The Fatal Englishman (41 page)

There are several versions of what happened next, but they all mean the same thing in the end.

One day Wolfenden took up to his room in the Hotel Ukraina a waiter from the Praga restaurant, and in the middle of their love-making two men sprang from the wardrobe with flash cameras …Wolfenden had fallen for the barber at the Ukraina and it was with him – or perhaps with his son – that he was compromised … Wolfenden came back one night to find a Polish boy sitting naked in his armchair, but was too drunk to do anything … Wolfenden was set up with a Polish boy called Jan and they went
to bed. ‘He was gorgeous,’ Wolfenden claimed, but he was so drunk he could not remember whether he had done anything or not. Nothing happened for a few days … He was immediately taken to a KGB office situated, conveniently, within the Ukraina.

Given Wolfenden’s vulnerable situation and the remorseless methods of the KGB it is possible that these are not all versions of the same story but in fact versions of two different incidents: first, a Polish boy followed by a functional failure through drink, then a more successful encounter with an employee of the Ukraina. Whatever happened, he was trapped. Next came the blackmail. Wolfenden tried to pass it off in Wildean style (he was so pleased with the prints that he asked for enlargements); but he knew that if the truth of his activities were made public he would lose his job. A man of his talents could easily have found other employment, but that was not really the point. Being a foreign correspondent, travelling light ‘with a typewriter and a revolver’, was something he had thought of for himself; he didn’t want to be a civil servant, a lawyer or a university teacher: he didn’t want to do one of those things his father might have advised or had already done himself.

Homosexuality was not embarrassing to Jeremy Wolfenden, but it was illegal. The Soviet penal code decreed a lengthy prison sentence, and although it was unlikely that the courts would imprison a British journalist, it was a worrying prospect. Meanwhile, the reason that the law had not been repealed in Britain was that Jack Wolfenden’s report was still lying in a fat, explosive bundle somewhere in the Home Office. If it were to emerge that its author’s son was homosexual the credibility of the report would be destroyed; the liberal reforms it proposed would be set back by a decade or more. Jeremy Wolfenden was open to blackmail not only on his own account but on behalf of the civil liberties of millions of British men. The KGB may have been slovenly, cynical and tired; but they were not that stupid.

Nor was the Secret Intelligence Service. Wolfenden’s relationship with the service was informal: he did not want to do anything that would compromise his work, but he was intrigued enough to keep a line open. After the incident in the Hotel Ukraina his position was considerably weakened.

He decided to report what had happened to the Embassy, and their response was soothing. They told him to do nothing: to go along with what the KGB asked him. Then, when he was on leave in London, he could call at the address in Whitehall and have a chat with Ml5. And so it was that both British Intelligence and Security were able to use the man they wanted. He had been delivered to them by the KGB. It was almost too good to be true.

And probably it wasn’t. SIS, especially after the Vassall case, was aware of the vulnerability of homosexual men to blackmail. The only reasonable inference is that they wanted Wolfenden to be set up, and in S.R. Pawley they had the man to help. He was prepared to send Wolfenden where
The Times
would not because he was doing what he was told. SIS hoped to learn more about the KGB by having someone on the inside, like Wolfenden, than through their own officers. They wanted him to tell them what the KGB was thinking, even though all the KGB was thinking, as it turned out, was: how can we embarrass more Western visitors?

Wolfenden’s colleagues, visitors and friends were surprised that the Embassy let him stay. David Shapiro, who visited Wolfenden in Moscow, discovered a sense of shock, of outrage, as though something unfair were being done. The standard procedure when someone had been compromised was to tell them to leave at once, but SIS believed Wolfenden could be of more use to them if he stayed. They gambled that any information he gave to the Soviets could only be of trifling use because he had no access to military or other secrets – unless they gave him some for the purpose of disinformation.

Wolfenden did some work for the KGB. He wrote articles for the Novosti Press Agency on the nature of British Institutions. This was standard low-level stuff. Wolfenden told John Miller that he was writing the articles and Miller told him he must be out of his mind. Wolfenden ignored Miller’s advice and did what he called ‘a few bits’. The main task the KGB asked of Wolfenden was to inform on his colleagues in the press. In an emotional meeting in Martin Page’s apartment, Wolfenden warned Page never to tell him anything that he would not want the KGB to know. When Page escorted Wolfenden to the lift he was
weeping; as the lift came, he said goodbye and kissed Martin Page on the lips.

A British journalist called Douglas Botting, who was in Russia making a film for the BBC, had to leave Moscow to go on location. He discovered on his return that Wolfenden had been reading his mail. Botting also saw the payment that Wolfenden received from the KGB: he was told such things as the composition of the new Politburo before it had been announced and would discuss diem loudly over vodka with his colleagues. They were embarrassed by this evidence of his situation but had too much affection for him to make anything of it.

It was the end of an era, but even what had gone before had not been simple. Both Wolfenden and Page were used to operating with the Soviet authorities for their day-to-day business. Wolfenden had a minder called Vladimir Pozner and Page was looked after by Yuri Vinogradov. Their role was to tell the English correspondents about Soviet foreign policy, or a version of it, and to portray the domestic situation in an optimistic light.

Pozner and Vinogradov were both cultured men, like Yuri Krutikov and Oleg Penkovsky; Pozner was in fact part Jewish and had been brought up in the United States. He had had an affair with an Anglo-American writer called Sally Belfrage and had told her many things about the Soviet Union that she subsequently used in a book called
A Room in Moscow.
Although Pozner may not have been a serving officer, this indiscretion put him in hock to the KGB. He was in any case a believing Communist who went on to become one of the great propagandists of the Brezhnev era. In one of the remarkable transformations of the late twentieth century he went on to present a talk show on American television.

Other more crude KGB types occasionally tried to bully the correspondents, and Wolfenden was by this time so trapped that he was unable to fend off pressure of any kind from any side. All he had left with which to defend himself was his wit and his arrogance. These now became not social manners but qualities on which he depended for survival.

In the autumn of 1962 Wolfenden was on leave in London and
saw a good deal of Susie Burchardt, to whom he was supposed to be engaged. Things did not run smoothly between them. Wolfenden’s drinking had reached colossal proportions and his fiancée found the brandy at breakfast increasingly hard to tolerate. However, she was still enchanted by his exuberance and by the fact that he seemed to understand how difficult the relationship must be for her. The engagement went off and on, according to the high spirits and optimism of both parties. He told her that he was ‘debriefed by the Foreign Office’ when he was in London, but she assumed that all correspondents went through a similar experience.

Then, on 7 May 1963, Greville Wynne and Oleg Penkovsky were put on trial. It was an astonishing story of microdots, dead-drop boxes, photographs taken with the smuggled Minnox camera, bugs, recordings, double-bluff, fear, farce and appalling drama. For all the inclination of journalists to mock the dreary men of the intelligence services and the ‘games’ they played, the information that Wynne took out from Penkovsky did change the course of the Cold War. At the intelligence level it enabled Britain to regain a little of the reputation it had so disastrously lost in American eyes with the Philby, Burgess and Maclean affair; more importantly, it helped the West face down the Russian threat in the knowledge that Khrushchev had fewer weapons than they did. Though some, including Wolfenden, feigned apathy, only those who believed that Soviet totalitarianism was morally the equal of Western capitalism could be quite indifferent to the outcome of such events.

At the trial both men pleaded guilty, though Wynne did not accept all the charges. The idea, prearranged with Penkovsky, was that he should present himself as an innocent dupe who had been drawn further into the business of espionage than he understood. His room for manoeuvre was limited by the fact that his captors had given him the answers they expected to hear. He was supposed to recite thousands of words from memory, though in the end they allowed him to read from a concealed text; by vigorous head movements and eye-rubbing he tried to indicate to the Western press that this was what was going on.

Jeremy Wolfenden was given the front and back pages of the
Telegraph
, to write about the trial, with further coverage inside. Most of this in fact came from Reuters, who occupied the only two seats in court that had been allocated to the British press. The ‘pool’ system was working at its best: the years of cooperation, kept secret from the newspaper offices in London, paid dividends in a masterfully smooth operation. Every half an hour or so either John Miller or Peter Johnson of Reuters would telephone into the Reuters office an account of what had happened. One of the newspaper correspondents would then sub-edit the story for the Reuter wire and provide ‘blacks’ or carbon copies for all the other papers. No reporter had a different story; and, best of all, no reporter was left exposed to the wrath of a Fleet Street foreign editor telling him to ‘match’ the account that had appeared in the Daily Other.

The Wynne they described was not the hard-eyed poker player of his own subsequent account. He came over in court as petulant and afraid; he spoke bitterly of the various ‘foreign office officials’ in London who at first led him on and then, when he understood the magnitude of what he was doing and tried to escape from it, threatened to cripple his electrical business. Wynne claimed that these recriminations were part of an agreed text which was to pave the way for his mitigating speech of repentance. In any event he gave the impression of being a man who was floundering. The
Daily Telegraph
editorial column took the line that Penkovsky was probably a double agent and that Wynne was his toy. It spoke with alarm of the prospect of exchanging him at a later date for the imprisoned Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale: such a swap would be a ‘sprat for a shark’. The
Telegraph
line was the line that SIS would most have wanted it to take: Wynne not really an agent, Penkovsky tarnished goods, no hope for Lonsdale … The
Telegraph
could not have done better if the editorial had been dictated by SIS itself.

Considerable damage was being done to SIS by the trial. Ruari and Janet Chisholm had been named in court, along with other embassy staff, John Varley, David Senior and Felicity Stuart, all of whom had been ordered out of Moscow. The
modus operandi
of a Western spy ring had been laid open to the public for the first time (it had been known to the Soviet authorities for many years,
thanks to the Cambridge spies). In a brash damage-limitation exercise, the Chisholms welcomed
Express
photographers to their home in Sussex with a magnificent display of baffled innocence. ‘It’s a pantomime,’ beamed genial Ruari on his sofa, drink in hand: ‘Do I look like a spy?’ asked busy ‘housewife and Mum’ Janet, as she tucked up little Ali-boy in his pyjamas.

Then on 8 May Greville Wynne dropped Martina Browne in the mire. The
Daily Express
had clearly had a tip that her name was going to come up, because they managed to take a picture of her in New York. On page 15 of the paper on 9 May the story ran:

Martina Brown [sic], former nanny from Greenford, Middlesex, was mentioned for the first time at the trial yesterday.

21-year-old Martina looked after the three children of British diplomat Robert [sic] Chisholm while she was in Moscow.

Wynne said in court: ‘I was told that there was a young English nursemaid who slept in the next room where I was given the packets by Mr Chisholm.

‘She used to go out with Russian civilians. Besides, I was told that there were microphones hidden in the apartments of foreign diplomats in Moscow.’

Martina now works in New York, where she is pictured yesterday.

That was all, but it was embarrassing. It is not quite clear what Wynne is suggesting, but the impression is that he was talking in general about the conditions of secrecy in which he operated with Chisholm. Extra care was needed because there was a nanny who might overhear what was said, and this nanny had Russian friends to whom she might inadvertently let something slip: this would land him and Chisholm in trouble. The use of the word ‘Besides’ seems to indicate that Wynne saw Martina as being in the same category as a microphone: you wouldn’t want to be overheard by either.

However, it is possible that Wynne believed that any leakage from Martina Browne to the Russians would not be inadvertent; it is possible he thought that she was actually working for the KGB. The Chisholms’ other domestic staff certainly were. All their ‘maids’ were university-educated linguists. There was a
wardrobe in Ruari and Janet’s bedroom with a mirror on the back of the door; if both bedroom and wardrobe door were open, it was possible to see into the bedroom from the front doorway of the flat. A quiet and unexpected return often revealed the sight of a Russian ‘maid’ rifling through the waste-paper basket.