A Brief History of the Spy (6 page)

Kim Philby had stayed in MI6 after the end of the war, becoming head of the Secret Service station in Turkey from 1947 to 1949 (using that position to betray any British agents who attempted to use the Turkish border crossing to gain access to the Soviet Union), and then was sent as MI6 representative in Washington from 1949, during which time he had access to both American and British case files. Not long before his recall in 1951, he passed over information about three groups of six agents who were parachuting into the Ukraine – sending them to their deaths, noting in his diary that ‘I can make an informed guess’ as to their fate.

During the same period, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were able to pass over reams of information from the Foreign Office, with Anthony Blunt occasionally assisting Burgess with the material. Although Burgess was gradually becoming more dissolute, often under the influence of drink or drugs, he could still charm information out of unsuspecting colleagues, as he did in the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office before he was posted to Washington in 1950. Maclean was posted to Cairo in 1948, but his drinking also slipped out of control, as did other aspects of his behaviour. According to Gordievsky, Moscow Centre blamed both his and Burgess’ excesses on their concerns that the Venona information might compromise them. After a drunken rampage in Cairo in 1950, Maclean was sent back to Britain, where he seemed to pull himself together – and was able to provide the Russians with useful intelligence regarding the onset of the Korean War.

As MI6 liaison with American intelligence and counterintelligence services, Kim Philby very quickly realized who code name Homer really was, but it was eighteen months before further decrypts would give enough clues for the FBI to gain sufficient evidence against Maclean. The field of
suspects narrowed to thirty-five by the end of 1950, and just nine by April 1951. Philby tried to divert attention away from Maclean, but a crucial piece of evidence both cleared Philby’s suggested suspect and became the fatal one for Maclean. However, because neither the FBI nor MI5 wanted to reveal the existence of Venona in court (Fuchs and Greenglass had confessed, so it wasn’t necessary in their cases), there was a period during which MI5 tried to gain new evidence of Maclean’s treachery.

Guy Burgess had been posted to Washington, and was staying with Philby (something that would compromise the latter tremendously after Burgess’ defection). However, he was spiralling out of control, and Philby used Burgess’ recall to Britain to get a message to Maclean, who had realized that his access to top-secret papers was being restricted, and that therefore he was probably under surveillance. When Burgess reached London he received a letter from Philby stating, ‘It’s getting
very
hot here.’ Burgess was finding it hard to deal with the situation, and Yuro Modin, his KGB controller, put pressure on him to defect alongside Maclean. Before MI5 could bring Maclean in for interrogation, Burgess and Maclean disappeared, travelling across the English Channel and then the continent before arriving in Moscow a few weeks later.

News of both men’s departure sent the intelligence community into uproar. Anthony Blunt was under no suspicion and was able to gain access to Burgess’ flat, where he disposed of a large number of incriminating documents (although he would inadvertently leave some handwritten notes which would lead directly to the unmasking of John Cairncross). Modin had tried to persuade Blunt to join Burgess and Maclean but he refused. (He would eventually confess in 1964, but gained immunity from prosecution.) Kim Philby, on the other hand, decided to brazen things out – but the CIA would have other ideas.

By the end of 1945, President Truman had come to the conclusion that the Soviets could not be trusted, but he still hoped that in some way peace could be maintained. Despite the clear evidence of Soviet networks operating in America, thanks to the testimony of Oleg Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley, and the emerging material from Venona, he was reluctant to expose them publicly. However, events in the first few weeks of 1946 would start to educate the American people that the wartime alliance with the Soviets was not going to extend beyond the end of the conflict.

In the USSR, Stalin was making it clear that he saw the way forward very differently from his erstwhile allies. In February 1946, he gave a speech to the voters of Moscow, in which he blamed the outbreak of the Second World War on ‘monopolistic capitalism’ and went on to say, ‘Perhaps catastrophic wars could be avoided if it were possible periodically to redistribute raw materials and markets among the respective countries in conformity with their economic weight by means
of concerted and peaceful decisions. But this is impossible under the present capitalist conditions of world economic development.’

A week later, the news of the arrests in Canada based on the Gouzenko information was released in America and a few days after that, political adviser George F. Kennan sent a briefing telegram from the US Embassy in Moscow, which would shape American foreign policy for much of the next forty-five years. It set out his belief that the ‘USSR still lives in antagonistic ‘‘capitalist encirclement’’ with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence’; that ‘Russians will participate officially in international organizations where they see opportunity of extending Soviet power or of inhibiting or diluting power of others’; and that ‘we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] US there can be no permanent
modus vivendi
, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.’

On 5 March, respected statesman Winston Churchill gave a speech at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri. Accompanied on the platform by President Truman, Churchill expressed his belief that the world had changed irrevocably, and coined a phrase that would epitomize the Soviet-dominated fiefdom. He told the audience of students:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist centre. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization . . . I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.

The Central Intelligence Agency was created by a National Security Act passed by Congress on 26 July 1947 and began operating in September, replacing the Central Intelligence Group which had been brought into existence in January 1946, once Truman appreciated that coordination of the various sources of intelligence data was vital. Admiral Sidney Souers, General Hoyt Vandenburg and then Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter were successive Directors of Central Intelligence during the CIG years, with Hillenkoetter transferring over to the CIA on its formation.

It’s fair to say that the CIA was not an immediate success. According to some reports, they simply weren’t up to the job. There’s a story that is still told in Berlin about the early days of the Agency’s involvement there: networks of agents would be set up secretly operating within the Soviet sector, in accordance with normal espionage principles, but then all those involved were invited to a cocktail party at the American base. This was great in terms of boosting morale for the agents – but it meant that all the Stasi, or the NKVD, had to do was arrest one person, and they could ascertain the identities of not just their one or two contacts, but potentially a whole host of them.

A similar error of judgement caused the loss of multiple teams during the Korean War: ethnic agents who were going
to be parachuted into mainland China were trained and lived together, and inevitably shared information about their missions. Betrayal of one team would lead to betrayal of others.

There certainly appeared to be a sorry litany of key world events that the fledgling agency failed to predict, which were highlighted by an article in the
New York Herald Tribune
in August 1950. Much of this work was carried out by the Office of Reports and Estimates (ORE), which would pay the price for the various failures when the Agency was reorganized in late 1950.

This began with the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1948. The Communists had become the single largest political party in Czechoslovakia in the elections held in 1946, with Klement Gottwald taking office as prime minster under President Edvard Beneš. Even though Beneš hoped to maintain diplomatic links with the West, the Communists took control of key ministries and started a drive towards total power. In September 1947, the newly formed Cominform (a group comprising members from the Communist parties around the world which aimed to spread the communist creed worldwide) noted that Czechoslovakia was the sole East European country in which ‘the complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie’ had not been achieved.

Action against non-communist ministers was stepped up, leading to the mass resignation by twenty-one of them in February 1948. Beneš was pushed into a corner, unable to back the non-communists for fear of the Red Army using a communist-backed insurrection as a pretext to invade. Gottwald threatened a general strike unless Beneš created a communist-led government – still technically a coalition, since it included the Communist Party, and the (pro-Moscow) Social Democrats. It meant that Czechoslovakia was now in the Soviets’ hands, and the elections held that May were purely for show.

The CIA weren’t expecting things to develop so quickly – a refrain that would be heard frequently under Hillenkoetter’s leadership – and they sorely misread the intentions behind the actions. ‘The timing of the coup in Czechoslovakia was forced upon the Kremlin when the non-Communists took action endangering Communist control of the police. A Communist victory in the May elections would have been impossible without such control,’ Hillenkoetter told Truman in a letter on 2 March, while on 10 March, a report suggested that ‘the Czech coup and the [Soviet’s] demands on Finland [for a ‘treaty of mutual assistance’ – a prelude to a takeover] . . . do not preclude the possibility of Soviet efforts to effect a rapprochement with the West’.

Three months later, the American government was shocked by a communiqué issued by the Cominform on 28 June, expelling Yugoslavia from its ranks. ‘The leadership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia has pursued an incorrect line on the main questions of home and foreign policy, a line which represents a departure from Marxism-Leninism,’ it stated. The Communist Party had placed itself ‘outside the family of the fraternal Communist Parties, outside the united Communist front and consequently outside the ranks of the Information Bureau’. The CIA had not put the various pieces of intel together to foresee Stalin splitting with someone regarded as one of his staunchest allies, Yugoslav prime minister Marshal Josip Tito.

In fact, the relationship between the two men had been rocky for some time, despite some surface signs of trust, such as the Cominform placing its headquarters in Belgrade. Tito had his own very clear ideas about how much he wanted his country to be under Soviet domination – he was happy to cooperate with Russia, and to emulate such concepts as the Five-Year Plan (Stalin’s grandiose centralized economic plans), but they would be implemented in a way that suited Yugoslavia, not the USSR. There were tensions over Tito’s use
of troops in Albania, and his plans for a joint Yugoslav-Bulgarian Balkan Federation, which Stalin at first denounced, and then suddenly demanded be speeded up (possibly so he could plant pro-Moscow Bulgarians in strong positions in the joint organization).

Letters were flying between Moscow and Belgrade, with Tito eventually pointing out that ‘No matter how much each of us loves the land of Socialism, the Soviet Union, he can in no case love less his country, which is also building Socialism.’ Moscow announced on 12 June that Belgrade would no longer be hosting the Danube navigation conference, claiming the city would have ‘difficulty in providing the necessary facilities’, a charge the Yugoslavs denied. The split followed two weeks later – and would lead to Yugoslavia ploughing a different course from other Communist countries for many years to come.

Although the CIA had noted developments, they were criticized for not predicting the cataclysmic nature of the split, and the potential for change within the Soviet-dominated countries. In his written response to President Truman following the
Herald Tribune
article, DCI Hillenkoetter would point out:

CIA noted that Tito was taking energetic steps to purge the Yugoslav Communist Party of diversionists, and on 10 June reported that the Yugoslav government was groping for a policy that would make it ‘the Balkan spearhead of evangelical and expansionist Communism’. When Yugoslavia defied the USSR on June 20 by insisting that the Danube Conference be held at Belgrade, the CIA estimated that the Kremlin faced a serious problem in reconciling within the Satellite states the conflict between national interests and international Communism.

In other words, yes, they did spot what was going on, but no one could have guessed it would be that serious.

The split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union was thrown into shadow by the start of another major rift between Russia and its former wartime allies, with the blockade of the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin that began in earnest on 24 June 1948. However, on this occasion, the accusation that the CIA failed to give adequate warning of this was not just unfair – it was manifestly wrong.