Too Secret Too Long, page 50
From his first meeting with Martin, and during several more interrogations, Long was to admit that his conduct had been treasonable.[5] Like Blunt, he insisted at first that he had ceased to spy for the Soviet Union in 1945 after his controller had left MI5. Yet he had remained in touch with secret information of the greatest interest to the U.S.S.R. until his intelligence post in Germany ended in 1952. Blunt must have told the Russians about Long during the six years when he was passing on his information because they would have demanded to know the source to be confident of its credibility. Is it conceivable that the Russians would have left Long alone between 1945 and 1952 when they had such a hold over him? Blunt’s attempt to get Long on to the staff of MI5 in 1946 was certainly carried out under Soviet instructions, for no such initiatives were permitted without the approval of the Moscow Centre. So Long’s spontaneous insistence that he had ceased to spy after 1945 raised the suspicion that he, too, had been informed surreptitiously of the Attorney-General’s similar condition concerning Blunt, which had not been imposed. It could, of course, have been Blunt who advised him how much to admit before they began their ‘bugged’ conversation or even on some previous occasion. Or Long could have been advised by somebody else.
The interrogation of Long, which continued over several sessions, produced a lead which enabled MI5 to identify another Cambridge recruit to Soviet Intelligence who was then working in Australia and had previous access to secret information. Steps were taken to ensure that this man had no further access to secret information.
MI5 applied the same restrictions of extreme secrecy to the Long case as it did to Blunt’s in order to protect Blunt’s immunity deal and its own reputation since the failure to prosecute Long would have caused intense embarrassment. Nothing was heard about it until the publication of Their Trade is Treachery which contained the following paragraph: ‘Blunt was more forthcoming about a man he had recruited himself in the 1930s, volunteering his name and some details of what he had done. This man held a position which gave him access to valuable secrets during the war, but now works for a commercial company. When faced with Blunt’s evidence and following a personal encounter with him, he admitted to having been a spy but managed to convince MI5 that he had ceased to help the Russians when he had married, realizing the danger to his family. No action was taken against him.’ Long’s name was in the typescript of the book but the publisher’s lawyers deleted it for libel reasons. I therefore gave it to various newspapers in the hope that, with their more buccaneering approach to the libel laws, they would follow up the lead. None did so.
Long was eventually exposed publicly by the Sunday Times in November 1981 and Mrs Thatcher made a statement to Parliament confirming his treachery.[6] He then appeared on television saying how much he regretted his actions.
chapter thirty-nine
The Interrogation of Sir
Anthony Blunt
When Blunt confessed to having been a Soviet agent after his acceptance of immunity in April 1964 he did not then produce a flood of revelations, as MI5 had hoped. On the contrary, disclosures and leads had to be dragged out of him in a long succession of interviews which stretched into 1972. When Martin was permitted by Hollis to begin the serious interrogation of Blunt, after his extraordinary two-week suspension, he was assisted by his technical colleague, Peter Wright. The questioning was carried out mainly in Blunt’s flat, which had been wired and miked, and was timed to his professional convenience. As the interviews progressed Blunt appeared, increasingly, to appreciate the strength of his position. Martin recalled to an informant that Blunt seemed to be ‘gently amused’ by the whole procedure. He became more and more reluctant to incriminate close or highly placed friends. He was, however, prepared to be helpful about his Soviet controllers whose operations dated back thirty years. MI5 was to rate the information he gave about them as among the most important results of the Blunt interrogations, which counters suggestions by Mrs Thatcher and others that such old events are no longer of consequence.
Blunt’s descriptions of his first controller, whom he knew only as ‘Otto’, did not lead to a firm identification but there was no doubt that the next, whom he knew only as ‘Henry’, was the Soviet ‘diplomat’ and highly successful K.G.B. agent-runner listed in London as Anatoli Gromov and whose real name was Anatoli Gorski. Claims that ‘Henry’ was a Soviet journalist writing under the name Ernst Henry are incorrect.[1] It was to Gromov that Blunt handed his most damaging material – the MI5 ‘order of battle’, the tip that there was a British agent in the Kremlin and the masses of documents abstracted by himself and by Burgess.
Among the first leads to other British traitors given by Blunt was information about his Cambridge associate John Cairncross, whom he did not like and whose treachery proved to be very serious and is dealt with separately in Chapter 40. Blunt was then asked about others who might have been recruited and responded by saying, ‘If you are looking for other people who might have been recruited by Burgess, then pay attention to those he praised lavishly, because he always tried to recruit them.’ Among those who were investigated following this remark was Alister Watson, a scientist who figures in the famous picture of a group of Apostles, taken while he was at Cambridge, and who had, indeed, been admired by Burgess.
This was by no means the first lead which MI5 had been given pointing to Watson. Ten years previously a highly trusted former MI5 officer, who had been at Cambridge at the relevant time, warned his old office that Watson was an ardent communist and should be investigated. No notice was taken of that lead. Later, when Michael Straight was questioned by MI5 in 1964 he named Watson as ‘a member of the King’s College Communist cell in 1936’.[2] Evidence suggested that Watson had been a major proponent of Marxism at Cambridge and had helped to convert Blunt to that creed. When asked if Watson had ever been recruited to Soviet Intelligence Blunt denied it saying tersely, ‘Watson is not relevant.’
Watson had been regarded as an outstanding theoretical physicist at Cambridge but he wrote a thesis which contained an elementary error and this wrecked his prospects as a don. Inquiries showed that he had openly rejected communism, to the great surprise of his friends, and had then joined the Admiralty as a research scientist in 1939. He worked in the highly secret Signals and Radar Establishment until 1953, when he was posted to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington, Middlesex, where he eventually headed a group working on the detection of submarines, achieving the rank of Senior Principal Technical Officer.
A small MI5 team was allocated to the case. They tapped his home telephone, installed hidden microphones and subjected him to surveillance. He was never observed in contact with Soviet Intelligence officers but it was proved that he was still a committed communist. The investigators proposed that they should confront Watson because he had made a false statement on his positive vetting form declaring that he had no connections with communism or communists but Hollis declined to give the case the necessary priority and no interrogation was possible until after he retired from MI5 at the end of 1965.
In 1967 the Admiralty wanted special clearance for Watson to enable him to visit the U.S. to see a secret underwater anti-submarine array. So, with the agreement of Hollis’s successor, he was pulled in for hostile interrogation spread over six weeks. Watson admitted that he was still a committed communist and always had been and had therefore breached the Civil Service security rules by failing to admit this when positively vetted. He admitted having been Blunt’s mentor in communism and to having met ‘Otto’, the early Soviet controller of the Cambridge Ring. He agreed that he had abandoned overt communism in order to secure a post in a Government defence establishment but he denied ever having been recruited as a spy, specifically stating that Burgess had never attempted to recruit him.
When shown a spread of photographs of Soviet bloc intelligence officers he picked out three men whom he had met, admitting that he had breached Admiralty security regulations by failing to report such contact, even though they might have been innocent. One of the Russians was Yuri Modin, who had supervised the defection of Burgess and Maclean and had controlled Blunt. Another was Sergei Kondrashev, a senior K.G.B. officer. Four years previously, the K.G.B. defector, Golitsin, had alleged that Kondrashev had been sent to Britain to control two particularly important communists. One of these had been George Blake, and he believed that the other had naval connections. Golitsin had recalled how this British communist had quarrelled with Kondrashev because he thought him ‘too bourgeois’ to be a good Soviet communist. When Watson saw Kondrashev’s picture he cried, ‘I hated that man. He was so bourgeois and had a pet poodle.’ The third Russian picked out by Watson was Nikolai Karpekov, who had controlled the Admiralty spy, Vassall.
To the MI5 officers it seemed highly unlikely that Watson would have met three spymasters on purely social grounds and he became suspect as probably the fifth man of the Cambridge Ring.
In a final attempt to induce Watson to commit himself he was confronted by his old friend Blunt in Brown’s Hotel off Piccadilly, with MI5 men sitting in, a situation described by Blunt as Kafkaesque. During the prolonged session, which lasted past midnight, the officers turned the conversation to Yuri Modin and they noticed that Watson, who had drunk a lot of sherry, referred to him once by the K.G.B. code-name ‘Peter’, which he was unlikely to have known had he met him only socially.
The use of Blunt in this way made it certain that Watson would not be prosecuted, even if hard evidence came to light or he confessed, and it is a fair assumption that Blunt had been assured of this before he agreed to confront his old friend. MI5 officers have told me that there was never any intention to stage a prosecution and that their purpose was solely to discover what damage Watson might have done and who his contacts had been. As a last-ditch effort to secure a confession, Watson was offered immunity from prosecution – the precedent set by Hollis being continued by his successor – but he ignored the proposal as though he had not heard it.
Watson had been positively vetted three times and had repeatedly failed to admit his involvement with communism so, in view of the extreme secrecy of his work, he could have been dismissed. There were fears, however, both in MI5 and in the Admiralty, that he would fight any dismissal through his union, the Institution of Professional Civil Servants, with consequent publicity. This might have revealed the Blunt case and would, undoubtedly, have inflicted further damage on Anglo-American relations. So action was limited to his removal from secret work. The security authorities withdrew his P.V. clearance, barring him from access to Top Secret information, and in November 1967 he was transferred to totally non-secret work at the National Institute of Oceanography, a move which he and his union accepted without a battle as he was not far from retirement.
As with the cases of Long, Blunt and other instances embarrassing to MI5 and Whitehall generally, the suspicions concerning Watson were kept as secret as possible and his Admiralty colleagues were never questioned about him. Nothing had been heard of the case until the appearance of Their Trade is Treachery in 1981, by which time Watson had retired on full pension. He died in 1983.
Following my disclosure of his name to the Observer he was interviewed and continued to proclaim his innocence while admitting that MI5 had good reason to suspect him.[3] He accused MI5 of pressing him to such an extent that, at one stage, he became confused and asked to see a psychiatrist because he feared that he was saying things that he did not mean to say.[4]
After Long had effectively been given immunity from prosecution, Blunt provided information about his activities which led to a Soviet agent, whose identity remains concealed. This man, another Cambridge contemporary who is well known academically, had been recruited by the G.R.U. and tried to recruit Long for that espionage organization. When he told Blunt of this effort there was consternation because Long was already working for the K.G.B. and Blunt had to ask his controller, ‘Henry’, to sort out the matter. This information confirmed MI5 suspicions that the G.R.U. had also been active in recruiting at Cambridge.
Blunt admitted that he learned about the G.R.U. attempt to recruit Long because he was having a homosexual affair with the man who had made it. It had been assumed that Blunt had always been a very discreet homosexual with steady, almost marital, relationships but MI5’s inquiries and his own admissions revealed that he was, in fact, openly promiscuous, haunting public lavatories and ‘gay’ bars and even picking up sailors.[5] Blunt said that he was ashamed of this side of his life and realized its dangers, but had been unable to control it, even when in the service of the Palace.
Blunt was also forthcoming, ungallantly in the circumstances, about a woman colleague at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool, with whom he had collaborated on a book about Picasso. Miss Pool was an unfortunate figure, described by a contemporary as ‘rather tall, gangling with glasses, a longish bob and very deaf, being required to wear a bulky hearing aid’.[6] Blunt induced her to act as a courier for agents who had been recruited for communist and Soviet work. Without indicating that he had confessed, he tried to jog her memory about her activities on behalf of himself and others so that he could pass on her recollections to MI5 before she herself was interviewed. She recalled meetings with ‘a sinister little Russian in Kew Gardens’, who was almost cetainly ‘Otto’, and named two men whom she thought Blunt should warn if MI5 was looking into communist undergraduates who might have been recruited by Soviet Intelligence. One of these was Sir Andrew Cohen, a former member of the Apostles who became a senior diplomat, while the other was an Oxford graduate who then held a high-level post in the Home Office and whose name would later be put forward, unsuccessfully as it happened, for a top position in MI5! Miss Pool also named a Labour M.P. called Bernard Floud as a crypto-communist and possible Soviet agent, claiming that in 1936 he had recruited for underground communist work a young Oxford undergraduate called Jenifer Fischer-Williams, who had then secured highly sensitive work in the Home Office.[7]
Miss Pool was never questioned by the MI5 officers because, shortly after Blunt had quizzed her, she threw herself under a train. Whether Blunt felt any responsibility for her suicide will never be known but his interrogators did not notice any sign of remorse about any of his actions though, publicly, he was to go through the motions later of expressing regret for his treason. Sir Andrew Cohen also died, of a heart attack, before he could be questioned.
Miss Fischer-Williams, who by that time was Mrs Jenifer Hart, married to Professor Herbert Hart, a distinguished lawyer and philosopher who was to become Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, was interviewed by MI5, as she has recently confirmed in a television broadcast. She said that she had joined the Communist Party in 1935 and when it was known that she intended to join the Civil Service she was instructed to become a secret member, carrying no Party card and disassociating herself publicly from other communists. She named Floud as her first mentor. She did well in the Civil Service examinations and entered the Home Office, when she was introduced to a more professional controller, a middle European whose name she claimed to be unable to remember but who was, almost certainly, ‘Otto’, then also serving as controller for Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
Whether by luck or by design, Miss Fischer-Williams was soon in the department responsible for handling the written requests from MI5 for official Home Office permission to tap the telephones of suspects. As she confirmed later in the television interview she ‘saw a lot of the MI5 people’. In fact she took the signed warrants from the Home Office to MI5 and became friendly with Brigadier A.W. ‘Jasper’ Harker, a very senior MI5 officer. She was even asked to recommend friends who might want to join MI5. In 1941 she married Herbert Hart who was then working in MI5.
Mrs Hart told her interrogators that she had become disenchanted with communism after the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 and that ‘Otto’ had specifically told her to do nothing for ten years. As she recalled in her T.V. interview, in 1983, the MI5 officers did not believe her, to her lasting annoyance. Such an instruction was certainly out of character for ‘Otto’ or any other Soviet controller when a recruit was in such a position. Mrs Hart, however, insists that she was never aware that she was recruited for Soviet Intelligence but only to serve the Communist Party and that, in the event, she did not even do that because she was not required to do so.
The MI5 officers were unable to interview and question Bernard Floud because he was an M.P. and the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had ruled that M.P.s and peers were to be exempt from investigation by the security authorities unless he gave special permission. It was also forbidden to tap their telephones and put them under any kind of surveillance without special leave. An opportunity to take action arose, however, in 1967 when Wilson was thinking about making Floud, M.P. for Acton, a junior minister. As a matter of routine the Prime Minister’s office needed an assurance from MI5 that it had nothing on record to his detriment. Wilson was told that Floud, who had been an open communist at Oxford, had been recruited to the Soviet cause by James Klugmann, had recruited others and had retained his ideological commitment while serving in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. Wilson then gave permission for Floud to be interviewed and he was interrogated for two weeks, during which he admitted his former communism but denied any connection with Soviet Intelligence. The MI5 officers suspected that he was, in fact, still in touch with the K.G.B. and said that if he confessed and could convince them that he had ended his relationship with the Russians some time ago they might not object to his ministerial appointment.
After further unproductive sessions, Floud, who was suffering from depression exacerbated by his wife’s recent death, went home and committed suicide. The extent to which the interrogations contributed to his death will never be known.
