by Tim Milne
Commander Travis is my guide.
I shall not want with him beside.
He for my wandering footsteps hath
Laid everywhere a concrete path…
And so on. But eventually she went too far. The output of Bletchley expressed itself in massive daily sheaves of teleprint. It was the custom of one of Commander Travis’s assistants to go through the material every day and pick out nuggets to show him. Angela, who for some reason had conceived an antipathy to this assistant, not only wrote derogatory verses about him, but with the help of friends had them teleprinted in the same format as the Bletchley output and inserted into the daily batch. Soon afterwards she left Bletchley and joined the Foreign Office Political Intelligence Department, which presented less temptation to scurrility.
At Glenalmond the Iberian subsection, like the rest of Section V, grew larger. Eventually we had ten officers all working in the single room. One of these was the long-awaited assistant on ISOS, who arrived at the beginning of 1943, just in time to help with all the extra work arising from the north African landing of November 1942. Kim’s area, and therefore mine, had been enlarged to include the new theatre of operations. Three of our original colleagues in Vd were now attached to various headquarters under General Eisenhower’s command, each with his own rapid cypher communications to Section V. Much of what they reported tied up with ISOS, and much of the ISOS needed investigation through them. Desmond Pakenham,9 the new ISOS assistant, not only was an amusing companion with a nice turn of phrase but took over much of the work.
Another area which took our attention in Vd for a short time was the Azores. Secret plans were being made in the summer of 1943 to establish a British and American base there, with Portuguese agreement, and it was arranged that a Section V officer would be attached to the force. He had previously been in MI5, but joined us in St Albans at about the beginning of June and was invited by Kim to become yet a further inmate of the rather crowded Spinney. Our chief reason for sending a man to the Azores was that the Abwehr in Lisbon had recently established an agent there (of Portuguese nationality) with wireless and cypher communication. Although we had not yet been able to identify him we wanted to nobble him as soon as possible. When therefore the expedition was launched in October 1943 it was accompanied not only by our officer but also by a radio direction-finding van capable of geographically pinpointing the source of transmissions. As soon as the troops landed the van was sent into action, but before the technicians had got the definitive fix the agent sent a final message, duly decyphered by Bletchley, which ran something like this: ‘Can see D/F-ing van at end of my street. Closing down.’ With no further transmissions to work on, it was some weeks before he could be identified and arrested.
I am very conscious that so far I have struck no sort of balance between my own work and that of other officers in the subsection. Many of the cases we were investigating came up first from the stations or other non-ISOS sources and would be dealt with by my colleagues; I would keep an eye open for ISOS reflections, an obvious criterion of the importance of a case. But a number of potentially dangerous operations might show up relatively little in ISOS, if at all. This was true, for example, of the many Spanish and Portuguese seamen recruited by the Abwehr to report on what they might see of Allied warships or merchantmen. The neutralisation of these operations was brought to a fine art by the Vd officer dealing with Spain, in conjunction with the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
I am also very aware that I have said nothing at all about the work of other subsections, of which I knew or at any rate can remember little. This was nothing to do with restrictive security or application of the ‘need-to-know’ principle. On the contrary we were encouraged within reason to share experiences and expertise, quite rightly in my opinion: in wartime there is often more to be gained from spreading knowledge within an intelligence organisation than is likely to be lost from increasing the security risk. But with the occasional exception of Turkey, there was not much parallel between our area and elsewhere, and I am afraid I was too immersed in my own work to bother much about what others were doing.
The job was so absorbing and completely time consuming that I would have found it almost impossible to imagine it could take second place to even more important work. Yet, one supposes, that is how it was with Kim. Sitting opposite me in the office, puffing at his pipe, with a faraway look in his eyes, he seemed to be planning some new initiative with the Foreign Office, some far-reaching scheme to discuss with MI5, some comprehensive instruction to the field. More probably he was putting together in his mind a report to the Russians, or wondering what, in furtherance of their interests, his next move or manoeuvre should be. I have no idea whether his contacts with the Russians were always direct or sometimes carried out through an intermediary, how frequently they took place and where, whether his reports to them were oral or written, whether he ever photographed papers for them or lent them copies to photograph and return, or what. He surely could not have had any contact with them in St Albans itself; there he was always to be found either at Glenalmond or at The Spinney, or travelling between, or in a pub with others of us. I assume that his contacts took place during his regular visits to London. But where? In a pub or restaurant? At a Russian safe house? In Guy Burgess’s flat? Whatever the nature of the contacts, they must have been quickly and efficiently managed, for his visits to London seldom lasted more than a day, travel included, and he always had a number of people to see and meetings to attend in Broadway, MI5 and elsewhere. If one tried to get a message to him on the telephone there were no unexplained gaps in his timetable. As to photography of documents, it certainly could not have been done either at Glenalmond, where privacy was nil, or at The Spinney, which was equally public and where nothing was ever locked. In any case Aileen would have had to be in the know, which I’m sure she wasn’t.10
I have searched my memory for incidents which might with hindsight be seen to have some significance, but apart from the case described in the footnote to the previous chapter, little emerges. Only once did he and I have anything like a disagreement in Section V. I have forgotten the subject, but I remember being surprised that Kim, who was normally so reasonable, was suddenly being utterly perverse. Perhaps he thought the same about me. But I have a faint memory that it may have been to do with Poland. Had I stumbled on something that meant more to him than to me?
Sometimes it struck me as strange that Kim was prepared to leave so much of the most interesting work to me. If I had been in his place I would have grabbed ISOS for myself with both hands. (When I did eventually succeed him as head of the subsection I continued to deal with ISOS as a main part of my function.) One might now surmise that he was content with the arrangement because it left him with more time for extramural activity. But I think this unlikely; the division of work made good practical sense, and enabled him to give proper time and attention to directing the work and policy of the whole subsection. I think too that he regarded himself as not having an ‘ISOS mind’, which he saw as slightly peculiar.
I seldom saw Kim even slightly disconcerted. Once, the officer who dealt inter alia with vetting questions and acted as a kind of security officer came up to him. ‘Sorry to bother you, Kim – mere formality. It’s about your wife’s application for a job – she’s quoted you as a reference. I just need the usual good word.’ Kim looked utterly blank. Then his face lit up. ‘Oh, you mean my first wife… Yes, she’s OK.’ Presumably Lizy, who had returned to England soon after the war began, had not let him know that she was giving him as a reference for some job she was seeking, and I imagine they were not in touch.
Kim had moved a long way by now from the asceticism of school and university days. Yet he still seemed to have little interest in physical comforts or luxurious surroundings. I think he bothered less about personal possessions than anyone I have known. If I had been in the habit of borrowing his clothes, or even his toothbrush, I don’t suppose he would have minded in the least, assuming h
e noticed. He was very easily bored, especially by pretentious or snobbish conversation or by social small talk. One always knew when Kim was bored: he would go very solemn, his voice would drop an octave and he would say, ‘That’s extremely interesting.’ He was not a good actor when it came to the minor exchanges of life, however adroit he may have been over anything to do with his great central secret.
Kim had a few foibles. One, trivial in itself yet unexpected in someone so sane and well balanced, was that he had an extraordinary aversion to apples – the sight, the smell, even the thought of them. I was once rash enough to allocate the code-name Apple to some intelligence operation, but had to change it at Kim’s insistence. Some years later in Istanbul I saw him angrily seize a bag of apples which the nannie or cook had surreptitiously bought for the children and hurl it out of the kitchen window into the Bosphorus. His third wife, Eleanor, in her memoirs, says that after she returned to America finally from Moscow, she sent Kim a Beatles record, ‘Help!’11 If it was on the Apple label, it would not have lasted long.
He, I and the others followed the course of the war very closely, especially on the Eastern Front, where the main fighting was taking place. While none of us seemed to discuss basic political beliefs, we often talked about the practical politics of the war. Kim had been critical of Churchill in the winter of 1941–42, and appeared to welcome any strong independent vote in a by-election, which of course was the only way in which anti-government feelings could be expressed at the polls. But he acknowledged that Churchill’s unequivocal broadcast on the evening of 22 June 1941, pledging immediate support to the Russians in their fight against Germany, showed a sense of greatness; we used to wonder what Chamberlain would have said. Sometime in mid-1942 Kim delivered himself of a rather uncharacteristic statement: ‘You know, I’m beginning to think we’re going to win this war.’ No doubt ‘we’ meant the Allies rather than Britain, but this was not the way he usually spoke. He never seemed to identify himself with his country, even over sport. Although Kim was a very English person, and much more at home in congenial English company than any other, he showed little affection for England or its countryside, cities, institutions and traditions. He had some regard for the qualities of English people as a whole, but much contempt for middle-class virtues and middle-class likes and dislikes. Though he never lacked physical or moral courage, one could not imagine him making patriotic gestures. Perhaps there should have been a clue in all this to his real feelings. But England is full of people who appear to have little patriotism yet would not dream of spying against their country.
Though not an intellectual, if I understand that term correctly, and still less an academic, he was very much one of the middle-class or upper-middle-class intelligentsia. Once at St Albans I said to him that I usually found it difficult to feel entirely at home with working-class people. ‘Really?’ said Kim in surprise. ‘I find it very easy.’ In fact I doubt if he ever had much to do with working-class people in his life, except in a small way at Cambridge. Although over the period 1935 to 1955 I met many of Kim’s friends, I do not recall any who did not have an ‘educated’ accent. His acquaintances came from a rather narrow social class, though they embraced a wide range of types within that class. While this may have helped his position as a Russian spy, I doubt whether it was in any sense dictated by that position; even if he had never been a spy I think he would have had the same sort of friends.
The St Albans time was drawing to a close. By the spring of 1943 Section V was beginning to be heavily involved in the war fronts that were opening up. The Allies were about to move into Sicily, and then Italy. Next year it would be western Europe. All this necessitated much planning with the War Office, the various commands that were being set up, MI5 (who were represented in the SCI units), the Americans, Broadway and others. We were beginning to feel more and more that we were out on a limb in Hertfordshire: power and action lay in London. An opportunity arose to move to Ryder Street in the St James’s area, a minute’s walk from MI5, but Felix Cowgill was strongly opposed to such a move. He foresaw that the character of the Section V he had built up in its country isolation would be threatened by a transfer to the London mêlée, and that he himself would find it more difficult to cope with his enemies. There were several Section V staff who wanted to stay in St Albans, perhaps for the same sort of reasons as Felix, perhaps because they now had strong domestic roots in or around the town, perhaps simply because they did not know London. But, when it was put to a vote, most of us opted for the move. I was much in favour, both for the reasons I have given above and on personal grounds. Kim also had personal grounds of a different kind: he would be nearer to the centres of power and better able to carry out Soviet aims. He was one of the strongest advocates of the move. As so often in this story, he was pressing for something which made admirable sense in itself but which one now sees he wanted primarily for different reasons.
July 21st was set as the date of the move. Kim, who had a monthly tenancy on The Spinney, decided to give it up at the end of June. He and Aileen and the two children – a third was on the way – went to Dora Philby’s flat in Grove Court, Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. (Either then or later Dora moved upstairs to another flat.) I moved to the flat near Chelsea Town Hall which Marie had taken a year or so earlier. For three weeks Kim, Helena, I and others commuted in the wrong direction, leaving St Pancras for St Albans in the morning and returning to London at night.
One sad casualty of the move, for me at any rate, was Sammy. Marie and I tried to keep him in London for a time, but with both of us working it was not a practical proposition. Eventually I handed him over to the assistant of David, the Glenalmond factotum. Sammy had conceived an inordinate attachment for him and he could offer him a decent home in the suburbs. Kim spoke his valediction. ‘David’s dogsbody’s dog,’ he said unfeelingly.
Notes
1. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973, pp. 167–8.
2. Dick Brooman-White was MP for Rutherglen 1951–64 and Under-Secretary of State for Scotland 1960–63. He died in 1964.
3. Tomás Harris was an expert on El Greco and Goya, and settled in Spain soon after the war. A brilliant intuitive agent handler who ran GARBO (see note 4), he had a theory as to why elaborate deception operations against the Germans could work so well and why the British were never taken in by similar German attempts. From his point of view the Germans were culturally and institutionally handicapped when it came to deception, ‘because they had closed their minds to the irrational’. Quoted from Stephen Talty, Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and saved D-Day, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2012.
4. Operation Garbo. Juan Pujol García, a Spaniard, was known by the British code-name GARBO and to the Germans as Agent ARABEL. He was one of the few people to receive decorations from both sides, an MBE from the British and an Iron Cross from the Germans. Initially from Lisbon and later from London, GARBO built a fictional network of agents feeding disinformation to the Germans and played a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation to mislead the Germans about the timing and location of the Normandy landings in 1944. For the full story of his life, Pujol’s own account makes compelling reading: Operation Garbo, Dialogue, London, 2011.
5. Arthur George Trevor-Wilson was raised in France from an early age and pre war worked in Paris and north Africa in finance and trading, even at one time as an Abyssinian skunk exporter. He joined the British army at the outbreak of hostilities and served as a liaison officer with the British 2nd Division until his evacuation from Dunkirk. Because of his fluent French, Trevor-Wilson joined SOE and later transferred to SIS, specialising in north African affairs. Towards the end of the war and fresh from a posting in Algiers, he was dispatched to Hanoi, where he was to spend much of the next ten years. He formed a close friendship with Ho Chi Minh, whom he met on a weekly basis. Historians sifting back through th
e morass of reports generated by the many different intelligence agencies during this complex period in the history of Indochina have singled out Trevor-Wilson’s reports as the most perceptive and objective. A great friend of the novelist Graham Greene and a fellow Catholic, Trevor-Wilson was subsequently ordered out of Vietnam by General de Lattre de Tassigny (the overall commander of French forces in Indochina from 1950). Greene, in his autobiography, wrote, ‘De Lattre reported to the Foreign Office that Trevor-Wilson, who had been decorated for his services to France during the Second World War, was no longer persona grata. Trevor was thrown out of Indo-China, and the Foreign Office lost a remarkable Consul and the French a great friend of their country.’ De Lattre justified his decision by telling the head of the Sureté, ‘All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient to have a Consul who’s in the Secret Service; they even send me their novelists as agents, and Catholic novelists into the bargain.’ After de Lattre left Vietnam, Trevor-Wilson returned, but this time under commercial cover as a leather goods distributor. He continued to do work for SIS, largely in Asia, until his retirement in the 1960s. Malcolm Muggeridge, a wartime colleague in Section V, described Trevor-Wilson as the ablest intelligence officer he had come across during the war. (Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Asia during the Second World War’, Modern Asian Studies (1998), vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 179–227; Graham Greene, Ways of Escape p. 154, Bodley Head, London, 1980.) For a fuller account of Trevor-Wilson’s time in Vietnam and the particular incident that earned de Lattre’s displeasure, see Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939–1955, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994, pp. 481–7.