Enemies Within

by Richard Davenport-Hines

  In 1945 Russia won its first victory in a major war since 1812. This triumph put the federated socialist republics in a ‘rough and boisterous mood’, reported Clark Kerr from Moscow. ‘The Soviet Union tends to disport itself like a wet retriever puppy in someone else’s drawing-room, shaking herself and swishing her tail in adolescent disregard for all except herself. We must expect her thus to rampage until she feels that she is secure from any unpleasant surprises in neighbouring countries.’ Only then would the Soviet Union ‘settle down to the serious and respectable business of … her relationship with Great Britain under the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, a commitment by which she sets great store’.54

  Rather as the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 arose from Russian participation in the European war and not from a Marxian crisis of capitalism, so the continent-wide destruction of 1939–45 enabled Stalinist Russia to impose communism in eastern and central Europe. It was by the conquests of Soviet troops that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finnish Karelia, Carpathian Ruthenia, a quarter of Austria and one-third of Germany were swallowed in the Soviet maw by the end of the European fighting. The decision of the supreme allied commander General Dwight Eisenhower not to push eastwards hard and fast had momentous and enduring consequences. The settlement at Yalta signified less than the demarcation lines between east and west on VE Day in May 1945, and the brute fact of Soviet armies of occupation. The Russians’ military advances westward in the spring of 1945 were the necessary precursor to the political scheming and constitutional malpractices whereby, during the next few years, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia became Soviet satellite states. The solidarity of the Soviet bloc was ensured by the Warsaw Pact of 1955, which was not dissolved until 1991.

  Owen O’Malley, as ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, was aghast at the concessions made to Stalinist domination of Europe. His Polish contacts understood that ‘British public opinion needed tactful handling, having been misled for many years into wishfully thinking that Stalin & Co., though a bit rough in their methods, were not bad fellows at bottom.’ The Poles were however astounded by Churchill’s courting of Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta conferences, and by the false hopes that led the western powers to yield to Russian pretensions. O’Malley’s contacts were shocked that government ministries, newspapers, the BBC, the Army Education Department and the Political Warfare Executive had all expressed trust in Soviet intentions. The Poles were dismayed, he said, that these bodies employed foreigners, some like Smolka/Smollett with anglicized surnames, ‘of multiple allegiances, self-appointed saviours of society, bitter little Messiahs, do-gooders, cranky professors, recognizable fellow-travellers and numberless camp-followers from among the frustrated and ambitious intellectual proletariat – all burrowing like wood-beetles, corrupting and softening with their saliva and excrement the oaken heart of England’. The Soviet occupation of Poland was brutal. ‘The Russians really control nearly everything,’ the young diplomat Robert Hankey reported from Warsaw in August 1945. ‘People disappear (in driblets not masses) all the time, and the police have a foul habit of sitting in a house and picking up anyone who comes to it.’ The captives taken in these household ‘blockades’ were kept starving in cellars for weeks. ‘This is essentially a polizeistaat,’ Hankey informed the FO of Stalinist Poland. He found common ground, though, in the gender of the outright Polish leaders who avowed their communism: ‘They are real men, and one can get on with them.’55

  Bill Cavendish-Bentinck, newly installed as Ambassador in Warsaw, summarized a speech by the communist Vice-Minister of Justice complaining that the Polish judiciary was defying the will of the people. ‘The courts of justice must state decisively on whose side they will be in their everyday work,’ declared the minister. ‘They must understand that there is no room for courts of justice that have regard for formal truth.’ If judges did not support ‘the interests of the vital matters of the nation, then Polish democracy will be compelled to establish new forms of courts of law at the cost of resigning from the worship of the professional skill of Polish courts of justice’. This was the reality of the Soviet bloc.56

  Until the publication in 1998 of Sir Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, the patriotic, indoctrinating bias of Anglophone history focused attention on Anglo-American campaigns in Italy, France, the Low Countries and Germany. It discounted the fact that the principal theatre of war in Europe had been in the east, where the Red Army had bested the Nazis. Losses in the region were appalling: 6 million Jews were exterminated there; Poland lost 17 per cent of its population (5.7 million people), Lithuania 14 per cent (370,000) and Yugoslavia 11 per cent (1.7 million). England was largely indifferent to the national oppression, local barbarities and individual cruelty visited by Red forces on the European mainland. Just two instances need be given of the nature of the new enemy. In 1945 a German field hospital, which had been installed in a school at Gorizia, an elegant town on the Italian–Slovenian border, was captured by communist partisans. The sixty-four patients were tied to their beds, with a detonator taped in their mouths. Slow fuses attached to the detonators were wound over chairs so that all could watch the progress of their deaths. When the Grenadier Guards reached the hospital later, sixty-three of the Germans were dead in bed without their lower jaws. One wounded German had survived because the detonator in his mouth failed to explode. Count István Bethlen, the elderly Transylvanian liberal who had kept fascism from power in Hungary when he was Prime Minister, was seized at this time, and soon perished in a Moscow prison. His widow was bound to a post and used as a living scarecrow on a Hungarian farm, with branches tied to her arms and feathers stuck in her hair.57

  The truth of the times was enunciated by Sir Victor Wellesley in 1944: ‘Europe can be saved only if the nations which compose it can free themselves from pre-war prejudices and conceptions and bring themselves to think on broader lines than in terms of nationalism and sovereignty. They must come to visualize the continent and not the nation as the economic unit of the future.’ Wellesley included his own country in the continental revisionism: ‘We must all begin by being good Europeans rather than good nationalists, and then follow on by being good world citizens.’ It was in a similar temper that Labour’s Ernest Bevin started as the first post-war Foreign Secretary. He proved one of the greatest holders of that office. The primary objective of his foreign policy, he declared in 1945, was to be able to go down to Victoria station for the boat train and buy a ticket to where the hell he liked without a passport.58

  CHAPTER 12

  The Desk Officers

  Modrzhinskaya in Moscow

  If a trusting office culture in London and Washington facilitated security failures, the Stalinist environment of distrust was disabling to Soviet espionage. Of all the available sources for Russia’s global intelligence during the People’s War, the Cambridge ring of five – as desk officers in the intelligence services or the Foreign Office – were the best. Yet the purges of 1936–8 had degraded intelligence analysis in Moscow and disrupted the running of foreign agents. The first-class material provided by the Cambridge spies did not seem threatening enough to convince Stalinist paranoiacs. Moscow’s analysts mistook intelligence of unparalleled quality received from London as cunning misdirection by British intelligence. They rejected the evidence supplied by Philby that SIS had no agent network in Russia. They refused to believe that SIS had not possessed a pre-war Moscow station. They never accepted that the Soviet Union was a far lower intelligence priority for London than Britain was for Moscow. (The paranoia of Stalin’s bureaucracy similarly led Moscow intelligence analysts to mistrust Duncan Lee, the most highly placed Soviet informant within OSS. Given his traceable communist sympathies, it seemed incomprehensible to Moscow that he had first been hired in Washington, and then heavily promoted within OSS; they suspected him of being a double agent duping them with misdirections.)

  The morbidly suspicious young head of the NKVD’s British department Elena Modrzhinskaya was a doct
rinaire who so little understood England, although she spoke English, that she thought the ring of five were ‘aristocrats’. Her obstinate misjudgement and repeated bad decisions exemplified Robert Conquest’s observation that every organization behaves as if it is run by the secret agents of its opponents. Her paranoid doubts put an onerous burden on Anatoli Gorsky, né Gromov @ HENRI @ KAP @ VADIM, a dour, rigid, irritable Stalinist who had come to London in 1936 as assistant to the rezident and as cipher clerk. One after another his chiefs were recalled for liquidation or purging, so that in the critical eighteen months from September 1938 until March 1940 he had to run, as a solo operation, fourteen agents (including the Cambridge spies), take his own photographs, encrypt or decrypt messages, translate and type. In February 1940 he was abruptly recalled to Moscow because the NKVD, and particularly Modrzhinskaya, feared that it was receiving misinformation. Not until November that year did Gorsky return to London, where he remained until 1942, when Boris Kreshin @ BOB replaced him. During the ten months of 1940 when the Cambridge spies lost contact with Gorsky and the rezidentura, Philby, Burgess and Blunt (but not Cairncross or Maclean) gave their material to Edith Tudor-Hart, who ensured that it reached Moscow through Bob Stewart of the CPGB. Talking of Russian spy rings in 1943, Stewart boasted: ‘I know more about this bloody job than most people. For years I saw every bloody man that come on the job … I might have been caught quite easy, because I carried the stuff.’1

  Modrzhinskaya and her colleagues felt sure that the ring of five could have exposed British agents in the Soviet Union or in the Soviet embassy in London if they had been sincere; and thus thought them falsifiers and shams. She also attacked the ring of five for trying to recruit Footman of SIS and other dubious candidates. In October 1943 Moscow reiterated to Kreshin that, after analysis of the voluminous intelligence received, they were sure that the five were double agents, working on the instructions of SIS and MI5. As far back as their years at Cambridge, Philby, Maclean and Burgess had probably been acting on instructions from British counter-espionage to infiltrate socialist or communist activism in Cambridge. This was the only possible explanation for why both SIS and MI5 were employing known Cambridge communists in confidential positions in the secret state. Modrzhinskaya thought herself hyper-vigilant, and reiterated a nagging question: why had no British agent been exposed in Russia?

  The Great Patriotic War was the Soviet Union’s title for the conflict that from a different perspective Americans and western Europeans called the Second World War. The ring of five were active on Moscow’s behalf throughout the conflict, taking fearful risks, seizing initiatives and enduring secret tensions that could not be shared or mitigated by alcohol. Yet (with the partial exception of Maclean) they were ill-appreciated, and were handled with a maladroitness that was inherent under Stalinism. The similar obtuseness in the NKGB’s mishandling of Elizabeth Bentley in New York and Washington had immensely damaging repercussions on all sides: the NKGB network in the USA was compromised and for a time defunct; agents’ lives were ruined; some were convicted of perjury, although there was generally insufficient evidence for treason charges. Vice-President Henry Wallace, whom Maclean admired, had recently proclaimed the Century of the Common Man, and brutal, thoughtless populism gained political legitimacy in the republic. In turn better modulated voices opposed Stalinist-like purges or Gestapo-type round-ups in the government departments of the English-speaking powers.

  In 1944 Anatoli Gorsky was transferred from London to serve as NKGB chief in the USA with legal cover at the Washington embassy. He disliked Bentley’s recalcitrant independence and lack of formal indoctrination in tradecraft, and was worried by the potential for incriminating discoveries by the FBI because many of her sources knew one another or worked together. Over the course of a year Gorsky supplanted her in running the Washington networks, isolated her from her friends, kept her in solitude in a hotel bedroom, where her alcoholism deteriorated, and urged her to embark for the Soviet Union without legal documentation. She rightly saw this plan as the preliminary to her liquidation, and felt mounting fears for her life (Juliet Poyntz, the Nebraska-born communist responsible for recruiting Bentley, had been abducted in New York in 1937 and was never seen again).

  There is little doubt that Gorsky urged that she should be killed. Her life was threatened to her face by Lement (‘Lem’) Harris, disinherited heir to a fortune derived from Texaco oil, Chicago commodity-dealing and Wall Street brokerage, who had joined the CPUSA in order to champion the cause of poor agricultural workers. Feeling thoroughly endangered, Bentley went on 8 November 1945 to FBI offices in New York, where she volunteered a long statement with names. Hoover’s agency gave a summary of her accusations to Sir William Stephenson, the shady Canadian financier who was the liaison between SIS and the FBI. Stephenson’s report to SIS in London was soon seen by Philby, who warned Moscow of what was pending. Gorsky, who left the US once it was known that Bentley had compromised him, urged that she should be poisoned or shoved under a subway train.

  Philby at SIS

  In 1940 Philby began living with Aileen Furse, a store detective in Marks and Spencer’s Oxford Street branch. They had three children before he divorced Litzi Friedmann and married Furse in September 1946: Josephine (1941); John (1942); Dudley (1943). Two further children were born after the marriage, Miranda (1946) and Harry (1950). Philby reported on his common-law wife to Moscow: ‘Her political views are socialistic, but like the majority of the wealthy middle class, she has an almost ineradicable tendency towards a definite form of philistinism (petite bourgeoise), namely: she believes in upbringing, the British navy, personal freedom, democracy, the constitutional system, honour, etc.’ He assured the NKVD that he could ‘cure her of these confusions, although of course I haven’t yet attempted to do so; I hope the revolutionary situation will give her the necessary shake-up, and cause a correct revolutionary response.’2

  Philby was in France as a war correspondent of The Times when the French armies surrendered and the Third Republic fell in 1940. During the ensuing evacuation of British subjects, Philby met Hester Marsden-Smedley, who worked for SIS under the cover of the Daily Express correspondent in Belgium and Luxembourg. On her recommendation he was invited to meet Leslie Sheridan, former night-editor of the Daily Mirror, who ran an SIS section disseminating false rumours and black propaganda, and had perhaps been given Philby’s name by Burgess. Both Marsden-Smedley and Sheridan recommended Philby to Marjorie Maxse, formerly a propaganda organizer at Conservative Central Office, who was wartime chief of staff of SIS Section D charged with sabotage and covert activities. Valentine Vivian recalled in old age that during lunch with St John Philby, whom he had first met before 1914, he asked about Kim, who was on a list of potential SIS recruits. ‘He was a bit of a Communist at Cambridge, wasn’t he?’ asked Vivian. ‘Oh,’ replied St John Philby, ‘that was all schoolboy nonsense. He’s a reformed character now.’ This senescent reminiscence should be treated charily. There is no evidence that any SIS officer involved in Kim Philby’s recruitment in 1940 knew of his allegiances at Trinity or his activities in Vienna. What got him into ‘the pool’ – the list of potential SIS recruits – was that he was an active and ambitious young man, who had shown courage under bombardment in Spain, who had been decorated with a medal by Generalissimo Franco and who had won acceptance at fascist military headquarters. There had been palpable bias against the left in his reports on the civil war for The Times. During the French collapse he had shown self-mastery and self-reliance. Vivian admitted that he had given a vague security endorsement to the young Philby: ‘I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people.’ But it was not family connections or the Westminster School tie that got Philby into SIS: it was his stupendously convincing cover story from Spain.3

  Some junior intelligence officers, who knew of Philby’s communist past, were ‘rather cheered than depressed by this unusual recruitment’, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was one of them. ‘My own view, like that of most
of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.’4

  When Philby joined SIS in June 1940, the memory of its late Chief Admiral Sinclair was omnipresent, not least because his successor Sir Stewart Menzies and other pre-war staff kept photographs of ‘Quex’ in their rooms. There was little for Philby to do at his desk in Section D. After SOE had absorbed Section D, Philby was sent in the autumn of 1940 to instil techniques of underground propaganda into the trainee saboteurs of many nationalities who were billeted by SOE on Lord Montagu of Beaulieu’s estate in Hampshire. With his Beaulieu pupils he developed the idea of the ‘subversive rumour’, which had to be plausible if it was to undermine morale: subversive rumours were to abound in post-war England, for the benefit of Soviet Russia, after the defections of Burgess, Maclean and himself. ‘Truth is a technical advantage,’ he told his students while instructing in the composition of convincing subversive leaflets. Many of his pupils, especially those from Poland, Mitteleuropa and the Balkans, were adamant anti-communists. ‘Gentlemen, I have no wish to stop you blowing up the Russians, but I would beg you, for the sake of the Allied war effort, to blow up the Germans first.’ Moscow’s agent inside Beaulieu coined an effective slogan for his trainees: ‘Germany is the main enemy.’5