Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  After we had been a few minutes in Pat’s house, the taxi arrived to take Kim and Eleanor to Victoria. The rest of us stood outside in the weak November sunlight to say goodbye. With a last genial touch of schadenfreude, Kim exclaimed, ‘Why Tim, you’re going grey!’ A moment later they were off. I never saw or heard from him again.

  Early in March 1963 I was having a quick lunch at home in Tokyo before going back to the embassy. Marie, glancing through the Japan Times, came across a four-line news agency item on an inside page which I had missed at breakfast. The Foreign Office had asked the Lebanese government for information about Harold Philby, a British journalist in Beirut, who had disappeared towards the end of January. No more than that; but it did not take much thought to realise that if he had been missing for several weeks without trace, he had almost certainly vanished deliberately. Behind the Iron Curtain? With all that had happened before, it seemed likely enough. But why? I knew nothing at all of his life since he had returned to Beirut – the new suspicions that had fallen on him, the confrontations with an investigator from London and the growing mental strain.3 One or two improbable scenarios went through my mind in the next few days. Even then I was looking for less disastrous explanations than the obvious.

  Some weeks later came the news that Kim was in Russia, and had been a Soviet agent for many years. In the world civil war we were now on opposite sides for ever.

  Notes

  1. Constance Ashley-Jones, later Stobo.

  2. He was also the correspondent for The Economist; his employment with The Observer was arranged by SIS, who had taken him back on their payroll as an agent.

  3. The investigator was Nicholas Elliott, who was a friend of Philby’s and had directly arranged his appointment as Middle East correspondent of The Observer in 1956 with Lord Astor, the proprietor, after Philby’s clearance by Harold Macmillan. Station chief in Beirut from 1960 to 1962, Elliott’s selection (by Sir Dick White) as the person chosen by SIS to confront Philby was to cause controversy within his own service as well as within MI5 where the ‘molehunters’ had long been convinced of Philby’s guilt and now wanted to carry out an aggressive and professional interrogation. Flora Solomon’s statement and those of the KGB officer Anatoli Golitsyn, who defected to the Americans in 1961 and provided the first confirmation of a ‘Ring of Five’ spy ring all recruited from Cambridge University in the early 1930s, were the final pieces of evidence needed to confront Philby, who was to be offered immunity against prosecution in return for a full confession. SIS, however, wanted to keep the interrogation an in-house affair and White felt that Elliott as a friend and previous defender of Philby could appeal to the latter’s ‘sense of decency’. Elliott, at the time in charge of SIS operations in Africa, arrived in Beirut and rather bungled the confrontation by managing to leave open the windows of the apartment where the taped interrogation took place. As a result, traffic noise drowned out a good part of the audio recording and only about 80 per cent was able to be successfully transcribed by MI5. Elliott was considered somewhat ‘accident prone’ by a number of his colleagues: in 1956 as the then head of the SIS London station, he had personally approved the choice of the unfortunate frogman Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb to carry out a risky operation in Portsmouth Harbour to inspect the hull of the Russian cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had brought Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to Britain on a visit to improve Anglo-Soviet relations. Crabb, who smoked sixty cigarettes a day, had a drink problem, suffered from depression and had been to a party the night before the operation, was clearly not in the greatest of shape for such a delicate mission. Unsurprisingly, he never returned from it and his headless body was found washed up on a nearby beach some fourteen months later (according to recent accounts, Crabb had his throat cut by a Russian frogman from the cruiser who was sent down to investigate the flow of air bubbles that were surfacing). The net result was a major diplomatic incident and the dismissal of Sir John Sinclair, the chief of SIS (who was replaced by White), as well as the demotion of the Foreign Office adviser to the service. Elliott, however, managed to keep his job. Part of the ancien régime and a ‘robber baron’, one of a small number of senior SIS officers who were regarded as having virtual carte blanche to do what they wanted on behalf of their country, Elliott had joined SIS before the war. (Peter Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, Viking, New York, 1987, pp. 72–5, 194; Gordon Corera, MI6: Life and Death in the British Secret Service, Phoenix, London, p. 77.)

  10

  ‘THE KGB OFFICER’

  In his introduction to My Silent War Kim repeatedly makes a remarkable claim: that he became an officer of Soviet intelligence as early as the 1930s. Let me summarise what he says of his secret career. He began with ‘nearly a year of illegal activity’ in central Europe (1933–34). Returning to England, he seems to have undergone a period of training which involved weekly clandestine meetings with the Russians in the ‘remoter open spaces’ of London; at this time he was a ‘sort of intelligence probationer’. His first ‘challenges’ came in Germany (1936) and fascist Spain (1937–39). During the Spanish war he learnt that his probationary period was at an end, and he emerged from the conflict as a ‘fully fledged officer of the Soviet service’. When his years of underground work ended in the Lebanon in January 1963 ‘only then was I able to emerge in my true colours, the colours of a Soviet intelligence officer’. In 1968 he was able to claim that he had been a Soviet intelligence officer for some thirty-odd years.

  A great gulf normally separates the functions of an intelligence officer from those of an agent. The officer is not a promoted agent, but something different in kind – a difference usually ignored or blurred in the media, which tend to call everyone an agent or a spy. Intelligence officers are basically government officials; that is to say an SIS officer is a British government official, a CIA officer an American official, and a KGB officer a Soviet official. Usually the officer works in one of the intelligence service’s offices or establishments, at home or abroad, or at least has access to them. His task is to conceive and direct intelligence and other operations; to organise, and often to carry out, the recruitment and running of agents; to perform functions within the office, such as handling the intelligence received, or providing administrative, technical or other support services; to deal with other government departments; to liaise, where appropriate, with the intelligence services of friendly countries. Almost invariably he is a citizen of the country of whose intelligence service he is an officer. He will know, and need to know, many secrets. He will therefore seldom be put in a position (in peacetime at any rate) where he might be arrested and interrogated, though he may have to risk being declared persona non grata by a foreign country and expelled. Whether at home or abroad, he will need some kind of cover, usually in one of his country’s official establishments. Sometimes the cover is not difficult to see through, and is intended to protect the decencies, and (abroad) the ambassador’s feelings, rather than the security of the officer or his activities.

  The agent is an entirely different creature. He may be of any nationality or background. His raison d’être arises from the fact that he is (or can be put in) a position, often deriving from his job, that gives him access, direct or through subsources, to needed information, or that enables him to perform other services for the intelligence service employing him. Usually he is required, in some degree, to betray a trust placed in him by his firm or department or other associates – often indeed to spy against his own country. His personal freedom, even his life, may be at risk. Two particular questions will be of concern to his intelligence masters. Is he secretly a double agent, working against them? Alternatively, is he in danger of being arrested and interrogated? It stands to reason that an agent should not be allowed to know more about the service he is working for than is necessary for that work.

  In SIS, of course, Kim was an officer until he had to resign in 1951. By all the normal criteria one would have thought that in
the Soviet service he was an agent, at least until he finally defected. Indeed he allows that most of his work lay in fields ‘normally covered, in British and American practice, by agents’; and he refers to himself as a penetration agent. It can be argued that Kim’s claim to have been an officer is merely false, and designed to serve some KGB purpose such as encouraging other potential spies, or perhaps, as Hugh Trevor-Roper hints, as part of the Soviet policy to glorify its spies but never to admit that they actually were spies.1

  There is some independent evidence that Kim very early achieved unusual status in Soviet eyes. Walter Krivitsky, who defected in October 1937, was later able to tell British investigators that Soviet intelligence had sent a young English journalist to Spain. Krivitsky knew of this although Kim had been sent there only a few months earlier and Krivitsky was apparently not concerned in running him. The story of Alexander Orlov, who defected in 1938, may provide further evidence. According to Gordon Brook-Shepherd in The Storm Petrels,2 Orlov claimed to have had occasion in about 1937 to discuss with Kislov, of the NKVD Paris station, the possibility of finding a Russian agent in Spain who could make radio voice contact in an emergency. Kislov said he had a first-class man, a British journalist, but there was no possibility of using him because he had a stammer. Since Orlov did not come out with this until about 1970, by which time Kim was a public character, its value is uncertain. But if the story is true, it means that Kim’s repute, though not his name, was already known by 1937 to two of the relatively few pre-war defectors.

  What had he done up to then to get himself talked about among the security-conscious Russians? Let us try to assess the record. According to Elizabeth Monroe, writing from documentary evidence, Kim had applied to take the Civil Service examination at this time.3 Of the three referees he named, two, both Cambridge dons, felt unable to recommend him for administrative work in view of his strong political feelings. Kim, apparently just back from Vienna, rushed to Cambridge to discuss the problem. It was agreed that he should withdraw from the examination, and thus the doubts of his referees were never officially recorded. St John Philby was furious and wanted to fight the issue, but Kim would have none of it. It appears that from the moment difficulties arose he was anxious only to erase the whole matter, so that it would not later be remembered against him. The likely conclusion is that a change had arisen in Kim’s life which made it important that his record should remain as clean as possible.

  This was the period of working for the Review of Reviews, and also of being trained by the Russians at clandestine meetings in the ‘remoter open spaces’ of London. His personal access to useful non-public information at this time was surely minimal, scarcely more than my own as I toiled away at slogans for Bovril or parodies for Guinness.

  In his introduction Kim makes an odd claim relating to this period: ‘In the first year or two, I penetrated very little, though I did beat Gordon Lonsdale to the London School of Oriental Studies by ten years.’ I do not know why in the mid-1930s Kim should have had any dealings with this school (renamed the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1938, though the old title continued to be commonly used), and can only suppose that he needed information on the Middle East or some other area in connection with his Review of Reviews work. Lonsdale’s period at SOAS was not until 1955–57. Presumably Kim simply meant to say ‘twenty years’: it is quite clear that in referring to his ‘penetration’ of the school he is speaking of the 1930s. Strangely, however, he could have gone to SOAS in 1946–47 in order to take Turkish lessons in preparation for his posting to Istanbul; this was a common practice in the Foreign Service.

  In 1936 came Kim’s involvement in the Anglo-German Fellowship and the abortive trade journal. Although this is said to have involved visits to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin and some acquaintance with Ribbentrop, and although Kim says that overt and covert links between Britain and Germany at that time were of serious concern to the Russians, I would have thought it unlikely that important inside information resulted. Overt links between Britain and Germany would hardly need to be reported on by a trained secret agent of high potential (and high vulnerability). Could any of the cavortings of the Anglo-German Fellowship be described as covert links? Most of it was rather public stuff, of the kind that a good journalist usually reports far better than a secret agent. There may have been a few intelligence dividends, but probably the Russians looked on Kim’s participation partly as an aid to removing the taint of leftism, and partly as a training exercise.

  From early in 1937 to the summer of 1939, except for brief periods, Kim was in Spain. Here at last he had something worth reporting on. True, his job gave him no access to British secret information, and possibly no formal access to that of the Spanish Nationalists; but a war reporter attached to the headquarters of one of the combatants inevitably learns much of value to the other. What we do not know is how many other sources the Russians and Spanish Republicans had among the Nationalists. A civil war – or any arbitrary division of a single country into two halves, as for so many years in West and East Germany – gives ample opportunity for the recruitment of agents, because there are so many family and other links transcending the division. Kim’s value to the Russians may have lain not so much in any unique access to information as in the cool analytical mind he brought to his reporting and in the detachment and objectivity he derived from not being Spanish.

  Even at this early stage, Kim must have impressed his Russian masters as a case officer’s dream. Agents are always exaggerating their access, wanting more money, reporting what they think you want to hear, getting into scrapes, missing their rendezvous (except on payday), intruding their personal problems, talking indiscreetly and getting cold feet. Relatively few can produce a really literate report. Training, if practicable, can do something to improve performance, but it cannot give a man either brains or background education, nor is it likely to change his character. In Kim the Russians must have found themselves presented with an agent who not only was remarkably free of the faults I have mentioned but could absorb complicated briefing and express himself with unusual clarity and conciseness both verbally and on paper. On top of this he was ideologically devoted to the cause and, apparently, required little or no payment.

  So far I have spoken of Kim’s pre-war value to the Russians in terms only of his own intelligence reporting. But he may have rendered other services. At some point before he went to Spain in February 1937 he claims to have suggested Guy Burgess as a possible agent. (Whether this turned out to be a service or disservice to the Russians, not to mention Guy and Kim himself, is of course another matter.) Not only was Guy used as a courier to replenish Kim’s funds in Spain in 1937, but his access to intelligence in this pre-war period, though nothing much, may have been more than Kim’s.

  Up to this point it is quite possible that Kim had broken no British law, or at least had done nothing which could possibly have led to a successful prosecution in British courts. As far as I know, he had not had access to confidential British information. But as a Times correspondent with the BEF at Arras he was in an altogether different position. Though still not employed by His Majesty’s Government, he would doubtless have come within the Official Secrets Act. The Soviet Union had a pact with Germany. If it had been discovered that Kim was passing information about British military movements and plans, in wartime, I imagine he could have faced a capital charge. He would have known much about the capabilities, dispositions, defences and weapons of British forces in France, and of some French units as well. He may have had some insight into Allied military plans, such as they were. But the much more important subject of German plans presumably lay hidden. Once the hectic fighting began he can have had little if any opportunity to report to the Russians, and whatever he said would be out of date before it got to Moscow.

  But Arras, like the phoney war itself, was only an interlude. Kim had already been told ‘in pressing terms’ by the Russians that his first priority must be the British secret servi
ce. He relates that after he returned to England in the summer of 1940 he had an interview with Frank Birch at Bletchley, arranged through a mutual friend, but was turned down because GC&CS thought the salary was not worth his while. (Conceivably, the friend was Dilly Knox, of whom Aileen sometimes spoke in familiar terms.4) How different his history might have been if Birch had been able to lay hands on another £100 a year.

  When Kim finally joined Section D of SIS in July 1940, with Guy Burgess’s help, he was still some way from what the Russians had in mind. The training schools at Brickendonbury and Beaulieu must have yielded interesting rather than vital information. Probably Kim’s greatest usefulness to Soviet intelligence at this time arose from his visits to London and such access as this gave him to senior officers in SOE and elsewhere; no doubt, too, it was these visits that allowed an opportunity for occasional contact with the Russians. But although his reports may not have been of great moment, he had two important things going for him: his own obvious ability and a now increasing circle of friends in the intelligence world. Through Burgess and SOE he met Tommy Harris; through Harris he came to know Dick Brooman-White and others in MI5; and thence came the introduction to Section V in August 1941. Now he was inside the citadel.