Enemies Within
Page 56
Beaverbrook’s journalists included Ian Colvin, whose unauthorized book The Unknown Courier, published in 1953, first publicly told the story of Operation MINCEMEAT. Colvin had previously written a biography of Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr until deposed and killed on Hitler’s orders after the Vermehren leak (which Oldfield attributed to Philby). In March 1954 Colvin filed a Sunday Express story based on an interview with ‘a mystery man of Harwell’ warning that West Germany was starting atomic research and development. ‘Within the foreseeable future she will have the means and knowledge for making the atom bomb – if allowed,’ Colvin wrote: West Germany might even become Europe’s leading atomic nation. He doubted if the Bonn government’s intentions were peaceable: ‘Germany’s atomic plans should be known to the people of Britain.’ Michael Palliser, one of the rising talents in the Foreign Office, linked Colvin’s report with recent Pravda attacks on resurgent German militarism and atomic research: ‘This is not the first time that we have been struck by the picture of Communist propagandists and Lord Beaverbrook walking hand in hand down the primrose path towards a neutralized Germany.’11
Delmer visited Germany at the same time as Colvin to gather material for stories suggesting that Bonn militarists were preparing for future wars. In Cologne he interviewed Putlitz, who told Express readers that he had ‘decided to get out [of West Germany] and go over to the Russians’ because only the Soviet Union had sound policies to enforce Germany’s demilitarization and deNazification. The Putlitz–Delmer exchanges included mischief-making about the missing diplomats. In Delmer’s words, ‘The baron is quite ready to chat. “You know,” he said to me, pensively sipping his Moselle, “I may have been the indirect inspiration of Guy Burgess’s decision to come over to us.” He smiled and quickly added: “Of course I cannot be certain that Maclean and Burgess are with us … such things are secret.”’ Putlitz told Delmer that he had been ‘an intimate friend’ of Burgess since 1934. ‘He was immensely impressed with what I had done. He kept telling everyone we met he thought I was the bravest man he ever met. It was most embarrassing. Probably he made up his mind to follow my example.”’ Their last meeting had been at a party in the Old Bond Street flat before Burgess left for Washington. ‘It was a terribly wild evening,’ said Putlitz. ‘Everyone was there. Even Guy Liddle [sic] and Blunt of M.I.5.’12
Michael Palliser was roused by Delmer’s hotchpotch of denial, misdirection and propaganda as he had been by Colvin’s tale of resurgent German militarists assembling atomic weaponry. ‘One is struck once again by the almost unbelievably naïve – or unscrupulous – way in which the Beaverbrook Press follows the Communist line on Germany,’ Palliser commented. The main source for Delmer’s warnings on the rebirth of German militarism was a communist pamphlet. As to the Putlitz interview, Delmer ‘admits that an avowed Communist has come to the West to preach what he describes as “the propaganda line”. He does not point out that this communist “propaganda line” is identical with the Beaverbrook “propaganda line”.’ A senior colleague endorsed Palliser’s minute: ‘Exactly. One is sometimes tempted to wonder if some Communist moles are not at work in the Express office.’13
In September 1954 Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, lunched with the newly appointed editor of the Sunday Express, John Junor. In answer to a question about Delmer, Junor admitted that he had been worried by evidence suggesting that ‘Delmer was Left-wing to an extent that might perhaps even be dangerous’. Churchill endorsed ‘Yes’ in red ink to Colville’s recommendation that ‘C’s organisation might ask M.I.5 to keep a close watch on Sefton Delmer and see whether he has any Communist affiliations.’ Downing Street was informed that neither SIS nor MI5 could substantiate rumours of Delmer’s covert Marxism. Anthony Eden, as Foreign Secretary, was relieved when Churchill abandoned his notion of bearding Beaverbrook about Delmer over lunch.14
In March 1955 Delmer launched a new scarifying series for Daily Express readers under such headlines as ‘How Dead is Hitler?’ and ‘Jobs for the Gestapo Boys – They’re Back at the Old Game’. ‘The rush to re-arm Germany, prompted by the war in Korea, has already given back enormous clandestine power to the same militarists’ and industrialists’ clan that was behind the disastrous wars of aggression of Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler,’ Delmer reported. ‘These men, despite their smooth protestations of “Europeanism” and devotion to the western ideals of democracy, are out for themselves and their clique only.’ Their object was control of Europe. Delmer presaged ‘the revival of Hitlerism’, for ‘the Nazi type of officer’ was ascendant in the new German army, ‘the old terroristic herd discipline’ was reviving among civilians, and ‘the germs of democratic freedom are already being extinguished’. In the Foreign Office Delmer’s reporting was deplored. Sir Frank Roberts, a future Ambassador in Moscow and Bonn, noted the damage inflicted on the cause of democracy in Germany by such untruths: ‘That however would hardly weigh with Lord Beaverbrook.’ Sir Anthony Nutting, Minister of State, minuted: ‘From such a scurrilous source I shd not have expected anything different … the more Delmers, the more Hitlers & the fewer Adenauers.’ There was an urgent need, wrote Nutting, to get the EDC operating with West Germany as a member, and to ‘give German democracy a chance to prove itself free of the suspicions sown so liberally and joyously by Mr Delmer and his unscrupulous boss’.15
William Marshall
This spirit of class suspicion aroused after June 1951 crystallized in the Marshall case of June 1952. William Marshall had been born in 1927. His father drove a bus, his mother worked in a newspaper shop and they lived together in Wandsworth. He trained at the British School of Telegraphy before attesting for military service in 1945. After military service in Palestine and Egypt, he was released from the army in 1948 and joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which posted him to SIS’s wireless station at the strategic Suez Canal port of Ismailia. It is likely that in Ismailia he was solicited by the Russians, who flattered him into believing that his low-grade leaks would be valued. After his Ismailia posting he made persistent applications (perhaps at the instigation of a Soviet handler) for transfer to the Moscow embassy, which he finally reached in 1950. Marshall proved so morose among his Moscow colleagues that after a year he was transferred to the SIS Communications Department at Hanslope in Buckinghamshire. There he had access only to low-grade secrets.16
In April 1952 MI5 watchers monitoring Pavel Kuznetsov, Second Secretary at the Soviet embassy, saw him meet a tall, pallid, graceless young man at a cinema in Kingston-upon-Thames. The pair lunched together in a restaurant with wide plate-glass windows opening on to the street, facilitating observation, and then strolled to a riverside park where in open view the youth showed papers and drew maps for Kuznetsov. The youth was soon identified as Marshall. Instead of designating dismal public houses and suburban parks as their meeting-places, Kuznetsov made assignations in smart restaurants in Mayfair and Chelsea, where Marshall’s cheap tailoring was conspicuous. Kuznetsov evidently wanted to be seen and remembered with Marshall. His conduct makes sense if Moscow wished to provoke a public spy trial to capitalize on the embarrassments caused by Burgess and Maclean. On 13 June, Kuznetsov and Marshall were detained at an oddly visible rendezvous in Wandsworth. In a search of Marshall’s billet after his arrest, a locked attaché case on top of his wardrobe was found to contain copies of What is Marxism? by the CPGB’s Emile Burns, Klugmann’s From Trotsky to Tito and High Treason: A Plot against the People by Albert Kahn, who had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of Jacob Golos’s sources.
Marshall seems to have been primed by his Marxist handlers to express class grievances under interrogation. The British embassy in Moscow had been a snob-centre, he said. ‘The people there were not in my class of people.’ It is true that Lady Kelly, the Ambassador’s wife, had excessive pride of caste, and used to recommend her sons to debutantes by saying that they had ‘the blood of the de Vaux’; but for all Marshall’s claims that the unkindliness, snobbery and petti
ness of embassy life had made him appreciate the striving egalitarian ideals of the Russian people, the truth was that the embassy had some hundred staff, including technicians, typists, cipher clerks, radio operators and other clerical employees: the diplomatists –Ambassador, First Secretary and attachés – were in a minority.17
As Glading’s trial demonstrated in 1938, the prosecuting and defence counsel in such cases like to agree a coherent and simplified narrative which the jury can understand and believe. Complicating facts are omitted by agreement, so that awkward questions are not raised in the minds of the jury or public, as Nunn May’s trial had shown in 1946. There was scant mention during Marshall’s trial of his contacts in Ismailia or of his duties at Hanslope. Instead, the case heard by the court depicted an anti-social introvert who felt estranged by the luxurious pride and icy haughtiness of embassy life, until in lonely humiliation he agreed to spy. This explanation, which exculpated the bus driver’s son but incriminated the high-ups, came just a year after the initial Burgess–Maclean revelations had brought discredit on the Diplomatic Service. It made Marshall rare among traitors in receiving public sympathy. The jury convicted him, but recommended mercy in the sentencing. The judge sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment, instead of the maximum possible of fourteen.
Sir Alvary (‘Joe’) Gascoigne, who succeeded Kelly as Ambassador soon after the Burgess–Maclean defections, reported that his predecessor had instructed senior staff that troubles in the embassy ‘had nearly always been traceable to a lack of balance in the private life or judgement of the person concerned, and sometimes directly to the fact that he or she was unhappy or discontented, or a bad mixer, or even had an unhappy home background’. He and Kelly both insisted that the primary consideration in choosing members of the Moscow embassy staff, from the most senior to the most junior, must be stable character. Marshall’s case had vindicated this standpoint: ‘while Whitehall cannot be certain that they will never appoint a secret communist here, they can ensure that no one is sent here who is in any way abnormal’. When that case broke in 1952, Gascoigne stressed to his section heads that ‘it was their duty to keep a sympathetic eye on their juniors. I equally insisted that they should avoid any appearance of spying: for the moral effect on the staff if they thought they were being suspected or watched would be deplorable.’18
Six months after Marshall’s conviction Skardon interrogated him at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Again there was an outpouring of Marxist-instilled complaints of class discrimination. Skardon could not stem the ‘flow of muddled abuse of the capitalist world, as Marshall sees it through the jaundiced eyes of an embittered young Communist. All the ideas to which he gave expression are heard from the lips of Communists at Spouter’s Corner.’ With a mass of collaborative detail Marshall inveighed against the conditions whereby ‘the common people are oppressed by the middle and upper classes. The ideas simply tumbled from his lips in no sort of order.’ Skardon showed sympathy in assessing the prisoner: ‘There is no doubt that he suffers from an inferiority complex, and through a natural shyness has found difficulty in living with people, with the result that gradually he has formed the view that it is MARSHALL against the world.’ He was sure that Marshall had discussed his job in general terms with Kuznetsov, but felt that he may have been arrested before he had disclosed any ‘serious Top Secret information’.19
‘The Third Man’
In April 1954 Vladimir Petrov, the KGB chief in Australia, who had a taste for the red-light districts of Australian cities and feared that as a protégé of Beria he was due for liquidation, defected. He had been drawn into doing this by Michael Bialoguski, a Polish-born physician and refugee from communism, who acted on his own initiative. There was minimal involvement from the Australian security services, which had stalled in the conventions of MI5 a quarter of a century earlier, when defectors were discounted as creeps ranking on the social scale between a pimp and a bookie’s runner. The social status of the Cambridge spies had not yet transformed Canberra’s perceptions.
Petrov hoped that his defection would permanently separate him from his wife Evdokia, another Soviet intelligence operative; but when the aircraft on which she was being forcibly returned to Russia halted for refuelling at Darwin, she was rescued by Australian police. The couple were granted political asylum: like Gouzenko nine years earlier, Petrov proved a rich source of intelligence revelations. A Royal Commission on Espionage was appointed by the Australian government and proved as informative as its Canadian predecessor, although it was misrepresented by Australia’s Labor opposition as a conspiracy of the Zinoviev-letter type intended to bias the upcoming general election campaign. Yuri Modin made his first contact since 1951 with Blunt and Philby in order to reassure the latter that Petrov knew nothing about him, and that there was no danger of him being named in the Australian hearings. Modin also provided £5,000 in cash for Philby.
Sefton Delmer attended the Petrov hearings in Canberra. ‘I’ve been getting’, he informed Daily Express readers, ‘an insight into the minds of Russia’s rulers; the kind of orders they are giving their agents; the methods they use to build a Fifth Column network of spies, saboteurs and underground guerrillas; the grim professional humour of their code words; the psychology with which they woo their operatives, then terrorise them into obedience.’ But where, he demanded, were Whitehall’s spy hunters ‘who are supposed to be following up the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean?’ He affected to believe that the British security services were not monitoring the Canberra revelations.20
Dick White, now Chief of MI5, was set on another close interrogation of Philby. He proposed to seize the initiative by pre-emptive publication of Petrov’s disclosures. ‘It will undermine Philby,’ he told the Foreign Secretary, Eden. ‘We’ll lure him into a new interview, and try again to get a confession.’ But Churchill’s retirement as Prime Minister was imminent, and Eden discountenanced any disturbance that might unsettle his succession. ‘It’ll look like a cover-up if it comes out in any other way,’ White supposedly warned Eden. In April 1955, newly installed as Prime Minister, Eden appointed Macmillan to succeed him at the Foreign Office. White meanwhile heard that Eden had been advised by his officials that SIS felt that he was pursuing an inter-departmental vendetta against Philby. Indeed in July Sinclair of SIS stated in a letter to White that Milmo’s hostile interrogation had victimized Philby whose enforced retirement from SIS had been unjust.21
The Australian Royal Commission’s final report was published on 14 September 1955. Bialoguski’s account of his dealings with Petrov had appeared in book form a few days earlier. Neither source mentioned Burgess or Maclean. But Petrov had sold his own revelations for simultaneous publication in Sydney, New York and London. On Sunday 18 September the People ran Petrov’s story. In it he described the missing duo as ‘long-term Soviet agents’, recruited at Cambridge, who ‘regularly supplied the Kremlin with all the information they could lay their hands on as trusted servants of the Foreign Office’. The Petrov exclusive – headlined ‘Empire of Fear’ in the People – made clear that Maclean but not Burgess had been under investigation when they absconded, and that a tip-off could be assumed. The Office’s News Department knew what was coming, and confirmed to the Press Association that the People story was accurate. This marked the end of the Office’s stonewalling, which had never convinced Fleet Street.22
Press comment was generally misleading. ‘It was careless talk by Guy Burgess at Washington cocktail parties’, opined Norman Ewer in the Daily Herald on 19 September, ‘that first aroused suspicions of him and Donald Maclean. Until then they had played very cleverly.’ Burgess was known to have been communistic at Cambridge, ‘but everyone – including myself – who knew him thought he had been cured’. No one, Ewer continued with monstrous inaccuracy, had any suspicions about Maclean: ‘Maclean, I believe but cannot be sure, was tipped off by a friend in the Foreign Office that he was under investigation.’ Although both men ‘knew that trouble was coming and that th
e game was up … they did not know that it had been decided not to prosecute’. But no such decision had been taken: far from it.23
Partly because of resentment at Whitehall’s perceived earlier stonewalling, and partly in the spirit of class resentment, the lead story in the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror on 20 September 1955 was headlined ‘Foreign Office Scandal’:
The British public have been treated in a shabby manner by the British Foreign Office.
Officials in that particular department of the Government have always regarded themselves as far above the level of the intelligence of ordinary people.
But ordinary people now know that the behaviour of the Foreign Office over the traitors Burgess and Maclean is an example of monstrous stupidity.
Donald Maclean was allowed to continue working in the Foreign Office AFTER he was suspected of spying for Russia. That is stupid enough.
Even more stupid is the Foreign Office attempt to conceal their stupidity from the people who pay their wages – YOU – until the facts were revealed by a Russian renegade.
The British Foreign Office – crammed with intellectuals, the Old School Tie brigade, long-haired experts and the-people-who-know-the-best-people – have taken a mighty drop in the estimation of the very ordinary men and women of Britain.24