In the absence of useful intelligence, however, cruelty to Aileen Philby did not constitute an adequate case for continuing the HOWs, which were suspended in 1956.70 There is other evidence that Aileen had finally realized her husband’s treachery and had thus become a potential threat to him. One of her friends later claimed that she had heard her blurt out one evening to Kim, ‘I know you’re the Third Man!’ That realization, combined with Kim’s mental cruelty, accelerated her decline into alcoholism and despair. She died on 12 December 1957 from congestive heart failure, myocardial degeneration, a respiratory infection and pulmonary tuberculosis.71 After her death, her psychiatrist said ‘that he suspected that Aileen might have been murdered’ by Philby.72 That is highly unlikely – not least because by then Philby had moved to Beirut to work as a journalist. But Kim’s callous treatment of Aileen, which probably hastened her end, was symptomatic of the cold brutality with which he treated those who threatened his security. He never forgave Burgess for having accompanied Maclean to Moscow and so cast suspicion on him. Philby refused to see him even on his deathbed.73
By the mid-1950s, those in the Security Service working on the Philby, Blunt and Cairncross cases seem to have been losing heart. The Service leadership saw little point in further work on the British VENONA material. Director D (Graham Mitchell) wrote to Sir Dick White in April 1956:
I am beginning to come regretfully to the conclusion that it is not worth the effort. All the messages on which progress has been made since Gardner came here and, I understand, on which there is hope of further progress are in the direction Moscow – London. Even if there were substantial further recoveries [decryption] on these, the odds are that the practical value to us would not be great. What we need, and can hardly hope to get, is recovery of the London-to-Moscow traffic.
White replied that he was inclined to agree.74 Though GCHQ continued to work on VENONA, the Service ‘virtually abandoned it until 1961’.75 Given Gardner’s success in October 1955 in decrypting a message from Moscow to the London residency which pointed to the strong likelihood that, at the time of Gouzenko’s defection, Philby was Agent STANLEY, the Service’s loss of interest in VENONA only six months later now appears inexplicable. The probability must be that both White and Mitchell had ceased to pay close attention to the VENONA project. When, some years later, GCHQ was asked to work further on the partially decrypted message from the Centre to the London residency of 17 September 1945, it produced a fuller version which revealed that STANLEY had been able to provide information on the Gouzenko affair and thus identified him even more clearly as Philby: ‘[c% Consent] [one group unrecovered] was given to verify the accuracy of your telegram containing STANLEY’s data about the events in the Neighbours’ sphere of activity [Gouzenko affair]. STANLEY’s information corresponds to the facts.’76
By the beginning of the 1960s the Security Service had still discovered very little about how any of the Magnificent Five had been recruited or controlled as Soviet agents. Its ignorance led it to exaggerate, sometimes very greatly, the quality of Soviet intelligence in the Stalin era. Unaware of the bungling by the Centre and some of its residencies in handling the Cambridge spies, the Service wrongly assumed that the successes of the Five reflected careful planning and exemplary tradecraft by the KGB. (Not until 1992, for example, did it discover from the material smuggled out of KGB archives by Vasili Mitrokhin both the Centre’s lamentable failure to respond to Maclean’s pleas for help from Cairo and the incompetence of the Soviet illegal HARRY as Philby’s controller during his Washington posting.)77 The gaps in the Service’s knowledge of the Five and their handlers provided increasing opportunities for its small but disruptive group of conspiracy theorists. It was possible to argue, for example, that the tip-off to Maclean, instead of coming from Philby via Burgess, had been given instead by an undiscovered Soviet agent inside the Security Service. In the imagination of Peter Wright the KGB became transformed into an agency of extraordinary operational subtlety and sophistication. As Wright began to descend into his conspiratorial wilderness of mirrors, Hollis warned him, ‘They’re not ten foot tall, you know, Peter!’78 That warning, however, merely strengthened Wright’s suspicions of Hollis himself.
The defection of a KGB major, Anatoli Golitsyn, to the CIA in December 1961 both provided significant new intelligence on the Five and sent the Service investigation as a whole seriously off course. According to a note prepared, somewhat reluctantly,79 by the Service for the Home Secretary in 1966:
In 1962 a defector [Golitsyn] from the R[ussian] I[ntelligence] S[ervice] stated that in the 1930s there was a very important spy network in the United Kingdom called the Ring of Five because it originally had five members all of whom knew each other and had been at the university together. He knew that Burgess and Maclean were members of the ring. He thought that the network had expanded beyond the original five.
Remarkably, the DG, Furnival Jones, told the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Charles Cunningham, that he ‘very much hoped that the Home Secretary would not feel he had to inform the Prime Minister’.80
By 1964 the Service had obtained confessions of varying frankness from Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. The breakthrough in the prolonged and generally dispiriting Security Service investigation of the Philby case came as a result of a chance meeting at the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1962 between the former MI5 officer Victor Rothschild and Flora Solomon, a Marks and Spencer executive and former lover of Alexander Kerensky, head of the Russian Provisional Government overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution. Solomon was outraged by Philby’s anti-Israeli and pro-Arab newspaper articles, and revealed that Philby had tried to recruit her as a Soviet agent before the war.81 Armed with Solomon’s information, Philby’s friend and former SIS colleague Nicholas Elliott flew out from London at the beginning of 1963 to confront him in Beirut, where he was working as a journalist. According to Philby’s later version of events given to the KGB after he escaped to Moscow, Elliott told him:
You stopped working for them [the Russians] in 1949, I’m absolutely certain of that . . . I can understand people who worked for the Soviet Union, say before or during the war. But by 1949 a man of your intellect and your spirit had to see that all the rumours about Stalin’s monstrous behaviour were not rumours, they were the truth . . . You decided to break with the USSR . . . Therefore I can give you my word and that of Dick White that you will get full immunity, you will be pardoned, but only if you tell it yourself. We need your collaboration, your help.
Philby assured the KGB that he had steadfastly resisted all attempts to persuade him to admit that he had ever been a Soviet agent.82
The truth was quite different. Philby’s version of events after he reached Moscow was a fabrication designed to avoid discrediting himself in the eyes of the KGB by admitting that, when offered immunity from prosecution by Elliott in return for a confession, Philby (probably tempted by the offer) had admitted working as a Soviet agent from 1936 to 1946. In 1946, he told Elliott, he had seen the error of his ways and broken off contact with Soviet intelligence, though he had sent a warning to Maclean in 1951 for reasons of personal friendship. Philby, one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished liars, made his bogus confession (part of it recorded by Elliott) so persuasively that, in addition to Elliott, the heads of both MI5 and SIS, Sir Roger Hollis and Sir Dick White, were deceived by it. Hollis wrote reassuringly to J. Edgar Hoover on 18 January 1963:
In our judgment [Philby’s] statement of the association with the R.I.S. is substantially true. It accords with all the available evidence in our possession and we have no evidence pointing to a continuation of his activities on behalf of the R.I.S. after 1946, save in the isolated instance of Maclean. If this is so, it follows that damage to United States interests will have been confined to the period of the Second World War.83
The fact that less than a week later Philby secretly fled to Russia aboard the Soviet freighter Dolmatova made Hollis’s and White’s subsequent relations w
ith the US intelligence community all the more embarrassing.
Philby’s defection probably helped to increase the psychological pressure on both Cairncross and Blunt to confess secretly to the Security Service, since neither was willing to take refuge in Moscow. Early in 1964 Cairncross accepted a teaching post at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. At a meeting in Cleveland, Arthur Martin (D1) persuaded Cairncross to confess that he had spied for the Russians until 1951. Unsurprisingly, Cairncross declined a request to return to Britain and be interviewed under caution. Later in 1964 he took up a job in Rome with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. For some years Cairncross was given to understand that he returned to the UK at his peril; not until 1970 did the DPP authorize the Service to give him some assurance of immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, ‘Although the information he provided seemed sometimes vague, confusing and contradictory, he appeared to co-operate honestly during the numerous interviews which followed his initial admission.’84
The decisive breakthrough in the Service’s investigation of Anthony Blunt came when the American Michael Straight admitted that Blunt had recruited him while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Arthur Martin called on Blunt at the Courtauld Institute on the evening of 23 April 1964 and asked him to recall all he knew about Michael Straight. Martin ‘noticed that by this time Blunt’s right cheek was twitching a good deal’ and ‘allowed a long pause before saying that Michael Straight’s account was rather different from his’. He then offered Blunt ‘an absolute assurance that no action would be taken against him if he now told me the truth’:
Daily Mail, 2 July 1963.
He sat and looked at me for fully a minute without speaking. I said that his silence had already told me what I wanted to know. Would he now get the whole thing off his chest? I added that only a week or two ago I had been through a similar scene with John Cairncross who had finally confessed and afterwards thanked me for making him do so. Blunt’s answer was: ‘give me five minutes while I wrestle with my conscience.’ He went out of the room, got himself a drink, came back and stood at the tall window looking out on Portman Square. I gave him several minutes of silence and then appealed to him to get it off his chest. He came back to his chair and [confessed].85
Once Philby had fled to Moscow and Cairncross and Blunt had confessed to working as Soviet agents, the Security Service had, without realizing it, identified all of the Ring of Five. The tragedy was that the Service failed to grasp that it had actually solved the case – chiefly because those involved in the investigation took literally Golitsyn’s statement that all five had been at university together. Blunt had not been recruited until after Philby had ceased talent-spotting at Cambridge. That and the fact that Blunt had been allowed by Moscow to leave MI5 after the war was thought to indicate that he did not qualify as the ‘Fourth Man’. The fact that Cairncross had not arrived at Cambridge until after Philby and Maclean had left was similarly regarded as ruling him out of contention as a candidate for the ‘Fifth Man’. Until 1974 James Klugmann, Maclean’s contemporary at both Gresham’s School and Cambridge as well as (at the time) one of Britain’s most active young Communists, was regarded as the most likely Fourth Man.86
For some years after 1964 the Service seemed to move further away from, rather than closer to, an identification of the two missing members of the Ring of Five and an understanding of the circumstances of Burgess’s and Maclean’s defection. Though the pool of able ideological Soviet recruits began to dry up during the early Cold War, KGB tradecraft and professionalism improved considerably. Some of the Security Service officers involved in the investigation of the Five and the cases of other suspected agents recruited during the 1930s and 1940s made the mistake of supposing that Soviet intelligence had operated then with the same level of sophistication as it did by the 1960s. The relatively simple fact that Burgess’s main objective on his return to London in May 1951 had been to warn Maclean was thus erroneously reinterpreted as an elaborate Soviet deception. K7, one of the Service’s experts on Soviet penetration, wrote in 1972: ‘That Burgess was sent back to London in May 1951 to warn Maclean as the R.I.S. would have us believe, is nonsense. We are justified in assuming the R.I.S. had other means to care for Maclean.’ Had K7 been aware of the gross mishandling of Maclean by Soviet intelligence in 1949–50 and of its numerous other limitations at that period, she would have realized that her ‘justified’ assumption was in fact unjustified. On the basis of that unjustified assumption, however, she and others constructed an elaborate conspiracy theory according to which Burgess’s defection, so far from being motivated by the Centre’s desire to ensure both that Maclean got to Moscow and that Burgess did not have the opportunity to get into more trouble in London, was actually motivated by a desire to increase Blunt’s opportunities to monitor MI5’s investigations of the Ring of Five:
By disappearing with Maclean, [Burgess] threw suspicion on Blunt. Blunt’s obvious course of action was to be seen to cooperate with the Security Service. In this way he was able to maintain his bona fides as a loyal citizen in the eyes of the Security Service. The contact had the additional advantage of permitting him to monitor Security Service action to some extent, and giving him access to safeguard R.I.S. interests if he could do so without endangering his own position . . .87
Peter Wright’s attempts to get Blunt to admit to this and other things he had not done increasingly disrupted serious investigation of his actual career as a Soviet agent. It was tragic that the lead role in interviewing Blunt was taken over by Wright, whose conspiracy theories arguably did as much damage to the Service as Blunt’s treachery.
Though Blunt had a considerable liking for gin and tonic before he had to deal with Wright, pressure to provide non-existent evidence to validate Wright’s misconceived conspiracy theories helped to turn him into an alcoholic. The more Wright questioned him, the more Blunt drank. The telecheck on Blunt’s flat in the Courtauld Institute recorded his partner, John Gaskin, saying in December 1965: ‘His drinking problem has been growing and growing . . . beyond all reasonable proportions. [Anthony has an] enormous drink bill – over £100 a month.’88 £100 a month in 1965 was more than the salary of a young academic. In January 1966 Blunt was heard telling a friend that he was ‘not feeling very well and [got] through yesterday solely on gin’.89 Within a few years Blunt’s drinking was making further questioning increasingly difficult. Wright noted in June 1970: ‘He is obviously drinking like a fish and consumed an incredible amount of gin during the lunch hour that I spent with him.’90 Four months later Wright reported that, after further heavy gin consumption at the beginning of another bout of questioning, ‘Blunt was in such a state that it was not worthwhile pursuing [further questions].’91
The fact that Golitsyn’s definition of the Ring of Five was taken so literally not merely by Wright and the small band of conspiracy theorists but by other Service investigators seems in retrospect remarkable, given both Golitsyn’s known tendency to exaggerate and his admission that he had not seen the files of any of the Five. In reality, the KGB’s habit of referring to them collectively with expressions such as ‘the Five’, ‘Ring of Five’ and ‘Magnificent Five’ did not mean, as Golitsyn claimed, that all had been at Cambridge at the same time. The Five were so called simply because they had established themselves as the five star performers among a larger group of Cambridge recruits. Had the Security Service adopted this common-sense definition and concentrated simply on identifying the most successful of the Cambridge recruits, it would have identified Blunt and Cairncross as the Fourth and Fifth Men far more rapidly than it did.
The failure to complete the identification of the Five increased fears that there were other undetected Soviet moles in high places who, like the Five, had been recruited at, or soon after leaving, university. In 1967 the Service’s newly founded University Research Group (URG) was given the mammoth task of tracking down all students at British universities who had been Communists or Communi
st sympathizers during the quarter-century from 1929 to 1954 and identifying their current employment. Hitherto the systematic study of Communists in British universities had been largely confined to Oxbridge. Had it been less sensitively carried out, the URG’s work might well have appeared as a McCarthyite witch-hunt of dedicated civil servants who were being persecuted simply because of their left-wing sympathies as university students. Remarkably, the URG attracted virtually no complaints or publicity. Most of those who were approached co-operated with the inquiry. Though the inquiry was well conducted, however, it achieved little of importance apart from adding to the Service’s contextual knowledge of past Communist and Comintern activities in British universities. Five years of investigations identified not a single additional Soviet spy.92
Not until 1974 was Blunt at last identified, initially tentatively, as the Fourth Man.93 Even then, however, the hunt for the Fifth Man still did not appear in sight of success. One of the few, rather slim, remaining hopes after the Service recovered its interest in VENONA during the 1960s94 was that a new Soviet decrypt might provide the solution. On 22 June 1977 the DG, Sir Michael Hanley, was asked by the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, if he knew the identity of the Fifth Man. Hanley’s response was somewhat defeatist:
I replied that I did not, though there were many theories. The only independent source on which I could rely was VENONA. There was still a chance that we should get enough VENONA messages from the London [residency] of the KGB in 1945 to enable us to discover more about the Ring of Five. NSA were doing a great deal of work on this and I had already emphasised to our American friends the importance, at least from our point of view, of bringing this to a successful conclusion.95
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