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note to Menzies he proposed that communications should henceforth be left to the intelligence organisations, rather than the politicians. The information from Canada, he wrote, confirmed ‘an assumption which any responsible person must have made long ago, viz. that the Soviet Union is using every means, fair and foul, to discover the extent of our progress in atomic research’. What remained, therefore, was merely a ‘technical job of investigating the extent, ramifications, nature, technique etc of Soviet organisation involved, and of endeavouring to assess the value of the information which it may have received’. Bevin and Cadogan, however, were convinced of the high political importance of the affair. It coincided with a bad-tempered Council of Foreign Ministers in London at which it was feared the Soviet delegation might demand access to atomic secrets, and they insisted that all Corby telegrams should continue to be passed to them. So, although all traffic went through Philby, he does not seem to have restricted what was shown to the Foreign Office and Downing Street. But he was more successful with MI5. When consulted by Menzies, Bill Stephenson welcomed the idea of sending out an MI5 expert to assist in the interrogation: ‘yes, please send immediately’, he cabled, and Hollis, who flew out on 16 September, became the linchpin of Gouzenko’s interrogation. Cables passed between Hollis and MI5 through Stephenson and Philby, an arrangement which MI5 found unsatisfactory and slow. Philby, despite giving constant reassurances that he would let both sides see all communications as soon as they were received, seems to have been adept at weeding out, amending or just delaying key messages, without ever quite going too far, making it hard for MI5 to insist on alternative channels.8

Nunn May, meanwhile, remained at liberty. A telegram to him from Moscow with instructions to make contact in London on 7 October had been intercepted and Menzies thought that ‘May should be allowed to travel in hopes of giving us an opportunity of identifying his London contact and possibly others.’ This was agreed by MI5 (whose responsibility it was) and the scientist returned to Britain to take up a post at King’s College London. In Canada Gouzenko named a series of Soviet agents and told his interrogators that the Soviet Union was ‘preparing already for war against Western democracies’ and that a ‘large proportion [of] diplomatic representatives of Russian satellite states’ were ‘Moscow agents’. Faced with the Corby revelations of Soviet covert aggression, both Cadogan and Bevin favoured a public response, with the arrest of suspected Soviet agents and formal trial, a course of action which it was recognised might involve the public humiliation of the Soviet Union.9 But there were wider political considerations and neither the Americans nor the Canadians were willing to act. President Truman, hoping to sustain some of the apparent Allied amity displayed at the Potsdam conference in July 1945, and faced with domestic pressure to keep atomic secrets firmly under United States control, was reluctant to upset things by washing dirty Soviet espionage linen in public, even after the FBI had uncovered evidence of an extensive Soviet intelligence network operating in the USA itself. This caused frustration on the British side, especially after Nunn May on 7 October failed to meet his Soviet contact (who had, of course, been warned off in part through Philby’s machinations).

All through the autumn Washington maintained an effective veto on action, President Truman refusing to discuss the case with Attlee when he visited Washington in November. On 21 November Menzies told Stephenson that the delay was ‘most disappointing’, and, while he understood that the FBI did not want to compromise their investigations into the Soviet network, he thought such compromise was unlikely since the Soviets had already been tipped off. ‘Meanwhile’, he wrote, ‘Corby scents are growing rapidly colder since it is already well over two months since first alarm was given.’ The