Last of the Cold War Spies (7 page)

Third, Straight suggested that Blunt was bored with religion at home, and with his father in church, not to mention the twice-daily compulsory chapel services at his school, Marlborough. The argument was that once he entered Cambridge, he was open to other religions, primarily art, and presumably then communism, which was an even more unbelievable point than that of the lack-of-a-father-figure. Yet Straight saw more similarities with Blunt to his own case by forever laboring the idea that he had given away religion early in life.

A fourth alleged similarity was their experience and attitude to education. But Dartington had led Straight directly to communism, whereas Blunt had been at an elite school, for which he had contempt. Yet he never lost his support for what it represented—elitism—which he supported, believing that the masses had to be led. It was hardly a position that would have driven him to communism with its alleged ideals of equality. (Although in this respect, he found he had a quaint kinship with the true impact of communism, which developed its own elite and divided from the masses.) This attitude was also unlikely to have driven Blunt to spy and betray his country.

The ten tourists bound for Russia were told to pack suitably shabby clothes—no smart cravats, ties, jackets, shirts, trousers, and shoes. It was a novel experience for most of them, who had been used to semiformal wear at least on campus and sometimes smart attire at night. The organizers did not wish the group to stand out for fear of reaction from the
proletariat. Better to conform to the impoverished, from whom they would be shielded as much as possible.

The group sailed from London Bridge at the beginning of August. Madge organized ship-board seminars to prepare and lift their expectations. These would distract them from the disturbing start for most concerning the ship’s filthy toilets and cramped two-berth cabins where eight of them slept. “Even for some of us who liked close male company,” Wilfrid Blunt remarked dryly, “this was a bit much.”
⁷

Wilfrid slept on deck, where he was further irritated by a Chinese deck-hand who wanted to show him dirty postcards. “What made it worse,” he remarked, “was that they were pictures of women.”

During the seminars, the lugubrious Blunt sat to one side and listened in silence. He seemed to be weighing the reactions to Madge’s comments. One member raised the matter of the toilets. Madge dismissed it as irrelevant and only something that would be brought up by someone from a privileged bourgeois background. The ship’s crew, the gullible group were reminded, were performing to a higher ideal. They could hardly be expected to concern themselves with such a triviality.

Straight shared neither Wilfrid’s disdain for the ship’s conditions nor his reticence. He was excited. He treated the trip as a true pilgrimage. He was overawed by the sight of a large female deckhand, which he took as symbolic of female emancipation and equality in a more advanced society. It was free of class barriers, both social and sexual. Straight took photos of her with his expensive Leica camera, of which she was wary. He was aglow with the thrill of a voyage to utopia, the new society of the Soviet Union.

Blunt and Fletcher-Cooke left the ship for one day to visit a German medieval town on the Baltic coast. Straight snapped them being lowered over the side in a boat.

When they arrived at Leningrad, a member of the party cried: “Freedom at last,” then stumbled on a sign ordering them not to walk on the grass verge. Brian Simon enjoyed himself. “They [the Russians] seemed to be pushing ahead all the time,” he noted through rose-tinted spectacles. “There was no unemployment. A planned economy seemed to be working.”
⁸

Charles Fletcher-Cooke was more circumspect. He had been given a grant to study libel law under communism and plenty of contacts. But on arrival he found they had disappeared. He learned later of Stalin’s purges.

From the first day in Leningrad they were given the usual tours of monuments to the October Revolution in 1917 and were kept well away from locals. Christopher Mayhew tried to engage them but was shunned. He wondered if it were his bad Russian, but none of the tourists understood that there was real fear in the country. Engagements with foreigners were forbidden. Any breach of this would run the risk of a heavy reprisal.

“They provided a bus [in Leningrad] for us,” Lord Young recalled, “and treated us royally.” Unlike Rycroft, Mayhew, and Wilfrid Blunt, he found the whole trip “great fun” and kept an enthusiastic diary.
⁹

Blunt avoided the dreary factory tours. He took his brother with him to the Hermitage, which took days to view. They both later wrote about it. The Blunts met Lady Muriel Paget, who was working on behalf of the British born “marooned” for one reason or another in Russia. Her flat, Wilfrid noted, had an air of conspiracy, with figures half-glimpsed coming and going.
¹⁰

The tour party took the night train to Moscow and stayed at the Moscow Nova at the corner of Red Square. There seemed to be much going on in the Russian capital. The seventh, and last, International Congress of the Comintern was passing resolutions on forming “popular fronts.” These Soviet-controlled organizations aimed at forming links with socialist parties in all Western European countries. The legitimate cover was an effort to defeat fascism. The second, more clandestine objective was to infiltrate non-Communist groups in order to gain control of public opinion throughout Europe.

The group was shown the Metro. Blunt wrote excitedly: “The Metro . . . is perfect in comfort and efficiency, but it has a Parisian chic and one almost expects a top hat to emerge from its doors.”

It resembled the neo-Baroque music halls of Europe, but it was limited in size—a fraction of the Paris Metro or the London Underground—and was more of a showpiece for visitors with a limited function for the average Muscovite. The gullible visitors were happily sucked into its apparent opulence. Blunt went further in his appreciation by suggesting that buildings in Moscow and Leningrad were superior to the best in London’s Regent Street and London University.

The tourists were very open to accepting the propaganda being thrown at them on their carefully managed tour, especially about increases in production of all industries. If any of the tour noticed anything that indicated backwardness in the economy, or poverty and squalor, they were
reminded that the Soviet Union was in the middle of a five-year plan. All would be sorted out in the medium-term.

There was not a whisper of the forced “collectivization”—the brutal takeover of farms throughout Russia and the Ukraine—that led to the deaths of between 15 and 20 million peasants. Not a word was mentioned of the burgeoning state concentration camps—the gulags that in August 1935 controlled five percent of the population for forced labor (and by 1939 would control ten percent).

Despite their gullibility, none failed to notice the restrictions on foreigners. Mayhew was keen to take photos of the Kremlin surrounded by its high walls. “We weren’t allowed to take shots,” he recalled, “we could do nothing. I got Anthony Blunt to hold my legs while I leant out of the hotel window so that I could take a picture.”
¹¹

Restrictions did not subdue Straight’s enthusiasm. At the hotel, he put on some drab clothes and asked Charles Rycroft if he looked like a proletarian. “No,” Rycroft replied, “you look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.”

Undaunted, Straight later was observed caressing a mantelpiece in the hotel dining room and mumbling: “This is made from Soviet timber, Soviet marble. . . . ”

A highlight in Moscow that excited some of the group was a visit to the Home for the Rehabilitation of Prostitutes. The visitors were led to believe that the women at the home had been taken off the street, given psychiatric counseling, and directed toward retraining in factory work. The Intourist guide (a KGB agent), with the help of the home’s “manager,” babbled on about how the women were guided into seeing the error of their ways by “instruction in the moral values engendered in the State by the teachings of Marx and Lenin.”

“It was run by the KGB,” Young remembered with a smile sixty-one years after the visit. “We were far more interested in the women themselves than how they were being rehabilitated. They were of all ages, and stunning, very beautiful.”

In actuality the KGB controllers of the home were the women’s pimps. It was the practice of Russian intelligence since the czars to use prostitutes to gain information. Stalin’s era had seen the increased development of the “honey-trap,” where women were forced at home and abroad to seduce diplomats, foreign agents, and businessmen into relationships in order to blackmail them. Not every woman at the rehabilitation center was
used this way. But by controlling them, the KGB could pick, choose, and direct whom they liked.

Some of the party wanted to take pictures of the women. They pretended to be interested in the home and its inhabitants. But shots were forbidden. Once a photograph was taken, the women pictured could never be used in operations against Westerners.

Again Blunt was able to leave the tourists with his brother and spend time at the Pushkin Museum, but they did attend a shoe factory. They were also entertained by Noel Charles, the acting counselor at the British Embassy. The dinner they attended at the Embassy, without dinner suits, verged on farce.

Over predinner drinks, Wilfrid was asked if he intended to publish any more diaries. “I have not published my diaries,” Wilfrid replied tartly.

“Oh,” the host replied with a frown.

“Perhaps more poetry?” the hostess inquired, expecting to restore the moment.

“I’m not a poet,” Wilfrid responded. “I think you are confusing me with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, our cousin.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” the host said, ushering them into dinner.

At the table, while other guests chatted, Charles remarked to Blunt: “I thought your brother appeared somewhat young to be the Blunt we were expecting.”

A miffed Wilfrid, aged about 30, overheard the comment and butted in: “Yes, Scawen Blunt would be more than ninety.”

“Oh, and how is he?”

“Dead, actually.”

“I am sorry.”

“I shouldn’t be,” Wilfrid said. “He has been gone since 1922.”
¹²

The evening at the embassy seemed even more bizarre in retrospect to Wilfrid when he learned that the butler at the embassy was a Soviet agent.

For a short time in Moscow, Blunt moved more easily with other members of the party, including Straight and Young. There were conversations, but Straight and Young claimed they could remember nothing of substance. Blunt was keen to engage Straight. He liked to cultivate the wealthy for his own purposes and those of his true masters. He had already ingratiated himself at Trinity with Victor Rothschild, the rich scion of the banking family, whose generosity was appreciated for both causes.
Blunt had benefited from the future lord’s largess in loaning him money for paintings and his willingness to be involved, for the time being, on the fringes of the Comintern’s plans for the United Kingdom. In turn, Blunt had been most supportive when Rothschild was on manslaughter charges (which were later dropped) in 1932 when he killed a cyclist outside Cambridge while speeding in his Bugati.

In Straight’s case, the trip was designed to ease Blunt into a relationship with the teenager, which he did to perfection. Straight was impressed by his cultivated air.

He suggested Blunt was remote and mysterious for most of the tour, which was not Wilfrid’s perspective, for he was with him almost all the time. Nevertheless, according to Yuri Modin, Blunt slipped away alone one night in Moscow to meet Nikolai Bukharin, the Bolshevik and Marxist theoretician and economist. Guy Burgess, a member of the Cambridge Soviet ring of agents, had met him in Moscow a year earlier.
¹³
Bukharin, 46, was then editor of
Izvestia
, the official government newspaper, and was busy writing the new Soviet constitution, but his star was in decline following Stalin’s purges. He was a prominent member of the Comintern, and as such advised Burgess and Blunt on tactics. Their discussions covered methods in selecting and managing likely new agents. Burgess had been advised to change his image and pretend to be a fascist supporter in order to infiltrate right-wing circles in England. Blunt, who had not been as militant and vocal as his lover Burgess, was told to continue his work as an art historian and stay at Cambridge as long as possible.

Straight would have loved to have met such a romanticized figure as Bukharin, but no one at the Moscow Center was ready to allow it. Nor was he then a fully fledged Soviet agent. Yet he and Young did manage to break away from the rest of the party, albeit for a less exciting assignment—an attempt to arrange an exchange of theater companies. The Jooss Ballet Company, which was at Dartington, wished to come to Russia. Straight and Young went to see if the Vakhtangov Theatre Company, named after its director, would like to visit England. They saw the director’s widow and a deal, in French, was struck.