However, at almost exactly the same time as the Russians were benefitting from Fuchs’ treachery and exploding their own atomic bomb, the Venona transcripts were providing clues to both Fuchs’ and Greenglass’ identities. Fuchs was arrested and confessed in January 1950, while Greenglass admitted his role in June that year. Information that Green-glass provided would prove critical in winding up the Soviet network run by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (see chapter 4).
In addition to cutting off the Soviets’ inroads into the atomic establishment, Venona also crippled one of their major operations in Australia. Since 1943, the NKVD residency in Canberra had great success penetrating the Australian Ministry of External Affairs, which gave them access to a lot of British secrets. Jim Hill and Ian Milner, the two best Soviet agents there, were compromised by the Venona material. Early in 1948, MI5 sent their Director-General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, accompanied by Roger Hollis, to conduct an investigation, maintaining the cover story that a British mole in Soviet intelligence had passed on the agents’ details, rather than risk compromising Venona. The loss of these agents was such a serious blow to Moscow Centre that by the time the KGB Resident Vladimiri Petrov defected in 1954, they had still not been able to achieve more than minor breaches of Australian security.
However, perhaps the most damaging discovery of the Venona material as far as the Soviets were concerned was the seemingly trivial item that a Russian agent, code-named Gomer (Homer in English), had been travelling from Washington to New York in 1944 to visit his pregnant wife. When this final piece was put into place, it meant that Homer could only be one person: Donald Maclean. And with Maclean would go the whole of the Magnificent Five.
Kim Philby had stayed in MI6 after the end of the war, becoming head of the Secret Service station in Turkey from 1947 to 1949 (using that position to betray any British agents who attempted to use the Turkish border crossing to gain access to the Soviet Union), and then was sent as MI6 representative in Washington from 1949, during which time he had access to both American and British case files. Not long before his recall in 1951, he passed over information about three groups of six agents who were parachuting into the Ukraine — sending them to their deaths, noting in his diary that ‘I can make an informed guess’ as to their fate.
During the same period, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were able to pass over reams of information from the Foreign Office, with Anthony Blunt occasionally assisting Burgess with the material. Although Burgess was gradually becoming more dissolute, often under the influence of drink or drugs, he could still charm information out of unsuspecting colleagues, as he did in the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office before he was posted to Washington in 1950. Maclean was posted to Cairo in 1948, but his drinking also slipped out of control, as did other aspects of his behaviour. According to Gordievsky, Moscow Centre blamed both his and Burgess’ excesses on their concerns that the Venona information might compromise them. After a drunken rampage in Cairo in 1950, Maclean was sent back to Britain, where he seemed to pull himself together — and was able to provide the Russians with useful intelligence regarding the onset of the Korean War.
As MI6 liaison with American intelligence and counterintelligence services, Kim Philby very quickly realized who code name Homer really was, but it was eighteen months before further decrypts would give enough clues for the FBI to gain sufficient evidence against Maclean. The field of suspects narrowed to thirty-five by the end of 1950, and just nine by April 1951. Philby tried to divert attention away from Maclean, but a crucial piece of evidence both cleared Philby’s suggested suspect and became the fatal one for Maclean. However, because neither the FBI nor MI5 wanted to reveal the existence of Venona in court (Fuchs and Greenglass had confessed, so it wasn’t necessary in their cases), there was a period during which MI5 tried to gain new evidence of Maclean’s treachery.
Guy Burgess had been posted to Washington, and was staying with Philby (something that would compromise the latter tremendously after Burgess’ defection). However, he was spiralling out of control, and Philby used Burgess’ recall to Britain to get a message to Maclean, who had realized that his access to top-secret papers was being restricted, and that therefore he was probably under surveillance. When Burgess reached London he received a letter from Philby stating, ‘It’s getting
News of both men’s departure sent the intelligence community into uproar. Anthony Blunt was under no suspicion and was able to gain access to Burgess’ flat, where he disposed of a large number of incriminating documents (although he would inadvertently leave some handwritten notes which would lead directly to the unmasking of John Cairncross). Modin had tried to persuade Blunt to join Burgess and Maclean but he refused. (He would eventually confess in 1964, but gained immunity from prosecution.) Kim Philby, on the other hand, decided to brazen things out — but the CIA would have other ideas.
3
THE COLD WAR BEGINS
By the end of 1945, President Truman had come to the conclusion that the Soviets could not be trusted, but he still hoped that in some way peace could be maintained. Despite the clear evidence of Soviet networks operating in America, thanks to the testimony of Oleg Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley, and the emerging material from Venona, he was reluctant to expose them publicly. However, events in the first few weeks of 1946 would start to educate the American people that the wartime alliance with the Soviets was not going to extend beyond the end of the conflict.
In the USSR, Stalin was making it clear that he saw the way forward very differently from his erstwhile allies. In February 1946, he gave a speech to the voters of Moscow, in which he blamed the outbreak of the Second World War on ‘monopolistic capitalism’ and went on to say, ‘Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.’
A week later, the news of the arrests in Canada based on the Gouzenko information was released in America and a few days after that, political adviser George F. Kennan sent a briefing telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow, which would shape American foreign policy for much of the next forty-five years. It set out his belief that the ‘USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘‘capitalist encirclement’’ with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence’; that ‘Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others’; and that ‘we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent
On 5 March, respected statesman Winston Churchill gave a speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. Accompanied on the platform by President Truman, Churchill expressed his belief that the world had changed irrevocably, and coined a phrase that would epitomize the Soviet-dominated fiefdom. He told the audience of students:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization… I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of
