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Enemies Within. Richard Davenport-Hines
Читать онлайн.Название Enemies Within
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007516681
Автор произведения Richard Davenport-Hines
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
For the first hour they exchanged ‘trivialities about the war and the comparative efficiency of the German and Russian Intelligence Services’. When lunch was over, Ewer said jokily, ‘Well now, disclose the great mystery.’ Finally, some quarter of a century after MI5 had first rumbled his network, one of its officers confronted him. ‘He had no inkling of the real purpose of the interview,’ Knight reported.
As he is a very highly strung person, in spite of his experience and undoubted intelligence, I thought it might be a good idea to deal him a rapid blow at the outset. I therefore said to him that what I really wanted to talk to him about was the Federated Press of America. This certainly took him by surprise, and it was on the tip of his tongue to pretend some difficulty in remembering what this was; but as he hesitated, I took out from my dispatch case a rather formidable bundle of typescript, whereupon, with a slightly self-conscious smile he changed his tone and said, ‘Oh yes, of course, I can remember the Federated Press of America very well.’
Knight made clear to Ewer that ‘there were “no strings” at all attached to this interview … and that if he felt he did not wish to discuss the matter with me, he had only to put on his hat and go home, and there would be no hard feelings on my side. I explained that, on the other hand, if he would be kind enough to discuss the case with me, I felt it might be extremely helpful.’
Knight explained that MI5 ‘made a habit of going over what might be termed “classic cases” in the light of new information or the general trend of international politics, as by doing so we not only frequently re-educated ourselves, but also obtained new information and clearer interpretations of matters which were originally obscure’. Ewer listened attentively, and nodded his agreement. Knight said that two or three recent cases indicated that there might be persons in high government positions who were giving information to the Russians. Ewer agreed to help, with the reservation that he felt hesitant about naming individuals. ‘I passed lightly over this, saying that I quite understood,’ Knight recorded. Ewer talked slowly and quietly, as if weighing every word. He seemed to Knight evasive, forgetful, ‘obstinately vague’ and sometimes ‘unconvincing’. He claimed that, with the exception of Slocombe’s activities in Paris, his group did not touch espionage, but only undertook counter-espionage. The limit of their interest was the actions and plans of the British intelligence services against Soviet and CPGB activities in Britain. This was hard to disprove (certainly in a criminal trial), but sophistical.47
There was no official discrediting of Ewer. His fifty years of diplomatic journalism was marked in 1959 by his investiture as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Colleagues hailed him as a fearless anti-communist who had once quenched Andrei Vyshinsky’s verbal outpourings at a Moscow press conference. Thirty years after the arrest of Dale, Ginhoven and Jane, their spymaster was honoured with a special pass to the Foreign Office which was valid for the rest of his life.
Years later Brian Stewart, the SIS officer who nearly succeeded Maurice Oldfield as Chief in 1978, declared that objectivity was the first necessity for successful intelligence work. ‘Report nothing but the unvarnished truth and, as far as possible, the whole truth. Understand, but do not pander to, the prejudices and preconceptions of the customer.’ Stewart was equally emphatic about the assessment of intelligence material: ‘beware of intellectual laziness, mirror imaging, prejudice, racial or professional arrogance, bias, groupthink, and the sin of assuming that the future will develop, broadly speaking, along the same lines as the past’. These commandments were the result of a century’s experience by the intelligence services, including MI5’s treatment of the Ewer–Hayes network. MI5 officers showed themselves as shrewd, efficient and decent in their questioning and turning of informants. Contrary to the caricature, they did not behave like clumsy oafish schoolboys playing rough sport. Effective counter-espionage needs tact and patience. Mistakes occur when time is short, or opponents are demonized. Although MI5 has often been depicted as blimpish, rigid, reactionary and thick, in reality its ductile liberalism ought to impress. There was a culture of respecting individuals. Secret policing was not oppressive. The security services were usually more considerate than Fleet Street reporters in minding people’s feelings.48
The Soviet Union’s earliest spies inside the Foreign Office are the subject of this chapter, which is avowedly revisionist. The security failings of the Office and of the intelligence services have been treated in the terminology of class for over sixty years. Public schoolboys supposedly protected one another in obtuse, complacent and snobbish collusion. The secrets of Whitehall were lost on the playing-fields of Eton, so the caricature runs. This, however, is an unreal presentation. The first Foreign Office men to spy for Moscow – in the years immediately after the disintegration of the Ewer–Hayes network – were members of its Communications Department. That department was an amalgam of Etonians, cousins of earls, half-pay officers, the sons of clergymen and of administrators in government agencies, youths from Lower Edmonton and Finchley, lower-middle-class men with a knack for foreign languages. Their common ingredient was masculinity. The predominant influence on the institutional character of the department, its management and group loyalty, its fortitude and vulnerability, all derived from its maleness. As in the Foreign Office generally, it was not class bias but gender exclusivity that created the enabling conditions for espionage. The Communications Department spies Ernest Oldham and John King, and the later spy-diplomatists Burgess, Cairncross and Maclean, had colleagues and chiefs who trusted and protected them, because that was how – under the parliamentary democracy that was settled in 1929 – public servants in a department of state prided themselves on behaving to their fellow men.
Reader Bullard reflected while Consul General in Leningrad in 1934: ‘Schools are not meant to give boys a good time, but to teach them to be happy together even when they are not having a good time.’ The office culture of the Communications Department was an extension of school: the staff there tried to be cheery in a hard place, valued camaraderie and professed individual self-respect as their creed; its vulnerabilities were easy for Oldham and King to exploit. Their male colleagues swapped banter and chaff, forgave and covered each other’s mistakes. They aspired to be tolerant, unflappable and conscientious. The departmental spirit precluded grudges and doubts among colleagues. They were not social equals, but they found their common ground as men. As a nationality, the English had too high and yet too juvenile a reckoning of themselves. ‘The strength of the British lies in never quite growing up,’ Vansittart, PUS of the Foreign Office, said with satisfaction: ‘the cause of our mercifully arrested development is that we have not been liable to introspection.’1
Boyish ideas about good sports were ubiquitous. The deputy governor of Parkhurst prison during the detention there of the spy Wilfred Macartney was nicknamed ‘Jumbo’ and was popular with most inmates. In 1930, on Jumbo’s last Sunday at Parkhurst, after his promotion to be governor elsewhere, the prisoners held a farewell concert to honour him. ‘I’ve found you fellows a jolly fine set of sports in playing the game,’ he told them after the concert in his pronounced Oxford accent. ‘Cheer up, and don’t forget that the game is not over till the stumps are drawn or the final whistle blown.’ Although these virile sentiments may seem laughable in the twenty-first century, in the early 1930s they meant the world for many men: Jumbo was cheered for a full five minutes by the Parkhurst prisoners.2
The office culture of the Communications Department is richly evoked in the memoirs of George Antrobus. ‘Bozo’ Antrobus was born in 1892, the only child of an official in the Crown Agents for the Colonies. He was educated at Westminster School before