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Twentieth-century history & later|Book Review
Don, double agent and housewife
New light on old spies
By Christopher Andrew
September 25, 2020
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George Blake|© PA Images/Alamy
IN THIS REVIEW
AGENT MOLIÈRE
The life of John Cairncross, the Fifth Man of the Cambridge spy circle
302pp. I. B. Tauris. £20.
Geoff Andrews
Buy
BETRAYAL IN BERLIN
George Blake, the Berlin Tunnel and the greatest conspiracy of the Cold War
530pp. John Murray. Paperback, £10.99.
Steve Vogel
Buy
AGENT SONYA
Lover, mother, soldier, spy
377pp. Viking. £25.
Ben Macintyre
Buy
The search for the Fifth Man in the KGB’s Cambridge “Ring of Five” led to the longest mole hunt in modern British history. Two of the five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow in 1951, followed by Kim Philby in 1963. Anthony Blunt, who confessed secretly in 1964 to having worked for Soviet intelligence in return for immunity from prosecution, was identified by MI5 as the Fourth Man in 1974. But, as late as 1977, the MI5 Director-General, Sir Michael Hanley, told the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, that there was still no sign of success in the hunt for the Fifth Man. Five years later, the problem was unexpectedly solved by MI6’s penetration agent in the KGB, Oleg Gordievsky. Ben Macintyre’s last bestseller, The Spy and the Traitor (2018), confirmed earlier accounts of Gordievsky revealing to his MI6 case officer that KGB files identify the Fifth Man as John Cairncross.
Though Agent Molière by Geoff Andrews describes Cairncross’s public exposure as the Fifth Man in 1990, mainly from Cairncross’s perspective, it does not relate how Gordievsky’s intelligence had secretly ended the MI5 mole hunt eight years earlier. Gordievsky also identified the main recruiter and first controller of the Five as the brilliantly talented “illegal”, Arnold Deutsch (codenamed “Otto”), who had taken only five years at Vienna University to progress from first-year undergraduate to the degree of PhD with distinction.
Though Cairncross, like Blunt, had secretly confessed to MI5 in 1964 and been publicly identified as a Soviet spy by the Sunday Times in 1979, his importance to the KGB had been underestimated. In retrospect, it is not difficult to see why the KGB ranked him as one of the “Magnificent Five”. During his career as a Soviet spy, Cairncross worked successively for the Foreign Office, the Treasury, one of Churchill’s ministers and MI6. Most importantly, at a crucial moment in the Second World War when the tide was turning on the Eastern Front, he became the only Soviet agent to penetrate the codebreaking and signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency at Bletchley Park. Kim Philby joined MI6 only after being turned down by Bletchley. In this instance Cairncross succeeded where Philby failed.
According to Cairncross’s post-war Soviet controller, Yuri Modin, who saw his KGB file, Cairncross was secretly presented in London with the Order of the Red Banner and visibly elated – despite having to return it to Moscow for safe-keeping. Cairncross later claimed to have no recollection of the award. He also claimed that he had never been a Soviet spy – merely “an independent and voluntary agent, using the KGB as a channel to the Russians”. This, Andrews euphemistically concludes, “sounds implausible”: “Evidence produced after [Cairncross] died confirms that he did not reveal the full extent of his espionage work, downplayed some aspects and ignored others entirely, notably in the post-war period”.
Andrews deserves credit for being the first to go through the Cairncross papers in Cambridge University Library. The problem, unsurprisingly, is that they contain little information on espionage he denied committing. The assessment by Modin of the intelligence provided by Cairncross from the Treasury in the early years of the Cold War is far more credible than that of Cairncross himself. Modin was “overjoyed by the quality of [his] information”. Cairncross’s responsibilities at the Treasury included authorizing expenditure on defence research. According to his colleague, G. A. Robinson, “He thus knew not just about atomic weapons developments but also plans for guided missiles … and all other types of weapons”. Research in Treasury files at the National Archives will be required to establish more precisely what Cairncross had access to.
On his recruitment in 1937, the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) had given Cairncross the codename “Molière” – his favourite French writer, on whom he later published three books in French. Andrews rightly emphasizes the range of Cairncross’s literary talents. He would have made a successful, though highly argumentative, full-time academic, and was a formidable linguist. While he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, the college magazine, which called him “The Fiery Cross”, complained that he “learns a new language every fortnight”. The TLS later headed its review of Cairncross’s translation of Racine’s Phaedra and Other Plays: “Racine Well Englished At Last”. His translations of poems from a number of languages, remarkably including Chinese, are sometimes brilliant. Cairncross’s book After Polygamy Was Made a Sin (1974) was also well received. His friend Graham Greene called it “a book that will strongly appeal to all polygamists”.
There was also a prickly side to Cairncross. In 1977, over forty years after his Cambridge graduation, he went to a reunion at Trinity College. Though the dinner and overnight accommodation would have been free of charge, Cairncross took the trouble to write afterwards to the Bursar to complain that dining arrangements had fallen far below his expectations. At the end of Agent Molière, Geoff Andrews finds it “tempting to think” that, when Cairncross later recalled such episodes, he was able to laugh at P. G. Wodehouse’s mildly xenophobic assertion that “it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine”.
Just as Soviet espionage by the Cambridge Five was winding down in the 1950s, the KGB achieved one major new penetration of British intelligence with its recruitment of the MI6 officer George Blake, codenamed “Diomid”. At a meeting with his controller on the top deck of a London bus in January 1954, Blake handed over details of one of the most ingenious US/UK intelligence operations of the Cold War, codenamed Operation Gold – plans for the secret construction of a 500-metre underground tunnel from West to East Berlin to intercept landlines running from Soviet military and intelligence headquarters at Karlshorst in the East Berlin suburbs. Blake was posted to the MI6 Berlin station on April 14, 1955, one month before the tunnel became operational. By the time the KGB staged an “accidental” discovery of the tunnel in April 1956, Operation Gold had produced more than 50,000 reels of magnetic tape recording intercepted Soviet and East German communications.
There is one significant gap in the mostly meticulous research for Steve Vogel’s gripping, well-written Betrayal in Berlin. When MI6 investigators discovered in 1961 that Blake was a KGB agent, they initially feared that, unless he confessed (which seemed unlikely), there would be insufficient evidence for a successful prosecution. MI5 records (quoted in The Defence of the Realm, MI5’s centenary history) show that they sought the advice of its head of counter-espionage, Martin Furnival Jones (later Director-General): “Their first question was whether it would be in order for them at an appropriate stage in the interrogation to tell Blake, as an inducement, that he would not be prosecuted if he confessed”. It seems likely that MI6 was willing to make the same offer to Blake that MI5 later made to Blunt after failing to gain adequate evidence to secure a conviction.
In the event, Blake unexpectedly confessed. As an ideological agent, he was – as Vogel shows – affronted by the suggestion that he had worked for the KGB not out of principle but because he had been tortured while a POW in Korea and blackmailed after his release: “No, nobody tortured me! No, nobody blackmailed me! I myself approached the Soviets and offered my service to them of my own accord!” At his Old Bailey trial in May 1961, Blake was given a record sentence of forty-two years in jail.
Most of the story of his betrayal of Operation Gold did not become public until he made a remarkable escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1967, crossed to the Continent hidden in a camper van, and reached Moscow. In an interview with Izvestia three years later, Blake revealed that he had told the KGB about the Berlin Tunnel even before it was constructed, boasting that it was “doomed to failure” from the outset. Western commentators then widely assumed that the intercepted Soviet communications must have been fabricated. The bestselling British spy-writer Chapman Pincher claimed that Operation Gold “produced nothing but a carefully prepared mass of misinformation”. In reality, as Vogel shows, all the intercepted communications were genuine. The intelligence yield was so considerable that it took more than two years after the end of the operation to process all the intercepts. The KGB did not interfere either with the tunnel’s construction or with its early operations, partly for fear of compromising Blake, by far its most important British agent. It also seems likely that, though the KGB successfully protected the security of its own communications, it was less concerned by the interception of those of the rival GRU and of Soviet forces.
Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya makes a notable – and, as always, very readable – contribution to the little-researched gender history of intelligence agencies. The German-born Ursula Kuczynski (1907–2000; codenamed “Sonya”) was probably the most successful female spy in Soviet history – the first woman in military intelligence (later known as the GRU) to be promoted to the rank of colonel. For more than twenty years, there has been reliable evidence from Russian sources that, in the middle of the Second World War, Kuczynski was case officer for both Klaus Fuchs, the most important of the British atom spies, and Melita Norwood, who became Britain’s longest-serving Soviet agent. Macintyre, however, is the first to piece together her extraordinary, peripatetic intelligence career, which ranged from Britain to Manchuria.
Sonya began work as a spy in Shanghai in 1930 as a member of the Soviet espionage network run by Richard Sorge, arguably the ablest Soviet spy of his generation. She also became one of Sorge’s lovers, later writing lyrically of riding pillion on his motorbike: “I was in ecstasy from this ride and shouted to him to ride faster. He was racing the bike as fast as it would go. When we stopped, I felt as though I had been born again”. Though Sorge later claimed that most women “are absolutely unfit for espionage work”, his chief assistant in Shanghai was the American writer Agnes Smedley, who later had a number of meetings with Mao in Yan’an after the Long March. Sorge could only rationalize her success by arguing that she had somehow acquired male characteristics. Smedley had, he wrote, a “brilliant mind and fitted in well as a news reporter … In short, she was like a man”.
Kuczynski and Smedley first met in 1930 in the Cathay Hotel, Shanghai, then the most luxurious hotel east of Suez. (On intelligence operations in Shanghai, it would be worth including in the paperback edition of Agent Sonya the additional sources discovered by Dr Alexander Millar for his path-breaking Cambridge PhD thesis, “British Intelligence and the Comintern in Shanghai, 1927–37”.) Both were carrying bunches of red roses to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For the next two years, wrote Sonya later, “There was hardly a day when we did not telephone or see each other”. Then they quarrelled. Smedley told Sonya, “You do not have what it takes to make a real revolutionary”. Though they were later reconciled, their friendship was never as close as before.
In 1940, after divorcing her first husband, Sonya married Len Beurton (or Burton), “a nice, modest young man”, and a fellow communist with a British passport, seven years her junior. She was a more successful spy in Britain than in China, partly because experience had taught her to be inconspicuous; she no longer attracted attention either as pillion passenger on a speeding motorbike or by rendezvous in luxury hotels. Sonya’s apparently humdrum life as a wartime housewife was almost perfect cover for running Fuchs and Norwood. Roger Hollis of MI5 (later its director-general) wrote in response to an enquiry from the FBI: “Mrs Burton appears to devote her time to her children and domestic affairs … She has not come to notice in any political connection”.
Like Sorge, Hollis – as Ben Macintyre shows – underestimated housewives. What makes Hollis’s misjudgement particularly remarkable is that he was more alert than most in wartime MI5 to male Soviet penetration and was the first to become suspicious of Blunt. Philby later recalled that “Hollis was always vaguely unhappy about him”. Blunt told his MI5 interrogators, “I believe [Hollis] disliked me – I believe he slightly suspected me”. As Gordievsky told MI6 (as well as Ben Macintyre and me), KGB headquarters found it difficult to understand the publicity given in the final decade of the Cold War to the conspiracy theory of the maverick former MI5 officer Peter Wright, that Hollis himself was a Soviet agent. “If the head of MI5 had been a Soviet super-mole”, concludes Macintyre, “Putin would be unable to resist boasting about it.”
Soviet intelligence learnt few lessons from Sonya’s remarkable wartime successes. So far as is known, no post-war female KGB or GRU officer was entrusted with Cold War agents as important as Fuchs and Norwood. At the end of the Cold War, the wholly male-run KGB made a bizarre attempt to use female glamour to improve its now tattered public image. In 1990 it announced, amid a blaze of Russian press and TV publicity, the appointment of Katya Mayorova as “Miss KGB”, the world’s first holder of a “security services beauty title”. Sonya must have been outraged.
Christopher Andrew’s next book, written in collaboration with Julius Green, Stars and Spies: Intelligence operations and the entertainment business, will be published next year
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