Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  Now for the first time I was brought into occasional contact with the chief, Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies. I think I had met him only once before, when he paid an official visit to St Albans. Normally he lived a remote godlike existence in his fourth-floor office in Broadway, never mingling informally with his staff. He had a flat on the premises, and took his breakfast in the office canteen in the basement; if you were night duty officer you were warned to be out of the canteen by 9 a.m. so that the chief could breakfast alone. He was a shy man of considerable charm and political acumen; Kim has well described the chief’s remarkable ability to scent and ward off danger arising to his own personal position. In pre-war days he had combined the headship of Section IV (dealing with the War Office) and the task of liaising with the French. He had little or no knowledge of counter-espionage, though he liked to dabble in it if a chance came his way. Once he called me in to say that a fellow member at White’s had given him a scrap of information about some suspicious character – would I look into the matter? ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘the chap at the club doesn’t know what I do.’ He seemed genuinely not to realise that probably the whole of White’s knew what he did. Nor was he minutely informed about what went on in his organisation. He once asked me to list all staff who were entitled to see a particular category of highly secret material. ‘I don’t suppose there are more than a dozen,’ he said. There were 180.

  The chief had no great liking for representational entertaining, but I persuaded him to give a small farewell lunch for our liaison officer with ONI (the intelligence branch of the US Navy) and his boss, the US naval attaché; the only other person present was myself. We lunched in a private house used by the service for this kind of occasion. Although there were no professional problems to discuss, the chief seemed extremely nervous. Perhaps to cover this, he talked continuously at high speed about a number of subjects, most of which we were supposed not to discuss with the Americans. Fortunately he spoke so fast and so allusively that it seemed unlikely our guests had understood more than a fraction of it.

  Kim used to argue that ideally the chief of the Secret Service should be an absolutely smashing girl, with no other qualifications for the job. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘one has to see the chief every now and then, and it’s usually rather a waste of time. This way at least you’d enjoy the occasion.’ I expect senior civil servants sometimes have the same feeling about their ministers.

  The chief’s handwriting was so illegible that one almost needed to call in Bletchley to decipher it. Once, Kim wished to inform somebody of the content of a characteristic green ink scrawl. ‘The Chief’, he wrote, ‘has minuted “I do not (two groups mutilated) with this idea”.’ Let me add that Kim came to have considerable respect for Menzies, as is clear from his book.

  In the second half of 1944 a joint War Room, staffed by Section V, OSS/X2 and MI5, had been set up to deal with the counter-espionage information coming in from the war theatres of western Europe, and to give the necessary guidance – and ISOS information – to the SCI units with the various British and American military headquarters. It has been alleged that this very sensible and obvious arrangement was a humiliating defeat for SIS and Section V, who, it is said, saw the most glittering intelligence prize of the war being taken away from them and who even had difficulties in providing staff for the joint effort. Not so. I believe that Felix was opposed to the establishment of the War Room, but almost everyone else thought it a good idea. One important reason why it was a tripartite affair was because the SCI units as a whole were similarly tripartite – the American units were staffed by OSS/X2 officers and the British ones by Section V and a few MI5 officers. It is true that, with our ever-increasing overseas commitments and the departure of Kim and Felix, we in Section V would have found difficulty in providing a suitable head. Happily, a universally acceptable candidate eventually became available in the person of ‘Tar’ Robertson,8 a regular soldier who had successfully headed MI5’s remarkable double-agent section for most of the war. He presided over the War Room’s mixed bag with tact and efficiency, but the brains of the outfit was probably Section V’s Colin Roberts. I am even more mystified by the suggestion that the War Room were dealing with the great intelligence prize of the war. German intelligence services were no longer the menace they had been. As the Allies drove eastwards, the Germans hastily recruited and trained a number of ‘stay-behind’ agents, French, Belgians and others, usually equipped with radio and cyphers, who were intended to stay put as the battle-line rolled over them and then transmit information to the Germans. In practice, virtually all of them either buried their equipment and went home to live a quiet life, or came running to the British or Americans. A number of them were used by us as short-term double agents. It was all a lot of work, but the German war was nearly won and the excitement of earlier days was lacking.

  I did not appoint a successor to the Vk chair but was fortunate enough to get Dick Brooman-White, now released by Duncan Sandys, as my deputy. We sat at each end of a large room and shared out the work. The arrangement meant that one of us would be free to travel when needed, while the other held the fort. Travel was becoming both easier and more necessary. My first visit, in March 1945, was to Paris (where Malcolm Muggeridge and Trevor-Wilson now enlivened an already complicated intelligence scene), Brussels and Germany west of the Rhine battle-line. At that time there were still fears of prolonged underground resistance in western Europe by hard-core Nazis, and even of a German military redoubt in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. Another matter of great interest was our future intelligence relationship with several western European countries. Section V had already established liaisons with a number of foreign counter-intelligence and security services and expected to build these up in the future.

  Our chief liaison relationship was and remained with the Americans. In addition to the very large OSS/X2 contingent, both G2 (the intelligence branch of the US Army) and ONI maintained small offices in Ryder Street. The chief reason for this was that on the American side, ISOS, like other cryptographic material, lay within the jurisdiction of G2 and ONI, and OSS/X2 had been allowed access only under their general supervision. A fourth American service with which we were in close liaison was the FBI, whose representative in the American embassy visited us frequently. I hope I will not do injustice to these departments and their professional value to us if I mention in this context a further benefit. To put it briefly, we British were starved of liquor. The Americans had plenty and as always were generous with it. This was the rye and bourbon period of my life.

  I am brought, by a natural transition, to Norman Pearson, head of OSS/X2. He later became a professor of English and American poetry, and co-edited with W. H. Auden a five-volume work, Poets of the English Language. Norman was a hunchback, but agile and cheerful if occasionally devious. In liaison he was neither unintelligent nor unhelpful, but his main task as he saw it was finding out what the British were up to. Liaising with him was more like liaising with the French than with the Americans. Unwittingly Marie and I fed his suspicions. She came along to the Unicorn one day in the middle of 1944 to have a drink with Kim and me, and announced in all innocence that she had been sent to a job with the Americans at 71 Grosvenor Street. ‘Marie,’ said Kim, ‘you have touched bottom.’ We explained that it was the London headquarters of OSS. It was some time before Norman fully accepted that this was not a deep (or rather a ridiculously shallow) plot to penetrate his service. In fact both OSS in Grosvenor Street and X2 in Ryder Street used a number of British secretaries, and the usual barriers of secrecy that exist between two intelligence services had been largely broken down.

  One secret we did try to keep from the Americans for a time was the nature of Kim’s new work and the existence of Section IX. I cannot remember what sort of feeble cover story was put around, but it was highly unlikely to fool someone as curious as Norman, who could see that the star of Section V had been removed for no good reason. Norman’s technique for getting informat
ion on SIS was to take its people out for the evening and try to get them drunk. Unfortunately, he always got drunk first, long before the martini stage was over. One evening he invited me to dinner at his home, along with Kim and Jack Ivens, who had been a colleague in Vd but was now, after a spell in Madrid, working in Section IX. Kim had a prior engagement; he joined us for a few drinks at the Unicorn but was able to cry off for the rest of the evening, which was obviously going to be a bumpy ride. In the taxi, before he lapsed into unintelligibility, Norman managed to mumble something about ‘What’s happening in the IX theatre?’, but that was the full extent of the business side of the evening. We arrived at his maisonette near Victoria and started on pink gins. It was one of those evenings where you finish the bottle of Angostura and have to find another, which we managed to do. Jack and I got Norman on to his bed and then set about cooking the meal, for which his daily woman had done the groundwork. Just as we had everything ready, with a bottle of wine open, we heard a fearful crash from above. I am sorry to say that we finished our chops before we went upstairs and restored Norman to his bed. Then we went back and scoured his cupboards till we found a bottle of Armagnac. Norman won in the end: we two had terrible hangovers, while he bounced into my office first thing as though he’d never had a drink in his life. The story was a favourite with Kim: ‘Tell me again about that evening with Norman.’

  VE Day brought a total stop to organised German clandestine activity of every kind. There was no hint of continued resistance by any of the organisations we had been interested in, or of the rise of new secret resistance groups; nor was there a whisper from ISOS. There were still hundreds if not thousands of our targets to be rounded up, members not only of the Abwehr and SD but also of the Gestapo and several other departments. The main work for this would be done by the armies and their interrogation staffs and our units in the field. The other problem that still lay ahead for Section V was the Japanese. At that time it was generally thought that the Far East war would continue for many months. But from the Section V point of view the Japanese were a very unsatisfactory and intangible target. I am no authority on their wartime intelligence activities, but it is fair to say that outside the Far East and south-east Asia they did not have a professional secret intelligence service in the normal sense. Their embassies and service attachés picked up what information they could, by any means that might be available. A great deal of Japanese embassy and service attaché cypher traffic was being read by GC&CS, and in Europe at any rate it was clear that the Japanese had few secret informants of any consequence. Their armed forces intelligence branches were active in the battle areas, but here it was difficult for us in London to contribute very much. We did send a number of Section V representatives to the Far East and made elaborate if rather unreal plans to form SCI units for attachment to several British and American headquarters. But we in Section V now lacked the most important ingredient of our work: an enemy.

  Not so, of course, in Section IX: here it was all just beginning. The balance of work in the joint V–IX complex began to move away from the heavy V predominance, but only slowly. Kim and I thought it was time to take a combined look at some of our V and IX people abroad and at SIS stations generally. My purpose was to find out how the Section V officers were coping with the post-war task of rounding up and interrogating German intelligence and security staff, and whether our officers were getting the service they needed from London; and to discuss their future career wishes and possibilities. Kim’s purpose, more exacting, was to examine with the stations the scope for and strategy of future anti-Soviet and anti-communist intelligence work. In addition the trip would give us an opportunity to get to know something of SIS stations abroad, outside the V and IX complex. There was also the possibility of a little relaxation after four very hard years. Towards the end of July we flew to Lübbecke in north-west Germany, one of several small towns where the British had established headquarters. All the larger towns, of course, were in ruins. After a day or two in this depressing area we motored by autobahn to Berlin. For two months after VE Day the Russians had had Berlin to themselves; the British, Americans and French were not allowed in until the beginning of July. By now, three or four weeks later, there were a number of SIS officers in place, including a Section V man, James, a highly resourceful Russian speaker.9 His chief occupation so far had been to match the Russians in friendly drinking bouts, at which the usual liquor was ‘V2 spirit’ (actually pure alcohol). With the press-ganged assistance of the Parteigenossen, or captured Nazi Party officials, James had managed to organise and furnish an extremely elegant and comfortable flat, to which Eva Braun had posthumously contributed her electric cooker.

  It was more than twelve years since Kim and I had arrived in Berlin as undergraduates, on the day when Hitler’s triumphant entry to power was being celebrated. Now we were seeing the place in destruction. We paid a visit to Hitler’s Chancellery, badly damaged but not totally destroyed. His office was still littered with broken glass and debris. A light bulb, somehow intact, was lying on the floor and I threw it at the huge marble-topped desk, where it burst with a satisfying report: a cheap and childish gesture for which I felt no shame. We went on to look for our former digs in the Potsdamer Straße. Not only could we not find the house, it was not possible to say even roughly where it had stood. Yet for all the scarcely believable destruction in the streets, the virtually complete absence of goods to buy and the lack of any of the normal amenities of life, Berlin was full of vitality, almost optimism. The atmosphere was quite different from that of defeated provincial Germany. In Berlin the citizens were living at the hub of a new conflict, symbolised by the presence of troops from East and West. Incidentally this must have been the first time, outside his clandestine contacts, that Kim had ever seen any Soviet citizens to speak of. One might almost say fellow citizens, given that he claimed to be an officer in the Soviet secret service, although he did not formally acquire Soviet nationality until after he defected to Moscow.

  On our last day in Berlin, James gave the two of us and another visitor a slap-up lunch at his well-appointed flat. I am sure that even the Führer never ate better from Eva Braun’s cooker. When we got to the trifle, the cook-housemaid produced a fine bottle of hock from the refrigerator. It was not like Kim to gulp wine, but he and James chose to down their glasses together. A second later I and the other visitor would have done the same but for the violent reaction of the first two. They had drunk pure Flit.† The poor maid, who for two months previously had been serving the Russians, was horrified. She had no doubt she would be either shot or at best sent to a prison camp. For the next thirty-six hours or more Kim was really quite ill. As we drove back that afternoon along the autobahn he was in a semi-stupor, as though he were not only extremely drunk but unable to pull out of it. He seemed to have little idea where he was. We had two nights at Lübbecke before he was himself again.

  After Germany we visited Klagenfurt, headquarters of the British zone of Austria. The head of the SIS station in Germany had arranged for the RAF to fly us down in an American Mitchell bomber. For some reason this involved our becoming part of the crew. Kim masqueraded as the bomb aimer, I as the navigator. It was in Klagenfurt that we awoke one morning to the news of Hiroshima. Three days later came Nagasaki and the opening of hostilities against Japan by the Soviets. The war was ending fast. It was also in Klagenfurt that several of us got into a discussion which possibly throws a light on part of Kim’s political philosophy. We were talking about Arthur Koestler’s recently published The Yogi and the Commissar. Yogis were those who went by intuition, ‘feel’; commissars by brutal logic, or ‘ruthless common sense’ as Kim put it. Kim suggested as the archetypal yogi the head of office administration in SIS. He was a breed all too common in Broadway at that time, a man whose mind worked in strange ways and with whom it was difficult to reason. There was general agreement that in a close Broadway field he probably came first. For commissar Kim suggested Stalin. It was clear that he approved of
the commissar cast of mind, whether exemplified by capitalists or by communists. He had little regard for those who used intuitions and hunches as substitute for the powers they lacked of intellectual analysis, and admired those who were prepared to put analysis to the test of action.

  We motored down through glorious scenery to Trieste. Now we were in another area of conflict with the new communist world, and one of much more professional interest to Kim as head of Section IX than to me. There was time to sun and bathe and think of peace. Driving through Trieste we saw a crowd round a newspaper seller: a man came away with a paper folded down the middle and I glimpsed half a headline, ‘Il Giappone [ Japan]…’ A few yards later another folded paper conveniently showed the rest: ‘…si arrende [surrenders]’. It was not entirely true, but evidently the end was very near. I celebrated the occasion by cracking a toe-joint against a rock while bathing near the Yugoslav border and had to spend half the night cooling it in that most versatile piece of equipment, the bidet.