Tag Archives: Blunt

Summer 2025 Round-Up

Contents:

  1. Publicity
  2. Richard Davenport-Hines
  3. The coldspur Library Project
  4. Blunt Lessons
  5. Detective Work
  6. Roger Hollis in Australia
  7. VENONA
  8. Victor and Venetia (continued)
  9. Car accidents?
  10. The Illegals
  11. ‘Murder in Cairo’
  12. Other Books Read
  13. Ethnicity
  14. British Magazines

Publicity

Every week, I receive several unsolicited emails from around the world, coming from consultants who have discovered coldspur, and want to improve my SEO (Search Engine Optimization) performance. The messages follow a regular pattern: the firms have detected multiple errors on my site, with their help I could vastly improve coldspur’s rankings with Google and other search engines, and I could therefore dramatically increase the number of visitors as well as the revenue derived from them. They all want me to respond by requesting a cost proposal. Fortunately all these messages go into my Spam folder, and individually they trouble me no more.

Yet I believe these outfits would not have noticed coldspur unless it had already cropped up frequently in search engines. These chaps have clearly not even looked at what I publish, since they would have realized that the tight editorial procedures imposed by the coldspur team mean that coldspur does not contain errors – and if one or two do slip through, they are quickly rectified. Moreover, if they had spent only a cursory glance at the coldspur format, content and delivery, they would have understood that it is a vanity project, with no advertising, and no subscription service, and thus carries no opportunity for increasing revenue. Lastly, I believe that coldspur already ranks very highly with search engines. For example, I have just typed in to the Google search bar ‘Missing Diplomats’, and the first relevant item listed is a page from coldspur. I next typed in ‘Peter Smolka’, and coldspur appears second, after the Wikipedia entry. That looks to me as if my reports are receiving due attention. Or is some kind of AI bot gratifying me? Is this the experience of others? ( I suspect Google results vary from country to country, and maybe by user.)

Thus I do not think that my visit to the UK in September is going to make much difference to the visibility of coldspur. I had vaguely thought about putting some effort into arranging further talks around the one arranged at Whitgift School, in order to help publicize my research, but I am not now going to bother. I have been let down in this area before. Readers may recall the nonsense with the University of Aberystwyth a few years ago, as well as the incident of the Norwegian professor who last summer promised me a slot in Oslo to talk about the PB614 disaster at Nesbyen. Stimulated by his enthusiasm, I started to make plans in the UK, and then his deal fell through. Earlier this year, I was grossly insulted by the Friends of the National Archives (who completely ignored me), the Friends of the Bodleian are too busy, and after four weeks of waiting for Christ Church to respond to my offer to speak on Dick White, I have given up in disgust. I shall probably abbreviate the length of my stay by a few days, and simply enjoy meeting individual friends and contacts, and maybe visiting one or two archives or museums – especially the MI5 exhibition at the National Archives, which is reported to be displaying some special items on Philby ‘loaned’ from MI5.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Richard Davenport-Hines

Readers will recall my expressed frustration with trying to get in touch with the renowned historian, biographer and critic Richard Davenport-Hines. The Times Literary Supplement had published a letter from him on the Borodin business, and, in a correspondence with the Letters Editor at the weekly, I had sought an introduction so that I could discover what the source of Davenport-Hines’s very fragmentary – and dubious – evidence was. I had worked out that D-H had discovered my review of Agent Sonya, but he declined to contact me. Eventually, however, I was able to get an alternative email address from an acquaintance of his, and I was very gratified to receive a response from him. Sadly, D-H had undergone a stroke, which had affected his memory, and he apologized to me, since he had assumed that he had already communicated with me.

In the meantime, I had stumbled upon the source of his intelligence – some items at the front of the Goronwy Rees file that I had overlooked beforehand. I had not come across the Borodin affair when I first studied the file, and those components had meant nothing to me at that time. Since then I have discovered much more about the very bizarre goings-on involving Guy Liddell, Goronwy Rees, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt and the attempted disinformation campaign (as I am confident it was) to deceive the Soviet Union, as well as details of how the 1949 Conference at Worcester College, Oxford was set up, and what its detailed agenda was. These details are all to be found in Guy Burgess’s Personal Files, and I shall report on them at a later date. I was happy to explain my ignorance to D-H, pointing to my coldspur posts to demonstrate why I thought much more sinister activities were afoot.

D-H was gratifyingly very positive about my research. I was amazed that the first paragraph of his message to me was: “What a wonderful source Coldspur is! I have been reading through it, & have learnt much, & been given much to think about. I had consulted Coldspur in the past, but because of my brain damage, had forgotten all about it: I won’t forget again: it is too good to miss.” He went on to compliment me on Misdefending the Realm: “Your mastery of the sources, and your fairness in evaluating them, is first-rate,” and he went on to encourage me to get the Borodin story published in a book, since it was ‘very original stuff’. We exchanged some thoughts about Donald Maclean and David Footman, but the exchange has since died out. No matter: I am enormously pleased that such a celebrated expert should have recognized my contributions to intelligence research, and just deeply sorry that his skills as an analyst and story-teller may have been impaired by his disability. Here I publicly wish him a full recovery.

He is not the only coldspur-reader who has urged me to write another book. Yet I doubt that will happen. After my last experience, when I had to do practically everything myself (even ordering a review copy from amazon.uk for the TLS since my publisher had gone on holiday to India without informing me), I do not really want to embark on another book-production venture, with no agent and no publisher, and being domiciled 3,500 miles from the action. The opportunity cost of tidying-up, repackaging, index and sourcing one of my major stories in the hope that a publisher would accept it is too high. I have too many other projects that I wish to address before I shuffle away in my slippers, hang up my boots, or pop my clogs. My stuff will continue to appear on coldspur – subject to the accessibility of my library.

The coldspur Library Project

‘The Percy Family Support Fund’

Progress has been made in transporting books from my library to the Percy Family Special Collection at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In January, a team arrived at my house to box up over a thousand volumes – items not critical for my ongoing research, but still significant. (I have already reached out for a volume of the old Dictionary of National Biography only to be reminded that that set was included in the first shipment). At the end of this month, a further two thousand books – history, biography, poetry, miscellaneous –  were boxed up and transported. It is with mixed feelings that I see the departure of these items: I have to keep telling myself that this is what I wanted. It was my strong desire to see my collection housed properly in an academic institution, but I shall adjust poorly to trying to work when I can no longer have immediate access to a vital publication. Eventually even the ‘core’ component of one or two thousand books on intelligence and espionage will have to go too, and my ability to perform my traditional research will dissipate. A visit to the university, thirty-five miles away, will have to be carefully planned so that I shall be able to access efficiently what I need.

Thus I can envisage the day – perhaps at the end of 2026, when I shall have entered my eighty-first year – when the nature of coldspur will change. I may then focus on shorter analyses of digitized archives, and on book reviews, and not attempt such deep, multi-dimensional analysis. I may concentrate on more autobiographical entries, and gradually wind the blog down. Yet the whole purpose of the exercise is to ensure that the coldspur archive, already over three million words almost exclusively on intelligence matters, will be permanently available. Not only will my library be available for visitors, but an electronic portal will be constructed that will introduce visitors to my research, and provided indexes to other paper archival material (articles, letters, magazines, clippings, etc.) as well as the vast electronic vault of information (notes to books, registers of personalities in intelligence, summaries of archival meta-data, articles and other digitized information, photographs of undigitized archives, correspondence with other researchers and historians, etc., etc. as well as my ‘Crown Jewels’, the enormous Chronology of Events for the twentieth century that comprises over four hundred pages of line entries on Word, with sources.

My objective is that, as the National Archives eventually declassify more material during the rest of this century, historians will be able to pick up my research, and extend it when they interpret the files that have been hung on to for far too long. That is why proper organization of the portal, and appropriate marketing of the facility, are essential. When future historians need to consult original published volumes on intelligence, they will find no more comprehensive collection of texts available in one place than in the Percy Family Special Collection. I have to report with some regret that I have had some problems convincing the authorities at UNCW of the seriousness of the project, but I am hopeful about sorting out such teething problems soon. In that respect, the Bodleian Library has since reacted with greater interest to my announcement from last year than has UNCW! I have been a Lifetime Friend of the Bodleian for many years now, and, in its centenary Special Edition magazine, the story of my arrangement with UNCW, and long-standing relationship with the Bodleian, were featured. (I do not believe that this periodical is on-line, but I can send a pre-release electronic version to anyone who is interested.)

Blunt Lessons

The nature of my research frequently encourages me to move towards a culmination of a particular topic, as in my recent theory about the management of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Yet that is an illusion: the research process is endless, and my continuing study of the Burgess, Maclean and Blunt Personal Files has unveiled events and accounts that are vital for extended interpretation. Thus I occasionally insert fresh discoveries into what should be summary pieces. It may appear clumsy, but I am in a hurry to publish new analysis, with sources identified. Occasionally I go back and revise an earlier piece, a practice I dislike (as an anecdote below exemplifies), but I am careful to annotate where and why I have done so. That is, at least, a benefit of having control of an on-line publication.

Two recent experiences with the vast Blunt (‘Blunden’) Personal Files – KV 2/4700-4722 – highlight the challenge. I decided, in mid-May, that I needed to start work on them even though I had not finished with the Burgess and Maclean PFs. After showing a useful miscellany of pieces from 1935, KV 2/4700 starts the ‘modern era’, i.e. post-May 1951, at sn. 24f, on page 186 of 316 (working backwards). It consists of a very familiar report, ‘Concordance Of Events Immediately Before And After The Disappearance Of Burgess And Maclean On 25th May, 1951’, the original of which appears in Maclean’s PF 604558 at sn. 98z, on page 10 of KV 2/4140-2. Yet I immediately noticed an anomaly (see image below). A hand-written entry has been inserted for Burgess’s activities on the evening of May 24, reading as follows: “Talked to BLUNT privately for a long time at the Reform Club”, with a reference of PF 604582 1112 bc.

The Modified Concordance

This was rather shocking. When had that entry been made? If the fact had been known early on in the investigation, it should have provoked a serious inquisition of Blunt, in order to determine what he and Burgess had been discussing the day before the escape. This version of the report is undated, but I verified that the original was compiled by J.A. of B2B on October 14, 1952. I needed to inspect the source at 1112bc in KV 2/4720. It turned out that it derived from an interview with Squadron Leader Richard Leven undertaken on August 18, 1972. (I wrote about that encounter in last month’s coldspur.) The MI5 officer Maconachie who wrote up the meeting added, helpfully, that ‘the information that BLUNT and BURGESS had a long conversation in the Reform Club in the early evening of either day [sic] seems to be new to us.’ Who are the ‘us’, one might ask? Who in 1951 was still around in 1972? And might that information have been known at the White level, but withheld from junior officers?

In any case, I think the insertion without a date was a very irregular and irresponsible practice. It could lead a researcher to believe that the information had indeed been officially known in October 1952, and thus should have been acted on. The implications are very controversial: maybe someone decided to insert the annotation for that very reason. If Burgess had been under such strict surveillance as the rest of the record suggests, and his activities at the Reform Club closely monitored, such a meeting would have had profound significance, and Blunt should have been questioned about it. In the master schedule in KV 6/145 (which was compiled in June 1953), Blunt is indicated as being seen with Blunt at the Reform Club on May 23, and as speaking with him on the telephone at 10:00 am on May 25, but no record of the May 24 meeting is presented. In fact, it presents a conflicting dinner engagement between Burgess, Peter Pollock and Bernard Miller at the Hungarian Csardas Restaurant that evening. (Did that event really take place?) Moreover, all questioning of Blunt on his involvement with Burgess before the disappearance is restricted to the telephone call on the morning of May 25. It is outrageous that Blunt’s inquisitors had not familiarized themselves with the chronology, and had let him get away with claiming that his short meeting with Burgess on the morning of May 25 was his first exchange since the Monday of that week.

So, how to interpret the insertion? Remember, these events occurred between Blunt’s confession (1963) and his unmasking (1979), at a time when MI5 was concerned about the truth coming out. J. A. Cradock (of K7, which was responsible for investigating Soviet penetration), to whom Stella Rimington gave her report on Leven, appears confused by the chronology in his memorandum of January 3, 1973 (at sn. 1128a). Another hand-written annotation appears on it, apparently by ‘LK’, drawing attention to the ‘long talk’, but inexplicably getting the date wrong (May 25). The handwriting is the same, so LK must have been the officer who made the amendment to the Concordance in KV 2/4700. [Unfortunately, Stella Rimington makes no mention of her personal projects on Blunt, Burgess and Leven in her memoir, Open Secret.] Yet both items are undated, so it is impossible to determine when, and with what authority, the change was made. My enduring questions: “What did he or she know at that time, and what did he or she see as her task?” face perpetual challenges.

The fact that the annotation was made on a file that would not have been generally available suggests to me that it was made with high authority. Leven must have been deemed a trusted source, and LK must have judged that the omission was important enough to appear on the record, perhaps as a subtle hint that the investigation into Blunt had not been as thorough and objective as the official story told. On the other hand, the utterly careless approach to chronology is bewildering, as is the lack of open recognition that the several meetings or exchanges between Blunt and Burgess in May 1951 should have come under closer scrutiny. There must be fresh secrets to be revealed – especially when I come to unravel the antics of Peter Wright (whom Rimington did not think highly of).

The other lesson derives from an interview of Blunt carried out by Ronnie Reed and Courtenay Young on May 15, 1956 (sn. 207c in KV 2/4702). It makes painful reading: the inquisitors are anxious to extract information from Blunt without antagonizing him, which means they do not challenge him vehemently on the obvious holes in his stories. One topic does, however, appear to rattle Blunt, and that is when Courtenay Young informs Blunt that a member of British Counter-Intelligence in London had handed over to the RIS dossiers on members of the Soviet Embassy, so that they could be photographed. (Razin is not mentioned by name, but this episode clearly has its roots in the Petrov affair.) While Blunt is given time to collect his thoughts, Young interpolates that the only candidates who had access, and were in London around that time were Hugh Shillito, Young himself, and Blunt. Young then excludes himself, claiming that he was also out of London at the time. “I think this certainly is a real tougher one,” ponders Blunt, earnestly.

Blunt’s explanation is that, to his immense chagrin, he took documents back to Bentinck Street to read in the evenings. Young interrupts to ask whether Burgess was a photographer (the implicit suggestion being that, if the dossiers were to find their way to the Embassy, Burgess would have had to photograph them quickly, before he was noticed.) Blunt does not think that was one of Burgess’s talents, so Reed helpfully suggests that Burgess must have handed over the originals for photographing. Yet, instead of querying how Burgess could have managed to convey the dossier to the Soviets without Blunt’s noticing (when he had, after all, brought them home only for the evening), Young disastrously lets Blunt off the hook, suggesting that Burgess, who came into the MI5 office frequently, could have gained access to the documents – which were presumably lying around instead of being locked up. (Young and Blunt agree that security was pretty shambolic.) Of course, Blunt cannot remember clearly whether he had left Burgess alone in a room or not. Despite the fact that the evidence points to a stream of files being passed on over a period of time, the conversation peters out, as if three old codgers were reminiscing.

The whole exchange was recorded, and can thus be read. Young’s summary of the discussion (dated June 5, 1956) is feeble. He admits that Blunt could offer no plausible explanation as to how the leakage occurred, and instead he reports Blunt’s revised assertion that he would have not taken the dossiers back to Bentinck Street, since there was no reason for him to study them, or to take action. Young concludes his paragraph by quoting Blunt again: “I think this is extremely obscure and I am sorry I cannot offer any help.” Ten days later, the Deputy Director-General Graham Mitchell noted: “D.1. [Young] and Reed conducted the interview with pertinacity and skill.” It makes one weep. [Calm down, coldspur. It’s just counter-espionage. Ed.]

The ineptitude in not following up the obvious holes in the case is enormous: If Blunt took the dossiers to Bentinck Street, how could he consider such an appalling security lapse? How big were the dossiers? When did Burgess have the opportunity to inspect them? Read them? Photograph them? Then why did the report state that the originals had been taken to the Embassy for photographing? And why did Blunt change his mind and suggest that Burgess had borrowed them at St. James, where MI5 was housed? And how come such files were conveniently left hanging around, over a period of time, for Burgess to pick and choose? [I note here that, in his ‘confession’ to Arthur Martin in April 1964, Blunt claimed that he had never seen any PFs of Soviet Embassy staff!] Even if Mitchell and his crew felt uneasy challenging Blunt over such points in their ‘interview’, they should have returned for a much colder and well-prepared interrogation at a later date.

Lastly, this episode represents a spooky echo of what happened in June 1951, when Dick White undertook his similarly disastrous interview of Philby immediately after the latter’s return from the United States. It is not clear what White’s objectives were in this interview, but he gives every impression of trying to let Philby off the hook, instead of challenging him on the points of the critical dossier on his subject that he had just sent to the FBI. In my earlier report (https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-not-the-kim-philby-personal-file/) I explained how White raise the notion that Burgess might have got wind of the HOMER investigation by snooping around the British Embassy in Washington – a notion that Kim Philby encouraged. It is almost as if White had trained Blunt what he should say should he ever be confronted with the embarrassing evidence coming from Razin. I shall be exploring these conundrums further in next month’s coldspur.

Detective Work

Richard Osman

A few weeks ago, I was irritated by the theme in the Spectator crossword puzzle, in the issue of February 22, titled ‘Very large fellow’. It concerned someone named Richard Osman [‘OutSize – Man’ – geddit?], and the unclued entries were all characters in some obscure book that he had apparently been responsible for.  The Spectator is supposed to be a magazine with an international audience, and the puzzle, by Doc (Tom Johnson), who is the periodical’s crossword editor, was typical of the trivialization of themes that he has encouraged over the past couple of years. Having to resort to the Web to hunt down the names, I discovered that Osman had written a book titled The Thursday Murder Club. I thought little of it, submitted my entry on-line, and awaited next week’s puzzle.

Some time afterwards – perhaps on Facebook – I picked up the fact that the movie rights to the book had been acquired, and that Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley would be appearing in the film, which was impressive. Netflix has started advertising it. The reviews of the book seemed quite glowing (it had been a New York Times best-seller, but, since I no longer subscribe to that journal, the fact had escaped me), and I hence inspected a copy of the book at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago, and bought it. It started off well and wittily – hokum, of course, but a pleasant diversion from my customary gritty reading – but then became rather tiresome as it wound down, with too many unlikely complications and some slip-ups in chronology. Yet it reminded me that what I try to do in my analysis of intelligence conundrums is precisely what the members of the Murder Club (Elizabeth, in particular) set out to do when a body drops in front of their eyes.

Take my latest puzzler – Milo John Reginald, Lord Talbot de Malahide, who was accused by some of being another Cambridge spy, and, in his highly dubious role as deputy Security Officer in the Foreign Office at the time of the Burgess/MacLean disappearances, spoke up much too late about his knowledge of what his cronies had been up to. Based on what Malahide’s friend Tony Scotland has recently written about him, he had been interviewed intensely at the time, but nothing had happened. Indeed, when his boss, George Carey-Foster, moved on the following year, Malahide was appointed acting Head of Security, which provokes all manner of observations about foxes, chickens and henhouses.

Lord Talbot de Malahide

Moreover, was there a murder angle? On April 14, 1973, Malahide was found dead in his cabin on the M.V. Semiramis, ‘lying in bed as though asleep, with what looked like a broken blood vessel under the skin on his forehead’. His companion Hugh Cobbe assumed it had been a heart attack, and the ship’s doctor, who carried out a careful examination, formally confirmed death by natural causes. No post mortem was required. Now, I have been in this business long enough to be very suspicious when anyone associated with Soviet intelligence is found dead, alone, in a hotel room or other secluded area, with symptoms of having had a heart attack. I think of Harold Gibson and Herbert Skinner alongside the more well-recognized victims. Had this been some kind of revenge attack, or punishment, by the Special Tasks unit? Speculation in the Irish media afterwards suggested that it could have been a KGB or MI5 job.

Maybe that was going too far, but the case of Malahide is very odd. He had had a career in MI6 and the Foreign Office, and was brought into Carey-Foster’s security team (‘Q’ Section) in 1950, although his attendance was erratic. Yet, if he came under suspicion in June 1951, what happened to the transcript of his interview? Why was he allowed to leave for a holiday in Tasmania soon afterwards? Why, if there were undeniable claims about his close relationship with Guy Burgess from their Cambridge days, was he not invited to resign, as was David Footman in MI6? Why, in those circumstances, was he appointed as acting security officer when, in 1952, Carey-Foster moved on (to Rio, and then Warsaw, where he maintained a close interest in the Burgess-Maclean post-mortems)? Was Carey-Foster pushed out? Why, when the Foreign Office was cracking down on homosexuals and other dubious characters in the wake of the Cadogan Report, was Malahide promoted? And what was the role of Patrick Reilly, who had been a close friend of Malahide’s at Winchester College, and had gone on holiday to France with him in 1930? Had Reilly contrived to insert Malahide into the Security Office, since Carey-Foster’s attempt at broom-cleaning was proving very unpopular with the Foreign Office mandarins? Was Reilly behind Malahide’s promotion? And why was Malahide eventually forced to resign in early 1954 – before the Petrov incident blew up? Was he suspected of having been a Soviet agent in the Ankara Embassy in 1945, shortly before the Volkov incident? Had Malahide really been a Soviet agent, or was he perhaps an agent-of-influence, like Rothschild or Berlin, who was careful never to touch or pass on any confidential material, but could certainly help to manipulate events?

Rothschild himself is a conundrum. He was willing to dribble out names to MI5’s investigators, but may have deliberately concentrated on small fry. Why did Rothschild not identify Malahide when he was providing ‘helpful’ tips to MI5 about Burgess’s cronies? Malahide’s name first comes up overtly in March 1966, so far as I can tell, when Evelyn McBarnet and Peter Wright interview the Rothschilds. At sn. 74a in KV 4532, after a long discussion about Klugmann, Harris, Walter and others, the following note appears: “PMW read out a list of members of the Foreign Office who, by virtue of their age and university background, might have been connected with the ring. Only three names provoked any reaction. And the first was Milo TALBOT (Lord Talbot of Malahide), who was remembered as a friend of Richard LLEWELLYN-DAVIES, and ‘who certainly knew all the members of the Group very well’.”  Yet what the reaction was is not recorded, as if Victor and Tess had nothing really to say.

There may, however, have been a hint to Malahide the previous year. In November 1965, Rothschild was passing on names of dubious characters to Peter Wright, and admitted that ‘he had always been extremely suspicious of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx’, a very long name redacted in KV 2/4531, sn. 49a.  (See Item 7 in the image.) But why, if he had always been so suspicious of Malahide, had he not mentioned his name earlier? And why was the name redacted at this late stage in the game? And why did Peter Wright not do anything about it? William Tyrer, who has studied the complete Blunt files, let me know that Blunt had casually brought up Malahide’s name in one of his ‘interrogations’ by Peter Wright a few months beforehand, so Blunt may have warned his old friends, Tess and Victor, to be ready for any reference.

From the Rothschild PF

You can see what I mean. It is like a detective story. Too many dogs that did not bark in the night-time. And I continue to dive around archives and memoirs looking for clues. It never stops. I thought I had processed the Rothschild files comprehensively, taking extensive notes, but I go back, and find that there are extracts from the recorded interviews with David Footman that I had not considered significant, as well as a tantalizing reference to an anonymous person whose redacted name looks suspiciously like that of Lord Talbot de Malahide. Just count the characters. This one will run and run.

Roger Hollis in Australia

Later this year, I plan to provide a detailed analysis of Roger Hollis’s service to MI5 – including his time in Australia, where he helped set up ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.  As part of my research, I have read David Horner’s rather dry The Spycatchers; The Official History if ASIO, 1949-1963, where Hollis’s contribution is described. It presents a typical Hollisian endeavour – plodding, and with little imagination, since he recommended replicating the MI5 structure and procedures on the Australian continent, when its size and devolved political organization, as well as the nature of the Communist threat, really called out for a more inventive approach. Soon after, I started discussing Horner’s book and the story of Hollis with one or two of my Australian contacts, but was rather shocked by what I heard.

Hollis is viewed unfavourably by many influential Australians, it seems. I recall the infamous investigation by the FBI, seeded by the Australian Paul Monk, that used ‘argument-mapping’ to come to the conclusion that there was an ELLI in the heart of MI5, and that Hollis probably fitted the bill. (See https://fbistudies.com/2015/04/27/was-roger-hollis-a-british-patriot-or-soviet-spy/). Monk advertised how much he had relied on Chapman Pincher’s Treachery for extracting ‘all the salient facts about Hollis’, as well as exploiting Christopher Andrew’s Defend the Realm. If that was the extent of his research, he should have been banished from the investigation, but he nevertheless participated remotely from Melbourne. It was all a very shallow exercise, far too much influenced by the lies and distortions peddled by Pincher, but it seems to have lasted well over the ten years since it was so earnestly presented.

The reason I say that is that I was astounded by something one Australian colleague wrote to me. He had described himself as a long-time enthusiast for Misdefending the Realm, and a fan of coldspur, and we enjoyed some very cordial exchanges by email. In February of this year he introduced me to a book by a former secret intelligence officer Molly J. Oliver-Sasson, who had died last year at the age of 101. At her funeral, my contact had delivered a tribute to her (written by a friend who could not be present), and he also sent me a review by the notable intelligence author Hayden Peake of the memoir, titled More Cloak Than Dagger. (The book contains a gratuitous and out-of-place slur against Hollis, simply reproducing Pincher’s assertions.) My colleague then introduced Peake’s review by stating that ‘an unexpected bonus’ in it was ‘that he was prepared to go on the public record to describe Hollis as a “suspected Soviet agent”’.

‘More Cloak Than Dagger’

I immediately challenged such a crass error of judgment, considering that it was undignified and unscholarly. It is one thing to harbour doubts about Hollis, but quite another to welcome some superficial analysis as confirming what I can only call a prejudice – especially from someone who was presumably familiar with my coverage of ELLI, Gouzenko, and Hollis. I wrote, very politely: “And why would you be so enthusiastic about this opinion being aired, I wonder, given that the case against Hollis has almost entirely been dismantled, with no solid evidence against him. Is the prevailing opinion in ASIO, and in Australia generally, that Hollis had been a Soviet agent?” My colleague provided me with some further information about the defector Tokaev (whom Sasson had nursed), and promised to provide more detail about Peake, and his judgment, but I have not heard from him since.

I thus took up my case with an experienced Australian in this business (who has asked to remain anonymous), asking him where the conviction that Hollis had been a traitor derived. In all seriousness he replied: “Ethnocentric bias. He was a Pom.” He went on to describe some of Hollis’s operational failings, but I was already dismayed. I told my contact that his explanation was feeble. Now, I understand some of the bias held against Britons (I have experienced it myself on business trips Down Under) because of the patronizing way some of them/us behave, but this was absurd. I can also understand that, in the Spycatcher trial, Robert Armstrong made a fool of himself in the courtroom trying to defend the indefensible actions of the Cabinet Office, and he would have provoked further Oz mockery of the typical British toff.

Yet the prime accusers of Hollis, Peter Wright and Chapman Pincher, were both members of the upper drawers of British society (although Wright’s later costumes and habits tended to undermine that status), and they should thus have been regarded with the same disdain. This pervasive judgment shows an utterly casual and sloppy attitude to what should be a serious business. Is Dick Ellis considered not to be a traitor because he was Australian-born, and thus not a Pom? But, of course, there were many Australian citizens revealed by the VENONA transcripts who, despite their presumably working-class background, and non-patrician manners, became willing and eager servants of the Soviet state. One of the criticisms given by my friend was that Hollis was too ‘impressionable’, but I could lay that accusation on a large number of the ‘thinking’ Australian public, it seems. Hollis in Australia – that would be a good idea for an opera, on the lines of Nixon in China. A great sequel to that blockbuster, Who Framed Roger Hollis?

VENONA

During my work on the investigation of Donald Maclean, I was constantly reminded of the role that the VENONA transcripts had played in his identification as the spy in the Washington Embassy, while I remained uncertain of exactly what cryptological breakthroughs had been made when. (VENONA was the program that decrypted – at least partially – a large number of messages sent between various Soviet Embassies at the end of the war, when the security of such was undermined by the reuse of One-Time-Pads by the cryptographic staff.) Indeed, it was VENONA itself that revealed that vital messages exchanged between Halifax and Churchill concerning the fate of Eastern European countries had been purloined, and then paraphrased, and that an important agent ‘G’, later expanded to ‘GOMER’ (= HOMER) had been responsible for passing them over. What civil servants reminded each other consistently at the time was the necessity of saying nothing about this source, for fear, presumably, that the Soviets would learn that their methods had been broken.

Yet I could never understand why such an attempt at secrecy was necessary. William Weisband, a linguist at Arlington Hall, had informed his Soviet masters of the project, and by 1948 the Soviets were able to undertake a total overhaul of their encryption procedures. Kim Philby also informed them of the progress made on the exercise. Yet the Foreign Office (who admitted to being controlled by MI5’s demands) stubbornly insisted that there was a security risk. As late as September 28, 1953, Talbot de Malahide (yes, he!), responding to a request by Patrick Dean as to why the Office was against releasing all our knowledge of the Maclean/Burgess affair, wrote:

The argument roughly is that it is most important to conceal from the Russians our knowledge of Bride [i.e. VENONA] material. They cannot, of course, now prevent us from extracting what we can from it. But if they knew we were doing this, they could take defensive action which would probably ruin any chance we still have of making use of the knowledge we obtain in this way. [FCO 158/126]

Dean annotated: ‘Thank you! I agree.’, thus endorsing the code of silence. Yet why Malahide and co. thought that the Soviets would not already be taking ‘defensive actions’, based on their knowledge of the exercise, rather than waiting for the British to declare to the world what they had discovered, defies explanation. Of course, those illusions would shortly be shattered by the Petrov revelations a few months later.

For some reason, American institutions also decided to try to keep the details about VENONA secret until writers like Chapman Pincher and Robert Lamphere started leaking details in the 1980s. It was not until 1995 that an admission was made, and a bi-partisan commission started releasing materials. From my study of the archives, I would conclude that the professed anxiety about admitting the VENONA programme to the public was attributable more to the embarrassment over the way that British institutions had been infiltrated, and to the decisions made about re-instituting Burgess and Maclean in prominent positions, than it was to the concern about divulging damaging secrets to the Soviets.

While there was a justifiable conviction that trying to use the transcripts themselves as evidence in any criminal trial, because of the use of cryptonyms and the lack of transparency in how the decryptions themselves had been made, it seems to me that a substantial propaganda coup could have been made by explaining the stunning achievements of the exercise. It was not that it would have alerted the Soviets: they had made the necessary adjustments as soon as they learned of the exposure. It was not like the secrecy over the ENIGMA project, and the corresponding British Type-X equipment, which had been supplied to other countries after the war, and thus might have provoked embarrassing questions. This was a once-off example of a lapse in procedure, and a spectacular effort to exploit it. Chrsitopher Andrew wrote: “The value of VENONA as a counter-espionage tool was diminished, sometimes seriously, by the extreme secrecy with which it was handled.” (Defend the Realm, p 380)

It seems to me that a fresh re-appraisal of VENONA is needed. I have been trying to work out who called the shots in that critical period between 1948 and 1951 – how much did Dick White know when Maclean returned to Britain in April 1950, for instance? MI5 was supposed to be in charge of the whole project (to the chagrin of Carey-Foster in the Security section of the Foreign Office), but several tensions existed. Sir Robert Mackenzie (ex MI6, and the Security representative at the Embassy in Washington) clearly did not appreciate receiving instructions from a greenhorn like Carey-Foster. Valentine Vivian of MI6 spread his wings, sometime misinforming his boss, ‘C’, Stewart Menzies, while communicating with his own representative, Peter Dwyer, in Washington, and busied himself investigating wartime British Security Co-ordination and retrieving missing telegrams from the Moscow Embassy. Arthur Martin, Dick White’s assistant, seemed to be working in parallel with Guy Liddell, but occasionally he and White veered off on tracks not aligned with those of the deputy director-general, while Martin communicated with MI5’s representative in Washington, Dick Thistlethwaite. Edward Travis of GCHQ was negotiating on cryptographic sharing with his counterparts at Arlington Hall, but often very secretively. And they all had to consider how to deal with the FBI, and how they could make inquiries concerning the lamentable security procedures at the Embassy without upsetting anybody, or alerting the spy (who might still be in residence) as to what they were up to.

I see a number of opportunities. First of all, a renewed attack on partially deciphered messages, using much faster computers, and probably advanced AI techniques, could surely reveal much more about the traffic and persons involved than was decrypted decades ago. Second, an integrative approach to the interpretation of information would be highly desirable since records released during the past twenty years for the Foreign Office, MI5, and GCHQ, as well as resources like the Mitrokhin Archive, would probably point to conflicting missions, and oversights in analytical opportunities. Third, much of the material that has been published has been redacted because of old sensitivities to living persons, and also contains errors or partial information that could be easily corrected based on intelligence that is now available. With the passage of time, and the deaths of such persons, such names should be restored. One of the most frustrating aspects of VENONA decrypts is that it has been impossible to determine what breakthroughs were made, when, which has complicated the task of historical interpretation.

Nigel West’s book, VENONA, and that by Haynes and Klehr, VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, were published in 2000. Defend the Realm (2009) has a decent and provocative chapter on it.  Romerstein’s and Breindel’s Venona Secrets appeared in 2014, but it has a strictly American focus. Andrew’s coverage in The Secret World (2018) is shallow: he could not even find room for an entry to VENONA in his Index. John Ferris’s Behind the Enigma (2020), the history of GCHQ, is feeble. A fresh look is required. Intellectually, I would find it an appealing challenge, but much of the material is contained in undigitized GCHW (HW 15 series) files that would have to be photographed. Furthermore, I am still working my way through the Burgess and Maclean PFs, and some residual FCO files, and still have (for example) the Philby and Blunt files to work on. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Victor and Venetia (continued)

Readers may recall my investigation into the society figure, Venetia Montagu, and her dalliances with men young enough to be her son, from last December’s Round-up (see https://coldspur.com/2024-year-end-roundup/). At that time, I stated that I was not going to shell out $100 to read Stefan Buczacki’s My Darling Mr. Asquith: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Venetia Stanley in order to learn more. Well, the price came down, I acquired it, and have since read it.

‘My darling Mr Asquith’

I was intrigued by Mr Buczacki’s interest in this range of not very attractive aristocratic persons from the Edwardian era, and beyond. I sought to learn more about him, since it sounded as if he might have fascinating antecedents deriving from some corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (actually, more likely to be Poland, though borders in that region have been very fluid over the past one hundred and fifty ears). I was delighted to discover that he simply describes himself as ‘English’, but I have been unable to determine whether he comes from the Huntingdonshire or the Somerset branch of the Buczacki clan. No matter. He has written a vastly entertaining book, although his understanding of the correct use of the comma is woeful, as are his occasional lapses into ‘from whence’, and the occasional erroneous ‘whomsoever’, when ‘whosoever’ was required. And, of course, no qualified editor was around to help him.

I shimmied my way through the perverse attentions to young women of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and the assortment of Wodehousian characters of whom Venetia’s set consisted – such as ‘Crinks’ Johnston, ‘Scatters’ Wilson, ‘Bongie’ Bonham-Carter – to find my way to the meat of the book, where Venetia meets Victor. Sadly, there is not much more to learn. Venetia probably met him because Victor’s father must have known Edwin Montagu, Venetia’s husband, in the Ministry of Munitions in 1916, and both were keen naturalists with an interest in East Anglian fauna (although Edwin liked to advertise his infatuation by shooting many of them). Buczacki states that Victor was at Trinity when Venetia ‘was passing through a phase of taking a sightly unorthodox interest in young research students’.

Buczacki does not believe that Venetia and Victor ever had an affair, but they remained friends, and Victor apparently took a ‘surrogate paternal interest’ in Venetia’s daughter Judy (thirteen years younger than him) after Edwin’s premature death from an infection picked up in South America. She did meet William Grey Walter through Victor, however, and he became ‘the most unlikely of all her lovers’, but, for some reason, that distinction does not merit Walter’s gaining an entry in Buczacki’s Index. Walter was just eight months older than Victor, was elected to the Apostles at the same time as Victor in 1933, and later became the Society’s secretary. “He was further to the left however and a serious fellow-traveller,” notes Buczacki, so MI5 were probably justified (to the extent that any of these surveillance activities were at all useful) in opening a file and keeping an eye on him. Isaiah Berlin met Venetia, but there is no mention of Guy Burgess or Donald Maclean, and that strange summer get-together in Cap Ferrat goes unnoticed. I tried to contact Buczacki via his website, but was put through such a hostile privacy rigmarole, being required to download some software that I did not trust, that I abandoned the idea.

I did discover, however, a reference to the sojourn in the Blunt archive, from August 27, 1969, when he was interviewed by Peter Wright and Cecil Shipp (sn. 729a in KV 2/4713). Blunt said that he was sure that the incident occurred in 1934, and that, apart from him and Burgess, the following had attended: ‘Dadie’ Rylands, Anne Barnes, Venetia Montagu, Penelope Dudley-Ward, Gerald Cuthbert, Claude Phillimore and Arthur Marshall. (Isn’t it extraordinary how reliably Blunt’s power of recall worked when it would not adversely affect him?) When Wright later jolted his memory about Grey Walter, Blunt did reflect that he might well have been in the party. He judged that Walter, also an Apostle, was an ‘extremely cold fish’, an opinion that one must assume was not shared by Venetia Montagu, whose embraces Walter was enjoying. He reinforced the laboratory link between Victor Rothschild and Walter, but did not remember him as a friend of Burgess, adding the intriguing observation that he thought ‘Burgess would have got to know him through Lettice Ramsey, whose boyfriend he had been for some time.’ History does not tell us whether Wright followed up this intriguing lead.

Car Accidents?

I mentioned earlier the suspicious circumstances in which Lord Talbot de Malahide died, and referred also to similar cases involving Harold Gibson and Herbert Skinner. When reading recently Michael Braddick’s biography of Christopher Hill, I learned that Hill and his second wife, Bridget, in August 1957 ‘were involved in a tragic car accident, in which their eleven-month-old daughter, Kate was killed’. That set my mind racing about other car accidents that had befallen Communist apostates or traitors, or their families. What about the death of George Graham’s son in 1949, in High Wycombe, when an errant wheel flew into his face? Or that of Paul Dukes, who died in South Africa in 1967, the result (according to his wife) of a serious motor accident in England the previous year? And what about Tomás Harris, who died in a mysterious motor accident in Mallorca in 1964? Nor should we forget Goronwy Rees, who almost died from a hit-and-run-accident in 1977. It seems to me that, statistically, these persons who had defied the KGB suffered an unusually high accident rate from motoring exploits.

I mention again the long list of deaths of such characters – including those who maybe simply knew too much – under other suspicious circumstances. Added to Malahide (found on a yacht with mysterious markings on his body), Skinner (found alone in a hotel room in Geneva, with symptoms of a heart attack), Gibson (found shot in his apartment), I would list the following deaths that have not been properly examined and explained:

  • Humphrey Slater, died in Linea, Spain, at age 51
  • George Placzek, physicist, died in Zurich in 1955‚ ‘probably a suicide’
  • John Costello, journalist, died on flight to Miami in 1995
  • Aileen Philby, wife of Kim, who might have committed suicide, or been murdered, in 1957
  • High Gaitskell, who was diagnosed with lupus after visiting the Soviet Embassy in January 1963
  • Victor Serge, who died ‘of a heart attack’ in Mexico in 1947, and whose son believed he had been poisoned by NKVD agents
  • Konstantin Umansky, who died in a plane crash in 1945, cause unknown
  • Victor Kravchenko, defector, who died from a gunshot wound in New York in 1966, his son believing he had been murdered

I have come across rumours affecting other premature deaths over the years, such as Alexander Kojève, Gordon Lonsdale (Molody), Alexander Foote, George Orwell even. These may simply be ‘conspiracy theories’, and easily debunked. I don’t know. And a whole host of earlier assassinations have been recorded by such as Boris Volodarsky, including (but not limited to) Miller, Serov, Kutepov, Krivitsky, Poyntz, Frunze, Agabekov, and Ryumin, as well as the famous cases like Trotsky. I noted Nikolay Zorya, found dead from a gunshot wound in his hotel room at the time of the Nuremberg trials in 1946, in an earlier coldspur. Molly Oliver-Sasson [see above] writes about the assassination attempt on the defector Tokaev, whose handler she was. I am thus sure that there were more assassinations than have been officially recognized. A project for someone else to pick up.

The Illegals

This spring I read two books on the Soviet-Russian ‘illegals’ programs, Russians Among Us (2020), by Gordon Corera, whom I knew through his Art of Betrayal, and The Illegals (2025) by Shaun Walker. As a reminder, the project for inserting long-term agents behind the borders of the western democracies, with false identities and ‘legends’, outside the protection of ambassadorial conventions (the ‘Illegals’), originated in the 1920s, and has continued well into Putin’s term as President of Russia. These two books take very differing approaches to updating the public, however. Corera’s book is a more journalistic effort that concentrates exclusively on the project since the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991. Alexander covers the same territory (and describes the actions and betrayals outlined by Corera in almost identical terms), but sets out to cover Russia’s century-long mission to infiltrate the West, as well.

‘Russians Among Us’

Russians Among Us is more a work of its time. It contains no bibliography, and its sources are primarily reports from the press, and on-line blogs and bulletins. Corera tells a pacy story, well-crafted, with Macintyreish flair, about the Heathfields, the Murphys, and the notorious and glamorous Anne Chapman, who apparently inspired The Americans (a television series I own, but have not yet viewed). They were all betrayed to the FBI by Alexander Poteyev, who worked for the KGB, and then its successor, the SVR, and who was recruited by the Americans. Amazingly, he managed to escape just before the FBI started its arrests.

‘The Illegals’

Walker is far more ambitious, setting out to describe the whole program since its inception by Meer Trilisser, born in 1883. I judge that Walker misses his mark in several ways. He offers a large bibliography, which includes the obvious work, Nigel West’s volume of the same name (1993), but fails to recognize a very important book, William E. Duff’s A Time For Spies: Theodore Stephanovich Mally and the Era of the Great Illegals (1999). Moreover he fails to cover this ‘era’ adequately. ‘Mally’ (or ‘Maly’) has no entry in his Index, and Walter Krivitsky is related to a minor footnote. He provides a chapter on the buccaneering character Bystrolyotov, but adds little new to what has already been published. It is a very disappointing coverage for anyone looking for a comprehensive and fresh approach to the subject.

Instead, Walker veers from his topic. He includes detailed coverage of an exercise from World War II, where NKVD agents were infiltrated behind German lines – but still on territory from the Soviet Union – to assassinate Wilhelm Kube, the governor of Belarus. Now, this is a gripping story – one that I had not encountered before – but the fact that the agents masqueraded as German officers in uniform does not make it an ‘illegals’ programme. Nor, by classifying the insertion into Afghanistan of a troupe of commandos to assassinate the troublesome Communist Party leader, Hafizullah Amin in 1978 as the birth of the ‘Fighting Illegals’, does the author shed any light on his core thesis. It is a muddle.

Wilhelm Kube

Both authors point out the drawbacks of the project as it was resuscitated in the 1990s. In the 1930s, the arrival of émigrés from Eastern Europe, bearing vague genealogies and questionable certificates, was hardly a cause for concern for the western democracies, what with the feverish ideological clashes between fascism and communism, and no obvious reason for the authorities to be on their guard against hostile penetration. And the period of the ‘great illegals’ came to an end because Stalin liquidated most of them. But it became increasingly difficult as the century wore on, with greater attention to stolen identities from gravestones, and better exchange of records between security departments.

When the program was resuscitated (with the USA especially targeted), intense energies were spent in providing watertight identities for apparently genuine citizens (normally originating in Canada). But part of this exercise meant that the illegals were a genuine married couple, living a typical American life, with a house in the suburbs – and children. That proved to be the most troublesome aspect of the arrangement, since the kids were encouraged to grow up as normal teenagers when they were being deceived by their parents, who were never supposed to reveal their true allegiance. This led to tensions when the fervent communist dad clashed with the natural interest in western delights shown by his son.

One last observation I make is that both authors appear to be tone-deaf to the possibility of the Americans running illegals in the Soviet Union – or Russia. Corera very naively attributes the lack of any such program to the obvious objection any CIA officer would have to spending decades in the country, completely ignoring the fact that attempting to live as an illegal, even if one had been born there, in totalitarian Russia would have been utterly impossible. Allen Dulles found that out the hard way (as Alexander briefly notes), but he should have worked it out before he initiated the CIA’s disastrous attempts to insert rebels into Belarus and other places in the 1950s. I also think that the authors misjudge the issue of allegiance in the twenty-first century, and why an illegals program was necessary. The illegals of the 1930s were able to recruit nationals to work for Moscow because of the ideological appeal of international communism, but once the horrors of Communism were laid bare after the war, what educated Briton (or American) would want to dedicate him- or her-self to that cause (as opposed to spying for financial reasons, or because of blackmail)? And why would Putin’s weird brand of Orthodox Christian ethno-nationalism motivate anybody outside Russia? It is no wonder that the resolve of the new illegals vacillated, with their bosses in Moscow never having any idea of exactly how they had to operate, but also fearful that they would adjust too well to their masquerades, and come to prefer the freedoms of a liberal democracy.

The project has now moved into the cyber space –  a whole new game of subterfuge. For that reason, Alexander’s chapter on the ‘Virtual Illegals’ is worth reading.

‘Murder in Cairo’

‘Murder in Cairo’

I stumbled on Murder in Cairo, by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo, in a review in the TLS of May 9 by Stephen Glover. It concerned the killing of the journalist David Holden in Cairo in November 1977, and sounded intriguing. I consequently went to order it from amazon, although for some reason the book was described there as Desperate Times, by Peter Brookes, published in 2021, while the image of the cover indicated the current, correct title. Furthermore, when I tried to find it on LibraryThing with the correct ISBN, amazon likewise came up with the ‘ghost’ version (a phenomenon familiar to my colleague Andrew Malec). I thus ordered it anyway, thinking perhaps that a ‘ghost’ book might demand only a ‘ghost’ payment, and the book arrived, as Murder in Cairo, a few days later.

It comes with the conventional arresting and gushing blurbs, from such as Daniel Finkelstein, Tina Brown, and Richard J. Aldrich. Yet I wondered: did they read the same book as I did? Were they all pre-publication tributes, before they actually got round to working through it? (The back-cover did not say.) Going back to Glover’s critique, I judged it very fair. He was not unconditionally positive about the book, writing: “On finishing the book, some readers may reasonably exclaim: so what?” That was very much my reaction, as the denouement does not reflect any breakthrough analysis that was not apparent after about page 10 – that Holden was probably some kind of KGB asset, and that the CIA was somehow tied up with his assassination, and too embarrassed to discuss it.

Gillman had returned to the investigation after forty years, when Times editor Harold Evans had originally sent a crack squad to Egypt to work out what had happened. With the help of the more Internet-savvy Emanuele Midolo, he was able to discover a raft of new leads and tidbits, and to interview several more people who may have been involved (or had known, or were related to persons who had been involved, since most of the latter were dead by then). Yet they never found a smoking-gun, and the obvious questions were never answered. For what transgression had Holden been killed? And why would the murder have been carried out in such a gruesome and clumsy manner? And why then, on Holden’s first visit to Egypt for several years? And if Holden had somehow upset the applecart of Egypt-Israeli-Arab relationships (or whatever), why would the CIA have been involved in arranging the execution of a British citizen? Hadn’t other journalists done such, or worse? Even if he had been some kind of KGB agent of influence, he did not have access to confidential information, so was therefore not a spy.

The reader has to engage in a mass of tense investigation, which the authors are no doubt extremely proud of, but it involves a cast of thousands. It can be difficult to track the personalities, since the authors sometimes refer to persons by their first name, sometimes by their second, sometimes by the identity of their second (or third) marriage. Fathers and sons can be mixed up, and Gillman and Midolo provide no useful charts of organizations and relationships. The book contains references to most of the intelligence elite of the late twentieth century. For the aficionados, you will find here Kim Philby, James Angleton, Dick White, Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, George Blake, Ralph Deakin, Archie Gibson, Edward Crankshaw, Antony Terry, Patrick Seale, Jeremy Wolfenden, Jan Morris, Peter Smolka, Phillip Knightley, Nicholas Elliott, Donald McCormick (aka Richard Deacon), Seymour Hersh, Fred Halliday, Oleg Gordievsky, Ian Fleming, Andrew Cavendish, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, and many more. The only obvious names missing were Goronwy Rees, Ursula Kuczinski, and Dame Edna Everage. (Yes, in case you asked, Ben Macintyre was interviewed.)

The problem is that, as the investigators search for ‘facts’ they come across persons who are dissembling half the time, and they do not know which half it is. The authors admit (and even boast of) this technique, inherited from the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, as if an accurate story could miraculously evolve from such a barrage. The impression I got from the descriptions of the actors is that a lot of unattractive people, if they were not plotting against their rivals, sat around in various watering-holes in the Middle East, getting sloshed at the tax-payers’ or their employers’ expense, while imagining that their gossiping constituted some advance in intelligence-gathering. My reaction is that Holden’s death might have been more because of what he might reveal than what he had actually written. Why he could not have been disposed of quietly, in an isolated hotel-room, with symptoms of a heart-attack, as the KGB’s Special Tasks squad would have carefully managed, is as much a puzzle as the reason for his being taken out. The assassins did not just want him killed, as retribution for his defiance or betrayal, they wanted to send a strong deterrent message. But who would have picked up any pattern? November 1977, eh? At exactly that time, Dick White was warning Andrew Boyle not to persevere with his questions about Blunt. That was a few years after Malahide met his sudden end, and a couple of years before Blunt was eventually outed  . . .

‘Manifest Lies’

As I was contemplating all these matters, I discovered Manifest Lies, a fictionalized version of the Holden case, written by Max Heaton, and published in 2024. As coldspur readers will know, I am not a fan of this particular genre. This novel is, however, quite well done, although I found the motives for Holden’s assassination far-fetched. Yet Heaton appeared to have trodden exactly the same research trails as had Gillman and Madioli, which set me wondering – who could he be, and why was he hiding behind an alias? I could find no footprint for Heaton on the Web, which was strange: moreover, the copyright notice in Manifest Lies was very odd. Perhaps Gillman was masquerading as Heaton, and, having been severely warned off publishing his real story by the CIA, had decided to write it up as fiction under an assumed name?

I took my theory to the Editor of hugejam, the publisher of Manifest Lies, first asking her whether she could tell me anything about Max Heaton. She replied promptly, saying that Heaton did not want anything about him disclosed, but she did not explicitly deny that Gillman could have been he. I thought that was provocative, as eliminating Hillman would not really have reduced the field by much. My next step, therefore, was to approach Gillman himself, and describe my interest and my hypothesis. He likewise responded promptly, energetically denying that he was Heaton.

I had a very fruitful exchange of emails after that. Gillman is a charming man, and happens to come from the same part of the world as I. We differed politely on one or two points of investigative journalism (he had read my quote from his book in my May coldspur by then), but I reinforced my view that, while the Sunday Times Insight team had performed a marvellous job in the 1960s and 1970s, too many authors today still followed the procedure of indiscriminately gathering as many ‘facts’ as they can about a case, and trying to weave a coherent story around them. Having been pointed to my website, Gillman said it was ‘terrific’, which was very gratifying. He said that he was also intrigued by the hidden identity of Max Heaton, who, he believed, had probably relied on Harold Evans’s My Paper Chase for much of his research. He also stated that he was close to homing in on him.  I am hoping to meet Gillman when I come to the UK in September. (Despite the collegiality I developed with him, I have not altered my less than stellar review of the book by him and Madioli.)

Other Books Read

I present here a few thumbnail comments on other books on intelligence and history that I have read this year, and which have not been mentioned elsewhere (either in this report, or in earlier coldspur bulletins in 2025).

Red List by David Caute (2022)

Caute provides a compendium of the leftist intellectuals whom MI5 tracked in the twentieth century, rightly pointing to the enormous effort that was expended to little effect in surveilling hundreds of persons who may have been naïve, but whose influence was meagre. His work is marred by the fact that he appears to believe that all relevant information consists solely of the Personal Files released by MI5, and to show a barely concealed admiration of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. (B-)

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel by Douglas Brunt (2023)

A timely investigation of the life and mysterious death of the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913), who may have conspired with Germany’s adversaries when he saw how his technology was going to be used. Brunt has performed some innovative research, and has a lively journalistic style, but he pads out his story with too much repetition and digression. (B-)

‘The Traitor of Arnhem’

The Traitor of Arnhem by Robert Verkalk (2025)

Verkalk’s thesis is that Anthony Blunt passed on to the Soviets information about the Arnhem operation, which they in turn gave the Germans, as a ploy to help the Red advance on Berlin. While his text contains some major errors, Verkalk presents some engagingly fresh research on the leaks of 1944. I am going to have to read this book again, very carefully, before passing full judgment, but it seems to me utterly impossible that Blunt (who did many stupid things) would have consciously leaked information to help the Germans, as he would have known that he would face the hangman’s noose if detected. Verkalk may have made some major mistakes of identification. (B)

Paris 1944 by Patrick Bishop (2024)

An original approach to telling the story of Paris’s liberation, by describing it from the standpoint of an eclectic set of observers and participants. I was drawn to this book since I enjoyed Bishop’s The Reckoning, about the Stern Gang. Perhaps a bit too much on Hemingway, for my liking, but Paris 1944 is a refreshing and informative account of an ambiguous period, frequently misrepresented, and it gives an arresting account of the summary justice that was meted out before de Gaulle applied discipline. (B+)

The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj (2022)

Be very wary of books that announce themselves as the ‘Secret History’ of anything. For if the history is published, it is no longer secret. And, if it is based on insider leaks, it may well be unreliable, and certainly will not be verifiable. Much of the material published here has been presented before, but the later chapters provide a useful compendium to information-sharing between the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – the Five Eyes of the title. (B)

Operation Biting by Max Hastings (2024)

A typically lively and gripping account by the renowned journalist/historian of the February 1942 Bruneval raid on the French coast to steal secrets of Germany’s radar network, specifically the Wûrzburg apparatus. This story was already familiar to me from George Millar’s Bruneval Raid (1974): Hastings has dug out some fresh sources, but the overall conclusions are not new. He does quote, however, one astonishing statement made by de Gaulle to a confidant that Patrick Bishop overlooked: “Between ourselves, the Resistance is a bluff which has succeeded.” (B+)

The Strategists by Phillips Payson O’Brien (2024)

O’Brien came up with the rather absurd notion that Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler were all competent ‘strategists’, and he inspects their individual experiences in World War I to show how their expertise was developed. Yet the idea is a clunker: none of the five really understood grand strategy or military strategy, and the occasional biographical insights do not make amends for what is an ill-conceived and clumsy book. (P.S. This book received a stellar review in the TLS issue dated June 13. I do not change my opinion one iota.) (C)

‘The Spy Who Helped . . . .’

The Spy Who Helped the Soviets Win Stalingrad and Kursk by Chris Jones (2025)

This book wins my award for Worst Title of the Year. Jones (who consulted me on his subject, and has some nice things to say about coldspur), has valiantly attempted a biography of Alexander Foote, the radio operator for the Lucy Spy Ring in Switzerland, who later ‘defected’ back to the British. Jones has dug out some useful facts about Foote, but offers a very uneven assessment of his life, neglecting, for example, an explanation as to why two versions of his ghosted memoir Handbook for Spies were published. (B-)

Operation Splinter Factor by Stewart Steven (1974)

Professor Haslam encouraged me to track down Operation Splinter Factor (a CIA project to foster insurgencies in Eastern Europe) in the work of Richard Deacon. I found nothing in Deacon, but discovered Steven’s journalistic work – in many ways fascinating, but not very scholarly. It offers a bibliography, but no individual references, and grossly exaggerates the role that Allen Dulles played, as well as that of the Communist dupe Noel Field. The trials and purges were more a factor of Stalin’s paranoia. (B-)

The Future Is History by Masha Gessen (2017)

An essential volume for understanding how totalitarianism returned to Russia under President Putin. The author skillfully weaves personal stories of friends caught up in the maelstrom into an account of Putin’s rise and manipulative methods. The book is probably 100 pages longer than it needed to be, and it focusses rather too much on what I shall reluctantly have to refer to as the ‘LGBTQ’ aspect of suppression, but digesting it was still a very rewarding experience. (A-)

‘The Determined Spy’

The Determined Spy by Douglas Waller (2025)

A comprehensive biography of Frank Wisner, the obsessive and bipolar head of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, who committed suicide at the age of 56. Supported by Dulles, he pursued a relentless quest for subverting Soviet influence around the world, an activity that caused much havoc, and rebounded badly on the reputation of the USA. The author spends too much space on familiar exploits (such as Guatemala and Iran, where Wisner was not closely involved), and not enough (in my estimation) on Wisner’s capacity to charm, despite his demons, and on his personal relationships – such as why persons like Isaiah Berlin and William Deakin were drawn to him. (B+)

Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis (1978)

Brilliant! I was drawn to this book by a Lewis revival presented in the TLS, encouraged by my previous analysis of Allied invasions of Italy in 1943-44, and by my vague knowledge that my father must have taken part in them. Lewis, an intelligence officer, shows that not everything the American and British forces did was valorous and heroic, and he sheds an ironic and insightful eye on the superstitions of the Neapolitans, the inherent cruelty in a society driven by vendettas, and the baleful influence of the Camorra. I even forgive this fabled writer for his ugly deployment of unrelated participles. (A)

Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian by Michael Braddick (2025)

This could have been an engaging life of the Stalinist dupe, Christopher Hill. Braddick knows the ins and outs of CP factions in the 1950s, and the trends in historiography since, and he writes tolerably well. Yet he is so much in sympathy with Hill’s Marxism that everything is reduced to ‘class’ terms – ‘bourgeois’ culture, the ‘capitalist ‘press (when there were ten competing daily newspapers in England alone!), as well, of course, as ‘the capitalist class’, sounding as if it were taken from a cartoon in Krokodil, but in truth deputising for a variegated world of free enterprise, which itself consists of a complex set of entrepreneurs, small business-owners, investors, risk-takers, losers, profiteers, managers, directors, pensioners, regulators, competitors, unions, etc. Then there is the dreary figure of Hill himself, who as his life drew to a close, admitted that he did not really understand economics, and was no longer a Stalinist, a communist, or even a Marxist. It was a shame it took him so long to work that out. (B-)

‘The Theory and Practice of Communism’

Postscript: Reading the above book prompted me to go back and re-read R.N. Carew Hunt’s The Theory and Practice of Communism (I still own my 1964 Pelican edition). Carew Hunt was an advisor to MI5, and this book was distributed to MI5 officers after the war. It drives home how utterly stupid today’s ‘marxists’ are to adhere to the absurd, ponderous, self-contradictory ramblings of someone who lived one-hundred and fifty years ago, had no clue as to how the world worked, had no imagination, and saw society only through artificial class-dominated eye-glasses.

Ethnicity

Regular readers will be familiar with my disdain for sociologists and bureaucrats who try to classify me by ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’. I am reminded of a management training course that I attended shortly after I arrived in the USA in the summer of 1980. The shiny and very confident instructor stressed to the class that it was against the law to inquire of any job candidate what his or her race was. (Ethnicity had not really made an impression by then, Human Resource departments were still called ‘Personnel’, and employees were not yet classified as ‘associates’.) Then, twenty minutes later, he was telling us that companies had to keep track of promotions and evaluations by racial classification, in order to ensure that no discrimination was taking place. I perked up, and asked, if employers did not know what the race of each employee was, were they relying on the employees to declare their race to Personnel, and how would the department know that they were telling the truth, and how would this information be divulged to each employee’s manager? Or did Personnel make a categorization of race based on what the employee looked like? It all sounded very invidious and unscientific to me. (This is the dilemma that the French and German governments have avoided by prohibiting the collection of such data.) The instructor was speechless for several seconds. I cannot now recall how he resolved the issue.

I am always on the lookout for intellectuals who are open about debunking these absurd notions, as a way of countering the proclamations of such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, and his calls for reparations. They are of course based on marxist ideas that each of us belongs to a class, and we are either ‘oppressors’ or ‘victims’, depending on what we have inherited. The fact that amongst one’s forbears there might be imperialists and slave-traders as well as serfs and slaves appears to have escaped such analyses. I have a well-developed resistance to any methodology that attempts to package people into oppressed ‘minorities’, and Thelma, my chief Sensitivity Reader, carefully goes over my text each month to make sure that I have included a slur against at least one of such groups, and that I have not been discriminatory in insulting any particular group less  than another.

Thus it was with some pleasure that I chanced on a review by Professor David Abulafia in May’s Literary Review, where his subject was Laura Spinney’s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. Professor Abulafia, when discussing the spread of Indo-European languages six thousand years ago, carefully dissected the myth that migrant tribes were united by language or ‘ethnicity’, and he went on to write: “Ethnic purity is a myth and we are all mongrels.” Splendid stuff! Yet, towards the end of his review, he wrote: “She [Ms. Spinney] makes it clear that there are still mysteries about how languages spread and are adopted, and about the relationship between language and ethnicity  . . .” I was dismayed. Having just dismissed the notion of ethnicity, Abulafia professed to endorse it. I had to write to him for an explanation.

His response was prompt and charming. He apologized for the fact that the exigences of a short book review imposed simplifications of an argument, and he explained that his comment about ethnicity and language related to the lack of congruence between the origins of a tribe and the origins, real or imagined, of a language. We enjoyed a brief exchange where we agreed that many persons, encouraged by these experts to mix up ‘ethnicity’ with ‘identity’ (two notions at cross-purposes) often very selectively picked which one of their forebears they regarded as dominant in their ‘ethnicity’, and were taken in by the false notion that such culture was inherited, or ‘in their DNA’. The Professor signed off by stating that he was once asked by the British Academy to indicate his ethnicity after a public lecture he had attended, and he wrote down that he was a Martian. I (who once declared on a USA government form that I was a ‘South Sea Islander’) responded that the Academy probably paid somebody to check whether it was attracting a ‘diverse’ enough audience. Not enough Venusians, perhaps. Thank you, Professor! A true mensch.

And then I read, in The New York Review of Books (June 26), a review of a book titled Proust: A Jewish Way by Maurice Samuels, who wrote: “The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.” No it does not, Maurice! Proust’s father was a Catholic who insisted that Marcel was baptised at birth! So he could hardly have a Jewish identity, could he? Your so-called debate is completely artificial. Zut alors!

Lastly, I read a passage in the Spectator (June 7) by a man I generally admire, Sir Anthony Seldon. (He was one of the examiners of my doctoral thesis: I notice that he has encountered some controversy recently over his Vice-Chancellorship at the University of Buckingham, but I do not know the facts.) He wrote: “As the son of a Jewish father who married a Jewish woman, I believe strongly in Israel’s absolute right to exist.” I first read that as indicating that his father married a Jewish woman. Is that not an extraordinary way to describe one’s parents? For his father, Arthur Seldon, married Marjorie Willett (née Stenhouse), who appeared to come from a  traditional English Christian background (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2711061/Love-loss-shadow-war.html). Maybe, like Victor Rothschild’s first wife Barbara Hutchinson, Seldon’s mother converted to Judaism before the marriage. And then it occurred to me that what Seldon meant was that he himself married a Jewish woman. Again, his first wife (Joanna Papworth) would appear to have been traditionally ‘English’. He married his second wife (Sarah Sayer) a few years ago. Is this a roundabout way of stating that Seldon does not consider himself ‘Jewish’ since membership of that ‘tribe’ is conventionally passed through the mother? And, in any case, why should such a pairing appear to guarantee from their offspring a belief in the Zionist project  (‘as the son . . .’)? There are many more seriously ‘Jewish’ couples who reject the whole notion. I wonder why Sir Anthony believes that his opinions are in some way determined by the arrangement to which his parents came, or by the background of his second wife. This whole ‘ethnic’ business, and how it encourages even intellectuals to go down illogical paths, and to publicize their misconceptions, continues to astonish – and dismay –  me.

British Magazines

For keeping current on what is happening in the United Kingdom, I rely a lot on magazines. I subscribe to the Times (primarily for the crosswords), so I can inspect its website for news and analysis, although I find much of the coverage shallow and repetitive. I am currently a subscriber to three print magazines as well, Private Eye (since 1965), the Spectator (since 1985), and Prospect (since 2015). Yet I have recently found that all are going to the dogs.

A recent ‘Private Eye’ cover

Private Eye rarely makes me laugh these days – which was the main objective of subscribing. Its cartoons are mostly weak, and its satire and parody usually repetitive and unimaginative. Its serious coverage obsesses over the media, and the knavery of local government. I can read only so much about fourth-rate persons, severely overpaid, who perform abjectly at administering services for the populations who presumably voted them in –  and that goes especially for my home town of Croydon, Surrey, which seems to be an utter basket-case. The letters are uniformly dreary. And, of course, I recognize the players in any forum, from the BBC to the Street of Shame, less and less, which makes the whole exercise become gradually more pointless. The magazine occasionally offers some first-class investigative journalism, such as in the Post Office Horizon scandal, and the further inquiries into the Nurse Lucy Letby case, but I did offer the Editor a scoop on my Flight PB416 research, and he did not even acknowledge my email.

The Spectator has for a long time been a vital organ for the distribution of generally conservative but independent and insightful analysis – both of domestic and European affairs, and it occasionally still provides respectable and useful articles. Its recent change of ownership, however, seems to have occasioned a tilt to preachiness and promotion of superstition, with far too many interviews of clerical personnel, columns by obvious Christian enthusiasts, articles about the Papacy and the Church of England, and letters from such sympathizers. For its recent Easter edition, it even recommended that ‘society’; should take the Easter story ‘seriously and literally’. Its new editor, Michael Gove, seems to be a bit barmy. In a recent long article (April 5), he wrote enthusiastically about ‘progressives’ from ‘the left and the right’ who have ‘thoughtful plans for long-term welfare reform’, and he even twittered on about making ‘social justice’ the ‘lodestar for policy’ in an attempt to tackle ‘entrenched economic inequality’ through ‘a coherent industrial policy’ – hardly the opinions of a conservative-leaning thought-leader, and resembling more a Labour dirigiste from the 1980s. I like to be challenged intellectually (why else would I have subscribed to the New York Times for so long?) but I cannot put up with such nonsense. Moreover, the crossword has deteriorated sharply over the past year, with too many ill-conceived ideas poorly executed. Doc should retire.

Prospect was given a new editor about a year ago – Alan Rusbridger, who used to be editor of the Guardian. He has quickly taken the magazine into the land of leftism and wokery, and its columns are generally filled with familiar complaints about inequality and ‘late-stage capitalism’, and the trumpeting of DEI initiates, ethnic identity, and grievances. Prospect has always been very think-tanky, with its absurd annual assessment of the ‘Best Thinkers of the Year’, but I have tolerated that for the occasional fine article on an important issue. Likewise, I cannot put up with its stale and irritating nonsense for long.

So – where do I turn to? The Oldie?

(This month’s Commonplace items can be viewed here.)

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2024: Year-End Roundup

To welcome the New Year, I present a potpourri of current heartwarming stories, mostly from the world of intelligence. I wish all coldspur readers a happy, prosperous and inquisitive 2025!

[Coldspur: ‘Purveyor of Conspiracy Theories to the Gentry’ ®]

Contents:

When Victor Met Venetia

(An odd sighting of Victor Rothschild and Venetia Montagu, with links to Blunt, Burgess and Maclean)

False Alarms: Sisman, Trevor-Roper and Philby

(Philby is falsely accused of prolonging the war)

‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’

(Some reflections on the romanticization of many WWII memoirs)

An Update on the Blunt Confession

(MI5 engineered Blunt’s confession before the Attorney-General approved it)

Philby the ‘Double Agent’

(Further hints that Philby was admitted to be working for MI6 and the RIS at the same time)

Christopher Andrew and the Minor Biographies

(Did the renowned authorized historian actually read his latest book?)

Borodin: Deception, Defection and Interception

(The experts let me down)

The Biography of Margaret Thatcher

(A slight quibble with Charles Moore’s masterful biography)

. . . and an aside on awards . . .

(Exactly that)

Michael Holzman, Proletarian

(A bizarre re-appearance of Holzman’s indigestible Kim and Jim)

Ruthenia Revisited

(Culture is not inherited)

‘Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes’

(A famous 1961 Test Match, and my association with it)

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

When Victor Met Venetia

While I was pursuing my research on Victor Rothschild, a correspondent alerted me to an article in the Daily Mail that claimed that the infamous Venetia Montagu (née Stanley) had had an affair with Rothschild (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13804049/Torrid-trysts-bedroom-wheels-Prime-Minister-Asquith-lover-35-years-junior-lost-Britain-WWI.html ), where he is described as ‘the immensely rich scientist, spy and polymath Victor Rothschild’. (This article was prompted by the publication of a ‘novel’ about the affair between Prime Minister Asquith and Venetia, written by Robert Harris, and titled Precipice.) Now my immediate reaction was that such an alliance was highly unlikely: Venetia was twenty-three years older than Victor. It is of course possible that he could have been her toy-boy, but other snippets reinforced my doubts. The article suggested that Venetia’s described flings with her string of lovers occurred before 1924, when her husband, Edwin Montagu, died. Victor would have been a callow thirteen-year-old at Harrow School at that time.

Venetia Montagu

It may have been a case of mistaken identity. The Mail itself, in an article in 2016, described Venetia’s fling slightly differently, as being with ‘the banker Victor Rothschild’ (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3634319/The-PM-daughter-love-girl-Venetia-Stanley-won-heart-Herbert-Asquith-host-men.html ). Now Victor never described himself as a ‘banker’ (or even a ‘bonker’), and he denied strongly the assertion of a certain ‘Colonel B.’ to that effect, as his memoir Random Variables explains (page 92). I initially suspected that, if a Rothschild had been involved with Venetia, it is much more probable that it was Victor’s father, Nathaniel Charles who was the Rothschild who had been enchanted by her. Charles (as he was known) committed suicide in 1923 by slitting his own throat. His obituary indicates that he had encephalitis, but maybe he was also lovestruck, and brought to despair by the fact that Venetia no longer had time for him? While a keen entomologist and conservationist, he was primarily known as a banker. Victor excluded any mention of his father in the few memoirs he recorded.

An inspection of Kenneth Rose’s Elusive Rothschild deepened the mystery, however. Charles had apparently been struck with St. Louis encephalitis in 1916, and, on medical advice, left for Switzerland that year, while his wife remained in England to look after their four children. Charles returned to Tring, but he was not cured. After a few years of depression and debility, he gave up the struggle in 1923. (I discovered I had a copy of Frederic Morton’s 1962 history of the Rothschild family, The Rothschilds,in my library. All it says of Charles (‘Nathaniel’), ‘a gifted natural historian’, is: “Conscientiously but unhappily, he performed his duties at the bank until his suicide in 1923.”) Charles had an older brother, however, named Walter, who retreated from reality in a different way. His heart was also not in banking, but in zoology (as was Victor’s). He was forced to sit at a desk at Rothschild’s during the week, but he loathed it. And he led an unconventional life. As Rose puts it, exploiting Miriam Rothschild’s biography of him: “For years . . . his emotional life had been of labyrinthine disorder. Two mistresses, by one of whom he had a child, fought each other for his favours. A third, a peeress, systematically blackmailed him for thirty years by threatening to tell his strait-laced mother of their defunct liaison. Only Lady Rothschild’s death in 1935, two years before his own, defused that aristocratic conspiracy.” Walter sounds a much more likely candidate – but he was definitely not a banker.

Walter Rothschild

Venetia was not a peeress, either – merely the daughter of a baron. Edwin Montagu was also a son of a baron, Lord Swaythling, and thus brought no elevated nobility to his wife. Strangely, he was also judged to have died from encephalitis. Venetia bore a daughter in 1923, Judith Venetia, but her Wikipedia entry states that Judith’s father ‘was said’ (that weaselly anonymous expression) to have been ‘William Humble Eric Ward, then Viscount Ednam and later 3rd Earl of Dudley’. What these aristocrats got up to! Were ‘they’ correct about Viscount Ednam, or had the father in fact been Walter – from whom Victor inherited the baronetcy in 1937?  As Miriam Rothschild writes in her biography: “Walter’s irreverent nieces remarked that it was a wise man who knew which Rothschild was his own father  . . .”.

Yet I soon found that there were connections between Victor and Venetia. When Venetia eventually married Edwin Montagu in 1915, she had to convert to Judaism so that Montagu could keep his inheritance. This was an exact forerunner of what Victor’s first wife had to undertake to become accepted by the Rothschilds. Moreover, the files on the Rothschilds at the National Archives show that Victor and Venetia socialized, possibly through their acquaintance with another Cambridge scientist named William Grey Walter.

In the extensive follow-ups to the defections of Burgess and Maclean, when Victor was dribbling names of leftist Cantabrigians from the thirties to his MI5 interviewers, Walter’s name came up, on February 16, 1966. Evelyn McBarnet (D1, who appeared to be leading Peter Wright in the exercise) reported that Rothschild had recalled four more names since their last meeting: Mickie Burn, Harry Collier, Grey Walter and a man named Katz. (McBarnet noted that this was a very disingenuous offering by Rothschild.) Rothschild described Walter in somewhat alarming terms:

A very beautiful young man whom he thought of as a queer fish. He recalled that on one occasion when visiting a certain Venetia MONTAGU, a much older woman with whom Grey WALTER was closely associated, he had met MACLEAN staying at her house.

Grey Walter

Walter had a file already, PF 765553, so he was therefore known to MI5, but McBarnet did not then pursue the inquiry. Why Rothschild would choose to describe Walter in that way (his pretty looks did not survive into middle-age, it would appear) is bizarre, but the veiled hint is that Walter, who was born in the same year as Rothschild, was having an affair with Venetia. The implication was perhaps that Walter was tarnished in some way by the Maclean connection. But why was Rothschild visiting Venetia? Was Walter having an affair with her then? If Rothschild knew Walter well, why would he complicate matters by introducing Venetia?

MI5 followed up later – much later. On August 26, 1969, an officer (whose name for some strange reason has been redacted) interviewed Walter at his office in the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol. The archived note does refer to an earlier discussion from August 4, and the interviewer sought clarity on something Walter had said about Guy Burgess. He wanted to know the date of a holiday that he had spent at Rothschild’s villa in Cap Ferrat, and who besides Burgess had been in attendance. Walter fumbled a bit: he thought it had happened before he was married, but he could not recall the exact date of the latter event. He concluded the visit was probably in 1932. (A note on the file says that Walter married his first wife, Katherine Monica Ratcliffe, in 1933. They divorced in 1945.) Walter then adds that the other attendees were Mary Rothschild, Venetia Montague [sic] and her small daughter, Anthony Blunt, and an auctioneer whose name he could not remember. I can find no trace of a ‘Mary Rothschild’ in the comprehensive Rothschild family tree which appears as an endpaper in Morton’s book: nor does Miriam Rothschild show one in the tree she provides with her biography of Walter. Did Victor perhaps present ‘Mary’ as some kind of relative? How did Walter misremember this person? Why did MI5 not follow up?

The report from the August 4 session is also perplexing. Grey Walter claimed that he had been Victor’s supervisor at Cambridge, which can hardly make sense, given that he was about six months older than Rothschild. He then expanded on his relationship, stating that he recalled attending parties at Llewelyn-Davies’s house in London after meetings of the Apostles. The report goes on: “The last, he thought, was about 1943, which, together with a lot of people he did not know, the following attended: Blunt, Burgess, Chesterman, Victor Rothschild, Alister Watson. . .”. He also expressed the opinion that it was paradoxical that a man of Rothschild’s wealth should join the Labour Party. Perhaps he might have wondered in that case why Rothschild had remained an Apostle, and had continued to mix with such a subversive lot.

So why was Victor friendly with Venetia, and inviting her (and her daughter) to his villa? Was it part of an obligation founded in his uncle’s abandonment of her? And did he introduce Venetia to Grey, or was the story of their affair all a pretence, to distract from his own entanglements? And what was going on with Burgess, Maclean and Blunt? I am not going to shell out $100 to buy Stefan Buczacki’s My Darling Mr. Asquith: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Venetia Stanley, which might help solve the mystery, but perhaps someone out there in coldspurland can contribute to solving the puzzle. Hallo, Nigel Platts! Hey, Richard Davenport-Hines! Help me out! (Has anyone read Precipice, and thus might be able to tell me if Harris has discovered any useful information?)

Nicholas Walter

Lastly, I should mention that Grey Walter’s elder son was Nicholas Walter, a prominent irritant to the authorities as a civil disobedience activist when I was growing up in the nineteen-sixties – a member of the Committee of 100, and of Spies for Peace. I notice that he also learned Russian while working for Signals Intelligence. His daughter, Natasha, carries on the family tradition, being an ardent feminist, anti-racist and climate activist (‘Extinction Rebellion’). She has also written a novel (A Quiet Life) based on the life of Donald Maclean’s wife Melinda Marling, which I have subsequently acquired. Perhaps being a gadfly is – ahem! – in her DNA. Then I noticed that she had written a memoir about her parents and grandparents, so I thought I ought to read that too, to see what she said about her paternal grandfather.

The book, Before the Light Fades, is primarily an elegy to the author’s mother, Ruth, who committed suicide as her dementia got worse, and Natasha spends a lot of time analyzing her own grief and sense of guilt. (As she admits, she makes ‘heavy weather’ of her grief.) She also describes the growth of the anarchist-protest movement that brought her parents together, and she appears to want to bear all the world’s woes on her shoulders. (You may not be surprised to learn that she is Honorary Professor of Climate Crime and Climate Justice [!] at Queen Mary University, without appearing to bring with her any appropriate qualification in meteorological science. As Dr. Heinz Kiosk constantly reminded us: “We are all guilty!”.) I found the story of her maternal grandfather’s sufferings under Nazism very poignant, but I was not moved by the overlarded lament about her own predicament and conflicts. In fact, I harbour some sympathies with her complaints about the condescending obscurantism and obsessive secrecy of British governmental institutions, but I have no time for persons who selfishly push their case by disrupting the ability of their fellow-citizens to carry on with their lives, and to go about their daily business. Moreover, the author is typically naive about the Soviet threat and influence during the Cold War. She writes nothing about the corresponding noisy protests demanding nuclear disarmament that did not take place in Russia while she and her friends were demonstrating so boisterously in Britain.

Natasha Walter

The disappointment was that I learned little about her paternal grandparents, since she concentrates on Ruth’s parents, Jewish refugees from Germany. I thus sent her an email (care of her press agent, of course), asking whether she was aware of the snippets in the Rothschild file, and whether she could add any information on her grandfather’s friendships and relationships. I received a very pleasant response from her, in which she revealed that she knew about Grey’s ‘connection with Victor Rothschild and Venetia Montagu’ – which statement implies that Venetia was closer to Victor than Grey was. She added that Venetia had given Grey a silver cigarette-case inscribed with the worlds ‘for services rendered’ – but what those services were is unknown. She said that her father had told her that her grandfather appeared to enjoy his association with the Cambridge spies, but that Nicholas believed that his father was probably not one himself. Apparently, Rothschild treated him poorly, refusing to see his old friend in 1970 after Grey underwent a serious accident. Maybe Rothschild felt awkward about having passed on his name to the authorities. And that was it.

I did read A Quiet Life. It is excellent. Walter’s novel was inspired by the life of Melinda Marling, but it does not attempt to embellish it. Instead, the author has written a very accomplished work of original imagination. Only towards the end, when the denouement of Edward Last’s escape is described, does Natasha Walter falter, as her details too closely mirror the circumstances of Donald Maclean, and a few jarring errors occur.

False Alarms: Sisman, Trevor-Roper and Philby

One of my correspondents, Moshe Evan-Shoshan, contacted me earlier this year to challenge me (very politely) over my treatment of Kim Philby, suggesting that I had downplayed his baleful influence on the course of the war, compared to the other members of the Cambridge Five. He referred me to a passage in Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, An Honourable Englishman, p 121 (in the USA edition), where the author claimed that Philby (as acting head of Section V of MI6, with Cowgill ‘out of the country’ at the time) had refused to allow a report by Trevor-Roper’s Radio Analysis Bureau (RAB) to be circulated further. The report, exploiting intercepted traffic, had reputedly indicated that the Sicherheitsdienst was encroaching on the work of Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr, pointing to a struggle for power between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff. “It implied that there was an opportunity for the Allies to exploit this widening rift”, wrote Sisman. Stuart Hampshire, representing RAB at the meeting with Philby, was reputedly astonished by Philby’s obduracy. When Trevor-Roper originally wrote about it, this incident had been eagerly picked up by other writers, such as Richard Deacon in The British Connection.

Adam Sisman

It was apparently not until two decades later that Hampshire and Trevor-Roper concluded that Philby had been carrying out Stalin’s orders, strongly discouraging any ‘dickering’ (as Philby described it in his memoir) with the Germans, as it was not in the Soviet interest to have the western allies colluding in any way with conservative Germans. Yet the strange thing about Sisman’s narrative here is that he provides no sources for any of his facts – neither the identity of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report, written by Hampshire in November 1942, nor its contents, nor the record of the meeting between Hampshire and Philby, nor the statement claimed to have been made by Hampshire immediately afterwards that ‘there was something wrong about Philby’. I dug around, and found that Edward Harrison, in his Foreword to Trevor-Roper’s Secret World, had identified the repository of the report as being HW 19/347 at the National Archives. So I turned to my London-based researcher, and asked him to photograph it: a couple of weeks later I received the package. I was at that time, however, consumed with other projects and distractions, and unable to give it any focussed attention for a while.

At about the same time, in April of this year, the Journal of Intelligence History published on-line an article by Renate Atkins and Brian Cuddy titled ‘The German opposition question in British World War II strategy: interpreting Hugh Trevor-Roger’s wartime intelligence reporting’. Moshe and I examined it. The authors were similarly puzzled. They had also located the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report in HW 19/347, but they pointed out that it had a date of June 5, 1943. Sisman knew about this file, as he provides an Endnote to a report written in August by RIS (Radio Intelligence Service, the successor to RAB) titled ‘Abwehr Incompetence’, but all he writes about the puzzle is that the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report was issued ‘in a bowdlerized form’ in June. That event occurred soon after Trevor-Roper had escaped a reprimand from Valentine Vivian, and been appointed the head of the new group, RIS, reporting directly to Menzies. (Sisman does not state who told him that it had been ‘bowdlerized’, or who had carried out such revisions.) On the other hand, Atkins and Cuddy, in their Footnote 27, gently undermine Sisman’s judgment concerning the virility of the struggle, pointing out that that opinion is not expressed in any of the three points that constitute the report’s conclusion, and that no recommendation for Allied intervention was made. They add that other scholars, such as P. R. J. Winter, who has written about the bomb plot against Hitler, have unwisely accepted unquestioningly what Sisman wrote, and they conclude that Trevor-Roper may have undergone an ‘embellished recollection’ when he wrote about the events in 1968. Yet Atkins and Cuddy do not express any scepticism about the claim that the earlier version of the report did exist.

An inspection of the file shows that the report, offered with Hampshire’s initials, and a date of June 5, 1943, could hardly be considered controversial. Its main conclusion is that Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst was indeed intruding on the territory of the Abwehr, and that Canaris was therefore emphasizing tactical operational intelligence. Its issuance did provoke some minor debate, with Palmer, from Hut 18 at GC&CS, disputing some of the evidence. That prompted a partial climb-down from Trevor-Roper, who stressed that the conclusions were indeed tentative. So what happened to that more outspoken earlier version? Sisman writes that Trevor-Roper, frustrated by Philby, had enjoyed a meeting, probably in early April 1943, with his ally Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s top scientific adviser, and given him the earlier version of the paper. This news had found its way to Valentine Vivian, the vice-chief of MI6, who demanded, in a meeting with Menzies, that Trevor-Roper be fired for bypassing the proper channels. Trevor-Roper managed to defend himself, and even gained his promotion after the incident.

Yet, again, Sisman provides no source for the events apart from Guy Liddell’s diary, since Trevor-Roper had looked for sympathy from his friend at MI5 when his ideas kept being rejected. As it happens, Liddell wrote admiringly of Trevor-Roper’s report in his June 19 entry, quoting large chunks of it – but he expressed no knowledge of the earlier ‘unbowdlerized’ version. Sisman did not start work on his biography until after Trevor-Roper’s death: he had access to diaries and other papers, but he refrains from citing them in reference to these episodes, so it is impossible to verify the claims he makes. The description of the events in the summer of 1943 sounds realistic, but what about the skirmish with Philby the previous year? Trevor-Roper was not present. Did Sisman rely on the testimony of that very dubious character Stuart Hampshire? And was Hampshire embellishing his description of the Philby meeting as a way of bolstering his anti-communist credentials, and highlighting his good nose for spies? After all, what Philby stated about not wanting to circulate the paper would have harmonized well with what Churchill himself had instructed about not negotiating with any Germans, as Sisman himself acknowledges on page 122. Philby would have had the support of Cowgill, Vivian, and Menzies.

Another sub-plot was carrying on at this time, however. Sisman describes how Trevor-Roper, frustrated by the excessive secrecy and territorialism of his new boss, Cowgill, had contacted Cherwell on December 17, 1942, seeking his help in finding him a new job. He had been feuding with Cowgill for over a year. This was just a month after the supposed creation of the elusive first folio of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ report. Sisman does not tell us what Cherwell’s response was, but it seems rather anomalous that Trevor-Roper would not have discussed with him then the essence of his controversial findings, and the regrettably undated contretemps between Hampshire and Philby, but instead have waited until April the next year to ‘mention casually’ to his mentor the fact that his unit had detected ‘signs of a power struggle’ in Germany, and passed him a copy of his report only then.

Elsewhere, Trevor-Roper wrote equivocally about his dealings with Philby. In his book The Philby Affair (the first chapter of which, rather confusingly, is also titled The Philby Affair), he provides two passages concerning these events. The first, in The New Machiavel, describing his summons to the meeting with Vivian and Menzies, runs as follows:

            I was, I fear, distrusted by our superiors, who suspected me, with some justice, of irreverent thoughts and dangerous contacts. I was secretly denounced as being probably in touch with the Germans, and more openly and more justly – accused of consorting with the more immediate enemy, M.I.5. I was once summoned to be dismissed.

Here, however, he does not single out Philby as being the prime agent of the accusations, or of behaving obstinately. Indeed, Trevor-Roper did not report to Philby, but to Cowgill (his immediate ‘superior’). The accusation of ‘being in touch with the Germans’ does, however, suggest a stronger liaison/sympathy than the eventual paper expressed, but Trevor-Roper’s failure to attribute to Philby the dramatic action which Hampshire described is a bizarre oversight.

A second passage (which is cited by Atkins and Cuddy, and of which Moshe carefully reminded me) appears in the chapter An Imperfect Organisation. Now Trevor-Roper is highly specific about Philby’s obstructiveness, and I reproduce the vital passage:

            Late in 1942, my office had come to certain conclusions which time proved to be correct – about the struggle between the Nazi Party and the German General Staff, as it was being fought out in the field of secret intelligence. The German Secret Service (the Abwehr) and its leader, Admiral Canaris, were suspected by the Party not only of inefficiency but also of disloyalty, and attempts were being made by Himmler to oust the Admiral and to take over his whole organization. Admiral Canaris himself, at that time, was making repeated journeys to Spain and had indicated a willingness to treat with us: he would even welcome a meeting with his opposite number, ‘C’. These conclusions were duly formulated and the final document was submitted to security clearance to Philby. Philby absolutely forbade its circulation, insisting that it was ‘mere speculation’.

I noted a few things about this passage. Nowhere does Trevor-Roper state that his report made a call for high-level action, as asserted by Sisman, or that the information, in Sisman’s words, ‘implied that there was an opportunity for the Allies to exploit the widening rift’. He does not explain why the report had to be approved by Philby: he says nothing about Cowgill’s absence. (I cannot even find evidence that Philby was officially Cowgill’s deputy at the time.) Philby was a junior officer who had been with MI6 for just over a year. How could he be expected to voice an opinion on behalf of Menzies, when the Chief was explicitly named in the report? Even if he had been deputizing for Cowgill, would he not have pushed the issue upstairs, rather than making a rash and very revealing decision on his own?

Moreover, Trevor-Roper is sophistical about his citing of Philby’s comments about ‘dickering with Germans’. Philby made these in the context of the state of the war at the end of 1943, not at the beginning. Philby himself writes that it was then clear ‘that the Axis was heading for defeat’. For Trevor-Roper to link his probably imaginary report of late 1942, and Philby’s apparent rejection of it, with the emerging dissentient voices in Germany a year later, is deceitful and unworthy. Neither Trevor-Roper nor Hampshire nor Philby was in a position to exert any influence on strategy, and the historian’s posturing looks like a piece of grandstanding, trying to show his moral superiority at the time, but also suggesting that he was outwitted by the evil Phiby.

Then other questions occurred to me. If Trevor-Roper had indeed stepped too far in interpreting intercepts, and recommending action, how come that Menzies (who needed to keep in favour with Churchill) had so swiftly accepted his arguments, and promoted him after the tense meeting with Vivian and Menzies? And why, if Cherwell had received a copy of the original RAB report, had it not surfaced in the Cherwell archive – perhaps with some indication of the action he took? Moreover, in the light of Trevor-Roper’s appeal to Cherwell in mid-December 1942, had the celebrated historian perhaps behaved especially provocatively in order to try to be transferred somewhere else? And why was Guy Liddell seemingly unaware of the earlier version of the report that got Trevor-Roper into so much trouble? Unfortunately, the historians involved here do not help much. Trevor-Roper’s Wartime Notebooks (edited by Richard Davenport-Hines) say nothing about the business. (It appears that the diaries have not been abridged.) Sisman uses Cherwell’s papers less intensely than does Edward Harrison, who, in Secret World engages in deep analysis of the disagreements between Trevor-Roper and Palmer, but studiously avoids any coverage of the genesis of the ‘Canaris and Himmler’ paper, or the resulting controversy.

RSS Arkley

I dug around a bit more. Guy Liddell’s Diaries were very revealing. They show that, in the winter of 1942-43, Liddell, as the chief of counter-espionage (B Division) at MI5, paid regular visits to St Albans for meetings of the RSS Committee, where Section V was based at the time: Trevor-Roper worked out of nearby Arkley, but reported to Cowgill of Section V. Thus Liddell kept in close contact with other Committee members, and was involved with the disputes over sharing ULTRA intelligence. Moreover, Cowgill was clearly present at the weekly RSS Committee meeting on December 3, 1942, at which everybody except Cowgill and Maltby voted not to dissolve the Committee. My records show that it was in early December 1941 (not 1942) when Cowgill and Montagu went to New York to help Stephenson with Double-Cross activities. It is highly unlikely that Cowgill would have left the country at such a critical period for the Committee – certainly for any length of time that meant he had to appoint someone to deputize for him. On January 7, 1943, Liddell and White discussed Cowgill’s behavior with Vivian, and Vivian had to admit that Cowgill’s perceptions were narrow.

I had also been surprised by Liddell’s reaction to the July version of the report, since his comments clearly tell (unless he was being massively deceptive) that this was the first time he had seen it – whether bowdlerized or not. His knowledge at the time would appear to be confirmed by another diary entry. On January 17, 1943, he comments on intelligence gained from Abwehr POWs about the incursions of the Sicherheitsdienst into Abwehr affairs, but Liddell makes no reference to any earlier RAB conclusions. Since he was in constant communication with Trevor-Roper (the contact that Vivian so strongly deprecated), it would be astonishing if the case of the inflammatory report had not been described to him by his friend.

Moreover, Liddell had known about Canaris’s dubious loyalty for some time. In his diary entry for November 12, 1940, he refers to testimony that the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky had given MI5 the previous January, namely the suggestion that Canaris was in Russian pay. (This item does not appear in the official report, but Liddell had enjoyed private sessions with Krivitsky.) Liddell even suggests a possible meeting in Portugal, and he indicates that he has recommended to Valentine Vivian that they should ‘try to get at’ Canaris. Over a year later, on January 7, 1942, he makes the astonishing observation that the Times has reported that Canaris ‘is intriguing with Gen. Marschner for the overthrow of the Nazi regime’. Thus intelligence of rifts in the German ranks and specifically of Canaris as a rebel, that, according to Sisman’s allegations, was gathered by Trevor-Roper, was hardly news, and was even in the public sphere. Trevor-Roper may well have been echoing received wisdom within MI6 when referring to the possibilities of a rendezvous in Portugal.

The obvious answer was to contact Sisman, and to ask him why he had published such claims with so flimsy material to back him up. Accordingly, I sent to his agent (no direct email access to Mr. S. being available, as he is an important man) on August 8, a ten-point questionnaire, preceded by a suitable introduction. It ran as follows:

* Who was the source of this story?

* Have you seen the original RAB report?

* Where may the report be found/inspected?

* How do you know that it was later bowdlerized?

* What changes were made to Hampshire’s original draft?

* Where is the evidence that Trevor-Roper sent Hampshire to St. Albans to discuss it?

* What evidence is there that Philby refused to allow its circulation?

* Did Hampshire write up the outcome of his meeting with Philby?

* Where did Hampshire record his statement that ‘there was something wrong with Philby’?

* Who were the other RAB officers who were ‘baffled by Philby’s obduracy’?

I should greatly appreciate any other information you can give me on this puzzling incident.

I never received any acknowledgment from Sisman, let alone a response. He has thus been added to my ‘List’. I wonder whether he is embarrassed by what he wrote: he should be.

Thus the claim that Philby may have helped to frustrate a rebellion and coup against the Nazis lies on very shaky ground. Philby’s probably mendacious boast is not backed up by any other evidence. The story of Hampshire’s indignation, and of Trevor-Roper’s frustration, is supported by no archival evidence, not even a confidently attributed conversation. Cowgill was around in November to process the report himself. Any relevant exchanges between Trevor-Roper and Cherwell remain elusive. The true cause of Trevor-Roper’s summons by Vivian and Menzies cannot be determined. The so-called ‘unbowdlerized’ report has not been located. Guy Liddell did not appear to be aware of its existence. I cannot identify any reference by Stuart Hampshire to the incident. Moreover, if Philby had obstructed a report that encouraged Britain to interfere in a potential conflict between the Nazi Party and the General Staff, he was only expressing a policy that emanated from Churchill and was passed through Menzies, Vivian and Cowgill to him.

As with so many incidents, we outsiders should be very wary of trusting what so-called ‘experts’ write on intelligence matters, whose authority relies solely on the fact that they have developed a certain reputation. If their unsupported pronouncements go unchallenged, they frequently become cast in stone, are cited and reinforced in other works, and thus become very difficult to dismantle. (I explored this problem seven years ago, in Officially Unreliable, at https://coldspur.com/officially-unreliable/, but the defect is not restricted to authorized histories.) Historical figures, irrespective of their reputation, tend to embellish their own achievements, and biographers should be very cautious before accepting such claims. Sisman has been shown to be a very slippery and imprecise chronicler, and his subject, Trevor-Roper, turns out not to be the completely ‘Honourable’ Englishman that Sisman dubbed him.

‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’

I must confess to an enormous amount of disappointment that my researches into the crash of Flight PB416 did not result in any recognition by the authorities (Squadron 617, the Foreign and Colonial Office) that the disaster was the result of an incredibly stupid decision that turned fatally wrong. My dismay was intensified by the fact that it was the official historian at the F&CO who had put me on to the Crash Report where I discovered the shattering but embarrassing facts about the subsequent investigation which confirmed my theories. I posted my analysis of the file well in time before the eightieth anniversary of the event, but it was sadly ignored. I had imagined that the British Embassy in Norway would be participating in a commemoration service at the church in Nesbyen, as they had done ten years ago, but its representative informed me that they had not been invited to any such event.

I feel that I have been let down by several persons – not just the obtuse ‘historians’ at the 617 Squadron Association and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but also by reporters in the national media, whose invitations for stories were clearly bogus, as the newspapers did not even acknowledge my emails. I failed to gain any response from more independent reporters who should have had a professional interest in what I wrote, and there even ‘friends’ I had acquired through coldspur who made promises, but turned out to be utterly useless. And the person who started the whole project off has turned out to be an empty vessel, and has done nothing detectable to promote my story in the UK. It is all quite astonishing, as my ‘conspiracy theory’ offers much substance, and a good deal of hard evidence, and I repeat my suspicion that some kind of celestial D-Notice may have closed out any discussion.

In late September, I noticed on Facebook that the 617 Squadron Society had posted a story, with photographs, reporting that the ‘Nes’ [presumably ‘Nesbyen’] Historical Society had held a ceremony at the crash site in September, and it offered photographs of those attending, including the mayor of Nesbyen. I immediately posted a message of support, recognition, and thanks, and provided a link to my analysis of the Crash Report. By the end of the month, fifty-three persons had indicated their approval of the ceremony: none had showed any appreciation of my message, which is prominently displayed. Is that not weird? I then dug out the email address of the mayor from the Web, and sent her a message explaining the history, and providing a link to my analysis. I never heard back from her.

Nesbyen Churchyard

I believe that a strange dynamic is at work here. I detect a very strong interest from amateur historians and aficionados in the fortunes of WWII frontline soldiers, airmen, seamen and agents – especially those who lost their lives in a good cause. Much of this derives from an appreciation of their heroism in confronting dangerous odds, and sometimes having to undergo unspeakable cruelty. I believe that a continuing remembrance of what they went through is admirable, and I have shown my support in my attention to the victims in F Section of SOE, and to the unfortunate casualties from Flight PB416 of the ‘Dambusters’ squadron.

Yet such concerns display all too often a sentimental and unrealistic side. Many books are written about the failed operations in which these heroes and heroines took part, and many of them are not very well put together. I have learned, from some of the chat-sites on the Web, that the mere publication of a book is an occasion for intense excitement and congratulations, irrespective of its quality. There are a few excellent authors out there, such as Clare Mulley and Stephen Tyas: on the other hand, too many clunkers are published. I recently read one, titled Behind Enemy Lines with SOE, based on the memoirs of Major E. C. R. Barker, introduced and annotated by Michael Kelly. It is a clumsily compiled work, and poorly edited. It is an account of Barker’s participation in Operation Arundel of the CLOWDER mission in the Balkans, which took place in the autumn of 1944. As the flyleaf describes: “The team’s brief was to find safe routes into Austria and infiltrate agents in order to encourage resistance against the Nazis.” It carries the obligatory blurb from Nigel West: “At last a brave officer on a clandestine assignment in the Balkans receives the recognition he deserves”.

This was, however, a foolhardy mission, conceived with poor intelligence, and launched without sensible logistic support. It should never have been undertaken. Yet to suggest that some of these schemes dreamed up in London were hare-brained frequently touches a nerve of those who are very reluctant to accept that the adventures of their relatives and heroes might all have been in vain. (Barker actually survived the CLOWDER operation, although Hesketh Pritchard, about whom I have written, did not.) Such persons can become very defensive about the units (SOE, Squadron 617, Bomber Command, etc.) for which the subjects of their attentions served. The epitome of this syndrome is Francis Suttill, Jr., who, naturally holding a life-long grief about the death of his father in the collapse of the PROSPER network, cannot face the facts about its betrayal and his father’s subsequent execution, as it would depreciate the sacrifice that he made. It is as if a criticism of the Gubbinses, Wilkinsons, Buckmasters, Harrises – all looking out carefully for the medals to be awarded to them – implies a criticism of the agents and airmen they sent out, many on doomed missions. As an antidote to some of the romanticism depicted in books about such exploits, I recommend Jim Auton’s bitter, but balanced, account of his aerial experiences, mostly in eastern Europe, titled The Secret Betrayal of Britain’s Wartime Allies.

I cannot help feeling that the lack of interest in my findings displayed in The Airmen Who Died Twice is largely explained by the same reluctance. The doubters would rather believe that the crash was a sad accident, an incident in which an airplane went off-course in a storm, rather than the outcome of a cruel and desperate project, devised by Churchill in a desire to appease Stalin, which could have enjoyed no satisfactory outcome whatever. It is, of course, complemented by the desires of the authorities I named earlier to bury any theories that might provoke very awkward questions as to why they had ignored the facts for so long.

An Update on the Blunt Confession

I have on this site occasionally referred to the startling discoveries of archival items that suddenly vindicate my previously tentative judgments, or break open startling new research avenues. These include – but are not limited to – the note on Burgess’s contacts with the Comintern, the letter to Len Beurton from SIS in Geneva, the reference to Francis Suttill’s two visits to France in 1943, the report by Jane Archer on Philby, the admission by Guy Liddell that George Hill’s cipher clerk with the SOE in Moscow, George Graham, was actually a Russian born as Serge Leontieff, and the reference to two Russians in the PB416 crash report. I now draw attention to a recent revelation, which might have been overlooked by some readers when it appeared in the September coldspur.

Readers are no doubt familiar with the story of Blunt’s ‘confession’. Andrew described it on page 437 of Defending the Realm, and accounts since have emphasized that MI5 sought the permission of the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General before approaching Blunt on April 23, 1964. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, described the episode thus to Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in December 1978, and his successor, Sir Robert Armstrong, wrote similarly to Margaret Thatcher in November 1979. Thatcher’s statement to the House of Commons on November 15, 1979, spelled out that the Attorney General concluded that ‘the public interest lay in trying to secure a confession from Blunt’, which duly occurred in that April of 1964, and she echoed the claim that new information had arrived earlier in 1964 (when the revelations from Straight had in fact been received the previous summer).

I debunked this account in my two pieces in January and February 2021, titled ‘The Hoax of the Blunt Confession’. My reasoning was primarily as follows: 1) Michael Straight had admitted, in the early summer of 1963, that Blunt had recruited him at Cambridge; 2) Roger Hollis visited the FBI soon afterwards; 3) Straight came to Britain that October, and had meetings with Blunt and with MI5; 4) John Cairncross, whom Blunt shopped, ‘confessed’ to Arthur Martin on American soil in February 1964; 5) the very stagey confrontation with Blunt, described in very melodramatic (and conflicting) terms, did not officially take place until April. My conclusion was that the deal had taken place in December 1963, and that Blunt had accepted the offer of immunity, and (partially) confessed.

[Incidentally, when reading Christopher Andrew’s recently published profile of Cyril Mills, an officer in B1A in MI5, titled The Spy Who Came in from the Circus, I noticed, in a Footnote on page 275, the following laconic text: “In 1963 Blunt had made a brief confession in return for a promise of immunity from prosecution.” 1963? Andrew has always, so far as I know, dated Blunt’s confession to April 1964! Why did he revise his opinion? No source or attribution is given, but I can only assume that the Professor has been reading coldspur, and that he was persuaded by my analysis. In any event, it would be useful for all of us to hear the facts from him.]

Yet, when I wrote those pieces about the Blunt Confession, I rather simplistically assumed that the approval process had also taken place that December, before the actual interrogation that gained the result that MI5 wanted. A couple of months ago, however, I stumbled upon another minute written by Sir John Hunt, this time to Harold Wilson, dated July 3, 1974. Here he wrote: “Following his [i.e. Blunt’s] confession, the case was referred to the Attorney General of the day, Sir John Hobson, who decided that the public interest lay against prosecution.” It was obvious from this that MI5 had forged the immunity deal when it lacked the authority to do so, and that the officials properly responsible had been informed after the fact. Hobson had to decide whether they should honour MI5’s clumsy initiative, or whether they should indeed prosecute Blunt, and explain to him that the offer had been made fraudulently. The authorities (presumably Prime Minister Douglas-Home – although he later claimed to have been uninformed – Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend, Home Secretary Henry Brooke, and the Attorney-General) chose the safer course. And thus the myth was promulgated.

Cabinet Secretary Sir John Hunt

Gave the game away about Blunt.

In a careless memo he conveyed

That the ‘confession’ was all a charade.

One important aspect of the deal is the legal wording that protected Blunt. In Thatcher’s statement she refers only to ‘the offer of immunity’, i.e. without a guarantee that the fact of his espionage would not be disclosed by the government. In the Epilogue that Andrew Boyle wrote for the paperback version of The Climate of Treason (in which he very provocatively presented Jim Skardon, not Arthur Martin, as being the successful emissary!), the author described how Thatcher’s Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers, having studied the documents, felt strongly that Blunt ‘deserved to be shielded from exposure as well as from prosecution’. But Thatcher overruled him. Nothing could have prevented Blunt from being exposed by the media, of course, though that might have entailed a costly libel action. But did the agreement actually spell out the implications of non-prosecution and non-disclosure? I suspect the original, non-authorized, offer was given only orally, and discussed in a collegial fashion after Blunt was faced with the Straight evidence. In any case I can’t imagine Blunt saying: “Oh, I’d better check that with my lawyer before I sign anything”. Moreover, the official version not so smoothly elides over the business of a written document to be signed. If Blunt had been unprepared, would he have not simply rejected the whole idea indignantly, rather than asking Skardon/Martin to show him the paperwork? Any hesitation would have given the game away. It is all very absurd.

While on the subject, I record here another story on Blunt. I read somewhere that T. E. B. Howarth, in his book Cambridge Between Two Wars, which appeared in 1978 (i.e. the year before Blunt was unmasked) had contained broad hints about the identity of the Fourth Man, and I wondered whether his disclosures had helped fuel the Fleet Street rumours. I acquired the book, and noticed that the text on the end flap encouraged such speculation, since Howarth harboured his own suspicions. The author wrote in his Preface (dated 1977) that the hypothetical ‘Fourth Man’ ‘was believed to have recruited [believed by whom? a passive formulation I abhor] Philby, Maclean and Burgess as Soviet spies’, but stated that he doubted whether the truth would come out without access to Soviet sources. Nevertheless, with his suspicions, he added: “Now that the period is being intensely studied, it would not be surprising if more light were soon to be shed on these murky corners. Perhaps a few glimmers may be found in the following pages.”

The most obvious statement would appear to be one found on page 210, where Howarth writes: “In a 1937 compilation of left-wing essays, characteristic of the times, and ironically titled ‘Mind in Chains’, we even find a future Keeper of the Queen’s pictures, Anthony Blunt, then a fellow of Trinity, torturing his critical sensitivity to conform with the new orthodoxy. He quotes Lenin to Clara Zetkin: ‘Every artist . . . has a right to create freely according to his ideals, independent of anything. Only, of course, we Communists cannot stand with our hands folded and let chaos develop in any direction it may. We must guide this process according to plan and form its results.’” The absurd aspect of this public expression is that Blunt, unlike Burgess, Philby and Maclean, made no attempt to conceal his true political opinions, right up to his recruitment by Military Intelligence in 1939. And yet he was the last of the Five to be exposed.

Lastly, my loyal correspondent Andrew Malec encouraged me to watch the 1987 TV movie on Blunt, The Fourth Man. I initially intended to offer a short review here, but its story and origins are so fascinating that I shall dedicate a coldspur bulletin to them. It will appear next month.

Philby the ‘Double Agent’

This one will not go away. Regular readers will be familiar with my disdain for writers who refer to members of the Cambridge Five (most frequently Kim Philby) as ‘double agents’. They were more correctly ‘penetration agents’, initially recruited by the Russian Intelligence Service (a useful term to represent Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU, and its companion Federal Security Agency, in the guise of the CHEKA, OGPU, NKVD, MGB, MVD, KGB, etc. over the years), who then infiltrated various British offices and intelligence agencies under false pretences, with their undivided loyalty remaining to the Soviet Union. Just because a Soviet agent happened to be employed by a British intelligence organization did not make him or her a ‘double agent’.

A ‘double agent’ is one who is believed by his (or her) new employer to have switched his allegiance from an enemy service to the domestic one, without the initial recruiting agency’s being aware of the change of allegiance. Of course, the representation might be false, and the enemy might actually still control the individual. That is why John Bevan of the London Controlling Section in WWII preferred to refer to the agents working on behalf of the Double Cross System as ‘controlled enemy agents’. That was also a misnomer, however. It was an accurate term only for those agents – e.g. Wulf Schmidt (TATE) – who had been recruited as loyal Nazis before being poached by MI5. Some of the agents were in fact ‘penetration agents’ who had been recruited by the Abwehr while intending all the while to work for the Allies – e.g. Pujol (GARBO) and Popov (TRICYCLE).

Yet the ‘control’ aspect is vitally important. With Schmidt, for example, all his wireless messages were prepared to be transmitted under his name by MI5 officers, and of course he was never let out of the country. If he had been, he surely would have blown the whole operation (in the early days, anyway). On the other hand, part of the ruse with Popov was that he was allowed to meet his Abwehr handler on neutral territory – a sure sign that he was trusted completely by his British mentors. If control could not be ensured, and doubts came to threaten the confidence the institution had in an agent – as happened with Arthur Owens (SNOW), or Eddie Chapman (ZIGZAG) – then that agent had to be dropped. That was a difficult operation, as the enemy might have wondered why the agent had been taken out of service, and perhaps it would have suspected that its negotiations and discussions with the gentleman in question could have been intercepted.

The inevitable conclusion from all this is that the life of a double agent is normally a very perilous one. It demands a great ability for dissimulation, and the commitment to memory of stories and facts supporting each discrete role. The threat of being caught out by the crueller of the two powers will cause immense stress – unless, of course, the person is safely ensconced in a remote house, such as Schmidt, with the work being done on his behalf. Yet, even up to the end of the war, Schmidt feared for his life that the Germans would discover who he was, and how he had allowed himself to be used in the Allied cause. Overall, true ‘double agents’ do not last long (and the disposition of such by the Soviets in World War II tells a very gruesome story.) Their eventual loyalty is solely to their own survival.

I was thus pulled up in my tracks, when reading John Fisher’s 1977 book Burgess and Maclean: A New Look at the Foreign Office Spies, by a brief assertion the author makes, on page 100, when writing about the leakages attributable to HOMER. The passage starts as follows: “Kim Philby, the spy who, all along, had been a double agent, says that he was briefed in London . . . .” What does this mean? It is not written in the context of a careless reference to Philby’s treachery. It follows a serious evaluation where Fisher writes: “In some cases they [counter-espionage officers] are prepared to work with double agents, that is, men who are betraying information to both sides, in the belief that they can feed more false information to the enemy through a double agent than he can feed to them – or alternatively they hope to win over the agent so that he or she will work exclusively for them in the future.”

It sounds as if these nuggets were fed to Fisher by some naive officer in MI6 who truly believed that such a policy would work with Soviet agents, but, more astonishingly, that Philby had actually been cast in that role, and was carrying out such disinformation exercises to his original masters in the belief that the messages would be trusted. But what if the first thing that Philby had done was to inform his NKVD handler that he was under British ‘control’, and that nothing he was passing on to the Soviets should be trusted? I have made the same point about Anthony Blunt, when the historian Michael Howard absurdly claimed in the Times that Blunt was being used for such purposes. And why would Philby submit to such a scheme, since he must have realized that, if ever he were suspected of having switched sides, his remaining days on this earth would have been drastically reduced? If he did consider volunteering such a recusancy to MI6, and agreeing to be ‘turned’, the first thing he would have done would be to contact the NKVD and gain its permission to do so. (One major irony of this whole exploit is that, for a while in 1943, the NKVD deemed that Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five were indeed under control of British Intelligence and passing on misinformation to the Kremlin.)

And yet this leaker indicates that Philby had been a double agent ‘all along’. Since when? Since Vienna in 1933/34? Since September 1939? Since he was recruited by SOE in 1940? By MI6 in 1941? It is not clear, but it echoes other vague assertions that I have noted in my previous research. (The conundrum implicitly posed by Fisher is irritatingly not addressed, let alone resolved, in his later chapter focused on the ‘Third Man’.) The murkiness of the Vienna days still bemuses me, but I have made a strong case that Philby did indeed offer his services to British Intelligence in September 1939, when, fearful of possible revelations from the coming Krivitsky visit, he used the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a pretext for coming to an ideological volte-face. He thus pretended to have recanted from his former Communist allegiance, and he promised that he and Litzi would now work for the Allied cause.

The continued belief held by many officers in MI6, even after the events of the summer of 1951, and Philby’s recall from Washington, that Kim had been a loyal officer throughout the war, and beyond, would tend to support my theory that he very skillfully effected a change of heart in 1939, deluding the big shots in MI6 and MI5. The problem was that the leaders of British intelligence simply did not understand guile and subterfuge, and certainly did not understand how the intelligence agencies of their enduring antagonist, the Soviet Union, worked. Their first reaction was to pat themselves on the back for the coup of gaining a Communist convert, when they should have been suspicious, sent Philby into exile in the Outer Hebrides, and asked themselves: “How many more might there be out there?”.

So where does that leave Philby’s status? To MI6, he was a counter-espionage officer who had been reformed, and seen the light, after the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and could be relied upon to pass on disinformation to his former controllers, who had been gulled, and (so they thought) continued to believe misguidedly in the loyalty of their agent. That illusion started to crumble after the Volkov incident of 1945, the embarrassment of the Litzi/Georg Honigmann elopement in 1946, and the association with Burgess in 1950 and 1951, with the ensuing ‘Third Man’ suspicions. In that sense, doubters of his integrity might justifiably have offered the opinion that Philby was some variety of ‘double agent’, working at times for both sides, but one who was not ultimately controlled by MI6. As for the Soviets, they believed they had installed a very capable agent who had hoodwinked British intelligence, until in 1943 they started to harbour doubts about the reliability of the information they were receiving, and considered that Philby might indeed be a creature of British intelligence. For a while they might too have judged that he was a ‘double agent’. (And later, in Moscow, they protected state secrets from him, still not trusting him utterly.)

I can think of no analogous example the other way – of a native German or Soviet citizen recruited by MI6 who confessed to his totalitarian organs his past role as a traitor, and volunteered to work for his national intelligence services in some role – while thinking that he could continue his work as a spy. I maintain that such a person in that situation would more probably have been executed on the spot. It could only happen in Britain, where the Soviet Union was a temporary ally, under a non-totalitarian system, with radically different cultural norms, accompanied by a rather simplistic approach to security by its intelligence services, that such events could be allowed to happen. Meanwhile, these hints about Philby’s transfer of allegiance continue to accumulate, without yet offering any conclusive evidence . . .

In that last respect, a dishonourable thought occurred to me. When Michael Howard wrote that notorious letter to the Times, he might have entertained one of two contrasting beliefs. The first might have been that he was disingenuously offering a cover story for MI5’s lamentable failure to prosecute Anthony Blunt, not seriously believing in the pap he offered to the newspaper. On the other hand, he might have been one of those intelligence officers who had convinced themselves that Philby had been working on behalf of British intelligence since the outbreak of the war, had been helping to pass misinformation on to the Soviets, had included Blunt (and maybe Burgess, too) in his team of fresh loyalists, and that such exercises were actually successful. After all, why was Liddell ‘consulting’ with Burgess and Blunt over the Borodin business unless he devoutly believed that they were reliable assets who would pass on disinformation to the Soviets? Such an idea is so preposterous, it might even have some validity.

Christopher Andrew and the Minor Biographies

Scattered around my shelves are the biographies of minor players in the intelligence world –  those of Kitty Harris, Klop Ustinov, ‘Tar’ Robertson, and the like. I had to read them all, because there were bound to be nuggets that appear only within their pages. But many of them are indifferent – and frequently have to be padded out with historical background material since there is not enough to write about the character to fill a book properly. Thus, for the neophyte who seeks an introduction to the hoary old stories (the Cambridge Five, ULTRA, the birth of SOE, the Double-Cross System, Gouzenko, etc. etc.) they can represent an engaging few hours of productive leisure-reading, but I cannot imagine anyone who is unfamiliar with the broad outlines of the canvas wanting to pick up such specialized volumes, unless they are dedicated aficionados like me, or are perhaps members of the extended family of the subject.

I have read at least four such books over the past year: A Faithful Spy: the Life and Times of an MI6 and MI5 Officer, by Jimmy Burns (about Walter Bell: the rather sad ‘Life and Times’ highlights the problem); Spy Runner by Nicholas Reed (a 2020 re-issue of the 2011 memoir of his father, Ronnie Reed); The Spy Who Came in from the Circus, by Christopher Andrew (about Cyril Mills of the circus family: I suppose he actually came in from the circus into the ‘Circus’, namely MI6, of John le Carré); and A Suspicion of Spies Risks, Secrets and Shadows, by Tim Spicer (about the no doubt ‘legendary’ but elusive figure of Wilfred Dunderdale, who rejoiced in the nickname of ‘Biffy’, at home alongside all those ‘Jumbos’, ‘Busters’, ‘Fruitys’, and ‘Sinbads’). I plan to write in detail about these four books in a coming coldspur bulletin, but wanted to make a few observations now about Andrew’s enterprise, as I found some aspects of its delivery very puzzling.

I can live with that that rather ponderous title: Mills was actually a spy before and after the war, while working in counter-espionage for MI5 during it. Andrew does have to cover, however, for the fact that Mills was not actually involved with many of the events that he describes, reflected in such speculative phrases as: ‘Though only twelve, Cyril Mills cannot fail to have been struck’. . . ; ‘He must have been impressed by Ramsay MacDonald’s acceptance. . . .’; ‘Abrahams must have told Cyril. . . .’; ‘Mills could not fail to have been moved by the speech . . .’; ‘The key intelligence breakthrough, of which Mills was unaware . . .’; and perhaps the most classic of all: ‘Cyril and Mimi . . . were not present on 8 July 1961 . . .’ (at Cliveden, on the day that Ivanov and Profumo first met Christine Keeler), alongside a lot of other more famous names who were curiously absent from the scene that day.

Yet it is the presentation by the author himself that I find bizarre. He offers an absurdly long bibliography (of which no less than seventeen items are by Andrew himself), and in his Footnotes adds a number of personal touches, describing his own interactions. In at least one, however, he refers to himself as ‘Christopher Andrew’ (p 201), instead of ‘the author’, or ‘me’, the more frequent designation. Furthermore, one remarkable passage appears as follows (p 102): “Despite this mess, the somewhat singed and water-damaged files from the First World War and interwar period, saved by Mills and his helpers, were a crucially important source for the history of MI5 published almost half a century later by its official historian, Christopher Andrew.”

Why would the author want to refer to himself in this pompous manner, in the third person, as if the readers have not already been reminded enough of his history of MI5 by now? And why ‘almost half a century later’? He is referring to the fire in Wormwood Scrubs in 1940: Defending the Realm was published seventy years later. How could he commit such an obvious error? Lastly, why would he refer to himself as the ‘official’ historian of MI5 – a mistake reproduced in the inside flap? He was the ‘authorized’ historian – which is quite another category. (He makes the same mistake about Keith Jeffery, described as the ‘official’ historian of MI6.) One wonders: did Andrew really write this book? And did he even read it before it was published?

Borodin: Deception, Defection and Interception

I enjoyed the exercise of researching and writing about N. M. Borodin, the biological spy. It was a change from the regular beat, and I learned a lot in the process. I was happy with the way my piece turned out, with a pattern evolving that allowed a reasonably coherent story to be laid out, while still leaving some unanswered questions. I have made one significant discovery since. Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, having inspected the Burgess file KV 2/1115 (which I am awaiting from my London-based photographer), wrote in their biography of Burgess (p 287) that, one of the visiting speakers at a joint MI5-MI6 event held at Worcester College in 1949 was ‘a defector from Soviet military intelligence, Nikolai Borodin’. While that description is wrong (and Borodin has no entry in the index), the note in the archive records that Burgess, Rees and Footman were in the forefront of those who attacked Borodin’s credibility after he spoke. It is the brazenness of that onslaught that amazes me, and I believe that it is very significant.

Amazingly, on December 30, I stumbled on a remarkable passage on Borodin, written by Guy Burgess. It was buried deep in one of Petrov’s voluminous files, KV 2/3453.  A letter from Moscow, perhaps to Tom Driberg, had been intercepted, dated March 15, 1956, and the passage read as follows:

Of course what you say about PETROV is true – he was ‘paid nark. As far as I can make out, he gave his original information C.O.D. and subsequently added to it – in different and self-contradictory forms in England and America – on the hire-purchase system. They always do – and the Foreign Office and Intelligence services should know that perfectly well. I remember I once stayed for some days at a joint Secret Service-M.I.5 ‘house-party’. One of the visiting lecturers was a Soviet defector, rather like PETROV, called ‘Borodin’. After he had given his talk containing sensational secret revelations about the USSR, he was whisked away. The audience, all of whom, except me, were members of either the Secret Service or M.I.5 and hence people of whatever experience the officers of those strange services do have – even they smelt obtrusive rats in the revelations we had heard. They attacked the organizer of this proto-PETROV. This was an officer of great experience. He sadly admitted that scarcely a word was to be believed, but that it was always the same. People had to invent to earn their keep. He quoted the cases of KRIVITSKY, KRAVCHENKO and others as examples. Had PETROV been about then, no doubt he would have cited him.

The attitude of the officer who was responsible for bringing in Borodin is even more fascinating than that of Burgess himself. I shall have to return to these matters before long.

Yet the immediate aftermath has had its disappointments. Having performed my due diligence, I wanted to return to the letter by Richard Davenport-Hines in the Times Literary Supplement, which seemed more absurd the more I looked at it. I had written a long letter to the journal at the time, but its content represented augmentation rather than refutation, since I had not yet carried out my research. So I re-approached my contact at the TLS at the end of November, inquiring whether the Supplement would consider another letter. Unsurprisingly, he responded that the matter was no longer topical, but he did promise to alert Mr. Davenport-Hines to my piece after I published it a few days later.

I accordingly sent him an email on December 3, giving him the url. Shortly afterwards, I was alerted by academia.edu that someone had recently looked me up on Google, and had found my review of Agent Sonya on the academia website. It also told me that the inquiry had come from Hackney. I didn’t think much about it, until my contact told me that he was working at home, and that he had been blocked from inspecting my piece. Very innocently, I asked him whether he lived in Hackney, and he replied that he did – without asking me how I guessed. When I expressed my frustrations at the way that coldspur was routinely blocked in some parts of the UK, he replied that he did not think that Mr. Davenport-Hines lived in the Peoples’ Republic of Hackney, and he promised to advise one of the periodical’s major reviewers and correspondents of the existence of my article.

I never heard from him again – nor from Davenport-Hines. After a week or so, I inquired of him whether he had heard back, out of courtesy, from Davenport-Hines, noting at the same time that I was not greatly surprised by Davenport-Hines’s studied aloofness, and reluctance to engage with me, but thought that he should have at least responded to my contact. That email was ignored as well. However, on December 16, I received an email message from academia.edu informing me that Richard Davenport-Hines had accessed my review of Agent Sonya  . . .  Maybe the TLS had prodded him into action? Yet I have heard nothing since.

And then there was Kevin Riehle, an academic with whom I have enjoyed cordial exchanges in the past. He is the author of Soviet Defectors, which focusses on defectors working in intelligence, not trade groups. When an enthusiastic new coldspur reader pointed out to me that Riehle had claimed that Borodin had still been alive in 1979, I immediately emailed Riehle, asking him for the source. Within an hour, he had responded, regretting that he could not recall wherefrom he derived the factoid. I thanked him, and encouraged him to read my article, asking him specifically to comment on my analysis of Davenport-Hines’s text, and my interpretation of the ‘defection’ itself. I never heard back from him.

Regular readers of coldspur will recognize this distressing phenomenon: an established authority declines to engage in debate, or withdraws from it, because of self-importance, a sense of proprietorship, or simply embarrassment – or some combination of the three. I don’t know what happened to scholarship, but it is all very sad. I do not believe that the TLS would have published that letter had it not come from their insider, Davenport-Hines, and they trusted him implicitly. Yet my hunch is that he has been used, in the way that Alan Moorehead, Chapman Pincher and others were exploited for propaganda purposes.

The Biography of Margaret Thatcher

As I reported in October, my reading of To Catch a Spy prompted me to acquire, and read, the massive three-volume biography of Mrs. Thatcher by Charles Moore. I acquired a set (each in a different format) of all 2,500 pages from abebooks, at a cost of about $18, which must have been a bargain. It is a monumental achievement by Moore, who shows utter control of his material, and writes in (almost) impeccable English (even correcting Maggie’s frequent grammatical and syntactical lapses with a careful ‘sic’). I have to confess that I found many chapters stodgy: the negotiations over the Exchange Rate Mechanism left me slightly woozy, and trying to capture exactly what the Westland Helicopter crisis was about resembled attempting to come to grips with the Schleswig-Holstein question. Yet, overall, Moore covers his subject with not completely uncritical sympathy, and shows an amazing familiarity with the highways and byways of political manœuvering in Britain in the 1980s.

It is salutary to consider how alive many of the challenges that Mrs. Thatcher faced in her time in office remain with us (or with those of you in the UK, I should say) today – the threat of striking workers, and the power of the unions; the need for some sort of energy policy (I read about her struggles with Arthur Scargill the same week that I learned that the last coal-fired power plant in the UK was shutting down); the constant debate of how ‘Europe’ should be treated, with Thatcher uniquely recognizing that a steady move to complete political integration would consist in the disappearance of democracy at the national level; the threat from the Soviet Union, and the tentative idea that what replaced it should even become part of NATO; perennial problems with Northern Ireland (then involving terrorism, and the murder of two close friends, Neave and Gow); enduring financial stresses, concerning austerity measures and the attempt to balance the budget and reduce the national debt; the vexing problem of how to privatize organizations that were effectively public monopolies. For a while, Thatcher was even an early advocate in the cause of climate change – until she discovered what a negative effect drastic measures to curtail it would have on the economy, and on shared prosperity (the Reeves-Miliband conflict in all its barest dimensions). It was all very fascinating.

Perhaps the most striking – and controversial – aspect of Moore’s research is his exclusive access to Cabinet and Prime Ministerial files, indicated by his voluminous references to ‘DCCO’ (‘Document Consulted in the Cabinet Office’) – a phenomenon that is apparently restricted to Volume 3. I have commented in depth on the relevance of such to matters of intelligence (see my October report: https://coldspur.com/to-catch-a-spy-actually-no/ ), but my observations extend to all domains of Moore’s research into Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The lack of attention paid to this disturbing phenomenon is astonishing. (A Google search on ‘DCCO and Moore’ comes up with nothing relevant.) Not only does some dedicated researcher need to catalogue these incidents: the unjust and discriminatory policy should be challenged at the highest level in the cause of the integrity of historiography.

Apart from Moore’s oversight in not discussing the creation of the University of Buckingham, Britain’s first private university which Thatcher supervised and encouraged – one aspect of Moore’s book really irritated me. It is a feature that attracts the attention of some of my coldspur correspondents, namely the use of Footnotes. Endnotes are a necessary component for the serious reader who needs to follow up references, and they do not interrupt the flow of the prose. But Footnotes can be disruptive, and should be minimized, in my opinion. If the incidental observation is important, the author should try to incorporate it into the main text. If it is largely irrelevant, it should be abandoned. And if it is of a repetitive, formulaic nature, it should be relegated to an Appendix.

Moore decided that, each time he introduced a new politician (or, occasionally someone from another sphere), a potted biography of him or her should appear as a Footnote. This information invariably includes the secondary school that he or she attended, and the college or university. And, with the politicians, the entry normally ends up with the date the MP was knighted (they are almost exclusively male), and, for many, when they were elevated to the peerage. I have no idea why the educational establishments are deemed to be of such interest, and it seems that even the less competent of Britain’s political representatives, so long as they hung around long enough, would end up with such awards or ennoblements. It just reminds me how absurd the whole UK Awards and Honours system is. (I have written about this before: see  https://coldspur.com/enigma-variations-dennistons-reward/ ) All such entries should have been placed in an Appendix for the benefit of those readers who consider such details important.

And then I read in The Times of November 7 the obituary of Sir John Nott, which summed up the nonsense very well:

He was bitterly disappointed to be awarded only a KCB. Compared to the peerages that Thatcher bestowed on virtually all her former cabinet ministers, as well as many junior ministers, it was matter of comment and seen as a mark of her disapproval. Yet he had been offered and refused a peerage only to regret it and request in vain if the offer could be repeated. In public he said he was glad not to be in the Lords and did not need the £300 allowance.

This was an aspect of Thatcher philosophy – the exaggerated power of patronage – that the very traditionalist Moore did not analyze in his work: nor did he remark upon the Nott incident.

. . . and an aside on awards . . .

Moore’s Footnotes reminded me of my father, a schoolmaster and amateur (in the best sense of the word) historian. He wrote an excellent history of the school at which he was educated and at which he taught for several decades, and he acted as the honorary archivist for most of that time. He was dedicated to local social history and fine arts groups, and he was a frequent speaker at gatherings of such devotees. He thus garnered an enormous amount of respect for his intellect and research. Astute readers may recall that, when I asked Sir Anthony Seldon at my doctoral viva whether he recalled F. H. G. Percy (from his teaching spell at Whitgift), he immediately responded; ‘Oh, that great man!’.

In that vein, a few years before he died, a group of former pupils conspired to recommend him for an award, and put the necessary paperwork together. But when my father discovered what was going on, and that he was going to be recommended for an M.B.E., he declared that he would rather have nothing than be dignified with a medal that was customarily (as he put it) handed out to the Warlingham postmistress for managing the local office for thirty-five years. (This was of course a long time before the Horizon IT debacle.) That reaction may have seemed ungracious to the well-intentioned team who wanted to have his contribution recognized, but I understood his opinion entirely. He knew his own worth, and what he had achieved, he knew that the persons he respected appreciated it as well, and having those three letters after his name, after all that time, would mean nothing. Would he have accepted an O.B.E.? A knighthood? Probably. One of the ironies was that he religiously scanned each announcement of the Queen’s Honours and Awards to ensure that any Old Whitgiftian thus recognized did not escape the notice of the archivist.

I was amused to read John Cleese’s take on the charivari, quoted in Jonathan Margolis’s biography of him:

I’m very proud. With all these bloody silly showbiz awards around nowadays there are really only three left worth having – the CH, the OM and this one [The Queen’s Award for Industry]. I should mop that lot up in a couple of years. I certainly wouldn’t want any old OBE. They’re like school prizedays where you go up and get patted on the head for being a good boy.

And, as a final comment, I quote the irrepressible and ubiquitous Richard Davenport-Hines, from his review of Hugo Vickers’ biography of Clarissa Eden, in Literary Review. He cites the Duke of Wellington complaining to the Countess: “The trouble with the Order of the Garter these days is that it is full of field marshals and people who do their own washing up”.

Michael Holzman, Proletarian

I was surprised to see an advertisement, in the Times Literary Supplement of September 6, for a book by Michael Holzman rather exhaustingly titled Spies and Traitors: Kim Philby, James Angleton and the Friendship and Betrayal that Would Shape MI6, the CIA and the Cold War. It was placed appealingly below Richard Davenport-Hines’s review of To Catch a Spy, and it declared that the volume was ‘available now from all good bookshops’. Well, that ‘available now’ suggested that this was a fresh publication, but I thought ‘from all good bookshops’ was a slogan that went out of fashion a couple of decades ago, when so much book-buying started to take place on the Web. But hadn’t Holzman written a similar book, titled Kim and Jim, which I had rather disparagingly reviewed a couple of years ago? Was this a rewrite?

I thus checked on amazon. S&T is given as having been published on October 5, 2021, by Pegasus books. K&J (Kim and Jim: Philby and Angleton, Friends and Enemies in the Cold War) was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on October 26, just three weeks later, and is indeed the same version that I acquired at the time. I offered a brief review of it in my 2021 Year-end Round-up (see https://coldspur.com/2021-year-end-roundup/ ), and it appears that I must have been able to get hold of it during the summer, maybe directly from England. I was rather dismissive of it, putting it alongside James Hanning’s Love and Deception, which I affectionately dubbed Kim and Tim, after Philby’s friend Tim Milne, and it provoked me into writing a spoof about similar books that might have extracted a snippet from Philby’s life and then puffed it out into a whole new story.

If you go back to study the various comments on that posting, you will find that on September 7, 2022, Michael Holzman offered some kind of delayed ‘correction’ to what I had written. I rather caddishly responded to his comment by writing the following: “I recall that, last November, you wrote me a message that read as follows: ‘I would not encourage you to read “Kim and Jim”. It might give you indigestion.’ That would appear to be a less than enthusiastic endorsement by an author on his contribution to the lore of writing on intelligence matters.” Holzman and I have not been in contact since. Yet I wonder: did Kim and Jim indeed give indigestion to a number of readers, and was it the title that caused their dyspeptic reaction? Or is Spies and Traitors a completely revamped version of his study that will not require the reader to keep the Pepto-Bismol on hand? From the descriptions on amazon, despite a new blurb, the given publication date would suggest that the text is unchanged. I am not going to purchase the version ‘available now’ just to ascertain what is going on.

I think this is all a bit underhand of Mr. Holzman. He is a strange fellow. He has written two useful but unprofessionally produced books on Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, where he showed his redoubtable sleuthing strengths, by digging around in FBI archives as well as in many letters and memoirs of participants in the events in which the Cambridge Five were embroiled. (And my name appears in the Acknowledgments of both of them.) Yet he gets many of the bigger picture items wrong, and he is a difficult man to debate with. He is an inveterate Marxist, and allows his dogma to get in the way of clear thinking. He also manages to get far more of his letters published in the Times Literary Supplement than I do (maybe because of that political stance, but, more probably, because he is a TLS reviewer and insider).

A few weeks ago, in one of his letters to that periodical, he was twittering on about William Morris, and wrote: “I believe this understates the importance of his commitment to improving the conditions of the working-class (that is, the vast majority of people). . . .” What did he mean? That most of us (readers of the TLS? citizens of the UK, and of the USA? the world’s population?) are proletarians, exploited by the wicked capitalists, even though we may reside in a comfortable house in upstate New York, write letters to the TLS, and use mendacious marketing techniques to promote our books that did not sell very well the first time round? Of course, it might be more accurate to say that most of the elitist group that reads the TLS are capitalists, since everyone who owns any shares in an enterprise is presumably contributing to that evil system. I suppose it is safe to assume that Holzman is not tainted by any such grubby commerce, unless of course he excludes himself from the category of that ‘vast majority of people’. Perhaps he is simply one of Keir Starmer’s ‘working people’.  

Ruthenia Revisited

Ruthenia 1939

One of the pleasures of managing the coldspur website is the surprise of reading messages from persons around the world who have come across my writings. Ten years ago, before my thesis had even started, I wrote a somewhat self-indulgent essay about the territory of Ruthenia, an area squashed between Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Ukraine that had captured my imagination. (See ‘Homage to Ruthenia’ at https://coldspur.com/reviews/homage-to-ruthenia/ .) Suddenly, in October, a native Rusyn named Vladimir Skala posted a comment that informed me that he had stumbled upon my website while reading Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections. (If anything, this proves to me that coldspur scores very well in Google search algorithms.) He overall agreed with my assessment while providing links to two fascinating articles on the history of the region.

His message ran as follows:

I stumbled upon this piece while reading Corrections by J. Franzen. In one passage, the female protagonist travels to the place of her ancestors, Ruthenia, looking for shtetls.
Anyways, being a native of Ruthenia (Karpatska Rus), I thought I could shed light on this topic. I have written down some of my thoughts on this topic, links below.
I essentially agree with your thesis, that is that Rusyns should find a way within a democratic Ukraine (I reject wholesale the notion you put forth that we should be satiated by folk dresses and folk songs, as that is just scraps), but democratic Ukraine means a country that, like it’s neighbors to the west, recognizes Rusyns as a separate ethnicity and supports Rusyn organizations and institutions. Ukrainian nationalism is in its essence antagonistic to that notion, thus this is not a matter of democracy, but one centered around deep-seated cultural norms and those are nigh impossible to change.
That much is clear in Ukraine’s refusal to recognize the democratic vote on Pidkarpatia’s autonomy from 1991 (close to 80% of people voted for autonomy), which is what had led to local frustrated leaders to push Kiev with an ultimatum in 2008, as you’ve briefly mentioned.
EU accession talks are a great opportunity for this issue to be resolved once and for all. But this issue is of little concern to Brussels, it seems. The last top western politician who took up our cause publicly was Senator McCain. That was a while back.

https://rusynsociety.com/2023/04/03/where-timothy-snyder-falls-pitifully-short/
https://rusynsociety.com/2022/07/22/between-the-millstones-the-rusyns/

To which I replied:

Thank you so much, Vlado, for posting this. (After ten years, I had to go back to recall exactly what I wrote!) I very much enjoyed your articles (I have also read Snyder).

While I obviously share your fascination with the disappearing tribes/nations/peoples/communities of Eastern Europe (and elsewhere), I am not enthusiastic about the current media focus on ‘ethnicity’ – so much favo(u)red by sociologists, demographers, and census officials, and so often a refuge for lost souls struggling to find an ‘identity’. The question always arises: if a Rusyn (or other ‘ethnic’ individual) marries someone who is not a Rusyn, what is the ‘ethnicity’ of their offspring? It seems to me, what with cosmopolitanism, increased travel, and some exclusive taboos dropping, such phenomena will occur more and more. And the emphasis on ‘ethnicity’ may not just be a romantic delusion, it can become dangerously divisive.

I give the example of the US golfer Jim Furyk. His Wikipedia entry states that his mother is of Czech-Polish heritage, his father of Ukrainian-Hungarian. (And Jim’s wife Tabitha probably complicates matters when their kids ask: ‘Where are we from?’) I have written about these issues elsewhere on coldspur.

I shall follow your future postings at rusynsociety with great interest.

As was perhaps clear, I am not convinced about the reality of ‘deep-seated cultural norms’. I recall Arthur Koestler making a similar point about Jewish ‘culture’ in The Thirteenth Tribe.  And then I came across two further examples about ‘ethnicity’ that reinforced my point. Lauren Markham recently wrote a book titled A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, which includes the following passage:

Though most of my living family members have never been to Greece, the story of our Greekness is central to our identity. Its significance is teleological: being Greek means something because it is important to us that it mean something…. Many white people in the United States are animated by a similar longing to claim a faraway homeland, even as they support, explicitly or tacitly, the exclusion of contemporary migrants — people making a journey parallel to those their own ancestors made generations ago.

Unfortunately, this romantic belief turned out to be illusory. Colin Thubron wrote a review in The New York Review of Books on October 13, where he noted the following: “She writes, almost as an aside, that her brother recently took a DNA test and found that their family was not Greek after all. They were Italian and vaguely Balkan – themselves bearing witness to the fallibility of nations and the agelong flux of the world’s peoples.”

Next, I picked out the following passage from Harald Jähner’s Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955, on page 69.

Many people saw the internal German migration as a kind of multi-cultural attack on themselves. Tribalism blossomed and people distinguished themselves with customs, practices, faith rituals and dialects that set them apart from their neighbours, let alone from German Bohemians, Banat Swabians, Silesians, Pomeranians and Bessarabian Germans – all of whom were dismissed as ‘Polacks’.

I have nothing against attempts to protect and celebrate harmless customs that are dying out. (There used to be a group of ‘Brits’ at St. James Plantation, where I live, who in the early days wanted me to join them to celebrate Guy Fawkes’ Night with bangers and baked beans. I declined.) But these practices should not be imbued with ‘essentialism’ – the notion that they define who you are, and are somehow inherited, as in that mendacious phrase, ‘in one’s DNA’. In that context I was dismayed to read what Ernst Chain thought about his genetic material, as recorded in Ronald Clark’s biography of him: “Visits to Russia had tended to qualify his views of the Soviet system but as he wrote to his elder son he felt what he called the strength of the Russian genes in his blood, and to the end of his life hoped that some rapprochement between East and West would be possible.” Of course, there are no such entities as ‘Russian’ genes. If biochemists who are Nobel laureates can express such nonsense, no wonder so many ‘ordinary’ people get the wrong message.

‘Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes’

My attention was drawn to this book, reviewed in the Spectator of August 31. Some readers may recall my solitary encounter with Benaud, the great cricketer and broadcaster, from my coldspur posting back in April 2015 (see https://coldspur.com/richie-benaud-my-part-in-his-success/ ). In that piece I highlighted Benaud’s triumphant spell of bowling in the Fourth Test at Old Trafford in 1961. (The link I originally gave in that piece is no longer available: the highlights of the match can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFDt3YlRLCM .) As Marcus Beckmann points out in his review, the bulk of the book is dedicated to this Test Match, and the authors David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts contrast the captaincy skills of Benaud with those of his opponent, Peter May. The title derives from the fact that Benaud, at the end of the fourth day of the match, went out to inspect the wicket wearing blue suede shoes, a fashion choice that probably would not have endeared him to the members had he done it at Lord’s.

Richie Benaud

I mentioned that one of Benaud’s victims in his second-innings 6-70 spell was Raman Subba Row, my sometime captain of the Old Whitgiftians’ Cricket Club. He can be seen in the video moving rather recklessly down the pitch to Benaud, and missing the ball completely, out for 49. Yet Raman had an exemplary Test career against the Australians: he played in only one series, but scored a century in both his first and his last appearances, after which he retired from first-class cricket at a young age. I was there at the Kennington Oval in August 1961, on the day he scored his second hundred, and I recall one outstanding event. Raman, not recognized as the most graceful of left-handers, was well-known for keeping the ball on the ground as much as possible, and carefully placing it wide of the fielders. He suddenly lifted a long hop over the head of ‘Garth’ Mackenzie at deep square leg for six, where the ball landed a few feet from where I was sitting. It was the solitary six of the match.

Raman Subba Row

One of my most precious cricketing memories is batting with Raman against Sunbury, in a Surrey Championship away game in the mid-1970s. The OWs had struggled, and I went in at number ten, with the score at about 80 for 8. Yet we put on a stand of over 90, which was a new ninth-wicket record for the Championship, and remained so for many years. I recall being given out LBW, having scored forty-five runs or so, and Raman sought to confirm from me as I trudged back to the pavilion that I had indeed gained an inside edge on the ball before it hit me on the pad. I think the opposition umpire was fed up by then. We lost the match, unfortunately, but the opposition was still complaining about Raman’s late declaration in the bar afterwards. It was the year that I managed to achieve the Championship ‘double’, namely over 200 runs and over 20 wickets, and I was listed in the Handbook alongside some eminent players who had achieved the same feat. (I have that Handbook in a box somewhere in the attic.)

Raman died earlier this year, aged 92. He had been England’s oldest living cricketer. I feel honoured to have played so much cricket with him. He was the kindest of men, though sometimes enigmatic as a club captain. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes gives a good profile of him. Sixty-five years ago I devoured cricket books like this, although RBBSS is a different specimen, analyzing not just that famous Old Trafford Test Match, but the competitions between England and Australia over the intervening sixty years. It contains a little too much irrelevant insertion of contemporary events that have nothing to do with cricket, so that you will learn, for example, that on the evening of the Saturday of the match, ‘by a swimming pool at Cliveden, the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was introduced by Stephen Ward to a semi-naked Christine Keeler’. (Note that, Christopher Andrew: Peter May and Richie Benaud must have been two others apart from Cyril and Mimi Mills who were not invited to the festivities and excitement that evening.) And the book contains one or two pretentious passages worthy of Pseuds’ Corner, such as “Trueman is all Sturm und Drang, Statham is the epitome of Pinteresque understatement.” But an enjoyable break from Philby and Rothschild.

(Recent Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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An Anxious Summer for Rees & Blunt

Goronwy Rees
Anthony Blunt after his exposure

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

Contents:

Introduction

Players and Predicaments

The Sources

Phase 1: May 7 to May 25

Phase 2: May 25 to June 2

Phase 3: June 4 to June 12

Phase 4: June 13 to August 27

Conclusions

Envoi

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

Introduction

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

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

Players and Predicaments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sources

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

‘A Chapter of Accidents’

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

‘The Spy Who Knew Everyone’

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 1: May 7 to May 25

The village of Sonning, Berkshire

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

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

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

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

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

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

The S.S. ‘Falaise’

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

Phase 2: May 25 to June 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Daily Telegraph’, June 11, 1951

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 3: June 4 to June 12

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

‘Looking for Mr. Nobody’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 4: June 13 to August 27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Envoi

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

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

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

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

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

John Hobson

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

John Hunt

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

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