Authors: Tim Milne
Kim’s three years in Section V, 1941 to 1944, gave him access to abundant secret information, and not only on Section V’s own work. Here, not necessarily in order of priority, are a few of the subjects he could have reported on:
It is a formidable list. But there were two extremely stringent limiting factors: first, the extent to which Kim and the Russians would have judged it safe to meet, and second, the time he could spare from his fairly exacting Section V work to prepare written or verbal reports for Moscow, or to carry out other risky and time-consuming tasks such as extracting papers and later getting them back to the office. The Russians would have calculated that Kim’s real fulfilment would come after the war, when anti-communist work would be resumed, and that his first wartime priority must be to improve his own position and reputation in SIS and avoid all serious risks. I would judge that the Russians had to exercise fierce self-denial over Kim at this time. The section of the NKVD that controlled him may have had to resist many demands from other sections and departments for information on this or that pet subject.
Paradoxically, a case can be made that in these years, mid-1941 to mid-1944, Kim’s position as a Russian spy may actually have brought the British greater advantage than disadvantage, irrespective of the merits of his work for Section V. Consider the balance sheet. We and the Russians were fighting on the same side. To give them our information about enemy intelligence activities or armed forces could not do us much harm provided that the information was not put at risk by Russian insecurity or by enemy capture. Details of British and Allied intelligence services and their work, though obviously relevant to their post-war capabilities, might not be of great practical value to the Russians unless and until updated after the war. On the other side of the balance
sheet, Kim was in a position to render an unusual service to the British. During the war we and the Americans were constantly giving assurances to the Russians on a number of matters. The Russian attitude was often sceptical, even when our assurances were genuine and accurate. But where Churchill, Eden and Roosevelt might not be believed, Kim probably would be. For example, he could have told them, if he reported accurately, that the Allies were broadly trustworthy in their refusal to consider any kind of anti-Soviet deal either with the German government or with anti-Nazi plotters. Whether he did so report, of course I cannot say. Certainly the Russians in their propaganda often accused the Allies of such deals – I remember particularly seeing as part of my post-war diplomatic duties a shamefully mendacious Soviet film,
The Fall of Berlin
, in which Churchill was shown in collusion with a German arms dealer while the Russians were fighting for their lives – but if they really believed such nonsense then they must have been bigger political fools than I take them for. With Kim (and Donald Maclean and perhaps others) to advise them, can they truly have feared the totally unreal prospect that the British and American governments might make a political anti-Soviet arrangement with any Germans? Churchill’s account of the approach by General Wolff, commander of the SS in Italy, to Allen Dulles in Switzerland in 1945 makes it clear that what the Russians chiefly feared was rather different: that German forces on one or other of the western fronts might make a military surrender which would allow Allied troops to proceed unopposed and eventually make contact with Soviet troops a good deal further east than had been anticipated. The Russians complained bitterly that they had done most of the fighting, and now the Germans were surrendering ground everywhere
in the west while disputing it inch by inch in the east. Stalin’s violent reaction to the meetings in Switzerland and his imputation of British and American political deals with the Germans, on the basis of information from what he calls ‘conscientious and well-informed Soviet agents’, admittedly suggest that if Kim was indeed in a position to report on this affair he did nothing to allay Soviet suspicions. He might even have been one of the conscientious Soviet agents. But he was now in Section IX and may not have been closely concerned.
One assurance he could have given the Russians – as no politician could have done – was that during these years the British were not conducting significant secret intelligence operations against the USSR. Presumably he did so report, and may even have done something thereby to improve trust between the two countries; how ironical that only a Soviet agent could have performed this particular service to Britain! But one needs to remember that Kim was in a delicate position. As in any secret service, there must surely have been some doubters at NKVD headquarters ready to question the genuineness of this agent whom so few people had ever seen. Kim – or his London masters – may not have liked to send reports to Moscow couched in terms too favourable to the British. In any case, his book gives the impression that he saw many things through Soviet eyes. One cannot be certain how he may have seen and reported German peace feelers, or SIS policy vis-à-vis the Russians.
With his move to Section IX the whole picture changed. It is on those remaining seven years in SIS, 1944 to 1951, that his fame or notoriety rests. No longer is there any question of a balance between benefit and harm to SIS and Britain: it was all harm, so much so that myths have begun to form. Take this
sentence from his own publisher’s blurb: ‘Throughout the tense and perilous years of the Cold War, every British intelligence activity was jeopardised – because the head of anti-Soviet operations was a Russian spy!’ Kim was head of Section IX and its successor section only from September 1944 to the end of 1946, before the Cold War really got going. Post-war intelligence had yet to move out of low gear. Probably his greatest service to the Russians at this time was the purely defensive one of stifling Konstantin Volkov. In Istanbul, between 1947 and 1949, his access to intelligence on SIS, though complete in his own territory, was geographically limited. It was not until he reached Washington in September 1949 that something like his full post-war potential to the Russians began to be realised. In the next twenty-one months he would presumably have been privy to all SIS, MI5, CIA and FBI matters that required high-level Anglo-American consultation; he was well placed to report on several other aspects of the American intelligence world; and there would have been important visitors to keep him up to date on London gossip. He would also have had some access to the ordinary political correspondence between his embassy and the Foreign Office. But he would not necessarily have been made aware of matters of Anglo-American intelligence interest that could be dealt with by contact in London or at the stations; still less of SIS operations and policies that did not need to be discussed with the Americans at all.
Even in the many things that came to his knowledge in these seven years, there were major limitations on his effectiveness. In the first place Kim was only one among a large number of SIS officers. Most of his actions, such as reports to his superiors, instructions to subordinates or comments on proposals and other
papers, would be known to several people. If he had shown, say, a marked disinclination to follow up a promising idea, or had tried to steer policy away from what had commended itself to his colleagues or Whitehall, this would have been noticed. Kim had a high reputation in SIS. One often finds duds in senior posts whose actions seem calculated only to help the other side, but one knows they are duds, not traitors, and one tries to bypass them. Not so with Kim; he was good, and had to be seen to be good. I would judge that in his general conduct of office affairs he could afford to differ very little from expectations. It is absurd to say, as has been said, that under Kim the anti-communist section of SIS became an extension of the corresponding NKVD section. He simply did not have that freedom of action. For 99 per cent of the time the only safe way he could help the Russians was to tell them what was happening, give advice where he could and leave the rest to them.
But the Russians too were far from able to act freely on his information. The trouble with a really good secret source is that you have to be so careful not to blow him. I can think of at least one large-scale intelligence operation – not connected with Kim – which in my opinion survived for several months simply
because
the other side learnt about it at an early stage from a highly delicate source.
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Probably they soon happened on it by other less delicate means as well, but dared not take action in case it drew attention to their original source. It is the old ISOS dilemma. I suspect that there were long arguments in the NKVD over the elaborate SIS/CIA plans for landing parties of agents in Albania and the Ukraine, on which Kim had presumably kept them informed. Was it safe to give those perverse and unreliable Albanian authorities the dates and times and map references of
expected landings? Might it not be wiser to wait and see if the infiltrators got caught anyway? After Volkov, the Russians must have been intensely aware that Kim was living dangerously and that precipitate action on his information might put someone on his track.
A further factor was that from 1949 onwards Kim had to devote more and more of his attention to negative defensive work, trying to shield Maclean (and by extension himself) from discovery. Among other things, Kim was a lookout man for Soviet intelligence, charged with warning them when SIS and MI5 were getting suspicious of a Russian agent. He seems also to have played something of the same role in relation to the FBI, once Judith Coplon had been arrested;
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until then she had apparently been able to keep the Russians informed of certain FBI investigations, but thereafter they looked to Kim.
Finally, one of the greatest limitations on his work for the Russians in these seven years must have lain simply in the shortness of the day. A stream of interesting paper passed through his in-tray, containing far more than he could possibly even read, let alone memorise or condense. Conferences and discussions would have yielded much further information. His legitimate work for SIS was quite enough to occupy a full working day, even if there had been no Russians to bother about. His value as a reporting agent would have been enormously increased if he or an accomplice were in a position to photocopy useful papers on a large scale. Did this happen? He describes how, on hearing that Burgess had fled with Maclean, he went down to the basement of his house in Washington, collected camera, tripod and accessories and buried them in the nearby woods. Somehow I can’t see Kim finding a way to photograph papers night after
night, at home, with Aileen and all the children around, not to mention Guy and the whisky bottle. Aileen once told my wife that in Washington she came across Tommy Philby, then aged about seven, playing with some expensive-looking photographic equipment which he had pulled out of a cupboard or drawer in Guy’s room and which she had not seen before. Was Guy the photographer? He had plenty of time on his hands and was possibly better placed than Kim himself to claim a little privacy from time to time. But ‘Brigadier Brilliant’, as Cyril Connolly called Guy, is difficult to visualise in this tedious and unspectacular role. Perhaps photography of documents was no more than an occasional luxury. Perhaps too it is relevant to quote a comment made by Kim in the context of his Beirut period: ‘Documentary intelligence, to be really valuable, must come as a steady stream, embellished with an awful lot of explanatory annotation. An hour’s serious discussion with a trustworthy informant is often more valuable than any number of original documents. Of course, it is best to have both.’ Kim is speaking here of the kind of documents a journalist might get hold of, but I think he intends his remarks to have a wider application. Is he defending his own style of espionage against that of George Blake or Oleg Penkovsky, who both handed over so much paper? The fact remains that many types of document are crammed with detail impossible to memorise. If one regards Kim simply as a reporting agent, his Soviet espionage career cried out for regular photocopying of papers, but how far it took place remains a matter for conjecture. It may well be that the Russians – and he – preferred to concentrate on other things.