The Fatal Englishman (46 page)

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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, drunk or sober, he could use them merely to amuse himself.

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.

That evening I switched on the tape of Martina Browne’s melodic (slightly Irish, as it turned out) voice and thought about Wolfenden. Compared to Christopher Wood or Richard Hillary he had ‘achieved’ almost nothing. Despite being far cleverer than they were, he was more deeply and horribly flawed. Apart from the memory of his brilliance, he had left nothing behind – no paintings, no book, only some newspaper articles now lost by the paper in question. Yet, like the other two, he had touched a nerve; in some minor way he had represented a generation. How? Was it that like Hillary, the pilot, the epitome of the 1930s private figure forced by calamitous events into a public role, he had been a victim of sinister global forces? Was there something exemplary in his life, like Wood’s, or in his death, like Hillary’s? Wolfenden’s was a murkier, more sordid story, replete with internal contradictions and dead ends. In fiction one would be
obliged to harmonise the dialogue, themes and actions of the narrative into a more artistic whole. In fact it presented a puzzle that I could not fully solve, though I felt that Colin Falck had been getting close when he talked about the failure of the institutions that produced him.