My Silent War

by Kim Philby

  In passing, I should mention that this increase in staff led to two wholly delightful associations. Graham Greene was brought back to reinforce Section V from Freetown, where he had been supposedly watching the intrigues of the Vichy French. He will forgive me for confessing that I cannot recall any startling achievements of his in West Africa; perhaps the French were not intriguing? I do remember, however, a meeting held to discuss a proposal of his to use a roving brothel to frustrate the French and two lonely Germans suspected of spying on British shipping in Portuguese Guinea. The proposal was discussed quite seriously, and was turned down only because it seemed unlikely to be productive of hard intelligence. Happily, Greene was posted, where I put him in charge of Portugal. He had a good time sniping at OSS, and his tart comments on incoming correspondence were a daily refreshment. At about the same time, Malcolm Muggeridge swam into our ken, wearing his usual air of indignant bewilderment. He was despatched to Lourenço Marques, too far away for my liking, where his principal adversary was the Italian Consul, Campini, an assiduous reporter of British shipping movements. I was glad when our interest in Campini died, and Muggeridge was brought back to deal with various aspects of French affairs. His stubborn opposition to the policy of the day (whatever it was) lent humanity to our lives.

  Some weeks before the North African invasion, Cowgill asked me whether I would take over responsibility for the area. It had previously been included in the French section, but for reasons not very clear to me it had been decided that the transfer would be beneficial. I had no hesitation in accepting. We had achieved a fair stranglehold on the Abwehr in Spain and Portugal, and were regularly picking up its agents. There was no reason why I should not shoulder additional responsibilities. It was also satisfactory to me personally to get nearer to the active conduct of the war, and the enlargement of my field at that crucial stage suggested the hope of further extensions as the Allied armies progressed. That hope was fulfilled in due course.

  My duties involved politics rather than intelligence work. The special units mentioned above were duly formed and attached to the army staffs under the title of Special Counter-Intelligence Units (or SCI units). The term, of course, was an Americanism—a concession to the fact of an American being in supreme command. We were also issued with new stamps marked Top Secret instead of Most Secret. It was a foretaste of things to come, but we were innocent enough then to feel enthusiastic about our precious Eisenhower. But the bulk of what I call, for want of a better term, our work, concerned relations with the French. For some time, there had been attached to Section V a Gaullist counter-espionage officer with ill-defined functions. Apart from giving him our most attractive secretary, on the grounds that she spoke French, we had kept him at arm’s length. I do not know what obscure reasons promoted Cowgill’s reserve towards Passy’s Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, the Gaullist intelligence organization. But when the political situation burst in our faces, when Darlan and Giraud became friends, not enemies, Cowgill passionately embraced a certain Commandant Paillole, a Vichy counter-espionage officer. In fact, Paillole proved to be a most attractive character, and his anti-Axis feeling was beyond reproach. Yet I could never understand what good intelligence purpose was served by the mountain of work involved in Cowgill’s self-imposed commitment to defend Paillole against all comers. It was probably just that he could not adopt any attitude falling short of total involvement. What came of it all in the end, I do not know. Before the issue was resolved, if it ever was, I was immersed in the problems of the Italian campaign, and the Paillole Affair reduced itself to its proper parochial level.

  The fact that in the year 1942–3 Cowgill had enlarged my field of responsibility to include first North Africa, and then Italy, suggested to me that I was beginning to make a career in the secret service. This was confirmed shortly after our move to London. Until then, Cowgill had delegated his work, during his rare absences on leave or duty, to his deputy, Ferguson. Ferguson had also come to us from the Indian police, though at one or two removes, and had impressed chiefly by his terror of taking decisions. It was time for Cowgill to pay an official visit to the United States, where he proposed to spend two or three weeks. On the eve of his departure, he circulated a minute to all officers in Section V. It informed them that during his absence, Ferguson would act as deputy in administrative matters, myself in the same capacity in all intelligence matters. This was the first formal intimation that I was on the ladder for promotion. Poor Cowgill!

  V. ON THE UP AND UP

  A shrewd MI5 officer once minuted a paper: “This case is of the highest possible importance and must therefore be handled on the lowest possible level.” During the two or three weeks of Cowgill’s absence in the United States, when I sat in his chair, I had good cause to reflect on that dictum. It was not an auspicious introduction to the higher levels. Most of the routine work was relatively simple. The other heads of sub-sections seemed well on top of their intelligence problems, and required little guidance from me. But when I turned to Cowgill’s own work, I ran straight into a horrible muddle, which proved an object lesson on the malign influence of office politics on intelligence. It was a foretaste of headaches to come, and is therefore worth notice in some detail.

  Some weeks before his departure, Cowgill had summoned a special meeting of his sub-section heads. He informed us that he was working on a case in conjunction with Claude Dansey. The case was of great potential importance, with such marked political overtones that he proposed to go on handling it in person. But he thought that we should know the general outline, in case our own work threw up anything which might have a bearing on it. The outline given us by Cowgill was exceedingly blurred. He was obviously tired and rambled on without making much sense. It appeared that some hostile service was preparing, or had prepared, a gigantic plant. The nature and purpose of the plant was obscure. “My own view,” Cowgill concluded with a sudden flash of life, “is that it has something to do with the Arabs. Whenever I look at this case, I see Arabs!” Richard Hannay was with us again.

  In an hour or two I had forgotten all about the case, but Cowgill reminded me of it when briefing me immediately before his departure. From his private safe he produced a fat file, and handed it over. He asked me to go into it during his absence and “see what I made of it.” I was told that it would be advisable to keep in touch with Dansey, as he was taking a personal interest in the matter. I thought it better not to ask why Cowgill was hand-in-glove with Dansey in relation to the case, though the connection was puzzling in view of Dansey’s contempt of counter-espionage and all its works. I guessed that the battle-scarred Cowgill was beginning to feel lonely, and that even Dansey might prove an acceptable ally. Perhaps they were ganging up against Vivian and MI5, a combination that would have made sense in terms of office politics. When I opened the file, Dansey’s interest immediately became clear, and I read on with increasing relish. It will be simpler for the reader if I tell the story in chronological order, not in the order which emerged from the file. Indeed, it took me a long time to unravel the essential threads.

  By the end of 1943, it was clear that the Axis was headed for defeat, and many Germans began to have second thoughts about their loyalty to Hitler. As a result, a steady trickle of defectors began to appear at the gates of Allied missions with offers of assistance and requests for asylum. These offers and requests had to be treated with care for a number of good reasons. Himmler could have sent us a spy disguised as a defector. It would have been dangerous for the Russians to think that we were dickering with Germans; the air was opaque with mutual suspicions of separate peace feelers. We could not encourage a flood of last-minute converts hoping to escape the war tribunals. There were strict standing instructions to British missions that no assurances should be given to any German without prior reference to London. One day, a German presented himself at the British Legation in Berne, Switzerland, and asked to see the British Military Attaché. He explained that he was an official of the German
Foreign Ministry, and had brought with him from Berlin a suitcase full of Foreign Ministry documents. On hearing this staggering claim, the Attaché promptly threw him out. The German’s subsequent attempts to see the Head of Chancery were likewise rebuffed. The attitude of the British officials cannot be condemned out of hand. It was barely credible that anyone would have the nerve to pass through the German frontier controls with a suitcase containing contraband official papers.

  The German, however, was determined to get results. Having failed at the British Legation, he tried the Americans. Their regulations, it seemed, were more flexible than those of the British. A Legation Secretary, deciding that this was cloak-and-dagger stuff, told the visitor that he should address himself to Mr. Allen Dulles*—“four doors down on the left.” Dulles, who was then head of the OSS office in Switzerland, heard the stranger’s story, and sensibly asked to see the contents of the suitcase. Without hesitation, he decided that the goods were genuine. They shocked him into a lyrical state which was still on him when he drafted his official report to Washington. “If only,” he wrote, “you can see these documents in all their pristine freshness!”

  The documents were copied and sent to Washington, and OSS loyally made them available to SIS. Because of the Swiss angle, they were sent in the first place to Dansey. I have explained that Dansey had taken a personal interest in Switzerland since before the war. That interest had become a fierce proprietary obsession. He had resented the installation of OSS in Switzerland, and had lost no opportunity of belittling Dulles’s work. The sight of the Berlin papers must have been a severe shock to him; this was evident from his recorded comments. But Dansey seldom stayed shocked for long. It was clearly impossible that Dulles should have pulled off this spectacular scoop under his nose. The stuff was obviously a plant, and Dulles had fallen for it like a ton of bricks.

  Plants involved operations by hostile intelligence services, and were a matter for the counter-espionage section. Dansey accordingly asked Cowgill to discuss the matter with him. What passed at their meeting was not recorded in detail. But it is evident that Cowgill left under the impression that it was to his interest to prove the spurious nature of Dulles’s documents. It is also clear that he never studied the documents, then or thereafter. He was too busy and too tired. It was office politics that prompted him to play Dansey’s game. His estrangement from Vivian was almost complete. His relations with the Chief, though still reasonably good, were not clearly so close as he would have wished. But Dansey’s were very close indeed. By doing Dansey a good turn, by proving that Dulles had been sold a pup, he could also do himself a power of good.

  Such was the picture that emerged from the messy Dansey-Cowgill correspondence. It made me think hard. About this time, a project was forming in my mind which needed a cautious approach. I was very anxious to get a certain job that would soon become available, and I could not afford to antagonize any of the people who might help me towards it. Cowgill, Vivian, Dansey, MI5, the Foreign Office, the Chief—they were all pieces of the jigsaw, and it was exceedingly difficult, from my comparatively lowly position, to see how they would fit together when the moment came for action on my part. I had, however, long since reached the conclusion that, although political manoeuvre can produce quick results, those results are lasting only if they are based on solid and conscientious work. I therefore decided to study the Dulles material on its merits. If it was unequivocally genuine or spurious, I would say so. If the outcome of my study was inconclusive, I would then reconsider the political aspects of the affair before deciding on which side to throw my own weight.

  The great majority of the documents purported to be telegrams received by the German Foreign Office from its missions abroad. The obvious first step was to check with our cryptographic experts whether they had already received intercepted messages matching the Dulles material. There was no evidence in the file that this elementary step had been taken; Dansey and Cowgill had contented themselves with skimming the papers cursorily in the search for implausibilities and contradictions to buttress their advocacy of the plant theory. I remember Cowgill’s instructions to keep in close contact with Dansey, and debated whether to consult him on the desirability of approaching the cryptographers. I was against it, as I thought that he would probably oppose the suggestion. When I found on rechecking the file that Dansey had minuted to Cowgill: “Passed to you for any action you may think necessary,” I decided that I was well enough covered to go ahead on my own.

  By that time, the Government Code & Cypher School, our cryptographic organization, had been virtually split into two departments. One, under Commander Travis,* dealt with all service traffic; the other, under Commander Denniston,† handled diplomatic messages. As the Dulles material was German Foreign Office correspondence, Denniston was my man. I chose for his scrutiny a striking series of telegrams from the German Military Attaché in Tokyo to the German General Staff which had been transmitted through diplomatic channels. They contained detailed statements of the Japanese Order of Battle and assessments of future Japanese intentions. There were about a dozen in all and, if genuine, they were clearly of the highest importance.

  Two days later, Denniston telephoned me in a state of some excitement. He told me that three of my telegrams exactly matched intercepted telegrams which they had already deciphered, and that the others were proving of the utmost value to his cryptographers in their breakdown of the German diplomatic code. Could I get him some more? I could indeed, and began to feed the stuff to Denniston as fast as he could absorb it. When about a third of the material had passed through his hands with a steadily increasing tally of matches, and never a suggestion of anything phony, I felt that I had no choice but to circulate the documents as genuine. Accordingly, I passed them on to our sections dealing with the service departments and the Foreign Office, purposely playing down their significance, as I did not wish Dansey to get premature wind of anything unusual.

  The reaction from the service departments was immediate. Army, Navy and Air Force—all three howled for more. The Foreign Office was more sedate, but also very polite. I asked the sections concerned to get written evaluations of the material from their departments. I also asked Denniston for a minute explaining the cryptographic reasons for supposing the documents to be genuine. I needed all the ammunition I could get for the inevitable and imminent confrontation with Dansey. Fortunately, enough accumulated for me to take action before Dansey heard of the affair from any other source. I thought of sending him the papers to prepare him for the shock, but rejected the idea on the grounds that he would not read them. So, with some trepidation, I asked when I could conveniently pay him a visit.

  The visit lasted a very uncomfortable half-hour. As was to be expected, Dansey was furious. But he was sobered by the fact that I had studied the material and he had not. Denniston’s minute deflated him a little. He did not understand the argument, but the conclusion was plainly stated. Anger mounted in him again as he read the eulogistic comments of the departments. He composed himself with some difficulty to read me a lecture. Even if the documents were genuine, what of it? I was encouraging OSS to run riot all over Switzerland, fouling up the whole intelligence field. Heaven knew what damage they wouldn’t do. Such matters had to be handled only by officers with experience of the pitfalls that beset the unwary. For all he knew, OSS, if egged on in this way, could blow the whole of his network in a matter of days.

  When Dansey had exhausted his reckless improvisation, I asked him with puzzled deference how OSS came into the business at all. I had not circulated the material as OSS material. Not even our own circulating sections, let alone the departments, knew that OSS were involved. They regarded it as our stuff, they were asking us for more. It seemed that the credit would be ours. When I faltered to an end, Dansey gave me a long, long stare. “Carry on,” he said at last. “You’re not such a fool as I thought.” When Cowgill returned, I took him the file and explained what I had done. To his immediate anxious enquiry about
Dansey’s attitude, I explained that I had consulted him and that he had approved my action. With relief, Cowgill handed me back the file and asked me to handle any sequel. To my surprise, the case was by no means closed. Our German friend proved to be an intrepid operator, and paid several more visits to Berne with his useful suitcase.

  Meanwhile, the work of my sub-sections dealing with German activity in the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and Italy, was going smoothly owing to an increasingly easy familiarity with the subject. German agents were picked up with monotonous regularity and, so far as I know, nothing of any importance escaped our net. Although the German services were accorded full facilities by the Spanish Government and Dr. Salazar offered them amiable hospitality, precious few Spaniards or Portuguese showed willingness to stick out their necks for Fascism. Many of those who accepted missions did so simply to get out of Europe or into Britain, or both. Besides, we held the master key to German intentions in regular perusal of their signals.

  The case of Ernesto Simoes may be taken as a representative example. We learnt from the German signals that they had recruited Simoes in Lisbon for service in England. His instructions were given to him in the form of microdots scattered about his clothing; his communications were to be by mail. After consultation with MI5, it was decided to allow him to run loose in England for a bit, in the hope that he might lead us to other German agents. He was therefore unmolested on his arrival, and was even given discreet assistance in finding employment in a Luton factory making parts for aircraft. The information he might have obtained there was just interesting enough to tempt a spy, without entailing much danger if anything had slipped back to the Germans by mistake. He was lodged with a married couple; the husband worked in the same factory. Arrangements were made for his movements to be watched and his mail checked.