On 20 November Blunt held a press conference in the offices of The Times. Only journalists from that newspaper, the Guardian and television newsrooms were admitted. Resentful of their exclusion, other newspapers burst into puritanical indignation that Blunt had been served white wine with smoked trout over lunch with the newspaper’s deputy editor: they thought he should have been served crusts and gruel. The next day’s front-page headlines included ‘DAMN YOUR CONSCIENCE! The British deserve better than this load of phoney humbug, Blunt’ (Daily Express – the voice of Britain, 21 November) and ‘THE SPY WITH NO SHAME – A performance of supreme insolence’ (Daily Mail, 21 November). The Daily Mail editorial raged with vindictive threats that:
the Establishment … cannot any longer continue to deceive the nation. The time for the truth is now. And we must have it.
If we do not, let them be warned: The truth will eventually be discovered, and then, no parade of consciences, however high-born, however mighty, will protect the Establishment from the rightful wrath of the British people.23
Two contrary voices were juxtaposed on the letters page of The Times. Sir Michael Howard, then Chichele Professor in the History of War at Oxford, decried ‘the witch-hunt in Westminster and elsewhere’. As the author of an official but suppressed Strategic Deception in the Second World War, he gave a temperate explanation: ‘When an enemy agent is discovered, the natural instinct of the security authorities is not to expose but to use him, and the greater his importance the stronger this instinct will be. Not only is he a mine of useful information, but if his employers are unaware that he has been “blown”, they will keep in contact with him. He can then be used as a double agent, feeding them misinformation.’ For MI5, Howard reminded readers, ‘the value of keeping Professor Blunt as a card in their hands rather than discarding him by handing him over to justice must have been a major factor in the minds of those who made the decision’. He doubted if ‘the country would really have been better off if Professor Blunt had been made to stand trial for treason in 1964’. The letter beneath Howard’s came from a pompous dunce named Russell Burlingham, well known as the club bore of the Reform and as the bane of staff at the nearby London Library. ‘Never has Mrs Thatcher shown her political resolution to better advantage than in her spontaneous decision to drag this shabby little history into the light of day. In doing so she has struck her shrewdest blow for British liberty and exposed spurious “liberal” values; and the moral impact will be quite as decisive in its effect, and as far-reaching, as any of her radical economic initiatives.’24
Blunt’s intellectual gifts, homosexuality and bodily posture were pilloried. He was attacked as snobbish, cold, imperious and sexually predatory in a hate campaign that gave a propaganda victory to Moscow. Commentators never paused in their diatribes against the old school tie, Cambridge and homosexuality to recall the triumphs at Bletchley, where public schoolboys had abounded, where Cambridge graduates had led its inaugural phase and where Alan Turing was genius loci. Chapman Pincher in the Beaverbrook press’s London evening newspaper called Blunt a ‘revolting individual’, and inveighed against the Foreign Office ‘as a natural home for homosexuals, drunks and unstable weirdoes in general’. Between hard covers, too, Pincher abused Blunt as toffee-nosed, spiteful and – a deadly charge in an increasingly anti-elitist age – ‘widely disliked for his intellectual arrogance, holding those whom he considered lesser mortals in contempt’. No admiration was permitted for Blunt’s brilliant mind and scholarship, although it is reductive to think of him primarily as a spy. ‘Blunt was only really happy when he was doing research,’ wrote his Courtauld colleague Peter Kidson. ‘He was one of those true intellectuals for whom there is no experience to compare with the eureka moment, when an obsessive problem finally dissolves into a pattern of intelligible connections.’25
What of Boyle and his book? ‘The Climate of Treason is riveting but not very intelligent,’ Frederic Raphael wrote at the time. It might be faulted, but it could not be ignored. It had, if not a bias, at least an entrenched basis to its ideas and procedures which is usually overlooked. Boyle was a devout Catholic: his brother was a Catholic priest; he corresponded with Cardinal Heenan and other Catholic clergy; he sent his son to the great Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, Stonyhurst. The Catholic influence is marked in Boyle’s references to sex. He referred to the ‘abnormal sexual proclivities’ of Burgess, who (he claimed without substantiation) ‘introduced Maclean … to the sad pleasures of sodomy’ at Cambridge: ‘boasting about it as if he had thereby earned the Victoria Cross for valour beyond the call of duty’. Boyle’s tone implied that the western world had been degrading itself since the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 or since Martin Luther’s protest at Wittenberg in 1517. Boyle approached the book, so he told George Carey-Foster when seeking an interview in 1978, with curiosity about the ‘spiritual distemper that prevailed among resentful, guilt-laden young men and women at our Universities, and which the Comintern and other Soviet agencies capitalised on brilliantly’. He was enterprising in using the US Freedom of Information Act to obtain CIA and FBI documents, although he sometimes misunderstood or perhaps was swamped by them. He interviewed hundreds of witnesses, took impressionistic handwritten notes rather than recordings, and was overwhelmed not only by his proliferating material but by the din of conflicting voices. One can only be impressed at how hard he worked to meet his deadlines.26
Some of the reviews were informed. ‘After the lapse of a generation, the mechanics of petty treachery become unimportant,’ wrote Trevor-Roper in the Spectator. He judged that Boyle ‘reveals nothing that was not known – perhaps more accurately known – to authority, and merely gives occasion for belated public persecution.’ Histories of espionage that answered general questions about human tendencies, institutional development and social systems had more value than those that presented an accretion of irrelevant and distracting factual detail. In the London Review of Books Neal Ascherson found The Climate of Treason too unforgiving: ‘Boyle is a bit of a prig. Nobody gets away with anything. Political hindsight dominates.’ He noted that Boyle dismissed Maclean’s book on British Foreign Policy since Suez as ‘ponderous’ whereas, wrote Ascherson, it is ‘penetrating and very readable’: he wondered whether Boyle had actually read it.27
Isaiah Berlin was surprised to be quoted in The Climate of Treason – sometimes inaccurately – because he had understood that his talk with Boyle at the Athenaeum had been on a non-attributable basis. In his complaint to Boyle, he noted factual errors, such as the statement that he and Burgess had flown on ‘a VIP flight’ to the USA in September 1940 when they had in truth travelled by a Cunard liner from Liverpool to Quebec in July of that year. Berlin rebutted Boyle’s statement that, after meeting Maclean in wartime Washington, he had thought him ‘abnormal and unhealthy’ – a phrase of Boyle’s that indicated his Catholic distaste for homosexuality. He also denied Boyle’s story that Maclean had cast a recruiting fly over Berlin by asking him in Washington, ‘why don’t you join us?’28
Patrick Reilly thought that Boyle had little idea how either the Foreign Office or an embassy worked. He skewered some of Boyle’s errors, such as the claim that Burgess had learnt about the VENONA-inspired investigation into the Washington leakages of 1944, and had warned Maclean when the latter was passing through London, from his old post in the US capital on his way to Cairo, in the autumn of 1948. But the first information about the 1944 leak did not reach London until January 1949. It is inconceivable that Burgess, who was then wasting time in the Office’s Far Eastern Department, would have had access to VENONA material. Reilly denied crucial details of Boyle’s account of the FO handling of Maclean’s case.
Dick White had no respect for Boyle or The Climate of Treason. ‘The first edition is crammed with inaccuracies & yet … he remains complacently satisfied that he is now accepted as the greatest authority on the subject of “moles”,’ White briefed Trevor-Roper in 1980. The worst mistakes were made, said
White, when Boyle became entangled by his American material. Boyle’s obstinacy in insisting that Wilfrid Mann, whom White knew to be a double agent turned by the Americans, was the Fifth Man also vexed White. ‘I think it is important to debunk Boyle once & for all. His Climate of Treason has to some extent created a climate of opinion which is dangerously provocative of a witch-hunt. His only bull’s eye was Blunt. Rees gave him that but it was already widely known in Fleet Street before Climate was published.’ White was altogether dismissive of Boyle’s efforts: ‘I don’t think the book has power at all, only luck that it was published in the wake of the showing on T.V. of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which created a feverish public interest in “moles”.’ The real misfortune of the publicity whirlwind aroused by Thatcher’s parliamentary statement was that it convinced critics of the Establishment that ‘there have been a whole bucket full of pardons issued to cover up numberless moles in Government. This is not so.’29
Thoughtless and banal over-simplifications about the English class system permeated Boyle’s text (neither Scotland nor Wales had any part). Burgess was described as belonging to ‘the vulgarly ostentatious Pitt Club, a decadent right-wing group, as well as to the élitist and secretive Apostles’, although the Pitt was boisterous rather than decadent and fogeyish rather than vulgar. The two Cambridge spies who confessed in 1964 received the equivalent of ‘Royal Pardons’, wrote Boyle, ‘exonerated at the discretion of the two secret services concerned, partly for the sake of expediency and partly as a reward for the important light they were able to shed on the pattern of treachery inside the British Establishment’. Boyle’s gloss on the episode in which Burgess revealed his and Blunt’s secrets to Rees, who disclosed them to Rosamond Lehmann, runs: ‘Thanks to the narrow, tightly enmeshed relationships which still characterized the structure of the British ruling class, whether at the centre of power or on the outer fringes, the gossip about Burgess did not spread beyond his intellectual friends.’ But Lehmann’s father was a rentier living in a pleasure villa on the banks of the Thames while Rees’s father was a nonconformist clergyman: neither was remotely ‘ruling class’. And outside totalitarian states, which class – rich, poor, middling, learned, outdoorsy – blabs like police informers? The experiences, for example, of France and the Netherlands under German occupation in the 1940s and during the unsettled period after their liberation suggest that informers were envious or vindictive neighbours, quarrelsome in-laws, disgruntled employees or other despicable types. It is hard to know what Boyle expected of Lehmann: it is hard to think what she could, with decency, have done.30
Wright had retired to a stud farm in Tasmania in 1976. He was embittered not only by the dismissal of his conspiracy theories, but also by the refusal of the Security Service to take account of his fifteen years at the Admiralty when computing the amount of his pension. The lucrative fame of The Climate of Treason must have unsettled his jealous spirit. He took his grudges to Lord Rothschild, who bought him air tickets back to England so that they could discuss Wright’s hopes of writing his memoirs. In 1980 he arrived at Rothschild’s home with a ten-page typescript about Soviet penetration, to which he gave the hackneyed title ‘The Cancer in our Midst’. Rothschild was hyper-sensitive about his reputation and perplexed by insinuations that as a friend of Blunt and Burgess he must have been a Soviet spy. He evidently hoped that he would be exonerated if Wright brought his experiences into the public domain. He invited Pincher to meet Wright; the two men collaborated; and Pincher wrote his hasty, shoddy book, Their Trade is Treachery.
Their Trade is Treachery, published in 1981, publicly revealed for the first time the investigation of Hollis, who had died in 1973, and suggested that Hollis had been guilty. Wright’s secret help was indispensable to Pincher, who had a second informant – a mischievous wretch, with confidential access, who had once leaked to the Sunday Times the fact that Sir Geoffrey Harrison had been forced to retire as Ambassador in Moscow in 1968 after sexual entrapment by a Russian woman domestic. Pincher opened Their Trade with a series of falsehoods. He said that Lord Trend’s inquiry of 1974–5 indicated that in addition to Blunt ‘there had been at least one “Super-mole”, and possibly two, with unrestricted opportunity for burrowing into secrets’. Readers could be excused for believing Pincher when he declared with such firmness, ‘Lord Trend concluded that there was a strong prima facie case that MI5 had been deeply penetrated over many years by someone who was not Blunt. He named Hollis as the likeliest suspect.’ It was Trend’s view, so Pincher avowed, that ‘Hollis had not cleared himself during his interrogation. His answers to searching questions had been unconvincing, and his memory had been at fault only when it suited him.’ Moreover, the former Cabinet Secretary supposedly concluded, ‘Hollis had consistently frustrated attempts by loyal MI5 officers to investigate the obvious penetration of their service.’ In fact, Trend had said nothing resembling this. Pincher also indulged in the obligatory cant about class conspiracy: he called Trend ‘the epitome of the Establishment’, and a stalwart of ‘the old boys’ network’, which was untrue if it meant that Trend was partial, socially discriminatory or nepotistic.31
In 1987 came Wright’s ghosted and scrappily edited memoirs Spycatcher, full of animus and confusion, to reanimate the attack-dogs on Hollis. ‘When I read Wright’s book, with its paranoid self-righteousness, its gloating record of persecution,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘I was reminded of that other half-crazed witch-hunter in our history, Titus Oates, who also could not be totally refuted, for the Popish Plot was not a complete myth: a small nucleus of truth lay buried under the unscrupulously manufactured hysteria.’ Spycatcher was published in Australia, to evade prosecution in London under the Official Secrets Act, and received an inordinate marketing boost from an ill-fated attempt by the British government in the Supreme Court of New South Wales to prevent its publication there. The luckless Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was sent to Sydney to testify on behalf of the Thatcher administration: he found himself in an impossible situation, and was drenched in the spittle of journalistic mockery. Many London newspapers treated Wright as a rebel-hero against authority, as a brave maverick, as a lone fighter against long odds. There was little criticism of his irresponsibility, fixations, vindictiveness, elisions, errors and conceit. One of Whitehall’s great objections to Spycatcher was its references to GCHQ – ‘the last really secret aspect of British government’, as the historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac say. At this time even Cabinet ministers did not know that it was twice the size of MI5 and SIS combined.32
Thatcher, whose autobiography seldom alludes to intelligence matters, presided over a vigilant and even aggressive regime – probably incited by Maurice Oldfield’s hard-line successors at SIS – to protect official secrets. She vetoed publication of Michael Howard’s officially commissioned history of wartime deception operations (finally published in 1990), while the Cabinet Office forbade publication of Howard’s essay on the double agent GARBO, who had been discussed in previous books by Masterman and Montagu. During the first five years of Thatcher’s administration, the Official Secrets Act was invoked once every eighteen weeks. The blanket of official silence on security matters created opportunities for the sensationalists and fabricators among writers of espionage history.
A renewed internal security investigation in 1988 concluded that the case against Hollis, which culminated in two interviews with him, was so meagre that it should not have been pursued. The prolongation of the divisive hunt for MI5 traitors was attributable to Wright’s dishonesty and invention of evidence, his leading of witnesses (including Blunt) during questioning, ‘His tendency to select a solution, then tailor the evidence to fit it’, and ‘His standard manoeuvre when worsted in argument of taking refuge in mystery (“If you knew what I know”)’. To this indictment by Christopher Andrew must be added the weak analysis by investigators associated with Wright and the bias derived from Golitsyn’s baneful delusions. The case against Hollis, White wrote in 1988, was ‘highly
contrived & purely circumstantial’. Wright’s conspiracy theories were, he said, deceptions.33
‘Only out for the money’
Even if one or two fingers had been amputated it would be easy to count on one hand the number of authors of espionage histories who practised scrupulous exactitude as they added to the heap of books responsible for what White called ‘the spy torment’. This section will examine the motives, methods and plausibility of other leaders of the genre, which has excited newspaper stories and the public mind since 1979. The first of these was Donald McCormick, who was foreign manager of the Sunday Times in 1963–73 and a prolific author under his own name and using the alias of Richard Deacon. The others were John Costello and Anthony Cave Brown.
The books of McCormick @ Deacon included The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959) and Erotic Literature: A Connoisseur’s Guide (1992). Cannibalism, Unidentified Flying Objects, libertarian economics and apartheid were among his enthusiasms. Fantasists, tricksters, escapists and impostors intrigued him. He wrote a biography of the arms dealer and champion self-mythologizer Sir Basil Zaharoff, and an admiring study Taken for a Ride: The History of Cons and Con-Men (1976). He enjoyed hoaxing readers, invented anonymous sources, fabricated documents and described himself with a wink as ‘a very clever man, who enjoys his quiet fun’. He had a canny sense of what would ring true and what would sell. One academic critic called him ‘a charlatan, who took a dishonest, mischievous approach to gathering evidence’, and whose books are ‘riddled with inaccuracy, misrepresentation, poorly supported judgements that are far away from reality … and cognitive conceit’. Even an admirer conceded, ‘I suppose his exactitude is not that of a scholar, but of a journalist.’34
Enemies Within Page 68
