Modin’s visit made sense in another direction. He happened to be the Soviet intelligence officer in London in 1951 who had supervised the defection of Maclean and Burgess and then, as we shall see, unsuccessfully instructed Blunt to follow them. The odds are that he brought with him to Beirut an escape plan for Philby.
If Philby had defected before Elliott interviewed him, it would have been obvious that he had been alerted, and the source responsible would have been thereby put at risk. So the best all-round solution for the KGB was for Philby to make a confession of old events no longer of consequence and use it to give misleading information to cover current operations. The confession would provide the reason for his eventual defection, the implication being that he would not trust any British promises.
As will be apparent, there is little doubt that Philby’s confession, which was tape-recorded, was written in advance under KGB control, most probably with Modin at his side. Philby’s intense anxiety during the few weeks he had to wait for the showdown after Modin’s warning can well account for his extreme drunkenness at the time. Donald Maclean had behaved similarly in Cairo in 1950, securing temporary forgetfulness from the bottle, after he first heard that evidence was mounting against him.
Elliott travelled to Beirut early in January 1963 and remains satisfied that no indication of the purpose of his visit came from him or from any officials in the embassy there. Furthermore, I have established that the CIA, which had a mission in Beirut, was not told in advance of the coming interrogation in spite of reports to the contrary.
Elliott telephoned Philby from a private flat, which had been hired and wired, and invited him around for a drink. The first thing Philby said was ‘I was half expecting to see you.’ In his diary, Harold Macmillan recorded that Philby had confessed ‘in a drunken fit’. In fact, throughout his encounters with Elliott, he was sober.
Without delay, Elliott told Philby that new evidence had come to light and that both White and Hollis no longer had any doubt about his guilt. With some anger, Elliott accused his former friend of behaving abominably to everyone who had trusted him. He then invited him to confess his past, assuring him that no action would be taken against him if he told the whole truth and returned to Britain.
Without even asking what the new evidence was, Philby agreed to confess, and as though to cover his first, unguarded remark, he said, ‘This was bound to happen one day. There was bound to be a defector, a cypher clerk or a spy-in-place who would know about me.’ But at no time did he ask for any details.
He then admitted that he had been a Soviet agent since 1934, when he had been recruited in Vienna, that he had warned Maclean through Burgess, whom he had recruited in the same year, and that he had been responsible for sabotaging a succession of secret service operations, which had cost many lives. These included the betrayal of a would-be KGB defector called Volkov, the failure of a secret service operation to free Albania from communism by infiltrating Albanian nationalists into the country, and the sabotage of an operation called ‘Climber’. The intention of ‘Climber’ was the infiltration of secret agents operating for the CIA and the British secret service into the Soviet Union via the Caucasus. At least twenty of these agents were never heard of again.
Philby denied that Blunt had ever been a spy. Instead, he threw false suspicion on an old colleague, which was proved to be an attempt to blacken an officer greatly disliked by the KGB. He also gave some information about his early Soviet controllers that turned out to be false.
The security authorities had been keen to establish the identity of a Ring of Five controller with the codename ‘Otto’. Philby said that, while ‘Otto’ had never given his true name, he had discovered him to be a man called Arnold Deutsch, a Comintern agent whom he had met in Vienna, where he had been firmly recruited to the KGB. Deutsch had come to London in 1934 for so-called postgraduate studies, but he was certainly not ‘Otto’. Philby said that he had recognised ‘Otto’ after he had seen a photograph of Deutsch in the FBI files in Washington. A check showed that the FBI files had contained no photograph of Deutsch before Philby defected. Furthermore, the detailed description of ‘Otto’ later given by Blunt in his confession did not fit Deutsch. As with much else in Philby’s ‘confession’, this was a KGB move to cover the truth. Finally, Philby offered to write a summary, which he would sign, for Elliott to take back to London but said he needed more time to think about the immunity proposition. Next evening, he produced a two-page typewritten document, which he signed, but he still insisted that he needed a few more days to make up his mind about returning.
With Sir Dick White’s agreement, Elliott flew direct from Beirut to Washington to brief James Angleton of the CIA about the confession. Only then was the CIA mission in Beirut told of it.
About ten days later, on 23 January, Philby disappeared from Beirut, probably on a Soviet freighter conveniently docked there and, it is believed, with the connivance of the Lebanese police. The freighter is believed to have been the Dolmatovo, registered at Odessa. Modin may also have been aboard it.
Elliott strongly suspected – and still does – that Philby had been forewarned of his mission by an MI5 source, and in My Silent War Philby was to write, tongue in cheek, ‘Maybe I was tipped off by a Fourth Man.’ Nevertheless Elliott’s colleagues at secret service headquarters tended to accept the confession as a reasonably true account, though incomplete. Philby had made no mention, for example, of his motives in opposing the circulation of papers concerning Admiral Canaris, the chief of the German Abwehr, which might have shortened the war. Canaris, who was opposed to Hitler and was eventually executed by him, seemed prepared to collaborate with the British secret service from late 1942 onward to expedite the Nazi leaders’ downfall. Philby stifled the move, probably because the Russians wanted the war to continue; once they had the Germans on the run, they could communise as much of Europe as possible.
In MI5, however, both the signed confession and the tape recordings were judged to be KGB ‘confections’, and it was concluded that the KGB had been able to follow the conduct of the Philby case from early 1962 onward. Among the possible lies listed by MI5 was Philby’s admission that he had not only sent Burgess from Washington to London to warn Maclean that the net was closing around him but also, a few days later, given the final alert in the form of the precise date when Maclean was to be interrogated. It is considered possible that Philby never knew this date. Very few knew it, but among those who did were senior officers of MI5. As Geoffrey McDermott, a long-serving diplomat, commented, ‘Parts of Philby’s confession could well have been bogus. He might have been protecting the real “third man” so that he could continue his activities among us.’ Further evidence to support McDermott’s hunch is presented in Chapter 14.
Still, such was the establishment’s success in continuing to conceal the truth that not until five months after Philby’s defection was the government driven to admit that he had been the Third Man and a Soviet agent. And, since then, the salient facts that I have described, such as the offer of immunity, have consistently been suppressed.
Lord George-Brown has assured me that, when he was Foreign Secretary and politically in charge of the secret service, he tried hard to learn the full facts of the Philby case but was denied access to the files. D-Notices – advisory notices to the media requesting suppression of sensitive information – were issued in an attempt to suppress disclosures about Philby and his activities.
Philby has continued in his totally unprincipled way behind the Iron Curtain. He remains a drunkard and even stole the only consolation left to Donald Maclean in dismal Moscow, his wife Melinda. Yet had he accepted immunity, this traitor, liar, cheat and accessory to murder might have remained ‘respectable’ into old age, rejoining his old clubs, like the Athenaeum, unless tongues wagged audibly enough for some writer to expose him. But there was no way that the Russians would have permitted him to face full interrogation in London out of their control. Maclean, who might have cracked
under relentless questioning, had been required to defect to protect Philby so that, hopefully, he could remain an active spy. Perhaps Philby, a burned-out agent showing signs of instability, was forced to defect for a similar reason.
Like the rest of the Philby story, his defection was covered up to the maximum possible extent, though the authorities were in no doubt that he was in Russia. The secret service was anxious to avoid any suggestion that it had staged the interrogation in order to induce Philby to defect and so save the embarrassment of a trial. Both the secret service and MI5, as well as the government of the day, were determined to keep the immunity offer secret. They were also keen to prevent inevitable questions about Philby’s continuing employment by the secret service after 1951, for, though his missions may not have been of high importance, he had obviously betrayed every one of them to the KGB.
CHAPTER 3
THE MITCHELL CASE
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF Kim Philby’s defection and analysis of the events preceding it profoundly dismayed those officers of MI5 who had been delving into the previous penetrations, which had nullified the counter-espionage efforts of their organisation. They felt so certain that a deliberate leak to Philby had originated in MI5 that it was a ‘moment of truth’, as one of them described it, concerning their suspicions of the existence of a really high-level ‘mole’. Knowing that they would get no effective support from their own director general, Sir Roger Hollis, they sought advice from someone more senior, whom they trusted, their former chief, Sir Dick White, then head of the secret service. Impressed by the weight of their evidence and appreciating the integrity of the men concerned, White advised them to continue with their inquiries and to report back to him before taking any action.
Comparing the tally of the suspected Soviet penetrations with the duties performed by all the senior officers, together with their known access to secret information, they produced a shortlist of five, including one woman. The investigators then fed these suspects ‘barium meals’, specially doctored documents or verbal information that might enable them to ascertain if any of it was being leaked. This narrowed the suspects to three and then, quickly, to two – Hollis himself and Graham Mitchell, the deputy director general. Though Mitchell remained suspect for years, he was eventually cleared completely. To avoid a collapse of morale at lower levels, the inquiry into Mitchell was kept as secret as possible within MI5, and he was referred to by the codename ‘Peters’. That was the name by which I referred to him in the first edition of this book, though I knew his identity. He has since admitted, both in writing to me and in public, that he was ‘Peters’.
As Hollis could not be told that he was suspect, the investigators again sought advice from White. He was an old friend of Hollis’s, had previously appointed him his deputy and had then recommended to Sir Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, that he should succeed him as director general, so he could not bring himself, at that stage, to believe that he could be a traitor. He advised that the alternative candidate, Mitchell, should be thoroughly investigated first, using all the facilities available to MI5. For this, Hollis’s permission would be necessary.
When consulted, Hollis agreed that Mitchell had been behaving most peculiarly, a common symptom of a spy who believes that he may be under suspicion, as both Maclean and Philby had demonstrated. There was also a statement that Blunt had made during his interrogation to the effect that Burgess and he had taken Mitchell out to lunch at the Reform Club and that Blunt had assumed that Burgess was looking him over as a likely recruit.
The mode of Mitchell’s entry into MI5 also appeared to be relevant. He had previously worked in the Conservative Party Central Office, which was regarded as a likely jumping-off place for a newly recruited Soviet spy, as it provided a right-wing image. Hollis would agree only to a limited inquiry to be confined to MI5. It was pointed out that this would be impossible because Mitchell knew all the MI5 watchers who would have to be detailed to keep him under surveillance. Hollis then reluctantly agreed that watchers from the secret service, who were unknown to Mitchell, should be called in and that the whole operation should be a joint MI5–secret service exercise. It was to be controlled by Martin Furnival Jones, then director of security.
It is convenient, at this point, to dispose of allegations that have been made against a former deputy director general of MI5, Guy Liddell, because he may be confused in the minds of some readers with Mitchell. Liddell had left MI5 ten years previously, in 1953, because he resented being passed over when Dick White, his junior, was made director general. He may have been imprudent when talking socially to former colleagues, like Blunt, who turned out to be spies, but he was never suspected of disloyalty. Nor is there any truth in the allegation that he was demoted and transferred to a derisory job in the Atomic Energy Authority. As Sir John Hill, chief of the Atomic Energy Authority, has confirmed to me, Liddell, who at sixty-one was beyond retirement age anyway when he left MI5, was the authority’s chief adviser on security. He could not have been appointed to a more sensitive post, especially in view of the poor state of Anglo–American relations on the interchange of atomic secrets following the cases of Fuchs, Pontecorvo and the Maclean–Burgess defection.
All the allegations against Liddell, who died in 1958, have been generated outside the security services. Those against Hollis, Mitchell and others I detail in this book were all generated inside those services by professional security and intelligence officers with inside knowledge.
Throughout his long and distinguished service in MI5, Liddell kept full diaries, which he dictated nightly, and I am told that nobody reading them could entertain the smallest doubt about his loyalty to Britain and his service. When he left MI5, he obeyed the rules and handed the diaries in for storage as a record. They were kept in the director general’s safe, under the code title ‘Wallflowers’, and, when Hollis was about to retire from that post, he ordered that they should all be destroyed. By chance, they were intercepted on their way to the shredding machine by someone who suspected Hollis, and so a valuable history of the department, covering many years, has been preserved.
Hollis’s strange behaviour in that respect was marked down in the dossier against him. So was his refusal to allow the now official investigating team to tap the telephone at Mitchell’s home. It had been decided that, in order to dispose of the case against Mitchell one way or the other and as quickly as possible, he should be given the full technical treatment. A mirror in his office was removed and made see-through by resilvering so that a television camera could be hidden behind it, the object being to allow the investigators to see if Mitchell was in the habit of copying secret documents. A check was kept on his office telephone, but, when Hollis was asked to request the necessary Home Office warrant for Mitchell’s home telephone to be tapped and bugged, he refused, saying that he did not want any outsiders to know anything about the investigation. Though the investigators were unable to tap the home telephone, they secured the help of post office security men in installing hidden microphones.
One ‘outsider’ was kept fully informed of all the details, even including the see-through mirror: the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. It was not only Hollis who told him but also Sir Dick White, with whom Macmillan has always been on close terms. (Though Hollis was director general of MI5 during the whole six years of Macmillan’s premiership, the former Prime Minister, whose memory for contemporaries is remarkable, claimed that he could not recall Hollis when I mentioned him to him recently. Hollis had been such a shadowy figure that Macmillan confused him with Gen. Sir Leslie Hollis, a marine commander who had served on Churchill’s staff during the Second World War.)
When Hollis tried to prevent the MI5–secret service team from using some of the technical facilities at their disposal to investigate Mitchell, they threatened to go over his head to Macmillan. Rather than face this, Hollis gave way. A meticulous search of Mitchell’s office, carried out at night, showed that there was one locked drawer in an antique desk, forme
rly the property of Guy Liddell, that had been unused for years. Examination showed that, unlike all the other drawers, the edges of which were dusty, the locked drawer had recently been in use. So, one evening, Hollis, whose office had a connecting door with Mitchell’s, was asked for his permission for the drawer to be opened the following morning by means of a skeleton key. He agreed.
When, on the next day, the drawer was eased out, there was nothing inside, but from marks in the dust it was obvious that some flat object on four button feet had been in the drawer on more than one occasion and had been hurriedly removed from it. The investigators thought that it could well have been a tape recorder.
The purpose of such a hidden device was only too obvious. The decisions about where the MI5 watchers were to be used, and against which targets, were taken at a weekly meeting held in that room. Though Mitchell chaired the meeting, a recording of it would be of enormous additional value to any KGB men with whom he might be in touch.
The surveillance men reported that Mitchell was certainly behaving as though he knew that he was under suspicion or was taking precautionary steps prior to meeting a contact. He wandered about in parks, repeatedly turning around as though to check that he was not being followed. In the street, he would peer into shop windows, looking for the reflections of passers-by. He also wore tinted spectacles, which might enable him, from the reflections, to see anyone who might be on his trail. The ‘candid camera’ in his office revealed that, whenever he was alone, his face looked tortured as though he were in deep despair.
In the context of Mitchell, it is possible to explain a peculiar and quite unprecedented event that occurred in July 1963, when MI5 announced the name of a KGB defector currently in Britain as Anatoli Dolnytsin. In fact, it is now known that the defector was Anatoli Golitsin, who had been passed to MI5 by the CIA. So why the false name, which did not fool the Russians for an instant?
Their Trade Is Treachery: the Full Unexpurgated Truth About the Russian Penetration of the World's Secret Defences Page 4