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At the end of this dreadful year, I use this bulletin to provide an update on some of the projects that have occupied my time since my last Round-Up. I shall make no other reference to Covid-19, but I was astounded by a report in the Science Section of the New York Times of December 29, which described how some victims of the virus had experienced psychotic symptoms of alarming ferocity. Is there a case for investigating whether traditional paranoiacs may have been affected by similar viral attacks, harmed by neurotoxins which formed as reactions to immune activation, and crossed the blood-brain barrier?

The Contents of this bulletin are as follows:

1. ‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out
2. The John le Carré I Never Knew
3. The Dead Ends of HASP
4. Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld
5. Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away
6. Bandwidth versus Frequency
7. ‘History Today’ and Eric Hobsbawm
8. Puzzles at Kew
9. Trouble at RAE Farnborough
10. End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes

‘Agent Sonya’ Rolls Out

Ben Macintyre’s biography of Sonia/Sonya received an overall very favourable response in the press, and it predictably irked me that it was reviewed by persons who were clearly unfamiliar with the subject and background. I posted one or two comments on-line, but grew weary of hammering away unproductively. Then Kati Marton, a respectable journalist who has written a book about one of Stalin’s spies, offered a laudatory review in the New York Times (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/agent-sonya-ben-macintyre.html?searchResultPosition=1) I accordingly wrote the following letter to the Editor of the Book Review:

Re: ‘The Housewife Who Was A Spy’

Even before Ben Macintyre’s book appears, enough is known about Agent Sonya to rebuff many of the claims that Kati Marton echoes from it.

Sonya was neither a spy, nor a spymaster (or spymistress): she was a courier. She did not blow up any railways in England: the most daring thing she did was probably to cycle home from Banbury to Oxford with documents from Klaus Fuchs in her basket.

A ‘woman just like the rest of us’? Well, she had three children with three different men. Her second marriage, in Switzerland, was bigamous, abetted by MI6, whose agent, Alexander Foote, provided perjurious evidence about her husband’s adultery. As a dedicated communist, she went in for nannies, and boarding-schools for her kids (not with her own money, of course). Just like the rest of us.

She eluded British secret services? Hardly. MI5 and MI6 officers arranged her passport and visa, then aided her installation in Britain, knowing that she came from a dangerous communist family, and even suspected that she might be a ‘spy’. The rat was smelled: they just failed to tail it.

Her husband in the dark? Not at all. He had performed work for MI6 in Switzerland, was trained as a wireless operator by Sonya, and as a Soviet agent carried out transmissions on her behalf from a bungalow in Kidlington, while her decoy apparatus was checked out by the cops in Oxford.

Living in a placid Cotswold hamlet? Not during the war, where her wireless was installed on the premises of Neville Laski, a prominent lawyer, in Summertown, Oxford. Useful to have a landlord with influence and prestige.

A real-life heroine? Not one’s normal image of a heroine. A Stalinist to the death, she ignored the horror of the Soviet Union’s prison-camp and praised its installation in East Germany after the war. Here Ms. Marton gets it right.

It appears that Mr. Macintyre has relied too closely on Sonya’s mendacious memoir, Sonjas Rapport, published in East Germany at the height of the Cold War, in 1977, under her nom de plume Ruth Werner. And he has done a poor job of inspecting the British National Archives.

(For verification of the true story about Sonya, see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html and https://coldspur.com/sonia-mi6s-hidden-hand/ )

My letter was not published.

As I declared in my Special Bulletin of December 8, I was, however, able to make my point. Professor Glees had introduced me to the Journal of Intelligence and National Security, recommending me as a reviewer of Macintyre’s book. Agent Sonya arrived (courtesy of the author) on October 8. By October 16, I had read the book and supplied a 6,000-word review for the attention of the Journal’s books editor in Canada. He accepted my text enthusiastically, and passed it on to his team in the UK. Apart from some minor editorial changes, and the addition of several new references, it constituted the review as it was published on-line almost two months later. It will appear in the next print edition of the Journal.

The team at the Journal were all a pleasure to work with, and they added some considerable value in preparing the article for publication, and providing some useful references that I had thought might be extraneous. But the process took a long time! Meanwhile, Claire Mulley had written an enthusiastic review of the book in the Spectator, and picked it as one of her ‘Books of the Year’. Similarly, the Sunday Times rewarded Macintyre by picking the production of one of their in-house journalists as one of the Books of the Year. I have to complement Macintyre on his ability to tell a rattling good yarn, but I wish that the literary world were not quite so cozy, and that, if books on complicated intelligence matters are going to be sent out to review, they could be sent to qualified persons who knew enough about the subject to be able to give them a serious critique.

Finally, I have to report on two book acquisitions from afar. It took four months for my copy of Superfrau iz GRU to arrive from Moscow, but in time for me to inspect the relevant chapters, and prepare my review of Agent Sonya. The other item that caught my eye was Macintyre’s information about the details of Rudolf Hamburger’s departure from Marseilles in the spring of 1939. I imagined this must have come from the latter’s Zehn Jahre Lager, Hamburger’s memoir of his ten years in the Gulag, after his arrest by the British in Tehran, and his being handed over to the Soviets. This was apparently not published until 2013. I thus ordered a copy from Germany, and it arrived in late November. Yet Hamburger’s story does not start until 1943: he has nothing to say about his time in Switzerland.

His son Maik edited the book, and provided a revealing profile of his father. Of his parents’ time in China, when Sonia started her conspiratorial work with Richard Sorge, he wrote: “Als sie nicht umhinkann, ihn einzuweihen, ist er ausser sich. Nicht nur, dass er sich hintergangen fühlt – sie hat die Familie aufs Spiel gesetzt.“ (“Since she could not prevent herself from entangling him, he is beside himself. Not just that he feels deceived – she has put the whole family at stake.”) When Sonia decided to return to Moscow for training, the marriage was over. And when she published her memoir in 1977 Maik noted: “Hamburger ist über diese Publikation und die Darstellung seiner Person darin hochgradig verärgert.“ (“Hamburger is considerably annoyed by this publication, and the representation of his character in it.”) Indeed, Maik. Your father suffered much on her account.

The John le Carré I Never Knew

I noted with great sadness the death of John le Carré this month. I imagine I was one of many who, during their university years, read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, and was blown over by this very unromantic view of the world of espionage. Perhaps it was that experience that led me into a lifelong fascination with that realm. He was a brilliant writer, especially in the sphere of vocal registers. I wrote an extensive assessment of him back in 2016 (see ), and do not believe I have much to add – apart from the inevitable factor of Sonia.

In our article in the Mail on Sunday (see: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html , Professor Glees and I had characterized Sonia’s story as real-life confirmation of le Carré’s verdict that ‘betrayal is always the handmaiden of espionage’ , and I concluded my detailed explanation of the saga (see: https://coldspur.com/sonia-mi6s-hidden-hand/ ) with the following words: “What it boils down to is that the truth is indeed stranger than anything that the ex-MI6 officer John le Carré, master of espionage fiction, could have dreamed up. If he ever devised a plot whereby the service that recruited him had embarked on such a flimsy and outrageous project, and tried to cover it up in the ham-fisted way that the real archive shows, while all the time believing that the opposition did not know what was going on, his publisher would have sent him back to the drawing-board.”

I had rather whimsically hoped that Mr. le Carré would have found these articles, and perhaps reached out to comment somewhere. But my hopes were dashed when I read Ben Macintyre’s tribute in the Times (see: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-le-carre-the-spy-who-was-my-friend-svr8tgv82 ). This is a typical item of Macintyrean self-promotion, as he encourages the glamour of le Carré to flow over him (‘Oh what prize boozers we were! How we joked and joshed each other!’), while the journalist attempts to put himself in a more serious class than his famous friend: “We shared a fascination with the murky, complex world of espionage: he from the vantage point of fiction and lived experience, whereas I stuck to historical fact and research.” Pass the sick-bag, Alice.

And then there was that coy plug for his book on Philby, A Spy Among Friends. “On another long ramble, between books and stuck for a new subject, I asked him what he thought was the best untold spy story of the Cold War. ‘That is easy,’ he said. ‘It is the relationship between Kim Philby and Nicholas Elliott,’ the MI6 officer who worked alongside the KGB spy for two decades and was comprehensively betrayed by him.’ That led to another book, ostensibly about the greatest spy scandal of the century, but also an exploration of male friendship, the bonds of education, class and secrecy, and the most intimate duplicity. Le Carré wrote the afterword, refusing payment.” Did ELLI not even touch the Great Man’s consciousness? What a load of boloney.

Thus, if le Carré really believed that the Philby-Elliott relationship was the best untold story of the Cold War, I knew we were on shaky ground. And, sure enough, a discussion on Sonya followed. “We met for the last time in October, on one of those medical toots, in the Hampstead house. A single table lamp dimly illuminated the old sitting room, unchanged over the years. Having read my latest book [‘Agent Sonya,’ for those of you who haven’t been paying attention], he had sent an enthusiastic note and a suggestion we meet: “You made us over time love and admire Sonya herself, and pity her final disillusionment, which in some ways mirrors our own. What guts, and what nerve. And the men wimps or misfits beside her.”

Hallo!! What were you thinking, old boy? Macintyre had hoodwinked the Old Master himself, who had been taken in by Macintyre’s picaresque ramblings, and even spouted the tired old nonsense that Sonya’s disillusionment ‘in some ways mirrors our own’. Who are you speaking for, chum, and what gives you the right to assume you know how the rest of us feel? What business have you projecting your own anxieties and disappointments on the rest of us? ‘Loving and admiring’ that destructive and woefully misguided creature? What came over you?

It must be the permanent challenge of every novelist as to how far he or she can go in projecting his or her own emotional turmoils into the world of outside, and claiming they are universal. As le Carré aged, I think he dealt with this aspect of his experiences less and less convincingly. And there have been some very portentous statements made about his contribution to understanding human affairs. Thus, Phillipe Sands, in the New York Times: “David [not King Edward VIII, by the way, but oh, what a giveaway!] was uniquely able to draw the connections between the human and historical, the personal and the political, pulling on the seamless thread that is the human condition.” (Outside Hampstead intellectuals, people don’t really talk like that still, do they?) With le Carré, one was never sure if he believed that the intelligence services, with their duplicities, deceits, and betrayals, caused their operatives to adopt the same traits, or whether those services naturally attracted persons whose character was already shaped by such erosive activities.

I believe the truth was far more prosaic. MI5, for example, was very similar to any other bureaucratic institution. In the war years, recruits were not subjected to any kind of personality or ideological test. They received no formal training, and picked up the job as they went along. Rivalries developed. Officers had affairs with their secretaries (or the secretaries of other officers), and sometimes they married them. Plots were hatched for personal advancement or survival. (White eased out Liddell in the same way that Philby outmanoeuvred Cowgill.) What was important was the survival of the institution, and warding off the enemy (MI6), and, if necessary, lying to their political masters. The fact is that, as soon as they let rogues like Blunt in, did nothing when they discovered him red-handed, and then tried to manipulate him to their advantage, White and Hollis were trapped, as trapped as Philby and his cronies were when they signed their own pact with the devil. Only in MI5’s case, these were essentially decent men who did not understand the nature of the conflict they had been drawn into.

On one aspect, however, Macintyre was absolutely right – the question of le Carré’s moral equivalence. With his large pile in Cornwall, and his opulent lunches, and royalties surging in, le Carré continued to rant about ‘capitalism’, as if all extravagant or immoral behaviour by enterprises, large or small, irrevocably damned the whole shooting-match. Would he have railed against ‘free enterprise’ or ‘pluralist democracy’? He reminded me of A. J. P. Taylor, fuming about capitalism during the day, and tracking his stock prices and dividends in the evenings. And le Carré’s political instincts took on a very hectoring and incongruous tone in his later years, with George Smiley brought out of retirement to champion the EU in A Legacy of Spies, and, a couple of years ago, Agent Running In The Field being used as a propaganda vehicle against the Brexiteers. (While my friend and ex-supervisor, Professor Anthony Glees, thinks highly of this book, I thought it was weak, with unconvincing characters, unlikely backgrounds and encounters, and an implausible plot.)

I could imagine myself sitting down in the author’s Hampstead sitting-room, where we open a second bottle of Muscadet, and get down to serious talk. He tells me how he feels he has been betrayed by the shabby and corrupt British political establishment. It is time for me to speak up.

“What are you talking about, squire? Why do you think you’re that important? You win a few, you lose a few. Sure, democracy is a mess, but it’s better than the alternative! And look at that European Union you are so ga-ga about? Hardly a democratic institution, is it? Those Eurocrats continue to give the Brits a hard time, even though the two are ideological allies, and the UK at least exercised a popular vote to leave, while those rogue states, Hungary and Poland, blackmail the EU into a shady and slimy deal over sovereignty, and weasel some more euros out of Brussels! Talk about moral dilemmas and sleaziness! Why don’t you write about that instead? Aren’t you more nostalgic, in your admiration for the ‘European Project’, than all those Brexiteers you believe to be Empire Loyalists?”

But I notice he is no longer listening. I catch him whispering to one of his minions: “Who is this nutter? Get him out of here!”

I slip a few uneaten quails’ eggs into my pocket, and leave.

(A product of coldspur Syndications Inc. Not to be reproduced without permission.)

The Dead Ends of HASP

I had been relying on two trails to help resolve the outstanding mysteries of the so-called HASP messages that GCHQ had acquired from Swedish intelligence, and which reputedly gave them breakthroughs on decrypting some elusive VENONA traffic. (see ). One was a Swedish academic to whom Denis Lenihan had introduced me, Professor Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at the University of Lund in Sweden. Professor Agrell had delivered a speech on Swedish VENONA a decade ago, and had prepared a paper in English that outlined what he had published in a book in Swedish, unfortunately not (yet) translated into English. The other was the arrival of the authorised history of GCHQ by the Canadian academic, Professor John Ferris. It was perhaps reasonable to expect that the VENONA project would undergo a sustained analysis in this work, which was published in October of this year.

Professor Agrell’s work looked promising. His paper, titled ‘The Stockholm Venona – Cryptanalysis, intelligence liaison and the limits of counter-intelligence’, had been presented at the 2009 Cryptologic History Symposium, October 15 and 16, 2009, at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, MD. His annotations indicated that he had enjoyed extensive access to Swedish Security Police files, as well as some documents from the military intelligence and security services. Moreover, his analysis had benefitted from declassified American, German and British intelligence, along with some recently declassified Swedish files. His references included two useful-sounding books written in English, Swedish Signal Intelligence 1900-1945, byC.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman, and the same McKay’s From Information to Intrigue. Studies in Secret Service based on the Swedish Experience, 1939-1945. I acquired and read both volumes.

The experience was very disappointing. The two books were very poorly written, and danced around paradoxical issues. I prepared some questions for the Professor, to which he eventually gave me some brief answers, and I responded with some more detailed inquiries, to which he replied. He had never heard of HASP outside Wright’s book. He was unable to provide convincing responses over passages in his paper that I found puzzling. Towards the end of our exchange, I asked him about his assertion that ‘GCHQ has released agent-network VENONA traffic to the National Archives’, since I imagined that this might refer to some of the missing SONIA transmissions that Wright believed existed. His response was that he was referring to the ‘so calledISCOT material from 1944-45’. Well, I knew about that, and have written about it. It has nothing to do with VENONA, but contains communications between Moscow and guerilla armies in Eastern Europe, decrypted by Denniston’s group at Berkeley Street. At this stage I gave up.

In a future bulletin, I shall lay out the total Agrell-Percy correspondence, and annotate which parts of the exchange are, in my opinion, highly important, but I do not think we are going to learn much more from the Swedish end of things. The Swedes seem to be fairly tight-lipped about these matters.

I completed John Ferris’s Behind the Enigma on November 30, and put its 823 pages down with a heavy thud and a heavy sigh. This book must, in many ways, be an embarrassment to GCHQ. It is poorly written, repetitive, jargon-filled, and frequently circumlocutory. The author is poor at defining terms, and the work lacks a Glossary and Bibliography. Ferris has an annoying habit of describing historical events with modern-day terminology, and darts around from period to period in a bewilderingly undisciplined manner. He includes a lot of tedious sociological analysis of employment patterns at Bletchley Park and Cheltenham. One can find some very useful insights amongst all the dense analysis, but it is a hard slog tracking them down. And he is elliptical or superficial about the matters that interest me most, that is the interception and decipherment of Soviet wireless traffic.

One receives a dispiriting message straight away, on page 4. “This history could not discuss diplomatic Sigint after 1945, nor any technicalities of collection which remained current.” Yet this stipulation does not prevent Ferris from making multiple claims about GCHQ’s penetration of Soviet high-grade systems, and promoting the successes of other apparent diplomatic projects, such as Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Cuba. For example, he refers to Dick White’s recommendation in 1968 that more Soviet tasks be handed over to the US’s NSA (p 311), but, not many pages later, he writes of the Americans’ desire not to fall behind British Sigint, and their need to maintain the benefit they received from GCHQ’s ‘power against Russia’ (p 340). On page 355 we learn that GCHQ ‘ravaged Soviet civil and machine traffic’. I do not know what all this means.

It seems that Ferris does not really understand VENONA. His coverage of MASK (the 1930s collection of Comintern traffic with agents in Britain) is trivial, he ignores ISCOT completely, and he characterizes VENONA in a similarly superficial fashion: “It [GCHQ] began an attack on Soviet systems. Between 1946 and 1948, it produced Britain’s best intelligence, which consumers rated equal to Ultra.” (p 279). He fails to explain how the project attacked traffic that had been stored from 1943 onwards, and does not explain the relationship between the USA efforts and the British (let alone the Swedes). His statement about the peak of UK/USA performance against Soviet traffic as occurring between 1945 and 1953 (p 503) is simply wrong. VENONA has just four entries in the Index, and the longest passage concerns itself with the leakage in Australia. He offers no explanation of how the problem of reused one-time-pads occurred, or how the British and American cryptologists made progress, how they approached the problem, and what was left unsolved. Of HASP, there is not a sign.

It is evident that GCHQ, for whatever reason, wants VENONA (and HASP) to remain not only secrets, but to be forgotten. All my appeals to its Press Office have gone unacknowledged, and the issue of Ferris’s History shows that it has no intention of unveiling anything more. Why these events of sixty years and more ago should be subject to such confidentiality restrictions, I have no idea. It is difficult to imagine how the techniques of one-time pads, and directories, and codebooks could form an exposure in cryptological defences of 2020, unless the process would reveal some other embarrassing situation. Yet I know how sensitive it is. A month or two back, I had the privilege of completing a short exchange with a gentleman who had worked for GCHQ for over thirty years, in the Russian division. He said he had never heard of HASP. Well, even if he had, that was what he had been instructed to say. But we know better: ‘HASP’ appears on that RSS record.

Anthony Blunt: Melodrama at the Courtauld

Every schoolboy knows who murdered Atahualpa, and how in April 1964 the MI5 officer Arthur Martin elicited a confession of Soviet espionage from Anthony Blunt. Yet I have been rapidly coming to the conclusion that the whole episode at Blunt’s apartment at the Courtauld Institute was a fiction, a sham event conceived by Roger Hollis and Dick White, in order to conceal Blunt’s earlier confession, and to divert responsibility for the disclosure on to an apparently recent meeting between MI5 officer Arthur Martin and the American Michael Straight, after the latter’s confession to the FBI in the summer of 1963. By building a careful chronology of all the historical sources, but especially those of British Cabinet archives, the FBI, and the CIA, a more accurate picture of the extraordinary exchanges MI5 had with Blunt, Straight and the fifth Cambridge spy, John Cairncross, can be constructed.

The dominant fact about the timing of Blunt’s confession is that all accounts (except one) use Penrose and Freeman’s Conspiracy of Silence as their source, which, in turn, refers to a correspondence between the authors and the MI5 officer Arthur Martin in 1985. Only Christopher Andrew claims that an archival report exists describing the events, but it is identified solely in Andrew’s customarily unacademic vernacular of ‘Security Service Archives’. The details are vaguely the same. On the other hand, several commentators and authors, from Andrew Boyle to Dame Stella Rimington, suggest that Blunt made his confession earlier, though biographers and historians struggle with the way that the ‘official’ account has pervaded the debate, and even use it as a reason to reject all the rumours that Blunt had made his compact some time beforehand.

This project has been several months in the making. I was provoked by Wright’s nonsense in Spycatcher to take a fresh look at the whole search for Soviet moles in MI5. I re-read Nigel West’s Molehunt, this time with a more critical eye. Denis Lenihan and I collaborated on a detailed chronology for the whole period. I reinspected the evidence that the defector Anatoli Golitsyn was supposed to have provided that helped nail Philby. The journalist James Hanning alerted me to some passages in Climate of Treason that I had not studied seriously. I was intrigued by David Cannadine’s rather lavish A Question of Retribution (published earlier this year), which examined the furore over Blunt’s ousting from the British Academy after his role as a spy had been revealed, and I pondered over Richard Davenport-Hines’s misleading review of Cannadine’s book in the Times Literary Supplement a few months ago. I went back to the source works by Boyle, Andrew, West, Costello, Pincher, Penrose and Freeman, Wright, Bower, Straight, Cairncross, Perry, Rimington, and Smith to unravel the incongruous and conflicting tales they spun, and acquired Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross. I inspected carefully two files at the National Archives, declassified in the past five years, that appeared to have been misunderstood by recent biographers.

The dominant narrative runs as follows: Golitsyn created interest in the notion of the ‘Cambridge 5’, and helped to identify Philby as the Third Man; Michael Straight confessed to the FBI that he had been recruited by Blunt at Cambridge; the FBI notified MI5; MI5 interviewed Straight; MI5 could not move against Blunt (the Fourth Man) simply because of Straight’s evidence; MI5 concocted a deal whereby Blunt would essentially receive a pardon if he provided information that led to the ‘Fifth Man’; Blunt revealed that he had recruited John Cairncross; at some stage, MI5 interrogated Cairncross who, on similar terms, confessed; Cairncross’s evasions deflected suspicions that he could have been the ‘Fifth Man’; other candidates were investigated. Blunt’s culpability, and the fact of a deal, remained a secret until, in 1979, Andrew Boyle revealed the role of ‘Maurice’ in Climate of Treason, Private Eye outed ‘Maurice’ as Blunt, and Margaret Thatcher admitted the unwritten compact that had been agreed with Blunt. Yet a muddle endured.

The archives show that this was not the actual sequence of events. The timing does not make sense. And it all revolves around Arthur Martin’s two interrogations of Cairncross in Cleveland, Ohio, in February and March 1964, i.e. before the date claimed for Blunt’s confession to Arthur Martin. Wright’s Spycatcher is perhaps the most egregious example of a work where the chronology is hopelessly distorted or misunderstood, and the author is shown to be carrying on a project of utter disinformation. All other accounts show some manner of delusion, or laziness in ignoring obvious anomalies. The fact is that Hollis, White, Trend & co. all hoodwinked the Foreign Office, and withheld information from the new Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home. In my report at the end of January 2021 I shall reveal (almost) all. In the meantime, consider these priceless quotations (from a FO archive):

“It is desirable that we should be seen to be doing everything possible to bring him [Cairncross] to justice.’ (Sir Bernard Burrows, Chairman of the JIC, February 20, 1964)

“At the same time I am bound to say I think MI5 are taking a lot on themselves in deciding without any reference not to pursue such cases at some time (in this instance in Rome, Bangkok, and U.K.) and then to go ahead at others (here in USA). The political implication of this decision do not appear to have been weighed: only those of the mystery of spy-catching. However effective this may now have been proved, it is apt to leave us with a number of difficult questions to answer.” (Howard Caccia, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, February 20, 1964)

“It is essential that I should be able to convince the F.B.I. that we are not trying to find a way out of taking action but, on the contrary, that we are anxious to prosecute if this proves possible.” (Roger Hollis to Burke Trend, February 25, 1964)

“We must not appear reluctant to take any measures which might secure Cairncross’s return to the United Kingdom.” (Burke Trend to the Cabinet, February 28, 1964)

The tradition of Sir Humphrey Appleby was in full flow.

Trevor Barnes Gives the Game Away

Regular Coldspur readers will have spotted that I frequently attempt to get in touch with authors whose books I have read, sometimes to dispute facts, but normally to try to move the investigations forward. It is not an easy task: the more famous an author is, the more he or she tends to hide behind his or her publisher, or press agent. Some approaches have drawn a complete blank. I often end up writing emails to the publisher: in the case of Ben Macintyre, it got ‘lost’. When Ivan Vassiliev’s publisher invited me to contact him by sending a letter for him to their office, and promised to forward it to his secret address in the UK, I did so, but then heard nothing.

With a little digging, however, especially around university websites, one can often find email addresses for academics, and write in the belief that, if an address is displayed publicly, one’s messages will at least not fall into a spam folder. I am always very respectful, even subservient, on my first approach, and try to gain the author’s confidence that I am a voice worth listening to. And I have had some excellent dialogues with some prominent writers and historians – until they get tired of me, or when I begin to challenge some of their conclusions, or, perhaps, when they start to think that I am treading on ‘their’ turf. (Yes, historians can be very territorial.). For I have found that many writers – qualified professional historians, or competent amateurs – seem to prefer to draw a veil of silence over anything that might be interpreted as a threat to their reputation, or a challenge to what they have published beforehand, in a manner that makes clams all over the world drop their jaws at the speed of such tergiversation.

In this business, however, once you lose your inquisitiveness, I believe, you are lost. And if it means more to you to defend a position that you have previously taken, and on which you may have staked your reputation, than to accept that new facts may shake your previous hypotheses and conclusions, it is time to retire. If I put together a theory about some mysterious, previously unexplained event, and then learn that there is a massive hole in it, I want to abandon it, and start afresh. (But I need to hear solid arguments, not just ‘I don’t agree with you’, or ‘read what Chapman Pincher says’, which is what happens sometimes.)

Regrettably, Trevor Barnes has fallen into that form of stubborn denial. When I first contacted him over Dead Doubles, he was communicative, grateful, open-minded. He accepted that the paperback edition of his book would need to reflect some corrections, and agreed that the several points of controversy that I listed in my review were all substantive. But when I started to quiz him on the matter of the disgraced MI5 officer (see Dead Doubles review), he declined to respond to, or even acknowledge, my messages. (And maybe he found my review of his book on coldspur, since I did take the trouble to point it out to him.) The question in his case revolves around a rather clumsy Endnote in his book, which, instead of achieving the intended goal of burying the topic, merely serves to provoke additional interest.

Note 8, to Part One, on page 250, runs as follows:

“Private information. James Craggs is a pseudonym. The name of the case officer is redacted from the released MI5 files. The author discovered his real identity but was requested by MI5 sources not to name him to avoid potential distress to his family.”

The passage referred to is a brief one where Barnes describes how David Whyte (the head of D2 in MI5), swung into action against Houghton. I reproduce it here:

“He chose two officers to join him on the case. One was George Leggatt, half-Polish and a friend, with whom he had worked on Soviet counter-espionage cases in the 1950s. The case officer was James Craggs, a sociable bachelor in his late thirties.”

That’s it. But so many questions raised! ‘Private information’ that ‘Craggs’ was ‘a sociable bachelor’, which could well have been a substitute for ‘confirmed bachelor’ in those unenlightened days, perhaps? (But then he has a family.) What else could have been ‘private’ about this factoid? And why would a pseudonym have to be used? Did ‘Craggs’ perform something massively discreditable to warrant such wariness after sixty years? Barnes draws to our attention the fact that the officer’s name is redacted in the released file. But how many readers would have bothered to inspect the files if Barnes has simply used his real name, but not mentioned the attempts to conceal it, or the suggestion of high crimes and misdemeanours? By signalling his own powers as a sleuth, all Barnes has done is invite analysis of what ‘Craggs’ might have been up to, something that would have lain dormant if he had not highlighted it.

For ‘Craggs’’s real name is quite clear from KV 2/4380. Denis Lenihan pointed out to me that the name was apparent (without actually identifying it for me), and I confirmed it from my own inspection. The MI5 weeders performed a very poor job of censorship. Indeed, ‘Craggs’s’ name has been redacted in several places, in memoranda and letters that he wrote, and in items referring to him, but it is easy to determine what his real name was. On one report, dated May 25, 1960, Leggatt has headed his report: “Note on a Visit by Messrs. Snelling and Leggatt . . .”. Moreover, on some of the reports written by Snelling himself, the initials of the author and his secretary/typist have been left intact in the bottom left-hand corner: JWES/LMM.

So, J. W. E. Snelling, who were you, and what were you up to? As I suggested in my review of Dead Doubles, the most obvious cause of his disgrace is his probable leaking to the Daily Mail journalist Artur Tietjen the details of Captain Austen’s testimony on Houghton’s behaviour in Warsaw. Yet it seems to me quite extraordinary that the institutional memory of his corruption could endure so sharply after sixty years. If there is no other record of what he did, the weeders would have done much better simply to leave his name in place. I can’t imagine that anyone would otherwise have started to raise questions.

Snelling is not a very common name, although, in an extraordinary coincidence, a ‘Freddie Snelling’ also appears in Dead Doubles. He was an antiquarian book-seller friend of the Krogers. From an inspection of genealogical records, however, it does not appear that the two could have been related. I performed some searches on ‘J. W. E. Snelling’, and came up with a couple of intriguing items. The name appears in the St. Edmund Hall Magazine of 1951-52 (see https://issuu.com/stedmundhall/docs/st_edmund_hall_magazine_1951) , and the Statesman’s Yearbook of 1966-67 shows that he was a First Secretary in the British Embassy to South Africa (see https://books.google.com/books?id=DdfMDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1412&lpg=PA1412&dq=j+w+e+snelling&source=bl&ots=8Pd9Dd0J97&sig=ACfU3U3DEgUt_KnJ2KZn_gbi9MbtoEjL8Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjxjsmI06rtAhXFjVkKHf6pAmoQ6AEwCHoECAgQAg#v=onepage&q=j%20w%20e%20snelling&f=false). I wrote to the Librarian at St. Edmund Hall, asking for further details on Snelling. She acknowledged my request, but after several weeks the Archivist has not been able to respond.

Can any reader help? Though perhaps it is over to Trevor Barnes, now that he has opened up this can of worms, to bring us up to date. Moreover, I do not understand why Barnes was working so closely with MI5 on this book. Was he not aware that he would be pointed in directions they wanted him to go, and steered away from sensitive areas? In this case, it rather backfired, which has a humorous angle, I must admit. Intelligence historians, however, should hide themselves away – probably in some remote spot like North Carolina – never interview anybody, and stay well clear of the spooks. Just download the archives that are available, arrange for others to be photographed, have all the relevant books at hand and put on your thinking-cap. I admit the remoteness of so many valuable libraries, such as the Bodleian and that of Churchill College, Cambridge, represents a massive inconvenience, but the show must go on.

Bandwidth versus Frequency

My Chief Radiological Adviser, Dr. Brian Austin, has been of inestimable value in helping me get things straight in matters of the transmission, reception and interception of wireless signals. Sometime in early 2021 I shall be concluding my analysis of the claims made concerning SONIA’s extraordinary accomplishments with radio transmissions from the Cotswolds, guided by Dr. Austin’s expert insights. In the meantime, I want to give him space here to correct a miscomprehension I had of wireless terminology. A few weeks ago, he wrote to me as follows:

Reading your July 31st “Sonia and MI6’s Hidden Hand”, I came across this statement:

“Since her messages needed to reach Moscow, she would have had to use a higher band-width (probably over 1000 kcs) than would have been used by postulated Nazi agents trying to reach. . . ”

This requires some modification, as I’ll now explain. The term bandwidth (for which the symbol B is often used) implies the width of a communications channel necessary to accommodate a particular type of transmitted signal. In essence, the more complicated the message (in terms of its mathematical structure not its philological content) the wider the bandwidth required. The simplest of all signals is on-off keying such as hand-sent Morse Code. The faster it is sent, the more bandwidth it requires. However, for all typical hand-sent Morse transmissions the bandwidth needed will always be less than 1000 Hz. On the other hand, if one wishes to transmit speech, whether by radio or by telephone, then the bandwidth needed is typically 3000 Hz (or 3 kHz). Thus, all standard landline telephones are designed to handle a 3 kHz bandwidth in order to faithfully reproduce the human voice which, generally speaking, involves frequencies from about 300 Hz to 3300 Hz meaning the bandwidth is B = 3300 – 300 = 3000 Hz or 3 kHz.

By contrast, TV signals, and especially colour TV signals, are far more complicated than speech since even the old B&W TV had to convey movement as well as black, white and grey tones. To do that required at least a MHz or so of bandwidth. These days, a whole spectrum of colours as well as extremely rapid movement has to be transmitted and so the typical colour TV bandwidth for good quality reproduction in our British Pal (Phase Alternating Line) system is several MHz wide. As an aside, the North American system is called NTSC. When Pal and NTSC were competing with each other in the 1960s for world dominance, NTSC was known disparagingly by ourselves as meaning Never Twice the Same Colour!

So your use of the term band-width above is incorrect. What you mean isfrequency. It is related to wavelength simply as frequency = speed of light / wavelength. And it is also more common, and more accurate, to specify a transmitter’s frequency rather than its wavelength. All quartz crystals are marked in units of frequency. The only occasion Macintyre took a leap into such complexities in “Agent Sonya” was on p.151 where he indicated that her transmitter operated on a frequency of 6.1182 MHz. That sounds entirely feasible and it would have been the frequency marked on the particular crystal issued to her (and not purchased in the nearby hardware shop as BM would have us believe).

You are quite correct in saying that to communicate with Moscow required a higher frequency than would have been needed for contact with Germany, say. But it would have been considerably higher than the 1000 kcs you mentioned. 1000 kcs (or kHz in today’s parlance) is just 1 Mcs (MHz) and actually lies within the Medium Wave broadcast band. Such low frequencies only propagate via the ground wave whereas to reach Moscow, and indeed anywhere in Europe from England, will have necessitated signals of somegood few MHz.

In general the greater the distance the higher the frequency but that is rather simplistic because it all depends on the state of the ionosphere which varies diurnally, with the seasons and over the 11-year sunspot cycle. Choosing the best frequency for a particular communications link is a pretty complex task and would never be left to the wireless operator. His or her masters would have experts doing just that and then the agent would be supplied with the correct crystals depending on whether the skeds were to be during daylight hours or at night and, also, taking into account the distance between the transmitting station and the receiving station. In my reading about the WW2 spy networks I have not come across any agent being required to operate over a period of years which might require a frequency change to accommodate the change in sunspot cycle that will have taken place.

An example from the world of international broadcasting illustrates all this rather nicely. The BBC World Service used to operate on two specific frequencies for its Africa service. Throughout the day it was 15.4 MHz (or 15 400 kHz) while at night they would switch to 6.915 MHz (or 6 915 kHz). The bandwidth they used was about 10 kHz because they transmitted music as well as speech and music being more structurally complicated than speech needs a greater bandwidth than 3 kHz.

Thank you for your patient explanation, Brian.

Puzzles at Kew

I have written much about the bizarre practices at the National Archives at Kew, and especially of the withdrawal of files that had previously been made available, and had been exploited by historians. The most famous case is the that of files on Fuchs and Peierls: in the past three years, Frank Close and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan have written biographies of Klaus Fuchs that freely used files that have since been withdrawn. Then, in my August 31 piece about Liverpool University, I noted that, over a period of a couple of days where I was inspecting the records of a few little-known scientists, the descriptions were being changed in real-time, and some of the records I had looked at suddenly moved into ‘Retained’ mode.

My first reaction to this event was that my usage of Kew records was perhaps being monitored on-line, and decisions were being made to stop the leakage before any more damage was done. I thus decided to contact one of my Kew ‘insider’ friends, and describe to him what happened. He admitted to similar perplexity, but, after making some discrete inquiries, learned that there was an ongoing project under way to review catalogue entries, and attempt to make them more accurate to aid better on-line searchability. Apparently, I had hit upon an obscure group of records that was undergoing such treatment at the time. It was simply coincidence. (Although I have to point out that this exercise did not appear to be undertaken with strict professional guidelines: several spelling errors had in the meantime been introduced.)

A short time ago, however, another irritating anomaly came to light. I had been re-reading parts of Chris Smith’s The Last Cambridge Spy, when I noticed that he had enjoyed access to some files on John Cairncross which showed up as being ‘Retained’, namely HO 532/4, ‘Espionage activities by individuals: John Cairncross’. This sounded like a very important resource, and I discovered from Smith’s Introduction that, among the few documents on Cairncross released to the National Archives was ‘a Home Office file, heavily redacted’, which he ‘obtained via a freedom of information request.’ I asked myself why, if a file has been declassified by such a request, it should not be made available to all. It was difficult to determine whether Smith had capably exploited his find, since I found his approach to intelligence matters very tentative and incurious. I have thus asked my London-based researcher to follow up with Kew, and have provided him with all the details.

Incidentally, Denis Lenihan has informed me that his freedom of information request for the files of Renate Stephenie SIMPSON nee KUCZYNSKI and Arthur Cecil SIMPSON (namely, one of Sonia’s sisters and her husband), KV 2/2889-2993 has been successful. The response to Denis a few weeks ago contained the following passage: “Further to my email of 14 October 2020 informing you of the decision taken that the above records can all be released, I am very pleased to report that, at long last, these records are now available to view, albeit with a few redactions made under Section 40(2) (personal information) of the FOI Act 2000. The delay since my last correspondence has been because digitised versions of the files needed to be created by our Documents Online team and due to The National Archives’ restricted service because of the Coronavirus pandemic, this has taken the team longer to complete than it normally would. However the work is now compete [sic].”

This is doubly interesting, since I had been one of the beneficiaries of a previous policy, and had acquired the digitised version of KV 2/2889 back in 2017. So why that item would have to be re-digitised is not clear. And yes, all the files are listed in the Kew Catalogue as being available – and, by mid-December, they were all digitised, and available for free download.

Lastly, some business with the Cambridge University Library. On reading Geoff Andrews’s recent biography of John Cairncross, Agent Moliere, I was taken with some passages where he made claims about the activities of the FBI over Cairncross’s interrogations in Cleveland in early 1964. I could not see any references in his Endnotes, and my search on ‘Cairncross’ in the FBI Vault had drawn a blank. By inspecting Andrews’s Notes more carefully, however, I was able to determine that the information about the FBI came from a box in the John Cairncross papers held at Cambridge University Manuscripts Collection (CULMC) under ref. Add.10042. I thus performed a search on those arguments at the CULMC website, but came up with nothing.

My next step was thus to send a simple email to the Librarian at Cambridge, asking for verification of the archival material’s existence, whether any index of the boxes was available, and what it might cost to have some of them photographed. I very quickly received an automated reply acknowledging my request, giving me a ticket number, and informing me that they would reply to my inquiry ‘as soon as they can’. A very pleasant gentleman contacted me after a few days, explaining that the Cairncross boxes had not been indexed, but that he would inspect them if I could give him a closer idea of what I was looking for. I responded on December 17. Since then, nothing.

Trouble at RAE Farnborough

Readers will recall my recent description of the remarkable career of Boris Davison (see Liverpool University: Home for Distressed Spies), who managed to gain a position at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough, shortly after he arrived in the UK, in 1938. I wondered whether there was anything furtive about this appointment, and my interest was piqued by a passage I read in Simon Ball’s Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services (2020). As I have suggested before, this is a very strange and oddly-constructed book, but it does contain a few nuggets of insider information.

On page 199, Ball introduces a report on Russian (i.e. ‘Soviet’) intelligence written in 1955 by Cedric Cliffe, former assistant to Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook. Its title was ‘Survey of Russian Espionage in Britain, 1935-1955’, and was filed as KV 3/417 at the National Archives. Ball explains how Britain suffered from penetration problems well before the Burgess and Maclean case, and writes: “The most notable UK-based agents of the ‘illegal’ [Henri Robinson] were two technicians employed at the time of their recruitment in 1935 at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, Farnborough. They had been identified after the war on the basis of German evidence, but no action was taken because one was still working usefully on classified weapons and the other one was a Labour MP.” But Ball does not identify the two employees, nor comment on the astonishing fact that a spy’s role as a Labour MP presumably protected him from prosecution. Who were these agents?

Then I remembered that I had KV 3/417 on my desktop. Only I had not recognized it as the ‘Cliffe Report’: the author’s name does not appear on it. (That is where Ball’s insider knowledge comes into play.) And in paragraph 96, on page 24, Cliffe has this to say:

‘Wilfred Foulston VERNON was also [alongside one William MEREDITH] an aircraft designer employed at Farnborough. He was active in C.P.G.B. activities from about 1934 onwards and visited Russia twice, in 1935 and 1936. From 1936 onwards he was, like MEREDITH, passing secret information through WEISS, first to HARRY II and later to Henri Robinson. He was probably present when MEREDITH was introduced to WEISS by HARRY II. In August 1937, a burglary at VERNON’s residence led to the discovery there of many secret documents. As a result, VERNON was suspended from the R.A.E., charged under the Official Secrets Acts, and fined £50 – for the improper possession of these documents, it should be noted, and not for espionage, which was not at this time suspected.’

Cliffe’s report goes on to state that, when Vernon’s espionage activities first became known, he was the Member of Parliament for Dulwich, which seat he won in 1945 and retained in 1950, losing it the following year. It was thought ‘impracticable to prosecute him’, though why this was so (parliamentary immunity? not wanting to upset the unions? opening the floodgates?) is not stated. Cliffe closes his account by saying that Vernon ‘admitted, under interrogation, that he had been recruited by Meredith and had committed espionage, but he told little else.’ An irritating paragraph has then been redacted before Cliffe turns to Vernon’s controller, Weiss.

This man was clearly Ball’s ‘Labour MP’. So what about his confession? MI5’s chunky set of files on Vernon can be inspected at KV 2/992-996, and they show that, once he lost his parliamentary seat in October 1951, MI5 was free to interrogate him, and he was somewhat ‘deflated’ by Skardon’s approach. After consulting with his sidekick, Meredith, he confessed to spying for the Soviets, and giving information to his controller. In 1948, Prime Minster Attlee had been ‘surprised and shocked’ to hear that MI5 had evidence against Vernon. Now that the Labour Party had lost the election, the case of Vernon & Meredith seemed to die a slow death. Vernon became a member of the London County Council. He died in 1975.

Little appears to have been written about the Weiss spy-ring. (Nigel West has noted them.) Andrew’s Defending the Realm has no reference to Cliffe, Weiss, Meredith, Vernon, or even the RAE. The Royal Aeronautical Establishment was obviously a security disaster, and a fuller tale about its subversion by Soviet agents, and the role of Boris Davison, remains to be told.

Eric Hobsbawm and ‘History Today’

Over the past six months History Today has published some provocative items about the historian Eric Hobsbawm. It started in May, when Jesus Casquete, Professor of the History of Political Thought and the History of Social Movements at the University of the Basque Country, provided an illuminating article about Hobsbawm’s activities as a Communist in Berlin in 1933, but concluded, in opposition to a somewhat benevolent appraisal by Niall Ferguson quoted at the beginning of his piece, that ‘Hobsbawm ignored entirely the shades of grey between his personal choice of loyalty and became blind to genocide and invasion, and the other extreme.’

The following month, a letter from Professor Sir Roderick Floud headed the correspondence. “As Eric’s closest colleague for 13 years and a friend for much longer”, he wrote, “I can testify to the fact that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is a travesty.” Floud then went on to make the claim that Hobsbawm stayed in the Communist Party because of his belief in fighting fascism, and claimed that Hobsbawm ‘did not betray his youthful – and ever-lasting – ideals’. Yet the threat from fascism was defunct immediately World War II ended. What was he talking about?

I thought that this argument was hogwash, and recalled that Sir Roderick must be the son of the Soviet agent Bernard Floud, M.P., who committed suicide in October 1967. I sympathize with Sir Roderick in the light of his tragic experience, but it seemed that the son had rather enigmatically inherited some of the misjudgments of the father. And, indeed, I was so provoked by the space given to Sir Roderick’s views that I instantly wrote a letter to Paul Lay, the Editor. I was gratified to learn from his speedy acknowledgment that he was very sympathetic to my views, and would seriously consider publishing my letter.

And then further ‘arguments’ in Hobsbawm’s defence came to the fore. In the August issue, Lay dedicated the whole of his Letters page to rebuttals from his widow, Marlene, and from a Denis Fitzgerald, in Sydney, Australia. Marlene Hobsbawm considered it an ‘abuse’ to claim that her late husband was ‘an orthodox communist who adhered faithfully to Stalinist crimes’, and felt obligated to make a correction. He did not want to leave the Party as he did not want to harm it, she asserted. Fitzgerald raised the McCarthyite flag, and somehow believed that Hobsbawm’s remaining a member of the Communist Party was an essential feature of his being able to contribute to ‘progressive developments’. “He was not to be bullied or silenced by Cold Warriors” – unlike what happened to intellectuals in Soviet Russia, of course.

So what had happened to my letter? Why were the correspondence pages so one-side? Was I a lone voice in this debate? Then, next month, my letter appeared. My original text ran as follows:

“I was astonished that you dedicated so much space to the bizarre and ahistorical defence of Eric Hobsbawm by Professor Sir Roderick Floud.

Floud writes that Hobsbawm ‘stayed in the Communist Party’ after 1956 ‘because of his belief in fighting fascism and promoting the world revolution, by means of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front’. Yet fascism was no longer a threat in 1956; the Popular Front had been dissolved in 1938, to be followed soon by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which Hobsbawm and Floud conveniently overlook. Even though Stalin was dead by 1956, Khrushchev was still threatening ‘We shall bury you!’

Floud concludes his letter by referring to Hobsbawm’s ‘youthful – and ever-lasting ideals’, having earlier described the statement that Casquete’s description of him as ‘a desperate man clinging to his youthful dreams’ is ‘a travesty’. Some contradiction, surely.

Like his unfortunate father before him, who was unmasked as a recruiter of spies for the Soviet Union, and then committed suicide, Floud seems to forget that communist revolutions tend to be very messy affairs, involving the persecution and slaughter of thousands, sometimes millions. If Hobsbawm’s dreams had been fulfilled, he, as a devout Stalinist, might have survived, but certainly academics like Floud himself would have been among the first to be sent to the Gulag.”

Lay made some minor changes to my submission (removing references to the suicide of Floud’s father, for instance), but the message was essentially left intact. And there the correspondence appears to have closed. (I have not yet received the November issue.) I was thus heartened to read the following sentence in a review by Andrew Roberts of Laurence Rees’s Hitler and Stalin in the Times Literary Supplement of November 20: “That these two [Hitler and Stalin] should be seen as anything other than the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of totalitarianism might seem obvious to anyone beyond the late Eric Hobsbawm, but it does need to be restated occasionally, and Rees does so eloquently.” Hobsbawm no doubt welcomed George Blake on the latter’s recent arrival at the Other Place, and they immediately started discussing the Communist utopia.

End-of-Year Thoughts and Holiday Wishes

Towards the end of November I received a Christmas Card signed by the editor of Prospect magazine, Tom Clark. The message ran as follows: “Thank you for your support of Prospect this year. Myself and the whole team here wish you a very happy Christmas.” I suppose it would be churlish to criticize such goodwill, but I was shocked. “Myself and the whole team . .” – what kind of English is that? What was wrong with “The whole team and I”? If the editor of a literary-political magazine does not even know when to use a reflexive pronoun, should we trust him with anything else?

I have just been reading Clive James’s Fire of Joy, subtitled Roughly Eight Poems to Get By Heart and Say Aloud. I was looking forward to seeing James’s choices, and his commentary. It has been a little disappointing, with several odd selections, and some often shallow appreciations by the Great Man. For instance, he reproduces a speech by Ferrara from My Last duch*ess, by Robert Browning, which contains the horrible couplet:

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

This is not verse that should be learned by heart. To any lover of the language, the phrase ‘They turned to me’, not ‘to myself’, should come to mind, and, since ‘but’ is a preposition, it needs to be followed by the accusative or dative case, i.e. ‘but me’. How could James’s ear be so wooden? Yet syntax turs out to be his weakness: in a later commentary on Vita Sackville-West’s Craftsmen, he writes: ‘. . . it was a particular focal point of hatred for those younger than he who had been left out of the anthology.’. ‘Him’, not ‘he’, after ‘for those’, Clive.

Of course, another famous ugly line is often overlooked. T.S. Eliot started The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock with the following couplet:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

It should be ‘Let us go then, you and me’, since the pair is in apposition to the ‘us’ of ‘Let us go’. Rhyme gets in the way, again. What a way to start a poem! What was going through TSE’s mind? So how about this instead?

Let us go then, you and me,

When the evening is spread out above the sea

But then that business about ‘a patient etherized upon a table’ doesn’t work so well, does it? Poetry is hard.

It’s ROMANES EUNT DOMUS all over again.

Returning to Clark and Prospect, however, what is this ‘support’ business? Does Clark think that his enterprise is some kind of charity for which his subscribers shell out their valuable shekels? I recall our very capable and inspiring CEO at the Gartner Group offering similar messages of gratitude to our customers, as if he were not really convinced that the product we offered was of justifiable value to them. I shall ‘support’ Prospect only so long as it provides insightful and innovative analysis, and shall drop it otherwise. Moreover, if Clark persists with such silly and pretentious features as ‘the world’s top 50 thinkers’ (Bong-Joon Ho? Igor Levit?, but mercifully no Greta Thunberg this year), it may happen sooner rather than later. I was pleased to see a letter published in the October issue, as a reaction to the dopey ’50 top thinkers’, where the author pointed out that there are billions of people on the planet whose thinking capabilities are probably unknown to the editors. The letter concluded as follows: “I know it’s a ‘bit of fun’, but it’s the province of the pseudo-intellectual pub bore to assert a right to tell us who the 50 greatest thinkers are.”

I wrote to Clark, thanking him, but also asked him how many people were involved in constructing his garbled syntax. I received no reply. Probably no Christmas card for me next year.

I wish a Happy New Year to all my readers, and thank you for your ‘support’.

December Commonplace entries can be found here.

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On December 8, the Journal of Intelligence and National Security published on-line my review of Ben Macintyre’s ‘Agent Sonya’, and it may be seen at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showAxaArticles?journalCode=fint20 . Those readers who have institutional access to the Journal may read the whole article there: for others, since the terms of the Agreement entitle me to re-publish the review on my personal website, I present it here.

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Personal, Politics

One of the pleasures of running coldspur is the fact that so many interesting people stumble across it, and contact me. Apart from the dozens of professional and amateur enthusiasts of intelligence and espionage matters, a number of individuals with intriguing backgrounds have written to me: for example, a retired counter-intelligence officer overseas; a man who lodged with Agent SONIA in Great Rollright as a boy; a grand-daughter of the MI5 officer Michael Serpell; the son of the FBI’s representative in London during the Fuchs events; a son of the Communist spy Dave Springhall, who only recently learned who his father was; and, recently, the grandson of a soldier who guarded interned spies at a Home Office internment camp in World War 2.

It is the last whose story I want to highlight in this month’s feature. I believe that Pete Mackean owns a startling set of photographs from Camp 020 in its four incarnations, at Latchmere House, Huntercombe Park, Diest and Bad Nenndorf, some of them showing notable figures involved in the administration of the camps that have not been published before. They deserve a wider audience. When Pete shared them with me, I immediately suggested that coldspur might be a good place to showcase them, and he graciously agreed to let me use them.

Yet I wanted to place them in a solid context. I was familiar with Latchmere House at Ham in Surrey, partly because I had played golf in the grounds next to it. I had also encountered the history of Camp 020 (as it became to be called) from the work issued in 2000 by the Public Record Office (as it then was), Camp 020: The Official History of MI5’s Wartime Interrogation Centre, compiled from the accounts of Lieutenant-Colonel R. W. G. Stephens and his assistants Lieutenant-Colonel G. Sampson and Major R. Short, and edited with an introduction by Oliver Hoare. Camp 020, otherwise known as Latchmere House, is a well-known landmark in counter-espionage literature. During World War II, it was used as a detention and interrogation centre for suspected German spies (most of whom, incidentally, were not German citizens), as well as, for a short time, a place to intern obvious domestic subversives, such as Oswald Mosley. It was led by the celebrated Lieutenant-Colonel R. W. G. Stephens, known as ‘Tin-Eye’ because of his monocle.

But Huntercombe, the alternative and back-up partner to Camp 020, which was dubbed Camp 020R, was much of a mystery to me, and I wanted to research its provenance and development in more detail. It was intended by Stephens and MI5 that there should not be any sharp distinctions made between the Camp 020 and Camp 020R. Yet a study of the files at the National Archives (specifically, KV 4/102 & /103) reveals that Huntercombe took on an identity and life of its own, and was not just an extension, or potential replacement, for Camp 020. (The ‘R’ stood for ‘Reserve’.) Its story has been largely overlooked.

Huntercombe merits only one paragraph (and a very occasional reference) in Stephens’s history: Christopher Andrew ignores it completely in his authorised history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, while John Curry briefly records, in his official history of MI5, that Camp 020 and 020R were in fact a ‘joint establishment’. Hinsley and Simkins, in Volume 4 of British Intelligence in the Second World War, merely cite, in an Appendix, when it was opened, as a reserve camp, in January 1943. In MI5, Nigel West suggests that ‘a long-term detention centre was hastily sited at a quiet spot on Lord Nuffield’s estate, Huntercombe Place, Nettlebed, near Henley’, an assessment that turns out to be incorrect on several counts. Guy Liddell, in his Diaries, makes one or two references to Huntercombe specifically, but his generic mentions of ‘Camp 020’ could be intended to designate either of the two.

As background reading, I heartily recommend A. W. Brian Simpson’s In The Highest Degree Odious (1992), a magisterial account of the slide into aggressive detention policy in the first years of the war. (Its major defect for me was an abundance of Footnotes, a tide that became highly distracting. Most of them should have been packaged as Endnotes. I also believe that Simpson is a little harsh on MI5, since his criticisms of it cover exactly the time that it was essentially leaderless, under Lord Swinton’s Security Executive, from May 1940 to March 1941.) Hinsley and Simkins give an overall solid account of the legislative muddles that accompanied the establishment of Camp 020, although they cover very superficially the implications of the Treachery Act. Helen Fry’s London Cage (2017) is a very useful guide to the string of prisons and detention centres where German prisoners-of-war were interrogated.

As a final observation on the slimness of official accounts, I have found no single place where all the Camps referred to in the literature (001- Dartmoor, 011- Bridgend, 020 – Ham, 020R – Huntercombe, 186 – Colchester, L – Isle of Man, WX – Stafford Prison, and then the Isle of Man, X – Canada, Z – Aldershot) are listed and described. A sentence on the Kew website runs as follows: “Those classified in Category A were interned in camps being set up across the UK, the largest settlement of which were on the Isle of Man though others were set up in and around Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Bury, Huyton, Sutton Coldfield, London, Kempton Park, Lingfield, Seaton and Paignton. Other documents indicate that there was not a direct correspondence between identified camps and named prisons: for example, Camp001 was the isolated hospital wing at Dartmoor.

The Background – Dealing with Hostile Elements:

Great Britain, primarily represented by the Home Office, struggled with the challenge of controlling and defanging undesirable elements in the first year of the war. The problem was multi-dimensional. In one category were British citizens who held unreliable opinions – the Fascist sympathisers, such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union, and The Link; communists driven into a hostile position by the demands of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, who might undermine the war effort; pacifists who, out of different convictions, might spread similar disaffection. In the second category were aliens, including German (and other) citizens who had fled from Nazi-controlled territories before the war, refugees escaping from territories that had succumbed to Nazi invasions in the first half of 1940, as well as unfortunate Germans and Austrians who had settled unobtrusively in the country during the last decade or two. The Home Office had no confident means of distinguishing between those fiercely opposed to Hitlerism, those who may have been infiltrated as spies or subversives, and those essentially apolitical beings who had switched their national loyalties. (This problem became more absurd when Italy entered the war in June 1940.) In the third category were true spies, who entered the country illegally or clandestinely (or, later in the war, were picked up on territories abroad), were not protected by any military uniform, and presented a unique challenge since no appropriate laws had been set up for their treatment, and, because of MI5’s peculiar interest in them, presented some problems for any open prosecutorial process.

The problem of handling subversive citizens had been addressed by some clumsy amendments to general Defence Regulations, most notoriously Amendment 39A, and a new paragraph 1a to 18B, which was introduced in May 1940. This allowed detention of any persons who were found to be furthering the objectives of the enemy, and resulted in many prominent citizens (such as Oswald Mosley) being detained in prison. As Simpson wrote, anyone to whom the Home Secretary took exception could be locked up for an indefinite period. Yet the policy took on a sharper focus in the summer of 1940. Mass internment of persons of German origin began after the Fifth Column scare of early June, 1940, and special camps, such as on the Isle of Man, were set up to hold such groups. Since the centuries-old Treason Act required special rules of evidence and procedure (and foreign spies, unlike those who has sought asylum, could hardly be accused of treasonable behaviour against a country to which they owned no allegiance), a Treachery Bill was quickly formulated, and passed on May 23. It likewise demanded the death penalty, but it could be commuted.

The outcome of this combination of respect for legal procedure, and somewhat panic-driven haste, was that a mixture of irritating but probably harmless ruffians, possible traitors sympathetic to Germany, suspicious but maybe innocent foreigners, and certifiably dangerous spies and saboteurs sometimes found internment in the same location. Ascot Racecourse was one internment camp, as were the Oratory Schools: Wandsworth and Holloway jails were also used. In January 1941, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Schools building in Wandsworth was set up as a general reception function (the London Reception Centre) for all manner of aliens, under the responsibility of the Home Office, but with MI5 conducting the interrogations, and the Army providing the guards and sentries. In mid-July, 1940, Latchmere House opened, and as Professor Hinsley wrote, ‘accepted its first batch of enemy aliens, British fascists, and suspects arriving from Dunkirk’. Yet the awareness of habeas corpus, and the inability of the government to hold suspects for more than twenty-eight days, led to vociferous complaints by the British citizenry among this group, declaring their entitlement to a fair trial, meant that a change of policy occurred. The crux of the matter was that internees could be interrogated, but those prosecuted could not.

As Hinsley went on to write (Volume 4, p 70): “Latchmere House had been opened as an interrogation centre for suspect Fifth Columnists in July, but in October MI5 decided that it should be used only for more serious cases among aliens, for example where espionage was suspected, and that British subjects should be taken there only in very exceptional circ*mstances. And from early in November the place was entirely reserved for captured agents, including some of the double-cross agents, arrangements being made by which MI5 reported to the Home Office every month the names of those detained, the reason for their detention, and the length of time they had been there.” Early the following year, as the double-cross operation gained momentum, the danger of leakage about the whole process impelled the authorities to decide that Latchmere House could not be used as a holding-place for short-term interrogation. It gained the nomenclature of ‘Camp 020’ in December 1941, and was by then assigned to the permanent detention of captured agents and dubious refugees, even though many were sent on to other secure areas, such as Dartmoor Prison (Camp 001), or Camp WX on the Isle of Man.

Since one of the primary functions of Camp 020 was to weed out dedicated Nazi agents, with the possibility of ‘turning’ suitable candidates to work for the British, it took on a highly secret nature, since, if an agent was detained, and then found not be suitable for turning, or betrayed that trust, MI5 could not risk any inkling of that attempt to leak out to the enemy. The initial policy for Camp 020 was to hold detainees incommunicado: that was one of the key differences between internment and imprisonment. (In September 1941, a potential disaster was averted after the failed double-agent JEFF had been sent to Camp WX, next to Camp L, on the Isle of Man, where Nazi German internees were held.) Moreover, complications were caused by the fact that, if any such victim were sent to trial, officers at Latchmere House would be called upon to give evidence. Proceedings and interrogations were documented in secrecy: if a formal statement were required, officers would have to send the subject to one of the prisons. Permanent detention was thus preferred to open prosecution. Permanent detainees could be housed in conventional prisons, but run-of-the-mill offenders could not be detained indefinitely in Camp 020.

Rumours about the prolonged interrogation and detention in 1943 would cause questions in high places to be posed about whether MI5 was under proper ministerial control. Indeed, up till then, Camp 020 had been running in an extra-legal fashion, much to the embarrassment of the Home Secretary, John Anderson. Nigel West points out that it was omitted from the list of camps submitted to the Red Cross, and thus was protected from inspection. MI5 survived that investigation, and several probable spies – though many who had been captured overseas could not be convicted of offenses against Great Britain, and had to wait until the end of the war to be repatriated – remained in detention for years. As Hinsley wrote: “Once a man’s case was completed, if he was not executed, released as innocent, or released to B1A to act as a double-agent. life in Camp 020 was far from intolerable.” (Hinsley overlooks the fact that some prisoners were despatched to other camps.) And that was the fate of the overwhelming majority of those sent to Camp 020.

From various comments in his Diaries, Guy Liddell betrays some of the tensions experienced in trying to keep the lid on the activities at Camp 020, away from the prying eyes of diplomats and bureaucrats. The main objective seemed to be to ensure that no whisper of information about the Double Cross initiatives – especially of those who had been initially considered, and exposed to the scheme, but then turned out to be unreliable – must be allowed to travel outside. Hence the emphasis on keeping prisoners incommunicado, and not releasing them for trial. Liddell makes references to more candidates who were offered the chance, but then failed the test. They had to be locked away. Moreover, MI5 took big risks with Agent ZIGZAG, Edward (Eddie) Chapman, who was brought back to Camp 020 for interrogations after undertaking missions abroad.

The Idea Behind Camp 020R:

The sense of awkwardness about Camp 020R may have been due to the fact that it had become an expensive white elephant. It was originally conceived as a back-up in the event that Latchmere House were bombed. A minor aeronautical raid in January 1941 had exposed the establishment, as if the Germans knew what was going on there. Stephens wrote as follows: “In consequence the Commandant was instructed to plan a duplicate camp at Nuffield. Thus Huntercombe, or Camp 020R, came into being. Primarily it was intended as a reserve camp. It was large enough to absorb Ham in time of crisis and to provide for the future commitments of a long-term war. It included a hostel at Wallingford where some 80 female staff could be accommodated. The decision was wise, but the cost, about £250,000, was high, and it is for consideration whether M.I.5. should not have a permanent lien on the place. In the event, Huntercombe was never put to full use as the Germans were good enough to leave Ham alone. The camp, however, did become the oubliette *; the place where enemy spies, no longer of interest, were allowed to vegetate until the end of the war.”

[* Oubliette: ‘a dungeon with no opening except in the roof’ (Chambers Dictionary, from the French ‘oublier’, to forget. Obviously a very un-English form of punishment)]

A study of KV 4/102 & 4/103 at the National Archives tells a rather more complicated story. Brigadier Harker had been discussing with Lord Swinton, the Chief of the Security Executive, as early as December 1940, the acquisition of ‘another complete establishment in the country’, concurrently with plans to construct new cells near the existing Latchmere House building. Early in 1941, waves of fresh German spies were expected. Army GHQ was concerned about the location and exposure of Ham, and the War Office began pressing Lord Swinton for an ‘alternative Latchmere’ in February. Swinton concurred: Latchmere had almost been hit again that month.

Thus negotiations began. The Home office and the Ministry of Works had to be involved. A March 10 memorandum to R. S. Wells at the Home office by D. Abbot states: “So far as the area of search [for premises] is concerned we must be guided by Home Forces. For our part we would like to be somewhere well outside London, and if possible in the general direction of Oxford. Or perhaps more broadly speaking within a sector bounded by lines drawn due West and N.N. West from London.” The search began. The Ministry of Works recommended a site, The Springs, North Stoke, in Oxfordshire, but it was deemed unsuitable.

The Selection of a Site:

By May 1, however, a more attractive site (for what was then called ‘Latchmere R’) had been found, and the Post Office was asked to be involved, as it would need setting up the same listening equipment that existed at Camp 020. Here we also find a mention of a ‘Home for Incurables’, suggesting that some diehard prisoners might be accommodated on the new premises, and require special handling in a facility some 200 or 300 yards from the main building. The site is not yet identified, but a report says that ‘the present owner, who is anxious to get rid of the place, has offered it for sale for £25,000, but the Ministry of Works . . . would requisition it under their present powers probably at a rental of £200 or £300 per annum.’

The site is soon identified as Huntercombe Place, owned by Sir Francis Maclean. Maclean had been a WWI air ace, and was now Sheriff of Oxfordshire. He was famous for an aviation feat on August 10, 1912, when he flew his biplane through Tower Bridge, and under several other bridges on the Thames (see https://www.thisdayinaviation.com/10-august-1912/ ) Sir Francis wanted to stay in the Mansion House until the end of the year, but he was told that the outbuildings would need to be possessed immediately.

Stephens visited the site in the middle of June, and was impressed with the location, the seclusion it offered, and the general amenities. But he was not so happy with the emerging plans for replicating Latchmere House, and the amount of personnel it would take to guard the place properly. On June 23, he wrote to Richard Butler (of the MI5 Secretariat) that his plans would turn out to be cheaper than those of the Ministry of Works: his suggestion can be seen alongside that of the Ministry. Lord Swinton chipped in at the end of the month, indicating that the back-up site was more urgent than the ‘Home for Incurables’, and stressing the need for speed.

Yet, despite all the apparent urgency, obstacles started to appear for what was now being called ‘Nuffield Camp’. The War Office was under the impression that the shadow camp would be occupied only if Ham were evacuated, and therefore no new guard personnel would be required. Stephens had to somehow finesse the problem that the separate oubliettes required by MI5 and SIS would come into operation immediately, while the shadow Prison block for Latchmere House would come into operation when Latchmere House was irretrievably ‘blown’, which went very much against Lord Swinton’s view of things. Moreover, the Ministry of Works was dragging its feet, and the optimum building season was, by July, passing by.

Stephens had a clash with the ‘pessimist’ Russell, of the Ministry of Works, who was slow visiting the site. They disagreed about the availability of labour, and Stephens was impelled to write a letter to Butler, complaining about the delays, saying that ‘the completion of Latchmere “R” ten months hence [i.e. May 1942] will be of little use to the Security Services’, when Swinton had hoped for completion by October 1941. Stephens was still referring to the need for the ‘reserve’ camp in terms of Latchmere House’s staff and prisoners moving ‘in the event of an invasion, or if it should again suffer from enemy action’. Yet he must have known by then, what with Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June, that both threats were drastically reduced.

Lord Swinton Intervenes:

And then a further blow occurred. There had obviously been rumblings about who should pay for the construction, and it was agreed in mid-September that it had to be out of MI5’s budget, on the secret vote, and not appear as a War Office expenditure. In that way, as a memorandum in November 1941, stated, ‘no inquisitive persons or committees will be able to investigate it’. Yet, as early as September 1941, a Ministry of Works letter to Abbot drew attention to the fact that the Prime Minister had asked the Production Executive to perform a drastic curtailment of any marginal projects. The official (a Mr. E. Batch) went on: “It is felt here . . . that it is doubtful whether we should proceed with Huntercombe Place”.

Lord Swinton was able to intervene, however, and the work that had started in late September continued. Batch was summarily taken care of. Construction, and especially the electrical installations, required sentries to guard the property: Latchmere overall was taking on a new existence, and on December 1, David Petrie, the Director-General of MI5, had to rule that the establishment would be separated from B.1.E. on the grounds of its discrete characteristics of Policy, Intelligence, Administration and Army Administration. Furthermore, he declared that “in the interests of Security it is desired that in future Latchmere House, and the Country establishment at Nuffield, shall be referred to in all connections as Camp 020 and Camp 020, R. respectively.’

The Nuffield reference is a fascinating one, in its own right. Nigel West’s suggestion of a larger Nuffield estate, of which Huntercombe Place was a portion, cannot be true. Lord Nuffield (who as William Morris, founded Morris Motors) moved into his house, which was formerly known as Merrow Mount, only in 1933, when he renamed it. One map in the archive shows ‘Merrow Mount’ as a mansion on the right of the entrance road to Huntercombe Place and its much more expansive property. Furthermore, the name of ‘Nuffield’, apart from giving away the location of the new camp, was possibly of some embarrassment, for Lord Nuffield had been a prominent member of the pro-German society, The Link (and is actually listed as such on page 167 of West’s book).

The bills started coming in. An expenditure of £26,500 was marked for the period up to the end of February 1942. The archive is strangely silent for the summer of 1942, but, in August, Lt.-Col Stephens started raising new security concerns, primarily because of the proliferation and extension of USA air-bases in the area. He specifically wanted Huntercombe (and Latchmere) to be declared a ‘Prohibited Area’, where any aliens would be excluded, writing in stark tones: “The fact is that Camp 020 and the reserve establishment 020R are not only contre-espionage [sic] centres, but also prisons where spies who richly deserve the death penalty under the Treachery Act are kept alive for active Intelligence purposes.”

At this point, Stephens made a more exacting demand, suggesting that the camps be handed over to the War Office for administration: “ . . . to discard the appellation ‘Internment Camp’ in each case, and to invite the War Office, from an Army point of view, to administer Camp 020 and 020R definitely as War Office units rather than the responsibility of London District and South Midland Area, by which uninformed and uneven treatment is not unnaturally at times received. Precedents exist in support of this proposal. The first is ‘Camp Z’, which was kept off official lists altogether, and the second is the series of M.I. 19 Intelligence Camps Nos. 10, 20 and 30, which are not only kept off official lists, but are administered by the War Office direct rather than the Military Districts in which they are situated.” This language is rather puzzling – and provocative – as it seems to draw attention to the fact that the legality of Stephens’s establishments may have been questionable.

The irony was that even the MI5 Regional Control Officer, Major M. Ryde, did not know what was going on, and rumours were starting to fly around about the new ‘P.O.W. camp’. The police had taken an interest, but had been refused entry. Even though the place had been requisitioned from the Sheriff of Oxfordshire, the Chief Constable did not know why his officers had been refused admittance. In addition, Stephens had to write about the ‘vast extension’ of the aerodrome at Benson, three miles north, and the erection of a camp for 4,000 US servicemen at Nettlebed, one and a half miles south, which, he believed, would ‘render Intelligence work by special apparatus quite impossible’. Yet he still used the threat of further air bombardment at Ham, and the threat of invasion, as arguments for protecting the ‘reserve’ site.

In the short term, Stephens managed to win this particular battle, it seems, and was able to turn to the problem of staffing. In this he was beset by the problem of whether Camp 020R was going to be complementary to Camp 020, or whether it would still have to absorb all the latter in an emergency. He produced a paper that stressed how important it was to remove the more dangerous ‘old lags’ from Latchmere to Huntercombe. Camp 020 was operationally full in September 1942. Stephens looked forward to Camp 020R opening ‘in the near future’: “I would move there the old lags, split disturbing elements between 020 and 020R, and possibly accommodate some XX prisoners under better conditions.” Who these reformed ‘XX prisoners’ were is rather mysterious, as it hints at several previously unknown spies who could neither be executed nor turned, and Stephens’s desire to house them in better conditions shows a rapid shift in humanitarian impulses from the commandant. In any case, in October, Stephens prepared for the influx. He arranged for Butler to appeal to the War Office that Huntercombe Farm, planned as a domicile for American troops, should be assigned to the Camp ‘for additional accommodation’. Brigadier Harker added his weight to the case in December. New maps of the protected territory were drawn. Another year had passed.

A Change of Mood:

While demands on rural space did not go away, Stephens’ tone continued to change. He softened his objections to low-flying aircraft from R.A.F. Benson. On January 26, 1943, he noted that ‘the threat of a comic Nazi invasion recedes’. Yet now a new bureaucratic challenge emerged – the Home Office, who may have been prodded into action by Stephen’s outburst from August. When MI5 started planning for the transfer of prisoners to Camp 020R in February 1943, it discovered that it had neglected to inform Sir Alexander Maxwell, the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, even of the idea of the camp. Since Maxwell was very concerned about issues of welfare and fair treatment, Stephens had to prepare a grovelling report, submitted under Petrie’s signature, that stressed how superior the conditions were to those at Latchmere.

Stephens’ words ran as follows: “The conditions at Camp 020 R are more advantageous to the prisoners than at Camp 020 itself. More space is available out of doors, constant association is possible when desirable, while wireless, papers, games, cigarettes and other privileges are provided free of charge. Rations are somewhat better than received elsewhere as we are able to supplement the prescribed scale by produce form the ground.” This was far from the notions of ‘oubliettes’ and ‘prisoners being kept alive’: a concern now focussed on prisoners’ welfare. It sounded as if the ‘country establishment at Nuffield’ was taking on the characteristics of a country club, or health farm.

Moreover, the emphasis is no longer on ‘reserve’, even though the two camps are to be considered as one entity. Stephens told Maxwell that the camp was to be used ‘primarily as a place to which we can send prisoners whose intelligence investigations have been completed at Camp 020 and who, because of the espionage nature of their case, cannot, for security reasons, be transferred to any ordinary internment camp, or other place of detention.’ He was no doubt thinking of agents who had not been successfully turned, and thus knew too much about the Double-Cross System, such as SUMMER. Yet SUMMER had had to be re-confined well before Camp 020R was ready to accept prisoners.

The Home Office Wakes Up:

Standing orders were issued for the reception of internees on November 10, 1942, and prisoners started arriving in January 1943, it seems. (On the other hand, documents in KV 4/103, such as those referring to unauthorised lending of library-books between prisoners [!], indicate that detainees were already being held there.) Soon some ‘incident’ must have occurred, probably of maltreatment, since Harker had to intervene, but possibly an attempt at suicide by one of the detainees. The full documents have been removed, but the Register holds a memorandum from the Deputy Director-General, who had to seek a meeting with Maxwell to ‘explain what had happened’. “I further made it quite clear to Sir Alexander Maxwell that Mr. Milmo was in no way responsible for what had occurred, and I feel sure that his position will not be imperilled in any way by reason of any premature action”. But what had ‘Buster’ Milmo done? Liddell went on to write that Maxwell confirmed Milmo’s view that ‘the persons transferred to 020(R) are illegally detained’. A flurry of activity resulted in a report for Maxwell’s benefit.

The legal basis for the camps thus had to be investigated, and was eventually determined. In an instrument dated March 20, 1943, Camp 020 was ‘formally authorised as a place of detention for persons held under Articles 5A and 12(5A) of the Aliens’ Order’, and the Home Secretary then signed an equivalent order for Camp 020R (thus, incidentally, undermining the argument that the two camps should be seen as one unit.) But the Home Office also found a loophole: there was no formal authorisation for those detained under D.R.18B and 18BA, namely arrested spies, and the Home Secretary had to sign an order with retroactive effect, to cover this situation. Sampson informs us that Home Secretary John Anderson had given Swinton a ‘verbal’ [he should have written ‘oral’] approval during a telephone call in 1940, but had clearly not discussed the matter with his civil servants.

[Lt.-Col. Sampson second from left. Is that a senior RAF officer in the centre, maybe visiting from R.A.F. Benson? Looks a bit like the future Marshal of the R.A.F. Arthur Tedder, but then perhaps all Air-Marshals looked like Tedder.]

Apparently the transferred prisoners were not happy with their lot, as they started sending in petitions to the Home Secretary in the summer of 1943. Whether the more comfortable conditions at Camp 020, and the availability of books, had contributed to their sense of entitlement, or whether they had been put up to it by some champion for them, is not clear, and the record is sparse. But in August 1943, Milmo (B1B) had to respond to a complaint from the Home Office, which was obviously perturbed by the volume of petitions coming to it. “As has been pointed out”, he wrote, “the amenities at Camp 020R leave nothing to be desired, and are of an exceptionally high standard, being more reminiscent of a modern hotel than an internment camp.” He went on to explain the comforts, freedom of movement and association, no forced work, gardening optional, free tobacco, etc. etc. , and concluded: “We are quite satisfied that these manifestoes are the result of something in the nature of a conspiracy, and this is borne out by the fact that there were no signs of unrest or disturbance of any kind at the camp.”

When Maxwell held a meeting, on July 29, to discuss the administration of Camp 020R, Petrie himself attended, confirmed the fact that both Dr. Dearden and a local practitioner were available for medical attention. (Here also is the first indication that Camp 020R had its own commandant, a Major Gibbs.) The last item informs us that ‘such matters as attempts at, or actual, suicide would be so reported’, thus confirming the ‘incident’. Petrie followed up, somewhat sluggishly, on November 29, by inviting Maxwell to visit Camp 020R, so that he might investigate working conditions for himself. He reminded Maxwell that a ‘considerable number’ of ‘detainees’ had been transferred to Camp 020R, and that he expected several more in the coming months. Some jocularity was now called for: “I think you will also be interested in the ‘amenities’ which are provided at Stephens’ ‘country’ residence!”.

Petrie had visited the camp just before he sent this letter, and a memorandum from Butler to Stephens, dated December 1, reminds the latter that he and Petrie were both keen that ‘more books and games’ should be made available for the prisoners, and that money was on hand to address this need. The ensuing flurry of memoranda shows the earnestness with which this project was pursued, and also informs us that ’well over 100’ internees were now present there, of which half knew little English. Maxwell, meanwhile, was highly occupied, and replied on December 16 that he would not be able to accept the invitation until January.

So yet another year passed. Maxwell visited Camp 020R on January 5, and wrote promptly to Petrie the next day. In a somewhat starchy and headmasterly way, he requests Petrie to make sure that the Home Office receives a copy of any report made after a prisoner complaint. He is evidently concerned that he is ultimately responsible for the treatment of the prisoners, but has not been kept properly informed. Stephens’ instructions to Butler, a few days later, indicate that Milmo has been following the book over such cases, and the problem was probably due to civil servants in the Home Office suspecting that facts were being withheld. Stephens takes the time to remind Butler that Maxwell was otherwise very impressed.

The final note in the first file on Camp 020R shows that Maxwell has bought into the idea that Camp 020R was ’not an ordinary internment camp’. In a memorandum to Petrie, Butler reports on a meeting he had with Maxwell, where the latter ‘entirely agreed that it was extremely important that as few people as possible should know the details of the cases at Camp 020 and Camp 020R, or indeed of their existence. In the preparations for D-Day it was essential that no leakage of information about the so-called ‘double agents’ should occur.

Stephens’ assessment of Camp 020R was somewhat mournful: “There the prisoners learnt much about the British Constitution; they whiled away their time by writing petitions to the King, to the Home Secretrary and to the Judges. Sometimes they gave good advice to Mr Churchill and Mr Anthony Eden. Occasionally they tried to escape. In the end it became a soulless camp, and much sympathy is due to the officers and men who carried out their dreary task so conscientiously and well for so long a time.” Peter Mackean has pointed out to me how these obligations endured for several years after the war.

Camp 020R in Operation:

The second file, KV 4/103, covers Camp 020R after it opened for business at the beginning of 1943. It is not very revealing. It is replete with standing orders, such as the posting of sentries, fire precautions and orders, inspections, and instructions for distributing newspapers and cigarettes, bathing protocols, cell cleanliness, exercise, and the procedures for escorts and vehicle searches. The Home Office is clearly very interested in the welfare of the internees, who are now granted rights that one might deem over-indulgent for such a group of desperadoes. “Complaints, couched in respectful language, will be in writing and will be handed by prisoners to the Orderly Officer of the day at breakfast rounds only”, runs one edict.

By early 1944, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, has visited the camp, and is overall satisfied, but he is concerned about extra medical supplies, and wants the chief prison Medical Officer, Dr. Methven, and Sir John Moylan (who appears to be responsible for handling petitions) to visit the camp at Huntercombe. Stephens is concerned about security and disruption. Maxwell seeks extra milk for prisoners having medical problems, a concern that Stephens has to address himself, and informs Milmo back in Head Office. Petrie is involved in the question of extra nourishment that ‘may be required for medical grounds’. One wonders: did these gentlemen not know that there was a war on?

Despite all this attention to their wellbeing, prisoners still planned escapes from their Colditz-in- the-Cotswolds, as a letter of February 21, 1944 confirms. The detainees involved were Stephens, K. C. Hansen, Pelletier, Hans Hansen, Oien, Olsen, Robr, Ronning, Steiner [sic], and Lecube – not all of whom, somewhat mysteriously, appear in the list maintained, and later distributed, by the camp authorities. But Stephens was on top of it, and wrote to Richard Butler on February 23: “I am not in the least troubled by the situation at Camp 020R. the men involved are determined to escape and the authorities concerned are equally determined that they will not succeed.”

Another year passed, apparently peacefully, and at the end of May 1945, Stephens planned to liquidate both Camp 020 and Camp 020R at once. He was alert to the constitutional challenges, and firmly believed that, no matter how ill-prepared their native countries might be, the prisoners should be repatriated at once. He wants some detainees at 020R to be sent to Camp 020, and sets a target of June 15 for Camp 020R to be closed. All prisoners were in fact moved to Ham by July 3, and the property was handed over to the Ministry of Works later that month, and its closure formally declared on September 5. Those German prisoners captured towards the end of the war who had been brought initially to Ham (such as Karl Heinz Kraemer, who played a very significant role in Stockholm) were transferred to Diest in Belgium, and then Bad Nenndorf, camps which were managed by the Ministry of War, not MI5. Camp 020 was disbanded in December, although Petrie did report to Maxwell that ‘a small residue’ of detainees were still in Beltane Schools [sic: a school originally for German Kindertransport children, in Wimbledon], awaiting repatriation.

After the war, Camp 020R became a Borstal prison. In 1983, it became a cellular prison for young juveniles. It has since (according to Wikipedia) taken a role for holding foreign national offenders awaiting deportation – an echo of its wartime role. Huntercombe Hall, which was used for administration, and as a recreational and residential facility, is now Huntercombe Hall Care Home, owned by Oxfordshire County Council, which offers ‘residential, nursing, and dementia care for up to 42 elderly residents’.

Thus the installation has come full circle, and acts as a stark reminder of the legal and constitutional challenges facing a security service and police force that today have to protect the democracy from hostile elements planning mayhem, but who may have not committed any act that can confidently be prosecuted.

The Prisoners:

Stephens’s commentary in his history, and a Kew file (KV 2/2593), combine to give us a good description of those who were moved to Camp 020R. I list them here, with a brief thumbnail sketch of those for whom information exists.

Stoerd Pons Only member of his LENA spy squad to escape execution

Gosta Caroli SUMMER: reneged, tried to escape by overpowering his guard

Kurt Goose Double-agent who tried to smuggle message to German Embassy

Albert Jaeger

Otto Joost LENA spy who was spared

Gunnar Evardsen LENA spy who was spared

Cornelius Evertsen Dutch captain who tried to land agents in Fishguard

Arie Van Dam Member of Belgian sea-mission in London; denounced

Theophil Jezequel Cuban from Spain recruited by Abwehr; brought in by Evertsen

Juan Martinez ditto

Silvio Robles ditto

Pedro Hechevarria ditto

Kurt Hansen

Gerard Libot

Wilhelm Heinrich

Hugo Jonasson Swedish skipper recruited by Abwehr in Brest

Francis de Lee

Jan de Jonge Dutchman arrested in Gibraltar making inquiries about convoys

Jose del Campo Cuban arrested in British port, confessed

Karl Hansson

Johan Strandmoen Norwegian arrested in Wick on ‘fishing’ expedition

Bjarne Hansen ditto

Hans Hansen ditto

Henry Torgesen ditto

Edward Ejsymont Pole form Gdansk who made misleading statements

Helmik Knudsen

Edward Balsam Polish Jew who shadowed Ejsymont; made false claims?

Abraham Sukiennik ditto

Eigil Robr Norwegian traitor spirited into UK by military attaché in Stockholm

Leopold Hirsch Crook who tried to bribe Germans captured in Trinidad

Oscar Gilinsky ditto

Gustav Ronning

Martin Olsen

Thorleif Solem Norwegian in pay of Germans arrested in Shetland Islands

Sigurd Alsaeth ditto

Cornelius Van der Woude

Florent Steiner Belgian seaman denounced by Verlinden

Piet Schipper Dutch seaman engaged by Abwehr

Jean Pelletier

Gottfried Koch

Erich Blau

Hans Sorensen

Carl Meewe

Hilaire Westerlinck Belgian doctor denounced by Verlinden

Tadeus Szumlicz Polish refugee recruited by Germans in Paris

Jens Palsson

Leon Jude Belgian airline pilot recruited by Germans

Robert Petin Frenchman in air force who retracted his confession

Alfred Lagall

Jose Manso Barras

Sandor Mocsan Hungarian employed by German in Brazil: radio interception

Janos Salomon ditto

Sobhy Hanna Egyptian groomed by Abwehr, arrested in Dar-es-Salaam

Pieter Grootveld

Pierre Morel Demobilised French pilot, employed by Germans: evasive story

Serrano Morales

Juan Lecube Mulish Spaniard, arrested in Trinidad: radio interception

Jose Moreno-Ruiz

Vincente Fernandez-Pasos

Gabriel Pry Belgian mathematician: offered services to Abwehr, arrested in Lisbon

Ernesto Simoes Portuguese spy in UK who contacted Germans by secret ink

Dos Santos Mesquita Portuguese journalist captured in Lourenço Marques

De Ferraz Freitas Portuguese radio operator on fishing-fleet: radio interception

Garcia Serrallach Petty Argentinian crook captured in Trinidad

Andres Blay Pigrau ditto

Homer Serafimides Greek seaman, swindler: handed over to British in Durban

Torre de la Castro

Frank Stainer Belgian crook Abwehr planned to infiltrate, captured in Lisbon

This is a mixed bag of scoundrels. Clearly some of them deserved the death penalty, but MI5 was reluctant to invoke the Treachery Act, as it would mean public trials, and secrets coming out that the service would prefer remain hidden, followed by an obligatory death sentence if the accused had been found guilty. There might be further information to be gained by interrogation, and, if too long a time passed, questions would be asked why there had been a delay. A few were failed ‘double-agents’ who knew too much. Some of the accused had been denounced, and motives might have been suspect; the identity of others had been gained by interception of Abwehr radio signals (ISOS), and clearly had to be kept quiet. Lastly, many of those detected had been arrested on foreign soil. The jurisdiction that the UK security service had over such probable criminals was uncertain, and many such persons had therefore to be detained until the end of the war, when they were repatriated to their home countries so that they could receive native justice. At least one (Stainer) was executed under such circ*mstances.

* * * * * * * * *

Now that the Presidential election is over and decided (pending last-minute judicial challenges), we have to look forward to the period of transition. We thus need to build a word-ladder from TRUMP to BIDEN.

A word-ladder is a set of words that incorporates a change of one letter at a time to transform the subject word into the object word, where no proper names are used. Thus MOAT can become HILL by a sequence such as MOAT-MOOT-HOOT-HOLT-HILT-HILL.

I have discovered a ladder of 14 steps to take TRUMP to BIDEN (i.e. thirteen intermediate ‘rungs’). And I have created another 14-step ladder to transform TRUMP to PENCE, as the Republican chief in waiting. However, if we want to project the transition to my favourite for the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, Nikki Haley, I have plotted another 14-step campaign for TRUMP-HALEY. On the other hand, sketching the 2024 handover from BIDEN to HALEY is a 6-step breeze. I am offering an extended free tour of my library to anyone who can offer a combined array shorter than these, a 48-step total. And I can promise that my library is far more interesting than the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library ever will be, as the latter will probably contain just bound volumes of Playboy, and signed copies of The Art of the Deal. Please send your answers to antonypercy@aol.com. (Travel and accommodation arrangements are the responsibility of the winners.)

New Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Geography, Management/Leadership, Politics

Dead Doubles, by Trevor Barnes (2020)

Atomic Spy, by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan (2020)

An Impeccable Spy, by Owen Matthews (2019)

Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming, by Alan Ogden (2019)

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, by Brian Toohey (2019) [guest review by Denis Lenihan]

I return this month to reviewing some recently published books on espionage and intelligence, and thank Denis Lenihan, coldspur’s Commissioner for Antipodean Affairs, for making a lively and insightful contribution. Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya did not arrive in time to meet the Editor’s deadline, but, in any case, I have been engaged to write a review of it for an external publication, so I shall have to hold off for a while. (My review was submitted on October 19, has been accepted, and will be published soon.) I considered two other books that, from their titles, might have been considered worthy of consideration for a review, Secret History: Writing the Rise of Britain’s Intelligence Services, by Simon Ball (2020), and Radio War: The Secret Espionage War of the Radio Security Service 1938-1946 by David Abrutat (2019). Then, a few weeks ago, I came across the following comment from one of my least favourite economists, Joseph Stiglitz, in a book review in The New York Times: “As a matter of policy, I typically decline to review books that deserve to be panned. You only make enemies.”

On reflection, this seemed a tendentious and somewhat irresponsible line to take. Assuming that experts like Stiglitz are commissioned to write reviews of books, how will they know whether such volumes deserve to be panned or not until they have read them – unless they make a prejudgment based on their understanding of the author’s politics or opinions, and in ignorance of how well the book may have been written? It would be a bit late to accept the commission, read the book, decide it was dreadful, and back out of the contract. But maybe that is why book reviews are overall positive: the publisher of the review wants to encourage readers, not warn them off undeniable clunkers.

Well, I am not worried about making enemies. Heaven knows, I must have upset enough prominent historians and journalists through my writings on coldspur, and the ones who were too elevated to engage with me were never going to change anyway, so that is not a worry that concerns me. And, since I am not in this for the money, I can choose to review what I want. But the two books named above, which would seem, potentially, to play a valuable role in the history of intelligence activities were in their different ways so poor in my opinion that I decided not to waste any further time on them. Incidentally, as I revealed a few months ago, Abrutat has recently been confirmed as the new GCHQ departmental historian.

Dead Doubles, by Trevor Barnes

The 1960-61 case of the Portland Spy Ring is, I assume, fairly well known by enthusiasts of espionage lore. A very public trial took place, and a government inquiry followed. Paul Tietjen, a Daily Mail reporter, wrote a very competent account, Soviet Spy Ring, in 1961, and a movie based on the case, Ring of Spies, appeared in 1964. References are sprinkled round various books, and the several million who read Peter Wright’s Spycatcher will have learned of some of the electronic wizardry that went on in preparation for the arrests. Late in 2019, the National Archives released a batch of files relating to the five subjects in the case, and Trevor Barnes has worked fast and diligently to produce a comprehensive account of what happened, in his recently released Dead Doubles. The title is a little unfortunate: it refers to the Soviet practice of stealing identities of children who died soon after birth, such as Konon Molody was permitted to do with Gordon Lonsdale. Yet it is not the essence of the story, and does not perform justice to the other actors in it.

In 1959, the CIA received a warning from a Polish intelligence officer who was close to defecting, Michael Goleniewski, that secrets were leaking from a top-secret naval research establishment in Portland, Dorset. When MI5 was informed, suspicion soon fell upon Harry Houghton, who maintained a relationship with Ethel Gee, an employee who had access to documents concerning development of underwater weapons technology. Houghton was trailed to London, where he had assignations with an enigmatic character called Gordon Lonsdale. By inspecting Lonsdale’s possessions, and eavesdropping on his apartment, MI5 and GCHQ were able to ascertain that Lonsdale listened to coded messages from Moscow on his wireless, and also owned one-time pads (OTPs) that were necessary for decryption – and probable encryption – of messages. He was in turn followed to a bungalow in Ruislip, where two ostensible New Zealanders, Peter and Helen Kroger, the latter a second-hand book-dealer, were living. As the KGB moved closer on Goleniewski, MI5 had to act quickly, and arrested all five miscreants, soon discovering a hidden wireless apparatus in the Ruislip basem*nt. All five were jailed: Gordon Lonsdale turned out to be one Konon Molody, while the Krogers’ real identities were Morris and Lona Cohen, known to the FBI as dangerous Soviet agents, but lost track of. Molody and the Cohens were soon released in spy swaps.

Barnes’s story does not start well. He supplies a map – an excellent device, since maps give substance to the dimension of space in the same way that a proper chronology provides a reliable framework for time. In his first sentence, however, he refers to ‘Fitzrovia’ in order to provide a location for ‘Great Portland Street’. But ‘Fitzrovia’ is a literary construct, not an administrative district, and his map betrays the confusion, as Fitzrovia is clumsily packed close to Marylebone, and, to make matters worse, mis-spelled as ‘FIZROVIA’. Moreover, on page 2, Barnes describes a journey from Great Portland Street to the ‘secret MI5 laboratory two miles to the west’. But this establishment does not appear on the map, and it was located two miles to the east, not to the west. Thereafter, some other important places do not appear on the map, such as the CIA’s London Office at 71 Grosvenor Street, referred to on page 15.

After this, Barnes quickly gets into his stride. He has performed all the necessary research to give the story the political and intelligence context it needs, exploiting American and Russian sources, the obvious archives at Kew, as well as the unpublished diaries of Charles Elwell, the MI5 officer on the case, and the papers of Morris Cohen at the Imperial War Museum. He understands the technological issues well, and re-presents them in a highly accessible and comprehensible way. He very rarely gives the impression of bluffing his way through a thorny controversy, although he may be a bit too trusting of that rogue, Peter Wright. (Barnes refers to Wright’s ‘Radio Operations Committee’, when the Spycatcher author wrote of a ‘Radiations Operations Committee’. I can find no trace of such an entity.) The story moves at a smooth pace, although the chronology darts around a little too much for this highly-serial reader, with the result that relevant details of some events are scattered around the text. An irritating structure of Parts and Chapters, a very sparsely populated Index, and – the bane of all inquisitive reference-followers – Endnotes that refer to Parts, but do not describe the relevant chapter or page ranges at the top of their own pages, made close analysis more difficult than it could have been. A master index of National Archives files used would have been useful, rather than having them scattered around the Endnotes. Overall, however, Dead Doubles is unmistakably an indispensable and highly valuable contribution to espionage literature.

And yet. (Coldspur regulars will know there is always an ‘and yet’.) While every aspect of the investigation, arrest and prosecution is fleshed out in gripping detail, I was looking for a deeper analysis of some of the more troubling dimensions of the case. For example, it does not help me to know that, a week before Houghton and Gee were trailed to London on the day of their arrest, the Beatles had given ‘a sensational performance in the ballroom of Litherland Hall’, or that The Avengers serial began on television the same day (January 7, 1961). What I would have liked to read, for example, was a more insightful analysis of why Houghton’s drunkenness and violent behaviour while working for the British Embassy in Warsaw resulted in his being sent home but then transferred to Portland’s Port Auxiliary Unit in 1951, rather than being fired.

It reminded me of the scandalous behaviour of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who benefitted from a series of indulgent job changes, instead of being despatched to earn their living elsewhere. What is it about the British Civil Service that causes it to think that a recruit has a job (and pension) for life? Barnes reveals some fresh information on the way that The Admiralty and MI5 had ignored a damaging report on Houghton provided in 1956 by his abused wife, which was buried, or diminished, and he concentrates on this new archival evidence, but at a cost of overlooking a more dramatic scoop.

For the charges went back farther than that. In his book, Tietjen had recorded, back in 1961, that the British Embassy in Warsaw had declared, when they sent Houghton home in October 1952, that he was ‘a security risk’. If that were true, the whole exposure could have been quashed at birth. (We must remember that Tietjen was not aware of the Goleniewski revelations, or Mrs Johnson’s testimony, when he wrote his book. Moreover, as is clear from his notations, his book was published before the Romer Report on security at Portland came out in June 1961.) It is not clear where Tietjen gained his information about the ‘security risk’ report, but it was obviously official, as Tietjen annotates his awareness of it with a Footnote: “Whether Houghton was ever reported to the Admiralty by Captain Austen as a ‘security risk’ is a matter still under investigation by a specially convened Government committee.”

Yet Barnes does not mention this report in his book: he records an interview (undated, but probably in late May 1960) that MI5 officer George Leggett and MI6’s Harold Shergold had with Captain Nigel Austen, for whom Houghton had worked in Poland, but Barnes does not cite Austen as referring to his own ‘security risk’ report on Houghton. On the contrary, Austen used the opportunity to minimise Houghton’s failings, and bolster his own image: Yes, Houghton had been drinking heavily, but Austen was quick to get rid of him; yes, Houghton did make money on the black market, but then no more than any other Embassy official; Houghton’s wife was as much to blame (‘a colourless, drab individual who disliked being in Warsaw and no doubt was partly responsible for Houghton’s conduct’) for her husband’s behaviour. And when Leggett asked Austen whether he thought Houghton was a spy, Austen suggested that Houghton’s actions never indicated any betrayal of secrets to the Poles. (p 19)

It appears as if Austen had been nobbled by this stage, and instructed that, if he wanted to keep his pension (he had retired in January 1960), he should downplay Houghton’s behaviour, and never mention the ‘security risk’ report. Yet the Admiralty had already started digging its hole. As Barnes writes: “The Admiralty had forwarded this report [UDE to Admiralty in 1956, concerning claims made by his ex-wife, now Mrs. Johnson] to MI5 with a covering note, which disclosed that Houghton had been sent home from Poland because he had become very drunk on one occasion, and ‘it was thought he might break out again and involve himself in trouble with the Poles.” (p 10)

‘On one occasion’? As Barnes adds: “According to Mrs Johnson, while in Warsaw Houghton was ‘frequently the worse for drink in public, and apt to talk loudly and indiscreetly about his work. On . . . occasions, at official parties at the embassy, Captain Austen was obliged to send Houghton home by car, he having become incapable of standing up.’” Moreover, when the MI5 officer James Craggs, ‘a sociable bachelor in his late thirties’, went into the Admiralty on May 5, 1960 to inspect the Houghton files, he apparently learned a lot. “A picture of Houghton’s life began to emerge. In December 1951 Austen had cautioned the navy clerk for heavy drinking, and the following May Austen wrote again to say that Houghton was still drinking excessively. Houghton was sent home later that year, and on his return to the UK he was posted to the UDE at Portland.” (p 12) The Admiralty was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of MI5. Certainly not just ‘one occasion’.

So where did Tietjen get his information? Did officer Craggs find out about the ‘security risk’ in his session at the Admiralty, and leak it to Tietjen? The claims that the Admiralty made were evidently untrue, according to Mrs Johnson’s testimony, but also from the Admiralty files that they must have forgotten to weed. But Craggs surely knew. And the whole problem of suitable behaviour at foreign embassies was brushed under the rug when Lord Carrington addressed the House of Commons on the Romer Report. On June 13 he spoke as follows, as Hansard reports: “1. No criticism can be made of Houghton’s appointment in 1951 as Clerk to the Naval Attaché in Warsaw. Nor can any criticism be made of want of action by the Naval Attaché or the Admiralty in the events leading up to his recall to London, before the expiration of his appointment, on account of his drinking habits.2. Given the security criteria of the time no legitimate criticism can be made of Houghton’s subsequent appointment in 1952 to a post in the Underwater Detection Establishment at Portland which did not in itself involve access to secret material. It is regrettable however that the authorities at Portland were not informed about the reason for Houghton’s recall from Warsaw.”

So that’s all right, then. Getting continually sloshed is a hazard of working in dull Embassies behind the Iron Curtain. Black market dealings are not mentioned. Nothing is said about the lost ‘security risk’ report. Yet the Admiralty’s own evidence contradicts this smooth elision of what happened. Did Tietjen speak up after the Romer Report was issued, possibly incriminating Craggs, and was he then sworn to silence? Moreover, a further disturbing complication has to be addressed. In an endnote, Barnes informs us that ‘Craggs’ was not the MI5 officer’s real name (it had been redacted in the archives), and Barnes, though he discovered the real name, had to conceal it, at the request of MI5, because of ‘potential distress to his family’. (Note 8, p 290)

Apart from questioning why Barnes was negotiating with MI5 during this research, I have to ask: what could Craggs possibly have done that would require his name to be concealed after sixty years have passed! This must be an epic scandal if today’s cadre of MI5 officers have to be warned about it. Was Craggs perhaps punished severely for leaking information from the Admiralty files to a Daily Mail journalist? Craggs’s inspection of Admiralty records, Tietjen’s knowledge of Austen’s report, Austen’s clumsy interview, the Admiralty’s claim that the report was lost, Cragg’s humiliation and excision from the record: they all point to a dishonourable leakage of information. I believe that Barnes could, and should, have paid more attention to this mystery. By highlighting the fact of his own diligent sleuthing, namely that he had discovered who the anonymous officer was, but then showing no interest in what the scandal was about, Barnes has simply drawn attention to the shenanigans. (I have communicated my thoughts to him, but he has not replied to my latest analysis.)

A related story worthy of deeper investigation is the lamentable security at the Underwater Defence Establishment (UDE) at Portland. On May 11, 1961, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan commissioned Lord Radcliffe to investigate security across all the public services, and the Romer Committee (which was inquiring into Houghton and Gee) delivered its own findings to the Cabinet Secretary on May 30. The Romer report described the lack of security-consciousness at UDE, and criticised the head of the establishment, Captain Pollock, but the outcome was feeble. As Barnes writes: “Although the Portland security officer was dismissed from his post, as a temporary civil servant his pension was not cut; and the head of UDE in 1956, Captain Pollock, who retired in 1958, submitted a robust defence. Almost a year after the Portland trial, the Admiralty decided there were simply no grounds for disciplinary action against him.” What incentive can there be for doing a job properly if the incumbent knows that the institution will always take care of its own? The analysis of the Radcliffe report warrants only two short sentences in Dead Doubles: no doubt Barnes felt it was outside his remit, but this is a subject crying out for greater analysis.

This account presents an absorbing case-study in historiography. Barnes has clearly benefitted from the support and encouragement of his mentor, Christopher Andrew (‘the godfather to this book’), and cites Andrew’s coverage of the case in his 2009 history of MI5, Defending the Realm (pp 484-488). Andrew had offered one line about the failure of MI5 to follow up on the clues provided by Houghton’s ex-wife. But Andrew was characteristically oblique in his sources, listing solely his traditional ‘Security Service Archives’, some conversations with MI5 officers, and some selective – and thus, highly questionable – references to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher. (which Andrew shamelessly lists in his Bibliography). The only specific source was an obscure article in Police Journal by Charles Elwell, one of Barnes’s key witnesses, written under the pseudonym ‘Elton’. See: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032258X7104400203 . (I do not believe Barnes cites this, but it may have been inserted into the recently released files.)

Yet a useful file was available at the National Archives at that time. In his 2012 work, The Art of Betrayal, Gordon Corera also wrote about the Portland Spy Ring at length, and dedicated a paragraph (p 234) to the fact that Houghton’s ex-wife believed that he was in touch with Communist agents. Corera quotes the response from MI5 that her accusations were ‘nothing more than the outpourings of a jealous and disgruntled wife’, citing the file ADM 1/30088, which was the text of the Romer Inquiry. One can ascertain from the Kew Catalogue that this file is accompanied by ADM 116/6295-6297: they appear to have been stored for access in the 1960s, and updated with various items since. Yet these files (which Andrew could have named) are not referred to by Barnes. Instead, he uses the more comprehensive version of the Romer Inquiry issued in 2017, at CAB 301/248. I have not been able to compare the two, but it is important to recognize that the facts about MI5’s oversights in not checking out Houghton have been known for almost sixty years.

Furthermore, Chapman Pincher claimed, at the same time, that Macmillan ‘declined to publish Romer’s findings’, and that they were not published until 2007, when the Cabinet Office yielded to a Freedom of Information request from Dr Michael Goodman. That presumably relates, however, to Cabinet Office files, not Admiralty records. (Infuriatingly, the Catalogue entry for ADM 1/30088 does not give a release date.) Naturally, Pincher places all the blame on Roger Hollis, and that his ‘minimalist policy’ had allowed Houghton to continue his espionage untroubled. That was more an indictment of incompetence rather than of treachery. If Hollis had really wanted the Portland Spy Ring to remain a secret, he would surely have arranged things so that Lonsdale left town at the first available opportunity.

I believe Barnes might have plunged in more boldly on some other intelligence aspects of the case, and I highlight six here:

1. Lonsdale’s One-Time Pads: One of the key discoveries made when Lonsdale’s safe-deposit box was opened by MI5 was a set of three one-time pads (OTPs), vital for the decryption of incoming and outgoing messages. It seems that Helen Kroger keyed in all of Lonsdale’s messages, both the confidential ones (encyphered and typed on his typewriter), and the family ones (in manuscript) that were found in HK’s bag. One of the pads evidently referred to encyphered messages received on Lonsdale’s general-purpose wireless set, and MI5 & GCHQ were able to detect the frequency of personalized transmissions by inspecting the use of the pad. Thus the second of the three OTPs found in Lonsdale’s box must have been used for the encypherment of transmissions. Why did GCHQ/MI5 not notice or comment on how pages in this OTP had been used up, as they did with his receiver OTP? And what was the third OTP used for? Barnes does not comment.
2. Lonsdale in Ruislip: The reason that the Krogers were able to be arrested was because Lonsdale had unwittingly led his surveillance officers to their bungalow. But why did Lonsdale have to visit them? It sounds to me like very dangerous tradecraft. He should surely have met Helen or Peter at a neutral location to pass over his documents. After all, when Lonsdale was extradited to Berlin in the swap with Greville Wynne, he told MI5 officers, as they went through Ruislip, that they had chosen that location because of the US air traffic that would mask their transmissions, so why would the three of them endangered that ruse by the possibility of Lonsdale’s leading surveillance officers to the secret place?
3. Flash Mode: Barnes comments that the Krogers had been issued with a ‘novel’ wireless apparatus (the R-350-M) that operated in ‘flash’ mode, namely allowing keyed messages to be stored on tape, and then sent at ultra-high speeds to Moscow to avoid interception and direction-finding. If the Krogers had been using flash mode from the start, why would they have been concerned about direction-finding? The operation would have been over before GCHQ could even contact a van, if they had been able to pick up the signal (which Arthur Bonsall of GCHQ said was impossible, anyway.) Barnes refers to their previous equipment as the ‘Astra’ box, but does not describe it fully, or explain whether it was also capable of ’flash’ operation. His reference to ‘novel’ suggests that the previous box did not have flash capabilities. This characteristic is important in the story of interception.
4. Interception and Direction-Finding: Astonishingly, the status of GCHQ’s ability to intercept and locate illicit transmissions in 1960 appears to be markedly weaker than it was in World War II, as is shown by the testimony from Bonsall that Barnes cites. Coldspur readers will recall that Peter Wright claimed that GCHQ said that it would have been impossible for Agent Sonia to have operated undetected in the years 1941 to 1945. Yet by 1959 GCHQ admits defeat in its ability to pick up clandestine traffic targeted towards Moscow, and needs MI5 to tip it off about the places to watch! There is an untold story here about the reality and deterioration of the capabilities of the RSS (after the war The Diplomatic Wireless Service). (I have my own theories on this, which I shall explain in my culminating chapter on Sonia and Wireless Detection.)
5. Soviet Stable of Spies: Barnes makes some highly provocative claims about the presence of unnamed Soviet spies and illegals, assertions that are dropped into the text – almost carelessly. He writes that, at the time of the arrests, GCHQ was aware of ‘radio signals transmitted by KGB illegals in the UK’. So how did they know of the existence of such? Elsewhere he refers to the ‘stable of spies’ which had issued burst signals similar to those transmitted by the Krogers? Who were these people? He also states that MI5 had no practical experience of KGB illegals. Apart from the fact that they were aware of Soviet illegals in the 1930s (Mally & co.), if GCHQ knew of them, MI5 must surely have known them, too. This is a puzzle that I do not understand, and I am anxious to know Barnes’s sources.
6. Lonsdale’s Death: Lastly, the demise of Lonsdale. I have a particular interest in the dozens of cases of unexplained or early deaths of those who incurred the wrath of the KGB, and whom Sudoplatov’s ‘Special Tasks’ group may have pursued and annihilated. Barnes recounts Lonsdale’s death from a heart-attack in Moscow while mushroom-picking (a notoriously dangerous Russian pastime, by the way). Was this a straightforward medical incident? After all (as Barnes relates) he received death warnings, feared being shot on his return, was openly critical of Soviet society, and was given multiple injections shortly before he died. Is it not possible that his appalling tradecraft incurred the ire of KGB high-ups?

The good news is that I have presented this set of questions to Mr. Barnes himself, and he has accepted them as appropriate and thought-provoking. He has promised to inspect them more closely when he is not so busy. He must be much in demand with the attention over his book, as he well deserves to be. I look forward avidly to Barnes’s eventual response. His discomfort with Peter Wright comes through in his narrative, where he is sensibly cautious in accepting some of Wright’s claims about GCHQ’s interceptions of related messages. That is the perennial challenge for Barnes, and Andrew, and anyone else who chooses to cite Wright’s recollections from Spycatcher. Why do you accept some assertions, but discount others, and what does the inclusion of the book in your Bibliography mean?

I also wish Barnes had pushed his comprehensive reportage a bit further into analysis, and not withdrawn because of pressure from MI5, but I still encourage you to read Dead Doubles. And please send me your thoughts on the issues I have listed. In order to ensure the confidentiality of our correspondence, I do remind you all not to re-use your one-time pads (as some of you have been doing), and to ensure that your indicator groups appear in your message after my name, not before it. And, if you run out of one-time pads, we use Wisden’s Almanac, 2016 edition (not 2015!) as our reference book. Got that? It shouldn’t be that difficult, should it?

Atomic Spy, by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan (2020)

Does the world need another biography of Klaus Fuchs? I have on my shelf those by Norman Ross, Robert Chadwell Williams, and Eric Rossiter, as well as last year’s epic composition by Frank Close. Evidently, the publishers at Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, thought so, even though Close’s Trinity was published by Allen Lane, also an imprint of Penguin Random House. Presumably Ms. Greenspan knew about Frank Close’s concurrent work, and she indeed lists it in her biography. So one might expect a novel interpretation of the life of the atomic spy with divergent loyalties. The sub-title is ‘The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs’. Dark – as in ‘previously undisclosed’? Or as in ‘sinister’?

And what are Ms. Greenspan’s qualifications for writing about Fuchs, and what is her approach? It is not clear. She is recorded as having collaborated with her late husband, Stanley, on works of child psychiatry, and she published a book on the Life and Science of Max Born a decade ago, but I can find no record of her academic credentials. Moreover, she appeared to require large doses of help in compiling her work – not just the predictable interviews with a large range of offspring of friends and associates of Fuchs, but availing herself of an impressive list of persons who ‘agreed to interviews, tours, meetings, teas, and lunches and in every way were supportive’, from Charles and Nicola Perrin to the inevitable Nigel West and the elusive Alexander Vassiliev. How very unlike the solitary drudgery in which coldspur finds himself performing his researches! I should add, however, that while I shall probably not breakfast in Aberystwyth again, I did have a very pleasant lunch with Nigel West a few years ago, but am still awaiting Sir Christopher Andrew’s invitation to tea.

Ms. Greenspan lists a highly impressive set of international archival references, which point to a broad and deep study of the available material. Moreover, one noticeable feature of Greenspan’s detailed endnotes is the fact that she appears to have had access to some of the Fuchs files that have been withheld at Kew, such as the AB/1 series, which has been closed for access for most human beings. Her ability to inspect Rudolf Peierls’s correspondence, for instance, represents a highly controversial feather in her cap, which demands a more open explanation. Why would the relevant ministries allow an American writer to inspect such files, and why does she not explain her tactics in achieving such a coup? I was immediately intrigued to know whether her access to papers that the authorities have, in their wisdom, deemed too confidential to be exploited by the common historian, enabled her to construct some piercing breakthroughs in analysing Fuchs’s relationship with his political masters in the United Kingdom. When researching this matter with an on-line colleague, however, I was informed that she (and Frank Close) both probably benefitted from the availability of papers before the decision to withdraw them – primarily the AB 1/572-577 series of Rudolf Peierls’s correspondence. From a study of her endnotes, and those of Close (which are, incidentally, a treasure trove in their own right, which teaches more on each subsequent inspection), it would appear that Greenspan delved more widely in these particular arcana than did Close. What prompted the sudden secrecy by units of the British government over atomic research in the 1940s remains an enigma.

Greenspan’s methodical coverage of the sources is, however, not reflected in the originality of her text. Atomic Spy is overall disappointing, and does not add much to our understanding of Fuchs’s motivations and behaviour. Nevertheless, in four aspects, I thought Greenspan provided some fresh value worth noting. She dedicates four excellent chapters on Fuchs’s experiences in Kiel and Berlin in 1932 and 1933 – a period compressed to just two pages in Close’s account – describing vividly the terrors that the Nazis imposed on opposition groups, but especially the German Communist Party. At the age of twenty-one, Klaus had taken over from his brother, Gerhard, the leadership of the Free Socialist Student Group (a cover name) in Kiel. Gerhard had escaped to Berlin, but Klaus was now a hunted man, under sentence of death. On February 28, 1933, Klaus himself escaped from Kiel, when he was number one on the list to be arrested, and moved to Berlin. Very recklessly, when Gerhard had had to go into hiding, Klaus continued to try to recruit students to the communist cause, when it was clearly a hopeless venture. The Nazis were leaving mangled bodies of communists on the streets. In mid-July, Klaus boarded a train for Aachen, Paris, and eventually Bristol.

Greenspan also sheds fresh light on the horrors of internment that Fuchs and others experienced on the S. S. Ettrick on the voyage to Canada in July 1940, the brutal way that the prisoners were treated by their guards, and the vile conditions that existed on the ship, with thirteen hundred refugees crowded into a hold with the portholes shut in conditions of unbelievable squalor. According to Fuchs, the communists did most of the work in cleaning up the vomit and excrement that swamped the place. While they were at sea, they heard that U-boats had torpedoed the sister ship, the Arandora Star. Dry land in Canada may have been a relief after ten days on the Atlantic Ocean, but conditions in the camp were also grim to start with, a freezing winter making life desperately uncomfortable. The prisoners successfully petitioned for improved conditions, and by December Fuchs was a member of one of the first lists of internees to be sent back to Britain. One can forgive him for harbouring a grudge against the treatment they received, and the frequent accusations and insults that they heard from guards and civilians that he and his fellow internees were ‘Nazis’ simply because they were Germans.

The third area where I believe that Greenspan is more perceptive than other biographers is her coverage of the conversations between Henry Arnold, the security officer at Harwell, and Klaus, in late 1949. A possible defence that Fuchs could have used at his trial was that he had been ‘induced’ by Arnold, and John co*ckcroft, the director of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, into confessing his espionage a spart of a deal. The concern that Fuchs’s confession might not have been truly voluntary brought MI5 to questioning whether the prosecution might fail on that account. Moreover, he had not been cautioned appropriately. Thus the written confession that he provided became extremely important. MI5’s attorney, B. A. Hill, was comfortable, however, with the sequence of events, and moved to advise the prosecuting lawyer, Christmas Humphreys. Yet Fuchs’s decision to say nothing at his initial hearing (on February 10, 1950), and the reluctance of Derek Curtis-Bennett, who represented Fuchs at the trial that took place on March 1, to challenge the Attorney-General, Sir Hartley Shawcross, on what Greenspan describes as ‘the now open secret of inducement’ is puzzling and disturbing. Curtis-Bennett, perhaps under instructions, made a very disjointed plea in Fuchs’s defence, but Fuchs had little to say when invited by Lord Goddard to speak.

Lastly, Greenspan adds some useful information about Fuchs from his time in East Germany, where he did not get the heroes’ welcome that he expected, maybe naively. The Soviets wanted no suggestion that they had acquired the atomic bomb other than from their own research and imagination. The author writes: “No celebrations and accolades welcomed him. The Russians wanted no reference to his passing them information. According to them, they had discovered the atomic secrets themselves. Russia’s denial of any connection to him made his past taboo. Even his nephew Klaus had felt the long arm of the KGB. When he applied for admission to Leipzig University in 1956, he included that his uncle had spied for Russia. University officials accused him of lying. Russia didn’t have spies. They forced him to delete the information.” But what is surprising is that Greenspan does not include the passage from the Vassilievsky Notebooks, where Sonia (Ursula Beurton, née Kuczynski) was quick to tell the authorities how ashamed she was of Fuchs’s conduct in confessing, and how, if she had been given the chance to give him a firm talking-to, the whole messy business of arrest and trial could have been avoided.

Yet the reader has to trudge through some familiar territory, well-ploughed by Close, to glean these insights. And Greenspan leaves behind a number of errors in her wake, mainly because she appears to have spent little time in the British Isles. She characterizes MI6 as ‘the military division of foreign intelligence’, represents the British intelligence establishment as ‘dominated by toffs’ from Eton or Harrow, which was certainly not the case, and introduces Edinburgh (where Fuchs returned to work under Max Born) in the following terms: “Januarys in Edinburgh are blustery and gray. The cold, raw air from the English Channel blankets the city of stone and seeps into the bones”, an observation bound to raise the hackles of even the most indulgent Caledonian. She hazards a guess that Sonia might have been in contact with Fuchs in 1949 because of ‘the proximity of Harwell to Great Rollright’, when Sonia had in fact lived closer to Harwell beforehand, and there is no evidence that she and Fuchs got together again in the UK after 1943. I would have thought that one of her many advisory readers would have shown a greater familiarity with British geography and institutions. Like many chroniclers, Greenspan is also a bit too trusting of ‘Sonya’s Report’.

The final judgments that emanate from all this teamwork are drearily mundane and misguided. She phrases her final verdict thus: “Fuchs’s actions left most people confused, but what they didn’t see was that his life, circ*mscribed from within, was consistent and constant to his unwavering set of ideals, he sought the betterment of mankind that transcended national boundaries. His goal became to balance world power and to prevent nuclear blackmail. As he saw it, science was his weapon in a war to protect humanity.” If this is what ‘Dark Lives’ consists of, it is very feeble, and represents the tired refrain that a traitor like Fuchs, who, like Sonia, took advantage of British citizenship, and then betrayed his adopted home, should somehow be forgiven because he was ‘sincere’. (Shortly before she died, Lorna Arnold, the official historian at AERE Harwell, gave Frank Close a similar testimony.) ‘An unwavering set of ideals’ – much the same could be said of Lenin, and Stalin, all the way to their grisly imitators such as Pol Pot, all laced with the vague narcissistic illusion that the hero of our tale had it in his hands the ability ‘to balance world power’. It is a shoddy ending to a weakly-conceived and ill-timed book.

Ms. Greenspan needed some help with her writing, as she acknowledges no less than sixteen persons who read ‘most or some of the manuscript’, a handful who helped her with German and Russian translations, another twelve who made suggestions or who provided introductions, and archivists from thirty or so libraries who pointed her in the right direction, as well as her team of agents, editors, project managers, an endnote compiler, and a copy editor. As an author who had to perform my own copy-editing with no benefit of outside readers, and was obliged to reconstruct my own text after an ‘experimental’ editor mangled my words and punctuation, who had to create all the footnotes and endnotes, create the Affinity Charts and Biographical Index, select and organize the illustrations, undertake the laborious task of constructing an index, recruit my own PR agency, and then, when a copy of Misdefending the Realm was requested for review purposes by the Times Literary Supplement, had to order a copy from amazon for the reviewer since my editor had taken off for India for a month without informing me, I was both overwhelmed and disenchanted. It is rather like comparing two expeditions to the Hindu Kush. The Zoological Society would take hampers of chutney, chocolate and champagne with them, and recruit a posse of porters and ponies to carry their provisions, while Eric Newby or Eric Shipton would go alone, with a rucksack on their backs. But it is the solo explorers who bring back the more intriguing stories.

An Impeccable Spy, by Owen Matthews (2019)

The only major feature wrong with this book is its title. If a spy were truly ‘impeccable’, he (or she) would be infiltrated silently into a target institution, would extract vital secrets and deliver them to his controllers without ever being detected, his achievements would never be lauded and publicized, and he would die in obscurity, his name and cryptonym forever a secret. No doubt there have been persons like that. But there would be no material to write biographies of them.

Richard Sorge (the subject of Owen Matthews’ book) was far from that model. He behaved ostentatiously, drawing attention to himself, he was caught by the Japanese, he confessed his crimes, and was eventually hanged. Up until the last day he believed that Stalin would rescue him in some exchange deal because of his dedication, and the value he had brought to his bosses. Yet that was not the way Stalin thought. Sorge was a failure because he had got himself caught. And maybe Sorge knew at heart that a return to Moscow might mean death at the hands of his employers. After all, in Stalin’s eyes, Sorge had lived too long abroad, would clearly have been subject to non-communist influences, and might disapprove of how Stalin had distorted the Bolshevik impulse. Moreover, he was half-German. Let him swing.

Biographers of spies have to spice up their stories to attract attention, admittedly. ‘The Most Dangerous Spy in History’ (Fuchs, according to Frank Close); ‘The Spy Who Changed the World’ (Fuchs, according to Mike Rossiter); ‘Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy’ (Sonia, according to Ben Macintyre), ‘The Spy Who Changed History’ (Shumovsky, according to Lokhova), etc. etc. Matthews appears to have taken his inspiration from Kim Philby, perhaps a dubious authority in this métier. Philby is quoted on the dust-jacket as stating that Sorge’s ‘work was impeccable’, John le Carré, for good measure, classifies Sorge as ‘the best spy of all time’, and Ian Fleming is recorded on the cover as claiming that Sorge was ‘the most formidable spy in history’, all reflecting an enthusiasm for bohemianism and extravagance rather than patience and discretion.

Sorge’s life was a rambunctious and exhilarating one. He was born in 1895 in Baku, in the Russian Empire, of a German father and Russian mother. He served on the Western Front, where he became a communist. After the Russian revolution, he moved to Moscow, where he was recruited by the Comintern, and roamed around Europe on various missions, including a short stay in the United Kingdom in 1929. Shortly after that, he was instructed to join the Nazi party with cover as a journalist, and sent to Shanghai, China in 1930, to join a motley international group of ne’er-do-wells, conspirators, saboteurs, spies and activists, and among his sexual conquests were Agnes Smedley and Ursula Hamburger (Sonia). (In Agent Sonya, Ben Macintyre has written: “Exactly when Ursula Hamburger and Richard Sorge became lovers is still a matter of debate.” That may be so in London, but in the circles in which I move, the precise date of that tempestuous event has never been a topic of conversation.) On a return to Moscow in 1933, where Sorge got married, he received fresh instructions to go to Japan and organize an intelligence network, since Stalin was more concerned about the threat from the East than he was of the Nazi menace. He went there via Germany, where he was able to build links with the Nazi Party, and thereafter led a stressful double life of hobnobbing with Nazi officials while building contacts with the Japanese government, and recruiting Max Clausen to send his reports to Vladivostok by wireless. He provided much valuable information to Stalin – although some of it is overrated – but the Japanese penetrated his ring, and he was arrested on October 18, 1941, interrogated and tortured. He then confessed, and was hanged on November 7, 1944.

I was familiar with Owen Matthews from an earlier work of his, Stalin’s Children (2008), which was not literally about the Dictator’s own offspring, but consisted of an uneasy combination of private memoir and serious history. It was an affecting and occasionally moving composition, uncovering the stories of Matthews’ maternal Russian grandparents (his grandfather was killed in the purges of 1937, and his grandmother lost her mind in the Gulag), and the love-affair of his own parents. (The granting of his mother’s visa to leave for Britain was part of the deal to free the Krogers, noted above.) Yet I found it flawed, owing to some mystical nonsense about ‘blood memory’, a lot of speculation about his grandfather’s thoughts and intentions, the insertion of many now familiar stories of the Ukrainian famine and the Purges, too much shy-making information on the author’s own love-life, and an irritatingly but no doubt fashionably erratic approach to the chronology of his story. The book was 50% longer than it needed to be.

Matthews, who spoke Russian before he learned English, studied Modern History at my alma mater, Christ Church, Oxford, and then pursued a career as a journalist, working in Moscow from 1997. His account of Sorge’s life is methodical, and sensibly cautious about many of the rumours that surrounded Sorge’s career in the muddle of Shanghai and wartime Japan. (I must confess that I have not read any other of the Sorge biographies, so cannot compare.) He has had access to American, German, Russian and Japanese archival sources, with necessary assistance in translation, and professes a large and learned bibliography. There is little of the Pincherite speculation about assignments and recruitment (e.g. ‘Hollis’s position at BAT would have been of interest to the GRU’ and ‘Sorge could have encountered Hollis there [at the YMCA]’: Treachery, page 46).

Matthews does comment on the Hollis case, however, although mainly in an endnote (of which there are many rich examples). On pages 367 and 368 he spends perhaps too much space on a topic that is not germane to the Sorge story, echoing the line of the Pincherite-Wrightean clique of faux-historians. He states that ‘there is evidence that Luise Rimm [the wife of a GRU operator] had a love affair with Roger Hollis that lasted three years’, and he accuses Hollis of being deceptive about his movements in China and Moscow. He is firmly of the belief that Hollis alone was able to shield Sonia from investigation, concluding, rather lamely: “The record is clear that Hollis was that protective hand, for reasons that make no apparent sense unless he was the agent ‘Elli’ and was working, like Sonja, for the GRU”. It would have been better for Matthews to have stepped back from this particular controversy.

I found a few mistakes about personalities and organisation. Matthews introduces Peter Wright as ‘the Australian-born head of MI5 counter-intelligence’, which is wrong on two counts. And he gets a bit carried away about Shanghai in the 1920s. One sentence stands out, on pp 57-58: “In the 1920s Shanghai hosted many of the great Soviet illegals of the age – Arnold Deutsch (who went on to recruit Kim Philby), Theodore Maly (later controller of the Cambridge Five), Alexander Rado (one of the many agents who would later warn Stalin of Nazi plans to invade the Soviet Union), Otto Katz (one of the most effective recruiters of fellow-travellers to the Soviet cause from Paris to Hollywood), Leopold Trepper (founder of the Rote Kapelle spy ring inside Germany before the Second World War), as well as legendary Fourth Department illegals Ignace Poretsky and Walter Krivitsky, Ruth Werner [Sonia] and Wilhelm Pieck.” No matter that this was the decade before Sorge arrived, that not all of these characters were ’illegals’, and that none of them was mythical. Sonia did not arrive there until 1930, and Agnes Smedley would have been very upset to have been omitted from this list of desperadoes. How a lot of problems would have been forestalled if this crew had been mopped up at the time and locked away where they could do no damage!

The account of Sorge’s eventual entrapment and arrest is very dramatic, and Matthews tells it well. I was particularly interested, because of my research into Sonia’s activities, in the attempts to determine the location of Clausen’s transmitter, as one would think that the Japanese would have been ruthless and efficient in tracking down illicit transmissions. Matthews reports: “Thanks to their own radio monitoring, and after a tip-off from the military government in Korea, the Japanese authorities knew that a powerful illegal transmitter was regularly operating from various sites in the Tokyo area. An all-points bulletin was sent out to all municipal police stations, including Toriizaka, to try to spot the source of the signals. But the Japanese were never able to successfully triangulate Clausen’s radio. And happily for Sorge, the Russian military code he used proved unbreakable – though the messages were faithfully monitored and transcribed by the Japanese in an ever-thickening file of unintelligible strings of number groups.” It seems to me that because of the wavelengths that Clausen would have been using, and the peculiar shape of Japan, and its mountains, that detecting the exact location of Clausen’s transmissions (and he did sensibly move around) turned out to be impossible.

Matthews’s final judgment endorses the view that Sorge was impeccable because he was ‘brave, brilliant and relentless’, and he laments the Soviet Union’s overall indifference to him, and the fact that it engaged in ‘the ultimate betrayal of its greatest spy.’ “It was Sorge’s tragedy that his masters were venal cowards who placed their own careers before the vital interests of the country that he laid down his life to serve” is the last sentence in Mathews’ book. Well, that is one way of looking at it. But you could also say that he was just like every other Stalinist dupe: he was consumed by a dopey ideology, believed that he was one of the charmed saviours of humanity, and completely overlooked the evidence that pointed to the fact that Stalin was a monster who would show no compassion or mercy when his underlings were no longer of use to him. One of Matthews’ excellent commentaries contains the following chilling fact (p 179): Soviet military intelligence had six different heads between 1937 and 1939, five of whom would be executed. The Hall of Fame consists of the following:

Jan Berzin, 1924-April 1935

Semyon Uritsky, April 1935-July 1937

Jan Berzin, July 1937-August 1937

Alexander Nikonov, August 1937-August 1937

Semyon Gendin, September 1937-October 1938

Alexander Orlov, October 1938-April 1939

Ivan Proskurov, April 1939-July 1940

Filipp Golikov, July 1940-October 1941

Alexei Panfilov, October 1941-November 1942

Not a career to be undertaken lightly. One might wonder why Jan Berzin, the second time round, didn’t reflect on the opportunity, and select a quieter and less hazardous occupation, such as deep-sea diving. But you couldn’t do that with Stalin. Once you were in the maw, you had no control. And the same for Sorge. Despite its occasional missteps, I recommend this book highly.

Master of Deception: The Wartime Adventures of Peter Fleming, by Alan Ogden (2019)

Most readers will probably recall Peter Fleming as the elder brother of Ian Fleming, or the husband of Celia Johnson, whose controlled performance of thwarted passion made Brief Encounter such an iconic film. That story of how Sonia (Celia Johnson) met Klaus Fuchs (Trevor Howard) at Birmingham’s Snow Hill Station, and then how the couple had to subdue their romance for the cause of delivering atomic secrets safely to the Soviet Embassy [are you sure this is correct? Ed.], was a box-office hit in 1945, and notable for the cameo performance by Joyce Carey playing Myrtle Bagot [sic! Milicent’s sister?], an MI5 officer under cover as the restaurant owner. Perhaps more authentically, I remember being introduced to Fleming in his travel-book, Brazilian Adventure (1933) about a poorly-organized search for Percy Fawcett, which entertained me because the author appeared to parody himself. I thus keenly consumed his One’s Company (1934) and News from Tartary (1936), in which his cover as a journalist allowed him to perform some intelligence-gathering on behalf of MI6. (There is no evidence that he had an affair with Sonia while he was in Manchukuo, and Sonia wisely decided to omit all references to any such liaison in her memoir.) His account of Hitler’s plans after the invasion of Britain, Invasion 1940, was of great historical interest to me. Finally, I enjoyed Duff Hart-Davis’s biography of Fleming, published in 1974.

Thus I jumped at the opportunity to learn more when Alan Ogden’s Master of Deception appeared last year, especially since it carried a warm endorsem*nt from Professor Glees on the back cover. Alan Ogden was not a name I knew, but, since he has written several books about the Special Operations Executive, especially concerning activities in a region of the world that I find utterly absorbing – Transylvania, Romania, and parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire – I thought that it was an omission that I should quickly remedy. Ogden has set himself the task of documenting Fleming’s war experiences in the Military Intelligence Directorate (MIR) and then in what Ogden calls the ‘mysterious’ D. Division, which was responsible for deception in the Far East.

Part of the problem of recording faithfully what went on in military intelligence circles is the tendency to be overwhelmed with acronyms, liaison officers, operational code-names, and a host of minor figures, the Biffies, Jumboes and Tigers who populated this realm. (Ogden recognises part of this challenge in his Preface, where he declares his aim to reduce the ‘alphabet soup’. Yet he provides no glossary of acronyms, and his Index is very weak.) Thus it requires a large amount of concentration and patience to keep up with the stream of codewords and rapidly changing military units that evolved as the war changed its shape. Another hurdle for the author to overcome, however, is more paradoxical, and more serious. Even though Fleming is characterised as the ‘Master of Deception’, his schemes and campaigns were essentially failures – not because of his lack of inventiveness, but because the enemy refused to bite, or because the battle was lost for external reasons. A campaign record of Norway, Greece, the Pacific and Burma is not the most illustrious showcase for how deception operations won the day.

I have recently studied the deception campaign supporting the Normandy landings (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-8/ ), and it was informative to discover that much of the investment that the Allies put into the movements of dummy armies was wasted because the Germans did not have the capacity nor the imagination to interpret all the fake signals and equipment that were constructed to convince them of the existence of FUSAG. The Nazis were nowhere near to building a picture of the organisation and order of battle of the Allies to match what British and American intelligence had constructed concerning Nazi forces. Thus Germany came to be completely reliant on its crew of agents, who had either been ‘turned’ or had signed up for the Abwehr originally with the intention of working for the opposition. And British intelligence was able to manipulate the Abwehr and its successors simply because they wanted to be misled.

Whereas deception, under Lt.-Colonel Dudley Clarke’s ‘A’ Force, had been successful in Africa, it was a struggle in the war in Burma and the frontiers of Japanese-controlled territory. As Fleming himself wrote in a report: “There can be no question that the Japanese Intelligence was greatly inferior in all respects to the German and even the Italian Intelligence. The successful deception practiced on the Axis military machine in Europe was made possible by the fact that the enemy’s Intelligence staffs and services were, though gullible, well organized and reasonably influential.” As Ogden concludes, D. Division’s plans were too sophisticated: Philip Mason, head of the Conference Secretariat (SEAC), echoed Fleming’s judgment: “Deceiving the Germans had been very different; they wanted to know our plans and expected us to try and deceive them. That had been like playing chess with someone not quite as good as oneself.; with the Japanese, it was like setting up the chessboard against an adversary whose one idea was to punch you on the nose.”

Fleming was to explain failure in other ways, such as a lack of knowledge with the deception planners as to what military strategies actually were in a chaotic and dispersed region – very different from what existed in the European theatre. But a naivety about deception, and maybe an overestimation of achievement, and a lack of understanding of how controlling agents was supposed to work, were evident in other activities. Ogden reports how, in March 1943, our old coldspur friend John Marriott was sent to India to advise on how a new section should be formed to handle double-agents (a formulation that immediately highlights a problem, as you cannot be sure you have ‘double-agents’ until you have trained them, and brought them strictly under your control). Ogden reports: “Marriott’s credentials were impeccable save in one respect. He had never been to India, and knew next to nothing about its peculiarities, impediments and handicaps.” Marriott was very critical of the set-up in India, and Fleming appeared to have been rather disdainful of Marriott’s practical experience. For where were these double-agents going to come from? Who arrested them, interrogated them, and who was to ‘turn’ them, and ensure that they were loyal to you? Moreover, Fleming frequently upset the military brass with his unconventionality. One judgment recorded by Ogden is that of Colonel Bill Magan, one of the officers in the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. He found Fleming ‘an irresponsible, ambitious and irrational man who was always trying to persuade us to pass messages which we believed would “blow” the channel.’

Ogden has clearly done his homework, as is shown by the hundred or so files from the National Archives that he lists in his Sources, and whose contents are faithfully reflected in his text. But it becomes a bit of a trudge working through his story to find the nuggets. Too many multi-page reports are embedded, when they should preferably have been summarized, and the complete versions relegated to Appendices. Much detail about operations, which is surely of considerable value to the dedicated military historian, could have been left out in order to focus more tightly on the author’s main thrust, and Fleming sometimes gets lost in the caravanserai.

Yet nuggets there certainly are. I was delighted to add the following assessment to my dossier on Roger Hollis. In August 1939, Fleming was invited to submit his recommendations as to who, among associates he had known, might be useful to the war effort, and offered, among his testimonies, that Hollis ‘Did several years in China with BAT’, adding: “Though he has not been there recently, his judgement of Far Eastern affairs has always impressed me as unusually realistic. His cooperation, or even his comments, might be valuable at an early stage, particularly as he is available in London.” Nothing appeared to come from this, but the outwardly rather dim Hollis had impressed someone who knew what he was talking about, and gained a fan of note. (My dossier has also been enriched this month by one of the more memorable phrases in Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya: “He [Hollis] was a plodding, slightly droopy bureaucrat with the imaginative flair of an omelet.”)

Another gem consists of a paper that Fleming wrote in Chungking in 1942, titled ‘Total Intelligence’, which, by using the fictitious example of Ruritania in 1939, outlined how a diverse set of intelligence sources could be harnessed without consolidating the gatherers of intelligence into one massive organisation. The paper takes almost ten pages of text, and should thus likewise have been a candidate for appendicisation, but it deserves broader exposure, and is well worth reading. I was a bit puzzled, however, by Ogden’s brief commentary on this report, where he indicates that, addressing Fleming’s criticism, SOE went out of his way to recruit business men and bankers to assist them in undermining the enemy. But SOE was a sabotage organisation, not an intelligence-gathering unit (although intelligence came its way by way of its destructive exploits), and I should have liked Ogden to explore this dilemma – one so keenly understood by MI6 – in a little more depth.

So what is the verdict on Fleming? Ogden’s assessment is a little surprising. He writes (p 274): “As the new world order unfurled, with his knowledge of and experience in dealing with Russia and China, he was eminently well qualified for a top post in either SIS or MI5.” That seems to me an errant call. Fleming had no insider reputation in the Security Service or the Secret Intelligence Service, and his sudden appointment would surely have provoked resentment. Moreover, I believe he was temperamentally unsuited for roles that required tact, patience, and an ability to negotiate with Whitehall. He was an adventurer, a maverick, and would have bridled at all the protocols and formalities of communicating with career civil servants – something that Dick White was famously good at. It is not surprising that Fleming took early retirement as a gentleman farmer.

‘Master of Deception’ he may have been, but the targets of his deception frequently failed to act like English gentlemen, or perform as they were supposed to, not having installed the obvious British-like institutions. In one important passage, Fleming’s frustrations come through. As Ogden writes, of one multi-year operation that had minimal impact, the HICCOUGHS project, which planted a network of notional agents in Burma, and somehow caused them to send messages back to Delhi (p 228): “For two years, Fleming and the HICCOUGHS case attached little importance to this rather tiresome routine commitment since it was transparently flawed. ‘Why,’ asked Fleming, ‘if our agents could communicate with us by W/T, could we not communicate with them by the same means? Why, if we were forced to broadcast messages to them, did we continue to use a low-grade cipher? How was it that they were all (apparently) able to listen in twice daily at fixed times to receive a message when in most cases it affected only one of them? How was it that the Japanese Radio Security Service never obtained the slightest clue to the places and times at which they transmitted their lengthy and invaluable reports? Why, after all this talk about sabotage and subversion, did nothing ever happen?’”

This was perhaps an admission that ingenuity alone was not enough. It needed comprehensive understanding and support from the military organisation, and it required, even more, a proper assessment of the psychology of the enemy, insights into how its intelligence units thought, and a clear idea of what behavioural changes the operation was trying to achieve. Causing confusion was not enough.

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State, by Brian Toohey (2019) [guest review by Denis Lenihan]

Even taking into account the generation gap, there are some remarkable similarities between Brian Toohey (born 1944) and Harry Chapman Pincher (1914-2014). Both began their journalistic careers in conventional fields, Toohey in finance, although the Australian Financial Review when he joined it in the 1970s had perhaps a somewhat broader range than now. Pincher’s field was initially defence and science on the Daily Express in the Beaverbrook days after the war. Both had the gift or the knack of attracting confidences, so that senior figures in government leaked material which they wished to see released, for varying reasons. The historian E P Thompson described Pincher as

“a kind of official urinal in which, side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.”

Pincher’s sources went beyond that group, taking in those who went fishing or pheasant or grouse shooting in season – cabinet ministers, industrialists, well-informed nobles – when some on Pincher’s account became much more willing to divulge secrets, or at least matters which were classified as secrets. It was not a difference that they or Pincher always recognised. Toohey’s only overseas posting was to Washington, and his social circle was more restricted; and if there were any grouse shooters among his sources, he has been careful to protect them.

While Pincher will be well-known to readers of coldspur.com some further information on Toohey might be helpful. He has written about national security policy since 1973 and is the author or co-author of four books, including Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (1989). After part of the manuscript came into the Australian (Labor) Government’s possession, it took court action which resulted in the book effectively being vetted by the Government. A sensible approach saw only one major deletion, the name of a public relations firm, an omission remedied soon after the book’s publication by another journalist who published not in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne).

Pincher became interested in spies in 1950 when he covered the trial of Klaus Fuchs, the atomic spy. Pincher informed his editor that a spy named Fuchs had been arrested, and the editor said ‘Marvellous! I’ve always wanted to get that word into a headline.’ As noted, Toohey has written about national security matters since 1973, while he was still at the AFR, perhaps more so later when he moved to the late-lamented National Times. Both believed in lunch as a setting where people talked; French was Pincher’s cuisine of choice, habitually at A L’Ecu de France in Jermyn St Piccadilly. His footnotes show that Toohey followed suit on at least one occasion, at La Bagatelle in Washington, but in New York he went to the Union Club (founded 1836), the cuisine in which was unlikely to have been French. No Canberra restaurant is mentioned. Perhaps Toohey was wise to move about. After A L’Ecu closed in the 1990s, Pincher was told by the senior director that MI5 had bugged the banquettes, including the one favoured by Pincher. A later development of the story had it that when MI5 went to remove the bugs, it found another set – put there by the KGB. Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant: it’s a great story. Pincher evidently had a very good memory and drank little. After lunch he would return to his office and dictate the story without reference to documents. ‘…I have always had a golden rule’, he recorded in 2013,’ that I would never touch or look at any classified documents’. (Foreword to Christopher Moran: Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (2013)). Toohey seems to have got documents frequently but after writing his story he would very sensibly destroy them, thus putting himself beyond the reach of his official pursuers who often took him to court.

Reading along and between the lines in Toohey’s book Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State (2019) suggests that most of his sources were public servants. As with Pincher, much public money was spent on attempting to find out who they were, evidently without success. Both lived or have lived long enough to be able to see from government files released to archives the attempts made to identify their sources. After Pincher had published in 1959 details of a cabinet decision two days after it had been made, Harold Macmillan was moved to exclaim: ‘Can nothing be done to suppress or get rid of Mr Chapman Pincher’. Pincher’s books contain the explanation for many of the characteristics of Australian government which Toohey rightly complains about: unwarranted secrecy and lies, particularly by security agencies. The UK system of government has for decades prized secrecy, very often in circ*mstances where it was later shown to be unnecessary and even harmful. In Treachery, Pincher is able to show that time and again MI5 in particular lied to ministers and even the Prime Minister, to the extent of being publicly reproved. In 1963 Harold Macmillan criticised Sir Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, in the House of Commons for keeping from him critical information during the Profumo affair.

As time goes by, more and more ludicrous examples emerge. In 1940 Neville Chamberlain while still Prime Minister commissioned Lord Hankey to investigate the efficiency of the intelligence services. His report has never been released in the United Kingdom, which had prompted much speculation about its contents. The spy John Cairncross had at the time slipped a copy to Moscow and in 2009, in its well-known role of assisting scholarship, the Soviet archives released it. Fallen upon by scholars eager to find its secrets, it turned out to be in the words of one reader ‘mostly pedestrian and superficial’.

That tradition of too much secrecy and too many lies was bequeathed to Australia and the other colonies and continues to bedevil them, as Toohey shows. He became the bete noire of Sir Arthur Tange, the Secretary of the Department of Defence, whose ‘demands to find the leakers chewed up the time of senior officials who had more important things to do than pursue often inept and always futile investigations’. Tange might usefully have followed the precedent of his UK counterpart, Sir Richard Powell, who advised his minister in 1958 with regard to Pincher that

“I believe that we must live with this man and make the best of it. We can console ourselves that his writings, although embarrassing at times to Whitehall, disclose nothing that Russian intelligence does not already know.”

Toohey’s jousts with the establishment make for enjoyable reading, and on most issues (nuclear bomb testing in Australia, ‘the depravity of nuclear war planning’ etc) he is on the side of the angels, even if sometimes he does not quote prominent supporters such as the Pope who give weight to his causes. Given that most of the Pope’s clergy and his flock do not at least in public echo his views on the bomb, Toohey’s omission is forgivable.

When he strays outside his area of expertise, however, as he does when arguing that out of the thirteen wars Australia has fought, only one (the Pacific theatre of World War II) was ‘a war of necessity for Australia’, Toohey stumbles. Some of the thirteen pre-dated the establishment of Australia in 1900, and while his argument might be true looking backwards, there was no prospect in say 1914 that Australia would not join in the defence of what was then called the mother country, especially when all her other white daughters enrolled. Toohey must also be one of the very few Australian commentators to have written about the Japanese and World War II and who have failed to mention the bombing of Darwin and the invasion of Sydney Harbour by midget submarines, both in 1942.

All this makes it very disappointing that Toohey should be so far off the mark in the very first chapter of his book (there are 60 chapters, some of them very short), which deals with ‘The Security Scandal that the US Hid from the Newborn ASIO’, as the chapter heading has it. The scandal concerned the Venona material, messages which passed between Moscow and its embassies in a number of countries, including Australia, in the 1940s, many of which were intercepted by the US or its allies (or by neutral countries such as Sweden) and some of which were able to be decoded or deciphered. On Toohey’s account, an NSA employee, William Weisband, was a KGB spy and told Moscow in 1948 about the interceptions and the encryption methods were then changed. Again on Toohey’s account, ASIO was never told about this betrayal. All these assertions are worth examining in some detail, together with Toohey’s account of what the Australian Venona material revealed.

Toohey begins by claiming that ‘the highly classified material handed over by the Australian spies was of no consequence’, in particular the two top-secret UK planning papers passed over in 1946 which showed ‘banal, often erroneous predictions’; further, the predictions were ‘fatuous’ while the other papers passed over were ‘trite’. That some of the predictions turned out to be wrong, and that some of the other material seemed to be unimportant, are hardly sufficient to dismiss them altogether. Given some indication by the Soviet Embassy in Canberra of the contents of the two top-secret reports, Moscow asked that they be sent immediately by telegram, which is a good indication of what it thought of them at the time. A more objective account of the Canberra Venona is to be found in Nigel West’s Venona (1999), where he describes one of these two documents as being ‘of immense significance’, and says that for it to have fallen into Soviet hands at that time was ‘devastating’.

In any event, Toohey fails to mention that in the estimation of the US National Security Agency which released the Venona material in the 1990s ‘More than 200 messages were decrypted and translated, these representing a fraction of the messages sent and received by the Canberra KGB residency.’ (NSA website). It is idle to suppose that those not intercepted contained no important classified material.

Toohey also misrepresents the messages sent by Moscow to the senior MI5 officer in Canberra, Semyon Makarov: ‘Moscow told Makarov not to let [Clayton, the Communist Party member who was the contact man for the spies in External Affairs] recruit new agents, not to send any document that was more than a year old, not to be overeager to achieve success and to stop obtaining information of little importance.’ What Moscow in fact said to Makarov was‘…if possible do not take any steps in the way of bringing in new agents without a decision from us’ (message of 6 October 1945); ‘you should not receive from [Clayton] and transmit by telegraph textual intelligence information that is a year old’ the implication being that it might be sent by bag (message of 17 October 1945); and that [Nosov, the TASS correspondent in Sydney] should be brought into the work ‘but do not be over-eager to achieve success to the detriment of security and maximum caution’ (message of 20 October 1945). This kind of close supervision by Moscow was not unusual, as West’s book shows.

Individual members of the External Affairs spy ring are declared to be innocent. Ric Throssell is described thus: ‘After interviewing him in 1953, ASIO concluded that he “is a loyal subject and is not a security risk in the department in which is employed” ‘. Quite true, but incomplete. After Petrov’s defection in 1954, ASIO formed the view that Throssell could not be given a security clearance for classified material, and he never was. Frances Garratt (nee Bernie) is described by Toohey as ‘working mainly on political party issues as a young secretary/typist in the Sydney office of the External Affairs minister, Bert Evatt..She insisted that she thought she was simply giving the local Communist Party some political information.’ Again, incomplete. As Robert Manne noted in The Petrov Affair (1987), the Royal Commission on Espionage found that

“While Frances Bernie had certainly broken the law – in passing official documents to Walter Clayton without authorisation – she had only admitted to doing so having been granted an immunity from prosecution.”

And according to the late Professor Des Ball, ‘In 2008, Bernie admitted that she had given Walter Seddon Clayton (code-named KLOD or CLAUDE), the organiser and co-ordinator of the KGB network, much more important information than she had previously confessed’. (‘The moles at the very heart of government’, The Australian, April 16, 2011)

The scandal referred to in the chapter heading is this. As noted, on Toohey’s account the Venona secret was betrayed to Moscow by William Weisband, a Soviet spy employed by the National Security Agency, and in 1948 the Soviet encryption systems were changed. Toohey takes up the story:

“I asked ASIO when the US informed it (or its predecessor) that Weisband had told the Soviets that Venona was able to read its messages; ASIO replied in an email on 30 June 2017: ‘The information you refer to is not drawn from ASIO records.’ ASIO also told the National Archives of Australia (NAA) that it does not hold any open period records (i.e.up to 1993) about the US notifying it that Weisband told the Soviets about Venona. The US should also have told the Defence Signals Directorate (now the Australian Signals Directorate, or ASD). When I asked ASD, via Defence, it declined to answer.”

It is worth noting here that entering ‘William Weisband’ and ‘National Security Agency’ into the Australian Archives website yields only references to public material about the Agency. Entering ‘William Weisband’ into the website of the UK National Archives yields no result; while the only two results for ‘National Security Agency’ are for files from the Prime Minister’s Office concerning the publication of material about the Agency. Toohey would presumably not argue on the basis of these results that the Agency did not tell the UK security authorities about Weisband. The strongest argument against Toohey’s claim is that entering Weisband’s name into the website of the US National Archives and Records Administration yields only scraps, and nothing connected directly to the NSA. Clearly NSA guards its records zealously, as one would expect. It was at one time so secret that its initials were said to mean ‘No Such Agency’.

In any event, ASIO did not come into existence until 1949, and on Horner’s account in Volume 1 of the history of ASIO – The Spycatchers – he and his research team ‘found files that ASIO did not even know they had.’ Relying on ASIO records, especially from the early days, is thus a chancy business.

So no scandal here – or not yet anyway.

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Tagged as Fleming, Fuchs, Lonsdale, Sorge

“These got a further boost when, just after midnight on 9 June, CATO [the German codename for GARBO] spent two full hours on the air sending a long and detailed report to his spymaster, Kühlenthal. The risk of capture was enormous when an agent transmitted that long, for it gave the direction-finding vans plenty of time to locate him. But this very fact impressed the Germans with the importance of his signal.” (Hitler’s Spies, by David Kahn, p 515)

“If the receivers of this vast screed had paused to reflect, they might have registered how unlikely it was that a wireless would have been able to operate for more than two hours without detection. But they did not.” (Double Cross, by Ben Macintyre, p 324)

“Garbo still ranked high in the esteem of his controller, but if Kühlenthal had thought coolly and carefully enough, there was one aspect of that day’s exchange of signals that might have made him suspicious. Garbo had been on the air so long that he had given the British radiogoniometrical stations ample time on three occasions to obtain a fix on his position and arrest him. Why was he able to stay on the air so long? Did he have a charmed life? Or was he being allowed to transmit by the British for the purpose of deception? These were questions that Kühlenthal might well have asked himself. But instead of being suspicious, he sent a message to Berlin. In it he recommended Garbo for the Iron Cross.” (Anthony Cave-Brown, Bodyguard of Lies, pp 676-677)

“The Abwehr remained remarkably naïve in thinking that in a densely populated and spy-conscious country like England an agent would be able to set up a transmitter and antenna without attracting attention. Moreover, it seems not to have smelled a rat from the fact that some agents, notably GARBO, were able to remain on the air for very long periods without being disturbed. It did have the good sense to furnish agents sent to Britain with only low-power sets that would cause minimal interference to neighbors’ receivers and would be more difficult for the British to monitor – though they also afforded less reliable communication. Once again, GARBO was an exception. Telling the Germans that he had recruited a radio operator with a powerful transmitter, he sent his messages at 100 watts from a high-grade set. Even this did not raise the Abwehr’s suspicions.” (Thaddeus Holt, The Deceivers, pp 142-143)

“And so, with Eisenhower’s authorization, Pujol transmitted, in the words of Harris, ‘the most important report of his career’. Beginning just after midnight, the message took two hours and two minutes to transmit. This was a dangerously long time for any agent to remain on air.” (Operation Fortitude, by Joshua Levine, p 283)

“GARBO’s second transmission lasted a record 122 minutes, and hammered home his belief that the events of the past forty-eight hours represented a diversionary feint, citing his mistress ‘Dorothy Thompson’, an unconscious source in the Cabinet Office, who had mentioned a figure of seventy-five divisions in England.” (Nigel West, Codeword OVERLORD, p 274)

“The length of this message should have aroused suspicion in itself. How on earth a real secret agent could stay on the air transmitting for so long in wartime conditions was unbelievable. British SOE agents operating in Europe were told to keep transmissions to less than five minutes in order not to be detected. However, this was not questioned.” (Terry Crowdy, Deceiving Hitler, p 270)

“We are sure that we deceived the Germans and turned their weapon against themselves; can we be quite sure that they were not equally successful in turning our weapon against is? Now our double-cross agents were the straight agents of the Germans – their whole espionage system in the U.K. What did the Germans gain from this system? The answer cannot be doubtful. They gained no good from their agents, and they did take from them a very great deal of harm. It would be agreeable to be able to accept the simple explanation, to sit back in the armchair of complacency, to say that we were very clever and the Germans very stupid, and that consequently we gained both on the swings and the roundabouts as well. But that argument just won’t hold water at all.” (The Double-Cross System, by John Masterman, p 263)

“Masterman credited only his own ideas, fresh-minted like gold sovereigns entirely from his experiences on the XX Committee. The wonder of it is, with the exception of the sporadic pooh-poohing from the likes of maverick Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor and veteran counter-intelligence officer David Mure, The Double-Cross System came to be swallowed whole. Farago’s book was essentially forgotten; Masterman’s became celebrated.” (Fighting to Lose, by John Bryden, p 314)

“Yet, when all is said, one is left with a sense of astonishment that men in such responsible positions as were those who controlled the destinies of Germany during the late war, could have been so fatally misled on such slender evidence. One can only suppose that strategic deception derives its capacity for giving life to this fairy-tale world from the circ*mstance that it operates in a field into which the enemy can seldom effectively penetrate and where the opposing forces never meet in battle. Dangers which lurk in this terra incognita thus tend to be magnified, and such information as is gleaned to be accepted too readily at its face value. Fear of the unknown is at all times apt to breed strange fancies. Thus it is that strategic deception finds its opportunity of changing the fortunes of war.” (Fortitude, by Roger Hesketh, p 361)

“Abwehr officials, enjoying life in the oases of Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm or Istanbul, fiddling their expenses and running currency rackets on the side, felt that they were earning their keep so long as they provided some kind of information. This explains why for example Garbo was able to get away with his early fantasies, and Tricycle could run such outrageous risks.” (Michael Howard, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, p 49)

“However, the claim that the Double Cross spies were ‘believed’ in ‘Berlin’ needs some amplification. Even if the information was swallowed by the Abwehr, that is not to say that it was believed at OKW or that it influenced overall German policy. Part of the problem is that the Abwehr was not a very efficient organisation. Nor was it involved in significant analysis of its intelligence product: on the contrary, the Ast and outstations tended to pounce on any snippet of potentially useful information and, rather than evaluate its intelligence value, pass it on to Berlin as evidence of their ‘busyness’ and as justification for their salaries and expense accounts.” (David Kenyon, Bletchley Park and D-Day, p 163)

“We have succeeded in sustaining them so well that we are receiving even at this stage . . . an average of thirty to forty reports each day from inside England, many of them radioed directly on the clandestine wireless sets we have operational in defiance of the most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures.” (Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, in February 1944, from Ladislas Farago’s Game of the Foxes, p 705)

“A fundamental assumption they [the Germans] made was logically simple: if they were reading parts or all of different British codes at different times, and no mention of any signal was ever found that referred to any material transmitted by the Germans in an Enigma-encoded message, then the system had to be secure.” (Christian Jennings, The Third Reich is Listening, p 261)

The Story So Far

(Readers looking for a longer recap may want to inspect the concluding paragraphs of The Mystery of the Undetected Radios, Part VII)

By 1943, the Radio Security Service, adopted by SIS (MI6) in the summer of 1941, has evolved into an efficient mechanism for intercepting enemy, namely German, wireless signals from continental Europe, and passing them on to Bletchley Park for cryptanalysis. Given the absence of any transmissions indicating the presence of German spies using wireless telegraphy on British soil, the Service allows its domestic detection and location-finding capabilities to be relaxed somewhat, with the result that it operates rather sluggishly in tracking down radio usage appearing to be generated from locations in the UK, whether they are truly illicit, or simply misguided. RSS would later overstate the capabilities of its mobile location-finding units, in a fashion similar to that in which the German police units exaggerated the power and automation of its own interception and detection devices and procedures. RSS also has responsibilities for providing SIS agents, as well as the sabotage department SOE (Special Operations Executive), with equipment and communications instructions, for their excursions into mainland Europe. SOE has had a very patchy record in wireless security, but RSS’s less than prompt response to its needs provokes SOE, abetted by its collaborators, members of various governments in exile, to attempt to bypass RSS’s very protocol-oriented support. RSS has also not performed a stellar job in recommending and enforcing solid Signals Security procedures in British military units. Guy Liddell, suspicious of RSS’s effectiveness, knows that he needs wireless expertise in MI5, and is eager to replace the ambitious and manipulative Malcom Frost, who is eased out at the end of 1943. It thus takes Liddell’s initiative, working closely with the maverick RSS officer, Sclater, to draw the attention of the Wireless Board to the security oversights. Towards the end of 1943, the plans for OVERLORD, the project to ‘invade’ France on the way to ensuring Germany’s defeat, start to take shape, and policies for ensuring the secrecy of the operation’s details will affect all communications leaving the United Kingdom.

Contents:

NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE

Determining Censorship Policy

The Dilemma of Wireless

Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet

Problems with the Poles

Guy Liddell and the RSS

‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?

Special Agents at Work

The Aftermath

NEPTUNE, OVERLORD, BODYGUARD & FORTITUDE

My objective in this piece is to explore and analyse policy concerning wireless transmissions emanating from the British Isles during the build-up to the Normandy landings of June 1944. This aspect of the war had two sides: the initiation of signals to aid the deception campaign, and the protection of the deception campaign itself by prohibiting possibly dangerous disclosures to the enemy that would undermine the deceits of the first. It is thus beyond my scope to re-present the strategies of the campaign, and the organisations behind them, except as a general refreshment of the reader, in order to provide a solid framework, and to highlight dimensions that have been overlooked in the histories.

OVERLORD was originally the codeword given to the assault on Normandy, but in September 1943 it was repurposed and broadened to apply to the operation of the ‘primary United States British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe’. (Note that, on Eisenhower’s urging, it was not considered an ‘invasion’, a term which would have suggested incursions into authentic enemy territory.) NEPTUNE was the codeword used to describe the Normandy operation. BODYGUARD was the overall cover plan to deceive the enemy about the details of OVERLORD. BODYGUARD itself was broken down into FORTITUDE North and FORTITUDE South, the latter conceived as the project to suggest that the main assault would occur in the Pas de Calais as opposed to Normandy, and thus disguise NEPTUNE.

I refer the reader to six important books for greater detail on the BODYGUARD deception plan. Bodyguard of Lies, by Anthony Cave Brown (1975) is a massive, compendious volume, containing many relevant as well as irrelevant details, not all of them reliable, and the author can be annoyingly vague in his chronology. Sir Michael Howard’s British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5 (1990), part of the authorized history, contains a precise and urbane account of the deception campaign, although it is rather light on technical matters. Roger Hesketh, who was the main architect of FORTITUDE, wrote his account of the project, between 1945 and 1948, but it was not published until 2000, many years after his death in 1987, as Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Campaign. (In his Preface to the text, Hesketh indicates that he was given permission to publish in 1976, but it did not happen.) Hesketh’s work must be regarded as the most authoritative of the books, and it includes a large number of invaluable, charts, documents and maps, but it reflects some of the secrecy provisions of its time. Joshua Levine’s Operation Fortitude (2001) is an excellent summary of the operation, lively and accurate, and contains a highly useful appendix on Acknowledgements and Sources. Nigel West delivered Codeword Overlord (2019), which sets out to cover the role and achievements of Axis espionage in preparing for the D-Day landings. Like many of West’s recent works, it is uneven, and embeds a large amount of source material in the text. Oddly, West, who provided an Introduction to Hesketh’s book, does not even mention it in his Bibliography. Finally, Thaddeus Holt’s Deceivers (2007) is perhaps the most comprehensive account of Allied military deception, an essential item in the library, very well written, and containing many facts and profiles not available elsewhere. It weighs in at a hefty 1000+ pages, but the details he provides, unlike Cave Brown’s, are all relevant.

Yet none of these volumes refers to the critical role of the Home Security Defence Executive (HSDE), chaired by Sir Findlater Stewart, in the security preparations. (Findlater Stewart receives one or two minor mentions in two of the Indexes, but on matters unrelated to the tasks of early 1944.) The HSDE was charged, however, with implementing a critical part of the censorship policy regarding BODYGUARD. The HSDE was just one of many intersecting and occasionally overlapping committees performing the planning. At the highest level, the Ops (B) section, concerned with deception under COSSAC (Chief of Staff to Supreme Allied Commander), was absorbed into SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in January 1944, when General Eisenhower took over command, expanded, and split into two. Colonel Noel Wild headed Ops (B), with Jervis Read responsible for physical deception, while Roger Hesketh took on Special Means, whose role was to implement parts of the deception plan through controlled leakage.

In turn, Hesketh’s group itself was guided by the London Controlling Section (LCS), which was responsible for deciding the overall strategy of how misinformation should be conveyed to the enemy, and tracking its success. At this time LCS was led by Colonel John Bevan, who faced an extraordinary task of coordinating the activities of a large number of independent bodies, from GC&CS’s collection of ULTRA material to SOE’s sabotage of telephone networks in France, as well as the activities of the ‘double-agents’ within MI5. Thus at least three more bodies were involved: the W Board, which discussed high-level policy matters for the double-cross system under General Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence; the XX Committee, chaired by John Masterman, which implemented the cover-stories and activities of both real and notional agents, and created the messages that were fed to the Abwehr; and MI5’s B1A under ‘Tar’ Robertson, the group that actually managed the activities and transmissions of the agents. Lastly, the War Cabinet set up a special group, the OVERLORD Security Sub-Committee, to inspect the detailed ramifications of ensuring no unauthorised information about the landings escaped the British Isles, and this military-focussed body enjoyed a somewhat tentative liaison with the civilian-oriented HDSE through the energies of Sir Findlater Stewart.

When Bevan joined the W Board on September 23, 1943, the LCS formally took over the responsibility for general control of all deception, leaving the W Board to maintain supervision of the double-agents’ work solely. Also on the W Board was Findlater Stewart, acting generally on behalf of the Ministries, who had been invited in early 1941, and who directly represented his boss, Sir John Anderson, and the Prime Minister. The Board had met regularly for almost three years, but by September 1943, highly confident that it controlled all the German agents on UK soil, and with Bevan on board, held only one more meeting before the end of the war – on January 21, 1944. It then decided, in a general stocktaking before OVERLORD, that the XX Committee could smoothly continue to run things, but that American representation on the Committee was desirable. As for Findlater Stewart, he still had a lot of work to do.

Determining Censorship Policy

The move to tighten up security in advance of NEPTUNE took longer than might have seemed appropriate. At the Quebec Conference in August 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed on the approximate timing and location of the operation, but it needed the consent of Stalin at the Teheran Conference at the end of November, and the Soviet dictator’s commitment to mount a large scale Soviet offensive in May 1944 to divert German forces, for the details to be solidified. Thus Bevan’s preliminary thoughts on the deception plan for OVERLORD, sketched out in July, had to be continually revised. A draft version, named JAEL, was circulated, and approved, on October 23, but, after Teheran, Bevan had to work feverishly to prepare the initial version of the BODYGUARD plan which replaced JAEL, completing it on December 18. This received feedback from the Chiefs of Staff, and from Eisenhower, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief, and was presented to SHAEF in early January, and approved on January 19. Yet no sooner was this important step reached than Bevan, alongside his U.S. counterpart Bauer, was ordered to leave for Moscow to explain the plan, and convince the Soviets of its merits. Such was the suspicion of Soviet military and intelligence officers, and such was their inability to make any decision unless Stalin willed it, that approval did not arrive until March 5, when the delegates returned to London.

Yet Guy Liddell’s Diaries indicate that there had already been intense discussion about OVERLORD Security, the records of which do not seem to have made it into the HDSE files. Certainly, MI5 had been debating it back in December 1943, and Liddell refers to a Security Executive meeting held on January 26. At this stage, Findlater Stewart was trying to settle what travel bans should be put in place, and as early as February 8 Liddell was discussing with his officers Grogan and (Anthony) Blunt the implications of staggering diplomatic cables before OVERLORD. The next day, he met with Maxwell at the Home Office to discuss the prevention of the return of allied nationals to the country (because of the vetting for spies that would be required).

More surprisingly, on February 11, when reporting that the Chiefs of the General Staff had become involved, and had made representations to Churchill, Liddell refers to the formation of an OVERLORD Security Committee, and comments drily: “The committee is to consist of the Minister of Production, Minister of Aircraft Production, Home Secretary and Duncan Sandys, none of whom of course know anything about security.” This committee was in fact an offshoot of the War Cabinet, which had established a Committee on OVERLORD Preparations on February 9, part of the charter of which was ‘the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus, and increased exertions against espionage’, perhaps suggesting that not all its members were completely au fait with the historical activities of RSS and the W Board. It quickly determined that it needed a further level of granularity to address these complex security matters. Thus the Sub-committee on OVERLORD Security was established, chaired by the Minister of Production, Oliver Lyttleton, and held its first meeting on February 18, when Liddell represented MI5. Oddly, no representative from MI6 attended. Liddell continues by describing the committee’s charter as considering: 1) the possibility of withdrawing diplomatic communications privileges; 2) the prevention of export of newspapers; 3) more strengthened surveillance of ships and aircraft; 4) the detection of secret enemy wireless apparatus and increased precautions against espionage. Findlater Stewart is charged with collecting relevant material. In what seems to be an overload of committees, therefore, the HDSE and the War Cabinet carry on parallel discussions, with Findlater Stewart a key figure in both assemblies.

The primary outcome of this period is the resistance by the Foreign Office to any sort of ban, or even forced delay, in diplomatic cable traffic, which they believed would have harmful reciprocal consequences abroad, and hinder MI6’s ability to gather intelligence (especially from Sweden). This controversy rattled on for months [see below], with the Cabinet emerging as an ineffective mechanism for resolving the dilemma. Liddell believed that, if the Foreign Office and the Home Office (concerned about invasion of citizens’ rights) had not been so stubborn and prissy about the whole thing, the Security Executive could have resolved the issues quickly.

Thus the impression that Findlater Stewart had to wait for Bevan’s return for seeking guidance before chairing his committee to implement the appropriate security provisions is erroneous. Contrary to what the record indicates, the critical meeting on March 29 was not the first that the HDSE Committee held. Yet, when Bevan did return, he might have been surprised by the lack of progress. He quickly learned, on March 10, that the Cabinet had decided not to withdraw facilities for uncensored communications by diplomats, as it would set an uncomfortable precedent. That was at least a decision – but the wrong one. Bevan had a large amount of work to do shake people up: to make sure that the rules were articulated, that the Americans were in line, and that all agencies and organizations involved understood their roles. “Only under Bevan’s severe and cautious direction could they perform their parts in FORTITUDE with the necessary harmony”, wrote Cave Brown. Bevan clearly put some urgency into the proceedings: the pronouncements of LCS were passed on to Findlater Stewart shortly afterwards.

The history of LCS shows that security precautions were divided into eight categories, of which two, the censorship of civilian and service letters and telegrams, and the ban on privileged diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams, were those that concentrated on possible unauthorised disclosure of secrets by means other than direct personal travel. The historical account by LCS (at CAB 154/101, p 238) explains how the ban on cable traffic was imposed, but says nothing about wireless: “The eighth category, the ban on diplomatic mail and cipher telegrams was an unprecedented and extraordinary measure. As General EISENHOWER says, even the most friendly diplomats might unintentionally disclose vital information which would ultimately come to the ears of the enemy.”

What is significant is that there is no further mention of wireless traffic in the HDSE meetings. Whether this omission was due to sheer oversight, or was simply too awkward a topic to be described openly, or was simply passed on to the War Cabinet meetings, one can only surmise. When the next critical HDSE meeting took place on April 15, headlined as ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’, it echoed the LCS verbiage, but also, incidentally, highlighted the fact that Findlater Stewart saw that the main threat to security came from the embassies and legations of foreign governments, whether allies or not. Well educated by the W Board meeting, he did not envisage any exposure from unknown German agents working clandestinely from British soil.

The Dilemma of Wireless

It is worthwhile stepping back at this juncture to examine the dilemma that the British intelligence authorities faced. Since the primary security concern was that no confidential information about the details of the actual assault, or suggestions that the notional attack was based on the strength and movement of illusionary forces, should be allowed to leave the country, a very tight approach to personnel movement, such as a ban on leave, and on the holidays of foreign diplomats, was required, and easily implemented. Letters and cables had to be very closely censored. But what do to about the use of wireless? Officially, outside military and approved civil use (railway administration, police) the only licit radio transmissions were being made by Allied governments, namely the Americans and the Soviets, and by select governments-in-exile, the French, the Poles and the Czechs (with the latter two having their own sophisticated installations rather than just apparatus within an embassy). It was quite possible that other countries had introduced transmission equipment, although RSS would have denied that its use would have remained undetected.

Certainly all diplomatic transmissions would have been encyphered, but the extent to which the German interception authorities (primarily OKW Chi) would have been able to decrypt such messages was unknown. And, even if the loyalty and judgment of these missions could be relied upon, and the unbreakability of their cyphers trusted, there was no way of guaranteeing that a careless reference would not escape, and that a disloyal employee at the other end of the line might get his or her hands on an indiscreet message. (Eisenhower had to demote and send home one of his officers who spoke carelessly.) Thus total radio silence must have been given at least brief consideration. It was certainly enforced just before D-Day, but that concerned military silence, not a diplomatic shutdown.

Yet the whole FORTITUDE deception plan depended on wireless. The more ambitious aspect focused on the creation of dummy military signals to suggest a vast army (the notional FUSAG) being imported into Britain and moved steadily across the country to assemble in the eastern portion, indicating a northern assault on mainland Europe. Such wireless messages would have appeared as genuine to the Germans – if they had had the resources and skills to intercept and analyse them all. Thus the pretence had to be meticulously maintained right up until D-Day itself. In August 1943, the Inter-Services Security Board (ISSB) had recommended that United Kingdom communications with the outside world should be cut off completely, and Bevan had had to resist such pressure. As Howard points out, most involved in the discussion did not know about the Double-Cross System.

As it turned out, both German aerial reconnaissance and interception of dummy signals were so weak that the Allies relied more and more on the second leg of their wireless strategy – the transmissions of its special agents. Thus it would have been self-defeating for the War Cabinet to prohibit non-military traffic entirely, since the appearance of isolated, illicit signals in the ether, originating from British soil, and remaining undetected and unprosecuted, would have caused the Nazi receivers to smell an enormous rat. (One might add that it strains credibility in any case to think that the Abwehr never stopped to consider how ineffectual Britain’s radio interception service must be, compared with Germany’s own mechanisms, if it failed completely ever to interdict any of its own agents in such a relatively small and densely populated territory. And note Admiral Canaris’s comments above.) Of course, the RSS might have wanted to promote the notion that its interception and location-finding techniques were third-rate, just for that purpose. One might even surmise that Sonia’s transmissions were allowed to continue as a ruse to convince the Germans of the RSS’s frailties, in the belief that they might be picking up her messages as well as those of their own agents, and thus forming useful judgments about the deficiencies of British location-finding.

We should also recall that the adoption of wireless communications by the special agents was pursued much more aggressively by the XX Committee and B1A than it was by the Abwehr, who seemed quite content to have messages concealed in invisible ink on letters spirited out of England by convenient couriers, such as ‘friendly’ BOAC crewmen. Thus TREASURE, GARBO and BRUTUS all had to be found more powerful wireless apparatus, whether mysteriously acquired in London, from American sources, or whether smuggled in from Lisbon. The XX Committee must have anticipated the time when censorship rules would have tightened up on the use of the mails for personal correspondence, even to neutral countries in Europe, and thus make wireless connectivity a necessity.

In conclusion, therefore, no restrictions on diplomatic wireless communication could allow prohibition completely, as that would leave the special agents dangerously exposed. And that policy led to some messy compromises.

Findlater Stewart, the Home Defence Security Executive, and the War Cabinet

It appears that the War Cabinet fairly quickly accepted Findlater Stewart’s assurances about the efficacy of RSS. A minute from February 28 runs: “We have considered the possibility that illicit wireless stations might be worked in this country. The combined evidence of the Radio Security Service secret intelligence sources and the police leads to the firm conclusion that there is no illicit wireless station operating regularly in the British Isles at present. The danger remains that transmitting apparatus may be being held in readiness for the critical period immediately before the date of OVERLORD – or may be brought into the country by enemy agents. We cannot suggest any further measures to reduce this risk and reliance must therefore be placed on the ability of the Radio Security Service to detect the operation of illicit transmitters and of the Security Service to track down agents.” Thus the debate moved on to the control of licit wireless transmissions, where the HDSE and the War Cabinet had to overcome objections from the Foreign Office.

The critical meeting on ‘OVERLORD Security’ – ‘Withdrawal of Diplomatic Privileges’ was held on the morning of April 15, under Findlater Stewart’s chairmanship. This was in fact the continuation of a meeting held on March 29, which had left several items of business unfinished. That meeting, which was also led by Findlater Stewart, and attended by only a small and unauthoritative group (Herbert and Locke from Censorship, Crowe from the Foreign Office, and Liddell, Butler and Young from MI5) had considered diplomatic communications generally, and resolved to request delays in the transmission of diplomatic telegrams. After the Cabinet decision not to interfere with diplomatic cable traffic, Petrie of MI5 had written to Findlater Stewart to suggest that delays be built in to the process. A strangely worded minute (one can hardly call it a ‘resolution’) ran as follows: “THE MEETING . . . invited Mr. Crowe to take up the suggestion that diplomatic telegrams should be so delayed as to allow time for the Government Code and Cypher School to make arrangements with Postal and Telegraph Censorship for particularly dangerous telegrams to be delayed or lost; and to arrange for the Foreign Office, if they agreed, to instruct the School to work out the necessary scheme with Postal and Telegraph Censorship.”

It would be difficult to draft a less gutsy and urgent decision than this. ‘Invited’, ‘suggestion’, ‘to make arrangements’, ‘if they agreed’, ‘to instruct’, and finally, ‘particularly dangerous telegrams’! Would ‘moderately dangerous telegrams’ have been allowed through? And did GC&CS have command of all the cyphers used by foreign diplomacies? Evidently not, as the following discussion shows. It is quite extraordinary that such a wishy-washy decision should have been allowed in the minutes. One can only assume that this was some sort of gesture, and that Findlater Stewart was working behind the scenes. In any case, as the record from the LCS history concerning Eisenhower, which I reproduced above, shows, the cypher problem for cable traffic was resolved.

When the forum regathered on April 15, it contained a much expanded list of attendees. Apart from the familiar group of second-tier delegates from key ministries, with the War Office and the Ministry of Information now complementing Censorship, the Home Office, and the Foreign Office, Vivian represented MI6, while MI5 was honoured with the presence of no less than seven officers, namely Messrs. Butler, Robertson, Sporborg, Robb, Young, Barry – and Anthony Blunt, who no doubt made careful mental notes to pass on to his ideological masters. [According to Guy Liddell, from his ‘Diaries’, Sporborg worked for SOE, not MI5.] But no Petrie, Menzies, Liddell, White, Masterman, or Bevan. And the band of second-tier officers from MI5 sat opposite a group of men from the ministries who knew nothing of Ultra or the Double-Cross System: a very large onus lay on the shoulders of Findlater Stewart.

The meeting had first to debate the recent Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Diplomatic Missions, while not preventing the arrival of incoming travellers. Thus a quick motion was agreed, over the objections of the Foreign Office, that ‘the free movement of foreign diplomatic representatives to this country was inconsistent with the Cabinet decision to prohibit the receipt of uncensored communications by Foreign Missions in this country’. After a brief discussion on the movement of French and other military personnel, the Committee moved to Item IX on the agenda: ‘Use of Wireless Transmitters by Poles, Czechs and the French,’ the item that LCS had, either cannily or carelessly, omitted from its list.

Sporborg of MI5/SOE stated that, “as regards the Poles and the Czechs, it has been decided after discussion with the Foreign Office –

• that for operational reasons the transmitters operated by the Czechs and the Poles could not be closed down:
• that shortage of operators with suitable qualifications precluded the operation of those sets by us;
• that accordingly the Poles should be pressed to deposit their cyphers with us and to give us copies of plain language texts of all messages before transmission. The Czechs had already given us their cyphers, and like the Poles would be asked to provide plain language copies of their messages.”

Sporborg also noted that both forces would be asked not to use their transmitters for diplomatic business. Colonel Vivian added that “apart from the French Deuxième Bureau traffic which was sent by M.I.6, all French diplomatic and other civil communications were transmitted by cable. There were left only the French Service transmitters and in discussion it was suggested that the I.S.S.B. might be asked to investigate the question of controlling these.”

Again, it is difficult to make sense of this exchange. What ‘operational reasons’ (as opposed to political ones) could preclude the closing down of Czech and Polish circuits? It would surely just entail an announcement to targeted receivers, and then turning the apparatus off. And, since the alternative appeared to be having the transmitters operated by the British – entrusted with knowledge of cypher techniques, presumably – a distinct possibility of ‘closing down’ the sets must have been considered. As for Vivian’s opaque statement, the Deuxième Bureau was officially dissolved in 1940. (Yet it appears in many documents, such as Liddell’s Diaries, after that time.) It is not clear what he meant by ‘French Service transmitters’. If these were owned by the RF Section of SOE, there must surely have been an exposure, and another wishy-washy suggestion was allowed to supply the official record.

The historical account by LCS says nothing about wireless. And the authorized history does not perform justice to the serious implications of these meetings. All that Michael Howard writes about this event (while providing a very stirring account of the deception campaign itself) is the following: “ . . . and the following month not only was all travel to and from the United Kingdom banned, but the mail of all diplomatic missions was declared subject to censorship and the use of cyphers forbidden”, (p 124, using the CAB 154/101 source given above); and “All [the imaginary double agents] notionally conveyed their information to GARBO in invisible ink, to be transmitted direct to the Abwehr over his clandestine radio – the only channel open after security restrictions on outgoing mail had been imposed.” (p 121) The irony is that Howard draws attention to the inconvenience that the withdrawal of mail privileges caused LCS and B1A, but does not inspect the implications of trying to suppress potentially dangerous wireless traffic, and how they might have affected the deception project’s success.

Problems with the Poles

Immediately after the critical April 15 meeting, the War Office began to toughen up, as the file KV 4/74 shows. The policy matter of the curtailment of diplomatic privileges was at last resolved. Findlater Stewart gave a deadline to the Cabinet on April 16, and it resolved to stop all diplomatic cables, couriers and bags, for all foreign governments except the Americans and the Russians. The ban started almost immediately, and was extended until June 20, even though the Foreign Office continued to fight it. Yet it required some delicate explaining to the second-tier allies. Moreover, the Foreign Office continued to resist it, or at least, abbreviate it. They even wanted to restore privileges on D-Day itself: as Liddell pointed out, that would have been stupid, as it would immediately have informed the enemy that the Normandy assault was the sole one, and not a feint before a more northerly attack at the Pas de Calais.

Brigadier Allen, the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence, who had been charged with following up with the ISSB on whether the British were controlling French service traffic to North Africa, drew the attention of the ISSB’s secretary to the importance of the proposed ban. The record is sketchy, but it appears the Chiefs of Staff met on April 19, at which a realisation that control over all diplomatic and military channels needed to be intensified. The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee was instructed to ensure that this happened, and a meeting was quickly arranged between representatives of the ISSB, MI6, SOE, the Cypher Policy Board and the Inter-Service W/T Security Committee, a much more expert and muscular group than had attended Findlater Stewart’s conference.

While the exposure by French traffic was quickly dismissed, Sir Charles Portal and Sir Andrew Cunningham, the RAF and Royal Navy chiefs, urged central control by the Service Departments rather than having it divided between SHAEF and Allied Forces Headquarters, and invited the JISC committee “to frame regulations designed to prevent Allied Governments evading the restrictions imposed by the War Cabinet on diplomatic communications, by the use of service or S.O.E. ‘underground’ W/T channels for the passage of uncensored diplomatic or service messages.” This was significant for several reasons: it recognized that foreign governments might attempt to evade the restrictions, probably by trying to use service signals for diplomatic traffic; it recommended new legislation to give the prohibitions greater force; and it brought into the picture the notion of various ‘underground’ (not perhaps the best metaphor for wireless traffic), and thus semi-clandestine communications, the essence of which was barely known. This minute appeared also to reflect the input of Sir Alan Brooke, the Army Chief, but his name does not appear on the document – probably because the record shows that he was advocating for the shared SHAEF/AFHQ responsibility, and thus disagreed with his peers.

The outcome was that a letter had to be drafted for the Czechoslovak, Norwegian and Polish Commanders-in-Chief, the Belgian and Netherlands Ministers of Defence, and General Koenig, the Commander of the French Forces in the United Kingdom, outlining the new restrictions on ‘communications by diplomatic bag and cipher telegrams’ (implicitly cable and wireless). It declared that ‘you will issue instructions that no communication by wireless is to be carried out with wireless stations overseas except under the following conditions’, going on to list that cyphers would have to be deposited with the War Office, plain language copies of all telegrams to be submitted for approval first, with the possibility that some messages would be encyphered and transmitted through British signal channels. A further amendment included a ban on incoming messages, as well.

Were these ‘regulations’, or simply earnest requests? The constitutional issue was not clear, but the fact that the restrictions would be of short duration probably pushed them into the latter category. In any case, as a memorandum of April 28 makes clear, Findlater Stewart formally handed over responsibility for the control of wireless communications to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), reserving for himself the handling of ‘mail and telegrams’ (he meant ‘mail and cables’, of course). By then, the letter had been distributed, on April 19, with some special annexes for the different audiences, but the main text was essentially as the draft had been originally worded.

The Poles were the quickest to grumble, and Stanisław Mikołajczyc, the Prime Minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, wrote a long response on April 23, describing the decision as ‘a dangerous legal and political precedent’, making a special case out of Poland’s predicament, and its underground fight against the Germans. He promised to obey the rules over all, but pleaded that the Poles be allowed to maintain the secrecy of their cyphers in order to preserve the safety and security of Polish soldiers and civilians on Polish soil fighting the German. “The fact that Polish-Soviet relations remain for the time being unsatisfactory still further complicates the situation,” he added.

It is easy to have an enormous amount of sympathy for the Poles, but at the same time point out that their aspirations at this time for taking their country back were very unrealistic. After all, Great Britain had declared war on Germany because of the invasion of Poland, and the Poles had contributed significantly in the Battle of Britain and the Italian campaign, especially. The discovery by the Germans, in April 1943, of the graves of victims of the Katyn massacre had constituted a ghastly indication that the Soviets had been responsible. Yet Stalin denied responsibility, and broke off relations with the London Poles when they persisted in calling for an independent Red Cross examination. Moreover, Churchill had ignored the facts, and weaselly tried to placate both Stalin and the Poles by asking Mikołajczyc to hold his tongue. In late January, Churchill had chidden the Poles for being ‘foolish’ in magnifying the importance of the crime when the British needed Stalin’s complete cooperation to conclude the war successfully.

Yet the Poles still harboured dreams that they would be able to take back their country before the Russians got there – or even regain it with the support of the Russians, aspirations that were in April 1944 utterly unrealistic. The file at HW 34/8 contains a long series of 1942-1943 exchanges between Colonel Cepa, the Chief Signals Officer of the Polish General Staff, and RSS officers, such as Maltby and Till, over unrealistic and unauthorized demands for equipment and frequencies so that the Polish government might communicate with all its clandestine stations in Poland, and its multiple (and questionable) contacts around the world. Their tentacles spread widely, as if they were an established government: on December 9, 1943, Joe Robertson told Guy Liddell that ‘Polish W/T transmitters are as plentiful as tabby cats in the Middle East and are causing great anxiety’. They maintained underground forces in France, which required wireless contact: this was an item of great concern to Liddell. Thus the Poles ended up largely trying to bypass RSS and working behind the scenes with SOE to help attain their goals. The two groups clearly irritated each other severely: the Poles thinking RSS too protocol-oriented and unresponsive to their needs, RSS considering the Poles selfish and too ambitious, with no respect for the correct procedures in a time of many competing demands.

The outcome was that Churchill had a meeting with Mikołajczyc on April 23, and tried to heal some wounds. The memorandum of the meeting was initialled by Churchill himself, and the critical passage runs as follows: “Mr. Churchill told Mr. Mikołajczyc that he was ready to waive the demand that the Polish ciphers used for communication with the Underground Movement should be deposited with us on condition first, that the number of messages sent in these ciphers was kept down to an absolute minimum; secondly, that the en clair text of each message sent in these ciphers should be communicated to us; thirdly, that Mr. Mikołajczyc gave Mr. Churchill his personal word of honour that no messages were sent in the secret ciphers except those of which the actual text had been deposited with us, and fourthly, that the existence of this understanding between Mr. Mikołajczyc and Mr. Churchill should be kept absolutely confidential; otherwise H.M.G would be exposed to representations and reproaches from other foreign Governments in a less favourable position.”

Thus it would appear that the other governments acceded, that the Poles won an important concession, but that the British were able to censor the texts of all transmissions that emanated from British soil during the D-Day campaign. And Churchill was very concerned about the news of the Poles’ preferential treatment getting out. Yet the JIC (under its very astute Chairman, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck) thought otherwise – that the news was bound to leak out, and, citing the support of Liddell, Menzies, Cadogan at the Foreign Office and Newsam at the Home Office, it requested, on May 1, that the Prime Minister ‘should consider the withdrawal’ of his concession, and that, if impracticable, he should at least clarify to Mikołajczyc that it ‘related to messages sent to the underground movement in Poland and not to communications with other occupied or neutral countries’.

Moreover, problems were in fact nor restricted to the Poles. De Gaulle, quite predictably, made a fuss, and ‘threatened’ as late as May 29 not to leave Algiers to return to the UK unless he was allowed to use his own cyphers. The Chiefs of Staff were left to handle this possible non-problem. Churchill, equally predictably, interfered unnecessarily, and even promised both Roosevelt and de Gaulle (as Liddell recorded on May 24) that communications would open up immediately after D-Day. Churchill had already, very naively, agreed to Eisenhower’s desire to disclose the target and date of NEPTUNE to France’s General Koenig. The Prime Minister could be very inspiring and insightful, but also very infuriating, as people like Attlee and Brooke observed.

And there it stood. Britain controlled the process of wireless communication (apart from the Soviet and US Embassies) entirely during the course of the D-Day landings, with a minor exposure in Polish messages to its colleagues in Poland. The restrictions were lifted on June 20. And B1A’s special agents continued to chatter throughout this period.

Guy Liddell and the RSS

Guy Liddell, deputy director-general of MI5, had been energized by his relationship with Sclater of the RSS, and, with Malcolm Frost’s departure from MI5 in December 1943, he looked forward to an easier path in helping to clean up Barnet, the headquarters of the Radio Security Service. In the months before D-Day, Liddell was focused on two major issues concerning RSS: 1) The effectiveness of the unit’s support for MI5’s project to extend the Double-Cross System to include ‘stay-behind’ agents in France after the Normandy landings succeeded; and 2) his confidence in the ability of RSS to locate any German spies with transmitters who might have pervaded the systems designed to intercept them at the nation’s borders, and who would thus be working outside the XX System.

Overall, the first matter does not concern me here, although part of Liddell’s mission, working alongside ‘Tar’ Robertson, was to discover how RSS control of equipment, and its primary allegiance to MI6, might interfere with MI5’s management of the XX program overseas. Liddell had to deal with Richard Gambier-Parry’s technical ignorance and general disdain for MI5, on the one hand, and Felix Cowgill’s territoriality on the other (since a Double-Cross system on foreign soil would technically have fallen under MI6), but the challenges would have to have been faced after D-Day, and are thus beyond my scope of reference. In any case, the concern turned out to be a non-problem. The second matter, however, was very serious, and Liddell’s Diaries from early 1944 are bestrewn with alarming anecdotes about the frailties of RSS’s detection systems. The problems ranged from the ineffectiveness of Elms’s mobile units to the accuracy of RSS’s broader location-finding techniques.

I shall illustrate Liddell’s findings by a generous sample of extracts from his Diaries, as I do not believe they have appeared in print before. Thus, from January 26:

Sclater gave an account of the work by the vans on an American station which had been d.f.d by R.S.S. The station was at first thought to be a British military or Air Force one as it was apparently using their procedure. The vans went out to the Horsham area where they got a very strong signal which did not operate the needle. Another bearing caused them to put the Bristol van out, which luckily found its target pretty quickly. The point of this story is that it is almost impossible to say more than that a wireless transmitter is in the north or south of England. Unless you can get into the ground-wave your vans don’t operate. To get into the ground-wave you may need to be very close to their target. There is still no inter-com between the vans and they cannot operate for more than 8 hours without having to drive several hundred miles in order to recharge their batteries. Not a very good show. Sclater is going to find out who is responsible for American Army signal security.

While this may not have been a perennial problem for units that were repeatedly broadcasting from one place, it clearly would have posed a serious exposure with a highly mobile transmitting agent. Moreover, at a meeting on February 17, MI6/SIS (in the person of Valentine Vivian, it appears) had, according to Liddell, admitted some of its deficiencies, stating, in a response to a question as to how its General Search capability worked: “S.I.S. did not think that an illicit station was operating in this country but it was pointed out that their observation was subject to certain restrictions. They were looking for Abwehr procedure, whereas an agent might use British official procedure, which would be a matter for detection by Army Signals, who were ill-equipped to meet the task.” Did Vivian not know what he was talking about, or was this true? Could an agent using ‘British official procedure’ truly evade the RSS detectors, while the Army would not bother to investigate? I recall that Sonia herself was instructed to use such techniques, and such a disclosure has alarming implications.

The minutes of the War Cabinet Sub-committee on February 17 confirm, however, that what Vivian reported was accepted, as an accompanying report by Findlater Stewart displays how the vision for wireless interception embraced by Colonel Simpson in 1939 had been allowed to dissolve. (In fact, as Liddell’s Diaries show, a small working-party had met on the morning of the inaugural meeting to prepare for the discussion.) In a report attached to the minutes, Stewart wrote the following (which I believe is worth citing in full):

“As a result of their experience extending over some four years the Radio Security Service are of opinion there is no illicit wireless station being worked in this country at present. Nevertheless it must be borne in mind that by itself the watch kept by the Radio Security Service is subject to some limitations. For example, the general search is mainly directed to German Secret Service communications and if an agent were to use official British signal procedures (there has already been some attempt at this), it is not likely to be picked up by the Service, and no guarantee that such stations would be detected should be given unless the whole volume of British wireless traffic, including the immense amount of service signal traffic, were monitored. This ‘general search’, however, is not the only safeguard. The danger to security arises from the newly arrived German Agent (on the assumption that there are no free agents at present operating here), but the art of tracking aircraft has been brought to such a point that the Security Service feel that in conjunction with the watch kept by the Radio Security Service even a determined effort by the enemy to introduce agents could not succeed for more than a few days. Admittedly if the agent were lucky enough to be dropped in the right area and obtain his information almost at once serious leakage could occur. But there is no remedy for this.”

I find this very shocking. While the RSS was justifiably confident that no unidentified spies were operating as its interceptors were monitoring Abwehr communications closely, it had abandoned the mission of populating the homeland with enough detective personnel to cover all possible groundwaves. Apparently, the sense of helplessness expressed in Stewart’s final sentence triggered no dismay from those who read it, but I believe this negligence heralded the start of an alarming trend. And the substance of the message must have confirmed Liddell’s worst fears.

Liddell and Sclater intensified their attention to RSS’s activities. Sclater also referred, later in February, to the fact that RSS had picked up Polish military signals in Scotland, but the Poles had not been very helpful, the signals were very corrupt, as picked up, and it was not even certain ‘that the messages were being sent from Gt. Britain’. Liddell also discovered that RSS had been picking up messages relating to Soviet espionage in Sweden, and blew a fuse over the fact that the facts about the whole exercise had been withheld from MI5 and the Radio Security Intelligence Committee, which Dick White of MI5 chaired. Thus, when he returned from two weeks’ leave at the end of March, his chagrin was fortunately abated slightly, as the entry for April 16 records:

During my absence there have been various wireless tests. GARBO, on instructions from the Germans, has been communicating in British Army procedure. He was picked up after a certain time and after a hint had been given to Radio Security Service. He was, however, also picked up in Gibraltar, who notified the RSS about certain peculiarities in the signals. This is on the whole fairly satisfactory. TREASURE is going to start communicating blind and we shall see whether they are equally successful in her case. Tests have also been taking place to see whether spies can move freely within the fifteen-mile belt. One has been caught, but another, whose documents were by no means good, has succeeded in getting through seven or eight controls and has so far not been spotted.

This was not super-efficient, however: ‘hints’, and ‘after a certain time’. At least the British Army procedure was recognised by the RSS. (Herbert Hart later told Liddell that ‘notional’ spies dressed in American military uniforms were the only ones not to get caught.) But the feeling of calm did not last long. Two weeks later, on April 29, Liddell recorded:

The Radio Security Service has carried out an extensive test to discover the GARBO transmitter. The report on this exercise is very distressing. The GARBO camouflage plan commenced on 13 March but the Mobile Units were not told to commence their investigations till 14 April. From 13 March to 14 April GARBO’s transmitter was on the air (and the operator was listening) for a total of twenty-nine hours, and average of one hour a day. On 14 April the Mobile Units were brought into action and they reported that the GARBO transmitter operated for four hours between 14 and 19 April inclusive. In fact, it operated for over six and a half hours, and it would seem that the second frequency of the transmitter was not recorded at all. On 15 April, GARBO transmitted for two whole hours. This incident shakes my confidence completely in the power of RSS of detecting illicit wireless either in this country or anywhere else. It is disturbing since the impression was given to Findlater Stewart’s Committee and subsequently to the Cabinet that no illicit transmissions were likely to be undetected for long. Clearly, this is not the case.

The irony is, of course, that, if the Abwehr had learned about RSS’s woes, they might have understood how their agents were able to transmit undetected. Yet this was a problem MI5 had to fix, and the reputation of the XX System, and of the claim that MI5 had complete control of all possible German agents in the country, was at stake. Liddell followed up with another entry, on May 6:

I had a long talk with Sclater about the RSS exercise. Apparently the first report of Garbo’s transmitter came from Gib. This was subsequently integrated with a V.I. report. The R.S.S. fixed stations in N. Ireland and the north of Scotland took a bearing which was well wide of the mark, and although the original report came in on March 13^th it was not until April 14^th that sufficiently accurate bearings were obtained to warrant putting into action of the M.U.s. They were started off on an entirely inaccurate location of the target somewhere in the Guildford area. Other bearings led to greater confusion. Had it not been for the fact that the groundwave of the transmitter was then ranged with the Barnet station it is doubtful whether the transmitter would ever have been located. The final round-up was not done according to the book, i.e. by the 3 M.U.s taking bearings and gradually closing in. One M.U. got a particularly strong signal and followed it home.

By now, however, Liddell probably felt a little more confident that homeland security was tight enough. No problematic messages had been picked up by interception, and thus there were probably no clandestine agents at large, a conclusion that was reinforced by the fact that the ULTRA sources (i.e. picking up Abwehr communications about agents in the United Kingdom) still betrayed no unknown operators. Nevertheless, Liddell still harboured, as late as May 12, strong reservations about the efficacy of RSS’s operations overseas, which he shared with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle at his club. At this time, MI5 was concerned about a source named JOSEFINE, sending messages that reached the Abwehr via Stockholm. (JOSEFINE turned out to be the Swedish naval attaché in London, and his associates or successors.) But then, Liddell expressed further deep concerns, on May 27, i.e. a mere ten days before D-Day:

I had a long discussion with TAR and Victor [Rothschild] about RSS. It seemed to me that the position was eminently unsatisfactory. I could see that the picking up of an agent here was a difficult matter. If he were transmitting on ordinary H.F. at fairly frequent intervals to a fixed station on the continent in Abwehr procedure we should probably get his signals. If he were transmitting in our military procedure it was problematic whether we should get his signals. If he were transmitting in VHF it was almost certain that we should not get him. I entirely accept this as being the position but my complaint is that the problem of detecting illicit wireless from this country has never been submitted to a real body of experts, and that possibly had it been given careful study by such a body at least the present dangers might have been to some extent mitigated. Victor agreed that it might be possible to work on some automatic ether scanner which would increase the chances of picking up an agent. There might also be other possibilities, if the ground were thoroughly explored. So much for picking up the call. The next stage is to D.F. the position of the illicit transmitter. Recent experiments had shown both in the case of GARBO and in the case of an imaginery [sic] agent who was located at Whaddon, that the bearings from the fixed stations were 50-60 miles out. This being so, the margin for error on the continent would be considerably increased. We have always been given to understand that fixed stations could give a fairly accurate bearing. The effect is that unless your vans get into the ground-wave they stand very little chance of picking up the agent. The D.G. is rather anxious to take this matter up; both TAR and I are opposed to any such course. I pointed out to the D.G. that the Radio Security Committee consisted of a Chairman who knew nothing about wireless, and that he and I had no knowledge of the subject, and therefore we would all be at the mercy of Gambier-Parry who could cover us all with megacycles. The discussion would get us no where and only create bad blood. He seemed to think however that we ought to get some statement of the position particularly since I pointed out to him that if an agent were dropped we should probably pick him up in a reasonable time. The fact is that unless the aircraft tracks pin-pointed him and the police and the Home Guard did their job, we should be extremely unlikely to get our man. Technical means would give us little if any assistance. By the time a man had been located the harm would have been done.”

Some of this plaint was misguided (VHF would not have been an effective communication wavelength for a remote spy), but it shows that, despite all the self-satisfied histories that were written afterwards, RSS was in something of a shambles. Fortunately there were no ‘men’ to be got: the Abwehr had been incorporated into the SS in the spring of 1944. Canaris was dismissed, and no further wireless agents were infiltrated on to the British mainland. Liddell was probably confident, despite RSS’s complacent approach, that no unknown wireless agents were at large because intercepted ISOS messages gave no indication of such. He made one more relevant entry before D-Day, on June 3:

TAR tells me that since 12 May RSS have been picking up the signals of an agent communicating in Group 2 cypher. They have at last succeeded in getting a bearing which places the agents somewhere in Ayrshire. The vans are moving up to the Newcastle area. Two hours later, TAR told me that further bearing indicated that the agent was in Austria. So much for RSS’s powers of D.F.ing. My mind goes back to a meeting held 18 months ago when G.P. [Gambier-Parry] had the effrontery that he could D.F. a set in France down to an area of 5 sq. miles.

Did someone mishear a Scottish voice saying ‘Ayrshire’, interpreting it as ‘Austria’? We shall never know. In any case, if Liddell ever stopped to think “If we go to the utmost to ensure there are no clandestine agents reporting on the real state of things here, wouldn’t German Intelligence imagine we were doing just that?”, he never recorded such a gut-wrenching question in his Diaries.

‘Double’ or ‘Special’ Agents?

Before Bevan left London for Moscow, he attended – alongside Findlater Stewart – that last meeting of the W Board before D-Day. They heard a presentation by ‘Tar’ Robertson, who described the status of all the double agents, confirmed that he was confident that ‘the Germans believed in TRICYCE and GARBO, especially, and probably in the others’. Robertson added that ‘the agents were ready to take their part in OVERLORD’, and offered a confidence factor of 98% that the Germans trusted the majority of agents. The concluding minute of the meeting was a recommendation by Bevan that the term ‘double agents’ be avoided in any documentation, and that they be referred to as ‘special agents’, the term that appears in the title of the KV 4/70 file. A week later, Bevan was on his way to Moscow.

The reason that Bevan wanted them described as ‘special agents’ was presumably the fact that, if the term ‘double agent’ ever escaped, the nature of the double-cross deception would be immediately obvious. Yet ‘special agents’ was not going to become a durable term: all agents are special in some way, and the phrase did not accurately describe how they differed. Liddell continued to refer to ‘DAs’ in his Diaries, John Masterman promulgated the term ‘double agents’ in his influential Double Cross System (1972), and Michael Howard entrenched it in his authorised history of British Intelligence in the Second World War – Volume 5 (1990).

Shortly after Masterman’s book came out, Miles Copland, an ex-CIA officer, wrote The Real Spy World, a pragmatic guide to the world of espionage and counter-espionage. He debunked the notion of ‘double agents’, stating: “But even before the end of World War II the term ‘double agent’ was discontinued in favor of ‘controlled enemy agent’ in speaking of an agent who was entirely under our own control, capable of reporting to his original masters only as we allowed, so that he was entirely ‘single’ in his performance, and by no means ‘double’.” The point is a valid one: if an agent is described as a ‘double’, he or she could presumably be trying to work for both sides at once, even perhaps evolving into the status of a ‘triple agent’ (like ZIGZAG), which applies enormous psychological pressure on the subject, who will certainly lose any affiliation to either party, and end up simply trying to survive.

Yet ‘controlled enemy agent’ is, to me, also unsatisfactory. It implies that the agent’s primary allegiance is to the enemy, but that he or she has been ‘turned’ in some way. That might be descriptive of some SOE agents, who were captured, and tortured into handing over their cyphers and maybe forced to transmit under the surveillance of the Gestapo, but who never lost their commitment to the Allied cause (and may have eventually been shot, anyway). Nearly all the agents used in the Double Cross System had applied to the Abwehr under false pretences. They (e.g. BRUTUS, TREASURE, GARBO, TRICYCLE) intended to betray the Germans, and work for the Allied cause immediately they were installed. Of those who survived as recruits of B1A, only TATE had arrived as a dedicated Nazi. He was threatened (but not tortured) into coming to the conclusion that his survival relied on his operating under British control, and he soon, after living in the UK for a while, understood that the democratic cause was superior to the Nazi creed. SUMMER, on the other hand, to whom the same techniques were applied, refused to co-operate, and had to be incarcerated for the duration of the war.

Thus the closest analogy to the strategy of the special agents is what Kim Philby set out to do: infiltrate an ideological foe under subterfuge. But the analogy must not be pushed too far. Philby volunteered to work for an intelligence service of his democratic native country, with the goal of facilitating the attempts of a hostile, totalitarian system to overthrow the whole structure. The special agents were trying to subvert a different totalitarian organisation that had invaded their country (or constituted a threat, in the case of GARBO) in order that liberal democracy should prevail. There is a functional equivalence, but not a moral one, between the two examples. Philby was a spy and a traitor: he was definitely not a ‘double agent’, even though he has frequently been called that.

I leave the definitional matter unresolved for now. It will take a more authoritative writer to tidy up the debate. I note that the highly regarded Thaddeus Holt considers the debate ‘pedantic’, and he decided to fall back upon ‘double agent’ in his book, despite its misleading connotations.

Special Agents at Work

The events that led up to the controversial two-hour message transmitted by GARBO on June 9, highlighted in the several quotations that I presented at the beginning of this script, have been well described in several books, so I simply summarise here the aspects concerning wireless usage. For those readers who want to learn the details, Appendix XIII of Roger Hesketh’s Fortitude lists most of the contributions of British ‘controlled agents’ on the Fortitude South Order of Battle, and how they were reflected in German Intelligence Reports. Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross gives a lively account of the activities of the agents who communicated via wireless – via their B1A operators, in the main.

TATE (Wulf Schmidt) was the longest-serving of the special agents, but the requirement to develop a convincing ‘legend’ about him, in order to explain to the Abwehr how he had managed to survive for so long on alien territory, took him out of the mainstream. In October 1943, Robertson had expressed doubts as to how seriously the Germans were taking TATE, as they had sent him only fourteen messages over the past six months, and in December, the XX Committee even considered the possibility that he had been blown. Their ability to verify how TATE’s reports were being handled arose mainly because communications were passed to Berlin from Hamburg by a secure land-line, not by wireless (and thus not subject to RSS/GC&CS interception.) Indeed, Berlin believed that the whole ‘Lena Six’ (from the 1940-41 parachutist project, and whose activity as spies was planned to last only a few weeks before the impending German invasion!) were under control of the British, but the Abwehr, in a continuing pattern, were reluctant to give up on one of their own. The post-war interrogation of Major Boeckel, who trained the LENA agents in Hamburg, available at KV 2/1333, indicates that Berlin had doubts about TATE’s reliability, but that Boeckel ‘maintained contact despite warnings’. TATE provided one or two vital tidbits (such as Eisenhower’s arrival in January 1944), and by April, the XX Committee judged him safe again. In May, he was nominally ‘moved’ to Kent, ostensibly to help his employer’s farming friend, and messages were directed there from London, in case of precise location-finding. But TATE’s information about FUSAG ‘operations’ did not appear to have received much attention: TATE’s contribution would pick up again after D-Day.

The career of TREASURE (Lily Sergeyev, or Sergueiev) was more problematical. In September 1943 she had had to remind her handler, Kliemann, that she was trained in radio operation, and that she needed to advance from writing letters in secret ink. Kliemann then improbably ordered her to acquire an American-made Halicrafter apparatus in London, and then promised to supply her one passed to her. He let her down when she visited Madrid in November, so the XX Committee had to start applying pressure. They engineered a March 1944 visit by TREASURE to Lisbon, where she was provided with a wireless apparatus, and instructed on when and how to transmit, with an emphasis that the messages should be as short as possible. She returned to the UK; her transmitter was set up in Hampstead, and her first message sent on April 13. There was a burst of useful, activity for about a month or so, but, by May 17, a decision was made that TREASURE had to be dropped. She confessed to concealing from her B1A controllers the security check in her transmissions that she could have used to alert the Germans to the fact that she was operating under control: she was in a fit of pique over the death of her dog. Robertson fired her just after D-Day.

TRICYCLE (Dusko Popov) had formulated a role that allowed him to travel easily to Lisbon, but the Committee concluded that he need to communicate by wireless as well. Popov had engineered the escape to London of a fellow Yugoslav, the Marquis de Bona, in December 1943, who would become his authorized wireless operator, and Popov himself brought back to the UK the apparatus that de Bona (given the cryptonym FREAK) started using successfully in February. Useful information on dummy FUSAG movements was passed on for a while, but a cloud hung over the whole operation, as the XX Committee feared, quite justifiably, that TRICYCLE might have been blown because Popov’s contact within the Abwehr, Johnny Jebsen (ARTIST) knew enough about the project to betray the whole deception game. When Jebsen was arrested at the end of April, TRICYCLE and his network were closed down, with FREAK’s last transmission going out on May 16. TRICYCLE explained the termination in a letter written in secret ink on May 20, ascribing it to suspicions that had arisen over FREAK’s loyalties. Astonishingly, FREAK sent a final message by wireless on June 30, and the Germans’ petulant response indicated that they still trusted TRICYCLE. After the war, MI5 learned that Jebsen had been drugged and transported to Berlin, tortured and then killed, but said nothing.

The career of BRUTUS (Roman Czerniawski) was also dogged by controversy, as he had brought trouble on himself with the Polish government-in-exile, and the Poles had access to his cyphers. Again, fevered debate over his trustworthiness, and deliberation over what the Germans (and Russians) knew about him continued throughout 1943. His wireless traffic (which had been interrupted) restarted on August 25, but his handler in Paris, Colonel Reile, suspected that he might have been ‘turned’. Indeed, his transmitter was operated by a notional friend called CHOPIN, working from Richmond. By December 1943, confidence in the security of BRUTUS, and his acceptance by the Abwehr, had been restored: the Germans even succeeded in delivering him a new wireless set. Thereafter, BRUTUS grew to become the second most valuable member of the team of special agents. A regular stream of messages was sent, beginning in from February 1, culminating in an intense flow between June 5 and June 7, providing (primarily) important disinformation about troop movements in East Anglia.

Lastly, the performance of GARBO was the most significant – and the most controversial. According to Guy Liddell, GARBO had made his first contact with the Abwehr in Madrid in March 1943. GARBO had also claimed to have found a ‘friend’ who would operate the wireless for him. The Abwehr was so pleased that it immediately sent him new cyphers (invaluable to GC&CS), and, a month later, advised him how to simulate British Army callsigns, so as to avoid detection. A domestic crisis then occurred, which caused Harmer in MI5 to recommend BRUTUS as a more reliable vehicle than GARBO, but it passed, and, by the beginning of 1944 GARBO was using his transmitter to send more urgent – as well as more copious – messages. GARBO benefitted from a large network of fictional agents who supplied him with news from around the country, and his role in FORTITUDE culminated in the epic message of June 9 with which I introduced this piece.

The Aftermath

BODYGUARD was successful. The German High Command viewed the Normandy landings as a feint to distract attention from the major assault they saw coming in the Pas de Calais. They relied almost exclusively on the reports coming in from the special agents. They did not have the infrastructure, the attention span, or the expertise to interpret the deluge of phony signals that were generated as part of FORTITUDE NORTH, and they could not undertake proper reconnaissance flights across the English Channel to inspect any preparations for the assault that they knew was coming. Interrogations of German officers after the war confirmed that the ‘intelligence’ transmitted by the five agents listed above was passed on and accepted at the very highest levels. This phenomenon has to be analysed in two dimensions: the political and the technical.

The fact that the Abwehr (and its successor, the SS) were hoodwinked so easily by the substance of the messages was not perhaps surprising. To begin with, the Abwehr was a notoriously anti-Nazi organisation, and the role of its leader, Admiral Canaris, was highly ambiguous in his encouraging doubts about the loyalty of his agents to be squashed. He told his officer Jebsen (ARTIST) that ‘he didn’t care if every German agent in Britain was under control, so long as he could tell German High Command that he had agents in Britain reporting regularly.’ Every intelligence officer has an inclination to trust his recruits: if he tells his superiors that they are unreliable, he is effectively casting maledictions on his own abilities. Those who spoke up about their doubts, and pursued them, were moved out to the Russian front. The Double Cross System was addressing a serious need.

When the ineffectiveness and unreliability of the Abwehr itself was called into question, and the organisation was subsumed into the SS, the special agents came under the control of disciplinarians and military officers who did not really understand intelligence, were under enormous pressures, and thus had neither the time nor the expertise to attempt to assess properly the information that was being passed to them. They had experienced no personal involvement with the agents supposedly infiltrated into Britain. What intelligence they received sounded plausible, and appeared to form a pattern, so it was accepted and passed on.

Yet the technical aspects are more problematic. Given what the German agencies (the Sipo, Gestapo, and Abwehr) had invested in static and mobile radio-detection and location finding techniques (even though they overstated their capabilities), they should surely have asked themselves whether Great Britain would not have explored and refined similar technology. And they should have asked themselves why the British would not have exercised such capabilities to the utmost in order to conceal the order of battle, and assault plans, for the inevitable ‘invasion’ of continental Europe. Moreover, Britain was a densely populated island, hom*ogeneous and certainly almost completely opposed to the Nazi regime, and infiltrated foreign agents must have had to experience a far more hostile and obstructive environment than, say, SOE agents of French nationality who were parachuted into a homeland that contained a large infrastructure of Allied sympathisers. Traces of such a debate in German intelligence are difficult to find. Canaris defended his network of Vertrauensmänner, and referred to ‘most intricate and elaborate electronic countermeasures’ in February 1944, but his motivations were suspect, and he was ousted immediately afterwards. Why was GARBO (especially) not picked up? How indeed could anyone transmit for so long, when such practices went against all good policies of clandestine wireless usage?

Even more astonishing is the apparent lack of recognition of the problem from the voluminous British archives. Admittedly, the challenge may have been of such magnitude that it was never actually mentioned, but one might expect at some stage the question to be raised: “How can we optimise wireless transmission practices so that it would be reasonable to assume that RSS would not be able to pick them up?” That would normally require making the messages as brief as possible, switching wavelengths, and changing locations – all in order to elude the resolute mobile location-finding units. That was clearly a concern in the early days of the war, with agent SNOW, when B1A even asked SNOW to inquire of his handler, Dr. Rantzau (Ritter) whether it was safe for SNOW always to transmit from the same place. Rantzau replied in the affirmative, reflecting the state-of-the-art in 1940. But progress had been made by the Germans, especially in light of the arrival of SOE wireless agents, and the XX Committee must have known this.

Yet, four years later, all that the XX Committee and B1a appeared to do was allow GARBO to emulate British military traffic. And they showed a completely cavalier attitude to the problem of time on the air by allowing GARBO to compose his ridiculously windy messages. After all, if they were sharp enough to ensure that signals emanated from a location roughly where the agent was supposed to be, in case German direction-finders were on the prowl, why would they not imagine that the Germans were contemplating the reciprocal function of RSS? It was even more comprehensively dumb than the Abwehr’s credulous distancing from the problem.

Did MI5 try to communicate to the Abwehr the notion that RSS was useless? Guy Liddell confided his doubts about the apparently feeble tracking of GARBO only to his diary, so, unless the Abwehr had a spy in the bowels of RSS, and a method of getting information back to Germany, that would have been an impossible task. Perhaps some messages from the special agents indicating that they were close to being hunted down, but always managed to escape, would have given a measure of verisimilitude, indicating the existence of a force, but a very ineffective one. The behaviour of B1A, however, in reusing transmission sites, while paying lip-service to the location-finding capabilities of the foe, but allowing absurdly long transmissions to take place, simply denies belief. The utterly unnecessary but studied non-observance of basic protocols was highly unprofessional, and should have caused the whole scaffolding of deceit to collapse. It is extraordinary that so many historians and analysts have hinted at this debacle, but never analyzed it in detail.

In conclusion, the mystery of the Undetected Radios was not a puzzle of how they remained undetected, but of why both the Abwehr and MI5 both considered it reasonable that they could flourish unnoticed for so long, and behave so irresponsibly. Findlater Stewart’s 1946 history of RSS – which helped set the agenda for the unit during the Cold War – proves that he did not really understand the technology or the issues. What all this implies for the Communist agent Sonia’s transmissions (around which this whole investigation started) will be addressed in a final report that will constitute the concluding chapter of Sonia’s Radio and The Mystery of the Undetected Radios.

(New Commonplace entries can be found here.)

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I recall, back in the early 1960s, seeing advertisem*nts in the Daily Telegraph for a charity identifying itself as the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association. They showed an elderly couple, a rather tweedy gentleman of military bearing, and his elegant wife, who probably had worn pearls at some stage, but could no longer afford them. (The image I show above is a similar exhibit.) These were presumably persons of good ‘breeding’ who had fallen on undeserved hard times. The organization asked the readership to contribute to the maintenance and well-being of such persons.

I found these appealsrather quaint, even then, and asked myself why ‘gentlefolk’ should have beensingled out as especially worthy of any handouts. After all, such terminologyhad a vaguely mid-Victorian ring: I must have been thinking of Turgenev’s ‘Nestof Gentry’, which I had recently read. Moreover, were there not moremeritorious examples of the struggling poor? Perhaps I had Ralph MacTell’s‘Streets of London’ ringing in my head [No. It was not released until 1969.Ed.], although I was never able to work out why, if the bag-lady celebratedby this noted troubadour (who, like me, grew up in Croydon in the 1950s) waslonely, ‘she’s no time for talking, she just keeps right on walking’. Was sheperhaps fed up with being accosted in the street by long-haired minstrelswielding guitars?

But I digress. It was more probable that I had been influenced by the lunch monitor at my school dining-table, the much-loved and now much-missed John Knightly, who would later become Captain of the School. I recall how he, with Crusader badge pinned smartly on his lapel, would admonish those of us who struggled to complete our rather gristly stew by reminding us of ‘the starving millions in China’. I felt like telling him that he could take the remnants of the lunch of one particular Distressed Fourth-Former and send them off to Chairman Mao, but somehow the moment passed without my recommendation being made.

Astonishingly, I have discovered that the DGAA endured under that name until 1989, when it was renamed as Elizabeth Finn Care, after its founder. A fascinating article about it, before the name change, appeared in the New York Times that year: https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/02/world/london-journal-lifting-a-pinkie-for-the-upper-crust.html?smid=em-share

I thought about thatinstitution as I was preparing this piece. I have warned readers of coldspurthat I would eventually be offering an analysis of the phenomenon ofLiverpool University as the Home for Distressed Spies, and here it is. Itanalyses the predicament that MI5 and the civil authorities found themselves inwhen they had clear evidence that Soviet spies were in their midst, but,because of the nature of the evidence, believed that they could not prosecutewithout a confession.

Theaccounts of the interviews, interrogations and suspicions surrounding some ofthe atom scientists (Pontecorvo, Peierls, Fuchs, Skinner, Skyrme, Davison) inBritain after the war display a puzzled approach to policy by the officers at theAERE (Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell) and at MI5. If suchsuspects were believed to have pro-Soviet sympathies, they could not be encouraged,on account of the knowledge they possessed about atomic power and weaponry, toconsider escaping to the Soviet Union. On the one hand, it would have beendifficult to prosecute those whose guilt was hardly in doubt (i.e. Fuchs andPontecorvo), as it would require gaining a confession from them, and, on theother, the sensitivity of the sources (the VENONA decrypts, and a lost item ofintelligence, respectively) would prohibit such evidence being used in a trial.In Fuchs’s case, some senior figures in MI5 (Percy Sillitoe, theDirector-General, and Dick White, head of counter-espionage) were keen ontrying to gain a confession, and prosecuting. Liddell of MI5 (Sillitoe’sdeputy), in conjunction with Harwell’s chief, John co*ckcroft, and Henry Arnold,the security officer, wanted to shift Fuchs and Pontecorvo quietly off to aregional university. Liverpool University loomed largest in this scenario.

Ihave decided to work backwards generally in this account, before advancing tothe connection between the controversial role of Herbert Skinner, and how heeventually exerted an influence on the removal of the mysterious Boris Davison.I believe it will be more revealing to display gradually the undeclared knowledgethat affected the decisions, misleading briefings and reports that emanatedfrom Guy Liddell and his brother-officers at MI5, and from other civil servantsat Harwell, and at the Ministry of Supply, to which AERE reported.

TheDramatis Personae (primarily in 1950, when most of theaction occurs):

Atthe Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell:

co*ckcroft Director

Arnold Securityofficer

Skinner Assistantdirector; Head of Theoretical Physics division

Fuchs Scientist

Pontecorvo Scientist

Davison Scientist

Buneman Scientist

Flowers Scientist

TheMen from the Ministries:

Attlee PrimeMinister

Portal Controller of Production, Atomic Energy, at the Ministryof Supply

Perrin Deputyto Portal

Appleton PermanentSecretary, Department for Scientific and Industrial Research

Makins DeputyUnder-Secretary of State, Foreign Office

Bridges PermanentSecretary to the Treasury, and Head of Civil Service

Rowlands PermanentSecretary, Ministry of Supply

Cherwell Paymaster-General (1953)

AtMI5:

Sillitoe Director

Liddell AssistantDirector

White Headof B Division (counter-espionage)

Hollis B1

Mitchell B1E (Hollis’s deputy)

RobertsonJ. C. Head of B2

Robertson,T. A. R. B3 (retired in 1948)

Marriott B3

Serpell PAto Sillitoe

Skardon B2A

Reed B2A

Archer B2A

Collard C2A

Morton C2A

Hill Solicitor

Bligh Solicitor

Atthe Universities:

Mountford Vice-Chancellor,Liverpool University

Chadwick Masterof Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Oliphant Professorat Birmingham University

Peierls Professorat Birmingham University

Massey Professor at University College, London

Rotblat Professor at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London

Fröhlich Professorat Liverpool University

Frisch Professor at Trinity College, Cambridge

Flowers Researcher at Birmingham University

Pryce Professor at Clarendon Laboratories

TheJournalists:

Pincher Daily Express

Stubbs-WalkerDaily Mail

Moorehead Daily Express

Rodin Sunday Express

Maule Empire News

West New York Times

De Courcy Intelligence Digest

Variouswives, mistresses, girl-friends and spear-carriers

Contents:

1. Bruno Pontecorvo at Harwell
2. Machinations at Liverpool
3. Klaus Fuchs at Harwell
4. Fuchs’s Interrogations
5. Herbert Skinner at Harwell
6. Skinner’s Removal?
7. Skinner’s Ventures into Journalism
8. Boris Davison – from Leningrad to Harwell
9. Boris Davison – after Attlee
10. Conclusions

1. Bruno Pontecorvo at Harwell

Bruno Pontecorvo’s journey to Harwell was an unusual one. An Italian who worked with Joliot-Curie in Paris, he had escaped from France with his Swedish wife and their son in July 1940, in the nick of time before the Nazis overran the country. After some strenuous efforts visiting consulates and embassies to gain the necessary papers, he and his family gained a sea passage to the USA on the strength of a job offer from his Italian colleague Emilio Segrè in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Inthe autumn of 1942, Pontecorvo was invited by Hans Halban to interview for aposition with the British nuclear physics team working in Montreal. He wasapproved in December 1942, and was inducted into Tube Alloys, the Britishatomic weapons project, in New York, the following month. He was a success inCanada, and, after Halban’s demotion and subsequent return to Europe, workedclosely with Nunn May on the Zero Energy Experimental Pile (ZEEP) project. Yet,as the war came to a close, Pontecorvo began to feel the anti-communist climatein Canada and the United States oppressive to him. In late 1945, with Igor Gouzenkoand Elizabeth Bentley revealing the breadth and depth of the Soviet espionage network,he was happy to receive an informal job offer from John co*ckcroft, who had beenappointed head of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, whichwas to open on January 1, 1946. Chadwick, who had led the British mission tothe Manhattan Project from Washington, had imposed travel restrictions on Pontecorvo,but the Italian was able to negotiate a satisfactory deal by the end of January1946. Despite competitive offers from several prestigious US companies, he madehis decision to join Harwell.

Yet,very strangely, Pontecorvo did not start work for three more years, continuingto operate in Montreal, and even travelling to Europe in the interim. InFebruary 1948, he became a British citizen, to assuage government concernsabout aliens working on sensitive projects. On January 24, 1949, he left ChalkRiver in Ontario for the last time, and officially started work at Harwell onFebruary 1. An entry in his file at The National Archives, however, indicatesthat he was, rather late in the day, ‘nominated for a position at Harwell’, onJuly 7 of that year. Astonishingly, the record indicates that Pontecorvo was‘confirmed in his appointment as S.P.S.O. [Senior Principal Scientific Officer]and established’ only on January 2, 1950! (KV 2/1888-2, s.n. 97c.)

Itwas not until October 1950, when Pontecorvo disappeared with his family duringa holiday on the Continent, that Liddell made his first diary entry – at least,of those that have survived redactions – concerning Pontecorvo. As the recordfor October 21 states: “Oninformation that had been received xxxxxxxxx in March of this year, intimatingthat PONTECORVO and his wife were avowed Communists, a decision was reached,after an interrogation of PONTECORVO by Henry Arnold, when the former admittedto having Communist relations – to get rid of him and find some employment forhim at Liverpool University.” Yet Liddell thus implies that he (or MI5) learnedof Pontecorvo’s unreliability only in March 1950, and his memorandum reinforcesthe notion that it was primarily the security officer Arnold’s idea toaccommodate Pontecorvo at Liverpool University, even though the news had apparentlycome as a surprise to Arnold back in March.

Liddellwas being deliberately deceptive. As early as December 15, 1949, (see KV2/1288, s.n. 97A, as Frank Close reports in Half-Life, his biography of Pontecorvo),the FBI sent a report to MI5, dated December 15, that identified Pontecorvo’slinks to Communism. As Close writes: ‘MI5 took note. Someone highlighted theabove paragraph in Pontecorvo’s file’, but Close then asserts that MI5 didnothing, as they were consumed with the Fuchs case at the time. On February 10, 1950, however, another clearerwarning arrived, when Robert Thornton of the US Atomic Energy Commission, on avisit to a Harwell conference, informed John co*ckcroft that Pontecorvo and hisfamily were Communists, repeating specifically the formal report from December.A vital conclusion must be that, if this visitor from the USA had not beeninvited to the conference, co*ckcroft might never have learned about the projectalready in place to remove Pontecorvo.

Pontecorvohad in fact left behind him a trail of hints concerning his politicalallegiances. He had joined the French Communist Party on August 23, 1939, theday the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. In July 1940, MI5 knew enough about him tojudge him as ‘mildly unsuitable’ for acceptance as an escapee to Britain. InSeptember, 1942, FBI agents had inspected his house in Tulsa (while Pontecorvowas away), and discovered communist literature there. After Pontecorvo’sapplication to join Tube Alloys, the FBI had exchanged correspondence withBritish Security Control (which represented MI5 and MI6 in the United States),concerning Pontecorvo’s loyalties. The FBI was able to confirm, afterPontecorvo’s flight, that it had sent letters to BSC on March 2, 16, and 19but, inexplicably, BSC had issued him a security clearance on March 3, and had failedto follow up.

Alarmedby Thornton’s warning (having been kept in the dark by his own security officerand MI5), co*ckcroft instructed Arnold to look into the matter. Arnold accordinglyspoke to Pontecorvo, elicited information from him, and was able to inform MI5,by telephone call on March 1, that Pontecorvo was ‘an active communist’. (Onthe same day, Collard of C2A reported that Arnold’s conversation withPontecorvo was ‘recent’: KV 2/1887, s.n. 20A.) Yet Arnold added more. He toldMI5 that Pontecorvo had recently before been offered a job at the University ofLiverpool, and that Pontecorvo’s acceptance of that offer would rid Harwell ofa security risk. Again, this news goes unrecorded in Liddell’s diaries at thetime.

Butis this not extraordinary? What does ‘recently’ mean? If Arnold learned of theLiverpool job offer from Pontecorvo himself, when had it been arranged? And wasthis not extremely early for Pontecorvo to be seeking employment elsewhere?Given the long gestation period preceding the confirmation of Pontecorvo’s postat Harwell, would this not have provoked some high-level discussion? After all,Pontecorvo had been ‘established’ a couple of weeks after the originalwarning from the FBI. And who would have made the offer? Liverpool Universityis associated in the archives most closely with Herbert Skinner, but, as will beshown, Skinner was not yet established in a position of authority and influenceat Liverpool. He had been formally appointed, but was not yet working full-time,as he was still executing his job as co*ckcroft’s deputy at Harwell. Some senioracademic figures should surely have been involved in the decision, especiallythe Vice-Chancellor, Sir James Mountford.

Thisaspect of the case has been strangely overlooked by Pontecorvo’s biographers,Frank Close, and Simone Turchetti. Both mention the fact that Pontecorvo hadfirst indicated the fact of the Liverpool offer to Arnold on March 1, but donot follow up why it would have been made so early in the cycle, or investigatethe earlier sequence of events, or even ask why Pontecorvo was informing Arnoldof the fact. Had someone revealed to Pontecorvo that incriminating stories werefloating around about his political beliefs, and had officers at LiverpoolUniversity come to some sort of unofficial agreement with the authorities atthe Ministry of Supply and MI5 – but not Arnold or co*ckcroft – since December? Itis difficult to imagine an alternative scenario. Thus it is much more likelythat MI5 did act in December, when they first received the report, butmade no record of the fact.

Turchettidoes in fact report that, in January 1950, i.e. well before theArnold-co*ckcroft exchanges, Herbert Skinner ‘asked Pontecorvo to join him atLiverpool, believing that he was the ideal candidate to lead experimentalactivities’, as if this would be a normal and smooth career progression. (Ishall explore Skinner’s split role between Harwell and Liverpool later.) Turchetti does not, however, follow up on theimplications of these early negotiations. For, as I suggested earlier, thiswould have been a very sudden transfer, given Pontecorvo’s officialconfirmation on the Harwell post earlier that month. Moreover, this item doesnot appear in the files at the National Archives. It comes from a statementmade by the Vice-Chancellor at Liverpool, Sir James Mountford, which seriouslyundermines MI5’s claim that it was not aware of the seriousness of the exposureuntil February 1950. Pontecorvo, incidentally, also had thechutzpah around this time to request a promotion at Harwell, which was promptlyrejected.

• Machinationsat Liverpool

I acquired a copy of Mountford’s statement from Liverpool University. [By courtesy of the Liverpool University Library: 255/6/5/5/6 – Notes on Bruno Pontecorvo by James Mountford.]

Itwas sent by the Vice-Chancellor to Professor Tilley, in September 1978.Mountford explains that, after Sir James Chadwick in the spring of 1948 vacatedthe physics chair to accept the Mastership of Gonville and Caius College,Cambridge, the university was faced with the problem of finding a suitablecandidate to replace him, with the added sensitivity that, if the right personwere not selected, the nuclear project might be transferred to Glasgow. Thechallenge required some diligent networking by the experts in this field.

Thefirst choice for Chadwick’s replacement was Sir Harrie Massey, the Australian Professorof Applied Mathematics at University College, London, who had had adistinguished war record, working lastly on isotope separation for theManhattan Project at the University of California. (Mountford indicated that Massey wasProfessor of Physics, but he was in fact not appointed Quain Professor ofPhysics until 1950.) Massey ‘reluctantly’ declined the offer, so the team fromLiverpool had a meeting on January 26, 1949, with Professor Oliphant ofBirmingham (to whom Massey had reported at Berkeley), Chadwick, and Sir EdwardAppleton, the Secretary of the Department for Scientific and IndustrialResearch (DSIR). They decided upon W. H. B. Skinner of Harwell. Herbert Skinnerheaded the physics section there: he also had experience on the ManhattanProject, as he had worked with Massey on isotope separation at Berkeley.

Thereis, oddly, no discussion by the team of Skinner’s merits, nor even thesuggestion of a process for interviewing Skinner, or asking him about his plansand objectives, or whether he even wanted the job. co*ckcroft does not seem tohave been consulted on his willingness to release his second-in-command so soonafter the latter’s appointment. This must be considered as highly provocativeand controversial, given Skinner’s role as co*ckcroft’s deputy, and what Mountfordwrote about the importance of the position, and I shall explore the rationalein detail later in this article. The note merely states: “He accepted and tookup duties formally in Oct. 1949.” Moreover,Andrew Brown, in his biography of Joseph Rotblat, states that Rotblat had beenappointed joint acting head of the physics department at Liverpool in October1948, before resigning in March 1949. That happened to be just after the speedydecision in favour of Skinner, but Skinner does not even merit a mention inBrown’s book. * Did Rotblat perhaps think that his close friend Chadwick shouldhave championed his cause instead of Skinner’s? Maybe he simply regarded theprospect of working under Skinner intolerable. Or perhaps he was asked to moveaside to make room for a Harwell transferee?

[*Rotblat obtained a Ph.D., his second, from Liverpool in 1950. It seems that thePh.D. was awarded after he moved to London.]

Accordingto what Mountford claimed, Rotblat moved to St. Bartholomew’s Medical Schoolnot out of pique at Skinner’s appointment, but because of his dislike ofmilitary applications of nuclear science. Again, Mountford’s judgment (ormemory) should be challenged. Rotblat had voiced his objections to the militaryuses of the science back in 1944, when it became apparent that the Germanswould not be successful in building such a bomb. He had moved to Liverpool,which was constructing a cyclotron to aid applications for energy, wasappointed Director of Research for Nuclear Physics at the university, and wasChairman of the Cyclotron Panel of the UK Nuclear Physics Committee from 1946to 1950. He had thus had several years to have considered any objections toworking there.

Irrespectiveof the exact circ*mstances concerning Rotblat’s departure, and whether he feltrebuffed, Skinner, on taking up his duties, raised the question of replacingRotblat, and ‘the idea emerged’ of a second chair in Experimental Physics. Turchettiindicates, more boldly, that Skinner ‘dictated’ that the Faculty of Sciencesagree to establish a professorship, as this would be the status that Pontecorvodemanded. Yet it is not clear where Turchetti gathered this insight, and it isnot precisely dated. Mountford gives October 1949 as the time Skinner assumedhis duties. Even if one considers it unlikely that a recruit not yetestablished would be able to make demands of that nature, if Skinner did indeedidentify and recommend Pontecorvo that early, two months before thedisclosures ofDecember 1949, it would have very serious implications,suggesting that MI5 and the Ministry already had reservations about thenaturalised Italian. And, even in December 1949-January 1950, Skinner’s approachingPontecorvo without informing his boss, co*ckcroft, would have been highlyirregular. Mountford may have been putting a positive gloss on the affair, butit now sounds as if undisclosed pressure was being applied from other quarters.

Inany case (again, according to Mountford) the Faculty responded by agreeing, inprinciple, to approve the chair ‘if a satisfactory person were available’. Theoutcome was that Mountford lunched with Skinner and Pontecorvo on January 18,1950, i.e. a month before the fateful visit of the American Thornton. Pontecorvo,according to Turchetti, was, however, not very impressed with Liverpool. (Andhis highly strung Swedish wife, Marianne, would have been very uncomfortablethere: the wife of one of my on-line colleagues, a woman who hails fromSheffield, asserts that there was not much to choose between Moscow andLiverpool at that time.) Alan Moorehead wrote that Mrs. Pontecorvo visited thecity, but was ‘worried about the cold in the north’ – so unlike her nativeStockholm, one imagines. The Chairs Committee then spent three months or socollecting information about the candidate. Mountford had meanwhile spoken toChadwick, who had doubts whether Pontecorvo could stand up to Skinner’s‘forceful personality’. A formal interview with Pontecorvo eventually tookplace, but not until June 6, 1950. He did not overall impress, however, partlybecause of his poor English. Yet the committee overcame its reservations, andPontecorvo would later accept the position, with January 1951 set as the dateon which he would assume duties.

Mountford’sdescription of events as a smooth series is a travesty of what was really goingon. Given what happened between January and June, Pontecorvo’s apparent freedomto accept or reject the offer in June was an unlikely outcome. First of all, inMarch, Pontecorvo had given Arnold the impression he had already received afirm offer, a claim belied by Mountford’s account. At this stage, Pontecorvo apparentlydid not respond to it, however vague and undocumented. Later that month,however, further damaging evidence against him came from Sweden via MI6 (acommunication that was surely not passed on to Mountford). A letter from MI6 tothe famous Sonia-watcher J.H. Marriott, in B2, dated March 2, 1950, describesPontecorvo and his wife as ‘avowed Communists’. This revelation applied more pressureon MI5 and the Ministry of Supply to remove Pontecorvo from Harwell. Theoutcome was that, on April 6 (KV/2 -1887, s.n. 26) Arnold was againrecommending that ‘it would be a good thing if he were able to obtain a post atone of the British universities’, even boosting the suggestion that ‘we mightcontinue to avail ourselves of his undoubted ability as consultant in limitedfields.’ The naivety displayed is amazing: Klaus Fuchs had just been sentenced tofourteen years for espionage activities.

Furthermore,Arnold added that Pontecorvo, after denying that he was a Communist, but admittingthat he was assuredly a man of the Left, ‘has already toyed with the idea of anappointment in Rome University, and is at present turning over in his mind anoffer which has come to him from America.’ The latter must have been anenormous bluff: given the FBI report, the United States would have been thelast place to admit him for employment. This truth of his allegiance was soonconfirmed, with matters became more embarrassing in July. Geoffrey Patterson inWashington then wrote to Sillitoe informing him that the FBI had learned ofPontecorvo’s working at Harwell, and had indicated that they had sent messagesto Washington (and maybe London) on three occasions in 1943 describingPontecorvo’s communist affiliations. The messages may have been destroyed,among the files of British Security Co-ordination, after the war. InWashington, as MI6’s representative, Kim Philby (of all people) could not tracethem – or so he said. MI5 apparently had no record of them.

Ifthe dons at Liverpool had been briefed on all that had happened, theypresumably would have been even more reluctant to take Pontecorvo on. Yet, themore dangerous Pontecorvo seemed to be, the more MI5 wanted to plant him atLiverpool. Using FO 371/84837 and correspondence held in the LiverpoolUniversity Library, as well as the Pontecorvo papers at Churchill College, (noneof which I have personally inspected), Turchetti writes: “From the spring of1950, Skinner used his recent security investigations to put pressure on hiscolleague to accept the new position. He also convinced the university’sadministrators of Pontecorvo’s suitability without making them aware of theongoing inquiry.” In addition, with ammunition from Roger Makins from theMinistry of Supply, Skinner had to wear down objections from universityadministrators that Pontecorvo was improperly qualified to teach. Skinner wasclearly receiving instructions from his political masters.

Chadwickand co*ckcroft acted as referees for Pontecorvo, but they could hardly beassessed as objective, given their involvement in the plot. Chadwick ponderedover whether he should confide in Mountford with the awful facts, and wrote tohim that he would discuss the university’s concerns with co*ckcroft, but he didnot follow up. And then, when the final offer was reluctantly made on June 6,Pontecorvo vacillated, requesting another month to consider. On July 24, theday before he left on holiday, never to return, he wrote to Mountford,accepting the offer, and stating that he expected to start work afterChristmas, when he would leave Harwell.

OnOctober 23, 1950, Liddell had an interview with Prime Minister Attlee. Heglossed over the FBI/BSC issue without giving it a date, and referred solely tothe Swedish source of March 2 as evidence of Pontecorvo’s communism,conveniently overlooking both the events of December 1949 and February 1950.All this is confirmed by his memorandum of the meeting on file (KV 2/1887, s.n.63A). MI5 had been attempting a reconstruction ofPontecorvo’s activities (KV 2/1288, s.n. 87C), which presumably fed Liddell’sintelligence. This account (undated, but probably in July or August 1950) omitsboth the warning from the FBI in December 1949 (which is confirmed elsewhere inthe file), as well as the information given to co*ckcroft at the beginning ofMarch 1950. It does concentrate, however, on the information from Sweden,reporting on the discussions that occurred in the following terms: “D.At. En. [Perrin, at Department of Atomic Energy] decided not to grantPONTECORVO’s request for promotion and to encourage him to take up the postoffered him at Liverpool by Professor Skinner. This was arranged only afterconsiderable discussion.” Pontecorvo was thus allowed to leave on vacation inJuly without submitting his resignation or formally being taken off Harwell’sbooks. And he never returned.

Yethis whole saga eerily echoes what had happened in a collapsed time-frame withKlaus Fuchs.

• KlausFuchs at Harwell

Fuchs’s path to Harwell was slightly less erratic, but also controversial. He had been recruited to Tube Alloys, the British codename for atomic weapons research, in 1941, and had moved to the USA at the end of 1943 to work on the Manhattan Project. In June 1946 he was summoned from Los Alamos to head the Theoretical Physics Division at Harwell, working under Herbert Skinner. Skinner had been the first divisional head appointed at Harwell. Fuchs was appointed chairman of the Power Steering Committee at Harwell, and Pontecorvo joined the committee later.

What is extraordinary about Fuchs’s return to the UK is that the first that MI5 learned about it was when Arnold, the security officer, wrote to MI5, in October 1946, about his suspicions that Fuchs might be a communist. He might well have gained his intelligence from Skinner himself, who had known Fuchs from the time they both worked at Bristol University in the 1930s. The political climate by this stage meant that embryonic ‘purge’ procedures (which were solidified in May 1947) would have to be applied to such figures working in sensitive posts. Frank Close, in Trinity, covers very thoroughly these remarkable few months at the end of 1946, when MI5 officers openly voiced their concerns that Fuchs might be a spy. Michael Serpell and Joe Archer (Jane Archer’s husband) were most energetic in advising that Fuchs should be kept away from any work on atomic energy or weapons research. Rudolf Peierls came under suspicion, too, but Roger Hollis countered with a strong statement that it was highly unlikely that the two were engaged in espionage, and gained support in his judgment from Dick White and Graham Mitchell.

Thenext three years were thus a very nervous time for MI5 and Arnold, as they kepta watch on Fuchs’s movements and associations. Yet Fuchs was placed on ‘permanentestablishment’ in August 1948, and Arnold was later to claim, deceitfully, thatFuchs came under suspicion only in that year, when he was observed speakingintently to a known communist at a conference. The matter came to a head,however, in 1949, when the decipherment of VENONA transcripts led theWashington analysts to narrow down the identity of the spy CHARLES to eitherFuchs or Peierls. Guy Liddell indicates that fact as early as August 9: at theend of August, the FBI formally told MI5 of its belief that the leak pointed toFuchs (because of the visit to his sister in Boston).

MI5immediately started making connections. It alerted MI6 to the Fuchs case, and tohis Communist brother, Gerhard. (Maurice Oldfield had told Kim Philby of thediscovery before the latter left London for Washington in September 1949.) MI5identified the close relationship between the Skinners and Fuchs. A report byJ. C. Robertson (B2A) of September 9 (after a meeting between Arnold, Collard,Skardon and Robertson) runs as follows: “Although FUCHS’ address has untilrecently been Lacies Court, Abingdon, he has in fact rarely lived there, buthas chosen to sleep more often than not with his close friends the SKINNERS atHarwell. He is on more than usually intimate terms with Mrs. SKINNER. TheSKINNERS will be leaving in about six months for Liverpool, where SKINNERhimself is to take up the chair about to be vacated [sic!] by Sir JamesChadwick. At present, SKINNER devotes his time about half and half to Liverpooland Harwell.”

Robertsonwent on to write that Professor Peierls was also a regular visitor at theSkinners, and that Fuchs was in addition very friendly with Otto Frisch ofCambridge University. (Frisch, the co-author, with Rudolf Peierls, of thefamous memorandum that showed the feasibility of building a nuclear weapon, hadmoved to Liverpool from Birmingham, where Peierls worked, and had beenresponsible for the development of the cyclotron developed there. Yet, afterthe war, he had taken up work at Harwell as head of the Nuclear PhysicsDivision, before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1947.) At Harwell, Arnoldalone was in on the investigation: co*ckcroft was not to be told yet of what wasgoing on.

Thisis an intriguing document, by virtue of what it hints at, and what it getswrong. The suggestion that Fuchs is having an affair with Erna Skinner is verystrong, and the mention of Herbert’s long absences in Liverpool indicates theopportunities for Fuchs and Erna to carry on their liaison. Yet the transitionof the Liverpool chair remains confusing: Chadwick had moved to Cambridge in1948; Mountford noted that Skinner had taken up his duties in October 1949, butalso referred (well in retrospect) that there had been an interregnum in thePhysics position for a year, from March 1948 to March 1949. Robertson indicatesthat the Skinners will not be moving until about March 1950. Skinner’s own fileat the National Archives informs us that he did not resign from Harwell untilApril 14, 1950, which was a very late decision, suggesting perhaps that his preferenceshad lain with staying at Harwell as long as possible, and that he might evenhave had aspirations of restoring his career there. The files suggest that hisduties at Harwell remained substantial well into 1950. A report by J. C.Robertson of B2A, dated March 9, 1950, describes Skinner as follows: ’. . .deputy to Sir John co*ckcroft and who has temporarily taken over Fuchs’ post ashead of the Theoretical Physics Division at Harwell’. Skinner then continued towork in a consultative capacity at Harwell: he wrote to the incarcerated Fuchsas late as December 20, 1950 that ‘we are definitely at Liverpool but go onvisits to Harwell quite often.’ How could Skinner perform that job if he wasspending so much his time in Liverpool? In any case, it was an exceedingly longand drawn-out period of dual responsibilities for Skinner.

• Fuchs’sInterrogations

Armed with their confidential VENONA intelligence, MI5 prepared for the interrogation of Fuchs, but were not initially hopeful of gaining a successful confession. Thus the thorny question of what they could collectively do to ‘eliminate’ him (in their clumsy expression) quickly arose. Fuchs might decide to flee the country, which would be disastrous, as his Moscow bosses would be able to pick his brains without any restrictions. Liddell continued the theme, showing his enthusiasm for a softer approach against his boss’s more prosecutorial instincts. Liddell doubted that interrogations would be successful in eliciting a confession from Fuchs, and, as early as October 31, 1949, he was suggesting ‘alternative employment’, though being overruled by Sillitoe. At this stage, Peierls and Fuchs were both under investigation, but Liddell was gaining confidence that Fuchs was ‘their man’. (Peierls had come under suspicion in August since he also had a sister in the United States, but he was soon eliminated from the inquiry.)

OnNovember 28, Liddell noted that he was still thinking in terms of findinganother job for Fuchs, and on December 5, he tried to convince Perrin that thechances of a conviction were remote, saying that ‘efforts should be made toexplore the ground for alternative work’. At a meeting to discuss Fuchs onDecember 15, 1949 (see Close, p 255), Perrin ‘commented that Herbert Skinnerwas about to move to Liverpool University, and that a transfer of Fuchs toLiverpool might be arranged through Skinner, who would probably welcome Fuchs’presence there.’ (Perrin was presumably unaware then of the Erna Skinner-KlausFuchs liaison.) It seems that the notion of parking Fuchs specifically at LiverpoolUniversity was first aired at this time. (Note that this is exactly the same date whenMI5 learned about Pontecorvo from the FBI.) When Jim Skardon managed to getFuchs to make a partial confession on December 21, Liddell was still considering finding him ‘some job at someUniversity compatible with his qualifications’.

After another interrogation of Fuchs, onDecember 30, Liddell met the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, on January 2,1950, and informed him of MI5’s resolve to complete the interrogations. EvenLord Portal (head of Atomic Energy at the Ministry of Supply) was in general harmony,although reportedly bearing the more cautious opinion that ‘the security riskof maintaining FUCHS at Harwell could not be accepted, and that some postshould be found for him at one of the Universities’. Attlee seemed ready toaccept Portal’s recommendation. Yet two important players had yet to be broughinto the plot: co*ckcroft and Skinner.

Whenco*ckcroft became involved, matters took an alarmingly different turn. co*ckcroftasked Skinner, on January 4, whether he could find a place for Fuchs atLiverpool. This would suggest that, unless a deep feint was being played,Skinner was not aware of the clandestine efforts to dispose of Fuchs, as hisdepositions to Liverpool had hitherto been made with Pontecorvo in mind.Skinner must surely have been bemused, and must have asked why such a step wasbeing considered. co*ckcroft probably said more than he should have. (co*ckcrofthad the irritating habit of concealing his opinions in meetings with hissubordinates, and then showing disappointment when his intentions were notread, but then talking too much in one-on-one conversations.) On January 10, co*ckcroft met with Fuchs andSkinner, separately. co*ckcroft told Fuchs ‘that he would help him find auniversity post and suggested that Professor Skinner might be able to takeFuchs on at Liverpool’. It also reinforces the fact that co*ckcroft had not beenbrought into the Pontecorvo affair. Astonishingly, all the time up until March1, Skinner was negotiating with Pontecorvo and Mountford behind co*ckcroft’sback, while co*ckcroft was pressing Skinner (up until Fuchs’s confession onJanuary 24) to place Fuchs at Liverpool without bringing Skinner into the fullpicture.

Whether Skinner learned about co*ckcroft’s offerto Fuchs from co*ckcroft or Erna is not clear, but MI5 reported that Skinnerlearned ‘considerably more about the Fuchs affair than he is authorized to know’,and (as Close writes), ‘in consequence decided to take steps to ensure thatFuchs stayed at Harwell’. Given the circ*mstances, this was not surprising.Skinner already had been promoting Pontecorvo’s case, and because of Erna,would surely have preferred that Fuchs stayed at Harwell. So much for Skinneras the enabler of graceful retirement, but he had been placed in an impossibleposition. He had been thrust into the middle of thesenegotiations, perhaps reluctantly. In the course of one month (January 1950),co*ckcroft applied pressure on him to accept Fuchs at Liverpool, Skinner nextprivately tried to talk Fuchs out of the move, and then, even before Fuchs madehis confession, Skinner met with Mountford and Pontecorvo to consider aposition for Pontecorvo at the University. It did not appear that his bosses atHarwell and the Ministry of Supply were behaving very sensitively to his ownneeds. At the same time, they were very anxious to make sure that Skinner keptto himself anything he may have learned about the predicament that Fuchs – andthe authorities – were in.

Herealso occurred the highly questionable incident of ‘inducement’, highlighted by NancyThorndike Greenspan in her recent biography of Fuchs, whereby co*ckcroftessentially offered Fuchs a free pass if he co-operated, stressing that therecent appointment of Fuchs’s father to a position in East Germany made Klaus’semployment at Harwell untenable. co*ckcroft also famously suggested thatAdelaide University might be an alternative home, a suggestion which left DickWhite and Percy Sillitoe aghast. Adelaide University happened to be the almamater of Mark Oliphant, who had been a colleague of Peierls at Birmingham, andhad also worked on isotope separation at Berkeley. (These connections go deep.)Oliphant’s biographical record suggests that he returned to Australia after thewar, yet he is recorded by Mountford as attending the fateful meeting inJanuary 1949 to decide on Skinner as Chadwick’s successor. No ground appearedto have been prepared for this idea, and the incident, while suggesting co*ckcroft’spolitical naivety, also hints that Oliphant had been brought into thediscussions some time before. MI5 struggled with the challenge of trying tocoordinate the roles of Arnold, Skinner and co*ckcroft, all with differentneeds, perspectives, and all being granted only a partial side of the story.

OnJanuary 11, Liverpool University decided to recommend the establishment of asecond chair in Physics: perhaps Mountford was not yet aware that he was aboutto face two candidates for one position. On January 18, Skinner broughtPontecorvo up for a meeting with Mountford. Then some of the pressure wasrelieved. On January 24, Fuchs made a full confession to Jim Skardon, in thefourth interrogation. He was arrested on February 2, sent to trial, andsentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment on March 1. For a while, LiverpoolUniversity was saved the embarrassment of being forced to accept one dangerouscommunist spy in its faculty. What Adelaide University thought about all this (ifthey were indeed consulted) is probably unrecorded.

• HerbertSkinner at Harwell

I wrote about Skinner’s enigmatic career in the second installment of The Mysterious Affair at Peierls. He had enjoyed a distinguished war record, both in Britain in the USA, and merited his appointment as co*ckcroft’s deputy at Harwell, where he was apparently a very hard and productive worker. Yet he had some facets to his character and lifestyle that raised security questions – not least the fact that he had married Erna, an Austrian born in Czernowitz, who socialized with openly communist friends. (The unconventional lives and habits of the Skinners assuredly deserve some special study of their own.) Despite their background, it appears (unless some files have been withheld) that MI5 began keeping record on the pair only towards the end of 1949, even though Erna had for a while maintained frequent social contact with her Red friends, including Tatiana Malleson. The statements that Skinner made, when later questioned by MI5, that protested innocence, could be interpreted as the honest claims of a loyal civil servant, or the obvious cover of a collaborator in subversion. (That is the Moura Budberg ploy with H. G. Wells, who, when asked by ‘Aitchgee’ whether she was a spy, told him that, whether she were a spy or not, she would have to answer ‘No.’)

Moreover,Erna was carrying on an affair with Fuchs, taking advantage of Herbert’sfrequent absences when he was splitting his time between Liverpool and Harwell,but also acting brazenly when her husband was around. In the last months of 1949, the Erna-Klausrelationship was allowed to thrive. As Close writes (Trinity, p 244):“Because Erna’s husband, Herbert, was in the process of transferring fromHarwell to take up a professorship at the University of Liverpool, he wasfrequently away from the laboratory, so there were many empty hours for Erna,which she would pass with Fuchs.” If they were not aware of it before, MI5could not avoid the evidence when they started applying phone-taps to Fuchs’sand the Skinners’ telephones. Skinner was thus a security risk himself.

Skinner,who had known Fuchs since their Bristol days, also made some bizarre andcontradictory statements about Fuchs’s allegiances, at one time, in 1952,admitting that he had known that Fuchs was an ardent communist when at Bristol,but did not think it significant ‘when he found Fuchs at Harwell’, havingearlier criticised MI5 for allowing Fuchs to be recruited at the Department ofAtomic Energy. On June 28, 1950, when Skardon interviewed Skinner about Fuchs,the ex-Special Branch officer reported his response as following: “Dr. Skinnerwas somewhat critical of M.I.5 for having allowed Fuchs, a known Communist, tobe employed on the development of Atomic Energy, saying that when they firstmet the man at Bristol in the 1930’s he was clearly a Communist and aparticularly arrogant young pup. He was very surprised to find Fuchs at Harwellwhen he arrived there to take up his post in 1946. Of course I asked Skinnerwhether he had done anything about this, pointing out that we were not psychicand relied upon the loyalty and integrity of senior officers to disclose theirobjections to the employment of junior members of the staff. He accepted thisrebuff.”

Yes,that response was perhaps a bit too pat, rather like Philby’s memoranda to Londonfrom Washington, where he brought attention to Burgess’s spying paraphernalia,and later to Maclean’s possible identity as the Foreign Office spy, as a ployto distract attention from himself. Fuchs ‘clearly a Communist’ – that should perhaps have provoked a strongerreaction, especially with Skinner’s assumed patriotism. But his claim wascertainly fallacious: Skinner’s Royal Society biography makes it clearthat he was busy supervising construction at Harwell in the first half of 1946,substituting for co*ckcroft, who did not arrive until June. Fuchs did not arriveuntil August, and Skinner must have known about his coming arrival, and evenfacilitated it.

Inaddition, early in 1951, after Skinner had moved full-time to Liverpool, Director-GeneralSillitoe wrote to the Chief Constable of Liverpool, asking him to keep an eyeon the Skinners. A Liverpool Police Report was sent to MI5 on May 10,indicating that the Skinners had been active members of the local CommunistParty ‘since they arrived in Liverpool from Harwell almost two years ago’. (Thetiming is awry.) Faulty record-keeping? The wrong targets? A mean-spirited slurby a rival who resented Skinner’s appointment? A reliable report on somefoolish behaviour by the new Professor? Another mystery, but a pattern ofduplicity and subterfuge on his part.

Skinner’sactions are frequently hard to explain. In my recent bulletin on Peierls, Ireported at length on the mysterious meetings that Skinner held with Fuchs inNew York in 1947, when they were attending the Disarmament Conference. Thisepisode was described at length by the FBI, but appears to have been overlooked(if available) by all five of Fuchs’s biographers: Moss (1987), Williams(1987), Rossiter (2014), Close (2019), and Greenspan (2020). More mysteriously,Skinner’s conversations with Fuchs suggested that he had a confidential contactat MI6. Was Skinner perhaps working under cover, gathering information onCommunists’ activities?

Thusit is not surprising that Skinner might not have embraced the prospect ofFuchs’s joining him (and Erna) at Liverpool once his assignments at Harwell hadbeen cleared up. Could he not get that ‘young pup’ out of his life and hismarriage? The record clearly shows that, after Skinner had been instructed byco*ckcroft to show no curiosity in what was going on with the Fuchsinvestigation, Fuchs admitted his espionage to Erna on January 17, after whichshe told her husband. By January 27, Robertson is pointing out that Skinner hasbeen told too much by co*ckcroft (who was not good at handling conflict), andthat Skinner has been trying to persuade Fuchs to stay at Harwell. Thisparticular crisis was held off by the fact that Fuchs had, shortly beforehand,made his full confession to Skardon, and the strategy favoured by White andSillitoe of proceeding to trial began to take firm shape.

Thefiles on the Skinners at the National Archives (KV 2/2080, 2081 & 2082) revealyet more twists, however, indicating that there were questions about Skinnermuch earlier, and also showing a remarkable exchange a couple of years afterthe Pontecorvo and Fuchs incidents, when Skinner naively exposed, to anAmerican publication, the hollowness of the government’s policy.

• Skinner’sRemoval?

We have to face the possibility that Skinner’s move away from Harwell had been planned a long time before. One remarkable minute from J. C. Robertson (B2A), dated July 20, 1950, is written in response to concerns expressed from various quarters about the Skinners’ Communist friends, and includes the following statement: “We agreed that since the SKINNER’s [sic], on their own admission, have Communist friends, they may share these friends [sic] views, and that Professor SKINNER’s removal from Harwell to Liverpool University should not therefore be a ground for the Security Service ceasing to pay them attention.” ‘Removal’ is a highly pejorative term for the process of Skinner’s being appointed to replace the highly-regarded Chadwick. Was this a misunderstanding on Robertson’s part as to why Skinner was leaving? Was it simply a careless choice of words? Or did it truly reflect that the authorities had decided that Skinner was a liability two years before?

Thesuggestion that Skinner was ‘removed’ might cause us to reflect on thepossibility that Chadwick was encouraged to take up the appointment atCambridge in order to make room for Skinner. What is the evidence? Chadwick wasassuredly an honourable and effective leader of the Tube Alloys contingent inthe USA and Canada. He forged an effective partnership with the formidableGeneral Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, but who was very wary offoreign participation in the exercise. Yet Chadwick became stressed with hisrole, conscience-strung by the enormity of what was being created, and notalways being tough enough with potential traitors.

Chadwickhad made some political slip-ups on the way. He had been criticised by MarkOliphant for not being energetic enough in the USA, he had provided a reference for Alan Nunn Mayfor a position at King’s College Londonjust before Nunn May was arrested, and, in a statement that perturbed many, hewould later openly express his approval of Nunn May’s motives, while saying hedid not support what his friend did. He had also given support to thequestionable Rotblat when the latter announced his bizarre plan to parachuteinto Poland. He had appointed another scientist with a questionable background,Herbert Fröhlich, just before his departure from Liverpool. Moreover, while hehad openly supported co*ckcroft’s appointment, he was not overall happy with theseparation of R & D from production of nuclear energy. He and co*ckcroftwere both building cyclotrons, and thus rivals, but co*ckcroft was gaining morefunding. Rotblat told Chadwick that Harwell was offering larger salaries. Thefeud over budgets simmered in the two short years (1946-1948) while Chadwickwas at Liverpool.

Hewas reluctant to leave Liverpool, Mountford reported, even though he was admittedlyan exhausted figure by then. His staff did not want him to leave, either, andhe maintained excellent relations with Mountford himself. By 1948, Perrin – whor*ported to the strict and disciplined Lord Portal at the Ministry of Supply – andMI5 were following through Prime Minster Attlee’s instructions to tighten up oncommunist infiltration, as the Soviet Union’s intentions in Eastern Europebecame more threatening. Thus installing co*ckcroft’s number two at Liverpoolwould have allowed the removal of a competent leader who had made anembarrassing choice of wife, place an ally of co*ckcroft’s at the rivalinstitution, and set up a function that could assimilate unwanted leftists fromHarwell. Overall, co*ckcroft trusted Skinner, who had worked for him veryeffectively on radar testing in the Orkneys at the beginning of the war, but hehad to be made to understand that Skinner’s wife’s friends were a problem.

Thus,if Chadwick was pushed out to make room for Skinner, what finally prompted theauthorities to eject him? It looks as if Liddell, White and Perrin were pullingthe strings, not co*ckcroft. Arnold, the security officer, stated in October1951 that Fuchs’s close relationship with Erna Skinner had started at the endof 1947. November 1947 was the month that the three of them were in New York. Theinjurious FBI report may have been sent to MI5, but subsequently buried. Thus MI5officers, already concerned about Fuchs’s reliability, might in early 1948 haveseen Skinner as a liability as well, arranged the deal with Perrin andOliphant, convinced Chadwick (who had, of course, moved on by then) of Skinner’ssuperior claim over Rotblat and Fröhlich, and set the slow train in motion. Itwas probably never explained to co*ckcroft what exactly what was going on.

Itis possible that MI5 had seen the problem of disposing of possible Sovietagents coming some time before. Chapman Pincher had announced, in the DailyExpress in March 1948, that the British counter-espionage service had beeninvestigating three communist scientists at Harwell. This triad did not includeFuchs or Pontecorvo, however, since two months later Pincher reported that allthree had been fired. In a memo written in August 1953, when Skinner was insome trouble over a magazine article [see next section], R. H. Morton ofC2A in MI5, having sought advice from one of MI5’s solicitors, ‘S.L.B.’(actually B. A. Hill of Lincoln’s Inn), stated that ‘The Ministry of Supplyshould be asked whether Skinner was ever in a position to know during the Fuchsinvestigation that although we knew Fuchs was a spy, he was allowed to continueat Harwell for a time’.

Thisis an irritatingly vague declaration, since ‘for a time’ could mean ‘for a fewweeks’ or ‘for a few years’, or anything in between. Yet it specifically states ‘was a spy’, not‘was under suspicion because he was a communist’. According to the releasedarchives, that recognition did not occur until September 1949. If the solicitorand the officer were aware of the rules of the game, and the impossibility of immediateremoval or prosecution, they might have been carelessly hinting at earlierundisclosed events, and that the Ministry of Supply had initiatedstables-cleaning moves that took an inordinate amount of time to complete.

• Skinner’s Ventures into Journalism

Herbert Skinner later drew a lot of unwelcome attention to himself in two articles that he wrote for publication. In August 1952, John co*ckcroft invited him to review Alan Moorehead’s book, The Traitors (a volume issued as a public relations exercise by MI5) for a periodical identified as Atomic Scientists’ News (in fact, more probably the American Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). And in June 1953, Skinner published an article in the same Bulletin, titled ‘Atomic Energy in Post-War Britain’. In both pieces he betrayed knowledge that was embarrassing to MI5.

Hewas sagacious enough to send a draft of his book review to Henry Arnold onSeptember 18, 1952, in particular seeking confirmation of the fact that Fuchs’sconfession to Skardon occurred in two stages, and to verify his impression thatthe information that came from Sweden in March of 1950 applied only to Mrs.Pontecorvo. He wrote: “But I know K confessed to Erna about the Diff. Plant aday or two prior to Jan. 19^th (the date when he was considered forthe Royal Society. This is confidential but did you know it?)” Skinner feltthat Moorehead’s account had been telescoped, and wanted to correct it. As forthe communication from Sweden, Skinner based his recollection on what co*ckcrofthad told him, expressing the opinion that, since Pontecorvo had spent so littletime in Stockholm, it was unlikely that data had been gathered about him.

Theinitial response from MI5 was remarkably light. Skardon (B2A) cast doubt on theearlier January 17 confession, and suggested that the claim should be followedup with Mrs. Skinner. His boss, J. C. Robertson, was however a bit moredemanding, requesting, in a reply to Arnold dated September 24, that an entireparagraph, about Fuchs’s confessions, and the pointers to a leakage arrivingfrom the USA, be removed. [The complete text of the draft review is available inKV 2/2080.] He added: “I understand that you will yourself be pointing out toSKINNER the undesirability of making any reference to the report from Stockholmwhich he quotes at the bottom of Page 9 of his manuscript.”

Thislatter observation was a bit rich and ingenuous. All that Skinner did wasattempt to clarify a statement made by Moorehead about the Swedish report, andMoorehead had obviously been fed that information by MI5. Moorehead’s text (pp184-185) runs as follows: “Indeed Pontecorvo was not persona grata anylonger, for early in March a report upon him had arrived from Sweden and thisreport made it clear that not only Pontecorvo but Marianne as well was aCommunist.” Moorehead went on to write that ‘there was nothing to support thisin England or Canada [or the USA?], but it was evident that he wouldhave to be closely watched’. Here was an implicit admission that MI5 had blownits cover by allowing Moorehead to see this information. MI5 wanted to bury allthe intelligence about Pontecorvo that had come in from the USA, and Robertsonclearly wanted to distract attention away from Sweden, too. The Ministry ofSupply also issued a sharp admonition that the item about Sweden in Moorehead’sbook should never have passed censorship. One wonders what Clement Attleethought about this anomaly.

Theoutcome was that Skinner had to make a weird admission of error. First of all,he agreed that he found Moorehead’s mentioning of the Swedish reference ‘unfortunate’,but insisted that he was not in error over Erna’s distress call to him on the 17^th,after Fuchs had confessed to her. This prompted Arnold to raise his game, andtry to talk Skinner out of submitting the review entirely, as he was usingpersonal information from his role at Harwell, and it would raise ‘a hornet’snest’ of publicity. He even suggested to Skinner, after lunching with him andErna, that his memory of dates must be at fault. Even though no statement tothat effect is on file, Robertson noted on October 30 that Skinner ‘has nowadmitted that he may have been mistaken’. (But recall Robertson’s statement ofJanuary 27, described above, which indicated that Skinner had already tried toconvince Fuchs to stay at Harwell.) Robertson added that ‘we have never beenvery happy about Mrs. SKINNER, who was of course FUCHS’ mistress’, butannounced that MI5 no longer need to interview her about the matter. Robertsonalluded to the fact that MI5’s own records pointed to the absence of anyevidence of any ‘confession’ by Fuchs to Mrs. Skinner, but how such an eventwould even have been known about, let alone recorded, was not explained.

Itappears that, after this kerfuffle, the review was not in fact published, butco*ckcroft and Skinner did not learn any lessons from the exercise. In the June1953 issue of the Bulletin appeared a piece titled ‘Atomic Energy inPostwar Britain’. The article started, rather dangerously, with the words: “Ithink that I, who was a Deputy Director at Harwell from 1946 to 1950, am by nowsufficiently detached to write my own ideas without these being confused withthe British official point of view.” Skinner went on to lament the decline incooperation between the USA and Great Britain, although he openly attributedpart of the blame to the Nunn May and Fuchs cases. But he then made anextraordinarily ingenuous and provocative statement: “It is true that we havehad on our hands more than our fair share of dangerous agents who have beencaught (or who are known).”

Whatcould he have been thinking? Sure enough, the Daily Mail ScienceCorrespondent J. Stubbs Walker picked up Skinner’s sentence in a short piecedescribing how Britain was attempting to convince Washington that its securitymeasures were at least as good as America’s. Equally predictably, the MI5solicitor B. A. Hill was rapidly introduced to the case, and, naturally, drewthe conclusion that Skinner’s words implied that there were other agents known,but not yet prosecuted, at Harwell. He thus asked Arnold, in a meeting withSquadron Leader Morton (C2A), whether Skinner had read Kenneth de Courcy’s IntelligenceDigest, since de Courcy (a notorious rabble-rouser who was a constant thornin MI5’s flesh) had made a similar statement in the Digest of thepreceding March that ‘there were still two professors employed at Harwell whowere sending Top Secret information to the Soviet Union’.

Fortunatelyfor his cause, Skinner had written to the Daily Mail to explain what hewrote, and how it should have been interpreted. (He assumed that Stubbs Walker musthave picked up his statement from the UK publication, the Atomic Scientists’News, which published the same text in July, but, while the archivecontains all the pages of the issue of the American periodical, it does nototherwise refer to the UK publication.) “The parenthesis was simply put in tocover the case of Pontecorvo,” he wrote, “and I would like to make it clearthat I have no knowledge whatever of any other agents not convicted.” It was aclumsy attempt at exculpation: the syntax of the phase ‘who are known’ clearlyindicates a plurality.

Yetwhat was more extraordinary is that, again, Skinner had written the article atthe request of the hapless co*ckcroft, ‘who read the article before it wasdespatched’. Moreover, a copy also was sent to Lord Cherwell’s office, and anacknowledgment indicated that ‘Lord Cherwell had read the majority of thearticle’. Perhaps Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s wartime scientific adviser, and in1953 Paymaster-General, now responsible for atomic matters, should have readthe article from beginning to end. Perhaps he read all he was given, becauseSkinner was able to produce a letter from Cherwell at the end of August,indicating that he had no comments. Yet what was sent to Cherwell was a ‘draftof the first half of the paper’. The offending phrase did indeed appear nearthe beginning of the article: Skinner was given a slap on the wrists, and sentaway. Whether co*ckcroft was rebuked is unknown. A revealing note in Skinner’sfile, dated June 12, 1953, reports that co*ckcroft would probably be leavingHarwell soon, to replace Sir Lawrence Bragg as head of the ClarendonLaboratory. Morton notes: “Rumoursindicate Skinner in the running to replace him. Arnold considers this mostundesirable ‘for obvious reasons’.” But it is an indication that Skinner stillregarded his sojourn at Liverpool as temporary, and wanted to return to replaceco*ckcroft.

TheMI5 solicitor made an unusual error of judgment himself, however. In thatinitial memorandum of August 12, when he had evidently discussed the matterwith some MI5 officers, he included the following: “On the other hand it wasnot generally thought [note the bureaucratic passive voice] that when hewrote the article he was in fact quoting DE COURCY, but rather that he had inmind cases such as Boris DAVIDSON, and what he really meant to say was thatthere were persons at Harwell who were suspected of being enemy agents but hadnot yet been prosecuted, though they were suspected of acting as enemy agents.”That was an unlawyerly and clumsy construction – and it should have beenDAVISON, not DAVIDSON – but the implication is undeniable. ‘Cases such as BorisDAVIDSON’ clearly indicates a nest of infiltrators. And I shall complete thisanalysis with a study of the Davison case.

• BorisDavison – from Leningrad to Harwell

The files on Boris Davison at the National Archives comprise nine chunky folders (KV 2/2579-1, -2 and -3, and KV 2/2580 to KV 2/2585), stretching from 1943 to 1954. They constitute an extraordinary untapped historical asset, and merit an article on their own. (Equally astonishing is that Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 has only a short paragraph – but no Index entry – on Davison, and nothing about him appears in Chapman Pincher’s Treachery, when Pincher himself was responsible, at the time, for revealing uncomfortable information on Davison’s removal in the Daily Express.) I shall therefore just sum up the story here, concentrating on the aspects of his case that relate to espionage and British universities, and how his convoluted story relates to the problems of dealing with questionable employees in confidential government work.

Davison’spilgrimage to Harwell is even more picaresque than that of Fuchs or Pontecorvo.Boris’s great-grandfather, who was English, had gone to Russia, accompanied byhis Scottish wife, in Czarist times to work as a train-driver in Leningrad.They returned to Rugby for the birth of Boris’s grandfather, James (the birthcertificate alarmingly states that he was born ‘at Rugby Station’), who wastaken back to Russia at the age of two months, in 1851. James married aRussian, and their child Boris was born in Gorki as a British subject, in 1885.The older Boris married a Russian, and the younger Boris was born in 1908. Hestudied Mathematics at Leningrad University, and graduated in 1930 with anequivalent B.SC. degree.

Davisonthereupon worked for the State Hydrological Institute, but, in trying to renewhis British passport, he was threatened by the NKVD. Unwilling to give up hisnationality, he applied to leave for the United Kingdom in 1938, and wasgranted a visa. He made his journey to the UK, and succeeded, through hisacquaintance with Rear-Admiral Claxton (whom he had met in the Crimea), to gainemployment in 1939 at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, workingon wind-tunnel calculations. A spell of tuberculosis in 1941 forced hisdeparture from RAE, but, after a year or so in a sanatorium, Rudolf Peierlsadopted him for his Tube Alloys project at Birmingham, working for theDepartment of Scientific and Industrial Research. (Avid conspiracy theorists, agroup of which I am certainly not a member, might point out that Roger Holliswas also in a sanatorium during the summer of 1942, being treated fortuberculosis.) Davison joined Plazcek at Chalk River in Canada, alongside NunnMay and Pontecorvo early in 1945, and, on his return to Britain in September1947, worked under Fuchs at Harwell, as Senior Principal Scientific Officer.

Thesuspicions of, and subsequent inquiries into, Fuchs and Pontecorvo provokedsimilar questions about Davison’s loyalties, and he was placed under intensescrutiny in 1951, after Pontecorvo’s defection. In a letter to A. H. Wilson ofBirmingham University, written from an unidentifiable location (probably theBritish mission in New York) on May 3, 1944, Rudolf Peierls had written thatDavison’s ‘best place would be at Y [almost certainly Los Alamos]provided he would be acceptable there, of which I am not yet sure.’ Davison’srecords at Kew state that he was sent to Los Alamos for a short while at the beginningof 1945, but indicate that the New Mexico air had not been suitable forDavison’s tubercular condition, and he had to return to Montreal. It is moreprobable that Davison’s origins and career would have been regarded negativelyby the Americans. (Mountain air was at that timeconsidered beneficial for consumptives.) In his memoir, Peierls alsoclaimed that ‘Placzek wanted Boris to accompany him to Los Alamos,but the doctors doubted whether Boris’s health would stand the altitude. Hewent there on a trial basis, but after a few weeks had to return to Montreal.’

Inany case, Davison was considered a very valuable asset, especially by co*ckcroft,who declared that Davison ‘knew more about the mathematical theory behind theAtomic Bomb than any other scientist outside America.’ Nevertheless, orpossibly because of that fact, MI5’s senior officers recommended in the winterof 1950-1951 that he should be transferred ‘to a university’. They wereoverruled, however, by Prime Minster Clement Attlee, who decreed that he shouldbe allow to stay in place. MI5 continued to watch Davison carefully, but when aConservative administration returned to power in October 1951, questions wereasked more vigorously, and Davison was eventually forced to leave Harwell,after some very embarrassing leaks to the Press, and some unwelcome questionsfrom the US Embassy. Hearing about the investigations, they would no doubt havebeen alarmed that Davison was another who had slipped through securityprocedures: the Los Alamos visit becomes more relevant. Davison joinedBirmingham University in September 1953, and a year later found a position in Canada,whither his wife, Olga (whom he had met and married in Canada), wanted toreturn. He died in 1961.

Thisbarebones outline (derived from various records in the Davison archive)conceals a number of twists, and raises some searching questions. I have beenporing over the reports, letters and memoranda in the archive, and discoveredsome surprising anomalies and missteps. My conclusion is that MI5’s approach toDavison was highly flawed, and I break it down as follows:

1. Lack of rigour in tracking Davison’s establishment in the UK: MI5 never investigatedhow he passed through immigration, how he provided for himself in the monthsafter he arrived in 1938, how he was able to apply successfully for a sensitiveposition with the Royal Aeronautical Establishment, how he was allowed to joinPeierls’s project supporting Tube Alloys at Birmingham without any vetting, orhow he was allowed to join the Manhattan Project in America. He was teased at the RAE because of his poorEnglish, and nicknamed ‘Russki’. An occasional question was posed about theseunresolved questions, but it appears that the mere holding of a Britishpassport was an adequate qualification for the authorities.
2. Failure to join the dots: When Peierls was viewed as a possible suspectalongside Fuchs in the autumn of 1949, MI5 might have pursued thePeierls-Davison connection. Peierls claimed in his autobiography Bird ofPassage that Davison’s name had been sent to him from ‘the centralregister’ after Davison completed his spell in a sanatorium, although the eventis undated. Peierls then recruited Davison. I can find no record of any suchcommunication. There is no evidence that Peierls was ever interviewed overDavison’s entry to the Tube Alloys project, or that MI5 explored potentialcommonalities in the experiences of Genia Peierls and Davison in dealing withthe Soviet authorities. In Bird of Passage, Peierls completelymisrepresented the authorities’ inquiry into Davison’s reliability, suggestingthat it did not get under way until 1953.
3. Ignorance of Stalin’s Methods: MI5 displayed a shocking naivety about themethods of the NKVD. Davison was a distinguished scientist, as the authorisedhistorian of atomic energy, Margaret Gowing, and John co*ckcroft both declared.Rather than allow such a person on specious ‘nationalist’ grounds to leave thecountry to abet the ideological enemy, Stalin would have probably confiscatedhis UK passport, and forced him to work for the Communist cause. MI5 had failedto listen to Krivitsky, or gather information on the experiences of otherscientists ‘expelled’ from the Soviet Union. Instead they trusted Davison’saccount of his ‘refusal’ to take Soviet citizenship, even though he gaveconflicting accounts of what happened.
4. Naivety over NKVD Aggression: One of the experiences related by Davison toMI5 was that, when his passport problem came up, he was asked by his NKVDinterrogators to spy on his colleagues at Leningrad University. He declined onthe grounds that he was too clumsy to conceal such behaviour, a response thatprovoked the wrath of his interrogator. Such disobedience would normally have resultedin execution or, at least, exile to Siberia. Yet Davison was ‘rewarded’ by suchnon-compliance by being allowed to emigrate to his grandfather’s native land,and spread the news. That sequence should have aroused MI5’s suspicions.
5. Delayed recognition of the threats of‘blackmail’: A refrain in the archived proceedings isthat Moscow would have been alerted to Davison’s presence at Harwell byPontecorvo’s defection in the autumn of 1950, and that only then would Davisonhave been possibly subject to threats. For that reason, his correspondence withhis parents in the Crimea (itself a noteworthy phenomenon from the censorshipangle) was studiously inspected for coded messages and secret writing. MI5failed to recognize that the threats to his family would probably have beeninitiated before Davison was sent on his mission, in the manner that thePeierlses were threatened. (That is an enduring technique: it is reported asbeing used today by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.) Since MI5 andthe Harwell management realised that Communists had been installed at Harwellfor a while, it was probable that the fact of Davison’s recruitment would havereached Soviet ears already. They ignored the fact that his working closely with Fuchs,Pontecorvo and Nunn May meant he would not have needed a separate courier, but theyexpressed little curiosity in how he would have communicated with Moscow afterFuchs’s imprisonment.
6. Unawarenessof the role of subterfuge: MI5 spent an enormous amount oftime and effort exploring Davison’s contacts and political leanings, lookingfor a trace of sympathy for communism that might point to his being a securityrisk. They even, rather improbably, cited the testimony of Klaus Fuchs from gaol,Fuchs vouching for Davison’s reliability, and quoted this item of evidence tothe Americans! Yet, if Davison had been a communist, he would probably havepreferred to stay in the Soviet Union, helping its cause, rather than taking ona role in provoking the revolution overseas, something for which his temperamentwas highly unsuited. Even if the lives of his parents had not been threatened,his most effective disguise would have been to steer clear of any communistgroups or associations.
7. Clumsyhandling of their target: MI5 and Harwell – and, especially,John co*ckcroft – showed a dismal lack ofimagination and tact in dealing with Davison. co*ckcroft was weak, wanted tohang on to Davison because of his skills, and avoided awkward confrontationalsituations. They failed to develop an effective strategy in guiding Davison’sbehaviour, and co*ckcroft, when trying to encourage Davison to leave Harwell,even suggested that he was entitled to have a government job back after hisone-year ‘sabbatical’, because of his civil servant status. Between them,Harwell and MI5 deluded themselves as to how the account of a Russian-bornscientist expelled from Harwell would manage not to be re-ignited, through idlegossip, or careless bravado (as turned out to be the case).
8. Simplisticviews of loyalty: MI5’s perennial problem was that it didnot trust ‘foreigners’, and had no mechanism for separating the loyal anddedicated alien from the possibly dangerous subversive, or taking seriously thepossible disloyalty of a well-bred native Briton. Davison fitted in to noestablished category, and thus puzzled them. In his letter to Prime MinsterAttlee of January 12, 1951, as Attlee was just about to make his decision as towhether Davison should remain in place, or be banished to a university, PercySillitoe wrote that ‘analien or a person of alien origin has not necessarily enjoyed the upbringingwhich, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, normally ensures the loyaltyof a British subject’, a sentiment that Attlee echoed a weeklater. Four months later, Burgess and Maclean defected.

MI5were not happy with Attlee’s decision, wanting Davison safely transferred toacademia. They were worried stiff that, if any action were taken, Davison‘might do a Pontecorvo on us’, and that in that case closer cooperation withthe Americans – an objective keenly sought at the time – would be killed by theCongressional committee. They thus hoped that matters would quieten down, andthat Davison would behave himself. Yet a meeting held in February 1951 with thePrime Minister provoked the following minute: “Rowlands, Sillitoe and Bridgesagreed there should be discussion on the proposition that Davison should beasked what his reactions would be if the Russians brought pressure on himthrough his parents. If approach were made, Davison would mark it as a mark ofconfidence in his own reliability.” What the outcome of this strange decisionwas is not recorded, but the threat to MI5’s peace of mind would turn out tocome from friendlier quarters.

• BorisDavison – after Attlee

Attlee made his decision on February 20, 1951. Sillitoe requested a watch be kept on the Skinners in Liverpool. Meanwhile, MI5 officers had a short time to reflect on Davison’s background. Dick White wondered who the other ‘Britishers’ who were deported at the same time as Davison were, and what had happened to them. (Whether this important lead was followed up is not known: the results might have been so uncomfortable that the outcome was buried.) Yet Reed was later imaginative enough to wonder how Davison ‘was able to survive the purges and outbreaks of xenophobia’, suggesting perhaps that further lessons had been learned. “What services were rendered in exchange for immunity?”, he asked, but there the inquiry ended, for 1951 turned out to be an annus horribilis for the Security Service, as the uncovering of the Burgess & Maclean scandal showed the authorities that espionage and treachery were not simply a virus introduced by foreigners. For a while it distracted attention from the quandary of suspicions persons in place at Harwell.

Bythat time, however, a series of events began that showed the Law of UnintendedConsequences at work. In February, Chapman Pincher had written a provocativearticle about Pontecorvo in the Daily Express, and on March 4 RebeccaWest had published an article about Fuchs, critical of Attlee, in the NewYork Times. Perrin and Sillitoe agreed that a counterthrust in publicrelations was required, and conceived the idea of engaging the journalist AlanMoorehead to write a book that would reflect better on MI5’s performance. Aftersome stumbles in negotiation, Moorehead was authorized to inspect someconfidential information on September 24, and started work.

Theyear 1952 progressed relatively quietly. John co*ckcroft had revealed to Skinnerin early 1951 that he was considering recommending the South African Basil Schonlandas his successor, and was perhaps surprised to be told by Skinner thatSchonland was not up to the job. This was surely another indication thatSkinner felt himself the better candidate, and wanted to return to Harwell nowthat Fuchs and Pontecorvo were disposed of. A possible opening for co*ckcroftappeared in March 1952 at St. John’s College, Oxford, but nothing came of it.On July 29, Sillitoe announced he would retire at the end of the year. InAugust, Davison indicated for the first time that he wanted to leave Harwell.And in September, as I described earlier, Skinner’s controversial review ofMoorehead’s finished work The Traitors came to the attention of Arnoldand MI5.

Whilethe Moorehead incident was smoothed over relatively safely, Skinner’s energiesas a literary critic had more serious after-effects in 1953. First of all, NunnMay had been released in January, an event that brough fresh attention to thephenomenon of ‘atom spies’. As Guy Liddell reported on January 13, ForeignSecretary Anthony Eden wanted Nunn May settled into useful employment, but thescientist was blacklisted by the universities. (After working for a scientificinstruments company for a few years, Nunn May moved to the University of Ghanain 1961.) Skinner’s observation about other spies being left in place,unpunished, was a far more serious blow to MI5’s reputation, and his weakexplanation that he was referring solely to Pontecorvo was not convincing.Privately, he admitted that he had indeed been referring to Davison.

Whatwas not revealed at the time was the fact that other such agents had been namedin internal documents. One of the Boris Davison files at the National Archives(KV 2/2579-1, s.n.184A) shows us that Dick White, as early as January 25, 1951,wrote that there were eighteen known employees at Harwell ‘who have some sortof a Communist suspicion attaching to them’.Of these, five were serious. He continued: “Two of the five, SHULMAN andRIGG are being transferred from Harwell on our recommendation. In the case of athird, DARLINGTON, we may recommend transfer and so this will almost certainlybe agreed. The remaining two, PAIGE and CHARLESBY, are under activeinvestigation and if additional information tends to confirm that they haveCommunist sympathies we may have to recommend their transfer likewise.”

Thisis an extraordinary admission. I have not discovered anything elsewhere onthese characters, although I notice that the first three are cited in the KewIndex as working at Harwell, as authors or co-authors of papers, in AB 15/73,AB 15/2383, AB 15/566, AB 15/586, AB 15/1661 and AB 15/1386 (N. Shulman), AB 15/1254(M. Rigg), AB 15/5531 (M. E. Darlington). Astonishingly, all three papers arecurrently closed, pending review. [Moreover, during the few days in which Iinvestigated these items, they were being maintained and their descriptionschanged. The author of AB 15/24, original given as ‘Rigg’, is now given as‘Oscar Bunnemann’ [sic], which, in the light of revelations below, posesa whole new set of questions. Can any reader shed any light on these men?]Yet it proves that Skinner was correct, and knew too much. And one another linkhas come to light. As early as July 12, 1948 T. A. R. Robertson had discoveredthat Davison and one Eltenton were in Leningrad at the same time, noting thatEltenton was already up for an ‘interview’. (The word ‘interrogated’ has beenreplaced with a handwritten ‘interviewed’ in the memorandum.) The story ofGeorge Eltenton, who brought some bad publicity to MI5 through his involvementin the Robert Oppenheimer case in the USA, will have to wait for another day.

Thedenouement was swift. Skinner was let off with a warning, but his goose wasessentially cooked. On August 8, 1952, he thanked Arnold for his support, addingcasually that Chapman Pincher had invited him to lunch. A few weeks later, onAugust 26, Pincher published his article on Davison in the Daily Express,and two days later Henry Maule’s piece in the Empire News reported how‘poor old Boris’ had been banished to the backwaters of Birmingham University,implicitly indicating that Davison was rejoining his prior mentor and supporterRudolf Peierls.

YetMI5’s embarrassments were not over. On December 14, 1952, a brief column bySidney Rodin in the Sunday Express claimed that Churchill had intervenedin the decision to replace Fuchs at Harwell, and explained that Davison hadbeen rejected because of his background, and that six others had been passedover because they were foreign-born. In place (the piece continued), the28-year-old Brian Flowers had been appointed, and ‘for months his backgroundwas checked.’ This announcement was doubly ironic, since it turned out that theleaker to Rodin was Professor Maurice Pryce of the Clarendon Laboratories,Acting Head of the Theoretical Division at Harwell alongside Rudolf Peierls. Hehad admitted planting the story as a way of ’distracting attention away fromthe “undesirable background of the Buneman case”’. Indeed. For Flowers had fora while been having an affair with Mary, the wife of Oscar Buneman, who hadbeen working under Fuchs at Harwell. The future Baron Flowers, who also held apost at Birmingham University, had married his paramour in 1951, and was nowpresumably respectable. Like Fuchs, Buneman had been imprisoned by the Gestapo,escaped to Britain, and been interned in Canada. Maybe MI5 and Arnoldoverlooked this rather seedy side to Flowers’ background: the episode showed atbest a discreditable muddle and at worst appalling hypocrisy at work.

Itwas thus Birmingham, not Liverpool, that became the home of a distressedscientist, one who may never have acquired the status of an official spy, butwho was perhaps a communicator of secret information under duress. A cabal ofLiddell, White and Perrin had plotted, and made moves, without consultingco*ckcroft or Arnold. Skinner never quite realised what was going on, failing toconsider that his wife’s liaisons were a liability, and harboured unfulfillabledesigns about returning to Harwell to replace co*ckcroft. Skinner would remainat Liverpool, unwanted by Harwell, and remaining under suspicion. The loosecannon co*ckcroft did not understand why Skinner had been banished, butconsidered him a useful ally at Liverpool, and naively encouraged him in hisliterary exploits. Fuchs was in gaol:Pontecorvo in Moscow. By the time Davison had transferred to Birmingham, inSeptember 1953, Liddell had resigned from MI5, bitterly disappointed at beingoutmanoeuvred by his protégé, Dick White, for the director-generalship, and hadtaken up a new post – as director of security at AERE Harwell. MI5 stillconsidered Davison on a temporary transfer ‘outhoused’ to Birmingham, but didtheir best to ease his relocation to Canada, perhaps masking his medical problems.Davison died in Toronto in 1961, at the young age of 52, the year afterSkinner’s death. I do not know whether foul play was ever suspected.

In conclusion, it should be noted that Peierls had his vitally significant correspondence with Lord Portal in April 1951, where he responded to accusations about him, and revealed the links with the Soviet Security organs that he had kept concealed for so long. (See The Mysterious Affair at Peierls, Part 1). Had Peierls perhaps discussed the shared matter of NKVD threats to family with his protégé, and ventured to inform MI5 and the Ministry of the predicament that Davison been in? Or, more probably, had Davison confessed to MI5 about how he himself had been threatened, and, as a possible source of ‘the accusations’, drawn Peierls in? Readers should recall that the decision to interview Davison, to ask him about possible threats to his parents, in the belief that such a dialogue might increase Davison’s confidence in them, was projected to have taken place just before then. The timing is perfect: Davison might well have told his interviewers the full story, and brought Peierls into his narrative.

Somany loose ends in the story are left because of the selective process ofcompiling the archive. In 1954, Reed of MI5 referred darkly to a confidentialsource who was keeping them informed of Davison’s negotiations with Canada: likewise,it could well have been Peierls. We shall probably never know exactly whathappened in that 1951 spring, but Portal, previously Air Chief Marshal, was nodoubt shocked by the whole business. He resigned his position at the Ministryof Supply soon afterwards: Perrin left at the same time. And if Moscow haddiscovered that their threats had been unmasked, or that any of their assetshad behaved disloyally, Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks squad would have beenready to move.

1. Conclusions

What should a liberal democracy do when it discovers spies, or potential spies, working within scientific institutions carrying out highly sensitive work? Is the process of removing them quietly to an academic institution a sensible attempt at resolving an apparently intractable problem, given that trials, however open or closed, are a necessary part of the judicial procedure? Torture or oppressive measures cannot be applied to the targets, backed up by other cruel or mortal threats, as was the feature of Stalin’s Show Trials. Perhaps moving awkward employees to a quiet backwater was the most sensible practice to protect the realm without causing undue publicity?

Attlee’s unfortunatelynamed Purge Procedure was provoked by the Nunn May conviction, and a CabinetCommittee on Subversive Activities was set up in May 1947. The topic of theProcedure, which was established in March 1948, and how it was applied, hasbeen covered by Christopher Andrew, in Defend the Realm, pp 382-393. YetI find this exposition starkly inadequate: it concentrates on the discovery ofcommunists within the Civil Service, but barely touches the highly sensitiveissue of possibly disloyal scientists working at a secret institution like AEREHarwell. For reasons of space and time, a proper analysis will have to bedeferred until another report, and I only skim the issue here.

Professor Glees hasinformed me that, during an interview that Dick White gave him in the 1980s(White died in 1993), the ex-chief of MI5 and MI6 impressed upon him ‘the importance of keepingpeople away from where they could do harm’, and that the execution of such apolicy was a key MI5 tool. As a counterbalance, the journalist Richard Deaconinformed us that, in the early 1950s, ‘gone to Ag and Fish’ (the Ministry ofa*griculture, Fisheries and Food) meant that an intelligence operative had ‘goneto ground’. That ministry was the destination for the MI6 agent Alexander Footeafter he had been interrogated. Perhaps he worked alongside civil servants withcommunist leanings who had also been parked there.

I find that statement of policy a little disingenuous on White’spart. For it is one thing to take a discovered Communist off the fast track insome other Ministry and transfer him out to grass sorting out cod quotas withIcelandbeforehe does any damage. And it is quite anotherto take a known or highly suspected spy from a secret institution like AEREHarwell, remove him completely from sensitive work, and transfer him to auniversity a hundred and fifty miles away. Multiple issues come into play: theprocesses of university councils, the creation of posts, preferential treatmentover other candidates, funding, the candidates’ suitability for teaching, languageproblems, relocation concerns, even a wife’s preferences – and the inevitablechatter that accompanies such a disruption.

So what should theauthorities have done in such cases? Civil servants were entitled to a certainmeasure of employment protection, and could not be fired without due cause. Beinga communist was not one of those causes, and Attlee was nervous about left-wingbacklash. The primary challenge to taking drastic action in the case of spies(who were frequently not open communists) thus consisted in the suitability ofthe evidence of guilt, however conclusive. Unless the suspect had been caughtred-handed (as was Dave Springhall, although he was not an academic), or he orshe could quickly be convinced to confess (as was Nunn May), the prosecutionprobably relied on confidential sources. In the case of Fuchs, the source wasVENONA transcripts: the project was considered far too sensitive to bring up incourt, and its validity as hard evidence might have been sorely tested. Evenwith a confession, there were risks associated. A defendant might bring upuncomfortable truths. With little imagination required, Fuchs could surely havebrought up the matter of his inducement by Skardon/co*ckcroft, and he could havehonestly described how he had been encouraged to spy on the Americans whilefurthering British objectives.

Moreover,public trials would draw attention to a security service’s defects:counter-intelligence units are not praised when they haul in spies, but severelycriticised for allowing them to operate in the first place. And if the suspectswere British citizens, and were threatened to the extent that they feltuncomfortable, or could not maintain a living, they could not be prevented fromfleeing abroad at any time (‘doing a Pontecorvo’), and had therefore to beencouraged to feel safe in the country. Thus sending such candidates to a functionalSiberia, in the hope that they would become stale and valueless, yet behaveproperly, came to represent a popular option with the mandarins in MI5 and theMinistries. (On Khrushchev’s accession to power, Molotov was sent to beAmbassador in Mongolia, while Malenkov was despatched to run a power station inKazakhstan. I have not been able to verify the claim that the Russians have aphrase for this – ‘being sent to Liverpool’.)

Yet it was anessentially dishonourable and shoddy business. First of all, unless theauthorities were simply scared about what might happen, it rewarded criminalbehaviour. It discriminated unjustly between those who did not confess andthose who did (Springhall, Nunn May, Fuchs, Blake): we recall that Nunn May wasblacklisted by British universities after his release, while Fuchs, with alittle more resolve, might have spent a few calm years considering where hemight be more content, continuing his liaison with Erna Skinner in Liverpool,or renewing his acquaintance with Grete Keilson in East Germany. The PurgeProcedure allowed suspected civil servants to leave with some measure ofdignity, but the method of transferring suspects to important positions atuniversities represented a deceitful, and possibly illegal, exploitation ofacademic institutions, and consisted in a disservice to undergraduatespotentially taught by these characters. Moreover, there was no guarantee that sucha move would have put the lid on the betrayal of secrets. The Soviets might tryto extradite a suspect (Moscow thought Liverpool was useless as a home forPontecorvo), which, if successful, would have raised even more questions.

Overall, the policy wasconceived in the belief that the suspect would behave like a proper Englishgentleman, but that was no certainty, and there were sometimes wives toconsider (such as Mrs. Pontecorvo.) Latent hypocrisy existed, in (for example)co*ckcroft’s hope that Fuchs and Davison might still help the government’s cause.It was an attempt at back-stairs fixing, and the fact that it was covered-upindicated government embarrassment at the process. They displayed naivety inbelieving that the story would not come out. It was bound to happen, as indeedit did with Davison, although Skinner’s ‘removal’ appears to have beensuccessfully concealed.

(I should also note thata similar process was applied to Kim Philby. He was dismissed from MI6, andmade to feel distinctly uncomfortable, but allowed to pursue a journalisticcareer, again in the belief that his utility to his bosses in Moscow wouldrapidly disintegrate. Yet he had loyal friends still in the Service, and becamean embarrassment. Some historians claim that Dick White allowed him to escape fromBeirut as the least embarrassing option.)

Whatfinal lessons can be learned? The experiences with Fuchs, Pontecorvo andDavison (and to a lesser extent, Skinner) reinforce that fact that MI5 washopelessly unprepared for the challenge of vetting for highly sensitiveprojects. Awarding scientists citizenship does not guarantee loyalty: theOfficial Secrets and Treachery Acts will not deter the committed spy. Stricterchecks at recruitment should have been essential, although they might not haveeliminated the expert dissimulator. Vetting procedures should have beendefended and executed sternly, with no exceptions. Yet MI5 also showed abewilderingly disappointing lack of insight into how the Soviet Union, andespecially the NKVD/KGB, worked, which meant that they were clueless when itcame to assessing an ‘émigré’ like Davison, who fitted into no known category.Until the Burgess-Maclean debacle, they continued to believe in the essentialloyalty of well-educated Britons. They continued to ignore Krivitsky’s warningsand advice, and failed to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union’s domesticpolicies, and strategies for espionage abroad. It should instead have built upa comprehensive dossier of intelligence on the structure and methods of itsideological adversary, as did Hugh Trevor-Roper with the Abwehr, andpromoted a strong message of prevention to its political masters andcolleagues. That opportunity had faded when its sharpest counter-espionageofficer, Jane Archer, was sidelined, and then fired, in 1940.

Theevents surrounding these scientists should surely provide material for a majornovel or Fraynian dramatic work. The linebetween inducement and threats, on the one hand, and careful psychologicalpressure, on the other, could have had vastly different outcomes, and couldperhaps be compared to the treatment of the hom*osexuals Burgess and Turing, andhow the former managed to get away with scandalous behaviour, while the latterwas driven to suicide. Perhaps whatever strategy was tried was flawed, as itwas too late by then, but dumping on universities was undistinguished andhypocritical. Demotion, removal from critical secret work, and removal ofoxygen sent a signal that might have been successful with a more timidcharacter like Davison, but it would not have worked with a showman likePontecorvo.

Thisbusiness of counter-intelligence is tough: MI5 was not a disciplined andruthless machine, but simply another institution with its rivalries, ambitions,flaws, and politics to handle. It was poor at learning from experience, however,and sluggish in setting up policies to deal with the unexpected, insteadspending vast amounts of fruitless time and effort in watching people, andopening correspondence. It thus muddled along, and found itself having to coverup for its missteps, and choosing to deceive the government and the public. Fora long time, the ruse appeared to be successful. Seventy years have passed. Aclose and integrative, horizontal rather than vertical, inspection of thereleased archives, however, complemented by a careful analysis of biographicalrecords, has allowed a more accurate account of the goings-on of 1950 to beassembled.

PrimarySources:

NationalArchives files on Pontecorvo, Fuchs, the Skinners, Davison: the Guy LiddellDiaries

TheMountford memoir at Liverpool University

Britainand Atomic Energy by Margaret Gowing

Half-Lifeby Frank Close

ThePontecorvo Affair by Simone Turchetti

KlausFuchs: A Biography by Norman Moss

KlausFuchs: Atom Spy by Robert Chadwell Williams

TheSpy Who Changed the World by Mike Rossiter

Trinityby Frank Close

AtomicSpyby Nancy Thorndike Greenspan

ElementalGermans by Christopher Laucht

TheAtom Bomb Spies by H. Montgomery Hyde

ScientistSpies by Paul Broda

Birdof Passage by Rudolf Peierls

SirRudolf Peierls, Correspondence, Volume 1 edited by Sabine Lee

co*ckcroftand the Atom by Guy Hartcup & T E Allibone

TheNeutron and the Bomb by Andrew Brown

JosephRotblat, Keeper of the Nuclear Conscience by Andrew Brown

Churchill’sBombby Graham Farmelow

Defend the Realm by Christopher Andrew

(New Commonplace entries can be found here.)

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Literature/Academia, Management/Leadership, Personal, Politics, Science

[This report lays out the detailed arguments behind the recent article in the ‘Mail on Sunday’ that featured research by Professor Glees and me. We claimed that MI6 had engaged upon a reckless exercise to try to manipulate Sonia as some kind of ‘double-agent’, but had been fooled completely by Sonia’s working as a courier for the atom-spy Klaus Fuchs. This piece reproduces and recapitulates some of my earlier research on Sonia, but also presents some new analysis.]

Background and Sources

Thestory starts – probably – in the summer of 1939. One has to qualify many of theSwitzerland-based events in this saga with ‘probably’ because so much of theevidence is provided by Ursula and Len Beurton themselves, who, in theirtestimonies to British immigration officials, told so many lies that it isdifficult to trust anything they said. Moreover, Ursula (agent SONIA) thencompounded the mendaciousness in her GRU-controlled memoir, Sonjas Rapport.We can recognise the first set of untruths because the statements are often self-contradictory,and easily refuted through an examination of the archival record. Many ofSonia’s claims in her book have been shown to be false by simple inspection oftime and space, or by other records that have come to light that show personsshe talks about were simply not where she said they were at the time, or byknowledge of the modus operandi of her employer, the GRU. Yet Sonia’saccount has been cited by numerous historians as if it were a reliable versionof what happened.

Theprimary source for assembling the story is a rich set of files at the UKNational Archives – not just on Sonia, but on her family, the Kuczynskis, andher husband Len Beurton, on the senior International Brigader she recruited forher team in Switzerland, Alexander Foote, and on other Communist agents such asOliver Green, whose exploits reflect usefully on the policies and practices ofMI5. The files on the primary spy for whom Sonia acted as courier, Klaus Fuchs,are also very relevant, as are, to a lesser extent, the Diaries of Guy Liddell,the head of counter-espionage at MI5 at this time. (I have taken one hundredpages of notes from the on-line Diaries, without recording a single referenceto Ursula, Kuczynski, Hamburger, or Beurton. The absence of nocturnal caninelatration, whether because of redaction or by Liddell’s choice, is highlysignificant.) MI6 files are regrettably not available, but correspondencebetween, and memoranda to and from, officers of the Security Service and theSecret Intelligence Service are scattered among the files, as are occasionalitems from the Home Office and the Foreign Office. These records arecomplemented by a variegated set of files concerning the Radio Security Service(RSS), which was responsible for wireless interception in WWII.

Morerecently, some analysts have been promoting the value of files held in Russianarchives, although nearly all of these derive from KGB (State Security) recordsrather than those of the GRU (Military Intelligence), for whom the Beurtonsworked. William Tyrer and Svetlana Chervonnaya (see www.documentstalk.com ),have cited items of relevance, yet the existence of actual documents is hard toverify. What Chervonnaya shows are primarily American, not Soviet documents,and her focus is on American history. Moreover, her website appears to havefallen into disuse in recent times. The Vassiliev Papers, again focussing onKGB matters, are a highly reliable source, and show some important facts aboutSonia, at a time when the KGB was exerting more control over the GRU. They also reveal some interesting informationabout Sonia and her brother after they escaped to East Germany.

Solid literature on Sonia is sparse. Alexander Foote’s memoir, Handbook for Spies, brings some psychologically convincing insights into his time with Sonia in Switzerland, as well as plausible observations on Sonia’s marriage to Len, but we have to recall that the book was ghost-written by MI5’s Courtenay Young. John Green’s 2017 study of the Kuczynski clan, A Political Family, is a useful compendium in some ways, drawing much from Kuczynski family memoirs and interviews, and helping with a few facts, but it contains many errors, and is too adulatory of the family’s ‘fight against capitalism’, thereby side-stepping any awkward anomalies in the records. (For example, he writes of the family’s ‘overall achievements and its contribution to our humanistic legacy’, a statement straight out of the Felix Dzerzhinsky playbook.) I have started to inspect one or two books in Russian: Vladimir Lota’s book on the GRU (cited in last month’s coldspur post) provides convincing proof of the communications of the Rote Drei in Switzerland (although nothing of Sonia’s), and presents photographs of decrypted GRU telegrams. I ordered V.V. Beshanov’s book on Sonia, Superfrau iz GRU on May 3 of this year, but it has not yet arrived: I hope to be able to report on it in a later bulletin.

Whatis certain is that Sonia was stranded in Switzerland in the summer of 1939. Shehad moved from Poland, where her daughter Janina, by her lover in China, JohannesPatra, had been born in 1936, but the affair had damaged her marriage to Rudolf(Rolf) Hamburger. Sonia’s visa was due to expire at the end of September: sheand Rolf had acquired Honduran passports, but they were of dubious stature. IfSonia were to be extradited to her German homeland, she would almost certainlyface death as a Jew and Communist. She had recruited the InternationalBrigaders Alexander Foote and Len Beurton as wireless operators, but they wereworking as spies in Germany during the summer, and were not withdrawn untiljust before war broke out.

Exactly what happened in those months is difficult to determine. Sonia’s account is illogical and inconsistent, and John Green skirts around that period, as if he didn’t trust her version of events, but also didn’t want to draw attention to the deceits. I gave an account in Sonia’s Radio: Part 2, but it is worth delving a little more deeply now, as the subterfuges hint strongly at strings working behind the scenes. The anomalies point strongly to the first plottings by the MI6 representative in Switzerland, Victor Farrell. What is certain is that Claude Dansey, the head of the shadow Z Organisation within MI6, and the deputy to the new Director-General, Stewart Menzies, had established its base in Geneva at the beginning of the war, and that Dansey himself was around to watch as these intrigues progressed, including Sonia’s divorce from Rolf Hamburger. Dansey did not return to Britain until November 1939.

In Handbook for Spies, Alexander Foote indicates that at this time Sonia’s husband, Rolf (identified as ‘Schultz’) was ‘incarcerated in a Chinese jail for Communist activities’. In Foote’s version of the story, therefore, Rolf never appears in Switzerland, and Foote records his visit to Sonia’s chalet, where she lived singly with her two children and the nurse. Foote then collapses the whole story of Sonia’s divorce and marriage as follows: “Sonia was increasingly dissatisfied with the life and work and wished to return [sic: she had never stayed there for long] to England. The main obstacle, apart from Moscow’s views, was of course her German passport. Therefore, in order to get British nationality, she managed to persuade Bill [Len Beurton] to agree to marry her if she could get a divorce from Schultz. She managed to obtain a divorce in the Swiss courts early in 1940, and straight away married Bill and was thus entitled to a British passport.” He adds that, throughout this whole exercise, ‘she had no intention of being unfaithful to Schultz’, but the charade of a mariage de convenance fell apart when she and Len fell in love. This is all nonsense, of course, because of her affair with Patra, and Foote’s suggestion that Sonia was feeling useless and ‘homesick’, with Moscow resisting her plans to withdraw from espionage. Sonia would have done what she was told.

In Sonya’s Report, the author imaginativelyhas both her husband and her lover in Switzerland at the same time that summer,but the chronology is gloriously vague. “In the early summer of 1939, as thedanger of war increased daily, an expired German passport was useless to anemigrant. My Honduras passport did not give me real security either. Centreasked what possibilities there might be of obtaining another passport for me.We proposed that, before Rolf left Europe, we should start divorce proceedingsand I would enter into a pro-forma marriage with an Englishman.” Apart from thesomewhat premature series of activities described, Jim [Foote] won the lottery,since his age was closer to Sonia’s: Rolf came to see Sonia for the last time.“When his return to China had been approved, Centre enquired whether he wouldbe prepared to work under Ernst [Patra]. Generous and principled as he was,Rolf had a high opinion of Ernst and agreed.” The display of lofty unselfishnessis comical: the notion that Soviet agents would have the freedom to accept ordecline Centre’s instructions is absurd.

Sonia then compounds the unlikelihood of thisdomestic drama by having Ernst visit Switzerland, to see his daughter for thefirst and only time, and she then (apparently in about July 1939) sees off herhusband and her lover from the train station in Caux. (Green informs us thatSonia and Patra did not see each other between 1935 and 1955.) Helpfully, Rolf,before he left, had written a letter to facilitate the divorce proceedings,which Sonia ‘ever since the spring’ had been trying to finalise. (So much forSonia’s suggestion to ‘start divorce proceedings’ in early summer.) Why Rolfcould not have more actively contributed by playing his part while inSwitzerland is not explained. But then Foote tries to back out of the arrangedmarriage, claiming some difficulties with a girl in Spain, and a possiblebreach of promise. Why he had not thought of that earlier is likewise not explained,but Foote then recommends Len to take his place, and Len gallantly accepts theassignment, with Sonia saying that she will divorce him as soon as required. ByFebruary 1940, Sonia had collected all the documents she needed in order tomarry.

When Foote was interrogated by MI5 and MI6officers in late 1947, however, a different story emerged. In a reportdistributed by Percy Sillitoe (from KV 2/1613-1, pp 23-28), Foote’s firsttestimony claimed that Sonia’s divorce had been put through without Hamburger’sknowledge, ‘Foote providing the principal false evidence of Hamburger’smisconduct in London’. Later, however, Foote was shown information at Broadway(MI6’s head office) suggesting that Hamburger had been in Switzerland in 1939,indicating that the Security Intelligence Service was already keeping closetabs on the extended members of the Kuczynski clan. Foote was shown aphotograph of Hamburger but was apparently ‘quite unable to identify it’.

When challenged later, Foote revealed even moreto the MI5 officers Hemblys-Scales and Serpell, the latter writing the report:“Foote replied blandly that he had been the sole witness in the case. It was onhis false testimony that Sonia obtained her divorce from Rudolf Hamburger andFoote made no bones at all about the perjury he had committed in the Swisscourts. When I asked him what was the false evidence he had produced, he saidthat it had been a story of Rudolf Hamburger’s adultery with one of Sonia’ssisters in a London hotel. I asked which sister was selected for this episodeand Foote replied, Mrs. Lewis. After these revelations, I can no longer feelsurprised at the anxiety shown by the Beurtons over the Hamburger divorceduring their conversations with Mr. Skardon and myself at Great Rollright.” And,if Foote’s testimony were truthful, he would obviously have had to tell theGeneva court that he knew what Hamburger looked like. In fact, he had committedobvious perjury, as he now confessed.

Lastly,we have the records from Moscow acquired by William Tyrer, although his storycontains its own contradictions. In a personal communication to me, he claimedthat Sonia and her husband lived with Honduran documents after she and Rolfwent to the Honduran consulate in Geneva, some time in mid-1939. Tyrer then,somewhat implausibly, suggests that, with her Swiss mission completed, she sether sights on going to Great Britain, where she would be more useful, andmoreover closer to her family – but that this desire awoke only after August1940! He then cites a reliable-sounding but undated document (TsaMO RF, Op. 23397, delo 1, l. 33-37: The Central Archive of the Ministry of Defenseof RF, op. 23397, file 1, pp. 33-37) that purports to record a wirelessmessage from Sonia to Moscow Centre in late August 1939. It is remarkable inmany dimensions, not least because it suggests that the thought of divorce hasonly just occurred to her, directly contradicting what she wrote in her memoir,and because it also asserts that Rolf is already working in China, a fact ofwhich Moscow Centre would clearly have been aware, if it were true, and aboutwhich it would thus not have to be informed.

The text ofthe message (the name of the translator is not given, but it could beChervonnaya, since the English is choppy) runs as follows: “In case of war, Iwill be sent to Honduras, where I won’t be able to work on your assignments. Inthis connection, I have the following suggestion. The idea is, that I divorceofficially with Rolf and marry “Jim” or “John”. The marriage would befictitious, but it would help me to obtain a permanent British passport, withwhich I’d be able to travel around the European countries without any obstaclesand would be able to go to Britain at any time.

… At present, I am still on a firm footingin Switzerland – my husband works as an architect in China, myself with twokids, I am unable to travel to join him, because China is in war. Waiting formy husband’s arrival, I am taking a rest with the kids at a mountain resort.With the help of my father, I am maintaining ties with some officials of theLeague of Nations, which also helps to improve my credibility.”

Fortunatelyfor Sonia, Moscow Centre went along with her plan. For some reason, they did notpoint out to Sonia that, in the event of war, she would not be able to gadaround Europe purely on the basis of a British passport. But why, if she wasproposing to divorce Rolf, would she lament that she was unable to join him inChina? (Note that Sonia here, in September 1939, first recommends the idea ofdivorce, while claiming in her memoir that Rolf had left the previous month,having already agreed to it. That the divorce was ‘unofficial’ beforehand isevident.) And how would she know, having just seen Rolf off at thetrain-station in Caux, that he was already working there as an architect? Evenmore incredibly, why would she be waiting for her husband’s arrival in lateAugust 1939, if they had agreed to split? And, if Moscow had just approvedRolf’s return to China, why would he be on his way back again?

Theconclusion must be that this document is a clumsy fake, inserted into thearchive at some unspecified time, and forgotten when the GRU helped Sonia writeher memoir. It is much more likely that Moscow approved the divorce plans muchearlier, ordered Rolf to return to China so that he was out of the way and thuscould not mess up the legal process, and then engaged in orchestrating Sonia’snew British citizenship and infiltration into the United Kingdom as a courier.And it is at this stage that MI6 starts to consider the possibilities of usingthe opportunity to manipulate Sonia.

Step One: Facilitating Sonia’s divorce and re-marriage

There is no doubt that Alexander Foote had been recruited by MI6. The file KV 2/1613-1 specifically records how in 1947, after his desertion and return to Britain, MI5 warned Foote not to talk about his intelligence experiences, using the claim that he had been a deserter from the R.A.F. as a threat hanging over him. One does not have to buy in to the argument that he was eventually used as a medium for passing on packaged ULTRA secrets to the Soviets (as I do) to conclude that he had been infiltrated into the Swiss network in order to gain insights into its wireless techniques. Indeed, one might assume that he started passing on the practices described in Handbook for Spies to his controllers in Berne as early as 1940, when he became the leading operator for the Rote Drei.

Thus,when faced with the prospect that Sonia intended to marry Foote when she hadgained her divorce, MI6 would have been appalled at the plan. It would not havehelped them to have Foote repatriated to the United Kingdom as soon as he hadbecome effective. Yet the notion of potentially manipulating Sonia wasattractive: Len Beurton would be proposed as the replacement candidate to marrySonia. Foote would then come up with a bogus explanation as to why he could notgo through with the marriage, and would instead provide false evidence againstRolf Hamburger, since the Swiss courts were apparently rather sticky when itcame to granting divorces against absent spouses. Whether Rolf actuallyprovided the letter that was supposed to grease the wheels is dubious:apparently it was not enough to convince the authorities.

Sohow did MI6 hope to use Sonia at this stage of the war? Of course, the SovietUnion’s pact with Nazi Germany was in effect: in principle, she might have beenable to inform them of strategic intelligence. Yet her utility in Britain wouldhave been very constrained. Any activity on UK soil – including contacts withas yet undiscovered sources – would transfer to MI5’s area of responsibility,and the Security Service would therefore have to be party to the plot, and takeover the supervision and surveillance of Sonia. Perhaps they thought that shewould lead them to other GRU agents in Europe, and would repay her new mastersfor their kindness in saving her from persecution in Germany. I suspect,however, that the real agenda was to use her as some kind of ‘double agent’ *,perhaps to feed her disinformation that she would be bound to transmit toMoscow Centre, and thereby gain further insights into her enciphermenttechniques. When her messages were intercepted (so went the plan), the factthat she had been passed texts that she would encode would provide an excellentcrib for assisting in decryption – a technique that mirrored what RSS andGC&CS were performing with transmissions performed by the Abwehr.

(*‘Double-agent’ is not really the appropriate term, as it suggests acontinuing dual role. ‘Controlled enemy agent’ is the preferred description. Ishall explore this phenomenon further in the coming final chapter of ‘TheMystery of the Undetected Radios’.)

Accordingto her marriage certificate, Sonia received her divorce on December 29, 1939 (notin October, as she for some reason told UK immigration officers later), and wasmarried to Len Beurton on February 23, 1940. Yet one further action hints atthe connivance of MI6.

Theanecdote appears in both Foote’s and Sonia’s narratives, although the detailsand motivations differ slightly, and it involves Olga Muth, Sonia’s nanny. Muthhad been hired shortly after Nina’s birth in April 1936, and accompanied Soniato London, back to Poland, and then to Switzerland. Sonia presents Olga asbecoming distraught over the prospect of being separated from Nina, Sonia’sdaughter, and, in the knowledge that Sonia had a wireless transmitter, goes tothe British consulate in Montreux to denounce her as a spy. Foote states thatOlga was distressed by Sonia’s disloyalty to Rolf in not just marrying Len, butsubsequently falling in love with him.

InFoote’s account, Olga rings up the Consulate to denounce Sonia and Len as Sovietspies, telling them where the transmitter was hidden. In both versions, herbroken English was incomprehensible, and she was thus ignored. During hisinterrogation in London, Foote additionally claimed (KV 2/1611-1) ‘that Ursula and Beurton were considered byMoscow to have been compromised by the action of Olga Muth, and it was thebasis of their return to England.’ This is quite absurd: if they had beenrumbled in Switzerland by the British, they would hardly have been allowed tosettle in Britain. MI5’s Serpell sagely made a note, questioning why Sonia andLen would have been denounced to the British authorities rather than theSwiss? One might thus ask: Had the whole business been a ruse concoctedto suggest distancing of the Beurtons from MI6 in Switzerland?

Step Two: Providing Sonia with a Passport

On March 11, 1940, Sonia visited the British Consulate in Geneva to apply for a British passport, based on her marriage to Beurton (who was known as ‘Fenton’ in the MI5 files). She records that the reaction of the Consul was ‘distinctly cool’, Victor Farrell no doubt affecting a lack of enthusiasm for the whole venture. Mr. Livingston passed her application on to the Passport Office in London, adding the annotation that the purpose of her marriage was probably to confer British nationality on her, and then he rather provocatively appended the strange observation: ‘Husband is understood to be under medical treatment, and intends to return to Switzerland after escorting the applicant to England.’ Why Beurton, if he had recovered enough to make the arduous journey across Europe to Britain in war-time, would jeopardise his health, and then want to repeat the ordeal by returning to Switzerland for medical treatment instead of seeking it in the UK, is not evident.

I have described the events that took place next in Sonia’s Radio: Chapter 2, and Chapter 8, but it is worth summarizing them here. The application was processed quickly, before Milicent Bagot, who was very familiar with the Kuczynski family, could advise against it. Sonia’s brother Jürgen had actually been interned as a dangerous communist, collaborating with another noted incendiary, Hans Kahle, in organizing espionage, but was conveniently released at about the same time that Sonia’s passport application was approved, in May. Len Beurton was on the C.S.W. (Central Security War) Black List, and thus not a person whose re-entry was to be encouraged. Cazalet in MI5 too late pointed out the anomalies, but stated that Sonia’s passport should be issued for limited duration, and should not be used for travel.

Onebizarre item in the KV 6/41 file shows that Sonia, perhaps concerned that theapplication was not moving fast enough, actually sent a letter to her father(addressed mystifyingly as ‘Renée’: his forenames were Robert René) requestinglocal pressure on the Passport Office. In this missive, she curiously refers toherself in the third person (‘Maria’), and informs her family that ‘Maria’shusband’ (aka ‘Georgie’) has just written to the Office to advance his claim.As it happened, the passport had been approved the day before: it is not clearhow Len’s personal approach would have helped his suit, unless he perhapsthought that making an overt breach from his chequered past would somehow makethe Passport office look on his submission with more favour. Len’s letter hasnot survived, but it was not necessary.

Thusit is apparent that MI6 was able to bulldoze through the application, eventhough Sonia was known to be one of a dangerous Communist family, withlower-level officers in MI5 speaking strongly against the award, at a time whenthe Soviet Union was supporting Nazi Germany in the war effort against GreatBritain. It is quite extraordinary that, during a period when any Germanrefugees were looked at with great suspicion, and as rumours of a dangerous‘Fifth Column’ of hostile aliens were gathering momentum, MI6 would go tostrenuous efforts to facilitate the entry into the United Kingdom of a knownGerman-born revolutionary. Laconically, Sonia reported in her memoir: “In thelate autumn of 1940, Centre suggested that Len and I move to England”, as ifthe thought had just occurred to them. (This is presumably the sentiment thatTyrer echoes in his notes.)

Step Three: Exploiting Len’s Extended Presence in Switzerland

Len’s status in 1940 is a little perplexing. We know from the infamous ‘Geneva Letter’ (see The Letter from Geneva) that Farrell must have engaged him for some intelligence-gathering purposes, with the Falkenberg connection providing a vital insight into how prominent German minds against Hitler might be thinking. Yet it surely cannot have been MI6’s intention to prevent his leaving with Sonia, as it would draw undue attention to her situation, and would make her passage more hazardous. Was the statement about his returning to Switzerland a blind, when they knew that he would struggle to gain a transit visa, and might be even less welcome in the UK than Sonia was?

Soniawrote that ‘as a former member of the International Brigade, Len could nottravel through Spain and had to stay in Geneva until we [Moscow? The BritishConsulate?] could find a different route for him.’ Yet she presents thisobservation very late in the cycle, after she and Len had received instructionsfrom Moscow towards the end of 1940. It is difficult to imagine that they couldhave been so uninformed at this stage. She confirmed the fact when she wasinterviewed by customs officials in Liverpool on February 4, 1941, saying(after lying about how long she had been in Switzerland) that her husband hadbeen unable to leave Switzerland as he could not obtain a Spanish visa.

Theuntruths about Len’s poor health (and other matters) start here. There are twointerrogation reports on Sonia on file: one dated February 8, from Security andImmigration, and the other February 15, from the Home Office. In the formerreport, she is quoted as saying that Len had been in Switzerland for about two years‘for health reasons’. She cannot give a date for when she first met him, but claimsshe went to Switzerland for the last time ‘just before the outbreak of war’,and that Len had paid visits to Germany during the previous nine months in anattempt to secure money owed her. She married Beurton in February 1940, ‘havingsecured a divorce from her former husband’. Fortunately, Len had now recoveredfrom his tuberculosis, but had not been able to acquire a Spanish visanecessary for reaching Portugal, because of his membership of the InternationalBrigades. Yet, despite Len’s ‘recovery’, she still cites his ill-health as an counterto the Spanish government’s obduracy, suggesting that his inability to fightshould remove their concern.

TheHome Office Report gives a slightly different story. Now Sonia claims that shehad been in Switzerland since February 1940, thus eliding the circ*mstances bywhich she had been able to acquire her divorce papers. She was presumably notquestioned as to where she had been prior to her arrival. She again says thatLen had gone to Switzerland for health reasons, but now embroiders the reasonwhy she had to leave Switzerland without him – that she was, as she coylyadmitted, ‘afraid to stay any longer owing to her connection with a well-knownanti-Nazi family’. That family was of course the Kuczynskis, to which she wasrather tightly bound, not simply ‘connected’. She does not indicate here thatLen has recovered, and thus leaves the argument that he was unfit to be afighting man in place.

Thereport goes on to say that the Spanish visa ‘has been refused by the Spanishauthorities as he is still of military age and when it was pointed out to themthat he was medically unfit they said that the grounds for refusal were that hewas an engineer and therefore as valuable as a fighting man.’ It is not clearwhether the officials derived this information from Sonia herself, or anothersource, but it does confirm that Len’s invalidity has already been raised as areason for letting him depart. Sonia rather ingenuously concluded her statementby indicating that ‘Mr. Beurton would attempt to leave France by a cargo boatfrom Marseilles’. A simple cross-check between different statements to customsofficials and Livingston’s passport application would have turned up anenormous contradiction about the supposed frailty of Len’s health and hisdesire to join his wife in England as soon as possible, as well as a cavalcadeof lies about their movements in Europe. MI5 and MI6 were simply not interested

Inany case, Len surely did face a challenge in trying to pass through France andSpain because of his history as an International Brigader, and this fact wouldconsume some more of MI6’s devious energies later. Meanwhile, he made himselfuseful. In Handbook for Spies, Foote stated that Len graduallyextricated himself from the Soviet organisation, and that contact ceased afterMarch 1941 (when Sonia was safely ensconced in Oxfordshire). This was theperiod when Farrell presumably nurtured him, believing him also to be an ally,and indebted to the British authorities, and used him forintelligence-gathering purposes. Some time after his return to the UnitedKingdom, Len apparently tried to revive his career with MI6. In the Alexander Footearchive, in KV 2/1612-2, can be found a statement that Beurton ‘gave information about his work with KWEI,Z.156 [presumably von Falkenberg] and Rolf SUESS which was of littlevalue, and he tried to obtain employment with British intelligence. This offerwas refused, and in July 1943 he asked for help in joining the R.A.F. on thestrength of “having rendered valuable assistance in Switzerland”’.

The exact sequence and timing of events is uncertain, but K 6/41 tends to undermine the ‘intelligence’ application in favour of the ‘R. A. F’ story. There, Colonel Vivian of MI6 confirms the approach, informing Shillito on August 17, 1943 that Beurton presented himself at the War Office with an introductory letter, asking for an interview with (name redacted). (But why else would Vivian have been involved?) Yet Beurton waited a long time to make this approach, as if he was not certain whether he was working for the GRU, or MI6, or both. He must have been getting rather desperate. Shillito had picked up the case again, and was busy asking questions at this time. Perhaps the combination of Farrell’s reminder in March, the imminent birth of his and Sonia’s baby, and his failure to find employment were making Len a bit desperate. MI6 in London were obviously quite aware of his services to the Swiss station, but had no wish to recruit him. If they were interested in taking him on, they would surely have acted soon after his arrival.

Step Four: Arranging the passage of Sonia and her children to Lisbon

Refugee literature informs us how arduous was the trek across France and Spain to the relative safety of Portugal. For a lone woman travelling with a nine-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter, it must have been especially difficult. Yet Sonia’s children (Maik and Janina) almost did not make it. The original passport application had specified that Sonia wanted her children added to the passport, but it seems that this inclusion did not guarantee their ability to travel, presumably since they had been born as German citizens, and had not been naturalized. This discovery occurred very late in the day. Sonia did not notice the dilemma until shortly before she left, apparently, or may have assumed that their status as appendages to her passport gave them right of entry. Else she may have considered that perhaps the original plan was for her to travel alone, leaving the children in Len’s (or somebody else’s) care. Sonia ignores the whole issue of her children’s approval process, merely stating that she planned to leave at the end of December.

YetKV 6/41 shows that an urgent plaintext telegram was sent from Geneva to Londonon November 21, 1940, reflecting the recognition that the children might beturned away on attempting to land. (The question of whether they would have gotpast the Embassy in Lisbon is not raised.) Extraordinarily, the cable states,even at this late stage, that the children would be accompanied by theirparents [sic, plural], and throws in the name of Sonia’s father,(“Doctor Kuczynski of London University’), as if that impressive academic touchwould seal the deal. Mystifyingly still, Cazalet’s response of December 10 missesthe point entirely, stating that MI5 (to whom the request was addressed) ‘haveno objection to the names of Mrs. Ursula BEURTON’s children being added to herpassport and the children accompanying their mother to this country’. His memoto Stafford of the Passport and Permit Office, dated December 4, clearlyindicates that the problem was due to the fact that they were ‘German bornchildren’.

Onceshe and her children arrived in Lisbon, Sonia faced multiple challenges inplanning her transit. This section of her memoir is probably one of the morereliable parts, in the bare outline of their movements. She wrote a letter toher parents in which she described the horrendous journey, the unheated busthrough France, the icy cold in which they stood waiting at customs houses,alleviated by a more comfortable train ride from Barcelona to Madrid, and thena more stressful passage to Lisbon, where they arrived on December 24, 1940, withall three of them ill. The British consulate explained that Sonia was ‘aboutthe most insignificant person on the long list’, so she moved, somewhatincongruously, to a comfortable hotel up the coast in Estoril (the ‘Grande’,“once the setting for the European aristocracy to spend its summers”), usingmonies from Moscow Centre’s account. “After about three weeks, the consulateinformed me that we would be taken to England by ship”, she wrote. Yet theletter she wrote to her family on January 4 indicates that she already knewthen that the waiting-time would be ‘about three weeks’ – not a bad prospectfor someone so lowly on the pecking-order. She had been granted a Category ‘C’endorsem*nt (no internment required) on January 10. It appeared that MI6 hadprimed the consulate: Sonia gave the game away again.

Moscowalso helped with the expenses involved in transporting Sonia and her familyacross Europe. While funding was tight in Switzerland, and caused specialstresses, Foote informed his interrogators that ‘Albert’ (Radó) managed to send$3,500 to her in Portugal. This was obviously essential for Sonia’s livingexpenses while staying at the Grande Hotel. Sonia admitted this contribution inher memoir. Yet she was clearly indebted to MI6 for working behind the scenesto advance her priority up the queue of desperate refugees waiting to gain aspot on one of the ships bound for Liverpool. No questions were apparentlyasked about her source of funds or her lavish accommodation.

Step Five: Helping Sonia Settle in Britain

In two respects, MI6 helped Sonia with her accommodation and trysting arrangements in England. In one extraordinary item of testimony, Foote told his interrogators (KV 6/43-243A) that, before Sonia left Switzerland, she asked Foote to send a message to Moscow giving the address in Essex where her GRU contact was to meet. Foote’s notebook revealed that Sonia was to ‘meet with the Russians on 1^st & 15^th of every month at 3pm GMT at Wake Arms in Epping’. This location has an especial interest, since some of the items of correspondence intercepted at the Summertown address in September and October 1942 came from Epping. It would nevertheless not have been an easy place to travel to and from for a mother with two young children resident in Oxford. Yet Epping had its enduring attractions. In 1944, Sonia consequently decided to send Nina, aged seven, to a ‘boarding school in beautiful rural surroundings near Epping Forest’, Micha having already won a scholarship to a boarding school in Eastbourne, Sussex. Nannies and boarding-schools: those are the emblems of the truly dedicated Communist with important work to do.

Whatis astonishing about this item is how Sonia must have gained the intelligence. Unlessthe claim was a gross invention by Foote (which seems unlikely, given itsdetail, and the context), we have to consider the alternatives for the sourceof a message that was to be sent to Moscow. It therefore could not haveoriginated from Moscow, but we also have to consider why Moscow would need thisinformation. Did Sonia believe that Moscow would have to pass it on to her GRUcontact in London, so that she and her handler could meet successfully? Surelynot: Moscow was in constant touch with London. Or was she simply confirmingwhat her GRU contact had told her already? Yet, even if she had been able tocontact the GRU in London, by wireless, or possibly by coded letter to hersister or father, there would have been no need for her to inform Moscow, asher relatives must have derived the data from the local GRU residency.

Thuswe have to assume that the address was given to her by Farrell in MI6. Theimplication that MI6 was in communication with GRU officers in London about theplan to bring Sonia to Britain, and aiding the process of setting up her treffs,is too scandalous and impossible to consider. I suggest one tentativeinterpretation. What probably happened is that Sonia had been able to informMoscow that MI6 was going to recommend a suitable meeting-place (presumablywith the objective of surveilling it closely), and, at the last minute beforeshe left, it gave her the times and location for Epping. Her message thusconstituted a warning to her bosses that this place was not to be used.There is no other evidence that she travelled regularly to Epping, which wouldhave been an arduous journey from Oxford, although much easier from Hampstead,if that is where MI6 believed she would probably take up residence.

Thefact that Foote had to inform Moscow of the arrangement must mean that the GRUwas aware that Sonia was negotiating with MI6. That was in principle also adangerous path, as such collaboration was severely frowned upon. In late 1943,Radó received a royal carpeting when he suggested to Moscow that he and Footeseek shelter in the British consulate in Geneva when the Gestapo startedapplying pressure to the Swiss, and mopped up the Rote Drei network.Sonia must have wisely told Moscow everything, and gained their approval for goingalong with MI6’s game, as it represented the best chance of gaining thefoothold in Britain that they all desired.

The other instance where MI6 helped her was in her attempt to learn where her destination in England would be. I laid out in Sonia’s Radio: Chapter 8 how she sent a desperate letter from Lisbon to her father’s address in London, which was redirected to the address in Oxford that she would later give, as her destination, to the immigration officer in Liverpool. Whether Oxford was chosen as part of a deep strategy by the GRU, as a sensible idea by MI6, or out of a firm preference from the Kucyznski family is unclear. It may well have been the latter, as Jürgen Kuczynski had expressed dismay that Sonia was coming to Britain, where she might draw undue attention by MI5 and Special Branch to his own subversive activities on behalf of the Party. The anguish in her letter shows that Sonia must have known already that she was not welcome in London, and would be directed elsewhere. Yet Sonia did learn what this address was before she arrived in Liverpool. Some emissary from MI6 must have provided this information care of the Consul in Lisbon: there is no other reasonable explanation. In Chapter 8 I put forward one speculative notion.

Thevoyage to Liverpool took three weeks: the Avoceta arrived on February 4.After the interrogation(s) (in which she was now able to provide a destinationaddress), Sonia managed to find a hotel to stay in, and after an air-raidinterrupted night, the next morning travelled smoothly by train to Oxford.Thereafter, her account does not ring true. She claimed that her parents werestaying with friends at the Oxford address (78 Woodstock Road, as the MI5 filestell us: they followed her there), but that they had to return to London‘because their room was needed by their friends’ relatives’. Implausibly, Soniastates that, because house-hunting in Oxford was ‘hopeless’, she tried to findsomething in the bombed cities, but that was impossible too. (Did she travel toPortsmouth? Coventry? Liverpool? She does not say.) ‘At last’ she found a furnished room, but hadto send the children away, as the landlady insisted on only one renter. So shefound a room at the vicarage in Glympton, near Woodstock, settled down, andstarted her fortnightly visits to London.

Ifone were not aware of her brother’s objections, one night ask why on earth shedidn’t move to the bosom of her family in London, so she would havegrandparents to look after her children, and be able to carry on her trysts somuch more easily? Apparently ‘moving in with them was out of the question’, asher parents were staying with friends in an overcrowded house’. In April 1941,she conveniently found the furnished bungalow in Kidlington, with no landlady,and the ability to keep her children with her. What she also omitted to mention,however, was that, during these hectic weeks, she was actually residing withher sister, Barbara, Mrs Taylor, at 97 Kingston Road, Oxford, as theconstabulary report of February 24 informs us. Barbara’s husband, DuncanBurnett Macrae Taylor, was a trainee wireless operator in the R. A. F., andthus may well have been the officer Sonia claimed to have developed as aninformer (‘James’) when she boasted of her ‘network’ in her memoir. Moreover,the report says that her parents are still living at 78 Woodstock Road. It isno wonder that Sonia fails to describe this part of her life in Oxford in anydetail.

Step Six: Allowing Sonia to Carry On Unsurveilled

What is clear from the archives is that a minimal surveillance of Sonia was undertaken, but it was of the generic kind of instructing the local constabulary ‘to keep an eye on her’, as if they might surprise her in the act of planting a bomb somewhere. It extended to intercepting her mail, but specifically did not track her movements. The problem is that much of the initiative came from younger officers, like Hugh Shillito, who were trying to do their job, but had clearly not been filled in on the bigger picture. Shillito (B.10.e) wrote to Major Ryde in Reading (the Special Branch representative) on February 7, suggesting that Sonia might want to ‘be kept under observation’. Yet he gives no indication that she is a communist, and related to subversives who have been interned. He merely states that she ‘clearly comes from an entirely different social stratum, and it appears that the marriage was one of convenience’. He says that Len’s ‘present whereabouts are unknown’. It is obvious that he has not been briefed properly, has not spoken to Milicent Bagot, has not read the immigration reports, and is completely unaware of the Communist group that Sonia was part of. He ends his request with the statement: ‘I shall be very interested to hear the result of any enquiries you may make’, but one could hardly expect Major Ryde to jump into action on the basis of this weak letter.

Shillitoin fact copied his letter to the Oxford Constabulary, and Ryde did send it onto the Oxford City Police. Acting Detective-Sergeant Jevons did make enquiries,and discovered the facts about the Taylors, and also that Sonia’s father held ‘strongCommunist views’, facts that he reported to Shillito on February 24. The verynext day, Hyde sent a letter to Shillito, enclosing a copy of the Beurtons’marriage certificate. This is shocking and absurd: Why did these dedicatedcivil servants have to educate an MI5 officer about the details of the case? Ihave noticed that MI5 officers often seemed remarkably ignorant of the maritalstatus of Len and Sonia: when Sonia’s application for a passport came throughin March 1940, Cazalet had even indicated that they thought Len was in Germany,in February 1940, which would have been a ridiculous supposition if he hadmarried Sonia the previous month.

ThusShillito appears to have been kept in the dark, deliberately. His response toRyde of March 1 suggests that the marriage is all news to him. In any case, atthat point Shillito effectively signs off, deeming no further action required,and again expresses the perennial hope that ‘an eye can be kept’ on Sonia. Thefile is passed to B4, as it appears to be a Communist Party matter. Thereafter,Sonia and Shillito disappear from the archival radar, the case not taking onnew life until her husband’s repatriation in July 1942, by which time Shillitohas been heavily involved with the business of Oliver Green, a member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain, and a spy who had been convicted andimprisoned, not for espionage, but for forging petrol coupons. In thereorganization of July 1941, after Petrie’s arrival, Shillito had been movedinto the new F Division, tracking CP members, and was given a new assignment.

Accordingto Sonia’s account, the hounds (if that is how these tentative inquisitors mustbe characterized) must have been called off at about the time she first metwith her controller in London, in May, after several abortive attempts. Shetravelled up to London every couple of weeks, to speak to her father, andcolleagues like Hans Kahle. She stayed with her parents, or one of her sisters,presumably leaving her children behind. She never explains how they were takencare of. It was in 1941, of course, that Peter Wright claimed that shemaintained ‘a nest of spies’, something that surely should have gained theattention of any agency chartered with ‘keeping an eye on her’. As readers ofthese bulletins will know by now, I largely discount Wright’s allegations,although it is possible that Sonia developed contacts in important scientificresearch organisations in Oxford. Andyet, throughout the rest of 1941, no one apparently noticed any of her journeysand absences, or pondered how a mother was able to leave her kids behind soregularly.

Thepolitical environment changed in 1941, of course. The Battle of Britain was over;the threat of invasion receded; the search for parachuted German agents waned;Hitler turned his attention eastwards and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22.With Churchill’s immediate message of support to Stalin, and signals from the YBoard and the Foreign Office that counter-intelligence operations against theSoviet Union should be wound down, Sonia would have been seen in a differentlight. What possible harm could a lone and disconnected housewife perform tothe cause of the war?

MI6’sneed for insights into Soviet decryption techniques, however, did not go away,and GCHQ never completely abandoned its plans for attacking Soviet traffic. Itwas in the summer of 1941 that Sonia, having assembled her wireless transmitterat Glympton, began transmitting regularly to Moscow, and the only survivingmessage concerning her wireless activity (not from her directly, but from theSoviet Embassy) dates from July of this year. As I have outlined, her attemptsto contact her bosses at that time were made from Kidlington, and were(apparently) never picked up. Thus it would appear that MI6 fell into a fallowperiod with Sonia, not certain what to do with her, and perhaps frustrated in noticingthat, having installed herself as a competent wireless operator in Oxfordshire,she stubbornly refused to co-operate by sending any messages that could beintercepted.

Thecirc*mstances surrounding Sonia’s broadcasts in 1941, and the apparent failureof RSS to pick them up, are still perplexing. Since her messages needed toreach Moscow, she would have had to use a higher band-width (probably over 1000kcs) than would have been used by postulated Nazi agents trying to reachHamburg, or enemy wireless operators working on the Continent. Such signalsshould have immediately drawn attention, but they would have been harder topick up at that wavelength, and it is probable that the Voluntary Interceptors (VIs)had not been instructed to perform General Searches in this range. We can onlyspeculate as to how well MI6 understood the technicalities of wavebandselection for the cuckoo they had transplanted into their nest, or howreluctant they would have been to divulge too much about her presence to RSSofficers who were supposed to detect her.

We do know that, by early 1942, a VI picked up such a signal from the Soviet Embassy, but location-finding techniques still had great difficulty in tracking it down. It may be that, not until MI6 took over the fixed direction-finding stations from the Post Office in late 1941, and built new ones, and connected them all, was the RSS able to include in its ambit a greater range of frequencies, and pass some of them to the VIs. One RSS officer, Bob King, assured me that the complete spectrum of wavelengths was monitored, and, moreover, that Sonia’s transmissions were picked up, and instructions received to ignore them, but the dating of such events suggests they were post-war. I shall pick up this fascinating aspect of the story in the conclusion to my series The Mystery of the Undetected Radios.

Thefinal anomalous oversight of this period was Sonia’s momentous meetings withKlaus Fuchs. Yet those encounters properly belong to the time after Beurton’sarrival back in the United Kingdom, which was an important scheme by MI6 in itsown right. It would be Len’s controversial arrangements for rejoining his wifethat would gain Hugh Shillito’s attention again.

Step 7: Orchestrating Len’s Repatriation

One extraordinary aspect of the whole project concerning Len’s repatriation is the extreme lengths that MI6 went to. When far more-deserving candidates, such as escaped prisoners-of-war, were struggling to gain passage back to England, Beurton, a known communist, agent in a Swiss spy network, and member of an official Black List, benefitted from the provision of false papers, and the advantage of an aircraft return to Poole, Dorset instead of the dangerous and slow sea journey that most refugees had to endure. (The busy MI9 route out of Gibraltar also used aircraft.) It is difficult to imagine that MI6 would go to such extreme lengths purely because of the pressure applied by leftist friends of the Kuczynskis, and for the office of the Foreign Secretary to become involved only draws attention to the anomaly.

Readerswill recall that, when Sonia arrived in Liverpool in early February 1941, oneof the accounts that she gave of Len’s absence was that he had gone two yearsago to Switzerland for treatment for tuberculosis, that he had recovered andwas thus fit to travel, but that the failure of the Spanish to grant him atransit visa had prevented his accompanying her. (And that this intelligencewas in contradiction of what the passport application from Geneva had indicated.)Unsurprisingly, the testimonies now differ. Sonia reported that Radó hadapplied pressure on Len, saying that his work in Switzerland was moreimportant, and Len had been influenced by him. But when he asked Moscow what heshould do, they told him to ‘do as Sonya says’ – an extremely unlikelyinterchange.

Footedescribed it differently: “Bill[Len] then pulled out of the organisation, and though he remained inSwitzerland until 1942 he had no more official contact with us after March1941. Moscow allowed him to try to make arrangements to leave at the end of1941 and even assisted him in obtaining a British passport by getting a leadingBritish politician to intervene on his behalf. The politician concerned acted,I am sure, quite innocently in this as worked through a number of cut-outs, andthe person in question would probably have been horrified at the thought ofassisting a Russian spy.” Probably a more accurate account, and a usefulcommentary by the MI5 ghost-writer, to be sure. Radó echoed Foote’s account in Codename Dora,indicating that ‘John’ [Len] stayed on to provide training (‘at Central’srequest’) but then observed that Len was able to leave the country by thespring of 1941. Even if Radówas mistaken over the date of Len’s derparture, it strongly suggests that Lenwas not occupied with the Rote Drei any longer.

Sonia made much of Len’s struggles to gain anypriority with the consulate in the queue of escapees trying to reach Britain,and she said she then contacted Hans Kahle, who, in turn invoked the support ofEleanor Rathbone, the left wing MP, who pleaded on the basis of Len’s eagernessto join the British Army. It might have suited MI6 to keep Len in place for awhile, since he was providing useful information on anti-Nazi thinking from hisassociation with General von Falkenhausen, but someone obviously concluded thathe would be of more use back in Britain. Events then took some extraordinaryturns, involving some barefaced lies that apparently did not concern theauthorities, who were, after all, responsible for some of them.

For example, Sonia wrote that Rathbone musthave asked a question in Parliament, along the lines of : “Why is a Britishcitizen and anti-fascist with military experience in the Spanish Civil War, whois abroad and wants to volunteer for the British Army, not being given thesupport of His Majesty’s Government in order to return to his home country?”She overlooked the obvious paradox that, in order to gain a transit visanecessary for repatriation and then enlisting, Beurton had to be declared unfitfor military service in Geneva. A veritable Catch22. [I cannot find, in the1942 Hansard records, this question from the MP for the Combined Universities,but Miss Rathbone was a vigorous and regular critic of government policy.]

When Rathbone wrote to Alexander Cadogan, thePermanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, on February 18, 1942, sheexplained that Beurton had gone to Switzerland before the war for healthreasons, and then underwent a serious ski-ing accident that prevented him fromleaving. For good measure, the International Brigade Association secretary, MrJack Brent, threw in (orally) that Beurton probably had tuberculosis as well,and would therefore be unfit for military service, thus undermining Rathbone’sappeal. This submission conveniently reinforced the ‘legend’ that Sonia hadbuilt up about Len’s affliction, yet rather over-egged the pudding with thedetails of Len’s misfortunes while ski-ing. Of course, the myth that Len wasunfit for military service was necessary in an effort to convince the VichyFrench and Spanish authorities that Len could not contribute to the war effort,but it rather undermined the urgency of the reasons why the British authoritieswould be eager to repatriate a tubercular, crippled Communist subversive. Didthey perhaps not recall that Klaus Fuchs’s brother Gerhard had arrived byaeroplane in the UK from Switzerland in July 1939, but had been denied entry,and had been forced to return, because he had tuberculosis?

Inany case, the Foreign Office wisely pointed out that Beurton would probablyneed to be pronounced unfit by an impartial medical board in order to gaintransit visas from the French and Spanish authorities. On June 3, Livingston,of the Geneva consulate, informed Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, thatBeurton had been trying to leave for two years (some slight exaggeration), but hewas able to supply the good news that, in April, the doctor attached to theFrench consulate had declared him unfit for military service. Thereafter, theyhad applied for French and Spanish visas. The Spaniards, not smelling a rat (orpossibly receiving some form of encouragement), had granted the visa, but theFrench were still delaying things. Yet what Livingston did not state at thisjuncture was that Beurton had already, on March 9, been issued with a falsepassport in the name of John William Miller. This fellow must have been areally important asset.

Thefinal visa was issued on July 8, Beurton left Geneva on July 13, and Livingstonreported his departure on July 20. There is no record of his journey on file,but Beurton apparently was given VIP treatment, not taking the regular MI9route for escaped POWs and agents from occupied Europe via Madrid to Gibraltar,but enjoying instead the diplomatic route, and the comfort of a quick planefrom Lisbon. He arrived at Poole Airport on July 29, hale, but a little peevedthat the he had to undergo an interrogation, as he felt that the authorities inLisbon should have warned immigration about his arrival. He confidently declaredthat his passport was a forgery, denied that he had gone to Switzerland forhealth reasons, indicated that he had gone to Germany in January 1939 toretrieve property owned by Rudolf Kuczynski, and intimated that he had anaffair with the latter’s daughter, Ursula. He boasted that he had survived on a$20,000 legacy that he had been carrying round in cash. Furthermore he statedthat he and Ursula were married in May 1940, and that they did not leaveSwitzerland at the beginning of the war as they were waiting for his wife’sdivorce papers to come through. He was, however, quick to mention his contactfrom the League of Nations, L. T. Wang.

Amore incriminating farrago of lies would have been difficult to concoct. OnAugust 5, Vesey (B4A) wrote to MI6 expressing surprise that the PassportControl Officer would have issued a false British passport to man whose historymust have been known. MI6 replied to Vesey that he had been given a fakedpassport as he had been refused a transit visa in his own name, adding that thePCO in Geneva was ‘of course’ not aware of the ‘individual circular’ concerningBeurton, who had in the meantime approached the ‘Passport Control’ (i.e. MI6itself) to join the Armed Forces. MI6 was meanwhile very interested in Wang andKwei. Vesey and a representative from MI6 would interrogate Beurton in Octoberabout the questionable legacy and his actions with Sonia’s friend MarieGuinzberg at the UN in gaining a Bolivian passport. Yet interest in all thesesuspicious activities was buried.

Step 8: Suppressing Leads on Sonia’s and Len’s Activities

I have written at length on the apparent confusion surrounding MI5’s surveillance of the Kidlington and Summertown addresses, and the Beurtons’ telephone and mail (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-response-to-denis-lenihan/, of March 19, 2020). Sonia claimed that she and Len had to move out of the Kidlington house very soon after Len’s arrival, but was fortunate in finding accommodation in the annex to the house owned by Neville Laski and his wife. Sonia was careful in picking landlords of impeccable standing: Laski was a notable jurist, and may have acted as a solicitor for MI5 at some stage. When the Beurtons moved to The Firs at Great Rollright after the war, they rented from Sir Arthur Salter, the Member of Parliament for Oxford University from 1937 to 1950.

Mymain conclusion was that Hugh Shillito, having been emboldened by a successfulinvestigation of Oliver Green’s espionage activities, shifted his attentionback to the Beurtons soon after Len’s arrival in July 1942, but was firmlydiscouraged by senior MI5 officers from pursuing the leads too energetically. Forexample, the apparent failure to follow up on the provocative batch of letterslisted on file is perplexing. Just after the time (November 1942) when he hadgained the enthusiastic support of Director-General Petrie, and his immediatesupervisor Roger Hollis, for his prosecution of the Green case, Shillito madethe outlandish suggestion that Sonia and Len were probably Soviet spies. Yetthis was information that some senior officers did not want to hear.

Itwould be quite plausible that Liddell and White had been drawn into the plot byMI6 at this stage, but that Petrie and Hollis (who had replaced his formerboss, John Curry, as head of F Division in November 1941), had not. F2 wasresponsible for ‘Communism and Left-wing Movements’, but Sonia and Len were notassociated with the Party, or visibly part of any ‘movement’, so they, alongwith many other free-flowing communists (such as Jürgen Kuczynski and FritzKahle) were allowed to behave unhindered. Perhaps a case was made on thoselines that the Beurtons should be ignored. As late as July 1943, however, whenthe very disgruntled but severely anti-communist Curry had been transferred toMI6, Shillito was still grumbling to his former director that he thought theBeurtons were Soviet agents.

Yetit is the Fuchs business that dominates this period. Sonia had been introducedto Fuchs through her brother, Jürgen. From Sonia’s account, one would get theimpression that she cycled out to the Banbury area a dozen times or more,sometimes meeting Fuchs in person, sometimes leaving a message in a shared‘letterbox’ to arrange a subsequent meeting. When Fuchs passed her ahundred-page book of blueprints, she had to travel to London to inform herhandler (by a secret chalk sign) that they would meet outside Oxford, and shethen had to pedal out to the junction of the A34 and the A40 to hand over theformulae and drawings. Frank Close echoes the account of these idyllic trysts,even quoting what Sonia later told the local Oxford newspapers: “During thefinal months of 1942, and throughout 1943, Fuchs and Sonya met at regularintervals near Banbury, always at weekends. She would come from Oxford by trainin the morning, Fuchs arriving from Birmingham in the afternoon. One meetingwas in Overthorpe Park, two miles east of Banbury, and within easy reach bybicycle or on foot.”

One can already see the contradictions. Did Sonia bike the whole thirty miles to Banbury, or did she take her bicycle to the train station, and then ride out to Overthorpe Park? Remember, most of these adventures would have occurred in the windy and rainy English winter of 1942-1943: moreover the Beurtons’ son, Peter, was born in September 1943, which would have hindered Sonia’s cycling excursions in the latter part of this period. Fuchs would not have been able to make regular forays to duboks in North Oxfordshire just to inform Sonia when the next meeting should be. Sonia promoted the notion that they walked around arm-in-arm, as if they were lovers, to throw off any suspicions. Yet most of this must be fantasy.

Soniaprobably met Fuchs for the first time in a café near Birmingham railwaystation, in late summer 1942, and on that occasion they probably only checkedeach other out. The Vassiliev Papers record that she had reported that Fuchshad already passed papers to her by October 22 (and they also inform us thatFuchs’s previous handler, Kremer, had returned to the Soviet Union in August1942). MI5 later claimed that such meetings occurred only every two or threemonths (echoing what Fuchs told them in his confession), and lasted only a fewminutes, which would appear to make more sense, with Fuchs needing to becareful about absenting himself from Birmingham. If Sonia had indeed beentaking her bike to Oxford station at regular intervals, surely ‘keeping an eyeon her’ would have quickly led to her being stopped, and interrogated about herbusiness? And what happened if her bicycle had broken down and she had secretplans in her basket?

Sonia’s handling of Fuchs lasted only one year. They had their infamous ‘Quebec Agreement’ meeting in mid-August 1943, and a final tryst in November. So, even allowing for MI5’s possible distortions to cover their ineptitude, she and Fuchs probably met only about three or four times before, which, logistically, makes much more sense. More poignantly, this period happened to coincide almost exactly with Len’s presence, and idleness, before being enlisted in the R. A. F. on November 18, 1943, as a trainee wireless operator. Len had expressed to Vesey, in October 1942, his annoyance at being turned down by the Air Force, whom he was keen to join, for health reasons. But his ill health was a myth. Had MI6 been working behind the scenes to disrupt his application? And what about the support of Rathbone, Cadogan and Eden for getting this man into the fight against the Nazis? Did Rathbone conveniently forget about the vociferous appeal she had made on behalf of the valiant British fighting-man?

Thatthere might be significance behind the apparent coincidence of Fuchs’sproductivity and Len’s wireless activity is too horrendous to consider, butBeurton had surely taken over the operation of the radio in Kidlington fromSonia. Was that what MI6 conceived as his role? Unless they were interestedpurely in improved marital relations for Sonia and Len, MI6 must have had plansfor him. Yet he could not be used for intelligence purposes in the UK, and hecould possibly be a danger if used in the Armed Forces, as his later problemsin being accepted reveal. Farrell’s letter of March 1943 remains puzzling, butcould have been a coded reminder that Len needed to re-commit to the cause of BritishIntelligence, and advice from his new-found ‘friend’ would be timely.

WhetherSonia actually used her apparatus to transmit from the new address in Summertownis mainly speculation. The discovery of her set in January 1943 has beenanalysed studiously. Certainly she claimed that she transmitted regularly, and thather children confirmed her nocturnal activities, but the evidence is sparse.GCHQ, on behalf of RSS, claimed very unscientifically to Peter Wright that shecould not have transmitted undetected, but of course her messages might havebeen intercepted, and decisions made to leave Sonia untouched and uninterrupted.Wright himself wrote vaguely of Sonia’s lost messages, and scoured the globefor them. William Tyrer’s dossier contains a number of unverifiable, mostlyundated, messages from Moscow to Sonia, but they are largely veryunbusinesslike and novelettish, and mostly predate the Fuchs era or are placedafter the war. If she did transmit anything from the Summertown address, itwould have been relatively harmless material, and used as a distraction to drawattention away from Kidlington.

Withher knowledge and experience from direction-finding in Poland, however, itwould have been career suicide for her to transmit repeatedly from a singleaddress in densely populated England, and expect not to be detected. Thus onemust assume that either a) if she had been a genuine, freely-operating spy, shewould not have used her apparatus (maybe surprised that the authorities did notinvestigate her equipment), but would have taken advantage instead of Len andthe Soviet Embassy to ensure that her secrets reached Moscow; or b) if she hadbeen aware of MI6’s attempts to control her, she would have transmitted onlyher variant of ‘chicken-feed’, which would be enough to keep her watchers busy,but would never reveal any information that might cast doubt on her ‘new’loyalties, even if GC&CS were able to decipher her messages. In any case,MI6 were stuck with the cuckoo in their nest, and, at the peak of GreatBritain-Soviet Union ‘co-operation’ in 1942-43, had to sit back and let thingstake their course. Even though the extent of Sonia’s espionage may have beenoverstated, she certainly duped British Intelligence in her coup with Fuchs.

Step 9: Keeping the Lid On, 1944-1946

After Fuchs’s departure for the USA in December 1943, and Len’s enlistment in the R. A. F., Sonia’s espionage activities waned. She claimed that she maintained her contacts, and continued to use her wireless, even stating that she sent her son, Micha, and daughter, Nina, to boarding-schools in Eastbourne and Epping respectively so that they would not notice her nocturnal transmissions. How the financially strained Beurtons found the money to pay for private education is never explained, although MI6 has been known to help out in this manner for well-deserving cases. Certainly Sonia helped Erich Henschke and other anti-fascists in the OSS project to drop agents into Germany, in late 1944, but since her brother Jürgen was actually engaged by the American OSS at the time, her actions would not have been regarded as suspicious.

Shealso had some contact with Melita Norwood (TINA) who was probably of even moreuse to the Soviets than was Fuchs, but this lasted only for a short time in1945. Melita’s mother was on friendly terms with Sonia’s mother, and Sonia andMelita had met shortly after Sonia’s arrival in 1941. It would not have beenefficient for Sonia, based in Oxfordshire, to have couriered for Norwood, whowas, after all, a KGB agent. The Vassiliev Papers (Yellow Notebook No. 1: File82702) tell us that, even though Norwood had been recruited by the OGPU as farback as 1935, the receipt of papers from her in June 1945 was only the secondbatch she handed over. Moreover, she had left her job at the BritishNon-Ferrous Metals Research Association in 1943 to bear her child, and was outof action for over a year. Thus the claim that David Burke makes in The SpyWho Came In From the Co-Op (p 14), that Sonia ‘was Melita Norwood’scontroller between 1941 and 1944’ should be quickly dismissed.

MI5,in the person of Shillito, continued to dig around, noticing the anomalies inBeurton’s sickness record. Shillito alsonoted that Sonia’s first husband Rudolf had been arrested as a spy in Persia,which resuscitated his suspicions about Sonia. Sargant of O.D.3a had to respondto Air Ministry questions about Len’s dubious story concerning money andhealth. It was apparent that the Service was now having a difficult timekeeping up consistent appearances of the plot to which it had colluded, andstruggled to explain why Beurton had been given a fake passport. The rumourseven reached the US Embassy, who in August 1944 were anxious to track downRudolf Hamburger’s wife and family. Roger Hollis himself was called upon torespond to an inquiry from M. J. Lynch. In a letter dated August 10, 1944,Hollis made the best fist he could, admitting that the Beurtons had ‘communistsympathies’, and had probably been funded by the Soviets, adding, however, thatMI5’s enquiries had come to nothing, and that neither Mr or Mrs Beurton hadbeen noticed performing anything nefarious. He clearly hoped the problem wouldgo away.

Inany case, Moscow Centre at this time decided to loosen its ties with Sonia,although it articulated this message via the Embassy, which had become a muchsafer way of exchanging vital information by this time. One of the moreconvincing messages cited in William Tyrer’s dossier, dated January 15, 1945,and sent to Sklyarov in London, runs as follows:

“Foryour personal information. In the mountain country [Switzerland]Sonia was in contact with Albert [Rado] and his wife. Thecounterintelligence in your country knows about Albert’s activities in themountain country and his work for us. There are grounds to suppose that to somedegree the counterintelligence may learn about Sonia’s work during her stay inAlbert’s country.

In this connection:

1. Any personal contact with Sonia shouldbe ceased and not to be resumed without our authorization.

2. To forbid Sonia to be engaged in ourwork. She should lead the life of a model mother, wife and housekeeper. Reporton the execution. Direktor.”

Moscow was apparently alarmed by the break-up ofthe Swiss Ring, and the fact that Alexander Foote and Radó might have betrayedinformation about Sonia’s past activity. Yet there is a trace ofdisingenuousness here: how could they have imagined that Britishcounter-intelligence was ignorant of Sonia’s career? Nevertheless, the pressureincreased, with Gouzenko’s defection in Canada in September 1945 causing panic,and the closing down of multiple agents. The Vassiliev Notebooks (YellowNotebook, No, 1, p 86) confirm that Moscow cut off all contact with Sonia inJanuary 1946. When Fuchs returned to the UK in 1946, he had to seek out a new go-between.Thereafter, while Sonia was said to communicate occasionally (the language isambiguous and puzzling), her sister Renate was used as an intermediary to getfunds to her. Sonia claimed that she still used her wireless set at this time,having moved to TheFirs in Great Rollright, and Bob King of theDiscrimination Section of RSS reported to me that he was certain that hermessages were picked up by the RSS interceptors, but buried by senior officers.

Before the dramatic defection in July 1947 ofAlexander Foote, back to the British, and his subsequent interrogation by MI5,one last twist in the story occurred, revealing the awkwardnesses of MI5officers having to explain the situation. In April 1946, the FBI, still tryingto establish the whereabouts of Rudolf Hamburger, through J. Cimperman, contactedMI5 to determine whether they might approach Ursula Beurton. This time, it fellupon John Marriott (him of the XX Committee, now F2C), and he shared theremarkable information that a letter from the FBI of July 13, 1945 had referredto an address in Geneva (129 Rue de Lausanne), reportedly the address throughwhich Hamburger could be contacted, which was the same address where Mrs.Beurton had last stayed in in Switzerland. Furthermore, she had indicated in1941, when he arrived, that she thought her husband was still resident there.

One might imagine that an astute officer would either have concealed this information from the Americans, or, alternatively, shown great enthusiasm in following up this extraordinary coincidence. Marriott used it, however, to suggest to Cimperman that the relationships between the two men and Mrs. Beurton made it ‘undesirable’ to approach the lady. Yet he did promise to make further enquiries. The wretched Hamburger meanwhile had been taken back to Moscow from Persia, cruelly interrogated on the suspicion of being a spy, and sentenced to a long stay in a labour-camp. Peter Wright claims in Spycatcher that Hamburger had been an MI6 spy, although John Green comments that this story has never been corroborated.

Maybe foolishly (why would he think that Hamburgerstill had a link with Geneva?), Marriott agreed to follow up, and turned to theMI6 office responsible – Kim Philby. The same day, he wrote to Philby,explaining the situation, and asking him to make enquiries about the address,and provide, if possible, information on the whereabouts of Hamburger. Marriottrevealed his discomfort about Cimperman’s approach directly to Philby, stating:“For a variety of reasons I do not feelable to comply with this request,. . .”, hinting at atacit, awkward understanding between the two. Two weeks later, Philby, having initiated the appropriate search,responded with a very enigmatic explanation, also confirming that his contactwas trying to establish whether Beurton was still living at that address. Continuingto play his role of the simpleton, he added that ‘we have no knowledge of thepresent whereabouts of HAMBURGER’. Marriott was soon able to enlighten Philbythat Beurton was now a Guardsman with the 1^st Battalion of theColdstream Guards in the B.A.O.R. He then sent a very useless and bland letterto Cimperman, which did nothing to shed light on the mystery of the sharedaddress. Apparently nobody followed up with Len or Sonia to learn more aboutwhat may have been a Soviet safe-house. Philby clearly wanted to bury thestory.

Step 10: Foote and Fuchs: Allowing Sonia and Len to Escape

Two challenges remained for the Beurtons – the defection of Alexander Foote, and the arrest of Klaus Fuchs.

TheGRU had always harboured its suspicions about Foote’s loyalties, because of hisrelationship with the British consulate in Geneva, and especially when heencouraged Radó to take cover with him there in November 1943. After Foote wasreleased from prison in November 1944, he made his way to Paris, where he madethe extraordinarily bold decision to travel to Moscow to face the music,arriving in mid-January 1945. During the next couple of years, MI5 and MI6communicated desultorily on Foote’s fate. Foote, meanwhile, was undergoingintense interrogation, and his brazenness in afforming his loyalty must haveimpressed the Soviets. He was sent to spy school, and on March 7, 1947, leftMoscow for Berlin, with a new identity, and a mission to operate as a Sovietagent in South America. On July 2, he defected to the British authorities inBerlin. Claude Dansey did not see his hero return: he had died, discarded,disliked and dejected, on June 11.

Footewas initially interrogated by MI6, and quickly revealed, as is evident from thefirst Interrogation Report of July 14, that he had worked alongside ‘Sonia’ inthe Rote Drei, and that ‘Sonia’ was the alias given to her by theRussian Secret Service, her real name being Ursula KUTSCINSKI’ [sic]. MI5’sSerpell (who had replaced an exasperated Shillito by then) was sent out tointerrogate Foote, who immediately voiced his concerns about Sonia’s probableespionage in Britain. Foote was broughtback to the UK, under an assumed name, and arrived at Northolt on August 7. Allthis must have been a little embarrassing for MI6, who know saw mattersspiralling out of control, with officers who had not been ‘indoctrinated’ inthe case, including the new Director-General, spreading the news around. PercySillitoe contacted the Canadians about the Gouzenko connection; Serpellexcitedly got in touch with the American Embassy. Foote, meanwhile, had acrisis of conscience: Sonia had, after all, been his collaborator and tutor,and he sent her a furtive message via Fred Ullmann, another InternationalBrigader who had originally helped recruit him, that she and Len should be ontheir guard.

Thisnews re-awakened MI5, with the familiar Marriott (now B1b) seeking informationon the Beurtons’ whereabouts, since they had lost track of Len since hisdischarge in August 1945. He immediatelyrequested a Home Office Warrant check put on the Beurton’s correspondence, asit had apparently just come to his notice that they had both been Soviet spiesin Switzerland during the early part of the war. Further revelations from theinterrogation of Foote came to light: “Foote suggested that another symptom ofSONIA’s continued link with MOSCOW after she reached England was contained in amessage he had from Moscow in 1941 about the efforts to get BEURTON back to theU.K. The message said that ELEANOR RATHBONE and others were helping.”

Marriotttreated the deluge of Foote’s divulgements as if they were all news to him, andwrote, apparently without irony: “It is not clear why Ursula Beurton leftSwitzerland as she did at the end of 1940 to proceed to this country, but onthe evidence of Foote she did so with at least Russian concurrence and thepossibility therefore cannot be excluded that she came here with a mission.” (Indeed. Had he not read the filesin the Registry?) On August 18, he disingenuously tried to finesse the issue bynoting that ‘the circ*mstances of the issue of this latter passport are knownto me, and are not relevant to my inquiries.’ The outcome was that Serpell, accompaniedby William Skardon, went to The Firs on September 13, to interrogateSonia and Len.

Thisextraordinary encounter has been thoroughly reported on, by such as ChapmanPincher and John Green. It seemed the intention of Serpell and Skardon was to putSonia at her ease, by assuring her that they knew that she had not engaged inany espionage activity in Britain, but instead indicating that they wanted tolearn more about what had happened in Switzerland. Yet Sonia had been preparedfor the visit by Foote. While Serpell’s continued references to her marriageunnerved Sonia, she realised that if she stuck to her guns, and remainedsilent, no ill could come out of the exercise. After all, British Intelligencehad as much to lose from the truth coming out as she did.

Whilethe focus of the questions seemed to be on events in Switzerland (andMarriott’s notes had indicated that questions concerning Len Beurton’s passportwere uppermost in his mind), Serpell and Skardon seemed singularly uninterestedin Len, who joined the gathering later, and even indicated that he thought thathe was on their side (which, of course, he had been, for a while). The behaviourof the officers in this encounter bewildered Sonia: it was as if MI5 had beentrying to catch her out, but they performed with total clumsiness. Serpell andSkardon revealed events in Switzerland that could only have been communicatedby Foote. Certainly, the visit confirmed that any espionage activity by her andLen would have to cease at that stage, but Moscow had already decreed thatoutcome. Or was it a subtle indication that MI5 knew all about her, and thatshe and Len should make their escape while the going was good? That is aninterpretation that John Green hypothesizes. Remarkably, the Home OfficeWarrant letter checks on not only Sonia, but on other members of her family,were withdrawn immediately after this encounter. So life carried on smoothlyfor a couple of years.

The arrest of Fuchs, on February 3, 1950, was more alarming. Sonia feared that he would reveal everything under interrogation, and, indeed, as early as February 20, J. D. Robertson (B2A) remarked that Sonia might be induced to talk because of the announcement of his arrest, although it is not clear what prompted him to make that connection. Fuchs had indeed spoken of a female contact he had had encounters with in Banbury, which should have set some MI5 pulses beating faster. Sonia herself wrote that ‘when the press mentioned that Klaus had been meeting a foreign woman with black hair in Banbury I expected my arrest any day’. Frank Close, in his biography of Fuchs, Trinity, reports that ‘the files record enigmatically that she was “touch not”’, but indicates that a pencilled annotation explained that this should be “tough nut”. Quite so: I have not been able to verify this, but the message is clear.

Inany case, Sonia jumped the gun, and escaped with her two youngest children toEast Germany on February 27, while Fuchs’s trial was under way. Theextraordinary gaffe in this exercise was that no effort at preventing herdeparture was made, despite the obvious recognition that MI5 had shown (such asin Robertson’s note) that she might have been connected to the case. It wasobviously easier to have her out of the way. She was untouchable. As Sonia herself wrote: “Either it wascomplete stupidity on the part of MI5 never to have connected me with Klaus, orthey may have let me go with it, since every further discovery would haveincreased their disgrace.”

Sonia’sdeparture must have been recorded, yet many MI5 officers remained in the dark.They even expressed the desire for bringing her and Len in for questioning.Fuchs continued to reveal more. On June 16, Robertson reported that JürgenKuczynski was the person who had originally put Fuchs in touch with theRussians. On June 22, a letter was sentto the GPO, requesting a Home Office Warrant for Sonia, as ‘we have recently received information which indicates that UrsulaBeurton has not relinquished her connection with Soviet espionage since herarrival in the U.K.in 1941’. Even Director-General Sillitoe was on the act,asking Rutherford on July 25 about the whereabouts of Sonia and her husband. OnJune 27, Len Beurton, who had been recovering from a broken leg sustained in a motorcycleaccident, was also allowed to leave the country untouched. On August 22,Robertson at last learned that Sonia had flown the coop. Not until November didFuchs, obviously having been informed that Sonia and Len had safely left thecountry, admit that Sonia was his contact, and on December 18 he recognized herin a photograph. All through 1950, Liddell made no comment in his diaries aboutthe Kuczynski link – or, if he did, the passages have been redacted. When Soniawas at last identified, his chagrin, and that of all senior officers in MI5 andMI6, must have been immense.

Conclusions

What started out as an imaginative opportunity for MI6 turned into a nightmare. It enabled the entry into Britain of a spy dedicated to the communist cause, one who helped her masters acquire secrets that would have been used to destroy the pluralist democracy. No doubt encouraged by the fruitful achievements of the emerging MI5 operation of developing double-agents (at that time, SNOW), Claude Dansey, the deputy to Stewart Menzies, alighted upon the availability of Ursula Hamburger to implement a similar project for Soviet spies. He was in Switzerland from September to November 1939, as Sonia’s divorce proceedings culminated. His man, van den Heuvel, and Farrell, the Passport Control Officer who was van den Heuvel’s deputy, became the instruments to make the plan a reality. In believing that they were saving Sonia’s life by abetting her escape, MI6 succumbed to the illusion that she and Len would be permanently beholden to them.

Yetmanaging so-called ‘double-agents’ is a hazardous business. It requires bothvery tight operational security, restricting knowledge of the project to as fewpersons as possible, and maintaining exclusive control over the agents’movements and communications. The handling agency can never be sure that theperson assumed to having been turned has made an ideological about-face, andswitched his or her loyalties. Thus, unless a very tight rein is held over theagents’ behaviour, there is always the risk that, in their communications, theywill betray the fact that they are being manipulated, or even arrangeunsurveilled meetings where they will be able to describe what is going on. Thatis why they are properly called ‘controlled enemy agents’. MI5 knew this; theAbwehr knew this; the CIA, in its enthusiasm for transplanting the Double-Crosstechniques to their own theatre of operations after the war, were slow torecognize the truth. For some reason MI6 did not think through the implicationsof bringing Sonia and Len into their fold.

Thebrunt of the burden fell upon MI5, who were responsible for domestic securityagainst subversion and espionage. And the archive shows clearly how the servicewas divided over how to handle Len and Sonia once they arrived in Britain. Thesenior officers (Liddell and White, but not the Director-General) were surelycomplicit with MI6 in the scheme. Junior officers and recruits (such asShillito, Cazalet, Reed, Vesey, J. D. Robertson, Bagot, Serpell) were kept inthe dark, and left to stumble around, pursuing leads, until they became tooenergized in their suspicions, recommended some kind of interrogation orprosecution, and had to be gently talked out of it. (At a high-level meeting onJanuary 25, 1950 between Lord Portal, Roger Makins, Liddell and White at theMinistry of Supply, this uncomfortable truth was even admitted.) The middleranks (such as Marriott, Hollis, and Curry) were no doubt brought, at leastpartially, into the subterfuge, and were delegated the unpleasant tasks ofdealing with other organisations, such as the Foreign Office, MI6 and the FBI. Ascan be seen, primarily in Marriott’s anguished correspondence, they struggleddismally with explaining away the inexplicable. The complexities of the projectand its intelligence ramifications were clearly too deep to be entrusted to theDirectors-General, one a soldier (Petrie) and the other a policeman (Sillitoe),although Petrie’s anti-communist vigour would mean that he probably had to havethings explained to him after the Green case.

Aboveall, the exercise shows how improbable the theory must be that Roger Hollissingle-handedly, as a Soviet mole, managed to protect Sonia (and Len) from theattention and prosecution that they obviously deserved. This theory has takenroot so deeply that new historical works and biographies regularly appear thattake it for granted that the assertions of Chapman Pincher and Peter Wrightshould be accepted unquestionably. Hollis’s guilt is affirmed purely on thebasis that he must have protected Sonia (Len is rarely mentioned). The mass ofdetail that shows how Sonia and Len were nurtured, supported, assisted,recruited, even lied for – and then deliberately ignored, and allowed to escape– proves that it could not have been because of Hollis’s skills in throwing ablanket of ignorance around the couple with the outcome that they were thusable to remain unmolested. Even if Hollis had possessed the power and authorityto insist that they were harmless, the widespread knowledge about theirbackground, the illicit marriage, the recruitment of Len by MI6, the phonystories about ex-husbands, tuberculosis, and ski-ing injuries, about forgedpassports, dubious medical certificates, and unlikely inheritances would havemade his protestations a laughing-stock.

Inthe English edition of her memoir, Sonia wrote: “I know no Fifth Man, and Imust also spoil the speculation or, as some writers state, ‘the fact’ that Iever had anything to do with the one-time director of MI5, Roger Hollis”. Thatmay be one of the few true statements she made in her book. Later in life,however, she wryly admitted that she mused over the possibility that someone inMI5 was protecting her. Indeed, madam.

Asfor the GRU, Sonia’s penetration of British atomic research was a coup,although perhaps not as astounding as the mythology has made it. Fuchs was hersource for only a year, and modern assessments indicate that, as far as theUnited Kingdom was concerned, Engelbert Broda and Melita Norwood were probablyfar more valuable contributors to the Soviet’s purloining of weapons secrets.Sonia’s connection with Norwood has often been overplayed. Yet Sonia’sachievements were a significant blow to the prestige of British Intelligence, whichhad held a worldwide reputation now revealed to be unmerited. In the firstcouple of decades after the war, the Soviet Union and East Germany openlydenied the activities of their spies, wanting to impress their citizens thattheir scientific achievements were attributable to Communist ingenuity.

Onlywhen the spy scandals were rolled out in the United States and Great Britaindid the mood change to one of pride in how their intelligence services hadoutfoxed the West’s. Then they lauded openly the achievements of their ‘atomicspies’, promoting memoirs like Sonia’s. President Putin, relying on hispublic’s fragile connection with history, after a brief fling promoting Sovietspy exploits (see the case of Svetlana Lokhova and The Spy Who ChangedHistory, at https://coldspur.com/four-books-on-espionage/) seems now to want to return to the Cold War status quo ante,reinforcing the idea that the Soviet Union’s success with nuclear weaponry owedmore to Russian skills than it did to underhand espionage and the theft of thediscoveries of former allies.

Onehas to assume that the GRU in Moscow knew exactly what was going on at thetime, and took a back seat while MI6 floundered. Immediately Sonia or Len wasfirst approached by MI6 with any sort of feeler, each would have reported it toMoscow. Thus all further moves would have been passed on as well. Anthony Bluntwas keeping his bosses informed, and relayed to them the lukewarm attentionthat Hugh Shillito paid to CP and GRU spies. The GRU must have wondered exactlywhat MI6 was up to, if it believed the opposition’s service could manipulate Sovietagents with such naivety. Indeed, around this time, the GRU’s sister service,the NKGB (as the NKVD-KGB was known at that time), was so dumbfounded by the factthat British Intelligence could allow the Cambridge Ring to flourish that itissued an internal report suggesting that the whole exercise was one ofdisinformation. Referring to the Double-Cross (XX) Committee as one of thevital institutions involved, Elena Modrzchinskaya, the head of the ThirdDepartment of the NKGB’s First Directorate, published the report in November1942: it took almost two years for the suspicions to be disproved, andcredibility in the sources re-established.

Yet,if MI6 and MI5 showed an alarming amateurishness about the whole process, theGRU’s agents likewise put on a dismal display of tradecraft. Before placing‘illegals’ in the western democracies, the GRU and OGPU/NKVD invested anenormous amount of time in creating solid ‘legends’ for their agents, where,supported by false passports, individuals of indeterminate central and easternEuropean origin were allowed to establish convincing identities and occupationsin the cities from which they operated. The GRU could not have exerted anyinfluence on the stories that Sonia and Len concocted before embarking on theirjourneys to Britain, yet they – especially Sonia – should have been wellindoctrinated into the necessity of maintaining a coherent narrative abouttheir previous travel, objectives, sources of funds, business activities, anddisabilities.

Sonia and Len behaved, however, completely amateurishly. Their accounts to the immigration authorities were absurd. It was as if they did not even discuss what their separate stories should be if they were interrogated, and how these rigmaroles would mesh together. The resulting narrative was so ridiculous that it should immediately have been discredited, and the suspects hauled in. We now know, of course, why that did not happen. Perhaps the Soviets, and Len and Sonia in particular, were so sure of MI6’s game-plan that they felt that they did not need to bother. But that assumption would have been based on granting the fragmented and pluralistic British intelligence services a discipline and unity that may have existed in the Soviet Union, but simply was unrealistic in a democratic society.

What it boils down to is that the truth is indeed stranger than anything that the ex-MI6 officer John le Carré, master of espionage fiction, could have dreamed up. If he ever devised a plot whereby the service that recruited him had embarked on such a flimsy and outrageous project, and tried to cover it up in the ham-fisted way that the real archive shows, while all the time believing that the opposition did not know what was going on, his publisher would have sent him back to the drawing-board.

This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Geography, Politics, Travel

(This report, on the dubious testimony of Peter Wright, the author of Spycatcher, concerning Agent Sonia and her wireless transmissions, is a long and challenging one, and I issue my customary health warning: Do not read this if you are of a sensitive disposition, or while operating agricultural machinery. I decided to lay out every step of my reasoning, with references, as I believe that, with the delivery of the authorised History of GCHQ in a few months’ time, it is important to present a comprehensive story of the slice of wartime Soviet wireless traffic that Wright focused on in his book. The interest in Spycatcher indicates that a mass of persons are fascinated by this topic: questions about possible traitors in the midst of the Security Service do not go away. I believe the issuance of this report is especially timely, as the recent feature in the Mail on Sunday should intensify the interest in the case that Wright made against Sonia and her alleged protector, Roger Hollis. If any of my readers would prefer to work with a Word version of this bulletin, in the belief that they might want to pore over it, and annotate it, please contact me at antonypercy@aol.com. After a thorough background check by my team of ultra-sensitive, highly-trained, Moscow-based security personnel, the report will be sent to you.)

“StellaRimington and some friends in the Security Service called Wright ‘the KGBillegal’, because, with his appearance and his lisp we could imagine that hewas really a KGB officer.” (Defending The Realm, p 518)

“Iwant to prove that Hollis was a spy; if I can do that I will be happy.” (PeterWright to Malcolm Turnbull, from the latter’s ‘Spycatcher Trial’, p 31)

“Thetime has come for there to be an openness about the secret world of so long ago… the consequences of Hollis being a spy are enormous. Not only does it meanthat MI5 is probably still staffed by people with similar view to him, but itmeans that ASIO was established on terms with the advice of a Russian spy.” (PeterWright in the witness-box, Sydney, December 1986)

Contents:

1. PeterWright and ‘Spycatcher’
2. TheBackground
3. Cableor Wireless?
4. Warand Peace
5. VENONAand HASP
6. Wrighton HASP
7. TheRemaining Questions
8. TheDrought of 1942-44
9. Whydid Wright Mangle the Story so much?
10. Conclusions

PeterWright and ‘Spycatcher’

As an ex-IBMer (1969-1973), until I read Spycatcher in the late nineteen-eighties, the only ‘HASP’ I knew was the Houston Automated Spooling Priority program (about which I shall mercifully write no more). One of the major contributions to mole-hunting that Peter Wright believed he made, in his best-selling account of dodgy business within MI5, was the unveiling of a new source of electronic intelligence, namely (as he described it) ‘the wartime traffic stored by the Swedish authorities known as HASP’. By citing a previously unknown and ever since unrevealed message that purported to indicate the size of Sonia’s ‘network’ of spies in 1941, Wright’s assertion has exerted quite a considerable influence on the mythology of Soviet ‘superspy’ SONIA. If judged as credible, his testimony boosts her achievements in England even beyond what the woman claimed in her memoir, Sonya’s Report. Moreover, Wright used this discovery as a major reason for confirming his belief that Roger Hollis was the Soviet mole known as ELLI: he drew attention to this accusation in his presence in the witness-box during the Spycatcher trial, and thus the process by which he came to this conclusion is of profound significance.

Spycatchersold over two million copies. This success was mainly due to the outcome of HerMajesty’s Government’s lawsuit against the author before publication, withMalcom Turnbull’s successful defence in the trial of 1986-87 issuing a sternblow to the forces of hypocritical secrecy. He was able to show that theBritish authorities had connived at, or even encouraged, the publication ofChapman Pincher’s two books, Their Trade is Treachery, and Too SecretToo Long (as well as Nigel West’s A Matter of Trust), which madenonsense of the claim that a ban on the whole of Spycatcher wasnecessary for security reasons. It was the obstinacy of Margaret Thatcher,abetted by poor advice, that caused the lawsuit to be pursued. The irony wasthat it was Wright who had fed Pincher most of his stories, and Pincher wouldlater amplify Wright’s case against Hollis with the very influential Treachery.That is why this article is so important. Those two million-plus readers needto learn the facts about a critical part of Wright’s story.

TheBackground

Anothersignificant outcome of a careful study of Wright’s claims concerning the HASPstory is the uncovering of secrets about the interception and decryption ofelectronic traffic that the British intelligence services (MI5, MI6 and,especially, GCHQ) would rather the public remain ignorant of. The authorisedhistories of MI5 (Andrew) and MI6 (Jeffery) steered well clear of analysis ofthe mechanics of wartime electronic espionage, since these volumes weredesigned and controlled as organs of public relations. No discussion of Sonia,or the controversies surrounding illicit wireless in wartime Britain, can befound in their books, and Andrew (especially) points readers towards thesecondary literature without any indication of how reliable it is, or how selectivelyit should be explored. Moreover, Iregret that I am not confident that all will be revealed to us when the authorisedhistory of GCHQ (Behind the Enigma, by Professor John Ferris) ispublished later this year. While a subsidiary objective of my focus on Wrightis thus to provide a more rigorous analysis of the often puzzling story of theAllied effort to interpret Soviet intelligence traffic in World War II, a morethorough account will have to wait until a later bulletin.

Thesecondary literature almost universally shows an alarming confusion about thetechniques and technology that underlay the surveillance of the traffic offoreign powers before, during, and after WWII. The largely American literatureon the VENONA program (to which HASP was a critical adjunct: see below) isdistressingly weak on technology, and focuses almost exclusively on theinterception of traffic in the United States. Even such a well-researched andmethodical work as Philip H. J. Davies’s MI6 and the Machinery of Spyingcontains only two short references to VENONA, guiding the reader (note 32, p237) for ‘a (contested) British version of the story’ to Peter Wright’s Spycatcher.This seems to me a gross abdication of critical responsibility. Daviesconcentrates of human ‘machinery’, not technology, and delegates coverage ofproblematic matters to a source he instantly characterizes as dubious. It wouldappear, therefore, that, even though Wright’s story does not derive from anypublished archive, his controversial memoir has become the default – but flawed– authority. Yet he was a minor officer in the grand scheme of things, and anelderly man with a grudge and a failing memory when his book was composed.

Itis certainly difficult to obtain reliable confirmation of the essence of HASPfrom other academic, or pseudo-academic, sources. One might, for example, haveexpected to learn about it in Richard J. Aldrich’s 2010 work, GCHQ, yet,while providing a comprehensive chapter on HASP’s cousin VENONA, the author doesnot mention the term. The only other analyst who appears to have writtenexplicitly about HASP without simply echoing Wright’s account is Nigel West, inhis 2009 book Venona. West has overall provided a competent guidebook tothe initial breakthroughs on decryption, and an excellent coverage of the contentof VENONA traffic, with emphasis on the London-Moscow communications, althoughit would benefit from a revision to consider the relevance of such sources asthe Vassiliev Notebooks (see https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks).Venona is a highly readable summary for the curious student ofintelligence, but West’s coverage of the mechanics of VENONA is spottyand inconsistent. Moreover, his representation of the HASP traffic is sodifferent from that of Wright that I believe the topic merits greater scrutiny,and it is my goal here to provide that level of inspection, and assess thevalidity of what Wright claimed. This is uncharted and complex territory,however, and the landscape is strewn with pitfalls.

VENONAwas one of the major successes of British-American co-operation on intelligencematters after WWII. Owing to a procedural mistake in 1943, a large number ofGRU (military and naval intelligence) and NKVD/KGB (* state security) messagesexchanged between Moscow and outlying stations in foreign embassies employed adefective technique for enciphering highly confidential messages – the re-useof so-called ‘one-time pads’. Intelligence agencies have regarded one-time padsas the most watertight way of preventing enemy decryption of messages, and theywere adopted by the Soviet Union in the 1930s. (Many readers will be familiarwith the concept if they have read Leo Marks’s Between Silk and Cyanide.)Alert cryptanalysts in the National Security Agency (NSA), inspecting messagesin 1946, noticed unusual patterns, and in 1948 were joined by their British counterpartsfrom GCHQ in exploring the phenomenon. By applying painstaking techniques todetect repeated sequences, they were able to initiate a project that gradually disclosedseveral networks of spies in the USA, Canada, Britain and Australia, leading tothe successful prosecution of such as Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, and AlanNunn May, and the identification of Donald Maclean. VENONA was not formallyrevealed to the public until 1995.

Yetexactly what this ‘re-use’ entailed, and where and when it took place, and towhich cryptological tools it applied, remains one of the most vexing puzzles inthe VENONA story. It is as if the practitioners, when explaining theirsuccesses to the lay historians who carried their accounts to the world, wishedto keep the process and sequence of events to themselves, as a defensivemeasure to protect their secrets, and maybe, even, to exaggerate what they wereable to accomplish. A deep integrative history is sorely needed.

[*The naming of the Soviet Security Organization changed frequently. In 1934,the OGPU was transformed into the NKVD, which for a few months in 1941 becamethe NKGB, before reverting to NKVD until April 1943. In March 1946, it becamethe MGB, but foreign intelligence was transferred to the Committee forInformation (KI) from October 1947 to November 1951. In March 1953, on Stalin’sdeath, the unit was combined with the MVD, out of which the KGB emerged, afterBeria’s execution, in March 1954. Source: Christopher Andrew. I sometimes use‘KGB’ in this article to refer to the permanent body, as do many authors.]

Cableor Wireless?

One conundrum in the analysis of VENONA and HASP has endured: no author on the subject is precise about where and when VENONA (or HASP) was the result of intercepting cable traffic, and where and when it involved wireless traffic. This distinction is important when one considers the challenges facing the counter-espionage organisations of the nations trying to protect themselves. The term ‘cable’ is frequently used as a generic term for ‘telegram’, reflecting its historical background, but telegrams sent by wireless should definitely not be called ‘cables’. Christopher Andrew, in Defending the Realm, makes a useful distinction, but his account is incomplete and thus overall unsatisfying. He contrasts (on page 376) the regulations pertaining in the UK, where ‘even before the Soviet entry into the war, the Foreign Office had agreed that the Soviet embassy in London could communicate with Moscow by radio on set frequencies’, and adds that a project was soon underway to intercept these messages. On the other hand, no corresponding agreement existed in the USA, where, instead, ‘Soviet messages were written out for transmission by cable companies, which, in accordance with wartime censorship laws, supplied copies to the US authorities.’

Thisstatement is probably an echo of what appears in the staff (but not ‘official’)story of VENONA, issued by the NSA/CIA in 1966 (VENONA: Soviet Espionage andthe American Response, edited by Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner).In the Preface (p xii) appear the following sentences: “Although Sovietintelligence services had clandestine radio transmitters in diplomatic missionslocated in several American cities, these apparently were to be used only in emergencies.In consequence, KGB and GRU stations cabled their important messages overcommercial telegraph lines and sent bulky reports and documents – includingmost of the information acquired by agents – in diplomatic pouches.” Thisstatement moves us closer to the truth, but in my opinion still misrepresentsthe essence of the Soviet strategy concerning clandestine systems, and does notexplain whether these secret channels were intercepted at all.

Confusionabounds. For example, in the very first sentence of Venona, Nigel Westwrites of the project to intercept Japanese traffic in October 1942 as follows:“Cable 906 purported to be a routine circular in seven parts and, as it hadcome off the wireless circuit linking Tokyo to Berlin and Helsinki, itunderwent the usual Allied scrutiny to see if it betrayed any information ofstrategic significance.” Cables cannot ‘come off’ (whatever that means)‘wireless circuits’, and it is inaccurate to describe temporary wireless pathsas ‘circuits’, since wireless transmission is by definition unconnected.It makes sense to refer to a ‘circuit’ linking ‘Tokyo to Berlin andHelsinki’ only in terms of a conceptual agreement about callsigns, frequencies,and schedules between intelligence services and outposts. As another example, theheading for the NSA’s official packaging of the London to Moscow traffic (at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Venona-London-GRU.pdf) is titled ‘London GRU – Moscow Center Cables: Cables Decrypted by theNational Security Administration’s Venona Project’, a regrettablemisrepresentation of reality. The messages were sent by wireless.

Themisconception is aggrandized by Peter Wright himself. In Spycatcher, theauthor, the self-professed expert in these matters, writes (p 182): “Whereasthe Americans had all the Soviet radio traffic passing to and from the USAduring and after the war, in Britain Churchill ordered all anti-Sovietintelligence work to cease during the wartime alliance, and GCHQ did not begintaking the traffic again until the very end of the war.” Sadly, every clause ofthis woeful sentence contains at least one blatant error, which casts serious doubton his reliability on other matters. Specifically:

1. The Soviet VENONA traffic to and from theUSA was almost exclusively commercial cable traffic.
2. ‘Had all the Soviet radio traffic’ ismeaningless. Did the Americans intercept it all? Most certainly not. As otherexperts have pointed out, wireless traffic was banned (officially) during thewar. The Soviets used wireless as an emergency back-up system, but also as achannel for clandestine espionage traffic.
3. No one can point to the minute whereChurchill ordered all interception, let alone all intelligence work, to cease.Hinsley’s famous footnote [see below] speaks only of ‘decryption anddecoding’, not interception, and does not constitute an authoritative record. (ProfessorGlees reports conversations with Hinsley on this point in his book TheSecrets of the Service: what Glees was told, namely that the Y Board mayhave issued such an order, now appears to be confirmed by the in-house historyof the NSA.) We know that interception of signals continued, if erratically, throughoutthe war, and that Alastair Denniston, previously head of GC&CS, started hisnew project on Soviet traffic in late 1942.
4. GCHQ did not come into existence until 1946.Before that the institution was known as GC&CS (Government Code &Cypher School). During the war, however, RSS was responsible for ‘taking thetraffic’, and never reported to GC&CS. We know from RSS files that itmonitored Soviet traffic, and that the ISCOT project started picking upComintern messages in 1943.

Within this fog of misrepresentation a very important distinction remains. A cable is a wire, with the important corollary that those agencies that control the input to the physical cable may have special authority (or power) to intercept and store the traffic that is passed to them. Such transmissions can also be detected clandestinely by specialized sensory equipment, which would have to be laid close to the cable. Thus cables are a direct, bounded, targeted medium and not universally detectable. (Today’s fibre optic cables, which GCHQ and the NSA tap, follow largely the same oceanic paths used by the cables laid at the end of the nineteenth century.) Wireless traffic is looser: it is transmitted over the ether. It may be picked up by local groundwaves, or, remotely, by any receiving device that is geographically well-positioned to receive shortwave transmissions, allowing for the vagaries of atmospheric conditions, and frequencies used. Yet, while the atmosphere is lawless, the source of the transmission is frequently concealed, and the activity unpredictable. Wireless transmission presents a completely different set of security challenges.

P. S. I am grateful to Ian W. who, on the day this report was published, informed me that ‘cables’ might be transmitted for part of their journey over ‘wireless’ links – something I had suspected, but had not been able to verify. Ian also mentioned that, half a century ago, it was common for wireless contacts to be referred to as ‘circuits’.

Warand Peace

Earlierin the century, circ*mstances – and improvements in technology – had encouragedthe use of wireless as a medium for confidential traffic. Private ornationally-owned cable facilities had been shown to be liable to attack anddestruction. Such sabotage happened when the British cut Germany’snationally-owned transatlantic cables in 1914, an event that forced Germandiplomatic traffic to be routed through ‘neutral’ third parties. Britain usedits sway to intercept German traffic, and with cryptological skills abetted bythe provision of codebooks supplied by the Russians, started deciphering Germanmessages. In February 1917, the British deciphered the Zimmermann Telegram,which had encouraged Mexico to join forces against the United States. WhenZimmermann admitted the truth behind the cable telegram, public disgust broughtthe USA into the war.

Suchan exposure encouraged experimentation with a rapidly developing wirelesstechnology. (In Spycatcher, Peter Wright himself explained how, afterWorld War I, his father assisted Marconi in convincing the British governmentthat the beaming of short-wave wireless signals would be more effective thandeploying long-wave technology as a means of linking the Empire.) In turn, aspractices and understanding matured, that led to the important adoption of water-tightencryption mechanisms. Correspondingly, in the next two decades of peace, hostgovernments tried to monitor such processes that originated on their hometerritory, by attempting to pick up open transmissions from the air, to setabout decrypting them, and thus identifying possible hostile threats. TheBritish project known as MASK, which detected Comintern traffic in London inthe mid-thirties, was an example of such.

Theadvent of war, however, made a more spirited approach to trapping andprosecuting illicit wireless transmissions much more urgent. For example, atthe outset of World War II, the British were fearful of the possibility ofswarms of enemy wireless operators in their midst. They were initially not soscared about routine intelligence-gathering as they were about the (imaginary) menaceof such spies using wireless to guide German bombers to their targets. The governmentalso wanted to control the dissemination overseas of secret intelligence byconventional agencies. It made demands to foreign embassies and legations aboutbeing informed of wireless frequencies, and even call-signs, before givingapproval for their use. Since a tacit understanding about reciprocal needsexisted, governments often turned a blind eye to some technical breaches (suchas the British with the Soviets, and the Swiss with the British). To monitorabuse of the airwaves, interception services then had to deploy enhanced wirelessdetection mechanisms to collect such clandestine messages, and maybedirection-finding/location-finding systems and vehicles to verify the source ofsuch messages (as happened with the Soviet Embassy in London in 1942.) Theelimination of any possibly overlooked German wireless agents was critical forthe success of the Double-Cross system.

TheUK government thus permitted the use of wireless transmitters on embassypremises only for Allies, while allowing, as a special case, the Polish andCzechoslovak governments-in-exile to have their own independent wirelessstations, the Czech station in Woldingham, Surrey playing a very significantrole. In the UK, all represented governments (including those in exile) clearlyhad a preference for using wireless rather than cable, in the belief that thetraffic might not be picked up at all, and thus be more secure. The SovietUnion was in a unique position, as it was officially neither ally nor enemyfrom September 1939 until June 1941, but was hardly neutral, as it had, in thatperiod been in a pact with Nazi Germany, and had aided the latter’s war effortagainst Great Britain. In those circ*mstances, it was supposed to use itswireless apparatus in the Embassy for diplomatic traffic only, and was instructedto inform His Majesty’s Government of frequencies and callsigns being used.

Thus,when any embassy or legation in World War II wanted to send a ‘telegram’, it stillmaintained some level of choice. First, it had to deal with the localgovernment, consider the regulations, and assess how strictly the rules weregoing to be enforced. Indeed, many such messages were enciphered, but still sentover private circuits. Copies were frequently taken by the local authorities, especiallyby those who (as with the USA) forbad the use of clandestine wireless byforeign governments. Indeed (as Romerstein and Breindel remind us in TheVenona Secrets), in 1943 the US Federal Communications Commission detectedillicit radio signals coming from the Soviet consulates in New York and SanFrancisco, and confiscated the apparatus. Consequently, the NKVD and GRU in theUSA had to rely almost exclusively on commercial telegraph agencies to sendtheir messages to Moscow. Likewise, all confidential traffic beyond thediplomatic bag that was sent back to Moscow by the embassy in Canberra,Australia (a vital VENONA source), was officially transmitted by commercialcable companies.

Romerstein’sand Breindel’s account corresponds in general with what NSA officers havewritten. Their statement is an echo of what appears in Benson’s and Warner’shistory mentioned above. In that work’s Preface (p xii) appear the followingsentences: “Although Soviet intelligence services had clandestine radiotransmitters in diplomatic missions located in several American cities, theseapparently were to be used only in emergencies. In consequence, KGB and GRUstations cabled their important messages over commercial telegraph lines andsent bulky reports and documents – including most of the information acquiredby agents – in diplomatic pouches.”

Yetthe FBI offers an intriguing twist to this story. In the archive of thatinstitution (‘The Vault’) can be found some provocative assertions. An undatedmemorandum outlining considerations in using VENONA information in prosecutions(p 63) declares that ‘these Soviet messages are made up of telegrams and cablesand radio messages sent between Soviet intelligence operators in the UnitedStates and Moscow.” While that is an implausible triad (cables and radiomessages are both ‘telegrams’), it suggests a more complicated situation. And,on page 72, the writer measures, with some timidity, some political considerations,indicating that the Soviet Union might react in a hostile fashion to the newsthat the USA had been spying on its wartime ally, thus not acting ‘in goodfaith’. He writes: “ . . . while nowritten record has been located in Bureau files to verify this it has beenstated by NSA officials that during the war Soviet diplomats in the U.S. weregranted permission to use Army radio facilities at the Pentagon to sendmessages to Moscow. It has been stated that President Roosevelt granted thispermission and accompanied it with the promise to the Soviets that theirmessages would not be intercepted or interfered with by U.S. authorities.”

Onecan imagine the frequently naïve Roosevelt making an offer like this, but it isdifficult to imagine that the wary Russians would take such an offer at facevalue, and have their cypher-clerks trek over to the Pentagon to send theirmaterial in the knowledge that it would probably be intercepted. Moreover, notall their traffic derived from Washington: New York and San Francisco were busyoutlets. The item is undated, and apparently unconfirmed, and thus needs to berecorded as a footnote of questionable significance.

Onthe other hand, what is certain is that the Soviet Embassy in London breachedthe rules, even before Barbarossa, first of all by sending not just diplomatictraffic but also military and intelligence reports to Moscow on theacknowledged channels. Yet Soviet Military Intelligence (the GRU), which wasfor a while the only functioning intelligence unit in the Soviet Embassy, asthe NKVD officers had reputedly been recalled for almost all of 1940, went far beyondwhat was permitted in order to deceive surveillance mechanisms. I refer to aVENONA message of July 17, 1940, from London to Moscow, which is titled ‘Settingup an illicit radio in the Soviet Embassy’. It unambiguously refers toapparatus sent over in the diplomatic bag, but without clear instructions, andrequests more guidance on setting up the antenna. The GRU in London was tryingto establish an alternative mechanism for transmission without informing itshosts, and, when the GRU rather absurdly suddenly were about to run out ofone-time pads in August/September 1940, messages at that time specify that the‘emergency system’ should be used. The emergency system was planned not just asa back-up procedure using a book-directed system for creating random keys (inplace of the printed one-time pads), but as the deployment of an alternativewireless transmitter/receiver apparatus. (I analyse this phenomenon in moredetail at the end of this report.)

Tosummarize, in the context of World War II: the pressures on combatants toprevent unauthorised intelligence from leaving the nation were intense. Thedistinction between the media was very important, as cables were finite,self-contained, and asynchronous, and could easily be collected by the host country.Wireless messages, on the other hand, were open, unconstrained, andalways somewhat speculative, but required a sophisticated infrastructure justto be intercepted. Synchronicity was the goal with wireless, but was not alwaysachieved: your target might not pick up your message and acknowledge it, ormight receive it only partially. On the other hand, an unintended bystandermight intercept it. Moreover, to circumvent the efforts of the authorities,units wanting to send intelligence back to their controllers would sometimesset up alternative wireless systems in secret, of which the local governmenthad not been notified. I do not believe any analyst of VENONA has explained indetail how the respective traffic was transmitted or collected in each country,i.e. by cable, by authorised wireless, or by unauthorised wireless. Certainly,the experience – and opportunity – differed greatly for the British and Americanauthorities.

VENONA& HASP

Thisconfusion appears to have leaked into the VENONA-HASP muddle. In order to putthe HASP phenomenon into the context of VENONA, I shall soon turn to the textsof Peter Wright, the primary source about HASP, and add detailed commentary oneach passage. One of the difficult concepts to bear in mind with VERONA andHASP is that decryption (with the exception of the Australian intercepts) didnot happen in real time. We are thus dealing with a process that attempted to decryptmessages that may have been transmitted two or three decades earlier, whichwere intercepted and stored at the time, but represent only a small percentageof the total messages that could have been theoretically available. Thusdiscontinuities and gaps are par for the course. Moreover, it is important tounderstand that the Soviets did not realise for several years that theirsystems had been exposed, and consequently did not rush to fix the problem. Thefact of the breakthrough was revealed to the Soviets by the spies WilliamWeisband and Kim Philby in 1949. Only then did the Soviets change theirprocedures, but they could do nothing about the historical traffic of 1940-48.

VENONAitself is a murky project filled with anomalies and unanswered questions,beyond the scope of analysis in this article. The set of facts that need to beborne in mind when considering HASP are the following:

1. The key years of 1940 (when John Tiltman received a GRU code-book from the Finns); 1945 (when the damaged Soviet codebook gained at Petsamo was acquired by the USA, and when the GRU cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada); 1946 (when Meredith Gardner made the first major VENONA decryption); 1949 (when ex-Comintern wireless operator Alexander Foote revealed GRU techniques in Handbook for Spies); 1954 (when Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, Soviet cypher experts who had worked in Stockholm, defected in Australia); and 1959 (when the Swedes handed over HASP, the result of their decryption successes, to GCHQ and NSA).
2. The GRU developed an auxiliary clandestine system to maintain secrecy. This consisted of a) an alternative method of using a secure one-time pad exploiting a reference book known to both parties (which could be used on the regular channel), and b) a separate wireless receiver-transmitter and protocols, not to be announced to the domestic authorities.
3. In the USA and in Australia, the Soviet units used commercial cable channels almost exclusively. In Britain, all traffic was sent by wireless.

Wrighton HASP

In1987, Peter Wright (with the assistance of the journalist Paul Greengrass)published his best-selling work Spycatcher, an account of the efforts bythe so-called ‘FLUENCY’ committee to identify a suspected mole in the seniorranks of MI5. Wright, who had been ‘chief technical officer’ within theservice, was appointed chairman of the committee when it was set up in 1964. Becauseof the way the programme had unmasked figures such as Fuchs and Maclean, thedisclosures from the VENONA project were viewed as possibly important providersof further breakthroughs. Yet successes with VENONA traffic had been slowingdown in the early 1950s, and Wright stated that the project had come to a haltin 1954. A few years later a fresh injection gave the project new life. I donot intend to discuss the broader issues explored in Spycatcher: myfocus is on a strict analysis of the passages where Wright writes about HASP.

Pp185-187 [i] “In 1959, a new discoverywas made which resuscitated VENONA again. GCHQ discovered that the SwedishSignals Intelligence Service had taken and stored a considerable amount of newwartime traffic, including some GRU radio messages sent to and from London duringthe early years of the war. “

Wrightappears confused from the outset. He explicitly states that this trafficincluded messages that could be classified as ‘GRU’ and ‘radio’. But if thistraffic had been stored, but not decrypted, how did the Swedish Service, or thereceiving agency, GCHQ, know they were GRU exchanges until they were decrypted?Moreover, Wright states that these were radio messages sent ‘to and from London’.Does that mean between London and Stockholm or between London and Moscow? Thesuggestion could conceivably be the latter, as Stockholm would have been geographicallywell-situated to pick up messages targeted at Moscow, and there would be littlereason for the GRU station in London to communicate with its Swedishcounterpart (although a few such messages do exist in the archive). Why theSwedes would be interested, however, in intercepting and storing traffic thatdid not concern them directly is a puzzle in its own way. As an addedcomplication, Fred. B. Wrixon, in his Codes, Ciphers & Other Cryptic& Clandestine Communications, states that the Swedes ‘had interceptedsome GRU radio exchanges between agents [sic: my italics] inGreat Britain and their headquarters in the Soviet Union’, (p 118), and thatGCHQ gave the name HASP to the project to decipher them. Wrixon’s sourceis not stated. How Wrixon derived this information is not clear, but it eerilyechoes one of Wright’s more outlandish caprices.

DidWright mislead his readers, whether intentionally or not? I think so. Hisassertion about the nature of the traffic appears to be contradicted by NigelWest, who, in Venona, on page 120, presents an alternative explanation.He writes: “ . . . in 1959 the Swedish National Defence Radio Institute(Forsvarets Radioanstalt, FRA,) revealed that it had retained copies of a vastquantity of the Stockholm-Moscow traffic and negotiated with GCHQ to releaseits archive to the NSA via Cheltenham. This was the batch of interceptscodenamed HASP, and, bearing in mind that some of these texts had been encodedand signed by Petrov, there must have been a great temptation to confront himwith them – if only to tax his memory by seeking clues to the missing,unrecovered groups.” West further explains that when the HASP material becameavailable, ‘two 1945 VENONA intercepts from the Stockholm embassy, dated 16July and 21 September, showed that Petrov, then codenamed SEAMAN, had been thepersonal cipher-clerk to two rezidents, first Mrs Yartseva, then VasiliF. Razin. However, their experience in Sweden had not prepared the Petrovs forthe atmosphere of intrigue in Canberra.”

ThusWest makes a very clear connection between traffic obtained locally in Swedenand the defection of Petrov and his wife in April 1954, and suggests, moreover,that HASP material was exclusively Stockholm-Moscow traffic. This is markedly incontrast to Wright’s representation. Yet West does not explain what therelationship was between the HASP and the VENONA material, how the formerhelped the GCHQ cryptanalysts, or where he derived his information. He refersto intercepts, but were these raw encrypted data, or partially decrypted texts– or both? The logic is very elusive, since the HASP messages are not separatelyidentifiable, but it would appear that additional information enabled thecryptonym MORYAK (SEAMAN), as a key member of the Soviet embassy in Stockholm,to be identified as Petrov. And indeed, the source telegrams confirm Petrov’sstatements from the memoir that he and his wife published in 1956.

The message of July 16 can be seen at: https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/dated/1945/16jul_cipher_text_seaman.pdf, but the VENONA records of September 21 appear to contain no Moscow-Stockholm traffic. Nevertheless, the identity of SEAMAN can be confirmed from earlier traffic from Stockholm to Moscow, when Petrov was working in Moscow (see telegrams No. 797, of September 6, 1941, and No. 821, of April 30, 1942), before the Petrovs’ dramatic seven-month journey to Stockholm, via Siberia, South Africa, and Great Britain.

Asignificant distinction between the respective descriptions of HASP by Wrightand West can thus be seen, with West, to support his cause, providing moretangible evidence of what the traffic contained. The account of anotherhistorian, Christopher Andrew, would appear to reinforce West’s description, althoughwithout actually mentioning HASP. On page 380 of Defend the Realm, Andrewwrites: “Following requests during 1960, the Swedes supplied copies of wartimeGRU telegrams exchanged between Moscow and the Stockholm residency, some ofwhich were discovered to have employed the same one-time pads used in hithertounbroken traffic with London. One hundred and seventy-eight GRU messages fromthe period March 1940 to April 1942 were successfully decrypted in whole orpart.” Andrew’s message is explicit: these messages were not London-Stockholmtraffic, but Stockholm-Moscow messages that the Swedes had apparently enjoyedsome success in decrypting. His log of successful decryption applies to London-Moscowtraffic, however, the suggestion being that both sets of traffic used the sameone-time pads, and that no progress had been made by GCHQ on the Londonmessages beforehand.

Moreover,what does that strange, anonymous notion behind ‘requests’ indicate? How didthe ‘requestor’ learn about them? What was the crypto-analytical expertise ofthe Swedes, and had they previously shared experiences with GCHQ and NSA? The certainimplication here is that the FRA had successfully deciphered some local GRUtraffic, as West informed us. Yet it was not the messages themselves that wereof relevance to GCHQ’s investigations, but a suggestion that the process ofusing stale one-time pads had been deployed, and that the revelations fromthese could be applied to traffic that the GCHQ possessed, but had been unableto break. This insight from Andrew (the source is the typically useless ‘SecretService Archives’ from the authorised ‘historian’), and his immediatelyfollowing comments, will turn out to be critical in working out what happened.It should also be noted that Andrew specifically contradicts Wright’sdescription of the essence of HASP, yet, with characteristic unscholarliness,includes Spycatcher in his bibliography.

Andrew’sfailure to specify explicitly whether these one-time pads were the conventionalset of random numbers created and printed by the KGB, or the alternative‘reference-book’ mechanism used as a back-up system, is a critical oversight. Inote also that this notion of ‘re-use’ suggests that deploying the same conventionalpads across different intelligence stations was as much against therules as was the ‘re-use’ over time of pads by a single pair ofstations. Alternatively, it could mean that London-Moscow and Stockholm-Moscowboth used the same reference-book in their emergency systems. Inany case, this ‘re-use’ evidently occurred in 1940, well before the muchpublicized year of 1943 described in the VENONA histories as the time when thefirst infraction occurred. Andrew provides no guidance for his readers.

[ii]“GCHQ persuaded the Swedes to relinquish their neutrality, and pass thematerial over for analysis. The discovery of the Swedish HASP material was oneof the main reasons for Arthur’s [Arthur Martin’s] return to D1. He was one ofthe few officers inside MI5 with direct experience of VENONA, having workedintimately with it during the Fuchs and Maclean investigations.

There were high hopes that HASPwould transform VENONA by providing more intelligence about unknown cryptonymsand, just as important, by providing more groups for the codebook, which would,in turn, lead to further breaks in VENONA material already held.

Thefirst point here is a reminder of Sweden’s neutrality – not just during WorldWar II, but during the Cold War, when it was not a member of NATO. LikePortugal and Switzerland, Sweden had been abuzz with spies during World War II,and its proximity to the northern ports of German-occupied Poland and theBaltic States meant that Stockholm was well-positioned to supply information onGerman naval capabilities, repairs, etc. Hence the feverish wirelesscommunications with Moscow. Moreover, that neutrality apparently endured, sothat Sweden would not have been a natural sharer of decryption techniques withNATO members. Yet Sweden was not ‘neutral’ enough to be free of suspicions aboutSoviet intentions, and thus pursued its own program of trying to gatherwireless intelligence.

In Venona, Nigel West relates how the Swedes collaborated with the more advanced, cryptanalytically speaking, Finns, who had provided the American with highly useful aids when they handed over the partially burned Petsamo codebooks that had been retrieved from the Soviet consulate in June 1941. And, no doubt, informal links were in place between the Swedes and the British, as Wright’s text suggests. West even indicates that the Finns managed to understand how the Soviets ‘built code-tables and relied on a very straightforward mathematical formula to encode emergency signals’, but it is not clear exactly how this happened, or whether the lessons learned applied to the GRU as well as to the NKVD.

Yetone overlooked event was John Tiltman’s acquisition of a GRU code-bookretrieved from the body of a Soviet officer in1940. On Page 372 of his historyof SIS, Keith Jeffery wrote: “In January1940 Menzies asked Carr to find out if the Finnish authorities had ‘procured anySoviet cryptographic material which could be communicated to us’. Carr immediatelyreplied in the affirmative and it was arranged that Colonel John Tiltman ofGC&CS should travel out to Finland, where he was presented by Hallamaa witha Red Army code-book taken off a dead Russian officer and which ‘bore the marksof a bullet. GC&CS noted afterwards that it had been ‘of real assistance’to their cryptographers.” It does not seem that this contribution, whichpredated the official recognition of the Petsamo code-book by five years, hasever been recognized in the few accounts of VENONA decipherment that exist.

Wright’ssuggestion here, however, is that HASP was, in essence, different fromtraditional VENONA, although it is not immediately obvious in what manner. Theimplication is that HASP would share much with the VENONA traffic, such as theuse of the same codebook (the reference by which otherwise meaninglesssequences of numbers represented terms, functions, identities of persons, countries,institutions, etc., sometimes known as a nomenclator). The studies of VENONA tell us that thedifferent functions of Soviet commercial organisations and intelligence(Amtorg, NKVD, GRU, Naval GRU and Foreign Ministry) used different code-books,and thus breakthroughs in one area did not mean that other successes naturallyfollowed. For instance, all departments referred to the Germans as ‘KOLBASNIKI’(’SAUSAGE-DEALERS’), but in the NKVD book, that word could have beenrepresented as, say, ‘1146’, and in that of the GRU, ‘9452’.

Thissystem was all independent of one-time pads for further encryption. Yet, ifAndrew’s description is correct, Wright’s concluding sentence in this extractmakes more sense. If the Swedes had managed to make inroads into the GRUcodebook from the analysis of their local messages, that experience wouldtransfer directly to the British study of GRU traffic. The emphasis on ‘VENONAmaterial already held’ is telling. Wright is starting to backtrack from hisoriginal characterisation.

[iii]Moreover, since powerful new computers were becoming available, it made senseto reopen the whole program (I was never convinced that the effort should havebeen dropped in the 1950s), and the pace gradually increased, with vigorousencouragement by Arthur, through the early 1960s.

In fact, there were no greatimmediate discoveries in the HASP material which related to Britain. Most ofthe material consisted of routine reports from GRU offices of bomb damage invarious parts of Britain, and estimates of British military capability. Therewere dozens of cryptonyms, some of whom were interesting, but long since dead. J.B. S. Haldane, for instance, who was working in the Admiralty’s submarineexperimental station at Haslar, researching into deep diving techniques, wassupplying details of the programs to the CPGB, who were passing it on to theGRU in London. Another spy identified in the traffic was the Honourable OwenMontagu, the son of Lord Swaythling (not to be confused with Euan Montagu, whoorganized the celebrated ‘Man Who Never Was’ deception operation during thewar). He was a freelance journalist, and from the traffic it was clear that hewas used by the Russians to collect political intelligence in the Labour Party,and to a lesser degree the CPGB.

Someof this is puzzling. Unfortunately, a detailed history of the evolutionary progressof the VENONA decrypts is not possible, based solely on the selection of documentsreleased. As West writes in his Introduction: “Whereas the American policy appears to have provided a measure ofprotection to the living, being those suspected Soviet sources who were neverpositively identified or confronted with the allegations, their Britishpartners seem to have adopted political embarrassment as their principalcriterion for eliminating sensitive names. The only other deliberate excisionin the declassified documents is the consistent removal throughout of allreferences to the first date of circulation. Each VENONA text is marked withthe last, and therefore most recent, distribution, but it is impossible todetermine precisely when the first break in a particular message was achieved,or to chart the subsequent program of the cryptographers.”

Overall, West’s statement is accurate, althoughsome decrypts (such as those on BARON) do reveal a series of release dates, andothers have had the issuance date deleted. Unfortunately, many of the criticalitems related to HASP, such as the discovery of the X Group, have no releasedates at all, so it is impossible to determine how much of the messages hadbeen decrypted before the contribution of the HASP codewords – and code-book. Wright’sseemingly authoritative view is that the project was suspended in the early1950s, and then reactivated at the end of the decade, but the redacted (orconcealed) data on the issuance of new decrypts does allow us to create only avery partial evolution of texts through time.

Allthis information described by Wright appeared as original VENONA material whendescribed by West in Venona (pp 62-63), and it can clearly be traced bystudying the on-line archive. So why does Wright revert to ‘the HASP materialwhich related to Britain’? He appears to be going back to his initial position,that HASP consisted of traffic intercepted by the Swedes. That might have reinforcedthe idea that HASP was a motley set of messages that included localStockholm-Moscow GRU/KGB traffic as well as interceptions of wireless messagesbetween London and Moscow – and maybe more. Yet that scenario continues to lookunlikely. And if these reports were ‘routine’, presumably familiar throughVENONA messages already deciphered, why did Wright not say so?

Furthermore, he introduces Haldane and Montagu as if their appearance were no surprise, and not scandalous. Haldane’s cryptonym was INTELLECTUAL and Montague’s NOBILITY: when did Wright learn that? The appearance of these cryptonyms would not have been ‘routine’ if this was the first occurrence, and their identities were not known. In fact, it would have been a stunning discovery to learn that one of Britain’s most respected scientists was a named spy. The fact that they were dead was irrelevant – except when it came to GCHQ’s heightened protectiveness about references to hallowed public figures, and maybe to their survivors. Wright’s manner here is astonishingly casual.

Itdoes not help that Nigel West (pp 75-81) presents the discoveries about Group Xand Haldane as standard VENONA traffic without mentioning any contribution fromHASP. He confidently identifies INTELLIGENTSIA as J. B. S. Haldane, andNOBILITY as the Honourable Ivor Montagu. After all, West’s understanding ofHASP was that it concerned Stockholm-Moscow traffic: he writes that the arrivalof HASP allowed the project to ‘be put back into gear’, but does not explainhow that happened. West provides a lot of useful and fascinating informationabout Haldane’s background and activities, but (for example) sheds no light onhow the decryption of the codeword INTELLECTUAL took place.

ChristopherAndrew, however, is more explicit on this portion of the traffic, although he,too, still does not mention HASP, and the description of it as ‘new’ VENONA is misleadingand unfortunate. “The main discovery from this new VENONA source was theexistence of a wartime GRU agent network in Britain codenamed the ‘X Group’,which was active by, if not before, 1940. The identity of the leader of theGroup, or at least its chief contact with the GRU London residency, codenamedINTELLIGENTSIA, was revealed in a decrypted telegram to Moscow on 25 July 1940from his case officer as one of the CPGB’s wealthiest and most aristocraticmembers . . .” Thereafter, Andrew rather surprisingly goes on to identifyINTELLIGENTSIA as Ivor Montagu, instead of ‘Montagu’s friend’, J. B. S. Haldane.In an endnote (p 926, No 81), Andrew states that ‘West misidentifies NOBILITY asIvor Montagu and INTELLIGENTSIA as Haldane’, but provides no argument for this.Certainly the meaning of the two cryptonyms would appear to suit West’sinterpretation better.

In2012, Nigel West amplified his previous analysis in the Historical Dictionaryof Signals Intelligence, where he added further detail: “. . . this unexpected windfall consisted of 390partially deciphered messages, exchanged with Moscow between December 1940 andApril 1446 [sic!]. The FRA had succeeded, as early as 1947, in reading afew messages, and between 1957 and 1959, some 53 texts were broken out.Information identifying individual Soviet spies had then been passed to theAllmänna Säkerhetstjänsten (General Security Service), which conductedinvestigations that effectively neutralized them without compromising thesource.”

Apartfrom the vagueness of such terms as ‘broken out’ (does that mean completedecryption?), such level of detail is impressive, and authoritative-sounding,and West piled on the authenticity by naming eighty NKVD cryptonyms thatprovided ‘depth’ to the VENONA cryptanalytical process, including names thatwould carry import for the Washington and London operations, such as DORA, EDWARD,FROST, GROMOV, and LEAF. West thenlisted an even longer array of GRU codenames, nearly all unfamiliar to me. Buthe did explain that, in August 1942, Lennart Katz ‘a source run by a contactworking under diplomatic cover named Scheptkov, was arrested’, and providedfurther leads. It sounds as if West had access to insider information (Venonaprovides an Acknowledgement to ‘Stefan Burgland and some others who prefer toremain anonymous’), and that those arrested may have been able to provide insightson the ciphers and codes used. Moscow, however, appeared not to have worked outwhat was going on, and how so many of its spies had been detected.

[iv]The extraordinary thing about the GRU traffic was the comparison with theKGB traffic four years later. The GRU officers in 1940 and 1941 were clearly oflow caliber, demoralized and running around like headless chickens in the wakeof Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. By 1945 they had given way to a new breed ofprofessional Russian intelligence officers like Krotov. The entireagent-running procedure was clearly highly-skilled and pragmatic. Great carewas being taken to protect agents for their long-term use. Where there seemedpoor discipline in the GRU procedures, by 1945 the traffic showed that controlwas exerted from Moscow Center, and comparisons between KGB and Ambassadorialchannels demonstrated quite clearly the importance the KGB had inside theRussian State. This, in a sense, was the most enduring legacy of the VENONAbreak – the glimpse it gave us of the vast KGB machine, with networks allacross the West, ready for the Cold War as the West prepared for peace.”

Thissection is mostly irrelevant to the quest. It is difficult to discern whatWright is talking about when he does not provide samples of the messages. TheKGB’s operation in London was (we have been told by several experts) suspendedfor nearly all of 1940, so the GRU was the only game in town. And these‘headless chickens’ did manage to recruit Klaus Fuchs, and manage a ring ofuseful scientists, such as Haldane. What he may have been alluding to was thesomewhat casual way that information was supplied in telegrams, but that wouldhave been more a case of insufficiently well trained officers, cipher clerks,and wireless operators – which were evidently in short supply at the beginningof the war – rather than the quality ofthose who recruited and handled British agents. Kremer’s struggles with settingup the alternative wireless link may be an example of what Wright was thinkingof.

Pp238-239 “Lastly there was theVENONA material – by far the most reliable intelligence of all on pastpenetration of Western security. After Arthur [Martin] left I took over theVENONA program, and commissioned yet another full-scale review of the materialto see if new leads could be gathered. This was to lead to the first D-3generated case, ironically a French rather than a British one. The HASP GRUmaterial, dating from 1940 and 1941, contained a lot of information aboutSoviet penetration of the various émigré and nationalist movements who madetheir headquarters in London during the first years of the war. The Russians,for instance, had a prime source in the heart of the Free CzechoslovakianIntelligence Service, which ran its own networks in German-occupied EasternEurope via couriers. The Soviet source had the cryptonym Baron, and wasprobably the Czech politician Sedlecek [sic], who later played a prominent rolein the Lucy Ring in Switzerland.”

Wright’srestricting of the ‘HASP GRU material’ to 1940 and 1941 is provocative, notsolely because he now seems to be classifying HASP material as GRU messagescollected locally. Is the temporal phrase ‘dating from 1940 and 1941’ merely addingchronology for the full scope of the material, or is it a qualifying phrasethat subdefines a portion of it? The parenthesis, separated by commas, suggeststo me the former, namely ‘the only GRU material that can properly be classifiedas HASP is that of 1940 and 1941’. Yet we have no way of knowing what GRUmaterial had been attacked, and partially decrypted, before 1960, apart fromvarious clues provided by the ‘experts’.

Therubric around the published VENONA messages is disappointingly vague. Yet thereappears to be some discernible order behind the numbering scheme. In myanalysis of the traffic between March 1940 and August 1941 (the last date inthat year for which a message from London to Moscow has been published), Icounted 137 L-to-M messages, with the first numbered (by the GRU) as No. 120,and the last as No. 2311. Yet a countback to zero seemed to occur at thebeginning of each year. The last listed in December 1940 is No. 1424, while thefirst listed for 1941, on January 16, is No. 83. Thus one might assume thatwell over 4,000 messages were sent by the London station in those two years.

TheMoscow to London traffic is sparser, with only 18 messages listed. The lastcalendar entry present for 1940 is from September 21, numbered as 482, so it wouldappear that Moscow was not so active sending messages to London, although therecord would suggest that the combination of RSS (Radio Security Service) andGC&CS was picking up far fewer inbound messages, both in aggregate and proportionately,than it was outbound. But that could also be explained by a far smallerproportion of inbound messages being (partially) decrypted, or even a largeramount being for some reason concealed.

Thesenumbers correspond closely with what Andrew has written (see above), where herefers to 178 messages between the period March 1940 and March 1942. Yet theautumn/winter of 1941/42 was clearly a period where activity of some sort(number of transmissions, number of interceptions, number of partial decryptions,number of released decryptions!) declined rapidly, and this is such acontroversial aspect of the whole business that I shall return to it aftercompleting my analysis of Wright’s text.

Asfor the remainder of this passage, the information, again, is not breathtaking,but Wright, alongside his rather laid-back commentary on Sedlacek [sic],does suggest by his comments that GCHQ had decrypted nothing on theCzechoslovak agent before the HASP project came along. Sedlacek [BARON] was afamiliar figure in the VENONA traffic (see West, pp 67-69), and he played a dangerousgame spying for the Swiss, the Czechs, the Russians – and the British, who latersupplied him with a passport under the name of Simpson so that he could enterSwitzerland and contribute to the Lucy Ring. Again, Andrew differs in hisanalysis of BARON, quoting (page 926, Note 82) an unnamed MI5 officer assaying, in 1997, that no serious attempts had been made to identify him. Whyanyone would expect an MI5 (or MI6) officer to be open and straightforwardabout such a controversial figure as Sedlacek (if indeed that was who he was)is puzzling. Andrew attempts to reinforce his argument by noting that the NSAregards BARON as unidentified, but interest in these local European matters is unsurprisinglymuted on that side of the Atlantic.

BARONindeed figures prominently in these messages: he was potentially very useful toMoscow as he was clearly passing on, in the run-up to Barbarossa, informationabout German troop movements in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, gained viahis contacts around Prague who were transmitting information to him viaWoldingham. I write ‘potentially’ because, of course, Stalin ignored allintelligence about the German invasion as ‘provocation’.

P374-375 [i] “There had recently been a small breakthrough in the existingtraffic which had given cause for hope. Geoffrey Sudbury was working on part ofthe HASP material which had never been broken out. Advanced computer analysisrevealed that this particular traffic was not genuine VENONA. It did not appearto have been enciphered using a one-time pad, and from the nonrandomdistribution of the groups, Sudbury hazarded a guess that it had beenenciphered using some kind of directory.

This,again, is distressingly vague. By alluding to ‘HASP material that had neverbeen broken out’, Wright again gives the impression that HASP was a collectionof London-to-Moscow (or Moscow-to-London) communications. Why would Sudburywork on native Swedish transmissions? Presumably, ‘genuine VENONA’ to Wright wastraffic that had become decipherable because the Soviets, under pressure,disastrously re-used one of their one-time pads. Distributing fresh pads was anenormous task in war-time, so the London-Moscow GRU link may have resorted to adifferent system whereby page-numbers and word-numbers in a shared book wereused for encipherment schemes. Such a mechanism was essential for anytransmission activity by clandestine agents, where the problems of distributionand security with one-time pads would have been insuperable. Leo Marks composedeasily memorable verses for use in the field by SOE agents: the GRU usedstatistical almanacs for in-house use.

Onthe surface, Wright’s description of Sudbury’s analysis would appear, however,to be reinforced by the few accounts of GRU espionage that we have. A classicaldescription of the use of one-time pads has the original cleartext (the passagein native language) immediately processed by a portion of the one-time pad,normally the next page, which would then be destroyed. In many accounts of theSoviet system (e.g. James Gannon’s Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies), thatwas the only method. Yet some accounts indicate that the GRU used a differentprocess of encipherment. Benson’s in-house history of the NSA informs us that IgorGouzenko described the method during his interview by Frank Rowlett in October1945, when he revealed the back-up system of using a shared reference book inplace of classical one-time pads. (Oddly, in his CIA report, Cecil Phillips,who assisted Nigel West in his researches, elides over this aspect ofGouzenko’s contribution.) In Appendix A to his 1949 book, Handbook for Spies,Alexander Foote (the Briton who was trained by SONIA as a wireless operator forthe GRU in Switzerland) explains how a keyword of six letters, ‘changed atintervals by the Centre’ (and thus presumably communicated in later messages)was first used to translate the letters of the alphabet into a set of apparentlymeaningless numbers. Further manipulation transformed the text into five-figuregroups – not yet a very secure encipherment.

Thencame the ‘one-time’ aspect of the GRU’s process – but it was not through theuse of a ‘pad’. Messages were then further processed by a function known as‘closing’. Foote explained that, after the first stage of encipherment, he hadto ‘close’ the message ‘by re-enciphering it against the selected portion ofthe “code book”’. (This ‘code-book, or ‘dictionary’ is a different entity fromthe ‘codebook’ that contained numeric representations of common terms.) Thiswas a mechanism whereby a passage in a book owned by both parties was referredto by page and line number in order to identify a sequence of characters to beused to encipher a text one stage further. Max Clausen used a similar techniquewhen enciphering for Richard Sorge, another GRU agent, in Japan. Foote said thathe used ‘a Swiss book of trade statistics’: David Kahn writes that Clausen used the 1935edition of the Statistiches Jahrbuch für das deutsche Reich. Thus, forthe GRU, the one-time pad was not a miniature printed guide that could beeasily destroyed, but an accessible but otherwise anonymous volume that couldbe used by both ends of the communication. (Christopher Andrew’s claim that theStockholm residency and the London residency employed the same one-time pads isthus probably not true: they almost certainly used the same – or a similar – referencework, however.) Sudbury had indeed hit upon the truth, and a directory was atwork. This is what must be meant by ‘not genuine VENONA’.

Whatshould also be recorded on this topic is the claim that Richard V. Hall makesin his ineptly titled but engrossing study of Wright and the Spycatchertrial, A Spy’s Revenge, that Wright acted as a ghost writer on Handbookfor Spies. Since Wright was still working at the Admiralty Research Stationin 1949, and did not join MI5 until 1955, this claim should be viewedcirc*mspectly. If true, Wright’s apparent unawareness, in 1970, of GRUenciphering techniques is even more inexcusable.

[ii]We began the search in the British Library, and eventually found a book oftrade statistics from the 1930s which fitted.

Atfirst glance, this represents an enormous leap of faith. From ‘some kind ofdirectory’ to stumbling on a book of trade statistics, with the implicationthat many others had been tested and found wanting first? Can it really bebelieved? That that is how the process worked, and that cryptologists wouldstumble on the right book? They must surely have been able to exploit a messagethat described the volume to be used, or gained a tip from someone. Suddenly,Alexander Foote’s hint of a ‘Swiss book of trade statistics’ takes on newsignificance. Wright echoes Foote’s words almost completely. Foote had died in1956 (somewhat mysteriously: I am sure that Moscow’s ‘Special Tasks’ team wasafter him), but was surely interviewed on these matters at length by MI5 andGCHQ before he died.

Thusthe dominant reaction should be: why on earth were Sudbury and Wright notfamiliar with Foote’s publication? It seems quite possible that they arrived atthis conclusion by other means – namely what the Petrovs told them, and howVladimir’s overall cryptological skills and knowledge, and particularlyYevdokia’s experiences as a NKVD cipher-clerk in Stockholm, benefitted the FRA,and in turn helped GCHQ. Yevdokia had worked for the GRU in her first eighteenmonths with OGPU, so she may have had some insight into its coding techniques.

Aftertheir post-war assignment in Stockholm, Vladimir Petrov and his wife hadarrived in Australia in 1951, and decided to defect in 1954. Nigel West writesthat Evdokia ‘was debriefed by western intelligence personnel, among them MI5’sGeorge Leggett, who travelled to Australia after the couple had been resettledon their chicken-farm . . .’ Yet what Evdokia told them has not been disclosed.Was she responsible for GRU coding and encipherment, as well as that of theNKVD/MGB/KGB? Almost certainly not, but if so, she might have been able toinform the Swedes of such items as the name of the code-book (dictionary) used,and they thus were able to make some progress on the texts they had storedbefore the British did anything. If she had no involvement with the GRU, shemight have been able to indicate the type of research volume that was used, andrepeated efforts by Sudbury on the few relevant books of trade statistics inthe British Library must have eventually borne fruit. Wright’s claim becomesclearer. It looks, however, as if the Swedes kept their project to themselvesuntil 1959, when, for some reason, an informal link must have been elevated toan official communication.

[iii] Overnight a huge chunk of HASP traffic wasbroken. The GRU traffic was similar to much that we had already broken. Butthere was one set of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent fromthe GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow Center, and described his meetings withthe GRU spy runner, Sonia, alias Ruth Kuzchinski [sic].

Thisis very dramatic – ‘overnight’, but, again, Wright dissembles and confuses. Ifthe traffic was suddenly ‘broken’, he suggests that ‘HASP’ was in the hands ofGCHQ already, but in a poor state of decryption. Now, HASP appears to mean ‘GRU trafficderived from both Stockholm and London’. But why next characterise it as ‘theGRU traffic’ – what else could it be? And what does ‘similar to’ mean? Werethey the same messages, enciphered differently? Was there really nothing new inthem worth recording? And his reference to ‘one set of messages’ is alsoambiguous. He gives the impression that this was a new trove of London-Moscowtraffic supplied by the Swedes, when we now know that that cannot be true.

Certainly,one meeting between Sonia and her handler is recorded in the VENONAtranscripts, dated July 31, 1941. The full item appears as follows:

“FromLondon to Moscow: No.2043, 31 July 1941

IRIShad meeting with SONIA on July 30. Sonia reported (15 groups unrecovered):

Salaryfor 7 months: 406

John: 195

??from abroad: 116

Expenditureon apparatus (radio and microdots): 105

??Expenditure: 55

Sheplayed [broadcast] on 26, 27, 28 and 29 July at 2400, 0100, 0200 hours . . . but did not receive you. BRION

(Commentsby translator: IRIS probably a woman, IRIS means either the flower, or a kindof toffee. Unlikely choice for covername. JOHN probably Leon BUERTON [sic]BRION probably SHVETSOV, Assistant Military Attaché.)”

Yetthe handler here is not Kremer: IRIS is probably Leo Aptekar, a GRU officerregistered as a chauffeur at the Embassy. The annotation here about BRION iswrong: BRION has been confidently identified in the Vassiliev Notebooks asColonel Sklyarov, for whom Kremer worked. Wright (and the VENONA website)identify Kremer as the rezident, i.e. senior GRU officer in London, butthat does not appear to be the case. In Venona (1999), Nigel Westdescribed Kremer as being Sklyarov’s secretary, but in his 2014 HistoricalDictionary of British Intelligence, West declares that the position wasa cover for his ‘residency’, citing Krivitsky’s warning about him from 1940.Gary Kern (the biographer of Krivitsky) reflects, however, on the fact thatothers claim that Sklyarov was the boss. My analysis suggest that Sklyarov mayhave been brought in because Kremer was struggling, and Kremer then probablyreported to Sklyarov after the latter arrived in October 1940. After all,Kremer turned out to be an unsuccessful cut-out for Fuchs, a role he would havehardly attempted had he been head-of-station. This is Pincher’s conclusion,too.

One of the irritating aspects of the Venona archive, as published, is that identification of codenames switches from page to page, and the identification of BRION is one such casualty, with the annotators not being able to make up their minds between Sklyarov and Shvetsov. Vladimir Lota, in his ‘Sekretny Front General’novo Shtaba’ (Moscow 2005), confirms that BRION was Sklyarov, and offers a photograph of the officer (see above). West selects one VENONA annotator’s analysis that the reporting officer was Shvetsov, but informs us that Shvetsov died in an air accident in 1942. (The source of this is not clear. The Petrovs record that the family of an unnamed London military attaché died in transit from Aberdeen to Stockholm in 1943, when the plane was shot down over Swedish territory by German aircraft, but suggest that the attaché himself was not on board. See Yuri and Evdokia Petrov’s Empire of Fear, p 165).

Asfor Kremer, Mike Rossiter, the author of a biography of Klaus Fuchs, writesthat he returned to Moscow in 1941, while West indicates that he remained inLondon throughout the war. Thus it is quite possible that Kremer composedreports on Sklyarov’s behalf, although his role had hitherto been as a courier.It was he who met Fuchs in August 1941, and he was Fuchs’s courier until thelatter found he could not work with him, whereupon Fuchs was handed over toSonia in the late summer of 1942. Kremer was also handling members of the XGroup, so it seems unlikely that, at the same time that Kremer was regularlymeeting Fuchs, he would also be meeting Sonia frequently, and then writing upthe reports for Moscow.

TheVENONA London GRU Traffic archive informs us that Kremer [BARCh] ‘was appointed in 1937 and is thoughtto have left sometime in 1946. The covername BARCh occurs as a LONDON addresseeand signatory between 3rd March 1940 and XXth October 1940, after which it issuperseded by the covername BRION.’ (This analysis relies on the survivingVENONA traffic only, of course.) BRION first appears as a signatory oraddressee on October 11, 1940. Thus the HASP traffic might provide evidencethat Kremer was still active, as courier or signatory, or both, or,alternatively, the VENONA records might throw doubt on Wright’s claims aboutHASP. All three officers (Kremer, Sklyarov, Shvetsov) were active in London onJune 7, 1941, as they are all cited as donating part of their salaries to theSoviet government.

Thebottom line on Wright’s observations is that we are faced with another paradox.Apart from the fact that no trace of the ‘set of messages’ exists (why not, ifthey were solved overnight?), the association of Kremer with Sonia is veryflimsy. The instance above is the sole surviving message in the VENONA archivethat mentions SONIA. Wright’s account would imply the following: Apparently outof frustration with the fact that her transmissions received no response fromMoscow, Sonia managed to contact the Embassy, and to meet her handler within aday or so. Sklyarov reported this event. At some stage afterwards, she wastransferred to Kremer, who, apart from handling Fuchs, now had occasion to meetSonia several times, and to make reports that he signed and sent himself. Yetthe official archive informs us that Kremer stopped signing messages himselfbefore Sonia even arrived in the United Kingdom.

What is also noteworthy is that Wright makes no comment about Sonia’s ability to escape radio detection-finding at this stage. If Sonia, as Kremer had recorded, had been transmitting for four successive nights, and had not been detected by RSS, one might have expected him, as a senior MI5 officer, to have reflected, at least, on her success in remaining undetected. He appears, at this stage, not to subscribe to the Chapman Pincher theory that Roger Hollis was able to interfere in the process; neither does he show any awareness that the proximity of Sonia’s home near Kidlington Airport might have masked her transmissions – which would admittedly have been a remarkable insight for that time. (It is probable that Sonia, and her husband, Len Beurton, adopted call-signs and preambles that made their traffic look, superficially, like British military signals, and that, should any remote direction-finding have taken place, the traffic’s origins would have been assumed to have been Kidlington airport itself.)

[iv]The Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuousto be relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain toescape Nazism and the war, and that she did not become active for RussianIntelligence until Klaus Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944.

Apartfrom an evasive non sequitur (the connection was held to be tenuous, butMI5 accepted that Sonia became active with Fuchs in 1944, a very solidinterrelation), Wright enters dangerous territory here, with a vague andundated summary of what ‘MI5 tended to believe’. Fuchs, of course, volunteeredhis services in 1941, not 1944, and was in the United States throughout all of1944. Yet Wright’s lapsus calami may reveal a deeper discomfort, in thathe utterly misrepresents the pattern of events. According to the archives, afterAlexander Foote had spilled the beans on Sonia’s activities in 1947, MI5 stronglysuspected that Sonia had been working for the GRU in the UK. They were ready (orpretended to be so) to haul her in for questioning on the Fuchs case as earlyas February, 1950, before his trial was even over, apparently unaware that shehad already fled the country! (The service probably connived at her speedyescape.) The Fuchs archive at Kew shows that in November 1950, and again inDecember, Fuchs, from prison, viewed photographs and recognized Sonia as hissecond contact. Wright was either hopelessly uninformed, or acting completelydisingenuously.

[v]In particular GCHQ denied vehemently that Sonia could have been broadcastingher only radio messages from her home near Oxford during the period between1941 and 1943.

But Kremer’s messages utterlydestroyed the established beliefs. They showed that Sonia had indeed been sentto the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she wasalready running a string of agents. The traffic even contained the details ofthe payments she was making to these agents, as well as the time and durationsof her own radio broadcasts. I thought bitterly of the way this new informationmight have influenced Hollis’ interrogation had we had the material in 1969.

Thestatement attributed to GCHQ, if it indeed was made – and Wright provides noreference – needs parsing very carefully. We should bear in mind that no GCHQspokesperson may have uttered these words, or that, if someone did statesomething approximating their meaning, Wright may have misremembered them. Heprovides no reference, no date, no name for the speaker.

Firstof all, Sonia’s home. She had, in fact at least four residences during thisperiod, but, if we restrict her domiciles to those where she lived after shebecame active, probably in June 1941, we have Kidlington (from that June) andSummertown (from August 1942). Summertown was in Oxford, not near it.Thus a reference to ‘her home’ expresses lack of familiarity with the facts.‘Only radio messages’ is perplexing. Does it mean ‘only those radio messagessent from her home?’, thus suggesting she could have sent messages fromelsewhere? Maybe, but perhaps it was just a clumsy insertion by Wright. Theomniscience that lies behind the denial, however, expresses a confidence that cannotbe borne out by the facts.

Itwould have been less controversial for GCHQ simply to make the claim that nounidentifiable illicit broadcasts had been detected, and that Sonia musttherefore have been inactive. But it did not. It introduced a level ofspecificity that undermined its case. It suggested that Sonia might have beenbroadcasting, but not from her home. If Sonia had been using her set, andfollowed the practices of the most astute SOE agents in Europe (who nevertransmitted from the same location twice – quite a considerable feat whenporting a heavy apparatus, and re-setting up the antenna), she would likewisehave moved around.

ForGCHQ to be able to deny that Sonia had been able to broadcast would mean that ithad 100% confidence that RSS had been able to detect all illicit trafficoriginating in the area, and that, furthermore, they knew theco-ordinates of Sonia’s residence at that time. Thus the following steps wouldhave had to be taken:

1. All illicit or suspiciouswireless broadcasts had been detected by RSS;
2. All thosethat could not have been accounted for were investigated;
3. Successful triangulation (direction-finding)of all such signals had taken place to localise the source;
4. Mobile location-finding units had beensent out to investigate all transgressions;
5. Such units found that all theillicit stations were still broadcasting (on the same wave-length and with theidentical callsign, presumably);
6. All theoffending transmitters were detected, and none was found to be Sonia’s.

Apartfrom the fact that transmissions from Kidlington were masked by proximity to theairport, and Sonia’s traffic concealed to resemble military messages, GCHQ’sassertion requires an impossible set of circ*mstances: that, if and when Sonia hadbroadcast, the location of the transmitter would have been known immediately,and the RSS would have been able to conclude that the signals could not be coming from Sonia’sresidence. That was not possible. No country’s technology at that time allowedinstant identification of the precise location of a transmission. Not evengroundwave detection was reliable enough to ‘pin-point’ the source of a signalto the geography of a city, even. Reports and transcriptions of suspiciousmessages were mailed by Voluntary Interceptors to the RSS HQ at ArkleyView, in Barnet! Sonia would have had to broadcast for over twenty-four hoursin one session to be detected by a mobile unit operating at peak efficiency,supported by rapid decisions (which was never the case). GCHQ might haveclaimed to Wright that no illicit transmissions originated from the Oxfordarea, and therefore they could discount Sonia’s apparatus (if they knew she hadone.) Yet, again, that would require RSS to have deployed radiodirection-finding technology in order to locate the transmitter, and Soniawould surely have stopped broadcasting by then.

ThusGCHQ’s claim is logically null and void. If Sonia made only one transmission,from her home or anywhere else, she would never have been detected. If she mademore than one, from the same location, she would (according to the RSS’s reportedprocedures) inevitably have been detected, interdicted, and prosecuted. AndGCHQ’s claim that she made no transmissions is clearly false, as she didtransmit from the semi-concealed site at Kidlington, which was apparently neverpicked up. (After the war, she broadcast from her next home, The Firs at GreatRollright, as Bob King of RSS has confirmed, but these events are strictlyoutside the scope of GCHQ’s claim here.)

Moreover,GCHQ (actually named Government Code & Cypher School, or GC&CS, duringthe war) was not responsible for intercepting illicit transmissions in1941-1943: that was the responsibility of RSS, which reported to SIS. GCHQ tookover RSS after the war. Institutional memory may be at fault.

Ironically,Wright then undermines the GCHQ statement as an unfounded ‘belief’, as if itwere a vague hope rather than a matter of strict execution of policy. Thus,either Wright drills a large hole in the track-record of GCHQ’s inviolability,or his claims about Kremer’s reporting of ‘the times and durations’ of Sonia’sown broadcasts lack any substance – or a mixture of both, since, irrespectiveof Sonia, RSS may not have been perfect in its mission of pursuing all illicitbroadcasts, as we know from its own files. And we also know from the VENONAtranscripts that Sonia tried to contact Moscow on successive nights in July 1941,from Kidlington. Since RSS apparently did not detect any of thesetransmissions, GCHQ’s boasts of omniscience are flawed. Wright’s lack ofexpressed astonishment at the inefficiency of RSS is again a remarkablereaction. Moreover, why would Kremer report on such details of hertransmissions, if she was successfully in touch with Moscow already? It was onething to report her failure to get through, but these claims appearsuperfluous, even absurd.

Howwe treat this claim about Kremer’s reports on Sonia’s broadcasts depends verymuch on how reliable a witness one views Wright by now. As Denis Lenihan haspointed out to me, what Wright asserts contains so much fresh information thathis claims should be taken seriously. On the other hand, I would say that the Kremertelegrams are simply too implausible to be considered as valuable evidence.That Sonia would have had a ‘string of agents’ by 1941, that they would need tobe paid, that Kremer would consider it necessary to report to Moscow thedetails of recent successful transmissions she had made to Moscow, even therole of Kremer himself in meetings and handling Sonia, fail to pass theauthenticity test with this particular analyst. West and Pincher apparentlyagree with me. West relegates the item to an endnote on page 70. Pincherignores the whole matter: there is no mention of HASP in his Index to Treachery.

Lastly,we have to deal with the final claims. It would be very unlikely for a wirelessmessage, sent to Moscow in 1941, to provide the information that Russianintelligence had specifically sent Sonia to the Oxford area, although thatmight be a reasonable conclusion for Wright to make. In addition, the claimthat Sonia had rapidly acquired a ‘string’ of agents, and was seeking expensesfor payments that she was making to these mercenaries, is very improbable.Where and how she acquired them is not stated, but any contact who might havebeen providing information to Sonia informally would have probably jumped withalarm if Sonia had suggested that he or she should be paid for suchindiscretions. Even Sonia herself, in her memoir, stated that the informantsshe nurtured provided her with confidential information out of principle, notfor payment.

Yetthe most awkward part of this testimony is the declaration that MI5 did nothave this evidence in 1969, when (so Wright claims) it might have helped with amore successful interrogation of Hollis. Wright explicitly indicates that thediscovery occurred in 1970, or later. The critical discoveries that were madein the decryption of reference book-based random numbers for the process of‘closing’ were revealed, however, in the 1960s. The VENONA records show thatGCHQ tried to censor a series of the Moscow-Stockholm GRU traffic for theVersion 5 release of the decrypts, and that the Swedes had to restore theexcised passages in Version 6. I have studied all these messages: a few appearto have no relevance to British affairs at all, but several do specificallyrelate to the use of commonly owned books (knigi), and even identify thetitles of the volumes. All these messages have an issue date in the mid-1960s.

Wethus come to the conclusion that GCHQ and MI5 had four opportunities to learnof the use of a common book to be used by agents and clandestine embassywireless when it was too dangerous to try to deploy conventional one-time pads:Gouzenko’s revelations in 1945; Foote’s disclosures in his memoir of 1949; thedescriptions gained from questioning the Petrovs in 1954/55; and theexperiences of the Swedish FRA when they handed over their decrypts in 1960.Practically all the final decryption work on GRU London-Moscow messages thatwas possible was completed during the 1960s, yet Wright tries to pass off thebreakthrough by Sudbury, and the serendipity location of the directory in theBritish Library, as occurring in the 1970s.

[vi]Once this was known I felt more sure than ever that Elli did exist, and that hewas run by Sonia from Oxford, and that the secret of his identity lay in hertransmissions, which inexplicably had been lost all those years before. Theonly hope was to travel the world and search for any sign that her traffic hadbeen taken elsewhere.

Overthe four years from 1972 to 1976 I traveled 370,000 kilometers searching fornew VENONA and Sonia’s transmissions. In France, SDECE told me they had nomaterial, even though Marcel told me he was sure they had taken it. Presumablyone of the Sapphire agents had long since destroyed it. In Germany they professedtotal ignorance. It was the same in Italy. Spain refused to entertain therequest until we handed back Gibraltar. I spent months toiling around telegraphoffices in Canada searching for traces of the telex links out there. But therewas nothing. In Washington, extensive searches also drew a blank. It washeart-breaking to know that what I wanted had once existed,had once been filed and stored, but had somehow slipped through our fingers.”

This,again, is a very controversial statement. Wright refers to ‘Sonia’stransmissions, which inexplicably had been lost all those years before’. Yetmentions of Sonia’s transmissions have never surfaced until now: theHASP exercise concerned the GRU’s alluding to such messages. Wright has givenno indication that any of Sonia’s transmissions had been intercepted, and he evencites GCHQ as saying she could not have operated her wireless set undetected. So,if they never existed, they never could have been lost. Moreover, the recordsof Kremer’s supposed transmission(s) have also been lost. Wright may havewished that he had them in time to interrogate Hollis, but he cannot evenpresent them after 1970, when it was too late!

Thusan astounding aspect of Wright’s testimony is his apparent lack of curiosity indetermining what happened to the missing messages. He does not investigate whatpolicy might have led to these last sets of decrypted traffic to be buried ordestroyed. Surely his named colleague Sudbury and his fellow-cryptologists musthave kept some copies of these vital messages, or at least have some recall asto what happened to them? Yet Wright does not undertake a search domesticallyfirst, or invoke his associates’ help in establishing the truth, and huntingthe transcripts down. He ventures no opinion on the fact of their possiblybeing destroyed, but simply looks overseas.

Maybethere was a glimpse of hope that other countries might provide further VENONAnuggets, but, since we now know that the Stockholm operation concerned localtraffic only, the quest seems very futile. And why ‘telex offices’? Why Wrightexpected further evidence of Sonia’s transmissions to come to light intelegraph offices around the world is astonishing. In the United Kingdom,Sonia’s messages were illicit, and subject to surveillance, with VoluntaryInterceptors dispersed around the country to pick up the ground-wave fromsuspicious transmissions. If, by any chance, her messages were noticed anywhereelse, amongst all the other radio noise, it would have been remarkable for anyinstitution, public or private, to have dwelled upon them long enough totranscribe and store them. And if GCHQ (RSS) was never able to detect them, whyon earth would Wright expect some foreign entity to be able to do so?

Inaddition, the question was not whether ELLI existed or not, but who ELLI was,and how significant a player he or she had been, and when he or she had beenactive. If this is the piece that clinches the argument for the case thatHollis was ELLI, it stands on very unsolid ground. Exactly what the link wasbetween Sonia’s ability to maintain a string of agents and the existence ofELLI is not made clear by Wright. Did Wright really believe that he would havebeen able successfully to confront Hollis with the transcripts of Sonia’smessages to Moscow, and challenge him on the grounds that he had been able toprevent superior officers in MI5, RSS and GCHQ from performing their jobs?

Itall echoes the laborious claims made by Chapman Pincher that the only way thatSonia could have hoodwinked MI5, RSS and GCHQ so that they all turned a blindeye to her shenanigans was through the existence of an intriguer in the middleranks of MI5 who was so devious that he could entice his colleagues to ignorethe basic tenets of their mission. Presumably it was ELLI who, instead ofwarning Sonia that it might be dangerous for her to persist in her illicittransmissions from one single geographic location, somehow convinced RSS thatit* procedures could be put in abeyance, and the signals ignored, and,moreover, that corporate memory allowed this oversight to become enshrined inofficial statements of policy within GCHQ after the war.

TheRemaining Questions

Twocrucial questions arise out of all this analysis:

1. Whathappened to the missing messages?

• Whydid Wright mangle the story so much?

Somuch evidence conspires to inform us that what has been released to the archiveof London-Moscow GRU traffic is only a small fraction of what was actuallytransmitted. The period of intensity is July 1940 to August 1941, followed byscattered fragments into early 1942, and a vast gulf until the end of the war,in 1945. The sequential telegram numbers tell us that less than 2% of themessages in 1940 and 1941 have been published. We have no idea how busy thecommunication link was during the next three years. We must therefore considertwo separate sub-questions: i) given the ‘overnight breakthrough’ described byWright, why were more messages in the 1940-1941 period not decrypted?, and ii)why was there a drought from the winter of 1941-1942 onwards?

Thefirst sub-question cannot be answered by external analysis, as we do not knowwhether all messages were intercepted, which of these succumbed to even partialdecryption, and which then remained classified because of issues of sensitivityor confidentiality. I do point out, however, that the official US VENONAwebsite informs us that GCHQ did not hand over to the USA 159 of the GRUmessages (i.e. close to the number I highlighted earlier) until 1996 – afterthe general disclosure of the VENONA project, indicating a high measure ofdiscomfort about the disclosures (such as the Group X information).

Whatis also significant is that, having been passed decrypts from the Swedish authorities,GCHQ actually removed sections of the translated text before passing them on(in Version 5) to the Americans, with the result that the Swedes had to restore(in Version 6) the excisions GCHQ had made. Thus many messages in the VENONAarchive include the puzzling rubric in their headings: “A more complete versionof British Government-excised messages previously released in fifth VENONArelease on 1 Oct 1996.” These revelations would seem to prove the case that theSwedes had made partial decryptions of their local GRU traffic, that they sendthese translations alongside the original messages, to GCHQ. It does notexplain why GCHQ thought it was its business to edit them before passing themon to the NSA, especially if they also passed back their treatments to theSwedes at the same time. A closeanalysis of all the relevant changes in Version 5 and Version 6 would bedesirable. As I have indicated earlier, many of them have to do with thedisclosures about shared reference volumes.

TheDrought of 1942-1944

Thesecond sub-question lays itself open to deeper inspection, because of theavailability of other sources. On the matter of the missing messages, we needto judge:

1. Didthey not exist?
2. Didthey exist, but were never intercepted?
3. Werethey intercepted, but never stored?
4. Werethey stored, but subsequently lost?
5. Werethey discovered, but not decrypted (even partially)?
6. Werethey decrypted, but then not released?

Thefirst issue is especially fascinating, partly because of Alexander Foote’s experience(or, at least, how he reported it). In October 1941, the Germans were at thegates of Moscow, and the vast majority of Moscow’s government apparatus wasmoved to Kuibyshev (now Samara), over a thousand kilometres to the east. In histestimony to MI5 in 1947, Foote told his interviewers that, working out ofSwitzerland, he lost contact with his controllers in Moscow in the middle ofOctober, and, a few days later, even cabled Brigitte (Sonia’s sister) in Londonto determine what had happened. He then claimed that contact was not restoreduntil March 1942, when he resumed his broadcasts. (This is all in Handbookfor Spies, as well.)

Yetthe existence of this forced hiatus is belied on at least two fronts. The TICOM(Target Intelligence Committee) archive indicates that Foote reported regularlyduring those winter months. Moreover, his boss, Alexander Radó (DORA) was usingeither Foote or another operator to communicate regularly with Moscow, as hismemoir Codename Dora describes, with frequent messages about Germantroop movements. Radó echoes Foote’s story about the interruption, but statesthat it was on October 29 that he sent a desperate message to Moscow Centre.Contact was resumed at the end of November or the beginning of December, andall dated messages from October (the texts of which appear in Radó’s book) werere-transmitted. A telling detail indicates that Foote indeed was the chiefwireless operator at this time: a TICOM interception shows that he reported onthe source LOUISE from Berlin on December 3, and a related message listed byRadó of December 9 similarly reported on LUISE’s intelligence from Berlin. Itcould well be that Foote’s claim about radio silence was inserted by hisghost-writer at MI5, Courtenay Young – but why?

Radó’stelegrams are confirmed by Lota, who transcribes several of Radó’s messagesfrom this period, and even includes photographs of a few from 1942. Asatisfying match can be made between a telegram received on November 27, 1941 (Lota’sDocument No. 37, on page 353), and Radó’s original message created on October27 (p 76 of Codename Dora), confirming the delay before ‘Moscow’returned to the air, and, incidentally, discrediting Foote’s account. Thus onemight have expected a similar interruption to have occurred in London. IvanMaisky, the Soviet Ambassador, tells us otherwise, however. Molotov remained inMoscow, and informed Maisky by telegram on October 17^th that ‘mostof the government departments and the diplomatic corps’ had left for Kuibyshev.This date, and the fact of the almost total evacuation of the Sovietgovernment, are confirmed by other memoirs, such as Tokaev’s and those of thePetrovs. Maisky does not tell exactly when communications were re-established,but hints it was after only a few days, and he was then able to resume fullcontact. Thus he would have been able to pass on to the GRU officers inside hisembassy what was happening, and they would not have made futile attempts tocontact their bosses. Maybe, after a month, however, the watchers got tired ofwaiting for something to happen, and dropped their guard?

Thenthere is the ‘government policy’ theory. In Defending the Realm (p 376),Christopher Andrew, following up his comments about British government approvalof Soviet use on ‘set frequencies’ (see above), writes: ”These radio messageswere initially intercepted and recorded in the hope that they could eventuallybe decrypted, but interception (save for that of GRU traffic, which continueduntil April 1942) ceased in August 1941 because of the need to concentrateresources on the production of ULTRA intelligence based on the decryption ofEnigma and other high-grade enemy ciphers. Interception of Soviet traffic didnot resume until June 1945.”

Thismust be partially true. Yet Andrew shows a remarkable disdain for the facts inhis endnote to this section, where he adds: “Since the intermittent Sovietreuse of one-time pads, the basis of the VENONA breakthrough, did not beginuntil several months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June1941, the messages intercepted and recorded up to August 1941 proved of littlepost-war value to GCHQ.” Au contraire, maestro! There was practicallynothing that was useful that occurred after August 1941, as Andrewhimself records a few pages later, when he describes the disclosure of Haldaneand the X Group, from July 1940. Moreover, Andrew does not explain whyinterception of GRU traffic continued for so long, or what happened to themessages stored. The VENONA GRU files show only two messages from 1942, bothfragments, from January 19 (London to Moscow) and April 25 (Moscow to London).

Whetherresources had to deployed elsewhere is a dubious assertion, too. Much has beenmade of the famous Footnote supplied by Professor Hinsley, on page 199 ofVolume 1 of British Intelligence in the Second World War, where he wrotethat ‘all work on Russian codes and cyphers was stopped from 22 June 1941’,variously attributed to Churchill himself or the Y Board. The Foreign Office had promptly followed upthe Y Board’s edict by forbidding MI5 to bug the Soviet Embassy, or to attemptto plant spies inside the premises, but was apparently more relaxed about theactivities of MI6 and GC&CS, which nominally reported to the ForeignOffice. While it may have taken a while for the policy statement to seepthrough, we should note that the edict said nothing about stopping the interceptionand storing of messages.

RobertBenson’s in-house history of the NSA (of which a key chapter is available onthe Web) contains far more direct quotations from British authorities, such asTiltman, Dill, Marychurch and Menzies, than can be found (as far as I know)from British histories. It reinforces the message that interception of Soviettraffic fairly rapidly tailed off towards the end of 1942, and that, during1943 and 1944 any messages that had been stored were actually destroyed, to thelater chagrin of intelligence officers. But that was what the alliance with theSoviet Union meant: a severe diminution in attempts to exploit Sovietintelligence, and that pattern was echoed in the USA. Since, at that time, no progresshad been made on deciphering Russian traffic, it may have made littledifference. One might also point out that, unless RSS intercepted all traffic,and inspected it, they would not know which was GRU and which was not, whichmakes Andrew’s already puzzling claim about the extension for GRU until April1942 even more problematic, unless RSS knew that the secondary clandestine linewas for GRU traffic only. Moreover, Andrew does not present Hinsley’s argumentas a reason for the cessation.

Certainly the Soviet Embassy was watched, and traffic was being monitored closely in March and April 1942. As I write, I have in front of me (see photograph above) the page from the RSS file HW 34/23, which shows a set of daily messages intercepted from March 16 to April 16, with callsigns, that changed each day, also listed. Very provocatively, the word ‘HASP’ has been written in opposite the April 7 entry, in what appears to be an annotation of May 1, 1973, and on the following page appears ‘from Maisky to Cadogan April 1942’, as if Maisky had perhaps had to explain himself to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. (One cannot be certain that the annotation ‘HASP’ refers exclusively to the April 7 entry, or whether its serves as a general descriptor. If the latter, it would appear that, in 1973, the observer recognized this set of traffic, coming from the back-up GRU transmitter, as generic HASP material, but it does not explain how he or she reached that conclusion.) Other sheets suggest the surveillance went on into 1943. Yet all the evidence seems to point to the fact that, because of the signals being received from the Y Board and the Foreign Office, and the volumes of Nazi traffic to inspect, traffic from the clandestine line was either ignored, or simply piled up unused, and was discarded. Moreover, it was remarkably late for Wright (or whoever was the annotator) to be making, in 1973, a link between the HASP material of 1959 and the RSS files of 1943.

Nevertheless,a completely new project to monitor Soviet traffic was started at the beginningof 1943. After Commander Denniston had been replaced by Travis as the head ofGC&CS in January 1942, he moved to London to set up a team that would beginto inspect and attempt to decipher Soviet diplomatic messages. This becameknown as the ISCOT project, after its key contributor Bernard Scott (néSchultz), and it led to the discovery of a rich set of ‘Comintern’ messagesbetween the Soviet Union and its satellite guerrilla operations, after Stalinhad supposedly closed down that organisation. Denniston was also involved indirection-finding the illicit traffic of 1942 to the Soviet Embassy. Thus, evenif GRU/NKVD messages classified later as VENONA were ignored, it could hardlyhave been because of scarcity of resources. In addition, Andrew never explainswhy interception suddenly picked up successfully again in June 1945, and whyRSS/GCHQ had no trouble finding the frequencies and call-signs used by the GRU.

Atantalising aspect of this whole investigation is the lack of overlap betweenpublished records of the GRU, and interceptions stored as part of the VENONAprogram. Verifiable records taken from Soviet archives are very thin on theground, and we should be very wary of claims that are made of privilegedaccess. Lota’s book (mentioned above) is a valuable source, containing multipletexts, and even photographs. It concentrates very much on military matters,especially concerning the movements of Nazi forces in the Soviet Union, andthus does not touch the early aspirations of the ENORMOZ (atomic weaponsresearch) project. The familiar name of Sklyarov (BRION) appears quitefrequently, but the first example of his telegrams is dated September 23, 1941(Document No. 25). The VENONA sample of intercepted GRU messages from London(visible at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Venona-London-GRU.pdf) shows regular communications from BRION up to August 28, 1941, followed by asprinkling of fragments up to March 1942, and then a long hiatus until 1945.Lota’s coverage thus overlaps in time, but I can see no messages that appear inboth accounts.

Lastly,I must include the maybe very significant possibility that the rival channelset up in the London Embassy was not taken seriously enough. The officialVENONA USA website offers (in ‘The Venona Story’) a very provocative paragraph,which runs as follows:

“Hundredsof GRU New York messages remain unsolved. The loss to history in the record ofthe GRU in Washington is particularly noticed. Of the several thousandWashington messages from 1941 to 1945, only about fifty were decrypted, inspite of the best efforts of the United States and the United Kingdom. Unlikethe New York GRU messages, where translations concern espionage, these fewWashington translations deal with routine military attaché matters (such asovert visits to U.S. defense factories). However, a separate Washington GRUcryptographic system, which was never read, presumably carried GRU espionagetraffic.”

One might ask: ‘How didthey know about this “separate Washington GRU cryptographic system’”?’ And whatdoes ‘never read’ mean? That it was not intercepted? How did they know it wasGRU if they never ‘read’ it? If it had been sent via cable, it would have beenaccessible, like all the other messages. Are the USA authorities referring to aclandestine wireless system, perhaps? And, if so, why did they not close itdown? The reason these questions are relevant is that we have ample evidencethat the GRU in London did attempt to set up a clandestine wireless system, and,after considerable teething problems, were apparently successful. (VladimirPetrov confirms that such an arrangement happened in Stockholm, as well.) As Isuggested earlier, it is possible that the RSS had worked out that theclandestine channel was for the GRU only. The intense USA focus of the VENONAwebsite, and the various books that have been published in the US, mean thatthis project has not received the attention it deserves.

Acloser inspection of the London-Moscow GRU traffic reveals the evolution of theproject. The documents in this file are unfortunately not in chronologicalorder, but a careful review suggests that the first reference is in a report datedJuly 17, 1940, from London to Moscow, where it is evident that atransmitter/receiver had been received in the diplomatic bag, but that theinstructions for its assembly and deployment were deficient. London has to askMoscow for the measurements for the aerial for MUSE’s apparatus. BARCh (Kremer)had decided to install the set in the lodgings of the military attaché, as heconsidered it was not safe in the Embassy, where the NKVD was ever-watchful.(“The only ones to fear are the NEIGBOURS’ people, who are in so many placeshere that it is hard to escape their notice.” This remark would tend tocontradict the well-publicised notion that the NKVD staff had all been recalledto Moscow during 1940.) A few days later, however, it appears that Kremer hasbeen ordered to change his mind, and install the radio-set in the Embassy, andis making rather feeble excuses about the lack of progress. On July 26, Kremercomplains that the receiver works on 100 volts, which means it would be burnedout by the 200-volt current in the embassy, and a transformer did not work. OnAugust 13, they are back in the attaché’s house, where alternating current isavailable, and MUSE plans to try again, as a telegram of August 27shows.Kremer requests a schedule for the following months.

OnAugust 30, 1940, reference is overtly made to the ‘London GRU emergencysystem’. The operator MUSE had been heard clearly, on schedule. Yet problems in communication begin to occurin September, and the Director begins to show impatience, reporting again onSeptember 18 that MUSE’s message was not received in full. Maybe it wasKremer’s struggles that prompted the transfer of Sklyarov from New York. Kremertries to get his act together. In a message of October 3, he remarks thatSklyarov’s arrival is impending. In the same message he reports that MUSE has hada successful communication with Moscow at last, and that she will be tryingagain on October 7. Yet it was not a proper two-way conversation. On October10, 1940, one of the few messages from Moscow shows the Director informingKremer of further problems receiving messages on the illicit line, with nothingreceived since September 18. TheDirector has to remind him of the correct wavelength, crystal, callsign, andtime.

Ittakes Sklyarov himself to report on November 25 that MUSE is now ready to beginregular communication, and that is the last we hear of the link for a while. Presumablyit worked satisfactorily. Yet a very significant message on July 31, 1941indicates a hitch, and that MUSE has had to test communications again. Sklyarovasked Moscow how well they had received her. The reason that this could be soimportant is the fact that the only report on SONIA that appears in theextracts was transmitted the very same day, suggesting perhaps that theback-up system (for highly confidential espionage traffic) was not working. Similarly,the only message from this period referencing Klaus Fuchs is of a short timelater, on August 10. It would seem, therefore, that Sklyarov had to resort tothe diplomatic channel to pass on critical information. Nearly all of themessages in the intervening period (November 1940-July 1941) concern moreroutine military matters (as Wright reported), so the absence of any otherinformation on SONIA, both beforehand and afterwards, could mean either thatthere were no reports, or that they were sent on the clandestine channel.

Itwas probably this traffic which excited RSS so much in the spring of 1942, whenthey tracked unauthorised wireless signals emanating daily from the SovietEmbassy, signals that displayed an unusual pattern of call signs. As Idescribed above, Alexander Cadogan in the Foreign Office seems to haveapproached Ambassador Maisky about them, but may have received a brush-off. Yetwhy only one of these messages was annotated with ‘HASP’ is puzzling. It is asif the messages had been intercepted and stored, and one of them had been(partially) decrypted through the assistance of the HASP code-book. But, inthat case, why only one? And where is it? Was it the missing message fromKremer claimed by Peter Wright to show SONIA’s recruitment of her nest ofspies?

Moreover,one final crucial paradox remains, concerning the two rare messages Iidentified a few paragraphs earlier. In the 1940-1941 GRU traffic can be foundonly one message referring to SONIA (3/NBF/T1764 of July 31, 1941: transcribedabove), and only one to Klaus Fuchs (3/PPDT/101 of August 10, 1941). Thesingularity is startling. In their book, Venona; Decoding Soviet Espionagein America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr offer (on p 439) a footnoteon the Fuchs message, which describes Fuchs’s meeting with Kremer. Part of thenote runs as follows: “This message is from a period antedating the Sovietduplication of one-time pads. Its decryption was made possible because theLondon GRU station in 1941 ran out of one-time pads and used its emergencyback-up cipher system based on a standard statistical table to generate theadditive key. British cryptanalysts working with the Venona Project recognizedit as a nonstandard and vulnerable cipher and solved it, but not until wellafter Fuchs’s arrest.”

Ifound this analysis disappointingly vague. Apart from the unlikelihood of theGRU’s suddenly running out of one-time pads, the note did not indicate for howlong the back-up system had to run, and how the problem of distributing newpads was resolved. I took a look at West again. On page 26, he writes: “The clerk [Gouzenko] also described the GRU’semergency cipher system, and although this was considered at the time to havepotential, it was never found to have been used apart from the 1940-41 Londontraffic, when the GRU apparently ran out of OTPs.” This was even more opaque.It threw the traffic for two whole years into the ‘back-up system’ bin, when acursory inspection of the files indicates that the primary system was workingwell until Moscow and London started discussing the problem. Yetit rather wearily echoed the text that appears in The Venona Story, namelythat ‘ . . . severalmessages deal with cipher matters — in 1940 to 1941, the London GRU used aso-called Emergency System, a variation of the basic VENONA cryptosystems.London GRU messages merit very close attention.’ Indeed.

I managed to contact Dr. Haynes by email, and askedhim whether he could shed any light on the source of the footnote. He promptlyresponded, reminding me that two messages in the GRU trove from this periodreferred to the OTP problem, citing telegrams No. 410, of August 30, 1940, and No.1036, of September 19, 1940. Yet Haynes and Klehr had cited 1941 in their note!These two messages were transmitted about a year before the phenomenonof the Fuchs and Sonia messages! How could an OTP problem remain unaddressedthat long? Was the implication that the back-up system (using the referencebook OTP on the diplomatic channel, as the new GRU wireless link was not yetworking) was used for the next twelve months? How should this information beinterpreted? I tactfully raised these questions with Dr. Haynes, but, evenafter conferring with Louis Benson, he has not been able to shed any light onthe confusion over the expiration of the one-time pads, and the use of theback-up system, although Benson did offer the important information that hethought the British had ‘identified the standard statistical manual used to generate the additive keys’.But no date was given.

The sequence of events between April 1940 andMarch 1942, the period that encapsulates the most frequent of the London GRUtraffic, is so confused that a proper assessment must be deferred for anothertime. The primary problem is that both London and Moscow refer, in messagespresumably transmitted using the standard diplomatic channel, exploitingconventional one-time pads, of the imminent exhaustion of such tools. In thatprocess, they ask or encourage the immediate use of the back-up system. Yet itis not clear that all successive messages use that back-up system, as latermessages make the same appeal. It might be that the pads were in fact re-usedas early as 1940. One enticing message (1036, of September 19, 1940) talksabout ‘the pad used having been finally destroyed’, as if it should have beenproperly destroyed earlier, but was in desperation, perhaps, employed again,against all the rules.

Inany case, a possible scenario could run as follows. Coincident with the GRU’splan to move Sonia to Britain, to create a new espionage network, it decided toestablish a clandestine wireless channel to handle her potential traffic. Thetask was entrusted to Kremer, but he struggled with getting the apparatus towork, and Sklyarov was transferred from New York to take charge. Theconventional connection was used until November 1940, when the clandestine linewas made to work, at about the time Sonia prepared to leave Switzerland. It wasthereafter used successfully, until an interruption at the end of July 1941 causedSklyarov to use the standard diplomatic channel for a critical message aboutSonia – the only one to have survived in VENONA. RSS appears to have noticedmessages on the clandestine link, but, if it did indeed intercept them andstore them, no trace has survived. It is probable that no messages on that linewere ever decrypted (apart from fragments at the end of 1941, and the two 1942messages identified earlier). If other messages concerning Sonia were picked upand analysed from the standard link, GCHQ and MI5 must have decided to concealthem. (I have outlined this hypothesis to Dr. Haynes.)

Whydid Wright mangle the story so much?

Thisclose inspection of Wright’s account in Spycatcher shows a gloriousmuddle of misunderstood technology and implausible explanations. So why did hepublish such an incoherent account of what happened? I present threealternative explanations:

1. Wrightsimply did not understand what had been going on.
2. Wrightunderstood perfectly what had been going on, but wished to distort the facts.
3. Wrighthad forgotten exactly what had been going on.

Number1 is highly unlikely. He had been recruited as an expert with scientifictraining, and had showed knowledge of audio-electronic techniques to the extentthat he uncovered Soviet bugs on embassy premises. He must have understood theprinciples of wireless communication, and the practical implications ofintercepting both cable and wireless traffic. Number 2 does not make sense, asthe mistakes that appear in his narrative tend to undermine any case he wantedto make about the identity of ELLI and the pointers towards SONIA. The sentenceI cited above (in Cable or Wireless) is so manifestly absurd that itshould immediately have alerted any knowledgeable critic to the fact thatsomething was awry. If Wright had wanted to place a false trail, or was on amission, he would have ensured that he appeared as a reliable expert on themain issues, but inserted subtle twists in the subordinate texts – in themanner in which Chapman Pincher operated. Wright definitely wanted toincriminate Hollis, but overall did not think he was distorting the truth, evenif he was part of the ‘conspiracy’ to obfuscate what happened in the VENONAproject. If he did embroider his account with the inclusion of an improbableand unverifiable message, he surely did not think it would be consideredimportant, or that he would be found out.

Regrettably,one must conclude that, by the time Wright came to put his memoir together, hewas approaching his dotage. Even though he was only seventy-one years old in1987, his health was not good: he had high blood-pressure, shingles, anddiabetes. In his account of the events, The Spycatcher Trial, MalcomTurnbull repeatedly draws attention to Wright’s failing health and faultymemory, pointing out that, as early as 1980 (when Wright was only sixty-four)he was too frail to travel from Australia to the United Kingdom by himself. Wrightdid not remember clearly how everything happened, how the intelligence serviceswere organized, what the processes behind VENONA were, or exactly what HASPconsisted of. His book was effectively ghost-written by Paul Greengrass, whoclearly did not understand exactly what he was told by Wright, and, by the timeit came for Wright to check the text, he was probably simply too impatient inwanting to see the book published, and consequently did not go over carefullyeverything that Greengrass had written. He was not concerned about the details:he wanted to get back at MI5 over its mistreatment of him on the pensionbusiness, he needed the royalties, and he was focused on getting the message onHollis out.

Ibelieve that it is entirely possible that, in his summoning up the telegramfrom Kremer that reported on Sonia’s network and payments, Wright was recallingthe July 31, 1941 message that I reproduced in full above. It does mentionagents and payments, but was sent not by Kremer, but by Sklyarov (BRION),mistakenly identified as Shvetsov in the annotations. We should not acceptWright’s account simply because, at one time, he had been an expert and areliable witness. In addition, later reports suggest that there was anuntrustworthy, almost devious, dimension to Wright’s behaviour. In his book onthe trial, Malcom Turnbull expressed surprise at Wright’s ‘too uncriticalworship’ of his mentor, Lord Rothschild. In his 2014 memoir, Dangerous toKnow, Chapman Pincher asserted that Rothschild and his wife Tess loathedWright, and he implied that Wright had exerted some kind of blackmail over thepair by threatening to include a chapter in Spycatcher that describedTess’s ‘long relationship with Anthony Blunt’.

AsI indicated earlier, Chapman Pincher does not use his sometime accompliceWright’s ‘evidence’ in his comprehensive presentation of the case againstHollis. Given that Pincher clutched at every straw he could find, and wasalways willing to present testimony from anonymous but ‘authoritative’ sources,this omission is somewhat startling. All Pincher states on Sonia’s recruitmentof agents (beyond Fuchs and Norwood) runs as follows: “There is also newevidence that she and Len may have recruited and serviced a further fellowGerman communist – an atomic scientist working at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford,whose wife Sonia had met socially.” (p 198 of Treachery) Pincher alsoacknowledges that members of her family were informants for her, but dismissesSonia’s claims about finding and recruiting ‘minor agents’ as possibly being a‘GRU legendary cover’ (p 259). What this ‘new evidence’ consisted of is notexplained, and the first statement has a very hypothetical ring about it. Theconclusion, however, must be that Pincher did not trust Wright’s account of thebreakthrough telegram.

Conclusions

Apart from the fact that ‘Spycatcher’ caught no spies, Wright was an unreliable witness. As D. Cameron Watt observed about the case: “A moderately careful reading of Wright’s book, let alone any checking of such statements he makes that can be checked, reveals, as most serious reviews of the book in the American press have shown, that Mr. Wright’s command of the facts, let alone his claims to universal knowledge, are such as to cast the gravest doubts on his credibility where his assertions cannot be cross-checked.” He completely misrepresented the structure of the VENONA project, and the material it used. He was likewise confused about the elements of the HASP program, and what the Swedes brought to the game. He magnified an illusory message, unlikely in its authorship, improbable in its content, and dubious in its objective, in order to promulgate a claim about Sonia that has no basis in any other facts, and to provide ammunition for a flimsy case that ELLI was Roger Hollis, the incrimination of whom he blatantly stated was his goal in publishing the book. In his muddled argument, he committed much damage to the other aspects of his case. At the time of the Spycatcher trial, even though he was only 71 years old, he was portrayed by Richard Hall and Malcolm Turnbull as an old, sick man, with a reputation for mendacity. He received the news of the outcome of the trial while in hospital.

TheVENONA files, which should provide the archival evidence for his investigation,are in a mess. The USA website is very US-centric, it is scattered withspelling mistakes, chronologically misplaced items, contradictory and incorrectannotations about identities, misrepresentations of English place-names, andwayward references that could be cleaned up by recent scholarship. The BritishGRU traffic has been broken out, but it is out of sequence. An intense analysisof the pan-European communications could shed some strong light on a host ofnew relationships. A comprehensive index needs to be built, so that scholarscould be more productive in bringing their expertise to bear.

HASPwas a project that exploited GRU traffic between Stockholm and Moscow, whichhad been partially decrypted by the Swedes. It succeeded because of the policythat the GRU deployed, for the operations of clandestine and emergencyservices, and those of agents under their control, of using a commonreference-book as a one-time pad. The Petrovs’ experience in Moscow andStockholm contributed substantially to identifying the volume used. Thusdramatic improvements in decrypting certain London-Moscow traffic were made.Yet fresh work can be undertaken. The considerations of HASP, and otherpublished material (e.g. Vassiliev), need to be incorporated into the BritishVENONA story (of which there is no ‘authorised’ publication at all, and nothingfresh since Nigel West’s book of 2009) and cross-referenced. An analysis of theexcisions that the British Government is stated to have made between theVersion 5 and Version 6 releases should be undertaken. In other words, itconstitutes a major opportunity for GCHQ in the year that its authorisedhistory appears. It needs a professional cryptanalyst to work on the sourcemessages, and the evolution of the decipherment.

AsI have written before, an authorised history of wartime and post-war interceptionservices remains to be written. To begin with, the function crossed multipleorganisations – not just all the intelligence services, but the War Office, thearmed forces, the Post Office, even the Metropolitan Police. The Radio SecurityService (RSS), of interest primarily to MI5, was never owned by the SecurityService (despite Nigel West’s continued claims to the contrary), and wasmanaged by a section of SIS from May 1941 until the end of the war, when GCHQtook control of it. Yet Keith Jeffery, in his authorised history of SIS,treated RSS (and GCHQ, which also reported to SIS during the war) asstep-children. It will be interesting to see whether the coming history of GCHQ(Behind the Enigma, The Authorised History of Britain’s Secret CyberIntelligence Agency, by John Ferris, due in November of this year), whencovering the wartime years, treats RSS as an essential part of GC&CS (as itwas then).

Ibelieve that this bulletin provides an accurate account of the phenomenon ofHASP, but a similar modern exercise needs to be performed against VENONAitself. After I post this report, I intend to draw the attention of the GCHQPress Office to it. I ask all readers who would like to see some effortexpended on clearing up this significant episode in British IntelligenceHistory to contact the Press Office at pressoffice@gchq.gov.uk themselves,and thus reinforce my message.

(I regret that this research has been conducted without detailed access to the several files on VENONA at the National Archives, which have not been digitized. My previous superficial scans of the information did not indicate to me that the matters I have discussed were covered by the archival material at all. If any reader has found information in them that either clarifies, expands or confounds what I have written, please contact me. I also want to express my gratitude to Professor Glees, and to Denis Lenihan, for comments and suggestions they made concerning an earlier version of this article. Denis has continued to provide, right up to the completion of this report, very useful insights from the material he has analysed. Dr. Brian Austin has been a perennial outstanding adviser on wireless matters. I alone am responsible for the opinions expressed here, and any errors that may appear in the text.)

MajorSources:

Spycatcher,by Peter Wright

Venona,by Nigel West

GCHQ,byRichard Aldrich

TheCode Breakers, by David Kahn

StealingSecrets, Telling Lies, by James Gannon

Handbookfor Spies, by Alexander Foote

TheCode Book, by Simon Singh

Battleof Wits, by Stephen Budiansky

StealingSecrets, Telling Lies, by James Gannon

HistoricalDictionary of Signals Intelligence, by Nigel West

‘SekretnyiFront General’nogo Shtaba’, by Vladimir Lota

Venona:Soviet Espionage and the American Response 1939-1957,ed. Robert Louis Benson & Michael Warner

Defend(ing)the Realm, by Christopher Andrew

TheHaunted Wood, by Allan Weinstein & AlexanderVassiliev

Venona:Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, by John Earl Haynes& Harvey Klehr

TheVenona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America,by Herbert Romerstein & Eric Breindel

TheSecrets of the Service, by Anthony Glees

TheSecret History of MI6: 1909-1949, by Keith Jeffery

Empireof Fear, by Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov

BetweenSilk and Cyanide, by Leo Marks

Codes,Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communications,by Fred B. Wrixon

BritishIntelligence in the Second World War, Volume 1, byF. H. Hinsley and others

TheVenona Story, by Robert L. Benson

MI6and the Machinery of Spying, by Philip H. J. Davies

ThePetrov Affair, by Robert Manne

ASpy’s Revenge, by Richard V. Hall

TheSpycatcher Affair, by Malcom Turnbull

Treachery,by Chapman Pincher

Dangerousto Know, by Chapman Pincher

PeterWright and the ‘Spycatcher’ Case, by D. Cameron Watt, in PoliticalQuarterly, Volume 59, Issue 2, April 1988

TheNational Archives

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/venona-soviet-espionage-and-the-american-response-1939-1957/preface.htm

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/article/Venona-London-GRU.pdf

https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/venona/dated/1945/16jul_cipher_text_seaman.pdf

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB278/01.PDF

https://vault.fbi.gov/Venona/Venona%20Part%201%20of%201/view

https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks

This month’s new Commonplace entries can be found here.

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Literature/Academia, Politics, Technology

Dateline: Sunday June 28, 2020

Today the Mail on Sunday has published an article based on research performed by Professor Glees and me, describing the way that MI6 (SIS) carried out a plan to manipulate Ursula Hamburger, nee Kuczynski, as a double-agent, and how the exploit catastrophically rebounded on both MI6 and MI5. It can be seen at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8467057/Did-staggering-British-blunder-hand-Stalin-atomic-bomb.html

Ever since I started exploring the KV 6/41 file at the National Archives in greater depth, and published my findings in a special bulletin at the end of April (see here), Professor Glees and I have been pondering over its implications. We quickly agreed that the letter sent by Victor Farrell to Len Beurton in March 1943 was conclusive proof that MI6 was using Len and his wife, Ursula (agent SONIA), as some kind of asset, and this finding sealed the somewhat speculative story I had outlined in ‘Sonia’s Radio’. Professor Glees was able to use his contacts at the Mail on Sunday to excite their interest, and the story that appears today is the result.

We are very pleased with the outcome. Of course, there are items which we might have expressed differently ourselves (and Professor Glees and I still enjoy differences of opinion on how some of the evidence should be interpreted), but we agree that a compelling account of the story of treachery and self-delusion has been laid out. We think it has shed dramatic light on an intelligence puzzle that has foiled the experts for decades.

The story is unavoidably very complex, and in compressing into a single article an international series of events involving multiple intelligence agencies, it is inevitable that some oversimplifications occur. The details of World War II, and the fact that the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany during the Battle of Britain, may not be familiar to many readers. A new generation will not be aware, necessarily, of who Klaus Fuchs was, and why secrets of atomic weaponry were so critical in the years following the war. Thus some of the nuances of politics in the 1940s have had to be skated over, as have some of the details of the career, movements, and activities of Ursula and Len Beurton.

Those readers who want to pursue in more depth the story of SONIA’s career, her activities in Switzerland, her arranged marriage, and her escape to the United Kingdom, are encouraged to read the full story of ‘Sonia’s Radio’, viewable here. And if any reader wishes to send a serious question about the Mail on Sunday piece, or anything that I have written about on coldspur, he or she is encouraged to post a comment after this bulletin, or to send me an email at antonypercy@aol.com. I shall post questions and responses here.

Lastly, look out for a fresh report at this website, an analysis of the description by Peter Wright (‘Spycatcher’) of the wireless messages that convinced him both of Sonia’s activity, and of Roger Hollis’s culpability, on Tuesday, July 1.

Update No. 1 (June 28)

Last night I received my first item of feedback, from a US resident. It ran as follows: “Utter nonsense. Sorry to hear that you bought into a ridiculous idea. Embarrassing for you that it has been published.”

My reactions are many. First of all, I know this correspondent (whom I shall call ‘Horace’) to be a smart fellow, who has contributed originally to intelligence research. But I also know him as a notorious skimmer of my work (like Frank Close, perhaps). After my Round-up last month, Horace wrote to me, enclosing a link to Ben Macintyre’s website, and the reference to the book on Sonia, at which I had to point out to him that I had already cited it in the same report, and pointed out a gross error. And, since, this Mail on Sunday feature is a highly logical extension of all that I have been writing in the saga of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ and since, Horace must have failed to follow the plot. He has occasionally stated that he does not agree with my conclusions, but has never provided a shred of evidence to challenge them. Moreover, Horace must be temperamentally unsuited to this business: so many mysteries exist that it is absurd to dismiss a serious attempt to explain them as ‘nonsense’. Alternatively, Horace must have a theory of his own to explain the multitude of accommodations that MI6 and MI5 made for Sonia – one he has never articulated.

I am far from ’embarrassed’. This feature is excellent publicity for coldspur. As for ‘buying into a ridiculous idea’, I find that amusing. No one ‘sold’ it to Professor Glees and me. We developed it.

Horace is not Ben Macintyre, by the way. I asked Horace whether I could quote his comments on coldspur. He never replied.

Update No. 2 (June 29)

Ihave now received many responses to the Mail on Sunday piece, for whichI thank everyone. They were, with one exception already reported on, overall verypositive, but I understand that the appearance of the information in thisformat did confuse some of you.

Let me recap first. Back in early May, I had been trying to find a media outlet for my latest conclusions about Sonia, in order to forerun the arrival of Ben Macintyre’s book on the Soviet spy. Having failed with the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, I was encouraged by Professor Glees to work with him on approaching the Mail on Sunday, where he had a solid contact. I jumped at the opportunity, but also had some concerns, as I was not sure how I would remain in control of the project. Things went fairly well, a story was put together (based on my material on coldspur, largely by Professor Glees, who was more familiar with the house style), and we in fact expected the story to be placed on May 31.

Thenmatters became difficult. For four successive weeks, the decision to publishwas deferred, since apparently more pressing stories demanded priority. Thiswas an extremely frustrating time for me, as I was obviously embargoed fromwriting any more on the subject that might weaken the freshness of the Mailon Sunday feature. We had no contract, but our contact implored us to bepatient. I was about to pull the plug on the whole project, and either start witha new media outlet (which could have caused a repeat of the whole drawn-out business)or simply reverse to my own publishing model, where I can issue what I want,when I want, in my own voice, and without any editors looming over me, butwhere the readership and the publicity are indisputably small. I wanted verymuch a) a story in the national media about Sonia, and b) publicity for coldspur,so that I could continue my writings with the confidence that they were gainingmore attention.

Wethus extended our offer for one more week, and the Mail on Sunday camethrough. Unfortunately, it did not refer to coldspur (at least not inthe on-line version), which I believed had been part of the agreement. That is agreat disappointment to me, but I imagine those readers really interested willtrack coldspur down. Has it drawn Ben Macintyre out of the undergrowth?Not yet, it seems, but that will probably take a little longer. I must believethat ‘his attention will be drawn’ by experts, agents, editors, and colleaguesat the Times to the Mail on Sunday story, and he may start toregret not having responded to my overtures a couple of years ago. I am predictablyvery keen on learning what his particular angle on Sonia (how Chapman Pincher spelledher) or Sonya (Macintyre’s choice, and the form in her translated memoir) willbe.

Asfor the story itself, some of you were confused, for which I apologise. Youfound the narrative unconvincing, and looked for more substance – such as thatwhich you normally find on coldspur. Some asked whether I agreed withall the statements ascribed to Professor Glees! I should mention that all thequotations offered to the paper were presented as joint submissions, but intheir intensity, and maybe for space reasons, the journalists attributed nearlyall to the Professor, and I was left with only a single, somewhat fracturedone. Never mind. I am very grateful to Professor Glees for the academic andprofessional authority he brought to the project, and the proof of the puddingwill remain in my researches on coldspur.

Thus I acknowledge that a slightly less ‘melodramatic’ version of the analysis would be useful – nay, essential – to many of my readers. You have submitted questions that demand scholarly and cool answers. Nevertheless, rather than address them during the month one by one here, I have decided to devote next month’s bulletin (to be published July 31) to an exposition of the full case of the MI6/MI5 collusion regarding Sonia, list all the evidence that led the Professor and me to our conclusions, and also describe the conundrums and unanswered questions that remain.

In the meantime, keep those comments coming, and do not forget to look out for new analysis on Peter Wright and Spycatcher tomorrow.

Update No. 3 (July 7)

The dust has settled a bit. I have received some further very positive feedback. Unfortunately the Google News feature that Professor Glees uses, which provides alerts on activities of his like the publication of this article, appears to have been de-activated. Many of his contacts may therefore not have noticed the feature. The editors at the Mail on Sunday are similarly perplexed. It looks as if some undefinable body, upset by the revelations, has the power to interfere with such mechanisms. How can that be?

Professor Glees and I have both been in cordial contact with Ben Macintyre. He claimed, in his message to Professor Glees, that his book would obviously be making references to coldspur. I await the arrival of his book (which he promised to send me via the US publisher) with great eagerness, so that I may verify that assertion. He apologised to me for the fact that my 2018 message to him via his publisher had gone astray, and told me that he had corrected the errors on his websites. Yet, as I look at them again today, they all appear to be unchanged.

Meanwhile, I have started working on a fuller and less hectic version of the Sonia/MI6 story for publication here on July 31. I also sent an email to the GCHQ Press Office, alerting it to my post on Spycatcher and HASP, and providing the link, on July 1. I have yet to receive any acknowledgment. I am sure my report has been the cause of much merriment in Cheltenham.

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Filed under Espionage/Intelligence, General History, Personal, Politics

Dumspiro, conspiro

Iwas intending to publish this month the final chapter in the series TheMystery of the Undetected Radios, but was inhibited from doing so by theclosure of the National Archives at Kew. I had performed 90% of the research,but needed to inspect one critical file to complete my story. Since my doughtyresearcher, Dr. Kevin Jones, will not be able to photograph it until we get the‘All Clear’, the story will have to remain on hold. Instead, I use this month’sbulletin to sum up progress on a number of other projects.

Contents:

• Sonia and Len Beurton
• Ben Macintyre
• Prodding Comrade Stalin
• TheNational Archives and Freedom of Information
• Professor Frank Close at theBodleian
• The BBC and ProfessorAndrew
• Nigel West’s new publications,and a look at ELLI
• The Survival of Gösta Caroli
• Dave Springhall and the GRU
• ‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-campTycoon Romance Drama!’ (exclusive)
• China and the Rhineland Moment

Soniaand Len Beurton

I published the recent bulletin, The Letter from Geneva, because I believed it was important to get this story out before Ben MacIntyre’s book on Sonia appears. The fact that Len Beurton, Sonia’s bigamous husband, had acted as an agent-cum-informant for SIS in Switzerland seemed to me to be of immense importance for Sonia’s story, and the way that she was treated in the United Kingdom. Sonia herself wrote in her memoir that, when Skardon and Serpell came to interview her in 1947, they treated Len as if he were opposed to communism, rather than being an agent for it, abetting his wife as a recognized but possibly reformed spy or courier for Moscow, and the contents of the letter helped to explain why.

Iwanted to have my conclusions published in a respectable medium, so as to havea more serious stake placed in the ground. I could not afford to wait for themore obscure journals on intelligence matters (and then perhaps get arejection), and instead considered that the London Review of Books mightbe suitable. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, could conceivably have a personalinterest in the story (she is an Eitingon, and has written about her grandfather’scousin Leon, who managed the project to kill Trotsky). The LRBfrequently runs long articles on off-beat subjects (in fact, it runs so many earnestleftish political pieces that one sometimes forgets what its mission issupposed to be), and it could presumably turn round my piece quickly. I thussent my bulletin, as an exclusive, to Ms. Wilmers, with a covering letterexplaining the appeal it could have to her readers, the opportunity for ascoop, and describing how I would re-work my article to make it a suitablecontribution for her periodical.

Aftera week, I had heard nothing – not even an acknowledgment. (Coldspur 0 : TheEstablishment 1) So I made a similar approach to the Times LiterarySupplement, with obviously different wording in the cover letter. TheEditor, Stig Abell (who had, after all, commissioned a review of Misdefendingthe Realm a couple of years ago), responded very promptly, and informed mehe was passing my piece to a sub-editor to review. A couple of days later, Ireceived a very polite and appreciative email from the sub-editor, who offeredme his regrets that he did not think it was suitable for the periodical. Thatwas it. I thus decided to self-publish, on coldspur. (Coldspur 1 : TheEstablishment 1)

I have since been in contact with a few experts on this aspect of Sonia’s and Len’s case, and have discussed the puzzling circ*mstances of the letter, why Farrell chose that method of communication, and how he must have expected its passage to be intercepted. Why did he choose private mail instead of the diplomatic bag? Would the diplomatic bag have taken the same route as airmail, and would the German have opened that, too? Why did he not send an encrypted message over cable (although the consulate had probably run out of one-time pads by then), or wireless to SIS in London? Presumably because he did not want Head Office to see it: yet this method was just as risky. And what kind of relationship did he possibly think he could nurture with Len in those circ*mstances? No convincing explanation has yet appeared.

BenMacintyre

Meanwhile,what about Ben Macintyre’s forthcoming book on Sonia, Agent Sonya,subtitled variously as Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, or as Lover,Mother, Soldier, Spy? The publisher indicates that it is ‘expected onSeptember 15, 2020’, yet Mr. Macintyre himself seems to be lagging a bit. HisUS website (to which I was directed at http://benmacintyre.com/US/) shouts at us in the following terms: ‘The Spy and the Traitor ArrivingSeptember 2018’, but even his UK website needs some refreshment, as it informsus that the paperback edition of his book on Gordievsky will be published onMay 30, 2019 (http://benmacintyre.com/about-the-author/), and lists events in 2019 where the author will be signing copies of the samebook. Wake up, Benny boy! This is 2020.

So,back to the publisher of Agent Sonya, where we can find information at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612487/agent-sonya-by-ben-macintyre/. The promotional material includes the following passage: “In 1942, in a quiet village in theleafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage withher three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. UrsulaBurton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreignaccent.” This is all rather disturbing, however. Sonia’s husband, Len, returnedfrom Switzerland only in July 1942, and they lived in Kidlington for a shorttime before moving to Summertown, in Oxford. Her third child, Peter, was notborn until 1943. Len did not work as a machinist at that time, since he was unemployeduntil called up by the R.A.F. in November 1943. And their name was not ‘Burton’but ‘Beurton’. Still, ‘thin’ and ‘elegant’ might, with a little imagination, conceivablybe accurate, and she surely spoke English with a foreign accent. Not apromising start, however.

Macintyre has updated his blurb, apparently.The Waterstone’s site (https://www.waterstones.com/book/agent-sonya/ben-macintyre/2928377041403?utm_source=wsnfpreorderA230520&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=preorders ) tells a different story. The year has beencorrected to 1944, where Sonia is pedalling her bicycle to ‘gather secrets froma nuclear physicist’. The only problem with this scenario is that Klaus Fuchshad left for the United States in December 1943.

So what is ailing our intrepid journalist? Ihope things improve from here onwards. I shall place my advance order, andawait the book’s arrival, as expectantly as the publisher itself. In fact, Iheard from my sources earlier this month that Macintyre has started ‘tweeting’about his new book. Meanwhile, I believe I have taken the necessary initiativeby posting my analysis first. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 1)

Prodding Comrade Stalin

It continues to dismay me how Stalin’s pernicious influence casts a depressing and inaccurate shadow over the history of the twentieth century. We can now read how President Putin attempts to resuscitate the days of the Great Patriotic War, emphasising Stalin’s role as a leader, and minimising events such as the Nazi-Soviet pact or the massacres of the Katyn Forest. At the end of last month, the New York Times carried a story that described how the Russian authorities have tried to discredit an amateur historian who discovered mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh in Karelia, near the White Sea. The State Military society is arguing that ‘thousands of people buried at Sandarmokh are not all Stalin’s victims but also include Soviet soldiers executed by the Finnish Army during World War II’, which is palpable nonsense.

Thus my disgust was intense when I read anarticle by one Lionel Barber in the Spectator of April 4. It includedthe following passage:

“Covid-19 is indeed the Great Leveller.Conventional wisdoms have been shattered. But crises offer opportunities. Wiseheads should be planning ahead. FDR, Churchill, and, yes, Stalin lifted theirsights in 1942-43 as the war against Nazi Germany began to turn. Prodded bygifted public servants like Keynes and others, these leaders thought about thefuture of Europe, the balance of power and the institutions of the post-warworld.”

The idea that Stalin could have been ‘prodded’by ‘gifted public servants’ is a topic to which perhaps only Michael Wharton (PeterSimple of the Daily Telegraph) could have done justice. I can alternativelyimagine a canvas by Repin, perhaps, where the wise Stalin strokes his chin ashe listens to a deputation from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, as if saying:‘You make a strong point there, Alexey Dimitrovich. Maybe world revolution isno longer necessary. I shall change my plans immediately.’ I was propelled intosending a letter to the Editor of the magazine, which ran (in part) as follows:

“I wonder whether the Stalin Mr. Barber refersto is the same Joseph Stalin who incarcerated and killed millions of his ownpeople, and then, after the war, enslaved eastern Europe, killing many of itsdemocratic leaders and thousands of those who defied him, as he prepared forthe inevitable collision with the ‘capitalist’ west? I doubt whether the despotStalin was ‘prodded’ by anyone, except possibly by a distorted reading of Marxand Lenin, and certainly not by ‘gifted public servants’, whether they wereKeynesian or not. The ‘future of Europe’, especially that of Poland, was atopic that, after Yalta, caused a sharp rift between the Allies, and led to theCold War. Where did Mr. Barber learn his history?”

The Editor did not see fit to publish myletter. I do not know what is the saddest episode of this exercise: 1) The factthat Lionel Barber, who was Editor of the Financial Times from2005 until January of this year, and is thus presumably an educated person,could be so desperately wrong about the character and objectives of Stalin; 2)The fact that the Editor of the Spectator was not stopped in his trackswhen he read this passage, and did not require Mr. Barber to modify it; 3) Thefact that no other Spectator reader apparently noticed the distortion,or bothered to write to the Editor about it; or 4) The fact that the Editor,having read my letter, determined that the solecism was so trivial that noattention needed to be drawn to it. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 2)

To remind myself of the piercing insights ofMichael Wharton, I turned to my treasured copy of The StretchfordChronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, and quickly alighted on the followingtext, from 1968:

Poorold has-beens

“The Soviet Government,” said a Times leaderwriter the other day, “has become hopelessly outdated and out of touch withcontemporary movements at home and abroad.”

So the Soviet Government is hopelesslyoutdated, is it? It has just imposed its will on the Czechs and Slovaks byforce. And this is supposed to be hopelessly outdated in an age which, thanksto perverted science (a highly contemporary movement if there ever was one),has seen and will see force repeatedly and successfully applied on a scaleundreamed of by the conquerors of the past.

So force is outdated. Treachery is outdated.War is outdated. Pain is out dated. Death is outdated. Evil itself is not onlyoutdated but out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.

That a writer, presumably intelligent,certainly literate and possibly able to influence the opinions of others, canbelieve these things is positively terrifying. If the Russian Communistleaders, as we are told day in day out, are now cowering in the Kremlin in astate of extreme terror here is some little comfort for them.

When Soviet tanks are on the Channel Coast, shallwe still be telling ourselves that the Soviet Government is outdated and out oftouch? As we are herded into camps for political re-education or worse, shallwe still go on saying to each other, with a superior smile: ‘This is really tooridiculously outdated for words. I mean, it’s quite pathetically out of touchwith contemporary movements at home and abroad.’?”

There was as much chance of Brezhnev and hiscronies paying heed to ‘contemporary movements at home and abroad’ in 1968 asthere was of Stalin being prodded ‘by gifted public servants’ in 1946. Pfui!

As a final commentary on this calamity, a few weeks ago I read Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe, published last year, which explained how duplicitous Stalin was in his dealings with western political entities, and how he restrained European communist parties until the Soviet Union successfully tested the bomb in August 1949. One of the books cited by Naimark was Grigory Tokaev’s Stalin Means War, published in 1951. I acquired a copy, and read how, in 1947, Colonel Tokaev had been commissioned by Stalin to acquire German aeronautical secrets, by any means necessary, including the kidnapping of scientists, to enable the Soviet Union to construct planes that could swiftly carry atomic bombs to New York. Thus would Stalin’s plans for world revolution be enforced.

I do not think this book is a hoax. Tokaevmanaged to escape, with his wife and young daughter, to the United Kingdom atthe end of 1947, where he had a distinguished academic career, and managed toavoid Moscow’s assassins. He died in 2003, in Cheam, in leafy Surrey, just afew miles from where I was born and grew up. I wish I had had the honour ofshaking his hand. His book provides undeniable evidence that Stalin was notlistening to gifted civil servants, and musing about the peaceful organisationof the world’s institutions. He wanted war.

The National Archives and Freedom ofInformation

In my recent piece on Rudolf Peierls (The Mysterious Affair . . . Part 2) I drew attention to the increasing trend for archival material that had previously been released to be withdrawn and ‘retained’. Further inspection, prompted by a deeper search by Dr. Kevin Jones, reveals that an enormous amount of material is no longer available, especially in the ‘AB’ (records of the Atomic Energy Authority) category. I have counted 43 files alone in AB 1, 2, 3, & 4, mainly on Rudolf Peierls, including his correspondence, as well as multiple reports on Pontecorvo, and including Fuchs’s interview by Perrin. For instance, if you look up AB 1/572, you will find a tantalising introduction to the papers of Professor Peierls, described as ‘Correspondence with Akers, Arms, Blackman [Honor?], Blok, Bosanquet [Reginald?], Brown . . .’, from the period 1940-1947: yet the rubric informs us that ‘This record is closed while access is under review’.

I suspect some of these files may never havebeen made available, but it is hard to tell unless one has been keeping a veryclose watch on things. For example, the file on Perrin’s interviews with Fuchs (AB1/695) has been well mined by other researchers, and the fact that thestatement ‘Opening Date: 16 July 2001’ appears below the standard message wouldsuggest that this file has indeed been withdrawn after a period ofavailability. But does the lack of any such date indicate that the file wasnever released, or is the absence merely the inconsistent application ofpolicy? Several months ago, I referred to another provocative file, HO 532/3(‘Espionage activities by individuals: Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls’),whichhas a different status of ‘Closed or Retained Document: Open Description’,where the rubric reads ‘This record is retained by a government department’,and has never been sent to the National Archives. It puzzles me somewhat as towhy the Home Office would even acknowledge the existence of such acontroversial file, as an open description without delivery just encouragesspeculation, but I suppose that is how bureaucracy works, sometimes.

Dr. Jones (who has made it his speciality tofind his way among prominent archives) offered me his personal interpretation,which may be very useful for other researchers. He wrote to me as follows:

• “Where a file is stated to be ‘closed while access is under review’, but has ‘Open Document’ in the ‘Closure status’ field (e.g. AB 1/572), then the file has always been available, until its ‘disappearance’.
• Similarly, as with AB 1/695, if there is a specific ‘Record opening date’ the previously retained file was made available from that date, again until its ‘disappearance’.
• With the likes of HO 532/3, where it is stated ‘Retained by Department under Section 3.’”, the file has indeed never been available.
• Many of these ‘Retained’ files do reveal the file’s title (the ‘Open Description’) to tantalise the researcher, but many such files are listed in the catalogue with no title/description.
• Where a specific government department is named in a retained file entry (e.g. FO, MOD, etc.), it is obliged to process a FoI request, though don’t expect a quick response, especially if they are composing various forms of waffle to justify not releasing the file! When the ‘government department’ is not named (as with HO 532/3), there is good chance it is retained by MI5/MI6, both of which are exempt from the FoI Act (well, certainly the latter, which also holds the retained SOE files; not 100% sure about MI5). In any instance, click the ‘Contact Us’ button and the TNA’s FoI team will inform you of the good/bad news.”

Occasionally, therefore, the researcher isinvited to submit an FoI (Freedom of Information) request, as an attempt tochallenge the status of the censored file. I performed this over the aboveEspionage file, on the grounds that no conceivable reason could be justifiedfor withholding it now that the subjects (and their offspring) are all dead,but received just an acknowledgment. My colleague Denis Lenihan had approachedGCHQ concerning the HASP file (referred to by Nigel West and Peter Wright), whichwas claimed to contain transcripts of Soviet wireless messages intercepted inSweden during WW II. Denis requested its release, as no conceivable aspect ofBritish security could be damaged through its publication, but his request wasrejected by the GCHQ Press Office (as if it were simply a matter of PR).

Denis then brought my attention to anotherstatutory body whither appeals could be sent – the Investigatory PowersTribunal. I had just read an article in the Historical Journal of March2014, by Christopher J. Murphy and Daniel W. B. Lomas (‘Return to Neverland?Freedom of Information and the History of British Intelligence’), which veryquickly explained that ‘the intelligence and security services fall outside itsprovisions, in marked contrast to the comparable legislation in the UnitedStates . . .’ I thus wondered why webothered, and under what circ*mstances any of the security services (MI5, SIS,GCHQ) would feel they should have to even consider such requests. But, afterall, Kew does advertise the facility: is it an exercise in futility?

Denis wrote to me as follows: “While they’re right about the FOI legislation, the securityagencies react in odd but sometimes helpful ways. I remember Pincher sayingsomewhere that the Romer Report (re the Houghton/Molody/Kroger case) wasobtained from MI5 by someone who applied under FOI. I once sought a documentfrom MI5 and got the classic Sir Humphrey response: ‘while MI5 is not subjectto the FOI Act, it has been decided to treat your application under that Act.It has been unsuccessful’.” That was rich – so generous! Then Denis went on tosay that the authors of the article appeared not to be aware of theInvestigatory Powers Tribunal, to which he had turned with the HASP material.(On his recommendation, I made a companion request, referring to the fact thata reference to HASP was evident on some of the RSS records, and that it wasthus in the public interest to make the material available. I have sinceconducted some deep research into the HASP phenomenon: I shall report in fullin next month’s coldspur.)

I followed up Denis’s valuable lead to Chapman Pincher’s Dangerousto Know. Pincher’s account of the application, and its rejection, can beseen in the chapter ‘The Elli Riddle’, on pages 318 and 319. An official of theIntelligence and Security Committee suggested that Pincher complain to theTribunal about MI5’s lack of action on a ‘missing’ report on Gouzenko made byRoger Hollis. The Tribunal had been set up in 2000, under the Human Rights Act,to consider complaints about the public authorities, but Pincher had,surprisingly, never heard of it. It took notice of Pincher’s request (would ithave paid heed to submissions by those of lesser standing, without a platformin the media?), and required MI5 to respond on the status of the Hollis report.

MI5 sent two items of correspondence to Pincher, stating that ‘despite an extensive search of the Service’s archives ‘it had to conclude that no record of the important interview was ever made’. And that appeared to be the end of the affair – until William Tyrer, through an astonishing display of terrier-like determination, managed to extract a copy from MI5, having first discovered a reference to a vital telegram in the Cleveland Cram archive. Tyrer wrote up his conclusions in 2016, in an article in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2016.1177404), and Denis Lenihan has analysed Tyrer’s findings in Roger Redux: Why the Roger Hollis Case Won’t Go Away.

As the Tribunal’s website (https://www.ipt-uk.com/ ) explains, the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 did strengthenprovisions for the public to make appeals, but it is not clear to me that thewithholding of files really fits into what the IPT declares its mission, namely‘a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawfulaction by a public authority using covert investigative techniques’. Thatsounds more like heavy-handed surveillance techniques, or officers and agentsmasquerading as person they were not in order to infiltrate possibly dissident groups.And the organisation has a very bureaucratic and legalistic methodology, as therecent decision on an MI5 case shows (see: https://www.ipt-uk.com/judgments.asp, and note that the Tribunal cannot spell ‘Between’). It isdifficult to see how the body could sensibly process a slew of failed FoIrequests. And what about the Home Office, retaining aged documents? Thatdoesn’t come under the grouping of security services.

Yet all of this fails to grapple with the main question: why hasthe Government suddenly become so defensive and concerned about records dealingwith matters of atomic power and energy, most of them over seventy years old,and many of which have already been dissected in serious books? In the articlesto which I provided links beforehand, Michael Holzman and Robert Booth say itall. The lack of a proper explanation is astounding, and the blunderbussapproach just draws even more attention to the fact that the civil service isout of control. Did Peierls’s letters to Blok and others betray some secretsthat would be dangerous for the country’s foes to get hold of? I cannot imagineit. Maybe all will be revealed soon, but the furtive and uncommunicative way inwhich these files are being withheld just induces more distrust of theauthorities, and their condescending attitude to the public. (Coldspur 2 : TheEstablishment 3)

Professor Frank Close at the Bodleian

My status as Friend of the Bodleian entitles me to attend events staged by that institution, and a couple of months ago I received the following invitation: “Our first video byProfessorFrank Close, available exclusively to the Friends, can be viewedhere. In this talk, ‘Trinity: Klaus Fuchs and the Bodleian Library’, Professor Close uses the Bodleian’s collections to describe an extraordinary tale of Communist spies and atomic bombs.” I viewed the presentation on YouTube, but I don’t believe that it is available solely through subscription, as the above link appears to function properly.

It does not appear that Klaus Fuchsever visited the Bodleian Library, but Professor Close uses Bodleian resources,such as the correspondence of Rudolf Peierls, and the photographic collectionof Tony Skyrme, another Trinity College, Cambridge man, and contributor to theManhattan Project (see https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3424 ) to weave a fascinating story about Fuchs. Skyrmeaccompanied Fuchs and the Peierls family on a ski-ing holiday in Switzerland in1947, and produced a riveting set of photographs of that adventure, some ofwhich Close reproduces in Trinity, his biography of Fuchs. Close alsomakes some fascinating linkages between the dates that Fuchs claimed vacationdays from his work at Birmingham, and the timings of wireless messages toMoscow reporting on the communication of his latest secrets. He does, however,avoid any possible hint of controversy over Peierls’s career, ignoring what Ihave written about him, even though his final message was a very pertinent oneabout the relationship between Fuchs and those who ‘adopted’ him, and how heeventually betrayed them.

Since I have read Close’s book, andam familiar with the overall story, the pace of his presentation was a littleslow for me. Yet I could see that Close is a very gifted lecturer, and musthave truly energized his students when he was a working physics don. Iaccordingly sent an email congratulating him on his performance, at the sametime asking a question about the source of some of his data. I never received areply. Apparently I have fallen out of favour with the learned professor, whowas so eager to communicate with me a few years ago. (Coldspur 2: TheEstablishment 4)

The BBC and Professor Andrew

Readers may recall my lastRound-up, in November 2019, where I left with the optimistic projection that,having been able to speak to Mr Brennan’s Personal Assistant, and hearing fromher that she would commit to follow up on my letter, I might be able to makesome progress on my complaint about Professor Andrew’s high-handed, evencontemptuous, behaviour towards the listeners to the ‘Today’ show. (Thisconcerns a letter written by Eric Roberts to a friend which Andrew categorizedas ‘the most extraordinary intelligence document’ that he had ever seen, but ofwhich he later claimed to have no memory.)

Well, I heard nothing. So, early inJanuary, I tried to call the lady at Broadcasting House. (I had to explain whoI was to get past the switchboard.) And there was no reply. I thus tried askingthe switchboard operator if he could give me her email address, telling him,quite truthfully, that I was following up a previous conversation with her.And, believe it or not, in what was probably a gross breach of institutionalpolicy, he gave it to me. I was thus able to write to her, as follows:

Dear Xxxxxxxx,

You may recall that we spoke several weeks ago about mycorrespondence with the BBC, specifically with Bob Shennan. You were familiarwith my letter, and told me that it had been passed to Audience Services. Youalso said that you would personally ensure that I received follow-up.

Well, I have heard nothing since, and felt it was time tomake contact again. Could you please explain to me what is happening, and why Ihave not yet received a reply to my letters?

Thank you.

Sincerely, Tony Percy.

Six days later, I received the following reply:

Good evening Mr Percy,

I am very sorry I have justpicked up this email, which was sitting in my Junk inbox. I willagain try and find out where your original correspondence is and why it hasn’tbeen responded to, I know you offered to resend me a copy, may I please takeyou up on this.

Apologies again for the nonresponse and I will come back to you as soon as I can.

Regards,

Xxxxxxxx

EA to Group Managing Director.

‘Be patient now . . .’I thus responded:

Thanks for your reply, Xxxxxxxx.

The reason I was notable to send you the letters beforehand was that I never received any emailfrom you giving me your address! Only when the kind switchboard operatoroffered it to me when I called last week (explaining that I had spoken to youbefore: otherwise he probably would not have handed it out), was I able tocontact you.

Anyway, here are the twoletters we discussed. I would really appreciate your tracking down whoever istasked with giving me a response. You will notice that it is now over threemonths since my original letter . . .

Best wishes, Tony.

I didn’t hear from Xxxxxxxagain, but on January 21^st, I received the following message:

Dear Antony Percy,

ReferenceCAS-5759257-M8M4X9

Thank you for your letters and we apologise for the time it has taken torespond.

I have discussed your request with Sanchia Berg whose report you refer to onthe Today Programme. While we appreciate your frustration, the decision whetheror not to release the document rests with the family and not with the BBC.Sanchia has confirmed that this was a private family document which EricRoberts’ family shared with her and later with Rob Hutton. The family did notwant to publish it in full but agreed to certain extracts being made public. Itwas only with their consent that she shared it with Christopher Andrew. Iunderstand Sanchia did suggest that you look at Rob Hutton’s book, as he’dpublished more of the letter than Sanchia had made available in her reports.Nor is it the case that Sanchia was being evasive. Rather she was respectingthe family’s wishes.

I am afraid too that we can’t really comment on what Christopher Andrew hassaid. He obviously views an awful lot of documents, so it’s not that surprisinghe cannot remember in detail a long document he read four years ago. He is notthe only historian the BBC talks to about MI5 – but he is their officialhistorian, so it’s logical that we should go to him fairly frequently.

I have asked Sanchia to contact the family on your behalf and will let you knowif she is successful. However, we would make it clear there is no guaranteethey will be back in touch. I am sorry I am not able to give you any furtherhelp and once again I apologise for the time it has taken to respond to yourconcerns.

Yours sincerely,

Sarah Nelson
Editorial Adviser, BBC News

BBC Complaints Team
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

I tried onelast gasp:

Dear Sarah,

Thank you foryour reply. It was worth waiting for.

I appreciateyour asking Sanchia to approach the family on my behalf. Since the familyapproved her showing the document to Christopher Andrew and Rob Hutton, Iassume that they were comfortable with greater publicity. (Rob Hutton did notreply to my inquiry.) I await the outcome with great interest.

But I mustadmit that I do not find your distancing the BBC from Andrew acceptable. Afterall, it is on the BBC website that his comments still appear (seehttps://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358).Do you not accept some responsibility for this highly provocativeopinion, and do you not agree that it would be appropriate for the BBC tocontact him, remind him of what he said, point out the information on thewebsite, and request a clarification from him, instead of members of the public(like me) having to chase around for months trying to gain an explanation fromthe corporation? Why does Andrew’s role as MI5’s ‘official historian’ allow himto use the BBC to promote himself and to provoke public interest, but then toevade his professional responsibilities by concealing facts concerning MI5?

Sincerely,

Tony Percy.

But that wasit. I heard no more. The BBC is in suchdisarray, and the ‘Today’ editors have now moved on. I am not going to gainanything else. For a moment, I thought I might score a goal, but I suppose itis a draw of some sorts. (Coldspur 2 – The Establishment 4)

Nigel West’sNew Publications

As I wasflicking through one of the book catalogues that I receive through the mail, Inoticed two startling entries, one advertising a new edition of Nigel West’sMI5 (originally published in 1981), the other his MI6 (1983),published by Frontline. Now this was exciting news, as I needed to learn whatthe “Experts’ Expert” (Observer, 1989) was now writing about the twointelligence services after an interval of over thirty years. I was half-mindedto order them immediately at the discounted prices of $37.95 and $26.95, butthought I should check them out on-line first. Thus Casemate Publishers can beseen to promote the books, at https://www.casematepublishers.com/mi5-british-security-service-operations-1909-1945.html#.XrLLhSN_OUk , and the overview for MI5 includes the following: “In this new and revised edition, Nigel Westdetails the organizational charts which show the structure of the wartimesecurity apparatus, in what is regarded as the most accurate and informativeaccount ever written of MI5 before and during the Second World War.”

This was encouraging, and I thought I might geta glimpse of the new Contents by gaining a Google Snippet view, beforecommitting myself. Yet the text, as displayed by that feature, indicated thatthe Contents of the book had not changed, and the number of pages had notincreased. Was that perhaps merely a procedural mistake, where Google had notreplaced the former text? I decide that the only way to find out was to ask theauthor himself. Now, I have not been in touch with Nigel for a few years. Ihave since tweaked his nose a bit on coldspur, especially over hissuperficial yet contradictory treatment of Guy Liddell, and I wondered whetherhe would reply. Maybe he had not seen what I had written, but, if he had, hemight not want to communicate with me.

Anyway, I sent a very polite message to him, inwhich I explained how excited I was at the prospect of reading his newversions, and the very next morning he replied very warmly, and included thefollowing revelation: “The four wartime titlesrecently republished (MI5; MI6; The Secret War: The Story of SOEandTheSecret Wireless War: GCHQ 1900 -1986) are simply corrected new editions ofthe four books previously published.”

Is this not shocking, even a gross misrepresentation of goodssold? Apart from the fact that, if I were a historian with a chance to revisean earlier book in these circ*mstances, I would take the opportunity to refresh*t with all the research uncovered in the meantime, such as a host of filesfrom the National Archives, and Christopher Andrew’s authorised history, Iwould be very careful in arranging how the book was presented to the public.But not just one! Four titles? I think this is highly irregular, and I herebywarn anyone who was thinking of acquiring any of these four volumes that theinformation they get will be very outdated, and that I doubt that all themultiple errors in them have all been addressed. (Coldspur 3 : TheEstablishment 4)

Meanwhile, I have been scouring other Nigel West books. Hislatest, Churchill’s Spy Files: MI5’s Top Secret Wartime Reports (2018),exploits the KV 4/83 file at Kew (although the reader is pushed to find thesource, since it does not appear until a footnote to the very last sentence ofthe book). Beginning in April 1943, Director-General Petrie of MI5 sent aregular summary report, delivered to Churchill and for his eyes only (the copywas taken by the emissary), outlining the activities and achievements of MI5.It seems that West produces the reports in full, although I cannot yet verifythat, as the files have not been digitized, and he adds some very useful (aswell as some very dense and impenetrable) commentary gained from study of the relevantMI5 files at Kew, such as on the Double-Cross System, and on MI5’s majorsuccess against Soviet espionage in World War 2, the successful prosecution ofDave Springhall.

Yet it is another weird West concoction, akin to his recent book on Liddell (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/ ), on which my colleague Denis Lenihan has recently posted an invigorating article (see https://www.academia.edu/43150722/Another_Look_At_Nigel_West_s_Cold_War_Spymaster_The_Legacy_of_Guy_Liddell_Deputy_Director_of_MI5 ). The author’s sense of chronology is wayward, he copies out sheaves of material from the archives, the relevance of which is not always clear, and he overwhelms the reader with a host of names and schemes that lack any proper exegesis. Moreover, the Index is cluttered, and highly inaccurate. I saw my friend General von Falkenhausen with a single entry, but then discovered that he ranges over several pages. Indeed, West describes, through rather fragmentarily, the SIS scheme to invoke Falkenhausen in 1942-43, which is very relevant to my discoveries about Len Beurton. I immediately downloaded from Kew the relevant files on the very provocative HAMLET, taking advantage of the current free offer. I shall return to comment on this volume when I have completed my reading of it.

West does highlight the role of Anthony Blunt in editing thereports for Churchill, which brings me back, inevitably I suppose, to ELLI, thespy within MI5 (or SIS) called out by the defector Gouzenko in 1945. I havestudiously avoided making any statement on ELLI in my reports so far, but DenisLenihan has been writing some provocative pieces, and I must catch up with himeventually. I had happened to notice, in Chapman Pincher’s Treachery(2012 edition, p 78), that the author quoted the file KV 3/417 as confirmingthat ELLI was a spy working for the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) inLondon in 1940. He gave the source as the GRU defector, Ismail Akhmedov, whosework In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, I had quoted in Misdefending theRealm. So I went back to that file, resident on my PC, and found thereference, in paragraph 104. The writer indeed states that Akhmedov was indeedthe source, but that the defector claimed that ELLI was a woman! Why didPincher not include that in his account – was that not rather dumb? And howcome nobody else has referred to this anomaly? Professor Glees has pointed outto me that no male given a cryptonym by Soviet Intelligence ever received afemale name. Apart from Roessler (LUCY, after Lucerne, which is a special case)and DORA (an anagram of Alexander RADÓ), I think he is overall correct,although I have to add the somewhat ambiguous IRIS, who was Leo Aptekar, a‘chauffeur’, Sonia’s handler at the Soviet Embassy.

I have thus started a fresh project on digging out the various sources on ELLI. First of all, I re-read Molehunt, Nigel West’s account of the hunt for Soviet spies in MI5. This is a very confusing world, what with Pincher staking his reputation and career on Hollis’s culpability, based on what Peter Wright told him, John Costello pointing the finger at Guy Liddell (before succumbing to a mysterious and untimely death himself), Nigel West, using the substance of Arthur Martin’s convictions behind the scenes, making the case that Graham Mitchell was the offender, and Christopher Andrew pooh-poohing the lot of them as a crew of conspiracy theorists while allowing himself to be swayed by Gordievsky’s assertion that ELLI was, improbably, Leo Long. West’s book is very appealingly written, but his approach to chronology is utterly haphazard, he is very arch in concealing his whole involvement in the process, and he makes so many unverifiable assertions that one has to be very careful not to be caught up in the sweep of his narrative. For instance, he identifies the failure of British double-agent manoeuvres with Soviet spies as a major item of evidence for stating that MI5 had been infiltrated. But he never explores this, or explains what these projects were. Apart from the attempt to manipulate Sonia (and Len) I know of no documented case of such activity, and, as I have repeatedly written, such projects are doomed to fail as, in order to be successful, they rely both on discipline by a very small and secure team as well as exclusive control of the double agent’s communications.

I also went back to Akhmedov, to re-acquaint myself with how hedescribed his lengthy interviews with Philby in Ankara in 1948. His conclusionwas that, even though a stenographer was present, and he suspected thesafe-house had been bugged, Philby reported only a small amount of the materialthat he passed on, which certainly included a description of the GRU’s set-upin London. (He does not mention ELLI here.) But he also wrote that he knew thisbecause of his contacts with American intelligence afterwards. “Many years later I learned that Philby hadsubmitted only a small part of the reams of material obtained from me to theBritish and American intelligence services”. That indicated to me that a fuller recordexists somewhere, and that Akhmedov was shown Philby’s report. Akhmedov also saidthat, a year later (in 1949) he was thoroughly debriefed by the FBI, CIA andPentagon officials in Istanbul. So I assumed that CIA recordswere a good place to look.

And, indeed, the CIA archives display quite a lot of informationthat Akhmedov supplied them about GRU techniques and organisation, but insecondary reports. (I have not yet found transcripts of the originalinterviews.) Moreover, literature produced more recently points to a criticalrole that Akhmedov played in unmasking Philby. One account (Tales fromLangley by Peter Kross) even states that Akhmedov informed the CIA in 1949that Philby was a Soviet spy (how Akhmedov discovered that is not clear, sincehe obviously did not know that for a fact in 1948, although he claimed he partlysaw through Philby’s charade at the time), and that Philby was presented withAkhmedov’s testimony when he was recalled from Washington immediately after theBurgess-Maclean escapade. Unfortunately, Kross provides no reference for thisassertion, but Akhmedov’s informing the CIA at that stage would be anastonishing revelation: it would put Philby’s presence in Washington under aharsh new light, frame White’s ‘devilish plot’ in a dramatic new context, andeven explain why Eric Roberts was faced with an astonishing new reality when hespoke to Liddell in 1949. Is that what Andrew was hinting at? I am going toclaim an early goal, before VAR gets in. (Coldspur 4 : The Establishment 4)

Another anomaly I have noticed is the famed reference to ELLI(actually ‘ELLY’) in the Vassiliev papers. (These were transcripts of files createdby Alexander Vassiliev from the KGB archives, containing information on the GRUas well, and available on the Internet at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks .) Chapman Pincher presented the assertion that Gouzenko hadbetrayed the existence of ELLI in British intelligence as appearing in a reportfrom Merkulov to Stalin in November 1945, and William Tyrer has echoedPincher’s claim in his article about ELLI.

Yet the published archive states no such thing. The comment that “Gouzenkoreported on the GRU source in British intel. ‘ELLY’” is not in the selectedhighlights of Merkulov’s report, but appears as an introduction in a separatepair of parentheses, looking as if it had been added by Vassiliev as editorial commentary,after the statement that informs us that what follows is a summarizationof what Philby has given them. If it is intended to also reflect theinformation received from ‘S’ [STANLEY = Philby] that immediately precedes it,it is worth noting that Philby’s report likewise includes nothing about ELLI.

Pinchercites the comment as coming from Merkulov’s report, but uses the on-lineversion as his source. He is wrong. Tyrer reproduces the whole introduction inhis article, but removes the parentheses. He is careless. Of course, it is verypossible that Merkulov did write to Stalin about Gouzenko and ELLI, andthat needs to be verified. Merkulov was, however, in the NKVD/KGB, not the GRU,and it seems implausible that he would want to lay any bad news concerning theGRU on Stalin’s plate. I cannot quickly see any other reference to the GRU inMerkulov’s communications, and Allen Weinstein and Vassiliev himself, in TheHaunted Wood, suggest (note, p 105) that any reference to the GRU byMerkulov was an attempt to pass off some of the responsibility for ElizabethBentley’s defection to the GRU, who recruited her originally in 1936, and forwhom she worked until 1938, when she was transferred to the NKVD.

Thusone might ask: if Vassiliev thought that the reference to ELLI was importantenough to be highlighted, why did he not publish the original text thatcontained it? (I have checked the original Russian manuscript on the WilsonCenter website: the texts are the same. Yet some pages are missing in allversions: original scan of manuscript, Russian transcription, and Englishtranslation). We should recall, also, that Vassiliev was not transcribing thetexts surreptitiously: he had been given permission from the Association ofRetired Intelligence Officers (KGB alumni) to inspect them, was well-briefed inwestern intelligence interests, and under no pressure. So I decided to try toask him what the import of his commentary was. I know he is hiding somewhere inEngland (maybe holed up with Oleg Gordievsky in an especially leafy part of foliateSurrey), so on May 18 I sent a message to his publisher to inquire whether theycould pass on a question to him. I was brushed off with a message saying Ishould look on Vassiliev’s social media, or write a letter to the publisher. Idoubt whether Vassiliev is seeking any attention, or wanting to give clues tohis whereabouts, so I shall take the latter course.

There is no doubt ELLI existed. But ELLI was almost certainly awoman, and the information on her is so sparse that she was probably a minorplayer, and was not an informant for long. Thus the quest for identifying ELLIhas to be separated from the generic search for traitors within MI5. If therewas evidence of leakage on certain projects, MI5 should have investigated it,traced it back to those officers who were privy to the information, and thentried to discern how they might have passed it to a member of Sovietintelligence. Instead, they listened to the emotional appeals of Angleton andGolitsyn, and started examining (and sometime interrogating) Mitchell, Hollis,Liddell, Hanley, even White.

In Spycatcher, Peter Wright tried to list the strongestreasons for suspecting a major source of treachery within MI5, narrowing hissearch for ELLI to Hollis and Mitchell.I noticed that, after the Gouzenko revelations broke out, he evenconsulted Akhmedov to discuss the arrival of ‘ELLI’s telegrams’ [sic] inMoscow. But the two of them apparently did not discuss ELLI’s gender! It is allvery mystifying. And if there was an endemic failure to protect againstcommunist subversion (as L’Affaire Sonia shows), it makes even lesssense to pretend that the rather dim Roger Hollis had the power and influenceto stop all his smarter colleagues from performing their jobs properly. Everytime I go back to Pincher, I am stunned by the ham-handed way he overstates hiscase against Hollis. Any decent defence-lawyer would submerge his case withinminutes. Nevertheless, I am not yet ready to claim the winning goal.

The Survival of Gösta Caroli

When I wrote about Jan Willem ter Braak, the German agent who apparently escaped undetected for several months in Cambridge in the winter of 1940-1941 (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-3/ and https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-2/ ), I referred to the claim that Nicholas Mosley had made about another agent parachuted in, Gösta Caroli, in his book The Druid. Mosley reported that Caroli had in fact been hanged in Birmingham prison, contrary to Nigel West’s reports that he had been repatriated to Sweden after the war.

Now, if that were true, it would have been an alarming course ofevents, with the Security Service arranging an extra-judicial killing, giventhat there was no account of a trial, even in camera, to be found. Thebiography of Caroli’s colleague Wolf Schmidt (TATE) was written by two Swedes, andmentioned Caroli, but it apparently gave no details about his incarceration andsubsequent return to Sweden. So I left the issue hanging.

Now I can report that the intrepid Giselle Jakobs (thegrand-daughter of Josef Jakobs, who was indeed executed as a spy) has trackeddown the biography of Caroli, written by the same two authors, in Swedish,which they self-published in 2015. She has arranged for enough portions of ittranslated to prove that Caroli, while his health had been damaged by the fallon his landing in England, did recuperate enough to live for thirty more years.It includes a photograph of Caroli after his marriage. Giselle’s extraordinaryaccount of his life, and of her admirable efforts to present the informationfor posterity, can be found at https://www.josefjakobs.info/2020/04/the-apres-espionage-career-of-gosta.html and at http://www.josefjakobs.info/.

While this is good news, removing one black mark against theoccasionally dubious application of the law by the British authorities whenunder stress in 1940 and 1941, it does not materially change anything of mysuggestion that the death of ter Braak was not a suicide. I expect this matterto be resuscitated before long. My on-line colleague Jan-Willem van den Braak(actually no relation, as Ter Braak’s real name was f*ckken) has written abiography of Ter Braak, in Dutch. It is now being translated into English forpublication next year, and Mr. van den Braak has invited me to offer an Afterwordto present my research and theories.

Dave Springhall and the GRU

In April last year, I was investigating hints provided by AndrewBoyle about the possible recruitment of Kim Philby by the Communist Douglas(‘Dave’) Springhall, and wrote as follows:

“Springhall isproblematical. On my desktop computer, I have twenty-seven bulky PDFs from hisfiles at the National Archives, which I have not yet inspected properly. Theyprovide a fairly exhaustive account of his movements, but Special Branch didnot appear to track him having a meeting with members of the Soviet Embassy in1933. (Springhall did make a request to visit Cambridge in March of that year,however.) I suppose it is possible that Liddell had an interview with thecommunist activist at the time of his conviction in 1943, but it is improbablethat a record of such a conversation has lain undiscovered. Somewhere in thatarchive (according to Springhall’s Wikipedia entry) is a suggestion thatSpringhall was working for the GRU from 1932 onwards, but locating that recordis a task that will have to wait – unless any alert reader is already familiarwith the whole of KV 2/2063-2065 & KV 2/1594-1598 . . .”

Well, I have at last had enough time on my hands to go through the whole of that archive, and take notes. The evidence of a strong connection between ‘Springy’ (the comrades referred to each other thus, with Len Beurton responding to his MI5 interviewers about ‘Footie’ – Alexander Foote – as if they were members of the England cricket team) and Soviet military intelligence is thin. It derives from an SIS report concerning a translation of a Russian request for information on Indian Army capabilities from the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff R.K.K.A. to the Military Attaché in Berlin, in which Springhall’s name is brought up (KV 2/1594-2, p 40, August 20, 1931).

YetSpringhall was very much a naval/military figure. Even though he missed theInvergordon Mutiny (he was occupied in Moscow at the time), he was a regularcommentator on military affairs. He was head of anti-military propaganda inEngland, he gave eulogistic descriptions of life in the Red Army, and busiedhimself with secret work at Woolwich Arsenal. And his eventual arrest, in 1943,for extracting secrets on radar defensive measures (WINDOW) from Olive Sheehan,was obviously for trying to transfer facts to Soviet military experts. MI5never determined, however, who his courier was, despite the close watch thatwas kept on him. I noticed in his MI5 that Nigel West suggested thatGorsky of the KGB was his contact at the Soviet Embassy, but in the sameauthor’s recent Churchill’s Spy Files, he indicates that it was a GRUofficer, and that the courier was someone called Peppin. (Somewhere in theSpringhall archive, I got the impression that the courier might have beenAndrew Rothstein.) So I wrote to West about it, and he confirmed that it musthave been a GRU contact, but he could no more about the courier.

Thisis a vast archive: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is writing a book about Springhallat the moment. West’s book provides a good introduction, but there is so muchmore to be explored, and I shall certainly return to the archive when I come towrite about Slater and Wintringham. I shall thus say little more here, butmerely make a few important observations on three aspects: 1) The role ofAnthony Blunt (as introduced above); 2) The immensity of the surveillance ofSpringhall; and 3) Springhall’s trial.

Oneof the remarkable features of the monthly reports to Churchill on MI5’sactivities, starting in March 1943, was that Guy Liddell, to whom the task wasdelegated by Petrie, in turn brought in Anthony Blunt to perform much of theeditorial work. Thus here was additional proof that most of the service’s‘secrets’ were being passed on to Moscow before you could say ‘AndrewRothstein’. Thus one has to interpret the prosecution and sentencing ofSpringhall (conducted in camera) in a completely new light. The CPGB (the headoffice of which, in King Street, had been bugged comprehensively by SpecialBranch) was shocked and disgusted at the fact that Comrade Springhall had beeninvolved in espionage, and thus was guilty of bringing the Communist Party intodisrepute. Moscow was, of course ‘appalled’, and denied anything untoward hadtaken place.

Yet,if Moscow had known what was going on throughout the Springhall investigationbecause of Blunt, they would not have been surprised at the outcome. They wouldhave to make the necessary melodramatic denials, but were perhaps notcompletely unhappy that all the attention was being paid on an expendable,somewhat irresponsible, open member of the Communist Party, while theirunmasked agents were gathering information on the atomic bomb. In that way, MI5would continue to imagine that the Party was the major source for subversiveactivity (with Ray Milne in MI6, and Desmond Uren in SOE being minor casualtiesdragged in by Springhall), and their moles in the intelligence services wouldbe able to carry on unhindered. ‘Springy’ was not sprung.

Thesecond noteworthy aspect is the sheer volume of material that was collectedabout Springhall, hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on his career in theNavy, his visits to the Soviet Union, his published articles in the DailyWorker, his girl-friends, his associates and friends, his meetings atCommunist Party headquarters, his speeches exhorting revolution at rallies –and of course on his espionage, his arrest, his trial, his sentencing, his timein prison, and his release before dying in Moscow of cancer in 1953. MI5 andSpecial Branch must have an expended an enormous amount of time trailing andsurveilling him, yet the service was mostly powerless in doing anything at all – until Springhall soclumsily tried to extract the secrets from the communist flatmate of a loyalcitizen, Norah Bond, who shared what she overheard with her RAF boyfriend,Wing-Commander Norman Blackie.

In a way, I suppose,Springhall’s being caught red-handed justified all the effort, and it enabledMI5 to move the traitor Ray Milne quietly out of SIS, and Raymond Uren out ofSOE. Yet so much other surveillance was going on that one has to conclude thatit was all rather wasted energy. ‘Keeping an eye’ on suspicious charactersbecame a literal watchword, in the vain hope that such an activity would leadto larger networks of subversive ne’er-do-wells. But what next? So long as theCommunist Party was a licit institution, its members could make calls forrevolution, even during wartime, without any fear of prosecution, and the HomeOffice seemed far too timid as to how the factories might be adversely affectedif too energetic moves were made against the comrades of our gallant ally, theRussians. Meanwhile, most government institutions were infected with Communistmoles, agents of influence, and fellow-travellers who separated themselves fromlinks with the Communist Party itself.

Lastly, the Trialitself. Files KV 2/1598-2 & -3 from Kew contain a full record of ‘Rex vDouglas Frank Springhall, at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, 20^thJuly Sessions, 1943’, before Mr Justice Oliver. It represents a transcript ofthe shorthand notes of George Walpole & Co. (Shorthand Writers to theCourt). The Solicitor-General, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, K.C. and Mr L. A. Byrneappeared on behalf of the Prosecution, with Mr J. F. F. Platts-Mills appearingon behalf of the Defence. I think it is an extraordinary document.

From the first lines ofthe transcript, where the portentous Justice Oliver rather patronisingly putsthe Rumpolean Maxwell-Fyfe in his place, and the Solicitor-Generaldeferentially responds ‘If your Lordship pleases’, we can see a classicalcourt-room drama take place. Oliver then treats Platts-Mills in the sameperemptory manner, and, when the prosecuting council start their questioning ofOlive Sheehan (who had passed on to Springhall secrets about ‘WINDOW’), Oliver interruptsthem freely, as I am sure he was entitled to. He rebukes Platts-Mills, ratherpettily, for referring to the Air Ministry as Sheehan’s ‘employers’: “Now, MrPlatts-Mills, this court has not become a theatre of politics.” Platts-Mills has to adapt to his Lordship’s pleasure.

I shall comment no morenow than to remark how different this court was from those administered byRoland Freisler or Andrey Vyshinsky. Yes, it was in camera, but this wasnot a show-trial where the defendants knew they were already guilty and werefacing inevitable execution. Britain was at war, and had caught a spy declaringallegiance to a foreign power, stealing secrets that could have seriouslyharmed the war effort if they had passed into the wrong hands, and calling forrevolution, but Springhall received a fair trial. It concludes with Springhallmaking a rather eloquent but disingenuous speech about wanting ‘to arouse thecountry behind the government headed by Mr Winston Churchill’. The jury took fifteenminutes to consider the evidence before returning a verdict of ‘Guilty’ onalmost all counts, and Springhall was sentenced to seven years’ penalservitude. A very British trial.

‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp Tycoon Romance Drama!’

(“I wanted to marry him”, confesses distraught schoolgirl)

A while back, I acquired a slim volume titled ‘Die Tochter bin ich’ (‘I am the Daughter’), by one Janina Blankenfeld. It was published in Berlin in 1985, and is a brief memoir by a schoolteacher who was the daughter of someone who will be familiar to all readers of this website – Ursula née Kuczynski, aka SONIA. Janina was actually Sonia’s daughter by her lover, Johannes Patra (cryptonym ERNST), conceived in China, born in Warsaw in 1936, and spending much of her childhood years in Switzerland and England. Janina did not learn who her real father was until 1955, when Sonia’s first husband, Rolf, returned to Berlin, and Sonia felt she ought to break the news to her. I bought the book because I thought it might shed some light on Sonia’s movements in the UK, and even explain how Janina was able to attend an expensive boarding-school in Epping.

Unfortunately, it gives little away, sheltering under her mother’smemoir, published a few years beforehand. Janina gives the impression thatmoney was very tight, and she says nothing about the private school. For awhile, the idea of a holiday was impossible, but Janina wrote that, six monthsafter her grandmother’s death (which occurred in June 1947), Sonia found aninexpensive room on the Welsh coast, in Criccieth, which was a revelation forJanina, as she enjoyed the coastline and the ruined castles. (Criccieth is abit too close to the University of Aberystwyth, to my liking.) But “Das schönste Erlebnis für mich war unserBummel durch Butlins Holiday Camp.” (‘The bestexperience for me was our stroll through Butlin’s Holiday Camp’.) She revelledin the string of bungalows, and the loudspeakers playing all day, and thedances and merry-go-rounds in the evenings. “Der Glanzpunkt war die Wahl der schönstenUrlauberin. Schöne Beine and ein hübsches Gesicht – mehr war nichtgefragt.“ (“The climaxwas the election of the most beautiful holidaymaker. Fine legs and a prettyface – nothing more was asked for.”)

I am not sure what the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation leaderswould have thought of all this frivolity, with no time spent on propagandalessons and correct ideological thinking, and far too much attention paid tosuperficial bourgeois pastimes like beauty contests, but Janina’s memoirmanaged to get through the censors. And it all made a strong impression on thetwelve-year-old girl. “Seitdiesem Besuch hatte ich neue Träume – ich wollte so gern Herrn Butlin heiraten,ganz reich sein and jedes Jahr meinen Urlaub in solch einem Feriencampverbringen. ” (Ever since this visit I had fresh dreams– I wanted to marry Mr Butlin so much, to become quite rich, and to spend myholiday every year in such a Holiday Camp.”) Instead, eighteen months later,she had to leave for good her idyllic life in the Cotswolds and Wales,exchanging it for Walter Ulbricht’s holiday-camp of East Germany.

China and the Rhineland Moment

I have been thinking recently of China’s gradual expansion, and reactions to threats to its growing power (e.g. concerning Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Uighurs, industrial espionage, Hong Kong), and reminded myself that, if the first response to a bully is to refrain from challenging him, and biffing him on the nose, he will continue in the knowledge that his adversaries are really too cowardly, afraid of ‘provoking’ him more, and that he can thus continue unimpeded with his aggressive moves. I thought of the piece I wrote on Appeasem*nt a few months ago, and how I judged that Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 was the incident marking the opportunity for the dictator to have been stopped.

Then, on May 30, Bret Stevens wrote an Op-Ed piece in the NewYork Times titled ‘China and the Rhineland Moment’ (at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/china-hong-kong.html, inside the paywall). His piece started off as follows: “Great struggles between great powers tend tohave a tipping point. It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differencesbecomes obvious to nearly everyone. In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisiswhen it sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as WinstonChurchill wrote in his history of the First World War, ‘all the alarm bellsthroughout Europe began immediately to quiver.’ In 1936 Germany provokedanother crisis when it marched troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach ofits treaty obligations. In 1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had nointention of honoring democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchillwas left to warn that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.” After making some recommendations as to whatthe USA and Great Britain should do, Stevens concluded: “If all this and morewere announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back from the brink. Inthe meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with China — and rememberwhat happened the last time the free world looked aggression in the eye, andblinked.”

This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.

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