Young Philby

by Robert Littell

  In truth, I was only too relieved to submit to Colonel Menzies’ entreaties. Mind, I still didn’t receive an honorarium, but thanks to my father’s flag-rank pension I was able to make ends meet without too much difficulty. And I didn’t fancy myself living out the days Providence left me preparing tea and crumpets for Temperance Society spinsters in Camden Town. “I shall be only too pleased to keep my nose to the grindstone,” I’d informed the Colonel. And I had, through the chaotic weeks of the blitz when SIS was expanding exponentially and we were issued sidearms to repel German paratroopers who might land on the roof of Caxton House; through the exhilarating months following the Normandy invasion when the red arrows on the giant war map marking the progress of our armies inched closer to Berlin; through these last several days when blood, sweat, and tears gave way to the exuberance of church bells ringing in every borough and shire.

  Colonel Menzies’ prickly voice broke into my remembrance of things past. “Miss Sinclair,” he growled, his cherubic face in the doorway of my cubical, “I shall be requiring your services this afternoon. That chap your father called the Hajj seems to be coming by at four.”

  My institutional memory rose to the occasion. “You must mean the Arabist St John Philby,” I said.

  “That’s the one. Let’s hope he has combed the lice out of his beard, what? Could you fetch the minute of the meeting we had with him in ’34 so I can stir my memory.”

  It didn’t take me long to locate the minute in the steel filing cabinet the security people had insisted on installing in my cubical. I brought it up to the colonel’s topside parlor straightaway. He had changed the décor since Father’s day. The thick curtain the admiral favored had been replaced by venetian blinds, albeit closed day and night; a mixed bag of kings and queens eavesdropped from the walls in the place of Wellington’s generals; a large electricity-powered wall clock thunderously ticked off the seconds where once Father’s nautical chronometer had delicately chimed watches at sea. “I expect this is what you are looking for,” I said, giving the typescript of the minute in question to the colonel.

  He read it on the diagonal, as we say in the espionage trade. “Seems to be a gap near the end,” he announced. I handed him my original shorthand notes of the minute. Half a page had been blacked out.

  “Who did that?” he demanded.

  “Father.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, really. I suppose he didn’t want to leave a paper trail.”

  He plucked the telephone off its hook. “Mrs. Mortimer, kindly ask Captain Knox downstairs in science to drop what he’s doing and come by.”

  Moments later there was a rap on the door. “Come,” Colonel Menzies called.

  “Sir?”

  “What do you make of this, Knox?” Colonel Menzies asked, holding out my shorthand notes of the minute.

  “Why, it’s been blacked out by a thick marker, hasn’t it?”

  “I can see that, man. Are you able to make out what’s under the black marker?”

  “I should think so.”

  “How will you do it?”

  “I expect I shall hold the paper up to a very bright light and photograph it, then work on the printing of the negative to bring out the writing a bit more on each positive.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “I should have it ready for Miss Sinclair to type up by the time you return from lunch.”

  “By the by, what is your clearance, Knox?”

  “I am cleared to read anything the prime minister can read, sir.”

  “I am not convinced that he is cleared to read this bit.”

  “I take your meaning, Colonel. I shall make no effort to decipher the shorthand under the black marker.”

  “Good man, Knox.”

  Knox was true to his word. Here is the last part of the minute. I’ve italicized the half page that father had blacked out:

  The Hajj: The future is perceptible to those who are not fearful of gazing into the crystal ball. Europe is heading for another Great War. Soviet Russia, with its limitless manpower, with Stalin’s ruthless thirst for conquest, will emerge from it to dominate Europe. The Soviets, keen to recover lost territories, will dress up old Tsarist appetites in Communist ideology. Revolutionary movements financed and encouraged by the Soviets, and ultimately loyal to the Soviets, will spring up in the most unlikely places. The empire will be at risk. India will be the first to go.

  Colonel Menzies: What would you have us do, St John, that we are not already doing?

  Colonel Vivian: Can we suppose you have something up your sleeve?

  The Hajj: Be a damn fool turning up here if I didn’t.

  Father: Could you tell us about it?

  The Hajj: I shall have to kill you all immediately if I do.

  General laughter.

  Father: You haven’t interrupted your exploration of Arabia’s Empty Quarter to hold back on us, old boy. Do spit it out.

  The Hajj: We must dangle an Englishman under their Soviet noses and entice them into recruiting him. Not just any Englishman but someone from the upper class, someone with a smart school tie, someone who the Russians think can worm his way into the Establishment. You see, we don’t have to penetrate Moscow Centre, we need only let Moscow Centre think it has penetrated our Secret Intelligence Service. Then we can feed them foolscap until the cows come home, along with the occasional real secret that they are able to verify. There is no end to the possibilities that will open to us. We can get into Stalin’s brain and do his thinking for him, we can manipulate his decisions. If we succeed, Stalin’s NKVD will become a wholly owned subsidiary of our SIS.

  Father: I presume you have a candidate in mind.

  The Hajj: I do, actually. My boy, Kim. He was made for the Great Game. I had him flirt with Communism at Cambridge to establish his Marxist bona fides. When he came down from university, I packed him off to Vienna to spout clichés about the Homo Sovieticus rising to historical challenges whilst he himself participated in the inevitable Communist mutiny against Dollfuss. He cabled me for permission to marry one of Moscow Centre’s local agents and bring her to safety in London. Not surprisingly, the Russians went for the bait. Swallowed it hook and sinker, you might say. The Soviet NKVD recruited my boy on a bench in Regent’s Park one month ago.

  Father: St John, do I understand you to be telling us that your boy Kim is a Soviet agent?

  The Hajj: They think he is. We must let the Russians go on believing they have an agent who can work his way up in the Foreign Office or on Fleet Street. With time they will come to trust him. At some point—after, say, he has made a reputation for himself as a diplomat or a journalist—you might recruit him into His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The Russians in Moscow Centre will break open bottles of bubbly, which is an amusing way of celebrating, actually—the one time I drank Soviet champagne it was flatter than stale beer. Think of the possibilities, man. Think of the disinformation we can feed them, think of what we can learn simply from the questions his Soviet handlers ask. We’ll be able to figure out what they don’t know.

  Colonel Menzies: Outrageous, what?

  Colonel Vivian: Rather boggles the mind.

  Father: Outrageous, indeed. But filled with the potential to influence the way the Soviets see the world. Can we agree that this meeting never took place?

  The Hajj: What meeting?

  * * *

  St John Philby turned up at Colonel Menzies’ door on the hour. He was still wearing scuffed tennis runners but the rest of his attire was straight from the flea market on Portobello Road: dark, pinstriped, threadbare, double-breasted with a frayed Westminster school tie knotted to the Adam’s apple, and the tip of what I took to be a Cellucotton gas mask filter spilling from his breast pocket.

  “You look fit,” Colonel Menzies remarked, greeting the Hajj at the door of the Holy of Holies, shaking his hand and pulling him into the room at the same time. “You will remember Colonel Vivian,” he added. “He still
minds our counterintelligence shop, which ought to be right up your alley, what?”

  “Great day,” Colonel Vivian remarked as he poured claret into three small glasses and offered one to the visitor.

  “Great day for those who can’t see beyond the tip of their nose,” St John said. He carefully set his glass on the low table, lowered himself smack center onto the couch, and reached down to undo his laces. “Ask me, our troubles are only just beginning.”

  “How so?” Colonel Menzies inquired.

  “Zhukov’s army beat us to Berlin. Red Army took Warsaw and Budapest and Sofia and Prague. I don’t see Stalin bringing his boys home anytime soon. What with the Americans abandoning the European Theater to concentrate on the Nips, nothing stands between the twelve-million-man Red Army and the English Channel. Uncle Joe may be tempted to organize a victory parade that finishes up on the French beaches facing our white cliffs of Dover.”

  “We have been dealing with that eventuality,” Colonel Vivian said. “We’ve had your boy feeding them bogus information designed to ruin Stalin’s appetite—aerodromes in Britain and Ireland crammed with B-29 bombers, the bombers armed with that new atomic explosive device the Americans tested in the New Mexican desert yesterday, even a list of five hundred Soviet cities we plan to obliterate if the balloon goes up.”

  Philby senior sank back into the cushions of the couch. “I take it my boy has earned his keep here.”

  Colonel Menzies beamed. “Kim was born to be a spy. He took to espionage like the proverbial fish to water. I don’t know how he keeps the various story lines straight in his head, but he does. I can tell you that despite his young years, he has become a rising star in Section Five, an expert in counterintelligence We had him in charge of our Iberian operation for most of the war.”

  Colonel Vivian said, “The Americans were so impressed with your boy they seconded one of their bright OSS recruits fresh from Yale to learn counterintelligence at his feet. Chap name of Jesus Angleton.”

  Colonel Menzies wagged a finger. “His name was James Angleton. Jesus was his middle name.”

  “Whichever,” Colonel Vivian muttered.

  The old animosity between the two colonels was never far from the surface.

  Colonel Menzies ignored his deputy. “You will get a kick out of the latest, St John. Once the end of the war came in sight, we opened a small Soviet Russia counterintelligence operation. Change of focus, what? Called it Section Nine. Decided to put Kim at the helm of this new tender-to.”

  “Russians probably couldn’t believe their good fortune when Kim let his handler know about this assignment,” Colonel Vivian said. “Seen from Moscow, they will think they have their mole running our anti-Soviet operation.”

  “Do the Yanks know about Kim being a double agent?”

  “I should think he qualifies as a triple agent,” Colonel Vivian remarked.

  Again Colonel Menzies took no notice of his chief of counterintelligence. “Not counting Kim, only the three of us in this room”—Colonel Menzies noticed me, sitting off to one side taking notes on a clipboard—“or should I say the four of us, yes, with Miss Sinclair here, only the four of us know the real story.”

  Colonel Vivian, restive, helped himself to more claret. “Wasn’t always smooth sailing, mind you. In the late thirties Moscow Centre had an obstinate female analyst who was convinced your boy was feeding them disinformation.”

  Colonel Menzies finished the story for him. “It was touch and go for a time. The analyst presented her conclusions to several constituencies in Moscow Centre, raising doubts about your boy’s loyalty to the Soviets. She was eventually discredited, we’re not sure why, we’re not sure by whom. The only thing we know is that at some point she was convicted of attempting to assassinate Stalin and shot.”

  “All of which brings me to the third act,” the Hajj said.

  “The third act? Dear fellow, with a bit of good fortune we can keep this show on the road indefinitely,” Colonel Vivian said.

  “I have given this a great deal of thought,” Philby senior said. “We should not count on the Russians being eternally duped. If the NKVD is anything like your Secret Intelligence Service, there will be a new generation of analysts coming up through the ranks. One of them will want to make a name for himself. What better way than to suss out a British agent. He will analyze all of Kim’s cables, beginning with 1934 when he told the then Rezident, the one who was later summoned back to Moscow and shot, that he had gone through my private papers and found no evidence I was working for the Secret Intelligence Service.”

  “That was true,” Colonel Vivian observed.

  “It was true enough to pass muster,” the Hajj agreed. “But a careful analysis will reveal that most of the so-called secrets my boy passed on either served British interests—as when he informed Stalin of the date Hitler had chosen for the German invasion of Soviet Russia—or were patently false. Take this business of the aerodromes in Britain and Ireland being crammed with B-29 bombers armed with that new-fangled atomic thingamabob. The Russians will eventually figure out it was not true. And an analyst worth his salt will raise the possibility that my boy knew it wasn’t true when he passed the information on to his handler, which would suggest he is a double agent.”

  “Oughtn’t that to be triple agent?” Colonel Vivian interjected.

  Both Colonel Menzies and Mr. Philby looked intently at Colonel Vivian, who scratched at his cheek in discomfiture. Colonel Menzies turned back to the Hajj. “Do finish your thought, St John.”

  “I was saying, when enough doubts are raised, the scales will tilt against my boy and the suspicion that he is a double agent—yes, I think double agent is the more accurate term—will begin to set in.”

  “What you’re telling us is quite unsettling,” Colonel Menzies allowed. “Can we preempt?”

  “We can and we should,” the Hajj said. “I should think the shelf life of an agent leading two lives is roughly ten years. Kim came on board your shop in 1940. If my hunch is right, we can continue on as we are for another five years.”

  “What then?” asked Colonel Vivian.

  “Long about 1950, we might arrange for my boy to be exposed as a longtime Soviet agent.”

  The colonels stared at the Hajj, speechless.

  “Am I to understand you to be suggesting—” Colonel Vivian sputtered.

  “Surely you are pulling our leg,” Colonel Menzies said.

  I could see that Mr. Philby seemed quite pleased with himself. “I have never been more serious,” he declared. “It ought to be simple enough. The Americans could break out phrases from old encrypted Soviet diplomatic telegrams indicating that one of their agents inside the F.O., whilst serving in the British Embassy in Washington, visited his pregnant wife in New York weekends. That will lead directly to Kim’s old Cambridge sidekick Donald Maclean—”

  “You would have us expose Maclean!” Colonel Vivian exclaimed.

  “He is, after all, a genuine Soviet agent,” the Hajj reminded his listeners.

  “Fair point,” Colonel Menzies murmured.

  “My boy,” Philby senior went on, “would in the course of his counterintelligence activities discover that the Americans were closing in on Maclean. He could dispatch Guy Burgess to warn Maclean to run for it. If Kim could manage to frighten Burgess, perhaps he would lose his nerve and run for it with Maclean. We would be rid of two Soviet spies without the awkwardness of bringing evidence against them in a public trial. When the two surfaced in Moscow, the Americans would zero in on my boy—he was, after all, a Cambridge comrade of theirs since the early thirties. Surely someone would recollect it was Burgess who put forward Kim’s name for recruitment into SIS. And how else could Maclean have been warned to flee if not by Kim?”

  The colonels were hanging on the Hajj’s words as if he were recounting the plot of a spy novel. “Then what?” Colonel Vivian demanded a bit breathlessly.

  “You would have to sack Kim, of course. He would be put through t
he wringer by your interrogators, but he would deny everything. ‘Me, a longtime Soviet penetration agent? Ludicrous!’ Any evidence against my boy—operations of his that turned sour, agents he ran who were rounded up by the Russians—could be written off as mere coincidences. Given the American qualms, Kim would have to be put to pasture. Perhaps he could go back to journalism. Yes, why not? A journalist covering the Middle East, which he knows well, from, say, Beirut. A bit of time would need to pass for the Russians to digest all of this. One fine day you could come up with the single detail—a witness who swears Kim tried to recruit her as a Soviet spy, something along those lines—that makes the case against Kim airtight. He would be given the choice of admitting his treachery and doubling back against the Soviets, or going to prison for the rest of his life. At which point he, too, would run for it. The Russians will have an exfiltration plan in place for just such an eventuality. My boy would surface in Moscow, where he would be given a hero’s reception. He would be welcomed into the Heart of Darkness, Moscow Centre in the Lubyanka. The Russians would be fools not to use Kim’s skills. He would become a senior Soviet intelligence officer, consulted on past and current operations, asked to vet prospective penetration agents, invited to give his opinion on potential targets.”