Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Philby had to present Franco’s victories positively, but without crude bias, while inwardly more committed than ever to communism as an anti-fascist resistance. His task was far harder than that of Peter Rhodes, the American who had become a communist while a Rhodes scholar at Oriel College, Oxford: Rhodes, who had the alias of Johan Kazer, was free as a war correspondent for the United Press in Spain during 1937 to file reports that did not dissemble his sympathies. He extolled the Americans fighting with the International Brigades in Spain, and had the comfort of being able to work openly for international agencies providing aid to Spanish Republicans. English journalists covering the Spanish civil war were biased partisans. ‘Men of the extreme left’, wrote Philip Jordan (who covered the war for the News Chronicle), ‘were unscrupulous, and cared little for the humanities’; but the anti-totalitarian cause was so precious for Europe that ‘it seemed right and proper to put aside all doubts, to conceal the truth from oneself at all costs, so that in the end one came to believe what one had always known to be nothing but a lie’.36

  In December 1937 Philby was travelling with three other journalists to the battlefield at Teruel when their motor-car was hit by an artillery shell. He sustained light head injuries, but his companions died. As a result, in March 1938, Franco personally pinned the Red Cross of Military Merit to Philby’s chest. Franco’s officers had hitherto suspected British journalists, because so many of their compatriots were fighting in the International Brigades that they thought the whole nation must be rotten; but after being decorated by their Generalissimo, Philby became acceptable to the Nationalist forces.

  In the autumn of 1938, Philby returned to London on furlough. Jordan, describing a similar return from reporting the Spanish war, enjoyed listing what he found good in his native land: ‘small fields, duck and green peas, some measure of personal liberty for those with decent incomes, walnut trees, the kindness of poor people, Rolls-Royce motor-cars, Bath, comfortable beds for those who could afford them’. Philby, though, had no time for savouring softness: Litzi Friedmann mentioned that she had heard of a scientist who was researching a new form of energy with a power equivalent of one lump of coal fuelling a train for the 4,000 miles from Vladivostok to Moscow. He arranged for her to report this rumour to a Soviet contact of Burgess’s. Later he suspected that the physicist was Klaus Fuchs, but never knew if he and his wife were the means of Moscow’s introduction to the atomic physicist who was to give Russia vital secrets about the atomic bomb.37

  Meanwhile Burgess had been introduced by Footman to Laurence Grand, a major in the Royal Engineers who in 1938 was seconded to SIS as chief of its new D Section (charged with planning wartime ‘dirty tricks’ and non-military attacks). Grand, who was scouting for men who might be adept at creating misdirection, asked Burgess to help D Section – while continuing his work as a BBC talks producer – in preparing anti-Hitler radio propaganda which was broadcast to Germany from Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. Burgess signed the Official Secrets Act before gaining access to Foreign Office material. Moscow received all that he learnt.

  Grand was a beau sabreur with an imperious manner but erratic abilities who came to be regarded inside the Foreign Office as a mountebank. ‘His judgement is almost always wrong,’ Gladwyn Jebb advised Cadogan, ‘his knowledge wide but alarmingly superficial, his organisation in many respects a laughing-stock, & he is a consistent, fluent & unmitigated liar.’ His leading positive trait was generosity to his staff, who responded with loyalty. ‘But to pit such a man’, continued Jebb, ‘against … German Military Intelligence Service is like arranging an attack on a Panzer division by an actor mounted on a donkey.’ In 1940 Grand was shunted to the remote sidings of GHQ in New Delhi: in 1945 he was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate in Nancy Astor’s former Plymouth constituency.38

  Grand’s deputy, Montagu (‘Monty’) Chidson, was more effective. At the age of twenty-one he was the first British pilot to claim the destruction of a German aircraft, which he shot down off the Kent coast on Christmas Day of 1914. He was taken prisoner when his aircraft crashed behind German lines in 1915 while he was on aerial photographic reconnaissance. Subsequently he organized secret message routes out of prisoner-of-war camps as well as several escape attempts. He spent the 1920s in the Military Intelligence Directorate, and the 1930s as an SIS officer in Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest. He had a Dutch wife, spoke Dutch and French like a native, and was PCO in The Hague when in 1938 he was recalled to London as Grand’s deputy. During the battle of the Netherlands in 1940 Chidson spirited industrial diamonds worth well over a million pounds out of Amsterdam in a backpack and brought them to safety in England. When questioned about Burgess in the 1950s, he was amnesiac, apparently as the result of incipient dementia. An SIS insider extolled his ‘integrity and fervent patriotism’, and said that he was admired by ‘people in all walks of life in this country and abroad for his quality of infectious gaiety and wit’. These were the terms which showed the best service ethos of SIS.39

  Goronwy Rees at All Souls

  Burgess weakened the security of the ring of five by his recruitment of an Oxonian named Goronwy Rees. Andrew Boyle in The Climate of Treason presented Rees as ‘a scholarship boy from a pious, lower-middle-class home in Wales’. Cliché-ridden journalists followed this misdirection by describing his father, the Reverend Richard Rees, as a ‘humble minister’. All clergy should be humble, no doubt, but the implication of ‘humble’ was absurd here. His father had a first-class degree from Oxford and charge of one of the largest Presbyterian churches in Wales; his brother had a first-class degree from Cambridge and became a circuit judge; his sister went to university and married a leading solicitor. He attended the best school in the Welsh capital, Cardiff High School, where he was a spotty and charmless adolescent. The glamour of Oxford University transformed him as an undergraduate. The Oxford don Maurice Bowra aptly described him as ‘a normally sexed pansy’, which meant that he was a coureur de femmes who felt at ease in the company of gay members of the intelligentsia, liked to tease and bemuse them, and attracted some of them by his moodiness.40

  Rees was the lover of two eminent novelists, Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann. ‘He was like a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang,’ Bowen wrote of the character based on him in Death of the Heart. Politically he seemed an extremist without fixed bearings. The philosopher Stuart Hampshire, who like him was a young pre-war Fellow of All Souls, saw him as a roving insurgent who liked to lay dynamite charges under hypocrisy. ‘Rees’, he told Isaiah Berlin in 1936, ‘sees himself as a marauding Fascist power, in league with the have-nots against the haves, and persecuted by status quo interests who talk of public law and international morality, and succeed in making even bilateral agreements and regional alliances seem immoral.’ Rees’s intelligence was emulative rather than original, and too unsystematic for scholarship. ‘Goronwy was very quick at picking things up,’ said Hampshire, ‘and he was very sensitive and observant, but he never had an intellectual outlook which gave him a mission to do something he thought important.’ His social charm exceeded his intellectual stability, Hampshire judged, and in the 1930s (despite being a novelist, a Spectator editor and a seducer of exciting women) he was scared of becoming a ‘boring plod’.41

  Hampshire said that his proximity and Rees’s to some of the leading appeasers of Hitler – Fellows of All Souls such as Lord Halifax (the Foreign Secretary), Sir John Simon (the former Foreign Secretary) and Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times) – enabled them to observe the ‘servility of Conservatives in the face of Fascism at first-hand’. The young Fellows felt that the Conservative fixation on the rights of private ownership swamped any other moral considerations: ‘they were ready to tolerate Fascist outrages and threats, and even to curry favour with Fascists, for the sake of protecting private property, which was threatened by the anticipated spread of Communism and of Socialism throughout Europe’. The sordidness of Conservative expedience, Hampshire fel
t, reinforced Rees’s tendency to take the left’s side with fatally vehement over-simplification. Louis MacNeice recalled an evening when Rees addressed a meeting of some fifty members of the intelligentsia opposed to fascism. ‘Goronwy’, he wrote, ‘… spoke like a revivalist, flashed his eyes, quivered with emotion, led with his Left and followed with his Left, punch on punch, dogma on dogma, over and over-statement, washed in the blood of – well, nobody asked of whom, but it certainly made you stop thinking.’ Rees hymned the proletariat as the only progressive class: writers, he said, had to repress their own personalities, obey orders from the workers and serve as the microphones of the plebs. After the meeting, he went for oysters at Prunier’s.42

  Burgess made his recruitment approach to Rees after reading a review by him in November 1937 of a book about unemployment, malnutrition and slum hovels in South Wales. They sank a bottle of whisky together, and were in an alcoholic haze when Burgess declared, ‘I am a Comintern agent, and have been ever since I came down from Cambridge.’ He volunteered the information that Blunt was collaborating with him, flattered Rees by soliciting his help, and urged him to give purpose to his life by aiding the communist resistance to the Nazis.43

  Under the codenames of GROSS and FLIT, Rees reported political talk at high table, and in the smoking-room and coffee-room, from All Souls grandees such as Halifax, Simon, Dawson, Sir Donald Somervell (the Attorney General), Sir Eric Beckett (the Foreign Office’s legal adviser), Leo Amery (former Secretary of State for the Colonies), Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury and Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham. Younger Fellows in the 1930s, who were probably less regular in attendance, included the diplomats Roger Makins, Con O’Neill and Patrick Reilly. Visitors airing their opinions included Churchill, the German Chancellor Brüning, the Czech leader Beneš and Whitehall’s arch-exponent of appeasement Sir Horace Wilson. All Souls discussions were privileged under the Chatham House Rule, which meant that confidential remarks should not be attributed when quoted to outsiders. Exchanges were highly informative: another college Fellow, A. L. Rowse, used to say that if he was away from All Souls for a fortnight, he could no longer interpret the news in the papers.44

  Hearsay from a discussion-group that met at All Souls may also have been reported by Rees. Named after its convener Sir Arthur Salter, who was MP for Oxford University and a Fellow of the college, ‘Salter’s Soviet’ included the military strategist Basil Liddell Hart, Arnold Toynbee of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Nobel peace prize winner Sir Norman Angell, the MPs Harold Macmillan and Harold Nicolson and a former director of Ewer’s Daily Herald, Lord Allen of Hurtwood. Rees may have reported Allen’s desire to conciliate Nazi Germany and his view that Czechoslovakia had ‘a monstrous record’ in its dealings with Germany: Allen described the beleaguered republic in May 1938 as ‘a geographical area distraught with the ambitions of several competing nationalities’; he thought it wrong ‘to insist that British youth shall be killed and Europe involved in a ghastly catastrophe’ merely to sustain Czechoslovak territorial integrity; the personal dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin were a ‘neurosis’ which had ‘revived primitive emotions of cruelty’. Rees stopped acting as the All Souls nark after the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939. Burgess lied to him that he, too, was going to stop work for the comrades, and thereafter avoided Rees. ‘The crisis has shown’, Burgess reported to Moscow, ‘that he was no Marxist at all.’45

  The Marxism of Burgess, though, was unassailable. Blunt told Liddell that Burgess had defended the Moscow show-trials of 1936–8. Burgess condemned Chamberlain’s government, Blunt said, for sending to Moscow in August 1939 low-level negotiators, lacking plenipotentiary powers and led by Admiral Sir Reginald Drax rather than a statesman, to discuss a tripartite military agreement between France, Russia and Britain against Germany. Drax’s ability was undeniable, but his delegation was made to seem dilatory and insincere by penny-pinchers at the Board of Trade, which chartered a slow steamer to carry Drax’s team to Leningrad when a train or air journey would have taken no more than two days. ‘Incredible!’ exclaimed Ambassador Maisky when he heard that the ship had a maximum speed of 13 knots. ‘This comes at a time when the ground in Europe is beginning to burn beneath our feet!’ Maisky suspected Chamberlain of insulting deviousness: ‘it’s not a tripartite pact that he needs, but talks about a pact, as a trump card for cutting a deal with Hitler’. Burgess at this time sent three crucial reports to Moscow. The first attributed to Chamberlain’s intimate adviser Sir Horace Wilson the statement that the Chiefs of Staff believed that Britain could beat Germany in a war without signing a defensive pact with Soviet Russia. In mid-August Burgess reported to Moscow a conversation with ‘Monty’ Chidson of SIS Section D. ‘It is a fundamental aim of British policy to work with Germany whatever happens, and, in the end, against the USSR,’ Chidson supposedly said. ‘But it is impossible to conduct this policy openly: one must manoeuvre every which way.’ German eastwards expansion would not be resisted by Britain, Chidson putatively assured Burgess. Finally, Burgess reported that Hermann Göring was expected to reach London on a secret mission on 23 August. Instead, on 23 August, the Nazi–Soviet mutual non-aggression pact was promulgated: its provisions for the partition of Poland between Germany and Russia, and for Russian annexation of Latvia and Estonia, were kept secret. On 1 September Germany invaded Poland. Soviet troops advanced from the east on 17 September.46

  The Chamberlain government was attuned to the majority public mood in its policy of appeasing Germany, but its handling of Stalin’s Russia was less in accord with voters’ preferences. In a pioneer British opinion poll taken in December 1938, of respondents who were asked if they would prefer a German or a Soviet victory in a war between the two nations, 59 per cent favoured the Russians and only 10 per cent supported the Germans. In answer to a poll question in January 1939, requiring a forced choice between fascism and communism, 63 per cent opted for communism and 21 per cent for fascism.47

  Nothing was sure in the advancing world crisis, despite the confidence of dialectical materialists that ultimate victory was theirs. In May 1939 the German Air Attaché in Spain unfurled a map of Europe before the British Ambassador, Sir Maurice Peterson. ‘Only see’, he cried, pointing with his finger, ‘what gains the Führer has brought about without firing a shot!’ Peterson asked what would happen when the shooting began. ‘Ah,’ replied the Attaché turning away, ‘that is just the doubtful point.’48

  CHAPTER 11

  The People’s War

  Emergency recruitment

  ‘If the balloon goes up, can you lay on a few chaps?’ was a question asked during the summer of 1939. The phraseology was flippant, for the speakers came from a generation that disliked grandstanding: as Crane Brinton, wartime chief of research and analysis in the London outpost of the US Office of Strategic Services, reported, ‘British self-assurance takes the (to us) odd form of an incurable addiction to understatement.’ The slang conveyed the certainty that Whitehall on a war footing needed to recruit active-minded men (women were not considered) who would take responsibility, appraise situations and suggest initiatives in the expanded government apparatus needed to wage war against Nazi Germany. Haste and wartime volatility brought topsy-turvy recruitment, affiliations, promotions and demotions. The Oxford don Maurice Bowra, who shirked official work, said in 1940: ‘War is a) very dull and b) brings all the crooks to the top.’ The motley backgrounds of the emergency recruits brought a perception that the People’s War, in Evelyn Waugh’s words, filled government ministries with ‘experts, charlatans, plain lunatics and every unemployed member of the British Communist Party’. How reasonable are these evaluations?1

  The government budgeted £93,000 to fund MI5 in 1939–40. The service was chronically understaffed, with 83 officers (almost entirely men), 253 support staff (almost entirely women) and only 36 watchers in Harry Hunter’s B6 surveillance section. Subsequently Jasper Harker and Guy Liddell recruited another 570 officers and s
taff. In June 1940 Churchill sacked the Service’s Director, Sir Vernon Kell, and his deputy Eric Holt-Wilson: Kell’s successor, Sir David Petrie, who used the title Director General, had been a police chief in India. ‘No Security Service could have had … a better chief,’ J. C. Masterman believed. ‘He was a rock of integrity, the type of Scot whose reliability in all conditions was beyond question, with strong and independent judgement, but ready and willing to delegate and trust.’ Petrie erred by being too considerate. Unlike Sir Stewart Menzies, his counterpart at SIS, he decided not to trouble Churchill with briefings on the Security Service’s wartime work. Not only would the Prime Minister have enjoyed Petrie’s briefings: they might have proofed him against the views of Sir Desmond Morton, his confidential security adviser, who as a former SIS officer felt antipathy to MI5.2

  In September 1939, when Germany and Russia invaded Poland, Maclean was a member of the Paris embassy and Cairncross already a government official. Burgess was employed by the BBC, but had an anomalous involvement with an SIS section that was the forerunner of SOE. The subsequent admission of Blunt, Philby and Burgess into MI5, SIS and the Foreign Office respectively has led to unforgiving criticism of lax security. The trio’s easy absorption into secret intelligence systems has been contrasted with the objections raised against, for example, Douglas Jay, the City editor of the Daily Herald, before his appointment to the Ministry of Supply. Jay’s blacklisting in 1939–40 was apparently because he had once attended a communist meeting in Paris, and believed that confiscation of inherited personal income was a better form of socialism than the nationalization of the means of production. Temporary recruits to MI5, with education and experience of the world, thought that Special Branch was unreasonable in treating attendance at fringe meetings as suspicious. They chortled when they investigated old files and found absurd misappraisals expressed in Special Branch’s costive, stilted reports. In free-spirited reaction to the obtuse alarmism of Special Branch, MI5 officers tended to imprudence in some of the recruits whom they accepted on trust. Jay’s MI5 file was destroyed by a friend who read it and found it unfair.