Too Secret Too Long, page 21
The Cambridge Conspiracy
Up to and including the 1950s – and continuing beyond – British governments of all colours treated the public, Parliament and the Press with disdain, almost amounting to contempt, concerning those operations of the Government machinery carried out in secret. Contrary to the situation prevailing in the U.S., where some public right to know is enshrined in the Constitution, British administrations took the view that there was never any requirement to tell their people anything which Whitehall regarded as its secret preserve. No announcements regarding secret matters should ever be made, even when the need for secrecy had totally evaporated. If such matters were ever to become public it should only be through historians riffling through papers released fifty, or even one hundred, years after the events concerned. Whitehall’s extraordinary success in concealing its secrets is exemplified by a major military operation launched in November 1951.
The Tory Government, headed by Churchill, dispatched an assault force, including three aircraft carriers, from Portsmouth to capture the Egyptian port of Alexandria. Simultaneously, troops and light armour based in the Canal Zone and at Port Said were to join the attack, which was code-named ‘Rodeo’ and was intended to depose King Farouk and establish a British military government in Egypt. On the way to Cyprus, where the assault force was to pause, troops of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers embarked on the carrier Triumph, and those aboard other warships were briefed on their part in the operation. Before the force left Cyprus ‘Rodeo’ was suspended, apparently because it was believed there had been a security leak. H.M.S. Triumph, with many troops aboard, sailed for Port Said to await further orders. In the following January a new operation code-named ‘Rodeo Flail’ was set in motion to occupy Cairo and Alexandria, but it was pre-empted by an uprising in Cairo. As a result the British attempt to topple Farouk was abandoned, that purpose being achieved by a revolution in the following year which had British covert support.[1]
It now seems extraordinary that these operations, though never completed in anger, could have involved so many men and so many ships and have remained secret. But in the 1950s Whitehall was suprised only when such a secret did become public; there was complete confidence that no internal act of treachery could ever affect the super-secret departments like MI5 and MI6. It was unthinkable. Had it been thought about there would have been no doubt in the minds of the managements of those agencies that any such scandal could be safely concealed from the public because should investigative writers, for example, seek out such information they could always be threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Acts, which were passed to deter and to punish spies but have been monstrously misused to prevent the disclosure of official information of all kinds. Parliament, to its shame, has long been party to this conspiracy of silence. Supinely, it has accepted ministerial assurances that this and that information would be prejudicial to ‘national security’, ‘the national interest’, ‘the public interest’ and other political conveniences. Party Whips are required to induce M.P.s to desist from asking Parliamentary questions on security and intelligence matters and the various select committees have studiously avoided investigating them.
In 1946 the unmasking of Alan Nunn May, the Cambridge-educated British scientist working as a Soviet spy in the Canadian section of the atomic bomb project, dented a few Whitehall illusions and some consideration was given to suppressing the case ‘in the national interest’.[2] Nunn May, however, was a scientist and scientists were known to be odd, especially concerning their belief that their discoveries belonged to the whole world. So his conviction and imprisonment did not raise any widespread fears that the Soviet Union might have recruited young men who might be in even more sensitive, non-scientific, employment. Four years later the case of Klaus Fuchs caused more widespread concern but, again, he was a scientist and a foreigner with no inborn loyalties to Britain. A closer watch on foreign-born scientists and a ruling that, in future, applicants for highly sensitive posts should be British-born of British parents were regarded as being sufficient in the way of extra safeguards.
The event which shattered this complacency and led to a new attitude to the conservation of secrets was the defection of two British-born Foreign Office officials, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, on 25 May 1951. The case caused a public furore, especially when Maclean’s personal behaviour and Burgess’s homosexuality and other excesses became known, but even those of us who were involved in investigating the circumstances had no real conception of the consternation and astonished incredulity behind the scenes in Whitehall. The confusion and shame were so great that a new attitude to information about the event, and others like it which might arise, was quickly generated in the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, and in the secret services. The truth had to be kept from the public by every means, from misinformation when total silence could no longer be maintained to blatant lies. That policy of cover-up concerning disasters which are embarrassing to politicians and their senior servants has continued to the present time.
While much has been written about the Maclean and Burgess affair – against every Government obstacle – there is so much that is unknown to the public, especially concerning the cover-up, that I shall deal with it at some length. It was a watershed in the art of news management in Whitehall, and on that score alone it demonstrates the need for Parliamentary oversight of departments operating in secrecy.
By late 1950 further progress with Operation Bride, the decoding of wartime Soviet radio messages, had produced evidence of serious penetration of British and French secret departments by the K.G.B.[3] The British were deeply involved in Operation Bride but the French were not. Without being told of the source of the information the French security authorities were warned of the infiltration and agreed to join a Tripartite Security Working Group, which held its first meeting in Washington in April 1951. The American representatives gave a presentation of their security procedures, which they hoped that the French would introduce, and the whole party then flew to London for a presentation by MI5 of the British methods of preventing penetration.[4] The party then moved to Paris where the procedures were to be incorporated in the French security system. These included the ‘purge’ procedure whereby the post-war Labour Government had hoped to remove and exclude communists from access to secret information.
The French talks had barely begun on Monday, 28 May, when the leader of the British delegation, Sir Robert Mackenzie, was called to the telephone to be told that a senior Foreign Office official named Donald Maclean had disappeared, along with a more junior official called Guy Burgess. The deeply embarrassed Mackenzie was also told that the Foreign Office was fairly sure that they had defected to the Soviet Union.[5]
A select number of people, who included Mackenzie, knew that Maclean had been under deep suspicion for many months because of a break in Operation Bride. The circumstances made it clear that Maclean had been warned of his danger and that somehow Burgess had been involved in the escape. Neither the French nor the Americans at the Paris talks were told of the defections and in London every effort was made to keep them secret, though the atmosphere in a very few areas of Whitehall, and particularly in MI5, savoured of panic.
Anglo-American relations were already in severe disarray because of the Fuchs case and the Labour Government had been trying to improve them in the hope of re-establishing the interchange of nuclear information. Though the public was not to know it for many years, Maclean had previously been concerned with secret Anglo-American atomic affairs while based at the British Embassy in Washington.[6]
Not until 7 June did the public become aware of the disappearance of the two men. Following information secured in Paris, the Daily Express, which I then served as defence correspondent, was able to reveal that two Foreign Office employees had apparently defected to Moscow and might have taken important information with them. A statement naming the two men was made by the Foreign Office in such a way that it suggested that Maclean might not have recovered from a medical breakdown. As will be seen, this was deliberate misinformation because it was known that Maclean had defected to avoid interrogation by MI5 officers who were convinced that he was a long-term Soviet spy.
The Foreign Office was to take the brunt of the public and Parliamentary censure, but MI5 was largely responsible for the disaster, through either bungling or betrayal, or possibly both.
To appreciate the extraordinary circumstances of this defection, and of further highly suspect events involving Hollis, it is necessary to examine the case histories of four Soviet spies who were all recruited at Cambridge University – Maclean, Burgess, Harold (Kim) Philby and Anthony Blunt.
Donald Duart Maclean, who died in Moscow in 1983, was born in 1913, the son of a Liberal M.P. who, as Sir Donald Maclean, was to become President of the Board of Education. Tall, slim, rather good-looking, intense and humourless, he won a scholarship to read modern languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1931. There he met Guy Francis de Money Burgess, the son of a naval lieutenant, who was some two years older. Burgess, thick-set with blue eyes and wavy hair, was an aggressive homosexual who had preceded Maclean at Cambridge by a year. He was a highly intelligent youth who had quickly established himself as a ‘character’ of notable wit and outrageous habits. He had joined an exclusive Cambridge club called The Apostles which, at that stage, was a centre of both homosexuality and communism.
Burgess also made the acquaintance of Harold A. R. Philby, known to his friends as Kim, who had entered Trinity College in 1929, having won a scholarship from Westminster. Philby, then twenty-one, was not an Apostle nor was he known to have any homosexual tendencies. He was, however, deeply interested in radical politics, in communist ideals and ideology and, with other undergraduates, in the Marxist interpretation of the current world slump. The Marxist group was soon to be joined by Maclean and by James Klugmann, a Jewish schoolfriend of Maclean whose whole life was to be openly dedicated to the pro-Soviet communist cause and whose clandestine activities were to have historic consequences.[7]
So far as is known, Philby never carried a Communist Party card but he, too, was totally committed to the communist cause before he left Cambridge in 1933 with a good second-class degree in economics. With £50 provided by his father, a famous and eccentric Arabist, Philby went to Vienna, partly to improve his German but also to witness the struggle of communism against fascism, arriving there in the late summer. There he secured a room in the home of an Austrian girl, a militant communist named Alice Friedman who called herself Lizi, often misspelled Litzi, as she pronounced it. Soon they were living together and then married, apparently to give Lizi a British passport as a means of getting out of Austria because she was Jewish. The MI5 view is that Philby was recruited to Soviet Intelligence while in Vienna, his wife already being in the Soviet fold. Whoever recruited him it is certain that it was on behalf of what is now called the K.G.B., not the G.R.U.[8]
In view of what has been written about the ‘climate of treason’ which induced young undergraduates to become traitors, it should be appreciated that Philby, Burgess and most of their fellow-spies did not decide to assist the Soviet Union essentially as a reaction to the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, as has been claimed by apologists for them. They did so because of their commitment to Marxism-Leninism and to the Communist Party which, at that time in Britain took the Moscow line in its entirety. Anti-fascism was much more of a hindsight excuse for their behaviour, which continued to be staunchly pro-Soviet even when Stalin made his non-aggression pact with Hitler. This was a patently cynical move which enabled the Nazis and the Soviets to partition Poland and ensured that many thousands of Polish Jews were made available to the S.S. who sent them to concentration camps and to the gas chambers. It was part of the pact that the Soviets would hand over to the Nazis German communists who had taken refuge in their share of Poland. Many of these, who were also Jews, were handed over to the Gestapo by the Soviet forerunner of the K.G.B. at the Brest-Litovsk bridge on the new border.[9] How Jewish communists like Klugmann and the Kuczynskis, who were also of Polish origin, could condone this and live with their consciences is extraordinary. They did so because they were ‘Moscow right or wrong’ communists and put their dedication to the Party line of Stalin, as bloody a dictator as Hitler, before genuine concern for their own people. They were to continue to do so when the pact, which ensured supplies of petrol and food to Germany, allowed the Nazis to conquer France and the Low Countries and subject millions more Jews and anti-fascists to persecution. The undergraduate traitors behaved in a similarly callous and cold-blooded manner.
Once back in Britain Philby secured a job as a journalist for a magazine and set up a news agency with one of his wife’s pro-Soviet friends, called Peter Smolka, who was himself a Soviet agent throughout the war and later.[10] In his book My Silent War, not all of which is to be believed as much of it is a K.G.B. disinformation exercise, Philby recalled how he was given instruction when he met his Soviet controller at regular intervals in open spaces in London. This controller, known as ‘Theo’ and almost certainly Theodore Maly, a former Hungarian priest who had become a Soviet citizen, was replaced early in 1937 by another ‘illegal’ controller known to his agents only as ‘Otto’ and believed to be a Czech. He has been described as a short man with no neck and swept-back, straight hair. MI5 has spent much time trying to establish ‘Otto’s’ identity but without success. While Philby remained based in London, he returned to Cambridge frequently on Soviet business, a fact which, according to him, MI5 was unaware of when it interrogated him later.[11]
At that time promising recruits to Soviet Intelligence were advised to try to insinuate themselves into certain selected organizations, according to their qualifications and circumstances. In order of priority the list ran: MI5, the Secret Service(MI6), G.C.H.Q. (known during the war as the Government Code and Cipher School, based at Bletchley), The Times, the B.B.C., the Foreign Office and the Home Office, there being no Defence Ministry as such in those days.[12]
One of the first orders which Philby obeyed was to pretend to have given up his communist beliefs. To this end he was encouraged to associate himself with anti-communist and pro-fascist organizations. He joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a useful move in itself because it meant that to some extent he infiltrated it. He even became acquainted with von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador in London, and visited Berlin frequently for talks at the Propaganda Ministry, passing all that he learned to the K.G.B.
Another Soviet requirement for recruits was assistance in the recruitment of others and among the first of those whom Philby brought in, probably in 1934, was Burgess. Having satisfied himself that Burgess was willing to serve as a clandestine agent, Philby introduced him to ‘Theo’ who gave him some tuition in conspiratorial practices and served as his controller until he was handed over to ‘Otto’. It cannot be stressed too often that under the Soviet system, whether run by the K.G.B. or the G.R.U., agents are continuously under Soviet control. Spies are not recruited, told what to do and left on their own to do it. Each time a new situation arises there must be communication with the controller either direct or by dead-letter box and advice is then sought from Moscow before the agent is instructed further.[13]
In the K.G.B. messages which the controllers sent to Moscow Philby’s contributions were referred to as from ‘Stanley’, while Burgess had the code-name ‘Hicks’.[14]
Burgess had also become friendly with a fellow Apostle called Anthony Blunt, a homosexual with whom, according to MI5 informants, he had a sexual relationship, though Blunt was later to deny this. Blunt, who was born in September 1907 and was some four years older than Burgess, was the son of a parson, the vicar of Holy Trinity, Bournemouth, and later of St John’s Church, Paddington. His family had impressive connections with landed gentry and his social relationships were to prove of value. After attending school at Marlborough Blunt won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he went in 1926 to study first mathematics and then French and English. After taking his B.A. degree he remained at Cambridge doing post-graduate work in his real love, the history of art. By the time he was twenty-five this tall, thin, rather drooping man, was elected a Fellow of his college and taken on to the permanent teaching staff. In an interview with The Times much later Blunt stated that he had become a communist and more particularly a Marxist in 1935 after a sabbatical year away from the university. ‘When I came back, in October 1934, I found that all my friends … had suddenly become Marxists under the impact of Hitler coming to power.’[15]
During his interrogation in 1964, Blunt described the insidious method whereby he and others had been recruited. One day when he and Burgess were discussing the international situation in late 1934 or early 1935, Burgess, who tried to recruit anybody whom he admired, said, ‘Anthony, we must do something to counter the horrors of Nazism. We can’t just sit here and talk about it. The Government is pacifying Hitler so Marxism is the only solution. I am already committed to work secretly for peace. Are you prepared to help me?’[16]
This was the standard form of recruitment laid down by the Soviet controllers to be applied to committed communists who had been talent-spotted by existing recruits like Burgess. The first appeal was to be made in the cause of peace, a term which the communists used as a euphemism for subversion even at that early stage. When Blunt, or any other recruit, had agreed to work for ‘peace’, which was difficult to refuse, he was then informed that he would be working for ‘peace’ through the Comintern, the argument being that the installation of communist governments throughout the world would eliminate fascism and ensure peace and goodwill everywhere. This too was not difficult for naive young people to accept. The next step was for the Comintern recruit to be introduced to his controller who was, in fact, a professional Intelligence officer working not for the Comintern but for the K.G.B. One of the controller’s first tasks was to secure some form of written commitment from the recruit through which he could be blackmailed later, if necessary. He was also required to induce the recruit to accept a small payment of money for expenses and sign a receipt for it.[17]
