Rothschild, the right, the far-right and the Fifth Man

We understand that Lord Rothschild was badly shaken last year by the many innuendoes linking him to the Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s. A typical example was Anthony Glees’ book on ‘British intelligence and Communist Subversion’:

“Rothschild (was) remarkably intimate with people subsequently proven to be secret Communists, and Blunt was a major Communist mole”. (1)

In a gesture of loyalty, one of his old ‘pupils’, Robin Butler, now the Cabinet Secretary, organised a reunion dinner of the 1970s Think Tank in December 1986 in order to cheer up the ageing eminence grise. Not long afterwards Rothschild sent his extraordinary letter to The Daily Telegraph:

“Since at least 1980 up to the present time there have been innuendoes in the press to the effect that I am ‘the Fifth Man’, in other words a Soviet agent. The Director-General of MI5 should state publicly that he has unequivocal, repeat, unequivocal, evidence, that I am not, and never have been a Soviet agent.”(2)

It was a bizarre letter if only for the fact that it is impossible to prove such a negative. The Prime Minister’s reply offered no such proof:

“I am advised that we have no evidence that he was ever a Soviet agent.”

This bland statement made no mention of the ‘unequivocal evidence’ Rothschild had demanded, and only served to make the episode even more mysterious. Chapman Pincher, acting as the unofficial spokesman for Rothschild, wrote, “The Prime Minister’s statement on Friday will not fully satisfy him.” (3)

In his book Molehunt Nigel West deals with the accusations against Rothschild, though much was apparently cut by the libel lawyers. Without mentioning Rothschild’s references to the innuendoes starting in 1980, West writes:

“Yet strangely, it was later to be claimed by Pincher that ‘people were suggesting that Rothschild himself had been a spy’. He also reported (Peter) Wright as stating that ‘articles had been appearing in the British media suggesting that Rothschild had been a Soviet agent himself’. In fact no such articles ever appeared…”(4)

In fact there were veiled references. A jokey piece in the ‘Londoner’s Diary’ in The Evening Standard following the exposure of Anthony Blunt said that “Rothschild himself is known among the cognoscenti as the First Man.” (5). Auberon Waugh in the Spectator (14 June 1980) had written a half-serious article titled ‘Lord Rothschild is Innocent’. Revealing the links between Blunt, Burgess and Rothschild, Waugh added, with tongue in cheek:

“Any suggestion which might be implied that Lord Rothschild could even have been under suspicion by MI5 as a Soviet agent or witting concealer of Soviet agents is so preposterous as to belong to the world of pulp fiction. Quite apart from anything else, Mr Heath would scarcely have been able to appoint him to a position in the Cabinet Office where he had instant access to any government information he required … Rothschild would have been subject to a very thorough security vetting.”

Nine years before this Waugh had written in his column in Private Eye:

“Rothschild’s detractors have an even less plausible rumour, which I happen to know to be completely without a shred of truth; the wankers (they say) not being elected politicians must be subjected to the process known as positive vetting by the Security Services. This has revealed not only that Rothschild was once a member of the Communist Party …. Rothschild’s failure to achieve top security clearance means that his blessed Wank Tank cannot be given any documents of a sensitive or highly classified nature.” (6)

It was these Waugh articles that, according to his friend Chapman Pincher, left Rothschild ‘deeply perturbed’. (7) One indication of this is a passage in Pincher’s book on the Spycatcher Affair:

“He (Rothschild) underwent positive vetting for the post, which would give him access to many secrets, with no difficulties whatsoever. MI5’s own list of his contributions to the security of the nation was considered to be a sufficient guarantee of his loyalty in itself. ” (8)

As we showed in Lobster 15, Waugh was the mouthpiece for some highly sensitive ‘gossip’ or intelligence smears. Other writers were much more circumspect, watchful of the libel laws. Following the Prime Minister’s statement, the whispers might have ceased had Rothschild himself unwittingly – and so far unnoticed by the media – not re-opened the whole question of his relationship to the Cambridge Comintern in March 1987. In the Daily Express Lord Rothschild refuted the suggestion that he and Kim Philby had been friends, stating that “he had met Philby once only”. (9). Really? It would appear that somebody had been lying for a number of years.

In his book on Philby, The Third Man, E. H. Cookridge wrote:

“During his first two years at Trinity, Kim Philby had remained inconspicuous. To his natural shyness he added a self-imposed restraint, a strange secretiveness, which he preserved even with the few close friends he had made. Amongst them were.. Victor Rothschild, afterwards the third baron, a brilliant biochemist, who became a daring Intelligence officer during the war.” (10)

One of the main sources for Cookridge’s book was a close friend of Rothschild and fellow MI5 officer, Guy Liddell. Ironically, he, like Rothschild, was also to be marked down as a Soviet agent.(11)

Cookridge adds:

“His (Rothschild’s) war work brought him in contact with Kim Philby who was in charge of the Iberian section of SIS at the time when Lord Rothschild was concerned with the detection of ship sabotage occurring at Gibraltar …. Lord Rothschild …. remained for several months in Gibraltar … Kim Philby paid several visits to the Rock at that time.” (12)

Anthony Boyle, in his The Climate of Treason, notes another encounter between Rothschild and Philby:

“It was in Paris during the bleak winter of 1944-45, when Philby was busily forming his new Soviet counter-espionage section, that Muggeridge met him again… Two small incidents imprinted themselves indelibly on Muggeridge’s mind. Each concerned Philby. The first was a heated discussion at table about the rights and wrongs of withholding important Bletchley intercepts from the Soviet Union. It was Victor Rothschild who raised the matter, startling Muggeridge by his vehemence in criticising this standard practice..The debate waxed hotter, and, for once, Philby joined in…..” (13)

And finally, Philby himself, during the series of interviews he did with Philip Knightley for the Sunday Times recalled meeting Rothschild after the war:

“In 1946 he (Rothschild) told me that he had decided to keep copies of the MI5 card indexes of some people he thought might be security risks … Then Rothschild said to me; ‘And how long have you been a member of the party, Kim?’. And I said, ‘Me, Victor?’ And Rothschild said, ‘Just a little joke. I try it on everyone.’ (14)

The evidence suggests that Rothschild knew and met with Philby – before, during and after the war. It may be that Philby was lying, the mischievous spy leaving one last bomb in Rothschild’s path. But Philby did explode the potential threat by claiming that there was no Comintern cell at Cambridge – and, consequently, no ‘Fifth Man’. Instead, he replaced it with a ‘First Man’, Professor Maurice Dobbs, the original talent spotter. Dobbs seems a fairly logical choice and fits in with the evidence Philby has already provided. (15) However, there is one important dissenter from the idea of Dobbs as the ‘First Man’, namely Michael Straight, the man who had blown Blunt. Following the Sunday Times interviews with Philby, Straight told the Sunday Express, “Philby is using the name of a dead man to cover up for someone else.” (16)

Who?

In his fiction book on Philby The Other Side of Silence, spy-writer Ted Allbeury calls him ‘Milord’.

” ‘And who recruited him for the Soviets?’

‘I’m sure he was looked over by ‘Milord’. And I’m sure that it was ‘Milord’ who had already spotted Burgess and Maclean. At that stage I should think that Burgess was the man who mattered. I’d say too that Philby got his Soviet funds through Burgess.’

‘What was ‘Milord’ doing at the time?’

‘Teaching science at Cambridge. The details will be on your files.’ “(17)

In his wartime diaries for February 1943, Hugh Dalton, on a trip to Moscow, recalled that:

“Stalin… referred to the publications of de Courcy … he was told by Clark Kerr that they were of no importance whatever, he (Stalin) did not believe us….’Which of your Departments’, he asked, ‘is encouraging them?’ ” (21)

Later a booklet was released by the Soviets called ‘Russia’s Enemies in Britain’. It devoted 39 of its 70 pages to an attack on de Courcy.

Rothschild, so the story goes, was ordered to see Churchill and pressed him – three times – to have de Courcy detained. Churchill refused. A far-right news-sheet, On Target run by Don Martin, which has been running an anti-Rothschild campaign, last year quoted a Sunday Times article of 22 June 1947 which noted that

Rothschild “was active in carrying out the Government’s internment policy”. (22). From then on, de Courcy believes, Rothschild was out to get him.

The first inkling of this was in September 1951. One of de Courcy’s publications had published some smear material about Hugh Dalton, curiously enough, who had been a Labour Cabinet minister and who had been linked to the scandal surrounding the Lynsky Tribunal. At the same time there was another smear campaign against John Strachey, the Minister of War. (These campaigns bear remarkable similarities to the later plots against Ministers in the Wilson governments.) According to de Courcy, on 14th September 1951, two MI5 officers under the orders of Roger Hollis were sent to Paris to interview French officials looking for dirt to discredit the Paris branch of de Courcy’s Intelligence Digest. This, so de Courcy says, had been undertaken with the blessing of the Labour Party and Strachey. (23)

The significance of this only became apparent to de Courcy some twelve years later.

In 1951 Rothschild was a member of the Labour Party, contributed funds to Tribune, and was a close friend of Leslie and Beattie Plummer, both of whom were prominent Labour left-wingers and later victims of the anti-Wilson/anti-Labour campaigns. Rothschild was also close to Strachey (a former communist theoretician), and had been a scientific adviser to Strachey’s infamous Groundnuts scheme, a financial disaster used by the Conservative Party and its allies in the press to discredit both Strachey and the Labour Party.

In 1963 de Courcy was found guilty of fraud and imprisoned – an episode which he believes was a set-up designed to snare him. This complicated case still trundles along; in 1968 de Courcy was awarded costs of £6,000 and all claims against him were ‘released and extinguished’. At the centre of the conspiracy, de Courcy claims, was a circle of former intelligence officers, friends of Rothschild and Philby. In September 1963 de Courcy wrote a remarkable series of letters. (24)

“I am, alas correct in my fears. An entire network of Russian agents has (illegible) since the thirties. Rothschild played a major role in recruiting them in the belief that Russia was necessary to defeat Nazi Germany – or rather it was his belated excuse because Hitler had not risen to power when Rothschild started. I suppose he would argue he saw it coming. His puppets were Burgess and co …..

My prime concern is its (the cases) connection with the pro-Russian group of which I have knowledge and of which Lord Vansittart so clearly and strongly warned me ….

Why won’t the security outfit investigate Vansittart’s documents on Soviet spies.. the answer is that Roger Hollis is himself a Soviet agent. And Roger Hollis is backed by the powerful Victor Rothschild who recruited the whole outfit.”

Some fifteen years before Chapman Pincher told the world about Hollis, de Courcy was expressing fears that he was the ‘Fifth Man’ and that Rothschild was the first. (With Rothschild born in 1910, de Courcy’s belief that he had begun recruiting this network of Soviet agents before Hitler’s rise to power, means that, according to de Courcy, Rothschild was doing this just out of his teens!) Muggeridge’s reference to Rothschild and Philby advocating handing over Ultra material direct to the Russians and the fact that the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn had named Rothschild and his wife Tessa as war-time spies must have been music to de Courcy’s ear. (25)

This far-right smear against Rothschild is as legitimate – i.e. is no less ill-founded – than the Pincher/Wright theory about Hollis with which it is now intimately intertwined. It should be noted, as was pointed out in Lobster 15, that Rothschild has taken considerable trouble to air the Hollis theory. De Courcy too has noticed Rothschild’s “sponsoring of Peter Wright’s disclosures to Mr Harry Chapman Pincher.”

To protect himself, Little alleges, Rothschild (with Philby!) launched the anti-Hollis smears.

Although this clearly belongs to the area of myth there are enough elements of truth in it to make it interesting. Besides which, Little has been peddling this tale for many years, and certainly before any of the serious books on Fuchs and the Atom Spies in which it finds echoes. (28)

Norman Moss’s book on Fuchs, The Man Who Stole The Atom Bomb, sets the scene:

“The Ministry (of Aircraft Production) asked MI5, the domestic counter-intelligence service, whether anything untoward was known about Fuchs. MI5 had two items about him in their files. One was the 1934 report from the German consul in Bristol that he was a Communist, but this was a tainted source. The other was more recent: a report from an informant in the German refugee community saying that he was known to be a Communist. This was not without significance. At this time the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was in operation and the British Communist Party, following the Soviet line, argued for peace with Germany.” (29)

Like Margaret Gowing in her official history of Britain and atomic energy, Moss absolves MI5 (and, in particular Roger Hollis, the man mainly responsible for dealing with the Fuchs file) of any blame for clearing Fuchs. They suggest instead that the Ministry overlooked the file because Fuchs’ scientific knowledge was so badly needed on the bomb project.

This view is not shared by the other recent book on Fuchs by Professor Robert Williams, which comes close to suggesting that the failure to uncover Fuchs was deliberate and points the finger at Hollis. (30) This is the position taken by Chapman Pincher, who points out that it was Hollis who again reviewed Fuchs’ file before he was cleared to work at Harwell, the new atomic energy station, (31) an institution with which Rothschild did have some involvement in this period.

The security officer at Harwell responsible to MI5 was Wing Commander Arnold and Little claims to have spoken to him many times over a period of years before he died in 1981. She claims to have had another MI5 source, presumably Grimston, though she has not confirmed this and we have been unable to find any reference to an MI5 officer named as such. Curiously, Professor Williams also claims to have had talks with an MI5 officer with knowledge of this area called John Saxon. ‘Saxon’ appears to be something of a mystery. Questions have been asked in the House of Commons about this alleged intelligence officer though nothing has yet been revealed. (32)

What this tale reveals is that the Fuchs file is at the centre of a debate between two wings of the right: one thinks Rothschild was the villain of the piece, the other points the finger at Hollis. It also shows that there is more to be revealed about Rothschild and that the untangling of the Hollis smear entails the decoding of much of the post-war history of Britain’s right-wing. And the place to begin that task is the MI5/Wilson plots.

Notes

1. Anthony Glees The Secrets of the Service (Jonathan Cape, London, 1987) p 413. The ‘Cambridge Comintern’ industry just keeps rolling on. Expected this year are books by David Leitch on Burgess, John Costello on Blunt, Robert Cecil (ex FO adviser to MI6) on Maclean, an autobiography from Jack Hewitt (Burgess’s lover), and two more books on Philby, one of them from the Soviet Union. There is also a completed biography of Rothschild which names him as the Fifth Man which will not be published until his death. The media seem to have failed to notice that a new candidate for the title of Fifth Man has recently entered the arena in the pages of the biography of Sir Stewart Menzies, The Secret Servant, Anthony Cave Brown (Michael Joseph, London 1988). There are some intriguing references to MI6 officer David Footman who was a leading authority on the Soviets within MI6. The hints are coming from former Deputy Chief of MI6, Sir Jack Easton, and are of interest because we understand that the American edition of the book contains more interviews with Easton which have been removed from the British edition:
   • p190 “…there could have been leakage, for at that time Footman was involved with Guy Burgess, the homosexual Apostle…”;
   • p198 “..Footman recruited Burgess, seconded by Guy Liddell, to join MI6”;
   • p474, on communists in Broadway (MI6 HQ) “..One of these (Col. Valentine) Vivian felt, was almost certainly David Footman….’C’ never said why he suspected Footman, but he did tell a colleague later that he felt Footman was suppressing intelligence that, if circulated, would be against the Soviet interest”;
   • Finally, p693, “Beyond the belief that ‘Elli’ (named by Gouzenko) was in another service, Easton explained, was ‘C”s conviction that if ‘Elli’ was in Broadway, then he would prove to be the head of the political section, David John Footman.”
2. Daily Telegraph 4 December 1986. What this ‘unequivocal evidence’ is remains unknown. Some have suggested that it was; (1) the information Rothschild gave to MI5 on the Cambridge scientist Alister Watson in the early fifties; (2) the information Flora Solomon had on Kim Philby. We find it hard to believe that this would be sufficient to convince sceptical counter-intelligence officers.The timing of this information could be seen as being too convenient. Even de Courcy spotted this: “The essential point being canvassed is that it appears that Lord Rothschild’s exposure of Philby could have occurred after the British Government discovered the truth about Philby by other means, in which case more questions about Lord Rothschild arise.” (Special Office Brief 11 December 1986)Even though Philby admitted in his Sunday Times interviews (20 March 1988) that it was “Flora Solomon’s statement to Victor Rothschild that finally pointed the finger” at him, it is not very convincing. The authorities had plenty of evidence by that time (August 1962), which, it is true, could not be produced in a court of law. But then neither could Solomon’s as she made it clear she was frightened of KGB retaliation.There is a further problem with Solomon’s tale – or, perhaps, with Peter Wright’s telling of it. Wright records her talking to Arthur Martin during her MI5 debriefing.
   

   ” ‘I will never give public evidence,’ she said in her grating voice. ‘There is too much risk. You see what has happened to Tomas since I spoke to Victor’, she said, referring to the fact that one of Philby’s friends, Tomas Harris, the art dealer, had recently died in a mysterious car accident in Spain.” (Spycatcher p173).

   The problem with this account is the timing. Harris died in January 1964 when Philby was already in Moscow and safe from prosecution. There were other mysterious deaths in this period, including one which has previously gone unnoticed. On 26 July 1963 The Times reported in a small column that three weeks previously – ie one week after the government admitted the defection of Philby – a Malcolm Dunbar had walked into the sea at Milford-on-Sea and committed suicide. What this report did not reveal was that Dunbar, son of Sir Loraine Dunbar, was a leading Communist, had been at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had been an Apostle. In 1956 he went to work for Labour Research, a CPGB front. A heavy drinker and a homosexual, he was a target for Special Branch in the fifties and, according to friends, was depressed at the time of his death.

   There were rumours of friendship with Philby and, more bizarrely, of gun-running. A colleague at Labour Research told us “At the time we did wonder if he really did walk into the sea. He was a marvellous person.” By coincidence – or not – a close friend of Dunbar was the painter Hal Woolf (who did know Harris) who himself died in very mysterious circumstances on 23 November 1962 (On which see Private Eye 9 August 1963). The case became a cause celebre and remains unsolved. Interest was heightened because Woolf had connections to the Profumo Affair and because his wife had been a friend of Guy Burgess.

3. Daily Express 7 December 1986
4. Molehunt: the full story of the Soviet spy in MI5, Nigel West (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1987) p 85. Through his solicitors Rothschild did issue a writ against West but later withdrew it deciding “since the whole book is based on conjecture, there is nothing to warrant the issue of a writ”. (Observer 22 March 1987). Very generous, but Lord Rothschild does like to avoid the publicity a court case would no doubt bring. West’s own books on MI5 are noticeably thin on references to the noble Lord. The Sunday Times (4 October 1981) noted of his first book on MI5: “In the original manuscript he (West) revealed that it was Lord Rothschild who recruited Anthony Blunt into MI5. However, I understand that he deleted the information after friends of Lord R pointed out that it would embarrass him.”In their book Conspiracy of Silence (Grafton, London 1986) on Blunt, Penrose and Freeman merely state (p236) “Anthony Blunt was called for an interview with MI5 in August 1940, after appealing to a friend in MI5 who provided him with an excellent reference. Blunt admitted privately after his exposure in 1979 that he was embarrassed at having abused a friendship in this way….”In his November 1979 interview at The Times Blunt “had agreed that the ‘old boy’ who recruited him to MI5 would have been aware of his Marxist convictions.” (Boyle, Climate of Treason, p196). Pincher’s account (Too Secret Too Long, p166) records “The man who was instrumental in getting Blunt in was a wealthy art dealer and artist called Tomas Harris …. Harris was fully aware of Blunt’s Marxist views and support for the Soviet Union”. Was Harris an ‘old boy’? Curiously, this knowledge which one assumes would be fairly widely known and hardly secret is, in Pincher’s account, based on ‘Confidential Information’. Who? Wright or Rothschild?
5. Evening Standard 2 November 1979
6. Private Eye 16 July 1971
7. A Web of Deception, Chapman Pincher (Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1987) p9
8. p144 ibid.
9. Daily Express 3 March 1987
10. The Third Man, E.H. Cookridge (Arthur Barker, London 1968) pp12/13
11. The strongest attacks on Liddell have come from Goronwy Rees and David Mure. “Burgess’ main source must have been Guy Liddell with whom he and Anthony Blunt remained, of course, on very close terms. I was strongly convinced, though I had no direct proof, that Liddell was another of Burgess’ predatory conquests.” (Observer 20 January 1980).Mure, a former intelligence officer working on deception in the Middle East during the war, claimed he had “come across a chain of circumstances which, in my opinion, made it certain that Liddell was a Russian agent.” (Times 31 December 1979). Rothschild wrote in his book Random Variables (p204) that Liddell was “a brilliant, sensitive and delightful man whose image, I am sorry to say, has become somewhat tarnished with no justification, by what are nowadays called investigative reporters.” Rothschild had been stung by the accusations.Mure was an odd character and there may have been more to him than merely a ‘legendary’ memory. Researchers in anti-fascist circles believe his carpet-laying business may have been a front. He apparently employed a number of British Movement skinheads in his firm and he had some important contacts in embassies and the like. His book The Last Temptation (Buchan and Enright – Chairman Robert Rhodes James MP), a roman-a-clef about the Burgess galere, contains some fascinating (though heavily disguised) information. Not only does Liddell get named as a possible Fifth Man, Mure also suggests that a former MI6 station chief, Charles Dundas, known as ‘Fergie’, was intimately involved with Burgess. An interested reader of the Mure books has been Kitty Little. (Letter June 1988)
12. Cookridge op.cit. p114/5
13. Boyle op.cit. pp279/80
14. Sunday Times 3 April 1988There were quite a few people keeping lists of Communist suspects. One was George Orwell. “A notebook of 1949 lists 86 names of Communists or Communist sympathisers in columns under ‘Names’, ‘Jobs’ and ‘Remarks’….Many of the entries were plausible as possible underground or front members, but a few seemed far-fetched and unlikely, listed simply for ‘Communist-like’ opinions.” (George Orwell: A Life Bernard Crick, Penguin, Harmonsworth, 1982, p 637/8). Another was Phillip Williams, best known as the biographer of Hugh Gaitskell. “(He) kept a record of a number of people whom he believed had been secret Communists since their days at Oxford. (He) noted wryly that certain individuals, many of whom went on to occupy important positions in the Civil Service and in academic life, nevertheless made no attempt to use their positions of influence seriously to undermine parliamentary liberal democracy.” Glees op cit p 297Knightley made himself a small fortune from the Philby articles but earned no academic kudos. As Allen Douglas noted (Kim Philby: the Spy Saga Rolls On in EIR (Executive Intelligence Review)13 May 1988) Knightley dismisses his own arguments for Philby’s escape from Beirut as he had previously outlined in The Philby Conspiracy. Similarly, in his last book he dismissed the Sean Bourke version of George Blake’s escape from prison, pointing the finger at the KGB, only weeks before the former members of the Committee of 100 were exposed in the press for their role in the escape. And then he fell flat on his face during the London Weekend TV ‘trial’ of Hollis, reciting false information fed to him by former heads of the intelligence services. The Sunday Times articles will reappear in a new Knightley book.LaRouche’s EIR (see Journals section in this issue) has been running quite a lot on Rothschild recently, all part of a view of the British Establishment in league with the Bolsheviks and Communist imperialism. The articles are interesting because the obvious hard research produces such meagre results.
15. See chapter 3 in Boyle op cit.Another possible recruiter at Cambridge was the Soviet scientist Peter Kapitza. In Spycatcher Wright reveals (p259) “For years it was rumoured inside MI5 that Kapitza had talent-spotted potential recruits inside the Cavendish (laboratory at Cambridge).” In November 1986, in Australia, Peter Wright made an ‘in camera’ statement about Kapitza which ‘puzzled’ Rothschild (Pincher, Web of Deception, p149). Special Branch officers then “questioned him (Rothschild) about Peter Kapitza.” We understand that MI5 were worried about this because Wright had made no mention in his files of Rothschild and Kapitza.
16. Daily Telegraph 3 April 1988
17. The Other Side of Silence, Ted Allbeury, (Granada London 1982) p85. Allbeury was in intelligence during the war and shortly afterwards but there is no evidence that he would have had access to information of this sort.
18. Special Office Brief 22 October 1987
19. Special Office Brief 14 November 1985
20. as 18.
21. The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton 1940-45, edited Ben Pimlott (Jonathan Cape, London 1984) p551
22. Letter from de Courcy 31 May 1988: “I am aware that Lord Rothschild was an officer in and associated with MI5 during the war and I know from the Equerry of the former Queen of Holland what Churchill said to her when having luncheon about 10 days after I had been for luncheon with her – at which the Equerry was present (Tomassen).”On Target 3 January and 17 January 1987. This particular issues notes that G.K. Chesterton’s 1972 book, The New Unhappy Lords, which has had a considerable influence in far-right and anti-Semitic circles, mentions that Burgess and Rothschild had shared a flat together. This is an early example of the attempt to link Rothschild to the Cambridge Comintern.
23. Letter, de Courcy to Strachey, 29 September 1951.
24. Letters, 28, 30 and one undated, September 1963
25. Spycatcher p317
26. On Target Vol. 19, January 1988
27. Letter, Little to Rt. Hon. Bernard Weatherill, Speaker of the House of Commons, 1 May 1987. Little was a member of the short-lived National Security Policy Committee of the Monday Club which met in the early 1980s. Chair was Commander Anthony Courtney. Despite its grand title, it seems to have done very little.
28. Certainly since 1978 when she had a pamphlet, Treason at Westminster, published by the noted anti-Semite, Lady Birdwood. This pamphlet also contained Little’s theories about Harold Wilson which are even more fascinating – and more misplaced – than the Rothschild version. It has been reported that the publishers of this pamphlet, Intercity Research, was a joint effort of Lady Birdwood and Ross McWhirter. Lady Birdwood denies McWhirter’s involvement. McWhirter was a member of the League of Empire Loyalists, Common Cause and, we believe, Mosley’s Union Movement. During research into the Profumo Affair we came across references to McWhirter’s apparent security links.
29. Klaus Fuchs: the Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb, Norman Moss (Grafton, London, 1987) p31.
30. Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy Robert Chadwell Williams (Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 1987)
31. Their Trade is Treachery, Chapman Pincher (New English Library, London 1982) p57
32. Telephone interview with confidential source, March 1988