Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  Although most of us, apart from the secretaries, were in the Army, or occasionally Royal Navy or RAF, we were an unmilitary lot. One admirably unorthodox colleague was A. G. Trevor-Wilson, who had been with Kim at the SOE training school at Beaulieu and who was working in Vd and looking after Tangier and Spanish Morocco when I arrived.5 Nominally a captain in the Intelligence Corps, he wore a strange assortment of uniforms and insignia. The badge on his cap was not the same as those on his lapels. His respirator came from the RAF. Sometimes he wore a white shirt with his uniform. Once he was stopped by a military policeman who told him that the flash he was wearing on his sleeve was that of a division in north Africa, and what was he doing in St Albans? Trevor (who worked flexible hours) used to cycle to the office. If it had been raining, he would then change his trousers for others equally contrary to military regulations, a process inevitably interrupted by the arrival of a secretary. Trevor claimed to have a variety of mysterious lady friends, to each of whom he was known by a different name. Once when we were walking together in Jermyn Street he suddenly dragged me into a shop. A woman went by. ‘I know her,’ whispered Trevor, ‘but I can’t remember the name I use with her.’ It was said that when Trevor first joined SIS he was surprised to find that the smallest comment he inscribed on a paper evoked immediate and deferential attention. It turned out that he was using green ink, a prerogative reserved for the chief since the First World War.

  Another member of the section was Sammy. He was an affectionate extrovert black-and-white spaniel whom Marie had been given as a puppy in the autumn of 1940. For a year we had toted him round from one unsuitable billet or rented house to another, with intervals of parking him on long-suffering relatives. Soon after arriving at St Albans I brought him to The Spinney, where Kim and Aileen took him in unenthusiastically. When Aileen fell ill Sammy had to leave with his master. There was nowhere to put him but Glenalmond, and here at last he came into his own, the Section V dog. When he was not out in the garden or fields getting filthy, or making the rounds of the other subsections, he was generally curled up asleep in my pending tray. The weekly meeting of Section V in the conservatory, or ‘snake pit’, was not deemed to have properly begun until Sammy, tail cocked high, had trotted in and taken his place. One summer’s day there was an official visit from the Director of Naval Intelligence, looking as smart as only a naval officer can – I retain an impression, which cannot possibly be accurate, of white ducks. While we (in Vd) were gathered round him, trying to explain what we were doing, an eager mud-caked figure hurtled through the open ground-floor window and leapt straight at the DNI’s resplendent chest. Admirals don’t usually take kindly to being landed on by muddy dogs belonging to Army lieutenants, but Admiral Godfrey was magnanimous. Sammy was the nearest thing we had to a watchdog at Glenalmond – Sammy, who thought the entire human race was perfect, even if a few of its members were more perfect than the rest. If parachutists dressed as nuns (or nuns dressed as parachutists) had descended on Glenalmond, Sammy would have been the first to welcome them.

  Some writers have suggested that SIS and other intelligence organisations were a kind of upper-crust preserve, effete, riddled with class prejudice, only too ready to cover up when one of their members came under suspicion. A novel written about Kim, called Gentleman Traitor,6 symbolises him on the cover by showing, of all inappropriate things, a bowler hat. Well, it makes more interesting reading than the truth, which is that in Section V at any rate we were a mixed but mostly middle-class lot. We did indeed have a baronet, laird of many a broad Scottish acre, and later a peer of the realm and even a cousin of the present Queen joined us. But mostly we came from a rather ordinary variety of jobs and backgrounds, such as the Indian police, schoolmastering and commerce. I do not even know where most of my colleagues in Section V went to school or whether they went to university. I do know that several of them had spent a great part of their lives abroad; their knowledge of foreign countries and languages was an important reason for their recruitment into Section V. Perhaps some of the secretaries tended to be well bred: however, as they also tended to be rather good-looking, and hard-working into the bargain, their origins could be overlooked.

  In these years of 1942 and 1943 Kim was riding high. He was rapidly making a name for himself, even among hard-core enemies of Section V in Broadway, as an intelligent, reasonable and effective person with whom business could be done. The Foreign Office, in the person of Peter Loxley,7 who was our main link, were beginning to like him very much. He was MI5’s favourite son. In Section V he was popular with his colleagues, and usually adored by the secretaries. Felix trusted and later promoted him; there was no hint yet of the future rift. But Kim had his own views about some of the people he was dealing with, especially in Broadway, which had more than its fair share of placemen, hangers-on, second-raters, former naval captains who were popularly reputed to have hazarded their ships, and plain duds. His book contains some of the acid opinions he – and many of us – expressed at that time.

  At home his life with Aileen seemed to be happy. I didn’t know they weren’t married. Vaguely it registered at the back of my mind that Aileen, with all her reminiscing, never spoke of any wedding day, and no anniversary was celebrated. With that, I put it out of my thoughts; it mattered little anyway. They probably assumed Marie and I knew, but in fact I first heard of it in 1945 from Dick Brooman-White. According to Aileen, she and Kim first met through Flora Solomon,8 under whom Aileen had worked in the staff welfare department of Marks and Spencer before the war. Already by May 1940 the Kim–Aileen affair must have been well established, because Aileen used to describe how she travelled to Paris to see him and arrived on the very day the Germans launched their drive into Belgium and Holland.

  Life at The Spinney continued to revolve around our Section V work. At one point I had to stop bringing papers home with me for about a fortnight because I found I was dreaming about the work all night and every night. We made little use of the garden, except for one attempt to grow garlic. Kim’s philosophy of gardening was simple: if a certain amount of fertiliser was good for a plant, then ten times the amount was ten times as good.

  In the summer of 1942 there was an addition to the household, a French bulldog whom we named Axel after a favourite ISOS character, the Abwehr guard dog at Algeciras. We used to have boxing matches with this seemingly ferocious dog, sparring with him and mock-punching him on the face. One evening Guy Burgess came to dinner. Guy seldom managed to get through an evening without doing something mildly shocking. Boxing Axel was not enough; he had to kiss him repeatedly on his snarling, slavering mouth. Another visitor was an American journalist, an old friend of Kim’s from the Spanish Civil War. I can no longer swear to his identity, but I think it was Sam Brewer, whose wife Eleanor Kim was eventually to marry. On another occasion Victor Rothschild, MI5’s anti-sabotage expert and an old friend of Kim’s, came down to St Albans and Kim and I arranged to have dinner with him at a hotel. ‘One doesn’t often dine with a Rothschild,’ said Kim, and we had visions of black market steaks, done rare, washed down with Château Lafite. Rothschild, very reasonably, entertained no such fantasies. We went Dutch, ate table d’hôte at the controlled price, and drank draught bitter.

  Somewhere about the beginning of 1943, Kim’s young sister Helena, aged nineteen, joined both Section V at Glenalmond and the family at The Spinney. With her mother’s red hair, a fair measure of her father’s and brother’s brains and a lively sense of humour, she was an acquisition to both places. She was assigned to subsection Vl, a roomful of girls responsible for keeping cards on all the thousands of names that appeared in ISOS. A formidable lady ran the team with efficiency, humour and an iron hand. Helena and the others wrote a poem about their lives (in V1) of which I remember but two lines:

  You can’t have ’flu –

  You’re much too new.

  Helena had high expectations of both her brother and me. ‘When you’re Sir Kim and Sir Tim…’ she would say. I fear that each
of us missed her target by a wide margin.

  The ISOS source continued to provide much more information than could possibly be followed up in full detail. At the same time our stations were providing an ever-increasing flow of intelligence, some from double agents, that is, Abwehr people whom our stations had managed to recruit for our own purposes. By now it was unlikely that any German agent dispatched from the peninsula would reach British territory – or, very often, other territories – without our knowing about it in advance. The first possibility to consider in the case of an agent coming to Britain was whether he would make a suitable British double agent after his arrival, feeding doctored information back to the Germans. This would primarily be a matter for MI5 to handle, in conjunction with the interdepartmental committee which dealt with double-agent and deception material policy. But a number of agents launched from the peninsula were, like pascal, destined in the first instance for other countries. If in their travels they passed through British colonial territory, they would normally be arrested, sent to Britain and interned for the rest of the war. One unfortunate fellow was caught because his name – with no details at all of what he was doing or why the Abwehr were interested in him – turned up in ISOS within a few days of his appearing in a long travel permit list which I happened to have been looking through. He was taken off a boat at Trinidad and interrogated, admitted nothing, was sent to England by sea, and halfway across jumped overboard and was lost.

  Double-agent operations were among the greatest successes of British counter-espionage during the war. ISOS was often immensely valuable as a check on how the Germans were reacting to such operations, whether their suspicions had been aroused and what their estimate of the agent’s value might be. In certain circumstances ISOS could also be used as a check on the loyalty (to the British) of the agent himself. If he were trusted he might be sent on a visit to Spain or Portugal from England with sufficiently interesting information to ensure that a telegram would be sent to Berlin; the resulting ISOS would show at once if he were acting disloyally or had been rumbled by the Germans. Although Section V’s role in UK-based double-agent operations was mainly in support of MI5, it was an important role and one in which Kim himself played a large part.

  One of the characteristics of the Abwehr was that it was highly decentralised. In addition to operations mounted from or in Spain and Portugal by the local Abwehr stations, the two countries were used as stepping stones to the outside world by a large number of other Abwehr stations in Germany and German-occupied territory – the ASTs or Abwehrstellen, which were main stations, and the NESTs or Nebenstellen, which were subordinate to ASTs. Each of these – AST Brussels, AST Hamburg, AST Paris, NEST Cologne and many others – had its own agents, and Spain and Portugal were favourite territories for their deployment or transit. In addition each station, like the headquarters, was divided into Abwehr I, II and III, and Abwehr I further divided into I/H (army), I/Luft (air force), I/M (navy), I/Wi (economics), I/TLW (technology) and so on. Thus there were literally dozens of different sections whose independent operations had to be sorted out. Some of these stations and sections specialised in particular lines. For instance, AST Berlin (not to be confused with the overall Abwehr headquarters in Berlin) specialised in agents of Swiss nationality. AST Berlin also had a nasty little habit of using two cover-names indiscriminately for each of its people, sometimes even in the same message, which caused confusion at first. The local Abwehr organisations in Spain and Portugal were supposed to give assistance to all these outside activities, but clearly resented them, particularly when our protests and harassment began to take effect and the Abwehr had to walk delicately.

  We made a close study of the German sabotage organisation in Spain, that is, the local staff and agents of Abwehr II. Their main targets were British shipping in Spanish ports and Gibraltar. In late 1941 a time bomb placed by this organisation among the cargo of a British merchant ship in a port in south-east Spain had resulted in the death of many seamen. The Germans had not managed to repeat this kind of success but had been able to maintain an organisation in the area. One day ISOS messages began to come through which showed that Abwehr II were planning to place a bomb on a named British ship about to visit Gibraltar. Abwehr II were in the habit of couching their operational messages in mildly cryptic language; it was not, one assumed, that they alone in the Abwehr doubted the security of their organisation’s cyphers, but rather that they did not want to have any too obviously incriminating and politically embarrassing messages sitting around in their office files. In this case they were using medical terms: ‘doctor’ for the agent who was to place the bomb, ‘patient’ for the ship, ‘medicine’ for the bomb and so on. The doctor, we learnt, would be visiting the patient and prescribing medicine in a Spanish port near Gibraltar. The ship was then due to spend a few hours in Gibraltar and sail on. Gibraltar had made it clear to us that if they were to find the bomb they would have to order the ship to unload her cargo on the quayside, where it would be examined crate by crate under the eyes of the dock workers and, in effect, those of the Abwehr station at Algeciras. In spite of the risk to ISOS, this action had been authorised if necessary. It so happened that on the night of the ship’s arrival in Gibraltar I was duty officer at Glenalmond. It had been arranged that the ship would be held overnight on some easily arranged pretext and searched at first light. Sometime after midnight Bletchley teleprinted a message they had just deciphered: the doctor, it seemed, had had to call off the visit to his patient. Here was a dilemma: the interpretation of the message, while very probable, was less than certain, and there was also the slight possibility that the Germans might after all have subsequently found a way of placing the bomb. On the other hand, risk to ISOS had to be avoided. While we thought it likely that if the Germans saw crates being unloaded they would assume a leak from their organisation or some other cause rather than cypher insecurity, we could not be sure. If they had indeed cancelled the operation, and then saw the cargo being unloaded, they might be less inclined to assume a leak.

  Normally something of this kind, involving risk either to ISOS or alternatively to human life, would have been put to Kim and Felix and discussed with the Admiralty and others concerned. But a decision had to be taken before morning. I think Kim was away from St Albans that night. Felix, on the other hand, was reputed to stay up every night till three or four, reading papers at home, and it was now only half past one. The matter was not one that could be dealt with on the telephone, so I jumped into the duty car and drove over to Prae Wood, a large house about a mile away formerly used as Section V offices, where Felix was now living. I rang the bell: no answer. I rang again, and again. I took a handful of stones and threw them at what I fancied to be Felix and Mary’s window. I threw more stones. The silence was absolute. I felt completely alone in the world. For a moment I clutched at the idea of going back to Glenalmond and telephoning, in the hope that this might wake Felix. Then I faced what I had known all along: that I was only trying to push on to someone else a judgement which in the last resort I was in the best position to make. All that Felix – or Kim – could have said was, ‘Well, you’re supposed to be the expert; what do you think?’ I drove back to Glenalmond and signalled Gibraltar to let the ship go. All through the next day I held my breath, but there was no explosion.

  It is the custom now to deride the Abwehr as a net liability rather than asset to wartime Nazi Germany. There is a measure of truth in this. Many Abwehr officers were at most only lukewarm about national socialism, and some were strongly opposed. Even those officers who weren’t politically minded preferred the good life in Madrid, Lisbon and elsewhere to the Eastern Front, and therefore had a special vested interest in exaggerating the value of their work and closing their minds to any suspicion that an agent might be inventing or embroidering his reports or actually working as a double agent for the British or Americans. But at this time, halfway through the war, the Abwehr was by no means a spent force. The crews of Allied convoys struggli
ng through the western Mediterranean, murderously bombed as a result of reports from the Abwehr observation posts in the Strait of Gibraltar, would no doubt have agreed. So too would those many Allied agent networks in occupied Europe whom Abwehr III succeeded in uncovering. One can only speculate how the Abwehr would have performed if ISOS had not been available to us; it seems likely, for example, that some of their agent operations in Britain might have escaped detection for a considerable time.

  Only once, as far as I know, did the German intelligence services seriously suspect that their cyphers were being read. An urgent message from Madrid to Berlin said that a Royal Navy ship had stopped exactly athwart the secret German infrared beam across the Gibraltar Strait. The Abwehr in Madrid, fearing that the British might have been reading their cypher to Tangier, changed it immediately. For a short time we thought some flaming idiot had been taking an unauthorised initiative with ISOS, but after enquiry we were assured that the ship had stopped for an entirely innocent and coincidental reason. I am still not entirely convinced. Bletchley broke the new cypher within a month. Nevertheless, the incident reminded us that the Germans were by no means blind to cypher security. On another occasion we had a bad moment when an ISOS message from the Abwehr at Algeciras to Madrid began, ‘To our friends in the British Secret Service…’ Then we realised it was 1 April.

  A more serious danger was that, with so much evidence that the British were uncannily well informed, the Germans might try to test the security of their cyphers by setting a few traps. It would have been easy to name some innocent traveller and then sit back to see whether we detained him for questioning, or to mention an arbitrary address and keep watch from nearby for signs of interest. But nothing of the kind ever happened.

  I don’t think Kim ever visited Bletchley, but I went there once. Denys Page, who had been one of my classics tutors at Christ Church, was in general charge of the ISOS hut; Tom Webster, who had also been my tutor, was personal assistant to Commander Travis, the head of GC&CS. But my chief contact at Bletchley was Leonard Palmer, whose function in relation to the cryptographers was somewhat akin to that of Hugh Trevor-Roper in relation to the interceptors: it was his job to know what was going on in the German intelligence world, so that proper guidance could be given to the cryptographers and translators. I had also come to see my sister Angela, the same who had worked briefly with Kim in 1936 on the magazine venture, and who was now employed in the naval hut. Both before and after the war Angela earned part of her living by writing for Punch. Bletchley offered her and one or two like-minded friends a rich field for light verse: