Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  One apparent advantage was that in 1949 Kim was able to warn the Russians that Maclean was in danger. Already Kim had been asked by his Soviet contact in Istanbul if he could discover what the British were doing about a case under FBI investigation involving the British embassy in Washington. At that time he was unable to help. But during his briefing at SIS headquarters in September 1949, before his departure for Washington, he was given details of a serious leakage of information to the Russians from the Washington embassy in 1944–45, which the British and Americans were still investigating though they had not yet identified the culprit. (He does not mention that what had alerted them was an NKVD coding error which had allowed certain messages to be deciphered by the British and Americans,1 although he does speak of the ‘documents’ and the use of the code-name HOMER for Maclean. It is interesting that Kim, who was head of Section IX in 1944–46, was apparently not told of this development at the time. Perhaps the information was not clearly established till later.) A check of the relevant Foreign Office list left Kim in little doubt that the source of the leakage must be Maclean. Moscow confirmed to him that this investigation and the one he had been asked about in Istanbul were the same. But even if Kim had known nothing at all about Maclean it would have made little difference; once he had passed on the information obtained at his briefing, the Russians would soon realise it referred to Maclean. In Washington Kim was able to keep his Soviet contact closely informed on the investigations, but he would equally have done so without his previous knowledge.

  By this time Maclean himself was already launched on his spectacular downhill course in Cairo. One supposes that the Russians had had to give him some sort of warning about the investigation, and that this contributed to his crack-up of May 1950 and recall to London. They would surely have been wiser to pull him out there and then. His subsequent usefulness must have been limited. Not until November was he sufficiently recovered to begin work as head of the American Department in the Foreign Office. At some point between then and his defection six months later he came under suspicion, and eventually under Special Branch surveillance. Contact with Russians was evidently broken off. For the sake of a few months’ reporting – admittedly at an important time in the Korean War – the Russians eventually lost three agents instead of one. It appears that Maclean’s rescue operation was delayed until it was too late to arrange it without bringing in someone else.

  In Washington Kim had been drawn ever further into the case. So too was Burgess, who had arrived there in August 1950. Kim says that he discussed with the Russians the question whether Guy should be let into the secret of the British embassy source. The Russians subsequently decided that the balance of opinion was that Guy’s special knowledge of the problem might be helpful. Whatever this obscure sentence may mean – it reads as if it had passed through more than one KGB in-tray – it does suggest previous knowledge on Guy’s part of what Maclean had been doing. (If Guy was also being used to photocopy SIS documents on Kim’s behalf, this could have been a further reason for bringing him in.) Guy was briefed by Kim in great detail.

  Kim’s account of what followed leaves much unexplained. He speaks of the high-grade intelligence to which Maclean, now in charge of the American Department, had access and the need for him to remain there as long as possible. Suspicions had not yet begun to crystallise in the investigators’ minds; they were still chasing embassy charladies and the like. However it seemed unlikely to Kim and the Russians that this situation could last, and it was eventually decided to extract Maclean by mid-1951 at the latest. Kim does not explain why the Russians did not thereupon go about things in the obvious way: that is, plan the thing fully with Maclean while they were still in contact. Indeed, they could have done this much earlier; they had known since at least September 1949 that an investigation was going on which could lead to him. As in the case of Kim himself after 1951, no elaborate plan would have been necessary, especially since surveillance did not begin until fairly soon before the escape took place: a flight to somewhere in western Europe on a Friday night or Saturday morning, and then on to Prague or elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. He would have been clean away by Monday morning.

  It is possible that by the winter of 1950–51 Maclean, for security reasons, was no longer seeing his Soviet contacts in London directly and was reporting by some other means such as ‘dead letterboxes’. Even so, one might have expected the Russians to be able to get messages to him by the same means in reverse. But no: of all people, Guy Burgess had to be brought in to ‘set the ball rolling for the rescue operation’. Apart from his other shortcomings, Guy was far from readily available; even his own return from Washington to London required a sort of escape plan. Three times in a day he contrived to get himself booked for speeding, so that the ambassador was forced to send him home. I have never found this part of the story convincing. Kim’s account gives the impression that the speeding was followed almost immediately by Guy’s recall; and indeed the escape plan would seem to require this, for there was no knowing when suspicion might suddenly fall on Maclean. Yet the Sunday Times authors, who presumably checked the facts, say that the speeding took place as early as February, whereas Guy did not leave for England until the beginning of May; and even then he went by sea.

  The choice of Burgess is all the more remarkable since it was made in the full knowledge that it could endanger Kim. In the hope that if need should arise it might help to divert suspicion from himself, Kim now chose deliberately to point the investigators in the right direction. He wrote to London suggesting that they should look again at statements Krivitsky had made about a young Foreign Office official recruited by Soviet intelligence in the mid-1930s, and compare these with records of British diplomats stationed in Washington at the time of the leakage.

  This is really very odd. Burgess was still in Washington and there was obviously much to be done before the rescue could take place; yet here was Kim intentionally and unpredictably speeding up the investigation. The effect, according to his own account, was that MI5 homed in fairly rapidly on Maclean as the chief suspect; what is more, they put him under surveillance, thereby making rescue more difficult. Kim admits that he was alarmed at the speed of developments. (It is possible that he was unaware of one piece of evidence mentioned by Patrick Seale as thrown up by the intercepts, namely that HOMER used to visit New York twice a week; this fitted Maclean and may have been a deciding factor.) Another oddity is that he should have drawn attention to the evidence of the very man who had spoken of a young English journalist in Spain. In the event his initiative seems to have done nothing to improve his position after Maclean’s escape. I find it all so peculiar that I have sometimes toyed with the idea that the real purpose was quite different – perhaps to divert suspicion away from someone important onto the now burnt-out Maclean – but it simply does not fit the known evidence.

  On arrival in London (Kim continues) Guy was to meet a Soviet contact and give him a full briefing. He would then pay an official call on Maclean at the Foreign Office, as head of the American Department. During the meeting he would slip a piece of paper across Maclean’s desk giving the time and place of a rendezvous. There he would put Maclean fully in the picture. From then on the matter would be out of Kim’s hands.

  There are one or two obscurities here. Why was it Burgess who had to give the Soviet contact a full briefing and not the other way around? Who was in charge? The Russians in Washington had been kept fully informed. They would have passed their information to the Russians in London, who indeed would have been more up to date than the leisurely Guy. Again, did Maclean have any idea that Burgess would be approaching him? If he did not – and bearing in mind that by May he was near a breakdown – the whole thing must have come as a shock. Alternatively, if the Russians were sufficiently in touch with him to be able to prepare him for the approach, then why was the intervention of Burgess necessary at all? And why, with Maclean in dire peril, did this ‘tired old all-in wrestler’ dilly-dally on the way
so casually? Kim had to find a pretext for writing to him and telling him to get a move on. Presumably Guy had failed even to make the initial contact with the Russians, otherwise they could have given him the necessary push.

  In the end of course the plan succeeded, in the limited sense that Maclean got away. But even in 1951 it was easy for anyone to leave England provided that he had a passport and there were no legal grounds for detaining him. We are left with the question: why was anyone else brought in and particularly why Burgess?

  One of the answers obviously lay in the personality and mental state of Maclean. Significantly, Kim’s story says nothing at all about this. Nor are we told whether Maclean was consulted about or even made aware of the escape plan being hatched in Washington; he is purely a lay figure. In reality his mental state must have been as important a factor as the investigation into HOMER. The evidence suggests that the Russians had long made up their minds that Maclean could not be relied on to effect his own escape. Is it possible that he was actually refusing to see them? I recall being told by someone closely concerned that, after his return from Cairo, Maclean utterly refused to have anything to do with the Foreign Office and eventually had to be coaxed along to a Soho restaurant by a sympathetic colleague who finally prevailed on him to come back. The Russians may well have decided that Maclean needed to be pushed into escape – and preferably by a sympathetic colleague.

  How well Burgess and Maclean knew one another personally and overtly never seems to have been satisfactorily established. But the introduction of Burgess into the plan makes much better sense if one assumes that he was already known to Maclean as a Soviet agent. Since there was no guarantee that Maclean would not be pulled in and interrogated before his escape, the advantage of using Guy was that it did not materially add to the information Maclean could give away. Again, if Maclean knew Guy as a long-time fellow agent – perhaps the only one he knew apart from Kim – this might be a valuable psychological aid.

  One can accept that Guy was not intended all along to defect with Maclean, and that Kim’s account of his consternation at the news is genuine; otherwise the whole plan becomes unbelievably suicidal.2 (Moreover, if Kim had known Guy was going he would surely have buried the camera much earlier, rather than leave it until attention was beginning to be focused upon himself.) But we are never told at what point Guy, having helped Maclean to get started, was intended to break off and return to London. If the reason for Guy’s participation was that Maclean could not be relied on to go it alone, the obvious guess is that Guy was meant to stay until he could hand him over to the Russians in France or elsewhere on the Continent. It has usually been assumed – certainly by me – that Guy then lost his nerve, insisted on coming too and was accepted by the Russians because otherwise he was likely to give the whole game away. This remains the most probable theory, particularly since Guy showed signs of wavering even before he left Washington. ‘Don’t you go too’ were Kim’s farewell words to him. But it is also possible that something happened at the last moment which persuaded the Russians that if Guy went back he could not avoid coming under suspicion.

  The Sunday Times authors, writing before Kim’s book appeared, consider that up to the morning of Friday 25 May Burgess was planning a genuine weekend holiday abroad, but that not later than 10.30 a.m. he changed direction abruptly and put the escape plan into effect. The authors suggest that the reason was the decision taken by the Foreign Office, MI5 and SIS the previous evening to seek the Foreign Secretary’s approval for Maclean to be interrogated on the following Monday. The theory requires that this news should have been telegraphed by SIS to Kim on Thursday night for passing to CIA; that would have enabled Kim to warn the Russians, and the Russians to get a message to Burgess on the Friday morning. All this is just possible, although the timing is very tight; but if London had indeed sent such a telegram one might have expected it to be mentioned in Kim’s book, especially since its existence would be known to SIS and MI5, and probably CIA and FBI. (Might one also have expected a sharp surge of NKVD traffic between Washington, Moscow and London? It would have made useful further ammunition at Kim’s interrogation by Milmo.) Kim’s account of the final days, which can hardly be far out of line since several people would have known the truth, indicates that he had been told two or three weeks earlier that Maclean would probably be interrogated when the case against him was complete; but it appears that he and Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 man, were by no means waiting on tenterhooks for the long urgent telegram that reached Washington after Burgess and Maclean had fled, as they might have been if they had known exactly when Maclean was to be pulled in. Perhaps the Russians simply decided for some reason unknown to us that the escape plan – which obviously needed to be carried out over a weekend – could not safely wait another seven days, and instructed Burgess on the Friday morning to go ahead. They do not seem to have kept Kim informed of developments – possibly they judged it too risky to contact him.

  To sum up, the whole bizarre and convoluted rescue plan becomes slightly easier to explain and justify if we make three assumptions: first, that the Russians decided, not later than January 1951 and perhaps much earlier, that Maclean was in no state to manage his exit alone; second, that Burgess was chosen to help because he and Maclean were already fully interconscious; and third, that Burgess was neither intended nor expected to go too. Nevertheless, the affair leaves an impression of amateurishness quite untypical of the highly professional Soviet intelligence service; nor does anything fully explain Guy’s leisurely behaviour. There may well be some major factors not yet revealed.

  I have suggested that the Russians used Burgess because he was already blown to Maclean. But it could also be that they didn’t have anyone else they could call on. It has often been surmised that Kim, Burgess and Maclean were merely three of many young men at Cambridge and elsewhere who were recruited into Soviet intelligence in the 1930s. We cannot deduce much about this from the events of 1951, but perhaps one small conclusion may be attempted: that there was no one else who was both known to Maclean for what he was and available to be used as an intermediary. Otherwise the Russians might well have called on him in preference to Guy, who was bound to endanger Kim.

  We can possibly deduce a little more about Soviet penetration in the 1930s from the extent to which known evidence from defectors and other sources so often seems to come back to just three people – Kim, Maclean and Burgess. Walter Krivitsky mentioned a young English journalist in Spain, and a young man of good family and education who had joined the Foreign Office. Alexander Orlov, if his evidence is valid, spoke of an English journalist in Spain who stammered. Konstantin Volkov claimed to be able to name a British head of counter-espionage in London and two Foreign Office officials. The Washington embassy leakage was ultimately narrowed down to Maclean. It has to be admitted that we do not know for certain that Krivitsky was referring to Kim and Maclean, or Volkov to Kim, Maclean and Burgess. Kim himself – who, of course, has an interest in keeping us all guessing – points out that there is still no basis for supposing that Krivitsky, Volkov and the HOMER information all referred to the same Foreign Office official. The details Krivitsky is supposed to have given of his Foreign Office man vary from book to book, and in at least one respect (the reference to Eton and Oxford) are actually untrue of Maclean; but this was apparently discounted by MI5 and it seems a fair assumption that Maclean was meant. Volkov appears to have given no details of his two Foreign Office officials, but if indeed he could name only two that fact could be significant in itself. So we come to this: if during the 1930s – when pro-Soviet ‘idealism’ was at its strongest – the Russians did succeed in recruiting a number of up-and-coming young men in Britain and getting them established in the official world, then one would have expected others besides the Cambridge Three to have been named or indicated by one or more of the sources I have mentioned above, and possibly by others. Perhaps they were; but if so, the facts have not come out and no one in this category – unless one
includes Alan Nunn May† – appears to have been brought to book. To press the point too far would be to beg the question, but it is worth considering. Put briefly: if there were a lot more just like these three, why haven’t we heard of any of them?‡

  One other KGB activity – or rather inactivity – deserves attention, though I am not suggesting that it represents inefficiency or wrong judgement. The Russians have never seriously exploited the public propaganda value of the Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blake affairs, or tried to extract the maximum political embarrassment for Britain out of either the fact of their treachery or the information they provided. It is true that for a period in the 1960s there was a policy of glorifying important Soviet agents like Kim, Blake, Sorge and Lonsdale, and the Soviet intelligence apparatus in general. But, over the last quarter of a century, this is nothing to what the Russians could have done – for example with Blake’s voluminous documentary intelligence while it still had some relevance. Nor for that matter was it Moscow that made a cause célèbre out of the Profumo–Keeler–Ivanov affair. Obviously the Russians have had other political priorities. Even the publication of Kim’s own book was indefinitely shelved by the KGB, until the Sunday Times and Observer articles of 1967 changed the situation, and the further writings foreshadowed in his preface of 1968 have not yet appeared.