Enemies Within
Page 54
Warner was targeted for attention by the Daily Express. In August 1952 its prize reporter Sefton (‘Tom’) Delmer obtained Hollis’s private telephone number from Bill Cavendish-Bentinck and sought a meeting with an MI5 officer. When J. C. Robertson saw him at the Lansdowne Club, he said that he was handling Burgess–Maclean investigations for Beaverbrook’s newspaper, which intended to shadow Warner during his upcoming summer holiday in mainland Europe. When Delmer hinted at the possibility of his paper collaborating with MI5, Robertson replied that if the Daily Express chose to ‘trail’ Warner abroad, this would not be harmful, and that MI5 would be glad to hear of any results. ‘He is a worldly, shrewd, suave individual with considerable charm,’ Robertson reported of Delmer. ‘Treated cautiously, I think he might on occasion prove a very useful contact for the office.’21
The first anniversary of the disappearances revived press interest in June 1952. Press photographers took shots of the Maclean children at their school, made a mob at the Beacon Shaw gateway and on 6 June Ernest Ashwick @ Ascheri filed a false Daily Express story from Zurich that Maclean was living in Prague sustained by illicit Swiss bank accounts. MI5’s Anthony Simkins minuted on 10 July: ‘many people (and perhaps most women) would say that the Security Services have taken a very naïve attitude to Melinda MACLEAN’. She must have heard versions of the drunken admissions that her husband had thrown at Culme-Seymour, Slater, Toynbee and others at the Gargoyle: moreover, Simkins argued, ‘even if she was not a party to Donald’s escape, she knew at once what was behind it’.22
Melinda Maclean was helped in her purposes by official distaste for Beaverbrook’s vendetta. A Daily Express story of 16 July contained quotes from her, which she could prove were fabricated. Lady Violet Bonham Carter complained in The Times on 21 July about the harassment of this lone woman stuck at Beacon Shaw with her small children. Sympathy for her intensified: with the prior consent of MI5, she took her children to live in the relative anonymity of Geneva in September 1952. There she misled friends by saying that she was contemplating divorce. Nora Beloff, the Paris correspondent of the Observer, was sent by her editor David Astor to report the harassment to which Melinda Maclean had been subjected by reporters and photographers. ‘She was dishonestly demure,’ Beloff recalled, ‘behaving like a bereaved widow who knew nothing of how, why or where her husband had vanished.’ A year later, in September 1953, newspaper headlines blazoned Melinda Maclean’s disappearance with her children behind the Iron Curtain to join her husband. ‘The Express is especially enjoying it!’ noted Harold Macmillan. ‘She may have been in it from the beginning,’ Aileen Philby told Moyra Slater in a bugged telephone call after the news had broken. ‘She was very Red at one period … but on the other hand, she swore she knew nothing about it.’23
There remained in London another Maclean woman to harass. Some years later the spitefulness of journalists was such that they prompted the porter of Lady Maclean’s block of flats in Kensington to report her to the ground landlords for taking a paying-guest against the terms of her flat’s lease. She needed the money of her lodger and, as an old woman living alone, welcomed the companionship. But it was thought that there was the making of a good story if the spy’s aged titled mother was put out on the street. The landlords had more sense.
‘As if evidence were the test of truth!’
It took only a few days for MI5 to suspect Philby and give him the codename PEACH. He rejected the possibility of emulating Maclean’s desperate flight. In mid-June an SIS expert in the fabrication of deception material arrived in Washington bearing a handwritten letter from Jack Easton of SIS forewarning him to expect ‘a most immediate, personal, decipher-yourself telegram from the Chief’ summoning him to London. ‘Why should Easton warn me of the impending summons and why in his own handwriting if the order was to reach me through the normal telegraphic channels anyway?’ Philby wondered. He concluded that Easton’s letter was intended to prompt him to flee, if he was guilty, and thus to save SIS from the awkwardness of confronting a traitor.24
According to Philby, Easton was surprised when he appeared at SIS headquarters in Broadway. They proceeded together to MI5 headquarters at Leconfield House, where (with Easton in attendance) Philby underwent the first of two interrogations by White. His published account of these interviews was prepared in 1967–8, when White was still Chief of SIS, and was designed to diminish White and damage SIS. It is clever but untrustworthy. White, who was hampered in his questioning by his inability to use confidentially obtained incriminating material, had no doubt of Philby’s guilt. The Volkov affair, viewed in retrospect from 1951, convinced him. Reilly and Carey-Foster at the Foreign Office were of the same mind as White. What they felt sure to be true, and what they could prove, were far apart: they might have exclaimed ‘As if evidence were the test of truth!’, Cardinal Newman’s indignant retort when someone expressed doubt about reports that St Winifred had walked about after her decapitation. Philby’s friends and colleagues in SIS were however loath to believe the calumnies spread by non-SIS men such as White of MI5 and Reilly and Carey-Foster of the FO. This has been represented – notably by John le Carré – as a matter of class bias; but it is understandable that any department would doubt that one of its most efficient, successful and admired officers had been working all along for the enemy. The loyalty of colleagues working together should preclude such a thought.
Washington meanwhile declared Philby persona non grata. He went to see Menzies, ‘C’, to whom his opening remark was reportedly: ‘I’m no good to you now, and never will be again. I’ll put in my resignation. I think you’d better let me go.’ This manly self-sacrifice was thought admirably unselfish at SIS, although of course it meant that he resigned before any question of dismissal was raised. Philby, however, maintained that he had been dismissed, and instead of a pension was given a gratuity of £2,000 with another £2,000 coming in instalments over two years. An unconvincing gang of workmen began many weeks’ digging the road outside his temporary English home, The Sun Box, at Rickmansworth. On 10 July an incoming call to The Sun Box, from ‘Bunny’ in Rugby, was recorded. Aileen Philby was alone in The Sun Box with the children, who were ‘making a hell of a row’. She railed against Burgess. ‘You know our escapist lived in our house in Washington?’ she asked. ‘This is absolutely on the Q.T. [hush-hush] … It’s mucked Kim. It’s the most wicked thing that ever happened.’ She avoided naming Burgess on the telephone: ‘one of Kim’s oldest friends’, she called him, ‘the unmarried one … you’ve met him, ducky.’ Aileen Philby told ‘Bunny’ that they had twice asked him to vacate his room in their Washington house, but he did not leave until Franks ordered his return to London. After he had left, Aileen Philby asked, ‘Kim, have I really got to have him back in my house?’ and was reassured by the reply: ‘No, he’s worn out all the friendship I ever had.’ It was ‘an absolute stinker’ that ‘the Americans won’t play as far as Kim is concerned’. Although his colleagues, she said, ‘backed him 100% … it was impossible to fight the crazy outlook which the Americans had on things. The individuals with whom he had worked were all for him and she knew of one who was fighting like mad for him … It had all been rather a pity because Kim was being coached for a big job.’25
In November, after careful preparation, the barrister and wartime MI5 officer Helenus Milmo (flanked by Arthur Martin) interrogated Philby. Like White, Milmo was handicapped by having intelligent conjecture, but not evidence, to arm his attack on Philby. All Philby needed to do was to avoid contradicting what he had said previously, and to concede nothing in answering Milmo’s questions and accusations. There was no need for cleverness or subtlety: exaggerating his stutter so as to pace his responses carefully, it was easy to evade awkward questions from a team that had no evidence. It did not matter that he was unconvincing. So long as he continued his denials, however implausible, he could not be touched. Accounts of this interrogation by Milmo are partisan and contradictory: ‘some felt that he was perhaps too much of a
gentleman for that daunting task – though a first-class cross-examiner’. Others say that, after failing to lure Philby into inconsistencies or admissions, Milmo resorted to bluster and shouted accusations without intimidating or ruffling Philby.26
Skardon accompanied Philby to The Sun Box, after the final Milmo interview, to collect the suspect’s passport, which was temporarily impounded. During the journey to Hertfordshire, ‘Skardon wasted his breath sermonizing on the Advisability of Co-operating with the Authorities,’ recalled Philby, who was too relieved at surviving the Milmo ordeal to listen. Skardon continued interrogations at intervals over several weeks. ‘He was scrupulously courteous, his manner verging on the exquisite,’ said Philby: ‘nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions’; yet he had no more success than White or Milmo.27
Denial is part of what it means to be human. Individuals, households and institutions all require ‘a blind zone of blocked attention and self-deception’, as the South African-born sociologist Stan Cohen has shown. The preservative silences, false alibis and ‘vital lies’ inside families about violence, sexual abuse, emotional deformity, bullying, adultery, alcoholism, gambling addiction and disappointment have their equivalents in official life. ‘Government bureaucracies, political parties, professional associations, religions, armies and police all have their own forms of cover-up,’ says Cohen. ‘Such collective denial results from professional ethics, traditions of loyalty and secrecy, mutual reciprocity and codes of silence.’ Denial may not be intentional lying: individuals, groups and societies can reach states of mind in which they simultaneously know a situation and don’t know it.28
Philby’s allies in SIS were in fervent denial of his guilt. White and others in MI5 were equally set on denial of his innocence. SIS opinion preferred to suspect Liddell: after years of hard work and shrewd service in Special Branch and MI5, he became a dubious object whose hopes of succeeding Sillitoe as Director General were dashed by the protracted sequels to the defections of 1951. Liddell was slow to accept the possibility of Burgess’s guilt, and was friendly with Blunt. His tolerant urbanity, which meant that he was on easy terms with gay men without feeling a need to avoid their company or make a show of repudiating their behaviour, made him suddenly suspect among unimaginative he-men. Quite apart from the personal issues involving Philby and Liddell, the friction between SIS and MI5 over suspicions and culpability in the case of the missing diplomats, the shock and wider departmental skirmishing within Whitehall, Washington’s exasperation and London’s discomfiture were bonuses for the MGB.
Only one member of the ring of five had a clean cut-loose. Weeks before Burgess and Maclean decamped Cairncross had once again undergone an inter-departmental transfer after alienating his superior: in May he had been shifted from the Treasury to the Ministry of Supply. He had been recruited to spy by Blunt and Burgess, and had known Maclean remotely at the Foreign Office and the Travellers, but it is unclear how well he knew Philby. On 23 June Modin advised that the defections should not endanger his position, but that he should leave England if he seemed close to arrest. Modin also primed him on handling counter-intelligence interrogations, which the NKGB/MGB had failed to do with Nunn May and Fuchs. On 23 June, and at a later meeting in July, Cairncross supplied parcels of secret documents totalling 1,339 pages. Material about weaponry, military equipment and rearmament was considered so important that it was reported direct to Stalin. Cairncross brought further documents to a meeting on 20 August.
After Evelyn McBarnet and Jock Colville had identified Cairncross as the author of the unsigned aides-memoires describing confidential Whitehall discussions, he was put under surveillance. A telephone tap revealed that he had arranged to meet Modin in Gunnersbury Park; but Modin spotted the watchers. In September Cairncross was summoned for interrogation by Arthur Martin, whose aggressive questions were along expected lines and for which Cairncross had rehearsed answers. He said that he had known Burgess somewhat, but had not seen him since 1943. He and Maclean knew one another slightly, as fellow members of the Travellers, but had never eaten a meal together there. He conceded that he had sympathized with communist views on Nazi Germany, but insisted that he had never joined the CPGB. He was suspended from the civil service, required to resign and encouraged to live overseas.
States of denial
Philby’s other contacts were pursued by MI5. The discovery in Burgess’s papers of detailed and revealing summaries made by Peter Smolka of informal discussions among wartime officials led to a round of interviews with people who had known Philby’s former business partner. Alan Roger was asked for his memories of Smolka’s journey from Russia through the Caucasus to Tehran in 1944. Roger recalled him as ‘filled with open admiration for Russia and things Russian, but many people were then’. Nothing was said or done to make Roger suspect his visitor of being a communist. Investigation by Skardon and others led to a re-evaluation of Smolka. The earlier view, which Philby had helped to form, that Smolka was too cowardly and lazy to be a sincere communist or an effective agent changed. It was realized that he had always been a bold and irredeemable believer in Marxist doctrine: indeed in 1952 he had been an active member of the Vienna communist party. By then he was out of reach in the Soviet sector of Vienna, where he lived in a comfortable villa and ran his father’s factory making metal kitchenware, buckles, locks, shoehorns and shoe-trees.29
Another historic contact of Philby’s, Edith Tudor-Hart, had been suspect for years. As a young Viennese visitor she had joined the CPGB in 1927, and had been expelled from Britain soon afterwards. She had been enabled to return by a marriage that entitled her to a British passport. Unknown to MI5, she had made the first recruitment approach to Philby in 1934. A year later MI5 watchers saw her being visited by the London illegals’ courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle. She was known to have sought contact in 1937 with Wilfred Macartney, who had previously been imprisoned for attempted RAF espionage. It was established in 1938 that she had supplied Percy Glading with a Leica camera and other photographic equipment. In 1946 she was heard soliciting work as a CPGB courier at a bugged meeting in a London hotel with Bob Stewart and Willie Gallacher, the communist MP for West Fife.
In 1951 Tudor-Hart still held a CPGB membership card under the alias of Betty Grey. She was evidently alarmed by the Burgess–Maclean defections, for in August 1951 (speaking to a friend who was an MI5 informant) she expressed anxiety about a police raid on her flat, and destroyed photographic negatives which might harm her if found by the police. These included posed portraits of Glading’s barrister Denis Pritt and of Philby, whom she called ‘an ace man in MI5’ (sic). An MI5 officer prepared an evaluation in advance of her interview: a ‘rather typical emotional, introspective and somewhat intellectual Viennese Jewess’, he called her, with ‘a morbid interest in psychology and psychiatry’. In October 1951 she was heard to say in a bugged conversation that party membership was of paramount importance to her; if she lost faith in the party, she would have nothing left. An MI5 source described her that autumn as ‘a sick woman, highly neurotic and suffering from a persecution mania’.30
MI5 watchers were set on her, preparatory to the interrogation of Philby, but it was found that efficient observation of her flat at 12 Grove End Court in St John’s Wood could not be maintained by fewer than eight men. Tudor-Hart had a mentally impaired son, Tommy, who was boarded at the Rudolf Steiner School in Aberdeen. The boy had previously been treated by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was eminent for his work on true and false selves. MI5 understood that Winnicott and Tudor-Hart were or had been lovers. If so, she will have been stricken by Winnicott’s curt typewritten letter of 2 January 1952, acknowledging one from her about Tommy’s treatment, with the handwritten postscript reading, ‘I think that you would like to know from me that I have remarried.’31
Certainly she was prostrate when Skardon and his colleague A. F. Burbidge, calling himself Mr Burlington, went unannounce
d to her flat on 8 January 1952. ‘A woman came to the door in response to our ring,’ Skardon reported: ‘we had some difficulty in penetrating to the bedroom and having got there even more difficulty in getting rid of the unwanted woman before starting the interrogation of Mrs TUDOR-HART. The latter was lying in bed, a low divan, and proved for various reasons to be a difficult person to interview.’ In answer to their questions about Litzi Friedmann and her family, Tudor-Hart ‘sheltered not only behind a faulty memory but also behind the fact that for some years she has been much distracted by caring for an invalid boy … She was quite indecisive in her replies and always unhelpful.’ For an hour Tudor-Hart prevaricated with Skardon and Burbidge: ‘she was completely composed and answered questions in the manner of a person well trained to resist an interrogation’. But in the days that followed she became paranoid, and had to be hospitalized at Epsom.32