Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  Early in 1933 a socialist leader named Koloman Wallisch revealed that truckloads of weapons, comprising up to 50,000 rifles and 200 machine guns, falsely documented as scrap metal, had been shipped from fascist Italy to the Hirtenberger munitions works. The leader of the reactionary Heimwehr (home defence force), Prince Starhemberg, a brainless swashbuckler with eighteen castles and countless millions, was complicit in this illegal consignment. After international protests, Dollfuss conceded that the trucks must return to Italy; but when they reached Innsbruck on their journey south, their contents were seized in a Heimwehr ambush. The exposure by Wallisch and fellow socialists of Italy’s illegal arms traffic to Austria convinced the Heimwehr that their conspiracies would always be foiled by the existence of the Social Democratic party backed by a free press.

  A month later, in March 1933, Dollfuss extinguished the parliamentary system. His pretext was a procedural row caused by the disallowing of a card vote left by a socialist deputy who hurried to the lavatory before a crucial division. On Dollfuss’s orders, the boulevard outside the parliament was blocked by barbed wire, the surrounding area was packed by mounted police armed with carbines, and stormtroopers prevented deputies from entering the building. In the ensuing months Dollfuss enacted decrees that restored the death penalty, deprived the urban proletariat of benefits, protected landlords, enriched his peasant followers, curbed the right to trial by jury, regulated the free press and put private letters under surveillance. Beginning in June (the month when Philby consulted Maurice Dobb about his future political duty), the Nazis waged a campaign of assassination, bombing, arson, sabotage and booby-traps aimed at individuals, bridges and telegraph and telephone systems. The British were indifferent to these preliminaries for a German seizure of Austria. In Room 22 George Antrobus considered Austria to be ‘a ridiculous petty state’ with ‘no chance of ultimate survival’. English newspapers mostly ignored the Nazi terrorism: when Naomi Mitchison, a cousin of the MI5 officer Maldwyn Haldane, heard Austrian atrocity stories, she thought, ‘Oh, it’s only the Manchester Guardian again.’5

  Slocombe concluded from his talk with Dollfuss in June 1933 that the Pocket Chancellor wished to establish ‘a semi-dictatorship, a mild, paternal, Catholic version of the dictatorship of Mussolini’. In August Dollfuss secured Mussolini’s promise that Italy would protect Austrian sovereignty; but in return he was required to give the Heimwehr liberty to extirpate the Social Democratic party. On 11 September Dollfuss held a huge rally to mark his adoption of Italian-model fascism. ‘I announce the death of Parliament,’ he declared. ‘The liberal-capitalist economic system’ and ‘socialist materialism’ were, he promised, finished. Social Democrats were ‘the modern anti-Christ’. His 100,000 followers made a pretty sight as they cheered: Heimwehr fascists in green uniforms, Tyrolese national guards in snow-white stockings, black-and-red jackets and sugar-loaf hats topped by quivering osprey plumes, blue-and-yellow scout battalions and peasant irregulars in a variety of picturesque Alpine costumes. Dollfuss believed that Catholic fascism could defeat both German national socialism and revolutionary Marxism. ‘Hitler is Jesus Christ for the whole of Europe,’ Austrian Nazis told George Earle, the US Minister in Vienna, at this time. ‘If the Jews continue resisting in Austria, the greatest pogrom in history will be executed.’6

  Anti-fascist activism

  It was around the time of the Dollfuss–Mussolini pact that Philby arrived in Vienna, at the instigation of Dobb’s Paris contacts, to work for the International Workers Relief Organization. He rented a bedroom in a pleasant apartment belonging to Israel Kohlman, a civil servant of Polish origins who was active in Jewish welfare work. It was probably in the month of Dollfuss’s public avowal of an Austrian fascist future that Philby became the lover of Kohlman’s daughter, an intense, exciting divorcee named Alice (‘Litzi’) Friedmann. She was two years older than Philby. Previously she had been recruited by Gábor Péter, a hunchbacked, limping Hungarian tailor and Stalinist tough, into Vienna’s illegal communist underground resistance. An MI5 source who had known ‘Litzi’ in Vienna described her in 1951 as ‘an out-and-out Communist, [who] enjoys good living and is certainly not the self-sacrificing type … she was obviously above the level of card-holding Communists and never seemed to want for money’.7

  Under her influence Philby deplored the moderate, temporizing response of Social Democrats to Dollfuss’s ‘Fatherland Front’. He raised money for Friedmann’s group, which used him as a courier delivering sealed packets (containing money and political instructions) to communists both in Austria and abroad. His British passport and general bearing ensured that he was unhindered on five trips to Prague and two to Budapest.

  In Vienna, on 12 February 1934, the Heimwehr seized control of official buildings, railway and radio stations, strategic roads and telephone and telegraph bureaux. Their thugs attacked the offices of trade unions and newspapers. Socialist leaders (including Vienna’s mayor, Seitz) were detained in lightning swoops. Viennese social housing, notably Karl-Marx-Hof, suffered heavy bombardment as hateful symbols of progressive ideals. The victors were so proud of their destruction that afterwards they sold picture-postcards showing battle-scarred workers’ flats. The Heimwehr’s Social Democrat counterpart, the Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Defence Association), was fatally punctilious. Its paramilitary forces did not defend Friedshof station because they lacked platform tickets. A detachment surrendered in a park because their retreat from the advancing Heimwehr was marked with signs forbidding anyone to walk on the grass. An estimated 5,000 Social Democrats were wounded and up to 2,000 killed. Koloman Wallisch, who had revealed the previous year’s arms scandal, was caught in the snows near the Slovenian border and garrotted. Numerous Viennese were arrested after denunciation to the police by their neighbours, sometimes for pay, but mainly so as to avoid arrest themselves.

  Philby learnt enduring lessons in the need for ruthlessness during the Vienna fighting. Julius Deutsch, commander of the Schutzbund there, was proud that his militia had never plundered a single shop. There was a sardonic riposte when Deutsch’s boast was repeated to a communist revolutionary turned diplomat en poste in Vienna:

  very nice, to be able to say that throughout the resistance to a brutal counter-revolution my men always behaved like perfect gentlemen. But had I been in command, I would rather have been able to say that my men had behaved like scientific revolutionaries. Very pretty, that nobody plundered … But if those not organized or armed for fighting had started to revenge themselves for this attack on their liberties by breaking open shops, things might have been very different. If every minute and from every quarter of the city had come a telephone call to the Chancellor: ‘Mr Dollfuss, they are stealing my shoes – Mr Dollfuss, send police, they are stealing my cheese – Mr Dollfuss, quick with the police – bad men are stealing my motor-car’ – police would have been running here, running there, and back again to arrest plunderers, and my poor troops would have had a chance to defend themselves against less terrible odds.8

  For ten days Philby distributed money, food and clothes to stricken comrades. Many of the vanquished socialists took refuge in Vienna’s sewers. Wounded men were tended there for weeks by selfless physicians, mostly Jewish, at the risk of their careers. An underground network smuggled the comrades to safety once they could be moved: Hungary returned all refugees, the Czech border was almost impassable, but hundreds got away – some to Soviet Russia. Philby was not directly involved with the sewer escapees, but collected respectable, inconspicuous clothes for them to travel in. He begged five suits from Eric Gedye, the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Vienna. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried to Gedye, ‘I have six wounded men in the sewers in danger of the gallows.’9

  The future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was visiting Viennese socialists when the sound of machine-gun fire started in the streets. The cannonading of Karl-Marx-Hof and the murder of Wallisch were his first experiences of fascist action. Similarly, the Vienna street violence was
‘a watershed’ in the political career of the future Labour jurist Elwyn Jones who, after returning to England, appealed in the Cambridge Review for funds to aid destitute Viennese families. By contrast, Leo Amery, a former Cabinet minister who sat on the boards of German metallurgical companies and had a Hungarian Jewish mother, assured his fellow Birmingham Conservatives that there had been an attempted socialist ‘revolution’ in Vienna, that the bombarded housing blocks had been designed as ‘fortresses’ and that Dollfuss exhibited ‘wise and generous clemency except in the summary punishment of the few ringleaders’. In a single week nine men were hanged, three sentenced to life imprisonment and sentences totalling 400 years imposed on thirty-one prisoners. Vanquished socialists decided that the anti-fascist resistance had been hobbled by social democratic scruples, and that the future lay with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Austrian communist party membership, which had been negligible, rose tenfold after February 1934.10

  In the aftermath of the fighting, Philby joined Marxist reading-groups and studied international press reaction. Litzi Friedmann was vulnerable as a communist from a Jewish family. In order to bestow the protection of British citizenship, Philby married her on 24 February in Vienna town hall. This was more than a marriage of convenience, because it rested on mutual sexual attraction, loving affection and shared political excitement. Once Friedmann’s British passport had been obtained in April, they left for London, where they joined Philby’s mother in Acol Road.

  Philby’s recruitment as an agent

  Philby’s initial idea to join the civil service was frustrated when his economics tutor at Trinity declined to give him a reference that did not mention his political allegiance. He was also rebuffed when he went to CPGB offices to try to join the party. He was interviewed by a party functionary who disliked Cambridge-educated middle-class men, and left the office without the promise of a green party card.

  At this moment there was a decisive intervention by a woman who had been known in Vienna as Edith Suschitzky. Under that maiden name, she has already been mentioned as someone with whom Maurice Dobb was in sympathy. Under her anglicized married name of Tudor-Hart, she has already been named as the supplier of a Leica camera to Percy Glading’s spy ring and as the NKVD recruiter who enlisted Arthur Wynn at Oxford. She was a photographer, who had run a shop that served as cover for the courier network for which Philby had visited Prague and Budapest. Born in 1908, the daughter of a Viennese social democrat bookseller, she first came to England in 1925 as a governess. She became the lover of Alexander Tudor-Hart, a Cambridge-trained physician and communist. He fathered children by different women, and dismissed sexual exclusivity as ‘puritanical & sentimental’, ‘mid-victorian’ and ‘historically doomed’. After attending a workers’ demonstration in Trafalgar Square, Suschitzky was ordered to leave Britain in 1930. ‘I am terribly sorry to hear about the police & Edith,’ Dobb wrote from Trinity to Tudor-Hart. ‘I have fumed with quite useless anger since I heard of it.’11

  During 1932–3 Suschitzky worked for Russian intelligence in Italy and Austria, in tandem with a Hungarian called Árpád Haaz, with a photographic studio as her cover. She was briefly detained after their activities had been discovered. Like Litzi Friedmann with Philby, she married Alexander Tudor-Hart in order to obtain a British passport: both marriages were a combination of political pragmatism and sexual attraction. Under the name of Edith Tudor-Hart she began cover work as a photographer and undercover work as a talent-spotter for the London illegals. Knowing of Philby’s recent Viennese courier work, she invited him and Litzi Friedmann to tea in May 1934. Their stories of the street-fighting, and Philby’s communist ardour, impressed her. Would Philby care to meet someone of unspecified interest? she asked. He did not hesitate in answering ‘yes’.

  Tudor-Hart stopped Philby from spoiling his cover by joining CPGB: his future lay as a conspiratorial worker rather than as an open activist. On a June morning she led him on an intricate journey designed to lose shadowers. They took a taxi, descended to an Underground train, walked the streets, hailed another taxi, changed to a third – a process lasting several hours. Eventually she brought him to a bench in the Regent’s Park, where a handsome, blue-eyed, curly-haired man was sitting. This was Arnold Deutsch, whom Philby knew only by the codename OTTO (and who was also Glading’s handler). During a relaxed conversation, mainly in German, Philby agreed to work for the anti-fascist cause. It is improbable that any organization was mentioned at this preliminary meeting. Tudor-Hart and Deutsch doubtless spoke of representing international Marxist interests without specifying any nation or communist front. This was certainly the practice of Ignace Reiss, Deutsch’s Paris counterpart. But there can have been no doubt that Deutsch was acting for Soviet communism after he recommended that Philby should enhance his general utility to the cause by taking a language course in Russian (Philby never achieved proficiency).

  In 1985, three years before his death, Philby gave an account of the Regent’s Park meeting to the Russian television presenter Genrikh Borovik. ‘You’re a brave fellow, I was told how you behaved in Austria,’ Deutsch reportedly told him. ‘The Party doesn’t play a big part in British life,’ Deutsch continued. Rather than helping the anti-fascist movement by touting the Daily Worker in working-class districts, he should make the bolder decision to become an infiltrator of bourgeois authority. The bigger the risk, the larger the potential dividends, as capitalists knew. Philby was enticed by Deutsch’s suggestion because he was too inexperienced to know what it entailed. In 1934, so he told Borovik, he could not imagine the reality of his future: ‘the difficult, exhausting and often very ordinary, even boring, work that required enormous patience, will-power and control’. Hitherto he had dreaded trying to reconcile his revolutionary yearnings with the conformist drudgery of a bourgeois career; but now he was empowered with a secret, romantic purpose. He found his talks with Deutsch inspirational. At every meeting Deutsch made a show of his empathy by asking about Philby’s plans, difficulties, pleasures and animosities. The young man felt valued, and responded with grateful admiration for his handler’s composure, clarity and fixed commitment. He gave OTTO the highest compliment payable by an Englishman of his generation to a foreigner: ‘he had a marvellous sense of humour’.12

  It seems possible that, until Deutsch met Philby, Moscow’s espionage services misunderstood the ranking of English universities. The greatest universities in Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Ireland, Scotland and other European nations were in their capital cities: Vienna, Prague, Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh. Apparently Moscow’s agents assumed that London University mattered more than Oxford or Cambridge. It was perhaps under this illusion that Deutsch had enrolled in a psychology department there. But with the advent of Philby, Deutsch and his group belatedly noticed the possibilities in the older universities.

  Philby’s one eccentricity was his aversion to the sight, the smell, even the mention of apples. He was also scared of horses. Otherwise he had a hardy masculinity: he was indifferent to personal possessions, unobservant about rooms and their contents, and bored by gossip, archness, pretension and snobbery. After years of resentful adolescent attendance at Westminster Abbey, he disparaged institutions of which the conventional English were proud, never supported England during international sporting tournaments, yawned at English landscape and mocked complacent middle-class stereotypes. Philby was given the Russian codename of SYNOK and the German codename of SÖHNCHEN (London illegals preferred to use German codenames to disguise their Russian connection in case of interception).

  Deutsch remitted to Moscow a character-sketch which depicted the young recruit as shy, irresolute, mild, solitary and emotionally awkward. He thought him a bad liar, sentimental in outlook and a pessimist who would need encouraging praise to keep him steady. Deutsch neither mentioned Philby’s handsomeness nor predicted that masculine vanity would motivate Philby’s undercover career. Once enrolled in a secret, exclusive and powerful cohort which survived by subterfuge an
d misdirection, Philby discovered that successful deception felt empowering. He became imbued with purposive ambition. The words of his contemporary Philip Jordan apply to the young man who became SYNOK: ‘ambition, if you have it, consumes your whole being, and should be as secret and precious as your sexual organs; for if you have none, you are without the ability to create – impotent, castrate, pitiable’. Once Philby became a man of secrets, with plans and rules which could not be shared, his isolation was intense, but he never felt like a political eunuch. As Glading had also found, an intricate, risky clandestine life brought a unique perspective on world events and swelled feelings of secret importance. By enlisting with the communist cause, Philby chose to live in a constant state of emergency.13

  Two years earlier Whittaker Chambers had begun work as a Soviet spy in Washington DC. ‘Underground work is one test of a communist,’ he wrote twenty years later in his repentant memoirs. ‘Few other party activities make such insistent demands upon his devotion, discipline, resourcefulness, and courage, because few others require him to demonstrate daily, in action, his revolutionary faith beyond all appeals of country, family, friendship, and personal interest.’ Although Chambers found the stealthy tradecraft of his work to be a nuisance, he felt pride in working for world revolution and proletarian dictatorship. Once the ‘startling novelty’ of underground work has gone, ‘and in my case that happened within the first few months’, wrote Chambers, ‘revolutionary purpose alone makes it bearable’.14

  As to Austria, in July 1934, three months after Philby and Friedmann had left Vienna, local Nazis seized Dollfuss’s office, mortally wounded him and denied him the comforts of a priest while he bled slowly to death. ‘We must keep out of trouble in central Europe at all costs,’ the Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon wrote two days later: ‘of course I abstained entirely from any hint of action.’ Nearly four years later, in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria. The communist view of the British ruling class was hardened by the House of Lords foreign policy debate a few days later. Ivan Maisky, Moscow’s Ambassador in London, sat aghast listening to the legislators’ wishful thinking. The veteran Marquess of Crewe, who had been Viceroy of Ireland during the 1890s, called for Czechoslovakia to give Gladstonian ‘Home Rule’ to Sudeten Germans who lived within its borders. Germany’s union with Austria had been ‘inevitable’, said Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘If the division had continued much longer it might have been a continuing sore spreading infection to other nations.’ Lord Redesdale claimed that the Anschluss had prevented the outbreak of a central European version of the Spanish civil war: ‘the gratitude of Europe and of the whole world was due to Herr Hitler for averting a catastrophe of such staggering magnitude without shedding one drop of blood’. Lord Stonehaven, reported Maisky, ‘called for the publication in English of an unabridged translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf at the price of no more than a shilling a copy – so impressed was he by the profundity and foresight of the Führer’s writings’. The Labour spokesman Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede insisted that it would be against English interests to intervene in central Europe. ‘There could not be one person in a 100 who knew where Czechoslovakia was,’ he said to the sound of laughter. ‘Other countries might commit crimes … but the attitude of getting on a pedestal and lecturing other people would not bring peace to Europe.’ After sitting through the debate Maisky commented: ‘The men sitting on these red benches are historically blind, like moles, and are ready to lick the Nazi dictator’s boots like a beaten dog. They’ll pay for this, and I’ll see it happen!’ It was similar loathing of complacent, reactionary defeatism that drove young Philby to treachery.15