They came not single spies, but in battalions
Oleg Gordievsky
THE FIFTH MAN by Ronald Perry
Sidgwick & Jackson, £16.99, pp. 486 Ronald Perry, an Australian investiga- tive journalist and author of several books about various conspiracies in different parts of the world, has written a book about British agents of the KGB. The laurels of such experts in espionage as Chapman Pincher, John Costello, Phillip Knightley, Nigel West etc. seem to have disturbed his rest. Now with the help of The Fifth Man, Perry has become a full member of that exclusive club of Espionage Freaks (it is difficult to see any other rea- son for him writing this book), and he will not be happy in this club, since the reigning spirit in it is one of rivalry, envy and malice.
This book should have been a sensation, since it answers the question of who was the fifth out of the five most important and notorious agents of the KGB after Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt. However, the answer to this question was given exactly four years ago in the book by Christopher Andrew and myself, KGB: The Inside Story of its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev. It was John Caimcross. Born in 1913 into a modest but intellectually gifted family, in 1934 he was at Trinity, Cam- bridge. There he became close to the future KGB agent Blunt and other Marxist intellectuals.
Throughout the Thirties and Forties, having begun to work for the KGB, he was at times more valuable to Moscow than any other agent. He served successively in the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the private office of a government minister and SIS. I recall my boss, head of the KGB British desk, Dmitri Sventanko, speaking of Cairn- cross with awe, admiration and respect. Since the publication of our book, Cairn- cross's position as the fifth man has been confirmed repeatedly by numerous KGB veterans and by Caimcross himself. He is alive and well, living comfortably in the south of France.
Ronald Perry, however, has tried to prove that the fifth most important spy for Moscow in Britain, also a member of the Cambridge group, was Victor Rothschild. It goes without saying that this is an absurd assertion. In 1980, the leaders of the KGB gave me the task of writing the history of espionage activity in Britain and Scandi- navia, to mark 'the 60th anniversary of Soviet intelligence'. I studied archival material and found there much of great interest, in part details of the work done by Cairncross for the KGB as the fifth man, of Soviet atomic spying in Britain, and many other things, but there was no mention of Lord Rothschild.
It is not impossible that in the 1930s and 40s, when it was fashionable in left-wing intellectual circles to be rapturous about the Soviet Union, Rothschild associated with Soviet officials and academics, and shared his ideas with them. Perhaps KGB officers did nurse the idea of attracting him into clandestine co-operation. However, there is absolutely no proof that he became a Soviet agent, let alone such an important one. In mid-May 1990, a memorial service was held for Lord Rothschild in the West London Synagogue. Margaret Thatcher attended and William Waldegrave deliv- ered an address. The Prime Minister and Mr Waldegrave, who had just previously been the Foreign Office Minister, both had access to the most secret documents of MI5 and MI6. It is clear that they would have known the result of any investigation of the Rothschild matter, had there been one. Since they found it possible to attend the memorial service, obviously Rothschild was never a Moscow spy. In the absence of sufficient material to support his completely fanciful idea, the author fills his book with numerous stories about spies. There is Maclean and Burgess's flight to the USSR in 1951, the story of Peter Wright and his book Spycatcher and the attempt by the British Government to prosecute the former counter-intelligence officer through the Australian court, details of Philby's life in Moscow, a description of the 'Roger Hollis case' (fortunately Perry does not consider him to be a Soviet agent), the tale of Commander Crabb and the cruiser Ordzhonikidze. Ploughing through all this, one has the feeling Of having already read this book at least ten times. Its author, clearly in a hurry for fear of other writers finding yet another fifth man, makes many ridiculous mistakes. For exarli- ple, he repeatedly asserts that the Na Soviet Pact was signed in 1938. In the autumn of 1985, after I had fled the USSR, 31 Soviet spies were expelled from Britain, not 19 as Perry claims. His statement that in 1985 the KGB residence in London los running 100 British agents is completelY absurd. His spelling of Russian names Is often ludicrous. How about `Smerch Pion- um' instead of `Smert Shpionam' or 'Kurza- stan' for 'Kazakhstan'? The history of MY collaboration with British Intelligence and flight from the USSR as described by line are full of errors. In any case, it has neither has any connection with Rothschild. The critics of this book were for once unanimous in their appraisal. Tom Bower in the Daily Telegraph stated that it was Me worth the wood pulp from which the paper was made. Christopher Andrew in the Sun' day Telegraph considered it to have been written 'in the British tradition of spy fan- tasy'. 'How anyone can make a 500-page, book out of such tawdry nonsense is one the miracles of modem publishing,'saT Robin Lustig in the Observer. Kenneth Rose, in the Sunday Telegraph, was devastating in his criticism. He in particul.a,r ridicules the allegation that RothschlIn was 'close to Churchill to learn his secrecit intentions', and that he 'lunched OA dined constantly with directors of MIS an MI6'. The Fifth Man graphically demonstrates that the British tradition of Cold War sPY books has reached a dead end, and that the Anglo-American club of Espionage Freaks, which includes more and more Russian authors who are former KGB officers' should dissolve and its members begin. do something more useful with their tivi' — and ours.
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