Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

BELFRAGE, CEDRIC• 39

officer for General Stawell, then in command of SOE’s Mediterra-

nean operations.

After the war Beevor returned to the law, becoming a successful

international businessman, and in his retirement he publishedSOE:

Recollections and Reflections, 1940–1945.

BELFRAGE, CEDRIC.Although Cedric Belfrage never concealed
his Leftist sympathies or his prewar membership of theCommunist
Party of Great Britain, the suggestion that he had spied for the
NKVDwhile working for British Intelligence was only made in Au-
gust 1945 when Elisabeth Bentley described him to theFederal Bu-
reau of Investigation(FBI) as having supplied secrets to a Soviet
contact. As a formerDaily Expressjournalist, his specialist field was
propaganda, disseminated on behalf of the Political Warfare Execu-
tive, and at the end of hostilities he transferred to theBritish Control
Commission for Germanyas a press officer. However, while he was
there,MI5learned fromvenonaintercepts that there had been a
leak inBritish Security Coordination(BSC) and, through the testi-
mony of adefector, some details of the source emerged. He was de-
scribed as having had access to classified information and as
someone who had given a lecture on British surveillance techniques
to a clandestine Communist cell. According to a decrypted Soviet
telegram, the spy’s first name was either Cecil or Cedric, and he was
described as a committed Communist. Then a further clue emerged
in some decrypted Soviet signals traffic that referred to the source’s
wife having recently published a cookbook. This matched Belfrage,
who had once attended a lecture given by aSpecial Branchdetective
on keeping suspects under covert observation.
Bentley’s confession to the FBI, encapsulated in her bookOut of
Bondage, covered her recruitment as a Soviet agent by an NKVD
illegal, Jacob Golos, who became her lover. When Golos died of a
heart attack in November 1943, Bentley had been asked by her Soviet
handler to take over the network. The knowledge that she acquired
proved enormously important, and for the next decade she gave
sworn testimony regarding her contacts, one of whom was Belfrage:

In the summer of 1943 Yasha wanted to turn over to me a young English-

man who was then working for the British Intelligence Service. Cedric Bel-