A Spy Among Friends (7 page)

Otto’s real name, which Philby would not learn for decades, was Arnold Deutsch. He was the chief recruiter for Soviet intelligence in Britain, the principal architect of what would later become known as the Cambridge Spy Ring. Born of Czech Jewish parents, Arnold and his family had moved to Austria when he was a child. Prodigiously clever, he emerged from Vienna University after just five years with a doctorate in chemistry, a fervent commitment to communism, and a passionate interest in sex. His first career was as publisher and publicist for the German sexologist Wilhelm Reich – the ‘prophet of the better orgasm’ who sought to bring sexual enlightenment to the prudish Viennese as part of the ‘sex-pol’ (sexual politics) movement, which equated sexual repression with fascist authoritarianism. Reich developed the radical, though slightly implausible, theory that ‘a poor man’s sexual performance led him to fascism’. While promoting Reich’s idea that better sex makes better revolutionaries, Deutsch was also secretly working for Soviet intelligence, having undergone a training course in Moscow. The Gestapo arrested Deutsch briefly in 1933; the anti-pornography section of the Vienna police were also on his trail, on account of his sex-pol activities. A year later, he arrived in Britain, to begin a postgraduate degree in Phonetics and Psychology at University College London, while working as a spy-recruiter. Deutsch had relatives in the UK, notably his wealthy cousin Oscar, the founder of the Odeon cinema chain, which was said to stand for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’. One Deutsch was doing well out of British capitalism; the other was hellbent on destroying it.

Deutsch was an ‘illegal’, espionage parlance for a spy operating without diplomatic status. His mission was to recruit radical students at the best universities (using his academic work as cover), who might later rise to positions of power and influence. Deutsch was on the hunt for long-term, deep-cover, ideological spies who could blend invisibly into the British establishment – for Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence, or left dormant for ever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.

Philby’s introduction to Deutsch appears to have been arranged by Edith Tudor-Hart, an Austrian communist friend of Litzi’s. Born Edith Suschitzky, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese publisher, Edith married an English doctor and fellow communist named Alexander Tudor-Hart, and moved to England in 1930, where she worked as a photographer and part-time talent-scout for the NKVD, under the remarkably unimaginative codename ‘Edith’. She had been under MI5 surveillance since 1931 but not, fatefully, on the day she led Philby to meet Deutsch in Regent’s Park.

Philby was just the sort of recruit Deutsch was looking for. He was ambitious, well connected and devoted to the cause, but unobtrusively: unlike others, Philby had never made his radical views obvious. He sought a career in diplomacy, journalism or the civil service, all excellent perches for a spy. Deutsch was also under the impression that St John Philby was an agent of British intelligence, with access to important secret material.

At their second meeting, Deutsch asked Philby if he was willing to act as an undercover agent for the communist cause. Philby did not hesitate: ‘One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force,’ he wrote. That was a most telling remark: the attraction of this new role lay in its exclusivity. In some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs. In a brilliant lecture written in 1944, C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the ‘inner ring’, the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join. Westminster School and Cambridge University are elite clubs; MI6 is an even more exclusive fellowship; working secretly for the NKVD within MI6 placed Philby in a club of one, the most elite member of a secret inner ring. ‘Of all the passions,’ wrote Lewis, ‘the passion for the Inner Ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.’

‘My future looked romantic,’ Philby wrote. Deutsch laid out a vision of that future: Philby and Litzi must break off all communist contacts; rather than join the party, he should establish a new political image as a right-winger, even a Nazi-sympathiser. He must become, to all outward appearances, a conventional member of the very class he was committed to opposing. ‘By background, education, appearance and manners you are an intellectual, a bourgeois. You have a marvellous career ahead of you. A bourgeois career,’ Deutsch told him. ‘The anti-fascist movement needs people who can enter into the bourgeoisie.’ Hidden inside the establishment, Philby could aid the revolution in a ‘real and palpable way’. Deutsch began to instruct Philby on the rudiments of tradecraft: how to arrange a meeting; where to leave messages; how to detect if his telephone was bugged; how to spot a tail, and how to lose one. He presented Philby with a new Minox subminiature camera, and taught him how to copy documents. Philby memorised Deutsch’s lessons ‘like poetry’. His double life had begun.

Deutsch gave Philby the affectionate codename ‘Sonny’ (Söhnchen in German), and reported his catch to the London
rezident
, the regional control officer of the NKVD (the predecessor organisation to the KGB), who passed on the news to Moscow Centre, the Soviet intelligence headquarters: ‘We have recruited the son of an Anglo agent, advisor to Ibn-Saud, Philby.’ Moscow was impressed: ‘What are his prospects for a diplomatic career? Are they realistic? Will he choose his own path or will his father “suggest” he meet someone and discuss it? That would be good.’ Deutsch instructed his new protégé to draw up a list of acquaintances and contemporaries, from Oxford as well as Cambridge, who might also be recruited to the cause. He told him to discreetly explore whatever documents St John Philby kept in his office at home, and to photograph ‘the most interesting’.

Asking Philby to spy on his own father was surely a test of his commitment, and Philby passed it easily. He did what was asked of him without hesitation. Deutsch reported that his new recruit ‘refers to his parents, who are well-to-do bourgeois, and his entire social milieu with unfeigned contempt and hatred’. Philby was doubtless putting on a display of class-warrior zeal for Deutsch, for he was spellbound by his spymaster, ‘his marvellous education, his humanity, his fidelity to building a new society’. They met often, always in ‘the remoter open spaces in London’, and once in Paris. Deutsch flattered and inspired his young ward. When Philby’s relationship with Litzi began to falter, the older man dispensed marital advice. (‘His wife was his first lover in his life,’ Deutsch reported to Moscow, keen, as ever, to establish a link between sex and socialist zeal. ‘When difficulties arose in their relationship, they would confide in me and both followed my advice.’)

Philby was bonded, ideologically and emotionally, to his charismatic Soviet controller. ‘I sometimes felt we had been friends since childhood,’ he wrote. ‘I was certain that my life and myself interested him not so much professionally as on a human level.’ The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated. Deutsch made a careful study of Philby’s psychology, the flashes of insecurity beneath the debonair exterior, the unpredictable stammer, his veiled resentment of a domineering father. Deutsch reported to the Centre that Philby had potential but needed ‘constant encouragement’: ‘Söhnchen comes from a peculiar family. His father is considered at present to be the most distinguished expert on the Arab world . . . he is an ambitious tyrant and wanted to make a great man out of his son.’ Deutsch noted his acolyte’s intellectual curiosity, his fluctuating moods, his old world manners, and his resolve: ‘It’s amazing that such a young man is so widely and deeply knowledgeable . . . He is so serious he forgets that he is only twenty-five.’

Deutsch urged Philby to get a job in journalism – ‘Once you’re inside, you’ll look around and then decide which way to go’ – and he reassured Moscow that Philby’s family contacts would ensure swift promotion. ‘He has many friends from the best homes.’ Philby soon obtained a job as a sub-editor at the
World Review of Reviews
, a literary and political monthly, before moving on to the
Anglo-German Trade Gazette
, a magazine devoted to improving economic relations between Britain and Germany which was partly financed by the Nazi government. Completing this lurch from extreme left (secretly) to extreme right (publicly), he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a society formed in 1935 to foster closer understanding with Germany. A sump for the forces of appeasement and Nazi admiration, the fellowship included politicians, aristocrats and business leaders, some naive or gullible, others rampantly fascist. With views diametrically opposed to his own, such people offered Philby ideal political camouflage, as well as information, eagerly received in Moscow, about links between the Nazis and their British sympathisers. Philby travelled regularly to Berlin on behalf of the fellowship, and even met the German foreign minister, von Ribbentrop. He later claimed to have found playing the part of a keen young fascist ‘profoundly repulsive’ because ‘in the eyes of my friends, even conservative ones, but honest conservatives, I looked pro-Nazi’. Former friends from the left were aghast at his apparent conversion, and some shunned him. Deutsch commiserated, telling Philby he knew ‘how difficult it is to leave old friends’.

Litzi and Philby’s commitment to communism proved more durable than their commitment to each other; they separated, without rancour, and she moved to Paris. To Moscow’s surprise, Philby found nothing of intelligence value among his father’s papers. The NKVD was convinced that someone as well connected as St John Philby, who travelled widely and freely, must be a spy. ‘It seems unlikely that his father . . . would not be a close and intimate collaborator with the Intelligence Service.’ Not for the last time, Moscow elevated its erroneous expectations into fact. Meanwhile Philby dutifully handed over a list of potential recruits among his left-wing Cambridge friends, including Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.

_*

Maclean, still a committed communist, was by now in the Foreign Office. Philby invited him to dinner, and hinted that there was important clandestine work to be done on behalf of the party. ‘The people I could introduce you to are very serious.’ Philby instructed Maclean to carry a book with a bright yellow cover into a particular café on a given day. ‘Otto’ was waiting for him, and duly signed up this ‘very serious and aloof’ young man with ‘good connections’. Codenamed ‘Orphan’, Maclean, too, began to shed his radical past. ‘Sonny has high praise for Orphan,’ Deutsch reported to Moscow. Burgess seemed a more dubious prospect: ‘Very smart . . . but a bit superficial and could let slip in some circumstances.’

Characteristically, Burgess sensed he was being denied admission to a most enjoyable and risky party, and brazenly barged his way in. One night he confronted Maclean: ‘Do you think that I believe for even one jot that you have stopped being a communist? You’re simply up to something.’ A little reluctantly, Deutsch added Burgess to his roster. Burgess duly announced, with maximum fanfare, that he had swapped Marx for Mussolini, and was now a devotee of Italian fascism. It was Burgess who subsequently introduced Deutsch to yet another recruit, Anthony Blunt, already an art historian of note. Slowly, discreetly, with paternal diligence and Philby’s help, Deutsch added one link after another to the Cambridge spy chain.

While Deutsch handled recruitment, much of the day-to-day management of the spies was carried out by another ‘illegal’, Theodore Stephanovich Maly, a Hungarian former monk who, as an army chaplain during the First World War, had been taken prisoner in the Carpathians and witnessed such appalling horrors that he emerged a revolutionary: ‘I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I became a communist and have always remained one.’ After training as an agent-runner, he arrived in London in 1932, under the alias Paul Hardt. For a spy, Maly was conspicuous, standing six feet four inches tall, with a ‘shiny grey complexion’, and gold fillings in his front teeth. But he was a most subtle controller, who shared Deutsch’s admiration for Philby, describing him as ‘an inspirational figure, a true comrade and idealist’. The feeling was reciprocated; in Philby’s mind the bewitching personalities of his handlers were indistinguishable from their political allure: ‘Both of them were intelligent and experienced professionals, as well as genuinely very good people.’

Philby’s work for the
Anglo-German Trade Gazette
came to an abrupt end in 1936 when the Nazis withdrew financial support. But by then, Moscow Centre had other plans for him. Civil war had erupted in Spain between the Republican forces and the fascist-backed Nationalist rebels under General Franco. Philby was instructed to spy on the Nationalists, using freelance journalism as a cover, and report back on troop movements, communications, morale, and the military support being provided to Franco’s forces by Germany and Italy. Moscow would pay for his passage. Philby ‘handles our money very carefully’, Deutsch told his bosses. In Spain, Philby quickly ingratiated himself with Franco’s press officers, and began sending well-informed articles to British newspapers, notably
The Times
. On a return trip to Britain, he persuaded Britain’s most influential paper to appoint him special correspondent in Spain: ‘We have great difficulty getting any information at all from the Franco side,’ Ralph Deakin,
The
Times
’s foreign editor, told Philby.