The Defence of the Realm (52 page)

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

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 merely 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