Read A Spy Among Friends Online
Authors: Ben Macintyre
Meanwhile Philby assiduously gathered intelligence for his Soviet spymasters, on ‘unit strengths and locations, gun calibres, tank performance’ and other military information. This he sent in code to ‘Mademoiselle Dupont’ in Paris (to an address which he later learned was the Soviet embassy itself). He began an affair with Frances Doble, Lady Lindsay-Hogg, an aristocratic former actress ten years his senior, a supporter of Franco and ‘a royalist of the most right-wing kind’ who gave him access to Franco’s inner circle. ‘I would be lying if I said I started the affair only for the sake of my work,’ he later observed. Philby was untroubled about making love to someone whose opinions he despised.
Philby’s controller in Paris, a Latvian named Ozolin-Haskins, was full of praise: ‘He works with great willingness [and] always knows what might be of interest to us. He never asks for money. He lives modestly.’ Nor did Philby neglect his role as a recruiter for the cause. During a return trip to London, he lunched with Flora Solomon, the Marks and Spencer executive who would later introduce him to Aileen. Despite her inherited wealth, and marriage to a general-turned-stockbroker, Flora Solomon was firmly on the left. According to one MI5 officer, she had ‘obviously been in the thick of things in mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow accomplice, and part courier’. During the conversation, Philby remarked, in an intense undertone, that he was ‘doing a very dangerous job for peace and that he needed help. Would she help him in his task? It would be a great thing if she would join the cause.’ He did not specify what his ‘important work for peace’ entailed, but insisted ‘You should be doing it too, Flora.’ Solomon, surprised at what was unmistakably an invitation to take on covert and dangerous work for communism, turned down the offer but told Philby ‘he could always come to her if he was desperate’. She would not forget that strange exchange.
In Moscow a still more radical plan was being hatched for Agent Sonny. Philby had already been asked to report on General Franco’s security arrangements. Now Moscow Centre wondered whether he might be able to get close enough to the
Caudillo
to kill him, and deliver a devastating blow to the Nazi-backed Nationalists. The officer with the unenviable task of passing on this idea was Theodore Maly, who knew that it was virtually impossible to achieve and, even if possible, suicidal. Maly discussed the proposal with Philby, but then sent a message to the Centre quashing the idea, fully aware that in doing so he was inviting Moscow’s mortal displeasure. ‘Even if he had been able to get close to Franco . . . then he, despite his willingness, would not be able to do what is expected of him. For all his loyalty and willingness to sacrifice himself, he does not have the physical courage and other qualities necessary.’ The plan was quietly dropped, but it was another mark of Philby’s growing status in Soviet eyes: in just four years he had gone from a raw recruit to a potential assassin.
The Times
was also impressed with his performance: ‘They are very pleased with Kim, they have the highest opinion of him,’ the diarist Harold Nicolson told Guy Burgess. ‘He has made a name for himself very quickly.’ That reputation expanded hugely when, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, New Year’s Eve 1937, Philby narrowly avoided being killed by a Republican shell (of Russian manufacture) while covering the battle of Teruel. The award of a medal from Franco himself convinced the Nationalists that Philby was, as one Spanish officer put it, ‘a decent chap’.
In the summer of 1939, with Franco victorious in Spain, Philby returned to London to a warm reception from his colleagues at
The Times
. There was no equivalent welcome from his Soviet spy friends, for the simple reason that they were all dead, or had disappeared, swept away by Stalin’s Terror. In the wild, murderous paranoia of the Purges, anyone with foreign links was suspected of disloyalty, and the outposts of Soviet intelligence came under particular suspicion. Theodore Maly was among the first to be recalled to Moscow, an obvious suspect on account of his religious background: ‘I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance. But I’ve decided to go there so that nobody can say “That priest might have been a real spy after all”.’ Maly was tortured in the cells of the Lubiyanka, headquarters of the secret police, until he eventually confessed to being a German spy, and was then shot in the head.
The fate of Arnold Deutsch has never been fully explained. Philby would later claim he had died when a ship taking him to America, the
Donbass
, was torpedoed by a U-boat, thus making him a victim of Hitler’s aggression rather than Stalin’s. The KGB history reports he died en route to South America, but another KGB report claims he was heading to New York. It seems just as probable that bright-eyed ‘Otto’, founder-recruiter of the Cambridge spy chain, shared Maly’s fate. As a foreign-born, Jewish intellectual who had spent years abroad, he was a likely candidate for purging.
The task of running the Cambridge spies was taken over by one Grigori Grafpen, until he too was arrested and sent to the Gulag. Philby’s controller in Paris, Ozolin-Haskins, was shot in Moscow in 1937. His successor, Boris Shapak, lasted two more years before he too was ordered home to be killed. A few defected before they could be seized, further fuelling Stalin’s paranoia, but most submitted to the inevitable. As Maly put it: ‘If they don’t kill me there, they will kill me here. Better to die there.’ One by one, Philby’s handlers were declared enemies of the people. Philby knew they were nothing of the sort. He had revered them for their ‘infinite patience’ and ‘intelligent understanding’, their ‘painstaking advice, admonition and encouragement’. But in later life, he expressed little sadness over the murder of these ‘marvellous men’, and offered no criticism of the tyranny that killed them. Only the politics mattered.
By 1939, however, politics was becoming extremely complicated. In August the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact. Philby had become a Soviet agent in order to fight fascism; under the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, communism and fascism were now effectively in alliance. For the first and only time in his life, Philby seems to have experienced an ideological wobble: ‘What’s going to happen to the single-front struggle against fascism now?’ he asked his new Soviet controller. The relationship cooled markedly. Philby complained that he was not receiving sufficient political instruction. The replacement case officer did not know him, and may not have trusted him. For a time contact was broken off, for reasons that still remain obscure.
That same year, the head of MI5 blandly declared that Soviet ‘activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion’. He could not have been more wrong, for the Soviet network in Britain was not only far more substantial than anything Germany could muster, but also developing new tactics, and encouraging its spies to seek positions within British intelligence itself, where they would have access to secrets of the greatest importance. Anthony Blunt would soon join MI5. Burgess had talked his way into MI6, known as ‘The Hotel’ in Soviet spy code, and helped to haul in Philby after him. ‘I had been told in pressing terms by my Soviet friends that my first priority must be the British secret service,’ Philby wrote. Obediently, he began putting out feelers.
The coolness between Philby and his Soviet handlers was short-lived. In the spring of 1940,
The Times
sent its star correspondent to France to join the British Expeditionary Force as the paper’s accredited war correspondent. Philby had already memorised elaborate instructions for contacting Soviet intelligence in Paris. He should stand near the Thomas Cook office in Place de la Madeleine with a copy of the
Daily Mail
; the Soviet contact would be carrying a copy of the same newspaper. Philby would ask him: ‘Where is the Café Henri round here?’ The man would reply: ‘It’s near the Place de la République.’ Having performed this mini-drama, Philby passed on information he had gathered in the course of his reporting, about British military strength and weaponry, as well as French forces behind the Maginot Line – information of great interest to Moscow, and of even greater interest to Berlin. But whatever qualms he may have felt about the Nazi–Soviet pact seem to have evaporated. Returning to London after the retreat, he hastened to contact Maclean, saying he had brought back ‘extraordinarily valuable materials’ which he wanted to pass to ‘the appropriate hands’. Philby’s loyalties were unchanged, his determination undimmed, and his hints about wanting to join the secret services already bearing fruit, in the shape of Hester Marsden-Smedley.
This, then, was the man who met and befriended Elliott in 1940, a two-sided man who used one side to disguise the other. Nick Elliott loved and admired Philby, the upper-crust, Cambridge-educated
bon viveur
; the charming, happily married, conservative clubman; the battle-scarred war correspondent now playing a vital part in the thrilling world of espionage. Elliott had no inkling of the other Philby, the veteran communist spy, and it would be many more years before he finally met him.
4
Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, was very nearly a caricature of what a spy chief ought to be: aristocratic, wily and enigmatic. Some said he was the illegitimate son of Edward VII, a rumour almost certainly untrue that he did nothing to gainsay. Like all chiefs of MI6, he was known as ‘C’, a tradition begun by the initial of the earliest chief, (Mansfield) Cumming. Menzies was a member of White’s Club, rode to hounds, mixed with royalty, never missed a day at Ascot, drank a great deal, and kept his secrets buttoned up behind a small, fierce moustache. He preferred women to men, and horses to both. He was impenetrably polite, and entirely ruthless: enemy spies, foxes and office rivals could expect no quarter. Nicholas Elliott revered ‘The Chief’ for what he called his ‘true sense of values’ – which was his way of saying that Menzies, an Old Etonian and a friend of his father, shared his own view of the world. Outwardly, Kim Philby was equally admiring of Menzies; privately he considered him a prime specimen of the doomed ruling-class elite. ‘His intellectual equipment was unimpressive,’ Philby later wrote, ‘his knowledge of the world, and views about it, were just what one would expect from a fairly cloistered son of the upper levels of the British establishment.’ C was ripe for manipulation.
Like many small, sealed, self-replicating communities, MI6 was riven with internecine feuding. Its senior officers loathed each other, and intrigued ferociously. Claude Dansey, the assistant chief, was described by Hugh Trevor-Roper as ‘an utter shit, corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning’. Valentine Vivian, ‘Vee-Vee’, who had eased Philby’s entry into the secret world, was an old-style veteran of colonial policing, a stickler for form and protocol who, as the son of a mere portrait painter, lived in a state of permanent social anxiety. He reacted to the smallest slight, real or perceived, with fury. ‘Vivian was long past his best if, indeed, he had ever had one,’ observed Philby. ‘He had a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and wet eyes.’ Dansey hated Vivian, and Vivian hated Dansey; Philby’s boss Felix Cowgill feuded with both, and was detested in turn. Philby cultivated, flattered and despised them all, while nurturing his relationships with other branches of intelligence, most notably MI5. The security service was the main customer for his counter-intelligence gatherings, but more than that, it was responsible for counter-espionage within Britain: if Philby ever came under suspicion, then MI5 would come hunting. It was, therefore, an important place to make friends. Philby’s closest contact within MI5 was Guy Liddell, the refined, cello-playing head of counter-intelligence and a regular at the Harris spy salon. A rumpled, genial figure, Liddell looked more like a country banker than a spymaster. ‘He would murmur his thoughts as if groping his way towards the facts of a case, his face creased in a comfortable, innocent smile,’ wrote Philby. ‘But behind the façade of laziness, his subtle and reflective mind played over a storehouse of photographic memories.’ Philby admired Liddell’s professionalism, and feared it.
Secrets are the currency of intelligence work, and among professional spies a little calculated indiscretion raises the exchange rate. Philby took to passing on titbits to selected colleagues, off the record, and they would respond in kind. As Philby put it: ‘The rewards of such unorthodoxy were often generous.’ A secret shared was a friend made, and friendship, or its simulacrum, was the best way to extract more secrets. Philby became a familiar and popular figure in the corridors of both MI5 and MI6, always happy to exchange pleasantries, gossip or confidences, always ready for a drink after work, and then another. Philby’s Soviet handler reported smugly that Agent Sonny was probably ‘the only man in The Hotel without any enemies’.
Menzies saw Philby and Elliott as his protégés, his ‘golden lads’ representing a new generation of intelligence officers, far removed from the whiskery ex-policemen and military leftovers who had dominated pre-war MI6. They were keen, ambitious and well educated (but not intellectuals – C had little time for those). They belonged to the right clubs, and spoke with the right accents. It soon became apparent that both young men were being groomed for promotion by Menzies, who fought off every attempt to lure them away. When the Foreign Office inquired whether Philby might be seconded to the diplomatic service, C rejected the request with a tart note: ‘You know as well as I do the valuable work which Philby is doing for me . . . the essential nature of Philby’s contribution to the war effort compels his present employers regretfully to refuse to let him go.’ Similarly, the King’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, sent a note to Guy Liddell telling him that Elliott was being considered for employment as a secretary to the monarch, and asking for his opinion. Liddell replied that he had got to know Elliott ‘in the hurly-burly of the Scrubs’ and found him ‘a pleasant personality highly recommended by Nevile Bland’. He might make a fine courtier. Menzies, whose mother was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, quashed that idea too. He wanted his lads in the inner circle, and Philby and Elliott, for rather different reasons, were only too happy to remain there.