Kim Philby (14 page)

It is rather surprising that Kim was not more enthusiastic about the Section V link with OSS. It was bound to give greater insight into OSS activities, capabilities and staff identities, and therefore those of whatever organisation would succeed it in peacetime – surely a prime Russian target. There is little doubt that the very close relations established between Section V and OSS/X2 helped to lay the foundations for later collaboration between SIS and the CIA, the post-war successor to OSS. Whether Kim thought this a good thing or not, his acceptance of Section V–X2 cooperation was grudging, though he certainly did not actively campaign or intrigue against it. He always disliked America and the Americans, whereas I had a weakness for them, and probably found it easier than he did to work closely with X2 as time went on. He had better relations with the much more professional FBI, with whom we had a less closely interlocked liaison.

One of the accusations made against Cowgill is that he clung jealously to Section V information, particularly ISOS. He has been described as notorious for sitting on information rather than circulating it. Certainly one of the many besetting sins of intelligence officers is the overuse of secrecy, ostensibly in the name of security, but actually to preserve some private empire. Claude Dansey, vice-chief of SIS in the war, and his special fief, Switzerland, immediately come to mind. But Cowgill’s
opportunities for restricting information were somewhat limited. ISOS, as I have said, was circulated in full to a number of departments, including MI5. Telegrams and reports from stations abroad, including Section V stations, automatically went to Broadway as well as to us, and into Central Registry files. Most other information was not Section V’s preserve, and restriction on it, if any, was imposed by others; the great mass of Bletchley information (other than ISOS) came into this category, and indeed we in Section V saw little of it apart from the diplomatic BJs.

There was for a short time a minor exception to what I have said above about ISOS. Felix arranged that some restriction should be placed upon the circulation of ISOS messages which appeared to name or refer to British agents and intelligence operations; at least, I think it was Felix who arranged it, but if so the idea found ready acceptance in Broadway, which disliked the thought that what appeared to be its failures were being gratuitously advertised to the intelligence branches of the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, particularly as the
Abwehr
reports were often untrue. As far as I recall, the restricted series, code-named ISBA, was fairly soon terminated and the total number of such messages was few. We in Vd thought the series was silly and unnecessary.

What Felix did do was to cling with his teeth to the principle that external action on ISOS information should be vested in Section V alone, and that any other department or section, including MI5, that wished to take action would have to do so with the permission and under the close supervision of Section V. Here he was on extremely strong ground. In using ISOS we were juggling with eggs. Anyone who was not devoting as much time and care as we were to the study both of ISOS and of all
the information from stations, interrogations and other sources might well do serious damage. I have no doubt that the rules about ISOS were bent from time to time by other departments, but the general principle was maintained.

I am mystified by a statement in Patrick Seale’s book: ‘[Cowgill’s] miserly attitude to the treasures at his disposal enraged the customers of Section V, and in particular MI5 who would dearly have liked sight of all the
Abwehr
material rather than having Cowgill release to them only what he felt concerned British security.’
¹
With the possible and frankly trivial exception of ISBA, MI5 received ISOS (if that is what is meant by ‘
Abwehr
material’) as soon as we did. Nor was there any serious holding back with MI5 on other material. At some point in, I think, 1942, Felix invited Dick White, deputy head of the intelligence division of MI5, to spend a fortnight with us at Glenalmond. We were instructed to show or discuss with him anything that he – or we – might wish, and we took full advantage of this. (I am also surprised by a statement of Patrick Seale’s that two extremely able GC&CS officers, Leonard Palmer and Denys Page, were critical of Cowgill’s ‘hoarding of their hard-won material’. Hoarded from whom?)
^†

There is no doubt that Felix could be highly obstructive to departments outside Section V, in strong contrast to his attitude towards his beloved OSS/X2. But the larger Section V became, the less this really mattered. The people who actually dealt with
the cases that came up every day were his desk officers, such as Kim, me and many others. I cannot recall having to hold back anything important from MI5. Few if any of us had much stomach for interdepartmental squabbles. There was far too much to do anyway. In Vd, MI5 were regarded as colleagues with whom we were more closely concerned than we were with, say, Ve, the Middle East subsection. Between us and MI5 there was, however, a difference of approach to the work. In Section V we were a bunch of amateurs who had been brought in to man a section which for practical purposes had scarcely existed before the war. However hard we worked, we always – Kim as much as anyone – maintained a rather light-hearted attitude, looking for the funny side even in our most formal correspondence. Although MI5 had also absorbed many people from outside, they remained a solemn-minded professional service whose officers prided themselves on the extreme care and thoroughness with which they handled every matter, however small: counter-espionage was much too serious to joke about. But in two of them – both close friends of Kim’s – irreverence was always breaking through.

Dick Brooman-White (not to be confused with Dick White) was head of MI5’s Iberian section. By the middle of the war, thanks largely to his own efforts, there was little left for him to do, so he joined us in Section V. Because of internal injuries caused in a riding accident he could not drink, but he was highly intelligent and amusing company. It was ever a mystery how this rapid and almost inaudible speaker managed after the war to make himself understood at the hustings and on the floor of the House of Commons.
²
Tommy Harris, also in the MI5 Iberian section, was a law unto himself.
³
Part Spanish, part Jewish, art dealer, rich, he came from a very different background from
most of us. ‘Tommy can’t read or write,’ Kim would say, ‘but he’s extraordinarily subtle and astute about anything to do with people.’ It is true that Tommy never read or wrote anything if he could possibly help it, but he ran the most remarkable double-agent operation of the whole war.
⁴
He was in some ways Kim’s closest friend and Kim named his second son Tomas after him.

It is time to mention the brilliant maverick section headed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had come up to Christ Church during my time at Oxford. The search for an interception of enemy intelligence radio messages was carried out by an organisation in Barnet called RSS – Radio Security Service – which then passed the messages on to Bletchley for decipherment. It was logical that a small office should be set up to extract, interpret and process intelligence – chiefly from the deciphered messages but also if appropriate from other sources – which might help the RSS interceptors in their search of the ether for clandestine transmissions (times, frequencies and call signs were constantly being changed). It was also logical that this office, while physically located at Barnet, should form part of Section V, where the intelligence was to be found; hence its title Vw. In the ordinary way the job might have remained on this basis for the rest of the war, filled by a single medium-grade officer. But equally it could provide unlimited scope for study of the
Abwehr
and SD, as a basis in the first instance for giving informed guidance to RSS. It so happened that Felix Cowgill, in organising Section V, had unaccountably neglected to set up a subsection to study the central organisation, personnel, policies, methods and political position of the
Abwehr
and SD. True, one officer was theoretically deputed for this task, part time, but since it should have involved among many other things a study of all the ISOS from all areas
there was no possibility of his achieving anything. No one as intelligent and enterprising as Trevor-Roper, in his position as Vw, could have failed to see the opportunity this presented. He gathered around him three other first-class Oxford academics – Gilbert Ryle (who had been one of my philosophy tutors), Stuart Hampshire and Charles Stuart. Although nominally a subsection of Section V, they were for most practical purposes independent (a position that was ratified later in the war when they were formally separated from Section V and given the title RIS, or Radio Intelligence Section).

In so uncharted a field as wartime intelligence, there are bound to be many demarcation disputes and many contenders for any piece of ground. But there is one argument that nearly always silences the rest: if someone is really producing the goods, it matters little what this or that directive or charter may say. Trevor-Roper’s high-powered team began to issue broad studies of the German intelligence services of a kind that no one else at the time was producing. It was useless for Felix to object, since he had failed to offer an acceptable alternative; and his own officers were glad to see the job being done. Battles continued for a long time, but in Trevor-Roper, Felix was up against someone who was as prepared to fight as he was and much cleverer about it. On the whole, at any rate at this time, there was little duplication between Vw and the regional subsections of Section V, and I found much profit in my dealings with Charles Stuart, whose area included the Iberian peninsula.

Felix, who was well liked by his staff, ran Section V as a cosy family affair – indeed his nice wife, Mary, and his sister-in-law were working in it. All of us, from Felix himself to the newest secretary, were on Christian-name terms. There is a tendency
anyway for this to happen in intelligence circles, partly for security reasons and partly because of the feeling you have of shared secrets and of isolation from the outside world. Section V, big as it became, never entirely lost this family atmosphere. There was a minimum of administrative tail. A factotum called David, with one assistant, looked after the building, slept there at night and presumably organised things like office cleaning. A middle-aged lady, widow of a former SIS officer and probably unpaid, helped over billeting and ration books. One or two cars and uniformed women drivers were allocated to the section.

Although most of us, apart from the secretaries, were in the Army, or occasionally Royal Navy or RAF, we were an unmilitary lot. One admirably unorthodox colleague was A. G. Trevor-Wilson, who had been with Kim at the SOE training school at Beaulieu and who was working in Vd and looking after Tangier and Spanish Morocco when I arrived.
⁵
Nominally a captain in the Intelligence Corps, he wore a strange assortment of uniforms and insignia. The badge on his cap was not the same as those on his lapels. His respirator came from the RAF. Sometimes he wore a white shirt with his uniform. Once he was stopped by a military policeman who told him that the flash he was wearing on his sleeve was that of a division in north Africa, and what was he doing in St Albans? Trevor (who worked flexible hours) used to cycle to the office. If it had been raining, he would then change his trousers for others equally contrary to military regulations, a process inevitably interrupted by the arrival of a secretary. Trevor claimed to have a variety of mysterious lady friends, to each of whom he was known by a different name. Once when we were walking together in Jermyn Street he suddenly dragged me into a shop. A woman went by. ‘I know
her,’ whispered Trevor, ‘but I can’t remember the
name
I use with her.’ It was said that when Trevor first joined SIS he was surprised to find that the smallest comment he inscribed on a paper evoked immediate and deferential attention. It turned out that he was using green ink, a prerogative reserved for the chief since the First World War.

Another member of the section was Sammy. He was an affectionate extrovert black-and-white spaniel whom Marie had been given as a puppy in the autumn of 1940. For a year we had toted him round from one unsuitable billet or rented house to another, with intervals of parking him on long-suffering relatives. Soon after arriving at St Albans I brought him to The Spinney, where Kim and Aileen took him in unenthusiastically. When Aileen fell ill Sammy had to leave with his master. There was nowhere to put him but Glenalmond, and here at last he came into his own, the Section V dog. When he was not out in the garden or fields getting filthy, or making the rounds of the other subsections, he was generally curled up asleep in my pending tray. The weekly meeting of Section V in the conservatory, or ‘snake pit’, was not deemed to have properly begun until Sammy, tail cocked high, had trotted in and taken his place. One summer’s day there was an official visit from the Director of Naval Intelligence, looking as smart as only a naval officer can – I retain an impression, which cannot possibly be accurate, of white ducks. While we (in Vd) were gathered round him, trying to explain what we were doing, an eager mud-caked figure hurtled through the open ground-floor window and leapt straight at the DNI’s resplendent chest. Admirals don’t usually take kindly to being landed on by muddy dogs belonging to Army lieutenants, but Admiral Godfrey was magnanimous. Sammy was the nearest thing we
had to a watchdog at Glenalmond – Sammy, who thought the entire human race was perfect, even if a few of its members were more perfect than the rest. If parachutists dressed as nuns (or nuns dressed as parachutists) had descended on Glenalmond, Sammy would have been the first to welcome them.