Kim Philby (17 page)

The St Albans time was drawing to a close. By the spring of 1943 Section V was beginning to be heavily involved in the war fronts that were opening up. The Allies were about to move into Sicily, and then Italy. Next year it would be western Europe. All this necessitated much planning with the War Office, the various commands that were being set up, MI5 (who were represented in the SCI units), the Americans, Broadway and others. We were beginning to feel more and more that we were out on a limb in Hertfordshire: power and action lay in London. An opportunity arose to move to Ryder Street in the St James’s area, a minute’s walk from MI5, but Felix Cowgill was strongly opposed to such a move. He foresaw that the character of the Section V he had built up in its country isolation would be threatened by a transfer to the London mêlée, and that he himself would find it more difficult to cope with his enemies. There were several Section
V staff who wanted to stay in St Albans, perhaps for the same sort of reasons as Felix, perhaps because they now had strong domestic roots in or around the town, perhaps simply because they did not know London. But, when it was put to a vote, most of us opted for the move. I was much in favour, both for the reasons I have given above and on personal grounds. Kim also had personal grounds of a different kind: he would be nearer to the centres of power and better able to carry out Soviet aims. He was one of the strongest advocates of the move. As so often in this story, he was pressing for something which made admirable sense in itself but which one now sees he wanted primarily for different reasons.

July 21st was set as the date of the move. Kim, who had a monthly tenancy on The Spinney, decided to give it up at the end of June. He and Aileen and the two children – a third was on the way – went to Dora Philby’s flat in Grove Court, Drayton Gardens in South Kensington. (Either then or later Dora moved upstairs to another flat.) I moved to the flat near Chelsea Town Hall which Marie had taken a year or so earlier. For three weeks Kim, Helena, I and others commuted in the wrong direction, leaving St Pancras for St Albans in the morning and returning to London at night.

One sad casualty of the move, for me at any rate, was Sammy. Marie and I tried to keep him in London for a time, but with both of us working it was not a practical proposition. Eventually I handed him over to the assistant of David, the Glenalmond factotum. Sammy had conceived an inordinate attachment for him and he could offer him a decent home in the suburbs. Kim spoke his valediction. ‘David’s dogsbody’s dog,’ he said unfeelingly.

Notes

1
. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville,
Philby: The Long Road to Moscow
, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1973, pp. 167–8.

2
. Dick Brooman-White was MP for Rutherglen 1951–64 and Under-Secretary of State for Scotland 1960–63. He died in 1964.

3
. Tomás Harris was an expert on El Greco and Goya, and settled in Spain soon after the war. A brilliant intuitive agent handler who ran
GARBO
(see note 4), he had a theory as to why elaborate deception operations against the Germans could work so well and why the British were never taken in by similar German attempts. From his point of view the Germans were culturally and institutionally handicapped when it came to deception, ‘because they had closed their minds to the irrational’. Quoted from Stephen Talty,
Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and saved D-Day
, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2012.

4
. Operation Garbo. Juan Pujol García, a Spaniard, was known by the British code-name
GARBO
and to the Germans as Agent
ARABEL
. He was one of the few people to receive decorations from both sides, an MBE from the British and an Iron Cross from the Germans. Initially from Lisbon and later from London,
GARBO
built a fictional network of agents feeding disinformation to the Germans and played a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation to mislead the Germans about the timing and location of the Normandy landings in 1944. For the full story of his life, Pujol’s own account makes compelling reading:
Operation Garbo
, Dialogue, London, 2011.

5
. Arthur George Trevor-Wilson was raised in France from an early age and pre war worked in Paris and north Africa in finance and trading, even at one time as an Abyssinian skunk exporter. He joined the British army at the outbreak of hostilities and served as a liaison officer with the British 2nd Division until his evacuation from Dunkirk. Because of his fluent French, Trevor-Wilson joined SOE and later transferred to SIS, specialising in north African affairs. Towards the end of the war and fresh from a posting in Algiers, he was dispatched to Hanoi, where he was to spend much of the next ten years. He formed a close friendship with Ho Chi Minh, whom he met on a weekly basis. Historians sifting back through the morass of reports generated by the many different intelligence agencies during this complex period in the history of Indochina have singled out Trevor-Wilson’s reports as the most perceptive and objective. A great friend of the novelist Graham Greene and a fellow Catholic, Trevor-Wilson was subsequently ordered out of Vietnam by General de Lattre de Tassigny (the overall commander of French forces in Indochina from 1950). Greene, in his autobiography, wrote, ‘De Lattre reported to the Foreign Office that Trevor-Wilson, who had been decorated for his services to France during the Second World War, was no longer
persona grata
. Trevor was thrown out of Indo-China, and the Foreign Office lost a remarkable Consul and the French a great friend of their country.’ De Lattre justified his decision by telling the head of the Sureté, ‘All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient to have a Consul who’s in the Secret Service; they even send me their novelists as agents, and Catholic novelists into the bargain.’ After de Lattre left Vietnam, Trevor-Wilson returned, but this time under commercial cover as a leather goods distributor. He continued to do work for SIS, largely in Asia, until his retirement in the 1960s. Malcolm Muggeridge, a wartime colleague in Section V, described Trevor-Wilson as the ablest intelligence officer he had come across during the war. (Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Asia during the Second World War’,
Modern Asian Studies
(1998), vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 179–227; Graham Greene,
Ways of Escape
p. 154, Bodley Head, London, 1980.) For a fuller account of Trevor-Wilson’s time in Vietnam and the particular incident that earned de Lattre’s displeasure, see Norman Sherry,
The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939–1955
, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994, pp. 481–7.

6
. Alan Williams,
Gentleman Traitor
, Blond & Briggs, London, 1975.

7
. A rising star of the Foreign Office who died tragically in 1945.

8
. An influential Zionist and long-time Philby family friend. In 1937 Kim had told her that he was doing ‘dangerous work for the communists’. She subsequently introduced him to Aileen. In 1962, when Philby was the correspondent of
The Observer
in Beirut, Solomon objected to what she perceived to be the anti-Israeli tone of his articles and related the details of her earlier conversation with Philby to Victor Rothschild, who in turn introduced her to MI5. This was the first hard evidence MI5 had obtained on Philby and led to his interrogation in Beirut.

9
. Henry Desmond Vernon Pakenham CBE. A schoolteacher before the war, he joined the Foreign Office in 1946, serving in Madrid, Djakarta, Havana, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires and Australia before his retirement in 1971.

10
. The distinguished Russian author and playwright Genrikh Borovik was allowed to interview Philby at length in the years 1985–8 and after Philby’s death was granted unprecedented access to KGB archives including the entire KGB case files on their master spy. In his subsequent book, Borovik quotes Philby’s Soviet controller’s report to Moscow Centre on 10 March 1943, which read, ‘Meetings with [KP] take place in London once every ten to twelve days, in the customary way, as with other agents. Sometimes, when the opportunity arises, he brings separate files to photograph (only when we ask him). In these instances we meet him in the morning and return the material in the evening. This, of course is inconvenient and incorrect according to operational procedures, but it’s the only way to get the documentary files that [KP] can’t copy, because they are too large. Earlier, as far as we know, he used to have a “Minox” but his photographs weren’t very good, and at your instruction we took the camera from him.’ (Genrikh Borovik,
The Philby Files: The Secret Life of Master Spy Kim Philby
, Little, Brown, Boston, 1994, p. 206.)

11
. Eleanor Philby,
Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved
, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1968.

†
Editor’s note:
Milne is right to say that most ISOS and ISK material went to MI5 but the main problem was not Cowgill’s refusal to pass material to MI5; it was his refusal, on misguided security grounds, to allow service intelligence officers involved in the Double Cross operations access to the ISOS and ISK material.

7

RYDER STREET AND BROADWAY

B
efore the war 14 Ryder Street had been the home of the Charity Commission, as it is once more.
^†
Even for London offices of the time it was old fashioned. The lift was more primitive than Broadway’s museum piece. Many of the rooms were small, high ceilinged and heated by little coal fires. For lack of a suitable large office the communal life of the Iberian subsection had to be broken up and we were housed two in a room. But there was compensation in all this: my room-mate for a time was Graham Greene, who had recently taken over the Portuguese desk when its former occupant was posted to Lisbon. Graham had returned from his post as SIS representative in Freetown at about the end of 1942 and was assigned to Section V. At Glenalmond he had been engaged in a solitary pursuit, the production of the Portuguese ‘Purple Primer’. A Purple Primer was a ‘Who’s Who’ of all known enemy intelligence officers, agents and contacts in a particular country, and was intended partly for current reference and partly for mopping-up operations after the war. It cannot have been one of the most rewarding experiences of Graham’s life, but he stuck to it tenaciously and completed it, on
the basis of evidence then available, before we left Glenalmond. Kim wrote an introduction. Later I had the task of amplifying and updating the work. Perhaps this entitles me to go down in history as the co-author, with Graham Greene and H. A. R. Philby, of a volume privately published, in limited edition, with numbered copies.

In Ryder Street Graham brought his own particular style to the handling of Portuguese matters. He was not greatly interested in the intelligence war, perhaps because it was now beginning to go so much in our favour, but anything in the nature of human injustices caught his imagination and his pen. He bombarded everyone for weeks with pleas and arguments on behalf of a former SIS agent who had ended up in a Lisbon jail, allegedly for activities on our behalf, and in whom we had now lost interest. Graham’s marginal notes on incoming correspondence, inscribed in a fine compressed hand in which he appeared to have omitted to move the pen sideways as he wrote, were a pleasure in themselves. ‘Poor old ——,’ he noted on one letter from the Broadway man in Lisbon, ‘bashing about like a bull in a china shop, letting in great glimpses of the obvious.’ I had less to do professionally with another luminary of Ryder Street, Malcolm Muggeridge, who had likewise returned from a post in Africa, in this case Lourenço Marques, and was to lighten the later months of our war with malice and wit.

At the time of the move to London I had already been Vd1 for nearly two years; Kim had been head of the subsection a few weeks longer. Neither of us had had any promotion within the service. However, Felix Cowgill had had some success in improving the status of his officers, and I think we were getting a little more pay than at first. There had also been some
improvement – though this, of course, did not affect Kim as a civilian – in the military ranking of Army officers in Section V. Felix had had a hard struggle to achieve this. A Brigadier Beddington in Broadway, who supervised Army staffing and promotion matters in SIS, had made it part of his life’s work to block all attempts to rationalise the Section V military establishment and place us on a more even footing with the people we were in touch with in the forces ministries, MI5, the Army commands and many other places. In November 1942 there had been a breakthrough, and I had gone up to captain, but I continued to wear civilian clothes and never used the rank. A captain was still nobody, and I was better able to deal with outside people if I appeared to be a civilian.

In September 1943, having secured an enlargement of the Section V establishment, Felix announced some promotions. A new post was created for Kim, with the designation Vk (the K stood for Kim), overseeing Vd and several other subsections. I became head of Vd in his place, though I continued to spend much of my time on ISOS, and Desmond Pakenham moved up to Vd1. The post of Vd now carried with it the rank of major. The higher status, and the condition of my civilian clothes, induced me to get out my battledress, and Marie was able to unpick the second lieutenant’s single pip and substitute the major’s crown without having to bother about the intervening stages.