Kim Philby (21 page)

Not so, of course, in Section IX: here it was all just beginning. The balance of work in the joint V–IX complex began to move away from the heavy V predominance, but only slowly. Kim and I thought it was time to take a combined look at some of our V and IX people abroad and at SIS stations generally. My purpose was to find out how the Section V officers were coping with the post-war task of rounding up and interrogating German intelligence and security staff, and whether our officers were getting the service they needed from London; and to discuss their future career wishes and possibilities. Kim’s purpose, more exacting, was to examine with the stations the scope for and strategy of future anti-Soviet and anti-communist intelligence work. In addition the trip would give us an opportunity to get to know something of SIS stations abroad, outside the V and IX complex. There was also the possibility of a little relaxation after four very hard years. Towards the end of July we flew to Lübbecke in
north-west Germany, one of several small towns where the British had established headquarters. All the larger towns, of course, were in ruins. After a day or two in this depressing area we motored by autobahn to Berlin. For two months after VE Day the Russians had had Berlin to themselves; the British, Americans and French were not allowed in until the beginning of July. By now, three or four weeks later, there were a number of SIS officers in place, including a Section V man, James, a highly resourceful Russian speaker.
⁹
His chief occupation so far had been to match the Russians in friendly drinking bouts, at which the usual liquor was ‘V2 spirit’ (actually pure alcohol). With the press-ganged assistance of the
Parteigenossen
, or captured Nazi Party officials, James had managed to organise and furnish an extremely elegant and comfortable flat, to which Eva Braun had posthumously contributed her electric cooker.

It was more than twelve years since Kim and I had arrived in Berlin as undergraduates, on the day when Hitler’s triumphant entry to power was being celebrated. Now we were seeing the place in destruction. We paid a visit to Hitler’s Chancellery, badly damaged but not totally destroyed. His office was still littered with broken glass and debris. A light bulb, somehow intact, was lying on the floor and I threw it at the huge marble-topped desk, where it burst with a satisfying report: a cheap and childish gesture for which I felt no shame. We went on to look for our former digs in the Potsdamer Straße. Not only could we not find the house, it was not possible to say even roughly where it had stood. Yet for all the scarcely believable destruction in the streets, the virtually complete absence of goods to buy and the lack of any of the normal amenities of life, Berlin was full of vitality, almost optimism. The atmosphere was quite different
from that of defeated provincial Germany. In Berlin the citizens were living at the hub of a new conflict, symbolised by the presence of troops from East and West. Incidentally this must have been the first time, outside his clandestine contacts, that Kim had ever seen any Soviet citizens to speak of. One might almost say fellow citizens, given that he claimed to be an officer in the Soviet secret service, although he did not formally acquire Soviet nationality until after he defected to Moscow.

On our last day in Berlin, James gave the two of us and another visitor a slap-up lunch at his well-appointed flat. I am sure that even the Führer never ate better from Eva Braun’s cooker. When we got to the trifle, the cook-housemaid produced a fine bottle of hock from the refrigerator. It was not like Kim to gulp wine, but he and James chose to down their glasses together. A second later I and the other visitor would have done the same but for the violent reaction of the first two. They had drunk pure Flit.
^†
The poor maid, who for two months previously had been serving the Russians, was horrified. She had no doubt she would be either shot or at best sent to a prison camp. For the next thirty-six hours or more Kim was really quite ill. As we drove back that afternoon along the autobahn he was in a semi-stupor, as though he were not only extremely drunk but unable to pull out of it. He seemed to have little idea where he was. We had two nights at Lübbecke before he was himself again.

After Germany we visited Klagenfurt, headquarters of the British zone of Austria. The head of the SIS station in Germany had arranged for the RAF to fly us down in an American Mitchell bomber. For some reason this involved our becoming
part of the crew. Kim masqueraded as the bomb aimer, I as the navigator. It was in Klagenfurt that we awoke one morning to the news of Hiroshima. Three days later came Nagasaki and the opening of hostilities against Japan by the Soviets. The war was ending fast. It was also in Klagenfurt that several of us got into a discussion which possibly throws a light on part of Kim’s political philosophy. We were talking about Arthur Koestler’s recently published
The Yogi and the Commissar
. Yogis were those who went by intuition, ‘feel’; commissars by brutal logic, or ‘ruthless common sense’ as Kim put it. Kim suggested as the archetypal yogi the head of office administration in SIS. He was a breed all too common in Broadway at that time, a man whose mind worked in strange ways and with whom it was difficult to reason. There was general agreement that in a close Broadway field he probably came first. For commissar Kim suggested Stalin. It was clear that he approved of the commissar cast of mind, whether exemplified by capitalists or by communists. He had little regard for those who used intuitions and hunches as substitute for the powers they lacked of intellectual analysis, and admired those who were prepared to put analysis to the test of action.

We motored down through glorious scenery to Trieste. Now we were in another area of conflict with the new communist world, and one of much more professional interest to Kim as head of Section IX than to me. There was time to sun and bathe and think of peace. Driving through Trieste we saw a crowd round a newspaper seller: a man came away with a paper folded down the middle and I glimpsed half a headline, ‘
Il Giappone
[ Japan]…’ A few yards later another folded paper conveniently showed the rest: ‘…
si arrende
[surrenders]’. It was not entirely true, but evidently the end was very near. I celebrated the
occasion by cracking a toe-joint against a rock while bathing near the Yugoslav border and had to spend half the night cooling it in that most versatile piece of equipment, the bidet.

We returned to Klagenfurt, motoring along the Gorizia route just west of the Yugoslav frontier. Our plan was to drive back from Klagenfurt through the American zones of Austria and Germany to Lübbecke. A ‘Cap/M’ or captured German military car was provided, with British driver. As we appeared to lack any proper documentation for a long journey of this kind an enterprising SIS officer took us to the office of the town major in Klagenfurt (who was fortunately out) and chopped such papers as we had with all the official stamps he could find. Although the town major’s authority did not extend outside Klagenfurt, the results if not examined too closely were extremely impressive. Our hosts also gave us what on the British points rationing system would have been about a year’s supply of tinned food, but forgot the tin opener. Car tools are a poor substitute, and we were very ready for the dinner provided by OSS in Salzburg, with whom we stayed the night. Next morning we were woken with the news that six years of war were over: this was VJ Day. We decided not to celebrate until we reached Frankfurt that evening; everyone assured us the town would be awash with liquor. Perhaps if we had not had a puncture some thirty miles short of Frankfurt, and then discovered that the driver had failed to bring a spare wheel, we might have arrived in time. When we finally made it to the US Army transit hotel, the whole of Frankfurt had been drunk dry. VJ Day remains in my personal annals, and no doubt in Kim’s, as a day totally without alcohol.

From this European visit, and one or two others he made alone in 1945, Kim must have reported to the Russians that for
the time being at least, SIS activities were unlikely to bring them many worries. ‘After each journey, I concluded, without emotion, that it would take years to lay an effective basis for work against the Soviet Union.’
¹⁰
On my side, there was an equally simple conclusion: apart from mopping up the old enemy and redisposing our staff, which might take a few weeks or months, Section V had nothing left to do. But there was still one important question to be settled: should something of the Section V concept and framework at home and overseas be preserved in peacetime and directed towards the new target? In other words, should there be a semi-independent branch of SIS, having its own stations abroad and manned by people spending their whole careers on this work, which would specialise in the investigation of Soviet and satellite espionage and covert communist activities? This is what Felix Cowgill had had in mind. In his book Kim expresses relief that it was eventually decided to wind up the Section V idea. Although he ascribes this decision to the committee – of which he was a member – that was set up to make recommendations for the post-war organisation of SIS, I think it would have happened anyway. There were two main reasons: the need to cut back on post-war expenditure, and the arrival of Major-General John Sinclair, formerly director of military intelligence (DMI) at the War Office, as the new vice-chief.

Sinclair was particularly interested in detailed organisation – a subject for which Sir Stewart Menzies had neither the gift nor the inclination – and brought a military mind to it. To him, a secret intelligence service was something that could be organised as an army could be organised. He was especially keen on tidy chains of command, tier upon tier, with never a loose end. Everything, including statistics of intelligence production,
was displayed on charts. There was little prospect that Section V, which had grown away from its titular position as a requirements section into something like a separate service, and whose achievements could not be judged by statistics, would commend itself to him, particularly as the subject of counter-espionage was one in which he as DMI had had little interest and which was now almost in abeyance for lack of material. Sinclair was a strong believer in non-specialisation: with a few obvious exceptions, such as technical experts or people who spoke difficult languages, everyone should be prepared to do anything (an analogous process was going on in the Foreign Office). When soon after his appointment he visited Ryder Street I knew from the first moment that the Section V cause, if it was a cause, was lost. I am not saying he was necessarily wrong in his judgement; there were arguments on either side. Certainly it was important that the espionage and counter-espionage sides of SIS should be closely interlocked, and not allowed to drift apart as they had in the war. But I merely ask myself, why was Kim so pleased that Section V was abolished? I can only imagine that he judged that the lack of a specialist branch would improve his prospects and those of other Soviet agents.

This is not the place to attempt a dispassionate appraisal of Section V’s work in the war. Perhaps no proper appraisal can ever be made. Even if the relevant Registry files still exist, they will give a haphazard and fragmented picture of what was achieved, with no clear means of determining relative importance. We never had time to sit back and write our own history, either as we went along or at the end. The nearest we came was in the monthly reports by the subsections, but since these made no attempt to camouflage raw ISOS they would not have gone to Registry, and
like much else would presumably have been destroyed. Large areas of activity are now probably little more than memories in the minds of ageing people like myself. But I think a fair verdict would be that Section V was a notable success, especially in the main task of dealing with the enemy on the ground. If I have lent any encouragement in this chapter to the impression that the section was a nest of intrigue, let me hasten to correct it: with the single exception of Kim’s anti-Cowgill manoeuvres – which in themselves would have passed as unremarkable in any university college or City boardroom – there was very little intrigue. The other common misconception I would like to correct is that Section V and MI5 were always fighting each other, to the detriment of the general cause; in fact, except for some jousting at the top, working relations were extremely good. I am glad to see that Robert Cecil considers that ‘the striking success of British counter-espionage during the war was, in the main, the result of loyal cooperation between SIS and MI5’.

I have said that it was Felix Cowgill who put Section V on the map; but the
quality
of the work probably owed more to Kim Philby than to anyone else. On paper he was admirably concise and clear, and set a standard for us all; he always took the trouble to master the relevant files and correspondence; and above all his judgement on intelligence matters was nearly always sound. In our dealings with MI5 and other departments he, more than anyone, neutralised the possible ill effects of Cowgill’s lone battles and established a position of trust from which the rest of us benefited. His achievements for Section V in those three years should not be set aside now that we know his real motives and mainspring.

Towards the end of 1945 our work at Ryder Street was so far
wound down that it was time to look for new jobs. I knew by now that I could find a place in the post-war service, though I had no wish to join Section IX. I could also have gone back to Benson’s, once I was demobilised, but lunch with the managing director showed that the best they could offer me, at that very uncertain moment for the advertising profession, amounted to only about two-thirds of my current salary. I therefore turned the proposal down. Probably I also turned down the one chance I had in my life of eventually earning first-class money instead of a fair livelihood.