Deceiving the deceivers.(Letter to the Editor)

To the Editors:

David Pryce-Jones makes several major errors in his brief references to my book, Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guyf Burgess. He claims that in my account the British intelligence services "deliberately and ingeniously" sent Maclean to Washington "and fed him with disinformation to serve up to the KGB." Ingenious it would have been but it couldn't have happened, and a careful reading of my book would deny any such interpretation. Maclean wasn't under suspicion when he left London for Washington in April 1944. Not until two years later in 1946 did American cryptologists at Arlington Hall Station begin to break into encrypted cable traffic from the Soviet missions in New York and Washington that would ultimately incriminate him.

In the same vein he asserts that British intelligence allowed Maclean while in Washington to pass to the Soviets the texts of the Churchill to Roosevelt cables on the Polish crisis to "boost Maclean's standing as an agent." This is equally preposterous. In March 1945 Maclean passed to his Soviet control six cabled exchanges between the Foreign Office in London and the British embassy on the Polish crisis. Not until 1948 were they sufficiently broken to suggest to M15 that there was a Soviet spy at the British embassy. There were no Churchill to Roosevelt cables among them. These interpretive comments by Pryce-Jones are at odds with his claim that the Maclean/Burgess defection (May 1951) forced the British to realize that they were losing the peace. As I also explain, by 1948 the Attlee government had grown increasingly aware of Soviet espionage activities in England and had given M15 the authority to employ far more extensive counter-espionage methods in their identification.

Pryce-Jones is in error when he writes that Philby was "furtively fired" from M16 in 1955 and was subsequently exonerated in the House of Commons by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Philby was forced to resign in 1951 alter his recall from Washington and CIA Director Bedell Smith's warning to "C." Smart Menzies, the head of M16, that the Agency wouldn't cooperate further until Philby was shown the door. Macmillan wasn't Prime Minister in November 1955 when he exonerated Philby while defending the September 1955 Government White Paper on the Maclean/ Burgess ...