The Defence of the Realm (82 page)

Daily Mail, 2 July 1963
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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.
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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 . . .
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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.'
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£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'.
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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.'
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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].'
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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 Communist 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.
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Not until 1974 was Blunt at last identified, initially tentatively, as the Fourth Man.
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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 1960s
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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.
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The identity of the Fifth Man was eventually to be established, not through a belated VENONA breakthrough, but as a result of intelligence from Oleg Gordievsky, an SIS agent in the KGB recruited late in 1974. From September 1975 SIS passed all intelligence received from Gordievsky
to K Branch (counter-espionage), where, in the Service's view, K6 made ‘a fundamental contribution to the collation and assessment' of his information.
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It was not, however, until after Gordievsky returned to Moscow at the end of the 1970s to work at the Centre that he discovered the identity of the Fifth Man.
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After his posting to the London residency in 1982, he revealed that the Fifth Man was John Cairncross, who had confessed his role as a Soviet agent to the Security Service eighteen years earlier. The Service then discovered that a major counter-espionage problem which had continued to preoccupy it for over twenty years had been resolved in 1964.

7

The End of Empire: Part 1

The post-war retreat from the greatest empire in world history without a single military defeat sets the British experience apart from the humiliations suffered by other European imperial powers. Britain's decolonization, unlike that of its main imperial rival, France, began before it was too late for an orderly withdrawal. The transfer of power in India and Pakistan in 1947, despite the horrendous inter-communal carnage which accompanied it, happened in time to preserve a degree of official goodwill for postimperial Britain. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was asked to stay on as governor general and the framework of the civil service of the British Raj was largely preserved in independent India. What was not made public, however, was that, during a visit to India in March 1947, the DDG, Guy Liddell, obtained the agreement of the government of Jawaharlal Nehru for an MI5 security liaison officer (SLO) to be stationed in New Delhi after the end of British rule.
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Though the first SLO, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Bourne, who had served in India with the Intelligence Corps during the war,
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stayed for only six months, he set an important precedent for the subsequent history of British decolonization. In all other newly independent Commonwealth countries, as in India, the continued presence of an SLO became a significant, though usually undisclosed, part of the transfer of power. For almost a quarter of a century, relations between the Security Service and its Indian counterpart, the Delhi Intelligence Branch (DIB or IB), were closer and more confident than those between any other departments of the British and Indian governments.

In 1948, shortly after Bourne had been succeeded as SLO by Bill U'ren, an old India hand with twenty-two years' service in the Indian police,
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a dispute between the British high commissioner in India, General Sir Archibald Nye, and SIS led to the reaffirmation of the principle that the Empire and Commonwealth were the exclusive preserve of the Security Service. After Nye had complained in the autumn of 1948 that SIS activities in India risked prejudicing ‘delicate negotiations' he was conducting in New
Delhi, the Prime Minister issued what became known as the ‘Attlee Directive' (an oral instruction which was never put in writing) formally precluding SIS from conducting clandestine operations in Commonwealth countries.
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An annexe to the 1952 Maxwell Fyfe Directive to the DG (this time in writing) allowed for a more flexible interpretation of the Attlee Directive:

Broadly speaking, the activities of the Security Service relate to British, Colonial and Commonwealth territory, and those of SIS to foreign territory but it is recognised that in certain circumstances it is expedient that each conducts operations on the other's territory, on the understanding that both parties are kept informed.
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Not till the late 1960s, with decolonization almost complete, did the Security Service surrender the lead intelligence role in India and most of the Commonwealth to SIS.
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In June 1950 U'ren's successor as SLO, Eric Kitchin, another old India hand, reported that the first head of the independent DIB, T. G. Sanjevi, lost ‘no opportunity of stressing the value which he places on maintaining our relationship on a professional and personal basis'.
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Liddell and Sanjevi were united in their deep distrust of the first Indian high commissioner in London, V. K. Krishna Menon, the Congress Party's leading left-wing firebrand who had spent most of his previous political career in Britain, founding the India League in 1932 to campaign for Indian independence and serving as a Labour councillor in London.
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In 1933 the Security Service had obtained an HOW on Menon on the grounds that he was an ‘important worker in the Indian Revolutionary Movement' with links to the CPGB.
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To outward appearance, Menon seemed an Anglicized figure. The only language he spoke by the time he became high commissioner in 1947 was English, he disliked curry and much preferred a tweed jacket and flannel trousers to Indian dress. But Menon also had a passionate loathing for the British Raj which independence did little to abate.

Though the JIC discussed the question of Communist influence at the Indian high commission, the discussion was considered so sensitive that no record was made of it. Liddell, however, noted in his diary that he told the JIC, ‘We were doing what we could to get rid of Krishna Menon.'
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The attempt failed. Though Menon was reported to be threatening to resign after press attacks in India, he was able to count on Nehru's support and did not do so.
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Fears of Menon's pro-Soviet sympathies were well founded. On at least one occasion during his later political career in India, the KGB paid his election expenses.
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