The Fatal Englishman (40 page)

In late 1960, at a meeting of the Scientific Research Committee which he attended as British trade delegate, Wynne spotted a Russian who was quite different from the other Soviets, with their unshaven, blackheaded complexions, their nylon shirts and their nicotine-stained coalminer’s hands. This man wore a silk shirt, he had manicured fingers and a plain, dark tie; he seemed – like Yuri Krutikov on Wolfenden’s NUS trip in 1956 – to be of a different pedigree. His name was Oleg Penkovsky and he asked Wynne to pass a message to the CIA.

Back in London Wynne reported the meeting to the head of the SIS station, Dickie Franks. SIS set up a joint operation with the CIA, who at that stage had no one in Moscow. It was agreed that Wynne should act as the go-between because he was not, like Ruari Chisholm, obviously a suspect. In the spring of 1961 he befriended Penkovsky and acted as his courier; he brought back large quantities of information and eventually, on an April trade mission, he brought back Penkovsky himself. In room 360 of the Mount Royal Hotel near Marble Arch in central London, Penkovsky was pumped up with benzedrine and ravenously debriefed by two SIS and two CIA officers. There was a direct line to Washington so that the Americans could simultaneously share the spoils that tumbled out into the spinning tape-recorders. The CIA had initially rebuffed an approach from Penkovsky because they thought he might be a plant; he was too good to be true. This time they were convinced; and their difficulty was in dealing with the demands of Penkovsky, who was disappointed not to be introduced to the Queen. His SIS interrogators thought he was deranged by vanity and by the hugeness of what he had done.

It was certainly important. The United States had been humiliated at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; Gagarin had been the first man in space; the West believed the ‘missile gap’ was in the Soviet Union’s favour. Now there was this excitable Russian colonel telling them that Khrushchev had been bluffing; that the West had more weapons and that many of those the Soviet Union did possess were unusable. They gave him a Minnox camera and sent him back to Moscow, telling him to concentrate on what mattered: ‘Only the top-secret stuff, Oleg, forget the plain secret material.’

Further meetings between Wynne and Penkovsky took place in the autumn at a trade fair in Paris; also on leave in Paris were Ruari and Janet Chisholm. Janet was to work with Penkovsky in Moscow when Wynne could find no plausible ‘trade’ reason to be there. Although all the operational procedures were gone through carefully, Wynne believed Penkovsky was uneasy about the change of contact by which Janet Chisholm became the main recipient of his largesse. SIS in London was also worried about
the Chisholm connection: Janet and Ruari had both known George Blake in Berlin and their files were accordingly marked. Dick White, the head of SIS, chivalrously believed that the KGB would not suspect a lady: he could not use Ruari Chisholm because, thanks to Philby and his friends, the Russians could always work out who the SIS officer was.

SIS decided to get Wynne back into the Soviet Union with instructions to bring Penkovsky out with him for the final time in one of his caravans. Luckily the vogue for ‘trade fairs’ – which seemed to exist principally for the benefit of frenzied espionage activity – was still on: the next was to be in Helsinki in September 1962, and the idea was that Wynne would slip along to Leningrad for a private exhibition soon afterwards.

Through the summer of 1962 Penkovsky continued to cooperate with the Chisholms. He used dead-drop boxes, but also passed film concealed in boxes of sweets, which he gave to Janet Chisholm and even to her children in the park. It was appallingly risky. Wynne, meanwhile, was having trouble with the chassis for his new mobile caravan: various British industrial relations problems and restrictive practices meant that they were out of stock. Wynne wanted to have the thing made in Europe; but SIS patriotically insisted that it be made in Britain – no Soviet defector was coming out beneath the floorboards of any foreign-built rubbish.

Then on 2 July Wynne flew to Moscow, ostensibly to smooth the official way for his Leningrad visit. He was by this time under suspicion: he had not been sufficiently well documented about his forthcoming ‘trade delegations’. Penkovsky had also become disenchanted with Wynne: he drank too much and boasted of his affairs with women.

In a room in the Hotel Ukraina Penkovsky and Wynne exchanged a large quantity of film and talked about plans for Penkovsky’s escape. By now Wynne was being followed; after dinner one night he found his room in the Ukraina had been searched. SIS had been greedy. Although both men had been willing to carry on, they should have stopped the operation at least six months earlier. At this stage Ruari and Janet Chisholm
made their undignified exit, with Martina Browne following close behind.

In late September Greville Wynne’s giant Mobile Exhibition hit the road. The chassis problems meant he had missed the private trade fair in Leningrad, but luckily there was one in Bucharest. In the plains of Rumania Wynne saw vast mobilisations of troops with long wobbling columns of tanks and armoured vehicles. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its perilous height and the Soviet bloc was preparing for world war. What Wynne did not fully understand was that the information he had carried out in the pocket of his sheepskin car coat was enabling Kennedy to win the staring match. Ray Cline, then deputy director of the CIA, said Penkovsky’s intelligence ‘allowed the CIA to follow the progress of the Soviet missile emplacement in Cuba by the hour.’ K also helped Washington grasp the extent of America’s strategic advantage in nuclear missiles.

Wynne was arrested by Soviet counter-intelligence officers in Budapest, where he had driven from Rumania, on 2 November. He was taken to Moscow and imprisoned in the Lubyanka to await trial the following May. Penkovsky was arrested in Moscow. The KGB had recordings of their conversations in the Ukraina, they had tapes and photographs; they had everything they needed.

The KGB initially acted only on suspicion in following Penkovsky; they had no evidence of his treachery until they found the Minnox camera in his apartment. Once he was arrested, SIS made no attempt to rescue or exchange him. This enraged Joe Bulik, the CIA case officer, who suggested that the British release the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale, then in prison in London, in a swap. SIS refused, and in the end Penkovsky was left to the mercy of the gentlemen in the Lubyanka.

Life in the press corps continued in its bizarre, anxious, drunken way. Once Chisholm had gone, those who had had anything to do with him came under increased scrutiny. Wolfenden was watched more closely than ever by the KGB: he had been a friend of the Chisholms; he had liked playing with their children; he had been close to their young mother’s help. He had also met
Greville Wynne at various parties and was more vulnerable than any other Western correspondent. Martin Page was also single, but he was clearly heterosexual; he lived in his own flat and was given protection from the KGB by virtue of working for the
Daily Express.
Lord Beaverbrook was favourably regarded in Moscow because of his support for two Germanies; he had procured British warplanes for the Soviet Union and his correspondents received favours in return.

The
Telegraph
, on the other hand, was implacably anti-Soviet. Its managing editor S.R. Pawley was believed by many people to be friendly to, if not actively involved with, SIS. During the General Strike in 1926 Pawley helped produce the anti-union
British Gazette
, edited by Winston Churchill; in the Second World War he served with the Buffs before being appointed Public Relations Officer to General Eisenhower. He was given an OBE and awarded the Croix de Guerre and the United States Bronze Star. In 1945 he returned to the
Telegraph
to organise its foreign news department, which was to be a separate entity for the first time. He visited eighty-two countries in twelve years and used up five passports.

In December 1968 John Miller, Wolfenden’s successor for the
Telegraph
in Moscow, reported that the Russian weekly newspaper
Nedelya
had published an exposé of the connections between the British press and the intelligence services. Among those journalists it said were linked to Intelligence were the two
Telegraph
men who had hired Wolfenden: its proprietor Lord Hartwell and its managing editor S.R. Pawley.

This in itself proved nothing; but the Russians were always good at knowing who the spies were. Dick White, head of SIS, did not even consider it worth trying to conceal the fact that Ruari Chisholm was the SIS officer in Moscow because, as he told a colleague, ‘they have our complete order of battle.’ SIS had been so often and so comprehensively betrayed from inside that Ted Heath, then a junior foreign office minister, told White in the wake of the George Blake case that he might as well start again on the grounds that the Russians knew the identity of every single SIS officer. Although the various diplomatic expulsions from Moscow over the next twenty-five years contained some
innocent people (including a subsequent
Telegraph
correspondent), the real spooks were always in there too.

During the Second World War there was a close liaison between SIS and senior newspapermen. The connections sprang from a patriotic desire to help the Allies and give no inadvertent comfort to the enemy. The links, however, survived the change of conditions: an unspoken assumption of a common interest and a greater good underlay dealings between SIS and some editors for at least twenty-five years after 1945. The egregious example is David Astor, the liberal-minded editor of the
Observer
, who was persuaded to offer cover for the SIS agent Kim Philby as a journalist in Beirut. (Neither Astor nor the SIS then knew that Philby was also working for the KGB). Sometimes a ‘journalist’ would ask an editor for a foreign job without revealing what his true purpose was. Frank Giles, Wolfenden’s former boss in Paris and a man with impeccable training in diplomatic and intelligence ways, helped Harold Evans, the editor, sniff out one such bogus applicant at the
Sunday Times.
The role of ‘stringer’ (a part-time, non-staff overseas reporter) was a cover much favoured by SIS. A whole section of SIS – the BAQ department – was given over to cultivating these contacts, and another to giving regular off-the-record briefings to correspondents close to the front line of the Cold War. The ethics of these briefings were unclear. The journalists were free to discount what they were told, but their independence was tarnished. As a correspondent in Germany, Neal Ascherson believed it was a duty to treat all information emanating from the West as sceptically as that which came from the other side. He found Jeremy Wolfenden’s failure to do so one of several reasons why his journalism was disappointing.

Even without such complications the pressure on a journalist was intense. No one could leave the Soviet Union without an exit visa, which might be denied at an official’s whim. A Swedish correspondent and his wife suffered nervous breakdowns because they could not make love beneath the hidden gaze of the KGB camera. Martin Page’s successor for the
Express
took an overdose within a week of arriving; Page, who was still in
Moscow, complained to the Foreign Ministry that he was having difficulty getting his man home. They replied that a Soviet Embassy chauffeur in London had developed schizophrenia and was still in an English hospital after eighteen months: the British press took this to be a warning that if they cracked up they would be sent to a Soviet mental institution.

The ‘Moscow twitch’ was a common phenomenon in the reserved diplomatic blocks in which Western journalists lived. The Western press was continuously denigrated in Soviet newspapers, and the lives of Soviet citizens who talked to any foreign correspondents were made unbearable. The cleverest instrument of anxiety developed by the Russians was their legal definition of ‘intelligence’, which was not restricted to the obtaining or relaying of secrets, but included any systematic analysis of printed matter. Thus a background feature article that innocently drew, for instance, on figures of agricultural production to try to give an overall picture of farming life in the Soviet Union could be termed espionage. All reporters lived with the knowledge that if the Cold War took a wrong turning, the Soviet authorities could legally arrest and convict them. The legitimate sentence for carrying out their jobs could be years of hard labour.

There were also provocations. An official might leave a file marked ‘Secret’ on a table while he left the room. The telephone would ring and a female voice would offer herself for company. Frequently such women operated in threes. A reporter for an American newspaper was unwisely tempted; within an hour he found himself with three naked Russian women dancing in his flat and three men in raincoats hammering on the door, saying they believed he was ill-treating Soviet citizens.

Drunk, lonely and banged up in the Ukraina hotel, Jeremy Wolfenden was an absurdly easy prey. In his life, sex had played not just a prominent part, but a part that was associated with laughter, romance and intrigue. He still also had the conviction that he knew how far he could go; his self-confidence and judgement had never previously deserted him.

Although Wolfenden was regarded by others of his generation as a leader and a man of distinct individualism, it is possible to argue that his life was excessively influenced by fashionable
writers. He and Neal Ascherson had clearly been thrilled while at school by the outsiderism of Camus and Sartre; Camus’s
The Myth of Sisyphus
, which took it all a step further by discussing suicide as a rational option, appeared in 1955, when Wolfenden was at Oxford, and was enthusiastically received by him. By this time Ionesco’s plays and Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
were also widely known, giving further moral respectability to an absurdist or nihilist point of view. In 1962 Allan Sillitoe published
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
, the story of a Borstal boy who refuses to win a cross-country race against another institution because to do so would be to accept the terms of the authorities who have imprisoned him. This tale also interested Wolfenden, who for some time had been developing the idea of deliberate under-achievement as the only honest response to a society whose own idea of ‘achievement’ he believed to be false. While all these writers in their way gave intellectual credibility to pessimism, a fellow-old Etonian, Cyril Connolly, had given sloth and despair a modish justification in
Enemies of Promise
, on which Wolfenden had been pretty well suckled, while the baleful influence of Connolly’s
The Unquiet Grave
, with its
angoisse des gares
, scholarship Latin and afternoon
cafards
, also surfaced in Wolfenden’s letters from Paris. Guy Burgess offered the worst living example of degenerate old Etonianism, but was a unique and patently inimitable disaster; Cyril Connolly, on the other hand, preaching privileged gloom from within the pale, may well have been an actively damaging influence.