One Boggis-Rolfe or two?
Philby: The Hidden Years
Morris Riley
Janus Publishing, London, 1999, £9.95 pb
There are almost as many Philbys as there are readers. His current reputation is as thin as the biographies are fat. Is there room on the shelf for yet another Philby book? Perhaps for a slim one.
Amidst legal difficulties, Morris Riley has finally published his account of Philby. He tries to establish that Philby did more damage to British interests after 1951, when he was partly severed from SIS, than before, when he was an undetected Soviet agent in place. As Robin Ramsay noted in Lobster 37, this idea isn’t very convincing – not in any obvious sense, at least. After 1951, Philby worked as a stringer for the Observer and the Economist, and for the KGB and SIS as an agent – hardly positions of influence to rival that of his previous employment as the head of SIS’s anti-Soviet desk and liaison officer with the CIA in Washington. It can be argued, however, that the political and social damage inflicted on the then British ruling elite by the various defections, and the revelations surrounding them, surpassed in the end any immediate intelligence damage sustained during their time in place. The British ‘culture of secrecy’ was badly damaged. Riley touches on this theme but doesn’t develop it. Did the Soviets utilize this embarrassment factor and to some extent orchestrate the political fallout over a thirty year period? And did they depend on a predictable British reaction, the cover-up, to self-inflict longer term political damage? Some sections of the British right seemed to believe so. Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951 after Maclean was pinpointed by a Venona decryption as agent Homer. Burgess didn’t have to go with him, he wasn’t suspected. Burgess’s defection then threw suspicion on Philby, however. In an injuncted book some years ago,The Last Temptation, Donald McCormick attempted to hint (he couldn’t give her name) that Clarissa Churchill, acting on information from Guy Liddell, had inadvertently given Burgess the nudge to defect by warning him as a friend that MI5 were closing in on Maclean. In the same year, she married Anthony Eden, who became Prime Minister on Churchill’s retirement. Around the time of Suez, while Eden was still Prime Minister, Burgess and Maclean held a Soviet sponsored press conference in Moscow. It was subsequently hinted that Burgess might return to Britain – embarrassing if Eden’s wife had been subpoenaed as a witness at a subsequent trial.
Philby’s defection in 1963 kept the affair in the limelight. As did his volume of memoirs, My Silent War, published in 1968. This was followed by Philip Knightley’s book on Philby, and Patrick Seale’s. By this time the Cambridge group were routinely and semi-derisively represented by Young Turk journalists such as Knightley (who, as an Australian, had few deferential inclinations towards British elites) as having demonstrated the need for social and political change in Britain. From 1963 onwards, after Blunt’s outing by Michael Straight, curiously coinciding with Philby’s by Flora Solomon and Rothschild, some members of the British upper classes knew of Blunt’s role and the subsequent offer of immunity. Though not, until much later, Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister, nor his Law Officers, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. The Lord Chancellor, Gerald Gardiner, and Elwyn Jones were kept uninformed for ten years: even though one of Gardiner’s private secretaries, in effect his office manager, had a father who had been at school and Cambridge with Blunt, and was also a fellow member of the Comintern. Elwyn Jones later noted that whenever he and Gardiner wished to speak in confidence they would drive round St James Park rather than speak in the office because Gardiner trusted his driver but not his civil servants. He suspected the office was bugged.
In addition, the late Niall MacDermot had his promotion to Cabinet rank blocked and his political career terminated on the grounds that his wife had once (innocently) worked for a KGB officer after the war. The more probable grounds were that MacDermot had himself served in MI5 and was about to become a Law Officer. He had previously sought to focus public attention on Philby. MI5 had long harboured suspicions that a Labour government might legally clip their wings. Both Furnival-Jones, MI5’s new D-G after Hollis, and Simpkins, his deputy, were lawyers. MacDermot’s impending promotion was read as a potential threat. From MI5’s point of view, knowledge of Blunt’s activities by either Wilson or the public would have fueled any existing movement towards reform of the security services. Blunt was a cousin of the Queen Mother, after all.
Before he died, Andrew Boyle, whose book finally exposing Blunt came soon after her election in 1979, expressed to me his opinion that Margaret Thatcher had withdrawn Blunt’s immunity from publicity rather than let him successfully sue Boyle for libel, only to have the truth emerge when Blunt died of old age deeper into her administration. Thatcher had a standing order that there were to be no simmering security scandals during her term of office, no compromised ministers or senior civil servants. This was because she believed that MacMillan’s government had been deliberately undermined by security scandals. No one as yet knows whether or not the Soviets manipulated these scandals but as H J van den Bergh, ex-head of BOSS, used to say to Gordon Winter, ‘They’d be stupid if they didn’t’. Exceptionally so.
Rothschild the puppet-master?
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book is the penultimate chapter, ‘The Philby Jigsaw’, where Riley attempts an overall view of Philby’s career, linking it with the general political and intelligence context of the time. This chapter also makes for the most difficult reading and needs to be read in close conjunction with the appendix on Victor Rothschild. The difficulty stems from a mixture of legal problems, compounded by a certain coyness in acknowledging sources. The essential thesis is that Rothschild was the initial recruiter of the Cambridge Comintern and the original source of this (as early as 1951, immediately after the defection of Burgess and Maclean) was the late Kenneth de Courcy. De Courcy, an intelligence insider who had probably worked for Menzies before the war, but was frozen out by Churchill, who saw him as an appeaser and Germanophile, also claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy and had been framed by covert supporters of the Cambridge Comintern, supporters who had, by the time of his trial and conviction for fraud in 1963, reached positions of power and influence. He claimed that Rothschild was the puppet-master behind this mise en scene. Some of the people involved were still alive ten years ago when Riley first wrote this book. With one exception, they are now dead.
When considering de Courcy’s claims, it is important to get the chronology right. The paper trail has to be examined to see whether or not he simply constructed a conspiracy theory after his conviction. The de Courcy papers have been lodged with the Hoover Institution for some years. He later claimed that some of them had been stolen. The copies that survive – unless forged, always a possibility in this area – seem to establish that de Courcy was accusing Roger Hollis, a future D-G of MI5, of being a Soviet agent as early as 1951, some twenty years before Peter Wright’s similar accusation started making the rounds. He also accused Blunt and various others of being members of the ‘Russian Party’, that is, Soviet agents, within the week of Philby’s defection to Moscow on January 23 1963. De Courcy had been arrested on January 11 of the same year.
If de Courcy was framed there are two possible reasons. Either he was the fall guy in a purely financial scam or the scam was arranged to cover up his knowledge of the Cambridge spies. Neither of these possibilities necessarily excludes the other: de Courcy’s enemies in what he saw as the establishment might simply have used the opportunity of the financial embarrassment as a means of getting to him.
In his telling of this complicated tale, Riley adopts the legal device of Andrew Boyle (called mistakenly Anthony Boyle by Riley) in his expose of Blunt in The Climate of Treason. He refers to some characters by name, then by description, and hopes the reader can join up the dots. The legal reasons for this device were more pressing ten years ago that they are now. The two characters who receive this treatment are the brothers Paul and Hume Boggis-Rolfe, together with Carl Aarvold. Paul Boggis-Rolfe, ex-MI6, was allegedly involved in drafting the land deal for which de Courcy was framed. Hume Boggis-Rolf, ex-MI5, was a senior official at the Lord Chancellor’s department (he retired without a knighthood) at the time of de Courcy’s trial. Aarvold was the judge at the trial. De Courcy alleged that these three, with Rothchild and others behind the scenes, framed him because of his knowledge of their (alleged) connections with the Cambridge Ring and that with Philby’s defection imminent, it was decided to shut him up by ruining his reputation. Evidence? Hume Boggis-Rolfe was at school (Westminster) and university (Trinity) with Philby, and held ‘extreme’ left opinions (mildly liberal, in common parlance, at least for the Lord Chancellor’s Department). Lever, a main player in the scheme, was a friend of Aarvold, a member of the same golf club, shared the train into London, attended City dinners together, etc. Aarvold was appointed to the trial under the auspices of Hume Boggis-Rolfe, also a friend. Superintendent Still, the investigating policeman, was given a lucrative position by Lord Mansfield, de Courcy’s ‘persecutor’, immediately after the trial.
The usual suspects
Well, there is certainly a strong whiff of rattus rattus hanging around this affair nearly forty years later. De Courcy was partly exonerated some five years later but served the rest of his sentence. At least one respected modern historian believes he was probably set up. Was his trial really a covert political one? The most obvious objection to this account is the role it assigns to Rothschild. As Riley convincingly argues, Rothschild almost certainly lied about his degree of acquaintance with Philby, both at Cambridge and after. But so did many others. However, as Riley himself has argued in the past (Lobster 16), would Rothschild have really been in charge of the recruitment of the most successful spy ring in modern times before he was twenty years old? Would Rothschild have continued working for the KGB after the Soviets became anti-Israeli in 1948? It’s possible that with an IQ of 184, the second highest ever recorded by the US Army, Rothschild did guess what his Cambridge friends were up to during the war, and also that he sympathized with their aims, later attempting to cover his tracks during the Cold War. In the absence of a smoking gun (still possible, of course; more Soviet intelligence archives are due to be opened next year as a Russian contribution to the Millennium celebrations) the case against Rothschild is still unproven. The most concerted effort to date to implicate him, that by Roland Perry in The Fifth Man, contained little evidence, depending mainly on the uncorroborated evidence of three anonymous ex-KGB colonels – two-a-penny in the last decade. Morris Riley is not an anti-semite. But many in the anti-Rothschild camp were and are. Rothschild is seen on the right as the seducer of English innocence, the original serpent in a thirties Eden. This notion (not, I repeat, held by Riley himself) is still given houseroom by some right wing revisionist historians. After all, the twentieth century cannot be the story of the eclipse of British capital at the hands of American capital, can it? Someone had to steal the British Empire, didn’t they? Round up the usual suspects.
Something very singular was happening
The strongest single argument in favour of de Courcy’s version of events comes from the nature of the English legal system, and the way in which the judiciary is hedged in. The Lord Chancellor’s Department goes to some trouble to make sure that the judiciary is uncompromised. When a judge is on circuit and invites people to dinner (a judge away from home for a week at a time can hardly be expected to exist in a social purdah) those people are carefully vetted to make sure that they aren’t connected (even accidentally) with the parties or witnesses to cases heard. So if the various legal personalities in the de Courcy case were well known to each other and to the prosecuting witnesses this alone gives grounds for believing that something very singular was happening.
In the light of current knowledge, the Cambridge spy Ring probably emerged gradually from an already existing Comintern operation/grouping, one in which Maurice Dobb, the openly Communist Cambridge academic, mentioned by Riley and then dismissed, was a central figure. Its initiator was Richard Sorge,on a trip to England in 1929. He’d been on a mission to Los Angeles because Stalin thought the movies had a future as a means of propaganda and mass control. Sorge later gave the Soviets precise timings for the German attack on the Soviet Union and the Japanese attack in the Pacific. Philby publicly ceded Sorge the Soviet spy of the century award and went out of his way to mention that to his regret he’d never met him. He never did. But the Soviets, who had denied any knowledge of Sorge after he was executed as a spy by the Japanese at the end of the war after two years of interrogation (one supposes the techniques were robust), finally acknowledged him as one of theirs. Before, they had always denied that the KGB had any spies. The acknowledgement came in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, no less, where a brief summary of Sorge’s NKVD/GRU career was given. This was published immediately after Philby was safely tucked up in Moscow, with a ‘babushka’ for company. Blunt had taken up the burden. As Murray Sale noted in a recent London Review of Books review of Sorge’s career, ‘Spying doesn’t come any better than this’.