Seven years after the Anschluss, in the spring of 1945, Vienna was again occupied: this time by ravaging Russian troops, who kept the eastern, southernmost and westerly districts of Austria’s capital under Soviet domination until 1955. In the Baroque expanse of Schwarzenbergplatz, on which the occupiers tried to foist the name of Stalin Square, they erected the Heroes Monument of the Red Army, a semi-circular colonnade commemorating Soviet ‘liberation’ of the city and proclaiming the coming dictatorship of the proletariat. Atop a red-stone pedestal at the centre of the colonnade stood the black-and-gold figure of a proud hero of the Russian military with a machine gun strapped to his chest. This robotic-looking sentinel still keeps vigil over the city. Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the Red Army monument in 2007. The Viennese called the statue der unbekannte Plünderer – the unknown looter.16
CHAPTER 10
The Ring of Five
The induction of Philby, Maclean and Burgess
Litzi Friedmann had a Viennese friend named Peter Smolka. He had been born in Vienna in 1912, the son of the owner of a prosperous metallurgical business, and caused his first security scare when at the age of seventeen he was detained as a suspected Italian spy and expelled from France after taking photographs inside a fortress at Marseille. A month later, in September 1930, he arrived at Dover with a press pass from the Austrian newspaper Der Tag to report a conference on the future rule of India. Special Branch watched as he filed poignant English true-crime stories and photographed dismal-looking sandwich-board men in Trafalgar Square. He moved from a Bloomsbury hotel to Bayswater lodgings, and thence to rooms off Finchley Road and finally to a flat in Wembley. Special Branch suspected ‘communist tendencies’ and found him ‘arrogant’, but had no evidence that he was engaged in espionage.1
Smolka returned to England in May 1934, accompanied by his wife Lotty Jackl, as the London correspondent of a Viennese Catholic monarchist newspaper, Neue Freie Presse. To English eyes he seemed a podgy-faced, solemn-looking, bespectacled chump. ‘Smolka is a Jew, rather a bore but decent,’ Sir Arthur Willert of the FO’s Press Department told Harker of MI5. In the autumn of 1934, probably at Edith Tudor-Hart’s instigation and with Arnold Deutsch’s approval, Smolka provided Philby with his first cover job. Together they formed a press agency called London Continental News. The idea of running such agencies as propaganda outlets was not new: the armaments manufacturer and former Intelligence Division officer Sir Vincent Caillard had, for example, sought financial aid from the Asquith government in 1916 for his projected Pronto Agency which would have been anti-German and pro-capitalist. All news agencies started in the 1930s were propaganda rackets: Associated Press, Havas, Reuters and United Press were so well entrenched that no younger rivals could compete without a subsidy from a right-wing millionaire or communist front organization. London Continental was intended to disseminate reports from central Europe, and to feed stories that purveyed the Moscow line, but it was still-born. Perhaps Moscow judged that Philby’s potential would be wasted if he showed his communist affiliations. He later had other journalistic jobs; but London Continental News is the most significant in showing the ruthless dishonesty of Philby’s new allies.2
Smolka established his London reputation with a series of articles in The Times about his travels in the Soviet Arctic. These were expanded into a bestselling book, Forty Thousand against the Arctic: Russia’s Polar Empire. It was a beguiling work of propaganda with no hint that Soviet Russia was an empire based on mass murder and cruel deception. Smolka extolled Stalinist plans to extract coal, oil, gold, silver, platinum and nickel from the Arctic regions. He eulogized the factories, meteorological stations and aerodromes which one day would serve passengers flying, via Arctic Siberia, from London to Tokyo or New York to Shanghai. The handsome young aviator who piloted Smolka in a hydroplane was idealized as a hero of the people, ‘tall and broad-shouldered, with a forehead firm and clear like a warrior’s shield’. Smolka rhapsodized over the explorers, physicians, teachers, engineers and ‘Red Missionaries’ whom he met. He depicted the Gulag as a social reformatory for murderers, thieves, peasants and Trotskyites. Its prisoners had reviled Stalin as ‘an opportunist traitor and wanted to smash him’. By their extremism, including a foreign policy that must bring Russia into conflict with the capitalist powers, ‘they were jeopardizing success at home and courting a Fascist attack’. Death or exile were the only antidotes to their venom. ‘They are the victims of history. Pitiable perhaps as individuals. But we had to sacrifice them to save the country.’3
In addition to Smolka, Philby was introduced by Deutsch to the newly arrived head of the Russian illegals in London, Alexander Orlov. Born Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin in Belorussia in 1895, Orlov had joined the Cheka in 1920 and had worked in Paris, under cover of the Soviet trade mission, using the alias of Leon Nikolayev until 1928. Then, under the name of Lev Feldel, he engaged in industrial espionage as a member of a Soviet trade delegation in Berlin during 1928–31. After obtaining a US passport in the name of William Goldbin in 1932, he served in Vienna and Copenhagen. In London, he had the cover of running the American Refrigerator Company in offices on the edge of Soho shared with Hollywood’s Central Casting Bureau and the Duckerfield School of Dancing. Orlov took over the running of the station’s active agents and candidates for recruitment after a scare that Deutsch had come under MI5 surveillance. The solicitude that he and Deutsch showed Philby strengthened their agent’s commitment to working for them. Philby admired Orlov as ‘a desperately energetic character’, who liked to sleep with a sub-machine gun beside him in bed.4
Philby compiled for Deutsch a list of seven young Cambridge men who might be recruited as penetration agents. Topmost was Maclean, who had just graduated from Trinity with first-class honours in modern languages and was too earnest in his communism to favour his mother’s ambition for him to enter the Diplomatic Service, which would have made him complicit in the abuses of the governing authorities. In a recent contribution to The Student’s Vanguard, David Guest had given their cell’s analysis of Whitehall. ‘The higher posts in the State departments are almost exclusively recruited from the upper classes,’ he falsely declared. ‘Among the lower officials habits of discipline and unthinking obedience are inculcated. This makes the State machine not only an instrument for ruling the society of today in the interests of capitalism, but a handle to counter-revolution to prevent the system of society being changed in any way.’5
Maclean thought like Guest until, in mid-August 1934, Philby invited him to Acol Road and, after conversational feints, suggested that if he was installed in the Foreign Office he could help communism by supplying material from confidential diplomatic sources. According to Philby, when Maclean asked if he would be working for Soviet intelligence or the Comintern, he replied that he did not know, but that Maclean could be sure that it was a serious anti-fascist network tied to Moscow. He forbade Maclean to consult Klugmann, who was too embedded in the CPGB to be safe. After two days of thought, Maclean agreed. Maclean was given the codename WAISE, meaning Orphan in German. London’s reports of these developments were photographed, and then sent to Copenhagen in rolls of undeveloped film concealed in boxes of women’s face-powder. In cultivating potential recruits on Philby’s list of seven, Orlov and Deutsch were flouting Moscow’s rule that agents who knew one another well should not be employed in the same network.
Other versions of Philby’s approach to Maclean must be discounted. John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, for example, used the clichés of class warriors to caricature events. ‘Like the sinister uninvited fairy at a royal christening party, he arrived during the first week of June when, even at the height of the Great Depression, the university was en fête,’ they wrote with puritan disapproval. (June 1934 marked neither the height nor the depth of the Depression, but the beginning of recovery.) ‘The spectacle of revellers still at midday in evening attire swaggering along King’s Parade would have been a powerful inducement to Philby in his secret mission to undermi
ne the British Establishment,’ they imagined. ‘Cambridge during May Week was nothing but a prolonged “coming-out party” for the sons and daughters of Britain’s ruling class. During a time of mass unemployment, their hedonism confidently celebrated their accession to their appointed places … [in] the ruling elites.’6
Maclean prepared for the Foreign Office examination as part of a scheme to penetrate bourgeois institutions. Orlov doubted that a youth who was known for communist affiliations would pass the selection process, and urged him to collect letters of recommendation from his parents’ influential friends. ‘Donald is much more progressive than his dear father,’ Lady Maclean admitted to people. Ignaty Reif, an illegal who was using a stolen Austrian passport giving him the alias of Max Wolisch, saw a letter (purloined or borrowed by Donald Maclean) from the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin assuring Lady Maclean that he would exert influence to get her son into the Diplomatic Service. Maclean expected the Interview Board to ask about his communist past and had an answer pat: ‘I did have such views, and I haven’t entirely shaken them off.’ His candour seemed attractive: he was one of half a dozen successful candidates. The Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, a former colleague of Maclean’s father, sent the new recruit a letter of congratulation, which Orlov forwarded to Moscow.7
A nimbus of prestige radiated over the Diplomatic Service in the 1930s. It was an exclusively masculine domain, which was described in the manly similes of the hunter of wild animals and beautiful women. Sir Owen O’Malley, whose official career spanned 1911–47, revelled in the ‘delicious atmosphere of secrecy, excitement and importance’ in his work: ‘the conduct of foreign affairs compared with internal affairs as big-game hunting compares with deerstalking or a covert shoot’. Lord Inverchapel, in whose Washington embassy Maclean was later Head of Mission, likened the diplomatist’s role to that of an inconstant lover ‘who moves from love to love taking on the new almost before the embraces of the old one are cold’. The Office environment was spartan, without feminizing touches. Valentine Lawford, who had a Cambridge double first in modern languages and studied at the Sorbonne and in Vienna, was in the same batch of recruits as Maclean. He was astounded by the charmless surroundings: ‘the mahogany Office of Works hat-stand hung with unclaimed umbrellas and unattractive “office coats” with glacé [worn] elbows, the screen with its gruesome pin-ups of Himmler, Streicher and Roehm, the jaundice-coloured distempered walls, hanging light-bulbs under china shades, and threadbare, grey-blue-bistre carpet of the kind that one had dismissed at one’s private school as probably made by convicts out of coconut fibre in the Andaman islands’.8
Maclean was put to work as a Third Secretary in the Western Department, which was responsible for Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland. The documents that reached his desk were enclosed in different coloured folders. ‘White jackets’ contained confidential material, ‘green jackets’ contained secret material, ‘red jackets’ contained SIS reports and ‘blue jackets’ contained the intercepted, deciphered messages of foreign powers. There were no restrictions on the papers seen by a newly recruited Third Secretary: Maclean was able to snitch material – mainly from folders with green or red bands on their covers, containing secret or SIS documents – which was copied overnight and returned. Blue-banded folders containing signals intelligence were high-security items which it was impossibly risky to smuggle out overnight; although Maclean was accordingly provided with a roll film reflex camera to photograph the contents of blue folders, this was seldom possible without detection. The films were smuggled by courier to Copenhagen, and went thence to Moscow. Maclean provided diplomatic dispatches and memoranda, reports from military attachés, appraisals by SIS and secret material from the Committee of Imperial Defence on British military, naval and aerial preparedness, the productive capacities and output of European munitions works, the mobilization plans of the European powers, and war plans against both Germany and the Soviet Union. He also supplied counter-intelligence material, such as the existence of an English informant in the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, the penetration of Münzenberg’s entourage and the plain texts of dispatches to Moscow at a time when King was providing enciphered versions of them. Comparisons enabled Soviet cryptanalysts to continue intercepting and eavesdropping on British secret radio traffic. Maclean also betrayed an ingenious GC&CS scheme of 1936 to break the Soviet embassy’s cipher.
NKVD archives contain forty-five boxes of material supplied by Maclean @ WAISE between 1935 and June 1940. Each box contained over 300 documents. Little wonder that Maly warned Moscow in 1936 that the abundant material supplied by Maclean was overwhelming his resources. ‘He came to us out of sincere motivation, namely that the intellectual emptiness and aimlessness of the bourgeois class to which he belonged antagonized him,’ Deutsch wrote in an early appraisal of Maclean. ‘He dresses carelessly like SYNOK [Philby], and is involved in the same Bohemian lifestyle. He takes an interest in painting and music. Like SYNOK, he is reserved and secretive, seldom displaying his enthusiasms.’ Maclean explained to Deutsch that he was unmarried because he felt averse to girls of his own class, and would only live with a woman who was ‘a comrade’. This seems true enough, for his first important lover and his choice of wife were female comrades whom he could trust. Contrary to later unsubstantiated tales about Maclean’s sexuality, Deutsch gives no hint that WAISE was attracted by his own sex or differed in his tastes from SYNOK. Both these new recruits, ‘and our other agents in England, have grown up in a climate in which the legality of our Party is upheld in an atmosphere of democratic illusions’, Deutsch continued. For this reason they were sometimes careless about security. Overall, despite this bourgeois laxity, Deutsch was sure that ‘our revolutionary cause has an absolute hold and authority over them’.9
In the Western Department Maclean’s ashtray was always full of cigarette ash and butts. The typing-pool nicknamed him ‘Fancy-Pants’ because he dressed with sober conformity. Cyril Connolly recalled him as ‘sandy-haired, tall, with great latent physical strength, but fat and rather flabby’ when he joined the Office in 1934. Connolly, who was a shrewd judge of his contemporaries’ sex lives, saw the young man as eager for experiences with women: ‘an outsize Cherubino intent on amorous experience but too shy and clumsy to succeed’; and, perhaps because of his frustration in this area, ‘given to sudden outbursts of aggression’. A few years of Whitehall responsibilities changed Maclean, who became ‘painstaking, logical and resolute in argument, judicious and even-tempered’, continued Connolly. After Maclean had vanished in 1951, Vansittart remembered him as an Office junior: ‘I thought him a pleasant, although not an outstanding, young man, who might have had a respectable, though not a brilliant, career.’10
Maclean’s boon drinking companion Humphrey Slater, who repudiated communism during the war, published a novel in 1948, The Conspirator, about a handsome, well-connected young man who is enlisted as a Soviet spy by an Oxford don while at university and lives in Sussex Square round the corner from Maclean’s boyhood home in Bayswater. The Maclean-like anti-hero, Desmond Lightfoot, describes himself as ‘a loyal supporter of the greatest social experiment in the history of mankind’ and as having voluntarily submitted to ‘paramilitary discipline’. His success as a spy imbues him with ‘proud self-assurance’ as European politics develop ‘inexorably towards … the dictatorship of the proletariat’. He feels that ‘there was absolutely no position in the world to which it would not be quite reasonable for someone of his age, ability and record to aspire. He walked across Sussex Square with an intensely strong sense of belonging to the future and of being a trusted and integral part of a massively invincible historic movement. He enjoyed the absolute discipline required and the rewarding consciousness of being valued.’ Slater might have been describing his friend Maclean.11
Enemies Within Page 32
