An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (34 page)

Instead of designating dismal public houses and obscure haunts as their meeting places, Kuznetsov took his stooge – who was a physical oddity, preternaturally tall, thin and narrow-chested, with a swan’s neck and pitted lumps bulging from pallid cheeks – to assignations where his cheap tailoring would be conspicuous. Marshall’s appointments diary, which Special Branch seized, showed that he had met Kuznetsov on 2 January 1952 for lunch at the Berkeley Hotel, Piccadilly; on 5 January for dinner at the Pigalle restaurant, Piccadilly; on 14 January for lunch at the Criterion restaurant at Piccadilly Circus; on 7 March for dinner at Chez Auguste in Frith Street, Soho; on 17 March for lunch at the Royal Court Hotel in Sloane Square. The Soviets, it seemed, wanted either to unsettle the English authorities with a spy trial, or to divert them from a more important agent. Marshall’s secrets from Hanslope Park were low grade.

On 13 June, Kuznetsov met Marshall in Wandsworth’s King George’s Park, which was then bisected by a colony of prefabricated houses inhabited by bombed-out Londoners. On one side of the prefabs there was a café, swimming pool, playground and other discreet nooks. But it was to the other side – a wide playing field with three exposed benches and a cinder track – that the Russian guided the youth. Kuznetsov sat on one bench, and cannot have missed the Special Branch party settling on another. Yet he continued in ostentatious confabulation even after the Special Branch men upped from the furthermost bench, and occupied the one nearest to Kuznetsov. Eventually they made their arrests.

Marshall’s line to his interrogators was saturated in self-pity and inverted snobbery. ‘I flew to Moscow arriving there on 31 December 1950, and started work at the British Embassy,’ he stated. ‘I was a misfit at the Embassy from the start. The people there were not in my class of people, and I led a very solitary life. I kept to myself, spoke to as few people as possible, did my work as well as I could, and just waited for the time to go home. I was disgusted with the pettiness of life at the Embassy.’ He soon became ‘impressed by the efforts of the Russian people and by their ideals’. After several days of interrogation, Special Branch summarised Marshall as ‘a morose self-contained individual with few friends … hesitant and indecisive’. Dick White, Director General of MI5, was summoned to Chartwell to report on the case to the Prime Minister. Churchill received him in bed, heard him attentively, offered him a cigar and sent him away for a drink.
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After Marshall’s conviction at the Old Bailey on 10 July 1952, newspapers gave sentimental extenuations of his conduct. The
Daily Mirror
reported his case under the headline ‘Downfall of a dupe!’ and described him as a ‘young misfit’. His parents, who owned a clock that chimed with the Harry Lime theme music from Orson Welles’s film
The Third Man
, gave an interview to the Labour Party’s Sunday newspaper,
Reynolds News
, in which parental distress mingled with prim disapproval of cocktail parties
.
‘Three weeks ago one of the most terrible blows which can fall on a working-class family descended on us. The police snatched a son away.’ Ethel and Bill insisted that he was a dupe. ‘Such a lad never deliberately gave away the secrets of England, the country he loved, to a foreign power.’ They were being shunned in Southfields. ‘Some people will not speak to us now. And when we go out everyone stares. “Fancy bringing up a son like that,” they say.’ When he was sentenced his mother called out, ‘Keep your chin up!’, and now the Marshalls were trying to do the same.
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Six months after Marshall’s conviction, Jim Skardon of MI5 interrogated him at Wormwood Scrubs prison. Marshall protested that he had been ‘absolutely alone at the Old Bailey, and no stronger than a trawler in a contest against the dreadnought of the law. He always felt that he had no chance.’ Once Skardon had got Marshall talking, he was ‘unable to stop a flow of muddled abuse of the capitalist world, as Marshall sees it through the jaundiced eyes of an embittered young Communist. All the ideas to which he gave expression are heard from the lips of Communists at Spouter’s Corner, and it seemed that he had collected together in a photographic sort of way a mass of information tending to show that the common people are oppressed by the middle and upper classes. The ideas simply tumbled from his lips in no sort of order.’ Speaking of his father’s disabling injuries from the wartime bomb, Marshall demanded: ‘What did they care when he was blown out of his bus? All they wanted to know was where he left the bus.’ Towards the Moscow embassy staff he remained bitter. ‘Call themselves gentlemen – beer is not good enough for them, all they want is whisky. And what about the girl who had to be sent home pregnant after one month? Bah! The Russians laugh at ’em! It was the same with our officers in the Middle East – the natives used to smirk at their behaviour.’
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The staff at the British embassy in Moscow in Marshall’s time numbered about a hundred. There were technicians, typists, cipher clerks, radio operators, and other clerical employees: their busy lives were evoked in the published diaries of the embassy’s chirpy night-watchman, Harold Elvin’s
A Cockney in Moscow
. The diplomats – the Ambassador, First Secretary, and attachés – were in a minority. Yet Marshall’s statement after his arrest gave a different impression: he was estranged by the luxurious pride of upper-class snobs, whose attention to him was fitful and derisory until, in lonely humiliation, he agreed to spy. It is more likely that he had been solicited by the Russians in Ismailia, that they flattered him into believing that his low-grade leaks were valued, but always envisaged his discovery by the British authorities. Nevertheless, journalists and their readers were eager to swallow Marshall’s tale that he felt a social reject, stranded out of his class among attachés who were as haughty as archdukes and as icy as alpine glaciers. This explanation, which exculpated the working-class youth but incriminated the high-ups, made Marshall rare among traitors in receiving sympathy. The jury found him guilty, but asked for mercy in the sentencing. The judge condemned him to five years’ imprisonment, instead of the maximum possible of fourteen, which meant that with remission he was freed after three years.
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One of Marshall’s Moscow colleagues, during interview by the security services, said that although Marshall owned sexology books, he doubted if he was ‘a practising pervert of any kind’.
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Worries about the link between homosexuality, diplomacy and espionage after the Burgess and Maclean defections partly explained the illegal methods with which police collected evidence and the vehement tenacity with which the Director of Public Prosecutions pursued the Montagu of Beaulieu case of 1954 (an unpleasant legal stunt in which three young upper-class Englishmen were convicted of sexual activity with two RAF men), for one of the defendants, Peter Wildeblood, was diplomatic correspondent of the
Daily Mail
. As more revelations about Burgess and Maclean emerged during 1955, this aspect was hysterically stressed. The front page of the special ‘EVIL MEN’ issue of the
Sunday Pictorial
(25 September 1955) blared that the ‘sordid secret of homosexuality’ provided a key to the betrayal. Cecil King felt fearful loathing of homosexuality. He severed contact in early middle age with his two closest Oxford friends after belatedly realising their preferences. Thereafter, in private conversation, he often accused influential men of secret inversion. Probably he felt so betrayed and sullied by his Oxford friendships that he incited the ‘Evil Men’ issue of 1955.

‘The wretched, squalid truth about Burgess and Maclean is that they were sex perverts,’ shouted the
Sunday Pictorial
. ‘There has for years existed inside the Foreign Office service a chain or clique of perverted men.’ By their machinations Burgess and Maclean were ‘protected’ and public morality suffered ‘hoodwinking’. Under the headline ‘Danger to Britain’, the story continued: ‘Homosexuals – men who indulge in “unnatural” love for one another – are known to be bad security risks. They are easily won over as traitors. Foreign agents seek them out as spies.’ As an addendum, seven years later, Cudlipp wrote of the ‘Evil Men’ articles: ‘doctors, social workers and the wretched homosexuals themselves recognised this as a sincere attempt to get at the root of a spreading fungus.’ He regretted, though, ‘that nothing practical was done to solve the worst aspect of the problem – the protection of children from the perverts’.
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At a by-election in 1954 there had been elected to Parliament a Tory MP called Captain Henry Kerby. He spoke Russian, and translated for Khrushchev and Bulganin during their 1956 visit to England. ‘Sinister’ was how Peter Rawlinson, Macmillan’s Solicitor-General, described Kerby, ‘a hugely unlikeable man, trusted by few’. He was suspected of leaking the parliamentary party’s soul-searching at the height of the Suez crisis to the lobby correspondent of the
Daily Express
; he was MI5’s plant in the Commons, and reported parliamentary gossip to the security services. When an all-party Civil Liberties group was inaugurated by MPs in 1962–63, Kerby insinuated himself into the post of vice-chairman, and, doubtless, acted as MI5’s mole. After being dropped by MI5 in 1966, he became a Labour Party informant of confidential Tory discussions. Kerby, with this background, gave a front-page interview which the
Sunday Pictorial
headlined: ‘Who is hiding the man who tipped off these sex perverts?’ Kerby decried ‘the “brotherhood” of perverted men’ responsible for the continuing cover-up of ‘flagrant homosexuality’ among diplomatists: ‘there are still many people of this ilk today in the Foreign Service’. Popular indignation should not be frustrated. ‘The British people are still denied the names of those Foreign Office officials who shielded both traitors during their service.’ He wanted a witch-hunt: ‘The archaic tradition of Ministers manfully shouldering and shielding Civil Servants at the Foreign Office is ABSURD and DANGEROUS.’ The ‘positive vetting’ that followed Burgess and Maclean, intended to placate agitators like Kerby, was neither rational nor productive. Alistair Horne, who was an intelligence analyst of Soviet satellite activities in the Balkans, noted that ‘the two most brilliant intelligence operators under whom I worked were both homosexual’. The campaign to identify and exclude such men, he reckoned, ‘caused a loss of talent to the secret services comparable to Louis XIV’s ill-conceived expulsion of the Huguenots from France’.
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The Labour frontbencher George Brown joined in the
Sunday Pictorial
onslaught. ‘This is the jet age. The era of moving damn fast.’ Yet diplomats, he said, were ‘cynical, long-haired young gentlemen toddling from one cocktail party to another, never meeting ordinary people, and proclaiming a belief in nothing at all.’ It is odd that he thought cynicism and scepticism were undesirable traits in diplomacy: did he prefer naïveté and credulity? Interesting, too, that Brown held the Marshall family’s view of cocktails as sinful. Brown was indignant that when he had visited Buenos Aires in 1954, he had been forced to sit through an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland dinner’ with embassy staff. ‘Every attempt I made to discuss Argentina and British prospects there was met with levity … The final curtain was pretty fine disorder, as I lost my temper and displayed how unsuitable I would be for the appointment to the cynical, ineffectual, prattling body we call our diplomatic service.’ This was from a man who was notorious for drunken aggression. Macmillan noted, after giving a confidential briefing to Labour Privy Councillors on Lord Radcliffe’s inquiry into the George Blake spy case in 1962: ‘George Brown was so rude that I could have kicked him out of the room. But it is not malice. He is just common & so ill-bred as not to be conscious of his boorish behaviour. He is one of those few men who is more disagreeable sober than drunk.’
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Bill Astor initiated a Lords debate on the Burgess-Maclean disappearances on 22 November 1955. The government’s attempts at suppression had been misguided, he said: ‘It is far better to get the truth out and finished with than to try to save prestige by hiding it.’ He did not say outright that the government’s White Paper on the subject had been a whitewash, but invoking a comic song of Stanley Holloway’s, likened it to ‘the magistrate in the sad affair of young Albert and the lion, who came to the conclusion “No one was really to blame”’. Some of his remarks made wry retrospective reading once his toleration of the louche Stephen Ward had brought him low. ‘I was one of the few people who never knew Guy Burgess, and apparently I missed a lot,’ Astor said. ‘By all accounts, he was one of the most amusing and clever conversationalists there was, who charmed a great many people. But he was drunken, dirty and a sexual pervert. He had been ever since his school days. He made no pretence about it.’ Astor felt that MPs and officials ‘should have a higher standard of personal conduct, whether they are in their office or not, than those who engage in commercial and private pursuits’. Profumo was not listening.
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After becoming Prime Minister in 1957, Macmillan put his greatest efforts into international diplomacy intended to avert nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. He hoped to revive the era of personal diplomacy during which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin settled the world at Tehran and Yalta, although his first encounter with the Soviet leader at a diplomatic conference in Paris had startled him. ‘Khrushchev is an obscene figure; very fat, with a great paunch; eats and drinks greedily; interrupts boisterously,’ he noted. In 1959, when Macmillan flew to Moscow on a diplomatic initiative, he was first publicly humiliated by the Soviet leaders. ‘I fucked the Prime Minister with a telephone pole,’ said Khrushchev. Then he was granted concessions, which turned his visit into a public relations triumph with his own electorate, although his common ground with the communists remained negligible. Malcolm Muggeridge attended a speech of Macmillan’s in Kiev during this visit. ‘He was dressed in a tweed ensemble suitable for rural occasions, worn, I should suppose, at many a Conservative garden fête. His speech, delivered with old style elegance, referred to how, in the eleventh century, a Ukrainian princess had married into the English royal house. Might not this union, he went on, be regarded as a happy augury for future relations between two countries whose history and traditions had so much in common?’ Muggeridge studied the officials and plain-clothes policemen as Macmillan’s oratory washed over them. ‘In just one or two of their faces I thought I detected a faint trace of wonderment; a tiny flicker of an eyelid, a minute fold of incredulity round the mouth. The others remained inscrutable, their pleasure in their former princess’s London nuptials, if any, well under control.’
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