by Kim Philby
For me, that was the end of the struggle. Vivian would not have dared to put such a far-reaching proposal to the Chief without Arnold-Forster’s blessing; and Arnold-Forster would not have given it if he had not first prepared the ground for a favourable reception. The fact that the minute was typed and ready to go told me that the Chief was prepared to risk a major show-down with Cowgill, even to the point of accepting his resignation. I had little doubt that the next few days would bring a summons from the Chief. But I had one last move to make, if the summons came. I spent some time thinking exactly how I should make it.
My problem was that a career in clandestine service is unpredictable, if not downright hazardous. It is always possible that something will go wrong. Minor mishaps I could probably take in my stride. But if disaster struck, I did not want to be dependent solely on the loyalty of my colleagues in SIS. The particular danger facing secret service servants is the charge of insecurity, or of related offences, which are the province of MI5. In case anything should happen to me in my new job, it would be well, I reflected, if MI5 could be officially embroiled in my appointment. What I wanted was a statement from MI5, on paper, to the effect that they approved my appointment. Yet I could scarcely say all that to the Chief in so many words. In short, I was in search of a formula. After anxious reflection, I thought that I had better call to my aid the Chief’s obsessive delight in inter-departmental manoeuvre.
The summons came. It was by no means the first time I had visited the arcana. But on this occasion, Miss Pettigrew and Miss Jones, the Chief’s secretaries, seemed especially affable as I waited in their room for the green light to go on. The green light flashed, and I went in. For the first time, the Chief addressed me as “Kim,” so I knew that no last-minute hitch had occurred. He showed me Vivian’s minute, and out of politeness I pretended to read it. He told me that he had decided to act on Vivian’s proposal and offer me the immediate succession to Currie. Had I anything to say? I had. Using the sort of I-hope-I-am-not-speaking-out-of-turn-Sir approach, I said that the appointment had been offered to me presumably because of the well-known incompatibility between Cowgill and his opposite numbers in MI5. I hoped that I would be able to avoid such quarrels in future. But who could make predictions? I would be much happier in the job if I knew for certain that MI5, the people with whom I would be dealing daily, had no objection to my appointment. It would make me just that much more confident. Besides, MI5 approval, officially given, would effectively protect the service against future criticism from that quarter.
Before I had finished my brief exposition, the Chief had got the point, with evident appreciation. He was extraordinarily quick to spot cover in the bureaucratic jungle. His critics used to say that only his grasp of tactics ensured his survival in the much-coveted control of secret funds. Before long, he was throwing my own arguments back at me with force and conviction. He dismissed me with great warmth, saying that he would write to Sir David Petrie* (then head of MI5) without delay. I left him in the hope that he would claim, and perhaps more than half believe, that the whole credit for the idea was his own. In due course, Petrie returned a very friendly reply. The Chief was delighted with it. So was I.
In launching this intrigue I hoped that Cowgill would end by getting himself out. He did. As soon as my appointment became known, he demanded an interview with the Chief. I know nothing of the details of the meeting, but I never saw Cowgill again. He had submitted his resignation once too often. It was a pointless and fatal mistake. Within little more than a year, Sections V and IX were united, under my direction. There was no Cowgill to dispute my path. If he had contented himself with a short period of eclipse, he would certainly have found another rewarding job in the service. But he had become used to riding high. As I hope I have shown, he was proud and impulsive, a man too big for his talents.
Within a few days, I was taking over from Currie, rather impatiently, I am afraid. I suggested to the Chief that, to regularize the position of the new Section IX, I should draft myself a charter for his signature. I cannot remember its exact wording. But it gave me responsibility, under the Chief, for the collection and interpretation of information concerning Soviet and Communist espionage and subversion in all parts of the world outside British territory. It also enjoined me to maintain the closest liaison for the reciprocal exchange of intelligence on these subjects with MI5. The Chief added a final clause. I was on no account to have any dealings with any of the United States services. The war was not yet over, and the Soviet Union was our ally. There was no question of risking leakage. The leakage which the Chief had in mind was a leakage from the United States services to the Russians. It was a piquant situation.
VII. FROM WAR TO PEACE
Taking charge of Section IX meant moving from Ryder Street to Broadway. The change was welcome for several reasons. Since the previous summer of 1943, when we moved up from St. Albans to London, I had enjoyed easy access to the heart of SIS. Now I was sitting right in the middle of it, in the best position to sniff the breezes of office politics and well placed to discover the personalities behind the faces that passed me in the corridors. I was also removed, by the width of St. James’s Park, from the OSS counter-espionage people. When Section V moved into its Ryder Street premises, Pearson and his colleagues had taken office-space, with Cowgill’s backing, in the same building. They had wearied us with their politicking, even if they sometimes amused us. Graham Greene has recalled, in a newspaper article, the OSS filing cabinet that just wouldn’t stay shut. For the benefit of conscientious duty officers doing their rounds in the evening, Pearson, again with Cowgill’s approval, adorned it with a discerning label: “This filing cabinet is to be considered secure.” As I have already explained, my first orders were to have nothing to do with the Americans. Pearson knew it perfectly well. But that did not prevent him from extending to me persistent and embarrassing offers of hospitality. It was best for me to be well out of his way, high up on the seventh floor of Broadway Buildings.
At the beginning, I was absorbed by bread-and-butter problems: staff, office-space, equipment, etc. The reader may think that this meant starting the wrong way round; that I should have considered the size of my problem first, and then looked for the staff to handle it. But that line of thought disregards Parkinson’s Law. I had no doubt that, however big the staff I engaged, I could always stretch the problem wide enough to engulf it. The important thing was to get hold of the good people while they were still available. With peacetime economies already in sight, it would be much easier to discard surplus staff than to find people later to fill in any gaps that might appear.
Currie’s Section IX had consisted of four officers: himself, two girls and a near-mental case (male). One of the girls was a very nice Wren whom I retained. The other was an oddity who had come to us from Censorship. I was relieved when, shortly after my arrival, she toasted an eyeball watching an eclipse of the sun and had to leave. The near-mental case was Steptoe of Shanghai, who had covered the whole Far East for SIS between the wars. How it happened is still a mystery to me: I found it difficult to believe that he could hold any job for a week. Steptoe had been foisted on Currie by Vivian, presumably for old times’ sake. But I had few qualms about standing up to Vivian on the issue; Vivian, after all, had served his purpose. Happily, Steptoe had already cooked his own goose. At Vivian’s suggestion, he had been sent on a round tour of our stations in the Mediterranean to spread the gospel of Section IX. The journey had been an unqualified disaster, since Steptoe, the old hand, had behaved with such ostentatious secretiveness that some of our field representatives had great difficulty in believing that he really was a secret service officer. A number of odd telegrams and letters reached Broadway, questioning the validity of his credentials. With this ammunition to support my own representations, I had little difficulty in convincing the Chief that his service would lose little if he pensioned Steptoe off. The latter departed with a consolation prize in the shape of one of Vivian’s stately letters, l
auding his past services and lamenting the untoward manner of his dismissal.
I felt no apprehension in losing two members of Currie’s exiguous team. The staff position was becoming easier with every Allied advance in Europe. Officers working in the offensive intelligence sections saw the objects of their offensiveness shrinking rapidly. Counter-espionage specialists working against the Axis secret services realized that they would soon have little to counter. I found myself in an unfamiliar and enviable position. Instead of having to fight for staff, I was being courted by would-be recruits to my section, sometimes by people I had no intention of employing. In short, as far as labour was concerned, it was a buyer’s market.
The field for recruitment was divided into four categories. There were the duds, on whom I wasted no time. There were many, among them some of the ablest, who wanted nothing better than to get back to their peacetime jobs, and the sooner the better. I tried to talk a few of them into changing their minds and staying on, but, to the best of my recollection, with only one success. Then there was a number of experienced older officers who were anxious to stay at their desks drawing a salary for a few more years pending retirement. Finally, there was a score or so of younger men about my own age, give or take five years, who had acquired a taste for intelligence work during the war and were keen to make it a career for life.
It was the fourth category which attracted me most, and to which I gave the greatest attention. When the section finally took shape, most of the officers were well under forty. But it was clearly bad practice to staff an entire section from the same age-group in view of the problems of promotion and seniority to which such a course would give rise. So I took also a sprinkling of older men who would pass into retirement within a few years and leave gaps to be filled from the next generation. The best known of the older men in the first Section IX was Bob Carew-Hunt, to whom I entrusted the composition of background papers on the subject of Communism. He had the great advantage of being literate, if not articulate. In due course, Bob became an acknowledged authority on the subject, and was much in demand as an adviser and lecturer, both in England and the United States. At a later date, he told me that he had intended dedicating to me his first book on the subject, The Theory and Practice of Communism, but that he had decided that such a tribute might embarrass me. Indeed, it would have given me grave embarrassment for a number of good reasons.
I was in the middle of my recruiting campaign when Vivian told me that Jane Archer had become available, suggesting that she would make an excellent addition to Section IX. The suggestion gave me a nasty shock, especially as I could think of no plausible reason for resisting it. After Guy Liddell, Jane was perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5. She had spent a big chunk of a shrewd lifetime studying Communist activity in all its aspects. It was she who had interrogated General Krivitsky,* the Red Army intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1937, only to kill himself a few years later in the United States—a disillusioned man. From him, she had elicited a tantalizing scrap of information about a young English journalist whom the Soviet intelligence had sent to Spain during the Civil War. And here she was, plunked down in my midst! Fortunately, Jane was a woman after my own heart, tough-minded and rough-tongued. She had been sacked from MI5 for taking the opportunity at a top-level meeting of grievously insulting Brigadier Harker, who for several years had filled the Deputy Directorship of MI5 with handsome grace and very little else. Within a short time of her joining us, a crisis in Greece called for action on the part of General Plastiras. Jane delighted me with a little jingle in which Master-Ass was pronounced to rhyme with Plaster-arse. It made me feel that we had come together in a big way. Jane would have made a very bad enemy.
To keep Jane busy, I put her in charge of the most solid body of intelligence on Communist activity available to the section at the time. It consisted of a considerable volume of wireless traffic concerning the National Liberation movements in Eastern Europe. It yielded a comprehensive and absorbing picture of the painstaking efficiency and devotion of the Communists and their allies in the struggle against the Axis. The systematic and massive support given them by the Soviet Union gave one much food for thought. Despite the efforts of OSS and SOE to buy political support in the Balkans by the delivery of arms, money, and material, the National Liberation movements refused to compromise. They would doubtless have accepted help from the Devil himself—but without going into league with him.
Apart from Bob Carew-Hunt and Jane Archer with their specialized duties, the section was split into the conventional regional sub-sections. But in those early days, there was very little secret intelligence to work on. The dearth of current material was not wholly disadvantageous. Very few officers in the service at that time knew anything about Communism, and our first task was to go back to school to learn the elements of the subject, while keeping abreast with current events through the study of overt material such as the Communist press and monitored broadcasts from Communist countries.
What little secret intelligence we got was mostly fake. There was a voluminous series of reports from France, which reached us through a lady named Poz who had behaved with prodigious valour during the German occupation. I had the honour of meeting her once, and she turned out to be quite a dish with eyes that dilated miraculously when she made a point. She claimed to have an agent on the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, from whom her reports emanated. They purported to show that the French Communists never took a step without direct instructions from the Soviet Embassy in Paris. Such a view was doubtless acceptable to a chic reactionary like Poz; but the language of the reports was that of Action Française, not Humanité—or anything like it. It took an awfully long time for the obvious fact of forgery to sink in, and meanwhile SIS went on paying. The chief beneficiaries of the operation were the SIS officers who, for political reasons, wanted the reports circulated and believed, fake or not.
I have already described how far the unsatisfactory relations between SIS and MI5 contributed towards my appointment to Section IX. It was now necessary for me to continue the good work, and place our relations on a new and friendly basis. My opposite number in MI5 was Roger Hollis, the head of its section investigating Soviet and Communist affairs. He was a likeable person, of cautious bent, who had joined MI5 from the improbable quarter of the British-American Tobacco Company, which he had represented in China. Although he lacked the strain of irresponsibility which I think essential (in moderation) to the rounded human being, we got on well together, and were soon exchanging information without reserve on either side. We both served on the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee which dealt with Communist affairs, and never failed to work out an agreed approach to present to the less well-informed representatives of the service departments, and the Foreign Office.
Although Hollis had achieved little in respect to Soviet activity, he had been successful in obtaining an intimate picture of the British Communist Party by the simple expedient of having microphones installed in its King Street headquarters. The result was a delicious paradox. The evidence of the microphones showed consistently that the Party was throwing its full weight behind the war effort, so that even Herbert Morrison, who was thirsting for Communist blood, could find no legal means of suppressing it.
At the beginning of 1945, when the section was adequately staffed and housed, the time came for me to visit some of our field stations. My object was partly to repair the damage done by Steptoe, partly to discuss with our station commanders ways and means of getting the information required by Section IX. The first part of my mission was easily achieved, simply by telling all concerned that my first action in taking over the section had been to get Steptoe sacked—a news item that won universal approval. But the second part was much more difficult. Our real target was invisible and inaudible; as far as we were concerned, the Soviet intelligence services might never have existed. The upshot of our discussions could be little more than a general resolu
tion to keep casting flies over Soviet and East European diplomatic personnel and over members of the local Communist parties. During my period of service, there was no single case of consciously conceived operations against Soviet intelligence bearing fruit. We progressed only by means of windfalls that literally threw the stuff into our laps. With one or two exceptions, to be noted later, these windfalls took the form of defectors from the Soviet service. They were the ones who “chose freedom,” like Kravchenko who, following Krivitsky’s example, ended up a disillusioned suicide. But was it freedom they sought, or the flesh-pots? It is remarkable that not one of them volunteered to stay in position, and risk his neck for “freedom.” One and all, they cut and ran for safety.
These trips, which covered France, Germany, Italy, and Greece, were to some extent educative, since they gave me insight into various types of SIS organizations in the field. But after each journey, I concluded, without emotion, that it would take years to lay an effective basis for work against the Soviet Union. As a result, it is the trivial incident, rather than any real achievement, that remains brightest in my memories of that summer. There was the wineglass of chilled Flit which I drained in Berlin; my host had proffered it in the belief that it was Niersteiner. My visit to Rome was marred by an interminable office wrangle over the Passport Control Officer’s transport. Was he entitled to an official car or was he not? In Bari, I was instrumental in getting a pet bugbear chosen for air-drop into Yugoslavia; but instead of breaking his neck, he covered himself with glory. In Larissa, I watched one of the atmospheric marvels with which Greece is so generous: two separate and distinct thunderstorms, one over Ossa, the other over Olympus, while around us the plain of Thessaly rippled quietly under the clearest of blue skies. Meanwhile, back in grimy Broadway, events were in train that were to claim a great deal of my attention.