Authors: Tim Milne
One author expresses surprise that I did not come forward at the time of Kim’s appointment to Section IX and inform my superiors that he had held communist views before the war.
7
I have already described what I knew about his political views up to April 1933, after which I was out of touch with him for more than a year; thenceforward he was less and less inclined in discussion to commit himself to any political creed. In 1944 it did not seem at all likely that he stood where he had in 1933. People
do
change their views, particularly those who form extremist opinions at university. This is well understood: previous membership of the Communist Party itself did not debar Denis Healey from becoming Secretary of State for Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Moreover, the implication that SIS should have required different standards of loyalty from anyone engaged on anti-communist work, by comparison with anti-German work, is debatable. It is anyway misleading to imagine that Kim was accepted into SIS during a temporary wartime phase when Germany was the enemy and nothing else mattered. When he first joined SIS (i.e. its Section D) in July 1940, the Russians were not our allies and were still regarded with great suspicion and hostility. It should also be remembered that while at Cambridge Kim had made no secret whatsoever of his politics. Some of his contemporaries there were working in or close to SIS during the war, yet they did not come forward. Nor did the contemporary (or contemporaries) of mine at Oxford to whom I am supposed in the early 1930s to have described him as a communist. Ignorance of what he was doing in Section IX can hardly have been the reason. The nature of his new work was very soon widely known in intelligence circles, and in any case once the war was over it was obvious that he and everyone
else remaining would be involved in anti-communist work. The fact that nobody appears to have come forward in 1944 or later suggests that it was quite unrealistic to expect anyone to do so. It was not Kim’s politics at Cambridge that were remarkable, but the fact that he became a Soviet agent.
My job as head of Section V meant that I was further removed than ever from the casework I enjoyed and for the first time since I joined SIS I felt at something of a loss. I soon found, however, that, while some of the problems I had taken over from Felix were real enough, others were not, and could be made to go away by the simple process of doing nothing about them. The central part of the job, in this last year of war when we were having to man or plan for many new stations and SCI units, consisted of arguing for establishments and in fitting people to slots and slots to people. The staffs of Sections V and IX in London and the overseas representatives of the two sections formed a single entity, sharing a small central personnel and administrative section. While the two London sections were independent of each other, the overseas officers were in principle available to carry out either V or IX tasks as required. This situation, which could have led to friction if the heads of V and IX had been bitterly hostile to one another, never caused the slightest difficulty. Kim’s staff needs were small – a handful in Broadway, and two or three officers in key stations overseas who would specialise in his field, though it was understood that everyone abroad must be prepared to follow up a IX matter if needed. At this time, nine-tenths of our total V and IX staff at home and abroad were still engaged on counter-espionage work against our Second World War enemies.
Now for the first time I was brought into occasional contact
with the chief, Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies. I think I had met him only once before, when he paid an official visit to St Albans. Normally he lived a remote godlike existence in his fourth-floor office in Broadway, never mingling informally with his staff. He had a flat on the premises, and took his breakfast in the office canteen in the basement; if you were night duty officer you were warned to be out of the canteen by 9 a.m. so that the chief could breakfast alone. He was a shy man of considerable charm and political acumen; Kim has well described the chief’s remarkable ability to scent and ward off danger arising to his own personal position. In pre-war days he had combined the headship of Section IV (dealing with the War Office) and the task of liaising with the French. He had little or no knowledge of counter-espionage, though he liked to dabble in it if a chance came his way. Once he called me in to say that a fellow member at White’s had given him a scrap of information about some suspicious character – would I look into the matter? ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘the chap at the club doesn’t know what I do.’ He seemed genuinely not to realise that probably the whole of White’s knew what he did. Nor was he minutely informed about what went on in his organisation. He once asked me to list all staff who were entitled to see a particular category of highly secret material. ‘I don’t suppose there are more than a dozen,’ he said. There were 180.
The chief had no great liking for representational entertaining, but I persuaded him to give a small farewell lunch for our liaison officer with ONI (the intelligence branch of the US Navy) and his boss, the US naval attaché; the only other person present was myself. We lunched in a private house used by the service for this kind of occasion. Although there were no professional
problems to discuss, the chief seemed extremely nervous. Perhaps to cover this, he talked continuously at high speed about a number of subjects, most of which we were supposed not to discuss with the Americans. Fortunately he spoke so fast and so allusively that it seemed unlikely our guests had understood more than a fraction of it.
Kim used to argue that ideally the chief of the Secret Service should be an absolutely smashing girl, with no other qualifications for the job. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘one has to see the chief every now and then, and it’s usually rather a waste of time. This way at least you’d enjoy the occasion.’ I expect senior civil servants sometimes have the same feeling about their ministers.
The chief’s handwriting was so illegible that one almost needed to call in Bletchley to decipher it. Once, Kim wished to inform somebody of the content of a characteristic green ink scrawl. ‘The Chief’, he wrote, ‘has minuted “I do not (two groups mutilated) with this idea”.’ Let me add that Kim came to have considerable respect for Menzies, as is clear from his book.
In the second half of 1944 a joint War Room, staffed by Section V, OSS/X2 and MI5, had been set up to deal with the counter-espionage information coming in from the war theatres of western Europe, and to give the necessary guidance – and ISOS information – to the SCI units with the various British and American military headquarters. It has been alleged that this very sensible and obvious arrangement was a humiliating defeat for SIS and Section V, who, it is said, saw the most glittering intelligence prize of the war being taken away from them and who even had difficulties in providing staff for the joint effort. Not so. I believe that Felix was opposed to the establishment of the War Room, but almost everyone else thought it a good idea.
One important reason why it was a tripartite affair was because the SCI units as a whole were similarly tripartite – the American units were staffed by OSS/X2 officers and the British ones by Section V and a few MI5 officers. It is true that, with our ever-increasing overseas commitments and the departure of Kim and Felix, we in Section V would have found difficulty in providing a suitable head. Happily, a universally acceptable candidate eventually became available in the person of ‘Tar’ Robertson,
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a regular soldier who had successfully headed MI5’s remarkable double-agent section for most of the war. He presided over the War Room’s mixed bag with tact and efficiency, but the brains of the outfit was probably Section V’s Colin Roberts. I am even more mystified by the suggestion that the War Room were dealing with the great intelligence prize of the war. German intelligence services were no longer the menace they had been. As the Allies drove eastwards, the Germans hastily recruited and trained a number of ‘stay-behind’ agents, French, Belgians and others, usually equipped with radio and cyphers, who were intended to stay put as the battle-line rolled over them and then transmit information to the Germans. In practice, virtually all of them either buried their equipment and went home to live a quiet life, or came running to the British or Americans. A number of them were used by us as short-term double agents. It was all a lot of work, but the German war was nearly won and the excitement of earlier days was lacking.
I did not appoint a successor to the Vk chair but was fortunate enough to get Dick Brooman-White, now released by Duncan Sandys, as my deputy. We sat at each end of a large room and shared out the work. The arrangement meant that one of us would be free to travel when needed, while the other held the fort.
Travel was becoming both easier and more necessary. My first visit, in March 1945, was to Paris (where Malcolm Muggeridge and Trevor-Wilson now enlivened an already complicated intelligence scene), Brussels and Germany west of the Rhine battle-line. At that time there were still fears of prolonged underground resistance in western Europe by hard-core Nazis, and even of a German military redoubt in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps. Another matter of great interest was our future intelligence relationship with several western European countries. Section V had already established liaisons with a number of foreign counter-intelligence and security services and expected to build these up in the future.
Our chief liaison relationship was and remained with the Americans. In addition to the very large OSS/X2 contingent, both G2 (the intelligence branch of the US Army) and ONI maintained small offices in Ryder Street. The chief reason for this was that on the American side, ISOS, like other cryptographic material, lay within the jurisdiction of G2 and ONI, and OSS/X2 had been allowed access only under their general supervision. A fourth American service with which we were in close liaison was the FBI, whose representative in the American embassy visited us frequently. I hope I will not do injustice to these departments and their professional value to us if I mention in this context a further benefit. To put it briefly, we British were starved of liquor. The Americans had plenty and as always were generous with it. This was the rye and bourbon period of my life.
I am brought, by a natural transition, to Norman Pearson, head of OSS/X2. He later became a professor of English and American poetry, and co-edited with W. H. Auden a five-volume work,
Poets of the English Language
. Norman was a hunchback,
but agile and cheerful if occasionally devious. In liaison he was neither unintelligent nor unhelpful, but his main task as he saw it was finding out what the British were up to. Liaising with him was more like liaising with the French than with the Americans. Unwittingly Marie and I fed his suspicions. She came along to the Unicorn one day in the middle of 1944 to have a drink with Kim and me, and announced in all innocence that she had been sent to a job with the Americans at 71 Grosvenor Street. ‘Marie,’ said Kim, ‘you have touched bottom.’ We explained that it was the London headquarters of OSS. It was some time before Norman fully accepted that this was not a deep (or rather a ridiculously shallow) plot to penetrate his service. In fact both OSS in Grosvenor Street and X2 in Ryder Street used a number of British secretaries, and the usual barriers of secrecy that exist between two intelligence services had been largely broken down.
One secret we did try to keep from the Americans for a time was the nature of Kim’s new work and the existence of Section IX. I cannot remember what sort of feeble cover story was put around, but it was highly unlikely to fool someone as curious as Norman, who could see that the star of Section V had been removed for no good reason. Norman’s technique for getting information on SIS was to take its people out for the evening and try to get them drunk. Unfortunately, he always got drunk first, long before the martini stage was over. One evening he invited me to dinner at his home, along with Kim and Jack Ivens, who had been a colleague in Vd but was now, after a spell in Madrid, working in Section IX. Kim had a prior engagement; he joined us for a few drinks at the Unicorn but was able to cry off for the rest of the evening, which was obviously going to be a bumpy ride. In the taxi, before he lapsed into unintelligibility, Norman
managed to mumble something about ‘What’s happening in the IX theatre?’, but that was the full extent of the business side of the evening. We arrived at his maisonette near Victoria and started on pink gins. It was one of those evenings where you finish the bottle of Angostura and have to find another, which we managed to do. Jack and I got Norman on to his bed and then set about cooking the meal, for which his daily woman had done the groundwork. Just as we had everything ready, with a bottle of wine open, we heard a fearful crash from above. I am sorry to say that we finished our chops before we went upstairs and restored Norman to his bed. Then we went back and scoured his cupboards till we found a bottle of Armagnac. Norman won in the end: we two had terrible hangovers, while he bounced into my office first thing as though he’d never had a drink in his life. The story was a favourite with Kim: ‘Tell me again about that evening with Norman.’
VE Day brought a total stop to organised German clandestine activity of every kind. There was no hint of continued resistance by any of the organisations we had been interested in, or of the rise of new secret resistance groups; nor was there a whisper from ISOS. There were still hundreds if not thousands of our targets to be rounded up, members not only of the
Abwehr
and SD but also of the Gestapo and several other departments. The main work for this would be done by the armies and their interrogation staffs and our units in the field. The other problem that still lay ahead for Section V was the Japanese. At that time it was generally thought that the Far East war would continue for many months. But from the Section V point of view the Japanese were a very unsatisfactory and intangible target. I am no authority on their wartime intelligence activities, but it is fair to say that
outside the Far East and south-east Asia they did not have a professional secret intelligence service in the normal sense. Their embassies and service attachés picked up what information they could, by any means that might be available. A great deal of Japanese embassy and service attaché cypher traffic was being read by GC&CS, and in Europe at any rate it was clear that the Japanese had few secret informants of any consequence. Their armed forces intelligence branches were active in the battle areas, but here it was difficult for us in London to contribute very much. We did send a number of Section V representatives to the Far East and made elaborate if rather unreal plans to form SCI units for attachment to several British and American headquarters. But we in Section V now lacked the most important ingredient of our work: an enemy.