Declassified MI5 Files Reveal New Details About the ‘Grandmother’ of the Cambridge Spy Ring Who British Intelligence Never Caught

Ian Cobain

August 22, 2015

How MI5 failed to expose matriarch of Cambridge spy ring 

The grave fascination that MI5 developed for an emigre photographer living in a small flat in north London – and the eventual realisation that she had been a key figure behind the Cambridge spy ring at the height of the cold war – has emerged from the secret files the agency compiled about her.

Declassified after 50 years, they show that MI5 subjected Edith Tudor-Hart to round-the-clock surveillance, opened her mail, tapped her telephone, bugged her home and eavesdropped on the conversations of her friends and associates. The agency even set up an observation post from which they could see her retiring to bed.

At one point in January 1952, after the defection of the Foreign Office spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had dumbfounded the British government and threatened its intelligence relationships with the United States, two MI5 officers barged into Tudor-Hart’s home and interrogated her while she lay in bed.

The MI5 files detail the way in which the agency’s close scrutiny of Tudor-Hart’s life eventually drove her to a breakdown and serious mental illness. Its officers never caught her spying, however; the only time they witnessed her committing an offence was when she dodged paying her bus fare.

They did establish that she was a clandestine member of the Communist party, and eventually learned that in the mid-1930s she had been the talent-spotter who had recommended the recruitment of Kim Philby, the Soviet spy inside MI6. Later that decade, she had acted as a courier for Burgess, Philby’s Cambridge university contemporary. But it was only in 1964, with the confession of the fourth member of the spy ring, Anthony Blunt, that the full truth emerged. Tudor-Hart had, Blunt told his MI5 interrogators, been “the grandmother of us all”. 

Born Edith Suschitzky in Vienna, she first came to the UK in 1927 to train as a Montessori teacher. She was deported in 1931 after being photographed at a communist party rally, and began working for a division of the NKVD that was a forerunner of the KGB. In Vienna, she met and married an English doctor, Alexander Tudor-Hart, and the couple returned to London, where Edith gave birth to a son. After the breakup of the marriage, she moved into a ground-floor flat opposite the Abbey Road recording studio in north-west London, and established herself as a children’s photographer.

Tudor-Hart had been friendly with Philby’s Austrian first wife, Litzi Friedmann, and when the Philbys also moved from Vienna to London, she arranged to introduce him to Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet agent who would eventually run the Cambridge spy ring.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, parts of Philby’s KGB file were declassified, and found to describe how Tudor-Hart and Philby spent several hours zigzagging across London before finally arriving at Regent’s Park, where Deutsch was waiting on a bench.

MI5 began to take close interest in her in 1951, at a time when the agency was desperate to prove that Philby had warned Burgess and Maclean that they had fallen under suspicion, enabling them to escape to Moscow. A decision was taken to interrogate her 48 hours before Philby was questioned, and an eight-man team was assigned to watch her following the encounter to see whether she attempted to alert Philby.

Two MI5 officers, one of them Jim Skardon, considered to be the agency’s most effective interrogator, burst into the flat, brandishing War Office identity cards, and questioned her for an hour. She admitted to knowing Friedmann, but claimed to have resigned from the Communist party and denied any knowledge of Philby. “This woman prevaricated from one end of the interview to the other,” Skardon noted in her file. Tudor-Hart subsequently told an informant – whose identity has been redacted in the declassified file – that she had destroyed pictures that she had taken of Philby.

MI5 noted that the interrogation had “produced some interesting reactions … and profoundly affected her”. She had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and was being treated for “persecution complex”. Surveillance devices inside the Communist party’s headquarters in Covent Garden, where she was registered as a member under the alias Betty Grey, showed that her comrades believed she could no longer be trusted, as she was “off her head”.

The Tudor-Hart files, all classified as top secret, are among the latest tranche of MI5 records transferred to the National Archives at Kew. They not only record MI5’s justified suspicions; they also betray a degree of antisemitism and xenophobia within the agency. 

One identifies her as “British by marriage, formerly Austrian. Height 5ft 8in, brown hair, blue-grey eyes, wears light-coloured horn-rimmed glasses; medium build. Foreign Jewish appearance. Alleged to speak seven languages.”

Another says: “From such evidence as is on record (letters, observations etc.) she would appear to be a rather typical, emotional, introspective and somewhat intellectual Viennese Jewess.” Elsewhere, her file records an MI5 officer’s observation that “like so many leftwing intellectuals of her generation, she displayed an unhealthy interest in psychology and psychiatry”.

Philby did not defect until 1963. Protected by his friends in MI6, he became a correspondent for the Economist and for the Observer, now the Guardian’s sister newspaper.

After Blunt’s confession the following year, MI5 realised that Tudor-Hart had vanished from sight. In July 1965 she was traced to Brighton, where she was found to be running a “good-class antique shop”, and was assessed to no longer pose a threat to national security.

She died in 1973, aged 64. A major exhibition of her photography at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery two years ago highlighted the way in which her innovative photographs of children broke the mould of static, studio portraits.