An article on the Sunday Times website on October 20 2024 by Nicholas Hellen was headlined ‘The Home Office high-flyer cultivated by Soviet spies’. It is the story of Jenifer Hart an Oxford graduate in 1935 who agreed at the age of 21 to become a Communist Party spy inside the Home Office. She had meetings with recruiters from the KGB. Nicholas Hellen’s article says the source of new material about Jenifer Hart is research I have done with my colleague Jeff Hulbert for our book ‘The Summer Camp Spies’. Here’s our summary of what we have discovered:

Newly unearthed documents reveal the full scale of the KGB’s attempt to repeat at Oxford University their success with the recruitment of the ‘Cambridge Five’ spies in the 1930s . They made contact with five Oxford graduates and three of these became KGB agents. 

All five were involved in a summer camp which Oxford students organised for unemployed workers in 1935. One female student who joined the Communist Party after the camp was targeted by the same recruiters who took Cambridge graduate Kim Philby to the KGB. She could have become a female Philby inside the British establishment but became ‘disillusioned’. 

Her history as a secret Communist inside the Home Office was covered up for two decades by her boyfriend, later her husband, an MI5 officer (he got the job thanks to her). She had met KGB recruiters at his flat and he used his MI5 role to try to keep her name out of their file of suspects. Thanks to him and his senior colleagues it was two decades before MI5 was forced to interrogate her after she let the cat out of the bag at a party.

The full story of the couple who became better known post war as Oxford dons Professor Herbert ‘H.L.A.’ Hart and Jenifer Hart is revealed in MI5 files in the National Archives and family files deposited at Oxford University. I discovered them and my colleague, Jeff Hulbert, made a fresh analysis of other MI5 archive files using digital tools not available to MI5 at the time. 

Our research is summarised in ‘The Summer Camp Spies by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert’ and in follow-up work which we report here. The Oxford students we name have a more diverse background than their posher counterparts in the Cambridge Five. Working with them at the summer camp was a wealthy Indian Marxist student. Apart from the first English woman known to have been targeted by the KGB other women made an impact as spy recruiters and spy catchers.

We name five Oxford graduates at the summer camp who were later involved in espionage either for the British Communist Party or the KGB or both:

• Peter Rhodes, the camp organiser, was an American student who became a communist while at Oxford. In 1945 he was named by a member of an KGB spy ring in America as a fellow Soviet agent.
• Jenifer Hart, recruited to the Communist Party at the camp, became an undercover communist inside the Home Office. She had meetings with two KGB recruiters before becoming ‘disillusioned’ with communism.
• Bernard Floud was a fellow student who asked her to be a secret Communist in the civil service and gather information to ‘prepare for a revolutionary situation’. He later became a Labour MP. After MI5 blocked his promotion to ministerial rank he committed suicide in 1967.
• Arthur Wynn was the KGB recruiter who Floud arranged for Hart to meet in 1936. He was later revealed in KGB files to be their ‘Agent Scott’. 
• David Floyd was, variously, an Oxford student on a scholarship from Wiltshire Council, a milkman, a Foreign Office diplomat and a KGB spy. In 1951 he confessed and was found a job on the Daily Telegraph.

Among our other discoveries are that MI5 missed several real spies by concentrating resources on surveillance of known Communist Party activists.

‘The Summer Camp Spies’ is available, price £10, from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road,London NW3 2QB. hampstead@dauntbooks.co.uk 020 7794 8206. Copyright © Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert 2024. Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.

spspurvis@blueyonder.co.uk