My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  From recent biographies of Greene, we now know that he reported on all these visits to MI6. Further, Greene has said that Philby would have expected him to do just that: “I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield [then head of MI6].”

  Greene would never have made the offer to Philby without authorization, and it would appear most likely that it was Oldfield who gave him the go-ahead. Greene even gave a tantalizing hint of the operation in interviews with his official biographer, Professor Norman Sherry. Sherry told me, “Greene said he had this dream of seeing Philby come walking down the street towards him in Britain. I suspect that this was not a dream but Greene’s roundabout way of saying what he had been up to with Philby.”

  Philby had no moral qualms about the agents he had betrayed during his spying career. He saw the struggle between Western intelligence and the KGB as a war. “There are always casualties in war,” he told me, adding, “Anyway, most of them were pretty nasty pieces of work and quite prepared themselves to kill if necessary.”

  He told me at our Moscow meetings that he had regrets about the way he had handled some things but no regrets whatsoever about the life he had chosen. He was uneasy, however, when our talk turned to the American spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been sent to the electric chair in 1953 for betraying American atomic secrets to Moscow. But there was doubt at the time about their guilt, and allegations that they had been made scapegoats to appease American public concern that the Soviets had exploded their own bomb in 1949—years before the CIA had predicted that they would. A worldwide campaign appealing to President Eisenhower for clemency was whipped up by national Communist parties, and there was international outrage when the president ignored it. Over the years, debate over the Rosenbergs’ guilt had not died out, so I asked Philby’s view. But apart from saying that all the Rosenbergs were guilty of was being “lowly couriers with no link to the main KGB atomic spy rings” and that he could not understand why Eisenhower denied them a reprieve, he refused to talk about them.

  I did not learn why until 1996, when stories began to appear about the “Venona decrypts,” the successful American deciphering of radio traffic between Moscow and the Soviet consulate in New York in 1944–45. This material, which began to be decoded in the early 1950s, gave clues as to the identity of KGB spies in the West and was ultimately behind the uncovering of nearly every major Soviet spy in the postwar period. As MI6’s liaison officer in Washington, Kim Philby had had access to the Venona material and knew the way the FBI was using it. This was a great break for the KGB, but it put Philby in a difficult and dangerous position. What should he do as he followed the FBI’s homing in on his Soviet intelligence service comrades? If he were to use his knowledge of Venona to warn those most at risk so that they could flee, the FBI would suspect a leak. It would investigate everyone who had had access to Venona, including Philby, and he would never again enjoy the same degree of confidence. He made a brutal decision—he would tip off those agents who were of most importance to Moscow and sacrifice the others.

  So he tipped off Donald Maclean, then a rising star in the Foreign Office, who fled to Moscow in May 1951. He tipped off Morris and Lona Cohen, responsible for couriering atom secrets stolen from Los Alamos to the Soviet consulate in New York, who fled the United States on an hour’s notice in June 1950.

  But no one tipped off the Rosenbergs, because the KGB considered them expendable. And no one imagined that the Americans would execute them. In the KGB’s eyes, according to Philby, “They were minor couriers, not significant sources, [and] provided no valuable secrets.” Philby felt guilty about the Rosenbergs for the rest of his life.

  Why are we so intrigued by Philby? That someone was capable of such treachery puzzles and frightens us. If Philby did not do it for money—as has been the case with most American traitors—what did he do it for? Philby made a total ideological commitment when he was only twenty-one and had the strength of purpose to stick to it for the rest of his life. Like a character in a Graham Greene novel, he mixed duplicity and charm. In his treachery he risked all for his convictions, and he got away with it.

  He recognized at one stage that things were going wrong in the Soviet Union but he told me that his choices were limited. “I couldn’t give up politics altogether. I’m too much the political animal. I could whine, as some have, that the cause had betrayed me. Or I could stick it out in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberrations of individuals, however enormous.” He had no doubt whatsoever about the verdict of history on this point, and four months later, before his beloved Communism collapsed, he died happy and fulfilled—perhaps his greatest coup of all.

  PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY is an author and journalist who lives in London. He is best known for The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents and propaganda; The Second Oldest Profession, an examination of the role of intelligence services through the ages; and Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby.

  FOREWORD

  Graham Greene

  This is not at all the book that Philby’s enemies anticipated. It is an honest one, well-written, often amusing, and the story he has to tell, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, is far more gripping than any novel of espionage I can remember. We were told to expect a lot of propaganda, but it contains none, unless a dignified statement of his beliefs and motives can be called propaganda. The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. “He betrayed his country”—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby’s own eyes he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit.

  Like many Catholics who, in the reign of Elizabeth, worked for the victory of Spain, Philby has a chilling certainty in the correctness of his judgement, the logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments. How many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope of the future as a riding anchor? Mistakes of policy would have had no effect on his faith, nor the evil done by some of his leaders. If there was a Torquemada now, he would have known in his heart that one day there would be a John XXIII. “It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made the choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course,” Philby writes, and he demands fairly enough what alternative there could possibly be to the bad Baldwin-Chamberlain era. “I saw the road leading me into the political position of the querulous outcast, of the Koestler-Crankshaw-Muggeridge variety, railing at the movement that had let me down, at the God that had failed me. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative it might have been.”

  His account of the British Secret Service is devastatingly true. “The ease of my entry surprised me. It appeared later that the only enquiry made into my past was a routine reference to MI5, who passed my name through their records and came back with the laconic statement: Nothing Recorded Against.” (He was luckier than I was. I had a police record, for after a libel action brought against me by Miss Shirley Temple, the papers had been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the trace had therefore to be submitted to C himself.) There was even a moment when Philby wondered whether it really was the Secret Service which he had entered. His first factual reports inclined his Soviet contact to the view that he had got into the wrong organization.

  His character studies are admirable if unkind. Don’t talk to me of ghost writers: only Philby could have been responsible for these. Anyone who was in Section V will agree with his estimate of its head, Felix Cowgill, whom he was to displace. “
Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He was one of those pure souls who denounce all opponents as ‘politicians.’” The Deputy Chief of the Secret Service is immediately recognizable. “Vivian was long past his best—if, indeed, he had ever had one. He had a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and wet eyes.” To C himself, Brigadier Menzies, Philby is unexpectedly kind, though perhaps the strict limitations of his praise and a certain note of high patronage will not endear the portrait to the subject. For Skardon, the MI5 interrogator who broke Fuchs down, he has a true craftsman’s respect.

  If this book required a sub-title I would suggest: The Spy As Craftsman. No one could have been a better chief than Kim Philby when he was in charge of the Iberian section of V. He worked harder than anyone and never gave the impression of labour. He was always relaxed, completely unflappable. He was in those days, of course, fighting the same war as his colleagues: the extreme strain must have come later, when he was organizing a new section to counter Russian espionage, but though then he was fighting quite a different war, he maintained his craftsman’s pride. He was determined that his new section should be organized better than any other part of the ramshackle SIS. “By the time our final bulky report was ready for presentation to the Chief, we felt we had produced the design of something like a service, with enough serious inducements to tempt able young men to regard it as a career for life.” He set about recruiting with care and enthusiasm. “The important thing was to get hold of the good people while they were still available. With peacetime economies already in sight, it would be much easier to discard surplus staff than to find people later to fill in any gaps that might appear.” No Soviet contact this time would be able to wonder whether he had penetrated the right outfit. A craftsman’s pride, yes, and of course something else. Only an efficient section could thoroughly test the security of the Russian service. It was a fascinating manoeuvre, though only one side knew that it was a mock war.

  The story of how, to attain his position, he eliminated Cowgill makes, as he admits, for “sour reading, just as it makes sour writing”—one feels for a moment the sharp touch of the icicle in the heart. I saw the beginning of this affair—indeed I resigned rather than accept the promotion which was one tiny cog in the machinery of his intrigue. I attributed it then to a personal drive for power, the only characteristic in Philby which I thought disagreeable. I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself, and so my old liking for him comes back, as I remember with pleasure those long Sunday lunches at St. Albans when the whole subsection relaxed under his leadership for a few hours of heavy drinking, and later the meetings over a pint on fire-watching nights at the pub behind St. James’s Street. If one made an error of judgement he was sure to minimize it and cover it up, without criticism, with a halting stammered witticism. He had all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to us.

  Some years later, after his clearance by Macmillan in the House of Commons, I and another old friend of Kim were together in Crowborough and we thought to look him up. There was no sign of any tending in the overgrown garden and no answer to the bell when we rang. We looked through the windows of the ugly sprawling Edwardian house, on the borders of Ashdown forest, in this poor man’s Surrey. The post hadn’t been collected for a long time—the floor under the door was littered with advertising brochures. In the kitchen there were some empty milk bottles, and a single dirty cup and saucer in the sink. It was more like an abandoned gypsy encampment than the dwelling of a man with wife and children. We didn’t know it, but he had already left for Beirut—the last stage of his journey to Moscow, the home which he had never seen. After thirty years in the underground surely he has earned his right to a rest.

  GRAHAM GREENE (1904–91), one of the greatest and most widely read English writers of the twentieth century, was the author of, among many novels, The Man Within, England Made Me, The Power and the Glory, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and Travels with My Aunt. He was, as well, a noted short-story writer, essayist, film reviewer, and occasional playwright.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This short book is an introductory sketch of my experiences in the field of intelligence. More will follow in due course. But already at this stage I must draw attention to a problem by which I am confronted.

  The public naming of serving officers whose work is supposed to be secret cannot fail to cause personal embarrassment. I have no desire to cause such embarrassment to former colleagues in the British, American and sundry other services, for some of whom I feel both affection and respect.

  I have tried therefore to confine the naming of names to officers whom I know to be dead or retired. On occasion, however, it has proved impossible to write a lucid story without naming officers who are still in service.

  To these latter I apologize for any embarrassment caused. I, too, have suffered personal inconvenience through my connection with secret service.

  Moscow, 1968

  INTRODUCTION

  This book has been written at intervals since my arrival in Moscow nearly five years ago. From time to time in the course of writing it, I took counsel with friends whose advice I valued. I accepted some of the suggestions made and rejected others. One suggestion which I rejected was that I should make the book more exciting by heavier emphasis on the hazards of the long journey from Cambridge to Moscow. I prefer to rest on a round, unvarnished tale.

  When the book was brought to a provisional conclusion last summer (1967), I gave long consideration to the desirability of publishing it, again consulting a few friends whose views might be helpful. The general consensus of opinion, with which I agreed at the time, was that the question of publication should be shelved indefinitely. The main reason for this was that publication seemed likely to cause a rumpus, with international complications the nature of which was difficult to foresee. It seemed unwise to take action that might have consequences beyond the range of reasonable prediction. So I decided to sit on my typescript.

  The situation has been completely changed by articles which appeared in the Sunday Times and the Observer in October 1967. Those articles, in spite of a number of factual inaccuracies and errors of interpretation (and, I fear, gratifying exaggeration of my own talents), present a substantially true picture of my career. It was immediately suggested, of course, by rival newspapers that the Sunday Times and the Observer had fallen victim to a gigantic plant. The absurdity of this suggestion has already been exposed in the Sunday Times. For my part, I can only add that I was offered an opportunity to vet the typescript of the Sunday Times articles before publication and, after reflection, deliberately declined. I felt that the Editor should be prepared to stand by the conclusions reached by his own staff, and that the objectivity of the articles would be open to attack if I, so interested a party, intervened.

  As I say, these articles completely charged the situation. The consequences of the truth being disclosed are on us irrevocably, for better or worse. I can therefore offer my book to the public without incurring the charge of wanting to muddy waters. My purpose is simply to correct certain inaccuracies and errors of interpretation, and to present a more fully rounded picture.

  The first serious crisis of my career was long drawn out, lasting roughly from the middle of 1951 to the end of 1955. Throughout it, I was sustained by the thought that nobody could pin on me any link with Communist organizations, for the simple reason that I had never been a member of any. The first thirty years of my work for the cause in which I believed were, from the beginning, spent underground. This long phase started in Central Europe* in June 1933; it ended in Lebanon in January 1963. Only then was I able to emerge in my true colours, the colours of a Soviet intelligence officer.

  Until quite recently, when the Sunday Times and the Observer let some large and fairly authentic cats out of the bag, writers who touched my case in newspaper articles and books thrashed around wildly in the dark. They cannot be blamed for their ignorance since,
throughout my career, I was careful not to advertise the truth. But some blame perhaps attaches to them for rushing into print in that blissful state, and for their insistence on looking for complex explanations where simple ones would have served better. The simple truth, of course, crumbling Establishment and its Transatlantic friends. But the attempt to wash it away in words, whether ingenious or just nonsensical, was futile and foredoomed to failure.

  After nearly a year of illegal activity in Central Europe, I returned to England. It was time for me to start earning my own living. Then something evidently happened. Within a few weeks I had dropped all my political friends and had begun to frequent functions at the German Embassy. I joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, and did much of the legwork involved in an abortive attempt to start, with Nazi funds, a trade journal designed to foster good relations between Britain and Germany.* In spite of my best efforts, this strange venture failed, because another group got in ahead of us. But while the negotiations were in progress, I paid several visits to Berlin for talks with the Propaganda Ministry and the Dienststelle Ribbentrop. No one has so far suggested that I had switched from Communism to Nazism. The simpler, and true, explanation is that overt and covert links between Britain and Germany at that time were of serious concern to the Soviet Government.

  The Spanish war broke out during one of my visits to Berlin. The Nazis were cock-a-hoop, and it was not until I returned to England that I learnt that General Franco had not taken over the whole country, but that a long civil war was in prospect. My next assignment was to Fascist-occupied territory in Spain with the aim of bedding down there, as close to the centre of things as possible, on a long-term basis. That mission was successful, for within a few weeks I became the accredited correspondent of The Times with Franco’s forces, and served as such throughout the whole heart-breaking war. Again, no one has suggested that this made me a Falangista. The simpler explanation still holds the field; I was there on Soviet service.