"I spent six years in the desert," he said limply. "I stayed behind two years after Yalta, when everyone else went home. I got no honors, but I thought at least I had earned a degree of trust."
Zaehner spoke quite without rancor; just a kind of sadness. After all that he had done, all that he had risked, to be accused of this, years later, wounded him to the quick. He dabbed tears from his eyes. I felt a heel, like a policeman who breaks bad news to parents in the night.
When Zaehner composed himself he was a paragon of professionalism. Of course, he understood why I had to come see him. He went through his career at MI6 and searched his memory for a clue as to the identity of Volkov's spy. We talked for hours as the shadow of the spires of All Souls faded across the lawns.
"I cannot think of an Englishman who could be this spy," he said, tapping his foot on the floor as if to trigger his memory. "There weren't many of us, and I'd vouch for every one."
He thought it was likely to be an agent, rather than an officer. Agents were often shared between MI6 and the KGB in the latter stages of the war, and the possibility of a plant was obvious. One name fitted perfectly, a man called Rudi Hamburger. After MI6 recruited him, he was arrested by the Russians, then turned loose, before being reemployed by MI6 again. The dates tallied perfectly with the time Volkov had access to files in Moscow, and it seemed obvious that Hamburger had simply been turned in prison, and tasked to find out whatever he could about his British employers. (Rudi Hamburger was the first husband of "Sonia," who later was an illegal in Switzerland and England.) Zaehner and I parted friends, but I felt bitter at the ease with which the accusation had been made, and anger at those who had left such an accusation lying in the files for so many years before clearing it up. Driving back to London I began to wonder about the cost of clearing up "loose ends." Was it fair, I thought, to drag these things up? Perhaps, after all, it was better to leave them in the files undisturbed and unresolved.
That Christmas Zaehner sent me a friendly Christmas card, and not too many years later he died. I sent a wreath, anxious to make amends; but I could never forget the look on his face when I asked him if he was a spy. In that moment the civilized cradle of Oxford disintegrated around him; he was back behind the lines again, surrounded by enemies, alone and double-crossed.
The last name Rees gave me was that of Sir Stuart Hampshire. Hampshire was a brilliant wartime codebreaker and analyst for the Radio Security Service, one of the elite team who broke the ISOS Abwehr codes, and laid the foundations for the Double Cross System. After the war he pursued a career in the Foreign Office, before leaving for a distinguished academic career as a philosopher at Oxford and Princeton. Rees had no evidence whatsoever for the charge he made in 1951; it was based solely on the fact that Hampshire had been extremely close to Burgess during the 1930s. I knew from my own interviews that Hampshire was considered by contemporaries to have been strongly left wing, although non-Communist, and I was amazed to find that no one had even bothered to interview him on what he knew about Guy Burgess.
However, there was an extraordinary complication with the Hampshire case. Although long since retired from the secret world, he had been invited by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, to conduct a major review of the future of GCHQ. Concern about the escalating cost of SIGINT had been growing ever since NSA moved into the satellite age. The Americans were pressing GCHQ to share the costs of spy satellites. The incoming Labor Government was already faced with annual bills in excess of 100 million pounds, and the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, instructed Trend to conduct a review to see if such costs were justified. Trend consulted Dick White, who suggested Hampshire for the review in the light of his previous RSS work. When I looked at Hampshire's file I was amazed to find that despite Rees' allegation, Hampshire had not been vetted. Dick White, who had known Hampshire for years, simply wrote Hollis a letter for the file, and that was it.
Hampshire's inquiry lasted the best part of a year, during which time he had full access to GCHQ, as well as a six-week visit to NSA. There were a number of fundamental issues raised in Hampshire's report. The first was whether, in light of the growing costs, Britain could afford to maintain its share of the UKUSA agreement, which guaranteed us so much exchanged information from the Americans. The second, more immediate issue was whether Britain should opt in with the Americans on a new generation of spy satellites; and the third area was how far GCHQ should support the Counterclan activities.
The answers in short were Yes, No, and Yes. We could not possibly afford to lose the UKUSA exchange, but on the other hand, we could remain in without necessarily funding every technical development pound for dollar. As for Counterclan, Hampshire endorsed it strongly. The only major change he requested was a termination of airborne RAFTER on the grounds that it was not cost effective. I opposed this at the time, but with hindsight it was a sensible economy, and the RAF were, in any case, beginning to resent the demands we were making on them. Hampshire and I spent a good deal of time discussing MI5's relationship with GCHQ. I pressed strongly for him to recommend the creation of a new Radio Security Service, an organization independent of GCHQ, which would be controlled by MI5, and responsible solely for the detection of domestic spy radios. I thought Hampshire, given his background, would welcome such an idea, and I told him that it was the only way that we would ensure the facilities that we needed. Hampshire disagreed, not, I think, with the principle, but more with the practicalities. He concluded, probably rightly, that such an initiative would be fought tooth and nail by both GCHQ and MI6, and would, therefore, be very unlikely to succeed.
Interviewing Hampshire about the Rees allegation was obviously out of the question until his review was complete, but in 1967 I obtained permission, and traveled to Princeton University in the USA, where Hampshire was the Visiting Professor. I knew Princeton well. I had often visited there in my days as a scientist. Rudi Kompfner, the man who invented the traveling wave tube (the radio valve used in most microwave links), gave me the best description of its bizarre architecture. He called it "pseudo-Gothic-Cotswold."
I talked to Hampshire for some time about his memories of Guy Burgess. He told me that he now thought in retrospect that perhaps he himself had been the target of a recruitment approach by Burgess, though he had not realized it at the time. He described how in 1935 he and Anthony Blunt had traveled to Paris together, and one evening they had dinner with James Klugman and the artist Ben Nicholson. After dinner Klugman took the lead in a lengthy session in which Hampshire was quizzed as to his political beliefs.
Some months later he was invited to dine alone with Guy Burgess at his flat in Chester Square. Both men drank heavily, and in the small hours Guy made a pitch at him, asking him to work for peace. It was dangerous work, he said, but worth it. There was much talk of the intellectual ferment of the times, the Nazi menace, and the need to take a much more Marxist line in academic studies. At the time Hampshire thought this was the prelude to an invitation to join a left-wing debating society, then the vogue among young Oxbridge intellectuals, but no specific proposition was made. "In retrospect," said Hampshire, "perhaps Burgess was trying to recruit me."
When I got back to Britain I checked this story with Blunt. He remembered the Klugman dinner, which he confirmed was a looking-over operation, but said he knew nothing of Burgess' pitch. Neither could he resolve whether the dinner had occurred in 1935 or 1937. The dates were important; in 1935 Blunt and Burgess were still mere Party members, but by 1937 both were spies and thus any recruitment would have been for the Russians. I sent one of my staff to see Ben Nicholson. Luckily he kept complete diaries for each year of his professional life, and was able to establish beyond any doubt that the dinner had, in fact, taken place in 1937.