My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (25 page)

The illegality of the arrest was duly lambasted in court, but worse was to follow. Coplon, though caught red-handed, was resolved to fight to the end. She dismissed her first counsel on the
grounds that he was too conciliatory to the prosecution; he was probably aiming, not at acquittal, which seemed a hopeless prospect, but at a mitigation of sentence. Coplon would have none of it. With a second counsel to assist her, she went over to the counterattack and began harrying the FBI witnesses. She tied them in such knots that they admitted to tapping not only her telephone, but telephones in the headquarters of the United Nations. The court proceedings began to damage the public image of the FBI so severely that Hoover incontinently dropped the charges. It was characteristic of him that he reacted to the fiasco by finding a scapegoat. Harvey Flemming, the principal FBI witness at the trial, was fired. But Coplon went free. It was the triumph of a brave woman. Whenever her name was mentioned thereafter in the Department of Justice, an abusive adjective was attached.

The failure of the FBI in the Coplon case was by no means unique, or even unusual. I cannot speak of the record of the FBI in checking crime in the United States. With that side of its activities I had nothing to do. But I had a great deal to do with its counterespionage work, and its record in the field was more conspicuous for failure than for success. Hoover did not catch Maclean or Burgess; he did not catch Fuchs, and he would not have caught the rest if the British had not caught Fuchs and worked brilliantly on his tangled emotions; he did not catch Lonsdale; he did not catch Abel for years, and then only because Hayhanen delivered him up on a platter; he did not even catch me. If ever there was a bubble reputation, it is Hoover’s.

But Hoover is a great politician. His blanket methods and ruthless authoritarianism are the wrong weapons for the subtle world of intelligence. But they have other uses. They enable Hoover to collect and file away a vast amount of information about the personal lives of millions of his fellow-countrymen. This has long been common knowledge, and it has brought Hoover rich dividends from the purse of the American taxpayer. There are few people in the world without skeletons in their cupboards which they would prefer to remain decently forgotten. The covert record shows that
a distressing number of American congressmen have pasts that do not bear minute scrutiny. And what about the covert record held by Hoover? The mere existence of the huge FBI filing system has deterred many from attacking Hoover’s totalitarian empire.

I am speaking of the McCarthy period. It might have been thought that Hoover would have resented the infringement of his monopoly by a Senator who claimed to have effected, single-handed, deep penetration of the Communist conspiracy in the State Department and other branches of the United States Government. Not so. Hoover knew that by merely opening his mouth he could have blasted McCarthy’s pretensions for ever. But why should he have done so? By raising a nationwide spy-fever, McCarthy was creating conditions in which no congressman would dare to oppose increased appropriation for the FBI. What Hoover really thought of McCarthy became evident at my first meeting with him when I put the question point-blank. “Well,” said Hoover in reply, “I often meet Joe at the racetrack, but he has never given me a winner yet.”

My first house in Washington was off Connecticut Avenue, almost directly opposite that of Johnny Boyd, the Assistant Director of the FBI in charge of security. It seemed a good idea to camp at the mouth of the lion’s den for a short spell—but only for a short spell. The house was a small one, and I was soon arguing the need for moving to larger quarters at a safer distance, eventually settling on a place about half a mile up Nebraska Avenue. Boyd was my principal contact with the FBI, and I saw him several times a week, either in his office or at home. He was one of Hoover’s original gunmen in Chicago—“the guy who always went in first” when there was shooting to be done—and he looked the part. He was short and immensely stocky, and must have been hard as nails before he developed a paunch, jowls and the complexion that suggests a stroke in the offing. He had no intellectual interests whatsoever. His favourite amusement was to play filthy records to women visiting his house for the first time. He had other childish streaks, including the tough, direct ruthlessness of a child. By any objective standard, he was a dreadful man, but I could not help growing very fond of him.

Boyd lost no time in letting me know that he disapproved of my close contact with CIA. He seemed genuinely disgusted with its cosmopolitan airs. “What do they teach them in CIA, son?” he said to me one evening. “Why, how to use knives and forks, how to marry rich wives.” He also had a deep suspicion of the social graces of the United States Navy. But, as I had thought in London, I got on with him provided that I did not try to be clever and endured his heavy taunts about my CIA friends. The first time I felt the rough edge of his tongue was (very fortunately) just before Peter Dwyer left for Ottawa. It so happened that the MI5 representative in Washington, Geoffrey Paterson, and we, received parallel instructions from London to take up a certain matter with the FBI. Paterson got in first and received a brush-off; he was told it was none of London’s business. When Dwyer and I arrived soon afterwards to raise the same question, Boyd gave us a wicked look. “So that’s the game,” he said, laying down his cigar and purpling. “Geoffrey comes in and I give him a flea in the ear. Then what happens? Then you two come along and try it on . . .” There followed a ten minutes’ tongue-lashing against which all protests were useless. His fury was quite sincere, although out of all proportion to the nature of the issue which we had been told to discuss with him. What enraged him was a simple matter of office politics. It was his job to play MI5 and SIS off against one another so as to exploit any differences between us. And here we were, clearly ganging up against him. Yet that same evening he telephoned to ask me over to drink bourbon deep into the night. Not a word was said about the unpleasantness of the morning.

A sluggish trickle of information about the Embassy leakage continued to reach us. Apart from Dwyer, who was soon to leave, three members of the British Embassy staff had access to the material: Paterson, myself and Bobby Mackenzie,
^*
the Embassy Security Officer, who was an old colleague of mine from Section V days. In the FBI, the officials concerned were Ladd, Lishman, who was
then head of the anti-Communist section, and Bob Lamphere, a nice puddingy native of Ohio who was responsible for the detailed analysis of the case on the American side. We were still far from identifying the source in the British Embassy, but during the winter of 1949-50 the net began to close around the Los Alamos source. The choice seemed to lie between two scientists of great distinction: Dr. Peierls and Dr. Fuchs.
^*
It was Dwyer’s last direct service to SIS that, by a brilliant piece of analysis of the known movements of the two men, he conclusively eliminated Peierls. Thereafter, the finger pointed unwaveringly at Fuchs.

The usual trouble arose over the nature of the evidence, which was not valid in law, but Fuchs, unlike Judith Coplon, provided the evidence against himself. Shortly after Dwyer had identified him as the Los Alamos source, he set sail for England on a routine visit. He was arrested on arrival and passed to William Skardon of MI5, for interrogation. Skardon succeeded in winning his confidence to such an extent that Fuchs not only confessed his own part in the business, but also identified from photographs his contact in the United States, Harry Gold. From Gold, who was also in a talkative mood, the chain led inexorably to the Rosenbergs who were duly electrocuted. It is worth mentioning that Eisenhower explained his refusal to reprieve Ethel Rosenberg on the grounds that, if he did, the Russians in future would use only women as spies. It was an attitude worthy of the most pedestrian of United States’ presidents.

There was another remarkable casualty of the Fuchs case. Hoover, who had contributed nothing to his capture, was determined to extract maximum political capital from the affair for himself. To that end, he needed to show that he had material of his own, and such material could only be obtained through the interrogation of the prisoner by one of his own men. He announced his intention of sending Lishman to London to question Fuchs in his cell. Paterson
and I both received instructions to tell him that such a course was quite out of the question. Fuchs was in custody awaiting trial, and it was just impossible to arrange for his interrogation by anyone, let alone by the agent of a foreign power. I found Hoover in a state of high excitement, and in no mood to be impressed by the majesty of British law. He refused to budge. Lishman was sent to London, with peremptory instructions to see Fuchs, or else. The answer was “or else.” When I heard that Lishman was back, I called at his office, a fairly grand, carpeted affair. Someone else was in his chair. Lishman himself I found a few doors farther down the corridor, writing on the corner of a desk in a small room tenanted by four junior agents. The poor devil was bloody and very bowed. He looked at me as if it had been my fault. Such was life under Hoover.

In the summer of 1950, I received a letter from Guy Burgess. “I have a shock for you,” he began. “I have just been posted to Washington.” He suggested that I should put him up for a few days until he had found a flat for himself. This posed a problem. In normal circumstances, it would have been quite wrong for two secret operatives to occupy the same premises. But the circumstances were not normal. From the earliest days, our careers had intertwined. He had collected money for me at Cambridge after the revolt of the Austrian Schützbund in February 1934. I had put forward his name as a possible recruit for the Soviet service, a debt which he later repaid by smoothing my entry into the British secret service. In between, he had acted as courier for me in Spain. In 1940, we had worked closely together in SIS, and he had paid me a professional visit in Turkey in 1948. Our association was therefore well-known, and it was already certain that any serious investigation of either of us would reveal these past links. It seemed that there could be no real professional objection to him staying with me.

There was another consideration which inclined me towards agreeing with Burgess’s suggestion. I knew from the files that his record was quite clean, in the sense that there was nothing recorded against him politically. But he was very apt to get into personal scrapes of a spectacular nature. A colleague in the Foreign Office,
now an Ambassador, had pushed him down the steps of the Gargoyle Club, injuring his skull. There had been trouble in Dublin and in Tangier. It occurred to me that he was much less likely to make himself conspicuous in my household than in a bachelor flat where every evening would find him footloose. I had scarcely replied to signify agreement when Mackenzie showed me a letter he had received from Carey-Foster, then head of the Foreign Office security branch, warning him about Burgess’s arrival. Carey-Foster explained that his eccentricities would be more easily overlooked in a large Embassy than in a small one. He gave a summary of his past peccadilloes, and said that worse might be in store. “What does he mean ‘worse,’” muttered Mackenzie. “Goats?” I told him I knew Guy well, that he would be staying with me, and that I would keep an eye on him. He seemed happy that there was someone else who was ready to share the responsibility.

In the light of what was to come, my decision to fall in with Burgess’s suggestion looks like a bad mistake. I have indeed given it much thought in the past fifteen years. It will not do to plead that the twist events were to take a few months later were utterly unforeseeable; security precautions are designed to give protection from the unforeseeable. But, on reflection, I think that my decision to accommodate Burgess speeded by a few weeks at most the focussing of the spotlight on me. It also lent vigour to the letter which Bedell Smith sent to the Chief insisting on my removal from the scene. It may even have been lucky that suspicion fell on me prematurely, in the sense that it crystallized before the evidence was strong enough to bring me to court.

Burgess’s arrival raised an issue that I could not decide by myself. Should he or should he not be let into the secret of the British Embassy source which was still under investigation? The decision to initiate him was taken after I had made two lone motor trips to points outside Washington. I was told that the balance of opinion was that Guy’s special knowledge of the problem might be helpful. I therefore took Guy fully into our confidence, briefing him in the greatest detail, and the subject remained under constant discussion
between us. My difficulty was that I had only seen Maclean twice, and briefly, in fourteen years. I had no idea where he lived, how he lived, or indeed anything at all about his circumstances. But it is now time to turn to the case, to explain how it stood, and the problems involved.

The development of the affair was giving me deep anxiety. It was beset by imponderables, the assessment of which could be little better than guesswork. We had received some dozen reports referring to the source, who appeared in the documents under the code-name Homer, but little progress had been made towards identifying him. The FBI was still sending us reams about the Embassy charladies, and the enquiry into our menial personnel was spinning itself out endlessly. To me, this remains the most inexplicable feature of the whole affair. There was already evidence that the Foreign Office had been penetrated. Both Krivitsky and Volkov had said so. There was, of course, nothing to suggest that the three sources referred to the same man. There is still no basis for that supposition. But if the assumption had been made, if in particular the Krivitsky material had been studied in relation to the Washington leak, a search among the diplomats would have started without loss of time—perhaps even before I appeared on the scene.

But another feature of the case was even more puzzling. I must confess to having enjoyed a great advantage in that I was pretty certain from the beginning who was involved. But, even discounting that advantage, it seemed to me quite obvious from the nature of the reports that we were not dealing with the petty agent emptying waste-paper baskets and snatching the odd carbon. Some of the reports dealt with political problems of some complexity, and on more than one occasion Homer was spoken of with respect. There could be no real doubt that we were dealing with a man of stature. The reluctance to initiate enquiries along these lines can only be attributed to a genuine mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the Establishment could do such things. The existence of such a block was amply borne out by the commentaries that followed the disappearance of Maclean and
Burgess—and for that matter my own. Explanations of extraordinary silliness were offered in preference to the obvious truth.