by Philip Kerr
The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, while almost unknown today, remains the greatest maritime disaster in history. Nine thousand four hundred people died, many of them children.
Formerly KÖNIGSBERG, Kaliningrad is the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. It is the only part of the Russian Federation that—geographically, at least—is entirely within the EU.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM really was a British spy and did indeed control a large network of secret agents in Petrograd in 1917. He died, aged ninety-one, in Nice, in December 1965. The Villa Mauresque, now Le Sémaphore, is to be found at 52 Boulevard du General-de-Gaulle, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. It is owned privately and, unlike the excellent Grand Hôtel Cap-Ferrat, is not open to the public.
GUY BURGESS, Clarissa Churchill’s former suitor and Soviet spy, died in Moscow, in 1963, aged just fifty-two. He and Anthony Blunt were both guests of Somerset Maugham at the Villa Mauresque in 1937.
ANTHONY BLUNT was knighted in 1956. He confessed to being a Soviet spy in 1964, and in return for this confession was granted full immunity from prosecution. His life continued as normal and he remained Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures until 1973, and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1974. His spying activities were not revealed to the general public until November 1979. He died in 1983.
KIM PHILBY was revealed in 1963 to be a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five; JOHN CAIRNCROSS was finally revealed to be a KGB spy in 1979.
SIR JOHN SINCLAIR was fired from MI6 by Prime Minister Anthony Eden in July 1956. He was replaced as director of MI6 by Sir Dick White. Sir Dick White was replaced as head of MI5 by Sir Roger Hollis, who after being director general of MI5 for nine years, from 1956 to 1965, died in 1973.
Formerly private secretary to Sir Stewart Menzies, then chief of MI6, PATRICK REILLY was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee from 1950 until 1953. He was knighted in 1957, when he was made British ambassador to Russia.
According to Selina Hastings’s definitive biography of Somerset Maugham, in 1959 ROBIN MAUGHAM was offered $50,000 to write his uncle’s biography by an American publisher. On learning about this project, W. Somerset Maugham sent Robin a check for $50,000 on the strict understanding that he drop all plans of writing about him. As Hastings writes: “. . . Maugham had no trouble in recognizing blackmail when he saw it.”
SIR ROGER HOLLIS was cleared of being a Soviet spy by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in a statement to the House of Commons in March 1981. However, Ray Cline, the CIA’s deputy director of intelligence from 1962 to 1966, concluded that there was “a high percentage of probability that MI5 had been penetrated at a high level and that, among the possible candidates to be a Soviet agent in that category, Roger Hollis was the best fit to be matched with all the evidence concerned.” Robert Lamphere of the FBI has also stated: “To me, there now remains little doubt that it was Hollis who provided the earliest information to the KGB that the FBI was reading in their 1944–45 cables. Philby added to this knowledge after his arrival in the US but the prime culprit in this affair was Hollis.” Senator Malcolm Wallop, a long-serving member of the Senate committee in charge of U.S. intelligence, told the British author Chapman Pincher that William Casey, the CIA chief from 1981 to 1987, was convinced that Hollis had been a spy. Victor Popov, Soviet ambassador in London from 1980 to 1986, agreed with this assessment. Pincher states in his exhaustively detailed and very readable book Treachery: The True Story of MI5 (2011): “In summary, if one imagines a magic compass that could be placed over any suspicious set of circumstances affecting MI5’s countermeasures to the Soviet intelligence assault, the needle almost invariably points to the man who served in the agency for twenty-seven years and became its chief. The extraordinary concatenation of dates and circumstances all fit. Hollis’s serial culpability for security disasters, whether due to treachery or to sheer incompetence, can no longer be in doubt. Except when events outside his control took command, almost every recommendation he made and every decision he took benefited Soviet intelligence.” That is also my own opinion.
Bernie Gunther will be back in 2017 with Prussian Blue.
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