HART, HERBERT• 235was a close friend ofAnthony Bluntand paid for the private educa-
tion of one ofKim Philby’s children. His association with Philby,
Blunt, andMelinda Macleanled to suspicion that he too had been a
Soviet spy, but he was killed in a car accident in Majorca in January
1964 before he could be interviewed. MI5’s investigation of Harris
proved inconclusive, although there was a belief that he had acted as
a conduit for the Soviets so they could instruct Maclean on how to
follow her husband to Moscow after his defection in May 1951. He
was also thought to have acquired some of the art sold in his gallery
from republican sources who had looted it from Spanish churches.HART, EDITH TUDOR.See TUDOR HART, EDITH.
HART, HERBERT.After leaving Oxford, H. L. A. Hart practiced at
the Chancery Bar before joining the Security Service in 1940. Ini-
tially he was employed in pursuing rumors of espionage and some
of the many denunciations received from the public alleging enemy
activity, often taking the form of lights seen to flash at night, perhaps
signaling German aircraft. One of his first tasks was to survey tele-
graph poles in the south of England after a report was received that
many of them bore coded messages for enemy parachutists. Of all
the claims that Hart investigated, only one case proved to be that of
an authenticAbwehrspy: that ofJan Ter Braak, a 27-year-old
Dutchman found dead in an air raid shelter in Cambridge in April
- Ter Braak’s identity papers were forged and Hart concluded
that he had shot himself when his food ran out because he had ex-
hausted his ration book and did not want to risk buying food on the
black market.
Most of Hart’s work forMI5was in B1(b), the ‘‘special research’’
subsection of thecounterespionagedivision that analyzed enemy in-
tercepts and gleaned information relevant to German spies destined
for infiltration into Britain, or data regarding any of thedouble
agentsrun by his colleagues in B1(a). On his staff were several bar-
risters and academics, including his close friendAnthony Blunt.
After the war Hart returned to Oxford to teach philosophy at New
College and in 1952 was appointed professor of jurisprudence. He
never discussed his wartime service in MI5, but he was embarrassed
in 1981 by the disclosure that his wife, who had worked in a sensitive