The Other Side of Silence

“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 fiancee. 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 Madchen-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.