by Max Hastings
The Russians had renewed contact with him nine months earlier, but his initial reports about life at Broadway earned their scorn. He asserted that the Soviet Union stood only tenth on MI6’s penetration target list, an incredible proposition to Centre, which was convinced that the existential purpose of the British secret service was to achieve the destruction of the Soviet Union. Russia’s leaders inhabited a society in which nobility of conduct was alien, indeed dangerous to the state. They were thus unable to credit the fact that for the war’s duration even the most impassioned anti-communists, including Churchill, had set aside their hostility to throw everything into the struggle against the Axis. This was emphasised in 1940 when Walter Krivitsky, the former NKVD resident in Holland, defected to the Americans. On 23 January, MI5 debriefed him at London’s Langham hotel. Krivitsky described almost a hundred Soviet agents in Europe, sixty of them working against British interests, including sixteen who were British subjects. Yet MI5, overwhelmingly preoccupied with the Nazi menace, felt able to commit only a single officer to investigate Soviet penetration, and it is thus unsurprising that he failed to identify an unnamed British journalist, mentioned by Krivitsky as having helped the NKVD in Spain to plan Franco’s assassination, as Kim Philby.
Moscow’s interest was reawakened by Philby’s appointment to head the Iberian section. Thereafter he provided Centre with almost a thousand wartime secret documents, channelled through Anatoly Gorsky, now reappointed as NKVD resident at the Soviets’ London embassy. Short and fat, Gorsky was a caricature Stalinist whose merciless chill roused the repugnance of the Cambridge spies, though insufficiently so to put them off their work. At this stage, Philby’s most significant contribution was to fuel Soviet paranoia about the prospect that Britain would make a compromise peace with Hitler, through the agency of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. This was pure mischief-making, presumably designed to raise its agent’s standing with Centre. In the same spirit, Philby reported that his MI6 masters had abandoned a plan to kill Admiral Canaris on one of his frequent visits to Spain, allegedly because the British anticipated that he might become the intermediary in bilateral negotiations.
Inside Broadway Buildings, Philby affected an old 1914–18 army tunic of his father’s. With his stammer, shabby clothes and diffident manner he seemed, in Robert Cecil’s words ‘like one of Graham Greene’s seedy anti-heroes’. Yet Malcolm Muggeridge warmed to an apparent fellow-free spirit: ‘His romantic veneration for buccaneers and buccaneering, whatever the ideological basis – if any – might be. Boozers, womanisers, violence in all its manifestations, recklessness however directed he found irresistible.’ Philby once told Muggeridge, in a familiar half-self-mocking key, that Göbbels was a man he felt he could have worked with.
Philby’s qualities commanded an extravagant premium inside Broadway: Hugh Trevor-Roper found him ‘an agreeable and effective person … intelligent, sophisticated and even real’. The historian was hated by many of his career colleagues because he never concealed his contempt for them, but Philby flattered and caressed them. The consequence was that Trevor-Roper the patriot was mistrusted – repeatedly threatened with dismissal and once with a prosecution for treason, for conveying details of Broadway’s failings to Lord Cherwell – while Philby the betrayer secured his masters’ absolute confidence.
Common to all the Cambridge Five was a disdain for loyalty not merely to country, but also to family and friends. In 1935 Philby rifled his own father’s papers on NKVD orders. He made much of his relationship with an old Westminster schoolfriend, Tom Wylie, in hopes of exploiting Wylie’s role as a War Office official. Goronwy Rees broke contact with Centre following the Nazi–Soviet Pact, an ideological bridge too far for him. Donald Maclean spat at Rees: ‘You used to be one of us, but you ratted!’ The writer promised the other traitors that their secret remained safe with him, and kept his word, an unedifying moral compromise. Burgess, however, remained fearful of Rees’s knowledge. In the spring of 1943 he urged his Soviet handler that his friend should be murdered. When Moscow dismissed this suggestion as a clumsy British provocation, at a meeting with Gorsky on 20 July Burgess offered to kill Rees himself, which was also thought superfluous.
Centre often sought to press money on its British agents. Most professed scruples, declaring themselves enthusiasts for an ideal rather than mercenaries. Anthony Blunt once surprised his handler by demanding, and receiving, £200 for some undisclosed personal purpose. He signed a receipt for the cash which thereafter reposed in the NKVD’s files, much to the satisfaction of Centre: the long, lean, boundlessly devious art historian was thus chained to its oar. Meanwhile, Philby’s lifestyle could only be sustained by an income from Mother Russia as well as from MI6.
As is often the case with double agents, both sides had moments of doubt about his loyalty. In November 1942 Stuart Hampshire, one of the Radio Intelligence Bureau’s Oxford dons, produced an important report on the power struggle taking place in Germany between Himmler and Canaris. Philby secured a ban on its circulation, without giving a reason. This caused Hampshire to say thoughtfully, ‘There’s something wrong with Philby,’ though neither he nor his colleagues could figure out what. Long afterwards, they concluded that Kim was probably under orders from Moscow to stifle any information that might encourage the British to talk to German opposition groups. At the time, Hugh Trevor-Roper was so annoyed by Philby’s behaviour that he gave a copy of Hampshire’s document to Lord Cherwell, which earned him yet another formal reprimand from Menzies and Valentine Vivian. He was ordered to write a formal apology for communicating with the prime minister’s adviser, rather in the spirit of a schoolmaster punishing an errant child by imposing ‘lines’.
Meanwhile in Moscow, at exactly the same time Elena Modrzhinskaya, one of the NKVD’s most respected analysts and an obsessive conspiracy theorist, urged that all the Cambridge Five were part of a British plot, ‘an insultingly crude capitalist provocation’. This seemed the more credible since three of the group’s early handlers – Deutsch, Theodore Maly and Alexander Orlov – had already been branded as traitors. Modrzhinskaya complained that the content of the copies of MI6’s signals to the British embassy in Moscow, passed to Centre by Philby, were far too banal to be authentic. The Russians never abandoned their conviction that their own country teemed with British spies. An NKVD report of 30 October 1945 stated: ‘The English intelligence organs took advantage of improved opportunities during the war and intensified the espionage against the Soviet Union. A total of around 200 British agents worked in the USSR during the war, of which 110 were in Moscow, 30 in Murmansk and over 20 among various delegations.’ This was an exquisite fantasy. MI6 had lacked any Moscow station since 1936, and the British ambassador vetoed a proposal to establish one.
By contrast, in the course of 1941 the NKVD’s London station forwarded to Moscow 7,867 British classified documents, 715 on military matters, fifty-one on intelligence, 127 on economics, and the rest on political or other topics. A similar traffic flow was sustained through the later war years. To preserve the security blanket over sources, inside Centre almost all original material was destroyed after being translated and paraphrased by desk staff. Such was the bulk, however, and so severe the shortage of English linguists, that thousands of pages were dispatched to the incinerators unexamined. Yuri Modin, one of seven Moscow desk staff charged with handling this mountain of material, later reflected sardonically: ‘What would [the spies] have thought if they had known that their telegrams and reports had barely a 50 per cent chance of being read?’ When Philby provided an address book of British agents in far-flung places, the NKVD brushed it aside: its chiefs wanted only material about MI6 activity in countries where Moscow had explicit interests.
But some of the British spies’ reports, true and false, found their way into the Kremlin. A typical missive from Centre to the USSR’s State Defence Committee was dated 21 April 1942: ‘This is to pass on to you the information from an agent, which NKVD of the USSR has received from Londo
n as a result of conversations between the sources and an official from the American embassy (“Gilbert”) and a number of MPs. 1. On The Second Front. It has become clear that … apart from active opponents of Churchill who think he is sabotaging the opening of the Second Front from his hostility towards the USSR, the delay is being viewed from two angles: Political aspect: there is disagreement among members of the government as to when offensive operations [an invasion of the Continent] should start … Many of those who know Churchill, including Lloyd George, say that he remains haunted by the failure of the Dardanelles campaign [in 1915] when he was blamed for the Gallipoli disaster … According to “Gilbert” … only 4 British divisions have had specialised amphibious training.’ This report, which continues at length, is not much different in style, accuracy and usefulness from routine diplomatic and for that matter newspaper reporting.
A similar NKVD report from London, dated 28 July 1942, was broadly sound in substance, but quoted some risible sources: ‘Our fixed agent in London sent the following information, obtained by an agent. Most officials have recently been asserting that the Second Front will not be opened this year. Such people as Lady Colefax – the agent-informant of the Conservative Party’s executive committee … are now declaring with almost complete assurance that the Second Front will not happen.’ Sibyl Colefax was, in reality, a mere social alpinist and conspicuously foolish woman, of whom a contemporary joke suggested that she scrawled on one of her luncheon invitations ‘to meet the mother of the Unknown Soldier’.
Meanwhile Donald Maclean told Moscow that Poland’s General Władysław Sikorski dismissed talk that the Katyn massacres of Polish officers were Nazi work, saying he was confident that they had been carried out by the NKVD, as of course they were. Anthony Blunt warned that the Polish government in London would never accept the proposed redrawing of its country’s borders. This was one of the British messages that appears to have had some influence on the Kremlin, confirming Stalin in his determination to spurn the ‘London Poles’ and create his own puppet regime. The MI5 officer also provided Moscow with a useful list of British sources recruited among the personnel of exile European governments in London.
The Russians received much information that was plain wrong, and reflected only their obsession with supposed conspiracies against themselves. For instance, on 12 May 1942 ‘a reliable source’ reported to Moscow that an official from the German embassy in Stockholm had arrived in London aboard a Swedish aircraft bearing peace proposals whereby: ‘England will stay intact as an empire. The Germans will withdraw troops from Czechoslovakia and restore its old borders. All Eastern Europe will be restored to its previous borders. The Baltic states will also remain independent. After England accepts these conditions Germany will reach an agreement with the USSR.’ The Russians assumed the worst about admittedly muddled Anglo-American policy in Yugoslavia. On 28 March 1943 an NKVD source in Algiers – possibly an OSS informant – messaged almost hysterically: ‘In collaboration with the Americans the English have instructed [General] Mihailović not to join any active operations [against the Germans], but instead to build strength and materiel and make his army as capable as possible [for operations against Tito and his communist partisans]. The English and Americans are helping Mihailović despite being well aware of his links with the Germans … In parallel with this the English have decided to exploit all opportunities to compromise Marshal Tito. Among other things they are using the neutral Swiss media for this purpose.’
Moscow nursed a running grievance about the British refusal to forward to them raw Ultra recrypts. The modern Russian intelligence official website asserts as fact in 2015: ‘Although the British intelligence service was getting reliable information of the plans of German army leadership at the Eastern Front, the English preferred to keep this information secret from their Soviet ally. It was through agents among the British secret service that the Soviet foreign intelligence service did acquire this information.’ Yet Yuri Modin admitted that London had reason on its side. The Russians were themselves haunted by fears of Nazi agents inside Soviet headquarters – including the NKVD – which were probably unjustified, but cost two suspect generals their lives.
In May 1943, MI6 created a new Section IX, tasked to study communism and Soviet espionage, though its staff was authorised to work only with such material as could be gathered outside the Soviet Union. In accordance with Churchill’s stern diktat, no penetration activities were carried out – not that these could have achieved much anyway. When an Estonian named Richard Maasing was debriefed by MI6, Philby displayed a keen interest, unsurprising to posterity: he wanted to discover who were Maasing’s contacts in territories claimed by the Soviet Union. Early in July 1944, MI6’s Lisbon station received some warning of the Hitler bomb plot from Otto John of the Abwehr. Philby was insistent that this report had no significance and should be ‘spiked’ – almost certainly for the familiar reason that his Moscow orders obliged him to do everything possible to frustrate Allied intercourse with the German Resistance. After the Abwehr officer Paul Vehmehren’s 1944 defection in Istanbul and subsequent debriefing, Philby passed to the Russians Vehmehren’s long list of Catholic conservative contacts in Germany: all those in the East were liquidated by the Russians in 1945–46, as actual or potential anti-communists.
Moscow’s suspicions of Philby nonetheless persisted, intensified by an episode in the autumn of 1943. He supplied to his handlers a copy of a supremely sensitive Ultra decrypt of a signal to Tokyo from the Japanese embassy in Berlin, detailing Baron Ōshima’s 4 October conversations with Hitler and Ribbentrop. The version wirelessed to Moscow omitted the concluding paragraph, because Bletchley had only a corrupted text. When the NKVD secured from another source a copy of the same signal, but including the missing section which discussed a possible separate peace, Fitin, the chief of the First Directorate, assumed that Philby had deliberately omitted it from his delivery on Broadway’s orders. Moreover, all the Cambridge Five were damned by their continuing failure to provide details of the non-existent British spy rings in the Soviet Union. On 25 October 1943 Centre told its London residency that it was plain Philby and his friends were double agents. It dispatched eight men to London with an explicit brief to secure confirmation of this, by shadowing their movements. Since none of the newcomers spoke English, the ‘tailing’ operation against the NKVD’s own sources was less than successful.
Only in August 1944 was there a change of heart in Moscow, a renewal of belief that the Cambridge spies were serving Soviet rather than British interests. Centre wrote to its London station that new evidence about Philby ‘obliges us to review our attitude towards him and the entire group’, who were ‘of great value’. In Moscow and London alike, rival employers now clamoured for his services. His old newspaper The Times strove to persuade him to return to journalism; one of its senior executives characterised him as ‘steady, experienced and wise’. Philby did indeed consider such a career change, but instead continued on his path of secret devastation at Broadway, facilitated by the disastrous decision of Stewart Menzies to appoint him to head MI6’s anti-communist espionage section. ‘C’s’ protégé rewarded him in his own inimitable fashion, by spending many hours at MI6’s St Albans out-station, photographing the files of its agents for Moscow’s edification.
Long afterwards, following the exposure of Philby, Burgess and Maclean, and amid a tidal wave of recriminations against the intelligence community for admitting such men to their councils, Hugh Trevor-Roper reflected upon both their recruitment and its cost to British interests: ‘If [Philby] had been turned down as an ex-communist, and never afterwards exposed, our fashionable left-wingers would have denounced his exclusion, just as they now denounce his appointment, as an infamous example of social and intellectual discrimination … Until 1944 I do not believe that Philby had much opportunity, or much need, to do harm. His work was against the Germans, in Spain, where Russia was powerless and, by now, uninterested. He had no access to political
secrets. Anyway the interest of the Russians was, at that time, the same as ours: the defeat of Germany.’
Philby then wrote from his Moscow refuge, commenting on Trevor-Roper’s remarks, and bitter strictures against him: ‘I note that you abhor treason. So do I. But what is treason? We could spend many days motoring around Iraq and discussing this without getting much nearer agreement.’ Trevor-Roper responded, ‘“What is treason?” You gaily ask, and, like jesting Pilate, do not wait for answer … To serve a foreign power, even to spy for a foreign power, does not seem to me necessarily treason. It depends on the foreign power, and the conditions of service … But to serve unconditionally, to equate truth with the reason of state of any power, that to me is treason of the mind; and to make this surrender to a form of power that is cynical, inhuman, murderous, that to me is treason of the heart also.’
Some of Moscow Centre’s officers retained doubts to the bitter end about the loyalties of the Cambridge spies. Elena Modrzhinskaya attended Philby’s 1988 funeral, in order to view his open casket. She was haunted by suspicions that even in death the British traitor might somehow have achieved a last deceit. Whatever the defiant claims of Philby and his kin to have taken pride in serving Moscow, the alcoholism and premature decay which overtook all save Blunt suggest that they found little contentment in treason. On Philby’s arrival in Moscow he was crestfallen to discover that he lacked any NKVD rank – no mere foreign informant was granted one. Trevor-Roper said he believed that Philby had enjoyed his supposed triumph over bourgeois capitalism less than he pretended: ‘Did Judas enjoy the Last Supper? I doubt it.’
Sir Dick White, later head of both MI5 and MI6, wrote to a friend after the Cambridge spies were exposed: ‘On balance it was not such a bad bet to fight the war on a united front. The cost was to have had Blunt in [MI]5, Philby in [MI]6 and B[urgess] and M[aclean] in the F.O. On the other side of the equation a massive intake of brain and abilities from the Universities which set entirely new standards of intellectual achievement.’ This was an extreme post-facto rationalisation of a disaster for the reputation of Britain’s secret services. Yet White was thus far right: that Britain’s war effort, not to mention its standing as a bastion of freedom, would have been much the poorer had every officer with a left-wing history been excluded from its inner councils.