Their Trade Is Treachery

by Pincher Chapman

  During his questioning of Burgess, Driberg induced him to recall some details of his brief time in the highly secret, wartime Special Operations Executive and to name some of the people who had worked with him. Under instructions from MI5, he included these in his script, which he then submitted to MI5 for security vetting. The publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, were then warned that they risked prosecution under the Official Secrets Act unless they removed the censored parts, which, in all innocence, they duly did. Thus was the stage set for the next move in the operation.

  A few days before the scheduled publication of the book, I was telephoned by Admiral Thomson, who said he had been asked to approach me again by Sir Roger Hollis, by that time director general of MI5. We lunched together, and the admiral then told me that MI5 would be grateful if I reported, with prominence, that it now had evidence that could lead to the arrest and prosecution of Guy Burgess should he ever return to Britain. He then explained how, through stupidity on the part of both Burgess and Driberg, the former had committed technical breaches of the Official Secrets Act. At that stage, I had no knowledge of Driberg’s connivance in this operation against his old friend.

  The details duly appeared in the Daily Express, and further prominence for them was afforded by publication of a complaining letter from Driberg with answers from me – supplied by MI5 via Admiral Thomson.

  Later, I asked the admiral why Hollis was clutching at such a thin straw, and he replied that the director general was determined to dissuade Burgess from ever returning to Britain. MI5 did not have enough usable evidence against Burgess at that time – none really accrued until the confession of Anthony Blunt in 1964 – and the authorities would look foolish if he swanned around London in his old style after helping a known spy, Maclean, to escape.

  A later event, in April 1962, of which I am deeply suspicious, enabled Hollis to generate worldwide publicity regarding the inevitable arrest of Burgess and Maclean if ever they set foot on British soil. Defence and crime correspondents of newspapers were quietly told that a tip had been received from Dutch intelligence to the effect that both Burgess and Maclean had been invited to a communist conference in Cuba and would be touching down at Prestwick Airport on the way. By that time, MI5 had solid evidence against Maclean, and officers there were keener than ever to subject him to tough interrogation, but Hollis was determined to ensure that they would get no such opportunity. He engineered a Home Office statement that warrants were to be issued for the arrest of both men, as they were.

  The defectors never moved out of Moscow, and we were told that the tip had proved to be false. The question is whether such a tip ever existed. It seems much more likely that the whole episode was an MI5 disinformation exercise. Maclean was well aware that both MI5 and the CIA must know the extent of his treachery, and it is not conceivable that he ever contemplated returning to Britain. Burgess, the former MI5 agent, was the danger man. He was bored out of his mind in Moscow and desperately wanted to return. Hollis was prepared to go to any lengths to stop him. Understandably, members of the Fluency Committee wondered why. If Hollis was a spy and Maclean had learned of it during his thirteen years of active espionage, that would help to explain why the KGB had been prepared to put Philby and Blunt at risk to get Maclean safely away before he could be interrogated. It would also explain Hollis’s determination to prevent the return or arrest of Maclean or Burgess, who might have learned of Hollis’s position from Maclean, had he not already known it.

  Driberg’s book contained enough lies and slanders against MI5 and the political system of the West for the KGB to be pleased with it, while MI5 regarded these as a worthwhile trade-off to prevent the return of Burgess. Driberg made money out of it while being paid by both the KGB and MI5. So all the participants, save for Burgess himself, who died aged fifty-two, lonely and homesick in Moscow in 1963, were well satisfied.

  As with many double agents, Driberg was coming increasingly under MI5 suspicion that he was doing more for the Soviet bloc than he admitted in his regular debriefings. Then, in 1969, the Czech defector Josef Frolik, who laid information against several Labour MPs, including Will Owen, gave specific information about a senior Labour MP who was a homosexual, had been recruited by Czech intelligence and had the codename ‘Crocodile’. Frolik described how the Czech intelligence men in London had been smartly censured by the KGB for this adventure because ‘Crocodile’ was already their man. Frolik, who had seen ‘Crocodile’ but did not know his name, identified him as Driberg from a spread of photographs shown to him by MI5.

  Driberg was therefore taxed with this information by the MI5 case officer handling him. ‘Have you ever done anything for the Czechs?’ he was asked. ‘I have written them a few articles,’ he replied with a shrug. Under questioning, however, he admitted that he had sold the Czechs additional information about the internal squabbles of the Labour Party and personal scandals about who was sleeping with whom. ‘All harmless stuff,’ he insisted with his usual charm.

  He admitted that he had continued to do this while chairman of the Labour Party, passing the information to his Czech controller whom he knew only as ‘Vaclav’. Apart from warning him about the danger of giving the Russians any information that had not been passed by MI5 as ‘chicken feed’, there was nothing the security authorities could do or wanted to do, in view of the scandal that open knowledge of the way they had employed the Labour Party chairman would create.

  My exposure of Driberg’s activities in the first edition of this book brought confirmation from several sources. Thus, Mr Zak Bosnyak, a Yugoslav living in Britain, has revealed how Driberg used him as an unwitting courier to post a letter to the Russian embassy in Belgrade while he was on vacation there.

  An opportunity for MI5 to dispense with Driberg’s services had arisen during the premiership of Harold Macmillan, who had discovered that several MPs, mainly Tories, were being run by MI5 as agents. The MI5 chiefs were told that this was no longer permissible, and the MPs were all paid off with the exception of Driberg, who refused to desist. He continued to report information to MI5 even after he had been elevated to the lords as Lord Bradwell, being known in MI5 headquarters as ‘The Lord of the Spies’.

  Driberg’s long relationship with MI5 solves the mystery of why such a notorious homosexual, who was repeatedly caught in the act publicly by the police, was never successfully prosecuted, though the practices to which he admitted in his biography were then serious crimes. He had been given an MI5 telephone number that he gave to police with the request to pass it to Special Branch. This secured his release, and whether the policemen concerned believed that his homosexual acts were ‘in line of duty’ will never be known. (Driberg was prosecuted – and acquitted – on a homosexual charge only once, when two men, insisting on court action, reported him.)

  The award of a peerage to such a notorious homosexual, who had admitted to another MP, Woodrow Wyatt, that he had once enjoyed the favours of a House of Commons chef in the Members’ lavatory, was also a cause for public curiosity. While the award was made by Harold Wilson, ostensibly for Driberg’s devotion to the Labour Party, it had been requested by his friend Michael Foot. Lady Falkender explained to me that Foot felt sorry for Driberg because he was going blind, a fact confirmed to me by another of his friends, Mervyn Stockwood, the bishop of Southwark. Foot apparently had never asked for an honour on behalf of anybody before, and Wilson felt that he could not refuse him.

  Inquiries after Lord Bradwell’s death in 1976 convinced MI5 that he had been controlled primarily by the KGB since the end of the war, partly because he may have been blackmailed but mainly because he had moved further to the left. The KGB had plenty of incriminating photographs. He had even been caught in a homosexual situation with Burgess when he visited him in Moscow and was shown the photographs as an extra ‘inducement’, as he reported to MI5 on his return. To his friends, Driberg pretended that, because his homosexuality was so well known, photographs, however revealing, would be useless as bl
ackmail. In reality, this was far from being the case, as Driberg well knew.

  All that the KGB needed to do was to post prints of the pictures to various influential people and to newspapers and magazines. The publicity would have made it impossible for MI5 to continue to support Driberg’s immunity from arrest, for his propensity for committing homosexual acts in public places remained an offence. It would also have ended his political career.

  Using this crude and ruthless device, in a heterosexual context, the KGB had effectively destroyed the political career of Comdr. Anthony Courtney. Courtney, a most able Tory MP, had the temerity to point out repeatedly in Parliament that the Foreign Office seemed to be psychologically intimidated by the Kremlin in the way it allowed Soviet diplomats concessions that the KGB habitually abused. It was suspected that the embarrassing photographs, taken surreptitiously in a Moscow hotel and involving a Russian woman on MI5’s list of KGB seducers, had also been issued to warn somebody else of more value to the KGB what might happen to him if he failed to remain in line. MI5 believes that person was probably Driberg.

  It would have been no more than just if Driberg had been betrayed, for the overall verdict on him – in journalism, politics and intelligence – is that, eventually, he betrayed everybody. His deceitful behaviour over so many years hardly justified Michael Foot’s post mortem tribute that ‘he never budged from his socialist convictions’.

  Another politician whose activities in the intelligence world were vaguely known but surrounded with doubt was Henry Kerby, the Conservative MP for Arundel. It can now be stated with authority that Kerby served for many years as an official agent of MI5, submitting most valuable reports and performing other functions bordering on espionage which, being of a technical nature and still usable, must remain secret.

  After the Macmillan ruling, MI5 was supposed to tell the Prime Minister of any MPs giving intelligence assistance, but an exception was made in Kerby’s case because of his unique usefulness. As he had been born in Russia and spoke the language fluently, he was occasionally used as an interpreter and so gained access to Soviet ministers and other officials. He put these contacts to good use on behalf of the intelligence authorities during his visits to the Soviet Union where, as he put it, he was given ‘the red carpet treatment’. This was not without its dangers because, as happened with Greville Wynne, he could have been seized and put on trial, had it suited the Russians to do so.

  Kerby, a large man with a bald, cannonball head and amusing, rubbery features, entered MI5 service through his friendship with ‘Klop’ Ustinov, the father of Peter Ustinov. Klop was a regular MI5 agent, and he and Kerby met through joint friendship with Lord Vansittart, head of the Foreign Office.

  In the early part of the Second World War, Ustinov and Kerby were involved in running an aristocratic young German called Baron Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who was in the German embassy in Holland. From 1935 to 1939 Putlitz passed secret information both to the British and the Russians, being at heart really a Soviet agent but prepared to do anything against the Nazis. Through these connections, he also became friendly with Burgess and Blunt, with whom he shared interests.

  It was through Putlitz that Winston Churchill, when outside the government, obtained his accurate information about the true strength of the Luftwaffe, which information he used to attack Neville Chamberlain in Parliament.

  Putlitz’s cover was blown early in 1940, almost certainly as a result of a deliberate leak by the Russians, trying to improve their intelligence interchange with the Abwehr during the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Klop Ustinov managed to extricate him to Britain, where he was put in the care of Anthony Blunt. He remained in Britain through the war, and, as he had hailed from East Germany and was pro-Soviet, he returned there. In his interrogation by MI5, Blunt recalled how he, personally, had taken him to a checkpoint on the East–West frontier and handed him over.

  During Kerby’s numerous visits to the Russian embassy, where he was always an honoured guest, as I witnessed myself, he talent-spotted for MI5 regarding Russians who might be induced to defect. He seemed to be friendly with so many Russians that there were some fears inside MI5 that he might be operating as a double, but the consensus among those officers who worked with him is that he was entirely loyal, and, while having to make overtures to Russians to preserve his appearances as a go-between on East–West trade, he would do anything to undermine the Soviet system.

  Kerby was convinced that Philby was a Soviet spy and the Third Man soon after the Maclean–Burgess defection. As Philby records in My Silent War, Kerby approached him using his alleged hatred of the Foreign Office as a means of currying his friendship, for which the spy did not fall.

  I became suspicious of Kerby, who was a friend, after he had obviously induced a Russian diplomat, who was also a senior KGB officer, to pay attention to me. This man, Anatoli Strelnikov, eventually offered me money to work for Russia, and, as I was in touch with an MI5 officer throughout the liaison, I naturally reported Kerby’s part in bringing us together. I was told to forget Kerby’s involvement and assumed that no action would be taken against him because he was an MP. Recently, I have discovered that he was working under MI5 instructions, after he had reported I had complained to him about never being asked to the Soviet embassy.

  Concerned about the extramural activities of Strelnikov, MI5 wanted to get rid of him, and I was to be the stalking horse, though I did not know it. MI5 was confident that within a few weeks Strelnikov would proposition me and paid me the compliment of believing that I would immediately report him, which I did. The ploy failed, as I have already recorded, only because my editor declined to report the events to the Foreign Office, which might have been induced by MI5 to expel Strelnikov.

  As I have reported at length in my book Inside Story, Kerby was undoubtedly acting as a spy for Harold Wilson and the Labour Party inside the Conservative Party. He volunteered this service and sent a shoal of letters, many of which I have seen, to Wilson and Wigg, giving details of private Tory meetings, plans and gossip. Whether this had anything to do with MI5, I have been unable to discover. I have also been unable to find any security official who will admit that he knew anything about it. There is strong evidence that Kerby may have been motivated by frustration at being unrecognised by the award of any honour from his own side and was seeking to secure one from Wilson.

  MI5 had been forced to drop Kerby as an official agent after Wilson called his new director general, Martin Furnival Jones, to Downing Street in 1966 and asked, ‘Are you running any MPs as agents?’ Furnival Jones, who knew about Kerby, stalled by answering, ‘If we are, I will stop it.’

  When Kerby was told he would have to be dropped, he was extremely disappointed, for he had regarded his work for intelligence and security as being a patriotic service he was proud to perform. He also enjoyed it.

  Soon after Wilson first became Prime Minister in 1964, he decreed that MPs were to be immune from investigation by MI5 without his specific permission, as I have recorded. He also told MI5 that he would not accept the evidence of defectors as a basis for investigation. Since defectors are the main source of prima facie evidence, these rulings were tantamount to the granting of immunity to all elected politicians and peers, a situation that to many in the security world is undemocratic, to say the least.

  Though several Members of Parliament, including former Labour ministers, have been named as Soviet bloc agents by defectors, the only one to be questioned was John Stonehouse, and this was done only briefly in the presence of Harold Wilson. Stonehouse, who had served in the Aviation Ministry and as postmaster general, was the former minister who staged a fake suicide from Miami Beach in 1974 and turned up under an assumed name in Australia, only to be exposed and arrested there, being eventually convicted for fraud. MI5’s limited interview with Stonehouse, at which Wilson insisted on being present, produced no further evidence and allowed Wilson to make a statement in Parliament that effectively cleared his former minister of treachery.

>   I have spoken with Stonehouse about this episode since his release from prison, after his conviction over financial dealings. He agreed that the Czechs would certainly have liked to recruit him as an agent but insisted that there was no way in which they could ever have succeeded.

  Nevertheless, MI5 felt cheated by being forbidden to interrogate Stonehouse about the contacts he admitted having made with the Czechs in line of ministerial duty because one of the men who tried to ingratiate himself with Stonehouse was a senior intelligence agent. Once again I was used, without my full knowledge, as a hopeful means of securing publicity about the situation. I was told by a former MI5 officer that a Czech defector, Frantisek August, who had made allegations against Stonehouse to a Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, would be visiting Britain secretly. It was suggested that I should find him and induce him to talk. I did my best but failed to track him down, though a question to the Home Secretary in Parliament confirmed that he had been granted a visa to enter the country. For years I wondered why I had been given this interesting tip. Now I know the reason – MI5 wanted to stir up the Stonehouse issue.

  Following the defection of August and of his Czech colleague, Josef Frolik, in 1969, information impugning the loyalty of several Labour MPs was laid with MI5, and their identities were established but none could be interrogated. One of them, who was named by Frolik, has since progressed prodigiously in the Labour hierarchy. Frolik reported that the politician concerned was under the control of the KGB, but he was asked, on one occasion, to speak to him at a function and make some trivial-sounding remark that was, in fact, a code phrase. The Czech said that he had been told that the politician would reply with another trite but specific statement, which would be an acknowledgement that he had received the message and understood it. Frolik claimed that the operation had gone exactly as planned.