by Kim Philby
A typical muddle confronted me at an early stage. An SIS agent in Madrid stole the diary of a certain Alcazar de Velasco, a particularly nasty Falangist from the Spanish Press Office, who had visited England a month or two previously. The diary stated explicitly that he had recruited a network of agents on behalf of the German Abwehr; names, addresses, and assignments were given in detail. It was not until many weeks’ work had been wasted that we reached what was surely the correct conclusion, namely, that the diary, though undoubtedly the work of Alcazar de Velasco himself, was fraudulent from beginning to end, and had been concocted solely for the purpose of extracting money from the Germans.
Yet the theft was not entirely fruitless. We had long suspected Luis Calvo, a Spanish journalist working in London, of passing to Spain information that might comfort, and possibly aid, the enemy. The fact that his name appeared in the diary as a recruit for the Alcazar de Velasco network suggested a promising means of extracting a confession, spurious though we thought the entry to be. Calvo was accordingly arrested and taken to the “tough” interrogation centre on Ham Common. No physical violence was used to break him down. He was merely stripped naked and propelled into the presence of the camp commandant, a monocled Prussian type called Stephens who punctuated his questions by slapping his riding-boots with a swagger-stick. We had made a correct assessment of Calvo’s nerve. Appalled by his compatriot’s frivolous treachery, and doubtless by the swagger-stick, he said enough about his activity to warrant his captivity for the duration. Another by-product of the famous diary was derived from the fact that it mentioned Brugada, the Spanish Press Attaché in London, in compromising terms. Brugada was the last person to want a scandal, and proved satisfactorily co-operative when MI5 hinted delicately that the diary might furnish the Foreign Office with a plausible pretext for declaring him persona non grata. He did not actually do much serious spying for MI5; but he passed on enough gossip about visiting Spaniards to earn a code-name: Peppermint.
A more spectacular success came our way soon afterwards, although I broke all the rules to achieve it and caused a ghastly mix-up which was only resolved after the war. We received an intercepted telegram showing that the Abwehr was sending two agents to South America on the Spanish SS Cabo de Hornos. With a carelessness which was all too frequent in Abwehr communications, their names were given in full. One was a certain Leopold Hirsch, travelling with his wife and mother-in-law, the other Gilinski. Shortly before their embarkation, a second, more mysterious message was received from the German out-station in Bilbao, confirming that Hirsch and his “ORKI companions” were ready to leave. “ORKI” was intriguing. What could it be but an organization of revolutionary international Communists—some splinter group of Trotskyists sponsored by the Germans with a view to confounding our Russian allies? We therefore passed the whole passenger list of the Cabo de Hornos through our records, finding at least a dozen whose careers suggested possible links with dissident Communism. Of these, perhaps half looked as if they might well be scoundrelly enough to fall in with Abwehr intrigues.
Accordingly, after consulting Cowgill, I sent a cable to the Defence Security Officer in Trinidad, where the ship was due to call, instructing him to arrest the Hirsch family, Gilinski and a string of others. I had no power whatsoever to order this, or any other arrest. The proper procedure would have been a recommendation from me to MI5; another from MI5 to the Colonial Office; an instruction “subject to local objection” from the Colonial Office to the Governor of Trinidad; and an order from the Governor of the Defence Security Officer. Fortunately, the DSO was an enthusiastic type, and acted on my orders without further question. Still more fortunately, Hirsch promptly confessed, saying, with almost certain truth, that he had nursed no intention of carrying out his German assignment but had accepted it simply to get out of Europe. In the euphoria created by this “triumph” we tended to overlook the fact that the rest of the detained men could not be induced to admit to anything remotely resembling espionage. But a search of their baggage showed that they were all smuggling in greater or lesser degree, so we had some small technical grounds for holding them, just in case.
The solution of the mystery came about a year later. My subsection officer responsible for handling all intercepted material was struck by a sudden thought. He got on the telephone to Palmer at GC & CS, and asked him to look up the relevant signal from Bilbao. Could “ORKI” possibly have been a mistake for “DREI”? Within a very short time, Palmer was back. Yes, it almost certainly was “DREI”; in fact, he could not understand how the cryptographers could have got ORKI in the first place. So, instead of Hirsch and his ORKI companions, we had Hirsch and his three companions, namely, his wife, his mother-in-law and Gilinski. By the time the British Government came to consider the claims brought by the others for wrongful arrest, I was safely out of the way, trying to penetrate the Soviet Union and the Balkan states from my comfortable base in Istanbul.
Hitherto, I have spoken only of the interception of wireless traffic. But there were several other forms of interception which, though less productive from the counter-espionage point of view, had their uses. There was the postal censorship which threw up one or two cases of interest, but less perhaps than might have been expected. There were also sophisticated techniques of opening foreign diplomatic bags. This method could not be used against the enemy directly, since German and Italian bags did not pass through British territory. But the bags of neutral states and of minor allies, such as the Poles and the Czechs, were fair game. Such operations involved several complex procedures.
First the courier had to be persuaded, by one means or another, to leave his bag in British custody. This was not so difficult as it sounds, owing to the inadequate courier systems employed by many states, and to the indiscipline of the couriers themselves. During the period that Britain was cut off from the continent, all diplomatic bags were carried by air. Delays in the departure of aircraft were an everyday occurrence, and it was always easy to engineer a delay even when flight conditions were favourable. On arrival at the airport, the courier would be confronted with an adverse weather report, or with the discovery of a technical fault in the aircraft, either of which could impose an indefinite wait. Thus he would have the choice of sitting on his bag in the airport lounge or going to the nearest town and enduring the rigours of a provincial hotel bedroom. In such circumstances, it was only courtesy on the part of the airport security officer to offer the perplexed courier the hospitality of his safe. “You can see me lock it up myself, old boy. It will be quite all right till you get back.” A surprising number of couriers fell for this soft sell and went off, without encumbrance, to inspect the local talent—which, of course, the security officer was happy to provide on request.
As soon as the courier was safely out of the way, the security officer would inform the waiting experts and put the bag or bags at their disposal. Each bag and its contents were studied with minute care before they were opened. Every knot and seal was measured, copied and photographed where necessary; chemical examination was also made. Then came the task of untying the knots, breaking seals, extracting and photographing the contents. Finally, the hardest of all, was the job of replacing the contents exactly as found, with infinitesimally accurate reproduction of the original knots and seals. The Russians were exempt from this treatment, partly because their bags were invariably accompanied by two couriers, one of whom was always on duty, partly because of a belief that they contained bombs designed to obliterate the inquisitive. But the diplomatic correspondence of the South American states, of the Spaniards and Portuguese, of the Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs and many others, was regularly subjected to scrutiny. Despite the extreme care used, accidents sometimes happened. On one occasion, the red seals in a Polish bag turned purple under treatment, and nothing could be done to restore them. The Poles were regretfully informed that the bag in question had been “lost.” This happy ending was possible only because the Poles, following their occasional custom, ha
d entrusted this bag to the British for onward transmission—presumably because its contents were of minor importance. It would have been much more awkward if it had been accompanied by a Polish courier.
By early 1942, the trickle of intercepted Abwehr telegrams had become a flood. This was largely the work of Dilly Knox,* who had succeeded in penetrating the secrets of the cypher machine used by the Abwehr. This comprehensive system of eavesdropping yielded fascinating glimpses of the intimate life of German intelligence officers. There was the case, for instance, of Axel, the German police dog. He had been posted from Berlin to Algeciras, presumably to guard the Abwehr out-station there from British agents sneaking across the bay from Gibraltar. On the last stage of its journey, Madrid sent a warning telegram to Albert Carbe, alias César, the head of the Abwehr post at Algeciras: “Be careful of Axel. He bites.” Sure enough, a few days later, Algeciras came up with the laconic report: “César is in hospital. Axel bit him.”
It was not long before we had a very full picture of the Abwehr in the Peninsula. We knew the names, pseudonyms, addresses, cover functions and real functions of most of the staff at Madrid headquarters and at the many out-stations, such as Barcelona, Bilbao, Vigo, Algeciras, etc. When our knowledge was already as comprehensive as one could reasonably expect, a maddening incident occurred which illustrates the dangers of having two separate organizations working on the same subject in the same area. I have already said that there were exceptions to the rule whereby service attachés in British Embassies abroad did not engage in secret intelligence work. One of the exceptions was Captain Hillgarth, RN, the Naval Attaché in Spain. There was an arrangement, prompted by Hillgarth’s personal acquaintance with Churchill, by which secret funds were made available to him for undercover activity. A condition of this arrangement was that Hillgarth’s only contact with SIS should be with the Chief himself. The ostensible reason for this was security; Hillgarth’s sources were to be particularly sacrosanct. But the condition also helped to feed the gallant officer’s illusions of grandeur. As a pseudonym for correspondence with the Chief, he chose Armada—natch!
One day, Cowgill asked me to make an appointment with the Chief to discuss an important communication from Armada. It was about the Germans in Spain. It was seldom that I saw the Chief in those days, and I was as shy in his presence as he was in mine. But I found him in a playful mood. He had been poaching on my preserves, he said; doing a spot of counter-espionage in Spain. He had given Armada authorization to buy, “for a very large sum,” details of the leading Abwehr officers in Spain. Those details had been received, and he handed me a telegram—a distressingly short one, containing about a dozen names and a few particulars about each. Gustav Lenz, head of the outfit; Nans Gude, in charge of Naval Intelligence, etc., etc. I remarked, somewhat tactlessly, that the information, so far as it went, was accurate. The Chief’s eyebrows rose. How did I know it was accurate? Because we knew it all already. How much more did I know? A very great deal. Why hadn’t the Chief been informed? But we compiled regular monthly reports of the progress of our investigations, and a copy always went to the Chief. At this point he showed what an essentially nice man he was. “My dear Philby,” he said with his characteristic quick smile, which had gone almost as soon as it came, “you don’t expect me to read everything that’s put on my desk!” We agreed that Armada’s source should be asked for more, but of course nothing came of it. What incensed me was that I soon identified this precious source—a high official of the Dirección General de Seguridad—and knew that his price would have been very high indeed. And I had to fight to get an extra £5 a month for agents who produced regular, if less spectacular, intelligence!
One problem of intelligence is how to get it. Another, equally important and sometimes much more difficult, is how to exploit it. Picking up enemy agents as they reached British territory was all very well and good. But what about our painstaking analysis of the German establishment in the Peninsula as a whole, and the organization in Germany from which it emanated? It was borne in on me gradually that our comprehensive knowledge called for more imaginative action than had been contemplated in the past. It was not enough simply to warn MI5 of the impending arrival in Britain of Abwehr agents, or to effect the occasional capture in Trinidad. It should surely be possible to put our information to good use in disrupting, or at least seriously embarrassing, the enemy on his own chosen ground in Spain.
These thoughts were spurred by the gradual accumulation of intelligence to the effect that the Germans were contemplating an operation in Spain involving the use of advanced technical devices. The Abwehr code-name for the operation was Bodden. The Bodden is the name of the narrow strip of water separating the island of Rügèn from the German mainland, not far from the wartime scientific research station at Peenemünde. Taken together with additional evidence that the Bodden experts, with their instruments, seemed to be closing in on Algeciras, this seemed a clear enough indication that something affecting the Straits of Gibraltar was brewing. We therefore consulted the formidable Dr. Jones, head of the scientific section of SIS, who studied the evidence, and pronounced fairly confidently that it indicated the installation of a device for detecting the passage of ships through the straits at night. As this would have introduced a serious new hazard into the supply position in the Western Mediterranean, I judged that the time was ripe for a new suggestion designed to scare the daylights out of the Abwehr in Spain.
I had already considered, and discarded, the possibility of putting SOE on to the Germans in Spain. Even if they had had the resources for such an operation, I doubted whether anyone on our side would really welcome a James-Bond-like free-for-all in Spain, where the authorities would have been against us. On reflection, it seemed that the diplomatic approach would be the best. We had a legitimate grievance against the Spanish Government for allowing the German intelligence a free hand on its territory, and a strong protest, based on detailed and cogent evidence, seemed quite in order. I had little hope that General Franco would take any action against his German friends; but I had no doubt at all that he would give them a friendly warning of their nakedness. My thoughts turned to General Westmacott, the Director of Extraordinary Intelligence in Compton Mackenzie’s Water on the Brain,* and his dictum: “After all, the whole point of the Secret Service is that it should be secret.” It was a good assumption that Gustav Lenz, the head of the Abwehr in Spain, would be severely shaken if his secrets could be shown to be no secrets at all.
The first step was to convince Cowgill that the operation was both worthwhile and feasible. Our indictment would have to be based largely on information derived from signals intelligence, and he was jealous of its safe-keeping, even vis-à-vis other British intelligence organizations. Yet the whole object of my proposal was that the document should be presented to an unfriendly Spanish Government in the hope that it would be shown to the Germans. To my great relief, Cowgill reacted favourably. He took my draft, in which I had been at pains to conceal our sources, to the Chief, who also approved. Fortunately, the Foreign Office link with SIS at that time was Peter Loxley, who had as much vigour as charm, and he lent the project enthusiastic support. Within a reasonably short space, instructions were sent to Sir Samuel Hoare,† then British Ambassador in Madrid, to protest to General Franco in the strongest possible terms. He was to support his protest with a copy of my memorandum.
It is difficult to write nice things about Sir Samuel. But the truth compels me to admit that he rose to the occasion magnificently. He dressed the senior members of his staff in full uniform, and took them in a body to see the Head of State. What Franco then said to whom is not yet known. But the results were gratifying beyond expectation. Within two or three days, panicky telegrams were flying between Madrid and Berlin; all sorts of useless emergency measures were taken. There was even a report, not taken too seriously by us, that some of the chimneys of the German Embassy in Madrid were smoking unduly. The final triumph came in the form of a peremptory order from B
erlin to Madrid: “The Bodden operation must be stopped in its entirety.” We continued to get our signals intelligence without interruption. It was clear that the operation had not compromised our main source.
Encouraged by our success in Spain, we then launched a similar operation against the Germans in Portugal, but with only indifferent results. In the case of Spain our problem had been straightforward. General Franco, after all, was a self-declared co-belligerent on the side of the enemy. With very few exceptions, his senior officials sympathized warmly with the Axis. For that reason, we could be pretty sure that, wherever we hit, we would hurt our enemies. The Foreign Office had less than its usual crop of inhibitions about ruffling Franco’s feathers, provided it had a good case; and, on the intelligence side, we had so few friends in Spain that we had little to fear from enemy reprisals. The position in Portugal was significantly different. Far from being straightforward, it was horribly complicated and fuzzy. Dr. Salazar, it is true, sympathized with the Axis. But he was far more cautious than his fellow-dictator in Spain, and pursued a more neutral line. For fear of disturbing Salazar’s balancing act, the Foreign Office shrank from strong action calculated to force him down off his fence. He might only too easily have come down on the wrong side. We had our own narrower preoccupations on the intelligence side. Several senior Portuguese officials, whom we knew to be receiving money from the Germans, were also receiving money from us. It was usually impossible to assess which side derived most advantage, if indeed any, from this tangle. The last thing I wanted was to have the officials come to us with a request to make good the extra-curricular salaries which they might lose through the expulsion of their German paymasters.