by Kim Philby
The accumulating shocks of war had swept away the amateurish service of previous years, although some of its survivals were a long time dying. With victory in Europe, the large wartime service contracted rapidly, and what was left of it had to be reshaped. As the head of a section, I was now regarded as an officer of some seniority—especially as my section was clearly going to be larger, by a long chalk, than any other. The penalty was that I was drawn increasingly into administration and policy-making. Doubtless there are expeditious means of administering organizations and framing policies; but we had not yet found them. I spent a frightening number of mornings and afternoons busily doodling in committee, with only one ear on the proceedings.
As this book is primarily a record of my own experiences, I have so far mentioned the higher levels of the service only occasionally, when their sometimes unaccountable interventions affected my work. Before going on to describe the reorganization of SIS which took place after the war, it is necessary to take a closer look at my elders and betters, beginning with the Chief, now Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies.
I think that I have already made it clear that I look back on the Chief with enduring affection. He was not, in any sense of the words, a great intelligence officer. His intellectual equipment was unimpressive, and his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered son of the upper levels of the British Establishment. In my own field, counter-espionage, his attitudes were schoolboyish—bars, beards and blondes. But it was this persistent boyish streak shining through the horrible responsibilities that world war placed on his shoulders, and through the ever-present threat of a summons from Churchill in one of his whimsical midnight moods, that was his charm. His real strength lay in a sensitive perception of the currents of Whitehall politics, in an ability to feel his way through the mazy corridors of power. Capable officers who knew him much better than myself spoke of his almost feminine intuition—by which I do not mean that he was anything but a whole man.
The Chief’s skill in this respect first became common knowledge in SIS when he repelled a determined assault launched by the three service Directors of Intelligence, his colleagues on the Joint Intelligence Committee. The burden of their complaint was that secret intelligence obtained from SIS was inadequate and something would have to be done about it. There was surely some substance in their allegations; there never was an intelligence service that could not have done with improvement. But the Chief knew that it would be useless to contest the accusations against him point by point. His basic weakness was that he had to look over his shoulder so often. Not a few senior officers were after his job; one of these was said to be Admiral Godfrey,* sometime Director of Naval Intelligence.
The Chief had no intention whatever of turning his office upside down to please the services. But he was astute enough to know that real danger lurked somewhere along the corridors. Characteristically, rather than meet it head on, he resorted to suppleness and manoeuvre. Conceding much of his colleagues’ criticisms, he invited each of the service Intelligence Directors to send to his staff a senior officer. These officers would be given the rank of Deputy Directors. They would be given full access to all aspects of work of SIS bearing on their particular provinces. They would be free to make any sort of recommendations they liked, and their recommendations would be given the most sympathetic consideration. The Chief, or so he said, had no doubt that, with specialist senior officers of the Military, Naval and Air Intelligence Directorates at his elbow, the requirements of the services would soon be fully covered.
It was a handsome offer, which the services could hardly have refused. It was also a shrewd one. The Chief knew well that no service Intelligence Director in his right mind would part with a senior officer of value to himself—certainly not in conditions of total war. It could be expected with the utmost confidence that the officers seconded to SIS would be expendables, if not outright duds. Once they were bedded down in Broadway Buildings, they could be shunted out of harm’s way. I do not suppose that the Chief for a moment doubted that he could achieve a happy ending; and the event proved him wholly right.
So we got our three service commissars, as they were promptly dubbed. Deputy Director/Army was a certain Brigadier Beddington. Within a few weeks, he was engrossed in the problem of checking the ranks of Army officers on the strength of SIS. As a civilian, I had no official contact with him, so I cannot say what lay behind his fleshy face. But I had one small brush with him that suggested that I was lucky to be out of his reach. In those days of clothes rationing, I tried to save the elbows of my two or three civilian suits by wearing in the office the tunic of my war correspondent’s uniform. Thus attired, I once entered the office lift with Beddington. We were not on speaking terms—he was that kind of a man—but I noticed a pair of widening eyes wander up my tunic and come to rest on my virgin shoulder-straps. Within half an hour, I received a visit from one of Beddington’s underlings, who asked me for details of my military service. I explained how I had come by my tunic and why I was quite entitled to wear it without badges of rank.
The representative of the Air Ministry, Air Commodore Payne,* was more difficult. Payne went to the United States, where his assignment, satisfactorily prolonged, took him as far west as California—Hollywood, according to some.
Deputy Director/Navy, Colonel Cordeaux, was a Marine officer, and the best of the three commissars. He was a footballer of parts, having played in goal for Grimsby Town. With the Chief’s encouragement, he soon settled down to conscientious, if some-what stodgy, direction of SIS operations in and around Scandinavia. It was nice to see at least one of the commissars taking an interest in the work of our service to the extent of actually doing a little himself. From the Chief’s point of view, it was satisfactory that Cordeaux, confined to his tight little corner of Northern Europe, was ill-placed to promote revolutions within SIS.
Not long after the Deputy Directors had settled down in their respective spheres of harmless obscurity, there were further changes at the top. I have already shown that Vivian’s star was waning rapidly. It became absurd that he should continue under the style of Deputy Chief. He was therefore kicked downwards and sideways into a sinecure created for him, as Adviser on Security Policy. He clung on for years regardless of pride, writing long minutes which nobody read, hoping against vain hope to retire with a K. His place was taken by Dansey. But, to assuage Vivian’s feelings, which were very easily hurt, Dansey became, not Deputy Chief, but Vice-Chief. Dansey’s former position, that of Assistant-Chief, was now filled by a new and unaccountable intrusion from outside the service in the diminutive shape of General Marshal-Cornwall. At the time of his induction into the service, he was the senior General in the British Army. If he does not figure more prominently in this narrative, it is because his influence was ineffectual where it was not unfortunate. It was he who, through some inexplicable quirk, sustained the long and vicious vendetta against the Passport Control Officer in Rome on account of his wretched car.
Peace soon brought new faces. Marshal-Cornwall left unregretted, almost unremarked. Dansey retired with a knighthood, to experience in quick succession the states of marriage and death. It came to me, when I heard that he was dead, that I had really rather liked him. Nefarious as his influence on the service was, it gave me a pang to think that that crusty old spirit was still for ever. Dansey’s place as Vice-Chief was filled from outside by the appointment of General Sinclair,* formerly Director of Military Intelligence. The Chief, on hearing criticism of the appointment, characteristically remarked: “Why, I have stifled War Office criticism for five years.” The vacancy caused by Marshal-Cornwall’s departure was filled by another outsider, Air Commodore Easton.
For both these newcomers I soon felt a respect which I had been unable to extend to their predecessors. Sinclair, though not overloaded with mental gifts (he never claimed them) was humane, energetic and so obviously upright that it was impossible to withhold admiration. Ea
ston was a very different proposition. On first acquaintance, he gave the impression of burbling and bumbling, but it was dangerously deceptive. His strength was a brain of conspicuous clarity, yet capable of deeply subtle twists. Regarding them from time to time in the light of antagonists, I could not help applying to Sinclair and Easton the obvious metaphor of bludgeon and rapier. I was not afraid of the bludgeon; it could be dodged with ease. But the occasional glimpse of Easton’s rapier made my stomach flop over. I was fated to have a great deal to do with him.
Before these last appointments were made, a serious attempt had been launched to put the whole organization on a sound footing. I have indicated that the pre-war service had been a haphazard and dangerously amateur affair. There was no regular system of recruitment, of training, of promotion or of security at the end of a career. The Chief took whom he could when and where he could, and all contracts of service were subject to termination at any time. In such conditions, it was impossible to attract a regular flow of recruits of the requisite standard. No wonder that the personnel of the service was of uneven quality, ranging from good through indifferent to downright bad. The war had been a rude awakening. The service had to be vastly increased in numbers, and many able people passed through its ranks, dropping ideas as they went. But the strength of the service had been achieved by a succession of improvisations under the day-to-day stress of war. Almost everything that was done could have been done better if there had been time for reflection. Now the time was ripe. The end of the war in Europe had relieved the pressure for immediate results, yet the government was still alive to the value of intelligence. It was essential to use the remaining months of 1945 to hammer out a new structure for the service before the government sank back into post-war lethargy. The Chief himself had doubtless been thinking along these lines. When it was presented to him that there was considerable support for the idea in the service, he appointed a committee to advise him on the subject. The so-called Committee of SIS Reorganization began its meetings in September 1945.
The ringleaders of the movement had been Arnold-Forster and Captain Hastings, RN, a senior and influential officer of the Government Code & Cypher School. Although not a member of SIS, Hastings had a legitimate interest in its activity, in view of wartime lessons on the need for close liaison between the cryptographers and SIS. His appointment also had the advantage of bringing a fresh mind to the debates in committee. David Footman* was brought in to look after the political needs of the service, while Colonel Cordeaux represented the “G” sections. I was also invited to serve, not because of any aptitude for committee work (which I detested), but because, Vivian excepted, I was the senior counter-espionage officer in the service. Our secretary was Alurid Denne, a careful, not to say punctilious, officer who could be relied on for complete impartiality because he had a comfortable niche awaiting him in the Shell Oil Company.
Most of us wanted Arnold-Forster to occupy the chair. Apart from his willpower, his enthusiasm and his clear mind, he had acquired, as Principal Staff Officer to the Chief, a better knowledge than any of us of the organization as a whole. But the Chief, leery of Arnold-Forster’s brains and wishing to keep any proposals for reform within bounds, had kept a bombshell in reserve for us. To our utter astonishment, he announced that our Chairman would be Maurice Jeffes, the Director of Passport Control. As the official responsible for the issue of visas, Jeffes was in frequent contact with our counter-espionage people; but his general knowledge of the service, of its possibilities and limitations, was nothing to write home about. As for his abilities, I do not suppose that he himself would have claimed to be more than a capable if colourless administrator. But there we were. The Chief had spoken.
In saying that Jeffes was colourless, I must explain that I use the term in a purely metaphorical sense. Some years before the formation of our committee, he had been the victim of a singular accident. A doctor, inoculating him against some disease, had used the wrong serum, with the result that Jeffes’s face had turned a strange purplish blue. The process was apparently irreversible, and Jeffes was stuck with his gun-metal face. During a visit to Washington, the honest fellow had been much incensed when the management of a hotel tried to cancel his booking on the ground that he was coloured. To be quite fair, Jeffes did little to interfere in the course of our debates, and never obtruded his authority as Chairman. It was impossible not to like him, and we soon got used to his spectacular presence at the head of the table.
Much of my time during the following months was taken up by the committee. Our deliberations had now become hopelessly academic, and do not call for detailed notice. But a few comments may perhaps throw light on some of the general problems confronting the organization of intelligence. Our first task was to clear up untidy survivals from the bad old days. During the war, finance and administration had gone separate ways with inadequate coordination. The “G” sections were generally messy, those concerned with Western Europe working for Dansey, the rest directly with the Chief. Looking at it from the other direction, Dansey was nominally Vice-Chief of the service as a whole; but in fact he was interested only in the production of intelligence in Western Europe. It was clear that the structure of the service as a whole stood in need of drastic streamlining.
But before we could deal with this first problem, a matter of fundamental principle had to be decided. Should the primary division of the service be along vertical lines, with regional organizations responsible for the production, processing, assessment and circulation of information relating to their respective regions? Or should it be along horizontal lines, between the production of information on the one hand, and its processing, assessment and circulation on the other? I confess that I still do not know the right answer to this question. But at that time my own interest was heavily engaged. If the vertical solution were adopted, work against the Soviet Union and Communism generally would be divided regionally. No single person could cover the whole field. I therefore threw my weight behind the horizontal solution, in the hope of keeping, for the time being at any rate, the whole field of anti-Soviet and anti-Communist work under my own direct supervision.
In favour of the case for a horizontal solution, I had a strong ally in David Footman. In fact, it was he, in his dry and incisive way, who made most of the running, with myself in support where necessary. My argument was, briefly, that counter-espionage was one and indivisible. A case in Canada might throw light on another one in Switzerland—as indeed one did shortly thereafter; an agent working in China one year might turn up in Peru the next. It was essential, therefore, to study the subject on a world-wide basis. I also made use of the less valid, though not wholly baseless, point that the production of intelligence should be kept separate from its assessment, on the grounds that production officers naturally tended to regard their geese as swans. There was, of course, much to be said on both sides of the question; but the body of service opinion in favour of the vertical division was weakly represented in committee, and the horizontal solution was finally adopted. I knew at least one colleague who might have turned the tide against us, and I had been at some pains to have him excluded from the committee membership.
Once that question of principle was decided, the rest was fairly simple, if arduous, donkeywork. We recommended the creation of five Directorates of equal status: (1) Finance and Administration; (2) Production; (3) Requirements, so-called because in addition to assessing information and circulating it to government departments, it passed back to the Directorate of Production the “requirements” of those departments; (4) Training and Development, the latter concerned with the development of technical devices in support of espionage; (5) War Planning. We drew up a system of ranks within the service, with fixed pay-scales and pensions on retirement. We threw on the Directorate of Finance and Administration the responsibility for systematic recruiting in competition with the regular civil service and industry, with particular attention to graduates from the universities. By the time our final bulky report
was ready for presentation to the Chief, we felt that we had produced the design of something like a service, with enough serious inducements to tempt able young men to regard it as a career for life.
The Chief did not accept all our recommendations. There was still a certain amount of dead wood which found no place in our plan but which he could not bring himself to cut out. But, by and large, the pattern sketched above was adopted as the basic pattern of the service. For all its faults, it was a formidable improvement on anything that had gone before. As for myself, I had no cause for dissatisfaction. One of the minor decisions of the committee was the abolition of Section V.
VIII. THE VOLKOV CASE
I now come to the Volkov case, which I propose to describe in some detail, both because of its intrinsic interest and because it nearly put an end to a promising career. The case began in August and ended in September of 1945. It was a memorable summer for me because it yielded me my first sights of Rome, Athens and Istanbul. But my delighted impressions of Istanbul were affected by the frequent reflection that this might be the last memorable summer I was destined to enjoy. For the Volkov business, which was what took me to the Bosphorus, proved to be a very narrow squeak indeed.
I had scarcely settled down to my desk one August morning when I received a summons from the Chief. He pushed across at me a sheaf of papers and asked me to look them through. The top paper was a brief letter to the Foreign Office from Knox Helm, then Minister at the British Embassy in Turkey. It drew attention to the attachments and asked for instructions. The attachments were a number of minutes that had passed between and within the British Embassy and Consulate-General, from which the following story emerged.