The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Guy Burgess signs the Official Secrets Act while working as a Soviet agent.

  During Blunt’s first six months in the Security Service, he received no guidance from the NKVD. Because of a recurrence in the Centre of paranoid suspicions that the London residency was being fed ‘disinformation’ by its agents, it was closed in February 1940 and the resident, Anatoli Gorsky, recalled to Moscow. In December 1940 the residency reopened, and Gorsky returned to London. On 28 December Blunt met him and made ‘a good impression’. Among the first MI5 documents which Blunt handed over to Gorsky in January 1941 was the final report on the debriefing of Krivitsky.56 Boris Kreshin, who took over from Gorsky as the case officer for Blunt (then codenamed TONY) and the rest of the Five in 1942, reported to the Centre: ‘TONY is a thorough, conscientious and efficient agent. He tries to fulfil all our tasks in time and as conscientiously as possible.’ Blunt met Kreshin about once a week in various parts of London, usually between nine and ten o’clock in the evening. The head of the British department at the Centre, Elena Modrzhinskaya, complained that Blunt was taking ‘incomprehensible’ risks by bringing many original MI5 documents as well as copies on film to the meetings with his case officer. According to KGB files, from 1941 to 1945 he provided a total of 1,771 documents.57

  The prodigious amount of intelligence supplied by Blunt and the rest of the Five aroused suspicion among the Centre’s conspiracy theorists, who included Modrzhinskaya. By November 1942, she suspected that the Double-Cross System which she knew, chiefly from Blunt, was being successfully used against Germany was also being targeted against the Soviet Union, using the Five as double agents. There was also what she believed was ‘suspicious understatement’ in the Five’s reports on British intelligence operations against Soviet targets: ‘Not a single valuable British agent in the USSR or in the Soviet embassy in Britain has been exposed with the help of this group, in spite of the fact that if they had been sincere in their cooperation they could easily have done [so].’58 It did not occur to Modrzhinskaya or other representatives of the Centre’s paranoid tendencies that no such agents had been reported for the simple reason that none existed. The lack of British agents working against Soviet targets, though due largely to the overwhelming priority of operations against Nazi Germany, was due partly to restrictions on covert activities imposed by the Foreign Office after Hitler’s surprise attack on Russia in the summer of 1941 turned Britain and the Soviet Union into allies.

  Despite its failure to penetrate Soviet intelligence, however, the Security Service had considerable success throughout the war in penetrating the Communist Party (CPGB). It had a ring-side seat as the Party leadership coped with the shock of the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in Moscow on 25 August 1939. Stalin, previously lauded by the CPGB as the world’s most dependable opponent of Fascism in all its forms, told Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop: ‘I can guarantee, on my word of honour, that the Soviet Union will not betray its partner.’ Though the CPGB initially announced qualified support for the war against Hitler, a week later it turned the Stalinist somersault required by Comintern and adopted a policy of ‘revolutionary defeatism’. The Central Committee minutes recording its ideological contortions were seized during a police raid on its King Street headquarters in June 1940. The Security Service later urged unsuccessfully that they be published to provide proof of the Party’s subservience to Moscow.59

  Among those who penetrated the CPGB early in the Second World War was Norman Himsworth, a journalist recruited to the Security Service by Maxwell Knight. Himsworth had great admiration for Knight, later recalling affectionately how he and others had sat on the bank of a pond listening to Knight explaining tradecraft while he was fishing. Among Himsworth’s early targets was the Workers’ Music Association, a cultural society founded by the CPGB primarily as a cover organization in case the Party’s ‘revolutionary defeatism’ led to its being banned.60 Within the Association Himsworth passed himself off as a civil servant in War Office public relations: ‘Gradually I got to know them, and I was gradually accepted as part of them.’ The Association’s Communist president, Alan Bush, then invited Himsworth to become its secretary and told him all office-holders were expected to be Party members. Himsworth agreed on the spot. Knight, he later recalled, ‘gave us a free hand; he had great faith in his staff.’ Bush gave Himsworth the cover name ‘Ian Mackay’, and urged him to keep his Party membership secret.61 Himsworth discovered that the Musical Association had set up a secret interview room in central London to collect classified information about weapons and military operations from Communists and sympathizers in the armed forces.62

  On 15 July 1942 Himsworth was unexpectedly summoned to King Street by the head of the Control Commission, Robert ‘Robby’ Robson, whose responsibilities included Party security.63 F2a, which was responsible for monitoring the CPGB, regarded Robson as a ‘particularly wily’ character, ‘in charge of the Party’s undercover work’, and had discovered he was receiving classified documents from an unidentified civil servant. As well as being subject to an HOW, he was under surveillance by B6, which tried unsuccessfully to find a vacant apartment in his block of flats at Parliament Hill from which to keep him under observation.64 After putting a few innocent questions to Himsworth about his background and how he came to join the Musical Association, Robson suddenly asked him: ‘How many reports have you sent in for MI5?’ He then quoted from a report which Himsworth had submitted to MI5 on 23 March 1941, unwisely writing it in the first person – thus making it easier to identify him as the author. According to a Security Service report on the meeting, Himsworth ‘gave as good as he got’, adopted an attitude of outraged innocence and tried to deflect suspicion on to the president of the Association. At one point Robson, ‘a violent man’ according to Himsworth, pushed him against a wall and was about to hit him. Himsworth believed that only the arrival of another member of the Control Commission, Jimmy Shields, prevented a fight breaking out. The meeting ended with Himsworth still protesting his innocence. He continued to do so during three further meetings.

  The last meeting was requested by Himsworth himself in the hope that, if he succeeded in making Robson angry, he might reveal clues about the source of the leak in MI5. Robson was unaware that, thanks to eavesdropping devices recently installed by the Security Service at King Street, his conversation with Himsworth was being recorded. Contrary to usual regulations, the head of the transcription section, Mrs Evelyn Grist, listened in live to Himsworth’s last meetings with Robson, apparently because of fears for his personal safety. By prearranged signal, while at King Street, Himsworth hummed the tune to ‘Non piu andrai . . .’ from the finale to Act One of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in order to reassure her that all was well.65 The best clue to the source of the leak within MI5, however, came not from Himsworth’s final showdown with Robson but from an earlier transcription of Robson talking to his assistants at King Street:

  Yes, they’re MI5 we’ve got inside the Party – very clearly . . . And this is one of them and the system we’ve got is just beginning to operate. [Identifying] Mackay [Himsworth] is the first fruits . . . Unfortunately the person that was able to do it got the bloody sack after getting this Mackay. And I had to send an urgent message that she was to get the job back at any bloody cost.

  Robson described the female MI5 employee who had got the sack as ‘one of these something or other liberals who have conscientious scruples and begin to come over a bit and start telling us things’. A hunt (codenamed the VIPER investigation) began for a secretary who had ‘got the bloody sack’ and found one possible suspect whose flat was searched without revealing incriminating evidence.66 It later turned out that the clue which led to the search was misleading. The secretary who had leaked classified information had not been sacked but had resigned.

  On 23 December 1942 further eavesdropping at King Street produced what MI5’s Legal Adviser, Edward Cussen, called ‘a Christmas gift’. The transcript revealed not me
rely that a female Party agent was still operating in MI5 but that Robson had asked her to look up his own file. Robson’s file was then used as bait in the Security Service Registry and a twenty-threeyear-old secretary in C3 (the vetting section) was observed looking through it ‘but not in the way of someone looking for a trace’. Subsequent surveillance of the secretary left ‘no doubt’ that she was a Communist.67 Blunt reported to his Soviet case officer that colleagues involved in the investigation had heard references to ‘our girl’ through the eavesdropping devices installed at King Street and were ‘absolutely sure that the Communist Party still has an agent inside MI5’. With his own security in mind, Blunt added: ‘It is good that it is a girl they speak about.’68

  On 19 January 1943 the secretary was questioned by Cussen, Reginald Horrocks, the Director of Establishments and Administration, and William Skardon, a detective seconded from the Met, and she eventually made a partial confession. Three days later, the hidden microphones at King Street picked up the following conversation between Robson and one of Wheeler’s Communist contacts, Philip McLeod:

  McLEOD: I wouldn’t do this unless it was very important. The girl came home last night and she’s been grilled

  ROBSON: She’s been what?

  McLEOD: Grilled

  ROBSON: Which is the person you’re talking about?

  McLEOD: Oh, she’s been with Norman [a Communist contact], you see

  ROBSON: Oh that person we’re getting the stuff from?

  McLEOD: Yes

  ROBSON: O-o-o-oh!

  McLeod said the girl had had to make a written statement but thought she had succeeded in concealing ‘some matters of importance’. Her statement, however, had raised suspicions about another secretary who had resigned from the Security Service early in July 1942, at precisely the point when Robson had been overheard saying that his MI5 informant had got the sack. Henceforth, wrote Cussen, ‘We assumed that [this other secretary] was the Party’s original agent within the Service and that it was upon her departure that the C3 secretary had been recruited . . . as a replacement.’69

  Investigation of this other secretary revealed that, while in the Security Service, she had been closely involved with a group of four Communist militants: two officers in the RAF medical branch, Wing Commander Robert Fisher and Squadron Leader John Norman Macdonald, Mary Peppin (who was married to Fisher) and her sister Geraldine. An HOW on the secretary also revealed that she had just had an illegal abortion and had been called to give evidence at the trial of the abortionist. Since she was no longer able to pass material from MI5 to the CPGB, it was decided not to interview her until after the trial. In the meantime the DG, Sir David Petrie, decided that prosecution of the C3 secretary, who had been dismissed on 24 January, would be ‘inexpedient’, probably because of the nature of the evidence needed to secure a conviction.

  When Cussen and Skardon on 15 July interviewed the other secretary, after the trial of her abortionist, they found her ‘in that untidy state which’, they condescendingly observed, ‘was usual for her when no special occasion was involved’. Cussen began by telling her they knew about her involvement with the abortionist as well as the fact that she had concealed it from her family. She must, said Cussen, have been through hell. But ‘When you were working in our office you betrayed us. You used to visit Fisher and Macdonald and the Peppins and you used to tell them things which were in our files. I know exactly what you told them and I will tell you about it in a minute.’ He implied that, if she co-operated, there would be no prosecution. She begged Cussen and Skardon ‘never to say a word about the abortion matter’, then ‘broke down completely and cried, and we spent a good deal of time in restoring her’. When she recovered, she made a statement admitting passing information to the CPGB. Her interrogators were impressed by her ability to recall much of the contents of the MI5 document with which Robson had confronted Himsworth. Cussen wrote later:

  Having regard to her character and ‘make-up’ we both thought the account which she gave of being unable to resist the temptation of mentioning its contents to Fisher in the presence of Mary Peppin was true. She is a mixture of an intelligent and a naive person. It is quite possible that Fisher got further information out of her, but I am inclined to think that the C3 secretary proved a much better agent when circumstances brought about the replacement of this girl.70

  Though the Security Service did not uncover any wartime Soviet spy as important as Blunt or the other members of the Five, it successfully resolved a number of other espionage cases. The first began with the chance discovery by the Special Branch of photographs of classified War Office documents while searching the London home of a Communist named Oliver Green, who was arrested in May 1942 on a charge of forging petrol coupons and later sentenced to fifteen months’ imprisonment. When questioned in prison in August by Hugh Shillito of F2c, Green admitted that he had been recruited as a Soviet agent while fighting for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.71 Green had first been identified as a CPGB member in 1935,72 but told Shillito that, after his recruitment, he had (like the Five) ‘cut right away from the Party and has had nothing to do with it from that day’.73 Though he refused to identify any of his sub-agents by name, he said that they included an informant in the army, a merchant seaman, a fitter in an aircraft factory, an official in a government department, a member of the RAF and a man who supplied figures on aircraft construction. Green claimed that he had forged petrol coupons only because he needed his car to maintain contact with his agent network. ‘Ideologically’, noted Guy Liddell, ‘he is a curious character, and not altogether unlikeable.’74

  Potentially the most worrying information provided by Green was his claim that ‘Russian Intelligence had an agent in the Security Service.’ He had been assured that, ‘if British Intelligence had any suspicion about them as Soviet agents, the Centre would come to know very quickly.’75 Since it is inconceivable that any of Green’s case officers would have compromised Blunt’s role in MI5 by making any reference to him, it is far more likely that they were referring to the fact (already known to Shillito and Liddell) that the CPGB had informants within the Security Service. On Green’s release from prison, he went to report to Robby Robson, the head of the Party Control Commission, at King Street. Unaware that everything he said was being picked up by MI5 microphones, Green revealed the names of his sub-agents.76 Though all were made subject to HOWs and physical surveillance, the evidence obtained against them was inadequate for a prosecution, perhaps because they had become more cautious after Green’s imprisonment.77

  The most important Soviet espionage case solved by the wartime Security Service was that of a spy-ring headed by the CPGB’s national organizer, Douglas Springhall, who was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in July 1943 for offences under the Official Secrets Act. Though the Service believed that Soviet agents normally ‘cut themselves off from the Party’, Springhall took the ‘unusual step of using the Party apparatus for espionage’.78 Like Green, Springhall was discovered as the result of a lead which came from outside MI5. John Curry later concluded, ‘There was reason to think that he had been active for some years and had excellently placed informants, and might have escaped detection but for a piece of negligence on his part.’79 Among Springhall’s sources was a secretary in the Air Ministry, Olive Sheehan, who passed him details of a new anti-radar device, codenamed WINDOW. Sheehan’s flatmate, Norah Bond, heard her discussing classified information with Springhall, saw her handing him material and succeeded in obtaining an envelope which Sheehan planned to pass to Springhall. Bond gave the envelope to an RAF officer who steamed it open, discovered that it contained information on WINDOW and informed the Air Ministry, which told MI5.80

  Security Service examination of Springhall’s diary led to the discovery of two further members of his spy-ring: Ormond Uren, a staff officer in the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and Ray Milne, a secretary in SIS. In November 1943 Uren, who was found to have revealed the entire
‘organisational lay-out of SOE’ to Springhall, was sentenced, like Springhall, to seven years’ imprisonment.81 Guy Liddell noted that, as a secretary in Section V of SIS, Ray Milne was ‘right in the middle of ISOS [Abwehr decrypts] and everything else’.82 During interrogation by Roger Hollis and the head of Section V, Felix Cowgill, Milne confessed to very little but claimed, like Springhall and Uren, that passing intelligence to Moscow was merely sharing information with an ally.83 She was dismissed but never prosecuted.84

  The CPGB leadership reacted with shocked surprise to Springhall’s conviction, expelling him from the Party and publicly distancing itself from any involvement in espionage. David Clarke (F2a) reported that both Pollitt and Willie Gallacher, the Party’s only MP, were ‘clearly anxious to clean the Party of such activities’. In order to emphasize its British identity, at the Sixteenth Party Congress in July 1943 the Party decided to call itself the ‘British Communist Party’. Clarke, however, saw the Party’s attempts to distance itself from Soviet espionage as primarily cosmetic: ‘The Soviet authorities have from time to time obtained information from most of the leading members of the Communist Party who have shown various degrees of willingness to do this work.’85 The Home Secretary told the War Cabinet in August that the Springhall case emphasized the ‘great risk of the Party trading on the current sympathy for Russia to induce people . . . to betray [secrets]’, and raised once more the question of barring Communists from access to classified information.86 Whitehall, however, still had a rather casual attitude to protective security. In February 1940 the Foreign Office had taken the long-overdue step of appointing a retired diplomat, William Codrington, as chief security officer. But Codrington was given neither a salary nor, until 1942, any assistant. Not until after the war did the Foreign Office at last establish a Security Department.87