Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Graham Greene, who had joined SIS in 1941 and worked in the Iberian Section under Philby in 1943–4, concluded from his experiences that Soviet espionage was ‘a branch of psychological warfare’ in which the object was to destroy trust between the allied powers that were its adversaries. He remained an SIS Friend, received funding from the Service for his inveterate travelling and reported to it from Russia, Poland, Vietnam and China during the 1950s and 1960s: the virulent anti-Americanism of his public statements about the Vietnam War may have been a cover for his continuing SIS allegiance. It was as an SIS trusty that he gave his conclusion that Russia had been enabled by Nunn May and Fuchs to advance its manufacture of atomic bombs by a few years, but would have soon reached parity in its ability to destroy the world even without their help. ‘The real value of the two scientists to the Soviet Union’, he wrote, ‘was not the benefit they received from their scientific information, but from their capture, and the breakdown in Anglo-American relations which followed. A spy allowed to continue his work without interference is far less dangerous than the spy who is caught.’32

  In Wakefield prison Fuchs shared a cell with Edouard-Jean Johnston @ ‘Count’ John Edward Johnston-Noad, a Mayfair bon vivant who had been disbarred as a solicitor after his conviction for keeping a brothel near Burgess’s flat in Old Bond Street, who posed as a member of the Montenegrin royal family, who was married to a Hatton Garden diamond thief known as ‘Black Orchid’, and who was described by his own counsel, at his fraud trial in 1952, as ‘a vain, egotistical megalomaniac’. This incompatible pair, who were the least rough cellmates in the prison, were both released in 1959. Fuchs soon moved to Dresden. There, suspected by the KGB of having given the names of its agents to MI5 under interrogation, he was forbidden to give interviews, prepare his memoirs or contact his former handlers. This treatment was a torment to him. Markus Wolf, head of the Foreign Intelligence Division of the Ministry of State Security in communist East Germany, encountered him during the 1980s and ranked him as a master-spy comparable to Philby. He tried to assuage his enemies by hard-line loyalty, which made him tell western visitors that the dissident nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov deserved more condign punishment than compulsory exile in Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod). Yet the KGB shunned Fuchs, never honoured his self-sacrificing achievements and perhaps blamed him for getting caught. ‘This silence from a country that he had served purely out of conscience and at great cost to his liberty and scientific career, weighed on him like a daily burden,’ wrote Wolf.33

  It is interesting to compare Fuchs’s fate with that of Theodore Hall @ MLAD. Born in 1925, son of a New York furrier named Holtzberg, he anglicized his surname before going to study physics at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1944. He and his Harvard room-mate Saville Sax @ STAR, who was another New Yorker of Russian Jewish ancestry, shared communist ideals. After Hall had been assigned to a Los Alamos team investigating the physics of implosion for plutonium-bomb development, he and Sax agreed that his secrets should be shared with America’s ally, the Soviet Union. Sax tried to approach Earl Browder, head of the CPUSA and ex-husband of Maclean’s handler Kitty Harris. After rebuffs, Sax finally contacted the NKGB agent Sergey Kurnakov @ BECK, whom he introduced to Hall. Kurnakov agreed to receive Hall’s material, if it was brought to him in secret batches from New Mexico by Sax. Hall was far junior to Fuchs as a scientist, but was well placed at Los Alamos to gain access to useful secrets. ‘His English is highly cultured,’ wrote Kurnakov in a pen-portrait of 1944 for Moscow Centre. ‘He answers quickly and very fluently, especially to scientific questions. Eyes are set closely together; evidently, neurasthenic. Perhaps because of premature mental development, he is witty and somewhat sarcastic, but without a shadow of undue familiarity.’ His family were Jewish, continued Kurnakov, ‘but [he] doesn’t look like a Jew’. Hall, who moved to scientific work in Chicago after the war, fell under suspicion with Sax in 1949, when VENONA decrypts showed their names in plain text, before they had been allotted cover names. They denied contacts with Soviet intelligence when interrogated by the FBI in 1951; and given the decision not to bring VENONA evidence to open court, and in the absence of other incriminating material, they were not prosecuted. Hall moved to England, where he worked in Cambridge University’s electron microscopy research laboratory before his death in 1999. Sax taught ‘values clarification’ in an educational programme of the mid-1960s, is said to have become a drug-experimenting hippy and died in 1980.34

  American witch-hunts intensified after (with help from the espionage of Nunn May, Fuchs and others) the Soviet Union had exploded its ‘First Lightning’ plutonium implosion bomb at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan in August 1949. The project was run by the nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov, but was under the control of the fearsome Beria. With characteristic Stalinist paranoia, Beria both suspected the Anglo-American atomic secrets as disinformation and used the same espionage material as a check on Soviet atomic scientists whom he equally distrusted. The test-site was a stony, sparsely covered expanse where the heat was oppressive by early morning. It had been arrayed with locomotives, railway-stock, tanks, artillery, animals and homesteads so that the effects of irradiation could be studied. After Beria’s arrival at Semipalatinsk, the device was detonated in its tower. A mushroom cloud rose 5 miles into the sky. At ground level everything was annihilated.

  ‘Molten lumps flew about in all directions like small pieces of shrapnel and radiated invisible alpha, beta and gamma rays,’ noted the chief of the Radiation Protection Service. ‘The steel girders of a bridge were twisted into ram’s horns.’ Beria was mistrustful of what he had seen. ‘Haven’t we slipped up?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t Kurchatov humbug us?’ He telephoned Stalin and said, ‘Everything went right.’ Stalin, who had been asleep, was confused by drowsiness and old age. ‘I know already,’ he replied untruthfully, and put down the telephone receiver. Beria erupted into paranoid rage at his companions at Semipalatinsk. ‘Who told him? You are letting me down! Even here you spy on me! I’ll grind you to dust!’35

  CHAPTER 14

  The Cold War

  Dictaphones behind the wainscots?

  ‘The British as a people are still self-assured, serene in their national sense of superiority’ and did not yet understand that they were no longer ‘top nation’, OSS’s Crane Brinton wrote in an assessment of the future of Anglo-American relations in 1945. This complacence proved unsustainable in a country where income tax averaged 50 per cent of earnings, where the top earners paid 97.5 per cent (19½ shillings in a currency when 20 shillings equalled a pound) and where it seemed impossible to save enough money to retire on. Despite the victory over Germany, domestic demoralization began within months, and soon saw the onset of four decades of national inferiority complex. In 1948 Angela Thirkell, the chronicler of mid-twentieth-century English county society, recorded the state of the nation in her novel Love among the Ruins. She pictured a nation burdened by dead glories and reduced to meagre hope by its manifest international disempowerment: ‘people who had taken six years of war with uncomplaining courage and were now being starved, regimented and ground down by their present rulers, besides the deep hidden shame of feeling that England’s name had been lowered in the eyes of all lesser breeds’. Sleepless nights did not refresh the English. They queued for unpalatable food, plain clothes and scarce fuel, their savings depreciated, they chain-smoked to kill time, they were squashed on overcrowded trains, they were annoyed by inquisitorial officials and prying questionnaires, and they felt shouldered aside by surging crowds of foreigners everywhere: ‘the lesser breeds, who although by their own account penniless expatriates, mysteriously had huge sums of money’. In Love among the Ruins these privations are lamented by the organizers of a charity garden-party until a naval officer half jokes: ‘I daresay there is a dictaphone behind the wainscot, and whoever is in charge of liquidating land-owners taking it all down in shorthand.’ The secret services were neither understood nor trusted.1

  Only a few polit
ical leaders and officials, who had been indoctrinated into Masterman’s Double-Cross System, knew that the Security Service had perpetrated the most successful wartime deception since the Trojan horse. Masterman’s historical monograph, The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939–45, was suppressed until 1972 in compliance with the wishes of the security services, the Cabinet Office and other stakeholders. These departments feared that counter-espionage revelations would ‘boomerang’, in the words of Lord Normanbrook, Cabinet Secretary from 1947 until 1962. They expected journalists to stress that Masterman was an Oxford historian, who had been temporarily engaged in wartime counter-espionage, and that full-time career Security Service staff were of lower calibre. Dick White in 1967 thought it would be detrimental to public trust of the two security services to know that the XX System had relied on ‘an immense amount of talent [seconded] from the outside world, particularly the Universities, during the war’. Both Normanbrook and White were advising in the context of press stories which had besmirched Whitehall and the security services as incompetent and untrustworthy after the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and of Philby in 1963.2

  Not a hint of XX was heard by the public or by hundreds of new MPs who were elected in the Labour landslide at the general election in 1945. Socialist parliamentarians knew nothing of the pre-war Vigilance spy network manned by the nominees of their former whip Jack Hayes. Instead they blamed MI5 for the spurious Zinoviev letter, which had lost their party the general election of 1924. Many of them mistrusted Special Branch. The former SIS officer ‘Rex’ Fletcher, who had been created Lord Winster, was ousted from his post as Labour’s Minister of Civil Aviation in 1946, because socialist MPs suspected his antecedents. At least a dozen Labour MPs were either secret CPGB members or pro-Soviet crypto-communists. In addition to Driberg, at least one had spied for Russia: Wilfrid Vernon, after being elected MP for Dulwich in 1945, acted as parliamentary spokesman of the far-left Association of Scientific Workers and was included on a list compiled by the general secretary of the Labour party of fifteen subversively pro-Soviet MPs. Two of his closer parliamentary associates, John Platts-Mills and Konni Zilliacus, were expelled from the parliamentary party in 1948. Some socialist leaders vied to excuse past excesses. Cecil L’Estrange Malone, who had sat in turn as a Liberal, Leninist and Labour MP, was recommended by socialist friends for a peerage in 1945. After losing his Commons seat in 1931, he had become Tokyo’s paid lackey during the Sino-Japanese war, and ran the propagandist East Asia News Service until Pearl Harbor in 1941. Attlee dismissed the suggestion that Malone should receive a barony with one of his crisp understatements: ‘hardly suitable’.3

  The incoming Labour government wanted to curb MI5’s powers of surveillance. Proposals in the autumn of 1945 either to bring the Security Service under the Home Secretary’s direct control or to subordinate it to SIS were defeated by Sir David Petrie, who was due to retire early in 1946. Petrie’s preferred successor, Guy Liddell, was discounted by Labour ministers who had doubted the political impartiality of MI5 insiders since the Zinoviev and ARCOS incidents in 1924–7. An impressive shortlist was drawn up, including two major generals, Sir Ronald Penney, recently retired as Director of Military Intelligence in south-east Asia, and Eisenhower’s intelligence chief Sir Kenneth Strong. ‘Latter the better, but didn’t much plunge for either of them,’ noted Cadogan. The selection process demonstrated that the candidate who shines at interview may not be the best person for the job. Sir Percy Sillitoe, the Chief Constable of Kent, who made a strong show before the appointment board, was unanimously chosen. ‘He certainly seemed v. good’ to Cadogan; Attlee liked him as ‘an honest policeman’; but MI5 officers complained that he never understood that the security services differ from the police, not least because their best evidence cannot be aired in court. In the constabulary Sillitoe had received automatic obedience to rules and unquestioning subordination to discipline, but he complained that in MI5 he met evasion and insolence.4

  Labour’s suspicions of MI5, and ingratitude for its achievements, were ill timed. The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) reported in September 1946 that the global spread of communism under Moscow’s direction was the primary threat to the British Isles, British colonies, western democracies, eastern Europe and eastern Asia. ‘The appeal of Communism is based on an all-embracing ideology, to which Communists adhere with religious fervour, and on the promise of a better world free from exploitation and war. The Communist Parties are led by nuclei of able, experienced and devoted men, capable of directing mass movements, and firm in the belief that they are assisting in an inexorable historical process.’ Under direction from Moscow, ‘Communists will use any instrument in any way, provided that the cause of Communism is furthered thereby, and are prepared to execute sudden and complete reversals of policy to meet a changed situation.’ In one respect the JIC analysis was misguided. It emphasized the role of the CPGB, and communist parties in other parliamentary democracies, in providing from their membership individuals willing to spy and subvert. Open party members, rather than penetration agents without current party allegiances, were put in the foreground of concern.5

  At the Foreign Office, from which the security officers William Codrington and Sir John Dashwood retired with the coming of peace, a former RAF group captain, George Carey-Foster, was appointed to head a Security Department in October 1946. Harold Caccia, the quick and able Chief Clerk, rejected Carey-Foster’s recommendation that all members of the Diplomatic Service should undergo positive vetting – not just new entrants. Officials felt that positive vetting (particularly of existing staff) sapped the tradition of trust upon which department loyalty had hitherto relied. It was too similar to the raucous injustice of loyalty testing in the USA and to barbarous purges in Soviet Russia. Yet positive vetting was little more than a systematic, comprehensive version of the checks that had been in place in the intelligence agencies for years: when someone was contemplated for a confidential appointment, their associates had long been asked about their family, their affiliations, their character and their frailties. The principle did not change, even if the methodical intensity increased. Carey-Foster installed regional security officers in New York, Cairo and a few other cities, but found successive heads of the FO’s Personnel Department to be obstructive. He was hugely overworked: it took three years for funds to be allotted for him to have an assistant, in the elegant form of Milo Talbot, who had recently inherited the Irish barony of Talbot de Malahide.

  The Office’s Personnel Department was described as ‘the most paper-logged Department in this paper-logged office!’ It was understaffed and sometimes overwhelmed, but found time to obstruct Carey-Foster by maintaining that the purview of the Security Department was limited to buildings, safes, locks and couriers’ bags, with human insecurity excluded. This resistance continued until Burgess and Maclean absconded in 1951.6

  As successor to Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’ at SIS, Cadogan wished to appoint a civilian, Victor (‘Bill’) Cavendish-Bentinck, who had been wartime chairman of the JIC and first post-war Ambassador to Poland. Cavendish-Bentinck had been rejected on medical grounds for military service in the first European war in which many of his contemporaries had died, and in expiation worked with formidable concentration, beyond the strength of most people, to master immense quantities of paperwork. He was sceptical, unprejudiced and amid tragedy could savour the human comedy. From the ‘eerie and awesome’ ruins of war-devastated Warsaw in August 1945, Cavendish-Bentinck relished the challenge: ‘Despite squalor etc., this is more amusing and interesting than the JIC … now that the war is over.’ Cadogan’s plan was however baulked when his candidate became embroiled in a squalid divorce, and was ejected from the Diplomatic Service, with loss of pension rights, on the personal decision of the Foreign Secretary, ex-trade union leader Ernest Bevin, who knew that Cavendish-Bentinck was heir-in-line to the dukedom of Portland (which he inherited at the age of eighty-two some thirty years later). ‘I could have saved him if
his name had been Smith,’ Bevin said.7

  Once Cadogan’s excellent candidate had fallen, Menzies, who opposed SIS being led by a civilian, obtained the appointment as his successor-designate of Major General John (‘Sinbad’) Sinclair, former Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office. Menzies’s friend General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, whom he had appointed as Assistant Chief of SIS in 1943, retired in 1945. Philby in his untrustworthy memoirs is slyly misleading about many MI5 and SIS personnel, including Marshall-Cornwall (whom Reilly thought ‘brought to Broadway long experience in Intelligence and a much needed intellectual distinction’). His estimate of Sinclair, however, was fair: ‘Sinclair, though not overloaded with mental gifts (he never claimed them), was humane, energetic and so obviously upright that it was impossible to withhold admiration.’8

  George Blake, who served SIS in The Hague and Hamburg before his posting to Seoul in 1948, felt that the pre-war service had resembled a club of amateur enthusiasts, ruled by an autocratic Chief who hired, fired and paid them as he wished, without regard to civil service rules. But in the first months of peace Cadogan instigated a committee to settle the post-war future of SIS, and Menzies soon reorganized the Service into, said Blake, ‘a properly established Government Department with a personnel department, grading, regular promotions, pension schemes and annual increments’.9

  A further point must be stressed about Whitehall after 1945. It was appallingly overworked. Its officials at every level were exhausted by the extra duties, the heavy responsibilities, the emergency pressure, insomnia, the meagre rations and the accumulative stress of the war years. With the exception of the end of night-time bombing, there was little peacetime alleviation. Indeed, the continuing shortages and inefficiencies of peacetime seemed more frustrating. When Sir James Chadwick, the atomic physicist whose trust had been betrayed by Nunn May, returned from his planet-transformative work in the United States in 1946, he and his wife were met at Southampton docks by a driver and car from the Ministry of Supply. The car ran out of petrol before they reached London. The chauffeur had no petrol coupons with which to refuel. Lugging their suitcases on a hot summer’s day the Chadwicks finished their journey to the capital on a series of jolting buses.