DIANA TRILLING
45
fledged agent?
"A fully-fledged agent, no," Tsarev replied in response to her insis–
tence upon precision. But an agent he had nevertheless been and one
who was wholly aware of the nature of the operation in which he co–
operated. "They were recruited for the cause, the Communist cause,"
Tsarev spelled out the situation for Jenny. With pedagogic patience, he
summed up Rees's role. "Rees could not be called an 'agent.' He was a
'source' and an 'operational contact'." He was motivated, said Tsarev,
by "romanticism" and "ideological conviction."
And so Jenny's investigation had at last come to its end. She had dis–
covered the truth of her father's relation to the Cambridge spies. Rees
had been a Soviet agent, but he had not been a fully-fledged agent, not
a spy in the sense in which his Cambridge associates were spies. He had
had a code name but he had not been under immediate orders, expected
to do as he was bid, whatever the assignment. In the language of spy
scholarship, he had been "an agent of influence." In the contest for
power between Communism and democracy, he had played his small
part: he had made his minuscule contribution to the success of the other
side by passing on such news as could be picked up at the dining tables
of All Souls. This paltry involvement he had then spent the rest of his life
trying to hide and redress, only to bring his world tumbling about his
ears.
Rees hadn't been important enough to have his own file in
Moscow, but he had been promising enough to have a place in Burgess's
file and a code name, "Gross" - the name was apparently a crude amal–
gam of the "G" of Goronwy and his last name. Reporting to his
Moscow contact, Burgess had boasted that he had "Tony" - Anthony
Blunt - in Cambridge and "Gross" in Oxford as "talent spotters." But as
Tsarev put it to Jenny, " 'Gross' had never realized himself in the role
Burgess had singled out for him. We know he did not because this talent
spotter [in Oxford] was somebody else ." Even as a spy, Goronwy had
failed to fulfill the expectations that the people of his acquaintance had
for him!
Tsarev's summary to Jenny of Rees's performance as a spy gave me
the answer to a question of my own. Throughout the war and even in
his position of trust on the staff of Field Marshal Montgomery, Rees had
maintained his intimacy with Burgess, visiting regularly at the Bentinck
Street flat. As I re-read
A Chapter of Accidents,
this struck me as incau–
tious in the extreme and, as I say, I also found it difficult to believe that
as late as 1951 Goronwy was uncertain whether Burgess had really been
a Communist agent and, if he had been, whether he was still engaged in
