After several hours, Watson picked out three photographs. The first was Yuri Modin, Philby's controller; the second was Sergei Kondrashev, George Blake's controller; and the third was Nikolai Karpekov, Vassall's controller. Watson admitted meeting all three regularly, sometimes close to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington during his lunch hour, but he denied passing any secrets. Golitsin said that he knew that Karpekov had two Naval spies, one of whom was a Naval scientist. Also that Kondrashev had had two spies, one of whom was Blake, the other a Naval spy.
Shipp tore into him. Did he really expect us to believe that he just happened to meet four top KGB controllers, by chance, for no reason? Did he think we were stupid? Naive? It was all secret, wasn't it? They were clandestine meetings? He was a spy, wasn't he? It all fitted, didn't it - friendship with Burgess, Marxism in the 1930s, concealed Communism and entry into secret work, meeting Russians? It was time to confess.
Day after day Shipp pursued him. Let's take it from the beginning again, he would say, and Watson would tell the same incredible story. The mark of a good interrogator is his memory, and Shipp had one like an elephant. Every variation, every omission in Watson's narrative was stored and thrown back at him hours, and sometimes days, later. But Watson stuck doggedly to his story. He had never passed anything over. His lips quivered, he was red and sweaty, but like a punch-drunk boxer he refused to take the count.
After six weeks of daily interrogation Watson was visibly wilting. He came into sessions drugged with tranquilizers, rambling incoherently, barely aware of the questions that we asked. In desperation almost, Cecil Shipp began to skirt the issue of immunity. At the time we had not obtained the Attorney-General's permission, so he phrased his questions hypothetically.
"Would it change your story," Watson was asked, "if we were to offer you immunity?"
But Watson was too far gone. He seemed unable even to understand the offer that was made to him, and the interrogation was suspended.
No one who listened to the interrogation or studied the transcripts was in any doubt that Watson had been a spy, probably since 1938. Given his access to antisubmarine-detection research, he was, in my view, probably the most damaging of all the Cambridge spies. One detail, in particular, clinched the case. Watson told a long story about Kondrashev. He had met him, but did not care for him. He described Kondrashev in great detail. He was too bourgeois, claimed Watson.
He wore flannel trousers and a blue blazer, and walked a poodle. They had a row and they stopped meeting.
This clicked exactly with one of Golitsin's early serials. He said Kondrashev was sent to Britain to run two very important spies - one in the Navy and one in MI6. The M16 spy was definitely George Blake, and we always assumed the Naval spy to be Blake too, since he served in the Navy before joining MI6. Golitsin had one more fragment. He said Kondrashev fell out with the Naval spy. The spy objected to his bourgeois habits, and refused to meet him. Golitsin recalled that as a result Korovin, the former London KGB resident, was forced to return to London to replace Kondrashev as the Naval spy's controller. It was obviously Watson.
At MI5's insistence, Watson was removed from secret access overnight, and transferred to the Oceanographic Institute, where he worked on until retirement. In the absence of a confession, we relied for our legal justification on Watson's failure to declare his Communist background, and those of his wife and daughter, on his vetting forms. He made no protest.
After Watson's interrogation I decided to have one more try at breaking him. I arranged for him to meet Blunt at a neutral venue - Brown's Hotel in London. There were two reasons for this, firstly, I was not at all sure that Watson understood the meaning of our immunity offer, and I wanted Blunt to explain it. Secondly, I wanted to resolve, if possible, the question of whether or not Watson was a member of the Ring of Five. Golitsin said the members of the Ring all knew each other, and all knew they were all spies. As far as Blunt was concerned, he claimed it was only ever a Ring of Four - himself, Burgess, Philby, and Maclean, with other recruits like Cairncross and Long existing independently of the central Ring members. Watson seemed by far the best starter for the fifth.
Blunt was very reluctant at first to go along with the plan.
"Alister has suffered enough," he pleaded, when I first raised it.
I had arranged meetings between Blunt and previous conspirators on a number of occasions. The sessions with Long and Straight were mild encounters, Blunt even told Straight that exposing him was the best thing he ever did. But when I suggested he contact Baron zu Putlitz, Klop Ustinov's wartime spy, who had returned to East Germany, he became distinctly agitated. Zu Putliz and Blunt were lovers during the war, after Klop Ustinov brought zu Putlitz out of Holland and back to London. In 1945 Blunt accompanied zu Putlitz back to East Germany, and they had remained in touch ever since. Zu Putlitz had also been working for the Russians before and after the war, in order to smooth his return East, and I was interested to see if he could be turned our way again. I asked Blunt to write him a letter asking him if he would be prepared to meet me in Helsinki or Berlin.
"That's not fair, Peter, that's dirty. He's done enough for this country."
But Blunt knew he could not refuse. He wrote the letter, although much to his relief zu Putlitz turned my offer down.
Watson was like zu Putlitz. There was something about acknowledging the relationship which caused Blunt deep unease, in a way that did not occur with Long or Straight or others. It was a deep-seated desire to protect them, to deny us any knowledge of their activities, and also a desire to hide his confession. He dreaded being seen by them, I think, as an informer.
I picked Blunt up from the Courtauld one evening and we drove over to Brown's Hotel, where Patrick Stewart had booked a room for us all. He and Watson were waiting. Blunt was desperately anxious.
"I hope you've got something to drink," he said when we arrived at the hotel.
He and Watson greeted each other nervously, afraid to show any warmth in front of either Patrick or me. Watson was frail, like a man just out of hospital, but eventually we coaxed him into telling the story of his dealings with the Russians again. It was a pathetic story in the interrogation room, but it looked even more ridiculous in front of Blunt.
They both talked about Cambridge most of the time, and Otto, and the move to the left in the 1930s. It struck me as an odd way for the idealism and activism of the 1930s to end: in a small hotel suite, with a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of gin. They wanted to change the world, but ended up changing only themselves.
"I'm through with it now, Alister," said Blunt. "I've confessed," he kept saying, "and I'm still here. You've got nothing to worry about."
But Watson scarcely listened to Blunt's entreaties. They were talking at cross-purposes. Watson was overpoweringly jealous of Blunt and clearly always had been for thirty years. It came to the surface in a drunken attack on his friend. Treachery, for him, seemed almost the secondary issue. He was much more interested in talking, now that his life had failed, about where it went wrong.
"You've been such a success, Anthony, and yet it was I who was the great hope at Cambridge. Cambridge was my whole life," he said, practically in tears, "but I had to go into secret work, and now it has ruined my life..."