Tag Archives: Third Man

“All Aboard the ‘Falaise’!”

Skylark, To To amuse oneself in a frolicsome way; to jump around and be merry; to indulge in mild horseplay. The phrase was originally nautical and referred to the sports of the boys among the rigging after their work was done. Hence perhaps the popular boat name, as in ‘All aboard the Skylark’. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 18th Edition)

In this bulletin, I outline my case that the escape of Burgess and Maclean was facilitated by the British authorities. But first, a diversion  . . .

A Self-Important Announcement

Before I get to the main agenda for this month, I need to make an announcement. I shall be visiting the UK this September, for the purposes of delivering a talk on the Cambridge Five at my old school (see https://www.whitgift.co.uk/my-whitgift/alumni/events for details), and of attending a re-union. This will probably be my farewell tour of the Old Country – not because I expect that officers from Special Branch will be waiting at Heathrow to clap the handcuffs on me, although I do not discount that possibility – but because making the arduous trip over becomes less and less appealing as I approach my eightieth year. I should thus like to make the most of what will probably be a stay of about two weeks between (roughly) September 5 and September 22.

I am going to seek out further speaking opportunities (the current talk is scheduled for September 12, in Croydon). As a Lifetime Member, whose career was recently featured in the Society’s Newsletter, I have approached the Friends of the Bodleian, who are this year celebrating their centenary, but their calendar is full for September. I am also a Lifetime Friend of the National Archives, but two emails to them (President and Secretary) have failed to gain any acknowledgment, even, which is disgraceful. (Don’t they know who I am??) I have written to my alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford, which is celebrating its five-hundredth anniversary this year, to suggest a lecture on one of their most celebrated – or notorious – alumni, Dick White, but after two weeks have not yet had a response. I have one or two other leads to follow, but if anybody out in coldspurland has a local historical society that might be interested, please let me know. I could talk on any one of my pet subjects (Sonya, the Cambridge Five, Dick White, Spycatcher, Flight PB416, PROSPER, Borodin, etc., etc.), or maybe give a more general, but light, presentation on the practice of interpreting archives, with liberal examples. The week of September 15 is probably best, so please contact me if you are interested.

In any case, I should very much like to meet colleagues acquired on-line through coldspur with whom I have frequently engaged over email, but whom I have never met. From discussions already under way, I can envision an itinerary taking in London, Oxford, Cheltenham, and Cambridge, one that could be extended to destinations not too far off that track. Again, please get in touch with me, and let me know your place of residence, and your availability. Thank you! And now back to research and analysis. (This story of the ‘Missing Diplomats’ continues to evolve, and there will be more to come.)

Contents:

Introduction

            The Committee

            William Strang

            Theory and Methodology

Actors and Agents

            Dick White

            The Cambridge Four:

                        Kim Philby

                        Guy Burgess (and Goronwy Rees)

                        Anthony Blunt

                        Donald Maclean

The British Authorities

MI5’s Dysfunction

Carey-Foster and the Security Department

A Possible Sequence of Events

A Lack of Imagination

            Prosecution

            Surveillance

            Authority

Conclusions

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

Introduction

I believe that the British authorities facilitated the escape of Burgess and Maclean.

Yet that sentence must immediately be qualified. Who were the ‘British authorities’? It is a lazy trick of the casual historian (I have done it myself) to hide behind generalities, and to write (for example) that ‘MI5 did this’, ‘the Foreign Office believed that’, ‘MI6 was opposed to something else’, without identifying particular agents, actors or authors, as if all decisions emanated from some impeccably drafted high-level policy, and were executed without dissension. Matters were far more complex than that, and I try to make it my business to assign responsibility to individuals where I can. Bureaucrats, however, have a particular partiality for using the passive voice, and thus disguising how decisions were made: authorized histories hiding behind unidentifiable sources aggravate the problem. The ‘authorities’ were a nebulous group: they were neither authoritative nor authoritarian, and they thus failed to control the narrative.

In other words, ‘the British authorities’, and ‘British intelligence’ were not, and are not, unitary, monolithic, single-minded, unlike the Russian Intelligence Services, where no one would raise a finger unless they knew that Stalin had already approved such a movement. In post-war United Kingdom, conflicts reigned, both inside and outside intelligence. That was an inevitable – and not always regrettable – outcome of pluralist tensions. A Labour government brought some very equivocal attitudes towards communism and the Soviet Union. Differences of opinion concerning policy towards the Soviet Union existed within the Foreign Office. As the Cold War began, some officials wanted to continue the policy of co-operation with, and appeasement of, the Soviet Union that had pertained during the war. Other factions were influenced more strongly by the Chiefs of Staff, who saw a direct military threat after watching Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe. Residual officers from SOE within MI6 tried to restart subversive efforts behind the Iron Curtain, while a more traditional faction wanted to focus on intelligence-gathering. Politicians and leaders were often kept in the dark by their intelligence units. Herbert Morrison, the Foreign Secretary, was not told of the abscondment of Burgess and Maclean until several days after they escaped. Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Minister Eden, on their taking office in November 1951, were not told the true story of the events.

As far as the intelligence services were concerned, there were rivalries and overlaps between MI5 and MI6. Moreover, within the services, decisions and information were often carefully protected. In MI5, Percy Sillitoe, the director-general, was not broadly respected by his subordinates, and was not kept fully informed of how B Division was dealing with the FBI and the CIA. White (in 1951 counter-espionage chief) and Liddell (deputy director-general) did not always disclose the decisions they had made to all their underlings – or even to each other. The details behind the case of Agent Sonya (Ursula Beurton), whose marriage and subsequent passage to Britain from Switzerland were abetted by MI6, were not divulged to the junior officers investigating her possible use of wireless. Certain files were kept as Highly Secure, not available for casual inspection. Officers posted memoranda that display complete ignorance of the reality behind events, such as J. C. Robertson’s annotation that Volkov’s warnings were referring to Guy Burgess’s spy network. Dick White did not inform Robertson of his scheme to pass on the Philby file to the FBI, otherwise White would not have had to swear his group to secrecy over the Philby identification in early 1952. It appears that Graham Mitchell, head of D Branch in 1954, had not been told by White about the dealings with Blunt.

The committee responsible for investigating the leakages from the British Embassy had started out in 1949 as a broader group, including Valentine Vivian from MI6, but by the spring of 1951 it constituted a tight cabal of career officers: William Strang, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs (later Lord Strang); his deputy, Roger Makins (later Lord Sherfield); Patrick Reilly, assistant secretary at the Foreign Office, and sometime personal secretary to Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6; George Carey-Foster, Security Officer at the Foreign Office; Percy Sillitoe, Director-General of MI5; and Dick White, head of B (Counter-espionage) Division at MI5. These six men were ultimately responsible for the handling of all aspects of the events leading up to the surveillance of Donald Maclean, and the escape made by him and Guy Burgess. They were abetted by Geoffrey Patterson, the MI5 Liaison Officer in Washington, and Robert Mackenzie, the Foreign Office’s Security Officer at the Washington Embassy. Dick White confided especially in his subordinate Arthur Martin. After the abscondment, J. C. Robertson, head of B2 (Soviet counter-espionage) became a key member of the MI5 investigating team. Some reports state that the half-dozen members of Carey-Foster’s team knew all about the investigation.

William Strang

William Strang was the senior official on the project, and, as Permanent Under-Secretary, responsible for all Foreign Office personnel. For research into this piece, I read his 1956 memoir, Home and Abroad. The author comes across as highly intelligent, erudite, humane, and sensible (although he did have a darker side). He very pointedly sidesteps the issue of Burgess and Maclean, however. In his Foreword, he writes: “As was to be expected, my publishers asked why I had not written about the case of Burgess and Maclean. The answer is simple. Even were I in a position to do so, it would not be open to me as an ex-official to add anything to the public statements already made by Ministers on the substance of the case; while merely to repeat those statements or any part of them would be otiose.” It is a characteristically cautious statement, Strang being reluctant to admit any irregularities, or to the fact that he had passed on disinformation to his masters, as had senior officers in his department.

Yet it is in many ways surprising, given his experience and wisdom, that he allowed the intrigues of White to proceed unchecked. It appears that he did not keep his Minister, the ailing Ernest Bevin (who resigned on March 9, 1951, and died the following month) informed, nor did he fully advise Herbert Morrison, Bevin’s successor, who was replaced when the Conservatives regained power in October. Moreover, his first briefing of Anthony Eden appeared to take place only in March 1952, when he admitted that his Foreign Office employees, Burgess and Maclean, had been spies for some time, and that Philby had probably been one throughout his MI6 career. That was something that he had understood for well over a year, so his reticence shows a large degree of discomfort, and his dedication to rectitude and honesty must be questioned. It is clear (for instance) that he lied to Christopher Steel in the Washington Embassy, claiming that Maclean had come under suspicion as the ‘leaker’ only after he disappeared. (It also sheds dazzling light on the untruths told by Macmillan and Eden later in the House of Commons.)

Strang Under Fire

I judge that Strang was probably too correct a man to understand the machinations of the intelligence world: he was also extremely busy, and before the escape probably considered this business as a low priority. He took control thereafter, but struggled over what he should say to his Minister, and to the Washington Embassy. The bottom line is that, apart from Strang, those persons actually in ‘authority’, namely the Prime Minister and his departmental ministers, as well as the chiefs of MI6 and MI5, did not receive a full explanation of what was going on. Strang was probably deceived to some extent, as well, but that does not absolve him from failing to take a more active role in the investigation. This was a prominent civil servant who had dealt personally with Stalin, Litvinov, Molotov, and Gusev. He knew the nature of his country’s adversaries, but showed no operational leadership in the consideration that Stalin may have planted spies in his nest, and he should probably have anticipated the minefield that White’s deviousness was setting.  A later opinion on Philby [see below] suggested that he was very comfortable with the idea of letting Burgess and Maclean escape, but he obviously did not want to admit that in June 1951. Strang’s psychology, and his interpretation of his duties during the whole business, are of great interest, and merit a separate study. You will find no entry for ‘Strang’ in Christopher Andrew’s Defend the Realm. Andrew has made much of intelligence being the ‘missing dimension’ of history, after his colleague David Dilks, but he has been negligent in tracking the dynamics of the interactions between the intelligence agencies and their political masters.

‘Murder in Cairo’

I find the conventional accounts of the successful escape of Burgess and Maclean utterly unconvincing, and hereby present an alternative analysis. I recently read Murder in Cairo, the recently published book by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo about the murder of the Sunday Times journalist David Holden in 1977, and came across the following sentence: “The journalists would follow what had become a tried-and-tested formula: gather every available scrap of information, assemble it into a coherent narrative and trust that the answers to the central question would become clear.” In that proud boast is encapsulated all that is wrong about the Phillip Knightley, Anthony Cave-Brown, John Costello, Andrew Lownie, Helen Fry, etc. etc. school of writing on intelligence matters. Trawl around for every conceivable factoid, treat them all as equally valid without verifying them, or cross-checking them, and hope that the reader will be able to discern from the resulting narrative what really happened. It is a recipe for confusion.

I do not expect to find any archival evidence that the cabal identified above (essentially ‘the British authorities’) arranged matters so that Burgess and Maclean were able to be exfiltrated from Britain apparently undetected. This report is thus based largely on speculation and hypothesis. But that does not mean that it is lacking in methodology. Facing what is frequently self-implicating evidence, I apply the technique of tracking carefully the chronology of events, examining geographical details, and cross-checking accounts from different sources – as well as the very important process of assessing the probable motives of the participants. I have previously hypothesized that the priorities of most persons in the business of intelligence (and probably in many other fields of endeavour) are i) one’s personal career, legacy and reputation – including the fending off of rivals – or even fighting for survival; ii) the status and repute of the organization to which one feels allegiance; and iii) the larger overall mission for which one is supposed to be working, such as ‘Defend the Realm’. Occasionally, objectives 1 and 3 combine, when self-important actors justify their personal vagaries as helping to achieve a patriotic goal. Some figures even extend their justifications to the loftier aim of ‘helping mankind’, the latter entity normally represented as ‘progressive humanity’ in Soviet jargon, as if any individual could be presumptuous enough to understand what such pretensions meant, or how they could ever be measured. Thus, when assessing the actions and objectives of the key agents in the drama, one has to pose the questions: What did they know? What were they supposed to be doing? Which priority loomed largest in their calculations?

Actors and Agents

Dick White:

Dick White was essentially the one-man-band managing the project, in his role of de facto show-runner of MI5, as he arrogantly described himself to Malcolm Muggeridge. I thus first look at him, the only experienced intelligence officer on the investigating team, somebody who was probably able to influence the three grey career diplomats, his boss (the ex-police officer Sillitoe), and the greenhorn Carey-Foster. What did he know in early May 1951, when Guy Burgess returned from the United States in disgrace?

First, he was familiar with the disclosures revealed by Walter Krivitsky in January 1940, in which the defector pointed to a set of penetration agents who had been recruited in the early 1930s. Among these was a spy in the Foreign Office who had been involved with the ‘Imperial Council’ meetings, and a journalist sent to Spain during the Civil War to be attached to Franco’s camp. White would recall that these leads had not been followed up, almost certainly by dint of the fact that Kim Philby (the journalist) had unmasked himself to MI5 after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed, in early September 1939, and claimed that he had abandoned his communist sympathies. The lead analyst of Soviet counter-intelligence, Jane Archer, had been removed from the group immediately after her report was filed. Philby had surely brought his wife, Litzy, along with him in his ruse: whether he also identified Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt as fellow apostates is not so certain. I shall explore that possibility soon.

White knew that Anthony Blunt, who was recommended for a post with MI5 by Victor Rothschild in August 1940, and eventually served as Guy Liddell’s assistant, among other roles, had been a communist. Yet White had treated that allegiance as a harmless aesthetic impulse, and during the war he had enjoyed Blunt’s company as a fellow-intellectual among the typically more philistine interests of the MI5 collegium. I strongly believe that White would have been aware of the indiscretions of Blunt and his side-kick Leo Long in extracting confidential material and passing it on to the Soviets in 1944, but he may have considered it part of their natural cover, to convince their supposed Soviet controllers of their commitment.

Doubts about Philby’s loyalties started to creep in with White and others at the end of the war. The Volkov incident, in which Philby engineered his own management of the would-be defector’s approach to the consulate in Istanbul, building in such a delay that the unfortunate Volkov was arrested, exfiltrated, tortured, and killed, brought strong attention to the possibility that Philby himself were the counter-intelligence officer identified, but not named. The sudden flight of Litzy Philby’s new partner, Georg Honigmann, into the Soviet zone of Berlin in the summer of 1946, caused a shock, and White may well have been involved in the dubious granting of Litzy a divorce decree from Kim, an event that is inexplicable in terms of chronology and geography. Litzy then joined Honigmann in Berlin. It suggests that White began to doubt the sincerity of the Philby volte-face some time before Liddell and others did, with Liddell continuing to trust his triad of Burgess, Blunt and Rees right up until the disappearance.

But Litzy was not the only communist, whether ex- or not, to abandon their recent country of naturalization for life behind the Iron Curtain. Peter Smolka, who had been granted UK citizenship during the war, and worked at the Ministry of Information, disappeared in Red Vienna in 1948. Ursula Beurton, aka Agent Sonya, had made a sudden flit to East Berlin in early 1950, as soon as she heard that Klaus Fuchs had been arrested. That left the neurotic and disorganized Edith Tudor-Hart, the third prominent member of female communists gaining British citizenship through marriage, as the remaining domiciliary in Britain. She was now relatively harmless, divorced, hamstrung with caring for her autistic son, and prone to falling in love with her psychiatrist and other undesirables. Yet why were all these presumed loyalists now fleeing to Stalin’s petticoats, without apparent fear of retribution?

The VENONA project, and the search for HOMER, complicated White’s counter-espionage efforts. While his suspicions concerning Philby had intensified, a name that may have been new to him as an espionage suspect, Donald Maclean, had come into view. It is evident from the archives that White soon realized that the HOMER investigation was going to break open a hornet’s nest of intrigue and embarrassment. Shortly after Kim Philby, in November 1949, had dramatically drawn attention to Krivitsky’s identification of a spy in the Foreign Office, in January 1950 White tried to call the whole exercise off – a foolish initiative that indicated he knew far more than he was letting on to his colleagues. Had Philby’s reminder prompted him to re-examine the case of the ‘Imperial Council’ spy? On February 16, White wrote a long memorandum recommending that the hounds be called off, since the field of investigation was so wide, and ‘that there was no possibility of reaching a solution unless more data becomes available’. This was a scandalous suggestion to make, since a shortlist of recipients of confidential telegrams had recently been produced (which obviously included Maclean), and Philby had just recommended that the investigation focus on the more senior officers!

Roger Makins

White had received nominal support from Vivian, but fortunately (in the cause of justice), Carey-Foster was recorded, a month later, as reacting strongly against White’s desire to close down the inquiry. White had to backtrack: Carey-Foster surely learned later the reason for White’s timorousness. Thus White had to show a measure of earnest endeavour again. His interactions with Makins over Maclean’s re-appointment in the Foreign Office in late 1950 indicate that White must have come to an earlier conclusion that Maclean was HOMER. He would not have been involved with Makins if Maclean’s problems had been solely internal disciplinary issues. He also had the case of Burgess to deal with. In the summer of 1950, Liddell had warned the Foreign Office about the dangers of sending Burgess into the sensitive arena of Washington, after his notorious exploits in Spain, and probable dealings with Fredrick Kuh, but he had been overruled. Someone – maybe White himself – had wanted to use Burgess as bait for Philby, in the same way that White needed to entrap Maclean into performing some indiscretion, such as meeting with his controller again.

White had managed to stall the HOMER inquiry long enough, but he could not hold off his colleagues on the team, or the FBI, much longer. The decision to impose surveillance on Maclean in mid-April 1951 must have been an obvious one, in the hope of delivering the crucial evidence of contact with Soviet Embassy officials that would condemn him. Yet White surely had his doubts. He could not rely on bringing VENONA evidence to court, and the only way of securing a conviction would be through a confession. Moreover, if Maclean were faced with evidence solely of a recent contact, to what crimes would he confess? Would his whole career since 1935 be laid on the line? When it came to a trial, would he reveal secrets that MI5 and the Foreign Office would rather stay undisclosed, such as the tolerance of his atrocious behaviour in Cairo, but consequent re-instatement? Might he even betray the secret of the VENONA program, since Philby had made him aware of what it delivered, in an effort to embarrass his inquisitors? Might the pointers from Krivitsky, and details about the ‘Imperial Council’ spy come out in the wash? Would Maclean say nothing about Burgess and Philby? And what use would it be putting Maclean behind bars while Burgess and Philby still roamed free?

When Burgess arrived, and was seen in the company of Blunt, as well as Maclean, White realized that events were coming to an even more critical point. Yet he still had no evidence of treachery on Maclean’s part: the surveillance had not revealed any indiscretions, despite the arrival of Burgess. MI5 had no power of arrest over suspects like Maclean. A continuing mystery about White’s behaviour, however, is his attitude towards Burgess and Blunt. It is now clear that he had had suspicions about Burgess that antedated his time in the United States. If he encouraged Ambassador Franks to send him back [see below], it must have been because he believed that Burgess’s contacting Maclean might help to entrap the pair of them, and to kill two birds with one stone. Yet the investigating group (or, at least, White and Sillitoe) was quite comfortable seeing Blunt have regular encounters with Burgess while not showing any concern as to how Blunt might be acting behind the scenes – namely, meeting with his Soviet contacts. Either that was because that was Blunt’s delegated role, or because White regarded him as being in a quite different camp from that of Burgess, a loyal servant who could spy on the pair, and be trusted.

That scenario immediately throws up another conflict, however – the fact that Burgess and Blunt had in 1949 been in close collusion over the Borodin affair, the mishandling of a Soviet scientist seeking asylum. Was White perhaps ignorant of the special project, one of disinformation to the Soviets, that Liddell was managing under his nose? It seems outrageous, but equally unlikely would be White’s regarding as wholly innocent the collaboration of Burgess and Blunt (and Rees) in Liddell’s scheme. White never referred to that business in what he told his biographers, but he should have asked himself: why would Blunt, in regular contact with Guy Liddell, say nothing about Burgess’s assumed disloyalty in 1949, but then be willing to act in subterfuge against him in 1951? (Blunt’s presence at Waterloo in greeting Burgess is obviously critical to this analysis.)  

The Perfect English Spy is overall not helpful, being a farrago of deceit and delusion. From what White told his biographer, when Rees informed him of the conspiratorial relationship between Burgess and Blunt going back to 1939, White was much more annoyed with Rees for hanging on to that information for so long than furious at possibly having been betrayed by Blunt. White makes no mention to Boyle or Bower of Blunt’s associations with Burgess and Maclean in May 1951. Disgusted with Rees over his tardy revelations about Burgess, he claims he mistrusted Rees’s accusations about Blunt, too, and professes to be shocked about the revelation in 1963 that Blunt was a spy. He conveniently forgets that he had agreed with Robertson, back in the autumn of 1951, that Blunt should be offered immunity in exchange for disclosing what he knew (or had done), and he blames his inability to understand the strange allegiances of homosexuals for never considering that Blunt, whom he had regarded as an inspiring and loyal colleague during World War II, could have been a traitor.

In any case, White feared for his future – and that of MI5. If MI5 were shown to have been grossly negligent, the Security Service might have been put under MI6’s wing, as had been threatened during the war, and which prospect had been raised by civil servants again recently.  White’s career in counter-intelligence would certainly be over. Thus the prospect of having Burgess and Maclean disappear from the scene, if it could be managed surreptitiously and with minimum risk of disclosure of any supportive activity, looked attractive.  Moreover, if Philby could be encouraged to remove himself while in America, that would solve another problem. Failing that, prompting the Americans to denounce him by feeding to them a dossier with incriminating information might have the equivalent effect of at least ostracizing Philby, and causing him to join his colleagues.

Finally, White was guilty of masking his own mistakes by loading the arch-demon Philby with responsibility for many of the security leaks with which MI5 was involved. When the Petrovs revealed in 1954 that their colleague Razin had pointed to the value for the NKVD of having an agent embedded in the enemy’s counter-intelligence service in London during the last years of the war, White must have known that he was referring to Anthony Blunt. Yet White allowed Graham Mitchell, to whom the secrets of the Burgess and Maclean investigation had not been divulged at the time, to carry the can, with Mitchell disclosing in his internal memoranda at the time that Razin must have been referring to PEACH (i.e. Philby). In that way was White able to deflect attention away from the highly embarrassing case of Blunt. White had seen through Blunt in 1951, but had then buried the case in the hope that interest would die away.

The Cambridge Four:

Meanwhile, what about the motivations of the Cambridge Four? (I exclude John Cairncross from this analysis, as his role as a suspect came to light only after the escape, when incriminating notes were found in Burgess’s flat.)

  1. Kim Philby:

When Kim Philby, on learning in August 1939 of MI5’s invitation to Walter Krivitsky to visit the UK, concluded that the game could very shortly be up, he decided (as has been my thesis) that he had to pre-empt any revelations by the defector about his (Philby’s) role in Spain. He thus decided to admit that he had been sent there as an emissary of the NKVD, but that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had completely destroyed his belief in Communism as a viable anti-fascist force, and he had consequently turned away from Stalin to rededicate himself to the British cause of defeating Hitler. That was a very logical and popular line to take, and the timing was perfect. As part of the arrangement with MI5 (since MI6 was not yet in the picture), he would continue to act as if he were a dedicated agent of the NKVD. (At this time, of course, Philby was considered of negligible value by his bosses in Moscow.) There was a danger, of course. If his Moscow masters suspected his apostasy was sincere, his name would appear on a possible death-list, even though the NKVD and GRU were warier of assassinating native citizens of the democracies than they were of turncoats from the old Russian imperial territories, mostly the ‘illegals’. Such persons would either be recalled for execution in the Lubianka, or would be hunted down in the cities of western Europe.

Thus I have to assume that Moscow knew about – even approved – the plan: Philby met with Gorsky at the beginning of September 1939, and MI6 submitted to MI5 a vetting request on him at the end of the month. Philby was still a war correspondent at this time, however, and it would take short spells in MI6’s Section D, and then the newly established SOE, before he joined MI6 in October 1940. In the first half of 1940, Moscow had ordered all contact with Philby to be halted, and Gorsky was absent until December of that year. Thus 1940 was very much a year of experimentation and fencing, with Philby not too strenuously trying to join MI6, and Moscow very cautious about the integrity of its agent network after the Krivitsky revelations.

Part of the long-term deception with MI6 would involve a commitment to providing information of value to the Kremlin, an exercise that would need to be handled carefully, mediating between items of significance that would not endanger security, and ‘chicken-feed’ that could not be too obvious. Claude Dansey, the deputy to Stewart Menzies in MI6, believed himself to be an expert at this game of misinformation. It gave officers like Philby an excellent cover for their true subversive activities, since they now had a valid reason for meeting their contacts, and in fact needed to do so to reinforce their story. Indeed, defenders of Philby within MI6 through the 1950s referred to such apparent subterfuges to explain why Philby had to meet with dubious characters in order to carry out his ‘double-agent’ role. *

[* I recently re-discovered an extraordinary item in Guy Liddell’s Diaries, which in puzzlement I had annotated a decade ago with two question-marks, but which now seems much clearer to me. It is dated December 18, 1951, and was entered after Liddell had read Dick White’s report on Philby for the Americans, essentially denying that Philby could have been ELLI. The note reads: “Arguable that Philby’s actions in recent years may have amounted to no more than betrayals in cases where he thought they were necessary to safeguard his own position.”]

Would Philby have included any of his collaborators in his scheme? In 1939, Philby had no proven track-record with the NKVD. It seemed unaware of his presence and his contribution, and regarded his wife as a more useful asset. Yet the prospect of neutralizing the influence of Krivitsky, and of Philby’s being eventually accepted for an influential role in Britain’s intelligence services, might well have been regarded as a powerful stimulus. Later in the war, in 1943, it should be remembered, Philby and his cohorts were indeed considered as ‘plants’ inserted by the British to confuse the Soviets with disinformation, as the Modrzhinskaya episodes confirm. Only an increase in the delivery of important confidential material convinced the Kremlin that the spies were indeed loyal to them.

If Philby’s goal had been solely to neutralize the threat from Krivitsky, he might have restricted the group to those whom, in his judgment, the words from Krivitsky might help identify. Yet his knowledge was minimal: the ‘Imperial Council’ spy (i.e. Maclean) was probably the strongest lead in the testimony that Krivitsky provided, but I do not believe that Philby would have known about that incident until he read Jane Archer’s report (something he internalized very closely, as his memorandum in 1949 later showed). No indirect pointers to Burgess or Blunt appear in that report. As far as I can gather, the equivalence of Maclean as a candidate for HOMER was the first indication to White and his colleagues that Maclean may ever have been associated with the Comintern and the NKVD. He had been open about his leftist sympathies at his Foreign Office interview, but he had never been noticed in dramatically subversive exploits – unlike Philby.

The evidence that Philby brought Blunt and Burgess into his cover-story is slightly more compelling, but pinning down the issue of timing is more complex. It would have made sense for the trio to be united about any deceptions. The fact that Blunt was smoothly introduced into MI5 in the summer of 1940, despite his Communist background, is telling. Burgess was a law unto himself: his behaviour was so outrageous, and his articulation of left-wing, and anti-American, views so brazen that no one could really believe that he could be a serious agent for any secret service, let alone the NKVD. Modin wrote that, when Burgess and Blunt returned to the UK from France at the end of August 1939, having learned of the Nazi-Soviet pact, they met with Philby, and had a long discussion. They concluded by re-affirming their commitment to the cause of the revolution, and Philby may well have shared his concerns about Krivitsky at that time.

Thus, in 1949 and 1950, when the clouds started rolling in on Maclean as the prime HOMER suspect, Philby might have believed that there was a firewall between his triad and Maclean. He had not seen Maclean since 1940 (or so he claimed: that assertion is belied by evidence in Blunt’s Personal Files). Having alerted Moscow to the threat, he seemed happy to let matters take their course. If Maclean had to be exfiltrated, so be it. It would not cast any further suspicions on him. As far back as November 1949, he had been preparing his cover by reminding his colleagues in detail of Krivitsky’s disclosures: he even pointed out to Mackenzie that the investigation was probably wasting too much time on lower-level staff. This was an astonishingly bold – but disloyal – gesture, showing that he was willing to sacrifice his friend to save himself. That constituted a weird twist to the Forsterian creed of loyalties. Philby did not selectively leak his thoughts to a confidant: he carefully wrote them up, knowing that they would gain broad distribution. In so doing, he knew that Krivitsky’s comments about a ‘journalist in Spain’ would inevitably gain fresh attention, and probably turn the spotlight on him. He must have been confident that White, who had been party to his volte-face, would come to his defence if necessary. But White clearly did not want to touch the matter.

(Incidentally, Philby’s account of these events is predictably unreliable. In My Silent War, he gives a very accurate and telling analysis of the failures of the cabal to follow up the Krivitsky leads, but presents his suggestion that the investigation could be accelerated as occurring only when the rescue plan was being developed in the spring of 1951, thus conveniently overlooking his contribution of November 1949. His masters at the KGB, controlling his text, would not have been too happy if they had learned that Philby had at that time been prepared to sacrifice such a valuable asset to save his own skin. It is perhaps also telling that it was in that same month of November 1949 – according to Christopher Andrew – that Maclean asked his controller to be relieved of his espionage duties.)

Arthur Martin responded to Philby’s memorandum by immediately claiming that the possibility of that identity had been ‘borne in mind since the beginning of the inquiry’, but the observation is not obvious from the evidence. Moreover, there is no track record of any follow-up before Dick White’s bizarre suggestion, on January 31, 1950, that the project should be handed over to the FBI. Thus the investigation continued, even though Carey-Foster, out of his depth, diminished the importance of Krivitsky’s hints. Yet it is inconceivable to me that Philby’s reminders, and the retrieval of Krivitsky’s testimony from the vaults, did not prompt some earnest inspection and consideration from the members of the team – especially those in MI5. And the reports of Maclean’s antics in Cairo (though not broadly distributed) should have caused some logical connections to be made.

Indeed, in March 1951, Philby renewed his accusations, clearly considering Maclean’s cause as lost, as he provided direct indications of Maclean’s possible guilt to Patterson, MI5’s representative in Washington, as a way of deflecting attention from himself, and reminding everyone of his loyalty. (Not only did he bring up the ‘Imperial Council’ spy allegation again, he also pointed out Maclean’s visits to New York.) Far from enabling Burgess’s return to London, as a way of warning Maclean, he would have done much better to keep him in Washington until the smoke cleared. If Burgess’s account can be trusted, Philby’s final instructions to him when he left Washington were ‘Don’t you go, too!’, but they should be seen more as a humorous gesture. Philby surely would have reacted in horror if he learned how closely Burgess consorted with Maclean in London, and how the pair were watched. Indeed, he was dramatically shocked when he heard that both of them had fled.

  1. Guy Burgess (and Goronwy Rees):

I include a discussion of Rees here, alongside Burgess, because the relationship between the two is one of the most provocative aspects of the case. Burgess had had his confrontation with Goronwy Rees the very next day after the Philby-Blunt-Burgess confabulation in September 1939 (described above), for the record of which we have to rely on Rees himself, of course. Burgess started by defending the pact, as if he hoped he might be able to confide in his friend, and have him join the trio in the scheme. Yet, when Rees showed dismay and disgust with Burgess’s behaviour, telling him that he wanted nothing to do with the Comintern again, Burgess apparently backtracked. As Andrew Lownie wrote: “Burgess, in order to ensure Rees wouldn’t betray him and Blunt, pretended to his friend that he, too, had become disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact and had given up his illegal work for the Communist Party.” (Stalin’s Englishman, p 103) That scenario would fit in with the idea that Philby had successfully brought just Burgess and Blunt into his conspiracy.

On the other hand, the very bizarre activities shared by Rees, Burgess and Blunt in the Borodin affair, under Guy Liddell’s stewardship, in 1948 and 1949, raise further puzzling questions. If we assume that Liddell was working with honest intentions, and that he was not a scoundrel like the rest of them, we have to judge that Liddell believed that the three of them were still loyal servants of the Crown. Furthermore, if this exercise had indeed been one of disinformation, and passing on useless secrets about the penicillin process to the Soviets, Rees’s joining a firm after the war to do business with Moscow would not have been a disreputable act, as Robertson and other officers in MI5 judged it, but a necessary front set up with the assistance of MI6, for whom he was working part-time. Liddell would have hardly laid out the details of the project so openly in his diaries if he had truly been involved in defying US instructions, and in assisting Moscow. Thus the episodes simply show, in my opinion, how gullible Liddell was, and how poor his judgment of character, and also how disinformation exercises can go so horribly wrong when you cannot rely on a crucial part of the intelligence infrastructure.

Yet perhaps it would have meant a most damaging outcome for Rees, since his failure to alert Liddell of his suspicions of Blunt and Burgess during the Borodin project would have been thrown severely in his face when he met Liddell on June 1, 1951. It was one thing to admit to having had suspicions about Burgess that had lain dormant for twelve years, but quite another to participate without demurral (alongside Blunt) in a Soviet deception exercise as recently as two years before the events of 1951. One can understand why Rees felt compelled to stand down from his denunciations of Blunt after his clandestine meeting with the deputy director-general, and one could even sympathize with Dick White when he expressed his contempt for Rees to his biographer. Rees was severely squeezed, and he nursed his grievances for years without ever admitting the shabby role he had played in the affair.

The interpretation I put on the Borodin affair is that Burgess must at that time have considered that Rees was ‘safe’, sympathetic to Burgess’s true role, and at no risk of betraying him. Thus the pre-planned visit to Sonning would not have been a madcap exercise to ensure Rees’s loyalty, but something undertaken as a way of exploiting Rees’s connections with MI6. Yet it is difficult to gauge Burgess’s motivations or fears as he prepared his trip home to the UK. He needed new employment, and his negotiations with Michael Berry of the Daily Telegraph suggest that he had long-term plans in the UK. It appears that he did not worry about being caught up in the Maclean investigation, probably because he had always behaved so outrageously, and got away with it. There had been fresh misdemeanours in the United States, but nothing specifically tied to espionage. He had always behaved in a scandalous manner, but it had not previously affected his career. He was not being asked to resign because of suspicions of disloyalty.

Nevertheless, he pitched himself into the maelstrom. He must have alerted Hewit to his homecoming, and he probably suggested that he be accompanied by Blunt to welcome him in London. His free association with Blunt thereafter would suggest that he believed that Blunt was in the clear, and not under suspicion. Had Blunt been told by Liddell of the surveillance involved on Burgess and Maclean? It is not impossible, but Burgess did not appear to be deterred by it, engaging in nothing more blatant than resuming a familiar friendship. And if he learned of the watchers from Maclean himself (as most accounts indicate), he carried on as if everything were normal. I drew attention last month to the feeble way in which Burgess’s actions have been chronicled in the couple of biographies of him.

At some stage Burgess must have concluded that, if Maclean’s escape were being arranged, he would have to accompany him. It was probably after the lunch at the Reform Club on May 15. Whether that was because Moscow had ordered him to accompany Maclean, or because Maclean had convinced him that their true home was now Moscow, as their roles had been snuffed out, or because Burgess had come to that decision off his own bat will probably never be known. Another explanation could be that, in order for ‘the British authorities’ to allow Maclean to escape unmolested, they insisted that Burgess be part of the deal as well.

  1. Anthony Blunt:

Why was Blunt on-site to welcome Burgess when he arrived at Waterloo Station on May 7? Whatever the circumstances, it would seem an unnecessarily bold and risky action. Blunt must have considered himself invulnerable, but who put him up to it? How did he learn of Burgess’s imminent arrival? If it was Modin who had learned of Burgess’s itinerary, he would surely have urged caution. Modin’s recollection is customarily untrustworthy. He claimed that he ‘was waiting anxiously’ in London – but does not define exactly what he was waiting for. When Blunt met with him the day after Burgess’s arrival, Modin wrote that Blunt told him that Burgess had ‘just arrived in London’, suggesting that it was news, and that Modin would not have known about the details of the voyage. But Blunt then continued: “Homer’s about to be arrested. MI5 has focused on three men, and now it seems they have a lead which points straight to Maclean. It’s only a question of days now, maybe hours”.

But that is nonsense. If Burgess had been on an ocean-liner for a week or so, he would not have been able to gather and impart such hot news. Blunt could have told Modin about the search being cut down to three men several weeks beforehand. He was in regular contact with Liddell, although Liddell does not specifically refer to his meetings with Blunt before the escape. While it was true that an interrogation might unveil the whole network, Maclean was not about to be arrested. Further lies followed: Blunt was said to have claimed that Maclean was then in such a state that Blunt was convinced that he would break down the moment MI5 questioned him. But Modin had just written that Blunt had heard nothing from Maclean since their last contact in April. Modin never challenged Blunt, however, on why he had gone out of his way to be seen in Burgess’s company. It consisted of really poor tradecraft. Modin could not really have believed at this stage that MI5 considered Burgess harmless, and that any meetings with him would be regarded as innocent. And then Modin compounded his error by arranging (so he said) a meeting with Burgess himself.

Yuri Modin

Modin admitted that Burgess then had to become the intermediary with Maclean, as Blunt could no longer contact him in safety. Yet that statement implies that it had been safe beforehand, even though Maclean had been under intense scrutiny for some months, and under close surveillance since the middle of April, during which month Maclean and Blunt had met. It all suggests that Blunt had been sent to Waterloo by White and his posse, in order for Blunt to put Burgess at his ease, and for Blunt to learn the news from America. (MI5 was probably told of Burgess’s itinerary by Blunt himself.) After all, the Watchers were there to notice the encounter. Blunt could have explained it to Modin as part of his deception game, where he pretended to be working as a consultant to help the Security Service. Given he was no longer an employee of MI5, it was pushing the idea a bit far to suggest that maintaining contact with Soviet officials was still an important part of his cover, but maybe Modin was not smart enough to work that out. In any event, White at this stage appeared to have every confidence in Blunt’s loyalties to use him as an informant and go-between.

The Modified Concordance

The recently released Personal File on Blunt reveals a remarkable annotation, in KV 2/4700, at sn. 24f. The Concordance of Events compiled after the ‘Disappearance of Burgess and Maclean’ appears in many places, but the version in Blunt’s file contains a hand-written addendum concerning Burgess that reads as follows: “24.5.51 6 or 7 pm:  Talked to BLUNT privately for a long time at the Reform Club”, with a reference to PF 604582 [Blunt’s file] 1112bc. Cross-referring to KV 2/4720, one finds that the evidence was not provided until 1972, by a Squadron-Leader Richard Leven. Leven, who had been waiting to pay Burgess some money he owed him, had seen Burgess and Blunt in a huddle on a sofa for ‘a few hours’ on the evening of May 24. Officer Maconachie of K3 (who appears a little confused) added: “The information that BLUNT and BURGESS had a long conversation in the Reform Club in the early evening of either day [i.e. May 24 or May 25] seems to be new to us.”

Why Leven did not volunteer this information to the authorities immediately afterwards is not apparent, while the apparently retrospective ‘enhancement’ of the archival report consists of a markedly dubious practice. (When the future director-general of MI5, Stella Rimington visited the seedy Leven in Weston-Super-Mare a couple of months later, she elicited the fact that Leven had shortly afterwards spoken to a reporter from the Daily Express, as well as to a Foreign Office acquaintance, about the events at the Reform Club. In his memoir, My Flying Circus (2006), Leven elides over the whole episode, suggesting that he never returned to the Reform Club after his complaint to the Club’s secretary about Burgess’s homosexual advance on him was ignored. Leven does however offer some useful observations about Burgess and Blunt, which I shall return to some time later.) Yet one should not immediately accept Maconachie’s claim that this information was new to MI5. Burgess was being watched closely, and it would seem impossible that such a lengthy discussion could have been missed. No one picks up on the significance of this discussion, however. Blunt did not mention it, and none of the inquisitors who immediately targeted Blunt as a possible conspirator of Burgess’s ever thought to question him about it.

Other evidence is damning. Blunt had been spotted with Burgess at the Reform Club the previous day, as KV 6/145 confirms. Were the Watchers called off on the Thursday, as a note suggests? Then why did they record Burgess’s meeting with Pollock and Miller at the Reform, and then moving on to dine with them both on that same evening, which must have clashed with the ‘couch’ engagement? Did no one notice this anomaly? Did White manage to convince everyone to steer clear of any Burgess-Blunt interactions at the time? In 1956, when Goronwy Rees’s article in the People had stirred up fresh interest in Blunt, Ronnie Reed and Courtenay Young tried to interrogate Blunt again, but Blunt was asked only about his brief meeting with Burgess on the morning of May 25. None of the several meetings or telephone discussions between Burgess and Blunt – including Blunt’s welcoming him at Waterloo – was brought up. [Reed’s and Young’s performance was characteristically inept, which must be fodder for later analysis. Rees had poignantly been provoked to supply his information to the People from his anger that the government inquiry had overlooked Blunt’s relationship with Burgess at the time, and that all blame had been placed on Philby.]

Thus Blunt found himself in an extraordinary, outwardly perilous, but internally safe, situation. He was trusted by Dick White to engage with Burgess without the risk of his being contaminated himself. He was not under surveillance, and he thus felt confident in carrying out his meetings with Modin. He knew that he was trusted at a very personal level by Guy Liddell. Modin did not feel threatened as he knew that Blunt’s true loyalties were to the Soviet Union. Blunt was therefore in a perfect position to help negotiate the outcome that would salvage some prestige for Moscow while allowing MI5 and the Foreign Office to solve the problem of its unarrestable espionage suspects. After the escape, as Guy Liddell’s diaries reveal, the newspapers quite freely described Blunt’s close relationship with Burgess, but the journalists did not pick up the story aggressively enough, and MI5 was spared.

  1. Donald Maclean:

Maclean is the most mysterious of the Four, since he committed nothing to paper about the events except for the unearthly press conference in Moscow in 1956, when the words were certainly dictated for him. I suspect that the stories of his hypercharged emotional state in April and May 1951 have been exaggerated or distorted, since many of the indications from those he had dealings with in the last two weeks of May indicate that he had reached a level-headed recognition that his days in the United Kingdom were numbered, and that he would be spending the rest of his life in Moscow – where, incidentally, he adapted much more successfully than did Burgess and Philby, even though he underwent a number of alcoholic binges that required hospitalization. It is highly unlikely that Burgess was appointed to accompany him because of his frail mental state.

The visceral reaction to the fact that his treachery had been revealed occurred in Cairo in early 1950. Since then he had walked a slow road to some sort of ‘recovery’, with psychiatric help that may have been undertaken as a necessary step to maintain a front. There had been, in the autumn of 1950, a diagnosis of ‘repressed homosexuality’, which Maclean may have borne without challenge if it provided him with some cover. His wife was quoted as supporting the notion that he had a homosexual (or bisexual) streak, but that may also have been part of the legend. (Cyril Connolly later gave confident evidence that Macean had had homosexual tendencies, but his testimony was overall very muddled. In January 1958, however, Sir Steven Runciman told Courtenay Young that Burgess and Maclean had conducted ‘a roaring affair’ up at Cambridge.) After the escape, Blunt would ‘confirm’ to Liddell that Maclean was a homosexual, thus helping to confuse the issues surrounding Maclean’s personality and motivations. Outlandish incidents still occurred, such as his outburst that he was the ‘English Hiss’ in the middle of March 1951, but he was cool enough to recognize the signs that he would soon have to face the music.

Melissa Maclean and sons

The tales of tensions in the relationship between Melissa and Donald may well have been overstated. He had confided in her his commitment to the communist cause right at the start of their relationship, and she had supported his actions. Yes, she may well have been shocked by her husband’s wild behaviour in Cairo, but it did not destroy the marriage. Despite her late pregnancy, she approved of Donald’s flight, and she always planned to join him in Moscow when the circumstances were right. Donald had presented a calmer face to his friends as the arrangements for his escape matured, and, in particular, Anthony Blake’s observations concerning his friend when they met on May 24, and the document that was passed on to the FBI, would tend to confirm that he was reconciled to the outcome. (An anonymous transcript of this letter was handed to MI5 by the US Embassy on June 14, but the Foreign Office judged that it was a poor fake: see sn. 97 in FCO 158/3.) Maclean may, however, have been amazed at Burgess’s perilous sense of timing as they raced their way along the roads of south-east England to make their rendezvous with the Falaise.

Most accounts indicate that Maclean picked up the fact that he was being surveilled, and informed Burgess of such. Yet multiple rumours, and informal statements from insiders, suggest that he had colleagues within the Foreign Office (Talbot de Malahide, conspiratorially) or Michael Wright (innocently) who may have kept him up to date with the progress of the project to investigate him. Jackie Hewit may have meanly identified Frederick Warner as a close intimate of Burgess’s in the Foreign Office who had performed a similar service. None of these relationships can really be construed, however, as being significant in the execution of the exfiltration plan – and certainly not as a ‘last-minute’ tip-off about an interrogation that was not just about to happen.

‘The British Authorities’

Consider what the authorities performed, or allowed to happen. First recall, however, that i) MI6 was not represented on the team investigating the Washington Embassy leaks; ii) MI5 and the Foreign Office could not control the appointments made by MI6, such as the transfer of Philby to Washington; iii) while in Washington, Kim Philby had access to the proceedings of the HOMER inquiry; iv) while Dick White had suspicions of Philby’s loyalty, he could not prevent Philby seeing the results of the cabal’s investigations; and v) Philby had his strong supporters and allies in MI6, including his bosses Easton and Menzies.

  1. While, in early 1950, evidence pointed strongly towards Maclean as being HOMER, the team stretched out the project, conceding only at the end of March 1951 that the search had been conclusive.
  2. Despite the warnings from MI5, and internal concerns, in 1950 both Burgess and Maclean were appointed to sensitive positions in the Foreign Office when disciplinary proceedings against each were considered. (Home Secretary Morrison was one who declared that they should both have been dismissed.)
  3. After Maclean was appointed head of the American desk at the Foreign Office in October 1950, highly sensitive reports were withheld from him.
  4. The official conclusion that Maclean was HOMER was made the day after Burgess was ordered back to London by Ambassador Franks.
  5. The Watchers of MI5 were prepared for Burgess’s arrival, and they noticed him being met by Jackie Hewit and Anthony Blunt at Waterloo Station on May 7, 1951.
  6. Close surveillance of Maclean had started on April 23, and it continued up until his departure on May 25. Surveillance on Burgess was less intense, and apparently selective, as his meeting with Modin (if indeed it did take place) was not observed; nor was his long session with Blunt on the evening of May 24.
  7. By all accounts, the surveillance of Maclean was so obvious that he noticed it, and thus probably became wary about making any incriminating contacts. Burgess likewise noticed that he was being watched, but it did not inhibit him.
  8. If the intention of the surveillance had been to capture contacts with a member of the Soviet Embassy, it failed to observe the one or two incidents in which Burgess was involved.
  9. The authorities appeared to have no interest in the meetings between Burgess and Rees, and Burgess and Footman, both MI6 officers. The exercise completely ignored the activities of Anthony Blunt, ‘consultant’ to MI5.
  10. The surveillance did pick up unusual events (such as the booking of berths on the Falaise, and the hiring of a rental-car, by Burgess) that should have alerted MI5 as to the intentions of the couple they were watching.
  11. Dick White prepared his dossier on Philby, to be given to the FBI, before the escape of Burgess and Maclean.
  12. Approval was sought from Foreign Minister Morrison to question Maclean as soon as the escape plan was finalized.
  13. No one in the Foreign Office or MI5 seemed to be disturbed by the subsequent non-appearance of Maclean in the office on May 26 (Saturday morning).
  14. Likewise, the response to Maclean’s failure to arrive on his normal train on May 28, and non-appearance in his office, was received with apathy. Carey-Foster and Makins even considered that he might have been granted another day off.
  15. The telephone surveillance carried out at the Maclean homes turned out to be a poisoned chalice. It could not be turned off without undermining the whole exercise, but the evidence it provided, involving suggestions of Maclean’s absence over the weekend of May 25-27, as well as fake indications of his proximal presence, should have caused acute embarrassment.
  16. The cabal spuriously interpreted the telephone activity (and inactivity) at the Maclean residence during the weekend of May 26-27.
  17. If MI5 did request Special Branch to keep watch on the ports, the officers failed to think through the implications that, as they admitted, they could not prevent subjects on whom no arrest warrant had been issued from leaving the country.
  18. If Maclean was indeed identified when he boarded the Falaise, no immediate report on his presence was made, or, if it was, it was apparently ignored.
  19. The scramble to involve foreign Police departments (especially the Sûreté) in tracking down the ‘Missing Diplomats’ was equally flawed, as the authorities had no legal authority to arrest the innocent parties.
  20. The cabal (primarily Carey-Foster and Reilly) misinformed the press by claiming that Maclean was due to be interrogated on May 28.

Some of these events may be coincidental. The circumstances of Burgess’s recall are enduringly provocative. It would appear that the cabal had no control over the rationale and timing of Ambassador Franks’s decision, but the evidence shows that the decision to send Burgess back to London had nothing to do with his speeding offences. The complaint from the Governor of Virginia arrived on March 14, 1951. Franks was in England between March 10 and March 28, and could certainly have conferred with his Foreign Office colleagues about Burgess’s status. If the cabal had requested that Burgess be disciplined, and required to return to the UK, Franks had other reasons for reprimanding him, given his obstreperous behaviour at the Philby household, for instance. Thus, if the British authorities wanted to package both Burgess and Maclean up in a ‘defection’ project, having Burgess back in London, consorting with Maclean, would have been a sensible option.

The material in the FCO files is informative. Despite any overt recognition that Burgess may have been a topic for discussion while Franks was in London, soon after his return to Washington, on April 7, Franks wrote a long letter to Ashley Clarke, the Chief Clerk at the Foreign Office, that came to a somewhat reluctant recommendation that Burgess be sent home. The reason was not because he was in disgrace, but because the Ambassador felt that ‘his usefulness here is small and that with this speeding trouble on top of the rest of the story he is more of a liability than an asset to us’ (FCO 158/182). Franks cited Burgess’s slipshod and superficial research, and a laxity towards security matters, but specifically denied that any serious personal or political offence was involved in his decision – thus rather dishonourably ignoring Burgess’s insulting behaviour at the Philby party in January, when he drew a disgusting caricature of the wife of William Harvey, the CIA officer. It is noteworthy that the speeding offences come up as a kind of incidental clincher for the decision, but are by no means essential parts of the argument. On the other hand, given Burgess’s reputation and track-record before he was sent to Washington, the sudden realization by Franks that Burgess was more of a liability than an asset, is unconvincing in its timing. It is perhaps not surprising that Burgess objected to his punishment if the case against him had been presented in that way.

MI5’s Dysfunction

Communications and cooperation were not a strength of MI5. Director General Sillitoe was not highly regarded by his subordinates, and he was thus not told everything that was going on. He held regular staff meetings, but no formal records are available. The position of Deputy (held by Liddell) was always an awkward one: in order to represent his boss while the latter was away, he would have had to imagine what Sillitoe’s policy would have been. That could not have been easy, since Sillitoe sometimes had to cable in for instructions when on the road. Liddell seemed to be occupied with political issues, and ‘special projects’. The relationship between Liddell and White had probably begun to deteriorate in the late 1940s. Liddell’s secret project with Borodin in 1948 and 1949 was probably undertaken without White’s knowledge. It seems that White did not confide to his former mentor all that was going on in the HOMER investigation. After all, he had indicated to Malcolm Muggeridge three years back that he was effectively running the show.

For example, part of Liddell’s diary entry for April 11, 1951, indicates that White has only very recently informed Liddell of progress in the hunt for a Soviet spy in the Washington Embassy. It runs as follows:

It is now thought that this individual may be identical with the Foreign Office agent reported by KRIVITSKY as supplying information on Imperial Policy back in 1937. KRIVITSKY said that he was the son of some titled individual. Recent ACORN material served to narrow the field; this material had been in the possession of the Americans for a long time, but for some reason has only just reached us. There are two people who might possibly fill the bill; one, Donald MACLEAN and the other, John RUSSELL. MACLEAN is now head of the American Department in the Foreign Office and is the brother of Nancy Maclean who was formerly in this office.

Liddell has clearly been left out of the discussions, despite the fact that he had formerly been the expert in Soviet counter-espionage, and had even interviewed Krivitsky at length. Moreover, White has deceived him over the nature of the project, claiming that the Americans have withheld information, when GCHQ had been working on the VENONA (= ACORN or BRIDE) texts for years, had specifically taken over control of the HOMER traffic in January 1949, and had been withholding details of its successes from the NSA! Only in April does Liddell learn about Maclean’s identity – some weeks later than did Philby through his ability to review progress in Washington. Moreover, Liddell oddly comes up with a name, Russell, who was not part of the triad identified in early April, namely Maclean, Gore-Booth and Wright.  It is apparently news to him that Maclean is now head of the American Department, when that appointment had been made six months beforehand. It is clear from Liddell’s diaries that neither Sillitoe nor Liddell knew about White’s little scheme of revealing damaging information to the FBI about Philby. At this stage the withholding of information was probably only a power-play by White, but his opinion of Liddell soon deteriorated.

The main source of discord was Blunt, but it was not over Blunt alone that the two officers disagreed. In his diary entries after the escape, Liddell consistently expresses his trust in Blunt, never believing that he could be a traitor, despite his known history of ‘intellectual’ communist sympathies. He is disparaging about Burgess – a ‘skunk’, but continues to show sympathy for Philby, from his immediate reaction after the events (“There is no doubt that Kim Philby is thoroughly disgusted with Burgess’s behaviour both inside his house and outside it.”) Liddell was broadly unsympathetic to White’s initiative to blacken Blunt in a formal report to the FBI at the end of June. When Liddell returns from leave at the beginning of October, he is apparently saddened to discover that the case against Philby is ‘much blacker’, and he records confidently that Philby was not the man mentioned by Gouzenko and Volkov. (The former, correctly so: the latter certainly not.) He shows his naivety by stating that it was inconceivable that Tomás Harris or Blunt would not have come forward and exposed Philby if they had known he had been a Soviet spy in SIS! And such ruminations lead up to the infamous note of December 18 that I recorded earlier, concerning Philby’s subterfuges as a ‘double agent’.

During the autumn of 1951 White was more involved with Philby than he was with Blunt, and he delegated the examination of Blunt’s record and statements to Robertson. Yet he was impressed enough by what Robertson reported to him (which may well have gone beyond the rather bland statement of Robertson’s that exists in the archive) to want to recommend that Blunt be given the immunity deal. He knew that he would have to get it past Liddell, given his colleague’s seniority and close relationship with Blunt. As I have written elsewhere, White and Liddell passed each other in the night, and the proposal somehow got lost in the fog. In retrospect, when Liddell was dead, White would convey to his autobiographer the suspicion that Liddell might have been party to the conspiracy to exfiltrate Burgess and Maclean, in such a way to shift responsibility while rather disingenuously indicating that such a plot had indeed existed. Liddell’s reluctance to pursue the Blunt deal would convince White that it was imperative that he himself take over the helm when Sillitoe retired. As he surely did.

Carey-Foster and the Security Department

One dimension of the controversy that has not received enough attention is the role of George Carey-Foster and his team of security officers in their attempts to break down the close and collegial atmosphere of the career Foreign Office ‘diplomats’. This aspect is important because of the press attention given during the early 1950s to the notion of an insider in the Foreign Office giving a ‘tip-off’ to Maclean. As I have explained, this was a red herring, since the authorities had skillfully conflated the ideas of a generic warning about the investigation into Maclean (which certainly went back to April, at least) and that of a last-minute alert (which was based on a convenient untruth, and was in any case irrelevant, since the plans had been sprung). Yet it is important because of the fact that the Security Department itself was infected.

Not much has been assembled about the activities of Carey-Foster’s ‘Q’ Section. I am indebted in many ways to an article by Daniel Lomas and Christopher Murphy, published in Diplomacy and Statecraft in August 2023, titled The Foreign Office ‘Thought Police’: Foreign Office Security, the Security Department and the ‘Missing Diplomats’, 1940-1952. While ‘Thought Police’ is a strange way of describing, presumably, what a vetting procedure is (it derives from Arthur de la Mare, who succeeded Carey-Foster after the de Malahide interregnum), the article goes deeply into some aspects of the topic, but it is surprisingly thin in much of its coverage, and, astonishingly and inexcusably, completely overlooks the role of Lord Talbot de Malahide. As I have indicated beforehand, de Malahide played a very equivocal part in the proceedings, and was even suspected by Malcolm Muggeridge and Lord Killanin of being a Soviet agent.

Lord Talbot de Malahide

Carey-Foster, who had been appointed to the position in 1948, struggled with his responsibilities. His function was presented as being ‘advisory’ rather than ‘executive’. The career officers resented this intrusion into their practices and habits, which were based on camaraderie and trust. Strang did not heed sound managerial principles of having Carey-Foster’s recommended disciplines incorporated into the chain of command, and thus Carey-Foster and his team were frequently treated with disdain. Early in the Maclean investigation, Carey-Foster had challenged White for his attempt to disband the exploration, probably because his was an MI5 voice, not a Foreign Office one. There had also been territorial disputes between Carey-Foster and Liddell over responsibilities for investigating the Embassy staff when the leakage was first detected. By the time of the disappearance of the ‘diplomats’, however, Carey-Foster had clearly been cowed into the party line adopted by the cabal, namely that the Foreign Office had not been betrayed by careless chatter or devious betrayal from insiders, but by the machinations of an outsider, Philby.

His conscience probably troubled by a sense of failure and guilt, Carey-Foster struggled after the events of 1951. In the immediate aftermath, in early June, his comments and reactions, as listed in FCO 158/3, show him to be confused and out of his depth. He comes across as week and vacillatory, and his inexperience is also evident from the later escape post mortem, when the Foreign Office was debating on how to handle the propaganda aspects of the events (in FCO 158/26).  Yet he maintained an interest in the business, since, after his retirement (or removal) from the Security post, he wrote rather apologetic memoranda from Rio de Janeiro and Warsaw that are available in the FCO/158 series. What is astounding about the account from Lomas and Murph, however, is that they completely ignore the interregnum when de Malahide took over as acting Security Officer before the arrival of Arthur de la Mare (whom they identify as Carey-Foster’s successor). Their confusion is manifest by an important sentence in their article: “As the defection of Maclean and Burgess revealed, colleagues in the Foreign Office already knew a lot about the conduct of the two men, which was finally brought to the attention of the Security Department when the scandal broke”.

To depict Carey-Foster as uninformed about the previous misdemeanours of both Burgess and Maclean is erroneous. He may not have been told at the time of Maclean’s return from Cairo about his behaviour in Egypt (although Lomas and Murphy misrepresent the dates here, claiming that the details started to reach the Security Department in ‘in March 1950, nearly ten months after his recall’, when they must mean March 1951). On the other hand, they clearly point out that Carey-Foster had been overruled by MI5’s Guy Liddell when he wanted to prosecute Burgess under the Official Secrets Act in January 1950, and he underwent resistance from MI6 as well as senior Foreign Office staff when he pursued his case. Nevertheless, to ignore the familiar and long-standing acquaintanceship that one of Carey-Foster’s officers, de Malahide, had with both malefactors, and which he declared soon afterwards, is simply lackluster and indefensible.

Does all this matter? From the standpoint of the overall plotting of the cabal, not very much, perhaps. It did not change the outcome of events at all, since the cover-up had been underway for a while, and Maclean may have had other well-wishers in the Foreign Office who alerted him to the investigation, which would have been of no surprise to him. On the other hand, it adds enormously to the critique of the leakiness and unstable nature of the Foreign Office itself. It was not simply that some friends of Maclean might have harboured misplaced sympathies, and warned him to get away: it was the fact that a probable Soviet ‘agent of influence’ was embedded in the Security Department itself, and may have been performing untold damage in other parts of the intelligence services before then. Furthermore, he may have been protected by his old school chum Patrick Reilly, who was as complicit in the lying to the outside world about the affairs of May 1951 as was Carey-Foster. No doubt Lomas and Murphy were carefully steered away from such incriminating material by some of the ‘advisers’ whom they acknowledge in a footnote, but they showed a lack of entrepreneurialism in not looking closely at the relevant archival material themselves.

A Possible Sequence of Events

Before the official conclusion from GCHQ, on March 30, 1951, that Maclean was surely HOMER, Dick White realized that the writing was on the wall. He persuaded his colleagues in the Foreign Office that, if Burgess were ordered to return to the UK, they could combine their operation by including a second agent about whom White held strong suspicions, and who might collaborate with Maclean in setting up clandestine meetings with the Russians. White thus exploited the visit by Ambassador Oliver Franks during March 10 to 18 (had he in fact been summoned on such a pretext?) to request that Burgess be sent home under a disciplinary cloud. Franks returned to Washington to discover the speeding incidents, which helped to strengthen what was a more work-related dossier of low performance. Burgess was thus ordered home, although he took his time. Probably alerted by Patrick Reilly, who had worked for Stewart Menzies as his Personal Assistant in World War II, Valentine Vivian flew out to Washington at the end of March to warn Philby about the unsuitability of boarding Burgess – a little late.

Meanwhile, the surveillance on Maclean was approved in early April. The Washington Leaks Committee continued to meet and ponder. They confirmed the HOMER hypothesis, and shared their findings with Patterson in Washington, who in turn showed them to Philby. On April 7, James Robertson of B Division pointed out the equivalence of Maclean and the ‘Imperial Council’ source. MI6 was being kept abreast of the progress, partly by Arthur Martin of MI5, but, at a higher level, no doubt by Reilly. Gore-Booth was officially eliminated as a suspect, for geographic reasons, on April 11. The cabal did not yet want to inform the FBI of its suspicions, believing it needed to have a stronger game-plan in place, but also because they were scared of the news leaking out. Strang was temporizing: he insisted no information be given to the Americans, and wanted Gore-Booth’s name to be added back to the shortlist. On April 13, Roger Lamphere of the FBI asked about the Krivitsky report, indicating that the organization was moving on similar lines. MI5 started its detailed investigation into Maclean’s past on April 20.

MI6 was drawn more closely into the project on April 23, when Robertson and Carey-Foster agreed to share information with a few MI6 officers, including Valentine Vivian. On April 28, Philby had his final briefing meeting with Burgess. The FBI was in the meantime demanding swifter action. On May 1, Arthur Martin flew to Oslo to interview Michael Wright, who had been head of Chancery in Washington. He confirmed Maclean’s incriminating absences in New York, but was incredulous at the probability of Maclean’s being a Soviet spy. On May 5, Martin was able to record the fact of Maclean’s ‘communist outburst’ at a party in January. In Washington, Patterson was concerned about secrets given to the FBI escaping to the notoriously loose-lipped State Department. Partly because of the pressure from the Americans, the team had considered on May 4 that Maclean should be interrogated ‘within a fortnight’. It is clear that the cabal at this time considered interrogation a necessary step, even though it had then gathered no incriminatory evidence from the surveillance. Moreover, it appears that no decision about the form of the interrogation, or who should conduct it, had been made. And then Guy Burgess arrived at Southampton on May 7.

Burgess informed at least two friends of his planned arrival – Goronwy Rees, and the man with whom he shared his flat, Jackie Hewit, who was a close friend of Anthony Blunt. Blunt may have learned the details from Hewit, but Burgess probably wrote to Blunt as well. I cannot say whether MI5 learned from Blunt the facts of Burgess’s itinerary, or whether conventional information-gathering led them to be ready to witness Hewit’s and Blunt’s welcoming of Burgess at Waterloo Station on May 7. Then Burgess got to work. He immediately updated Blunt about the severity of the situation, and the need for Maclean’s exfiltration, something that confirmed what Modin was hearing from his bosses. Modin wrote that, on May 9, Blunt told him that the search had narrowed down to three, which indicates that Blunt was getting updates from Liddell, since Burgess would not have been privy to that information.

The next step for Burgess was to visit Goronwy Rees in Sonning, either on May 7, or the next day. I suspect that Burgess told him the whole story of what he had discussed with Philby, and the need for Maclean to flee, even though no specific plan had been made by Moscow yet. It is probable that Rees, armed with this information, alerted his friends in MI5 (probably Liddell), but not his boss, David Footman, in MI6, to what Burgess had told him. At this stage, he would have laid out the story about Burgess’s attempt to recruit him for the Comintern, thus confirming White’s suspicions that Burgess was in the same category as Maclean. (Rees made a cagey attempt to conceal the fact that he made such disclosures in his weaselly and not very credible anecdotes describing the weekend of the escape.) Yet the most critical part of his testimony would be the revelation about Moscow’s goal of exfiltrating Maclean.

It is at this stage that I hypothesize that White made his decision to facilitate the escape. He was now convinced that both Philby and Burgess had been permanently disloyal: there must be a question mark above Blunt, but he would have his uses as an intermediary. I am sure there was no direct negotiation with the Soviet Embassy, but Blunt would have been instructed to encourage Modin to develop a plan in which Burgess would be included. Burgess would have been told that he was so deeply incriminated that he had to accompany Maclean, and the arrangement was confirmed with Moscow by May 17. The cabal continued to dilly-dally over telling the FBI anything, delaying revealing the latest ‘recovery’ of information on HOMER. It is probable that MI5 suggested the Falaise solution, as opposed to Burgess (or Blunt, or Modin) chancing to see an advertisement in an agency window. Thus the bookings were made, Burgess hired his car, Maclean’s absence on Saturday morning was overlooked, the telephone interceptors failed to indicate with any clarity Maclean’s absence from home over the weekend, Goronwy Rees made his phony calls about Burgess’s anguished conversation with his wife and his own speedy conclusion that Burgess had gone to Moscow, and Maclean’s non-arrival at the office on Monday morning was noticed without alarm. One can even imagine the story about the report going to Leconfield House from Southampton Docks at midnight on Friday May 25, with a brisk telephone call: ‘CURZON and BARCLAY safely aboard!’.

On May 28, MI5 pretended that it was business as usual, and passed the latest recoveries from GCHQ to Arlington Hall. Meanwhile, Dick White had been preparing for the FBI his dossier on Philby. On May 29, Patterson in Washington complimented White on his ‘ingenious scheme’, and White was able to add to his list of charges the fact that Philby had been the tip-off man who had alerted the pair, ready for Martin to take with him to Washington June 6. That was the cover for the apparent gross failure in supervision that had enabled Burgess and Maclean to escape the clutches of Special Branch, and Carey-Foster and Reilly started to exploit it by leaking disinformation about the assertion that Maclean was about to be brought in for interrogation on May 28, but had been able to make a hasty escape at the eleventh hour. On the same day, June 6, MI6 officer Drew during his visit to Washington passed to Kim Philby a letter composed by Jack Easton that warned him of the gathering storm, and which may have constituted a hint that he should disappear, too. If that had happened, White would have had just Blunt still to deal with.

A Lack of Imagination

Of course, MI5 and the Foreign Office should not have fallen into their predicament in the first place. They had engaged in casual recruitment policies, and they had foolishly believed that there was a substantive distinction between political communism and academic communism. MI5 had disastrously ignored the insights and lessons given them by Walter Krivitsky, and had failed to follow up his leads. Kim Philby had led both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service a merry dance with his dissimulations and deceptions, and the obvious signals concerning his probable treachery had been misinterpreted or overlooked. The temporary alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second-Word War had given too many diplomats and civil servants a starry-eyed opinion of Stalin as a co-operative partner, and diminished the threats of his ideology. The Foreign Office had been atrociously indulgent to Maclean and Burgess over their outrageous behaviour, events that to any reasonable observer should have been grounds for dismissal.

Yet the primary problem reflected in the events of the summer of 1951, given a tortured history of twenty years or so, was, I believe, a lack of imagination. In several domains, MI5’s leaders – and Dick White in particular –  failed to think through the implications of the policies they pursued to achieve their goal of Defending the Realm – in those of prosecution, surveillance, and what I choose to call authority, which is really a combination of legality, secrecy, and public relations.

Prosecution:

A perennial challenge presented itself: what do we do with hostile agents whom we find in our service? With conventional spies, the matter was more clear-cut. Klaus Fuchs was a foreigner, recently naturalized, who confessed to passing on atomic secrets to the Soviets. Alan Nunn-May was a scientist with a narrow domain of access, who did likewise, but confessed. No evidence was required in either trial. Much later, George Blake would confess out of wounded pride. But he was another foreigner (a Dutch Jew), and he thus could be made an example of. MI5 and the Public Prosecutor were able to show the efficiency of the service in tracking down spies and show a deterrent example to any others, giving the public a sense of security.

George Blake

Long-time penetration agents were in another league, however. I do not believe that Dick White and his cohorts understood subterfuge, which was the marrow of the Soviet undertaking. White famously diminished Krivitsky, because he was a fake general and did not use his given name, as if he should have turned up in his old school tie when facing his British inquisitors. Philby’s subterfuge was that he had had a radical change of heart when the hypocrisy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was laid bare. Maclean’s subterfuge was to admit to his Civil Service Selection Board that he had not completely abandoned his juvenile leftist enthusiasms  – a show of compassion that impressed his assessors, who knew his father well. Blunt’s subterfuge was to suggest that there was a material difference between communism as a methodology for guiding artistic appreciation, and that as an instrument of political oppression. Burgess’s subterfuge was to behave as the riotous homosexual he was, constantly to spout anti-American and pro-Soviet rhetoric, so that any observer would conclude that he could not have been a secret agent of any sort, let alone for the Soviet Union. MI5’s counter-intelligence expected hostile elements to play with a straight bat, so that they would be found within the echelons of the Communist Party, not masquerading as servants of the Empire in the corridors of power.

So, when it came to the crunch, and the truth became evident, MI5 was in a bind. The evidence against Maclean, for example, was inherently strong, but unusable. For reasons of security (which I judge were exaggerated and not really necessary – fodder for a later article), identifying the phenomenon of the VENONA transcripts was held by ‘the authorities’ to be out of the question. And, even if they had been declassified, the very shaky evidence of coded partial messages translated from the Russian would not have convinced a jury of anything. Thus a confession from Maclean was necessary. But how much might he confess? How much pressure could legally be brought to bear on him? And, if it did come to a trial, what other embarrassing information might come out, such as the disclosure of his scandalous behaviour in Cairo, the failure to discipline him properly, and his re-installation in an important post in London? And what might come out about the failure of MI5 and the Foreign Office to detect someone whose communist sympathies had been so obvious during the early 1930s? How would the reputation of the intelligence services suffer for harbouring these vipers for so long?

In contrast to what happened with Fuchs and Nunn May, the situation was thus very challenging, given the lack of hard evidence. The interrogations of Philby by White and Milmo in the second half of 1951 – clumsy and ill-prepared as they certainly were – showed how difficult it was to pin the subject down over his obvious lies and contradictions, so long as he simply continued to deny anything, or made excuses about his failing memory. Yet there was a perennial problem in MI5’s interrogation techniques, from White through Young to Wright: inadequate preparation, irresolute questioning, and a reluctance to stay silent when the subject was supposed to be answering; too much chumminess in the hope that the subject would respond positively; an inability to apply pressure and home in on the salient contradictions. Burgess would have been a nightmare, since he had acted as the obstreperous and undisciplined leftie for years, and the concrete evidence of espionage was even flimsier. He would have been tough to handle in the witness-box. Along with that, of course, was the deception promoted by Philby, which gave him, Burgess (and Blunt) valid reasons for making contact with NKVD or MGB officers. That would constitute a very strong plank in any defence argument.

Thus the option of disposing quietly of such cases was an attractive option. Starve them of oxygen, deprive them of a living, force them into some kind of exile away from the public eye (as happened with Cairncross, of course, and with which Philby was threatened in 1963). But that might not prevent them from talking, from leaking secrets to the press. In addition, there was the sense of justice. These men were traitors. They deserved punishment – a hefty prison sentence. And, if the public found out about the offences, and then learned that nothing had been done, or the culprit even continued to be succoured and rewarded (as with Blunt), there would be outrage. That is why having the offenders quietly exfiltrated to their intellectual home without any hue and cry began to present an attractive strategy.

But MI5 appeared never to have considered these issues until it was too late. Thus they stumbled into the game of surveillance, and all its complications.

Surveillance:

The collusion to allow both Maclean and Burgess to occupy sensitive positions in the Foreign Office, despite their earlier transgressions, was the first major mistake that Dick White made, presumably having convinced his colleagues in the Foreign Office that some sort of entrapment was necessary. Too many persons knew too much. Carey-Foster had protested the laxity over Burgess, but while he had not been informed about Maclean’s appalling behaviour in Cairo, the inappropriateness of allowing such obvious problem cases to be re-installed was recognized and remarked on by several civil servants in the Foreign Office. The excuse given that a closer eye could be kept on Burgess in an environment like the Washington Embassy was simply sophistical and outrageous. After a disciplinary hearing, he should have been fired. White (and Strang) showed dreadful judgment in not anticipating what the fallout would be if his ruse failed, and if Burgess (in particular) behaved spectacularly badly again – as indeed he did.

The decision to place close surveillance on Maclean, to the extent not only of watching his movements closely, but also installing telephone taps in his home, and in that of his mother, must have seemed a good idea in April. (In 1951, official qualms about such intrusions into the privacy of British subjects were absent or subdued.) After all, it must have seemed imperative to try to catch him in the act of making contact with his handler from the Soviet Embassy, as a firm indicator of his guilt. (Later, Carey-Foster regretted the fact that taps had not been applied on Maclean’s phone in the Foreign Office.) The initial move, however, was much vaguer, and was made at a meeting of Reilly, Carey-Foster, White, Robertson and Martin on April 17, where the group decided that it needed to determine more precisely the political sympathies of Maclean – and, incidentally, Gore-Booth, who was still in the running at this stage. Martin wrote up: “Investigation should be made by the Security Service, the extent of which should be left to their discretion, into the current activities of MACLEAN.” The next day, when Ronnie Reed made the request to the Postmaster-General for the Post Office to record all conversations at the Maclean household, he wrote of Maclean, ‘employed by the Foreign Office, where he has access to important secret information’: “He has been reported to be a communist, and it is desired to learn more about his associates and activities.”

That request assumed that Maclean might freely discuss his political affiliations on the telephone, but it also implied that, from the identification of his friends, a more useful dossier might be built up. In fact, telephone checks were already being applied to his communist friend Peter Floud, who had called Donald’s mother, asking her about his whereabouts, a few days before. Next, having gained White’s permission, on April 21, Roberston instructed D. Storrier in B5 to begin physical surveillance of Maclean, and issued with him a physical description. After a few stumbles, Storrier’s men successfully identified Maclean, and gave their first full report on April 25.

And so the month-long vigil began. One would imagine that some discretion would be needed so as not to make it obvious that he was being watched. Yet, if we can believe the testimony that witnesses such as Carey-Foster and Maclean himself supplied, the attentions of the Watchers were indeed very noticeable. Either that phenomenon was due to clumsiness, or the goal must instead have been one of frightening Maclean into doing something drastic. In essence, it undermined the stated justification for the telephone check, which referred to acquiring ore intelligence about Maclean’s contacts. If he knew that the surveillers were onto him, he would surely have been more careful in his choice of social engagements.

The surveillance of Burgess is even more problematic. I can find no evidence in the archival material of a request to the Watchers: Burgess’s file is apparently opened only after the escape. We know that his arrival at Waterloo Station was noticed, and the tracking of his movements thereafter is not dependent solely on his meetings with Maclean. Yet, if he did meet with Modin and Krovin soon after his arrival (May 10), as Modin claimed, the Watchers failed to follow him. We know from later comments that the surveillance was erratic, and was astonishingly called off on May 24 (see last month’s report, Question 6), thus possibly explaining the oversight on the Blunt-Burgess couch discussion at the Reform Club. The master register (at KV 6/145) is tantalizing: it sometimes relies on retrospective information from his acquaintances, such as Cyril Connolly, but it also includes items that seem to have come from direct surveillance or interception, such as the fact that Burgess called Footman on the telephone on May 8, and that he lunched with Footman on May 11, and afterwards called Rees, and that, after parting from Maclean at the Grosvenor Hotel on the evening of May 22 , he visited the Shakespeare public house, alone.

What would call the surveillance operation off? An incriminating meeting, no doubt, or Maclean’s eventual ‘invitation’ to be interrogated. What Dick White had not planned for was the handling of the process once the critical weekend arrived. It would have been absurd, and keenly challenged, if the Watchers had been ordered to hold off on Friday, May 25, but in effect they had to turn a blind eye, or put in their conventional reports, only to be ignored, when all the critical signs of errant behaviour were shown: the failure of Maclean to turn up for work on Saturday, the paradoxical indications of Maclean’s probable absence from home over the weekend without any indications of concern from his wife or his mother, the inexplicable non-appearance of Maclean at Victoria Station or the Foreign Office by 11:00 am on the Monday. A trap had been laid, but Dick White and his cohorts had fallen straight into it themselves.

Authority:

What authority did MI5 and the Special Branch have over the movements of Burgess and Maclean? In many accounts of the events you may read that the tip-off forestalled the imminent arrest of the pair. Yet that was never the case. There had never been an arrest warrant issued. Edward Heath’s statement of July 1963 proclaimed that Philby had warned Maclean that MI5 was ‘about to take action against him’ – a very vague undertaking. The White Paper of 1955 had merely indicated that ‘the security authorities’ were embarking upon ‘the difficult and delicate investigation of Maclean’. The fact that the miscreants fled strongly suggested that they were fearful of such an investigation, but it did not point unerringly to the fact that the authorities had collected enough evidence to seek their arrest.

Bruce Pontecorvo

Thus the whole notion of ‘keeping a watch on the ports’ was essentially fruitless. Apart from recording the departure of any suspect, the latter could not have been detained, not stopped from leaving the country. This came to be known as ‘the Pontecorvo Effect’, after the Italian-born atomic scientist who had fled the country in October 1950. Guy Liddell recorded in his diary entry for October 8, 1952, that Sillitoe had attended a meeting of the Cabinet ‘where a new law was discussed for preventing suspects like FUCHS or PONTECORVO leaving the country’. Liddell added that the draft was being sent back to legal advisers –  no surprise perhaps, since it would have to develop some special sort of category for British subjects suspected of being spies. If they wanted to leave the country, perhaps that was the best outcome for all concerned, but the authorities were left in a state of ignorance, unsure what they might have stolen, who their accomplices had been, and what secrets they might be taking with them. And the authorities did not like being outwitted. The dilemma could be depicted as follows: However dark the suspicions of a candidate were, he (or she) could not be detained; if the subject fled, however, he (or she) was obviously guilty, and the authorities had failed.

The pressure also came from the FBI, who, unlike the British Parliament, had been kept up to date with the case – how could you let them go? If Maclean had indeed been recognized when boarding the Falaise, and challenged, he could simply have said: ‘You have no right to stop me’, and continued on his voyage. Thus the hue and cry that ensued were equally futile – even counter-productive. Trying to chase down the duo in France would have resulted in the same inability to detain them, or to return them to British shores. They could have said: “We are not ‘missing diplomats’: we know where we are, and we are enjoying a short holiday.” Yes, they might have been asked why they had abandoned their committed journey on the Falaise, and Maclean could have been asked whether he had leave from work that week, but they would not have been obliged to comment. With the intention of suspending their free movement, immigration officers could have asked them to surrender their passports, but they would have been under no obligation to hand them over.

Dick White may have decided that MI5 needed to look busy, that he should travel to France and involve the Sûreté, in order to show the Americans that the troops of MI5 were not sitting on their heels, but all it did was to draw attention to the fact that something was up. If the pair had been found, and been returned to the UK, on what grounds could the authorities have detained them? It would have been back to Square One. Moreover, far too many persons had been exposed to the goings-on, and most of them were not attuned to the needs of secrecy. Immigration officials, French police officers, Watchers, minor Foreign Office personnel, club servants, in addition to all the confused contacts that Guy Burgess – and, to a lesser extent, Donald Maclean – had left in their wake. The FBI knew exactly what had been going on. Jackie Hewit started talking to the Press, Margie Rees began chatting to her friends. MI5 was no longer capable of controlling the narrative. What is astonishing was the fact that the Foreign Office’s denial that it knew anything about the affairs or whereabouts of the ‘Missing Diplomats’ kept the story from boiling over until the Petrov defections almost three years later.

And at the centre of all this sat Anthony Blunt, who probably knew as much as anybody about the objectives and activities of both sides. Astonishingly, despite the fact that he had been watched having long and intense discussions with Burgess immediately before the escape, he was never questioned about what went on between them. The Soviets apparently instructed him to defect as well, but he arrogantly declined, and he got away with it. Soon, Dick White would have come to the conclusion that Blunt should have been part of the package, but Blunt survived for another twenty-eight years before he was unmasked. Moreover, White used Blunt to warn Philby that he should prepare for defection himself, by sending him as an emissary to Beirut in 1962 in advance of Nicholas Elliott’s meeting with the Third Man in January 1963. Ironically, that was the advice that Strang had given his colleagues back in December 1952: “If we want to avoid embarrassment, the best course would be to let him slip away.” White had learnt from the events of 1951 enough to be able to use the threat of ostracism and penury to push Philby to flee to Moscow, but he could never use the same tactics on Blunt. It was too late: the Fourth Man knew too much.

Conclusions

That is my theory of how Burgess and Maclean managed to leave Britain under the noses of MI5, Special Branch, and the Foreign Office. It is a story of collusion and deception, stage-managed by the devious Dick White, who extraordinarily was able to retire and die with his reputation intact. In the short term, White and Strang succeeded. But the exposures from the Petrovs, the public exculpation of Philby, followed by his eventual abscondment, and the fiasco over Blunt’s pardon, corroded the reputation of the government and the intelligence services.

My story is revisionist: The Perfect English Spy morphs into Tricky Dicky. I welcome any challenges to it, and indications of any factual errors that I have made. I do not expect it to gain broad endorsement, but I strongly believe that it makes far more sense than do any of the other accounts of the events of the run-up to May 28, 1951. Not that I have found any narrative that takes into consideration the full scope of activities carried on by the troupe of miscreants, grandees, humbugs and prevaricators who played a leading role in the escapade – as well as those of the common foot-soldiers in MI5 trying to do an honest job.

(Latest Commonplace entries can be seen here.)

1 Comment

Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Geography, Management/Leadership, Politics, Travel

Third and Fourth Men: The Great Cover-Up

How did the Foreign Office and MI5 so massively mess up the surveillance of Burgess and Maclean?

This month I explore the first topic concerning the ‘Missing Diplomats’, an affair that continues to perplex – see last month’s bulletin:  https://coldspur.com/the-missing-diplomats-literature-since-1987/. I am dedicating a complete report to this first set of questions, as its scope is so large, the analysis is pivotal to the exercise, and the implications are very significant. I shall cover the remaining questions at the end of April.

This is how I introduced the topic:

  1. ‘The Third Man’: Was the Third Man the leaker who first gave the warnings about HOMER? Or was he the person who supposedly precipitated the escape at the last minute? Did the UK authorities deliberately make the question ambiguous? Did the question help to divert attention from Blunt’s true ‘third man’ role?

Contents:


Dispelling the Rumour

The Third Man

Hoover Intrudes: The Commons Debate

The Petrov Files: The Defection

Burgess & Maclean

MI5 Reacts

Further Entanglements

Reinspecting Cookridge’s Claim

Nervousness in London

Philby’s Story

The Washington Connection

Summary and Conclusions

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

Dispelling the Rumour

Edward Heath

On July 1, 1963, Edward Heath, Lord Privy Seal, appeared in the House of Commons intending to put the longstanding ‘Third Man’ rumour to rest. He addressed the Members of Parliament with the probable intention of forestalling any public announcement that Kim Philby, who had disappeared from Beirut earlier that year, might soon make in Moscow. After claiming that no evidence had been found in 1951 that Philby had been responsible for warning Burgess and Maclean, or that he had betrayed the interest of his country, he declared:

            The secret services have never closed their files on this case and now have further information. They are now aware, partly as a result of an admission by Philby himself, that he worked for the Soviet authorities before 1946 and that in 1951 he had warned Maclean through Burgess that the security services were about to take action against him.

This statement contained so many ambiguities and half-truths that it should have provoked further questions, even at this late stage. When was the admission by Philby made, under what circumstances, and to whom? Had Philby really stopped spying for the Soviets – phrased as the almost respectable ‘Soviet authorities’ –  in 1946 (something he erroneously claimed in his ‘confession’ in Beirut)? How did the secret services know that for sure? What other sources had led the secret services to their conclusions? How and when had Philby (located in Washington at the time) communicated with Burgess to warn Maclean? How imminent was the ‘action’ to be taken against Maclean? If the security services had been about to make such a move against Maclean (alone), why did Burgess accompany him?

Marcus Lipton

Marcus Lipton, a member of parliament who had originally raised the possibility of Philby’s being the ‘Third Man’ in a parliamentary debate in October 1955, had been forced soon after to make an apology when Philby, after conducting his notorious press conference, was publicly exonerated. Eight years later, Lipton now asked: “Does the Lord Privy Seal’s statement mean that Mr. Philby was, in fact, the third man that we were talking about at the time of the disappearance of Maclean and Burgess?” He received Heath’s reply: “Yes, sir”.

Yet had anyone (‘we’?) in fact been talking about a third man in June 1951? Apart from a vague and unsupported rumour aired in the Daily Express on June 21, the answer is ‘No’. Had the memory of the honourable and gallant member for Brixton really been so frail? At first, the Foreign Office had claimed that it knew neither the reason for the duo’s sudden departure, nor whither they had vanished – let alone that a collaborator had aided their escape. This was despite the fact that, in an unguarded moment, Percy Sillitoe, the MI5 director-general, had told the Daily Express in August 1951 that the pair were ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ (see KV 2/4106, sn. 273b). The mood of studied relaxation continued. A year later, in July 1952, Anthony Nutting, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, answered a question from Lipton in the House of Commons by stating that the search was still continuing, adding rather nonchalantly that Burgess and Maclean had been dismissed from the service on June 1.

With rumours about their possible political unreliability floating around, the popular press analysis was that the primary problem behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean was the fact that they had still been employed by the Foreign Office at the time, not that their employer had been derelict in failing to prevent their escape. Extraordinarily, one or two stories in the Press were overlooked. On June 8, 1952, the Sunday Pictorial published a column that claimed that Maclean had known that he was under surveillance, that he had been suspected of being a Soviet spy, and that Burgess had helped his escape by hiring a car. Lady Maclean (Donald’s mother) brought it to the attention of the Foreign Office, asserting that it was libellous. But nothing happened. And the period of what the Daily Express called the ‘Four Years’ Silence’ continued.

‘Sunday Pictorial’ column (with Lady Maclean’s annotations)

By 1955, however, the Foreign Office was forced to make an announcement in the wake of the defection of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov in Australia, and it was only then that the concept of a ‘third man’ (a ‘tipoff man’) took root. The Petrovs had defected in April 1954, in very dramatic circumstances, and Vladimir had immediately begun to talk – both to the press, and in a series of debriefings carried out by the ASIO (Australia Security Intelligence Organisation) officer G. R. Richards.  Edward Heath, nine years later, took the opportunity to remind his listeners of the circumstances of that time, trying to convoy the notion of a ‘third man’ through the potential minefield. He explicitly confirmed the substance of such an entity, but he felt confident enough to discount any possibility that Philby might have been suspected of filling that role:

            Both Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, when he was Foreign Minister, and former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, now the Earl of Avon, had told the House in 1955 there was no reason to suspect Philby had been the tipoff man in the Burgess and Maclean case.

Heath did not explain to his audience exactly what Macmillan and Eden had been told at the time by their intelligence chiefs, or how such guidance contributed to their confident judgments. They probably did not have a clue: the FBI and the CIA knew more about the case than the leading members of the UK government. For example, after the Conservatives won the November 1951 election, Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Secretary Eden were, according to Foreign Office mandarins, told the ‘full story’, namely that Maclean had come under suspicion because of his mental breakdown in Cairo. Eden gave a peremptory answer to a parliamentary question, namely that he had no knowledge of the ‘present whereabouts’ of Mr. Burgess and Mr. Maclean. I doubt whether Eden, if pressed, could have explained the circumstances of the ‘tipoff man’. So where and when did the ‘Third Man’ story originate?

The Third Man

One prominent source appeared in a book that traded on the concept. In his 1967 volume profiling Philby, The Third Man (a title to which the author does not really perform justice), E. H. Cookridge – an Austrian-born journalist who had known Philby well in Vienna in 1934 – described how the Australian Royal Commission on Espionage, on September 18, 1955, had delivered its report on the discoveries made by the revelations of the Petrovs. According to Cookridge, the report contained Petrov’s deposition that Burgess and Maclean had supplied the Soviets with a rich trove of photographs and other documents from the Foreign Office. Vladimir Petrov stated that he had learned these facts from a cypher clerk who worked for him in the Canberra rezidentura from October 1952, one Filip Kislitsin, who had provided operational support to Burgess and Maclean when he worked in London during the late 1940s, and had later, in Moscow, helped organize their exfiltration from London. Kislitsin was proud of his performance in this case and boasted that it had gone off ‘exactly as we had planned’. When the news of Melinda Maclean’s successful break-out to join her husband in Moscow was published in 1953, Kislitsin had been prompted to tell Petrov what he knew about the Burgess-Maclean business, and Petrov had skillfully elicited further information from him.

F. V. Kislitsyn

Cookridge then made a startling claim, introducing a new actor on the scene:

            Also in Petrov’s deposition was the statement that Kislitsin had told him that a ‘third man’ in Washington had informed Colonel Vassilyi Raina, head of the First Directorate of G. U. R., that Maclean was under investigation and there was a danger that he might be arrested. This ‘third man’ had apparently warned Maclean by sending a friend to London. Kislitsin was obviously unaware that the emissary was Burgess; neither did he know the name of the ‘third man’ in Washington.

Note that this claim carefully points to the tipoff occurring while Burgess was still in the USA: it is a general warning about the investigation, not an alert about an imminent arrest. It suggests that Philby was, improbably, in direct contact with Raina. It also provocatively implies that Raina and his organization did not have the means to contact Maclean directly, and that the Soviets had had to rely on Philby to provide the alert by very circuitous means. In any case, if this assertion by Cookridge were true, it pointed to a shocking oversight by MI5 and the Foreign Office. Had a direct pointer to a person undeniably identifiable as Philby been made public as early as September 1955? The British authorities had appeared ignorant of this disclosure by Petrov (or had believed that they could safely repress it), as they published, on September 23, a notorious statement on the defections that took no account of the assertion, in the form of a White Paper titled ‘Report Concerning the Disappearance of Two Former Foreign Office Officials’. How could they have ignored the statement to which Cookridge referred?

It seems that the Foreign Office had been waiting for the dust to settle in Australia before delivering the paper, but it had also been pushed into activity when an item about Burgess and Maclean that had been published in the Australian press appeared in an article in The People on September 18. It was an extract from the Petrovs’ ghost-written and as yet unpublished memoir Empire of Fear.  Rebecca West wrote that an enterprising journalist called the Foreign Office for comments, fully expecting to get rebuffed, but instead received confirmation of all the basic facts about the pair and their escape, including the critical one that they had left because they knew that they [sic!] were being investigated. Two cats were out of the bag.

The Government’s White Paper did contain two important paragraphs concerning the defections, however. Paragraph 11 read:

            It is now clear that in spite of the precautions taken by the authorities Maclean must have become aware, at some time before his disappearance, that he was under investigation. One explanation may be that he observed that he was no longer receiving certain types of secret papers. It is also possible that he detected that he was under observation. Or he may have been warned. Searching enquiries involving individual interrogations were made into this last possibility. Insufficient evidence was obtainable to form a definite conclusion or to warrant prosecution.

The suggestion of a tip-off man was very tentative, and was restricted to the possibility that Maclean had been warned of the investigation ‘some time before his disappearance’.  Nevertheless, the end of paragraph 26 ran as follows:

            It was for these reasons necessary for the security authorities to embark upon the difficult and delicate investigation of Maclean, taking into full account the risk that he would be alerted. In the event he was alerted and fled the country together with Burgess.

The tone has changed: the notion of a tip-off man is firm. Yet this is a different dimension: it suggests that the tip-off occurred at the last minute, and that it probably provoked the flight. It shows confidence that Maclean had been alerted – yet how did the security authorities know that for sure? I do not believe the scandalous implications of this second statement have ever been analyzed closely. The government made an explicit admission that it knew that Maclean had been alerted, but never stated what the evidence was, or why such evidence did not lead to the source. It also did not explain how the authorities thought Maclean might have been alerted: were their own security procedures so frail, or did they suspect that Maclean had conspirators in high office? It was also ingenuously vague and incongruous about the circumstances: ‘embark[ing] upon the difficult and delicate investigation’ suggested an extended process that in fact went back several months, while the description of the alert, and Maclean’s subsequent flight, indicated a more sudden event. This assertion had another very important implication: by indicating that the twosome had been able to make a quick decision to abscond, it finessed the whole question of the need for a Soviet logistics effort to enable their passage to Moscow once they reached France.

The extent of the confusion – or self-deception – can be shown by other archival sources. The Foreign Office file FCO 158/133, a heavily redacted 1955 report claiming to analyze the possible penetration of the Foreign Office by Soviet agents includes the following passage:

The suggestion that Maclean (or Burgess) may have been ‘tipped off’ by someone in the Foreign Office proper or in the Foreign Service overseas has been exhaustively examined. While a deliberate warning cannot be entirely ruled out, or an inadvertent and innocent ‘tip-off’ conceivably given in London to Maclean, it has been concluded that the disappearance of the two men, at that particular time, can be explained quite independently of any warning.

So much for the White Paper confirmation that Maclean indeed ‘was alerted’. Maybe the report was simply trying to exculpate the Foreign Office, and detach it from MI5’s rather shabby account. Yet leaks in the Foreign Office had indeed been recognized early on. As recorded in KV 2/4104, Malcolm Cummings in B4 of MI5 had on June 12, 1951 described ‘slipshod security’ at the Foreign Office. A member of the cypher staff there had informed MI5 that a large number of people at the Foreign Office were aware of the investigation into Burgess and Maclean. There was little evidence of the ‘exhaustive’ examination claimed by the anonymous official, in that case. A simpler admission of this fact could have saved the Government a lot of grief.

Moreover, other contradictions were obvious. Another internal Foreign Office memorandum, by Arthur de la Mare, dated November 7, 1955 (see FCO 158/177), recorded that members of the Press had noticed that the White Paper told how ‘Maclean and Burgess made their escape when the Security Authorities were on their [sic] track’, when elsewhere the Report had stated that Burgess had not been under suspicion. De la Mare tried to explain away the contradiction by saying that the impression was given by the account of Petrov’s testimony in paragraph 23, but it was not a convincing defence. Foreign Office high-ups were aware of the contradictions.

Percy Hoskins’ Eight Questions

The British Press immediately picked up on that critical phrase: ‘he was alerted’, and the concept of the Third Man thus took root – in September 1955. Yet the journalists overall did not cover themselves with glory over these ambiguous signals. Percy Hoskins of the Daily Express tried valiantly to energize the discussion, and in one column listed ‘eight points’ – questions he believed MPs should be asking in the forthcoming parliamentary debate, which astutely highlighted some of the anomalies in the White Paper. He drew attention to such embarrassing items as Maclean’s taking the day off on May 26, without any indication of concern by his bosses. (The column can be seen at sn.502 in FCO 158/7.) The Foreign Office was alarmed enough over the adverse criticism it received in the Press to create a tabulation of the questions raised: this in itself could have acted as a comprehensive assault on the flimsiness of the case presented. At the end of September, the Foreign Office was preparing some tentative responses that Prime Minister might be able to deploy when the inevitable Commons debate took place. Yet, perhaps because the media were so fragmented and competitive, no concerted challenge evolved. Members of Parliament were either distracted, confused, or cowed into silence, and presented no substantive confrontation.

Percy Hopkins

As an example of how scattered and random the criticisms were, in one of the reflective pieces which Hoskins supplied between the issuance of the White Paper and the debate in the House of Commons, he raised again the subject of the tip-off man. wrote: “It has been assumed that he [Burgess] had been tipped off by a contact in Washington or London, that he had hired the car to flee . . .”. (Note that it is now Burgess, not Maclean, who has been tipped off: Hoskins had sharply pointed out that it was absurd to consider that Burgess should have been able to escape after renting a car on the day of his disappearance, but the lead was not pursued.) Who had made that assumption is not stated: Hoskins was no doubt using an insider source who had given him the hint concerning an informant in Washington. *

[* An intriguing entry in Guy Burgess’s file KV 2/4104, at sn. 203z, dated June 25, 1951, declares, based on evidence from Judy Cowell: “The leakage to the Daily Express occurred in Percy Hoskins’ bar – his flat, at Arlington Court, is a rendezvous for civil servants, police officers and officers of the Security Service.”]

There appears to be no paper-trail of these fragmented revelations, although they obviously came to the notice of Cookridge as well. My first reaction was that any relevant records that emanated from Australia must have been weeded by MI5, and that a disgruntled insider had passed them on to Cookridge. I had to remind myself that, back in April 2109, I had concluded that Guy Liddell had been Cookridge’s informant: see the second section of my posting at https://coldspur.com/the-importance-of-chronology-with-special-reference-to-liddell-philby/. Liddell had resigned from MI5 in May 1953, so would not have officially been exposed to the Petrov business at close hand. The Petrov files, however, show that he visited Australia, with the knowledge of ASIO, in the autumn of 1954, returning after a satisfactory visit in November. He may well have been on an undercover assignment to gather information on Director-General White’s behalf. He certainly had an interest in diverting attention away from Blunt to Philby, which this ‘extract’ undeniably does. Thus he might have continued to feed information to Cookridge, while Cookridge may have added the flamboyant flourish himself.

Yet Hoskins, who acted as the doyen of the journalists, never asked himself: How could a Third Man in Washington have given a last-minute tip off? Hoskins never re-assembled the dual dimensions of leakage that had explicitly been stated in the White Paper, and instead he applied the secret intelligence he possessed solely to the phenomenon of the last-minute alarm. Marcus Lipton’s question to Prime Minister Eden had similarly failed to grasp the nettle, since he concentrated on the ‘Third Man’ activities of Harold Philby, when it was well-known that Philby returned to Britain after Burgess and Maclean had disappeared. An opportunity was missed: any properly focussed attention was probably distracted by an event across the Atlantic.

Hoover Intrudes: The Commons Debate

J. Edgar Hoover

It would appear that the information described by Cookridge had slipped out already – even to the USA. J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. chief, who had, as I have explained elsewhere, been tipped off by Dick White, via Arthur Martin, in June 1951 as to Philby’s role as the ‘alerter’ in Washington, entered the fray. (Please see the following bulletins for the full story:  https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/ and https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-tangled-web/ ). At that time, White’s logic had been as follows: Philby was already under suspicion; he was indoctrinated into the HOMER inquiry; his close friend, Burgess, stayed at his house outside Washington; Burgess returned to the UK, and consorted with Maclean; Burgess and Maclean absconded. Thus Philby was responsible. Instead of having to battle with Philby’s employers and allies at MI6, why should White not induce the Americans to force the issue, and have him outed? White’s scheme had been received enthusiastically by Geoffrey Patterson, the MI5 representative in Washington. In fact, Philby had been recalled before the Americans took action.

When the Petrov story broke, Hoover pursued his own investigation, however. According to David Horner’s Official History of ASIO: 1949-1963, in August 1954 Hoover ‘arranged for an FBI liaison officer to visit Spry in Melbourne’, which led to more solid relations between the two agencies. Horner continued (p 380):

            Hoover then wrote directly to Spry asking for various pieces of information from the Petrovs. The information was cross-checked against that provided by the Soviet defector Rastvorov in the United States, and both ASIO and the Americans were satisfied that Petrov’s evidence was reliable.

Rastvorov had defected in Japan in February 1954, after receiving a recall instruction in the wake of the purge of Beria’s men. Horner’s attention to detail is regrettably lax, however. His source for this item is an unidentified ASIO memorandum dated July 9, 1974: the chronology does not make sense. What Rastvorov claimed about Burgess and Maclean is thus not easily verifiable. (Rastvorov contributed three articles to Life magazine at the end of 1954, but they contain only a cursory reference to Burgess and Maclean.)

White’s little game with the FBI was a dangerous one: he was suffering from delusions of grandeur. His behaviour in 1951 and 1952 had been one of the most disreputable aspects of the whole affair. He had for a long time believed that he was running the whole show at MI5, and he had given that impression to others. In a diary entry for January 28, 1948, Malcolm Muggeridge, having just lunched with White, wrote: “He is now more or less head of MI5”. Sillitoe was just a figurehead, and Deputy Director-General Liddell had been carefully sidelined. Having executed his ruse of leaking his strong suspicions about Philby to the FBI via Arthur Martin’s dossier, White then had to face the prospect of having Philby interrogated when the latter was recalled in June 1951, and he took on the responsibility himself.  He was, however, mentally, psychologically, and technically unprepared for this task, as the transcripts in the PEACH files show. He had probably expected that the reaction from the United States would have eliminated Philby by then – or even pushed him to defect, too.

Yet, having failed at his task, and with MI6’s senior officers rallying to Philby’s support, White had to delude his own team about the implications of the man’s guilt. In an extraordinary minute recording a meeting of MI5’s B2 team (Soviet counter-espionage) held in February 1952 (see sn. 387z in KV 2/4108), White explained to the officers present that, after Helenus Milmo’s interrogation of Philby in December 1951, he was known to be a Soviet agent and was deemed responsible for the leakage of information that led to the flight of Burgess and Maclean. White warned everyone in attendance that no mention of the case could be made to anyone not present. If the information became public, he explained, serious damage to MI5’s relations with the US security authorities might occur. B1 and B4 also received the lecture. Guy Liddell apparently did not get the message. It was a hypocritical and deceitful show of behaviour of the lowest order on White’s part. There would be many who would recall White’s recklessness in the years to come.

In any event, Hoover ordered a story to be leaked to the New York Sunday News, in which Philby was named as the ‘Third Man’. It appeared on October 23, 1955. The timing was extraordinary, since Hoover’s insertion simply caused all the attention in the UK to shift from the several relevant questions about the whole surveillance project to the more volatile and eye-catching theme of the tip-off man. (Might the story’s release and timing have been arranged behind the scenes? I do not regard it as impossible.) The disclosure encouraged the terrier-like but not outstandingly smart Marcus Lipton, at Prime Minister’s Question Time in the House of Commons on October 25, to shift his focus. He requested that a Select Committee be appointed to investigate the Burgess and Maclean business, and he followed up with the following question:

            Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby, who was First Secretary at the Washington embassy a little time ago, and is he determined to stifle all discussion on the very great matters which were evaded in the wretched White paper, which is an insult to the intelligence of the country?

It appeared that Lipton was brazenly, but confidently, using Hoover’s leak to exploit intelligence that could only have derived from the debriefing of the Petrovs – information that he had acquired clandestinely. Anthony Eden’s reply, however, was to fence off the whole matter:

My answer was “No” to the hon. and gallant Member’s Question, which was not about all that but asked for the appointment of a Select Committee. My answer remains “No.” So far as the wider issues raised in the supplementary question are concerned, the Government take the view that it is desirable to have a debate, and an early debate, on this subject, in which I as Prime Minister will be glad to take part.

Harold Macmillan

The outcome was that a further debate did indeed take place, on November 7. Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan’s long exculpatory speech can be seen at https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1955-11-07/debates/45728b3c-a5e0-48ac-829f-a47d00fec839/FormerForeignOfficeOfficials(Disappearance) .  On Philby, he made the following statement:

It is now known that Mr. Philby had Communist associates during and after his university days. In view of the circumstances, he was asked, in July, 1951, to resign from the Foreign Service. Since that date his case has been the subject of close investigation. No evidence has been found to show that he was responsible for warning Burgess or Maclean. While in Government service he carried out his duties ably and conscientiously. I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country, or to identify him with the so-called “third man,” if, indeed, there was one.

While the charge of having ‘had communist associates’ sounded a feeble reason for suspension (of how many leading members of various government administrations might that have been said?), it was allowed to pass. If that was all that Philby had been accused of, he could have borne justifiable grievances about his peremptory dismissal. (When one considers how Burgess and Maclean were kept on and sustained after their reprehensible patterns of behaviour, it is almost comical.) Also allowed to pass was Macmillan’s naïve but very characteristic questioning of the existence of a ‘Third Man’, even though the earlier government report had admitted that Maclean had indeed received a warning from someone of presumably humanoid origins. Moreover, the outcome of Macmillan’s clearance of Philby, the virtuoso performance to the Press by Philby at his mother’s home, and his subsequent challenge to Lipton to repeat his accusation outside the protection of the House of Commons, meant that Lipton had to make an abject apology. If Philby had been courageous, he might have declared that it was impossible that he could been the Third Man who gave the last-minute tip-off, since he was over 3,500 miles away from the action at the time. Yet he might thereby have rekindled the idea of an unidentified Third Man in Washington who much earlier had alerted Maclean to the investigation, and he thus could also have turned the spotlight afresh on someone else, the last-minute informant in London.

Yet how was it that the statements issued in the House, and the White Paper issued on September 23, could so glibly avoid the revelation that Cookridge later identified? And why did Lipton have to withdraw his remarks, if the evidence was so unambiguous? The Government had admitted that there had been a ‘Third Man’, but happily went along with Philby’s resolute denial that it had been he. In that case, however, the real Third Man was still at large. A more dogged approach by the Press and the Members of Parliament should have pushed the Government to explain why their investigations had failed to unearth who the true culprit was, and it could have applied pressure for it to explain the paradox about warnings from Washington and leaks in London.

The fact is, however, that in one critical respect Cookridge was completely wrong about the Washington-based alert. No such statement concerning a ‘Third Man’ had ever been published in the Australian proceedings. The Final Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage has no indexed entries for Burgess or Maclean, and the detailed transcripts of the Commission’s inquiries that lasted for one-hundred-and-twenty-six days, dating from May 1955, contain no testimony from the Petrovs that referred to the fact that Burgess and Maclean may have received a tip-off before they escaped. All the relevant information was concealed in secret exchanges between ASIO and MI5 in London. No doubt Cookridge, Lipton and Hoover, and senior members of the CIA’s counter-intelligence staff, all received the same damaging item from an insider source, but were constrained by the ethics of source protection. Thus the story died for a while, and the Foreign Office breathed again. The clandestine proceedings of the handling of the Petrovs were to reveal, however, that MI5 and the Foreign Office were in 1954 and early 1955 trying to protect some very dark but related secrets.

The vital aspect of the two paragraphs in the White Paper is the fact that they implicitly pointed to the possible existence of a Third Man as well as that of a Fourth Man, two separate persons giving warnings at different stages of the investigation! And this was, of course, precisely true, namely Philby (stage 1) and Blunt (stage 2). Dick White and his subordinate officer Graham Mitchell (head of D Division), responsible for the text of the White Paper, surely never considered that the wording of their statement might have given the whole game away. Neither the honourable members of Parliament nor the less honourable members of the Press could possibly imagine that there were two tip-off men involved, and they failed to pick up the obvious but probably unintended clues that had been thrown to them.

Where was the accountability? For four years, the British authorities had pretended there had been no exposure or malfeasance, but were then forced to acknowledge that the pair had indeed been spies, and that Maclean (at least) had been tipped off. They then forcefully denied that Philby had been the Third Man who had alerted the pair, and they defended him. Another eight years were apparently spent doing nothing –  until Philby’s disappearance forced them to admit that he had indeed been that individual. In attempting to explain their dismal performance over the whole imbroglio, however, the Foreign Office and MI5 had opened a Pandora’s box of puzzles and conundrums that has never been closed. What exactly did the defection of the Petrovs uncover, and why were the disclosures not followed up with any vigour?

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

The Petrov Files: The Defection

The National Archives files on Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov are gigantic. They encompass KV 2/4339 to KV 2/4388 – fifty discrete files. Most of these, for reasons of size, are split into further sub-files, numbering from two, three, four, five – even to eight in one case. Most of these sub-files contain a hundred pages or so. They are a mess. The transcripts of the hearings (KV 2/3478 to KV 2/3487), comprising the full record, over one-hundred-and-twenty-six days, and consisting of photocopies of densely-typed pages, should have been extracted into a separate file, alongside the relatively brief official ‘Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage’, dated 22 August 1955, at KV 2/3488. The remaining files are  a largely disorganized accumulation of memoranda, reports, telegrams, interviews, etc. etc. dealing with the investigations into the Petrovs, the attempts by London (the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, MI5 and MI6) to control what was going on, and the arduous role of MI5’s Service Liaison Officer with ASIO in Canberra to act as a mediator.

There are many highly valuable items in the archive, such as fascinating reports on the structure and methods of Soviet Intelligence, and profiles of its agents abroad in many countries, but they are interspersed with much repetitive information, and a rather chaotic set of correspondence. Moreover, the files have been weeded and redacted. Since cable numbers were applied serially, the existence of missing items is obvious by virtue of the discontinuity of identifiers. Several items (including a few relating to Burgess and Maclean) that are listed in the Minute Sheets have been removed from the dossier. On the other hand, significant pieces concerning the pair are absent from the Petrov files, but can be found in the Burgess PF (in KV 2/4111). Names are frequently redacted. Memoranda are referred to, often as enclosures, but they are not attached. It is utterly chaotic – maybe deliberately so. Wading through these files is a laborious – but necessary – process.      

Yet a careful examination reaps great rewards. To a small extent, the MI5 officers who studied them have helped researchers. They were on the lookout for references to Burgess and Maclean in the transcripts, and inserted their hand-written notes where information needed to be extracted to the defectors’ files. Thus, when the examiner is trying to pinpoint the date when Kislitsyn (aka Kislitsin) arrived, in KV 2/3485 (Day 93, February 2, 1955), Evdokia Petrov helps the investigator by indicating when the news was received that Melinda Maclean had made her escape.         At the top of the first page of the Transcript for each day, the MI5 officer has carefully listed all the Personal Files that need to be updated with relevant information from the record, and the officer responsible (R. T. Reed, a name that will be familiar to many coldspur-readers) has faithfully listed Maclean (D.D. – to distinguish him from an unrelated Australian Maclean) and Burgess for processing with items on page 2002. Thus, if Reed and his colleagues were doing their job properly, we should be able to rely on them for a comprehensive collection of Burgess and Maclean sightings. The gems derive from the mass of other material.

Evdokia & Nikolai Petrov

This was not a normal, clandestine defection. Vladimir Petrov had been under close inspection ever since he arrived in Australia, and ASIO had marked him out as a potential defector in July 1953. While Petrov had been discreet in his negotiations, he had not been open with his wife, Evdokia, who worked alongside him as his cypher clerk. She was torn between loyalty to her husband and her concern for relatives left behind in the Soviet Union, and she actually defected two weeks after Vladimir. A very public attempt at abduction of Evdokia by KGB goons was caught on camera, and the world’s press was alerted to a major story. Vladimir was interested in milking the highest bidder to pay him for what he knew, and the Australian government knew that it could not keep him quiet. Petrov brought very little documentary evidence of espionage with him, however: most was in the heads of him and his wife.

There was also much political controversy, since an election was to take place on May 29. The incumbent Prime Minister, and leader of the Liberal/Country Coalition, Robert Menzies, had feared a strong challenge by dint of the free-spending promises of Dr. Evatt, the opposition Labour leader. When Menzies won the election, Evatt, a communist sympathizer, claimed that Premier Menzies had arranged the defection for electoral purposes, and that the documents were fake. Tension existed between the fledgling ASIO (set up and trained by Roger Hollis) and the MI5 officers in London. ASIO wanted to show its independence in what it saw as an Australian affair, while the UK was concerned about the broader implications, and was already uneasy in its relationship with the Americans because of VENONA-related leakages in Australia. Indeed, VENONA cast a shadow over the whole proceedings, since many of the identifications of Soviet agents that the Petrovs were able to make could not be revealed in open court because of the secrecy behind the VENONA programme. Yet, owing to a coincidental acquaintance, the Petrovs had some fresh secrets to reveal about events way beyond Australia. They had insider information about the abscondment of the Missing Diplomats.

Burgess & Maclean

The fact that what the Petrovs had to say about the Burgess-Maclean business was based on second-hand evidence was of no concern to such as the Daily Express, but it was a critical concern for MI5 and the Foreign Office, who went to strenuous lengths to make sure that anything inflammatory was described as purely speculative. As early as April 7, 1954 (i.e. a couple of days after Petrov defected) the Security Liaison Officer (SLO) in Canberra, Derek Hamblen, summarized in a cable the major points Petrov had already revealed: that the NKVD had recruited Burgess and Maclean as students; that, when the pair considered they were under surveillance, the MGB ordered their retrieval; that the escape arrangements were handled by Kislitsyn; and that the spies had taken valuable information with them. MI5 was very concerned about the details behind these allegations, and it wanted to prevent any fresh bare facts from coming out.

The references to the university background of the recruitment of the pair might have provoked greater concern than was apparent. After all, if you find a couple of dead bats in your attic, it is unlikely that there are not many more who have decided to roost under your rafters. The public at large may not have thought twice about this phenomenon, but any MI5 officer who had been exposed to the Krivitsky disclosures should have reacted with alarm. If Burgess and Maclean, what about Philby, Blunt, Rothschild, for starters – and that was just Cambridge? White, Liddell, and Archer (especially) all knew about the Imperial Council spy and the journalist in Spain. Could the lid be kept on that part of the story?

One of the hitherto unspoken areas of interest must have been the implication that Burgess and Maclean contacted their Soviet handlers when they realized that they [sic!] were under surveillance: since the pair had been closely watched since Burgess’s arrival, and no contact with members of the residency had been noticed, who had been the messenger? This conundrum would not have been apparent to the outside world, but it was of critical importance for MI5. When the first report from Australia on Petrov’s testimony on Burgess and Maclean arrived in London on April 7, declaring that the Soviet Embassy had ordered their withdrawal after the couple had told them they were being surveilled, someone has inscribed: ‘How did they know?’. Indeed, Robertson immediately replied, in a message visible at sn. 519a in KV 2/4111, but which (I believe) is absent from the Petrovs’ PF: “Urgently interested to know why BURGESS and MACLEAN considered Security Service were on their track.”

[I insert here what I believe are important comments about the organization of MI5 at the time. In May 1953, Dick White had been appointed Director-General to replace Percy Sillitoe, much to the chagrin of the Deputy D-G Guy Liddell, who retired to work at AERE Harwell. White, who knew where the bodies were buried, and was determined not to let their whereabouts harm his career, set out to re-build MI5. In October 1953 he implemented his changes. Roger Hollis moved from C Division to become White’s deputy. Divisions now became Branches. F Branch was re-formed to intensify domestic surveillance of subversive movements. The Counter-Espionage B Division was reconstituted as D Branch: in what must have been a surprise move, the relatively inexperienced and untested Graham Mitchell (who had been responsible for ‘Vetting’ under Hollis in C3) was appointed head of D. Whether James Robertson, who had worked closely with White on counter-espionage projects such as the Blunt business in 1951, was miffed by this apparent snub, cannot be ascertained. Robertson (as head of D1, the Soviet counter-espionage section) continued to lead the Burgess/Maclean inquiries while his boss, malleable under his new protector, learned the ropes. The Petrov case immediately applied pressure on the somewhat unworldly Mitchell, while Robertson disappeared from D Branch records late in 1955 – perhaps because he was disgusted with the shape that the White Paper had taken – although he did resurface as ‘D’ in July 1956. That was the month in which Roger Hollis replaced White as Director-General, and Mitchell was moved into the deputy spot. Courtenay Young, who had served as Special Liaison Officer between ASIO and MI5 from 1952 to 1955, and also ghost-wrote Alexander Foote’s memoir Handbook for Spies, had joined D1 from B1k earlier in the year, but in June 1956 he reported that Rodney Reed had been taken away from him. Young was left to hold the fort on Burgess and Maclean himself as D1, until D. M. Whyte was moved in a couple of months later. Thus there were certainly continuity problems in D Branch, and probably some concerning morale, as well.]

Very curiously, moreover, the narrative takes two different courses at this point. The relevant Burgess Personal File (KV 2/4111) includes documents that are not to be found in the corresponding Petrov Files (KV 2/3440 and 2/3442). KV 2/411 shows that a contentious exchange of cables took place at the end of April 1954, in which Charles Spry, the head of ASIO, accused the Foreign Office of making unauthorized and unnecessary comments on confidential material. London, in response, suggested that leakages of information to the Press had occurred in Australia, and that it was a mistake for the Australian authorities to be arranging press conferences for the Petrovs. In fact, ASIO had to concede that a source close to Evatt had leaked information to the Press after a Cabinet meeting. The Burgess file does include a fuller attempt by the SLO to explain what Petrov knew and had said about the communications between Burgess and Maclean and the Embassy, but the defector’s story varied, possibly because of translation issues, and the Petrovs started to clam up as they did not want to say anything that might damage their ex-colleague, Kislitsyn.

Returning to the annotation of puzzlement above, I declare that this simple reaction has very deep implications. First of all, the author of the note was probably interested in knowing how the couple knew that they were being surveilled, but it could also refer to an explanation of how the Soviet Embassy learned of their suspicions. After all, if Burgess and Maclean were being closely surveilled, any contact with Embassy personnel would surely have been picked up. Yet there is a degree of naivety in the inquiry: since the surveillance of the duo was so very obvious (and maybe designed to frighten them into an indiscretion such as arranging a meeting with their Soviet handlers), why would Robertson appear to be so surprised that Burgess and Maclean had detected that they were being watched? Was he perhaps ignorant of the true nature and purpose of the surveillance exercise? This would not be the only occasion when aspects of the project were being withheld from lower-level MI5 officers. It seems that Petrov had assumed that the pair had been alerted rather than working it out themselves, but he may have been fed a leading question.

The response could have been very provocative, and a little troubling, but it is not clear that Robertson’s question was directly addressed. An item in the ‘Kislitsyn’ file maintained by ASIO (Volume 3: A6119, p 17), recording an interrogation of Petrov that took place on April 13, confirms the evidence: “According to GLEB [Kislitsyn] they [Burgess and Maclean] reported to the contact man that they were fairly certain that Security were taking an unusual interest in their activities. Sometime later the Soviet arranged their escape.” A ‘contact man’, eh? Who might that be? I could not find this nugget in the KV Petrov files. And MI5’s Watchers had not noticed any meetings between Burgess or Maclean and members of the Soviet Embassy. Yet Anthony Blunt had been in plain sight. Was there a possible exposure here?

MI5 Reacts

In any event, MI5 jumped into action – before the date of the above ASIO minute. It expressed great interest in trying to persuade Kislitsyn to defect, too, as a cable from Robertson, sent as early as April 9, reveals. ‘Prepared to go to any reasonable limit financially’, he adds. This was assuredly because the KGB officer might have been able to shed light on how the London residency learned of the investigation into Maclean. MI5 had its suspicions of Blunt’s disloyalty by then, of course (with White wanting to give him immunity for a full confession back in the summer of 1951), but the Security Service had apparently not seriously considered that he had acted as an emissary between the Missing Diplomats and the MGB. Information from an insider might give them vital information. However, as with Petrov, it was a two-edged-sword. If Kislitsyn were to defect, and start talking casually to the Press, MI5 and the Foreign Office would lose control of the process, and embarrassing stories might emerge. As it happened, Kislitsyn, who witnessed Yevdokia’s struggles at Darwin airport, accused the Australians of trying to kidnap her, and coolly continued on his route to Moscow. Moreover, the chief of ASIO, Charles Spry, had enough defectors on his hands: he did now want to have to deal with Kislitsyn as well. *

Charles Spry

[* Astonishingly, when questioned by the panel at the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security, in February 1976, Spry twice referred to Kislitysn as ‘probably one of the most important defectors ever to defect from the Soviet Union’. It is clear from the context, however, that he was referring to Anatole Golitsyn, and that the stenographer mis-recorded the name. The error was never noticed, and the document never corrected. In such a manner do mistakes in chronicles occur, and erroneous history is written.]

After Evdokia made her choice, the Petrovs were made available for press questions as early as a couple of weeks after Menzies’ announcement of April 13 that an official inquiry into Soviet espionage would take place. By the end of the month, MI5 was urgently requesting full details of exactly what the couple had already said. The local Daily Express stringer, Morley Richards, was feeding information to Percy Hoskins in London, and the newspaper started to publish stories. An alarming article appeared in the Daily Mirror (Sydney) on April 28, 1954, citing a column in the Daily Express from the same day, in which Petrov was claimed to have told reporters who planned the escape of Burgess and Maclean from Britain, and who helped them across the Continent. It is probably safe to assume that messages on this topic were being exchanged between MI5 and the SLO about this article, but any record of such has been weeded out from the files.

In his Soviet Defectors (pp 244-245), Kevin Riehle in an Endnote explicitly highlights this Daily Express article for the revelations of Petrov (whom he identifies as ‘Shorokhov’), and he provides the headline ‘Maclean: Petrov Tells: The Full Story of Vanished Diplomats Sent to Britain’. I have tracked the article down [see image introducing this report]. It is unremarkable – more titillating than revelatory. It dramatically indicated that the authorities now knew who had arranged the escape, and where Burgess and Maclean were now resident, questions that may have been of great interest at the time, but it did not describe exactly what the Petrovs had disclosed.

Nevertheless, MI5 was alarmed, and thus requested, on April 29, further details on exactly what Petrov had divulged, and from whom he had gained the information. MI5 pleaded that ‘nothing the Petrovs say (especially regarding Burgess and Maclean) is made available for publication except after consultation with us’. Perhaps in recognition that this was a futile request, MI5 then changed tack, starting to emphasize that the testimony of the Petrovs was based on second-hand (or even third-hand) evidence, and was thus only ‘hearsay’. That line was adopted when questions were asked in the House of Commons on May 3, to which Selwyn Lloyd replied that ‘such information about Burgess and Maclean which had so far been elicited was of limited and general character and it was not known whether it was based on Petrov’s personal knowledge or hearsay’. For several months, this strategy seemed to work. By July, however, fresh alarm bells began to ring, as Foreign Office and MI5 sensitivity to scrutiny came under intense media pressure, probably fuelled by MI5 insiders dissatisfied with the cover-up.

The greatest concern for MI5 and the Foreign Office was the possibility of stories appearing in the press about i) the claim (much later referred to by Cookridge) that there had been a British officer in Washington who had managed to communicate an early warning to Maclean about the investigation, and ii) the notion that the local Soviet residency had instigated the exfiltration, based on knowledge acquired clandestinely, rather than responding solely to the beliefs expressed to them by Burgess and Maclean that they were under surveillance. (Yet even that theory had its dangers, as I suggested above, and shall later explain.) The exposure of these tales would have been disastrous: it would have confirmed all the accusations against Philby, and unveiled his associations with Burgess, and it would have also strongly reinforced the idea that the Soviets were receiving regular updates on the situation from a friendly source in London as well. There is no evidence, in April 1954, that a specific reference to a Washington link in the chain had been revealed to ASIO and MI5 by the Petrovs. But matters were to become a bit messier.

Further Entanglements

Nikolai Khokhlov

A further shock must have been an item published in the Brisbane Sunday Mail, on May 23, when another Soviet defector, Nikolai Khokhlov, appeared on the scene. Rather dramatically titled ‘The Burgess-Maclean Mystery Is Solved’, the short piece concentrated on the escape of Melinda Maclean and her children that had been facilitated by the KGB, but it also stated that Khokhlov had provided an accurate story to his US debriefers of how Burgess and Maclean ‘slipped behind the Iron Curtain’. Khokhlov had been on a mission to assassinate the Russian opposition activist Okolovich earlier in 1954, but had felt horror at the last minute, admitted his role to his would-be victim, and then defected to the Americans in Germany on February 19, 1954. The CIA gave him a thorough debriefing. How the news filtered through to Brisbane, but apparently nowhere else, is puzzling. Yet, since ASIO picked up the story, and has a clipping in its files, the information presumably went to London, too.

More information followed. On June 30 (see KV 2/3456, sn. 79a), the SLO reported that Petrov had provided additional information about the set-up in London, with Chichaev (the NKVD representative to SOE) named as playing an important role in the escape. Petrov also described the size of the MGB cadre in London at the time. And on July 14, the SLO provided, by cable, identified as Y.262, a very focused, single item of information gained from the interrogation of the Petrovs (see KV 2/3457, sn. 91b). The item was troubling, and its essence contained the following sentences:

            RAZIN informed P. it would be very useful if they could secure agent inside Swedish Service who might be able to tip them off about surveillance and other counter espionage measures against N.K.G.B. RAZIN said (?they had) such a man in London who worked in British counter-intelligence and passed on valuable information to N.K.G.B. about British counter measures. RAZIN gave P. NO other information.

It concluded by stating that the report would follow by diplomatic bag.

The full report contained several additional items, and it was indeed sent by diplomatic bag the same day. (It appears at sn. 101z in KV 2/3457.) These ancillary statements were not so shocking: they simply add background as to the means whereby Razin might have learned the information. For the record, I present the slightly fuller text that appeared as the first item in this Report (‘RAZIN’s reference to an Agent in the U.K.’)

While RAZIN was the N.K.G.B. Chief Legal Resident in Sweden (i.e. 1944-1945/6), he told PETROV (who was his N.K.G.B. cypher clerk) that it would be very useful if they could secure an agent inside the Swedish Counter-Intelligence Service who might be able to tip them off about surveillance and other counter-measures practised against the N.K.G.B. RAZIN added that they possessed just such a man in London who worked in the British Counter-Intelligence Service, and passed on valuable information to the N.K.G.B relating to British measures. RAZIN gave no further details.

The Foreign Office was alarmed. That it was embarrassed by what it knew, and that it was executing a cover-up, was indiscreetly recorded as early as November 1954, in an attempt to forestall what might emanate from the Petrov disclosures. A memo from A. J. de la Mare, freshly appointed as Chief Security Officer in the Foreign Office, to his boss, Sir Patrick Dean, appears in FCO 158/198, where he writes, on November 4: “The Security Service tell me that elaborate precautions are being taken in Australia to ensure that the proceedings of the Royal Commission will not disclose the source which revealed the treachery of these two men.” Apart from the clumsy phrasing (to whom was the ‘treachery’ revealed? or was the discovered treachery simply an accidental outcome of the source’s actions?), the implication is clearly that the identity of the source was known.

Officials continued to give the game away. A few months later, in March 1955, as work on the Petrovs’ book, ghost-written by ASIO officer Michael Thwaites, was under way, Graham Mitchell, the head of D Branch, made an extraordinary reference to the exchange from that previous July. His telegram is significant, and it deserves to be quoted in full:

  1. Foreign Secretary, after consultation with Cabinet colleagues, has decided to make no B and M comment.
  2. This decision reached in full awareness that PETROV will give publicity to story in due course and that this could happen at any time.
  3. Generally recognized here that events in Australia must be allowed to take their course. On behalf of F. O. and ourselves we express only the following wishes:
  4. The longer publication delayed the better;
  5. Assumption in paragraph 1 of our DS/2066 of 22.2.55, on which you gave welcome assurance in paragraph 1 of your Y.79 of 4.3.55, repeated with emphasis;
  6. As example of specially embarrassing matter which we hope will in no circumstances be made public, we cite RAZIN story first referred to in your Y.262 of 14.7.54, partly on general grounds, partly because of possibility of Press here connecting culprit with name of PEACH.
  7. Story such as that drafted by Thwaites and enclosed with your PF703 of 8.3.55 would be unobjectionable, subject only to it being made clear that it was B and M who warned M.G.B. of their danger and not vice versa. This would be in accordance with all known probabilities and with earlier recollections of PETROV as several times repeated.
  8. Spry’s sympathetic co-operation on this delicate matter warmly appreciated.

Notes: (1) RAZIN: Vasilli Razin had been the rezident in Stockholm (1943 or 1944 to spring 1945) when the Petrovs worked there. He is Cookridge’s ‘RAINA’.

            (2) PEACH: PEACH was the name given to Philby in the eponymous 1951 inquiry.

            (3) DS/2066 & Y79: These items appear in the Minute Sheet of KV 2/3462, but have apparently been withdrawn from the file.

            (4) PF 703: This item is likewise missing from the relevant KV 2/3463 file.

What is remarkable is the fact that, while the passage containing the reference to a Soviet agent in London appears in the archive, the apparently obvious hint to the presence and contribution of PEACH in Washington was either never made, or has been weeded from the file. There is no obvious redaction in a long memorandum that describes what Razin knew (‘Supplementary Information from the Petrovs concerning aspects of the Burgess and Maclean Case’), in KV 2/3457, sn. 101a(i), apart from a possible final Item 23. It seems unlikely that a note on the Washington connection would have been extracted and despatched separately, but the message from Mitchell is incontrovertible. The key, however, is the reference to ‘Y.262’, which identifies the precise telegram number, as described above. It does not appear to have been doctored or redacted: there are only three paragraphs, and the third indicates sign-off by simply stating ‘Report follows by bag’.

Mitchell’s admission (in March 1955) that the matter was ‘specially embarrassing’ is very telling. What had been the reaction of MI5 when the message was first received? We do not know. No response is recorded, whether of surprise, or shock, or horror. Yet Mitchell’s communiqué suggests that the SLO was in on the guilty secret – that there was no surprise in the claim that a Soviet agent was (or had been) working in the guts of British Intelligence in London, but that nothing had been done about it. (And it was not Gouzenko’s ‘ELLI’: MI5 had put out feelers to the Petrovs on this possibility, but it had drawn a blank. Vladimir and Yevdokia did not respond to the name.) Was Mitchell simply being clumsy about the possibility of PEACH’s being identified as ‘the man in London’ from May 1951? Why, in March 1955, would he have been concerned about the possibility of the Press’s associating Razin’s defined NKGB agent as Kim Philby? Philby would officially have been an unknown to the Press at this time – and when journalists did learn about him, they would before long discover that he had been out of the country at the time of the escape. In the normal course of events, they would have known nothing about Burgess’s close friendship with Philby, or the fact that he had stayed with him in Washington. It suggests that rumours must have been floating around – kindled no doubt by disgruntled insiders in MI5 – that Philby indeed had acted in that role at some time, and that it was only Edgar Hoover’s publicly naming of him that prompted Lipton to bring the insinuations out into the open. That initiative was abetted, of course, by the People article of September 18 that reminded the British public that the government had been very evasive and secretive about the whole business. So what was the truth behind the ‘Third Man’ claims?

Reinspecting Cookridge’s Claim

Cookridge’s claim needs to be re-inspected. He specifically stated that the Third Man in Washington both alerted Raina (Razin) and sent a friend to London to warn Maclean. Where and how Kislitsyn gained these pieces of intelligence is not explained. Cookridge’s item appears bogus. For one thing, Philby would not have been in direct contact with Razin. Since Philby had been in touch with his Soviet controllers via Makayev in the USA, one would expect Kislitysn to have assumed that the customary secret backstage channels would have been used to alert Maclean. The other vital error is the fact that, as most commentators have now concluded, Philby never arranged for Burgess’s recall to London! A complete mythology has grown (as I explained last month) about the notion that Philby exploited Burgess’s traffic offences to send him to London bearing the bad news, and to alert Maclean. Even if Razin and Kislitysn had later been exposed to such a rumour (one that Yuri Modin reinforced, by the way), they would not, in the period of the escape and its aftermath, have been able to endorse such a story. Cookridge’s nugget states that Razin knew the names of neither the Washington-based agent nor his messenger. I conclude that Cookridge’s informant (probably Liddell) must have packaged up his gobbets of intelligence in more formal dressing in order to try to enhance their credibility. The author’s assertion in The Third Man thus loses all claims to genuineness and authenticity, even though it carries a hint of historical truth.

One has to wonder, again, how clued up Mitchell was on the whole operation, and how sharp he was. He was clearly unaware of the implications of the surveillance on Burgess and Maclean, since he stressed how important it was to clarify that ‘it was B and M who warned M.G.B. of the danger and not vice versa’. That judgment would have been considered dangerous by Dick White, since it explicitly pointed to the ineffectiveness of the surveillance process, or the awkward fact that there had been a messenger, someone who had been in MI5’s direct sights during those hectic May days, but who had been overlooked. Given the thoroughness of the surveillance process, the testimony should have been an enormous wake-up call for MI5: perhaps White and his cohorts did take it seriously, but buried the traces. In any case, it was careless of the custodians of the archive not to have noticed this inconsistency, and to have let Mitchell’s comments pass unredacted.

Another concern of Mitchell’s might have been the disclosure of these reports to the Americans. In David Horner’s 2014 official history of ASIO, Volume 1, from 1949-1963, The Spycatchers, the author writes “Nonetheless, despite initial criticism from MI5 that ASIO was not [sic] passing information to American agencies [sic: plural], from as early as June 1954 Spry was forwarding copies of the Petrovs’ statements to the Americans.” (Chapter 14, p 359). Horner cites as his source: ‘Memo, Spry, 3 June, 1954, ASIO records’. This was despite a published plea by MI5 and the SLO that Spry keep such communications in his private store. What Spry actually did, and why he would even selectively pass on any depositions when the matters were sub judice, is a mystery. Yet, if such information did reach the CIA and FBI, it would not have helped the cause of MI5 to keep a lid on its secrets. It remained under stress.

Nervousness in London

As work on the Petrovs’ book Empire of Fear progressed, the mandarins in London became more nervous, especially when the White Paper was being prepared by Mitchell in September 1955. On August 8, the SLO had informed MI5 that he regretted overlooking the fact that Petrov’s version of his recall had appeared as ‘my recollection’ rather than ‘my belief’. On August 19, Mitchell let J. E. D. Street in the Foreign Office know that he was edgy about requiring further changes to the text (which was, amazingly, already in the hands of various media outlets around the world) since it would draw attention to areas of sensitivity. A couple of weeks later, in light of an imminent press conference geared around the Burgess & Maclean revelations – an event approved by Charles Spry, the ASIO chief – the SLO advised London that the ASIO officers should be able to ensure that the Petrovs stick to a firm line, that the couple assert that the Thwaites draft covers all they know about the defectors, that they will refrain from further speculation, that they will not exaggerate Melinda Maclean’s role, and that ‘no mention to be made of Razin’s story concerning the U.K.’ [my italics].

Robertson and the Foreign Office reacted in alarm, wanting Spry to reverse his decision. In any event, they wanted the Petrovs’ pronouncements to be closely monitored. Apparently, the Petrovs must have been suitably cowed (or bribed), since the conference went ahead without incident, and an innocuous story appeared in the Melbourne Sun of September 17. With an almost detectable sign of relief, Mitchell was able to inform the SLO on September 20 that his White Paper would probably be published the next day, and that it contained no material concerning the story and exfiltration of Burgess and Maclean beyond the content of the Thwaites’ chapter 12, titled Maclean and Burgess (pp 271-176).

The chapter contained no fresh revelations, and covered the activities of Burgess and Maclean quite superficially. It did, however, make a strong but erroneous point about the surveillance of the pair, an assertion that would not have publicly embarrassed the British authorities unduly, but would provoke some anxious soul-searching privately: “When Burgess and Maclean discovered that they were under investigation by the British security authorities, they reported the matter to their Soviet contact in the utmost alarm.” As I have already pointed out, the subtleties of the joint discovery, and the relationship of the alarm to the notion of a ‘Third Man’ informer’ were lost on the journalists when the book was published in 1956, but the claim that the pair were able, despite close surveillance, to make swift contact with their Soviet control was a disturbing disclosure for the Foreign Office-MI5 team.

Yet the problem did not go away entirely. The revelations in Empire of Fear, mild as they superficially appeared, had a much more dramatic impact in Europe than they did in Australia. The Swedish Press was especially attentive to the affair, given Petrov’s disclosure about Soviet subversion in Stockholm, and various newspapers reported on the story – and on the British White Paper – with fascination. One report included the suggestive sentence: “It has not been disclosed whether the British Secret Service was aware of their flight plans”, as if that had been a distinct possibility. The SLO reported on November 12 that the Daily Express had offered £1000 to Petrov if he agreed to an interview with two of their reporters, and he followed up by stating that this opportunity could be used to the security services’ advantage provided that Petrov refused to indulge in speculation and ‘made no mention of the Razin story’.

Mitchell backed down in a cable two weeks later, but attached greatest importance to the elimination of any reference to Razin. The same day he informed de la Mare in the Foreign Office what was going on, again stressing that the interview would go ahead ‘so conducted as to exclude mention of the Razin story’. Like Basil Fawlty mentioning the war, he presumably believed that he would get away with it. Yet the panic might have passed. In December, Evdokia was very ill, and thus could not take part, and Vladimir was considering that his existing contracts might prevent him from taking the Express’s shilling.

Moreover, the previous month, further evidence of Philby’s guilt had arisen. Christopher Andrew writes (Defend the Realm, p 431) how a fresh VENONA decrypt had been provided to a group of VENONA initiates by Meredith Gardner on October 10, 1955. It referred to agent STANLEY’s contributions to the analysis of the Gouzenko affair in September 1945. The context clearly showed that STANLEY was Philby: one of those in MI5 who were indoctrinated into the disclosure was C. P. C. de Wesselow (D1a), the officer who had been carrying on the negotiations with ASIO over the Petrovs. Yet nothing was done.

Philby’s Story

Meanwhile, what of Philby? In the final chapter of My Silent War (‘The Clouds Part’), he described how the ‘next storm gathered’ after the defection of Petrov [sic: singular], and ‘some not very revealing remarks he made about Burgess and Maclean’, and he associated these disclosures with the Fleet Street quest for the Third Man. Yet he claimed that, before the events of April 1954, when he was seriously considering the possibility of escape, he received an encouraging message that prompted him to think again. He wrote:

            Finally, an event occurred which put it right out of my head. I received, through the most ingenious of routes, a message from my Soviet friends, conjuring me to be of good cheer and presaging an early resumption of relations. It changed drastically the whole complexion of the case. I was no longer alone.

Who was the bearer of the message? Suspicion has fallen on the Australian Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, who, having retired from MI6 when investigations into his loyalty were dropped, in September 1953 sailed out to Australia to work for ASIO on a two-year contract. Yet, after being present at a briefing by Charles Spry in November of that year when Petrov’s impending defection was being discussed, he suddenly returned to London. As Ellis’s biographer, Jesse Fink, relates, Chapman Pincher and others had theorized that Ellis had mistaken Vladimir Petrov for his old nemesis Vladimir von Petrov, and caught fright. He arrived in London on February 11, and, soon afterwards tried to contact Philby, suggesting they meet. In The Spycatchers, Dabid Horner cites a 1967 letter from MI5’s A. A. Macdonald to Spry, indicating that Fink and Philby probably never met.

Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis

Yet the recent release of the PEACH Personal File shows that Philby was still under surveillance, and that he and Ellis did in fact get together. KV 2/4731 indicates that they met at the Athenaeum on March 4, 1954, although the event is not recorded until May 12 (sn. 490a). From a telephone intercept, we learn that Philby told his girl-friend on March 3 that he would be meeting Ellis the next day. But there is no trace of his telling her that ‘the clouds are parting’ (a touch added by Pincher) after their meeting, and Philby does not appear to mention what had transpired to Tomás Harris [HONEY], with whom he was heavily involved in plans to write his memoir at the time. Thus, while the possibility that Ellis gave Philby a serious warning is real, it is unlikely that Philby would have interpreted Ellis’s signals as an opportunity to relax. (I recommend Fink’s Eagle in the Mirror for an analysis of this puzzle, although it was published before the record of the Philby-Ellis encounter was declassified.)

Ellis’s behaviour was very odd. It was one thing to make a very sudden and flamboyant journey from Australia to the United Kingdom, giving spurious reasons for his travel plans, but then seeking out Philby could have drawn even more attention to his intrigues. And, if he did intend to transmit a warning, what could Philby do? By then, he had no contact at the Soviet Embassy with whom he could communicate, and, if he had, giving an alert about the imminent Petrov defection, and thus pre-empting it, would only have drawn attention to his meeting with Ellis. Perhaps the visit makes sense only in the context of Ellis’s wanting to warn Philby to clear out, but was that gesture not a little excessive?

Philby believed that someone had leaked his name to the newspapers, and referred to a Daily Express article (undated), in which a ‘security officer from the British Embassy in Washington’ had been asked to resign. One of his friends in MI6 told him that the leak came from a retired senior officer of the Metropolitan Police, a gentleman they both knew ‘for his loose tongue’. Yet Philby adds that it took four years for the Press to get on to him, which would suggest that it was not until the summer of 1955 that the rumours started flying. That does not tally with the timing of the critical cables deriving from the intelligence from Kislitsyn and Razin that were sent in July 1954. Of course, nothing that Philby writes can explicitly be trusted, but perhaps all that is proved by these events is that Graham Mitchell did not have his ear very close to the ground.

The Washington Connection

So where did the story about the tip-off man in Washington originate? I summarize what I think are the relevant facts:

  • Vladimir Petrov did not reveal anything about a Washington link in the interrogations undertaken before his wife joined him on April 20.
  • The much-highlighted reports in the Press on April 28, 1954, from both Australia and the United Kingdom, were provocative, but melodramatic, and held little substance.
  • On April 28, Morley Richards of the Daily Express in Australia claimed that the latest information had come from the Australian Government, ‘who was prepared to sell the whole Petrov story to the highest bidder’.
  • On April 28, the Australian Government offered to make the Petrovs available for interview by six members of the Press.
  • The event was scheduled for May 10, but was cancelled so as not to prejudice the Commission’s Inquiry.
  • The Petrovs felt betrayed by the Daily Express article. Vladimir dried up, but he said he had already told all he knew. Yevdokia had a special relationship with Kislitsyn, and she may have known more.
  • The SLO in Australia judged the Daily Express article to be contradictory, and suspected that it was angling stories in order to gain a reaction, whether confirmation or denial.
  • There is no mention of the Washington link in any of the exchanges between Australia and London during April-May 1954. Nevertheless, since many cables are missing (as can be determined by noting the discontinuity of the numbers), complete exchanges may have been excised from the record.
  • Both MI5 in London and ASIO were aware by July 14, 1954 of Razin’s allegation of a Soviet agent in London.
  • Cookridge’s citation of a text (made in 1967) has a ring of genuineness (it sounds like an official message) but not authenticity (the content is dubious). The attribution of the statement to Petrov may have been guesswork on his part. His informant probably misled him, by dressing up a rumour in more official-looking garb. Cookridge was wrong about the assertion that Petrov’s evidence had appeared in the Commission Report.
  • In the archival material relating to the events around July 14, 1954 [see above], no messages referring to the Washington link can be found, but that date coincides with the recent release of testimony given by the Petrovs to the Commission, specifically that of Yevdokia. [KV 2/3444, sn. 308a].
  • By July 1954, testimony given by the Petrovs was considered sub judice, since the Commission had started its work,
  • In a period of one month (January 24-18 February 1954) three other Soviet agents, Rastvorov, Deryabin and Khokhlov, had defected – in Japan, Austria and West Germany, respectively. Khokhlov, in particular, claimed to bring knowledge of the Burgess-Maclean escape with him.
  • The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had in June 1951 been supplied with information by MI5’s Arthur Martin and Percy Sillitoe that marked Philby as a tip-off man in Washington.
  • Hoover was in contact with ASIO Director-General Spry over the Petrov testimony, and had checked it against what the FBI had been told by Rastvorov.
  • At some stage between the issuance of the White Paper (September 23, 1955) and the subsequent debate in the House of Commons (November 7), in an undated article, Percy Hoskins made reference to that same person in Washington.
  • Insiders from MI5 or from the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police had probably been leaking Philby’s name to the Press for some months before the Hoover disclosures.

There is no obvious place in the Petrov archive where the Washington reference could have been smoothly entered, and later redacted.  Mitchell’s reference is specific, and verifiable. Even though its content is vague and not totally logical, it would seem that the story of a London-based agent emanated here, rather than from other defectors. On the other hand, outside Philby’s own testimony, no precise reference to a Soviet agent working in Washington has appeared apart from Hoskins’ rather vague statement in his article between the appearance of the White Paper and the debate in the House of Commons. Hoskins probably gained his main story from Hoover, although he was certainly being fed hints by disgruntled insiders as well. Likewise, the detail given in Cookridge’s statement suggests that an insider gave it to him, and that it came from an item in MI5 files subsequently weeded, but the authenticity of the piece is highly dubious. Cookridge had good contacts within the intelligence services: he used them to solid effect in his book on SOE. What is surprising is the fact that he waited until 1967 to tell the world, and he then got his facts wrong. I judge it unlikely that he invented the whole story, but he may have embellished a simpler version. Yet the discomfiture of Mitchell shows that Cookridge’s claim was essentially correct.

Summary and Conclusions

In summary, here is displayed the whole ghastly story in all its ignominy. MI5 and the Foreign Office had strong third-party confirmation of what they had known all along – that the suspect Philby had initiated the escape plan for Maclean from Washington, by informing the MGB of the investigation. Yet they could not admit such, as in October 1955 they had just publicly exonerated him, with the Government deceiving the House of Commons. It was better to suggest incompetence than conspiracy or lies. But ‘incompetence’ set in motion a number of other challenges. The Petrov revelations had started to unravel a skein that was hard to control. Burgess and Maclean were shown to have been spies for some time. Maclean had been under suspicion for the specific HOMER identification. The authorities had to admit that Maclean was being watched, but could not satisfactorily explain why Burgess had joined him in the escape, how the pair had been alerted, why the Foreign Office had not learned about the communist backgrounds of the duo until after they disappeared, or why both had been appointed to sensitive or important positions after their misdemeanours. They obviously had to conceal the fact that for some time they had had stronger evidence of the treachery of both diplomats.

In a way, Hoover came to the rescue of the Foreign Office-MI5 team. Despite the disappointment in seeing Philby brazen himself out of the situation, the authorities were able to use the smokescreen of the ‘Third Man’ to suggest that a leaker had confounded their attempts at secrecy by managing to alert both Burgess and Maclean to the ‘imminent’ interrogation of Maclean, even though they knew that the framework was bogus. In 1955 they confirmed that such a warning had been given, locally in London, but got away without having to explain why they had not been able to identify who was responsible. In 1963, after Philby’s disappearance, they managed, implausibly, to transfer the agency to Philby, even though he had been 3,500 miles away at the time, thus successfully diverting attention away from Anthony Blunt. Edward Heath had been able to suggest that Maclean alone was under suspicion, and that Burgess had merely acted as a naive go-between. No one noticed the failure of recall. The authorities successfully confused the two issues, and no one called them out on it.

The final irony consists of the fact that it was Dick White, through Arthur Martin, who had planted the fateful dossier on Philby to the FBI in June 1951. I listed the seven critical points that summarized Philby’s probable guilt, and which were passed on to Robert Lamphere, the last being ‘Philby was suspected of assisting in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean’. Yet, when Philby was recalled in June 1951, White’s woeful series of ‘interrogations’ of Philby failed to extract the confession from him that MI5 needed, and, when the task was passed in December to Helenus Milmo, Q.C., the latter was not given enough time to prepare. Philby survived; he exploited his supporters within MI6, and was even re-hired as an agent, able to renew his operational contact with the KGB until the events of 1963 provoked his exfiltration to Moscow where he could join his cronies.

Irrespective of the fact that the process by which MI5 came to the conclusion of Philby’s guilt, and with how many officers White shared his convictions, it is not surprising that the ire of J. Edgar Hoover was raised when Philby was publicly exonerated – especially if he had been put up to his disclosures by friends in London. Moreover, a telling item in the Petrov file, dated April 12, 1954, just as the aspirations for getting Kislitsyn to defect were being voiced, proves how confident MI5 was of Philby’s treachery at this time. Robertson remarked on the increased radio traffic detected between Moscow and London, and speculated that the Russians might be making plans to exfiltrate Philby. Dick White alerted Commander Burt of the Special Branch, who was instructed to put a watch out at all British ports  . . .

And who was the Director-General of MI5 who in September 1955 had to pass on to Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan the White Paper that covered up the whole story? Step forward, Dick Goldsmith White, Machiavellian and Chief Court Jester. Thus White, who in June 1951 was eager to pass on to a foreign power the intelligence that Philby was probably a Soviet agent and the tip-off man for Maclean, in September 1955 firmly set out to conceal that selfsame information from his own government. Meanwhile, as the pooh-bahs at MI5 and the Foreign Office squirmed over their deceptions and intrigues and cover-ups, the junior officers in MI5 no doubt marvelled at the ingenuousness of their superior officers, and started to leak their knowledge to the outside world  . . . The role of a counter-intelligence organization is to deceive the enemy, and to confound its stratagems. But when it spends so much of its efforts misleading its own leaders, its members, its sister services, its government and its allies, no good can come of it.

Envoi: The month after Heath made his statement, Guy Burgess died, in August 1963. In December of that year Anthony Blunt was granted a pardon for providing – absurdly –  ‘a full confession’. That fact was revealed to the House of Commons by Margaret Thatcher sixteen years later.

(Latest Commonplace entries can be viewed here.)

6 Comments

Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Management/Leadership, Media, Politics, Warfare