Dirk Bogarde: KGB Agent?
Let's look at the declassified allegations against the actor by Russia's top defector
Here at Senators Don’t Kill, we share the hard-boiled crime writer James Ellroy’s fascination with the gossip trade. Hollywood Dirt Files and Scandal Skank, the pulp master calls it in his sprawling novel American Tabloid, in which reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes acquires low-rent Hush-Hush magazine in the City of Fallen Angels for the purpose of printing dirt on JFK (so as to impress fellow Kennedy hater J. Edgar Hoover.) It’s why we couldn't wait to present this exclusive item - albeit circa 1958 - picked up in our relentless (obsessive) combing of the CIA archives.
It ain't just bobby soxers lining up to get the autograph of Britain's biggest box-office lure. The KGB considers matinee idol Dirk Bogarde a prize catch. On his recent trip to Moscow, the Campbell’s Kingdom star was contacted by the Soviet spy agency wanting to recruit this hunky comrade into their worker revolution. Remember, dear readers, you heard it first here: off the record, on the QT, and very Hush-Hush...
Our source? Not just any trash digger lurking around Belgravia, but a tipster of the highest order.
The story begins on a cold winter evening in Helsinki (is there any other kind?) in December 1961. The CIA Chief of Station in Finland is getting ready for a smart holiday cocktail party. His doorbell rings. Standing outside his home on Haapatie Street is a plump man, 35, in a fur hat and overcoat, with his wife and daughter holding her favorite doll. His name is Anatoli Golitsyn, a KGB staff officer working under the cover of vice consul at the Soviet Embassy. He wants to defect. Within two hours, the CIA agent is escorting Golitsyn and his family aboard a commercial flight to Stockholm. Frankfurt from there, then London, Bermuda, New York City, and finally, a safe house in the suburbs of Washington DC. There, Golitsyn sings for his supper.
The revelations the KGB defector offers on President Charles de Gaulle’s recently established Fifth Republic of France are shocking. Primarily, Golitsyn’s claim that the top ranks of Élysée Palace are riddled with Soviet operatives who are all part of a spy ring known within the deepest KGB files as Sapphire. Mon dieu! President Kennedy sends a personal letter to General De Gaulle. Affronted by the suggestion that his inner circle was infected by Reds, the thin-skinned general dismissed JFK as a naive lightweight duped by the wild accusations of his own secret services. It caused a breakdown of relations between American and French intelligence services, more or less led to France’s temporary withdrawal from NATO, and perhaps worse of all, provided the basis for one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lousiest films: Topaz
If one subscribes by the Oliver Stone/conspiratorial version of history (like most of us here at Senators Don’t Kill), there’s grounds to argue De Gaulle was right about the CIA pulling the wool over JFK. The French secret servicemen that De Gaulle sent to DC to interview Golitsyn seemed to think the CIA used the defector as a mouthpiece to promote their own theories on the perceived anti-Americanism of the French Fifth Republic.
Indeed, it appears Golitsyn was little more than a KGB desk jockey (assigned to the lightweight post of Helsinki) who had visions of grandeur even greater than those of pompous De Gaulle. Off the bat, Golitsyn demanded an outrageous sum of $15 million to personally wage ops against his former Soviet employers. He didn’t help his rep as a prima donna by telling CIA agents they were too stupid to handle him. Amidst his debriefings, he abruptly left on a cross-country road trip for two weeks at Disneyland.
After a few months, the CIA gladly let Golitsyn go when MI5 invited him to Britain to ferret out Soviet agents within their ranks. Waving goodbye on the luxury Queen Elizabeth sailing from New York, Golistyn spent the next year in London. Prodded on by a cabal in MI5 who were convinced that their own director was a KGB mole, according to High Wilford’s newly published and highly acclaimed The CIA: An Imperial History, Golitsyn greatly improved his capacity for storytelling. By the time he returned to America in summer 1963 - this time choosing New York City rather than dreary DC, the defector knew just how to milk CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, an enigmatic Ivy Leaguer whose raging alcoholism didn’t help his paranoia.
Golitsyn claimed that the KGB not only infected the French and British secret services, but America’s as well. Fervently believing in this “Monster Plot,” Angleton effectively paralyzed the CIA and destroyed careers via his witch hunts to root out moles. As for Golitsyn? Angleton made sure his star defector was taken care of with a gift of $200K [$2 million today] that got him a nice townhouse on the Upper East Side. It pays to have entertaining material, and while Monster Plots are all well and good here at Senators Don’t Kill, let’s get back to some scurrilous scandalmongering.
Among the stories spun by Golitsyn was that the KGB tried to recruit Dirk Bogarde when the actor was in Moscow during 1958 or 1959. What do we make of this bombshell tip? Apart from the fact Dirk seemed too in demand during that time as a matinee idol to even take a filming break and make a trip to Moscow, the actor evidenced little tolerance for politics, all forms of which his autobiography says he abhorred:
Dreadful young men with red ties and corduroys who bleat about Russia and Capitalists and wag pamphlets about with a vague idea as to their meaning; and awful young women with fat legs and high ideals who strive for better things, and seldom get them.
If we consider Golitsyn’s year abroad in Britain, the baseless allegation makes more sense. Dirk spent the beginning of 1963 filming The Servant, his attempt to break out of the glut of stardom and do some serious acting. Directed by his friend Joseph Losey, an expat Hollywood director blacklisted as a Communist, the film scripted by Harold Pinter was a vicious satire of the British upper-class, Bogarde starring as a deviously calculating manservant who upends the life of posh Londoner Tony (James Fox.)
Its Venice Film Festival premiere that September was perfectly timed to deliver a death blow to the British establishment, in a state of upheaval after the one-two punch of the Profumo Affair (British minister of war, teenage model, Soviet naval attaché) and the summer’s big news in espionage: M16’s Kim Philby being in the Cambridge Five.
What better way to discredit The Servant by panting its star as a possible KGB agent?
Thankfully for Bogarde and us moviegoers who tend to salivate over his more serious roles - Death in Venice, The Night Porter - Golitsyn’s nasty little tidbit came to nothing. Did Bogarde ever catch wind of it? Probably not. Otherwise it’s doubtful that he would’ve taken the role in The Serpent (1973) in which he plays an M15 agent - ‘a kind of Mr. Philby,’ Bogarde put it - caught up in a deadly plot put into motion by a KGB agent who defects and reveals deep Soviet penetration of the Western intelligence services.
Obviously a Topaz ripoff.
For UK fans of Senators Don’t Kill, I’ll be featured in the documentary series produced and narrated by Michael Imperioli, American Godfathers: The Five Families, airing on Oct. 6 at 9pm on Sky History.
I vouch for it.