With much of Europe occupied by Nazi forces, the neutral capitals of the continent – Stockholm, Madrid and Lisbon – were the only common ground on which the Abwehr and SIS vied on equal terms. In the summer of 1941 Tómas (‘Tommy’) Harris and Dick Brooman-White, head of SIS operations in Iberia, both cognizant of Philby’s previous experiences in Spain, recommended him as the head of the new, expanded SIS Sub-section 5d covering Spain and Portugal. Philby in his memoirs My Secret War attributed this opportunity to ‘the Old Boy network’, and harped on the ‘mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the Establishment could do such things’ as spy for Russia. My Secret War is an exercise in spreading Philby’s old speciality, subversive rumours. He wrote it under Soviet direction, with the purpose of damaging confidence in SIS – partly by deploying the language of class suspicion and antagonism. Trust was not the exclusive frailty of the supposed ruling class: the success of confidence-tricksters in cheating people at every social level shows that individuals seldom expect to be told lies, to hear falsified personal histories or for cruel betrayals to be meticulously planned.6
Philby began his new Iberian work in September 1941. His efficiency, his patience, his calm under pressure, his inordinately long working hours were immediately distinctive, and soon made him seem near-indispensable. Favourable judgements of him owe nothing to ‘the Old Boy network’: everything to the fact that he was superb at his job. ‘Kim was not an intellectual in the All Souls sense; he was not drawn to abstract ideas at a high level of generality,’ began an assessment of 1973 drawing on numerous off-the-record sources. ‘The aptitude required for counter-espionage is a minute study of the subject on which one is working. His desk was deluged with telegrams from his men in the field, with pressing requests for tip-offs from MI5, with situation reports on Abwehr strength … and … the vital raw material of the radio intercepts from GC&CS.’ To clarify this mass of material, to trace the significant patterns in it and to keep its ingredients in due proportion required a kind of all-absorbing scholarship. Ever since 1934 he had been training his brain and his emotions to compartmentalize his activities. He disallowed any room for overlapping mental clutter. At his desk he dictated lucid reports, gave clear briefings and wrote minutes in a small, neat, legible handwriting which seemed to signify all his virtues.7
In a novel by J. C. Masterman published in 1956, one of the chief protagonists is a blackmailer who spent the war as an SIS double agent in Portugal and has since betrayed his closest friends. Masterman never said or did anything by chance: it is hard to believe that the resemblance of the fictional Evelyn Bannister to the real-life Kim Philby is accidental. ‘Lisbon became a kind of international clearing-ground, a busy ant-heap of spies and agents, where political and military secrets and information – true and false, but mainly false – were bought and sold, and where men’s brains were pitted against each other,’ Masterman wrote of Bannister @ Philby. ‘I believe that if he had dined with the Borgias and been faced with two glasses of wine one of which was probably poisoned, he could have lifted and drained one of them without a tremor of the hand. I believe, too, that he would have been quicker than any other man to note the smallest indication which might suggest that one glass was more likely to be safe than the other. And the very risks of his life were meat and drink to him.’ His further description of Bannister applies equally to Philby. ‘Calculated, steel-cold courage he had, and yet he shrank from physical violence, and that, I fancy, was his heel of Achilles.’ Masterman’s character could order, without a tremor, the killing of an inconvenient agent, ‘but if, as an officer, it had been his duty to draw his revolver and shoot, let us say, a man for cowardice, I can see him flinching and going to any lengths to escape the task’.8
Philby’s staff appreciated him. ‘If one made an error of judgement he was sure to minimize it and cover it up, without criticism, with a halting stammered witticism,’ recalled Graham Greene in his foreword to My Silent War. ‘He had all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to us.’ His super-efficiency was ubiquitous. He did not fawn on the chiefs of SIS: nor did he chafe with impatience at their methods or allow himself disrespectful jokes. In 1943 Trevor-Roper predicted that the organizational problems of SIS would solve themselves. ‘As each area becomes really important, it will have to be given to Philby, and thus, in the end, he will control all, and Cowgill and Vivian and the rest will drop uselessly from the tree, like over-ripe plums.’ Philby received his extra energy and motivation from what Trevor-Roper later called ‘the exquisite relish of ruthless, treacherous, private power’.9
Trevor-Roper, who was told in 1952 by White of MI5 about the suspicions of Philby, grew fascinated by the psychological problem of his former SIS colleague. After lunching with White in 1967, Trevor-Roper asked himself apropos Philby: ‘How can any man, being an intelligent man, devote his whole life to so negative a satisfaction as the secret destruction not merely of the impersonal system around him, but of all the personal relations – relations of friendship, dependence, trust – which have been built up, in good faith, around him?’ But then Trevor-Roper wondered about the degree of Philby’s intelligence. ‘Sharp, shrewd, superficially sophisticated – yes; but is (or was) he in any sense intellectual? By contrast with the other members of the Firm he did of course seem to be an intellectual; but did he in fact read, could he in fact think?’ He never mentioned a book to Trevor-Roper, except a single reference to Marx. ‘Nor could I ever get him to talk on serious topics: he would always keep conversation on a superficial plane, in ironic, Aesopian language, as if he knew of the differences which would divide us should we break the surface on which, till then, we could happily and elegantly skate.’10
Philby resumed contact with the Viennese Marxist with whom he had collaborated in 1934–5, Peter Smolka @ Smollett. After Smolka had been put in charge of the Russian Section of the Ministry of Information, Philby asked him to provide items of interest for remittance to Moscow. They agreed that when Smolka wished to convey material, he would take two cigarettes from a pack, holding them in the shape of the letter ‘V’, and give Philby one while he smoked the other. Under the codename ABO, Smolka funnelled good material to Philby and was introduced by him to Burgess. When Gorsky forbade further use of ABO in 1941, Blunt, Burgess and Philby privately agreed that Blunt would check Smolka’s MI5 file, that Burgess would handle him and pass his material to the rezidentura as his own. Gorsky was infuriated when in 1943 he discovered from Burgess’s indiscretions and Blunt’s admission that his instructions to drop ABO had been ignored. He went so far as to recommend that Moscow Centre should break contact with the Cambridge trio.
Some of Smolka’s secret notes, which he passed to Burgess with the intention that they go to Moscow, were later found by MI5 secreted in Burgess’s belongings. From the Ministry of Information he peddled the line to officials in other departments that the Soviet Union had no need of territorial expansion for economic strength, was less interested in ideological expansion than it had been in the 1920s and would only seize buffer zones necessary for its strategic defence. Smolka recommended a passive British policy towards the Soviet Union. Freed from military dangers, its citizens would develop a taste for the comforts of bourgeois consumerism, and Russia accordingly drift from communism to capitalism. He advised his fellow Whitehall officials that they should ‘persuade our high-ups’ to try pursuing policies that gave the Russians no cause for feeling insecure. Given the possibility of Soviet communism evolving towards democracy, ‘The ruling class of Russia must therefore be free of fear from foreign intervention. In order to free the Russians from this fear and allow them to become democratic, we must show them that we intend to leave them alone and trust them. In fact, we want to initiate a virtuous circle.’ Amid other material, Smolka provided Burgess in May 1942 with a résumé of remarks by William Ridsdale, the waspish but trusting head of the Foreign Office’s News Department. ‘The talks with Molot
ov are one long sweat,’ ‘Rids’ said of the Anglo-Soviet treaty negotiations. ‘These bastards are absolute shits to deal with. The trouble is they know they are shits, they know we know they are shits, and they don’t seem to care a damn what we think of them … You make a little concession to them and being an English gentleman you instinctively expect that the other fellow will make some decent countermove or at least acknowledge that you have been trying to be decent to him – not pushing, they go straight on to their next demand.’11
Patrick Reilly became the Foreign Office liaison in SIS in 1942: his influence was resented by Valentine Vivian, who spoke of ‘the unfair advantage of the All Souls style’. Reilly acknowledged that the Service had been underfunded and understaffed before 1939, and that some of its officers were intellectually nondescript. He however spurned the fashion for discounting the pre-war SIS as a collection of retired Indian Army officers and Anglo-Indian policemen jumbled with ‘“metropolitan young gentlemen whose education had been more expensive than profound”, rich playboys recruited from White’s and Boodle’s, failed stockbrokers and the like’. This myth confused the pre-war Service with the wartime recruits, and relied on excessive generalization taken from a few examples of St James’s Street clubmen. Reilly emphasized that SIS officers were in aggregate ‘a devoted body of men, loyal, discreet, with a strong esprit de corps, content to work hard in obscurity for little reward’.12
The wartime masterstroke of Philby was to jockey his way to promotion in 1944 to be head of SIS Section IX, which was charged with collecting and analysing material on communist espionage and subversion. In his memoirs, he dates the preliminaries for the reactivation of Section IX as occurring in 1943, so as to mislead readers into believing that SIS, with Foreign Office connivance, was preparing to turn against the Soviet Union two years before the Hitler war had been won. Felix Cowgill had joined SIS as an anti-communist expert, in the expectation that he would be put in charge of an expanded Section IX. Instead, his wartime efforts had been directed against the Nazis. He made many enemies, especially among temporary wartime recruits to the intelligence community. These included the classicist Denys Page and the historian Trevor-Roper, both Christ Church associates of Masterman, and the Bletchley Park code-breaker Leonard Palmer, an academic philologist who after the war became a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, where Masterman was Provost. This trio were outspoken critics of Cowgill’s mismanagement and hogging of deciphered radio traffic.
Cowgill returned to London after establishing Special Counter-Intelligence Units in liberated Europe to find that in his absence Philby had been named to take charge of Section IX with effect from November 1944. Section V was taken over by Philby’s friend, nominee and semi-stooge Tim Milne – a fact that is notable for its omission from Philby’s memoirs. In usurping Cowgill, Philby got rid of a staunch anti-communist and ensured that Britain’s counter-communist efforts would be accessible to Moscow. His mischievous claim in his memoirs that the Foreign Office helped the intrigue by which he ousted Cowgill was denied by Reilly. Philby’s appointment to lead Section IX convinced Trevor-Roper and others that he was being groomed to succeed as ‘C’, the Chief of SIS, some time in the 1950s.
Maclean in London and Washington
Maclean was confronted in January 1940 by his NKVD handler in Paris, Kitty Harris, who was his illicit lover, about changes in his behaviour. He admitted to her that he was in love with a young American, Melinda Marling, to whom he had confided his communist allegiance and espionage activities. He had been compelled to these indiscretions, he explained, after Marling had halted their affair with the explanation that she found him intolerably evasive and erratic. When he explained that he had a double life, as a communist penetration agent, she made the capital mistake of reconciling with him. On 10 May 1940 Germany invaded France. Just over a fortnight later the British Expeditionary Force began its evacuation from Dunkirk. Marshal Pétain set out on his quest to save France from what he called ‘Polonization’, meaning ultra-brutal Nazi occupation. On 10 June, the French government declared Paris an open city, Italy declared war on Britain, and Maclean married Melinda Marling in a hasty ceremony in a mairie in Paris. Owen Wansbrough-Jones, Maclean’s senior tutor at Trinity Hall, later volunteered to MI5 that having met her, he thought her a typical ‘intellectual Communist’.13
Back in London, Maclean worked in the Foreign Office’s prosaic General Department, where he handled shipping and contraband matters. The Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie recorded a visit to the Office in the week that France fell to find ‘three or four pleasantly satirical and studiedly casual young [diplomats] draped about the room drinking their tea and eating strawberry shortcake’. These men knew as well as anyone what was at stake for Europe: their afternoon tea and ironic jokes were their deliberated response to totalitarianism, said Ritchie, and a symbolic expression of ‘What We Are Fighting For.’ Maclean was more earnest and perhaps more self-obsessed than these sane, amusing youngsters. In December 1940, he assured Moscow Centre of his relentless commitment to espionage: ‘it is my life’, he told them, ‘I live for it’. He undertook not to endanger his position. ‘I can’t say that I like my work. But I admit that it is one of the uses in our great struggle to which I am most suited, and I intend to stand by it until I am relieved of it.’ This zealotry and subterfuge set him apart from his contemporaries in the Office, who upheld and epitomized a gentler system. He fostered an impression that his fellow-travelling sympathies had been jettisoned, but he did not convince all of his contemporaries. To Fitzroy Maclean, who was no relation but had read history and classics at Cambridge and joined the Diplomatic Service a year ahead of him, he admitted being a communist in 1935. When they met again four years later, possibly in a Foreign Office corridor, Fitzroy Maclean challenged him to say if he was still a communist and received a feeble reply, but did not report his suspicions. Nor did the author Christopher Sykes, when Maclean admitted being a communist to him around 1943.14
In April 1944 Maclean was transferred to the Washington embassy. His eldest son Fergus was born there in September of that year. A second son Donald followed in 1946. His daughter Melinda was born soon after his defection in 1951. Maclean’s reaction to his new surroundings doubtless resembled those of the diplomat-politician David Eccles on an official mission to Washington in 1941: ‘I was stupefied by the number and size of the cars, four lanes on each road bowling along head to tail at 40 m.p.h. For the first time I realized we were not the richest people. This revelation gives a new edge to patriotism, it is better and purer to love the second-rate.’ Eccles found American officials ‘frisky and foolish’, because they were too impatient to listen to the answers to their own questions. ‘They love themselves ecstatically, and gape at the world in a trance of self-satisfaction … with a million Buicks on the road and the President going to church.’15
Lord Halifax was the Ambassador under whom Maclean initially served in the Washington embassy. In 1946 Halifax was succeeded by the newly created Lord Inverchapel, who as Archie Clark Kerr had been many things, including Harold Nicolson’s Edwardian lover and Ambassador in Moscow during 1942–6. Since the 1980s Inverchapel’s success in handling Stalin has been used not as evidence of his diplomatic aptitude, but as a reason to blackguard him as a traitor. As his biographer Donald Gillies declares, ‘These baseless smears are invariably encountered in the more sensational and hysterical outpourings of right-wing molehunters, whose methods too often involve exaggeration and misrepresentation.’ Inverchapel was a complicated man. In Guatemala, early in his career, he had been supervising the erection of a marquee for a garden party to mark George V’s birthday when some urchins, mistaking the tent for a circus, asked when the animals were arriving: thereafter he referred to diplomatic colleagues as ‘the zoo’. He was witty, expressive and fearlessly candid, as shown by his description of Churchill’s visit to Moscow in 1942: he envied, so he wrote, Churchill’s ‘ability to transform his face from the rosiest, happiest, the mo
st laughing, dimpled and mischievous baby’s bottom into the face of an angry and outraged bullfrog!’16
Inverchapel was a raunchy bisexual. When he received his peerage, he took three heraldic mottoes: ‘Blast!’; ‘Late but Hungry’; and ‘Concussus Surgo’, meaning ‘Having been shaken, I rise’, which was given its meaning by the heraldic supporters, two naked, full-frontal and promisingly unaroused male athletes. He was attracted to cheerful, straightforward young men, but married a beautiful Chilean heiress in 1929, was divorced by her in 1945 and remarried her three years later. On relinquishing the Moscow embassy he was presented by Stalin with an inscribed photograph, two bottles of brandy, a huge pot of caviar, a panther-skin rug and (what was far rarer than any of these) an exit visa and valid passport for a Volga German youth named Evgeni Yost. The visa had been his special request to Stalin: Yost, a former embassy footman promoted to be the Ambassador’s valet-masseur, had been accused of ‘hooliganism’ and was at risk of hard labour or execution. Stalin had released Yost in the manner of a tsar liberating a serf, and in Washington Inverchapel liked to tease po-faced Americans by saying, ‘I have a Russian slave at the embassy given to me by Stalin.’ Maclean first met Yost when he arrived in Washington with Inverchapel, and showed his disapproval by hostile glares. Possibly he suspected that Yost was a watchdog set on him by the NKVD. Probably he feared that the interloper Yost would bring American surveillance on the embassy and therefore complicate his own arrangements. Inverchapel used to lie in hot baths reading telegrams and official papers, and hand each item, when he had finished his scrutiny, to Yost, who was standing by. Yost would then carry them to the Ambassador’s private secretary. There would have been ample chances for chicanery if Yost was a spy; but he was an abused Volga German, not a Russian, and hated the Soviet system. He remained with his saviour until Inverchapel’s death.17
Enemies Within Page 41