My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (26 page)

Yet I knew quite well that this bizarre situation could not go on for ever. One day, any day, somebody in London or Washington would look into his shaving mirror and find inspiration there. Once investigation of the diplomats started, it would certainly yield the right answer, sooner or later. The great question was: How soon? How late?

From discussion with my friends at meetings outside Washington, two main points emerged. First, it was essential to rescue Maclean before the net closed on him. That was accepted as an axiom. No question was raised about his future potential to the Soviet Union in the event of his escape. It was quite enough that he was an old Comrade. Some readers, prisoners of prejudice, may find this hard to swallow. I do not ask them to do so. But they cannot blame me if they suffer unpleasant shocks in future cases. Second, it was desirable that Maclean should stay in his post as long as possible. After his departure, it was said blandly that he was “only” head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, and thus had little access to high-grade information. But it is nonsense to suppose that a resolute and experienced operator occupying a senior post in the Foreign Office can have access only to papers that are placed on his desk in the ordinary course of duty. I have already shown that I gained access to the files of British agents in the Soviet Union when I was supposed to be chivvying Germans in Spain. In short, our duty was to get Maclean to safety, but not before it was necessary.

But there were two further complications. I had been sent to the United States for a two-year tour of duty, and I could therefore expect to be replaced in the autumn of 1951. I had no idea what my next posting would be; it could easily have been Cairo or Singapore, far out of touch with the Maclean case. Groping in partial darkness as we were, it seemed safest to get Maclean away by the middle of 1951 at the latest. The second complication arose from Burgess’s position. He was emphatically not at home in the Foreign
Office, for which he had neither the right temperament nor the right personality. He had been thinking for some time of getting out, and had one or two irons in the fire in Fleet Street. As a result, his work at the Foreign Office had suffered, so much so that it looked like a close thing between resignation and dismissal. In any case, he was anxious to get back to England.

In somebody’s mind—I do not know whose—the two ideas merged: Burgess’s return to London and the rescue of Maclean. If Burgess returned to London from the British Embassy in Washington, it seemed natural that he should call on the head of the American Department. He would be well placed to set the ball rolling for the rescue operation. It would have been possible for him to have resigned in Washington, and returned to London without fuss. But it might have looked a bit odd if he had gone back voluntarily shortly before the disappearance of Maclean. Matters had to be so arranged that he was sent back, willy-nilly. It was the sort of project in which Burgess delighted, and he brought it off in the simplest possible way. Three times in one day he was booked for speeding in the state of Virginia, and the Governor reacted just as we had hoped. He sent a furious protest to the State Department against this flagrant abuse of diplomatic privilege, which was then brought to the attention of the Ambassador. Within a few days, Burgess was regretfully informed that he would have to leave.

As soon as the possibility of Burgess helping in the rescue operation emerged from our discussions, great attention was paid to my own position. Despite all precautions, Burgess might be seen with Maclean and enquiry into his activity might lead to doubts about me. There seemed very little that could be done about it, but it occurred to me that I could help to divert suspicion by making a positive contribution to the solution of the British Embassy case. Hitherto, I had lain low, letting the FBI and MI5 do what they could. Now that the rescue plan was taking shape, there was no reason why I should not give the investigation a nudge in the right direction.

To that end, I wrote a memorandum to Head Office, suggesting that we might be wasting our time in exhaustive investigations of the Embassy menials. I recalled the statements of Krivitsky to the best of my ability from memory. He had said that the head of the Soviet intelligence for Western Europe had recruited in the middle thirties a young man who had gone into the Foreign Office. He was of good family, and had been educated at Eton and Oxford. He was an idealist, working without payment. I suggested that these data, such as they were, should be matched against the records of diplomats stationed in Washington between the relevant dates in 1944–5 of the known leakages. I received a reply from Vivian, assuring me that that aspect of the case had been very much “in their minds.” But there was no evidence on file that anything had been done about it, and the speed, the disconcerting speed, of later developments suggested that the idea must have been relatively new.

A match of the Krivitsky material with the reports of the Embassy leakage yielded a short list of perhaps six names which was sent to us by London, with the comment that intensive enquiries were in progress. The list included the names of Roger Makins,
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Paul Gore-Booth,
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Michael Wright and Donald Maclean. (It may be objected that Maclean was not at either Eton or Oxford. He was not. But MI5 did not attach too much weight to that detail, on the ground that foreigners often assume that all well-born young Englishmen must go to Eton and Oxford.) The list provided Bobby Mackenzie with one of his finest hours. He offered me short odds on Gore-Booth. Why? He had been educated at Eton and Oxford; he had entered the Foreign Office in the middle thirties; he was a classical scholar of distinction to whom the code-name Homer would be appropriate; Homer, in its Russian form of Gomer, was a near-anagram of Gore; as for ideals, Gore-Booth was a Christian
Scientist and a teetotaller. What more could I want? It was a neat bit of work, good enough, I hoped, to give London pause for a few days.

Burgess packed up and left. We dined together on his last evening in a Chinese restaurant where each booth had “personalized music” which helped to drown our voices. We went over the plan step by step. He was to meet a Soviet contact on arrival in London, and give him a full briefing. He was then to call on Maclean at his office armed with a sheet of paper, giving the time and place of rendezvous, which he would slip across the desk. He would then meet Maclean and put him fully in the picture. From then on, the matter was out of my hands. Burgess did not look too happy, and I must have had an inkling of what was on his mind. When I drove him to the station next morning, my last words, spoken only half-jocularly, were: “Don’t you go too.”

MI5 were not particularly impressed by Mackenzie’s brainwave about Gore-Booth. Confronted by their short list, they were looking for the odd man out, the man who conformed least to pattern. It was intelligent procedure, and it led them to put Maclean at the top of the list. He had never enjoyed the social round of the diplomatic corps. He had preferred the society of independent minds. By contrast, the others on the list were depressingly conformist. In communicating to us their conclusions, MI5 informed us that Maclean would probably be approached when the case against him was complete. Meanwhile, certain categories of Foreign Office paper would be withheld from him, and his movements would be put under surveillance. These last two decisions, taken presumably to soothe the Americans, were foolish. But I saw no reason to challenge them. I judged that they might serve me in good stead if anything went wrong. I was quite right.

I was nevertheless alarmed by the speed with which the affair was developing, and at the next meeting with my Soviet contact told him of the pressing need for haste. I was also given a pretext for writing to Burgess direct. The Embassy transport officer had twice asked me what was to be done about the Lincoln Continental which
Burgess had left in the car park. So I wrote to Burgess in pressing terms, telling him that if he did not act at once it would be too late—because I would send his car to the scrap-heap. There was nothing more I could do.

One morning, at a horribly early hour, Geoffrey Paterson called me by telephone. He explained that he had just received an enormously long Most Immediate telegram from London. It would take him all day to decipher without help, and he had just sent his secretary on a week’s leave. Could he borrow mine? I made the necessary arrangements and sat back to compose myself. This was almost certainly it. Was Maclean in the bag? Had Maclean got away? I was itching to rush round to the Embassy and lend a third hand to the telegram. But it was clearly wiser to stick to my usual routine as if nothing had happened. When I reached the Embassy, I went straight to Paterson’s office. He looked grey. “Kim,” he said in a half-whisper, “the bird has flown.” I registered dawning horror (I hope). “What bird? Not Maclean?” “Yes,” he answered. “But there’s worse than that . . .
Guy Burgess
has gone with him.” At that, my consternation was no pretence.

XII. O
RDEAL

Burgess’s departure with Maclean faced me with a fateful decision. From the earliest discussions of Maclean’s escape, my Soviet colleagues had been mindful that something might go wrong and put me in danger. To meet such a possibility, we had elaborated an escape plan for myself, to be put into effect at my discretion in case of extreme emergency. It was clear that the departure of Burgess gave rise to an emergency. But was it extreme emergency? I had to put aside the decision for a few hours, in order to deal with two immediate problems. One was to get rid of certain compromising equipment hidden in my house. The other was to get the feeling of the FBI, since that might affect the details of my escape. Getting rid of the equipment was perhaps the most urgent task of the two, but I decided to let it wait. It would have looked very odd if I had left the Embassy immediately after hearing the news; and Paterson’s telegram gave me a good excuse for testing the FBI without delay. The telegram concluded with instructions that he should inform Ladd of its contents. Paterson, doubtless thinking that his face would be pretty red by the end of the interview, asked me if I would accompany him on the grounds that two red faces might be better than
one. The fact that my face was probably more grey than red did not alter the principle of the thing.

Ladd took the news with remarkable calm. A few flashes of mischief suggested that he might almost be pleased that the bloody British had made a mess of it. But I guessed that his calm masked a personal worry. Ladd had often met Burgess at my house, and had invited him back to his own. Against all the odds, they had got on well together. Both were aggressive, provocative characters; they exchanged insults with mutual appreciation. At their first meeting, Burgess had attacked the corruption and graft which, he alleged, made nonsense of the Indianapolis motor trials, and in doing so took several hefty sideswipes at the American way of life in general. Ladd positively liked it. He had probably never heard a prissy Englishman talk that way before. In the present crisis, he would not have been Ladd if he had not wondered how much “the boss,” Hoover, knew about his own acquaintance with Burgess. I concluded that Ladd’s personal interest would work in my favour. From him, we went to see Lamphere, whose manner was quite normal. We discussed the escape with him, and he ventured a few theories in his solid, earnest way which suggested that he was still far from the truth. I left the building much relieved. It was possible that both Ladd and Lamphere were consummate actors who had fooled me. But it was no good jumping at shadows. I had to act as if the FBI were still in the dark.

It was possible that at any moment MI5 might ask the FBI to put me under surveillance. They could easily have done so without my knowledge by using the FBI representative in London as a direct link with Washington. But here again I felt I had a few days’ grace. It was most unlikely that MI5 would put a foreign security service on to me without the agreement of MI6,
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and I thought that the latter would hesitate before compounding an implied slur on one of
their senior officers. I should emphasize that this was pure guesswork on my part, and remains guesswork to this day. It is supported, however, by the fact that for several days I was left in peace.

When Paterson and I got back to the Embassy it was already past noon and I could plausibly tell him that I was going home for a stiff drink. In my garage-cum-potting-shed, I slipped a trowel into my briefcase, and then went down to the basement. I wrapped camera, tripod and accessories into waterproof containers, and bundled them in after the trowel. I had often rehearsed the necessary action in my mind’s eye, and had lain the basis for it. It had become my frequent habit to drive out to Great Falls to spend a peaceful half-hour between bouts of CIA-FBI liaison, and on the way I had marked down a spot suitable for the action that had now become necessary. I parked the car on a deserted stretch of road with the Potomac on the left and a wood on the right where the undergrowth was high and dense enough for concealment. I doubled back a couple of hundred yards through the bushes and got to work with the trowel. A few minutes later I re-emerged from the wood doing up my fly-buttons and drove back home, where I fiddled around in the garden with the trowel before going into lunch. As far as inanimate objects were concerned, I was clean as a whistle.

I was now in a position to give attention to the escape problem. As it had never been far from my mind in the previous weeks, I was able to make up my mind before the end of the day. My decision was to stay put. I was guided by the consideration that, unless my chances of survival were minimal, my clear duty was to fight it out. There was little doubt that I would have to lie low for a time, and that the time might be prolonged and would surely be trying. But, at the end of it, there might well be an opportunity for further service. The event was to prove me right.

The problem resolved itself into assessment of my chances of survival, and I judged them to be considerably better than before. It must be borne in mind that I enjoyed an enormous advantage over people like Fuchs who had little or no knowledge of intelligence
work. For my part, I had worked for eleven years in the secret service. For seven of them I had been in a fairly senior position, and for eight I had worked in closest collaboration with MI5. For nearly two years I had been intimately linked to the American services, and had been in desultory relationship with them for another eight. I felt that I knew the enemy well enough to foresee in general terms the moves he was likely to make. I knew his files—his basic armament—and, above all, the limitations imposed on his procedures by law and convention. It was also evident that there must be many people in high positions in London who would wish very much to see my innocence established. They would be inclined to give me the benefit of any doubt, and it was my business to see that the room for doubt was spacious.