by Max Hastings
Moscow Centre’s recruiters profited mightily from the Soviet Union’s status as principal standard-bearer for communism as a creed. Many NKVD and GRU sources around the world embraced the fiction that by giving secrets to the Comintern, they were aiding an international ideal rather than any narrowly national cause. Zbigniew Brzezinski defines ideology as combining theory and action with a ‘consciousness of purpose and of the general thrust of history. It gives its adherents a sense of consistency and certainty that is too often absent among those … brought up in the tradition of short-term pragmatism.’ Even before the enormity of the fascist menace in Germany, Italy and Spain became apparent, left-wing socialism attracted many enlightened and compassionate people. The creed came dressed in many guises. Explicitly to avow communist sympathies was no barrier to admission to cultured London, Paris or Washington society, because communism was not then universally identified with the barbarities laid bare in the second half of the twentieth century. James Klugmann, a Moscow informant who worked for SOE, said later: ‘We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand. If anyone had suggested it wouldn’t happen in Britain for say thirty years, I’d have laughed myself sick.’
In the 1930s communists seemed to be the only people who were challenging fascism with any conviction, and the 1936 outbreak of the Spanish Civil War dramatically enhanced the credibility of the Soviet Union in intellectuals’ eyes. They became obsessed with Spain in an even more profound sense than a later generation embraced Vietnam. No Westerners in the 1960s, however hostile to American policy, took up arms for Ho Chi Minh. Yet thousands of Europeans and Americans fought for the Republicans in Spain, or worked to assist them. Millions of people around the world identified with the cause with an almost religious fervour. In this febrile climate, perhaps more intensely politicised than at any time before or since, Moscow recruited young idealists of all nationalities to serve as covert warriors for communism.
Centre’s British and American informants were diverse characters, united by a messianic belief in their own rightness, indispensable to enable them systematically to betray their employers, colleagues and country. Hugh Trevor-Roper reflected long afterwards that he and many others of his generation had underestimated the perils posed by communists within British and other democratic societies, because they had mistakenly perceived adherents to the creed as ‘merely the most radical of our allies against fascism, the militants on the extreme left of a coalition in which men agreed to differ with mutual respect. Educated liberal Englishmen and Americans failed to understand that communism is a religion … [which] can totally paralyse the mental and moral faculties of its converts and cause them to commit any turpitude and to suffer any indignity, for its sake.’
Yet many of those who called themselves communists throughout the 1930s felt obliged to recant in the face of the supreme cynicism of the August 1939 deal between the Nazis and the Soviets. Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘Many of our friends had been, or thought themselves, communists in the 1930s, and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed; for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s pact with Hitler.’ Thus, as the high tide of enthusiasm for communism receded in the Western democracies, all but the most doctrinaire conservatives became reluctant to hold it against young men and women that they had avowed enthusiasm for Moscow before the Nazi–Soviet Pact exposed its turpitude.
It remains nonetheless remarkable that the Cambridge Five, and others of their kind, sustained for so many years parallel roles in the secret services of Britain and Russia. The spies had in common dysfunctional personalities, together with an anger against family, class or society which impelled their treachery and, in their own minds, justified it. All had intellectual gifts and varying degrees of charm. John Cairncross was the outsider, born the son of a Lanarkshire ironmonger in 1913. He became a scholarship boy first at Glasgow University, then at Trinity, Cambridge. Frail and untidy in appearance, adorned with a shock of red hair, his earnestness and gaucherie caused him to be dismissed by Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville as ‘very brilliant, very boring’. The latter handicap set him apart from the other, famously personable Cambridge spies, though brains secured him a government job. In 1936 Cairncross passed top of his year into the civil service.
Like the others, he was recruited to the NKVD by Arnold Deutsch, a Viennese Jew and enthusiastic sexual liberationist who since 1934 had occupied a flat in Lawn Road, Hampstead, next door to Agatha Christie. Deutsch pursued a strategy of wooing young high fliers who seemed to be in transit towards the corridors of power. Kim Philby later described him as ‘a marvellous man’, funny and brilliant, who treated the Five as comrades rather than subordinates. He later asserted that he never hesitated for a moment before embracing Deutsch’s proposal: ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.’ Donald Maclean, after his 1951 flight to Moscow, justified his own treason in more disdainful terms: ‘It’s like being a lavatory attendant. It stinks, but somebody has to do it.’
Cairncross was introduced to Deutsch by James Klugmann in Regent’s Park in May 1937. A few months later, the NKVD man was recalled to Moscow during the Purges. His successors as the Cambridge spies’ handlers never, in their eyes, matched Deutsch’s charm and professionalism. Though he narrowly preserved his own life, he remained suspected by his employers, and the Five’s association with him sustained the NKVD’s wariness of them. A winter 1938 assessment by Moscow Centre warned that the London intelligence operation ‘was based on doubtful sources, on an agent network acquired at a time when it was controlled by enemies of the people and therefore extremely dangerous’. Although Centre for a time kept open its links with the Five, their material was treated with the utmost caution.
Early in 1940, Russian suspicions mounted. Lavrenti Beria became convinced that the Cambridge spies were serving either the British or the Germans, and not the cause of socialism. He recalled to Moscow Anatoly Gorsky, sole remaining member of the NKVD’s London legal residency. For several months, while the greatest war in human history unfolded, Soviet intelligence conducted no significant operations in Britain; Stalin made it plain to his spymasters that he was more interested in killing Trotsky than in discovering what Hitler – or, for that matter, Churchill – was doing. Only late in 1940 did the intelligence policy of the Kremlin shift with its accustomed abruptness. The word went forth that Centre was to rebuild its foreign agent networks, which had been allowed to atrophy.
When relations with the Five were resumed, the new NKVD resident agent arranged meetings with them in Kensington Gardens, because the rendezvous was handy for the nearby Soviet embassy. The spies resumed their covert crusade for socialism, even though at this time Stalin was supposedly the associate of Hitler. Cairncross’s absence of social skills caused him to be transferred from the Foreign Office to the Treasury, and then in 1940 to become private secretary to Lord Hankey. If there was anything Moscow Centre did not know about the structure and activities of Britain’s intelligence services, Hankey now filled the gaps through the agency of Cairncross. The minister had conducted an exhaustive inquiry into MI6 and Bletchley. Cairncross slipped his NKVD handler a copy of Hankey’s interim report, which had been first circulated within Whitehall in March 1940.
Thereafter, he spent a year as a codebreaker in Bletchley’s Hut 3 before his health failed, prompting a transfer to MI6. Between 1941 and 1945 he passed 5,832 documents to the Russians, including many decrypted German signals. Cairncross was so technically incompetent that he was incapable of photographing material: he could only copy extracts by hand, or temporarily filch them for his handler to film. The NKVD resident often found himself unable to cope with enciphering all the material his informant supplied, but he was sufficiently appreciative to give Cairncross cash to buy a car to make it easier for him to deliver stolen secrets. The spy’s personal unpopularity with colleagues proved n
o barrier to his continued employment by MI6, and Moscow eventually presented him with the Order of the Red Banner in recognition of his contribution to its own interests.
Guy Burgess was a naval officer’s son, born in 1911, who attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, then began to scrape a living from the BBC, while partying on the fringes of London intellectual and political circles. Even in an era of hard drinking, Burgess’s consumption of alcohol amazed his acquaintance. His favourite tipple was a large port, which became known to waiters at the Reform Club in Pall Mall as ‘a double Burgess’. Amid the defiant squalor of his flat in Bond Street, he sometimes cooked a stew of porridge, kippers, bacon, garlic, onions ‘and anything else lying about in the kitchen’ to sustain him through a weekend. In December 1938 his wit and social connections caused him to be recruited into MI6’s propaganda department. After some months he transferred to the BBC, where he produced the radio programme The Week in Westminster, a passport to useful political contacts.
Thereafter he enjoyed a rackety existence, commuting between Broadcasting House and the Fitzrovia intellectual world, the wilder shores of homosexual London and the darker corridors of its secret world, both British and Russian, while excused from military call-up through the good offices of Blunt at MI5. How he avoided disaster mystified all those who encountered his reckless indiscretion long before he was exposed as an agent of Moscow. A characteristic 1942 Burgess contribution to the war effort was to recruit as an MI5 source Andrew Revoi, leader of the so-called Free Hungarians in London – whom he himself had put on the NKVD payroll back in 1938. During the early war years Burgess contributed less to Centre’s interests than the other Cambridge spies, but in 1944 Sir Alexander Cadogan incomprehensibly appointed him to the Foreign Office News Department. Between January and July 1945 Burgess passed 389 top secret files to his Soviet handler.
Donald Maclean provided Moscow with its most important secret political intelligence. His family were Highland Scots, oppressively Presbyterian and committed to temperance; his father was a lawyer who eventually became a Liberal cabinet minister. Young Donald, born in 1913, was educated at Gresham’s, a harsh Norfolk public school where boys had their trouser pockets sewn up to discourage putting hands in them. Maclean, tall and handsome, was once described by an admiring Nazi as having ‘perfect Aryan good looks’. From an early age, with his Balkan cigarettes and lounging charm, he cultivated a pose of mandarin ease. Philip Toynbee wrote of his friend’s ‘lazy wit and sophisticated good humour’. Maclean and the others recruited by Moscow at Cambridge professed to believe – and perhaps initially did so – that they were working for the Comintern rather than explicitly for the Soviet Union. Maclean joined the Foreign Office and began to pass documents to his NKVD controller. In 1937 Kitty Harris, born to poor Russian parents in London’s East End and briefly bigamously married to American communist leader Earl Browder, assumed this role. She and Maclean concluded their first meeting in bed together, and thereafter for some months conducted an affair. The following year he was posted to Paris. Robert Cecil, who had known Maclean in his younger days and was now an embassy colleague, thought his demeanour had become uneasy and hesitant, in contrast to his earlier self-assurance. At the time Cecil was bemused by the change, but much later he identified it as reflecting guilt about Maclean’s double life. The handsome young diplomat was by no means universally liked: typists referred to him disdainfully as ‘smarty-pants’.
Nonetheless Melinda Marling, an American girl whom Maclean met in Paris, gave a glowing account of him to her mother: ‘He is six foot tall, blonde with beautiful blue eyes … He is the soul of honour, responsible, a sense of humour, imagination, cultured, broadminded (and sweet), etc.’ In June 1940 she found herself pregnant amid the chaos of France being overrun by the Germans. These twin shocks caused her to brush aside earlier reservations about marrying Maclean. After a hasty wedding, they were evacuated to Britain. Melinda then sailed for New York, where their first child was born – and swiftly died. Only in the autumn of 1941 did she return to live with Donald in London. It seems almost certain that from an early stage the left-leaning Melinda was aware both of her husband’s work for Moscow, and of his bisexuality.
The enforced accession of the Soviet Union to the struggle against Hitler lifted the spirits of the Western spies serving Moscow. Now that Britain and Russia, and soon afterwards also the United States, were fighting the same fascist foes, such people as Maclean could persuade themselves that passing information to ‘Uncle Joe’ was no betrayal, but instead merely a means of assisting a common cause. In 1942 alone, the documents he stole or copied from the Foreign Office filled forty-five files in the NKVD’s Moscow archives. Maclean’s rich crop included much material about Britain’s relations with the Soviet Union and details of British positions in negotiations and before summit meetings. In April 1944 he was posted to the British embassy in Washington as first secretary, where he played tennis with Lord Halifax, and raised his game as a purveyor of Anglo-American secrets. The strain of life as a spy and bisexual showed in Maclean’s increasing consumption of alcohol and lapses into ugly scenes under its influence. But his intelligence and charm, leavened with Foreign Office and class solidarity, enabled him to keep both his job and his role as the Soviet Union’s most important source on Western foreign policy.
Anthony Blunt, a vicar’s son born in 1907 and educated at Marlborough, won a mathematics scholarship to Cambridge and later took a First in foreign languages. Thereafter he became a don and an embryo art historian. Both his homosexuality and his left-wing sympathies were well known – his friend Guy Burgess may have been responsible for recruiting him to the NKVD. But in 1939 neither politics nor sexuality proved a bar to his joining the Intelligence Corps, with which he served for some months in France. Finding himself homeless after Dunkirk, he became a temporary London lodger of Victor Rothschild of MI5, through whom Guy Liddell recruited him to the security service.
Blunt won immediate plaudits as an intelligence officer, especially for his dexterity in examining the contents of neutral diplomatic bags. An MI5 secretary of the time later recalled: ‘My God, he was a charmer! Poor Anthony! We were all a bit in love with Anthony, you know … He used to wander around with his cod-liver oil and malt, saying “That’s what Tiggers like for breakfast.” He knew Winnie the Pooh very well. He had a Leslie Howard face – a matinee idol – a rather thin and drawn-looking face but it was the face of Leslie Howard. Everyone was in love with Leslie Howard at that time.’ On several occasions Blunt was sent to represent MI5 at meetings of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and in 1944 he was seconded to SHAEF to work on deception planning. In his parallel NKVD role he recruited and ran as a sub-agent Leo Long, who worked in military intelligence. Blunt provided a stream of MI5 documents and some Ultra decrypts, including signals relating to the 1943 battle for Kursk, the substance of which had been conveyed to Moscow through British military channels. He also briefed the Russians about the activities of the Twenty Committee, which ran ‘turned’ Nazi agents in its masterly wireless game with the Abwehr.
Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, most notorious of the Cambridge group because he gained access to the most sensitive secrets and his treachery ultimately cost most lives, was the son of the Arabist scholar St John Philby, an obsessive personality who tottered on the edge of insanity. The elderly sage declared, for instance, that Hitler was ‘a very fine man’, and in 1940 became convinced of the inevitability of British defeat, which caused him to be briefly interned in India. After Westminster and Cambridge, the NKVD gave Philby career counselling: get into newspapers, said Arnold Deutsch, which would provide an ideal platform for his Moscow work. During the later 1930s Philby became a well-regarded journalist, serving in Spain during its civil war as a correspondent for The Times as well as an agent of the NKVD, who doubled his newspaper income. Philby’s personal extravagance made Russia’s cash as important to him as the pleasure of assuaging his closet contempt for Britain by serving its enemi
es. People of power and influence loved him as the most congenial of companions: he was sponsored for membership of London’s august Athenaeum Club by the military theorist Basil Liddell Hart. A joke that pleased Philby mightily was that Franco the fascist awarded him Spain’s Red Cross of Military Merit, though in 1937 the Russians briefed him to gather intelligence to facilitate Franco’s assassination.
Thereafter, however, during the Purges and the period of the Nazi–Soviet Pact he found himself dropped as abruptly as were many other NKVD informants. His offers of new material, forwarded to Moscow through Donald Maclean, were spurned. He was obliged instead to busy himself as a Times war correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force in France. Philby was appointed to MI6 in 1940, after expressing an interest in an intelligence career to one of the service’s talent-spotters, Harriet Marsden-Smedley. Valentine Vivian was a friend of St John Philby, and cheerfully accepted the old man’s assurance that his son had forsworn dalliance with the left. Kim started his career with British intelligence by lecturing on techniques of subversive propaganda to foreign exiles recruited to SOE. He often opened his flamboyant talks by urging his audiences, many of whom recognised Stalin and Hitler as matching monsters: ‘Gentlemen, I have no wish to prevent you blowing up the Russians, but I would beg you, for the sake of the Allied war effort, to blow up the Germans first.’ Philby won the affection as well as the warm approval of Broadway colleagues and chiefs, and in October 1941 was promoted to head the Iberian section of MI6.
