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Chapman’s HOMER: ‘The Fourth Man’ Movie

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.

            (from John Keats’s ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer’)

(This report is dedicated primarily to an analysis of the 1987 movie The Fourth Man. I append an important correction to my recent observations about Anthony Blunt, and seek reader comments. I also mention here that an enormous trove of files was released earlier this month by the National Archives, including records on Philby, Blunt, Cairncross, and Litzy Friedmann. Fortunately, all these records have been digitized, so access is easy. I have made a brief inspection of these to look for obvious newsworthy items, but since I am still working my way through the undigitized Burgess, Maclean and related Foreign Office files, it may be a while before I can give them the treatment they deserve.)

Contents:

Introduction

Friendship and Betrayal

‘The Blunt Affair’

‘The Fourth Man’: The Storyline

The Sources

Chapman’s HOMER

Conclusions

Anthony Blunt: A Correction

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Introduction

Andrew Malec encouraged me to view the 1987 TV movie The Fourth Man, from a screenplay written by Robin Chapman, about Anthony Blunt and his role in helping Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escape in 1951. I resisted at first: it sounded rather dire, and I deemed that watching it might have been bad for my mental health. I had watched another series, The Cambridge Spies, when it came out in 2003, and remember it now as fairly dreadful. (I have not yet watched Philby, Burgess and Maclean, starring Derek Jacobi and Anthony Bate, made in 1977, from the pre-Blunt era.) Yet Andrew persisted, and I had to admit that anything with Ian Richardson in it (and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Hopkins) was probably worth seeing. So I acquired the DVD, viewed it, and, with some misgivings, even enjoyed it. It occurred to me that, at the time of its release, the movie might have influenced a number of persons who had hazy notions about the whole ‘Missing Diplomats’ fiasco, and I thus thought it would be worthwhile to conduct a deep analysis of it. I also thought it was a good place to start a project to try to unravel many of the anomalies and paradoxes in the ‘Third Man’ story that had vaguely occupied my mind for many years.

Some of the questions that exercised me were the following:

  • What was the storyline, and what lesson did it draw from the episode?
  • On which sources was the storyline based?
  • What errors did it make, given the paucity of archival information available at the time?
  • Where did the storyline break out into new activities and events?
  • Was the imagination in such ventures justified?
  • How should the movie be assessed in light of what we know almost four decades later?

Before I tackle these questions, however, I want to raise some broader issues that were provoked in my mind by watching the movie. For many years, I have been fascinated – and irritated – by the way in which highly dubious memoirs or testimonies by participants in intelligence scandals have been given an undeserved level of authoritativeness by being quoted by ‘serious’ historians. As examples, I offer four different accounts, one by an obvious scoundrel (Kim Philby), another by a fringe player of questionable integrity (Goronwy Rees), the third by an obsessive junior counter-intelligence officer (Peter Wright), and the fourth by a senior officer of good repute (Dick White). Their books (in White’s case, a biography to which he contributed) have been cited – usually carelessly – innumerable times, perhaps the most notable illustration being Christopher Andrew’s Defend the Realm. Thus the lies of those anxious to embellish their reputations become smoothly incorporated into historical lore. Level 1 – inaccurate history.

The next stage is when the events and characters are incorporated into fictional constructs – or that hybrid, fictional history. For example, John le Carré modelled Magus Pym (in A Perfect Spy) and Bill Haydon (in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) on Philby. Alan Bennett wrote a couple of screenplays, A Question of Attribution (with Blunt as the lead character), and An Englishman Abroad (using Burgess), where the boundaries between historical fact and artistic invention were blurred, while he drew carefully-crafted moral or philosophical lessons from the dynamics and conflicts behind the events. Such works probably gained a much larger audience than those who studied any ‘historical’ volumes, yet most of them were written before the appearance of the authorized history, and had little access to relevant archival material. Level 2 – muddled realities.

A further level of sensationalism, or misrepresentation, may then occur when such works are reproduced in visual media – movies made for TV or for general distribution, where the potential audience is even greater, and the influence even more impressive. Call it the ‘I Claudius’ Syndrome. The opportunity for heightening the emotional or intellectual impact is maximal. (I have to admit that this is a medium that has largely passed me by. I am not a frequent movie-goer: the last movie I watched at the time of release was The Imitation Game, and this is partly why writing this analysis has been such a revelatory experience for me.) Yet it seems that the line between historical fact and artistic license is rarely clearly drawn (a reason why The Imitation Game irritated me), and viewers taken in by the extravaganza may end up with an even more distorted view of the facts behind the story. Level 3 – distortion and melodrama.

Friendship and Betrayal

Apart from an earnest inquiry as to what sociological phenomena caused the Cambridge Five to become traitors, I seem to recall that a prominent theme in works based on their exploits was the matter of betrayal itself, and the conflict between betrayal of one’s country and betraying one’s friends. That idea was frequently accompanied by the hoary statement from E. M. Forster about having to choose between the two, and his hope of ‘having the guts’ to betray his country, as if that provided some excuse for the treacherous behaviour of the Cambridge Spies. I have always regarded that as one of the most fatuous pronouncements of the 1930s (made in 1939) – as I shall explain soon – but I decided I should go back first to ‘What I Believe’ in Two Cheers for Democracy to verify exactly what Forster was trying to say.

E M Forster

It is not a very impressive paragraph, and Forster is shown to be making ‘friendship’ equivalent to some sort of comradeship towards a cause, and the famous quotation above is introduced with the phrase: “I hate the idea of causes, but . . .” It is utterly illogical. He has pointed out that ‘personal relations are despised today’ – a vapid, passive claim that cries out for some identification of who the ‘despisers’ are. Yet friendship is not inevitably tied to shared political fervour, and one might enjoy only superficial intimacy with colleagues who are dedicated to the same political cause. Moreover, if Forster hated causes, why would his friends have been those who went to (presumably) fascist or communist gatherings, or whatever was the 1939 version of CND or Extinction Rebellion? Surely he would have been closer to persons who, like him, were ill-disposed to the earnest demonstration of ideological commitment?

Nevertheless, the idea caught on. My own reaction has always been that, in committing to betraying one’s country to communism, if the objective were reached, one of the first human faculties to be eroded would be sentiment. The movement was everything, and personal relationships were subordinate. Come the Revolution, any weak-willed hesitant ex-devotee would be the first to receive the bullet. In the Soviet Union, in the 1930s, you had to get your denunciation in first, before your friend denounced you. And that might apply to family members, too: for instance, Molotov denounced and divorced his Jewish wife after Stalin had her arrested for ‘treason’. If such persons showed any sign of anti-Soviet thinking, and you did not declare them to be an Enemy of the People, then you were as guilty as they, and off to the Gulag you stumbled. So much for not betraying one’s friends. In A Chapter of Accidents Goronwy Rees claimed that he protested to Blunt along these lines after the latter tried to talk him out of going to MI5 just after Burgess and Maclean disappeared. The same essential message – that when you betray your country to totalitarianism you risk fracturing the loose arrangements that foster long-standing friendships – can also be found in Noel Annan’s Foreword to Robert Cecil’s A Divided Life.

This idea of friendship hardly pertains to the Cambridge Five, however. Cairncross was an outlier, and hardly knew the other four. Maclean was something of a loner, and did not mix closely with the other three. Philby was inscrutable, and actually seduced the wives of his friends. Blunt and Burgess enjoyed a special kind of friendship, a homosexual relationship. Burgess, ‘The Spy Who Knew Everyone’ in the words of Hulbert and Purvis, may have been a sparkling conversationalist, but his predatory and louche behaviour alienated many acquaintances. Moreover, at one critical juncture, he wanted one of his special friends, Rees, murdered, lest he betray the group. That constituted a weird kind of loyalty, in which the cause dominates over friendship, and it undermines the whole notion, especially when Burgess is later shown to be applying emotional pressure to Rees.

As for the causes of the Cambridge Five’s betrayal of the nation to the communist movement, much nonsense has been written about the subject, from Andrew Boyle to Richard Davenport-Hines. It was a revolt against the Great Depression, it was their public-school upbringing that led them into deceit, it was a missing father (or perhaps a dominant father), it was disgust over the privileges of their class (or a dismay that those privileges were disappearing), it was the arrogance of Empire (or the loss of Empire), it was their homosexuality (or bisexuality, or frustrated heterosexuality), etc. etc. What is absurd about any such analysis is that hundreds, maybe thousands, of young men coming from a very similar background never felt the urge to endorse Stalin and become spies, but instead ended up perhaps as rather ineffectual servants of the Crown, or else straightforward citizens who got on with their lives, and maybe sacrificed those lives in World War II for a better cause.

And then, just after I had viewed The Fourth Man for the first time, I discovered that someone had written about these matters. At great expense, I acquired The Blunt Affair, by Jonathan Bolton, published in 2020. It is subtitled ‘Official Secrecy and Treason in Literature, Television and Film, 1980-1989.’ Bolton is the Hollifield Professor of English Literature at Auburn University in Alabama.

‘The Blunt Affair’

‘The Blunt Affair’

The fact that it is the immunity granted to Blunt, and kept secret for sixteen years, that dominates Bolton’s thesis, is revealing. The author attempts to use it as anchor for his analysis of several works of drama, fiction and film, from Dennis Potter to the movie Scandal, but flails around trying to find a convincing theme of any substance. Moreover, his text is replete with such banalities, misunderstandings, non sequiturs, and sociological jargon that this reader strained to make sense of it all. The book has been atrociously edited: for example, Bolton writes ‘Education Rita’, and ‘Citizen Cane’, and introduces the biographer of Blunt as ‘Miranda Martin’, perhaps confusing her with the elegant TW3 chanteuse Millicent Carter. Practically every time he introduces a historical episode, he gets several facts wrong.

His unifying idea appears to be that those writers who studied the Blunt affair, and the shenanigans of the Cambridge Five, were essentially protesting about the evils of the Thatcher era – namely monetarism, inequality, greed, the rapacity of the free market, bigotry against homosexuals, government secrecy, abuse of privilege, military aggression (the Falklands), etc. etc., and that they were offering a necessary challenge to outdated notions of patriotism and privilege. Somehow, the subjects, primarily active in the 1930s and 1940s, ‘exemplified modes of anti-establishment thought and action during the late Cold War era.’ What the authors, whose works range from Tom Stoppard’s farcical The Dog It Was That Died to Joe Boyd’s and Michael Thomas’s 1989 movie about the Profumo Affair (Scandal) think (or would have thought) about such assertions is not clear. I do not believe that Dennis Potter was familiar with that entity known as ‘the LGBTQ+ community’.

One of the problems is that Bolton, in trying to harness these works to his theme, unwittingly displays a number of paradoxes and contradictions in his text. For example, he blames the Tory government for granting Blunt his immunity, but then has to accept that Douglas-Home and his successors were not told of the MI5 initiative, and that it was in fact Thatcher herself who brought the case into the open. He continually adopts the voguish meme of criticizing ‘late-stage capitalism’, but he then has to point out that that system helped bring about the fall of communism in 1989. He frequently draws attention to the existence of bigotry against homosexuals within the Establishment, but then reminds us that it was the clannishness of the Foreign Office and MI5 that ignored the sexual preferences of Burgess and Blunt. He praises the authors of the works for their reliance on biography and memoir [sic!] for their factual accounts, as opposed to the melodrama of the tabloid media and the unreliability of official statements, but then points out that The Fourth Man was heavily criticized for the liberties it took with the truth. National Service was an unjust penance, and an infringement of personal rights: but those who were exempted from it felt excluded. Etc. etc.

This is all shrouded in verbosity (‘heteronormativity’, ‘the reality of reality’) and repetitiveness. Several times he invokes, and re-quotes, the Forster statement, without inspecting it closely (although he does credit the speech given to Rees in One of Us that pulls it to pieces). And behind it all is the constant theorizing about what drove the spies to their treachery, displaying a complete lack of insight concerning social causes that I highlighted beforehand. One can find a few valuable comments about the art of composition and the representation of character in the works, but overall the book is a mishmash, and should never have been published, to my mind.

I offer an example of the Professor’s style, a passage that he presents when he tries to sum up his argument:

As Russian operatives continue to interfere with the liberties of Western democracies, as late-capitalism mutates into corporatocracy, oligarchy and kleptocracy, producing precisely the kinds of economic inequality that the Cambridge spies found repellent, as national ideologies demand patriotic fidelity in order to enforce territorial boundaries and preserve misguided notions of ethnic homogeneity, and as powerful forces of religious orthodoxy foster a bigotry that challenges equal rights in the LGBTQ community, many should find the texts considered in this study to retain the value and relevance that they held back in the 1980s, and also find that they reward thoughtful reading and viewing.

If you enjoy sentences like that, this is a book for you. But I think the Professor should have gone back to an undergraduate class.

‘The Fourth Man’: The Storyline

The movie’s screenwriter was Robin Chapman, and the script was based on his two-act play titled One of Us, which enjoyed its first performance at the Greenwich Theatre, London, on February 12, 1986. The action of that drama takes place at the home of Goronwy and Margaret Rees, the first act on May 6, when Guy Burgess visits them, fresh from his return from the USA, scene one of the second act at night on May 27, two days after Burgess and Maclean fled, and scene two the following morning, when Anthony Blunt comes to talk to Goronwy. The author describes the play as ‘a work of the imagination based on fact’, and describes the hypothesis from which the action evolves, namely that Blunt recalled Burgess from the United States, as his own ‘imaginative but reasonable assumption drawn from the historical facts as they are currently known’.

‘One of Us’

The essence of the plot of One of Us can be told quite simply: Burgess visits Rees to explain the imminent escape of Maclean to Moscow, and Blunt’s role in it, and he manages to persuade Rees to promise that he will not betray him and Blunt as they prepare for the departure. Three weeks later, after Burgess signals his imminent departure to Margie over the telephone, Rees admits to his wife his past involvement with the Comintern. Shocked, she tries to convince him to have nothing more to do with Blunt, who has been pestering her by trying to call her on the phone while her husband has been away. When Blunt arrives the next morning, he reminds Rees that, if he denounces Burgess, the spotlight will be placed on his own shady past, and he emphasizes to him the necessity of being loyal to his friends first. Rees vehemently complains that Blunt is distorting the famous statement that E. M. Forster made about the betrayal of friends and country, and ripostes that he has other friends and family dearer to him than utopian comrades. Rees sends Blunt packing, and he tells his wife that he will indeed contact MI5.

There are some clever exchanges in the dialogue, although it is not clear exactly why Burgess sought out Rees so eagerly, and the role of Blunt as super-fixer of the whole operation is undermined by how Blunt himself describes his contribution. Burgess is the most colourfully drawn character, and is given an outrageously camp flow of language that would seem offensive today. Rees is shown as weak, and his much younger wife appears as a strong and imaginative foil to her vacillating husband. The play ends with Rees apparently set on telling MI5 all he knows, although he expects that he may end up feeling like a traitor.

When One of Us was transformed to the screen, several changes were made. The main thrust is that the attention switches sharply to Blunt, and his machinations behind the scenes. The freer format of film allows some events hinted at in the stage play to be delivered directly, and some new action to be created that sometimes illuminates but frequently undermines the essence of the story. Moreover, whereas the play ends with Rees’s apparent determination to tell MI5 all, the screenplay adds a substantial twist to the plot.

The main action starts with Blunt meeting his Soviet contact, Vasily, in a Gentlemen’s Public Convenience in early May, where, after Blunt reminds Vasily that it was he himself who recommended Burgess’s recall, Vasily informs him that Burgess has just arrived. Blunt is very much in charge, and rebukes Vasily for arranging to meet in such an exposed and dangerous place. (In this scenario, of course, with Blunt taking the initiative, and engaging Philby’s help, he would really have been the ‘Third Man’, with Philby related to the ‘Fourth Man’, but history had taken its course by then!) The next scene shows Burgess arriving at Blunt’s apartment at the Courtauld, and, after a loving reunion, Burgess explains how the CIA had forced Kim Philby’s hand, whereupon Philby had confused the issue in order to give his comrades time to prepare. Burgess claims that his speeding offenses were designed to make the Embassy send him back to the UK on the first boat home. Blunt explains that Burgess’s role is simply to ‘nanny’ the very distraught Maclean and get him out of the country. Maclean’s distress is shown when he and Burgess call Blunt from a public telephone box.

Blunt is then shown at a meeting with Guy Liddell of MI5, where he receives an update from the Assistant-Director on narrowing down the list of ‘HOMER’ suspects to four, one of whom is Maclean. The date is May 16. Blunt informs Liddell that Guy ‘sends his love’, and he tells him that Burgess has just gone to Sonning to visit Goronwy Rees. The action shifts to Sonning, where Burgess is ingratiating himself with the Rees family, although there is obvious tension between him and Margaret Rees. Privately, Burgess updates Rees on the HOMER business, and on Maclean’s achievements in purloining valuable atomic secrets, all the time subtly suggesting that Rees is as much a conspirator as the others. While Goronwy is on the telephone, Margaret asks Guy about the man in the club who had accosted her husband the previous November, and who had accused him of ‘ratting’. (It was Donald Maclean, but Burgess does not have time to reply to her.) Guy and Goronwy then have another serious discussion á deux, where Guy informs Goronwy of the plan for him to accompany Donald for the first part of his escape. He again reminds Goronwy that he is ‘one of us’, and he is able to extract from him a promise not to tell anyone – even Margie – about the machinations and connections. Rees, biting his lip, agrees to remain silent, as a friend, in order to protect Blunt.

Blunt is then seen entering Clifford Chambers, where Burgess has his flat. Finding Guy in bed with his friend picked up on the Queen Mary, he urgently extracts him, since he has learned that Maclean’s interrogation is planned for May 28. Blunt gives Guy instructions for the escape, handing him travel tickets, a visa (for Maclean), and cash. The plan is for Guy to accompany Donald as far as Paris, with instructions for Maclean to move on to Prague, while Guy will return home, all innocent, explaining that his friend gave him the slip. Guy will rent a car and pick Donald up at Tatsfield for the journey to Southampton, and then St. Malo. Burgess reminds Blunt that Kim’s last words to him were: “Don’t you go, too!”. Anthony and Guy plan to meet up again on Tuesday May 29. Burgess looks very thoughtful, as if considering the enormity of what is about to happen.

Guy is then shown calling the Reeses very ostentatiously from the Reform Club, finding Margie in (he knows Goronwy is in Oxford that weekend). He informs her in a drunken and incoherent state that he is about to do something astonishing, and will be away for a while, and reminds her that her husband must ‘do the right thing’. Blunt is then shown meeting Vasily at the more sensible Treffpunkt of Kew Gardens, where he again shows who is boss. He tells Vasily of the plans, and he instructs him that his bosses must take over when Maclean arrives in Paris.

The date is now Friday May 25. Maclean is tailed to Charing Cross station, at which point his watchers sign off for the day. Driving down to Tatsfield in a cheerful frame of mind, Burgess posts a letter to Blunt, confident, after he engages with the collector in banter, that it will be picked up that evening. The next morning, Blunt receives the letter, on Reform Club notepaper, which contains the simple message: ‘What’s Become of Waring?’. He looks up the text of the Browning poem, and quickly concludes that it is a coded message informing him that Guy is not planning to return. He thus hurries to Burgess’s flat (where Guy’s boyfriend Hewit is fortunately not at home), raids Guy’s private boxes and drawers to retrieve incriminating letters, film, photographs and documents, and takes them in bags to the furnace at the Courtauld Institute, where he incinerates them. One last item visible is Guy’s 1951 Communist Party membership card.

A short scene then shows Blunt trying to call the Reeses on the phone, with Blunt hanging up when Margie picks up. (Goronwy is still in Oxford.) Rees arrives home, and Margie tells him of Guy’s incoherent call, and then of the repeated hang-ups. She wants to know what is going on, and she is not convinced by Rees’s feeble attempt to explain that Guy was talking about his new job. Margie is suspicious – and maybe jealous – of her husband’s close friendship with Guy, and challenges him by saying that Guy perhaps means more to him than do his wife and children. Goronwy is torn between his promise, and what he owes his wife, and tries to explain it away by saying that Guy was a spy for the Comintern, and that he had tried to enroll him in it as well. That leads Margie to suggest that Rees had also been a spy, and she asks whether Maclean’s outburst at the Gargoyle Club was related to Goronwy’s previous affiliation. He struggles to explain: Margie cannot understand why Rees would not go to the authorities when he learned that Guy was still spying, and Goronwy resorts to the theme of not betraying one’s friend.

After a brief telephone call that Margie picks up, the caller (Blunt) simply identifying himself as ‘a friend’, Blunt tells Rees that he needs to see him urgently the next day (Monday). On hearing this, Margie asks whether Blunt is a spy too, as she recalls the flat in Mayfair where Rees, Blunt and Burgess met during the war. It is here that Rees shares his belief that Burgess has gone to Moscow: he does not know what to do, as he admits to Margie his low self-esteem. They argue: Margie does not want her husband to meet with Blunt, but he convinces her that he may be making too hasty a judgment about the flight to Moscow, and ought to listen to what Blunt will tell him. Reluctantly, she tells him that he must do what he thinks best.

Blunt visits Rees in Sonning: neither is in a good mood. Rees tells Blunt all he knows, somewhat to Blunt’s surprise. Rees admits that he told his wife the whole story, which shocks Anthony. Blunt then astounds Rees by telling him that he knows that Rees contacted David Footman of MI6 the previous evening, a nugget he had acquired from his friend Guy Liddell. He admits to making the anonymous phone calls that Margie picked up. While admitting that his fate is essentially in the hands of Goronwy and Margie, Blunt strenuously reminds Rees of his necessary loyalty to his friend, citing Forster again, and points out that the authorities will be very suspicious of Rees’s testimony, anxious to know why he had taken so long to inform them of his friends’ treachery. There is a hint that Rees’s absence in Oxford during the weekend of the escape was not purely coincidental. For the first time, Rees responds with appropriate passion, and stresses to Blunt that he has made up his mind to tell MI5 all. “On your own head be it!”, responds Blunt, and leaves.

Liddell has invited Rees to his club for luncheon, so that they might there discuss Rees’s concerns. Rees is surprised at the venue, and its lack of privacy. He is even more astonished when Blunt turns up as the second guest. It must be June 1, as Goronwy states that the Burgess phone call happened six days beforehand. Rees is set back considerably by the fact that Liddell and Blunt appear to be in complete sympathy as they encourage him to speak up. Liddell explains what little they know so far about the abscondment of the pair, but he does not appear to be greatly alarmed. Rees is stunned into silence by the conspiratorial nature of the spy and the counter-espionage officer.

A brief scene shows Blunt and Vasily meeting again. Blunt declines an order to escape to Moscow himself, reminding Vasily of his prominent position and reputation, indicating he is untouchable. It is the day that the ‘Missing Diplomats’ story broke – June 6. Lastly, Rees has a meeting in Liddell’s office, with Dick White in attendance. Again, Liddell does not appear concerned. Rees asks him when he is going to haul in Blunt for questioning, but Liddell indicates that he will mull on it, and keep a close eye on the former MI5 officer. And at that point the movie ends.

Neither One of Us nor The Fourth Man could be said to be didactic, but the lesson has changed in the transfer from the stage to the screen. In One of Us, Rees appears to come to a belated conclusion that the loyalty that he owes his wife and his country is more important than a promise he has made to his friends (and conspirators) that he will not betray their secret, and he prepares to undergo what may turn out to be a difficult conversation with MI5 with a degree of confidence that he will be able to overcome their suspicions, and explain away his tardiness. The Forster assertion gets its come-uppance.

The situation has become much more nuanced by the time that The Fourth Man is delivered. The same demands of personal friendship are emphasized by Burgess and Blunt, and Rees’s weaknesses are again exposed, but the denouement presents a shocking climax for Rees. The fact that Blunt has insinuated himself into Liddell’s confidence, and has succeeded in lining him up as an ally against Rees, presents Goronwy with a more alarming fact – that a personal and institutional loyalty between Liddell and Blunt has perverted the cause of justice, and made the question of betrayal of country or friend almost irrelevant. The fact that Rees’s prolonged silence is shown to be held against him reinforces the point that Rees has betrayed himself, by not coming to grips with reality early enough, by not facing up to the conflict in loyalties when it first occurred, and by not understanding what the bonds of love and marital faithfulness should mean in practice. Yet the relationship between Blunt and Liddell is left enigmatic: is it just a misreading of collegiality, or is there something more sinister afoot?

The Sources

What was available to Chapman when he wrote his works? Chapman had written about ‘the historical facts as they are currently known’, but he had a welter of ‘facts’ to select from. The published material available in 1987 consisted of a mixture of evasive official statements, unconfirmed press reports and rumours, leaked propaganda from ministerial offices, exculpatory tales from friends and family, mendacious memoirs designed to protect reputations, some probably accurate insights from intelligence insiders disgruntled about the cover-up, and misleading stories from participants planted to lay a false trail. Amid all this lay a host of contradictions that any person who was trying to transform the events into a dramatic work would have to pick from very selectively. One might assume that Chapman read all – or most of – the relevant literature: in any case, he encountered that pitfall of selection.

The first work to appear was Cyril Connolly’s The Missing Diplomats (1952), who exploited the fact that he had met Maclean socially in the two weeks before the escape to inform his readers that Burgess had bought the tickets on Wednesday 26 May, that Maclean was calm at lunchtime on the Friday he left, and that Burgess had his last drink in London that day at 7 o’clock. He also stated that the details of the journey from Rennes to Paris had been established.

Clare Hollingworth & Geoffrey Hoare

A couple of years later, Geoffrey Hoare offered his insights, in The Missing Macleans (1954). Hoare was married to the notable journalist Clare Hollingsworth, and was on close terms with Donald’s mother-in-law, who had married Charles Dunbar after gaining a divorce from Melinda Marling’s father. Hoare wrote that Donald had told Melinda on May 24 that ‘Roger Styles’ would be coming to dinner the following evening, although he asserted that Burgess did not book the two berths until the day of departure. Nevertheless, Hoare discounted the theory that a sudden warning precipitated the flight, and he suggested that Maclean had dropped broad hints to Melinda that he would be leaving. He expressed the opinion that neither Burgess nor Maclean believed that he would never return to Britain, but indicated that Moscow decided that it would be too risky to allow Burgess to return from accompanying Maclean to Paris, and ordered his flight, too. Hoare mentioned the very flamboyant way in which the pair drew attention to the details of their flight.

‘Empire of Fear’

Input from an unexpected quarter arrived when Empire of Fear, the ghost-written memoir of the defectors in Australia, Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, was published in 1954. This was of importance, because Petrov’s MVD boss in Australia had been Kislitsyn, who had helped plan and direct the escape of Burgess and Maclean. (Kislitsyn had been in London between 1945 and 1948.) He stated that the plan was initiated because both of the spies were under investigation, and that they had reported the surveillance with some alarm to their Soviet handlers. Many plans were apparently put forward (and rejected – suggesting that the process took several weeks) before the final project involving an eventual air flight to Prague was approved. Petrov did not know how the couple reached Paris, but he was confident that Donald confided in Melinda before he left. [Melinda eventually escaped to Moscow, with her three children, in 1953.] Kislitsyn intriguingly suggested that Burgess and Maclean did not know each other as agents before the emergency. Robert Manne expanded slightly on this account in his 1987 book The Petrov Affair (which probably arrived too late for Chapman), in which he confirmed that Kislitsyn aided the escape working under Raina and Gorsky (the wartime minder of the London-based spies), adding that Petrov did not know the identity of the ‘Third Man’, but thereby confirming the role of an abettor. He opined that some London newspapers gained their stories from disgruntled MI5 officers disillusioned with their institution’s incompetence over the affair. He refers to a Times editorial ‘Too Little, Too Late’ from September 24, 1955, that I have not been able to locate.

‘The Petrov Affair’

An official statement, given under much pressure, was released on September 23, 1955. Titled ‘Home Office Report on Missing Diplomats’, it was compiled by the MI5 officer Graham Mitchell under the guidance of Dick White. Analysts such as Nigel West have criticized it for its many errors, but the report contained a few salient observations. It set out by claiming that Foreign Secretary Morrison had on May 25 indeed approved the proposal to interrogate Maclean, but that the interview had been delayed until mid-June (i.e. after Melinda’s confinement). [West lists this as an untruth, but in this case West was certainly wrong.] Thereafter, what Mitchell had to offer was bland: he indicated that Maclean knew he was under investigation (excluding Burgess implicitly), and then he related some of the details of the passage, and Melinda’s reporting her husband’s absence to the Foreign Office on the afternoon of Monday 28 May. He refers to the telegrams – both fake and real – that arrived from the two spies and, rather lamely, reproduces the evidence that the Petrovs had presented. It is not a very convincing or illuminating report, but it does contain some reckless language that embarrassed the government later. In Section 11, it states that Maclean ‘may have been warned’, and in Section 26 affirms that suspicion: “In the event he was alerted and fled the country together with Burgess.” Those statements would dramatically introduce the ‘Third Man’ controversy.

A compilation of mainly press reports, augmented by interviews with insiders, appeared as The Great Spy Scandal, which was published in 1955, with Donald Seaman and John S. Mather as the authors. It is for that reason not a very coherent account, but it does introduce several telling items. One of the first is the information that Burgess told his live-in boyfriend, Jackie Hewit, soon after he arrived back in Britain that he had a ‘friend in trouble’ whom he needed to help – surely a very incautious move. The authors add that Hewit and Miller (Burgess’s alleged pick-up from the Queen Mary) did not report that Guy was missing until Monday May 28. Hewit then called Blunt to let him know (on the authors’ assumption that Blunt knew nothing), and Blunt then contacted the authorities. As for Maclean, he apparently told his Hungarian contact (Ludwik Frejka, who was hanged in 1952) that he had taken Melinda into his confidence, and the story echoes the claim made elsewhere that both Burgess and Maclean noted that they were under surveillance. It may have been Hoskins of the Daily Express who aired the rumour that there was a ‘Third Man’ who alerted Burgess and Maclean of the imminent danger. Hoskins (perhaps receiving a dubious tip from inside the Foreign Office) had claimed that the warning might have arrived from Washington or London. A last, rather mysterious, anecdote describes how Hewit reported that Burgess had received a troubling phone call from Maclean at 5:30 pm on May 25, and that Burgess seemed upset by it. Burgess of the News Chronicle asserted that MI5 knew about this warning. [The variously attributed movements of the evening of May 25 merit a complete separate analysis, since they take on an Agatha Christie-like complexity. The accounts given here, and by Fisher, and later by Cecil, are in such blatant contradiction that a detailed inspection of train timetables and the geography of north-east Surrey is essential.]

‘The National Uproar’ (from ‘The Great Spy Scandal’)

Guy Burgess also made a contribution when Tom Driberg visited him in Moscow. Guy Burgess: A Portrait, written by Driberg, and published in 1956, is predictably misleading. Burgess claimed that Maclean was the second person with whom he got in touch after arriving in England (after Blunt? Rees?). They met at the Reform Club, and Maclean told him that he was being tailed, possibly because of his pro-Soviet remarks, and let Guy know that he wanted to clear out and go to Moscow, seeking his friend’s help in getting tickets. A few days before they left, Burgess decided he wanted to accompany him, too – how far is not clear: he also told his interlocutor that Petrov’s account that the Russians planned it was ‘pure rubbish’. Burgess then contradicts himself: he says that he did not know that he was going the whole way to Moscow with Maclean until he got to Tatsfield. He added that Maclean acquired his Czech visa at the Czech Embassy in Berne, that Burgess reached Prague with Maclean, and that he ‘decided’ to accompany him to Moscow when the story broke. What happened with Burgess’s visa requirements was not stated, and how the two managed their negotiations with the Czech Embassy without Soviet help is not explained. It is difficult to take Burgess’ account seriously.

[In July 1963, Edward Heath, Lord Privy Seal, acknowledged to the House of Commons that Philby had indeed been the ‘Third Man’ who ‘had warned Maclean through Burgess that the security services were about to take action against him.’]

The famed author and journalist Rebecca West picked up the story in her New Meaning of Treason (1964). While she brought little fresh insight to the mechanics of the escape (and indeed misrepresented many aspects), her independence of mind and her sceptical intellectual analysis highlighted many of the paradoxes of the events. Her account of the circumstances of the escape is unfortunately riddled with vague and unattributed rumours. For instance, she declared that Maclean fled with Burgess when he had just been informed ‘probably by several persons, including another person in the employment of the Foreign Office named Philby, that he had been detected and was under surveillance by security’. She provocatively asserted (without providing a source) that Maclean had been identified as the principal suspect as early as 1949. She bizarrely deemed it probable that Philby told Burgess that Maclean was about to escape to the Soviet Union, and instructed Burgess that he must therefore accompany him.

West is stronger in describing the inexplicable poor performance of the security authorities in failing to prevent the defections, or manage the fallout: the absurd way in which the disreputable behaviour of Maclean and Burgess was rewarded with further employment; the clumsiness of the surveillance; the questionable role of Roger Makins in watching Maclean at work; the ridiculous suggestions that Burgess and Maclean made a decision to leave on learning of Herbert Morrison’s approval of the interrogation; the unnecessary alerting of the Sûreté; the behaviour of Melinda Maclean; the amateurish explanations that followed. She also drew attention to the flamboyant way that Burgess went about his preparations, including the very obvious (and unnecessary) hiring of a car to enable the escape, and the reckless dash to Southampton, the failure of which would really have set the cat among the pigeons.

For some reason, Dame Rebecca – perhaps because she was considered an outsider meddling in matters she did not understand – did not receive the recognition she deserved from other journalists. Her conclusion, however, when she assessed Philby’s quoted admission that he had warned Maclean through Burgess that the security services were to take action against him, summarized the general way in which the notion of the ‘Third Man’ has been allowed to be distorted: “It [the statement] does not explain why a Soviet agent in England, certainly in touch with local agents, could be warned that he was being watched by English security agents only by another Soviet agent in America who sent a third all the way to England to tell him so. Soviet intelligence has better communications than that. This cannot be the story.”

Indeed. In these sentences, however, West revealed her own confusion as well as hinting at the generic fog that the British government managed to spread over the whole business, a miasma that has never properly been dispelled.

Kim Philby put his oar in, in My Silent War (1968). Predictably, it moves Philby himself to the centre stage, suggesting that he despatched Burgess to London in order to brief his Soviet control on what was happening – a scenario highly improbable for many reasons. Burgess was then to follow Philby’s instructions and contact Maclean to put him in the picture: there is no mention of Blunt, of course. At the same time, Philby reported how concerned he was at the lack of urgency with which the case was progressing, and he informed his Soviet contact of his worries.

Philby’s influence is also visible in The Philby Conspiracy (1968), also released as The Spy Who Betrayed A Generation (1969), by Bruce Page, David Leitch, and Phillip Knightley. Again, it is Kim who is instrumental in using Guy to send the alarm to London, and to warn Donald. Yet the authors remark on Burgess’s very leisurely return to the UK. The next movements between Burgess and Maclean mirror Burgess’s account of the story, with Guy agreeing to join Maclean when the latter asks him to. They diverge on the matter of the Soviets’ planning the whole affair, however, claiming that the Russians wanted to organize an escape-route in order to motivate other spies, should the occasion require it. And here is the first major push for the theory of the ‘last-minute alert’ – the notion that the interrogation was scheduled to begin on May 28, and that only on the Friday, when that decision was made, did an insider manage to get the news to the pair, so that their escape could be accelerated. They claim that Burgess received that fateful message as early as 10:00 am on May 25, whereupon Burgess made the final arrangements, told Miller that their trip was probably off, ordered the rental car, said goodbye to Hewit, and went to pick up Maclean in Tatsfield. In this wild and woolly scenario (‘a mixture of careful planning and last-minute improvisation’) the authors speculate that Philby could have received a cable in Washington on the Thursday night, and that he could thereby have notified the Russians! It is all very fanciful and absurd.

E. H. Cookridge (born Ernest Philo)

Also in 1968 a work with a significant title, The Third Man, by E. H. Cookridge, appeared. Cookridge was the anglicized name of Edward Spiro, who had known Philby in Vienna in 1934. Rather oddly, he does not introduce the concept of the ‘third man’ until he describes Philby’s interrogations after June 1951, when he records that Philby knew that there was nothing to connect him with ‘the missing diplomats’ or to brand him as ‘the third man’. It is not until Cookridge covers the defector Petrov’s deposition, published by the Australian Royal Commission on September 18, 1955, that the theme becomes clear. Here (according to Cookridge) appeared the statement that Kislitysn (who worked for Petrov in Canberra) had told him that a ‘third man’ in Washington had informed Colonel Raina that Maclean was under investigation,. This ‘third man’ had (so Cookridge claimed) also warned Maclean by sending a friend to London, but Kislitsyn did not know the names of either the emissary or the ‘third man’ in Washington. This essence of this reference had apparently been picked up by Marcus Lipton, M.P., on October 25, 1955, when he asked a question about the ‘third man’ in the House of Commons. Yet Lipton failed to join the dots properly, or else had misunderstood the information given to him. Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan acknowledged the possibility of a tip-off, and even reported that Philby had been first secretary at the British Embassy, but he did not explicitly endorse the concept of a ‘third man’. This was potentially an extremely important disclosure by Cookridge, but he was in one significant way quite wrong. (I shall pick up this story in March.)

Cookridge had obviously had access to some insider information, and displayed a fresh account of Maclean’s last known movements, but he erred over a few other aspects of the story. Very provocatively, he argued that Philby quickly concluded that both Burgess and Maclean had become liabilities, and that they both ‘had to disappear quickly’. He even postulated that, had Philby been as ruthless as his masters, he might have arranged the liquidation of his two accomplices. This scenario, where Philby feels safer with both taken out of the picture, is clearly in contradiction of the favoured alternative, in which Burgess’s disappearance would lead to Philby’s unmasking, as well. It obviously casts doubt on the famed but questionable claim that Philby’s last words to Burgess were ‘Don’t you go, too!”

The timeline for the journey to Southampton is even more hectic in Cookridge’s narrative. He has Burgess driving to his club in Pall Mall at 6:30 pm, where he made several phone calls, before returning to his flat to collect his suitcase, and then driving to Tatsfield, which he surely could not have reached before 8:30. He and Maclean did not leave until 10:15, Burgess having to travel for nearly ninety miles in less than an hour and a half. With the state of the roads, and several towns to cross, it simply does not compute. Cookridge acknowledges Maclean’s rather unorthodox request to have the Saturday off, but he has nothing to say about the planned interrogation. He does indicate that Melinda called the Foreign Office, in some despair, on the Monday morning, and again, specifically to Carey-Foster, in the afternoon.

Richard Deacon made only a brief comment on the business in his History of British Seret Service (1969, revised and updated in 1980), but managed to mangle the story completely. His account reads as follows: “Gradually the counter-espionage service built up their case against Maclean, yet even when convinced reluctantly that Maclean must be interrogated on the subject of leakages of information to the Russians, a dilatory Foreign Office decided he need not be questioned until the weekend was over. Thus was Philby able to warn Burgess and Burgess to persuade Maclean to escape with him via Southampton and Le Havre on a secret route which took both behind the Iron Curtain.” How Deacon came to those absurd conclusions is unfathomable: it cannot be attributable to mere laziness, as his book elsewhere shows some diligence.

Goronwy Rees’s A Chapter of Accidents was published in 1972, and it has obviously exerted a powerful influence on many authors, especially Chapman. For details of Rees’s account, I draw readers’ attention to my analysis of his mendacious memoir in my coldspur bulletin of last September (see https://coldspur.com/an-anxious-summer-for-rees-blunt/ ). Of course, the archival material that shows up Rees’s deceitful account was not available in 1987, so perhaps some researchers and authors could be forgiven for believing that this eminent person would be providing them with an accurate story of the events of May and June 1951.

John Fisher was Chief Diplomatic Correspondent at the Times, and presumably well connected. His 1977 account, Burgess and Maclean, shows signs of being fed apparently useful nuggets, but Fisher should perhaps have cast a little more suspicion on what he was told. His account is remarkable for referring to Anthony Blunt several times – at a time, of course, when Andrew Boyle was being fed rumours about him. He offers some revealing details about the movements of May 25, including the potentially useful information that Maclean was normally driven from Woldingham Station to his home in Tatsfield – not from Oxted Station, which is farther down the line, a journey that Melinda Maclean claimed her husband regularly took. (I know that latter route well: it would involve a steep and eminently avoidable drive home up Titsey Hill. Yet Oxted has the advantage of a fast train from Victoria, which Maclean could pick up at East Croydon if he left from Charing Cross.) His description of the plans made is a bit of a muddle: he points out that Burgess’s journey home was not executed in a hurry, since Guy took a holiday in New York along the way. It is Fisher who reveals the essence of the VENONA program that led to HOMER’s unveiling, and he makes the alarming comment that Philby had ‘all along’ been a double agent. Fisher was apparently convinced by someone that catching spies and then turning them into double agents was a reputable and successful practice. (See my recent commentary on that phenomenon at https://coldspur.com/2024-year-end-roundup/ .) As for Burgess’s actions, he asserts that Guy went to Rees’s house first, after landing, that the plans had been made by the Russians in New York, and that Burgess booked the cabin on the Falaise on May 23 (the Wednesday).

It is not clear where Fisher is simply regurgitating stories that had appeared before. He credits Burgess with some skillful bluff over communicating plans for dining with Blunt on May 28, believing that Burgess knew that he was not returning, and that he set out to save his own skin at the expense of Blunt – and maybe Philby, who accused Burgess of doing just that. Miller has been taken in by the story that Burgess may have been alerted by Philby that Maclean was about to be interrogated, but he does not explain how that happened. With wild speculation, he suggests that Philby ‘might have slipped a message to Burgess on Friday afternoon’. He also identifies a call that Burgess made to the USA on May 25, for which Hewit paid the bill. As for Hewit’s activities, Miller has him calling Rees and Blunt over the weekend, and he echoes the statement that Culme-Seymour (Maclean’s luncheon partner on Friday) made that Melinda had known for a long time that she would end up in Moscow. All in all, it is another less than rigorous analysis.

The rather excitable and impressionable Richard Deacon (Donald McCormick) re-appeared, offering some commentary in his controversial book The British Connection (1979), which was recalled for pulping because of the Peierls errors, accusations made by Deacon in the belief that Peierls was deceased. Deacon had been told that Philby was tipped off to defect in 1963 because the CIA was about to kill him. He also claims that an anonymous letter was sent to the US Embassy as late as May 24, in which the writer asserted that Maclean had expressed to him sympathy for patriots who chose voluntary exile (such as the journalist John Peet, whom Maclean admired). The document was not made available until 1977, through the US Freedom of Information Act. Why it was concealed, or whether it was some sort of forgery, is difficult to determine. Deacon also makes anonymous remarks about Blunt, and the boasts that the latter made about his aiding the USSR during the war, which are interesting as further clues, but published just before the official disclosures about Blunt’s career.

And then came Andrew Boyle’s Climate of Treason (1979), which led to the unmasking of Blunt. [The revised edition of 1980 named Blunt explicitly.] Boyle states that Burgess visited Rees the day after he arrived, namely on May 8. He adds that Burgess and Maclean met several times between May 10 and May 20, sometimes at the Foreign Office itself – a factoid that would encourage the dual surveillance story. Maclean seemed to have accepted that the game was up, and he awaited the roll-out of the escape plan, which Blunt, in his ‘confession’ to MI5, had said had been worked out by him and his Soviet control. Boyle’s description of the fateful day is like that of many others a bit frenetic. Morrison had authorized the interrogation for May 28 (an item of misinformation supplied by Carey-Foster, the FO Security officer), and it was a closely guarded secret, but some form of warning from Philby arrived on May 23 or May 24 (i.e. before the decision had been made.) Boyle names Blunt as the source who told Burgess of the May 28 interrogation: Burgess knew of the escape plan, but he had no intentions of going further than Southampton until he undertook the drive to Tatsfield, when he decided on the spur of the movement to join Maclean across the channel. Yet Boyle next concedes that the Russians had decided that Burgess should abscond, too, as they could not trust him to keep the secret if he returned. Boyle echoes the main parts of Rees’s story, saying, however, that the critical meeting between Liddell, Blunt and Rees did not take place until June 7. He also inserts the idea that Burgess and Blunt had been farsighted enough to spring-clean Burgess’s flat, but he does not indicate when that happened.

In 1963, Donald Sutherland had co-authored with Anthony Purdy a work titled Burgess and Maclean. Sutherland updated it in 1980, under the title The Fourth Man. Sutherland rejects a lot of the common Philby-inspired story of his own role, namely that Maclean made up his mind to leave, and that Philby agreed with his Soviet control that Burgess should be entrusted with arranging Maclean’s escape. Sutherland’s judgment is that the RIS (Russian Intelligence Service) was in charge, but that it was a botched job, ‘badly arranged by a man on his own and in a panic’. Nevertheless, Sutherland has also been taken in by the story that Philby was able to cable Burgess on the morning of May 25, with the text being relayed by telephone. Somehow, it was a pre-arranged message that Maclean would be interrogated on May 28. (He even claims that MI5 later found the cable in the flat – an extraordinary achievement if the text had actually been read out to Burgess.) Sutherland then simply echoes the conventional story about Burgess’s partly rushed exit from London, without attempting to disentangle the paradoxical timings. He echoes the thought that Burgess intended to return, but that the Russians thought otherwise. Sutherland’s final flourish? “Alarm bells should have rung on the morning of the interrogation”, showing how he had been successfully deluded.

Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery (1981) also takes a predictable path. He attributes no urgency to Burgess’s return to the UK, but that it was at Guy’s request that Blunt met him at Southampton. Burgess then described the purpose of his voyage, and that it was he who knew how to get in touch with Modin, the MGB controller. The Soviets decided to use Burgess as an intermediary to Maclean, who agreed to go to Moscow only if Burgess accompanied him. Thereafter, Pincher gets sucked into the last-minute warning syndrome, except rather than Philby being the agent, it was more probably a penetration agent in MI5 – namely Roger Hollis! Pincher’s bête noire somehow had taken part in, or heard about, the Morrison meeting, and had managed to contact Burgess between 10 and 11 on the morning of May 25 to let him know about the Monday interrogation. According to Pincher, when Modin heard the news, his bosses decided to move immediately. As my sometime doctoral supervisor, Professor Glees, informed me once, Pincher admitted that he invented things from time to time, and this anecdote would appear to emanate from that same fertile imagination. Pincher does add that Modin ordered Blunt to defect as well, but the art expert declined. That was something Pincher probably got right.

In A Matter of Trust (1982), Nigel West adds to the confusion. He is of the school that asserts that the interrogation of Maclean was indeed scheduled for May 28, to the extent of claiming that MI5 lied to the FBI in stating that the interrogation had been delayed a fortnight. West also claims that Liddell was ‘aghast’ when Carey-Foster informed him of Maclean’s disappearance that day. (Since Carey-Foster had learned of Maclean’s absence from Melinda only that afternoon, the surprised reaction does not ring true if Maclean was due to have been called in that morning.) West also states that Burgess had never come under suspicion as being a Soviet spy. He does, however, offer the intelligence that Liddell turned to Blunt for help, and that Blunt accompanied a couple of watchers from B2a to Burgess’s flat, where Blunt was able to sweep up some letters before the MI5 team found them. That episode was of course after the escape.

An important contribution was made by the Foreign Office insider Robert Cecil in his contributing essay to The Missing Dimension, edited by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks (1984). It was titled The Cambridge Comintern, and represents an interesting segue from what was largely gossip up to this time to the more formal and academic histories that followed in the next two decades. Cecil had known Maclean well, and he was appointed to replace him after the defection. His essay is an excellent tour d’horizon of the careers of the prime Cambridge Four, but it also reveals how susceptible the most expert witness can be to the attempts of those he respects to mislead. He is also a little imprecise in his chronology.

Cecil appears to trust what Goronwy Rees rote about his separation from Burgess and Blunt, although he claims that Rees gave an undertaking not to betray either of them back in 1939, which goes against the grain of how Rees represented his view of Blunt’s allegiance. He accepts Philby’s highly improbable divorce from Litzi without question. He implies that Maclean was still in touch with his control right up to the time of his surveillance, but he offers no evidence for that assertion. He rightly does not believe that the incidents of Burgess’s speeding in Virginia were part of any ruse to gain Burgess’s departure: instead he judges that Phiby exploited his expulsion in an ‘unprofitable’ venture to use him as a go-between. Yet Cecil was taken in by the claims of his Foreign Office colleagues that Maclean was going to be brought in on May 28, and that there was some kind of ‘Third Man’ who tipped the pair off. He even criticizes MI6 for not accepting that Philby was the ‘Third Man’, but does not explain whether, by this, he means the officer who raised the alarm in Washington, or the man who passed on the (false) secret about the imminent interrogation. He presents the American student Miller as Burgess’s ‘boyfriend’, which he clearly was not: he declares, without evidence, that Burgess was not under surveillance, which probably reflects what another inside told him. Finally, in what became a more controversial item, he criticizes Roger Makins (the Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office) for not passing on to Carey-Foster, its Security Officer, the fact that Maclean had asked for leave of absence for the morning of Saturday, May 26.

Chapman Pincher followed up his earlier work with his mammoth Too Secret Too Long (1984). He dedicated a chapter to the defections, which is replete with much earnest speculation, a lot of imprecise dating, and multiple insights granted to him confidentially, all of which he implicitly trusts. What truths he may have gathered in his investigations are swamped by the numerous hypothetical events he posits. Thus he confidently assumes that Philby accepted that, when Oldfield told him in September 1949 about the leakage from the British Embassy, the culprit was Maclean. Thereafter, Pincher relies too much on what the FBI agent Robert Lamphere told him, for instance that the FBI was not even told that Maclean was a suspect until after he and Burgess had absconded. He also cites Blunt’s various ‘confessions’, sometimes as ‘confidential information’, such as the claim Blunt made that Philby had managed to warn Maclean when he was in Cairo, and thus contributed to Maclean’s breakdown before he was recalled in May 1950. This might be a very important insight, but it is hardly verifiable.

Another confidence entrusted to Pincher was the claim that Burgess was under similar suspicion before he went to Washington in August 1950 and that, ‘organized by MI5 or MI6’, an army officer was sent out to keep an eye on him. He carries on in this vein, with stories about Maclean possibly having have met his Soviet controllers around Tatsfield just before he absconded, since he was not being surveilled in the country. Without giving any dates, Pincher declares that the KGB plotted Maclean’s escape in Moscow, and selected Burgess to warn him. Despite characterizing Burgess as being in addicted to drugs and alcohol at this time, the KGB also believed that Burgess was a suitable companion to prevent Maclean from getting drunk and distracted in France during the escape. Yet elsewhere he echoes Blunt’s claim that the Soviets had decided some time before that Burgess had to be part of the package. He mysteriously treats Burgess’s booking of the berths on the Falaise as a ‘coincidence’. With Pincher, all roads lead to Roger Hollis, of course, and so, while correctly rubbishing the theory that Philby could have had the time to warn his colleagues of the imminent interrogation, he assures his readers that it was Hollis who, as Security Officer for MI5, managed to get a message to Burgess on May 25 to accelerate the departure. Hollis’s role was, naturally, covered up. Enough said: it is a typical Pincherian muddle and bluster, all delivered with the confidence of the insider with connections.

The penultimate relevant work, which may have arrived too late for Chapman’s consideration, but is worth including for the record, is Conspiracy of Silence (1986-87), by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman. It is, like so many of the other accounts, much of a muddle, but it does shed fresh light on the supposed actions of Jackie Hewit and Goronwy Rees. Their narrative follows closely the notion of Philby’s propulsion of the plan, even to the extent of Kim’s ability to alert the duo to the need to escape at the last moment, despite his remoteness in Washington. The timetable indicates that Burgess was met by Blunt at Southampton, and proceeded to Sonning the next day, suggesting that Rees in some respect had an important role to play. The authors even make the provocative claim that Hewit had declared that Rees was ‘up to his neck’ in the whole business, was panicking, and that Burgess went to Sonning to re-assure him. That would shed a completely fresh light on the relationship between Blunt and Rees, if true, but would seem to fail the test of a realistic chronology. How would Burgess have known, from the USA, that Rees was already panicking?

Thereafter, their account follows the line that Maclean, in a state of nervous collapse, asked Guy for help in getting to the Soviet Union, Hewit offering the opinion that he would not go unless Burgess accompanied him. As for the circumstances of the fateful weekend, Penrose and Freeman indicate that Rees called both Footman and Blunt on the Sunday night, and that Hewit also called Rees and Blunt because of Burgess’s extended absence. They roughly follow Rees’s version of events, but they claim that Rees was so frightened by his own entanglement that he created a cover-story to implicate Blunt. They echo the story of the searching of the flat (on May 29), claiming that Rosamund Lehmann told them that Rees had helped Blunt on that project. Lehmann also believed that Rees knew a lot more about what was going on than he admitted.

‘Molehunt’

I include here as the last book to be analyzed Nigel West’s Molehunt (1987), since, even though it was also too late to have been considered by Chapman, it seems to me to belong to the more novelistic approaches of the 1980s. West endows his description of the events with some flourishes probably intended to apply verisimilitude, but which serve only to undermine his authority. Thus his Introduction describes Maclean as ‘a well-dressed young man’ (it was his thirty-eighth birthday) ‘driving through the country lanes of rural Kent’ (both Oxted and Tatsfield are in Surrey), after which he ‘swung through the gates of a modest, two-story home’ (it was hardly modest, containing four bedrooms, but, if it had been, it would probably not have had gates). He goes on to write that Maclean had ‘caught his usual commuter train, the 5:19 from Charing Cross to Sevenoaks’ (it was the regular 6:10 from Victoria to Oxted). Without specifying any times, he then writes that ‘Roger Styles’ (Burgess) arrived about half an hour later (6:30 pm?), and that the Macleans and Burgess sat down to a meal at 7, after which Burgess and Maclean drove away in Burgess’s cream Austin A40 at about nine o’clock. How, if the escape had been a ‘last-minute affair’, arrangements were set up in France for them to proceed to Moscow, is not investigated by the author.

West’s tale then becomes a bit more interesting, yet still problematical. Melinda and Donald apparently maintained a pretense that she had never met Burgess, the purpose of whose visit was ‘to enable him to escape abroad’. Since Burgess had just been tipped off that the Foreign Secretary had that same morning consented that Maclean should be interrogated the following Monday, Burgess’s task that evening was to ‘persuade Maclean to flee, while taking precautions to being identified as a fellow-conspirator’. That was, to say the least, leaving the appeal a little late. Yet Donald and Melinda knew that their house had been bugged, and that all their conversations were being recorded even when the headset was not in use. MI5’s case officers had no idea that their project had been compromised. The play-acting in which the trio indulged was ‘just one of the countermeasures devised by Burgess to throw MI5 off the scent’. (Whether MI5 had picked up anything useful before Burgess’s arrival is not considered by West.) West observes that it was not until the afternoon of May 28 that Melinda telephoned the Foreign Office to report that her husband had disappeared. Presumably the interrogation team was sitting at Leconfield House just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the Foreign Office to bring in their victim  . . .

It is all a sorry affair.

Chapman’s HOMER

Robin Chapman

One could be forgiven for concluding that Chapman would have had an impossible task in making sense of this mélange of assertions. It was perhaps ingenuous of him to refer to the ‘known facts’ of the case without having to define what he thought they were. I could suggest, on the other hand, that, while the preceding analysis might be nugatory for assessing the decisions that the playwright made, it does offer some other advantages. The above accounts must overall be of great value for anyone trying to establish exactly what did happen in those few weeks in May 1951 – if only because the obvious contradictions have to be inspected and resolved. It is true that, before the end of the century, some fresh perspectives from overseas commentators (such as Newton in the USA, and Modin and Mitrokhin in the USSR) did enter the arena to add new dimensions to the story, and offered further ‘facts’ to be checked. There was, however, not much new independent analysis during the next decade or so. The authorized history of MI5 then followed, but it was particularly feeble (as I shall explain next month). Its appearance as the implied ‘last word’ may however have discouraged any new analysis for a while. It was not until the National Archives, during the 2010s decade, threw up a variety of information on Philby, Burgess and Maclean, as well as the very revealing Personal Files on the Reeses, that inquisitive biographers tried to pick up the challenge.

It seems to me that Chapman, perhaps overwhelmed by the conflicting stories published, stuck with his attachment to Rees’s memoir, believing in the authority of such artifacts, but enhanced it to try to take advantage of the very topical information about Blunt’s unmasking, and his subsequent ‘confession’. If Chapman had constrained himself in this area, he might have avoided much unnecessary complexity, but he latched on to the fact that Blunt had played a role in arranging the escape, and then amplified it to a degree that presented him with some plot challenges. His decision created several fresh clashes with the chronology and geography of the events as described by various of the other chroniclers.

In my opinion, Blunt, for reasons of temperament, ability, and circumstances, could not have been a decisive leader of the project. Yet Chapman presents him as essentially bossing Vasily (Modin), issuing the orders, and instructing what the NKVD/MGB should do. (In that way, he endorses Burgess’s’ view of things in defiance of what Petrov reported.) Blunt would have struggled to acquire travel tickets and visas for the itinerary across Europe without drawing undue attention to himself. Moreover, if he seriously believed that he could send Burgess over for part of the way, and then have him return home, with Maclean reputedly having ‘given him the slip’, Blunt seriously underestimated the problems that Burgess, under surveillance himself, would have encountered with the authorities, having accompanied the known suspect in such an underhand manner, and abetted his escape.

Moreover, Chapman then had to deal with the vital and central episode in his story, Blunt’s searching for and incinerating incriminating papers that he found in Burgess’s flat. Recall – in Chapman’s scenario, that took place on the morning of May 26, the Saturday, because Burgess was able to get a breakfast message to Blunt that vaguely hinted at the danger represented by the contents of Burgess’s flat. The impression is that Burgess was somehow suddenly alerted to the fact that he had to accompany Maclean all the way to Moscow. First, Chapman had to create a McGuffin – the ‘What’s Become of Waring’ letter, which Burgess had written on Reform Club notepaper, but had placed with a postal collector in the countryside early on the Friday evening. (The ‘What’s Become of Waring’ idea is taken from Rees’s memoir, where he retrospectively reflects on Burgess’s character, but Chapman’s deployment of it is simply a highly imaginative addition to the screenplay.)  Burgess may not have wanted to face his lover with the news by speaking to him on the telephone, but why did he not mail the letter from his Club, which action would probably have guaranteed the chance of delivery the next morning? And would Blunt interpret the message accurately?

And what had prompted Burgess’s sudden decision? Chapman does refer to the late decision to interrogate Maclean, and he shares the misapprehension that he was going to be hauled in on Monday 28. On the other hand, he never indicates that Burgess learned of that resolution. One clue that Chapman does offer, however, is an extended view of a very pensive, even, distraught, Burgess, immediately after Blunt has divulged the secrets of the plan to him, as if he then realized the enormity of what was about to happen, and resolved to defect as well. But why did he not discuss that outcome, and its implications, with Blunt, or take the time to clear out his flat at leisure? In addition, Burgess is shown to be in a very jaunty mood as he drives down to Tatsfield, which would be surprising given that he has probably seen his intimate friend Blunt for the last time, that there is a possibility that Blunt will not be able to clean up his possessions in time before MI5 gets there, and that he is facing a probably bleak residence in Moscow that he had not even imagined a few days before. (Rees wrote how much Burgess loved life in England.) It is psychologically very unconvincing.

The spotlight turns on Burgess’s relationship with Rees. Blunt is shown to inform Guy Liddell, gratuitously, that Rees has just gone down to Sonning, in a brief scene that is clearly dated as May 16, since Liddell’s desk calendar boldly informs us of the timing. (It serves as an intro to the next scene, in Sonning.) Yet that is a sharp departure from what happened in One of Us, where the stage directions state that the visit occurred on May 6. (This is itself a clumsy variation from Rees’s memoir, where he states that Guy arrived on Monday, May 8. We know that Burgess arrived in Southampton on May 7.) It might have seemed to Chapman that it would be dramatically more sensible for Burgess to contact Rees, in order to ensure that he would stay silent, when the plot had been hatched, and thus a mid-May visit would make sense. Yet in the stage version, Burgess tells Rees that Maclean is already in danger, and that Blunt is organizing a plot for his exfiltration. That would have been the day after Burgess disembarked at Southampton, when he did not yet know where Maclean lived, even. The description of the advanced state of the project is simply absurd.

And why would Burgess, who has reputedly not seen Rees for some time, want to inform him about the plot? Would it not have been better for him and Blunt to ignore Rees, carry out the procedure for exfiltrating Maclean (no matter to what extent Burgess was to accompany him), and leave Rees in the dark, so that he would not make any impetuous approach to MI5? Stirring up a hornet’s nest with Goronwy – as well as Margie, who had witnessed the ‘ratting’ episode at the Gargoyle Club the previous November – would appear to introduce some unnecessary risk to the equation. Why was the extraction of the promise from Rees not to divulge anything considered so important, especially when it was bound to cause tension between husband and wife? Moreover, Chapman inserted one or two provocative incidents in the story: he has Burgess noting early on that Rees will be away at All Souls on May 24, and the exchange between Margie and Goronwy indicates that she had had no luck in getting through on the telephone to Rees while he was in Oxford – not how her husband described it in his memoir.

The problem is that the account in A Chapter of Accidents is utterly unbelievable, as Burgess would not set up the self-invitation from the USA, and then rush to Sonning, simply to discuss his imminent expulsion from the Foreign Office and his probable job with The Daily Telegraph. Yet Chapman’s interpretation (which is not supported by anything Rees wrote) is likewise ridiculous, in that Burgess would not be describing the planned exfiltration of Maclean just after he had disembarked, when he had not even talked to Maclean. There must be another agenda behind the visit (which is hinted at by Chapman and other authors), one to which I shall have to return soon.

Lastly, The Fourth Man makes several glaring errors. It refers to the Soviet organization as the KGB, but the KGB was not created until 1954, after Stalin’s death. (This error appears in many of the books described above, as a kind of shorthand for the various guises the Soviet Security Service took on since the days of the Cheka.) Rees and Burgess discuss Maclean’s fate in terms of a probable death sentence hanging over him, as if that intensified his despair, but that punishment, as part of the Treachery Act, applied only to treasonable activities carried out to help a country with which Great Britain was at war. Chapman presents Bernard Miller, Burgess’s supposed ‘pick-up’ from the Queen Mary, as being in bed with him in mid-May. But Miller was not homosexual, he disembarked from the Queen Mary in Cherbourg, and he did not arrive in London until May 23. Chapman indicates that the shortlist for HOMER was reduced to Maclean as late as May 16, when it had happened over two weeks before. When Blunt incinerates Burges’s possessions, the last item visible is Guy Burgess’s Communist Party card for 1951. He may have been a member of the Party in the early 1930s, but he was certainly not so in 1951.

Other touches are simply clumsy. Just before his assignation with Modin in adjacent stalls in the Gentlemen’s Public Lavatory, Blunt, in prim office garb, with rolled-up umbrella, checks his watch before marching to the rendezvous, where a policeman is present. It is absolutely incongruous and absurd. In another scene, Burgess and Maclean, supposed to be under surveillance, crowd into a public telephone-box in broad daylight to await a call from Blunt. That is similarly ridiculous.

Conclusions

Did The Fourth Man succeed as an artistic venture with political overtones? As a reliable record of what events led to the escape of Burgess and Maclean, it is feeble and misleading, but one could not expect any viewer to know enough about the evidence behind the action to be able to challenge the apparent facts. Even today, because of the successful job that intelligence officers and civil servants such as George Carey-Foster, Patrick Reilly, Roger Makins, and Dick White executed in planting false trails, the mendacious memoir of Rees, the prevarications of Melinda Maclean, the unreliable testimony from Jackie Hewit, the boastfulness of Yuri Modin, etc. etc., even the ‘experts’, such as Nigel West, have a difficult time tracing an accurate and convincing sequence of events for those heady days in May 1951.

As a psychological study of intrigue and comradeship, however, it does carry some degree of truth, or at least, realism, even though the hackneyed quotation from Forster is overdone, and misrepresented. Since Rees was a liar over his experiences after May 27, there is no reason to suspect that he was telling the truth when he described his interactions with Burgess and Blunt before that fateful Sunday. Yet the existential dilemma that a former ideologue would find himself in when he no longer believed in the cause, but had failed to act with integrity immediately the crossroads appeared before him, is well-portrayed. The gauntlet thrown in his face that it was difficult to believe him now when he had stayed silent so long carries a lot of heft. Moreover, any apostate from the Comintern cause would have reason to fear for his life. Rees certainly did not know that Burgess wanted him killed at one stage, but in 1957 he was almost killed in a hit-and-run car ‘accident’ that could conceivably have been engineered by the KGB.

On the other hand, the theme of the betrayal of ‘friends’ carries a hypocritical and hollow ring. Guy appeals to Goronwy’s friendship to keep silent about the escape plan, as otherwise he, Kim, Donald and Anthony will all be at risk. Yet Burgess had been willing to have Rees killed to save his own skin, and the others were never friends of Rees. Rees and Blunt disliked each other intensely, and Rees hardly knew Maclean and Philby. On the other hand, Philby had reputedly impressed upon his friend Burgess that he should never accompany Maclean to Moscow, but Burgess had to let Philby down, and expose him, because of Moscow’s orders. That was an example of betrayal, and, in his unpublished memoir, Blunt accused Burgess of betraying his friends, including Blunt himself by (in Blunt’s opinion) ‘insisting’ that he accompany Maclean to Moscow. Philby (considering the prime fault was Burgess’s, not the MGB’s) refused to visit Burgess in hospital in Moscow in 1963, when his friend was dying and had asked specifically to see him. Nicholas Elliott, who admired Kim greatly and considered him a close friend, was devastated when he learned that Kim had lied to him and betrayed him.

Moreover, was Rees ever under any real pressure to incriminate Burgess and Maclean? Once they had disappeared, it was soon cut-and-dried that they had escaped to Moscow, and Rees’s reinforcing that idea, by indicating he had a hunch to that effect the weekend they left, but before the authorities learned about it, would only serve to invite embarrassing questions directed at himself. He could not damage his ‘friends’ once they were in Moscow. He did not directly point the finger at Philby, but he did let Blunt know, unnecessarily, it would seem, about his plan to tell all he knew to MI5. Being straight about one’s intentions may have seemed an honourable course of action, but it surely would have been wiser for Rees to watch and see what happened, and to wait for MI5 to contact him if they thought that he could help, rather than stirring up Blunt’s animosity. (That was what Stuart Hampshire advised him to, incidentally, between the escape and Rees’s first meeting with Liddell.)

As we now know from Rees’s Personal File, Rees did indeed retract his commitment to accuse Blunt head-on, either because Liddell persuaded him that a softly-softly approach to tackling Blunt was more appropriate, or because he convinced Rees that he had too many skeletons in the closet (as did Liddell, of course) to want to risk being dragged through the mud as well, or – heaven forbid! – because Liddell convinced him that Blunt was more useful left in place as a vehicle for carrying misinformation to the Soviets, as Sir Michael Howard claimed in a letter to the Times.

That assumes that Rees was a reformed character, of course. Yet that is not a waterproof assertion. So many loose ends, alarming coincidences, and contradictory items of evidence exist that they could well be exploited to propose another answer to the mysteries behind the evolution of the Rees dilemma. Some of these are hinted at by the Chapman scripts: others in the archival material. I have started to develop my own alternative theory, which I shall outline here on coldspur soon, after providing an analysis of the literature that has appeared since the release of the movie in 1987, and a discussion of the prevailing conundrums concerning the case. Those two exercises are so substantial that I shall have to defer the presentation of my hypothesis until April. Watch this space!

Anthony Blunt: A Correction

In my September and November bulletins, I presented as fact the idea that MI5 officers, primarily Guy Liddell and Dick White, had been aware at the time of Anthony Blunt’s espionage in World War II, specifically that he had passed on confidential information collected by Leo Long to his Soviet controller. I should have made clear that this was a hypothesis – quite a strong one, incidentally – but not a conclusion verifiable from any sources. My correspondent Keith Ellison had pointed out the fallacy some time ago, and I have acknowledged the flaw on coldspur, and have also expressed an intent to try to resolve it. Yet, somewhat absent-mindedly, in writing my report in September I considered that the evidence that I had used acted as a confirmation of the Long-Blunt incident when in fact it was the sole (possible) evidentiary item – and I repeated that mistake in my November bulletin. Keith has subsequently reminded me of the oversight.

I gave the story comprehensive coverage in Misdefending the Realm, on pages 190-199 in Chapter 7, under a sub-heading The Case of Leo Long. That analysis was based on a pattern of activity described by Joan Miller in her 1986 memoir One Girl’s War, which had to be published in Ireland since the British Attorney-General had sought to ban the book in the United Kingdom. The critical conclusion to which I arrived was that the unidentified department in which Miller had been working when she witnessed espionage must have been MI14. Yet that is not explicit, and Keith has rightly challenged me on it. The controversy has nothing to do with the fact of Long’s espionage, which is not disputed: it was acknowledged by Blunt, and by Long himself, in 1981. (see https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1981/nov/09/mr-leo-long-1#:~:text=I%20do%20not%20therefore%20propose,Security%20Commission%20are%20now%20conducting.&text=asked%20the%20Prime%20Minister%20what,being%20a%20traitor%20in%201964.&text=The%20Prime%20Minister-,Mr.,for%20under%20social%20security%20legislation. ) The Crown Jewels, by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, confirm the acts. It concerns the question of whether officers in MI5 learned about it at the time it occurred. And it is important because it has bearing on the later treatment of Blunt by Liddell and White.

‘One Girl’s War’

I here recap the key points of Miller’s story. In February 1944, MI5 (for whom she had earlier worked for Maxwell Knight, in B5(b)) arranged for Miller to work for the Political Intelligence Department. The position did not suit her, so she was soon transferred to another unnamed department that required knowledge of the War Office, the Foreign Office, and the Special Operations Executive, as the functions involved the correct re-distribution of decoded secret cables. Miller soon noticed that a colleague, a Major, would try to transcribe, covertly, messages arriving from the Middle East. She was able to alert her previous boss to this dubious activity, and the authorities detected that their content had been picked up in intercepts at the Communist party head office, in King Street. The outcome was that the Major was caught in the act of trying to smuggle his notes out of the office, and he was taken away by Special Branch officers. Instead of being prosecuted, however, he was moved away to a safer job. Later, when the war was over, the Major turned up in Germany, working for the Control Commission, an appointment that astonished Miller.

Now, if the department was not MI14, and the culprit was not Long, it means that an unidentified army officer, who, like Long, purloined confidential material from an intelligence unit to benefit the Soviets, was unpunished, and also served with the Control Commission in Germany, has essentially been allowed to be struck from the record. That would be a remarkable coincidence. So how reliable is Miller’s description of her workplace? As a footnote informs us, the PID was abolished in 1943, and it makes the claim that the Political Warfare Executive continued to operate under that label. Then why would Miller introduce it as the PID, and even name her chapter ‘PID’, when it was already defunct at the time she joined it, especially since she declared that she moved to a new department? I doubt, moreover, that the PWE was involved in routing highly sensitive cables on military matters to their correct targets. Was the naming of her employer a gesture made to offer some kind of concealment of what went on?

And why would Her Majesty’s Government be so sensitive about what the book described? Maxwell Knight’s homosexual proclivities could hardly have been that dangerous in 1986. And why have no files on Long been declassified? The National Archives describe two critical items that might be relevant – PREM 19/918 and CAB 301/885, but both are permanently closed. Leo Long must surely have had a Personal File created for him by MI5, but none has been identified let alone released, even after all this time.

Readers will perhaps understand why, even though Keith Ellison is technically correct, I express confidence about my hypothesis. And perhaps it is incumbent on the Ellison camp (if such an entity exists) to offer suggestions for who the mystery major might be. Keith has reminded me that Anthony Masters, in his 1984 biography of Maxwell Knight, The Man Who Was M, identified Joan Miller’s Major as a Major Bell. I have riposted, however, that Masters has no track record as a reliable informant, he provides no source for his claim, the assertion is unverifiable, and I have suggested that Masters may well have been fed this name to throw researchers off the track. I have suggested to Keith (a former member of the Intelligence Corps) that he come up with supportive evidence, but I have only very recently realized that Keith was not familiar with the Hansard report that carried information on Long’s confession, and thus did not understand some of the substance behind my theory. He now has access to it!

Can anyone shed fresh light on the events? Is there a register of army officers in the Control Commission who had been detected spying for the Soviets? Are there any Special Branch records of the arrest? What personnel records for PWE exist? Did it have duties distributing confidential cables? Are there any MI14 records as yet unexploited? Any relevant family memoirs or letters to be revealed? What other reasons might the Government have had for wanting to bury the book? And how would Burke Trend have adjudicated? I suppose also that a Freedom of Information request on the Leo Long files would be in order. Please contact me with your thoughts and reactions.

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Kim Philby in 1951: Alarms and Diversions

[I am happy to report that the production of this column was only temporarily inconvenienced by the Hollywood Writers’ strike. I have been able to deploy instead a modified version of an AI Engine that has been carefully tuned to generate plausible conspiracy theories, a product called Conspirobot™. I trust readers will not detect any deterioration in service quality.]

Kim Philby in 1951

In this, the third in a series of bulletins that re-assess the careers of Kim and Litzy Philby, I explore the following question:

  • How did MI5 and MI6 process the evidence of Philby’s treachery when he came under direct suspicion in June 1951?

Contents:

Introduction

Chronology & Sources

The White Interviews

American Pressure, and the Resignation

The Dog Days of Summer

Churchill Replaces Attlee

The Milmo Interrogation

Analysis, Outcomes, and Conclusions

Summary

Introduction

‘Wanted’ (Burgess detectable because of his ‘Pidgeon’ toes)

On May 25, 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean absconded in circumstances that suggested to the cross-departmental committee tracking the case (Strang, Carey Foster, Liddell, Sillitoe & White) that the pair had received advance warning that Maclean was about to be called in for interrogation. It is important to bear in mind the background to the event, namely:

  1. Dick White’s team had started investigating Kim Philby once the HOMER=Maclean equivalence had been made in April. Milicent Bagot then prepared a dossier on him.
  2. Burgess had been the intermediary between Philby and the latter’s handler, Makayev, based in New York. Philby then met Makayev himself, and insisted to him that Maclean should be exfiltrated. The KGB thus would have been able to contact Maclean through the London residency.
  3. MI5 acknowledged that Philby had known about the progress on the HOMER case since early January, but never considered the idea that Philby might have been communicating his knowledge about it to a Soviet controller in the USA.
  4. Philby’s final message to Burgess before he left the United States was that he ‘should not go too’, confirming that he was already promoting the notion of the exfiltration of Maclean.
  5. Burgess arrived in the UK on May 7, was met at Southampton by Anthony Blunt, and was seen meeting Maclean two days later.
  6. Blunt informed Yuri Modin (the KGB controller in London) on May 9 that the search for HOMER had narrowed down to three.
  7. Before Burgess absconded, the committee did not interpret his bizarre return to the UK, and subsequent activities, as anything harmful or suspicious.
  8. Modin wrote that a decision had been made on May 17, on the basis of the proposed May 28 arrest of Maclean, to exfiltrate Maclean (only) – something confirmed by KGB archives. He further stated that Anthony Blunt had been the prime intermediary between the spies and the KGB, but, for safety reasons, Burgess had on his arrival to take over as the sole link with Maclean.
  9. On May 24, a decision was made to defer Maclean’s interrogation to June 18, and it was thus no longer ‘imminent’, as the archival material at KV 6/143 confirms. (Chapman Pincher, Douglas Sutherland, Nigel West, Ben Macintyre, as well as the more respectable Robert Cecil, are among the authors who have promulgated the myth that, on May 25, Foreign Secretary Morrison approved a decision to move up the interrogation to the following Monday, thus precipitating the need to escape. Christopher Andrew coolly indicates that that was not true. In testimony to his biographer, Dick White likewise indicated that the interrogation had been deferred until the time of the hospital confinement of Mrs Maclean in mid-June. Morrison’s signature was purely for formal approval of the interrogation itself.)
  10. Blunt knew about Philby’s coded letter to Burgess, indicating that matters were ‘heating up’ in Washington, which arrived after the decision on Maclean had been made. According to Modin, it was Blunt who suggested that both Burgess and Maclean should go.
  11. Moscow ratified that decision, in order that Burgess could ‘keep Maclean out of trouble along the way’.
  12. Maclean was aware, because of clumsy surveillance, and documents being withheld from him, that the net was closing in.
  13. Despite his known links with the Comintern in June 1940, Burgess had never been suspected of being a Soviet agent until he disappeared with Maclean. Suddenly his antics in engineering a return to London were seen in a new light – a perspective actually encouraged by Philby himself.
  14. When he learned about the flight of Maclean, Philby was astonished to hear that Burgess had accompanied him.
  15. When Burgess and Maclean fled, Philby came under more intense scrutiny because of his friendship and association with Burgess in Washington.
  16. MI5 assumed that Philby must have continued to alert Maclean through some way of communication with Burgess, including the final notice of the ‘imminent’ interrogation.
  17. This implausible ‘fact’ – that he was suspected of abetting in their escape at the last minute – was added as the seventh and final point in the document passed to the Americans.
  18. Both White’s and Milmo’s interviews/interrogations of Philby were nominally focused on discovering how Maclean had been warned just before he was to be interrogated, not whether there was any indication of earlier leakage in the form of warnings concerning suspicions about Maclean.
  19. The enduring debate about the ‘Third Man’ has significantly focused on the identity of the man who alerted ‘Burgess and Maclean’, not simply ‘Maclean’. Philby had no idea that his Soviet masters planned to exfiltrate Burgess as well as Maclean. Indeed, they did not, at first.

In summary: Burgess had ample opportunity to warn Maclean. The KGB had been alerted beforehand. Soviet exfiltration plans had been in the works for a week before the event. The timing of the escape was arranged to pre-empt the originally scheduled day of interrogation. Maclean was, however, not imminently to be interrogated. No further leakage had been necessary. Philby was by this time out of the loop.

Reward Poster for Burgess & Maclean

After the disappearance of the pair, Philby was recalled from Washington, and arrived in the UK on June 12, whereupon he was immediately invited to a series of interviews by Dick White, the head of counter-espionage in MI5. That same day, Percy Sillitoe, head of MI5, accompanied by Arthur Martin, arrived in Washington with the objective of soothing the troubled minds of the FBI and the CIA.

I refer readers to my articles from four years ago, https://coldspur.com/the-importance-of-chronology-with-special-reference-to-liddell-philby/ [the second half], and https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/, for a detailed analysis of the events leading up to Philby’s departure, including the delivery by hand of a letter to him on June 6, alerting him that he would shortly receive a formal recall. I have supplemented that research with some fresh findings since then, such as the fact that Guy Liddell (deputy to Sillitoe) was on leave between June 3 and June 12, which helps to explain his general bewilderment as to what was going on. Given the misinformation that has circulated about the sequence of events, I hereby summarize the main facts:

  • As early as May 24, a visit to Washington by Sillitoe had been planned for June 18-25, to coincide with the date of Maclean’s interrogation on June 18. The focus and objectives of the visit changed after the ‘two diplomats’ disappeared.
  • White and Arthur Martin had in hand by the end of May a dossier on Philby, prepared by Milicent Bagot, the essence of which White related to MI6 chief Menzies, on June 4.
  • This dossier had the appearance of being compiled as a result of the Burgess/Maclean absconding, but it is clear that MI5 had been working on it for some time before.
  • MI5’s representative in Washington, Geoffrey Patterson, on May 29 agreed to an ‘ingenious scheme’ by White, and confirmed that he had sent information to the FBI.
  • The decision that Philby was to be re-called was taken by Menzies on June 5: it was not because the CIA had considered him persona non grata, and had demanded his expulsion.
  • Menzies and his deputy, James (Jack) Easton, then composed a letter for Philby that Drew carried to Washington that night.
  • Not until June 6 did the FBI learn that one of the escapees was Maclean.
  • On June 7, Sillitoe proposed that Martin join him on the visit to Washington to appease the FBI. The Americans had become very concerned about intelligence exposures, and even brought up the case of Engelbert Broda.
  • On June 11, Sillitoe and Martin departed, carrying the document with the ‘seven points’ about Philby’s probable culpability. Martin handed the document to Robert Lamphere of the FBI on June 12.
  • Lamphere passed the document to his ex-colleague from the FBI, Bill Harvey, now with the CIA, who was able to pass off the conclusions as his own when he handed it to the chief of the CIA, Bedell-Smith, on June 14.
  • On June 15, Harvey provocatively informed Allen Dulles, the recently appointed CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, that Philby could be ‘ELLI’, the Soviet spy in British intelligence identified by the defector Igor Gouzenko, a supposition that had been strangely omitted from the White/Martin dossier.
  • On June 16, Dulles handed Harvey’s report to Sillitoe, who was ignorant of the original source of its allegations.
  • Sillitoe and Martin returned to London on June 18, when Sillitoe passed on Harvey’s ‘revelations’, an event that reportedly enabled MI5 to compile a dossier. [!!]
  • Bedell-Smith then wrote to Menzies, stating that Philby would no longer be welcome in Washington.

The main lesson is the fact that White was successful in diverting the main thrust of the challenge to Philby away from MI5 to the CIA, by virtue of the ‘seven points’ confided via Lamphere to Harvey. That ruse served to distract attention from any deficiencies on MI5’s part in not identifying any signs of treachery in Philby’s behaviour, helped to conceal the possibility of any London-based leakage, maintained MI6’s trust in its intelligence partner, and granted MI6 an external excuse for dealing with Philby. Yet the project was not without risk: while White’s memorandum stressed the Volkov affair, with which the CIA could well have been expected to be familiar, it also listed domestic events (such as Philby’s communism at Cambridge, and his cover-story with the Anglo-German Friendship Society) that had probably escaped the attention of the Americans.

Robert Lamphere’s account of Arthur Martin’s document

The fact that these two items could have been overlooked by MI5 was perhaps pardonable, but the third point – that Philby had married the communist Litzi Friedmann – was potentially dynamite, in that it might have uncovered a host of embarrassing incidents, which White presumably believed he could keep securely sealed. For instance, at that time Martin had most certainly not been indoctrinated into the fact that the informant known as Lizzy Feabre was Philby’s wife, which meant that he could be relied upon not to reveal any awkward secrets to the Americans. The fourth item mentioned Krivitsky’s pointer concerning the journalist in Spain, which was dangerously self-incriminating, as it would have been squarely in MI5’s court to investigate, and yet they had not acted. Moreover, the list omitted the Gouzenko reference to ‘ELLI’, a story which was very familiar to the Americans, and which troubled them greatly. That omission must have puzzled Bedell Smith and his team, and it would lead to some uncomfortable exchanges later that summer.

Chronology & Sources

Determining exactly what happened, and when, during this period is difficult, as the sources available are almost exclusively comments made by the slippery Dick White to his biographers, and asides from other MI5 officers. Philby’s memoir is almost devoid of dates, and should in any case be approached with caution. Guy Liddell’s Diaries can be considered (mostly) reliable, since they reflect an immediacy of response rather than a long-term memory, but there is some dissemblance in his observations. The first entry in File FCO 158/27 (the ‘PEACH’ Investigation) is disappointingly a memorandum dated as late as September 27, 1951. PREM 8/1524 (Prime Ministerial papers on the events) contains some useful background information. Christopher Andrew provides in Defend the Realm a narrow but reliable outline of events, exploiting the Mitrokhin archive, relying also on Yuri Modin’s testimony in My 5 Cambridge Friends, yet not using primary British sources. Very little archival reference is made in (for example) Tom Bower’s A Perfect English Spy, or Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends, beyond Liddell’s Diaries. Anthony Cave Brown’s biography of Menzies, “C”, displays conversations the author had with James Easton in Michigan shortly before he died: the latter’s reminiscences are probably authentic, but Cave Brown’s chronology is rather chaotic, and he struggles to organize his material convincingly.

John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair

A rather sparse account of these events, complemented by generous extracts from the files, can be found in Chapter 6 of Nigel West’s Cold War Spymaster: The Legacy of Guy Liddell, Deputy Director of MI5 (2018), although Liddell’s involvement in the exercise was in fact minimal. In an astonishing lapse, West also presents ‘C’, the conventional title for the head of MI6, as being John Sinclair during the time of the inquiry, whereas Stewart Menzies was still in harness, and did not retire until 1952. (In 1945 Menzies had brought in two military intelligence officers: John Sinclair to replace Claude Dansey as deputy, and James Easton, who took over from Valentine Vivian, assistant-chief, in November of that year, while the latter was demoted to Chief Security Adviser to Menzies. Vivian retired early in 1951.) West’s book offers no archival references, but relies heavily on FCO 158/27 & 158/28. Unfortunately, he sometimes inserts names to fill redactions without explaining where or why he performs such services (as he does in his editing of the Liddell Diaries): he is probably correct in his emendations, but it is not a commendable practice. His representation of large redacted segments as a simple line of ‘XXXXXXXXX’ also does not perform justice to the size of such passages.

I present here a tentative time-line of the more solidly verifiable events of the second half of 1951, as a set of reference-points for the interested reader:

Jun 10 Prime Minister Attlee asks for details of careers of Burgess & Maclean

Jun 11  Carey Foster (of F.O.) distributes memorandum requesting secrecy over investigation

Jun 12 White conducts first interview of Philby

Liddell returns from leave

Jun 14 White conducts second interview: he asks Philby about Litzi

            Sillitoe cables to ask whether he should reveal to FBI that Litzi was a Communist?

            Sillitoe reports that CIA has declared Philby persona non grata

Jun 15 CIA’s Bill Harvey issues report on Philby (actually fed to him by White & Martin)

            The report suggests that Philby could be ‘ELLI’

Jun 18 Sillitoe informs Attlee visit was a success, and Hoover was most co-operative

Jun 20  Bedell Smith informs MI6 that Philby must be dismissed

Jun 21 Morrison suggests setting up Cadogan Committee to investigate FO security

Jun ?    Menzies tells Philby he will have to resign

Jun 26  Morrison states in House that Maclean had no access to technical information

Jun 27 White has agreed with SIS the form of memorandum to go to FBI

Jul 7    Menzies says Philby will have to be told the Americans suspect him of being ELLI

            Menzies wants the case completed before Philby returns from leave

White recommends that Cussen or Milmo should conduct an enquiry

Jul 12  MI6’s Easton arrives in Washington: he tells Scott he is convinced of Philby’s innocence

Jul 13  Easton tells Hoover & Smith that Philby is guilty of nothing more than ‘indiscretion’

Jul 20? Easton returns to London: finds document that Menzies had withheld from him

            Easton reads evidence of Philby’s bigamy, and nine other points

Easton challenges Philby over document’s claims: presumes Philby guilty

Easton presents conclusions to Menzies

Aug 4  Philby & Elliott are reported to be on vacation, yachting, in Chichester

            Philby is reported to be very active in looking for a job

Aug 16 Liddell tells Patterson about his proposed visit to Canada and the USA

Aug 20 Liddell reports that Washington believes MI5 may no longer be investigating Philby case

            Liddell explains it in terms of interrogation not being useful at this stage

            USA urging GB to interrogate Philby immediately on Gouzenko & Volkov cases

Aug 27 White returns from leave

Sep 18 Philby officially resigns from MI6

Sep 19-21 Liddell is in Washington for meetings with the CIA

Sep 21 ‘H.A.R. Philpott’ reported as journalist in Spain, and decorated by Franco

Oct 1   Liddell returns from leave [!!]

Oct 1   Bedell Smith of CIA is told facts of Philby case were ‘chain of coincidences’

            Liddell reports that case against Philby is ‘blacker’

            Bedell Smith told Menzies MI5 identified Philby as man referred by Gouzenko & Volkov

            Liddell says that that is ‘far from the case’

Oct 2   Edith Tudor-Hart is reported to have been involved in Russian espionage

Oct 3   Martin interviews Laemmel, MI5’s informant known as KASPAR or LAMB

Oct 13 Martin writes to Philby asking for information on Alice Honigmann

Oct 23 Philby explains his retirement from MI6 to Tomás Harris & Liddell

            Philby claims he has been treated very generously: he has no recriminations

Oct 25 Conservative Party defeats Labour in UK Election: Churchill replaces Attlee

Oct 30 Mackenzie of Washington Embassy expresses doubts about Philby’s behaviour in May

Nov 27 Carey Foster of FO warns White of possible damage to Anglo-American relations

Nov 30 White’s report on Philby is submitted and distributed

Dec 3   Terms of reference for Milmo are issued to him

Dec 6   Reilly prepares brief for Eden: says ‘MI5 is ready for interrogation’

Dec 7   Eden expresses deep concerns about Philby case, but is unaware of White interviews

            Liddell informs Churchill that all possible inquiries have only just been completed

            Churchill orders interrogation to occur at once

Dec 10 Liddell tells Burt of cumulative effect of evidence

Dec 12 Interrogation of Philby by Milmo takes place

            Philby denies that any of his previous statements were falsehoods

Dec ?   Milmo issues detailed report, concluding that Philby is guilty

Dec 18 White has completed his draft report for Americans on Philby

Dec 21 MI6 starts counter-attack on Milmo’s findings

Dec 28 Philby is encouraged to comment orally on his previous falsehoods

Dec 31 MI6 & MI5 to send agreed viewpoint on Philby to FBI & CIA

            Martin has made extremely good analysis of position: heavy burden of guilt

            Plan for White to take memorandum to FBI & CIA on January 14

Several broad conclusions can be drawn from these items:

  • A song-and-dance was being undertaken on the report into Philby. It had essentially been completed before June, but was not actually released until the end of November. MI5 pretended to the Foreign Office that the discoveries were all new, while White’s report did not disclose fresh findings unearthed during the summer.
  • MI5 had obviously been in close communication with MI6 throughout, and the presentation of the report to Menzies on November 30 would have been no surprise.
  • White continued to dissemble, presenting his personal submission to Menzies of his report as an act of courage.
  • MI6 was both in denial and in panic. Under pressure from the Americans, they forced Philby’s resignation at the same time that Easton was telling them Philby was innocent.
  • Philby’s resignation occurred more than two months before the official report was submitted.
  • The arrival of the new government under Churchill in October 1951 may help to explain the sudden change in the course of events in November.

The White Interviews

Dick White

During the six months after Burgess and Maclean disappeared, MI5 undertook, on the assumption that there had been a last-minute tip-off, a frequently hesitant inquiry into Philby as its possible source. The process (the ‘PEACH’ case) started immediately after Philby returned to Britain on June 12, when he was asked ‘to help with the inquiries’ into the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, and underwent three interviews, in quick succession, carried out by Dick White. Since we are dependent almost exclusively on the memoirs or communications of the two participants (with some added commentary from Guy Liddell) for a record of what happened, it is useful to summarize how they each presented the events before I attempt to put the confrontations in context.

Philby had prepared thoroughly for the encounter, since a handwritten letter from Jack Easton had alerted him to the reason that he was being recalled – as if he had not been able to guess it. Easton’s precise role here is uncertain: at this stage he was probably less informed about the background material, least of all the Litzi business. Philby interpreted the message as a friendly warning. Easton was present at the subsequent interviews carried out by White (of which Philby claimed there were ‘several’), but White was not a practiced interrogator: he tried to be friendly, wanting help in ‘clearing up this appalling Burgess-Maclean affair’. Philby prevaricated and distorted the truth, but when openings cropped up, such as the question of the funding for Philby’s first trip to Spain, White failed to follow up his line of questioning. Philby wrote little more about what else was discussed, and concluded his account by describing how he was summoned twice by Menzies, once to be told that Bedell Smith had declared him persona non grata in Washington, and then to be informed that Menzies would have to ask for his resignation. He would be given £4000 in place of a pension. Both events are undated: Philby also misidentified the source of Bedell Smith’s intelligence as William J. Howard when it should have been Daniel Harvey.

As for Dick White’s testimony, Tom Bower (White’s biographer, who inherited substantial notes from Andrew Boyle), relates how White had beforehand visited John Sinclair of MI6 in Broadway Buildings to ‘discuss the unprecedented MI5 questioning of a senior SIS officer’, and how Sinclair had grudgingly agreed to the request. At that stage, White gave the impression that suspicions about Philby barely existed, and that he and Martin were therefore about to start out on their task of research. In light of the chronology given above, it is clear that the idea that a fresh MI5 project allowed it to uncover dramatic new information on Philby was a fiction.

But what shocking information they uncovered! As Bower records:

There was the discovery that Philby’s first wife, Litzi Friedmann, was an Austrian Communist. In 1946, White had been asked by SIS to check on Litzi after Philby had applied for permission to divorce his youthful transgression. White had been told by Klop Ustinov that Litzi was a Soviet agent, but that had not been held against Philby.

(Of course, Bower gives Seale and McConville as sources for this revelation.) But that was no ‘discovery’, if White had been informed of it back in 1946. And Philby did not need ‘permission’ to get his divorce: what he had to do was face the music of informing his boss at MI6 that he was still married to Litzi. Moreover, that factoid was one of the points expressed in the dossier already sent over to the CIA. One can already detect the clumsy attempt at covering up traces, and the absurd pretence that the senior officers in MI5 had known nothing about the Litzi Feabre nonsense.

White described his tactics as relying on ‘an element of quiet probing and deceptive gentleness’, as if his prey would have been easily susceptible to such charms. He quickly concluded that Philby was lying, but he lacked the patience and guile to trap him. According to Bower, White then submitted a report to Menzies ‘which concluded that Philby was suspect’. That precise report (which may have been delivered orally) has not seen the light of day, and it is significant that White’s final version of it was not presented until November 30 – a phenomenon that I shall analyze later. The judgment on Philby’s possible culpability seems very tame: Philby was suspect when he was brought in, and clearly incriminated even more deeply by the time White had finished. Yet Bower appears to have been taken in by White’s claim that he showed great courage in confronting the MI6 chiefs with his suspicions, a dishonourable performance since it was he who had arranged for the indictment that he and Martin had prepared to be used as evidence for Menzies from the CIA.

The last source is Guy Liddell, who was listening in to the interviews (and had only that day returned from leave, it should be recalled). He failed to find Philby convincing when the latter was asked about the Volkov affair, and at the second interview, when White started asking Philby about his first wife, Liddell recorded:

            Dick then questioned him about his first wife. He said that he had married her in Vienna in about 1934, knowing that she was a Communist, but that he had subsequently converted her. His marriage had broken up in 1936 and, so far as he knew, she was no more than a left winger. He had himself never been a Communist, but his sympathies with the left had been strong when he married his first wife in 1934.

Liddell felt uncomfortable about revealing this information to the CIA. Sillitoe had just cabled from Washington asking for guidance as to when he should reveal to the FBI that Litzi had been a communist, and Liddell dithered, writing:

            We have, therefore, left the decision with the D.G., emphasising that if he feels it necessary to communicate this information now, he should make it clear that no proper assessment of Philby’s position has so far been possible, and that they should not prejudge the issue on the information about his former wife. This is to be subject of C’s approval, which we cannot get until tomorrow.

This whole exercise was thus something of a charade. Yet a fresh interpretation jumps out. Menzies may well have been convinced of Philby’s guilt, and thus become party to White’s plot,  before Kim arrived in London. He and White could have decided that, by encouraging the CIA to demand punishment for Philby’s transgressions, it would provide a useful external alibi for what had to be done. Menzies and White both knew about the Litzi-Honigmann business, and must have started to experience horrifying suspicions that they had been utterly hoodwinked by Philby, and that his career with MI6 since 1941 had been a chapter of disasters. Thus Menzies dutifully followed what Bedell Smith advised him to do – dismiss Philby. By that action, Menzies and White probably believed and hoped that the problem would die away. But the events show that the newly appointed deputies to Menzies, Sinclair and Easton, were going to become the flies in the ointment, not having been directly exposed to the shenanigans of 1946. One (Sinclair) remained a staunch believer in Philby’s innocence, the other (Easton) soon felt betrayed by the fact that part of the Philby dossier had been withheld from him, and he became convinced of Philby’s guilt. In their different ways, they would both exert a significant influence on the evolution of the case.

American Pressure, and the Resignation

The ‘negotiations’ of Philby’s resignation (if they can be considered such) are worthy of comment. Menzies ‘asked’ for Philby’s resignation, the implication being that, if he did not do so, he would be fired, presumably for conduct unbecoming an intelligence officer, or because he had lied about his past. One might expect an innocent man to protest violently at the ruination of his career, but Philby did not do so. He not only knew he was guilty: it was evident that his employer had enough evidence to condemn him, even though none of it would stand up in a trial – a procedure that MI6 would be very reluctant to engage in because of the publicity and the possibility of a negative result. After all, Philby had not actually been caught in the act of handing over privileged material to a foreign power, and he had resisted pressure to confess.

Yet letting the man loose had its problems, too. MI6 could hardly expect Philby to put a convincing spin on the termination of his career, and his friends would ask questions. Those in the United States and in the United Kingdom who were convinced of his guilt would demand to know why he had been allowed to get away, and ask questions about unresolved aspects of the case. And those who believed that he had been set up as a scapegoat for the Burgess/Maclean fiasco would make protestations about an innocent officer’s being lost from the service. In fact, all three reactions occurred, which meant that the matter could not be buried quietly.

The actual date of the agreement is elusive. As I showed, Philby himself indicated that it occurred very soon after the White interviews, in June, and that he thereafter spent the whole summer house-hunting. Cave Brown had the encounter occurring at the end of July or the beginning of August. Nigel West bizarrely presents it as happening in November. The argument in favour of Philby’s account is defensible, since Menzies would have needed to respond quickly to American pressure. In his book The Agency, John Ranelagh wrote that Bedell Smith accompanied the Harvey report with a cover letter to Menzies that stated: “Fire Philby or we break off the intelligence relationship”.

Yet other evidence at first suggests that the process was more drawn out. The discussion in July over the ‘ELLI’ question, and White’s continued process of investigations, suggest that Philby’s fate might still have been in the air, with Menzies possibly having second thoughts: he expressed a desire for the case to be completed before Philby returned from leave. Easton’s trip to the United States at that time to inform the CIA that Philby was guilty only of ‘indiscretions’ is difficult to explain if the traitor’s disposition had already been decided, although it would have constituted a tactless response on Menzies’s part after Bedell Smith’s forthright threat by letter. The fact that Philby was recorded by Liddell as being on holiday in early August, ‘looking for a job’, might indicate that the agreement had only recently been made, and the timing of his resignation taking effect only on September 18 would support the Cave Brown thesis, with Easton’s memory being judged more reliable than Philby’s.

Carey Foster

The truth is probably more complicated, and the archive is ambiguous. Philby’s account appears to be superficially correct. A memorandum written by Carey Foster on December 11 specifically states that Philby’s employment was ‘terminated’ in June,’ because of his close association with Burgess’ (a euphemistic way of representing Philby’s culpability). Perhaps he was given three months’ salary, which might explain the September 18 ‘resignation’, the record of which also appears in the PEACH archive. But other events suggest that Menzies issued some kind of suspended sentence, and awaited the results of further research before confirming his decision. These events include the bizarre mission by Easton to Washington.

As the news spread around Washington in late June, pressure started to be applied to the MI6 outpost in the British Embassy, with questions being asked as to whether Maclean had had access to technical information on atomic weaponry. The Foreign Office had to arrange for a question to be asked in the House of Commons whereby the new Foreign Minister, Herbert Morrison, could deny any such knowledge on Maclean’s part. (His predecessor, Ernest Bevin, had given up the post in March, owing to ill-health, and had died a month later.) Moreover, the CIA persisted on the ‘ELLI’ business, which White’s memorandum had naively overlooked. Liddell recorded in his Diary (July 7) that Menzies had judged that Philby would have to be told about the American’s belief that he could be ‘ELLI’, and would even have to explain to the Americans why he was not ‘ELLI’ – a quite absurd proposition, given the murkiness behind the rumour. Of course Philby would not have been able to do anything about it, but it helps to suggest that his fate was still undetermined at this stage, and that Menzies was not fully committed to firing him. It was now that Dick White determined that he had to bow out of the investigation, since he believed that the ‘ELLI’ and Volkov cases were outside his purview (mistakenly, of course, with ‘ELLI’, since the defector had made his assertions on Commonwealth soil). White recommended that Edward Cussen (who had interrogated P. G. Wodehouse) or Helenus Milmo should conduct an inquiry. No doubt he felt the heat around him.

In mid-July Easton was sent to Washington to calm things down. In the words of Cave Brown (who interviewed Easton in early July, 1986):

            At that point [vaguely defined, in Cave Brown’s narrative] “C” decided to send Jack Easton to Washington to see Bedell Smith. But he did not tell Easton about Goldsmith White’s communiqué, nothing about Philby’s involvement in the Volkov affair (Easton had joined SIS afterward), and he enjoined Easton to take the boat to the States rather than fly. He further instructed Easton to tell nothing more than that Philby was ‘guilty of nothing worse than gross indiscretion, but that an inquiry was being instituted into all aspects concerning him’. Indeed, “C” appears not to have been as alarmed as those around him.

This is all very weird, and does not sound authentic. Admittedly, Easton was known and well-respected in Washington, but for Menzies to send him as an emissary with such parsimonious information, on a slow boat to China, while at the same time concealing vital information from him, would have been a colossal misjudgment. Simply because Easton joined MI6 after the Volkov affair was no reason for him not to have been briefed on it, or not to have read the reports. Moreover, Easton had been present at White’s interviews with Philby, so how could he claim such ignorance to Cave Brown? I think it much more likely that Easton was already familiar with the other nine points of the communiqué, but that, on his return, a major assertion about Philby’s marital status stunned him. To mix metaphors, it is much more likely that Cave Brown simply got the wrong end of the stick than that Easton was trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Nevertheless, Washington seemed appeased, and Easton sent a signal to Menzies advising him not to take any action against Philby until he returned – a clear indication that Philby’s fate was still up in the air.

For some reason, on his return, Easton contacted his predecessor, Valentine Vivian, and probably through him discovered an expanded version of the seven-point report compiled by White. This contained many of the familiar claims against Philby (from Litzi’s communism to the gatherings at Bentinck Street, from Burgess to Volkov), but was headed by an astounding, fresh assertion – that Philby’s marriage to Aileen Furse had been bigamous. (The ten points of this document are reproduced in a tight summary in Cave Brown’s book, suggesting that Easton had maintained a copy rather than relying on memory.) It was this finding that appeared to anger Easton the most, as he recalled the occasion when Philby had responded to his congratulations on the birth of his latest child, now shown to be out of wedlock. It confirmed his impression that Philby was a cad, ‘an accomplished liar . . . capable of anything’. Most of all, Easton felt that his professional integrity had been attacked, since he had been called upon to lie to the Americans.

Now this revelation may not come as a surprise to coldspur readers, as I expressed my bewilderment last month over the indulgence of the Chelsea Registry Office in so casually accepting the fact of Philby’s divorce from Litzi. So perhaps it never happened? And thus the Georg Honigmann-Litzi Friedmann/Philby marriage was likewise bigamous? While the comrades might not have concerned themselves unduly with such bourgeois matters, the whole exercise provoked Easton (who had been assigned the Philby case by Menzies) to haul in Philby for another inquisition, where he challenged him about several of the points – including a telling item about ‘the revelations concerning Lizzy Friedmann’s [sic] associations with a Soviet agent in Germany’, which suggested that a garbled version of the Honigmann business had found its way into the chronicle. He asked him about his bigamous marriage: Philby apparently did not deny it. He had no answers to Easton’s questions. Easton told Cave Brown that ‘he looked and behaved like a rat in a trap. I let him go. But his attitude was such that everything being said against him was true and therefore a strong presumption of guilt against him’.

What is disappointing about this account is Cave Brown’s inability to follow up with incisive questions: he appears to be overwhelmed by the material, and can be considered the journalistic equivalent of Arthur Martin. To start with: in what circumstances was the fact of Philby’s bigamy discovered? When did it occur? Who knew about it? Did anyone at the Kim-Aileen ceremony in September 1946 bear false witness? Why was Tomás Harris listed as the only witness when we now know that Flora Solomon – and Frank Birch – also attended (see KV 2/4634)? Did Philby truly not admit that he had never divorced Litzy? And did Easton (who clearly knew about the Honigmann business) ask Philby why he had not arranged his divorce in that summer of 1946 before Litzi left the UK for good? (It is possible that Easton was ignorant of the events of the summer of 1946, and believed that Philby had bigamously married Aileen much earlier: after all, she had changed her name by deed poll.) In any event, Easton then presented his findings to Menzies – it could not have been a comfortable encounter – and soon Menzies realized the seriousness of the situation, and came to grips with his earlier decision that Philby would have to be dismissed. Bigamy was a crime, unlike adultery, and provided solid grounds for dismissal. Thus Philby could be relied upon not to spill the beans about the true cause.

What is also extraordinary about this revelation is that it was Easton alone who provided it, thirty-five years after the events, a few years before his death in 1990. One might have expected someone else to have leaked the secret during that time. So was Easton the only officer who knew about it? Would John Sinclair and his cohorts have been such enthusiastic supporters of Philby had the shocking news been revealed to them?

The Dog Days of Summer

Events moved in a desultory fashion that summer. No doubt many of the leading figures had to take their vacations, holidays and leave. As early as June 11, Carey Foster, the Foreign Office’s Security Officer, had requested other government departments to refrain from commenting on issues related to Burgess and Maclean, as he wanted the Foreign Office itself to handle any communications. Ten days later, the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, recommended setting up a committee to review Foreign Office security. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. approved, but when the group met under Alexander Cadogan’s chairmanship, members were kept in the dark as to the investigations into Kim Philby, with Dick White appearing at one of the meetings to help obfuscate the situation.

One might conclude that, with Philby’s resignation sealed, White and Menzies would have imagined that the troublesome case would quietly die down. After all, the destination of Burgess and Maclean was unknown. Attlee’s administration did not apply any pressure, since the possibility of a ‘Third Man’ had been concealed from them, and Attlee was constantly looking over his shoulder at his Left Wing, sympathetic to the Soviets. White had kicked the ball into the long grass by abdicating any responsibility for looking into the Gouzenko and Volkov cases. Yet the pot started to be prodded from both sides.

Kim Philby’s greatest friend and ally, Nicholas Elliott, had in June returned to the UK from Bern, Switzerland, to take up a new position in MI6. Liddell refers to a visit that Elliot paid him on June 16 (his name is redacted, but the identity is unquestionable), indicating that Philby was using him to determine where he stood:

            Xxxxxxx xxxxxxx came round to see me. Telephone checks had indicated that he had rather got his ear to the ground in S.I.S. and was trying to find out for Kim where the latter stood. He did not, however, attempt to pump me and prefaced his remarks by saying that he knew nothing whatever about the case.

Apart from the ominous reference to telephone-tapping, this was relatively harmless, but Elliott would increase the volume during the following months, especially when Philby felt badly treated by the Milmo interrogations. In the gloom of his betrayal, Elliott’s 1991 memoir Never Judge A Man by His Umbrella clumsily finessed his whole campaign to defend Philby. Ben Macintyre describes Elliott’s efforts in the following terms: “Within MI6 Elliott swiftly emerged as Philby’s most doughty champion, defending him against all accusers and loudly declaring his innocence”, but the author provides no sources for his claims.

The pressure from the accusers annoyingly arose in Washington, where some niggling interest endured, and Guy Liddell gave the impression that it was his job to quell it. On August 16, he informed Patterson that he intended to pay a visit to the USA and Canada, and his diary entries at the end of August (when White was on leave, and Liddell therefore had to take over) indicate that the CIA was expressing disappointment at the speed of the inquiry. Liddell had to explain that it was not useful to attempt to interrogate Philby over Gouzenko and Volkov, since MI5 was still gathering information. The outcome was that Liddell did indeed visit Washington between September 19 and 21, although we have to draw on CIA records for this information, as Liddell gives no indication of the mission in his diaries, rather naively reporting that he returned from leave (again!) on October 1.

Liddell’s task was not eased by the political rivalry between the FBI and the CIA. (In October, Hoover came to be very annoyed on learning that Menzies had explained VENONA to Bedell Smith, and he let Geoffrey Patterson know of his ire in no uncertain terms.) On August 9, Liddell wrote:

            I saw Patrick Reilly and cleared with him, and subsequently of SIS, a letter which the D.G. is sending to Hoover, suggesting the indoctrination of Bedell-Smith into basic material connected with the MACLEAN case. In spite of the fact that Bedell-Smith is Chairman of U.S.C.I.B., the equivalent of SIGINT, he is unaware of the source of our information. [VENONA: coldspur]. This causes his subordinates to worry about S.I.S. and ourselves with wild theories about the disappearance of BURGESS and MACLEAN.

Three days later, he records how the FBI was demanding more stringent interrogation of the suspect based on ‘more sinister allegations against Philby arising from both the Gouzenko and Wolkov [sic] cases’, and Liddell again had to temporize by replying that MI5 was still making exhaustive inquiries.

As summer turned into autumn, the investigation picked up again. What further inquiries were being made at this stage is unclear, and it took until October 1 for Liddell to acknowledge that the case against Philby was now ‘much bleaker’. (His diary for the whole of September is blank.) By now, evidence of Litzi’s multiple travels to the Continent in the late 1930s has come to light. “The inference is that she was then acting as a courier. These facts were never revealed by Kim, although they must have been within his knowledge.” And then, Liddell responds in a provocative fashion to an observation by Bedell Smith, who had apparently told Sillitoe ‘that he thought that MI5 were now confident that Philby was identical with the man mentioned by Gouzenko and Wolkov.’ Liddell’s comment runs as follows: “This is of course far from the case.”

Now this statement could be interpreted in many ways. It could suggest that the figures identified by Gouzenko and Volkov were confidently not identified as being the same individual – a simplification encouraged by the two-dimensional American mind, and abetted by inadequate knowledge. It could serve simply to deny MI5’s confidence that Philby was either ELLI, or Volkov’s counter-intelligence officer. It could imply that MI5 had excluded the possibility that Philby could be one of the pair – perhaps because the ELLI business had already been solved and put to bed. But why ‘of course’? It indicates that certain facts of the case were widely understood and accepted by Liddell and his colleagues. Above all, it suggests that MI5 in general was still very uncertain as to how it could handle the Americans’ persistent objections and inquiries about Philby.

A remarkable new set of items of information arrived, beginning at the end of September, which suggested that further investigations were being taken a little more seriously. The first has a humorous angle. It consists of a memorandum sent by an A. G. R. Rouse, from within the Foreign Office, to Carey Foster of the Security Department, dated September 21, and headed: ‘British Journalists Attached to the Franco Side During the Spanish Civil War’. The writer apologizes for the delay in responding, but he has evidently been making discreet inquiries via Chatham House while avoiding any direct approach to the Times. His main conclusion runs as follows: “There was, however, a British correspondent by the name of H. A. R. Philpott who was evidently decorated by Franco, but we have been unable to trace what paper he represented.”

Apart from the mistake over the name, the obvious question is: what took MI5 so long to trigger this request? It should clearly have been made in February 1940, after the interrogation of Krivitsky, and not as the outcome of an afterthought in the summer of 1951. Yet I offer a darker interpretation. If this disclosure was made only in September 1951, how was it that a confident expression of the connection was able to be made in the dossier of May? It suggests again that the link had been identified earlier, soon after the Krivitsky interrogation, but put into abeyance because of the belief in Philby’s new commitment, until the suspicions about him surfaced at the end of the decade.

Further items followed. On October 2, Edith Tudor-Hart had been interviewed, and admitted to having been involved in Russian espionage, thus casting the spotlight again on her close friend, Litzi. The following day, Arthur Martin conducted his infamous interview of Laemmel, MI5’s informant known as KASPAR or LAMB, which I tried to dissect in my March posting, and cleared up last month. This interview can be interpreted to show just how ignorant or confused Martin was, despite the fact that, according to Liddell’s diary entry of August 20, ‘Martin knows his cases inside out and backwards’. Martin’s bizarre behaviour was then further exemplified by a letter he wrote for the attention of MI6 on October 13, probably to Kim Philby, apparently unaware of the fact that his target had resigned some time ago. He asked for information on Alice Honigmann, revealing that he knew that she had been married to ‘a British subject’ in 1934, but thereby failed to help his addressee at all, since he omitted providing the husband’s name. The text suggests that he had no idea that the new bride of Georg Honigmann had actually been married to (and maybe was still legally entwined with) the subject of MI5’s continuing inquiries, and he makes some clumsy mistakes about the Honigmanns’ marital status. It is at first difficult to determine whether Martin was being stupid, obtuse, or simply devious.

Yet this document strikes me as being a classical example of the ‘Genuine’ but ‘Inauthentic’ article. It is Genuine, because it is correctly dated and authored, and appears in a context that looks realistic, but the letter is patently Inauthentic. Its insincerity is obvious in many ways: the name of the addressee has been redacted, but the suffix of ‘Esq., O.B.E’ has been disingenuously left in place, betraying a clear clue to whom the letter was sent. Martin may or may not have had the facts of Philby’s dismissal explained to him, but the impression he wants to give is that lowlier officers in MI5 like him have properly been kept in the dark. He also pretends to show ignorance of the full history of Lizzy Honigmann, thus not providing full help to the person whose help he is requesting, even though the record of his interview with LAMB a few days before proves that he knows a lot more. And finally, he displays a foggy but very revealing understanding of the marital status of the Honigmanns, first claiming that Litzi lived with Georg until 1946 (i.e. in an unmarried state) ‘when they both left the UK’, next indicating that Litzi ‘joined her husband in Berlin’, before stating that ‘it is believed that the Honigmanns married after they arrived in Berlin’ (clumsiness, simply confusion, or another example of deliberate obtuseness, perhaps?). It all sounds like an awkward put-up job engineered by his supervisor, Dick White, to furnish evidence for the historical record that MI5 was performing its due diligence.

Liddell was actually groping around in the dark at this time, trying to put his finger on the core of the communist conspiracy, all the while blissfully unaware of how he had been betrayed. A telling diary entry of October 22 shows how he had had a private talk with Anthony Blunt, of all people, and had sought insights from him about Burgess’s motives for ‘going away’– like Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, presumably. He also had a private discussion with Victor and Tess Rothschild, believing them to be loyal and honourable allies, and Tess tried to distract attention from herself and her husband by pointing to ‘a girl who was formerly a secret member of the Party, but has had, she believes, nothing to with it for ten years’. (How she knew that fact so intimately did apparently not cross Liddell’s mind.) He wrote: “I do not know to whom she is referring, it may be xxxxxxxxx’s wife’ [probably Jenifer Hart, Herbert Hart having been being a respected member of MI5 during the war]. Liddell then reflected:

            Tess would be willing to put us in touch with this person, provided it were possible that the information did not go further than Dick and myself. I said that one of the difficulties we were up against was that we had had to revise our opinion about these [sic] sort of people. Formerly we had been inclined to take the view that those who had committed youthful indiscretions and had not showed up in the records for ten years could now be regarded as cleared, but in the light of recent experiences we have had to revise our views.

Indeed.

Yet what probably changed the course of events dramatically was the fact that Prime Minister Attlee called an election for October 25, but lost it. The Tories returned to power, under Churchill’s leadership, with Anthony Eden resuming his post as Foreign Secretary.

Churchill Replaces Attlee

It apparently took several weeks for the new administration to concern itself properly with the PEACH case. When Liddell accompanied Sillitoe to the offices of Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Secretary Eden on December 7, he observed that Eden did not have a good insight into what had been happening, and what the strategy was, recording:

            Eden was worried about the PHILBY case; he had evidently been extremely badly briefed and had given the P.M. the impression that PHILBY might escape at any moment and that another scandal would ensure similar to that in the case of BURGESS and MACLEAN. The D.G. explained that on the fact [sic] of it this was not at all likely. Eden was evidently unaware that PHILBY had already been interrogated three times, although not quite on the lines of the proposed interrogation which is to take place on the 19th December, on the basis of a number of subsequent enquiries.

Liddell was displaying a good deal of disingenuousness here. After all, the Foreign Office, in the shape of Carey Foster, had done its best to cast a veil over the whole affair, and MI5 was historically not known for its candour with its political masters. Only eighteen months beforehand, in the wake of the Fuchs business, Liddell and White had persuaded Sillitoe to lie to Prime Minster Attlee over the checks that had been carried out on Fuchs’s communism, with the result that Sillitoe had given them a severe dressing-down over putting him in that position. Moreover, Liddell confessed in his diary that he had claimed to Eden that ‘all enquiries which seemed possible had only just been completed’, to which a more competent and alert Foreign Secretary might have riposted: “What is taking you so long?”

Indeed, MI5 must have been sensing some pressure, as White’s dossier had been ‘circulated’ (to whom is not clear) on November 30. Liddell’s comment on Eden’s being left in the dark is ambiguous (Did he not know that Philby had been interrogated at all? Or was he in ignorance that as many as three interviews had taken place?). Yet, since the White report states clearly that Philby was ‘interviewed on three occasions’, it seems safe to assume that Eden had not been granted the favour of being able to read the report for himself. Surely, if he knew of the existence of such, he would have asked for a copy.

The introduction to White’s report is worth quoting in full:

            Ever since the disappearance of Maclean and Burgess the Security Service have been making a study of all available evidence in order to find out how Maclean was alerted just before he was going to be interrogated.

This is a carefully crafted deception. The study had started before the disappearance. It was an inquiry into the probability of Philby’s general guilt, not the specific event of an ‘alert’ to Maclean. The implied immediacy of the interrogation was a lie.

This MI5 dossier listed several items that appear in my catalogue of lapses in last month’s coldspur, citing them as evidence of Philby’s mendaciousness (‘PEACH’s statements are false’). They include his status with the communist Litzi, his relations with Burgess, and his own political views. It then goes on to list ‘information from the Russian defectors and Intelligence sources’, namely (i) the Krivitsky testimony, (ii) the Volkov disclosures, (iii) the changes to the Soviet cypher system, (iv) Philby’s ability to inspect a telegram to Washington (on May 16) concerning the date of the Maclean interrogation (projected then to be ‘immediately after May 23’; and (v) the probable acquaintance of Philby and Maclean when at Cambridge. One notable omission from this list is the Gouzenko pointer to a spy known as ‘ELLI’ in the bowels of the Intelligence Services. Again, one has to wonder whether this was because ELLI had already been accounted for, or because the exposure was too monstrous to admit. Given the Americans’ perpetual interest, I would support the former theory. It also fails to report the fresh revelations about Litzi’s travels in Europe which Liddell referred to in his diary entry for October 1.

The objective of the report, however, was apparently not to make a case that Philby had operated for any length of time as an agent for the NKVD/KGB, but to determine whether or not PEACH was ‘the most likely person to have been responsible for alerting Maclean’. (Note the subtle change from the introductory language: Philby had of course alerted Maclean to the HOMER advances.) And White offered the information that the Security Service had reached the conclusion that it was indeed PEACH who was responsible (how else would that derive, except from him?), stating that he had ‘studied all the evidence’ and agreed with that conclusion. But of course White had done no such thing. He had apparently never considered any other possible leakers (such as Blunt), and ignored the fact that Philby, working in Washington, was surely not best situated to control the course of events. He had of course suggested that Philby was able to intervene only as late as May 16, when he saw the telegram. Moreover, a mass of relevant information that had either been known about for some time, or had been uncovered in the period since (such as the whole Honigmann business) had been omitted from the report.

Rather ingenuously, however, the White/Martin report does not examine how Philby was able to evade any investigation at the time of the various events, a point that I shall re-examine later. For instance, the following text appears, concerning Krivitsky’s evidence:

            In all respects, therefore, PEACH fulfils the description given by Krivitsky. So far as can be ascertained no other journalist accredited to Franco Spain does.

Anyone with any sense of the political background who came across this sentence should have reacted with dismay, even rage, since it reflects dire incompetence on the part of MI5. Nevertheless, Carey Foster was highly positive when he read the report: “I have read your dossier on PEACH which I think has been extremely well assembled.”

Churchill and Eden, presumably basing their judgments on a précis of the report, were less patient. Eden and his Permanent Under-Secretary of State, William Strang (who had been serving in that role since 1949) believed, according to Liddell, that further interrogations would lead to prosecution – an observation that would suggest that Carey Foster had not been keeping his boss Strang (a nasty piece of work, by the way) properly informed of MI5’s deliberations. Somewhat hastily, Prime Minister Churchill ordered that a more rigorous interrogation be undertaken immediately. He and Eden would be visiting Washington in the near term, and they wanted to be able to deal with the case then, whatever the outcome. Helenus (‘Buster’) Milmo Q.C., who had already been selected to perform a more severe examination of Philby on December 19, was ordered to start it a week earlier.

Helenus Milmo, Q.C.

The éminence grise behind the strategizing was Patrick Reilly, the rather ineffectual chief of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who would have been responsible for the smooth transition of intelligence matters between administrations. Yet he may have had conflicts of interest, having served for a year during the War as Menzies’s private secretary, and he notoriously admitted to having a chair-destroying fit when he heard about the disappearance of Burgess and MacLean (see the section ‘Reilly and the Hollis Mystery’ in https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/, where I also analyze Reilly’s mendacious contribution to the affair). I repeat here what I quoted then from Michael Goodman’s history of the JIC: “The JIC’s failure to probe the strategic implications of the damage caused by Soviet espionage is even harder to understand, despite the fact that administrative responsibility for security and counter-intelligence lay with MI5”.

The reason for the expedited second stage of the investigation was the concern that Philby might flee the country: the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was fearful of a repeat of the Burgess/Maclean fiasco, and advised Churchill accordingly. If Philby (or Moscow) had been hellbent on his departing, however, it would have been arranged whether he surrendered his passport or not. Yet the result was that Milmo did not spend enough time performing research to prepare properly for the case. Since the Foreign Office believed that a prosecution would be the natural outcome of the procedure, and was aware of the Americans looking over their shoulders, it was eager to pounce on any timidity. MI5 was much more wary, knowing that, since the evidence was so circumstantial, only a full-blown confession by Philby would lead to conviction, and a trial could moreover turn out to be very messy.

The result was a rush. It was not that Milmo was unfamiliar with the world of intelligence and counter-espionage: he had worked for MI5 during the war, and had interrogated suspected Nazi spies. But he did not have time to think through the implications of all the information that was passed to him. He was provided with a dossier ‘together with a large number of appendices, statements taken from witnesses and other papers and documents bearing upon the subject matter of the inquiry’. MI5 had by now upped its ante: in its initial recommendation that PEACH be interrogated, it overtly expressed its suspicion that PEACH ‘is, and has been for many years, a spy for the Russians’. It also highlighted the risk of Philby’s fleeing abroad, and what steps should be taken to prevent such an event, and also stressed the importance of keeping the Americans informed because of any possible political fallout.

The Milmo Interrogation

Thus Milmo undertook the interrogation on December 12. I do not intend here to provide a comprehensive summary of Milmo’s findings: Nigel West’s Cold War Spymaster provides a useful reproduction of most of his report, which is in any case available for downloading at no charge from the National Archives as an item in the second PEACH file (see https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C14944024 ). What I shall explore are a few fascinating aspects of the process and of Milmo’s findings, namely the following phenomena: 1) the terms of reference and the logic behind Milmo’s conclusions; 2) the items that were left out – or possibly redacted from the published version of the report; 3) the items that were freshly recorded here, and have not been presented anywhere else, so far as I can judge; and 4) the sections of the Appendix, and a later ‘Summing-Up’ that show how Philby later reacted to demonstrably false assertions that he had made in the course of the interrogation.

  1. Terms of Reference:

Milmo introduced his report by writing: “By letter dated 3rd December 1951, I was instructed to undertake an official enquiry into the possibility of there having been a leakage of information to Mr Burgess and/or Maclean resulting in their subsequent disappearance.” I make an important distinction here. Note that Milmo was not instructed to make an inquiry into the method by which Maclean had been warned that his identity as HOMER had been divulged: Burgess was an implicit subject of the inquiry. His mission was to determine how Burgess and Maclean had been warned of Maclean’s approaching interrogation, which action enabled them to escape. That strictly framed the inquiry into the events of late May in the UK, not those of April in Washington. Milmo would later come to link the two sets of circumstances, but his method of doing so was utterly illogical.

Milmo was further instructed, if he were ‘satisfied that such leakage did in fact occur, he was to ‘enquire as to the identity of the officials or official responsible for such leakage and the motive which prompted such leakage’. Yet he did no such thing. He received his instructions soon after December 3, and started the interrogation just over a week later. He had no time to conduct an independent investigation: he admitted that he was completely dependent on ‘a very full dossier on the case’, which he had to assimilate over a few days, complemented by interviews with officers of the Security Service. He never interviewed members of the Foreign Office staff, and for documentation relied on what had been prepared for him. He had no way of knowing how ‘full’ the dossier was, or what had been left out.

He thus made an inconsequential jump in judging that ‘there was no doubt that it was as a result of a leakage that Burgess and Maclean disappeared from this country on 25th May’, and that, since Philby knew Burgess, and that the evidence points to the fact that Philby had been a Soviet agent for many years, Philby must have been ‘directly and deliberately responsible for the leakage which in fact occurred’. A key passage in the Appendix (which may have been overlooked) runs as follows:

            At the end of February 1951 Burgess commits a series of ridiculous speeding offences and the suggestion initiated by Philby himself that this may well have been done deliberately in order to engineer his (Burgess’s) return to London. If Burgess did in fact know at that stage of the danger of Maclean’s position, he would have been only too conscious of the danger in which he himself stood  . . . .

            If one assumes that Philby was also a Soviet agent, the obvious course was to get Burgess, who was not suspect, to London as soon as possible, for then both ends are covered. Philby is stationed at the listening point in Washington and will know exactly what is planned; Burgess is in London to take the necessary action on the information which Philby can easily transmit to him. Before Burgess left it was known to Philby that Maclean was on the short list of Foreign Office official under suspicion.

The poverty of this analysis is dumbfounding. Milmo apparently trusts what Philby tells him. He ignores the fact that Burgess was not a suspect at this time, and thus not in danger, and could have remained unscathed had he not joined Maclean. Burgess did not return to London ‘as soon as possible’: he took months to do so. There was no guarantee that all the decisions being made in London about Maclean would be routinely communicated to Washington, for Philby’s consumption. Philby had no ‘easy’ way of transmitting such information to Burgess. How this nonsense was accepted without question is mind-boggling.

Nevertheless, having summarized the evidence that pointed to Philby’s role as a Soviet agent, Milmo presented his conclusion that ‘everything points to Burgess having been the channel through whom Maclean received his warning that an immediate escape was necessary’, and that, since Philby was being kept up-to-date on what was happening, even though he was in Washington, he must be the culprit. The illogical leap he makes is that, since Philby knew Burgess in Washington, Maclean must have received a late warning in London from Burgess, and that message somehow came from Philby, not elsewhere in the Foreign Office. To try to back this up, he asserts that Burgess and Philby ‘were in communication prior to the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean’, although he offers no dates or evidence of how they maintained this communication – an astonishing lapse that MI6 would pounce on early in 1952.

Milmo relegated to an Appendix the less confident statement about his conclusions, accepting that Maclean’s information could have come from a London source. He qualified that by adding ‘it might equally well have been from a Washington source’, which offers a bizarre use of the word ‘equally’, given the logistical problems of communicating secretly from Washington to London. His final observation in this section should have been challenged by any astute reader:

            The fact that Burgess, who had only very recently arrived from Washington in circumstances to which I will revert later, organized the escape and is now known to have been a Soviet agent and to have been one over at least as long a period as Maclean, is a strong pointer to Washington as having been the site of the leakage. Although I have not completed a full enquiry into the point, I came to the conclusion at an early stage that Washington was the probable source of leakage and thereafter concentrated my attention on the personnel at that end.

This is pure waffle. If Milmo has not completed a full enquiry yet, when will he do so? Yet the more dramatic revelation that appears here is the claim that Guy Burgess is ‘now known to have been a Soviet agent and to have been one over at least as long a period as Maclean’. What evidence had led to that conclusion? [see below]

Milmo’s whole strategy and thought-processes were utterly illogical. The exercise may have been a useful one in synthesizing all the collected details about Philby’s career, but it was essentially tangential to the inquiry. Moreover, the mass of evidence supporting Philby’s role as a Soviet agent apparently helped build a case that alleged the longevity of the treachery of Burgess and Maclean, rather than the reverse. After all, the HOMER investigation revealed only fairly recent incidents of espionage activity.

2. Omitted Items:

The body of Milmo’s report is in truth very short: all the interesting material appears in the Appendix. The substance of his argument is the close relationship that Philby enjoyed with Burgess, and the fact that Philby, during his interrogation, denied that he had known Burgess at Cambridge and that Burgess had been a Communist. Milmo also drew attention to the activities of Litzi Philby, and her frequent visits to the Continent in the middle of the 1930s, travel that Philby could not explain from an expense standpoint. He could also not divine any possible objectives of such trips. Milmo judged that they must have been financed by some Communist or Soviet organization.

Krivitsky and a redacted section

Two paragraphs have been redacted in the copy released to the archive (see figure above). Number 8 is short, and, since it is an independent item, its substance cannot easily be determined. The second is itself a second example of ‘further matters which cannot be wholly excluded from consideration though their probative value is small’. Since the first of these examples is the Krivitsky testimony (which Milmo assessed as almost certainly pointing to Philby), one might expect the second to be perhaps analogous evidence from another Soviet defector, and the likeliest candidate is Konstantin Volkov. I recall that, in White’s report, Volkov appears immediately after the Krivitsky item, and White used the Volkov incident to drive home the pattern between the Volkov and the Maclean disappearances, Philby being the common factor. Why, in that case, when the Volkov story has already appeared elsewhere in the file, it would have been felt necessary in 2015, when the file was released to the public, for such information to be blacked out in the Milmo report, is puzzling.

Moreover, the report says nothing about Gouzenko and ELLI, despite the fact that a memorandum from Reilly, issued on December 6 as a brief to the Foreign Office to introduce it, refers specifically to reports from ‘defectors’ (plural), namely Volkov and Gouzenko, claiming that Philby fitted information from them. From the structure and sequence of the report, it is hard to imagine that Item 8 could constitute a paragraph on that mysterious character, ELLI. It also ignores the suggestion (noted by White) that Philby might have been responsible for the leaking of the news that breaches had been made in the Soviet cryptographic system (VENONA). The real culprit was William Weisband, who had been detected in 1950 and sentenced to a year in prison for contempt (not espionage) in November 1950, but, if British intelligence had not been informed of this by the time of White’s report, it is highly unlikely that Milmo would have learned of it in the short time at his disposal. (The Americans had nasty secrets in their closet, too.)

Another area where Milmo is even less forthcoming than White is in his discussion of Litzi, where he draws attention to the inexplicable trips to the Continent, but does not echo White’s assertion that she ‘has been working for the Comintern’ ever since her marriage in 1934. White even included the observation that she was currently married to a German communist and living in East Berlin, but Milmo overlooks that point. Of course, there is no mention of the embarrassing events concerning the Honigmanns, and the dubious divorce, of the summer of 1946.

What is evident from some of the fascinating details in the Appendix is that Milmo had access to some rich information that must have been maintained on Philby for some time, but which had not seen the light of day, and in some cases still has not, even seventy-two years later.

3. Fresh Items:

Apart from the highlighting of the details about Litzi’s unexplained travel, in my mind, the most astonishing revelation is the firm and confident assertion that Burgess ‘has been a Communist agent since not later than his visit to Moscow which took place in 1934’. By now, of course, Maclean has been identified as HOMER, through the VENONA decrypts and his visit to New York to see his wife, although there is no evidence offered for how long he had been involved in espionage, apart from the fact that he had been a dedicated communist at Cambridge. Thus Milmo’s claim that Maclean ‘had been, it is known, a Soviet agent of long standing’, made in his introduction to the Appendix, is vain and unsupported, with the evasive use of the passive voice.

Burgess, on the other hand, was by most accounts out of any such focus until he absconded with Maclean, and became guilty by default, and by association. For instance, Christopher Andrew writes of Burgess’s state of mind in May 1951 (Defend the Realm, p 425):

            Though Burgess was obviously worried, it was reasonable to suppose that the cause of his worries was the fact that he was facing the sack and the end of his Foreign Office career. The very outrageousness of his behaviour protected him against suspicion that he, like Maclean, was a Soviet agent.

Liddell recorded in his diary on June 27:

            I find it difficult, too, to imagine BURGESS as a Comintern agent or an espionage agent in the ordinary accepted interpretation of these terms. He certainly had been Marxian, and, up to a point, an apologist for the Russian regime, and would have been capable of discussing in a highly indiscreet manner with anyone almost anything he got from official sources. He would have done this out of sheer political enthusiasm without any regard for security.

And Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, in The Spy Who Knew Everyone (p 257) inform us, when analyzing the account of Tom Driberg, and describing the fevered meetings that Maclean and Burges had that May:

            The more logical and likely scenario is that the two men, one now known to be a KGB spy, and one still undetected, debated their options and made their decisions.

Thus Milmo miraculously, without performing any original research himself, came up with unassailable conclusions about the status of Burgess that had apparently eluded the best minds in MI5, including Liddell. It would appear that some intense research had been carried out during the summer (as reflected in Liddell’s October 1 diary entry that matters had become ‘blacker’ for Philby), but it is not clear which of the evidence discovered had been lying unanalyzed in the files, and which had been revealed through fresh interviews of relevant persons. For instance, Liddell’s diaries show that Goronwy Rees told him in June that Burgess had been a Comintern agent in 1937 (a fact included by Milmo as secondary support: ‘one Goronwy Rees’: the name is actually redacted in the original, but West supplies it without explanation). Milmo reports, however, (in the Appendix) that ‘the records show’ that Burgess was a prominent Communist when at Cambridge, and he also cites a letter sent by Burgess’s friend Derek Blaikie to the Daily Worker dated December 27, 1935 that reports Burgess’s betrayal by becoming involved in right-wing politics.

What I find provocative about such items is the fact that they had been ignored for so long. (Purvis and Hulbert give a good account of how Burgess had been several times vetted by MI5, and his behaviour excused.)  Moreover, Liddell seemed to be unaware of this evidence, continued to disbelieve the allegations against Burgess, and for the rest of the year stoutly defended Blunt when other MI5 officers started taking an interest in him – no doubt because the investigation moved on to check out other figures who had been contemporary Communists at Cambridge. Blunt was an obvious candidate, and his case was particularly poignant since his communism was known when he joined MI5, and he had been discovered passing messages from Leo Long in MI14 to his Soviet contacts in 1944. Such revelations would have been acutely embarrassing to the PEACH inquiry, and it is not surprising that the weight of the argument should so heftily be placed against Burgess and Philby. Since this piece is focussed on Philby, I shall write no more on this conundrum now, but it is very bizarre that Liddell appeared to be excluded from knowledge of the existence of highly incriminating documents.

            4. The Appendix and Summing-Up:

The meat of the evidence appears in the very dense Appendix, which makes riveting reading.

What is fascinating is the amount of detail provided on the activities of Burgess and Philby (especially), indicating that a close degree of surveillance must have been undertaken for some time. Thus, in a matter of a few months in the summer of 1951, MI5 was able to come up with the following gems:

  1. Burgess’s prominent role as a Communist at Cambridge.
  2. Burgess’s visit to Moscow in 1934 with Derek Blaikie, and his subsequent meeting in Brittany, probably with Klugmann, Maclean and Philby, where the decision to sever their ostensible connections with Communism was made.
  3. Burgess’s employment in Conservative Central Office being revealed by Derek Blaikie in a letter to the Daily Worker.
  4. Maclean’s letter to Granta, published in the issue of March 7, 1934, in which he expressed his fervent communist opinions.
  5. Philby’s being refused a reference for the Indian Civil Service by his Cambridge tutors, because he was a ‘militant Communist’.
  6. Philby’s membership of the Cambridge University Socialist Society.
  7. Burgess’s leading a hunger march at Cambridge.
  8. The discovery in Burgess’s possessions of Philby’s Cambridge degree.
  9. A statutory declaration made by Philby’s grandmother on the occasion of his impending marriage.
  10. A 1937 letter from Litzi Philby to Burgess inviting him to visit her in Paris.
  11. Knowledge of Litzi’s friendship with Mrs Tudor-Hart, and the fact that she owned in 1951 a negative photograph of Philby.
  12. Highly detailed information on Litzi’s multiple journeys to continental Europe in 1934, 1935, 1936 and 1937.
  13. Knowledge that Litzi had the authority to draw on Philby’s banking account during that period, and did exploit that benefit in Greece and Austria.
  14. Availability of correspondence between Litzi and Philby that confirms a strained relationship.
  15. Litzi’s mother revealing that Philby was contributing to her maintenance, derived from her application to the Aliens’ Tribunal.
  16. Philby’s letter to the Passport Office of 26 September, 1939, requesting permission for Litzi to go to France, which contains a number of falsehoods.
  17. Litzi’s ability to gain permission to go to Paris in December 1939.

While these items are not all equally significant, it is evident that MI5 had been keeping close tabs on Philby and Burgess for many years. (Nigel West, in his history of MI5, states that Milicent Bagot presented the secretly-classified files to Arthur Martin after he returned from Washington with Director-General Sillitoe.) The contents of the dossier suggest, however, that MI5 must have been grossly incompetent in its failure to exploit any of the material. Of course there is another explanation, based on my analysis from last month: in late 1939 MI5 had been advised to put the Philby file into abeyance, since he was about to become a reputable MI6 officer. Nearly all the Philby-related items in the list above antedate 1940. The file had clearly not been destroyed, and, if it was retrievable in 1951, it is presumably in the same state in 2023.

The document titled ‘A Summing-Up After The Cross-Examination’ (undated, but probably not submitted until January 1952) merits broader publication, since it contains, in a structured form, the evolution of Philby’s statements during the interrogation, the counter-arguments shown to refute them, and Philby’s ensuing written and oral replies to them, dated December 28 (see sample above). The tables show the webs that Philby span for himself, and his feeble attempts to explain his lies, in matters such as his associations with Burgess and Maclean, his wife’s excursions, and his acquaintance with Tudor-Hart and Klugmann.

One entry especially caught my eye, since its subject-matter does not appear in either the report or the Appendix. It is Item 4 (displayed in the extract shown above), and relates to Philby’s recruitment by Section D of SIS, a matter about which I have written with keen interest. The text (with redactions) appears as follows:

First Statement: “In June 1940 I was introduced to Section D by XXXXXXX (a phrase of about thirty-five characters).”

Evidence for its rejection: (a) Statements by XXXXXXX (a phrase of about sixty characters) that PHILBY was recruited by BURGESS. (b) Spontaneous remark made by XXXXXXX (twenty characters) showing that she played no part in PHILBY’s recruitment.

Summary of Second Statement: PHILBY repeated the assertion that XXXXXXX (twenty characters) had recruited him until, faced with the evidence, he withdrew to the extent of admitting that he might have mis-interpreted the circumstances.

Summary of Third Statement: PHILBY continued to maintain that he had mis-interpreted the circumstances of his recruitment to S.I.S. but admitted that he knew that BURGESS had often claimed to have introduced him.

References to a woman (Flora Solomon)

This is an intriguing exchange. First of all, Milmo quite blatantly introduces a female into the story, which must surely be Flora Solomon. (One might have expected readers of the report, if they got that far, to raise an eyebrow or two at the involvement of a woman.) Philby’s first statement seems to indicate that he regarded Solomon and Frank Birch as aiding his entry into Section D of MI6, an account that is supported by the evidence from the Solomon file (see last month’s report). This may well have been the strategy agreed between him and Vivian, so that he could be admitted smoothly, and without controversy. The Evidence for the Rejection is flimsy: some other MI6 officer could well have been encouraged to say that Burgess was responsible, and Solomon’s denial might likewise have not been sincere. Philby must have realized that it would not help him to be too obdurate on this point, since it might antagonize any allies he had in MI6, so made a tactical withdrawal. (In his memoir, he suggests that Burgess was indeed behind his recruitment, Burgess invoking the services of a Captain Sheridan at the War Office to set up a staged ‘interview’ with Miss Maxse of MI6.)

Yet I wonder how much of this Milmo understood. The careless reader at the time might have interpreted his script to indicate that Burgess facilitated Philby’s final entry into MI6, when, as I have explained earlier, Section D was untethered from MI6 into SOE, and, after Burgess was sacked, Philby worked for a year under Colin Gubbins in SOE training. He was then re-introduced to MI6 (so he wrote) through his ex-colleague in SOE, Tomás Harris, now working for MI5, who used his connections there with Dick Brooman-White and Dick White to arrange an appointment with Felix Cowgill of Section V of MI6. Cowgill hired Philby late in 1941. That is not the impression that Milmo’s text and chart suggest.

Analysis, Outcomes, and Conclusions

The Interrogation was a failure. The major point of frustration for MI5 was the fact that Philby, despite all the bluster and embarrassment, and the apparent failure of memory, denied everything. Without a confession, no indictment could proceed, since so much of the evidence was circumstantial, and an open trial would simply have been too embarrassing for both intelligence services. Yet the purging carried out through the process of discovery simply revealed more ills.

Th interrogation was moreover not carried out with precision or flair. The whole process was flawed from the start. Milmo was all too rushed. He failed to push home on grounds where he had strong evidence (such as Litzi’s travels), but was confused over many other points (such as the details of the divorce, and the Honigmann business). Milmo stumbled over the vital question of how and when Maclean had been alerted, and thus failed in his given objective.  He painstakingly went through many of the same incriminating events that I listed last month, and rightly drew attention to many troubling facts, such as revealing the inexplicable activities of ‘Lizzy’, and the failure of the couple to get a divorce. He muddled some issues, however, such as the movements by Philby concerning Litzi’s travel in the winter of 1939-1940, and failed to follow up when he had an advantage. 

At times Milmo appeared to be getting close to the nub of the matter, but was prevented, either because of the terms of his brief (which concentrated on the ‘Third Man’ leakages), because he was not given full information, because he was not give enough time, or because he was discouraged from airing certain topics. For instance, he wrote:

            One wonders whether the real reason there were no divorce proceedings prior to 1945 [sic!] was because it was felt that Lizzie’s position as a Communist agent required her to remain the wife of Philby. The suspicion is reinforced when it is known that from 1942 onwards Lizzie was in fact living with the man to whom she is at present married.

Yet this passage is followed by a redacted segment – perhaps too embarrassing. And, Buster, too much use of the passive voice! Too many vaguenesses! And why did he not ask how the Krivitsky disclosures were not followed up, or whether MI5 and MI6 had tried to track and interpret Litzi’s movements in 1937 and 1938? It was clear that the goal of the inquiry was to determine whether Philby had lied, but not to ascertain why his lying had been so imperceptible.

The problem also was that Milmo was not shown the full dossier, nor did he interview any MI6 officers, as he explicitly admitted. Of course, MI6 officers might not have co-operated (Menzies might have excluded them from the inquiry), but that itself would have constituted intelligence. It looks certain (outside the segment frustratingly redacted) that Milmo was not shown the October interview with KASPAR, or the documents from the Honigmann file. What might he have concluded if he had learned that Litzi Philby’s identity had been withheld from MI5 investigative officers, that Litzi was left uninterrogated when her partner debunked to East Berlin, and that Philby and MI6 concocted some obviously phony story about Reuters while declining to admit that Litzi was still Philby’s wife at the time?

In summary, Milmo stumbled over the vital question of how Maclean had been alerted (or even the predecessor question of whether he had really been alerted just before he absconded), and thus failed in his mission. Having established that Burgess had ample opportunity to warn Maclean, weeks before the escape, that the HOMER investigation was closing in on him, Milmo failed to consider that a plan for escape might have been crafted at that time. His report showed an enormous failure of imagination: if Burgess and Maclean had escaped to Moscow (as the multi-departmental team believed), it would have required KGB operatives to have been prepared and organized in Continental Europe to secure a smooth passage. This obvious fact is ignored by those who claim that the escape was planned at the last minute, even by such a careful and close observer as Robert Cecil: Nigel West even suggests that MI5 doctored the records to indicate that the interrogation had been put back three weeks.

The whole exploit would have demanded careful planning, and a sudden change in schedule would not have been accommodatable. For the diplomats to have known what to do when they arrived in St. Malo they must have been informed of what those plans were. It would have been utterly impossible for Philby to have been that medium (despite what Douglas Sutherland claimed). If there had been a late leak of any significance, someone in London (the ‘Fourth Man’) must have been responsible. Yet Milmo never pursued that angle, nor did he analyze closely the role of Burgess as emissary.

Yes, MI5 had nailed an obvious traitor, and it was thus convenient for the authorities to convince themselves that they had discovered who the ‘Third Man’ was, but they had neither been able to dispatch that issue with confidence, nor had they been able to dispose of Philby in a way that could satisfy his defenders and his pursuers. And the haste with which MI5 officers piled on Philby distracted their attention from the villainous Blunt (maybe intentionally). Why did MI5 undertake such a feeble exploit, the holes of which should have been immediately detectable? Probably because they had a known traitor on their hands, and needed to associate him with a semi-plausible example of treachery, while concealing the more dangerous and embarrassing case of the VENONA leakage, since he had been exposed to its revelations. While senior officials and officers in the Foreign Office and MI6 knew all about the VENONA case, the dossier was compiled primarily for the benefit of Eden and Churchill, who were surely not yet aware of the background. Milmo’s report significantly overlooked the VENONA exposure that White had listed.

Moreover, there is no record of the authorities showing any bewilderment at the supine inability of MI5 and MI6 to have detected anything suspicious about Philby’s activities in the years before. At some stage, one would have expected Eden and Churchill to react with amazement at the fact that so much of a nefarious nature had been gleaned about Maclean, Burgess and Philby during their careers, yet nothing was done about it at the time. If any inquest took place at the time, it has not been recorded.

Thus the irony of the interrogation is that the authorities had indeed alighted on the right suspect, but for the wrong event. Philby was in fact the ‘Second Man’ who had in April 1951 (through the KGB) alerted Maclean to the fact that he had been identified as HOMER, a message that would then be reinforced by Burgess in person. The timing of the escape was determined by a coincidental understanding of the date of interrogation that turned out to be wrong. In their desire to incriminate Philby, the authorities grossly misrepresented the final days of the Maclean investigation. When Burgess and Maclean absconded, however, there had been no immediately precedent leak, and thus no ‘Third Man’, only an unacknowledged ‘Fourth Man’ who passed on instructions, namely Blunt. The phenomenon of that phantom Third Man would however come to haunt Britain’s intelligence services, and the Foreign Office, for decades to come, and even spawn the ridiculous search for ‘ELLI’, which consumed so many MI5 man-hours, and cast a long shadow, especially over Roger Hollis.

My inquiry at this stage does not look beyond 1951, but even before the year was out, MI6 started to question the implied guilt of their star officer. The Secret Intelligence Service predictably did not accept the report’s conclusions with any enthusiasm. As Menzies wrote:

            I cannot bring myself to believe that an enemy agent would sit in our midst and fool MI5 and my service for so long a period, unless one accepts the view that his activities were confined to protecting himself.

That statement constitutes a weird kind of reasoning, but would come back to haunt Menzies. MI5 and MI6 were indeed fooled, and MI6 itself encouraged that behaviour.

Liddell himself expressed a bizarre kind of excuse for Philby in his diary entry for December 16, where he wrote that MI5 ‘was pointing out to Menzies that PHILBY’s activities in recent years may have amounted to no more than betrayals in cases where he thought they were necessary to safeguard his own position’. What the master of counter-intelligence meant by that statement is not clear to me. On December 21, he gave the opinion that Milmo had come down too heavily on a ’positive assertion of PHILBY’s guilt’, and suggested that the evidence was ‘no more than a chain of coincidences.’ Some chain. One marvels at Liddell’s naivety.

And so the year ran down. MI5 informed the Americans that Philby was probably a spy, but that MI6 claimed that the accusations were not proven. Bedell Smith of the CIA agreed with this conclusion. Sillitoe prepared to retire, and Liddell hoped to replace him. As West writes: “The PEACH case was quietly consigned to MI5’s top security Y Box Registry”. MI6 hoped that Philby would be forgotten, but their collective stubbornness in trying to reinstate him ended up hurting them.

Yet I must include one important item from 1953. It opens up a completely new field of inquiry, and casts the spotlight acutely back on that unidentified woman in Milmo’s Summary, Flora Solomon, and her lover Dr. Eric Strauss. It appears in one of the Flora Solomon files, KV 2/4633, and concerns testimony from someone called Stevenson, reported here by Graham Mitchell of D Division, on December 28. Part of the heavily redacted text runs as follows:

              . . .  that STRAUSS knows a great deal more about the security suspicions connected with PHILBY, BURGESS and MACLEAN than he has any right to. For example, he recently mentioned  xxxxxxxxxxxxxx that he knows that there was a damning incident in Kim’s past relating to Turkey. Xxxxxxxxx assumes that STRAUSS gets his information on these matters from Flora Solomon, who in turn gets it from Aileen. . .

Flora Solomon demands further investigation. The saga continues . . .

Summary

The disappearance of Burgess and Maclean required a convenient scapegoat, and for obvious reasons Philby – already under suspicion – was selected. Yet Dick White and Stewart Menzies knew that the unveiling of Philby would stir a hornets’ nest of unpalatable facts. The oversights and omissions undertaken over the career of Philby were much worse than those associated with Burgess and Maclean. In its joint investigation, MI5 and MI6 had the impossible task of satisfying multiple constituencies: their political masters, who wanted quick justice; the hawkish Americans, who wanted the stables to be cleaned; the old guard defenders of Philby in MI6, who found the whole process reprehensible; the lower-grade officers in MI5 who did not understand the indulgences shown by their leaders. Yet any truths that came out would incriminate MI5 and MI6 as much as Philby. Philby in turn called their bluff, since he knew that they had done a deal with the devil. White and Menzies could rely on Philby’s silence because of the bigamy charge, but they could not protect themselves and their successors forever from the accusations of Soviet defectors, the leaked hints from disaffected insiders, and the inquisitiveness of investigative journalists.

In his biography of Menzies, Anthony Cave Brown quotes Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary from 1952 until 1965 as saying: “There is one secret left in the Philby case, and that I may not discuss.” Cave Brown goes on to speculate that it might be that Philby was used as some kind of ‘double agent’ to transmit disinformation to the Soviets. I have written before that I consider that idea absurd: how would his manipulators know that Philby was not indicating that he was supplying false information? It is far more likely that the secret was to do with his hoodwinking of MI6 at the end of 1939, and the circumstances of his bigamous marriage in September 1946.

(This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

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