Some documents from the 1930s having to do with the negotiations of British leaders with the highest leadership of Fascist Germany, including directly with Hitler, have been kept to this day in secret archives of the British Foreign Office. The British do not want the indiscreet peering at the proof of their policy of collusion with Hitler and spurring Germany on to its eastern campaign.83
FOUR
THE MAGNIFICENT FIVE
Among the select group of inter-war heroes of foreign intelligence whose portraits hang today on the walls of the SVR’s Memory Room at Yasenevo is the Austrian Jew Arnold Deutsch, probably the most talented of all the Great Illegals. According to an SVR official eulogy, the portrait immediately “attracts the visitor’s attention” to “its intelligent, penetrating eyes, and strong-willed countenance.” Deutsch’s role as an illegal was not publicly acknowledged by the KGB until 1990.1 Even now, some aspects of his career are considered unsuitable for publication in Moscow.
Deutsch’s academic career was one of the most brilliant in the history of Soviet intelligence. In July 1928, two months after his twenty-fourth birthday and less than five years after entering Vienna University as an undergraduate, he was awarded the degree of PhD with distinction. Though his thesis had been on chemistry, Deutsch had also become deeply immersed in philosophy and psychology. His description of himself in university documents throughout his student years as an observant Jew (mosaisch)2 was probably intended to conceal his membership of the Communist Party. Deutsch’s religious faith had been replaced by an ardent commitment to the Communist International’s vision of a new world order which would free the human race from exploitation and alienation. The revolutionary myth image of the world’s first worker-peasant state blinded both Deutsch and the ideological agents he later recruited to the increasingly brutal reality of Stalin’s Russia. Immediately after leaving Vienna University, Deutsch began secret work as a courier for OMS, Comintern’s international liaison department, traveling to Romania, Greece, Palestine and Syria. His Austrian wife, Josefine, whom he married in 1929, was also recruited by OMS.3
Deutsch’s vision of a new world order included sexual as well as political liberation. At about the time he began covert work for Comintern, he became publicly involved in the “sex-pol” (sexual politics) movement, founded by the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, which opened clinics to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers.4 At this stage of his career, Reich was engaged in an ambitious attempt to integrate Freudianism with Marxism and in the early stages of an eccentric research program on human sexual behavior which later earned him an undeserved reputation as “the prophet of the better orgasm.”5 Deutsch enthusiastically embraced Reich’s teaching that political and sexual repression were different sides of the same coin and together paved the way for fascism. He ran the Munster Verlag in Vienna which published Reich’s work and other “sex-pol” literature.6 Though the Viennese police were probably unaware of Deutsch’s secret work for OMS, its anti-pornography section took a keen interest in his involvement with the “sex-pol” movement.7
Remarkably, Deutsch combined, at least for a few years, his role as an open disciple of Reich with secret work as a Soviet agent. In 1932 he was transferred from OMS to the INO, and trained in Moscow as an OGPU illegal with the alias “Stefan Lange” and the codename STEFAN. (Later, he also used the codename OTTO.) His first posting was in France, where he established secret crossing points on the Belgian, Dutch and German borders, and made preparations to install radio equipment on French fishing boats to be used for OGPU communications in times of war.8 Deutsch owed his posthumous promotion to the ranks of KGB immortals to his second posting in England.
The rules protecting the identities and legends of illegals in the mid-1930s were far less rigid and elaborate than they were to become later. Early in 1934 Deutsch traveled to London under his real name, giving his profession as “university lecturer” and using his academic credentials to mix in university circles. After living in temporary accommodation, he moved to a flat in Lawn Road, Hampstead, the heartland of London’s radical intelligentsia. The “Lawn Road Flats,” as they were then known, were the first “deck-access” apartments with external walkways to be built in England (a type of construction later imitated in countless blocks of council flats) and, at the time, were probably Hampstead’s most avant-garde building. Deutsch moved into number 7, next to a flat owned by the celebrated crime novelist Agatha Christie, then writing Murder on the Orient Express. Though it is tempting to imagine Deutsch and Christie discussing the plot of her latest novel, they may never have met. Christie lived elsewhere and probably visited Lawn Road rarely, if at all, in the mid-1930s. Deutsch, in any case, is likely to have kept a low profile. While the front doors of most flats were visible from the street, Deutsch’s was concealed by a stairwell which made it possible for him and his visitors to enter and leave unobserved.9 Deutsch strengthened his academic cover by taking a postgraduate course in psychology at London University and possibly by part-time teaching.10 In 1935 he was joined by his wife, who had been trained in Moscow as a radio operator.11
KGB files credit Deutsch during his British posting with the recruitment of twenty agents and contact with a total of twenty-nine.12 By far the most celebrated of these agents were a group of five young Cambridge graduates, who by the Second World War were known in the Centre as “The Five”: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. After the release of the enormously popular Western The Magnificent Seven in 1960, they were often referred to as the “Magnificent Five.” The key to Deutsch’s success was his new strategy of recruitment, approved by the Centre, based on the cultivation of young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power. As Deutsch wrote to the Centre:
Given that the Communist movement in these universities is on a mass scale and that there is a constant turnover of students, it follows that individual Communists whom we pluck out of the Party remain will pass unnoticed, both by the Party itself and by the outside world. People forget about them. And if at some time they do remember that they were once Communists, this will be put down to a passing fancy of youth, especially as those concerned are scions of the bourgeoisie. It is up to us to give the individual [recruit] a new [non-Communist] political personality.13
Since the universities of Oxford and Cambridge provided a disproportionate number of Whitehall’s highest fliers, it was plainly logical to target Oxbridge rather than the red brick universities elsewhere. The fact that the new recruitment was based chiefly on Cambridge rather than Oxford was due largely to chance: the fact that the first potential recruit to come to Deutsch’s attention, Kim Philby, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of the other members of the “Magnificent Five,” all recruited as a direct or indirect consequence of Philby’s own recruitment, three (Blunt, Burgess and Cairncross) also came from Trinity College and the fourth (Maclean) from the neighboring Trinity Hall.14
Deutsch’s recruitment strategy was to prove a spectacular success. By the early years of the Second World War all of the Five were to succeed in penetrating either the Foreign Office or the intelligence community. The volume of high-grade intelligence which they supplied was to become so large that Moscow sometimes had difficulty coping with it.
AFTER GRADUATING FROM Cambridge in June 1933 with the conviction that “my life must be devoted to Communism,” Philby spent most of the next year in Vienna working for the MOPR (the Russian acronym of the International Workers Relief Organization) and acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party.15 While in Vienna he met and married a young Communist divorcee, Litzi Friedman, after a brief but passionate love affair which included his first experience of making love in the snow (“actually quite warm, once you got used to it,” he later recalled).16 The first to identify Philby’s potential as a Soviet agent—and probably to draw him to the attention of Arnold Deutsch—wa
s Litzi’s friend Edith Suschitsky, who was herself recruited by Deutsch and given the unimaginative codename EDITH.17
In May 1934 Kim and Litzi Philby returned to London, arriving some weeks after Deutsch. Several months earlier Edith Suschitsky had also taken up residence in London, marrying another recruit of Deutsch’s, an English doctor named Alex Tudor Hart. The newly married couple were given the joint codename STRELA (“Arrow”).18 In June 1934 Edith Tudor Hart took Philby to his first meeting with Deutsch on a bench in Regent’s Park, London. According to a later memoir written by Philby for the KGB, Deutsch instructed him, “We need people who could penetrate into the bourgeois institutions. Penetrate them for us!”19 At this early stage, however, Deutsch did not tell Philby that he was embarking on a career as a Soviet agent. Instead, he gave him the initial impression that he was joining Comintern’s underground war against international fascism. Philby’s immediate task, Deutsch told him, was to break all visible contact with the Communist Party and to try to win the confidence of British pro-German and pro-fascist circles.20 As was not uncommon at this period, Philby’s first codename, given him immediately after his meeting with Deutsch, had two versions: SÖHNCHEN in German or SYNOK in Russian—both roughly equivalent to “Sonny” in English.21
Half a century later, Philby still remembered his first meeting with the man he knew as “Otto” as “amazing”:
He was a marvelous man. Simply marvelous. I felt that immediately. And [the feeling] never left me… The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment… And he had a marvelous sense of humor.22
It is difficult to imagine any other controller in the entire history of the KGB as ideally suited as Deutsch to the Cambridge Five. Though four of the Five graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors,23 Deutsch’s academic career was even more brilliant than theirs, his understanding of human character more profound and his experience of life much broader. He combined a charismatic personality and deep psychological insight with visionary faith in the future of a human race freed from the exploitation and alienation of the capitalist system. His message of liberation had all the greater appeal to the Cambridge Five because it had a sexual as well as a political dimension. All the Five were rebels against the strict sexual mores as well as the antiquated class system of inter-war Britain. Burgess and Blunt were homosexuals, Maclean a bisexual and Philby a heterosexual athlete. Cairncross, a committed heterosexual, later wrote a history of polygamy which concluded with a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Women will always prefer a 10 percent share of a first-rate man to sole ownership of a mediocre man.”24 Cairncross plainly considered himself first-rate rather than mediocre. Graham Greene was charmed by Cairncross’s book. “Here at last,” he wrote to Cairncross, “is a book which will appeal strongly to all polygamists.”25
During almost four years as an illegal controlling British agents, Deutsch served under three illegal residents, each of whom operated under a variety of aliases: Ignati Reif, codenamed MARR; Aleksandr Orlov, codenamed SCHWED (“Swede”); and Teodor Maly, successively codenamed PAUL, THEO and MANN. By 1938 all three were to become victims of the Terror. Reif and Maly were shot for imaginary crimes. Orlov defected just in time to North America, securing his survival by threatening to arrange for the revelation of all he knew about Soviet espionage should he be pursued by an NKVD assassination squad.26 Somewhat misleadingly, a KGB/SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov published in 1993 claimed that he was “the mastermind” responsible for the recruitment of the Cambridge agents.27 There are probably two reasons for this exaggeration. The first is hierarchical. Within the Soviet nomenklatura senior bureaucrats commonly claimed, and were accorded, the credit for their subordinates’ successes. The claim that Orlov, the most senior intelligence officer involved in British operations in the 1930s, “recruited” Philby is a characteristic example of this common phenomenon.28 But there are also more contemporary reasons for the inflation of Orlov’s historical importance. It suits the SVR, which sees itself as the inheritor of the finest traditions of the KGB First Chief Directorate, to seek to demonstrate the foolishness of Western intelligence and security services by claiming that they failed for over thirty years to notice that the leading recruiter of the Cambridge Five and other agents was living under their noses in the United States. For several years before his death in 1973, the KGB tried to persuade Orlov to return to a comfortable flat and generous pension in Russia, where he would doubtless have been portrayed for propaganda purposes as a man who, despite being forced to flee from Stalin’s Terror, had—like Philby—“kept faith with Lenin’s Revolution” and used his superior intelligence training to take in Western intelligence agencies for many years.29
In reality, Orlov spent only just over a year in London—ten days in July 1934, followed by the period from September 1934 to October 1935.30 During that period Deutsch, who was subordinate in rank to Orlov, had to seek his approval for his intelligence operations. On occasion Orlov took the initiative in giving instructions to Deutsch. But the files noted by Mitrokhin make clear that the grand strategy which led to the targeting of Philby and other young Cambridge high-fliers was devised not by Orlov but by Deutsch.31 And, as Philby himself acknowledged, no other controller equaled Deutsch’s tactical skill in implementing that strategy.
Philby’s first major service to Soviet intelligence was to direct Deutsch to two other potential Cambridge recruits, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.32 If not already a committed Communist by the time he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1931, Donald Maclean became one during his first year. As the handsome, academically gifted son of a former Liberal cabinet minister, Maclean must have seemed to Deutsch an almost ideal candidate to penetrate the corridors of power. On his graduation with first-class honors in modern languages in June 1934, however, Maclean showed no immediate sign of wanting a career in Whitehall. His ambition was either to teach English in the Soviet Union or to stay at Cambridge to work for a PhD. In the course of the summer he changed his mind, telling his mother that he intended to prepare for the Foreign Office entrance examinations in the following year.33 That change of heart reflected the influence of Deutsch. The first approach to Maclean was made through Philby in August 1934. Deutsch reported that Philby had been instructed to meet Maclean, discuss his job prospects and contacts and ask him to open contact with the Communist Party and begin work for the NKVD. Maclean agreed. For the time being, however, the Centre refused to sanction meetings between Deutsch and Maclean, and contact with him for the next two months was maintained through Philby. Maclean’s first codename, like Philby’s, had two versions: WAISE in German, SIROTA in Russian—both meaning “Orphan” (an allusion to the death of his father two years earlier).34
For some months Guy Burgess, then in his second year as a history research student at Trinity College preparing a thesis he was never to complete, had been enthused by the idea of conducting an underground war against fascism on behalf of the Communist International. Ironically, in view of the fact that he was soon to become one of the Magnificent Five, he seems to have been inspired by the example of the Fünfergruppen, the secret “groups of five” being formed by German Communists to organize opposition to Hitler. Maclean was, very probably, among the Communist friends with whom he discussed the (in reality rather unsuccessful) German groups of five.35 When Maclean admitted, against his instructions, that he had been asked to engage in secret work,36 Burgess was desperate for an invitation to join him.
In December 1934 Maclean arranged a first meeting between Deutsch and Burgess. 37 Deutsch already knew that Burgess was one of the most flamboyant figures in Cambridge: a brilliant, gregarious conversationalist equally at home with the teetotal intellectual discussions of the Apostles, the socially exclusive and heavy-drinking Pitt Club and the irreverent satirical revues of the Footlights. He made no secret either of his Communist sympathies or of his enjoyment of the then ill
egal pleasures of homosexual “rough trade” with young working-class men. A more doctrinaire and less imaginative controller than Deutsch might well have concluded that the outrageous Burgess would be a liability rather than an asset. But Deutsch may well have sensed that Burgess’s very outrageousness would give him good, if unconventional, cover for his work as a secret agent. No existing stereotype of a Soviet spy remotely resembled Burgess.38 When invited to join the Comintern’s underground struggle against fascism, Burgess told Deutsch that he was “honored and ready to sacrifice everything for the cause.” His codename MÄDCHEN39 (“Little Girl,” by contrast with Philby’s codename “Sonny”) was an obvious reference to his homosexuality.
Deutsch initially told both Maclean and Burgess, like Philby, that their first task was to distance themselves from the left and conform to the ideas of the establishment in order to penetrate it successfully.40 Maclean successfully persuaded his mother, Lady Maclean, that he had “rather gone off” his undergraduate flirtation with Communism. In August 1935 he passed the Foreign Office exams with flying colors. When asked about his “Communist views” at Cambridge, Maclean decided to “brazen it out”:
“Yes,” I said, “I did have such views—and I haven’t entirely shaken them off.” I think they must have liked my honesty because they nodded, looked at each other and smiled. Then the chairman said: “Thank you, that will be all, Mr. Maclean.”41
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