Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  6. Alan Williams, Gentleman Traitor, Blond & Briggs, London, 1975.

  7. A rising star of the Foreign Office who died tragically in 1945.

  8. An influential Zionist and long-time Philby family friend. In 1937 Kim had told her that he was doing ‘dangerous work for the communists’. She subsequently introduced him to Aileen. In 1962, when Philby was the correspondent of The Observer in Beirut, Solomon objected to what she perceived to be the anti-Israeli tone of his articles and related the details of her earlier conversation with Philby to Victor Rothschild, who in turn introduced her to MI5. This was the first hard evidence MI5 had obtained on Philby and led to his interrogation in Beirut.

  9. Henry Desmond Vernon Pakenham CBE. A schoolteacher before the war, he joined the Foreign Office in 1946, serving in Madrid, Djakarta, Havana, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Australia before his retirement in 1971.

  10. The distinguished Russian author and playwright Genrikh Borovik was allowed to interview Philby at length in the years 1985–8 and after Philby’s death was granted unprecedented access to KGB archives including the entire KGB case files on their master spy. In his subsequent book, Borovik quotes Philby’s Soviet controller’s report to Moscow Centre on 10 March 1943, which read, ‘Meetings with [KP] take place in London once every ten to twelve days, in the customary way, as with other agents. Sometimes, when the opportunity arises, he brings separate files to photograph (only when we ask him). In these instances we meet him in the morning and return the material in the evening. This, of course is inconvenient and incorrect according to operational procedures, but it’s the only way to get the documentary files that [KP] can’t copy, because they are too large. Earlier, as far as we know, he used to have a “Minox” but his photographs weren’t very good, and at your instruction we took the camera from him.’ (Genrikh Borovik, The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby, Little, Brown, Boston, 1994, p. 206.)

  11. Eleanor Philby, Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968.

  † Editor’s note: Milne is right to say that most ISOS and ISK material went to MI5 but the main problem was not Cowgill’s refusal to pass material to MI5; it was his refusal, on misguided security grounds, to allow service intelligence officers involved in the Double Cross operations access to the ISOS and ISK material.

  7

  RYDER STREET AND BROADWAY

  Before the war 14 Ryder Street had been the home of the Charity Commission, as it is once more.† Even for London offices of the time it was old fashioned. The lift was more primitive than Broadway’s museum piece. Many of the rooms were small, high ceilinged and heated by little coal fires. For lack of a suitable large office the communal life of the Iberian subsection had to be broken up and we were housed two in a room. But there was compensation in all this: my room-mate for a time was Graham Greene, who had recently taken over the Portuguese desk when its former occupant was posted to Lisbon. Graham had returned from his post as SIS representative in Freetown at about the end of 1942 and was assigned to Section V. At Glenalmond he had been engaged in a solitary pursuit, the production of the Portuguese ‘Purple Primer’. A Purple Primer was a ‘Who’s Who’ of all known enemy intelligence officers, agents and contacts in a particular country, and was intended partly for current reference and partly for mopping-up operations after the war. It cannot have been one of the most rewarding experiences of Graham’s life, but he stuck to it tenaciously and completed it, on the basis of evidence then available, before we left Glenalmond. Kim wrote an introduction. Later I had the task of amplifying and updating the work. Perhaps this entitles me to go down in history as the co-author, with Graham Greene and H. A. R. Philby, of a volume privately published, in limited edition, with numbered copies.

  In Ryder Street Graham brought his own particular style to the handling of Portuguese matters. He was not greatly interested in the intelligence war, perhaps because it was now beginning to go so much in our favour, but anything in the nature of human injustices caught his imagination and his pen. He bombarded everyone for weeks with pleas and arguments on behalf of a former SIS agent who had ended up in a Lisbon jail, allegedly for activities on our behalf, and in whom we had now lost interest. Graham’s marginal notes on incoming correspondence, inscribed in a fine compressed hand in which he appeared to have omitted to move the pen sideways as he wrote, were a pleasure in themselves. ‘Poor old ——,’ he noted on one letter from the Broadway man in Lisbon, ‘bashing about like a bull in a china shop, letting in great glimpses of the obvious.’ I had less to do professionally with another luminary of Ryder Street, Malcolm Muggeridge, who had likewise returned from a post in Africa, in this case Lourenço Marques, and was to lighten the later months of our war with malice and wit.

  At the time of the move to London I had already been Vd1 for nearly two years; Kim had been head of the subsection a few weeks longer. Neither of us had had any promotion within the service. However, Felix Cowgill had had some success in improving the status of his officers, and I think we were getting a little more pay than at first. There had also been some improvement – though this, of course, did not affect Kim as a civilian – in the military ranking of Army officers in Section V. Felix had had a hard struggle to achieve this. A Brigadier Beddington in Broadway, who supervised Army staffing and promotion matters in SIS, had made it part of his life’s work to block all attempts to rationalise the Section V military establishment and place us on a more even footing with the people we were in touch with in the forces ministries, MI5, the Army commands and many other places. In November 1942 there had been a breakthrough, and I had gone up to captain, but I continued to wear civilian clothes and never used the rank. A captain was still nobody, and I was better able to deal with outside people if I appeared to be a civilian.

  In September 1943, having secured an enlargement of the Section V establishment, Felix announced some promotions. A new post was created for Kim, with the designation Vk (the K stood for Kim), overseeing Vd and several other subsections. I became head of Vd in his place, though I continued to spend much of my time on ISOS, and Desmond Pakenham moved up to Vd1. The post of Vd now carried with it the rank of major. The higher status, and the condition of my civilian clothes, induced me to get out my battledress, and Marie was able to unpick the second lieutenant’s single pip and substitute the major’s crown without having to bother about the intervening stages.

  Sicily had fallen to the Allies in July–August 1943, and Mussolini had been deposed by his compatriots and incarcerated in a mountain fastness. At the beginning of September our troops had begun landing in southern Italy. In Ryder Street a new subsection, Vt, was set up to handle Italy, and a brilliant recruit, Colin Roberts of St John’s College, Oxford,1 was brought in to deal with ISOS in the Vt area; he and I looked after it jointly until he was ready to take over.

  It was during this time that one of the might-have-beens of the war occurred. The cypher used between SD headquarters in Berlin and their station in Rome had just been broken by GC&CS, but for the first week or two, as so often with newly broken cyphers, the decoded messages reached us in random order and with many gaps. Evidently something big was being planned, involving a specialist commando under Otto Skorzeny.2 But one or two vital earlier messages were missing, and it was not until after Skorzeny and his men had landed on the Gran Sasso and ‘rescued’ Mussolini that Bletchley manage to unbutton them. Had they broken the SD cypher a few days earlier, or had Skorzeny attempted his snatch a few days later, means might conceivably have been found to forestall the operation. Mussolini would not have ended the war hanging upside down with Clara Petacci in a Milan square, and might have stood trial as a war criminal instead.

  Now, of course, I was seeing much less of Kim. He was working in a different room, and concerned with several areas besides my own. After office hours there was not much time or energy for social life. But the lunch hour usually found Kim, me and a few companions in one or other of the many pubs within thre
e minutes’ walk of 14 Ryder Street. Our favourite was the Unicorn, at the corner of Jermyn Street and Bury Street. Here on one occasion Kim and I were sitting at the bar when a man walked in whom I recognised as a former contemporary of ours at Westminster, from another house. He caught sight of Kim, and without noticing me went up to him and said, ‘Good Lord, aren’t you Milne?’ ‘No,’ said Kim, ‘he is.’ I can think of no obvious reason why somebody whom each of us had known only slightly at school and whom neither had seen or heard of since should have mentally associated us to the point of confusion. The newcomer seemed as mystified as we were.

  Some accounts suggest that Kim travelled a good deal at this period, visiting our stations in Spain and Portugal several times and even the Middle East. I recall only one visit by Kim to the peninsula and none elsewhere, as long as he was in Section V. But there was plenty for him to do in Ryder Street, especially in supervising the new Italian subsection and in planning the Section V contribution to the forthcoming Overlord operation. It was also in these first few months in Ryder Street that a most interesting case arose which Kim made very much his own and which he describes in detail in his book. A German Foreign Office official, code-named wood,3 was supplying Allen Dulles, head of OSS in Switzerland, with en clair texts of telegrams between German embassies and Berlin, most of which were not available through Bletchley. Each time he came to Berne he deposited a batch of telegrams on Dulles’s office. For complicated reasons it fell to Kim to handle the processing and distribution for British customers of this voluminous and extremely valuable material. It was through WOOD that we first learnt about CICERO, the valet to the British ambassador in Turkey, who for a few months supplied so much information to the Germans in Ankara. CICERO was run by the SD, whose cyphers between Ankara and Berlin were not being read by Bletchley. But the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, also sent a few telegrams about him to the German Foreign Office, and it was these that wood produced. While they did not name or directly pinpoint the SD agent, there was enough information for the British investigators to get uncomfortably close to him and frighten him off for the rest of the war, though it was not until the Americans captured CICERO’s case officer, Moyzisch, after VE Day that we learnt the full truth. Seldom has a case had such an all-star cast: CICERO, probably the best German agent of the war; WOOD, one of the most remarkable Allied agents; Dulles, perhaps the most celebrated of OSS officers; and Kim, described (by Dulles) as ‘the best spy the Russians ever had’.

  Though I did not know it, my time in the Iberian subsection was coming to an end. In February 1944, I went down with severe sinus trouble and a high temperature, and as recovery was slow I was packed off to Dorset to convalesce. Arriving back in Ryder Street on 1 March, I found I had made a sideways move and was now in charge of a new subsection, Vf, dealing with Germany. Felix Cowgill was belatedly making good his original omission to do anything about Germany, and handsomely. Within a few months Vf numbered twenty or more officers. They included three or four first-class people, a larger number who were competent without being outstanding, and one or two elderly has-beens who were so abysmally useless that all one could do was to put them onto relatively unimportant matters where they could do no serious harm. This was not too difficult to arrange because Vf had no stations to deal with and no current casework to handle. One of our main tasks was to assemble in easily available form all information about German intelligence services and their members that might be useful to the Allied forces when the time came for them to enter and govern a large part of Germany; it was anticipated that by then Abwehr and SD officials who had not yet been captured either would be found corralled within Germany or could be repatriated there by arrangement with neutral countries. Our field included the Gestapo (who had not hitherto come much within our purview) and several other departments concerned with aspects of intelligence and security. Of course, the work was nothing like so exciting as it had been in Vd. We had no telegrams to send, no spies to catch or turn, no démarches to make.

  But in truth the counter-espionage war against the Germans was already near to being won. The Abwehr was in disarray. On top of the humiliations it had suffered at our hands in Spain – to the personal disadvantage of Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, some of whose earlier prestige had arisen from his close friendship with Franco and other Spanish leaders – three Abwehr officials in Turkey defected to the Allies early in 1944. Soon after this, slight changes began to be noticeable in the designation of certain addressees and signatories of Abwehr messages. The phrase ‘Mil.Amt’ appeared – i.e. Militärisches Amt, or Military Office. It eventually emerged that the politically unreliable Abwehr had been put under the command of the SD and was now designated as the SD’s ‘Mil.Amt’. First to appreciate what was happening were Trevor-Roper’s section, from their central vantage point. If Vf had been properly established by then I hope we would have been equally quick. But to anyone concentrating on Spain, Portugal and north Africa the change was distinctly unexpected. There the SD had been ineffective. Only their man in Tangier remains in memory, not for any achievements but for his big mouth. After the Allies landed in north Africa, he was forever promising Berlin that he had a team ready to assassinate Eisenhower in Algiers or an agent who could penetrate this or that headquarters. At first he had a slight nuisance value, but was soon discounted. Elsewhere the SD were of greater consequence: I have already mentioned the Skorzeny and CICERO operations. The political significance of this takeover of the German General Staff’s secret intelligence service by the rival Party organisation, at a time when German forces were in retreat, was unmistakable.

  Although I had left the Vd subsection (now headed by Desmond Pakenham), Kim as Vk was still my immediate boss. A subject which was increasingly occupying our attention was that of anti-Hitler plots within Germany and attempts by the plotters to gain the interest and support of the Allies. I put one of my officers, Noel Sharp, on to the subject full time. As early as the summer of 1942 Otto John,4 on one of his visits to Madrid as Lufthansa’s legal adviser, had begun to give information to an SIS agent (on the Broadway side, not Section V) about a group, including Ludwig Beck, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and others, which was said to be planning to overthrow the Hitler régime. In the two years that followed, other emissaries such as Adam von Trott and Hans Bernd Gisevius amplified the information in other neutral countries – as did John himself on further visits to the peninsula. The broad political aim of the group was to set up a government which would be friendly to Britain and America and ready to make peace.

  A myth has grown up that Kim, in the Soviet interest, managed to stifle reports of this kind or at least to get them regarded as unreliable. I have no doubt that if he had seen in this situation an opportunity of helping the Russians without danger to himself he would have taken it. But he was not really in a strong position to influence events. For one thing, the plotters were in touch with the Americans as well as the British. Within SIS, it was for Section I, not Section V, to decide what political information should be circulated to the Foreign Office and other Whitehall departments. To the best of my memory John’s reports were indeed so circulated by Section I, with the reasonable comment that as the source was not a regular SIS agent the reports could not be vouched for. I assume that something similar happened to the reports from the other emissaries. Section V’s primary role was to examine whether there was any evidence that the whole thing was a plant by a German intelligence service, or alternatively that the German security service had penetrated the group and were aware of what was going on. It soon became apparent that there was no evidence for the first possibility. Although, as we could see from ISOS, some of the emissaries were technically Abwehr agents, this meant nothing. Almost all Germans who visited neutral countries frequently were likely to be given some sort of brief by the Abwehr to report any useful information that came their way. We found it harder to judge the second hypothesis. It seemed impossible that the Gestapo and SD, with all their
resources and ruthlessness, had never, in the course of two years and more, had an inkling of what was going on when we were picking it up all over the place. Perhaps the plotters were deliberately being allowed a lot of rope by the Gestapo and SD. The general attitude in London was cautious. One reason was that, in November 1939, SIS had fallen head first into a trap laid by the SD at Venlo, on the Dutch–German frontier. Two SIS officers, lured by a bogus resistance group, had been captured by the Germans. (The leader in that operation had been a young man called Walter Schellenberg, who was now incidentally in charge of the Mil.Amt.)

  Nevertheless Noel Sharp and I found ourselves getting increasingly interested in and optimistic about this group of plotters, and I don’t recall any contrary view from Kim. The real objections to giving encouragement to these and similar feelers came from the Foreign Office. It was fixed Allied policy to reject anything that could be interpreted as an attempt to drive a wedge between the Western Allies and Russia. There may also have been reluctance in the Foreign Office, and indeed elsewhere, to believe that this was more than a small bunch of amateurs unlikely to achieve anything. Not long after the bomb attack of 20 July 1944 several of us, as was our custom, were listening to the news in the hall of 14 Ryder Street. Noel and I looked at one another open mouthed as so many familiar names were reeled off, of plotters now dead or in custody. Perhaps the Gestapo had already had some of them in its sights, but it had not managed to prevent Claus von Stauffenberg’s bomb (provided by accomplices in Abwehr II, from captured SOE stock) from going off under Hitler’s conference table.