Helen Fry
The Cambridge Spies, Part 2

Dr. Helen Fry - The Cambridge Spies, Part 2

- We’re in for a treat, again today, I hope with more spies asking the question, “Who was the fifth man?” It’s such an enigmatic subject. Will we know ultimately who was the fifth man? But I’m going to look at three characters today in what is a very complex and tangled web of Cold War espionage. On the left you have Roger Hollis. In the middle you have George Blake, and the top right hand corner you have Victor Rothschild. So I’m going to look at these three characters shortly and how, although one doesn’t necessarily see immediate connections between them, there’s an awful lot going on in the whole mirrors and shadows of Cold War espionage. And we mustn’t underestimate that they reckon that some of the Cold War espionage, the scenarios were as dangerous as anything we had experienced in the Second World War, that in fact, although it was not a hot war, it was, as we know, a Cold War that didn’t make it any less dangerous. And it was the fight for those nuclear weapons. The arms race shortly to be overtaken by the space race. And so it was all about gaining intelligence on the other side to see how far they had developed, particularly their nuclear weapons. And mixed into that, we have a whole number of double agents, traitors, those who were prepared to betray their country with secrets to the other side. And in our case, from the American British side, smuggling secrets out to the Russians. And next slide please.

And previously I spoke a little bit about Anthony Blunt and just to pick up the ends of the first part of the lecture, which I did earlier this week. So this is today a part two. You have those Cambridge spies in the 1930s and 40s who were prepared to portray their country to actually pass secrets to the Soviets. And whilst they didn’t think they were doing anything particularly wrong, particularly in the Second World War, because the Soviets were our allies, things become very different when we tip into the Cold War period. And it is said that MI6 or SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service actually had its suspicions, particularly about Anthony Blunt, who rose to be purveyor of the queen’s pictures. Very, very close to the royal family, mixing in high circles and passing intelligence to the Soviets. Why didn’t MI6 act and we might pick up that thread towards the end of today. And he ultimately was not prepared to defect to Russia, unlike Burgess and Maclean and Philby. Anthony Blunt, very firmly wanted to stay in England. And in full response for his confession, it was agreed that he would have immunity from prosecution and that he wouldn’t be outed as a Soviet spy or Soviet agent for at least 15 years. But the pressure’s mounting and towards the late 1970s, it’s exactly the 15th of November, 1979, that Margaret Thatcher finally gives a statement to the House of Commons in London and spills the beans that Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy. So why had it taken so long? Next slide please.

And one of the points I made last week, which will be equally true I think as we worked through the material today, what was the most surprising revelation in all of this in the Cambridge spies and actually in the other Cold War spies? That it may well be as simple as to say that MI6 preferred just to brush these scandals under the carpet. They don’t necessarily, didn’t necessarily want to expose these traitors in court because if you do that, all kinds of other intelligence operational material might come out. And it begs the question why they weren’t tried in secret. Again, I think from what I understand, MI6 would prefer to be completely ignoring the issue publicly. And we mustn’t forget actually until the late 1990s, MI5, the British Home Security Service and MI6 responsible for espionage and intelligence abroad, MI5 and MI6 did not officially exist. So it’s easy for us today to wonder why they didn’t actually expose these suspected moles and spies. There was a witch hunt to hunt down some of these suspected moles within these intelligent services, but they didn’t officially exist. Today, MI5, GCHQ and the head of MI6 all have Twitter accounts. They have their own websites, that was unthinkable in the early days of the internet. But even way before that, they never admitted officially to existing. And of course everybody knew where their headquarters were, everybody knew they existed. But from these intelligence agencies, complete silence. So we must understand, I think, the information that we’re going to look at today against the backdrop of these highly secret agencies that are still so secretive today, but even back then, were not even prepared to admit that they existed. Next slide please.

And to pick up a final thread about an Anthony Blunt, which has only emerged in recent years, utterly fascinating. One of the strands of why Anthony Blunt was not prosecuted for stealing secrets was because there was a far greater secret that had to be protected. And that was this secret mission by Anthony Blunt, at the end of the war, he made a visit to Friedrichshof in Germany to the castle, and there he retrieved some top secret letters, which are allegedly deemed to be very sensitive. I don’t know any historian that’s actually seen them, they’re now held in the Royal Archives at Windsor. But from what one understands, they contain very sensitive information, letters between the Duke of Windsor, the king who abdicated, between him and Adolph Hitler. So one day will it ever be released for historians to look at? Who knows? Next slide please. But I want to take a look at George Blake. You can see him pictured here with his mother. It’s in that whole period of the early 1960s. There’s a whole mix and complex picture going on. And just to give you four key moments, and there are others, of course, it like the Cuban Missile Crisis, et cetera. But 1961, the capture and sentencing of George Blake by the British courts, and we’ll come back to that shortly. In 1962, John Vassall was jailed, if I’m not mistaken, it’s only recently that some of the files about him have been declassified. And because he was homosexual and that was illegal then, he was open to blackmail and the Soviets discovered about his sexuality and used that to blackmail him to become a spy for them. January, 1963, famously the defection of Kim Philby and I’ll be doing more on Kim Philby later in the year. And that same year, 1963, the whole Profumo Scandal blew up and I will just launch into a tiny bit, skim around a tiny bit of that shortly. Next slide please.

So what about George Blake? Of course, he was the last of those famous guys to pass away. He passed away during the pandemic, I understand of old age, not necessarily from COVID. He died in Christmas 2020, so almost so he was just, well, I’m not short of his 100th birthday. So he was Jewish from Sephardic roots, Jewish on his father’s side. His father actually had British nationality and had served in the first World War. His father was a bit of a mysterious character. We don’t know too much about him. Albert Behar, George Blake was not his original name. It’s not clear when he changed his name, sometime during the Second World War, he changed his surname from Behar to George Blake. During the Second World War, he had actually served in Naval Intelligence and I actually have him located in the eavesdropping programme, which was run by spymaster, Thomas Joseph Kendrick. And you’ll have heard me speak about spymaster, MI6 spymaster Kendrick previously. But there were three sections within the eavesdropping programme, Tri-Services, Army Air, Naval Intelligence. And Ian Fleming, of course, was part of that picture. Ian Fleming actually recruited the Naval Intelligence team that worked at the eavesdropping sites. And it’s that moment of never being surprised by what you’re going to discover in your research because there are hints that George Blake is involved in this. Some of the training he has in the Second World War is quite unusual, but he is trained as an interrogator. And then at the end of the Second World War, he’s posted to post-war Europe to Germany. He ends up becoming head of the Naval Intelligence team in Hamburg. He takes over from Charles Wheeler, Charles Wheeler, famous journalist in the post-war period. So he’s actually in Hamburg, he’s been working and he’s dispatched to Germany with the same team that he’d worked with in the wartime in Naval Intelligence. Next slide please.

And his involvement, quite important actually in the U-boat crew. So the whole Naval Intelligence team, you can see them pictured here at one of the secret wartime sites. This is Latimer House near Amersham in Buckinghamshire. So we’re about 20 miles outside of London, not far from the M25, not far from Watford just to give you a perspective, if you’re not in the UK. So he’s here in the wartime and with some of these characters, he’s actually working in key locations out of Hamburg and it’s this team that actually in the end take the surrender of Admiral Dönitz. Fascinating stuff. And then the key naval, German naval commanders, when they’re captured, they have to go through a process of denazification. And George Blake is very firmly part of that. In fact, he is, or he was, should we say, incredibly loyal. There is no evidence at this point that he was ever working for Soviet intelligence. So the issue comes later, just a bit later in the Korean War when he’s actually captured and taken prisoner and it’s there that they managed to turn him to work for Soviet intelligence. And so after he’s released, there is perhaps no way of telling that they’ve actually turned him while he was in captivity. And it said that he’d actually converted to communism, that he’d had an ideological shift whilst prisoner of war during the Korean War. Next slide, please.

I’d love to have interviewed him. Didn’t get a chance, of course, not that I was necessarily going to travel to Russia to interview him, but I did think about whether someone else would go on my behalf, a journalist and perhaps interview him. But he’s given some very rare interviews and there are a number of really brilliant books I’ll come to later about him. The famous Berlin Tunnel. And I hope to do more on this for you at some point. There are rumours that he was posted to Berlin. We know that he was certainly involved with the Berlin Tunnel. The Berlin Tunnel was constructed between 1953 and 19, well, it becomes operational in 1955. It takes at least a year to create this underground tunnel under the Soviet sector of Berlin. In the 1950s, well, immediately after the Second World War, the allies have actually broken up parts of Germany into sectors as well as they did with Austria. So you have the British sector, American sector, French sector and Soviet sector. As I’m sure you’re aware. And that was true for Berlin as well. We were not going to allow the Soviets to take Berlin completely. So you have various sectors and it was too much of a good opportunity if you like, not to start tunnelling under the Soviet section of Berlin because what the CIA and MI6 discovered, and it was a joint operation, Operation Gold, was that all the Soviet, particularly its military telephone network and telegraph network, all those cables networks went under the Soviet section of Berlin. And so this huge long tunnel over 1,400 feet long, almost 1,500 feet long, was actually constructed and incredible that they were able to successfully tunnel under without anyone finding out.

And it’s believed that George Blake in this period, he’d already been turned, he’d been turned towards communism and was he already and highly likely working for the KGB. And it is said that he betrayed a number of agents, over 40 agents, at least, in Eastern Europe to the KGB and they lost their lives as a result. So pretty terrible treachery. The Berlin Tunnel was discovered ultimately, but very, very important to listening to the cable traffic of Moscow that’s going out across via Berlin, including two key postings in Warsaw and Bucharest. So very, very important operation and I’ll tip back onto that a little bit later. Next slide please. So it was said too that his actions completely devastated MI6’s operations in the Middle East that he’d passed so much information of as I’ve put there, every British agent working out of Cairo. Cairo was always a really significant posting for anyone working for MI6 in this period. Cairo was highly significant during the Second World War, all kinds of double agent operations were emerging out of there. We were running double agents. We had an MI6 station, of course, the special operations executive also were running operations out of Cairo, the SOE. So we normally think of particularly with France, but they were also running operations out of Cairo. But so every British agent was betrayed to the Soviets, working out of Cairo in the early Cold War, Damascus and Beirut. And so you can see if you are going to spill the beans and names of available working in this area, it’s pretty much covering most of the Middle East. And later Lord Parker, then Lord Chief Justice likened Blake’s actions actually to treason. And he once said, “It is one of the worst that can be envisaged other than in a time of war.” Next slide please.

Blake was arrested. He was captured in eventually during 1961 and faced trial. He was found guilty of betraying his country in 1961. Of course, although he did have British nationality at this point, he did always say that he didn’t belong. He wasn’t really, this wasn’t really his country. He was born in Holland. He was sentenced to 42 years and even at the time for all his treachery, and don’t forget, we’ve got the treachery of Burgess and Maclean who have defected to Moscow. They defected in 1951, 10 years earlier. It was five years before Küche publicly acknowledged that they were in Russia, they were in Moscow. So by now, by the time that Blake faces trial, the fate and where Burgess and Maclean are, that’s known and we shortly to have of course the treachery of Philby and his defection. But all this is sort of bubbling in the background against the background of the failed CIA mission to try and land on Cuba and The Bay of Pigs, Blake, who has betrayed at least 42 agents and he’s given one year imprisonment for every agent that he’s betrayed. It’s an extraordinary number of agents, but also the longest sentence ever passed for espionage. He was charged officially under the Official Secrets Act on five separate accounts of passing secrets to the Soviet authorities. Next slide, please. And as I’ve put as I’ve said just now, it was the longest jail term any British court had handed down to an individual up until 1961. And for all his treachery in the public outcry, I think there was still shock at the length of his sentence. The photograph here actually is him returning after being POW in the Korean War. Next slide please.

He’s held famously in Wormwood Scrubs, but I mean you can’t make it up really. He is ultimately broken out of jail. I really hope they fictionalise this and make something on Netflix or one of the other channels. So I think this is really ripe for this to be fictionalised in a drama series. Would be absolutely fantastic. It’s the 22nd of October, 1966. So he’s only just about served five years in prison. There’s a roll call, a daily roll call at 5:30 in the evening, but by 7:00 PM he’s missing from his cell. Next slide please. So how could he possibly have broken out of Wormwood Scrubs? Well, on the particular corridor that he was, and the landing at the end when the guards came to look, they could see that the bars had been sawn and he’d clearly escaped through a window, a rope ladder had been taken down from the window and he’d actually managed to scale down the prison wall. And it led to a number of questions, of course who had actually helped him because there was no way he could have got out without any insider help. Had he, questions were raised. Had he enjoyed a number of privileges in prison, had he befriended too many of those guards? I mean he was charming. You can see from some of his photographs and some of the interviews he gives later in his life, particularly towards the end of his life, you can see there is quite a charisma about the man. Questions were asked too, was it too easy for him to escape? Surely he should have been kept in a high security wing. But you know, did anyone really anticipate that he would try to escape, well successfully escape, not try to escape, he successfully escaped. Next slide please.

So he had assistance, of course he had to, three prison guards in particular who I’ve named there, Sean Bourke, Michael Randal, and Pat Pottle, very famously. And questions again have been asked, why would they do that? They’re trusted guards, they’re supposed to clearly look after their charges, but they later, I think it was Pat Pottle who gave an interview later and said that “The sentence,” the 42 year jail sentence, “was completely disproportionate to the crime he’d committed.” Well, of course it’s not their right to actually pass judgement like that. But they did and they managed to get him out of the prison over the wall. And he was smuggled, I mean just incredibly smuggled out of England across the channel and over the border eventually driven long hours over the border into East Berlin and there was a van, I’ve put car, but it was more like a sort of converted small van, not quite a camper van, but it had a secret compartment in it. And if you want to read about what is an incredibly dramatic escape, actually if whatever one thinks of George Blake, it was a really daring, almost James Bond type escape. If you want to read about the very tense and fantastic escape, I can recommend Roger Hermiston’s book and it’ll come up on the screen shortly in a moment, “The Greatest Traitor”. Absolutely fantastic. I think my favourite biography of George Blake, I really, really recommend that. It’s called “The Greatest Traitor”. And so Blake always throughout his life and in later interviews, he denied ever being a traitor. And as I mentioned just now, he always insisted that he never really belonged, he never felt British. And you know, that’s one of those things that he, not unlike Philby, Philby felt he didn’t quite sort of belong to the society that was emergent. And he comes out with a very similar, not dissimilar sentence during one of his interviews to the press, but Blake said his actual words, “To betray you first have to belong. And I never belonged.” Next slide, please.

Of course, eventually he himself goes public with his memoirs. 1990, he’s published his autobiography, “No Other Choice” it’s called. So he felt he had no other choice than to be broken out of jail and to end up in the Soviet Union. It’s interesting, if you look at his wartime period, what he says, this is 1990, before the whole eavesdropping programme, the Second World War had itself been declassified. There is absolutely nothing about his work in the eavesdropping programme, but he has a very protracted, almost, I think it’s at least nine months of training in naval, things to do with boats technology and interrogation. And then he goes on to work on the Dutch desk of the intelligence services and that’s very, very odd. So certainly it’s my belief and I’ve located him in the eavesdropping programme for just a short time in the wartime. So his autobiography is interesting. It’s published in 1990. I don’t know if he left any further memoirs after his death would actually eventually be published and be very interesting. He was astonishingly given an advance of £60,000 for a British publisher. But the British government then stepped in and froze the remaining balance, which was due to be paid to him on publication £90,000 in the 1980s. I guess it’s probably equivalent to an advance of 1 to 2 million today. So quite astonishing advance for his revelations, but I’m not really sure that he gives very much away in his book. Anyway, next slide.

But the legal battles are ongoing and in May, 2003, he’s accused of British government of breaching his human rights. And finally, three years later in September, 2006, he is granted compensation. It’s nowhere near of course the money that was frozen, but he was granted £5,000. Now it’s not known whether the British government had seen any advanced manuscript that he’d written, but certainly I think perhaps he didn’t tell the full story even in 1990. And interestingly in an interview just the year beforehand in 2002 year before he accused British government of breaching his human rights, he’s one of the few of those spies, Cambridge spies, although he’s not from Cambridge, but of that whole cold world espionage circle that seems to have been happy in the Soviet Union. He seemed very, very relaxed in the interviews and in photographs you see of him in Soviet Russia. He described those years in Russia as, “The happiest of my life.” We certainly can’t say that of Guy Burgess. I think Donald Maclean perhaps a bit more lukewarm. They would, certainly the other Cambridge spies certainly missed England, that’s for sure. But George Blake never really felt he belonged or settled in England, even though he hadn’t had of course the privileged Cambridge life and education that the others had had. Next slide please. Incidentally, he comes to England first. Officially it’s the summer of 1942, but there’s no paper trail for that. I have looked so we dunno the exact date when he comes into England. And he was supposed to be doing, and that’s admitted in books about him, admitted that he did some intelligence work before he came here. There he is pictured in Moscow with Kim Philby. They had a good friendship and met from time to time. On the right hand side, you can see the book that I’ve recommended, “The Greatest Traitor”, absolutely brilliant and so readable and so well researched. Next slide please.

So in his lifetime then he did give a number of interviews. Why was his treachery so sensitive? Well, apart from, well quite seriously of course portraying 42 agents, most of them in the Middle East and compromising whatever operations were going on then. Arguably too, and this I don’t think was brought up in his trial transcripts haven’t been released. I haven’t been able to find them. The Berlin Tunnel, I’m coming back to the Berlin Tunnel I mentioned earlier, constructed as I said, between 1953 and operation in 1955, a joint operation by the CIA and MI6. Now it was said that he actually betrayed the existence of that tunnel. That’s why the Soviets found the tunnel. It wasn’t planned this way, but we are the 11th of May today, 2023. It was the 11th of May, 1955 that we first tapped that tunnel was finished and we first tapped those cables successfully and were managed to listen in to the first message from Soviet military intelligence. So who would believe it? Oh, we’re on the anniversary. So we are picking up the CIA and MI6 are picking up vital intelligence. The Soviets have no idea and that tunnel would’ve kept running, it is said, without George Blake’s treachery. And what kind of intelligence were the CIA and MI6 gaining from it? Apparently the Soviet Atomic Programme, aspects of that and the scientists who were working on it started at the beginning by talking about the race for the Atomic Programme. Each side trying to find out how advanced the other was, how much have been developed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear weapons as well as the nuclear energy programme. They also picked up, interestingly, rising tensions in Poland. So they were being able to gauge MI6 and CIA were able to gauge from the correspondence crossing under Berlin in those cables, they’re able to gauge what was happening with Poland.

‘Cause don’t forget, once the, you know, there’s that iron curtain that goes down, but once the Berlin Wall, and this is later of course, but even before the Berlin Wall, it was incredibly difficult to get anything out of East Berlin or the Soviet sector. You pretty much had to send agents in incredibly difficult to get intelligence. So this seemed ideal to actually be listening in to the Soviet military communications. It’s a sort of Cold War Bletchley Park. And they also picked up that the Soviets had no intention of actually invading Western Europe. Now it was a lot of propaganda going on from both sides and a lot of rhetoric from the Soviets. And we didn’t know whether they were going to mount a military operation to take the rest of Berlin. We think about the Berlin airlift where the supplies much earlier were being brought in the late 1940s. You know, these were very, with the blockade of Berlin, these were very dangerous and difficult times, although not even a single gun was fired in action. So to actually gain this really sensitive information, to have a sort of eye view of what is really happening in Soviet military intelligence, it’s so valuable that you can imagine if you have a double agent, like a traitor like George Blake who’s betrayed that, the whole operation was shut down by the Soviets, we now are not getting that intelligence and that could lead to quite serious or very serious consequences. Next slide please.

And it may really account for some of the tensions going into the early 1960s when we were trying to gauge and at one point you have the tanks near Checkpoint Charlie literally pointing at each other that the barrels of the tanks, I mean there were some very dangerous moments as we know during the Cuban Missile Crisis which brought us to the brink of nuclear war and behind all of that, in parallel to that we have a number of agents and I can’t go into Fuchs today, I’m going to do a bit more on him sometime. Klaus Fuchs, his files have now been declassified. There are some MI5 files about him. He was eventually unmasked as a mole passing, a scientist passing intelligence. He’d been working on various programmes, the buildup to the atomic programme in the Second World War working for the British. He spent some time in America, but he was actually passed the intelligence to the Russians on the state of the Allied Atomic Programme, believing because the Soviets were our allies, that they had a right to know this. Next slide please.

And already in 1945 the allies had taken or discovered the experimental nuclear reactor at Haigerloch. There is a museum there. This picture on the left is the American and British soldiers April, 1945. It was really important right from the end of the Second World War to gain a picture of the Soviet threatened just how far the Soviets had with their atomic programme. And it was as part of that race, the fact that those Cambridge spies, the likes of Klaus Fuchs and the likes of George Blake are compromising absolutely vital intelligence operations makes them amongst the worst traitors in intelligence history. Next slide please. But at the same time as the allied soldiers or should I say, the British and American soldiers had discovered Haigerloch. They are also in post-war Germany with the snatch and grab of the famous atomic scientists. And I’m not sure if you are aware, but 12 of them, of Hitler’s top scientists may included Otto Hahn, Max von Laue and Werner Heisenberg. They were amongst the 12 that were brought back by various T forces. They were sort of smashed almost like the Commander, smash and grab teams that brought them back to this place. This is Farm Hall at God Manchester, not far from Cambridge. This whole place was wired for sound. It came under the command from July, 1945 of Thomas Kendrick, mentioned him before, he was part of the eavesdropping programme. There were German Jewish refugee secret listeners who’d worked during World War II at three other secret sites of the eavesdropping programme for Kendrick. Some of them were transferred here to Farm Hall from July, 1945 until the end of 1945. And here these civilian scientists were held and we bugged their conversations, trying to ascertain if they would give away any mathematical technological information. We were interested in their reactions to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But crucially we were trying to map the Soviet, the picture of the Soviet Atomic programme. And these scientists, of course eventually are transferred to the Manhattan Project in America. Next slide please.

So into this mix and into this background where we are trying to ascertain the state of the Soviet Atomic programme, which is behind the Allied one. At one point during the Second World War, it is now known that they are about a month ahead of the German programme. But Klaus Fuchs, was he missed in any vetting programme? They, the Soviets had actually reestablished contact with him and wanted him to spy for them, particularly after the Soviets had invaded Germany it, sorry, the Germans had invaded Soviet Union in June, 1941. Next slide please. But in an interesting twist here, Klaus Fuchs becomes the handler for a very important, passing information to his handler was Agent Sonya that Ben McIntyre written about, Ruth Kuczynski. She was actually a courier for the Russians. She was living in the heart of England here, completely discreet. It took a long time to unmask her, but she was actually pretty senior in Soviet military intelligence. So you get a picture, it’s a very complex picture emerging of atomic spies on both sides that are trying to gain information. But at the heart of it, Klaus Fuchs who’s been working at the heart of the British Atomic Programme is actually passing secrets to agent Sonya. And I’m not sure if people have made that connection before. So these were a very dangerous time and we mustn’t underestimate for those that actually passed intelligence to the Soviets. An incredible time of great treachery. Next slide please. So I’m not sure whether George Blake was ever really suspected of being the fifth. Well he was certainly a mole. He’s not one of the five of the Cambridge spies.

Was he the fifth man? They now believe there’s far more of them and not necessarily those that went to Cambridge. Historically, of course Victor Rothschild came under suspicion as possibly the fifth man. Interestingly, his wife Tessa also came under suspicion and some of the files about Victor and Tessa have only just been declassified this year. So MI5 ran a file on them because they were suspected of potentially were they passing secrets to the Soviets. Victor Rothschild joined whilst at Cambridge, had actually joined the Cambridge Apostles, that’s that secret organisation of 12 mirroring Jesus’ apostles. He was known to be a friend of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. He moved in those circles. He went to the same parties and socialised with them. And so during the Cold War period, he comes under suspicion, when there’s the witch hunt, the mole hunt for the mole, the senior mole within the intelligence services, all the connections to the Cambridge defectors obviously come under scrutiny. The Victor Rothschild himself that had a very important role in the Second World War in highly loyal, it’s not believed that he was passing any information to the Soviets during the Second World War. He was actually involved in sabotage. He worked for a while for MI5. He was involved in propaganda, disinformation side of propaganda and also espionage. And he would actually diffuse some quite dangerous booby traps and bombs. And it’s for that he was actually awarded the George Medal, for “dangerous work in hazardous circumstances”. Next slide please.

Again, I’m not sure whether you are aware, but after the liberation of France, Paris is liberated towards the end of August, 1944. Rothschild actually working directly with Dick White and we’ll come to him shortly. Dick White, who goes on to head MI5, Kim Philby for a time. And Malcolm Muggeridge. Yeah, Malcolm Muggeridge we now know was working for MI6. And actually there were some MI6 offices stationed, abilitied after the liberation of France in the Rothschild Mansion in Paris. I mean, what a place to hold your headquarters out there after the liberation of Paris. Amazing. Next slide please. So he’s actually in and out of those intelligence services. He’s obviously has very clear access to some pretty senior levels of intelligence. Roland Perry, an interesting guy who wrote a book, “The Fifth Man” said, that it was, “Rothschild, not Klaus Fuchs, or, as is generally believed, the civil servant John Cairncross.” John Cairncross was at Bletchley Park for a while, remember. It was Rothschild who first alerted Stalin to ally plans to build a bomb, an atom bomb using plutonium 235. Well now this begins to place a different light. So was he after all, already passing secrets towards the end of the Second World War. Next slide please.

And Roland Perry also wrote this is of course, Waddesdon Manor, Rothschild Manor house. Beautiful place. Really worth a visit. I’m sure most of you have probably visited. He said, “Rothschild was involved in so many aspects of spying that he seemed to be like a super-agent, sabotaging every Western intelligence initiative for 20 years after the war.” These are really serious allegations and it’ll be good for us to do a little bit more, I think in depth on Victor Rothschild. And whether he was just, I think in the last few years when historians were beginning to actually conclude that Victor Rothschild was not a fifth man, but the recently declassified files that need some proper analysis. Maybe the picture is just a little bit more grey. Next slide, please. Not committing myself either way on Rothschild. It was Yuri Modin, the KGB officer who said, “Rothschild was the key to most of the Cambridge ring’s penetration of British intelligence.” That puts a whole new light on things, doesn’t it? He had the contacts, he was the one that was able to introduce Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and the others to important figures in intelligence such as Stuart Menzies, who was the third head of MI6, head of MI6 during World War II. Dick White, who becomes the head of MI5, Sir Robert Vansittart, who’s working in the foreign office. He’s a permanent undersecretary at one point. He has access to a lot of foreign office intelligence. So he had the context, it was Rothschild who was in a position. In fact, he argues, to introduce them to the senior levels, the senior levels in the foreign office, and those who controlled MI6. Next slide please.

After Blunt’s full confession, it’s in 1964. Rothschild himself, I’m not sure if you know this was actually questioned by Special Branch. Publicly, he was ultimately cleared. And there are all kinds of names and reputations that are being banded around at this time, potentially as being possible Soviet spies. But what are, and I’ll leave this hanging ‘cause I think again, we can do some more on the Profumo Affair is too much to cover in one lecture. What of Rothschild’s involvement in the Profumo Affair. Question, was he a friend of Stephen Ward? And you can begin to see this kind of incredibly tangled web and for historians to try to make sense of what is already a mysterious shadowy world, untangling this is quite tricky. It’s an incredibly complex, but I think absolutely fascinating web of espionage in the Cold War. Next slide please. Rothschild actually wrote to the British newspapers 3rd of December, finally 1986 when the suspicion is still continuing about him. His name is still banned around. He said, quite categorically, “I am not and never have been, a Soviet agent.” Margaret Thatcher also said, “We have no evidence he was ever a Soviet agent.” Now I have had a brief glance through the Rothschild files that have been declassified at the National Archives. And again, it’s not 100% clear. I’m going to go through in far more detail, but it’s still a very, very murky world and I’m not sure we’re ever really going to get the answer. Next slide.

But Kim Philby actually had something to say on Victor Rothschild. Philby said, and whether this was just a divert from a suspicion from him before he himself defects to Moscow in 1963. He said that it was around about, “1948 that Victor Rothschild seized, or copied, all of the file-cards listing Soviet agents in Europe and elsewhere.” And he, “Passed them to Mossad to aid the fledgling state of Israel.” Now, I don’t know if that’s true. I haven’t looked into, I haven’t researched in depth, anything to do with Mossad history, but that would be incredible, wouldn’t it? It’s almost like a parallel to Robert Maxwell who controversial figure of course, and his business dealings, but who did help the state of Israel. So did Rothschild actually in the end on the flip side of this actually use any connections he had to pass lists of Soviet agents to Mossad. Fascinating question. Next slide please. Roger Hollis, who becomes the head of MI5 for 10 years, he’s the head of MI5 at this critical period. He sees it through the Profumo Affair through the Cuban Missile Crisis through, he just comes in after the defections of Burgess and Maclean. But he sees it through the Antony Blunt period. And as I said, the defection of Kim Philby, a critical time that he’s Director general. The official MI5 website says this about him. Yeah, MI5 has its own website. How things have changed, as I said earlier.

It says, “Sir Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5, from 1956-1966, was investigated after allegations were made that either he or his deputy, Graham Mitchell, fitted the profile of a long-term undercover Soviet agent. The allegations were made following the exposure of the Cambridge spy ring and the subsequent hunt for other Soviet moles.” And that’s about all it says. I mean, it’d be very interesting. You can go and have a look at the official website. Next slide please. There was an official investigation into whether Roger Hollis was the fifth man. And for a long time, if you ask people in the public, particularly the older generation, they were pretty much on the side that he had been a Soviet mole. But there was a long investigation between 1964 just after Kim Philby’s defection until 1971. He came under intense investigation. But the conclusion of the investigation was that there was no evidence to show that Hollis had ever been a Soviet agent. And MI5 officially stated the case against Hollis was so insubstantial that it should never have been pursued. Next slide please. But another character I’m going to do more on for you later in the year, Buster Crabb, he’s been in a lot of the podcasts and news recently because he mysteriously this MI6 frogman disappears under a Soviet ship, the official ship when Khrushchev makes a visit to the UK in 1956. Was that a coverup? And if it was a coverup, was it Roger Hollis that actually smoothed over what had really happened during the 'Buster’ Crabb, Lionel Crabb affair. And Klaus Fuchs I mean, looking back during the investigation into Roger Hollis, people were saying, “Well, look, it was Roger Hollis who was who in 1941 even cleared Klaus Fuchs of ever being an atomic spy.” And later of course, Klaus Fuchs serves a jail sentence for having passed secrets to the Soviets. Next slide, please.

It’s a very kind of complex, murky world. And then we have some baffling, what I’ve called oversights during the Profumo Affair that we’ll look at in more detail another time and just as an overview. But it is said that Hollis in some cases turned a blind eye. The Profumo Affair was one of the most significant embarrassments to the government at the time. And it led to the fall of the conservative government. Profumo himself, John Profumo had to resign. He was British Secretary of State for war. He had a hugely responsible role in government and did it lead to the installation of a labour administration more acceptable to the Soviet Union? And this is the whole mix of whether Harold Wilson was really a Soviet spy. And of course, before he becomes leader of the Labour Party, there is the mysterious death of Hugh Gaitskell. So we’ve got all this mix into what initially seems to be quite separate stories. There almost seems, you know, connection between the Cambridge five, George Blake and this. But there is this complex web and all this at the time when the US was planning to supply weapons into Western Germany. And the Soviet spy, Veni Ivanov, who was a naval attache in the Soviet embassy in London, he was trying to get details and of course there allegations, probably true actually, that he’d slept with Christine Keeler, who can see pictured here. So who was Hollis really working for? Was he the fifth man? Because as is said, that he failed to warn the Prime Minister about the security risks and the situation, that relationship between Keeler who’d had a long-term, fairly quite long-term affair with Profumo and had slept once at least with Ivanov. Next slide please.

Finally, it’s Harold Macmillan that declares of Roger Hollis, that MI5 had kept him ignorant about the relationship between Profumo and Keeler and of her being asked, of Christine Keeler, being asked to discover the nuclear weapons date to West Germany and the weapons that were going to be sent to West Germany. So Macmillan very publicly says that it was Roger Hollis that had kept him in the dark. Next slide, please. It’s coming to my final points for today. A question, I leave a question with you. I mean, I’m not sure in a way these are many unanswerable questions. Historians are making progress as files are declassified. So much of course still has not been declassified. A question was there in reality, at least one long-serving penetration agent whilst they’re a super mole, nevermind the mole hunt by Peter Wright, who’s looking for a number of kind of key moles. But did he really miss a super mole inside MI5 who, as I’ve put here, was not only supplying Moscow, the Kremlin with British and American intelligence secrets as an defence in secrets, but also was that Super Mole protecting the other spies and agents around them and therefore preventing effective action against those other moles? Was he the super mole that is protecting all the others? Next slide please.

So by the 1980s, can we say, is it that Hollis’s non-involvement with the Soviets, sorry, Hollis’s non-involvement with the Soviets, was finally confirmed by Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky, who is still alive. He’s written some memoirs, fascinating character, MI6 smuggled him out in the boot of a car out of East Berlin, out he comes out from Moscow, I believe it’s via Berlin. And the Soviets, it said, he said, you know, he was debriefed when he got here. He said, he claims the Soviets are baffled. They were baffled why Hollis ever came under suspicion. And he said the Soviets in the end concluded that there was “some mysterious, internal British intrigue” going on. Next slide, please.

But could it simply be yes, we have this complex web of a serious Cold War espionage goings on at a time when the world is brought to close to nuclear war, but is it just incompetence? And I asked that question and I’m not the only historian who’s asked this, is it in the end, ineptitude on such a scale by the British and security services is entirely due to incompetence? My last slide, please. There are still of course, so many unanswered questions, too many unanswered questions about not only the Cambridge spies were the five, some historians have postulated there were 6, 7, 8, possibly even more. We probably won’t ever really know. But for me as a historian working in espionage and intelligence, I work with what has been declassified. And I think we have so much there that’s coming out that has just been released that we need to sort of start working on but for me, I wonder if we had all the answers, if we were privileged enough that the intelligence services said, “Here are all of the files, here are the answers.” For me, it takes away so much of the excitement and mystery of what is an incredible period of espionage. Thank you. I hope you’ve enjoyed today.