Authors: Tim Milne
The choice of Burgess is all the more remarkable since it was made in the full knowledge that it could endanger Kim. In the hope that if need should arise it might help to divert suspicion from himself, Kim now chose deliberately to point the investigators in the right direction. He wrote to London suggesting that they should look again at statements Krivitsky had made about a young Foreign Office official recruited by Soviet intelligence in the mid-1930s, and compare these with records of British diplomats stationed in Washington at the time of the leakage.
This is really very odd. Burgess was still in Washington and there was obviously much to be done before the rescue could take place; yet here was Kim intentionally and unpredictably speeding up the investigation. The effect, according to his own account, was that MI5 homed in fairly rapidly on Maclean as the chief suspect; what is more, they put him under surveillance, thereby making rescue more difficult. Kim admits that he was alarmed at the speed of developments. (It is possible that he was unaware of one piece of evidence mentioned by Patrick Seale as thrown up by the intercepts, namely that
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used to visit New York twice a week; this fitted Maclean and may have been a deciding factor.) Another oddity is that he should have drawn attention to the evidence of the very man who had spoken of a young English journalist in Spain. In the event his initiative seems to have done nothing to improve his position after Maclean’s escape. I find it all so peculiar that I have sometimes toyed with the idea that the real purpose was quite different – perhaps to divert suspicion away from someone important
onto the now burnt-out Maclean – but it simply does not fit the known evidence.
On arrival in London (Kim continues) Guy was to meet a Soviet contact and give him a full briefing. He would then pay an official call on Maclean at the Foreign Office, as head of the American Department. During the meeting he would slip a piece of paper across Maclean’s desk giving the time and place of a rendezvous. There he would put Maclean fully in the picture. From then on the matter would be out of Kim’s hands.
There are one or two obscurities here. Why was it Burgess who had to give the Soviet contact a full briefing and not the other way around? Who was in charge? The Russians in Washington had been kept fully informed. They would have passed their information to the Russians in London, who indeed would have been more up to date than the leisurely Guy. Again, did Maclean have any idea that Burgess would be approaching him? If he did not – and bearing in mind that by May he was near a breakdown – the whole thing must have come as a shock. Alternatively, if the Russians were sufficiently in touch with him to be able to prepare him for the approach, then why was the intervention of Burgess necessary at all? And why, with Maclean in dire peril, did this ‘tired old all-in wrestler’ dilly-dally on the way so casually? Kim had to find a pretext for writing to him and telling him to get a move on. Presumably Guy had failed even to make the initial contact with the Russians, otherwise
they
could have given him the necessary push.
In the end of course the plan succeeded, in the limited sense that Maclean got away. But even in 1951 it was easy for anyone to leave England provided that he had a passport and there were no legal grounds for detaining him. We are left with the question: why was anyone else brought in and particularly why Burgess?
One of the answers obviously lay in the personality and mental state of Maclean. Significantly, Kim’s story says nothing at all about this. Nor are we told whether Maclean was consulted about or even made aware of the escape plan being hatched in Washington; he is purely a lay figure. In reality his mental state must have been as important a factor as the investigation into
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. The evidence suggests that the Russians had long made up their minds that Maclean could not be relied on to effect his own escape. Is it possible that he was actually refusing to see them? I recall being told by someone closely concerned that, after his return from Cairo, Maclean utterly refused to have anything to do with the Foreign Office and eventually had to be coaxed along to a Soho restaurant by a sympathetic colleague who finally prevailed on him to come back. The Russians may well have decided that Maclean needed to be pushed into escape – and preferably by a sympathetic colleague.
How well Burgess and Maclean knew one another personally and overtly never seems to have been satisfactorily established. But the introduction of Burgess into the plan makes much better sense if one assumes that he was already known to Maclean as a Soviet agent. Since there was no guarantee that Maclean would not be pulled in and interrogated before his escape, the advantage of using Guy was that it did not materially add to the information Maclean could give away. Again, if Maclean knew Guy as a long-time fellow agent – perhaps the only one he knew apart from Kim – this might be a valuable psychological aid.
One can accept that Guy was not intended all along to defect with Maclean, and that Kim’s account of his consternation at the news is genuine; otherwise the whole plan becomes unbelievably suicidal.
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(Moreover, if Kim had known Guy was going he would
surely have buried the camera much earlier, rather than leave it until attention was beginning to be focused upon himself.) But we are never told at what point Guy, having helped Maclean to get started, was intended to break off and return to London. If the reason for Guy’s participation was that Maclean could not be relied on to go it alone, the obvious guess is that Guy was meant to stay until he could hand him over to the Russians in France or elsewhere on the Continent. It has usually been assumed – certainly by me – that Guy then lost his nerve, insisted on coming too and was accepted by the Russians because otherwise he was likely to give the whole game away. This remains the most probable theory, particularly since Guy showed signs of wavering even before he left Washington. ‘Don’t you go too’ were Kim’s farewell words to him. But it is also possible that something happened at the last moment which persuaded the Russians that if Guy went back he could not avoid coming under suspicion.
The
Sunday Times
authors, writing before Kim’s book appeared, consider that up to the morning of Friday 25 May Burgess was planning a genuine weekend holiday abroad, but that not later than 10.30 a.m. he changed direction abruptly and put the escape plan into effect. The authors suggest that the reason was the decision taken by the Foreign Office, MI5 and SIS the previous evening to seek the Foreign Secretary’s approval for Maclean to be interrogated on the following Monday. The theory requires that this news should have been telegraphed by SIS to Kim on Thursday night for passing to CIA; that would have enabled Kim to warn the Russians, and the Russians to get a message to Burgess on the Friday morning. All this is just possible, although the timing is very tight; but if London had indeed sent such a
telegram one might have expected it to be mentioned in Kim’s book, especially since its existence would be known to SIS and MI5, and probably CIA and FBI. (Might one also have expected a sharp surge of NKVD traffic between Washington, Moscow and London? It would have made useful further ammunition at Kim’s interrogation by Milmo.) Kim’s account of the final days, which can hardly be far out of line since several people would have known the truth, indicates that he had been told two or three weeks earlier that Maclean would probably be interrogated when the case against him was complete; but it appears that he and Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 man, were by no means waiting on tenterhooks for the long urgent telegram that reached Washington after Burgess and Maclean had fled, as they might have been if they had known exactly when Maclean was to be pulled in. Perhaps the Russians simply decided for some reason unknown to us that the escape plan – which obviously needed to be carried out over a weekend – could not safely wait another seven days, and instructed Burgess on the Friday morning to go ahead. They do not seem to have kept Kim informed of developments – possibly they judged it too risky to contact him.
To sum up, the whole bizarre and convoluted rescue plan becomes slightly easier to explain and justify if we make three assumptions: first, that the Russians decided, not later than January 1951 and perhaps much earlier, that Maclean was in no state to manage his exit alone; second, that Burgess was chosen to help because he and Maclean were already fully interconscious; and third, that Burgess was neither intended nor expected to go too. Nevertheless, the affair leaves an impression of amateurishness quite untypical of the highly professional Soviet intelligence
service; nor does anything fully explain Guy’s leisurely behaviour. There may well be some major factors not yet revealed.
I have suggested that the Russians used Burgess because he was already blown to Maclean. But it could also be that they didn’t have anyone else they could call on. It has often been surmised that Kim, Burgess and Maclean were merely three of many young men at Cambridge and elsewhere who were recruited into Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. We cannot deduce much about this from the events of 1951, but perhaps one small conclusion may be attempted: that there was no one else who was both known to Maclean for what he was and available to be used as an intermediary. Otherwise the Russians might well have called on him in preference to Guy, who was bound to endanger Kim.
We can possibly deduce a little more about Soviet penetration in the 1930s from the extent to which known evidence from defectors and other sources so often seems to come back to just three people – Kim, Maclean and Burgess. Walter Krivitsky mentioned a young English journalist in Spain, and a young man of good family and education who had joined the Foreign Office. Alexander Orlov, if his evidence is valid, spoke of an English journalist in Spain who stammered. Konstantin Volkov claimed to be able to name a British head of counter-espionage in London and two Foreign Office officials. The Washington embassy leakage was ultimately narrowed down to Maclean. It has to be admitted that we do not know for certain that Krivitsky was referring to Kim and Maclean, or Volkov to Kim, Maclean and Burgess. Kim himself – who, of course, has an interest in keeping us all guessing – points out that there is still no basis for supposing that Krivitsky, Volkov and the
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information all
referred to the same Foreign Office official. The details Krivitsky is supposed to have given of his Foreign Office man vary from book to book, and in at least one respect (the reference to Eton and Oxford) are actually untrue of Maclean; but this was apparently discounted by MI5 and it seems a fair assumption that Maclean was meant. Volkov appears to have given no details of his two Foreign Office officials, but if indeed he could name only two that fact could be significant in itself. So we come to this: if during the 1930s – when pro-Soviet ‘idealism’ was at its strongest – the Russians did succeed in recruiting a number of up-and-coming young men in Britain and getting them established in the official world, then one would have expected others besides the Cambridge Three to have been named or indicated by one or more of the sources I have mentioned above, and possibly by others. Perhaps they were; but if so, the facts have not come out and no one in this category – unless one includes Alan Nunn May
†
– appears to have been brought to book. To press the point too far would be to beg the question, but it is worth considering. Put briefly: if there were a lot more just like these three, why haven’t we heard of any of them?
‡
One other KGB activity – or rather inactivity – deserves attention, though I am not suggesting that it represents inefficiency or wrong judgement. The Russians have never seriously exploited the public propaganda value of the Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blake affairs, or tried to extract the maximum political
embarrassment for Britain out of either the fact of their treachery or the information they provided. It is true that for a period in the 1960s there was a policy of glorifying important Soviet agents like Kim, Blake, Sorge and Lonsdale, and the Soviet intelligence apparatus in general. But, over the last quarter of a century, this is nothing to what the Russians could have done – for example with Blake’s voluminous documentary intelligence while it still had some relevance. Nor for that matter was it Moscow that made a cause célèbre out of the Profumo–Keeler–Ivanov affair. Obviously the Russians have had other political priorities. Even the publication of Kim’s own book was indefinitely shelved by the KGB, until the
Sunday Times
and
Observer
articles of 1967 changed the situation, and the further writings foreshadowed in his preface of 1968 have not yet appeared.
Kim Philby’s career ought to tell us more about the Soviet intelligence service than we can learn from dozens of other individual cases because he has written a book which in spite of his omissions says a great deal. Professionally, one of the features of his Soviet espionage career seems to have been the rapport established at an early stage between service and agent, and maintained throughout; they appear to have been speaking the same language. I base this not on the rosy picture Kim paints of the KGB and its predecessors, as a band of high-minded philanthropic equals with never a cross word among them, but on the facts of the affair so far as they can be judged. How much of the credit for the relationship should go to one party and how much to the other is hard to say, as in a successful marriage. I suspect, however, that Kim often called the shots. Indeed it would be foolish to try to run an agent in his position without constantly deferring to his better judgement. With the exception
of the Section IX job, the Russians generally seem to have left it to him to fashion his own SIS career – for example, to decide whether to accept or resist a posting. Even the intervention from Washington which helped to put London on Maclean’s track is represented as his own idea and made on his responsibility, although no doubt he cleared it with the Russians.