The truth is that the malaise affecting British intelligence was much greater than one man. Philby’s betrayal masked far more fundamental problems in the specific operations and in the whole culture of Anglo-American intelligence. The problems with the operations continued long after Philby had left Washington and when he was in no position to know the details. Cavendish, McCargar and others intimately involved knew he could not have been aware of all the landing times and places in the Albanian and Baltic operations. The operations were deeply flawed and compromised from the start, even without Philby. Security was lax. The Soviets had informers in all the refugee camps, in the front movements and in the networks themselves. Everyone everywhere knew what was happening inside the leaky émigré community where agents were recruited.60
Not just the execution but the very concept of the operation in Albania was fundamentally flawed. The Musketeers were personally committed to backing their men against the Communists. But they failed to appreciate that much of the support for Hoxha was based on real sentiment among the populace. And even as that sentiment began to sour, the strength of the secret police left others fearful of joining what always looked like a small-time attempt at revolution. The Soviets had much more to go on than just Philby.
The same was true for the Baltic operation. Philby may have kept the KGB informed of MI6’s deception plans but the operation had been organised separately. He had very little involvement with Carr’s work after 1947 apart from during his trips to Washington and knew almost none of the detail. All across Eastern Europe, the CIA and MI6 had begun to support resistance movements which had peaked in 1947 and by the time the parachutes and boats arrived they had dwindled to nothing, or worse, had become KGB traps. The methods of the last war were simply not up to the job this time round. MI6 did not yet have the measure of the new enemy it was facing.
It was all too convenient to blame every disaster on Philby in those years. He was a scapegoat who could be cast into the wilderness bearing the sins of Britain’s and America’s spies, leaving them free of blame. A few knew that it was not so simple. Philby’s betrayal was enormous. But it did not account for everything. His greatest damage lay in what his betrayal did to Washington’s perception of British intelligence and particularly in the manner of his departure.
In the summer of 1950, Philby received a letter from his old Cambridge friend Guy Burgess. He had been posted by the Foreign Office to Washington and wanted to stay at Philby’s house. This was a problem for Philby. He had first introduced Burgess to Russian intelligence in the 1930s and Burgess had repaid the favour by helping Philby into British intelligence during the Second World War. But Philby had been unsure about Burgess from the start and the once lovable rogue was becoming increasingly dissolute and dangerous.61 He left a trail of destruction wherever he went, from Tangier to Dublin, involving drunkenness, young men and occasional boasts of espionage.
At the same time, Philby had been briefed about an FBI investigation hunting for a spy who had been at the British Embassy. The FBI’s knowledge was only partial, based on a decrypted set of Soviet communications, and its officers had been inclined to think that the culprit was a junior or a local member of staff. A charlady with a Latvian grandmother had a fifteen-page report compiled on her private life. But Philby watched nervously as the investigation began to lead to another of his Cambridge contemporaries whom he had talent-spotted for the Soviets fifteen years earlier. Donald Maclean, once the golden boy of the Foreign Office, was by then back in London. After his time in Washington, he had begun to self-destruct in Cairo, thanks in part to a poor KGB handler looking after him. Fifteen years of deception had taken its toll. He wanted out. But it was too late. He trashed an American’s flat by smashing a large mirror on to a bath after a drinking binge. However, after a brief spell with the Foreign Office shrink he had been made head of the America desk. Now Philby, who never showed the same signs of cracking that his fellow spies did, could see the net closing in on Maclean.
Burgess would go back home to warn Maclean, he and Philby agreed. At the last dinner they would share, Burgess and Philby sat in a booth at a Chinese restaurant where music could mask their conversation. ‘When I drove him to the station next morning, my last words, spoken only half-jocularly, were “Don’t you go too.’”62 A few days later Philby was called in by a colleague at the Embassy who had just received a ‘Most Immediate’ telegram from London. Could Philby’s secretary help decrypt it? When the work was complete, the man looked grey. ‘“Kim,” he said in a half-whisper, “the bird (meaning Maclean) has flown … there’s worse than that … Guy Burgess has gone with him.’” Philby did not need to feign distress at the news. There was panic in London, where they had been waiting until the weekend was over to interrogate Maclean. The Soviets knew that the MI5 surveillance team did not work weekends and had taken advantage of this by sending their two agents on a weekend cruise to France which did not require passports. From there, they fled east.
Philby realised that the Cambridge connection between Burgess and Maclean would also lead to him. So he returned to his Washington home, went down into his basement and wrapped his secret camera and accessories into waterproof containers and drove out to Great Falls. He parked his car on a deserted stretch of road and began digging with a trowel to bury evidence of his deceit. But rather than panic and flee Philby decided to hold his nerve. He understood the Americans and the British spy-hunters in a way his two colleagues did not and he knew that any evidence would be circumstantial. He also understood that many senior people in London would not want to face up to the possibility that they had been duped, and that his many friends would give him the benefit of the doubt.
The summons to London soon arrived. On his way back, Philby went to see Angleton and they passed a ‘pleasant’ hour in a bar. He even saw CIA chief Allen Dulles, who acted as if it was business as usual and asked Philby to follow up some business back home.63 But while Angleton, despite what he later claimed, never had any doubts about his friend, other CIA colleagues did. One, Bill Harvey, wrote a memo outlining the circumstantial case that Philby had gone bad and sent it to Dulles. Washington had insisted to London that Philby leave and not come back.64 Back in London, the first of many interrogations began. The initial task fell to the capable MI5 officer Dick White. Philby was a cool customer and knew that since his former friends at MI5 had no evidence they were counting on a confession. He toughed it out. He was asked to resign but was handed a fat payoff. Ministers and other officials were not told of MI5’s investigation.
The Americans were unhappy, in some cases furious, with the failure to resolve the issue and pressured the British to do more, especially in the wake of the Albanian failures. As a result, Philby was hauled in for another three-hour questioning. The interview was led by a lawyer turned Security Service officer, H. J. Milmo. Sitting in with him was a quiet young MI5 officer who would become Philby’s chief pursuer. His name was Arthur Martin. ‘He remained silent throughout, watching my movements,’ Philby recalled. Martin was intense and focused, determined to expose the traitor for what he was. He had been recruited into MI5 on Philby’s recommendation but now he burned with anger at the way Philby had got away with it for so long and at the way MI6 protected him.65 Much of the evidence Martin had carefully pieced together was admittedly circumstantial. There had been a spectacular rise in the volume of Soviet radio traffic at just the moment in 1945 that Philby had been informed about a defector offering his services in Turkey. Philby had been assigned to follow up the offer and, sensing the danger to his own position, had played for time until the would-be defector could be spirited back to the Soviet Union on a military aircraft, presumably to his death.
Litzi and the Vienna connection were a weak spot and Martin zeroed in on it to search for proof to support his conviction. Those who had known Litzi were summoned to Room 055 of the War Office to meet a man named Morley, Martin’s cover-name.66 He began one interview in October by explaining that the inquiry
was about Litzi and asked what the interviewee knew. The interviewee had only known her in London during the war but said she never seemed to want for money and now seemed to be living a surprisingly comfortable life in the Soviet sector of Berlin. Martin focused on Edith Tudor-Hart, who had walked Philby to the park bench to be recruited. The day before the interview in Room 055, a full telephone tap was placed on her in addition to the existing mail check and surveillance. She realised that she was being watched and became increasingly neurotic, waiting for her house to be raided.67 She also received a phone call – from whom is unclear – and destroyed a picture she had taken of Philby back in the 1930s.68
The investigation into Philby generated a painful fracture within British intelligence. Almost everyone in MI5 – and especially those who had watched him being questioned – was convinced of Philby’s guilt. The two agencies were rivals in the way many sister services can be, expending untold energy in petty bureaucratic squabbles, but there were also deeper distinctions. MI5 were seen as little more than policemen – many were ex-Colonial Special Branch officers – and their well-tailored relatives from MI6 certainly never left them in any doubt that they did not move in the same circles or inhabit quite the same world as MI6 did with its gentlemanly values. Philby’s friends in MI6 thought it impossible that one of their own could have been working for the other side. He had been the victim of a McCarthyist witch-hunt by those fanatics in Washington, they said.
The misplaced loyalty to Philby reflected the culture of the Secret Service and its cherishing of ‘gentlemanly conduct’. Security and vetting had been lax at MI6 for decades. This was because the service recruited incestuously from within small circles in the tight-knit British elite. Fathers recruited sons, officers married secretaries and they all socialised with each other, partly because it alleviated any security concerns and partly because of the sense of superiority it provided. MI6 was a gentlemen’s club and a gentleman could always be trusted. Intelligence, to the old-school types, was a game like cricket where alongside some cunning there were still rules of gentlemanly conduct to be observed (‘It’s such a dirty business that it’s only suitable for gentlemen,’ a spy once said of his work).69 The KGB, whose culture was very different, exploited this weakness by recruiting young idealistic agents who were rebelling against the smug certainties of their parents’ generation. There had been a distrust of intellectuals before the war by the men of action, property and Empire who ran MI6. The service’s number two had boasted that he ‘would never willingly employ a university man’.70 But after the war things began to change. Philby, though recruited through the club, had managed to style himself as a man of the future, representing the rise of the professional. In 1950, one new recruit was told that he should ‘model’ himself on Philby, the ‘star of the service’.71
Philby’s best friend in MI6 was Nicholas Elliott, son of an Eton provost and a classic establishment man: ‘he was everything you would expect an Etonian to be,’ recalled Anthony Cavendish, who knew him well. A thin man who would glance over his round glasses in a donnish manner, he had two joys in life, Ascot and dirty jokes. Elliott’s recollection of a conversation with a security officer on his return to London from the Middle East in 1945 gives a taste of both Elliott himself and of the closed world of MI6 and the establishment:
Security Officer: Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.
Nicholas Elliott: As you wish, Colonel.
Security Officer: Does your wife know what you do?
Nicholas Elliott: Yes.
Security Officer: How did that come about?
Nicholas Elliott: She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.
Security Officer: Quite so. What about your mother?
Nicholas Elliott: She thinks I’m in something called SIS which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.
Security Officer: Good God! How did she come to know that?
Nicholas Elliott: A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.
Security Officer: Who was he?
Nicholas Elliott: I’d prefer not to say.
Security Officer: Then what about your father?
Nicholas Elliott: He thinks I’m a spy.
Security Officer: So why should he think you’re a spy?
Nicholas Elliott: Because the Chief told him in the bar at White’s.72
Elliott, like many of the new generation, looked up to Kim Philby. He became his greatest defender, paving the way for a very personal betrayal. Philby too had been recruited through knowing the right people, culminating in lunch with a senior MI6 officer accompanied by his father St John Philby. ‘When Kim went out to the lavatory, I asked St John about him,’ the officer later recalled. ‘“He was a bit of a communist at Cambridge, wasn’t he?” I enquired. “Oh, that was all schoolboy nonsense,” St John replied. “He’s a reformed character now.’”73 That was enough for the MI6 man, who had known St John from India and who later said, ‘I knew his people.’74 St John Philby was an oddity, a member of the imperial establishment who had begun in the Colonial Service in India but ended up converting to Islam and receiving as a second wife a slave girl from King Ibn Saud. All the way through this strange journey, he kept his membership of the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall and tried to catch the cricket test match scores. When his young son Harold talked to the locals in India, the father said of him, ‘He’s a real little Kim,’ after the Rudyard Kipling spy-boy who could blend in with the locals. The nickname had gone with him through Westminster School and Cambridge and then to the service. On one hand, there could hardly have been a less apt nickname for a man who so utterly rejected the flag-waving, imperial patriotism that Kipling had espoused and that had lured many others, like Daphne Park, to join the Secret Service. On the other hand, Kipling’s Kim was a boy who could pretend to be someone else (Indian rather than English) and above all, ‘what he loved was the game for its own sake – the stealthy prowl through the dark gullies’. Philby too loved the game of espionage but was also trapped by it.
For all his success, Philby had not always been trusted by his KGB mentors. They had refused to believe him when he said that MI6 had no agents in Russia, and the fact that MI6 appeared so incompetent in failing to spot his Communist past added to suspicions that he might be a double agent whose allegiance remained with Britain and who was being used against them. At one point contact with him was terminated and a rather inept surveillance team sent out to see if Philby and those he recruited (with the possible exception of Maclean) really were loyal to British intelligence.75 Although he hid them carefully in his untrustworthy memoir, Philby himself had doubts, particularly when he was abandoned and at the start of the war when the Soviet Union signed a short-lived pact with the Nazis. But, once embarked on, the path of treachery is almost impossible to leave. Philby remained steadfast. Some say it was deceit itself and the thrill of the double life which drove him rather than a faith in Communism. In later life he denied that his commitment was anything other than ideological. He had chosen his side and then stuck with it, he said, quoting a line from his friend Graham Greene’s book, The Confidential Agent, in which the agent defends himself for backing the poor even when their leaders commit atrocities like those of the other side. ‘You’ve got to choose some line of action and live by it. Otherwise nothing matters at all … It’s no worse – is it? – than my country, right or wrong. You choose your side once and for all – of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.’76 Philby particularly hated being called a ‘double agent’ in the popular sense of the term implying someone who had changed sides. He always saw himself as a ‘Soviet intelligence officer’ for whom the struggle against fascism extended into a struggle against imperialism. ‘All through my career, I have been a straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest.’77 The burden of betrayal, however, did not perhaps sit as lightly on Philby as he, and his critics, would make out.
H
e was so successful as a penetration agent that some thought Kim was destined to become chief of MI6. That was partly because the competition was not up to much. ‘Sometimes, in the early weeks, I felt that perhaps I had not made the grade after all,’ Philby says of his early days in the Second World War. ‘It seemed that somewhere, lurking in deep shadow, there must be another service, really secret and really powerful.’ Fellow wartime MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper thought Philby a candidate for the top. ‘Who else of his generation was there? … I looked around the world I had left, at the part-time stockbrokers and retired Indian policemen, the agreeable epicureans from the bars of White’s and Boodle’s, the jolly, conventional ex-naval officers and the robust adventurers from the bucket-shop; and then I looked at Philby.’78 McCargar says Angleton told him that Kim might yet become chief even after the first allegations had surfaced.79 Philby himself was more realistic, understanding that the number-two spot was more likely thanks to his complicated personal life, which featured women and too much drink even for the 1950s.
But then in 1951 he found himself out of a job and without a purpose. He floated around the City and journalism for a few years. Then a Russian defector in Australia revealed that Burgess and Maclean had been long-term penetration agents who had been tipped off by a ‘third man’. The pressure was back on. The Americans, especially FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had been a guest at Philby’s house, were convinced of his guilt and angry about their British cousins’ perceived protection of him. Along with some MI5 officers, they made sure that friends in the newspapers got hold of his name. Ironically, MI6 officers would be furious with the Americans for the leaking of Philby’s name, seeing it as the unacceptable smearing of one of their own. Philby was on a train, undertaking the long process of getting rid of any surveillance in preparation for meeting his Soviet contact, when he saw a copy of the Evening Standard newspaper. In October 1955 an MP had asked the Prime Minister Anthony Eden ‘how long he was going to go on shielding the “dubious Third Man activities of Mr Philby’”.80 By a strange quirk of fate, the title of Graham Greene’s screenplay was now applied to the man who, unbeknown to anyone, may have helped inspire it.
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