Kim Philby (19 page)

One book has related a story of an agent of German nationality called Schmidt who had been executed by the Gestapo as a British spy and whose mother, as Allied troops advanced into Germany, wrote to the British SCI unit there demanding compensation.
⁵
The SCI telegraphed London, but allegedly the telegram was conveniently ‘lost’ in Ryder Street. After the war, the account continues, captured
Abwehr
records showed Schmidt
to have been not only a British agent but also an important Russian one. This author surmises that the telegram may have been deliberately suppressed, presumably by Kim, to prevent investigation of a Russian network. The story does not make much sense as it stands. So far as Kim is concerned, he had left Section V and Ryder Street, and had become head of the anti-Russian section in Broadway, several months before the Allies entered Germany. In any case, a telegram of this kind – of which there would probably have been at least two or three copies – would normally have gone first to a desk officer in Section V, who would then have had the agent traced in Registry. If this showed he had been an SIS or SOE agent, the desk officer would have alerted the appropriate Broadway officer or our link with SOE. Only if the trace had showed a Russian connection – which, to judge from the story, it did not – would Kim’s section have been brought in. It would have been very difficult for him, or for that matter anyone in Ryder Street, to suppress all copies of the telegram and all action on and knowledge of the case.

I comment on these three matters not in order to play down Kim’s activities for the Russians, far from it, but simply to show that it is not easy to tinker with facts and paper; this applies as much to the Secret Service as to the most public of government departments. Too many people and too many copies are involved, particularly over matters of wide interest like anti-Hitler plotters or
Abwehr
–SD rivalry. You cannot usually make something go away simply by destroying or holding back a piece of paper. It would have been foolish for Kim to expose himself to suspicion on inessential matters by suppressing papers or taking a notably different line from other people. He makes no mention of any
of these affairs in his book although he describes in detail other services he was able to render the Russians in his SIS work.

In the summer of 1944 the Russians agreed to the establishment in Moscow of an SIS officer to liaise with their intelligence service (an SOE officer had been there for a considerable time). The interest was primarily on Broadway’s side rather than Section V’s, but the officer chosen for the task was given a Section V brief as well. We in Ryder Street spent some time putting together information for him to pass to the Russians (not of course extending to raw ISOS) and also some questions: we reckoned among other things that a considerable number of
Abwehr
and SD officers must by now have fallen into Russian hands on the Eastern Front. It was many weeks before our man got anything out of the Russians. One reason was that they insisted on dealing with him only at a very high level, through a lieutenant-general, as good a way as any of ensuring frustration. Eventually a small batch of stuff arrived in Ryder Street, and Kim, I and others examined it. It was pathetic: one might have concluded that in counter-espionage the Russians were no further forward than we had been in 1940 or 1941. One assumes now that while we were getting together our collection of material to pass to the Russians they must already have been in possession of much important Section V information, as much anyway as Kim could provide. No wonder they had no great interest in giving us anything useful (possibly the service our representative was dealing with was not the NKVD but the military GRU; however, I assume that counter-espionage information would have been exchanged with the NKVD).

Felix Cowgill’s picture of a joint Section V and OSS/X2 office was now coming nearer to reality. X2 had offices next door to
14 Ryder Street, with communicating corridors. They too had a German subsection, called V/48/F, with whom Vf worked very closely: we divided the work between us. Other X2 subsections, parallel to our own, were called V/48/D, V/48/E and so on, though they had no V/48/K. (The reason for the ‘48’ was that, in our code language, the United States was 48-land.)
^†
The American contribution to the joint stock of counter-espionage intelligence was still fairly modest, but after the Normandy landings of June 1944 and Patton’s breakthrough of August–September the American SCI units, manned by OSS/X2 with officers who had been through Ryder Street, began increasingly to produce information from captured German intelligence staff and agents.

Those three months, June to September, coincided with the main V1 attacks. One of the arguments against moving to London from St Albans had been that the Blitz on London, or something like it, might be resumed; but I think most of us felt it was an unworthy argument, when so many other departments were working in central London. It is certainly true that a V1 nicely placed on 14 Ryder Street, even outside office hours, would have caused tremendous dislocation. Although most of the material in our records could in theory have been reconstituted from Bletchley, MI5, the SIS registry, overseas stations and elsewhere, the destruction of our working files and cards would have been a devastating blow. Fortunately all we lost were a few windows and, temporarily, Dick Brooman-White, who was seconded for some months to the special office headed by Duncan Sandys to deal with V-weapon problems.

And now, in September 1944, an event of the first importance occurred: Kim was posted away from Section V to head a small new section in Broadway that had been set up earlier in the year to deal with intelligence on communism and Soviet espionage and subversion. It was a subject which for reasons of political policy had been deliberately ignored since June 1941, although the Russians had not been inhibited by any comparable policy of self-denial towards the British. The new section, called IX, was independent of Section V, though both came ultimately under Colonel Valentine Vivian, who had the title of deputy chief of the Secret Service but whose sphere did not extend outside counter-espionage and security. The story of Kim’s appointment has been told in some detail in the Philby literature, particularly in his own book. He describes how, under great Russian pressure and with the support of Vivian and the chief’s principal assistant, Christopher Arnold-Forster, he obtained the Section IX job and, as a consequence, secured the resignation of Felix Cowgill, who had been expected to take over the section when the war ended. Kim’s account gives the impression that this was all a single episode, whereas in fact he was made head of Section IX and moved over to Broadway in September, while Felix remained as head of Section V until Christmas. After Kim’s departure Felix appointed me Vk in his place. This was hardly surprising, as I had been successively in charge of the two most important subsections in the Vk area. It was not promotion in the material sense: I remained a major and my salary was not increased. But Vk was probably the second most important job in Ryder Street.

My immediate reaction to Kim’s transfer to Section IX, in spite of the change it was to bring in my own fortunes, was sharp disappointment. It was the end of three years’ working together.
I had no knowledge of and small interest in his new subject, on which there seemed to be little hard information. As far as I was concerned, the war was still on and the chief enemy was still Germany. I was not yet ready for adjustment to a post-war world.

But a further change was soon on its way. Felix Cowgill resigned at the end of December 1944, and I was appointed head of Section V in his place. I had no experience of administration on the scale that this now involved, with perhaps 200 officers and secretaries in Ryder Street and abroad. On the other hand, there was no obvious alternative candidate. Two or three people with comparable experience and seniority were abroad in jobs where it was important not to disturb them. It might have been possible to bring in somebody from MI5 or elsewhere, but he would have been at a disadvantage and as far as I know the question never arose. The post now carried the rank of lieutenant-colonel, but it was four months before I got the promotion, thanks to a determined rearguard action by Brigadier Beddington.

The
Sunday Times
account of Kim’s elimination of Cowgill as a rival has it that, early in 1944, Kim made a bid to take over the directorship of Section V, before the Section IX opening occurred. The article goes on to say that this bid depended on my being given command of Vd, with Graham Greene taking my place as number two in the subsection; however, according to this version, Graham rather upset the plan by declining to take the promotion. So far as my own position is concerned, there is no truth in the story: as I have said, I became head of the Vd subsection several months earlier, in September 1943, when Kim was made Vk. Those moves were not the result of any intrigue, but were voluntarily made by Cowgill when he managed to get his establishment expanded, not before time. It is true that later
there was some talk of promotion for Graham (unconnected, as far as I know, with any advancement of Kim) and that Graham, for his own reasons, resisted this; at any rate I recall his taking Kim, me and our administrative officer to the Café Royal for a splendid lunch in order to persuade us that he should stay as he was, which he did. Not long afterwards, to everyone’s regret, he resigned. In his introduction to Kim’s book he says he did this ‘rather than accept the promotion which was one tiny cog in the machinery of [Kim’s] intrigue’. I recently asked Graham if he could substantiate this with further details. Unfortunately he could not put his finger on any specific piece of evidence, but he said he had had a definite impression of ambitious intrigue on Kim’s part. Evidently he saw more at that time with his novelist’s eye than I did (though it is true that I was absent for nearly all of February 1944).

Kim’s own account of these events makes no reference to any attempt to take over Section V from Cowgill: he indicates that it was the establishment of the rudimentary Section IX which gave him his opening. Even before the section was formed, he speaks of being ‘anxious to get a certain job that would soon become available’. He places this in the early days of the wood affair, that is, late in 1943 or early in 1944. The job he had in mind can only have been that of IX, once it was formed – he had already been appointed Vk, and there was no other post in Section V which he could have been angling for and which was soon to become available. After Section IX had been set up, Kim describes the next stages as follows: first, several weeks of discussion between himself and the Russians which resulted in their deciding he must get himself made head of IX at all costs; second, his anti-Cowgill manoeuvres with Vivian,
Arnold-Forster and others; and third, discreetly canvassing the Foreign Office. In this third step he claims to have had a lucky break over an unconnected matter. Cowgill put up a draft of a letter from the chief to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI which Patrick Reilly, the chief’s Foreign Office assistant, rejected as wholly unsuitable and likely to make the chief look ridiculous. At Vivian’s request, Kim put up a second and successful draft. The incident helped to establish Kim’s political good sense in the eyes of Reilly, by contrast with that of Cowgill.

This all appears to make sense until one realises that, as Robert Cecil (Reilly’s successor)
⁶
has pointed out, Reilly was posted away from SIS as early as September 1943. It can hardly be that the Hoover incident actually occurred later with Cecil playing the part of Reilly, or Cecil would have said so in his article;
^†
in any case, Kim is completely specific in ascribing it to Reilly. Nor can it be that the original setting up of Section IX took place as early as the summer of 1943. Kim himself gives the date as ‘when the defeat of the Axis was in sight’ and his whole account implies that the interval between the establishment of IX and his appointment (in September 1944) was not more than a few months. This agrees with my own memory and with Cecil’s account. The likeliest conclusion is that Kim has erroneously transplanted an incident from an earlier period to the summer of 1944. But if this is so, it throws some doubt on the accuracy of his memory of these events, crucial to his career though they were. The Hoover incident also suggests that Kim had his eyes on the future Section IX as early as the summer
of 1943 or thereabouts, and was seeking friends who could help him.

I believe that Kim may have overestimated the difficulties he faced in getting the Section IX job, to judge from his story. People were already beginning to realise that Felix Cowgill, with all his drive and administrative and executive gifts, might not be the ideal man for it. Apart from his bad relations with MI5, the FBI and others, I would say that he did not have the background and intellectual outlook to cope with the post-war task of studying and understanding communist movements and parties, their position in their own countries and their relation to the Soviet Union. He was better equipped to deal with the other half of the work, Soviet bloc espionage, but that problem was certain to be quite different from what we had been faced with in Section V. Kim, on the other hand, had excellent qualifications: his sound economics degree, his first-hand knowledge of Europe, his languages, his political literacy, his successful record in the Iberian subsection and his ability to get on with people, especially MI5 and the Foreign Office. In retrospect I suppose that he might even have thought to make a virtue of his former interest in and knowledge of Marxism, a skill which in any case was going to be necessary to the job; it would have been easy enough to say – truthfully, I imagine – that he had made some study of it at Cambridge as a part of his economics syllabus. For all I know he may even have said something of this kind. As for Cowgill, I am not sure that he would have been given charge of the post-war anti-communist section even if Kim had never existed. There were other jobs to which he was well suited. In any case, after-events suggest that he would probably have been sent abroad in two or three years, as was Kim himself at the beginning of 1947.