Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  It seems very likely that, because of the imagined Trotskyist connection, Kim saw a great opportunity to score a success with the Russians. He would certainly have wished to discuss it with them. They would have been extremely interested if the Germans really were helping dissident communist groups in this way, and they may have pressed Kim to take the action he did. In the state of ignorance prevailing in Section V at the time, this would have scarcely have aroused suspicion. I wonder if it was the Russians who put him onto the possible interpretation of RKI/ORKI, or whether it emerged from a study by Kim and others of ancient Central Registry files – or perhaps both. Even if Kim did not have the opportunity to consult the Russians, he must have seen a chance of presenting them with a coup. Subsequently – as in his book – he made a joke of it, and even claimed it as a triumph of sorts, although in fact it was an utter fiasco. He seems to have acted miles out of character and indeed common sense. My conclusion is that he could not conceivably have behaved in this way if he had not been pursuing something of value, as he saw it, to the NKVD. I am happy to say that we never treated ISOS so recklessly and crassly again.

  Notes

  1. A British physicist and scientific military intelligence expert attached to SIS during the war. In 1946, Jones was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, which he held until his retirement in 1981. He did not want to stay in intelligence under the proposed post-war reorganisation.

  2. Known as Operation Biting. One of the most daring raids of the war, it was carried out in February 1942 by units of the newly formed British 1st Airborne Division, who seized the German radar station at Bruneval in northern France, and brought back to England vital components of the German ‘Würzburg’ radar installation.

  3. See Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973.

  4. BJ stood for ‘Blue Jacket’, denoting the colour of the files in which they were circulated. They were the product of material produced by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), later GCHQ.

  † Editor’s note: In the names ISOS and ISK, the IS stood for ‘Illicit Signals’. OS stood for Oliver Strachey, brother of Lytton Strachey, and K for Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox, brother of Ronald and E. V. Knox. Strachey and Knox were two of the Bletchley immortals.

  † Editor’s note: The ‘present prices’ are from the late 1970s. In 2014 Milne’s wartime prices equate to around £150 and £180 respectively.

  † Editor’s note: Woolton pie was a wartime vegetable pie recommended by the Ministry of Food and named after the Food Minister, Lord Woolton.

  6

  ON THE MAP

  By the summer of 1942 Section V was beginning to take on a different look. The number of officers and secretaries was steadily increasing. The flow of ISOS was now five or ten times what it had been a year earlier. Abroad too we were expanding. In the early part of the war SIS overseas stations had been all-purpose, trying to produce intelligence of all kinds, military, political, technical and counter-espionage. But counter-espionage had had very low priority. In 1940–41 Felix Cowgill succeeded in arranging for specialist counter-espionage officers to be posted to the Madrid and Lisbon stations. Although nominally subordinate at this time to the existing head of station, they became in practice (and later officially) independent, with their own offices, staff and cyphers. Now other officers from Section V were being sent abroad to open their own stations. We were beginning to become almost a separate service from the rest of SIS, though under the same general management in London and having very close links both at home and in the field.

  There is no doubt that Cowgill was the man chiefly responsible for putting Section V on the map. History so far has given him a raw deal. He was caricatured in the original Sunday Times articles, and not very fairly treated in Kim’s book. Not that I am in a position to throw stones at the authors of either: my views of Felix became very critical as the war progressed, and in the end I was, I suppose, a beneficiary of his downfall. Certainly he had large faults, two in particular. One, much commented on in the Philby literature, was that he made an altogether inordinate number of enemies. Anyone who tried to build up a large department from almost nothing in the cut-throat world of wartime intelligence was bound to make enemies, but Felix seemed to go far out of his way to antagonise people. A more serious fault in my view was that his judgement on intelligence matters was not always sound, and he did not fully appreciate the changing pattern of the work. It would indeed have needed one of R. V. Jones’s ideal intelligence officers with an outsize brain to keep up with all that was coming in, but Felix’s operational judgements and ideas became increasingly remote from reality. His considerable gifts lay in a different direction. A section chief without his drive, stubbornness, courage, capacity for hard work and interest in administration would not have succeeded in preserving and increasing Section V’s role and getting the necessary staff in the crucial years of 1941 and 1942. Kim, with all his great abilities, could not have done the same job.

  It is interesting to speculate on the kind of animal Section V might have become if Kim had been in charge in those years. Probably it would have been much smaller and more closely knit with MI5, perhaps in a joint working organisation; it would have had good staff and would have done an efficient job; but in the end it would not have made such a mark. Kim congratulates himself in his book on having helped to abolish Section V after the war. But there would not have been so much to abolish if it had not been for Felix Cowgill.

  In two of his projects Felix showed himself more far sighted than Kim or me or most other people in Section V. These were, first, liaison with OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the American counterpart of SIS) and, second, the establishment of Special Counter-Intelligence (SCI) units in a number of military headquarters in the field. Though both belong more fully to a later period of the war, their beginnings were in 1942. Contact between SIS and OSS had begun even before OSS was properly established and collaboration was of course inevitable after Pearl Harbor. But Felix conceived something far more radical – no less than a joint counter-espionage headquarters consisting of Section V and the corresponding section of OSS, later called X2 – the very name was derived from XB, the code-name used for Section V in our communications with the field. During 1942 the first X2 officers appeared in St Albans, and huts to accommodate them and the later arrivals were built in the grounds of Glenalmond. Most papers could be freely passed between Section V and X2, which also received ISOS although action remained with Section V.

  The objections from me, Kim and others were twofold. First, the risk to ISOS, and to SIS organisation and operations generally, would be enlarged. Second, we foresaw that for a long time we would get little or nothing from the arrangement, and would have to spend a lot of our precious time talking to and training the X2 officers. So we did, but in the end it paid off because from November 1942 onwards much of the German-occupied territory liberated by the Allies fell in the first instance to the Americans. Information from captured Abwehr and SD officers and agents, and the opportunity to ‘turn’ suitable agents against the Germans, were immediately available to us. The process was greatly helped by the establishment of British and American military SCI units, staffed by officers trained in Section V and attached to Army Group headquarters or sometimes a lower formation. The SCI units were equipped with rapid and secure wireless and cypher communications with Section V, and in effect were Section V (or X2) outstations in the battle areas. X2 officers could be attached to Section V’s SCI units and vice versa.

  It is rather surprising that Kim was not more enthusiastic about the Section V link with OSS. It was bound to give greater insight into OSS activities, capabilities and staff identities, and therefore those of whatever organisation would succeed it in peacetime – surely a prime Russian target. There is little doubt that the very close relations established between Section V and OSS/X2 helped to lay the foundations for later colla
boration between SIS and the CIA, the post-war successor to OSS. Whether Kim thought this a good thing or not, his acceptance of Section V–X2 cooperation was grudging, though he certainly did not actively campaign or intrigue against it. He always disliked America and the Americans, whereas I had a weakness for them, and probably found it easier than he did to work closely with X2 as time went on. He had better relations with the much more professional FBI, with whom we had a less closely interlocked liaison.

  One of the accusations made against Cowgill is that he clung jealously to Section V information, particularly ISOS. He has been described as notorious for sitting on information rather than circulating it. Certainly one of the many besetting sins of intelligence officers is the overuse of secrecy, ostensibly in the name of security, but actually to preserve some private empire. Claude Dansey, vice-chief of SIS in the war, and his special fief, Switzerland, immediately come to mind. But Cowgill’s opportunities for restricting information were somewhat limited. ISOS, as I have said, was circulated in full to a number of departments, including MI5. Telegrams and reports from stations abroad, including Section V stations, automatically went to Broadway as well as to us, and into Central Registry files. Most other information was not Section V’s preserve, and restriction on it, if any, was imposed by others; the great mass of Bletchley information (other than ISOS) came into this category, and indeed we in Section V saw little of it apart from the diplomatic BJs.

  There was for a short time a minor exception to what I have said above about ISOS. Felix arranged that some restriction should be placed upon the circulation of ISOS messages which appeared to name or refer to British agents and intelligence operations; at least, I think it was Felix who arranged it, but if so the idea found ready acceptance in Broadway, which disliked the thought that what appeared to be its failures were being gratuitously advertised to the intelligence branches of the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, particularly as the Abwehr reports were often untrue. As far as I recall, the restricted series, code-named ISBA, was fairly soon terminated and the total number of such messages was few. We in Vd thought the series was silly and unnecessary.

  What Felix did do was to cling with his teeth to the principle that external action on ISOS information should be vested in Section V alone, and that any other department or section, including MI5, that wished to take action would have to do so with the permission and under the close supervision of Section V. Here he was on extremely strong ground. In using ISOS we were juggling with eggs. Anyone who was not devoting as much time and care as we were to the study both of ISOS and of all the information from stations, interrogations and other sources might well do serious damage. I have no doubt that the rules about ISOS were bent from time to time by other departments, but the general principle was maintained.

  I am mystified by a statement in Patrick Seale’s book: ‘[Cowgill’s] miserly attitude to the treasures at his disposal enraged the customers of Section V, and in particular MI5 who would dearly have liked sight of all the Abwehr material rather than having Cowgill release to them only what he felt concerned British security.’1 With the possible and frankly trivial exception of ISBA, MI5 received ISOS (if that is what is meant by ‘Abwehr material’) as soon as we did. Nor was there any serious holding back with MI5 on other material. At some point in, I think, 1942, Felix invited Dick White, deputy head of the intelligence division of MI5, to spend a fortnight with us at Glenalmond. We were instructed to show or discuss with him anything that he – or we – might wish, and we took full advantage of this. (I am also surprised by a statement of Patrick Seale’s that two extremely able GC&CS officers, Leonard Palmer and Denys Page, were critical of Cowgill’s ‘hoarding of their hard-won material’. Hoarded from whom?)†

  There is no doubt that Felix could be highly obstructive to departments outside Section V, in strong contrast to his attitude towards his beloved OSS/X2. But the larger Section V became, the less this really mattered. The people who actually dealt with the cases that came up every day were his desk officers, such as Kim, me and many others. I cannot recall having to hold back anything important from MI5. Few if any of us had much stomach for interdepartmental squabbles. There was far too much to do anyway. In Vd, MI5 were regarded as colleagues with whom we were more closely concerned than we were with, say, Ve, the Middle East subsection. Between us and MI5 there was, however, a difference of approach to the work. In Section V we were a bunch of amateurs who had been brought in to man a section which for practical purposes had scarcely existed before the war. However hard we worked, we always – Kim as much as anyone – maintained a rather light-hearted attitude, looking for the funny side even in our most formal correspondence. Although MI5 had also absorbed many people from outside, they remained a solemn-minded professional service whose officers prided themselves on the extreme care and thoroughness with which they handled every matter, however small: counter-espionage was much too serious to joke about. But in two of them – both close friends of Kim’s – irreverence was always breaking through.

  Dick Brooman-White (not to be confused with Dick White) was head of MI5’s Iberian section. By the middle of the war, thanks largely to his own efforts, there was little left for him to do, so he joined us in Section V. Because of internal injuries caused in a riding accident he could not drink, but he was highly intelligent and amusing company. It was ever a mystery how this rapid and almost inaudible speaker managed after the war to make himself understood at the hustings and on the floor of the House of Commons.2 Tommy Harris, also in the MI5 Iberian section, was a law unto himself.3 Part Spanish, part Jewish, art dealer, rich, he came from a very different background from most of us. ‘Tommy can’t read or write,’ Kim would say, ‘but he’s extraordinarily subtle and astute about anything to do with people.’ It is true that Tommy never read or wrote anything if he could possibly help it, but he ran the most remarkable double-agent operation of the whole war.4 He was in some ways Kim’s closest friend and Kim named his second son Tomas after him.

  It is time to mention the brilliant maverick section headed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had come up to Christ Church during my time at Oxford. The search for an interception of enemy intelligence radio messages was carried out by an organisation in Barnet called RSS – Radio Security Service – which then passed the messages on to Bletchley for decipherment. It was logical that a small office should be set up to extract, interpret and process intelligence – chiefly from the deciphered messages but also if appropriate from other sources – which might help the RSS interceptors in their search of the ether for clandestine transmissions (times, frequencies and call signs were constantly being changed). It was also logical that this office, while physically located at Barnet, should form part of Section V, where the intelligence was to be found; hence its title Vw. In the ordinary way the job might have remained on this basis for the rest of the war, filled by a single medium-grade officer. But equally it could provide unlimited scope for study of the Abwehr and SD, as a basis in the first instance for giving informed guidance to RSS. It so happened that Felix Cowgill, in organising Section V, had unaccountably neglected to set up a subsection to study the central organisation, personnel, policies, methods and political position of the Abwehr and SD. True, one officer was theoretically deputed for this task, part time, but since it should have involved among many other things a study of all the ISOS from all areas there was no possibility of his achieving anything. No one as intelligent and enterprising as Trevor-Roper, in his position as Vw, could have failed to see the opportunity this presented. He gathered around him three other first-class Oxford academics – Gilbert Ryle (who had been one of my philosophy tutors), Stuart Hampshire and Charles Stuart. Although nominally a subsection of Section V, they were for most practical purposes independent (a position that was ratified later in the war when they were formally separated from Section V and given the title RIS, or Radio Intelligence Section).

  In so uncharted a field as wartime intelligence, there are bound to be many
demarcation disputes and many contenders for any piece of ground. But there is one argument that nearly always silences the rest: if someone is really producing the goods, it matters little what this or that directive or charter may say. Trevor-Roper’s high-powered team began to issue broad studies of the German intelligence services of a kind that no one else at the time was producing. It was useless for Felix to object, since he had failed to offer an acceptable alternative; and his own officers were glad to see the job being done. Battles continued for a long time, but in Trevor-Roper, Felix was up against someone who was as prepared to fight as he was and much cleverer about it. On the whole, at any rate at this time, there was little duplication between Vw and the regional subsections of Section V, and I found much profit in my dealings with Charles Stuart, whose area included the Iberian peninsula.

  Felix, who was well liked by his staff, ran Section V as a cosy family affair – indeed his nice wife, Mary, and his sister-in-law were working in it. All of us, from Felix himself to the newest secretary, were on Christian-name terms. There is a tendency anyway for this to happen in intelligence circles, partly for security reasons and partly because of the feeling you have of shared secrets and of isolation from the outside world. Section V, big as it became, never entirely lost this family atmosphere. There was a minimum of administrative tail. A factotum called David, with one assistant, looked after the building, slept there at night and presumably organised things like office cleaning. A middle-aged lady, widow of a former SIS officer and probably unpaid, helped over billeting and ration books. One or two cars and uniformed women drivers were allocated to the section.