My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  In August 1939, when the war clouds were piling up fast over Danzig, The Times told me to forget Spain and hold myself in readiness for attachment to any British force that might be sent to the Western Front. It was as good as I could have expected in the circumstances. Any war correspondent with an enquiring mind could amass a huge amount of information which censorship would not allow him to publish; and my experience in Spain had taught me the right sort of question to ask. As it turned out, British headquarters were established in Arras, within easy reach of Paris. I spent most of my weekends in the heaving anonymity of the capital, not only for the obvious purpose of philandering. But, good as it was, the Arras post was not good enough. I had been told in pressing terms by my Soviet friends that my first priority must be the British secret service. Before the press corps left for France in early October, I dropped a few hints here and there. All that I could then do was sit back and wait. This book describes in some, though not complete, detail how this new venture was crowned with success.

  In case doubt should still lurk in devious minds, a plain statement of the facts is perhaps called for. In early manhood, I became an accredited member of the Soviet intelligence service. I can therefore claim to have been a Soviet intelligence officer for some thirty-odd years, and will no doubt remain one until death or senile decay forces my retirement. But most of my work has lain in fields normally covered, in British and American practice, by agents. I will therefore describe myself henceforth as an agent.

  “Agent,” of course, is a term susceptible of widely different interpretations. It can mean a simple courier carrying messages between two points; it can mean the writer of such messages; it can imply advisory or even executive functions. I passed through the first stage rapidly, and was soon writing, or otherwise providing, information on an increasingly voluminous scale. As I gained in knowledge and experience, consultative and executive functions were gradually added to the mere acquisition and transmission of intelligence. This process ran parallel to my rising seniority in the British service, in which, from about 1944 onwards, I was consulted on a wide range of policy problems.

  Some writers have recently spoken of me as a double agent, or even as a triple agent. If this is taken to mean that I was working with equal zeal for two or more sides at once, it is seriously misleading. All through my career, I have been a straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest. The fact that I joined the British Secret Intelligence Service is neither here nor there; I regarded my SIS* appointments purely in the light of cover-jobs, to be carried out sufficiently well to ensure my attaining positions in which my service to the Soviet Union would be most effective. My connection with SIS must be seen against my prior total commitment to the Soviet Union which I regarded then, as I do now, the inner fortress of the world movement.

  In the first year or two, I penetrated very little, though I did beat Gordon Lonsdale to the London School of Oriental Studies by ten years. During that period, I was a sort of intelligence probationer. I still look back with wonder at the infinite patience shown by my seniors in the service, a patience matched only by their intelligent understanding. Week after week, we would meet in one or other of the remoter open spaces in London; week after week, I would reach the rendezvous empty-handed and leave with a load of painstaking advice, admonition and encouragement. I was often despondent at my failure to achieve anything worthwhile, but the lessons went on and sank deep. When the time came for serious work, I found myself endowed with much of the required mental equipment.

  It was just as well, for my first challenges came in Germany and in Fascist Spain, both countries with a short way of despatching enemy intelligence agents. My reward came during the Spanish war, when I learnt that my probationary period was considered at an end; I emerged from the conflict as a fully-fledged officer of the Soviet service.

  How did it all begin? My decision to play an active part in the struggle against reaction was not the result of sudden conversion. My earliest thoughts on politics turned me towards the labour movement; and one of my first acts on going up to Cambridge in 1929 was to join the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS). For the first two years, I attended its meetings with regularity, but otherwise took little part in its proceedings. Through general reading, I became gradually aware that the Labour Party in Britain stood well apart from the mainstream of the Left as a world-wide force. But the real turning-point in my thinking came with the demoralisation and rout of the Labour Party in 1931. It seemed incredible that the party should be so helpless against the reserve strength which reaction could mobilise in times of crisis. More important still, the fact that a supposedly sophisticated electorate had been stampeded by the cynical propaganda of the day threw serious doubt on the validity of the assumptions underlying parliamentary democracy as a whole.

  This book is not a history or a treatise or a polemic. It is a personal record, and I intend to stray as little as possible from my main theme. It is therefore enough to say at this point that it was the Labour disaster of 1931 which first set me seriously to thinking about possible alternatives to the Labour Party. I began to take a more active part in the proceedings of the CUSS, and was its Treasurer in 1932–3. This brought me into contact with streams of Left-wing opinion critical of the Labour Party, notably with the Communists. Extensive reading and growing appreciation of the classics of European Socialism alternated with vigorous and sometimes heated discussions within the Society. It was a slow and brain-racking process; my transition from a Socialist viewpoint to a Communist one took two years. It was not until my last term at Cambridge, in the summer of 1933, that I threw off my last doubts. I left the university with a degree and with the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism.

  I have long since lost my degree (indeed, I think it is the possession of MI5).* But I have retained the conviction. It is here, perhaps, that a doubt may assail the reader. 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. It is reasonable to ask why.

  It is extremely difficult for the ordinary human being, lacking the gift of total recall, to describe exactly how he reached such-and-such a decision more than thirty years ago. In my own case, an attempt to do so would make appallingly tedious reading. But, as the question will be asked, it must be answered, even if the answer takes the form of gross over-simplification.

  It seemed to me, when it became clear that much was going badly wrong in the Soviet Union, that I had three possible courses of action. First, I could give up politics altogether. This I knew to be quite impossible. It is true that I have tastes and enthusiasms outside politics; but it is politics alone that give them meaning and coherence. Second, I could continue political activity on a totally different basis. But where was I to go? The politics of the Baldwin-Chamberlain era struck me then, as they strike me now, as much more than the politics of folly. The folly was evil. 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.

  The third course of action open to me was to stick it out, in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would outlive the aberration of individuals, however enormous. It was the course I chose, guided partly by reason, partly by instinct. Graham Greene, in a book appropriately called The Confidential Agent, imagines a scene in which the heroine asks the hero if his leaders are any better than the others. “No. Of course not,” he replied. “But I still prefer the people they lead—even if they lead them all wrong.” “The poor, right or wrong,” she scoffed. “It’s no worse—is it?—than my country, right or wrong. You choose your side once and for all—of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can
tell that.”

  The passage throws some light on my attitude in the depths of the Stalin cult. But I now have no doubt about the verdict of history. My persisting faith in Communism does not mean that my views and attitudes have remained fossilized for thirty-odd years. They have been influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime. I have quarrelled with my political friends on major issues, and still do so. There is still an awful lot of work ahead; there will be ups and downs. Advances which, thirty years ago, I hoped to see in my lifetime, may have to wait a generation or two. But, as I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.

  Finally, it is a sobering thought that, but for the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist idea, the Old World, if not the whole world, would now be ruled by Hitler and Hirohito. It is a matter of great pride to me that I was invited, at so early an age, to play my infinitesimal part in building up that power. How, where and when I became a member of the Soviet intelligence service is a matter for myself and my comrades. I will only say that, when the proposition was made to me, I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.

  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

  Abwehr German Military Intelligence

  ACSS Assistant Chief of the Secret Service

  BSC British Security Co-ordination

  CUSS Cambridge University Socialist Society

  GB State Security Service of the USSR

  GC & CS Government Code & Cypher School

  GUR Soviet Military Intelligence

  MI5 Originally the counter-espionage section of British Military

  Intelligence—the usual name for the Directorate-General of Security Service

  NKVD Narodnyi Komissariat Vniutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)

  OPC Office of Policy Co-ordination

  OSO Office of Strategic Operations

  OSS Office of Strategic Services (USA), the American counterpart of SIS

  PWE Political Warfare Executive

  SCI Special Counter-Intelligence

  SIS Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)

  SOE Special Operations Executive

  CURTAIN RAISER: A WHIFF OF THE FIRING SQUAD

  It was quite early in my career as a Soviet intelligence official that I first ran into serious trouble, escaping, almost literally, by the skin of my teeth. It was in April 1937, when my headquarters were at Seville in the south of Spain. My immediate assignment was to get first-hand information on all aspects of the Fascist war effort. The arrangement was that I should transmit the bulk of my information by hand to Soviet contacts in France or, more occasionally, in England. But for urgent communications, I had been provided with a code and a number of cover-addresses outside Spain.

  Before I left England, instructions in the use of the code were committed to a tiny piece of substance resembling rice-paper, which I habitually kept in the ticket-pocket of my trousers. It was this tiny object that nearly brought me face to face with the firing squad.

  After a few busy weeks in Seville and the surrounding countryside, my eye fell on a poster advertising a bull-fight to be held on the following Sunday in Córdoba. The front line then ran just twenty-five miles east of Córdoba, between Montoro and Andújar, and the chance of seeing a bull-fight so close to a front which I had not yet visited seemed too good to be missed. I decided to spend a long weekend at Córdoba, including attendance at the Sunday corrida. I went to the Capitania, the military headquarters in Seville, to get the necessary pass, but a friendly major waved me away. A pass was not required for Córdoba, he said. All I had to do was get on the train and go.

  On the Friday before the bull-fight, I boarded the morning train at Seville, sharing a compartment with a group of Italian infantry officers. Always on the job, as the saying goes, I asked them to have dinner with me in Córdoba, but they explained courteously that they would not have time. They would be too busy in the brothels before moving up to the front next day. I took a room in the Hotel del Gran Capitan, enjoyed a solitary meal, and walked the scented streets in a happy daze until about midnight when I returned to the hotel and went to bed.

  I was aroused from a deep sleep by thunderous hammering on the door. When I opened, two Civil Guards stamped into the room. They told me to pack my bag and accompany them to headquarters. To my question why, the senior of the two, a corporal, answered simply, “Ordenes.”

  I slept heavily in those days. Besides, I was at the disadvantage of confronting, in my pyjamas, two heavily booted men with rifles and revolvers. Half asleep and half scared, my brain reacted with less than the speed of light. I was conscious that something might have to be done about the tell-tale paper tucked away in my trousers; but how to get rid of it? My mind moved vaguely in the direction of bathrooms, but I had taken a room without a bath. By the time I had dressed and packed, and the Civil Guards had turned over my bedclothes, I had got no further than a sluggish resolve to get rid of my scrap of paper somehow on the way from the hotel to Civil Guard headquarters.

  When we got into the street, I found that it was not going to be easy. I had only one free hand; the other gripped my suitcase. My escort, evidently well trained, kept a steady pace behind me all the way, watching me, for all I knew, like hawks. So the incriminating material was still on me when I was shown into an office lit by a single bright naked bulb shining on a large, well-polished table. Opposite me stood an undersized major of the Civil Guard, elderly, bald and sour. With eyes fixed to the table, he listened perfunctorily to the report of the corporal who had brought me in.

  The major examined my passport at length. “Where,” he asked me, “is your permission to visit Córdoba?” I repeated what I had been told at the Capitania in Seville, but he brushed my words aside. Impossible, he said flatly; everyone knew that a permit was necessary for Córdoba. Why had I come to Córdoba? To see the bull-fight? Where was my ticket? I hadn’t got one? I had only just arrived and was going to buy one in the morning? A likely story! And so on. With every fresh outburst of scepticism, I became aware, with growing unease, that my interrogator was a confirmed Anglophobe. There were plenty of Anglophobes in those days in Spain, on both sides of the line. But by this time my brain was beginning to work normally, and I began to see possibilities in that wide expanse of gleaming table.

  With an air of utter disbelief, the major and the two men who had arrested me turned to my suitcase. With unexpected delicacy, they drew on gloves and unpacked it item by item, probing each article with their fingers and holding it up to the light. Finding nothing suspicious in my change of underwear, they next examined the suitcase, tapping its surface carefully and measuring its inner and outer dimensions. There was a sigh when its innocence was established beyond doubt. For a second, I hoped that that would be the end of it, and that I would simply be told to get out of town by the first available train—but only for a second.

  “And now,” said the major nastily, “what about you?”

  He asked me to turn out my pockets. I could no longer postpone action. Taking first my wallet, I threw it down on that fine table, giving it at the last moment a flick of the wrist which sent it spinning towards the far end. As I had hoped, all three men made a dive at it, spreadeagling themselves across the table. Confronted by three pairs of buttocks, I scooped the scrap of paper out of my trousers, a crunch and a swallow, and it was gone. I emptied my remaining pockets with a light heart, and the major fortunately spared me the intimacies of a rigorous body-search. He gave me instead a dry little lecture on the Communists dominating the British Government, and ordered me to get out of Córdoba next day. I was paying my hotel bill in the morning when my two friends of the Civil Guard emerged from a recess in the lounge and asked if they might share my taxi to the station. As I boarded the Seville-bound coach, I gave them a packet of English cigarettes, and they waved to me happily as the train pulled out.

  It was not a heroic episo
de. Even if my coding instructions had been found, my British passport would probably have saved me from the death sentence. But in subsequent years I have often had occasion to reflect that the really risky operation is not usually the one which brings most danger, since real risks can be assessed in advance and precautions taken to obviate them. It is the almost meaningless incident, like the one described above, that often puts one to mortal hazard.

  I. TAKEN ON BY THE SECRET SERVICE

  It was in the summer of 1940, to the best of my knowledge, that I first made contact with the British secret service. It was a subject that had interested me for some years. In Nazi Germany and later in Spain, where I served as correspondent for The Times with General Franco’s forces, I had half expected an approach. I was confident that I would recognize my man the moment he made his first cautious soundings. He would be lean, and bronzed, of course, with a clipped moustache, clipped accents and, most probably, a clipped mind. He would ask me to stick my neck out for my country and frown austerely if I mentioned pay. But no, nothing happened. If anybody did size me up during that time, he found me wanting. The only intelligence officer who took the slightest interest in me during my Spanish days was German, a certain Major von der Osten, alias Don Julio, who died early in the World War in a motor accident in New York. He used to take me to Abwehr headquarters in the Convento de las Esclavas in Burgos, and explain his large wall maps dotted with the usual coloured pins. He dined and wined me in desultory fashion for a year or so, and it proved a useful contact as far as it went. It emerged in due course that his real interest in me was to get an introduction to a lady of my acquaintance. When I obliged him, he propositioned her forthwith, both espionage-wise and otherwise. She turned him down indignantly on both counts, and his manner to me became distant.