Named after 67 years, the Oxford traitor whose spying for Russia was hushed up by MI5
Astonishingly, they helped get him a job at the Daily Telegraph where he was known as ‘Pink’ Floyd
THE SUMMER of 1951 was a wretched time for the Foreign Office and British Intelligence. In May, diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had sensationally fled to Moscow after being told that their pro- Soviet treachery was about to be exposed.
The man who had tipped them off was Kim Philby, a high-ranking MI6 officer who lost his own job soon afterwards when he, too, was suspected of being a Soviet mole.
Understandably, the Americans — who shared huge amounts of highly classified material with the British — were incensed. The CIA and the State Department declared that they were ‘highly disturbed’ the Foreign Office could employ such men.
‘They pointed out that in the State Department, repeated drunkenness, recurrent nervous breakdowns, sexual deviations and other human frailties are considered security hazards, and persons showing any one or more of them are dismissed summarily,’ the British Embassy sheepishly reported.
When the Burgess and Maclean story went public in June, it was one of Britain’s worst spy scandals. As both men had been educated at public schools and at Cambridge, it seemed something was very rotten at the heart of the British Establishment.
Until now, however, it was not generally known that the Foreign Office and MI5 had discovered yet another Soviet agent in their midst, whose treachery was kept secret.
Yesterday, The Sunday Times reported that a Foreign Office official called David Floyd had passed material to the Soviets during the Forties while employed in the Russian secretariat of the British Embassy in Moscow. He was also strongly suspected of having done the same while working in our embassies in Belgrade and Prague.
The revelation comes from top-secret Foreign Office files released after a Freedom of Information application. Papers obtained by a biographer of Burgess show the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute Floyd.
But how on earth could such a man have been hired in the first place?
Floyd had been secretary of the Oxford University branch of the Communist Party and was married to a communist. He had two criminal convictions and had been in prison.
Even so, he was appointed to sensitive posts by the Foreign Office.
Worse still, after Floyd’s treachery was exposed and then the truth was covered up, he found respectable employment as ‘communist affairs correspondent’ at the Daily Telegraph and then at The Times.
FLOYDtook his secret to his grave when he died in 1997 at the age of 83. At the time, The Guardian described him blithely as ‘one of Fleet Street’s most knowledgeable Kremlinologists’. The Telegraph’s own obituary said he was ‘a valued member of staff’.
His son Sir Christopher Floyd, now a Lord Justice of Appeal, appears to have known nothing about his father’s secret past. ‘It’s very shocking for me to hear this,’ Sir Christopher told The Sunday Times.
Born in 1914 in Swindon, the son of a railwayman, Floyd was drawn to communism at Oxford. With the rise of fascism in Europe and an economic slump, many welleducated youngsters saw communism as the ideal social system.
But while for many this was a peaceful interest, Floyd’s leftism was unabashedly militant and proudly unpatriotic.
He had already joined the AntiWar Movement, a group banned by the Labour Party for being a ‘communist satellite’.
One evening, Floyd and two comrades went to a cinema in Swindon to see a documentary film called Our Fighting Navy. Taking exception to stirring scenes of the Royal Navy carrying out a mock battle, they stood up and shouted: ‘Take it off! We won’t fight for King and Country!’ The trio were duly arrested and sentenced to a month in prison, although they were released after two days.
One of the three, Albert Hanson, later became Professor of Politics at Leeds University and was succeeded in that post by the Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David).
Floyd was arrested again and charged with four offences relating to a strike by workers at a steel factory in Oxford. He was charged with obstructing a police constable, blocking a bus with his motorcycle and assaulting a man.
With his bail stood by his father and the vice-principal of his Oxford college, St Edmund Hall, Floyd was fined £2 (about £140 today).
His brush with the law may even have strengthened his commitment to communism, as he became secretary of the university’s branch of the Communist Party.
During this time he was spotted by Arthur Wynn, a postgraduate who recruited spies for the KGB.
Although millions of words have been written about the notorious ‘ Cambridge Spies’ including Burgess, Maclean and Anthony Blunt (who was allowed to pursue a career as an art historian and as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in exchange for a detailed confession), much less has been told about how Wynn assembled a similar spy ring in Oxford.
Members included a Labour MP called Bernard Floud and his brother Peter, who worked for the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Along with Wynn, Floyd met another student communist, Joan Dabbs, whom he married in 1939.
Apparently because of his poor eyesight, he was unable to fight in the war — but his ability to speak Russian got him a job at the UK Military Mission in Moscow in 1944. After the war he stayed in the Russian capital, where he was employed by the British embassy.
Although his position was relatively lowly, according to Roger Allen, then the embassy’s First Secretary, Floyd would have been able to get hold of ‘almost any file, with a few exceptions, on legitimate grounds’.
Like the Cambridge spies, it seems that in public, Floyd carefully downplayed his adherence to communism. Indeed, Allen recalled him as ‘ cheerful and on the whole sensible’ and found it ‘almost impossible to believe that he was an ideologically orthodox communist’.
That said, Floyd’s private life had become unorthodox.
He began an affair in Moscow with a Russian actress and his marriage collapsed.
After being posted to Prague, he then had a relationship with a
woman called Hajka Goldmannová, whom he married in 1948 and who was the mother of their son Christopher.
With this raggedy private life, not to mention his communist student past, it seems astonishing that he did not trigger security concerns.
It was not until an Oxfordeducated employee at the Ministry of Defence met Floyd in early 1950 and recalled Floyd’s communist activities at university that the alarm was raised.
A security check was carried out to look for any ‘early record of tendencies towards communism’. Most worryingly, even though such tendencies were discovered, they were dismissed by the authorities as ‘youthful indiscretion’.
One diplomat even commented that it would have been impossible to ‘conceal a double loyalty during all this time’.
It looked as if Floyd had got away with his treachery. But then it seems he had an attack of conscience and confessed to being a Soviet agent — although he admitted only to having passed over ‘very low-grade’ documents. Why did he confess? He told the Foreign Office ‘it was the honest thing to do’. More revealingly, he also said he feared the Russians ‘might kidnap him’.
Floyd, perhaps motivated by the fact that his second wife was pregnant, claimed he wanted to ‘begin life anew with a clear conscience’.
After MI5 investigated, a file was passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Extraordinarily, even then it was considered there was not enough evidence to charge Floyd with any crimes.
At the end of summer 1951, British government officials admitted to their American counterparts that another Soviet spy had been unearthed, but played down his significance.
MI5 officers met agents from a section of the CIA called the Office of Special Operations and told them there was ‘no basis for legal action against David Floyd [...] who voluntarily disclosed Soviet Intelligence associations but disclaimed any transmission of confidential information’.
The Americans accepted the British assurances. At the same meeting, MI5 revealed to the Americans that Floyd had ‘implicated’ Arthur Wynn, the man who had recruited him as a spy in Oxford and who was working at the Ministry of Fuel and Power.
Despite being investigated by intelligence officer Peter Wright — who later wrote the book Spycatcher, which sensationally alleged that Harold Wilson was the target of an MI5 conspiracy and that former MI5 chief Roger Hollis was a Soviet mole — Wynn was left to pursue his Whitehall career until his retirement in 1971.
But what was to be done about Floyd, who, according to a memo, the Foreign Office believed to be ‘sincerely repentant’? HOW
typical that the Establishment came to his rescue.
In 1952 he was given a job by the Daily Telegraph as its communist affairs correspondent. The paper’s deputy editor was Malcolm Muggeridge, who had worked for MI6 during the war.
It is not known if Muggeridge — later known as a broadcaster and Catholic convert nicknamed St Mugg — was aware of Floyd’s treachery, although it is likely he would have known of his past.
Floyd worked, without suspicion, at the Daily Telegraph for almost 30 years. Inevitably, considering his area of reporting, he was known as ‘Pink Floyd’.
In the late Seventies he moved to The Times, where he was also ‘communist affairs correspondent’.
Although the treachery of many other spies is known to have led to the deaths of compatriots whose secret work they exposed to their enemies, it is hard to be precise about the damage Floyd did. Yet how can we accept the assurances of a man willing to betray his country that he had only passed on ‘low-grade’ material?
Of course, British Intelligence may have found a use for him as a double or triple agent.
It seems outrageous that David Floyd should be known as the spy who got away with it, though — and another big question remains: how many others also got away with it?
Could Albert Hanson, for example, his communist comrade who became a Leeds University professor, also have been a spy? It is certainly possible, as we now know that Floyd’s Oxford recruiter on behalf of the Kremlin, Arthur Wynn, was offered immunity from prosecution (although the deal collapsed) and allowed to work in a taxpayer-funded government post until retirement.
Until the next tranche of secret documents is belatedly released, we can only speculate.