The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives by Sebastian Faulks
‘I should say too that until recently he was a wayward and a restless spirit; then, a year or so before his death, he seemed to find himself; and he found himself in the best way – by finding someone else. In one of his last letters he told me without sentimentality how happy his marriage had made him. He was not fated to enjoy that good fortune for long. If that adds poignancy to our sorrow, let us at least be thankful that before he died he knew what it was to give such happiness and to receive it.’
Jeremy Wolfenden’s ashes were scattered beneath the trees of Addison’s Walk in Magdalen, but his friends still mourned him.
That was the end of Jeremy Wolfenden’s life, but there is a sense in which his story is likely to remain incomplete. In spring 1966 SIS officers visited All Souls and Magdalen. They were unhappy about his death, but if they found out anything from his former colleagues they kept it to themselves.
The end of the Cold War has meant that intelligence services admit their own existence and provide press officers. This is a significant development. What has not changed is this: they still reveal nothing. It is not so much that, in the dispiriting phrase of James Jesus Angleton, we are in a wilderness of mirrors; it is more that we are through the looking-glass.
One person who is occasionally helpful to writers is a man called Gervase Cowell, who has the tide ‘Advisor to the S.O.E. Archive’, He was, funnily enough, Ruari Chisholm’s successor at the embassy in Moscow and his expulsion by the Russians, for spying, was reported by Jeremy Wolfenden in the Daily Telegraph on 14 May 1963.
Anyone can ring Gervase Cowell and ask for his help. Unfortunately, he told me, he was not allowed to reveal anything at all about British citizens. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you are entitled by the Citizen’s Charter to write to MI5 if you think he was also involved in security work. I can give you their address.’
There are always the tactics of the side-door. Friends of friends can make discreet inquiries of retired officers and they in turn … One such man replied that indeed Wolfenden’s name rang a bell, but he didn’t hold out much chance of anything coming to light: it was all a bit recent. Something pre-War would stand a better chance of an answer.
From Yuri Kobaladze, chief of the Press Bureau of the Russian Intelligence Service (KGB), came this fax:
There are two aspects to your request which have to be explained. First, the Russian Intelligence Service is responsible only for foreign operations ie outside the territory of Russia (the Soviet Union in the past). And second, irrespective of the person in question it is to be borne in mind that the existing law prohibits to reveal operational information. So we keep to the rule adopted by secret services throughout the world not to comment on the questions of attribution of any person to Soviet/Russian Intelligence Service.
Give or take a verbal construction, this could have been written by Gervase Cowell himself.
The Soviet double-agent Oleg Gordievsky confirmed that the seduction and blackmail of Wolfenden would have been a routine job for the Second Chief Directorate, or Counter-intelligence Service. ‘But,’ he said, ‘it is almost impossible to get anything from the domestic service.’ Many weeks later a reply finally emerged from its office in Moscow:
I regret to inform you that no record of the Counter-intelligence Service concerning the dealings with Jeremy Wolfenden was found in our archives. In addition to this I must certify that Mr Wolfenden is unknown to the Service. As a result of the matter I can’t give any documentary evidence of the case to you.
Yours sincerely Alexander Mikhailov.
Vladimir Pozner, Wolfenden’s link to the Russian establishment, who now lives in New York, made no reply to a request for information. Both the FBI and the CIA, however, are bound to answer questions under the American Freedom of Information Act. The FBI said that the large number of applications meant that there would be a delay of up to two years in dealing with new inquiries.
The CIA wrote as follows:
I must advise you that in all requests such as yours, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or the non-existence of any CIA records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of records containing such information – unless, of course, it has been officially acknowledged – would be classified for reasons of national security under sections 1.3 (a) (4) [intelligence sources and methods] and 1.3 (a) (5) [foreign relations] of Executive Order 12356. Further, the Director of Central Intelligence has the responsibility and authority to protect such information from unauthorized disclosure in accordance with Subsection 102 (d) (3) of the National Security Act of 1947 and Section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949.
Accordingly your request is denied on the basis of FOIA exemptions (b) (1) and (b) (3). By this action, we are neither confirming nor denying the existence or non-existence of such records. An explanation of the FOIA exemptions cited above is enclosed.
The letter was signed by John H. Wright, Information and Privacy Co-Ordinator. The attached explanation of exemptions included the two relevant paragraphs:
(b)(1) applies to material which is properly classified pursuant to an Executive order in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;
(b) (3) applies to the Director’s statutory obligations to protect from disclosure intelligence sources and methods, as well as organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency, in accord with the National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA Act of 1949.
Many of Jeremy Wolfenden’s friends, including his cousin and confidante Sally Humphreys and his former fiancée Susie Burchardt, were ignorant of his involvement with the intelligence services. Those who knew of it had their own theories. Some believed that Yuri Krutikov, his first KGB contact on his student trip in 1956, later ran him as an agent in Moscow; others believed that he was switched from Moscow to Washington by the Telegraph at the request of SIS because a former Russian lover had been posted to Washington and they were consequently hoping for a klondike of new information through Wolfenden.
The extreme theory of Wolfenden’s death ran as follows: that he was murdered, probably by the CIA. Furious at SIS’s indifference to the fate of Penkovsky, whom it left to be tortured and killed by the KGB, the CIA determined on revenge. They reasoned that the only person who could have known both what was going through Ruari Chisholm’s flat in Sad Sam and who was in regular contact with the KGB was Jeremy Wolfenden. Against the argument that Wolfenden would not have wished to blow Penkovsky’s cover, the conspiracists had the answer that it was not deliberate: the man was drunk for twelve hours a day every day. The KGB had nothing on Penkovsky until they searched his room and found a Minnox camera; his meetings with Greville Wynne and Janet Chisholm had not been observed: someone must have tipped them off. Given a chance to redeem himself in America through contact with the FBI, Wolfenden failed. He was killed, or pushed into suicide, and his wife, herself an agent, was squared by SIS.
This is an attractive theory, not least because it answers one of the great mysteries of the Cold War: who shopped Penkovsky, the Man Who Saved the World? However, it cannot be true. The CIA did not plot to kill people like Jeremy Wolfenden, white Old Etonians, in Washington. They plotted to kill people like Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo. Nothing in Wolfenden’s private letters to Martina Browne suggests any degree of knowledge or culpability in Penkovsky’s fate. The theory also depends on Martina Browne’s being an SIS officer who married Wolfenden under false pretences. But although she may have helped in the Chisholm household she was not herself working for SIS; and, despite everything his friends believed, Wolfenden married her for reasons of sentimental love.
Wolfenden drank himself to death. His involvement with the intelligence services increased his self-destructive desperation and made his life shorter, but the spies did not kill him. His gift for self-preservation, of knowing just how far he could go, deserted him in the end because he underestimated the doggedness of the intelligence services and believed that,
In fact they used him. SIS had their eye on him in the Navy and recruited him at Oxford. He was not trained by them, but felt formally enough attached to attempt to recruit one of his best friends, Colin Falck.
His ambition to go to Moscow was thwarted at The Times because his superiors saw the risks. S.R. Pawley of the Daily Telegraph, however, was more responsive. Senior Telegraph men had retained wartime connections with intelligence, and though such contacts were considered louche at 135 Fleet Street, they were regarded as acceptably patriotic. A degree of cooperation with ‘the Embassy’ was the price Wolfenden was asked to pay for getting posted to Moscow in the first place. It did not in the first instance seem much to ask. Wolfenden knew he was likely to be blackmailed by the KGB, but he did not mind. He thought it would be amusing.
SIS did not mind either; in fact they preferred it that way. A double agent was more useful to them than a loosely sympathetic journalist. Wolfenden resented having to work for either side, largely because what he was required to do – open mail, write articles, report on Keith Morfett’s sex life – was boring. He also took his journalism seriously and felt compromised.
By then it was too late. His father’s reputation and the civil liberties of millions of homosexual men in Britain were at stake. When Ruari and Janet Chisholm turned out to have been connected with the greatest flow of information ever received by the West, his position became more tense. Both sides took a closer interest in him. By the time he married the Chisholm nanny – a woman who had been named by Wynne at the trial and who was warned by her own country’s Intelligence service that she faced a lifetime of incarceration if she so much as set foot in the Soviet Union – he had become enmeshed beyond any hope of escape.
The United States provided no relief. Because the Penkovsky-Wynne connection had been run jointly by Britain and America, both SIS and the CIA assumed there was a legitimate continuity in his commitment. Suspicions about the shopping of Penkovsky did not help.
In 1965 the Americans were extremely agitated about Soviet penetration in the United States. Wolfenden was thus asked to advise the FBI on the bona fides of Russian diplomats, businessmen and other visitors. The FBI also, in his wife’s belief, made further, tougher demands of him. British intelligence and security continued to maintain an interest.
There was no amusement any more to be had from these flirtations; there was desperate pressure with no end in sight. The man who had impressed his Oxford friends not just by his brilliance but by the sweetness of his temper, had been worn down. There were no more ‘dishes’, no parties that he cared for, no more excitement. There was only drink, and that by now had a self-destructive purpose.
Martina Browne felt that in Jeremy’s dealings with the FBI there was the suspicion of some love affair; the utter misery they caused him could not otherwise be explained. She assumed the affair was with the FBI agent, which seems unlikely, but her instinct may have been right. Sex and spying were intimately connected in Wolfenden’s life, and somehow, somewhere, with some person, it may have continued in Washington. No one knew the details. His wife knew only that ‘something was going on’. This final emotional twist provided the leverage that broke him.
All this I had pieced together without any official help or confirmation from the intelligence or security services. Then, when this book was with the printer, one of the many side-doors I had been trying swung open a few inches. I was not disabused. Wolfenden was on SIS’s books, and although nothing more was ‘confirmed or denied’, I was offered a likely outline of what might have happened in such circumstances. It tallied in almost every respect with the story Jeremy Wolfenden’s friends had put together for me and which I have told here. The role of the FBI was considered plausible, that of the KGB almost inevitable. Why Wolfenden was allowed to go to Moscow remains unclear, though dangers revealed by a routine MI5 defensive security briefing would not necessarily have been shared with the Daily Telegraph.
None of the four Wolfenden children ‘achieved’ anything in the sense their father would have understood. This would not matter if they had seemed happier or more fulfilled in other ways. Was there a trauma in childhood? Or since such relative ‘failure’ is the norm of human life, is it naive to look for a single cause? Jeremy Wolfenden would certainly have laughed at this biographical enterprise (he referred mockingly to ‘my biographers’ in a letter); but he might have laughed less if he thought it was offering a complete psychological theory or ‘solution’.
He would have died anyway, even without the intelligence complications; his liver would have killed him. It was not for any spying activities, anyway, that his friends mourned or remembered him, but for the reckless way he burned away his life for their edification and amusement.
His death left them all diminished and uneasy. They wondered if they could have helped; they wondered what they were supposed to learn from his existence. They missed him because they had known no one like him and a part of their sense of what life could be had died with him. The Allies had won the War, England had in the phrase of Wolfenden’s one-time drinking partner A.J.P. Taylor, ‘arisen’; now it needed thinkers of Wolfenden’s brilliance to shape the peace – to form the new, post-Beveridge world of social justice and universal education, to inspire the country whose values had supposedly been ‘stamped for ever on the future of civilisation’ by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of men like Richard Hillary. It never happened.
Wolfenden’s friends lived their own lives, the majority of them in the disappointing country Britain became. With the education they had, most of them have done well by the standards of the world, though their ideas of what that world might turn out to be have, over the years, been modified.
More than thirty years after his death, they puzzle over him, one or two become damp-eyed when they recall him, some shake their heads and smile.
Mike Artis, who appeared to Wolfenden’s Etonian friends as though he were starving to death from a cocktail of industrial diseases, is now Professor Michael Artis and lists his hobby as ‘eating out’. He and Robin Hope both live in Italy. Sally Humphreys and Colin Falck teach in America. Philip Howard, Neal Ascherson, Philip French and Godfrey Hodgson have been among the most prominent journalists of their generation. Susie Burchardt, under her married name of Susan Watt, runs the London publisher Michael Joseph.
Stephen McWatters, the Eton Master in College, is long retired, but remembers the schoolboy he taught: ‘He admitted to having homosexual inclinations and he was critical of society’s attitude to the question and the school’s policy that reflected that attitude.’
Wolfenden’s own views survive – for instance, in a letter to Michael Parsons, an Oxford friend, from Paris, January 1961: ‘There is just no such thing as anyone’s real personality. Personalities are the product of the initial feelings or attitudes someone takes up and the needs of the situation they find themselves in … and, for that matter, the initial feelings themselves are the product of earlier conflicts of that sort. There is a dialectic of personality, just as there is a dialectic of history (and it’s just as unpredictable).’
There are other voices whose words stick in the memory:
Sally Humphreys: ‘Martina said an extraordinary thing after he was dead. She said, “Why was he always so unhappy?” This surprised me, because I felt in general that the opposite was true.’
Eileen Wolfenden: ‘When I heard that he was dead I thought, Never again can I have a marvellous boy who turned out to be everything to us … It was not until I had had three normal children that I understood how extraordinary he was.’
Robert Cassen: ‘I felt it was a defect of character that someone that brilliant should be so bored.’
Jeremy Wolfenden himself in a letter from Moscow, January 1962: ‘Personally I’m becoming more and more anti-political; the gap between the fascination of political theories and dreary actions which people take in their name is getting me down.
His Finals examiner at Oxford, after giving him eight alphas: ‘He wrote as though it were all beneath him; he wrote as though it were all such a waste of his time.’
David Shapiro in his letter of condolence to Martina Browne: ‘I was for a long time frightened of him, at first by his sheer brilliance, but then, even after one felt the kindness of his wit, by the deep unhappiness of his life.’
Martina Browne: ‘And then in Washington, with the FBI, something was going on, and he died, and we’re never going to know.’
David Edwards, his friend in London: ‘Jeremy was on course to meet his fate before he even set foot in Moscow.’
Philip French: ‘Turning recklessness into a philosophy and a style, he behaved as if life truly was absurd, as if suicide was a serious option, and nothing really did matter beyond a certain point What others see as the proper subject for a book or play, he made the improper subject of a life.’
Colin Falck ‘His inability to find a way to live and be happy seemed not so much a personal failure as somehow a failure of all the English structures and systems that had produced him.’
Martin Page, his colleague in Moscow: ‘The intelligence services pursued him for information that was so trivial it was of no account to them. Yet they were willing to see this extraordinary man of such brilliance collapse as a human being, to the point of death, apparently without remorse. So much of the Cold War seemed to be like that.’
When I left Martina Browne’s house in Ireland I drove to the airport in thick snow and flew back to London. The news on the radio at home was that the Prime Minister, John Major, was facing criticism on two fronts. The Opposition told him that his party’s education reforms were failing the country’s schoolchildren, while a group of Conservative MPs had criticised his foreign policy: they believed that Britain must fight to stay further aloof from the European Union.