Diplomats were anti-democratic conspirators in the Century of the Common Man, the foreign correspondent James Cameron explained to Sunday Mirror readers. ‘Every man jack of our Foreign Service abroad is a creature not of the Government of the day, but of the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, owing allegiance not to any popular administration but to the Machine.’ Cameron wanted populism rather than non-partisanship from diplomats, and apparently valued bad manners and ill-education, for he faulted the present Diplomatic Service for employing ‘gentlemen of impeccable tastes and great civility; they are always excellently educated, and usually well-born’. He recalled that in the 1940s there had been promises that the Service would ‘be revolutionised, democratised, disinfected of its almost total adherence to the upper-class myth, purged of its insistence on the Public School and Oxbridge’. Instead Britain would be represented abroad by ‘technicians, businessmen, trade unionists’. Instead, ‘the great crushing irresistible weight of the Establishment overlaid the plan … and left the FO exactly as it was: the pasture of the public school, the grazing-ground of the upper-class intellectual, above all the haven of the play-safe’.49
This publicity offensive had a crucial part in the election of a Labour government, with Harold Wilson as Prime Minister, in 1964. Wilson affirmed that the fumbling, privileged ancien régime was retarding Britain, and that his new brand of managerial professionalism would be a panacea. He convinced his supporters that if only the government apparatus had efficient managers, with slide-rules in their pockets and technical jargon on their tongues, the country would be able to afford its global military burdens and its high defence expenditure as well as expanding social services, cutting unemployment and eradicating poverty. After his promises began to be broken in the years from 1967, the Labour party, as Nora Beloff of the Observer wrote in 1973, ‘developed a mood of “anti-elitism” and “anti-intellectualism” repudiating any confidence in expertise or superior knowledge, and coming round to feeling that it was just as unfair for the clever as for the rich to have all the advantages’. A new stage in the undermining of experienced authority had begun. Young adherents to the Alternative Society, and the student revolts of 1968–72, received immense publicity in this period. They diverted attention from the more enduring and significant fact that it was becoming unacceptable, as the historian G. M. Young had earlier lamented, to tell voters that ‘a man has no more right to an opinion for which he cannot account than to a pint of beer for which he cannot pay’.50
Donald McLachlan, a wartime naval intelligence officer, who had recently retired as editor of the Sunday Telegraph to write Room 39: Naval Intelligence in Action, 1939–45, published a convincing defence of the secret services in October 1967. ‘The revival of the Philby affair has provoked a fresh wave of anti-gentleman, down-with-the-old-boy-ring, let’s expose the Establishment fervour, of which the Labour Party has been in the past such a beneficiary. The implication is that the Secret Service is a closed circle which should be “exposed”; that it is probably decadent and inefficient; that it should be “cleaned up” and released from its “class loyalties”.’ He regretted that most newspaper readers did not realize that this was ‘one of the favourite lines of Communist propaganda’, which had developed ‘most conspicuously during the Burgess and Maclean episode’. A secret service had to be an exclusive body, which co-opted its officers, rather than openly recruited by competitive examination. ‘Its members must be highly educated, loyal, intelligent, ruthless, secretive and ready to be lonely. The field is at once greatly restricted; it must, in fact, be an old-boy net, like its Soviet, French and American counterparts. If it has shown a partiality for gentlemen, that is on a par with the Soviet preference for good party members.’ He reminded readers that Britain’s record of defections, traitors and long-undetected spies was no worse than that of the United States. He gave a litany of American spies that sounded like a list of New York delicatessens: Hiss, Soble, Soblen, Gold, Rosenberg, Slack, Greenglass, Brothman, Moskowitz, Abel, Coplon, Haynahen, Scarbeck, Bucar, Cascio, Verber, Dorey, Sobell, Boeckenhaupt, Martin and Mitchell. He overlooked Duggan, Halperin, Lee, Rhodes, Silvermaster and others.51
The Cambridge spies failed in their aim to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat, but by the 1960s they had helped to discredit and destabilize the government apparatus of Russia’s historic adversary. SIS, MI5 and the Foreign Office were all weakened. The wrecking of the Establishment was a gift to the Kremlin.
CHAPTER 18
The Brotherhood of Perverted Men
The Cadogan committee
Sir Rupert Grayson, who underwent four security vettings during his work as an Admiralty courier and Foreign Office King’s Messenger, asked his interrogators on each occasion what weakness they considered to be the greatest security risk. He expected to be told homosexuality or alcoholic excess, and was surprised by the unanimity of their response: though the vetting interviews were years apart, ‘they all four opted for vanity’. The conceit of Hayes, Ewer, Slocombe, Oldham, King, Glading, Vernon and other communist agents, and the self-regard with which they played their duplicitous roles, exemplify the power of vanity to draw men into treachery.1
The next greatest security risk was alcohol. Officers in SIS, MI5, the KGB and CIA, journalists employed by Fleet Street newspapers, many parliamentarians and some diplomatists shared one characteristic with the Cambridge ring of five: they drenched themselves in alcohol. Many protagonists in this book were often soused: lead characters such as Oldham, Goronwy Rees, Elizabeth Bentley and Duncan Lee; secondary players including Tomás Harris, James Pope-Hennessy, Philip Toynbee, Joseph McCarthy and James Angleton. Drunkenness was a ceaseless threat to security, judgement and discretion on every side. Blunt, Philby, Maclean and Burgess (but not Cairncross) were all alcoholics: Blunt controlled the outward signs of his drinking, and was seldom seen the worse for his lashings of gin; but the other three were problem drinkers. Yet dipsomania only bordered the narrative that was spun to explain the security lapses discovered in 1951. Too many of the men apportioning blame were themselves heavy drinkers, who were unlikely to start a campaign against the mistakes, omissions, truancy and hangovers associated with boozy colleagues.
Still less were officials likely to fault the joke-filled, masculine sociability which kept their departments working agreeably. Instead, after Burgess and Maclean’s vanishing act, male homosexuality was brought to the fore of security assessments: same-sex contacts became more publicized, policed, politicized and punished; indeed they were treated as a national menace. The worst damage wrought by the missing diplomats was to the administrative leadership of the nation that they betrayed; but indirectly, through the official reactions to their treachery, they were the pretext for a sexual intolerance that marred hundreds of thousands of lives. The harmful repercussions of the security inquest of 1951 endured into the twenty-first century.
Sexual acts between men were criminal offences until 1967, when legal sanctions were partially repealed. These illegal pleasures were obnoxious to some people, but insignificant to others. The Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences had reported in 1926 that ‘sometimes juries are loth to convict, even when the evidence is clear, and that this may be due to the fact that in some cases they find it hard to accept as true the shocking facts submitted for their verdict, or it may be due to an insufficient appreciation of the gravity of the offence’. A Liverpool wool-broker who sat on a jury which acquitted a man charged with sodomy explained afterwards that although the accused had been guilty, ‘half the jury didn’t think it was possible, and the rest of us didn’t think it mattered’.2
Among diplomats opinion was divided between those who thought the subject too sordid for notice, those who reckoned it to be unimportant and a few like Vansittart who had a neurotic hatred of homosexuality, which he identified with Germans. Van’s views were at odds with those of some of his colleagues. As young attachés Harold Nicolson and Archie Clark Kerr (the future Lord Inverchapel)
had been lovers. ‘Dear warm gentle Arch,’ Nicolson wrote in 1911, ‘either one dislikes you, or finds you a darling’; and in 1912, recommending a novel with ‘an attractive bugger’ and a woman ‘rather like you’ as central characters, he wrote, ‘Dear Arch I want you so … How careless we were to let it slip away!’ After dinner at the Carlton Grill in 1916, Gerald Villiers made advances to his departmental junior, Duff Cooper, in the misplaced hope that any man as highly sexed as Cooper, even though a womanizer, might lend a hand. ‘I parried his advances as best I could,’ Cooper recorded, ‘but as I was opening the front door to let him out, he caught hold of me and kissed me which was very unpleasant.’ Sir Louis Mallet, after his retirement as Ambassador in Constantinople, lived in the inter-war years in Park Lane and Port Lympne, overlooking the Kent coast, with his fellow bachelor Sir Philip Sassoon.3
Jock Balfour, who spent four years interned in Ruhleben, the imperial trotting course at Spandau where thousands of British subjects were confined in 1914, accepted that the complete absence of women led many prisoners to join ‘the gay brigade … on a temporary basis’. He served in two embassies, Moscow and Washington, where Inverchapel was Ambassador, and doubtless sensed his chief’s vigorous bisexuality. It was no secret that Inverchapel left a big enough legacy to his valet Evgeni Yost for the young man to start a catering business on the Isle of Bute (Yost learnt to speak English with a Glasgow accent, made money from fish-and-chip shops, jukeboxes and ice-cream, fathered nine children, voted Conservative and admired Margaret Thatcher). When Sir Maurice Peterson, who joined the Diplomatic Service in 1913 and served as Ambassador in Baghdad, Madrid, Ankara and Moscow, came to write his memoirs, he dropped unmissable hints about the pugnacious, stealthy and insecure Lord Lloyd. ‘His courage, both physical and moral, was of a high order: the very suggestion of a menace, from whatever quarter, was for him but an incentive to further effort,’ Peterson wrote of Lloyd, who began as an unpaid attaché in the Constantinople embassy and ended as High Commissioner in Egypt. ‘He had a keen, almost feminine intuition, which was a real asset in the East where most things happen underground … His mind was, above everything, suspicious. The hidden motive was what he always sought.’4
Perhaps the majority of members of the Diplomatic Service thought it silly and unpleasant to be prejudiced against an activity which might not attract them, but should not be illegal. Sir John Dashwood, the Office’s wartime deputy adviser on security, welcomed gay men to his Buckinghamshire home. ‘Staying there’, Charles Ritchie noted in 1941, ‘was one of these aesthetic intellectuals or intellectual aesthetes who leave their London flats, their left-wing politics and their rather common “boy-friends” at the week-ends for the more decorative and well-heated English country houses.’ It may have been Burgess or Blunt described by Ritchie ‘peering at old family letters in pillared libraries or adjudicating the origin of rugs … or else … simply sitting on the sofa before the fire with their legs curled up having a good gossip with the wife of their host’.5
Hardy Amies, the couturier who joined the Intelligence Corps in 1939 after completing an application form in which he claimed boxing and shooting as his hobbies, liked the joke that the Tudor-rose motif on the Intelligence Corps badge represented ‘a pansy resting on his laurels’. Among some university-educated wartime officers there was a reflective curiosity about the range of sexual possibilities. ‘I am not naturally monogamous, and slightly homosexual,’ Stuart Hampshire wrote in a self-analysis of 1942; ‘I wish I were more homosexual, because I very much prefer the society of men to the society of women.’ On a walk Maurice Oldfield once asked his SIS colleague Anthony Cavendish if he had had any homosexual experiences. ‘I admitted that I remembered one occasion with other boys in a shepherd’s hut in the Swiss mountains,’ Cavendish recalled. ‘Maurice just nodded.’6
Patient, resourceful and perceptive men with criminalized sexual tastes undertook sterling intelligence work in every theatre of war. To give one example, Alan Roger, the notably successful Defence Security Officer (DSO) in Tehran, was a cheerful, comfortable and shrewd bachelor who after the war was posted to Hong Kong before becoming a director of Cable & Wireless. He lived in London with his Japanese majordomo, popularized bonsai gardening, operated as an SIS Friend and left much of his fortune to his companion’s children. One of Roger’s successful operations arose from an Iranian living in Berlin who had been allowed to return to his homeland on the understanding that he would remit wireless reports to the Abwehr and answer strategic questions. This Iranian, who was codenamed KISS, had no intention of spying for anyone. He was detained by the British after his return to Tehran, where he refused when asked to act as a double agent feeding misinformation on Iraq and Iran to the Abwehr. He would rather spend the war in custody, he said, than get involved in such dangerous duplicity. He was eventually released, and spent the next three years oblivious of the fact that during his detention his style on the Morse key was emulated to perfection, his misuse of German grammar and vocabulary were imitated and his mental traits were studied so that a counterfeit KISS could send wireless traffic. By this ruse, Berlin was misled on many crucial points. The British, in order to sustain the deception, had to confide particulars of the KISS deception to their Russian counterparts in Tehran and sought their help in providing material on Russian troop movements. ‘To work in contact with Russian Intelligence with proper reserve and eyes well open seems to me to afford far better opportunities for learning all about it than by peering through key-holes or relying entirely on “delicate” and highly placed sources which must not be compromised and which are therefore often uncheckable,’ reported Roger.7
Another intelligence officer with criminalized sexual tastes was Roger’s brilliant and brave SIS colleague in Iran, Robin Zaehner. In appearance Zaehner was likened to one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, with thick pebble spectacles to adjust his myopia: this made it hard for him to find men who would reciprocate his lusts, which were vigorous when young. He later had a succession of obsessive interests including a Czech lover, Charles Manson (whom he believed to be the reincarnation of ancient savage gods), Californian hippies (whom he saw as a prelapsarian race of angels) and motorcyclist Hell’s Angels (who thrilled him). He combined an esoteric brilliance of intellect with a childish bent: on a visit in the 1950s to Goronwy Rees’s seaside house in Wales he consumed sherbet and lollipops galore, and was found screaming with fear in the drawing-room after, he said, meeting a ghost on the stairs. These eccentricities never compromised his work or reduced his value. Sir Alistair Horne, who had been an intelligence officer based in Cairo, noted that his two ablest bosses, Claude Dewhurst and Maurice Oldfield, were both homosexual. The campaign to identify and exclude such men, Horne reckoned, ‘caused a loss of talent to the secret services comparable to Louis XIV’s ill-conceived expulsion of the Huguenots from France’.8
In these matters newspapers, like church pulpits, were ‘half a generation at least behind the times’, admitted the editor of the Sunday Dispatch (Rothermere’s forerunner of the Mail on Sunday). ‘Fleet Street morality was that of the saloon bar,’ recalled Peter Wildeblood who was appointed diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail in 1953: ‘every sexual excess was talked about and tolerated, provided it was “normal”’. Otherwise pressmen shrank from the abnormal. The Daily Express journalist Sefton Delmer recalled his first meeting with the German master-spy Otto John, who became a valued source for him. It occurred in 1944 at Delmer’s old school, St Paul’s in Hammersmith, which was being used as an interrogation centre for incoming aliens. John had dyed his hair and eyebrows while hiding from the Gestapo in Spain: Delmer’s first reaction to the resultant peroxide brightness was hostile. ‘Good God,’ he thought, ‘I do hope he is not another one of those!’9
On 10 June 1951 – three days after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean had been publicly admitted – a notable article appeared in the Sunday Dispatch. Its author, Alastair (‘Ali’) Forbes, was an American of bounding self-conf
idence and histrionically anglicized manners. He was also a gossip with a love of showing that he knew the inside dirt; a voluptuary who was censorious of other people’s pleasures; and a provocateur who liked to embroil people in denunciations, calumny and feuds. Forbes claimed that he had long suspected that Burgess was a secret member of the CPGB: ‘if he has defected now it must either be on superior orders or because he believes that war is imminent’. He said little about male homosexuality in the Sunday Dispatch, other than to enjoin that ‘the case for weeding out [from the Foreign Office] both sexual and political perverts seems unanswerable’; but his dig was made clear by the headline to his article, ‘Whitehall in Queer Street’. Next day, in the Commons, the Labour MP George Wigg asked Morrison, as Foreign Secretary, to investigate Forbes’s account of ‘widespread sexual perversion in the Foreign Office’ (although ‘Whitehall in Queer Street’ had not made any such sweeping allegation). Wigg added the absurd suggestion that, if these allegations were disproved, Forbes and the newspaper’s editor Charles Eade should be prosecuted by the Crown for criminal libel. Morrison did nothing to defend his officials from obloquy, but instead gave the shocking reply, ‘I have not been long enough at the Foreign Office to express an opinion.’ As Harold Macmillan noted of Morrison’s speeches as Foreign Secretary, he appeared ‘to know nothing whatever about matters of the highest importance’. Conscious that he was ‘quite out of his depth’, his reaction to parliamentary challenges was ‘bad-tempered, rude & silly’.10
There were class distinctions in MI5’s approach to interviewing Burgess’s sexual partners after he had vanished. James Pope-Hennessy and Peter Pollock were treated perhaps as curiosities but certainly with courtesy. Maxwell Knight, on 12 June 1951, was politely condescending about working-class Jack Hewit (‘the “cosy one of the two who does the cooking”’), but Skardon, who had interviewed him a week earlier, had begun his report with a single-sentence paragraph: ‘He is a loathsome creature.’ It ended just as tersely, ‘I was glad when the interview was over.’ When Commander Leonard Burt of Special Branch (the officer who had arrested Nunn May and Fuchs) was asked to interview Hewit, Sir Harold Scott, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, enjoined upon him the extreme delicacy of the inquiries. Burt assumed from this that Hewit was of ‘the same social class as the principals in this enquiry’. Skardon corrected this misunderstanding by recounting Hewit’s ‘immoral background’. In Skardon’s words, once Burt understood that Hewit was ‘just an unpleasant working-class man, he did not feel that there should be any particular difficulty in handling him’.11
Enemies Within Page 59
