The Bedbug (34 page)

MI6, as usual, was playing devious games. When Moura’s daughter Tania applied for a job with the Hungarian travel bureau in London in 1934 and needed security clearance, MI6 spoke up on her behalf, pointing out that MI5’s head of counter-espionage, Guy Liddell, knew the family well. The manager of the travel bureau was under observation and MI5 went to considerable trouble to ensure Tania got the job; the implication being that either she, or perhaps Moura, would be a source of information about him. A year later, after Maurice Dayet’s claims that Moura was ‘a letter box in the Russian interest’ and possibly a German agent as well, Liddell himself contacted MI6 and was reassured by Valentine Vivian, their Russian expert, that the stories were ‘the result of spite and vindictiveness on the part of monarchist White Russians’.
³¹¹

Vivian sent Liddell some notes on Moura compiled by one of his agents, probably Ernest Boyce who had been with Bruce Lockhart in Moscow in 1918 and was then appointed head of station in Helsinki and Tallinn from 1920.

During the war, the suspicions of Russian espionage continued to be voiced by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, based on surveillance which showed Moura in frequent contact with the gregarious Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky. Yet her social circle extended to Winston Churchill and his personal assistant and propaganda minister Brendan Bracken. Duff Cooper described
her as ‘a tiresome old woman’ who was nevertheless a prominent person in official circles.
³¹²

Despite the rumours, Moura was recruited at the start of the war to a secret radio propaganda unit, the Joint Broadcasting Committee, run by the former BBC director of talks, Hilda Matheson. She found herself working alongside Guy Burgess. Special Branch reports claiming that she was a Soviet agent, who had meetings with Communist agitators, led to her being disbarred from this work, yet she somehow managed to act as an adviser to the BBC on its Russian coverage. MI5 asked Klop to keep an eye on his old friend and report regularly. Within weeks he wrote a supportive note saying that Moura was highly intelligent, shared H. G. Wells’s political views, and that both had been dumbfounded by the Russian pact with Hitler. It was out of the question that she would be pro-Nazi. Late in 1940 she went to work for the left-wing journalist André Labarthe, on his magazine
La France Libre
, which was financed by the intelligence services. Robert Bruce Lockhart had a hand in the appointment and required Moura to be the eyes and ears of the Foreign Office inside Labarthe’s organisation.
³¹³
He and his comrades were the driving force of a rival faction to General de Gaulle’s leadership of the Free French, regarding de Gaulle as right-wing almost to the point of fascism. Among the magazine’s contributors were Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Military articles were written by Stacho Shimonchek, a Pole married to Marthe Lecoutre. Among the financial backers were Cecil and Marie-Alixe Michaelis of Rycote Park, Thame, friends who lived close to Moura’s daughter Tania in Oxfordshire.
³¹⁴

The rivalry between the left- and right-wing factions of the Free French led to a series of farcical confrontations which sucked in MI5 and MI6 and caused ever deepening rifts between de Gaulle and Churchill. The left’s rallying point was Admiral Emile Muselier, leader of the French naval forces. Late in 1940 MI5 obtained documents from members of his staff which appeared to show that he had betrayed plans for the unsuccessful Free French raid on
Dakar in West Africa in September to the Vichy regime, puppets of the Nazis, who held the port. According to Guy Liddell of MI5, he personally took the evidence to Churchill’s security adviser Desmond Morton while warning him that it was not conclusive. But on Morton’s advice Churchill ordered the immediate arrest of Muselier and his entourage and intended to have Muselier executed. In the police raids that followed, two women were found in bed with their lovers. One, celebrating his birthday by sleeping with her for the first time, ended the night in police cells; the other claimed diplomatic privilege and was released. The admiral was also entertaining a lady friend, somewhere out of town, and could not be arrested until the following morning.
³¹⁵
De Gaulle had also been out of town – on official business – and was outraged that the action had been taken behind his back, quickly denouncing the evidence as fake and accusing British intelligence of planting it. MI5’s source, a disgruntled member of Muselier’s staff, admitted soon after that he had forged the documents. Churchill was forced into a humiliating apology and MI5 had to take the blame for the precipitate arrests. That did not stop Muselier’s supporters, André Labarthe, Marthe Lecoutre and Moura among them, plotting to supplant de Gaulle with their man. They had a good deal of British sympathy. Harold Nicolson recorded in his diary a dinner with Juliet Duff in December 1941 at which the guests were Moura Budberg and André Labarthe. He felt that Labarthe was a passionate and brilliant man, loved by the French people and representing their country far better than de Gaulle.
³¹⁶

Churchill’s security adviser Desmond Morton, the man who had come close to getting Muselier executed at the beginning of 1941, had been paying close attention to the Muselier-Labarthe machinations, to the extent of attending a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in September 1941 where Muselier, Labarthe and others discussed how de Gaulle might remain as a figurehead while they democratised the Free French movement. Muselier had already handed de Gaulle a note to that effect. Churchill had been urging
de Gaulle for some time to agree to a ruling council and was in favour of Muselier’s move. De Gaulle was not, and effectively scotched it. Muselier, however, did not give up and in March 1942 tried again to form a breakaway movement, once more with support from the Labarthe faction and from the British. De Gaulle sacked him, placed him under house arrest, and denounced him to the British as ‘morally unbalanced’, accusing him of ‘indulging in drugs’.
³¹⁷
The latter was no surprise to MI5 who had found opium-smoking equipment in his flat when they arrested him.

MI5 was aware of Moura’s involvement in this latest escapade but do not seem to have thought any the worse of her for it. One MI5 officer, Kenneth Younger, commented that there were half a dozen women and scores of men who deserved a reprimand for their part in the quarrel but he did not believe Moura would deliberately do Britain harm.

Downing Street was less sanguine. Without alluding to his own role in the previous conspiracy, Desmond Morton wrote to MI5 director Sir David Petrie complaining about ‘this appalling woman’ who was a perfect terror at intrigue in Free French affairs and a violent enemy of de Gaulle. Lord Winster, private secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, had complained to Morton that Moura had tried to involve him in the Muselier conspiracy, having accosted him at a dinner party. Winster remarked that Moura was a friend of Victor Cazalet, the Conservative MP who had fought the Bolsheviks in Siberia in 1919 and became liaison officer, the Polish leader General Wladyslaw Sikorski, and of Lady Ravensdale, daughter of the former Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. Her extraordinary range of social contacts also included the veteran MI6 officer Sir Leonard Woolley who had run agents throughout the Middle East during the First World War, worked with Lawrence of Arabia and directed archaeological excavations of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur.

Others, including Harold Nicolson, retained their admiration for Muselier and Labarthe. In the space of a week in April 1942,
immediately after de Gaulle had sacked his naval commander, Nicolson lunched with Muselier and then Labarthe, whom he found brilliant and difficult to disagree with when he complained that de Gaulle was untruthful, treacherous and unbalanced yet still treated as the embodiment of France. He held further talks with Muselier in June of that year but by then de Gaulle had fully asserted his authority.

It only emerged long after the war that Labarthe’s group at
La France Libre
had been working for Russian intelligence as early as 1940, at a time when the Soviet Union was still observing its peace pact with Hitler. The Venona transcripts were the result of a joint American and British project to decipher Soviet secret messages from the Second World War. Although the results started to flow in the 1950s, and were instrumental in unmasking many of the KGB’s best agents, their existence was kept secret from the general public until the 1990s. Among the decoded traffic from London to Moscow in 1940 is a series of messages from an unknown agent describing his (or her) work with André Labarthe and Marthe Lecoutre. They in turn were putting together a network of agents and among the intelligence they supplied was news of the planned Dakar raid a month before it happened; details of a conversation with Churchill’s private secretary; and figures for RAF aircraft production and losses. At one point Labarthe and Lecoutre proposed trying to steer de Gaulle into Leftists politics and were warned by their Soviet handler to leave de Gaulle alone and concentrate on keeping up the flow of intelligence.
³¹⁸

The novelist Rebecca West, who worked for MI6, insisted that Moura was working for the Russians while pretending to help the British, and that H. G. Wells and his family knew it. Her opinion may not have been entirely objective, since she had been H. G.’s lover, and had a son by him, before being supplanted by Moura. Her doubts about Moura’s loyalty were not universal. When she applied in 1947 for British citizenship her proposers were Robert Bruce Lockhart and the former Labour Lord Chancellor Lord Jowitt.

Guy Liddell, head of counter-intelligence at MI5, took a passing interest in Moura in October 1946. Over drinks at his London club, the Travellers, he took the opportunity to ask Count Constantin Benckendorff, whose father had been Russian ambassador in London before the Revolution, what he knew of Moura, ‘whose true colour has always been a matter of some speculation in this office’. Benckendorff, who had remained in Russia until 1924 before settling in Britain, does not seem to have been able to enlighten him. The real irony of this inquiry, though, is that it was prompted by Guy Burgess, who had mentioned to Liddell that he often met Constantin at Moura’s cocktail parties. Very soon the real question would become apparent – what was Burgess doing mixing in such company?

The suspicions intensified as the Cold War gradually engendered a kind of paranoia against all Communist sympathisers and fellow travellers. It would take decades to show how much of that paranoia was justified but at the time MI5 resorted to telephone taps, bugging devices and the bonhomie of Klop the little bedbug at Moura’s soirées. They learned more than enough to cause alarm, and yet surprisingly, with hindsight, reacted not with panic but almost casual indifference.

In August 1950, at a time when questions were being asked about Guy Burgess, he was seen by Klop at one of Moura’s parties, in company with the publisher James MacGibbon. In a report to their legal adviser Bernard Hill, MI5 referred to the frequent accusations that Moura was a Soviet agent and made the point that while they had never been proved, it was fair to say that she was ‘a dangerous woman and a born
intrigante
’. The report continued:

There is no evidence that Burgess was in any way indiscreet at this party, or that he notably exceeded the standard of conviviality common at such an occasion. On the other hand I am inclined to think that Budberg is not a desirable acquaintance for someone of his character and in his position and you may therefore like to have this note for your information.
³¹⁹

MacGibbon was already under investigation by MI5, who were certain he had been engaged in espionage for the Russians. He was another Communist recruited to the intelligence services during the war and both he and Burgess had been stationed in New York at a time when secret telegrams were known to have been leaked. An MI5 telephone tap on the Communist Party headquarters in King Street, Hammersmith, had revealed that MacGibbon had performed such valuable service for the Russians that they had secretly rewarded him with a high military honour. A bug planted at his home produced further evidence that he was still under pressure from his Russian handler to provide further intelligence in the post-war period and that his wife Jean was begging him to drop the contact.

MI5 unleashed its best interrogator, Jim Skardon, on MacGibbon in 1950 but despite catching the suspect unawares, turning up at his home at 8:15 a.m. while MacGibbon was taking a bath, he could not extract a confession. He reported:

During the interview he maintained a pose of carefree abandon, but he was in reality more than a little worried. However, he made no attempt to disguise his enthusiasm for Communism. Midway through the interview Mrs MacGibbon entered the room looking very much like my conception of Lady Macbeth, and in a very tense manner produced coffee for our refreshment.
³²⁰

After Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951, Moura told Klop that Burgess had on occasions met Soviets in company with MacGibbon. She added: ‘MacGibbon could tell you more about Burgess than almost any other person.’ MacGibbon stayed on the suspects list and was questioned at least once more but apparently maintained his innocence.
³²¹
His firm was suspected of being
subsidised by the KGB and published Kim Philby’s memoirs, after he defected. It was noted that an American director of the firm had been linked to a KGB spy ring which infiltrated the US Treasury.