A Brief History of the Spy by Paul Simpson Read Free Book Online Page A

inroads into the atomic establishment, Venona also crippled one of their major operations in Australia. Since 1943, the NKVD residency in Canberra had great success penetrating the Australian Ministry of External Affairs, which gave them access to a lot of British secrets. Jim Hill and Ian Milner, the two best Soviet agents there, were compromised by the Venona material. Early in 1948, MI5 sent their Director-General, Sir Percy Sillitoe, accompanied by Roger Hollis, to conduct an investigation, maintaining the cover story that a British mole in Soviet intelligence had passed on the agents’ details, rather than risk compromising Venona. The loss of these agents was such a serious blow to Moscow Centre that by the time the KGB Resident Vladimiri Petrov defected in 1954, they had still not been able to achieve more than minor breaches of Australian security.
    However, perhaps the most damaging discovery of the Venona material as far as the Soviets were concerned was the seemingly trivial item that a Russian agent, code-named Gomer (Homer in English), had been travelling from Washington to New York in 1944 to visit his pregnant wife. When thisfinal piece was put into place, it meant that Homer could only be one person: Donald Maclean. And with Maclean would go the whole of the Magnificent Five.
    Kim Philby had stayed in MI6 after the end of the war, becoming head of the Secret Service station in Turkey from 1947 to 1949 (using that position to betray any British agents who attempted to use the Turkish border crossing to gain access to the Soviet Union), and then was sent as MI6 representative in Washington from 1949, during which time he had access to both American and British case files. Not long before his recall in 1951, he passed over information about three groups of six agents who were parachuting into the Ukraine – sending them to their deaths, noting in his diary that ‘I can make an informed guess’ as to their fate.
    During the same period, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were able to pass over reams of information from the Foreign Office, with Anthony Blunt occasionally assisting Burgess with the material. Although Burgess was gradually becoming more dissolute, often under the influence of drink or drugs, he could still charm information out of unsuspecting colleagues, as he did in the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office before he was posted to Washington in 1950. Maclean was posted to Cairo in 1948, but his drinking also slipped out of control, as did other aspects of his behaviour. According to Gordievsky, Moscow Centre blamed both his and Burgess’ excesses on their concerns that the Venona information might compromise them. After a drunken rampage in Cairo in 1950, Maclean was sent back to Britain, where he seemed to pull himself together – and was able to provide the Russians with useful intelligence regarding the onset of the Korean War.
    As MI6 liaison with American intelligence and counterintelligence services, Kim Philby very quickly realized who code name Homer really was, but it was eighteen months before further decrypts would give enough clues for the FBI to gain sufficient evidence against Maclean. The field ofsuspects narrowed to thirty-five by the end of 1950, and just nine by April 1951. Philby tried to divert attention away from Maclean, but a crucial piece of evidence both cleared Philby’s suggested suspect and became the fatal one for Maclean. However, because neither the FBI nor MI5 wanted to reveal the existence of Venona in court (Fuchs and Greenglass had confessed, so it wasn’t necessary in their cases), there was a period during which MI5 tried to gain new evidence of Maclean’s treachery.
    Guy Burgess had been posted to Washington, and was staying with Philby (something that would compromise the latter tremendously after Burgess’ defection). However, he was spiralling out of control, and Philby used Burgess’ recall to Britain to get a message to Maclean, who had