Enemies Within is a set of studies in character: incidentally of individual character, but primarily a study of institutional character. The operative traits of boarding schools, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Intelligence Division, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and Moscow Centre are the book’s subjects. Historians fumble their catches when they study individuals’ motives and individuals’ ideas rather than the institutions in which people work, respond, find motivation and develop their ideas. This book is not a succession of character portraits: it seeks the bonds between individuals; it depicts mutually supportive networks; it explores the cooperative interests that mould thinking; it joins ideas to actions, and connects reactions with counter-reactions; it makes individuals intelligible by placing them in sequence, among the correct types and tendencies, of the milieux in which they thought and acted.
In addition to Evans-Pritchard I have carried in my mind a quotation from F. S. Oliver’s great chronicle of Walpole’s England in which he refers to Titus Oates, the perjurer who caused a cruel and stupid panic in 1678–9 by inventing a Jesuitical conspiracy known as the Popish Plot. ‘Historians’, wrote Oliver in The Endless Adventure,
are too often of a baser sort. Such men write dark melodramas, wherein ancient wrongs cry out for vengeance, and wholesale destruction of institutions or states appears the only way to safety. Productions of this kind require comparatively little labour and thought; they provide the author with high excitement; they may bring him immediate fame, official recognition and substantial profits. Nearly every nation has been cursed at times with what may be called the Titus Oates school of historians. Their dark melodramas are not truth, but as nearly as possible the opposite of truth. Titus Oates the historian, stirring his brew of arrogance, envy and hatred in the witches’ cauldron, is an ugly sight. A great part of the miseries which have afflicted Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century have been due to frenzies produced in millions of weak or childish minds by deliberate perversions of history. And one of the worst things about Titus Oates is the malevolence he shows in tainting generous ideas.
One aim of this book is to rebut the Titus Oates commentators who have commandeered the history of communist espionage in twentieth-century Britain. I want to show the malevolence that has been used to taint generous ideas.
This is a thematic book. My ruling theme is that it hinders clear thinking if the significance of the Cambridge spies is presented, as they wished to be, in Marxist terms. Their ideological pursuit of class warfare, and their desire for the socialist proletariat to triumph over the capitalist bourgeoisie, is no reason for historians to follow the constricting jargon of their faith. I argue that the Cambridge spies did their greatest harm to Britain not during their clandestine espionage in 1934–51, but in their insidious propaganda victories over British government departments after 1951. The undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, the suspicion of educational advantages, and the use of the words ‘elite’ and ‘Establishment’ as derogatory epithets transformed the social and political temper of Britain. The long-term results of the Burgess and Maclean defection reached their apotheosis when joined with other forces in the referendum vote for Brexit on 23 June 2016.
The social class of Moscow’s agents inside British government departments was mixed. The contours of the espionage and counter-espionage described in Enemies Within – the recurrent types of event in the half-century after 1920 – do not fit Marxist class analysis. To follow the communist interpretation of these events is to become the dupe of Muscovite manipulation. The myths about the singularity of the Cambridge spies and the class-bound London Establishment’s protection of them is belied by comparison with the New Deal officials who became Soviet spies in Roosevelt’s Washington. Other comparisons are made with the internal dynasties of the KGB and with MI5’s penetration agents within the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The belief in Establishment cover-ups is based on wilful misunderstanding. The primary aim of counter-intelligence is not to arrest spies and put them on public trial, profitable though this may be to newspapers in times of falling sales or national insecurity. The evidence to the Senate Intelligence Committee tendered in 2017 by James Comey, recently dismissed as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by President Donald Trump, contains a paragraph that, with the adjustment of a few nouns, summarizes the policy of MI5 during the period of this book:
It is important to understand that FBI counter-intelligence investigations are different than the more commonly known criminal investigative work. The Bureau’s goal in a counter-intelligence investigation is to understand the technical and human methods that hostile foreign powers are using to influence the United States or to steal our secrets. The FBI uses that understanding to disrupt those efforts. Sometimes disruption takes the form of alerting a person who is targeted for recruitment or influence by the foreign power. Sometimes it involves hardening a computer system that is being attacked. Sometimes it involves ‘turning’ the recruited person into a double agent, or publicly calling out the behavior with sanctions or expulsions of embassy-based intelligence officers. On occasion, criminal prosecution is used to disrupt intelligence activities.
For MI5, as for Comey’s FBI, the first priority of counter-espionage was to understand the organization and techniques of their adversaries. The lowest priorities were arrests and trials.
The Marxist indictment of Whitehall’s leadership takes a narrow, obsolete view of power relations. Inclusiveness entails not only the mesh of different classes but the duality of both sexes. In the period covered by this book, and long after, women lacked the status of men at all social levels. They were repulsed from the great departments of state. The interactions in such departments were wholly masculine: the supposed class exclusivity of the Foreign Office (which is a partial caricature, as I show) mattered little, so far as the subject of this book is concerned, compared to gender exclusivity. The key to understanding the successes of Moscow’s penetration agents in government ministries, the failures to detect them swiftly and the counter-espionage mistakes in handling them lies in sex discrimination rather than class discrimination. Masculine loyalties rather than class affinities are the key that unlocks the closed secrets of communist espionage in Britain. The jokes between men – the unifying management of male personnel of all classes by the device of humour – was indispensable to engendering such loyalty. Laughing at the same jokes is one of the tightest forms of conformity.
Enemies Within is a study in trust, abused trust, forfeited trust and mistrust. Stalinist Russia is depicted as a totalitarian state in which there were ruthless efforts to arouse distrust between neighbours and colleagues, to eradicate mutual trust within families and institutions, and to run a power system based on paranoia. ‘Saboteurs’ and ‘wreckers’ were key-words of Stalinism, and Moscow projected its preoccupation with sabotage and wrecking on to the departments of state of its first great adversary, the British Empire. The London government is portrayed as a sophisticated, necessarily flawed but far from contemptible apparatus in which trust among colleagues was cultivated and valued. The assumptions of workplace trust existed at every level: the lowest and highest echelons of the Foreign Office worked from the same openly argued and unrestricted ‘circulating file’; in the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police, until the 1930s, matters of utmost political delicacy were confided to all men from the rank of superintendent downwards.
At the time of the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, the departments of state were congeries of social relations and hierarchical networks. They were deliberate in their reliance on and development of the bonding of staff and in building bridges between diverse groups. Government ministries were thus edifices of ‘social capital’: a broad phrase denoting the systems of workplace reciprocity and goodwill, the exchanges of information and influence, the informal solidarity, that was a valued part of office life in western democracies until the 1980s. The era of the missi
ng diplomats and the ensuing tall tales of Establishment cover-ups chipped away at this edifice, and weakened it for the wrecking-ball that demolished the social capital of twentieth-century Britain. The downfall of ‘social capital’ was accompanied by the upraising of ‘rational choice theory’.
This theory suggests that untrammelled individuals make prudent, rational decisions bringing the best available satisfaction, and that accordingly they should act in their highest self-interest. The limits of rational choice theory ought to be evident: experience shows that people with low self-esteem make poor decisions; nationalism is a form of pooled self-regard to boost such people; and in the words of Sir George Rendel, sometime ambassador in Sofia and Brussels, ‘Nationalism seldom sees its own economic interest.’ Rational choice is the antithesis of the animating beliefs of the British administrative cadre in the period covered by this book. The theory has legitimated competitive disloyalty among colleagues, degraded personal self-respect, validated ruthless ill-will and diminished probity. The primacy of rational choice has subdued the sense of personal protective responsibility in government, and has gone a long way in eradicating traditional values of institutional neutrality, personal objectivity and self-respect. Not only the Cambridge spies, but the mandarins in departments of state whom they worked to outwit and damage would be astounded by the methods and ethics of Whitehall in the twenty-first century. They would consider contemporary procedures to be as corrupt, self-seeking and inefficient as those under any central African despotism or South American junta.
The influence of Moscow on London is the subject of Enemies Within. As any reader of The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism will understand, Soviet communism was only one version of a Marxist state. ‘As the twenty-first century advances,’ writes Stephen A. Smith, editor of the Oxford Handbook, ‘it may come to seem that the Chinese revolution was the great revolution of the twentieth century, deeper in its mobilization of society, more ambitious in its projects, more far-reaching in its achievements, and in some ways more enduring than its Soviet counterpart.’ All this must be acknowledged: so, too, that Chinese revolutionaries took their own branded initiatives to change the character of western states. These great themes – as well as reactions to the wars in Korea and Vietnam – however lie outside my remit.
If I had attempted to be comprehensive, Enemies Within would have swollen into an unreadable leviathan. Endnotes at the close of paragraphs supply in order the sources of quotations, but I have not burdened the book with heavy citation of the sources for every idea or judgement. I have concentrated its focus by giving more attention to HUMINT than to SIGINT. There are more details on Leninism and Stalinism than on Marxism. The inter-war conflicts between British and Soviet interests in India, Afghanistan and China get scant notice. There are only slight references to German agents, or to the activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain. There is nothing about Italian pursuit of British secrets. Japan does not impinge on this story, for it did not operate a secret intelligence service in Europe: a Scottish aviator, Lord Sempill, and a former communist MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, were two of its few agents of influence. The interference in the 1960s and 1970s of Soviet satellite states in British politics and industrial relations is elided. Although I suspect that Soviet plans in the 1930s for industrial sabotage in the event of an Anglo-Russian war were extensive, the available archives are devoid of material. The Portland spy ring is omitted because, important though it was, its activities in 1952–61 are peripheral to themes of this book. The material necessary for a reliable appraisal of George Blake is not yet available: once the documentation is released, it will need a book of its own. I have drawn parallels between the activities of penetration agents in government departments in London and Washington, and have contrasted the counter-espionage of the two nations. There is a crying need for a historical study – written from an institutional standpoint rather than as biographical case-studies – of Soviet penetration of government departments in the Baltic capitals, of official cadres in the Balkans and most especially of ministries in Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Rome and Vienna.
Enemies Within is not a pantechnicon containing all that can be carried from a household clearance: it is a van carrying a few hand-picked artefacts.
PART ONE
Rules of the Game
CHAPTER 1
The Moscow Apparatus
When Sir John (‘Jock’) Balfour went as British Minister to Moscow in 1943, he was given sound advice by the American diplomat George Kennan. ‘Although it will be very far from explaining everything,’ Kennan said, ‘it is always worthwhile, whenever the behaviour of the Soviet authorities becomes particularly difficult, to look back into Russian history for a precedent.’ Current ideas and acts, he understood, encase past history. Similarly, in 1946, Frank Roberts surveyed post-war Soviet intentions from his vantage point in Britain’s Moscow embassy. ‘Basically, the Kremlin is now pursuing a Russian national policy, which does not differ except in degree from that pursued in the past by Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Catherine the Great.’ The chief difference between imperial and Stalinist Russia, according to Roberts, was that Soviet leaders covered their aims in the garb of Marxist-Leninist ideology, in which they believed with a faith as steadfast as that of the Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation.1
Although Tsar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861, most of the subjects of his grandson Nicholas II lived in conditions of semi-vassalage in 1917. It was the promise of emancipation from Romanov controls, exploitation, injustice and ruinous warfare that made the Russian people give their support to the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s one-party state faced the same crisis of economic and institutional backwardness that had overwhelmed the last Tsar: industries, agriculture, bureaucracy, the armed forces and armaments all needed to be modernized, empowered and expanded at juddering speed. As Kennan and Roberts indicated, a sense of the historic continuities in Leninist and Stalinist Russia helps in evaluating Moscow’s ruling cadres and in appraising the function and extent of communist espionage. It matters as much to stress that the pitiless energy and ambition of the Bolshevik state apparatus surpassed any previous force in Russian history.2
Tsarist Russia
Russia’s earliest political police was the Oprichnina. It was mustered in 1565 by Ivan the Terrible, Grand Duke of Muscovy and first Tsar of Russia. Ivan’s enforcers dressed in black, rode black horses and had saddles embellished with a dog’s head and broom to symbolize their task of sniffing out and sweeping away treason. During the European-wide reaction after the Napoleonic wars, a new apparatus called the Third Section was formed in 1826. It was charged with monitoring political dissent and social unrest, operated in tandem with several thousand gendarmes and employed innumerable paid informers. Annual summaries of the Third Section’s surveillance reports were made to the tsarist government. ‘Public opinion’, declared the Third Section’s Count Alexander von Benckendoff, ‘is for the government what a topographical map is for an army command in time of war.’3
From the 1820s political dissidents, criminals, insubordinate soldiers, drunkards and vagabonds were deported in marching convoys to Siberia. They were consigned to this harsh exile (often after Third Section investigations) partly as condign punishment, but also to provide labour to colonize and develop the frozen wastes beyond the Ural Mountains. The rape of women, male and female prostitution, trafficked children, flogging, typhus, tuberculosis, the stench from human excrement, the hunger and destitution that occurred inside the penal colony became notorious as the number of exiles mounted (in the century before the Russian revolution of 1917, over a million individuals had been sent to Siberia).
After the fatal stabbing of the Third Section’s chief in 1878, a new state security apparatus named the Okhrana was instituted to eradicate political crime. Its draconian prerogatives were exercised with restraint in some respects: only seventeen people were executed for political crimes during the 1880s; al
l were assassins or implicated in murderous plots (a youth hanged for conspiring to kill Tsar Alexander III in 1887 was elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who took the alias of Lenin). But Okhrana’s policemen were empowered to imprison and exile suspects in Siberia on their own authority. Thousands of deportees died there of disease, hunger and exhaustion. The overseers of one gang of convict roadbuilders starved their men into cannibalism. Exiles were regularly flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails.
Not everyone suffered intolerably. Conditions were generally ameliorated at the time of Lenin’s exile in Siberia in 1897–1900. While living in a peasant hut surrounded by steppe, swamp and the village dung-heaps, he was able to borrow statistical, political and economics books from libraries, and published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which established him as a Marxist ideologue. He secured a lucrative contract to translate into Russian The History of Trade Unionism by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. The authorities allowed him to keep a two-bore shotgun, cartridges and an Irish setter to hunt duck and snipe. Throughout his exile, Lenin played chess by correspondence across Russia and abroad. His letters were intercepted but seldom stopped: he maintained contacts with conspirators and subversives far away in Moscow, Kiev, Geneva and London. ‘Lenin’s letters from Siberia make strange reading,’ writes Victor Sebestyen. ‘They might be the letters of an indolent country squire of outdoor tastes but gentle epicurean philosophy which forbade him to take such tastes too seriously.’4
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