Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
No one knows how many died as a consequence of Philby’s actions, because MI5 and MI6 have never released Vermehren’s list. In his diary, Liddell of MI5 noted reports that Soviet forces were liquidating opposition in East Germany in the ‘drive against the Catholic Church, which the Russians recognise as the most powerful international force in opposition to communism’. Years later, Philby observed: ‘I was responsible for the deaths of a considerable number of Germans.’ It was assumed he was referring to Nazis, but among his victims were also an unknown number of German anti-Nazis, who perished because they did not share Philby’s politics. Any lingering doubts Moscow may have had about Philby seem to have evaporated at this moment.
The Vermehrens believed they were alerting the Allies to the men and women who might save Germany from communism; unwittingly, they were handing them over to Moscow. Through Philby’s betrayal, Elliott’s greatest triumph was a secret, sordid tragedy.
7
D-Day was approaching, the Allies were advancing and Kim Philby, Nick Elliott and their OSS colleague Jim Angleton, like so many others who had come of age in war, began to wonder what they would do with their lives when it was over. Each was determined to remain in the intelligence game, and make a career of it; each had found success in the arcane art of espionage, and all three were destined for rapid promotion, two through merit, and one by an office putsch.
As the Nazi threat receded, the fear of Soviet espionage revived. Before the war, MI5 and MI6 had expended considerable energy, resources and anxiety on combating the communist menace, both inside and outside Britain. But the overwhelming challenge of the war with Germany, and the alliance with Stalin, had diverted attention from Moscow’s covert activities. By 1944 the Soviet espionage threat was coming back into sharp focus. ‘We’ve been penetrated by the communists,’ Sir Stewart Menzies told Angleton, ‘and they’re on the inside, but we don’t know exactly how.’ Waking up to the threat of communism from within, the chiefs of British intelligence were increasingly aware that new weapons, and a restructured service, would be needed to take on ‘the next enemy’, the Soviet Union. The battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.
In March 1944, Philby suggested to C that the time had come to resume the fight against communist spies by establishing a new section, Section IX, for the ‘professional handling of any cases coming to our notice involving Communists or people concerned in Soviet espionage’. C was enthusiastic, and so was the Foreign Office ‘provided you do not do anything in the USSR itself (despite Soviet espionage in this country)’. An MI5 officer, Jack Curry, was initially placed in charge, but the obvious person to run the new division in the long term was the experienced head of Section V, Felix Cowgill. Philby later claimed that Moscow ordered him to elbow aside Cowgill, a task he did not relish. ‘I must do everything, but
everything
, to ensure that I become head of Section IX,’ Philby wrote. ‘Cowgill must go.’ It seems more likely that Philby suggested the setting up of Section IX with the firm intention of taking it over, and Cowgill was in the way.
The removal of Cowgill was carried out with surgical detachment, and no remorse. Philby carefully stoked the antagonism between Cowgill and his senior colleagues, brittle Valentine Vivian and venomous Claude Dansey; he whispered darkly to those in authority of the sour relations between Cowgill and MI5; and he manoeuvred himself into a position as prime candidate to take over Section IX in Cowgill’s stead. Finally, in September 1944, Philby was summoned to C’s office, received with ‘great warmth’, and told that he would be running the new Soviet section. Philby accepted with pleasure, but not before planting a small and suitably deferential suggestion in C’s mind. Since Cowgill’s dealings with MI5 had been so bad, might it be sensible to ensure the sister service had no objection to his own appointment? Philby was not remotely fearful that MI5, where he had many friends, would actually challenge his promotion. He merely wanted to be sure that MI5’s fingerprints were all over this decision; that way, if the Security Service should ever investigate how he had come to be in such a powerful position, he could point out that they had helped to put him there. Menzies swiftly became convinced that ‘the idea was his own’. When Cowgill discovered he had been passed over for the top job, he resigned in fury, as Philby knew he would.
Section IX was originally envisaged as a counter-intelligence unit, to attack Moscow’s espionage efforts abroad, but it would soon expand to include running intelligence operations
against
the Soviet bloc, as well as monitoring and secretly attacking communist movements in Europe. Philby, the veteran Soviet spy, was now in charge of Britain’s anti-Soviet intelligence operations, in a position to inform Moscow not only of what Britain was doing to counter Soviet espionage, but also of Britain’s own espionage efforts against Moscow. The fox was not merely guarding the hen house, but building it, running it, assessing its strengths and frailties, and planning its future construction. As a contemporary later observed, ‘At one stroke he got rid of a staunch anti-communist and ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage offers few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.’
The reaction in Moscow was, naturally, ecstatic. ‘The new appointment is hard to over-estimate,’ the British section of the NKVD reported, noting that Philby was ‘moving up in his institution, he is respected and valued’. Soviet suspicion of Philby had already waned, and now dispersed altogether, in part because Elena Modrzhinskaya, the doyenne of conspiracy theory, had retired with the rank of colonel to give lectures on the evils of cosmopolitanism at the Soviet Institute of Philosophy. Notwithstanding her suspicions, Philby and the other Cambridge spies had been loyal throughout the war, and astonishingly productive. Philby had reported on the ‘Manhattan’ atomic bomb programme, the plans for D-Day, Britain’s Polish policy, OSS operations in Italy (thanks to Angleton), MI6 activities in Istanbul (thanks to Elliott), and much more, all perfectly truthfully. In the course of the war an estimated 10,000 documents, political, economic and military, were sent to Moscow from the London office of the NKVD. Modrzhinskaya stands as a symbol of Stalinism at its oddest: she was consistently ideologically correct, while being utterly, hilariously wrong.
Philby’s latest Soviet case officer was Boris Krötenschield, a young workaholic codenamed ‘Max’ – a ‘jovial, kindly man’ who spoke an antique, courtly English that made him sound like a tweedy country squire. Krötenschield was closer, in mentality and character, to the men who had recruited Philby back in 1934, ‘a splendid professional and a wonderful person’ to whom he could ‘unburden’ his thoughts and feelings. Some of his former hero-worship was returning. The Centre showered him with praise and presents. ‘I must thank you once again for the marvellous gift,’ Philby wrote in December 1944. ‘The prospects that have opened before me in connection with my recent change at work inspire me to optimistic thoughts.’ Philby’s new job in MI6 was coincidentally reflected in a change of spy name: agent ‘Sonny’ was now agent ‘Stanley’.
*
In Istanbul, Elliott remained oblivious to the way Philby had ousted their old boss. He knew only that his friend had landed an important new job as head of MI6’s powerful Soviet counter-espionage section, and Elliott was rising through the ranks in tandem. After a few months back in Turkey, Elliott was summoned to London and told by C that he had been appointed MI6 station chief in neutral Switzerland, a crucial intelligence battleground during the war that would acquire even greater importance as the Cold War grew hotter.
After a long and difficult journey across newly liberated, war-wrecked France, Elliott crossed the Swiss frontier in early April 1945, and checked into Geneva’s Hotel Beau-Rivage as night was falling. ‘After the gloom of London and France it was an extraordinary contrast to be shown up to a clean bedroom with a view across the lake and to relax in a hot bath with a whisky and soda.’ After Turkey, Switzerland seemed disconcertingly civilised, tidy and regulated, an almost artificial world. Here were no dodgy nightclubs where spies swapped secrets with belly-dancers, no bomb-throwing assassins or corrupt officials ready to sell truth and lies for the same inflated price. Elliott was nettled to hear the Swiss complain of their wartime privations, when the war seemed to have swept around and over Switzerland.
But beneath a placid, neutral surface, the place was riddled with spies. Swiss efforts to discourage espionage during the war failed utterly: Allied, Axis and freelance agents had converged on the country, as a base from which to launch intelligence operations into enemy territory. The Soviets had run at least two, linked spy networks based in Switzerland, the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) and the Lucy Ring, extracting top-secret information from Nazi Germany and funnelling it to Moscow. In 1943, an anti-Nazi German diplomat named Fritz Kolbe had turned up in Berne and offered his services to the Allies: first to the British embassy, which turned him away, and then to the OSS station chief Allen Dulles (who would go on to become director of the CIA). Kolbe became, in Dulles’s words, ‘not only our best source on Germany but undoubtedly one of the best secret agents any intelligence service has ever had’. He smuggled more than 2,600 secret Nazi documents into Switzerland, including German plans before D-Day and designs for Hitler’s secret weapons, the V1 and V2 rockets. As Hitler’s regime crumbled, Switzerland became a magnet for defectors, resisters and rats leaving the sinking Nazi ship, all clutching their secrets. During the war, the Soviets ran their own networks, and the British and Americans ran theirs, in wary cooperation. But with the coming of peace, Soviet and Western intelligence forces would turn on each other.
In Berne, Elliott rented a flat on the Dufourstrasse, not far from the British embassy, in which he installed his family, which now included a baby daughter, Claudia. (Elliott had insisted that the baby be born on English soil; had she arrived on her due date, VE Day, 8 May 1945, she would have been christened Victoria Montgomeriana, in patriotic tribute to the British general. Luckily for her, she arrived late.) The baby was the responsibility of ‘Nanny Sizer’, the widow of a sergeant-major, who had enormous feet, drank gin from a bottle labelled ‘Holy Water’ and doubled up as Elliott’s informal bodyguard. Officially, Elliott was second secretary at the British embassy and passport control officer; in reality, at the age of thirty, he was Britain’s chief spy in another espionage breeding ground. In the summer of 1945, after only a few months in post, he was invited to meet Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary. One of Britain’s earliest Cold Warriors, Bevin remarked over lunch: ‘Communists and communism are vile. It is the duty of all members of the service to stamp upon them at every possible opportunity.’ Elliott never forgot those words, for they mirrored the philosophy he would take into his new role.
*
While Elliott settled in to Switzerland, James Angleton took up residence in neighbouring Italy. In November 1944, the young OSS officer was appointed head of ‘Unit Z’ in Rome, a joint US–UK counter-intelligence force reporting to Kim Philby in London. A few months later, at the age of twenty-seven, he was made chief of X-2 (Counter-espionage) for the whole of Italy, with responsibility for mopping up remaining fascist networks and combating the growing threat of Soviet espionage. With an energy bordering on mania, Angleton set about building a counter-espionage operation of extraordinary breadth and depth. It was said that during the final months of the war he captured ‘over one thousand enemy intelligence agents’ in Italy. Philby kept Angleton supplied with the all-important Bletchley Park decrypts. The American was ‘heavily dependent on Philby for the continuation of his professional success’.
Angleton chatted up priests and prostitutes, ran agents and double agents, and tracked looted Nazi treasures. An ‘enigmatic wraith’ in sharp English tailoring, he ‘haunted the streets of Rome, infiltrating political parties, hiring agents, and drinking with officers of the Italian Secret Service’. At night he was to be found among his files, noting, recording, tracking, plotting, and wreathed in cigarette smoke. ‘You would sit on a sofa across from the desk and he would peer at you through this valley of papers,’ a colleague observed. His fevered approach to his work may have reflected a poetic, if misplaced conviction that he, like Keats, was destined to die of consumption in Rome. He smiled often, but seldom with his eyes. He never seemed to sleep.
Over the coming years, as Soviet intelligence penetrated deeper into Western Europe, James Angleton and Nicholas Elliott worked ever more closely with Philby, the coordinator of Britain’s anti-Soviet operations. Yet the separate sides of Philby’s head created a peculiar paradox: if all his anti-Soviet operations failed, he would soon be out of a job; but if they succeeded too well, he risked inflicting real damage on his adopted cause. He needed to recruit good people to Section IX, but not too good, for these might actually penetrate Soviet intelligence, and discover that the most effective Soviet spy in Britain was their own boss. Jane Archer, the officer who had interrogated Krivitsky back in 1940, joined the section soon after Philby himself. He considered her ‘perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5’, and a serious threat. ‘Jane would have made a very bad enemy,’ he reflected.
As the war ended, a handful of Soviet officials with access to secret information began to contemplate defection, tempted by the attractions of life in the West. Philby was disdainful of such deserters. ‘Was it freedom they sought, or the fleshpots?’ In a way, he, too, was a defector, but he was remaining in place (though enjoying the fleshpots himself). ‘Not one of them volunteered to stay in position and risk his neck for “freedom”,’ he later wrote. ‘One and all, they cut and ran for safety.’ But Philby was haunted by the fear that a Soviet turncoat would eventually emerge with the knowledge to expose him. Here was another conundrum: the better he spied, the greater his repute within Soviet intelligence, and the higher the likelihood of eventual betrayal by a defector.