Category Archives: Literature/Academia

‘To Catch A Spy’? Actually, no . . .

‘To Catch A Spy’

For casual browsers, here is the short version of the book review, in the form of a clerihew:

Margaret Thatcher

Vigorously hounded ‘Spycatcher’.

For Wright’s attorney the clincher

Was her indulgence to Pincher.

For those of you who are fully paid-up subscribers to coldspur, and want to read the full version, start here:

Contents:

Introduction

Parallel Narratives

The MI5 Report  

Jonathan Aitken

The Plot

The ‘Spycatcher’ Trial

The Epilogue

Miscellaneous

Conclusions

Appendices 1-9

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Introduction

Someone (I do not recall who or where) recently pointed out that the one thing that Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, failed to do was to catch any spies. It seems that Tim Tate did not get the email, since he has titled his new book on the ‘Spycatcher’ affair To Catch A Spy. Since Wright was keen to boast that he was ‘the only senior officer in MI5 to have spent twenty years in counter-espionage’, either he was not a very capable sleuth, or else his energies were for some reason thwarted. It is the latter tale that Wright vigorously promoted, and it is the story that Tate has chosen to endorse. As an account of the catalogue of woe that Margaret Thatcher and her administration brought down on itself in trying to suppress Wright’s memoir, To Catch A Spy is, for the most part, excellent: on the other hand, as an investigation into the realities of Wright’s claims that MI5, and the UK government in general, were riddled with Soviet spies, it does not grab the nettle, makes some spectacularly wrong assertions, and is disappointingly bland and incurious. It fails to unravel the complexities of the establishment plots to control the narrative, and is far too accepting of what Wright and his accomplices claimed about the extent of Soviet penetration.

I approach volumes on intelligence like this one with three primary questions: What is the track-record of the author, and what credentials does he [or she] have? What fresh sources does he bring to the table that may cause a revised history of the events to be justified? What methodology does he apply in sifting the evidence, and dealing with the multiple obfuscations and dissimulations that inevitably bedevil the records and testimonies?

Tim Tate

I had encountered Tate in two previous books: Hitler’s Secret Army, and Agent SNIPER (published in Britain as The Spy Left Out in the Cold), his biography of the Polish defector Michal Goleniewski. He describes himself as a documentary film-maker and investigative journalist. I gained much from both books, although I believe Tate exaggerated the Nazi threat in the first book, and Goleniewski, who rapidly entered the predictable world of fantasy when his intelligence ran out, hardly had enough substance to warrant a full book about him. Rating: B.

On sources, Tate has performed a phenomenal job in rooting out arcane material – especially in British Government archives, where critical information was released to select historians, but weeded from the files before they were released to the public – with many still withheld. He has also scoured the records of the ‘Spycatcher’ trial in New South Wales to deliver valuable new material from the transcripts and affidavits. He has secured several personal communications with prominent members of the controversy, from Nigel West through Jonathan Aitken and others, to Peter Wright’s offspring (although such confidences should not be automatically trusted). Rating: A-.

Sadly, Tate has not applied the methodology of a professional historian to his material. (The qualifications for adoption as a Fellow of the Historical Society must be low.) He is far too trusting of what Wright said in his book, and in his affidavits, when careful checks and third-party testimony lead one quickly to the conclusion that he was a consummate liar. His exaggerated respect for Wright is shown by the fact that a majority of the chapters in his book are introduced with a statement from him. All too often I looked up a reference in Tate’s Endnotes to find it simply cited a page from Spycatcher, and Tate shows no discrimination in deciding when Wright should be believed, and when he should not. That weakness extends to his coverage of other witnesses. Tate also quotes, far too often, Christopher Andrew and his unverifiable references to ‘Security Service Archives’ in Defending the Realm, and he never attempts to engage the authorized ‘historian’. He accepts all such information as gospel – except when it tends to contradict his main thesis. The unwillingness to challenge Wright’s lies is in contrast to his justified contempt for the prevarications and perjury of Sir Robert Armstrong. This failing undermines a dominant theme in his book – that dozens of Soviet spies remained unchallenged and unprosecuted in Britain’s offices of state. I was tempted to redeem Tate’s grade slightly in recognition of the industrious work he has performed in comparing declassified files with published texts, but found the process of unravelling his cross-references so laborious that I stayed with my more negative appraisal. Rating: C+.

To illustrate some of my points, I present some extracts from Tate’s Introduction, with commentary. It is not a good beginning.

P 1 “Peter Wright, a senior Security Service officer for more than twenty years, had been at the centre of many of the most damaging intelligence scandals of the 1950s and 1960s. He had been MI5’s chief counter-espionage officer, leading its efforts to catch Kim Philby, to uncover Soviet penetration of Britain’s twin intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, and to root out the long tentacles of Moscow’s infamous ‘Ring of Five’ spies, embedded in the heart of the British Establishment.”

Wright had not been a senior MI5 officer for twenty years. He had been recruited in 1955 as a scientific officer, and had been appointed head of research in D Branch in January 1964. By then, Guy Burgess was dead, Donald Maclean had been in Moscow for thirteen years, John Cairncross had been encouraged to resign in 1951 after owning up to espionage and had formally confessed in December 1963 after being named by Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby had absconded from Beirut in 1963, and Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet agent not in April 1964 but in late 1963 (as my original articles strongly hypothesized, at https://coldspur.com/the-hoax-of-the-blunt-confession-part-1/ and https://coldspur.com/the-hoax-of-the-blunt-confession-part-2/ , and which I reinforced last month, at https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/ ). Wright was never head of counter-espionage, although he did chair the combined MI5-MI6 FLUENCY Committee to investigate Soviet penetration, and before his retirement he was a special adviser to Michael Hanley, the Director General from 1972 to 1978. That the ‘Ring of Five’ had tentacles, and that the level of commitment to the Soviet cause dedicated by the persons supposedly representing them was high, is not questioned by Tate. He is intuitively sceptical of anything MI5 directors-general say, and (for instance) criticizes Antony Duff for carrying out a stringent internal inquiry in 1987 without reaching out to contact Wright himself!

P 2 “It [the government] had also allowed retired Director General Sir Percy Sillitoe and its in-house traitor Anthony Blunt to write their own memoirs . . . .”

Unlike Sillitoe’s book (which boasted a foreword by Clement Attlee), Blunt’s memoir was never published. In light of other indiscreet revelations provided by unnamed MI5 officers, coupling Sillitoe and Blunt is a bizarre choice. In PREM 19/1952, John Masterman’s The Double Cross System in the War of 1939-45 is listed alongside Sillitoe’s memoir as the only other book by an ex-MI5 officer that received authorization by the government – although that statement misrepresents what was in fact a very awkward process.

P 2 “Wright’s allegations of Soviet penetration of MI5, and of MI5’s habitual law-breaking, were simultaneously admitted as true for the purposes of the Australian trial but pronounced false in the House of Commons.”

That statement constitutes a dubious representation of the truth. Tate echoes it on page 245, where he writes of the government’s ‘admission that – for the purposes of the trial –  every word in Spycatcher was true’, and again on page 290, where he claims that Thatcher’s denials to the House of Commons about the Wilson plot were contradicted by the fact that the government had accepted during the Spycatcher trial that ‘all Wright’s allegations were true’. I cannot locate any passage in Tate’s book that supports this thesis: the whole point of the Government’s defence was that Wright’s claims could not be dissected at all because they were all confidential. I believe that these assertions may be a lazy paraphrasing of what Charles Moore wrote in Volume 3 of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, on page 239. The relevant text runs as follows: “It [the British government] agreed, for the purposes of the court case alone, to admit the truth of Wright’s allegations and information, disputing only the author’s right to publish them. This was a legal technicality, but of course it was not understood as such.”

This is an uncharacteristically sloppy passage by Moore, and his heavily annotated book provides no sources for these claims. With whom did the government ‘agree’? What was the implication of ‘for purposes of the court case alone’? How public was that statement? What are the implications of the words ‘legal technicality’? Who were the agents and figures who did not ‘understand it as such’? Moore predictably did not start to answer such questions, but, in my opinion, Tate should have taken it upon himself to analyze them further before promoting the underlying assertion as gospel.

P 4 “The Security Service was determined to cover up the truth about Soviet moles in its ranks, to conceal its habitual domestic law breaking and to prevent any democratic supervision of its actions. . . . . .  At its behest, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Secretary conspired to defuse the ticking time bomb of the investigation into Sir Roger Hollis by leaking top-secret information.”

While Tate appears, rather alarmingly, to have pre-judged that the existence of moles within MI5 was an inarguable fact, he provides no evidence of MI5’s determination to cover up such a ‘truth’ in the critical period under review. As he records, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the Security Service presented to her a detailed report that outlined the investigations into possible ‘moles’ in the service, and particularly that into Roger Hollis. Yet the Director General of MI5 at the time (1978-1981), Sir Howard Smith, does not even appear in the Index of To Catch A Spy, and it is moreover unlikely that Armstrong and Thatcher would have been persuaded to engage in such conspiracies by the arguments of such a weak character. The claim that it was MI5’s ‘behest’ that convinced Thatcher and Sir Robert Armstrong to initiate the leakage operation thus lacks any supportive evidence, and runs counter to the narrative as presented in Tate’s text. [In Volume 3 of his biography of Thatcher, Charles Moore attributes Smith’s supportive role in responding to Pincher to a conversation he had with Lord Armstrong, as he became, and the claim is thus not seriously verifiable. Moreover, in Volume 1, Moore had reported that the Director General had advised Thatcher not to make any announcement when the Blunt rumour first surfaced in ‘late’ 1979. Since Moore recorded the D-G as being Michael Hanley, who had retired the previous year, this unsourced item must therefore be treated as another vague observation. The whole section covering the Blunt revelation is very loose.] After Their Trade is Treachery began serialization in the Daily Mail, the newspaper reported that Thatcher had ordered Smith to provide an explanation, but that may have been a supposition inserted by Pincher.

Howard Smith

P 4 “He, with official approval and the backing of Lord Victor Rothschild, himself a former spy, used this material to publish a book about the case in 1981. And Pincher’s secret co-author as the British government knew – was Peter Wright.”

Lord Rothschild – who strongly protested when his name appeared in the form given by Tate, by the way – was never a ‘spy’ for British intelligence (though he had been an ‘agent of influence’ for the Soviets). [Tate, mimicking the unfortunate example of Tom Bower, who titled his biography of Dick White The Perfect English Spy, regularly classifies counter-espionage officers as ‘spies’, a practice that may have started with Isaiah Berlin’s career advice to Philip de Mowbray.] Tate also fails to draw clear lines in the conspiracies to exploit Wright’s findings via the media of Chapman Pincher. In his main text, he judges it a ‘coincidence’ that Armstrong and Thatcher were plotting to use Pincher at the same time that Rothschild and Wright were doing exactly the same thing. He fails to explain why the backing of Rothschild was significant if ‘official approval’ had already been registered.

As a parenthesis, I point out that I have added several Appendices to this report, the first and second consisting of a comprehensive guide to the National Archives files used by Tate – which would have been a useful component of his supportive material – and a summary of the information exceptionally provided to Charles Moore. The others constitute a record of the incumbents in critical positions during the period of these events (broadly 1945-1990). I compiled these partly for my own edification, as it is useful to be able to verify personalities when a record refers simply to the ‘Prime Minister’ or the ‘Director General’ of the time, but also to show the general lack of continuity among most political appointees or electees. MI5 and MI6 reported to the Home Office and the Foreign Office, respectively, so I include the Ministers responsible, many of whom must have been overwhelmed by the intelligence shenanigans they encountered, but did not remain long enough in office to have any influence. Amid all this was the relative permanence of the Cabinet Secretaries, solidly ensconced in the engine-room of the ship of state, with only four such civil servants holding the office between 1947 and 1987, thus confirming the importance of their interest and actions as the investigations into Soviet infiltration evolved. Robert Armstrong uniquely served only one Prime Minister – Margaret Thatcher.

Parallel Narratives

One of the most extraordinary aspects of Tate’s story is the manner in which his narrative and that of Christopher Andrew run on parallel but contradictory lines. Tate shows much ingenuity in expanding on Pincher’s account, explaining how in early 1980 the MP Jonathan Aitken approached Thatcher and Armstrong to warn them about the level of Soviet penetration in the intelligence services, augmenting what a report given by MI5 to Thatcher soon after her assuming office in May 1979 had declared about the FLUENCY investigation. That initiative led to a plot by Thatcher and her Cabinet Secretary to try to deliver the unsavoury news about Hollis through a supposedly friendly journalist, Chapman Pincher. As I pointed out above, Tate never mentions the current MI5 Director General, Howard Smith. Andrew, on the other hand, says nothing about Their Trade is Treachery until describing the occasion on which Thatcher was forced to make her statement in the House of Commons. He writes nothing about the MI5 report that educated her to the threats back in 1979. According to him, the ruse to employ Pincher was cooked up solely by Rothschild and Wright (although Andrew does confirm that Wright had been leaking information to Pincher for some years). On the other hand, Andrew has several things to say about the ineffectual Howard Smith, who had been brought by James Callaghan from the Embassy in Moscow to lead MI5 in 1978, but thereafter stayed in the background, was a weak leader, and did not concern himself with operational affairs.

It is perennially difficult to assess how reliable Andrew’s judgments are. We do not know (for instance) the extent of his access to MI5’s files. (He describes it as ‘virtually unrestricted’, but how does he know?) We do not know how many he himself inspected, or whether those cited were perhaps summarized or sanitized by his research team of ex-MI5 officers. We do not know whether relevant files from other government departments were placed before him: certainly he cites resources such as the FCO and the PREM categories, but his narrative would suggest that some vital files escaped his notice. The status of the files his team did inspect – whether still unclassified, or since released – is unknowable. It is a very sorry state of affairs that I – and other historians – have lamented.

‘Their Trade is Treachery’

Andrew’s oversight in this particular domain is all the more remarkable since Pincher first referred to Aitken’s letter to Thatcher, dated January 31, 1980, in Their Trade Is Treachery (hereafter referred to as TTIT; 1981) and published its full text as an Appendix in his 1988 book A Web of Deception. Pincher, rather disingenuously, claimed that he had gained most of his material for TTIT from Aitken, who had, in turn, been indoctrinated by James Angleton of the CIA, and then further educated by Arthur Martin (at that time retired from the intelligence scene). Pincher then claimed that Thatcher and Armstrong had brushed off Aitken’s warning, assuredly after receiving guidance from MI5 to ignore it (though Pincher provided no evidence of such), and that Armstrong did not become alive to the imminent revelations about Hollis until he received an early copy of TTIT in January 1981. His thesis (as I explained in coldspur two months ago, at https://coldspur.com/the-still-elusive-victor-rothschild/ ) was to judge that the government had stumbled into allowing TTIT to be published out of a misguided concern for secrecy rather than from any devious plotting.

Tate’s coup has been to exploit archival material declassified in 2023 to blow a hole in both these stories, thus resolving the conflicts that puzzled me last month – why Thatcher and Armstrong would behave so passively over Pincher’s subversive book, and why Rothschild would risk so much in dealing with, and encouraging, Wright. Reproducing information from PREM 15/591, Tate shows that Thatcher and Armstrong considered, in June 1980, that allowing the leaked story to be communicated by a ‘sympathetic’ journalist, namely Pincher, would defuse the volatile Hollis situation and allow them to control the risks embodied by Wright. These revelations hold enormous significance for the encounters between Rothschild and Wright, and the ‘introduction’ of Pincher, in late summer 1980. But first, I want to step back and consider the implications of the 1979 MI5 report, and the incongruous entry of that popinjay and perjurer* Jonathan Aitken into the narrative.

[* Aitken was convicted of perjury in 1999, and served prison time for it.]

The MI5 Report

The May 1979 report, which consists of eight pages, in PREM 19/120, offers a broad summary of the (unidentified) FLUENCY Committee investigations. It is anonymous, but was probably compiled by the Deputy Director General, John Jones, who had been working for MI5 since 1955. It explains the disclosures by one defector (Gouzenko) and one would-be defector (Volkov) that had encouraged the inquisition, and Tate’s text briefly outlines the trail that led to Roger Hollis’s being considered the prime suspect. Yet it also provided an important qualification: “No information was discovered to confirm the supposition of espionage . . .”, which suggested that all the claims of ‘failures’ of counter-Soviet operations rested on shaky ground. My contention has always been that the first responsibility of MI5 and MI6 should have been to try to determine why such projects had misfired, and whether such failures could reasonably be attributed to leakage, rather than blundering around looking for scapegoats. For instance, in ‘Peter Wright’s Agents and Double-Agents’ (see https://coldspur.com/peter-wrights-agents-double-agents/ of May 2022), I debunked the notion of MI5’s having a hope of running ‘double-agents’ against the Soviets in London, and I expanded on this theme earlier this year in ‘Some Problems with Westy’ (see https://coldspur.com/some-problems-with-westy/ ).

Yet Tate disposes of this report in a very perfunctory manner. First of all, his introduction is inaccurate. On page 115, he states that Thatcher would not have been able to rely on Sir John Hunt for guidance, since she had replaced him with Sir Robert Armstrong in October. Hunt, however, had been supplying the Prime Minister with analysis, draft written responses should the crisis erupt, and supplementaries to possible parliamentary questions, from her accession on May 4 right up until October 10, five days before Armstrong officially took over. (Tate lists only Volume 3 of Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher in his ‘Selected Bibliography’.) In this communication, he showed how alive he was to the situation by pointing out that Blunt might a) initiate libel proceedings, b) make a public confession, or c) commit suicide. Armstrong’s first recorded memorandum is dated November 8th, after Climate of Treason had been published.

John Hunt

Furthermore, Tate misrepresents the essence of the MI5 report. He dedicates only a single paragraph to it, and summarizes it as referring to ‘the facts which had pointed at Hollis as the most likely traitor in its ranks’. Yet the report expressed no such opinion. It stated that there had been no evidence of penetration for twenty years. Over a hundred leads had been investigated (presumably including those that Wright identified), but they had been cut down to only five by 1973, and to a single case in 1976 –  which was still being looked into. Tate’s immediate judgment is that MI5 ‘was determined to keep its political masters in the dark about the extent of the problem’ (p 110), but he offers no evidence for that conclusion, and appears not to consider that, since MI5 had opened up the project, the Security Service might have expected to receive further questions from their bosses about the process and the eliminations. Yet that apparently did not happen. Simply because MI5 was evasive and dilatory concerning the activities of some spies, it did not automatically mean that it was concealing information about a clutch of others.

In addition, nothing incriminating had been found against Graham Mitchell or Roger Hollis, and the judgment was that Volkov’s identification was much more likely to have been Philby rather than Hollis (even though the report characteristically misrepresented Hollis’s role during World War II). One of the most ridiculous suggestions is that, when Blunt resigned from MI5 in 1945, Moscow might have wanted a spy within the service to carry on the work, and thus they ‘activated’ either Mitchell or Hollis, or both – as if they had been waiting quietly in the wings for that day. Meanwhile, as Blunt admitted, he carried on supplying information to the Russians through the 1951 events (exploiting his excellent relationship with Liddell and White), and beyond – and was probably involved in the tip-off to Philby in 1963.

What is more astonishing is that in MI5’s report the original trigger for the investigation into possible infiltration was ascribed to an interview by MI5 of Philby’s wife Eleanor after the defection. She stated that her husband had become very nervous, and started drinking heavily (again) in 1962, and the Security Service assumed that one of the only five senior officers who knew about the renewal of the investigation into Philby must have leaked that information to him. That led to Mitchell and Hollis, but, later in the report, the author pointed out that Philby might well have become very anxious because of the news that the defector Golitsyn was starting to talk, and might be able to finger him – which indeed was the case. If Eleanor Philby’s claim truly was the prima facie cause for the whole inquiry, it rested on very shaky ground. Tate ignores that observation, preferring to trust the version that Wright offered.

Tate largely ignores the tenor and details of the MI5 report. I hoped, nevertheless, that he would apply some rigorous analyses of the failures claimed by Wright. Yet, in his critical Chapter 7, title ‘DRAT’ (the code-name for the investigation into Hollis), where he covers the allegations, he first refers to the August 1975 report submitted by Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, to Prime Minister Harold Wilson, which mentioned in vague terms the possibility of espionage leads beyond proven spies, but then for his next seven sources relies almost exclusively on Wright’s testimony, from the Granada television program, from Spycatcher, and from his affidavit in Sydney. These are notoriously unreliable, as several commentators have pointed out. Tate later admits that Wright was accused by other MI5 officers of inventing evidence where none existed, but he largely ignores the consequences of such claims.

There have never been any documents released from the FLUENCY Committee, or the DRAT investigation, so Tate cites Christopher Andrew for two important anecdotes. In Defending the Realm, on page 511, Andrew wrote that Hollis and White, the respective chiefs of MI5 in 1965, had accepted the conclusions of the FLUENCY Committee that Soviet penetration of both services had endured, and that they authorized further investigations. The circumstances of these judgments are maddeningly elusive, as, again, Andrew is exploiting an unverifiable source. White’s reasoning, and the possibility that his protégé was influenced by him, must be one of the most important aspects of the whole case. And on page 517, Andrew describes a June 1970 report written by John Day titled ‘The Case Against DRAT’. (By then, both Hollis and White had retired, although White was active as Intelligence Co-ordinator for the Cabinet office until 1972.) Andrew was probably the only outsider who had read the report. In his Endnote, however, Tate writes: “The only account of its contents . . . . unsurprisingly denounces it as ‘threadbare’ and ‘shocking’.” Why would Tate characterize Andrew’s analysis in such a deprecatory manner? Does he think that Andrew was prejudiced? Why does he not trust Andrew’s assessment of the significance of its contents? Why did he not attempt to have a conversation with Andrew about it, as he did with other participants?

I should record that Andrew took a dim view of Wright and his fellow ‘conspiracy-theorists’. He wrote of Day’s paper: “It remains a shocking document – a classic example of a paper written to support a conclusion already arrived at which excludes important evidence to the contrary and turns on its head evidence which does not fit the preconceived conclusion”, and Andrew gives examples of Hollis’s positive track-record, and how misguided the characterization of Hollis’s roles was as presented in the report. Now, one could not expect Tate to argue on the merits of Day’s report, since he had not read it, but it seems to me utterly cavalier and irresponsible of him not to record Andrew’s judgment, and instead to imply that Andrew was party to a cover-up. I encourage readers to re-inspect these pages 517-521: Andrew also cites at length a 1988 report issued by K10R/1 that catalogues Wright’s dishonesty and fabrications, and points to the lack of intellectual rigour on the part of many of the investigators. Sadly, it is another of those anonymous items footnoted solely as ‘Security Service Archives’. Yet Tate should have at least recognized its existence.

‘The Spy Who Came In From The Circus’

Andrew has recently added further testimony to support one of his claims – that Wright had created false evidence to incriminate Hollis. In his 2024 biography of the MI5 officer Cyril Mills, The Spy Who Came in from the Circus, he reinforces his argument by quoting Mills’s disparaging view of how Wright, in Spycatcher, completely misrepresented Mills’s contributions in surveilling the Soviet Embassy. When Wright’s book was published, Mills – who had up until then been a stickler about confidentiality, and honouring his commitments – told his family that the real traitor was not Hollis, but Wright himself. The distortions by Wright that Mills documented for his bosses were later confirmed through an internal MI5 inquiry.

Tate makes no mention of another distinguished critic of Peter Wright – Hugh Trevor-Roper. In a withering review of Spycatcher in the Spectator of October 10, 1987 (republished in The Secret World of 2014), Trevor Roper lambasted Wright’s ‘advocacy coloured by personal prejudice’, noted some further errors to those that had already been listed, and characterized his approach as ‘somewhat paranoid’. Trevor-Roper was also the first to refer to the complaints made by Cyril Mills, as echoed by Andrew. He vented at the hypocrisy displayed by Wright, who claimed that he was on his crusade for the public good when he had already admitted that MI5 was ‘mole-free’ by the time the book was published.

That intellectual flabbiness was evident at the top is, nevertheless, undeniable. Andrew cites another unverifiable archival item in which Furnival-Jones (the Director-General between 1965 and 1972), ‘despite his own scepticism about “The Case against DRAT”’, informed the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office (Sir Philip Allen) and the Cabinet Secretary (Sir Burke Trend) of the investigation of Hollis, but for some reason failed to tell either the Home Secretary (Reginald Maudling) or the Prime Minister (Edward Heath), who had replaced Wilson after the June 1970 election. One might have expected a disciplined leader of MI5 to have carried out his own rigorous assaying of his subordinates’ extravagant claims before sharing with his political masters the facts of the internal divisions, but Tate characterizes Furnival-Jones as amiable and unenterprising.

Thus Tate allows Wright’s presentation of the ‘twenty-eight solid cases’ to hold sway. I shall not here analyze in depth such episodes, but merely record some of the obvious errors made in Wright’s presentation of the interrogation of Hollis in 1970, as recorded by Tate, since I have written about these beforehand. The first is Volkov’s claim about ‘the acting head of a section of the British counter-intelligence directorate’. Tate echoes the assertion that that must point to Hollis, the ‘acting head’ of F Branch during WWII. Yet B Branch was responsible for counter-intelligence; the mission of F Branch was controlling subversion, and Hollis was its permanent head after June 1941. Philby in MI6 was the obvious candidate. The second is a complete misrepresentation of Gouzenko, and the ‘ELLI’ accusations. The third is the outlandish suggestion that both Hollis and Mitchell owned the combination of length of service and access to information that would have allowed them to tip off Philby before his defection. To this, Tate notes without comment Wright’s claim that the evidence against Hollis was ‘far greater than any of the other people’. It is quite absurd. If Tate sincerely believed that the MI5 report was a stitch-up, and that Wright’s case was strong, he should at least have examined the evidence more carefully, and not have misrepresented the conclusions of the report.

Jonathan Aitken

Jonathan Aitken

Aitken’s insertion of himself into the controversy is quite extraordinary. Aitken had become a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1974. He was a colourful showman of solid ‘pedigree’, with a varied and stimulating background career. He had been introduced to James Angleton at the Army and Navy Club in December 1979, whereafter events took an alarming shape. Angleton expressed his suspicions about the security of Britain’s intelligence services, introduced him to Arthur Martin (now employed as a clerk in the House of Commons), and Aitken was excited enough about what he was told by Martin and his wife (who had been Guy Liddell’s secretary) to join the bandwagon.

On January 31, 1980, Aitken thus wrote a long letter to Margaret Thatcher, attempting to bypass normal Civil Service channels, outlining his concerns, and recommending action. (Tate refers to it as an exhibit of the Supreme Court of News South Wales: as I mentioned earlier, the full text appears as Appendix A in Pincher’s A Web of Deception, and it has recently been published in PREM 19/951.) It comprises an astonishingly arrogant set of largely unsubstantiated claims, laying out a supposed case against Hollis, and asserting that ‘Hollis and Mitchell between them recruited other unidentified Soviet Agents into the Security Service’, and that it followed from that the Security Services [sic] ‘may still be severely penetrated today’. In summary, he recommended a full independent inquiry, an interrogation of Mitchell (Hollis was dead), statements to be made to the House of Commons, and a reform of the Security Service with a view to amalgamating MI5 and MI6. He signed off by expressing his hope to the Iron Lady that his suggestions would be ‘helpful’.

An even more melodramatic dimension to this outburst is the background. When Aitken met Angleton, he was apparently on his honeymoon, having just wedded Lolicia Azucki. Yet he had for some time before been dating Thatcher’s daughter, Carol, and had jilted her just after the election in May 1979, an event that apparently provoked almost as much grief to the Prime Minister as it did to her daughter, and caused her to overlook him for a ministerial post. (As a woman of traditional customs, Mrs. Thatcher may well have wanted to ask Aitken if his intentions towards her daughter had been honourable. Charles Moore wrote that she ‘deliberately overlooked his talents’ after he dumped Carol.) Thus the bold approach could be interpreted in different ways: as a cold-blooded gesture to remind his boss of his independence and imaginative ways; as an innocent and sincere initiative, since he might have supposed that romance was inevitably a messy business, but outside the realm of politics; or as a means of trying to ingratiate himself with her by genuinely alerting her to a real and present exposure. In any event, one might have expected Thatcher to have responded to his unsolicited advice with disdain.

Indeed, some years later, when confronted by Aitken again on the need for parliamentary oversight of MI5, she replied (as Tate records, citing Aitken’s biography of Thatcher): “What rot! That would mean people like you poking their noses into security matters they know nothing about!” It is a shame that she did not respond that way back in February 1980, although, with her rather two-dimensional view of the world, she was as much a novice in the world of intelligence as Aitken himself was. Outwardly, that was what happened. The letter nevertheless found its way to Sir Robert Armstrong (as Tate reports), who advised her to ignore Aitken’s recommendations, and a few weeks later Aitken received a curt response, indicating that Thatcher knew about the allegations.

The Plot

Yet Martin continued to leak. Aitken later told Tate that he was not concerned about the Official Secrets Act. Jonathan Penrose and Chapman Pincher were reported to be working on new embarrassing stories. It was probably Pincher’s approach to the Attorney-General Sir Peter Rawlinson, indicating that he was writing a book about Hollis, and was looking for some government help, that provoked the fateful decision by Armstrong and Thatcher. On June 10, 1980, Armstrong wrote to Thatcher, suggesting that Pincher, as a friendly right-wing journalist, might be relied upon to defuse the coming Hollis scandal by declaring that he had been found innocent, by the original investigation as well as by Sir Burke Trend’s lengthy analysis. Thatcher soon agreed to the scheme, although the cut-out of the Attorney-General was used to provide deniability about an official government leak. As Tate writes, the move was not only probably illegal, but also naive. “Armstrong grossly underestimated Pincher’s willingness to cause mischief and his genuinely extensive contacts among the group of dissident molehunters who fervently believed in Hollis’s guilt.”

Robert Armstrong

Thus the conspiracy to try to exploit Pincher as a way of muffling Martin – and Wright – has to be seen in a new light. Tate presents the parallel negotiations between Wright and Rothschild as completely unrelated to the Armstrong/Thatcher dealings with Pincher. “By a remarkable coincidence,” he writes, “Rothschild’s plan for publishing Peter Wright’s dossier involved the same intelligence muckraker.” Yet Rothschild had been in contact with Wright for some years, he had been keeping MI5 informed of Wright’s grievances and plans, he had been feeding Pincher with juicy tales from MI5 for some time, he had been in regular contact with Dick White on intelligence matters, he had his own ambitions for playing a dominant role in the Intelligence Services *, and he was on close terms with Armstrong. Furthermore, he had experienced that visit when in hospital (almost certainly by White: see https://coldspur.com/the-still-elusive-victor-rothschild/ ) where he had been encouraged in the plan to dismantle the Wright detonator by transferring the authorship elsewhere. He later requested cover when Wright planned to reveal his role at the trial, and warned Armstrong that he would disclose the names of other conspirators, prominently Maurice Oldfield #, if the Law continued to harass him. He was the ideal candidate to be the medium for the Armstrong-Thatcher plot.

[* Tate reports, using Moore’s biography of Thatcher, that Rothschild had in June 1979 recommended himself to the Prime Minister for the post of overseer of both Intelligence Agencies.

# Later in this report I debunk the notion that Oldfield would have been involved.]

Dick White is noticeably absent from Tate’s account of this period. Indeed, he has fewer entries in Tate’s Index than does Nigel West. Yet it is difficult not to see him as the ghost in the machine. As I wrote in my August posting, a few years later White told his biographer that he had warned Rothschild not to get involved too deeply with Wright. But Rothschild was dead then, and it was a typical example of self-serving mendaciousness from the man who for decades had been pulling the strings behind the scenes to protect his own reputation. I am confident that White and Rothschild were as involved with the plot as deeply as were Armstrong and Thatcher.

Before long, however, things began to turn sour. Pincher turned out not to be the compliant and sympathetic supporter Armstrong had judged him to be. For some reason, Rothschild was sluggish with his payments to Wright, who became impatient. When the first reactions to TTIT were somewhat quashed by Thatcher’s denials, Pincher wrote to Wright requesting new stories. Wright believed that he should be receiving royalties from the serialization of TTIT in the Daily Mail. Wright was angered by the way that Thatcher had evaded the challenges in her public statement, and wanted to renew the battle. He started to seek new outlets and fresh collaborators. Meanwhile, Armstrong and Thatcher had constructed a huge future hole for themselves by not taking any action to censor TTIT. The file PREM 15/591 shows the level of confusion reached, as memoranda are exchanged offering reminders that they were not officially supposed to have seen TTIT yet, and disingenuous questions being lobbed around as to who Pincher’s informant could possibly have been. And that error would turn out to be the vital factor that made the ‘Spycatcher’ trial such a disaster for Her Majesty’s Government.

One of the triggers that prompted Wright’s ire was the statement that Thatcher made to the House of Commons on March 26, 1981. Tate categorizes all three of her major points as ‘substantially false’, but I think he is being a bit shallow. Thatcher was careful to state that the leads gained by MI5 suggested that there ‘had been a Russian intelligence agent at a relatively senior level in British counter-intelligence in the last years of the war’, and she reduced the pressure on Hollis by stating that the leads could have pointed to Philby or Blunt. Wright, on the other hand, recalling the conclusions of the Fluency Committee, in his later affidavit asserted that the evidence of penetration had occurred ‘throughout the fifties and early sixties’, which would probably exclude Blunt *, and, since the betrayed operations were carried out by MI5, would presumably take a by now much less influential Philby out of the picture. His point on timing was no doubt correct, but no one who was hearing these statements for the first time knew exactly what Fluency had reported. On the other hand, Thatcher was essentially correct in the way she described how Burke Trend had examined the evidence in the files, and how he had offered a corrective to the shaky accusations made by Wright and his team. When Tate writes: “Her account of Trend’s verdict was the clearest evidence of her willingness to lie to parliament”, I believe he picks the wrong target.

[* I should point out that, in PREM 16/2230, John Hunt reports that Blunt had admitted providing information to the Soviets up until 1956. Of course, Blunt may have been lying, and he was probably involved with Philby’s escape in 1963.]

The ‘Spycatcher’ Trial

The account of the trial is where Tate really gets into his stride. Readers may be familiar with the broad outlines from Andrew’s history, from Malcolm Turnbull’s The Spycatcher Trial, and Richard Hall’s A Spy’s Revenge. They can cheerfully skip Chapman Pincher’s mendacious account in The Spycatcher Affair: A Web of Deception (although Tate lists it in his ‘Selected Bibliography’.) The trial in which Thatcher sent out Armstrong on a fool’s errand is the prime focus of Tate’s attention, and drives his story of how MI5 was placed into a proper statutory position (’Brought in from the Cold’) after the experience. The vital – and winning – point in the argument of the defence was that the government had taken no suppressive action in the cases of TTIT and Nigel West’s MI5: A Matter of Trust, even though both works had shown clear evidence of the leaking of secrets by intelligence insiders. What makes Tate’s narrative outstanding is the fact that he has carefully exploited files that have been declassified in the last few years, and, what is more, has identified several critical passages derived from secret archival material that was made available to Charles Moore, the authorized biographer of Thatcher (in particular Volume 3, 2019), and to Ian Beesley, who wrote a monumental Official History of the Cabinet Secretaries (2017), but which were removed from the files before they were released for public inspection (if the relevant file has not been permanently ‘closed’).

The government was in a bind in trying to ban the publication of Wright’s book. It had not seen the full text, of course, but it had to claim that the complete story was too confidential to be dissected and discussed, in order that it not be required to disclose secret documents in court. Otherwise it would have had to resort to discussing individual passages, which would have been embarrassing. Broadly, the contents would have fallen into five categories: 1) items that were known to be true, and dangerous, such as the accounts of ‘bugging and burgling’ across London; 2) items that were known to be true, but harmless, such as Wright’s description of his early career; 3) items that were known to be untrue, but dangerous, such as Wright’s more outlandish claims about Soviet penetration; 4) items that were untrue, but harmless, such as his account of explaining Blunt’s confession to Tess Rothschild; and 5) items that the authorities were really in the dark about, such as the accusations against Hollis, and MI5’s campaign against Harold Wilson – suspicions of whom, as Wright later admitted, had been harboured only by himself and one other colleague.

The trouble was that Robert Armstrong was ill-equipped to understand the context of any of these issues, and, while his resorting to the ‘too confidential to be discussed’ argument enabled him to conceal his ignorance, the reluctance of the government to enter into any challenges to Wright’s text contributed to the propaganda fall-out. The more energetically that the government tried to ban the book, the more Peter Wright was believed. The fact that the defence had to imply, for legal reasons, that Wright’s allegations were essentially valid, and did not offer any discrimination of them, gave even more power to the ‘Hollis is guilty’ chant.

The most significant item uncovered by Tate is clearly the idea expressed by Armstrong in June 1980 that the government should use Pincher as a way of controlling the narrative. While Charles Moore was allowed to see that memorandum, it was not released until December 2023, as part of PREM 19/591. Moreover, it was of course not divulged to Wright’s legal team, so that Armstrong was able to perjure himself quite shamelessly in the witness-box, claiming that Turnbull’s claims of complicity were just an ‘ingenious conspiracy theory’. Tate covers all this deception in his Epilogue [see below], where he justifiably lambasts the repeat of the policy of selectively releasing sensitive information to certain ‘approved’ writers, and then enforcing some level of control over what they are allowed to say.

It is worth recording some of the most important ‘bootlegged’ findings that, if they had been known at the time of the trial, would have had a very dramatic effect. They include Rothschild’s bid to become intelligence czar, and his discussions with Thatcher on the subject (p 116); the recognition by the Cabinet Office in the summer of 1980 that Rothschild and Wright were already acquainted (p 141); Armstrong’s warnings to Thatcher about being indulgent in allowing former intelligence officers to be indiscreet (p 151); and Thatcher’s subsequent deep concern, in June 1983, about the disclosures. Immediately after the trial, Armstrong started voicing deep concerns that MI5 should be brought under statutory control, and the debates and arguments that followed were heated (pp 275-278). One noticeable exception is the revelation that Armstrong recommended to Thatcher, in June 1980, that Chapman Pincher could be used to defuse the situation: the memorandum was included as part of PREM 19/591, although that file was not declassified until December 2023, which is why the item is such hot news now. Another important item (in PREM 19/1592), which I think Tate overlooks, is the statement made by Sir Anthony Kershaw, the head of the House of Commons Select Committee, in a letter dated November 29, 1986, that the government knew that Wright was the source of information for Pincher’s book. He wrote that two MI5 officers had read the text, and had come to that inescapable conclusion. He thus undermined the case that the government was making about not prosecuting the publishers of TTIT because it appeared not be reliant on an insider source.

The Epilogue

I believe the most significant chapter in the whole book is Tate’s Epilogue, where he describes the scandalous way in which archival material on the ‘Spycatcher’ case has been withheld – but very selectively released to a couple of writers. As stated above, the beneficiaries were Beesley, and Moore, whose Volume 3 of the authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher is the more important. Both writers describe, without any apparent sense of shame or unease, how they were allowed access to papers which had not yet been released to the public, or in fact would never be released at all (or which, individually, were removed from files before they were packaged for declassification, and, in some cases, digitization). What is outrageous, as Tate unequivocally spells out, is that this egregious behaviour is a carbon-copy of the original Thatcher-Armstrong plot. Civil servants have been making judgments about how to propagandize history, and try to ensure that the correct spin is put on events, without any apparent understanding that their highly improper actions would eventually come out in the wash.

‘The Official History of the Cabinet Secretaries’

Tate uses both Beesley and Moore, although in a rather chaotic and uneven manner. Despite being an ‘Official History’, Beesley’s work has been very poorly edited, with multiple typographical mistakes and a chaotic set of indexes. Beesley is a bit out of his depth in intelligence matters, makes several mistakes in his nomenclature, and fails to gain insights into the intrigues going on. As an example, in his chapter on John Hunt, he fails to make any mention of the coming crisis over Blunt in the late 1970s, where Hunt was intimately involved, an astonishing oversight given the evidence shown in PREM 16/2230. Yet he offers a wide range of items – primarily from ‘Cabinet Office Archives’ (or ‘papers’: the distinction is not clear) and from ‘Prime Minister’s Papers’ – hardly any of which boast an official file identifier, and are referenced solely by date. It is somewhat surprising that Beesley was not able to provide any file numbers, unlike Moore, since their research was roughly contemporaneous. Tate quotes thirty of these items, and they cover an assortment of Armstrong’s and Thatcher’s communications on how to handle the impending crisis, including evidence that Armstrong clearly spoke perjuriously in the witness-box in Australia.

Charles Moore

As for Moore, Tate invokes him more cautiously, offering only about a dozen references. Moore, however, does supply file numbers in his supporting Endnotes, and Tate has thus been able to inspect the files that have subsequently been declassified, primarily PREM 19/2506, which was released in December 2023. He claims that he has been able to determine that all the important documents that he cites from Moore have been removed from the relevant file. He is thus dependent upon Moore’s interpretation for what he read, and investigative historians like me cannot verify the sources. (Moore’s Endnotes are dotted with the rubric ‘DCCO’, namely ‘Document Consulted in the Cabinet Office’.) In Moore’s Chapter 8 of Volume 3 (‘Spycatcher: Wright and Wrong’) appear several documents described in this way [see Appendix 2], although it would take another extensive project to discover which of the items in Moore that are not specifically annotated by Tate, but catalogued with a file name (such as PREM 19/591, which was also declassified in December 2023), have been promulgated, and which had been removed beforehand. One very significant item that Moore was allowed to browse – and which he quotes from – is PREM/2500, which covers discussions about the Official Secrets Act, but it is still firmly closed.

I do not believe that all of Tate’s assessments are accurate: for instance, the document described in Note 92 of Chapter 8 in Moore’s book, which is among those that Tate says were removed, appears to exist on page 10 of the digitized version of PREM 19/2006. He makes a reference to Moore’s use of PREM 19/2500 on page 251 of the Thatcher biography, but that file is not listed in the relevant Endnotes. He attributes the reference to Rothschild’s ambitions to lord it over both intelligence services to Moore (p 234), but fails to mention that Moore’s Endnotes indicate that the two items cited came from PREM/2843. The descriptor of that file at TNA indicates that it covers meetings with the heads of the three intelligence services, as well as correspondence with Rothschild. Moore was able to ‘consult’ it, but it has been ‘closed and retained by the Cabinet Office’. This must be one of the most significant partially ‘bootlegged’ files. I thus do not have complete confidence in his process. A rigorous re-evaluation of Moore’s sources needs to be made.

‘Margaret Thatcher’ (Volume 3)

Moore has written a much more engaging book than Beesley’s, and has a sharper nose for the political nuances. Unfortunately, he has also been susceptible to the interview with participants, and Lord Armstrong – as he was when interviewed – was probably as notoriously deceptive in speaking to Moore as he was when appearing in New South Wales. Why should one expect otherwise? And he is also very indulgent with Wright’s character, describing him (in a footnote on page 237) in the following flattering terms: “  . . . his knowledge of the facts was strong, his experience at a senior level in MI5 lengthy and his record of zeal in pursuing treachery unblemished.” In one respect, however, Moore sheds greater light on the machinations behind the dealings with Pincher, when he describes Rothschild’s role. Yet, for some reason, Tate ignores Moore’s very detailed coverage of Rothschild (pp 241-246), where the author, having set up the rather ingenuous statement made by Armstrong to Thatcher in March 1981 that ‘Pincher is known to be acquainted with Lord Rothschild’ (an item acknowledged by Tate), goes on to explore Rothschild’s movements behind the scenes, and his desires to be publicly exonerated.

Moore grasps at Rothschild’s close involvement with the protagonists, but, possibly because of Armstrong’s input, fails to connect the dots. He justifiably raises the important rhetorical question: “If such a person as Lord Rothschild, so close to the world of secrets, had been orchestrating Pincher and Wright to disclose things illegally, why were he and Pincher not being chased by the authorities?”, and goes on to mention the probable conclusion with the government that Christopher Mallaby in the Cabinet Office had pointed out. Yet he fails to drive the point home, leaving the question unanswered, since his primary focus is Thatcher, not the wannabe Spycatcher.

Tate’s studied overlooking of these crucial passages is bizarre, however – almost as if he did not want to undermine his prominent claim that the Wright-Rothschild-Pincher arrangements were coincidental to what Armstrong and Thatcher were plotting. Readers will recall that I recorded two months ago how, according to Bower, both Armstrong and White were convinced that the sick-room adviser to Rothschild had been Maurice Oldfield. Yet the evidence from Moore (including an exchange that the author had with Armstrong) indicates that Rothschild’s introduction of Oldfield into the saga was the first and only time his name had been mentioned. Armstrong apparently did not believe Rothschild’s claim. I suspect, again, that Armstrong was covering up for White. The undeniable fact remains: Armstrong and Thatcher were planning to use Pincher in June 1980, just as the Rothschild-Wright negotiations were about to heat up.

Miscellaneous

I do not like the way that the supportive collateral information has been packaged. I have referred earlier to the arduous exercise of tracing Tate’s connections. It starts with his Endnotes, which lack clear associations with the pages to which they refer. Unlike, say, Andrew’s ‘History’, or Volumes 2 & 3 of Moore’s biography of Thatcher, the Endnotes lack any page header information concerning the pages or chapter to which they refer. I had to inscribe the relevant series of pages at the top of each Endnote page, in order to keep track. When Tate makes a cross-reference to either Beesley or Moore, instead of providing a link to the page number and relevant Endnote number, he simply enters a page number and a date of the minute or letter. Thus I had to turn to the relevant text, take note of the range of Endnote numbers on that page, and check Moore’s and Beesley’s Endnotes to identify the item of interest by its date. All too often, an item for that date could not be found on the page. It seems that the entries were not made by a dedicated professional. All this represents some unnecessary clutter that could have been prevented by the attentions of a qualified Editor.

The ‘Selected Biography’ is very sparse, and while excluding several books mentioned in the Endnotes, does list four volumes written by the notorious fabulist Chapman Pincher. The Endnotes themselves are messy. Apart from the regrettable practice of not providing page numbers above them to guide the reader, the notes themselves are very cluttered, with much repeated information. Each time Beesley’s or Moore’s book appears, for instance, the whole title and publication details appear within the Endnote itself. It is as if the Notes had been prepared by a well-intentioned intern who has not been guided in the correct use of ‘op. cits.’ and ‘ibids.’ The space saved could have been diverted to a structured list of archival sources and descriptions. I created such an inventory myself, finding over forty individual files, or sets of files, that Tate refers to, and which are described on the website of the National Archives. They range from KV (MI5) through HO (Home Office) and FCO (Foreign and Colonial Office) to CAB (Cabinet Office) and PREM (Prime Ministerial) items. A brief description of each would have been invaluable for the occasional researcher: I attach this list as Appendix 1.

Tate’s judgments are sometimes suspect. As I explained in my analysis of his Introduction, I am very critical of his consistent faith in what Wright wrote in his book and in his testimonies. He is in my opinion a bit too trusting of his conversational sources – rather as Moore was with Armstrong – thanking in his ‘Acknowledgements’ Lord Neil Kinnock, Jonathan Aitken and Nigel West, who were all ’refreshingly frank’ about their experiences. He makes an odd judgment that the surveillance of the union leader Jack Jones (who had been in Moscow’s pay, and was later recognized as one of its agents) ‘demonstrated that MI5 had abandoned any pretence of political neutrality’. MI5 did indeed engage in some dubious decisions about perceived threats, but it seems to me that the notion of ‘political neutrality’ should not extend to rejecting surveillance of confirmed subversives intent on overthrowing the constitution. (Jones turned out to be in the pay of the KGB.) He echoes unquestioningly legends such as that of ‘Gibby’s Spy’ (see https://coldspur.com/gibbys-spy/ ), which shows that a reading of coldspur archives might have benefitted him.

The author is rather cavalier about dates. Several times, when I wanted to pinpoint the timing of a statement or event, I turned to his Endnotes only to find that none was offered, and it would require access to Beesley or Moore to discover exactly when the episode occurred. That is a luxury that should not be demanded of curious readers. His style tends to be journalistic and clichéd (especially at the beginning of the book), a characteristic that is shown by the rather melodramatic presentation of personalities involved in the background to this story.

I also believe that he could have exploited to a greater extent recently declassified files. From my initial inspection, they are quite rich, and show the extraordinary lengths to which Armstrong, Thatcher and their minions went to conceal the deceptions, and to spin their messages for outlets such as the House of Commons. Certainly, the PREM 1951-1953 series offers more than appears from Tate’s references, and I judge he could have raided them more deeply instead of relying so heavily on Beesley and Moore. PREM 19/1634, on the Security Commission, and especially the instructions given, in April 1981 – shortly after her statement about the inquiry into Roger Hollis – to Lord Diplock and his team to ‘review security procedures and practices’ is also a very revealing file. Given that the report ascribed the impulse for the inquiry as being the revelations displayed in TTIT by Pincher, and that the Commission had no idea that Thatcher and Armstrong had facilitated that publication, the irony is heavy. Perhaps it was no surprise that the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister could well have been hoist with their own petard, and did walk into a minefield.

One of the troubling outcomes was another secret story that had been carefully protected. At the time the Security Commission issued its report in December 1981, Robert Armstrong, with some alarm, informed the Prime Minister that, because of the written evidence that Chapman Pincher had given the Commission, it was probable that a person identified as ‘FOLIO’ would soon be exposed. Pincher had claimed to know FOLIO well, and that he had visited him shortly before he died. Armstrong’s hint was that FOLIO was a spy, but Thatcher must have known to whom the Cabinet Secretary was referring. It was certainly Maurice Oldfield, an admitted homosexual who had died in March of that year. (She had been shocked and disbelieving when she learned the truth.) A faint handwritten inscription on Armstrong’s note confirms my conclusion by indicating that the memorandum should be copied to the ‘Oldfield’ file.

Maurice Oldfield

Yet the anecdote would reinforce the fact that it would have been very unlikely that Oldfield was the mystery person who had advised Rothschild in hospital, since he had lost his security clearance by then. Tate continues to assert that the ‘former MI6 chief’ was Oldfield, not White. If Tate had inspected Moore’s biography more closely, he would have discovered that another file, PREM 19/2483, also ‘closed’, but to which Moore had access, would show that Oldfield’s homosexual activities had been reported to Thatcher as early as November 1979, and that Thatcher wanted him out of his job by June 1980. By then, Oldfield was already dying from cancer. He would hardly have been in a position to advise Rothschild what action to take on the emerging Wright problem. Furthermore, his reputation would scarcely have been harmed by Rothschild’s naive threat to Armstrong, in January 1987, that he would expose ‘Oldfield’ for conspiratorial work on the Hollis case. He was conveniently dead, and could thus be maligned. On April 23, 1987, Thatcher informed the House of Commons that Oldfield’s security clearance had been cancelled in March 1980 because he had admitted to homosexual activities.

The reason that this possible exposure was embarrassing was the fact that the Commission’s Report had strongly made the point that homosexuals should not be recruited to sensitive government posts because of the risk of blackmail, and the outing of Oldfield would have been a difficult case to explain. (The report had also stressed that, during Positive Vetting, two of the characteristics that should disqualify a candidate were that the subject i) ‘has grossly infringed security regulations’, and ii) ‘has shown himself by act of speech to be unreliable, dishonest, untrustworthy or indiscreet’. Ironically, those exclusions would well apply to Armstrong’s own behaviour through the whole Pincher-Wright-Spycatcher business.) Armstrong also expressed the fear that Pincher might reveal the identity of Oldfield in the coming paperback version of TTIT, showing that he recognized what an unreliable medium the journalist had become. In fact, in the re-issue of TTIT, Pincher was guarded in his references to Oldfield. He did state that, on being posted to Washington, Oldfield had agreed to undertake a CIA polygraph test to confirm that, though a bachelor, he was not a homosexual, and, in his fresh Postscript, Pincher remarked that after Oldfield’s death, MI6 officers had carefully combed his living quarters to look for dangerous evidence. It would have taken a very sharp observer to put two and two together.

The initial leak, as Moore reports, actually came via the editor of the Daily Express, John Junor, who had himself been told by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir David McNee. It was McNee who had earlier advised the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, of the evidence found at Oldfield’s flat. Somehow, the actions that MI5 took in confronting Oldfield discouraged Junor from printing anything about the scandal, his rivals did not get wind of it, and Oldfield’s rapidly failing health may have induced a measure of sympathy. Thus the story lay buried for a few years. Whether Rothschild was responsible for the fresh rumours in the press that provoked Thatcher’s statement is another open question. The timing is very provocative, but what Rothschild had to gain from it is obscure, unless it was another collusion between him and Armstrong to distract attention from his role in the Wright business.

I noticed a number of errors that the author might want to correct should the book be considered for a re-print. It should be ‘Richard V. Hall’ (p 371). Auberon Waugh’s article (‘Lord Rothschild is Innocent’) appeared in the Spectator, not in Private Eye (p 354). The biographer of Harold Wilson was Philip ‘Ziegler’, not ‘Zeigler’ (p 347). The reference in Note 19 on p 345 should be to PREM 19/120, not to PREM 19/12. It is ‘Anthony’, not ‘Antony’ Blunt (p 352). On the other hand, it should be ‘Sir Antony Duff’, not ‘Sir Anthony’ (p 380). Victor Rothschild was not recruited by MI5 in the autumn of 1939, and his second wife was an ‘alumna’, not an ‘alumnus’, of Cambridge University (p 61). Tate means ‘orally’, not ‘verbally’ (p 175). The Oxford college should be identified as ‘Christ Church’, not ‘Christ Church college’ (p 213). ‘Peter Wright’s’ appears as ‘Peter Wight’s’ on page 145. In his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement of September 16 (which I read after completing the first draft of this bulletin) Richard Davenport-Hines points out that Stanley Baldwin was never a member of the Cambridge Apostles (p 46), that David Footman did not study at Oxford in the 1930s (p 63), and that it was Macmillan’s Conservative administration of 1962-63, not Wilson’s Labour government in 1964, which appointed Stuart Hampshire to review the operations of GCHQ (p 62).

Conclusions

The primary message behind Tate’s book, with its subtitle ‘How the Spycatcher Affair Brought M5 in from the Cold’ would appear to suggest that the embarrassing events in Australia were a critical trigger in putting MI5 on a proper statutory footing. Yet that is hardly news: Christopher Andrew’s chapter ‘The Origins of the Security Service Act’ (Section E, Chapter 11) covers the events very logically, and attributes the courtroom debacles as being a strong provocation for such legislation, with Armstrong quickly getting behind the move, and Thatcher eventually being persuaded. Yet, in the promotional description within the covers of the book, this aspect is ignored. The text instead focuses on Peter Wright: “This is the story of Peter Wright’s ruthless and often lawless obsession to uncover Russian spies, both real and imagined, his belated determination to reveal the truth [is there a missing comma here?] and the lengths to which the British government would go to silence him.”

Tate does not deliver on that mission, in my opinion. I see so much tension in the proximity of ‘obsession’, ‘real and imagined’, and ‘reveal the truth’ that cries out for some more profound examination. Until the FLUENCY Committee reports are released, I imagine that a close inspection of the claims of Soviet infiltration will be difficult to assess, but it should be possible to examine more critically the assertions as they are outlined in Spycatcher. I have started that exercise in my analysis of Wright’s double-agents, and of the ELLI controversy, in my debunking of ‘Gibby’s Spy’, and in my comments about the Lonsdale/Cohen case, and I hope some day to pick up the remaining pieces. While Tate has delivered strong and impressive new evidence about the conspiracies and cover-ups within the Cabinet Office, he has carefully avoided tackling the intriguing topic with which his flyleaf entices his readers. He characterizes Wright’s behaviour as ‘obsessive’, but spectacularly fails to analyze how that mania may have affected the accuracy of his accusations.

Another important comment concerns the role of conspiracy theories in intelligence historiography. Christopher Andrew has been quick to deride those unsatisfied by official explanations of puzzling events as ‘conspiracy theorists’ who live in a world unrooted in reality. This saga proves, however, that, when inexplicable events suggest a conspiracy at work, a theory should perhaps be developed for them. That is what Malcom Turnbull did, and challenged Robert Armstrong in court over it. Under oath, Armstrong told Turnbull that his theory was ‘totally untrue’. Baron Armstrong died in 2020: Moore’s devastating description of the deceit appeared in 2019. I wonder whether Armstrong read it, and whether a mischievous civil servant had judged that it was only proper that the secret be leaked before he died . . .

I should also record an important impression. To Catch a Spy led me to reading all three volumes of Moore’s biography, and that exercise clarified for me what enormous pressures Margaret Thatcher was under at the time the ‘Spycatcher’ business required her attention. In her struggles to make her economic policies concerning inflation and the reduction of the annual deficit work, she underwent strong resistance within her own cabinet. She had to deal with militant unions and growing unemployment. There was severe unrest in Northern Ireland, and she faced the ongoing challenge of defining a nuclear defence capability to deter the Soviet Union. It was an enormously onerous time for a new Prime Minister: while she had good instincts, and a solid eye/ear for loose or sloppy thinking, she was not a strategic thinker or a good delegator. Thus I think Robert Armstrong was very foolish to have encouraged her to enter picaresque games with Chapman Pincher. He should have been wise enough to steer her away from such intrigues rather than putting such ideas in her head.

Finally, what about the still unreleased files? In his Epilogue, Tate produced a stirring statement of outrage about the failure of the Cabinet Office to declassify so many important items – including the thirty-two files on the Peter Wright/Spycatcher case. Even Armstrong’s successor, Robin Butler – who declared that he knew what they contained – believes that they should be released. It is difficult to judge how anybody could in this decade be harmed by what they might divulge. Malcolm Turnbull already knows that he was cruelly deceived. The withholding of these important items represents a shocking evasion of responsibility, and a great insult to the intelligence of the public. Someone should make a fresh FOI request for all those items that were exceptionally shown to Charles Moore.

Appendix 1:

Kew Archives referred to by Tate:

Legend: ! = closed; # = declassified; * = digitized

BT 11/2835                 #         Sale of jet aircraft to Russia

CAB 21/3761              #          Publication of Sillitoe’s biography

CAB 21/4971              #         Minelaying in the Gulf of Bothnia

CAB 63/192-193        *          Hankey’s investigation into Security Service

CAB 164/1870-1901 !           Peter Wright: ‘Spycatcher’ case

CAB 301/30-31          #          MI5 Postwar Organizational Issues

CAB 301/270             *          John Cairncross

CAB 301/855              #          Prime Minister’s 1974 visit to Paris

CAB 301/861              *          Allegations about possible coup in 1968

CAB 301/927-2          *          Notes on Philby (1967-68)

FCO 30/7004              #          European Parliament & ‘Spycatcher’ extracts

FCO 40/2343              #          Publication of ‘Spycatcher’ in Hong Kong

FCO 158/28                *          Philby (PEACH) File 2

HO 287/145                #         Police Pensions

J 157/76                      #          Attorney-General vs. Newspaper Publishing PLC

KV 2/1420-1428         *          Gouzenko

KV 2/4607-4608         *          Goronwy Rees

KV 2/4393-4397         #         Flouds

KV 2/1543-1544         #         Clarks

KV 2/1555                  *         Cockburn

KV 2/1636-1646         *         Marshall

KV 2/3030-3031         *          Zuckerman

KV 2/3221-3222         *          Bernstein

KV 2/3444- 3448        *          Petrovs

KV 2/3993-3995         #          Dewick

KV 2/4531-4534         *          Rothschilds

KV 2/4601                  *          Rudolf Katz

KV 4/88                      #          Petrie’s 1941 Report on MI5

KV 4/466-467             *          Liddell’s Diaries

PREM 11/2800           #          1959 leak on space research

PREM 16/2230           #          PM briefings on Blunt

PREM 16/2230-1        !           Notes to briefings on Blunt

PREM 19/120             #          Blunt and Security

PREM 19/120-1          !           Notes to Blunt and Security [open 2032]

PREM 19/591             *          ‘Their Trade is Treachery’

PREM 19/918             !          Activities of Leo Long

PREM 19/1621           !           Publication of book by Bloch and Fitzgerald

PREM 19/1634           #          Review by Security Commission

PREM 19/1951-1953 *          ‘Their Trade is Treachery’ & Hollis

PREM 19/2500           !           Reform of Official Secrets Act

PREM 19/2504-2511 *          ‘Their Trade is Treachery’ & Wright

PREM 19/3942           *          Blunt & Home Affairs Select Committee

Appendix 2:

Moore’s DCCO Sources in ‘Spycatcher: Wright or wrong’

Additional Legend: % cited material removed before release (acc. Tate)

PREM 19/591 *%

PREM 19/1951 *%

PREM 19/1952 *

PREM 19/1953 *

PREM 19/1954 *% John Bettaney

PREM 19/2074 ! Defence: Zircon satellite Project Part 1

PREM 19/2483 ! Security: Sir Maurice Oldfield

PREM 19/2500 ! OSA [cited erroneously by Tate]

PREM 19/2505 *

PREM 19/2506 *%

PREM 19/2507 *

PREM 19/2508 *

PREM 19/2509 *

PREM 19/2510 *

PREM 19/2843 ! Security: Prime Minister’s Briefing

PREM 19/3530 ! Reform of OSA: Part 3

Appendix 3:

Directors General of MI5

1941-1946       David Petrie

1946-1953       Percy Sillitoe

1953-1956       Dick White

1956-1965       Roger Hollis

1965-1972       Martin Furnival-Jones

1972-1978       Michael Hanley

1978-1981       Howard Smith

1981-1985       John Jones

1985-1988       Antony Duff

1988-1992       Patrick Walker

Appendix 4:

Prime Ministers

1945-1951       Clement Attlee

1951-1955       Winston Churchill

1955-1957       Anthony Eden

1957-1963       Harold Macmillan

1963-1964       Alec Douglas-Home

1964-1970       Harold Wilson

1970-1974       Edward Heath

1974-1976       Harold Wilson

1976-1979       James Callaghan

1979-1990       Margaret Thatcher

Appendix 5:

Cabinet Secretaries

1947-1962       Norman Brook

1963-1973       Burke Trend

1973-1979       John Hunt

1979-1987       Robert Armstrong

1987-1997       Robin Butler

Appendix 6:

Chiefs of MI6

1939-1952       Stewart Menzies

1953-1956       John Sinclair

1956-1968       Dick White

1968-1973       John Rennie

1973-1978       Maurice Oldfield

1979-1982       Arthur (‘Dicky’) Frank

1982-1985       Colin Figures

1985-1989       Chris Curwen

Appendix 7:

Attorneys General

1945-1951       Hartley Shawcross

1951-1951       Frank Soskice

1951-1954       Lionel Heald

1954-1962       Reginald Manningham-Buller

1962-1964       John Hobson

1964-1970       Elwyn Jones

1970-1974       Peter Rawlinson

1974-1979       Samuel Silkin

1979-1987       Michael Havers

1987-1992       Patrick Mayhew

Appendix 8:

Home Secretaries

1940-1945       Herbert Morrison

1945-1945       Donald Sorrell

1945-1951       James Chuter Ede

1951-1954       David Maxwell Fyfe

1954-1957       Gwilym Lloyd George

1957-1962       Rab Butler

1962-1964       Henry Brooke

1964-1965       Frank Soskice

1965-1967       Roy Jenkins

1967-1970       James Callaghan

1970-1972       Reginald Maudling

1972-1974       Robert Carr

1974-1976       Roy Jenkins

1976-1979       Merlyn Rees

1979-1983       William Whitelaw

1983-1965       Leon Brittan

1985-1989       Douglas Hurd

1989-1990       David Waddington

Appendix 9:

Foreign Secretaries

1940-1945       Anthony Eden

1945-1951       Ernest Bevin

1951-1951       Herbert Morrison

1951-1955       Anthony Eden

1955-1955       Harold Macmillan

1955-1960       Selwyn Lloyd

1960-1963       Alec Douglas-Home

1963-1964       Rab Butler

1964-1965       Patrick Gordon Walker

1965-1966       Michael Stewart

1966-1968       George Brown

1968-1970       Michael Stewart

1970-1974       Alec Douglas-Home

1974-1976       James Callaghan

1976-1977       Anthony Crosland

1977-1979       David Owen

1979-1982       Peter Carrington

1982-1983       Francis Pym

1983-1989       Geoffrey Howe

1989-1989       John Major

1989-1995       Douglas Hurd

(Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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An Anxious Summer for Rees & Blunt

Goronwy Rees
Anthony Blunt after his exposure

[I had been intending to study closely Goronwy Rees’s files at Kew ever since they were released in October 2022. My correspondent Edward M. prompted me to bring forward my analysis when he recently drew my attention to MI5’s tentative idea about offering immunity to Anthony Blunt soon after the abscondment of Burgess and Maclean. I thank him for his percipience. Here is my analysis. In short, Blunt should have been nailed in 1951  . . .  Now read on.]

Contents:

Introduction

Players and Predicaments

The Sources

Phase 1: May 7 to May 25

Phase 2: May 25 to June 2

Phase 3: June 4 to June 12

Phase 4: June 13 to August 27

Conclusions

Envoi

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

Introduction

When Donald Maclean disappeared in May 1951, while it was a setback and an embarrassment to MI5, the Service could hardly have been shocked. After all, Maclean was shortly to be brought in for interrogation after a confident conclusion had been made, arising from the VENONA decryption project, that he was the spy HOMER who had passed on confidential material to the Soviets from Washington in 1944. The surveillance on him had been very obvious, but not comprehensive. On the other hand, his accompaniment by Guy Burgess by all accounts astonished and perturbed Guy Liddell and Dick White. Burgess was a troublesome character, but he was apparently not suspected of any treacherous activities. While he had had meetings with Maclean since his return to the UK in April, MI5 did not believe that the couple maintained a longstanding relationship. Yet Burgess had resided with Kim Philby, already under some suspicion, in Washington, and if a maverick like Burgess could have been a Soviet agent, what others might be lurking?

Moreover, the escape carried a strange twist. According to Burgess’s long-time friend, and former conspirator, Goronwy Rees, whose account of the events has been allowed to dominate the histories, MI6 and MI5 were alerted to Burgess’s disappearance – and maybe to the suspicion that he might have fled to the Soviet Union – the day before Maclean’s absence was officially noted by his employer, the Foreign Office, namely Monday May 28. (It may amuse some readers to learn that on Tuesday, May 29, J. D. Roberston of B Division applied for a Home Office Warrant to intercept Maclean’s mail. It was granted the same day.) The reason that Rees was ahead of the game was because Burgess had carried on a long and rambling telephone call with Margie, Rees’s wife, the morning of his escape, and her husband decided to inform MI6 and MI5 of his hunches when he returned home on Sunday, May 27, and learned about the conversation. Why would the academic draw unnecessary attention to his own dubious past, and his association with the traitors, at such a perilous time? And how could he have been so sure, after Burgess had been absent for just a couple of days, and before he knew that Maclean had also disappeared, that he had absconded to Moscow? This report explains the story that other accounts have overlooked. As with many of his cohorts and contemporaries, Rees left behind him a deceitful memoir, but his main adversaries in MI5 also showed a false trail.

Players and Predicaments

The action takes place between May 7 (a Monday), when Guy Burgess returns in disgrace from Washington, and August 31, when MI5 takes a closer look at Goronwy Rees’s collusion with Anthony Blunt. The key figures are Burgess, Blunt, Rees, David Footman (an MI6 officer), Guy Liddell (deputy director-general of MI5), and Dick White (head of B Division).

Burgess: Guy has been sent home in disgrace, and he is shortly facing dismissal from the Foreign Office. He thus needs to find a new job. With the net closing around Donald Maclean, he must quickly assess his own vulnerability, and ascertain from his fellow-spy Anthony Blunt what plans are in place to exfiltrate Maclean. He realizes that events in recent years, including his residing with the Philby household in Washington during his spell there, will provoke suspicions about his integrity. He must also check whether he can rely on his old friend and recruit Goronwy Rees, who had disastrously changed sides at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and whom he wanted killed at the time, not to denounce him. He has thus set up early assignments with Blunt (who, according to some reports, meets him at Southampton), and with Rees, at whose house in Sonning, Berkshire, he arrives later on the day he landed, May 7.

Blunt: Anthony Blunt, who left MI5 at the end of the war, has been kept informed of the progress on the HOMER case by his handler Yuri Modin, fed via Moscow Centre by the communications of Kim Philby, who, as MI6’s representative in Washington, has been privy to the investigation, and has passed on information to his handler. Contrary to many accounts, Moscow was thus not dependent on the arrival of Burgess to learn that Maclean indubitably fitted the profile of HOMER, identifiable by his trips to New York. Blunt is nervous: he had been recruited by Burgess in the 1930s, and he has a more obvious shadow hanging over him because he was known to have had communist sympathies in the past, and to have been caught passing on military information to the Soviets in 1944. That misdemeanor appears, however, to have been forgiven as a case of exuberant solidarity with the wartime ally, and he remains good friends with Liddell and White. Yet the possibility of a chain of disclosures, what with Philby coming under deep suspicion in the preceding years, and Burgess’s closeness to him in Washington, seriously unnerves him.

Rees: Goronwy Rees has three dark clouds hanging over him: i) in the late 1930s, he had agreed to supply Burgess with information (to the extent that he was given a cryptonym by the NKVD), although he knew that his friend was working for the Comintern; ii) he knew that Blunt had fulfilled the same role, since Guy had told him so; and iii) he has never disclosed any of this information to MI5, out of loyalty to his friends. The longer that time passes, the more awkward it would be to explain away any of these embarrassments. Since the breach with Burgess in 1939, he had restored his friendship with him, and after the war seen him frequently, to the chagrin of his wife and relatives, but he is grateful that Burgess has recently been an ocean away. He assumes that Blunt made a similar breakaway in 1939, but he is not certain.  A recent chance encounter, and a verbal assault by a drunken Maclean, accusing him of ‘ratting’, has caused him to think that Maclean may have been a Burgess recruit, as well. Thus, when Burgess writes to him from the U.S.A., requesting to visit, it fills him with some anxiety, even though he knows nothing about the revelations gained from the VENONA project. Rees had been working alongside David Footman in MI6 – though only part-time – at least until September 1949.

Footman: David Footman is a minor player, but as a friend of Burgess, Rees and Blunt, and as a vital conduit from MI6 to MI5, plays an important role in the scenario. When Burgess was working at the BBC in 1936, Footman had recruited him to report on communist activities in the universities. He is a novelist, and an intellectual historian of some stature in MI6, but also not utterly trusted because of his left-wing views. Indeed, items in Goronwy Rees’s file explicitly state that MI5 suspected that Footman had himself at some time been an agent of the Russian Intelligence Service. This testimony may have been supplied by Stuart Hampshire, whose identical claim can be seen in the Personal File of the Rothschilds.

Liddell: The deputy director-general of MI5 has had an uncomfortable time under Percy Sillitoe, a figure out of his depth and little respected by his subordinates. Liddell is not closely involved with the day-to-day counter-espionage projects, since the more politically astute Dick White has kept the HOMER investigation under his wing. As Blunt had been his personal assistant during WWII, Liddell retains a close admiration for him, and treats him as a consultant, meeting him frequently. One critical aspect of the case is that Liddell is away on leave in Wales from June 3 to June 12, a fact that is vital for verifying some of the claims made by Rees.

White: Dick White, the head of B Division, has steered the HOMER investigation, sometimes in ways that indicate that he would prefer the whole project be abandoned, yet he has been pushed to the climax by the growing evidence. He struggles in trying to control his sister intelligence organizations, GCHQ, which has exclusive control over some vital decrypts, MI6, which is overall protective of Philby, as well as the Foreign Office, which wants to prevaricate. He is, however, a more commanding figure than Sillitoe in the multiple meetings that take place. His main concern is that the FBI should not find out about the identity of HOMER before MI5 can inform them, and he is intent on controlling the damage when the news does come out. While he judges that Maclean is acting alone, he has for a few years held, alongside Liddell, strong suspicions about the possible treachery of Kim Philby, but he has been reluctant to speak out because of the entrenched support for him held by senior MI6 staff. He has, however, recently instructed his team to create a dossier on Philby for passing clandestinely on to the FBI, and this package contains suspicions about Burgess, partly owing to his close companionship with Philby in Washington. Yet White’s failure to act earlier means that he might later be held partially responsible for Philby’s disastrous posting to Washington.

(For further background reading, see https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/ and  https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-tangled-web/.)

The Sources

The primary sources are the memoirs (as personally written, or as described to biographers) of Goronwy Rees (A Chapter of Accidents, 1972), Dick White (The Perfect English Spy, 1995), and Yuri Modin (My Five Cambridge Friends, 1994). Rees’s contribution is extended by the reflections of his daughter, Jenny (Looking for Mr. Nobody, 1994 & 2000). Yet all these volumes must be treated with some caution, as each participant had reasons for disguising his exact role, and thus for omitting certain events, or for providing misleading information. A faulty memory (especially in the case of Rees, who drank more heavily than most of his colleagues and friends) may play a part.

‘A Chapter of Accidents’

Also important is Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason (1979), the revelations of which largely derived from what he was told by Rees. Conspiracy of Silence, by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (1987), is a noble endeavour to unravel the complexities of the Blunt case, but relies too much on oral testimony, and the authors fail to resolve the multiple contradictions that their narrative throws up. John Costello’s Mask of Treachery (1988) offers a solid couple of chapters on the events: Costello brings some very useful analysis of the FBI files to the case, and is good on the American connection, but he is less insightful on the aspects of the case concerning Rees. Boyle and Tom Bower (who took over the biography of White after Boyle’s death) conducted multiple interviews with persons who knew, or who were associated with, Blunt, Maclean and Burgess in 1951: these individuals occasionally provided dates to encounters that can probably be regarded as reliable, but The Perfect English Spy is overall a very untrustworthy guide to the events of this period.

‘The Spy Who Knew Everyone’

Two biographies of Burgess are useful. Andrew Lownie’s Stalin’s Englishman (2015) and, even more so, The Spy Who Knew Everyone (2016) by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, bring some important background research to the table. For example, Purvis and Hulbert’s research into David Footman is particularly enlightening. Miranda Carter’s profile of Blunt, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2002), is insightful, though now much out-of-date. The most significant source, however, is the set of files on Rees released to the National Archives in October 2022 (KV 2/4603-4608), which were obviously not available to Purvis and Hulbert when they wrote their book. KV 2/4603 is the most relevant to this inquiry, although some of the interrogations and interviews carried out in the 1950s and 1960s shed important light on the accuracy of statements made in 1951. (I hope at some stage to analyze in depth the five other files.) This resource is complemented by a rich timeline detailing the activities of Maclean and Burgess in the critical weeks of May 1951, which can be inspected at serial number 607P in KV 6/145, one of the files concerning the investigation of the ‘Leakage of Top Secret Foreign Office Telegrams in the U.S.A.’

A last, but problematic, resource is Nigel West’s Cold War Spymaster (2018), which contains a long (ninety-page) chapter on the Burgess-Maclean business, and how it contributed to Liddell’s decline. It offers a rich array of facts and background material, but it is densely packed with long extracts from Liddell’s Diaries, and from the archival material on MI5’s investigation, and is short on proper integrative analysis. Rather alarmingly, West cites as a source Goronwy Rees’s files (which he erroneously lists as KV 2/3102-4106), yet they were not released until October 2022, four years after his book appeared. Whether West was given privileged access to this material, or whether he was simply advised of its existence and future release, is never stated. In any case, he fails to exploit the files and the contradictions implicit in them, or to compare the ‘facts’ in them with other accounts, as I have set out to do.

One of the most significant aspects of this timeline is the detail concerning Burgess. Whereas Maclean was under constant surveillance (and thus his encounters with Burgess reliably recorded), and Maclean told Burgess that he knew about it, Burgess was officially not under suspicion. Yet the chronology shows many of his May 1951 activities when he was not in Maclean’s company. Regrettably it rarely indicates the source of each datum: while some may have been compiled from interviews with his friends and associates after the disappearance of the duo, many would suggest that Burgess himself was under surveillance from the time he landed at Southampton docks. (And he admitted to Blunt that he believed he was, a claim that Blunt passed on to Robert Cecil.) For example, the first entry upon his arrival on the Queen Mary on May 7, 1951, states that he was met at Victoria Station by Blunt and Burgess’s boy-friend Hewit, and that he or Hewit then telephoned Rees. This is contrary to other accounts that assert that Blunt met Burgess in Southampton, including statements made by Peter Wright. It strongly suggests that he was immediately being closely surveilled, even to the extent of a phone warrant. If the story about the telephone call had come from Rees, he surely would have recalled who it was on the other end of the line? Moreover, Burgess’s visit to the Reeses the same day is attributed to ‘Rees’s signed statement’, suggesting that the other information was gathered by less conventional means.

The last vital source consists of the Diaries of Guy Liddell. Since they had immediacy, being written up almost exclusively every night, they are probably very accurate – although Liddell certainly dissimulated occasionally. Moreover, much critical information has been redacted. Yet the journals show unfailingly Liddell’s attitudes, especially towards Blunt and Burgess, and help pinpoint some critical meetings.

There are many accounts of this period in the literature, but I believe all are flawed by relying too much on the testimony of Rees, Philby, Blunt, Burgess (via Driberg), and Modin, all of whom probably distorted the facts deliberately. The stories told by Costello, and by Purvis and Hulbert, are probably the most comprehensive. Overall, so many contradictions are evident, such as in the multiple claims that were made as to whose idea it was that Maclean should escape to Moscow. In my analysis, I shall not attempt to reconcile all the conflicts, but instead concentrate on summarizing the evidence as it relates to Rees’s behaviour. I shall occasionally present parenthetical comments to identify some common traps into which writers have stepped.

Phase 1: May 7 to May 25

The village of Sonning, Berkshire

Burgess did not immediately seek out Maclean when he arrived in England: his first encounter was with Blunt, whom he had telephoned from the Queen Mary to request to be met at Victoria Station. He then went that afternoon to stay with the Reeses at Sonning. In his memoir, Goronwy described how he had received letters from Guy outlining his speeding incidents, and the fact that he was being sent home in disgrace. Burgess wrote that he would probably have to resign from the Foreign Office, and he added that he wanted to discuss a job opportunity with Goronwy. Strangely, Rees wrote that he arrived ‘after a night in London’, a timing that does not tally with the surveillance record. After some spirited debates, Guy explained that he had received an offer as diplomatic correspondent to a national newspaper (the Daily Telegraph). He was also on his best behaviour, to the degree that Rees invited him to stay the following weekend (presumably that of 18-21 June).

That did not turn out: Rees (who had been ill) called off the invitation by telephone. During that call, Burgess told him that he had since shared with Maclean a contentious memorandum he had shown Rees, which came as a surprise to Rees. He stated in his memoir that he never saw Burgess again, but in his interrogation by Peter Wright in March 1965, he told him that he did in fact meet Burgess again a few days later, and that it was then that Burgess told him about the exchange with Maclean over his memorandum. (Whether that was a lie, or a failure of memory, is not clear: the surveillance reports do not indicate a second meeting.) Rees wrote that he ‘later’ [unqualified] heard from friends that Burgess had relapsed into erratic patterns of behaviour again, drinking heavily and taking lots of medication of various kinds. Indeed, Burgess seemed intent on being visible in the company of his friends at regular drinking-haunts: he had lunch with David Footman at the Reform Club on May 8; he lunched with Cyril Connolly the next day, and with Footman again on May 11, and was noticed at the Reform Club the following day.

Yet, by then, moves to exfiltrate Maclean had quickly developed. (The Mitrokhin Archive, as cited by Christopher Andrew, indicates that it was at Philby’s insistence: I have not been able to inspect the original note.) According to Yuri Modin, his Soviet handler, Blunt had passed on to him news from Burgess, the day Burgess left Sonning, and Modin was perturbed enough to contact his superiors in Moscow. (Much has been made of the fact that Burgess’s role was to deliver news about Maclean from Washington, but that is clearly absurd given the time it took him to make his passage, as I have explained elsewhere.) On May 10, Modin met Burgess and Blunt, accompanied by the rezident Korovin. Moscow had approved a strategy for Maclean to escape, and Burgess was instructed to prepare Maclean for the process. If the two met soon after, surveillance failed to pick up the encounter, although a telephone watch recorded that they spoke on May 14. Yet two provocative events occurred on May 11: Burgess was noticed telephoning Rees – a conversation that Rees did not record in his memoir – and that was the same day that Burgess had lunched with Footman. Had he perhaps confided in his two friends what was actually going on?

It would not be surprising that Burgess was under surveillance. In the past few years he had drawn undue attention to his behaviour and affiliations. It went back to 1940, when he was shown to be in touch with the Comintern when he embarked on an eventually aborted mission to Moscow with Isaiah Berlin. MI5 had opened a file on him in 1942, although Liddell wrote in his Diary, on June 15, 1951, that the Foreign Office had first referred his name to MI5 only in January 1950. He had misbehaved in Gibraltar and Tangier in December 1949, and soon after he was detected leaking information to Frederick Kuh, an American journalist with dubious connections. His misdemeanours, including other drunken incidents were investigated, but he was merely ‘admonished’, not ‘reprimanded’. He was, however, considered a security risk because of his association with Moura Budberg and the Halperns. Yet, despite this track-record, in 1950 he was posted to the highly visible and important Embassy in Washington, as second secretary, where Kim Philby agreed to have him as a lodger, in the belief that he could ‘control’ him better that way. But Burgess misbehaved there, too, and the association just confirmed the suspicions.

On May 15 (Tuesday), Burgess went to see Maclean at the Foreign Office, and lunched with him at the RAC Club. According to Modin, Maclean was depressed when Burgess had to tell him of the escape-plan, Burgess giving Korovin a report after the meeting. Maclean was judged to be in such a frail state that Moscow decided that Burgess should accompany him for part of the way, and then return to Britain. But this plan was quickly rejected as impracticable, and Burgess was set up to disappear for good. The availability of the weekend ferry from Southampton to St. Malo was discovered (by Blunt? Burgess? Modin?), and a plan to exploit it on May 25, the weekend before Maclean was originally due to be brought in for questioning, was developed. Some accounts have claimed that the day of escape was accelerated because of the imminence of the interrogation, but that is not borne out by the evidence. In addition, the stories about Kim Philby’s assumed role as the ‘Third Man’, and his supposed ability to warn Burgess so late in the day by sending him a coded message, ignore the impossibilities of his passing information from Washington to London, and the fact that the logistics of the escape, involving reception parties and transport in Europe, would not have been able to be adjusted at such short notice.

What is certain is that the Foreign Secretary approved the interrogation on May 25, but the actual date had been postponed until at least June 18, to allow time for Maclean’s wife to have her child. During that last week before the abscondment, the investigating committee continued to dither, with Sillitoe expressing extreme caution lest the FBI not be suitably informed first, but with further evidence mounting against Maclean. Burgess continued to lead a busy social life, being seen at several clubs, and lunching or dining with Maclean, and again with Footman, and meeting Tomás Harris, Halpern, Miller (his pick-up from the Queen Mary), Blunt, Pollock, Kemball-Johnston, and even his one-time headmaster at Eton, Robert Birley. His solitary drinking was recorded, which proves that a watch was being maintained on him. It was almost as if he was keen to gain attention, and to drag as many of his friends into the whirlpool that would be created when he left the country. One has to wonder what this garrulous individual said about his emotional stress and predicament to these close friends.

The S.S. ‘Falaise’

Burgess and Maclean made their infamous escape when Burgess, on the evening of May 25, picked up Maclean at his house, in Tatsfield, Surrey, and drove to Southampton, where they boarded the Falaise. The official MI5 account claims that Maclean’s absence was not noted until May 28. In his 1989 book, Molehunt, Nigel West, relying on MI5 insider information, asserted that a watchful Immigration Officer had noted Maclean’s identity when he passed through the port, and had alerted Leconfield House. The lack of acknowledgment of that tip might encourage theories that MI5 were in no haste to prevent the duo’s departure. West’s account is useful, although he is mistaken over the timing of the interrogation plans for Maclean, and he is also adamant that Burgess had not come under suspicion before he absconded – something we now know is not true. West includes the feeble White Paper written by Graham Mitchell concerning the defection, issued on September 23, 1955, as an Appendix to his book. He identifies multiple errors of fact in Mitchell’s text.

Phase 2: May 25 to June 2

Goronwy Rees had left for Oxford on May 24, to attend a meeting at All Souls, where he was the Estates Bursar, and he consequently missed some important action. Burgess had started the day on Friday May 25 by calling Footman, and then speaking to Blunt, where he gave his listeners a false alibi, telling them that he would be helping a friend over some difficulties during the weekend, but looked forward to having dinner with him the following week. After trying to contact W. H. Auden at the Spenders’, Burgess then apparently called the Rees household, wanting to speak to Margie. (He presumably knew that Goronwy would be away.) The events were recalled by Rees in his memoir, and were later described to his MI5 interrogators. There is an incongruous aspect to the account.

Margie called her husband on the morning of May 26 (Saturday), asking him whether Guy had come to Oxford to see him. She posed this question because Blunt’s boyfriend, Jimmy Hewit, had just called her in some agitation, as Burgess had not returned to the flat on Friday night. When Goronwy expressed only mild surprise at such an absence, she then informed him that Guy had telephoned her on Friday morning, but had rambled on in a very incoherent fashion. Rees again was not much perturbed, but it was not until he returned home on Sunday evening that his wife told him more about the conversation, which, rather oddly, Rees states occurred ‘the previous Friday’. Guy had implied that he was about to perform some startling act, and that he would not see the Reeses for some time.

Why had Margie waited until she saw her husband to describe the essence of Guy’s call? And, why, given what Guy told her, would she imagine that he might have sought her husband out in Oxford? Her behaviour simply does not make sense. Goronwy does not comment on the irrationality of her communications, but instead jumps to a highly controversial conclusion, interpreting Guy’s implied departure in the following terms: “ . . . having got so far I suddenly had an absolutely sure and certain, if irrational, intuition that Guy had gone to the Soviet Union.” Well, yes, intuitions are by definition irrational.

I believe Rees loses much credibility here. According to the book, he knows nothing about the Maclean investigation and threat to him, he believes that Burgess had probably given up his espionage some years before, and he recognizes only a vague friendship between Burgess and Maclean. He has recently dismissed Burgess’s absence as trivial. And then simply because of a puzzling speech by Guy to his wife, he makes an enormous conceptual leap in concluding that his friend has fled to Moscow – something he tells his wife. It seems to me far more likely that Burgess had confided in Goronwy (and probably in Footman, as well) what was afoot, and that Rees had concealed from Margie what Guy had told him.

In any event, Rees jumped into action. He claimed that, late on that Sunday night, he phoned ‘a friend, who was also a friend of Guy’s and a member of MI6’ [in fact, David Footman]. (A few years later, in March 1956, as his scandalous disclosures were starting to appear in The People, he would recall that these initiatives did not occur until the Monday morning.) He told Footman that Burgess had apparently ‘vanished into the blue’, said that he might have defected to the Soviet Union, and that MI5 should be told. Footman was incredulous, but promised to inform MI5 of what Rees had said. The following morning, Rees received a message from Footman saying that he had done as requested, and that MI5 would be contacting him. Before that, however, Rees wrote that he told another friend of Guy’s, ‘who had served in MI5 during the war’ [i.e. Anthony Blunt] what he had done, and that this person, ‘greatly distressed’, insisted on coming to see Rees the next day at Sonning, and there made a convincing case to him that his accusations concerning his friend were based on very flimsy evidence. He pointed out that Rees had not done anything when Burgess had told him, a long time before, that he was a spy. Rees nevertheless was determined to tell the authorities what he knew and thought, much to Blunt’s chagrin.

One can imagine Blunt’s consternation at this time. Rees believes that he is doing his friend a favour by declaring that Blunt had terminated any information-passing to Burgess in 1939. Yet Blunt must know that his ‘indiscretions’ of 1944, treated then as a foolish but well-intentioned act in reaching out to the Soviet ally, will be interpreted very differently if MI5 discovers that his unauthorized disclosures had in fact started in pre-war days. It is no surprise that he is ‘greatly distressed’ and wants to talk Rees out of his plan.

Rees’s story then goes astray, however. He wrote that he went to MI5 the next day (i.e. May 29) and saw an unnamed MI5 officer, to whom he poured out his story, being rather surprised that he was listened to with utter seriousness. The officer then startled him by saying that Burgess had not departed alone: he had been accompanied by Maclean, which made Rees think matters were even worse than they were. He completes his chapter by saying that he stepped out of the office, and immediately saw the newspaper headlines announcing that two British diplomats had vanished into the air. A few pages later in his memoir, he repeats the timing of his meeting: “When I first told them I believed Guy had gone to Moscow, it was largely out of a sense of desperation and urgency. Guy had hardly been two days gone . . .”

There are several things wrong with this story. First, Guy Liddell’s diary states that Rees came to see him on June 1. Second, Rees would later make much of the fact that, when Peter Wright questioned him in 1965 why he had not informed MI5 earlier about his suspicions, he had to wait ten days until the Security Service invited him in: see KV 2/4607. Third, the news that two diplomats were missing did not appear in the British press until June 7, when the Daily Express had a scoop. * Fourth, while a record of the meeting does occur in Rees’s file (at KW 2/4603, sn. 3H), and Dick White refers to it in his recollections to Bower, Peter Wright was completely ignorant of this June 1 meeting between Liddell and Rees. Wright reminds Rees that he came to Leconfield House on June 6 to see Dick White, and Rees agrees with Wright’s statement.

[* Newspapers.com does not maintain Daily Express issues from that time. I instead present a Daily Telegraph item from a few days later.]

‘The Daily Telegraph’, June 11, 1951

Now it is possible that, in 1972, when Rees was completing his memoir, with his memory possibly impaired by drink, he might have conflated two meetings, but the circumstances are such that it appears he wanted – or was instructed – to bury the June 1 encounter with Liddell. It was definitely White who informed him, on June 6, that Burgess had been accompanied by Maclean, at which Rees feigned such surprise, but the build-up to those conversations was so extraordinary (as I shall explain in the next section) that it stretches the imagination to think that Rees could have got the details so wrong. He incidentally also dithered evasively to Wright in 1965 concerning the truth of whether he had called Blunt immediately after phoning Footman, something he had no trouble affirming when he wrote his memoir.

Rees also claimed to Wright at that time that all that he had told Footman on May 27 was that Burgess was missing, and that he had definitely not told him the whole story. It makes Rees’s claims in his memoir look even more threadbare. Yet Rees persevered with his original assertions, no doubt thinking that any MI5 records would remain secret. Indeed, Andrew Boyle, in The Climate of Treason (which relied very much on Rees’s disclosures to him) reported that Rees told him that he had informed Footman of his suspicions about Burgess and Moscow, and that Footman confirmed that Rees indeed told him that over the telephone. Boyle also reinforces the account that any meeting that Rees held with MI5 did not take place until much later (he actually states June 7), thus implying that Rees tried to conceal his June 1 meeting with Liddell from the author.

Liddell’s diary entry is perfunctory, and not very useful, but it shows little sign of shock, given that, at the time, Liddell and White knew only that Burgess and Maclean had disappeared in France, and, perhaps surprisingly, harboured no hunches that they might have moved on to Moscow. He wrote: “Garonwy [sic] Rees came to tell me about a conversation his wife had with Burgess before the latter’s departure. I said that I would very much like to have as accurate an account as possible. He promised to do this in conjunction with his wife and let me know. He thought the conversation sinister.” Either Liddell was being very deceptive and cagey, or Rees had backed off at the last minute from his intuitions, or perhaps he had even invented his description of them to Footman for the purposes of spicing up his memoir. What is also very suspicious is that accounts of the exchange that appear in Rees’s file in April 1956 state that Liddell ‘received a message’ from Rees that day: for some reason, somebody was anxious to conceal the fact from the officers in B Division that a meeting between the two had actually taken place. That misrepresentation was echoed in R. T. Reed’s note to file on June 6, where he states that ‘Geronwy [sic] Rees telephoned Captain Liddell last week to say that REES’ wife, MARGIE, had a very ‘alarming’ conversation with BURGESS the day before he left this country.’

Liddell’s diary entry was a verbatim reproduction of a memorandum that Liddell posted in Rees’s file that same day, which proves that Liddell’s fellow-officers (e.g. White, Reed, Robertson, and much later, Wright) should have known about the conversation. It does not display any element of outrage, which one might have expected if Rees had related his full story, including his own, and Blunt’s, transgressions, and his strong belief that Burgess had fled to Moscow. Of course, he was not supposed to know of Maclean’s disappearance (and maybe he did not), and, if he had leaked that, he would surely have raised the alarm, and would have been brought in for sharper questioning. Liddell’s note has been delivered in a very low-key manner, although Reed the same day imaginatively interprets Rees’s statement that Burgess’s comments were ‘alarming’ that it ‘presumably means that he intended to go to Russia’. This is a very paradoxical entry: was Reed much sharper than Liddell, or was he merely echoing what the Deputy Director-General had hinted to him orally? Liddell’s opinion about Burgess, expressed a couple of weeks later, might indicate the former, even though the March 1956 entry (see above) attributes the statement about Russia to Liddell himself. In any event, Dick White’s team in B Division was further along in the investigation than White later claimed.

The initial conclusion might be that Rees had been persuaded by Blunt to restrain his disclosures, and stick to the bare facts, which immediately casts doubt on how much Rees told Footman on the Sunday evening, and how little Footman in turn passed on to Liddell. Yet events were a little more complicated, I suspect. I judge that Blunt was not aware of Rees’s meeting with Liddell on June 1, and that he believed that his successful later insertion into the interview with Dick White was part of the first encounter that Rees had with MI5 officers.

[As an aside, Tom Bower presents an utterly incongruous account of the events of this week. He has Blunt calling Liddell on the morning of May 29 (the reason not given), when we know from Liddell’s diary that Blunt had been out all day, and that Liddell had called Blunt that evening. According to Bower, Liddell then confided in Blunt that Burgess had disappeared, and Blunt feigned surprise. Bower’s other illogical observations concern Rees’s lunch meeting with Liddell ‘later that week’. He declares that one outcome of that meeting was that Liddell ‘fell under suspicion as a Soviet agent’. That would imply either that Rees at the time expressed that view to other MI5 officers, or that Liddell learned of that belief from Rees himself, and passed it on to White and company. It is all very nonsensical. Rees did much later voice his concern (to Wright) that Liddell might have been a Soviet agent, but Liddell had been dead for several years by then.]

As Liddell’s diary entry confirms, however, he had instead, on the evening of May 29, asked Blunt what he knew about Burgess’s disappearance – perhaps as a reaction to Footman’s message, wanting to consult his friend before he met Rees. Blunt volunteered to him that he knew that Hewit had reported Burgess missing. The next day, Blunt and Tomás Harris (the MI5 officer who had been GARBO’s minder, and who was later also suspected of being under the control of the Soviets) came to see him, and Liddell (rather irresponsibly) told them that Burgess had left the country with another Foreign Office official. Thereupon Blunt asked whether that official was Maclean. Liddell confirmed that it was, at which Blunt gave his thumbnail sketch of Maclean, saying how astonished he had been at returning to Cambridge in 1934 to find that he and Burgess, as well as Cornford and Cornforth, had drifted into the Communist camp.

Blunt and Harris then shifted gears. They explained that they had come to their supposition about Maclean because Burgess had told Blunt that he would, that weekend, be having to help a friend who was in some sex trouble and was being blackmailed. The pair had speculated that the friend might have been Maclean, since he was known to be a homosexual. The three of them then discussed the money that Hewit had found in Burgess’s luggage when he returned from America, and pondered over its source – from the Russians? Lastly, Liddell gained an assurance from the two of them that they would not disclose to anyone that Burgess had been accompanied by Maclean. Yet the naive Liddell had already gone too far, disclosing such information to outsiders. His action in seeking out Blunt, and speaking confidentially to him, suggests to me that he had no inkling of the seriousness of Rees’s charges at the time. Moreover, Blunt and Rees must surely have discussed the matter in depth by then.

Liddell was also to enjoy a long discussion with Harris on the night of May 30, since Harris and his wife had the previous Wednesday entertained Burgess, who had apparently become quite emotional. Burgess had burst into tears when asked about Kim Philby, avowing how wonderful Philby had been to him. Liddell showed how out of touch he was with the whole situation by writing in his diary: “There may possibly be some significance in this, in spite of everything the Philbys had done to keep him straight, he had betrayed Kim through getting to know something about the MACLEAN case and acting on the information. There is no doubt that Kim Philby is thoroughly disgusted with BURGESS’s behaviour both inside his house and outside it.” Thus did the finest mind in British counter-intelligence work, with his firm belief in the good nature of those persons he liked: hoodwinked by Blunt, Burgess, and Philby, and even forgetting his recent (1947) suspicions about Philby, Liddell seemed to lag the insights then held by his protégé, Dick White, about the menace represented by him.

Dick White returned from Paris on June 1, and Liddell was able to tell him that Blunt had been ‘helpful’, and to describe his meeting with Rees earlier that day, explaining that he had asked Rees to provide a written account of the Burgess phone-call. But how much did he tell? He surely did not let White know that he had revealed to Blunt and Harris that Maclean had been the official who had accompanied Burgess (see below). My belief is that Rees had communicated to Liddell his serious accusations, but that Liddell had instructed Rees to write a much less incriminating report, and instead to save his critical exposures concerning Blunt and Burgess in 1939 for his session with White. Liddell thus posted a harmless note on file, failed to give White the full details, and tried to wash his hands of the whole business. It was all too painful for him. Yet the record of the ‘meeting’, not just a telephone conversation, endured.

Saturday June 2 was a working day: Liddell also engaged Blunt to explore possible places in France and Italy where Burgess and Maclean might have stayed. Then Liddell left for his week’s holiday in Wales, delegating the management of the case to White, having advised Sillitoe on his coming visit to Washington to appease the FBI. It was not the most auspicious time to take leave, but, as readers may recall when Philby explained the dalliance over the Volkov business in 1945, leave arrangements were treated with a high degree of respect in the intelligence services. Liddell felt he probably needed a breather, given what Rees had told him, but to absent himself while Rees was creating his report was very eccentric. He was nevertheless much more comfortable delegating everything to White, and letting him sort out the Blunt problem.

Phase 3: June 4 to June 12

Monday June 4 was a busy day for White, having to deal on his return to the office with a clumsy memorandum from Philby attempting to distance himself from Maclean, and to set about organizing the final dossier on Philby and Burgess. Arthur Martin took over preparing a brief for Sillitoe should his planned trip be finalized. Obviously pre-occupied, White agreed that no further interviewing of Rees should occur until his report had arrived and been digested. Little happened on June 5, although plans were being made to recall Philby, and MI6’s Drew left for Washington with a letter to be handed to him. Telephone intercepts allowed Blunt and Hewit to be overheard discussing how depressed Goronwy and Margie Rees were.

‘Looking for Mr. Nobody’

The next day (June 6) Rees handed his statement to Footman, who delivered it to White at 2:30 pm. The formal interview could now take place. Yet again, Rees’s account (as he passed on to his daughter) does not hold water. In Looking for Mr. Nobody, Jenny Rees writes: “When Rees met Guy Liddell, on 7 June [sic], he was surprised to learn that the meeting was not to take place in an office, but at an informal lunch. When he arrived, he was even more surprised to find Blunt there, too.” This is absurd, since Liddell was of course in Wales at the time. And in fact it was White who experienced the surprise. Rees’s MI5 file suggests that White was taken aback when Rees turned up for his interview (on June 6, incidentally) accompanied by Blunt! What is also outrageous is the fact that, in March 1956, after Rees had had his scandalous stories about Burgess published in The People, provoking fresh interest in him by MI5, he told Reed that, on the morning of his interview (on May 29!), he had dropped by at Blunt’s flat, and Blunt had insisted on accompanying Rees to the meeting . . . (See KV 2/4605 sn.165a)

A very amateurish recording of the meeting was made. White had hardly had time to read Rees’s report, since the time-stamp on the meeting reads as 3:10 pm. Yet what Rees put together was underwhelming. Far from spilling the beans on Burgess’s shady past, and Rees’s suspicions of him, Goronwy had put together an anodyne document that hardly touched on the dynamics of the Margie-Guy conversation as he represented it in his book. The report is spent largely describing Burgess’s professional problems, saying nothing about any communist links. Contrary to how Margie had characterized Guy’s demeanour beforehand, Burgess comes across as coherent, almost sensible. Only in the last sentence is a suggestion of turmoil hinted at: “M. said that during the conversation she had the impression that, if G. had come to some decision, he had only just made up his mind and had not made any definite plan.” This was a very timid performance by Rees, and sharply shows that the testimony he later provided in his memoir was an undignified show of braggadocio. If his report did truly correspond to what he had told Liddell a week beforehand, it is no wonder that the Deputy Director-General did not get excited. On the other hand, as I have suggested, Liddell had probably instructed Rees to turn in a very subdued account.

White made several mistakes in trying to interrogate Blunt and Rees at the same time. He should have rejected their group approach and insisted that they be interrogated separately. He should have prepared himself for the encounter, so that he knew what questions to ask, and would not have been caught out in so many mistakes of memory or ignorance. And he should have arranged for a proper transcription of the exchanges. As it is, the record is a technical failure, and an intelligence disaster. One outcome, however, of Rees’s stumbling effort to describe Burgess’s experience with the Comintern in the 1930s, and Rees’s and Blunt’s involvement with him in 1937, is that Rees was obliged to write up a more coherent account of what he admitted during the interview. And he did so immediately afterwards.

While it is difficult to unscramble the flow of the discussion from a very garbled transcription, White’s lack of reaction to what Rees (who dominates the briefing) says is extraordinary. He does not appear to be unduly perturbed when Rees describes Burgess’s association with the Comintern, and Blunt’s involvement in passing information to him. When Rees states that ‘Anthony was of course working for him’, White merely interrupts mildly, saying: “Can we stop a second – Were you consciously doing that, Anthony?”. When Blunt replies ‘No’, White simply echoes the ‘No’, but Rees then carries on in full flow before White can pick up the thread. White must have recalled the Comintern connection from Burgess’s aborted trip to Moscow with Isaiah Berlin in 1940 (see Misdefending the Realm, Chapter 4), and Blunt’s being detected passing on secrets to the Soviets in 1944. At this juncture, White should have reacted with horror at the news that Blunt had a possible espionage track-record going back over a decade, and had been helping Burgess in the 1930s. Either he was simply very slow on the uptake, or it came as no real surprise to him, since Liddell had already confided in him, and he concealed his horror. I suspect the former: he was simply overwhelmed, and his head was in a spin.

White does not give a very poised performance. He appears confused over the list of names of furtive Burgess cronies given to him by Rees (e.g. Katz, Arnesto, Pfeiffer). In any event, White suddenly discloses that Burgess was not alone when he disappeared, saying, with a Bondian flourish: “He’s not alone. He’s with a man called Maclean. Donald Maclean”, as if his two interlocutors would not have known who that person was. A few minutes earlier, Rees had even mentioned Maclean’s name alongside that of Blunt as one of those ‘who always worked with Burgess’, but White could not have been thinking clearly. Moreover, he was also unaware that Liddell had already confided in Blunt (and Harris) that Burgess had been accompanied by Maclean. So much for close cooperation: Liddell had not told him all.

At the close of the meeting, Rees was then instructed to provide a write-up of what he had just said. I do not believe that his report has been reproduced anywhere: it should be. I extract from it the following main points:

  1. Rees knew Burgess as an active Communist in 1932-1933. He left the Party in 1935, an action that offended many of his friends.
  2. After the rift, Rees became friendly with Burgess again in 1937.
  3. Burgess told Rees that he had left the Party under direction, and was now working for the Comintern.
  4. Burgess sought help from Rees, and stated that Blunt was also assisting him with information.
  5. Rees believed that Rolf Katz and Edouard Pfeiffer were two of his Communist associates, and he thought that Burgess was acting as an intermediary between Daladier and Chamberlain.
  6. Burgess told him that he passed on information to a Russian whom he met in small cafes.
  7. After the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced, Rees told Burgess that he wanted nothing more to do with his organization. Burgess said that Blunt was of the same mindset.
  8. Burgess pleaded for silence over the relationship: Rees told him (untruthfully) that he had deposited a statement about it in his bank.
  9. Rees nevertheless said that he believed that Burgess had given up his pro-Soviet commitment at the time of the Pact.
  10. Since then, and especially recently, Burgess had expressed anti-American views.
  11. May 7 was the last time that Rees saw Burgess, but the latter had a strange and long conversation with his wife on May 25, on which Rees had reported elsewhere.

I believe that Numbers 4 and 7 are the most important items in this statement  – Rees’s explicit incrimination of Blunt as a communist sympathizer like himself, who had similarly been assisting Burgess in his criminal endeavours, but who reputedly had abandoned his ideological commitment in September 1939. This should have been a red flag to White. It was the outstanding fact that Liddell did not want to deal with.

Yet it was this confession that White later stated brought him to apoplexy, in the way he described it to his biographer. White claimed that he challenged Rees on why he had not come forward beforehand, to which Rees responded that he thought that MI5 knew all about Burgess’s background. Both men were distorting what happened to aid their particular mission: Rees to conceal his moral dilemma, White to assert his individual ignorance about Burgess’s accepted misdemeanors, and to blame someone else for MI5’s institutional failure. What is important to underline, however, is that this statement was not made by Rees when alone with Liddell soon after the disappearance, as Rees claimed, but to White, in the company of Blunt, who must have been compliant in the story Rees told. (Bower’s account is muddled and chronologically wrong, by the way. For instance, he introduces Rees’s accusations against Hampshire and Liddell being made at this time, which is patently untrue.)

Unfortunately, Jenny Rees is responsible for further confusion surrounding these events, mixing up the chronology. She has her father meeting Stuart Hampshire ‘shortly after Guy and Maclean had disappeared’ at a party, where Rees expressed his terror over a meeting he was soon to have with Jim Skardon. (Yet Rees had no planned meeting with Skardon at this time.) Rees had confided in him that Blunt had been an agent, too, and Hampshire, to his eternal shame, admitted to Jenny that he had advised Rees to do nothing, and let MI5 sort it out for themselves. Yet Jenny places this before the June 7 meeting, and associates it with Rees’s accusations against Zaehner and Liddell, which happened much later. She also quotes what Rees reputedly wrote after the June 7 meeting with Liddell [!], in which Rees claimed that Liddell and Blunt tried to talk him out of his delusions about Burgess. (I cannot trace this passage: it is certainly not in A Chapter of Accidents, and Jenny Rees provides no sources.) Rees claimed he dug his heels in, and then, a few days later, kept a further meeting with Liddell and White. It is another sorry mess.

Yet there was a June 7 meeting, this time between White and Rees alone, which was also recorded – and with greater quality than that of the previous day. This time, White and Rees chat as if they were old friends, and they try to identify the roots of Burgess’s alienation, discussing Burgess’s friends and associates, and, after a tortuous discussion, coming up with the name of James Klugman as a probable recruiter. Rees also voices his suspicions about Footman. The whole exchange is very rambling, and does not reveal much, except to point out that White and Rees obviously enjoyed a collegial relationship, and the exchange was not at all antagonistic in the way White framed it later. White was far more perturbed about Blunt than he was angry with Rees.

Nothing dramatic concerning Rees happened for a few days. White was busy arranging for Martin to accompany Sillitoe to Washington, charged with taking the dossier on Philby and Burgess with him. The same day that Sillitoe and Martin flew out of London, Philby was in the air returning to Britain, and White prepared to interrogate him immediately he arrived, on July 12. Liddell had returned from his leave on June 11 (Monday), and he started catching up with what had happened in his absence. White updated Liddell on the meeting with Rees and Blunt, indicating that he had gained an unfavorable impression of Rees, who seemed very nervous, but White apparently did not tell Liddell about the more amiable discussion the following day. Liddell would surely have mentioned it in his diary if he had.

Liddell did record that King George VI had shown an interest in the case, and had requested that Liddell speak to the King’s secretary, Tommy Lascelles. Liddell said there was not much more to tell than could be read in the newspapers, and that the disappearance of the pair was probably due to blackmail or ‘to some espionage past’. He went on to write: “I was a little inclined to fear the latter, only there was no firm evidence on which to do beyond the fact that both parties had gone through a period of Left Wing activities while at the University. It seemed to me unlikely that a man of Burgess’s intelligence could imagine that he had any future in Russia, and I was rather forced to the conclusion that he might have thought that his past was catching up with him and the alternative was a stretch in Maidstone gaol.”

Yet this assessment was contradicted by a later diary entry for that day. After describing White’s experiences in interrogating Philby, and positing that Burgess may have had access to secret files on Philby’s desk, Liddell brings up the Volkov incident, and how badly it reflected on Philby’s role. He then records having dinner with Blunt, who felt he was being hounded by the Press – a revealing declaration that proves that the Burgess-Blunt association was public knowledge. “No new facts emerged”, Liddell wrote, “except that I feel certain that Anthony was never a conscious collaborator with BURGESS in any activities that he may have conducted on behalf of the Comintern (vide Rees’s statement).” At least White had informed Liddell about the Comintern connection, but it was a very lazy and unimaginative conclusion by Liddell, who was too trusting of what Blunt told him, and still reluctant to face the truth.

Phase 4: June 13 to August 27

Meanwhile, Rees was undergoing further setbacks. His ‘confession’ prompted Reed, on June 14, to submit a Home Office Warrant request to tap his telephone. When Burgess’s flat was searched on June 7, hundreds of letters addressed to him had been found in a guitar-case at the bottom of his wardrobe, including a few from Rees, which might have been incriminating. (Source: KV 2/4605, sn. 177a). And an enterprising journalist had uncovered telephone records from the Reform Club, which showed that Burgess had called the Reeses at Sonning just before he absconded. The Reeses’ house was soon besieged, and Goronwy and his family were severely harassed.

Yet Rees in fact enjoyed a brief respite from MI5’s attentions. The tranche of letters discovered in Burgess’s flat prompted a broader large-scale inquiry, with multiple new files opened and acquaintances interviewed, with the Rothschilds in particular becoming a focus of attention. Martin and Sillitoe were still in Washington, and the ruse to plant the dossier on Philby and Burgess was proceeding satisfactorily: they returned to London on June 18. White’s interrogation of Philby was inconclusive, but Menzies was persuaded that Kim would have to resign from MI6. Liddell reported that awkward questions had been asked in the House of Commons concerning the lack of screening of Burgess, and on June 23 Prime Minister Attlee agreed to set up a committee, under Alexander Cadogan, to investigate Foreign Office security.

Rees then drew unnecessary attention to himself. He gave an interview to a reporter from the Daily Mail, which resulted in a story headlined: ‘Burgess: One of the Nicest Men I Know’ appearing on June 18. Starting by saying ‘To my knowledge he is not a communist’, Rees went on to offer a grovelling defence of Burgess as a patriotic Englishman who would never harm his country. He attributed any eccentricities of his conduct to a fracture of the skull he incurred a few years before when he fell down some stairs. Why Rees volunteered this hypocritical nonsense is unclear: the malfeasance of Burgess and Maclean was becoming very public, and MI5 knew that Rees had given strong evidence incriminating Burgess. It made Rees look very foolish, and MI5 eventually decided to haul him in again.

On June 19, Robertson noted that Rees had been suspected of helping the Soviets acquire equipment for making penicillin from America, something the USA had been trying to ban. (This was an extraordinary series of incidents, involving the defector N.M. Borodin, that merits detailed coverage. Rees was not honest about his business relationship with the writer Henry Green, and the Pontifex company, at a time when Rees was working for MI6. I plan to pick up this story in my November bulletin.) The same day, John Lehmann, in an interview by Jim Skardon, criticized Rees and Blunt for not notifying the authorities of the politics of Burgess and Maclean. Around this time, Lehmann’s sister, Rosamund, had informed MI5 of the fact that Rees had told her in the late thirties that Burgess was working for the Comintern: Skardon interviewed her in October 1951 to confirm her story. Rees had told Reed and Robertson on July 24 that he had confided in Rosamund. MI5 maintained the telephone check on Rees: when his wife phoned Hewit on June 27, they learned that Rees had been ‘in an awful state over Guy’, not sleeping, and weeping every night. Following some ‘unusual’ conversations between the Reeses and Blunt, on July 6 Reed requested a re-imposition of telephone checks on Blunt.

Liddell continued to come to Blunt’s defence. On June 27, he reviewed a report on Philby that MI6 was about to send to the FBI. He deemed that it was too sympathetic to Rees’s claims concerning Burgess and the Comintern, he trusted what Blunt had claimed about ignorance of Burgess’s affiliation, and he judged that Blunt would have been very unlikely to get involved in such political activities. Moreover, he expressed his disbelief that Burgess could have been ‘a Comintern agent or an espionage agent in the ordinary accepted interpretation of these terms’. So what had Burgess been running from? And, if Maclean, why not Burgess or Blunt? Liddell does not examine such ideas.

Nevertheless, the interest in Blunt increased. On July 7, Owen O’Malley, a retired Foreign Office diplomat, informed Sir William Strang, the Permanent Under-Secretary, that Blunt had been a Communist at Cambridge alongside Burgess. And Dick White asked Liddell to arrange an interview with Blunt in the light of correspondence found in Burgess’s flat. Liddell took the opportunity to have lunch with Blunt, and quiz him about his communist activity at Cambridge. Blunt finessed the issue, stating that he had taken an intellectual interest in Marxism, but had never been attracted by the Russian implementation of it, and reiterated his belief that Burgess had been working for British Intelligence. Liddell seemed impressed enough with this testimony to pass it on immediately to White and his lieutenants, recording that what he told them appeared to ‘dispel their suspicions’ on a number of points. Robertson and Martin accordingly interviewed Blunt on July 14, when he gave them an utterly mendacious account of his association with Burgess, suggesting that the disciplines of the Communist Party were objectionable to Burgess, and, again, that any information that he had given him was in the belief that Burgess was working for British intelligence.

Yet sharper counter-espionage officers would have asked more penetrating questions. How could it be that Blunt received such a different impression from that of Rees, never believing that Burgess was working for the Comintern? Why would Rees have implied that Blunt was assisting him in that goal? Had Blunt not been a communist himself? (It seems that Robertson and Martin had not been informed that Blunt had been suspended from an Intelligence course at Minley Manor in 1940 because of his communist sympathies.) And why would Burgess have been ‘stunned’ by the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, if he had simply been working for British intelligence? Had Blunt really not worked everything out only when Rees recently told him that Burgess’s active work for the Russians had ceased?  In that case, when had Blunt believed that Burgess had really been working for the Russians? Yet the opportunity was missed.

On July 18, Dick White wrote a letter to Rees, asking him in a friendly fashion whether he could ‘look in’ at the MI5 office for an hour or two the following week. The outcome was that Rees underwent a more searching interview by Robertson and Martin on July 24. Yet he immediately tried to control the process, refusing to provide a full account of his knowledge of, and association with, Burgess, but stating instead that he would simply answer direct questions. What ensued was not a very revealing exercise: overall, Rees stuck to his guns, although he tripped up occasionally, describing Burgess’s attention to security in contradictory fashion, and letting some facts slip out about which he had previously expressed ignorance. His representation of Burgess as ‘the most complete Marxist he had ever known’, while expressing doubt as to whether Burgess would have considered spying after 1939, was, to me, a very flabby argument, but was not picked up by his interrogators. Robertson and Martin concluded that Rees was holding something back, instead revealing a part of the story as an insurance policy against MI5’s discovering the facts on their own. They also made the significant observation that ‘he may also have conferred with BLUNT before making his statement in order to give BLUNT the opportunity of producing his own denial’. They also noted that Rees had been very keen in trying to elicit from the two of them whether his statements concerning Burgess had been confirmed by any other source.

After reflection, Robertson wrote a note to White concerning the interview, in which he repeated some of the frustration arising from Rees’s evasiveness and contradictions. He pointed out the curious manner in which Rees and Blunt had presented themselves at the office to volunteer a statement, and then he turned the spotlight on Blunt, who seemed to him to have much more to lose because of his public position. “It seems to me very possible”, he wrote, “that, REES having informed BLUNT that he could no longer withhold from the proper authorities at least a part of what he knew about BURGESS, the two men came to an agreement whereby each would make a mutually agreed statement. This agreement would include an understanding that REES, in implicating BLUNT in Burgess’s activities, would do so in a manner that would not prevent BLUNT from denying it convincingly.”

This was a shrewd observation from Robertson, but his follow-up was less than stellar. He had suggested to Liddell himself that the latter ‘attempt to draw’ Blunt on the subject before the latter left for Greece, but the opportunity had not arisen. How a softball approach from Liddell, Blunt’s crony, might extract any breakthrough insight is not clear, but then Robertson himself displayed a similar indulgence towards Blunt. Addressing his boss, White, he wrote: “I should be grateful if you could now reconsider the matter yourself, with regard to the possibility of our telling BLUNT, on his return to this country, that we do not accept the truth of his statement unreservedly, at the same time guaranteeing to him (if you think we can go so far), that he will not suffer in his career or reputation, if he tells us with complete frankness of his knowledge of BURGESS’s espionage.”

This was a dramatic conceptual leap: suddenly considering immunity from prosecution for someone who had apparently been treated as a loyal ally up till then. Thus did the steely minds of MI5 deal with potential traitors in their midst. White could not have been happy that his junior officers were now starting to suspect Blunt. Maybe he had put Robertson up to this suggestion: White referred the memorandum to Liddell, and asked whether the Deputy Director-General would be prepared to interview Blunt. But nothing happened for a while. By the time Blunt returned from Greece, Liddell had left for the USA, being absent for the whole of September. Nevertheless, Liddell had time to issue a more disciplined riposte to White, who, on August 27 (having just returned from leave himself) reported to Robertson that Liddell had firm objections to giving Blunt open assurances without any considerations of the consequences of what he might say. (Liddell’s lack of expressed surprise at this initiative is telling: it was a canny attempt to cover his back.) White minuted to Robertson that they would have to re-think their strategy. It is clear that White again would have preferred that the whole matter be hushed up. Thus did the days of summer wind down, and the intensity of the investigation fade away. Not long afterwards, an officer in MI5 was present at a cocktail party also attended by Rees, and the latter was notably relieved to learn that the officer’s interpretation of events was that the BURGESS/MACLEAN case was being dropped.

Conclusions

Guy Burgess created havoc before he absconded. Aware that he was being watched, he drew in as many of his friends and associates as he could, leaving an obvious trail behind him. The cause of this may have been a degree of spite, not seeing why he should be singled out for banishment, but it may have taken place with the objective of causing MI5 to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort in chasing down his links, and in that way distract attention away from Blunt. In this project, the Security Service may have trawled up one or two confirmed miscreants (such as Alister Watson), but they also interviewed at length a number of misguided leftists from the 1930s who were now reformed characters, and no danger to the nation. The fact that the Foreign Office had not sacked Burgess earlier, but instead searched to find him a comfortable job, is shocking.

Anthony Blunt played a wily game, but he should have been doomed. Even Goronwy Rees’s reduced accusations should have been enough to condemn him. He believed that he had shrewdly manipulated Rees, and for most of the summer of 1951 appeared to be able to exploit his good relationships with Guy Liddell and Dick White to present himself as a useful consultant rather than a potential candidate for conspiracy. He was able to gain some respite because of their absences, and the welter of other events. That situation would not last, of course, but he surely persuaded his Soviet controllers (who had ‘ordered’ him to defect as well) that he was more useful keeping a watchful eye on matters back in London, and frustrating MI5’s inquiries. The insinuations made against Blunt at the end of this summer confirm the fact that he was by then already under grave suspicion as a Soviet agent of some long standing.

MI5 itself was dysfunctional. It was led by an ex-policeman, Sillitoe, who had to cable back to London from Washington for instructions on sensitive matters. His deputy, Liddell, largely stayed out of the picture, recording his private impressions and thoughts in his diary, and failing to take a leadership role in the investigation of Maclean and Burgess. A single man again, he could not even consider cancelling his summer holiday at a time of great intensity for the project. That was possibly because he keenly wanted to adopt a low profile. He did not communicate regularly with White, head of B Division, who himself did not show the discipline appropriate for a mature counter-intelligence officer. White had started to guess as to the enormity of the errors that MI5 had committed in its indulgence to communist sympathizers, and he feared that any public acknowledgment of the recruitment disasters that MI6 and MI5 had undertaken would probably destroy his career, as well as the independence of MI5.

The problem was that MI5 had no strategy in place for proceeding after the probable guilt of Soviet agents had been established. VENONA evidence could not be brought to any trial, and a confession from the subject was thus a necessity. The latter tactic worked in the case of Fuchs and Blake (who were not true-blooded Englishmen anyway, and thus should not have been trusted), and with Nunn May, but the thought of bringing Maclean to trial, after he had confessed (as he was surely about to) must have filled the hearts of White and his colleagues with extreme nervousness, when the indulgences over (for instance) Maclean’s abject behaviour in Cairo would have been received derisively. The theory that Maclean had been allowed to escape should not be discarded completely, as it was a pattern with Philby and Smolka, among others. Moreover, the skills of the interrogators were inadequate. They did not have the historical training to understand fully the political background to the events. They ambled into their sessions unprepared, they were not briefed properly, they were too deferential, and they were outwitted by university graduates who demonstrated sharper mental acuity. Dick White was a poor role model.

The other aspect was the pretence that such suspects should be allowed off scot-free on the condition that they told their inquisitors everything they knew. It probably started here, with Blunt. Of course, this policy of granting immunity from prosecution was based on self-delusion. How would they know that the candidate would tell them everything, or that what was divulged was true? Yet the indulgence was considered, for the benefit of a quiet life. John Cairncross was encouraged to resign at this time when confidential notes from him were found in Burgess’s apartment, while MI5 at this stage had no idea about the duration, breadth and depth of Cairncross’s espionage. Liddell’s cautiousness in this regard was praiseworthy (thought it may have been a ruse), but it was not authoritative enough, and he was not to last much longer in MI5.

The most troublesome, but also revealing, event is the meeting between Rees and Liddell, which Rees stifled in his memoir, and the existence of which was later concealed from junior MI5 officers, being downgraded to a ‘telephone conversation’. Indeed, soon after the meeting, on June 6, Reed confirmed it as such, but indicated that Liddell had used the word ‘alarming’. My suspicion is that Rees did indeed tell all to Liddell, who demanded that he downplay his suspicions in his immediate report, and that he reserve his full disclosures for his future interviews with MI5, namely with White. Liddell sanitized the essence of the discussion in his diary entry and his posting to Rees’s file, gave a careless hint to Reed, but withheld the frightful news from White, preferring that White discover it for himself. If Liddell now began to harbour severe misgivings about Blunt, he did not share them, but his laconic response when reading White’s suggestion for immunity for Blunt indicates to me that he understood the severity of the problem. It took Michael Straight to accuse Blunt, and prompt his confession, over a decade later, but Rees’s fury over the lack of action undertaken against him would lead to the eventual exposure of the art historian.

As for Rees, he comes out of this adventure with his reputation even more tarnished. It is difficult for me to understand how someone reputedly so smart as he (he was awarded a Fellowship at All Souls, after all) could be so gullible and impressionable. A mild flirtation with communism in the early 1930s was perhaps pardonable, but for him to reject Stalinism only in 1939, at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, shows a cavalier and obtuse blindness to the evils of Stalin’s oppression and purges. (The photograph below shows Rees at the May Day Parade in 1935.) Moreover, Rees had visited the Soviet Union in 1935, and he could have seen for himself what Communism meant in practice.

Rees on May Day 1935 (from ‘Looking for Mr. Nobody’)

His admiration for those two charlatans, Burgess and Blunt, is also astounding. Apparently impressed by Burgess’s brilliant mind, and his vivid and convincing explanation of Marxism, he was equally attracted to that woeful humbug, Blunt.  And that breach in 1939 did not allow him to reset his opinion of Burgess, despite the latter’s admission that he had broken with Communism, and taken up the fascist chant, on Moscow’s orders. Thereafter, Rees showed, in his mendacious and self-serving memoir, that he himself was a humbug who could easily be manipulated by Blunt, and he did not have the courage to tell a consistent story. He lived and died in the belief that the archival records would never appear to disprove his story.

Five years later, his world would fall apart when he was reckless enough to sell his story to The People, in which he pointed the finger closely at Blunt, without naming him, but brought down bitterness from his former friends for making such outrageous accusations. By that time, he was furious that Blunt had managed to escape undamaged and protected while Philby had been hounded and expelled from MI6. That outburst leads me to believe that he at some stage learned much more about Blunt’s long-standing espionage and treachery. He may have shared this with Liddell alone, but he had to soften his accusations when he underwent his formal interrogations, since Blunt was present. He set out doing what he did what he did out of a desperate attempt to salvage his honour, and to protect him and his friend from criminal charges, but he ended up feeling betrayed by Blunt.

Envoi

This article was prompted by my correspondent’s noticing the initiative to offer immunity to Blunt as early as 1951, and that episode is the main driver of this revision of history. When I wrote about the dissimulation over Blunt’s confession three-and-a-half years ago (see https://coldspur.com/the-hoax-of-the-blunt-confession-part-1/ and https://coldspur.com/the-hoax-of-the-blunt-confession-part-2/ ), I noted that Arthur Martin had been credited with the idea of offering Blunt immunity, but regarded the gesture as highly dubious. The evidence in Rees’s file proves that the idea had been simmering for thirteen years.

Moreover, while other Prime Ministers had inquired of their Cabinet Secretaries the circumstance of the Blunt immunity deal (with Jim Callaghan perhaps being the most perspicacious), it was Margaret Thatcher who was obliquely required to draw attention to it. I quoted in my first piece part of her statement to the House of Commons in November 1979, and I reproduce the key paragraphs here:

It was early in 1964 that new information was received relating to an earlier period which directly implicated Blunt. I cannot disclose the nature of that information but it was not usable as evidence on which to base a prosecution. In this situation, the security authorities were faced with a difficult choice. They could have decided to wait in the hope that further information which could be used as a basis for prosecuting Blunt would, in due course, be discovered. But the security authorities had already pursued their inquiries for nearly 13 years without obtaining firm evidence against Blunt. . . .

They therefore decided to ask the Attorney-General, through the acting Director of Public Prosecutions, to authorise them to offer Blunt immunity from prosecution, if he both confessed and agreed to co-operate in their further investigations.

Yet I believe I accepted too much of what Thatcher said, and I misrepresented the facts back in February 2021. I wrote: “Straight was invited over to the UK in October [1963], where he briefed Hollis and White, and a highly confidential immunity agreement for Blunt was made with the help of Cabinet Secretary Trend, Home Secretary Brooke, and Attorney General Hobson.” I am now certain that the deal was not arranged until April 1964 – but was done in haste. When John Hunt, the Cabinet Secretary, in December 1978 described to Prime Minister Jim Callaghan the events, he declared that MI5 had approached the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions on April 18, with a following exchange of letters, and that it was all set up for the ‘interrogation’ of April 23. A similar (but not identical) account, given by Robert Amstrong in November 1979, appears in PREM 19/120. Everything was performed with a speed uncharacteristic of the wheels of bureaucracy.

John Hobson

It was all part of the hoax. As the Times reported in July 2020: “The distinguished art historian was offered complete immunity if he confessed, a sordid deal with no legal basis that was agreed by the then attorney-general, Sir John Hobson.” Hobson was presented with a fait accompli, and he had to agree to it. An astonishing nugget from the Prime Minister’s folder on the case, PREM 16/2230, contains the following statement from the same John Hunt, written on July 3, 1974, and addressed to Harold Wilson, which carelessly confirms what happened: “Following his confession [my italics!] the case was referred to the Attorney General of the day (Sir John Hobson) who decided that the public interest lay against prosecution.” Thus the timing of the confession was staged to reflect Hobson’s approval after the event. The sequence could not have been spelled out any more plainly.

John Hunt

The facts are clear. Thirteen years takes us back to 1951. Blunt was indeed interrogated many times (the first on July 14, 1951), but he refused to confess. It took the testimony of Michael Straight to pin him down in the autumn of 1963. MI5 was not authorized to offer immunity, but it had done so without approval in December 1963, when Roger Hollis was still under the influence of his sponsor and colleague Dick White, now chief of MI6. It was White who had floated the idea of conditional immunity back in 1951. The decision whether to prosecute or not, however, was the responsibility of the Attorney General. The framed event of the April 1964 ‘confession’ was set up because the real confession had been made several months earlier before the Attorney General, John Hobson, even knew about it. Blunt should, however, have been nailed in 1951. It was primarily the pusillanimity of Liddell and White that allowed him to escape.

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The Still Elusive Victor Rothschild

‘Elusive Rothschild’

(My original plan was to publish this essay at the end of September, since I had a few weeks ago completed a study of the problems of Goronwy Rees and Anthony Blunt in the summer of 1951 that was ready for the August coldspur issue. I thus started work on a piece on Victor Rothschild, targeted for September. And then a correspondent alerted me to the fact that Tim Tate’s new book, To Catch A Spy, enhanced with the subtitle How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold, was going to be published in August. I immediately pre-ordered the item from amazon.uk, but decided that I needed to put my stake in the ground on Rothschild, Wright, Pincher and the Spycatcher business before I was influenced in any way by what Tate wrote. Thus I accelerated the development of this month’s piece: Rees and Blunt will now appear at the end of September. My copy of To Catch A Spy arrived a couple of days ago: I shall start reading it today. I shall dedicate my October bulletin to a review of Tate’s book, and to an update on the Borodin affair – which is turning out to be even more sinister than I earlier described.

P.S. This piece was created in some haste. I intend to re-structure it at some stage to give it a more logical flow. I hope that my readers will be indulgent, and will understand my desire to lay out the facts of my story promptly.

P.P.S. I have just noticed a report in the Times dated August 16 that describes Margaret Thatcher’s collusion with Sir Robert Amstrong, using Rothschild and Pincher, to promulgate the Hollis accusations that derived from Wright. See: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/history/article/margaret-thatcher-approved-leak-m15-rml5xdgrd .I imagine this matter is covered comprehensively in Tate’s book, and shall comment in my October posting.)

Contents:

Introduction

  1. Molehunting:

‘The Climate of Treason’

Rothschild and Wright

‘Their Trade Is Treachery’

An Impossible Delivery

Manipulation and Misinformation

Pincher’s Version

2. Agent of Influence

3. Zionism

4. MI5 & MI6 Postwar

5. The Kew Archive:

Introduction

Surveillance

Investigations (1)

Investigations (2)

Disclosures and Explanations

Rothschild’s Self-Importance

Burgess as Financial Advisor

Tess and Blunt

6. Conclusions

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

Introduction

What was Lord Rothschild up to at the end of World War II? And why was he so inextricably involved with the intelligence leakages of the 1980s? The questions about his loyalties, his connections with the Cambridge Five, and his activities in support of the Israeli effort to build an atomic bomb continue to float around in various memoirs and articles. Yet it is hard to pin down a reliable account of his life: what one might expect to be the gold standard of accuracy and integrity, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, has not updated its entry since 2010, and it is based largely on Kenneth Rose’s generally favourable but shallow biography of him, Elusive Rothschild. Since then, both Russian and British archival material has appeared (with several large files having been deposited at Kew by MI5 in 2022), yet no authoritative new account has appeared, so far as I know. The Wikipedia entry is a little more exploratory, but likewise deficient: it was updated recently, but apparently only because of the death in February of Jacob Rothschild, Victor’s eldest son. The Andrew Lownie Agency has recently announced that Weidenfeld & Nicholson has acquired the rights to Roley Thomas’s biography of Victor, titled The Spy and the Saboteur: the Untold Story of Victor Rothschild (see https://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/roley-thomas/books/the-spy-and-the-saboteur-the-untold-story-of-victor-rothschild). In what way Rothschild was a ‘spy’ or ‘saboteur’ (as opposed to a counter-espionage officer responsible for detecting sabotage attempts) is undeclared: I shall have to watch out for the publication of this volume, which is not due until late next year.

The most damaging claim against Lord Rothschild is that he had been a Soviet agent of some kind – perhaps simply an ‘agent of influence’, but also, in a more imaginative leap, the ‘Fifth Man’, at a time when Cairncross’s role had not been established. (Roland Perry’s assertion that Rothschild was the ‘Fifth Man’ can be quickly rejected, even though Perry dug out some intriguing ‘facts’ about his Lordship.) I dedicated a chapter in Misdefending the Realm to the phenomenon of agents of influence working in the shadows to assist Soviet objectives, and included Rothschild as the leading figure in that category. That same claim appeared from the Russian side, with the recollections of Ivan Serov, one-time chairman of both the KGB and the GRU (who died a month before Rothschild in early 1990), revealing through his posthumously published memoirs that Rothschild had for a short while been a valuable agent of influence.

In this piece I explore several critical aspects of Rothschild’s career. First of all, I examine closely the extraordinary role he played in the molehunting sagas of the 1970s and 1980s, as one in a triumvirate of deceptive characters. I consider this period very significant, because it brought parts of Rothschild’s hitherto private career into the public eye, and he began to realize that he could no longer control the narrative of his life. I believe that that recognition buffeted his ego, and his sense of prestige, and he never recovered from it. I next delve into other dimensions of his roles, using a variety of archival sources, that highlight some of the major conflicts in his life. Lastly, I offer a detailed analysis of the MI5 Personal Files on him and his wife (KV 2/4531-4534), recently released, which I believe are revealing as much for the inertia displayed by MI5 over the Rothschilds’ prevarications as they are for the intrinsic accounts that the couple gave of themselves.

I shall not cover in detail Rothschild’s career in his official capacity at MI5 during the war. He notably set up the B18 counter-sabotage section (in 1941 renamed B1c), and displayed some courage in his dismantling of bombs, although the self-aggrandizement of his feats, leading to the award of a George Medal, did not endear him to his colleagues. His other remarkable achievement was to introduce Anthony Blunt to Guy Liddell, who subsequently recruited him as his personal assistant, with disastrous consequences. He was also responsible for helping Eric Roberts set up the ‘Fifth Column’ to penetrate a group of Nazi sympathizers. (For a comprehensive account of this operation, see Robert Hutton’s Agent Jack, and my comments at https://coldspur.com/a-thanksgiving-round-up/ ).  At the end of the war, Rothschild successfully recommended to Liddell that his assistant, Tess Mayor, be awarded an M.B.E. for gallantry in Paris, but the objectivity of his judgment was somewhat tarnished by the fact that in 1946 he divorced Barbara and married Tess in August of that year. Overall, his reputation within MI5 – and outside – was good, to the extent that Duff Cooper even suggested that he should be appointed Director-General when Petrie retired.

  1. Molehunting:

‘The Climate of Treason’

Victor Rothschild’s problems started when he gained some unwelcome attention after the publication of Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason in 1979. Not only did a prominent photograph of the noble lord appear under one of a set of ‘Apostles’ from the 1930s (which included Blunt, ‘a close companion of Burgess and an ardent Marxist’), Rothschild was also described in potentially damaging ways in the text. He was presented as ‘the amiable Trinity neighbour’ of Burgess at Cambridge, who ‘professed sympathy with Socialism, but took no noticeably active part in proceedings of the non-Communist rump of the Labour Club to which Philby and Lees both belonged’. That was in fact a distortion of the politics of the Cambridge University Socialist Society, but the juxtaposition was nevertheless a little embarrassing. Furthermore, Boyle explained that Burgess had received Rothschild money for services rendered, and that he had been a tenant of Rothschild’s flat in Bentinck Street during the war.

Apostles and Rothschild (from ‘The Climate of Treason’)

A more serious incident reported by Boyle occurred during the winter of 1944-45, when Philby, Burgess and Malcolm Muggeridge were staying at the Rothschild mansion in Paris. Rothschild (as described by Muggeridge in his 1973 memoir Chronicles of Wasted Time) was provoked to criticize the withholding from the Soviets of Bletchley Park secrets concerning the German order of battle. That was a sensitive matter, as it suggested that Rothschild (and the others debating with him) knew for certain that such material had been withheld, as if they had all been privy to the highly secret way in which intelligence had been passed on to the Soviets. One could pose the questions: had any members of the group been told by Moscow that it was not receiving unrefined ULTRA transcripts through official channels, and how did the NKVD come to that conclusion? If that was indeed the case, whom did Moscow tell?

This gathering of anecdotes had started a buzz of chatter, which the journalist Auberon Waugh picked up in an article in the Spectator in June 1980. This piece was even significant enough to be copied into PREM 19/3942, a file curiously titled ‘Security of the Secret Service – Professor Blunt: Terms of Reference of the Home Affairs Select Committee with regard to the Security Service’. The whole text of the article (‘Lord Rothschild is Innocent’) can be seen on page 101. Of course it is a provocative title, since it implies that the subject had perhaps in some quarters been regarded as guilty, and Waugh is out to vindicate him. Yet Waugh had a notorious gift for irony, and the attention given to Rothschild surely displeased Waugh’s subject.

Auberon Waugh in the ‘Spectator’, June 1980

What Waugh had done was to identify that the anonymous hereditary peer who (according to Boyle) had been one of those persons questioned by MI5 after the defection of Burgess and Maclean was in fact Lord Rothschild, and Waugh qualified his revelation by stating that it would be very surprising if MI5 had not asked him to help in their investigations. Furthermore, ‘any suggestion which implied that Lord Rothschild could even have been under suspicion by MI5 as a Soviet agent or witting concealer of Soviet agents is so preposterous as to belong to the world of pulp fiction. . . .’. Waugh skillfully avoided any libel suit with this wording, but, according to Roland Perry in The Fifth Man (1994), Rothschild was very worried, and sensed trouble ahead. Perry’s mission was, however, to prove that Rothschild was indeed the ‘Fifth Man’, and he was as wrong about that as he was in underestimating John Cairncross’s contribution.

Chapman Pincher later went on to defend Rothschild’s reputation in Too Secret Too Long (1981), where he stressed Victor’s war-record, his working for MI5, and his award of the George Medal for bravery in anti-sabotage activity (something that the vainglorious lord had promoted a bit too eagerly). Pincher expanded on the Bentinck Street charivari, but absolved his lordship since he asserted that he could have had no knowledge that the residence he had sub-let had been harbouring two spies. “Innuendoes about his loyalty are completely groundless as his part in the exposure of Philby alone showed”, he wrote, an ingenuous statement that in its dubious logic downplayed the role of intrigue. Moreover, Pincher failed to mention Rothschild’s close association with the communists at Cambridge, and their memberships of the Apostles.

In 1980, Rothschild’s reputed contribution in exposing Philby was almost certainly not broadly known. Flora Solomon’s From Baku to Baker Street, in which she described her encounter with Rothschild in Israel, in 1962, where she informed him of her strong belief that Philby and Tomás Harris had been spies, was not published until 1984. (Did anyone make note of Pincher’s insight at the time?) By this time, however, Rothschild was beginning, in a defensive manoeuvre, to become involved in a curious triad consisting of himself, Chapman Pincher, and Peter Wright, an arrangement that would cause some enmities and jealousies, but which eventually led to the highly successful publication of Wright’s controversial Spycatcher in 1987. Pincher probably became acquainted with Rothschild in the mid-1970s. In Treachery, he describes how Rothschild had introduced him to Dick White ‘several years before’ 1982, and he also states how he had been in regular touch with him ever since the exposure of Blunt in 1979. In 1980, Pincher had been giving Rothschild advice concerning a possible libel action over the media speculation that he might have been a Soviet agent, even the infamous ‘Fifth Man’ of the Cambridge quintet. The Auberon Waugh article was a major irritation. Suddenly, on September 4, Pincher received a telephone call from Rothschild asking him to come and meet an ‘overseas acquaintance’ of his – who turned out to be the disgruntled Peter Wright. Pincher emphasized the unexpectedness of this call. But how did the participants arrive at this strange encounter? Sadly, the testimonies of all those involved – including Dick White – are riddled with untruths.

Rothschild and Wright 

The association between Wright and Rothschild went back much further. As Wright explained in Spycatcher (1986), Roger Hollis had introduced Wright to Rothschild in 1958, when Wright was trying to set up a scientific department in MI5, and Rothschild’s enthusiasm for what Wright was doing started a long period of admiration for Rothschild in the frequently under-appreciated MI5 officer. (One has to be wary of relying on what Wright wrote in Spycatcher, but these anecdotes sound authentic.) The pair maintained a supportive relationship, and Wright was asked to install Special Facilities (i.e. microphones) in Rothschild’s flat when Arthur Martin interviewed Flora Solomon there in the autumn of 1962. Rothschild was nervous about this, and sceptical that the devices would be disabled afterwards. As Wright wrote: “Victor was always convinced that MI5 were clandestinely tapping him to find out details of his intimate connections with the Israelis, and his furtiveness caused much good-humored hilarity in the office.” Rothschild would presumably have been shocked to learn of the surveillance carried on against him in 1951 when he and Tess were in regular contact with Anthony Blunt. In his 1979 book, Inside Story, Chapman Pincher refers to an unnamed ‘dissident’ MI5 officer (who must have been Pincher’s informant) who sought help from ‘a senior Whitehall personality’, known as ‘Q’. There is now no doubt about their identities.

A very stagey and melodramatic episode then followed, according to Wright’s largely apocryphal account. As he told it, shortly after Blunt had confessed (in 1964), he (Wright) was summoned to Hollis’s office, where he also found Rothschild and Furnival Jones. Hollis had just informed Rothschild about Blunt’s recent confession, and Rothschild looked ‘devastated’. The upshot was that Rothschild wanted Wright to be the bearer of the news to his wife, Tess, who had been very fond of Blunt (and had some sort of an affair with him, if what Pincher wrote in Treachery, based on what Kenneth Rose told him, can be trusted). “To her,” wrote Wright, “Blunt was a vulnerable and wonderfully gifted man, cruelly exposed to the everlasting burden of suspicion by providence and the betrayal of Guy Burgess.” Why Rothschild did not feel capable of taking the news to his wife, and why he thought that she would think better of him for delegating the task to the technical officer from MI5 (who admittedly had come to know Tess very well), was not explained. The mission was accomplished. Wright went with Evelyn McBarnett. Victor left the room. Tess was incredulous, and went ‘terribly pale’ as Wright told the whole story. The story is assuredly untrue, as the Rothschild Personal File reveals [see below]. It was a ruse to absolve Rothschild and his informer (Dick White) of breaching confidences, and Victor of recklessly informing his wife about the confession. In his account recorded in the Rothschild file, Wright knew that Tess had already been told about Blunt’s confession.

Martin Furnival Jones

Wright had kept up his association with Rothschild over the years. Rothschild would help him in his molehunts, dropping hints, and arranging another meeting with the reluctant Flora Solomon, who gave a lead to Sir Dennis Proctor, whom Wright believed had leaked information to Burgess. Rothschild had been appointed head of the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS) by Edward Heath in 1970, and thus had useful connections in government. Wright’s account of the events seems somewhat inflated, although the records in the Rothschild archive show a close level of familiarity. Rothschild soon addresses his letters to Wright as ‘Dear Peter’. On the other hand, Wright received some antidote to his enthusiasm for Rothschild: he wrote that the defector Anatoliy Golitsyn had told him in 1968 that the agents DAVID and ROSA named in the VENONA transcripts were in fact Victor and Tess Rothschild. Wright probably did not pass on this insight to his idol.

Sir Dennis Proctor

Thereafter Rothschild was involved with Wright in MI5 Director-General succession planning, using his influence to thwart Civil Service preferences. (Wright’s claimed position of influence here is not convincing.) And in 1975, when Blunt was dangerously ill, Rothschild expressed some nervousness as to what he might reveal in any testament to be made available after his death. He pressed Wright to provide a full briefing on ‘the damage Blunt could do if he chose to tell all’, indicating some serious alarm. While Rothschild ingeniously presented this as a concern for the reputation of current politicians and members of the government, he was surely holding his own interests paramount. In any event, Wright agreed that a full outline of the Ring of Five and their sympathizers should be compiled, listing all names even if no proof were attachable, and he duly composed it. It apparently pleased Robert Armstrong in the Cabinet Office (a close chum of Rothschild’s through the CPRS connection, and at first glance perhaps a surprising participant in this scheme), but how this project related to the possible exposure by Blunt, or whether Rothschild’s name appeared among the forty names listed, is not made clear. Spycatcher concluded when Wright said ‘farewell’ to Rothschild, and left for Australia. It would be left to others to describe the messes that followed.

Exactly what were the interactions between Rothschild, Pincher and Wright is hard to pin down, as much of the testimony comes from Pincher himself, who was duplicitous in attempting to conceal the fact that he had known Wright for some time, and had already been using his leaked intelligence, at the time that he was ‘introduced’ to Wright by Rothschild in September 1980. In Molehunt (1987), Nigel West devoted a chapter (‘The Red Shield Connection’) to the negotiations: it is a rich and fascinating account, benefitting especially from references to many comments appearing in the press in 1986, but impaired by West’s tendency to go off on many barely relevant tangents. West very capably draws out many of the contradictions implicit in the statements made by Pincher and Wright concerning the negotiations. In any event, Rothschild’s strategy in paying Wright’s airfare to come to Britain, and then setting up mechanisms for Wright to be paid royalties from the ensuing book by Pincher based on Wright’s memoirs (Their Trade Is Treachery), was astonishing. Rothschild was essentially encouraging a retired civil servant to breach the Official Secrets Act, and rewarding him for it. This was either a very reckless move, or else had some official blessing. What was Rothschild thinking?

‘Their Trade Is Treachery’

West expressed puzzlement over Rothschild’s motivations in encouraging Wright: he judged that his lordship was surely over-reacting to the Prime Minister’s statement of November 1979 that had justified the immunity arrangement with Blunt on the grounds that he might be able to assist MI5 in investigating Soviet penetration. West hinted at some possible underlying reason for Rothschild’s embarrassment by listing the conventional aspects of his career that may have alarmed the baron: the Burgess connection and payments; the DAVID and ROSA allegations; the Bentinck Street affairs. Yet the first items would have been known only to MI5 insiders, as would the other startling fact that West introduced – Rothschild’s recommendation to Guy Liddell in 1940 that he recruit Blunt to MI5. This was a startling revelation by West, as Liddell’s Diaries had not yet been published, and it should have generated much more interest than it appeared to. It must have been the secret that caused Rothschild the most anxiety. Yet again, his hyperactivity in wanting to control the narrative indicated a measure of guilt rather than innocence.

The precise nature of the communications that occurred between Wright, in Tasmania, and Rothschild, in Cambridge, leading up to Wright’s visit in September 1980 was for a long time unclear. From the authorized corner came Christopher Andrew, in Defend the Realm (2009), customarily exploiting ‘Security Service archives’ without identifying them. He suggested that Wright had written to Rothschild some time between 1976 and 1980 complaining about his pension arrangements and voicing his belief that writing a memoir might bring him in the money he needed. At that stage, Rothschild alerted MI5’s Director-General to Wright’s plans, suggesting that at that time he (Rothschild) was not unnerved by phenomena such as the Blunt confession, and was firmly on the side of the authorities. Yet when Wright wrote again in 1980 – Andrew provides an extract from the letter, but does not date it or source it – his letter explained that he thought he could publish his memoir, but believed he could avoid any penalty under the Official Secrets Act by staying in Australia. Now Rothschild took a different tack: he encouraged Wright, did not inform MI5 of what Wright was planning, and instead paid for Wright’s passage to the UK that summer. This was a shallow analysis by Andrew.

The story was in fact more complex than that. In 2003, Kenneth Rose had in Elusive Rothschild provided a closer breakdown of the events, having been able to inspect some of the correspondence. He stated that the first letter was sent in November 1976, thus confirming that the Director-General was Hanley. In this letter, Wright hinted that he wanted to write about some of the confessions that Blunt had made to him – which must have severely alarmed Rothschild. (Rose does not make that point, but since Rothschild had already expressed to Wright the previous year his concern about Blunt’s revelations, Wright’s intentions should not have been such a surprise to him.) Rothschild accordingly had not been idle, although why he thought that some enhancements to Wright’s pension might deter him from spilling the beans is not clear. Knowing the problem concerning the pension, he followed up with Hanley, suggesting a review of the arrangements. Hanley was unable to get the Civil Service to change its rules, and Rothschild had to inform Wright of that decision in May 1977. Two months later, when Wright expressed his determination to continue writing, Rothschild tried to assume a more active role of caretaker for Wright’s effusions, believing that in that way he would be able to control the narrative. Tess Rothschild also wrote to Wright, referring to the rumours circulating about a projected book by Andrew Boyle, and also mentioning that Anthony [Blunt] was nervous about his possibly being named.

Rose added further twists to the story. Tess wrote to Wright again just before Boyle’s book came out, updating him on developments. Her husband was not unduly harmed when it did appear (apart from the placement of the photograph), but his health suffered badly in the first few months of 1980, and, when the revised edition of The Climate of Treason was issued a few months later (with Blunt named, and three columns of indexed entries dedicated to him), it contained veiled references to two members of the House of Lords who had been questioned back in 1951, and Rothschild was soon identified as one of them. That brought events up to the Auberon Waugh article [see above], and, according to Rose, Rothschild panicked. Having made a vain attempt to ingratiate himself with Margaret Thatcher, he turned again to Wright in the hope that he might be able to produce a paper that would list all his loyal services to MI5, and thus exonerate him. That led to the visit by Wright in late summer, armed with a three-page testimonial and ten chapters of his embryonic book. Rothschild later told Rose that he had destroyed the testimonial. Yet Roland Perry was able to provide a summary of all the achievements that Wright compiled to portray Rothschild’s loyalty in his chapter ‘Victor’s List’ in The Fifth Man.

Auberon Waugh

According to West, when Rothschild saw Wright’s chapters, he changed his plan, and decided to assist in the publication of the book. The essence of the text now consisted mainly of charges against Roger Hollis, and Rothschild believed that it would thus powerfully distract the attention of the world from himself. Wright was quoted in a statement to the press in December 1986 that he showed the ‘true facts’ about Hollis in a paper that he laid before Rothschild. Yet the embryonic story still held troubling information about Rothschild, and probably other MI5 officers. By the time it arrived in print as Pincher’s Their Trade Is Treachery it had been censored: it conveniently did not include a single mention of Rothschild. A whole chapter on the peer had already been removed, at Rothschild’s insistence. It would seem that Wright and Rothschild must have come to some sort of agreement that guaranteed support as a quid pro quo for some excisions from Wright’s text.

In any event, Pincher was then introduced, and a deal was quickly struck, with Wright requesting 50% of any net profits that the book would bring. Rothschild set up the banking arrangements, and then largely absented himself from the proceedings. The correspondence between Pincher and Wright that followed made coded references to what ‘our mutual friend’ was undertaking to pass on revenues. We can see now that in his letters to Rothschild Wright had hinted at some of the possibly embarrassing disclosures he was prepared to make, and that Victor probably alerted his friends in MI5. They probably then all agreed to a deal whereby Rothschild would help Wright in exchange for Wright’s silence over sensitive issues, especially those potentially damaging revelations about Rothschild himself. The story was primarily about Roger Hollis. The point was, however, that any embarrassing revelations could not be restricted to Rothschild alone. Intelligence high-ups were happy to delegate the project to the safe pair of hands – and deep pockets – of Victor Rothschild.

An Impossible Delivery

While it is tangential to the Rothschild story, I believe the delivery of Their Trade is Treachery merits further attention, since the timeline defies credibility. Perry wrote that Pincher had to fly to Tasmania in October to carry out further research with Wright, where he discovered that he would have to ‘discard Wright’s document of nine chapters – 9000 words in all, after the removal of the chapter on Rothschild’. Pincher returned to London, gained the enthusiastic interest of his publisher, William Armstrong, at Sedgwick & Jackson, and set to work. Yet the book was published as early as March 13, 1981. Pincher had managed, apparently from scratch, to compile a book of over 100,000 words, in a few months. Moreover, as Pincher wrote in his ‘Postscript’ to the second edition of the book (the version in my possession), he claimed that MI5 had gained a copy of the script ‘at least a week in advance and probably well before that’, which telescopes the gestation period even further.

My conclusion is that Wright and Pincher must have been collaborating on the book that turned out to be titled Their Trade is Treachery for some time beforehand. Pincher did not inform his publisher of his source, or of the Rothschild connection, and it simply seems impossible to me that he could have put together such a monumental (though wrong-headed) work in that time when he was the other side of the world from Wright, and, according to his account, had had to discard everything that Wright had written. My suspicions were reinforced when I went back to Pincher’s Treachery (2011), where he reported that there was ‘disappointingly little meat in the chapters I saw’, and, extraordinarily, that ‘there was no mention whatever of the Hollis case’. (In November 1986, however, Pincher told the Daily Express that Wright had shown him a list of traitors, including Hollis, with which he proposed to deal.) Pincher said that he had to take notes from the chapters, as Wright would not let him carry with him anything that could be traced to him. He claimed, however, that he was able to extract from Wright all he knew about Hollis in ‘nine long days’. He arrived back home on October 24, and started work on the book immediately. Pincher then claimed that he wrote the book in less than four months, and delivered the typescript on January 13, 1981.

Against this lies a timeline offered by Nigel West that makes the project look totally impossible. In Molehunt, he has Pincher arriving in Tasmania on October 19 for a visit lasting two weeks. Returning to Britain (‘carrying Wright’s draft manuscript’ [!]), Pincher next offered a two-page synopsis to his publishers, and signed a contract with Sidgwick & Jackson on December 12, 1980. Pincher himself wrote, in A Web of Deception (see below) that the contract did not become valid until December 23. On that same date, miraculously, Pincher wrote to his publisher, William Armstrong, that he was ‘nearing the end of my labors’, ‘incorporating Wright’s information with what I already knew’. (Yet, several years later, he was able to state that MI5 had been able to prove that Wright had been a major source for the book.) According to West, Pincher was unaware that a copy of his synopsis had been handed to MI5, but Pincher stated that he knew that the shorter, two-page version of the synopsis had been shown to Sir Arthur Franks, the head of MI6. Pincher continued to work on his manuscript, which he delivered, with required legal changes, at the end of January, 1981. That constituted a very productive effort right through the festive season. The question must also be asked: why was Pincher so quick to agree to dedicate 50% of his royalties to Wright if there was so little that was new, and Wright would not even hand over his notes? It reinforces my view that Their Trade is Treachery had been largely written before Pincher ‘met’ Wright at the Rothschilds in September 1980.

In any event, by my reckoning, the period between October 24 and January 13 is less than three months, so I do not know how Pincher performed his calculations, nor whence he derived his source material, if all he had was notes taken from talking to Wright. He does not explain what happened to the chapters that Wright brought over to show Rothschild. The comment about the lack of coverage of Hollis is bewildering, given what West wrote, the fact that that story was one of the features that provoked Rothschild’s interest, and the obvious truth that Wright had a big grudge against Hollis. (In fact Wright did not publicly denounce Hollis until his Granada TV appearance in July 1984.) In addition, Rose provocatively quotes a letter from Rothschild to Pincher, written in July 1980, where Rothschild was ‘so convinced of Hollis’s innocence’, that he warned Pincher ‘against a small number of people who have got the subject on the brain to the extent of paranoia . . .’.  If Rothschild and Pincher were discussing Hollis the month before Wright was summoned to the United Kingdom, what was their business, and who had already been feeding Pincher with the material for Their Trade is Treachery? Was it Wright’s testimony – and maybe threats – that changed Rothschild’s attitude towards the accusations against Hollis, and make him more supportive of them? It sounds like that to me.

Manipulation and Misinformation

Pincher was obviously duplicitous about the whole affair. He continued to claim that he had not met Wright until Rothschild introduced him that summer, and providing contradictory information about the material he had access to. Yet he needed an intermediary to maintain the fiction that he and Wright had not met before: else Wright could simply have contacted him about assistance with writing and publication. In Treachery, Pincher stated that he had ‘been looking for someone like Wright for forty years’, ignoring the fact that his books must have been dependent on carefully managed leaks from within MI5. In Molehunt, Nigel West wrote that Pincher ‘had few, if any, sources within the British intelligence community’, but then went on to describe incidents that plainly showed he was the beneficiary of multiple leaks. He craftily showed that an episode in Inside Story (p 153), could easily be traceable to Wright as the ‘dissident MI5 officer’ involved in Operation SATYR. If Pincher was already speaking to such dissidents ready to talk to him, why would he suddenly deny their existence when retelling the encounter of September 1980? In any event, a war of words, with Rothschild and Pincher both trying to control the narrative, would erupt after the fall-out from the publication of Their Trade Is Treachery, spilling eventually into the controversial cauldron of the Australian law-courts.

It was the possibility that someone in intelligence had been manipulating and encouraging the publication of damaging accusations against Hollis that aroused these contrary narratives. The case is best couched in retrospect by a discussion between Peter Wright and his counsel, Malcom Turnbull, in pre-Spycatcher trial discussions in late 1986. Wright had argued to Turnbull that he believed that the involvement of Rothschild somehow gave a degree of official approval to his disclosure of information. Kenneth Rose quotes what Wright put on the record:

I knew Lord Rothschild to be an intimate confidant of successful heads of British intelligence establishments. I could not conceive of him embarking on such a project without knowing it had the sanction, albeit unofficial, of the authorities.

I sensed I was being drawn into an authorised but deniable operation which would enable the Hollis affair and other MI5 scandals to be placed in the public domain as the result of an apparently inspired leak.

All I know about Lord Rothschild and the ease with which ‘Their Trade Is Treachery’ was published leads me to the inescapable conclusion that the powers that be approved of the book.

Now this may have been sophistical cant, and Turnbull correctly was cautious. After all, had Rothschild not warned MI5 about Wright’s plan to write ‘vengeful memoirs’? Moreover, Wright was initially reluctant to drag his friend into the morass. Much later, however, Rothschild told his biographer about an influential friend who had visited him in hospital some time between February and April 1980. This visitor suggested to him the plan that culminated in the publication of Their Trade Is Treachery. Rothschild would not say who that figure was. Rose reasoned that it was probably Maurice Oldfield, partly because both Dick White and Robert Armstrong denied their own involvement when he spoke to them about it, and both suggested that it was most likely Oldfield, who had been the head of MI6 between 1973 and 1978. Yet it was perhaps unprofessional and dishonourable of both gentlemen to accept so quickly that there had in fact been such a leak, and to accuse someone who had never worked for MI5, and who was no longer around. Oldfield had conveniently died in March 1981.

Sir Robert Armstrong

I suspect the man was much more likely to have been Dick White himself. He had been a notorious, though vaguely anonymous, informant to Andrew Boyle behind the scenes, as Nigel West describes in Molehunt, in the chapter ‘Cover-up’. He had a dishonorable track-record of diverting attention to Hollis in the series of searches for traitors within inspired by the CIA’s noxious James Angleton, and adopted by Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. In fact he had a habit of casting aspersions on his professional colleagues (e.g. Liddell, Hollis, Oldfield, Rothschild) – but only when they were deceased and thus not able to counter the charges. Be that as it may, Wright’s action in going public with his claims, effectively ‘throwing Victor to the wolves’, in his own words, immediately brought some harsh attention from the press. In addition, Wright coloured his affidavit with so many untruths and misinterpretations that he caused his erstwhile friend a lot of grief. Rose may have been a bit too convinced of Rothschild’s essential innocence, since he deplored Wright’s evidence that Rothschild had thus lured ‘an innocent patriot into disloyalty.’ Wright was by no means an innocent patriot, but Rothschild was certainly one who loved intrigue and conspiracies, and manipulating matters behind the scenes, as Wright accurately portrayed him.

The central question still must be: why would Rothschild expose himself to the very serious charge of abetting someone to break the OSA, simply as a way of gaining publicity for a cause (the denigration of Hollis and the praise for Rothschild) that might distract from the negative publicity that Rothschild was receiving? After all, here was a man of some stature, known to have brought in a real mole into MI5, and now seen to have helped two dedicated molehunters, equally obsessed with unmasking Hollis, in publicizing their philippics! It was that conundrum that prompted Paul Greengrass, a member of Turnbull’s defence team (and the eventual ghost-writer of Spycatcher) to share his suspicions with the CIA that Wright and Rothschild had been encouraged to collaborate by MI5 (i.e. by Furnival Jones), and to use Pincher as the medium. In other words, the British Government wanted Their Trade is Treachery to be published. Yet, if that were true, Rothschild displayed a large amount of naivety in accepting the gauntlet, knowing that the act would be denied should accusations to that effect ever take place. In that situation, however, he would hardly have wanted to encourage and abet the struggling would-be author to bring his thoughts and memoirs to the printed page, and he would probably have preferred to let him fade away in rural Tasmania.

‘Inside Intelligence’ by Anthony Cavendish

A further hypothesis was presented by Anthony Cavendish in his 1990 memoir Inside Intelligence. Maurice Oldfield had been outed by Chapman Pincher in 1987 as a practicing homosexual who had had his security clearance dropped in 1980. According to Cavendish, the only other two persons to whom Oldfield had confided his secret back then were Sir Robert Armstrong and Victor Rothschild. Cavendish speculated that Rothschild may have shared this knowledge with Pincher in an attempt ‘to take the heat off the Wright case’. Yet that strikes me as rather absurd. While it could be interpreted as the mirror-image of Oldfield’s encouraging Rothschild to pursue the Hollis disclosures as a means of diverting attention from his own predicament (see above), such attempts at distraction would probably have only raised the public’s interest in the obsessions of the authorities concerning secrecy, and their clumsy efforts in disinformation exercises. One can hardly imagine Rothschild’s using his friend in such a mean and petty fashion, even if Oldfield had been dead for six years.

The succeeding events can be read in Rose’s chapter ‘Spies and Spycatcher’. As I indicated before, the essence was that Rothschild had been brought to a measure of despair by the criticisms, and by a question in the House of Commons as to whether he had been the ‘Fifth Man’. He perhaps protested too much, looking for someone who might vindicate him, and point to his loyal service. He turned to his old friend, Dick White, but had become estranged from him. It is not a convincing tale. White told his biographer that he maintained close social relations with the Rothschilds in the 1970s, after he retired from MI6, and that he and Victor discussed and dissected MI5 ‘endlessly’ during the Whites’ visits to Cambridge. Why White should have been so indulgent to the Rothschilds, since he must have been familiar with the alarming information held in the MI5 files, is puzzling. He must have been very naïve, or simply complicit. And, if the two of them enjoyed endless congenial discussions about the predicament of MI5, it hardly seems likely that they would have stepped around the emerging Wright business.

White wrote to Kenneth Rose in January 1991 (i.e. the year after Rothschild’s death) that he had warned Victor, in the summer of 1980, to keep out of intelligence matters. “He was too close to Peter Wright. I told Victor that if this continued, Wright might ask him to do things that went too far and put him in danger. He resented my warnings and ceased to consult me.” Yet this was before Rothschild summoned Wright to England. Rothschild might have been trying to help Wright, but he was hardly ‘close’ to him any more. Why, at that stage, would the mighty Rothschild not have been able to resist any requests made to him by Wright? Moreover, since the revelations that Wright was threatening to disclose would embarrass White as much as they would Rothschild, it does not make much sense that White felt that he could simply distance himself from the whole project. White claimed that he had been offended when Victor did not consult him about the plot to bring together Pincher and Wright. Yet he would have had to say that, to protect his own reputation. White was almost certainly involved in the deception.

Later, Rothschild ended up writing a letter to the Daily Telegraph, published on December 5, 1986,requesting that the Director-General of MI5 ‘state publicly that it has unequivocal, repeat unequivocal, evidence that I am not, and never have been a Soviet agent’. That was absurd, histrionic, and illogical. Margaret Thatcher’s statement in response that ‘I am advised that we have no evidence that he was ever a Soviet spy’, was correct, as how could evidence to the contrary ever be collected? (Pincher would foolishly write that a record of Rothschild’s positive work for MI5 would have constituted ‘the unequivocal evidence’ he sought, forgetting that a similar statement might have been said about Philby.) It was not a vindication, but Rothschild had brought it upon himself. And the truth was more complex. Rothschild was never the ‘Fifth Man’. He had been careful never to purloin secrets and pass them on to an adversary, but he may well have been ‘an agent of influence’.

As a coda, Rothschild was required to submit to interrogation between January and April 1987, as a consequence of Wright’s testimony in the Spycatcher trial. The Serious Crimes Squad of Scotland Yard invited him to help with their inquiries in light of the fact it appeared that he had breached the Official Secrets Act. Remarkably, Rose’s account of the process is dependent largely on the records that Rothschild himself kept of the interrogations, and what he subsequently told his biographer of the proceedings. Rothschild did not acquit himself well, but then neither did his prosecutors. The latter had not challenged or inspected closely the truth of what Wright had said, and he was not about to come to the UK to give evidence in any trial. The outcome was predictable: the authorities did not want any further public laundering of their dirty washing. Despite Rothschild’s prevarications over his role, and the reputed introduction of Wright to Pincher, the Director of Public Prosecutions determined that there was no justification in bringing proceedings against Rothschild – or Pincher, who was also a subject of the inquiry.

Pincher’s Version

Pincher had a rather different take on the events. His opinion was coloured by a) the fact that Their Trade Is Treachery had not been quite the success he had hoped for, after Margaret Thatcher in March 1980 effectively dismissed his accusations against Hollis; b) his obsession over the guilt of Hollis; and c) his later irritation that Wright had broken off communications with him in 1984, probably because Wright had demanded some of the proceeds of Pincher’s following book, Too Secret Too Long, and had seemed committed to writing his own account of the affairs. He would probably mull ruefully over the fact that the mixture of truth and lies submitted by an insider (Wright, abetted by Pincher’s rival, Greengrass) had turned out to be commercially more successful than a similar medley by an outsider (himself). First of all, Pincher denied that there had been any secret deception project by which MI5 had conspired with Rothschild and himself to disclose truths that could not be stated publicly. When the publicity about the ‘Fifth Man’ crescendoed, Pincher misrepresented the controversy by first suggesting that the rumours emphasized that Rothschild had encouraged Wright ‘to give Pincher the information about Hollis so that the former MI5 chief would be exposed as the Fifth Man’, and then by demolishing this argument because Hollis had been at Oxford, and thus could not have been the last of the Cambridge Five.

He then disingenuously implied that he had been ignorant of the Hollis claims until Wright came along, claiming that Rothschild had known all about ‘the Hollis case as it unfolded in MI5 because Wright had kept him informed’Rothschild could (he wrote) have simply given the information to Pincher. Yet, as shown above, Rothschild did not believe in Hollis’s guilt, and Pincher had clearly been researching Hollis, with the help of Wright and others, long before the staged encounter in September 1980. Rothschild may have seen an opportunity to distract attention from himself, but it was not because he firmly believed in Hollis’s guilt, or that Their Trade Is Treachery was going to make a solid case about it. Pincher later described (in the chapter ‘Brush with the Police’, in Treachery) how Rothschild and he, while being interrogated separately ‘demolished Wright’s statements with insider table documents and facts’. How he knew how the Rothschild interrogations evolved is not stated.

Pincher had earlier expanded on the saga in his book A Web of Deception: The Spycatcher Affair, (1987) which is essentially a diatribe about Wright’s motives, activities, and pronouncements about the whole business, and a paean to the noble Lord Rothschild. (I discovered, acquired, and read this work only in the middle of August.) He offers a prolonged defence of Rothschild that is naive and misguided. He denies that Rothschild introduced Blunt to MI5, or that Rothschild was under surveillance at all after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. He attributes to Wright assurances that ‘Rothschild’s file in the MI5 Registry contained only material to his credit’, when, as my analysis below shows, that is simply not true. (How come your process of verifying what Wright told you did not work here, Chapman?) He is unable to imagine that his friend, with his ‘intellectual brilliance and flair for original thought’, could ever have done anything ignoble.

His main thrust, however, is that the authorities allowed Their Trade is Treachery to proceed out of a muddled concern for secrecy, rather than as an active conspiracy. Yet the volume is itself self-contradictory and evasive: for instance, the author claims that Rothschild was concerned about Wright’s ability to write his book in a professional manner when in fact the reason that Wright came to see him was because he felt physically incapable of writing the book himself. Pincher admits that the only texts that he brought from Tasmania were transcribed notes, and that Wright convinced him to mail them to friends in separate envelopes to avoid security detection. He states that it was Jonathan Aitken who first told him about Hollis, but not until the end of April, 1980. (And Aitken could not have known the whole story.) Pincher boldly declares that neither Arthur Martin nor Stephen de Mowbray had ever met him or given him any information. Dick White, on the other hand, openly stated that Wright had been Pincher’s primary source.

And his account of the final steps does not make sense. He absurdly claims that he was able to use the skills of a professional researcher (namely his son) to confirm most of Hollis’s information when he returned to London, and only then decided to write the book – something that must have taken additional weeks, of course. Elsewhere in the book, however, he sophistically states that, when he decided to write Their Trade is Treachery, ‘It was entirely as a means of placing on public record old history [sic!] which I felt to be in the national interest’ –pure humbuggery. Moreover he slipped up on several matters, such as the investigation by Lord Trend into the Hollis affair. How he was able to verify Wright’s claims, except perhaps by checking back with Wright’s old crony, Arthur Martin, is not stated. The book follows this vein throughout. In summary, A Web of Deception is exactly what the title says – but it was Pincher’s Web as much as it was Wright’s or that of the British authorities.

The conclusion must be that only a very detailed examination of the contrary claims in the testimonies of Wright and Pincher might lead to a clarification of what really happened. Too many lies were being told. Here were two charlatans, at daggers drawn, both with an unhealthily exaggerated and unmerited respect for Rothschild. That is beyond the scope of this article. The paradox is that Pincher’s role as an investigative journalist, in a world dominated by too much secrecy and by rules of confidentiality, is an extremely important one, but such a function has to be carried out with method, discipline and integrity. In that regard Pincher failed miserably. Yet it was Rothschild, after his clumsy and naïve foray into the world of investigative journalism, who was the person most harmed when his two admirers started to bicker and fall out. And White’s constant involvement with Rothschild, his own nervousness about what Wright might reveal, and his known desire to turn attention towards the hapless Hollis, all point towards his close collusion with Rothschild and Pincher. And that was the nub of the defence’s argument in the Spycatcher trial.

  • Agent of Influence

I dedicated Chapter 6 of Misdefending the Realm to the topic of Agents of Influence, focussing on Rothschild, Gladwyn Jebb, and Isaiah Berlin. I explained that such persons were careful never to place themselves in positions where they could be accused of handing over confidential documents, but instead worked behind the scenes to influence domestic policy, or to facilitate the activities of genuine spies. In that role they could in the long run be far more dangerous. In that respect, I outlined how the three gentlemen identified above abetted the progress of Stalin’s Englishmen, especially that of Guy Burgess.

On pages 140-144 of my book I described many of the facts about Rothschild’s career that are sprinkled around this report, including more details about Liddell’s negotiations with him when Rothschild had been working on matters of sabotage and unconventional warfare, as personal assistant to Sir Harold Hartley, for the government department MI/R. I also referred to a letter (cited by Andrew Lownie in his biography of Burgess) that Michael Straight had written to the journalist Michael Costello, claiming that it was Rothschild’s ties with Soviet Intelligence that had driven him to fund Wright’s enterprise with Spycatcher in a way that would totally exclude any such analysis or innuendo. I pointed out that Straight’s accusations should not be accepted unconditionally, although it was his evidence that eventually unmasked Blunt. Yet it was Rothschild’s continued association with and support for former Cambridge ‘Apostles’, primarily Blunt and Burgess, when it should have been apparent that their behaviour was suspect, that would more permanently taint him.

Ivan Serov

Moreover, in recent years, evidence from Russia itself has reinforced the idea of Rothschild’s role as an influential agent of the Kremlin. In 2013, the memoirs of Ivan Serov, who led the KGB from 1954 to 1958, and the GRU from 1958 to 1963, were discovered, and published in 2016 (Zapiski iz Chemodana). Serov had been one of Stalin’s most loyal servants, and supervised many of the repressive measures taken by the vozhd. A vital entry in Serov’s diaries appears from the year 1956, when he accompanied Khrushchev to London, and met Rothschild. It runs (see https://espionagehistoryarchive.com/2018/03/27/victor-rothschild-soviet-spy/ .)

I met Victor Rothschild only once, at the Embassy. This person was well-known from very long ago as an ‘heir’ to the Philby affair and others. He knew perfectly well that these people, having certain inclinations, were connected to us, and used them to pass on information to Moscow, including false information.

Serov was not impressed with Rothschild, possibly because he distrusted the sincerity of his information leakage: he also suggested that the connection to Rothschild compromised the loyalty of the spies in Moscow’s eyes. Moreover, the creation of Israel put an end to his usefulness, since Rothschild started to take up a strongly Zionist stance. In fact, Stalin had initially supported such goals, until he soon realized that the ferment was encouraging separatist and divisionist leanings at home. Zionism and Stalinism were suddenly in opposition, and Stalin quickly turned against any Jewish resurgence in the Soviet Union. Serov finally dismissed Rothschild as a ‘fellow-traveler’, one rung down on the ladder of Communist sympathizers, probably just above ‘useful idiot’, and praised instead such allies as ‘Bernal, Ivor Montagu, and major scientists’. He considered that Rothschild was someone who simply followed his own goals rather than owning loyalty to any group or creed – probably an accurate assessment. That was a line that Jonathan Haslam echoed in his Near and Distant Neighbors (2015), where, using Victor Popov’s 2005 monograph on Blunt, Sovetnik korolevy, he stated that Rothschild provided cover for the Cambridge Five while ploughing his own furrow.

An intriguing footnote is offered in Mark Hackard’s article, namely that Theodore Mally recruited Rothschild at a concert in London in August 1934. That claim was made by a retired KGB officer, Victor Lekarev, who had worked in the London residency. In 2007, he had written an article characterizing Rothschild as the ‘sponsor’ of the Cambridge Five. It can be viewed (in Russian) at https://argumenti.ru/espionage/n40/33679 , and shows how Rothschild, on the recommendation of Kim Philby, was encouraged to accept a free ticket to a concert where he met Mally, and was then recruited for some role with the OGPU. If we can trust what Lekarev writes, it would have been the ‘Cambridge Six’ if Rothschild had been recruited as a penetration agent, but, if only as an agent of influence, it would indicate that he probably knew about the statuses of the original Five. In any event, owing to his connections with the political elite (and eventual membership of the House of Lords in 1937), Rothschild was thereafter privy to much confidential information, and was able to exert his influence even on Churchill, claims Lekarev, who clearly categorizes Rothschild as an ‘agent of influence’. In his profile, he also indicates that Rothschild was actually working at Porton Down on bacteriological warfare when war broke out, a fact that I have not been able to verify, although an entry in Rothschild’s MI5 Personal File does confirm that one of his roles was to advise MI5 on that very topic. Lekarev also stresses how important Bentinck Place was as a rendezvous and location for the passing on of secrets, a claim that is probably exaggerated.

The conclusion might be that Rothschild had such a high opinion of his own ability to manipulate events that he was not a durable ‘agent of influence’ for any institution. His evolving political philosophies (communist, anti-fascist, socialist, Zionist, conservative free-enterpriser) reinforced that unreliability. Yet his undeniable actions supporting and abetting communist infiltrators in the 1930s and 1940s ensured that he did indeed play a malignant role helping Soviet goals in that critical period.

  • Zionism

Rothschild’s reputed support for Zionism has a dubious pedigree. After all, the Rothschilds were a prime example of a well-assimilated family, and Victor in many ways became a quintessential landed Englishman, augmented by his expertise at cricket and golf. He was a non-believer: Rose wrote that ‘he looked on religious belief with the confident agnosticism of a Victorian freethinker, a Huxleyan rationalist’. His first wife, Barbara Hutchinson, was not Jewish, and it was on the insistence of Victor’s grandmother that Victor’s fiancée converted to Judaism before the marriage, so that any offspring would be ‘Jewish’ (that attribute traditionally passing through the mother.) I find that doubly absurd: the notion of some racial-tribal identity being transferred through such an arrangement, and the obvious hypocrisy of a woman’s swiftly changing her religious beliefs to appease a misguided matriarch.

Being assigned the role of some figurehead for British Jews did not always suit Victor. In December 1938, after the assassination of Von Rath in Paris, he did write to the Times about the plight of persecuted Jews in Germany. Roland Perry, citing with apparent authority Guy Burgess’s KGB file No. 83792, declares that Burgess wrote to Moscow Centre in December 1938 to say that his boss in D Section, Lawrence Grand, had given him the task of activating Rothschild in a tactic to split the Jewish movement by creating opposition to the Zionists, who were represented by Chaim Weizmann.

On July 31, 1946, Rothschild gave a noted speech in the House of Lords in the wake of the Irgun terrorism in Palestine, specifically the murdering of ninety-one persons in the King David Hotel bombing. Rose dismisses it in one brief sentence as ‘a courageous but embarrassed attempt on his part to explain the historical background to the Palestine conflict and the murder of British soldiers by the Stern Gang’. Yet it was an equivocal and dishonourable display that calls for deeper analysis.

Rothschild started off by identifying the conflict he felt as a recent member of the British Army. “It was only a few months ago that he was a British Army officer”, he said. Yet he spent the war in MI5, and did not see combat (“even though one may not have been very near the front line”). “No Jew”, he continued, “can fail to feel despair and shame when confronted with the stark fact that his co-religionists . . . should have been responsible for the deaths of British soldiers”. “Co-religionist” is the language of a Foreign Office mandarin, not of a Jew, and in any case Rothschild himself demonstrated that not all Jews are Judaists. He next described his attitude towards Zionism, saying that he had never been a supporter of Zionism, or political Zionism (whatever that meant), and that he had never been associated in any way with Zionist organizations.

Yet he then effectively made a plea for the Zionist cause, assuming that he could accurately generalize about the mentality of ‘the Jews’ in Palestine. “Palestine”, he declared, “is the only country where the Jews, after 2000 years, have been able to get back to their business of tilling the soil and living on the land”, forgetting perhaps that the Rothschilds, in England, if not actually ‘tilling the soil’, had been able to live comfortably on their landed estates, and instead echoing the oversimplified trope about the Jewish diaspora. (Rothschild’s interests in soil-tilling were rewarded by his being appointed chairman of the Agricultural Research Council in September 1948.) Rothschild regretted that ‘the Jews, having found the Promised Land’, find their fields are ‘burnt and ravaged by gangs of marauding Arabs’. His plea sounds like an apology for terrorism and murder, and is unworthy. Moreover, his final statement was to sit on the fence: “I do not entirely share the aspirations of the Jews in Palestine”, as if he conceded that the displaced Arabs, who probably considered that the fields were ’theirs’, might be justified in their grievances about increased immigration, although he did not say so. It was not a very noble performance by the noble lord. It probably derived more from clumsiness than from deviousness, but Rothschild’s opinions were rapidly evolving at this time.

Rothschild’s House of Lords speech was designed as a response to the government’s recent proposal to split Palestine up into four areas, and allow 100,000 European Jews to be settled in the ‘Jewish Province’. In 1947 the United Nations Partition Plan was adopted, and in May 1948 Britain abandoned its mandate. The agency chartered with managing security in Palestine was the cross-departmental unit based in Cairo, SIME (Security Intelligence Middle East), led by an MI5 officer. When Palestine cased to be a British territory, however, responsibility for gathering intelligence in Israel/Palestine shifted uneasily from MI5 to MI6, and that had serious implications for Rothschild as well, in relation to where he tried to exert his influence. His views may well have been evolving to a more pro-Zionist stance: according to Christopher Andrew (p 364) Kim Philby was an energetic supporter of the terrorist campaigns as a way of undermining British imperialism in the region, and Rothschild may have owned a similar perspective. A note in Liddell’s diary dated January 22, 1948, reports that Rothschild had been dealing with Chaim Weizmann, the prominent Zionist publicist, who was becoming frustrated in his attempts to gain access to Attlee. Rothschild had advised Weizmann not to go straight to Churchill instead: furthermore, the Government was much more interested in ‘fixing things up with the Arabs’. (An intercepted conversation between Burgess’s mother Mrs. Bassett and Blunt from 1956 discloses that Weizmann had vigorously tried to convert Rothschild to Zionism, when Burgess had argued strongly against it, but the event was not dated. Blunt told Tess that he thought the debate had occurred ‘during the war’ at the Dorchester hotel.)

Rothschild’s Declaration, from KV 2/4531

For Rothschild had by then very openly changed his political affiliations. On January 20, 1946, he had made a very pompous public declaration (in Reynolds News) that he had joined the Labour Party. “We [ = who?] have come to associate with Conservative rule the following conditions: unemployment, undernourishment, unpreparedness, unpopularity abroad, unequal pay, education and opportunities, undeveloped resources, and lack of opposition to Fascism.” Given that a coalition government led by the Conservative Churchill had just concluded the war against Hitler, and that the United Kingdom had been the only country in Europe not to have been occupied by the Axis powers or to have declared neutrality, this was another ill-mannered, provocative and ingenuous statement that for some reason did not materially harm Rothschild’s reputation among the elite. He was gently rebuked by Petrie, since his political utterances might be in conflict with MI5’s neutrality on such matters, but Sir John Anderson wanted to keep him on, leaving it to his lordship’s judgment. (Why Anderson was influential at this time is not clear, since Churchill’s administration had by then been replaced by Attlee’s.) Rothschild resigned from MI5 on May 7.

  • MI5 & MI6 Postwar

MI6 records are of course not available. In MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, Stephen Dorril limits his references to Rothschild to his role as a conduit used by MI6 to pass on payments to the editors of Encounter. Guy Liddell’s Diaries offer a few insights into Rothschild’s involvement with MI5 after his resignation. I recall Peter Wright’s comments about Rothschild’s ‘intimate connections with the Israelis’, and wonder how serious Rothschild’s anxieties were at having his telephone tapped. Maybe MI5 knew of such relationships, and Rothschild was joking. Wright also referred to Rothschild’s work for Dick White and MI6 in the late nineteen-fifties, but these likewise represent murky goings-on. In his testimony in Australia, he stated that Rothschild had been involved in the MI6 plot to overthrow Iran’s Mossadeq. The excerpts available from Liddell are fragmentary, and do not by themselves offer a very cohesive narrative, so I simply record them in sequence.

Even before the war was over, Rothschild seemed to be plotting with Kim Philby for a future with MI6. On March 7, 1945, Kim came to Liddell, saying that he was anxious that Victor should work for Section 9 (his new counterpart-intelligence organization) while in Paris. Indicating that he already had approval for such a scheme (presumably from Menzies), Philby claimed that Rothschild had some very valuable contacts in the French capital, some of which had already proved to be useful. Liddell sounded guardedly alarmed, and promised to look into the matter. Two weeks later, having discussed the matter with Bobby Mackenzie (of the Foreign Office), he told Philby that it would not be a good idea. He minimized the value of Rothschild’s personal contacts (‘French officials’), and pointed out that Victor still had much to do with building up intelligence at home. His final comment was, however, again cryptic: “ . . . It was particularly important that Victor should not run paid agents in France, not because he would not do the job admirably but because it would spoil his usefulness if there was any sort of come-back.”

Whether Rothschild’s changing political views were related to the successful deployment of atomic weaponry, and the subsequent end to hostilities, is not clear. In May 1945, he had been occupied training the British Control Commission in Germany on counter-sabotage techniques, but when he returned home, he immediately started busying himself with scientific research. The Joint Intelligence Committee had proposed that efforts on scientific intelligence-gathering should be increased, and on June 29, Guy Liddell suggested to Stewart Menzies, the MI6 chief, rather cryptically that ‘there might be a place in all of this for Victor, both on the offensive and defensive side’. Liddell discussed the opportunity with Rothschild when he returned on July 31, Victor stating that MI5 had been too passive. In any event, Rothschild became very interested in the Nunn May case (concerning the passing of atomic secrets to the Soviets) when it blew up in September, and managed to join a highly-select committee to discuss security over atomic matters, strongly arguing that such aspects were not being addressed aggressively enough. How sincere his motivations were in getting close to the hub of affairs is not clear: on October 2 he downplayed his interest when speaking to Liddell, suggesting instead that he would tidy up some affairs and then write a history of his B1c unit.

Wallace Akers

On November 1, however, he renewed his vigorous campaign, saying that Wallace Akers, the director of the Tube Alloys project, was not taking security seriously enough. A month later he shifted his position, declaring to Liddell that he would more effectively work informally, exploiting ‘his own personal high-up contacts’, while accepting that such an approach would require the approval of some higher authority. What it appeared he wanted to do was highly irregular – snooping around in the laboratories to find informants who knew the political leanings of scientists like Nunn May. Was this a defensive move prompted by the threats to other spies? Such an idea should not be discarded completely. By mid-January 1946, it seemed that he was being successful. Petrie had approved Rothschild’s idea, and had agreed to write letters to Sir John Anderson and Edward Bridges to allow Rothschild to carry out his inquiries, the subjects of which include some novel uses of uranium that he hoped to learn from Lord Cherwell. And then, on May 9, Rothschild wrote a letter to Harker suggesting that his official connection with MI5 should be severed, while ‘he would of course remain at our disposal as adviser on scientific matters’. That was a generous gesture! He presumably had gained the authority he needed. Indeed, Liddell recorded in his diary on May 22 that the irritating pamphleteer Kenneth de Courcy was suggesting that Rothschild now had some kind of mandate from Menzies, the MI6 chief.

Richard Meinertzhagen

One of the most intriguing incidents at this time concerns Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a controversial figure suspected of fraud in many exploits. He was the uncle of Tess Mayor, Rothschild’s assistant (and eventual wife), but he also lived with Teresa (‘Tess’) Clay, a woman much younger, who assisted Rothschild on the ‘Fifth Column’ project with Eric Roberts. Clay was also a close friend of Victor’s sister, Miriam. Thus the connections with the Colonel were tight: Victor considered him a close friend. In November 1946, Clay reported to Guy Liddell that a representative from Irgun had approached Meinertzhagen, saying that the group would not execute any terrorist activities on British soil for fear it would jeopardize its fund-raising opportunities. Liddell noted that Meinterzhagen was known to possess sympathies with ‘Zionist revisionists’, a group which promoted expansion of Jewish settlements – even beyond the Jordan River.

Rothschild’s name does not appear for some time, but on September 24, 1949, when reports arrived indicating that the Soviets had successfully detonated an atomic bomb, he provoked a bizarre entry in Liddell’s Diary, which is worth quoting in its entirety: “Dick [White] saw Victor last night. The latter shares my scepticism about the Russian atomic bomb. He also takes the view very strongly, largely based on communications with Duff [Cooper], that a resurgence of Right Wing parties in Germany is the most serious menace at the moment. He thinks it might well lead to a tie-up with the Russians. Winston, I gather, takes a contrary view.” The ingenuousness and inanity of such utterings are bewildering. Klaus Fuchs’s confession was just about to burst out. On February 21, 1950, Menzies told Liddell (completely off the record) that he didn’t think the Russians had made an atomic bomb – an extraordinary admission from the head of MI6.

Yet Rothschild continued to snoop around, exploiting his previous rank and respectability. On January 27, 1951, he turned up at Liddell’s office, requesting a list of officers involved on atomic research. Liddell noted that ‘he will show it to Hans’ (i.e. Hans Halban, another shady character of dubious loyalty.) And there the record peters out. A few entries concern Rothschild’s behaviour in connection with the Burgess/Maclean fiasco, and I shall incorporate them into my study of Rothschild’s Personal File below. He was also involved with Liddell’s attempt, early in 1953, to find the spy Nunn May a job after the scientist was released from prison, but I do not believe his actions therein are of importance.

Overall, it seems that Rothschild transferred his allegiance to Menzies after his resignation from MI5, but facts about what he really accomplished are hard to find. For instance, rather alarmingly, Wright described Rothschild’s involvement with MI6 in these terms: “He maintained his links with British Intelligence, utilizing his friendship with the Shah of Iran, and running agents personally for Dick White in the Middle East, particularly Mr. Reporter, who played such a decisive role in MI6 operations in the 1950s.” Kenneth Rose, on the other hand, links Reporter, an important middleman to the Shah, to Rothschild only in the late 1960s, when Rothschild was head of Research at Shell, and was pursuing regular commercial opportunities in Iran. It sounds all rather careless and undisciplined to me. I notice that Stephen Dorril offers a contradictory comment about Sir Shapour Reporter, who worked for the Indian Embassy in Tehran, but ‘did not, as has been suggested [?], play a role in any operations’. He also records how enthusiastic a supporter of the Israeli cause Rothschild had been, but offers no details. Liddell’s diary comes to an abrupt close in May 1953 when he discovers that White has been appointed the new Director-General of MI5.

  • The Kew Archive:

Introduction

‘Red Tess’ Mayor

The files on Victor and Tess Rothschild (née Tess Mayor, known at Cambridge as ‘Red Tess’ because of her communist sympathies, whom he married, as his second wife, in August 1946) fall into two primary tranches. The first section primarily covers the period immediately after the abscondence of Burgess and Maclean in May 1951, and gradually peters out in 1956. After a brief flurry because of the Flora Solomon disclosures in 1961, the story picks up in early 1964, after Anthony Blunt’s confession, and exploits Tess’s close relationship with Blunt. This investigation carries on for several years, with new teams of officers brought in, before running out of steam in 1973, with an inconclusive but overall favourable verdict. Thus, if the earnest researcher was hoping to find here a comprehensive description of the Rothschilds’ interactions with the authorities, he or she will be disappointed.

What intrigues me is that the first entry in Rothschild’s Personal File (PF 605,565) consists of a letter created on March 21, 1951, in other words well before the disappearance of the pair who came to be known as ‘the missing diplomats’. It is a relatively harmless item, representing a communication from Victor to Guy Liddell and concerning the suitability of a Professor Collier, whom Rothschild knew as a Communist from his Cambridge days, for a position at the Agricultural Research Council that Rothschild headed. Yet it obviously caught someone’s eye (that of Liddell himself?). The letter could be interpreted as a diversionary exercise by Rothschild, as an attempt to convince his former boss of his anti-communist credentials while the investigation into the leakages in Washington, resulting in the suspicion that HOMER was Maclean, was heating up. The letter was probably inserted into the file when it was created, probably in May 1951. The PF number and the date the letter was written (not when it was received) appear in the structure of a red stamp, with room for a signature, a date, and a target, as well as a note that the letter should be copied into PF 46,567 – that, presumably, of Collier himself, whose file has never been released. Liddell’s rather weak and equivocal response is also included.

This is not the earliest entry in the file: others go back to 1940. Most are simply extracts from Rothschild’s personnel file at MI5, or other Security Service memoranda, recording such events as his introduction to MI5 by Liddell in May 1940, Victor’s own recommendation of Tess two months later, and his resignation in May 1946. His introduction of Anthony Blunt to Liddell is noticeably not included, although an important annotation by John Curry was inserted in September 1969. While Rothschild stated on his personal record form that he had been introduced by Guy Liddell, Curry pointed out that the lead for Rothschild had been orchestrated by a scientist and Trinity College contemporary, A. S. T. Godfrey, a friend of Brian Howard, who had recommended him to Curry. Godfrey was killed in action in Norway in 1942: it is not clear why Rothschild concealed this connection.

Award Recommendation for A. S. T. Godfrey

It is true that two further items from 1940 include the ‘PF 605,565’ stamp, but since the PF numbers were created sequentially, 605,565 belongs to the 1951 era. The two items (on Geoffrey Pyke, PP 983, and Claud Cockburn, 41,685) must have been copied from the original files at the time the Rothschilds’ file was being created. The Pyke item, especially, is of considerable interest, and I shall return to it later in this piece. Some items have been dredged out of much earlier files.

I identify several themes in the material on the Rothschilds:

i) The quite extraordinary level of surveillance, consisting of phone-taps and interception of mail, that was undertaken. It was not authorized against the Rothschilds directly, but they would have been extremely shocked had they learned of it. Yet MI5’s reaction was very sluggish.

ii) The readiness, under gentle pressure, displayed by Victor and Tess to make suggestions about possible Communist sympathizers they knew – especially at Cambridge.

iii) The high degree of self-importance and sense of entitlement shown by Victor, and the unjustified deference paid to him, especially when Peter Wright joins the team.

iv) The contradictory verdicts on Guy Burgess expressed by Victor, deprecating him one moment, the next having to admit that he used him as a financial adviser – a most unsuitable arrangement – and Victor’s highly dubious, even criminal, behaviour concerning investment tips.

v) Tess’s very provocative friendship with Anthony Blunt, and her duplicitous remarks concerning her awareness of his confession.

Surveillance

From what Peter Wright reported (see above) Victor Rothschild may not have been surprised by the fact that some of his mail had been intercepted, and his telephone chats occasionally tapped, but it appears that the surveillance was initiated vicariously. The activities of Guy Burgess were followed carefully in May 1951, and Blunt was one of his regular contacts. Thus a Home Office Warrant was requested for Blunt after the ‘diplomats’ disappeared, and the Rothschilds turned up frequently on the antennae, both in correspondence and on the telephone. This process went on for over ten years, and the warrant should thus have been renewed constantly. Furthermore, letters sent by Rothschild to Burgess from before the war were found in Burgess’s flat, as well as correspondence from Goronwy Rees that mentioned Rothschild, thus encouraging MI5 to believe that Victor and Tess might be able to help them with their inquiries. Kim Philby mischievously brought up Rothschild’s name as a close confidant of Burgess when he was interrogated. So did David Footman, when he was interviewed. It is possible that the Rothschild were on their guard whenever they spoke to Blunt, as Victor would have known how the Watchers operated.

A touch of pathos is attached to the process. Here was MI5, desperately concerned at tracking down what conspirators and colleagues of Burgess and Maclean may have been lurking in various organizations, but relying greatly on the most guilty candidates, Blunt and Rothschild, to provide names for them to investigate. Moreover, their methodology was almost hopeless. In the absence of suspects being caught red-handed, they knew that they would need a confession in order to convict. It had worked for Fuchs and Nunn May, but the highly incriminated Philby was resolute at not conceding anything to White or Milmo, and Blunt managed to avoid admitting anything until Michael Straight unmasked him twelve years later. (A spy, William Marshall, who had worked for Gambier-Parry in RSS, was actually caught passing secrets to a Soviet diplomat early in 1952, and sentenced to prison for five years – who remembers him now?)

The fact that Blunt had a very affectionate relationship with Tess Rothschild meant that they communicated frequently on the telephone, and M5 was able to pick up several hints at shared acquaintances from these exchanges. What is extraordinary is that some very perturbing letters exchanged between Rothschild and Burgess concerning Rudolf Katz were found at Burgess’s flat in June, and on July 17, 1951, Arthur Martin asked his boss, Dick White, whether Rothschild should be questioned about the relationship. On November 29, 1951, Arthur Martin picked up the issue again: apparently no move at all had been taken. Yet a delay at this time should probably not be interpreted as gross negligence: B Division was then very occupied with processing Goronwy Rees’s testimony, interviewing both him and Blunt, and expanding the dossier on Philby. If the records can be relied upon, however, it does not appear that Rothschild was interviewed until 1956, which does constitute an embarrassing lapse.

Investigations (1)

For several years the only entries in the file are extracts from other sources that tangentially mention Victor or Tess. Bentinck Street as a meeting-place began to arouse interest – mentioned by Philby in December 1951, by Cairncross in April 1952, and by Pope-Hennessy, who declared in January 1954 that he had seen Rothschild there with Burgess ‘alongside other curious people’, in the early days of the war. Yet MI5 still showed no interest in following up these leads with the Rothschilds, as if the junior officers had been instructed to hold off. The Katz connection appeared to have been forgotten completely. It was not until Goronwy Rees’s stunning articles appeared in the People in March 1956 that Victor could no longer avoid the awkward questions.

Victor’s first response was to take the initiative – and bluster. He wrote to Dick White, attempting to refute the first article by claiming that he had never known that Burgess had been a member of the Communist Party, that it was he, Rothschild, who had tried to cancel Guy’s visit to Russia in 1940, that he had reported Guy’s poor habits at Bentinck Street to the police, and that he had recorded his doubts about Burgess to the high-ups in MI5. He said that he had passed on to Special Branch and to MI5 his suspicions that there was something ‘fishy’ about Burgess, but not because of his communism. This was a shoddy performance by Rothschild: much later, in 1969, a note was put on his file that he had failed to volunteer any information about Burgess early in the cycle, and now he was putting up a very flimsy smokescreen. It is clear that Dick White (now Director-General) had recommended that Rothschild put his thoughts in writing after the two of them had discussed the matter, and Victor volunteered his availability for interview. Roger Hollis thus sent an invitation to him on May 4.

The result was that Courtenay Young (D1) at last interviewed Rothschild on May 23, 1956, and wrote his report a few days later, five years to the day since the disappearance of the miscreants was noted by MI5. Rothschild confirmed what he had written in his letter, adding a few details, and then, when asked by Young whether he could think of any persons who fitted the profile of similar figures in the Burgess entourage, he came up with Alister Watson and ‘Jennifer Hart’ [sic: actually ‘Jenifer Hart], who ‘used to say quite openly that she had been told to sever her connections with the Party and go underground’. Again, no action appears to have been taken: MI5 was next occupied with Tom Driberg’s recent visit to Moscow, and with his imminent book about Burgess. Blunt and Tess Rothschild discussed it on the telephone, and how it might embarrass Victor, and Blunt again brought up the matter of Katz, and Burgess’s providing financial advice to Victor’s mother. An excerpt from the book describing the arrangement appeared in the Daily Mail on October 19, 1956. MI5 gained all the inside information when Mrs. Bassett called Blunt about it, assisted by follow-up calls that Blunt made to Driberg and to Tess.

Extraordinarily, Burgess was involved with the subsequent negotiations from Moscow, by telephone and telegram. Rothschild was very upset about the claims made that Burgess had helped his mother financially, and denied them. Blunt called Tess again on October 20, and Tess declared that the story about Burgess’s role was essentially true, and that her husband could not reasonably deny it. Yet again, nothing happened. Mrs. Bassett had spoken to Guy on the telephone that morning: Guy could not understand why Victor was so upset. This is the last entry on file for almost a year. If MI5 did follow up on these highly provocative exchanges, there is no record of it. By then, some further personnel changes at the Security Service had probably hindered the investigation.

Investigations (2)

While the Rothschilds moved sedately on, MI5 experienced its discontinuities. Liddell had resigned in 1953, stung by his being overlooked for the Director-General position. White appointed Hollis as his replacement heading B Division. A largely new set of junior officers had to pick up the reins, but it seemed that White was not very eager to pursue an investigation into his long-time pal. Yet a major intelligence disaster had occurred that April, when Commander Crabb was assumed dead after inspecting a Soviet vessel on a diving expedition, and Anthony Eden demanded that the head of MI6 (Sinclair) be replaced. Much to the chagrin of Sinclair’s Number 2, in the summer Dick White was moved over to lead the sister service, and the dull but in no way nefarious Roger Hollis became Director-General of MI5 for a stint of ten years.

Still nothing more was initiated. One reason for the lack of action may have been the fact that the Rothschild file was not generally available to MI5 researchers. In a bizarre twist, a Mr. A. J. D. Winnifrith from the Treasury sent, about a year later, on September 25, 1957, a cautiously-worded letter inquiring whether a certain character involved with the Agricultural Research Council could be trusted not to disclose confidential information. He had to reveal the name of the person in a separate letter. It was Rothschild. This request sparked the interest of John Marriott and Courtenay Young, who of course retained some knowledge of the case from his current position in the reconstituted D Division responsible for counter-espionage. Young took a look at the file ‘which is limited to the head of R.5. and D.1 Mr Whyte’, and made some guardedly caustic comments about Rothschild’s reluctance to come forward concerning his connections with Burgess, and his assumed effort to protect himself. On October 11, John Marriott accordingly replied to Winnifrith that Rothschild ‘is slightly intolerant of bureaucratic red tape, and as he is a man of great wealth and assured position he is certainly no more likely than any other scientist to feel bound by the restraints imposed by the possession of secret information’.

The years went by. In September 1961 Rothschild took on a part-time job as head of Shell Research, and discussed security matters with Hollis, including his own security clearance. A random note on Rothschild’s file was posted by Evelyn McBarnet in D1 (now working alongside Arthur Martin) that drew attention to the financial arrangements with Burgess in 1937, which was now apparently causing some embarrassment to his lordship – although it is not clear how McBarnet learned that. And then Flora Solomon enters the scene, having indicated to Rothschild at the Weizmann Insitute that she believed Philby had been a spy. That provoked Arthur Martin to interview her, and afterwards speak to Rothschild about it. He posted a note on August 7, 1962, that describes relationships between Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Burn in a very confused manner, but it may have started his juices running. (Philby absconded from Beirut in 1963.)

Soon afterwards, however, another significant event had occurred. Blunt had confessed, and was undergoing more intensive interviews. Some desultory discussions took place, and Rothschild’s name came up more frequently in interviews with Blunt’s contacts (e.g. Edward Playfair, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire), although without anything decisive occurring. On November 24, Hollis, accompanied by his assistant Director-General Furnival Jones, had a meeting with Rothschild, and it was Peter Wright (D3) who made his entry in the chronicle, reporting that Rothschild told them that he had learned about Blunt’s confession, but not from Blunt himself. He again mentioned Alister Watson and Jenifer Hart, as well as Judy Hubback (Hart’s sister) as potentially sinister figures from the Bentinck Street galère. And 1965 came to a close with Victor generously offering an opportunity for Wright and McBarnet to interview him and Tess. That same year, Roger Hollis had retired, and was succeeded by Martin Furnival Jones.

Disclosures and Explanations

It was only now, in early 1966, that the Rothschilds were essentially forced to open up. Yet the interview undertaken by Wright and McBarnet on January 27 involved, for the most part, only Tess Rothschild, with her husband joining towards the end. She offered dozens of names of leftish associates going back to her Cambridge days: maybe the outpouring was designed to overwhelm her interrogators. A further meeting was held on February 16, in which Victor offered more names, but dishonourably tried to transfer blame to Stuart Hampshire for not passing on to the authorities what he knew about Burgess’s communism. Peter Wright was able to explain that MI5 was now benefitting from the insights of KAGO (the defector Golitsyn), which may have alarmed the Rothschilds. Lord Rothschild also tried to defuse the Rudolf Katz problem by issuing a throwaway line about his mother, ‘who may have made a payment to Katz’. McBarnet instantly knew that Rothschild was concealing the major part of the story.

A further meeting was held on February 21, and by now the Rothschilds were having a ball, throwing out names and casting suspicions on a whole fresh cast of characters – known communists at Cambridge, or left-wingers who had moved on to posts in the Foreign Office or MI5 or were scientists of repute, such as Solly Zuckerman. The sleuths zealously wrote everything down, seemingly unaware that they were being manipulated. Rothschild agreed to speak to Flora Solomon again, to determine whether she would recall anything more about the Philby connection. And this set the pattern for some time: MI5 officers earnestly following up on these numerous leads, but relying on the Rothschilds too closely as sources. Wright had another intense discussion with Tess about the genuineness of Blunt’s confession. One of the revealing discoveries was that, in May 1939, Rothschild had issued a positive recommendation to the Admiralty that it recruit Alister Watson – one of the scientists he was now urgently denigrating. Blunt also revealed to Wright that he believed Dick White must have been the source who had told Rothschild about his confession, thus confirming my supposition.

Geoffrey Pyke

The discovery of the recommendation for Watson should perhaps have caused MI5 to revisit the Geoffrey Pyke business of 1942. Papers about Pyke, probably written by Peter Smollett, were found in Burgess’s flat in 1951. Rothschild had issued a stern warning about recruiting left-wingers like Pyke in sensitive security positions. Despite ‘the risk of MI5’s being seen as Colonel Blimps’, he had issued in June 1942 the following portentous message: “On the other hand, I feel that someone who combines extreme Left view with an erratic character should not be at Combined Operations headquarters which must, owing to the operational nature of its activities, be one of the most secret government departments. But, apart from PYKE’s erratic tendencies, the authorities may not feel happy at the thought that somebody whose first loyalty may be to Moscow rather than this country is in a position where he may well get information of considerable interest to Moscow and which the Government may not wish them to have at the moment. This latter point affects Professor J.D. BERNAL as well.” This declaration by the man who had succeeded installing Blunt in MI5 a couple of years before was either stupid, hypocritical, or simply devious. It certainly was not honourable. Geoffrey Pyke was an inspired Jewish-atheist scientist (like Rothschild) who committed suicide in 1948. It seems that the entry was not retrieved from Rothschild’s rather inaccessible file until 1973.

In any event, the pattern continued, with Rothschild trying to help as much as he could in identifying further Soviet agents. In July 1966, Rothschild told Wright he was happy to use deception in order to get more out of Stuart Hampshire. After speaking to him at length, Rothschild recommended that Hampshire be grilled by MI5 over his dealings with Blunt and Burgess. The years dragged on. Rothschild’s security clearance was under review. Alister Watson confessed in March 1968. The same month, Rothschild told Wright that he had heard about the ‘PETERS’ inquiry, and alarmingly indicated that he thought Hollis was a better fit, since he matched more closely to the Volkov description. Telephone conversations between Blunt and Tess continued to be tapped. Wright and McBarnet continued to be consumed with essentially fruitless investigations, hoping to find some more Watsons. When H. P. Milmo (the interrogator of Philby) pointed out in May 1969 that Rothschild might be a security risk, B. Palliser shrewdly responded that ‘It also seems to have become almost a legend that he and Tess are above suspicion while others, with lesser “crimes of association” are considered suspect.’

It was not until the beginning of 1970 that someone in MI5 started to reflect that the integrity of the Rothschilds was perhaps not as strong as the service had hitherto believed it to be. The report is dated January 19, but the name of the author (K3) has been redacted. (It was almost certainly B. Palliser). It is a very accurate summary of the prevarications and untruths perpetrated by Victor and Tess, and it points to the possible exposure that MI5 has drawn on itself by entrusting to these two persons so much information about the investigation when the behaviour of the Rothschilds themselves casts a large amount of suspicion on them. Yet still nothing happened. Rothschild continued to pass aspersions on Flora Solomon: other leads, such as Henderson (one-time brother-in-law of Alister Watson) and Professor Jack Plumb were assiduously followed up.

By now, Peter Wright and the Rothschilds were on much more intimate terms, with Victor sending letters addressed to ‘Dear Peter’. Wright may have been shielding the couple from any closer inspection. After Rothschild was appointed by Edward Heath to head the Central Policy Review Staff in early 1971, Rothschild apparently wanted a phone tap placed on a Mr. Jones (PF 41186, not identifiable as such, but no doubt the Communist union leader Jack Jones, who had served in the International Brigades in Spain). Such a move might have caused concern at the Home Office. Wright was able to record, when doubts about his reliability were voiced by the Deputy Director-General: “I am confident that Rothschild is under control, and will not do anything to damage this Service’s relationship with the Home Office. He gave me the most solemn assurance that he would not.” It is astounding that senior MI5 officers would rely on such an informal and personal guarantee from someone such as Wright, who clearly believed he was in a privileged position. In an unnerving and significant aside, in December Tess called Peter Wright to let him know how alarmed she has been on reading the galley-proofs of Goronwy Rees’s A Chapter of Accidents.

Richard Llewelyn-Davies

Thus the last lap started. Early in 1972, Patrick Stewart was introduced to the project. Yet his detailed discussion with Rothschild concerned the Llewelyn-Davieses, about whom the ‘K/Advisor’ (Peter Wright, who had gone on a trip abroad) had expressed concern, since the investigation was moving too slowly. It was a sensitive issue. Richard Llewelyn-Davies had been a colleague of Rothschild and Blunt at Trinity, and a member of the Apostles. His wife, Patricia, had had a short marriage to Rawdon-Smith, was a resident with Tess (then Mayor) at Bentinck Street, and had married Llewelyn-Davies in 1943. Richard had been a habitual visitor at Bentinck Street. But his wife was an important member of the Labour Party, and had been made a peeress in her own right. Moreover, as Rothschild himself declared to McBarnet and Wright, she had had an affair with Anthony Blunt before her divorce from Rawdon-Smith, an experience that she would probably have wanted to be kept secret. Given the imagined resistance of Lady Llewelyn-Davies, Furnival Jones had thought that Rothschild might be the one person who could arrange an interview with Llewelyn-Davies. Rothschild shared the concern about Patricia creating a scene, while stressing the belief that neither he nor Tess believed that Richard had been involved in any sinister activities. No doubt he was happy that the focus of MI5’s counter-subversion investigations was directed elsewhere.

Patricia Llewelyn-Davies

In February, Stewart had to call off the surveillance. Rothschild had spoken to Llewelyn-Davies, who had been hostile and very averse to submitting to an interview. Yet Victor managed to make sway by invoking the wiles of Tess. When E. W. Pratt (K3.0) and another officer (K3.7) visited Tess, she put on a show. After stating that they had agreed with Peter Wright not to discuss the Llewelyn-Davieses, since they were close friends, she confirmed her keenness on the investigation, how important it was to check out those who had been close to Philby, Blunt and Burgess, how wrong they had been over Blunt, and thus could be wrong again, and that such persons would now be at the peak of their careers. She was at her most feline. She dropped a few other hints, and they arranged to talk again in about a month’s time. K7 (his name redacted) did some further digging around on Tess, and re-discovered the duplicitous way that she had shown how she learned that Blunt had been a spy . . .

For some reason (maybe simply because of a passport renewal request), MI5 next investigated Victor’s first wife, Barbara, who had married the left-winger Rex Warner, but then divorced him, and had in 1961 married a Greek named Ghika. In May 1972, after Rothschild’s assistance, Pratt and Stewart did at last manage to interview Llewelyn-Davies, who was deemed to have held back when his own activities were concerned. Only brief extracts have been supplied, in which Llewelyn-Davies was shown to have misrepresented Rothschild’s joining the Apostles, which actually happened while Llewelyn-Davies was still a member at Cambridge. And there the file ends. Nothing from the momentous 1970s, with Goronwy Rees feeding Andrew Boyle for The Climate of Treason, and the further headwinds that Victor Rothschild would face, and nothing about the ‘Spycatcher’ fiasco, which is where my story started.

Rothschild’s Self-Importance

Victor Rothschild’s behaviour consistently showed an arrogance that probably derived from his ill-conceived notion of superior social status, and what it meant in terms of duties and obligations. On October 4, 1957, Courtenay Young, commenting on Lord Rothschild’s selective memory when recalling his associations with Guy Burgess, and especially the matter of financial advice, minuted: “It is possible a fair assumption from paragraphs 4 and 5 above that Lord ROTHSCHILD thinks that the State has responsibilities towards him rather than he towards the State.” Aspects of this egotism can be seen in other significant actions. He is recorded as not responding to requests from Petrie on important matters. When in December 1945 he wrote to Guy Liddell, announcing his proposed resignation from MI5, he attached to the letter certain conditions about his continuing role as part-time Scientific Adviser, including the statement: “None of these proposals requires any explanation”. Liddell replied meekly. Petrie had apparently rejected these proposals already: nevertheless Rothschild sent him a note at the end of the year effectively telling him what he should do. His approach comes across as pompous and superior, but he obviously did not think that normal rules of conduct applied to him.

That incident was followed by his ill-conceived explanation of why he had joined the Labour Party, published in Reynolds’ News in January 1946. Now it was Petrie’s turn to be meek. Instead of sending him scurrying away for his ill-mannered piece of self-promotion – which clearly broke the rules for MI5 officers to be non-political – Petrie discussed the matter with Sir John Anderson, who likewise opted for appeasement. Sir John would have preferred it had Rothschild not become involved in politics, but obviously believed that having him at hand outweighed the disadvantages. Yet they left it to Rothschild himself to judge whether his activities ever conflicted with his MI5 duties: if he judged it so, he should come to Petrie to declare the fact! And if Petrie or his successor ever believed that such a conflict was happening, Petrie ‘would send for him, and deal with him accordingly’. Lord Rothschild was not deterred at all by the prospect of being summoned to the Headmaster’s Study for a beating: he thought this ‘a perfectly fair arrangement’.

A third episode consists of his request for a false passport. As his involvement with Israel became more intense, and his international travel increased, he became more concerned about his personal safety – especially after the Marks and Spencer bombing incidents in 1969. In September of that year he thus asked Peter Wright, during a routine meeting with him, whether he could arrange a false passport for him, so that he could travel around the world incognito. Wright acted on the matter, and took it up with Denis Greenhill, who looked into precedents. R. G. I. Elliott went to the Passport office to help gain approval. The matter eventually reached Sir Stanley Tomlinson, ‘Supt. Under-Secretary of the Immigration and Visa Department of the Foreign and Colonial Office’. The support of Dick White was invoked. Yet in February 1970 the request was turned down. There was no peacetime precedent for granting a false identity to a private person, with multiple risks involved. Surely the matter would have been despatched much sooner if the applicant had not been Lord Rothschild.

The reciprocal of this behaviour is that MI5 overall showed Rothschild far too much deference. Occasionally, as I have shown above, a junior officer such as Palliser or Young would hint at the way he was treated differently from any other individual who deserved investigation, but it was if such initiatives were immediately quashed – perhaps by Dick White, Rothschild’s old crony, as if a member of the House of Lords must be beyond reproach. White may have exerted his influence from MI6. Each time a new semi-crisis struck the Rothschilds (e.g. the Burgess letters, the Driberg book, the Philby defection, the Blunt confession, the Rees articles, the Golitsyn disclosures, the Rees memoir), a flutter of fresh interest occurred, but was swiftly suppressed, and no action was taken. And when Peter Wright came on to the scene, Rothschild immediately gained a devoted admirer who could see no wrong in his impressive lordship. It was like Basil Fawlty fawning over the confidence trickster ‘Lord Melbury’.

Burgess as Financial Advisor

One of the most embarrassing episodes for Victor Rothschild was his engagement of Burgess as a financial advisor to his mother, a fact that he strenuously tried to play down. MI5 apparently gained its first lead in a recorded interview with David Footman, who stated that Rothschild had paid Burgess £200 pounds for some service around 1937. That was on June 18, 1951, just after the Burgess/Maclean escapade. The name of Rudolf Katz came up from testimony by Goronwy Rees, and MI5 was able to establish from Katz (now living in Argentina) that he had claimed to help the French branch of the Rothschild family on banking problems [!], and had known Burgess well in the 1936-1938 years, contacting him several times. A letter found among Burgess’s effects was addressed to Burgess’s mother, dated March 31, 1937, and constituted the first of his ‘reports’ that he had apparently been contracted to supply. He regretted not answering sooner, but stated that he had been waiting for a list of investments. That Victor was involved is shown by a confirming letter that Burgess wrote to him the same day.

Rothschild’s complicity had been proved by another letter, from Victor to Guy, written on February 3, 1937, in which Rothschild approved the arrangement of hiring Katz at £50 Pounds a month. Victor insisted on the utmost secrecy and discretion over the arrangement, and asked that Guy destroy the letter – an instruction that Guy impishly ignored. Victor then mischievously asked Guy (working at the BBC) whether he knew which of two technologies the BBC would be selecting for its television launch – ‘quite an important thing from an investor’s point of view’. Now, in 1937, insider trading may not have been considered as outrageous as it would be a few decades later, but this was a highly unethical move by Rothschild. A further possibly egregious example followed on February 5, where he thanked Guy for some tips on selling Rolls-Royce shares, over which he boasted at having performed well. He enclosed a check for the Rolls-Royce transaction, and warmly signed his missive ‘Love, Victor’ – perhaps an over-cosy manner of greeting to one’s financial advisor.

An extraordinary aspect of these letters is that the files indicate that they were found ‘at the Courtauld Institute of Art by Professor A. F. Blunt in Nov. 1951’. Was Blunt’s negligence in not destroying them, or facilitating their coming to MI5’s attention, a way of dragging Rothschild with him into the pit in which he had fallen? Amazingly, these revelations triggered no action. It was five years later, after Driberg’s visit to Guy in Moscow, and a rumour in the Daily Mail, that Guy’s mother, Mrs. Bassett, admitted in a telephone call to Blunt that the story was true, even confirming the payment over the Rolls-Royce advice. When Blunt alerted Tess Rothschild, she told him they would sue if the claims appeared in Driberg’s coming book about Burgess. Soon afterwards, Blunt again called Mrs. Bassett (who was in regular contact with Guy at the time), and told her that Rothschild was very upset, and had denied there ever having been regular payments to Guy. (Had Blunt actually read the letters?) Driberg had written to her that Guy had assured him that Victor knew nothing about the transactions with Victor’s mother, which comforted Mrs. Bassett, but was an unlikely story. Meanwhile, Tess and Blunt had agreed that silence was the better course: they had convinced Victor of such action, since they reminded him that the story was essentially true.

Tom Driberg

Driberg’s book Guy Burgess: a Portrait with background duly appeared. It recorded Mrs. Rothschild’s delight with the tips of her Marxist financial adviser, including the sale of some Latin-American railway companies, and the investment in Rolls-Royce, from which Victor had also handsomely benefitted, and paid his friend £100. Driberg reported the £100 monthly allowance given to Burgess, but failed to mention Rudolf Katz or any insider information concerning the B.B.C. So Rothschild escaped relatively unscathed. There was no lawsuit.

Again, so much vital information gathered by intercepts, but no action taken. Ten years later, in February 1966, when the Rothschilds were interviewed by McBarnet and Wright, Victor admitted that Burgess had introduced his mother to Katz, and that his mother ‘might’ have made payment for financial advice. It was part of his pattern at this stage to disparage Burgess when he could, such as claiming that he ‘was a failure in everything he did’. It was four years later, however, when the first serious assessment of the Rothschilds’ prevarications and evasion was made, in the famous report by K3 of January 19, 1970. Yet this eloquent report entirely overlooked the Katz/Burgess business. Later that year, in December, the testimony from KAGO (Golitsyn) brought Katz to the forefront again, and a memorandum on expanded ‘rings’ of spies suggested that ‘Rothschild, his wife, and Blunt’ might be members of the ring (the author obviously not privy to the fact of Blunt’s confession several years before). Palliser’s magnificent summarization of the Rothschilds’ casebook in January 1971 included observations to the effect that Victor’s February 1966 evidence was dishonestly presented, but the detail is swamped by more urgent accusations in the report.

Rudolf Katz

Lastly, out of the blue, appears a brief biography of Rudolf Katz, sent on October 13, 1971 by K3 to the Liaison Officer in Washington – presumably forwarded to the FBI. Katz had been a member of the Communist Party in Germany, who had fled the country and met Burgess in Paris in 1935. It confirms that, late in 1936, Katz was introduced by Burgess to Rothschild and his mother, whose financial adviser he became, working through Burgess. Early in 1937, he left for Argentina, but continued to communicate regularly with Burgess on the project. He returned to the UK in 1937, but was expelled in 1940 because of suspicions of espionage. (The bio also mentions that letters between Katz and Burgess were found among Burgess’s letters, but I do not believe they have been released.) Katz misled the FBI when interrogated in New York in 1951.

In summary, the whole Burgess/Katz saga represents a lamentable failure of due diligence – the concealment of records, the constant cycling through of fresh recruits who do not know the whole story, no doubt the careful admonitions from on high not to pursue some matters too energetically. Rothschild was engaging in very foolish, dubious, even illegal, behaviour – and he knew it, to the extent of wanting his correspondence destroyed. The fact that it was not, and that maybe Burgess and Blunt wanted to subtly bring Rothschild into the same hell that they had created for themselves, but were unable to achieve it, is remarkable, pointing toward the inefficiencies of MI5 and the irrefutable advantages of being a peer of the realm.

Tess and Blunt

Lady Rothschild

Tess Rothschild and Anthony Blunt had a very affectionate relationship: at one stage Blunt confessed that she was the only woman he could have married, and they conversed on the telephone regularly. Tess clearly felt warmly about Blunt, too. And when Tess became increasingly under MI5’s microscope late in the cycle, in 1970 and 1971 (if the attentions they directed to the Rothschilds warrant such a metaphor), the junior officers started looking at patterns of activity afresh.

The first report is the famous anonymous K3 report of January 19, 1970, which declares that Tess Rothschild ‘in particular has not been entirely frank with us’. It then goes on to state that, sometime before November 1965, Victor was informed of Blunt’s confession to espionage – by someone whose name he did not disclose, but it was not Blunt. Rothschild added, however, that he had told his wife, who was apparently very upset, and told her husband that she could not have Blunt in her house again. Yet, when she was subsequently interviewed, she claimed not to know about Blunt’s espionage, and displayed her distress afresh. The report then went on to list several other insights that Tess had offered, such as her knowledge about Jenifer Hart’s instructions from the Party, her awareness of Stuart Hampshire’s doubts about Blunt, her knowledge of Cairncross’s confession to espionage, as well as tidbits about other prominent leftists at Cambridge, including Jack Plum.

As I have recorded, little notice was taken of this incisive statement. It was the November 29 1965 memorandum by Peter Wright that explained that Rothschild had had a meeting with Hollis and Furnival Jones a few days before, and had admitted that he had been told about Blunt’s confession. According to Victor, he had passed on the news to Tess, who was ‘very upset’, refused to have him in her house again, and when, a short time afterwards, Blunt invited himself to stay, she fobbed him off with an excuse. It was the alert B. Palliser who picked up the Hollis discussion in his report of January 27, 1971. He recorded that it was just two months later, on January 31, 1966, when McBarnett and Wright interviewed Tess, and she showed ‘utter astonishment’ at Blunt’s guilt. (This account clearly nullifies Wright’s imaginative tale in Spycatcher, which was clearly designed to provide exculpatory cover for the indiscretions of White and Rothschild.)

One might have expected the Rothschilds to have planned their little charade rather more carefully, but the error appeared not to hurt them. Why Rothschild was not pressed to declare who his informant had been, and under what conditions the confidence had been passed on, is also surprising. It is perhaps ironic, and rather sad, that, while junior officers in MI5 could not be trusted to know that a prime suspect, interrogated multiple times over the years, had eventually confessed to his espionage for a hostile power, it was inappropriate for some of the junior officers to be informed of this breakthrough.

  • Conclusions
Lord Rothschild

Somewhere between White’s Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering around ever since. Embedded deep down in him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times lovable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent  . . . .  this Socialist millionaire, this Rabbinical sceptic, this Wise Man who had followed the wrong star and found his way to the wrong manger – one complete with chef, central heating and a lift. I think of him in the Avenue Marigny dictating innumerable memoranda, as though in the hope that, if only he dictated enough of them, one would say something; on a basis of the philosophical notion that three monkeys tapping away at typewriters must infallibly, if they keep at it long enough, ultimately tap out the Bible. After the war I caught glimpses of him at Cambridge, in think-tanks, once in the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv, still dictating memoranda. (Malcolm Muggeridge, in The Infernal Grove, p 222)

I doubt I have ever met a man who impressed me as much as Victor Rothschild. He is a brilliant scientist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, with expertise in botany and zoology, and a fascination for the structure of spermatozoa. But he has been much, much more than a scientist. His contacts, in politics, in intelligence, in banking, in the Civil Service and abroad are legendary. There are few threads in the seamless robe of the British establishment which have not passed at some time or other through the eye of the Rothschild needle. (Peter Wright, in Spycatcher, pp 117-118)

It was a most monstrous smear of a most distinguished scientist and public servant, then aged, sixty-nine, whose zoological work had earned him a Fellowship of the Royal Society, whose wartime work had merited the George Medal for bravery, who had headed the research team for Shell International, chaired the Agricultural Research Council for ten years, formed and headed the Government’s first ‘Think Tank’, and been chairman of Rothschild’s bank . . .

Because of his intellectual brilliance and flair for original thought, Rothschild was appointed head of the Government’s ‘Think Tank’ in Downing Street by Edward Heath in 1971, with Sir Robert Armstrong as his principal private secretary. He underwent stringent positive vetting for the post, which would give him access to many secrets, with no difficulties whatsoever. MI5’s own list of his contributions to the security of the nation was considered to be a sufficient guarantee of loyalty in itself. But later, when he was under public attack, MI5 was not prepared to state this in his defence, even through the Prime Minister. (Chapman Pincher, in A Web of Deception: The Spycatcher Affair, p 9 & p 144)

A complicated man who had early on rebelled against the burdensome destiny his banking dynasty had defined for him, Rothschild had a somewhat ambivalent attitude towards Moscow: the cause might be just, but everything had to be on his terms. (Jonathan Haslam, in Near and Distant Neighbors, p 82)

He was proud of being Jewish rather in the way Disraeli was; he saw the romantic and tragic history of the Jews as conferring upon them a natural aristocratic lineage. And he regarded the princely role which his family have played among the Jewish people as a source of both pride and responsibility. (Lennie Hoffman, only Jewish eulogist at Rothschild’s memorial service)

For someone as smart as Victor Rothschild (who liked to remind his colleagues of his high I.Q.) to perform so many foolish acts was perhaps a surprising phenomenon. Yet, as the judgments of various MI5 officers recorded in this piece confirm, he regarded himself as unconstrained by the normal boundaries of behaviour, owing to his intellect, rank, wealth, and contacts with the people wielding real power. If any of the above officers had had the opportunity to confront him with the evidence of wrongdoing that they carefully had written up, he might have replied: “Don’t you realize who I am?”, and the wretched underling would have been the victim instead, being sent to the Registry, or some backwater in the dominions. For Rothschild had his protectors, and Dick White was certainly a prominent one.

Yet what could MI5 have done to close out its investigation? So he abetted spies, none of whom had been convicted in a court of law, and two of whom had confessed in a meaningless plea deal. He had not told the truth about his financial agreements with Burgess, and perhaps naively introduced Blunt to MI5. But he had helpfully shopped many other left-wingers, which was what MI5 wanted out of him. There was no point in trying to prosecute him for vague charges of assisting a foreign power, and the investigation at the end of his life initiated by the Director of Public Prosecutions into violation of the OSA concluded that no case could be made for pursuing it with legal charges. There were far too many other skeletons in the closet.

Rothschild frequently did not tell the truth. He was not a congenital or a habitual liar, but he was an occasional one – just like Rees, Blunt, Philby, Berlin, Pincher, Wright, White, Armstrong, and others who believed that some dissimulation was an essential part of preserving their careers and their reputation, and protecting the institutions which they served. And he probably believed that whatever particular underhand venture he was embarking on at any time was an honourable pursuit, with valid goals. He was essentially an intriguer, who gained his excitement from backstage manipulation and deviousness. When in August 1969 J. E. Day of MI5 (K7) interviewed at her home in Shaftesbury Jane Archer (née Sissmore), the celebrated Soviet expert who had worked for MI5, had been dismissed, had worked for Philby in MI6, and had then returned to MI5, she explained that she had been invited once to Rothschild’s home, and felt honoured. Yet all he did was to pump her about her run-in with Jasper Harker, and she felt demoralized and insulted. Rothschild was nothing but an intriguer, she said.

Malcolm Muggeridge, with his mixture of native cynicism and Christian sanctimony, was probably much closer to the truth about the essence of Rothschild than were those two impressionable scallywags Pincher and Wright. Yet the aura that this pair detected was real, and inhibited any incisive action by MI5. By the time Blunt confessed, the important culprits were all sewn up. The damage had all been done much earlier, and the molehunts were largely a waste of time, an exercise in self-flagellation. Rothschild’s misfortune after that was due to his arrogant belief that he would be safe and inviolate above intrigues that he could not control – the wiles and devices of investigative journalism.

(Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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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

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

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?”

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Dick White’s Tangled Web

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

When first we practise to deceive!” (Sir Walter Scott, Marmion)

In this bulletin, I use some correspondence as a trigger to invoke a more detailed analysis of Dick White’s plot to leak information on Kim Philby to the CIA – the exercise that his representative in Washington characterized as an ‘ingenious scheme’ – and to re-assess White’s overall track-record as a counter-espionage officer.

Contents:

An Uncomfortable Exchange

The Letter from Mr. Even-Shoshan

Re-Assessing Dick White’s Plot

Milicent Bagot’s Dossier

The Strange Reactions of Robert Lamphere

Deeper Implications

White’s Predicament

PEACH

Enter ‘Buster’ Milmo

‘The Imperfect English Counter-Espionage Officer’

Postscript: The Lost Philby Chapters

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

An Uncomfortable Exchange

I often reflect on the various email exchanges I have with two groups of individuals. The first I shall call ‘members of the public’, namely amateur enthusiasts for intelligence matters, former intelligence officers, journalists, and writers of histories and biographies with no relevant academic qualifications. The second is simply ‘academics’, professional historians with doctorates or professorships teaching at universities. The messages from the first group are almost uniformly engaging, showing humility, a genuine curiosity and willingness to engage in sensible discussion, patience, and an appropriate degree of scepticism, as well as a readiness to express complimentary remarks about my research. The academics, on the other hand (if they respond at all, of course) are generally – but not always – abrupt, dogmatic, patronising, intemperate, and stingy with any praise.

I was reminded of this contrast during two recent conversations I had with persons I have never met. The first was a female academic (whom I shall not name – unless there is an overwhelming demand for her identification from coldspur readers) whom I had approached concerning Kim Philby. She responded quite pleasantly to start with, and I sent her a late draft of my February coldspur article on Smolka. Her immediate response was ‘Yes, I know the whole Smolka story’, and she described a recent project concerning him that she had worked on. This was a clear message to me that she was the undisputed expert on Smolka, and that she had nothing to learn from any other source. (I do dislike know-alls.)

And then, when I suggested that Edith Tudor-Hart’s role had been greatly exaggerated by such persons as Anthony Blunt (as well as the KGB), she immediately accused me of having male chauvinist tendencies, telling me that I underestimated the work of female intelligence officers. This was an extraordinarily illogical – and faintly insulting – conclusion to come to, and I responded that I was a big fan of Jane Sissmore/Archer, and that I recognized what Daphne Park had achieved. I also mentioned that I had recently read Helen Fry’s Women in Intelligence, and learned much from it. She ignored my response, and then questioned me about the planting of the 1934 press article about Philby, which I had ascribed to MI6, and lectured me that Philby had had nothing to do with MI6 at that time.

It was quite obvious that she had not read the piece I sent her (nor was she familiar with Fry’s book), so I gently drew her attention to it again, asking her whether she had already encountered everything that I had uncovered about Smolka. She quickly wrote back a hot-headed message titled ‘Philby working for MI6 in 1933 is SO NUTS!’, and I quote the full content of her text (which lacked any salutations):

Helen Fry cannot be serious. This is the most ludicrous theory ever.

Christopher Andrew must be laughing his head off (but you will probably say he is establishment and we have to believe in conspiracies instead).

Regarding Smolka: Yes of course he was working for the Russians. That is hardly new (I did not mean you should try to read Russian books. I mean their archive releases. Go to their websites)

Korda and Greene had other things to do in Vienna in 1948 than interviewing the little fish Smolka. (Ever heard of Peter Lunn and his tunnels?)

And one did not need Smolka to learn about penicillin and sewers (yes, I know that Montagu claimed his short story was vital etc) If you read German, go through the newspaper collection ANNO. It is online. They were covering these stories all the time. It was public knowledge.

My first reaction was to wonder whether the lady harboured any inherent prejudices against all female historians, but I quickly put that unchivalrous thought behind me, and turned to the substance. It seemed to me that not only had my correspondent not read carefully anything I had written, but that she also was grabbing the wrong end of the stick with her rhetorical and ill-mannered flourishes. Specifically:

  • It did not appear that she had read Helen Fry’s Spymaster, for she would otherwise acknowledge that Fry actually cites a retired MI6 source who made the claim about ‘Philby always working for MI6’, while she (Fry) cast doubts on its veracity. Moreover, Fry withdrew that assertion in the second edition of the book, a move that I ascribed to the fact that she had been ‘nobbled’ by the authorities. My correspondent shows no awareness of these events, and thus her opinion on the ludicrousness of the assertion is ill-directed and lacks any substance.
  • Why the reactions (cachinnatory or otherwise) of the ‘great Yoda of intelligence studies’ [M.S. Goodman] had to be invoked was a mystery to me. After all, Andrew is the authorized historian of MI5, not MI6, and his pronouncements on these matters have been erratic. It was he who declared, almost a decade ago, that his findings on the very relevant Eric Roberts correspondence would ‘keep the conspiracy theorists busy for fourteen more years’, but he then suffered from an attack of amnesia when asked to recall the circumstances behind that observation. The woman is clearly an acolyte of Andrew: she echoes the clumsy characterization that anyone who suggests that a conspiracy may be lurking behind any event is an irredeemable (and maybe congenital) ‘conspiracy theorist’, while implying that all the reputable scholars like her and Andrew (the ‘Establishment’, presumably) exclude conspiracies from their analyses as a matter of principle.
  • The lecturette on the fact that Smolka ‘of course’ (a typical donnish insertion) was working for the Russians was naive and patronising. The fact that he was a Soviet spy is incontrovertible: the issue at stake was whether he had been recruited by the NKVD in 1933 or 1934, or whether, as Philby claimed in 1980, that it was he who had done so in 1939-1940. One major point of my article was to show how absurd Philby’s claim was, and how it must have been arranged by the KGB on Smolka’s death. My correspondent declined to engage me on this matter. She expresses far too confident an opinion of the reliability of Russian archival sources (a language she does not use, incidentally).
  • She continued her bossy lesson with another arrogant remark about Peter Lunn. Indeed, ma’am, I am familiar with Lunn and his project (‘Operation CONFLICT’) to eavesdrop on Soviet telephone communications in the tunnels below the French and British zones in Vienna. Only Lunn – according to Stephen Dorril – did not replace Young as station chief until 1949, and the first recognition of the telephone cable infrastructure did not occur until late 1948, almost a year after the Greene encounter with Smolka. The woman’s insinuation is that Greene and Korda would have been involved with the operation. But Korda did not accompany Greene to Vienna at that time, and, even if the project had occurred earlier, there is no earthly way that Greene, an ex-MI6 officer with no engineering background, would have been introduced to such a sensitive project. With Philby under suspicion at the time, it would have been hugely irresponsible to have exposed any aspects of CONFLICT to Greene, Philby’s old crony in Section V of MI6.
  • Lastly, she fails to acknowledge that I myself had questioned the fact that Smolka had been the source of the anecdotes about adulterated penicillin and transport through the sewers, and that I had suggested that the story had been created as a useful distraction from the real reason that Greene was sent to interview him. What she means by ‘they were covering these stories all the time’, or that ‘it was public knowledge’ eludes me. That the Viennese press in 1948 was writing about fake penicillin, and that everybody knew about it? She fails to provide the evidence. It was indeed the ANNO archive that allowed me to re-present the extraordinary article about the Philby marriage in the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung from May 1934. As for challenging my ability to read German, I actually told her that I studied the language at Oxford: she may not have encountered my translations of Honigmann yet. Yet she chooses to disbelieve me, and thinks that I used Google Translate.

You will notice that this person does not have the graciousness to say one good word about my research, or to admit that she learned anything at all from it. Her whole behaviour was clumsy, waspish, unscholarly, supercilious and offensive. It is as if she wanted to reinforce through her responses the characteristics of donnishness in all their darker aspects, and to teach this upstart a lesson. I did not respond to her outburst, but merely added her name to the List.

The Letter from Mr. Even-Shoshan

On the other hand, some conversations can be very pleasant. A week earlier, I had received an email from a fresh correspondent, one Moshe Even-Shoshan, who lives in Pennsylvania. He had just finished reading Misdefending the Realm, and, after a complimentary comment, wrote:

                Yet I still struggle with the crucial question why the original approach, of the 1920s and early 1930s, to Communist/Soviet espionage changed so drastically in the critical period that you study—precisely and ironically on the background of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. In the last chapter, you pin the rap, to use detective novel parlance, on Dick White. But on the eve/at the beginning of WWII (for Great Britain, as opposed to the USA), he was just the first university recruit to MI5. So how could one “blame” him? After all, it was Liddell who brought Blunt in and who socialized with characters who should have not have been touched with a ten foot pole.

I look forward eagerly to your comments.

After thanking Mr. Even-Shoshan for his interest, I replied as follows:

I think your question is a very shrewd one, and it is one that has occupied me again of late, since I have started preparing a future edition of coldspur that will provide a topographical guide to my research since I published MTR.

I stand by what I wrote on p 75, as a decent account of the debacle, and how it has shifted since 1940, including Andrew’s rather shameful comments. Yet I believe that some recent research of mine  involving Philby and Smolka, the second installment on whom will appear in a couple of weeks’ time, and will reinforce the points I am about to make  sheds some further light on the passivity of MI5.

The main problem at the time was a lack of intellectual leadership in the Soviet counter-espionage business. Jane Archer was obviously outstanding, but she was a woman in a man’s world, and she fell foul of political intrigues, I suspect. Whether those intrigues were initiated by communist sympathizers, one can only guess. But she was taken off the case, and Hollis was a poor substitute.

I see White’s entry as an attempt to bring more serious intellectual heft into the organization. Some military men have declared that more soldierly than academic skills should have been brought in to counter the communist threat, but my view is that a more subtle assessment of Moscow’s strategies was required. Liddell was sharp, but he was essentially a policeman, and was surrounded by such. The dominant belief within MI5 was that Soviet spies would have to emanate from the CPGB a policeman’s response, ignoring what Krivitsky said, and Petrie let Soviet counter-intelligence wither on the vine during WWII. The successes of Trevor-Roper (against the Abwehr), Austin (against the Wehrmacht – see https://coldspur.com/summer-2023-round-up/), and, to a lesser extent, Masterman on XX, showed that an Oxford don had a powerful role to play in building up intelligence about an enemy agency. In my piece on Austin, I made the point that his skills and processes should have been applied within MI5 in creating a model of the Comintern, and how it worked. White failed in this exercise, since he did not push for it, and he was in many ways a weak man (and he married a Communist). He failed to see through Burgess, Blunt   even Rothschild – and felt humiliated.

Then there was the problem of leakage. From the Home Office, Jenifer Hart passed on to Berlin and Burgess the details of the Krivitsky business. One must also have questions about Stephen Alley, who translated between Archer and Krivitsky. He is still largely a mystery, with maybe torn allegiances. The NKVD had an opportunity to move, sway MI5 opinion, and stifle any further investigations.

The lack of resolve in tracking down Philby ‘the journalist’ astonished me at the time. If you have read what I wrote about Philby last year: see https://coldspur.com/litzi-philby-under-the-covers/, https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-always-working-for-sis/, https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-in-1951-alarms-and-diversions/ (especially), and https://coldspur.com/kim-philbys-german-moonshine/, you will learn that White clearly ignored much of the evidence in 1951, even though it had been sitting in MI5 files for a long time, and it was left to Milmo to point out the obvious.

And my recent research on Smolka, and his relationship with Philby, introduces a far more important dimension. My hypothesis has been that Philby, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, essentially pretended to break away from the Comintern and offer his services (alongside those of Litzy) to MI6, where Claude Dansey was having his whimsical ideas of ‘turning’ known Communist agents (including Ursula Kuczynski and Smolka) into assets for the Secret Intelligence Service. Philby fitted into that pattern. It was a disaster that MI6 has ever since tried to cover up. But, if Philby had been regarded as a friend in late 1939, it would explain why following up, in January 1940, on his activities in Spain would have not been given much attention. After all, Philby would have explained them away. But one of the reasons he moved when he did was because he knew what Krivitsky was saying in the USA, and probably that MI5 was planning to ask him over . . .

Mr Even-Shoshan was sympathetic to my analysis, responding as follows:

I agree with you totally that a more subtle assessment of Moscow’s strategies was required than a pure policeman’s approach and therefore an academic’s approach and experience would have been appropriate. You mentioned Trevor-Roper’s work at the RSS on the Abwehr. I would add, to make the point sharply, his RSS/RAB colleague Stuart Hampshire’s Nov. 1942 report ‘Canaris and Himmler’, where SH “concluded that this struggle [with Himmler’s SD] for secret intelligence was a symptom of a wider struggle for power between the Nazi party and the German General Staff.” (Adam Sisman, An Honorable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 121). This conclusion of RH is, of course, of crucial importance to the question of whether WWII could have been ended much earlier through a negotiated peace with certain forces in Germany. And this, of course, links to Philby’s baleful impact as a Soviet agent  I recall that HTR said Philby prevented this report from going to the British leadership or, perhaps, even just to the top of SIS. It was in the interest of Stalin that the war drag on until Stalin was able to extend his power westward through his eventual “satellite” Communist states–and also to increase his influence in Western Europe through the CPs (especially the French CP), which were able to gain stature as resistance forces. I think you have downplayed Philby’s actual impact on affairs as compared others in the Cambridge Five. But could this one act of Philby have been of great consequence?

This addition of Hampshire to the list of dons was a useful one, and I was able to locate the cited report in a file described, however, as containing exclusively contributions by Trevor-Roper, namely HW 19/347 at Kew, as listed by Edward Harrison in his Introduction to Trevor-Roper’s Secret World. I subsequently commissioned photographs of the file. Yet the result was puzzling: Sisman gets the year of the report wrong (it is dated June 5, 1943), Hampshire’s name is never mentioned, and the tone of the report’s conclusions is much less dramatic than is implied by Sisman. Moreover, the writer offers no sources for his anecdotes outside two references to Philby’s memoir. Sisman’s reliability as a chronicler must be questioned: it is as if Trevor-Roper (or Hampshire, perhaps) wanted to embellish evidence of his colleague’s treachery in order to enhance the record, and distance himself from the mole.

As for my assessment of Philby’s relative influence on military outcomes, I do not recall ever analyzing this topic in detail. I shall simply point out here that Philby started providing intelligence much later than the other members of the quintet, and he was initially distrusted. An interesting matter to be pursued another time, perhaps.

Re-Assessing Dick White’s Plot

One of the reasons why Mr Even-Shoshan’s letter was so timely was the fact that I had been planning to write about Dick White’s very bizarre behaviour during the compilation of his report on Philby in the autumn of 1951. In my Year-End Round-Up published last December, the leading sentence in my ‘Research Agenda’ section ran as follows: “I want to explore more thoroughly where Milmo derived his facts about Kim and Litzy in his December 1951 report, and why White failed to disclose them in his report issued just beforehand.” To summarize the relevant facts concerning White’s activities (as described in https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-in-1951-alarms-and-diversions/ ):a file on Philby had been maintained since 1934 (PF 40408 – and, incidentally, someone has whispered to me that this folder contains over 16 discrete files); Dick White had instructed Milicent Bagot to use this file when preparing the dossier for the FBI/CIA before the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean; and he had had access to it for his summer 1951 report, the release of which was curiously delayed until November. Yet he had used it very selectively.

Dick White

For a comprehensive background on the events of 1951, I recommend to readers that they return to the second half of my post from April 2019 (https://coldspur.com/the-importance-of-chronology-with-special-reference-to-liddell-philby/) and my account, two months later, of Dick White’s scheming (https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/). This plot was designed so that MI5 could pass confidential information, via Robert Lamphere in the FBI, to the CIA so that the latter could inform MI6 of their strong suspicions about Philby, thus forcing a breach between MI6 and Philby that would not be attributed to White and MI5. Readers should recall that White had communicated his intention to mislead Lamphere and the FBI as early as May 25, the day that Burgess and Maclean disappeared, and that his representative in Washington, Geoffrey Harrison, acknowledged the scheme four days later. The purpose of this month’s bulletin, in the context of my exchange with Mr. Even-Shoshan, is to focus on Dick White’s character, motivations, and abilities as reflected in his very deceptive and discreditable performance in 1951, and to draw long-term conclusions about MI5’s failures in counter-espionage.

I have just re-read those posts of five years ago, and I would hardly change a word. My findings since have only reinforced the conclusions I made then, adding further evidence to support the hypotheses of Dick White’s misplaced ingenuity, and of Lamphere’s conspiratorial support. What I did not cover at the time were the exact circumstances behind the material that Martin released to Lamphere of the FBI when he and Sillitoe visited Washington in June 1951, where that information came from, why some highly confidential facts about Krivitsky were included, why the reaction of the FBI concerning Krivitsky seemed so passive at the time, or why the exact role of the CIA’s Bill Harvey has since been obscured. One major fresh consideration to be taken into account, however, is my recent conclusion that Philby had made a false renunciation of his communist allegiances to MI6 in 1939, just before the Krivitsky interrogations. In my opinion MI5 and MI6 would therefore, in 1951, have had additional reasons for being on guard against possibly traitorous behaviour from Kim and Litzy. The details of White’s plotting come into sharper focus because of the events of 1939.

Milicent Bagot’s Dossier

The MacGuffin in the plot is the dossier prepared by Milicent Bagot at the request of Dick White. While White claimed to his biographer that this was compiled only after Martin and Sillitoe returned from Washington, it is obvious that Martin took it with him to show to the FBI agent Robert Lamphere. And White must not simply have asked for a general trawl to see what could be found: he must have been very familiar with the Philby file where everything relating to its subject had been collected. A very telling detail is released in The Perfect English Spy, Tom Bower’s biography of White, where Jane Archer (who was assisting Bagot on the project, having recently returned to MI5 after her spell under Philby in MI6) is shown to contribute a breakthrough finding. White misleadingly presents its timing as occurring after his interrogations of Philby in June 1951. The passage runs as follows (and was provided to Bower by a confidential insider at MI5):

            Shortly after that encounter, White immersed himself in the research prepared by Arthur Martin and Jane Archer about Philby’s past. For the first time, Archer produced a thin MI5 file compiled in 1939 and then forgotten. A report contrasting Philby’s communist sympathies at Cambridge and his sudden espousal of fascism made a deep impression. Alongside was Philby’s own résumé. One coincidence was interesting. Philby mentioned his employment by The Times covering the Spanish civil war. Krivitsky had claimed that among the Soviet agents he controlled from Barcelona was one unnamed English journalist.

Now the significance of this sparkling item from a file that was by then – contrary to how White characterized it – quite thick may not come as a shock to any dedicated coldspur reader, but to the uninitiated, it should have sent out some shrill warning signals. What was Philby doing in 1939, providing details of his career to MI5, and even admitting to his role as a journalist working in Spain? Why was he providing a résumé when he was not being interviewed for a job with MI5? The submission of this data to his file occurred just before Krivitsky arrived in the UK: how could it happen that MI5 failed to follow up at all and make the obvious connection? The reasons for this paradox appear to have eluded all the other historians. Yet the facts fit in perfectly with my theory that, in September 1939, Philby concluded a deal with MI6 and MI5 whereby he admitted his past career working for the Comintern, but agreed to switch back his allegiances to his fatherland, and bring along Litzy with him, while they would both pretend to be working for the Soviets still. In such circumstances, MI5 and MI6 would acknowledge Philby’s journalist role in Spain, but they would forgive it as a youthful mistake.

The reference to Krivitsky is very poignant, since an even more prominent hint was dropped by the defector about ‘the Imperial Council spy’. The placement of these two items by Jane Archer (who wrote the summary back in 1940) is fascinating, and significant in the light of future events: the description of the Imperial Council leakage appears prominently in the Appendix to Chapter 2, concerning OGPU agents in the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. Archer qualifies Krivitsky’s suggestion that the candidate attended Eton and Oxford by adding that Krivitsky conceded that he might have got those details wrong. The item about the ‘young Englishman, however, ‘a journalist of good family, and idealist and fanatical anti-Nazi’ recruited by Theodore Maly to assassinate Franco, appears only as a marginal note under Maly’s entry in the list of Soviet Agents mentioned by Krivitsky. It could well have been overlooked by the casual reader – but not by the experts.

I here re-present the seven points in the package delivered by Arthur Martin to Lamphere, as they appeared in my April 2019 bulletin:

  1. Maclean, Burgess and Philby had all been communists at Cambridge
  2. Philby had become pro-German to build his cover story
  3. Philby had married the communist Litzi Friedman
  4. Krivitsky had pointed to a journalist in Spain (who was in fact Philby)
  5. Philby was involved in the Volkov affair
  6. Philby was involved in infiltrating Georgian agents into Armenia
  7. Philby was suspected of assisting in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.

What is important to note is that most of this list was prepared before Maclean had been officially identified as the ‘Imperial Council spy’, and thence as HOMER. (Item 7 clearly had to have been added after the May 25 debacle.) Yet that conclusion had not been communicated to the FBI, and the relevant datum is not included in the list, which focuses sharply on Philby. Armed with it, Martin flew out to Washington at the same time that Philby was returning to London on his recall.

The Strange Reactions of Robert Lamphere

Robert Lamphere

One puzzling aspect of Lamphere’s account of the briefing is the fact that it is not absolutely clear that all that he describes (on pages 232-237 of The FBI-KGB War) derives from the memoranda that Martin brought with him. The dominant impression given in his narrative was that the whole cavalcade of facts concerning the careers of Maclean, Burgess and Philby came from Martin at that time, but he also hints that he fleshed out his story with information learned since then. (His book came out in 1986.) What he wrote is not precise:

            The memoranda that Martin gave to me outlined the lives of all three men as they were then known to MI-5. Over the years since 1951, many details have been added to the portraits of Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but the basic facts of their lives remain substantially the same as when I first learned the details that June.

Thus we cannot be sure how much of what Lamphere reports thereafter derives from the Martin memoranda, and what is later embellishment – or even correction.

In any event, it is salutary to compare his description of how the revelations occurred with that of White. Lamphere described Martin’s visit by recording his own remonstrations about MI5’s lack of honesty over its closing in on Maclean, and then by emphasizing his own suspicions about Philby in the Burgess-Maclean disappearances. The exchange went as follows:

            “That makes it doubly hard for me to admit all this. However, I have for you now several memoranda which go into the background of Burgess and Maclean.”

            “Where does Philby fit in? Burgess was living with him.”

            Somewhat relieved, Martin replied, “Most of what I have to tell you relates to Philby. We now have the gravest suspicions about him.” (The FBI-KGB Wars, p 232)

This strikes me as stilted and artificial. Why, when being offered some surely intriguing morsels about Burgess and Maclean, would Lamphere sharply switch the subject to Philby? And why, if Martin was planning to divulge some critical information about Philby anyway, would he be ‘relieved’ that Lamphere brought the subject up?

Dick White presented it otherwise to his biographer. After reporting how Sillitoe and Martin had experienced their awkward interview with Hoover, in which Hoover ranted most of the time, Bower’s narrative runs as follows:

            Arthur Martin’s subsequent conversations with FBI officers, especially Lamphere, were focused upon Burgess. As recollections of the antipathy and outrage they had felt towards the dishevelled diplomat were rekindled, the Americans recalled that that his host, Kim Philby, had been remarkably supportive of him. (The Perfect English Spy, pp 120-121)

Again, this is a strained path of logic, contradicting what Lamphere wrote. In any event, Philby’s behaviour towards Burgess might have been caused by natural loyalty. Burgess had been shown to be a boor, but there had been no evidence that he was a spy. If he had been, and Philby did not know about it, he would have supported him. On the other hand, if Philby were guilty, too, one might have expected him to distance himself. The two accounts are certainly at variance, even though both of them attempt to show a natural progression for the discussion switching rapidly to Philby.

Yet other passages are more precise. For example, Lamphere devotes a paragraph to the Krivitsky affair, although he does get the date of the interrogations wrong, and he inserts an ‘as you’ll recall’ to the reader, suggesting that some of what he writes about is information imparted earlier. He then highlights the claims that Krivitsky made about two agents: one ‘a Scotsman of good family who had been educated at Oxford and Eton’ – erroneous in detail, of course, and corrected by Lamphere in his text; and the other ‘a journalist, a man who had been with the Franco forces during the recent Civil War’. And he cites, as the fourth of the ‘Seven Points’ the fact of Krivitsky’s referring to the journalist in Spain, and that it had been used as one of the arguments pointing suspicion at Philby.

Yet what astonishes me is Lamphere’s reaction. His first (and only) impulse is to express the wish that he would have liked to interrogate Philby on all these matters. (He was unable to, primarily because Philby had already been recalled to England, but the spy would obviously not have agreed to be ‘interrogated’ by a foreign intelligence officer.) If, as Lamphere claimed, this was the first occasion when he had learned of the political leanings and disloyalties of those three prominent persons, one would have expected him to have expostulated, and demanded to know how long the British had known those facts. His passivity is inexplicable: he must have been confided in already. Moreover, it would have been scandalous for MI5 to have passed across highly incendiary documents to a foreign power without very tight safeguards. The whole process had been set up.

Moreover, Lamphere appears utterly unimpressed with the factoid concerning the journalist. One might have expected him, if had encountered the Spanish reference beforehand, to declaim: “What? You can now associate the journalist in Spain with Kim Philby? When did you achieve that?” Yet he is totally unsurprised. And what he did not do was to request a copy of the complete report on Krivitsky, which would appear to have been a much more sensible and professional response. After all, Krivitsky was well-known in the USA, had given evidence to a congressional committee, had published a book, and had been assassinated (almost certainly) some time after his return. Would not any smart, inquisitive intelligence officer have wanted to inspect the primary source material? Is it possible that Martin had brought a copy of the full report with him?

I thought it unlikely. The report was a bulky one. Lamphere refers only to ‘memoranda’. If he had seen the full report, one would expect that he would have written about it. By 1986, its contents of were public knowledge. Gary Kern, in his superb study of Krivitsky, A Death in Washington, credits Gordon Brook-Shepherd with breaking the news about Krivitsky in his Storm Petrels, published in 1977, in which he gave a full account. Brook-Shepherd had clearly been given access to the Krivitsky file by MI5, and authorization to write his book, in an attempt to reverse recent Soviet propaganda claims. It is true that the report (or at least a summary of it) had been circulated to government offices in 1940 by Vernon Kell, as Kern relates, and as I explained in Misdefending the Realm, including the Home Office, where the spy Jenifer Hart saw it. Yet that meant that the beneficiaries would have been the Soviets, not the Americans, and if anyone had passed it on across the Atlantic, I concluded that the revelations would surely have prompted questions well before 1951.

Deeper Implications

On the other hand, why did White, after requesting Milicent Bagot to create the dossier on Philby, and presenting it to Martin to pass on to the FBI (without the knowledge of White’s boss, Percy Sillitoe), include such a provocative and incriminating lead in the package? After all, even if the FBI/CIA had learned through some clandestine source about the tip concerning a journalist in Spain, they probably never knew that Philby fitted that profile, and thus would not have made the connection! True, it might add another brick to the rapidly growing structure of evidence against Philby, but, at the same time, the disclosure opened up the possibility of serious accusations being laid against MI5. If the Security Service had had this factoid in their hands since 1940, why had it not been able to follow up the lead, and identify Philby? There could not have been that many British journalists working closely with Franco in Spain in 1937 – certainly fewer than the number of diplomats who might have had access to confidential material in the British Embassy in 1944-1945 . . .

Either White was behaving remarkably stupidly, or he had come to an agreement with his American counterparts already, or he was trying on a risky bluff.  In any case, he received the reaction he wanted. When Lamphere passed on the memoranda to his ex-colleague Bill Harvey, now in the CIA – an action incidentally not recorded by Lamphere, who grants Harvey and Bedell Smith the perspicacity of coming up with the same conclusions independently – Harvey latched on to items 3 and 5 on the list, namely the fact that Philby had married a known Soviet agent Litzi Friedmann, and the circumstances of the Volkov affair. He also introduced the ELLI phenomenon originating from Gouzenko. The exposure of the Krivitsky hints, and the lack of follow-up, appeared to have been forgotten.

And then I recalled vaguely an item in the PEACH archive, from KV 6/142-2, and retrieved it. Serial 351A, dated April 9, 1951, consists of a letter written by MI5’s man in Washington, Geoffrey Patterson, to the Director-General (Sillitoe). The second paragraph runs:

When I visited Lamphere today he asked me casually whether we had ever given the F.B.I. a copy of Krivitsky’s statement about the source in the Foreign Office. I told him I did not know and that there was no copy in my office. He then told me he would make enquiries within the Bureau to see what they had. Patterson continued:

I think we can assume that Lamphere’s mind is running along parallel lines to our own and that it will not be long before he asks us which members of the Embassy fit in with Krivitsky’s description. By a process of elimination he will probably end up with the same conclusions as we have.

This was extraordinary! Lamphere worked for the FBI: why would he be referring to it as a separate entity? He himself was obviously familiar with the (perhaps partial) contents of the Krivitsky report already. He must have been shown it in confidence –  no doubt by a colleague in MI5, presumably Patterson. Yet, if had encountered the ‘journalist in Spain’ reference at this time, he would not have seen it as having any relevance to the HOMER investigation. Patterson in turn showed that he was familiar with the material, and that he had surely read the report (and not simply been informed of its contents), since he admitted that there was no copy in his office. He also showed that he thought it quite regular for Lamphere to be familiar with the report, perhaps carelessly forgetting that he had shared it with Lamphere confidentially, and betraying that fact to history. Why would Patterson not be surprised by the fact that Lamphere alone has knowledge not available to the rest of the FBI, and had not passed on the information to his colleagues, unless he and Lamphere were alone privy to the deal? The exchange is all very phony.

In addition, the irony of this episode lies in the fact that Patterson was then working closely with Philby to try to determine who the spy in the Embassy was. Philby would have become aware of this exchange, and of the fact that Lamphere had access to a vital pointer to Maclean. He might thus have also suspected that Lamphere knew about the journalist in Spain, which could have been alarming. Was MI5 trying to put the wind up Philby, to draw him out? Philby knew that Maclean was HOMER, of course, and the current hunch of the British cross-Atlantic team was that Maclean was indeed the prime suspect, with Gore-Booth an alternative. Indeed, Philby pushed the latter theory: Gore-Booth had the unfortunate qualifications of having attended Eton and Oxford, which temporarily placed him Number 1 on the charts in the Foreign Office assessments. Yet MI5 and the Foreign Office did not want to let the Americans know of their conclusions before they were ready to move, and they also did not want the Americans to work it out themselves.

At this time, the British were making careful comparisons between Krivitsky’s description of the ‘Imperial Council Spy’ and Maclean.  Was the FBI following similar leads, with inferior information? No result of Lamphere’s investigations has survived, but on April 18, a remarkable letter from Arthur Martin of B2b (yes, him of the FEABRE/HONIGMANN/TUDOR-HART saga) to Patterson appears on file. A critical paragraph runs:

            I don’t think we need worry unduly about the F.B.I request for a copy of Krivitsky’s statement. In fact they received from us, through S.I.S., an expurgated version of what KRIVITSKY said which omitted any reference to the “Imperial Council” source. However, they would undoubtedly have heard of this source from Don LEVINE who, you will remember, ‘ghosted’ KRIVITSKY’s book and would almost certainly have received this information during his conversations with KRIVITSKY. If the F.B.I. raise the subject again I think you should simply feign complete ignorance but if they press hard agree to refer the request to me.

This note reflects the fact that, at a meeting in London on April 17, Dick White had reported that the FBI had asked for a fuller [sic] version of the Krivitsky material. Lamphere had presumably followed up, discovered that the Bureau had located its expurgated copy, and was now requesting the full Monty.

What to make of all this?

  • MI6, whenever they forwarded the Krivitsky report to the FBI, had obviously been sensitive and embarrassed enough about Krivitsky’s references to the ‘Imperial Council’ source to want to conceal the information. (What else did they hide, one wonders? And did they redact it in a noticeable fashion, or merely re-present the harmless sections?)
  • Unless Lamphere was dissembling, he was in April unaware that anyone in the FBI had seen the report. And maybe it had been buried and forgotten: certainly he had not been able to rely on his bosses to share its contents with him.
  • On the other hand, Lamphere had been confided in by MI5 to the extent that he knew about (some of, maybe all) the expurgated sections, but had apparently withheld the nature of this confidential statement from his colleagues in the FBI. That explains his lack of interest in seeing the whole report, and instead his expressed desire to interrogate Philby.
  • Martin (as is habitual) had been kept in the dark. He failed to distinguish between the FBI in general, and Lamphere in particular, and somehow thought that Patterson, if pressed, would be able to feign ignorance if Lamphere were to raise the topic of the ‘Imperial Spy’ with him. This was despite the fact that Patterson’s earlier correspondence indicated irrefutably that he, Patterson, had discussed the topic with Lamphere.
  • Martin was again shown as being somewhat slow. He failed to detect the difference between the full Krivitsky material and the expurgated version, or to realize why the FBI might want to see the former.
  • Lamphere’s loyalties and sympathies would appear to have been as much with MI5 as they were with his employers, the FBI. (He bore some animosity to the chief of the FBI, Edgar J. Hoover.) Moreover, his first step when Martin arrived with the incriminating dossier was to leak it to his ex-FBI colleague, Bill Harvey, now working for the CIA. Yet he concealed this action in his memoir, and made no mention of Harvey’s report, or its introduction of ELLI. It strongly suggests that Lamphere was a party to White’s Devilish Plot.
  • Lamphere may even have been obstructing the official American inquiry, since memoranda on file indicate that he stated, as late as May 1, that he was still undecided as to whether the spy was British or American, and that he wanted attention spent on Halpern. This trend is reinforced by the fact that, as the FBI was reported to be heating up its inquiries, on May 7, the bureau was reported by Patterson to be ‘thinking in terms of HALPERN and FISHER’.
  • In his report to Bedell Smith condemning Philby, Harvey of the CIA focused on the Volkov affair, and Philby’s marriage to Litzy, while introducing the Gouzenko references to ELLI in place of inspection of the Krivitsky reference. That was probably because he could not have been expected to know about Krivitsky’s description of a journalist in Spain, let alone that that role could have been linked to Philby. In addition, it helped to distinguish his conclusions from what Martin had passed to Lamphere.
  • White’s gesture of help towards Bedell Smith may have arisen from his service with the General towards the end of the war. (White had been appointed deputy counter-intelligence adviser to Bedell Smith, then Eisenhower’s chief of staff.) Bedell Smith had rebuked White for openly opposing USA policy over counter-intelligence issues: at the time, White had not felt confident enough to hold his ground.
General Bedell Smith in Moscow

Yet the most dramatic conclusion must be the fact that some weeks before Burgess and Maclean disappeared, when Maclean had still not been solidly identified, when Burgess was officially not regarded as involved at all, and Philby was not only out of the picture but part of the team working on the leakage, MI5 had been preparing a dossier that essentially presented not just Maclean, but also Burgess and Philby, as long-term Soviet agents. (What information MI5 had gathered on Burgess, and what suspicions the service had about him at this time, are important questions – as some coldspur readers have pointed out – that will have to be deferred for analysis another time.)

White’s Predicament

It is no wonder that White attempted to present the sequence of events as markedly at variance with the facts. He had to pretend that the project of identifying Homer had focused on Maclean, and that MI5 had no suspicions that Burgess was involved – or even harboured any concerns about Philby’s involvement. He had to imply that the first accusations against Philby came from the CIA, and that Philby returned after the visit by Sillitoe and Martin. He had to conceal the mission undertaken by Martin to leak the dossier to Lamphere. He had to claim that it was only after Martin’s return from Washington that a proper investigation into Philby’s past was undertaken, and that, with Bagot’s help, a dossier was then created and passed to MI6’s chief, Stewart Menzies. As I have described elsewhere, White’s description of events, as relayed first to Andrew Boyle and then to his biographer, Tom Bower, is a tissue of lies. Moreover, it is as if Bower, who lists Lamphere’s book in his bibliography, and uses it in his endnotes, did not read it properly, since he fails to identify the contradictions, ignoring completely Lamphere’s account of how Arthur Martin passed him the detailed dossier. It is worthwhile here recapitulating – and slightly expanding – White’s version of events, as essentially displayed in Chapter 5 of A Perfect English Spy.

In the early days of the investigation after Burgess and Maclean absconded (May 28), MI5 was very much reliant on the testimony of Goronwy Rees, who had volunteered information about Guy Burgess, Burgess having left a message for Rees just before he disappeared. Even though Burgess was quickly confirmed as the person who had rented the Austin A40 left on the quay at Southampton, Dick White claimed to his biographer that he could not believe that Burgess had been an accomplice to Maclean. He said that he was astonished at Rees’s descriptions of Burgess’s past, even though Anthony Blunt, a close friend of Guy Liddell, had helpfully suggested that Burgess might have escaped with Maclean. This was all clumsy dissimulation, in light of the contents of the dossier compiled for Lamphere.

Yet, when White described the meetings between Arthur Martin and Lamphere, he indicated that the conversations were focused on Burgess. This is astonishing, as the main part of the dossier outlined by Lamphere – which White does not mention at all – concentrated on Philby. White attempted to explain this outcome by virtue of the fact that the Americans recalled that Philby had been very supportive of Burgess, and that their investigation therefore was re-directed at Philby. This was simply a clumsy effort by White to explain why the coming broadside from Washington was targetting Philby, when White himself had set up Lamphere & co. with the ammunition.

White went on to state that, soon after Sillitoe’s return to London (actually on June 18, alongside Martin, who had held his meetings without Sillitoe in attendance), ‘a long message arrived from Philby’ offering his thoughts about Burgess. That implies that Philby was still in Washington, but in truth he had already been recalled by Menzies, and he arrived the day after the departure from London of Martin and Sillitoe (on June 12). White would also have in mind another infamous message, suggesting that Maclean might be the guilty party, which Philby had sent on April 2 (see KV 6/142). Yet Philby wrote a further attempt to distract attention from himself on June 4, when he indeed wrote to Menzies about some of Burgess’s dubious habits, and his suspected Marxism. That must be the missive to which White was referring, although why a telegraphed message should have taken so long to arrive on White’s desk is highly questionable. His dating of its arrival serves to postpone the timing of Philby’s departure from the USA.

Thus White’s account of the process of interrogating Philby is mendacious. In his recollection, after the return of Sillitoe and Martin (undated, of course, but actually June 18) White approached Jock Sinclair of MI6, and convinced him that Philby would be of use in London in the inquiries. (Philby had already been in London for a week.) Jack Easton then sent a handwritten message to Philby warning him of an imminent recall – which was in no way ascribable to any misdemeanours. And only at that stage, according to White, did MI5 set to work, preparing for Philby’s return:

            Over the next few days, White and Martin diligently compiled a record of Philby’s work. There was the discovery that Philby’s first wife, Litzi Friedmann, was an Austrian communist. In 1946, White had been asked by SIS to check on Litzi after Philby had applied for permission to divorce his youthful transgression . . .

            There was also Philby’s handling of the Volkov defection in 1945. Konstantin Volkov’s offer to defect had been negotiated with John Reed, a first secretary at the British Embassy in Turkey. . . .

Bower notes without comment that no attempt was made to question Reed before Philby’s return from Washington. Of course, it is absurd to accept that MI5, having maintained a dossier on Philby, would acquaint itself with its contents only at this late stage of the game. If White, as he admitted, had been involved with the embarrassing business of Kim’s wanting a divorce from Litzy in the summer of 1946, when her background was well-known, how could he have suddenly ‘discovered’ those facts in 1951? All the work had already been performed for Martin’s and Lamphere’s benefit.

Next followed the interrogations. Easton had been provoked to have suspicions about Philby himself, but why Sinclair did not object strongly to the process, having been told that Philby’s recall was imply for amicable discussions, is not explored by Bower. White was not practiced in interrogation, and did not prepare himself properly: thus he failed to get any admission or confession out of his subject. Philby simply stuck to his guns, and refused to admit anything, or to concede any of White’s points, knowing that without a confession his accusers were powerless. There was a certain farcical aspect to the exchanges, however. As Philby and White jousted over the funding of Philby’s trip to Spain, White knew that the NKVD had been his paymaster, while Philby had to pretend otherwise in order to ward of Jack Easton, innocently attending the interrogations.

Irrespective of White’s mendacious account of the events, and the inability of his biographer to unravel its contradictions, a balance-sheet of White’s situation can be drawn up. On the credit side, Philby had been forced to resign; the FBI and CIA appeared not to be disturbed by the revelations, which could have rebounded harshly on White and MI5 generally; White’s devious tricks had not been picked up by Petrie or Liddell; his cohorts of Martin, Archer and Bagot kept their silence; hardly anyone outside the intelligence services would have ever heard of Philby; and Attlee and his administration were too consumed with other matters to want to stir up trouble with spies  On the debit side, MI6 was not unified in its attitude to Philby, with Sinclair, Vivian and Nicholas Elliott stoutly defending him, Easton supportive (until July, when he became a fierce critic), and Menzies forced to sit on the fence; the flurry of documents circulating could well have come to the attention of politicians who might ask why on earth MI5 had been so sluggish; Guy Liddell was pursuing the eponymously named PEACH inquiry into the possible misdemeanours  of Philby; the Foreign Office, in the guise of the Washington Security Officer, James Mackenzie, was also revisiting Philby’s behaviour in Washington; and Harvey in the CIA had resuscitated the spectre of ELLI, something White considered a dead issue by then, but one which could have opened a whole fresh disclosure of uncomfortable secrets concerning SOE and the Soviet Union from the war period.

Dick White surely hoped that things would blow over. But unconnected events suddenly changed the rules.

PEACH

After the interrogations, Dick White had reportedly submitted a report to Menzies constituting the case against Philby. It has not come to light. According to what White then told Andrew Boyle and Tom Bower, he then busied himself with an intense study of the connections and affiliations of the Cambridge graduates of the early 1930s, remorsefully admitting that MI5 had not been thorough enough. Yet he also complained that the establishment resented their digging around, and its members in influential places came to their friends’ defence. This was much of a sham show by White: he had had ample time to consider the facts back in 1939 and 1940, when Philby’s malfeasances had come to notice. Moreover, he still showed loyalty to Anthony Blunt, who had also been an Apostle at Cambridge, had visited the Soviet Union in 1934 with Burgess and (despite what Bower writes), had remained friends with him, and had maintained his communist opinions, as was evident when he was recruited by MI5 in 1940. That was an utterly naïve display by White.

MI5’s initial focus during the PEACH inquiry seemed to be on confirming that Philby had been a Soviet agent. Yet what did that mean? The Security Service had no evidence that he had passed on secrets of any kind: he was not trapped from VENONA decrypts. With the Foreign Office investigations, the attention appeared to shift smoothly to another domain: ascertaining whether Philby could have been the man who had alerted Maclean to the imminent interrogation, thus proving his guilt. This line of inquiry was flawed on three counts: the ability of Philby to gain up-to-date information, and then communicate with Maclean from Washington, must have been thin, to say the least; the interrogation was not imminent, but planned for a day a couple of weeks later; and, in principle, Philby might have wanted to save the skin of his friend without necessarily being employed by the NKGB. White and MI5 knew better, of course, but it was a politically more astute strategy to pursue the ‘Third Man’ angle.

White had tried to disqualify himself from the inquiry, on the grounds that ELLI and Volkov were not in his bailiwick – a rather feeble declaration. Thus the substance and the timing of his report are both very bizarre. During the summer (as I have explained elsewhere) matters started heating up, what with the CIA getting antsy again, and demanding more action, Liddell visiting the USA, and getting messages that he could not rationalize because of his exclusion from the plot, and the Foreign Office also stirring the pot afresh. When Liddell returned from leave in August and wrote that things were looking bleaker for Philby, it is not clear what he was referring to, and White’s report (not issued until the end of November) does not reflect any fresh discoveries – not even the quirky letter that reported that H. A. R. Philpott had indeed been a journalist in Spain in 1937. Why would such a spurious item be so prominently added to the archive at that late stage? Now that Jane Archer’s recovery has been publicized, it appears as a clumsy KGB-type spravka inserted in the file to give the impression that vague pointers to Philby in Spain surfaced only in the summer of 1951.

The Philpott Memorandum

Thus White’s report, presented without any fanfare or explanation in FCO 158/27 as being distributed on November 30, may have been a modest revision to what he submitted to Menzies back in June. The tone of the text suggests, however, that more serious investigations of material undertaken during the summer had strengthened the case that Philby was a Soviet agent, but the linkage between that assertion and the desirability of determining who had leaked information to Maclean before he escaped is never made clear. The report is in many ways a re-working of the ‘Seven Points’. It is, however, very superficial on the ties with Litzi.  It states that Philby did indeed go to Spain as a journalist (as had been declared to Lamphere back in June), but it does not explain how this information was derived. Without identifying the project itself, it adds the details of the VENONA decryption exercise, and the changes which the Soviets made in December 1949. It does not mention ELLI.

Yet it is also mendacious. White cites the Krivitsky testimony, noting that the plan to assassinate Franco ‘did not mature’, and then adds: ‘but Krivitsky says he is pretty certain that the “imperial council source”, namely Maclean, would have been amongst the friends of the young man sent to Spain’.  That is nonsense: moreover, Krivitsky was long dead by then, and the use of the present tense is incongruous. Krivitsky is not on record of saying any such thing (I am not sure what the original Russian for ‘pretty certain’ would have been), and there is no linkage between the two in the Krivitsky report. White goes on to repeat, several times, the vague assertion that Philby and Maclean must have been well acquainted, and he uses this claim to conclude that Philby was ‘the most likely person to have been responsible for alerting Maclean’.

The irony was that, even if Philby had managed to warn Maclean of the impending interrogation from afar in Washington, it would have been the least of his considerable sins. White and Menzies must have come to that conclusion, and dreaded what might come out of the woodwork. If only they could just shuffle him off quietly to the side, and hope the story died down  . . .

Enter ‘Buster’ Milmo

What upset their musings was the General Election in October, with Churchill’s Tories returning to replace the Attlee administration, and displaying a traditionally more robust response to the evidence of Soviet penetration. As I explained in my May 2023 piece, both Eden and Churchill were badly briefed, and Churchill, with typical impetuosity, insisted that Milmo’s interrogation of Philby be advanced a week, to December 12, only five days after Liddell had accompanied Sillitoe to listen to Eden’s fears about another scandal, and only two weeks after White’s document had been distributed. The main concern seemed to be that Philby would flee the country (one of the reasons why Churchill demanded haste): the belief was that a confession would be gained from Philby, although the implications of putting him in the dock were not clearly thought through. A vague desire of convincing the Americans that ‘we are resolute in clearing up Soviet espionage in the United Kingdom’ was expressed. What was not planned for was an outcome where Philby denied everything, and in which MI5 and the Foreign Office were left helpless in the stand-off.

Helenus Milmo, Q.C.

Milmo was given his instructions on December 3: he conducted his interrogation on December 12. During that time he studied a dossier (‘a very full one’, though how he knew that is not evident) prepared for him, no doubt by Arthur Martin. Again, I shall not repeat my analysis of Milmo’s report from last May: what intrigues me is the fresh evidence that he turned up – clearly not ‘fresh’ to him, as it must all have been new – but fresh in the sense that White had curiously avoided mentioning it. I listed seventeen items that MI5 had appeared to have dredged up during the summer, all of them relating to events before the outbreak of the war. The most startling are perhaps the details of Litzy’s movements in Europe between 1934 and 1937, and her banking arrangements. I find it impossible to believe that these items were discovered and prepared especially for Milmo’s benefit, considering the short time between his appointment and the interrogations. But neither do I think it likely that MI5 came up with these gems by trawling through previously arcane folders in the summer of 1951, or by making requests to the Immigration authorities about her movements. They must have all been in Philby’s Personal File, and they had been entered there at the time that the events occurred.

So why did Dick White appear unaware of them in his report? It is inconceivable that he was not familiar with the details. After all, he had reported to his biographer the item whereby Philby’s role as a journalist had been ‘discovered’ by Jane Archer – a nugget, by the way, that was noticeably absent from Milmo’s Appendix. First of all, his report must have been written some time beforehand, at a time when he thought matters were settling down, and surely not in the knowledge that Milmo was about to embark on another interrogation. Second, the report must have been pulled out to provide evidence that MI5 had been doing some kind of investigation, but it ran the risk of harming the reputation of White and the Security Service because of its shallowness. Yet the most provocative aspect of the dossier is that it closes in 1939, the time when Philby (as I claim) performed his deal with MI5 and MI6. The file no doubt moved into a ‘Y’ category with special security status at that time, and its contents were not made available to casual researchers in MI5. The intent was to show that Philby had been a careless and subversive operator in his early years, but that there was no evidence of any treacherous activity once war broke out.

The risks were enormous, however. Anyone reading Milmo’s Appendix should have expostulated: “You mean, you had all this information on Philby in the 1930s, and you still employed him in SOE and MI6, and promoted him to high positions, even head of Soviet counter-intelligence??”, and wondered why the routine checks were not made.  As I have explained before, it is documented that, on June 18, 1940, MI6 made a telephone inquiry to MI5, requesting a trace on Philby, but all the Security Service came up with was a record of his previous membership of the Anglo-German Fellowship.  (For example, the item on his role as a journalist in Franco’s Spain, matching the Krivitsky tip, was conveniently overlooked.)

Certainly, only a carefully doctored subset of Philby’s file would have been presented to Milmo for inspection. Milmo might have been presented with the specially crafted September evidence about Philpott the journalist in Spain, but assuredly not the original 1939 entry, so that it would appear that the Spanish connection was only a recent discovery. Yet, in his report, Milmo refers neither to the résumé information that Jane Archer ‘discovered’ nor to the dubious ‘Philpott’ memorandum, instead writing:

            There is no proof that PHILBY was in fact the agent referred to in the above statement but this information fits him like a glove and no the alternative candidate has been found.

The ‘above statement’ cites the phrase attributed to Krivitsky concerning his being ‘pretty certain’ about the friendship between the Imperial Council spy and the journalist, so it is clear that Milmo is merely parroting what White had written. He had had no time to undertake any original investigation: the dossier presented to him was not as ‘full’ as he supposed.

Nevertheless, White’s leaving it to Milmo (who worked for MI5 during the war) to come up with the documentation of all those telling stories is unfathomable. He should have been mortified that Milmo would be allowed to be the first to reveal some of the unpleasant secrets in the MI5 files. One can only assume that he had no choice, and matters were by then beyond his control. Alternatively, he would probably have claimed that he never would have had a chance of viewing the  records that Arthur Martin and Jane Archer managed to dredge up from the vaults for Milmo’s benefit. Yet he must also have figured that, if someone were incisive enough to question MI5’s thoroughness in this respect, the matter would come back to rebound primarily on Menzies. Menzies and White knew the score, were both party to the confession and deal that Philby engineered, and protected each other, but no one in authority was smart enough to challenge them.

‘The Imperfect English Counter-Espionage Officer’

‘For he himself has said it,

And it’s greatly to his credit,

That he is an Englishman!’ (W.S. Gilbert, HMS Pinafore)

I have previously pointed out that The Perfect English Spy was one of the worst-selected titles for an intelligence biography. Dick White scored one out of three: he was indisputably English. But he was primarily a counter-espionage officer, not a spy. And his performance was frequently poor.  Whatever native intelligence he possessed was too often directed at schemes to confound his rivals and allies rather than towards thinking strategically about the enduring enemy. White was treading very dangerous ground, but he must have calculated that no archival material would be released in his lifetime to undermine his account of what happened. In that respect, he was right, but a more careful analysis by his biographer should have pointed out the contradictions.

Mr. Even-Shoshan is nevertheless correct: few of the errors of 1940 can be laid directly at White’s door. After the opportunity that Krivitsky placed before MI5, the service was in confusion. Jane Archer was pushed aside in bizarre circumstances. Vernon Kell was overwhelmed by the illusory German ‘Fifth Column’ crisis, and then deposed. Liddell was ineffectual. Churchill’s Security Executive caused demoralization. The implications of Krivitsky’s death in Washington were overlooked. Petrie came in to restore order, but completely mismanaged the Soviet counter-espionage effort during the war. It was delegated to the unimaginative Hollis, who was charged with keeping an eye on the Party. Others who spoke up about the Communist threat (Harker, Curry, Knight) did not have enough clout, and were not leadership material. By 1945, when White took over B Section, most of the damage was done.

At the outset of war, however, White had been quickly introduced to some of MI5’s major projects. He had opportunities to break through, and shine, but was at that time guileless, too ingenuous. He was present at some Krivitsky interrogations, but he did not trust the defector since he himself lacked appreciation for the cunning and dissimulation essential for spycraft, and he thus classified all Krivitsky’s pointers as worthless. In dealing with Whitehall over the double-cross operation, White decided to be deferential, and that behaviour let him down when he tried to criticize Beaverbrook’s policy for hiring communists. Indeed, Roger Hollis (who had not completed his degree course at Oxford) was more forceful than White over the communist threat. Bower writes that White’s attitude towards communism at that time was ‘benign’. White never raised any objections to Smolka’s employment: he admitted that communist penetration was a side-issue. When Percy Sillitoe was appointed Director-General after the war, and White took over the counter-espionage B Division from Liddell, Hollis remained more hawkish than White. Again, White kowtowed to Whitehall.

White had been the first graduate to be employed by MI5, which was significant, in that it represented a development away from Special Branch police officers and military men. Yet he did not possess a first-rate brain: he had gained only a second-class degree in history at Christ Church, Oxford, and had been assessed by his tutor as being a little slow to ‘get going’. Thus he was not a ‘don’ with a post-graduate degree: in fact he had been turned down for a university appointment. (His mentor at Christ Church, was another history don, John Masterman, who came to work for him during the war, and led the XX Committee). Moreover, White complained, when he belatedly tried to understand the mechanics and structure of Soviet subversion, that he was constantly thwarted by ‘the intellectuals’. On the other hand, he mixed well with the Oxford group – especially what was known as the Christ Church mafia:  Masterman, Gibert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Charles Stuart, and Denys Page (MI5’s representative at Bletchley Park). Moreover, given his relationship with Blunt, this was a rather simplistic view of the world, and reflected a lack of toughness, of the keen curiosity that is essential for counter-intelligence work.

On the other hand, perhaps reflecting the mutual admiration society of Christ Church men, Trevor-Roper spoke highly of him:

            He was a true professional in his methods, but what we most admired was his intellectual lucidity, his equanimity, his unfailing sense of proportion and humour . . .  He believed that all problems are soluble by reason; and he never lost his balance.

That would be a positive assessment for a clubbable civil servant, yet what was required of someone prepared to confront the KGB were steelier qualities: greater cynicism and less optimism; an appreciation of the presence of the irrational and cruel. Dropping that ‘sense of proportion’ might have been a useful guardrail against Stalin’s evils. An echo of that assessment came from Kim Philby, who wrote to Trevor-Roper (in a letter dated April 30, 1968) that his survival from his interrogation had been gained courtesy of the ‘ineffective’ White, who was ‘pretty nondescript besides such colleagues as Liddell, Hart, Blunt, Rothschild and Masterman’.

As Tom Bower points out, there were some sour grapes behind that observation, and he points out that none of the officers named ‘would have been minded to lead the charge against Philby’. He is right: Liddell was cerebral, but lacked confidence and guts; Hart was a very meek and mixed-up personality; Blunt’s reputation for scholarship and clear-thinking was obviously blasted after his exposure; Rothschild was a devious and vainglorious character, with dubious motivations; Masterman was surely equipped to enjoy a quiet life, skillfully organizing the XX Committee. Trevor-Roper acknowledged Philby’s grudge and poorly disguised motivations in a tribute to White in Christ Church Report, 1993, where he disparaged Philby’s letter. Yet Philby was overall on the mark: White blew his opportunity.

As I indicated in my response to Mr. Even-Shoshan, I think the comparison should lie elsewhere.  In writing on what makes a good Intelligence Officer, in my piece from last December (https://coldspur.com/a-wintry-miscellany/ ), I wrote:

In conclusion, after reading the biography of J. L. Austin, I realized that it was a figure like him that MI5 (and MI6) desperately needed to coordinate intelligence about Soviet intentions and practice in all their aspects – Leninist and Stalinist doctrine, the Comintern and its successors, Moscow’s relationship with the CPGB, the role of spies, illegals and agents of influence, the use of propaganda and subversion. Austin’s capacity for hard work, his ability to learn, his excellent memory, his historical sense, his patience, his lack of sentimentality, and his synthetic abilities in interpretation all gave him an unmatched capability. Two heads of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith and William Casey, were both highly impressed with Austin’s work, and tried to bring his disciplines to work in reforming the organization.

J. L. Austin

Thus Bedell Smith, for whom White had served in Germany at the end of the war, thought more highly of Austin. White had had an opportunity to bring his expertise to bear in the immediate post-war years, and to dedicate appropriate analysis to the warning signs. The intelligence concerning Blunt, Feabre, Honigmann, Smolka, Broda, Tudor-Hart, Nunn May, Philby (abetted by Gouzenko and Volkov), as well as Alexander Foote, and Ursula and Len Beurton, followed by the Fuchs case, should have formed a pattern. Yet, facing the unthinkable, he failed to grasp the nettle. He set about concentrating on cover-ups, saving his own career, helping to ensure the survival of MI5 by lying to his bosses, and then persuading Sillitoe in turn to lie to Attlee over the Fuchs business. Afterwards, he felt like resigning when severely rebuked by Sillitoe, yet was convinced by Liddell that he should soldier on, only then to betray Liddell in his quest for the top job. And then, later, when chief of MI6, he undermined his former service by encouraging rumours of Soviet penetration of MI5 – the ‘ELLI’ fiasco. It was a selfish and dishonourable end to his career.

So that is my conclusion about White: on the surface, a heartily good fellow who knew how to deal with Whitehall, but altogether too decent a chap to take on the monstrosities and wiles of Stalin. ‘The schoolmaster’, as Malcolm Muggeridge called him after hearing of his promotion to Director-General. True, he was not immediately responsible for the policies of Section B when he arrived in MI5. He soon had an opportunity to extend a fundamental influence, however, but he failed to do so. He was not comfortable speaking ‘truth to power’. He disbelieved the harsh truths from Krivitsky, but succumbed to the flattery and attention of Blunt. He showed some worldly wisdom, and was not without ingenuity himself, as his plot with the CIA demonstrates, but he quickly wove himself a tangled web which should have been impossible to escape. He did escape for a long time, however, and even received a bountiful biography, and accolades, which have positively enhanced his reputation. The crucial factor was that he was fortunate in that his political bosses were not very smart, either.

Postscript: The Lost Philby Chapters

As a result of another amiable email from a regular correspondent, I followed up a lead on the chapters of Philby’s autobiography that failed to be included in My Silent War. The writer drew my attention to a story published on-line by the BBC, at  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67456282.   My informant went on to tell me that Philby’s widow had been trying to sell some of their possessions after the fall of the Soviet Union, yet, shortly before the auction was to take place, MI6 became rather nervous about what might be revealed, and persuaded the auction house to remove the more sensitive portions of the memoir. Money changed hands, and the censored material is now reportedly held in the MI6 vault.

From the photographs of the excerpts, I was able to determine that what was presented by the Spyscape Museum actually represented the extra two chapters that were published in The Private Life of Kim Philby, by Rufina Philby, assisted by Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov, published in 2000. They appear as ‘Autobiographical Reminiscences’ on pages 206 to 243: the first covers Philby’s early years, while the second starts with Philby’s arrival with his new bride in London in the spring of 1934, and describes his recruitment by Arnold Deutsch. So what might the withdrawn chapters have contained? It occurred to me that Philby’s time in Vienna was completely absent, and that he might well have written a chapter describing his experiences there – the revelation of which would have been very embarrassing for MI6.

I decided to contact Shari Kashani, Head of Collections and Curation at Spyscape. She was very helpful and appreciative. Portions of the two chapters had originally appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, in 1993: she very kindly sent me images of the extracts. But she (and Skyscape) did not even know that the two chapters had appeared in the Private Life book published in 2000! So we know that what Skyscape owns appears to correspond to what Rufina handed over. Yet, as I pointed out to her, it is odd that the memoir would jump from childhood reminiscences to London in 1934, without covering the tumultuous days in Vienna. I wrote to her:

                I find it all intriguing, because Philby’s memoir (My Silent War) is judged to have been written with the KGB looking over his shoulder, and is very unreliable. One might think that Philby would perhaps have tried to correct some false impressions, but the second chapter (concerning his recruitment) is probably just as unreliable. For example, he starts off by writing about his return by train via Berlin and Paris, but E. H. Cookridge, who knew him well in Vienna, wrote in his memoir that Kim and Litzy returned to the UK on a motorcycle . . .  The fact that he did not write about the controversial time in Vienna (that would have preceded this chapter) is also provocative.

Ms. Kashani replied:

            Thank you so much for sharing that very interesting information. When we purchased the memoir, it was specified that the work was unpublished, hence we didn’t know of its inclusion in Rufina’s memoir. You are correct – the work comprises 48 typewritten pages, and then additional pages of edits. Nevertheless, we are thrilled to have the memoir and its document holder as part of our collection, and very happy to know that the public have access to Philby’s words in this 2000 compilation. 

Finally, I informed her of the story of MI6’s intervention, and gently pointed out that Spyscape might have been misled over the exclusivity of the chapters the firm did buy (since they were unaware that they had been published in book form), and that it may also have purchased less than was originally described. She had confirmed to me that there were only 48 pages extant, which number matches that stated by Peake in his Introduction in the book. On the other hand, in an article in The New York Times of 1994 (‘Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia’), Ron Rosenbaum described how he had been able to inspect the consignment of Philbyana received from Moscow when he visited Sotheby’s, and that among the papers he discovered the unfinished biography. “Five [sic!] chapters in manuscript pages whose publication the K.G.B. had apparently prohibited”, he wrote. This was apparently news that Spyscape did not want to hear, as she did not respond to my comments: her previously very affable communications ceased over two months ago. She and her bosses were presumably no longer ‘thrilled’. In a way, I was sorry to detect her chagrin, but I had hoped she might follow-up my lead more aggressively.

So it seems there exist two chapters as yet unpublished. Can anyone out there add anything else?

Late News: I have compiled Omnibus Editions of a) the demise of PROSPER, and b) recent bulletins on Kim Philby, that can both be inspected via the Reports and Articles page at https://coldspur.com/reviews/.

(Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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

‘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.

[Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.]

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A Wintry Miscellany

A Memorial : The Shooting of Protestors at a Soviet Prison Camp in December 1923

In Memoriam: On December 19, 1923, six prisoners were shot at the Savvatievsky monastery compound, which was located on an island in the White Sea and had been converted by the Cheka into a camp for political prisoners. The four men and two women, from ages 23 to 37, had staged an open protest about living conditions at the camp, and either perished on the spot, or died soon after from their wounds. The remembrance of this event is especially poignant since Memorial, the Russian organization that has striven to keep alive records of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, such as this, has been shut down by President Putin.

While I wish all coldspur readers the compliments of the season, I warn them that this bulletin does contain some cheerless, even curmudgeonly, observations.

Contents:

  1. Personal Files at Kew
  2. Was Kim Philby a Bigamist?
  3. Hannah Coler’s ‘Cambridge 5’
  4. The Rejuvenation of Dick Ellis
  5. The Book Review Magazines
  6. Research Agenda
  7. ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’
  8. ‘This I Cannot Forget’
  9. J. B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’
  10. The coldspur Archive
  11. Mental Health
  12. Coffeehouse Talk

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

  1. Personal Files at Kew

The Personal Files (PFs) maintained by MI5 represent a rich but often enigmatic resource. They are sometimes converted into a new series of identities in the KV/2 class, KV being the Reference for the Security Service (MI5). Thus most descriptors of individual KV/2 units will declare the number of the PF from which its content is assembled. Yet many PFs have not been released: there exists no master list of such files, but some of their identities can be easily detected since they appear as unredacted annotations made on the pages of many released files. Furthermore, the system used for PFs appears to have allocated numbers in sequential order, with the result that the approximate date of the creation of ‘ghost’ PFs can be quite readily determined.

For example, coldspur readers will by now be familiar with the PF number allocated to Litzy Philby, 68261, since handwritten inscriptions made on items in the Tudor-Hart files (and in others) request that a copy of certain items (letters, memoranda, etc.) be placed in her file – which she may well have shared with her husband. Thus a stab could be made at establishing when her file was opened by studying the dates of released files of PFs holding numbers close to hers. In fact I have started to create a spreadsheet in which I record the PF numbers and their corresponding KV/2 identities, and if a PF has not been released, I enter it in sequence with a reference to the KV in which it appears. I thus have codes for a) unreleased, b) released but undigitized, and c) released and digitized entries, and, if possible, a date on which the file was created. (Undigitized files have to be inspected on site, or, since I have not travelled to Kew for several years, to be photographed professionally by my London-based researcher.)

I have found anomalies. For instance, it appears that a bevy of PFs was created after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, with numbers allocated, as the investigation gathered steam, to suspected associates as well as the escapees themselves, such as Philby (PEACH), Blunt (masked as BLUNDEN because of his wartime employment by MI5), and Goronwy Rees (who had volunteered vital information soon afterwards). Yet the suggestion that the collection of material was initiated at this time (May-June 1951) is belied by the fact that the released file on Rees (for instance) contains material that derives from the 1930s. A reference to Philby’s file (PF 604502), dated November 1946, can be seen in the file of the Sicherheitsdienst officer Protze (KV 2/1741). That would suggest that pre-existing PFs on some of these characters had been maintained for some years, but that they were suppressed, for reasons of ‘security’, and that the appearance of a completely fresh inquiry was promoted by the creation of ‘new’ files that may have incorporated older material, and may even have been in existence for a while.

Thus a large number of identifiable but unavailable files exist (unless some of them have been destroyed). Why have they not been released? It could be that the authorities are embarrassed – by the unnecessary surveillance of persons who were of no danger whatsoever, or by the ineffective observations of individuals who were clearly guilty of subversive or treasonable activity. Sometimes specious reasons about protecting family members are given. (I have recently started a project to list all the archival material related to Guy Burgess that appears in the National Archives Directory, consisting of two or three hundred discrete items, mostly in the Foreign and Colonial Office records. It is a shocking story – with many items permanently retained, and many closed but due for opening in the next few decades, including some not to be released until January 2073 (!) – that I shall report on fully in a future coldspur bulletin.)

I have a very pragmatic and inquisitive approach to interpreting all this. One of my on-line colleagues (who has a background with British intelligence) claims that he knows how the system works, and that any anomaly he finds in the records is due to mistakes made by officers, or by the custodians of the Registry. You might call his methodology an a priori interpretation. Since I have no preconceived notions of how the system was designed and implemented, I am a little more sceptical. I tend to regard all manifestations as features of the system, supplemented by possible attempts to cover tracks. You could call my approach an a posteriori one.

One of the anomalies is the fact that certain individuals were given separate classifications, under the KV/6 reference instead of KV/2, representing so-called ‘List’ files. An example is Georg Honigmann (KV 6/113 & 114), whose source is given as L169/65. The Kew Catalogue describes this category rather obliquely and circuitously in the following terms: ‘relating to investigations carried out on related individuals or organisations (for example, investigations into SOE personnel forming part of the SOE ‘list’)’. That is not very helpful. In what way, for instance, would Honigmann have been considered part of a ‘list’ when he arrived in the UK in 1931? I am looking out for other persons of interest in the KV/6 series in an attempt to derive a pattern, and have already collected a small but interesting set.

My study has been complemented by the inspection of some archival material concerning the Registry itself, namely KV 4/21: ‘Report on the Operations of the Registry During the War 1939-1945’. DDO (‘R.H.’, namely Reginald Horrocks) started by describing the state of the Registry in June 1940, when ‘the organization of the service had all but broken down’. The Registry had been allowed to lapse ‘into a most lamentable position’. It seemed that inertia had encouraged information to be gathered in ‘subject’ files, which made extraction of intelligence on individuals particularly difficult. He summarized the problem as follows:

            The basic system of filing was inefficient and inelastic. While a diminishing number of individual files were made the records of those individuals on which interest centred (Aliens, Right and Left Wingers) were filed on a subject basis (i.e. Communists in Northumberland). [‘Seriously?’ – coldspur] The effect was, that to obtain complete information regarding an individual several files were needed, many of which were required by other Offices for other individuals. So few obtained the files they needed and Officers’ rooms were stacked with unanswered correspondence and with files all awaiting other files which could not be obtained. Personal files were classified in series, this being a quite unnecessary complication in the process of file making.

Happily, this mess was rapidly cleaned up, and new systems were introduced. Unfortunately, a bombing raid in September 1940 destroyed some of the records of the new Central Index, but its reconstruction was completed by June 1941. According to Jack Curry, this extended period of turmoil, which severely affected morale, was brought to an end only when Petrie approved Horrocks’s scheme. The former chaos, however, may help to explain why searches were often unsuccessful when they should have uncovered incriminating material. Whether the ‘subject’ files corresponded in some way to ‘List’ files is not clear however. The Kew rubric on ‘Lists’ refers, for example, to SOE, which was not created until this exercise was under way. The fact that Georg Honigmann remained in a ‘List’ file, and was never granted a Personal File, may indicate that he was of no particular interest. On the other hand, an alarming note in the report states that ‘In 1940 a number of the old files of no current interest were destroyed’. [How did they know the files contained nothing of interest?] Perhaps the survival of Honigmann’s file is a lucky accident.

Lastly (for the time being, anyway) I refer to one critical file revealed by this practice. In a recent post (https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-always-working-for-sis/ ) I expressed my incredulity that, if a file had been opened on John Lehmann when he travelled to Vienna as an obvious left-winger, one would not have been opened on Kim Philby. Lehmann’ s PF number is 41490, and the first entry in it is dated October 1, 1932. In fact, MI5 picked him up after he was mentioned in a letter by Gerald Hamilton, a few months before he went to Austria. The highly dubious Peter Smolka (later to be named Smollett) had a file opened on him when he arrived in the UK in November 1930. Its number is 39680. And when Smolka asked the Home Office to allow him to set up the Intercontinental News Agency with his colleague H. A. R. Philby, in November 1934, a handwritten note on the letter (visible at ser. 62a in KV/2 4167) indicates that the aforementioned Philby has a PF numbered 40408. That would appear to show that a file on Philby was probably started during 1931, when he was up at Cambridge . . .  I wonder what happened to it.

Smolka’s Letter of November 15, 1934

2. Was Kim Philby a Bigamist?

There once was a person from Lyme

Who married three wives at a time.

            When asked: ‘Why a third?’,

            He said: ‘One’s absurd,

And bigamy, sir, is a crime.’

(attributed to William Cosmo Monkhouse)

A brief synopsis of the saga of Kim Philby’s ‘divorce’, as conventionally represented, runs as follows: He failed to divorce Litzi when they drifted apart, even when he started cohabiting with Aileen Furse in 1940, and had children with her. In August 1946, he reputedly woke up to the idea that he should legitimize his relationship with Aileen, and confessed the existence of his marriage with Litzy to his former boss at MI6, Valentine Vivian. He subsequently contacted Litzy (who had left England by then), and gained her agreement to a divorce, which was finalized in Paris (or maybe Vienna) in early September. He married Aileen on September 25. Litzy was then free to marry Georg Honigmann, which, by most accounts – including the memoirs by their daughter-to-be, Barbara – took place later that year, or in early 1947. Yet records maintained by Barbara Honigmann’s extended family on the genealogical website, Geni, indicate that Litzy and Georg were ‘partners’, not ‘spouses’. Litzy’s Wikipedia entry states merely that she lived with Honigmann, with no mention of marriage. In his biography of Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, Anthony Cave-Brown wrote that Kim married Aileen bigamously, without offering evidence either way, or even investigating why, if he was correct, the events were not pursued by the authorities.

One of the most astonishing aspects of this case is the lack of curiosity on the part of those writers who have blandly accepted Philby’s account of the ‘divorce’, without any tangible evidence, and who have ignored the absurdities of the arrangements by which he gained his decree – which would presumably have been an essential piece of evidence for his marriage to Aileen. (Otherwise why did he bother? He had already lied to a colleague in MI6 that Litzy had been his ‘first wife’.) I have thus been drawn into the dark web of Geni, in an attempt to pin down the evidence that Georg and Litzy were only ‘partners’, not husband and wife. Of course, in principle, based on hearsay and memoirs, it is far easier to suggest that the couple were legally married than they were not, especially as the Berlin marriage records will not be released until eighty years after the event, thus in 2026 (or 2027), and the ‘fact’ of Kim’s marriage to Aileen would strongly suggest that he was a single man again at the time. When we can inspect those records, the matter should be settled one way or the other.

Geni is not wholly satisfactory. The data is maintained by a string of semi-anonymous characters, who apparently do not have to show their accreditation when they maintain genealogical information, are not required to identify sources, and all too often rely on Wikipedia for relevant ‘facts’. They offer email addresses, but often fall into desuetude, and do not respond to inquiries. Yet some valuable details can emerge. While I have not been able to get a response from the person responsible for the information concerning Barbara and her parents’ partnership, I have succeeded in exchanging messages with some genealogists and serious amateurs who have given me some important leads. As for Barbara herself, she is reported to dislike any ‘prying’ into her life, which I thought was a bit rich. After all, if you are going to try to draw in the public by writing very personal memoirs (Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, about her mother, and Georg, about her father) that contain multiple untruths and contradictions, you can hardly expect the intellectually curious to turn off their inquiries when matters become a little sensitive. It reminds me of Peter Cook, and his pastiche on Greta Garbo (‘Emma Bargo’), who goes around with a megaphone declaring ‘I Vant to be Alone!’. [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGVcgZkMxWk]

Peter Cook as Emma Bargo

I have discovered some important facts. When I wrote about Georg’s cousins in last month’s posting, I assumed that Andreas and Johannes were the children of Georg’s brother Heinrich. But Heinrich died in World War I, unmarried, before the boys were born (and Barbara understated their ages, for some reason). On reinspecting Barbara’s text, I noticed that she had described Andreas as ‘ein Cousin zweiten Grades’, which can mean either ‘second cousin’, or ‘first cousin once removed’. The latter relationship turns out to be the correct one: Andreas and Johannes were Schuelers, the grand-children of Georg Senior’s (Georg’s father’s) sister Elise. Elise married Baruch Spitz, and their daughter, Hedwig, married Alfred Schueler. They had the two sons. Hedwig was thus Georg Junior’s first cousin. I also learned that Barbara Honigmann has two (unidentified) siblings, by all accounts also the children of Litzy and Georg, although the displayed genealogical information is very confusing. Barbara’s husband (Oppermann) is recorded on Wikipedia as having taken Barbara’s surname as his own, but one of her siblings also married an Oppermann while assuming the Honigmann surname. In contradiction of this intelligence, Barbara declared in her memoir that she was an only child – and she surely was the expert in this matter. I am not sure what is going on here.

When I tried to contact the primary author (Decker) of the posting about the ‘partnership’, however, I was thwarted, and received no response. On the other hand, I did manage to initiate an email exchange with two other members of the extended Honigmann clan, who were able to supply comprehensive details of the family tree (excluding living members, apart from Barbara). From open information, however, I was able to identify a great-nephew of Barbara, one Leon Rieding, who is apparently in agreement with Mr. Decker’s posting. I attempted to get in touch with him through a surrogate to determine whence comes his intelligence, but he was one of those shadowy figures who do not respond to emails.

And then I returned to Barbara’s memoir Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter from My Life), and discovered some startling disclosures. She writes of her mother: “In marrying my father in Berlin, she evidently completely blocked out her second marriage with Philby, being content to produce the divorce decree from her first marriage. The requirement to produce a certificate of capacity to marry was certainly fulfilled in a formal fashion, but it was bogus.” She also reveals an extraordinary ‘admission’ from her mother, who told her: “It was in 1942, I think, that I divorced Kim, or perhaps in 1944 or 1945, unless it was in 1946. I have forgotten what year it was that we saw each other for the last time.” Barbara is stupefied that her mother cannot recall the date of her divorce: Litzy is clearly trying to cover up in some confusion, but all that she can add is that she cannot even recall the date when she divorced Georg, as if she suffered from amnesia in this department.

Later, Litzy tells her daughter that she left the UK for Paris ‘in the spring of 1946’ – definitely untrue – and made her way to Berlin. Yet she had to take a detour via Prague, where she met up with her schoolfriend Lotte, the wife of Smolka, before taking the train to Dresden. At no stage of this explanation does she make any reference to her divorce from Kim, in contrast to her husband’s very dramatic, though detail-free, narrative. It is quite incredible that she could have failed to recall such life-defining events if she had indeed managed to gain the divorce decree in Paris or Prague, and she tries on the pretense that the legal separation had taken place some time before.

Of course, the obvious place to gain their divorce would have been the city where they married – Vienna. Borovik, in The Philby Files, claimed that Kim saw Litzy in Vienna. And indeed, Kim has been recorded as making a secret visit there ‘after the war’. The infamous Note 19 in Chapter 1 of Gordon Corera’s Art of Betrayal cites the tape by Bruce Lockhart making a reference to Kim’s presence there, an item ‘since  . . . withdrawn from the Imperial War Museum’. Yet Litzy made no mention of visiting Vienna, and the records discovered by British Military Intelligence in January 1952 (where they astonishingly refer to Litzy’s marriage to ‘Harold Adrian Russel’ on February 24, 1934) show no recognition of their subsequent divorce, and no knowledge of the couple since they left for England on April 28. If the divorce had been made official there, presumably MI6, as well as Kim and Litzy, would have found it useful to provide evidence.

These claims to Barbara about her divorce and subsequent ‘marriage’ to Georg are thus highly provocative. It would appear that Litzy maintained the fiction that her marriage to Honigmann took place, despite the frauds committed. Otherwise why would Barbara reveal such an unlikely tale? And why (and when) did Litzy confide this truth to her daughter? (I cannot believe that Georg was unaware of the lapse.) Thus we then have to consider the scenarios:

1) The authorities were convinced by the evidence, and approved the marriage, while Litzy and Georg were complicit in a bigamous arrangement, about which no one else knew until Barbara dropped her clumsy hints. Presumably Litzy would have had to show an ID at the ceremony, and her current British passport would have declared her to be a ‘Philby’: the methods of the East Berlin authorities are unknown by me.  (How concerned they were about such bourgeois considerations is another matter, I suppose. If MI6 could prevail on a London registry office to connive at a bigamous marriage, I am sure that the KGB could do the same.) In that case, if a marriage was formalized, a ‘divorce’ could have been accepted in 1953, or whenever it was, but the deception would endure through George’s further two marriages.

2) The marriage was not allowed (or even attempted), and Georg and Litzy were indeed just ‘partners’ (as Mr. Decker indicates), but they were not punished for any attempted deception, since the KGB was partly responsible for the predicament they were in. Barbara was consequently misled. Thus, when the affair fell apart, Georg was free to re-marry, but Litzy was not. And that might explain her later very sentimental reflections on Kim, and her resistance to joining in matrimony with any of her several admirers, since she was still Kim’s legal wife.

I favour the second interpretation. The evidence I have assembled (the claims from Cave-Brown, the very improbable logistics, Litzy’s vagueness and selective amnesia over some of the major events in her life and her later nostalgia for Kim, the bold assertions on the Geni family tree,  the nervousness in the Home Office and MI5 about Litzy’s possible return to the UK, and the Home Office’s apparent determination to keep the Honigmann file closed) suggests to me that the divorce never took place. And that has monumental implications for the Philby and Honigmann families.

Lastly, I reproduce an astonishing article (tracked down by one of my collaborators through the Geni link) from the Vienna press of May 1934, filled with untruths about the circumstances of Kim’s sojourn in Vienna, and obviously placed by MI6 in an attempt to distance Kim and Litzy from their communist actions, and present them as closely tied to Kim’s father, the fascist, Hitler sympathizer and Arabist Harry St. John Philby, while emphasizing Kim’s ‘aristocratic’ background. This is a story with enormous implications that I shall return to next month.

Report on Philby Marriage: ‘Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung’, May 24, 1934

3. Hannah Coler’s ‘Cambridge 5’

Some coldspur readers may recall my distant and short-lived contact with the prickly and elusive historian Jonathan Haslam, and his subsequent disinclination to respond to my written letter during my investigations into ‘Gibby’s Spy’. I have discovered that he is now the partner of the German historian Karina Urbach, whose book Go-Betweens for Hitler I had enjoyed several years ago. I even exchanged emails with her afterwards (in 2014 and 2017), and have been able to retrieve from my personal computer archives our very positive conversations about the Hohenlohes, and my researches on Churchill, Halifax and Burgess. Urbach is definitely a class act. She and Haslam co-edited a book titled Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918-1989 that, I must confess, I have not yet read.

‘Cambridge 5’

Somehow I discovered that Urbach had written a novel, in German, bearing the title Cambridge 5: Zeit fűr Verräter (‘Time for Traitors’), but appearing under the pseudonym ‘Hannah Coler’. The topic was clear: I had to read it. The book arrived, and I retrieved my 1968 German skills to work on it. Only when I was three-quarters of the way through its 400-odd pages did I learn – after inspecting Urbach’s Wikipedia page – that what appeared to be an English translation had been prepared and published! A search on amazon (not on ‘Coler’, but on ‘Urbach’) had come up with the rather mysterious title The Cambridge Five: A Captivating Guide to the Russian Spies in Britain Who Passed on Information to the Soviet Union During World War II, with the author’s name rather bizarrely offered as ‘Captivating History’. (I do not see how the ‘Urbach’ in the Search found its target.)

I am sure, however, that this is not the novel, but simply a potted guide, maybe based on the imaginary thesis on Philby written by Wera, one of the characters in the book. Large chunks of her work are ‘extracted’ in the book’s pages. I am not going to acquire the English book to prove my hypothesis. I am not sure why this enterprise was thought worthwhile: indeed the German texts presented could act as an informative guide to German readers who know no English, and have thus not been exposed to the wealth of books about the Five, but another publication in English about Philby would appear to have little new to offer.

But back to the novel. It really was quite enjoyable, mainly because Ms. Urbach is obviously very familiar with Cambridge, and the English scene in general, and writes with flair, humour, and a wry affection for the personalities and pretensions of those figures who coloured media and academic life in the early 2010s. The plot revolves around three generations of students: the Cambridge 5, their leftist successors, engaging in protests in the 1970s, and three doctoral students in 2014, working on their theses under one of the previous activists, the womanizer Professor Hunt. Hunt becomes involved in a murder mystery, since one of his former colleagues (and the father of one of the trio of doctoral candidates) is found stabbed to death in Hunt’s rooms at New College. Thus echoes of 1930s revolt, attachment to causes, recruitment by the Russians, betrayal and revenge reverberate across the three generations.

The main thread of the book is the idea that Wera, the German student (whose name echoes that of Urbach’s mother: the author also explains in a postscript that her elderly father had worked as an agent for the CIA) has selected as her thesis a detailed analysis of Kim Philby, and occupies the rooms at Trinity College that were once Philby’s. The novel is interspersed with chapters of her findings as they evolve, and as they are presented to her supervisor, Professor Hunt. She exploits the Mitrokhin Archive (with the help of a Russian girl called Polina), and is presented as revealing hitherto unknown ‘facts’ about Philby. This was, for me, the weakest part of the book, although I can imagine that German readers would be fascinated. The texts of the thesis are unannotated, and thus lack sources, and the ability of Wera to comprehend the multiple cultural and social aspects of the 1930s milieu is unexplained.

The sources for Urbach’s findings about Philby and his traitorous colleagues would appear to consist of the writings of Macintyre, Knightley, Modin, and Philby himself, as well as the usual suspects of background literature (e.g. Andrew, Costello, West, and her partner Haslam). She does also list Barbara Honigmann, but there appear no breakthrough insights. She lists nothing from the National Archives in her Sources, which is astonishing. Admittedly, the Flora Solomon file was released too late for the project, but the Honigmann and Tudor-Hart folders should have been inspected by the time Urbach wrote her book, and what little has been released about Philby’s interrogations in 1951 should also have provided a richer context.

Some early observations caught my eye. Hunt, who is initially very disdainful of Wera’s ability to shed any fresh light on the paradoxes of Philby’s career, is impressed by her spunk, ambition, and skills of observation. He gives her some advice on the research process. He is very disparaging about the role of authorized historians who are fed documents to analyze, and are thus manipulated. He encourages her to look for details that other historians might have overlooked, and advises her to learn Russian, so that she will not be reliant on translators who might deceive her.

All this was very close to my principles, as I have repeatedly written on coldspur, and I wondered whether this exchange was a key to the eventual plot, and resolution of the skullduggery to come. As it turned out, it was a red herring. But I was energized enough by what must be Urbach’s beliefs about ‘official’ historiography of intelligence matters to reach out to her by email, and draw attention to my recent articles on Philby, which I thought might throw Wera’s apparent ‘breakthrough’ up into the air. I sent a congratulatory and very amiable message to her. It was not rejected outright (as if her address were no longer valid), but in the six weeks since, I have received no acknowledgment or reply. I know that she now resides in Cambridge, England, ‘with her family’. I hope that Haslam is not influencing her modus operandi, but she now appears to have taken on the persona of a media celebrity who needs to be protected from the public at large. She has her own website (at https://karinaurbach.org.uk/ ), and the ‘Contact’ button directs potential communicants to her agent. My opinion of her has gone down.

4. The Rejuvenation of Dick Ellis

Over the years I have had dozens of exchanges – well over a hundred – with persons around the world who discovered coldspur, and had some observation or question for me. Apart from Henry Hardy (whom I actually approached early on in my researches) I have not met any of these people, but I appreciate you all. I have spoken on the telephone to merely two or three. Some disappear suddenly, and then reappear years later. Others appear to go off the radar, as if they had been trapped by the 21st-century equivalent of Radio Direction Funding – email surveillance. One or two, I have regretfully learned, have died. Many wish to remain anonymous. Each of them has idiosyncratic ways of communicating, and follows different email etiquette. I try to match them, but I find it strange that some ‘correspondents’, having received an encouraging reply from me, decline to acknowledge it. (If I have failed to respond to anyone trying to contact me, or not thanked a contact for a contribution, or have left a query hanging in the air, I apologize.)

After my recent book review of Jesse Fink’s Eagle in the Mirror, I received a series of emails pointing to useful material from someone with an email name of ‘Dr. Jonathon Empson’, who did not introduce himself, or describe his background, or explain why he was sending me the links. He sounded like an academic (rather than a medical practitioner), one who has studied intelligence matters, or even worked in such organizations. He drew attention to two of the well-known photographs of Ellis that appear in Fink’s book, suggesting that the subject had aged considerably between 1923 and 1927, when a photograph of him had been taken by the British Chamber of Commerce in Vienna. Readers can compare the two:

Dick Ellis in 1919 & 1927

The Doctor merely observed that there was a ‘discernible difference’ between the two images, describing the second as follows: ‘a different person – haunted, and may hint to his first undeclared contact with an opposition service’. I do not believe he was suggesting that the photograph was actually of someone else. When Fink presented the second photograph, he simply noted that Ellis ‘had aged rapidly’. Yet it now occurs to me: can it really be the same person? Apart from the filling-out of the face, and the receding hairline, are the ears not markedly different?

And then there is a third photograph, also reproduced by Fink, taken at a wedding in London in 1933, six years later, with Dick Ellis on the right (see below). Has he not regained some of his youthful demeanor, with his face regaining its less fleshy shape? Fink does not comment on it. I sent an email to Fink just after I received the Doctor’s message, without mentioning the photographs, as I incidentally wanted to point out to him the fact that Ellis’s book on the League of Nations may have been written by the Communist Konni Zilliacus (Fink had referred to the article making the claim, but had not mentioned it in detail), and also to alert him to the fact that Jimmy Burns’s very poor new book on the insignificant Walter Bell, The Faithful Spy, contained excerpts of correspondence on Ellis that he would probably be interested in.

Dick Ellis (on right) in 1933

For several weeks I never heard back from Fink, so had not presented this enigma to him. I imagined that he was still upset over my review, as his post on coldspur suggests. And then, on December 14, I did receive a message from him: he had completely overlooked my message in his inbox, so I was able to rewrite this paragraph in time. As for the Doctor (whose name is almost certainly a pseudonym), I do request of my informants that they identify themselves properly, although I of course always respect any desires for secrecy and confidentiality if their position requires it. One primary rule of intelligence gathering is to try to verify the reliability of a source. The Doctor, despite his flattering remarks and apparently astute observations, is an obvious ‘dangle’, and an irritation. At the same time, I somewhat wryly deemed that Fink was perhaps a double agent, who couldn’t work out whether he should be working for the Potboilers or for the Scholars, but professional relations between us have been restored, and we have discussed a quite shameful review of Fink’s book by Nigel West in The Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence.

But does anyone else have an opinion about the puzzling rejuvenation of Dick Ellis? Recall that, when discussing the testimony of Protze, Kim Philby had stated that the Ellis whom Protze had encountered was shown to be ‘(a) a White Russian and not an Englishman, and (b) a fraud and a forger’. Answers on a postcard, please, or via a posting on coldspur, or an email to antonypercy@aol.com.

5. The Book Review Magazines

I subscribe to four journals dedicated primarily to reviewing books, Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. I occasionally write letters to the Editors of each, some of which I have reproduced on coldspur, and the writing of this section has been prompted by the non-publication of a recent letter by me.

The best of the four is undoubtedly Literary Review. It offers reviews of a wide range of books across many subjects, both fiction and non-fiction. The reviewers are almost always very well qualified, and directed to write concise and compact critiques of the volumes selected. They are obviously encouraged to give unfiltered opinions about a book’s merits and flaws, such as the novelty of its research, or its overlooking of important sources. There is no room for them to expand on all they know about the subject, and then briefly mention the writer towards the end, which is a policy some other magazines appear to promote. In addition, there is no apparent log-rolling, although I do find a little hypocritical the semi-apologies for expressed ‘quibbles’ and ‘niggles’ when they list mistakes they have found. Its Letters section is its weakest part, publishing mostly uncontroversial and trivial comments – but it allocates very little space to this intrinsically rewarding exercise. I wish all the magazines under review would provide more space for readers’ letters, and also offer more details about the qualifications of the reviewers it engages.

The Times Literary Supplement comes in second ahead of the two Book Reviews. It maintains a weekly schedule, and offers a fairly broad array of topic headings, with some reviews much shorter than others, although it sometime strains to find capable objective reviewers in all the domains it covers, and is liable to offer weak assessments based on good fellowship or potential mutual admiration. It does not take itself too seriously: it provides a full page for readers’ letters, although what is published tends to be on the dull side, dominated by sometimes pedantic corrections from around the world, and frequently including ripostes from authors who feel that they have been short-changed or misrepresented in earlier reviews. It regularly covers film, television and other media, which to me is supererogatory, and outside its mission. The style of the reviews is overall lively and engaging: the editor since 2020, Martin Ivens (who formerly was editor of the Sunday Times), overall maintains an expert but ironic touch.

I place the fortnightly New York Review of Books above its London cousin because, while they both occasionally (but not frequently enough, in my opinion) publish outstanding critical reviews, and both select too many very obscure and marginal items, the NYRB does not contain as much political polemic as does the LRB. It covers a gratifying number of books pertaining to Europe, which is important, as I regret my interest in USA history and political affairs is not as great as it should be. I always welcome Ferdinand Mount and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, as well as Marina Warner and Miranda Seymour, who are regular though infrequent contributors: in a brief column in the TLS on October 20, on the achievement of the NYRB’s sixtieth anniversary, recognition of the British influence on the magazine was stated. (I was also pleased to see that the editor, Emily Greenhouse, is allergic to the expression ‘the lived experience’.) The Letters section is, however, the weakest of all four, dedicated primarily to long and fairly abstruse debates between authors and critics.

So why do I subscribe to the London Review of Books (also a fortnightly)? It is sadly still in the shadow of the rather dire Mary-Kay Wilmers (her of the Eitingon family), who, having retired from the editorship a year or so go, still endures in an advisory capacity as ‘Consulting Editor’. But her enthusiasm for very long leftist essays (and her taste, presumably, for really dreadful ‘poetry’) remains, with such as Perry Anderson to the fore among several writers, often from Embankment universities, who indulge themselves mostly in Pikettyish criticisms of free enterprise –  presented often as the phenomenon of ‘late-stage capitalism’. Deploring Trump has also been a popular hobbyhorse in articles (not book-reviews!), and I have asked the editors why I should be paying for such obsessions when the magazine is supposed to be a London Review of Books?

I have received no answer.

Yet occasionally an issue of the LRB will be so spectacular that it makes the annual subscription worthwhile, such as that of early October this year, which featured a superbly entertaining review by Lorna Finlayson on some books on animal rights and speciesism (by Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum), as well as an outstanding review of Orwell material by Colin Burrow. Thus I persevere, bypassing some very ordinary submissions, waiting for the next masterpiece. Moreover, one aspect of the LRB amazes me: it employs a simply gigantic staff, which it proudly lists on its title page. It puts the respective display by the TLS to shame (see images below). How on earth a straightforward literary magazine can afford to sustain all these positions is quite remarkable – and these are only the heads of departments. Could they not double up on some of these duties? And what do all these people do in the afternoons? One wonders whether it is all being subsidized by some generous benefactor, such as the Soros foundation. If it were, I am sure the truth would have come out, but it is all very mysterious to me.

The London Review of Books staff
The TLS Staff

This is all as way of introduction to another unpublished letter. In August, the TLS published a review by a Professor Krishnan Kumar titled This Is Britain. I do not need to quote any part of it, as I believe the letter I sent to the Editor adequately reflects the problem. It ran as follows:

I wonder whether I was the only reader to be profoundly disturbed by some of Professor Kumar’s remarks in his review of books on the vexed issue of ‘race’ (‘This is Britain’, August 11).  Most alarming was his statement that, in Britain, ‘mixed-race people are now the fastest-growing ethnic group’. The implication behind this assertion is that each partner in a ‘mixed-race’ marriage (or relationship) must be of ‘unmixed’ or ‘pure’ race, which is not only nonsensical, but also deeply insulting, by resuscitating a doctrine that has been clearly discredited. Kumar compounds his error by classifying such pairs as an ‘ethnic group’, which, given the undeniable different backgrounds of the members, makes the integrity of that highly questionable concept even more absurd.

He makes further categorical mistakes, such as reinforcing the notion that it makes sense to collect ‘Asians’ in a group, and make stereotypical observations about them (‘they are less inclined to intermarry’), as if it made sense to consider immigrants from Iran to Japan, and everywhere in between, as a viable entity worth studying, and one that displayed consistent behavioural characteristics.

It is sad to see how the sociological academics and the census bureaucrats, initially in the USA, but now, apparently, in Britain, too, have ousted the anthropologists and evolutionary biologists in occupying the spheres of social influence. Their obsession with racial classification has encouraged millions to believe that their ‘identity’ can be defined primarily by some tribal heritage, when all it does is to encourage stereotypes, and to promote some unscientific thinking.

My letter was not published. Thus is this sub-Marxian claptrap further established. Kumar, the current Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, was educated at Cambridge University and took his postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. He presumably developed his ideas when he was studying for his doctorate, and encountered no resistance. He was then appointed Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent, and was able to guide the curriculum and modes of thinking. Since 1971, he has published several books, which his academic colleagues probably praised. Having been away from Britain for twenty years, he was invited to submit a review of three books on ‘race’ and ‘race relations’, and the Editor was either unable or unwilling to challenge him on the primitive and undisciplined points he made. When these absurd ideas, with their outrageous definitions, appeared in print, several readers may have been shocked, but I may have been the only subscriber to take the trouble to write. And the editor decided to ignore my letter.

In such a fashion do insidious and dangerously divisive ideas become accepted. The cult of defining everyone by the so-called ethnic groups or classes that they are claimed to have belonged to since birth, inheriting the victim or oppressor status of their predecessors, is rammed home without any subtlety or scientific understanding. And, as I was writing this piece, I came across a relevant passage by Lionel Trilling (whose windy abstractions and vague generalisations I am mostly not a fan of) in The Sense of the Past (1942), published in The Liberal Imagination:

            This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking, and now the errors of academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action.

Soon after, I read the following, written by John Gay in his new book The New Leviathans, and cited by John Banville in his NYRB review of December 21:

            In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society.

If I had not just passed my seventy-seventh birthday, I might get really steamed up about this travesty. Yet it appears I have allies. On the other hand, maybe I would gain greater attention if I wrote on Christ Church notepaper: the first letter published in the December 15 issue of the TLS was written by Richard Swinburne, from Oriel College, and contains the following nonsense:

            Of course ‘an extreme improbability is not an impossibility’, as Edward Greenwood writes (Letters, December 8); but the issue is whether it is rational to believe (in the absence of contrary evidence) that an event (such as the universe being so precisely fine-tuned for life) that would be extremely improbable if it had occurred without a cause, did not have a cause. We should only do this if we cannot postulate a simple explanation of it. But in the case of the universe, we can postulate a very simple explanation, that it was caused by a very simple cause (God, one entity with one essential property, omnipotence), which, I have argued, would make its occurrence probable.

Between superstition and pseudo-science lies sense.

6. Research Agenda

At the beginning of the year, I never expected to be spending so much time on Kim Philby and his various associates, and thus several projects that I had planned have been deferred. Yet they remain on my active list, and I make notes occasionally in preparation for tackling such themes seriously when a vacant spot in the docket turns up.

There is still some unfinished business concerning the Philby investigations. I want to explore more thoroughly where Milmo derived his facts about Kim and Litzy in his December 1951 report, and why White failed to disclose them in his report issued just beforehand. I need to unravel the very strange ‘Stevenson’ business in the Tudor-Hart files, and try to ascertain whether the mystery informant was indeed Graham Greene. A major new thrust will be an in-depth examination of the files on Peter Smollett/Smolka. A cursory look – supplemented by research into Graham Greene, and his dealings with Smolka in Vienna in 1948 – has convinced me that several major anomalies exist in the relationship between Philby and Smollett, and these have been glossed over in all the literature. I need to explore exactly what MI5 knew about Guy Burgess before the notorious escape, and analyze closely the post-mortems that occurred. My analysis of the complete Burgess trove at Kew needs to be completed, and the recently released Rothschild files are straining for my attention. I also have a daunting set of Russian books on intelligence lying on a table, waiting to be tackled.

Matters of peripheral interest endure. I want to compare Chapman Pincher’s fanciful accounts of what Roger Hollis was allegedly doing in Soviet counter-espionage after the war with the more mundane accounts that can be found in source records, such as in the diaries of Guy Liddell, who sprinkles his journals with valuable tidbits concerning the actions of Roger (including his frequent periods of leave and sickness). I’d like to engage in a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of ‘double agents’, and to produce examples from a broad set of initiatives beyond the rather hackneyed and mis-represented set of that species, namely the ‘Abwehr’ agents manipulated to deceive the Germans over the Normandy crossings. I want to investigate the controversies and lawsuits that challenged the first appearance of M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France. [This topic has been partially addressed by Christopher J. Murphy in a recent article in Intelligence and National Security, published on-line on December 22 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2023.2291873 , but I believe Murphy has refrained from touching the serious, more long-lasting, issues associated with the debacle.] Now that I have acquired the files of the prominent Sicherheitsdienst officers who were interrogated after the war, I also want to develop a more rigorous schematic of the activities of Dick Ellis, and what he was claimed to get up to, probably by scouring the original German transcripts of the interrogations.

Other projects go some way back. I have always wanted to understand better exactly what codebooks John Tiltman managed to recover from Petsamo, and when, how they were passed on to the Americans, and how they helped the VENONA project. One longstanding exercise is an investigation into the inquiries that Alan Foote made into the Gouzenko affair, and the connections between the Canadian spies and the Rote Drei in Switzerland. I have not yet studied closely the massive set of Petrov files, which I believe may have much to reveal about Soviet techniques, and possible links to agents who have not been properly identified. I want to examine the cables that were sent by MI6 and the Embassy from Kuibyshev and Moscow in 1943-44, as I believe that George Graham had passed over the cipher- and code-books, and the information transmitted in such telegrams may shed a shocking light on how much Stalin knew about Allied tactics. I also want to pick up my story about the ‘heretic’ communists who fought for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, and then apparently switched their allegiance, such as Humphrey Slater.

Lastly, I have a few more administrative projects to accomplish. I plan to finish my topographical guide to the coldspur collection, and publish it early next year. I’d like to spend some more serious effort on the post-war organization of MI5, which has not received the attention it deserves. Over time, I shall flesh out my spreadsheet of missing cross-references of MI5 Personal Files, offer some sort of chronology, and, maybe with the help of recently photographed files concerning the Registry, describe the processes by which it was maintained.

I thus have plenty to occupy me for a while, and I shall be a much older man than I am now when I complete this assignment – if ever! I am always eager to hear from coldspur readers of other topics worth investigating, as I may find them automatically engaging and thus worthy of elevation in priorities (such as Jesse Fink and his study of Dick Ellis), but I may have to decline. Of course, if Calder Walton wants me to contribute something to his much-awaited three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, of which he is General Editor, he only has to contact me, and I shall name my fee . . .

STOP PRESS: As I was tidying up this piece on December 29, I was alerted to a large new release of files from The National Archives, involving much on the ‘Spycatcher’ case, as well as on Joan Miller’s One Girl’s War, and on Victor Rothschild’s grumblings. From a quick inspection the Joan Miller material looks very disappointing, but it will mean a lot more work – and I haven’t yet studied the already released Rothschild files. Maybe I need to hire a research assistant, but, hang on, that would be contrary to my principles  . . . (I note in my Commonplace file this month an incident where a Professor tried to blame an example of plagiarism on sloppy work by his research assistants. Tsk! Tsk!)

7. ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’

A few correspondents have asked me what happened to this project (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-the-airmen-who-died-twice/ ). My colleague Nigel Austin and I were rattling along quite well, having completed six chapters of a planned ten, when Nigel sadly succumbed to some personal problems, and was consequently unable to fulfill his side of the research and writing. I waited patiently for many months, but my interest (alongside my ability to understand and explain work already done) was starting to flag, so I had to let him know that I would have to complete the project by myself. It is a fascinating and ground-breaking story, and I am very keen to see it published.

One of the major chapters to be written, however, concerns the state of Norwegian Resistance during World War II, the political tensions between the different factions, and how Stalin hoped to exploit them. This is not a topic that I am intimately familiar with, and I have performed very little of my own research. I am thus going to have to dedicate a large amount of time in between my other monthly projects to attempt to gain some kind of expertise over the subject-matter. I do not want to start publishing earlier segments (which are in good shape, I believe) until I am confident that the complete story has coherence and quality, and that it is properly defensible. When I am ready, I plan to publish a couple of chapters at the mid-point of each month, as a contrast to the monthly bulletins, in a way that will allow the narrative to have some momentum. I’ll report again in a month or two.

8. ‘This I Cannot Forget’

‘This I Cannot Forget’

One of the most moving books that I read this year was the memoir by Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed after one of Stalin’s show trials in 1938. Larina was twenty-six years younger than Bukharin, but had known him since she was a child, since her step-father was a colleague of Bukharin’s in early Bolshevik days. She and her husband knew that the inevitable would happen as the noose tightened, and previous friends began to denounce Bukharin for bogus plots to re-install capitalism and assassinate Stalin. Before the trial, she was exiled, with her infant son sent to a children’s home, then learned of her husband’s death, was interrogated and incarcerated in prison-camps, and was fortunate not to have been executed herself by the NKVD.

Before he was arrested, Bukharin managed to persuade his wife to learn by heart a testimony protesting his innocence, something she repeated to herself every day, occasionally committing it to paper, but each time destroying it because of its incriminating implications for her. Eventually, after Stain’s death, and Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ 1956 speech denouncing the dictator and his crimes, and the relative Thaw that followed, Larina in 1961 delivered the testimony to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, hoping that it would be published. It did not appear until 1988.

I had conveniently seen Bukharin only as a noble victim, someone who had had the guts to stand up to Stalin, and to attempt to moderate such disasters as the forced collectivization of the peasants, someone who had tried to put a human face on communism. Stalin never forgot a slight, or a challenge, and had planned the murder of those who had ever disagreed with him, or stood in his way, over many years, manipulating them at his will. His victims would appeal to him, stupidly imagining that it was the NKVD that was at fault, when in fact it was merely a creature carrying out his bidding.

And then I read Bukharin’s testament in Larina’s book. An early paragraph runs as follows:

Dzerzhinsky is no more; the wonderful traditions of the Cheka have gradually receded into the past, those traditions by which the revolutionary idea governed all its actions, justified cruelty towards enemies, safeguarded the state against any counter-revolution. For this reason, the organs of the Cheka won a special trust, a special honor, an authority and respect.

Bukharin went on to contrast the nobility of the Cheka with the ‘degenerate and dissolute organs of the NKVD’. Yet these are not the words of a humanist communist: they reflect the opinions of a bloodthirsty and vengeful Bolshevik, ready to approve the extermination of all ‘class enemies’, including the barbarous treatment of the protestors at the Savvatievsky monastery. For that is what the Cheka, with its ‘wonderful traditions’, was under Lenin – an executor of terrorism and persecution for its own sake, with anyone who showed the smallest sign of ‘privilege’, from Boy Scout medals to aristocratic background, as someone worthy of being exterminated. Any sympathy I had had for Bukharin instantly disappeared.

Nikolai Bukharin

I wrote about the horrors of the Red Terror last year, in my review of books by Antony Beevor and Donald Rayfield. And I was recently exposed to a personal account of exposure to it when I read The Unmaking of a Russian, by Nicholas Wreden. (I bought a copy of a 1935 first edition of this work, signed by the author, for $4 in a second-hand bookstore a few years ago, but had never got round to reading it until I catalogued it in ‘LibraryThing’.) Wreden offers a fascinating description of the chaos of Petrograd in 1918, how ‘enemies of the people’ were summarily executed by the Cheka, and his narrow escapes from such a fate. He also has a gripping story to tell about fighting for the Whites in Estonia, before he manages to gain a retreat to Denmark. Ironically, from his eventual seclusion in the United States, he saw the NKVD on the road to reform by the early nineteen-thirties – an opinion directly opposed to that of Bukharin.

Remarkably, only one of the quoted letters from readers reacting to Larina’s publication in Znamya in 1988 displayed the same reaction that I had. Professor Yevgeny Stanislavsky, after suggesting that all those who had facilitated Stalin’s rise to power were themselves guilty, wrote: It occurs to me that if we had not had the most brutal so-called Red Terror immediately after October [1917], when we exterminated the better part of the Russian intelligentsia or forced it to abandon Russia, and simultaneously exterminated or expelled the technical specialists, the progressively minded bourgeoisie, when we destroyed anyone who was ‘not with us’, when we savagely shot the entire family of Romanovs, including the children, if we had not had that, we would not have had Stalinism.

He finished his letter by writing:

But reading the memoirs of victims of Stalin’s repression, I feel my blood ‘run cold’ and involuntarily there come to mind the atrocities of the German fascists, whom we properly judged (alive and dead) with the full severity of the law.

Well said, Professor.

9. J. B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’

This summer I read J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. I had acquired a handsome Folio Society edition some years back, enhanced by some period photographs of the time, and an introduction by Margaret Drabble. Priestley is an author who seemed to go out of favour in the latter half of the twentieth century, although there has been a recent revival. I regret that I have read very few of his other works, although my father must have been an enthusiast in the 1930 and 1940s, as I recall that he had a prominent copy of J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time lying around the house, as well as editions of Priestley’s ‘time’ plays that were influenced by it.

J. B. Priestley

A very clear recollection of listening to a radio version of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls stays with me, however. It must have been in about 1960 (I can find no record or cast-list on the Web), and I was enthralled. My younger brother, Michael, my mother, and I listened to it on an evening when my father was out at some committee meeting: I was not only captivated by the plot, but recalled how my mother instructed her two boys not to inform our father that we had listened to it. She did not explicitly say why, but, since the play involved rape, prostitution and alcoholism, it was very clear what the reason was. Those were not subjects that youngsters in 1960 should have been exposed to, and she would have been criticized for allowing us to listen in. Nowadays, I notice, the play is a GCSE set text.

I was astounded to learn that An Inspector Calls was first produced on stage in Moscow in August 1945, purportedly on the grounds that no theatre in England was available for staging it. I find that hard to believe, and it was a very foolish decision by Priestley, about whom suspicions of communist sympathies were immediately expressed. I noticed also that, in his recent sequel to his biography of John le Carré, The Secret Life of John le Carré, Adam Sisman records his subject’s nervousness about the role of his biographer. Le Carré had written to his brother, Tony, that it was odd ‘to have an “Inspector Calls” in one’s life, going round ringing doorbells from one’s past, & not always coming up with very edifying results . . .’

And then, while I was ready to complete the writing of this month’s edition of coldspur, I came across during a book-cataloguing stint a copy of Priestley’s Margin Released, in a black faux leather edition published by Heron Books in 1962. It has a price of £2 inside, so I must have bought it in England, but had never read it. It is subtitled ‘A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections’, and I have enjoyed fewer books more this year. Priestley is opinionated, but engaging, unpretentious, and eminently sensible, and writes in flawless English about his experiences in various fields of writing. Occasionally he is pompous and deceptive. He gives no account of his lawsuit for libel against Graham Greene, about which I read in Norman Sherry’s biography of the rival writer. On page 63 he offered the following insight, however: “Managers who were obdurate if the mill girls wanted another shilling a week could be found in distant pubs turning the prettiest and weakest of them into tarts. (Over thirty years later I made some use of these discoveries in a play, An Inspector Calls, set in 1912.)”

To return to my main topic: English Journey is a wonderfully crafted portrait of a country just starting to emerge from the worst of the Depression, published in 1934, and Priestley’s only rarely sinks into sentimentality. As a proud Yorkshireman, he was distressed at the apparent wastage of human capability that was evident from wide scale unemployment, but he admired the resilience of the affected communities that he encountered, with a familiar divide affecting the North and The South (where light industry was starting to take off). His socialism was obvious, but it was never dogmatic, and he was clear that the rigours and cruelties of Communism should never be part of any political response. His love of, and appreciation for, the countryside, as well as his delight in literature and music, are always apparent. Towards the end, he becomes somewhat repetitive, and occasionally maudlin, but I found the book very evocative of a fascinating period in English social history.

1933 had been a critical year for Europe. Hitler had come to power, and banned the Communist Party. Many of its members fled to the Soviet Union: most of them were later shot by Stalin. Stalin himself had become emboldened by his ability to endure unchallenged the horrors of dekulakization and the Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) to prepare for a fresh series of purges, starting with the assassination of Kirov. Just as Britain started to crawl out of its slump, Kim Philby decided to throw in his lot with the Communist horror. English Journey remains a timely contrasting perspective.

10. The coldspur Archive

I am happy to report that I have signed an agreement with an academic institution that commits me to entrusting to it my library and archive, with the university allocating a separate space for my collection, and providing indexing and electronic gateway access. I look forward to providing more detail about this arrangement early next year.

The good news is that I now have a home for my library without it’s being broken up and its contents dispersed, or even destroyed. I believe the accumulated volumes are so much more valuable as a unit, and that my collection constitutes a unique set of books on twentieth-century history and literature. The bad news is that at some stage in the next few years I shall be deprived of instant access to my non-electronic resources. Thus, with a full agenda of research still to be executed, I may have to re-assess my plans!

Meanwhile, I continue with my project to record every volume (or, at least, all those books that will be of interest for the Special Collection) on LibraryThing for eventual export to the university authorities. I have now started a routine whereby, every Sunday morning, I spend a couple of hours cataloguing another hundred books, and, as of this date, have entered about 2,200 volumes. Several more months of work await me  . . .

11. Mental Health

A couple of months ago I underwent my annual medical check-up, and shortly afterwards received an invoice from my doctor. It was not a large one, for an amount not covered my Medicare, but I was startled to read a couple of line items in the statement. The listing describes the treatment, the standard fee that the doctor would charge for someone uninsured (‘Initial Cost’), the adjustment to reflect the fee agreed with Medicare (or other insurance provider, presumably) for the treatment (‘Insurance Adjustment’), the amount actually reimbursed to the doctor (‘Insurance Paid’) and any remaining amount owed by the patient (‘You owe’.)

‘Wellness Visit’

As can be seen my treatment included a ‘Medicare Annual Depression Screen’, estimated to take 5-15 minutes, and a ‘Medicare Annual Alcohol Misuse Screening’, also 5-15 minutes. I recall telling the nurse that I enjoyed one glass of white wine a day (I could have lied, of course), and discussing with the doctor for a couple of minutes what depressing times we live in, what with tribal conflicts around the world, Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyahu and other monsters, as well as the challenges of dealing with Greta Thunberg and Sam Bankman-Fried. I thus thought that this allocation was a bit excessive. After all, what would anyone do about my ‘depression’? The fact is that everyone seems to be concerned about ‘mental health’ these days, and media icons even self-diagnose, as if they were quite competent in distinguishing between various forms of mental stability or instability. Yet anxiety, grief, even despair, are part and parcel of human existence, and, if one is not allowed to feel depressed occasionally about the reality and prospects of old age, then the world has come to a pretty pass. I thought of Hugh Kingsmill’s parody of A. E. Housman:

What? Still alive at twenty-two?

A fine, upstanding youth like you.

I suppose the authorities at Medicare need to be on the alert lest I convert any dire thoughts into harmful actions against my fellow-citizens, but this whole process appears to me at a piece of bureaucracy run amok. Plus it is deceitful. The doctor was paid for processes that were completed in a minute or two. When I paid my bill, I suggested to him that we drop these ‘screenings’ next year, and divert to those who truly need help the taxpayers’ $40 it will probably cost by then. As for my predicament, as Mona Lott said in the World War 2 wireless series It’s That Man Again: “It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.”

‘It’s That Man Again’

12. Coffeehouse Talk

Some time earlier this month, I was sitting in one of Wilmington’s more fashionable coffee-houses, when I couldn’t help overhearing a monologue from a woman at the next table. I made a few mental notes on what she was saying to her companion . . . .

“I think that everyone should have access to free child-care staffed by competent professionals who probably don’t have children of their own to care for so that all can undertake safe, well-paid and fulfilling stress-free jobs that allow them to stay out of poverty, and live in a solar-powered home in a crime-free and multi-ethnic neighborhood, close to good schools with excellent teacher quality and teacher-to-student ratios, while not actually depriving anyone else from an underprivileged minority of the employment opportunity, and should be able to enjoy healthy foods, the cultivation of which does not require the exploitation of the labor of any children or disadvantaged persons, as well as enough material goods that also do not derive from any similar exploitation, and certainly did not in their manufacture cause any environmental degradation, or challenge the survival of any threatened species, or damage to a World Heritage site, or harm any local cultural traditions that should nevertheless evolve to be respectful of women’s and minority rights (especially of the LBGTQ community), and be able to enjoy the occasional holiday abroad while maintaining a low carbon footprint, thus without negatively affecting climate change (although I worry about the enormous demands for water that converting airplanes to run on ethanol will cause), as well as having free access to first-rate medical care, including the availability of a cardiologist and endocrinologist within a twenty-minute drive, using suitably qualified immigrants if necessary while not exploiting anybody and not depriving underdeveloped or developing countries of the home-grown skills they need to emerge from poverty (in a way that avoids the perennial social injustices and ills of developed countries), and enjoy the benefits of a well-staffed care-home nearby, subsidised by the government, so that their aged parents can be looked after by dedicated carers, but can be visited regularly at weekends, and that their investments for their own retirement income grow regularly, with the companies they own shares in making satisfactory (but not excessive) profits while pleasing all their ‘stakeholders’ and engaging in sustainable business models without having to behave in a predatory manner by underpaying their workers or indulging in practices that might harm the planet or contribute to global warming, and can use an eco-friendly car to exercise their right to explore the country and visit protected national parks without interfering with the rights of indigenous peoples to indulge in traditional practices (that may in fact be harmful to them, and in poor taste), or worrying whether such areas in other countries where the laws are less restrictive will have to be exploited for the rare earths that have to be mined for the construction of the batteries needed for such vehicles, or that the surveys that have to be carried out for offshore wind farms will not harm the fragile whale populations, and that their implementation will not require excessive use of energy and steel, or result in massive blots on the landscape, or damage populations of any rare bird species, or that the mining of cobalt, graphite and other elements required to manufacture such items will not cause environmental devastation, civic discord, or harm to any tribal heritage (although the whole notion of tribes that have to stay on their reservations and marry within their own community in order to preserve their tribal identity is a deeply troubling one for any progressive and emancipated thinker . . . and were you aware that many of the Cherokee Indians on the protected reservations are not Cherokees at all, but black slaves who were captured ? . . .)”

I had heard enough. I drank up my Reserve Hazelnut Bianco Latte and left.

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Summer 2023 Round-Up

J. L. Austin

Contents:

Introduction

The Cyber-Attack

Kim Philby

‘The Scarlet Papers’

What’s New at Kew

Intelligence Officers

The Lady Novelists

Beverly Gage and ‘G-Man

Summer Biographies

  • Ellis, Ker-Seymer, Déricourt, Austin, Orwell, Berlin

The Love-Lives of the Philosophers

Coldspur: Method, Archive & Topography

Introduction

For this August bulletin, I decided I needed to take a break from the intensive research into Kim Philby that has occupied me over the past few months. I suffered a nasty bout of Covid in June, which knocked the stuffing out of me, and also put a dent in my research agenda. So, in this summer round-up, I take instead the opportunity for the more leisurely exercise of catching up with various intelligence-related events and activities. This tour d’horizon has turned out to be a bit more expansive than originally planned: I hope every coldspur reader will find herein something of interest.

The Cyber-Attack

My website suffered a short-lived, but alarming, disruption in early June. I was working from my iPad when I was suddenly unable to access any coldspur page except the home page. I immediately went to my PC, only to find that the same problem occurred, with some message indicating that the page I was seeking was unavailable. This happened in the evening, so I sent off a message to the support desk of my web hoster, and awaited a response. Early the next morning I received a message back suggesting that I clear my browser cache, and, having done so, I saw the apparent return of the complete coldspur site.

So I turned to my PC, and then discovered that there was no cache problem there: the site was available likewise, so I quickly concluded that something else had been at fault. Moreover, I then noticed that a few of the recent comments made by visitors were no longer visible. It looked as if there had been a problem in the regular back-up/recovery procedures. I brought this fact to the attention of the support person, who then dug an even greater hole for herself by stating that such procedures were not the responsibility of her company, and that I needed to get in touch with the outfit that actually hosted the site. Her company was responsible only for managing the WordPress environment.

Now, there are few things that rouse my ire more quickly than technical support organizations who guess, or bluff, or try to deceive me. I have no business relationship with any other entity, and, indeed, I have to declare this outfit as my ‘web hoster’ each year when I renew my contract for www.coldspur.com with GoDaddy. I thus contacted the President of the company in some frustration, and asked him to sort it out. The outcome was that he did get involved, and had to apologize for his support person, who ‘misspoke’, yet he himself was guilty of some prevarication. He started off by stating that the management of the site had indeed been entrusted to a ‘third party’ (which suggests a separate legal entity to me), but he then backtracked somewhat in asserting that the management of all WordPress sites had been consolidated on to a single server. When I pressed him, he admitted that part of his business was in fact outsourced to another company. He could not explain what had happened, but confirmed that the few missing comments were indeed lost for ever.

I am not happy about this at all, and have requested a more thorough approach to data archiving and data quality. In the meantime, I apologize to those couple of coldspur readers whose comments were lost, and especially to David Coppin who took the time to try to re-create his comments.

And then, on the morning of July 30, coldspur became completely unavailable. I informed the web hoster, and soon received an acknowledgment, as well as a message from the President of the company that his team was working on the problem, and that it would contact me as soon it made progress. I wondered whether the outage was due to Chinese malware, since a disturbing story appeared in the New York Times the same day, alerting readers to the exposure of critical national infrastructure by China’s malicious actions. I reflected, however, that the availability of coldspur is probably not vital to the safety and integrity of the social fabric of the United States. I thought it far more likely that MI5, anticipating another blistering post on August 1, and suspecting that coldspur’s defences would be on low alert on a Sunday, had decided to disrupt its availability.

The site was down for about twelve hours. I learned later that the problem had not just affected coldspur: it had been in fact been caused by a Chinese DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack! No virus or malware had infiltrated the servers, but a blitz of messages brought the installation to its knees, and a range of new IP addresses had to be added to the firewall. Who would have thought a relatively minor installation in North Carolina would come under attack? Was this random? Or did the Chinese have some knowledge of which websites were maintained by this hoster? I was also interested in whether the Department of Homeland Security keeps track of all such attacks. The President of the company told me that he had reported the onslaught to his upstream provider (a wholesale manager of IP addresses and traffic), but it does not seem that there is a requirement to inform the government. Given the source of the invasion, and the current ferment over China’s cyberattacks, that strikes me as odd.

Kim Philby

In the Spectator of June 10, Douglas Murray wrote a column ‘How to dismantle history’, selecting as his subject the TV adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s Colditz. He introduced the author in the following terms: “He is a fine popular regurgitator of history who has previously brought to public notice such things as the hitherto untold story of a spy named Kim Philby.” Apart from the fact that the adaptation of A Spy Among Friends apparently contains some creative flourishes that would tend to undermine its reliability as a historical record (I have not watched it), I was struck by the paradox: if the story of Philby is ‘hitherto untold’, how could Macintyre ‘regurgitate’ it?

I did not expect, a few months ago, that I would be dedicating so much of my research and writing time this year to Philby. I know that several coldspur readers have devoured everything they could find about Philby over the years, and I have been much the same – but without paying really close attention to the details (apart from my inspection of all the accounts of his recruitment by the NKVD in 1933-1934, as laid out in Misdefending the Realm.) Thus I succumbed to the familiar broad-brushed arc of his career: the marriage to Litzi, the recruitment by Arnold Deutsch, the assignments in Spain, the attachment to SOE, and then to MI6, the near disastrous exposure by Volkov, the interlude in Turkey, the posting to Washington, the secrets revealed by VENONA, the postulated ‘Third Man’ role with Burgess and Maclean, the investigations, the time in the wilderness, and the eventual escape from Beirut.

Dominating this career was Philby’s memoir My Silent War, which seems to have been cited quite indiscriminately by any number of writers, including the ‘authorized’ historian, Christopher Andrew, even though its source and sponsorship should have given grounds for severe scepticism. I have pointed out before that, when in that text Philby identifies his past employer as MI5, it serves as a kind of radio security check, whereby he informs his readers in Britain that they shouldn’t really take all that he writes very seriously, as everything is under the control of the KGB (who in general never understood the difference between MI5 and MI6.)

Then, at the beginning of this year, a few queries from coldspur readers (and especially some exchanges with Keith Ellison) prompted me again to dig into aspects of Philby’s career, gather a few archives that I had overlooked, re-inspect some folders that I already had on my desk, and start building a chronology for some of the more controversial events in Philby’s career. Writing the reports of the past few months has been a fascinating experience, and has made me believe that a brand new biography of Philby is required, one that would not automatically ‘regurgitate’ all the falsehood of his memoirs, and the exculpatory asides of those officers who were supposed to have been monitoring him, but instead point out some of the anomalies and confront the fact that, on many aspects of his troublesome life, we simply do not know exactly what happened.

And there is more work to be done, for example on the origin of the Litzi Feabre alias, verification of what must have been a very shaky divorce settlement, what was known about Burgess’s connections before 1951, the Foreign Office post-mortems, and the mysteries of Philby’s last few years with MI6, including the falsehoods passed on by Nicholas Elliott. In that context, while reading recently Burton Hersh’s history of the CIA, The Old Boys, I came across the following passage: “He [Wisner] downplayed American annoyances at the pigheadedness of the English at suggestions that they get busy or flutter their people, stop mincing around and bring the Philby situation to a head. At Dulles’s urging, Wisner got close enough to Roger Hollis [1959] to break loose ‘a really valuable body of evidence about Philby,’ Cleve Cram says, ‘which filled in a lot of the chinks and helped overcome the horrified reaction around the Agency when we were given to understand that MI6 was running him still’.” What might Hollis have known, and what could he possibly have told Wisner that would have calmed the concerns of the restless Americans?

Moreover, in recent weeks, fresh leads have sprung up to be investigated: Vivian’s dissimulations of August 1946; Philby’s postwar presence in Vienna and the missing Bruce Lockhart tape; the surprising addition of Philby to the circle of acquaintances of the psychiatrist Eric Strauss; the debate about ‘STEVENSON’; and a suggestion in a recent book by Charlotte Dennett (Follow the Pipelines) that Philby was involved in the 1947 death of her father, the CIA agent Daniel Dennett, in an aircrash. I have ordered the book, and shall report more later. Perhaps most significant is the acquisition of the MI5 December 1939 Staff Lists from the National Archives, that include a ‘Miss Furse’ working in C2b. Keith Ellison has pointed out to me that Yuri Modin wrote, in My 5 Cambridge Friends, that Philby, at the time he was recruited by MI6 in 1941, ‘was having a passionate love affair with Aileen Furse, who worked in the MI5 archive department’. So was Aileen already working for MI5 when she met Kim at the Solomon/Birch luncheon? And was she thus able to wield some power over him?

‘Among Others’ by Michael Frayn

Lastly, towards the end of the month, while reading Michael Frayn’s new collection Among Others: Friendships and Encounters, I learned that Frayn had innocently introduced his college (Emmanuel, Cambridge) friend John Sackur to Harold Evans of the Sunday Times in 1967. The encounter did not go well, since the paper was deep into its investigation of Philby, and Evans discovered (from his deputy editor, Frank Giles) that Sackur worked for MI6. Frayn postulates that Sackur may have been sent to Evans on a mission to try to control the narrative, and that he, Frayn, was used as a channel. Frayn led me back to Evans’s account in his memoir My Paper Chase (which I had read when it came out, but had forgotten the episode), but that did not seem to me to represent the whole story. Where else had I read about it?

Evans refers to Phillip Knightley’s belief that Sackur was a member of a dissident group inside MI6. Knightley had argued in 1998, in an article in British Journalism Review, that Sackur was in fact a member of a ‘ginger group’ who wanted the Philby inquiry to go ahead, so that further Soviet agents could be unmasked. My first thought was that was equally unlikely, and a check on Chistopher Moran’s Classified seemed to confirm that what the Sunday Times was about to reveal was way beyond the control of MI6, or even the UK government. It would have been pointless and clumsy to try to encourage the investigation in person. Moran had suggested that Sackur had probably been sent as a spy to discover exactly what the Sunday Times had put together, and that he reported to his bosses the extent of the possible damage.

I needed to find the article. David Spark, in his book Investigative Reporting, sources Knightley’s comments as Volume 9, Number 2 of the British Journalism Review, in June 1998, where an abstract of Knightley’s riposte to a critical piece by his ex-colleague Bruce Page piece can be seen (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095647489800900206). It reads: “In the last issue of the British Journalism Review Bruce Page criticired [sic] a former Sunday Times colleague, PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, for his role in the paper’s investigative campaigns 30 yearr [sic] ago. Knightley now exercises his right of reply.”Yet nothing by Bruce Page in 1998 can be found via a search on the Review’s website. In fact, Page did write a piece criticizing Knightley in Volume 9, Number 1, with his authorship not indexed, but his focus was apparently on thalidomide. I needed to find out how the riposte switched to Philby.

After a while, I managed to get a copy of the Knightley piece, titled ‘The inside story of Philby’s exposure’. The facts are predictably elusive but the interpretation of what happened comes down partly to timing. Knightley starts off by setting the introduction by Frayn to Evans as occurring ‘when The Sunday Times was sniffing around the story’ of Philby, i.e. when any conclusions would have been very tentative, and he reports that Sackur appeared to be taken aback when Evans told him that the paper was looking into the life of ‘your old Foreign Office colleague’, Kim Philby. Sackur’s response was extreme: he immediately elevated the potential political embarrassment such an investigation would provoke, and described Philby as ‘a copper-bottomed bastard’. This exchange would suggest that Evans and his team did not yet know that Philby worked for MI6, and that Evans learned of Sackur’s employer only soon afterwards, when Sackur met Giles. Naturally, Sackur’s outburst encouraged Evans to pursue the case even more determinedly. (Evans recounts all this in his memoir.)

The disagreement between Page and Knightley comes down to the reason why Sackur appeared in Evans’s office. Page believed that it was coincidence, and that Sackur genuinely wanted to leave the ‘Foreign Office’ (i.e. MI6) for a journalistic career, while Knightley was convinced that Sackur was one of the ‘young Turks’ who were disgusted that their senior officers in MI6 would not let him (and Stephen de Mowbray and Arthur Martin) continue their molehunt, and Sackur thus wanted to encourage the exposure of Philby. In this scenario, Sackur must have gained a smell of what the Sunday Times was up to: his surprise was feigned, and his melodramatic response deliberate. Yet Evans’s conclusion was that Sackur ‘was not a plant, but a young man whose conscience would give him no rest’.

Moran, writing in 2013, had had access, however, to the private papers of George Wigg, the Paymaster-General in Harold Wilson’s government, which confirmed that Sackur had indeed gone on a fishing-trip, and, having learned the extent of the investigation, alerted his bosses and sent Whitehall in a tizzy. Maybe his behaviour in front of Evans was to gain the trust and confidence of Bruce Page, which certainly occurred when the leader of the ‘Insight’ team took Sackur for a liquid lunch at Manzi’s seafood restaurant in Soho. In this scenario, the disclosure of facts that Sackur revealed to Page at their meeting may have been a deliberate attempt to distract the paper from the more serious crimes of Philby. Evans even records that Sackur gave broad hints about Philby’s transgressions in World War II rather than in the Cold War, which his team ‘eventually’ was able to determine as relating to Germany’s plans for a separate peace, and the purging of Catholic opposition to the communists in Germany – actually after the war. All very odd. As Frayn describes, Sackur was a deceiver par excellence.

And what happened to John Sackur? Frayn and Evans write that he died young. Outside Frayn’s vignette (Sackur’s non-appearance at a college reunion inspired Frayn’s play Donkeys’ Years), I have been able to find a few references to him. Daphne Park’s best friend was a Jean Sackur. Was she related, I wonder? The answer came from Paddy Hayes, the author of Queen of Spies, his biography of Park. He had interviewed Jean Sackur, who had been married to John, and divorced from him some time in the 1960s. Ancestry.com confirms that Christopher John Sackur was born in Wharfedale, Yorkshire, on February 8, 1933 (his mother née Humphries), and died on January 24, 1986, in Bury St Edmunds. (see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/241252354/christopher-john-sackur). He married Jean La Fontaine in the summer of 1958, in Cambridge, married a woman named Morgan in 1974, and further married Joanna Butt in May 1985. Hayes writes that Sackur was offered a job by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, but that MI6 would not let him go there, after which he became a successful management consultant. Another report states that Sackur was one of those officers ‘burned’ by the revelations of George Blake to his Moscow bosses, and that John Quine, head of MI6 counter-intelligence, decided that Sackur had to resign. As with all such stories, the truth is hard to pin down.

The Scarlet Papers

As I was drafting the section above, I came across, in the May issue of Literary Review, a short review of a novel by one Matthew Richardson, titled The Scarlet Papers. It started off as follows:

This magnificent spy novel sees disappointed academic Max summoned to a secret interview with Scarlet King, an elderly woman he has never met. His expertise being the history of the intelligence services, he knows that she was once the most senior woman in MI6 and one of the greatest specialists on the Soviet Union.

‘The Scarlet Papers’ by Matthew Richardson

After giving a glimpse of the plot (without really spoiling the reader’s future enjoyment) the author of the review (Natasha Cooper) continues:

Richardson uses plenty of real names to provide authenticity, from John le Carré and Vasily Mitrokhin to Sergei Skripal, Maurice Oldfield and even Churchill’s confidant Professor Lindemann. He draws upon his own experiences as a researcher and speechwriter in Westminster, with the result that his political and civil service characters behave in ways that are entirely convincing.

Well, up to a point, Ms. Cooper. I of course had to acquire the book after this endorsement, and was entertained by the smoothly-written novel. Perhaps it does not need to be mentioned that Kim Philby plays a semi-prominent role, something that piqued my attention even more. But authenticity requires more than dropping in famous names from the world of intelligence, using all the established jargon of spycraft, and scattering dozens of well-known (even overused) anecdotes that have populated the literature over the past fifty years. It requires chronological exactitude, and attention to detail in background, careers, expertise, achievements, psychology and motivations.

The problem starts with Scarlet King herself, who is described as being in her nineties at the time of the action – in fact given more precisely as ninety-five in one passage. Her first assignment with MI6 was in Vienna in 1946. Thus, if she were, say, twenty-five years old at the time, the action would probably be no later than 2016. (At one point, Richardson writes that she was only twenty-one when she took on her first assignment for MI6 in Vienna in 1946 – highly improbable!) Yet, in one scene, Scarlet is accused of possibly meeting Philby at the SOE training school at Beaulieu in Hampshire, since she had worked previously for SOE. Philby was dismissed from SOE in the summer of 1941, however, and soon after joined MI6, which, to require King to be of a reasonable age to be employed by SOE, would probably bring the current events forward a few years. And then we learn that she attended Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University, gaining her degree in Modern Languages, which means that she must have completed it in the summer of 1939 or 1940 (at the latest) to be recruited by SOE, which would give her a probable birth-year of about 1917.

Now matters start to get stretched the other end. From ‘authentic’ remarks made by MI5 officers, we learn that ‘current’ events must be occurring after 2018, since the attempted assassination on Skripal in Salisbury is referred to as an event worth recalling. Next, we learn that the year must be in the 2020s, as Brexit (January 2020) is referred to as a past happening. Thus Scarlet King suddenly would have to be a centenarian – and a very sprightly one, at that. But then Richardson informs his readers that King was born in 1923, and was ‘recruited’ (by what organization I shall not divulge) at the tender age of thirteen. She then is described as appearing in sub fusc at Oxford, which meant she must have been admitted to the university at a very young age to be ready to work at SOE in 1940. Yet later in the book, we are told that she went up to Oxford after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact in the autumn of 1939, which would make her recruitment in by SOE in 1940 utterly impossible. Nevertheless, King continually draws on her experiences during training at the SOE school in Arisaig. She is again described as being aged ninety-five in what must be 2021 or 2022. It is all a mess.

The curriculum vitae of the historian embroiled in the plot (Max Archer) is just as dubious. He is aged forty-two at the time of the events, which has him born in (say) 1980. He earned a double-first at Cambridge (under Christopher Andrew), took a Master’s degree, and then, having been rejected for a job in MI6 at the end of 2001, was accepted to take a Ph.D. at Harvard. He then returned to the UK, working as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, which must have taken him up to about 2005. He went on to write two books that gave him his reputation: a volume titled Double Agents: A History, and The Honourable Traitor: An Unauthorized Life of Kim Philby. No dates are given for these publications, but they did apparently necessitate some heavy years of toil. Yet Max is described as having been a consultant to the BBC series The Cambridge Spies (not something one should be very proud of, by the way, because of the way it played around with the facts). That production came out in 2003, however, when Max was presumably completing his doctorate in Boston.

Moreover, the two publications in his name cast serious doubts on Archer’s professional excellence. Richardson himself throws around the term ‘double agents’ carelessly (using them to categorize Philby and Blunt, for example), when what he really means is ‘agents in place’, ‘penetration agents’, or simply ‘traitors’. Just because a person betraying his country happens to work for an intelligence service does not make him a ‘double agent’. (Michael Holzman, Ben Macintyre, Tim Tate, et al., please note.) That Richardson is aware of this semantic error is made evident in a speech that he allocates to Max Archer (p 264): “‘My academic research is on double agents’, he said, steadying his voice. ‘Intelligence officers who officially work for one side but secretly work for the other. The thing is, technically, some intelligence historians dispute the use of the term “double agents” for professional spies like Philby and the Cambridge Five.’” Why, if he were a serious historian who wanted to make his reputation, Archer would go against the grain of what ‘some’ intelligence historians affirm (how many are there, anyway?), and promote an incorrect and unrecognized classification, Richardson does not explain.

Likewise, the account of his biography of Philby is unconvincing and ambiguous. Archer is supposed to have spent years in the archives digging out the facts about Philby, but the whole point of Kim is that there was practically no archival evidence available about him – certainly not in the early 2000s, and the books about him relied largely on the secretive investigations and interviews conducted by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, unreliable memoirs from his colleagues, as well as Philby’s own highly dubious account, My Silent War. Yet Archer is described as taking four years to write his biography, and the Endnotes took twelve months. What they could have contained, for a professedly serious academic publication, would have been very thin gruel. (Even if he had had access to the same MI5 files that Christopher Andrew was able to inspect – impossible, by the way, since there were no historians ‘authorized’ before Andrew – most of his Endnotes would simply have stated ‘Security Service Archives’.) Yet Archer later explains that both his books were tuned for a less demanding market (p 228): “He’d glamorized them, emphasized the sex and the danger, even hoped they might be optioned in a splashy bidding war by Hollywood and hungrily consumed by the masses.” That is absurd: you cannot be the pot-boiling Ben Macintyre and the dryasdust Michael S. Goodman at the same time.

I could cite more – but enough. The book is pure hokum – quite enjoyable hokum – but still hokum. If the fictional characters are too closely tethered to real figures, credibility is quickly undermined, while if they also lack their own coherence in the imagined world, the whole edifice crumbles. What publishers in this sphere need are not Sensitivity readers but Authenticity Readers.

What’s New at Kew

In March of this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the National Archives at Kew. I had noticed that HO 382/255, a file on Georg Honigmann and his daughter Barbara (by Kim Philby’s former wife, Litzi) relating to their passport status, had been withheld, not to be released until 2061! This was shocking. I could not understand why information on the Honigmanns could still be regarded as sensitive. After all, Georg had absconded to East Berlin in 1946, seventy-seven years ago, and Litzi had joined him soon afterwards, whereupon they were married.  Barbara was born in 1949. The file was closed, it seems, in December 1960, and an arbitrary retention period of one hundred years allocated. Why would the Home Office need to maintain information on these people for so long, and who might be affected by its disclosure? Was something embarrassing about Litzi included, perhaps?

The initial response was not encouraging, but due process was followed. At last, on June 28, I received the following message from the Quality Manager at the National Archives:

Thank you for your enquiry regarding a review of:

HO 382/255 – HONIGMANN, George [sic] Friedrich Wolfgang: German. HONIGMANN, Barbara: German


Please accept our apologies for the delays in responding to your Freedom of Information request.

I can now confirm that a redacted version of this record will be made available for public viewing at The National Archives, Kew by 5 July 2023. We have outlined your options for accessing the record at the end of this response.

We have had to carry out a public interest test.  This was because some of the information you requested is covered by the Section 23(1) exemption, which by virtue of Section 64(2), becomes a qualified exemption where information falling within it is contained in a historical record in a public record office, such as The National Archives. Section 23 exempts from public disclosure, information that is directly or indirectly supplied by, or relates to, certain organisations dealing with security matters listed at Section 23(3).

After careful consideration, the public interest in releasing some of the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. 

We have applied the Section 23(1) exemption to information in the file relating to the Security Service. We shall continue to protect such information for the personal security of the individuals involved and the national security of the United Kingdom. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that may assist those determined to undermine the security of the United Kingdom and its citizens.

The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity.  It does not consider the latter to be a “public interest” in favour of disclosure.  In this case disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not, therefore, benefit the public good.

I scanned a copy of a police report from this record in order to obtain the Metropolitan Police’s approval to release their Special Branch generated material, (something I am obliged to do under the Freedom of Information Act).
As they have stated that they have no objection to release, I have attached a copy of the scan so that you at least have some details to look at while waiting for the file to be made available in full.

The file has now been returned to the repository.

My London-based researcher has recently viewed and photographed the file, and I received it on August 9. There does not, at first glance, appear to be anything controversial in it, apart from the fact that Barbara Honigmann (who is still alive), the daughter of Georg and Litzi (sometime Philby) Honigmann applied to spend a month in the United Kingdom when she was eleven years old, in 1960! No doubt there are other secrets within. I shall provide a full report on it in my September bulletin. One thing that had struck me is that Honigmann is described in the header as being ‘German’, yet a sample of the file sent to me by the Quality Manager reports on Honigmann’s application for British naturalization in 1936, on the basis that he promised that he ‘he had no intention for making application to the German authorities for permission to retain his German citizenship if granted British naturalization’. Puzzled, I returned to the Honigmann files previously released, and then discovered that Honigman’s application for naturalization was rejected because of his communist sympathies.

Intelligence Officers

I frequently ask myself: what makes a good intelligence officer, and were those recruited by MI5 in wartime well-suited to their career? Selecting a profession has a high degree of chance about it, in my opinion. I almost went into teaching (and took a post-graduate degree in education), but I think I would have been a very poor schoolmaster. (Several persons I have encountered said that I should have been a lawyer.) Fortunately I joined IBM instead, and finished my career in a job of technology analysis that I believe was ideal for me, demanding business acumen, technical knowledge and experience, good analytical and communications skills, and a healthy lack of idealism. And one thinks of doctors: presumably all doctors who pass their final examinations must be qualified, but one would expect a vastly different set of skills between those who passed with flying colours and those who always confused the ileum with the ilium.

Were the Oxbridge dons, lawyers, and acquaintances from the Club uniquely suited to the positions found for them in MI5 when it was recruiting furiously in 1940? Perhaps on the principle that smart persons can adapt to the demands of any particular job, it made sense, but training and preparation were practically non-existent, and the management infrastructure was woefully inefficient. Moreover, there were different kinds of skill required: more cerebral, contemplative assessment of evidence, with a background of history and politics required; interrogatory skills in challenging and verifying the stories of suspected spies; the more people-oriented capabilities of emotional intelligence and patience in running agents.

Allen Dulles

I recently came across what Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, wrote about ideal intelligence officers. In The Craft of Intelligence appears the following:

                “When I recently addressed a class of junior trainees at CIA I tried to list what I thought were the qualities of a good intelligence officer. They were:

            Be perceptive about people

Be able to work well with others under difficult conditions

Learn to discern between fact and fiction

Be able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials

Possess inquisitiveness

Have a large amount of ingenuity

Pay appropriate attention to detail

Be able to express ideas clearly, briefly and very important, interestingly

Learn when to keep your mouth shut.”

As afterthoughts to what he presented in his lecture, he added other desirable characteristics: an understanding of other points of view; no rigidity or closed-mindedness; lack of ambitiousness or rewards in fame or fortune.

It’s not a bad list: I wonder whether his trainees were screened before they were hired, or whether he thought that some of the qualities could be inculcated into them? I might add a hard-headed, even cynical, perspective on how the world works, a degree of humility, and a sense of humour, even to the extent of not taking oneself too seriously. (Are you listening back there, Angleton?) And I was reminded of the sentences that Stella Rimington included in her memoir concerning Peter Wright (that I used in my July coldspur):

            But it [counter-espionage work] is not the quick jumping to conclusions and the twisting of facts to meet the theory which Peter Wright went in for in those days. He was in fact by then [1972] everything which a counter-espionage officer should not be. He was self-important, he had an over-developed imagination and an obsessive personality which had turned into paranoia. And above all he was lazy.

Wright would have failed the Dulles test quite dramatically.

But what about his colleagues, in MI5 and MI6? Were they much better? Consider the very smart and cerebral but rather romantic and impressionable Guy Liddell, lacking confidence in expressing his opinions forthrightly; the ambitious and political Dick White, who manipulated others to protect his position; the bumbling and easily influenced Arthur Martin, who certainly could not keep quiet when he needed to; the insightful but neurotic and demanding John Curry; the vain and detached Valentine Vivian, suffering from depression, who did not have the brain-power to recognize what he was up against; the unpopular and heartless loner Claud Dansey, whose deviousness led him into some dismal traps; the well-intentioned but cautious and unbrilliant Roger Hollis, who really just wanted to stay out of trouble and play golf; the misplaced Percy Sillitoe, treating counter-espionage as a police exercise, who had to call in from the USA for instructions. In comparison with this lot, I suspect that Jasper Harker and Felix Cowgill may have received an undeservedly bad press.

On the other hand, I believe the true stars were more junior officers like Jane Archer (née Sissmore), Michael Serpell and Hugh Shillito, who had their fingers on the pulse, but for various reasons were pushed aside or became disheartened. And one has to recognize that it would take a very persistent and confident MI5 leadership, with carefully prepared arguments and principles, to withstand some of the political pressures. If Petrie, Liddell and White had insisted to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, just after the Soviet Union had entered the war as an ally in the summer of 1941, that Klaus Fuchs should in no circumstances be employed on the Tube Alloys project because he was a known Communist, their careers might have been put in jeopardy.

And what about all those MI6 officers with Russian connections – Alexander McKibbin, Henry Carr, Paul Dukes, Stephen Alley, George Hill, Wilfred Dunderdale, Harold Gibson, George Graham, and maybe others? They were selected because they spoke Russian, and knew the country: some of them had wives from tsarist times. Obvious candidates to handle agents behind the lines. But of course those qualifications represented a massive exposure. Their skills and background stood out a mile to the various Russian Intelligence Services over the years, and they were ideal candidates for manipulation by the NKVD through the issuance of threats to family members still residing in the Soviet Union. Unimaginative heads of MI6 could not spot the danger, and the cause of counter-intelligence – injured of course by Philby – was mortally damaged.

It was not easy. And re-discovering a passage in the 1944 Bland Report (which made recommendations about the future organization of MI6) caused me to reflect that the leadership of the Services sometimes failed to come to grips properly with their missions. Keith Jeffery cites a statement inserted by Stewart Menzies (after influence from the rather flimsy Peter Loxley, Alexander Cadogan’s Private Secretary, who was tragically killed in an aircraft accident on his way to Yalta), which tried to steer an apolitical track:

            We think it is important that those concerned [eh?] in the S.I.S. should always bear in mind that they ae not called upon to investigate such organisations [Nazis, Communists, Anarchists, etc.] because of their political ideology; and that they should therefore only engage in such investigations when there is prima facie evidence that the organization in question may be used as instruments of espionage, or otherwise when specifically requested to do  . . . We consider it to be of great importance that the S.I.S. should avoid incurring any suspicion that it is the instrument of any political creed in this country, and we believe therefore that C would always be well advised to seek guidance from the Foreign Office as to what political parties in foreign countries need special watching, and for how long.

This seems to me to be taking neutrality too far. (It was at a time when factions in the Foreign Office were strenuously promoting ‘co-operation’ with the Soviet Union.) Defending the Realm, the Constitution (no matter how dispersed or vague it was) – even the Empire – was presumably what MI6 and MI5 were supposed to be doing: confounding the knavish tricks of those who wanted to overthrow them could hardly be construed as adopting a political ideology. This must have raised a few guffaws in the Kremlin.

In conclusion, after reading the biography of J. L. Austin (q.v. infra), I realized that it was a figure like him that MI5 (and MI6) desperately needed to coordinate intelligence about Soviet intentions and practice in all their aspects – Leninist and Stalinist doctrine, the Comintern and its successors, Moscow’s relationship with the CPGB, the role of spies, illegals and agents of influence, the use of propaganda and subversion. Austin’s capacity for hard work, his ability to learn, his excellent memory, his historical sense, his patience, his lack of sentimentality, and his synthetic abilities in interpretation all gave him an unmatched capability. Two heads of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith (q.v. infra) and William Casey, were both highly impressed with Austin’s work, and tried to bring his disciplines to work in reforming the organization.

But instead, MI5 and MI6 got Hollis and Vivian.

The Lady Novelists

If W. S. Gilbert’s text for The Mikado had had to undergo the surveillance of a ‘sensitivity reader’, we would have been spared the appearance of ‘the lady novelist’ in Ko-Ko’s list of persons who ‘never would be missed’. Lest anyone be under the misapprehension that I carry any bias against members of this category, I hasten to point out that I am an enthusiastic fan of Angel Thirkell, Helen MacInnes, Olivia Manning, Barbara Pym, and Elizabeth Taylor. Thus I trust that my recent criticisms of Kate Atkinson, Rebecca Stanford and Charlotte Philby will not be interpreted as a sad case of male chauvinism. As is evident, I mete out the same harsh treatment to characters like Matthew Richardson.

Unfortunately, when I wrote to Charlotte Philby, suggesting that her obvious talents might be better applied to writing a non-fictional account of her grandfather’s marriage with Litzi instead of an imagined tale of his relationship with Edith Tudor-Hart, she reacted badly, believing that I was being facetious. (An unremarkable conclusion, should she have happened to know me, but in this case I was behaving utterly sincerely.) I immediately tried to repair the damage, but heard no more from her. I wonder whether she has been tracking the saga on coldspur. . . .  Nevertheless, I remain a sucker for picking up these creative attempts to write convincing fiction based on a distortion of historical events.

The latest in this genre that I read was a title that caught my eye on the Barnes & Noble best-selling table – The Paris Spy by Susan Elia Macneal. Since it involved an SOE agent in 1942, as the plans for the ‘invasion’ of France are being made, I thought I should give it a go. Heaven knows, the author might have dug out some new source I had overlooked. When I inspected the bibliography at the back, I could tell that she had immersed herself deeply into the goings-on with F Section, Buckmaster, Déricourt, Atkins, Dansey, Khan and company.

‘The Paris Spy’ by Susan Elia Macneal

The novel turned out to be another mess of fiction and ‘authenticity’. At times, Macneal introduces real characters in her plot, but introduces the main actors by hiding their real-life models behind imagined names. Thus James Lebeau is based on Henri Déricourt, Henry Gaskell on Maurice Buckmaster, Diana Lynd on Vera Atkins, and George Bishop on Claude Dansey. (Occasionally she forgets where she is, and refers to such characters by the names of their prototypes.) The author admits, proudly, that her story is ‘fiction, pure fiction’ but then acknowledges her debt to Phyllis Brooks Shafer, retired Berkeley Professor, as well as Ronald J. Granieri, director of research and lecturer in history at the Lauder Institute at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, for their contribution by checking her manuscripts for historical accuracy.

But what can ‘historical accuracy’ mean in such a scenario? The plot is quite absurd, with a larger-than-life appearance by Coco Chanel, implausibly simplified radio transmissions, miraculous escapes – one aided by an accommodating Nazi officer – the seizure of prisoners of the Germans, and an unlikely flight back to the United Kingdom in which the Déricourt character pilots the Lysander, but has to be subdued and rendered unconscious, whereafter the heroine (who has never flown a  plane beforehand) manages to bring it home with the help of a groggy RAF officer. It is not to say that the book lacks style: wartime Paris is described with obvious care, and Macneal has a good knack for dialogue. All harmless nonsense, I suppose, and it seems that there is an audience for such hokum which does not care about the extravagances and distortions.

Beverly Gage and ‘G-Man’

‘G-Man’ by Beverly Gage

One of my summer reading assignments was to read Beverly Gage’s critically acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the long-lasting director of the F.B.I. Now, I have never regarded Hoover as a very estimable or sympathetic figure: I detected a high degree of hypocrisy in his private life, and judged his commitment to dirty tricks disgraceful. I considered that his approach to segregation and civil rights, and his obstinacy in deeming the movements behind them as being inevitably controlled by Soviet intelligence, were simply foolish. I had also been disturbed by Hoover’s inappropriate championing of the Catholic Church – something that Gage dispenses with fairly sympathetically in just three pages – and was thus intrigued to read, in the July issue of History Today, a review of a new book on his influence in this sphere, titled The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, by Lerone A. Martin. The reviewer, Daniel Rey, writes: “From Hoover’s petty squabbling over biblical disputes to his flagrant abuse of the separation of church and state, the details in Martin’s book are astonishing.” I doubt whether I shall get round to reading this – one can take only so much Hoover in one decade – but it just shows that the ‘definitive’ biography will never be written.

Yet Gage manages to describe Hoover as a vaguely respectable character, politically savvy and ready to adjust – obviously something he would have had to perform if he managed to fulfill his duties under eight different US presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon. If a biographer is going to spend that amount of time on any character, he or she will probably present a mostly positive angle on the subject. I was surprised, however, given what I recalled of Anthony Summers’s 1993 biography of Hoover, how little time she spent on Hoover’s secret files on politicians, items that he used to threaten anyone who challenged him. Why, for instance, could Richard Nixon not bring himself to fire Hoover when all his aides were pressing him to do so? Gage also has no room to explore the way her subject was sometimes lampooned. In 1964, the satirist Art Buchwald wrote a column claiming that Hoover was a ‘mythical person first thought up by Reader’s Digest’, which magazine took the name from the manufacturer of kitchen equipment. Hoover was not amused.

Hoover had appeared on my screen because of his demand to have Fuchs interrogated in prison by an FBI officer, because of the episodes involving Philby, Burgess and Maclean, because of his energetic anti-communist stance, and because he had tried to prevent the CIA learning about VENONA. I had always been a bit puzzled about his relative patience with the visits of MI5 chiefs and vice-chiefs (e.g. Sillitoe, Liddell, Hollis) who had gone to Washington in an attempt to appease him, since he must have considered the set-up at the Security Service impossibly leaky and not managed on the strict procedural and hierarchical lines that he prided himself on developing for the FBI. In fact, Hollis and Liddell do not appear in Gage’s index (there is no mention of Hoover’s gift of golf-clubs to Hollis), and Sillitoe is mentioned only in the context of his giving an honorary knighthood to Hoover at the British Embassy in 1951. Gage is very weak on matters of international intelligence, such as the complicated relations between the CIA and the FBI when it came to the handling of Soviet defectors and agents-in-place, most notably Michał Golenewski. That all goes to show, I suppose, that you can write a rich 837-page biography without touching some of the critical aspects of a life, and that Gage has a naturally domestic focus.

Gage overall writes quite elegantly (I do not understand why she capitalizes ‘Black’, but not ‘white’, but observe that this anomalous usage extends to the pages of the Times Literary Supplement), and her narrative moves forward strongly. Yet I wondered whether her perspective lost some of its individuality in the process of writing. In her Acknowledgments she gives credit to no less than one-hundred-and-twenty-eight individuals, and it is difficult for me to see how she could listen to the opinions of that many persons without compromising her independence of voice. For example, she shows a less than authoritative stance on the issues of ‘racial and social justice’, and the competition between ‘capitalism and communism’, and sometimes evades judgments where a more confident scholar would have put her oar in. The sources she gives are overall thorough, although it worries me when a respectable academic relies on Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends and Phillip Knightley’s The Master Spy for her intelligence on Kim Philby, and she also cites Amy Knight’s highly flawed When the Cold War Began for her information on the Gouzenko case. How can I trust her authority on the topics and authors with which I am not familiar?

One of her woollier assertions really stopped me in my tracks. On page 418, she writes: “One Venona cable even hinted that Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA beginning in 1950, might have been turned by the Soviets during his time in Moscow as American ambassador.” No commentary is supplied: no source for this claim is given. I judge that observation so shocking, with highly grave implications if true, that it should never have been allowed to appear in the text so baldly. If the evidence is flimsy, the observation should have been omitted. If it is not, a proper analysis should have been offered. I can find no reference to Bedell Smith in either of the two primary American works on the VENONA project, namely the book by Haynes & Klehr, and that by Romerstein & Breindel. Moreover, I cannot imagine anyone less likely to have been ‘turned’ (whatever that means in this context) than Bedell Smith. I accordingly sent a polite email to Professor Gage, asking her to provide me with the source statement, and to explain exactly what she meant. (Writing emails to authors is frequently a thankless task: non-academics tend to hide behind their agents or their publishers, but academics normally display an email address somewhere on the institution’s website, and that is how I was able to target Professor Gage’s inbox – or spam folder.)

I received no acknowledgment or reply. I put her on the List.

Summer Biographies

It is a rich summer for the publication of biographies. Jesse Fink, who declared himself a coldspur enthusiast a few months ago, is a British-Australian author. His latest offering, as he posted, is a life of the intelligence officer Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, titled The Eagle in the Mirror, and his objective is to refute the common claim that his subject was a ‘scoundrel’ – contrary to what I, like many others, believed. In order to get my hands on this book as soon as possible, I ordered it from amazon.uk, and eagerly look forward to its arrival, and learning what the facts about this mysterious character are.

I also read in a recent Spectator a review of a recently-published biography of the photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, written by Sarah Knights. Attentive coldspur readers will recall that I covered this little-known character in a piece from February 2019, Two Cambridge Spies – Dutch Connections (1) ( https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-1/) , where I explored Ker-Seymer’s links with Donald Maclean, and whether she was the elusive ‘Barbara’ to whom Goronwy Rees referred. Duncan Fallowell’s review in the magazine was hardly compulsive: “She took some attractive photo-portraits before the war in her studio above Asprey’s and that was it.” I wondered, if Ker-Seymer was so insignificant, why Knights deemed her worthy of a biography. Was anything about Maclean to be revealed in the book? I doubt whether I shall bother to acquire it, since Knights may not have advanced so far as I did in my researches. Maybe somebody out there reading this report will know more, and inform me.

At some stage I am also expecting the arrival of Robert Lyman’s book on the double-agent Henri Dericourt. Lyman, a somewhat arrogant New Zealander (in his self-promotion, he always prefixes his name with ‘Dr.’, in my mind a rather pretentious habit when exercised by those who are not medical practitioners), appears not to have been chastened by the drubbing that Patrick Marnham gave him recently on coldspur (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-patrick-marnham-responds-to-robert-lyman/ ). For example, it has been reported to me that Lyman was enthusiastically touting his ‘new’ researches at the Chalke Valley History Festival in June. Patrick and I are very sceptical that Lyman will have come up with any fresh insights after his time at Kew, and it seems to us that he is being set up by Mark Seaman and the other Foreign Office propagandists as the successor to the now much subdued Francis Suttill. I suppose I shall have to acquire his book when it comes out, in the cause of research completeness, but, again, if any coldspur reader can perform the job for me first, and advise me accordingly, I should be very grateful.

‘J. L. Austin’ by M. W. Rowe

On August 4, I received my copy of M. W. Rowe’s J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer, which was reported (in a Spectator review) to have a fascinating account of the Oxford philosopher’s contribution to intelligence in World War II. It weighed in heftily at just over two pounds, with 660 pages. I completed it on August 19: it is a monumental work, a tour de force in many aspects, but ultimately unsatisfactory. The problem is that it actually consists of three separate books: a conventional biography of Austin, a study of military intelligence in World War II, to which Austin contributed mightily, and an account of Ordinary Language Philosophy in post-war Oxford. None of these three subjects is probably worthy of a separate volume, yet, when merged together, they produce something rather indigestible.

Austin tragically died very young, of lung cancer at the age of forty-eight, and the events of his life, outside the war service and the linguistic battles at Oxford, do not contain enough of interest to fill a biography. The cause is not helped by a very stodgy and irrelevant genealogical introduction, which, by focussing on only one patrilineal thread, does not do justice to the scope of Austin’s heritage, and sentimentally makes some rather unrigorous conclusions. I cite here an example of Rowe’s whimsical day-dreaming: “It is pleasing to think that two mordant intellects and fine prose stylists – the J. Austen who wrote Sense and Sensibility and the J. Austin who wrote Sense and Sensibilia – are related, even if their closest common ancestor is to be found in the late fifteenth century.” That is a rather desperate effort.

On the other hand, the middle section, on intelligence on wartime, is fascinating, and sheds vital fresh light on Austin’s contribution, especially concerning the D-Day landings, that has not been published beforehand. Yet the author chooses to include a host of ancillary information about the conflict that has little to do with Austin’s life. The last section is simply tedious: Austin’s apparent obsession with the detailed inspection and promotion of ‘Ordinary Language’ to solve ‘philosophical problems’ (that are undefined) seems to this reader quite futile, since that school of philosophy combines a mixture of the palpably obvious with a failure to understand that language is an infinitely deceptive tool, and that the spoken form, through emphasis and intonation, introduces a whole fresh dimension of significance and meaning. Rowe quotes something that Isaiah Berlin, in a typically arch and equivocal manner, wrote about Austin, as the philosopher was dying, that, to my mind, ironically undermines the whole principle of ‘Ordinary Language’: “  . . . I think on the whole that he is the cleverest man I have ever known – in curious ways also the nicest, perhaps not the nicest, but wonderfully benevolent, kind, good and just, despite all his little vanities, etc.” Analyzing the difference between ‘the nicest’ and ‘the nicest’ could have occupied a whole seminar. I recall reading, in my late teens, Language, Truth and Logic, by Austin’s adversary, A. J. Ayer, followed by Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, and then Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, which tried to demolish the kernel of Austin’s ‘Ordinary Language’ ideas. My vague recollection is that I found Gellner, despite his rather lush and imprecise prose, the most convincing.

‘Sense and Sensibilia’ by J. L. Austin

The book is not helped by a too rich set of distracting Footnotes, mostly clarifying who some rather obscure and less obscure persons were – all of which could have been relegated to a Biographical Appendix, so that the reader could more easily discover what nuggets and insights the author wanted to mention that he did not judge were appropriate to include in his narrative. This clutter is reflected in a less-than-useful Index, which is dominated by the same hundreds of personal names, while ignoring many of the more vital entities (such as wartime Operations) in which I had interest. I was also puzzled that no analysis of Austin’s precipitous demise was given. He had been a dedicated pipe-smoker – like thousands of his generation – but why did he succumb so early to squamous cell carcinoma? (My father, who was born a month before Austin, also smoked a pipe intensively until the 1970s, but outlived him by forty-five years.) And how come that Austin, a resolute atheist, was given a grand memorial service in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin? I should also have liked to learn more about the contribution of Austin’s loyal and admirable widow, Jean, who, as I picked up from a New York Times review of Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure, carried on teaching philosophy at Oxford after her husband’s death. So – a necessary read, in many ways, but it is hard to see at which audience this dense tome is targeted.

And then there are the reissues of two famous works: D. J. Taylor’s biography of George Orwell, and Michael Ignatieff’s revised life of Isaiah Berlin. I have an extensive supply of Orwell-related literature in one of my bookcases, including Taylor’s Life, the biographies by Crick, Meyer, Bowker, Shelden, and dozens of volumes that inspect various aspects of Orwell’s life and works, as well as an almost full set of the magnificent Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison. In view of my breakthrough research in 2004 suggesting that Orwell had Asperger’s Syndrome – a diagnosis later confirmed by Professor Michael Fitzgerald in his 2005 book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity (see https://coldspur.com/reviews/orwells-clock/ ), I was keen to learn how Taylor had treated this information in Orwell: The New Life. I had written to Taylor many years ago, and pointed him to my article posted on coldspur, so he must have been aware of the theory.

‘Orwell: The New Life’ by D. J. Taylor

The book duly arrived. I checked out the index: no mention of Fitzgerald or Percy or Asperger’s. Yet the flyleaf declares that the book uses ‘a wide range of previously unknown sources’, and that it is ‘poignant, far-reaching, and critically astute’. I read all of its 540 dense pages, and enjoyed it, but did not learn much more than I gained from the 2003 version, and it sometimes is simply too encyclopaedic. Indeed, the resident literary lampoonist and satirist at Private Eye captured the spirit of it in a short parody published a few weeks ago. While his contributions are always presented anonymously, I know that the author’s identity is – D. J. Taylor.

So what happened? I was apparently not the only reader to wonder about Taylor’s disdain. Alexander Larman, in a review of the biography in the July issue of The Spectator World, wrote:

“Taylor shies away from any suggestion that Orwell was on the autism spectrum, but judging by many of the actions depicted in this necessarily lengthy but never self-indulgent book, he suffered from at least a moderate form of Asperger syndrome, which might explain his often uncomprehendingly forthright attitude towards his fellow writers.”  Yet that is only partly true. Taylor does not ‘shy away’: he never even engages with the hypothesis, which represents a very bizarre way of treating fresh research. Ignoring coldspur is perhaps pardonable, but pretending that the relevant publication by the very prominent Professor Fitzgerald had no merit is surely inexcusable. Since a review of the book also appeared in Literary Review, I sent a letter to the Editor of that excellent magazine describing my puzzlement, and drawing attention to both my article and the book by Professor Fitzgerald. He declined to print my letter.

Soon afterwards, I read in the Wall Street Journal of August 12-13 a very positive review of a book titled Wifedom, a biography of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, by Anna Funder. The reviewer, Donna Rifkind, wrote:

            Ms. Funder clearly believes that Eilleen’s role in Orwell’s life has been undervalued. She balks at the ways Orwell views “women – as wives – in terms of what they do for him, or ‘demand’ of him.” His exalted status, she implies, has obscured how tyrannical this hater of tyrannies could be, how insensitive he was towards the women who best understood him.

It has been shown that Orwell treated several women in his life in a severely abusive manner. Taylor definitely soft-pedalled this aspect of his hero. It sounds as if a new version of his work is called for . . .

And then there was Michael Ignatieff and Isaiah Berlin. I learned from a Facebook post by Henry Hardy (Berlin’s long-time amanuensis and editor) that a revised edition of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, first published in 1998, was to appear this summer. I awaited its appearance eagerly. After all, in my study of Berlin, most prominently in my 2015 History Today article The Undercover Egghead (see https://coldspur.com/the-undercover-egghead/), in my comprehensive coverage in Misdefending the Realm (2017), and in my elegiac contribution in Isaiah in Love (see https://coldspur.com/isaiah-in-love/), I had done much to disclose Berlin’s involvement with intelligence, frequently of a highly dubious nature, which Berlin, in his conversations with Ignatieff, and in his own writings, had very strenuously denied. Surely Henry Hardy would have alerted Ignatieff to my contributions: Hardy had attended the lecture at Buckingham University where I first unveiled The Undercover Egghead, he was familiar with Misdefending the Realm, and had complimented me (he is not one to dispense praise easily) on Isaiah in Love.

‘Isaiah Berlin: A Life’ by Michael Ignatieff

I had enjoyed the first edition of the Life, but thought it intellectually lazy. I do not know how one can write a serious biography when one is mainly dependent upon the reminiscences of the subject himself. Ignatieff brought a cultured and refined perspective to the incidents in Berlin’s life, but it was far too hagiographic, focused too much on Berlin’s frequently garbled thinking without analyzing it critically, and lacked objectivity and discipline in covering the essence of Berlin’s ‘Jewishness’ (whatever that means), and his adherence to ‘Judaism’ and Zionism. Thus I had great expectations that the new edition would address many of the faults of the first, and take into consideration the bulk of what has been written about Berlin in the past twenty-five years.

The arrival of the book was a colossal disappointment. It is described as a ‘fully revised definitive edition’, ‘a magisterial biography’. No new blurbs are listed, however: Doris Lessing’s tribute is highlighted, but she died in 2013. That was not a good sign. In his Preface, Ignatieff writes that ‘a steady stream of articles, books and commentary have explored Berlin’s ideas. In this new edition, I have tried to incorporate as much of this new material as possible’. He claims that he has also ‘tried to clarify Berlin’s relations with important figures’, but his interest is superficial. He maintains the individual chapters that carved up the first edition. His Endnotes reveal only about three books that have been published since 1998, and two of those consist of reminiscences of Berlin, one of which is by Henry Hardy himself. ‘Definitive’ it is not. Even Hardy agrees that a proper authoritative and objective life of Berlin remains to be written.

Thus we read no fresh analysis of Berlin’s activities in the intelligence world. The story that Guy Burgess was on a mission to Russia, for MI5 (an error, since any overseas engagement would have been undertaken by MI6), and that he wanted Berlin to be appointed as a Press Officer at the British Embassy in Moscow, is carelessly repeated, as is Berlin’s denial that he ‘had ever been sent on a secret mission anywhere by anyone’, in response to Goronwy Rees’s assertions in his People article in 1956. None of the many incidents that I describe in my articles, from the visit to sub-Carpathian Ruthenia in the summer of 1933 (see https://coldspur.com/reviews/homage-to-ruthenia/) , through the strange negotiations with Chaim Weizman at the end of 1940, to the furtive meetings in Washington with Anatoly Gorsky, the previous handler of the Cambridge Five in London, starting in December 1944, is covered.  I also note (something that I overlooked in the first edition) that Berlin ‘gave every assistance to Peter Wright . . . .who called in search of any other accomplices Burgess might have had inside academe or the Establishment’. What possibly might Berlin have known if he was never involved with Intelligence?

Henry Hardy (who worked closely with the author on the notes and sources, and the editing of the book) agrees with me that Ignatieff is guilty of misleading his audience, and wrote to me declaring that ‘he shouldn’t have pretended to have done more than he did, and he should have made the case for leaving the book essentially unaltered’, adding that he didn’t think Ignatieff could be bothered to perform any more research. It is all rather sad, and the Pushkin Press should be embarrassed over this sorry effort to present the thing as a ‘fully revised definitive edition’. I have not seen any reviews yet, but I shall watch out to detect whether anybody has the same reaction as I did. (The Summer Special issue of Prospect carried an encapsulation of Berlin’s ideas by Ignatieff, suggesting that his Concepts of Liberty could act as guidance for the political challenges of today, but I found it too abstract and unconnected – as useless as the ideas of his adversary, John Rawls, Daniel Chandler’s biography of whom was reviewed a few pages on.)

The Love-Lives of the Philosophers

As I read Ignatieff’s book, I made notes on items that I thought were incorrect, or examples of sloppy or imprecise writing. I sent these to Henry Hardy, and some lively exchanges followed. One particular item that caught my eye was a sentence in the first paragraph of Chapter 15, where Ignatieff describes a scene at a beach outside Portofino in 1956. He lists some characters visible in Aline Berlin’s home movie, including ‘Stuart Hampshire and his son Julian Ayer’. Ayer? What did that mean? Had a few words been omitted? I know that Hampshire and Ayer (A. J. or ‘Freddie’, the logical positivist) were closely associated, but why would Hampshire’s son be called Julian Ayer? (Hampshire is of intelligence interest to me, since he worked with Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Radio Analysis Bureau of the Radio Security Service in World War II, and, despite a slightly questionable reputation, was invited by the government to conduct an audit of Britain’s intelligence services, and specifically GCHQ, in 1965.) I also checked out the first edition: there the text runs simply ‘Stuart Hampshire and his son Julian’. So I asked Hardy about it: was this a mistake? His first response was to inform me that Julian was indeed Hampshire’s son, but was known as Ayer. From straightforward research on Wikipedia, I established that Hampshire had married Ayer’s first wife, Renée Lees, and I assumed that Julian was thus his stepson.

Stuart Hampshire

Yet further investigations pointed to something more sinister. Hardy then told me that Julian was not Hampshire’s stepson: he was Hampshire’s biological son, ‘conceived before his parents were married’. This, however, turned out to be something of an understatement, and I sent my consequent discoveries to Hardy: “A long time before his ‘parents’ were married! All very strange. Julian was apparently born in 1939, but Ayer did not divorce Renée Lees until 1945, and Hampshire did not marry her until 1961. Thus Julian’s status at Portofino in 1956 was indeed ambiguous. On-line information on him describes him as Ayer’s ‘adopted son’”. Moreover, when I returned to Hampshire’s Wikipedia entry that morning, references to Julian (that I had picked up a couple of days ago) had disappeared, even though the last date of change was given as July 23. It seems that Hampshire’s daughter, Belinda, was also a product of his liaison with Renée Lees.

I detect some awkwardness over these events. Sadly, Julian was drowned in the tsunami disaster of 2004: maybe Ignatieff judged that it was time to open up about these relationships. By simply adding ‘Ayer’ to ‘Julian’, however, he provoked far more questions than he closed. What were his motivations?

And then, the very same day on which I was pursuing this inquiry, I read a column in the Spectator of July 22 by Charles Moore where he explained that the father of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was Churchill’s private secretary Sir Anthony Montague Browne. His mother, Lady Williams of Elvel, admitted that she had gone to bed with Browne, ‘fuelled by a large amount of alcohol on both sides’, probably the night before she eloped with Gavin Welby. DNA tests gave a 97.78 probability that Montague-Browne was Welby’s father. What is it about the sexual mores of the Great and the Good, and what do they think they are they up to, lecturing to us about Morality? I knew that Freddie Ayer was a relentless satyr, but it seems that his habits were adopted by many of his friends and contemporaries. One of the fresh revelations in Ignatieff’s book is that Isaiah Berlin, after his marriage to Aline, not only carried on his affair with the sometime Soviet agent Jenifer Hart (which I had learned from Nicola Lacey’s biography of her husband H. L. A. Hart), but also conducted one with the Oxford sociologist (and later head of Newnham College, Cambridge) Jean Floud. Floud, née Macdonald, had married Peter Floud, and joined the Communist Party with him in 1938. Peter Floud’s brother Bernard was probably a member of the Oxford Group of spies, and committed suicide as the net closed in in 1967. Maybe it was over details concerning that circle that Berlin was able to clarify matters for Peter Wright.

Coldspur: Method, Archive & Topography

Method

It occurs to me that it might be useful to describe the method(ology) behind my conclusions posted on coldspur, and how I treat comments submitted by readers. My researches are undertaken with the suspicion that most accounts of events in the world of espionage and counter-espionage are probably inaccurate, and a detailed study frequently reveals anomalies in time, geography and psychology, as well as conflicts between different records. (The full methodology I applied when performing my doctoral thesis can be inspected at  https://coldspur.com/reviews/the-chapter-on-methodology/. )

My writing is designed to counter the baleful influences of at least four groups: 1) Those who write memoirs, or confide ‘remembrances’ to their biographers, when their primary objective is to beautify their reputation; 2) The bureaucrats, such as the ‘Foreign Office advisors’ who guide (for example) SOE researchers away from embarrassing material, and government employees (current or retired) who display indulgence to their ‘colleagues’ for sentimental reasons; 3) The amateur historians who distort the facts out of carelessness or a desire to glorify their subjects, or look for publicity by promoting melodramatic theories; and 4) The authorized historians who breach their professional objectivity by agreeing with their sponsors to constrain their areas of research.

What I am doing is, I suppose, ‘investigative reporting’, but of recent history, not current events. The experts in this subject encourage the maintenance of a large number of human sources – giving as an example the Sunday Times team researching Philby. Yet it requires an open mind and a good nose to distinguish between probable facts and possible disinformation when dealing with such sources: Bruce Page with Sackur, Seale and McConville with Vivian, Chapman Pincher and Anthony Glees with White and Reilly. Thus ‘sources’ can be a two-edged sword. I have enjoyed the contributions of very few ‘live’ inputs during my research. Moreover, it probably explains another dimension of the 70-year rule for releasing archival material. That limitation is frequently explained as a mechanism to protect the living, or their relatives. Yet it is just as useful for the authorities in preventing the insiders from being interrogated by inquisitive researchers, since they are no longer with us.

As I process the information available, and publish my conclusions, I am of course merely developing hypotheses. I never pretend that they are the last word on the subject, and I encourage challenges to them. Contrary to the belief of some, an accurate account of what really happened is not going to magically appear from an exhaustive presentation of all the ‘facts’. Some records may never be released, disinformation has been inserted into the archives, and memoirs are notoriously unreliable. I note the following statement from M. W. Rowe’s biography of J. L. Austin, where the author comments on the challenge of dealing with less than conclusive evidence: “ . . . truth is ultimately more likely to emerge from a bold, crisp and refutable claim than a range of hesitated options; and a full discussion of every option would weigh down the story and take up too much space.”

Well, I suppose my texts could be crisper, but I do believe that recording a detailed exposition of my material is essential for the benefit of posterity, since it will not appear anywhere else. I develop my hypotheses from a meticulous examination of information from multiple sources, and try to interpret/transform a series of discrete events into the structure of a plausible theory (such as my recent hypothesis that in 1939/40 Kim and Litzy Philby presented themselves to MI5 and MI6 as turncoats from Communism). Now a thesis such as this, which helps to explain a number of riddles and paradoxes, could be refuted, but that will not happen simply because one (or more) of the links in the chain can be broken. For example, some readers have challenged my suggestion that the informant to MI5 in 1953 was Graham Greene, and they may be right. Yet, even if that person is never correctly identified, it cannot detract from the fact that someone, almost certainly from MI6, told MI5 that the psychiatrist Eric Strauss knew more than he should have about Philby’s exploits in Turkey.

Thus most of the comments that I gratefully receive on coldspur help me to refine the arguments, and correct errors. So far, no one has submitted any evidence that causes me to retract a theory, though I am ready to do so, if appropriate. To any sceptics, I sometimes reply: “Show me an alternative explanation that fits the facts!”, but that may be unreasonable, as they have neither the time nor the interest to go that far, and they might disagree with me over what the ‘facts’ are. I should love to participate in a forum that explored these rival ideas, such as a debate at Lancaster House (probably not chaired by Mark Seaman), but that is unlikely to happen. Coldspur under WordPress is not the most efficient chat-room for exploring rival ideas, but it is what I have, and the ability to follow up controversies in my own space and time enables me to avoid the noise and muddle of other media. 

Archive

As I have previously written, I have been trying to find a home for my substantial library, and a custodian for coldspur, for the time when I am no longer around. I believe I have found a suitable educational institution who is eager to house my collection and provide a portal to my research and other archival material, but I have nothing in writing yet, so I am reluctant to say any more until a firm agreement has been reached. What has emerged from the discourse so far is the requirement to have my collection of books catalogued, and I have thus been involved in working with a website called LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/home) to enter the details of the relevant volumes in my library.

So far I have entered about fifteen-hundred items on intelligence, history and general biography, with a few thousand still to be processed. (It may be that the institution will not want all my library, which contains a large selection of fiction, books on language, poetry and humour, including a particularly rich assortment of volumes of comic and nonsensical verse.) It has been a fascinating exercise: LibraryThing offers a choice of search engines to locate a title, normally by ISBN, such as amazon, the Library of Congress, and the British Library. I have found that amazon is by far the fastest and the most reliable. Very oddly, even when a book is identified with a ‘Library of Congress’ number, for instance, that search capability usually fails to come up with a candidate. For older books, of course, when no ISBN number existed, I have to enter search arguments by title and author, and make annotations. Occasionally no entry at all can be found, and I have to input all the details (publisher, date, etc.) myself. I place a little sticky label on each book entered, in order to control where I am.

One revelation for me has been how chaotic the ISBN system is. It looks as if it maintains an erratic ‘significance’ in its coding (and we data modellers know how error-prone such coding systems can be, as, for example, that used for postcodes in the UK), but I don’t know what it is, and there appears to be little consistency between what should be related entries, and books republished in a different format frequently own vastly different identifiers. I also found that some newish books remarkably have no ISBNs printed within them, and that some have them, but they are wrong, or have been used by other books before them. One of my on-line correspondents has made a detailed study of ISBNs and formats, and I may return to this issue at some stage.

A fascinating benefit from this exercise is that the user of LibraryThing can determine how many other users own the same volumes. This feature is a little unreliable, however, as it does not distinguish between different editions, but works only by title. Thus my owning a very rare nineteenth-century edition of a memoir, for example, may appear to be echoed in a count of other registers when the latter probably reflect much later re-prints. Occasionally, I find that I am the sole owner of a particular volume, which is a pleasing discovery.

I hope to report more on this project soon.

Topography

As the volume of research on coldspur has increased, I find it more and more difficult to track down references, statements and conclusions that I have made. (My bulletins have been going on for over eight years now, comprising what I estimate to be about one-and-a half million words – not all of serious import, of course.) An Index would be highly desirable, but I do not think the creation of one is going to happen. The internal search capability within WordPress is somewhat useful, but it identifies only the entry that contains the reference(s), and is thus very laborious. I do preserve the original Word version of each posting, so I can go back to an individual report and execute a search that highlights each reference. But I have found that an inadequate mechanism.

I know that there are procedures out there that can convert text, even extracted from coldspur itself, and convert into a PDF, maybe with Index entries, and that would be a great help, but would not go far enough. For an Index to be useful, it needs qualification of the entry (how many of you have been frustrated to look up, say, ‘Philby’, in the Index of a book, and find a list of twenty-eight page numbers without any indication of what aspect of ‘Philby’ each covers?). I know, from my experience in compiling the Index for Misdefending the Realm how desirable such a capability is, but also how tedious an exercise it is. 

The other aspect of this dilemma is the fact that I now detect multiple linkages between my research projects that were not obvious beforehand, such as the manipulation of the FBI/CIA by Dick White in 1951 and the investigations into Philby that summer, or the involvement of Claude Dansey in the attempts to ‘turn’ Ursula Kuczynski, Henri Déricourt, and, possibly, Litzi Philby. Thus I plan to provide some sort of guide to the coldspur archive, organized along chronological lines, that will highlight important threads and related events, and provide direct pointers to the urls, as well as the position of the relevant text within the report itself, so that the required information may be found more easily. That is my hope, anyway. I plan to start this project soon, and I hope to deliver the results before the end of the year. 

(This month’s Commonplace entries viewable here.)

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Litzi Philby Under (the) Cover(s)

Litzi Philby

Contents:

Introduction

Topical News

Litzi Philby

The Martin Interview

Candidates for the Mystery Interviewee

Helen Fry & ‘Spymaster’

A Fragile Marriage

Kim’s First Spell in Spain

Kim’s Second Spell in Spain

Litzi in France

The Approach of War

The Honigmann Era

Life in the East

Conclusions

Postscript: Charlotte Philby & ‘Edith and Kim’

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Introduction

From comments offered by readers of coldspur, I understand that substantial interest endures in the affairs (both political and amorous) of Kim Philby and his first wife, Litzi. In recent months several useful contributions have been posted, and I now take up the challenge of trying to make sense of the fragmented archival material and memoirs that exist. To me, the burning questions outstanding could be framed as follows:

  • Why was Litzi deployed by Soviet intelligence when there was a severe risk of exposing Philby in so doing?
  • Why were Philby’s connections with Litzi and her communist associates not picked up and taken seriously by British intelligence?

and, as a specific inquiry into a very bizarre period:

  • What was Philby up to in Europe in 1945?

I originally intended to address all three questions in this month’s report, but I had so much material on the first to consider that I shall defer addressing the latter two until next month.

But first, I want to comment on some recent relevant events.

Topical News

A few weeks ago, one of my most loyal readers, David Coppin, alerted me to an on-line article from the Daily Mail that described Andrew Lownie’s efforts to have a ‘Seventh Man’ identified (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3797379/The-seventh-man-Letter-reveals-new-1950s-Cambridge-spy-suspect-judge-rules-t-named-alive.html). I have to admit that my first impression was that this was a recent revelation, until I saw that the item was dated September 19, 2016. Nevertheless, since I had not seen the piece before, it set my mind racing, and I wondered about the unreality of it all. It referred to a letter in which the ‘seventh man’ had been identified, and that he was moreover part of the 1950s Cambridge spy ring. Yet the person could not be named because, as the judge Sir Peter Lane explained in his ruling, he was still alive and it was ‘quite possible that personal relationships could be jeopardised’. Tut! Tut!

Now, by the 1950s, this Cambridge ‘spy ring’ was in disarray. Burgess and Maclean had debunked to Moscow in 1951, Philby was under suspicion, Blunt was dormant, and the outlier Cairncross had had to retire from the Civil Service in 1952 because his ‘indiscretions’ had been detected. Wilfred Mann lived in the USA. To be genuinely part of that ‘ring’, any spy would have had to be one of the ideological true believers of the 1930s, and would thus have been born in the years between 1905 and 1915. For any such person to have survived until 2016, he would be a centenarian of some repute, and I thus cannot understand how the judge could confidently maintain that such a person (not George Blake, who was never a member of the Cambridge ring anyway) was both a close associate of the Cambridge Five and also among the living in 2016. (Even Eric Hobsbawm had died in 2012.) Had an MI5 officer perhaps rather playfully referred to a ‘seventh man’ even though he might have been a less harmful fellow-traveller, or even a less important younger agent who had been convinced of the righteousness of Communism? Remember, after the brutalities of Stalinism in Eastern Europe after the war, there were few fresh champions of Soviet-style Communism in the West. Most spies from this time had mercenary motives, or were blackmailed into the game.

The article did not mention the Oxford Group (Wynn, Floud, Hart & co.), but they too were, as far as we know, all dead anyway. How many ‘men’ there were in this cabal is a source of endless fascination – even whimsy. I can imagine a cricket-team of Stalin’s Men, all A-listers, with a twelfth man waiting in the pavilion should any one of the select XI become disabled. I see them taking the field, with Rees and Maclean to open the bowling. Mann is behind the stumps, Philby and Blunt can be seen discussing who should be at Third Man, Burgess perches uncomfortably at Square Leg, Leo Long has a despondent air at Long Off, Cairncross and MacGibbon are crouching nervously in the slips, Michael Straight has been correctly placed at Silly Gully, and, my goodness, could that be Lord Rothschild patrolling the covers as captain . . .? Despite such bathetic ruminations, I still wondered where this Freedom of Information inquiry stood. Seven years later – surely Sir Peter Lane, who is apparently still busy on his various benches, must have volunteered some fresh insights by now. Was his mystery man still alive?

I decided to contact Andrew Lownie, whom I knew from several years ago, and had met in London. I had also tracked his tribulations with the Mountbatten papers in Private Eye. He responded very promptly, but was singularly unhelpful and unimaginative. His first message stated that ‘the case was still rumbling on’ (shades of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce), and he asked me whether I had any ideas who the person might be. Not having seen the evidence, I declared I had no idea, and explained my reasoning given above. I asked him for further details on what he had found, and he merely wrote back ‘All I know is the original file number which is in the tribunal decision’. And there the matter lies: all very unsatisfactory.

Next, an obituary in the New York Times on February 19 caught my eye. It was of Arne Treholt, a Norwegian diplomat convicted in the mid-1980s of spying for the Soviets. Here was a trusted high-flyer, discovered with sixty-five confidential documents in his briefcase as he tried to leave Oslo airport to meet his KGB handler, Colonel Gennady Titov, in Vienna. Tipped off by Soviet defectors, the Norwegian authorities had already found piles of cash in his apartment. After his plea of idealism, ‘wanting to lower tensions between nuclear-armed antagonists’, failed to influence the court, he resorted to claims that he had been subject to blackmail after compromising photographs had been taken of him at a party in Moscow in 1975. Treholt was sentenced to twenty years in prison – the maximum allowed – but then was inexplicably released and pardoned in 1992.

Arne Treholt

But worse was to come, as the Times reported: “After his release, Mr. Treholt received the equivalent of about $100,000 from an anonymous donor, money he used to start a new life in Russia. Along with his investment activities, he became an advocate for Russian interests: most recently, he wrote articles defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine.” Thus the idealistic peacemaker, abetting the brutal communist regime, effectively switched sides, supporting the neo-Fascist Putin, whose policy of trying to come to the help of ‘ethnic’ Russians living in places like Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Latvia most closely resembles that of Hitler, trying to bring ‘ethnic’ Germans scattered from the homeland into a greater Reich.

To call Treholt a ‘worm’ would be an insult to the entire worldwide vermiform community. It reminds me of Kim Philby, professing how he could not turn down an offer to join an elite force. So long as that membership gave him attention, and made him feel that he was doing something worthwhile in the vanguard of humanity, it probably did not matter which totalitarian secret police force it was, either the Gestapo or the KGB. But at least Philby didn’t accept piles of cash.

To show how allegiances have been turned upside down in the twenty-first century, I next cite the case of Carsten Linke, a former German soldier, who was recently arrested in Bavaria on charges of treason and spying for Russia. No clear financial incentives had been detected, but Linke was known to have been linked to the far-right party, AfD (the Alternative fűr Deutschland). As the New York Times reported: “Over the years, far-right groups have grown increasingly sympathetic to Russia, enamored of Mr. Putin’s nationalistic rhetoric.” The German Federal Intelligence Service (the BND), notoriously leaky from Cold War days, had recently appointed Mr. Linke to head personnel security checks, and he probably passed on masses of information about possible informants to his Russian controllers. The same KGB officer in Leningrad who plotted to help overthrow the imperialistic and fascist West, Vladimir Putin, has now become the role model for the worst tendencies of a movement whose mission had originally been to demonize the Communist regime that Putin defended and served so loyally. And yet Putin characterizes those who assist Ukraine as ‘fascists’.

Lastly, a mention of Nigel West’s latest book, Spies Who Changed History. It is more out of a sense of duty than excitement that I have acquired West’s recent publications, but I diligently ordered this new item, despite the trite and overused formula of its title. (Of course no one ‘changes’ history, as history is invariable.) It is subtitled The Greatest Spies and Agents of the 20th Century, not to be confused with West’s 1991 offering Seven Spies Who Changed the World, which somewhat diminishes the focus, if ‘agents’ (recruiters, couriers, agents of influence and the like) were to be included. So which central figures were to be given this fresh analysis?

‘Spies Who Changed History’

My heart skipped a beat when I noticed a photograph of Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky) on the cover, since I was naive enough to believe that I might learn a lot more about this intriguing character who played a perhaps overstated role in England as recruiter, courier, and photographer in the Comintern’s conspiracies of the 1930s and beyond. Yet she is not in the list of West’s fourteen history-changing agents, a roll-call that ranges from Walter Dewé to Gennadi Vasilenko (yes, of course you recognize those names!). The only reason that she appears on the cover is that she was one of the prime recruits of Number 4 in West’s catalogue, Arnold Deutsch, who was never a spy in his life, but a Soviet illegal. (That portraiture on the cover must constitute some kind of misrepresentation.) To distract his readers even more, in his Acknowledgements West offers his gratitude to over a hundred persons who assisted his research, nearly all of whom are dead, and whose number include Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, Len Beurton, and Ursula, Robert and Wolf Kuczynsky [sic]. I hope they all advised him with honesty and integrity. This is a very sorry work, replete with pages and pages of transcribed archival material, that should never have been published. A few decades ago, Nigel West developed a brand that indicated high competence in research: for example, this month I read his excellent 1989 book, Games of Intelligence, which gives a fascinating overview of the intelligence and counter-intelligence institutions of the UK, the USA, the Soviet Union, France and Israel, and their successes and failures. What a falling-off there has been.

But to return to my main topic . . .

Litzi Philby

Matters were relatively simpler back in the 1930s. Diehard communists for the most part remained loyal to their totalitarian boss, even though they had a devilish time concealing their ideological roots when they went under the cover of the British intelligence services and other institutions. Litzi Philby (née Kohlmann, then Friedmann, then Philby, then Honigmann, with several lovers throughout this period) was an extraordinary exception, since, as an open Communist Austrian-born Jew, she never hoped or planned to be able to work for the British establishment, but neither did she make much effort to conceal her loyalties. She remained an agent of the NKVD, acted as a vital courier, was lavishly supported by the NKVD for a while, and even sent back from Paris to England in 1940 as the Nazis approached. In approving and effecting her return to her husband’s haunts, however, it would seem that her bosses undertook an enormous risk that Kim Philby might thereby be exposed. Why did they do it? I explore that conundrum in this text.

For those readers who may not be closely aware of the role that Litzi played in Philby’s treacherous career, I refer to her Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litzi_Friedmann. This is overall a serviceable though flawed summary, and shows the difficulties of trying to verify details of her life and background from somewhat dubious sources, including the mendacious account of her own life that she bequeathed to her daughter. It also omits some critical events in her career. Moreover, why she should be known as Litzi Friedmann, I have no idea. Her maiden name was Kohlmann, her marriage to Friedmann lasted only about a year, and she was Mrs Philby from 1934 to 1946, which represents the essence of her puzzling career trying to stay under cover.

Tracing the recruitment of Soviet agents with confidence is a notoriously difficult business. In Misdefending the Realm (pp 37-39) I detailed seventeen different accounts of how, when and where Kim Philby had been recruited, and I cited the author Peter Shipley, who wrote: “No fewer than twelve individuals have been identified as the recruiters, and, or, controllers of Kim Philby between 1933 and 1939”. Moreover, the event of ‘recruitment’ is necessarily fuzzy. Potential serious candidates for infiltration may have worked first as couriers or spotters; they may have been given a cryptonym before being ‘officially’ recruited – a process that required approval from Moscow. They may have been members of the local Communist Party, or one of its cover organizations. A superficial distinction was made between working for the Comintern and the more serious Russian Intelligence Services (the NKVD or the GRU). Memoirists may have had ulterior motives in misrepresenting what happened: drawing attention to their own successes as a recruiting-officer, for example, or concealing the importance of another agent by misrepresenting the role of a minor figure. Kim and Litzi plotted how they should separately explain their story should they be blown: Litzi openly lied to her daughter about the course of events, but claimed that she had forgotten many of the details – maybe a protection mechanism against decisions and activities she later regretted.

The outline of the story seems uncontested. In 1933, Philby, on the guidance probably of his Cambridge tutor Maurice Dobb, sought out the IOAR (International Organization for Aid to Revolutionaries) in Vienna, a communist front. He discovered that Litzi headed the group in the ninth district, lodged with her and his parents, and was seduced by her in between more formal activities of helping communists oppressed and chased by Dollfuss’s government. Philby became the treasurer of the branch, raising and distributing money. His British passport enabled him to travel as a courier to Prague and Budapest. With Litzi under threat, they married on February 24, 1934 to give her authority for making her escape to the United Kingdom, with her new spouse in tow. They arrived, via Paris, in early April.

The Martin Interview

In October 1951, in the wake of the abscondment of Burgess and Maclean, Arthur Martin of B.2.B in MI5 was busily investigating the possible involvement of Philby. He had invited a known acquaintance of Edith Tudor-Hart to an interview on MI5 premises, and he was accompanied by an unidentified ‘Captain’. (Tudor-Hart was a forerunner of Litzi’s. She had been a Communist in Vienna and had married a British doctor, thus enabling her to reside in Britain, where she led a nefarious cell – the Austrian Communist Party in exile.)  Martin explained that the enquiry was ‘more than usually confidential’, and thus he requested utmost secrecy from his interviewee. He further explained that the subject of the enquiry was Lizzy [sic] Philby, and that he wanted his subject to recount all that he knew about her. [The record of the conversation is held in one of the Tudor-Hart files, KV 2/1014, at the National Archives. Unsurprisingly, Litzi Philby’s file has not been released.]

The interviewee, whose name has been redacted from the report, started by saying that he had met Litzy ‘spasmodically’ between 1944 and 1946 in London, and thus had personal exposure to her, but that most of the knowledge of her background came from Edith Tudor-Hart. Martin recorded his assessment of her character as follows:

             . . . a woman who, though an out and out Communist, enjoys good living and is certainly not the self-sacrificing type. She is attractive to men. Xxxxx said that he had always been curious about Lizzy because she was so obviously above the level of card-carrying Communists and never seemed to want for money. He compared her standing in the Party with that of Arpad Haasze, a Communist he had known in Vienna in the early 1930’s. Haasze, said Xxxxx, had definitely worked for Soviet Intelligence.

Now, is this not a startling testimony? The interviewee appears to know a lot about Litzi’s life-style, and admits that he had ‘always’ been curious about her. That is a strange choice of qualifier for an acquaintance that has outwardly been only occasional, and restricted to a couple of economically austere years at the end of the war. Furthermore, the overt reference to movement in Communist circles in Vienna in the early 1930s provides a solid clue as to the person’s identity, while also casting doubts on the honesty of his narrative. How did he learn about Litzi’s ‘standing within the Party’ from meetings in war-time London? I shall return to this matter, but Martin had further questions about Lizzy’s pre-war activities, and wrote up Xxxxx’s responses as follows:

Xxxxx had heard that Lizzy was first married (he presumed in Vienna) to a wealthy Austrian whose name he could not remember. He did however make a guess which was sufficiently close to convince me that he meant FRIEDMAN. Xxxxx did not know when or whence Lizzy came to the U.K., nor did he (until a few weeks ago) know anything more about her second husband than his name was PHILBY. He still has no idea when or where they were married or when they were divorced. His one firm conviction was that Lizzy had lived in a flat in Paris before the war on a fairly lavish scale. When asked how he knew she lived well while in Paris, Xxxxx said that he remembered Lizzy had a bill for £150 for storage of her furniture in Paris throughout the war, from which he had deduced that her possessions there must have been fairly substantial.

How kind of Litzi to confide to such a nodding acquaintance the secrets of her personal finances! Martin, however, did not follow up on this provocative assertion. He moved quickly on to their subject’s association with H. A. R. Philby, to which Xxxxx responded (apparently forgetting what he had stated a few minutes earlier): “Xxxxx said that (until a few weeks ago) he knew nothing of PHILBY except that he and Lizzy were divorced by 1944.” Martin notes that this latter fact was not true, but does not record that Xxxxx had been found out in an obvious lie, he having previously denied knowing when they had been divorced. Unfortunately, the bottom of this page of the record is torn and undecipherable, although it does indicate Martin’s apparent interest in how Xxxxx had learned of the event.

Moreover, the character whom the interviewee compared with Litzi, Arpad Haasze (or Haaz), was known by MI5 to have been Edith Tudor-Hart’s partner (both professional and amorous) in Vienna at this time. The tracking of Haasze went back many years: a note from May 3, 1935 records that Edith had cabled £25 to Arpad Haas [sic] in Zurich. Haas also had had a Personal File (68890) created for him at this time, although the author said that Haas ‘is probably quite O.K.’  MI5 would in time learn otherwise. A note in Edith’s file, dated February 24, 1947, records that she had worked for Russian Intelligence (she confessed this fact to MI5), ‘and ran a photographic studio in Vienna as a cover for her Intelligence work, together with a Russian who was also her boy friend.’ And a further note, dated August 16, 1947, includes the following:

            Mrs TUDOR-HART’s partner in the Russian Intelligence set-up in Vienna before the war, who after the discovery of the ‘activities’ by the Austrian authorities, fled from Austria and was later reported dead by the Russians, has suddenly appeared in the Russian Zone of Austria. Mrs Tudor-Hart recently received a letter from him in which he stated that he is now working with the Russians. He does not give any details of his work. He is an Hungarian named Arpad HAAZ and gives his address as: c/o U.S.S.I.W.A , 25 Glauzing Gasse, Vienna XVIII.

Through these hints of familiarity, the interviewee shows himself be a close friend of Edith Tudor-Hart (whom he describes in the record as ‘a sick woman, highly neurotic, and suffering from persecution mania’). He indicates that he has been having regular conversations with her.

I shall return to the remainder of the interview later, when I analyze Lizzy’s relationship with Georg Honigmann, but I need to speculate here on the identity of the interviewee. Here is what we know about him (apart from the fact that he is a clumsy deceiver):

  • He is an apparently well-trusted source, a man of some standing
  • He is someone who was intimately involved with communist movements in Vienna in the early 1930s, to the extent of being acquainted with assuredly genuine Soviet agents, such as Haasze
  • He knows Litzi from occasional encounters between 1944 and 1946, yet is aware of her standing in the Communist Party
  • He knows Litzi had been married again, to someone called Philby
  • He did not know who ‘Philby’ was until a short time before the interview
  • He knew that the Philbys had been divorced in 1944
  • He is much more familiar with Edith Tudor-Hart

Yet what is also remarkable is the reaction of Martin and his partner, and their subsequent interaction. They appear to be utterly unsurprised by Xxxxx’s admission that he was familiar with the communist underground in Vienna in 1933, and, likewise, Xxxxx does not attempt to conceal such activity. They are, moreover, completely incurious about the man’s activities in Vienna, having presumably failed to do any homework, and miss the obvious opportunity to ask how he had not been aware of the collaboration and affair between Kim and Litzi. They never ask why he has associated with both Litzi and Edith Tudor-Hart, both of whom were known to MI5 as dedicated communists, probably involved with espionage. Why would Edith have told this person so much about Litzi Philby? While listening solemnly to the account of how the interviewee knew many details of Litzi’s extravagances in Paris, they never ask why the facts about her marriage to Philby were not revealed to him. Why did the name ‘Philby’ mean nothing to him until the autumn of 1951, when Litzi would have borne the name ‘Philby’ when he met her in the mid-forties, and presumably provoked his interest? It is all utterly unreal – and unprofessional –  as if the whole exercise were a charade.

Candidates for the Mystery Interviewee

It is time to speculate on who the mystery man was. The redacted space where the name would have appeared is about five letters long. Two candidates come to mind: Eric Gedye and Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, both of whom worked in some capacity for Thomas Kendrick, the head of the SIS station in Vienna, in 1933. It would have required such a presence for the person to be that intimately familiar with both Edith Tudor-Hart (Edith Suschitzky until she married Alexander Tudor-Hart in Vienna in August 1933) as well as the notorious Haasze. Yet there must be a major question-mark against both candidates.

(I should add that the journalist E. H. Cookridge could conceivably be considered a candidate, since he was born Edward Spiro, and that surname would fit. But I discounted him for several reasons: 1) It is unlikely that Cookridge, a foreign-born journalist, would have been welcomed easily into the interrogation halls of MI5; 2) He would probably have been known as ‘Cookridge’, not ‘Spiro’, at that time, since he published books in the late 1940s under that name; 3) He had surely not been embedded enough in intelligence in Vienna in 1933/34 to know Haasze; 4) Since he had been the most closely involved with Kim and Litzi in Vienna, he could hardly have got away with implying that he did not know about their marriage; and 5) Given his knowledge of Philby’s visits to the Soviet Embassy in Vienna, he would probably have volunteered such information in the wake of the Burgess-Maclean fiasco. Of course, if he were the interviewee, he may have done just that, but such insights might simply have been omitted from the transcript.)

Eric Gedye

Gedye was a journalist who had at one time worked for the Times and then represented the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times.  Yet he was also an MI6 asset, passing on intelligence to the Vienna head-of-station, Thomas Hendrick, and, when Kendrick was eventually arrested in 1938, Gedye reported instead to Claude Dansey as part of the Z network. The main challenge to the theory is the fact that Gedye had been intimately familiar with both Litzi and Kim: he must otherwise have been dissimulating grossly to Martin and the Colonel. According to Boris Volodarsky, it was Gedye who welcomed Philby in Vienna by immediately recommending him as a lodger with the Kohlmann family, and Kim famously, by his own admission, took several suits from Gedye’s wardrobe as clothing to help his oppressed colleagues.

‘Betrayal in Central Europe’ (or ‘Fallen Bastions’)

Gedye was in fact an accomplished political analyst with strong left-wing persuasions. He wrote Fallen Bastions (titled Betrayal in Central Europe when published in the USA in 1939, as my copy shows) and in his despatches was reported to have exerted a strong influence on Winston Churchill. Yet there was something very paradoxical about him. His Wikipedia entry includes the following statement: “In Vienna he became known among colleagues as ‘The Lone Wolf’ for keeping a certain distance from the group of Anglo-Saxon correspondents who often gathered in the city’s cafés and bars, including  Marcel Fodor, John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson.” That strikes me as somewhat phony, as if Gedye himself were promoting that impression. In his book about Kim Philby, The Third Man, E. H. Cookridge wrote:

            There were in Vienna several permanent British newspaper correspondents; their doyen was the genial and omniscient Eric Gedye, who had represented the Times since 1926 and was now working for the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times. These and other British and American journalists had made the Café Louvre their regular haunt, where they discussed the situation.

            Gedye presided at these gatherings. Every afternoon and evening he received some furtive visitors, who darted in and out of the café, and imparted to him whispered messages. They were leaders and members of the illegal socialist groups, who has sprung up immediately after the putsch.

Some ‘Lone Wolf’. Moreover, Cookridge was one of those who gave information to Gedye. And it was at the Louvre that Cookridge met Kim Philby, who sometimes brought with him a woman whom he introduced as his fiancée, even though they had been married a fortnight after the putsch, on February 24. Thus, if the interviewee was Eric Gedye, he was behaving as ingenuously as Martin was acting obtusely. If, as he had claimed, the name ‘Philby’ meant nothing to him until the Burgess and Maclean affair, it was a monumental dissimulation: he must have earnestly wanted to conceal any connections, and he must have imagined that his interlocutor would not have the knowledge or the means to penetrate his deceptions. A riposte would be that this exchange shows that the interviewee was not Gedye, since the man in question was evidently unacquainted with Philby, and, despite his close relationship with Litzi’s close friend Edith Tudor-Hart, had not been informed about his marriage to Litzi until 1951.

One important factor working against Gedye’s being the interviewee is chronology. According to his ODNB entry, Gedye spent the later war years with his future wife (also called Litzi) in Turkey and the Middle East, working for SOE. They were arrested by the Turkish police in 1942, released shortly afterwards, and relocated to Cairo. After the war, he apparently returned to Vienna, reporting for the Guardian, and was appointed bureau chief for Radio Free Europe in 1950. So it seems improbable that he could have mixed socially with Litzi Philby and Edith Tudor-Hart in London between 1944 and 1946, or have been available for an impromptu interview in October 1951.

Irrespective of the timeline, the proposition has its own absurdities. How could Eric Gedye, having introduced Philby to Litzi, and assisted Kim in his underground activities, not have heard about Philby and his marriage? After all, Hugh Gaitskell and his future wife Dora, Muriel Gardiner, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender, Flora Solomon, Naomi Mitchison, Teddy Kollek – and probably many others – all knew about what Philby was up to in Venna, and of his very public marriage to the communist Litzi. The scenario is preposterous either way. . (For my account of the adventures – amorous and otherwise – of Muriel Gardiner and Stephen Spender, please see the March 2016 piece, Hey, Big Spender!.)

So perhaps the mystery man was Dick Ellis? Yet that hypothesis contains its own paradoxes. Dick Ellis was a scoundrel in his own right, although the indictment of his career, recorded in Stephen Dorrill’s MI6, as well as in Nigel West’s Dictionary of British Intelligence, comes predominantly from Peter Wright in Spycatcher, and various writings of Chapman Pincher. Care is thus required.

Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis

Ellis was certainly working officially under Kendrick in Vienna in the early 1930s, so his testimony concerning Haasze can be regarded as authentic. Yet exactly the same criticisms of his statements that I have made about Gedye apply: how could a person in such a position be ignorant of the Kim/Litzi shenanigans, or expect to get away with denying any knowledge of them to an MI5 interrogator, unless the latter were an absolute greenhorn, or were contributing to a cover-up himself? Moreover, Ellis came under suspicion himself in the nineteen-fifties, in a case that has so many twists that it makes the head of the most patient sleuth spin.

The career of the four-time married Ellis is an extraordinary story of mis-steps and indulgence. He was born in Australia, and educated at Oxford. After the First World War, he was recruited by MI6, and posted to Berlin in 1923. He then moved to Paris where, like many of his colleagues, he made the bad judgment of marrying a White Russian woman – his betrothed bearing the name Zilenski. Yet this woman was connected to an agent named Waldemar von Petrov. Walter Krivitsky, the GRU defector called to London in January 1940, actually informed Jane Sissmore of MI5 that the GRU had recruited Petrov, who was working for the Abwehr, shortly before the war. Dorrill picks up the story:

            When an Abwehr officer was interrogated after the war, he confirmed that von Petrov had claimed to have had an excellent source of information inside MI6. He said that he had worked through an intermediary called ‘Zilenski’, whose source, ’Captain Ellis’, had supplied documents revealing MI6’s ‘order of battle’ and information about specific secret operations, including the tapping of the telephone of the German ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop. Disturbed by the allegations, MI5 sought permission to interrogate Ellis, but MI6 refused, contemptuously dismissing the allegations by suggesting that the German officer had faked the evidence.

Could Martin have been unaware of these events? Dorrill’s account suggests that the aborted investigation occurred soon after the war, but Peter Wright indicates that MI5 began to re-evaluate Krivitsky’s depositions seriously only after the Burgess/Maclean defections in 1951 – that is, at exactly the time of the Martin interview. Yet Wright’s chronology is typically loose. He wrote, after describing how MI6 had rejected the possibility that Ellis could have been a spy:

            In any case, Ellis had opted for early retirement, and was planning to return to Australia. Dick White, newly appointed to MI5 and not wanting to aggravate still further the tensions already strained to breaking point by the gathering suspicions against Philby, agreed to shelve the case.

Ellis, who headed MI6 in Singapore, retired to Australia in 1953. (Wright also wrote: “Within a year of Philby’s falling under suspicion Ellis took early retirement, pleading ill-health”, which is also incorrect.) 1953 was the year White became MI5 chief, not ‘newly appointed to MI5’. If, indeed, MI5 did not pick up the Krivitsky threads until the time of the White regime, it might, however, explain how MI6 was able to fob off an unsuspected Ellis to MI5 in October 1951.

Wright’s account of the investigation into Ellis (pp 325-330) is fascinating otherwise, and one of the most convincing sections of his book. The fact is that Ellis eventually (much later, the date is not given) confessed – in the same room where Martin carried out his interview – to passing on secrets to the Abwehr, through his brother-in-law, when under financial pressures. He also came under suspicion of being a Soviet informant, perhaps being blackmailed by Russian Intelligence because of his known Abwehr connections. Contributory photographic identification was gained from the widow of Ignace Reiss, Elizabeth Poretsky, and from Mrs. Bernharda Pieck (the wife of Henry Pieck, the Dutch agent of the GRU, who had worked for Reiss), but Ellis was not conclusively pinned as such.

The dates fit much better for Ellis. He worked for British Security Coordination in New York and was appointed head of the Washington office in 1941.  He spent some time in Cairo in 1942, rejoined BSC later that year, and then returned to London in 1944. Thus he would have been around to renew his contacts with Edith Tudor-Hart, as he described them. And if, indeed, the revivified investigation into the Krivitsky files did not take place until 1953, he would have been a safe choice by MI6 to condescend to speak to MI5 and lie on behalf of the service. Yet the same urgent questions apply to the lack of disciplined follow-up by Martin and the Colonel. Why did they not interrogate the interviewee about his admitted interactions with the two women, and why did they not challenge the contradictions in his story? Why did Martin’s boss, Dick White, not challenge the officer over his inept performance, and why did MI5 post such a damaging report in the archive? Whoever the mystery interviewee was, this entry looks like an elaborate charade.

Helen Fry & ‘Spymaster’

Helen Fry’s ‘Spymaster’

One writer who has questioned the activities of MI6 in Vienna at this time is Helen Fry. The revision of her biography of Thomas Kendrick, Spymaster is sub-titled The Man Who Saved MI6, and it was issued in 2021. As I have written before, it is in many ways an irritating book, containing too much irrelevant material and unexplained asides, and stylistically very clumsy. For example, it suffers from overuse of the passive voice (‘it is believed that’, ‘it is thought that’) with the result that the reader has no idea which persons are responsible for various activities and opinions. Yet Fry has read widely, and is prepared to stick her neck out in admirably unconventional ways when dealing with paradoxical information. In this respect, she finds much that is bizarre in the conduct of Philby, Ellis and Kendrick during the frenzied events of 1933-1934 in Vienna.

Since Kendrick had proved himself to be a very adept spymaster, and had shown an ability to penetrate communist networks, Fry finds Kendrick’s lack of interest in Philby’s associations with Litzi quite astonishing, and wonders to herself why had Kendrick not been tracking her before Philby arrived on the scene. She introduces the hypothesis that Philby may actually have been given the task to infiltrate Communist networks rather than being coincidentally led to Litzi by Gedye.  She supports this theory by mentioning that E. H. Cookridge noted that Philby had made contact with two figures at the Russian embassy in Vienna, one of whom, Vladimir Alexeivich Antonov-Ovseyenko, was suspected of being a Russian spy’. (He was later to supervise activities for the Soviet mission in Spain during the Civil War before being recalled and executed in the Purges.) Cookridge in fact claimed that Philby told him he could get money to help the socialist groups that Cookridge worked with, and he concluded:

            The money which Philby offered could only have come from the Russians, and the last thing my friends and I wanted was to accept financial help from Moscow. Philby was told this in unmistakable terms and our relations with him and his friends came to an abrupt end.

Yet no breach with Kendrick occurred, nor any reprimand. “Could the spymaster have instructed Philby to get close to members of the Russian embassy there? Was Philby, in fact, one of Kendrick’s agents?”, writes Fry. She thus ventures the possibility that Philby was sent to Vienna in 1933 to penetrate the communist network for SIS, and uses this conjecture to explain the indulgence of SIS, in 1940, over the fact that their new recruit had an overtly communist wife. It would also explain Philby’s apparent insouciance during the war concerning a divorce. He may have believed that he did not have to distance himself from Litzi so demonstrably, since his bosses knew the real story.

Thomas Kendrick

Even if that were true, however, Philby did not have to further his enterprise to the extent of marrying Litzi, an action that gives a whole new dimension to the notion of penetration. And that union may have been directed as a Soviet counter-thrust: have Litzi seduce a naïve Englishman, and then marry him, in order to allow a valiant female agent to become installed legitimately in Great Britain. After all, Litzi already had a firm CP and agent pedigree: she had been the mistress of Gábor Péter, a communist activist from Hungary who (according to Philp Knightley) was the first officer to recruit her. The Soviets had already accomplished the same objective with Edith Suschitsky, and, of course, Ursula Kuczynski would (in 1940) become another famous beneficiary of marriage arrangements that granted UK citizenship to women who took advantage of it to set about undermining their adoptive country.

A Fragile Marriage

Neither Kim nor Litzi expected the marriage to last long. According to Seale and McConville, Kim informed his parents, when writing to them about the event, that he expected the marriage to be dissolved ‘once the emergency was over’ – a strange formulation that perhaps suggested that he thought that Litzi would before long be able to return to Austria. Litzi declared that she had held some true affection for her husband, but she was in no two minds about the precipitate course of events, and for what purpose the two of them had been united. Predictably, Litzi was not warmly welcomed by Kim’s mother at Acol Road in Hampstead (his anti-semitic father being in Saudi Arabia at the time): she found Litzi too strident and showy, and the fact that she was Jewish, a communist, and a divorcée did not help her cause.

And Kim needed a job. While his left-wing ideas blocked him from a civil service career, he looked for a post in journalism, and in the summer of 1934 (or maybe early in 1935) was appointed editor of Review of Reviews.  Meanwhile, Litzi socialized regularly with other Austrian communist exiles, such as her close friends Edith Tudor-Hart and Peter Smolka, whom both she and Kim had known from Vienna. What is surprising about this period is the nonchalance with which both went about their business, Litzi mixing with friends who were being watched by MI5, and Kim collaborating with Smolka to set up a press agency, the London Continental News, Inc. It would appear that, at this stage, Kim did not have a clear idea as to how he could be useful to the Communist cause.

By the end of 1934, Kim had been officially ‘recruited’ by Arnold Deutsch. The accounts of this engagement have been grossly melodramatized over the years: Edith Tudor-Hart has been identified as being the queenpin in the operation to spot new recruits, but it all seems rather ludicrous. Anthony Blunt famously named Edith as ‘the grandmother of us all’, but it is hard to reconcile such a categorization with the frail, neurotic, exploited and clumsy woman who could not even carry out her photographic business without drawing hostile attention to herself. It is far more likely that Blunt described her as such to distract attention from Litzi herself. Moreover, Deutsch had known Litzi and Edith in Vienna: Borovik claims that he had ‘recruited’ Edith back in 1929, and that Edith ‘recruited’ Litzi as MARY in 1934, after which Edith talent-spotted Philby. Yet, according to what Philby told Borovik, he had also known Deutsch in Vienna. Why did Deutsch therefore have to undergo such clandestine efforts to meet Philby and check him out?

After his formal recruitment at the end of 1934, Philby was told (via Edith) to keep away from party work in London, and to distance himself gradually from his ideological background. Thus Philby began to recommend his Cambridge friends, more suitably placed and with less obvious drawbacks in their curricula vitae, for conspiratorial work while his own career was still in limbo. Yet Philby was obviously not ordered to separate from Litzi at this time, an omission in policy that seems quite extraordinary: in fact they spent the summer of 1935 together on a holiday in Spain. One interpretation could be that the NKVD at this stage considered Litzi a much more vital asset than Kim, even if she was public in her affiliations. Significantly, Nikolsky (known as Orlov), who for a few months in 1935 was a rezident at the Soviet embassy in London, observed that ‘with such a wife, Philby had hardly any chance of getting a decent job.’ Volodarsky notes that no-one expected him to be able to join the secret service, and thus be of use to his masters.

Litzi, as MARY, continued to be busy, and Nigel West has identified her in the clandestine wireless traffic between the Comintern and its agents in London that was picked up and decrypted by the Government Code and Cypher School. While some of the references to MARY in the transcripts seem to denote a male character, one entry for November 7, 1934, appears to point incontrovertibly to Litzi:

            ABRAHAM: ‘MARY has arrived safely and she asks you to take special care of her artist friend who you will meet and who is a very special person.’ HARRY.

As West observes: “If MI5 had succeeded in linking MARY to Litzi Friedman, and then connecting her to Kim Philby, his subsequent career might have taken a rather different course.”

Kim started his gradual process of moving to the right, and distancing himself from his communist connections. This strategy had both public and personal aspects. Edward Harrison informs us that a friend from Westminster School, Tom Wylie, introduced him to a businessman named Stafford Talbot, who was planning a journal focussed on Anglo-German trade. (Historian Sean McMeekin states that Wylie was the agent named MAX, who supplied information to Burgess and Philby from the War Office.)  Both Talbot and Philby joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a move that was designed to provide his Soviet bosses with intelligence on covert links between the German and British governments. As Phillip Knightley wrote:

            Philby had worked so enthusiastically part-time for the Fellowship that in 1936 it offered him a full-time job. He was to start a trade journal, which would be financed by the German Propaganda Ministry, and which would have the aim of fostering good relations between Germany and Britain. Philby flew to Germany several times for talks with the Ministry and with the Ambassador in London, von Ribbentrop.

Yet this initiative stalled, as the Fellowship selected a rival publication as its outlet. The Anglo-German Review was launched in November 1936. While Knightley judged that, despite that setback, ‘Philby’s control must have been pleased with him’, Edward Harrison claimed on the other hand that, since Philby’s efforts to secure Nazi financial backing for his trade journal had failed, ‘by the end of 1936, Soviet intelligence described the situation as a fiasco and Philby’s attempts to spy on unofficial Anglo-German relations had yielded little’. It was a very tentative start by Philby to a career in espionage, and his bosses had to look for a new role for him. Moreover, the presence of his Jewish, communist wife was a permanent handicap. In June 1936, Philby divulged to his old coal-miner friend Jim Lees that he would have to get rid of Litzi. Lees stormed out of his house over Philby’s attitude towards Germany and his proposed treatment of his wife.

What is extraordinary about this period is the amount of travel that Litzi was undertaking – activities that MI5 was apparently watching closely. When Helenus Milmo interrogated Philby in 1951, he presented him with the following dramatic description:

            He further concedes that his wife had no resources of her own and was earning no money. Nevertheless, it appears that between 6th March 1934 and 15th April Lizzie Philby made no less than three journeys into Czechoslovakia from Vienna on her British passport which she obtained two days after her marriage. Philby is unable to explain the purpose of any one of these visits. On their return [sic] to England, she went to France on 4th September 1934 and entered Spain on the following day. Ten days later she left a French port and on 21st September 1934 she entered Austria where she remained over a month. On 8th April 1935, she paid a week’s visit to Holland and on 16th August she arrived in France, entering Spain on the following day. On 3rd April 1936 she entered Austria and a week later went on to Czechoslovakia, returning to Austria again on 22nd April. Between 25th May 1936 and 22nd July 1936, she made a visit by air from this country to Paris and on 22nd July and 28th December 1938 she made further journeys across the channel.

Philby must have been crushed by these revelations, but admitted nothing. Yet what is perplexing is why these peregrinations drew no attention at the time. Were the facts collected only in retrospect? If she had been tracked closely at the ports during this period, one might have expected MI6 to have been invited to investigate who her contacts were in all these places.

Kim’s First Spell in Spain

In February 1937, on the instructions of Theodor Maly, Philby travelled to Spain, in an endeavour to breach General Franco’s security, and to determine how he might be assassinated. At some stage after that, Litzi left the UK for France. The role of Litzi in supporting Philby’s exploits in Spain, by acting as a courier to take messages from him to Soviet controls in Paris is, unsurprisingly, a not well-documented one, and pinning dates on their encounters is a very hazardous exercise. The primary source for events at this time is Genrikh Borovik’s Philby Files, but that work – by a planted KGB officer –  is severely impaired by Philby’s own dissimulations in speaking to Borovik, the latter’s gullibility in accepting what Philby told him, the confusing information in the NKVD files, Borovik’s own unfamiliarity with the personages involved, his lack of foreign languages, and his inability to bring any discipline to his analysis. Matters were further complicated by the consequences of Stalin’s Purges, whereby several agents who had recruited or controlled Philby and his colleagues had been executed, with a loss of ‘corporate memory’, and a distrust of anybody who might have been recruited by such counter-revolutionaries and ‘foreign spies’.

Philby’s first visit to Spain was brief, for about three months, when he travelled as a freelance journalist, with letters of accreditation from The London Central News and the London International News Service, as well as from the Evening Standard. His status was not fully trusted by Moscow Centre.  Maly reported that Soviet Intelligence in London (maybe the GRU) had discovered papers in Philby’s flat in London that suggested that he was working for the Germans. Maly had to clarify matters for Moscow, and rebuke Philby on his return. The major incident during this period, however, was when Philby was arrested, and had to surreptitiously swallow some paper containing his secret codes for communicating with Paris.

At this time, Philby was sending out information, written in invisible ink, in letters to a Mlle. Dupont in Paris. (Philby was later to discover that the address to which he sent these letters was in fact the Soviet Embassy – an atrocious piece of tradecraft that, if Franco’s intelligence had been on the mark, would have ensured his death.) Borovik implies that Litzi received these missives, as he was accustomed to receiving quick responses from ‘MARY’. But, when Philby wrote requesting a new dictionary, the response came not from MARY but from Guy Burgess, who suggested that they meet in Gibraltar. And here, Borovik starts to trip over his own details, writing: “As for Mary, he never saw her again”. Awkwardly, there were two MARYs in Philby’s domain. The first (according to what Philby told Borovik) had been a Russian woman whom Maly had introduced him to in London, a good-looking woman in her twenties, who was designated as being the person he should contact in an emergency. But it hardly makes sense that messages would be sent via Paris to MARY in London, with responses being able to be sent thence by her frequently and openly to him in Spain. Moreover, that would have undermined the whole point of an ‘emergency’ contact. Philby makes no mention of this association in My Silent War. This was surely an invention by him, and probably designed to confuse Borovik (which he did) and divert attention from the true MARY.

Indeed, in a letter to Moscow Centre dated March 9, 1937, Maly briefed his bosses about the slowness of the mails, since  ‘the censors hold on to the letters for a long time’ (so much for Philby’s statement that ‘he didn’t have to wait long for an answer’), and indicated that he needed help from a cut-out to get the nature of the current assignment (the assassination of Franco) to their man. He mentions a woman candidate, INTOURIST, but she is unwilling to travel, as she would be too conspicuous. Moreover, she and Philby have never met (so she could not have been the London or the Paris MARY). So Maly suggested that Litzi, who would have a valid reason for contacting her husband, should try to arrange a meeting, and also carry the murder equipment with her. Even more confusingly, he states that he will refer to Litzi as ANNA.

Yet, according to what Philby told Borovik, by April 9 Maly had found a new candidate for emissary – Guy Burgess. Exactly what Burgess brought with him to Gibraltar is not clear, but Philby had neither the means, the gumption nor the opportunity to attempt to kill the Nationalist leader. And, if he had tried, it would have been a disastrous failure and a colossal embarrassment.  Whether this emissary really was Burgess must be questioned: Philby may again have been trying to minimize his wife’s involvement. Litzi’s daughter, Barbara, wrote that her mother told her that she and Philby ‘met in hotels in Biarritz or Perpignan, and even in Gibraltar, where he gave her information that she then carried to her control officer in Paris’.

What it does suggest, however, is that Moscow did not think highly of the enduring value of Philby (now known as ‘SÖHNCHEN’ – SONNY) for their cause – risking his life in two ways, one, by encouraging him to send incriminating letters to France, and two, by encouraging him to sacrifice himself in a probably hopeless assassination attempt. (Ben Macintyre, rather incongruously, regards this fiasco as evidence of Philby’s ‘growing status’ in Moscow’s eyes.) Philby left Gibraltar at the end of April ‘with his tail between his legs’, as Edward Harrison writes. Maly informed Moscow that Philby had returned on 12 or 13 May ‘in a very depressed state’ because of his ineffectiveness. Maly was, however, able to direct Philby to write some attention-grabbing article about the Spanish situation for the Times, an initiative that sealed the next stage of Philby’s career. As for Maly, that was his last act before being recalled to Moscow, to be shot.

Borovik adds that when Philby arrived in Southampton, Litzi was there to meet him, and he notes: “In Kim’s absence Otto [Deutsch] had maintained constant contact with her, and so she could tell her husband when he could meet his Soviet colleague.” This, again, is puzzling. Had Litzi been in the United Kingdom all this time, and not sending replies to her husband from France? Alternatively, how had Deutsch managed to stay in constant contact with her over a three-month period?

Kim’s Second Spell in Spain

Philby’s successful articles, submitted to the Times, had gained him a permanent appointment with the newspaper on May 24, 1937. It is probable that Litzi moved, semi-permanently, to Paris soon thereafter, in the summer of 1937, staying there until early in 1940. So was Litzi acting as a courier for her husband when residing in Paris? The mainstream biographies of Philby are very vague about his methods of communication with his controllers: Harrison is the most careful, but when he writes:

            Before Philby returned to Spain, Deutsch explained the schedule for future meetings with his spymaster. Once a month Philby was to cross the border into France and take the train from Bayonne to Narbonne, where he would meet his contact and provide both a written and an oral report. This contact turned out to be Alexander Orlov, whom Philby had already met in England.

Harrison’s source is stated to be Knightley (p 66). But Knightley says no such thing: all he writes is (on p 60):

            Philby would make an excuse to The Times for a visit across the border, to Hendaye, the town astride the frontier, or to St Jean de Luz, where most of the correspondents took their leave periods. These places seethed with gossip and intrigue, and were thus not only convenient for passing of information but for gathering more.

Moreover, Orlov would have been a very unlikely courier. He had been appointed head of the NKVD operation in Spain in February 1937, and was busy exterminating Stalin’s enemies.

Frances Doble

Seale and McConville are similarly vague, describing the sorties into Hendaye, but veiling their ignorance with colourful digressions, such as an account of the dancing skills of Philby’s new lover, Frances Doble. Burgess is re-introduced as his contact, without any source being given:

            His orders were to transmit his information by hand to Soviet contacts in France or, in the case of urgent communications, to send coded messages to cover address outside Spain. This fitted in well with the pattern of his movements as a journalist, and it was one of his regular excursions to the Basque country that he again met Guy Burgess who, Kim later revealed in his book, brought him fresh funds.

Just like that. This seems simply a careless transposition of dates, with no attention to chronology.

Thus I have to return to Borovik to try to establish what role Litzi played as a cut-out. Borovik suggests that Philby sent over a report ‘with Guy Burgess’ in mid-1937 that reached Moscow.  That may however be a misunderstanding of how it actually reached his colleague. After Philby’s near-death in a bombing incident, and his commendation by Franco, Moscow was apparently ‘pleased by the information coming from SONNY’, Borovik noting afterwards (probably based on what Philby told him) simply that Philby turned in his monthly or bimonthly report to his Soviet colleague. Yet Philby spun Borovik a tale when the latter asked him whether Litzi knew about his affair with Frances and whether she worked with him:

            Yes, she knew about my work for Soviet intelligence. She was a good friend. When we moved to London from Austria and I started working for the KGB, she was in a delicate situation. She had to break her ties to the Left, like me, stop working with the Communists, otherwise she would compromise me. But it was too great a sacrifice for her. I understood. We discussed the whole problem calmly and decided that we would have to separate. Not right away, but as soon as there was a reasonable opportunity.

This is vain and sophistical nonsense. It exaggerates Philby’s standing at the time. It ignores the facts, since Litzi was not easily able to shed her persona, nor did she attempt to. They could have separated immediately, if they had been so ordered. Their personal lives were not carried on at their own discretion and preferences. Philby was again trying to conceal his wife’s role.

Indeed, Philby’s account of his contacts with his Soviet handlers/cut-outs is both contradictory and absurd. He claimed that, before his second departure to Spain, he was told that he would take the train from Bayonne to Narbonne, two or three weeks after his arrival, and meet his man there. The figure would be Orlov, whom he knew from London, and he was scheduled to meet him once a month, to hand over written and oral reports. They met at the railway-station square in Perpignan, and Orlov got out of a big car, very obvious in a bulging raincoat, and they chatted carelessly for a while, as Orlov told him of his exploits in ‘suppressing’ the Trotskyite organization.

This is like a scene from a bad movie. To think that the chief executive of the NKVD in Spain would so brazenly step out in a public place to spend hours chatting to a reporter associated with the Nationalists, is beyond belief. It was all part of a game by Philby to boost his reputation, and give him a chance to offer an opinion on the loyalties of Orlov (who defected a year later, having performed a remote deal with Stalin not to reveal anything.) Moreover, it goes completely against the grain of what the official story was. A few pages later, Borovik writes:

            According to the documents, when Philby came to Spain for the second time in the summer of 1937, he did not have a meeting with Orlov right away. His first contacts with the Centre were apparently through ‘Pierre’ (Ozolin-Haskin, from the French residence, later shot in Moscow).’Pierre’ would take the materials from Kim and bring them to Paris, from where they would be sent on to Madrid (sometimes via Moscow).

Borovik adds that this process was very slow, and that, in September 1937, Philby would meet Deutsch in the lobby or café at the Miramar Hotel in Biarritz, as Maly had suggested, where Deutsch would tell Philby that he would be working with Orlov. But Maly was dead by then. In addition, Borovik later undermined his own shaky testimony by pointing out that Ozolin-Haskin did not take over the Paris rezidentura until some time in 1938, replacing the anonymous ‘FIN’. A farrago of disinformation.

Litzi in France

So did Litzi play a role here? In another flight of fancy, Kim informed Borovik that Litzi was spending her time in France by attending the university in Grenoble, but that was not the life as Litzi herself recalled it. She did explain to her daughter that his mission in Spain ‘had been the first real assignment that the Soviet espionage service had given him’, and that she had therefore taken an apartment in Paris so that she could be his cut-out, his intermediary. In fact she spent most of her time partying – and having fun with her new Dutch lover, an artist.

Yet this rather hedonistic period was interrupted by a very bizarre event that needs to be noted first. I believe it was first recorded by Seale and McConville (1973), and then echoed by Knightley (1988), that Litzi returned to Vienna in 1938 to exfiltrate her parents and bring them to London. Neither author gives a source for this story, or explains under what conditions the venture was able to take place. It is presented as if it were more in the nature, say, of a day-trip down to Worthing to bring the aged Ps up to the Metropolis. To accept that Litzi could have somehow contacted her parents and gained their assent, returned without fear of arrest to Vienna, convinced the authorities to grant them an exit visa, to have prepared the Home Office in London to allow them entry and permanent residence, and then fund and arrange their travel before herself returning to Paris, all without noticeable alarm from MI5 or the Home Office, stretches one’s credulity to absurd limits. Was this story really true?

I doubted it, until I started to explore ancestry.com and other records of detained aliens in 1939.

The registers are a little confusing, since there was more than one Israel Kohlmann who escaped to England at this time, but I eventually found the proof I needed – two death certificates from 1943. Adolf Izrael [sic] Kohlmann is registered as dying in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, in April 1943, although his birthdate (December 31, 1868) is here given incorrectly, reflecting another refugee of the same name who was born in Nűrnberg, Germany in 1879. (I am confident about this analysis, although as I returned to verify, I could not trace my exact steps.) The death of Izrael’s wife, Gisella (nee Fűrst) Kohlmann, who was born on April 14, 1884, occurred in July 1943, in Amersham – her name is incorrectly listed as ‘Kollmann’. Moreover, an item in the Appendix to Helenus Milmo’s report on Philby in early 1952 (FCO 158/28) runs as follows:

            In 1939, Lizzie’s mother, in an application to the Aliens’ Tribunal for release from restrictions, stated that PHILBY was paying £12 per month towards her maintenance.

MI5 was clearly keeping a close eye on the activities of Litzi and her clan at this time.

What were Litzi’s parents doing in the heart of what would become Philby country, either side of St Albans? How could they have been ceremoniously dumped in the British suburbs, with their daughter returning to France, and their son-in-law in Spain? Their escape must have had assistance from MI6, but the lack of curiosity on the part of the traditional historians in this remarkable exploit is to me dumbfounding. And what caused their deaths, in that same summer of 1943, in towns separated by a few miles? I am tempted to order up their death certificates, but I wonder whether any coldspur reader can shed light on this strange episode.

Meanwhile, our communist heroine was living it up. As she told her daughter:

            Soon after my arrival in Paris, I collected a group of artists around me, painters and sculptors, students of Maillol, mostly Hungarians or Dutchmen. The Hungarians were terribly poor, the Dutch relatively well off, but at that time I was quite well off, since I was picking up a check every month at Lloyd’s, Kim’s salary from the Times, with which I maintained the apartment. Never again in my life did I live in such grand style and toss money around that way – it was all great fun. I bought clothing and hats – you know my passion for hats – big hats with wide brims, with feather boas, dernier cri, nouvelle collection! And my artist friends gave me paintings, pieces of sculpture, and drawings. And that’s when I bought the two Modigliani drawings that got lost along with all the other things somewhere in London, sometime or other, with all the moving from one place to another during the Blitz.

That observation about her husband’s salary was utter nonsense, of course: the NKVD was funding her very lavish lifestyle, but would eventually claw back on such self-indulgence. Ozolin-Haskin (‘PIERRE’) confirmed her occasional role as a cut-out. When the newly installed officers in Moscow Centre, mystified as to who these agents were, asked about SÖHNCHEN and MARY, PIERRE wrote, on December 25, 1938, that MARY was SÖHNCHEN’s wife, that she worked as a messenger, and was ‘totally aware of the work of SÖHNCHEN, MÄDCHEN [Burgess] (despite the fact that I meet MÄDCHEN separately), and many other people whom she knows from her old work in England.’

After this, the trail becomes very confused. According to a report in late March 1939, Philby apparently met Maclean in Paris, and complained about the irregularity of communications. Pavel Sudoplatov in Moscow Centre questioned why no materials had been received from SÖHNCHEN. Gorsky (‘KAP’, the new rezident in London) then entered the stage, but Borovik declares that he was soon shot as a Polish spy. That was not true, and Gorsky survived to have an illustrious career in London and the United States, where he was honoured to have clandestine meetings with Isaiah Berlin. PIERRE, before he was hauled back to his death in Moscow, had again to explain who MARY was, and that she was most easily reached through MÄDCHEN. KAP then took over, and had to confess his bewilderment in a message of July 10, 1939:

            MARY raised the question about paying EDITH. I asked her to write about it and I am sending you her letter. I know nothing about this case, and your instructions would be highly appreciated   . . . MARY announced that as a result of a four-month hiatus in communications with her, we owe her and MÄDCHEN £65. I promised to check at home and gave him £30 in advance, since she said they were in material need . . . MARY continues to live in the SCYTHIAN’s country [identified as ‘the OGPU residence in France’] and for some reason, she says on our orders, maintains a large apartment and so on there. I did not rescind those orders, since I do not know why they were given; however I would ask that you clarify this question.

Litzi, if she had been a messenger, had clearly not been a very frequent or effective one, and was living high on the hog in the meantime. A few days later, a sterner reply was sent by Moscow, after someone had presumably performed some homework in the files:

            Inform KAP that at one time, when it was necessary, MARY was given orders to keep an apartment in Paris. That is no longer necessary. Have her get rid of the apartment and live more modestly, since we will not pay. MARY should not be paid £65, since we do not feel we owe her for anything. We confirm the payment of £30. Tell her that we will pay no more.

It looked as if the sybaritic days were over for Litzi, and she would have to behave like a good Communist again. Meanwhile, the Centre also concluded, from deeper investigation of its files, that it did have a good assessment of SÖHNCHEN, who was ‘very disciplined’. It admitted that ‘communications with him were very irregular, particularly of late.’

The functions of the NKVD residences in Paris and London between 1937 and 1939 are overall very puzzling, as unnecessary travel seemed to be involved in getting messages to Moscow when more local approaches might have worked better. In London, there was a hiatus between Deutsch’s return to the Soviet Union, and Gorsky’s appointment in December 1938, during which an incomplete transition to the ineffectual Grafpen took place. Guy Burgess (for example) was handled by Eitingon in Paris until Gorsky’s arrival, and he was then shifted to control through London in March 1939. For Paris also had its troubles, with the doomed Ozolin-Haskin also falling into disfavour. That may explain why complex chains of messengers were used in both directions to route important information to Moscow Centre.

The Approach of War

As the Spanish Civil War wound down, with Moscow Centre stabilizing somewhat after the blood-letting, Litzi’s prestige and standing appeared to improve. In June, PIERRE wrote to Moscow with suggestions for how SÖHNCHEN should be deployed, and cited MARY’s recommendation that he should work in the Foreign Office, since his father was now back in the UK, and could presumably grease the wheels for his acceptance. Sudoplatov agreed, but then Borovik goes off the rails. Here occurs the incident over STUART that was the subject of some very useful annotations on coldspur a few months ago. (see Comments following https://coldspur.com/2022-year-end-round-up/)

Litzi had clearly made a visit to London, since KAP (Gorsky) reported, on July 10, 1939, that she had met there ‘one of her intimate friends’, a certain STUART whom, she says ‘we know nothing about’. Had Litzi made the trip back to the UK to meet her husband on his return? Harrison says that Philby left Spain ‘in July’, which hardly allows enough time. (Borovik says ‘late July’.) Yet she obviously felt free to meet with Gorsky, since she followed up by writing a detailed report on STUART, who had already recommended that SÖHNCHEN be considered for a post in ‘the illegal ministry of information’. She also gives the impression that she has seen Philby recently, as she talks about his ties with people in the British Intelligence Services as if they had discussed them in the very recent past.

When I first read this passage, it did not seem to me that the reference to STUART (Donald Maclean’s cryptonym) implied Maclean, as Borovik surmised and puzzled over, for any number of reasons, not least the fact that this STUART was working in London, while Maclean was with the Embassy in Paris. And the dedicated coldspur reader Edward M., who had been diligently trawling round, came up with the name of Sir Michael Stewart (not to be confused with the Labour Minister of the same name) who had been a contemporary of Philby’s at Trinity College, Cambridge, and (as Tim Milne recorded in his memoir) had accompanied Philby on a motor-cycle trip to Hungary in 1930. He would later be appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Greece. Furthermore, Edward quoted a passage from Nigel West’s At Her Majesty’s Secret Service:

            By the time Elliott was sent back to Beirut to confront Philby ten days later, he had disappeared. Tim Milne, then at the Tokyo station, was investigated and cleared, although his brother Antony, who had been at the Montevideo station between 1961 and 1965, was fired for failing to have declared a past relationship with Litzi Friedman, Philby’s first wife. A British diplomat, Sir Michael Stewart, who also had shared Litzi’s favours, was rather more lucky, and was appointed to Washington DC before going to Athens as ambassador, and receiving a knighthood. 

I was intrigued to know where West had derived this information, and an inquiry from Keith Ellison ascertained that the sources were Peter Wright and that other impeccable functionary, Arthur Martin, MI5’s ‘legendary’ mole-hunter and incompetent interrogator. During the Blunt post mortem in 1980, the Cabinet Office reported that Sir Michael Stewart was one of Blunt’s acquaintances who had been investigated and (though the language is ambiguous) consequently cleared (see PREM 19/3942). The scope of the investigation has not been published.

Sir Michael Stewart

Stewart remains a very elusive figure, but the connection sheds a little more light on the influential role that Litzi was playing behind the scenes, encouraged to move around between Paris and London in 1939 despite the Centre’s disapproval of her bourgeois extravagances. A likelier explanation was that she was preparing the ground for her husband’s return rather than welcoming him in person, although, if Philby and Stewart had been close friends for years, it seems odd that she would be needed as an intermediary in helping her husband find a job. (In the files on Victor Rothschild recently released by TNA can be found a note confirming Philby’s friendship with Stewart, and the fact that Stewart’s sister Carol was married to another dubious character, Francis Graham-Harrison.) This might explain why a vetting-form for Philby was filled out by SIS on September 27, 1939, as Keith Ellison notes in his e-book at https://www.academia.edu/50855482/Special_Counter_Intelligence_in_WW2_Europe_Revised_2021_?email_work_card=view-paper. On the other hand, Philby’s candidature may have been part of a routine sweep: Valentine Vivian informed Seale and McConville that his name came to SIS’s notice from a ‘pool’ – a list of potential recruits drawn up early in the war.

By then, however, great political shifts had occurred. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced, causing great heartache to Stalin’s loyalists in the West, and Britain declared war on Germany. Gorsky’s plans for sending Philby to Berlin or Rome were dropped. Philby arranged an important job for Peter Smollett (né Smolka), whom he had known in Vienna, and on October 9 the Times appointed Philby as Special War Correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force. Harrison suggests that he set out soon after that date, and whatever hopes he had for joining SIS were obviously shelved. Meanwhile, Litzi was apparently stranded in Paris.

This was a difficult period for Philby. In September, he managed to inform the London residency of his mission in France, and Gorsky set up rendezvous arrangements for him in Paris for late October and early November – not with Litzi, but with a representative named ALIM, who did not know him by sight. Philby had been unnerved by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and was unable to get away to Paris for his encounter until the back-up date of November 1. He presumably saw Litzi at this time as well, because a 1941 report referred to the disillusionment with Ozolin-Haskin at this time that he had expressed to her. Nevertheless, Philby handed over information about the British Expeditionary Force’s capabilities and equipment that could have been construed as treacherous, given that his Soviet masters might have passed it on to the Germans.

The fact that Litzi was able to regain entry into the United Kingdom, arriving at the port of Newhaven on January 2, 1940, is most intriguing. We owe it to a short item in the Minute Sheet of the personal folder of Kim’s father (KV 2/1181-1) for the confirmation of her arrival. That Philby facilitated her transit is shown by what he told Borovik:

            When the war started. I knew she would be better off in England. If the Germans took Paris, she would not survive. At that time any movement between France and England – except for military movements – could be made only with permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I wrote a letter requesting permission for her to return to England. Legally she was still my wife, and they had no reason to refuse. The ministry gave its approval, and she moved back to London.

I find this a remarkable statement, for several reasons:

  1. December 1939 was a very early time to be making and executing emergency flight plans. The Germans were nowhere near to ‘taking Paris’. The haste is noteworthy.
  2. The NKVD would have made their own arrangements for exfiltrating their assets. Kitty Harris (Donald Maclean’s courier and former lover) was moved, with a false passport in the disguise of a wife of an Embassy official, to the Soviet Union as the Germans approached in May 1940. (Obviously, Philby would not have acknowledged that parallel.)
  3. The NKVD would have directed Litzi’s next move. It shows how highly they regarded her that, despite her irresponsibly prodigal lifestyle using NKVD funds in Paris, she was approved for a new assignment in the United Kingdom (instead of being sent ‘home’ to Moscow in disgrace), and they saw no risk in this decision. (Litzy had been making regular visits back to England in the preceding couple of years.)
  4. The installation of a well-regarded agent in London occurred at exactly the time that the rezidentura in London was being closed down, and Gorsky recalled to Moscow for the best part of a year.
  5. Philby must surely have met Litzi during this period, to make the arrangements. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that Gorshakov in the Paris residency reported that Philby provided valuable information in the period September – December 1939.
  6. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs saw nothing unusual or suspicious in allowing a known Communist to regain entry to the United Kingdom, at a time when the Nazi-Soviet pact was in effect, and it reacted extremely promptly to Philby’s request.
  7. Philby’s implication is that, if he had been divorced from Litzi by this time, she would not have been allowed in the country. This represents a significant argument as to why they had indeed remained married for so long.
  8. Many years later, Litzi told her daughter that, after the outbreak of the war, she and Kim had returned to London, and that she had been able to terminate her relationship with the Soviet secret service. That was a double lie: Kim was still in France when she arrived, and individuals were not able to break away from the NKVD at their own whim.

Yet there are two further twists to this very odd tale. The first can be found in the Appendix to Helenus Milmo’s report (see above) where he writes as follows:

            What I regard as particularly important and significant in this connection is a letter which PHILBY wrote to the Passport Office on 26th September 1939 in order to enable Lizzie to obtain the requisite facilities to get to France. If PHILBY’s story is to be accepted, at that time he did not know what his one-time Communist wife had been doing with herself in the course of the previous 2½ years.

What is going on here? Litzi was apparently already in France at this time, and Kim was not appointed BEF correspondent of the Times until October 9. Why, if travel restrictions had been imposed, would Philby so clumsily attract attention to his wife’s ambitions on the Continent? Milmo goes on to write: ‘The letter which he wrote contains a number of falsehoods and of course could only have been written because PHILBY was still Lizzie’s husband in name.” Apart from noting the fact that Milmo’s evidence would tend to support the fact that a file on Philby had been maintained at the time, I shall suspend judgment on this bizarre artefact until next month.

The second twist appears in a report submitted by MI5’s E5 (Alien Control: German and Austrians) to F2B (Subversive Activities: Comintern Activities and Communist Refugees) on September 13, 1945, which describes members of Edith Tudor-Hart’s circle. Here a reference to a ‘LIZZY FEABRE or FEAVRE née Kallman’ is made. It states that this woman was born in Vienna, which she left in 1934, and that later ‘she went to France, where she lived for three years and married an Englishman there thus acquiring British nationality’. The note then introduces her relationship with Georg Honigmann. (It is perhaps ironic that, the very same day that this report was written, Guy Liddell was meeting with John Marriott and Kim Philby to discuss what should be done with Nunn May after the Gouzenko revelations.)

There is no doubt that this is a weakly-veiled description of Litzi Philby. ‘Kallman’ is an obvious rendering of ‘Kohlmann’. Indeed, the scribe has annotated that the entry should be copied into ‘PF 62681 PHILBY’, but what is going on here? Had someone tried to conceal Philby’s marriage to Litzi by inventing a spurious anecdote about an Englishman in France? And is it a feeble ruse, with FEABRE perhaps being a clumsy French representation of PHILBY, perhaps misheard during telephone surveillance? Or was Litzy being encouraged to join Tudor-Hart’s circle of Austrian Communists under a false name? It sounds as if the watchers in E5 (led by J. D. Denniston, the classical scholar) had no clear idea of what was going on, and were being misled. On the other hand, the canny recipient in F2B probably Hugh Shillito, assisted by the redoubtable Milicent Bagot (although Shillito resigned in frustration around this time) knew very well what the circumstances of Litzi’s marriage were, but did not bother to correct overtly the muddled information that had been presented to him.

On June 14, 1946, Lizzy Feavre is again described as being a member of Edith Tudor-Hart’s circle, and observers (in Germany) have clearly been very diligent, as the memo describes her as having been very active, and lists contacts she has had in Paris. A hand-written annotation authoritatively confirms that ‘FEAVRE’ is ‘Lizy Philby’. And in a later report dated November 6, 1946, submitted by B4c, Litzy is directly identified as ‘LIZZY PHILBY @ FEAVRE”, indicating that ‘FEAVRE’ was the cryptonym used by MI5 to refer to her. This all suggests that MI5 had for some time been familiar enough with Litzi’s movements and contacts to be keeping a watchful eye on her. Yet the charade becomes absurd: in A. F. Burbridge’s profile of Edith Tudor-Hart, dated December 1, 1951 (from B2a) as part of the PEACH investigation (PEACH being the cryptonym for Philby), Lizzie Feavre and Lizzy Friedmann [sic] are presented as if they were two separate persons, and the memo is routed to both the PEACH and FEAVRE Personal Folders. It is difficult to work out who was trying to fool whom.

My conjecture would be that MI5 must have opened a file on Litzi Philby as soon as she arrived in Britain, and kept a close eye on her from 1934 until 1937, when she moved to France. After her return in 1940, however, and her husband’s entry into MI6, B4a must have received instructions that they were to conceal her identity under a pseudonym, and PHILBY (Litzi) became FEABRE/FEAVRE, with a ‘legend’ (in the sense of a fictitious biography) constructed for her. The watchers of E5 would not have been brought into the plan, and newer members of B2a were also kept in the dark. Litzi’s Personal File (PHILBY #62681) is clearly a different one from that of Harry St. John Philby (#40408). The existence of any file on Kim has not been admitted apart from that of the PEACH inquiry, yet it would be extraordinary if one had not been started for him in 1933, when he went to Vienna. The report written by Helenus Milmo after his interrogation of Philby strongly suggests that there were comprehensive files maintained on both Kim and Litzi. (I shall explore that highly important topic next month.)

In general, it is hard to make sense of the first few months of 1940, as described by Borovik – who seems to be unaware that the residency was vacated for most of 1940. By February, Gorsky had been recalled and the residency in London was unmanned. Yet Borovik cites a message sent by the chief of the London residency dated April 1, 1940, that describes the ‘irregular contact’ that it has (had?) been having with Philby, and how their agent had bridled at the lack of political instruction he had received. One might perhaps conclude that what Borovik was quoting was a report by Gorsky written when KAP had returned to Moscow. In fact, KAP had also written a report just before he left, on February 20, informing Moscow that ‘the source SÖHNCHEN had lost touch with KARP, the Paris residency agent, and couldn’t re-establish it.’  But, if Philby was in France at this time, why was KAP in London, not KARP in Paris, reporting that state of affairs, and how did that intelligence reach Gorsky? Perhaps Litzi brought that news to Gorsky, and there was a delay in communication.

Whatever the circumstances, a few days later Moscow ordered KARP to break off all contact with SÖHNCHEN. Maybe his disgruntlement was beginning to grate with the NKVD bosses. Thus he was unanchored when he returned on Britain on May 21. (Some accounts indicate that he did not escape until just before the Armistice of June 22.) A few weeks beforehand, however, he had written to Maclean in Paris, urging him to try to arrange for a rendezvous, as he had ‘extraordinary valuable materials’ to impart. This initiative provoked a flurry of interest in the Lubianka, with Kreshin pressing for Gorsky to return. Yet the Commissar for Security turned the opportunity down: Philby was not considered important or reliable enough at this time. So Philby resumed his quest for a more important role in the intelligence machinery.

The Honigmann Era

According to what Philby told Philip Knightley, when he returned from France, he found that Litzi was now living with George Honigmann, ‘a German communist refugee who had a job monitoring German broadcasts for the news agency Extel’. It is highly improbable that this statement is literally true: Litzi may have told him that she had been living with Honigmann, but the fact is that Honigmann was shipped off to Canada as a Class A alien on June 7, 1940, and had surely been mopped up as one of the 8,000 Germans and Austrians who were placed in detention in May 1940. In fact Milmo’s Appendix states that they did not begin living together until 1942.

Georg Honigmann

Moreover, Honigmann was not a recent acquaintance. It was Kim’s and Litzi’s mutual friend Peter Smolka who had set up London Continental News in 1934, and Smolka and Philby contributed news articles to the Exchange Telegraph Company [Extel], which Smolka himself joined in 1938. Seale and McConville describe it as ‘a haven for left-wing refugees from fascism’. (Peter Smolka recommended that Philby be appointed a nominal director of Extel in August 1939.) Exactly what was Honigmann’s background is unclear: some accounts state that he was a former member of the German Communist Party; others that it was Litzi who converted him (see below). His Wikipedia entry (in German) states that he fled to Britain as early as 1933, and worked there as an independent journalist with Extel and then as head of the European Service of Reuters, until 1946.

The Martin interview asserts that Honigmann had been interned in Canada, and had there met a man named ‘Hornic’ (actually Leopold Hornik). Martin’s interviewee deemed that it was probably through Hornik that Honigmann had subsequently entered the Tudor-Hart circle, and it was also this gentleman’s impression that ‘he had no firm political views until he met Lizzy’. Hornik was a dedicated Viennese Communist who had arrived in Britain in 1938, and had subsequently been interned on the Isle of Man and in Canada. Edith Tudor-Hart wrote warm letters to him during his absence, and he resumed his vigorous membership of the Austrian Communist circle when he was released in 1942. Honigmann was probably not such a danger as Tudor-Hart or Litzi, as he was a vague, irresolute character, and easily swayed, but the fact that he mixed with the band of Austrian Communists necessarily brought him under suspicion. What is perplexing is how the interviewee knew all these fascinating facts about Honigmann, and was familiar with the nest of vipers at Extel, whom MI5 was carefully watching. Perhaps Martin and his colleagues left the record of this interview for posterity in the confidence that it would be accepted as plausible and reliable.

What Litzi was occupied with in 1940 has given rise to a lot of speculation. Peter Wright had written of Litzi’s role in establishing contact with the Soviet residency after Deutsch left, and Nigel West has suggested that Litzi reprised this activity when she took over Gorsky’s role, acting as courier – even ‘handler’ – for Blunt and Burgess, during Gorsky’s absence in 1940. Yet this prompts the question: to whom did she deliver information if there was no NKVD representative in London? Wright wrote that messages passed the other way, from Litzi through Edith Tudor-Hart, to Bob Stewart at the CPGB headquarters, asserting that he was ‘the official responsible for liaison with the Russian [sic, actually ‘Soviet’] Embassy’. But that would have been very dangerous and irregular, and MI5 had the CPGB premises bugged. Moreover, Blunt was hardly active in 1940, having returned from France himself, and then being recruited by MI5 in the summer, where he took a few months to find his feet. It is all very confusing – and maybe it is supposed to be.

An item in the recently released Victor Rothschild file appears to give Litzi a more important role at this time – and a more visible presence. A report shows that Blunt, under interrogation, offered the following:

            He also recalled that during the time from December of 1940 onwards when Lizzie Philby had acted as his contact he had met her on several occasions in Bentinck Street in Burgess’s presence. He commented that perhaps Tess Rothschild [the former Tess Mayor, who also lived at Number 5: she would later marry her boss at MI5, Victor Rothschild] would remember the visits although, on reflection, he thought that Lizzie PHILBY might have called only when she knew that Tess would not be there. He had also occasionally met Lizzie at the Courtauld Institute. He went on to say that Lizzie Philby had made no secret of the fact that BURGESS and PHILBY were also ‘in the game’ and that she was taking the material which they gave her to Bob Stewart at Party Headquarters. He remembered that she had said that STEWART had been given all their names.

How much of this can be relied upon is obviously dubious. A typed annotation states that ‘None of this is new information’, but has it been recorded in this form beforehand, or was it simply ‘not new’ to the investigators at this time? Litzi might not have wanted to be seen by Tess Mayor, specifically, if she considered that her presence might alert Tess to some mischief, and be reported back to MI5, but Litzi was nonetheless taking an enormous risk in visiting 5 Bentinck Street, and possibly being surveilled. After all, Dick White and Guy Liddell were regular visitors, and Blunt was behaving irresponsibly if he allowed Litzi to use the house as a Treffpunkt. His disingenuous second thought concerning Litzi and Tess is very telling. Philby had clearly not enforced any distancing. It is all very provocative: I shall inspect this alarming phenomenon in greater detail next month.

With Philby temporarily dropped from the team, in August 1940 he managed to get himself recruited, with Guy Burgess’s help, by D Section of MI6, which was very soon afterwards spun off as a separate entity, the Special Operations Executive, where he worked until his successful admission to Section V of MI6 in August 1941. Thus it took about seven years from his original recruitment for the ‘master spy’ to gain access to one of Britain’s diplomatic or intelligence departments, having been beaten to the punch by Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross and Burgess, all of whom had worked for the Foreign Office, the Treasury, GC&CS, or MI5.

Little appears to have been written about Litzi’s occupations after her arrival in the United Kingdom. The Barbarossa invasion of June 1941 obviously put the role of defenders of the Soviet Union in a new light, and she took advantage of the new climate (not that she had been particularly disadvantaged up until that time.) Two incidents stand out from this period: her involvement as a messenger for Engelbert Broda’s stolen intelligence, and her application for some government job.

Engelbert Broda

In January 1943, Engelbert Broda (ERIC), who was one of Edith Tudor-Hart’s paramours, and who had gained a position at the Cavendish Laboratory working on the Tube Alloys project on atomic weaponry, passed documents on to Litzi, via Edith. According to Gorsky’s report, Litzi (MARY) apparently met the NKVD officer Barkovsky (GLAN) outside a London tube station in January 1943. Yet this was not Litzi’s first exposure to the potentiality of new power sources. Borovik reports of an encounter back in 1938 (one confirmed in Litzi’s reminiscences to her daughter) where Litzi asked Philby to set up a meeting for her with his Soviet contact. “She had met a man whose friend was working on problems developing new forms of energy.” Some have suggested that this person was Fuchs, which would shed a brand new light on the betrayals of that spy. In any case, it indicated that Litzi was keeping her nose very close to the ground, and mixing with important sources. Borovik writes that, since Philby had no Soviet contacts at that time, he passed the information on to Burgess, who presumably handed it on to his controller, Eitingon, in Paris.

We owe it to Tim Milne, who worked for Philby in the Iberian subsection of Section V at Glenalmond, St Albans, for the insight on the second incident, Litzi’s job application. The event probably happened towards the end of 1943, and Milne describes it in the following terms:

            I seldom saw Kim even sightly disconcerted. Once, the officer who dealt inter alia with vetting questions and acted as a kind of security officer came up to him. ‘Sorry to bother you, Kim – mere formality. It’s about your wife’s application for a job – she’s quoted you as a reference. I just need the usual good word.’ Kim looked utterly blank. Then his face lit up. ‘Oh, you mean my first wife  . . . yes, she’s ok.’ Presumably Lizy, who had returned to England soon after the war began, had not let him know that she was giving him as a reference for some job she was seeking, and I imagine they were not in touch.

Thus did MI6’s redoubtable security officers go about their work.

The incident is in many ways remarkable. Here is Litzi, so confident of her position and reputation, that she believes she can apply for a sensitive job without any risk of her – or her husband – being unmasked. (A note in the Tudor-Hart file states that she worked in a factory concerned with aircraft, and that she was a shop steward there: maybe that was the sensitive post suggested here.)  Furthermore, she does not even bother to inform her husband of her use of his name as a reference. And Kim, in some kind of delusion that he was ‘married’ to Aileen Furse despite never having divorced Litzi (an impression over which he misled Borovik, later), perpetuates the illusion by indicating that Litzi was his first wife. Was he confident that the security officer, and whoever was guiding him, would not verify those details? Or did he believe that Litzi was invulnerable, anyway?

It is useful to point out the ironies of this period of the war – between July 1941, when all hands were suddenly on the pump to help ‘our gallant Soviet allies’ in defeating Hitler, and August 1944, when Stalin’s plans for tyrannizing Eastern Europe became apparent. I quote the infamous report that Philby sent in March 1943, detailing a briefing that Valentine Vivian had given to Section V. It includes this passage:

            Vivian said that the Russians had known about Operation TORCH in advance, repeating what he had already told me – namely, that the Russians had had accurate intelligence on the codes, beaches, medical supplies, etc., for the operation long before it was launched. In his words, senior officers in volved had gone straight from their desks at the War Office to clandestine rendezvous with Communists. Frank Foley then asked where those officers were now. Vivian replied that they were still in their jobs, ‘We did not want to make a big thing of it’, he added. This reply of course leads one to assume that the authorities know who these officers are, although I cannot vouch for the accuracy of what Vivian said.

In such a climate, Litzi’s performance seems conventional.

At the same time, the trustworthiness of the Cambridge Five came under fierce scrutiny in Moscow. It started with Philby’s unapproved recruitment of Smolka (ABO), and continued through 1943 with his apparent failure to pass on details of a telegram from the Japanese ambassador. These events caused Elena Modrzchinskaya to conclude that their agents were under control of British Intelligence, and passing on disinformation.  A special exercise to verify the reliability of their intelligence was ordered, and it was Philby’s contributions that helped prove their loyalty. Yet it took until August 1944 for the confidence of Moscow Centre in the Cambridge ring to be restored.

Life in the East

The spotlight now turns on Georg Honigmann. The records are inconsistent, but it seems that, when the war ended, the Control Commission for Germany decided to send him to that country to help in its denazification. Seale and McConville write that the Commission posted him to Hamburg, ‘to help set up a proposed German news agency’. That would appear to be an incongruous choice, nominating a suspected Communist for the job: the Commission presumably was not aware that he was living with an RIS agent, the more vigorous subversive Litzi, whether her surname was Feabre or Philby. In any case, Honigmann never arrived in Hamburg. He ‘had been given permission to travel by way of Berlin’, but was thought lost ‘in the great confusion of the immediate post-war months in Germany’. That was a poor excuse. His Wikipedia entry states that he did not arrive in Germany until May 1946, when the war had been over almost a year. Governments did not simply ‘lose’ officials so carelessly: in fact Honigmann moved promptly to the Soviet sector of Berlin after his arrival, where he took on various roles in journalism, becoming editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung in 1948. Honigmann’s friend Peter von Mendelssohn, a native German writer who had become a naturalized Briton, had recommended Honigmann for the Control Commission post, and was distraught when he learned about his friend’s abscondment.

Litzi did not accompany her partner at first. (Seale and McConville note vaguely that she ‘eventually’ joined him, but the timetable shows that only a few brief months elapsed between Honigmann’s arrival in May and the divorce settlement in September.) Honigmann was still married to his first wife, Ruth, whom he had wed in Britain, and Litzi was of course still married to Philby.  An entry in Edith Tudor-Hart’s file (the same one cited above in connection with Litzy FEABRE) records that Litzi had been living with Honigmann, but had left him recently ‘owing to a disagreement’. It is possible that Litzi disparaged Honigmann’s decision to accept a job in the British Sector, and eventually persuaded him that their duty was to help construct the socialist paradise in East Berlin. Arthur Martin’s report suggests that Litzi convinced him to use the Control Commission offer as a ruse to travel to the Soviet Sector.

Honigmann was not known for his resolution: his Geni entry (in German) indicates that he had been greatly influenced by a ‘Herr Martin’ (certainly Leopold Martin Hornik: see above) while in internment in Canada, that he jumped from marriage to marriage, and from job to job, and that later he was too bourgeois for the comrades, and too bohemian for the bourgeois. [“Für die Genossen war er zu bürgerlich. Für die richtigen Bürger war er zu bohèmehaft.”]. Arthur Martin’s interviewee also thought that he ‘was not a strong personality’. Yet Litzi was still surely under orders, and she left the United Kingdom, via Czechoslovakia, to join him in East Berlin. This seems certain, because it was at this time that Kim decided that he had to open up about his marriage, and get a divorce. At least that is what he said, but he was of course under orders as well. Now that Litzi was in East Berlin, she no longer had need of that residential protection by virtue of her marriage.

Philby’s account of the agreement is characteristically cynical and untrue. He claimed that it was only now that his career ambitions required him to regularize his relationship with Aileen, and gain a divorce from Litzi – just at the time when she was least accessible. As Ben Macintyre reports the events:

            He approached Valentine Vivian, the man who had so casually waved him into the service in the first place, and explained that, as an impetuous youth, he had married a left-wing Austrian, whom he now planned to divorce in order to make an honest woman of Aileen. The revelation does not seem to have given Vee-Vee a moment’s concern.

(In this unlikely scenario, Vee-Vee – even out of his depth as he notably was – would have been the only officer in ‘the intelligence community’ not to have known that Kim and Litzy were husband and wife.) And Macintyre continues:

            Philby now contacted Litzi, now living in Paris, arranged an uncontested and amicable divorce, and married Aileen a week later, on September 25  . . .

Meanwhile, Vivian put in a routine request for a trace on Litzi to MI5. Seale and McConville record that ‘The reply (on information from ‘Klop’ Ustinov, via his boss Dick White) was that Litzi was a Soviet agent.’ The authors ascribe this remarkable insight to a private communication from Vivian himself, deceased by the time the book was published (1973). No doubt Vivian did not ‘want to make a big thing of it at the time’, even though gross suspicions of Philby’s involvement in the Volkov incident the year before must have been fresh in his mind.

Only Litzi was not living in Paris, but in Berlin. Moreover, Philby told Borovik that they met in Vienna. And Philby would have had to know how to contact her, and Litzi would have had to gain permission to leave the Soviet sector for a while. Did he gain her consent through the mails, as is implied? Presumably his travel had to be approved by the Foreign Office, and no one has written about what legal circumstances made it possible for an agreement to divorce made in a foreign capital to hold legal standing in a British divorce court. And Litzi might have protested: ‘Why didn’t you do that earlier’? and even refused the divorce without some financial settlement. Seale and McConville write that ‘in due course Litzy petitioned for a divorce on the grounds of her husband’s adultery’, but where was the petition heard? It all went smoothly, however: they were both adulterers, and they were no doubt following orders.

Thus Litzi was now free to marry Georg, although there were clearly tensions in the relationship. A daughter, Barbara, was born in February 1949. Litzi found a job as a sound dubber with the East German film corporation, DEFA, to which her husband moved in 1953. The marriage had broken up by then and Honigmann married the playwright Gisela May in 1963. Litzi thought of her lost love, the Dutch sculptor, Pieter, but lost track of him. And she was surely now disillusioned by the drab, oppressive realm of communist East Berlin, and apparently regretting her services to the cause of that oppression. She must have missed her Modiglianis and fancy hats. She told her daughter that she did not believe that the Rosenbergs had been wrongly executed – an utterly heretical claim for a member of the Party (and one ridiculed even by many non-communists in the West), and something that Kim Philby or Ursula Kuczynski would never have let pass their lips.

Litzy, Karl, Rina, Denny (Rifikim, 1967) [from the Richard Deacon archive, now owned by coldspur]

Thus it is perhaps not surprising that Litzi sought to escape to the West. Her well-appointed villa, ‘with its spacious book-filled room, with low settees in primary colours, suggested the setting of a well-paid woman at the BBC’, Neal Ascherson of the Observer wrote, and Litzi expressed to him her regret at not being able to go back to London. She managed to gain a temporary exit visa to travel to her home-town of Vienna, and then simply did not return. She died there in 1991.

Conclusions

Kim and Litzi both lied about their experiences, Kim out of a need to magnify his own importance and achievements and diminish those of his wife, Litzi probably out of a sense of shame at what they both had done. Litzi was the one who matured out of her youthful indignation: Kim was the stolid unwavering ideologue. And yet the chronicle of events shows that Moscow Centre looked far more favourably on the future apostate than it did on the ‘master spy’.

Philby was a failure for most of his career. He was too obviously attached to the left-wing cause to be considered a serious candidate for infiltration into the British establishment. Unlike the colleagues he recruited, he failed to land a job with potential, and moved into the less effective world of journalism. He fumbled his awkward switch of persona as a fascist sympathizer. He was installed in Spain, but exposed to such dangers that it showed that his Soviet masters thought him disposable. His reports were infrequent and lacklustre, and he regarded himself as a failure. On his return to Britain, he missed out, for various reasons, on being employed by GC&CS or MI6, and ended up in another uninfluential journalist’s job. His ineffectualness, compounded perhaps by his questioning of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meant that Moscow decided to drop him. He slowly worked his way into intelligence, through the sideshow of Section D and SOE, until he rather fortunately gained an important position with Section V in MI6. No sooner had he become established there than the apparatchiks of the NKVD started suspecting – because of his impetuous actions – the entire Cambridge Ring of being controlled by British Intelligence. Not until late 1944, and when Litzi left for East Berlin, did he come into his own, and perform his worst damage. Yet he should have been exposed by the Volkov incident of September 1945.

Litzi, on the other hand, led a charmed life. She was surely an elite agent, selected to gain entry to the West by marrying an Englishman. She had overall a well-respected and important role as a courier, and her opinions on Kim’s future career were listened to by the NKVD high-ups. In the mid-thirties, she was able to visit several other cities in Europe without let or hindrance, and was presumably a very important and much-esteemed courier. The NKVD thought well enough of her to help fund an exorbitant life-style in Paris, and apparently never punished her for it. She passed freely between Paris and London, was able to return to Vienna to rescue her parents, and gained the help of the British authorities in escaping to England in 1940, where it seems that she may have been designated as the temporary replacement for Gorsky. She used her amorous skills to engage in relationships with intelligence officers and diplomats, such as Anthony Milne and Michael Stewart, without damaging her credentials with either side. Through Stewart she may have been instrumental in getting Kim his job with MI6. She frequented the potentially dangerous Bentinck Street location, without being ostracized or persecuted. She kept her eyes open to assist in the project to steal atomic weapons secrets.

In other words, the reason why the NKVD felt confident in deploying her without risk of exposing Philby (my original question) was that she herself was regarded as the vital agent, and Philby was the sideshow. Thus the puzzle next reverts to the passivity of MI5 and MI6 in indulging this overt Communist, even known as a ‘Soviet agent’, in their midst, even before the troublesome era when Great Britain and the Soviet Union were temporary allies, committed in the war against the Axis powers. The NKVD did not force an abrupt breach between Litzy and Kim, in order to protect the Englishman, but brazenly deployed agent MARY in a number of roles that should not have escaped even the shallowest surveillance techniques.

It is something of a mystery. I have at least to consider that Helen Fry may have been on to something, when she hinted at Litzi’s role in Austria, and Philby’s rapid discovery of her. Yet, for reasons that I shall explain next month, I am not convinced that Philby could in any sense have been used by MI6 at that time. It is possible, however, that some background deals were performed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The paradox lies in the fact that Soviet Intelligence continued to deploy her as if she were invulnerable, while British Intelligence allowed her to operate as if they believed that they had a controllable cuckoo in their nest, in the manner of Ursula Kuczynski. They let Litzi fly around unchallenged in the hope, perhaps, that she would lead them to more dangerous entities, or assist in the transfer of disinformation. It is difficult to explain away all the multiple occasions where Litzi’s subversive work was detected, but nothing was done about it. I have a theory, and shall pick up this perplexing business in next month’s report. In the interim, please let me know of any insights on these matters, or challenges to my reasoning, that occur to you.

Postscript: Charlotte Philby & ‘Edith and Kim’

As I was performing research for this piece, I read Edith and Kim, a ‘novel’ by the grand-daughter of Kim Philby, Charlotte Philby. Despite the laudatory blurbs and the enthusiastic reviews that the book has received, I consider it a very poor production. It lies in that tradition of novelization of true intelligence events such as Transcription by Kate Atkinson and An Unlikely Spy by Rebecca Starford (see https://coldspur.com/summer-2022-round-up/), whereby authors think that if they selectively take some real-life characters, mess around with the facts and chronology a bit, and introduce some new agents and activities, they will somehow produce a more convincing psychological truth than can be derived from a proper analysis of historical characters and events. At least, that is what I imagine they think they are doing.

In this latest mess, the figures are (if course) Kim Philby and Edith Tudor-Hart. Charlotte P., who came across the Tudor-Hart archive fairly late in her journalistic career, had the inspiration that building up the very flimsy relationship that Kim had with the Austrian photographer into something more significant would make for a great story. In her introductory note, the author writes:

            What follows is not meant as a comprehensive re-telling of a highly contentious period, but a work of fiction based on the facts as I have variously found them, reimagining the lives of two people from starkly different backgrounds whose very existence transformed one another’s, and changed the course of history.

‘Changing the course of history’, again. It sounds as if she has been studying Nigel West. And the ‘transforming’ of each other’s lives is purely fanciful.

Ms. Philby admits that she distorted events, and omitted characters, if they didn’t serve the version ‘as she reconstructed it’, and impishly displays a slogan ‘All history is fiction’ at the start of her story. (She might have chosen ‘All memoir is fiction’, which would have been a better signpost for her grandfather’s contribution.) I am not sure what that unattributed post-modernist statement means, but fiction is certainly not history, and it seems to me that Ms. Philby is looking for an alibi. She is no Hilary Mantel. In her ‘reconstruction’, a highly contentious nomenclature, by the way, she makes out (for instance) that Edith was a great lover, adding Arnold Deutsch and the psychologist she consults to help with her mentally-handicapped son to her list of sexual partners, while omitting to include her paramour and business-partner Arpad Haasze from Vienna. She intersperses her plot (admittedly studded with several accurate but familiar episodes, embellished of course by imagined conversations and several distortions) with letters that Philby might have possibly written to Edith from Moscow before her rather sad death in Brighton in 1973. Yet the epistolatory nonsense continues through the Thatcher and Reagan eras right up until 1988, and the death of Klaus Fuchs, as if Philby imagined Edith were still alive, reading his letters. It is all very absurd.

That is not to say that the book lacks style, or art. For instance, Charlotte P. must have had great fun compiling the letters that her grandfather ‘wrote’: they come across as pastiches of the ‘Dear Bill’ letters in Private Eye, where the communications of a crusty and reactionary Denis Thatcher were purportedly directed to his old pal, William Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph, only in this case by a communist version of him. But to imagine that Philby would have bothered to send such letters to a neurotic Austrian woman whom he knew only vaguely, or that Edith would have appreciated his mixture of cynicism and English humour, is quite absurd. (No letters from Edith to Philby are included.)

In her Acknowledgements, Charlotte expresses her gratitude to such persons (friends) as Philip Knightley and Chapman Pincher who ‘supported, inspired and informed the book’. I am not sure why those two gentlemen would have encouraged the endeavour, but maybe the fictional aspect attracted them. Moreover, they have both been dead for several years: I wonder what that says about the gestational effort of the work. She also thanks her editor/co-pilot Ann Bissell, ‘who understood from the outset what I was trying to achieve with this book, and knew just how to make it happen’. But she does not explain to her readers exactly what it was she was trying to achieve, so I suppose that aspect will remain a mystery. Still, the film rights have been sold (see https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/metfilm-production-picks-up-film-rights-to-philbys-edith-and-kim) , and I suppose that the movie-going public will be able to compare the eventual outcome with the production of that other largely fictional work, Agent Sonya.

I hope someone introduces this piece to Charlotte Philby. Perhaps she might then acknowledge that, instead of indulging in decade-long fantasies about a largely mythical relationship between Kim and Edith, she could have spent her obvious talents (she was shortlisted for a prize in investigative journalism in 2013) on a much more fascinating story to be unveiled about her grandfather – but one concerning his first wife. And it does not need ‘fictionalizing’ to move closer to the truth – just some old-fashioned journalistic sleuthing.

Late News: In the first session of play in the cricket match described above, Goronwy Rees was regrettably struck with a hamstring injury, and had to withdraw. His place was taken by the Twelfth Man, Bernard Floud. And I notice that the series A Spy Among Friends is now available on MGM. More creative license, and new characters introduced, I see.

(New Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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Enigma Variations: Denniston’s Reward

Alastair Denniston

Contents:

Denniston’s Honour

Secrecy over Bletchley Park

Polish Rumours

GC&CS Indifference?

The Aftermath

Conclusions

Envoi

Sources

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

Denniston’s Honour

As I declared in my posting last December, my interest in the career of Alastair Denniston was revived by my encounter with some incorrect descriptions of the acquisition by the Government and Cypher School (GC&CS) of Enigma models, and evidence of decryption successes, from Polish Intelligence shortly before the outbreak of World War II. These anecdotes reawakened my interest in exactly what Denniston’s contribution had been. Irrespective of any mis-steps he may have made, I have always considered it inexplicable that Denniston, who apparently led GC&CS so expertly between the wars, should be the only GC&CS or GCHQ chief who was not granted a knighthood.

Now I am not a fan of the British Awards and Honours system. As someone whose career was exclusively in competitive commercial enterprise in the UK and the USA, my experience is that, if you did your job well, you kept it, or might be promoted, and if you failed, you were sacked (or demoted, or put in charge of ‘Special Projects’, or be moved over to an elephants’ graveyard, if your organization was large enough to sustain such an entity). Occasionally you could perform a stellar job, and still be sacked – probably because of political machinations. And the idea that someone should receive some sort of ennoblement because of his or her ‘services to the xxxxxxx industry’ displays a woeful understanding of how competitive business works.

Thus I am very antipathetic to the notion that awards of some sort should be handed out after a career that simply avoided noticeable disasters. (And in the case of one notorious chief of MI6, even that is not true.) It does not encourage the right sort of behaviour, and grants some exalted status to persons who have had quite enough of perquisites and benefits to sustain their retirement. Nigel West describes, in his study of MI6 chiefs At Her Majesty’s Secret Service, how senior MI6 officers were concerned that the pursuit of moles might harm the chances of getting their gongs.

What is more, as I learned when studying SOE records, the level of an award is directly associated with the rank an officer of official has already received, which often meant that those most remote from the action were awarded ribbons and medals much more distinguished than those risking their lives on the frontline, such as those SOE agents who ended up with civilian MBE medals – quite an insult. I am also reminded of a famous New Yorker cartoon where one general is admiring all the ribbons on the chest of one of his colleagues, and points to one he does not recognize. ‘Advanced PowerPoint Techniques: Las Vegas, October 1998’, boasts the celebrated general. (I don’t see it at the cartoon website (https://cartoonbank.com/), but, if you perform a search on ‘Medals’ there, you can see several variations on the theme, such as ‘This one is for converting a military base into a crafts center’.)

As I was preparing this piece, I made contact with Tony Comer, sometime departmental historian at GCHQ, and he explained to me that, in June 1941, Denniston received only a CMG rather than a knighthood. But that did not make sense to me. Denniston was not demoted until February 1942. The notorious letter to Churchill that reputedly sealed his fate, composed by Welchman and others, was not sent until October 1941. What was going on? Fortunately, a follow-up email to Mr Comer cleared up the confusion.

Mr Comer patiently explained that the headship of GC&CS did not qualify, in Whitehall bureaucratese, as a ‘director’-level position. The CMG was indeed the appropriate award for someone at the ‘Deputy Director’ level. Stewart Menzies (who took over as MI6 chief from Sir Hugh Sinclair after the latter’s death in November 1939) was the director of GC&CS, and thus was entitled to the KCMG awarded him on January 1, 1943.  In early 1942 Denniston was effectively demoted, while still maintaining the Deputy Director (Civil) title, after the mini-rebellion and his replacement as head of Bletchley Park by his deputy Edward Travis, now Deputy Director (Service). Denniston thereupon moved down to Berkeley Street to work on diplomatic traffic.

In 1944, Travis was promoted to full Director, while Menzies was promoted to Director-General. Travis was thus, owing to his newly acquired rank, awarded the KCMG in June 1944, despite having led the service for only two years, while Denniston, who had by all accounts performed very creditably for two decades (although he struggled during 1941 with the rapid growth of the department), was left out in the cold. Thus all Denniston’s valiant service as chief between 1919 and February 1942 was all for nought, as far as a knighthood was concerned. Since then, every chief of GC&CS, and GCHQ (which it became after the war) has benefitted from the raising of the rank to full directorship.

Thus it would appear that Denniston was hard done by, as several commentators have noted. For example, his biographer, Joel Greenberg, echoes that sentiment, albeit somewhat vaguely. In Alastair Denniston (2017), he offers the following opinion: “It is hard not to come to the conclusion that any public acknowledgement of AGD’s work at Berkeley Street from 1942 to 1945 might have drawn unwelcome attention to a part of GC&CS that the British intelligence community prefers to pretend never existed. Even the award of a knighthood to AGD might have raised questions about British diplomatic Sigint, both during the war and immediately afterwards.”

Yet this judgment strikes me as evasive and irrational. It would have been quite possible for the authorities to have awarded Denniston his knighthood without drawing attention to the Berkeley Street adventures. After all, as Nigel West informs us in his study of MI6 chiefs, when the highly discredited John Scarlett returned from chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Committee to head MI6, at least one of the senior officers who resigned in disgust at the appointment (Mark Allen) was awarded a knighthood when he left for private enterprise. Moreover, Denniston was also treated badly when he retired in 1945. He was given a very stingy pension, and had to supplement his income by taking up teaching. This appeared to be a very vindictive and mean-spirited measure. Why on earth would Stewart Menzies have harboured such ill will towards a dedicated servant like Denniston?

I decided there was probably more to this story. I found Mr Greenberg’s book very unsatisfactory: it regurgitated far too much rather turgid archival history, without analysis or imagination, and frequently pushed Denniston into the background without exploring the dynamics of what must have been some very controversial episodes in his career. It was, furthermore, riddled with errors, and poorly edited – for example, the Index makes no distinction between the US Signals Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service, and the text is correspondingly sloppy. I had an authoritative and technical answer to my question about Denniston’s awards, but continued to believe that there was more to the account than had been revealed, and suspected it had much to do with Enigma.

Secrecy over Bletchley Park

My main focus in this piece is on the pre-war negotiations over the acquisition of Enigma expertise. There is no question that Denniston struggled later, in the first two years of the war: his travails have been well-documented. He lost his boss and mentor, Hugh Sinclair, soon after the outbreak of war, and had to report to the far less sympathetic Stewart Menzies. A furious recruiting campaign then took pace, which imposed severe strains on the infrastructure. There were two hundred employees in GC&CS at the beginning of the war: the number soon rose into the thousands. Stresses evolved in the areas of pay-grades, billeting, transport, building and cafeteria accommodation, civilian versus military authority, as well as in the overall challenge of setting up an efficient organization to handle the overwhelming barrage of enemy signals being processed. All the time the demands from the services were intensifying. In the critical year of 1941, Denniston made two arduous visits to the United States and Canada, underwent an operation for gall-bladder stones, and suffered soon after from an infection. It was a predicament that would have tried and tested anybody.

But Denniston was a proud man, and apparently did not seek guidance from his superiors – not that they would have known exactly what to do.  What probably brought him down, most of all, was his insistence that GC&CS was historically an organization dedicated to cryptanalysis, and should remain so, when it became increasingly clear to those in the forefront of decrypting the messages from Enigma, and carrying out the vital task of ‘traffic analysis’ (which developed schemata about the location and organization of enemy field units largely – but not exclusively, as some have suggested – from information that had not been encrypted), that that tenet no longer held true. A very close liaison between personnel involved in message selection, decryption and translation, collation and interpretation, and structured (and prompt) presentation of conclusions was necessary to maximize the delivery of actionable advice to the services.

Yet it took many years for this story to appear. All employees at the GC&CS (and then GCHQ) were subject to a lifetime of secrecy by the terms of the Official Secrets Act – largely because it was considered vital that the match-winning cryptanalytical techniques not be revealed to any current or future enemy. It was not until the early nineteen-seventies that drips of intelligence about the wartime activities of Bletchley Park began to escape. The British authorities had believed that they could maintain censorship over any possible disclosures of confidential intelligence matters, but failed to understand that they could not control publication by British citizens abroad, or the initiatives of foreign media. This was a pattern that repeated itself over the years, what with J. C. Masterman’s Double-Cross System, published in the United States in 1972, Gordon Welchmann’s Hut Six Story, also in the USA, in 1982, Peter Wright’s Spycatcher, which was published in Australia in 1987, as well, of course, by the memoirs of traitors such as Kim Philby and Ursula Kuczynski.

As with the memoir of the Abwehr officer Nikolaus Ritter (Deckname Dr. Rantzau), which appeared in 1972, GCHQ was taken aback by the appearance in 1973 in France of a book by Gustave Bertrand, Enigma ou la plus grande énigme de la guerre 1919-1945. Bertrand had been head of the cryptanalytical section of the French Intelligence Service, and claimed that he had been prompted to write his account after reading a rather distorted story (La Guerre secrète des services speciaux français 1939-1945) of how the French had gained intelligence on a German encryption machine from an agent in Germany, written by Michel Gardet in 1967. Less accessible, no doubt, but probably much more revealing, was Wladyslaw Kozaczuk’s Bitwa o tajemnice [Battle for Secrets]published in Warsaw in 1967, which made some very bold claims about the ‘breaking’ of the German cipher machine that surpassed the achievements of the French and the English.

Thus, in an attempt to take control of the narrative, Frederick Winterbotham, who had headed the Air Section of MI6, and reported to Stewart Menzies, received some measure of approval from the Joint Intelligence Committee to write the first English-language account of how ULTRA intelligence had been employed to assist the war effort. (Note: ULTRA included all intelligence gained from message interception, decryption, translation and analysis, and was not restricted to Enigma sources.) Winterbotham had been responsible for forming the Special Liaison Units (SLUs) that allowed secure distribution of ULTRA intelligence to be passed to commanders in the field. His book, The Ultra Secret, appeared in 1974, and had a sensational but mixed reception, partly because many old GCHQ hands considered he had broken his vow of secrecy, and partly because he, who had no understanding of cryptanalysis, misrepresented many important aspects of the whole operation.

The Enigma

As an aside, I believe it is important to mention that Enigma was sometimes ‘broken’ (in the sense that it did not remain completely intact and secure), but never ‘solved’ (in the sense that it became an open book, and regularly decrypted). That distinction can sometimes be lost, and too many authoritative accounts in the literature refer to the ‘solving’ of Enigma.  Dermot Turing’s recent (2018) book on the Polish contribution to the project, XY&Z, is sub-titled The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken, and thus technically represents the project according to the distinctions above, but might give the impression that a wholesale assault had been successful. The Enigma machine was a moving target; before and during the war, the Germans introduced new features (e.g. additional rotors) that made it more difficult to decrypt. And each of the German organizations using Enigma deployed it differently. The degree of its impenetrability was very dependent upon the disciplines that its operators exercised in setting daily keys with their opposite numbers, and how casually they repeated text messages that could be used as cribs by the analysts. It supplemented very complex enciphering mechanisms (i.e. translation of individual characters) with the use of rich codebooks that allowed substitution of words and phrases with numerical sequences. Many variants of Enigma discourse were thus never broken. Mavis Batey’s biography of Dillwyn Knox is carefully subtitled The Man Who Broke Enigmas – but not all of them.

My approach that follows is overall chronological – to explore how the pre-war discovery of Enigma characteristics was understood and represented by various authors, and how the accounts of dealing with Enigma evolved. In this regard, it is important to distinguish when some accounts were written, and to what sources they had access, from the time that they appeared in print. For example, the report that Alastair Denniston wrote, The Government Code and Cypher School Between the Wars, was written from his home in 1944, but did not see the semi-public light of day until his son arranged to have it published in the first issue of the Journal of Intelligence and National Security in 1986 (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684528608431841?journalCode=fint20) . About a decade later, it was released by The National Archives as HW 3/32.

Polish Rumours

For a concise and useful account of the relationship between Bletchley Park and the Poles, the essay Enigma, the French, the Poles and the British, 1931-1940 by Jean Stengers, found in the 1984 compilation The Missing Dimension, edited by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, serves relatively well. It has a very rich set of Notes that lays out a number of primary and secondary sources that explain where much of the mythology of Enigma-decryption comes from. Yet the piece is strangely inadequate in exploring the early communications between the French and the British in 1931, and also elides over the exchange between Dillwyn Knox and Marian  Rejewski in July 1939 which showed up Bletchley Park’s failings in pursuing the project, but then allowed the British endeavour to assume the leading role in further decryption.

When Winterbotham published his book in 1974, it contained some recognition of a Polish contribution. Yet this was based on a rumour that must have been encouraged within GC&CS, while being utterly without foundation. The French writer Colonel Gardet, in La Guerre Secrete [see above], had claimed that a Polish mechanic working on the Enigma had been spirited out of Germany and had reconstructed a replica in Paris – a story that Winterbotham picked up with enthusiasm. It was later embellished by that careless encyclopaedic author Anthony Cave-Brown. And it was Cave-Brown who introduced the imaginary character, Lewinsky. He also implicated ‘Gibby’ Gibson, who reputedly spirited Lewinsky and his wife out of Poland, as well as the SOE officer Colin Gubbins, reported as taking Enigma secrets with him to Bucharest in September 1939. Both these preposterous anecdotes have found eager champions on the Web.

Yet these tales took time to die, and the claims about a spy in the heart of Germany’s cypher department (the truth of the matter) were initially distrusted. In Ultra Goes to War (1974), Ronald Lewin, perhaps overestimating the confidences told him by Colonel Tadeusz Lisicki (who had worked on the Enigma team, and took up residence in England after the war) echoed the claim that the Poles had, in 1932, ‘borrowed’ a military Enigma machine for a weekend. Lewin had read Bertrand’s account, but considered it ‘overblown’. He was very sceptical of the story that a Polish worker had smuggled Enigma parts over the border, but considered the assertion that an officer in the Chiffrierstelle had made overtures to the French in 1932 [sic: the occurrence of ‘1932’ instead of ‘1931’ is a common error in the literature, originating from Bertrand] only slightly more probable.

In fact, it was a review by David Kahn of Winterbotham’s book in the New York Times (on December 29, 1974) that brought the name of the spy, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, to the public eye. (see https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/29/the-ultra-secret.html?searchResultPosition=2). In his later publication, How I Discovered World War II’s Greatest Spy & Other Stories of Intelligence and Code (2015), Kahn described how he had tracked down Schmidt’s name, and then confronted Bertrand with his discovery. Bertrand had wanted to keep his spy’s identity secret, and was outraged at Kahn’s disclosure. Yet, even at this late date (2015), Kahn misrepresented what actually happened, and failed to explain the true story about the Poles’ success – as I shall outline below.

Hans-Thilo Schmidt

And the muddle continued. In Most Secret War (1978), R. V. Jones declared that the Poles ‘had stolen the wheels’ of an Enigma machine, and the following year, a rather strange account by F. H. Hinsley appeared in the first volume of British Intelligence in World War II. Hinsley attempted to bring order to Gardet’s garbled story, and Bertrand’s subsequent controversial response, by openly describing the contribution of Schmidt, incidentally identified by his French cryptonym ‘Asché’, which appears to represent nothing more than the French letters ‘HE’. At the same time, however, Hinsley introduced his own measure of confusion. (He had not been a cryptanalyst.) Perhaps out of a desire to undermine the claims of the Poles, he reported that a 1974 memorandum by Colonel Stefan Mayer, head of Polish intelligence, made no mention of Asché’s papers and explicitly cast doubt that espionage had played any part in the project, as if it had been pure Polish ingenuity that had achieved the results. Moreover Hinsley contributed to the mythology by adding that  ‘from 1934, greatly helped by a Pole who was working in an Enigma factory in Germany, they [the Poles] began to make their own Enigma machines’.

Harry Hinsley, Edward Travis & John Tiltman

Yet Hinsley stated that he had discovered evidence of the French approach in the archives, although he circumscribed Bertrand’s account by characterizing what the Frenchman wrote as merely ‘claims’. (It appeared that he had, at least, studied Bertrand’s book.) Hinsley had also been prompted by a letter to the Sunday Times in June 1976 by Gustave Paillole [see below] that contested Winterbotham’s version of the events. Hinsley wrote (without identifying the archival documents):

GC and CS records are far from perfect for the pre-war years. But they confirm that the French provided GC and CS (they say as early as 1931) with two photographed documents giving directions for setting and using the Enigma machine Mark 1 which the Germans introduced in 1930. They also indicate that GC and CS showed no great interest in collaborating, for they add that in 1936, when a version of the Enigma began to be used in Spain, GC and CS asked the French if they had acquired any information since 1931; and GC & CS’s attitude is perhaps explained by the fact that as late as April 1939 the ministerial committee which authorized the fullest exchange of intelligence with France still excluded cryptanalysis.

This passage is important, since it strongly suggests that senior GC&CS members were aware of the French donation of 1931, and in 1936 rightly tried to resuscitate the exchanges of that time to determine whether any fresh information had come to light – a behaviour that strikes me as absolutely correct. Nevertheless, the official historian should have displayed a little more enterprise in his analysis. The head of GC&CS himself had apparently forgotten about the 1931 approach. When Denniston wrote his memoir in December 1944, all he stated about the French/Polish contribution was (of an undated event some time in 1938 or 1939): “An ever closer liaison with the French, and through them with the Poles, stimulated the attack.” Joel Greenberg cited a statement made by Denniston in 1948:

From 1937 onwards it was obviously desirable that our naval, military and air intelligence should get in close touch with their French colleagues for military and political reasons. The Admiral [Sinclair] had always wished for a close liaison between G. C. & C. S. and SIS but I have always thought that Dunderdale, then in Paris, was the man who brought Bertrand into the English organisations. Menzies, it is true, had a close relationship with Rivet under whom Bertrand worked but I think it was Dunderdale who, entirely ignorant of the method of cryptographers, urged the liaison on a technical level.

This appears, to me, to be a very naive observation by Denniston. It contradicts what Bertrand asserted about direct relationships with GC&CS and overlooks the 1936 overtures to the French, noted by Hinsley. By highlighting the lack of expertise in the matter held by the chief officer in MI6’s Paris station at the time, his statement might help to explain the embarrassments of 1931. At the same time, the comments of both Hinsley and Denniston suggest that the edicts of the ‘ministerial committee’ that prohibited discussion of cryptanalytical matters with the French could perhaps be defied.

Frank Birch, a history don who re-joined GC&CS in 1939 as head of the German Naval Section (he had worked in Room 40, which had been a Sigint Centre for the Royal Navy, between 1917 and 1919), and later became GCHQ’s historian, also covered that period superficially. When he wrote his internal history of British Sigint (he died in 1956 before completing it), he was similarly laconical about the pre-war co-operation, writing: “In the summer of that year [1939], as a result of staff talks with the French and the Poles, the head of GC&CS and Dillwyn (Dilly) Knox, a pioneer of Enigma research, visited Warsaw. There they learned of some successful solution of some earlier German traffic and the construction of an electrical scanning machine known as ‘la bombe’.” Just like that: staffs decided to converse. It was a very superficial account.

Yet there was at this stage evidence of a desire to conceal the fact that the British had been approached by Bertrand in 1931. Józef Garliński had published his account, Intercept, in 1979, and acknowledged the help he had received from Colonel Lisicki. (Garliński had served in Polish Intelligence, and was an Auschwitz survivor who did not come to England until after the war: he is best known for his memoir, Fighting Auschwitz.) He explicitly described the approach by Schmidt to the French in 1931, but omitted any reference to Bertrand’s first turning to the British. As he wrote about Bertrand’s reactions after receiving the first documents:

            Captain Bertrand’s thoughts immediately turned towards Poland. He knew that Polish Intelligence had for some years past been trying to break the Germans’ secret. The Poles had been co-operating and exchanging information with him and now he could present them with a discovery of incalculable value.

This grandstanding account directly contradicts what (for example) Dermot Turing later wrote –  that Bertrand turned to the Poles almost in despair after the British and Czechs had shown no interest. Moreover, there was no discussion of sordid financial negotiations, apart from the statement that Schmidt ‘had been given a substantial advance payment’. The impression given is that the French were quite happy to pay Schmidt, but passed on his secrets to the Poles for free. The author never suggests that the French might have turned to perfidious Albion first. Yet Garliński, in his Acknowledgments, singled out Harry Golombek and Ruth Thompson from Bletchley Park, and listed several other veterans who had helped him, including Mavis Batey, Anthony Brooks, Peter Calvocoressi, and Frederick Winterbotham He also paid thanks to a few British subjects close to the participants, a group that included Robin Denniston, Penelope Fitzgerald and Ronald Lewin. Did none of them attempt to put him right about the British Connection, or did they simply not know about it? Were they not aware of the archival material that Hinsley exploited in his publication of the very same year? One would expect these people to meet and talk, and at least be aware what was being written elsewhere. Significantly, perhaps, Garliński had not interviewed Hinsley or Wilfred Dunderdale.

Gordon Welchman also admitted his confusion when his Hut Six Story was published in 1982, not knowing how much to trust the various accounts of the Poles’ access to Enigma secrets. Apart from his exposure to Stengers, Hinsley, Lewin, and even William Stevenson’s highly dubious A Man Named Intrepid, Welchman had started to pick up some of the information disclosed in non-English media. He was aware of the activities of Schmidt, and described how the latter had passed documents to Bertrand in December 1932 [sic]. Notably, however, he referred solely to the fact that, since French Intelligence was not interested, Bertrand had passed the material to the Poles. There was no mention of any approach to the British at that time.

Gordon Welchman

After publication (and the furore that erupted with American authorities about security breaches), Welchman realized that he needed to make changes to his account. As his biographer, Joel Greenberg, wrote: “He had learned some of the details of the pre-war work by the Poles on the Enigma machine too late to include them in his book.” He was also engaged in some controversy with the Poles themselves. Kozaczuk had diminished the contribution of the British in his 1979 work, Enigma, and in the 1984 English version had explicitly criticized The Hut Six Story. At the same time, Welchman had come to realize that Hinsley’s official history was deeply flawed: Hinsley had not been at Bletchley Park in the early days, and had obviously been fed some incorrect information. Welchman judged that Hinsley had been unduly influenced by the sometimes intemperate Birch.

Welchman gained some redemption when Lisicki came to his rescue, confirming the original contributions that Welchman and his colleagues had made, and eventually even Kozaczuk had to back down. The outcome was that a corrective article (From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: the Birth of ULTRA) was published in the first issue of Intelligence and National Security in 1986 –    and eventually appeared in the revised edition of Welchman’s book. (Denniston’s son was manœuvering behind the scenes, as his father’s wartime memoir also appeared in that first issue of the Journal.) The issue at hand was, however, the contribution from British innovation and technology in 1940 – not the question of access to purloined material in the early 1930s.

Similarly, Christopher Andrew, in his 1986 work Her Majesty’s Secret Service (titled simply Secret Service when published the previous year in the UK), and subtitled The Making of the British Intelligence Community, left out much of the story. He obviously credited Stengers, who had contributed to the anthology that he, Andrew, edited with David Dilks [see above], and he also referred to Garliński’s Intercept (re-titled The Enigma War when published in the USA). Andrew echoed Garliński’s claim that Rejewski had gained vital documents from Schmidt back in the winter of 1931. Yet Andrew gave no indication that the British had been invited to the party at that time: he merely observed that, since the French cryptographic service had shown no interest in the documentation, Bertrand passed it on to the Poles. One might have imagined that the discovery of a spy within the Chiffrierstelle would have sparked some greater curiosity on the part of the chief magus of our intelligence historians, and that Andrew would have studied Hinsley’s opus, but it was not to be. And the story of Bertrand’s approach to the British was effectively buried.

Thus the decade approached its end without any confident and reliable account. Nigel West’s GCHQ (1986) shed no new light on the matter, while Winterbotham, in his follow-up book The Ultra Spy (1989), felt free to reinforce the fact that the French had been approached by a German spy in 1934 [sic], but that Bertrand had then turned to the Poles, echoing Andrew’s story that the British had been told nothing. It still seemed an inconvenient truth for the British authorities to acknowledge that GC&CS (or MI6) had treated with too much disdain an approach made to them in the early 1930s, and the institution’s main focus was to emphasize the wartime creativity of the boffins at Bletchley Park while diminishing the efforts of Rejewski, Zygalski and Różycki.

One final flourish occurred, however. In Volume 3, Part 2 of his history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, published in 1988, Hinsley (assisted by Thomas, Simkins and Ransom) issued, in Appendix 30, a revised version of the Appendix from Volume 1. (Tony Comer has informed me that this new Appendix was actually written by Joan Murray. I shall refer to the authorship as Hinsley/Murray hereafter.) She wrote as follows:

Records traced in the GC and CS archives since 1979 show that some errors were introduced in that Appendix from a secondary account, written in 1945, which relied on the memories of the participants when it was dealing with the initial breakthrough into the Enigma. Subsequent Polish and French publications show that other errors arose from a Mayer memorandum, written in 1974, which apart from various interviews recorded in British newspapers in the early 1970s was the only Polish source used in compiling the Appendix to Volume 1.

Oh, those pesky unreliable memoirs – and only a short time after the events! While the paragraph issued a corrective to Colonel Mayer’s deceptive account, Hinsley/Murray seemed ready to accept the evidence of two ‘important’ French publications that had appeared since Bertrand’s book of 1973, namely Paillole’s Notre Spion chez Hitler, and an article by Gilbert Bloch in Revue Historique des Armées, No. 4. December 1985. Hinsley/Murray went on to confirm that Bertrand ‘acquired several documents, which included two manuals giving operating and keying instructions for Enigma 1’, and added that, ‘as was previously indicated on the evidence of the GC and CS archives, copies of these documents were given to the Poles and the British at the end of 1931.’ Yet this was a very ambiguous statement: by ‘these documents’, did Hinsley/Murray imply simply the ‘two manuals’, as he had indicated in the earlier Volume of his history, or was he referring to the ‘several documents’? The phrasing of the quoted clause clearly suggests that the Poles and the British were supplied with the same material at the same time, but his own text contradicts that thesis.

The puzzle remained. Exactly what had Bertrand passed to the British in 1931, and who saw the material?

GC&CS Indifference?

In 1985, Paul Paillole, a wartime officer in France’s secret service, published Notre Spion chez Hitler, which, being written in French, did not gain the immediate attention it deserved. (It was translated, and published in English – but not until 2016 – under the inaccurate title The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle.) Paillole’s role in counterespionage in Vichy France is very ambivalent, and he tried to show, after the war, a loyalty to the Allied cause that was not justified. Nevertheless, his account of the approach by Schmidt to the French, and the subsequent negotiations with the Poles, has been generally accepted as being reliable.

Paul Paillole’s ‘The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle’

Paillole had joined the Deuxième Bureau of the French Intelligence Department on December 1, 1935, and, hence, was not around at the time of the initial assignments made between Schmidt and Rodolphe Lemoine (‘Rex’), a shady character of German birth originally named Rudolf Stallman, who was detailed to respond to Schmidt’s overtures of July, 1931. Paillole first learned of the spy in the Chiffrierstelle from Gustave Bertrand, who had joined the department in November 1933 as head of Section D, responsible for encryption research. His book is many ways irritating: it has a loose and melodramatic style, and lacks an index, but it contains a useful set of Notes, and boasts an authoritative Preface by someone identified solely as Frédéric Guelton (apparently a French military historian of some repute) that reinforces the accuracy of Paillole’s story. It also includes references to KGB archival material, and the involvement of two fascinating and important NKVD spy handlers, Dmitry Bystrolyotov and Ignace Reiss, which could be a whole new subject for investigation another day.

Typical of Paillole’s rather hectic approach is his account of how Bertrand told him the story about Schmidt. We are supposed to accept that, one day early in 1936, Bertrand pulled Paillole into his office and started to deliver a long description of the negotiations, a discourse that continued over lunch. Moreover, an immediate conflict appears: while Guelton had indicated that Bertrand ‘arrived on the scene’ in November 1933, Bertrand claimed that he had established Section D in 1930. Notwithstanding such chronological slip-ups, Bertrand told a captivating story.

Somehow, Paillole was able to reproduce the whole long monologue without taking any notes, including the details of the material that Schmidt had handed over in late 1931, namely seven critical items mainly concerning the Enigma, including ‘a numbered encryption manual for the Enigma I machine (Schlűsselanleitung. H. Do. G. 14, L. Do. G. 14 H. E. M. Do. G. 168)’. Since this information must have come from a written report, it is hard to understand why he felt he had to dissemble. (This represents an example of an ‘Authentic’ release of intelligence, but not a ‘Genuine’ one.) For the purposes of this investigation (the exposure to the British), however, the exact form of Bertrand’s report is less significant. Early on, Bertrand offered the following insight: “I’ve used the good relationships our Bureau has with allied bureaus in London, Prague and Warsaw to comparing our level of knowledge with theirs and work to share our intelligence efforts. The British know less than us. They show a faint interest in the research in Germany and cryptography. The only ones who are passionate about these problems are the Poles.”

Now, one might question the timing of this activity: ‘I’ve used’, instead of ‘I used’ suggests a more recent event, but that may be an error of translation. Yet a later section expresses the idea more specifically. After presenting the documentation to Colonel Bassières, the head of the Intelligence Department, and receiving a depressing rejection because of the complexity of the challenge, and the lack of resources to undertake the work, Bertrand described how he approached his British allies:

In Paris, I entrusted the photographs of the two encryption and usage manuals for the Enigma machine to the representative of the Secret Intelligence Service, Commander Wilfred Dunderdale. I begged him to inform his superiors of the opportunities that were available to us. I proposed to go to London to discuss with British specialists the common direction we should take for our research.

If any approach were to succeed, I had secretly hoped that it would encourage the interests of French decoding services. Naturally enthusiastic, Dunderdale, convinced of the importance of the documents I possessed, immediately went to England. It was November 23, 1931. On the 26th, he was back. From the look of dismay on his face, I knew that he had been hardly any more successful than I had been in France.

Thus Bertrand turned to the Poles.

Certain aspects of this anecdote do not ring true. This was of course the same Dunderdale who, in the words of Denniston, ‘was entirely ignorant of the method of cryptographers’. Yet it is he who immediately understands the importance of the documents, while his superiors in London reject them. (My first thought was that Denniston deliberately downplayed the insightfulness of Dunderdale in an attempt to extinguish any trace of the 1931 exchanges.) Moreover, if Bertrand enjoyed such a good relationship with the ‘allied bureau’ in London (GC&CS, presumably, not SIS/MI6), and knew enough to be able to state that his British counterparts were less well informed than the French, why did he not indeed visit London to meet Denniston himself, instead of relying on an intermediary with less experience? (Tiltman visited Paris, but not until 1932, to discuss Soviet naval codes, and struck up a good relationship with Bertrand, which aided in Tiltman’s inquiries with the French over Enigma in September 1938.) Can Bertrand be relied upon for the intelligence that Dunderdale actually went to London himself to make the case?

Yet the account presented a tantalizing avenue for investigation. Was there any record of that British response to be found in internal histories of British Sigint, or in memoirs of those involved?

In Seizing the Enigma (1991), David Kahn, the celebrated author of Codebreakers, tried to dig a little further, although he was largely dependent upon the accounts of Bertrand and Paillole. At least he brought the French sources to a broad English-speaking audience, as well as the voice of authority. One significant aspect caught my eye. When Bertrand brought his photocopies to Colonel Bassières of French Intelligence, he waited two weeks before returning to find out how he had progressed: it took that long for Bassières to digest the contents of the material, and to conclude that it would be very hard to make any progress without knowledge of the wiring of Enigma’s rotors and of the settings of the keys on any particular day. Yet only three days elapsed between Dunderdale’s receipt of the same material (in Paris, on November 23) and his report that the British likewise judged them to be of little use.

Wilfred Dunderdale

Is that not astonishing? Surely, MI6 – and GC&CS, if it were contacted – would not have made any judgment based on a cabled summary from Dunderdale? They would have demanded to be able to inspect the source documents carefully. Bertrand implied that Dunderdale took them with him to England. But for him to set up meetings in London, travel there, have the documents assessed, and so swiftly rejected, before returning to Paris, seems highly improbable. He was informed on a Monday, and was back on the Thursday to deliver his verdict. Did the cryptographically challenged Dunderdale really follow through? Had he actually taken the samples with him to London?

The 1988 analysis from Hinsley/Murray appears to confirm that Dunderdale did manage to get his material through to GC&CS in London, and that, as Bertrand reported, the two manuals giving operating and keying instructions were received by the appropriate personnel. And Hinsley/Murray confirmed the lukewarm response:

On the British lack of interest in the documents, GC and CS’s archives add nothing except that it did not think them sufficiently valuable to justify helping Bertrand to meet the costs. It would seem that its initial study of the documents was fairly perfunctory [indeed!] since it was not until 1936 that it considered undertaking a theoretical study of the Enigma indicator system with a view to discovering whether the machine might be reconstituted from the indicators if enough messages were available.

The suggestion that GC&CS personnel did truly get an opportunity to inspect the two documents in 1931 is vaguely reinforced by an Appendix to Nigel de Grey’s internal history of GC&CS, although his text is irritatingly imprecise, with a lack of proper dating of events, too much use of the passive voice, and actors (such as ‘the British’) remaining unidentified. He acknowledges that GC&CS had access to two documents from Bertrand, but his evidence of this claim is a memorandum from September 1938.

Silence from the British camp over the incident appears therefore to have derived from embarrassment, not because the transfer never happened. Yet the Hinsley/Murray testimony introduces a new aspect – that of money. It suggests that Bertrand may have been requesting payment, or perhaps a commitment of investment, for the treasure he was prepared to hand over. At the time of that revisionist account, all the senior figures who could have been involved were dead: Denniston (1961), Knox (1943), Travis (who might have used any misdemeanor to disparage Denniston, 1956), Tiltman (1982), and Menzies (1968). No one was around to deny or confirm.

On the other hand, Bertrand had not been entirely straight with the British. His account never indicates that he asked the British for funds, but that he was offering a sample out of his desire for cooperation. If he turned to the British first, why did he offer them only two items, when he handed over the complete portfolio to the Poles a week later? It is true that the remaining documents might not have been so useful, but why did he make that call? As it happened, the Poles were overjoyed to receive the dossier on December 8, although they eventually would come to the same conclusion that they were stymied without understanding the inner workings of the machine, and some daily keys. Moreover, no account that I have read suggests that Bertrand asked the Poles for payment. Yet the French Security Service needed cash to pay Schmidt, and it is unlikely that, having been turned down by the British, they would agree to hand over the jewels to the Poles for free. They needed to sustain payments for Schmidt, but were not making use of any of the material themselves, and were not even being told by the Poles what progress they were making. It does not make sense.

Nevertheless, over the next few years, Bertrand continued to supply the Poles with useful information from Schmidt, and Rejewski’s superb mathematical analysis enabled the Poles to make startling progress on decrypting Enigma messages. The British heard nothing of this: Hinsley/Murray report that a memorandum as late as 1938 indicates that they had not received any fresh information since 1931. They also wrote:

In all probability the fact that GC and CS had shown little interest in the documents received from Bertrand in 1931 is partly explained by the small quantity of its Enigma intercepts; until well into the 1930s traffic in Central Europe, transmitted on medium frequencies on low power, was difficult to intercept in the United Kingdom. It is noteworthy that when GC and CS made a follow-up approach to Bertrand in 1936 the whole outcome was an agreement to exchange intercepts for a period up to September 1938.

This strikes me as a bit feeble. (Since when was Germany in Central Europe? And was interception really a problem? Maybe. The British were picking up Comintern messages in London at this time, but the Poles would have been closer to the Germans’ weaker signals.) Yet surely GC & CS should have been more imaginative. They had acquired a commercial Enigma machine: they could see the emerging German threat by the mid-thirties, and they were intercepting Enigma-based messages from Spain during the Civil War. (Hinsley/Murray imply that no progress had been made on this traffic, but de Grey, in his internal history, reported that Knox had broken it on April 24, 1937.) It is also true that the Poles were better motivated to tackle the problem, because of their proximity to Germany and the threats to their territory, but Denniston and his team were slow to respond to the emergent German threat, no doubt echoing the national policy against re-armament at the time, but also failing to assume a more energetic and imaginative posture.

After all, if the War Office had started increasing the interception of German Navy signals during the Spanish Civil War, it surely would have expected an appropriate response from GC&CS, whether that involved shifting resources away from, say, Soviet traffic, or adding more cryptographic personnel. GC&CS did respond, in a way, of course, since Knox set about trying to break the Naval codes. He had had much success in breaking the messages used by the Italians and the Spanish Nationalists, but, soon after he switched to German Naval Enigma, the navy introduced complex new indicators. He thus started work on army and air force traffic under Tiltman. GC&CS might have showed a little more imagination, but, as Hinsley/Murray recorded, they were constrained (or discouraged?) from discussing decryption matters with the French. Despite that prohibition, Tiltman was authorized to go to Paris to discuss cryptanalysis with Bertrand in 1932. Was he breaking the rules?

I looked for further confirmation of the nature of the material handed over, and who saw it. That careful historian Stephen Budiansky covers the events in his 2000 book Battle of Wits. He lists an impressive set of primary sources, including the HW series at the National Archives, but admits that he was very reliant on Ralph Erskine ‘the pre-eminent historian of Naval Enigma, who probably feels he wrote this book himself’ for supplying him with answers to scores of emailed questions. He writes, of Bertrand’s transfer of material to the British: “Copies of the documents were sent to GC&CS, which dutifully studied them and dutifully filed them away on the shelf, concluding that they were of no help in overcoming the Enigma’s defenses.” Yet his source for that is the Volume 3 Appendix, and his comments about defenses contradicts what Hinsley/Murray wrote about Enigma not being considered a serious threat at that time. This is disappointing, and strikes me as intellectually lazy.

Mavis Batey

And then some startling new insights appeared in Mavis Batey’s profile of Knox, Dilly, which appeared in 2009. Batey had joined GC&CS in 1940, and had worked for Knox until his death in February 1943. She introduced some facts that bolster the hints of the mercenary character of Bertrand’s offer, but at the same time she also indulged in some speculation. Batey suggested that Bertrand’s main liaison was Dunderdale (this minimizing his claims about close contacts in London), and that, when he offered Dunderdale the documents, Bertrand demanded to be paid for them. Yet her text is ambiguous: she writes that Bertrand ‘wanted a considerable sum for any more [sic] of Asché’s secrets’, thus implying that he had already received some for free. Moreover, when Dunderdale contacted London, he received a negative response, for reasons of cost.

            The request was turned down flat. It was a political matter of funding priorities and it seems that Denniston, Foss, Tiltman and Dilly [Knox] were not consulted. Dunderdale did have the original batch of documents for three days and in all probability photographed them, allowing Dilly to analyse them later, but the ban on paying any money for them cut the British off from the rest of Asché’s valuable secrets.

This is an astonishing suggestion – that no employee of GC&CS, and probably no MI6 officer, either, even saw the documents at the time, but that MI6 (Sinclair?) simply sent a message of rejection by cable based on a message from Dunderdale. If that were true, it might explain the singular lack or recollection of the events on the part of Denniston and others. (One has therefore to question the Hinsley/Murray interpretation of the archive.) But the text is also very disappointing. Batey does not identify the ‘original batch’: were they the set of seven, or just the two on operating instructions and key settings? Did Dunderdale actually photocopy them, or was that not necessary, given Bertrand’s indication that he offered those two – which were themselves photographs, of course –  for free? Did Knox really analyze them later? (The evidence of others suggests that this is pure speculation.) And, if the documents that Asché provided in the following years were truly ‘valuable’, to what extent was the British decryption effort cruelly delayed? (The Poles would later admit that the stream of documents after 1931 was critical to their success.) Did the quartet complain vigorously when they were able to inspect Dunderdale’s copies, and did they inquire about the source, and whether there was more? Unfortunately, Batey leaves it all very vague. What she does confirm, however, is that, in 1938, Sinclair ‘anxious to increase co-operation with France, authorized Denniston to invite Bertrand over for a council of war’.

Mavis Batey’s ‘Dilly’

One might imagine that, with the passage of time, greater clarity would evolve. Yet that is not the case with Dermot Turing in his 2018 book X, Y & Z, the mission of which is to set the record straight on the Polish achievements. While his coverage of the Polish contribution is very comprehensive, Turing shows a muddled sequence of events in the early 1930s, and his analysis is not helped by a rather arch, journalistic style. He refers to ‘Bertrand’s sniffy friends across the Channel’, and informs his readers that ‘the British had sniffed around the Enigma machine before’. Nevertheless, he is ready to describe John Tiltman as ‘the greatest cryptanalyst’ they had, and explains that Tiltman had visited Paris around this time, as I noted earlier.

            In 1932, he had been in Paris, asking the French to help with a perennial problem – that Britain’s precious Navy might be under threat from the Soviets. Tiltman came with an incomplete set of materials on Soviet naval codes, which he hoped the French might be able to complement. Alas, the answer was no, but the potential for cooperation had been established.

Unfortunately, Turing then moves from this event to declare that, after an Enigma machine had been inspected back in 1925 by Mr Foss, who made a detailed technical report that was put on file, the link established by Tiltman facilitated an initiative by the British to discuss the Enigma with the French. He writes:

            But now Captain Tiltman had made the diplomatic link between GC&CS and Captain Bertrand’s Section D, perhaps the boffinry [sic] might be extracted from its file and put to good use. The question was duly put, via the proper channels, which is to say MI6’s liaison officer in Paris.

            Bertrand’s bathroom photographs were carefully evaluated at MI6. The photography was good, but MI6 independently came to the same conclusion as the Section de Chiffre. The documents were, unfortunately, useless.

Turing, perhaps not unexpectedly, provides no references for this mess. Tiltman’s initial visit occurred after Bertrand made his 1931 approach. Turing provides no rationale for the British suddenly making timely overtures to the French. (He was probably confusing the 1938 overtures with the events of 1931.) He has MI6, not GC&CS, making the evaluation, which is superficially absurd, and may echo the reality that Batey described, but undermines his disparaging comments about the sniffy boffins at GC&CS. Yet his conclusion is the same: ‘the British were a dead end’.

Dermot Turing’s ‘X,Y & Z’

And what of Gustave Bertrand? He was a very controversial figure: he was arrested by the Germans in 1944, but managed to escape to Britain, claiming that he had agreed to work for the Nazis – though what he was going to reveal, how they would control him, and how he would communicate with them is never stated. Paillole himself investigated the affair, and determined that Bertrand was innocent of any treachery. Dermot Turing also gives him the all-clear in X, Y & Z, but it would not be out of character for Bertrand to have withheld some information from the British in 1931 when he wanted to keep much of the glory to himself and the French service. His petulant behaviour during, and immediately after, the war, when he showed his resentment at the achievements of the British, was noted and criticized by the Poles. He was not going to give anything away in a spirit of co-operation, and he left for posterity an inadequate account of the financial aspects of the deal. He may also have handed the documents over to the Czechs, as he hinted at in his book, and as David Kahn claimed he told him. If so, they would have been forwarded immediately to the Russians.

Gustave Bertrand

Whatever Bertrand’s motivations and actions, however, I have to conclude that GC&CS did not show enough energy and imagination in the second half of the 1930s decade. It moved too sluggishly. The fact that GC&CS historians felt awkward in admitting that it would not have made sense to pursue the matter in 1931, but affirmed that the service should have revisited it in 1936, suggests to me a widespread embarrassment over the advantage that they unwittingly conceded to the Poles. While we are left with the conflicting testimonies from Denniston and Hinsley/Murray, it seems clear that neither Sinclair nor Denniston was prepared to take a stand. Yet the vital conclusion remains that, if indeed MI6 had concealed Bertrand’s approach, and the accompanying documents, even from the chief of GC&CS, the responsibility for the lack of action must lie primarily with Sinclair.

The Aftermath

Especially in the world of intelligence, the evidence from memoirs and interviews is beset with disinformation, the exercise of old vendettas, and a desire for the witness to show him- or her-self in the best possible light. So it is with the Enigma story. The whole saga is beset with contradictory testimonies from participants who either wanted to exaggerate their achievements, or to conceal their mistakes. One has to continually ask of the participants and their various memories: What did they know? From whom were they taking orders? What were their motivations? What did they want to conceal? Is Mavis Batey implicitly less trustworthy than Frank Birch or Alastair Denniston? Thus the addressing of the two important questions: ‘To what extent did the hesitations of the early thirties impede the British attack on the Enigma?’, and ‘How was Denniston’s reputation affected by the leisurely build-up before the war?’ has to untangle a nest of possibly dubious assertions.

Dillwyn Knox

Of all the cryptanalysts who might have felt thwarted by any withholding of secret Enigma information, Dillwyn Knox would have been the pre-eminent. It was he who led all efforts to attack it in the 1930s, although the accounts of his success or failure are somewhat contradictory. According to Thomas Parris in The Ultra Americans, Knox had been on the point of retiring in 1936, wishing to return to teach at King’s College, Cambridge, but was persuaded to stay on to tackle the variant of Enigma used by the German Military, Italian Navy and Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. (The claim about his retirement aspirations may be dubious, however. It cannot be verified.) Stengers wrote that Knox had applied himself to the task with vigour, and had ‘cracked’ the cipher. On the other hand, Milner-Barry stated that Knox had been defeated by ‘it’, but he was probably referring to Knox’s efforts in tackling the more advanced German naval version. Denniston’s son, Robin, wrote that a more intense project had started after the Spanish civil war, and that Knox worked on naval traffic, with some help from Foss, while Tiltman concentrated on German military uses, and Japanese traffic. He also mentioned that Knox had cracked the inferior version used by the Italian navy. Those were Batey’s ‘Enigmas’. And she strongly challenged the view that Knox would have been ‘defeated’ by anything.

Knox was by temperament a querulous and demanding character, and was outspoken in his criticisms of Denniston over organizational matters in 1940, which the chief sustained patiently. Thus, if he had believed that he had been let down by GC&CS over the acquisition of Enigma secrets, he surely would have articulated his annoyance. But all signs seem to point that he was unaware of any negotiations between the French and the British, or of the existence of a long-lived chain of communication from internal German sources to the Poles when he had the famous encounter with Rejewski at Pyry, outside Warsaw, in July 1939. After the initial fencing, when neither side was prepared to reveal exactly what progress it had made, Knox posed the vital question ‘Quel est le QWERTZU?’. By this, he wanted Rejewski to describe how the keyboard letters on the Enigma were linked to the alphabetically-named wheels (the ‘diagonal’). When Rejewski rejoined that the series was ABCDEFG  . . ., Knox was flabbergasted. One of his assistants had suggested that to him, and he had rejected it without experimenting, believing that the Germans would not implement something so obvious.

The irony was that Rejewski had experienced that insight back in 1932, and had been helped by the supply of further keys and cribs from Schmidt since then. (According to Nigel de Grey, Rejewski later implied that the information on the diagonal came directly from Schmidt, and de Grey cites, in French, a statement from Rejewski that, even so, ‘they could have solved it themselves’. Most accounts indicate that Schmidt was never able to hand over details of the internal wiring of the machine.) Knox knew nothing of that. He was sceptical of the ability of the Poles to have made such breakthroughs unaided, but he never understood the magnitude of the advantage they had. Admittedly, in a report he compiled immediately on his return from Poland, he mentioned that Rejewski had referred to both ‘Verrat’ (treachery), and the purchase of details of the setting as contributing to the breakthrough, but Knox never explored this idea. Rejewski’s more mathematical approach was superior to Knox’s more linguistic-based analysis, it is true. But seven years in the wilderness! Welchman wrote in 1982 that Knox could have made similar strides and ‘arrived at a comparable theory’ if he had had access to the Asché documents, yet (as Tony Comer has pointed out to me) that judgment ignores the fact that no mathematical analysis was possible at GC&CS until Peter Twinn joined early in 1939.

Marian Rejewski

Why did the services of the three countries – all potential sufferers from German aggression – not collaborate and share secrets earlier? It boils down to money, resources and lack of imagination on the part of the British, money, proprietorship of ownership, and skills with the French, and primarily security concerns with the Poles. Because of geography, and political revanchism, the Poles were the most threatened. They believed for a long while that they could handle Enigma on their own and, moreover, had to protect against the possibility that the Germans should learn what they were up to. In 1931, two years before Hitler came to power, they could not count on Great Britain as a resolute ally against the Germans. They therefore did not share their experiences until the pressures were too great.

An important principle remains. If Sinclair, in 1931, justifiably did not press for funds to pay for Schmidt’s offerings, a time would come when the German threat intensified (perhaps with the entry to the Rhineland in 1936, as I suggested in On Appeasement) to the point when he should have taken stock, recalled the missed opportunity of 1931, and followed up with Bertrand to try to revivify the relationship, and the sharing of Enigma intelligence. That might have involved a confrontation with the War Office, but, as I have shown, that Ministry was then starting to apply pressure off its own bat. Hinsley/Murray make the point that an anonymous person did in fact attempt such contact, but that the outcome was sterile, because of policy. The general silence of inside commentators over the decisions of the early 1930s suggest to me that they were not comfortable defending Sinclair’s initial inaction (which was, in the political climate of 1931, indeed explicable), or his lack of follow-up when conditions had sharply changed.

While Denniston can surely be cleared of any charges of concealing important intelligence from his lieutenants, the accusations made that he had been too pessimistic over the challenge of tackling Enigma have some justification. Denniston’s position was originally based on his opinion that radio silence would be imposed in the event of war (an idea derived from Sinclair), but also on a conviction that the demand on costs and resources would be too extravagant to consider a whole-hearted approach on decryption. Frank Birch became a strident critic of his bosses:

            To all this, are added the ‘most pessimistic attitude’, ascribed to the head of GC&CS ‘as to the possible value of cryptography in another war’ and the fear expressed by the director of GC&CS [i.e. Sinclair] after the Munich crisis ‘that as soon as matters became serious, wireless silence is enforced, and that therefore this organisation of ours is useless for the purpose for which it was intended.

His disdain became very personal (to the extent that he even spelled his boss’s first name incorrectly as ‘Alistair’), and over the crisis of 1941, when Denniston resisted the introduction of  wireless interception and analysis into his province, Birch resorted to undergraduate cliché to characterize Denniston’s approach: “Commander Denniston’s attitude was consistent with his endeavour to preserve GC&CS as a purely cryptanalytic bureau and, Canute-like, to halt the inevitable tide that threatened to turn it into a Sigint Centre.” Birch was no doubt thinking of Room 40, where Denniston, Birch and Travis had served.

Yet even Denniston’s initiative to change the intellectual climate at Bletchley Park came under attack. Some commentators, such as Kahn, Aldrich, and Ferris, have commended Denniston for starting the drive to recruit mathematicians, after the experience at Pyry. John Ferris even wrote, in Behind the Enigma, that Denniston had prepared his service for war better than any other leader of British intelligence, a view also anticipated by Nigel West:

For almost twenty years Denniston succeeded in running on a shoestring a new and highly secret government department. When his resources were increased on the eve of war, he began the expansion which made possible the achievements of Bletchley Park. [DNB] Many of his best cryptanalysts would not have taken kindly either to civil service hierarchies or to a Chief devoted to bureaucratic routine, Denniston’s personal experience of cryptography, informal manner, lack of pomposity and willingness to trust and deal get to his sometimes unorthodox subordinates smoothed many of the difficulties in creating a single unit from the rival remains of Room 40 and MI1b.

Maybe these positive assessments were based too much on what Denniston wrote himself. Again, Birch took vicarious credit for the execution of the policy. Ralph Erskine, in his Introduction to Birch’s History, wrote: “From about 1937 onwards, Birch played a major part in advising Alastair Denniston, the operational head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), on choosing the academics, including Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, who were to become the backbone of GC&CS’ wartime staff.”

The verdict on Denniston must be that he was a very honourable and patient man, a dedicated servant, and a very capable cryptographer, but one who excelled in managing a small team – as he again showed when he was moved to Berkeley Street. In an internal note, Tony Comer wrote:

His memorial is that he built the UK’s first unified cryptanalytic organisation and developed the values and standards which made it a world leader, an organisation which partners aspired to emulate; and that he personally worked tirelessly to ensure an Anglo-American cryptologic alliance which has outlived and outgrown anything even he could have hoped for.

I believe that is a fair and appropriate assessment. Denniston perhaps did not show enough imagination and forcefulness in the years immediately before war broke out, and the stresses of adjusting to the complexities of a multi-faceted counter-intelligence campaign taxed him. But he surely deserved that knighthood. There was nothing in the treatment of the French approaches, and the consequent negotiations, that singled him out for reproach, and he was out of the picture when the general desire to muffle the actions of 1931 became part of GCHQ doctrine. The initial suspicions I had that some stumbles over Enigma might have caused his lack of recognition were ungrounded, but the exploration was worth it.

Conclusions

As I noted earlier, one might expect that the historical outline would become clearer as the procession of historians added their insights to what has gone before. “All history is revisionist history”, as James M. Banner has powerfully explained in a recent book. But sometimes the revisions merely cloud matters, as with Dermot Turing’s XY&Z, because of a political bias, and a less than rigorous inspection of the evidence: the ‘definitive’ history eludes us. I believe I have shown how difficult it is to extract from all the conflicting testimonies and flimsy archival material an authoritative account of what really happened with the Asché documents. Perhaps the key lies with that intriguing character Wilfred Dunderdale – like some of his notable MI6 colleagues, born in tsarist Russia – who was at the centre of events in 1931, and for the next fifteen years, and thus could have been the most useful of witnesses. Denniston praised his role: the man deserves a biography.

It is nugatory to try to draw sweeping conclusions about the behaviours of ‘the British’, ‘the French’, and ‘the Poles’ in the unravelling of Enigma secrets. Tensions and conflicts were the essence of a pluralist and democratic management of intelligence matters, and that muddle was clearly superior to the authoritarian model. Sinclair was too cautious and he probably mis-stepped, Menzies was out of his depth, Denniston lacked forcefulness, Knox was prickly, Birch caustic, Travis conspiratorial. The mathematicians, such as Welchman and Turing, were brilliant, as was that cryptanalyst of the old school, Tiltman. Lamoine was devious and treacherous (he betrayed Schmidt in the end); Bertrand suspicious, resentful and possessive.

A significant portion of recent research has set out to correct the strongly Anglocentric view of the success of the Enigma project, and Dermot Turing’s XY&Z is the strongest champion of the role of the Poles. Perhaps the pendulum has temporarily moved too far the other way. His Excellency Professor Dr Arkady Rzegocki, the Polish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, wrote in a Foreword to Turing’s book:

            In Poland, however, the story is about the triumph of mathematicians, especially Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henry Zygalski, who achieved the crucial breakthroughs from 1932 onwards, beating their allies to the goal of solving Enigma, and selflessly handing over their secret knowledge to Britain and France.

‘Solving’ Enigma again. No mention of the exclusive access the Poles had to stolen documents in the race with their allies (who were not all formal allies at the time), or who paid for the traitor’s secrets. No reference to the fact that they kept the French in the dark about their progress until they realized they desperately needed help. ‘Selflessly’ does not do justice to their isolation and needs.

Other experts have bizarrely misrepresented what happened. David Kahn (he who originally revealed Schmidt’s identity) in 2015 revisited the man he described as ‘World War II’s Greatest Spy’. He asserted that Poland had ‘solved’ the Enigma (while two other countries had not) because it had the greater need, and greater cryptanalytic ability – and was the only country to employ mathematicians as cryptanalysts. Yet in that assessment he ignores the fact that the Poles had exclusive access to purloined material that made their task much easier. It is a careless comparison from a normally very methodical analyst.

In summary, the Poles overall acted supremely well, although they were not straight with Bertrand over their successes, and should have opened up earlier than they did. For the same complementary security concerns that they had harboured in the 1930s, when the two surviving members of the trio (Rejewski and Zygalski) escaped to England in 1944, they were not allowed near Bletchley Park. It was all very messy, but could not really have been otherwise. It was a close-run thing, but the assault on Enigma no doubt was the overriding critical factor in winning the war for the Allies.

Envoi

As part of my research for this piece, I read Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies, by Christopher Grey, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the University of Warwick. I picked up what was potentially a useful fragment of his text from an on-line search, and consequently acquired the book.

If the following typical sentences set your heart aglow, this book is for you:

What is problematic, at least in organization studies, is that this process of de-familiarizing lived experience has gone to extreme lengths.

Yet grasping temporality is not easy when research is conducted in a contemporary organization, whereas viewed from a historical distance it becomes easier to see how a process operates, or, as one might perhaps better say, proceeds.

In these and other ways, then, the BP case can serve as an illustration of both the empirical nature of modern organizations as located within a heterogeneous institutional and ideational network and the theoretical deficiencies of conceptualizing organization and environment as distinct spheres.

One of Professor Grey’s messages appears to be that those who experienced the labours at Bletchley Park are not really qualified to write or speak accurately about them, because they were too close to the action, and lacked the benefit of being exposed to organization studies research. On the other hand, the discipline of organization studies has become bogged down in its own complexities and jargon, with the result that the reading public cannot easily interpret their findings. Hence:

What I mean by this is that it has in recent years moved further and further from providing incisive, plausible and readable accounts of organizational life which disclose more of, and explain more of, the nature of that life than would be possible without academic inquiry, but which do so in ways which are recognizably connected to the practice of organizational life. Let me unpack that rather convoluted sentence. As is basic to all social science, organization studies is concerned with human beings who themselves already have all kinds of explanations, understandings and theories of the lives they live. These may be under-examined or unexplored altogether, or they may be highly sophisticated. Yet, as Bauman [1990: 9-16], amongst many others, points out, these essentially commonsensical understandings of human life differ from those offered by special scientists in several key respects, including attempts to marshall evidence and provide reflective interpretations which in some way serve to ‘defamiliarize’ lived experience and common sense.

When an academic writes admittedly convoluted sentences, but fails to correct them, and then has to explain them in print, it shows that the field is in deep trouble. The book contains one or two redeeming features. It presents one notable humorous anecdote: that Geoffrey Tandy was recruited because he was expert in ‘cryptogams’ (mosses, ferns, and so on), not ‘cryptograms’. And Grey supports those who believe that Denniston was poorly treated, and deserved his knighthood. But overall, it is a very dire book. Maybe those coldspur readers who arelocated within a heterogeneous institutional and ideational network might learn where your organization is failing you.

(I should like to thank Tony Comer most sincerely for his patient and wise help during my research for this piece, an earlier draft of which he read. He has answered my questions, pointed out some errors, and shown me some internal documents that helped shed light on the events. While I believe that our opinions are largely coincident, those that are expressed here, as well as any errors, are of course my own. Tony maintains a blog at https://siginthistorian.blogspot.com )

Primary Sources:

The Government Code and Cypher School Between the Wars by Alastair Denniston(1944)

The Official History of British Sigint 1914-1945 by Frank Birch (1946-1956 – published 2004)

The Ultra Secret by F. W. Winterbotham (1974)

The breaking up of the German cipher machine ENIGMA by the cryptological section in the 2nd Department of the General Staff of the Polish Armed Forces by Colonel Stefan Mayer (1974)

Bodyguard of Lies by Anthony Cave-Brown (1975)

Ultra Goes to War by Ronald Lewin (1978)

Most Secret War by R. V. Jones (1978)

British Intelligence in WW2 (Volume 1) by F. H. Hinsley (1979)

The Enigma War by Józef Garliński (1979)

Top Secret Ultra by Peter Calvocoressi (1980)

‘How Polish Mathematicians Deciphered the Enigma’, Annals of the History of Computing, 3/3 by M. Rejewski (1981)

The Hut Six Story by Gordon Welchman (1982)

The Missing Dimension edited by David Dilks & Christopher Andrew (1984)

The Spy in Hitler’s Inner Circle by Paul Paillole (1985; 2016)

GCHQ by Nigel West (1986)

The Ultra Americans by Thomas Parrish (1986)

Secret Service by Christopher Andrew (1986)

British Intelligence in WW2 (Volume 3, Part 2) by F. H. Hinsley, E. E Thomas, C. A. G. Simkins & C. F. G. Ransom (1988)

The Ultra Spy by F. W. Winterbotham (1989)

Seizing the Enigma by David Kahn (1991)

Codebreakers edited by F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (1993)

Station X by Michael Smith (1998)

Battle of Wits by Stephen Budiansky (2000)

Enigma by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (2000)

Thirty Secret Years by Robin Denniston (2007)

Dilly by Mavis Batey (2009)

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich (2010)

The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, edited by Ralph Erskine & Michael Smith (2011)

Decoding Organization by Christopher Grey (2012)

Gordon Welchman by Joel Greenberg (2014)

How I discovered World War II’s Greatest Spy & Other Stories of Intelligence and Code by David Kahn(2015)

Alastair Denniston by Joel Greenberg (2017)

XY&Z by Dermot Turing (2018)

Behind the Enigma by John Ferris (2020)

(Recent Commonplace entries can be viewed here.)

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