Treachery

by Pincher, Chapman

• ISBN13: 9781400068074
• ISBN10: 140006807X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-07
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

Prime Minister's Personal Minute

Author Biography

CHAPMAN PINCHER is perhaps the best-known British espionage writer in his field. Educated at King’s College in London, for decades he has been the most effective critic of the British security system, and as an author and journalist broke scores of stories that created headlines for years. Pincher lives in Berks, United Kingdom.

Table of Contents

Introduction Admission	p. xi
A Momentous Message	p. 3
Duplicity Exposed	p. 9
A Spy Called Elli	p. 16
Inauspicious Start	p. 23
Cosmopolitan Comrades	p. 33
Strange Interlude	p. 42
Someone for Tennis	p. 50
Inside MI5	p. 58
The Krivitsky "Coincidence"	p. 67
Toxic Troika	p. 77
Traitors to Order	p. 84
In Charge of "Soviet Espionage"	p. 93
Secrets by the Bagful	p. 99
Enter Sonia	p. 106
Another Insidious Immigrant	p. 115
"Signing On"	p. 124
Calling Moscow	p. 131
An Enlightening Book	p. 138
In The City	p. 146
Flagrant "Divergence"	p. 154
Two-Headed Colossus	p. 160
Red Light from Green	p. 170
A High-Level Culprit	p. 176
Calamitous Clearance	p. 183
An Enlightening Letter	p. 188
First Atomic Spy?	p. 193
Enormoz	p. 198
The Strange Behavior of Roger Hollis	p. 204
In a New World	p. 214
A Mystery Resolved	p. 223
Blind Eye to Elli	p. 232
The Denigration of Igor Gouzenko	p. 237
Long Shot Shot Down	p. 244
Protective Perfidy	p. 249
Back in Full Flood	p. 258
Another Gru Defector	p. 263
The Firs Fiasco	p. 268
Australian Assignment	p. 277
Betraying the Superbomb	p. 283
A Brilliant Break	p. 288
Confessions-of a Kind	p. 295
Misleading the Attorney General	p. 302
Misleading the Prime Minister	p. 308
Alienating the Americans	p. 314
Unhampered Escape	p. 320
Volume of Deception	p. 328
Hollis at Bay	p. 337
Italian Fiasco	p. 342
Another Volume of Deception	p. 351
Betrayal Beyond Belief	p. 359
Rigorous Scrutiny-For Some	p. 365
Escape at the Double	p. 369
A More Credible Scenario?	p. 378
A List of Nine	p. 386
Reluctant Riddance	p. 394
Suspicious Aftermaths	p. 400
Pamphlet of Deception	p. 405
A Ruthless Defamation	p. 414
Master of Minimalism	p. 424
A Warning from Hoover	p. 430
Master of Disaster	p. 437
Another Spy in MI6	p. 444
The Penkovsky Problem	p. 450
Another Enlightening Case	p. 460
Another Naval Spy	p. 465
The Strange Escape of an Archtraitor	p. 471
"The Year that the Roof Fell in"	p. 482
Portentous Liaison	p. 489
The Fall of Supermac	p. 495
Irish Interlude	p. 504
A Sordid Deal	p. 508
Playing The Royal Card	p. 513
Still More Cover-Ups	p. 521
Suspect Finish	p. 530
Kid-Glove Showdown	p. 538
Overdue Cull	p. 549
A Crucial Call	p. 553
Two Turncoats	p. 564
Brush with the Police	p. 572
Missing Link?	p. 579
Sonia Resurgent	p. 587
The Sanden Saga, Part 1	p. 595
The Sanden Saga, Part 2	p. 600
Censure Deferred	p. 605
Conclusion	p. 608
Acknowledgments	p. 615
Appendix: The Scroll of Anomalies	p. 617
Note on the Sources	p. 623
Archival Sources	p. 637
Bibliography	p. 643
Index	p. 651
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One


A Momentous Message

Late in the year 2000, vladimir putin, president of the Russian Federation, awarded the posthumous title “Superagent of Military Intelligence” to Ursula Beurton, a former British housewife who is better known in the annals of espionage by her Soviet code name, Sonia. It was an unprecedented honor for a woman who had already held two Orders of the Red Banner for her treacherous activities in several countries, especially in Great Britain, where she had been deeply involved in the theft of both British and American atomic bomb secrets during World War II. Shortly after she died, in Berlin in 2000 at the age of ninety-three, some of her other exploits were released from the Moscow archives for publication in Russian books. One of them, which had occurred in Oxford in 1943 under the noses of MI5, then located nearby, involved information so politically explosive that it was regarded by the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, as requiring the utmost secrecy.

In August 1943, Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, accompanied by senior aides, met in Quebec to decide about the date and details of the invasion of Italy from North Africa and, later, of France from Great Britain. In addition, on August 19, they signed a separate agreement concerning collaboration between Britain and the United States on the production of an atomic bomb. The American atomic proj?ect was progressing so rapidly that Churchill wanted British scientists to join it there, but the U.S. government had objected to such a move. Previously, in June 1942, at a meeting in Washington, D.C., Churchill and Roosevelt had made a loose arrangement to pool atomic information and develop a bomb together, but with the setting up of the vast Manhattan Project, the United States was contributing so much more money and effort that the will to share the proceeds had seriously declined. At Quebec, Churchill was determined to exploit his friendship with Roosevelt to resurrect the partnership and enshrine it in a formal treaty.

The old warrior’s persistence resulted in a separate two-page document, usually referred to as the Quebec Agreement. In it, the two leaders stated that Great Britain and the United States would collaborate to produce an atomic weapon and would never use it against each other or against any other country without mutual consent. It also declared that neither would ever communicate any information about it to any third party without joint consent. There was also agreement about continuing atomic collaboration in the postwar situation.

The Quebec Agreement was an exceptionally sensitive document because the very existence of any work on the bomb was supposedly so secret that it referred to the project only as “Tube Alloys.” Also, Churchill and Roosevelt were most anxious to avoid offending the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, by making him aware that he would not be given any information about the new weapon, which could devastatingly weaken the Soviet Union’s military position in the postwar world. Having been forced into becoming allies by Adolf Hitler’s attack on them in 1941, the Russians were bearing the brunt of the fighting.

Churchill therefore kept the Quebec Agreement and its details secret to himself, a few trusted aides, and the Chiefs of Staff of the British Armed Forces. The distribution list—those to whom a copy was sent for information—is therefore likely to have been very restricted indeed. Several documents now in the British National Archives testify to the extraordinary extent of the measures taken to prevent unauthorized persons from having any knowledge of its details. As late as June 1949, the prime minister, then Clement Attlee, expressed his deep concern that details of the Quebec Agreement and subsequent secret accords might be revealed to a U.S. Senate committee, from which they might leak

---

Excerpted from Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, Cover-Ups - Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain by Chapman Pincher
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.