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To make a spy
What are the psychological characteristics of a secret agent? What motivates them? How do they stay hidden? New research into the most successful undercover recruiter of them all shines a surprising light on Skripal, Litvinenko and a new generation of Rus
The Salisbury nerve-agent attacks last month shone a light on the murky world of espionage. So what makes a perfect spy and how are they recruited? Roland Philipps reports
In the summer of 1934, two recent Cambridge graduates sat down to supper in a modest flat on Acol Road, a quiet residential street in Kilburn, north London. At 21, Donald Maclean was a year younger than his friend, Kim Philby, who was suave, handsome and deeply charming, and worked for the Anglo-german Trade Gazette, an extreme right-wing newspaper that covered his true political allegiances: he was a passionately convinced communist.
Weeks earlier, Philby had agreed to spy for the Soviet Union, having been ‘turned’ by Arnold Deutsch, an old friend of his wife’s and a chemical engineering graduate now studying psychology. By then Deutsch worked in London as a Russian ‘illegal’ (an agent operating without diplomatic cover) and had spotted a way to get to the heart of Britain’s ruling class: as fascism had started to brutalise Europe, a generation of committed left-wingers were coming through the great universities and would soon fill the highest echelons of the establishment. So the first task he set Philby was to make a list of his Cambridge peers who might join him undercover, then sound them out. Top of the list was Maclean, who had recently applied to the Foreign Office.
Though they hadn’t known one another well at Cambridge, both men had taken part in a pacifist Armistice Day march in 1933, and Philby knew that Maclean shared his – and Deutsch’s – visionary faith in a world free from oppression and war. Over supper and cheap red wine in his sparse kitchen, Philby asked Maclean whether he might be interested in ‘special work’ – and was astonished at the speed of the reply. Would the special work involve reporting to the Communist organisation Comintern, or directly to Soviet intelligence? asked Maclean. In the memoir he penned years later, while in exile in Moscow, Philby wrote that he did not need ‘the arsenal of arguments and counterarguments’ he had lined up.
Two days later, Maclean walked into a north London café to meet Deutsch for the first time, carrying a yellow hardback book. (Published by left-wing Victor Gollancz on behalf of the Left Book Club, the yellow book was a clear political symbol.) What happened in that café was never recorded, but by the time he left, Maclean was as captivated by Deutsch as Philby had been. As Philby told his Russian biographer years later, ‘You could talk on any topic with [Deutsch]… He looked at you as if [there was] nothing more important in life than you and talking to you.’
Maclean would go on to rise through the ranks, becoming head of the American Department of the Foreign Office at just 37, all the while feeding highly classified information to the intelligence headquarters known to spies as ‘Moscow Centre’, and to the Kremlin. Thanks to Maclean, Moscow had advance warning of Britain’s plans in the build-up to war, of the negotiating positions Churchill and Roosevelt would take before the Yalta Conference, which settled the shape of post-war Europe, of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Germany, and of American nuclear capability in the early, terrifying days of the Cold War.
In the space of a few weeks, Deutsch had secured two of Russia’s greatest assets. He would go on to recruit three more – diplomat Guy Burgess, art historian Anthony Blunt (who became surveyor of the Queen’s pictures) and Treasury worker John Cairncross, all Cambridge graduates and with Philby and Maclean collectively known as the Cambridge Five. The network would get inside the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the BBC, MI5, MI6 and the Royal family, changing spy recruitment in ways that still reverberate – and making Deutsch the most gifted spy recruiter in history.
Despite advances in technology, spy recruitment remains important today. ‘Human force hasn’t changed,’ says Nigel West, European editor of the World Intelligence Review and author of Spycraft Secrets. ‘However much one invests in satellite systems, they still cannot register the intentions of other humans. They could not, for example, have looked into the minds of General Galtieri [President of Argentina during the Falklands War] or Saddam Hussein and registered that next Tuesday they might indulge in aggression and invade their neighbours.’ Yet recruiters since Deutsch have never come close to forging a network as successful as his Cambridge Five.
When I made enquiries, a source close to the British intelligence services said there is little Russian recruitment in Britain today, the focus being on homegrown terrorism. But there are notable exceptions. Since his death in 2006, it has emerged that Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian spy who became a fierce critic of the Kremlin, was paid money by MI6. Shortly before he was poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 believed to have been slipped into a cup of tea, Litvinenko, it is
‘Even today’s best satellite systems cannot register human intention’
alleged, was investigating Spanish links to the Russian mafia.
And then there is Sergei Skripal, the retired Russian military intelligence colonel found poisoned on a park bench in Salisbury last month. In 2006, Skripal was convicted by Russia of passing the identities of Russian agents in Europe to MI6 in return for money transferred into a Spanish bank account. When he was sentenced to 13 years in prison, the daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda stated that in Soviet times he would have been shot. (He allegedly confessed and was later pardoned.) In 2010, Skripal was involved in a major ‘spy swap’, one of three prisoners released in exchange for 10 Russian spies arrested by the FBI, including Anna Chapman, nicknamed ‘Russia’s most glamorous secret agent’. But since then, West says Russia has taken a firmer line and clamped down on suspected traitors.
‘Russia’s attitude to spies is always a reflection of the leadership,’ he says. ‘When Yuri Andropov was chairman of the KGB and was informed that the defector Vladimir Petrov had been found in Canada, he told his subordinates to leave him alone. There is a great difference between that and what has taken place since then.’ West suggests that this is the result of three high-profile defections of senior Russian intelligence officials, which came to light after the Cold War. ‘Russian intelligence had no idea of this high-level penetration, and it influenced every intelligence officer on the planet, but especially Putin.’
Speaking about the Skripal case – for which Russia denies responsibility – West adds, ‘With Skripal, he was an officer of the GIU, which is the Russian military intelligence service – they are an elite, never penetrated, had very few defectors even during the height of the Cold War, are all subject to military discipline as they’re all army officers or naval officers. So Skripal had 300 people who were quite prepared to kill him.’
Before Deutsch, Soviet espionage in Britain had been haphazard – despite the fact that the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) believed the country to be a major threat to the goal of worldwide communism – and recruitment had mostly involved either bribery or blackmail, or a combination of the two, as it does today. Captain John King, a Soviet agent working in the Foreign Office in the 1930s, was a lowly cipher clerk with a wife and a costly mistress, and Deutsch’s predecessor, Hans Pieck, spotting his need for money, had wooed him into working for the Soviets during an expensive motoring holiday. Later, in the 1960s, the British civil servant John Vassall was blackmailed into passing classified information to the Soviets after being photographed in compromising positions with men at parties in Moscow, where he was a diplomat (homosexuality was then a crime in Britain). Skripal, codenamed Forthwith, has been described as a man ‘with a nose for
money’. According to some reports, MI6 bought him a holiday timeshare in Spain, and a case officer would allegedly visit, paying between $5,000 and $6,000 in cash each time.
But what made Deutsch a master recruiter, even compared with those who recruited Skripal, Vassall and King, was his psychological acumen; he recognised that tapping into the political ideologies of those he targeted would make them far more committed spies than bribery or blackmail – the Magnificent Five, as the Cambridge spy ring was known in Moscow Centre, were working for a better world, for peace, not to repeat the mistakes of their parents that had led to the First World War and the Great Depression. Yet Deutsch’s method has never been replicated as effectively. Of later Soviet spies, only one other influential one – George Blake of MI6, turned while held prisoner during the Korean War in the early 1950s – was compelled by belief in the communist cause.
Throughout the Cold War, Soviet spy chiefs harked back to this golden era of interconnected ideologues and attempted to recruit influential left-wingers, buying Labour MPS tea in London hotels in the hope of recreating the glory days of their British network. They were unsuccessful. Instead, recruiters returned to the incentives of money and kompromat (blackmail).
So what made Deutsch more successful than any other spy recruiter in history? He was a stout man with bright blue eyes and curly hair, but little is known of his early life or relationships. Born in Prague, he attended Vienna University, where he was awarded a PHD in 1928, aged 24, and in university documents he described himself as mosaisch (an observant Jew), perhaps to cover his greater loyalty to the secular faith of the Communist Party.
After working as a courier at Comintern, Deutsch joined a publishing house in Vienna, printing ‘sex pol’ literature (which propagated a startling theory that a man’s poor sexual performance led him to fascism) until he was sought by police on pornography charges and fled to London, his visa supported by his cousin Oscar, the millionaire proprietor of the Odeon cinema chain. Deutsch settled in the Isokon Building, a modernist block in Hampstead favoured by writers and artists (the architect Walter Gropius and Agatha Christie are among former occupants), and although he lived alone, residents often dined together after cooking in the communal kitchen.
Around that time, Deutsch enrolled in the University of London, University College on a psychology diploma course; he had long been fascinated by psychology, and the men he cherrypicked and turned shared certain psychological traits. He identified the perfect spy as having ‘an inherent class resentfulness, a predilection for secretiveness, a yearning to belong and an infantile appetite for praise and reassurance’ – all struck a chord when he met Maclean, whom he codenamed Orphan.
Maclean’s father, Sir Donald, an austere teetotal Presbyterian who had risen from humble origins to become a solicitor, MP and eventually cabinet minister, had died at the end of his son’s first year at Cambridge – after which the young Maclean joined protest marches as a communist sympathiser. Maclean’s relationship with his Russian handlers was essential for his equilibrium – to the point where he had a passionate affair with one of them in his first foreign posting, in Paris, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.
Maclean was also instilled with a ‘predilection for secretiveness’ as a boy at Gresham’s School in Holt, where he was introduced to socialism by a friend. By the time he joined, in 1923, the school had abolished caning and imposed a self-regulating disciplinary system, where boys took an oath ‘to avoid impurity’ and were to confess to the headmaster if they broke it. According to memoirs written by a later headmaster of the school, impurity included ‘smutty thoughts’. As a teenage boy, Maclean became skilled at separating his inner thoughts from his outward appearance; later he excelled at being simultaneously a high-flying diplomat and an immensely productive spy.
One of the features of the Foreign Office in the 1930s was that its denizens had private incomes to boost their modest salaries and to entertain on foreign postings. As the son of a self-made man descended from crofters, Maclean had no inherited family wealth, and in his first report to Moscow Centre, Deutsch commented that his new agent was ‘accustomed to a modest lifestyle’ even by Soviet standards. No doubt he also felt the ‘class resentfulness’ posited by Deutsch: his time at Cambridge coincided with the Hunger Marches, and after joining one in Hyde Park, Maclean was nearly arrested. Later, when he was posted to Paris in 1938, the junior diplomat’s tables were old packing cases, and his wine was described by one colleague as plentiful but ‘definitely ordinaire’.
Maclean, like the others Deutsch recruited, went on to eminence in his chosen field and was of inestimable value to the Kremlin through the Second World War and the critical early years of the Cold War. No suspicion fell on him even when a senior former KGB illegal defected and gave a description in 1940 of a spy he had heard much about in Moscow Centre: one who had a Scottish name, was under the age of 30, and whose father had possibly been ‘one of the chiefs of the Foreign Office’.
In February 1941, that illegal’s body was found in a locked hotel room alongside three suicide notes, with a gunshot wound to his temple, the gun itself on the wrong side of the wound and a long way from his hand. Maclean, meanwhile, remained undiscovered for several years.
In total he kept his cover for 17 years, until he was rumbled after an inexperienced handler made a mistake when sending a telegram. He fled to the Soviet Union in 1951 and stayed there until he died of cancer in 1983. Fittingly for the most astute spy recruiter in history, Deutsch’s fate remains unknown.
A Spy Named Orphan by Roland Philipps is published by Bodley Head (£20). To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
'Skripal had 300 people who were quite prepared to kill him’