The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives Read online

  Jeremy Wolfenden was given the front and back pages of the Telegraph, to write about the trial, with further coverage inside. Most of this in fact came from Reuters, who occupied the only two seats in court that had been allocated to the British press. The ‘pool’ system was working at its best: the years of cooperation, kept secret from the newspaper offices in London, paid dividends in a masterfully smooth operation. Every half an hour or so either John Miller or Peter Johnson of Reuters would telephone into the Reuters office an account of what had happened. One of the newspaper correspondents would then sub-edit the story for the Reuter wire and provide ‘blacks’ or carbon copies for all the other papers. No reporter had a different story; and, best of all, no reporter was left exposed to the wrath of a Fleet Street foreign editor telling him to ‘match’ the account that had appeared in the Daily Other.

  The Wynne they described was not the hard-eyed poker player of his own subsequent account. He came over in court as petulant and afraid; he spoke bitterly of the various ‘foreign office officials’ in London who at first led him on and then, when he understood the magnitude of what he was doing and tried to escape from it, threatened to cripple his electrical business. Wynne claimed that these recriminations were part of an agreed text which was to pave the way for his mitigating speech of repentance. In any event he gave the impression of being a man who was floundering. The Daily Telegraph editorial column took the line that Penkovsky was probably a double agent and that Wynne was his toy. It spoke with alarm of the prospect of exchanging him at a later date for the imprisoned Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale: such a swap would be a ‘sprat for a shark’. The Telegraph line was the line that SIS would most have wanted it to take: Wynne not really an agent, Penkovsky tarnished goods, no hope for Lonsdale … The Telegraph could not have done better if the editorial had been dictated by SIS itself.

  Considerable damage was being done to SIS by the trial. Ruari and Janet Chisholm had been named in court, along with other embassy staff, John Varley, David Senior and Felicity Stuart, all of whom had been ordered out of Moscow. The modus operandi of a Western spy ring had been laid open to the public for the first time (it had been known to the Soviet authorities for many years, thanks to the Cambridge spies). In a brash damage-limitation exercise, the Chisholms welcomed Express photographers to their home in Sussex with a magnificent display of baffled innocence. ‘It’s a pantomime,’ beamed genial Ruari on his sofa, drink in hand: ‘Do I look like a spy?’ asked busy ‘housewife and Mum’ Janet, as she tucked up little Ali-boy in his pyjamas.

  Then on 8 May Greville Wynne dropped Martina Browne in the mire. The Daily Express had clearly had a tip that her name was going to come up, because they managed to take a picture of her in New York. On page 15 of the paper on 9 May the story ran:

  Martina Brown [sic], former nanny from Greenford, Middlesex, was mentioned for the first time at the trial yesterday.

  21-year-old Martina looked after the three children of British diplomat Robert [sic] Chisholm while she was in Moscow.

  Wynne said in court: ‘I was told that there was a young English nursemaid who slept in the next room where I was given the packets by Mr Chisholm.

  ‘She used to go out with Russian civilians. Besides, I was told that there were microphones hidden in the apartments of foreign diplomats in Moscow.’

  Martina now works in New York, where she is pictured yesterday.

  That was all, but it was embarrassing. It is not quite clear what Wynne is suggesting, but the impression is that he was talking in general about the conditions of secrecy in which he operated with Chisholm. Extra care was needed because there was a nanny who might overhear what was said, and this nanny had Russian friends to whom she might inadvertently let something slip: this would land him and Chisholm in trouble. The use of the word ‘Besides’ seems to indicate that Wynne saw Martina as being in the same category as a microphone: you wouldn’t want to be overheard by either.

  However, it is possible that Wynne believed that any leakage from Martina Browne to the Russians would not be inadvertent; it is possible he thought that she was actually working for the KGB. The Chisholms’ other domestic staff certainly were. All their ‘maids’ were university-educated linguists. There was a wardrobe in Ruari and Janet’s bedroom with a mirror on the back of the door; if both bedroom and wardrobe door were open, it was possible to see into the bedroom from the front doorway of the flat. A quiet and unexpected return often revealed the sight of a Russian ‘maid’ rifling through the waste-paper basket.

  On 11 May, to the loud applause of the court, Penkovsky was sentenced to death. Wynne was given three years in prison and five in a labour camp.

  On 18 August Jeremy Wolfenden wrote to Martina Browne in New York:

  They were rather beastly to your Big Boss, weren’t they? Did the newspapers pick up all the bits about us – for instance the bit where Ruari was alleged to have said to Wynne: ‘You mustn’t talk because we have an English girl sleeping in the next room, and we don’t want the press to hear all about it? This must have seemed a bit mysterious to most people, though it made John [Miller] and me chortle a bit. Having sat through the whole wretched trial, I found it difficult to take the whole thing seriously, or to keep my temper with it in general. But at least there were some nice newspaper photographs, especially in the Daily Express. There was one of Janet and Ruari sitting on a sofa and Ruari expansively smoking a cigarette and saying how absurd it all was – and then there was that funny one of you from New York – which I must say still looked very like a rather smudgy picture of you and not at all like a rake, or a Nanny who has stopped wearing her nanny’s hairdo. How did they get hold of you? Was the wicked Harper [Stephen Harper, former Express Moscow correspondent] to blame for putting them on to you? I must say the quotes sounded quite convincing… or at least what I would have invented if I had been going to invent quotes from you about Ruari.

  Wolfenden’s interpretation of Greville Wynne’s reference to Martina Browne was that Chisholm warned Wynne to keep his voice down in case Martina heard something and told her boyfriend (ie Wolfenden), who was a journalist. This was what made him and Miller ‘chortle’: they knew that he and Martina saw each other a good deal. However, Wolfenden must either have misremembered what Wynne actually said (he made no reference to the ‘press’ or to ‘English friends’, but to ‘Russian civilians’) or Wynne must have said something else about Martina that was not reported. Where in the Express story are the ‘quotes’ that she is supposed to have ‘invented’ about Ruari Chisholm? The third possibility is that the paper got it wrong. Perhaps Wynne did mention ‘British press’, not ‘Russian civilians’. Perhaps the Express misquoted him. It’s not impossible; after all, in their references to Martina Brown and Robert Chisholm they managed to get the names of both protagonists wrong.

  On 2 July Wolfenden finally escaped from the Ukraina hotel and moved to an apartment in Sadovo Samotechnaya. He described his new flat in a letter to Martina:

  It consists of a huge long corridor and a huge kitchen and a huge whisky bottle and three very small rooms … I sit out on my balcony and watch all the nannies coming and going from my Captain’s Cabin on the eighth floor. Or else pour beer on John Miller who also has a captain’s bridge from which he controls the traffic in the yard from the third floor. Or just shout at everybody …

  It does feel funny, having a flat of my own after all this time. I keep wandering from one room to another, not being able to remember where I put things now there is more than one room to put them in. But I went to Copenhagen and in one and a half hectic days bought all the things that I’d seen other people buy… The bed almost entirely fills the bedroom (but this is not a bad thing … one really has to decide whether one hates the people one is living with more when they are horizontal or when they are vertical … whether one would rather have them in the bed to avoid them, but keep bumping into them when one is dressing, or the other way round. My answer is: only bed, no manoeuvring.) And
there are also lots of blue and white sofas and things, and a special Apricot room which is my office, with apricot curtains and a black and apricot lamp. It’s all very snazzy and is going to cost the Daily Telegraph a lot of money.

  I am still very frightened of Sadovo geysers, and the hot water makes a lot of volcano noises, but I expect I shall get used to that in time as well. I also keep losing the key to the door, so that string men have to come with pick axes to break it in, and the commandant reads me a long lecture… But it’s so nice to wander up and down, and even to be able to cook for oneself a sort of meal (usually consisting of a tin of Individual Steak and Kidney Pudding from the Embassy). The only trouble is that since I am so near the Reuters office all the people come and drink my Scotch, instead of my going and drinking theirs. But after two and a half years, this is only fair.

  Some of the ‘self-assembly’ furniture he had bought in Copenhagen never did assemble itself, but lay around the apartment in unopened flatpacks. Wolfenden’s contempt for the material world was so complete that he could not be bothered to drive or buy clothes: he was certainly not the man to pass Sunday morning with bradawl and spanner. The ready-made Embassy pie was as far as he could go in preparing food, which in any case he seldom ate. This was partly a doctrinaire position: food was bourgeois and boring; it was partly an alcoholic’s revulsion; and it was made worse by the fact that opening a can represented the height of his practical abilities. Other correspondents bought Wiltshire pork sausages, English tea and Heinz beans from the commissary in the British Embassy; they placed orders for fresh food with O. Y. Stockmann in Helsinki and would receive regular deliveries of meat, cheese, beans and even salad. The only meals Wolfenden ate were the ones Brenda Miller cooked him or the bits and pieces he might pick out in the restaurant to accompany his lunchtime drinking. His colleagues despaired of watching him try to force down a plain omelette. Like Guy Burgess, he had a motherly Russian housekeeper who would try to make him eat soup, but with little success. He hated breakfast, and fought against the idea of food at that time of day. The daily retching and heaving in the Reuters office was the convulsion of an empty stomach.

  Sad Sam was arranged about a courtyard in which, weather permitting, the Embassy wives would sit knitting or sewing for the bazaar run by the ambassador’s wife, Lady Trevelyan. No secrets could be kept from the tricoteuses, who provided a more effective, if more friendly, security screen than the KGB men who hung around outside. Once a year a team would be sent out from the Ministry of Works in London armed with chisels and metal detectors. They would attempt to remove from the walls the various wires which had no right to be there. In the Chisholms’ flat they were helped by little Ali-boy whose repeated hammering of the wall with his plastic tommy-gun had revealed a suspiciously hollow area.

  Microphones were reinstalled as fast as they could be taken out. Russian workmen came hammering on the Chisholms’ door almost every day with unreported gas leaks to fix, plumbing to be checked, draughty windows to be rehung. On one occasion, as Wolfenden himself recounted in an article for the New York Times Magazine, ‘The British Embassy was doing a plaster job on the apartment of their security officer when they located a hollow spot in the wall. Digging into it, they found what they had expected, a microphone. But when they tried to pull it out of the wall, they felt an answering tug on the other end of the wire. Three or four Britons joined in the tug of war, but the forces at the other end seemed to have been reinforced to the same extent. At last the Russians gave up, and the Britons fell backwards, with a microphone and some strands of hastily clipped wire in their hands.’

  Sad Sam was where the Chisholms’ flat had been: a busy place where Wynne had unloaded the goods and Wolfenden had paid court to the teenager nanny before passing out on the sofa. When Wolfenden moved into the block the Chisholms’ flat was unoccupied. Chisholm’s successor at the Embassy, Gervase Cowell, had gone the same way – expelled by the Soviet authorities on 13 May 1963 in the immediate wake of the Wynne-Penkovsky trial. By this time the walls were so hollow that the rooms were echoing.

  In a letter dated 18 August 1963 Wolfenden told Martina Browne, ‘I shall probably be here for some time yet… now I’ve at last got the flat and furnished it, I feel very reluctant to get out and hand it over to someone else … I haven’t been very well recently, and the Daily Telegraph are apparently thinking that I’ve had about enough (which annoys me a bit). But I reckon I’ll be here until April at least… it would be unfair to send someone in just at the beginning of the winter.’

  Whatever he wrote – and he may not have wished to be fully honest about his feelings, for a variety of quite innocent reasons – Wolfenden was by now sweating under the pressure of the demands being made of him. He took a BEA flight to London that summer with Martin Page and demanded two large vodkas before take-off. He told Page he was going to see his boss to ask for a change of posting. When they met again in Moscow, he told Page that his request had been turned down; he appeared crestfallen and desperate. One of his Russian minders was heard by Douglas Botting to comment: ‘I think we’re going to have to get Jeremy out. I don’t think he can take much more of this.’

  In the autumn of 1963 Guy Burgess died. He had been a considerable collector of books, specialising, though not exclusively, in stories of himself, Philby and Maclean. He left to Wolfenden the first pick of his library; Wolfenden was in Yugoslavia when the news came, and by the time he got back to Moscow the KGB had been through Burgess’s flat. All that was left were cloth-bound uniform editions of the works of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. Wolfenden had been close to Burgess; he may even have been his lover, though given the physical state of Burgess by the time they met no one could imagine much serious activity. The two men were alike in style – drunk, clever, epigrammatic. But in Wolfenden’s manoeuvring between the competing intelligence services there was a feeling of bravado and superiority to both. It was a long way from the idealistic fight against Fascism undertaken by the Burgess generation; it had neither the glory of Spain nor the squalor of subsequent treachery.

  Wolfenden was a pallbearer at the funeral, where Burgess’s brother told him that most of his estate had been left to Kim Philby. At about this time Susie Burchardt came to visit Wolfenden in his flat in Sad Sam. He made an effort to amuse her by taking her to a series of exotic places and drunken parties. She had the impression that he was not wholly approved of at the Embassy: he was impatient at the protocol but still seemed to know, just as at Eton, how far he could take his rebellion. When she said she could not be bothered to attend a certain function he emphatically told her she had no choice. He took her to Georgia and to the Ukraine. Outside Moscow he seemed less desperate and less drunk; back in town he seemed to suffer a mixture of boredom and fear which only ever-increasing quantities of alcohol could assuage.

  Susie Burchardt took back an alarming picture of Jeremy Wolfenden’s life to his friends in London. David Edwards, with whom he had shared the house in Oakley Street and later a flat in Gray’s Inn, heard the story with alarm. He had often suggested to Wolfenden that he should at least try to eat a steak before going out for an evening’s drinking, but soon recognised that there was very little he could do. He believed that Wolfenden drank and smoked to excess because that was how he thought he ought to behave; it was part of the idea of a foreign correspondent as a cross between Humphrey Bogart and W.H. Auden. Even at the time it seemed childish, but there was little that his friends could do: if they tried to remonstrate they would wither under the superior fire of Wolfenden’s wit.

  There was still some desperate fun to be had from life in Moscow. At Christmas there was a visit to a diplomatic hunting lodge at Zavidovo on the Volga river north of Moscow, where the Foreign Ministry invited the British journalists to go on an elk-hunt. It was agonisingly cold, even by Russian standards, and Wolfenden in his flapless Astrakhan contracted frostbite in one ear. Part of the lobe came off, and the pain was soothed by gargantuan quantities of vodka. Owing to a short
age of implements the Christmas turkey had to be carved with an axe. Although the other journalists knew of Wolfenden’s compromised position, the group survival instinct made them disinclined to be critical. So many people in so many different occupations were involved in one way or another with intelligence that even those who had kept aloof were forced to accept it as part of the background to their daily lives.

  Eventually the management of the Daily Telegraph relented. Things had not been going well. Wolfenden made a show of being able to dictate grammatically correct sentences, ad lib, while drunk, but on occasions the foreign desk’s calls had gone unanswered. For periods of four or five days Wolfenden would have to lie low and give his traumatised system time to rest. The telephone in the apricot room would thunder on ignored and the paper would have to whistle up John Miller to fill the ever-hungry foreign columns. Perhaps these lapses in such a young correspondent convinced his superiors of the strain he was under. At any rate they finally reached an agreement by which Wolfenden was to be allowed to swap jobs for one year with Ian Ball, the correspondent in New York, on the understanding that he would return to Moscow when the twelve months were up.

  Wolfenden was out of Moscow. In January 1964 he left the Soviet Union and went via London to New York. It was a watershed. He had escaped from the demands of both the KGB and the British; it was possible that he could put his life together again. He did not have career ambitions in quite the same way as his old friend Godfrey Hodgson, who had been for eighteen months the Observer’s Washington correspondent. Hodgson was tall, good-looking and startlingly young for the job; it was assumed that he too would do ‘great things’ – a slightly more realistic assumption, perhaps, given his greater sense of self-preservation (everyone had a greater sense of self-preservation than Jeremy Wolfenden). What Wolfenden wanted more than office promotion was somehow to realise the fantasy of his life. This ambition certainly involved being in the right places, on the right stories and dazzling all the right people by his reckless brilliance; but it did not include the kind of orthodox achievement that could be measured in published books or honours lists. He had won the honours, and they had bored him. His driving wish was to be the emotional nomad whose nonaligned intellectual integrity would somehow be a rebuke to the small-minded.