by Kim Philby
The notebooks which I filled during those journeys would have made nice material for one of Rose Macaulay’s “Turkey books.” Turkey east of the Euphrates had scarcely moved out of the nineteenth century. The Armenians, it is true, had been obliterated, and many of the Kurds as well. But you could still stand on the foothills of Palandöken and look across Erzurum towards the Camel’s Neck and the Georgian Throat, and almost hear the thunder of Paskevich’s guns forcing the eastern defiles. All that was about to be swept away. The Americans, with their missile-launching pads and U2s, were poised to move in.
My first call in Erzurum was at Tefik Bey’s office. He was a pleasant enough colleague with a more lively interest in his work than either Uncle Ned or Aunt Jane. But our discussions gave me little ground for hope about our prospects of infiltrating agents over the Soviet border into Georgia or Armenia. Like his opposite number in Adrianople, Tefik relied on the occasional tip-and-run agent, the occasional refugee, and professional smugglers. He spoke gloomily of the thoroughness with which the Russians had protected their frontier, of the numerous watch-towers and of the continuous ploughed strip on which illicit frontier-crossers must leave tracks. His own intelligence maps showed the poverty of his resources. A few Soviet units in the immediate vicinity of the frontier had been identified, most of them tentatively. Penetration in depth had not even been attempted, let alone achieved. The tabula was depressingly rasa.
The talks with Tefik yielded one strong negative conclusion. To achieve penetration in depth, by which I meant the establishment of resident agents in Erivan, Tiflis,* and the eastern ports of the Black Sea, it was useless to look for agent-material locally. The population on the Turkish side of the border was just too backward to serve our purposes. Besides, Tefik had combed the area for years, and it was silly to think that I could find material of promise where he had failed. We would clearly have to concentrate on, say, Georgian and Armenian emigré communities to find agents of sufficient ability to be trained in our requirements. My first recommendation to headquarters was that our stations in Paris, Beirut, Washington, and other centres where refugees tended to congregate be instructed to institute a search.
Another hint of Tefik’s gave me an idea in a different direction. He spoke of the magnificent views of Erivan to be obtained from the Turkish frontier. It occurred to me that if the armed services in London were so interested in a topographical survey of Turkey, they might also take kindly to a long-range photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet frontier area. Before I left Erzurum, I had begun to rough out a memorandum outlining the general idea of an operation on such lines. I called it Operation Spyglass. There was little doubt in my mind that it would be approved, if only because it would give our technical people a chance of trying out some of their latest equipment in the camera line.
I returned to Istanbul reasonably well content with the results of my trip. Very little had been achieved towards penetrating the Soviet Union, but at least I had some ideas on the subject to keep headquarters quiet for a time. The real gain was Spyglass. I strongly doubted whether it would contribute much to the benefit of the armed service. But it would give me a cast-iron pretext for a long, hard look at the Turkish frontier region.
The reception of my proposals at headquarters was wholly favourable. I had learnt long before, while working for The Times, some of the tricks of dressing implausible thoughts in language that appealed to the more sober elements in the Athenaeum. An emissary was sent from London to Paris to discuss the problem with Jordania, sometime head of the independent Republic of Georgia that came into fleeting existence in the confusion following the great October Revolution. Jordania was the most widely acknowledged leader of the Georgian emigration, and it would have been very difficult for us to recruit Georgian volunteers without his blessing. Our request, of course, put him in a very awkward position. He had claimed so often that his people, with a few minor exceptions like Stalin and Ordzhonikidze, were wholeheartedly anti-Soviet that he could scarcely express doubts on the nature of the welcome they would receive in their native country. It was no business of ours to discourage him, and we gratefully accepted his promise to furnish suitable men. But our emissary obviously had his misgivings. In a telegram which he sent me describing the results of his mission, he dismissed the Elder Statesman succinctly as a “silly old goat.”
We were indeed to have our troubles with Jordania. By now, I had a reasonably clear vision of our future proceedings. We would start with a few tip-and-run raids, lasting a few days or perhaps weeks. Their object would be to explore the possibilities of conspiratorial existence in Georgia. Could safe houses be found? Was it possible to obtain a legal identity by purchase or otherwise? Could reliable courier lines be established? If these preliminary sallies went well, a start could be made with setting up, by gradual stages, a resident network, its shape and style to be dictated by the results of the early reconnaissances. What Jordania had in mind it was not easy to discover. We suspected that he wanted to burden his men from the beginning with bundles of stirring leaflets at which the Foreign Office might have looked very askance indeed. So it became a sort of Chinese tea party. We had to be polite to Jordania because he was in a position to deny us recruits. On the other hand, without our help he would not get any of his people into Georgia at all. Our emissary soon came to know the London-Paris air schedules by heart, and to confess to a dawning dislike of the very sight of Paris. Thus, with deep mutual suspicion, the venture was launched.
My Spyglass proposals were described as “extraordinarily interesting.” This was very gratifying. It meant that I should spend most of the following summer, when the diplomatic corps came down to Istanbul from Ankara, at the opposite end of Turkey. Sir David Kelly, the Ambassador, now deceased, was a shy man with an acute and sensitive mind.
It also meant that I could ask for almost any amount of equipment with a reasonable assurance of getting it. The main item was, of course, the camera. Having no technical knowledge of photography, I could not specify the make; I simply described what I wanted it to do and left the rest to headquarters. In addition, I put in for two jeeps, lightweight tents, miscellaneous camping equipment, compasses and whatnot. Our technical people, always inclined to think that their ingenuity was insufficiently exploited, went to work with a will, and even sent a lot of stuff which I had not asked for, “to be tried out.” Throughout the winter an imposing number of packing-cases were hacked apart in our store-room. The show-piece was the camera. I had imagined some small and highly sophisticated instrument which might, with luck, be invisible from the Soviet watch-towers at a distance of a hundred yards or so. When I first clapped eyes on it, it looked as big as a tram. My reaction was a quick decision that I was not personally going to hump such a monster over the blazing foothills of Ararat and Aladag. My tough young junior was clearly the very man to come with me and do the heavy work.
Meanwhile, during the winter and spring, I was cast back on the meagre resources of intelligence available in Istanbul itself. Following standard procedure, I began by sounding members of the resident British community. It was rough going. There are, of course, British residents abroad, businessmen, journalists and so on, who are prepared to stick their necks out. There was a Swinburne and a Wynne. But these are usually the lesser fry and their potentialities are limited. The big men, with their big potentialities, are usually unhelpful. They have too much to lose; they have duties to themselves, to their families; they even have duties to their damned shareholders. They would usually agree to pass on anything that “came their way”—invariably valueless gossip. But patriotism was not enough to induce them to take the risks involved in the systematic search for intelligence; and I could not offer them anything like the inducements they received from, say, the oil companies or civil-engineering firms. My patience would be tried by requests from headquarters for information about Turkish harbours which had actually been built by British concerns.
Our lack of success in Istanbul threw int
o higher relief the importance of our plans for Georgia. Here at least there was some progress to record. Jordania, rather to my surprise, made good his promise of furnishing men, and I was informed in due course that two recruits were undergoing training in London. My task was to clear matters with the Turks and, after several discussions with Uncle Ned, arrangements were made for the reception of the agents in Istanbul and their onward journey to Erzurum. But on one crucial point Uncle Ned proved immoveable. Tefik Bey would take control of the operation in Erzurum and himself make all arrangements for infiltrating them over the frontier. Uncle Ned insisted that I should not accompany them on the grounds that my own safety might be endangered. As he had given me permission to travel the whole frontier area in connection with Spyglass, the pretext was absurd. His obvious purpose was to get the agents to himself for the last forty-eight hours in pursuance of some scheme of his own. Thus, the luckless Georgians would cross the frontier with one assignment from Jordania, another from ourselves and yet another from the Turks. Everyone was conspiring to weight the scales heavily against them. I gave way with very bad grace just as I thought that Uncle Ned was getting ready to threaten cancellation of the whole business.
In due course, we foregathered in Erzurum: Tefik Bey, myself and the two Georgians. The latter were alert and intelligent enough, but their backgrounds inspired little confidence. They were both in their twenties and had been born in Paris. They knew Georgia only by hearsay, and shared the myths of other emigrés about conditions in their country. One of them was notably subdued. Tefik Bey explained with maps that he proposed to infiltrate them in the neighbourhood of Pozof, a Turkish village facing the Soviet garrison town of Akhaltsikhe. We discussed the time of crossing with reference to the moon. We examined the arms and equipment with which the Georgians had been furnished in London. I wondered who would first lay hands on the little bags of sovereigns and napoleons—the Russians or the Turks. When I got Tefik alone, I questioned the wisdom of putting them over the frontier directly opposite a garrison town, but he countered with the observation that the terrain in that sector was ideal. Just because it was ideal, I asked, would it not be more heavily patrolled? He shrugged his shoulders. I was in a very weak position to argue as I had no personal knowledge of the frontier in that sector. For all I knew, Tefik might be right. Anyway, it was essential that I should be soon doing everything possible to ensure the success of the operation.
So the two Georgians went off under the escort of a Turkish officer to Ardahan and points north. All I could do was bite my nails in Erzurum. One of Tefik’s men was put to following me at a respectful distance of some fifty yards, so I amused myself by walking briskly about the countryside during the hottest part of the day, watching him take off his hat, then his tie and finally his coat. I happened to be with Tefik when the expected telegram came from Ardahan. The two agents had been put across at such-and-such a time. So many minutes later, there had been a burst of fire, and one of the men had fallen—the other was last seen striding through a sparse wood away from the Turkish frontier. He was never heard of again.
By contrast, the Spyglass venture was wholly enjoyable. Under the escort of Major Fevzi, one of Tefik’s officers, we started at the extreme eastern end of the line, where the frontiers of the Soviet Union, Turkey and Iran meet, and worked our way gradually westward. Our technique was simple. We pinpointed our position on the map every few miles and swung the camera in a wide arc across Soviet territory. For the first day or two, I was expecting a burst of machine-gun fire at any moment. The Soviet frontier guards might have been excused for mistaking our instrument for a light mortar. As far as Tuzluca we followed the course of the Aras, with its teeming population of marshbirds, with Ararat on our left and Algöz on our right. Then we worked up the valley of the Arpa Cay, past the ancient Armenian capital of Ani, as far as Digor, opposite Leninakan. At this point, I decided that I had already taken too long a busman’s holiday, and that the western half of the frontier should wait until the following year. We drove back to Erzurum with a night-stop at Kars, where Fevzi startled me by suggesting a visit to a brothel.
X. THE LION’S DEN
I never did the second half of Spyglass. In the summer of 1949, I received a telegram from headquarters which diverted my attention to quite different matters. The telegram offered me the SIS representation in the United States, where I would be working in liaison with both CIA and FBI. The intention was to upgrade the job for a significant reason. The collaboration between CIA and SIS at headquarters level (though not in the field) had become so close that any officer earmarked for high position in SIS would need intimate knowledge of the American scene. It took me all of half an hour to decide to accept the offer.
It would be a wrench to leave Istanbul, both because of its beauty and because it would mean leaving a job considerably less than half accomplished. But the lure of the American post was irresistible for two reasons. At one stroke, it would take me right back into the middle of intelligence policy-making and it would give me a close-up view of the American intelligence organizations. These, I was beginning to suspect, were already of greater importance from my point of view than their British opposite numbers. I did not even think it worth waiting for confirmation from my Soviet colleagues. The event justified my action. No doubt was expressed anywhere of the unlimited potentialities of my new assignment. It was arranged that I should leave for London at the end of September and, after a month’s briefing at headquarters, sail for America at the end of October.
In London I found that Jack Easton had the general supervision of relations between SIS and the American services, and it was from him that I received most of my instructions. I appreciated, not without misgivings, his command of the elusive patterns of Anglo-American co-operation. But the range of collaboration was so wide that there was scarcely a senior officer in the whole organization who had not got some axe to grind with me. I was lunched at many clubs on business pretexts. The discussions over the coffee and port covered many subjects, but all my hosts had one thing in common—the desire for a free trip to America. I did not discourage them. The more visitors I had in Washington, the more spies I got my finger into. That, after all, was my aim in life.
Apart from these diverting interludes, my briefing caused me serious preoccupation in more than one respect. It became clear from Easton’s succinct expositions of the situation that my path in Washington was likely to be thorny. I was to take over from Peter Dwyer, who had spent several years in the United States. I knew him for a brilliant wit, and was to learn that he had a great deal more to him than just wit. During the war, he had succeeded in the prickly task of establishing close personal relations with many leading figures in the FBI. These relations, maintained after the war, had given the SIS representation in Washington a bias towards the FBI at the expense (so some thought) of CIA. As the FBI, taking its cue from the prima donna Hoover, was childishly sensitive on the subject of CIA, it was extremely difficult for Dwyer to keep a balance without exposing himself to snarling charges of double-crossing his old friends.
One of my new jobs was to tilt the balance in the opposite direction. CIA and SIS had agreed to close collaboration over a wide range of issues which inevitably meant more day-to-day contact than SIS would have with the FBI. Nothing about this change of policy could be acknowledged, of course. My assignment was therefore to tighten links with CIA and loosen those with the FBI without the FBI noticing. It did not take much reflection to convince me that such a task was impossible and absurd. The only sensible course was to get in with CIA on subjects of common interest and take on the chin the unavoidable resentment of Hoover’s men. A corollary of this was that it would be dangerous to be too clever since the cards would be stacked too heavily against me. It would be better to play it silly and be ready to apologize freely for the bricks which my position would force me to drop from time to time.
My briefing on the counter-espionage side also aroused grave anxiety in my mind. This was g
iven me by the formidable Maurice Oldfield, and included a communication of the first importance. Joint Anglo-American investigation of Soviet intelligence activity in the United States had yielded a strong suggestion that there had been a leakage from the British Embassy in Washington during the years 1944–5, and another from the atomic energy establishment in Los Alamos. I had no ideas about Los Alamos. But a swift check in the relevant Foreign Office list left me in little doubt about the identity of the source from the British Embassy. My anxiety was tempered by relief, since I had been nagged for some months by a question put to me by my Soviet contact in Istanbul. He had asked me if I had any means of discovering what the British were doing in a case under investigation by the FBI—a case involving the British Embassy in Washington. At the time of asking, there was nothing that I could have done. But it seemed, after my talk with Oldfield, that I had stumbled into the heart of the problem. Within a few days, this was confirmed by my Russian friend in London. After checking with headquarters, he was left in no doubt that information from the FBI and my own referred to one and the same case.
A careful study of the files did something to allay my immediate fears. As SIS was not supposed to operate inside the United States, investigation of the leads provided by the source was in the hands of the FBI. Characteristically, they had put in an immense amount of work resulting in an immense amount of waste paper. It had so far occurred neither to them nor to the British that a diplomat was involved, let alone a fairly senior diplomat. Instead, the investigation had concentrated on non-diplomatic employees of the Embassy, and particularly on those locally recruited, the sweepers, cleaners, bottle-washers and the rest. A charlady with a Latvian grandmother, for instance, would rate a fifteen-page report, crowded with insignificant details of herself, her family and friends, her private life, and holiday habits. It was testimony to the enormous resources of the FBI, and to the pitiful extent to which those resources were squandered. It was enough to convince me that urgent action would not be necessary, but that the case would require careful watching. Something drastic would certainly have to be done before I left Washington. Heaven knew where my next appointment would lie; I might well lose all control of the case.