My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  We might have learnt a useful lesson in security procedure if we had but known it. The truth did not emerge for some years. As we proposed to deal with agents to be sent to enemy territory where they were likely to be captured, it was decided that the identities of officers on the training staff should be protected by aliases. Peters became Thornley, Hill became Dale and so on. Guy, indulging his schoolboyish sense of fun, persuaded the Commander to impose on me behind my back a name so inappropriate that I refuse to divulge it. The only exception was Tommy Harris who, for reasons which escape me, was allowed to retain his own name. Sometime after the war, Tommy ran into the head of our Belgian group, a nasty man of carefully obtruded aristocratic origin, and repaired to a teashop with him. While reminiscing about Brickendonbury, the Belgian remarked that the trainees had penetrated all our aliases save one. Tommy tested him and found that he did indeed know all our names, and asked him who the exception was. “Actually it was you,” replied the Belgian.

  Guy Burgess will soon disappear temporarily from these pages, so I may perhaps be forgiven a story which brings out his love of innocent mischief. Night had just fallen after a fine summer day. The Commander was in bed, nursing a sharp attack of eczema, to hide which he was growing a beard. A visiting instructor, masquerading under the name of Hazlitt, was at his bedside sipping a glass of port. There was a sudden shout from the garden, which was taken up by a babel in five languages. Trainees poured into the house, claiming to have seen one, three, ten, any number of parachutes falling in the vicinity. On hearing the news, the Commander ordered the Belgians to get into uniform and mount a machine-gun in the French windows. It commanded a nice field of fire, right across the school playing grounds. I do not know what would have happened if the enemy had come in by the front door. “If the Germans have invaded,” the Commander told Hazlitt, “I shall get up.”

  He then made a disastrous mistake. He instructed Guy to ascertain the exact facts of the case, and telephone the result to the Duty Officer in London. Guy went about the business with wicked conscientiousness. I heard snatches of his subsequent telephone report. “No, I cannot add to what I have said. . . . You wouldn’t want me to falsify evidence, would you? Shall I repeat? . . . Parachutes have been seen dropping in the neighbourhood of Hertford in numbers varying from eighty to none. . . . No, I cannot differentiate between the credibility of the various witnesses. Eighty to none. Have you got that? I will call you again if necessary. Goodbye.” He went to report in triumph. “I don’t know what I shall do if I do get up,” said the Commander, “but I shall certainly take command.”

  An hour or two passed, and nothing more happened. The Belgians sadly took apart their Lewis gun, and we all went to bed. Next morning, Guy spent a lot of time on the telephone, and periodically spread gleeful tidings. The Duty Officer had alerted his Chief, who had communicated with the War Office. Eastern Command had been pulled out of bed, its armour grinding to action stations in the small hours. Guy made several happy guesses at the cost of the operation, upping it by leaps and bounds throughout the day. I should add that the nil estimate given him the night before was my own; the eighty, I should think, came from Guy himself. Both of us were wrong. One parachute had fallen. Attached to a landmine, it had draped itself harmlessly round a tree.

  As the summer weeks went by without any clear directives from London, the Commander’s aspect changed for the worse. He became more than usually taciturn and withdrawn. At first, I thought that his eczema was bothering him more than he cared to admit. But then I began to hear from the grapevine things which had never been told us officially. Section D had been detached from SIS and reformed under the aegis of Dr. Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare; Grand had gone, his place taken by Frank Nelson,* a humourless businessman whose capacity I never had an opportunity to gauge. After a visit to Brickendonbury from Colin Gubbins† and a posse of fresh-faced officers, who barked at each other and at us, the Commander fell into a deep depression. He minded not being told. It was no surprise when he summoned Guy and myself one morning and told us that he had spent the previous evening composing his letter of resignation. He spoke sadly, as if conscious of failure and neglect. Then he cheered up and the charming smile came back, for the first time in many days. He was clearly happy to be going back to his little ships after his brief baptism of political fire.

  The Commander’s resignation was accepted without difficulty. Listlessly, we set about disbanding our establishment. The steps taken to this end are no more than a blur in my memory. We must have stashed the trainees away somewhere for future use, as I heard later that, in addition to Werner, at least two of them were dead. One, a nice Norwegian wireless operator, had been caught by the Germans and shot soon after his return to Norway. The other, the best of the Belgian group, had been flown to a dropping place in Belgium. But his parachute had somehow caught on the under-carriage of the aircraft, and he had been hurtled at mercifully high speed to unconsciousness and death. The Spaniards I was to see again.

  Tommy Harris left us in pretty high dudgeon and soon found his true level as a valued officer of MI5. Guy and I reported to the new headquarters of Special Operations at 64 Baker Street which afterwards became famous (or notorious, according to the point of view) as plain “Baker Street.” An awful lot of office furniture was being moved in and around; every time we visited the place, partitions seemed to be going up or coming down. Below us, the staff of Marks & Spencer watched and wondered. There were many new faces confronted with new jobs. Banking, big business and the law had been combed for recruits. There was also a distressing dearth of old colleagues. Nelson’s purge had been thoroughgoing. He had been gleefully assisted by some senior officers on the intelligence side of SIS, notably Claude Dansey and David Boyle, of whom more will be heard. They were determined not only to “get Grand,” but to get all his closest henchmen as well.

  The purge was to come yet nearer before it was called off. One evening, Guy dropped in for a drink in an unusually tongue-tied condition. Finally it came out; he had fallen “victim to a bureaucratic intrigue,” by which I understood that he had been sacked. I assumed that my own days, if not hours, were numbered, and Guy obviously looked forward to having me as a companion in distress. But next month, and the month after that, my pay envelope still contained ten £5 notes. Special Operations, it seemed, had need of me; or perhaps I was too insignificant to merit dismissal. Guy was nothing if not resilient. He soon found a desirable niche in the Ministry of Information, which gave him a wide range of cultivable contacts. He began to refer contemptuously to my continued association with “Slop and Offal.”

  II. IN AND OUT OF SOE

  Although the failure of our first training venture was depressing, it had the advantage of getting me back to London, where I could at least feel nearer to the corridors of power and decision. In practical terms, it did me little immediate good. I had no specific duties, and therefore could not lay claim to office space. I drifted around Baker Street, trying to memorize the new faces and fit them into a coherent organizational pattern, a most difficult task for anyone at that time. Everybody seemed very busy, if only moving furniture. In the presence of such activity, my idleness embarrassed me. It was like a cocktail party at which everybody knows everybody but nobody knows you.

  Improbable though it seemed at the time, I was witnessing the birth-pangs of what was to become a formidable organization. If I have described its origins, such as I saw them, in flippant terms, it is because flippancy is unavoidable. Between the wars, the intelligence service had enjoyed a mythical prestige; but the myth had little substance. This statement may strain the credulity of many, especially in the absence of published records. But is it any more incredible than the known fact that the prestigious fleet sent to Alexandria to frighten Mussolini away from Abyssinia was incapable of action because it had no shells? The truth is that, under a succession of complacent and indifferent governments, the secret service had been allowed to wither, just as the armed forces h
ad withered. Apart from financial starvation, there was little serious approach to staffing and system. Just as horse-minded officers were allowed to dominate the army twenty years and more after the battle of Cambrai, so the secret service, because its Chief happened to be an admiral, was overloaded with naval rejects. No particular blame can attach to Admiral Sinclair* for this; thrown entirely on his own slender resources, he naturally picked his subordinates from the circles he knew best.

  As for system, there was virtually none. When, as a result of the Fifth Column scares in Spain, the potential importance of undercover action against an enemy seeped into what passed for British military thinking, the result was reluctant improvisation. Section D was grafted onto a sceptical SIS, to plan noisy acts of derring-do, while the theme of “black propaganda”† became the toy of a number of government fringe organizations which stumbled about in the dark, bumping into one another. Small wonder that the results in the first year of war were minimal. In case I should be thought to exaggerate, let me quote Colonel Bickham Sweet-Escott,‡ one of the ablest and most perceptive officers to serve SOE throughout the war: “Our record of positive achievement (Summer, 1940) was unimpressive. There were a few successful operations to our credit, but certainly not many; and we had something which could be called an organization on the ground in the Balkans. But even there we had failed to do anything spectacular . . . our essays in Balkan subversion had succeeded only in making the Foreign Office jumpy. As for Western Europe, though there was much to excuse it, the record was lamentable, for we did not possess one single agent between the Balkans and the English Channel.”* Strange, but true.

  This was the background of the changes described in the last chapter. But they were only small parts of a much bigger programme of reform. In July 1940 Churchill invited Dr. Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, to assume the sole responsibility for all undercover action against the enemy. To discharge this responsibility, Dalton called into being an organization which he called the Special Operations Executive.† Originally, it was divided into three parts: SO1, for black propaganda; SO2, for sabotage and subversion; and SO3, for planning. SO1 was later rechristened Political Warfare Executive, and SO2 took over the name originally given to the organization as a whole, Special Operations Executive. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to them in future as PWE and SOE, even if the events described took place before the change of name. SO3 need bother us no longer, as it soon drowned in paper of its own making and died an unlamented death.

  I was beginning to wonder how long I could go on drawing pay without working for it when I received a summons from Colin Gubbins. He had been put in charge, among other things, of our training programme, and must have heard my name in connection with the abortive Brickendonbury experiment. Gubbins, of course, was to achieve great distinction by the end of the war,‡ and I am pleased to think that at that first interview I sat up and took notice. The air of his office crackled with energy, and his speech was both friendly and mercifully brief. A friend of mine nicknamed him “Whirling Willie” after a character in a contemporary comic strip. It was rumoured that he could only find time for his girl-friends at breakfast. But he was man enough to keep them.

  Gubbins began by asking if I knew anything about political propaganda. Guessing that he would like a monosyllabic answer, I replied: Yes. He went on to explain that the new training establishment was being planned on an ambitious scale. There would be a considerable number of technical schools for demolition, wireless communication and the rest. In addition, he was setting up a central school for general training in the techniques of sabotage and subversion. Underground propaganda was one of the techniques required, and he was looking for a suitable instructor. He wanted me to go away and produce a draft syllabus on the subject. He showed me to the door with the words: “Make it short.”

  When I got down to it, I realized that my knowledge of propaganda left much to be desired. I had no inside experience of modern advertising methods. My few years in journalism had taught me to report what was happening, often a fatal mistake in a propagandist whose task is to persuade people to do things. I consoled myself with the unconvincing reflection that the world had seen many successful propagandists who had been equally ignorant of the techniques of selling soap. But, to be on the safe side, I took the trouble to consult a few friends of mine in the advertising world from whom I picked up some basic principles that could be padded out to fill quite a few lectures. I have found that advertising people can be relied on for two things. First, they will warn you on no account to go into advertising; second, they will expatiate at length on the dirtier tricks of their profession.

  Within a few days I felt that I had enough to sustain the draft syllabus which Gubbins wanted, provided I lent it reality by drawing on examples from European politics and from Fascism in particular. I compressed it all into a page and a half of foolscap and telephoned Gubbins to say that it was ready. In five minutes he was back again, saying that he had arranged a meeting in Charles Hambro’s* office to discuss the paper that afternoon. It was the first time since the fall of France that I had seen any action to speak of.

  Gubbins brought several of his staff officers along to the meeting. Hambro greeted us in his friendly, comfortable way, making us all feel at home. He took my paper and read it aloud, slowly and deliberately. At the end of it, he remarked that it all sounded very sensible. Gubbins’s officers nodded in brisk, no-nonsense manner; they looked intensely military. To my surprise Gubbins himself was smiling happily. “Exactly what I wanted,” he said emphatically. “Exactly . . . what do you say, Charles?” Hambro said nothing in particular. Perhaps the Great Western Railway was on his mind. “Go ahead and do just that,” Gubbins told me. The meeting was over.

  I had now got specific duties which entitled me to a desk in Gubbins’s offices. These were not at No. 64, but farther up Baker Street towards Regent’s Park. I set about expanding my draft syllabus into a series of full lectures. But I was still far from happy. The new school was to be located in Beaulieu, Hampshire, far from London. Such a distance would interfere horribly with my other pursuits. Sometimes it seemed that I would do better to throw my hand in, but I was deterred by two considerations. In the first place, it was essential to keep my foot in the door of the secret world to which I had gained access. It would be stupid to resign until I had a clear prospect of other employment in that same world. In the second place, knowledge is seldom wasted, and I could not lose by finding out what was going on in the Special Operations’ far-flung establishments. I decided to stay on until something more rewarding turned up.

  I had little doubt that the training people would let me go when the moment came. I knew that I would make a lousy lecturer. Since the age of four, I have had a stammer, sometimes under control, sometimes not. I also had qualms about the subject matter of my course. The prospect of talking about political subversion did not worry me. There were very few people in England at that time who knew anything about it, and I had at least had a little practical experience in that field. But I was disturbed by my rudimentary acquaintance with propaganda techniques. I had drafted leaflets before but had never printed one.

  It was some time before we foregathered at Beaulieu, and I used it to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. As often as possible, I visited Woburn Abbey, where Leeper* presided languidly over the black propaganda people in PWE. (More than four years later, I found him little changed. It was the summer of 1945; he was languidly swatting flies in the British Embassy in Athens while Greece came to the boil.) But I was surprised to learn that he could be pettish on occasion. It was said that he clashed with Dalton more often than not, and gave the good Doctor much food for exasperated thought.† There is some confirmation of this story in Dalton’s memoirs.

  If the new Baker Street was the preserve of banking, big business and the law, Woburn had been stormed by the advertisers. Outside Leeper’s own sanctum, the place sounded like a branch of J. Walter Thompson. There were e
xceptions, of course: Dick Crossman, Con O’Neill, Sefton Delmer‡ and Valentine Williams, to mention a few. But the majority, so it seemed, had just the sort of expertise I stood most in need of.

  At first, I was treated with some reserve. Like all departments, especially new ones, Woburn was on the lookout for trespassers. But they soon realized that my interest in getting to know them was sincere, and that I was more than ready to accept advice. It was clear that secret agents in Europe would indulge in propaganda, whether we wanted it or not. That being the case, it was good policy for Woburn, as the authority responsible for black propaganda, to get a foot in the door in the shape of a co-operative instructor. After a few visits, I qualified for a lunch with Leeper. Valentine Williams, who was present, offered to drive me back to London in his official Rolls-Royce. I would have liked to talk to him about Clubfoot. But we had lunched well and he slept all the way.

  There was another, perhaps more important, field for my researches at this time. It was all very well to teach agents the forms of propaganda. But the content of propaganda was just as important. Doubtless, the agents would get their orders on the day; but it was necessary to prepare them in advance for the sort of orders they would receive. This required a certain amount of political indoctrination, so that they would reach their fields of operation with at least some general idea of what the British Government had in mind for the future. Woburn was not a good place to seek answers to such questions. Leeper and his men were themselves complaining of the lack of political direction from London.

  For this purpose, I turned to Hugh Gaitskell.* I had known him slightly before the war, when we had discussed Austrian problems. I cannot remember the nature of his interest, and I am quite sure that he did not know mine. At the time of which I am speaking, he was Principal Private Secretary to Dalton, sitting right under the horse’s mouth. He was closely associated with Gladwyn Jebb,† whom Dalton had made responsible for Baker Street operations. Gaitskell was a very busy man and usually suggested our meeting for dinner at a pub off Berkeley Square. We would discuss my problems over sausages and mash. Sometimes we would go back to his office and consult Jebb or perhaps the Doctor himself. The latter was always ready with a hospitable whisky-and-soda. (I have already boasted of having recognized Gubbins as a man of distinction. To restore the balance, I must confess that I never suspected in Gaitskell the first-class Front Bench material which emerged later.)