Kim Philby (12 page)

But the agent-running activities of the
Abwehr
in the peninsula were less important and less damaging to Britain than their ship-watching activities in the Strait of Gibraltar, to which the Spanish authorities were not so much turning a blind eye as giving active if undeclared assistance. The
Abwehr
station at Algeciras reported all comings and goings in the port of Gibraltar, and together with the station at Tangier covered the passage of Allied naval units, convoys and other shipping through the strait. But
Abwehr
observation did not, at that time, extend to the hours of darkness. It was I think in February 1942, soon after the machine cypher had been cracked, that we saw the first cryptic ISOS message about ‘Bodden’. This enterprise appeared primarily to involve infrared searchlights, cameras and heat-sensing apparatus beamed across the Strait of Gibraltar between two German-manned posts on either side of the water; but radar equipment was also mentioned, and a ‘
Lichtsprechgerät
’ or ‘light speech apparatus’. (This last, if I understand it correctly,
made use of a visible light ray, or more probably an infrared one, modulated to carry a voice transmission in the same way, very broadly, that a radio wave of more conventional frequency is modulated. It would be almost impossible to intercept, unless one could position oneself exactly in the line of the very narrow beam, and had some rather exotic equipment.) After ten or twenty ISOS messages had accumulated, bristling with German electronic terms, it was clear that first-class technical advice was needed. Felix suggested I should take the whole problem to R. V. Jones in Broadway.
¹
Jones’s official title there was IId, that is to say he was nominally one of several desk officers in the Air Section, but in fact he held a more or less autonomous post in charge of technical intelligence; he also held a comparable position in the Air Ministry intelligence branch. Though still only twenty-nine, he was already famous for his exploits in ‘bending the beam’ used by the Luftwaffe in bombing Britain. (This is probably an inaccurate description of what he actually did, but it is what we believed.) The first thing I saw in his room, apart from his own young and cheerful face, was something that looked like a rather complicated piece of radio equipment. This turned out to be the German radar set (or part of one) that British commando troops had just captured in the Bruneval raid.
²
The official reports in the press had said the radar was destroyed, but here it was. Jones and his number two were cock-a-hoop. We turned to the ISOS I had brought, and it was obvious I had come to the right place. From then on I consulted Jones regularly about Bodden.

Kim describes in his book the political steps we were subsequently able to get the Foreign Office to take through our embassy in Madrid, which finally compelled the Germans to close down the whole Bodden operation. I hesitate to pit my memory against
his, because I am relying entirely on what I can remember of these events of more than thirty-five years ago, whereas Kim, writing in Moscow, had presumably been able to consult directly or indirectly the reports which I imagine he made to the Russians at the time. My own recollection is that the first démarche to the Spaniards, made in 1942, concerned not so much Bodden as the presence and activities of so many German
Abwehr
officers in Spain under diplomatic cover, a large number of whom we named with details of the posts they held. We would certainly have laid emphasis on the unusual concentration of Germans, offices and observation posts in the Strait of Gibraltar, but I doubt whether we could have said very much about the Bodden plans or any special technical apparatus; we had no knowledge of these except from ISOS, much of which was still difficult to interpret. The Germans were eventually forced to abandon Bodden, but not as far as I recall for several months – perhaps after the Allied landings in north Africa of November 1942.

There were, I think, three or four British démarches to General Franco in 1942 and 1943, all based primarily on ISOS, with the support of ground information for identifications and for a number of other details. It is remarkable in retrospect that we were allowed to do so much with this secret material, in the light of the absolute need to protect the source and the knowledge that the Spaniards would pass our protests verbatim to the Germans. Perhaps it was because no one above the level of Kim fully understood what we were doing. The prevalent wisdom had been that no action must be taken on ISOS unless there was some kind of confirmation from ground sources. This, it was thought, would give ‘cover’ for the use of ISOS. We reasoned that the only thing that mattered was what the Germans would
think. Would they jump to the conclusion that we were reading their signals? Or would they think rather that the ubiquitous and omniscient British Secret Service had pieced it all together from its countless agents throughout the peninsula, if not in Berlin itself? We reckoned that, provided we were certain that any German we mentioned really existed in the name and position we gave for him, it did not matter whether we had information on him from the field or not: after all, how were the Germans to know what reports we had? We felt confident that our use of ISOS, unprecedented though it was, would not endanger the source.

The text of the first démarche was drafted by Kim, though later I had a hand. Patrick Reilly of the Foreign Office, by now seconded to the chief as personal assistant, gave valuable help. Kim evolved a fine Augustan style in which indignation at the outrageous behaviour of the Germans, and pain that the Spaniards were allowing their neutrality to be thus compromised, were nicely blended. Once the first protest had been made, with no adverse effect on ISOS, we became increasingly bold until finally we were able to present Franco with an almost complete order of battle of the
Abwehr
stations in Spain and Spanish Morocco. Later we saw the whole list go over the air from Madrid to Berlin, but no one at either end ever suggested that cypher security might be to blame. One of the possible reactions to be expected was that the Germans would retaliate by similarly denouncing SIS staff in Spain; some Broadway officers made much of this at first but they were overridden. We were confident (partly on the basis of ISOS) that German knowledge of SIS in the peninsula was sketchy. Sure enough they eventually produced a list, a strange concoction naming one or two
actual SIS staff and agents, lost among a much larger number of irrelevant names, including people who had died or left Spain. Nobody on the British side took much notice, and the Spaniards did not press it. They did, however, press the Germans as a result of our protests and sometime in 1943 a large number were withdrawn from Spain, including most of those in the south.

Why did Spain, which was openly committed to supporting the Axis, pay so much attention to our démarches, first presented in mid-1942, when the Germans were riding at their highest, pressing towards the Caucasus and along the north African coast and sinking a frighteningly large proportion of our shipping? The truth was that Franco (whom Kim always regarded as exceptionally astute) was prepared to help the
Abwehr
only so long as it maintained reasonable secrecy about its staff – most of whom were commissioned or non-commissioned officers in the armed forces – and its operations. We knew, the Spaniards knew and the Germans knew that our information was true, and that what the Germans were being allowed to do was totally incompatible with neutrality, however nominal. A protest in 1943 to Portugal had much less success: the Portuguese considered they had behaved with reasonable neutrality, and their consciences were fairly clear.

It is easy to see your own job, and your performance of it, in a very rosy light. Throughout 1942 and most of 1943 I reckoned I had the key job not only in the Iberian subsection but in all of Section V. Indeed I would not have changed it for any other post in the whole counter-espionage world. Never before or since did I have a job that seemed to suit me so exactly. R. V. Jones once said to me (anticipating computers) that the ideal intelligence assessment officer would have a brain as big as a room, capable
of absorbing and synthesising the entire field of relevant information, and I would say that the description applied more nearly to Jones himself than to anyone else I met in the war. I was not in that class, but such capacity as I had at the time for ingesting and retrieving names, dates, places, figures and facts now paid off. On top of that, I was working with congenial colleagues under Kim whom we all respected and liked. I have said little so far about these colleagues, who had to cope with the bulk of the material coming from the stations and elsewhere, the requests from MI5 and a hundred other things, and who had a knowledge of the area and its languages which I totally lacked. Over all this Kim – himself familiar with Spain, its leaders and its language – presided with a benign and unruffled wisdom.

Life was far from overserious. Counter-espionage has an advantage over most other intelligence work: its subject is people, and a very mixed bag too. Anything funny, lewd or otherwise interesting was shared among all of us, working as we were in the same room. Kim was very much a part of this. Yet again I was fascinated by the change that had come over him. Section V had more than a normal share of enemies but Kim seemed to get on with everybody. In his dealing with others he appeared the very opposite of his uncompromising and often cantankerous father, and quite different from his own earlier self. Yet Kim himself could also be uncompromising on anything he considered important. Somehow he usually got his way without antagonising the other party, often without even letting him realise there had been a conflict. One of his weapons was that he was always well informed on the subject he was talking about; all too many officers in SIS and indeed elsewhere had a marked aversion to reading papers really thoroughly.

The files in the SIS Central Registry (which was located in St Albans at a house two fields away from Glenalmond) went back to the early 1920s. We saw much of them because every new name that came up was automatically ‘traced’ in the registry: one was constantly receiving huge bundles of files with any likely – or unlikely – traces flagged. I cannot say that these pre-war records really justified to us the reputation SIS had achieved in the world. In the Section V field, concentration on the communist target meant that very little had been done about German intelligence by the time the war began: even obvious basic work, for example the assembling of overt material such as German telephone books or other reference publications while they were still easy to obtain, had been neglected. To judge by the stories of our colleagues who had joined in peacetime, pre-war SIS had considered secrecy an end in itself. There had been a mindless concentration on the inessentials of security: just about the two worst offences you could commit were to let your wife know what your real job was, and to tell any of your colleagues your salary. The war had swept away a lot of this nonsense, but we were still paid our monthly salaries in crackly white fivers. The security effect was the opposite of what was intended; you were pinpointed either as a black marketeer or as someone in the Secret Service. Once when I wanted to raise a small overdraft at my bank I went to see the manager and explained that my only source of income was the small batch of fivers I deposited monthly. ‘Ah yes,’ he said with a knowing grin, ‘we have several customers like you.’ I don’t
think
he meant I was a black marketeer.

We in Vd were all extremely busy. In my own job alone there was enough work for almost any number of people. Twenty
of us could easily have been employed in following up all the possible leads and subjects that ISOS produced in our area; but even if war priorities had justified a large increase (which clearly they did not) and good staff had been obtainable, there would have been no point in generating more enquiries than could be handled by our stations abroad. Every day brought its excitements and its new problems. I insisted on taking one day off a week, and seldom came back without being told by Kim that as usual a crisis had arisen in my absence. There was a crisis every day, I replied; he was just seeing one in seven.

Almost every evening the two of us took work home. We would continue at Glenalmond till about seven, then fill our briefcases and go. The bus went almost from door to door, with a pub at each end. What drinking we did at St Albans, which was nothing remarkable, was mostly at one or other of these two pubs: there was little drink at The Spinney itself, and no bar or mess at Glenalmond. During the winter of 1941–42 Kim and one or two others from the subsection used to lunch at the White Hart in St Albans and have a few drinks, but they abandoned this eventually, probably for financial reasons. Patrick Seale says that throughout the war Kim seemed to get hold of black market whisky at £4 a bottle when nobody else could.
³
This seems to show a misunderstanding both of the wartime alcohol situation and of Kim’s own way of life at this time. To the best of my memory whisky from distillers outside the Scotch Whisky Association was often available in the shops towards the end of the war at £4 15s. a bottle if you could conceivably afford it, but the ordinary person established himself with one or more retailers and bought the occasional bottle at the unofficially controlled price of something over a pound. Kim could never
have afforded to make a habit of buying whisky from his own pocket at £4 or £4 15s. a bottle – say £20 to £30 at present prices
^†
– and it would surely have been far too risky to take subsidies from the Russians for the purpose. Our drink at St Albans was usually draught bitter, sometimes laced or chased with a small gin: the object was to make the alcohol go as far as possible. It was not until the arrival of the Americans in force from about 1943 onwards that drinking became a little easier.