by Tim Milne
We returned to Klagenfurt, motoring along the Gorizia route just west of the Yugoslav frontier. Our plan was to drive back from Klagenfurt through the American zones of Austria and Germany to Lübbecke. A ‘Cap/M’ or captured German military car was provided, with British driver. As we appeared to lack any proper documentation for a long journey of this kind an enterprising SIS officer took us to the office of the town major in Klagenfurt (who was fortunately out) and chopped such papers as we had with all the official stamps he could find. Although the town major’s authority did not extend outside Klagenfurt, the results if not examined too closely were extremely impressive. Our hosts also gave us what on the British points rationing system would have been about a year’s supply of tinned food, but forgot the tin opener. Car tools are a poor substitute, and we were very ready for the dinner provided by OSS in Salzburg, with whom we stayed the night. Next morning we were woken with the news that six years of war were over: this was VJ Day. We decided not to celebrate until we reached Frankfurt that evening; everyone assured us the town would be awash with liquor. Perhaps if we had not had a puncture some thirty miles short of Frankfurt, and then discovered that the driver had failed to bring a spare wheel, we might have arrived in time. When we finally made it to the US Army transit hotel, the whole of Frankfurt had been drunk dry. VJ Day remains in my personal annals, and no doubt in Kim’s, as a day totally without alcohol.
From this European visit, and one or two others he made alone in 1945, Kim must have reported to the Russians that for the time being at least, SIS activities were unlikely to bring them many worries. ‘After each journey, I concluded, without emotion, that it would take years to lay an effective basis for work against the Soviet Union.’10 On my side, there was an equally simple conclusion: apart from mopping up the old enemy and redisposing our staff, which might take a few weeks or months, Section V had nothing left to do. But there was still one important question to be settled: should something of the Section V concept and framework at home and overseas be preserved in peacetime and directed towards the new target? In other words, should there be a semi-independent branch of SIS, having its own stations abroad and manned by people spending their whole careers on this work, which would specialise in the investigation of Soviet and satellite espionage and covert communist activities? This is what Felix Cowgill had had in mind. In his book Kim expresses relief that it was eventually decided to wind up the Section V idea. Although he ascribes this decision to the committee – of which he was a member – that was set up to make recommendations for the post-war organisation of SIS, I think it would have happened anyway. There were two main reasons: the need to cut back on post-war expenditure, and the arrival of Major-General John Sinclair, formerly director of military intelligence (DMI) at the War Office, as the new vice-chief.
Sinclair was particularly interested in detailed organisation – a subject for which Sir Stewart Menzies had neither the gift nor the inclination – and brought a military mind to it. To him, a secret intelligence service was something that could be organised as an army could be organised. He was especially keen on tidy chains of command, tier upon tier, with never a loose end. Everything, including statistics of intelligence production, was displayed on charts. There was little prospect that Section V, which had grown away from its titular position as a requirements section into something like a separate service, and whose achievements could not be judged by statistics, would commend itself to him, particularly as the subject of counter-espionage was one in which he as DMI had had little interest and which was now almost in abeyance for lack of material. Sinclair was a strong believer in non-specialisation: with a few obvious exceptions, such as technical experts or people who spoke difficult languages, everyone should be prepared to do anything (an analogous process was going on in the Foreign Office). When soon after his appointment he visited Ryder Street I knew from the first moment that the Section V cause, if it was a cause, was lost. I am not saying he was necessarily wrong in his judgement; there were arguments on either side. Certainly it was important that the espionage and counter-espionage sides of SIS should be closely interlocked, and not allowed to drift apart as they had in the war. But I merely ask myself, why was Kim so pleased that Section V was abolished? I can only imagine that he judged that the lack of a specialist branch would improve his prospects and those of other Soviet agents.
This is not the place to attempt a dispassionate appraisal of Section V’s work in the war. Perhaps no proper appraisal can ever be made. Even if the relevant Registry files still exist, they will give a haphazard and fragmented picture of what was achieved, with no clear means of determining relative importance. We never had time to sit back and write our own history, either as we went along or at the end. The nearest we came was in the monthly reports by the subsections, but since these made no attempt to camouflage raw ISOS they would not have gone to Registry, and like much else would presumably have been destroyed. Large areas of activity are now probably little more than memories in the minds of ageing people like myself. But I think a fair verdict would be that Section V was a notable success, especially in the main task of dealing with the enemy on the ground. If I have lent any encouragement in this chapter to the impression that the section was a nest of intrigue, let me hasten to correct it: with the single exception of Kim’s anti-Cowgill manoeuvres – which in themselves would have passed as unremarkable in any university college or City boardroom – there was very little intrigue. The other common misconception I would like to correct is that Section V and MI5 were always fighting each other, to the detriment of the general cause; in fact, except for some jousting at the top, working relations were extremely good. I am glad to see that Robert Cecil considers that ‘the striking success of British counter-espionage during the war was, in the main, the result of loyal cooperation between SIS and MI5’.
I have said that it was Felix Cowgill who put Section V on the map; but the quality of the work probably owed more to Kim Philby than to anyone else. On paper he was admirably concise and clear, and set a standard for us all; he always took the trouble to master the relevant files and correspondence; and above all his judgement on intelligence matters was nearly always sound. In our dealings with MI5 and other departments he, more than anyone, neutralised the possible ill effects of Cowgill’s lone battles and established a position of trust from which the rest of us benefited. His achievements for Section V in those three years should not be set aside now that we know his real motives and mainspring.
Towards the end of 1945 our work at Ryder Street was so far wound down that it was time to look for new jobs. I knew by now that I could find a place in the post-war service, though I had no wish to join Section IX. I could also have gone back to Benson’s, once I was demobilised, but lunch with the managing director showed that the best they could offer me, at that very uncertain moment for the advertising profession, amounted to only about two-thirds of my current salary. I therefore turned the proposal down. Probably I also turned down the one chance I had in my life of eventually earning first-class money instead of a fair livelihood.
At the end of December I left Section V for a job in Broadway.11 The section carried on at Ryder Street for a short time and then what little was left was merged into Section IX, or rather its successor section, under Kim. My new job, if without executive power, was a fairly central one. There was enough to do but, for the first time in over four years, not the smallest need to work late. Meanwhile, for Kim it seems that one or two clouds a good deal larger than a man’s hand had appeared on the horizon.
Notes
1. A classical scholar and Greek papyrologist who later became director of Oxford University Press. He published The Codex in 1954, subsequently expanded into The Birth of the Codex, which examined the process by which the codex – the traditional form of the Western book – replaced the scroll as the primary vehicle for literature. (Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, Oxford University Press, 1983.)
2. A German commando and specialist in unconventional warfare. Apart from his successful mission to free Mussolini, Skorzeny was the leader of Operation Greif in late 1944, where German soldiers fluent in English and wearing Allied uniforms infiltrated American lines. At the end of the war he was involved in the Werwolf stay-behind guerrilla network as well as the Odessa line, which helped fugitive Nazis escape to South America and the Middle East.
3. WOOD was Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat who became America’s most important spy against the Nazis. In 1943 he became a diplomatic courier and on a visit to Berne, he offered secret documents to the British, who rebuffed his approach. He then went to the Americans, who realised that in Kolbe they had an agent of the highest quality. He was given the code-name GEORGE WOOD and Allen Dulles wrote of him, ‘George Wood was not only our best source on Germany but undoubtedly one of the best secret agents any intelligence service has ever had.’ (James Srodes, Alan Dulles: Master of Spies, Regnery, Washington DC, 1999.) After the war, Kolbe unsuccessfully applied to rejoin the German Foreign Office.
4. The first head of Germany’s post-war domestic intelligence agency. In 1954, he sensationally disappeared to East Berlin and was subsequently interrogated by the KGB in Moscow. Eighteen months later, he reappeared in West Berlin claiming he had been kidnapped by the Russians. He was tried for treason, found guilty and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
5. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, Philby: The Long Road to Moscow, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973.
6. The Foreign Office official assigned as PA to the chief of SIS from 1943 to 1945. In 1994 he contributed a scholarly article to the journal Intelligence and National Security entitled ‘Five of Six at War: Section V of MI6’ (vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 345–53). For this article, Cecil had corresponded at some length with Felix Cowgill. Cecil makes the point that ISOS and ISK were vital sources and Cowgill, very conscious of the ‘need-to-know’ principle, was determined to restrict its circulation. When Trevor-Roper defied the restriction, Cowgill recommended to the chief that he be sacked. Cowgill’s wish to restrict circulation was neither arbitrary nor frivolous as another traitor, Anthony Blunt, then working in MI5, was one of the recipients of the ISOS and ISK material, but he went too far, restricting its availability to members of the Double Cross Committee in a way that hampered its operations. Regarding Philby, Cowgill commented that he ‘was recruited at a time when MI5 records were still in chaos. An MI5 trace was therefore of little value and Vivian may be excused for relying on his own judgement.’
7. Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and David Leitch, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, André Deutsch, London, 1968.
8. Thomas Argyll Robertson, always known as ‘Tar’. After a short stint as a professional soldier, Robertson joined MI5 in 1933. During the war he ran one of the cleverest deception and disinformation operations, Operation Mincemeat, revealed for the first time in Ewen Montagu’s book The Man Who Never Was, Evans Brothers, London, 1953. For an account of Robertson’s remarkable life, see Geoffrey Elliott, Gentleman Spymaster: How Lt Col. Tommy ‘Tar’ Robertson Double-crossed the Nazis, Methuen, London, 2011.
9. James Malcolm Mackintosh CMG. He read Russian at Glasgow University and joined SOE in 1942, later parachuting behind German lines to join the British mission with Tito’s Partisans. He subsequently transferred to Section V, where he was posted to Bulgaria (Sofia) and then to Berlin at the end of hostilities. Post war, Mackintosh achieved wide renown as an intelligence analyst, Sovietologist and adviser to successive Prime Ministers and Cabinets. Retired from the Cabinet Office in 1987.
10. Kim Philby, My Silent War, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1968.
11. Milne’s new job was as Staff Officer to the new Assistant Chief of the Secret Service, Jack Easton.
† Editor’s note: The Charity Commission has since moved to 1 Drummond Gate, Pimlico.
† Editor’s note: SIS allocated two-digit code-numbers to each country in which it operated. Germany, for example, was 12.
† Editor’s note: Milne wrote this book in the 1970s but it is clear that this section was added later since Cecil’s article in the academic journal Intelligence and National Security did not appear until 1994.
† Editor’s note: An insecticide.
8
DECLINE AND FALL
Almost the first lesson I learnt in Section V was that spying is a mug’s game. Here were all these German agents, unmasked not through any fault of their own or of the case officers running them but simply because the German cypher was not completely secure. Towards the end of the war German agents were also, and increasingly, given away by Abwehr officers who defected to our side or were captured. Indeed, this eventually became an embarrassment to MI5 in their running of double agents: an Abwehr officer would say on arrival, ‘There’s an agent reporting on all your troop movements around Portsmouth. Here are the details – now you can pull him in.’
It was not to be supposed that the same cypher weaknesses would be found in the Soviet intelligence services, still less that we would be capturing any of their officers on the battlefield. But occasionally one of these officers would defect. Already Walter Krivitsky, who came over to the West in 1937, had told MI5 that the Russians had sent a young English journalist to Spain during the Civil War, a lead that apparently was not followed up. Now in the later months of 1945 there were two more danger signs for Kim, one minor, the other a flashing red light. The lesser case was that of Igor Guzenko, a cypher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who defected and in due course gave away a number of Soviet agents in Canada. One of them, Gordon Lunan, had been a colleague of mine in Benson’s before he emigrated to Canada in 1938 or 1939, though he was then a youth of about nineteen without, as far as I knew, marked political leanings. Lunan went down for six years. The other and (for Kim) much more important case was the attempted defection of Konstantin Volkov in Istanbul. The story has been recounted at length in the Philby books, especially his own. Assuming Kim’s account is correct, Volkov, nominally a Soviet vice-consul in Istanbul, secretly approached the British consulate general there in August. He sought asylum in Britain and offered in return to give much information about the NKVD, of which he claimed to be an officer. In particular he offered to identify three Soviet agents in Britain, namely the head of a counter-espionage organisation in London and two Foreign Office men. But he stipulated that all communication between Istanbul and London on the subject should be by diplomatic bag because the Russians had broken certain British cyphers. Kim had heard nothing of the case when he was summoned to the chief’s office and shown the letter from Istanbul outlining Volkov’s offer. In front of the chief he had to read what might almost have amounted to his own death warrant, not to mention that of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Yet it seems that he showed no sign of shock and aroused no suspicion. That evening he got word to the Russians, and the next day persuaded the chief to send him to Istanbul to investigate. The Russians must have concluded that he had nerves of steel, and they were able to spirit Volkov out of Turkey.
Neither SIS nor Volkov seem to have thought their positions through. As Kim points out, SIS observed Volkov’s stipulations about not using cypher telegrams, but only in respect of messages about Volkov himself. Where was the logic in that? Either the cyphers were unsafe and should not have been used for any future messages at all, or they were safe and could have been used for all messages, including those about Volkov. It was also strange that Sir Stewart Menzies, on learning that a Soviet official claimed to be able to name as a Russian spy the head of a counter-espionage organisation in London (admittedly a wide expression that could have covered many people in MI5 and elsewhere), handed over investigation to … his own counter-espionage head! Volkov for his part was so concerned over cyphers – thereby causing a delay which probably helped to seal his own fate – that he does not seem to have considered the danger that the very man he was talking about might be put in charge of the case, or at least might learn about it. If for h
is own safety he had mentioned this one name, how different history would have been.
It has been suggested by some writers that Kim deliberately dragged his feet over the Volkov case so as to give the Russians more time to get Volkov away. A close reading of Kim’s own account suggests that while he rejoiced inwardly over the fortuitous delays that arose, he did not cause them. It is highly unlikely that at this extremely dangerous moment he would have taken any positive delaying step which could later be remembered against him. At the same time, two aspects of his behaviour could have aroused suspicion and may have done so later: first, that with all his experience of ISOS matters he did not immediately question the validity of obeying Volkov’s stipulation about cyphers (in fact he privately spotted the fallacy at once, as he makes clear); and second, that he appears to have accepted with equanimity the delays he encountered in Istanbul, instead of urging utmost speed as most SIS officers would have done. The exact timetable of events in the Volkov case is a little difficult to follow from Kim’s account and others, but on one calculation it is possible that Volkov’s original approach took place while Kim and I were still on our European travels; in other words, had Volkov not imposed his cypher veto, a telegram might have arrived in London before Kim was available to deal with it.
Kim must have wondered when and where the next blow would fall. A defector might turn up anywhere. He might not defect to the British: it could be to the Americans or any of the large number of other countries. He might spill the beans at once, before there was a chance of Russian counter-action. Kim would have realised more than ever that his future safety depended on events outside his own control and, to a large extent, outside that of his Russian masters. I wonder how he felt on hearing that even the remote Guzenko had put the finger on someone he had happened to know.