The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Despite the accuracy of Krivitsky’s intelligence on Captain King, Harker correctly concluded after investigation that, at least as reported by Levine, Krivitsky’s information on the second Soviet agent was seriously garbled. He told the Foreign Office on 8 November: ‘We know the identity of the man who bought the aeroplanes for Spain, whom we believe not to be identical with the Scottish artist and idealist, who is a totally different person.’7 On 10 November Jane Archer (née Sissmore),8 the Security Service’s main Soviet expert, wrote to Vivian, ‘Personally, I am convinced from [Krivitsky’s] articles, and the scraps of information that Levine has obtained from Krivitsky and given to our Ambassador in Washington, that if we wish to get to the bottom of Soviet military espionage activities in this country, we must contact Krivitsky.’9 Harker agreed. He told the Foreign Office on 20 November, ‘It is imperative that Krivitsky should be seen as early as possible.’10 Next month Krivitsky accepted an invitation to visit Britain.

  By the time Krivitsky landed at Southampton in January 1940 under the alias ‘Mr Thomas’, he had begun to suspect that he was walking into a trap. He was welcomed by a Russian-speaking Security Service officer, Major Stephen Alley, who invited him to tea. Because of wartime shortages, there was no sugar and Alley offered him a saccharine tablet. As Guy Liddell noted afterwards, Krivitsky ‘sheered right off this, obviously thinking it was dope or poison’.11 To try to put him at his ease, Harker, Archer and Vivian began the questioning on 19 January 1940 not in a Whitehall office but in the relative comfort of his room at the Langham Hotel in Portland Place. The debriefing, however, began badly: ‘He obviously feared lest any admission from him of participation in Soviet espionage activities against the United Kingdom would lead to a “full examination” as understood by citizens of the U.S.S.R.’12 Krivitsky eventually admitted that he was aware of a Soviet intelligence network operating in Britain, but ‘was very anxious to point out that he himself was not responsible for the direction of activities against the U.K.’, and wanted ‘to know what action we would take on his information, as he was convinced that anything we did in the way of arrests, etc., would at once be attributed by the Soviet Government to his activities’. Harker and Vivian assured Krivitsky that he would not have to give evidence in court and that whatever he told them ‘would be treated as regards its source with absolute confidence’.13

  Thus reassured, Krivitsky began to talk about the first agent in the Foreign Office. It had already been decided that, as one of the tactics to try to persuade him to open up, an attempt would be made to impress him with how much his questioners already knew. He was told that British intelligence were ‘perfectly aware’ of the agent, that his name was King, and that he had already begun a ten-year prison sentence. As Harker observed, ‘This rather took the wind out of [Krivitsky’s] sails.’14 Thereafter, with Jane Archer taking the lead role in the questioning, Krivitsky began to open up. Liddell noted on 2 February: ‘Krivitsky is coming out of his shell and has told us quite a lot. He has as far as possible given us a detailed picture of the 4th Department [Soviet military intelligence] and the OGPU [NKVD].’15

  As a post-war report acknowledged, Krivitsky provided the Security Service ‘for the first time with an insight into the organisation, methods and influence of the Russian Intelligence Service’.16 Though Krivitsky was a military intelligence officer, from 1935 to 1937 he had been involved in NKVD as well as Fourth Department operations in Western Europe. During his four weeks’ debriefing, he identified over seventy Soviet intelligence personnel and agents operating abroad, most of them previously unknown to MI5.17 There were, however, limitations to his knowledge. Since all NKVD legal and illegal officers serving in Britain before Krivitsky’s defection in 1937 had been withdrawn, he was unable to provide any information on the current London residency. His information on illegals operating in Britain during the mid-1930s – among them the two main controllers of the Cambridge Five, Deutsch and Maly – was of mainly retrospective interest. The only British agent on whom he was precisely informed was Captain King. Though Krivitsky did not speak English and had never been stationed in Britain, he had, curiously, been chosen to run King in 1935 (in the event he did not do so) and briefed on the case before it was reassigned.18 He was unaware, however, that in 1937, during the paranoia of the Great Terror, the Centre had absurdly concluded that King had been betrayed to British intelligence by (the wholly innocent) Teodor Maly, and the NKVD had since made no contact with him.19

  With the exception of the King case, Krivitsky’s information on Soviet agents still operating in Britain was too muddled to make identification possible. Claims that the Security Service should have been able to identify Maclean and/or Philby after the debriefing are ill founded.20 Krivitsky was confused about both the background and the role of the second spy in the Foreign Office. Harker noted on 23 January that, according to Krivitsky, ‘there had been for some time a leakage of valuable information which emanated from what he described as the Council of State – but which we think must be the C.I.D. [Committee of Imperial Defence] Offices.’21 On 3 February, however:

  . . . Thomas [Krivitsky] suddenly said ‘Ah, I now remember this man must be in the Foreign Office’. He then told me a story . . . of how a third man was approached by a Dutchman from Holland, and offered to supply material from the Foreign Office. He says he now remembers that he refused to allow this man to be taken on because they already had two good sources in the Foreign Office and he thought to take on a doubtful third would imperil those two. The two agents in the Foreign Office were King and the Imperial Conference man, of that he seems now quite certain.22

  Krivitsky’s information about the second agent in the Foreign Office was inconsistent, not least in his confused references to the ‘Council of State’ and ‘Imperial Conference’. He no longer described the agent (correctly) as a Scotsman or (incorrectly) as ‘a well-known painter and perhaps a sculptor’ who had purchased planes for the Spanish Republicans. According to the final version of his shifting recollections:

  He is certain that the source was a young man, probably under thirty, an agent of Theodore Mally [sic], that he was recruited as a Soviet agent purely on ideological grounds, and that he took no money for [his] information . . . He was almost certainly educated at Eton and Oxford. Krivitsky cannot get it out of his head that the source is a ‘young aristocrat’,23 but agrees that he may have arrived at this conclusion because he thought it was only young men of the nobility who were educated at Eton. He believes the source to have been the secretary or son of one of the chiefs of the Foreign Office.24

  With the gift of hindsight, this now seems to have been a garbled description of Maclean, who had been educated at public school and Oxbridge (though at Gresham’s and Cambridge rather than Eton and Oxford), and was the son of a knight (though not an aristocrat) who had also been a cabinet minister (though not ‘one of the chiefs of the Foreign Office’). At the time, however, Krivitsky’s information could not have enabled the Security Service to identify Maclean. There were other young British diplomats who were a closer fit than Maclean – who really had been to Eton and Oxford, who did come from aristocratic families, and whose fathers were, or had been, senior Foreign Office officials.

  At one point, while talking about the Foreign Office agent, Krivitsky began to ‘harp on the suggestion that [the agent’s] name began with P’. It is possible that Krivitsky was confusing Maclean with Kim Philby. At another point in the debriefing, a clue provided by Krivitsky can be seen, again with the gift of hindsight, to refer to Philby. He recalled that the Foreign Office agent was ‘amongst the friends’ of another ‘English aristocrat who was to go to Spain to murder Franco’.25 By ‘aristocrat’, Krivitsky, who lacked a sophisticated understanding of the British class system, meant no more than of ‘good family’. He subsequently recalled that Franco’s intended assassin was also a journalist. According to the final report on Krivitsky’s debriefing:

  Early in 1937 the OGPU received orders from
Stalin to arrange the assassination of General Franco. Hardt [Maly] was instructed by the OGPU chief, Yezhov, to recruit an Englishman for the purpose. He did in fact contact and sent to Spain a young Englishman, a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi. Before the plan matured, Mally himself was recalled to Moscow and disappeared.26

  When Philby later saw this report, he recognized himself.27 In 1937, he had been entrusted by Maly with a mission to assassinate Franco (later abandoned) and had operated under journalistic cover. Even if the Security Service had had the resources in 1940 to follow up this and the many other imprecise leads provided by Krivitsky, however, it is unlikely that Philby would have been unmasked. Since the NKVD had at its disposal the trained assassins of Serebryansky’s Administration for Special Tasks, the Security Service would have found it difficult to credit that the inexperienced Philby could have been selected for the highest-profile foreign assassination it had yet attempted. Maly himself made clear to the Centre that he did not believe Philby was capable of carrying out the mission entrusted to him.28

  One name mentioned by Krivitsky proved too sensitive to include in the report on his debriefing. Jane Archer, who drew up the report, assured Valentine Vivian that she had left out all references to a current SIS agent, Jack Hooper. Krivitsky had claimed that, while working for SIS in the Netherlands, Hooper had shown Christiaan Pieck, a Dutch agent-runner working for Soviet intelligence, ‘a document purporting to incriminate him. Pieck was frightened of him from that time.’ According to Krivitsky, Hooper had subsequently asked Pieck to find him work with Soviet intelligence.29 Both Vivian and his successor as head of SIS Section V, Felix Cowgill, believed Hooper to be innocent and were thus anxious that he should not be incriminated in Archer’s report. Hooper had admitted to pre-war contact with both Soviet and German intelligence but had what Vivian and Cowgill regarded as a satisfactory explanation.30 After his admitted contact with Pieck, Hooper had provided intelligence which, as MI5 later acknowledged, ‘should have enabled us to identify J. H. King’, the Soviet agent run by Pieck in the Foreign Office Communications Department, well before the outbreak of war.31 When Hooper was recruited as an MI5 agent in 1941, Cowgill ‘said that, above everything, he is certain that he is absolutely loyal’.32 Hooper, it was later discovered, was in reality the only MI5 employee who had previously worked for both Soviet and German intelligence (as well as SIS).33

  Despite Krivitsky’s inability to provide clear leads during his debriefing to any current Soviet agents or intelligence personnel in Britain, he none the less transformed the Security Service’s understanding of the nature and extent of Soviet intelligence operations.34 As recently as January 1939 Kell had confidently declared that ‘[Soviet] activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion.’35 Once its eyes were opened by Krivitsky a year later, the Security Service was handicapped in investigating Soviet espionage by lack of resources. B Division (counterespionage) was wholly occupied with enemy (chiefly German) spies. Wartime Soviet counter-espionage, which was considered a much lower priority, was initially relegated to a single officer (F2c) in F Division (counter-subversion).36 The Service’s main handicap in countering Soviet penetration, however, was that, with the recruitment of Anthony Blunt in June 1940, it was itself penetrated.

  Blunt had been the only one of the Cambridge Five to attract the pre-war attention of the Security Service. After he joined what his brother Wilfrid called ‘left-wing pilgrims’ on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1935,37 Blunt’s name was discovered on the passenger list of the Russian M/V Sibier, which left London Bridge for Leningrad on 10 August, and was recorded again when he returned from Russia just over a month later. Though Blunt himself was not put under any form of surveillance, the HOW on Marx House in London revealed that on 15 March 1936 he volunteered to give a lecture to the Marx Memorial Library.38 After his recruitment by Arnold Deutsch early in 1937,39 he was more cautious, ‘trying to create the impression that I didn’t share left-wing views’ while simultaneously talentspotting left-wing students for the NKVD. His most successful recruit was a Communist student at Trinity College, Leo Long, who later became a wartime military intelligence officer and was run by Blunt as a sub-agent.40

  On the eve of war, after taking advice from the NKVD resident in London, Anatoli Gorsky, Blunt applied to join the Intelligence Corps.41 His first attempt was unsuccessful. Following a Security Service report on 29 August 1939 that it would be ‘inadvisable to employ him on Intelligence duties’ he was expelled from a training course at Minley Manor, near Aldershot.42 Blunt told Gorsky that there were two possible reasons for his expulsion: his past Communist activities or his homosexuality.43 A fellow of Trinity College later told the Security Service that ‘it was basically on the score of homosexuality that the College Council had turned down the suggestion that Blunt should be elected to a permanent Fellowship of the College.’44 Blunt’s expulsion from the Intelligence Corps training course, however, was due not to his indiscreet gay love life but to the MI5 record of his Communist associations before he left Trinity in 1937 to work as an art historian at the Warburg Institute. He told Gorsky that, with the help of a friend in Whitehall, he had talked his way back on to the training course by claiming that he was interested only in ‘the applications of Marxism to art history’ and did not hold Marxist ‘political views’.45 In June 1940 Blunt succeeded in moving from the Intelligence Corps to the Security Service. Though the contemporary record of Blunt’s recruitment does not survive, a later account concludes: ‘The exact circumstances in which he joined M.I.5 are obscure, but do not appear to be unusual or sinister.’46 Blunt’s Cambridge friend and contemporary Victor Rothschild, the Security Service counter-sabotage expert, introduced him to the head of B Division, Guy Liddell, who took to him and offered him a job in the St James’s Street office.47 Liddell seems to have been convinced by Blunt’s claim that his interest in Marxist theory did not extend to politics. Just over a decade later when Blunt first began to come under suspicion, Liddell still believed that, though ‘he had associated with a number of Communists [at Cambridge] and believed in the Marxist interpretation of history and art, . . . he had no sympathy with Marxist theories as applied by the Russians’. He was convinced that ‘Blunt had never been a Communist in the full political sense, even during his days at Cambridge.’48

  From the moment that he arrived in the Security Service, Blunt embarked on a remarkably successful charm offensive. Dick White later recalled:

  He made a general assault on key people to see that they liked him. I was interested in art and he always used to sit down next to me in the canteen and chat. And he betrayed us all. He was a very nice and civilised man and I enjoyed talking to him. You cannot imagine how it feels to be betrayed by someone you have worked side by side with unless you have been through it yourself.49

  The secretary of Courtenay Young, who shared a room with Anthony Blunt and was ‘in and out of their room all the time’, later recalled:

  My God, he was a charmer! Poor Anthony! We were all a bit in love with Anthony, you know . . . He used to wander around with his cod-liver oil and malt, saying ‘That’s what Tiggers like for breakfast.’ He knew Winnie the Pooh very well. He had a Leslie Howard face – a matinée idol – a rather thin and drawn looking face but it was the face of Leslie Howard. Everyone was in love with Leslie Howard at that time.

  When she heard a quarter of a century later that Blunt had confessed to being a Soviet agent: ‘It was exactly like being in an earthquake – or on a quicksand, I couldn’t believe it. I really, truly, couldn’t believe it . . . Really, I mean the whole world shook. It really shook for me. You started thinking, “Who else? What about me? Was I one too?” ’50 Another secretary in St James’s Street remembers being equally charmed by Blunt and equally shocked when she later discovered his career as a Soviet agent: ‘Very tall, very good-looking, extremely charming always. You couldn’t fault him in any way. And I was absolutely
astounded when [news of his treachery] broke. Incredible!’51

  A few months after Blunt joined the Security Service, he moved into a flat off Oxford Street belonging to Victor Rothschild, which he later shared with his close friend and fellow Soviet agent Guy Burgess.52 Late in 1940 Blunt recruited Burgess, who had just been dismissed by SIS and was working as a BBC radio producer, as a Security Service agent with the codename VAUXHALL. Though the BBC had previously agreed that Burgess should be called up for military service,53 Blunt successfully argued in 1941 for the call-up to be cancelled: ‘Burgess has been working for us for some time and has done extremely valuable work – principally the running of two very important agents whom he discovered and took on. It would, therefore, be a great pity from our point of view if he was called up . . .’54 Blunt seems to have persuaded Guy Liddell that, following Burgess’s success as an agent, he should be recruited as a Service officer. Liddell told Curry, then head of F Division, that, though Burgess had ‘completely abandoned’ his former support for Communism, he retained ‘an extraordinary knowledge’ of it as well as of ‘the work of the Communist Party’ which could make him ‘very useful’. After investigation, Curry decided not to recruit Burgess – partly because of his promiscuous homosexuality, partly because he was ‘not satisfied that his claim to have abandoned Communism could be accepted at its face value’. Liddell told Curry he thought he was mistaken, but did not press the point. Curry later recalled that this was their only disagreement during his twelve years in the Service. After Burgess had defected to Moscow with Donald Maclean in 1951, Liddell congratulated Curry on the judgement he had shown a decade earlier. The recruitment of Burgess, he acknowledged, ‘might have been a catastrophe’.55