Blunt left MI5 soon after the war to become Surveyor of the King’s Pictures (in charge of the royal art collection) and in 1947 was installed as Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square. He acted as an intermediary between Burgess and Philby for a period after the Volkov affair, and again from June to October 1947, and took photographs for them. Philby had no regular controller while he was head of station in Turkey, and used Burgess to communicate with Moscow. SIS developed a strategy of training exiled Armenians and Georgians from outlying districts on the edge of the Russian empire, and sending them over the frontier as spies or fomenters of unrest. Philby was involved in organizing several such ventures, including Operation CLIMBER of 1948, whereby two men were sent over the border from north-eastern Turkey into a mountainous district of Georgia with orders to infiltrate local communities. They vanished immediately: it is beyond doubt that Philby had betrayed them.
The true index of a man’s character, Cyril Connolly used to say, was the state of his wife’s health. During Philby’s posting in Istanbul, his wife began to harm herself. On one occasion she claimed to have been ambushed by a robber who hit her on the head with a rock. Her wounds, whether self-inflicted or the work of a real assailant, were certainly reinfected by her during her hospitalization. For the remaining ten years of her life, she was a recurrent self-injurer. The consequent domestic strain aggravated Philby’s drinking, which had intensified after the Volkov crisis.
Philby’s trail also began to be stalked by Maurice Oldfield. Like many effective intelligence officers, Oldfield had a historian’s mentality. He had envisaged a career as an academic historian before his mentor at Manchester University, Sir Lewis Namier, got him involved in intelligence work in European university cities during 1937–8. Installed from 1947 as deputy head of R5 counter-espionage section at SIS headquarters, Oldfield began studying a case that had disturbed him when he was in wartime Cairo with Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME). It concerned Alexander Rado, a cartographer who had joined the Hungarian communist party in 1918 and been recruited by the GRU while a refugee in Geneva in 1935. Rado was short, stout and foxy as well as fluent in six languages. Under the anagrammatic codename of DORA, and with the cover of a map business called Geopress, he ran a network spying on Germany. Alexander Foote was its radio operator. After the network had been compromised, Rado and Foote underwent separate tribulations before converging on Paris in November 1944. On 6 January 1945 they were both passengers on the first Soviet aircraft to leave the French capital since its liberation. Rado had been lured on to the flight with the promise of $80,000 and a guarantee that he would be permitted to return to Paris after a fortnight. But when the aircraft halted in Cairo, Rado fled from his hotel after an alarming night-time talk with Foote. He appealed to the British authorities for asylum and was interviewed by Oldfield, who saw that his defection could yield useful material.
When the Russians requested Rado’s extradition (as he was Hungarian it could not be called repatriation), his Cairo internment camp sought guidance from SIS. An unsigned reply came promptly from Broadway: ‘Release the subject to Egyptian police for onward transit to Moscow.’ When Rado heard this news, he cut his throat and resisted the guards who saved his life: ‘Let me die! Let me die!’ he cried. Meanwhile Foote, who was undergoing harsh debriefing in Moscow, was assured that Rado would be returned to Moscow by force. ‘Very soon there will be no place in the world where it will be possible to hide from the Centre,’ Foote was told. Oldfield and the camp commandant repeatedly queried the instructions from London, but always received the unsigned response: ‘Release the subject to Egyptian police for onward transit to Moscow.’ As late as June 1945 Cairo received an inquiry from London: ‘Please telegraph present position RADO case. Is he still in hands of Egyptian police?’ Rado was returned to Moscow, where he was condemned without trial to ten years in Siberia for negligence in allowing his cipher to be taken by the Swiss police. He went, said Foote, ‘to the living death of an NKVD [NKGB] labour camp’. (Foote was sent to the Soviet sector of Berlin under the alias of Granatov with instructions to establish a new identity as a German called Albert Müller; but conditions were so objectionable that in 1947 he defected to the British sector.)35
In rescrutinizing Rado’s case and while evaluating leakages about Erich Vermehren, an Abwehr agent in Istanbul who had defected in 1944, Oldfield noted that Philby had been a desk officer on duty at SIS at the time of the anonymous telegrams dismissing Rado and that Vermehren had been lodged in London in the flat of Philby’s mother. He recalled the Volkov debacle. By 1949, at the latest, Oldfield suspected Philby, although he had not a jot of evidence to support a denunciation. Indeed, it would have wrecked his career to attack a man with a golden reputation who was in line to become Chief of SIS. ‘Nowadays it is not what you do that counts,’ as Evelyn Waugh wrote in Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947), ‘but who informs against you.’36
CHAPTER 15
The Alcoholic Panic
Philby’s dry martinis
Shortly before the Semipalatinsk detonation in August 1949, it was decided to move Philby from Istanbul to Washington, where he was to serve as SIS representative and chief contact with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which had replaced OSS two years earlier. This was such a plum job that Philby did not consult Moscow before accepting it. Soon he was meeting the agency’s officers on a daily basis and betraying its activities to Moscow. His reports on the agency’s personnel, developing ideas, tactical plans and preconceptions enabled Moscow’s deception planners to incorporate existing CIA assumptions into their misdirections and thus make misinformation more credible.
In September, shortly before Philby’s departure to Washington, the CIA informed SIS that recent VENONA decryption had established that there had been intelligence leakages from the British embassy in Washington in 1944–5. Maurice Oldfield knew the advantages of fostering insecurity in a suspect against whom nothing could be proved, and was expert in turning agents after catching them. Just before Philby embarked for the United States, Oldfield gave him a counter-espionage briefing in which he described the VENONA material. This information, as Philby later admitted, worried him. It was obvious to him that the leaks which had been revealed by VENONA and were under active investigation had emanated from Maclean, whom he had recommended for communist recruitment as a penetration agent fifteen years earlier. Once he reached Washington, he saw each new batch of VENONA decrypts and reported to Moscow the encroaching threat to the security of the ring of five.
The progressive VENONA advances put pressure on Philby, Maclean and Burgess, and to a lesser extent Blunt, that sent them lurching into alcoholic debauches that were intended to quieten their anxiety and fear. (Cairncross was the exception in this, as in much else.) After the identification of Klaus Fuchs as an atomic spy in 1949, there was an intensifying effort to identify a Soviet spy who had been active in the British embassy in Washington under the codename HOMER and whom Philby knew to be Maclean. Philby learnt in June 1950 that VENONA decrypts mentioned an important spy – codenamed STANLEY – working for the Russians in 1945: he knew that he was STANLEY. More than ever, during 1949–51, Burgess spoke and behaved with destructive alcoholic bravado. Maclean tried to quell conscience and worry by drinking himself insensate. Philby had heavy binges. Blunt drank steadily, especially when under stress, although his behaviour and efficiency were unimpaired. This was the impalpable background to Philby’s posting in Washington.
The mounting menace did not disempower his ability to do harm. His baneful duplicity reached as far as the Adriatic. In November 1945 the governments in London, Moscow and Washington had recognized Enver Hoxha’s communist government of the most impoverished and vulnerable of Balkan states, Albania. As Hoxha owed his position to the support provided by Britain in the closing stages of the war, it seemed irrational to deny recognition to his regime. Four years later, however, London and Washington were keen to shake the communist hold on Albania. J
oint operations were therefore devised in 1949 with the aims of inciting insurgency against Hoxha’s regime, of detaching Albania from Moscow’s orbit and of helping the CIA and SIS to bond by running a joint project. The idea was to recruit exiled Albanians, who were marooned in displaced-persons camps in Italy, Greece and Turkey, and train them in Malta and later Heidelberg to act as infiltration agents to provoke local uprisings. A joint Anglo-American group, the Special Policy Committee, was formed in Washington with oversight of the enterprise; but divergences between the approaches of Washington and London were soon evident. The Americans spent freely, prepared intricate organizational charts and made formal presentations to large planning meetings as if they were launching a foreign sales drive for a mass-market consumer product. They seldom used the word ‘Albania’ or considered local conditions and susceptibilities. Menzies at SIS was unenthusiastic about the Albanian scheme, but agreed to participate as a way of gratifying ex-SOE ‘stinks and bangs people’ who knew the country from earlier operations. One participant recalled a planning session at SIS headquarters which remained desultory until someone said, ‘I say, why don’t we get old Henry up here? He knows about this.’ A day or two later ‘old Henry’ arrived from Sussex, and when the challenge was put to him, agreed with the right touch of self-deprecation to meet it. ‘This will wreak havoc with the garden,’ he said. ‘Just getting it into trim.’1
The FO representative on the Special Policy Committee was a dashing young veteran of SOE operations in Greece, Lord Jellicoe, while SIS was represented by Philby. ‘Kim was the one who made all the operational decisions,’ Jellicoe recalled. ‘He was intelligent, professional and hard-working. How on earth he found time to do a job for the Russians, I just don’t know.’ Philby exercised the secret ruthlessness that he had first learnt in Vienna in 1934 was essential to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat. The numbers, movements, instructions and timings of the guerrilla landings were all betrayed by him. The twenty-four men in the first British contingent went ashore at night, in small groups, along the southern Albanian coast and were ambushed by Albanian troops when they went inland: four of the raiders were killed, while the others escaped to Greece. The Americans’ infiltration agents, dropped by parachute in northern Albania, were caught by waiting security police, who either put them before a firing-squad or subjected them to show-trials that were broadcast by Radio Tirana.2
Philby, in his later public account written in Moscow, exaggerated the importance of his betrayal as a way of denigrating the Anglo-American authorities. The poverty of the Albanian peasantry, rather than his treachery or indiscretions from ex-King Zog of Albania’s entourage, was the chief cause of failure. Very poor people are sharp risk-assessors and disinclined to risk losing what little they possess. In remote districts of Albania, the impoverished peasantry would not jeopardize their lives and property, or endanger their neighbours by provoking reprisal raids, without definite proof that the men inciting them were supported by the wealth and might of the USA rather than optimistic freelances or worst of all Hoxha agents trying to entrap them. As the US was committed to ‘plausible deniability’, this proof could not be given.3
Washington ran on dry martinis at this time. Philby and Angleton of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations had a weekly liaison lunch either at Harvey’s Seafood House or at the Army and Navy Club. They had cocktails before lunch, wine with the food and brandy afterwards. Philby had a strong head for alcohol, and lured Angleton into shattering and calamitous indiscretions as they sat boozing. Philby kept a clear enough head to report what he heard to Moscow. Philby is described by Angleton’s biographer as ‘a product of the privileged old-boy system, one of the foundations of the self-protecting world of the British upper-class’. Angleton succumbed to Philby’s ‘upper-class plausibility’, it is said, ‘as did nearly everyone else in the Washington and London intelligence communities’. This is to miss all the points. Philby duped his fellow spooks because he was infallibly and unostentatiously efficient: he seemed to do his duties exceptionally well; his plausibility derived from his super-competence; it had nothing to do with upper-class manners, for Philby was a representative of the middle classes, disavowed the old school tie, refused to look spruce in or out of the office, despised church-going, was a militant atheist and was known to have lived with the mother of his children for years before marrying her.4
Philby was involved in settling the terms of CIA–SIS cooperation in the event of the Atlantic powers going to war with Russia. He helped Soviet deception planners by reporting CIA responses to the misdirection that he helped to fashion. All the time he seemed to his SIS chiefs to be an excellent officer. He had no enemies to obstruct him. He never showed impatience or disrespect towards slower but senior minds. His successive responsibilities had given him a wide understanding of SIS’s varied branches, and equipped him well to take command of it. Few people noticed that he was drinking too much, or knew of his grievous marital troubles with a wife who felt rejected and contrived physical injuries to gain his attention. Maurice Oldfield had kept his doubts to himself. John Reed had resigned from the Diplomatic Service in 1948, and was engaged in forestry in Shropshire. In the summer of 1950 Menzies and his designated successor ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair agreed that they must fix the SIS succession so as to exclude the appointment of an unsympathetic or blundering outsider, as had happened with Sillitoe at MI5. Menzies’s apprehensions were well judged, because the government indeed forced an unwelcome outsider, Dick White of MI5, on SIS when Sinclair was replaced in 1956 well before his sixtieth birthday. In the succession plan envisaged by Menzies and Sinclair, James (‘Jack’) Easton was the front runner. Easton was a former air commodore who had succeeded General Marshall-Cornwall as Assistant Chief of SIS in 1945. His assumed air of fumbling haziness masked a shrewd, subtle and decisive mind which Philby, at least, reckoned hard to fool. Philby was identified as a conscientious and effective officer who should be groomed to follow in the Sinclair–Easton sequence.
Menzies and Sinclair explained their plan to the Foreign Office, which had oversight of SIS. Reilly, as the Office’s liaison with SIS, was asked to interview and assess Philby. ‘I just did not like the smell,’ as he later told William Waldegrave (both men were Fellows of All Souls). After his near-exposure by Volkov, Philby had become a heavier social drinker: the VENONA threat had him swilling more booze than ever. Yet it was not only that Philby’s suffused and bleary face convinced Reilly that he was a drunkard. In other ways he made a poor impression on the FO’s intelligence expert. ‘There was something about the whole man which made me think that … he had gone completely to pieces,’ recalled Reilly. ‘The impression was overwhelming. I had never experienced anything like it in my life.’ The FO vetoed the Philby succession plan ostensibly on the grounds of his alcoholism.5
Although SIS officers later shuddered to think that – without Reilly’s veto – Philby might have become ‘C’, his friend Tim Milne disagreed that the higher Philby rose in the Service, the greater his value to the Russians in misdirecting its actions to serve Soviet interests. Milne thought that Philby as Chief of SIS would have lost close contact with detail. He would have known the broad lines but not the operational details of current or future operations, because he would always be working through and relying on subordinates. His actions would be accountable to Whitehall committees, to the Prime Minister and to Cabinet ministers. It would have been impossible for him to take zigzag journeys by bus, tube trains and taxi to rendezvous. To signal the need for an emergency meeting, he could not amble through Kew and chuck a copy of Men Only into Charles Moody’s front garden. Nor could he – without observation – make chalk marks on walls or lamp-posts under cover of stooping to tie a shoelace or halting to light a cigarette. Moreover, how could Moscow act on information from such a highly placed source without betraying him? The only advantage for Moscow in having Philby as ‘C’ would have been if the communists took power in Britain or western Europe.
&nbs
p; Burgess’s dégringolade
In December 1946 Burgess was appointed personal assistant to the Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Hector McNeil. He thus became an established member of the Diplomatic Service: it should be emphasized that he was not absorbed into the permanent government machinery through the influence of his family, fellow Etonians, sexual partners, members of the Reform or mandarin officialdom; straightforward political influence, exerted by a Labour MP, who was the son of a journeyman shipwright, did it. The Service’s Personnel Department refused to admit him into the senior branch A, but kept him in the secondary branch B. McNeil had been a journalist on Beaverbrook’s Scottish newspapers before his election as a Labour MP in a by-election of 1941. His recent promotion to be Minister of State was in the place of his former mentor Francis Noel-Baker, who bored the Cabinet (‘’E talks too much, this chap’, said Ernie Bevin) and infuriated Cadogan, who thought him a ‘silly baby’. McNeil had earlier proven himself by going to Athens during a constitutional crisis: ‘he found himself landed in a position’, wrote the British Ambassador, ‘which would have been perplexing and discouraging even to the most hardened and experienced. He was in a strange land amongst very strange people at a very strange time. His quick grasp of essentials, his initiative and resourcefulness saved the situation.’ McNeil, it was said, ‘worshipped the ground Bevin trod’. His generous spirit, respect for justice and trenchant vocabulary were exemplified by an incident at a session of the United Nations. When Vyshinsky made a vitriolic attack on Churchill, McNeil replied with unstinting praise of the Conservative leader: ‘it was not in his nature to keep silent when Sir Winston was traduced’, commented the Manchester Guardian, ‘and by a Russian, too. It was handsome and British.’6
Enemies Within Page 49