The Cloud of Treason Descends Upon Another Bastion of British Respectability : Espionage: Documents fresh from the KGB archives reveal a group of well-placed Soviet moles at Oxford. The government’s face is red.

As Britain’s Queen Elizabeth arrived in Canada for a state visit recently, the Royal family was feeling unusually grateful to the KGB. The monarchy’s troubles had been knocked off Fleet Street’s front pages by the embarrassment of another section of the British upper class, the revelation that a new group of Soviet spies had been recruited among the dreaming spires of Oxford in the 1930s.

The startling news that that British Establishment had secreted another, and largely unsuspected, group of well-placed Soviet moles was just part of a haul of documents fresh from the KGB archives. They include Kim Philby’s expense accounts and payment orders, copies of British Cabinet minutes from the 1930s never released to the Public Record Office and some documents called “Black Jumbos,” still so secret the government refuses to acknowledge their existence.

The Black Jumbos were, in fact, Soviet diplomatic and intelligence messages, intercepted and decrypted by British counterintelligence in the 1930s. Donald Maclean, the Cambridge-educated spy who helped get the atom-bomb secrets to Moscow from his time at the British Embassy in Washington, tipped off the Russians that their codes were being read in 1938. Maclean used a miniature camera to photograph Cabinet papers and the Black Jumbos in the secret room at the Foreign Office.

Moscow’s motive for these new revelations seems an equal mix of high-minded glasnost and the new Russian government’s hunger for hard cash. The KGB’s successor in the field of foreign intelligence, the Russian Intelligence Service, has signed a contract with the Crown Books division of Random House, to publish jointly five volumes of selected documents and six books by Russian and Western historians on aspects of the KGB’s work abroad. The RIS expects to make “at least a million dollars.”

The feeding frenzy that hit Fleet Street may soon have an echo in America, with the publication of the two books on Soviet intelligence operations there up to the 1960s, and on Soviet penetration of U.S. intelligence. The lingering question of Alger Hiss--was he a Soviet agent all along?--may now be a matter for history.

Announced at a recent Washington press conference by publishing and RIS executives, the decision to publish the KGB archive made little news in the United States. But after the press conference, the former KGB officials showed they understood their market by leaking some of the juicier tidbits to the only British journalist who showed up.

The news that rocked Britain was that Oxford, too, had spawned her group of moles, led by a shadowy Old Etonian who went on to Oxford University, where he was recruited by the Russians and given the code name “Scott,” and then embarked on a glittering career in the Foreign Office. The Russians have not released his name, but have at least given the reference number in their archives.

“Scott,” it is now strongly suspected, was Sir David Scott Fox. He was a friend of Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, served at crucial pre-war posts in the Embassy in Berlin in 1937, in Prague in 1938 and ended his career with ambassadorial rank as the personal representative of the foreign secretary from 1970-75. Other KGB documents reveal the series of curiously transparent code names by which the British spies were known. Maclean was “Waiser,” German for orphan, since his father had died. Burgess, the homosexual, was known as “Maedchan,” (little girl). Anthony Blunt was known as “Tony” to the Russians.

“Scott” was so important to the Russians that they commissioned their own psychological profile of him, put together by Soviet experts in Moscow on the basis of interviews, handwriting studies and social backgrounds. In the course of 1936 and 1937, “Scott” helped arrange the recruitment of the rest of the Oxford ring, of four serious and witting agents and a wider group of Oxford men who are listed in the Soviet files as “sources.”

The new mole hunt unleashed by the KGB documents, by questions in the House of Commons and by front-page stories in the British press, is now looking at some extraordinary names. Those who are now being reinvestigated by British Intelligence include:

-- Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, later Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador to the United States from 1946-48, who aroused FBI suspicions by bringing his Russian valet with him. He had been British ambassador in Moscow in 1944, and boasted of getting on well with Josef Stalin because they shared a fondness for dirty stories. He was also implicated by the KGB defector Walter G. Krivitsky.

-- Sir Anthony (Horace) Rumbold, who was principal private secretary to the foreign secretary at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, and who had been the best man at Maclean’s wedding. Rumbold ended his career as ambassador to Austria, and died in 1983.

-- Sir George Cuttrell, a British Museum expert on early woodcuts who joined the Foreign Office in 1940 and served in the Belgrade Embassy at the time of Josip Tito’s split with Stalin. He became British ambassador to Poland in the 1960s, and died in 1983.

-- Peter Wilson, another gay Old Etonian who went to Oxford and then into British intelligence during World War II, before becoming head of Sotheby’s in the 1970s. He died in 1984, and his family has denied he had ever been a Soviet agent.

-- Geronwy Rees, who became a Marxist and a Soviet agent in the 1930s, according to the confessed spy Blunt, and who later edited Encounter, the intellectual magazine funded by the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Rees, who denied having betrayed any secrets, went to MI5 (British counterintelligence) four days after Burgess fled Britain in 1951 to denounce his old friend. Rees, it now transpires, had been given the code name “Gross” by the Russians. He died in 1981, three weeks after Blunt was unmasked as traitor.

-- Jennifer Hart, historian and fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, who went from being a 1930s Oxford undergraduate into the Home Office, and married Professor Herbert Hart, who ran the analysis section of MI5. She has admitted being recruited by the Russians, but denies being an active spy, and dropped her communist allegiance when Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler.

Britain’s own belated version of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts for communists in high places had been confined to a group of consenting adults from Cambridge, the other elite university. Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt were all Cambridge men, all from that upper crust of British society and clubland whose loyalty was taken for granted.

The common factor among the Cambridge spies was an exclusive intellectual and dining club known as the Apostles. Its Oxford counterpart in the 1930s was the Clarendon Club, where wealthy undergraduates dined well and shared their sense of guilt at the impact of the Great Depression on unemployed workers and mourned the inability of the capitalist democracies to stand up to Hitler.

“There was another factor,” suggests British historian John Costello. “These men came from families that were accustomed to running a global empire, to making decisions that affected the world. Britain’s decline was evident to them, and as well as communist ideology and anti-Nazism, they may have been tempted by the prospect of serving a Soviet cause that looked as if it were to inherit Britain’s role as the new superpower.”

The new revelations began more than two years ago, when Costello wrote to the press office of the KGB, asking what information they had on the mysterious flight of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess to Britain in 1941. Via the diplomatic bag, he received copies, from Oleg Tsarev of the KGB, of the decrypted messages sent to Moscow by Philby, then a senior official in British intelligence. Costello went to Moscow and became the first Western historian to gain access to the KGB files.

Tsarev and Costello agreed to work jointly on the extraordinary career of the Soviet master-spy Alexander Orlov, based upon some KGB archives. Orlov handled the Cambridge group of British spies in the 1930s, ran the Red Orchestra intelligence network in Berlin during World War II, recruited the atom-bomb spies in the United States and finished up as the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence defector to come to the West.

The publication of the KGB archives has deeply embarrassed the British government, and may render untenable its strict policy of official secrecy over intelligence documents. After years of outflanking the British controls by using the U.S. government’s Freedom of Information Act, intelligence historians will now be able to go directly to the raw data from the Russian archives.

One person that Britain’s spymasters has traditionally kept in the dark was the Queen. She was hideously embarrassed to learn, in 1981, that the man she had appointed to be Keeper of the Royal Paintings, the most prestigious post in the British art world, and whom she had awarded a knighthood, was the Soviet spy Blunt. The government knew, and did not tell her. And as she currently enjoys a respite from Fleet Street, the ominous thought must linger--how many more of her household, and of the British Establishment she trusted, will be revealed to have been Moscow’s spies all along?