The Bedbug (33 page)

It was during this period that Klop met the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Brousson, who was working as a children’s nanny for the Swiss Foreign Minister Max Petitpierre while improving her French. They sat next to each other at a dinner party hosted by the British military attache Norman Fryer and the incorrigible Klop, making light of a forty year age difference, asked her out. She recalls:

I didn’t have much of a social life and if I got invited to anything I just said yes. I was so anxious for experience outside the little island of my life. I was still very young. He was charming and all sorts of people imagined all sorts of things that weren’t happening [about their relationship]. I was used as a sort of decoy. He took me to meet all sorts of peculiar people and I realised later that they must have been German or Russian spies. I was just an acceptable normal healthy English girl. People didn’t know who I was. It was an excuse.

I didn’t understand about spies and that sort of thing and I always had a question mark in my mind as to what was going on. A lot of the conversation was in Russian. I just looked vague and benign and enjoyed the good food when I was with him. It was only later when I read things about Klop that I wondered whether I was part of the set up.
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It was a relationship that endured, and blossomed as she became a close lifetime friend of Nadia too. When she returned from Switzerland Klop found her a job with MI5. She was also a guest at one of his intimate dinners at Chelsea Cloisters where she drank too many cocktails and fell asleep on his bed. She awoke after midnight to find Klop waiting patiently to serve her dinner. Or so she thought. Later he admitted he had locked her in the flat and gone out for a riotous dinner party with the art historian Francis Watson and friends, returning just in time for her to regain consciousness.
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CHAPTER 15: MOURA

A
s the Nazi threat receded, Klop and his joint masters at MI5 and MI6 became increasingly preoccupied with the menace of Soviet Communism. The investigations in Switzerland had demonstrated that the Russian intelligence service had never allowed the immediate danger from Germany to deflect them from the wider imperative of long-term conflict with Western capitalism.

There had been an embargo on British agents spying on their Soviet allies during the war so it came as a devastating blow to discover how widely the forerunners of the KGB had infiltrated the highest levels of the British diplomatic, scientific and intelligence communities.

The shock of betrayal caught MI5, in particular, at a moment of weakness. Sir David Petrie retired as director-general in 1946, well-regarded by political masters and colleagues. His last act had been to fight a rearguard action against those who wanted to subsume his organisation into MI6. The new Labour government, with some justification, nursed deep suspicions of the security services in peacetime. The leaking of the Zinoviev letter, which had helped bring down the first Labour government more than twenty years earlier, still rankled. MI5 brought in an outsider, Sir Percy Sillitoe, chief constable of Glasgow, to replace Petrie. He had no real experience of intelligence work but was thought to be a safe pair of hands who would keep his agents noses out of places they had no need to be poking. For Guy Liddell, the deputy
director who had appeared to be a shoo-in for the job, it was a bitter disappointment. For Dick White and Klop Ustinov it was an ominous precedent. They had previous form with Sir Percy.

On the eve of the outbreak of war one of Klop’s surveillance tip-offs had led to the arrest under the Official Secrets Act of a suspected German agent. It was hardly a significant coup and caused barely a ripple at the time. William Brand, a 27-year-old electrician, was seized by police at a Perth post office in Scotland on Saturday 23 August 1939 and in a closed session of the local magistrates was accused of offering to communicate secrets that might be useful to an enemy. He was remanded in custody but by the following day needed hospital treatment and on the Monday was released ‘to take a holiday’. No more was heard of the case.

Behind the scenes, Klop had warned several months earlier that the German consul in Glasgow, Werner Gregor, was a suspicious character. Like Klop, Gregor had served in the German Army in the First World War and then entered the diplomatic service. He had been shunted into a dead-end job in Glasgow after making derogatory remarks about Hitler but Klop, for some reason, thought he was up to no good. MI5 began intercepting his mail and discovered a letter, which they traced back to Brand, purporting to pass on naval intelligence. Under questioning Brand confessed that the intelligence was entirely the product of his own imagination. The only noteworthy aspect of the case was the difficulty Dick White had encountered in getting it investigated. The Glasgow Chief Constable, then Captain Percy Sillitoe, was a personal friend of Werner Gregor and took some convincing that he could be mixed up in espionage. Gregor in due course returned to Germany, where he remained in the diplomatic service throughout the war, and in 1948 wrote to his old friend asking for a reference to help him get a job. By that time Sir Percy Sillitoe had been two years in the job of head of MI5 and duly provided Gregor with a letter confirming his anti-Nazi credentials and omitting any reference to the espionage allegation.
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That demoralising incident was as nothing to the furore when the atom bomb scientists Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs and the diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were exposed. Between them they had given away the secrets of nuclear weapons that granted the West a commanding military advantage over the Soviets and exposed the innermost workings of the intelligence services and the Foreign Office. It was obvious they had not acted alone so suspicions spread like a virus among their friends and colleagues. One figure, who seemed to stand at the heart of it, innocently clutching a large gin and tonic, gossiping and flirting for all she was worth, was Klop’s old friend Moura Budberg. In terms of colourful antecedents, amorous adventures, devious plots and dubious friendships, she was at least his equal.

Moura was born in the Ukraine around 1893, the daughter of Ignaty Zakrevsky, a Russian diplomat and former Attorney General. Her sister Alexandra was great-grandmother to the British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. At the age of seventeen Moura married Johann Benckendorff, a diplomat at the Russian embassy in Berlin and a relative of the Tsarist ambassador to Great Britain. When her husband was called away to fight in the First World War she returned to St Petersburg and led the life expected of a wealthy aristocrat, ingratiating herself particularly at the British embassy where she befriend the ambassador’s daughter Meriel Buchanan. They would spend long weekends together on the Benckendorff estates at Yendel, in Estonia, where they would be joined by naval officers from British submarines in port at the capital Reval (now Tallinn). Among them was Captain Francis Cromie. When Meriel and her father were obliged to leave St Petersburg after the Revolution a tearful Moura was the last person waving them off from the rail station platform.
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She stayed on, as did Captain Cromie, who had been appointed naval attaché. He was killed on the steps of the embassy as he tried to obstruct members of the Cheka, the Russian security police, who were intent on breaking in to discover what Britain’s secret service
agents were up to. Moura knew full well what they were up to. She had begun a passionate affair with the British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart who was implicated in a plot to assassinate Lenin. As a result Lockhart and Moura were arrested and it was only her feminine wiles that persuaded the head of the Cheka Felix Dzerzhinsky and his deputy Yakob Peters to release her lover.

He ungratefully abandoned her, returning to his wife in Britain, although they resumed their friendship in later life. In the meantime her husband had been murdered by revolutionaries on his estate and Moura turned for consolation to the writer Maxim Gorky. She became his lover and his secretary at around the time he was running the House of Arts where Nadia and Klop used to go to dance and it is entirely conceivable that this is where they first met. It was at this time too that the British author H. G. Wells travelled to meet Gorky. Wells later recalled his first sight of Moura in Gorky’s flat in 1920. She wore an old khaki British army waterproof coat, a shabby black dress, and had a black stocking tied in her hair for decoration. He thought her magnificent, gallant and adorable:

I fell in love with her, made love to her, and one night at my entreaty she flitted noiselessly through the crowded apartments in Gorky’s flat to my embraces. I believed she loved me and I believed every word she said to me.
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She saw little of Wells for several years thereafter but when they were reunited his affection for her developed into a lifelong passion which she never fully reciprocated, refusing his frequent proposals of marriage.

Moura had two children being raised by relatives on her late husband’s Estonian estates. She was unable even to visit them, since she lacked the necessary travel documents, so Gorky, who was on good terms with the Communist regime, intervened with Dzerzhinsky of the Cheka, to get her permission. Once there, the
ever-resourceful Moura managed to make ends meet by dealing in gold and jewels on behalf of the immensely rich Urvater family, diamond dealers from Antwerp.
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Her longer-term expedient was to marry another Estonian, Baron Nikolai Budberg, in 1922. She helped him pay his gambling debts and he enabled her to obtain a legitimate passport and travel documents which she very soon used to return to her lover, Gorky. By 1926 she and the baron had divorced and he had left to start a new life in South America. She continued to live in exile with Gorky, in Germany and Italy, but when he was persuaded to return to his native land she chose instead to migrate to Britain, setting up home with her two children and her niece Kira Engelhardt in Cadogan Square, Knightsbridge. Her affair with H. G. Wells granted her an entrée into London society and introductions that would enable her to earn a living as a literary translator and film studio adviser.

Through Wells she met other literary luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. She worked with Alexander Korda on the film adaptation of Wells’s novel
Things to Come
. Korda had close links to Claude Dansey, the deputy director of MI6 and Greene worked for the intelligence agency during wartime.

She settled in a flat at 68 Ennismore Gardens, Knightsbridge, where her almost nightly cocktail parties attracted a range of mainly left-leaning socialites, from the former Russian Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky to the exiled Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, philosopher Bertrand Russell, politician and writer Harold Nicolson and the poet Robert Graves. She was a regular house guest at the home of the libidinous young MP Duff Cooper and his wife, Diana Cooper, acclaimed in the gossip columns as the most beautiful woman of the century. It was there that Moura met the pre-war Foreign Secretary Antony Eden.
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It had long been suspected, by writers such as Nina Berberova, who was part of the Gorky household, and by H. G. Wells,
that Moura had been recruited by the Cheka as far back as her association with Robert Bruce Lockhart and that the price she paid for his freedom was to be a lifelong informant for the Soviet authorities. Berberova maintained that Moura betrayed Gorky by handing over Gorky’s private archive to Stalin when the writer died.
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MI5’s publicly available records on Moura date back to 1921 when they spotted her name while monitoring the correspondence of Prince Pierre Volkonsky. He was related to Moura’s first husband and had been a leading diplomat in the Tsarist regime before being jailed by the Bolsheviks. His wife, Princess Sophy, a successful surgeon, pilot and published poet, was a direct descendant of Catherine the Great. She had escaped from Russia in 1917 with the few surviving close members of the Tsar’s family, but returned secretly to enlist Gorky’s help to get the prince released. The Volkonskys spent their impoverished exile in Paris: Princess Sophy became a taxi-driver and her daughter became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
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Much of MI5’s information about Moura came from the shipping magnate Sir Lionel Fletcher whose Russian wife, Liuba, had previously been married to Captain William Hicks, Bruce Lockhart’s right-hand man when they were all arrested in Moscow over the Lenin assassination plot. Fletcher described her as an attractive person to meet though by no means good looking. He added:

She is intimate with the Duff Coopers at whose house she meets, inter alia, our Foreign Secretary [Anthony Eden]. My wife warned me at the very outset that the Baroness was not really a clever woman, but she liked to be considered the best-informed woman in Europe; that she talked a great deal, knew an immense number of people, and I was advised to watch my step when talking to her. The Baroness has certainly heard things which should not have been repeated in her presence by ministers.
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Moura’s character was further damned by the First Secretary at the French embassy in Moscow, Maurice Dayet, who assured Conrad Collier, the British air attaché, that Moura had three meetings with Stalin while in Russia to attend Gorky’s funeral, and took him an accordion as a present. Many years later the Russian newspaper Pravda claimed that Moura had poisoned Gorky while working for British intelligence and many years after that a former KGB agent claimed she poisoned him on Stalin’s orders; two stories that even by the standards of Moura’s extraordinary life seem equally preposterous.