Abstract
The defection to Moscow of Guy Burgess gave the British media a classic spy story, but was their reporting of events as objective as it seemed?
When you've regularly revisited a half century-old news story for more than five years it is reasonable to wonder at the end of it whether you've found anything new. Especially when the story is as well-trodden a path as the defection of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951.
Guy Burgess: the Spy Who Knew Everyone, written with Jeff Hulbert, is the first book on the Cambridge Spies to be published since MI5 and the Foreign Office released most, but not all, of their files on the two men to the National Archives in October last year. The top line of our book is that we have found in the files the evidence of how brilliantly Burgess outmanoeuvred his colleagues in British intelligence to provide Moscow with foreign policy insights over a decade and a half. The second half of the previously under-told story is how MI5 had its revenge by preventing his returning to Britain, which could have embarrassed them further.
These files, and other documents that Jeff and I have studied, provide fascinating colour and detail about the relationship between the British establishment and the media at the time. They are also relevant to current issues such as the future of the Freedom of Information Act.
Something that those of us of a certain age once knew but may have forgotten is that the Daily Express, owned by Lord Beaverbrook and edited by Arthur Christiansen, was a bloody good newspaper. For a year from 7 June 1951, when they broke the story “Yard Hunts 2 Britons ‘On way to Russia’”, the paper was first on every major revelation. MI5 later found out it was actually Sam White, the Evening Standard's Paris correspondent, who got that first exclusive from a French police source and passed it on to what was then his sister paper.
Investigating a later leak to the Express, this time in London, MI5 was told it had originated from “Percy Hoskins' bar” – the London flat of the Express crime correspondent that was a “rendezvous for civil servants, police officers and officers of the Security Service”. The Express also published a book, The Great Spy Scandal, in 1955, which told the British public more than a government white paper published about the same time. The book included material given to it by Jack Hewit, one of Burgess' lovers.
Later, The Sunday Times got its fair share of exclusives. In 1952 it published a “personal and intimate study” by Cyril Connolly, who knew both men and gave readers new insights into the “missing diplomats” they had heard so much about. Burgess was “immensely energetic, a great talker, reader, boaster, walker, who swam like an otter and drank … like some Rabelaisian bottle-swiper whose thirst was unquenchable”. An MI5 officer was deputed to go through the article looking for clues into the identity of other possible spies.
Burgess stripped bare
In November 1956 the foreign correspondent Richard Hughes, under pressure from The Sunday Times's “foreign manager” Ian Fleming (yes that Ian Fleming) to come up with an exclusive, suggested to the Russians they should put up Burgess at a Moscow press conference and he was the only Fleet Street paper man present. The Express group responded by commissioning an article by the spy himself. Burgess, ever the former Foreign Office spin doctor, responded to a cabled request from the news editor of the Sunday Express with a message that he had prepared an 800-word article “containing some personal experiences and developing Moscow statement”. He demanded that it would have to be published unchanged or he would take up one of the many other media offers he'd received. Alert to any suggestion that he might be cashing in on his new status, he proposed that the fee – “the highest reasonable normal sum” – should be paid to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The RNLI declined to accept the contribution: “We do not accept money from traitors.” Burgess duly filed his copy on time, 11 words short of the 800-word target. There was none of the “personal experiences” he had promised the Sunday Express. Instead, it was predictable stuff, emphasising how much he wanted to help “East-West relations in general and Anglo-Soviet relations in particular”.
The following month, one of the Sunday Express's main rivals, then known as The People, now Sunday People, hit back with an exclusive that readers would have found a lot more interesting than Burgess's views on foreign policy. Certainly the headline – “Guy Burgess stripped bare!” – would have grabbed their attention. It was the first of what the paper called “a profoundly disturbing series of articles” and began: “For 20 years one incredibly vicious man used blackmail and corruption on a colossal scale to worm out Britain's most precious secrets for the rulers of Russia.” It went on: “Men like Burgess are only able to escape detection because they have friends in high places who practise the same terrible vices.”
Over five weeks of Sunday paper sensation, all the “appalling facts” of the story were laid out. The author was anonymous, but the articles were dripping with clues as to who he might be. For example, he was Burgess's “closest friend”; they'd met in 1932 while a fellow at “one of the most famous Oxford colleges”; he'd worked on “the Conservative journal, The Spectator” and now occupied “a high academic post”. With so many fingerprints on the articles it was not surprising that MI5 turned up on the author's doorstep the next day. But it took Peterborough, the diarist of The Daily Telegraph, a full two weeks to confirm that the author was Goronwy Rees, who by now was principal of University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. He was fired by the university. Rees's tabloid demolition of Burgess was rather different from what he had told the Mail at the time of the defection in 1951. Then, Burgess had been one of the nicest and most patriotic Englishmen he knew and “to my knowledge he is not a communist”.
Burgess's own version of events was set out in a book written by Tom Driberg, Labour politician and former William Hickey diarist in the Express. Driberg rewarded Burgess for his co-operation by shipping furniture to his new flat in Moscow. MI5 was intercepting Burgess's mail and was able to see proofs of the book well before the Mail, which bought the serialisation rights, cleared them under the D Notice system. This early notice gave MI5 time to prepare a list of all the things in the book that would embarrass it or the other British intelligence and propaganda agencies for whom Burgess had previously worked.
To try to prevent any further embarrassment it came up with a plan to frighten off Burgess from even thinking of coming back to Britain. It created an exclusive aimed at just one reader – him – and gave it to the Express. The scoop specialist Harry Chapman Pincher was fed a story that Burgess faced prosecution if he ever returned. In fact MI5 did not have any evidence that Burgess was a spy that it could use in court.
These early years of the newspaper coverage of the Burgess and Maclean saga produced a phrase that became a regular part of the English language. In 1955 Henry Fairlie wrote in The Spectator of how the representatives of the “establishment” had moved in after the defection. The term “establishment” had been used by Fairlie and others before, but this was the moment it entered the mainstream. The point Fairlie was making was that the good and great, embarrassed by the treachery of two of their own kind, were at work “in the columns of the more respectable newspapers”. The Times had carried a letter from Lady Violet Bonham Carter who knew Burgess and Maclean, complaining that “the repeated invasion of the privacy” of their families was a “flagrant violation of what, I hope, may still be called the ethics of journalism”. Her son-in-law, Jo Grimond, who had been at school with Burgess, raised the matter in the Commons.
Spy mania hits the Street
Another Eton contemporary of Burgess, David Astor, spoke up for Maclean's wife in his paper, The Observer. A further Eton chum and Fleet Street editor was more discreet about his connections. Just before Burgess defected he had discussed joining The Daily Telegraph with the editor-in-chief, Michael Berry, later Baron Hartwell.
Fleet Street's search for exclusives did not always end well. In 1977 The Times ran a story by Peter Hennessy (now Baron Hennessy of Nympsfield) headlined “Fourth man in inquiry on Philby, Burgess and Maclean”. Hennessy named a Cambridge don called Donald Beves, who had died in 1961, as being “suspected by security circles of having played a crucial role” in the transformation of the three men from Cambridge undergraduates to Soviet agents. Two weeks later Hennessy wrote to his own paper to “retract in full the grievous allegation”.
Two years later, the real fourth man – also a Cambridge academic whose five-letter name began with B, which may explain the earlier error – was revealed by Private Eye to be Sir Anthony Blunt after the publication of a book by the BBC World at One editor Andrew Boyle. For legal reasons Boyle had not given Blunt's name.
A whole new Cambridge spies industry opened up in Fleet Street in search of more traitors with some of the most intense competition happening within Times newspapers, where the daily and Sunday titles were both owned by Roy Thomson but had different editors in William Rees-Mogg and Harold Evans.
Phillip Knightley led a team of no fewer than 13 Sunday Times reporters assigned by Evans to follow up the naming of Blunt. In the aftermath of The Times debacle about the naming of Beves, Knightley had picked up from Rees-Mogg some clues about the identity of a fifth spy. The Times editor, perhaps bruised by his previous failure, didn't seem keen to follow them up himself. So Knightley did and the reporters David Leitch and Barrie Penrose got two front-page stories climaxing in their confrontation with a former civil servant then living in Rome. On Sunday 23 November 1979, a front page headline ran: “John Cairncross, ex F.O. confesses to Sunday Times. I was spy for Soviets”. Phillip Knightley sat down and wrote a memo to Harold Evans “to set down how we came to scoop The Times twice on its own story”.
During the 12 years Burgess spent in the Soviet Union before he died in 1963 he got to know many of the British press corps, none better than The Daily Telegraph correspondent, Jeremy Wolfenden. He had many things in common with Burgess. Both had been to Eton, were described at some point as “one of the most brilliant men” of their generations, had connections with both MI5 and the KGB, were heavy drinkers, chain smokers and unashamedly gay. One journalist told MI5 that he thought Wolfenden and Burgess were “currently involved in a close homosexual relationship” and The Telegraph correspondent would “know more of Burgess's secrets than any other living person”. By coincidence Wolfenden's father was the chairman of the inquiry that recommended reform of the law of homosexuality.
Many of the details of what MI5 knew about reporters and Burgess, including the two Observer journalists suspected of posting letters for him to avoid MI5's interception, are in the 400 files released to the National Archives last October. But they are not the full story of Burgess and Maclean. More than 20 per cent of the documents remain closed and many of those that were released have redactions where text has been covered up. In addition, MI5's personal files on key figures such as Lord Rothschild and Sir Harold Nicolson are still secret. A freedom of information request we submitted to see a report requested by King George VI has been rejected under an exemption to the FoI act “for communications with, or on behalf of, the Sovereign”.
Sixty-five years after their country's biggest ever spy scandal, there is still material the British public is not allowed to see. But thanks to the files that are open we are now able to enjoy Whitehall's frustration at its occasional inability to manage the media as it would wish.
In November 1956 Burgess, who subscribed to The Spectator every week from Moscow, wrote a long letter to the weekly magazine, based on a textual analysis of an extract from the collected works of Lenin, to dispute what an anonymous reviewer had said about a serialisation of his biography by Tom Driberg.
It was published but was all rather above even the readers of The Spectator. The following year Burgess sent in a review of a book about Wolfgang zu Putlitz, a German diplomat who provided information to the British secret service during World War Two and later became a Communist. It was the first book review Burgess had written for the magazine since his days at Cambridge. During the saga MI5, who were tracking the correspondence between Burgess and The Spectator, had pressure brought on Ian Gilmour the owner and editor (and later a leading “wet” minister in a Thatcher cabinet). At one point the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Patrick Reilly, wrote to the Foreign Office; “Incidentally do you think it is really going a bit far for The Spectator to start using Burgess as a reviewer? What on earth does Ian Gilmour think he is doing?”
When the book review was published Gilmour's “Spectator Diary” noted that he had received a request to send it first for vetting. “I would have thought it a safe assumption that any disclosures Burgess had to make would have been made six years ago to the Russians, rather than now in these columns”.
