My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (28 page)

I offered to put a summary of what I had said on paper. It was possible that our talk was bugged, and I wanted a written record to correct any bias that the microphone might have betrayed. When I went back for my second interrogation a few days later, White gave my note a cursory glance, then edged towards the real focus of his interest. We might clarify matters, he said, if I gave him an account of my relations with Burgess. To that end, a detailed statement of my own career would be useful. As I have explained in the previous chapter, there were some awkward zig-zags to be negotiated, but I explained them away as best I could. In doing so, I gave White a piece of gratuitous information, a slip which I regretted bitterly at the time. But it is virtually certain that they would have dug it out for themselves in time, and it is perhaps just as well that I drew attention to it myself at an early stage.

This information related to a trip which I had made to Franco Spain before
The Times
sent me as their accredited correspondent. It seemed that MI5 had no record of that trip and had assumed that
The Times
had sent me to Spain direct from a desk in Fleet Street. When I corrected White on this point, he did not take long to ask me if I had paid for the first journey out of my own resources. It was a nasty little question because the enterprise had been suggested to me and financed by the Soviet service, just as Krivitsky had said, and a glance at my bank balance for the period would have shown that I had no means for gallivanting around Spain. Embedded in this episode was also the dangerous little fact that Burgess had been used to replenish my funds. My explanation was that the Spanish journey had been an attempt to break into the world of high-grade journalism on which I had staked everything, selling all my effects (mostly books and gramophone records) to pay for the trip. It was
reasonably plausible and quite impossible to disprove. Burgess’s connection with my Spanish venture was never found out. I had an explanation ready, but already had quite enough to explain.

When I offered to produce a second summary of our talks, White agreed, but asked me rather impatiently to harp less on Burgess and concentrate on my own record. All but the tip of the cat’s tail was now out of the bag, and I was not surprised to receive a summons from the Chief. He told me that he had received a strong letter from Bedell Smith, the terms of which precluded any possibility of my returning to Washington. I learnt later that the letter had been drafted in great part by Bill, an American official, a friend of mine, whose wife Burgess had bitterly insulted during a convivial party at my house. I had apologized handsomely for his behaviour, and the apology had apparently been accepted. It was therefore difficult to understand his retrospective exercise in spite. From him of all people! After this, it was almost a formality when the Chief called me a second time and told me, with obvious distress, that he would have to ask for my resignation. He would be generous: £4,000 in lieu of pension. My unease was increased shortly afterwards when he told me that he had decided against paying me the whole sum at once. I would get £2,000 down and the rest in half-yearly instalments of £500. The ostensible reason for the deferred payments was the fear that I might dissipate all in wild speculation, but, as I had never speculated in my life, it looked a bit thin. A more likely reason was the desire to hedge against the possibility of my being sent to gaol within three years.

So there I was with £2,000 in my hands and a great black cloud over my head. I spent the summer house-hunting and settled for a small place near Rickmansworth. It was already November when the Chief telephoned me and asked me to see him at ten o’clock on the following morning. I drove up to London on a beautiful wintry morning with the hedgerows bending low under inch-thick rime. The Chief explained that a judicial enquiry had been opened into the circumstances of the Burgess-Maclean escape. The enquiry was in the hands of H.J.P. Milmo, a King’s Counsellor who had
worked for MI5 during the war. I was required to give evidence, and the Chief hoped I would have no objection. The mention of Milmo indicated that a crisis was at hand. I knew him and of him. He was a skilled interrogator; he was the man whom MI5 usually brought in for the kill. As I drove with the Chief across St. James’s Park to Leconfield House, I braced myself for a sticky ordeal. I was still confident that I could survive an examination, however robust, on the basis of the evidence known to me. But I could not be sure that new evidence had not come to hand for Milmo to shoot at me.

On arrival at Leconfield House, I was introduced to the head of the legal branch of MI5 and then ushered into the presence of Milmo. He was a burly fellow with a florid, round face, matching his nickname, “Buster.” On his left sat Arthur Martin, a quiet young man who had been one of the principal investigators of the Maclean case. He remained silent throughout, watching my movements. When I looked out of the window, he made a note; when I twiddled my thumbs, he made another note. After sketchy greetings, Milmo adopted a formal manner, asking me to refrain from smoking as this was a “judicial enquiry.”

It was all flummery, of course. It crossed my mind to ask Milmo for his credentials or to suggest that the headquarters of MI5 were an odd venue for a judicial enquiry. But that would have been out of character for the part which I had decided to play; that of a cooperative ex-member of SIS as keen as Milmo himself to establish the truth about Burgess and Maclean. So, for the best part of three hours, I answered or parried questions meekly enough, only permitting a note of anger when my character was directly attacked. It was useless, I knew, to try to convince the ex-intelligence officer in Milmo; my job was simply to deny him the confession which he required as a lawyer.

I was too closely involved in Milmo’s interrogation to form an objective opinion of its merits. Much of the ground that he covered was familiar and my answers, excogitated long before, left him little to do but shout. Early in the interview, he betrayed the weakness of his position by accusing me of entrusting to Burgess “intimate
personal papers.” The charge was so obviously nonsensical that I did not even have to feign bewilderment. It appeared that my Cambridge degree had been found in Burgess’s flat during the search which followed his departure. Years before, I had folded that useless document and put it in a book. Burgess, as anyone would have told Milmo, was an inveterate borrower of books with and without the permission of their owners. The aim of the accusation was to show that I had deliberately underplayed the degree of my intimacy with Burgess. It was flimsy stuff and went far to strengthen my confidence in the outcome.

But Milmo produced at least two rabbits out of the bag which I had not foreseen, and which showed that the chain of circumstantial evidence against me was even longer than I had feared. Two days after the Volkov information reached London, there had been a spectacular rise in the volume of NKVD wireless traffic between London and Moscow, followed by a similar rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul. Furthermore, shortly after I had been officially briefed about the Embassy leakage in Washington, there had been a similar jump in NKVD traffic. Taken in conjunction with the other evidence, these two items were pretty damning. But to me, sitting in the interrogation chair, they posed no problem. When asked in Milmo’s most thunderous tones to account for these occurrences, I replied quite simply that I could not.

I was beginning to tire when suddenly Milmo gave up. Martin asked me to stay put for a few minutes. When I was invited into the next room, Milmo had disappeared and the MI5 legal officer was in charge. He asked me to surrender my passport, saying that they could get it anyway but that voluntary action on my part would obviate publicity. I readily agreed as my escape plan certainly did not envisage the use of my own identity papers. My offer to send the document that night by registered post was rejected because it was “too risky.” William Skardon was detailed to accompany me back to my home and receive it from me. On the way, Skardon wasted his breath sermonizing the Advisability of Co-operating with the Authorities. I was too relieved to listen, though my relief was
tempered by the knowledge that I was not yet out of the wood—not by a long chalk.

Several times in the following weeks, Skardon came down to continue the interrogations. He was scrupulously courteous, his manner verging on the exquisite; nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions. He was far more dangerous than the ineffective White or the blustering Milmo. I was helped to resist his polite advances by the knowledge that it was Skardon who had wormed his way into Fuchs’s confidence with such disastrous results. During our first long conversation, I detected and evaded two little traps which he laid for me with deftness and precision. But I had scarcely begun congratulating myself when the thought struck me that he might have laid others which I had not detected.

Yet even Skardon made mistakes. He began one interview by asking me for written authority to examine my bank balance. He could have got legal authority to do so whether I approved or not; so I raised no objection—especially since he would find no trace of irregular payments because no irregular payments had ever been made. But, with the authority in his hands, he began to question me on my finances, and I took the opportunity of giving him some harmless misinformation. My object in doing so was a serious one. I had been able to invent plausible explanations for most of the oddities of my career, but not all of them. Where my invention failed, I could only plead lapses of memory. I just could not remember this person or that incident. The probing of my finances gave me a chance of confirming the erratic workings of my memory. If I could not remember my financial transactions, I could scarcely be expected to remember all the details of my social and professional life.

After several such interrogations, Skardon came no more. He did not tell me that he was satisfied or dissatisfied; he just left the matter hanging. He was doubtless convinced that I was concealing from him almost everything that mattered, and I would have given a lot to have glimpsed his summing up. There was no doubt that the
evidence against me was impressive, but it was not yet conclusive. That it was not so regarded emerged from yet another summons to Broadway, this time to be interrogated by Sinclair and Easton. It was distasteful to lie in my teeth to the honest Sinclair; I hope he now realizes that in lying to him I was standing as firmly on principle as he ever did. But I enjoyed my duel with Easton. After my experiences with White, Milmo and Skardon, I was moving on very familiar ground, and did not think he could succeed where they had failed. He didn’t.

XIII. T
HE
C
LOUDS
P
ART

For more than two years I was left in peace—or perhaps armed neutrality would be a better word. I had no illusions that my file was closed; but no charges had been proffered and I remained on friendly terms with a few ex-colleagues in MI5 and SIS. It was an anxious period. I had my £2,000 and the prospect of another £2,000, and perhaps two or three thousand more in the shape of insurance policies. Lucrative employment remained a distant aspiration since when I applied for work, the first question asked was always why I had left the Foreign Service. My best chance seemed to be journalism; my thoughts turned to Spain where I had made my first breakthrough. I had no doubt that I could soon pick up the threads again, and I reflected that a Spanish destination would strengthen the hands of those who still doubted my guilt. Madrid could hardly be further from the Iron Curtain. So I wrote to Skardon asking for the return of my passport. It reached me by return of post—without comment.

My Spanish venture was of short duration. I had scarcely been in Madrid three weeks when I received a letter offering me a job in the City. The salary mentioned was modest but commensurate
with my total ignorance of business procedures. So for a year I dabbled in general trading, commuting daily between Rickmansworth and Liverpool Street. I was totally unsuited to the job, and was relieved when the firm for which I worked teetered towards bankruptcy owing to the rash behaviour of its shipping department with which, fortunately, I had nothing to do. My employers were happy enough when I took myself off, thus relieving them of the burden of my salary. From then on, I made some sort of living from freelance journalism, a most arduous occupation calling for a depressing amount of personal salesmanship—never my strong point.

This rather dreary existence was enlivened by a curious episode which began with a letter from a Conservative MP, who asked me to tea at the House of Commons. He told me candidly that he was gunning for the Foreign Office in general and Anthony Eden in particular. His own position, he said, was impregnable; he had one of the safest seats in the country and his local Conservative Association ate out of his hand. He had heard that I had been sacked from the Foreign Service, and had surmised that I must suffer a sense of grievance. If I could give him any dirt to throw at the Foreign Office, he would be most grateful. There was much to the same effect from my host, accompanied by gusts of laughter at his own sallies. I replied that I fully understood the reason behind the Foreign Office’s request for my resignation, and left abruptly.

Several times during this period, I revived the idea of escape. The plan, originally designed for American conditions, required only minor modifications to adapt it to European circumstances. Indeed, in some ways it would be easier from London than from Washington. But each time I considered the project the emergency appeared to be less than extreme. Finally, an event occurred which put it right out of my head. I received, through the most ingenious of routes, a message from my Soviet friends, conjuring me to be of good cheer and presaging an early resumption of relations. It changed drastically the whole complexion of the case. I was no longer alone.