Authors: Tim Milne
2
. Gordon Brook-Shepherd,
The Storm Petrels: The First Soviet Defectors, 1928–1938
, Collins, London, 1977.
3
. Elizabeth Monroe,
Philby of Arabia
, Faber, London, 1973.
4
. Alfred Dillwyn Knox CMG. Knox was a leading codebreaker during both world wars and throughout the inter-war period, breaking a number of important codes and ciphers, including the cipher used in the Zimmerman telegram, the exposure of which brought the US into the First World War. He was the leading codebreaker working on the Enigma cipher, breaking a number of different variants, including those used by Spain and Italy during the Spanish Civil War, and leading the initial breaks into the German armed forces Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park. Knox broke the
Abwehr
Enigma, probably the most complex Enigma cipher broken by the Allies, to produce the ISK material, without which the Double Cross deception, which ensured the safety of the D-Day landings, could not have taken place.
5
. The author is referring to Operation Gold, the code-name for the Berlin Tunnel, which involved tapping the telephone cables in East Berlin. ‘Gold’ was a joint SIS–CIA operation and betrayed from the start by George Blake, who was stationed in Berlin at the time and was secretary to the joint planning committee and thus keeping the minutes.
6
. Judith Coplon was allegedly recruited by the KGB in 1944 when she was working at the US Department of Justice. Arrested in 1949, she was convicted in two separate trials with both verdicts being overturned on appeal, not because of insufficient evidence but largely because the FBI had engaged in wiretapping and had bugged her telephone without having a warrant to do so. The Justice Department finally dropped the charges against her in 1967.
7
. Ewen Montagu,
The Man Who Never Was
, Evans Brothers, London, 1953.
8
. John le Carré,
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
, Victor Gollancz, London, 1963.
11
THE ELITE FORCE
S
IS has come in for harsh criticism over the Philby affair, some of it undeserved. What about the other side, the ‘elite force’ that he joined in the 1930s? In the period up to 1944, there are four episodes in his underground career which on present evidence the KGB and its predecessors may be thought to have handled with less than their usual judgement and professionalism. A much bigger question mark hangs over the events that led up to the debacle of 1951. Let us start with a glance at the earlier episodes, already touched on in previous chapters.
First, Vienna. If indeed Soviet intelligence recruited him before he went there, or soon after, then to use him on ‘activist’ work was the opposite of far sighted: it might have damaged him forever. That is why I have suggested the recruitment did not come till near the end of his time in Vienna, or even later.
Second, the pro-German phase of 1936: on the face of it a crass idea. I imagine that he had to play it well down in order not to strain the credulity of his friends. If he were really instructed to behave as heavy-handedly as we have been given to understand, the only way one can make sense of it is to assume that the Russians, victims of their own propaganda, were expecting or
at least allowing for an eventual Anglo-German line-up against themselves. Kim’s Spanish interlude would fit into this picture.
Third, the recruitment of Guy Burgess. I have read somewhere that Kim, probably in a newspaper interview after the publication of his book, admitted that he had made mistakes and invited readers to spot them. The introduction of Burgess, if that is what he did, seems by far the most obvious one. But some of the blame would have to fall on the Russians for taking him on.
Fourth, the pressure that the Russians put on Kim in 1944 to elbow his way through in order to become head of Section IX. Kim says he made an attempt to demur, and not surprisingly. He would probably have been just as useful to his masters if events had simply been allowed to take their course. With Cowgill’s tendency to dig holes for himself Kim might well have become head of the anti-Soviet section before long; and if not he would almost certainly have been its number two, with comparable access to information. The only question is whether he would then have been told about Volkov. (I feel fairly sure he would.)
There may have been good reason for any or all of these four episodes, but hindsight suggests that if the Russians – and Kim – had their time over again they might have arranged things differently. One notes that the first three had all occurred by 1937, before the pattern of his career become plain, and even the fourth took place before his seven most important years began. But now we come to the event that terminated his career as an SIS officer. Much remains obscure about the interplay between the careers of Kim, Guy and Maclean, but we do know the ending: the need to rescue Maclean brought down all three. Why was the highly experienced Soviet service unable to prevent this?
Writing of the situation in 1950–51, Kim makes two ambiguous references to his earlier acquaintance with Maclean: ‘I had only seen Maclean twice, and briefly, in fourteen years’ and ‘I had only met him twice, for about half an hour in all and both times on a conspiratorial basis, since 1937.’ This seems to mean that he had met him only twice in his life, one of the occasions probably being in 1937 or 1938 and the other later; but, linguistically, another interpretation is not excluded, that he had met Maclean (perhaps on several occasions) in the years up to 1937 and only twice since then. The ambiguity could be intentional.
†
What does seem certain is that their
public
acquaintance was either nil or extremely small, otherwise Kim would not have dared to tell Dick White in 1951, and his press conference in 1955, that he could not clearly remember having met Maclean. (I never heard Kim mention him. Before 1951 I knew of Maclean’s existence only because his sister was posted to the office in Egypt where I was working in early 1948, and people spoke of her having a brilliant brother in the Foreign Office.) ‘On a conspiratorial basis’ can only mean that Kim and Maclean were each aware that the other was working for the Russians. By all the normal principles of espionage, the Russians ought to have made every effort to ensure that two such dangerously exposed agents should never become ‘interconscious’. Yet apparently that is what they were, from at least 1937–38. Why?
One can guess at several possible explanations. For example,
Kim might have been involved in Maclean’s recruitment in about 1935; but it is difficult to see why, if the two were not well acquainted. Or problems might have arisen over contacting arrangements between the Russians and one of the two men, and the other had to be brought in to help. Here the dates may be significant. Kim was out of England almost continuously from early 1937 to mid-1940. While he was reporting the Spanish war his contacts with the Russians presumably took place in France; moreover Lizy had a flat in Paris in 1938–39. Again, during his time with the BEF in 1939–40 he says that he spent most of his weekends in Paris, ‘not only for the obvious purpose of philandering’. Maclean was working in the Paris embassy from 1938 to mid-1940. Possibly one or both of the conspiratorial meetings took place in Paris. A third possible explanation might be that from time to time agents like Kim and Maclean must desperately need the company of others in the know; the Russians may have found it more important to improve morale – especially Maclean’s – than to stick to the rules of security. And, fourthly, wherever we find something getting out of line, Guy Burgess comes to mind. Little things like rules on interconsciousness would be difficult to maintain in the vicinity of Guy, who knew everybody and liked to be in on everything. No doubt he knew Maclean at Cambridge. There is some evidence, referred to below, that at least by the time Guy was posted to Washington in 1950 he was aware that Maclean was a Soviet agent. Perhaps the Russians found it impossible to keep Kim and Guy on the one hand and Maclean on the other in complete mutual ignorance, and decided instead to extract whatever advantage they could from interconsciousness.
One apparent advantage was that in 1949 Kim was able to
warn the Russians that Maclean was in danger. Already Kim had been asked by his Soviet contact in Istanbul if he could discover what the British were doing about a case under FBI investigation involving the British embassy in Washington. At that time he was unable to help. But during his briefing at SIS headquarters in September 1949, before his departure for Washington, he was given details of a serious leakage of information to the Russians from the Washington embassy in 1944–45, which the British and Americans were still investigating though they had not yet identified the culprit. (He does not mention that what had alerted them was an NKVD coding error which had allowed certain messages to be deciphered by the British and Americans,
1
although he does speak of the ‘documents’ and the use of the code-name
HOMER
for Maclean. It is interesting that Kim, who was head of Section IX in 1944–46, was apparently not told of this development at the time. Perhaps the information was not clearly established till later.) A check of the relevant Foreign Office list left Kim in little doubt that the source of the leakage must be Maclean. Moscow confirmed to him that this investigation and the one he had been asked about in Istanbul were the same. But even if Kim had known nothing at all about Maclean it would have made little difference; once he had passed on the information obtained at his briefing, the Russians would soon realise it referred to Maclean. In Washington Kim was able to keep his Soviet contact closely informed on the investigations, but he would equally have done so without his previous knowledge.
By this time Maclean himself was already launched on his spectacular downhill course in Cairo. One supposes that the Russians had had to give him some sort of warning about the investigation, and that this contributed to his crack-up of
May 1950 and recall to London. They would surely have been wiser to pull him out there and then. His subsequent usefulness must have been limited. Not until November was he sufficiently recovered to begin work as head of the American Department in the Foreign Office. At some point between then and his defection six months later he came under suspicion, and eventually under Special Branch surveillance. Contact with Russians was evidently broken off. For the sake of a few months’ reporting – admittedly at an important time in the Korean War – the Russians eventually lost three agents instead of one. It appears that Maclean’s rescue operation was delayed until it was too late to arrange it without bringing in someone else.
In Washington Kim had been drawn ever further into the case. So too was Burgess, who had arrived there in August 1950. Kim says that he discussed with the Russians the question whether Guy should be let into the secret of the British embassy source. The Russians subsequently decided that the balance of opinion was that Guy’s special knowledge of the problem might be helpful. Whatever this obscure sentence may mean – it reads as if it had passed through more than one KGB in-tray – it does suggest previous knowledge on Guy’s part of what Maclean had been doing. (If Guy was also being used to photocopy SIS documents on Kim’s behalf, this could have been a further reason for bringing him in.) Guy was briefed by Kim in great detail.
Kim’s account of what followed leaves much unexplained. He speaks of the high-grade intelligence to which Maclean, now in charge of the American Department, had access and the need for him to remain there as long as possible. Suspicions had not yet begun to crystallise in the investigators’ minds; they were still chasing embassy charladies and the like. However it seemed
unlikely to Kim and the Russians that this situation could last, and it was eventually decided to extract Maclean by mid-1951 at the latest. Kim does not explain why the Russians did not thereupon go about things in the obvious way: that is, plan the thing fully with Maclean while they were still in contact. Indeed, they could have done this much earlier; they had known since at least September 1949 that an investigation was going on which could lead to him. As in the case of Kim himself after 1951, no elaborate plan would have been necessary, especially since surveillance did not begin until fairly soon before the escape took place: a flight to somewhere in western Europe on a Friday night or Saturday morning, and then on to Prague or elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. He would have been clean away by Monday morning.
It is possible that by the winter of 1950–51 Maclean, for security reasons, was no longer seeing his Soviet contacts in London directly and was reporting by some other means such as ‘dead letterboxes’. Even so, one might have expected the Russians to be able to get messages to him by the same means in reverse. But no: of all people, Guy Burgess had to be brought in to ‘set the ball rolling for the rescue operation’. Apart from his other shortcomings, Guy was far from readily available; even his own return from Washington to London required a sort of escape plan. Three times in a day he contrived to get himself booked for speeding, so that the ambassador was forced to send him home. I have never found this part of the story convincing. Kim’s account gives the impression that the speeding was followed almost immediately by Guy’s recall; and indeed the escape plan would seem to require this, for there was no knowing when suspicion might suddenly fall on Maclean. Yet the
Sunday Times
authors, who
presumably checked the facts, say that the speeding took place as early as February, whereas Guy did not leave for England until the beginning of May; and even then he went by sea.