My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (27 page)

What evidence, to my knowledge, could be brought against me?

There were the early Left-wing associations in Cambridge. They were widely known, so there was no point in concealing them. But I had never joined the Communist Party in England, and it would surely be difficult to prove, eighteen years after the event, that I had worked illegally in Austria, especially in view of the sickening fact that most of my Vienna friends were undoubtedly dead. There was the nasty little sentence in Krivitsky’s evidence that the Soviet secret service had sent a young English journalist to Spain during the Civil War. But there were no further identifying particulars, and many young men from Fleet Street had gone to Spain. There was the awkward fact that Burgess had got me into the secret service in the first place. I had already decided to circumvent that one by giving the name of a well-known lady who
might
have been responsible for my recruitment. If she admitted responsibility, all would be well. If she denied it, I could argue that I would scarcely have named her if I had not really believed that she was responsible.

It would have been desperately difficult, of course, if the security service had been able to check the files I had drawn during my service at headquarters, since that would have proved that my interests had roamed far and wide beyond my legitimate duties. My only possible defence, that I was passionately interested in the
service for its own sake, would have carried little conviction. But I knew that the tallies were periodically destroyed, and thought it very unlikely that they would have survived the holocaust of unwanted paper that took place after the war. There were also the number of cases which I had handled, such as the Volkov case, which had gone wrong for reasons which had never been established with certainty. But every one was susceptible to explanation without reference to myself; there were two important cases, those of May
^*
and Fuchs, which, despite my best efforts, had gone right. The cases which went right would not clear me; but they would help me to throw an essential doubt over my responsibility for the others.

The really difficult problem was to explain away my relations with Burgess. I shared very few of his tastes, very few of his friends, and few of his intellectual interests. The essential bond between us was, of course, political, and that was a point that had to be blurred to the best of my ability. To a certain extent, geography helped. While I was in Austria, he was at Cambridge; while I was in Spain, he was in London; much of the war period, he was in London, but I was in France, Hampshire and Hertfordshire; then I went to Turkey, and he only caught up with me in Washington after a year. I could therefore show that real intimacy never had a chance to grow; he was simply a stimulating but occasional companion. Even the fact that he had stayed with me in Washington could be turned to advantage. Would I be such a complete fool as to advertise my connection with him if we shared a deep secret?

Another difficulty was the actual course of my career. The more I considered it, the less I liked it. There were the known Left-wing associations at Cambridge, and suspected Communist activity in Vienna; then the complete break with my Communist friends in England, followed all too closely by cultivation of Nazis in London and Berlin; then the choice (of all places) of Franco Spain in which
to carve out a journalistic career; then the entry in the secret service with Burgess’s help and my emergence in the service as an expert on anti-Soviet and anti-Communist work; and finally my foreknowledge of the action to be taken against Maclean and the latter’s escape. It was an ugly picture. I was faced with the inescapable conclusion that I could not hope to prove my innocence.

That conclusion did not depress me unduly. A strong presumption of my guilt might be good enough for an intelligence officer. But it was not enough for a lawyer. What he needed was evidence. The chain of circumstantial evidence that might be brought against me was uncomfortably long. But, as I examined each single link of the chain, I thought I could break it; and if every link was broken singly, what remained of the chain? Despite all appearances, I thought, my chances were good. My next task was to get out into the open and start scattering the seeds of doubt as far and wide as I possibly could.

The next few days gave me plenty of opportunity. In the office, Paterson and I talked of little else, and Mackenzie joined our deliberations from time to time. I do not think that Paterson had an inkling of the truth at the time, but I am less sure of Mackenzie. He was idle but far from stupid, and on occasion I thought I caught a shrewd glint in his eyes. My part in the discussions was to formulate a theory which covered the known facts, and hammer it home until it stuck. The opening was given me by the decision of MI5, which I have already described as foolish, to withhold certain papers from Maclean and to put his movements under surveillance. Taking that as a starting-point, I made a reconstruction of the case which was at least impossible to disprove. It ran as follows.

The evidence of Krivitsky showed that Maclean had been working for at least sixteen years. He was therefore an experienced and competent operator. Such a man, ever on guard, would be quick to notice that certain categories of paper were being withheld from him and to draw disquieting conclusions. His next step would be to check whether he was being followed. As he
was
being followed, he
would not take long to discover the fact. But, while these discoveries would alert Maclean to his danger, they also put him in a quandary. The object of surveillance was to trap him in company with a Soviet contact; yet without a Soviet contact, his chances of escape would be greatly diminished. While he was still meditating this problem, the Act of God occurred. Burgess walked into his room—his old comrade. (I could produce no evidence that there had been an old association between Burgess and Maclean, but the fact that they had gone together made it a wholly reasonable assumption.) The arrival of Burgess, of course, would solve Maclean’s problem, since Burgess, through
his
contact, could make all necessary arrangements. This was strongly supported by the fact that it was Burgess who looked after the details such as hiring the car. And why did Burgess go too? Well, it was clear to Paterson and Mackenzie that Burgess was washed up in the Foreign Office, and pretty near the end of his tether in general. Doubtless, his Soviet friends thought it would be best to remove him from a scene in which his presence might constitute a danger to others.

Such was my story and I stuck to it. It had the advantage of being based on known facts and almost unchallengeable assumptions. The only people who could disprove it were the two who had vanished and myself. I was also happy to see that the theory was wholly acceptable to the FBI. Ladd and Lamphere both liked it, and, in a short interview I had with Hoover at the time, he jumped at it. In his eyes, it had the superlative merit of pinning all the blame on MI5. I have no doubt that he made a great deal of political capital out of it, both on Capitol Hill and in subsequent dealings with MI5. Hoover may have got few winners on his own account; but he was not the man to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

The position with regard to CIA was more indefinite. It was an FBI case, and I could not discuss its intricacies with CIA without running the risk of irritating Hoover and Boyd, both of whom I was anxious to soothe. So I confined my talks with CIA officials to the overt details of the case which became known through the press,
somewhat late and more than somewhat inaccurate. I had no fear of the bumbling Dulles; years later, I was to be puzzled by President Kennedy’s mistake in taking him seriously over the Bay of Pigs. But Bedell Smith was a different matter. He had a cold, fishy eye and a precision-tool brain. At my first meeting with him, I had taken a document of twenty-odd paragraphs on Anglo-American war plans for his scrutiny and comment. He had flipped over the pages casually and tossed it aside, then engaged me in close discussion of the subjects involved, referring from memory to the numbered paragraphs. I kept pace only because I had spent a whole morning learning the document by heart. Bedell Smith, I had an uneasy feeling, would be apt to think that two and two made four rather than five.

The next few days dragged. I experienced some mild social embarrassment when the news broke with all the carefree embellishments of the popular press. One of the snootier of the Embassy wives gave me a glacial stare at one of the Ambassador’s garden parties. But London remained ominously silent. One telegram arrived from London saying that “it was understood” that I knew Burgess personally; could I throw any light on his behaviour? But the one I was expecting was a most immediate, personal, decipher-yourself telegram from the Chief, summoning me home. At last the summons came, but it took a most curious, thought-provoking form. An intelligence official specializing in the fabrication of deception material flew into Washington on routine business. He paid me a courtesy call during which he handed me a letter from Jack Easton. The letter was in Easton’s own handwriting, and informed me that I would shortly be receiving a telegram recalling me to London in connection with the Burgess-Maclean case. It was very important that I should obey the call promptly. While the sense of the communication was clear enough, its form baffled me. Why should Easton warn me of the impending summons and why in his own handwriting if the order was to reach me through the normal telegraphic channels anyway? There is often a good reason for eccentric behaviour in the secret service, and there may have been
one in this case. My reflection at the time was that, if I had not already rejected the idea of escape, Easton’s letter would have given me the signal to get moving with all deliberate speed.

After a few days the telegram came. I booked passage for the following day and prepared to say goodbye to Washington for ever. I met Angleton for a pleasant hour in a bar. He did not seem to appreciate the gravity of my personal position, and asked me to take up certain matters of mutual concern when I got to London. I did not even take the trouble to memorize them. Then I called on Dulles who bade me farewell and wished me the best of luck. Ladd was next on my list and we spent some of the evening together. He seemed to be genuinely preoccupied with my predicament and kindly offered some words of advice on how to keep out of trouble in London. Part of his concern may have been due to his sense of personal involvement in the Burgess affair; but I also detected some genuine feeling for which I was grateful. Ruthless as he was, Ladd was a human being.

I arrived in London about noon, and was immediately involved in a bizarre episode. I had boarded the airport bus and taken a seat immediately next to the door. When the bus was full, an agitated figure appeared on the running-board and frantically scrutinized the passengers. He looked over my left shoulder, over my right shoulder, tried to look over my head and then looked straight at me. Dismay settled on his face and he vanished. It was Bill Bremner, a fairly senior officer on the administrative side of SIS. I knew very well whom he was looking for. If I had been two yards away from him instead of two feet, he would have spotted me. I had never been met officially before. What with Jack Easton’s letter and the designation of an officer of Bremner’s seniority to act as reception committee, I could not complain that I had not been warned. As the bus drove into London, the red lights were flickering brightly.

I went to my mother’s flat and, after lunch, telephoned Easton. There was a perceptible gasp at the other end of the line. After a pause, Easton asked me where I was, and I told him. Was I too tired to come over to Broadway straight away? Of course not. On my way,
I took relish in the thought of the panic that must have spread when Bremner reported my non-arrival. Easton looked a bit sheepish when I entered his office. He said that my telephone call had surprised him, because he had sent Bill Bremner to the airport, “to see if he could be of any help to me.” It was pretty lame, and I felt that I had won the first trick. The trick was valueless, of course, but the mere winning of it did me good. The perhaps fanciful thought has since occurred to me that part of Bremner’s mission to the airport was to see that MI5 did not pull a fast one on SIS by arresting me on arrival. In view of later developments, this seems, on the whole, unlikely, so I put forward the idea for fun only.

Easton told me that Dick White was anxious to see us both as soon as possible, so we drove across the park to Leconfield House, off Curzon Street, where MI5 had set up their headquarters. This was to be the first of many interrogations, although an attempt was made, at this early stage, to conceal that ugly fact. Easton sat in while White asked the questions; the role of the former was presumably to see fair play. It may be imagined that there was some apprehension on my side, some embarrassment on theirs. I could not claim White as a close friend; but our personal and official relations had always been excellent, and he had undoubtedly been pleased when I superseded Cowgill. He was bad at dissembling, but he did his best to put our talk on a friendly footing. He wanted my help, he said, in clearing up this appalling Burgess-Maclean affair. I gave him a lot of information about Burgess’s past and impressions of his personality, taking the line that it was almost inconceivable that anyone like Burgess, who courted the limelight instead of avoiding it and was generally notorious for indiscretion, could have been a secret agent, let alone a Soviet agent from whom strictest security standards would be required. I did not expect this line to be in any way convincing as to the facts of the case; but I hoped it would give the impression that I was implicitly defending myself against the unspoken charge that I, a trained counter-espionage officer, had been completely fooled by Burgess. Of Maclean, I
disclaimed all knowledge. I had heard of him, of course, and might even have met him here or there, but offhand I could not have put a face to him. As I had only met him twice, for about half an hour in all and both times on a conspiratorial basis, since 1937, I felt that I could safely indulge in this slight distortion of the truth.