I went to see Dick White and gave him the Hampshire papers to read. I was puzzled as to why Hampshire had never told MI5 about his dealings with Guy Burgess after Burgess defected in 1951. Dick confirmed that Hampshire had never mentioned this to him. I went to see Hampshire again when he returned to London. He seemed slightly embarrassed. He told me that Burgess' approach was so muddled that he could hardly be sure of its importance. As for Blunt, it never occurred to him to connect Blunt's presence at the dinner with Burgess' approach, and since Blunt was on such personal terms with people like Dick White and Guy Liddell throughout the war, he assumed he was entirely trustworthy. Anyway, he was not alone in wanting to close the chapter.
Both Dick and Hollis were desperately embarrassed at the revelation that the man whom they had chosen to conduct the most secret review of Anglo-American intelligence sharing should himself have been the unwitting target of a Soviet recruitment approach. They knew that the arrangements for Hampshire's vetting would, at the very least, look seriously inadequate to American eyes, particularly at a time when they were already up in arms at what they saw as the "old school tie" approach to intelligence in Britain. They could hardly own up, and the Hampshire case was carefully buried forever.
The unsuccessful recruitment of Hampshire was also interesting for the light it cast on James Klugman's role in Soviet Intelligence recruitment in the 1930s. He had clearly been instrumental in arranging the looking-over dinner in Paris. Cairncross had also told us that it was Klugman who had recruited him. Until then, MI5 had tended to assume Klugman was merely an overt Party activist, rather than a covert agent recruiter or talent spotter. It was obvious that Klugman could tell us much about the 1930s, if we could persuade or pressurize him to confess. I knew Klugman would never accept a direct approach from MI5, so we struck a deal with Cairncross; if he came back to Britain, confronted Klugman, and persuaded him to meet MI5 and tell all, we would allow him to come back to the country permanently.
Cairncross accepted our offer with alacrity, and visited Klugman in London. Klugman was an old man, a hard veteran of the class war, busy writing a history of the Communist Party as a last testament to a lifetime's work. He laughed when Cairncross asked him to meet MI5, and shrugged him off when Cairncross threatened to expose him if he did not. The attempt failed miserably and Cairncross was forced back into exile. Shortly afterward, Klugman took his secrets to the grave.
There were other loyal Party servants who refused our approaches. Bob Stewart and Edith Tudor Hart, both of whom were involved as couriers for the Ring of Five in 1939-40, were approached. Neither would talk. They were disciplined soldiers, and had spent too long in the game to be broken. The public rarely realizes the weakness of MI5's position with inquiries of this sort. We cannot compel people to talk to us. Almost everything we do, unless an arrest is imminent, depends on cooperation. For instance, Blunt told us that he knew of two other spies - one of whom he had discovered after the man made a recruitment approach to Leo Long, whom Blunt was already running. The situation was additionally complicated by the fact that Blunt was having an affair with the potential recruiter, although neither told the other about his designs on Long. Both of these men, who are still alive and living in Britain today, were working on the Phantom Program during the war, although they left afterward to pursue academic careers. Despite many efforts, neither would agree to meet me to discuss their involvement with Russian Intelligence. The only positive action was to warn a senior police chief, who was friendly with one of the spies, and their relationship ceased.
After I had been meeting Blunt for a year, an obvious pattern emerged. I was able to tease things out from him - mostly pillow talk he had gathered from Guy Burgess. He claimed a writer on THE TIMES had been approached. I traced him, and he confirmed that Burgess had tried to recruit him, but that he turned him down, fearful of the consequences of being caught. Another contact Blunt identified was Tom Wylie, a War Office clerk, long since dead. Wylie, said Blunt, used to let Burgess see anything which came into his hands. But although Blunt, under pressure, expanded his information, it always pointed at those who were either dead, long since retired, or else comfortably out of secret access and danger.
I knew that Blunt must know of others who were not retired, who still had access. These were the people he was protecting. But how could I identify them? I decided to draw up lists of all those who were mentioned by interviewees as having noted left-wing views before the war, or who interviewees felt would have been likely to have been the target for a recruitment approach from Guy Burgess.
One name stood out beyond all the others: Alister Watson. Berlin mentioned him, the writer Arthur Marshall mentioned him, Tess Rothschild mentioned him. He was, they all said, a fervent Marxist at Cambridge in the 1930s, an Apostle, and a close friend of both Blunt and Burgess. Burgess, so far as they recalled, admired him intensely during the 1930s - a sure sign that he was likely to have been approached.
I began to make inquiries into his background. I knew him quite well from the war. He worked currently as a scientist in the Admiralty Research Laboratory, and actually lived for two years with my brother in Bristol. I never cared for Watson at the time. He was tall and thin, with a pinched, goatlike face and a strange affected tiptoed walk. Watson considered himself one of the greatest theoretical physicists of his day, yet most of his colleagues thought his grasp of practical work distinctly ropey and that he had made serious mistakes in theoretical work. He was, I thought, a bit of a fraud.
Watson was a failure. At Cambridge he was considered a brilliant student, destined for the highest academic honors, until his thesis was found to contain a massive fundamental error. He failed to gain a fellowship, and took a job in the Admiralty instead. After service in the Radar and Signals Establishment of the Navy, he became head of the Submarine Detection Research Section at ARL. It was one of the most secret and important jobs in the entire NATO defense establishment, but it was obscure work, particularly for one who had promised so much in his youth.
At Cambridge, Watson was an ardent Marxist; indeed, many of those I interviewed described him as the "high priest" of Marxist theory among the Apostles. Marxism had a beautiful logic, an all-embracing answer to every question, which captivated him. He was drawn to DAS KAPITAL as others are drawn to the Bible and, like a preacher manque, he began to proselytize the creed among his friends, particularly when his hopes of an academic career began to fade. Blunt later admitted that Watson schooled him in Marxism.
When I studied his file, his departure from Cambridge struck me as most peculiar - just at the time of Munich, when radical discontent with the Establishment was at its height. It bore all the hallmarks of Burgess' and Philby's move to the right at the same period. There was one other item of interest. Victor Rothschild wrote a letter to Dick White in 1951 suggesting that Watson should be investigated in view of his Communist affiliations in the 1930s. Inexplicably, Victor's suggestion had never been pursued, and since then Watson had been successfully vetted no less than three times, and made no mention of his political background.