The Times May 14, 2009

History won't allow us to let sleeping dogs lie It is an injustice to those who are falsely accused, both living and dead, if the secrets of the past remain hidden

Ben Macintyre

Should old men be left in peace with their secrets?

Should John Demjanjuk be dragged to justice on a hospital gurney to answer charges that he was Ivan the Terrible, a guard at Sobibor concentration camp? Should Pope Benedict XVI explain, finally, whether he was a member of Hitler Youth? And should Arthur Wynn, a former civil servant and pillar of the British scientific community, be exposed, eight years after his death and seventy years after his last known contact with Moscow, as “Agent Scott”, the KGB recruiter responsible for forging the Oxford ring of Soviet spies?

There is only one honest answer. The imperative to account for the past should not be fired by ideology, morality or revenge, but by the desire for clarity and to pay the debt that we owe the past. If we let sleeping dogs lie, we give the lie to history.

Britain remains fascinated with Soviet spies, and mole-hunting is still a national obsession, coloured by fiction. Indeed, the word “mole” was coined by John le Carré, capturing the silent, apparently innocuous burrower deep in the Establishment, undermining its foundations.

Yet the great postwar mole-hunt, launched after the defections of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, did huge damage, and not only to the credibility of the intelligence services. The innocent were tarred along with the guilty: many individuals were “identified” as Soviet spies on little or no evidence, and had their reputations ruined.

The case of “Scott”, whose identity was revealed by The Times yesterday, is a salutary illustration of what happens when secrets are left to fester. Moscow's decision to acknowledge “Scott's” existence in 1992, without revealing his identity, prompted a 17-year witch-hunt, with obvious political overtones.

Sir David Fox Scott, a distinguished British diplomat who had died in a road accident in 1984, was widely accused of being “Scott”, largely because he knew Burgess. The KGB chose some oddly indiscreet codenames (Anthony Blunt's original cryptonym was Tony before being changed to Johnson) - but even the most blundering (or double-bluffing) case officer would pause before adopting a real name as a cover.

Some leaped to paint the mysterious Scott as a spy cliché: “The Guardian can confirm that Scott was a senior official in the Foreign Office, an Old Etonian and a Scotsman, who was recruited in 1936.” Wynn was not Scottish, did not go to Eton, was not recruited in 1936 and never joined the Foreign Office. It was stated equally emphatically that Scott was Peter Wilson, a former director of Sotheby's. Wilson worked briefly for British Intelligence, but the main source of suspicion appears to have been that, like Burgess and Blunt, he was homosexual. Among others confidently identified as “Scott” on the frailest of evidence were Archibald Clark-Kerr, a former Ambassador to the US (he had a Russian valet), Anthony Rumbold, a former Ambassador to Austria (best man at Maclean's wedding), and George Cutrell, a British Museum expert on woodcuts (he had served with the Foreign Office in Belgrade after the war.) All these “suspects” were conveniently dead when accused. All were innocent.

The hunt for “Scott” was intense, partly vindictive and entirely on the wrong track, but it was a pale imitation of the even more hysterical (and continuing) search for the Fifth Man. The intelligence officers John Cairncross, Roger Hollis and Guy Liddell, the author and academic Goronwy Rees and even the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have all been identified at some point as this shadowy missing link in the Soviet spy chain, some on the basis of evidence, some on very little.

Victor Rothschild had known Burgess and Blunt, and worked for MI5 on bomb disposal during the war: those links were enough to set the rumour mill grinding, to the point where he had to defend himself in an open letter to newspapers in 1986: “I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent.”

Intriguingly, the spies identified definitively in recent years are not the upper-class products of Oxbridge and clubland familiar from fiction, but altogether less conspicuous figures: Melita Norwood, “the spy who came in from the Co-op”, a grandmotherly figure who supplied secrets to the KGB for four decades; Engelbert Broda, the Austrian-born physicist who spied for Moscow from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge; and now Wynn, the expert on maternal nutrition, who was Agent Scott in an earlier life.

The unmasking of “Scott” solves one mystery, but compounds others. Who was Agent Bunny, referred to by Scott's KGB controller? Did MI5's interrogation of the Labour MP Bernard Floud, a suspected member of the Oxford ring, provoke his suicide? Only opening Britain's intelligence archives will finally end the speculation.

The KGB files in Moscow that identified “Scott” were unlocked during glasnost (before being shut again). There are signs that MI5 has moved towards greater openness: this year will be published a history of the Security Service by Christopher Andrew, who has been granted access to the MI5 archives.

The glasnost approach is the only way to turn the British taste for mole-trapping into real history, by allowing researchers to name the guilty few and exonerate the many suspected unfairly. The same principle should apply to the Pope's alleged membership of the Hitler Youth, Demjanjuk's trial and the expenses claims of British MPs.

The truth is seldom as lurid and spectacular as our imaginings, stoked by secrecy. Most MPs claim for things like dog food and trouser presses, not dancing girls and champagne. The Pope probably joined the Hitler Youth because he had no choice.

And Agent Scott was not some masterspy in the Philby mould, but a quiet, clever bureaucrat with a complicated and fascinating past, who clung to his secret until death.