This discovery came at a time of great tension between the French and British intelligence services. Anti-French feeling ran strongly inside British Intelligence. Many officers of both services had served in the war and remembered the supine French surrender. Courtney Young always claimed that he formed lifelong views on the French when traveling back from Dunkirk on a boat. Even Blunt, for all his reverence for French art and style, was vituperative on the subject of French cowardice.
Relations were not helped by the arrival of Anatoli Golitsin. Some of his best intelligence concerned Soviet penetration of SDECE, the French equivalent to MI6. Golitsin said there was a ring of highly placed SDECE agents known as the Sapphire Ring. Shortly after Golitsin defected, the deputy head of SDECE threw himself out of a window. Angleton persuaded the head of the CIA to get President Kennedy to write to de Gaulle warning him about Golitsin's allegations, but de Gaulle felt the Americans and the British were manipulating Golitsin to cast aspersions on French integrity. This remained the official French view even after Golitsin gave the information which led to the arrest and conviction of Georges Paques, a senior French Government official, in 1965.
To complicate matters still further, the DST (the French counterespionage service) and MI5 were collaborating on a case involving a double agent, Air Bubble. Air Bubble was an industrial chemist named Dr. Jean Paul Soupert. Soupert was an agent runner for East German Intelligence and the KGB, but the Belgian SECURITE D'ETAT doubled him. He revealed that two of his agents were employees of the Kodak Company in Britain who were passing him details of sensitive commercial processes. The Belgians informed MI5, who began an intensive investigation of both Kodak employees, Alfred Roberts and Godfrey Conway. Soupert also told the Belgians about an East German illegal named Herbert Steinbrecher, who was running agents inside the French Concorde assembly plants, and this information was passed on to the DST to investigate in collaboration with MI6.
Unfortunately both cases ended in catastrophe. Although Conway and Roberts were caught, they were acquitted. Far worse for Anglo-French relations, the inquiries into Steinbrecher revealed that MI6 had recruited a French police chief, whose police district ran up to the German border. He was a "blanche" agent, that is to say MI6 had deliberately concealed him from their hosts, the French, and were using him to spy on both French and German nationals. The French, for their part, were forced to admit that Steinbrecher's agents had acquired for the Russians every detail of the Anglo-French Concorde's advanced electronic systems. The result, inevitably, was a spectacular row.
I approached Angleton and Louis Tordella of NSA, and got their agreement to provide the DST with the VENONA intelligence which proved Cot and Labarthe to be Russian spies. They were old, but still politically active, and it seemed to me a sensible precaution. I traveled to Paris in early 1965 to DST headquarters, where I was met by Marcel Chalet, the deputy head of the service. Chalet was a small, dapper Frenchman who joined the DST after the war, having served with great courage in the Resistance under Jean Moulin, narrowly escaping arrest by the Gestapo on the day Moulin himself was lifted. Like all French Resistance veterans, Chalet wore his pink ribbon with conspicuous pride. He was a militant anti-Communist, and yet he admired Moulin, a dedicated Communist, more than any other man in his life. Several times he and I discussed the Resistance, but even in the 1960s he could not discuss his former commander without tears coming to his eyes.
I explained to Marcel that we had obtained new information which indicated the true roles of Cot and Labarthe, and showed him the relevant VENONA decrypts. He was astonished by the material, and immediately pledged a full investigation.
"You don't think they are too old, then?" I asked. Marcel fixed me with a withering glance.
"Until you see a French politician turning green in his coffin, you cannot say he is too old!"
Unfortunately Labarthe died of a heart attack as Marcel interrogated him, and Cot was left to die in peace, but the exchange of information did much to ease tension between the DST and MI5, and made Marcel and me friends for the rest of our careers.
The night before I left Paris he took me out to dinner. The restaurant was discreet, but the food was excellent. Marcel was an attentive host, providing bottles of the best claret, and regaling me with a string of waspish anecdotes about the perils of Gallic intelligence work. We discussed VENONA, and he was fascinated to learn about the scale of our success.
"They had some success with us recently," he told me, and described how in Washington they had discovered a fuse in the French Embassy cipher room modified to act as a transmitter.
"It was non-Western specification, and the range was perfect for the Russian Military Attache's house across the road," he said, noisily tucking into his plate of oysters in typical French style. My ears pricked up. The STOCKADE operation against the French Embassy ciphers in London and Washington had recently ended precipitately, when teams of French technicians went into both embassies with sheets of metal and copper tubes, and began screening the cipher rooms. Obviously the Russians, too, had realized that radiations could be picked up from poorly screened machines. Still, I thought, at least the French had not discovered our operation.
Chalet obviously found the whole affair amusing, and even offered to send the fuse over to Leconfield House, so that we could examine it. Still smiling, he casually dropped a question below the belt.
"And you, my dear Peter, have you had any luck with radiations... ?"
I choked momentarily on my claret.
"Not much," I replied.
Marcel filled my glass, patently disbelieving my every word. Like true professionals, we turned to other things, and never discussed the matter again.
But for all the enjoyment of the French interlude, research into the Ring of Five was the most pressing task facing D3. I asked Hollis for the 8D branch interrogators to be placed inside D3, so that I could use them for an extensive program of interviews with every known acquaintance of Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Long, and Cairncross. Hollis agreed, but instructed that I myself had to conduct any interview deemed sensitive, which normally meant it was with a lord, a knight, a politician, a top civil servant, or a spy suspect.
In all, I saw more than a hundred people. Labor politicians like Christopher Mayhew and Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defense, who refused even to meet me, were unwilling to discuss their memories of the Communist Party in the 1930s. But others, like historian Isaiah Berlin and writer Arthur Marshall, were wonderfully helpful, and met me regularly to discuss their contemporaries at Oxford and Cambridge. Berlin insisted we meet at the Reform Club. He thought it appropriate to discuss Guy Burgess at the scene of his greatest triumphs. He had a keen eye for Burgess' social circle, particularly those whose views appeared to have changed over the years. He also gave me sound advice on how to proceed with my inquiries.
"Don't go to see Bowra," he told me, referring to Maurice Bowra, the distinguished Professor of Literature at Oxford University. Bowra was a homosexual as well as a close friend of Guy Burgess, and was close to the top of my list of those who I thought could help me. "Why not?" I asked.
"Because he'll have it all around every high table in Oxford if you do," he said.
I took Berlin's advice and gave Bowra a wide berth. Marshall, or "Artie" as he was known to everyone, knew practically everyone in Cambridge in the 1930s, particularly the secret network of homosexuals at King's and Trinity. Artie had a prodigious memory for gossip, intrigue, and scandal, and, most important of all, he knew who was sleeping with whom in the Burgess and Blunt circles. Blunt, too, loved to discuss the scandalous side of Cambridge life in the 1930s. He relished gossip, and never tired of telling me of the time he blackballed Sir Edward Playfair, in later life Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defense, for the Apostles Society. Blunt thought Playfair crushingly dull, and, having met the man, I could not disagree with his judgment. His funniest story concerned Guy Burgess and Churchill's niece Clarissa Churchill. Apparently Burgess was asked by his Soviet controllers to wed Clarissa Churchill, to ensure him perfect cover for his espionage activities. Burgess was appalled by the task. For one thing, he was an inveterate homosexual; for another, Clarissa Churchill was scarcely better-looking than her uncle; and lastly, it was known that James Pope-Hennessy, later to become a distinguished writer, had become infatuated with her.