‘Before the war there were no resources with which to check on undergraduate activities,’ Dick White recalled forty years later. ‘Consequently I guess there were quite a number of former Communists & Marxists around in the wartime Int[elligence] services including Bletchley … but my equally strong guess is that few of these were spies & that for many of them the war brought enlightenment. On balance it was not such a bad bet to fight the war as a united front.’ The debit, he told Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1980, was to have Blunt inside MI5, Philby in MI6 and Burgess and Maclean in the FO, but on the credit side there was ‘a massive intake of brains & abilities from the Universities which set entirely new standards of intellectual achievement. What I am getting at is you can’t expect to understand individual cases or events of thirty years ago without being fully aware of how we fought the war.’ The purpose of this chapter is to give a fuller context of how the war of 1939–45 was fought.3
Castigators of the recruitment of Blunt, Burgess and Philby rely on the benefits of hindsight. They treat Britain as distinctive from other western democracies, overlook the reality that no government apparatus on either side of the Atlantic had yet introduced the costly, time-consuming system of positive vetting, and discount the simple truth that MI5’s advice to exclude suspect individuals from certain posts was routinely rejected by its political masters. It was impossible to appraise people with consistency in the conditions of 1939–40: some traits that are regrettable in peacetime civilians become useful in wartime; ethical criteria and risk assessment change in times of war; permanent mental transformations may occur in combatants whether they are fighting on battlefields or sitting at desks. ‘There are degrees of moral obliquity,’ wrote Masterman: ‘it is sometimes hard to determine when shrewdness and the ability to make the most of an opportunity end, and when the commission of crime and pursuit of evil begin.’ Critics such as Andrew Boyle, who described wartime MI5 officers as ‘often mediocre’, undervalue the prowess of many emergency wartime recruits. A quartet plucked from a sample of dozens – the circus master Cyril Mills, the lawyer Herbert Hart, the banking heir Victor Rothschild and the art dealer Tomás Harris – make the point.4
Cyril Mills’s father Bertram Mills was the son of an undertaker, embalmer and pioneer of cremation: Bertram’s work with funeral cortèges, and love of thoroughbred horses, led him to start a coach-building and harness business. With its profits he gentrified his elder son Cyril (born in 1902) by sending him to Harrow School. Cyril was one of the first post-war generation of undergraduates at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After obtaining an engineering degree, he worked in the oilfields of Burma: he survived an explosion in which he was drenched in burning oil, and saved himself by rolling in filth to extinguish the flames. As a substitute for the declining coach-building business, Bertram Mills began importing American automobiles, opened a circus in 1920 and diversified into dance halls. After Cyril Mills’s return from Burma in 1925, he became assistant manager of his father’s Covent Garden dance hall, and then assistant manager of the Christmas circus at Olympia. His first challenge was to transport a pride of seventy lions from Paris to London in 1926. As a good linguist and keen aviator he flew himself across Europe seeking talented new performers, especially from the big German circuses. He hired a female ‘fakir’ who hypnotized crocodiles, jugglers, clowns, trick unicyclists, high-wire walkers, human cannonballs, wall-of-death motorcyclists, ‘Borra’, King of the Pickpockets and a trapeze family called the Flying Gaonas. His side-show amusements included a Burmese troupe of giraffe-necked women and Major Horace Ridler @ the Great Omi, the most tattooed man in the world. Mills was embarrassed when in old age, on the television programme This is Your Life, an American admirer called him ‘a typical English aristocrat’. He was as bourgeois as Philby or Burgess.
In his eighties Mills confided some of his memories to a former MI5 colleague. ‘At this stage there is no harm in my telling you, although I do not tell anyone else, that for 21 years I had a single engine aircraft and from 1933 onwards I did all my talent-spotting in Europe flying myself and this involved going to Germany eight or ten times every year,’ he informed Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1985. Flying over Germany in his De Havilland Hornet Moth in 1936, Mills noticed a railway disappearing into remote mountains, which suggested to him a covert installation. On returning to England, he asked the passport officer at Lympne aerodrome to put him in touch with someone to whom he could describe his observations. He was contacted by MI5, which introduced him to Frederick Winterbotham, head of the Air Section of SIS, who used him as a source for the next three years. On aerial trips over Germany Mills flew off course, near factories or aerodromes, used his circus man’s eye for subterfuge and reported what he saw: ‘when working for Winterbotham before the war I was not paid a cent even for expenses’. He provided the first reports of the existence of the Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bomber, constructed in a secret new factory which he found by flying over a prohibited area near Ravensburg. In September 1939 he tried to enlist in the RAF, but at thirty-eight years of age was wanted only as ground staff; so he telephoned his MI5 contact and started work a week later at MI5’s wartime headquarters in Wormwood Scrubs prison. He was night duty officer on 29 September 1940 when the prison was bombed. Later, Mills and Richard (‘Dick’) Brooman-White advised the Special Operations Executive (SOE) on improvements in subterfuge. Mills’s office nickname was ‘the old dog’. He controlled the double-cross agent Juan Pujol Garcia @ GARBO, and was crucial in turning a colleague’s idea for deceiving the Germans about allied plans for the invasion of France in 1944 into the practical reality of Operation MINCEMEAT. ‘Perhaps,’ he mused to Trevor-Roper, ‘it was because I had taken a few risks in a difficult business that I adapted to the XX game.’ Mills was shrewd, amusing, urbane and proud; a tough disciplinarian; capable of either plain-speaking or careful discretion as necessary; a sharp-eyed showman with plenty of initiative, adaptive ingenuity and energy.5
Herbert Hart, son of a Jewish tailor and furrier in Harrogate, had been mortified at failing to gain a Prize Fellowship at All Souls in 1930 and took up practice at the Chancery bar. ‘His great quality’, in the estimate of his intimate friend Richard Wilberforce, ‘was intense curiosity about all varieties of life – the more special, or even comic, the better – and he was wonderfully good at getting specialists and “characters” to talk about their niches.’ He had ‘vast tenacity in pursuit of the truth’, judged Wilberforce, who became one of the great law lords of their generation. Hart was chaotic in desk-work, but superb at mental synthesis. Having failed on medical grounds to join the Military Police after the outbreak of war, he was brought into MI5 at the instigation of his future wife, the Home Office high-flier Jenifer Williams, who claimed to have left the CPGB by 1939. Williams had several meetings with Harker about her lover’s recruitment into MI5: at one of them, Harker asked, ‘you were a communist, weren’t you?’, and seemed satisfied by her quick response, ‘Oh, we were all red in our youth.’ Hart’s introduction to MI5 by his ex-communist wife excited hostile newspaper coverage when it emerged in 1983. There is not a jot of evidence that he betrayed his employers. ‘Everybody in the world of intelligence adored Herbert: he was the perfect intelligence officer,’ recalled his colleague Stuart Hampshire. ‘He was absolutely accurate and reliable, but not very intuitive. He was also very sensible in a crazy world: he was perpetually amazed at … human folly.’6
In 1941 Hart was put in charge of MI5’s B1B Division, which (writes his biographer Nicola Lacey) ‘amassed a treasure-trove of highly sensitive intelligence material’, and thus gained masterful knowledge of German intelligence’s attack on Britain. ‘His lawyer’s capacity to assimilate and master a brief, his ancient historian’s skill in marshalling and evaluating evidence, and his philosopher’s taste for precision’ enabled Hart, when in charge of B1B, ‘to assimilate, interpret, and organize this information so that it could be used to maximum effect by … double agents, police forces, immigration authoriti
es, coast guards, military personnel’. Isaiah Berlin remembered his friend in terms that might be wished on all counter-espionage officers: ‘always moderate, just, understanding, sane … he was a man who could not tolerate obscurantism, oppression, injustice, all that he regarded as reactionary’.7
Victor Rothschild was brought into MI5 by Liddell. A banking millionaire, a member from the age of twenty-six of the House of Lords (where for a time he sat on the Labour benches), a zoologist, jazz pianist, cricketer, art collector and bibliophile, Rothschild was a man of intellect, wealth and taste, with a mind that liked to classify and rule. He was as autocratic as any spoilt child, but too disciplined and productive to waste time. He had a taste for going incognito, wore an open-necked shirt and carried a workman’s satchel so as to be mistaken for a plumber. In Cambridge during the 1930s he knew Burgess, Maclean and especially Blunt, whom he considered saintly. Rothschild ran MI5’s first counter-sabotage department (B1C). Using skills that he had learnt when dissecting frogs’ spawn and sea urchins, he proved his courage in defusing German bombs. He was exceptional in describing his every bomb-disposal move into a field telephone as he worked, so that if he was blown up other bomb-disposal men would learn from his mistake. Churchill nominated him for the George Medal after he had defused a device secreted in a crate of Spanish onions and timed to explode in an English seaport. As Churchill’s poison-taster, he smoked Havana cigars, ate Virginia hams and drank vintage Armagnac. Indeed, he was a consumer with gusto. ‘I like him very much and admire his physical energy and more-than-life-size qualities, and an enormous appetite for self-improvement,’ Stuart Hampshire wrote after several months of official work in Paris with Rothschild in 1945. William Waldegrave, a Fellow of All Souls who was recruited by Rothschild into the Cabinet Office’s Central Policy Review Staff in 1971, described him as ‘one of the most complex and difficult men of his age’. The fable that he was a Soviet spy – trying perhaps to protect his wealth by conciliating Stalinists – depends, says Waldegrave, on wishful thinking, envy and anti-semitic conspiracy fantasies. This delusion has been refuted by Dick White, Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, but still festers in some minds.8
Another MI5 recruit was Tomás Harris. Born in 1908, he was the son of Lionel Harris, Jewish owner of the Spanish Art Gallery in Mayfair, and his Spanish wife, Enriqueta Rodríguez. In 1923, at the age of fifteen, he won a scholarship to the Slade School of Fine Art. He was a pianist, saxophonist, sculptor, engraver and ceramicist, and a culinary artist, too. During the 1930s, from his gallery in Bruton Street, he sold the works of El Greco, Velázquez and Goya, medieval tapestries, oriental carpets, Renaissance jewellery and other artefacts acquired from Spanish palaces and religious houses. Harris was thought illiterate by Philby: certainly his abilities were visual, tactile and sensual; he had subtle, astute intuitions when reading people as well as images. Harris’s knack for discovering lost works of art in unlikely places was admired by Blunt, who appreciated his exuberant generosity of spirit. After the outbreak of war, Harris and his wife Hilda Webb became the cook-housekeepers at Brickendonbury Hall, the SOE training school in Hertfordshire. Later he handled the double agent Pujol @ GARBO. The Germans, he believed, could be duped by elaborate deception operations because their minds rejected the irrational: rationalists were easier to mislead. Harris was an enthusiast in his connoisseurship, in his hospitality and (like many of his generation) in his drinking. His death in a car smash in 1964 was due to drunk driving: the innuendoes that he was killed by the security services, midway between Philby’s defection and Blunt’s confession, are silly fancies.
Mills and Harris were brought into full-time secret service after showing their suitability in other roles; Hart and Rothschild came on recommendation; none of the quartet underwent vetting. The difficulties in being just and consistent in this process were shown by the cases of Arthur Reade, Dudley Collard, Wilfrid Vernon and Peter Smolka. The fact that Britain and Russia were allies from June 1941, and were bound by a treaty of May 1942 that was a primary guide to London’s subsequent wartime decisions, provides the ruling context for all that happened.
Reade had been sent packing from his Oxford college in 1921 for sedition, but gave convincing signs of being disillusioned with communism by the late 1920s. He became a barrister, was elected to the Travellers Club and stood as a Labour parliamentary candidate. When, in October 1939, he sought a job in military intelligence, MI5 blocked him. Ten months later, when MI5 discovered that he was a lance-corporal in the Field Security Police at Belfast, they had him dismissed. The Deputy Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, who interviewed Reade in 1940, ‘considered him a he-man and just the sort of fellow they want’. Harold Nicolson, Under Secretary at the Ministry of Information (‘futile and self-satisfied’ as Cuthbert Headlam called him), provided a further testimonial for Reade. MI5 relented, but in 1942 Reade was repatriated to England from the Intelligence Corps in Cairo following a complaint of drunken verbal indiscretions. Loftus Browne of MI5, who met Reade during the war, thought him ‘an insufferably self-important ass’, but Dick White expressed unease about the case in 1948. The adverse vetting reports had not been evaluated, he minuted. On the basis of untested information, ‘outside bodies were ten times warned against READE. What makes it much worse is that there are in this file ten testimonials in favour of READE … our obstinacy in this case must have gained us a bad reputation in many different quarters.’9
Similarly Dudley Collard, the communist barrister who had defended Percy Glading in 1938, found his way blocked. His applications were spurned for an intelligence job (‘I can speak almost perfect French, reasonably good German and Russian, and I can read with ease Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Spanish, and to some extent also Italian and Dutch’). The Ministry of Information declined his overture. Collard finally became an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy in 1941, and next year was commissioned as a naval officer despite MI5 telling the Naval Intelligence Department that it was ‘strongly opposed’ to Collard’s ‘particularly dangerous’ type of communist becoming officers: ‘well-educated men of good social position, frequently members of the legal profession, who place their services at the disposal of the Executive of the Communist Party, and work for the latter secretly, so far as possible without disclosing their membership’. Once a man of this type succeeds in joining one of the armed forces, they refrain from ‘subversive propaganda amongst their fellows, or, at any rate, are so careful and clever over it that it is extremely difficult as a C.O. [commanding officer] to detect them. Their aim is to behave well outwardly in order to qualify for commissions, and after that to continue satisfactory outward behaviour.’ In this ploy educated communist servicemen were aiding ‘the long-term policy of the Communist Party, which is directed to turning National War into Civil War when the right moment arrives – probably during the demobilisation period, when they hope to reproduce what happened in 1919 with much greater chances of success’.10
Wilfrid Vernon, who had escaped so lightly when prosecuted without much earnest in 1937 for stealing aviation secrets, was vetoed by MI5 for any form of employment at the Air Ministry in 1939. The Security Service ensured that he was refused a commission in 1941, and withheld his vetting certificate in 1943. Together with Tom Wintringham, who had been expelled from the CPGB in 1938 on the grounds that his wife was a Trotskyite spy, he ran the wartime Home Guard in Osterley Park.
Where Reade, Collard and Vernon were sieved out, Philby’s former partner in the London Continental News Agency, Peter Smolka, squeezed in. Smolka had anglicized his surname to Smollett in 1938, and was naturalized as a British subject with the sponsorship of Sir Harry Brittain, founder of the Empire Press Union and former Tory MP, and Iverach McDonald of The Times. He ingratiated himself with Lord Astor (who considered installing him as editor of the Observer). At the time of the Nazi–Soviet pact, MI5 opposed Smolka’s appointment to the Ministry of Information; but their qualms were allayed by the Foreign Office’s Rex Leeper, a
nd Smolka/Smollett took charge of the ministry’s propaganda news service to Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium on 1 September 1939. The Directorate of Military Intelligence soon complained to Kell of the scandal that Smolka/Smollett had access to secret material. An MI5 report of February 1940 depicted him as ‘an unpleasant but brilliantly clever little Jew’. Dick White attributed the hostile tales about Smolka to temperamental failings: ‘he has a most unattractive personality and is a pushing type’. Roger Hollis of MI5, after reading Smolka’s burgeoning files, concluded that he was ‘too closely concerned with his own prosperity to commit himself to any side until he is sure that is the winning side’. In sum, the justified doubts raised against Smolka were couched in anti-semitic terms which provoked other officials who read his file to compensate for the racial prejudice against him by under-evaluating his suitability for confidential work. Smolka penetrated the Ministry of Information without needing a slot in the English class system.11
Despite the prevalent mistrust of Smolka, he took charge of the Soviet Section of the Ministry of Information in 1941. His influence and tentacles were extensive. He was not merely a Soviet informer, but a master at misdirection by hints, distractions, suppressions and diversions. He had his part in the toadying of official information and propaganda, and hence in inducing unofficial civilian obsequiousness, towards Stalinism. The Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archie Clark Kerr, wished that there was franker criticism of Soviet policy in Britain. ‘We should put a stop to the gush of propaganda at home,’ he urged in March 1945, ‘in praise not only of the Soviet war effort, but also of the whole Soviet system, which can only have convinced the realists at the Kremlin that there is a complex of fear and inferiority in Great Britain where the Soviet Union is concerned.’12
Enemies Within Page 36
