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• For those of you who were intrigued by the career of Lt.-Col. Adrian Simpson a few months back, a research colleague, Dr. Giselle Jakobs, has performed some spectacular sleuthing, and uncovered a host of new facts about his life. Please see http://www.josefjakobs.info/ for her blog of December 3.
• It may interest others that the yearly rainfall for the area where I live (near Wilmington, North Carolina) reached almost 102 inches on December 30. The previous record was 83.65 inches, in 1877. Our average annual rainfall is 57.61 inches. (Final year’s total came out at 102.40 inches.)

I was intending to pick up the story of ‘The Mystery of the Undetected Radios’ this month, and had written much of the piece by the end of November, when a startling discovery made me decide to change my plans. An overseas contact casually referred me to a document in the CIA archives that turned out to be the first of two articles from the British Sunday newspaper, the Observer, from early 1980. One sentence in this piece made me gasp with amazement, and I immediately convinced myself that I should investigate the story, and report on it as soon as possible. (My contact has since provided me with one or two important documents, including a copy of the New Statesman from February 1980 that he tracked down in his local library, and he has also offered me many encouraging words. Yet he prefers to remain anonymous.)

The sentence ran simply, as follows: “Krivitsky, the first major Soviet defector, saw specimens of Maclean’s handiwork in Moscow”, and it was reported by Andrew Boyle that Goronwy Rees had said it.  That was it. Now, a casual reaction today might run as follows: “Goronwy Rees? Wasn’t he mixed up with Guy Burgess somehow? Well, of course Rees would have been aware that Maclean had spied for Russia. And it is common knowledge that Maclean absconded to Moscow with Burgess, but that was all a long time ago, in 1951. Was Maclean still alive in 1980? Oh, yes, so he was. Died in 1983. And Boyle? Didn’t he write the book that led to the outing of Blunt? Yes, The Climate of Treason. So Boyle must have known what was going on. As for Krivitsky, what were his dates? Okay, he died in suspicious circumstances in 1941. But you can’t always trust what these defectors say. So Krivitsky knew about the spies. What’s the big deal?”

Yet the potential dynamite behind this statement could have been enough to destroy the good name of a senior retired intelligence officer, and to drag the reputation of MI5 into the mire. The constant challenge over Maclean (and Philby) issued to the British intelligence services by historians has been: “Did you not receive enough hints from Krivitsky in 1940 to identify them and haul them in?”. These two articles offered some enticing suggestions that some information was still being withheld.

The first article appeared on January 13, 1980, exactly forty years on from the time when Walter Krivitsky was on his way across the Atlantic to be interrogated by officers from MI5 and SIS. But Goronwy Rees was dead: he had died from cancer at Charing Cross Hospital in London on December 12, 1979. Andrew Boyle had published his exposé The Climate of Treason in November 1979, making a veiled reference, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and then Philby in 1963, to the Fourth and Fifth Men in the scandal as ‘Maurice’ and ‘Basil’ respectively. Shortly after his book was published, the periodical Private Eye had revealed that Maurice was in fact Anthony Blunt, and Margaret Thatcher had, in two separate sessions in the House of Commons, on November 15 and 21, admitted that Blunt had been granted a pardon sixteen years earlier in exchange for giving his interrogators a full confession. (The authorities had no way of gauging how comprehensive the information was that Blunt gave them: not surprisingly, he held back.) The responses to the outing of Blunt, both from those who hounded him and those who defended him, are not the concern of this report. Nor is the overall embarrassment of the Security Service at the fact that the closely-guarded secret of Blunt’s confession and pardon had been revealed. The focus is on the secret source that Boyle dared not describe openly.

Goronwy Rees’s Quandary

Why did Rees grant Boyle such an extensive interview at this particular time – on his deathbed, when the revelations had already been published? Rees had had a chequered career, and a very troubling relationship with Guy Burgess. Burgess had recruited him as an informer in late 1937 or early 1938, when Rees was a Fellow of All Souls’ College at Oxford University, and had passed on to Burgess high-table titbits in which Burgess’s masters in Moscow were interested. Burgess had told Rees that he was working for the Comintern: we know this as Rees shared that fact with his lover, Rosamond Lehmann, and Lehmann later confirmed the story. (In an interview with John Costello, Lehmann provocatively dated the disclosure to ‘late 1936’, and declared that Rees threatened to strangle her if she mentioned it to anybody.) Burgess also confided to him at that time the name of Anthony Blunt as a fellow-conspirator: Rees described the incident in his 1972 memoir A Chapter of Accidents, but did not name the individual. (“I don’t suppose he could have named a person who could have carried more weight with me.”) When Burgess and Rees both learned, in late August 1939, of the Nazi-Soviet pact (which dashed any pretensions Communism had for being an antifascist force), however, Burgess had to claim that he had given up work for the Communists, since Rees defiantly declared he wanted nothing more to do with them. A few years later, in July 1943, Burgess was so afraid that Rees might betray him (and also Blunt, now with a critical post within MI5) that he even told his controllers he was willing to murder Rees, a suggestion that Moscow rejected as too melodramatic and dangerous.

I stay here with Rees’s account of the saga in his memoir. Some time after the war, in July 1950, when Burgess had been sent to Washington, Rees encountered Donald Maclean, whom he had not seen for fifteen years. Maclean got drunk at the Gargoyle Club, and made the famous observation to Rees: “I know all about you. You used to be one of us, but you ratted”. Rees immediately realised that a) Maclean was surely another spy in the Foreign Office, and b) Burgess had at some stage told Maclean of Rees’s pivotal ‘betrayal’ of the movement in 1939. Several months later, in May 1951, when Burgess had returned from Washington, Rees, now Estates Bursar of All Souls, met him for a drink. He decided, however, not to mention to Burgess the challenge he had received from Maclean. A few days later, on Friday May 25, not many hours before the defectors took flight, Burgess called Rees’s wife, Margie, on the telephone, and carried on a long incomprehensible monologue with her. When Rees returned home on Sunday evening, he interpreted what Burgess had said as some kind of warning and farewell message.

Rees’s first reaction was dramatic. He claimed he told his wife: “He’s gone to Moscow” – perhaps not a surprising conclusion. But he then took it upon himself to sound the alarm. He called an unnamed ‘friend’ in SIS (MI6), saying that he thought MI5 should be told that he had a hunch that Burgess had defected to Moscow. Was such an action really justified? The only cause for concern was that ‘Jimmy’, Guy’s live-in boyfriend (actually Jackie Hewitt), had also called Rees’s wife in a great state of agitation, since Guy had not returned home on the Friday night, something that, according to ‘Jimmy’, he had never done before. Margie Rees, however, remarked to her husband that staying overnight with them without telling anyone was something that Burgess had done ‘often enough’. Another twist to the story, as told later by Miranda Carter in Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001), is that Hewitt called Blunt first to report Burgess’s disappearance, and then – against Blunt’s advice – called the Reeses.

For Rees to insert himself so speedily in the hunt for a missing person – if indeed Guy would truly have been considered ‘missing’ so soon – seems on reflection to have been either reckless or the work of a busybody. Whatever Rees’s precise intentions, his contact in SIS arranged for a meeting to be set up between Rees and MI5. That same evening, however, according to A Chapter of Accidents, Rees called another unnamed friend of Burgess’s, ‘who had served in MI5 during the war’ to tell him of what he had done. This ex-officer was apparently so troubled that he visited Rees on the Monday, trying to convince Rees that it would be rash to disclose what he knew about Burgess, as it might all rebound unpleasantly on him. Rees rejected his friend’s advice, and went ahead with his meeting, convinced that now was the time to open up. He writes in his book that appointment with MI5 occurred the next day. He then told his contact in MI5 that he thought Burgess had gone to Moscow, and was then informed by the officer (whom he also knew from his wartime days: one might ask why he did not contact this officer directly in that case, rather than going through an intermediary) that Burgess and Maclean, about to be dubbed ‘the missing diplomats’, had absconded together. In his memoir, he claims he then experienced ‘a terrible sinking of the heart’, and that ‘matters were even worse than I thought’.

That was in fact not how matters evolved. What Rees did not say in his memoir was that when he had his first meeting with the (unnamed) Guy Liddell, which was set up after a provocative delay (i.e. not the very next day), the latter was improbably accompanied by Anthony Blunt – the ‘ex-officer’ from the preceding paragraph. (I shall examine the whole timetable in more detail later.) This was a somewhat inhibiting experience, since, in Blunt’s presence, Liddell tried to ward Rees off making extravagant claims about Guy Burgess. When this casual meeting was followed by a more formal appointment with Liddell, Liddell was accompanied by Dick White, who was heading the investigation into the disappearance of the Cambridge duo. Upset at the way he was being treated by the two counter-intelligence officers, Rees identified Blunt as a further conspirator, but Liddell and White responded stonily, making Rees feel that he was the transgressor. They gave signs of knowing then of Blunt’s past treachery (the evidence for which I have shown in Misdefending the Realm, but which is not a fact that has been recognised in print elsewhere, I believe: see below). At this stage Blunt showed all the calmness of one who knew that the authorities were on his side.

It was not the way for Rees to win friends and influence people. After an embarrassing flurry of media attention in the following months of summer 1951, when he even chose to deny, in the Daily Mail, Burgess’s possible malfeasance, or even that his friend had been a Communist, Rees bit his tongue for a few years. He was appointed Principal of the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, and then ruined his career in March 1956 by some ill-conceived articles, published anonymously, but soon undeniably attributable to him, in The People. Spurred, and annoyed, by a press conference given by Burgess and Maclean in Moscow, Rees had described the treacherous behaviour of the pair, and warned of other traitors who needed to be rooted out. The reaction was almost uniform: Rees was accused of being disloyal to his friends, and was largely ostracised by former acquaintances. (I have written about the bizarre exchange between him and Isaiah Berlin over the incident in Misdefending the Realm.) He was fired from the Principality, and surely did not lunch in Aberystwyth again. At his death the University even refused to lower the flag to half-mast. He struggled out of the limelight, issuing his rather sad but not completely honest apologia in 1972, until Andrew Boyle sought him out (according to Jenny Rees) in October 1978.

What emerges from all this is that Rees was a psychological wreck. Having refrained from informing MI5 about the treachery of Burgess (and Blunt) back in the thirties, partly because he was to some extent guilty himself, but also because he did not want to snitch on friends, it became more and more stressful to bottle things up. If he did finally break his silence, he also feared that his interviewers might ask him: ‘Why did you not do this before?’ And if he said nothing, and the authorities discovered from another source of his complicity in the subversion, it would be too late to declare his knowledge of what was happening, and he would be as guilty as his friends. This crisis contributed to his telling some untruths, and making some rash statements that found favour with nobody. But how did he know of Krivitsky in Moscow, and why would he make extravagant claims about Maclean’s handiwork?

Andrew Boyle’s Quest

Andrew Boyle was best-known as the editor of the BBC Radio 4 programme The World at One, and had written some well-received biographies. Having witnessed the fugitive Kim Philby follow his conspirators to Moscow in 1963, Boyle set about discovering who the ‘Fourth and Fifth Men’ in the group were. He stated in his Prologue to The Climate of Treason (published in the USA as The Fourth Man) that he had gained much of his information from CIA and FBI files in Washington.  That may have been partly true, but it was also a feint to protect a number of retired and serving intelligence officers in Britain who knew they were breaking the Official Secrets Act when they divulged inside information to him. One major figure who spoke to him was Dick White who, having headed both MI5 and SIS, and served as an intelligence advisor to the Cabinet, had by then retired to Sussex. While Boyle minimised the importance of the direct conversations he had had with White, he was fascinated enough by them, after the publication of his book on the Cambridge Five, to start to gather research for a biography of White. The project was eventually abandoned, ostensibly because of Boyle’s illness and untimely death. Instead, the journalist Tom Bower was given access to Boyle’s files, which resulted in his profile of White, The Perfect English Spy, which was published in 1995.

Boyle also understated the contributions to his research provided by Goronwy Rees. In The Perfect English Spy, a rather undisciplined, and certainly mistitled, compilation, Bower states that Boyle met Rees as early as May 1977, where the academic, now a journalist, soon disclosed to him that Blunt was the Fourth Man, a fact that Boyle managed to have confirmed by speaking to other intelligence officers. He thus arranged a series of interviews with White, who was writing a history of MI5 that was planned to be part of the series of British Intelligence under the overall editorship of Professor Harry Hinsley. In the wake of the attempts to identify Communist moles within the intelligence services, White was trying to rebuild the reputation of MI5 and SIS by describing its successes, primarily the wartime Double Cross Operation. After long discussions, Boyle let drop his suspicions about Blunt, and was testily warned by White to stay off ‘that difficult and embarrassing ground’. White added, rather paradoxically, that he ‘knew nothing about that subject, whatsoever’. After a few months, however, White had to change his tune, as general media coverage, and what Boyle had uncovered, suggested to him that journalists were better at uncovering skulduggery than were his own officers. He decided to face the inevitable while trying to protect MI5’s reputation in the whole sordid affair. He effectively confirmed Blunt’s treachery, and made only trivial comments when he reviewed Boyle’s manuscript in April 1979. (For libel reasons, the text concealed the names of Blunt and the gentleman considered at that time to be the Fifth Man, Wilfrid Mann.)

The account by Jenny Rees, Goronwy’s daughter, in Looking for Mr. Nobody (1994) differs, not only chronologically. She complemented the evidence derived from her father, not always the most reliable of witnesses, with information gained from later publications, but still stressed her father’s role as a collaborator with Boyle, as ‘together, they were putting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle’. But Boyle may not have told Rees immediately about everything he had gathered, as Goronwy wrote a letter, a few months before the book was published, to his friend Micky Burn (who had been a friend of Burgess’s), saying: “He told me, among other things, that our friend AB [Blunt] had actually confessed, but it would have caused too much of a scandal to do anything about it. This was on the personal authority of Dick White, but please don’t mention it  . . .”  Boyle may have kept that observation out of the notes that eventually fell to Bower: it might also explain his reluctance to conclude the biographical project, as it might have turned out to be unfavourable. Rees was by then, however, a very sick man. He was admitted to Charing Cross Hospital because of cancer at the beginning of November 1979, and soon experienced an unpleasant jolt when, because of a missing line in a Daily Mail review of The Climate of Treason, the article suggested that Rees himself had recruited Kim Philby.

After Private Eye made the identification clear, Blunt made a statement blaming Rees for his unmasking, and then went into hiding. This is an important fact, as the fatally ill Rees was to become a convenient dumping-ground for all manner of accusations that must have been preying on Boyle’s mind. Prime Minister Thatcher’s admission of Blunt’s guilt, and of his confession to the authorities in 1964 (after a broad pointer from Michael Straight in the USA) referred to Rees’s act of informing MI5 of Blunt’s treachery (without identifying Rees by name), claiming that the accusation had been dismissed because of lack of evidence. That was another lie prepared for the PM. I have shown, in Misdefending the Realm, how White and Liddell had assuredly had to face the truth of Blunt’s espionage when they caught his accomplice Leo Long (arguably the Sixth Man) in the act of purloining secrets from MI14 during the war. Moreover, Blunt’s communism had already come under the very opaque MI5 microscope when he was recruited by Military Intelligence in 1939, and then by MI5 in July 1940. Rees watched Mrs. Thatcher’s announcement from his hospital bed, and derived much satisfaction from the knowledge that the villain had been brought out into the open at last. In the Observer the following Sunday, Boyle acknowledged Rees’s contribution in nailing the art historian. That same day, Rees went into a coma.

With the consideration that the exact timing – or even genuineness – of all these events may be open to some debate, the documentary evidence of what Boyle engineered in the winter of 1979-80 is incontrovertible. Rees came out of his coma after a week, but his health steadily declined. Nevertheless, Boyle arranged to speak to him, and encouraged him to contribute to a testimony that appeared as the two Observer articles. On the day he died, December 12, Rees wrote to Jenny of the long pieces that Boyle had written based on their recent conversations: “They will appear after Christmas, and are, I think, very good.” It is clear that he approved of the texts, and supported Boyle’s aims. Jenny Rees informs us, according to what her sister Lucy told her (Jenny lived in Brittany at the time), that her father resisted seeing Boyle at first, but Boyle was then a man on a mission, and must have persuaded Rees to participate in creating the bizarre testimony that ended up in the Observer.

The first of the articles, published on January 13, can be seen at
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00552R000100600022-2.pdf .  Immediately, we can note a discrepancy in the accounts: Boyle claims that, when he regained consciousness after his coma, ‘the only visitor he asked to see was Andrew Boyle’. If Rees had indeed had a preview of the articles, that would appear to contradict what his daughters passed on to us. Perhaps Rees did not think that his coma was ‘consistent with his malignant condition’ (as one doctor had advised his family) and may have been induced by a malevolent outside agent, and thus wanted to impart extra information to Boyle in a hurry. As Boyle tells the story, Rees was roused to anger by Blunt’s ‘disingenuous replies’ in an interview broadcast on November 22. Yet, as Jenny rightly points out, the text that follows does not sound like a natural conversation, especially from a dying man. It is scripted, unnatural, with Rees melodramatically appealing to Boyle as if in a poorly constructed novel: “You, Andrew, [who else, in a duologue?] were largely instrumental in exposing him publicly as a Soviet spy.” What follows is a narrative about Rees’s life that must have also been very familiar to Boyle, not meriting the dying man’s wasted breaths. It was a show designed for the chattering classes.

And then we come to the critical leading questions on Maclean: “Was that the only occasion on which Maclean came into your life? Did anything occur at that time which might have alerted you to the double life he was already leading as a Soviet agent?”, asks Boyle. Rees has to think about this, as if it were all impromptu. He then comes up with new details about ‘Barbara’, a mutual friend, a photographer with a studio in Mayfair, who one day told Rees about Maclean’s skill with a camera. And suddenly, after all those years when, in decent health, he might have considered such details more constructively, he comes up with the linkage to Krivitsky, and how the defector had seen, in Moscow, specimens of Maclean’s handiwork (presumably photographs he took rather than documents with Maclean’s signature on them, although how Krivitsky knew that Maclean had photocopied them himself is not explained). Yet the vital salient fact is that, according to the report on Krivitsky compiled by Jane Archer in the spring of 1940, Krivitsky had never identified Maclean by name, and thus had been unable to ascribe documents he had seen in Moscow to Maclean’s doing. It was that failure by MI5 to follow up on clear hints to Maclean’s identity that had brought a heap of justifiable criticism to the Security Service, and especially to Guy Liddell and Dick White. To what source could Rees (and Boyle, his stooge in this conversation) possibly have been referring?

Mysterious Clues

Before I switch to exploring Krivitsky’s role in this adventure, however, I must inspect two clearly stated hints that appear in The Climate of Treason, but seem to have been overlooked by everyone, including Dick White, presumably, when he had a chance to vet the proofs. While the Archer report (which was eventually released to the National Archives in KV2-805, and can be read in Gary Kern’s 2004 package of documents on Soviet intelligence, Walter G. Krivitsky: MI5 Debriefing) gives vague background hints to Maclean’s identity, Boyle went to two outside sources for some of his information. In chapter 6 of his book, he records the verifiable evidence that Krivitsky asserted that the second spy in the Foreign Office ‘was a Scotsman of good family, educated at Eton and at Oxford, and an idealist who worked for the Russians without payment’. Krivitsky was wrong about the candidate’s precise educational background, but was giving reasonably warm tips. Then without defining the exact source, Boyle goes on to say that the spy ‘occasionally wore a cape and dabbled in artistic circles’, as if Krivitsky had also provided this information.

This line has been quoted also by Robert Cecil (in his 1988 biography of Maclean, A Divided Life), merely giving a reference for it of ‘FBI’, and by Roland Philipps (in his 2018 A Spy Named Orphan), with Phillips giving a precise reference (WFO 65-5648 from the ‘FBI Vaults online’), while suggesting also that Victor Mallet, the chargé d’affaires in Washington, heard of the statement. The phrase was reputedly included in the report that Mallet, on behalf of Lord Lothian, sent to MI5, and which prompted London to invite Krivitsky there for discussions. The archives at Kew inform us that, after Levine’s visit on September 3, Mallet immediately communicated with Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office, who then delegated action to Gladwyn Jebb, the Foreign Office liaison to the intelligence services. Levine, on the other hand, in his Plain Talk article written in 1948, asserted that he dealt solely with Lothian until the latter received confirmation from London a couple of weeks later that King had been identified as a spy, and that it was only then that Lothian introduced Mallet to him. The cables indicate otherwise. We must therefore bear in mind that Levine’s accounts may not be completely reliable, and that he could have been trying to elevate the role he played.

What Mallet wrote, thereafter, in the only extant memorandum to Jebb, was a profile that indicates that lines had been crossed somewhere: ‘a Scotsman of very good family, a well-known painter, and perhaps also a sculptor’, in connection with someone who had abetted in providing arms to Spain. (Despite Mallet’s belief to the contrary, Krivitsky did know the name of his agent who bought ‘arms for Spain’: it was Henri Pieck.  And Pieck was, indeed, a painter and graphic artist. Typical of the confusion sown was a message from Washington where a character named ‘K’ was being interpreted as meaning ‘King’, when it in fact meant ‘Krivitsky’.) Yet, even though the ‘cape’ delineation is the closest indication we have of a description from someone who actually met Maclean, it never appears in the Archer report. There is, furthermore, no record of it in the Krivitsky files at Kew, where the single confidential memorandum above is presented, but not the full correspondence between Mallet and Jebb. Krivitsky presumably did not repeat the phrase in London, or, if he did, for some reason the team overlooked it.

The intricacies of the supposed statements by Krivitsky – or, more accurately, by his guide, ghost-writer and translator Isaac Don Levine, who told officials of the British Embassy in Washington facts without letting Krivitsky know what he was doing – and where they were recorded, and how they have been distorted, are such that they merit a complete blog to themselves, and I shall thus defer a full analysis for another time.  Suffice it now to clarify five important points:

1. The extended communication chain of Krivitsky-Levine-Lothian-Mallet-Cadogan-Jebb-Liddell was bound to introduce some misunderstandings at some stage.
2. It is probable that Mallet and Jebb concealed from MI5 and SIS exactly what Mallet exchanged with Jebb in their ‘most secret’ communications;
3. We must remember that, when Krivitsky faced his interrogators in London, he did not know that Levine had told them anything about Soviet spies in the UK government (or, at least, that is what we have been led to believe);
4. Krivitsky himself behaved very deviously with his interrogators: if he had really wanted to help identify the anonymous spy in the Foreign Office, he would have provided them with clearer clues rather than the deliberately vague and misleading hints that Jane Archer extracted from him.
5. If Archer and her colleagues had really studied all Krivitsky’s pronouncements from articles published in the USA more thoroughly, they would have been able to apply far more pressure on him.

I thus return to the statement about the cape – the visual clue which is the closest we get to a suggestion that one of Krivitsky’s informers had actually encountered Maclean. Where did it originate? A startling item of data appears on page 460, as Note 24 to the ‘cape’ sentence (only) in Chapter 6 of A Climate of Treason. Boyle writes of the source: “FBI/CIA files, incorporating testimony of Isaac Don Levine and Walter Krivitsky. Apart from the Lothian report to the Foreign Office [sic, not to MI5], earlier evidence had been submitted on Krivitsky’s behalf by Wilfrid le Gallienne, a British diplomat *. In this evidence the unnamed ‘idealist of a good family’ had already proved his value by providing photocopies of proceedings of the Committee of Imperial Defence, seen by Krivitsky on his final visit to Moscow before defecting to the West. The photocopying was done in a Pimlico flat ” (my italics). Yet no explanatory information for this cryptic reference is provided. The apparently French connection is intriguing, since Krivitsky had, according to Kern and others, left massive amounts of testimony about his European spy network with the Sûreté in Paris before he left for the Americas in 1938. These volumes mysteriously disappeared at some stage, but is it possible that a British diplomat in the French capital had glimpsed what Krivitsky revealed of the UK group?  Lastly, I remind readers that Krivitsky’s ‘final visit to Moscow’ concluded on May 22, 1937.

[* Probably Wilfred Gallienne, 1897-1956. Gallienne was born in Guernsey. Having been chargé d’affaires and consul for four years in Tallinn, Estonia, he was appointed Ambassador on April 26, 1940. How Gallienne might have been encountered Krivitsky is not easily explained: Kern does not mention him. After the Soviet invasion of Estonia, Gallienne undertook a train journey from Moscow to Tokyo in August 1940: the timing is inappropriate, the connection to Krivitsky obscure. Gallienne was intriguingly appointed British consul in New York in January 1941, a couple of weeks before Krivitsky’s death, but Boyle writes of ‘earlier evidence’ suggesting, at the latest, summer 1939. Alternatively, but less probably, Boyle could have meant Richard de Gallienne, 1866-1947, poet, essayist and critic, who wrote from Paris to H. Montgomery Hyde in 1938, and could have thus run across Krivitsky there. The Hyde lead is intriguing, since he joined SIS in 1940, and then worked for British Security Coordination in New York. He later wrote several books on intelligence. A promising letter from Gallienne’s step-daughter, Gwen, to Montgomery Hyde, however, turns out to be concerned with Hyde’s enthusiasm for homosexual law reform, not espionage. (My thanks to the Record Office at Liverpool Libraries for providing a photocopy of the letter.) A longshot could be that Boyle misinterpreted his source, and was referring to GALLENI, the alias of the illegal Dmitri Bystrolyotov, who almost became Maclean’s (or King’s) handler in 1936, and also managed Henri Pieck for a while. Yet supplying motivation and opportunity for Bystrolyotov to speak up for Krivitsky is a struggle. Whichever source is correct, it is astonishing to me that the ‘de Gallienne’ lead was not substantiated, verified, or followed up by anyone. A research task for another day.  Lastly, I should declare an interest: I am a descendant of the Galliennes of the Channel Islands through my maternal grandmother. See: https://coldspur.com/reviews/an-american-odyssey/ ]

The first part of Boyle’s explanation does not make sense. To begin with, the CIA was not created until after the war, and it is highly unlikely that original statements made by Krivitsky about a spy in the British Foreign Office would appear only in an FBI file. Philipps’ citation of a detailed reference appears to be false: I have asked the author about it, and he states that he was relying on Cecil, and inserted it as a kind of guess by default. (Research at the National Archives and Records Administration indicates that the record cited concerns a possible Soviet double-agent, Nosenko.) One can find another statement about the hints to Maclean in an article, Who Killed Krivitsky?, by the American journalist Flora Lewis published in the Washington Post of February 13, 1966, to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Krivitsky’s death. (It appears as an Appendix to Krivitsky’s In Stalin’s Secret Service). A clipping of the article appears in the Krivitsky file at the FBI Vault, which might explain later references. This text reads as follows: “Krivitsky described another agent in the British Foreign Office, a dashing Scotsman given to smoking a pipe and sometimes wearing a cape.” But no mention of ‘dabbling in artistic circles’. (And smoking a pipe was hardly a characteristic likely to distinguish a British civil servant from the herd in the 1930s.) Astonishingly, Lewis provides no source for her citation, and she includes multiple egregious errors in her account of the Krivitsky/Levine approach to the British. (One of the few weaknesses of Kern’s book is that he pays close attention to what she writes about Krivitsky’s death while ignoring her very palpable errors concerning transatlantic matters.) But was there a missing Krivitsky document to which she referred, perhaps?

This whole farrago is muddied even further by John Costello, who wrote his in-depth analysis of the whole business, The Mask of Treachery, in 1988. Costello did not help his cause by writing imprecisely about who was saying what. “He also referred to another traitor in the Foreign Office ‘whose name was Scottish and whose habits were Bohemian’”, he wrote, on page 345, as if Krivitsky had said this before the initial message arrived on Alexander Cadogan’s desk, when we know that it was Levine who provided the information.  Furthermore, Costello attributed this statement in his Notes to one of the Saturday Evening Post articles from April 1939, as well as to Levine’s Stalin’s Great Secret (p 140). Yet neither source shows evidence of any such description: Jane Archer of MI5 had read the Saturday Evening Post articles that summer, and would surely have noticed such a statement, anyway. Levine’s book did not come out until 1956: it contains only 126 pages, with no mention of Krivitsky. (In Plain Talk, in November 1948, Levine did write, however, that he “learned that the second agent was of Scottish origin, with an artistic background”.) Costello then shed doubt on the case for Maclean, agreeing with the author Richard Deacon, and pointed his suspicion towards Lord Inverchapel (then Archibald Clark Kerr), who would in 1942 replace Stafford Cripps as His Majesty’s Ambassador in Moscow. Yet Kerr was posted to Iraq between 1935 and 1938.

Even if Krivitsky did not know the name of his agent, Lewis’s phrase would suggest that he knew what the spy looked like. And in his 1973 memoir, Eyewitness to History, Isaac Don Levine reinforced that notion, on p 191, with the following startling revelation: “Krivitsky could describe his appearance, he knew something of his background, he did not know his name.” (In his 1956 evidence to Congress, Levine merely paraphrased what Krivitsky told him as follows: ‘a member of a Scottish family and a young intellectual communist with artistic interests’, echoing his Plain Talk description.) To be able to describe someone’s appearance strongly suggests that one is not relying on second-hand impressions. Unfortunately, Levine shed no new light on capes, pipes, artistic circles, bohemian habits, or even hints of Caledonian élan, but it is worth mentioning that, in making the arrangements for Krivitsky’s passage to England at the end of 1939, Levine said that Krivitsky was nervous because he had travelled to the UK once before, probably undetected, but no doubt on a false passport, and thus might have feared being arrested. And, as I indicated above, Krivitsky told Levine his knowledge about the spies in the Foreign Office in confidence, and did not know that Levine had passed on the hints to the British Embassy in Washington. One of the benefits to the British was that they were able to impress Krivitsky with the fact that King was already behind bars when he arrived in January 1940, and thus give the defector the impression that British Intelligence was much smarter than he thought it was. Yet Krivitsky never told his interrogators that he could ‘describe the spy’s appearance.’

Given this muddle, and the absence of evidence elsewhere, the second part of Boyle’s Note has therefore to be taken more seriously. But what was the purpose of presenting, in 1979, this gratuitous factoid, and why could Boyle not be more explicit about the ‘de Gallienne’ informant? If the source of the original documents was not identifiable, why was the location of their copying, but not the camera-operator, worth mentioning? Why would Boyle refer to Pimlico as the location, but encourage Rees to cite a studio in Mayfair? Yet the Note does suggest that someone not only knew that Maclean had provided photocopies, but could also locate the studio where he had performed the job. Was that a hint that the purloiner had been the copier? If that was known, why could it not be declared openly? I shall return to this point later.

Krivitsky’s Supervision

An accurate recording of Krivitsky’s chronology is essential for setting Boyle’s claims in a proper context. (I shall not provide here a full summary of his life: readers can go for that to Misdefending the Realm, or, better still, to Gary Kern’s superlative biography, A Death in Washington.) All that is necessary to know here is that Walter Krivitsky had been head of Soviet Military Intelligence (the GRU) in western Europe, had defected in 1937 after seeing his colleague Ignace Reiss killed by Stalin’s assassins, survived two assassination attempts in France, and had made his way to the USA. There he struggled with residency permits, suspiciousness on the part of the FBI because he was defector, attacks from the right because he was a communist, and from the left because he was anti-Stalin, and disdain from the White House because he was rocking the boat against the USA’s future ally, for whom Roosevelt harboured some ideological sympathy. After his intermediary Isaac Don Levine revealed to Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, the existence of a Soviet spy named King in the Foreign Office, and hints of a second agent there, Krivitsky was brought over in January 1940 to London, under conditions of extreme secrecy, to be interrogated by officers of MI5 and SIS about possible other infiltrators in Britain’s political hallways. It was then that he gave broad tips to the identities of Kim Philby and Donald Maclean that were not followed up. Krivitsky died in a Washington hotel, in January 1941, almost certainly shot by Stalin’s hitmen, in circumstances that were made to look like a suicide.

What is critical to this story is the fact that Krivitsky’s last visit to Moscow took place in May 1937: he left there for the Hague on May 22. Thus any evidence of espionage records that he described to his British interrogators must refer to a period before then. This fact is important, as Maclean’s chief courier (and soon lover) was one Kitty Harris, a Moscow agent who had travelled widely, and had even engaged in a probably bigamous marriage with the founder of the Communist Party of the USA, Earl Browder. The leading biographers of Maclean, Roland Philipps (A Spy Named Orphan, 2018) and Michael Holzman (Idealism and Espionage, 2014) both suggest that Harris and Maclean met for the first time some months after Kitty returned from Moscow after intensive training (in wireless and photography) in May 1937. Philipps sets the date as late as April 1938, indicating that Harris had spent some time in the USA: Holzman merely states ‘early 1938’. Both appear to derive their information from Igor Damaskin’s The Spy With Seventeen Names (2000), a work that the author claimed was based on reliable Soviet archives, but which, he has since admitted, contains some romantic flourishes and innovations. What neither author points out, however, is that Damaskin relates how Harris was working as a courier between London and Paris as early as 1936, before being summoned to Moscow in January 1937 for training. Thus she might well have been used as an intermediary for Maclean in this period, and the dramatic first encounter (using coded phrases) that Damaskin describes could have been an invention. Overall, Kitty Harris’s movements in the late thirties are more easily verifiable than her exploits in China the previous decade.

What Damaskin does not report, however, is that, while in Moscow, Harris, who was an NKVD operative *, had a meeting with Krivitsky, as they were both staying at the Savoy Hotel. In his memoir, In Stalin’s Secret Service, based on his 1939 Saturday Evening Post articles, Krivitsky explained that he was looking for a woman agent for Switzerland, and Harris was sent to him to be interviewed, as if he did not know who she was. (“She had been described to me as the former wife of Earl Browder . . .”) It is a rather disingenuous statement by Krivitsky, as he later admitted, to Ruth Shipley of the State Department, that Earl Browder’s sister, Marguerite, going under the name of Jane Montgomery, had been an agent working for him in Berlin, while in his book he declares only that Marguerite ‘was then in our service in Central Europe’, and that Kitty ‘spoke well’ of her. It was this encounter that enabled him later to recognise Kitty in a photograph, but he seemed to want to distance himself from both agents in any written account.

[ * The state intelligence service, the future KGB, previously the OGPU, was titled the NKVD between 1934 and 1941.]

Nevertheless, Krivitsky claimed that he approved Kitty’s assignment to a foreign post without resolving for us the issues of how NKVD and GRU responsibilities and agents were shared or allocated, or why she was not suitable for Switzerland, or how the coincidence of her ending up as the handler for Maclean occurred. The details he provided, however, constitute reasonably solid evidence that the encounter did in fact happen. And one can understand, perhaps, why the Moscow organs did not want to have Krivitsky’s name soiling the heroic biography that Damaskin was concocting. It is another reason why Damaskin’s accounts have to be taken with some scepticism, and his assertions verified from another source, if possible. Yet we have to remind ourselves that Krivitsky was devious too, as the ‘kriv’ origin (= ‘crooked’) of his assumed name tells us.

When Kitty Harris landed in London in April 1938, Maclean advised her to rent an apartment where she could perform photography, and she took up a flat in Bayswater, where, so Maclean said, he went from his own place in Oakley Street, in Chelsea, twice a week with papers ‘borrowed’ from the Foreign Office, to have them photocopied. Other accounts suggest that Kitty came to his flat, and copied them there: that is unlikely. We must draw two conclusions from this timeline: even if the district of Pimlico, indicated by Boyle, might have been a mistake, Kitty Harris was certainly not the agent responsible for getting documents to Moscow that Krivitsky would have been able to see, but it is quite possible that Kitty could have been the source of Krivitsky’s impressions of the character and employment of Maclean if she did indeed act solely as a courier in 1936.

Maclean Delivers the Goods

1936 was a very productive year for Maclean, although the evidence is a little contradictory. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, in Deadly Illusions (1993), claim that he was ordered by his ‘illegal’ * NKVD handler Alexander Orlov not to supply any documents in the first few months of the year, but instead focus on finding his way properly around the Foreign Office. Orlov, when he had to make a speedy exit from London in October 1935, had taken with him a copy of a letter from Lord Simon congratulating Maclean on his acceptance into the Foreign Office, something that was ‘read with glee in the Lubyanka’, according to Costello and Tsarev. Orlov thus had to leave another renowned illegal, Arnold Deutsch, in charge. A few months later, Orlov wrote, in a memorandum to Slutsky, the head of the Foreign Department of the NKVD, that Maclean was ready for ‘full activation’ on March 26. Yet the same authors report that Maclean had already provided Deutsch with his first batch of documents in January. Maclean and Deutsch must have ignored Orlov’s instructions.

[* ‘illegal’: an agent operating without protection of Soviet diplomatic cover, probably in the country on a false passport]

In April 1936, the Politburo decided that Orlov should be sent to Spain, and Theodore Mally, another Great Illegal, who had originally been sent to the UK, in January 1936, to handle the other spy in the Foreign Office, was appointed the chief illegal rezident in England. Deutsch thus started working for Mally. This was also the time when Kitty Harris was assigned to Mally, and started acting as a courier. Moreover, Deutsch was to meet Krivitsky for the first time, in Paris, in June 1936, so that encounter could have provided another opportunity for the achievements of their young star to be communicated and lauded. Nigel West and Tsarev, in The Crown Jewels (1998), assert that Deutsch started working for himself again at the end of August, only to be re-assigned to Mally in January 1937. It might have all been rather confusing for Maclean, and the NKVD infrastructure was not very stable, but the documents got through.

Krivitsky referred to some important documents that he had seen on three occasions, in 1936 and 1937, in Moscow. On the last, he had called on Slutsky (see above), who was a friend. Slutsky, clearly well-briefed by Orlov, handed him the latest book of extracts of information from the ‘Imperial Council’ source, which were treated with special respect, as they dealt with vital information concerning the political situation in Berlin. They were in fact minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and we can rely on the inspection of the same by Tsarev to understand that Maclean had been the source of the originals that had been photocopied in London. Security in the western department, where Maclean worked, was notoriously lax, and Maclean was able to help himself to any number of telegrams, reports from SIS, and transcriptions from deciphered foreign reports, as well as to re-assure his controllers that Britain was not making breakthroughs in cryptology against Soviet ciphers. The trove from the latter part of 1936 was especially valuable, culminating in the delivery of the complete minutes of the meeting of the Imperial Defence Committee of December 20, at which Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was not the only prominent attendee.

How were these documents photographed? Costello and Tsarev tell the story as follows: When Maclean handed over bundles of documents “ . . . they were then photographed in the apartment of HERTA, another codename used by the female courier PFEIL. They were returned to Maclean the next day, so he could take them back the following day. For the most secret ‘blue jackets’ containing signals intelligence which Maclean could only obtain access to during office hours, he had been given a roll-flex camera so that he could photograph them himself in situ.” Michael Holzman, using information from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service in Moscow (‘Sketches of History’), says that the documents ‘were photographed on a “flat carrier” at the NKVD residency and given back to him so that the next day he could return them to their proper places in the Foreign Office files.’ Holzman echoes the claim that Mally gave Donald a miniature camera. Thus Maclean may have been an occasional photographer, but there was no indication that he maintained his own studio.

PFEIL (German) or STRELA (Russian), in English ARROW, was the cryptonym initially given jointly to Alexander Tudor-Hart and his wife, Edith (née Suschitsky). Edith had been born in Vienna, and was a close friend of Philby’s first wife, Litzi Friedmann. She was a renowned photographer, and, according to West and Tsarev, maintained a studio in Brixton, which was not really convenient for quick turn-rounds from Chelsea, but could have served as an overnight operation. Ironically, MI5 kept a constant watch on Tudor-Hart: she was implicated in the Percy Glading spy affair, since a Leica camera belonging to her had been found on Glading’s premises. MI5 interviewed her in March 1938, but again failed to join up the dots: Tudor-Hart simply denied knowing how Glading could have acquired the camera, and MI5 dropped the investigation.  She was later divorced from her husband, in 1940: he had gone to Spain with the Republicans Medical Aid Committee. Tudor-Hart has obtained a somewhat mythic status among the friends of Stalin, a reputation that is probably overstated.

Philipps claims that Deutsch ‘would meet Maclean on his way home to Chelsea, take the files to his photographer and then meet Maclean again in Chelsea late in the evening so that he could give the documents back for their return to the office.’ That sounds like a dangerous routine that should have been avoided, as it was too predictable and regular, and presumably also made Maclean’s social life rather dreary. A visit to Brixton and back, including a session in the dark room, would have been well nigh impossible. The source, however, was Kim Philby in a STASI training-video, so we should not rely on that too heavily. Other accounts suggest that Maclean was encouraged to pass on documents on Fridays, so that the photographer would have more time to work on them before the next business day. Tudor-Hart was also reported to have acted as courier, taking photographs clandestinely to Copenhagen, which would indicate that dealing with the Soviet Embassy was considered too risky. Yet it would have taken Tudor-Hart out of action for long stretches, provoked suspicion as she returned through customs each time, and extended the delay after which Moscow could view the secrets. Deutsch wrote for her file that she was ‘modest, diligent, and brave’, but also rather careless, though he might have been covering up his own clumsiness in that memorandum. And, since Tudor-Hart was also a well-known photographer for children, she attracted more attention than was appropriate. (But not the scrupulous attention from MI5 that she merited.)

A study of Tudor-Hart’s files at the National Archives suggests a more complicated story, however. The address at Brixton was probably that of her husband, with whom she was not living permanently. Surveillance reports indicate that she was living alone at Haverstock Hill, in Belsize Park, NW3 (very close to the celebrated Lawn Road flats, where communists and illegals resided). There she maintained her studio, from April 1935 until at least February 1936, and probably until late 1937. For a while, in the summer of 1937, she was reported as staying with her husband in Acre Lane, Brixton – somewhat astonishingly in the company of Margaret Moxon, described as the wife of Arthur Wynn, who would later be unveiled as the leader of the ‘Oxford Ring’ of Soviet spies – and departed thence to collect her mother from Vienna.  On August 27, 1937, landing from Ostend, she gave the authorities an address of 132C, Sutherland Avenue, Maida Vale, and by the following January, she was reported living at that address, with her studio moved to Duke Street, off Oxford Street. To muddy the waters even further, when a suspected communist Siegfried Baruch was interrogated on arrival in February 1938, he communicated with Tudor-Hart at an address in Halsey Street, Knightsbridge. The conclusion concerning Maclean would appear to be that the peripatetic Tudor-Hart, if she did carry out the photographing of documents during 1936, would have performed the procedure from her studio in Belsize Park, and it is highly unlikely that she moved her operation from one side of London to unfashionable Brixton. (By 1939, she had moved to 128 Alexander Road, Hampstead.)

There was, however, another photographer working for Mally at that time, someone called Wolf Levit, and his story really belongs to that of another spy.

The Demise of Captain King

Much has been made of the rivalry between the Soviet GRU (Military Intelligence) and OGPU or NKVD (State Intelligence), but Krivitsky’s close involvement in NKVD espionage operations in Britain in the mid-1930s shows that a more cooperative atmosphere was evolving. The frequent exchanges that he, as a GRU officer, had with NKVD agents and illegals is explained by the MI5 report, which informs us that, under the commission granted to him in 1935, Krivitsky was entitled to look into Mally’s organisation. Krivitsky was based in the Hague in the Netherlands, and was also allowed to use NKVD agents for his own operations if it was convenient. He himself indicated that the NKVD had begun to take over the functions and personnel of the GRU in 1935-36, and in May 1937 the Fourth Department of the Red Army General Staff (which was the official name of the Foreign Branch of military intelligence) was transferred to the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, under Nikolai Yezhov. This background manoeuvring helps explain why Krivitsky became so involved with the decisions concerning NKVD agents.

This was true in the case of John King, a clerk in the cipher department of the Foreign Office. King, who had money troubles, was recruited by the NKVD in March 1935, and quickly provided a steady stream of notes, and summaries of cables – but not yet photocopies. Moscow wanted originals, however.  The NKVD infrastructure was stretched: King was handled by a Dutchman called Henri Pieck, but Pieck was under surveillance, and had to restrict his visits to the United Kingdom. In May 1935, Mally came back to London to review the situation, and recommended that King be handled by Orlov. This suggestion was rejected by Moscow Centre, as Orlov (and Deutsch) were too occupied with handling Percy Glading and the burgeoning Cambridge spies. In June, Moscow then made the superficially astonishing decision that Krivitsky should handle King, perhaps because Krivitsky actually controlled the NKVD agent Pieck, and was geographically close to him. While this was being considered, Mally returned to London to set up an apartment in Buckingham Gate, ostensibly for Pieck’s business, and rented by Pieck’s partner, Conrad Parlianti, which King then visited practically every day, taking documents for a quick turn-round of photocopying.

Mally was clearly concerned about King’s status. Because of morale problems, he could not be left unsupervised for long, and Mally doubted that Krivitsky (who at that time did not speak English, and would have had visa problems getting into the UK) would be able to take over such an important responsibility. Hence Mally went to the Hague to speak to Krivitsky in December 1935, and apparently convinced Krivitsky that he should abandon the idea of taking on the supervision of King: he, Pieck and Mally decided that this valuable spy needed to be controlled by Mally himself. Mally thus returned to London, and had his first meeting with King at the 34 Buckingham Gate apartment on January 6, 1936. What is truly significant about this episode is that Krivitsky was fully briefed on John King, his motivations, his employment, his access, and the existence of the convenient address at Buckingham Gate (which is actually in Westminster, close to the Foreign Office, on the border with Pimlico).

Yet complications ensued. MI5 learned that the Buckingham Gate address was registered in the name of Pieck’s company. The British commercial attaché in the Hague, John Hooper, who might have been trying to recruit Pieck to SIS, attended a house-warming party at Pieck’s new apartment in the Hague, and revealed to Pieck that British intelligence knew about his past. Pieck immediately let Krivitsky know of the peril they were now in, and informed Mally that no more rendezvous could be held there. The fact was that Pieck’s business partner Parlianti, with whom Pieck’s wife was in love, was an informer for MI5, and Parlianti discovered the camera studio at Buckingham Gate. As West and Tsarev relate it: “A replacement was rented and the meetings were resumed with the previous frequency.”  They do not tell us where the replacement address was located.

Buckingham Gate may have been used as a drop-off point for some while after that, as Krivitsky told his MI5 interrogators that a young Englishman, Brian Goold-Verschoyle (who met a grisly end in the Soviet Union in 1942, murdered by the NKVD as a ‘Trotskyist’) was used to fetch packages from that location and deliver them to Mally. “If the material contained matter of urgent importance HARDT [Mally] telegraphed its contents to Moscow through the Soviet Embassy. If not, he sent it by Brian Goold-Verschoyle, or by another courier to Wolf Levit to be photographed”, ran Jane Archer’s account. Levit was apparently a GRU man, and Krivitsky had the authority to move him from Paris to London specifically to address the need for photographing King’s documents. William E. Duff, in his account of the Great Illegals, A Time For Spies (1999), locates Levit’s studio off Belsize Park in London NW3, much further away from the centre of London than Brixton, and in the opposite direction, (and, of course, close to Tudor-Hart’s studio). Duff states that Levit also acted as a courier for the photographs he took. It was not an efficient way of doing things.

The time of these Great Illegals was winding down. Mally was appointed chief illegal resident in April 1936. He and his wife had arrived as ‘Hardts’ on their passport: MI5 noticed their arrival with suspicion, but did nothing. Mally quickly concluded that the volume of material coming from Maclean was so great and so important that he needed a dedicated handler. Mally could not give him enough attention, since he was occupied with all his other recruitment and management duties. According to Costello and Tsarev, Moscow Centre responded promptly, saying that another famous illegal, Dmitry Bystrolyotov, would be coming over to handle Maclean. Bystrolyotov’s biographer, Emil Draitser, claims that the agent was sent over to handle King, perhaps to free up Mally.  Irrespective of the exact mission, however, Bystrolyotov fell into disfavour, and was prohibited from travelling. (He later endured a long period of torture and incarceration, but escaped a bullet in the back of the neck.) Mally thus had to continue to handle Maclean himself. Early in 1937 the rezident also realised that there was a lot of overlap in the documents coming from King and Maclean, which diminished King’s importance somewhat. Furthermore, by April 1937 Mally had also recruited John Cairncross, so he had yet another source in the Foreign Office. Mally was also involved in trying to set up another photography studio in May 1937, after the credentials of the MI5 agent Olga Gray had been accepted by the CPG, which was looking for a valuable assistant. She was encouraged to take up an apartment in Holland Street, Kensington, and receive training in photography from a Mr. and Mrs. Stevens – in fact the agents Willy and Mary Brandes. Mally liked to keep his photocopying crews separated. This successful penetration by Gray – when MI5 came very close to capturing Mally red-handed – led to the successful arrest of Glading by MI5 and Special Branch.

Stalin’s purges were now in full swing. In June, Mally was ordered to go to Paris to help organise the killing of Krivitsky’s colleague and friend, Ignace Reiss, something that he rejected, thus signing his own death-warrant. Mally was then summoned to Moscow in July, and shot soon after. Reiss was killed, anyway. King faded from view at this time, as he now had no contacts on whom to pass information. Left without a Soviet handler, Guy Burgess set about recruiting further enthusiasts for the cause, and it was soon after this, probably at the beginning of 1938, that he encouraged Goronwy Rees to provide him with information from the All Souls High Table, ready for the time when a new contact, Anatoly Gorsky, was sent out in December 1938 to take over the ‘legal’ NKVD rezidentura. Moscow Centre was convinced enough of Rees’s seriousness to grant him the cryptonyms GROSS and FLEET, and examples of the fairly trivial information he provided can be found in the Mitrokhin archive.

Krivitsky ignored the recall to Moscow in early October 1937, and made his escape via France, avoiding an attempt on his own life a couple of weeks later. His friend Slutsky was not so lucky, killed by cyanide poisoning in February 1938. And Krivitsky’s survival would mean that King would eventually be ‘betrayed’ by Krivitsky. When Krivitsky eventually reached the USA, and told his ghost-writer and adviser, Philip Don Levine, about the spy in the Foreign Office, Levine decide to inform Lord Lothian in the Washington Embassy, with the result that King (alongside a number of other traitors) was detained and interrogated. The incriminating evidence of payments made to him from the Narodny Bank was discovered: he initially denied that any secret documents had been photographed, but eventually confessed, and was sentenced and in jail by the time Krivitsky arrived in January 1940. Krivitsky did not mind sacrificing a mercenary: though not a Stalinist, the defector was still a communist, and did not want to make it easy for the imperialist enemy to start mopping up the networks in which so much investment had been made.

A. Kitty Harris’s studio                                          E. Wolf  Levit’s studio

B. Olga Gray’s apartment                                      F.  Tudor-Hart’s home & studio

C. Edith Tudor-Hart’s home – 1937                      G. ‘Barbara’s’ studio

D.  Victor Rothschild’s house                                 H.  Tudor-Hart’s studio – 1937

I.  The Foreign Office                                              M.  Henry Pieck’s office

J.  Guy Burgess’s apartment                                   N.  John King’s lodgings

K. Donald Maclean’s apartment                            O.  Tudor-Hart’s 2nd home

L.  The mysterious studio in Pimlico                     P.   A. Tudor-Hart’s home

The Pimlico Gambit

What the events of these years tell us is that a) Donald Maclean never developed the skills to operate his own photographic studio, b) while the NKVD may have operated such studios in Brixton, Maida Vale, Mayfair, Kensington, Westminster, Bayswater and Belsize Park (and maybe elsewhere), there is no evidence that it used premises in Pimlico, and c) Maclean’s ‘handiwork’ was never manufactured in the Buckingham Gate office that was closest to the district of Pimlico. Thus we have to conjecture what Andrew Boyle had in mind when he very provocatively claimed that Maclean’s photocopying was performed ‘in a Pimlico flat’. (I note that the real Fifth Man, John Cairncross, lived in Pimlico at the time, but Maclean and Cairncross were unaware of each other’s recruitment by the Soviets.)

It seems probable that Boyle knew far more than he was able to let on. By the time he submitted the copy for The Climate of Treason, he must have received some insider knowledge that Maclean’s espionage activities had been known a long time back. Of course, it should not be discounted completely that he was simply making an intelligent assumption about the fact that the copies that Krivitsky saw in Moscow must have been photographed somewhere close to the Foreign Office and Maclean’s apartment. Yet it was a worthless and unsubstantiated squib to throw out in a well-concealed Note. If he had something important to say, he would have brought it out in the main text. As a footnote, however, it is highly puzzling. Were readers supposed to track down who of the spies were known at that time, identify who lived in Pimlico, and therefore work out for themselves who the responsible party was?

We have to accept, of course, that the provocation must have failed, as nobody appears to have noticed it. If Boyle had been challenged on this fact – say by White, who must have failed to spot the reference when he reviewed the text – he might have been able to ascribe it to vagueness, or muddled notes, as it was not specific enough to incriminate a source for the geography. For Boyle had to be very careful: if an ex-intelligence officer had given him information that breached the OSA, he would have been very careful not to have endangered that person’s reputation (and pension) by revealing any undisclosed information that could point unfailingly to a particular source. Moreover, Boyle was surely scared. White had given him warnings not to delve too deeply into the matter of Blunt, even. Yet Boyle was anxious to see the story developed further, as he sensed a massive cover-up.

And then the Blunt story broke, thanks to Private Eye, on November 9. That was one hurdle crossed. Margaret Thatcher made her announcement on November 15. In the Observer of November 18, Boyle revealed how Goronwy Rees had confirmed Blunt’s treachery to him a couple of years earlier, and he also made the claim that ‘two dozen and more accomplices and accessories whom MI5 claims to have neutralised’ still remained at large, and had been responsible for protecting Burgess and Maclean. Matters then must have moved quickly. Blunt came out of hiding on November 20, and made a statement. Maybe another intelligence officer contacted Boyle after the story broke, to encourage him or even give him new facts. At some stage Boyle must have decided that he could use Rees to deflect attention away from himself in his campaign to name the guilty persons. As indicated above, Jenny Rees claimed (based on what her sister told her) that her father did not want to see Boyle at first, ‘though he finally [sic] agreed to do so’. Boyle and Rees did not have much time to share their thoughts.

Maybe Rees was provoked into helping Boyle by a strange incident. As I reported above, the day that Margaret Thatcher made her announcement, Rees fell into a coma. Jenny’s brother Daniel telephoned her to say that a doctor at the hospital believed he could have been injected with insulin, and accounts of unidentified Russians loitering near the wards of the hospital were repeated. Another doctor said that his coma could have been ascribed to his cancer. In any case, Rees took a week to recover, which would take the chronology up to November 22. (In November, I tried to contact Jenny Rees, who has been very helpful to me in the past, to ask whether her father had retained any memory of being injected by non-professional staff, but she has not responded to my email.)

I do not believe this incident has gained any other attention: it sounds a bit desperate for either the KGB or MI5 to want to kill a dying man who had probably already communicated all he knew about the case. As Rees’s other daughter, Lucy, said: “Boyle wanted to talk to him to see what more he could find out, but Rees said he did not know any more and there was nothing he could add.” That was probably true. Yet Boyle must have succeeded in completing some lengthy conversations with Rees, written them up, and given them to the dying man to approve. And that approval was probably sought by David Astor, the editor of the Observer. Ironically, two days before Rees died on December 12, Isaiah Berlin wrote to Margaret Thatcher to decline her offer of a life peerage. Perhaps he recognised that it would have been unseemly for him, as one of the closest conspirators with Burgess, to have accepted such an honour just after Blunt had been deprived of his knighthood.

Yet, if Boyle hoped that there would be a counter-reaction to Rees’s spurious claims about Mayfair and the probably fictitious ‘Barbara’, with a revitalised interest in real photographic studios, he must have been disappointed. How would the Pimlico Gambit play out?

Controversy in the ‘Observer’

I now return to the two instalments that were published in the Observer, on January 13 and 20, 1980, and analyse their arguments and structure in more detail. The first article starts off by trying to change the perception that Rees was a villain to making the case that he was a victim: “But Rees himself, although close to Burgess, was never a spy, or a homosexual, or even a member of the Communist Party”. This statement was certainly true about Rees’s sexual preferences, but mendacious or irrelevant otherwise. Rees had indeed acted as a spy, and avoiding the Communist Party was a key behaviour of the most dangerous of Stalin’s Men and Women. Boyle then brings up the troubling matter of Rees’s coma, even citing the ‘bizarre murder of Georgi Markov’, perhaps to suggest that the KGB had been responsible. He specifically indicates that Rees was in peril from ‘more dangerous intruders’ than ‘over-zealous journalists’.

Boyle then makes the point that the meeting with him was undertaken on Rees’s initiative. It may have been – or Boyle might have convinced him that this was the better way of representing for posterity what happened next. Then follows a long, and largely redundant, account of Rees’s encounters with Guy Burgess. It is stagey, artificial, and includes information which Boyle certainly knew already, or with which readers of A Chapter of Accidents would have been familiar. It has clearly been set up for the benefit of the uninformed Observer readership: Rees would not have wasted his dying breaths on such material otherwise, and would not have requested a meeting with Boyle to tell him what the author already knew.

Some of Rees’s testimony is deceitful. He makes the ridiculous claim that ‘Burgess ‘had inexplicably turned a political somersault, declared himself a Fascist and gone down from Cambridge’, adding that he didn’t hear Burgess’s explanation until 1935-1936, when he and Burgess became neighbours in London. Yet Burgess had taken his aegrotat degree at Cambridge in the summer of 1933, and even replaced Rees on a visit to Moscow in 1934, showing openly communist sympathies. Burgess was probably recruited officially by the NKVD early in 1935, and took up his right-wing cover only at the end of that year, when he started working for the Conservative MP John Macnamara, and joined the Anglo-German Fellowship. Burgess told Rees that he was working for the Comintern, and tried to recruit him, probably in late November 1937. Thus Rees’s reputation as someone unreliable with the truth can be seen to be deserved, even on his deathbed. He then makes a disparaging (for 1979) remark about Kim Philby being another of Burgess’s sexual conquests, an assertion that is highly unlikely. He also makes a mention of Burgess’s Chester Square flat – in Belgravia, so not strictly Pimlico, but right next-door, in case that was seen as a marker.

Now comes the critical, but almost parenthetical, section. Rees happens to mention his first encounter with Donald Maclean: ‘his air of empty superiority affronted me’. Here Boyle comes up with the question that must have been on his mind ever since the ‘Pimlico’ reference: “Did anything occur at that time which might have alerted you to the double life he was already leading as a Soviet agent?” After a significant pause, Rees does not respond with any insights on Maclean’s political affiliations or sympathies, his activities at Cambridge, his friendship with Burgess, but a wholly irrelevant and assuredly imagined story of his and Maclean’s ‘mutual friend’, Barbara, who was a professional photographer in Mayfair. I repeat the section, for emphasis: “She told me one day how skilful Donald was with a camera – so skilful that she’d no hesitation in letting him use the studio for his own work.” (We should also recall that Rees earlier stated that he had not seen Maclean between 1935 and 1950, so the reality of this liaison, since Maclean did not start handing over documents until early 1936, must be highly questionable.)  Rees then makes the extraordinary conceptual leap that, because documents probably stolen or borrowed by Maclean had found their way on to Krivitsky’s desk, Maclean himself must have photographed them, and used the highly insecure vehicle of a female friend’s studio to do so.

No other source indicates that Maclean had any disposition to photography as a hobby, that he was outstandingly skilful at it, or had his artwork displayed anywhere. As we have seen, no evidence has yet appeared elsewhere to suggest that Maclean photocopied any documents himself apart from the use of the miniature camera at the Foreign Office. Since the Special Branch had not seen fit to detain Edith Tudor-Hart when she was caught practically red-handed, it was not going to detain Donald Maclean on the grounds that he was in unauthorised possession of photographic paraphernalia. Moreover, why would Rees recall this incident only now, a recollection which would undercut the claim he made that he did not conclude that Maclean was a spy until the unpleasant encounter in 1950? And he significantly does not mention Pimlico.

Yet a more important question must be asked: how did Rees know that Krivitsky had seen specimens of Maclean’s handiwork in Moscow? The information in Jane Archer’s report was tightly held by MI5, and was not declassified until 2002. Moreover, it does not specifically identify Maclean – the whole catastrophe of MI5’s indolence lies around the fact that the Security Service did not follow up the obvious hints. As I have explained in Misdefending the Realm, Jane Archer’s report passed over the desk of Jenifer Williams (soon to be Hart) at the Home Office in March 1940, and was certainly seen by Guy Burgess after that, but the last thing that Burgess, who in 1943 recommended that Rees should be killed as he was a possible threat to his safety, would have wanted to do at that time would be to share the contents of the MI5 report with Rees.

Boyle must have known, however. A possible circumstance – unless excavating the de Gallienne Connection shows some fresh intelligence from Europe – was that a prominent intelligence officer had either described or shown to him the Krivitsky report. Yet more than that: that person might have indicated to Boyle that Krivitsky had told one (or some) of the officers who interrogated him more than appeared in the eventual report, presumably enough to identify surely Maclean as the informer. Having access to the report itself was not enough. Yet an analysis of Krivitsky’s evidence (see below) suggests that off-the-record hints were unlikely. A more probable scenario is that Levine could have told Mallet (and Jebb, vicariously) of some obvious pointers that were concealed from the interrogators, but divulged elsewhere. For example, Boyle claims that Mallet (in the latter’s own words) ‘sent to London a very detailed and secret dossier’. That dossier has, however, not come to light. Thus, whether Krivitsky or Levine actually provided the address of a studio in Pimlico will probably never be ascertainable. (Liddell’s final conversation with Krivitsky before his departure has been redacted from his Diaries.) Boyle could not divulge that person, or the relevant nugget of information, but he presumably believed that, after the vague hint in the book, and the much bolder statement made posthumously by his proxy, Rees, he would be able to bring the controversy into the open.

If Krivitsky did provide the information, who could his informer have been? Of the officers and civil servants who interviewed Krivitsky (Vivian, Harker, Archer, Liddell, White, and Jebb), Jebb, White and Archer were still alive in 1979. Gladwyn Jebb is an unlikely source: he was a shifty character who displayed sympathies for Soviet Russia, and tried to conceal his close association with Burgess in his memoirs. I even classify him as an ‘Agent of Influence’ in Misdefending the Realm. White is, of course, even more unlikely, since he was the person who was going to come under fire from any media onslaught if the news got out. Jane Archer is a possible candidate. She had singularly developed a very strong rapport with Krivitsky. Having been ousted by Liddell from the very expert job she was doing in communist counter-espionage, she was put on the sidelines, and eventually ended up working for Kim Philby in SIS, before returning to MI5. Her moral code would have prevented her from too casually breaking the OSA, but she may have been so disgusted at the deal done with Blunt, and the cover-up after it, that she felt obliged, after almost forty years of silence, to speak to the author when Boyle’s book came out. That argument, however, does not explain where she gained the information, unless Krivitsky gave it to her confidentially, or she perhaps saw a highly secret part of the Mallet-Jebb correspondence. And there was another example of justified righteous feminine indignation. Soon after that, Joan Miller was so disgusted at the treatment of Blunt (she had witnessed Blunt’s and Leo Long’s espionage at MI14 during the war) that in 1986 she published One Girl’s War in Ireland, a book that MI5 tried to ban.

The transcripts of interviews that Jane Archer had with Krivitsky that appear in the Kew archive, but which did not become part of the final report, show that Archer valiantly tried to extract further details about the ‘Imperial Defence’ spy from Krivitsky, but he would not budge, despite giving the appearance of struggling hard. It was probably an act. One very significant item of evidence is the fact that, in an interrogation of January 30, Krivitsky suggested that the ‘Imperial Council source’ was a young man. Furthermore, “the boy obtained the papers from his father who may probably have taken them home.”  Krivitsky encouraged Jane Archer to pursue this paternal aspect: not even Gary Kern has noticed that this was a mean trick.  For a spy whose cryptonym was in Russian SIROTA (or, in German, WAISE), namely ORPHAN, it was a rich and sardonic piece of irony to emphasise his active relationship with his father, a ruse undetected by the stumbling British. (Donald’s father had died in 1932: hence the unimaginative choice.)

Archer and her colleagues should have been familiar with cryptonyms: the Double Cross agents were all given them, and Archer even refers, in a memorandum of May 1939 to GROEHL (or GROLL), which was in fact the code name for Krivitsky himself. In the interrogations, Krivitsky went so far as to provide some cryptonyms (or ‘service names’, as Archer called them), such as FRIEND for Goold-Verschoyle, and HARDT for Maly. It seems now to be an obvious question not asked of what label had been assigned to Maclean, given that there seems to have been an unavoidable tendency on both sides to bestow cryptonyms that had some relevance to the agent (e.g. TATE, because Wulf Schmidt looked like Harry Tate, TONY for Blunt, GIRL for Burgess, and SONNY for Philby). Another later note by Archer claims that Krivitsky was ‘passionate’ to stay in touch with her, should further thoughts come to his mind. The defector and the inquisitor may have built some rapport, but the evidence seems to be that Krivitsky did not want to betray a dedicated ideological spy not motivated by monetary needs, and was having some sport at the expense of his interrogators.

Boyle then changes gears in the first Observer article. The main thrust now is a pointed criticism of the groups that used to gather during the war at Victor Rothschild’s residence, at 5 Bentinck Street (in Marylebone, some distance from Pimlico). “Among the most frequent of the casual visitors I noticed in 1943-44 were J. D. Bernal, the scientist, John Strachey, the politician, and Guy Liddell, a long-serving officer of MI5 whose marriage had recently broken up and who was a colleague of Blunt’s. He was also on close terms with Burgess.”  Then Boyle makes the highly controversial claim that this faction at Bentinck Street was abetting Stain’s objectives in Eastern Europe: “Although many voices were raised at that time in the clamour for a ‘Second Front Now’, Goronwy Rees believed that the Soviet sympathisers of Bentinck Street helped to orchestrate the discord.” He then quotes Rees’s lamenting how Blunt had betrayed the lives of Poles, Finns and Ukrainians.

The chronology is again dubious. By 1943-44, the plans for the invasion of Normandy were well advanced. The dangers of a Soviet propaganda campaign pressing for a premature Second Front had been real back in late 1941 and 1942: it was then one of Stalin’s most urgent appeals, and was not resisted properly, but by this time it was not an issue of debate. And by incriminating such luminaries as Liddell and Rothschild in this cabal, Boyle was treading on very dangerous ground. It was one thing to accuse Liddell of having been negligent or incompetent, but quite another to suggest he had been helping the cause of a foreign power.

Yet Boyle made more focussed accusations in the second article, published on January 20, where he reproduced Rees’s further indictments of Liddell, showing how Liddell had behaved evasively when Rees informed him of the Blunt connection in 1951, and intensifying his criticisms. The sub-heading ran “How Burgess and Blunt entangled top MI5 man Guy Liddell in their treachery.” (The full article appears below.) The most damning testimony would appear to be the claim that Liddell had invited Blunt to the meeting with Rees, and essentially ganged up with the Fourth Man against the plaintiff. It should have been a decisive lead to be followed up, but it apparently was lost in the controversy over Rees’s more speculative claims.

What also hurts Rees’s argument is that his story here changes from that in A Chapter of Accidents. Rees feels free now to name David Footman as the SIS officer (echoed by Jenny Rees in Looking for Mr. Nobody), someone who later also came under suspicion because of his communist sympathies. The ex-officer from MI5 was, of course, none other than Blunt himself, as Rees likewise revealed in the Observer: Boyle identifies him, and records that conversation. Yet Rees’s story in 1979 changes: he oddly dates the call with Footman as happening on the Saturday evening, and also states that he called Blunt that same evening, and that Blunt came down to his house, at Rees’s request, on the Sunday, not the Monday. John Costello, somewhat improbably, has Rees, on the Sunday afternoon telephoning Blunt to ask for his advice, since he (Rees) had still [sic] not heard from Liddell. Given what he knew about Blunt, going to the art historian as a mentor in this situation would appear to be downright lunacy. Blunt apparently ‘read the signs of incipient panic’ in Rees’s voice, rushed to his house, and tried to convince him that it would be best for the authorities to find out the truth about the absconding independently.

In any case, we are thus left with the question as to why Rees contacted Blunt, urging a person-to-person discussion, if his intention was to denounce him to the authorities? Had he at this stage been considering solely describing the fact that Burgess had admitted his Comintern allegiance in 1937? If so, why not simply go to MI5, and leave Blunt out of it? The only possible outcomes from discussing the problem with Blunt could be either that Blunt would talk him out of saying anything about Burgess (and himself!), or that Rees would end up scaring Blunt witless, but allow him to develop a plan to protect himself. Burgess had surely told Blunt of his critical conversation with Rees, as he had indeed told Maclean. Blunt knew what Rees knew: Rosamond Lehman even thought that Blunt knew that Rees had told her everything. The fact that Blunt did not panic suggests very strongly that he knew that, despite his past transgressions, he enjoyed the patronage of the high-ups in MI5. And Rees in fact gave him a very clear warning.

Then there is the conflicting information about the meeting with Liddell and Blunt. In his memoir, Rees said he went up to London, ‘alarmed and despondent’, for his meeting with MI5 the following day. Yet his Observer statement runs as follows: “What I have been wracking my brains over was the extraordinary slowness on the part of Liddell. He let nearly ten days pass before doing anything positive. . . . Not until the end of the following week was a move initiated.” He might have left that detail out of his memoir because he was scared, but if he wanted MI5 to be investigated in 1978 by reporters other than himself, he could have left much broader hints without pointing directly at Blunt’s guilt, and Liddell’s compliance. As it turned out, Blunt and Liddell must have strategized, and concluded that putting on a united front was the best way to silence Rees. Yet it was an extraordinarily stupid move by Liddell, a clear breach of protocol, as Blunt had left MI5 in 1945. What is more extraordinary is that none of the commentariat picked up this anomaly: Rees’s obvious inability to tell a plain truth did not help his, or Boyle’s cause. But Boyle should have been more careful, too.

Jenny Rees adds further complications to the story. She advises us of a further conversation that Rees had on the subject – in between the recognised disappearance by MI5 of the ‘diplomats’ on May 28 and his meeting with Liddell on June 7, which Rees does not mention in his memoir or in the Observer articles. At a party that week, he encountered an old friend, the prominent academic and intelligence officer, Stuart Hampshire, and explained the dilemma he had established for himself.  Hampshire admitted that he had advised Rees not to stir the pot – advice he said he regretted much later. (Implicitly, it would appear that Hampshire knew what was going on, even though he was also no longer employed by MI5, and was then one of the select many who knew the secret of Blunt.) As we see, Rees rejected Hampshire’s counsel, but assuredly went too far, as, in one further interview with MI5, apparently implicated not only Burgess and Blunt, but also Hampshire, the former SIS officer Professor Robin Zaehner, and even Guy Liddell himself. The evidence from Jenny Rees is confusing: it is unlikely that Rees would have accused Liddell in an interview where the latter was present. But it was still an extraordinarily undisciplined and disloyal performance by Rees, seeking advice from his old friend Hampshire and then immediately denouncing him to the authorities. It is another example of how Rees’s erratic behaviour undermined any serious intentions he could have had.

The Backlash

By the Law of Unexpected Consequences, instead of Boyle’s receiving encouragement for his pains, and attempt at full disclosure, he bore the brunt of a fierce backlash. He made (at least) five major mistakes:

1. He loaded up the charges against Liddell with so much irrelevant and erroneous information that the strong but smaller points were overlooked. If he had concentrated on i) the Gallienne/Pimlico disclosure, and ii) Liddell’s unprofessional behaviour in drawing Blunt into his meeting with Rees, he might have achieved his goals of more serious attention to the obvious secrecy and conspiracy that cloaked the Blunt case.
2. While claiming that Rees should not be condemned by virtue of mere association with Burgess, he implied that Liddell was guilty for exactly the same reason – he had consorted with Burgess and company at Bentinck Street during the war. Since this was the only evidence of pro-Soviet conspiracy (as opposed to incompetence), it was very a flimsy argument.
3. He forgot that Rees had a reputation for being an unreliable witness. Since (for example) his facts about the chronology of his association with Burgess in the 1930s were wrong, it could have led knowledgeable readers of the account to doubt Rees’s other assertions. Readers who bothered to read A Chapter of Accidents would have found further disturbing anomalies. Rees (they would claim) was saying whatever it took to save his own reputation before he died.
4. Boyle underestimated the wrath of Dick White. Even though he did not mention White in the Bentinck Street Brotherhood, White had been just as frequent a visitor to Rothschild’s premises as Liddell. Thus White would have concluded that he was tarred with the same brush, and he was implicitly under attack.
5. He overestimated the tenacity of the British press. He left enough leads and inconsistencies in his story to provoke a dedicated sleuth, but even the ‘quality’ newspapers seemed to be more interested in dramatic headlines and hints of sleaze than following-up with simple but arduous digging-around at the coal-face.

Tom Bower wrote that White was infuriated by the articles. Not only was his own reputation vicariously under assault, all his efforts to try and redeem the status of the intelligence services he had led were being quashed. While there had been an initial outrage at the covert deal agreed with Blunt, Boyle’s attack on Liddell provoked a recoil the other way. In the Sunday Times of January 20, in an article by Barrie Penrose, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley headlined ‘“A grotesque smear” say top spymasters’, Dick White was quoted as saying, somewhat bizarrely, that ‘accusing him [Liddell] may have possibly have been a way of deflecting accusations against others.’ Why Rees would want to conceal the names of others on his deathbed was not explained. Then the minor character William Skardon, who had an overrated reputation as an interrogator, was wheeled out to give his testimony in favour of Liddell. No notice was taken of Gallienne, or Maclean’s photography, or the Pimlico-Mayfair discrepancy. This was not a very enterprising piece of investigative reporting by the famed Insight team at the Sunday Times, but it surely distracted attention away from the oversubtle allusions made by Boyle.

A minor skirmish followed in the pages of the New Statesman. In the issue of February 1, one Richard Winkler rather laboriously pointed out that much of what Rees was quoted as saying was almost an exact echo of what had appeared in A Chapter of Accidents. The fact that that was no doubt Boyle’s aim eluded him, and, by concentrating on what was re-hashed, Winkler overlooked the really dramatic new material. He did then isolate the major discrepancy in Rees’s story, that concerning the timing of Rees’s meeting with MI5, but interpreted it as a plot by Rees and Boyle to doctor the story to show how ‘sinister’ Liddell’s behaviour was. It was a very obtuse performance by Winkler, who sounded as if he had a grudge against Boyle.

Boyle responded in a letter published on February 15. He essentially confirmed that the statements came, with Rees’s approval, from Rees’s memoir, but that Rees had refreshed them with some new recollections. He then, rather clumsily, attempted to turn the tables on Winkler by saying that it was Blunt who first pointed out the timing discrepancy, and that the meeting could not have occurred as soon as Rees first said it did, because of the contemporaneity of the announcement of the ‘missing diplomats’, as if that absolved Rees of his initial carelessness. It was all rather an inelegant and pointless spat, and added nothing to the resolution of the mysterious references.

The hunt for Boyle’s traitors was apparently on. The Sunday Times did extract a confession from John Cairncross, the ‘Fifth Man’, at the end of 1979. Margaret Thatcher, however, pressed by intelligence chiefs upset about the Blunt admission, was energised enough to cancel publication of Dick White’s pet project, Volume 4 of the series British Intelligence in the Second World War, which would have cast glamour on the successes of the Double-Cross system in an official light. White, who was ‘furious’, according to Boyle’s notes, immediately went underground, and broke all his OSA vows by encouraging Rupert Allason (Nigel West) to use White’s knowledge, and access to the MI5 officers involved, to write an unofficial history of MI5. Then the investigation into Roger Hollis started, and the controlled leaks via Victor Rothschild to Chapman Pincher about Hollis, followed by Pincher’s series of books, and Peter Wright and Spycatcher. Jane Archer died in 1982, a year before Donald Maclean. Volumes 4 and 5 of British Intelligence came out in 1990. Dick White died in 1993. The journalist John Costello continued to pursue the Liddell trail, and included a scathing indictment, in his Mask of Treachery (1988), of Liddell as the likeliest candidate for the mysterious GRU spy within MI5, ELLI, who had been identified (but not named) by Gouzenko in 1945. Costello succumbed to an odd and unexplained, but fatal, bout of shellfish poisoning in 1995, at the young age of fifty-two. But all of this is probably for another story.

It took exactly thirty-nine years from Krivitsky’s death before Rees’s hints to awareness of Maclean’s fabled career in photography were published – and then forgotten. Almost precisely thirty-nine years later, this blog resurrects the strange story of the Pimlico Gambit. Perhaps the puzzle will be resolved in the winter of 2057. The project starts now, with an investigation into (de) Gallienne and Montgomery Hyde, the constitution of the British Embassy in Paris in 1938, and a deeper analysis of the statements left behind by Krivitsky and Levine. The game’s afoot! As always, I encourage insights and leads from my readers.

Sources, and for Further Reading:

The Climate of Treason by Andrew Boyle

A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Phillips

Donald and Melinda Maclean by Michael Holzman

Stalin’s Agent by Boris Volodarsky

The Crown Jewels by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev

Deadly Illusions by John Costello and Oleg Tsarev

Defence of the Realm by Christopher Andrew

A Chapter of Accidents by Goronwy Rees

Searching for Mr. Nobody by Jenny Rees

MI5 Debriefing by Gary Kern

A Time for Spies by William E. Duff

The Spy With Seventeen Names by Igor Damaskin

In Stalin’s Secret Service by Walter Krivitsky

A Death in Washington by Gary Kern

The Perfect English Spy by Tom Bower

The Sword and the Shield by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin

Stalin’s Englishman by Andrew Lownie

Mask of Treachery by John Costello

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

A Divided Life by Robert Cecil

The Cambridge Spies by Verne Newton

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Christopher Andrew

Eyewitness to History by Isaac Don Levine

Treason in the Blood by Anthony Cave-Brown

Agent Dimitri by Emil Draitser

Misdefending the Realm by Antony Percy

Archival Material from Kew (TNA), the FBI and the CIA

(Final set of the year’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

A Very Principled Boy by Mark A. Bradley (Basic Books, 2014, pp 348)

The Spy Who Changed History by Svetlana Lokhova (William Collins, 2018, pp 476)

A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps (Norton & Company [in USA], 2018, pp 440)

Enemies Within by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, 2018, pp 642)

A Very Principled Boy

By now, many readers may have been sated by stories of the Cambridge Spies, but may not be aware that Oxford University was determined not be outdone in infamy. Despite the observations of Professor Trevor-Roper, who, with an air almost of regret, asserted that his university had not produced any Soviet agents of its own, Oxford certainly had solid claims to a comparable Comintern-spawned ring. When MI5 and SIS in the 1960s, after the confessions of Anthony Blunt, performed their internal investigation into further penetration of the services by Soviet spies, they discovered that Arthur Wynn was probably responsible for recruiting at Oxford a number of agents in the 1930s, including Christopher Hill and Jenifer Hart (née Fischer-Williams). After Bernard Floud and Phoebe Pool (independently) committed suicide, however, the mandarins decided that they should perhaps let any other sleeping dogs lie, lest any action provoke an epidemic of self-destruction that might have challenged even the considerable skills of Chief Inspector Morse.

Yet another furtive element had existed in the nest on the Isis – Rhodes Scholars. It surprises me that so many paragons of the USA educational system, chosen for their all-round excellence, whether they brought the virus of Communist idealism with them across the Atlantic, or became infected with it by their colleagues and acquaintances at places like the Oxford Labour Club and October Club, turned out to be such bad apples. The group included Daniel Boorstin, Peter Rhodes, Donald Wheeler, and the New Zealander Ian Milner. But the most renowned individual – and the one who did the most damage – was Duncan Lee, the subject of this book. Its title derives from an assessment of Lee by a Yale professor: ‘a thorough gentleman, earnest, high-minded, tactful, clean, and honorable, and a man of unusual intellectual power and promise’. Lee also happened to attend my alma mater, the college of Christ Church, and thus I have a particular interest in him.

The author of A Very Principled Boy, Mark A. Bradley, was a Rhodes scholar himself, and his conclusion is that Lee, whose family was related to the famous Confederate general, had leftist tendencies, but was converted to a commitment to the Communist cause by his wife, Isabelle Gibb (known as Ishbel), whom he met at a dance in Oxford in May 1936. Lee had a conventional upbringing to prepare him for committing to a Great Cause: he was born in China, of earnest Episcopalian missionaries, Edmund and Lucy, and he admired his parents’ dedicated but fruitless attempts at converting the natives to Christianity. The family moved back to the United States in 1927, where, after a stellar academic career at boarding-schools, Duncan was accepted by Yale in 1931. He read widely and had deep thoughts, but remained unpoliticized, concentrating more on awards and honours, with the result that he was selected for a Rhodes scholarship in January 1935.

At Oxford, he met the already radicalized Ishbel in May 1936: they were engaged by August, and shocked his parents by their obvious cohabitation when Lucy and Edmund visited that summer. The couple visited Germany that autumn, and made the pilgrimage to the Soviet Union the following year. By then Ishbel had converted Duncan to the communist cause, and they were able to close their eyes to Stalin’s Great Terror. When they returned to Oxford, Duncan shocked his parents by telling them that he and Isabel were planning to join the Communist Party.  After their marriage in May 1938, the Lees moved to the United States, where their subversive activities were reported to the FBI, who did nothing. Duncan then took up an honest communist job working as a lawyer on Wall Street. One of the partners of the firm was William Donovan, who was in April 1942 invited by Roosevelt to set up the OSS, the equivalent of Britain’s SIS. Lee moved to the OSS as Donovan’s assistant, at about the same time he was recruited, via Joseph Golos and Mary Price, to become a spy for the Soviet Union.

What distinguished Lee’s espionage was that he never handed over any physical document. Everything he gave to Mary, and her successor, Elizabeth Bentley (after Price had a health breakdown) was passed over orally. So when Bentley, in her famous 1945 confession to the FBI, identified Lee as a prime informant, he buckled down and denied everything. And even when the VENONA project, the decryptions of which revealed secret cable communications between the Washington outstation and Moscow Centre, confirmed that Lee was a prominent Soviet agent, the FBI could not afford to unveil such a sensitive source. Lee brazened it out, but it cost him his marriage (the FBI made it difficult for him to rejoin his wife and family in Bermuda), and his clean conscience. Yet he had betrayed some of the most significant secrets of World War II, those that condemned eastern Europe to Soviet domination. Lee remarried, moved to Canada, and died in 1988 after leaving a testimony for his children that portrayed himself as a victim.

Hadley tells all this in a very cool and professional way. He has delved into all the appropriate sources and archives. His judgments are sound. His conclusion on Lee’s motivations and make-up could stand as a classic assessment of many others of his tribe: “Although there is no evidence that the CIA’s psychiatrists ever studied Lee’s background, his personality reflected several of the basic traits that they have seen in others who have stolen their country’s secrets. Most spies have the ability to exhibit a sham, superficial loyalty. As narcissists who believe themselves destined to play a special role in history, they have already led lives full of mini-defections before they finally cross into full-blown betrayal. Perhaps most importantly, they are capable of ignoring the devil in themselves while condemning it in others. This permits them to deflect guilt, blame, and responsibility.” And further: “Lee’s multiple sexual affairs, or ‘mini-defections’, his compartmented personality, his violation of his government’s and mentor’s trust, his prodigious ability to lie, his belief that his hour had come when Mary Price recruited him to spy for the Soviets, his wallowing in victimhood, and his cruel attacks on Bentley underscore how accurately the CIA’s profile fits. To unleash these traits and commit espionage, Lee needed only a great cause, access to classified information, and a permissive environment.”

And what happened to the redoubtable Ishbel, who put Duncan on his perfidious track? She returned to Oxford with their four children, and then moved to Edinburgh, where she married John Petrie (who, so far as I can tell, was not closely related to David Petrie, the wartime head of MI5). To her dying day, she refused to acknowledge that Duncan had been involved in espionage. A retired CIA officer interviewed her in 1989, but drew a complete blank. In 1997, she published a brief memoir titled Not a Bowl of Cherries, emblazoned with a drawing of Christ Church’s Tom Tower on its cover, and a blurb that merely states that she was divorced from her American lawyer husband. “Duncan felt the charges made by Elizabeth Bentley very keenly, and not only because he had to answer them before a Committee of Congress and two grand juries in 1947 and 1954,’, she writes, adding: “Needless to say the charges were never substantiated.” The VENONA transcripts had been published two years before, but that did not cause the lady to even flutter. “Mainly, though, the whole crazy scene was so unlike Duncan’s style and unlike anything he had ever experienced,” was her only comment. She died in 2005. The capacity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s useful idiots for selective self-delusion and mendacity is unlimited.

The Spy Who Changed History

Let me get the ridiculous title out of the way first. This book is clearly not to be confused with Mike Rossiter’s 2014 book about Klaus Fuchs, The Spy Who Changed the World, or with Nigel West’s 1991 compendium Seven Spies Who Changed the World, a select group that excludes all of the Cambridge Spies, no doubt to their evident chagrin had they all survived long enough to learn about it. * Now, a Great Spy might make History, but he or she cannot change History, because History is integral and unvariable, and any self-respecting spy who didn’t believe that he or she was in truth having an effect on the course of history was obviously in the wrong job, and should have been working for Facebook helping to spot harmful fake news posts. The other alarming item about the choice of titles is that this book is subtitled The Untold Story of How the Soviet Union Won the Race for America’s Top Secrets, which should set off warning signals among those of us who were not aware that the project to engage in massive plundering of industrial secrets in order to be prepared to destroy the owner of such technology was actually a race to be won. What other competitors were there in this race, one wonders, and why should such sordid endeavours be sanctified with such puffery?

(* I have since discovered that Anthony Blunt is one of the featured spies in West’s book. October 1, 2018)

Next, the author. Svetlana Lokhova is described as ‘a By-Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was ‘until recently a Fellow of the Cambridge Security Initiative jointly chaired by the former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, and Professor Christopher Andrew, former official historian of MI5’. So her association with those names should obviously add some gloss to that rather enigmatic introduction, right? Or was her fellowship rescinded? Her website biography claims as one of her accomplishments that she ‘identified the Sixth Man, Cedric Belfrage’, which is hardly a newsworthy achievement, and should pose questions about her credentials, and what the depth of her reading has been. Yet the unfortunate author has since had to deny suggestions that she was too closely involved with the disgraced Trump official General Michael Flynn (see https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39863781), in a tale that is echoed somewhat by the case of another young Russian academic, this time in the USA, Sara Butina. Apparently the author had to flee, with her baby, to a retreat 600 miles from London to escape all the adverse publicity. I would not bring this up unless her work had not irritated me as a piece of inappropriate Russian propaganda: I tried to contact Ms. Lokhova via her website, but she has not granted me the favour of a reply.

So who was this epoch-making spy? His name was Stanislav Shumovsky, and Lokhova has a very innovative tale to tell. She had been given exclusive access to NKVD files (an alarming signal, in fact, which historians should be wary of) and has thus been able to disclose information unavailable to western analysts. Shumovsky was a Pole, born in 1902, whose career in flying was cut short by a crash. He then developed such depth of expertise as an aeronautical technician that he was selected to be enrolled at Harvard in 1931, with the cryptonym BLERIOT, after his hero. This was before the USA had officially recognized the Soviet Union, so trade between the two countries was impossible. The Russians, however, had their eye more on stealing industrial secrets than on paying for them. At Harvard, Shumovsky was taught by the aviation expert Jerome Hunsaker, and set about recruiting agents to the cause. He exploited mainly Jews, the offspring of parents who had escaped from pre-revolutionary Russia, but an Englishman, Norman Leslie Haight, was also in his network. In the year 1933, when the much better-known Gaik Ovakimian came to the US to be Shumovsky’s boss, Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union, which opened up dealings quite considerably, and made institutions and corporations more positive about the country. In 1939, 18,000 pages of technical documents, 487 sets of designs, and 54 samples of new technology were shipped back to Moscow, in areas such as wind-tunnel design, high-altitude flying, and bomb-loading. Shumovsky travelled thousands of miles inspecting manufacturing plants to learn from American techniques. He arranged for Semyonov and other scientists, who would later work on the ENORMOZ atomic-bomb project, to be enrolled at MIT, which was now considered a finishing-school for ‘legal’ Soviet spies, and returned to Moscow in 1939. The capstone of his efforts was probably the unveiling of the Soviet Union’s most advanced strategic bomber in 1947.

Not only did I find all this activity distasteful, I also thought Lokhova’s treatment of it betrayed too much of a celebratory attitude towards the achievements of Comrade Stalin. There was an obtuseness about Lenin and Stalin in failing to understand that the creativity of the American free-enterprise system was what allowed so many inventions to be pursued, and yet Lokhova echoes such hypocrisy in comments such as the following: “Despite being a lifelong and dedicated Communist, he [Shumovsky] had come to respect American scientists and entrepreneurs for their extraordinary achievements in his beloved field of aviation. He had worked in the heart of capitalism and seen the rewards on offer for a successful entrepreneur like Donald Douglas, but was never tempted to defect; he was too aware of the inequalities and injustices of capitalism. All the American technological treasures he acquired were the tools needed to defend his people from a merciless invader.” She goes on to praise Shumovsky’s  ‘remarkable’ skills, as he was able to exploit the disenchanted, the greedy and the idealistic – all in a cause of ugly Stalin totalitarianism that she never actually admits, as she glorifies the Soviet Union’s ability to wage war – one that Stalin thought was inevitable, even if the Americans did not.

She is also rather scathing about Western histories of intelligence, suggesting that they are ‘biased’, since they rely primarily on open western sources, or accounts from journalists and defectors. According to the author, the accounts of such as Elizabeth Bentley and Harry Gold were ‘problematic’: the results of the VENONA project have long been ‘unreliable’. You mean that they have failed to exploit those famously open archives of the Kremlin, Ms. Lokhova, and that we should be looking to the official Russian state-sponsored publications for the unvarnished truth? Given that President Putin decided to close the KGB archives after an exciting decade when western historians were allowed to gain a glimpse of what the secret police had recorded, one must view Ms. Lokhova’s access with some suspicion. I have written elsewhere (see SoniaandtheQuebecAgreement) about the highly dubious way in which Russian archives have been selectively revealed to compliant historians.

As an example, the author reveals, on page 389, that the nuclear scientist Igor Kurchatov ‘responded enthusiastically’ when Stalin made the decision on 27 September, 1942 to restart research on the atomic bomb. Kurchatov was then put in charge of the project, and became an eager consumer of all the pillaged information that Ovakimian and his agents provided for him. He provided long lists of further secrets needed, as evidenced, apparently, from Kurchatov’s letters to Molotov. Lokhova informs us that Kurchatov’s note to Stalin on accepting the challenge ‘testified not only how deep was the penetration of British laboratories in Cambridge, Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as the Chicago Metals Lab . . .’. Such a revelation should cause some flutters in English academic coops, as Kurchatov was later received and remembered with much fondness by British scientists. As Dr. Brian Austin writes, in his biography of Basil Schonland: “ . . . it was actually this giant of a man’s [Kurchatov’s] wholeheartedness and bonhomie that had endeared him to so many at Harwell . . .” (see below).The role of Fuchs and Peierls at Birmingham has been well publicised, of course, but such statements about Kurchatov’s knowledge of deeper and broader espionage merit further evidence, which Lokhova does not provide. Her source (given only as ‘USSR’s Atomic Project Documents and Materials, Moscow Naeuka, 1998’) can therefore not implicitly be relied on. She reproduces a couple of pages of VENONA transcripts identifying Shumovsky (unreliable? – see above), but offers us no NKVD documents.

In a somewhat fawning review of Sir Christopher Andrew’s The Secret World: A History of Intelligence in this month’s Literary Review, Professor Michael Goodman (who is on the Advisory Board of the Cambridge Security Initiative – not a connection he declares in his piece) refers to the historian as ‘the doyen of the academic study of intelligence on the UK  . . . [who] has really made the field his own’, and ‘the great Yoda [who he? Ed.] of intelligence studies in the UK’. He added that ‘there are few academics working on intelligence in the UK who cannot trace the origins of their work back to him’. Well, I am not sure that that is a healthy state of affairs, and I don’t count myself in that number, but Ms. Lokhova surely does. In her Acknowledgements, Ms. Lokhova says that she owes ‘an enormous debt to Professor Sir Christopher Andrew for introducing me to the fascinating study of intelligence history . .  .  Over the many years it has taken me to complete this work, Chris [sic] has been unstinting in his support and praise for my work.” Now that the text has appeared, I am not sure that the high-sounding Cambridge Security Initiative would still want its name associated with this book. Maybe that is why Ms. Lokhova is no longer a Fellow of the Initiative. ‘Former people’ – ‘byvshie lyudi’: that is what they were called in Stalin’s Russia.

Thus, for all its breakthrough revelations, it is difficult to accept Lokhova’s work completely seriously. The Spy Who Changed History fits in well with President Putin’s desire to reinvigorate Mother Russia and to bring alive again the heroic nature of the communist era. We all know that he regarded the dismantling of the Soviet Union as one of the most tragic events of the century, and Ms. Lokhova’s work falls uneasily on the wrong side of the propaganda campaign to further that goal. Maybe the most important lesson we should take from her book is that today the Chinese may have similar designs on Western technology as the Soviets did in the 1930s and 1940s.

A Spy Named Orphan

Of the Cambridge Five (or was it Thirteen? One struggles to remember . . . ), Donald Maclean was perhaps the most enigmatic. Burgess was brazen and undisciplined; Cairncross cerebral and reclusive; Blunt artificial and aloof; Philby calculating and ruthless. But none of them was tortured so severely by his traitorous activity as was Maclean, given the cryptonym ‘SIROTA’, Orphan, because of his famous father, who died in 1932. He was, in Civil Service parlance, ‘very able’ – a high-flyer expected to go far. He was also, when he was not drinking, a hard and productive worker, but the fact that he was at the same time toiling so industriously for a foreign power anguished him. At one stage, he wanted to get out, but his handlers would not let him as he was too valuable – unlike Blunt, who was able to persuade the boys from Moscow that he would be of little use to them after the war. And then, when in 1951 Maclean escaped with Burgess (to be followed later by Philby), he alone adapted successfully to life under the Communist state. He became a well-respected analyst of international affairs, whose reports were regarded seriously in the West. A famous photograph shows him at Burgess’s funeral – austere, almost pious, as if he were an acolyte at some papal ceremony, which in one sense I suppose he was.

Yet do we need another biography of him? What more is there to tell? Robert Cecil gave us his personal, sometimes fond, but not uncritical portrait of Maclean in 1988, in his A Divided Life. Michael Holzman, of a more leftist persuasion, offered a summary that exploited much new material in his 2014 work Donald and Melinda Maclean: Idealism and Espionage, including an analysis of his published work from the Soviet Union, but it was not generally available, being self-published. And there have been dozens of related works that have picked at Maclean’s boyhood, his indoctrination at Gresham’s School, Holt, and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and traced his turbulent career in the Foreign Office, and the highly dubious circumstances of his escape with Burgess in 1951. ‘The Enigma of Donald Maclean’ is how Roland Phipps subtitles his work, incidentally reinforcing the Maclean puzzling persona. So perhaps readers should look forward to an unravelling of the riddle, and an explanation of why such an otherwise sensible boy was taken in by all the nonsense of the Communist utopia?

Roland Philipps (whose first book this is) has solid qualifications. He claims two relevant grandfathers – Roger Makins, the last Foreign Office man to see Maclean in 1951, and the unreconstructed Communist Wogan Philipps. He is a publisher with the right contacts: his ‘matchless friend and brilliant author’ Ben Macintyre encouraged him to write the book. (How come Benny Boy never urged me on? Do not write in. I think I know the answer  . . .) Philipps has enjoyed access to the full Philip Toynbee and Alan Maclean papers, and help from all manner of archival resources in the UK, as well as an impressive list of experts in the field. Thus we learn details about Maclean’s life and career that have not been revealed elsewhere. I should add, however, that the author had not then had the benefit of reading Misdefending the Realm: else his Chapter 5, ‘Homer’, that covers Maclean’s relationship with Isaiah Berlin in Washington would have been a tad sharper and more insightful. (I have brought this point to Mr. Philipps’ attention, and he graciously acknowledged my message.)

I noticed a few false notes and errors. When Philipps writes on page 133: “Yet none of the Five was passing on information that would harm British interests, which therefore meant they could not be real traitors to their country  . . .”, it is not clear whether he is representing Moscow’s opinion, or his own. His reference to ‘the rabid witch-hunts of the McCarthy era’, on page 284, has too much of the unthinking leftist sloganeering about it. He misrepresents some details in the Krivitsky affair. Yet it his conclusion that is the most disappointing. It runs: “Donald Maclean’s conscience was inspired by his Victorian, church-going parents, and then was forged in the godless atmosphere of the General Strike, the Depression and the rise of fascism. He was dedicated to the pursuit of peace and justice for the largest number, the humanism referred to by Izvestia. His conscience and the fulfilment of the secret life enabled him to maintain his core beliefs through the purges and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and when many others fell away he continued to work for what he still believed in resistance to the capitalist hegemony and atomic might of his wife’s country. There is purity about this consistency that makes his collapse into alcoholism in Cairo and afterwards all the more painful.”

I don’t think this is good enough. (And it sounds rather like an obituary in Pravda.) The same could be said of Duncan Lee and his ‘Victorian, church-going parents’, but what about all those other young men growing up in the 1930s who had moralising parents or difficult fathers but who were not attracted to the plodding deceits of communism, and instead saw through Stalin and his communist edifice as a destroyer of millions rather than as a ‘pursuer of peace and justice for the largest number’? A ‘purity about his consistency’? To praise a stubborn commitment to evil in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is in fact loathsome and soul-destroying and averse to those principles one claimed to cherish is simply perverse. Moreover, Philipps quotes without comment Maclean’s best man, Mark Culme-Seymour, who had felt ‘betrayed by a man he had loved and trusted’, and had the effrontery to write to Alan Maclean, Donald’s brother, that Maclean ‘was a victim of our times and I will cling on to the idea that he was a noble victim, no matter how profoundly misguided’. Victimisation – the scourge of 21^st century denial of responsibility (and remember Duncan Lee above). For Philipps to record this observation without comment shows simply bad taste. And his epitaph, on depicting Donald and his father lying side-by-side in graves in Penn, Buckinghamshire, is the equivocal and rather distressing statement: “. . . the remains of two men with the same name, both men of their times, of high ideals, optimism and strong consciences. Men with similar but differing beliefs and truths to which they remained firm, perhaps too doggedly firm.” The old thread of moral equivalence.

Thus A Spy Named Orphan is an intriguing and comprehensive – almost ‘definitive’ – account of a spy who, even he did not make Nigel West’s Top Seven, was one of the most significant betrayers of Western security. Yet we are no nearer to knowing exactly why he chose that path. Maybe it was something in the water at Gresham’s School, Holt, but more likely it was due to a mentor who encouraged what Robert Cecil called ‘Gresham’s radical heritage’ under its headmaster J. R. Eccles. Certainly that tradition allowed not only Maclean, but also such (temporary or permanent) subversives as James Klugmann, Bernard Floud, Roger and Brian Simon, Cedric Belfrage, Stephen Spender, Christopher Strachey and W. H. Auden to flourish and reinforce each other, with Tom Wintringham leading the way a decade before. One master whom the author identifies as wielding such an influence was Frank McEachran, who (as Philipps tells us) has also been claimed as a model for Hector in Alan Bennett’s History Boys. McEachran gains a short vignette in A Spy Named Orphan as ‘the Svengali-like teacher’, who, though ‘not a Marxist himself’, urged Maclean and Klugmann ‘to read Marx, and imbibe the core ideas on the state, class struggle and historical materialism’. Ah yes. I recognize those ‘academic Marxists’ (or non-Marxists), who are supposed to be quite harmless, but encourage their pupils to swallow at the pump of Marx’s banalities. That’s what the War Office and MI5 concluded about Anthony Blunt when they allowed him back into intelligence – not practical or dangerous at all. So another armchair revolutionary, McEachran, caught his ‘victims’ [!] at a most impressionable age, and they were hooked.

Enemies Within

Richard Davenport-Hines may have wondered why the Times Literary Supplement review of Enemies Within had to be shared with some upstart he had never heard of. Ben Macintyre perhaps, but Antony Percy? After all, R D-H has written one-hundred-and-sixty entries for The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, while I have written only one. And he is a Major League historian, and biographer of such subjects as W. H. Auden, Maynard Keynes and Harold MacMillan, while I am a latecomer who have never even been put on a shortlist for a possible interview by Melvyn Bragg. On the other hand, I was greatly honoured to have Misdefending the Realm appear alongside Enemies Within in Mark Seaman’s review of May 27. And I have coldspur, while Mr. Davenport-Hines does not.

So why has Mr. Davenport-Hines turned his attention to the world of espionage? As an expert analyst on social trends (look to his book on the Profumo era, for example), he brings a depth of knowledge of social climes, and a capability for narrative strength, to this intriguing topic. The flyer is promising: “With its vast scope, ambition and scholarship, Enemies Within charts how the undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise and the suspicion of educational advantages began, and how these have transformed the social and political agenda of modern Britain.” It sets out to challenge ‘entrenched assumptions about abused trust, corruption and Establishment coverups’. If indeed Davenport-Hines can explain why the Cambridge Five betrayed their country (a task that has apparently fallen beyond the capabilities of other biographers), and how it was that they managed to provoke such a passive response from the authorities, his massive work would indeed have to be compulsory reading.

But it is a heady programme. First of all, while he brings several new facts to the table, it is not clear who his audience is. While his research into some new areas (such as the Rhodes scholars) make this an indispensable book for the dedicated student of espionage history, the latter will be very familiar with most of the accounts of the nefariousness of the 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, such masses of detail may overwhelm the more casual reader, who will no doubt be familiar with much of the story, but become confused by the mass of names and events. A long preliminary discussion over Soviet history really does not belong here, and adds little. If his case for a fresh analysis of political dynamics in Britain is to hold water, it is critical that any major new lessons that Davenport-Hines derives from his material can clearly be ascribed to a pattern of particular incidents. Yet, as he declared in his Introduction, the author does not really believe in the truth that the wills and actions of individuals can exert a powerful effect on history.

Davenport-Hines lays out some early guidelines that point to the nature of his argument: “Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals’ motives and individuals’ ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas.” “One aim of this book is to rebut the Titus Oates commentators who have commandeered the history of communist espionage in twentieth-century Britain.” “The key to understanding the successes of Moscow’s penetration agents in government ministries, the failures to detect them swiftly and the counter-espionage mistakes in handling them lies in sex discrimination rather than class discrimination.” Are these a priori impulses, or a posteriori conclusions? One’s immediate reaction might be to challenge all of these assertions: that individuals can exercise no individual choice but are driven by workplace factors, that a free market in espionage history has somehow been made an oligopoly (pace Sir Christopher Andrew’s dominance), and that the fashionable theme of sex discrimination has suddenly become a retrospective critical factor for assessing British political structures and why cover-ups were engaged in. So how does Davenport-Hines go about it?

The author develops his theme by covering a vast and rich array of incidents, but it is not clear which episodes support which aspect of his argument. As he tells it, overall, MI5 performed an honourable and professional job in countering the Communist subversion. The criticism that the intelligence services were guilty of aristocratic in-breeding, or homosexual camaraderie, is quite misplaced: the symptoms of failure were more male chauvinism, since female expertise was discarded or overlooked. The blame for misrepresenting what happened lies with the gutter press, with irresponsible journalist and writers, and an ill-educated Labour Party. The Cambridge spies did far more harm in eroding trust between civil servants than they did in betraying secrets. Yet even worse were the journalists. “The mole-hunters of the 1980s were foul-minded, mercenary and pernicious. Their besmirching of individuals and institutions changed the political culture and electoral moods of Britain far beyond any achievement of Moscow agents or agencies,” he writes, as if the Press had invented the whole story. The spies, he claims, could not be prosecuted because conviction would have been difficult without a confession, the evidence against them (such as in VENONA transcriptions) being too sensitive to be used in court. (But he also admits that a prosecution of Burgess would have released too many embarrassing secrets about his past career in diplomacy.) Finally, the recent loss of trust in ‘experts’ has opened the debate to untutored discussion.

This seems to me a strange line to take, and it is not helped by Davenport-Hines’s approach. The problem is that he really shows no methodology in his use of sources, making no distinction as to why some are reliable and some not, with the result that (for instance) he is taken in by a letter to one of the authorized historians of intelligence, Sir Michael Howard, who wrote an absurd letter to the Times after the Blunt fiasco claiming that inactivity was justified as Blunt had been useful as an asset in MI5’s hands. Davenport-Hines largely accepts the official histories on trust, when they need to be treated with a high degree of scepticism: he refers to Sir Christopher Andrew ‘whose painstaking research and careful conclusions belied the conspiracy theorists’. Yet, for all the diligence of the undertaking, the authorised history of MI5 is inadequate: a selective, censored and far from definitive work, and its sources cannot be verified. Davenport-Hines tends to accept unquestioningly the pronouncements of the Great and the Good (such as Gladwyn Jebb on Laurence Grand), is too quick to come to the defence of officers like the hapless Dick White against his justified critics, or the ‘luckless’ (rather than incompetent) Robert Armstrong, and is too hasty in backing the opinions of his fellow-academic Hugh Trevor-Roper. His opinion on the amount of harm perpetrated by the spies would appear to run counter to that of another well-respected ‘expert’, Nigel West, who wrote, in The Crown Jewels: “Undoubtedly, the damage inflicted by Philby, Burgess, and Blunt can only be described as colossal, and on a much greater scale than has ever been officially admitted.”

In addition, I noticed multiple minor but important errors (for example, over Fitzroy Maclean, Kitty Harris’s birthplace, the identification of ELLI, Liddell’s handling of Burgess, Petrie’s accession as head of MI5, the identities of Joe and Jane Archer, and the ‘turning’ of Wilfrid Mann).  He denies the existence of an Oxford ring of spies, and judges the confessed traitor Jenifer Hart to be innocent. He is very contradictory about the role of religion in the 1930s. He makes the extraordinary claim (p 442) that the spies were relics of the 1941-45 period, when the Soviet Union was an ally, although they had been infiltrated long before. And the case for anti-feminism is weakly made, coming in almost as an afterthought. “My belief is that the dynamics of departments in government ministries and agency were gender-bound more than class-bound”, he writes, but that is rather like criticising Trollope for not writing about the ‘LBGQT community’. If there were a case to be made there, it would be over the sidelining of MI5’s sharpest counter-espionage officer, Jane Archer. Davenport-Hines picks up the fact that she was not forced to retire when she married (at the outbreak of war), but he does not develop the theme to support his argument. And how would ‘feminine’ influence have changed things? Would it have made vetting more rigorous, a pattern he would appear to disdain? Which characteristics of the ’gentler sex’ would he have preferred to have seen holding sway in the Civil Service? Those of Jenifer Hart or Ellen Wilkinson? Or those of Margaret Thatcher – or even Rosa Klebb? He does not tell us.

Yet my main cavil with the book is the fact that the author turns the undermining of civil institutions, which was undeniably effected by the actions of the Cambridge spies, into a free pass for the intelligence services and the politicians themselves, as if they were merely victims, and responded only as they could, given the constraints. On page 368, he writes that trust is one of the elements that distinguished liberal democracies from despotisms. But if a certain trust has been shown to be broken, it should be reviewed. Since the objective of the spies was to erode the whole blooming edifice of a liberal democracy, the fact that the civilities of political trust were fractured first should hardly have come as a surprise. That was why we had a Security Service in the first place. The fact was, however, that MI5 received solid leads about the deep insertion of Soviet spies from Krivitsky, but lacked the guts and insight to pursue them single-mindedly. As an institution, it never planned what it would do if it found such traitors in its midst, so it was in ‘react mode’ every time another ghastly truth came out. Davenport-Hines says that he prefers the level of trust that existed before positive vetting arrived in 1951 to ‘Gestapo methods, Stalinist purges, American loyalty tests or HUAC scapegoating’, as if there were no less draconian alternatives. But the careless way that the threat was managed could have paved the way for such totalitarian horrors.

MI5 (and SIS) should not have trusted anyone for sensitive work in intelligence simply because that person came with a good reputation. In a pluralist democracy, trust has to be earned and protected: reputation is everything. As a result, rather than facing the facts, the two intelligence services indulged in an operation of continuous cover-up, over Fuchs (when the survival of MI5 was at stake), over Burgess’s and Maclean’s career, over Blunt, over Cairncross, and even over Philby, for whom SIS had no realistic strategy. They did encourage the prosecution of outsiders (like Fuchs, and Nunn May, and Blake), but not those native Englishmen whom they had recruited themselves. Their selectivity therefore looked hypocritical. Out of this desire to protect the institution there came a great betrayal of trust to the British public, whom the authorities thought inferior and not deserving of openness. The result was that a natural void occurred for the inquiring newshounds and journalists, who smelled that the facts were not being told. The indomitable Chapman Pincher, for one, was fed both truths and lies by his informers, and it often suited the authorities to have the waters permanently muddied. The official histories came too late, and tried to finesse the problems.

I believe it is also very dangerous to draw simple sociological conclusions over such a large sweep of history. When, for my doctoral thesis, I was studying MI5 over a period of just two years (1939-41), I was exposed to multiple dynamics in organizational frameworks, managerial conflicts, personal relationships and affiliations, and individual ambitions, betrayals and mis-steps, all in an environment of rapidly shifting political fortunes and alliances. In that context I felt comfortable making judgments about the wisdom or foolishness of decisions taken or not taken. To analyse a period of sixty years, and replace one grand theme of misplaced Establishment loyalty with one that identifies failures ascribed to gender-bound, as opposed to class-bound, weaknesses, does not move the debate forward constructively. The psychology of each mole gets smothered in the sociological generalisations, and the personal contributions of different political and intelligence leaders become homogenized.  “Institutional life, not parental influence, made Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and Philby what they were. They disliked the bullying, discomfort, injustice and surveillance of their schooling,” Davenport-Hines writes with apparent authority, ignoring the fact that a far greater majority of young adults were subjected to the same disciplines, but did not become traitors. Kim Philby himself warned of the danger of ‘long-range psychology’.

I suppose it all comes down to this matter of trust. Davenport-Hines wants the judgments of the experts (like him) to be trusted. He is a believer in epistocracy – government by the knowledgeable. But this is the world of espionage and intelligence. You cannot trust the memoirs of those who took part, whether spies or intelligence officers. You cannot trust the experts, especially not the authorised historians. You cannot trust the politicians. You cannot trust the scoop-seeking journalists. You cannot even trust the original documents – the archives – as they have been doctored and weeded, and maybe even deliberately planted with disinformation. Davenport-Hines does not explain why he trusts some sources, but not others, and also appears to be of the opinion that the Great British Public should not be trusted with the facts about the security services which should be accountable to it. Thus he has compiled a fascinatingly rich and enjoyable romp through a century of subversion and counter-intelligence, but, since the reader cannot rely on the sources of his judgments, he or she has to parse very carefully any claim he makes. Enemies Within is a very impressive achievement, but it is very difficult to interpret with confidence a canvas this large because of the multiple distortions of reality that are woven into the fabric in every sector. The problem is that the experts very quickly come to resemble the Establishment, and, as another famous political critic wrote of related goings-on: “ . . . already it was impossible to say which was which”.

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When I set about my research into the puzzle of the apparent failure of the British Radio-Direction Finding mechanisms to detect the German agents incorporated in the Double-Cross System, I thought it would turn out to be a relatively straightforward case of guile – foolish, perhaps, and lucky – but still a feint. Yet my readings led me to conclude that here was a multi-dimensional enigma, involving the following conundrums: the bizarre and humbling treatment of Gill, after he made a breakthrough analysis; Gill’s mistake over the assumption that Hitler’s agents all had receivers as well as transmitters; the mystery of Lt.-Col. Simpson, who made a significant impact, but was almost completely removed from the records; the deceptions of Dick White about the timetable of the Double Cross System; the misrepresentations of Guy Liddell about his organisation; the official exaggeration of the Abwehr strategy, and finessing of some technical aspects of their agents’ method of operating; the contradictory representations, by various ‘experts’, of the state-of-the-art of wireless direction-finding; and the scanty coverage of the topic by the authorised historians.

Yet perhaps the most extraordinary finding was the almost apocalyptic observation that appeared in John Curry’s confidential history of MI5 compiled at the end of the war, asserting that the decisions made about the responsibility for the Radio Security Service (RSS) had caused a tragedy of Greek proportions to take place. This judgment was made when the war had recently been won, and the activities of the Double Cross Committee, in exploiting the agents under its control to promote the message that a dummy army (FUSAG) was assembled to invade the Pas de Calais, had been a primary contributor to the success. Was Curry hinting at the Cold War, and the betrayal of Eastern Europe by the Allies? Was he suggesting that British Intelligence had abdicated its responsibility for monitoring illicit Soviet transmissions? Did a careless decision not to deploy the RSS with the correct discipline allow the Soviets to transmit undetected, or did a careful decision to soft-pedal RSS in order to allow the spies to be surveilled open up a different exposure? Or was he simply lamenting the handing-over of control of RSS to SIS, with the struggle over the release of ISOS (Intelligence Service Oliver Strachey) material implying a colossal failure in joint intelligence? Given the political climate at the time, it is difficult to posit any other scenario beyond these. And, in fact, archival documents that have recently come to my attention firmly suggest that it was complacency about German agents that led to carelessness over other threats.

In my May blog, I had referred, in passing, to three documents written by the enigmatic Lt.-Col. Simpson that I believed were no longer extant. In June, through the agency of Dr. Brian Austin, I managed to contact a wartime RSS operator, one Bob King (who can be found in Pidgeon: see below) now in his nineties, who passed on to me a few files. One, though undated and unauthored, was surely an early draft of a contribution by John Curry of MI5 to his 1946 history of the institution (as the style was unmistakeable), but included comments that did not find their way into the eventual published version. The second was the 1938 report by Simpson on the threats constituted by the use of low-powered and miniaturized wireless transmitters in time of war, and what infrastructure, technology and organisation would be required to take on and eliminate such a menace. The discovery of this document is as if one of the lost plays of Aristophanes had suddenly been found. Likewise, I had not been able to locate this report from the Index of the National Archives at Kew, but, if any of Simpson’s contributions have been made publicly available, it astounds me that no historian appears to have grasped the significance of both these pieces. Another absorbing item is a report by an engineer who worked on a secret wireless interception project under the Metropolitan Police. I have no doubts whatever as to the authenticity of these documents, and shall use them (and others) to update the story in this entry. Moreover, in an email communication, Bob King assured me that Sonia’s illicit messages were picked up by the RSS, but the unit was told to ignore them. This nugget of information has enormous significance, and I shall address it in a future episode.

I had originally intended that this chapter would move the whole story – including progress in wireless transmission and detection techniques made by British, Soviet and German espionage and counter-espionage agencies – up to June 1942. The discovery of these new sources, however, means that this piece is dedicated to a deeper analysis of the evolution of RSS leading up to its transfer to SIS in the spring of 1941, and the immediate decisions made in the months afterwards.  I shall return to a full discussion of Phase 2 (January 1941 to June 1942) in a couple of months’ time.

RSS finds its Home

• Background

For my research on the RSS as displayed in ‘Sonia’s Radio’, I had relied primarily on the Introduction to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Secret World, subtitled Behind the Curtain of British Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War, written by its Editor, Edward Harrison, for much of my information on the evolution of the Radio Security Service in the first two years of the war. That was complemented by a revealing chapter in Nigel West’s GCHQ, although West probably ascribes too much importance to the role of Lord Sandhurst, since West enjoyed exclusive access to the Sandhurst papers, and relied on them for much of his narrative. I found valuable, but mainly anecdotal, evidence in Geoffrey Pidgeon’s The Secret Wireless War, some rather fragmented accounts in Frank Birch’s often inscrutable Official History of British Sigint (which frequently reads as if it had been poorly translated from a foreign language, probably German), and some revealing but often imprecise material in Professor Hinsley’s official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War. Philip Davies’s MI6 and the Machinery of Spying is overall very thorough and contains good corrective analysis. But Keith Jeffery’s Secret History of MI6 is very disappointing in its coverage, considering that it is the authorised history, and that RSS was an integral part of SIS after the spring of 1941. I had inspected some of the source material at the National Archives on a visit in 2017, but, since little of it has been digitised, I have not been able to analyse any other since, apart from a few pieces shared by other researchers.

I recently discovered (thanks to Stan Ames, an RSS enthusiast) a longer paper published by Harrison, which appeared in the English Historical Review Vol. CXXIV, no. 506, dated January 13, 2009. It is titled ‘British Radio Security and Intelligence, 1939-1943’, and provides a very comprehensive account of this critical era in wireless and intelligence. Harrison, who suggests that his contribution ‘fills the gap’ in offering an academic article ‘dedicated to the organisation’ of RSS, generally provides an insightful guide to the literature, and skilfully exploits a broad number of sources. He crisply explains the evolution of RSS, taking the line that MI8 tried to find it a  home in MI5; that MI5 resisted, because of issues of overstretch and competence; how Walter Gill, introduced to the unit late in 1939, brought to it new skills in discrimination (isolating and organising signals of relevance from among a vast noise in the ether); how Gill’s findings shifted efforts towards Abwehr signals abroad rather than illicit transmissions from the UK; and how, because of this geographical re-focusing, with the approval of the imminently-to-be-appointed chief of MI5, David Petrie, RSS was handed over to SIS early in 1941, with official approval occurring in May. He then relates the continuing battles between MI5 and SIS – primarily through the personalities of Guy Liddell, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Maurice Cowgill – over the availability of ISOS decrypts that MI5 thought were critical for the smooth running of the Double-Cross system. It is a masterful and highly valuable contribution to the history.

Yet Harrison’s story does, I believe, not perform full justice to RSS, or describe accurately the manoeuvrings that went on behind the scenes to determine the control of RSS. It is a more a study of the relationships and tensions between MI5 and SIS than of the machinery and contributions of RSS itself, and Harrison is perhaps a touch too respectful of Trevor-Roper’s role, describing him as ‘the intellectual inspiration of RSS’. Moreover, Harrison largely ignores some of the figures who participated. He says nothing about Lord Sandhurst, who was appointed to RSS, and played some role in recruiting or training the Volunteer Interceptor force in the first months of the war. (As indicated above, this may have been a sagacious choice, as Sandhurst’s involvement remains somewhat controversial.) Harrison does not mention, however, the greater contribution of Lt.-Colonel Adrian Simpson, who wrote the seminal paper that defined the structures, technology and organisation that he felt were vital for protecting the nation’s defences. Harrison seems to be unaware of SIS’s own clandestine interception capabilities constructed in cooperation with the Metropolitan Police, documented by Kenworthy, and chronicled in the National Archives, which throw a bizarre light on the whole issue of MI5/SIS territorial control. He rather bizarrely devotes a section to Malcom Frost’s late efforts to increase the efficiency of the mobile detection units without offering an explanation of what illicit operators they were supposed to be pursuing. He mentions Richard Gambier-Parry, who headed SIS’s Section VIII, under which RSS resided, only in passing. He offers a restrained analysis of John Curry’s highly provocative assessment of the ‘Greek tragedy’ that resulted from SIS’s takeover of RSS, an opinion that Curry himself appeared to abjure elsewhere.

Moreover, Harrison brings to the surface a number of anomalies and paradoxes that are not satisfactorily addressed in his paper, and I have to backtrack a little to the topics I introduced in the first chapter of this saga to refresh the story. I should point out that I am not attempting to offer a comprehensive account of RSS’s history, but to focus on the questions highly relevant to radio interception and direction-finding policies in WWII. Who drove the takeover of RSS by SIS? Why were domestic interception and detection so casually executed? Why were Sonia’s radio transmissions overlooked? Why did British intelligence believe it could convince the Abwehr that the Double Cross agents had not been detectable?

• The Strange Decline of Lt.-Col. Simpson

Now that one of Simpson’s papers has come to light, one can understand his considerable strengths, as well as what probably caused him to fall into disfavour. (If not familiar with him, readers should inspect Chapter 1 of this saga first.) His October 1938 report to the Director of Security Service at the War Office, titled ‘Illicit W/T Communication’, is a masterful explanation of the way developments in wireless technology could allow a nest of foreign spies to remain undetected in Britain. He pointed out that low-power transmitters would be able to broadcast to receiving stations overseas (in Germany) while remaining difficult to detect locally via normal ground waves. He recommended the establishment of three fixed Direction-Finding (DF) stations, each complemented by a pair of portable (i.e. mobile) stations, that in turn would be supported by a set of hand apparatuses that could be used for house-to-house search. Landlines to connect the DF stations would be essential, and a line would also link the main DF station with the fixed Interception station. The project was to be enabled by the recruitment of ‘some 50 or 60 picked amateurs out of the 4,000 now existing in this country’; Simpson did add, however, that he believed that the creation of such an organisation was already under way.

Simpson expressed concern about the suitability of the G.P.O., the institution currently chartered with executing MI5’s requirements in this area, since it had a more regulatory and bureaucratic approach to the issue of frequency usage. ‘Our objective’ (which should probably not be interpreted as ‘MI5’s objective’, but as a national interest), he said, is to prevent any unauthorised transmissions, not just investigate them after they had happened. That is why he focused on developing a more elite, professional staff from among all the amateurs who held experimental licenses. He did add, however, the intriguing comment that one of the objectives would be to ‘locate the source of transmission with the least possible delay, but not necessarily stop it’, hinting at the notion of possible control of alien broadcasts, but in fact suggesting a desire to distort the suspected propaganda signals to make them unintelligible. His final appeal was for centralised control over the whole process of interception, direction-finding, and message gathering, and that, when the collection ‘of a certain class of highly confidential intelligence’ had been made, it would be conveyed to the appropriate department ‘to take the necessary executive action’. Lastly, he nominated three very distinguished names to serve on a Technical Advisory Committee, Dr. James Robinson, Director of Wireless Research at the Air Ministry, Captain Round, an expert in DF and interception work, and Mr. K. Tremellen, ‘the greatest practical authority alive on the subject of short-wave communication’. Strangely, none of these names appears in the authorised histories.

Some of Simpson’s ideas would be echoed later (e.g. the need for unification of resources, the professionalisation of voluntary interceptors), but his recommendations were perhaps influenced by two notions that were gradually becoming obsolete: i) a too technical approach that emphasised that the problem was one simply of interception and location, not foreshadowing the technique of traffic analysis, and the way in which that process, alongside (even partial) decryption, fed back into the act of discrimination, and ii) the belief, perhaps encouraged by WWI memories of German spy threats, that the country was riddled with German agents, equipped with wireless, who were ready to spring into action. What is also significant that he articulated the mission as ‘closing . . . all illicit channels of communication with the enemy in time of war, and of locating sources of political propaganda in time of peace’. What he did not include was the need to protect the realm from hostile (not necessarily declared enemy) communications designed to help subvert the country – i.e. transmissions by Communist spies, whether in time of peace or war. This must have been a failure of knowledge or imagination, and it is astonishing that, since he was offering his report on behalf of MI5, he was allowed to make his submission to the Director of Security Service at the War Office without this oversight being pointed out.

John Bryden, in Fighting to Lose, suggests that MI5 rejected his ideas there and then, ‘being firmly of the view that German agents would only be using the mails or couriers to send in their reports’, and that the matter was turned back to the War Office. But that does not make sense. The source that Bryden provides for this explanation (Curry) does not give that as the reason: Curry blamed it on the administrative burden and financial commitments required. Moreover, despite the fact that the War Office approved Simpson’s recommendation that the RSS unit be set up, it did not endorse his ideas of ‘unified control’, and when MI5 declined to become involved, Simpson stayed on as the Security Service’s expert. He was surely happy to see his recommendations accepted, no matter where the unit reported. (His perspective on MI5 ownership is a little ambiguous: at one stage in his report he refers to ‘our’ DF or interception stations, but then goes on to write that they would be used ‘in conjunction with M.I.5.’ It appears he had an open mind on the command structure.) Bryden and Curry do agree, however, that the founding of MI1(g) was attributable to MI5’s lack of eagerness to take charge. Accordingly, RSS started collaborating with the Post Office in March 1939, with MI5 demoted to the sidelines, waiting for results.

Simpson may have been somewhat deflated, but thus hung around in MI5 (though without warm recognition from Liddell, his boss in MI5’s Counter-Espionage B Division). The fragment from Curry indicates that he was vigorously promoting his original vision of unified control, and stressing the importance of the Post Office in harnessing the appropriate resources to tackle the threat of illicit transmissions by supplying suitable personnel, and moving to build the new facilities required. Indeed, Curry reports that Simpson was the main muscle behind the establishment of the Voluntary Interceptor system: a recognition that other commentators have overlooked. As B3b, he was actively supplying the liaison between MI5 that was later mirrored in SIS’s Section V. As MI5’s representative on the Technical Committee on Leakage of Information (TCLI) that the War Office set up in October, 1939, he was quick (in February 1940) to try to persuade the Ministry of Home Security to bring pressure on to the GPO. He attended the critical meeting on March 20 at Bletchley Park after which GC&CS agreed to set up the ISOS decryption unit. Yet his stubbornness in believing that a domestic German menace was being overlooked (when none existed) must have clashed with the messages coming from RSS. His emphasis on the need for widely dispersed Voluntary Interceptors to pick up illicit ground signals turned out to be something of a luxury, although the wide dissemination of interceptors greatly aided the ability of the unit to avoid omissions provoked by the whimsicality of ‘skip zones’ and the presence of thunderstorms. His expressed frustrations with the GPO’s lack of urgency in constructing new DF and Interception stations was probably on target, but his insistence that the detection of illicit wireless was ‘extremely unsatisfactory’ was not.

Maybe the SNOW affair changed Liddell’s mind somewhat. Simpson’s ideas must have had a slight resurgence with the ‘Fifth Column’ scare in the summer of 1940, but Liddell’s entering discussions with ‘the BBC man’ Malcolm Frost in May 1940 suggests that Simpson was no longer around. (Frost had been the BBC representative on the TCLI, and thus presumably had caught Liddell’s eye as a possible replacement for Simpson.) Indeed, the system of Regional Security Liaison Officers that MI5 set up by Guy Liddell in June 1940, specifically to address the threat of illicit wireless (and which was headed by Jane Archer, mysteriously sidelined from her expert role in tracking Communist subversion) mapped very closely to Simpson’s areas of demarcation. But when that was shown to be a false alarm, his whole infrastructure was seen to be somewhat redundant, especially in the light of the lessons being learned by Gill and Trevor-Roper in the RSS organisation. Interceptors were needed in large numbers, but did not have to be located so evenly around the country in order to pick up ground waves. Simpson’s attendance at the meeting at Bletchley Park where the revelations about the discovery of Abwehr traffic were made is the last reference that Liddell makes to him in his Diaries.

Still, Simpson’s omission from the record books (outside Curry) is extremely puzzling, and some of his contribution remains uncredited. For example, his report clearly refers to the 4,000 amateurs known to the Post Office who had the potential of providing the elite force that Simpson needed. Yet most histories and memoirs attribute the imaginative idea to Lord Sandhurst, who was reportedly recruited by RSS at the outbreak of war to develop a professional force of interceptors to replace the largely part-time group assembled by Colonel Worlledge. Sandhurst, who had also been instructed to liaise with R. L. Hughes of MI5 (who, Curry informs us was B3b, responsible for liaison with the RSS and the BBC, and thus working directly for Simpson at that time), soon approached Arthur Watts, the President of the Radio Society of Great Britain. Watts had ‘several thousand’ members who were radio hams, so Sandhurst then began to select the most suitable for training. Thus Simpson’s contribution is overlooked: Davies, like Harrison, remarkably makes no mention of wireless expertise in MI5 before Frost.  Simpson will turn up again in this account, when I write about the negotiations to find RSS a suitable home, but the verdict on his contribution must be that he was technically correct, but strategically wrong. He brilliantly assessed the state of the art of short-wave wireless telegraphy, and its potential subversive use, but he was caught up in the tide of searching for a phantom menace – the German W/T agents installed in the English countryside – and failed to gain the confidence of his colleagues in MI5. The irony was that the flock of interceptors he identified to protect the nation did not need to be precisely dispersed to detect ground waves, as there were no illicit operators at large at that time, but the volume and placement of such individuals did turn out to be essential to pick up the mass of signals originating from overseas.

• The Rise and Fall of Walter Gill

Walter Gill, on the other hand, was (in a specialised sense) technically wrong, but strategically correct. It still comes as a surprise to some observers that nearly all the Abwehr agents infiltrated by air or sea in 1940 were equipped only with a transmitter, and not with a combined transmitter-receiver, or with a separate receiver. Operating ‘blind’, without any confirmation that one’s message was being received at all, or perhaps not clearly enough (and thus needed to be re-sent) would appear to reflect a less than serious objective by the perpetrators of the scheme. And that is one interpretation that can be cast on the German planning, as I have suggested. (Preparations for sending agents into Britain did not begin until July 1940.) Yet that phenomenon is confirmed by the archival reports, as well as by the memoirs of some of the members of RSS. While Gill showed great insight over the question of the source of beams guiding German aircraft, his thesis, that if the supposed German agents could hear their controllers’ signals, then so should the operators in RSS have been able to, and that there were therefore none operating, was based on a false assumption. The focus on enemy signals originating abroad, and the eventual deciphering of many of them (ULTRA), was, however, a major contributor to the success of the war.

Gill’s policy must come under continual scrutiny, however. I have recently read accounts of two Abwehr agents who parachuted on to English soil before the main wave (Operation LENA) that arrived in early September 1940. Each of this pair was reported to have brought a working transmitter/receiver unit and successfully exchanged messages with his controller. Such transmissions were presumably not detected by RSS, since Gill claimed the unit had not identified any unexplained outgoing Abwehr signals. Such agents might therefore have been able to transmit undetected for some time, contrary to the accounts that the authorised and semi-official historians would have us believe. I shall investigate such adventures in my next chapter, to judge whether this was all an elaborate hoax. It should perhaps also be noted that Gill came to his breakthrough conclusion about the absence of German agents in Britain in December 1939, when SNOW was, almost certainly, the only wireless operator recruited by the Abwehr. His report, however, was not written until November, 1940, when the experience of Operation LENA, under which a dozen or more spies landed on British soil, would have sharpened sensitivities in MI5. Indeed, as early as July 13, 1940, Liddell felt compelled to record in his diary the following: “While I feel it is likely that there are a few German agents here, possibly transmitting by wireless, I do not envisage anything in the nature of large bodies of individuals going out to stab us in the back as soon as the Germans invade this country.” That observation indicates that the Gill doctrine had not been accepted wholesale at that time, and Liddell did not have complete trust in the energies of RSS.

I have little here to add to my account of Gill’s demise that I described two months ago, but the account that Hugh Trevor-Roper gave of Gill’s departure is somewhat paradoxical. Trevor-Roper was known for his caustic dismissals of many of those he encountered in wartime, especially the blimpish characters he considered to be his intellectual inferiors, but he clearly had some admiration and affection for Gill. Gill had been a lecturer on electricity at Oxford University, and a successful Bursar at Merton College, although Trevor-Roper had diminished his overall academic qualifications by writing that he ‘could only by a charitable laxity of definition be included among the educated’, a harsh and inaccurate judgment (as revealed in Dr. Austin’s detailed profile of him), which sheds more light on Trevor-Roper’s arrogance than on Gill’s cultural accomplishments. Yet they worked well together as a team. Trevor-Roper, however, when commenting on Gill’s clumsy and harsh dismissal and demotion, could only comment (in Sideways into SIS) as follows: “The real genius of the affair, Major Gill, was also deliberately overlooked. Left to find other employment, he became a radar officer and an expert on captured German equipment. Under the new regime, his name was never mentioned.”

Was there a reason for Trevor-Roper’s coyness over Gill’s treatment, which he also characterised simply as ‘rather shabby’? After all, Gill had been fired without even a formal notification, and then demoted from Major to Captain. Major Cowgill, the offended SIS officer (who had joined SIS only in March 1939, so did not enjoy a reputation of any sort), had repeatedly called for Trevor-Roper, who had been just as complicit in the affair as Gill, to be court-martialled. Yet Trevor-Roper escaped unscathed, even though the head of RSS, Colonel Worlledge, lost his job as well. It is surprising that Trevor-Roper did not provide a more comprehensive coverage of the whole business. In fact he concluded that Cowgill in fact ‘had every right to explode’, as Worlledge had revealed secrets concerning intelligence and security ‘not only to his official contacts in the Armed Services intelligence departments . . . but also (horror of horrors!) to the civilians of the Post Office.’ Perhaps Gill and Worlledge were punished because, as military veterans from WWI, they should have known better. In fact, as will be shown, it was a bit more complicated than that.

One last mysterious incident concerns Gill’s reappearance in April 1942. Despite what Trevor-Roper wrote over fifty years later, Gill’s name was apparently mentioned again, because (as Harrison reports) Trevor-Roper was in contact by letter with F. E. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), who was Churchill’s scientific adviser, at a time when Trevor-Roper, disenchanted again with his work in SIS, was looking for other opportunities. As Adam’s Sisman’s biography of Trevor-Roper makes clear, he was highly frustrated over the failure of RSS management (Maltby and Gambier-Parry) to keep technical policy aligned with intelligence aims. He had earlier rather indiscreetly criticised the leaders of RSS, specifically Gambier-Parry, and now told Lindemann that Menzies (chief of SIS) had called him in, and then accused him (Trevor-Roper) ‘of having supplied facts to Gill which he had supplied to you and you to Swinton’. Is that ‘he’ Menzies or Gill? Unlikely the former, as Trevor-Roper would presumably not have been party to information passed by Menzies to Lindemann: Menzies would in that case have been concerned about a breach of security elsewhere.

So if it was Gill supplying facts to Lindemann that got back to Menzies via Swinton of the Security Executive, what could those facts have been about, and on what basis were Gill and Trevor-Roper still in communication over important matters if Gill was by then working in a completely unrelated sphere of the war effort? And why would Gill want to leak secrets to Lindemann? It may be relevant that, at exactly this time, as Dr. Austin informs us, Gill joined the Army Operational Research Group, where he was responsible for investigating advanced aspects of Army field communications, but no details of the exchange have come to light. It sounds very much as if Gill and Trevor-Roper had stayed in touch, as ex-colleagues who had collaborated very productively on the matter of intelligent signals analysis, and that Gill was a man whose reputation had been restored, and had connections with influential persons. Another interesting twist to the story (as related by Sisman) is that when Trevor-Roper made a trip to Ireland in early 1942, i.e. just before the contact with Gill, Colonel Worlledge invited him to his home, Glenwilliam Castle, where ‘over a convivial dinner each outlined to the other what he knew of the takeover of RSS by SIS’. The existence of this conversation hints at untold scheming and plotting. Vivian of SIS was later to use this incident to make the astonishing claim that Trevor-Roper had gone to Dublin to betray the Ultra secret to the Germans, and that he had been ‘motivated by resentment against SIS for its treatment of Worlledge, and of Gill in particular.’ (Vivian was by now unstable: Liddell reports that he suffered a nervous breakdown in June 1942.) Trevor-Roper’s published account of Gill’s dismissal was clearly much more muted than this: he was surely concealing something of substance, but it may have no important connection with the fate and mission of RSS.

Gill’s major contribution to the debate about RSS’s future was his November 19, 1940, paper on the Organisation of RSS. Curry represented the arguments therein (the whole Theseus episode, after which focus was shifted to interception of overseas transmissions) as a clinching argument for RSS’s ‘vitality and value’, and for moving it into MI5, but that judgment appears weak and woolly. The timing of this report suggests it was produced under some pressure, but Gill’s account expresses no concern about the current organisation, or the allocation of work between RSS & GC&CS, and it concludes simply with a modest request for more resources. Yet the report includes a very telling statement concerning Direction Finding: “Any of the residue [i.e. the messages remaining after known ones had been identified] found by D.F. to be outside the country could for the above purpose have been neglected [but were not].”  RSS was successful in tracking those same messages, but, by implication, some unknown messages did originate inside the country. Gill gave, however, no indication of how these were investigated, a statement that should have alarmed MI5’s officers. If anything, the case as he made it was an argument against moving the unit to MI5, contrary to what Curry claimed. As we shall see, the question of territory and ownership would play a strong role in the decision, and MI5, even if the service had an outspoken champion, was on its weakest footing at this stage. The transfer to MI5 of course did not happen, but it did provoke a major debate about where RSS should report. Had Gill performed his job, and was thus no longer needed? Or was his demise just an accident of politics? That question may be unanswerable.

• Kenworthy and the Secret Interception Unit

SIS was a notoriously secret organisation, but even it had clandestine corners that were not apparently known to all its officers, or even its authorised historian. In Keith Jeffery’s Secret History of MI6 the author informed us that the strategic split between the responsibilities of MI5 and MI6 (SIS) was made on October 1, 1931, when the semi-autonomous unit of the Special Branch, SS1, which consisted of the familiar Guy Liddell and his colleague Hugh Miller, experts in counter-subversion, was peeled off from the Metropolitan Police and handed over to MI5. SIS was also stripped of its domestic intelligence network, the ‘Casuals’, which was causing an embarrassment. This decision apparently simplified and clarified the missions for MI5 and SIS to handle subversion in the Empire and in foreign countries, respectively. “Thus . . . the Secret Intelligence Service and the Security Service took on their modern form and distinct spheres of responsibility which were to survive for at least the next eight years”, Jeffery wrote, with a high degree of authority (p 236).

Yet it was not quite like that. The reader will learn, from Nigel West’s 1986 book, GCHQ, that in 1930, a Commander Kenworthy reported ‘an illicit Comintern circuit operating between a site just outside Moscow and a terraced house in a suburb of London’. (The Moscow location was verified by direction-finders located in Palestine’s Sarafand, in India, and in London, thereby showing that widely dispersed location-finders working in harness could place remote transmitters with an accuracy that could not always be exercised in more confined areas. Such phenomena perplexed security officers like Liddell.) West added that Kenworthy was ‘the controller of the Home Office intercept station at Grove Park, Camberwell’. It might surprise some that the Home Office was involved with interception. Indeed, in West’s later book (2005) on this Comintern project, MASK, the author informs us that ‘GC&CS’s [sic] monitoring station at Grove Park, Camberwell, headed by Commander Kenworthy, first began intercepting Wheeton’s signals in February 1934 . . .’. Aided by the revelation by an MI5 mole of the cipher used, the codebreakers Leslie Lambert and John Tiltman were able to read the traffic until January 1937. By employing the full force of the direction-finding equipment of the Army (Fort Bridgewoods), Navy (Flowerdown) and Air Force (Waddington), the team of technicians were able to locate the members of a worldwide Comintern ring.

The intercept station, however, was not run consciously by the Home Office or by GC&CS. It was run clandestinely by the Metropolitan Police. We owe it to a memorandum by Kenworthy himself, available at HW 3/81 at the National Archives, for a richer account of how Special Branch, assisted by both SIS and MI5, kept a watch on traffic that the armed forces declined to surveille. Supported by secret funds, an interception unit was encouraged by its experience in the General Strike (1926) to seek support from SIS in trying to detect foreign diplomatic stations which did not have ‘Berne List’ status (the latter presumably representing official frequencies allocated by international agreement). Kenworthy made it clear that Admiral Sinclair, the chief of SIS, was intimately familiar with what was going on. Remarkably, Kenworthy indicated that the expertise in interception gained by his unit entitled him to attend Y [= Signals Interception] Committee meetings, where the Services ‘looked to him for guidance’. He described his success in locating the illicit Comintern operator in Wimbledon, also showing that he and his colleague Lambert developed a portable direction-finding piece of apparatus that was critical for their mission.

What is intriguing is that The Metropolitan Police was the institution responsible for tracking the increasing volume of diplomatic traffic that appeared in the 1930s. “The Services were however disinclined to intercept Diplomatic (Commercial) Wireless to any extent as it would lead to a curtailment of the examination of their particular Service channels of Foreign Countries, as it became more and more important that encouragement should be given to Police by S.I.S”, Kenworthy wrote. Soon SIS was funding the exercise, as it was difficult to account for the expenses internally, and not long thereafter the new Receiving Station at Denmark Hill was constructed. Some official funding was approved, and made public, in 1938, but SIS maintained a controlling interest in the project. (At the base of one of his many organisational charts, Birch lists the Police Y Station at Denmark Hill as being controlled by the Foreign Office, i.e. SIS’s sponsor!) Now the interest of GC&CS (which reported to Admiral Sinclair, SIS’s chief) was piqued. In 1939 it decided that Commercial traffic should be intercepted as well, requiring a workload that Denmark Hill could not handle. “G.C. & C.S. realised that more facilities were required but unfortunately they had to cloak their activities and could not openly control wireless stations.” Everything that was going on was contrary to the rules of the protocol-oriented GPO. The outcome was that a new interception station was set up at Sandridge, near St. Albans, ‘specially for G.C. & C. S.’. Finally, to tidy up the picture, GC&CS took over the complete Police signals intelligence capability between November 1939 and January 1940, as the summary of the relevant files at the National Archives website informs us. (Regrettably, I have not yet been able to inspect the complete file.)

This whole chapter in British signals intelligence contains some remarkable ironies. The first is that the task of intercepting commercial and diplomatic traffic had devolved to a clandestine unit of Scotland Yard, a fact that appears to have been overlooked by all historians except Frank Birch. (HW 3/81 was not declassified until 2004: Andrew and Jeffery would have had access to it anyway, but chose not to use it.) The second is that SIS was involved in intercepting traffic occurring within the territorial boundaries of the UK, which flagrantly broke the rules that had been set up in 1931 guiding the missions of the two intelligence services. Since one of the main planks of the argument for placing, in early 1941, RSS under SIS’s aegis was the fact that RSS, after the beginning of the war, changed its focus from domestic to international interception, the episode sheds fresh light on the sincerity and professionalism of Sinclair and Menzies. The third irony is that MI5 knew all about this incursion on its turf, but apparently did not raise any protest: Curry mentions, without judgment, that ‘a certain amount of interception work was being done by M.I.6’, referring to the illicit set operated by the Russians. (One of Kenworthy’s paragraphs reads: “A conference took place with S.I.S. and M.I.5. The latter pointed out that strictly speaking the G.P.O. as the Communication Authority were the Department who should tackle these sorts of jobs but for reasons best known to S.I.S. and M.I.5. G.P.O. were not considered a very secure body.”) In early 1941, the Security Service, already weak in its drive and leadership, would have been on insecure footing had it tried to play the territorial card.

The fourth irony is that GC&CS was allowed to enter the interception game at the beginning of the war (the transfer presumably muscled through quickly by Menzies) at a time when Commander Denniston was making vigorous representations about interceptors invading his own domain of cryptography, an action that led to Worlledge and Gill losing their jobs. Denniston was extremely possessive about GC&CS’s ownership of cryptanalysis, even though he and others (according to Birch) accepted that ‘Y generally involved interception, traffic analysis and ‘low-level cryptanalysis’. But Hinsley also records that, in the summer of 1940, Denniston opposed the demand from MI8 (RSS) that its Traffic Analysis staff of 70 officers be transferred to GC&CS (on the basis that Traffic Analysis and cryptanalysis should be done in the same place), on the grounds that ‘his establishment should continue to be a cryptanalytical centre’ (only).

Kenworthy thus moved to GC&CS, worked there during the war, when it became GCHQ, and retired in 1957. Though working for Bletchley Park, he was stationed at Knockholt, where he led the project to intercept German Teleprinter Communications. This was the very important ‘Fish’ set of non-Morse messages, and Kenworthy wrote a report on that activity in 1946. But of enduring interest to this area of research is his achievement in developing, so early, effective handheld location-finding equipment. I have not yet been able to trace the extent to which his inventions passed on to the GPO in wartime, apart from a brief mention by Curry, who stated that Kenworthy’s portable D-F set was tested by MI5, and that ‘some interesting Mobile Unit operations were carried out on connection with this case [the detection of the Comintern transmissions]’. I thus have not been able to determine whether the apparent dilatoriness of the GPO – so frequently demeaned by intelligence officers – was caused by inadequate technology or by official edict.

• The Transfer to SIS

So was the transfer of RSS to SIS a smooth operation, or was it bedevilled with conflict and controversy? One can learn little from the authorised histories. The History of British Intelligence in the Second World War contains some errors, as well as some very puzzling observations that do not always make sense. Christopher Andrew does not mention the episode at all, or even the mission that MI5 shared with MI8/RSS. You will not find Lt.-Colonel Simpson, Malcolm Frost, the RSS, or even Section B3, in his Index. Keith Jeffery devotes just two sentences of his equally massive book to the adoption by Section VIII of RSS, indicating simply that it occurred ‘on Petrie’s recommendation’. He has nothing to say about Trevor-Roper, and Cowgill receives just a cursory mention. Geoffrey Pidgeon records the event as follows: “In January 1941, Swinton recommended that RSS be handed over to SIS, but this met with fierce opposition throughout the upper echelons of MI5, resulting in a battle that reached the highest levels”.  However, since Pidgeon (like many commentators) appeared to be under the impression that RSS had been run hitherto by MI5, his account may have been coloured. Nigel West, in his 1985 history, MI5, represents the struggle as one more between Menzies, the SIS chief, and Worlledge of RSS than a conflict between SIS and MI5, although West’s somewhat haphazard chronology of events means it is difficult to follow his narrative. He does, however, make the provocative claim that the change-over ‘was, in effect, “C”s (i.e. Menzies’s) final consolidation of his grasp on signals interception, and was only achieved after a closely-fought struggle with MI5’s ‘old guard’, but this interesting thread is not picked up or developed in his history, MI6, which came out two years later. Since Menzies did not assume his leadership of SIS until November 1939, and did not enjoy a reputation as a deep thinker or strategist, West’s opinion comes over as rather startling. I shall return to it later.

So what does the evidence indicate? Birch suggests that several agencies had had their eyes on the prize of domestic interception, namely MI1b, MI5, SIS, the armed services, the police and the Post Office, before the 1938 decision that the War Office should be in charge, and the establishment of RSS. MI5 had a natural interest, because of the mission it shared with the unit, but, as has been explained, was reluctant to plunge in. Lt.-Col. Simpson must have grown frustrated, because he expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs on September 15, 1939, and, according to Curry ‘suggested that the assistance of Colonel xxxxxxxx [name redacted] (an M.I.6. officer) should be sought’. Now, there were not many established Colonels in SIS at that time. Sinclair, mortally ill, was an Admiral, and Colonel Dansey was absent in Switzerland between September and November 1939. Unless Simpson intended to invoke Dansey, not knowing he was abroad, that left Colonel Menzies, head of Section II (military) and Sinclair’s deputy, Colonel Vivian, head of Section V (counter-espionage). Another officer, however, had been promoted to Colonel earlier that year – Richard Gambier-Parry, head of the Communications unit, Section VIII. There is no doubt, given the length of the name redacted, that it is he whom Simpson approached, and the significance of this connection will be explored later. It is not clear why Simpson decided to voice his frustrations at this time, apart from the fact that war had recently been declared. Was he annoyed at the pace of RSS hiring? Or at the shift to tracking overseas transmissions? Or at MI5’s continued reticence to grab the bull by the horns? The fragment from Curry’s report indicates that his ideas had moved on to consider broader issues of signals security, but his plans at that time encompassed a leading role for MI5 as the hub of a wireless intelligence organisation that it must have been reluctant to assume. Perhaps Gambier-Parry was an old ally, and this was a move to invite SIS to step in. But Simpson might have upset his bosses in MI5 during the process.

RSS was in fact moving along reasonably well: the GPO must have been propelled into action, though perhaps reluctantly. It did not think its mission was to build interception stations that would be focusing on detecting traffic originating from overseas. Three new Direction-Finding stations had been set up, and arrangements had been made in August for linking them with telephone lines. Lord Sandhurst was turning the corps of radio amateurs into a more professional body, though perhaps not as quickly as Simpson would have liked. As Nigel West writes: “The operators had to be skilled, discreet and dedicated, so the recruitment process was necessarily slow. By Christmas 1939, the Home South Region boasted only seven VIs (Voluntary Interceptors) on its roll.” Within three months, RSS had recruited fifty VIs, who were tracking 600 sources – all on the other side of the Channel. West reports that the Home South section had produced 1,932 logs by the end of the year, a figure that grew to 3,052 by March 1940. And, by that time, Gill and Trevor-Roper had cracked the Abwehr hand-cipher, and Bletchley Park had agreed to set up a special-purpose cryptographic unit to handle the traffic. RSS’s reputation was on the rise, but its role probably not broadly understood.

At the same time, fierce arguments over policy and organisation were being discussed by members of the Y Committee, which broadly was responsible for interception, traffic analysis, and low-grade cryptography. There were disagreements about the degree to which the needs of the three Services should be shared, or kept separate, but there was also questioning as to why SIS (whose head, Menzies, chaired the meetings) should control proceedings. It took an appeal to Lord Hankey, the ultimate committee man, for a solution, which involved a stronger Y Committee with a full-time chairman, and supporting clerical staff. Frank Birch suggests some of the confusion when he indicates that the news about the interception and decryption of Abwehr traffic in Europe, and the establishment of GC&CS’s ISOS group appeared to come as some surprise to the committee. ‘Officially, all this was no one’s concern’, he wrote, but in May 1940 the Committee gave formal recognition to the extension of RSS’s responsibility to provide preliminary investigation of these groups of signals. Seven months into the war, the Committee was still in reactive mode, instead of setting policy. The full Committee met for the first time not until January 1, 1941.

In the summer of 1940, after Simpson’s departure, Liddell also found a new candidate to lead B3b (Simpson’s unit), one Maurice Frost of the BBC, whom Swinton encouraged Liddell to hire. After initial good impressions, Frost was signed up, and in June 1940, Liddell reported plans for Frost to set up a new branch (the W Branch), instead of reporting to Liddell in B. The decision was made in July, and ‘Tar’ Robertson (who was handling SNOW) was deputed to work for him. But Liddell had to backtrack, and in August the W unit was folded back into B Branch, much to Frost’s annoyance. (Curry’s report states that Frost was Director of the W Division at this time ‘which comprised B.3’. It is probable that Liddell’s journal is more accurate than Curry’s memory on this matter.  MI5 was also notoriously inconsistent in its naming conventions for Branches and Divisions.) Yet Frost was beginning to get under everybody’s skin by this time. Robertson declared he could not work under him, and even Lord Swinton, who had supported Frost’s recruitment, said in late November 1940 that Frost could not stay in MI5. His ambition and untrustworthiness had become intolerable: moreover, he probably did not possess the appropriate skills for such a job. His interest was more in establishing a service to monitor foreign broadcasts.

Matters appeared to come to a disruptive head in September. According to Hinsley, the War Office concluded that its own interception capabilities (of German Air Force Enigma traffic) were not keeping up with GC&CS’s capacity to absorb it. Thus, on Winston’s Churchill’s bidding, Hankey ordered a transfer of an unspecified number of ‘operators’ from RSS to the Services, ‘overruling RSS’s protests’. This was probably a gross misjudgement: the failure to detect the enemy’s movements in the Nazis’ overrun of Europe in the summer of 1940 was due more to an incapacity to analyse and integrate intelligence properly than a paucity of intercepts. That was the insight that Gill and Trevor-Roper had arrived at.  Moreover, the War Office was responsible for MI8, which was where the unit reported. RSS received intercepts from its team of VIs, the permanent stations managed by the Post Office, as well the Armed Forces, the BBC and the cable companies, so simply shifting operators around was not likely to fix the poorly identified problem. Somehow the discoveries that Gill and Trevor-Roper had made about Abwehr communications with agents as the German war machine moved across Europe in the summer of 1940 should have made it to the General Staff, but there was no mechanism for that to happen.

By now, however, MI8 was feeling the pressure. On October 9 it pushed MI5 to take over the RSS unit en bloc, as it needed to concentrate on military matters, clearly not understanding that the work that RSS was doing was much more closely related to the theatre of war than the stated mission of detecting illicit domestic transmissions. But, of course, MI5 did know. Moreover, Brigadier Allen (MI5’s assistant director) went on record as saying that the service was being asked to take over an organisation that was breaking down. MI5 thus still demurred, because of cost and complexity, and because it understood that the current concentration on Abwehr traffic in Europe (and beyond) made the procedural case for the responsibility’s belonging to the Security Service completely tenuous. MI8 and MI5 were at cross-purposes. No doubt the secret but successful execution of an unchartered mission had to be revealed. The publication of Gill’s report in November 1940 thus brought the achievements of RSS into the open, perhaps preventing any further poaching by the Military, but inevitably driving the unit further away from MI5.

MI5 was also experiencing considerable turmoil at the time: even as Vivian of SIS was reminding MI5 officers (via Jasper Harker) of the correct procedures for communicating with SIS, Liddell was lobbying for Vivian to head MI5, so confusing was the current leadership. Lord Swinton, who headed the Security Executive set up by Churchill, had made life difficult for acting Director-General Jasper Harker, and had inserted William Crocker as an awkward co-head of B Division with Liddell. On December 3, 1940, Churchill’s security adviser, Desmond Morton, had told the Premier that MI5 was ‘close to collapse’, but the previous month the Lord President of the Council, John Anderson, had already brought in David Petrie to review its operation. Petrie had in fact been offered the job of Director-General, but declined to accept until he had performed a proper survey of the operation. He did not complete his report until February 13, 1941, but by January 30 he had already recommended to Swinton that SIS take over RSS. Where is the evidence of the struggle of ‘MI5’s old guard’, identified by West? It seems they put up no fight at all.

Yet the same day that Petrie arrived in MI5 to perform his investigation (January 1), Swinton approached the Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General F. H. N. Davidson to discuss the future of RSS. In an exchange that underlined what critical observers might say about the oxymoron of ‘military intelligence’, Davidson was reported to respond that he found RSS and related matters ‘very interesting, very complicated, and a strain on one’s brain’. Maybe this ‘very model of a modern major-general’ was simply overwhelmed, since he had assumed his new post only the previous month. Harrison, having inspected the Davidson papers, observes that Davidson noted in his diary that Swinton was ‘not satisfied that it [RSS] was doing its stuff’. Whether Swinton understood what RSS’s ‘stuff’ was, or consulted Lt.-Colonel Simpson, as a possibly sharper analyst of RSS’s failings, is not recorded. Davidson’s overall contribution is ambiguous: Cavendish-Bentinck, a normally good judge of character, who was the highly successful Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) for most of the war, recorded that Davidson was ‘a very mediocre officer, with a permanent desire to make our reports fit in with the views of the CIGS [Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff].’ On the other hand, the official history of the JIC makes it clear that Davidson sensibly pressed, in January 1941, for a more integrated view of intelligence to assist the war effort – although he did not include MI5 or SIS in his choice of contributors to the process.

When Worlledge opposed the transfer on February 14 (’vigorously’, as Davies informs us), he also cast aspersions on SIS’s administrative skills, as well as making tactless criticisms of Gambier-Parry’s technical abilities, a mis-step that would later cost him his job. Why Worlledge was so set against SIS’s taking over RSS is puzzling, since it should have been clear to him that MI5 was even less endowed with managerial and technical talent than SIS. Hinsley writes that ‘the MI8 Colonel in any case fervently believed that the Services should control Sigint in time of war’. Was Worlledge perhaps aware of the Metropolitan Police unit, and its mobile detection exercises over the Comintern spies, and harboured some doubts about SIS’s interception policy and strategy?

Maybe Davidson was a fast learner, and had quickly unravelled the complications of RSS. The next day, he questioned Petrie’s decision, pointing out that ‘MI6 is concerned with the transmitting of signals and not their interception or location’, a claim that, as has been shown above, merely indicated that the Director of Military Intelligence did not know the full story of what was going on in the world of interception. Yet Davidson’s preference appeared to be to keep RSS under MI8 control rather than pass it to MI5, echoing his clearly diminished regard for the civilian services. Swinton coolly demolished Davidson’s objections, drawing on his position as supremo of both Intelligence Services to ensure that matters would work out fine, that the necessary committees would be in place to handle overlaps and conflicts, and that more professional training of RSS personnel would address his colleague’s concerns. Davidson was subdued, but not eliminated as a threat. Nigel West informs us that Davidson would later cross swords with Menzies, as he was not happy about the civilian nature of GC&CS, and wanted to wrest control back to the War Office. He believed the Office had not gained the results from interception which it merited for the investment it had made.

Yet another extraordinary step occurred before the eventual decision was made. According to Curry: “Early in 1941 it was suggested that an independent adviser, Mr. Kirke of the B.B.C., should carry out an investigation into R.S.S. organisation from the technical point of view and make recommendations for its future running by M.I.5.” The passive voice disguises an unlikely initiative: that the opinion of a BBC manager, supposedly independent of Frost and his objectives, might have been considered a fair judge of the best home for RSS, with the outcome of the investigation apparently pre-determined, and when in the past year the unit had moved well away from its mission of tracking voice broadcasting, and Frost himself had fallen out of favour, is simply shocking. Unsurprisingly, ‘this proposal aroused considerable opposition’. Curry nevertheless noted that ‘although it was partially carried out’, it resulted in meetings between the Director-General of the Security Service and representatives of SIS. Unsurprisingly, Petrie’s recommendation held. Liddell reported in his diary entry for March 6 that Gambier-Parry of SIS was taking over RSS, and the formal transfer occurred the next day.

• The Aftermath: RSS under Gambier-Parry

RSS was indeed transferred to the control of Colonel Gambier-Parry in Section VIII of SIS. Gambier-Parry was a larger-than-life character who had been recruited by Sinclair in 1938 to fix the ailing communications systems of SIS and its satellites overseas. Gambier-Parry was an expert on radio: he had worked for the BBC, and for Philco, an American radio company. He had a reputation for being able to get things done, while showing a disdain for any bureaucrats who placed constraints on his will. From most accounts of those who worked for him, he was a popular figure who brought much energy and understanding to the complex challenges facing SIS. He thus embarked on a crash programme of building transmitter-receivers for the locations on the Continent, establishing broadcasting stations in safe places on the UK mainland, and devising the protocols to allow them to communicate securely.

Section VIII was certainly not in the business of interception – overtly, at least. Yet an enigmatic comment by Keith Jeffery in his history of SIS hints at a perhaps clandestine programme that has otherwise escaped the analysts. When Maurice Hankey performed his investigation into SIS at the beginning of 1940, one of the officers he interviewed was Rear-Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, seeking his views on the effectiveness of the Secret Intelligence Service. Godfrey was less than enthusiastic about GC&CS, though Jeffery then wrote: “But for Godfrey ‘the one really bright spot’ was the ‘” Y’ side”, in particular the intercepted signals and call signs, which the Admiralty found of the greatest possible use. All praise for this state of affairs’, he added, ‘was due to Colonel Gambier-Parry’. Now Admiral Godfrey was no slouch: he was a well-respected intelligence officer (celebrated for being Ian Fleming’s boss and mentor), and had even been a candidate to replace Admiral Sinclair as head of SIS. It is thus highly unlikely that he would have misunderstood someone else’s contribution as that of Gambier-Parry. This insight therefore does appear to confirm what Nigel West alluded to, namely SIS’s deeper involvement with interception than the authorised histories are prepared to admit.

Guy Liddell knew in March that Gambier-Parry would be taking over RSS, and he was initially optimistic about the changeover, although he recorded in his diary his concern that RSS might now concentrate on ISOS messages solely, to the detriment of MI5’s total interests. Swinton informed the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office Alexander Cadogan on March 10, and on March 16 a meeting was held between representatives of MI5, RSS and SIS to discuss responsibilities. Liddell’s diary entry shows that Gambier-Parry was already putting his stamp on the organisation: “It was agreed that G.P. should set up two Y. masts and retain a limited number of skilled V.I.s. At present there were some 450, many of whom were useless and could be returned to store. He would have expert personnel with his Y. masts who would know the ether and be in a position to eliminate anything but the suspicious traffic. Any communication thought to be peculiar would be sent to the W. Analysis Committee and would be co-related and distributed by Cowgill’s organisation. G.P.s organisation would only be responsible for sifting in the first instance genuine traffic from the suspicious.” It seems clear that Gambier-Parry believed the interceptors themselves were capable of deciding what should be investigated, and would be authorized to do so.

In a significant move, Felix Cowgill had replaced Valentine Vivian as head of Section V in January. It was Cowgill who had objected so strongly to Worlledge’s initiative over the Morocco revelation, and for some reason he was given the task of developing a charter for the new RSS. Liddell again wrote an ominous comment on the proposal in his entry for April 10: “It seems to lay far too much emphasis on the interception of the Group traffic and to neglect the possibility of illicit transmissions in this country. We are replying in this sense.” Was someone guiding the novice Cowgill on this issue? Liddell reinforced his concerns in a conversation with Gambier-Parry on May 1, when he urged that he did not want transmissions from the UK ignored. Gambier-Parry gave a very revealing response, echoing the Gill doctrine that traffic had to be two-way, and arguing that ‘thus we have good chance of picking up traffic from abroad’. Gambier-Parry thus appeared to be set out in an unnecessarily dogmatic vein, parroting a policy that he had not crafted himself. Why would he not show greater sensitivity to his customer’s needs? Since the source of previously unidentified short-wave signals could not easily be located, why would Gambier-Parry promote a policy of diminishing efforts at direction-finding on the mainland? It was another indication that, despite the experience from the MASK exercise, non-Abwehr traffic was not going to be considered seriously. Meanwhile, the highly security-conscious Cowgill was already tightening up on the distribution of ISOS material.

The official handover occurred in early May. Gambier-Parry moved swiftly, installing a long-time friend, Major E. H. Maltby, as Controller of RSS. Liddell reported that Army Signals was taking over the responsibilities of the sniffer vans. A new interception station was set up at Hanslope Park, and some select VIs were recruited to become part of a more professional Royal Signals cadre there. Gambier-Parry dismissed Gill in an unprofessional manner, but Worlledge, contrary to some reports, was not fired immediately. He was instead effectively demoted, to work under Cowgill of Section V. Worlledge did not last long there: Dick White reported later that he resigned that summer on a matter of policy. He might have found working for Cowgill intolerable, but it is also quite possible, given his outspoken comments the previous December, that he did maintain grave concerns about the way interception policy was being diverted away from the mission that he had been attempting to execute. As for Trevor-Roper, he escaped dismissal – no doubt because he and Gambier-Parry had enjoyed hunting together with the Whaddon hounds before the war. “In the world of neurotic policemen and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais”, wrote the Oxford don of his comic-opera friend. Adam Sisman goes on to record that, after his appointment as head of Section VIII, “Gambier-Parry had seized an opportunity to establish his headquarters at Whaddon Hall, which was not far from Bletchley. There he lived like a colonial governor, with a fleet of camouflaged Packards at his disposal.”

On May 20, Liddell chaired the first meeting of the Joint Wireless Committee, attended also by Malty, White, Cowgill and Frost. This was a series of fortnightly gatherings that would eventually create deep rifts between the two security services. The first resolution at this meeting ran as follows: “It was agreed that it was the function of the committee to coordinate the mutual interests of S.I.S. and the Security Service in the Radio Security Section [sic: according to Trevor-Roper, ‘Section’ was a temporary name soon abandoned]. It should lay down general directions for the operation of R.S.S. and decide priorities of service to be supplied by R.S.S. to S.I.S. and the Security Services.” It was also resolved to invite Mr. Strachey from GC&CS to become a member, and Captain Trevor-Roper was appointed Secretary. On the provocative and controversial matter of detecting domestic illicit transmissions, the minute for Item 4 read as follows: “It was agreed to proceed with a limited policy of ‘snifting’ in cases where intelligence information gave rise to a reasonable belief that an illicit transmitter existed at any known location in the British Isles. All Sections of the Security Service should be informed of the facilities available but demands should be strictly allotted to those important cases where the position of a wireless set by any individual was considered a genuine possibility. Major Frost would consult with Mr Dick White on the importance of the cases submitted, and the priority to be given to them.” The bland implication here is that some examples of illicit transmissions would be ‘unimportant’. But who would be the judge of that unless the incident were properly investigated?

That same week, at the end of May 1941, agent Sonia of Soviet Military Intelligence sent, from her lodgings in Oxfordshire, her first wireless message from British territory to her masters in Moscow.

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So what evidence is there for Nigel West’s claim about SIS’s long-term ambitions to gain control over interception, and that Gambier-Parry’s Communications Section may have been assisting in its objectives? We have the clandestine operation that uncovered the Comintern spies, sponsored by SIS. Lt.-Colonel Simpson may inadvertently have helped the SIS’s cause when he brought Gambier-Parry into the picture in September 1939. That may have provoked SIS into moving on the Denmark Hill operation: the unit was transferred to GC&CS as the disputes over RSS’s future heated up in the winter of 1939-1940. We have the evidence of Admiral Godfrey, who appreciated Gambier-Parry’s valuable contribution to interception and traffic analysis in early 1940. Worlledge is outspoken on his concerns over Gambier-Parry’s and SIS’s suitability for tackling the interception problem thoroughly, and resigns on a point of policy. And SIS’s charter for RSS is oddly delegated to Major Cowgill, who is a relative newcomer to the business, has had no involvement in telecommunications, and does not work for Gambier-Parry. Moreover, Cowgill has recently taken over from Colonel Vivian, who was always bitter enemies with a man who is now his rival as second-in-command at SIS, Colonel Dansey. Dansey will be familiar to readers of Sonia’s Radio, and the most perspicacious of you will recall, from Part 9, that I pointed out an exchange of opinions between Dansey and Gambier-Parry in 1943, which showed conclusively that Dansey maintained a very active interest in clandestine wireless communications. As the saga enters the phase where SIS is in control of RSS, Liddell is soon seen to harbour grave concerns about the purity of SIS’s intentions, and Gambier-Parry gives the impression of voicing a dangerous policy crafted by someone else.  But why would SIS set out so obstructively, not accepting MI5’s requirements, or attending to their legitimate concerns?

An observer might ask at this stage: why did the JIC not take a firmer interest in all these negotiations? The committee was in fact still finding its feet after a revitalisation arising from Churchill’s accession to the premiership. MI5 and SIS were not even admitted to the committee until mid-1940, and were normally represented by Brigadiers Allen and Menzies, respectively, who might not have known exactly what was going on, or may not have been certain how much they should disclose. After all, Cavendish-Bentinck, even as Chairman of the JIC, did not know about ULTRA at this time. Yet Hinsley records that the first attempt during the war to involve the JIC in the discussion of Sigint policy and organisation foundered on Menzies’s opposition. This is an extraordinary assertion, given that Menzies, as a newcomer, presumably could not have had much clout, and he would not have been able to display his ULTRA card. As I have shown, the Y Committee, which determined interception priorities, was likewise undergoing a high degree of turmoil at the time. The whole dispersal of policy and practice for interception and intelligence gathering seems a glorious muddle, and then one remembers that glorious muddling-through is the modus operandi of liberal democracies, and the reason they thrive. Halfway through this chapter of RSS’s wartime translocation, the Conservative administration of Chamberlain had been replaced by Churchill’s coalition, with new ministers, new ideas, new appointments. There was in fact a great deal of trust and creative, open discussion between the departments, unlike the fiercely competitive agencies in Hitler’s Germany, or those cowed into indecision under Stalin, with both intelligence groups mainly telling their respective dictators what they wanted to hear.

And, finally, what about the ‘Greek tragedy’ alluded to by John Curry? We recall that this judgment appeared in the official internal history completed by Curry in 1946. Yet in his draft chapter on Illicit Interception dated October 22, 1945, Curry (who was a rather cautious and neurotic individual, as Liddell’s Diaries inform us) came to a very different conclusion. “It is nevertheless true to say that the benefits derived as a result of R.S.S. being under the control, first of the War Office, and secondly of M.I.6. were considerable and the results achieved and the benefits to intelligence work were immense. However, one is left with the feeling that had M.I.5 accepted responsibility for the organisation in 1938 a great deal of the trouble which ultimately arose between R.S.S. and M.I.5. and the ultimate change of command in 1941, would never have arisen and indeed the organisation detecting illicit wireless transmissions would have been just as good, if not better, than the one that ultimately emerged.”

That is a weak and fudgy statement that sounds as if Curry was trying to please too many audiences. Why those multiple ‘ultimates’? Is Curry referring to friction between RSS and MI5 before the ‘ultimate change of command’, or that which occurred afterwards? Was his subjective and unanalytical ‘feeling’ shared by other officers? Why did Curry alone believe that MI5 would have found the right talent and skills to sort out RSS’s house, when its own organisation was in such a mess, and short of managerial talent, and Simpson had resigned? If the SIS control turned out to be a disaster, why did he not say so?

I suspect that the ‘Greek tragedy’ conclusion may have been inserted by Petrie himself. Harrison implies (tacitly) that it might have been the Director-General who doctored Curry’s official history, since he disagreed with Curry’s conclusions, and wanted a firmer statement made on Cowgill’s obstinacies. Harrison, by the way, clearly identifies the ‘Greek tragedy’ as the withholding of ISOS material in April 1942 by Cowgill. Yet that was an Act III episode that was overcome before the finale. I have pointed out before how the circumstances of Petrie’s retirement are finessed by Andrew: I suspect Petrie had discovered some of the nasty smells that derived from a flawed interception policy when he retired in 1946. It is possible that he then realised that a deal between SIS and MI5 had already been in the works when his opinion was sought, one that effectively hamstrung him in his effort to protect the nation from the malign efforts of Soviet spies. Ensuring that his opinion of the whole affair was recorded for posterity was his swan-song.

(I am very grateful to Dr. Brian Austin, for his very helpful comments during the evolution of this article, and to Stan Ames and Bob King for their research contributions and insights. The conclusions made in it, and any errors therein, are mine alone.)

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