Two months later Philby returned to London with his bride (who was met with the instant disapproval of her newly acquired mother-in-law). He had glimpsed what he believed was the dark future for Europe if fascism triumphed. It was a danger he believed his countrymen had yet to understand. Others had also noticed how the young man had shown courage in his willingness to fight and risk his life for a faraway country and for ideals in which he believed. So, soon after returning home, one of Litzi’s friends from Vienna who had also come to London took him on a long walk to Regent’s Park. Edith Tudor-Hart was slim and pale with blue eyes and bobbed blonde hair. She had been under occasional surveillance from MI5 and the police since 1930 when she attended a workers’ rally in Trafalgar Square before being deported back to Vienna. They suspected she was already working with the Russian intelligence services. They were right. Like Litzi, a marriage to a British citizen who was a Communist would allow her to come to London after the uprising. An opportunity to change history was lost. MI5 and the police Special Branch were still trying to establish where exactly she lived in June 1934 and so there was no surveillance on her the day she took Philby on a roundabout walk to meet a man on a park bench.23 He was another Austrian, a former university lecturer who now lived near Hampstead and was ostensibly studying psychology. Cosmopolitan and erudite, he was the perfect recruiter for the forerunner of the KGB, having the right personality to appeal to the fresh, intellectual Cambridge man. His strategy was to cultivate young idealists and then send them into the British establishment. This required a patience that MI6 officers later reflected they did not possess.24
Philby’s work in Vienna had caught people’s attention, the man explained. Would he be interested in working secretly for the Communist cause? ‘You are a bourgeois by education, appearance and origin. You could have a bourgeois career in front of you – and we need people who could penetrate into the bourgeois institutions. Penetrate them for us!’25 A message soon went back to Moscow with news of the recruitment of an insecure and shy young man. He had said there were other ‘sons of functionaries’ at Cambridge who shared his views and he would soon be providing a list.26 With his stories of blood and turmoil in Vienna, Philby drew others to his cause. He would only tell Litzi of his recruitment the following year.27
Philby was instructed to hide his Communist past and he publicly began to disavow it, flirting with right-wing pro-German politics. One person who knew the truth was Greene’s tour-guide around Vienna, ‘Hans’ Peter Smollett, another friend of Litzi’s in Austria who had come to London. Philby and Smollett even went into business for a while running a press agency. Philby thought he ‘was a hundred percent Marxist, although inactive, lazy and a little cowardly’. That did not stop Philby using him as an occasional source. One day he said to him, ‘Listen, Hans, if in your present job you come across some information that in your opinion could help me in my work for England – and I winked at him – come over to me and offer me two cigarettes. I’ll take one, you’ll keep the other, that will be a signal you want to tell me something important.’28 But Smollett’s amateurishness irritated the security-conscious Philby, especially once he had made it into the inner sanctum by joining MI6 in 1941. Smollett was like the embarrassing friend from school who followed you to university and knew you were not quite what you pretended to be.
With his easy charm, Philby had skilfully glided up the ranks of the British Secret Service. Betraying those around him, and especially the women who fell for him, came easy. There was the illicit thrill of not just entering the secret world but of subverting the establishment which he held in disdain, of duping the fools around him. Secret knowledge offers the needy a sense of superiority and power over ordinary folk. For the traitor within a service, that extended even to one’s colleagues. As the war ended and his career showed no sign of waning, Philby realised he needed to normalise his personal life. His relationship with Litzi was long over but they were technically still married. Philby took the risky step of telling his superiors, explaining that the marriage had been a gallant attempt to rescue a young woman. His superior sent a request over to MI5 for a trace – she was a Communist, now living with a Soviet agent they said. That revelation barely caused a ripple. End it quickly, they said, and Philby did. The two Communist agents agreed to divorce on the pretext of infidelity so that Philby could marry his new partner, Aileen, who by then was expecting their fourth child.29 The two former lovers never met again and rarely spoke of each other. The few times Litzi mentioned ‘Kim’, it was with a tone of regret and love but tinged with bitterness. To those who knew them well, the reticence hid the pain aroused by a deeply felt relationship which had been sacrificed for the cause.30
Greene was one of the few friends not scarred by Philby’s betrayal. Instead it provided a wellspring for his fiction. Philby had been Greene’s boss during the war in MI6, the two men lunching and drinking and enjoying each other’s company, Philby in his tweed jacket with leather patches. Greene had flirted with Communism in his youth but had eventually sided with Catholicism.31 ‘Of course I couldn’t talk to him as a Communist,’ Philby said years later. ‘But I did talk to him as a man with left-wing views and he was Catholic. But at once there was human contact between us.’32 Greene had left MI6 suddenly for a far less exciting job in the Ministry of Information. Why? A few have wondered if he might have suspected what his friend was up to and wanted to avoid becoming caught up in it. If so, The Third Man takes on a different hue with its story of a hapless writer, shocked at the amoral behaviour of an old friend he had once looked up to and now determined to chase down the charismatic but ruthless rogue. The writer even falls for the rogue’s East European girlfriend, who needs a passport to get out.33 In the screenplay, the writer, torn between conflicting loyalties, finally sides with the authorities over his treacherous friend. Reality, for Greene, was always more complex and beguiling than the fiction.
Spy-fact and spy-fiction intertwined from the earliest days of the British Secret Service when Whitehall’s decision to establish what would become MI5 and MI6 was encouraged by ribald thrillers which warned of German spies fanning out across England, stealing its secrets and preparing for an invasion. Sleep safe, the writers told their readers, for the British Secret Service was busy catching the German spies and returning the favour. Except that the bureaucrats knew it was not, since it did not yet exist, and so in 1909 they founded the Secret Service Bureau to catch up. In Vienna, the early Cold War provided the ferment for a new generation of novelists whose work would again shape reality. Greene was foremost among them. It was not long after his visit that the CIA chief could stand on the city’s streets and watch Orson Welles film his scenes for The Third Man.34 Once it opened, the British Field Security team trooped en masse to the cinema to watch their world brought to life.
Over in the Austrian town of Graz another twenty-year-old member of Field Security was discerning the cadences of loyalty and betrayal. He would draw on his experiences to create a fictional world that would define the public understanding of the British Secret Service. David Cornwell, later to become John le Carré, plied his trade among the desperate detritus of the refugee camps. Thousands had been swept up in the ebb and flow of Nazism and the Red Army and deposited far from home. Moving through the flotsam were the spies of many nations picking over the remains. Inside the camps could be found every type of person fleeing something, heading somewhere, some perhaps knowing something.35 In his most autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy, le Carré has the young Magnus Pym of Field Security trawling the camps asking the questions Jan Mašek was asked. ‘Where do you come from? What troops did you see there? What colour shoulder-boards did they wear? What did they drive around in, what weapons did they have? Which route did you take, what guards, obstructions, dogs, wire, minefields did you meet along your way? What shoes were you wearing? How did your mother manage, your grandmother if the mountain pass was so steep? How did you cope with two suitcases and two small children when your wif
e was so heavily pregnant? Is it not more likely that your employers in the Hungarian secret police drove you to the border and wished you luck as they showed you where to cross? Are you a spy and if so, would you not prefer to spy for us?’36
There was the occasional burst of excitement – for instance, carrying a loaded Browning revolver while accompanying a senior officer to meet a Czech source who was promising a ‘one-time sell’ of intelligence. But then there was the disappointment when the clandestine rendezvous at a pub drew a blank. Later he would wonder if the Czech agent ever really existed and whether his senior officer was not something of a fantasist living out his own dream of the spy-world like so many others. ‘He imagined himself at the Spies’ Big Table, playing the world’s game.’ In the fictional world, Magnus Pym is artfully reeled in by an intellectual friend, his own version of Philby’s man on the park bench, who draws him into choosing friendship over his country and embarking on a long path of betrayal for the Czech Secret Service. ‘What would have bought me, I wonder? What would have turned me?’ le Carré later asked.37
Le Carré soon afterwards entered the inner sanctum of MI5 and MI6. ‘It wasn’t long before I, too, was fantasizing about a real British secret service, somewhere else, that did everything right that we either did wrong or didn’t do at all.’38 One day, he bumped into the in-house lawyer. Sitting on his Formica-topped table was a copy of Graham Greene’s latest book. Our Man in Havana was a savage satire of Greene’s former employers in which an MI6 officer recruits a vacuum-cleaner salesman who in turn passes off designs for his latest model (‘the atomic’) to a gullible and eager service as those of a new weapon of mass destruction being built in the mountains. The sight of the two-way nozzle causes particular consternation in London. ‘Fiendish isn’t it?’ the Chief says, after someone remarks that plans for the weapon of mass destruction bore a passing resemblance to an outsized vacuum cleaner. ‘The ingenuity, the simplicity, the devilish imagination of the thing,’ he adds. Greene, the lawyer remarked to le Carré, had gone too far and might have to be prosecuted for this outrage. ‘It’s a damned good book. That’s the whole trouble,’ he explained.39
Vienna was filled with its own tricksters, fraudsters and charlatans on the make. Intelligence was a commodity for sale like everything else on the black market and often just as fake, with refugees running paper mills churning out fabricated documents to satisfy the demands of the spies. There was the high-living, sixty-year-old ‘Count’ with his bevy of lady friends who claimed to know a Soviet major interested in betraying the latest ciphers in return for $25,000. Washington was so excited that it sent out a team. ‘This guy’s lying like a rug,’ they were told after a polygraph.40 The British had similar problems. One agent codenamed ‘Dandelion’ was being run as a double agent against the Soviets until he explained that his Russian case officer wanted him to go to South America and needed money to continue his work there. He was a fraud, one officer warned, only to be overruled. Once safely ensconced in Venezuela, Dandelion vanished. It was clear he had made everything up.41
One young MI6 officer, who had warned of Dandelion’s flakiness, walked the Viennese stage with all the confidence that came from being the youngest officer then recruited into the British Secret Service. Once a month, the dark-haired Briton, straight out of central casting and with a swagger to match, would turn into an alley and then down some steps into a gothic beer cellar just inside the Russian sector of Vienna. He would take a seat and listen carefully to the music. If the next song that the musician struck up was a popular Austrian song called ‘Mamachi’ then all was clear and his contact – a Russian official – had also arrived. The musician was in the pay of the British Secret Service. If he didn’t play the song, Anthony Cavendish would have a beer and hopefully leave as peacefully as he had arrived.42 It was risky, perhaps a bit amateurish – typical of the Secret Service culture of the times. Vienna had become a place to take risks and play spy games in because, like its larger German cousin Berlin, the Viennese capital was one of the only places that British, American and French soldiers and spies came into direct, daily contact with their erstwhile allies, the Soviets. Austria had been sliced into four zones – Soviet, British, American and French. Vienna itself was entirely surrounded by the Soviet zone. It was isolated.
The city itself was divided into four sectors, one for each power. The exception was the First District, the old medieval Innere Stadt or inner city. In a decision that could only have been agreed in the opening days of hesitant co-operation, it was policed collectively by ‘four men in a jeep’, one military policeman from each of the powers with the lead role rotating every month. In their jeeps, suspicions often turned violent. When one patrol passed a Russian checkpoint, the Russian in the jeep forced the vehicle to stop and got his colleagues to drag out a prisoner the Americans had been after.43 One Sunday in June 1946, British and Russian troops brawled outside the railway station, wielding broken bottles. It began when a group of more than fifty British soldiers charged a Russian jeep. One Russian officer died of his injuries.44
Smaller than Berlin and nestled into Eastern Europe, Vienna’s intimacy and its location meant that it acted as a place in which to probe the enemy and see what could be learnt and how far they could be pushed before pushing back, a place to divine both Stalin’s intentions and those of individual Communists to see if someone from the other side might be encouraged to meet and perhaps to talk out of line. Within months of the war ending, MI6 officers in the city could see the advantages of making Vienna a centre for intelligence gathering for all of Central and South-Eastern Europe. ‘I would like to urge the importance of establishing in Vienna a separate long-range SIS bureau, entirely divorced from all existing intelligence organisations, if necessary entirely unknown to any of the latter, and operating directly under London,’ wrote one officer in November 1945.45
By the time Cavendish arrived in Vienna with its Middle European cold and its grey skies, he was working out of the Schönbrunn barracks on the outskirts of town. His task, like that of every MI6 officer, was the recruiting and running of agents. MI6 officers only occasionally spy themselves in terms of collecting secret information. More often than not, they gather intelligence by recruiting agents – people with access to secrets who are willing to risk their lives by passing it on. They might offer their services (a ‘walk-in’ or a defector) and do so willingly – for money or to escape. Or they might be ‘persuaded’ – perhaps they need a passport or they have had their hand in the till or been in someone else’s bed.
Cavendish, aged just twenty-one, was imbued with all the brash self-confidence that came from the combination of youth and membership of the secret world. His father had taken the family to Switzerland but then died in a mountaineering accident when his son was only five. His mother decided to stay and the boy attended a village school in the Alps, becoming fluent in French, German and Swiss-German. Cavendish had been commissioned young into the Intelligence Corps, aged just nineteen, and was posted to Cairo as the war ended. There he had met a plump, owl-faced lieutenant colonel with rumpled khaki shorts, untidy hair and spectacles. Maurice Oldfield, the grammar-school-educated son of Derbyshire hill-farmers, worked for British Security in the Middle East. He was a natural intelligence officer destined eventually to become chief of MI6, and he took Cavendish under his wing.
Cavendish had roared around Cairo on his Twin Triumph motorbike, occasionally posing as a German prisoner of war to infiltrate escape routes. Oldfield went on to join MI6 and Cavendish soon followed. There he worked in R5, Philby’s old section (‘Call me Kim,’ the leading light of the service would say as he popped into the office) and in the department dealing with Austria, Germany and Switzerland – his first assignment was eavesdropping on a Swiss trade delegation in London. Training for new officers was slapdash and had not progressed much from the pre-war days when the new MI6 officer in Vienna – fresh to the whole game and without any instructions from base – had arrived in town and we
nt to see the man he was succeeding for any tips on how to recruit agents. ‘Could you give me some idea of how to begin?’ ‘You’ll just have to work it out for yourself,’ he was told. ‘I think everyone has his own methods and I can’t think of anything I can tell you.’46
Cavendish had his own painful introduction into the costs of Secret Service work just before he arrived in Vienna. As he was driving through the North German countryside looking for an evacuation route in the event of the Red Army rolling west, he picked up two young hitchhikers, a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties. They came from a town in East Germany called Prenzlau. The Russians had a military garrison in the town and the service wanted a source there. He bought them dinner at a guesthouse. The girl’s name was Frieda, his was Alfred, and they both disliked the Russians. To them Cavendish was ‘Paul’. He persuaded the girl to undertake some rudimentary training for a few days, while Alfred was given some money to enjoy himself. She was taught how to use a wireless set and a one-time pad that allowed messages to be written in code, then they were both sent home. Three weeks later she filed her first report. Simple. But six months on, Cavendish had received a message that he should come to see Frieda. Over dinner, she said she was scared that her boyfriend had informed on her because he suspected an affair with Cavendish. ‘Of course, you’ll be safe,’ he reassured her. Next time they met, she said she thought she was being watched and wanted to stay in the West. It took a lot of persuasion but she went back. A few weeks later she was caught, put on trial and shot. It was only in his later years that the memory of the young girl would trouble Cavendish as he looked back on his own younger, more ruthless self.47
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