My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  III. “AN OLD-ESTABLISHED RACKET”—SIS

  My transfer, or rather my drift, from SOE to SIS was completed in September 1941. A dynamic lady who made the same move a year or so later was happy at the change, because, as she said: “If you have to work for a racket, let it be an old-established racket.” I could have said the same earlier, if I had thought of it. It would have been stupid to underrate the ability of the new men flowing into Baker Street, and their objective was a thoroughly worthy one. Yet they brought with them a style of strained improvisation as they left their tidy offices in the City and the Temple to spread disorder and financial chaos throughout Europe, gamekeepers turned poachers one and all. It was great fun in theory with ideas whizzing up and down the corridors. But most of the hard work involved pleading with the Air Ministry and the Admiralty for an extra aeroplane or an extra small boat, and SOE had yet to establish itself with Britain’s perennially conservative services.

  SIS was also undergoing changes, and its staff was expanding, but all too slowly, to meet the growing hunger of the services for intelligence. But there was a hard core of established practice and a staff structure to correspond. The new accretions did little to change its essential nature. SIS resembled the Chinese in their ability to absorb and digest alien influences. Under pressure, it took in representatives of the Foreign Office and of the service departments, of whom Patrick Reilly* alone left a significant mark. It even survived more corrosive imports, such as Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, both of whom merely added to the gaiety of the service.† In short, I was happy to find solid ground beneath my feet, and to get down to real work.

  As is well known, the headquarters of SIS were then in Broadway Buildings, just across the road from St. James’s Park station. But the wartime organization had outgrown its original habitat. Both Section V and Central Registry had been displaced to St. Albans, while other odds and bits had been scattered around London and the Home Counties. On arrival at St. Albans, I was billeted on some horribly rich people, whose wealth was not the only horrible thing about them. The husband was conveyed daily between his house and the station in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, while the wife locked up the sugar and counted jam-pots lest the maids should pilfer. In a mercifully short time, I found a convenient cottage on the farthest outskirts of town, where I could be free of unwanted interruption. Within a few days, I bought a pheasant from a man at a bus stop. He told me that he “sometimes got a chicken,” so I fared well thereafter.

  Much will be heard of SIS in the following pages, and a general, though far from comprehensive, picture of its activities should emerge in due course. At this stage, it is necessary to give only a summary account of its structure and proceedings, to assist the reader in understanding my story from the outset. It should be understood that any summary account must be an over-simplification. If the British genius leans towards improvisation, then SIS is a true reflection of it. The organization is like an old house, the original plan of which is still visible though dwarfed by subsequent additions.

  SIS is the only British service authorized to collect secret information from foreign countries by illegal means. Its monopoly in this respect is sometimes infringed by enthusiastic amateurs. But whenever such infringements come to light, they lead at best to acrimonious inter-departmental correspondence, at worst to serious confrontations in Whitehall. The words “by illegal means” distinguish the secret service from other newsgathering agencies, such as the Foreign Service and the press, though some nations fail to appreciate this fine, and sometimes illusory, distinction. Thus, in the Middle East, as I know from personal experience, journalists are confused with spies—often rightly so. Yet, however blurred in practice, the distinction is real. SIS alone receives secret funds, for which it is not accountable in detail, so that it may get information from foreign countries which is not obtainable by ordinary, lawful means.*

  The basis of SIS activity is the network of agents, almost always of foreign nationality. These agents work, directly or indirectly, under the control of an SIS office, known as a “station,” housed in a British Embassy and thus protected from the action of local authorities by diplomatic convention. Their motives in working as agents are various, ranging from the heroic to the squalid. The great majority are paid for their work, though not too well. On the whole, SIS prefers to have agents on its payroll, since the acceptance of pay induces pliability. The unpaid agent is apt to behave independently, and to become an infernal nuisance. He has, almost certainly, his own political axes to grind, and his sincerity is often a measure of the inconvenience he can cause. As one SIS officer remarked in disgust of the Vermehrens, the German couple who defected to the British in Istanbul during the war: “They’re so Godawful conscientious you never know what they’re going to do next.”

  Information collected by agents finds its way, directly or by devious means, to the local SIS station responsible for their recruitment in the first place. There it is given a preliminary assessment, for value and accuracy, by SIS officers disguised as diplomats. If considered of interest, the information is transmitted, with appropriate comment, to London headquarters. Transmission is normally by foreign service communications, radio or diplomatic bag, according to the degree of urgency. At the time of which I am now speaking, the pre-war disguise of Passport Control Officer* for the chief SIS representative was still in wide use, although it was already a little less than opaque. Its advantage was that the holder of that office was legitimately entitled to make enquiry into the records of visa applicants, and one type of enquiry could lead to another. Its disadvantage was simply that the device had become known. In a later chapter, I will deal with more recent disguises.

  The structure of headquarters in London was based on a division of responsibility for the production and assessment of intelligence. Those who produced the stuff should submit their wares to independent scrutiny before the finished article was sent to government departments. In accordance with this principle, headquarters was divided into two groups of sections, known respectively as “G” Sections and Circulating Sections. The “G” Sections administered overseas stations, and supervised their operations. Each had a regional responsibility; one would manage Spain and Portugal, another the Middle East, a third the Far East and so on. Circulating Sections assessed the intelligence received, and passed it on to interested government departments; they would then pass back to the “G” Sections the judgement of those departments, together with their own. The Circulating Sections were divided, not regionally, but according to subject matter. One would handle political intelligence, others concerned themselves with military, naval, economic and other types of information.

  Section V, to which I found myself attached, was in a peculiar position, in more than one respect. In name, it was a Circulating Section, and its subject matter counter-espionage. But, whereas the other Circulating Sections dealt with regular government departments, such as the Foreign Office, the Admiralty and the rest, whose knowledge of secret operations was marginal, Section V’s main “customer” was itself a secret organization: MI5. This, it might have been thought, should have led to mutual understanding and smoother co-operation. In fact, the reverse was the case, and it was not until the war was nearly over that reasonable harmony between the two organizations was attained. This unhappy situation was partly due to personal factors, which were aggravated by the fog, not to mention the hysteria, of war. But it was also due to basic differences of opinion about the line of jurisdictional demarcation between the two organizations. MI5 argued that counter-espionage was indivisible, and that they were entitled to all information on the subject available to Section V. Cowgill, speaking for Section V, rejected that view, maintaining that MI5 were entitled only to information bearing directly on the security of British territory, with the implicit rider that he himself was sole judge of the relevance of information to British security. He claimed, apparently in all sincerity, that MI5 were planning to set up their own counter-espion
age organization in foreign territory, while MI5, in their turn, suspected Cowgill of withholding from them essential information on the pretext of safeguarding the security of SIS sources. These clashes were to put me in a whole series of awkward situations, as my own sympathies in the debate were usually with MI5. To avoid needless trouble, many of my subsequent communications to MI5 had to be made verbally.

  Partly out of this painful situation, there arose a second peculiarity of Section V. In the early days of the war, the demands of the service departments on SIS were urgent and overwhelming. As we shall see, there were also powerful people in SIS who regarded offensive intelligence as the only serious form of intelligence in wartime. As a result of these pressures, SIS stations abroad were concentrating more and more exclusively on getting information required by the armed forces, such as troop movements, naval concentrations, air potential, weaponry and so on. Counter-espionage was starved of resources, and MI5 was justified in complaining, not only that Section V was withholding information, but also that SIS was not getting enough anyway. This was a charge that Cowgill could not ignore; he felt much the same himself. But he was not strong enough to force through the necessary diversion of existing SIS resources to counter-espionage goals. He preferred to circumvent the existing establishment by having specialist officers of his own attached to overseas stations. Nominally, such officers came under the general administration and control of the “G” sections; but most of the latter were far too busy to pay them any attention, and their day-to-day instructions emanated direct from Section V. The “G” officer in charge of Spain and Portugal, for instance, was a certain Fenwick, who had come to SIS from the oil business. He acquiesced, with only a minimum of grumbling, in the posting of counter-espionage specialists to Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier, and within weeks had practically forgotten all about them. So all went smoothly, provided I paid him a courtesy call every now and then and (in his own words) “munched a chop” with him. The general effect of this arrangement was that Section V, though still a Circulating Section in name, acquired some of the functions of a “G” Section. It became a hybrid, regarded with a degree of suspicious incomprehension by the rest of SIS. The position suited Cowgill well. It enabled him to claim that counter-espionage was an esoteric art, calling for wisdom not revealed to the common run of intelligence officers. He thus acquired a certain immunity from criticism within SIS. Unfortunately, he could not expect the same respectful hearing from M15.

  Although I have said that SIS is the only British organization authorized to collect information by illegal means, it does not follow that it is alone in collecting secret intelligence. By interception of wireless signals, it is possible to obtain huge quantities of secret intelligence without breaking any national or international law. Before wireless messages can be read, they must be decyphered. This was done in wartime Britain by the so-called Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley. Much of their work was brilliantly successful. I must leave it to learned opinion to decide how much more could have been achieved if the wrangling inside GC & CS had been reduced to manageable proportions. (The same could be said of most government departments, not to mention the universities in peacetime.)

  To sum up very briefly the place of Section V in the intelligence world: as part of SIS, it was responsible for the collection of counterespionage information from foreign countries by illegal means. The department chiefly interested in its intelligence was MI5, which was responsible for the security of British territory and therefore required as much advance news as possible of foreign attempts to penetrate British secrets. Some of the work of Section V was also of interest to other departments. For instance, the Foreign Office had a direct interest in the facilities offered by neutral governments to the German intelligence services. The efforts of Section V were at first supplemented by the Radio Security Service (RSS), which intercepted enemy intelligence signals, and by GC & CS, which read them. Before the war had gone on long, these roles were in fact reversed. Section V’s investigations abroad were directed mostly to filling in the gaps in the extraordinarily comprehensive picture derived from signals intelligence.

  It is now time to turn to some of the personalities involved, many of whom loom large in my subsequent story. The head of Section V, as I have mentioned, was Felix Cowgill.* He had come to SIS from the Indian police shortly before the war, and had already made his mark. His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in. His most conspicuous positive quality, apart from personal charm of an attractively simple variety, was a fiendish capacity for work. Every evening, he took home bulging briefcases and worked far into the small hours. Friday nights, as a regular habit, he worked right round the clock. Mornings would find him, tired but still driving, presiding over a conference of his sub-section heads and steadily knocking an array of pipes to wreckage on a stone ashtray. He stood by his own staff far beyond the call of loyalty, retaining many long after their idleness or incompetence had been proved. To the outer world, he presented a suspicious and bristling front, ever ready to see attempts to limit his field of action or diminish his authority. By the time I joined Section V, he was already on the worst of terms, not only with MI5, but also with RSS, GC & CS and several other SIS sections as well. Glenalmond, the St. Albans house in which Section V had established its headquarters, already felt like a hedgehog position; Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He was one of those pure souls who denounce all opponents as “politicians.”

  Unfortunately, Cowgill was up against a formidable array of brains. Most of our dealings with GC & CS on the subject of German intelligence wireless traffic were with Page and Palmer, both familiar figures in Oxford. RSS presented the even more formidable Oxonian combination of [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire and Charles Stuart. Herbert Hart, another Oxonian, confronted him in MI5, though here Cambridge too got a look in with Victor Rothschild,* the MI5 anti-sabotage expert. All these men outclassed Cowgill in brainpower, and some of them could match his combativeness. Trevor-Roper, for instance, was never a meek academic; and it was characteristic of Cowgill’s otherworldliness that he should have once threatened Trevor-Roper with court martial. It is a tribute to Cowgill that he fought this combination for nearly five years without realizing the hopelessness of his struggle. How often would he fling off a furious minute denouncing this or that colleague, and then softly murmur, with a gleam of triumph, “and now let’s get on and fight the Germans!”

  The main issue on which these personal battles were joined was control of the material derived from the interception of German intelligence-signals traffic. When the question first arose, the Chief of SIS had vested control in the head of Section V. There was plenty to be said for the ruling, and, to the best of my knowledge, it was never seriously challenged. What was challenged was the way in which Cowgill exercised his control. He realized at once that he had been dealt a trump card, and from the beginning he guarded it jealously, even to the point of withholding information that might have been put to effective use. His foes held him guilty of seriously restrictive practices, while he held them at least potentially guilty of disregarding totally the security of the source. After a hassle with Cowgill, Dick White, then Assistant Director of the MI5 Intelligence Division, claimed to have had a nightmare in which the material concerned was on sale at the newsstands.

  Cowgill’s relations with the rest of SIS posed problems of a different order. Here he was faced, not with what he regarded as excessive interest in his doings, but with the danger of total neglect. During the war, offensive intelligence absorbed most of the energies of SIS. Counter-espionage, with its emphasis on defence, was reduced to Cinderella status. This was largely due to the influence of Claude Dansey,* who was then Assistant Chief of the Secret Service, or briefly ACSS. He was an elderly gentleman of austerely limited outlook who regarded counter-espionage as a waste of effort
in wartime, and lost no opportunity in saying so. His specialty was the barbed little minute, which creates a maximum of resentment to no obvious purpose.

  The cause of counter-espionage should have been defended, at that high level, by Valentine Vivian,* whose title was Deputy Chief of the Secret Service, or DCSS. He was a former Indian policeman, and had been head of Section V before the war. But 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. He cringed before Dansey’s little minutes, and shook his head sadly at his defeats, which were frequent. Shortly before I joined Section V, Cowgill had brushed Vivian aside, making little effort to hide his contempt. It was no thanks to Vivian that Cowgill finally won his battle for increased appropriations for Section V, and with Vivian that was to rankle. It may seem that the feelings of so ineffectual a man scarcely require mention in a book of this kind. But, at a later stage, they were to play a critical part in my career.

  It was more than a year before I was directly affected by these high-level rivalries. My first duty was to do my job and learn it at the same time. I was given precious little guidance from above, and soon became indebted to my head secretary, an experienced girl who had been in the service before the war and was able, despite chronic ill health, to keep me from the worst pitfalls. The volume of work was monstrous. As a result of staff increases, we were now six in the Iberian sub-section, doing the work which two were supposed to have done before. Small wonder that one of them committed suicide. We were still regularly swamped with incoming mail. Some allowance must be made, of course, for Parkinson’s Law; even so, like many of my colleagues, I could only keep pace with my towering “in-trays” by taking a fat briefcase home in the evenings. Every day brought a few telegrams from Madrid, Tangier or Lisbon. We received showers of minutes from other sections of SIS and of letters from MI5. Once a week, we received depressingly heavy bags from the Peninsula, where our representatives were still thrashing around in the dark. For every lead that produced results of any kind, a dozen lured us tortuously into dead ends.