Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  As a forcibly retired social networker Burgess was frustrated by the limited scope in Moscow for regenerative gossip. He longed for well-connected, informative visitors from London. ‘You will have heard that I normally prefer boys,’ he told Nora Beloff, ‘but I will make an exception in your case.’ He advised her on survival in Moscow: in negotiations with bureaucrats, bang fists on tables and shout them down; storm at hotel servants in order to get good service. Members of the British embassy were instructed to leave any gathering attended by Burgess or Maclean; but they had indirect contact through the many reports that English visitors to Moscow provided of Burgess, who craved meetings, and the scarcer accounts of Maclean, who avoided them.14

  Patrick Reilly, who was Ambassador in Moscow in 1957–60, remitted to London an account received in 1959 from Edward Crankshaw of three recent meetings with Burgess. ‘We exchanged some quite hard words, calling spades spades, but quietly and reasonably,’ Crankshaw wrote in his invaluably unbiased appraisal. ‘I had never known anyone who flaunted his homosexuality so openly: whether he did this in England others will know. But he neither bullied one nor bored one with it. And once I got accustomed to this strange atmosphere I liked him very much and finished up by being deeply sorry for him, although at no time did he exhibit self-pity.’ Burgess, said Crankshaw, was avid ‘for the opportunity to talk and talk and talk with someone who, sex apart, could speak his language’. Tonya, ‘his “boy friend” who lives with him, is a young factory mechanic who plays the concertina beautifully, keeps up an incessant moan about living conditions and the regime, and is intelligent, unsqualid, and pleasant in a pansy way. B also has a “boy friend” who is a priest at the Novo Devichi church. Over 6 foot tall, youngish and wholly repellent – v. handsome in a horrible way – and corrupt to the core. B is quite obviously head over heels in love with this monster.’ Crankshaw watched Burgess gazing at the priest during a service: ‘B’s face was radiant and he was clearly transported with delight. One could have wept.’ Crankshaw assessed Burgess’s political views as at the level of ‘intelligent junior Party members … He said he could not live now anywhere but in the USSR, so long as the cold war continued. His anti-Americanism is as strong as ever, and he said he would be stifled in a non-socialist country, in spite of the many sins and defaults of this one. At the same time he talked incessantly and with delight of Eton and Oxford [sic] and mutual friends.’ Crankshaw’s companion Doreen Marston asked Burgess to telephone Maclean to arrange a meeting. ‘Melinda wanted to meet us but Donald would not hear of it. Burgess got angry and called him in effect a stuffed shirt. Donald got angry back.’ Burgess said that Maclean ‘liked laughing at himself, but could not bear it when others laughed at him’, whereas he, Burgess, ‘found it almost impossible to laugh at himself, though he tried very earnestly, but he did not mind being laughed at by others’. Burgess agreed with Crankshaw’s strictures on ‘the atavistic methods of repression and treachery’ used to repress the Hungarian uprising of 1956, ‘but insisted that, although there was a genuine and reasonable revolt among the factory workers and the intelligentsia, the Soviet Govt. had sufficient evidence of American efforts to support such a rising … to make it necessary for them to use extreme measures’. As he talked, Burgess paced incessantly up and down the room, and seemed ‘full of almost incoherent impulses’. He was desperate to visit his seventy-seven-year-old mother: ‘He expresses conviction that he cannot be nabbed on an official secrets or treason charge, though he thinks M.I.5 might nobble him and rig a trial in camera; he was a little lurid about that. He also thought he might be taken on a charge of homosexual conduct and put away for a bit and was interested in the workings of the statute of limitations.’ Crankshaw’s conclusion was compassionate but fatalistic: ‘The man is half dotty, not actively vicious’; trapped in ‘the sort of personal tragedy that can only be ended by death. It is a terrible waste, but the waste is absolute.’15

  The England to which Burgess wished to return was changing fast. ‘Macmillan has captured the hearts of the great British public,’ Harold Nicolson warned him in 1959. ‘The proletariat is becoming bourgeois, or so close to the middle classes that they are beginning to feel themselves budding capitalists. Thus they regard extreme socialism as a relic of their impoverished youth and aspire to be among those who stand by the established order.’ Next year a writer in the Spectator mused on ‘this fascinating, frightening, trembling moment of time’ in which the working class was revelling in its new-found ‘selfish solidarity, its mass-produced culture, its cheerful apathy’. The pool of potential Labour votes was notable for ‘its reluctance to enrol in crusades, its obsession with trivial, sentimental injustices, its old-fashioned affection for capital punishment, bad food, derelict transport, hypocritical laws, hideous architecture, and sensational newspapers, its sudden outbursts of pointless and ineffectual violence’. Michael Young, the sociologist who had accompanied Blunt on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935, wrote his seminal pamphlet The Chipped White Cups of Dover in 1960: ‘More people than ever before recognise that Britain is inferior in many ways it should not be to other countries in Europe and America. More people than ever before recognise that in certain respects Britain is superior in many ways it should not be to other countries in Asia and Africa. Britain is too drab in relation to Europe, and too selfish in relation to Asia and Africa.’ With the exception of the Iberian despotisms, Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, almost every western European country excelled Britain in the quality of their public amenities: town planning, architecture, transport and the scope for enjoying leisure. Young found Britain’s complacent insularity to be pitiful. ‘We go on arrogantly refusing to learn the languages of Europe,’ said Young, and ‘go on making ourselves ridiculous by talking English a little louder when we get to Orly [airport]’.16

  Macmillan described the Soviet Union in 1961 as ‘this strange system, half Orwellite & half Byzantine’, but its pioneering technological feats, notably the orbiting of the planet by the satellite Sputnik in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s outer-space flight in 1961, increased anxieties that Britain was technologically retarded and economically failing. After two years of guerrilla warfare, Fidel Castro announced his seizure of power in Cuba on 1 January 1959, and was joined a day later in Havana by his deputy commander, a Marxist physician from Argentina named Ernesto (‘Che’) Guevara. Castro was an innovator in class warfare, who had the unprecedented notion of expelling the bourgeoisie from his nation, so the middle classes were sent packing to the United States. Guevara’s advocacy of rural guerrilla warfare across Latin America incited a decade of revolutionary turbulence in that continent. A few weeks later, the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s central committee avowed to the 21st Party Congress: ‘the ideas of communism have become the ruling ideas across the entire world, no borders or barriers impede them, they conquer peoples by their life-affirming strengths and truth’. Little wonder that, as the Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart was to write in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, ‘The Soviet leaders continue to have a deep-rooted and dogmatic belief in the eventual universal triumph of their model of Marxist-Leninism.’17

  Burgess kept rousing himself to sound grateful. ‘I love living in this country,’ he told Stephen Spender, who visited him in 1960. ‘It’s solid and expanding like England in 1860, my favourite time in history, and no one feels frightened.’ Yet a few minutes later he gestured at the wall and said: ‘I suppose they’re listening to everything we’re saying.’ He seemed a figure of Whitehall un peu passé, with ‘a seedy, slightly shame-faced air, and shambling walk: like some ex-consular official you meet in a bar at Singapore and who puzzles you by his references to the days when he knew the great, and helped determine policy’. Burgess gave no sign of reluctant allegiance to a lost cause when, having donned his Old Etonian tie, he met a Daily Herald interviewer in 1962. ‘I like living in the Soviet Union under Socialism,’ he insisted. ‘I would not like to live in
expense-account England.’ He regarded Macmillan as an American stooge. ‘He will do what he is told, just as he has always done. He would take out a warrant against me like a shot if Kennedy asked him.’18

  Philby in Beirut

  Philby’s domestic life was destroyed in 1951. In the months after his abrupt recall from Washington, he would return home in the evenings sodden with drink, and demanding more alcohol. At a dinner party with neighbours he lost his temper with his wife, went outside in a fury, punched through the windscreen of their car and was left standing there when she sped off. He began an affair with a middle-aged civil servant. For the next few years he repeatedly went on alcoholic ‘blinders’. Money from Aileen Philby’s aunt enabled them to buy a spacious, gloomy, decrepit Edwardian house near the Sussex dormitory town of Crowborough. Aileen came to realize that he was a spy, and blurted out drunken, panicky remarks on the subject. She was horror-struck by her belated recognition of his deep, inscrutable secrecy. Mistrust of everyone and every surface appearance ruined her mind. He began to hate her, as someone to whom he had done irremediable harm, and to fear that she might betray him as he had done her. He seldom went to Crowborough except to see his children at weekends: when there he preferred to sleep in a tent in the garden; he discouraged potential visitors by telling them that she was mad and aggressive. Looking neglected, unwashed and frantic, she sank into alcoholic isolation, once crashed her car into a shop-window in Crowborough and more than once was hospitalized. In December 1957, after four years of increasingly secluded struggle, Aileen Philby was found by her young daughter dead in bed, aged forty-seven, having succumbed to heart failure (her heart was weakened by alcoholism), tuberculosis and a respiratory infection. Her mother-in-law, Dora Philby, had been drinking more than a bottle of gin a day before her death earlier that same year.19

  As Chief of SIS Stewart Menzies remained non-committal about Philby’s guilt or innocence. After his retirement in 1952 he suffered a recurrent nightmare in which a Russian defector was flown above the English Channel in a helicopter and given the choice to reveal what he knew of Philby or be chucked into the sea: the ordeal always ended with the defector being thrown to his death. Jack Easton, Deputy Director of SIS, felt sure of Philby’s guilt and shunned approaches from Nicholas Elliott and other SIS officers seeking their friend’s rehabilitation. In August 1956 Philby was enabled to escape from the morass of his life in Crowborough, when SIS, acting through the Foreign Office, arranged for him to go to Beirut as the correspondent of the Observer and the Economist. The compassionate wish to help an ex-employee who was down and out, and had been exonerated months earlier in the House of Commons, was mixed with continuing suspicion of him. His Beirut posting enabled SIS to preserve working contacts with him, and to monitor his working environment, in case – as happened in 1962 – new evidence emerged which would justify a renewed bout of close questioning. From Beirut Philby reported on developments in the Arab but not the communist world. The expenses claims that he submitted to his London employers were said to be ‘staggering’.20

  Hugh Trevor-Roper once asked Dick White why, when he became Chief of SIS in 1956, he left Philby on the strength in Beirut. White replied that he had been dismayed to find that Philby had resumed work for SIS, but decided on reflection that ‘it was safest to leave him there because if he were brought back to London it would be impossible to convict him or to prevent him from seeing his old colleagues in SIS and picking up old threads’. In his Middle East years Philby was wary of official associations. Perhaps fearing a verbal ambush or tricky darting questions, he exaggerated his stutter when he went to stay in Amman with Julian and Margaret Bullard. This gave him time to think of the best answer to any remark ventured in this quick-thinking diplomatic household. During his Beirut evenings, he was helpless with drink: he found a fellow drunkard – Eleanor Brewer, divorced wife of the Middle East correspondent of the New York Times – whom he married in London in 1959.21

  Blake’s arrest in April 1961 doubtless shook Philby. The defection in December that year of Anatoli Golitsyn resulted in closer tracking of him. Probably he heard that MI5 interviewing of his old associates had been resumed. The most interesting approach was to his former news agency partner, Peter Smolka. After the war Smolka had moved to Vienna at a time when the conurbation was divided into four sectors of occupation, Russian, American, French and British, with the inner city administered by each power for a month at a time. Smolka chose to live in the Russian sector. When E. H. Carr lectured in Vienna in 1947, he stayed with Smolka. Carr’s lecture, with its denigration of US capitalist imperialism and emphasis on British political and economic decline, will have gratified Smolka, although it pained British officials. A year later Graham Greene visited Vienna in search of ideas for a film-script. As a former SIS officer and continuing SIS Friend, he lunched with Charles Beauclerk, a colonel in the Intelligence Corps based in Austria and afterwards Duke of St Albans. Beauclerk filled Greene with lashings of pink champagne and gave him the idea of putting the murderous trade in black-market penicillin at the centre of the plot of The Third Man. After lunch, dressed in heavy boots and mackintoshes, Beauclerk guided him through the extensive system of Viennese sewers that also feature in the film. Smolka was also at hand proffering advice. He persuaded the film director, Carol Reed, to cut a scene from the shooting-script in which Russians kidnapped a woman: he could not claim that the scene was unrealistic, but warned that it smacked of facile anti-Soviet propaganda. Greene accordingly inserted into the script a knowing joke in which a Beauclerk-figure offers a shot of vodka to an American visitor. The vodka is Russian, and its brand-name is Smolka.22

  An intermittent watch was kept on Smolka in Vienna during the 1950s. He developed creeping paralysis, which deprived him of the use of his legs, and by 1958 depended on a wheelchair. He avoided London until September 1961, when he returned for the first time in fifteen years and took rooms in the Savoy Hotel. MI5’s Arthur Martin arranged to interview him at the War Office on 2 October. He arrived in a wheelchair with a rucksack tied to the back, chain-smoked and exploited his disabilities. Whenever he needed time to think of the safe reply to a tricky question, he fumbled with lighting a new cigarette and sometimes distracted Martin by asking him to hold the lighter. Loud street noises from pneumatic drills also put Martin at a disadvantage.

  Smolka won most of the tricks in the interview. He was quick, wily and forceful. He claimed that after being introduced to Philby and opening a news agency with him in 1934–5, his business partner, as the son of the Arabist St John Philby, was ‘anti-Jewish’ and had shunned him. He called Burgess ‘a colourful and attractive nut’ and ‘a very vain busybody’, who asked him to supply reports on conversations and opinions that he heard. Believing, so he said, that Burgess was attached to MI5, he supplied notes on discussions with Ridsdale, Fletcher-Cooke and others, which were later found among Burgess’s belongings. He admitted to having met Blunt in the Bentinck Street flat, and pretended to have forgotten whether it was owned by a Sassoon or a Rothschild. As to his own politics, he described himself as a fellow-traveller during his years as a Ministry of Information official, and as a member of the Vienna communist party from 1946 until the anti-semitic show-trial in 1952 of the Czech communist leader Rudolf Slánský and his associates who were accused of a Trotskyite–Titoist–Zionist conspiracy. Eleven men, including Slánský, were executed. Since 1952 Smolka, although he stayed in the Savoy Hotel, counted himself as a Titoist. Nothing that he said was demonstrably false, but most of his statements were untrue. He presented himself as an enfeebled man, near to death, but in fact survived until 1980.23

  Philby was put in jeopardy by denunciation from an unexpected source. Flora Solomon was the Marks & Spencer executive who had introduced him to Aileen Furse in 1940 and had together with Tomás Harris been a witness at their wedding in 1946. Solomon had known of his communist affiliations and services to Moscow since a lunch in 1938 when he tried to recruit her to the Soviet cause; but she
took no action until October 1962. Then, irritated by what she considered to be the anti-Zionist tone of Philby’s reports in the Observer, she told Victor Rothschild – at a meeting at the Weizmann Institute in Israel – that Philby had tried to enlist her as a Soviet agent. How could David Astor, she asked, employ at the Observer a known communist who had surely worked for Moscow? After Rothschild reported these remarks, she was interviewed by Martin in Rothschild’s London flat, with Martin’s MI5 ally Peter Wright listening. Wright thought her an untrustworthy, vindictive, screechy, rambling witness. ‘I guessed from listening to her that she and Philby must have been lovers in the 1930s,’ he later said. ‘She was having her revenge for the rejection she felt when he moved into a new pair of sheets.’ This is typical of Wright’s false links: there is no evidence for it; she was sixteen years older than Philby.24

  When Lord Carrington, First Lord of the Admiralty, first discussed Vassall’s arrest with Macmillan in 1962, the Prime Minister supposedly exclaimed: ‘Very bad news! You know, you should never catch a spy. Discover him and control him, but never catch him. A spy causes far more trouble when he’s caught.’ Already dismayed by the Portland, Blake and Vassall cases, Macmillan had indicated to White that it was preferable to avoid further sensational espionage publicity. It was agreed with Macmillan that Philby should be confronted in Beirut. Instead of Martin of MI5, Nicholas Elliott of SIS was sent to the Lebanese capital early in January 1963. Elliott had been Philby’s stoutest defender within SIS, but was now convinced of his guilt. He was widely known to be ‘a poop’, but White thought that in Beirut, outside British jurisdiction, Philby might disclose in full his activities to his former ally in return for an offer of immunity from prosecution. There was no advantage for the intelligence services, or for any Whitehall department, in giving the Soviet Union the propaganda gift of another spectacular treason trial so soon after Blake and Vassall had rocked public opinion and shaken the Macmillan government. A meeting was arranged whereby Philby went to an embassy flat in Beirut, ostensibly to meet the SIS head of station Peter Lunn to discuss possible future work. When Elliott rather than the local man opened the flat door, Philby said, ‘I rather thought it might be you.’25