Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain. Richard Davenport-Hines
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for he was an idealist and recruited on the basis that the only man who would fight Hitler was Stalin: that his feelings had been worked on to such an extent that he believed that in helping Russia he would be helping this country and the cause of democracy generally. Whether if he has wanted to “stop work” he is a type with sufficient moral courage to withstand the inevitable OGPU blackmail and threats of exposure KRIVITSKY cannot say.’ No one connected the supposed Eton and Oxford aristocrat to Maclean, the non-Etonian, non-Oxford politician’s son.43
Krivitsky repeatedly alluded to a young ‘University man’ of ‘titled family’, with ‘plenty of money’, whose surname began with P. He was ‘pretty certain’ that this individual was in the same milieu as the Foreign Office source. In Archer’s summary of Krivitsky’s remarks, Yezhov had ordered Maly to ask this young Englishman – ‘a journalist of good family, an idealist and a fanatical anti-Nazi’ – to murder Franco in Spain. No one had the time to connect this information to Philby, who met many of the criteria but had no titles or fortunes in his background. It is usually forgotten that at the time of the Krivitsky interrogations Philby was working as a war correspondent in France and six months away from his recruitment to SIS.44
Doubtless at Vivian’s request, Archer omitted from her summary of Krivitsky’s debriefing all reference to Hooper, who had been rewarded for informing on Pieck by being re-engaged in October 1939 by SIS. Both Vivian and his SIS colleague Felix Cowgill trusted Hooper, and did not want him incriminated. Vivian insisted that Hooper was ‘a loyal Britisher’. Cowgill concurred that he was ‘above everything … absolutely loyal’. In fact Hooper was the only man in history to work for SIS, MI5, the Abwehr and the NKVD. He was sacked from SIS in September 1945, after post-war interrogations of Abwehr officers revealed that he had worked for them until the autumn of 1939.45
The earliest MI5 material supplied by Blunt to Moscow in January 1941 included a full copy of Archer’s account of debriefing Krivitsky. A month later Krivitsky was found dead, with his right temple shot away and a revolver beside him, in a hotel bedroom in Washington, where he was due to testify to a congressional committee. Moscow’s desire for revenge must have intensified after reading all that he had said in his debriefing, but suicide is equally probable. MI5 felt a moral responsibility to give financial help to his widow. Ignace Reiss had already been ambushed near Lausanne and raked with machine-gun fire in 1937. Joseph Leppin, Bystrolyotov’s courier for Oldham’s material, disappeared in Switzerland in the same year. The courier Brian Goold-Verschoyle was summoned to Moscow from the Spanish civil war and never seen again. Liddell’s informant Georges Agabekov vanished in 1938 – perhaps stabbed in Paris and his corpse put in a trunk that was dumped at sea, perhaps executed after interrogation in Barcelona, perhaps butchered in the Pyrenees with his remains thrown in a ravine. Theodore Maly, with his hands tied behind his back, dressed in white underclothes, kneeling on a tarpaulin, was shot in the back of the neck in a cellar at the Lubianka in 1938. Bazarov, who had been transferred from Berlin to serve as OGPU’s illegal rezident in the USA, was recalled in the purge of 1937 and shot in 1939. Bystrolyotov was luckier than these colleagues: recalled in 1937, he was tortured and survived twenty years’ hard labour in the camps (although his destitute wife and mother killed themselves). After Krivitsky’s death his refugee literary agent Paul Wohl told Malcolm Cowley: ‘We are broken men; the best of our generation are dead. Nous sommes des survivants.’46
George Antrobus was at home with his parents in Leamington Spa, celebrating his father’s eightieth birthday on 14 November 1940, when a bomb fell on their house – dropped by a German aircraft during the night of the great aerial blitz on Coventry. Antrobus and his father were killed. In the same week Jane Archer was sacked from MI5 for insubordination. Earlier that year, at MI5’s instigation, Vernon Bartlett, a diplomatic correspondent who had been elected as a Popular Front MP, tried without avail to inveigle Pieck into visiting London, where he would have been interrogated. Instead, in May 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, Pieck was taken into Nazi captivity and incarcerated in Buchenwald. Somehow he survived the barbarities of camp life, and resumed his design business in peacetime. In April 1950 he was induced to visit London for interview by MI5 about King. His clarifications may have contributed to a final death.
Armed with Pieck’s information, MI5 reinterviewed Oldham’s ex-colleague Thomas Kemp. Kemp, whose account of his contacts with Pieck was disingenuous, had been Lucy Oldham’s confidant and may have kept in touch with her. She had sunk towards destitution in the 1930s and spent the war years in the grime of Belfast, but in 1950 (aged sixty-seven) was living in a drab Ealing lodging-house. Perhaps because she was in desperate straits for money, perhaps after a tip-off from Kemp that MI5 were reinvestigating her complicity in the old treason, probably because both converging crises were intolerable, she drowned herself in the River Thames at Richmond in June 1950 before MI5 resumed contact.
Despite the determination of Antrobus, Cotesworth, Eastwood and Hay to coast through life with jokes, there was no laughter at the end.
Industrial mobilization and espionage
The design of new weapons, the quantities produced, their export to foreign powers and the capacity of munitions works to expand production were subjects for the War Office’s nineteenth-century Intelligence Division and for its counterparts across Europe. As early as 1865 two young men were dismissed from Armstrong’s naval shipyard and armaments factory in Newcastle for copying secret plans: ‘for some time past much annoyance has been felt from similar malpractices’, complained a director of Armstrong’s. Forty years later, when the naval shipyards at Kiel were ice-bound, Sir Trevor Dawson, the Edwardian naval ordnance director of the armaments company Vickers, skated round the docks, like a pleasure-seeker on a spree, making mental notes of what was visible. Arthur Conan Doyle’s story ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’ (1908), about secret submarine designs missing from Woolwich Arsenal, showed the increasing awareness of industrial espionage in a mechanized age. The earliest known intelligence report from SIS, issued in January 1910, concerned Vickers’s German counterpart, Krupp.1
The crisis over the shortage of artillery shells in 1915, and general battle experiences during 1914–18, demonstrated that armaments manufacturing capacity was as important to victory as fighting manpower. ‘National armies cannot even be collected without the assistance of the whole modern machinery of national industry, still less equipped,’ wrote the first communist MP, Cecil L’Estrange Malone, after returning from his visit in 1919 to the Soviet Union. Russian revolutionaries knew they had to match the industrial potential of the British Empire, the USA, France and Germany, for ‘without equipment on the modern scale great armies are sheep for the slaughter’, Malone explained. ‘The next war will be won in the workshop,’ General Sir Noel (‘Curly’) Birch, Master General of Ordnance at the War Office turned director in charge of land armaments at Vickers, told Lord Milne, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in 1929. ‘If we are honest as a nation we must pay just as much attention to the industrial mobilisation for war as we do to our armed forces.’ If the productive capacity of British armaments companies continued to be depleted, as it had been for the ten years of attempted world disarmament, Birch asked, ‘where will be the force behind diplomacy?’2
Intelligence services exist to monitor risks. They amass, collate and analyse information covering the fluctuations of public opinion and national sentiments, they collect diplomatic and strategic secrets, they foster subversion and they practise counter-espionage; and