Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences

by Chapman. Pincher

  Cairncross recalled how his Glaswegian accent was of some concern to ‘Otto’, who felt that he needed to improve his diction if he was ever to get into the top echelons of Whitehall. ‘Otto’ also advised him against marrying a ‘bourgeois’ wife because he had already lost a very promising agent, whom he had recruited at Cambridge, through marriage to a woman too ‘bourgeois’ to condone his spying for Russia. (MI5 is confident that it knows the identity of this short-time agent, who is now a life-peer.)

  Acting on ‘Otto’s’ instructions, Cairncross competed for entry to the Foreign Office, passed top of his list and began work there in the German department, where Donald Maclean was also then located. Cairncross remained in the Foreign Office for two years, and he admitted that, after ‘Otto’ had been recalled to Moscow in September 1938, he handed his documentary material to Burgess, who passed it to Litzi Philby, Kim Philby’s estranged Austrian wife, who was then working in London as a full-time Soviet agent.

  Litzi had been a militant communist, divorced and living with her parents in Vienna, where Philby had married her in 1934. He brought her to London soon afterward, and so superficial was the checking of entrants into the secret service that nobody in authority knew that Philby was married to a Russian spy until 1946, when he needed a divorce. Even then, no effective notice was taken of the fact.

  In 1938, at the suggestion of his Soviet controllers, Cairncross applied for transfer to the Treasury. This is believed to have been preferred by the Russians because Maclean was already covering for them in the Foreign Office.

  Cairncross admitted that in his early days he had been given money by the Russians but only in small amounts as expenses. This included the purchase price of a cheap motorcar to facilitate contacts with Soviet controllers outside London.

  In 1942, after he had given Burgess the notes that ten years later were to betray him to a minor extent, he managed, because of his fluency in German, to get himself onto the staff of the most secret establishment involved in the war effort. This was the so-called Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, famous for its cracking of the German enigma-machine codes by the superbly ingenious processes known by the codename ‘Ultra’.

  He worked there as an ‘editor’ dealing with air intelligence. He described how he used to visit London at weekends and pass ‘Ultra’ secret documents to his Soviet controller, who, at that stage, was ‘Henry’ – Anatoli Gorski. One batch, which he remembered with some pride, concerned details of the strength and dispositions of the Luftwaffe before the Battle of Kursk, an important turning point for the Russians. Cairncross received a commendation from Moscow for that effort, while ‘Henry’ was eventually awarded two Orders of Lenin for his espionage efforts in Britain. Later, a ‘man of military bearing’ took him over.

  Cairncross also told his interrogators how, on another occasion, he had supplied information from Ultra sources that enabled the Russians to destroy hundreds of German aircraft on the ground. Sir Winston Churchill called the people at Bletchley ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’. In fact, Cairncross cackled all the time – directly to the Russians.

  With some force, Cairncross argued that he had only been assisting an ally and had therefore indirectly helped to defeat the common enemy, but, in fact, his behaviour was reprehensible in the extreme. The Russians were being given relevant information they needed by an official London–Moscow route, as I have described, but only after it had been dressed up to make it look as though it had been obtained from some other more conventional source.

  The need to hide the truth that Bletchley Park was cracking the German codes day by day was paramount for the success of the eventual Allied invasion of Europe. Cairncross’s treachery meant that the Russians knew the true source, and, had this leaked to the Germans, he could have been the most damaging spy of the war. There were German spies in Russia who might have got hold of it, and it has been established that the KGB was in close touch with senior German intelligence and security officers who were taking out personal insurance against the possibility of a Nazi defeat. The defector Goleniewski revealed how one of these was Heinrich Muller, a notorious Gestapo chief. So it was not impossible that, at some stage, the Russians might have leaked the ‘Ultra’ secret deliberately to hold up the British–American advance while they overran more of Europe.

  In 1944, Cairncross moved from Bletchley, then part of the secret service, to secret service Headquarters in London. The KGB did not object because they probably had other sources there, as records of deciphered Russian radio traffic suggest. I have talked to several of his former colleagues who remember him well. At first, he worked in German counter-intelligence, then switched to Yugoslav affairs, one of his field officers being Klugman, who was then based at Bari in Italy. Cairncross admitted that he continued to spy there so that the Russians secured a direct reading of the Allied plans concerning the future of Yugoslavia, a matter of great political significance to Moscow.

  Cairncross remained in the secret service until the end of the war and then returned to the Treasury, where, colleagues recall, he was known as ‘Butch’ in spite of his slight build, or because of it. He never rose to eminence there but had excellent access to high policy documents and assessments of the UK economy, which, he admitted, he continued to hand over to the Russians.

  In September 1945, with the war at an end, Cairncross, who until then had been meeting with his Soviet controller twice a week, was reduced to meeting once a month – as were Blunt and Burgess – because he did not have so much material to transmit. He remained in touch with the KGB and at the time of the Maclean and Burgess defection in 1951 was called to an emergency meeting with his controller in a wood in Surrey. It was decided that he was unlikely to become suspect and continued to spy actively from inside the Treasury until early in 1952, when he was challenged about the papers found in Burgess’s abandoned flat.

  When he admitted the authorship of the papers but strenuously denied he had been any kind of agent, he was allowed to resign and move to Rome because that was all that MI5 knew about him then. He took care not to return to England because of his fear that more information about him may have come to light. Though the war was over, what he had done during it had been a capital offence, as was later pointed out to him by his interrogators. Cairncross said that the KGB had lost interest in him once he had left London, and that is believed to be true.

  Cairncross was not granted immunity either from prosecution or publicity. On the contrary, he was told that if ever he came under British jurisdiction he would be prosecuted, which was a sure way of preventing his return to Britain. Offences against the Official Secrets Act are not extraditable.

  His information about the part played in his recruitment to espionage by James Klugman, then a senior official of the British Communist Party, was the first hard evidence of Klugman’s treachery. So MI5 decided to use Cairncross to try to break Klugman into making a confession, which might uncover other spies. Cairncross was told that he could return for a limited visit to England without fear of prosecution if he agreed to help.

  Acting on MI5’s instructions, Cairncross saw Klugman and, with some courage, threatened to expose him, pointing out the damage it would do to the Communist Party. He promised to keep quiet if Klugman would cooperate with MI5, but Klugman refused to do anything of the kind, and the attempt came to nothing. Klugman, who was a committed Stalinist, did all he could to undermine his own country and promote the Soviet Union until his timely death in 1977.

  In the course of his long interrogations, both in Rome and in London, Cairncross identified several other Britons who had served the KGB. These included a senior civil servant who had also been recruited at Cambridge. He refused to be interviewed by security men but was nevertheless removed from access to secret information. This did not prevent his further promotion in the civil service or the award of an important honour. At the time of writing, he still has an influential political positi
on.

  Another Cambridge communist, who, according to Cairncross, had operated inside the Treasury and in the Cabinet Office, also refused to be interviewed. He, too, was later promoted in the civil service and is currently a director of a famous company.

  Cairncross’s espionage activities for the Russians covered fifteen years, much of this time from positions providing access to highly secret intelligence. He must, therefore, be rated as an extremely damaging spy, far removed from the ‘small fry’ status previously awarded to him. But was he the Fifth Man of the Ring of Five? He had all the obvious attributes – recruited at Cambridge, a friend of Burgess and Blunt with early knowledge that Philby and Maclean were also Soviet agents. He was controlled by ‘Otto’ and then by ‘Henry’, who were both assigned to the Ring of Five. Like the other four, he was an eminently successful and damaging spy.

  Evidence provided by defectors has, however, indicated that, while the Fifth Man of the original ring became a civil servant, he was also a scientist, which would rule Cairncross out. Furthermore, the security authorities do not think that Blunt would have been so forthcoming about the real Fifth Man as he was about Cairncross. Instead, he tried to shield the scientist who is believed to have been a member of the Ring of Five, as I shall now record.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE REAL FIFTH MAN?

  THE PERSON BELIEVED by the security authorities to have been the Fifth Man of the Ring of Five and who, being still alive, can shelter behind the libel laws, was traced by an inadvertent lead given by Blunt. After he had categorically denied knowing the identity of any other members of the ring beyond his close friends, Maclean, Burgess and Philby, Blunt had remarked, ‘If you are looking for other people who might have been recruited by Burgess, then pay attention to those he praised lavishly, because he always tried to recruit them.’

  The interrogators took Blunt at his word and compiled a list of people whom, according to the recollections of friends, Burgess had praised. One of them proved to be a defence scientist in a most sensitive position in the government service. This person is not Dr Basil Mann, the atomic scientist living in the United States and recently named as the Fifth Man, and against whom I am assured there is no evidence. The man in question has no connection with atomic science.

  So long as Hollis remained bead of MI5, he refused to allow the Blunt case officers to interview the scientist. Soon after he had retired, in 1965, however, inquiries involving telephone tapping and surveillance revealed that the scientist and his family – though associated with Blunt and Burgess, he was not a homosexual – were still secret communists. It was also discovered that MI5 had been warned about the man ten years previously, but nothing had been done.

  As the man was about to be given special clearance to visit secret American installations, he had to be pulled in sooner than the authorities would have liked, for an interrogation that lasted six weeks.

  He admitted that he was still a committed communist and had breached the civil service security rules by failing to admit it on his positive vetting form. He admitted meeting ‘Otto’, the early Russian controller of the Ring of Five, while he himself had been at Cambridge. He agreed that he had ceased to be an overt communist and had made a pretence of seeming to be right wing in order to secure a post in a government defence establishment.

  The scientist insisted that he had never given any secret information to the Russians, but, when confronted with evidence, he admitted that he did occasionally meet Russians from the Soviet embassy and appreciated that they might be intelligence officers. Again, he admitted that he had breached security regulations in failing to report such contacts even if they had been innocent.

  He was then shown a spread of photographs of Soviet bloc intelligence officers and picked out pictures of two whom he had met. One was Yuri Modin, Blunt’s controller for a time and the man who had supervised the defection of Burgess and Maclean. The other was Sergei Kondrashev, a senior KGB officer who had served in Britain. It seemed unlikely that he would have met two such active spy masters on purely social terms, and what followed made it even more improbable.

  Four years previously, in 1962, the important KGB defector Anatoli Golitsin had reported on Kondrashev, saying that he had been specially trained to control two very important spies in Britain. One proved to be George Blake, the spy inside the secret service (see Chapter 19), while the other, who had not then been detected, was known to be in defence work. Golitsin had recalled how this communist scientist had quarrelled with Kondrashev, whom he considered to be ‘too bourgeois’ for a Russian communist.

  When the suspect Fifth Man saw Kondrashev’s photograph, he exclaimed, ‘I hated the man. He was so bourgeois. You know – he wore blazers and had a pet poodle!’ Such are the chance remarks that can mean so much to an alert counter-espionage interrogator who has done his ‘homework’.

  As a last-ditch effort to induce the suspect to talk, there was a confrontation between him and Blunt in Brown’s Hotel. The interrogators provided plenty of drinks – gin for Blunt, sherry for the suspect and watered whiskey for themselves. During the long session, which lasted until after midnight, they talked about the Russian intelligence officer Yuri Modin, and among the slips the suspect made was to call him by his codename ‘Peter’, which he would have been unlikely to have known unless professionally involved with him.

  The suspect was the first to leave, whereupon Blunt, who had polished off a whole bottle of gin, remarked, ‘You have convinced me that he was one of us.’ He then recalled that after the 1951 ‘crisis’, when Philby had been very toughly interrogated by Helenus Milmo, Philby had told him, ‘They didn’t seem to know about my return to Cambridge after I got back from Austria. Thank God they didn’t!’ Blunt then suggested that Philby might well have been referring to the recruitment of the Fifth Man. Burgess had accomplished that recruitment, but Philby had been involved in it in some way. What was known about the suspect’s life and activities at Cambridge fitted the date of Philby’s return.

  As the suspect had been positively vetted three times, at intervals, and each time had failed to admit that he had been a communist, he knew that his career was blighted. He also knew that he would be barred from further access to secrets and was not allowed to visit the American installation, the CIA being given the reason.

  To induce him to confess, he was offered the chance of immunity from prosecution if he would cooperate, but he ignored the proposal as though he had not heard it, perhaps reserving it in his mind in case he might, one day, be faced with harder evidence.

  The MI5 chiefs, then headed by Sir Martin Furnival Jones, met with civil service representatives to decide what other action should be taken against the suspect. As he was quite close to retirement – and perhaps to cover up the suspicion, which could have serious consequences for the Anglo–American exchange of defence secrets – he was transferred to non-secret work and later retired on full pension.

  CHAPTER 18

  A HAUL OF SUSPECTS

  ANOTHER PROMINENT ENGLISHMAN, knighted for various services, was followed up after Blunt’s advice that Burgess tried to recruit anyone he had praised highly. He admitted that Burgess had told him that he was a Comintern agent and had tried to recruit him but claimed that not only had he declined but had tried to talk his friend out of his dangerous treachery.

  The man admitted that he knew that his plea had failed and that he had never reported on Burgess even when he himself had achieved an important position in the Foreign Office after the war. He had no reasonable explanation of this dereliction of duty, and MI5 still list him as a possible former agent.

  As a result of another lead given by Anthony Blunt, MI5 became highly suspicious of Bernard Floud, then Labour MP for Acton and previously labour relations adviser to the independent television companies. Nothing could be done about him because soon after Harold Wilson became Prime Minister in October 1964 he introduced new rules making all MPs and peers immune to investigation by the security autho
rities without his special permission.

  It has long been standard practice that, when a new Prime Minister takes office, the security service is asked for the names of any MPs of his party about whom he might have need to be concerned. While no reasons are given with the list, Wilson apparently thought that some of the names given to him were so unlikely that MI5 had been overdoing its inquiries or might do so in the future. Senior MI5 officers also believed that Wilson was partly motivated by complaints he had received from some of his MPs who believed that they were under surveillance – as some of them were.

  Whatever his reasons, he decreed that Members of Parliament – MPs and peers – were to be immune from surveillance of any kind, such as telephone tapping, the opening of letters, the examination of bank accounts or shadowing. Exceptions would be made only with his personal permission, and MI5 was told that this was unlikely to be given on the evidence of defectors alone.

  Whether Blunt counted as a ‘defector’ was a moot point, and there was the additional problem that Wilson had not been told about Blunt, who was still under active interrogation. So no move was made against Floud.

  In 1967, however, Wilson wanted to make Floud a junior minister. It is also standard practice that, if a Prime Minister wishes to give office to an MP who is on his list of MI5 suspects and might require access to secret information in the prospective post, he must specifically ask MI5 if it has anything to tell him to that MP’s detriment.

  It was known that Floud, who had been an open communist at Oxford University, had been recruited to the Soviet cause there by James Klugman, who operated there as well as at Cambridge. Floud, who retained his ideological sympathies with communism while serving in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, had in turn recruited others, including a woman who later managed to insinuate herself into a highly sensitive position in the Home Office. This woman had been interrogated and had named Floud as her recruiter.