In June 1934 Kim Philby, who had graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in
the previous year with the conviction that “my life must be devoted to
communism”, had his first meeting with his Soviet controller, Dr Arnold
Deutsch.
The rendezvous took place in Regent’s Park. Philby became the first of the
“Cambridge Five”, the ablest group of British agents ever recruited by a
foreign intelligence service.
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.
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 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” who in 1936 had
graduated from Trinity with first-class honours in modern languages and come
top in the Foreign Office entrance examination.
All were inspired by the myth-image of Stalin’s Russia as a worker-peasant
state with social justice for all, free from the exploitation and alienation
of the capitalist system. The message of liberation had all the greater
appeal for the Five because it had a sexual as well as a political
dimension. Burgess and Blunt were gay and Maclean bisexual at a time when
homosexual relations were illegal. When the war ended, four of what were
later called the “Magnificent Five” were still in place in Britain. Philby
was in MI6 with, some believed, the potential to become a future “C”.
Maclean and Burgess were both supplying large quantities of classified Foreign
Office documents. Cairncross, though the peak of his career as a Soviet
agent was past, was well positioned in the Treasury to provide intelligence
on British defence expenditure. Blunt, who left the Security Service to
become director of the Courtauld Institute, continued to carry out
occasional missions for Soviet intelligence.
On the eve of the Cold War, by contrast, the Security Service had not a single
Soviet agent worth the name and was woefully ignorant of the extent of
Soviet wartime intelligence penetration. The Security Service’s first major
post-war insight into Soviet intelligence operations in the West was the
result of a defection in Canada.As well as providing evidence of Soviet
espionage in the United States, Igor Gouzenko, a 26-year-old cipher clerk
who had been working for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) at the
Soviet embassy, revealed the existence of a major GRU Canadian spy ring.
More, only a month after Hiroshima, Soviet intelligence had obtained
“documentary materials of the atomic bomb: the technological process,
drawings, calculations”.
References to an agent codenamed ALEK identified the British scientist Alan
Nunn May. A secret communist and contemporary of Donald Maclean at
Cambridge, May was the first of the “atom spies” to be unmasked.
Yet MI5 formed a greatly exaggerated view of the sophistication of
late-Stalinist foreign intelligence operations. In reality, Soviet
agent-running in the West during the 1940s and early 1950s was frequently of
poor quality. There were senior Soviet intelligence officers who argued that
the Five were part of a “fiendishly clever” British plot. In the early Cold
War both Maclean and Philby were badly let down by the controllers at
crucial moments.
After Maclean’s posting to Cairo in October 1948 as counsellor and head of
Chancery at the age of only 35, apparently on a path which might take him to
the top of the diplomatic service but with his double life placing him under
increasing strain, he asked to be allowed to give up work for Soviet
intelligence. The Cairo residency forwarded his note unread to Moscow.
Incredibly, the Centre also ignored it. Not until Maclean sent another
appeal in April 1950 did he at last succeed in attracting the Centre’s
attention.
While the Centre was still deliberating on its response, Maclean went berserk.
One evening in May, in a drunken rage, he and a drinking companion
vandalised the flat of two female members of the US embassy. A few days
later Maclean was sent back to London to see a Harley Street psychiatrist.
Such was his desperate mental state, the last thing either the Foreign
Office or the Harley Street psychiatrist imagined was his involvement in
espionage.
Burgess, like Maclean, was showing the strain of his double life. His
behaviour had become so outrageous that he had come close to dismissal from
the diplomatic service. A trip to Gibraltar and Tangier in the autumn of
1949 had turned into a “wild odyssey of indiscretions”: among them failing
to pay his bills, publicly identifying MI5 officers and drunken singing in
local bars, “Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday”. But it
was Maclean who was most vulnerable. Philby was told by the Centre that
plans would be made to rescue him “before the net closed in”.
In April 1951 Burgess was ordered home from Washington in disgrace after a
further series of escapades. On the eve of Burgess’s departure, he and
Philby agreed that Burgess would convey a warning to Maclean as soon as he
reached Britain. Immediately after his return to England on May 7, Burgess
called on Blunt and used him to deliver a message to the current controller
of the Five at the London residency. Two days later the Centre agreed to
Maclean’s exfiltration. Since it seemed clear that Maclean would need an
escort, the Centre insisted that Burgess accompany him to Moscow. Burgess
initially refused but seems to have been persuaded by a half-promise that he
would be free to return to London. In reality, the Centre believed that
Burgess had become a liability and was determined to get him to Moscow – by
deception if necessary – and keep him there.
Maclean was observed leaving the Foreign Office after work on Friday, May 25,
carrying a large cardboard box, and tracked to Victoria Station, where
“after a drink he boarded the 6.10pm train”. That was to be the last seen of
him. Security Service surveillance of Maclean was flawed as a result of its
lack of resources. The London residency knew from studying the watchers’
working pattern that they clocked off each evening and stopped work for the
weekend at Saturday lunchtime with no Sunday working.
The Centre calculated that, since their recruitment in 1934-5, Philby, Burgess
and Maclean had supplied more than 20,000 pages of “valuable” classified
documents and agent reports. As Philby had feared, however, the defection of
Burgess and Maclean did severe, though not quite terminal, damage to the
careers in Soviet intelligence of the other three members of the Magnificent
Five. Philby was recalled from Washington. On his return to London, he was
officially retired with a golden handshake. Dick White as Director B
(counter-espionage) asked Philby to help in the investigation of “this
horrible business with Burgess and Maclean”. White’s friendly manner left
Philby off his guard when summoned to a further meeting at the Security
Service. This time the interrogator was H.J.P. “Buster” Milmo KC, later a
High Court judge, a wartime member of the Service with a confrontational
style who concluded “that Philby is and has been for many years a Soviet
agent. But the case remained unproven”. The defection of Burgess and Maclean
also cast suspicion on Cairncross and Blunt. 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. 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 led by Peter Wright who were convinced 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.
By 1964 the Service had obtained confessions of varying frankness from Philby,
Blunt and Cairncross. The breakthrough came as a result of a chance meeting
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. Armed with Solomon’s information, Philby’s friend and
former SIS colleague Nicholas Elliott flew from London at the beginning of
1963 to confront him in Beirut, where he was working as a journalist.
When offered immunity from prosecution in return for a confession, Philby
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 20th-century’s most
accomplished liars, made his bogus confession so persuasively that, in
addition to Elliott, the heads of both MI5 and MI6, Sir Roger Hollis and Sir
Dick White, were deceived by it. It was a severe embarrassment to them when
less than a week later Philby secretly fled to Russia.
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. Once they had come clean, the
Security Service had identified all of the Ring of Five.
The tragedy was that it failed to grasp that it had actually solved the case.
Not until 1974 was Blunt at last identified, initially tentatively, as the
Fourth Man. Even then, however, the hunt for the Fifth Man still did not
appear in sight of success. His identity was eventually to be established as
a result of intelligence from Oleg Gordievsky, an MI6 agent in the KGB
recruited in 1974. After his posting to the London residency in 1982, he
revealed that the Fifth Man was indeed Cairncross, who had confessed 18
years earlier. The Service discovered that a major counter-espionage problem
which had continued to preoccupy it for more than 20 years had been resolved
in 1964.
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher
Andrew is published by Allen Lane on Monday 5 October, £30 hardback.
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