of threatening Stalin’s power), but he was no ‘liberal’. He was a Bolshevik who had enthusiastically embraced the revolution, and he was until his death a firm champion of the ‘glorious Cheka’ and its barbarous methods. A too facile equivalence of Bukharin and Furubotn glosses over what Furubotn might have become.

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Postscript

Lastly, a few observations on methodology. My collaborator on this project, Nigel Austin, has been a determined sleuth, tracking down arcane sources, identifying persons who have some connection with the mystery, and refusing to let go. I know, however, that he was continually on the search for proof of exactly what happened on that night in September, the proverbial ‘smoking gun’, and he might have proceeded forever until he found such. I have occasionally been able to track down such items in my attempts to solve intelligence mysteries, such as with the memorandum about Guy Burgess and the Comintern, the Letter from Geneva concerning Len and Ursula Beurton, and the article in the Viennese newspaper that revealed much about MI6 and Kim Philby, but such moments are very rare.

I decided to explain to Nigel that historiography is frequently an exercise of the imagination, a detective investigation, in which one searches for clues, and then tries to construct a pattern of behaviour and events that can explain what is superficially inexplicable. There is not going to be a solid paper-trail in a case as complex as this. And that is how it was with ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’. To me, the borrowed uniforms and ID-tags suggested stowaways of some kind. Yet in those conditions the stowaways could not have been furtive: they must have had approval. They could not have been British airmen: that group was completely accounted for. They must therefore have been agents, saboteurs, spies, of some kind. They would not have been Norwegian communists in exile: such persons would not have had to disguise themselves that way, impersonating British RAF crew members. They must have been NKGB agents – Russians. And if they were agents, they must have had a mission. And the obvious mission was assassination. A study of Norwegian resistance quickly came up with the name of Peder Furubotn, who had offended Stalin.

Thus was the theory constructed. It all seemed rather tenuous: had Furubotn really annoyed Stalin that much? And why would Stalin choose that time to set his murder-squad off the leash? And then the encounter with Professor Titlestad’s latest research indicated that assassination attempts had already been made against Furubotn. Stalin could no longer rely on the Gestapo or the Sunde organization to get rid of his foe. So he took on the task himself, and invoked the gullible Churchill to assist him. As the cliché goes: ‘The rest is history’. But in this case it has not been so – until now. And it would be commendable if the British Government, through the Ministry of Defence, made some sort of statement and apology to the public and to the relatives of the dead airmen in time for the eightieth anniversary of the crash on September 17, 2024.

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Special Bulletin: ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’ – Part 3

(This bulletin contains the third segment of my study of ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, which explains why two Soviet agents were carried on board a British Lancaster aircraft in September 1944, a flight that ended in disaster when the plane crashed into a hill in Norway. For the previous two segments, please turn to Part 1 and Part 2.)

The Lofotens

Chapter 5: Intelligence Manœuvres

The implications of co-operation between the RAF and the NKGB in infiltrating Soviet citizens with subversive objectives into a third country occupied by the enemy are highly significant. It is such a sensitive issue that one would have to conclude that one of Britain’s wartime intelligence organizations was involved. Admittedly, southern Norway was beyond the regular range where the Soviets were able to drop agents for intelligence purposes, but they would not have sought British assistance unless it were not a routine operation. It does not appear that they wanted to parachute in a spy or saboteur blind, without some sort of reception committee. Hence they must have been seeking help from British or British-trained contacts on the ground. Such a pattern is not unprecedented, but the utter lack of any reference, in the records of the RAF and the intelligence agencies, to the joint operation over Norway points not just to a highly clandestine operation, but also to a monumental embarrassment when it ended so dismally and tragically.

The two institutions that maintained networks in countries occupied by the Nazis were the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, sometimes known as MI6). The first was essentially a sabotage organization, a civil unit reporting to the Ministry of Political Warfare, although many of its leaders were military men. It had been created by Winston Churchill in 1940, specifically to cause havoc behind enemy lines. SIS, on the other hand, was an intelligence-gathering service with some history that worked more by stealth. It resented SOE’s very existence, since the business of sabotage tended to draw the attention of the enemy, while the agents of SIS worked as quietly as possible. Moreover, the fact that SOE had agents in the field meant that they were also a provider of intelligence. Claude Dansey, the assistant chief of SIS, made it his mission to undermine SOE whenever he could.

Hugh Dalton

SOE had an occasionally very strained relationship with the governments-in-exile of the countries where they built their networks. Hugh Dalton, the first minister responsible for SOE, was a socialist who viewed the mission of his organization to enhance the possibility of implementing socialist ‘revolutions’ throughout Europe after the Nazi foe had been defeated. Such a strategy was anathema to most governments-in-exile which, composed of members of the pre-war ruling class, hoped to reinstall the previous form of government, and its attendant privileges, after the war. In addition, Dalton was a notorious showman, who misrepresented SOE’s achievements in Norway, and over-promised to Churchill what the section could achieve. In turn, Churchill, ever the romantic, in February 1942 told the Norwegian government-in-exile that Norway would be the first country to be liberated – a foolish claim.

On the ground, however, much of the strongest resistance to the fascists came from underground communist groups, who had suspended their disgust when the Nazi-Soviet pact occurred. After June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin’s dictatorship became an ally of the western democracies, these cells renewed their vigorous ambitions for proper (not Daltonian) revolution. A pattern across Europe occurred whereby weapons and supplies dropped by parachute, intended for patriot forces, frequently ended up in units taking orders from Stalin. The perennial problem with SOE was that its strategy was apparently to prepare patriot armies for the coming arrival of British troops, but that event often took years in the making, or never happened at all, which was damaging to morale. Moreover, there was a permanent risk of arms caches being discovered by the Germans, or simply falling into disrepair. SOE’s management of expectations was poor, to say the least.

Frank Foley

This pattern repeated itself in Norway. Before the war, the SIS station in Oslo reported through Stockholm, but after some embarrassing events in Sweden, Frank Foley (who had been posted to Oslo in September 1939) returned to London in early 1940, and was put in charge of the whole of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. The Royal Navy soon made demands on SIS for intelligence on German naval movements along the coast. The arrival of SOE agents complicated matters, however: Norway was too thinly populated for networks to remain isolated, and there were several clashes between the two organizations. Moreover, SOE initially worked independently of both the Norwegian government-in-exile, and of Milorg, the military arm of the Norwegian Home Front, which, despite its name, was more focused on the future liberation of the country than attention-drawing sabotage adventures. SOE kept clear of it, as it regarded its security as lax. Likewise, the small communist groups also stayed apart from Milorg. They criticized it for its passivity, and were less concerned about Nazi brutalities.

The Lofotens Raid

Thus some harsh lessons were learned. The reprisals after the Lofotens raid of December 1941 triggered Norwegian animosity to SOE, which led to the establishment of a Joint Anglo-Norwegian Committee in London in February 1942. In January, a new SOE Norwegian section was split off from the Scandinavian unit, and the very pragmatic John Wilson had been appointed its head. Yet it took time for the Committee to exert any influence. In April 1942, mismanaged landings at the community of Telavåg, involving mis-steps by both MI6 and SOE in which two Gestapo officers were killed, led to fearsome reprisals. SOE accordingly made contact with Milorg in September of that year, in a spirit of collaboration. It took the first major operation undertaken by SOE and Combined Operations forces (commandos), the November 1942 attempt to land gliders in an attack on the Vermork heavy-water plant, to change policy. The assault was a disaster. The participants were executed: severe reprisals on the civilian population followed. Both Milorg and the government in London were horrified, and their disgust led to a more cautious approach to sabotage. The eventual sinking, in February 1944, of the steamer carrying heavy water on Lake Tinnsjo bolstered SOE’s reputation, but twenty-six persons were drowned in the process.

Reprisals after Telavag
Norsk Hydro, Vermork

1943 was a transition year. After Milorg had supported, in April, an attack by the communist Sunde’s group on labour offices in Oslo, the government in exile called it to stop collaborating with communist organizations. In May, at a conference in Sweden, Milorg agreed that its future activities would be determined by the Allied Supreme Command, and that its mission would be to prepare for liberation. Norway had a role to play in diversionary exercises away from the main European theatre (Operation TINDALL, as part of the COCKADE deception plan), and some weaponry was parachuted in for the Norwegian resistance. Yet SOE itself suffered a major setback that autumn, when the infiltration of its Dutch and French circuits was discovered by the Chiefs of Staff. SOE survived (thanks to Churchill’s intervention), but was put under military control, the Norwegian Section of SOE coming under Special Forces Headquarters in May 1944. Soon afterwards General Eisenhower sent out a stern message to the Norwegians that, in the wake of the Normandy landings, no national uprising should take place, as the Allies had no immediate plans to invade their country. A predictable lowering of morale ensued, and, in recompense, some steady carefully-targeted sabotage operations were encouraged.

The early months of 1944 had created a new climate, however. In February, the Foreign Office reported that uncontrolled sabotage by the Communists was increasing, sometimes with the aid of arms supplied by SOE. That was not part of the plan. In May, the Germans tried to press-gang Norwegian workers for work in the Reich, and hundreds of youths fled to the mountains, thus creating a kind of Norwegian ‘maquis’. An unuathorized but efficient group known as the ‘Oslo Gang’ reached a peak of sabotage activity in August. On August 17, Milorg executed a very damaging operation in which an oil storage depot at Son, on the Oslofjord, was exploded. More serious plans for guerrilla attacks were forged, and in May 1944, four sites were identified for the congregation of partisans, one of which was at Elg, north-west of Oslo – a few miles from Nesbyen, the site of the crash. Two men parachuted into Elg on August 31, 1944, and over a hundred men assembled there, with weapons and food stockpiled. That same month Jens Hauge, the head of Milorg, had travelled to London for four weeks of consultations with SOE, Army chiefs, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the Norwegian government-in-exile, and he crossed back into Norway from Sweden.

Meanwhile, SIS in Sweden had been experiencing its own tribulations. The Admiralty applied pressure on the organization to provide intelligence on Kirkenes, on the Norway/Russia border, which led to a catastrophic joint project with the Soviets, where two SIS agents were flown into an airbase in August 1942. Instead of parachuting them in promptly, however, the Russians held them for two months, and then dropped them, improperly equipped, into Finland rather than Norway. They were captured, handed over to the Germans, and shot. Soon afterwards, the hapless head of station John Martin was replaced by the Russian-speaking Cyril Cheshire, but the lessons from trying to collaborate with the Soviets on clandestine operations appeared not to have been passed on, and properly internalized.

Improbably, the closest cooperation between SOE and SIS occurred within the section of SOE that worked in the Soviet Union. At the end of 1941, an exchange of missions between London and Moscow had been set up, with an old WWI Russia veteran George Hill appointed as leader. He took a small group with him to start negotiating with the NKVD on shared sabotage endeavours, while the obdurate Colonel Chichaev took up a corresponding post in London. The whole project was highly controversial, since the Soviets wanted SOE help in parachuting agents into Western Europe, which was out of reach of their aircraft. The governments-in-exile would have had a fit if they had known that a British intelligence unit was abetting a potential Communist revolution in their home countries. Moreover, the Foreign Office – quite enthusiastic about ‘co-operating’ with Soviet diplomats – was alarmed at the prospect of collaboration with Communists in more murky quarters.

As it turned out, the operation (named PICKAXE) was for many reasons a disaster, and incriminations started to flow both ways. Collaboration was called off in practical terms by early 1944. Yet by then, the SOE mission in Moscow had been badly abused by the NKGB (as the NKVD became). Hill had probably been appointed by Menzies, the head of SIS, and he represented both SIS and SOE in some of his agent management roles. Unfortunately his cipher-clerk, George Graham (who was of Russian aristocratic birth), allowed himself to be suborned by NKGB intrigues, with the result that Soviet intelligence gained access to SIS codes and cyphers. How that helped Stalin in his preparation for Yalta is an untold story.

A further group in the drama was the 30 Mission, a British military unit sent out to Moscow in 1941, charged with exchanging military intelligence as a way of improving Allied combat against the Nazis. This was another troubled enterprise, since the officers who went there mostly returned in disgust after a short spell, frustrated by Soviet obtuseness and secrecy. Its negotiations had to take place via contacts in a department of the NKGB, and its direct exchanges with the Red Army (and even more so, the Air Force, which was subsidiary to the Army and Navy) were few and constrained. With the Arctic Convoys playing a large role in sustaining the Soviet Union’s goodwill, and ability to counter the Wehrmacht, a large body of sailors and other men was required in Murmansk, a presence that alarmed the NKGB, for fear of ideological infection of the local populace. 30 Mission was the hub through which all the problems and challenges had to be routed: General Martel, and his successor, General Burrows, tried vainly to make the Soviets see reason, and concluded that resolution and hard bargaining produced better results than attempts to please their reluctant hosts.

Voskresenskaya-Rybkina

Last but not least was the offensive arm of the NKVD/NKGB. In July 1941, after Barbarossa, Pavel Sudoplatov was appointed director of the Administration of Special Tasks, charged with sabotage and political assassination abroad. (Sudoplatov had been overall responsible for the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940.) One of his closest associates was a woman called Zoya Voskresenskaya, also known as Rybkina, via marriage, and as a working alias, Madam Yartseva. Rybkina was sent by Sudoplatov to Stockholm, ostensibly as the press attaché to the Ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai, but in fact as the head of the NKVD station, which exercised a firm control over the activities of all the staff. Her husband, who went by Boris Yartsev as a junior diplomatic official in Stockholm, returned to Moscow in 1943, was present at Yalta, and met his death in Czechoslovakia, in 1947, in one of those mysterious car crashes that prematurely took the lives of intelligence officers who fell out of favour.

In his memoirs, Sudoplatov wrote glowingly about his protegée, who had actually been his handler in Helsinki at the beginning of his career. In 1942, Sudoplatov was also put in charge of collecting information about atomic weaponry, and agents working for Rybkina in Sweden gained information from Lisa Meitner, who had discovered fission with her nephew, Otto Frisch. Sudoplatov claimed that the British knew about the NKGB’s networks in Sweden, and that they were collaborating with the Soviets on joint sabotage operations in Europe. Like many agents who worked under Beria, she was purged (but not imprisoned or killed) after Beria’s own execution.

The deHavilland Mosquito

Yet the most remarkable aspect of Rybkina’s possible contribution to this story is the journey she made to the United Kingdom in February 1944. The VENONA transcripts inform us that Vasily Razin, the First Secretary at the Stockholm Legation, informed Lt.-General Pavel Fitin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate in Moscow, that IRINA (Rybkina) had successfully arrived in England, by air, on February 6. This flight was operated as part of the so-called ‘ball-bearing’ run, almost certainly deploying a modified Mosquito. It was actually run by the Norwegian Air Force, but under civilian registration, with crews wearing BOAC uniforms and carrying British passports. It was a harrowing and dangerous experience: there was room for only one clandestine passenger, in the bomb-bay. Niels Bohr, the atomic scientist, was one beneficiary, and almost died from lack of oxygen.

The Mosquito Bomb-bay

Why permission should be granted to a known Soviet intelligence agent to take advantage of such a facility is mysterious, and can only point to some very high-level and secret negotiations. What is more, soon after Rybkina arrived, Colonel Chichaev had a private meeting with Colin Gubbins of SOE, a record of which may never have been made. Whether these events were related to the sudden movements in August, 1944, when Colonel Burrows of 30 Mission was recalled to London, his opposite number in the NKGB, General Slavin, disappeared abroad on some unspecified business, Jens Hauge, the head of Milorg, also travelled to London to meet with SOE officers, and two SOE agents were parachuted into the mountainous country north-west of Oslo, is still a matter of speculation. The coincidences are remarkable, yet the need for extreme secrecy over the negotiations with Stalin probably indicates that the particulars of the parachute drop were not on the agenda of the meetings.

Chapter 6: Stalin’s Organs

‘Smersh’ by Vadim Birstein

The rationale behind Stalin’s constant re-organization of his security apparatus is sometimes hard to unravel. In 1943, he separated some functions from the NKVD (The Peoples Commissariat for Internal Affairs) into a structure that had briefly existed in 1941, the NKGB (The People’s Commissariat for State Security). The latter was supposed to focus on the territories that had been briefly held between 1939 and 1941, and were shortly expected to return under Soviet rule, such as the Baltic States. But it lacked ample security forces. The NKVD had its foreign mission withdrawn, and concentrated on domestic affairs, such as surveillance of the citizenry, and management of the GULAG. At the same time, Stalin created a new body, SMERSH (‘Death to Spies!’), peeling off those cadres in the NKVD responsible for monitoring disaffection and cowardice in the armed forces. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin made this move to prevent his NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria from interfering with military promotions – and demotions.

SMERSH existed between April 1943 and May 1946. Its head was Viktor Abakumov, who, like many of Stalin’s security and intelligence chiefs, came to a grisly end. Yet, while its initial task was to root out corruption in the military, it soon took over a more aggressive role identifying and eliminating real or imagined opponents of the Soviet regime in newly conquered territories. Moreover, while the initial threat was identified as German infiltration of the armed forces, its innate suspicion of foreigners in general meant that it turned its attention on the presence of Allied forces on Soviet territory. Notably, supervision of the American air bases in Ukraine had become the responsibility of SMERSH, alongside keeping a close eye on the naval mission in Murmansk supporting the convoys, and on the short-lived presence of PARAVANE operational staff at Yagodnik.

Foreigners might not only be spies: they might also exert a pernicious influence on Soviet citizenry, and the records show that the organs assiduously kept a watch on any liaisons between Soviet citizens and members of the visiting armed forces and their support crews, and followed up with dire threats. Yet the war diaries of the PARAVANE operation do indeed show that some officers showed a more than casual interest in Soviet installations of technology, such as communications. The fact that such interest paled into insignificance against the wholesale theft of Western technology and ideas that the GRU (Military Intelligence) and the NKVD/NKGB had been undertaking for years was irrelevant to the earnestness of SMERSH’s hunt to extirpate any such activity.

Mikhail Ryumin

A SMERSH officer submitted a report on the PARAVANE operation on October 6, 1944, casting doubts on the true motives of the RAF members who led it. The report was probably written by a sadistic thug called Mikhail Ryumin, who was head of the Counter-Intelligence White Army Flotilla, reporting directly to Admiral Panteleyev in Archangel and Abakumov in Moscow. Ryumin had moved up the NKVD ranks by being a protégé of Nikolai Yezhov, the short-lived executor of Stalin’s most dreadful purges, but had survived after Yezhov’s execution. He was later a prime mover in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’, a mirage of Jewish conspiracy conceived by Stalin, and he even denounced his boss, Abakumov. Stalin fired him for incompetence, however, and, after the dictator’s death, Beria had Ryumin arrested and executed.

Ryumin’s report shows that he had a hazy understanding of the PARAVANE mission, emphasizing the failure of the attack on the Tirpitz as a cover for the true objective of seeking information about Soviet military installations (“It can be concluded that under the pretext of the shuttle operation, the flight had an exclusively reconnaissance purpose.”). He refers to the loss of one Lancaster over Norwegian territory, but indicates mistakenly that the return flights were undertaking another bombing raid on the battleship. As evidence for his conclusions about ulterior purposes of the mission, he lists misleading data about the weight and explosive capacity of the Tallboy bomb, the pilots’ cancellations of call-signs on the radio, and an understatement of the number of officers and men who would be arriving (which was, in fact, justified).

The fact that he had been kept in the dark about the true circumstances surrounding the change of plan is shown by the fact that he attributes the haphazard landings at various airfields to a deliberate ploy by the RAF to determine the location, size, and condition of those same airfields. Of course, his report may have been crafted to show the appropriate communist diligence in disparaging the RAF’s failure to sink the Tirpitz, the objective of Operation PARAVANE. Its timing, moreover, could be significant: it was submitted to his boss, Abakumov, three days before the start of the so-called ‘Tolstoy’ Conference in Moscow, where Stalin hosted Churchill and Eden, and the notorious agreements about the carve-up of Europe were made without Roosevelt’s presence.

Group Captain McMullen

Yet some inappropriate nosing around was undertaken by some of the RAF contingent (see Chapter 3). Captain Abercrombie, who had joined the (military) 30 Mission in Moscow the previous April, sought permission to take photographs without constraints, and asked questions about the radio and power stations in Archangel. Ryumin also had negative things to say about a Lieutenant-Colonel Happen, who, after a request by Group Captain McMullen to travel via Moscow, Stalingrad and Tehran to Cairo been rejected, apparently made disparaging remarks and spread ‘anti-Soviet sentiments’. The fact was that the RAF members generally had good relations with their opposite numbers in the Soviet Naval Air Force, and probably said too much in unguarded moments. Such conversations were bound to be overheard by or reported to the SMERSH commissars embedded in the units. (An Appendix to the War Diary refers to ‘the sprinkling of N.K.V.D. personnel (male and female) to check that the interests of the Communist Party are not prejudiced’.) The Diary nevertheless expresses great appreciation of the support they received, especially from Colonel Loginov, who was Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Air Forces of the White Sea Flotilla, and McMullen wrote generous letters of thanks. These commendations (which may have been largely political) would have cut no ice with Ryumin.

Pavel Sudoplatov

One significant Soviet officer who was familiar with Ryumin (and had a low opinion of him) was Pavel Sudoplatov, who had been appointed head of the NKVD ‘Special Tasks’ unit in July 1941. Sudoplatov, who had engineered the assassination of Trotsky, was thus responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines, as well as further assassinations. He also took on a major role in handling disinformation exercises to fool the Germans about a potential anti-Soviet movement within the Soviet Union, as well as Operation MONASTERY, which aimed to penetrate the Abwehr’s intelligence network behind Soviet lines. Abakumov was jealous of Sudoplatov’s role, wanting it for himself, and challenged him in 1942 to turn over all radio deception games against the Germans to him. He was partially successful, but Sudoplatov kept the MONASTERY operation, as well as the COURIERS operation, which claimed the existence of an anti-Soviet faction within the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus the rivalries between Sudoplatov and Abakumov may have contributed to some mis-steps in the execution of the mission to Nesbyen.

The relevance of these connections is important in the PARAVANE story because of Sudoplatov’s relationship with the NKVD officer Zoya Voskresenskaya, also known as Rybkina, after her marriage to another NKVD officer. She had worked for Sudoplatov at the beginning of the war, planning sabotage, and training partisans, when she and her husband were suddenly sent to Stockholm, where she was appointed nominally the press attaché to the Ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai, and took up the name Yartseva. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, a neutral country, was, like Portugal’s Lisbon, a nest of spies and intelligence-gathering, and it controlled through regular communication the Stalinist faction of the Norwegian Communist Party, as well as providing it with funds. Yartseva was actually the most important person in the Embassy, and was also responsible for controlling the receipt and transmission of all the intelligence coming from the Soviet Union’s Rote Kapelle network in Germany. (Ian Fleming’s Rosa Klebb was reputedly based on her.)

Voskresenskaya-Rybkina

Sudoplatov’s relationship with Yartseva went back many years, since she had actually been his controller in Finland in the early 1930s, and they stayed in close touch. Yartseva had more recently been involved with Sudoplatov’s COURIERS operation, controlling members of the clergy in Kalinin. Sudoplatov also claimed that Yartseva was part of his management team on the ENORMOZ (atomic weapons) project, but his version of events has been challenged by Western experts. Yet they did have another important colleague – Colonel Chichaev, the NKVD representative in London charged with liaising with SOE and its Russian section, and maybe even handling some of the NKVD’s nest of spies. Chichaev had spent time at the Stockholm Embassy in 1940, working with Yartseva.

These threads would come together as Stalin’s strategy for Scandinavia took shape. His ambitions were overall modest for neighbouring territories that were not to be occupied by the Red Army. Finland was problematic. It had a long border with the Soviet Union, and after losing a war in 1940 against the Communist regime – in which the Red Army was at first humiliated – the country had dangerously aligned itself with Nazi Germany, in the belief that Hitler would be the victor. While Stalin respected the Finns for their courage, he resolved to exploit them because of their support of the Fascists rather than waste military forces in conquering them. He was anxious to gain strategically useful territories from them, such as islands in the Gulf of Finland, in order to give him protection for the port of Leningrad and the Baltic States, and regain ownership of the Petsamo (Russian: Pechenga) region in the far north, with its valuable nickel mines. Moreover, the Communist Party was strong in Finland, although Stalin had purged many of its leading members in Moscow.

Pechenga

Sweden was not really a consideration: it had remained neutral during the war, and was geographically not so relevant. Norway had been occupied by the Nazis, and harboured a somewhat subdued resistance movement. Despite the lack of contiguity, some of Stalin’s ministers had pressed for Sweden and Norway to come under the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’, with Norway’s Communist Party a potential asset. The Norwegian government-in-exile was fearful that the Red Army would make incursions through the north of the country, and in early 1944 made appeasing overtures through the Soviet ambassador to avert the possibility. While Stalin probably found satisfaction in keeping that threat alive, and gaining concessions from the Norwegians, he in fact did not want to move Red Army divisions to Norway. He would prefer that the British take responsibility for clearing the country of Nazi troops, although he did not want the latter pouring into Northern Russia. (The negotiated restoration of Pechenga would present the Soviet Union with a narrow border with Norway.) Thus, in the summer of 1944, he pressed Churchill and Eden to take a leading role in the liberation of Norway, and gained a concession from them in August that Finland naturally fell in his bailiwick, and that the British had no strategic interests there.

The western Allies wanted to consolidate their assaults into western Europe and Germany before dealing with the Wehrmacht in Norway: to that end the Chiefs-of-Staff had developed an operational feint called RANKIN designed to pin German troops in Norway through the D-Day invasions. On the other hand, the British did not want premature uprisings in Norway, hoping to preserve the partisan forces to hold their fire until the real day of reckoning. They were aware, however, of maverick Communist Party guerrilla units continuing to cause trouble. Yet Stalin, as in France, did not want any Communists to engage in provocative behaviour and risk turning the Americans against him before the Nazis had been beaten. Thus British and Soviet needs in the area began to converge. Stalin wanted to sign a pact with Finland, using it as a proxy.  He planned to demand from it the harassment of German divisions in the north of the country, as he wanted to move the few divisions he maintained on the Finnish border to the vital German battlefield, and he sought British assistance in the endeavour.

On September 19, 1944, a few days after the PARAVANE Operation was executed, the Moscow Armistice was signed by representatives of Finland, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The British War Cabinet had reviewed its protocols as early as September 7. They laid out some strict conditions: for example, the withdrawal of Finnish troops to the frontier as it existed in 1940; Finland to be responsible for disarming German land, air and naval forces in the country; the transfer to the Soviet Union of critical territories, such as Pechenga; the provision of up to three hundred million dollars’ worth of goods as indemnification for Soviet losses; and the handover of airfields in southern Finland for the Soviets to attack German forces in the Baltic States. Whether this last item was part of a quid pro quo with the British for the use of Soviet airfields in the attacks on the Tirpitz is not stated. But the timing is intriguing, and Stalin was accustomed to including ‘secret’ protocols in his political agreements.

The negotiations that led up to this agreement are regrettably opaque. Yet the intrigues in sending Yartseva to London in February 1944, and the subsequent meetings (see Chapter 5) must have had some serious objectives. Stockholm was a notoriously isolated location: it took the Petrovs nine months to reach it from Moscow in 1942. For Yartseva to gain approval from the British and Norwegian governments for a valuable place on the ball-bearing run to Leuchars in Scotland (and presumably a return flight) must have meant that they considered she had both clout and information of great value, and that it was both safe and wise to allow her to have discussions with Chichaev. What political backdrop could have led to such a concession?

(The final part of this story will appear on April 15.)

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‘At Last the 1948 Show’: Smolka & the Third Man

‘At Last the 1948 Show’

[Disclaimer: While I was researching last month’s piece on Smolka, I discovered a seminar delivered by Professor Charmian Brinson, of Imperial College, London, on November 9, 2017 – see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/events/99573/nothing-short-of-a-scandal-harry-peter-smolka-and-the-ministry-of-information/. I sent Professor Brinson an email, asking whether a transcript of her address was available. She did not reply. As I reported in my piece, I had found that an Austrian periodical had published such an article, but I had been unable to gain any response when I tried to order it on-line. Then, on February 1, one of my correspondents alerted me to the fact that Brinson had written a book on German-speakers working in British propaganda during the war. I had overlooked it, since it is not listed on her sadly out-of-date Publications page at Imperial College – see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/c.brinson/publications.html. I instantly ordered it, but also sent at that time an early draft of the following bulletin (an almost verbatim copy of what can be read below) to Mark Hollingsworth. The book arrived on February 5, and I saw that her Chapter 7 covers some of the same ground that I tread on. Her chapter is very strong on Smolka’s activities during the war, since she uses archival material that I have not seen, but she is otherwise cautious, and does not present any startling insights, in my opinion. Mr. Hollingsworth can attest to the fact that my research was carried out without her help, or access to her publication, in any way.]

‘Working for the War Effort’ (Brinson & Dove)

In the first bulletin of this two-part report (see https://coldspur.com/peter-smolka-background-to-1934/ ), I introduced Peter Smolka, presented a detailed analysis of the literature about him, and gave a brief description of the archival material on him released by Kew a few years back. Using his Personal File as an anchor, I then performed a detailed investigation into what I classified as the first chapter in his association with British Intelligence, namely the years between his arrival in the UK in 1930, and his rather bold declaration of his collaboration with Kim Philby in November 1934. This segment addresses the remaining five chapters in his career.

Chapter 2: 1934-1939 – Building Connections

Special Branch and MI5 continued to keep a watch on Smolka, although their quarry spent an increasing amount of time abroad. By the time that the Home Office replied to his request for permission over the London Continental News, on January 3, 1935, he had left for undetermined places. He boarded a boat to Dieppe on December 27, 1934, not returning until May 31, 1935, when he landed at Croydon Airport. No interest is expressed in his point of departure; no questions are asked how the journalist might have sustained himself during his travels. Lotty is not recorded as accompanying him. Nor is there anything on file until a report from the Immigration Officer at Tilbury, dated August 8, states that Smolka was ‘one of the outward-bound passengers on the M.V. ‘Felix Dzerjinsky’, when she left Hay’s Wharf for Leningrad via Dunkirk on 17.8.35.’

Smolka returned on the ‘Jan Rudzutak’ from Leningrad on September 24, but, again, no interest is apparently shown in what the intrepid traveller might have been up to. In fact that is the last entry in the file for 1935. Smolka was a little late to have been able to attend the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, held in Moscow, but one might imagine that MI6 would have been intensely interested in learning more about how the Popular Front, activated after the Soviet Union’s treaty with France in May, was being received by the citizenry. After all, it had no other sources of intelligence within the country. Yet no evidence has been left behind of any debriefings.

The files do show a rather desultory interest shown by the Foreign Office in Smolka’s relationship with a Margherita Mantica (née Vesci), who had represented the Neue Freie Presse in the United States. An awkwardness can be detected in a concern that Smolka might trace any inquiry to the Foreign Office, but one fascinating new link crops up, in that Mantica is reported to be living in London with her brother-in-law, Lejos Biro, described as ‘a Hungarian, who is a literary supervisor and director of London Film Productions Limited’. As observant readers will recall, this was the company founded by Alexander Korda in 1932, and which was responsible for the Third Man project in 1948 and 1949. Biro was in fact Lajos Bíró, a playwright and screenwriter of some repute, who contributed a long list of titles to the Korda canon. Korda himself appears to have already been ‘recruited’ by Claude Dansey of MI6 by this time: some reports claim that it was Dansey who introduced Korda to Winston Churchill in 1934.

Nothing else is recorded until July 1936, when Smolka was shown to be off to the Soviet Union again, the Immigration Officer recording that he left on M.V. ‘Sibier’ for Leningrad on July 4. Strangely, there appears no record on file of his return. The reason for his voyage was to perform research for a series of articles that appeared in December 1936 in the Times, and was eventually published in book-form as Forty Thousand Against the Arctic, on April 29, 1937. Yet Smolka was very coy about the dates of his itinerary, neither specifying when his invitation to visit was made at the Soviet Embassy in London, nor when he left, nor when he returned. What is not in doubt is that his writings represented an utterly disgraceful show of Soviet propaganda, and the bravado with which Moscow perpetrated this ruse is matched only by the gullibility with which it was encouraged and endorsed by the Times. He had already delivered a paper at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on February 15, 1937 (‘The Economic Development of the Soviet Arctic’), in which he presented himself as an ‘unbiased non-Bolshevik’, again praising the initiatives of the Soviet government in opening up the Arctic, as they will prove ‘profitable and valuable to Russia and the world in general in the long run’.

In his Acknowledgments, Smolka first lists two Soviet apparatchiks, and then expresses his gratitude to ‘The Editor of The Times for allowing me to express again some of the thoughts first published in my series of articles in his columns’, next to ‘Sir Harry Brittain for his many acts of encouragement’, and then to ‘Mr. Iverach McDonald of The Times for acting as physician and surgeon to this book in its infancy’. What is extraordinary is the fact that the Editor of the Times during this period was Geofrey Dawson, a noted appeaser and member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Harry Brittain was a Conservative politician with an unremarkable career. Iverach McDonald was an elusive character, described in the few items available on him as ‘an expert on Russia’, but where he derived his expertise, or whether that competence translated into a sympathy for the Soviet Union, is not clear. He was The Times’s Diplomatic Correspondent, and Dawson sent him to Prague in the autumn of 1938 to cover the Sudetenland crisis. Why all three gentlemen should have been taken in by this monstrous apology for Stalin’s penal colony is utterly perplexing.

I shall not spend time here summarizing the content of Smolka’s book. I leave it to the verdict of Andrew and Gordievsky: “The most ingenious fabrication in Smolka’s book was his portrayal of the hideous brutality of the gulag during the Great Terror as an idealistic experiment in social reform” (KGB, page 325). Yet the response of the two is unimaginative: they merely draw notice to the fact that Smolka’s reputation in the eyes of the Times and the Foreign Office was not damaged by this piece of propaganda was ‘curious’. (Then why not show more curiosity, gentlemen?) As for the author, he wrote in a note to the second edition (from New York, in December 1937): “I was immediately accused of having fallen victim to Soviet Russia’s exuberant and boastful optimism.” In his Appendix, he claims that ordinary people, ‘further away from the capital’ were able to talk to him freely, and that ‘their criticism of existing conditions and Government measures was even astounding to me at first’.

Yet Smolka’s fortunes improved markedly after this shocking event: little interest was shown in him. A routine inquiry from Indian Political Intelligence was made to Guy Liddell at the end of 1936. On July 13, 1937 Smolka thanked Erland Echlin, the London representative of Newsweek (who had been allocated a PF no., and apparently got into some trouble a few years later) for introducing him to his New York friends, and he must have departed soon after for New York. His departure was not noted, while an embarkation card shows him returning at Southampton on December 20. Likewise, no trace of his leaving the UK appears on file, but he is shown sailing in from Rotterdam on March 7, 1938. He had probably visited Austria, because a Special Branch report shows him as a member of the Austrian Self-Aid Committee on May 11.

His next step was naturalization, and Special Branch recorded his application on June 13, requesting a Search from MI5. His referees were the aforementioned Harry Brittain and Iverach McDonald (Diplomatic Correspondent of the Times), both of whom had encouraged and supported the creation of his notorious book, and Philip Burn, an editor at the Exchange Telegraph (who appears not to be related to Michael Burn, Smolka’s communist friend, of whom more below). Amazingly, nothing detrimental later than 1930 was discovered: it was if the Service turned a blind eye to the fact that this Communist had reinforced his admiration of Stalinism in his recent writings, which might indicate that his loyalty to the United Kingdom may have been in doubt. He travelled to Le Bourget from Croydon Airport on June 27 (itself an unusual and possibly proscribed activity while one’s naturalization request is pending), returning via Rotterdam on July 28. Maybe it was to visit his parents, Albert and Vilma, since a visa application on their behalf was submitted at the end of June. Despite some warning flagged in a police report concerning Smolka’s attendance at ‘certain meetings’, MI5 signed off on September 17 that there nothing ‘detrimental to the character of this alien’. Presumably the request was granted (the archive shows no evidence), and Smolka celebrated, on November 8, by announcing in the London Gazette that he was changing his name to Harry Peter Smollett. Two days later, he joined the staff of the Exchange Telegraph’s Foreign Department.

It is perhaps educational to compare the process that Smolka underwent with that of Georg Honigmann. On April 8, 1938, while pressing Smolka’s case, Rex Leeper in the Foreign Office brought to the attention of the Home Office the names of six other journalists whom the Foreign Press Association was recommending for naturalization, including Honigmann. Honigmann was an industrious journalist with artistic credentials, effectively exiled by the Nazis, who had gathered first-class sponsors with conservative leanings for his naturalization request, but, on bewilderingly pitiful evidence, had been twice rejected because his loyalty to his potential adoptive country was questioned. Smolka was an avowed communist, with dubious connections, who, having been installed as a journalist based in London, had swanned around Europe without being questioned about his business, and had engaged in heavy propaganda for a cause that was overtly opposed to the interests of the British Empire. Yet he breezes through his naturalization test. Many other worthy German or Austrian applicants were rejected. It does not make sense.

Next comes the puzzling gap in the record. In last month’s bulletin, I noted how nothing is recorded in sequence between November 1938 and September 1939, but a report at s.n.116k in KV 2/4178 (undated, but probably submitted by MI6 in December 1939) describes Smolka’s activities that attracted the attention of the Swiss military authorities. Having joined the Exchange Telegraph, Smolka built up a news service organization focused on Switzerland, Holland and Belgium. The report continues:

In April 1939 he went to Switzerland with letters of recommendation from Mr. Leeper, and in May he established a new service at Zurich, at the head of which he placed a Hungarian Jew named Leo Singer, who was subsequently expelled from Switzerland by the Swiss police. Smolka replaced him by Mr. Garrett, who represents himself as related to Mr. Chamberlain by marriage, and enjoys prestige on this account.

I shall return to the controversy of Smolka’s heavy-handed approach to trying to monopolize news delivery from Britain (and suspected intelligence leaks arising therefrom) in the next chapter, and simply note here that the apparent lassitude on MI5’s part in tracking Smolka at this period is more likely to be due to a policy of deliberate concealment. Smolka’s exciting adventures in Prague in March 1939 have been conspicuously omitted in the records of the Security Service.

Rex Leeper

As war approached, on August 30 Smolka’s name was submitted on a list of applicants for employment in the Ministry of Information, to which MI5 responded with a proposed ban on his employment. On August 31, Rex Leeper, head of the Political Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office, while claiming that ‘we’ did not suggest his name, defended the candidate, since Smolka ‘has been very well known to the Foreign Office for a considerable time past, and we have no reason to suspect him of any improper activities’. The very next day, a Mr. Strong (C2, Vetting), having spoken to Leeper, and being reassured about Smolka’s credentials, caved in, waiving the objection. The episode is all too pat, too prompt. In such a significant case, Strong would at least have had to confer with more senior officers outside his section. What is also extraordinary about Leeper’s enthusiasm for Smolka is that, in 1935, he had urged the removal of Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the British Communist Party, from an influential BBC panel, shortly after Pollitt had returned from Moscow. Leeper was now committing a volte-face in favour of Smolka: one has to assume that he was being swayed by other more influential voices.

The final pre-war incident of note is Phiby’s putative recruitment of Smolka as an NKVD agent. The primary source for this event is Philby himself, and his account is typically deceptive and contradictory. According to what Oleg Tsarev discovered in the KGB archives (The Crown Jewels, p 157), in 1980 Philby had made a statement to his bosses that described the initiation. The key sentences run as follows:

            Once, on my own initiative, I decided to recruit an agent, a Henri Smolka, an Austrian who was the correspondent of the right-wing Neue Frei Presse. In spite of working for the magazine, Smolka was hundred percent Marxist, although inactive, lazy, and a little cowardly. He had come to England, taken British citizenship, changed his name to Harry Smollett and later headed the Russian department in the Ministry of Information.

West and Tsarev comment that ‘this account coincides with the explanation offered by Philby to Gorsky and Kreshin in 1943, although in his original version he had given a few more details’. (They never state how they knew what Philby said at that time, nor do they provide documentary evidence of it. Kreshin had taken over from Gorsky as handler of the Cambridge Five sometime in 1942: Gorsky was replaced as rezident by Kukin in June of 1943.) I point out that Philby never gives a precise date for his ‘recruitment’ of Smolka: his reference to the Neue Frei Presse would indicate pre-January 1939 (since it ceased publication that month); the adoption of ‘Smollett’ simply indicates post-November 1938; the citation of the Ministry post as a future event defines some time before June 1941.

This claim needs dissecting carefully. Remember, Philby was talking to his KGB handlers, who, he must have presumed, were not entirely clueless about both Smolka’s and his own history. Philby never indicates that he knew Smolka in Vienna (or had even collaborated with him in the sewers), or that Litzy had been a friend of his. That the Presse was ‘right-wing’ is probably correct (elsewhere in Smolka’s file, it is described as an ‘Austrian Catholic Monarchist paper’): that it closed down in January 1939 is not debatable. It is perhaps significant that Philby refers to the defunct Presse and not the Exchange Telegraph, on which he and Smolka collaborated. Philby describes Smolka as a committed Marxist. He describes the latter’s career as the routine progression of an émigré, overlooking his visits to the Soviet Union, and his publication of pro-Soviet propaganda, but he appears to contradict his own assessment of Smolka’s character by pointing out his rapid rise in an important British Ministry. Lastly, the year should be noted: Smolka died in 1980, so Philby may have been asked to provide a false legend, now that the subject could say no more. The whole deposition looks like a clumsy ruse to conceal the KGB’s relationship with Smolka.

In The Philby Files (1994) Genrikh Borovik presents a slightly different tale (p 137). The KGB had agreed to let the playwright interview Philby in depth. Borovik relates what Philby told him:

            In London there was a correspondent of the Austrian newspaper Neue Freie Presse, a man named Hans Smolka. I had met him back in Vienna. Whether he was a Communist or not, I do not know. He seemed to be, judging by his theoretical views – we had chatted more than once. But from the point of view of his own lifestyle, his love of comfort, I would not consider him a Communist.

This is another disingenuous item of testimony, bringing in Philby’s ‘acquaintance’ with Smolka, and introducing the notorious Vienna connection without describing the close connection through Litzy and Lotty. At the same time Philby underplays his knowledge of Smolka’s political affiliations, which must have been obvious to anyone exposed to the agent’s propaganda. The flow of Borovik’s narrative suggests that the recruitment occurred in the autumn of 1939, but Philby adds that he and Smolka ‘used to run into each other at receptions and cocktail parties’, indicating an extended pattern of social acquaintance before the ‘recruitment’ occurred. Yet Philby did not return to England from Spain until late July, met Gorsky for the first time in early September, and left for France as a reporter for the Times in early October, not returning permanently until June 1940. Gorsky was out of the country for most of 1940, but he reported meeting Philby again on December 24 of that year.

The absurdity of the saga is further intensified by commentary that West and Tsarev then make:

Philby’s recollection in 1980 of the ABO episode, which he considered mildly amusing, had caused pandemonium in the rezidentura and the Centre. Who was Smollett? Was he a counter-intelligence plant? What was the extent of his knowledge about the Cambridge ring? (The ABO episode concerns an infamous message from Moscow to London, dated June 14, 1943, in which the Centre assessed that the unreliability of the Philby/Burgess group had been confirmed by the unauthorized recruitment of Smolka, aka ABO.) Maybe this is simply an unfortunate choice of syntax by the authors, but the sentence declares that it was Philby’s ‘recollection in 1980’, not the ABO episode itself, that had wreaked such havoc in the rezidentura and Centre. That must surely be unintended. The suggestion is that the KGB in 1940-41 had no idea who Smolka was, and that Philby’s reckless move of introducing Smolka to Burgess and Blunt had caused irreparable damage to the security of the ring.

Yet, even if Gorsky and Kreshin in London, and Ovakimyan in Moscow, had indeed lost track of the status of some of their agents owing to the execution of so many in the purges (recall that when Ozolin-Haskin, shortly to be killed himself, reported from Paris to Sudoplatov about SÖHNCHEN’s [Philby’s] arrival in June 1939, Moscow did not know who SÖHNCHEN was), it beggars belief to imply that the London residency (Gorsky included) did not know who Smolka was. After all, he had publicized himself in his Times articles, his book, and had enjoyed a sponsored tour of the Soviet Union’s gulags. This farce is put into sharper focus by Gorsky’s report dated August 1, 1939, where he discusses the next step for deploying Philby productively:

            In accordance with your instructions we recommended that he try to get a posting in Rome or Berlin. As for the proposal of ‘Smolka’ for ‘S’ [SÖHNCHEN] to become the nominal director of the Exchange Telegraph Agency, we write about it below, in a different section. ‘S’ is not inclined to accept that at the moment.

This must be a genuine article, provided to Borovik by the KGB. (And if it is a fake, an item of misinformation, it clumsily contradicts other plants.) It proves that Smolka was in regular contact with Gorsky and the residency before the war, and Gorsky’s openness in describing his activities indicates that he must have been a familiar figure to Moscow Centre. What is slightly surprising is the fact that Smolka is not identified here by his cryptonym, but the ‘Smolka’ in quotation marks may simply be the result of a transcription process. Moreover, the fact that Smolka had at one time been given the name of ABO (Абориген? = aboriginal?) would also show that he had been approved and recruited by the NKVD. Philby would not have had the authority to allocate cryptonyms, and the whole episode reinforces the notion that it was a clumsy attempt at planting a ‘spravka’ in the file by the KGB.

Indeed, the Mitrokhin Archive is the culprit here. On page 84 of The Sword and the Shield (by Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin) appears the statement that Kim and Litzi [sic, i.e. both] recruited Smolka in 1939, and that he was given the cryptonym, ABO. The story is attributed to Volume 7, Chapter 10, Item 4 of the Archive. As I have shown in the chronology above, such timing of the ‘recruitment’ was impossible: the entry is an item of disinformation. In KGB Andrew and Gordievsky were right, and Smolka had been recruited well before then. The whole account of Philby’s recruitment of Smolka is an absurd fiction.

Chapter 3: 1939-1945 – Propagandist in War

As soon as Smolka was recruited by the Ministry of Information, he started throwing his weight around and antagonizing people, yet continued to be defended by his chief mentor, the inscrutable Rex Leeper. One of the ongoing projects he took under his wing was the husbanding of a press agency called Defence and Economic Service, which sent ‘six articles a week on military and economic subjects in English and German to 568 newspapers on the continent’. Before the war, this had been an independent commercial enterprise, but by December 1939, Smolka had gained a subsidy from the Ministry to encourage wider dissemination on the Continent. Its editor was, rather astonishingly, an Austrian who had apparently passed the Aliens’ Tribunal, and was thus considered safe – one Dr. Paul Wenger. On December 2, Smolka felt emboldened enough to introduce him to the Press Officer at the War Office, a Mr. McCulloch, asking for information.

If the distribution in German, by an Austrian, of material gathered and synthesized from open sources widely around Europe was not considered controversial, the inclusion of possibly restricted information from the War Office should have raised eyebrows. Whether Defence and Economic Service was an alibi for the Exchange Telegraph is not clear, but Smolka soon resorted to threats when he expanded his service to Switzerland. A note on file reads: “Smolka has threatened to get the head of the Agence Suisse (Keller) deprived of his British visa, if he refused to take his news service”. It adds that Reuters and Havas have refused to take Smolka’s service, with the result that Smolka ‘had a virtual monopoly of British news in Switzerland, Holland and Belgium’.

Major-General Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt

Indeed, on January 12, 1940, Major-General Frederick Beaumont-Nesbitt, Director of Military Intelligence, was moved to complain in writing to the head of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, drawing attention to leakage of confidential information, pointing the finger at Smolka, and, after noting that he knew that Smolka had been hired despite the objections of MI5, observed, in manuscript, that ‘Smollett’s employment in his present position seems to me nothing short of a scandal!’. His deputy, Brigadier Penney, approached MI5 simultaneously at a lower level (Major Lennox), and the complaints came to Dick White’s attention.

White’s response was meek. He instructed Mr. Maude of ‘S.L’ (in actuality Section B19, ‘Rumours’) to help him formulate a reply. A letter of January 19 merely temporized, indicating that ‘Smolka is not an easy problem’. But not much happened. War Office people sniffed around; B7 in MI5 (a section that must have been soon closed down, since no reference to it appears in Andrew, Curry or West) interviewed Wenger, confirming that his salary was being paid by the Ministry, and concluding that he was genuine. A Mr Bret, London representative of the French Commissariat á L’Information, reportedly echoed the rumour of leakage. Special Branch noticed wireless equipment at Smolka’s house at 16 Fitzjohns Avenue, N.W. 16.

A long report on Smolka was submitted by Maude on February 4, 1940. At first glance it seems extraordinary that such an important undertaking should be delegated to such an irrelevant section. Nigel West, in MI5, reports as follows:

            At one point before being posted to Washington [elsewhere he states that Maude became a Regional Security Liaison Officer], John Maude was in charge of a ‘B’ Division section, B19, which ‘investigated the source of rumours’. He soon discovered that the unit, which consisted of about a dozen solicitors, was doing very little useful work and these legal brains spent much of their time answering letters that had arrived denouncing various individuals as enemy agents. Maude wrote a firm memo to Richard Butler and the greater part of B19 were transferred to more productive duties.

It seems irresponsible: the DMI had made a significant inquiry into a possible case of information leakage, yet the task was given to a solicitor investigating rumours. It is more likely that White personally trusted Maude (who would later become a K.C.) to perform a more thorough job than anyone else, or else wanted to keep the investigation out of the mainstream. If White orchestrated a response to Beaumont-Nesbitt, it has not survived.

After providing a recapitulation of Smolka’s career (which in its details reflects precisely what is on file, suggesting perhaps that it had been weeded already), Maude makes a number of points. He suggests that Mr Christopher Chancellor of Reuters may have been casting aspersions on Smolka’s character. He introduces the name of Sir Robert Vansittart as a Smolka champion, alongside Charles Peak. He had interviewed M. Brett [sic], and discounted what he said as evidence that Smolka had contributed to the leaks. He concedes that Smolka was unpopular, and offers the following opinion: “I must say that to me it passes all understanding that the Ministry of Information should employ a German [Dr. Paul Wegner, actually Austrian] to write articles on English military matters.” He notes that Smolka had put forward a proposal that all reports from British Press Attachés should pass through his hands and be edited by him before being issued, (which appears to me a preposterous suggestion) and concludes that ‘the power and influence of Mr. Smollett has [sic] been increasing and ought to be halted’. At least, the Ministry of Information should have been closely surveilling all material that the Exchange Telegraph sent out of the country.

Valentine Vivian of SIS then puts in his oar. On April 8, Vivian writes to Major Marshall of MI5, referring to the latter’s minute of March 29 on MI6’s ‘Vetting’ Form dated February 13. The Minute Sheet lists the arrival of the Form from SIS on February 16 as item 122x, but the entry has curiously been pasted over another item. Indeed, the original trace request is present, directed at Captain Butler, and it expresses a desire to ascertain the reliability of ‘Smollett, possibly Smolka’, who ‘was formerly with one of the news agencies in Switzerland’. Marshall responds with the conventional bio of Smolka, describes him as ‘very able’, states that he is second-in command to Professor E. H. Carr, the Director in the Publicity Department of the Ministry of Information, but does add that Smolka acted in a very high-handed manner in Switzerland in April 1939.

What is going on here? How could anyone in SIS with the authority to submit a Vetting Form be so ignorant about this prominent character? And why would he be interested in the circumstances of a domestic ministerial role, which was MI5’s responsibility in the first place? Was it a test to determine how much the grunts in MI5 knew? Whether SIS was grateful for the information it received is not recorded, but all that Vivian has to say is:

            It may just interest you to know that out information is to the effect that Mr. Smollett is in no sense second in command to Professor E. H. Carr, but occupies a much more subordinate position as Foreign Relations Press Advisor in the Ministry of Information.

Well thank you, Vee-Vee, for that shrewd contribution. Those kinds of insight are what led you to having a corner office, I suppose. It is all quite absurd. Moreover, the archive declares elsewhere that Carr was subordinate to Smolka, who exerted a strong influence over him.

On May 17, 1940, the Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, cancelled Smolka’s Daily Press Review as a waste of paper and time. An announcement about it in the Evening Standard was noticed by Indian Political Intelligence, who reminded B4b of MI5 of the suspicions previously harboured over Smolka, and inquired whether MI5 was now satisfied with him. Dick White responded on June 8, attributing the suspicions to the fact that Smolka had ‘a most unattractive personality’: he was otherwise politically reliable. Meanwhile, Smolka was pushing ahead, trying to get his father a place in the Ministry. Leeper then tried to gain him (the son) a post on Intelligence Duties in the War Office, which prompted Colonel Jervois to seek MI5’s advice. On July 26, B19 (a John Phipps?) replied, judging that Smolka could not be trusted absolutely, and thus recommended that he not be hired for such a role. Yet this was absurd: if the Director of Military Intelligence had protest strongly about Smolka six months beforehand (a complaint not formally responded to, according to the records), why on earth would the War Office be considering him for intelligence duties?

The rest of the year proceeded in similar fashion, with occasional questions raised about Smolka’s reliability, while the man himself increased his influence. His secretary, Stella Hood-Barrs, was investigated for passing on possibly encrypted information to German emigrants in Holland, a charge that Vivian dispelled. Albert Smolka, his father, was released from internment in August. The Air Ministry showed interest in Smolka fils in October: Squadron-Leader Pettit (of D3 in MI5) cleared him again, but reminded Wing Commander Plant that he should not be employed on Intelligence duties.

In that way the archive peters out for 1940, with no further entry until March 1941. It was a puzzling year, since any searching questions about Smolka’s reliability appeared to have been quashed without any documentary evidence. What was Beaumont-Nesbitt told, and what was his response, for instance? That dashing officer was forced from his post on December 16, 1940, having made a mess of signalling an invasion alarm in September (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-vii/), but there had been plenty of time for him to follow up on his vigorous inquiry. Perhaps someone had had a quiet word in his ear. Maude’s judgment from April 1 would seem a fitting analysis of the situation: “My own view is that Mr. SMOLLETT has now entrenched himself behind a sort of super Siegfried Line erected by the Foreign Office and it is quite impossible to dig him out at this stage of the war.”

Smolka was heading the Central European Division of the Ministry of Information at the start of 1941. His progress was marked in August, soon after Barbarossa, when the Soviet Union became an ally, by his being appointed head of the Anglo-Soviet Liaison Section at the Ministry. Andrew and Gordievsky, in KGB: The Inside Story (pp 326-328), using Ministry of Information and Foreign Office archives, give an excellent account of Smolka’s labours for Soviet propaganda during the war, and I shall thus not repeat the whole story here. Last month I recommended W. J. West’s The Truth About Hollis as an extremely valuable contribution, and I can now suggest that readers turn to Chapter 7 of Charmian Brinson’s Working for the War Effort for a comprehensive account of all that Smolka did to promote the Soviet cause in the UK – as well as enabling the Russians to understand a lot more about Britain’s culture and its war effort. Meanwhile, Smolka and his cronies were still being watched carefully. A furtive telephone call with Andrew Revai is listened to in May: Revai was a journalist, a Hungarian exile who had been recruited by Guy Burgess, and had been given the cryptonym TAFFY (not that that was known by the Ministry of Information at the time). Smolka tried to get him into the Ministry (or the BBC), but experienced resistance. Using an inside source, B8c reported, in August, that ‘Smolka is a Communist and has good connections with the C.P.G.B’.

Thus 1941 wound down with further desultory efforts to track what Smolka was up to, some dubious broadcasts by the Hungarian section of the BBC taking up most of the bandwidth, and MI5 following lazily some of Smolka’s ‘Peace’ initiatives. His wife, Lotty, was cleared to work as a Research Assistant at the Political Warfare Executive. [Note: Her employer is not recorded here, but appears in a later bio from 1951, proving that several routine items have been weeded.] Likewise, little happened in the first half of 1942, until an important entry is made on June 30. Mr Wolfgang Foges writes to the Ministry of Information about a book titled Russia Fighting 1812-1942 that he has written in collaboration with Smolka, and to which Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador has consented to write a forward. In his letter, Foges notes that Smolka ‘has known me since childhood’: we thus have an important confirmation of the relationship described in his son’s memoir (see coldspur of last month). (Note: Foges was the founder of the firm Adprint, which introduced the technique of commissioning material and having it published externally. With some assistance from the Ministry of Information, in 1941 it launched the excellent series Britain in Pictures, of which I own several dozen volumes.)

Soon after, Kim Philby enters the picture. Roger Fulford, now Assistant-Director of F Division, had beforehand been responsible for tracking Peace Movements and related activities in F4. On September 10, he writes to Dick Brooman-White (B1g), enclosing an anonymous report (that probably came from elsewhere in F Division) that sets out the following statement concerning Smolka: “In November 1934 with a certain H. R. Philby he formed a small press agency called London Continental News Limited”. The couching of Philby in those terms is presumably not ironic, and it shows how well encapsulated the officers in MI6 were from even some members of its sister service. Yet Fulford knows more: he tells Brooman-White that the man referred to ‘is almost certainly our mutual friend in Section V’, and he requests of his colleague (who, being responsible for Spanish espionage, would have been the liaison with Philby at the time) that he contact Philby to learn what information on Smolka he can give them.

Philby might have been a little alarmed at this connection having been unearthed, but tried to play it off with a mixture of lies and dissimulation. Having spoken to Philby, Brooman-White responds to Fulford, two days later, as follows:

            The press agency in question never actually functioned but Philby knew Smollett quite well at the time. He says he is an Austrian Jew who came to this country about 1920 [!!], did well in journalism and is extremely clever. Commercially he is rather a pusher but has nevertheless a rather timid character and a feeling of inferiority largely due to his somewhat repulsive appearance. He is a physical coward and was petrified when the air-raids began. Philby considers his politics to be mildly left-wing but had no knowledge of the C.P. link-up. His personal opinion is that SMOLLETT is clever and harmless. He adds that in any case the man would be far too scared to become involved in anything really sinister.

A shrewd but still clumsy item of denial. Yet it appeared to settle things.

Moura Budberg (some years earlier)

1943 is a barren year for the Smolka archive, with only one insignificant entry in January. The cupboard for 1944 is similarly bare. The only event is the appearance of Baroness Budberg, the mistress of H. G. Wells, and another Soviet agent. A Special Branch report dated April 27, 1944 reveals that Budberg ‘was instrumental in getting  . . . . SMOLKA  . . . his job as chief of the Soviet Relations Branch of the Ministry of Information, displacing a non-Communist’. No source or explanation of this snippet is provided. Suddenly, the war is over, and the archive jumps to December 8, 1945, where a report from E5l (‘Germans and Austrians’) reveals the following important information:

            Hans WINTERBERG, Hilde SCHOLZ, Dr. George KNEPPLER and Dr. Walter HOLLITSCHER are reported to be leaving for Austria in the course of the next few days, most probably for Prague. W. HOLLITSCHER has made an arrangement with Peter SMOLLETT, correspondent of the ‘Daily Express’, to live in his house in Vienna. SMOLLETT and his wife, Lotty, are back in London after having visited Austria, Hungary, Jugoslavia, and Roumania, but intends to go back to Vienna. Though not party members, they are regarded as sympathisers, and, as well as Walter HOLLITSCHER, they are on friendly terms with Lizzy FEABRE, nee Kallman (see report of 9.9.45) and Fred GREISENAU [?] @ HRJESMENOU (see report of 3.9.41).

A hand-written note enters ‘PHILBY’ over ‘FEAVRE’.

Smolka is now apparently so well-established that no questions are asked about the purpose of this highly provocative travel. Moreover, an extraordinary visit to Moscow in 1944 (never an easy journey) has been omitted completely from the record. A correction is entered, however, four days later. While Lotty is recorded as remaining in London, Peter is now in Prague, and is supposed to be going to Vienna shortly. Will our gallant security personnel be able to keep tabs on him?

Chapter 4: 1946-1948 – The 1948 Show

It is in fact Kim Philby who kicks off the 1946 Smolka season. On February 26, 1946, he writes a brief letter to Major Marshall, reminding him of the February 1940 vetting form, and inquiring whether MI5 has any information about Smolka’s activities since then. Had MI6 lost track of him, perhaps? John Marriott of F2c responds on March 12. He describes Smolka’s role at the Ministry of Information, remarking that he visited the U.S.S.R. in February 1944, on official duties, but left the Ministry in June 1945, or near then. He goes on to list a number of associations that Smolka had with known Communists between 1941 and 1945, including Betty Wallace alias Shields-Collins, Agnes Hagen, and Eva Kolmer, as well as the afore-mentioned Hollitscher and Hrjesmenou. At the end of June 1945 Smolka went to Czechoslovakia as Central European Correspondent accredited to the Daily Express.

Since Marriott also asked Philby for any further information he had, a reply came back on March 29 (not necessarily from Philby: it is unsigned), declaring that MI6’s representative in Vienna has said that Smolka is now representing the Daily Express there, and adds the somewhat disturbing news: “There are indications that he has been asking questions about Austrian Barracks Unit, and about our representative in VIENNA. Also that he is cultivating Ernst FISCHER, former Minister of Education and his wife, and is in contact with TITO Yugoslav circles in Vienna.” This was, however, not the Ernst Fischer residing in the UK, a communist who worked for the BBC during the war, and whose PF number is annotated as 45068 (unavailable at Kew) on the letter, but another Austrian Communist, a future Minister of Education, who had spent the war in Moscow.

A follow-up revealed that Smolka must have returned to the UK to pick up his family, as a Special Branch report of April 24, 1946, indicates that they all left from Croydon Airport for Prague that day. MI6 had not been doing a stellar job of tracking his movements. Another report suggests that Smolka remained in Britain while his wife and daughter flew to Austria, but on May 2 M. B. Towndrow of F2a informed Philby of the departure of the four, and he follows up by stating that the renowned Communist Hollitscher is still staying at Smolka’s flat in Vienna. (One might expect the MI6 station in Vienna to be responsible for collecting such information, rather than MI5, but no matter.)

B2B starts to get excited about Smolka again, and it compiles another dossier. A source called ‘VICTORIA’, who had accompanied Smolka to the Czech-Austria frontier in 1938, has submitted a note that endorses Smolka’s communist sympathies. But the wheels continue to grind slowly. In November 1946, MI6 developed a report on Political Journalists in Austria, in which Smolka featured, and it shows an increasing trend. An extract reads:

            He [Smolka]came to Vienna as a representative of various English newspapers. His articles are regarded by Austrian Government circles as anti-Austrian, particularly those in ‘Reynolds News’. His fortnightly ‘tea’ soirées at his villa in Hietzing, VIENNA XIII, are a meeting place for leading Russian and Austrian Communists. He has been having difficulties with his British employers and is now trying to gain a firm footing in the Vienna Press. Ernst FISCHER has engaged him as Foreign Editor for ‘Neues Österreich’ and it was he who reported on Dr Gruber’s recent activities in Paris at the Conference.

In these circumstances it might seem odd that Smolka would return to Britain. But maybe MI6 facilitated his return, as it had business to discuss. A report dated February 10, 1947, indicates that Smolka is once more leaving the country, destined for Austria, that he is still employed by the Daily Express, and that he has ‘O.B.E.’ proudly attached to his name on his passport, issued in July 1945. By July, Milicent Bagot is being warned of Smolka’s alarming behaviour. A letter from MI6, based on intelligence from the Vienna station, says that Smolka ‘attends Mr. Helm’s confidential background talks to British newspapermen concerning H.M.G.’s policy, etc.’. It was presumably hard to turn away an accredited journalist for the Daily Express who had been awarded the O.B.E., but suspicions about Smolka’s true allegiances must have been growing.   MI6 believes that it has ‘adverse information of a security nature’ against Smolka, and Helm wants to know what it is. Its representative (Philby is no longer around, having been removed from his post as head of Soviet counter-intelligence in December 1946, and been posted to Istanbul) writes to Miss Bagot:

            To assist us in concocting this prophylactic, we should be very grateful if you would please send us a summary of your more recent adverse information about Smollett.

That is an odd choice of words. ‘Concocting’ and ‘prophylactic’ suggest that the process is merely a charade, a going-through the motions, and that, moreover, Bagot is in on the game. She was probably not the right person to jockey with on these matters, however. G. R. Mitchell, of B1a, then takes charge, but merely informs his MI6 contact that MI5 has nothing to add to the summary that was sent over on March 12, 1946. And then a new appointment occurs. On February 9, 1948, B1a reports that Smolka has just been appointed as Times correspondent in Vienna, replacing a Mr. Burns [actually ‘Burn’], who was also a Communist (and who incidentally had a PF, numbered 69202, created for him, again not available at the National Archives). Smolka had apparently switched from the Daily Express to Reynolds News as he did not like the paper’s politics, yet that newspaper can hardly have changed its political stance in the period that Smolka worked for it. MI6 confirmed this news to J. L. Irvine on March 2, reinforcing the fact that MI6 was a bit slow on the uptake.

Antony Terry
‘Sarah Gainham’ (Rachel Terry)

Yet before this, Smolka had become friendly with two fresh visitors from Britain, Antony Terry and his wife Rachel. Terry, with a distinguished war record, had been recruited by MI6 through Ian Fleming, and had cover as a correspondent for the Sunday Times. In fact, MI6 had insisted that he, a divorcé, marry one of his girl-friends before being posted to Vienna, as they required their officers to have the profile of a stable married man. Terry and Rachel Nixon (also divorced) had consequently undergone a wedding ceremony in April 1947. In June, Rachel, a rather dewy-eyed ingénue as far as the realities of Communism were concerned, met Smolka for the first time – presumably in the company of her MI6 husband. As newsmen, the pair would have inevitably come across each other. (Prompted by an article by Philip de Mowbray of MI6 about Soviet spies, Rachel, writing under her nom de plume of Sarah Gainham, recalled the events in a letter to Encounter magazine in December 1984.)

‘Encounter’, December 1984

Rachel became especially friendly with Smolka’s wife, Lotty, but Peter apparently also opened up to her. What is significant for the story is the fact that Smolka unabashedly declared his sympathies for the Soviet system immediately. He described his work in Moscow during the war as editor of a news-sheet called British Ally (and we thus learn what his mission there was about), while avowing to Rachel his admiration for the Soviet form of government, which was ‘more democratic’ than the British way. Rachel then explains that Smolka was uniquely served by the Soviet administration in south-east Vienna, in that his family factory in Schwechat, unlike all other such properties, was not appropriated by the Russian authorities. A sensational anecdote then appears (which text I recorded last month):

            In November Picture Post wanted an article on a foreign correspondent’s life in an Occupied city, and Peter proposed this to my husband as something in his gift. Smolka had the permits necessary to go to such places as Klosterneuburg, impossible to get from the Russians except on an official level. He also invited us and the photographer, the wife of the editor of Picture Post, to dine at the British Officers’ Club with a woman Russian colonel, whose picture duly appeared with us all in the magazine. [The magazine identifies her as Major Emma Woolf: the photograph was taken at Kinsky Palace on January 10, 1948.] This was something so unheard-of that even I could see something odd in it. It could only have occurred with official Soviet approval, and to get permission for foreign publicity of that kind proved intimate and high-level contacts.

Terry keeping Woolf fascinated at the Kinsky Palace

One could well imagine that Antony Terry, who had assumed responsibility for some of Kennedy Young’s agents, would have been initially impressed, but secondly shocked, by these events, and reported them to his boss. The timing is very poignant, for we are now in the middle of the period of the ‘Third Man’ extravaganza, about which Smolka’s files are ostentatiously silent. One might imagine that after the growing concerns about Philby after the Volkov incident (September 1945), the Honigmann business in the summer of 1946 (including the weird divorce), and the decision by Menzies to move him out of the critical counter-intelligence role, MI6 might have started to investigate some of Philby’s cronies. And Smolka would have been an obvious candidate. After all, if the Secret Service believed that Smolka had been some kind of asset of theirs, with the plan of his being able to help in post-war counter-intelligence work against Moscow and its satellites, and had protected and fostered him during the war, it would be of utmost concern if he drifted away, did not inform them of his movements, and increased his involvement with dedicated Communist cadres. This now appeared to be what was happening.

In last month’s bulletin, I laid out the discrepancies and contradictions in the accounts of Graham Greene’s meetings with Smolka in Vienna in early 1948. The dominant evidence is that Greene was asked to go to Vienna to sound out Smolka in as discrete a way as possible, with a plausible reason for being there, with his presence, as a known close colleague of Philby’s, representing no threat to Smolka, unlike what any approach by the local MI6 station would have constituted. I believe it is impossible to determine, from the sources now available, exactly what happened in the planning and execution of Graham Greene’s visit to Vienna and Prague. Every participant had a valid reason for obfuscating the truth. Yet the evidence of Drazin and Fromenthal (see coldspur last month) suggests that in November 1947 MI6 made a decision to send Greene and Montagu on the mission, and the arrangements were facilitated by the close relationship that Korda enjoyed with the Secret Service.

Whether the projected research into the ‘Third Man’ plot was a lucky coincidence, or whether Greene’s findings in Vienna actually drove the decision to stage the film there is a fascinating question. The plan had hitherto been to have the action take place in London: Korda’s claim that he needed to use the Austrian capital since he had pre-war assets there cannot be relied upon. He was notoriously bad with money, and it is not clear what form those assets took, or whether they were in fact liquid. Moreover, all the later explanations of Smolka’s contribution to the plot, with their apparently convincing details about his literary agents, may have been an elaborate fiction, designed to turn attention away from the real reason that Greene needed to spend time with him.

Smolka was in a precarious situation. As a Soviet agent and a British subject, he could have stayed in the United Kingdom relatively safely, unless he started making anti-Soviet noises, when Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks forces would have been sent out to assassinate him. But he was of little use to the NKGB in London, having lost his job when the Ministry closed down, the war propaganda cause complete, and his lack of access to vital secrets negating any value he may have had as a spy. Smolka would have been needed back in Austria or Czechoslovakia to help build Socialism. And that is where his MI6 sponsors, having nurtured and protected him for so long, wanted him, too, to deliver on his side of the bargain, and inform them about the communist cadres. Hence the cover of a journalist, which, after all, was his trade.

Yet it would have been difficult to masquerade as a bemedalled British toff at the same time as exercising a role as a servant of Stalin. The Austrian Communist Party would be looking for his full, energetic support, and that would not involve high-living it with his English colleagues at the Press Club. Furthermore, there would be many communists in Prague and Vienna who did not know that he had been recruited by Stalin’s organs fifteen years earlier, and they would have harboured great suspicions about this rather obvious plant. When Smolka travelled to Czechoslovakia on his way to Austria, the customs and immigration authorities in Prague would have noticed his British passport (although the O.B.E appendix would not have been present in June 1945). Indeed, that later got him into trouble at the Slánský trial in November 1952, when he was publicly denounced as an ‘imperialist agent’.

Thus Smolka had a decision to make, and soon decided that he had to boost his Communist credentials, and slough off the British Intelligence skin. That is presumably why he started praising Soviet democracy to his English colleagues, vaunted his connections with Soviet Military Intelligence, and did not conceal the help he received in restoring his father’s business to health. In addition, he started squealing early in 1948. Sarah Gainham wrote: “It became clear that we were in disfavour, and a Czech interpreter ‘blabbed’ to my husband that he and another correspondent had been denounced by Smolka as spies.” She continued: “It indicated a wish to please the new Czech government, and therefore the Russians who were the direct manipulators of the takeover”, and she concluded that Smolka’s concern to please the Russians was of much greater importance to him than his position with the British.

Smolka would have been more likely to confide in the state of the game directly with his sympathetic old acquaintance Graham Greene, and to give him the depressing news (for MI6, no doubt, since Greene would surely have found the whole business utterly entertaining) that the game was over – or that, in fact, the game had never even begun, since he had been working for the NKVD since 1933. And that illumination must have sent shock-waves and curses throughout MI6. Readers will recall the episode where George Kennedy Young reported that one of his assets had gone over to the other side, as well as the coldspur bulletin I submitted in November 2019 (https://coldspur.com/a-thanksgiving-round-up/ ) where I wrote of my frustrations dealing with the BBC in a report on a letter written by Eric Roberts: “The matter in question concerns an intelligence officer, Eric Roberts, who was informed in 1947 by Guy Liddell of suspicions about a senior MI6 officer’s being a Soviet mole, but was then apparently strongly discouraged from saying anything further in 1949, when he (Roberts) returned from an assignment in Vienna.” The disclosure of this artefact caused Christopher Andrew to react as follows: “It’s the most extraordinary intelligence document I’ve ever seen. It’s 14 pages long – it will keep conspiracy theorists going for another 14 years.” Yet Andrew refused to say any more, claiming loss of memory.

The 1947 suspicions were clearly about Philby (Smolka may have been a loose MI6 asset, but he was never a ‘senior officer’), but the follow-up strongly suggests that the ‘confession’ by Smolka led MI6 to review the connections between Smolka and Philby, having probably learned through Greene of the collaboration in the sewers of Vienna in 1934, and taken a fresh look at the evidence of their joint venture, The London Continental News. Guy Liddell must have known what was going on, and he had had access to all the documents that did not find their way into the Smolka PF. It is no surprise that Roberts was strongly discouraged from saying anything when he returned from his very fruitless stint in Vienna in 1949.

Czechoslovakia obviously plays a big part in this drama, but I do not yet interpret Greene’s unpremeditated move to Prague after his time in Vienna as necessarily linked to Smolka. MI6 received rumours of a coming Revolution in the capital, and it needed boots on the ground. Of course Greene would not want to boast of his work for MI6 in his memoir, but his sharp eye and his contacts would have made him a useful asset, and other commentators have fleshed out the story. Apart from the return by Greene to Vienna in June, where he met Smolka again, reportedly to discuss copyright arrangements, but probably to buy his silence, and square him off, there is little else from 1948 to add about the spy – except for one revealing last anecdote . . .

A letter to Irvine (now B1a) from MI6, dated July 5, 1948, informs him of a difference of opinion between the Czech Foreign Office and the Czech Ministry of Information as to whether Smolka should be granted a visa for Czechoslovakia. Klinger, head of the Foreign Office Press Department ‘is strongly opposed to it on the grounds that SMOLLETT is working for the American and other foreign intelligence sources’. It took an intervention by the Austrian Communist Party to have the visa granted. This follow-up includes the priceless explanation:

            The grant of a visa was originally opposed by the Czech Foreign Office because SMOLLETT let it be known during his last visit that he was on a secret mission for the KPÖ. This story was checked by the Czechs and found to be without foundation. It was therefore assumed that SMOLLETT was using the story as cover for an intelligence mission for the Western Powers.

Smolka was clearly out of his depth, and he needed help. I recall the irony of Philby’s comment that Smolka would be ‘far too scared to become involved in anything really sinister’. But, for MI6, the 1948 Show was over.

Chapter 5: 1949-1951 – Evidence of Espionage

So what should the response of the Intelligence Services have been? After all, there was nothing illicit in an émigré’s applying for naturalization, pursuing a career in a British Ministry, providing propaganda for a wartime ally while not disguising his or her political sympathies, with the overall contribution being recognized via a medal. And the holder of a British passport would be entitled to travel wherever he or she wanted (indeed Smolka would not have been allowed to go to Prague and Vienna without one) in an accredited role as a newspaper correspondent. Yet anyone’s intensification of associations with communist organizations when the Cold War was hardening, and the apparent demonstration of a lack of commitment to returning to his or her adopted country, would naturally provoke questions. One of the statements that Smolka had to make in his naturalization request was to express an intention ‘to reside permanently within His Majesty’s dominions’. The Metropolitan Police report on him records: “He states that in the event of a certificate of naturalisation being granted to him he will make no effort to retain his Austrian citizenship”, and: “He wishes to become a naturalised British subject because he is not in sympathy with the present regime in Austria and desires to accept the responsibilities of a British subject.”

Those involved can be divided into two groups: those senior officers in MI5 and MI6 who had devised the plan to recruit Smolka as an asset for MI6, or to whom the plan had been confided, and those junior officers who had been left uninformed, and regarded the events more routinely.  This latter group would have considered Smolka’s behaviour as an example of how not all those aliens who had come to the United Kingdom before the war, and had taken advantage of its hospitality, even becoming naturalized, were loyal admirers of its political system. The strange case of Georg Honigmann and Litzy Feabre would have been fresh in their minds. The former group would prefer that the whole matter be hushed up, since, even if Smolka had done something illegal (such as passing on confidential information), the last thing they wanted was for the whole messy business to come out in the open, and thus reveal their colossal misjudgments. (How could they have imagined that Smolka, with that résumé, would have been able to carry out a productive role as a spy on the communists in Vienna or Prague, for example?) As for the second group, they would have been professionally earnest in going over the evidence to detect whether the procedures had been followed, whether any oversights had been made, whether there were any clues to Smolka’s future behaviour that had been overlooked, and whether he had had any accomplices that they should investigate.

But Smolka was not going away. He kept both groups busy in the next few years.

MI6 kept Irvine of MI5 informed of Smolka’s recent moves. On 5 February, 1949, the anonymous officer wrote, based on information from the Vienna station, that Smolka was anxious to get a permanent visa for Czechoslovakia, ‘as he claims to have property there’, and Smolka hoped to be successful as he had good connections with Toman of the Ministry of Interior. Someone has written on the letter that Toman had been imprisoned by then, so maybe Smolka’s hopes were dashed. (A later annotation on file states that Smolka was put on the Czech blacklist on January 11.) Yet it sounds as if the Vienna station has another spy in the camp, since the letter next states:

            Our representative has learnt from the same source that SMOLLETT’s connections with the Communist Party were not ‘overt’, because it was agreed that he was more useful in his capacity as ‘Times’ correspondent and preferred to remain incognito for that reason. At the same time it has been agreed in the Party that he should be given facilities equal to those of a Party member.

One would expect the Times not to be happy to receive this intelligence. Yet over a year passes before the next entry on file, when, on May 17, 1950, MI6 writes (this time to W. Oughton of B1a) that the French Sûreté has let them know that Smolka, described still as ‘correspondent of the Times newspaper in Vienna’, is said to be in touch with Soviet and Communist circles in Vienna. Not news, at all (as the writer admits), except that it shows the planned move to Czechoslovakia had not been successful. The writer shows his disdain, however. “But we have heard nothing of this creature since our letter to you of 5.2.49.”, he adds, and inquires whether Smolka is still the Times correspondent, and whether Oughton is still interested in him. It takes a while for the facts to emerge, but Norman Hinsworth (B4c) informs Morton Evans (B1a) that Smolka ceased working for the Times at the end of May 1949. So it appears the information was passed on.

It should be remembered that George Orwell had sent his list of ‘Crypto-Communists and Fellow Travellers’ to the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department on May 2, 1949, and Smolka was on this list.  Orwell (correctly) believed that it was Smolka who had tried to prevent Animal Farm from being published. Orwell wrote to Celia Kirwan that same day: “. . . it isn’t a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed. If it had been done earlier it would have stopped people like Peter Smolka worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they were probably able to do us a lot of harm.” The Foreign Office and MI6 were probably not comfortable when they received this news. And fifty years later, Peter Davison (who compiled The Lost Orwell, in which Orwell’s denouncements appear), was ordered to apologize by influential members of the German Press, as well as by members of Smolka’s family, for repeating assertions made by Michael Shelden that Smolka was a traitor. Very sensibly, Davison refused.

By then, however, MI6’s view of Smolka was becoming less charitable. A letter to Oughton dated 20 June provides an update on Smolka’s activities in Vienna, primarily concerned with running his father’s button factory while staying in close contact with various Austrian communists and fellow-travellers. It goes on: “Subject still lives at Vienna XIII, Jagdschlossgasse 27, and suffers from severe diabetes. We wish DR. BANTING had not discovered insulin”, a sentiment that implicitly expresses a hope that a Soviet-style assassination squad would take care of this troublesome person. At this time, the British and US occupation forces were still in bitter conflict with the Soviet Union over the running of the country, and the management of the economy. The Marshall Plan was starting to take effect, Austria being the major beneficiary of that project. Smolka’s preferential treatment by the authorities in the Soviet zone, and his unique ability to run his own business, must have raised the hackles of those who had regarded him as an ally.

And then Smolka came to notice again because of the Peet affair. A few months ago (see https://coldspur.com/the-tales-of-honigmann/) I wrote about John Peet, and the way that Georg Honigmann had deputized for him in the Berlin press shortly before Peet defected to the Communists in 1950. Peet had been the Reuters correspondent in Vienna until 1946, when he transferred to a position with the agency in Berlin, and fled to the Eastern Zone in June 1950. British Military Intelligence in Austria became involved, and Sjt. J. W. Wardlaw-Simons reported that Peet’s predecessor in Vienna, a Mr. H. D. Harrison, had told him that Peet had always held extreme left-wing views, and had been ‘on intimate terms of friendship with the British Journalists SMOLLET and BURNS [sic]’, and asked whether he should approach ‘the subject’ directly.

The ‘subject’ was Mrs Christl Peet, née Guderus, who, shortly before her husband’s defection, had apparently returned to Vienna because of altercations with him. That Peet had foolishly fallen for Soviet propaganda is evident from an extract of a letter to her, where he wrote that he was now ‘on the side of the Peace-loving peoples of the World’. Wardlaw-Simons’ interview revealed little more about his relationship with Smolka and Burn. MI5 received the report in July, and then was sent a confidential memorandum on the Peet defection on October 18, when W. R. Hutton, assistant director of B.I.S. in Chicago, offered a long analysis.

What was B.I.S.? I had assumed it was ‘Berlin Intelligence Services’, but I was puzzled why that organization had an office in Chicago. And then Phil Tomaselli pointed me to the ‘British Intelligence Service’, which (as Wikipedia informs us) was a white-propaganda department of the Foreign Office established in 1941, and re-energized when the Ministry of Information was closed down at the end of the war. Hutton, who stated in his report that he had been in Chicago for about a year, had clearly been working in Vienna during the period in question, since he was intimately familiar with the players. Yet it occurred to me: had Smolka himself perhaps been transferred to BIS when the Ministry shut its doors, under cover as a journalist for the Daily Express?

Hutton described his role in Vienna as ‘information officer for the British element of the Allied Commission headquarters’. He expressed some surprise that both Reuters (in the person of Alfred Geiringer) and the British political adviser in Germany (Peter Tennant) had expressed unawareness of Peet’s political sympathies, since Peet’s fellow-journalists there in 1946 had no doubt that Peet was ‘a close “fellow-traveller”’, or even worse. Hutton identified an ‘unholy triumvirate of Peter Smollett (then DAILY EXPRESS), Michael Burn (LONDON TIMES) and John Peet (REUTERS)’. Hutton then added further incriminating details, including this remarkable passage:

            When Michael Burn was moved to Hungary to await receipt of his Moscow visa (which never came – a great disappointment to him), he recommended Smolka for the London TIMES vacancy in Vienna, and despite the protests to the paper’s headquarters in London by legation and by independent British newspaper men, Smolka was appointed and continued as the TIMES correspondent until mid-1949. Though in ill health (Smolka suffers from glandular trouble), he combined this job, firstly, with that of assistant to Dr. Ernst Fischer when the latter was Communist foreign editor of the NEUES-OESTERREICH, triparty ‘independent’ paper. When Fischer, the only real brains of the K.P.O. was ousted, he went to work, it is believed, as the shadow foreign editor of the official Communist party paper. The pro-Communist news agency, TELE-PRESS, was apparently started by Smollett, and he is still a shareholder. On his ‘resignation’ from the LONDON TIMES (as a result of heavy pressure rather than the ‘illness’ which was announced), Smolka assumed managership of a button factory in the Soviet section of Vienna, formerly owned by his father-in-law [actually, ‘father’], and which, remarkably enough, he had managed to get released from Soviet control. He still maintains his interest with the Communist news agency, TELE-PRESS, and is allegedly writing books.

I take several lessons from this testimony. Smolka’s true allegiances seem to have been far more obvious to his journalist colleagues than they were to MI6, even back in 1946. The infamous Michael Burn (incidentally a one-time lover of Guy Burgess), who abetted Smolka’s career at the Times, had in fact been one of Smolka’s referees in his naturalization request, and MI5/MI6 had obviously been lax in not tracking this triad properly. Burn was a provocative character, but also a brave one, since he was captured during the St. Nazaire raid of March 1942. He published a biography in 2003, Turned Towards the Sun, that is predictably equivocal about his ideological sympathies. (He died in 2010, aged 97.) An intimate friend of Guy Burgess, he suggests that he was almost recruited by his lover to the Comintern cause, and he later got into some trouble for delivering Marxist lectures when in German prisoner-of-war camps. He claimed that he was never a communist, never a fellow-traveller, but admitted to having Communist Party ‘mentors’ in London after the war. At one point he writes that he wanted to get to Budapest early in 1948 simply to witness the trial of Cardinal Mindszenty, yet elsewhere describes his great disappointment in not gaining a visa to move to Moscow (as Hutton confirmed). He was in fact tipped off about the Mindszenty trial by Guy Burgess. In his book he makes only one brief mention of Smolka, when the latter attended a dinner in London at which the Austrian Ernst Fischer and his wife were present, which is disingenuous, to say the least.

‘Turned Towards the Sun’

Smolka was engaged in manifestly underhand and subversive work that could have been considered traitorous, and that could have called for his British citizenship to be revoked. His illness (of which much was made in successive years) may well have been a deceit: although apparently confined to a wheelchair soon afterwards, he survived until 1980. It all points to an unhealthy degree of toleration by MI6 for Smolka and his clique. Interestingly, a further provocative statement is made by Hutton on Antony Terry, whom he accuses of staying too close to Peet and Smolka, and of being influenced by them. Terry, who was ‘vehement in his declarations that he was not a Communist’, soon after received a firm defence from the Intelligence Organization of the Allied Commission. In his role handling agents under the aegis of the Vienna station, a certain amount of dissimulation on his part may however have been necessary.

Next came the highly charged and very critical year in British Intelligence history – 1951. In March, the analysts of the VENONA decryptions were closing in on Donald Maclean as the figure behind HOMER, the betrayer of secrets in Washington, and his identity was almost certain by the end of the month. Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador in Washington, informed Guy Burgess that he was seeking Foreign Office approval for his recall to London. Burgess returned at the end of March, and he and Maclean would abscond to Moscow on May 25. At some time during March, Smolka made a visit to the United Kingdom – but his arrival and departure were not noticed by the Immigration authorities.

The sole indication that is recorded is a series of intercepted telephone conversations between Smolka and someone identified as ANDREW, some of them undertaken in Russian. Who initiated the surveillance, and why, are not recorded, but D. Mumford of B1g receives a transcript of them, and wonders whether the Peter Smolka may be identical with the Smolka with whom MI5 is familiar with, and he makes a request that someone should check up whether the person was in the country on March 1. The outcome of that inquiry is not recorded, but on May 30, an investigation from British Military Intelligence in Austria is launched concerning a letter sent from a S. A. Barnett to Smolka, including information on biological warfare in China, and intercepted on February 1. James Robertson of MI5 asks his colleague in MI6 whether the service has any fresh news on Smolka, but receives the answer that there is nothing new in his file since June 20, 1950. Evelyn McBarnet of B2b agrees with her MI6 counterpart that ‘there is little doubt that he is a Communist’ – an assessment that would appear to be somewhat tentative and dilatory given the man’s track-record. On July 9, B1g is able to inform Military Intelligence in Vienna that Barnett is a biologist, a member of the Marylebone branch of the Communist Party, and a security risk.

It is evident that MI5 is trying to determine whether there were any links between Burgess and Smolka. MI6 in Vienna can find nothing. And then the bomb drops. The Minute Sheet to KV 2/4169 shows that Smolka, as early as August 21, 1951, had come to MI5’s notice in connection with the investigations by B1 & B2 into the Maclean/Burgess case. In November 1951, a trawl through correspondence found on Burgess’s abandoned premises reveals a sheaf of documents that were believed to have generated by Smolka. In an extraordinary pageant, seventy pages of these documents can be seen in Smolka’s third file, KV 2/4169: they have been copied from Burges’s unreleased file PF 604529. They merit a complete transcription, as they cover all manner of highly confidential topics, from notes made from Cabinet meetings, discussions of British strategy towards the Soviet Union, success of bombing raids, to details on armaments. They constitute an astonishing proof that Smolka was not merely an influential propagandist, but also acted as a genuine spy.

The introduction to the documents merits being reproduced in its entirety.

            The enclosed documents, all of which were found in Guy BURGESS’s correspondence, are believed to have emanated from Peter SMOLKA @ SMOLLETT. They consist of:

  1. Notes relating to R.A.F. bombing raids in SMOLLETT’s handwriting.
  2. Document describing conversations with various people. This document as typed on a machine with a faulty lower case “m” and has been annotated in SMOLLETT’s handwriting.
  3.  A number of documents describing conversations with various people. All these documents typed on a machine with a faulty lower case “m”.
  4. Two documents similar in material and manner to III but typed on a different typewriter.
  5. Sample of SMOLLETT’s handwriting obtained from Ministry of Information File F.P. 8052/4.

This evidence is far stronger than the corollary claims on the typewriter technology made about Alger Hiss by Whittaker Chambers a couple of years earlier, after which Hiss was jailed for perjury. And the whole scenario shows how reluctant Smolka was to pass such documents to the new ambassador, Gusev, his predecessor and close friend Ivan Maisky having been recalled in August 1943. Smolka thus had to implicate the unreliable and undisciplined Burgess in his crimes, and rely on him to forward the information to their masters.

The first reaction by MI5 was to try to acquire a complete statement of Smolka’s immigration records. The request expresses the belief that Smolka may have visited the UK in March 1951, and follows with: “Discreetly obtain U.K. address and particulars of foreign visa and documents of interest and telephone arrival or departure to M.I.5.” The result was that Smolka was seen to have benefitted from a constant renewal of his passport: the original in 1938; a fresh one issued in Moscow on June 17, 1944; an exit permit to allow him to travel to Prague dated June 27, 1945; an application made that same day for a new passport tissued on July 5; a granting of a new passport by the Vienna consulate on July 30, 1947; and a further issuance on July 21, 1951. This last event is the most extraordinary of all, Smolka by then having reneged on his naturalization promises, and shown his utter opposition to British democracy, as well as a clear intent to reside permanently in Austria. What thought-processes did the authorities go through? After all, as his naturalization papers confirm, Section 23 of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, 1914, provides that:

If any person for any purposes of this Act knowingly makes any false representation or any statement false in a material particular, he shall in the United Kingdom be liable on summary conviction in respect of each offence to imprisonment with or without hard labour for any term not exceeding three months.

Maybe Smolka had reconsidered his ‘intention’ to reside permanently within His Majesty’s dominions, but he had omitted his early 1934 visit to Vienna when listing his various absences from the United Kingdom.

So what action did MI5 take on learning of this treachery? According to the archive, nothing. in October 1951, Martin had suggested that, should Smolka visit the UK again (as appears to be his practice) ‘we might wish to get in touch with him’. Indeed. It appears again that the lower-level officers in MI5 have not been brought fully into the picture. Yet an apparently harmless request may have caused greater soul-searching. On December 11, British Military Intelligence in Austria made a routine inquiry (on behalf of their US colleagues) about the activities of Smolka and another Austrian émigré, George Knepler, who had been staying at the Smolka domicile. It takes a while for MI5 to respond.

Chapter 6: 1952-1961 – Survivor and Diehard

On January 22, 1952, Arthur Martin, now B1g, wrote a report (heavily redacted in the archive) for British Military Intelligence in Austria. What remains of it is anodyne and stale. Five days beforehand, Martin’s colleague, R. V. Hodson, had recommended a cover-up of Smolka’s role with the Ministry of Information, as the allegations against him concerning his Communism might damage relations with the Americans. Martin notes that the FBI and the CIA have already started nosing around over Smolka, and that B2b has been in contact with them. The Americans can therefore not be fobbed off completely, and he recommends sending to the Intelligence Organisation Austria a sanitized version of his report to pass on to ‘the local American element’.

On February 5, another report arrives, from Vienna, dated January 25, concerning Alice Honigmann (aka Litzy Philby) and Smolka. It seems that the Austrian police have become interested in the activities of both before 1934. The dossier has its amusing items: both the Vienna constabulary and British Military Intelligence are under the misapprehension that Alice married ‘Harald Adrian Russell, student of philosophy’ in February 1934. It goes on to declare that ‘Russel’ was a ‘British diplomat who was alleged to be a dignitary at the court of Siam’. The information is explicitly traced to the article in Die Illustrierte Kronenzeitung (see last month’s coldspur). Neither MI5 nor MI6 has seen fit to point out to their colleagues in Intelligence the true identity of Litzy’s second husband. Thus the Vienna contingent was not aware that Alice Russel was actually Alice Philby, or that she had since married George Honigmann in East Berlin, which indicates that the civil Intelligence Services had been very selective in the information they passed on to their military brethren.

Wherefrom the local interest derives is not clear, but a connection between the two is suggested by another erroneous ‘fact’ – that Smolka ‘lived with his parents in Vienna until 27.9.35’, at which time he left for England. The Colonel GS who signs his name to this report is under the impression that he is at the research frontier, and that he is passing on hitherto unknown information. Whether and how MI5 responded is not revealed, but by now Arthur Martin had more urgent tasks to attend to. A memorandum of February 11 states: “The documents recovered from BURGESS’s flat and from the Courtauld Institute (as listed on PF.604529/SUPP.B.) have recently been re-examined by B.2.B.” Martin goes on to describe in detail greater than was recorded in November the nature of the documents discovered.

Whether ‘re-examined’ in this case means ‘a second examination by B2b’ or ‘the first by B2b after the November analysis’ is not clear. Yet it seems odd that it has taken three months for B2b to start work on such a dramatic and illuminating find. Moreover, the casual mentioning of the Courtauld Institute suggests that the premises of Anthony Blunt had also been successfully searched – which would constitute a startlingly early pointer to the treachery of the art historian. In any event, a project is initiated to track down the sources of the leaks, such as how Smolka obtained access to an Admiralty telegram and to a letter from Sir Stafford Cripps. (Martin was probably unaware of the close friendship between the fellow-traveller Cripps and Smolka.)

Smolka with Sir Stafford and Lady Cripps

Evelyn McBarnet joins the quest, and lists persons who may be able to help, including the inventor Geoffrey Pyke, and Professor Bernal. Minutes of a critical meeting on March 19, 1942, to discuss the highly secret ‘Snow Vehicle’ are dredged out. (One can imagine in what Northern terrains such a vehicle might be put to use.) A few days later, it comes to light that Combined Operations were aware in March 1942 that Pyke had been in touch with Smolka over the scheme. George Carey-Foster, the Security Officer in the Foreign Office, confirms the contents of a telegram despatched by Admiral Myers on Moscow. Anecdotes about Smolka’s favoured treatment by the Soviets when leaving Russia in 1944 are recorded.

The evidence that Smolka passed on several confidential documents, whose use by the Soviets could have seriously weakened Britain negotiating capabilities, is conclusive. A summons to return to the UK for interrogation and a trial would appear to be in order – except, of course that messy, open trials are not popular items on the MI5 menu, and both services would probably have preferred that Smolka simply fade away, literally so, owing to his severe ailment. Thus it is alarming to discover that the next minuted item, dated May 1, 1952, appears under the signature of J. C. Robertson, as B2:

            At DB’s [Dick White’s] request I asked yesterday if he would check up in Vienna on the report received from Carey Foster, to the effect that a certain xxxxx of the British Embassy in Vienna had stated that, in his opinion, SMOLKA might be ready to ‘come over’ if suitably approached.

Irrespective of the uncertain syntax (whom is Robertson asking?), this is an utterly shocking switch in policy. To articulate the term ‘come over’ suggests that Smolka is recognized as a committed Soviet agent, of alien nationality, who has expressed a desire to defect for reasons of weakening belief, fear of punishment, or for some other personal reason. Yet Smolka is still a British citizen who has appeared to have betrayed his naturalization promises, has recently been proved to have passed on confidential papers to the enemy, and should face severe penalties if he returned to the United Kingdom. Moreover, MI6 should have been aware that, if such a figure ‘defected’, he would immediately appear on an assassination list, and would be disposed of ruthlessly. Smolka would know that, too. So what is going on here?

A few trivial items follow: Lotty Smolka was reported a paying a fleeting visit to London in June; Smolka was linked to Guy Burgess’s buddy, Jack Hewett; another Peter Smollett, a young American, was mistakenly identified as Smolka for a while; Smolka informed the Vienna consulate of his new address on August 14. Military Intelligence forwards a report from the Austrian Police on October 30, shedding no new information, but merely reinforcing the fact that Smolka is a ‘fanatical communist’. It contains many errors, which McBarnet points out. Yet Smolka still seems attached enough to his status in England to have compiled an entry for Who’s Who 1953. His continuing British connections, however, may have attracted suspicion not far away.

Rudolf Slansky at his Trial

It is possible that Smolka detected warning signs from Hungary some time in 1952. A report from Special Branch, dated November 18 draws attention to some denunciations of Hungarians made by a Jozsef Menny*** (the page is torn). It was entered into Smolka’s file, presumably because he was subject to similar attacks in Czechoslovakia. On Stalin’s insistence, Rudolf Slánský, the Secretary-General of the Czech Communist Party, had been arrested on November 24, 1951, and, after a year of torture, Slánský had been coached to admit his guilt to a Zionist and imperialist conspiracy at his trial which opened on November 20, 1952. He was hanged alongside several others on December 3. During the trial Smolka was also denounced as an ‘imperialist agent’, an accusation, among all the imaginary charges dreamed up by Stalin and his henchmen, that had a measure of truth in it. I have noted earlier Gordievsky’s observations that a plan was hatched to kidnap Smolka from Austria, but was, oddly, not implemented. Presumably Stalin knew enough about the case to conclude that it would be a great injustice – not that such humanistic concerns troubled him normally. He was initiating a fresh new Jewish Purge, and Smolka could easily have fallen into the maw.

This all leads to a remarkable reprise of the ‘defector’ theme from Robertson, who on January 23, 1953, contacts MI6 with an appeal based on the belief that the attacks on Jews may bring Smolka into British hands, thereby offering MI5 ‘some valuable information about Russian espionage’. What is extraordinary is that a group of five further malefactors are listed on this letter, verifiable by their PF numbers, namely Herzfeld, Klopstech, Beurton (Ursula née Kuczynski), Juergen Kuczynksi, and even Georg Honigmann (who had, so far as can be determined, never engaged in espionage). This is, moreover, a very mixed bag, which, significantly, includes Honigmann, but not his partner, Litzy. Robertson couches his invitation in the following terms:

            We recognize that, however alarmed any of these people may be by the uncertainty of their future under Communist regimes, this might be outweighed by fear of legal or other punitive action on the part of the British authorities. With this in mind, our suggestion is that you might instruct the appropriate M.I.6. representatives to do whatever may be possible to let it become known to them, or at least to those of them who are at all accessible, that they need have no fear on this particular score.

Robertson must have had approval for this nonsense. It just shows how amoral and disoriented MI5’s counter-espionage policy was at this time.

I can see several flaws in this madcap initiative. First of all, MI6 personnel approaching anyone on this list would put themselves in danger, as well as increase the risk to the targeted individual. All members of this group were regarded with suspicion by their respective security organs behind the Iron Curtain, because of their extended sojourns in the West. Whoever might be approached might certainly report the contact to the Secret Police immediately, a fact that would be relayed, thus putting everyone else in jeopardy. The targets would perhaps be more fearful of losing their lives after defection than becoming victims of Stalin’s purges. The mechanics of exfiltrating such persons, either serially or at the same time, would pose immense problems. The challenge of deciding whether whole families should be brought over (else those left behind would be punished) appears to have been overlooked – as the Honigmann case suggests. If any of these foes of British constitutionality did defect successfully, there was no guarantee that they would tell anything useful (or accurate, even), and, if the truth came out about the nature of their original entry to, and survival in, the United Kingdom, some very embarrassing questions would have to be handled – including the obvious one: “Why are these people being given amnesty instead of being prosecuted?” All this for a vague opportunity to gain some ‘valuable information about Russian espionage’! MI5 and MI6 had been utterly outplayed by their Soviet antagonists, and this was a desperate and hopeless idea.

MI6 responded positively to MI5’s suggestions, and indicated it might be able to set up a rendezvous with Smolka through a third party. McBarnet of B2b gets quite excited at the prospect. Fortunately for everybody involved, Stalin died on March 5, 1953, and the scare of the ‘Jewish Plot’ was over. A report comes in dated May 2. The MI6 representative in Vienna (BLAIR) had made an approach to Smolka on Christmas Eve, but the gesture had not been returned. He concludes that Smolka must, after all, be a ‘dyed in the wool communist, for whom there is no hope’. He notes also that there has been a change in policy on the Communist attitude to Semites. McBarnet attempts to climb down, claiming that she ‘never had any high hopes of SMOLLETT’s defection.’

At the Smolkas in Vienna

And there matters peter out for a few years. In 1957, the Attorney-General refers to the embarrassment of holding a trial should Guy Burgess return to the country, and Smolka’s case is mentioned in passing. On October 29 of that year, prominent mole-hunter Courtenay Young of D1 writes to MI6, asking if they have any news on ‘our old friend’ Smolka, and he has to jog their memory on December 3, having received no response. Another month passes, and he has to make a telephone call to try to prod the Viennese Police into action. At last, a report on March 3, 1958, informs David Whyte that Smolka has moved house, is totally crippled in both legs, and was ‘released’ [actually, ‘ausgeschlossen’, better ‘expelled’] from the Communist Party in the autumn of 1952. Expulsion was a serious action. MI5 feels safe arranging for the watch for Smolka at Britain’s ports to be cancelled.

Out of the blue, Smolka turns up in London. On September 27, 1961, Evelyn McBarnet notes that the Information Resource Department of the Foreign Office had contacted F1a of MI5 to inquire about him, since a Thomas Barman, Political Correspondent of the B.B.C., had been invited to a dinner for Smolka at the Savoy Hotel. She writes to him at the Savoy the next day, and she discovers that his British passport was re-issued in Vienna on June 22, 1960 – an extraordinary revelation, indicating deep confusion and lack of communication. Ms. McBarnet applies for a telephone warrant: G. R. Mitchell reinforces the need to know as much as possible about his present activities and contacts. The outcome was that Smolka agreed to an interrogation by Arthur Martin on October 2, but at the Savoy Hotel, because of his mobility problems.

The transcript of the meeting takes twenty pages: it is the most abject example of an interrogator’s work one could ever imagine reading. Martin has not been briefed properly; he is unsure of what he is trying to achieve; he interrupts frequently; Smolka runs rings around him. It is as if Martin had been instructed to bungle it – but then why did MI5 pursue the interrogation at all? On the major issue of the Burgess documents, Smolka explains it away by stating that Burgess told him that he worked for MI5, and asked Smolka to write down ‘his impressions’ for him. Smolka is allowed to make all manner of outrageous statements – about Burgess, Philby and Litzy, about his communist past. He concludes by telling Martin that he suffers from ‘creeping paralysis’, which is incurable, and that he has been warned that he has little longer to live. He left England on October 4, and died in 1980.

MI6 expressed their interest in reading Martin’s report. No doubt they were delighted that Smolka had escaped without revealing anything embarrassing. Yet a last vital entry hints at far more. Extracts from interviews with KAGO (items 322t through 322z), dated November 29, 1961, are listed in the Minute Sheet, but have been redacted from the file. KAGO was the defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, who did not actually move across from the KGB, in Helsinki, until December 15, so it is clear that he had been briefing MI6 and CIA officers for a while already. Golitsyn is recognized as supplying the final proof about Philby, but I do not believe that his providing information on Smolka has been revealed anywhere else.

Summary & Conclusions:

The career of Peter Smolka is shocking in that he easily escaped all justified challenges to his advancement as a Soviet agent, and to the disclosure of that role. He arrives in the UK with a police record, and is noticed attending subversive rallies. He is recognized as having Communist sympathies. He travels abroad frequently, and is watched, but a critical visit to Vienna to join Kim Philby, who marries the best friend of his wife, is ignored, or its existence concealed. He arranges a journey to the Soviet Union, and writes a highly-biased book about Stalin’s Gulag, which is serialized in the Times. He applies for British naturalization, makes false declarations on his papers, but is endorsed by a team that includes two of the persons who championed his book, and a colleague from the Exchange Telegraph. Despite strong objections from MI5, his application is accepted, largely because of support from the Foreign Office.

As his professional career moves on, further objections arrive, including a strong one from Military Intelligence. Yet, when war breaks out, Smolka seems to have enough champions to be recruited by the Ministry of Information, where he soon exerts considerable power as head of the Soviet desk, promoting vigorous propaganda on behalf of the Soviet Union. In 1944 he receives the O.B.E. for his efforts. When the Ministry is closed down, he moves to Vienna as a newspaper correspondent, eventually replacing Michael Burn of the Times. There he fosters contacts with Communists, and, despite his British citizenship, criticizes his adopted country.

When suspicions about his friend and colleague Kim Philby grow in 1947, MI5 and MI6 start to investigate Smolka. So as not to draw attention, or make the approach too obvious, in 1948 MI6 sends out its former officer, the writer Graham Greene, to meet Smolka, and try to determine where his true allegiances lie, and what he knows about Philby. Smolka probably tells Greene all, but the accounts of the discussion are a smokescreen, with Smolka being attributed with anecdotes for The Third Man. Smolka continues with his communist activities, but he is able to renew his British passport regularly, and even makes an unannounced and unnoticed visit to Britain in March 1951, just as the Burgess-Maclean affair is heating up.

In August 1951, a few months after Burgess and Maclean have absconded, MI5 discovers papers containing confidential information in Burgess’s flat that have unmistakable traces of having been created by Smolka. The Security Service fails to act, but when Smolka becomes a near victim of Stalin’s purge against Jews, culminating in the trial and execution of Rudolf Slánský in Prague in November 1952, MI5 recommends reaching out to Smolka, and offering him amnesty, in the hope that he might ‘defect’, and give the intelligence services vital information on Soviet espionage techniques. Stalin’s death in March 1953 pre-empts this initiative.

Smolka is thereafter watched in a desultory fashion. He eventually returns unobserved to London in October 1961, where his presence is accidentally noticed, and MI5 is informed. He agrees to an interrogation, held at the Savoy Hotel, since he has been rendered immobile, dependent upon a wheel-chair, because of ‘creeping paralysis’. Arthur Martin conducts a half-hearted and utterly incompetent interrogation, where Smolka runs rings around the hapless officer. He tells Martin that he has not long to live. The spy returns to Vienna, and he dies in 1980.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

My theory is that MI6 developed a plan to try to use Smolka for Soviet counter-intelligence purposes. The idea was surely Dansey’s, as it anticipates a pattern of naïve ‘recruitment’ of Soviet agents who, according to Colonel Z, could be manipulated. In 1940, Dansey enabled Ursula Kuczynski’s marriage to Len Beurton in Switzerland, thereby allowing her to gain a British passport. Her passage to Britain via Lisbon was then facilitated, whereupon she took up her committed role of Soviet agent and courier. In a similar fashion did Dansey identify Smolka as a target with potential, and recruit him as some kind of ‘asset’, probably in 1933.

Dansey’s thinking must have been that, given the chance to work for the world’s premier intelligence service (as he no doubt would classify MI6), and being exposed to the obvious attractions of a democratic, pluralist society like the United Kingdom, agents with communist persuasions who must have known about the persecution of the same by Stalin would gratefully redirect their allegiances. (Admittedly, 1933 was early for Stalin’s purge of NKVD operatives called home for execution, or assassinated abroad, but the Terror was clear.) Yet Dansey completely misunderstood the dedication of the communist mind, or the fear that the system implanted in its agents. Moreover, Kim Philby claimed that it was the attraction of working for an elite force that convinced him to turn traitor.

Exactly how Dansey planned to exploit Smolka is a mystery. To encourage him to take up a virulently pro-Communist stand would probably have deceived his Soviet masters about the plot, but it was so excessive (at a time when the Soviet Union was regarded as equally dangerous as Hitler’s German) that it could – and should – have reduced Smolka’s career prospects in the corridors of power. If Moscow in truth recruited Smolka at about the same time, it would have looked for a more stealthy and subtle approach, akin to Philby’s joining the Anglo-German Friendship Society. Maybe Smolka told his NKVD bosses about the Dansey ruse immediately, and they simply played along with it.

Yet it required a high degree of collusion – from the Home Office, MI5, and the Foreign Office (in the person of the oily bureaucrat Rex Leeper), even the Times, to maintain the pretence. That high-level officials did turn a blind eye to Smolka’s misdemeanours and obvious subversive instincts is evident from all the missteps, unpursued complaints, and clumsy derelictions of duty displayed in the Smolka archive. And all for what? To establish a powerful propagandist for the Soviet cause in the Ministry of Information, while he secretly passed on highly confidential intelligence to the Russians via Guy Burgess. Then, finally, he was packaged and polished to be sent abroad under cover of a press representative to infiltrate the Communist cadres in Vienna, and presumably pass back valuable information.

Why MI6 believed that this scheme would work is beyond explanation. It shows a frightening naivety about the nature of the communist machine, how suspicious it would be about cosmopolitans returning from the West, and how ruthless it would be with possible traitors. Smolka was not a particularly brave man. When he returned to consort with his communist friends in Vienna, he knew there was no going back, no matter how much he had grown to enjoy the life in London (as did Georg Honigmann and his partner Litzy). He had far more to fear from the NKGB than he did from the intelligence and police officers in his country of naturalization, since he knew they could never publicly reveal anything about his extraordinary compact. Maybe he did a deal with Graham Greene, and promised to keep his mouth shut for a sum of money – especially about his friend and colleague Kim Philby.

The exact relationship been MI6, Smolka and Phiby in 1934 is inevitably very murky. The fact that Philby declared that he knew Smolka in Vienna is, to me, incontrovertible proof that they collaborated there, since it was otherwise an unnecessary and incriminating admission. It would appear that MI6 secretly sent Smolka to Vienna to join Philby, which would suggest that the Secret Intelligence Service likewise considered Philby as some kind of asset at this time, and the clumsy attempt by the Vienna station to portray him as a prosperous right-winger would reinforce that view. Yet now is the time to pause for breath, and wait to see how the analysts, experts, and insiders respond to the hypotheses presented here.

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Special Bulletin: ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’ – Part 2

(For those readers who have expressed interest in the disposal of my Library I should like to draw your attention to the following press release, issued by the University of North Carolina on February 6: https://giving.uncw.edu/stories/new-special-collection-to-make-randall-library-a-destination-for-researchers-worldwide.)

The first two chapters of ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’ can be seen at https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-the-airmen-who-died-twice-part-1/.

The Memorial at Saupeset

Chapter 3: The RAF in Yagodnik

When the decision to launch the attack from Soviet soil was made at this late stage, on 11th September, the security questions raised in April 1943 were sadly overlooked. Bomber Command (or whoever was calling the shots) was apparently able to take the final decision without further consultations with the Soviet Air Force. Amazingly, approval for this revised plan must have been received immediately. It is probable that Stalin now encouraged it, as it would enable him to lay his hands upon the Tallboy itself, and not simply bombers with empty payloads, as well as to exploit the homeward flight of a Lancaster for his own devious purposes. It is certain that an agreement in principle had been hammered out some time beforehand, but that Stalin had wanted to wait until the Warsaw Uprising had been quashed before granting permission.

Preparations for the refined operation were very hurried. One significant outcome of the new arrangement was that, on that same day, 11th September, the Lancasters flew directly from Bardney and Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire to Yagodnik, while the Liberators (which were originally scheduled to arrive in an advance party to prepare for the Lancasters’ arrival) proceeded to Lossiemouth, and then Unst in the Shetlands, for re-fuelling. This was to have serious implications when one third of the Lancasters lost their way in looking for Yagodnik. One of the reasons that the Liberators were originally supposed to arrive before the Lancasters was to provide improved VHF radio guidance, and the reliance on confusing Soviet signals and beacons certainly contributed to the errant landings and resultant written off aircraft. Moreover, the weather in Yagodnik was, in McMullen’s words, ‘appalling’. Whatever forecast had been issued from London was completely off the mark, and the Soviets (who had surely provided the forecasts themselves, and in fact given one for the day after the arrivals) were amazed that the planes had attempted the journey in such conditions.

Routes to Yagodnik

Thus, ironically, while the ground-rules of the Operational Order had been ostensibly changed because of unfavourable weather forecasts for Altenfjord, the whole mission was jeopardized because of a failure to predict very poor weather in Archangel, the error in not implementing proper communications and signalling protocols, and the delay in sending out the Liberators which were intended to guide and welcome the Lancasters to Yagodnik. It all comprises an extraordinarily incompetent example of leadership and decision-making. One might suspect, nevertheless, that the Soviets were not too concerned about the safe arrival of all the planes. After all, there was valuable new technology to be inspected and exploited. In the developing saga of the disaster at Nesbyen, the immobility of some grounded aircraft in the swamps and forests around Archangel would turn out to have dire and unexpected consequences.

Group Captain McMullen, in his report following Paravane, stated that atrocious weather conditions from the Finnish border, incompatible call signals between Russian and English alphabets, lack of WT beacon information, and maps without towns or railways led to the scattering of one third of the planes of Squadrons 9 and 617 on arrival in Russia. Only twenty-three Lancasters, one Liberator, and one Mosquito, from a total of thirty-nine aircraft, landed safely at Yagodnik on 11th September. The remaining fourteen planes and forty-two Lancaster crewmen, with their hi-tech munitions, crash landed or were diverted to Kergostov, Vascova and Onega. These became the object of a frantic Anglo/Soviet search and rescue operation on September 12. One of the pilots added that lack of fuel was a major cause for these forced landings. McMullen did not mention this factor in his report.

In spite of the lack of English-speaking Russians or RAF interpreters there was a concerted and effective drive to locate and retrieve the fourteen lost planes and crews. Soviet efforts are illustrated by the parachutist who was dropped by one crash-site and then guided the crew to a lake where it was collected by a Soviet flying boat for return to Yagodnik. Squadron Leader Harman noted in the official diary: “We were very fortunate that we have no casualties”. All forty-two RAF crew were safely returned to their Squadrons within forty-eight hours. McMullen and his Soviet counterpart Colonel Loginov worked closely to coordinate the rescue so that, by 14th September, twenty Lancasters with Tallboys, six Lancasters with Johnny Walkers, one Mosquito film unit and both Liberators were in place at Yagodnik ready for the assault on Tirpitz.

The Airstrip at Yagodnik

McMullen made clear that very few of the expected facilities to ensure a successful mission were in place on site. The essential refuelling was limited by bowser numbers and capacity to 6 x 350 gallons instead of the 8 x 3,500 gallons and 4 x 2,000 gallons expected. As a result, the Squadron was not ready to fly for another twenty-four hours, delaying action until 14th September. It is almost an understatement when he asserted: “Misleading intelligence of this kind can be most embarrassing and can even ruin all chances of success”. What is not clear is whether he was blaming British 30 Mission in Moscow, 5 Group in UK, or the Soviet authorities at Yagodnik for the misinformation supplied to Squadrons 9 and 617 before 11th September. He concluded that close cooperation with 30 Mission was essential to operate in Russia, implying that this had not been a priority for 5 Group in the UK.

Ralph Cochrane, Air Vice Marshal at 5 Group Headquarters, Swinderby was responsible for coordinating the Squadrons for Paravane, reporting to Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Cochrane had no doubt that the careful work of his planning staff at 5 Group was responsible for the success of the operation, as he declared to Harris on 15th October. He acknowledged none of the practical problems which plagued McMullen in Russia nor why basic technical coordination with the Russians essential for navigation was not prepared by his planning staff and communicated to the crews.

Tirpitz in Kafjord, inner to Altenfjord

On the 15th September at 9.30 am, over a twenty-three minute period, twenty-six Lancasters and one Mosquito took off to attack the Tirpitz in Altenfjord. They flew at 1,000 feet until they reached the Finnish border, when an altitude of 12,000-14,000 feet was maintained over Norway. Within sixty miles of the target all planes, in four waves, would dive to bombing height to despatch their Tallboy and Johnny Walker bombs. Flak was intense from shore and ship, but it was ineffective. There was no German fighter plane opposition. Although surprise was achieved by using the southerly approach against Tirpitz, the smokescreen to hide the battleship was in place within seven minutes of the RAF arrival.

In the debriefing after the attack the crews confirmed that one of the seventeen Tallboys had hit the target: sixteen did not. The outcome from the deployment of the Johnny Walker bombs designed to target the hull of the ship ‘walking’ through the sea was uncertain. At 18.20 the battleship remained afloat. The Mosquito film crew was not able to secure a damage report until 20th September: it appeared to show a possible hit. The disappointing result was heightened by the knowledge that Tallboy and the SABS (Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight) were radically new weapons designed to be accurate within a hundred yards and to destroy any obstacle. Only Squadron 617 was equipped to deliver the 12,000 lb. rotating bomb guided by computerized SABS at 715 mph, which detonated only from inside the target. On 15th October Cochrane told Harris: “None but the heaviest and strongest type of bomb could penetrate (Tirpitz’s) horizontal armour and burst within the ship.”

With the safe return of all Lancasters late on 15th September from Altenfjord, McMullen had two priorities: first, the refuelling and repair of the planes for return to the UK and active duties over Germany, and second, the salvage of the munitions scattered across the region. By 19th September Thomas Williams, assistant Chief of Air Staff, was anxiously demanding information from Harris and Cochrane on radar equipment, gun sights and bomb sights on board the Lancasters that had crashed on arrival on in Russia. A systematic campaign was launched by RAF to salvage or destroy any technology which their Russian hosts might be keen to acquire, although the RAF remained awkwardly reliant on Russian aircraft to reach the remote wrecks.

By the 20th September the chief engineer reported that all fuses and detonators had been removed from the remaining Tallboys and returned to the UK. McMullen was under instruction to retrieve everything of value from the wrecks. Despite Williams’s concern that the Russians would not allow retrieval of the Tallboys, 30 Mission was able to confirm their safe shipment to the UK on 3rd November. As a Soviet engineer wryly observed of his RAF allies: “The British dismantled or destroyed radars, radio stations, bombsights. All aircraft were stripped of the most scarce power units.” The limits of Anglo-Soviet military cooperation were clear.

The enthusiastic cooperation leading to the Tirpitz attack was replaced by growing strains between both sides. Squadron Leader Harman’s official diary charted this tortuous breakdown. On 18th September McMullen secured agreement from Loginov for the use of the Russian Dakota to inspect crashes at Belomorsk and Vascova. On the 19th September the plane was suddenly not available. Finally, on 20th September, ‘after a lot of pressure had been put on the Russians’, McMullen was able to visit the sites. When, however, a repeat exercise was attempted on 24th September with the RAF Mosquito, fuel was denied by the Russians. While thirty Lancasters, with one exception, had returned safely to the UK by 17th September; the Liberators loaded with the salvaged equipment were trapped at Yagodnik as the weather deteriorated. McMullen tried to secure Russian permission on 22nd and 24th September to fly south via Moscow to escape the northern storms: this was refused. At one point Harman despaired at the prospect of spending the winter in Russia.

Was this Russian recalcitrance due to disappointment at the apparent failure of the RAF attack on Tirpitz? Had the Russians become angry that the British were so determined to deny them access to the Tallboy and SABS technology? A report on 5th October by Mikhail Ryumin, head of SMERSH Secret Police in Archangel to his Moscow Head Office provides a clue. Describing the activities of Flight Lieutenant Abercrombie seconded from 30 Mission Moscow ‘who sought permission to take photographs as he pleases’, he added that he ‘persistently asked where the radio and power stations are located in Archangel.’, while his colleague Wing Commander Hughes was carefully recording the size and state of various Russian airfields.

If this British research was simply practical preparation for Paravane a secret Appendix in the 15th October report to Cochrane appears to confirm the Secret Police’s worst fears: “Some details regarding North Russian Airfields were obtainable but it was not possible to get much information from the Russians without arousing their suspicions. For instance it is rumoured that a very big airfield is being constructed near Molotovsk, and during a flight from Yagodnik to Belomorsk the Russian pilot could not be induced to get off track to permit one to see this rumoured airfield.” This was the same flight which McMullen and Hughes took on 20th September in the Russian Dakota to inspect the Lancaster crashes.

Group Captain McMullen was at the centre of this swirling confusion of military cooperation and political subterfuge. His praise for the Russian military was generous. “They gave full and free cooperation in every respect”, he wrote, which contradicted Harman’s meticulous record of Russian obstruction from 17th September. McMullen blamed ‘misleading intelligence’ for almost ruining the Operation, much of which originated from the Russian sources at Yagodnik.  His official final letter to Russian commanders and Yagodnik ground staff was glowingly uncritical: “Your cooperation enabled us to gather the force sent to attack the Tirpitz. For that we shall always be in your debt.” On the other hand, in private to Cochrane, he conceded: “The praise in the letters is lavish, but I was advised that the Russians value this kind of thing.”

Yet a man who tacked his position to suit the audience of the moment was adamant on one point: he strongly recommended to Cochrane that Colonel Loginov, Major General Dyzmba and Vice Admiral Pantaleyev be awarded the highest British honours for their service to the RAF in Yagodnik. Although Cochrane was silent on this point in his report to Harris, the Foreign Office obliged with CB and CBE honours to all three Russians. We can only surmise whether this repayment for the debt that McMullen confirms he owes his hosts was given freely or under duress.

On 27th September the two Liberators finally left Yagodnik, eleven days after the attack on Tirpitz and the subsequent mysterious crash of Lancaster PB416 in southern Norway.

Chapter 4:  The Crash at Saupeset

Nesbyen Cemetery

At about 5:15 pm on 16th September, 1944, the first group of sixteen Lancaster bombers, with a total of a hundred and thirty-one crew, took off over a two-hour period to return to the UK, over the airspace of neutral Sweden, avoiding occupied Norway. Each plane, which normally had a crew of seven, was carrying extra passengers because of the disabled planes that had had to be left behind. Leading the group, Wing Commander Tait confirmed his safe return to the UK at 1:39 am on September 17, after a fair-weather flight. All the other planes returned safely, except the Lancaster piloted by Frank Levy, PB416.

At 5.20 pm the following day, Group Commander McMullen, on temporary assignment in Yagodnik, near Archangel, sent a Top Secret WT (wireless transmission) concerning the disappearance of Lancaster PB416, assumed missing, to Ralph Cochrane, Commander of 5 Group, to Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to Sir Thomas Williams, Assistant Chief of Air Staff at the Air Ministry in Whitehall, and to the 30 Mission in Moscow. It ran: “Following were crew of Victor 617 Squadron: Levy, Groom, Fox, Peckham, McGuire, McNally, Thomas, Naylor, Shea.” McMullen was responsible for the overall organisation of Operation PARAVANE, the air assault on the German battleship Tirpitz, from the airbase at Yagodnik, including liaison with his immediate RAF commanders in the UK, Cochrane and Harris. He also reported to Williams at the Air Ministry in London, who was responsible for defining operational requirements, and to 30 Mission Moscow. 30 Mission coordinated the project with the Soviet armed forces as well as with the British base at Archangel across the river Dvina from Yagodnik.

In the ORB (Operations Record Book) entry from the end of September Squadron Leader Tait stated: “This aircraft was lost on the return from Yagodnik to base on 17/9/44. An acknowledgement for a QDF (map location fix) from Dyce was received at 0121 GMT.  Nothing else was heard from this aircraft.” Willie Tait had recently been promoted commander of No 617 Squadron that had achieved fame for its ‘bouncing bomb’ raids against the Möhne and Edersee dams in 1943. He held responsibility for the attack on the battleship Tirpitz launched by the RAF squadrons at Yagodnik. At 15.05 on 17th September Squadron Leader Harman had confirmed the coordinates of the QDF request from PB416 in the Squadron Diary as 60 50 North 009 45 East.  Harman was both a Squadron Leader and Acting Adjutant for Operation PARAVANE. In the latter role he compiled a daily diary of the Operation, which was supplied to Group Commander McMullen.

The QDF coordinates refer to Oystogo, in southern Norway, a remote hamlet in a grassy valley with steep mountains on two sides. The river Etna runs through the valley. It is about fifty miles from Saupeset where Lancaster PB416 crashed, three-hundred-and-thirty miles off course from the rest of the group of sixteen Lancasters returning to the UK. The RAF Flight Loss Card for PB416 confirmed the crash location as lying approximately 110 km north-west of Oslo at about 0138 GMT. Nine crewmen were shown on board, the same as the details on McMullen’s wireless telegram.

PB416’s Flight Loss Card

It is both curious and provocative that Norway was identified as the target. There was no indication that this aircraft had been engaged in Operation PARAVANE and was supposed to be flying home from Yagodnik. In general RAF records present specific, functional, and accurate data. The clerk who completed the Loss Card would have used information provided by RAF No 617 Squadron. This is the only known official record confirming Norway as PB416’s target for this date, and it was clearly not considered a problem to state the target as Norway so soon after the crash. In other words, PB416 was meant to be over Norway and had confirmed its target by the transmission of its coordinates, over Oystogo, to RAF Dyce Aberdeen. By this reckoning the location of PB416 was not an accident: it had reached its target by 0121 GMT on 17th September and confirmed the same to the RAF base in the UK.

On 15th October Cochrane confirmed to Harris: “With the exception of one aircraft which is presumed to have crashed in Norway all aircraft in Russia less the six which could not be repaired had arrived back in this country by September 28th”. The site of the crash is well documented. At a height of about 3,500 feet, Saupeset is a steeply wooded ridge overlooking a valley with the village of Nesbyen below. Saupeset is used for summer pasture with few human inhabitants. A Lancaster bomber exploding on impact with at least one third of its fuel unused would have been a colossal shock to the remote rural scene. In the days following, a shallow mass grave was dug in the rocky ground close by the crash, most probably by local residents from Nesbyen. No names were permitted to be recorded by the German authorities, whose Gestapo Headquarters at Gol was about ten miles away. With active Norwegian Resistance from Milorg in the Hallingdal area the Germans were determined to minimise any boost to local morale which this unexpected British Lancaster might have supported. In spite of the Germans, the local Norwegians erected a simple wooden cross with ten nails to represent the ten bodies they had buried.

The Grave at Saupeset

The next official document to appear was the initial registration made by the GRU (Grave Registration Unit) on 24th July 1945, two months after the German surrender in Europe. This was the first stage of the task of the War Graves Commission, namely to identify graves, reconcile names of casualties and where required prepare reburial to a designated military cemetery. This July registration by Captain Byrne confirmed eleven bodies as casualties of the crash of PB416. Strangely the same document was amended on 22nd August 1945 by Captain Byrne to show only nine bodies, which of course tallies with the RAF Crash Card from September 1944. The two names deleted in August from the initial July register were Squadron Leader Wyness and Flight Lieutenant Williams.

Squadron-Leader Wyness (front left)

It is puzzling why there should have been such confusion over the most simple of tasks, namely confirming the number of crew on board a Lancaster departing the Soviet Union and determining the number of bodies found at the crash site of the same plane on a remote mountain in Norway. The evidence is moreover contradictory. One clue was an unofficial memorial panel, hand painted with Norwegian text, which was installed at the crash site. According to local sources it was attached to the cross with ten nails as soon as the Germans had retreated from the area in May 1945. The panel confirmed ten RAF crew as casualties, including Williams and Wyness. These were the same airmen who were included on the British GRU report in July and then deleted in August 1945. Curiously the Norwegian panel omits Flight Sergeant McGuire, who is included in all RAF and GRU records. If McGuire’s name had been added to the Norwegian memorial panel in May 1945, the total number of casualties would have been eleven.

Memorial Panel

The Norwegian list was based on the physical identity of the casualties before burial in September 1944.  Their names were confirmed by the ‘dog tags’ worn on the wrist and the ID on each serviceman’s uniform. A severe crash and explosion might have made verification of bodies difficult, but the Norwegian panel confirms the clear identity of ten airmen, with the exception of McGuire, which tallies exactly with the same ten names in the GRU report in July. This implies that the ‘dog tags’ were readable on ten bodies. This assessment further suggests that the initial British GRU list in July 1945 was based both on RAF records and cross referenced with local Norwegian records including the memorial panel. Otherwise the names of Williams and Wyness would not have been included. It is unlikely that the mass grave on Saupeset was exhumed by the British in July 1945, since the fact that McGuire’s ID was missing would otherwise have been questioned by Captain Byrne in his report to the RAF. The question must be asked: Why did Captain Byrne delete Williams and Wyness from the GRU list on 22nd August 1945? The reason is that, although the ‘dog tags’ and uniforms of these two airmen were found at the crash site, these two officers were not on flight PB416 from Yagodnik.

The Squadron records show Williams was hospitalized at Yagodnik with severe dysentery on 16th September when PB416 took off. (Perhaps that is the reason his uniform was ‘borrowed’). Wyness did indeed leave Yagodnik with the sixteen Lancasters on 16th September, but as a passenger on Flight Lieutenant Iveson’s Lancaster ME554, which landed safely in the UK at 0124 GMT on 17th September. (Wyness’ own plane had crashed on landing on 11th September  and was abandoned in the Soviet Union.) But both the Norwegian memorial and July 24th GRU record confirm the identities of Williams and Wyness at the crash site. If Williams and Wyness were not on board PB416 on 16th September, who, then, were wearing their uniforms and IDs when the plane crashed at Saupeset?

Wyness’s plane grounded

We know for certain that Williams and Wyness were not passengers. Their fate was one shared by many brave airmen who served their country and flew with Bomber Command. Together with six other Lancasters of 617 Squadron, on a mission to bomb the Kembs barrier on the river Rhine, their plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at Rheinweiler, Germany on 7th October 1944. Although they successfully bailed out before impact, they were captured by German troops and executed, in breach of the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners-of-war. Wyness, aged 24, the pilot, was buried at Choloy, in France and Williams, aged 22, was buried in the Dürnbach Cemetery, in Germany.

In Memoriam
In Memoriam

By 1946, further notifications in the record had been made. The Grave Registration document early that year shows ten allocated graves in the cemetery, one of which, XII G2, has been left blank and is later overtyped, “UNKNOWN BRITISH AIRMAN 17.9.44”. This document confirms the reburial of the bodies from the top of Saupeset to individual graves in the church yard below. These details were reconfirmed in the Graves Concentration Report of 9th August 1946. The record now states that ten bodies had been transferred from Saupeset and re-interred at Nesbyen, with nine names matching those in the RAF Crash report plus one ‘unknown British airman’. McGuire was included: Wyness and Williams had been withdrawn. The resolution thus appears to reflect faithfully the RAF Flight Loss Card, perhaps ascribing the extra body to a clerical oversight.

Final Report on PB416

When asked about the inconsistency of GRU and RAF records for PB416 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) confirmed that all data was based on the lists supplied by the Germans at the time of the initial burial, forwarded to the Red Cross and subsequently to the RAF. When the Red Cross and International Red Cross were requested, however, for their record of the accident, both confirmed that they had no information of either the crash or any of the casualties at Saupeset on 17th September 1944. When asked about the Norwegian memorial from May 1945 the CWGC said they had no knowledge of its existence.

So why did the first GRU report of July 1945 include Williams and Wyness, while RAF records did not? The implication is that Captain Byrne of the GRU, on the first British visit to the crash site, took the details he had been given from the RAF crash card, which showed the nine names. On discovering the new names of Wyness and Williams from the local Norwegian memorial, he simply added them to give a total of eleven casualties.  Yet McMullen was clearly aware that Williams and Wyness were not on board PB416 on 16th September and knew that they had become casualties in Germany on 7th October 1944, not in Norway. After submitting his list of eleven names to RAF on 24th July 1945, Byrne was surely advised to delete the names of Williams and Wyness, which he did on 22nd August.  This left a total of nine casualties, consistent with the RAF version, but not with the Norwegian memorial that showed they had buried ten bodies, with ten readable ID tags, the year before. That may explain the need for the addition of the ‘unknown British airman’ for the reburial in March 1946 to bring the total number of graves at Nesbyen to ten.

How could one set of IDs been lost? PB416 was carrying approximately 800 gallons of fuel on impact, so it is quite possible that the eleventh body was so badly burned in the crash that the airman’s ID was unrecognizable. This probably explains why McGuire’s name was missing from the Norwegian memorial panel. Yet the lack of any process to reconcile differences is disturbing. When the RAF received Byrne’s report of 11 bodies at the mass grave on 24th July 1945 it was the first time that McMullen’s account of nine casualties on PB416 had been challenged. McMullen was still Commander at RAF Bardney at this time, and he was presumably a difficult man to challenge. His list of nine RAF airmen was partially accurate, but he had omitted the identity and existence of the two passengers who must have been wearing the uniforms of Williams and Wyness, which brought the true total of people on board PB416 to eleven.

A local story has circulated in Nesbyen that, after the first British inspection in July 1945, a transportation was arranged by British troops with local assistance to move one body from the Saupeset grave to the British Embassy in Oslo. If the story is true it aligns with RAF instructions to Byrne in August 1945 to reduce the number of identifiable casualties in the report from eleven to nine, while honoring the Norwegian memorial, with its count of ten. Unlike the GRU, the RAF and McMullen were aware of the number of people who boarded PB416 at Yagodnik on 16th September, 1944, and that by physically removing one casualty from the mass grave this would leave ten bodies on Saupeset. The RAF had to admit that Wyness and Williams had not been on the flight, because of subsequent events, but they had to bury the fact that their uniforms and IDs had been borrowed by unnamed passengers and had been found at the crash site. The final step in adjusting the body count was made public in March 1946 when the casualties were reburied at Nesbyen, ready for visits by families from the UK. A tenth body was now added to the adjusted GRU reports in March, confirmed in August 1946 and designated ‘Unknown British Airman’. It is certain that McMullen was aware that the tenth and eleventh bodies were neither RAF nor British: hence there was little risk of their families being aware that the GRU or the RAF had been involved with the burial of foreign servicemen in a British War Cemetery in a remote part of Norway.

Defence Attache Matt Skuse in Nesbyen Graveyard

This total perfectly aligned with the 10 new gravestones in Nesbyen cemetery for the ten bodies brought down from Saupeset in Spring 1946. It is likely that the instruction for this change by GRU was made and approved by the RAF in line with previous changes by the GRU. If the eleventh body was transported to the British Embassy in summer 1945 it would have required an order from the RAF and official sanction from the Foreign Office in London. Yet, by making one body physically disappear to the British Embassy in 1945, and the second body being made anonymous as ‘Unknown British Airman’ in 1946, it was as though the two persons wearing the uniforms of Williams and Wyness had never existed and certainly could not be traced.

But they did exist. What next has to be investigated are the questions of who might have been wearing the uniforms belonging to Williams and Wyness, why they were on board an RAF Lancaster three-hundred-and-thirty miles off route in Southern Norway, and why the RAF, the CWGC and local Norwegians still prefer not to discuss the matter. For they were certainly Soviet agents authorized at the highest level to be flown on a secret mission to Norway.

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