Coldspur

(For the story so far, please see Part I. This article brings the story up to May 1940, when Churchill was appointed Prime Minister.)

The failure to prosecute Sonia’s illicit radio activity has to be interpreted in the following contexts: the overall techniques for detecting unauthorised radio transmissions within British borders; the changing policy towards Soviet and Comintern wireless messages from the time of the Nazi-Soviet pact through the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and beyond; evolving attitudes towards communists residing in Britain at that same time; and the tensions between MI5 and SIS that arose partly from the fact that international radio exchanges traversed the bailiwicks of each department.

The  main challenges in wireless telegraphy that faced Britain’s authorities as World War II approached could be characterised as follows: 1) the interception and interpretation of diplomatic and military traffic from the nation’s adversaries; 2)  the detection of subversive alien transmissions from within the country’s borders (the responsibility of MI5, also known as the Security Service); 3) the provision of secure and reliable communications for the government’s own diplomatic and military agencies; and 4) the supply of the same facilities for the intelligence service to communicate with its agents abroad – primarily in Europe (the responsibility of SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, and also, from July 1940, SOE, the Special Operations Executive). Much has been written about 1 (e.g. about ULTRA, the German enciphered traffic decrypted at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park) and 2 (e.g. on the Double-Cross System, whereby German spies were ‘turned’ to send deceptive messages back to their masters). Very little has been written about 3, presumably because governments are loath to have light shed upon the strengths and frailties of their cryptographic techniques, and the damage that was caused when they were broken, while 4 has enjoyed a good deal of publicity because of the considerable media attention given to the exploits of those who tried to help ‘set Europe ablaze’, in Churchill’s much reported phrase. That coverage includes successes achieved by agents parachuted into Europe as well as disasters like the ‘Englandspiel’, when the Gestapo was able to convince SOE officers in London that the radio transmissions of captured agents in the Netherlands were genuine.

In addition, because of reasons of history, technology and expertise, no clear organizational charters for addressing these tasks existed. For example, during the 1930s, the nominal responsibility for the interception of hostile transmissions had lain with the War Office, under an organization named MI1g. The surveillance of radio communications thus resided alongside that of oversight of messages sent commercially by cable, and was seen essentially as a function of military intelligence. Yet the tasks carried out did not reside exclusively within the Military Intelligence organization, which sometimes appeared to be less than totally committed to its mission. The official historian of British Intelligence , when describing the group’s execution, added the qualification:  ‘ . . . with the GPO [General Post Office] acting as its agent for the provision of men and material and the maintenance and operation of the intercept stations’. This division of labour, however, was clearly not satisfactory in a time of war. In November 1939, in the light of such pressures, a new organization, the Radio Security Service, was set up as MI8c – thus still under Military Intelligence. This reallocation of effort was an improvement, but nevertheless still represented an uneasy compromise.

Furthermore, the precise nature of these groups and their reporting structures is difficult to determine, as the various histories offer conflicting accounts. Philip Davies informs us that MI1g was a ‘very small body’ staffed and equipped by the GPO, which maintained only three fixed and four mobile operating stations, supported by a ‘nascent corps of volunteer intercept operators’ – no doubt a very enthusiastic crew, but not automatically suggesting the discipline that would be required of military intelligence. Davies ascribes the organizational changes that occurred in November 1939 to the report on the security services undertaken by Lord Hankey, at the request of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, in August 1939, on the brink of war. (Other accounts suggest that funding for RSS had already been approved earlier that year.) Hankey identified three groups covering signals activity that were probably not working as efficiently as they could, and listed the processes: detection of illicit transmissions in the UK, the handling of radio beacons, and the challenge of communications from agents of SIS abroad. He recommended a new department be set up, absorbing all three. The outcome of Hankey’s recommendations was less dramatic: the unit in the GPO was set up as an independent group as the Radio Security Service (RSS), ‘placed under the War Office interception (Y) service, MI8, as MI8c’. Nigel West suggests that the head of MI5, Vernon Kell, may have contributed to this reorganization out of a fear that a network of agents within the UK would assist raiding German aircraft to home in on their targets, and wanted such illegal signals identified, and their originators arrested.

One frequent misconception – found in many books, and in profiles on the World Wide Web –  is that RSS had its origins within MI5 itself, the organization tasked with ‘defending the realm’, and thus needing to be aware of illicit signals activity emanating from within the country’s borders. It has been suggested that this historical background contributed to the later friction between MI5 and SIS over signals detection in 1941 (which will be analyzed in more depth later). The diaries of Guy Liddell (deputy to Jasper Harker of MI5’s Counter-Espionage B Division until he replaced Harker when the latter was moved upstairs in May 1940), provide evidence of this confusion. For example, when Chamberlain, defining one of the objectives of the study described above, asked Hankey to investigate the issue of information ‘leakages’ to Germany, portrayed by Liddell as a ‘wrangle’ between the War Office and SIS, Liddell discovered that Hankey too (no neophyte in these matters) was under the misapprehension that MI5 was responsible for wireless interception.

Quoting Davies’s cool judgment is the easiest way of summarizing the nature of this misrepresentation. Assessing the eventual takeover of RSS by SIS in 1941, Davies writes: “It is often asserted that SIS acquired RSS from MI5, over the security service’s objections, and that this was one of the sources of friction between the two agencies which marred their cooperation during the war. However, as pointed out by Hinsley and the former post-war Deputy-General of MI5, C. A. G. Simkins, in Volume IV of the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, nothing of this sort took place. The RSS was acquired by the SIS from the War Office signals organization, MI8, with the very explicit backing of DGSS [Director-General of the Security Service] Sir David Petrie. However, the process by which this was developed was nothing like as consensual as Hinsley and Simkins suggest, with considerable resistance appearing, not from MI5, but from MI8 and even the DMI [the Director of Military Intelligence].”  Davies adds examples of the confusion in his Notes: “See, for example, West, MI6, pp. 148, 284 (although West also – correctly – identifies the RSS as having originally been under the War Office as MI8c), and in greater detail in his earlier, MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945, pp 201-4. This version of events is also suggested in the first volume of the official history, Hinsley, et al., British Intelligence, vol. 1, p 277, although the official history corrects its position in the fourth volume on counter-espionage and security.” Davies’s commentary is a very important contribution to the narrative.

Thus, during the Phoney War (from September 1939 to May 1940), MI5 was out of the mainstream management of illicit signals detection, but still maintained a very strong interest in how it was executed, as the department was responsible for working with the police to investigate possible infractions of the law. The emergent RSS organization in fact worked alongside MI5 in the recently appropriated location of Wormwood Scrubs (whither the Headquarters of MI5 had moved in August 1939), allowing the Security Service to learn at close hand what was going on  ̶  a co-residency that coincidentally contributed to the historical confusion over responsibilities. Liddell and his officers frequently expressed frustration over the capabilities of the detection-finders, and its troops of ‘amateurs twiddling knobs’, being made aware of illicit signals from their old contacts in the Post Office. Liddell’s diary entries, at the end of 1939, are riddled with observations about illicit broadcasts being made, but not being followed up appropriately, even though the infractions turned out to be almost all harmless. He also expressed frustration with the laws that prevented the authorities from entering anyone’s premises in search of illegal apparatus.  Yet part of the overall strategy of radio communications was to give the Germans the impression that Britain’s detection techniques were not that efficient: MI5 was already using the double-agent SNOW (Arthur Owens) to relay information to the Nazis, and it did not want the Germans to start wondering why his broadcasts had not been picked up. What is more, no other evidence of German spies was found. Was this due to inefficiency, or to an absence of any subversive activity?

As 1939 turned into 1940, MI5’s interest seemed to switch from the detection of local radio transmissions to the analysis of broadcasts and messages emanating from Germany, primarily the threat represented by the New British Broadcasting Service, a propaganda vehicle of the Nazis. MI5 harboured the suspicion that the NBBS was sending coded messages to a ‘Fifth Column’ preparing to take up arms at the right call. Complex discussions took place between the War Office, SIS and GC&CS over whose responsibility this should be. While MI5 resisted attempts to have this task palmed off to its overstretched workforce, a continuing professional interest in the topic would eventually lead to Liddell’s hiring an executive from the BBC to set up a new group dealing with such ‘codes’. What did constitute a break-through, however, was the detection of wireless interactions on the Continent between German units and their corresponding offices or outlying agents: Liddell refers quite excitedly to the evolving decryption of such messages. It is not surprising that his diary had to be secreted.

Meanwhile, in the light of its failure to provide a cross-European network, SIS had its own reasons for improving its radio communications expertise, as Hankey had intimated. (At the outbreak of the war, for example, SIS agents in Switzerland could only receive radio traffic, not send it.)  The pre-war director of SIS, Hugh Sinclair, had concluded that he needed to own and maintain his own secure network, independent of the Foreign Office, for his secret communications with agents, and transmissions from embassies, overseas (i.e. separating task 3 from task 4). It can be seen that SIS was, somewhat anomalously, responsible for tasks 1 and 4, a grouping that turned out to be quite significant as the war progressed. In 1938 Sinclair moved the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) from Broadway to Bletchley Park, and the next year moved  most of the staff at the Barnes wireless station (then shared with the Foreign Office – task 3) to Whaddon Hall, which, like Hanslope Park, where RSS was eventually to reside, was also close to Bletchley Park. Sinclair had recruited Richard Gambier-Parry from the private radio industry in 1938 to manage this new network. Gambier-Parry immediately developed new radio equipment in Barnes, including more portable sets for agents going overseas, and set up new transmissions stations, for example in Woldingham, Surrey. When Sinclair died in November 1939, he was replaced by Stewart Menzies, not an uncontroversial choice, but one supported by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Menzies was not a strong leader, but he exploited his responsibility for GC&CS to his best advantage, gaining significant political support from Churchill.

As has been shown, the original mission of RSS had been to intercept and track down transmissions from enemy agents working from within Britain. According to Geoffrey Pidgeon’s account, The Secret Wireless War, the idea for engaging amateurs for this task had come from Lord Sandhurst of MI5, who approached Arthur Watts, then President of the Radio Society of Great Britain in the summer of 1939. MI5’s section to handle any spies who had been detected and apprehended also resided in Wormwood Scrubs, and it was there that Watts was interviewed. (Another contributor to the confusion over responsibilities.) While ‘amateur transmitters were impounded on the outbreak of war the short wave receivers were not’, writes Pidgeon: thus an enthusiastic body of capable interceptors was available. The rather transparent name of Illicit Wireless Intercept Organization (IWIO) was established, which eventually morphed into the RSS. The officer who headed this new organization was a Colonel Worlledge, described by West as ‘a veteran interceptor, who . . . was give an brief to “intercept, locate and close down illicit wireless stations operated whether by enemy agents in Great Britain or by any other persons not licensed to do under Defence Regulations, 1939”.’ This charter paradoxically suggested that the allegiance of persons operating such equipment could be determined prior to their apprehension, but at least it did not exclude the possibility of trapping (for instance) Communist agents as well.  Procedures were put in place for suspicious Morse signals to be transcribed by the force of Voluntary Interceptors (VIs) and sent to Howick Place in London, and Post Office direction-finding vans were ready to move in on the spies when their locations were discovered. On April 5, 1940, Liddell wrote: “Matters have been brought to a head by some radio-therapy organisation called Hanovia which has been broadcasting a colossal beam day and night. The discovery was made by Col. Worlledge and his boys with the vans.” Hereby Liddell perhaps betrayed his less than complete  respect for the organization.

The process of listening for enemy Morse signals was an arduous one, requiring intense concentration and patience. The volunteer hams who comprised the force were directed to tune in to particular German wave-bands at a certain frequency and then accurately and quickly transcribe what they heard. Call-signs might be changed, so operators started to learn the pattern of radio operations, the individual’s ‘fist’. Frequencies might be changed at set intervals, so listeners had to be attentive to signals suddenly stopping. Overall, however, the amateurs developed a higher level of skill than the professional Post Office operatives. Thus, by early 1940, the RSS had become very successful at picking up messages from German agents on the continent – but the department had not discovered any messages originating from British soil, apart from SNOW, the agent mentioned above. Yet this phenomenon eventually betrayed an important fact: communication with spies and their controls would obviously have been two-way. As Hinsley wrote: “Since Snow’s signals had not been heard before MI5 took control of him, the failure to intercept others was understandably attributed to the inefficiency of the watch or to technical problems, notably the difficulty of picking up low-powered high frequency signals except at very close or very long range. By December 1939, however, it had been recognised that the difficulty did not apply to transmissions made from Germany to agents: they had to be able to receive their control stations’ signals, and if they could hear them, so could the RSS.”

RSS was by this time energetically recruiting from the universities, as was MI5. Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of the first academics to be hired by E. W. B. Gill, the bursar of Merton College, Oxford, who had been recruited in December 1939 to head up what was called the ‘discrimination’ unit of RSS. Trevor-Roper thus took up his duties at Wormwood Scrubs, and built solid relationships with Liddell and other officers, such as ‘TAR’ Robertson and Dick White. Their supervision of agent SNOW (and his periods of downtime), combined with rapidly improving goniometric techniques for location finding, were to provide a breakthrough in traffic analysis. Having detected wireless messages between a German ship, the Theseus, off the Norwegian coast, and an Abwehr station in Hamburg, RSS sent the transcripts to GC&CS at Bletchley Park, but surprisingly was told that they should be ignored. Not the most tactful of persons, Trevor-Roper, intellectually stimulated, then quickly broke the cipher on his own, early in 1940. Bletchley Park was annoyed at this territorial infringement, but RSS succeeded in breaking further ciphers, and a special group was set up under Oliver Strachey at GC&CS to process such messages. Thus was begun the powerful programme that later became to be known as ULTRA.

Meanwhile, what of Sonia (Ursula Hamburger, née Kuczynski)? The accounts of her movements are inherently not very reliable. The memoir of a close colleague and agent of hers in Switzerland, Alexander Foote, ‘Handbook for Spies’ (published in 1950), was in fact ghosted by an MI5 officer, Courtenay Young, who had his employer’s own agenda in mind when he doctored Foote’s story. Sonia’s record is equally dubious, conveniently passing over several facts, having been directed by the authorities in Moscow. The files at the National Archives, especially those covering Foote’s interrogation by MI5 after he defected from the Soviets in 1947, probably provide the most realistic picture of the bizarre events that preceded Sonia’s arrival in England.

What appears indisputable, confirmed by all accounts, is that, in the summer of 1938, Sonia had been instructed to set up a spy network in Switzerland with herself as radio operator, one that eventually became known as the ‘Rote Drei’ (the ‘Red Three’). She had left her two children (a son Michael, by Rudolf Hamburger, the second Janina, by her lover from China, Ernst) at Felpham in Sussex, and spent three months in Moscow. She returned to England in October, seeking a recruit for her team, probably someone with experience in the Spanish Civil War, who would be suitable for carrying out espionage in Germany. The Communist Party of GB recommended one Alexander Foote, a leftist who had seen action in Spain, but was importantly not a CP member (which would have otherwise have drawn the attention of MI5 to him). Through illness, Foote missed his appointment with Sonia, but had a meeting with her sister Brigitte after Sonia had returned to Switzerland. In January 1939, Foote met Sonia in Geneva: she then trained him in radio operation, at which he became very proficient. They were also both capable of building their own radio equipment. The following month, Foote introduced an ex-colleague from Spain, Len Beurton, to Sonia, as a second agent to operate in Germany. By then, however, Sonia had received fresh instructions from Moscow.

Here the story diverges. It would seem that the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) had determined that Sonia should return to Britain as a deep penetration agent, probably to initiate the transmission of purloined atomic weapons research to Moscow, as the Soviet Union had solid contacts with those carrying out atomic research in British universities at the time. But Sonia was not a British citizen, and entry would have been impossible in wartime. Foote’s account is not credible: he suggests that Sonia became so disillusioned about the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 that she decided to quit espionage, and set her mind on returning to England. “The main obstacle, apart from Moscow’s views, was her German passport”, he writes, as if Moscow Centre would have tolerated such bourgeois self-indulgence. Foote then laconically comments on her arranged marriage to Beurton, and acquisition of a British passport.

Sonia herself approaches the truth a little more closely. She indicates that Moscow was predictably concerned about the expiry of her documents, that she was given a choice of marrying either Foote or Beurton, but that she found Beurton more congenial. (They did become devoted: the marriage lasted until his death in 1997.) Having married Beurton in February 1940, she was able to exploit the reputation of English friends introduced to her by her father, including the leftist John Belloch of the International Labour Organisation, the son-in-law of the Manchester Guardian correspondent, Robert Dell. Belloch’s name indeed appears in the National Archives as one who gave a good reference for her in her passport application. Then Moscow ‘suggested’ that she and Beurton ‘settle’ in Great Britain.

The National Archives indicate, however, that a more sinister plan of action was undertaken. In October 1939, Sonia had gained a divorce from her husband, Rudolf Hamburger (who had by then returned to the Soviet Union, but was complicit in the subterfuge, as Moscow orders were orders), based on the perjurious testimony of Foote, who claimed that he had seen Hamburger conducting an affair with Sonia’s sister Brigitte in London. Foote’s testimony is occasionally contradictory: for example, at one stage he told his interrogators that Sonia was ordered to go to Britain, but on another misleadingly claimed that ‘Moscow instructed Ursula that she was on no account to work in England, even if she wished to do so; it was against Soviet policy for foreign nationals to work in their own country, and against that country’. Yet it is unlikely that he would have invented such a story that would incriminate himself so boldly.

What followed next was either an example of gross incompetence or an exercise in looking the other way for some larger political reason. Despite the fact that MI5 knew of the subversive intentions of the whole Kuczynski family (her openly communist brother was rabble-rousing under internment at the time), and that the Soviet Union was at that time still an ally of Nazi Germany, and supplying it with war matériel to be used against Britain, MI5 failed to respond in a timely manner about any concerns they had about the genuineness of Sonia’s marriage and passport application. Sonia was issued her passport on April 24, 1940. (Some voices in MI5 spoke up: their contribution will be analyzed later.) She then prepared to take her two young children with her to England, Len inconveniently not yet being able to accompany them because his role in the International Brigade in 1936 would have prevented him travelling through Spain. She would eventually arrive in Britain in January 1941, after an extraordinary journey with her children that took her to Lisbon, where she would be granted passage on one of the few ships that were able to set sail in those days. Thus did the British authorities connive in the facilitating of the entry into the country of one of the most notorious communist agents of her time. And outside Oxford she would set up her radio, in the grounds of a house owned by Neville Laski, the brother of the communist fellow-traveller, agent of influence, and would-be terrorist, Harold Laski.

Thus, in May 1940, when Germany invaded the Low Countries, and WWII began in earnest for Britain, an intriguing confluence of factors was at work. Britain was now led by a premier who had a fascination with intelligence and clandestine operations. Radio-detection, interception and decryption techniques were rapidly advancing. With a German invasion in the offing, a ‘Fifth Column’ scare provoked the authorities to a hyperactive response to the threat of subversives in their midst, a group that was not restricted to Nazi sympathisers only. In March 1940 the scientists Peierls and Frisch published their famous memorandum recommending Uranium 235 as the basis for an atomic bomb, and the Maud commission on nuclear fission was set up the following month.  On the same day that the Netherlands were invaded (May 14, 1940), however, the scientist and future spy for whom Sonia would eventually act as courier, Klaus Fuchs (who had worked with, and been sponsored by, Peierls), was interned and sent to Nova Scotia. Sonia would soon be safely installed near Oxford, but her energies would have to wait until Fuchs’s communist past was overlooked in favour of his potential contribution to atomic weapons research, and he was plucked out of internment to join what was now named the ‘Tube Alloys’ project.

Principal Sources:

British Intelligence in the Second World War, by F. H. Hinsley et al.

The Security Service 1908-1945: The Official History by John Curry

The Secret History of MI6,1909-1949 by Colin Jeffery

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew

MI5 by Nigel West

GCHQ by Nigel West

The Secret Wireless War: The Story of MI6 Communications, 1939-1945 by Geoffrey Pidgeon

MI6 and the Machinery of Spying by Philip H. J. Davies

GCHQ by Richard J. Aldrich

The Secret World by Hugh-Trevor-Roper

The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay

The Secret War by Max Hastings

Sonjas Rapport by Ruth Werner

Handbook for Spies by Alexander Foote

The National Archives

(Part 3 – and maybe Part 4 – will appear in the next few months. Their writing will require me to inspect first some archival material at Kew that is not available for download remotely.)

This month’s Commonplace entries available here.  (June 30, 2016)

The Book Cover       

Sonia’s  Inscription

A couple of years ago, I bought on-line, from a bookshop in Minneapolis, an item titled ‘Sonjas Rapport’ (‘Sonia’s Report’) by one Ruth Werner. It is rather a drab publication, a fourth edition of 1978, issued by Verlag Neues Leben, in East Berlin.  On one of the leading pages, it appears that the author has written an inscription for the buyer. It runs as follows: ‘Jeder Autor hat beim Aufschreiben seiner Erinnerungen Schwierigkeiten; Auswählen, Komprimieren und die Wahrheit sagen, das war für mich der Weg. Mit gutem Gewissen, Ruth Werner. 14 Avril 1977.’ [‘Every author experiences difficulties in recording his or her memoirs: to select, to condense and to tell the truth, that was the approach I took. With a clear conscience, Ruth Werner. 14 Avril, 1977.’]

What is going on here? Is this a hoax? Why would the inscription be dated ‘April 1977’ when the book was printed the following year? A Google search for the sentence is partially rewarding but also frustrating: it seems that this was something that Werner had declared when the book was first published. An occasion to celebrate her 75^th birthday (in 1982) reproduces the sentence. See: https://books.google.com/books?id=O3omAAAAMAAJ&q=jeder+autor+hat+beim+Aufschreiben&dq=jeder+autor+hat+beim+Aufschreiben&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiFhoy5653MAhVCdD4KHQujCXEQ6AEIODAE   So, Werner presumably thought it appropriate to annotate the volume with her pronouncement, but indicate the date she first said it, at the time of the book’s launch, I imagine. The statement is, however, both anodyne and perplexing. Of course, every memoirist faces difficulties – but was telling the truth one of these challenges? And why introduce her ‘conscience’ unless she had something she was feeling guilty about?

So why did I seek this particular book out? Because Ruth Werner (aka Ursula Hamburger, or Kuczynski, or Beurton: agent SONIA) was one of the most notorious Communist spies of the century. (I direct readers to her Wikipedia entry to learn more about her life and career. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Kuczynski.) Now, we must bear in mind that the reminiscences of spies are not at all trustworthy, despite their claims to clean consciences and honesty, and Werner’s work was no doubt controlled by Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. Yet I was especially interested in what she had to say, because of my research into Communist subversion in the early part of World War II. For Sonia managed to hoodwink an incompetent MI5 into letting her back into the United Kingdom, after her arranged marriage to Spanish Civil War veteran Len Beurton in Switzerland (by which she gained British citizenship), in the winter of 1940-1941. Soon thereafter, she became the primary contact for Klaus Fuchs, allowing the German Communist (now also a naturalised Briton) to give her atomic secrets for passing on to Moscow, and she started using radio equipment given to her by her London contacts (or maybe constructed by herself) to communicate information to her bosses in the Soviet Union. Falling upon a signed copy of her memoir was quite a coup.

Yet Sonia pulled off this massive espionage exercise when MI5 was completely aware of her political affiliations, and the probable intentions behind her marriage, as well as her relationship with her openly subversive brother, Jürgen, who was interned early in 1940, alongside some of his Comintern friends. Moreover, a couple of years later, in January 1943, a wireless set was discovered at the cottage in Oxfordshire which she was renting from Neville Laski, the brother of the notorious Communist sympathizer, Harold Laski! Yet nothing was done. What was going on?

Now that my doctoral thesis has been submitted, I can turn to some of the puzzling and controversial episodes of communist subversion in the period of the 30s and 40s (and occasionally beyond)  that have never been satisfactorily resolved (e.g. Kim Philby’s recruitment, Philby’s relationship with Stephen Spender, Guy Burgess’s protectors, Isaiah Berlin’s relationship with Soviet intelligence, Klaus Fuchs’s Aliens War Service permit, Victor Rothschild’s guilt, the early detection of Leo Long’s espionage, the role of Basil Mann, the death of Hugh Gaitskell, etc.). Why illicit broadcasts from Soviet spies were allowed to proceed unpunished is one of the most perplexing of these challenges. The journalist/historian Michael Smith even claims that, during World War II, a nest of communist spies was overheard discussing plans for the forthcoming war between the Soviet Union and the West. (That assertion must be tested.) Ursula Werner’s ability to remain untouched is part of that enigma.

Most of this story has been told before. One of the best accounts appears in Chapman Pincher’s ‘Treachery’, although the reader must be careful with Pincher’s narrative, as he provides no sources for his multiple claims, and since his goal is to show that Roger Hollis was the Soviet Super-Spy in the innards of MI5, his objectivity and accuracy (especially as regards chronology) cannot be readily trusted. For example, his argument is that Sonia was able to continue to perform untroubled because Roger Hollis and his counter-espionage partner in SIS, Kim Philby, were able to keep the authorities from investigating and prosecuting her. Yet it seems inconceivable to me that those two would be able to pull off such a coup, and convince their masters of the correctness of such a course of action, without drawing obvious attention to themselves. Moreover, MI5 harboured a more deep-seated problem of dealing with Communists than might have been contained in the unbrilliant mind of Roger Hollis.

Wireless and its associated techniques are a complex area, attracting both brilliant and slightly eccentric characters. As George Smiley says, when describing to his colleague Peter Guillam the encounter he had with Karla, in John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: “We all have our prejudices and radio men are mine. They’re a thoroughly tiresome lot in my experience, bad fieldmen and overstrung, and disgracefully unreliable when it comes down to doing the job.” (Chapter 23).  I can’t claim to have a good understanding of the technology involved, but I believe I have learned enough to conclude that the failure to act over Sonia (and maybe other spies at the time) was not a technical problem.

I do know that possessing unregistered wireless sets was illegal, as was using registered sets for transmission. I have learned that, in the first years of the war, the responsibilities for tracking, recording and decoding illicit radio transmissions (as well as messages originating from overseas) were calamitously split between such groups as the BBC, Military Intelligence (in a section called MI8), Section W in MI5, the Radio Intelligence Service and its offshoots (which was a reincarnation of the group within MI8 called MI8(c), and moved to SIS in 1941), and the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), whose name was changed to Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in 1943. I know that MI8(c) and RSS very much focused their efforts on Nazi wavebands (‘the enemy’), even when the Soviet Union was still an ally of Germany, that is up to June 1941. (Older readers of this blog may be familiar with the BBC 1979 television programme ‘The Secret Listeners’, which described the corps of amateur wireless enthusiasts who aided the effort. It is viewable at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwbzV2Jx5Qo).   I recall that MI5 rapidly claimed, in its promotion of the Double-Cross System, that no unidentified Nazi spies remained at large in the UK, sending radio messages back to Germany, despite the administrative mess.  I know that Malcolm Frost, who joined MI5 from the BBC to run Section W, was a very arrogant and ambitious character, and that Guy Liddell (head of B Division, responsible for Counter-Espionage) felt threatened by him.  I know that the head of MI8(c) protested the move of RSS to SIS, and that his boss, the Director of Military Intelligence, tried to talk the head of the Security Executive (Swinton) out of it, but that Petrie of MI5 and Swinton forced the transfer through in May 1941.  I also know that, once MI5 had declined the offer to take over RSS itself in early 1941, Liddell started being very critical of RSS’s direction-finding techniques and discipline.

But what I don’t know is who called the shots, who made the fateful decisions to minimise the Communist threat and to allow people like Sonia to continue working, even after the defector Krivitsky had warned MI5 of the dangers of Communist infiltrators. I certainly do not yet know what is the source of Smith’s claim that the codes of the Soviet spy network in 1943 had been broken, and by whom, or whether the Joint Intelligence Committee knew what was going on. In the coming months, I plan to dig around relevant papers at the National Archives that are available on-line, various works of intelligence history (which are very contradictory about organisation and responsibilities on these issues), and the memoirs of such as the history don Hugh Trevor-Roper (who worked for RSS).  I thus hope to be able to offer a workable hypothesis as to why MI5 – or the government in general – was so indulgent with the Soviet Union’s subversive efforts with illegal radios. Anyone who has unpublished (or published) insights on these issues is encouraged to contact me at antonypercy@aol.com.

Finally, a hint as to the muddle that was MI5 – and at the same time a reminder that it was such a pluralist muddle that we were fighting for in the struggles against the totalitarian states. Readers may recall those wartime films, where the Gestapo homes in on the desperate SOE agent, feverishly tapping out a Morse message on his (or her) radio set, perhaps in an attic in suburban France, hoping that he can complete it before the Nazis, with their goniometric equipment, can identify the location whence the transmissions are made. The Gestapo officers normally burst in just as the operator is winding down. And we know what happens next: the agent is executed – or maybe, after torture, turned to send false messages back to Britain. If the operator does not use a cyanide pill first, or puts a revolver to his or her head.

Guy Liddell’s Diaries report an incident when the German spy Wulf Schmidt, known as TATE, after being maltreated by a brutal Military Intelligence officer, is rescued by MI5 and persuaded to track down where he buried his parachute and wireless set after landing. MI5 sends out its men to Cambridgeshire to dig it up. But they forget to alert the local constabulary of their intentions. As Liddell records it (September 24, 1940): “The worst of it was that the police, L.D.V. [Local Defence Volunteers], etc. have been scouring the country for this wireless set during the last 48 hours. They eventually came upon some people who reported that some mysterious diggers had come down in a car and removed what appeared to be a wireless set. On making further enquiries they discovered that these people were officers of M.I.5.” On another occasion in 1940, Liddell complains that the police are not allowed even to enter any house merely on the suspicion that illicit transmissions may be going on.  (Maybe that reminds you of the current ban in Brussels on night-time police incursions into possible terrorist houses.)

Watch this space! I plan to provide the next installment in a couple of months’ time.

P.S.  The New York Times fails to learn. Despite my attempt to engage the newspaper a couple of months ago (see Refugees & Liberators), it has not got things straight. In an article on immigration to Germany in its Magazine of April 10, James Angelos wrote: “The scale of the influx last year – roughly one million asylum seekers in all, nearly half of whom made formal applications – was exceeded in German history only by the influx of ‘ethnic Germans’ who were expelled from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union after World War II.”

P.P.S.  Again, for those of you who want to contact me, please send your message to my email address at antonypercy@aol.com. If you use the box underneath maintained by WordPress, your message will probably get lost among the literally thousands of spam messages that I have not yet ploughed through. If I have not yet acknowledged your genuine message deposited there, I apologise.

This month’s new Commonplace entries appear here.           (April 30, 2016)

This essay is not about Thomas, Manfred, or even F. G. Mann: it concerns the scientist, Wilfrid, of that Ilk. It was prompted by my recent reading of Andrew Lownie’s biography of the spy Guy Burgess, Stalin’s Englishman, which reveals a number of important facts about the notorious reprobate. It is a highly enjoyable work, my only major reservation being that Lownie does not assiduously enough pursue the several hares that he starts, leaving such readers such as this one gasping to know (for example) why Burgess not only managed to maintain any job he had in government, but how he succeeded in getting placed elsewhere despite his reputation. I have a particular interest in Burgess’s high-level sponsors and protectors (there must have been at least one), because of my research into the enigmatic voyage that he and Isaiah Berlin made towards Moscow in the summer of 1940.

One intriguing detail that Lownie does bring to the table, however, is an addendum to the case of espionage made against the nuclear scientist Wilfrid Mann. When Andrew Boyle published his Climate of Treason (originally titled The Fourth Man) in 1979, the author made broad hints about the identity of two suspected spies. The first, whom he called ‘Maurice’ was quite easily identified as being Anthony Blunt. The second, ‘Basil’ (whom Boyle then called the ‘Fifth Man’, not knowing about John Cairncross or even Leo Long at the time), was a British scientist in Washington whose name had been revealed to the F.B.I. by the Israelis, and who was subsequently ‘turned’ by the F.B.I. to provide disinformation to the Soviets. Boyle wrote: “It has not surprised the counter-intelligence interrogators that ‘Basil’ broke down quickly and easily, confessing that he had become a covert Communist in his student days and a secret agent for the Soviet not long afterwards.” (p 310) Unlike the hints about Blunt (who turns up regularly in Boyle’s book), there was only one reference to the obvious candidate for ‘Basil’, namely Wilfrid Basil Mann, where he attends a party given by Kim Philby, at which Burgess predictably misbehaves. Boyle must have felt on firm ground to use Mann’s second name without fear of a libel suit.

Mann replied not with a legal action, but with a rather dubious protest, in a book titled Was There a Fifth Man? (1982), suggesting explicitly that the question should be about whether such a character existed rather than whether he, Mann, was that person. It cast doubt on Boyle’s chronology, claiming to show that the author was not around when the episodes of espionage occurred, and that he was in fact out of the nuclear picture when the leaks occurred. Like so many memoirs in the field of espionage and counter-espionage, however, Mann’s account is not really to be trusted. Yet the topic of his guilt has languished for a while, with no definite proof either way (not that proof could be found that determined that anyone had never been a spy, as Lord Rothschild discovered). And then, in 2015, Lownie offers his revelation. He presents new evidence of Mann’s guilt. On page 213, he writes: “ . . .  Mann’s recruitment and turning has now been confirmed by Patrick Reilly, chair of the Foreign Intelligence Committee, and then the Foreign Office Under-Secretary in charge of intelligence, who wrote in his unpublished memoirs, ‘that “Basil”, who can easily be identified, was in fact a Soviet spy is true: and also that he was turned round without difficulty.” Lownie gives a reference to this item as appearing at the Bodleian Library. I am sure it is valid, and I plan to inspect it next time I am in Oxford. But I wonder why it has not been picked up before?

Moreover, another lead appears in Lownie’s book. On page 211, he reproduces two caricatures drawn by Burgess on Wilfrid Mann’s copy of Atomic Energy, the author of the book described here as being George Crannov. This is, however, an obvious misprint, as Lownie has admitted to me: the caricature clearly shows the correct name of the author, G. Gamow, who is described, in Burgess’s writing, as being ‘under the action of absinth’, and it features an obvious image of Joseph Stalin chewing a cocktail-table, as if Gamow were haunted by the influence of the Soviet dictator, and taking on his shape. The episode occurred in November 1950, as the caricature is clearly dated. What is going on here? And what is the connection between Burgess, Mann, Gamow, and Stalin?

Well, I am familiar with this George Gamow. In my thesis about Soviet subversion that is about to be submitted, I have a paragraph on him, which runs as follows (the footnotes and endnotes demanded by such a work being replaced with parenthetical explanations):  “As has been shown with Isaiah Berlin’s father, Mendel, threatening exiles with harm to relatives still living in the Soviet Union was a favoured tactic of Stalin’s secret police. Pavel Sudoplatov [who headed the ‘Special Tasks’ group, responsible for the liquidation of Stalin’s enemies, and had blood on his hands, personally] described how another physicist suffered the same treatment because of his concern for relatives left behind. ‘Using implied threats against Gamow’s relatives in Moscow, Elizaveta Zarubina [a resident NKVD operative in the Unites States, and also not a nice person] pressured him into cooperating with us. In exchange for safety and material support for his relatives, Gamow provided the names of left-wing scientists who might be recruited to supply secret information.’  Like Peierls’ wife, Eugenia, George Gamow had started his scientific career in Leningrad: he was also a friend of Peierls [Rudolf Peierls, who spearheaded atomic weapons research in Britain in 1940, and was the colleague and mentor of the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs], who credited Gamow’s explanation of alpha decay as ‘one of the earliest successes of quantum mechanics’. Max Born [another famous émigré scientist with communist sympathies] explains that Gamow made several unsuccessful attempts to escape to the West from the Soviet Union, but eventually gained a permit in 1932 after several distinguished physicists, including Einstein and Bohr, had guaranteed his return. When Gamow decided to settle in the United States, Stalin was so furious at his refusal to return that he took his frustration out on Pyotr Kapitza [another leading Soviet scientist who worked at Cambridge University for many years, before being recalled by Stalin and not allowed back].”

You can find a rich biographical article on Gamow. ‘Getting a Bang out of Gamow’, at  https://physics.columbian.gwu.edu/george-gamow , although it says nothing about any espionage activity, or his relationship with Mann and  Burgess. He is credited with being the originator of the ‘Big Bang’ theory of the universe, and is ascribed as having a considerable influence on the scientists at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. It includes a fascinating photograph of John Cockcroft and Gamow at the Laboratory in 1931. The account of the escape by Gamow and his wife to the West, after making unsuccessful attempts beforehand, does not ring true. The fact that he gained – ‘more than a little surprised’  ̶  Molotov’s and Stalin’s approval for him and his wife to attend a conference in Brussels in 1933 suggests a deal was done.  In fact, Gamow wrote a memoir titled My World Line [that I read since I originally published this piece], which totally finesses the whole drama in a way that makes his escape from the Soviet Union seem like farce.

Gamow and his wife, Rho, were so desperate to leave the Soviet Union that, in the summer of 1932, they attempted to row in a kayak across the Black Sea to Turkey, but were beached by a violent storm. They also inspected the Finnish border in Karelia to see where they might cross. Despite these escapades, Gamow, on receiving an invitation to attend the October 1933 Solvay International Congress on Physics in Brussels, applied for a visa for Rho and himself. Through Bukharin, he arranged an unlikely interview with Molotov, then President of the USSR, to make his case. Gamow tells the story thus: “Here I told him the truth, nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘You see’, I said, ‘to make my request persuasive I should tell you that my wife, being a physicist, acts as my scientific secretary, taking care of papers, notes, and so on. So I cannot attend a large conference without her help. But this is not true. The point is that she had never been abroad, and after Brussels I want to take her to Paris to see the Louvre, the Folies Bergère, and so forth, and to do some shopping.’ He smiled, made a note on his pad, and told me to come back a week or so before I would leave, adding, ‘I don’t think this will be difficult to arrange.’”

To imagine that the gloomy and unhumorous Molotov would find such an explanation engaging is high comedy. In fact Gamow did experience difficulties getting his passports, and they arrived shortly before he was due to leave. He disingenuously observed, nearly forty years later: “Thinking back now, I still cannot figure out how it happened that I got the second passport. It seems likely that the wires had crossed somewhere.” It looks very much as if Sudoplatov was right, and the condition of his going was committing to a mission to steal Western nuclear secrets. As Gamow writes elsewhere (p 93): “It became a crime for Russian scientists to ‘fraternize’ with scientists of the capitalist countries, and those Russian scientists who were going abroad were supposed to learn the ‘secrets’ of capitalistic science without revealing the ‘secrets’ of proletarian science.”  Gamow never went back to the Soviet Union, yet claimed that he was able to maintain good relations with Soviet consulate personnel in Washington. On page 131, he writes: “In fact, during that winter [of 1934], Rho and I kept up contact with the consulate, and even went to movies with some of its members, criticizing the Hollywood productions. The case of Kapitza only strengthened my decision not to return to Leningrad.” If Gamow really had absconded without permission, it would gave been utterly foolhardy for him to present himself at the Soviet consulate.

(Another interesting tidbit is that Gamow presents a fetching photograph (p 49) of a very alluring young lady sprawled on his lap in a ‘private room at a restaurant’ in Leningrad, with his good friend Lev Landau – who won the Nobel prize in 1962  ̶  acting as ‘the hired musician’. The lady is Yevgenia Kannegiesser, who was to become Rudolf Peierls’s wife: Landau was a close friend of Peierls as well. Gamow coolly notes that Yevgenia ‘eventually married a German theoretical physicist, Rudolf Peierls, and left Russia’, as if he really didn’t know Peierls at all, which is not how Peierls represented their relationship. Gamow is a phoney.)

While Sudoplatov may not be normally be considered a wholly reliable source, it would appear that he was probably accurate in this case, and we could conclude from Gamow’s own clumsy testimony that he had a justification for being mentally tormented.  What does Mann therefore say about him? Well, he admits he knew him. On page 70 of his memoir, he writes: “During this latter period of my stay in Washington [1950] we became very friendly with Professor George Gamow and his wife Rho, and I attended one semester of his course of lectures on nuclear physics at George Washington University, which helped me to keep in touch with my fast-fading profession.” All well and good. But Mann also adds something about the caricature incident. Describing a party hosted by Mann himself, on November 25, 1950, he writes: “Guy Burgess gate-crashed the party on the excuse of bringing Kim’s secretary. It was the only time he entered our house but while he was there he got hold of a book by George Gamow entitled Atomic Energy (a subject on which he occasionally tried to sound me out!) and drew a caricature of one of the guests on the inside of the cover, and as psychologically interesting one of Stalin eating a marble table of the type one might find in a side-walk café in France.” All this sounds very bogus: the jokey aside, the deliberate indication that Burgess had never visited before (Lownie notes that Burgess was a close friend of Mann’s at the time, citing a colleague of Mann’s, Arnold Kramish, who encountered them together in Washington several times), Burgess’s ability to select the right book, Mann’s omission that the caricature described Gamow (even though he reproduces the text in his book, also). It surely sounds as if Burgess and Mann both knew Gamow, and that the relationship probably went back further than Mann claimed, i.e. that he was able to fit in a semester of lectures during this short time. Mann was probably recruited by Gamow.

Moreover, other things in Mann’s testimony do not ring true. One major problem I have is with his membership of the Technical Committee of the MAUD project on atomic weaponry (which was the name given to the activity before it was transferred from ICI to the government, and became the Tube Alloys project, late in 1941). Mann resigned almost as soon as the Committee was set up, in May 1941. He writes (p 20): “In the spring of 1941, under the strain of the hit-and-run raids, I began to feel dissatisfied with my work on the uranium project, and I went to discuss it with the Rector of Imperial College, Sir Henry Tizard. Sir Henry had been chairman of the Technical Sub-Committee of the Air Defence Research Committee since the mid-1930s and had, I understood, played a great part in pushing the development of the spitfire and of Robert Watson-Watt’s radio direction finding, each of which had stood us in good stead on the Battle of Britain. I told him that I could not believe that an atom bomb would be developed in time to win the war against Germany and I felt I ought to get into other work more directly concerned with the main objective. Sir Henry agreed and so I entered into negotiations with the Ministry of Supply in London while continuing to give my lectures at the Imperial College. I started work at the Ministry on 12 May, although the correspondence showed that the negotiations continued until 29 June in order to clarify whether or not my work at the Imperial College constituted ‘an outside interest’!”

Is this not extraordinary, that an eminent scientist should be allowed to run away from a project of such national importance, based on such a whimsical excuse, at a time when native British scientists were urgently needed on the project, especially when Mann was so closely involved with the key figures on the project, Rudolf Peierls, Basil Dickins and G. P. Thomson? Mann adds: “After 12 May, when I went to work at the Ministry of Supply, I had not, as far as I remember [always a sign of the selective memory at work. Coldspur], taken any part in the work of the MAUD Technical Committee, but I had apparently remained a member of it.”  Yet on December 22, 1941, J T C Moore-Brabazon, of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, writes a letter to Mann, saying that the report of the MAUD Committee has been examined by the Defence Services Panel of the War Cabinet Advisory Committee. He appears to be thanking Mann for his efforts, writing: “Inasmuch as the completion of the examination of this project by your [sic] committee, and the acceptance, in the main, of your [sic] recommendations, move the whole matter to the stage where large scale experiment and possible production are now our principal concern, a new organisation has been set up on this basis, and I think the time has come to wind up the MAUD Committee. In doing so I would like to take this opportunity of thanking you for the tine and thought which every member must have devoted to this very difficult problem, in preparing, in such a short time, so clear and concise a summary of the whole question. Although the Committee are now disbanded I am sure that the new organisation under D.S.I.R. can rely upon your co-operation at any time when they may want your help or advice” (from Appendix A of Mann’s book). Moreover, Mann merits no entry in Margaret Gowing’s official history of Britain and Atomic Energy: he is simply listed as one of the Technical Committee in a footnote to page 48 of Volume 1.

This is all very strange. Why would Moore-Brabazon be thanking Mann so profusely if he had been an absentee and reluctant contributor? Why Mann would want to diminish his efforts and expertise is also puzzling, unless he wanted to give the impression  ̶  as he carefully notes elsewhere  ̶  that he was no longer active in atomic research: “Thus ended my association with nuclear physics until the end of the war . . . “. But this was obviously not so, as he was sent to Washington in the late summer of 1943, to serve in the British Central Scientific Office in Washington. This account, again, does not ring true, as he informed his boss at the Ministry of Supply that he was resigning before he even received the USA-based job offer. Maybe, like Burgess, he had friends in high places.

Nigel West’s Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence does not help much. It describes Mann’s career only from 1948 onwards, suggesting that he was approached by a Soviet diplomat in 1961, and that his subsequent meetings with that person were monitored by the F.B.I., but it says nothing about the earlier espionage activity, apart from referring to what Boyle wrote. West concludes his entry on Mann by writing: “Having successfully repudiated the allegations, Mann retired to Chevy Chase, Maryland, and later moved to Baltimore, where he died in March 2001. In 2003, documents retrieved from the KGB archive suggested that Mann may have been a Soviet spy codenamed MALLONE.”

Another hare left unchased. Will someone please haul Wilfrid Mann in?

The normal set of Commonplace entries can be found here, and a few more examples of the Hyperbolic Contrast here. (October 31, 2015)