Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  A Tory MP called Captain Henry Kerby had been elected in a recent by-election. Kerby, who had been born in Russia, spoke its language so fluently that he translated for Khrushchev and Bulganin during their state visit to England, for dignitaries who visited the Commons and as a member of parliamentary delegations to the Soviet Union in 1957 and 1959. He was an utter snake, who leaked party confidences to the lobby correspondent of the Daily Express, and served as MI5’s informant in the Commons. When an all-party Civil Liberties group was inaugurated by MPs, he insinuated himself into the post of vice-chairman and acted as MI5’s mole. After being dropped by MI5 in 1966, he became a Labour party informant of confidential Tory discussions and sought a knighthood from his opponents. Kerby, who had served in wartime military intelligence, gave a front-page interview in the Sunday Pictorial’s ‘EVIL MEN’ issue under the headline ‘Who is Hiding the Man Who Tipped Off These Sex Perverts?’ He decried ‘the “brotherhood” of perverted men’ responsible for the cover-up of ‘flagrant homosexuality’ among diplomatists: ‘there are still many people of this ilk today in the Foreign Service’. The will of the people was being frustrated by withholding ‘the names of those Foreign Office officials who shielded both traitors during their service’. Kerby wanted politicians to provide their officials as the quarry in a witch-hunt: ‘The archaic tradition of Ministers manfully shouldering and shielding Civil Servants at the Foreign Office is ABSURD and DANGEROUS.’24

  Burgess and Maclean’s public re-emergence in Moscow in February 1956 prepared the way for another onslaught. On 11 March the People, which had published the Petrov revelations six months earlier, began to run a series of weekly articles on the Burgess and Maclean scandal. The pieces were anonymous, but an influential minority knew the identity of the author. The young historian Keith Thomas had recently received a kind letter from Goronwy Rees congratulating him as a fellow Welshman on his election as a Fellow of All Souls. Sixty years later Thomas still remembered seeing a copy of the People article, illustrated by a pair of sinister, peering eyes, lying on the central table in the college coffee-room and being discussed. Everyone realized that Rees was the author. His decision to sell his story to a Sunday scandal-sheet, and to let its hacks sensationalize the more temperate memoir that he had prepared, was an act of tragic self-spoliation. Rees was finding himself, in George Herbert’s phrase, ‘no star, but a quick coal of mortal fire’: a bright but unstable force, who was burning out, his judgement unbalanced by an alcoholic intake that was ruining his health as well as disappointing his hopes of himself. The articles were intended by him as pre-emptive of any damage that Burgess might do him by revelations of their association before 1939; but his complex character included a liability to harm his own interests.

  Rees let the People journalists attribute destructive exaggerations to him. ‘Guy Burgess is the greatest traitor in our history,’ stated the opening article. ‘He was a Communist of the deepest Red.’ At the time Rees was the most compassionate and enlightened member of the government inquiry into homosexuality and prostitution under the chairmanship of Sir John Wolfenden, so it is extraordinary that he let himself be used as a ventriloquist’s dummy mouthing populist bigotry. ‘For 20 years one incredibly vicious man used blackmail and corruption on a colossal scale to worm out Britain’s most precious secrets for the rulers of Russia. That is the truth … that even today the men whose duty is to protect us from foreign spies dare not admit.’ The ersatz Rees in the People warned, ‘men like Burgess are only able to escape detection because THEY HAVE FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES’. Wolfenden and the Home Office agreed that Rees must retire from the committee after such utterances.25

  A subsequent issue of the People reverted to this prurient theme:

  THE MOST PAINFUL PART OF THE ENTIRE GUY BURGESS AFFAIR IS THE STORY OF HIS INCREDIBLY DEPRAVED PRIVATE LIFE.

  For this man who was the greatest traitor Britain has ever known – and who for a long time was my closest friend – indulged in practices that repel all normal people.

  Yet I must place the facts before you because they disclose a state of affairs in high places that remains to this day a terrible danger to Britain’s security.

  Guy Burgess was not only guilty of practising unnatural vices. He also had, among his numerous friends, many who shared his abnormal tastes.

  And he was in a position to blackmail some of them – including men in influential positions – to get information for his Russian masters.

  Without naming Hewit or Footman, Rees gave a garbled account of Burgess’s help to SIS in monitoring Henlein’s telephone conversations at the Goring Hotel: ‘he made use of a young man he had corrupted. He actually got this perverted lad installed as a telephone operator in Henlein’s hotel.’ Without naming Blunt, he referred to ‘a distinguished academic’ as ‘ONE OF BURGESS’ BOON SEX COMPANIONS AND HE HOLDS A HIGH POSITION IN PUBLIC LIFE TODAY’. At All Souls it was clear, as it was to the cognoscenti elsewhere, that Rees meant Blunt. Isaiah Berlin, an All Souls friend who remained devoted to Rees malgré tout, said that no one except fellow-travellers objected to the attack on Burgess, and few people minded ‘the anti-homosexual tone of the piece’. What was found unforgivable was the ‘hysterical McCarthyism’ of the accusations that the Foreign Office was full of homosexual communists. Rees was ostracized by many friends: among former intelligence officers Hampshire sent him an indignant letter, but A. J. Ayer, F. W. Deakin, Footman and Zaehner did not waver in their affection for him.26

  The prejudices of the Sunday Pictorial’s ‘EVIL MEN’ articles and of the People’s ‘Guy Burgess Stripped Bare’ series were assimilated by institutions that ought to have been wiser. Thus the memorandum of evidence submitted by the British Medical Association to the Wolfenden committee began by declaring: ‘The proper use of sex, the primary purpose of which is procreative, is related to the individual’s responsibility to himself and the nation.’ Physicians were pained to ‘observe their patients in an environment favourable to sexual indulgence, and surrounded by irresponsibility, selfishness and a preoccupation with immediate materialistic satisfaction’. The BMA deplored licentious advertisements, suggestive articles and photographs in Sunday newspapers, cheap novels with lurid covers and the eroticism of the cinema, all of which ‘tends to increase heterosexual over-activity, while, for homosexuals, it fans the fire of resentment at the latitude allowed to heterosexual indulgence’. There was a national threat, the BMA judged. ‘Homosexual practices tend to spread by contact, and from time to time they insidiously invade certain groups of the community.’ Male homosexuals aroused public hostility by placing ‘loyalty to one another above their loyalty to the institution or government they serve’. Such outcasts, when in positions of authority, gave preferential treatment to their kind or required ‘homosexual subjection as an expedient for promotion. The existence of practising homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, Civil Service, Forces, Press, radio, stage and other institutions constitutes a special problem.’ If the BMA words meant anything, the Association wanted a purge of sexual deviancy undreamt of by J. Edgar Hoover.27

  The psychiatrists of the National Health Service’s famous Tavistock Clinic in London also submitted evidence to Wolfenden. ‘The staff of this Clinic are unanimously of the opinion that homosexuality is a disorder of the personality and as such to be regarded as an illness.’ They discerned in the majority of homosexuals ‘a lack of capacity to form lasting affectionate relationships (of a non-sexual character) towards any other persons, with a correlated morbid degree of self-centredness which may take the form of self-admiration or self-abasement.’ Tavistock psychiatry deplored any sexual act ‘which offends public decency or decorum, or which tends to flaunt or glorify this mental illness as if it were a superior social cult’. For this reason it favoured ‘strict legislation in relation to the offences of importuning, corrupting, soliciting or the establishment and maintenance of clubs or “maisons de rendezvous” for homosexual purposes’. The Tavistock reiterated: ‘abnormal
sexual behaviour should be regarded basically as a public health problem. The homosexual should be thought of and proclaimed in the public mind as an immature, sick and potentially “infectious” person, and the whole subject divested of the glamour of wickedness as well as the aesthetic of superiority.’28

  It is too much to say that the BMA and Tavistock prejudices were engendered by Burgess and Maclean; but certainly such views were escalated by them.

  John Vassall

  In Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger (1959) James Bond meets a lesbian couple whose names, Pussy Galore and Tilly Masterson, indicate which of them plays the feminine role and which the butch. ‘Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not completely homosexual, but confused,’ Bond reflects. ‘He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.’ The fear that ‘unhappy sexual misfits’, as Bond called them, were growing ubiquitous had entered the national psyche since 1951. This anxiety was to be invigorated three years after Goldfinger by the Admiralty spy case.29

  In April 1962 the Soviet defector Anatoli Golitsyn gave information which led to the detection of a junior Admiralty official who was a communist spy. John Vassall had been born in 1924, the son of an impecunious clergyman, and was educated at a boarding school in Monmouth, where his sex life began with his fellow pupils. After conscription into the Royal Air Force in 1943, he became expert at handling Leica cameras, developing pictures and making prints. Following demobilization in 1947, he became a clerical officer in the Admiralty. He was a sexually confident young Londoner who attracted prosperous and amusing men. ‘He was very successful in this sphere,’ wrote Rebecca West, and ‘could hold his own in an outlaw world where tact, toughness and vigilance had to be constantly on the draw’.30

  By his own account, Vassall applied on impulse for a post as a clerk on the Naval Attaché’s staff at the British embassy in Moscow in 1954. The likelier truth – as in Marshall’s case – is that he was induced by a prior Soviet contact to apply for a Moscow posting with espionage in mind. Like Marshall again, Vassall claimed that he had been driven to espionage by the snobbery of embassy life. He described, or invented, rebuffs and snubs supposedly delivered by the Ambassador and his wife, Sir William and Lady Hayter, by the Naval Attaché for whom he worked and by other diplomats. After his arrest in 1962, his fluent rigmarole of complaints about the aloofness of the Hayters, the rigidity of the embassy hierarchy and the inexorable protocol was uncannily like Marshall’s. It seems to have been a KGB instruction for English spies, if caught, to parrot tales of class stigma and subjugation.31

  Vassall claimed that one evening in Moscow he was dosed with a drug that made him extra-suggestible, and induced him to strip naked and disport with three men while being photographed under harsh lights. In later public self-exculpations Vassall spoke of crying out with pain; but at the age of thirty, after multiple experiences, he can hardly have been a novice at being buggered, and this is just one of several unbelievable flourishes in his account of his entrapment. According to his later narrative, he agreed to spy after being confronted by compromising photographs and threatened with gaol. Only an inexperienced, helpless man would have submitted to KGB threats of exposure, and Vassall was hardy, smart and resourceful. A man who had the nerves for years of high-level espionage would not have been so timid with blackmailers.

  Vassall began taking documents from the Naval Attaché’s office, giving them to Soviet agents for photographing and returning them. After resuming work in the Naval Intelligence Department in London in 1956, he regularly photographed material. After a year he was appointed assistant secretary in the private office of the Civil Lord of the Admiralty. In 1959 he was posted to the Fleet section, where he had access to secret documents. He suspended spying when the Portland spy scandal broke, but resumed in December 1961 and continued until his arrest in September 1962.

  Vassall’s Old Bailey trial in October was held partly in camera. The prosecution accepted his story of the compromising photographs as the reason for supplying his Soviet controllers with documents. It was no truer than the prosecution arguments at the trials of Glading, Nunn May and Marshall. The judge endorsed this tale in his summing-up. After Vassall had been sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment, MPs debated his activities without anyone questioning the official line. A subsequent tribunal of investigation led by the law lord Lord Radcliffe did not challenge the legend. Radcliffe’s report enforced the view that Vassall was flighty, malleable and submissive, which seemed less threatening than the reality that he was a resilient and abundant source of secrets for Moscow.

  In order to pay for his defence, Vassall sold his memoirs to the Sunday Pictorial for £7,000. The first instalment appeared on the first weekend after his conviction, and was full of the archness and salacious guilt that the newspaper required for its money. The stifling class discrimination of the Moscow embassy and Vassall’s bracing lack of snobbery were stressed. The front-page lead in that issue parroted the new conventional wisdom – unknown before the FBI’s pressure on Whitehall in 1951 – that ‘civil servants with homosexual tendencies were especially vulnerable as security risks’. Detectives were tracking such men and expunging them from influential government posts. A week later, the Sunday Pictorial reported Vassall urging the need for an inquiry into ‘sex blackmail’ of officials ‘to weed out homosexuals and bisexuals in high office’. Many of them, Vassall was made to say, appeared to be ‘respectable married men’ beyond suspicion of ‘abnormal sexual practices’. The News of the World had to vie with the Sunday Pictorial exclusive serialization as best it could. On 28 October it moved into its customary mode of scaremongering about ‘twilight people working in places where they can betray their country to indulge their perverted pleasures’. It pretended that Burgess was the spymaster who had recruited and run Vassall: ‘BURGESS SITS IN MOSCOW LIKE A PATIENT TOAD AWAITING HIS NEXT WILLING VICTIM.’32

  Vassall was paroled from prison in 1972, and three years later published his self-serving memoirs which made him, for a few months, a celebrity spy. Before publication of the memoirs he holidayed in Brighton with the former Labour MP Thomas Skeffington-Lodge, who (in the words of the novelist Francis King) took him incognito to a bar, where he introduced him to ‘a male tart’ who was brought back to the house and paid after giving satisfaction. Some time later, when Vassall’s memoirs were being promoted by the publisher, an outraged rent boy returned to Skeffington-Lodge’s front door. ‘He had been watching the telly and had seen his former client on it. How dare S-L get him to go to bed with a spy?’33

  Charles Fletcher-Cooke

  The FBI’s obsession with hunting perverts, the Cadogan committee’s focus on male homosexuality rather than alcoholism as the primary ‘danger signal’, the misdirection about Maclean’s sexual tastes, the spurious evidence of motives adduced at Vassall’s trial, the prejudice of journalists and Fleet Street’s appetite for personalizing issues and making scapegoats created an unpleasant national atmosphere.

  One forgotten casualty is the politician-barrister Charles Fletcher-Cooke. Born in 1914, he was an undergraduate at Peterhouse, a small, reactionary Cambridge college containing few fellow-travellers. In the summer of 1935 he joined a group of young CPGB members or sympathizers which visited Russia. Apart from Fletcher-Cooke, these included Blunt, John Madge, Charles Rycroft, Brian Simon, Michael Straight and Michael Young, all of whom made dutiful visits to showpiece factories and collective farms. Fletcher-Cooke’s special interest, however, was the Moscow theatre festival. ‘We worried that we were squandering the resources of the Worker’s State if we put two lumps of sugar in our tea,’ recalled Straight. ‘We tried not to see the poverty, the squalor, the primitiveness that surrounded us wherever we went.’34

  Fletcher-Cooke edited Granta, was president of the Cambridge Union and got a first in his finals. He was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1938, entered the chambers of the Labour lawyer Sir William Jowitt, co-authored a textbook on monopolies and restrictive practices and later to
ok silk. He joined naval intelligence in 1940, and was posted to Washington in 1943 with the rank of lieutenant commander charged with liaison with US naval intelligence. ‘I am quite hopeless to fight our battles here,’ he admitted to Noël Annan. ‘I succumb to the charm of the American navy immediately. And it’s very difficult to explain … when I come back having bartered our whole case for a smile!’ His posting back to London, where he was to work on the Cabinet Office’s Joint Intelligence staff, left him with ‘a broken heart’, he told Annan. On paper he left the gender of his lovers unspecified – ‘they are so beautiful, so gentle, so affectionate’ – but admitted that his experiences left him ‘near tears continually. It’s just as well to part.’ Before leaving the US, Fletcher-Cooke had ‘an eight cylinder orgy in New York – the Metropolitan, “Oklahoma”, the Navy yards at Brooklyn, and some squandering of dollars in the stores’.35

  At the general election of 1945 Fletcher-Cooke contested East Dorset as Labour candidate. He was legal adviser to the Foreign Office at the Danube River conference held at Belgrade in 1948. Vyshinsky’s negotiating brutality – the Russians opposed unrestricted Danube navigation as they did any measure that smacked of the American pet project of internationalized European waterways, and refused compensation for nationalized property – led Fletcher-Cooke to resign from the Labour party. He had transferred his political allegiance by 1951, when he was elected as Conservative MP for the Lancashire cotton town of Darwen. Fred Warner listed him to MI5 in June 1951 as one of Burgess’s closest friends.