Kim Philby (29 page)

The basic pattern of his work for the Russians throughout his decade in SIS can only have been: to do as good a job for SIS
as possible and thus advance his career; to keep the Russians informed of all important matters; to give them advice; and, within SIS, never to act in a way inappropriate to a loyal officer of the service unless either the need was imperative or there was no risk whatsoever. He mentions four occasions when trouble or near-trouble resulted from his sticking his neck out. The first, at St Albans, was relatively trivial: he managed, irregularly, to get hold of the old files relating to SIS agents in Soviet Russia, but even this nearly landed him in difficulties because of a mix-up. Second, in order to secure the Section IX post for himself; while this did not put him under suspicion, the affair evidently left a bad taste. Third, the Volkov affair: again he escaped suspicion at the time, but the incident was later to contribute strongly to the case against him. Finally, the operation to get Maclean to safety: and with it the end of Kim’s career as an SIS officer. These four cases occurred in ascending order of necessity, and of damage to himself. It is hardly likely that there would not have been other crises if he had survived the Maclean affair.

People usually think that the higher he rose in SIS the more valuable he could be to the Russians, and the more he could influence and twist SIS actions in the Soviet interest; what a disaster, they say, if he had eventually become chief! I believe this to be a fallacy. By 1951 Kim had probably already reached his optimum level in SIS, the level at which he could serve the Russians most effectively. Perhaps I can illustrate this best by supposing, entirely for argument’s sake, that he had eventually become chief of SIS. He would no longer be in very close touch with detail. Unless he made special and probably conspicuous efforts to find out, he would seldom know the closely identifying particulars of an agent, and his knowledge of current or future
operations would be broad rather than detailed. He would have surprisingly little freedom to influence events in favour of the Russians; in everything he did he would in effect be highly accountable, both to Whitehall and to his subordinates, through whom he would nearly always have to act. On their side, the Russians would have enormous difficulties in running him as an agent. How do you arrange frequent clandestine meetings with a person of this stature? You really cannot have a chief of the Secret Service taking numerous zigzag bus and Tube journeys to get from A to B; although he would not be a well-known public figure, his face would be familiar to a large number of people – for instance, junior staff, many of whom he himself would not know. The perpetual problem of how to handle and act on the information produced by a delicately placed agent would be more acute than ever with someone so eminent. There would also be the difficulty of restricting knowledge of his identity to the fewest possible KGB staff. Even the KGB consists of human beings. The fact that one of their agents was chief of the British secret service would be almost irresistible gossip material among the better informed, and useful political capital for the KGB in the corridors of power. How long before a defector or informant would be able to point the finger?

Of course, there could be other ways of exploiting the situation. Hugh Trevor-Roper suggests that after the war the Russians, hopeful of carrying the revolution to western Europe, would have looked on Kim primarily as a likely future head of the Secret Service who could play a vital part in a communist takeover; this would be far more important than having him produce current secret information. Even without postulating such a takeover, it is known that the Russians are especially interested in establishing
‘agents of influence’ in high political and government places; such agents probably make contact relatively rarely and do not pass regular information, but are relied on, without the need for instruction, to give a subtle pro-Russian twist to things – or to pull their anti-Russian punches – when they can safely do so. But after Volkov, and still more after the Russians learnt of the danger to Maclean, I doubt whether long-term hopes of this kind played much part in their plans for Kim: better to get all the current use they could out of him, while the going was good. His career suggests that he was constantly immersed in problems of the moment, not that he was being kept on ice for a greater future.

Nobody in any case will ever know whether Kim could have made it to the top. Several other SIS officers of about his age were in the running, not to mention candidates who might come in from outside. In 1951 he still had a long way to go, and the strain of his double life must have been telling on him. If he ever set his sights on becoming chief, I think he had probably begun to abandon the prospect by 1950 or 1951, realising that his years as an SIS officer might be numbered. Otherwise he would surely have been more strongly impelled to find a way of keeping the raffish Guy Burgess out of his Washington household; the effect on his reputation as a solid reliable man, destined for high places, was likely to be damaging. Patrick Seale claims that even before Burgess and Maclean fled adverse reports on Kim’s behaviour in Washington had spoilt his chances of becoming chief. Things had probably not gone as far as this, but his reputation may have begun to suffer; I heard stories to that effect afterwards, but it was difficult to judge how far people were merely being wise after the event.

Aware though the Russians may have been that time was running out for their Cambridge trio, even they can hardly have expected, in May–June 1951, to lose the effective services of all three at a single blow. Though Maclean and Burgess, safe in Russia, could still be used as consultants and advisers on diplomatic and political matters, the fact that they were packed off to remote Kuibyshev for the next two years, while their knowledge was at its freshest, suggests that their usefulness in Russia was never seen as more than marginal. (Kim says more or less the same thing: ‘It was essential to rescue Maclean … No question was raised about his future potential to the Soviet Union.’ It was enough that he was an old comrade.) Kim himself, out of his SIS job yet still in England, fell between two stools. He had lost his access and could no longer report on current intelligence matters; nor, probably, could he be used as a background consultant, because it was now surely unsafe to make regular contact with him. Indeed, it appears from his account that he and the Russians had to break off relations for much of the next five years. If he had been able to continue serving them at this time, I think he would have said so in his book.

His loss was no doubt mitigated for the Russians by the acquisition of George Blake. I know too little of Blake to be able to compare his seven fat years, 1953–60, with Kim’s 1944–51. Blake’s time coincided with a more interesting period in the intelligence world, but he was not so close to the centre of things. A statement made by him and quoted at his trial included the sentence: ‘There was not an official document on any matter to which I had access which was not passed to my Soviet contact.’ This admission, or claim, can hardly be taken literally unless Blake’s in-tray was unlike any other I have known; it would be
quite impossible to photograph or take away all the pages of all the documents and files that pass across one’s desk in the course of a day. But it does seem that Blake had a capacity for producing papers for the Russians which puts him very high in the league table of agents.

Kim’s great value to the Russians during his years in SIS had been that he was there. Within and to some extent outside his own wide field, nothing of importance could happen that would not be disclosed to the Russians at the next contact. Now, abruptly, he was gone. His usefulness in the period mid-1951 to mid-1956 must have been either nil or vestigial. Would he have done better to escape to Moscow as soon as possible after Burgess and Maclean? He would have arrived there at the age of thirty-nine or forty, with his knowledge of SIS and CIA still fresh and many years of active service before him. Instead, his worth to the Russians for the whole of the period between his resignation from SIS in 1951 and his defection in 1963 must hang on his performance in Beirut, where he arrived in August 1956.

Kim writes: ‘While the British and American special services can reconstruct pretty accurately my activities up to 1955, there is positive and negative evidence that they know nothing about my subsequent career in the Soviet service.’ This suggests that, although reporting on SIS would undoubtedly have been one of his activities in the Middle East, it was not the main one, since SIS would afterwards be able to work out fairly closely what information he had been in a position to pass. The subject of greatest interest to the Soviet Union in the Middle East, according to Kim himself, was that of American and British intentions in the area, for an assessment of which he was ‘not too badly placed’. He implies that he went about this target by exploiting
his journalistic access to British, American and other officials. In other words, it was Spain and the BEF all over again, in a different setting. But Kim by this time was the highly experienced product of two major intelligence services, capable of playing a much more important part than previously. The Soviet Union at that time did not have diplomatic representation everywhere in the Middle East, the Arabian peninsula being particularly blank. Here, even as a straight journalist, he would have been able to fill in gaps in Moscow’s knowledge. But he had one other advantage which he may have exploited for intelligence purposes: he was British. It is likely that some of his Arab contacts passed him information in the belief that it was destined for the British government. He may even have recruited some of them as agents, ostensibly on behalf of SIS, but actually, though they did not know it, for the KGB. This technique, quite common among intelligence services, would have enabled him to tap a reservoir of informants who would otherwise be unwilling to help. It seems unlikely, at all events, that he would have taken the risk of revealing his hand as a
Soviet
agent to Arab contacts.

Some have interpreted his Beirut years as a complicated chess game between British and Soviet intelligence. Maybe; I do not know the inside story. But espionage is usually a much more straightforward affair than one would imagine from novels and TV – or even from some allegedly factual accounts. It is great fun in theory to work out double, triple, quadruple bluffs, with the other side going most of the way but missing the final step. In practice, the law of diminishing returns begins to operate almost at once. Every step away from the simple and straightforward means that you are using more brain-power and time to produce less certain results. An intelligence operation is not much use
unless you can interpret the results with confidence. Even a complicated deception project like Operation Mincemeat – described by Ewen Montagu in
The Man Who Never Was
⁷
– was at bottom quite simple, with clear-cut aims and fairly solid means of determining whether they were being achieved. The shadowy exchanges of espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage that fill so many novels would in the real world be a shocking waste of time and effort, like trying to play table tennis in the dark.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
⁸
is a man who never was.

‘So, after seven years, I left Beirut and turned up in the Soviet Union. Why? Maybe I was tipped off by a Fourth Man. Maybe someone had blundered. It is even possible that I was just tired.’ Kim wrote this before the
Sunday Times
authors and Patrick Seale and others had published their accounts of the last months in Beirut. I know no more about the questioning he underwent there than I have read in these accounts, but it is obvious that Kim was not tipped off by an unauthorised person, even though he inevitably learnt, from being questioned, that the British now believed he was a spy. ‘Someone had blundered’: yes, in the sense that the final exposure apparently came from a defector, reinforced by other evidence. ‘It’s possible that I was just tired.’ One side of Kim was undoubtedly relieved when the long struggle was over and he could sleep peacefully at night. But another side surely did not want to break finally with the West. He went when he did because the game was up. Incidentally, as far as one can judge from his own book and any other evidence, it does not seem that the relative value of the work he was doing for the KGB in Beirut, by comparison with what he might do for them in Moscow, was much of a factor one way or the other.

We can be sure of one thing. His full value to Soviet intelligence in 1941–51 was not to be measured in reporting statistics; it would not have shown up in the equivalent of General Sinclair’s charts. The Russians probably sacrificed much immediate reporting in order not to overload Kim; the important thing was to keep him in place. The extremely unusual situation called for great judgement and skill from the Soviet service as well as from Kim; and it is worth asking, in the next chapter, whether they always made the wisest possible use of him, and in particular what we can deduce from the extraordinary affair of Burgess and Maclean.

Notes

1
. The author was correct in his assumption that Philby was run purely as an agent by the KGB, a fact that was to cause Philby himself much distress after his arrival in Moscow in 1963 when he discovered this fact. Indeed, following the initial lengthy debriefing he was then effectively retired with a pension, a situation that continued until the early 1970s when he was partly rehabilitated by the KGB and used as a consultant. The first seven or eight years after his flight to Moscow were, from later published Russian accounts, extremely unhappy ones for him. Largely abandoned by the KGB, Philby’s life at this time consisted of drinking binges and even a failed attempt at suicide in the late 1960s, such was his despair. Indeed his one and only visit to KGB headquarters came many years later. However, there was a strong belief in Western intelligence circles that Philby, in the ten year period 1963–73, was masterminding all offensive KGB operations against the West. This was the position of James Angleton, the legendary and powerful head of counter-intelligence for the CIA for two decades, who had been completely hoodwinked by Philby in Washington. Angleton developed paranoid tendencies in his search for ‘moles’ within the CIA and other friendly intelligence services, notably MI5. Offensive CIA operations against the Soviets in the decade after Philby’s defection largely ground to a halt as Angleton and his disciples on both sides of the Atlantic were of the belief that all Soviet bloc defectors during this period were dispatched to peddle disinformation. Angleton’s theories were later ridiculed and he was fired by the CIA in late 1974.
    For a detailed account of Angleton’s career and stewardship of CIA counterintelligence see Tom Mangold,
Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton – the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter
, London, Simon & Schuster, 1991.