Deceiving the Deceivers by S. J. Hamrick & Kim Philby Donald Maclean & Guy Burgess

Author:S. J. Hamrick & Kim Philby Donald Maclean & Guy Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

Fifty years after the Maclean affair, Washington’s decision to declassify Venona gave London a final opportunity to clarify the record. British intelligence might have admitted that he had been identified earlier than April 1951 and explained that his return to the Foreign Office in November 1950 was to place him under surveillance to identify his Soviet control. London could have collaborated in the 1995–1997 NSA release of the Venona archive by disclosing the complete texts of the Maclean recoveries as Arlington Hall did in publishing the Soviet cables that led to the FBI’s identification of Klaus Fuchs, Judith Coplon, and Julius Rosenberg, among others. There was nothing unusual or extraordinary in MI5’s 1949–1951 Maclean deception, which followed widely known counterintelligence practice. An agent of a foreign power was secretly identified and given access to official documents; counterintelligence officers monitored his movements to identify his foreign handler and any other agents under his control. Once that operation was concluded, the details could be disclosed at an appropriate time. After fifty years, there was no reason for Washington to suppress the dates or details of those incriminating Venona exposures and in 1995–1997 the NSA and the FBI had no hesitation in providing them. Full disclosure was the purpose of Venona’s declassification. London might have followed suite, releasing the full texts of all twelve of GCHQ’s final Maclean recoveries for publication with Venona.

But full and complete disclosure had different implications and more serious consequences for London than for Washington. Maclean wasn’t MI5’s only target. Philby and Burgess were part of the counterespionage operation designed to fully expose all three using Maclean as a stalking horse, an inclusion the Foreign Office and the foreign secretary weren’t aware of. Both had been misled. So had the British government in preparing the 1955 White Paper. The MI5 and MI6 secrets and those at GCHQ remained securely under lock and key until the July 1995 decision to declassify Venona. The date of Maclean’s conclusive identification as a Soviet agent was the rusty hinge that would reopen MI5’s Pandora’s box, sealed since 1949–1951.

That date wasn’t April 1951 but a minimum of eight months earlier, more probably a year or even three years earlier. The sensitivity of the Venona Maclean texts when released would have refuted the notion of scores of suspects that required a long and protracted MI5 search for HOMER. The earlier identification of Maclean would have exposed the falsity of those periodic reports to Hoover through Philby’s MI6 cipher from the early summer of 1950 through May 1951. Philby in particular, believed by so many to have gotten his crucial intelligence from Venona, had been deliberately misled by MI5. Since both Philby and Burgess were included in the Maclean deception, then both also had been suspected far earlier by GCHQ recoveries. When Roger Makins brought Maclean back to the Foreign Office, Philby and Burgess were posted to Washington. Not only had the Foreign Office been deceived but so had the FBI, the CIA, and Arlington Hall.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.