Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  Wilson was therefore told that there were serious suspicions against Floud involving communism – as a Member of Parliament he had kept his communism secret from the Acton Labour Party – and possible espionage. He then gave permission for Floud to be interviewed so that the security authorities could judge whether his activities had been no more than youthful folly.

  Floud was interrogated closely for two weeks, during which he denied all knowledge of any connection with the KGB. Then, on being shown evidence, he claimed that he could not recollect it. The MI5 men suspected that he was still in touch with Soviet intelligence but told him that, if he confessed his past activities and could convince them that he was no longer involved, they would not object to his appointment.

  Floud did not react to the offer even after prolonged thought, so he was interviewed again. This produced nothing further, and, while MI5 could not give him clearance, they intended to persist with their questions and inquiries for a little longer. After an unproductive session in October 1967, Floud, who had already been suffering from depression exacerbated by his wife’s death earlier in the year, went home, wrapped himself in a blanket with a gas poker, turned on the tap and killed himself.

  There is a widespread belief among responsible MPs, including, for example, Enoch Powell, that the civil service staff of the Home Office has been heavily penetrated by extreme left-wingers. Leads provided by Blunt and others have satisfied the security authorities that not only is the charge true but some of the extremists have been active agents of the Soviet Union. The woman whom Floud had recruited was one of these.

  This woman, who is still alive, admitted that, having been willingly recruited into the service of the ‘Comintern’, she had been instructed to forswear her open communism and to get herself onto the staff of the Home Office. Being bright and well connected, she managed to do so. Whether by fluke or by design, she soon found herself in the department handling the official written requests from MI5 for the Home Secretary’s permission to tap the telephones of suspects and to open their letters. As a result, she knew who was under suspicion and saw the warrants granted by the Home Secretary.

  When interviewed, she claimed that she had not only given up spying before she became involved with the warrants but had abandoned her communist beliefs because she had become totally disenchanted by the behaviour of the Soviet regime both inside and outside Russia. The security men were unconvinced.

  An even more extraordinary situation involving the Home Office arose as a result of another disclosure by Blunt. This concerned a woman colleague at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool, with whom he had collaborated on a book about Picasso. Blunt said that she had acted as a courier for Soviet agents, including the woman at the Home Office whom I have mentioned. When Blunt tried to jog her memory, she recalled meeting ‘a sinister little Russian in Kew Gardens’ to whom she passed on messages. She also named two men and said that they should be contacted urgently and warned that MI5 would soon be after them. One of these was a former senior diplomat, Sir Andrew Cohen, now dead, a former member of The Apostles Club and close friend of Blunt. The other was a senior civil servant in the Home Office. Fortunately, the Prime Minister of the day was told of his background, which included close friendship with members of the Ring of Five.

  Sadly, Phoebe Pool herself could not be questioned by the security men. Soon after Blunt had spoken of her, she threw herself under a train. Her suicide may have been expedited by fear of being confronted by MI5, but one of her contemporaries at the Courtauld Institute told me that the prime cause may have been her progressive deafness.

  The woman who had been involved with handling the surveillance warrants named another high-level civil servant, stating that she knew he had been a communist. He was known to have been a friend of Blunt, who was questioned about him. ‘He was never in the game,’ Blunt had assured his questioners, but, because the man had held such sensitive positions, including a spell in the Cabinet Office, it was decided that he should be interviewed.

  Having retired from the public service, he had moved abroad, where he was outside the jurisdiction of the Official Secrets Act, so it was hoped that he might talk freely. He did so, up to a point. He admitted that he had always been a Marxist and had remained a close friend of Guy Burgess. He insisted that Burgess had never tried to recruit him to the Soviet cause, but later, when mellowed by a few drinks, he added, ‘He didn’t need to recruit me. I had no secrets from him.’

  When this information was given to Blunt, he smiled and said, ‘I can tell you now that he was the best source Guy ever had for the Russians.’

  There was good reason to believe that the man had taken fright just at the time when Maclean had been warned that evidence of his treachery had come to light through the decoding of the KGB radio traffic. It is thought that he was warned that his own activities might also be revealed in the same way. Though questioned again, he declined to commit himself, and nothing further was done because he was safely abroad. He is still alive at the time of writing, with a knighthood and other honours.

  Several others named by Blunt, but without much detail, were approached, and some agreed to be interviewed. One of them, who had lived with the promiscuous Litzi Philby, went on to become an ambassador.

  Blunt was more forthcoming about a man he had recruited himself in the ’30s, volunteering his name and some details of what he had done. This man held a position that gave him access to valuable secrets during the war but now works for a commercial company. When faced with Blunt’s evidence and following a personal encounter with him, he admitted to having been a spy but managed to convince MI5 that he had ceased to help the Russians when he had married, realising the danger to his family. No action was taken against him.

  Another senior civil servant, who was still in Whitehall when Blunt gave a lead to him, turned out to have been an active communist who had acted as a courier for other Soviet agents as well as supplying information himself. He was completely uncooperative, so that all the security authorities could do was to ensure that he received no further promotion. It was only because of their action that he was denied a knighthood.

  Blunt also pointed the finger at another Cambridge acquaintance whom he knew as a communist and who might have been recruited as a spy. This was the late Paddy Costello, a New Zealander who became professor of Russian at Manchester University. He had come under special suspicion in 1961 when it was discovered that, while serving in the New Zealand consulate in Paris, he had signed New Zealand passports for Peter and Helen Kroger, the spies in the Navy spy ring. It was on these false passports that they had entered Britain for, in fact, their true name was Cohen, and they were American citizens.

  Costello was known, too, to have provided an accommodation address in London for the wife of a Swedish diplomat spying for Russia. He was also observed meeting with a Soviet agent only shortly before his death in 1964.

  Among the foreign students who were recruited by the KGB, according to Blunt, was a Canadian called Herbert Norman. He joined the Canadian diplomatic service, and while he was ambassador in Cairo he was recalled to Ottawa to discuss his communist past, which had come to light following inquiries in the United States. Just prior to his departure, a CIA man in Cairo was imprudent enough to try to encourage Norman to talk to him about his links with the Russians. Later, the CIA man quoted the Canadian as having said to him, ‘I can’t go back to Ottawa because, if I did, I would have to betray more than a hundred people’ – probably meaning people who had secret links with the Communist Party rather than known Soviet agents. That night, he jumped from the roof of an apartment block, where he had a flat.

  When questioned about Norman for corroborative evidence, Blunt said, ‘Herb was one of us.’ There is no doubt that by this remark Blunt meant that Norman had been a recruit to Soviet intelligence. He was not referring to homosexuality, as apologists for Norman have suggested.

  Several of the men whose names were volunteered by Blunt were beyon
d interrogation because they were already dead. One of these was a homosexual friend of Burgess called Tom Wylie. During the war, Wylie had been a high-level duty officer in the War Office in Whitehall, and he had a flat there. Blunt said he had been a most valuable source because Burgess used to drop in there for a drink in the evenings and browse through the papers in the ‘in trays’. There was no evidence that Wylie was a deliberate spy, and, just as he was to be questioned about his relationship with Burgess, he died of a heart attack.

  The same fate overtook Sir Andrew Cohen, one of Blunt’s close friends at Cambridge, who became a diplomat and was about to be questioned after statements made by Phoebe Pool.

  The particular friend of Blunt whom MI5 would dearly have liked to interrogate was already dead when Blunt was induced to confess. This was Tomas Harris, the former art dealer who had managed to give Blunt his great opportunity for big-scale treason by getting him into MI5.

  Harris, son of a Spanish mother and an English father, had been a successful art dealer, mainly in Spanish paintings. Tommy, as he was known, was a talented artist who then turned to art dealing himself and became wealthy in his own right. At the outbreak of war, as a contribution to the fight against Hitler, he and his wife served as rather grand housekeeper-cooks to a defence establishment near Hertford for teaching the techniques of sabotage.

  Harris was introduced there by his old friend Burgess, who had managed to insinuate himself onto the staff. From there, Harris secured a transfer as an officer to the section of MI5 that ran the double-cross system, whereby German agents were ‘turned’ to work for the British either because they volunteered or as an alternative to execution or imprisonment for life.

  He had an outstanding qualification for the work because of his knowledge of Spain and Portugal and became head of MI5’s Iberian section. He proved to be a most ingenious exponent of deception techniques, mainly designed to mislead the Germans about Allied invasion plans. The particular agent he ran, codenamed ‘Garbo’, was the most effective of the war.

  After the hostilities, Harris gave up art dealing and devoted himself to painting and collecting, spending more and more time in Spain and Majorca. He was, therefore, not available for interview by his old MI5 colleagues when he naturally came under suspicion following the defection of his friends, Maclean and Burgess.

  Most of his colleagues whom I have consulted do not believe that he was an active Soviet spy or even a communist. But he was named as having served as a courier during the Spanish Civil War for Philby, who, while reporting from the Franco side, needed to get information to the Russians. The person who named him was Flora Solomon, whose other accusations eventually led to the exposure of Philby as a spy.

  It is also believed that Harris may have assisted in the escape of Melinda Maclean from Switzerland to join her husband in Moscow in 1953, but there was nothing illegal in that, and he may have been doing it to help an old friend. That is the view, for instance, of such a balanced former colleague as Col. T. A. Robertson. Others are also prepared to believe that any financial assistance Harris may have given to Philby was no more than his natural generosity, though it remains possible that he was serving as a paymaster for the Russians.

  Harris was killed in January 1964 in a car crash in Majorca. The police could find nothing wrong with the car, which hit a tree, but Harris’s wife, who survived the crash, could not explain why the vehicle had gone into a sudden slide. It is considered possible, albeit remotely, that the KGB might have wanted to silence Harris before he could talk to the British security authorities, as he was an expansive personality, when in the mood, and was outside British jurisdiction. The information about which MI5 wanted to question him and would be approaching him in Majorca could have leaked to the KGB from its source inside MI5. Flora Solomon’s allegation against Harris was in the same MI5 document as her accusation of Philby, and there is little doubt that the latter leaked to the KGB, as I have described.

  Even if Harris was a Soviet spy, he was definitely not the Fifth Man of the Ring of Five. Nor, as I have already established, was his death the reason why Blunt was prepared to confess.

  Not all the inquiries that followed Blunt’s leads were on such a sombre note – and some had humorous touches. One currently well-known academic, who was interviewed because his communist affiliations at Cambridge had come to light, admitted to having induced his girlfriend – now a prominent Labour politician – to smuggle a letter to Paris addressed to the Soviet agent James Klugman. On his express advice, she had taken it in sewn in her knickers!

  The interrogation of Blunt led to the detection of at least one further treacherous member of the secret service who cannot yet be named for legal reasons as he was allowed to ‘retire’ prematurely to prevent open scandal. This man had held several important foreign assignments. When confronted with evidence of his duplicity by Sir Maurice Oldfield, he scoffed at the organisation’s inability to take any action against him so long as he refused to confess. Incredibly, this man attended Oldfield’s memorial service at the chapel of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in 1981, where the officer who had been instrumental in exposing him was appalled at his brass nerve.

  The evidence against other possible Soviet agents accruing from Blunt’s confession and MI5’s reaction to it admirably demonstrates the difference between counter-espionage operations and police work. The MI5 investigators almost invariably have to work on evidence that is not only slender but inadmissible in a British court of law. Their main initial source, defectors, can never be introduced as evidence, firstly because the identity of the defectors themselves cannot normally be revealed at the time and, secondly, because, as traitors to their own countries, their credibility could so easily be undermined by a clever defence counsel in open court. Evidence obtained by surreptitious methods like telephone tapping, on which counter-espionage operations heavily depend, is inadmissible, as it can be held to be faked.

  Having no powers of arrest or legal authority of its own, MI5 cannot require suspects to undergo interrogation. They can only be invited to do so, and if they refuse, as several of the suspects named by Blunt did, little or nothing can be done.

  The offer of immunity to traitors like Blunt and Philby is as distasteful to the loyal members of MI5 as it is to the public, but all too often it is their only means of securing information from someone who will, otherwise, remain free anyway.

  These limitations are rightly regarded as a greatly preferable alternative to the knock-in-the-night powers enjoyed by the KGB and other secret police – properly so-called because they have powers of arrest. But in the view of MI5 itself and of many others knowledgeable in the field of espionage, these limitations have been overdone with respect to Members of Parliament. There is no conceivable justification for making any section of the community immune to investigation by the proper authority, which MI5 is, when reasonable suspicion exists. The rules laid down by Wilson, and which limited MI5’s inquiries in the Floud case, are still in force unless recently changed by Mrs Thatcher. Once such privileges are accorded to Parliament, they tend to be ‘set in concrete’.

  I have more, later, to disclose about the penetration of Parliament. At this point, I can state with certainty that the security authorities were convinced that it was in the national interest that certain Labour MPs, including junior ministers, should be investigated because of known contact with Russians listed as KGB officers. They were not allowed to do so because of the standing restrictions and, in one glaring instance, where formal request for permission to investigate and, if necessary, interrogate was made to the Prime Minister of the day it was refused.

  The mixed-bag results of Blunt’s interrogations raise a further question. Was it really necessary to keep him on as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures until his normal retirement in 1972 and then to continue his prestigious connection by appointing him adviser for the Queen’s pictures and drawings, a post he held until 1978?

  The theory that his removal from h
is royal post, even after a decent interval, might alert the Russians to the fact that he had confessed never made much sense. If Blunt was still in regular touch with Soviet agents in 1964, they would soon have realised that something had happened when he stopped seeing them if they had not already been warned during the fortnight when Blunt was ‘on the loose’. It was odds on that any such Russians would be members of the Soviet embassy, with diplomatic privilege, so that MI5 would be powerless to do anything about them.

  As regards those civil servants and others likely to be named by Blunt or for whom he might give leads, it seems improbable that they would have taken fright if he had quietly left the royal service. The danger that they would defect in any event was minimal.

  The sensible explanation, which is supported by my confidential sources, is that continuation in royal employment was an integral part of the immunity package deal offered to Blunt and that he would not have accepted it without the ongoing privilege. This likely requirement by Blunt must have been made clear to Sir Michael Adeane and, through him, to the Queen. Nevertheless, as the official advice was that everything possible should be done to ensure Blunt’s cooperation, Her Majesty accepted it.

  When the Blunt affair became a public scandal in 1979, it was widely assumed that the Queen was both embarrassed and angry at being shown to have been used as cover for an intelligence exercise. Because of the fluke circumstance, to which I have already referred, I can state with confidence that the Queen was quite unflustered and was in no doubt that the advice she had been given had been correct, as she herself had been in accepting it.