Intelligence

I spied for Stalin at War Office, publisher confessed

Times Online

After the death of his widow, a Soviet agent reveals posthumously how he passed on information about troop movements, writes Magnus Linklater

A REMARKABLE confession by one of London’s most respected postwar publishers has revealed that for most of the Second World War he acted as a secret Soviet agent, using his position in the War Office to pass top-level information to Moscow on German troop movements, including plans for the D-Day landings.
James MacGibbon, who ran the publishing firm of MacGibbon and Kee, wrote a detailed account of his activities and passed it to me shortly before his death in February 2000, requesting only that I wait until after the death of his wife, Jean, to publish it. She died last year.
Last week, a detailed MI5 dossier, which shows that Mac-Gibbon was suspected of espionage and placed under close surveillance, was passed to his family.
MacGibbon was questioned by the agency’s top interrogator, Jim Skardon, who had broken the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, but revealed nothing. “I was impressed to know that I had been interrogated by the top man and had lied my way out,” he told me. MacGibbon’s 12-page account of how he progressed from prewar membership of the Communist Party to secret wartime meetings with a contact from the Soviet Embassy, known only as Natasha, reads as if it came straight out of a spy thriller.
But it has, too, a strangely innocent feel to it. Convinced that, following the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941, it was his duty to keep the Soviets, who were Britain’s allies, up to date with German troop movements, MacGibbon made contact with the Soviet Embassy in London. He was put in touch with Natasha and met her at a pre-ordained spot near Westbourne Terrace in West London.
“We exchanged passwords and walked along together [it was dark] introducing each other,” he wrote. “I passed on my first note on the German units facing the Soviet armies. The first cache was arranged, this was usually under a bush in a front garden of the terrace houses, my typed notes including a matchbox. The caches were changed each time. In each one I left an empty box which was marked with a cross by Natasha before I left the new box with my notes.
“This became a regular routine once or twice a month, with occasional meetings, always taking care that we were not being watched as we walked along chatting about this and that — we became friends although I never met her in daylight.”
Since MacGibbon worked in the Map Room of the War Office, it was relatively easy for him to note down details of German troop movements.
“When I heard that our enemy intelligence was not passed on to the Russians, who were confronting the greater part of the German armies, it obviously seemed disgraceful,” he said. “Our knowledge of the locations of the German units happened to be very good — much better than the Russians.”
Because he spoke German, MacGibbon had joined the Intelligence Corps and gone through an intelligence course, where two of his fellow officers were Enoch Powell and Hardy Amies. Although he had been vetted by MI5 in May 1940, it had been at best a cursory affair. After some questions about his membership of the CP, Mac-Gibbon was asked: “Are you for us or for Stalin?”
He answered: “For us.” “Shake on it, old man,” said his vetting officer.

James MacGibbon would meet “Natasha”, his Soviet contact, and leave wartime secrets under a bush in a front garden of a house in Westbourne Terrace, West London

“And that,” said MacGibbon, “was that. For the rest of the war years no secrets were withheld from me. It was still an age of innocence. A gentleman’s word was his bond.”
He was posted to MI3, the section of the War Office dealing with early plans for Operation Overlord, the projected invasion of France. It is not clear how much of this was passed on to the Russians, but Mac-Gibbon told me that he sent them everything he had that could have been of help to them, and this must have included details of Overlord.
In 1944, after two years of passing information to his Soviet contact, MacGibbon was posted to Washington, working on the British side of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He became part of Anglophile Washington Society, mixing with celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks Junior.
Soon after arriving he began having regular meetings with another Soviet contact – “this time a sophisticated man, and arranging drops as I had in London. All this had become so much of a routine that after he and I had begun having occasional drinks in a bar, I began to feel that I was taking unnecessary risks and we stopped that practice.”
Instead MacGibbon used to take long tram rides to north Washington, where he met his contact near a large Roman Catholic cemetery.
Soon after VE Day, he returned to London, supposing that his job of passing on information was over. “But that was not the end,” he wrote. “I was pestered for some time by phone calls from a rather dreary man who persisted in keeping in touch with me.”
Then, in 1950, he received an unexpected visit from a British agent, who informed him that MI5 knew about his contacts. “He stayed for about an hour, I denied everything, assuring him that the Russian could only have wanted to see me because I had been a CP member.”
The MI5 files, released to MacGibbon’s family, show that not only was he suspected, but his telephone was tapped, and his house in St John’s Wood placed under surveillance.
Every single one of his letters was photographed.
He was interrogated at length by Skardon, but after that produced nothing, he was called in to the War Office and told that he had been “cleared”. It was, he said, “a great relief”.
Last night Hamish MacGibbon, his son, said: “The information that has been recently released concerning my father adds little to what we, as the family, already knew. It confirms our view that all he did was to report on German troop movements to our Russian allies.
“In view of the situation as it existed then this was exactly the right thing to do. It has not in any way altered our view of him as a man and a father, of whom we are very proud.”

October 30, 2004 at 11:31 AM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home