But Burgess was nothing if not game. Within a month he was pursuing Clarissa Churchill, causing upset and outrage in equal measure. James Pope-Hennessy was desperately upset by Burgess' attentions to her. One evening he arrived at Burgess' flat with a revolver, threatening to shoot them both before attempting to commit suicide. Blunt loved the story, and it was made all the better, in his eyes and mine, by the fact that, shortly afterward, Clarissa Churchill married Anthony Eden and later became Lady Avon.
I soon realized that the Ring of Five stood at the center of a series of other concentric rings, each pledged to silence, each anxious to protect its secrets from outsiders. There was the secret ring of homosexuals, where loyalty to their kind overrode all other obligations; there was the secret world of the Apostles, where ties to fellow Apostles remained strong throughout life; and then there was the ring of those friends of Blunt and Burgess who were not themselves spies, but who knew or guessed what was going on. They shared the secret, and worked to protect them for many years. Each ring supported the others, and made the task of identifying the inner core that much more difficult.
It was hard not to dislike many of those I interviewed. Funnily enough, I did not mind the spies so much; they had made their choice, and followed it to the best of their abilities. But those on the periphery were different. When I saw them they were clothed in the respectability of later life. But their arrogance and their cultured voices masked guilt and fear. It was I who was wrong to raise the issue, not they; it ought to be left alone, they would tell me. I was being McCarthyite. Things were different then. Of course, spying was wrong, but there were reasons. They were a Lotus Generation, following political fashions as if they were a clothes catalogue, still pledged in the 1960s to vows of silence they made thirty years before. They in turn disliked me. I had seen into the secret heart of the present Establishment at a time when they had been young and careless. I knew their scandals and their intrigues. I knew too much, and they knew it.
One of the first D3 tasks was to reexamine a lead which had lain uninvestigated in the files since Burgess and Maclean's defection in 1951. It was given by Goronwy Rees, a friend of both Burgess and Blunt. He first met them at Oxford in the 1930s, and during the war, while serving in Military Intelligence, was a regular visitor to Bentinck Street. Shortly after the defections he approached Dick White, then the head of Counterespionage, and told him that he knew Burgess to have been a longtime Soviet agent. Burgess, he claimed, had tried to recruit him before the war, but Rees, disillusioned after the Molotov-von Ribbentrop pact, refused to continue any clandestine relationship. Rees also claimed that Blunt, Guy Liddell, a former MI6 officer named Robin Zaehner, and Stuart Hampshire, a brilliant RSS officer, were all fellow accomplices. But whereas Blunt was undoubtedly a Soviet spy, the accusations against the other three individuals were later proved groundless.
Dick White disliked Rees intensely, and thought he was making malicious accusations in order to court attention, if not publicity. The four men were all close friends, and it was for this reason that he found it hard to share Arthur Martin's suspicions about Blunt. Dick's view of Rees seemed confirmed when, in 1956, Rees wrote an anonymous series of articles for a popular newspaper. Orgies and espionage made as good copy in the 1950s as they do today, and the Rees articles, detailing some of the salacious activities of Burgess and those close to him, caused a sensation.
But when Blunt confessed, the color of Rees' 1951 testimony changed. I thought it at least prudent to reexamine it, if only to satisfy myself that Rees had not been lying when he claimed to have given up all thoughts of the Soviet cause before the war. At first he was reluctant to talk to me, and his wife accused me of Gestapo-style tactics in trying to resurrect the past after so many years. They had both suffered grievously for the newspaper articles. Rees' authorship became known, and he was sacked from academic life. Since 1956 they had eked out a miserable existence, shunned by the Establishment. Eventually Rees agreed to see me, and went through his story again. He had no proof that any of those he named were fellow conspirators. But all, he said, had been close friends of Burgess in that crucial prewar period.
The accusation against Guy Liddell was palpably absurd. Everyone who knew him, or of him, inside MI5 was convinced that Liddell was completely loyal. He had left his diaries, known as "Wallflower," when he left MI5. Reading those, nobody could believe that he was a spy. But the accusation against Robin Zaehner, who had served for MI6 in the Middle East, cross-checked with Volkov's spy in the Middle East.
I studied Zaehner's Personal File. He was responsible for MI6 counterintelligence in Persia during the war. It was difficult and dangerous work. The railway lines into Russia, carrying vital military supplies, were key targets for German sabotage. Zaehner was perfectly equipped for the job, speaking the local dialects fluently, and much of his time was spent undercover, operating in the murky and cutthroat world of countersabotage. By the end of the war his task was even more fraught. The Russians themselves were trying to gain control of the railway, and Zaehner had to work behind Russian lines, constantly at risk of betrayal and murder by pro-German or pro-Russian Arabs. On the face of it, the very fact that Zaehner survived gave a touch of credibility to Rees' allegation.
After the war Zaehner left intelligence work, and became Professor of Ancient Persian at Oxford University. I made an appointment to see him at All Souls. The cords which bind Oxford and British Intelligence together are strong, and it was the first of many trips I was to make to that city during the next five years.
Zaehner was a small, wiry-looking man, clothed in the distracted charm of erudition. He poured me a drink and chatted easily about old colleagues in the secret world. I wondered, as he chatted, how I could broach the subject of my visit in a tactful way. I decided there was none.
"I'm sorry, Robin," I began, "a problem has come up. We're following up some old allegations. I'm afraid there's one that points at you...''
At first he rallied. Pointed at him? he protested. Of course, I must be mistaken. Had I checked his record? Which allegation?
I told him about Volkov, and the spy in Persia.
He crumpled. I knew then, from his reaction, that Rees had been terribly, vindictively mistaken.