If true, it was an astonishing story. In the summer of his graduation from Cambridge, Crane had been instructed by his NKVD handler, Arnold Deutsch, to apply for a postgraduate position at Oxford. Moscow’s requirements were simple: Crane was to spend a year talent-spotting Communists whom he felt had the potential to work as agents for the Soviet Union. In other words, he was to perform the same job that Burgess had done, to such great effect, in the earlier part of the decade at Trinity. Crane’s controller at Oxford was a man named Theodore Maly, an undercover Soviet intelligence officer. Maly had already succeeded in recruiting Arthur Wynn, a former student at Trinity, to the Soviet cause. According to Neame, ATTILA and Wynn had succeeded in penetrating Oxford’s left-wing community and had effectively green-lit a ring of at least seven spies which, it transpired, had been every bit as successful as their counterparts at Cambridge. For Gaddis, this wasn’t just a major development in the Crane story; it was a huge scoop in its own right.
