The Defence of the Realm (34 page)

Otto spoke at great length, arguing that a person with my family background and possibilities could do far more for Communism than the run-of-the-mill Party member or sympathiser . . . I accepted. His first instructions were that both Lizzy and I should break off as quickly as possible all personal contact with our Communist friends.
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Philby became the first of the ‘Cambridge Five', the ablest group of British agents ever recruited by a foreign intelligence service.

Deutsch, whose role as a Soviet intelligence officer was not discovered by the Security Service until 1940,
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well after he had left England for the last time, had an even more outstanding academic record than any of the
Cambridge Five. Though, as Philby recalled, he was of Czech origin, his parents had moved to Austria when he was a child. At Vienna University he had progressed in only five years from undergraduate entry to the degree of PhD with distinction. Deutsch's description of himself in university documents throughout his student career as an observant Jew (
mosaisch
) was probably designed to conceal his membership of the Communist Party. Though his doctorate was in chemistry, he had also taken courses in psychology and philosophy. After being awarded the PhD, he had, remarkably, combined secret work for Comintern and the OGPU with open collaboration with the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, who was then engaged in an attempt to synthesize the work of Marx and Freud and later earned a probably undeserved reputation as ‘the prophet of the better orgasm'. Deutsch publicly assisted Reich in the ‘sex-pol' (sexual politics) movement, which ran clinics designed to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers, and founded a small publishing house, Münster Verlag (Dr Arnold Deutsch), to publish Reich's work and sex-pol literature. At the time when he moved to London in April 1934, Deutsch was under surveillance by the ‘anti-pornography' section of the Vienna police.
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Even if, during Deutsch's period in England, the Security Service had known of his earlier involvement with Reich and the sex-pol movement, it would probably have regarded his unusual career as improbable cover for a Soviet spy.

Deutsch had the lead role in recruiting the Cambridge Five.
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The key to his success, apart from his flair as an agent-runner, was his new recruitment strategy, endorsed by the Centre (Soviet intelligence headquarters), based on the cultivation of young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power:

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 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.

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 less ancient redbrick English universities. The decision to begin the new recruitment in Cambridge rather than Oxford was due largely to chance: the fact that Philby, the first potential recruit to
come to Deutsch's attention, whom he codenamed SÖHNCHEN (‘Sonny'), was a Cambridge graduate.
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Half a century later, after his defection to Moscow, Philby still remembered his first meeting with Deutsch as ‘amazing':

He was a marvellous man. Simply marvellous. 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 marvellous sense of humour.
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Though Deutsch had trained in Moscow as an OGPU illegal with the alias ‘Stefan Lange',
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he used his real name and nationality with the immigration authorities when arriving in England, probably so that he could use his cousin Oscar Deutsch, the millionaire owner of the Odeon cinema chain, as a referee.
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(Though the name of the chain was derived from the Greek
odeion
(concert hall), the spelling was adapted to form an acronym for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation'.) Arnold Deutsch's Home Office file does not survive,
⁴⁷
but it is clear that there was nothing on file to attract suspicion to him from the immigration authorities. Apart from the backing of his millionaire cousin, he was academically very well qualified for postgraduate work at London University which provided ideal cover for his intelligence work as well as giving him first-hand experience of British university life. From October 1934 to January 1936, he took (but did not complete) the Psychology Diploma course at University College London, which would have qualified him to move on to a PhD.
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Though the name of his postgraduate supervisor is not recorded,
⁴⁹
later Security Service investigations suggest that it may well have been the controversial head of the Psychology Department at London University, Professor Cyril Burt (later knighted), whom Deutsch used as a referee.
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Deutsch's initial reports to the Centre on Philby, who he believed needed ‘constant encouragement', reflected his interest in psychology as well as his intelligence training:

SÖHNCHEN comes from a peculiar family. His father [currently adviser to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia] is considered at present to be the most distinguished expert on the Arab world . . . He is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son. He repressed all his son's desires. That is why SÖHNCHEN is a very timid and irresolute person. He has a bit of a stammer and this increases his diffidence . . . However, he handles our money very carefully. He enjoys great love and respect for his seriousness and honesty. He was ready, without questioning, to do anything for us and has shown all his seriousness and diligence working for us.
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Deutsch asked Philby to recommend some of his Cambridge contemporaries. His first two nominations were Donald Maclean, who had just graduated from Trinity Hall with first-class honours in modern languages, and Guy Burgess of Trinity College, who was working on a history PhD thesis which he was never to complete. By the end of 1934, with Philby's help, Deutsch had recruited both, telling them – like Philby – to distance themselves from Communist friends. Burgess did so with characteristic flamboyance, becoming personal assistant in the following year to the right-wing Conservative MP Captain ‘Jack' Macnamara, with whom he went on ‘fact-finding' missions to Nazi Germany which, according to Burgess, were largely devoted to sexual escapades with gay members of the Hitler Youth.
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At the very moment when the recruitment of the Cambridge Five was beginning, the Security Service was actively investigating Pyotr Kapitsa. Identifying Cambridge's most militant student Communists at the same time would not have been difficult had the Service realized they were being targeted by Soviet intelligence. A generation later, after Philby, Maclean and Burgess had all defected to Moscow, the Service obtained, by means unknown, the minute book for the period 1928 to 1935 of Cambridge's main student Communist organization, the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS), which usually met in Trinity College.
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The minutes record that Maclean, the son of a former Liberal minister, was elected a committee member during his first year at Trinity Hall in 1931 and later put in charge of CUSS publicity at a meeting when ‘Members created a precedent in Cambridge by singing the Internationale and other songs vociferously.' Philby was elected treasurer of the Society in 1932.
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He reported in March 1933, three months before graduating, that ‘the financial position of the Society was very insecure and that a deficit was in prospect owing to the fact that very few fresh members had joined in the present term.' He remained in active contact with CUSS after graduation. A committee meeting in March 1934 considered ‘a . . . letter from H. A. R. Philby appealing for support' for persecuted Austrian workers. It was agreed that a collection would be taken, and Guy Burgess was one of two CUSS militants put in charge of managing a fund to respond to Philby's appeal.
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The Security Service, however, carried out no serious investigation into CUSS. Given the Service's small size and limited resources, it is perhaps understandable that student Communist groups should have been considered too low a priority to merit active investigation.

The first of the Cambridge Five to penetrate the ‘bourgeois apparatus' was Maclean, who entered the Foreign Office in 1935. Burgess's main role in his early years as a Soviet agent was as a talent-spotter. Early in 1937, by then a BBC producer, he arranged the first meeting between Deutsch and Anthony Blunt, French linguist, art historian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Blunt in turn identified as a likely recruit his former pupil John Cairncross, a passionate Scottish Marxist nicknamed ‘The Fiery Cross' by the
Trinity Magazine,
who in 1936 had graduated from Trinity with first-class honours in modern languages and come top in the Foreign Office entrance examination. Deutsch met Cairncross in May 1937 and reported to Moscow that he ‘was very happy that we had established contact with him and was ready to start working for us at once'. KGB files credit Deutsch with the recruitment of twenty agents during his time in Britain. The most successful, however, were the Cambridge Five: Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross. The Security Service had no suspicions about any of them until 1951. (After the release of the enormously popular Western
The Magnificent Seven
in 1960, some in the Centre referred to them as the ‘Magnificent Five'.) All were committed ideological spies inspired by the myth-image of Stalin's Russia as a workerpeasant state with social justice for all rather than by the reality of a brutal dictatorship with the largest peacetime gulag in European history. Deutsch shared the same visionary faith as his Cambridge recruits 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 for the Five because it had a sexual as well as a political dimension. All were rebels against the strict sexual mores as well as the antiquated class system of interwar Britain. Burgess and Blunt were gay and Maclean bisexual at a time when homosexual relations, even between consenting adults, were illegal. Cairncross, like Philby a committed heterosexual, later wrote a history of polygamy which prompted his friend Graham Greene to comment: ‘Here at last is a book which will appeal strongly to all polygamists.'
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Extract from the Communist-dominated Cambridge University Socialist Society's minute book for 1934, which MI5 acquired in 1972. Had the minutes been obtained before the War, Philby would probably have had much greater difficulty in entering SIS.

The successes of Soviet agent penetration during the 1930s were made possible by Whitehall's still primitive grasp of protective security. Moscow had vastly more intelligence about British policy than the British intelligence community had about the Soviet Union's. Until the Second World War the Foreign Office had no security officer let alone a security department. Hence the relative ease with which the OGPU/NKVD
¹
recruited FO cipher clerks in the early 1930s. The Centre believed that the first of the cipher clerks to be recruited, Ernest Oldham, was discovered by MI5 or the Foreign Office and assassinated in 1933. In reality, Oldham committed suicide and his treachery was not discovered until the Second World War. Captain John King, the most productive of the FO cipher-clerk recruits, also went undiscovered until the outbreak of war. Donald Maclean quickly established himself as a high-flyer with, according to the Foreign Office Personnel Department, ‘plenty of brains and keenness', as well as being ‘nice-looking', and provided Moscow with a regular flow of classified diplomatic documents. John Cairncross gained access to what he called ‘a wealth of valuable information on the progress of the Civil War in Spain' before moving on to the Treasury in 1938. MI5 had little if any ability to improve the woeful state of Foreign Office security. When the FO discovered in 1937 that classified documents were haemorrhaging from the Rome embassy (as they had been doing for more than a decade), it sought help not from MI5 (as it would have done during the Cold War) but from SIS, despite the fact that SIS disclaimed any expertise in embassy security. Even when Major Valentine Vivian of SIS Section V identified the current culprit as a Chancery servant, Secondo Constantini, the ambassador refused to believe it and invited Constantini and his wife to the coronation of King George VI in May 1937 as a reward for his long and supposedly faithful service.
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