The Other Side of Silence

EIGHTEEN

Like most Englishmen of my recent acquaintance—at the Grand Hôtel and the Villa Mauresque—Guy Burgess spoke with a plummy, nasal voice that seemed to contain a slight speech impediment, although that might just as easily have been the effect of too much alcohol. What else is there to do on a three-day voyage to Leningrad but get drunk? Suave, reptilian, and dripping with disdain, as if the whole business of being debriefed by his Russian handlers were beneath him, the voice reminded me of an English movie actor I’d once seen called Henry Daniell, who had seemed to me to be the screen personification of the sardonic, well-bred villain. As I listened to Burgess, it was as if the man were with us in Maugham’s drawing room, searching his memory and perhaps his conscience for the best interpretation of his actions—indeed, he seemed every bit as mannered as Somerset Maugham and as full of whinging self-justification as the great writer’s nephew. The recording was a good one, and occasionally, in the silences, you could even hear the dull, rhythmic throb of what might have been the ship’s engines but could as easily have been the slow breathing of some unseen leviathan.

“My name is Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess and I was born in Devonport, England, on the sixteenth of April nineteen eleven. For the purposes of verification, in nineteen forty-four I was running a Swiss source for MI5, code named Orange, who, I’m afraid to say, met with a sticky end in Trier. MI5 is, of course, Britain’s domestic secret intelligence service. My father was a naval officer and I myself attended the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth before going on to Eton and then Trinity College, Cambridge.

“Today is the twenty-eighth of April nineteen fifty-one and I just turned forty a couple of weeks ago, which seems incredible and rather horrible to me. Currently I am aboard a Russian freighter which must remain nameless, I’m afraid, and on my way to Leningrad in the company of my Foreign Office colleague Donald Maclean, with a collected edition of Jane Austen in my bag and a new raincoat from Gieves in Old Bond Street. But I can tell you that Donald and I reached Saint-Malo on the Falaise, from Southampton. And that prior to this, I hired a car from Welbeck Motors in Crawford Street to make the journey to Southampton. I think it was an A-forty. Cream color. In Saint-Malo I paid a taxi driver rather a lot of money to drive his empty taxi to Rennes and to buy two tickets to Paris in our names. Meanwhile, we boarded this Russian ship. Because the fact of the matter is that I’ve decided I want to live in the Soviet Union because I am a socialist and it’s a socialist country. And I think Donald feels the same way that I do. In fact, I know he does.

“The reason I’m saying all this on tape now is so that my Russian friends can send the recording to the BBC in London in the hope that they might broadcast it and let people back home in England know for themselves the truth about my decision and not what they’ve been told by the British government. I expect the newspapers are already calling me a traitor, but of course I’m nothing of the kind. That’s a lot of nonsense. No more is it true of Donald Maclean. Besides, I really don’t know what this word means anymore. I did what I did for conscience sake, for something I believed in, and which I happen to think is rather more important than some outmoded notion of loyalty to king and country. As it happens, I do love my country very much indeed, I just think it could be governed rather better than it is. (But for my poor eyesight I would very likely be a serving naval officer right now, like my late father.) But I still have family back in England and at some stage I would rather like to be able to go back for a month or so, and see them again, but I couldn’t ever do that, of course, unless I knew for certain that I could get out of England again and come back to Russia.

“My critics will doubtless see this recording as a confession; I prefer to think of it as an explanation. As Voltaire once said, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ And whilst I don’t expect to be forgiven, I do hope that my actions might come to be better understood. Consequently, I think it only right to place this explanation firmly in the context of my early life. So I suppose I ought to begin by mentioning that when I first went up to Cambridge in the summer of nineteen twenty-nine I found that most of my friends had either joined the Communist Party or were at least very close to it politically. Indeed, by nineteen thirty-two, the atmosphere in Cambridge was so febrile and the issue of Fascism so horribly pressing that I joined the party myself. It seemed to me inarguable that the Western democracies had taken an uncertain and compromising attitude toward Nazi Germany and that the Soviet Union constituted the only real bulwark against European tyranny. I believe that during the war the Soviet Union was never treated as a full and trusted ally by Britain and America in spite of the fact that the sacrifices made by the people of Russia were greater than those of all the other Allies put together.

“After I joined the Communist Party, like most young men I did a lot of talking and not much else. But by January nineteen thirty-three, with the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, that no longer seemed enough. Perhaps if I’d come down from Cambridge in the summer of nineteen thirty-seven, I might have gone to Spain to fight in the civil war, but in the summer of nineteen thirty-three I felt obliged to look elsewhere for some means of making my new beliefs seem at all relevant. Then, in December nineteen thirty-four, I met a Russian called Alexander Orlov who recruited me into the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD—the forerunner of the KGB, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. It was he who persuaded me that I could best serve the cause of anti-Fascism by resigning from the Communist Party and spying for the Soviet Union.

“Orlov introduced me to another man called Arnold Deutsch, code-named Otto, who urged me first to join the BBC—where I was a Talks Assistant; and then as war approached, MI6, which is Britain’s foreign intelligence service. Indeed, so keen was Deutsch on my achieving a perfect cover for my future espionage activities within the British establishment that he actively encouraged me to try and wed Winston Churchill’s niece. Can you imagine? Me, married to a Churchill? I did as I was told and pursued her for a whole month even though I did have some rather obvious disadvantages as a prospective husband for the girl. We were quite friendly for a while. I think I even took her for a weekend to stay with Dadie Rylands and his family in Devon and I may have introduced her to them as my fiancée. Clarissa Churchill is, of course, now the wife of the current British prime minister, Anthony Eden.

“It was Deutsch who gave me the code name Mädchen—the German word for ‘girl’—and in retrospect it’s clear to me that Arnold must have had a great sense of humor. My first major task—if it can described thus—was to make friends with as many people in government and the civil service as possible, and you might almost say that I became a sort of talent spotter for the NKVD. I made a pitch to everyone who was anyone. The historians G. M. Trevelyan and Stuart Hampshire, John Maynard Keynes, Noel Annan, the poet W. H. Auden, Anthony Blunt, Maurice Bowra, Isaiah Berlin. All of them pillars of the British establishment now. And I wasn’t exactly subtle about it. I’m not saying I tried to recruit all of these people as spies, not a bit of it; I was trying to chivvy out people who were sympathetic to the Russian cause, and who might be persuaded to speak up for Russia and for the Communists—which is of course a very different thing. It’s often forgotten that men as famous as George Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union in nineteen thirty-one and became enthusiasts for Russian Communism. And yet until his death last year only his most virulently right-wing critics were inclined to call him a traitor.

“I think it must have been in nineteen thirty-seven—around the time of the Spanish Civil War—that I went to stay with the writer Somerset Maugham at his fabulous villa on the French Riviera. There were five of us, I think. Dadie Rylands, Anthony Blunt, Victor Rothschild, Victor’s girlfriend Anne Barnes, and me. Victor had a smart new Bugatti and we drove to the Cap from Monte Carlo, where we’d been staying. I think I may have tried to sound him out as a potential recruit to the cause but Maugham wasn’t much interested in politics; he was much more interested in boys, and I remember I had a rather marvelous time as his guest. Certainly after Victor and Anne left. For a young and highly impressionable queer like me, it was like peeking through the keyhole at Trimalchio’s party and an insight into what it might be like to live quite openly as a practicing homosexual. God, how I envied that man. We all did. Anyone who was queer, that is.

“From the French Riviera I went to Rome and from there to Paris, which both the GRU—the GRU is Russian military intelligence—and the KGB were using as a recruitment and clearance center. It was a chance for me to meet my controller in a more relaxed environment, which is to say, far away from the risk of surveillance. I even made a pitch to Edouard Pfeiffer, Daladier’s chef de cabinet, who at the time of my proposition was playing ping-pong across the body of a naked young man in lieu of a net. I stayed on in Paris until just before Christmas nineteen thirty-seven. The Paris Bureau of the Comintern introduced me to all sorts of interesting people, many of them sympathetic Englishmen, such as Claud Cockburn and John Cairncross. Meanwhile, Arnold Deutsch took me out to dinner with all sorts of strange folk, not all of them obvious recruitment material. People who had no languages. People who hadn’t even been to university. Some of them were downright dull. Not to say stupid. I remember a very uninspiring young English salesman recently returned from China, where he’d been working for a tobacco company. I mean, this chap hadn’t even been to university, let alone Cambridge. All he could talk about was tobacco and the Chinese and about some awful bloody girl he’d married back in Somerset. And I remember thinking, what’s the point of trying to recruit a chap to the cause who’s going to be happily married and selling cigarettes? Are the Russians so desperate for spies that we’re willing to fund the local tobacconists? Not that he took Arnold’s ruble, so to speak. Anyway, ours not to reason why and all that rot. Of course, lots of these people are dead now. Killed in the war. Disappeared. God knows.

“In nineteen thirty-eight, I got back to London from Paris and joined Section D of MI6, before joining MI5, who sent me back to the BBC and while there, I interviewed Mr. Winston Churchill, in September nineteen thirty-eight. This was, of course, the time of the Munich crisis, which upset me greatly and resulted in my subsequent resignation from the BBC. Anyway, I had a Ford V8 of which I was inordinately fond, and one morning I drove down to Westerham and Churchill’s house at Chartwell. I told him I was in some despair about what had happened and he showed me a letter from Prague, signed by Edvard Beneš, which ran as follows: ‘My dear Mr. Churchill, I am writing to you for your advice and perhaps your assistance regarding my unhappy country.’ Churchill looked at me and said, what advice, what assistance should I offer, Mr. Burgess? I am an old man, without power, and without party; what help can I give? And I said, don’t be so downhearted, sir, offer him your eloquence; awaken people in this country with your speeches. He was rather pleased by that, I think. We then shared a bit of mutual hatred about Neville Chamberlain. Having finished discussing Munich, he then presented me with a book of his speeches, which he inscribed for me and which I still have. You and I know that war is inevitable, he added; if I am returned to power—and it seems likely that I shall be—and you need a job, come and see me, present this book, and I will make sure that you are suitably employed. I then went outside to my car and drove home. But it’s an interesting story, I think—certainly of interest to listeners to The Week in Westminster, which is the show I used to produce for the BBC. The point of me telling this story now is to demonstrate to any listeners I might have that while I may be a Communist and allegedly a traitor, I am still enough of a patriotic Englishman to admire an old Tory grandee like Winston Churchill.

“From the BBC I went to the news department of the Foreign Office, and after the war I became an assistant to Hector McNeil, the current secretary of state for Scotland, who was then a junior minister in the F.O. and who sometimes stood in for Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, which meant there were lots of MI6 papers that came my way.

“I was handing over top secret stuff to the Russians on a weekly basis after that. Looking back on this time, I think he made it easy for me since he was always disappearing up north to his Glasgow constituency. Greenock, I think. Somewhere ghastly like that. I went with him on more than one occasion and felt like a foreigner since I could understand nothing at all of what was said to me. I’m not for a minute suggesting Hector McNeil knew what I was up to. But frankly, my work couldn’t have been easier. People always imagine that spies live lives of derring-do and intrigue. It wasn’t like that at all. No guns, no invisible ink, no disguises. I just lifted the files out of poor old Hector’s filing cabinet, or the yellow boxes that arrived from MI6, took them home in the car, and a chap from the KGB spent all night in my bathroom photographing them; I then placed them back in poor old McNeil’s filing cabinet the following morning. I even had my own key so that I didn’t have to bother him when I needed access to his papers. Once, I accompanied McNeil to the United Nations in New York and I pinched some papers from his ministerial box and had them photographed during his liquid lunch hour. These were mostly cabinet papers, government policy documents—Britain’s position on this, Britain’s position on that, and, rather horribly, which major Russian cities we might bomb if we decided on a first strike against the Soviet Union. The point is that nobody got hurt by what I was doing. Nobody.

“The last thing I want to say is this, and it’s important. What I did really didn’t require much nerve or ingenuity; nor was I required to take any great risks. In the beginning I was nervous, but after a while it became routine. Frankly, if someone such as I could get away with spying on His Majesty’s Government for almost fifteen years, then anyone could. And in my considered opinion Britain is not well served by its security and intelligence services. Not well served at all. It’s small wonder that the FBI doesn’t trust MI6 and MI5. Which is hardly surprising as MI5 and MI6 don’t trust each other one inch. They’re great rivals. Not only that but our security services are riddled with so-called traitors and . . .”

Burgess stopped speaking at this point as someone else said something, possibly in Russian, and a few seconds later the tape ended. I turned off the machine and perched on the edge of the refectory table to await the old man’s considered verdict.

“He’s got a bloody nerve,” said Somerset Maugham. “It’s largely thanks to Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean that the Americans don’t trust us anymore.”

“So you do think it’s him?” I said. “The real Guy Burgess.”

“It’s been a few years since I saw him, and many others would know better than me, but it certainly sounds like him, yes. As to whether it was actually recorded on that Russian ship, as he and Maclean fled London for Leningrad, I have no idea. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Hot stuff, some of it,” muttered Robin. “Don’t you think? All that stuff about Trimalchio’s house. You wouldn’t want that to come out, Uncle Willie.”

“I suppose not,” said Maugham unhappily.

“Though some of it was really quite amusing, what? All that stuff about Clarissa Churchill?”

“The urgent question is, of course,” insisted Maugham, “where the fuck did this tape come from? And how did Harold Heinz Hebel come by it? Did the KGB send a copy to the BBC? If they did, it was obviously never used. I can’t imagine the circumstances in which they would have broadcast the whole thing. I think we’d have heard about that by now, even down here. If it was sent to the BBC, then has the BBC already shared the tape with the intelligence services? And if not, why not? Is it possible that the tape was stolen from the BBC? On the other hand, was the tape given to Hebel by someone in the KGB—someone who is intent on making more mischief in our security services? Or is it someone who just wants to make a ton of money from our security services, as Walter here suggested before? Is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to the British government to stop that tape from being sent to an American radio station?” Maugham relit his pipe and puffed it thoughtfully. “And even more importantly, is it worth two hundred thousand dollars to me? When you buy a tape recording, how do you know there isn’t a copy?”

“To that extent, it’s no different from buying a photograph,” I said. “Even if you buy the negative there’s no way of knowing how many more prints there are.”

“Those are all good questions,” said Robin. “And I wonder how on earth we can answer them?”

“I don’t know,” said Maugham. “But I do know someone who might.”