The Bedbug (35 page)

Shortly after the heavily censored MI5 files on MacGibbon were released in 2004, four years after his death, his friend Magnus Linklater revealed that he had made a deathbed confession.
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It has since been claimed that among the secrets he handed over was the entire order of battle for the Normandy landings.
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Klop’s observations also revealed Burgess’s close friendship with the Russian refugee Salomea Halpern, who was considered to have pro-Soviet sympathies. She and her husband Alexander were often among Moura’s guests. Alexander Halpern was a Russian-born lawyer who had been Alexander Kerensky’s private secretary before the revolution and served with British Security Coordination – MI6’s intelligence and propaganda arm in New York – during the war.

At the end of August 1951, Klop questioned Moura further about her knowledge of the defection of Burgess and Maclean and reported back:

The most startling thing Moura told me was that Anthony Blunt, to whom Guy Burgess was most devoted, is a member of the Communist Party. When I said: I only know about him that he looks after the King’s pictures; Moura retorted: Such things only happen in England.
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An unidentified senior MI5 officer issued orders that this information was not to be added to Blunt’s file. A month earlier, a secret source had told MI5 that Blunt was even closer to Moura than Burgess. Blunt was questioned repeatedly over the ensuing twelve months but only confessed in 1964, in return for immunity from prosecution, after MI5 had already confirmed his guilt by the admission of one of his recruits, the American Michael Straight. He was only publicly unmasked by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in November 1979.

Blunt seems to have known rather more about Klop than Klop knew about Blunt. He had reported on his wartime activities to his Soviet controllers, in particular an investigation into a Czech intelligence officer named ‘Brochbauer’. The investigation was done in conjunction with another of Blunt’s contacts, Susan Maxwell, widow of the Tory MP Lt Col. Somerset Maxwell who had been killed in the fighting at El Alamein. She had obtained a job as a secretary at the Swedish embassy in London and kept Blunt informed of any pro-Nazi activity that went on there. Brochbauer appears to be a misspelling for Karl Bloch-Bauer who was the son of a wealthy Czech businessman who owned sugar refineries in Austria and had been one of the great patrons of the arts in the turn-of-the-century Vienna. Karl had been Swedish consul there until 1938 when he and many of his Jewish family were forced to flee, losing most of their possessions. He maintained his Swedish diplomatic connections during the war both in Paris and in London, where he joined the Czech resistance army. There were question marks over his attempts to rescue some of the family fortune, but the most likely reason for MI5’s suspicions was that he had fallen head-over-heels in love with the glamorous German film and cabaret star Rita Georg. According to Blunt he was being utterly indiscreet and using methods which were ‘quite impossible’. Bloch-Bauer later married Rita and they settled in Canada. In 2006 the Bloch-Bauer family finally recovered the most precious part of their fortune – five paintings by Gustav Klimt, including two portraits of Karl’s aunt Adele. The first of them later fetched a world record price for a painting of $136 million.

Blunt would have certainly known of the family. He explained to his Soviet handlers that he had not seen much of Klop since the Bloch-Bauer investigation. He had already filed a full report on him and would get an opportunity to update it when Klop’s boss, Dick White, went away for a few weeks. He could, he said, always see him on personal grounds – a reference, presumably, to Klop’s
interest in art dealing since Blunt went on to reveal Klop’s link to the Dutch art dealer and secret agent Daan Cevat.
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In October 1950, under Klop’s insistent questioning, Moura had pledged ‘to report everyone moving in her sphere whom she suspects of being a traitor to this country – actual or potential’. She duly regurgitated every piece of tittle-tattle which came her way at cocktail parties. They talked about the celebrated war photographer Lee Miller, employed at
Vogue
by Klop’s friend Harry Yoxall, her Communist sympathies and relationship with the surrealist painter Roland Penrose, a friend and biographer of Picasso.

At the meeting where she denounced Blunt, Moura also passed on to Klop some gossip from the historian Philip Toynbee suggesting that Burgess and Maclean were lovers, who had sneaked away on a yachting trip in the Mediterranean, and that no Iron Curtain country was involved. A telephone tap also revealed that she was trying to contact Dick Ellis on behalf of a Russian friend, three months after Burgess disappeared. He was identified as a Russian mole within MI6 by Peter Wright when he reinvestigated the Cambridge spy ring of Blunt, Burgess, Philby, Maclean and John Cairncross twenty years later.

Klop and Moura became a kind of cocktail-hour double act, she playing the hostess and he mixing the drinks. Moura could, by all accounts, consume prodigious quantities of gin without impairing her mental faculties. She went out of her way to invite guests she thought might be of interest to Klop and enable him to tell his superiors how helpful she had been. He maintained that it was only his gallant assurance of her integrity that saved her from a security service grilling. The defections of Burgess and Maclean did not deter her guests from attending her salon or being indiscreet. In one week in July 1951, guests included the MI5 man Kenneth Younger, whom she described as her ‘special pet’, the scientist Julian Huxley, magazine editor Kingsley Martin, film director Carol Reed, author Rose Macauley, actress Vera Poliakoff, and Sir Christopher Warner, Soviet specialist and Foreign Office under-secretary, who
apparently assured Moura that Burgess and Maclean had fled to escape prison for homosexual offences and not for political reasons. As an expert in anti-Soviet propaganda he presumably relished the opportunity to spread a little personal disinformation.

Confusingly, another of Moura’s guests was Fred Warner, also of the Foreign Office, who had worked with Burgess when they were both in the private office of junior minister Hector McNeil and with whom he had become drinking buddies. He was regarded with deep suspicion when Burgess disappeared and took years to live down the association.

Moura was more than capable of catching Klop unawares. He attended one of her soirées in August 1951 where, apart from the usual suspects, like Communist sympathisers Alexander and Salomea Halpern, he discovered an ‘old friend’ George Simunek. He was a Czech diplomat who had been seconded to the United Nations in Geneva and had helped Klop arrange the defection of a fellow Czech to the West. He revealed enough of this story to his fellow guests to make Klop feel very uncomfortable.
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While Klop took a benign and indulgent interest in Moura, he was far less tolerant of one of her frequent party guests, fellow Russian Vera Traill. She was the daughter of a minister in the short-lived Kerensky government of 1917 who had fled to Paris after the Revolution. She married Robert Traill, a committed British Communist who died fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Traill came from a ‘respectable’ British family who knew nothing of the marriage, or the birth of a daughter, until after his death when Vera came to claim her inheritance, a small annual income. They strongly suspected it had been a marriage of convenience, enabling Vera to claim British nationality. Vera latched on to Klop at one of Moura’s parties, explaining that her Russian first husband had worked for Sergei Diaghilev and therefore knew Alexander Benois, Nadia’s uncle. She invited herself round to drinks with Klop and Nadia. But when Klop studied a Special Branch report on Vera he found that
she was associated with Roland Abbiate, a Russian secret service assassin responsible for the murder in Switzerland of Ignace Reiss in 1937. Reiss had been one of Stalin’s best agents until he turned against the Russian dictator, denouncing his murderous purges and defecting to the West. What horrified Klop was that Vera Traill, despite this severe doubt about her character, had been assigned as interpreter to a more recent Russian defector, Victor Kravchenko, who had sought asylum in the United States in 1944. Shortly before Klop and Vera met, Kravchenko had launched a highly publicised libel action against a French Communist magazine and the Soviet government had despatched a host of party-faithful as witnesses to try to discredit him. How had Vera been put in such a position of trust, Klop wondered. Did no one fear another assassination? MI5 appears to have been dumbfounded by the question, apparently unaware of the risk that had been taken.

Opinions about Moura’s own loyalty remained divided. Her daughter, Tania Alexander, who scarcely saw her while she was growing up in Estonia but formed a closer bond after she moved to London in her late teens, says of her:

Those who knew Moura testify at once to her courage, her charm, and her self-confidence: even her sharpest detractors do not deny her good humour, her warmth and her affection. And yet at the same time they also acknowledge the lack of scruple, the disregard for truth, the insatiable need for admiration and attention.
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She defended her mother against allegations that she betrayed Gorky to the secret police or that she had made some of kind of deal with the Cheka to act as their informant in return for Lockhart’s freedom. Tania had visited Gorky’s family shortly after he died in 1936 and met Genrick Yagoda, who was by then head of Stalin’s secret police and responsible for engineering the show trials and executions that purged the Russian hierarchy of Stalin’s perceived enemies.

But it was only in 2010 that Moura’s great-great-nephew, Dimitri Collingridge, discovered that the suspicions had been well-founded. With the help of Colonel Igor Prelin, a former member of the KGB, he got access to secret police files from the 1930s which showed that Moura had been Yagoda’s informant. Prelin told Collingridge:

As a former KGB operative I know how these things work. Of course Moura was asked to do certain things – to report about what was happening in Gorky’s circle, to exert some influence over Gorky at the request of the Soviet authorities. Naturally she couldn’t say no. She was compromised in connection with the Lockhart plot and could be arrested at any time. If Moura had refused she would have been denied permission to come to the USSR or she may have been prevented from leaving it and she was intent on seeing Gorky … She was an informant for the secret service.
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Moura and Nadia Benois remained friends right up to Moura’s death in 1974. They had already known each other for many years when Nadia asked her, in 1939, to help her translate a play by Alexander Blok from Russian into English. It helped to launch Peter Ustinov in his career as a theatre director.
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He later gave her a walk-on part as Kiva the cook in the film version of his play Romanoff and Juliet.

Although Moura worked as a translator she was not hugely successful and often needed the help of friends to tidy up her work. So it was something of a coup in the 1950s when Nadia again turned to her for help and asked her to translate Alexandre Benois’s autobiography. Moura’s daughter regarded it as the most interesting and successful of the some twenty titles her mother worked on.
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Peter Ustinov remembered the indomitable Moura with special affection. She was, he said a great intangible influence and when he was with her he felt ‘deeply and serenely Russian.’
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Klop, having devoted the latter stages of his life to becoming most decidedly English, and trying to coax Moura along with him, might have found his son’s spiritual association unsettling.

CHAPTER 16: DEFECTORS

O
ne of Klop’s post-war tasks was to keep an eye on Czechs in London. There had been a close relationship between British and Czech intelligence during the war and some of Klop’s best contacts, including Josef Bartik and Vaclav Slama, chose to return home in 1945-46 to the support the government of Edvard Beneš.

Beneš, who had led the Czech government in exile in London, returned as President in 1945, a position he held until 1948. He awarded Klop the Czechoslovak medal of merit, first class, and also gave a plethora of other awards, including the Order of the White Lion for Dick White, Guy Liddell and the directors of MI5 and MI6, Sir David Petrie and Sir Stewart Menzies.
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From 1947 Klop made a habit of spending Saturday afternoons with his old friends at the Czech Deuxieme Bureau office at 42 Wilton Crescent, Belgravia picking up the gossip on the exiles in Britain and the progress of the regime in Prague.

Czech refugees from the Nazi invasion had begun to arrive in Britain en masse in 1938-9 and been catered for by the Czech Refugee Trust, set up by Sir Walter Layton, chairman of the Liberal-leaning
News Chronicle
. It quickly became a matter of concern to MI5 that this organisation was being controlled from within by Communists, both British and exiles. They struggled to convince Sir Henry Bunbury, the retired civil servant responsible for administering the Trust, that Communists were taking on positions of responsibility within the organisation with the
intention of controlling it. Klop was drawn into this controversy and began working closely with Vaclav Slama who warned that nearly 90 per cent of the refugees taken in by the Trust were socialists and Communists of German ethnic origin and therefore potential spies and infiltrators. He offered to draw up a list of the chief suspects. The director general of MI5, Sir Vernon Kell, warned the Home Office of this on at least two occasions and Klop’s boss Dick White lamented: