Richard Davenport-Hines - Enemies Within - Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © 2018 Richard Davenport-Hines

Cover design by Kate Gaughran

Cover images © Tallandier/bridgemanimages.com; © Keystone/Getty Images; © Lytton Strachey/Frances Partridge/Getty Images; © Keystone/Getty Images (photographs); Shutterstock.com(background texture & flag)

Richard Davenport-Hines asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007516674

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780007516681

Version: 2017-12-11

With love for † Rory Benet Allan

With gratitude to the Warden and Fellows of All Souls

The lie is a European power.

FERDINAND LASSALLE

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

CHARLES DARWIN

No great spy has been a short-term man.

SIR JOHN MASTERMAN

Men are classed less by achievement than by failure to achieve the impossible.

SIR ROBERT VANSITTART

Men go in herds: but every woman counts.

BLANCHE WARRE-CORNISH

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Glossary

Illustration Credits

Aims

PART ONE: Rules of the Game

Chapter 1: The Moscow Apparatus

Tsarist Russia

Leninist Russia

Stalinist Russia

The Great Illegals

Soviet espionage in foreign missions

The political culture of everlasting distrust

Chapter 2: The Intelligence Division

Pre-Victorian espionage

Victorian espionage

Edwardian espionage

Chapter 3: The Whitehall Frame of Mind

The age of intelligence

The Flapper Vote

Security Service staffing

Office cultures and manly trust

Chapter 4: The Vigilance Detectives

The uprising of the Metropolitan Police

Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald

George Slocombe in Paris

The Zinoviev letter and the ARCOS raid

MI5 investigates the Ewer–Hayes network

Chapter 5: The Cipher Spies

The Communications Department

Ernest Oldham

Hans Pieck and John King

Walter Krivitsky

Chapter 6: The Blueprint Spies

Industrial mobilization and espionage

Propaganda against armaments manufacturers

MI5 watch Wilfrid Vernon

MI5 watch Percy Glading

The trial of Glading

PART TWO: Asking for Trouble

Chapter 7: The Little Clans

School influences stronger than parental examples

Kim Philby at Westminster

Donald Maclean at Gresham’s

Guy Burgess at Eton and Dartmouth

Anthony Blunt at Marlborough

Chapter 8: The Cambridge Cell

Undergraduates in the 1920s

Marxist converts after the 1931 crisis

Oxford compared to Cambridge

Stamping out the bourgeoisie

Chapter 9: The Vienna Comrades

Red Vienna

Anti-fascist activism

Philby’s recruitment as an agent

Chapter 10: The Ring of Five

The induction of Philby, Maclean and Burgess

David Footman and Dick White

The recruitment of Blunt and Cairncross

Maclean in Paris

Philby in Spain: Burgess in Section D

Goronwy Rees at All Souls

Chapter 11: The People’s War

Emergency recruitment

The United States

Security Service vetting

Wartime London

‘Better Communism than Nazism’

‘Softening the oaken heart of England’

Chapter 12: The Desk Officers

Modrzhinskaya in Moscow

Philby at SIS

Maclean in London and Washington

Burgess desk-hopping

Blunt in MI5

Cairncross hooks BOSS

Chapter 13: The Atomic Spies

Alan Nunn May

Klaus Fuchs

Harwell and Semipalatinsk

Chapter 14: The Cold War

Dictaphones behind the wainscots?

Contending priorities for MI5

Anglo-American attitudes

A seizure in Istanbul

Chapter 15: The Alcoholic Panic

Philby’s dry martinis

Burgess’s dégringolade

Maclean’s breakdowns

The VENONA crisis

PART THREE: Settling the Score

Chapter 16: The Missing Diplomats

‘All agog about the two Missing Diplomats’

‘As if evidence was the test of truth!’

States of denial

Chapter 17: The Establishment

Subversive rumours

William Marshall

‘The Third Man’

George Blake

Class McCarthyism

Chapter 18: The Brotherhood of Perverted Men

The Cadogan committee

‘Friends in high places’

John Vassall

Charles Fletcher-Cooke

Chapter 19: The Exiles

Burgess and Maclean in Moscow

Philby in Beirut

Bestsellers

Oleg Lyalin in London

Chapter 20: The Mole Hunts

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

Robin Zaehner and Stuart Hampshire

Anthony Blunt and Andrew Boyle

‘Only out for the money’

Maurice Oldfield and Chapman Pincher

Envoi

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Richard Davenport-Hines

About the Publisher

In MI5 files the symbol @ is used to indicate an alias, and repetitions of @ indicate a variety of aliases or codenames. I have followed this practice in the text.

– Sir Robert Vansittart, head of the Foreign Office. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

– Cecil L’Estrange Malone, Leninist MP for Leyton East. (Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock)

– Jack Hayes, the MP whose detective agency manned by aggrieved ex-policemen spied for Moscow. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

– MI5’s agent M/1, Graham Pollard. (Esther Potter)

– MI5’s agent M/12, Olga Gray. (Valerie Lippay)

– Percy Glading, leader of the Woolwich Arsenal and Holland Road spy ring. (Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy Stock Photo)

– Wilfrid Vernon, the MP who filched aviation secrets for Stalinist Russia and spoke up for Maoist China. (Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock)

– Maurice Dobb, Cambridge economist. (Peter Lofts)

– Anthony Blunt boating party on the River Ouse in 1930. (Lytton Strachey/Frances Partridge/Getty Images)

– Moscow’s talent scout Edith Tudor-Hart. (Attributed to Edith Tudor-Hart; print by Joanna Kane. Edith Tudor-Hart. National Galleries of Scotland / Archive presented by Wolfgang Suschitzky 2004. © Copyright held jointly by Peter Suschitzky, Julie Donat and Misha Donat)

– Pall Mall during the Blitz. (Central Press/Getty Images)