Spycatcher (43 page)

I asked Flora why she mentioned Proctor.

"Kim used to bring people to see me," she said. "He valued my opinion. I would never join, but I used to tell him what I thought of his recruits."

"And what did you tell him about Proctor...?"

"Kim brought him around for dinner one night. I didn't like him. I told Kim he was no good. He had no backbone. 'How will he stand up to stress?' I asked him."

Proctor was another name which Blunt had clearly deliberately avoided giving to me. I went to Hollis and requested permission to interview Proctor, but he refused. It would cause too much fuss in Whitehall, he said, and there were enough problems there as it was. I would have to wait until he retired. After all, said Hollis, it's only a few months.

Proctor retired to a delightful rustic French farmhouse in the rolling countryside outside Avignon with his second wife and children, and in February 1966 I traveled to France to visit him.

Proctor was a distinguished-looking man, with a hook nose, receding hairline, and just a touch of the cleric about him. He greeted me with the easy charm and familiarity which upper-class Englishmen use to set their visitors at a distance. I explained that MI5 were looking back into the 1930s.

"We're just tying up loose ends, you know, that sort of thing..."

Proctor talked about the period in crisp civil servant's shorthand. He rarely mentioned himself at first. Like the model civil servant, he was the modest observer of other people's lives and decisions. But beneath his reserve, I could detect an enthusiasm, as if he were recalling a better world.

"And how did you feel about things then yourself?" I asked. "You mean what were my politics?" he countered, smiling at my

euphemism. "Well, you presumably know I have been left-wing all my

life." "Really?"

"Oh yes," he went on, "but never Communist. I wanted to go into Government service too much to join the Party, and besides I didn't have the courage of people like Guy Burgess, who did it openly."

I asked him if Guy had ever approached him to work for peace, or for the Comintern, or anything like that.

He shook his head.

"No, I don't think so... No, I don't remember anything like that at all."

"But Guy knew what your political views were?"

"Why, yes. We were very close. Guy, myself, Anthony. The Apostles, you know..."

"Don't you think it's odd he never tried to recruit you?" He paused for thought.

"I suppose it is, now you come to mention it. In fact, I'm really rather insulted he didn't..."

He laughed. I laughed too, and he suggested we take a walk before dinner. It was still just winter, but the earth was thawing, as if spring lay just beneath the surface. We talked about other things - about England, and the Civil Service, and the way things had changed.

"Most of us, you know, have spent our lives escaping from the thirties," he told me, as we looked back down the valley toward his house.

"We were all so exquisitely happy then. It was our world. But we lost it in 1939, and we've been looking to escape ever since."

He pointed to the farmhouse, shrouded in late-afternoon mist. "That's my escape..." he said.

That evening we had a splendid dinner, and afterward retired to his study with the port. Proctor was drunk, and I could see he was finding my visit a strain. He knew that sooner or later I would return to Burgess.

For a while he seemed to doze off over his port, and woke up perspiring heavily. He began to dab his forehead nervously with his handkerchief.

"Why do you think it was Guy never bothered to approach you?" I asked as I filled his glass again.

Proctor gulped his down, and poured himself another.

"I admired Guy very much," he said, after a pause. "People forget, you know, just how gifted Guy was. They don't remember how he was before the war. The looks, the vitality, the intellect. They just think of him afterward."

I said nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence. He began again, talking more urgently.

"You see, I had no secrets from him. Whenever I had a problem, no matter how secret, I used to discuss it with him, and his advice was always sound. I think the real truth of the matter is that Guy had no need to recruit me. He could get to know anything he wanted. All he had to do was ask."

"What about 1951?" I asked, anxious to press him while he was talking.

"No, no, no," he clucked, "you've got that all wrong. I left in 1950 for personal reasons, nothing to do with this - to do with Varda, my first wife. She committed suicide, you know, in 1951."

"Did you see Guy before he went?"

"No - but my wife did, about six weeks before. She and her father were very close to him. I was in Copenhagen at the time."

"And she killed herself afterward?" "Not long after, yes..."

He sat up and looked at me, suddenly sober.

"I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind. But there's no connection, I promise you."

He slumped back again in the chair, disheveled like a defrocked priest.

"They were both terrible, shocking events," he said quietly. "A year or two later, when I recovered, Edward Bridges invited me back into the Civil Service, and I came back to England." (Edward Bridges was then Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service.) I never did discover why Proctor's first wife, Varda, committed suicide, or what she and Guy Burgess discussed. The truth about Proctor was difficult to judge. I was inclined to believe his claim that he was never formally recruited, while disbelieving his assertion that Burgess had nothing to do with his departure to Denmark in 1950. But whatever the case, I am absolutely sure that during the time he was Baldwin's private secretary, and probably right up until 1950, he shared with Guy every secret which crossed his desk.

The next time I saw Blunt I told him about my discussion with Proctor.

"You didn't tell us about him, Anthony," I said, reproachful rather than angry. It always upset Blunt more if he felt the deceit was a matter between friends.

"You kept quiet again - to protect him."

He got up and went to the window, and gazed through it as if he could see back into the past.

"What about Dennis?" I asked again.

"All I can say is he must have been the best source Guy ever had. But I didn't know what role he was playing," he said finally. "All I knew was that he was still in Government..."

"But you could have guessed..." I sighed with irritation.

Blunt pulled the curtains, as if faintly disappointed with the noise and dust and fashions of the square outside.

"Unless you lived through it, Peter, you cannot understand..."

"Oh, I lived through it, Anthony," I said, suddenly angry. "I know more about the thirties probably than you will ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldn't get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the thirties..."

One of the most interesting things to emerge in the D3 researches was the existence of the Oxford Ring. In the past, Soviet recruitment was associated mainly with Cambridge University, but once Blunt opened up, it was obvious that Burgess and James Klugman had targeted Oxford in the same way. The first hard source on the Oxford Ring came from a colleague of Blunt's at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool. Blunt admitted that she had been his courier during the 1930s, and I was anxious to interview her. She and Blunt were close; they had even written a book together on Picasso.

Blunt told me she was a neurotic, and already in the process of a nervous breakdown. He said that she would clam up, or worse, if I spoke to her directly, so he organized a cutout for me-another senior figure at the Courtauld, Anita Brookner, to whom I could relay questions for Pool. A degree of deception was inevitable. Pool was told that new inquiries were being made into the 1930s, and Anthony wanted to know if there was anybody else he should warn.

Phoebe Pool told Anita Brookner that she used to run messages for Otto to two brothers, Peter and Bernard Floud. Peter, the former Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was dead, but his brother Bernard was a senior Labor MP. Pool also said a young woman, Jennifer Fisher Williams, was involved, and urged Brookner to ensure that "Andy Cohen," the senior diplomat Sir Andrew Cohen, was warned too, as he also was at risk. All these names were well known to me. All except Andrew Cohen (Cohen was an Apostle and Cambridge student) were connected with the Clarendon, a left-wing dining and discussion club in Oxford during the 1930s, but this was the first hard evidence that the club had been a center for Soviet espionage recruitment.

Ironically, Jennifer Fisher Williams was married to a former war time MI5 officer, Herbert Hart, by the time her name emerged, so I visited her husband at Oxford, where he was pursuing a distinguished academic career as Professor of Jurisprudence, and asked him if he would approach his wife on my behalf. He rang her up there and then, assured her there was no threat to her position, and she agreed to meet me.

Jennifer Hart was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt and white net stockings she was wearing.

She told her story quite straightforwardly, but had a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies' skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and ungentlemanly.

She said she was an open Party member in the 1930s, and was approached by a Russian, who from her description was definitely Otto. Otto instructed her to go underground, and she used to meet him clandestinely at Kew Gardens. She told us that she was merely part of the Party underground, and that she gave up meeting Otto when she joined the Home Office in 1938, where she worked in a highly sensitive department which processed applications for telephone intercepts. She told us, too, that she had never passed on any secret information.

She had two other contacts, she said. One was Bernard Floud, who recruited her, and the other man who controlled her for a short time she identified from a photograph as Arthur Wynn, a close friend of Edith Tudor Hart and her husband, who was active in trade union circles before joining the Civil Service.

There was no doubt in my mind, listening to Jennifer Hart, that this was a separate Ring based exclusively at Oxford University, but investigating it proved enormously difficult. Almost at once, Sir Andrew Cohen (who was at Cambridge and became a diplomat) died from a heart attack, so he was crossed off the list. Peter Floud was already dead, but his brother looked more hopeful when the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, named him to a junior ministerial post in the Labor Government. MI5 were asked to provide him with security clearance. We objected and requested permission to interrogate Floud about Jennifer Hart's allegation. Wilson had, at the time, a standing ban on any inquiries relating to MPs, but when he read the MI5 brief, he gave clearance for the interview.

Floud's attitude, when I began the interview, was extraordinary. He treated the matter as of little importance, and when I pressed him on

Jennifer Hart's story he refused to either confirm or deny that he had recruited her.

"How can I deny it, if I can't remember anything about it?" he said repeatedly.

I was tough with him. I knew that his wife, an agoraphobic depressive, had recently committed suicide, but Floud was eager to conclude the interview, presumably lured by the scent of office. I explained to him in unmistakable terms that, since it was my responsibility to advise on his security clearance, I could not possibly clear him until he gave a satisfactory explanation for the Hart story. Still he fell back lamely on his lack of memory. The session ended inconclusively, and I asked for him to attend a further interview the following day. I did not make any progress with him, he maintaining that he had no recollection of recruiting Jennifer.

The next morning I got a message that Floud had committed suicide, apparently with a gas poker and a blanket. Not long after, Blunt telephoned me with more bad news.

"Phoebe's dead," he said. "Good God, how?" I gasped.

"She threw herself under a tube..."

Three deaths, two of which were suicides, in such a small group of people, at a time when we were actively investigating them, seemed far more than bad luck. MI5 was terrified that it would be linked publicly with the deaths, and all further work was suspended. Newspapers were already vigorously pursuing the story of Philby's role as the Third Man, and had discovered for the first time the seniority of his position in MI6. Rumors of Blunt's involvement were also beginning to surface in Fleet Street. The entire scandalous tapestry was in danger of unraveling. That still left the problem of Arthur Wynn, who, by coincidence, was also due for promotion to the Deputy Secretary's job at the Board of Trade, which also required security clearance.

"What shall we do?" asked F.J. nervously.

"We should tell him we'll give him his clearance, if he tells the truth about the Ring. Otherwise no clearance..."

"But that's blackmail," he said, doing his best to sound shocked.

I saw nothing unfair about my offer, but then, as I told F.J., I was never destined to be a diplomat or a politician.

"All these suicides," he said, "they'll ruin our image. We're just not that sort of Service."

The Oxford Ring completed my inquiries into the 1930s conspiracy. By the end of the 1960s the task was virtually complete, those involved nearing or well past retirement. We had identified every member of the Ring of Five and a number of others and their controllers. We knew how the Ring worked at various times, we knew what their communications were, whom they depended on, and where they went for help. We had also identified one major undiscovered spy, Watson, and another crucial source for the Russians during the period 1935-51, Proctor, as well as an important new Ring at Oxford. Altogether we had identified, dead or alive, nearly forty probable spies. Beyond that we had scrutinized carefully the records of dozens of people in every sphere of British public life. Most were given a clean bill of health, but some were found to be secret Communists or associates, and were removed from access or quietly encouraged to retire.