The Defence of the Realm (64 page)

On the eve of the Cold War, by contrast, the Security Service and SIS had not a single Soviet agent worth the name, were woefully ignorant about the extent of Soviet wartime intelligence penetration, and lacked even much basic information about Soviet intelligence agencies. SIGINT, for several years, provided little assistance and never came close to replicating against the Soviet Union the spectacular wartime successes against Nazi Germany.
²
The Security Service's first major post-war insight into Soviet intelligence operations in the West was the result of a defection in Canada.

On the evening of 5 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a twenty-six-yearold cipher clerk working for the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, secretly stuffed more than a hundred classified documents under his shirt and attempted to defect. He tried hard to hold in his stomach as he walked out of the embassy. ‘Otherwise', his wife said later, ‘he would have looked pregnant.' Defection turned out to be more
difficult than Gouzenko had imagined. When he sought help at the offices of the Ministry of Justice and the
Ottawa Journal
, he was told to come back next day. But on 6 September both the Ministry of Justice and the
Ottawa Journal
, which failed to grasp it was being offered the spy exclusive of the decade, showed no more interest than on the previous evening. By the night of the 6th, the Soviet embassy realized that both Gouzenko and classified documents had gone missing. While Gouzenko hid with his wife and child in a neighbour's flat, Soviet security men broke down his door and searched his apartment. It was almost midnight before the local police came to his rescue and the Gouzenko family at last found sanctuary.
³
Though Gouzenko later persuaded Guy Liddell that he was an ideological defector,
⁴
at the time his decision to defect was thought to derive chiefly from fears for his own fate if he returned to the Soviet Union. He had breached GRU security regulations by failing to lock up classified material in the Ottawa residency and had been summoned back to Moscow.
⁵

Ignorance about the extent of Soviet intelligence penetration of its Western allies contributed to the shock produced by Gouzenko's revelations in both London and Ottawa. Among those most shocked was the Canadian Prime Minister, William Mackenzie King, who naively told his diary:

As I dictate this note I think of the Russian embassy being only a few doors away and of them being a centre of intrigue. During the period of war, while Canada has been helping Russia and doing all we can to foment Canadian–Russian friendship, there has been one branch of the Russian service that has been spying on [us] . . . The amazing thing is how many contacts have been successfully made with people in key positions in government and industrial circles.
⁶

As well as providing some further evidence of Soviet espionage in the United States, Gouzenko revealed the existence of a major GRU Canadian spy-ring which had penetrated parliament, External Affairs, air force intelligence, the Department of Munitions and Supply, and scientific research.
⁷
Gouzenko's most shocking revelation, only a month after Hiroshima, was that Soviet intelligence had obtained ‘documentary materials of the atomic bomb: the technological process, drawings, calculations'.
⁸
The documents he provided included GRU telegrams on an agent codenamed ALEK, soon identified as the British atomic scientist Alan Nunn May. A secret Communist and contemporary of Donald Maclean at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, May was the first of the ‘atom spies' to be unmasked.
⁹
In January 1943 he had joined an Anglo-Canadian nuclear research laboratory at Montreal. Despite the fact that he had made contact with the GRU in
Britain during the previous year, it took the local GRU some time to grasp his importance. Not till late in 1944 was Pavel Angelov of the Ottawa GRU residency selected as his case officer. At some point during the first half of 1945, Angelov asked May to obtain samples of the uranium used in the construction of atomic weapons – an assignment which a Canadian agent of the GRU, Israel Halperin, had described as ‘absolutely impossible'. May, however, succeeded. On 9 August 1945, three days after Hiroshima, he gave Angelov a report on atomic research, details of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and two samples of uranium: an enriched specimen of U-235 in a glass tube and a thin deposit of U-233 on a strip of platinum foil. The GRU resident in Ottawa, Nikolai Zabotin, sent his deputy to take them immediately to Moscow. Soon afterwards Zabotin was awarded both the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star. Angelov gave May about 200 Canadian dollars in a whisky bottle.
¹⁰

The intelligence officer best equipped to interrogate Gouzenko after his defection was Jane Archer, née Sissmore. But for her move from MI5 to SIS in 1940,
¹¹
she would probably have done so. In 1944 Archer was posted to the newly established SIS Section IX, which was responsible for Soviet and Communist counter-intelligence. Unluckily for British intelligence, but luckily for Soviet espionage, the head of Section IX was none other than Kim Philby. As one of Philby's SIS colleagues, Robert Cecil, later acknowledged, his remarkable success in becoming head of Section IX ‘ensured that the whole post-war effort to counter Communist espionage would become known in the Kremlin. The history of espionage records few, if any, comparable masterstrokes.'
¹²
One of Philby's first priorities was to neutralize the potential threat from Jane Archer, for whom he had a healthy respect: ‘After Guy Liddell, Jane was perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5. She had spent a big chunk of a shrewd lifetime studying Communist activity in all its aspects.' Archer's interrogation of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky in 1940 had produced ‘a tantalizing scrap of information about a young English journalist whom Soviet intelligence had sent to Spain during the Civil War', which Philby, but no one else, had immediately recognized as a reference to himself. ‘Jane', he realized, ‘would have made a very bad enemy.' Philby therefore diverted her formidable energies to analysing the large amount of intercepted radio traffic on Communist activities in Eastern Europe,
¹³
thus ensuring that she had no involvement in either the Gouzenko or (almost immediately afterwards) the Volkov defection cases, where her exceptional skills would have been far more productively used.

The lead roles in the British response to the Gouzenko case were thus
taken within SIS not by Archer but by Philby, as head of Section IX, and within the Security Service by the head of F Division (counter-subversion), Roger Hollis (later Director General from 1956 to 1965). Philby's first response on hearing the news from Ottawa was one of personal alarm that Gouzenko might have evidence which could lead to his own exposure. His Soviet controller, Boris Krötenschield, reported to the Centre:

STANLEY [Philby] was a bit agitated . . . I tried to calm him down. STANLEY said that in connection with this he may have information of extreme urgency to pass on to us. Therefore STANLEY asks for another meeting in a few days. I refused a meeting but I did allow him to pass on urgent and important information through HICKS [Burgess].
¹⁴

Philby was even more alarmed by news from Istanbul on 19 September about the attempted defection of an NKGB officer stationed in Turkey, Konstantin Dmitrievich Volkov. In late August 1945, a matter of days before Gouzenko defected in Ottawa, Volkov had written to the British vice consul in Istanbul requesting an urgent appointment. Receiving no reply, Volkov had turned up in person on 4 September – the day before Gouzenko first attempted to defect – and in return for political asylum for himself and his wife and £50,000 (about a million pounds at today's value) he offered important files and information which he had obtained while working on the British desk in the Centre. As an indication of the importance of the intelligence he had on offer, Volkov revealed that among the most highly rated British Soviet agents were two in the Foreign Office (no doubt Burgess and Maclean) and seven ‘inside the British intelligence system', including one ‘fulfilling the function of head of a section of British counter-espionage in London', which was almost certainly a reference to Philby himself.
¹⁵
Philby quickly warned Krötenschield of Volkov's threatened defection.
¹⁶

In response to Philby's warning, the Centre took predictably drastic action. On 21 September the Turkish consulate in Moscow issued visas for two Soviet diplomatic couriers (in reality hitmen from the Centre) to travel to Istanbul. The British investigation into the Volkov case would normally have been handled by the head of Security Intelligence Middle East (SIME), whose head, Sir Douglas Roberts, then happened to be in London. Luckily for Philby, Roberts hated flying. Using this as a pretext for involving himself in the case, Philby succeeded in gaining authorization from ‘C', Sir Stewart Menzies, to fly to Turkey and deal personally with Volkov. Due to travel delays, Philby did not arrive in Istanbul until 26 September.
¹⁷
By then it was too late. Volkov had asked the British vice
consul to contact him by phone at the Soviet consulate. But, as Guy Liddell noted in his diary:

The telephone was answered by the Russian Consul General on the first occasion and on the second by a man speaking English claiming to be Wolkoff but [who] clearly was not. Finally contact was made with the Russian telephone operator who said that Wolkoff had left for Moscow.
¹⁸

By then, the Soviet hitmen had done their job. Volkov and his wife, both on stretchers and heavily sedated, had been carried on board a Soviet aircraft bound for Moscow.
¹⁹
Under brutal interrogation in Moscow before his execution, Volkov admitted that he had asked the British for political asylum and £50,000, and confessed that he had planned to reveal the names of no fewer than 314 Soviet agents, probably including Philby.
²⁰
As Philby later admitted, the Volkov case had ‘proved to be a very narrow squeak indeed'.
²¹
With slightly less luck in Ottawa earlier in September, Gouzenko would not have been able to defect. With slightly more luck in Istanbul, Volkov would have succeeded in unmasking Philby and disrupting Soviet intelligence operations on a much larger scale than Gouzenko was able to do.

Reassured by Volkov's forcible removal to Moscow that he himself was not in danger, Philby was able to concentrate on limiting the damage to Soviet intelligence caused by Gouzenko's revelations. His first priority was to try to prevent a successful prosecution of his Cambridge contemporary Alan Nunn May, who was unaware that he had been identified by Gouzenko. Philby reported to Moscow that Gouzenko's evidence against May was unlikely to be adequate to secure a conviction. He sent a warning, however, that Gouzenko had revealed that, after returning to Britain, May had a series of meetings scheduled with his Soviet controller in London, beginning on 8 October outside the British Museum, where he was to identify himself by carrying a copy of
The Times
under his left arm.
²²
Sir David Petrie took the personal decision that May was to be caught in the act.
²³
Though MI5 and the Special Branch kept the meeting point outside the British Museum revealed by Gouzenko under surveillance, neither May nor his new Soviet case officer appeared. Philby reported, doubtless with relief, to his controller on 18 November:

According to MI5, May has not put a foot wrong from the time he arrived in England. He did not establish any suspicious contacts. He does not show any signs of being afraid or worried and continues to work quite normally on his academic research. Bearing this in mind, MI5 came to the conclusion that May is a tough
customer who will not break down under questioning until he is confronted with fresh and convincing evidence.
²⁴

But no ‘fresh and convincing evidence' turned up. MI5's Legal Adviser, Colonel Cussen, later acknowledged that, as Philby had indicated to Moscow:

it was not likely that any evidence against Primrose [May] obtained in Canada would be admissible without the calling of a Russian official, since it was contained in telegrams exchanged between Ottawa and Moscow . . . If Corby [Gouzenko] were called at Bow Street [magistrates' court] himself, he would not be able to identify Primrose whom he had never seen.
²⁵

Not until the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, which cast suspicion on Philby for the first time, did MI5 begin to suspect that May's failure to meet his controller after his return to London was due to the fact that Philby had warned the Centre. Philby probably also warned the Centre about other Soviet agents identified by Gouzenko who were under British and American surveillance. Within SIS, Philby was responsible for coordinating intelligence on the case emanating from the FBI and other US sources, with the assistance of the SIS representative in Washington. On at least one occasion, an agent identified by Gouzenko was able to escape from America, probably to the Soviet Union, despite being under active surveillance by the FBI.
²⁶
A warning to the Centre from Philby may well have prompted the escape.

For a year and a half before Gouzenko's defection, Philby's aim had been to establish himself as the leading Soviet counter-espionage expert within the British intelligence community. As head of Section IX, Philby had met regularly with Roger Hollis, to discuss Soviet and Communist affairs. Philby wrote patronizingly in his memoirs: ‘[Hollis] was a likeable fellow of cautious bent . . . Although he lacked the strain of irresponsibility which I think is essential (in moderation) to the rounded human being, we got on well together, and were soon exchanging information without reserve on either side.'
²⁷
Philby passed on to Moscow the information which Hollis supplied ‘without reserve'. Within a few days of Gouzenko's defection, Hollis had flown to Ottawa to liaise with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and was treated ‘as one of their own investigating team'.
²⁸
The fact that Gouzenko had defected in a Commonwealth capital, rather than on foreign territory, meant that the Security Service, rather than SIS, had the lead role in responding to it. Although Hollis's presence in Canada was unpublicized, he was present during the questioning of
witnesses by the Canadian Royal Commission on the Gouzenko case, and was allowed to examine all the documents and other evidence gathered by the RCMP.
²⁹
When Mackenzie King arrived in Southampton on 7 October 1945 on board the
Queen Mary
, at the beginning of a four-week stay in Britain, Hollis came on board and showed him a telegram from the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, reporting President Truman's wish that May, who, Gouzenko had revealed, was due to meet his Russian contact next day outside the British Museum, should not be arrested ‘unless it was obviously necessary for security reasons and then only if he were discovered to be communicating some document of a Top Secret nature to the man he was to meet':