The Defence of the Realm (81 page)

The DDG, Anthony Simkins, also found ‘this apparent boob' surprising. The DG, Furnival Jones, noted: ‘I agree.'
⁶³
Like MacDonald, they seemed unaware that, so far from ‘no one in the Security Service' realizing that Philby was ‘a strong candidate for STANLEY', de Wesselow had written a paper saying precisely that. De Wesselow could not later recall to whom he had showed his paper, but ‘thought it inconceivable that he would not have discussed this with D1 [J. C. Robertson] who would have instructed him to make the researches on which his note was based'. Neither Robertson nor any other Service officer, however, could remember having seen the paper.
⁶⁴
The confusion over this important episode reflects a broader failure in the Service's management of the VENONA project, as well as the extreme secrecy with which it was handled.
⁶⁵
The failure to identify STANLEY as Philby was so remarkable that Peter Wright and others later claimed that the identification must have been deliberately suppressed and therefore pointed to possible Soviet penetration of the Service. An investigation in 1967 by D1/Inv reached the more sensible conclusion ‘that there could have been explanations other than a sinister one but whatever they were did indicate a lack of professionalism on the part of those who were aware of the message'. De Wesselow lived almost in a world of his own within the Service, working on material too secret to mention to most of his colleagues.
⁶⁶

Given Philby's knowledge of Security Service procedures, he can have been in no doubt since Milmo's interrogation that the Service would have obtained Home Office Warrants for letter and telephone checks against him. For that reason both checks yielded slim intelligence pickings – though his lack of contact with the KGB until his undetected meeting with Modin in 1954 meant in any case that there was little of importance about his
current activities to discover. An analysis of thirty-three volumes of checks for the five years from 1951 to 1956 concluded that ‘The only intelligence dividend . . . is the extent to which PEACH [Philby] is still in touch with, and subsidised by, M.I.6.'
⁶⁷
The checks did, however, also reveal much about Philby's sometimes squalid private life which has escaped the attention of his biographers, ‘show[ing] that PEACH is apt to get blind drunk and behave abominably to his best friends'.
⁶⁸
Philby's most abominable behaviour was towards his mentally fragile second wife, Aileen, by whom he had five children. Aileen Philby's psychiatrist told the Service that among her problems was her belief in her husband's guilt – which was at least partly responsible for Philby's attempts to ‘smash Aileen up': ‘He is convinced that she possesses important security information about her husband and her own Communist past . . . In [Aileen's] opinion and that of her psychiatrist, Philby had by a kind of mental cruelty to her “done his best to make her commit suicide”. '
⁶⁹

In the absence of useful intelligence, however, cruelty to Aileen Philby did not constitute an adequate case for continuing the HOWs, which were suspended in 1956.
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There is other evidence that Aileen had finally realized her husband's treachery and had thus become a potential threat to him. One of her friends later claimed that she had heard her blurt out one evening to Kim, ‘I know you're the Third Man!' That realization, combined with Kim's mental cruelty, accelerated her decline into alcoholism and despair. She died on 12 December 1957 from congestive heart failure, myocardial degeneration, a respiratory infection and pulmonary tuberculosis.
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After her death, her psychiatrist said ‘that he suspected that Aileen might have been murdered' by Philby.
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That is highly unlikely – not least because by then Philby had moved to Beirut to work as a journalist. But Kim's callous treatment of Aileen, which probably hastened her end, was symptomatic of the cold brutality with which he treated those who threatened his security. He never forgave Burgess for having accompanied Maclean to Moscow and so cast suspicion on him. Philby refused to see him even on his deathbed.
⁷³

By the mid-1950s, those in the Security Service working on the Philby, Blunt and Cairncross cases seem to have been losing heart. The Service leadership saw little point in further work on the British VENONA material. Director D (Graham Mitchell) wrote to Sir Dick White in April 1956:

I am beginning to come regretfully to the conclusion that it is not worth the effort. All the messages on which progress has been made since Gardner came here and, I
understand, on which there is hope of further progress are in the direction Moscow – London. Even if there were substantial further recoveries [decryption] on these, the odds are that the practical value to us would not be great. What we need, and can hardly hope to get, is recovery of the London-to-Moscow traffic.

White replied that he was inclined to agree.
⁷⁴
Though GCHQ continued to work on VENONA, the Service ‘virtually abandoned it until 1961'.
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Given Gardner's success in October 1955 in decrypting a message from Moscow to the London residency which pointed to the strong likelihood that, at the time of Gouzenko's defection, Philby was Agent STANLEY, the Service's loss of interest in VENONA only six months later now appears inexplicable. The probability must be that both White and Mitchell had ceased to pay close attention to the VENONA project. When, some years later, GCHQ was asked to work further on the partially decrypted message from the Centre to the London residency of 17 September 1945, it produced a fuller version which revealed that STANLEY had been able to provide information on the Gouzenko affair and thus identified him even more clearly as Philby: ‘[c% Consent] [one group unrecovered] was given to verify the accuracy of your telegram containing STANLEY's data about the events in the Neighbours' sphere of activity [Gouzenko affair]. STANLEY's information corresponds to the facts.'
⁷⁶

By the beginning of the 1960s the Security Service had still discovered very little about how any of the Magnificent Five had been recruited or controlled as Soviet agents. Its ignorance led it to exaggerate, sometimes very greatly, the quality of Soviet intelligence in the Stalin era. Unaware of the bungling by the Centre and some of its residencies in handling the Cambridge spies, the Service wrongly assumed that the successes of the Five reflected careful planning and exemplary tradecraft by the KGB. (Not until 1992, for example, did it discover from the material smuggled out of KGB archives by Vasili Mitrokhin both the Centre's lamentable failure to respond to Maclean's pleas for help from Cairo and the incompetence of the Soviet illegal HARRY as Philby's controller during his Washington posting.)
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The gaps in the Service's knowledge of the Five and their handlers provided increasing opportunities for its small but disruptive group of conspiracy theorists. It was possible to argue, for example, that the tip-off to Maclean, instead of coming from Philby via Burgess, had been given instead by an undiscovered Soviet agent inside the Security Service. In the imagination of Peter Wright the KGB became transformed into an agency of extraordinary operational subtlety and sophistication. As Wright began to descend into his conspiratorial wilderness of mirrors, Hollis warned
him, ‘They're not ten foot tall, you know, Peter!'
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That warning, however, merely strengthened Wright's suspicions of Hollis himself.

The defection of a KGB major, Anatoli Golitsyn, to the CIA in December 1961 both provided significant new intelligence on the Five and sent the Service investigation as a whole seriously off course. According to a note prepared, somewhat reluctantly,
⁷⁹
by the Service for the Home Secretary in 1966:

In 1962 a defector [Golitsyn] from the R[ussian] I[ntelligence] S[ervice] stated that in the 1930s there was a very important spy network in the United Kingdom called the Ring of Five because it originally had five members all of whom knew each other and had been at the university together. He knew that Burgess and Maclean were members of the ring. He thought that the network had expanded beyond the original five.

Remarkably, the DG, Furnival Jones, told the PUS at the Home Office, Sir Charles Cunningham, that he ‘very much hoped that the Home Secretary would not feel he had to inform the Prime Minister'.
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By 1964 the Service had obtained confessions of varying frankness from Philby, Blunt and Cairncross. The breakthrough in the prolonged and generally dispiriting Security Service investigation of the Philby case came as a result of a chance meeting at the Weizmann Institute in Israel in 1962 between the former MI5 officer Victor Rothschild and Flora Solomon, a Marks and Spencer executive and former lover of Alexander Kerensky, head of the Russian Provisional Government overthrown by the Bolshevik Revolution. Solomon was outraged by Philby's anti-Israeli and pro-Arab newspaper articles, and revealed that Philby had tried to recruit her as a Soviet agent before the war.
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Armed with Solomon's information, Philby's friend and former SIS colleague Nicholas Elliott flew out from London at the beginning of 1963 to confront him in Beirut, where he was working as a journalist. According to Philby's later version of events given to the KGB after he escaped to Moscow, Elliott told him:

You stopped working for them [the Russians] in 1949, I'm absolutely certain of that . . . I can understand people who worked for the Soviet Union, say before or during the war. But by 1949 a man of your intellect and your spirit had to see that all the rumours about Stalin's monstrous behaviour were not rumours, they were the truth . . . You decided to break with the USSR . . . Therefore I can give you my word and that of Dick White that you will get full immunity, you will be pardoned, but only if you tell it yourself. We need your collaboration, your help.

Philby assured the KGB that he had steadfastly resisted all attempts to persuade him to admit that he had ever been a Soviet agent.
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The truth was quite different. Philby's version of events after he reached Moscow was a fabrication designed to avoid discrediting himself in the eyes of the KGB by admitting that, when offered immunity from prosecution by Elliott in return for a confession, Philby (probably tempted by the offer) had admitted working as a Soviet agent from 1936 to 1946. In 1946, he told Elliott, he had seen the error of his ways and broken off contact with Soviet intelligence, though he had sent a warning to Maclean in 1951 for reasons of personal friendship. Philby, one of the twentieth century's most accomplished liars, made his bogus confession (part of it recorded by Elliott) so persuasively that, in addition to Elliott, the heads of both MI5 and SIS, Sir Roger Hollis and Sir Dick White, were deceived by it. Hollis wrote reassuringly to J. Edgar Hoover on 18 January 1963:

In our judgment [Philby's] statement of the association with the R.I.S. is substantially true. It accords with all the available evidence in our possession and we have no evidence pointing to a continuation of his activities on behalf of the R.I.S. after 1946, save in the isolated instance of Maclean. If this is so, it follows that damage to United States interests will have been confined to the period of the Second World War.
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The fact that less than a week later Philby secretly fled to Russia aboard the Soviet freighter
Dolmatova
made Hollis's and White's subsequent relations with the US intelligence community all the more embarrassing.

Philby's defection probably helped to increase the psychological pressure on both Cairncross and Blunt to confess secretly to the Security Service, since neither was willing to take refuge in Moscow. Early in 1964 Cairncross accepted a teaching post at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. At a meeting in Cleveland, Arthur Martin (D1) persuaded Cairncross to confess that he had spied for the Russians until 1951. Unsurprisingly, Cairncross declined a request to return to Britain and be interviewed under caution. Later in 1964 he took up a job in Rome with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. For some years Cairncross was given to understand that he returned to the UK at his peril; not until 1970 did the DPP authorize the Service to give him some assurance of immunity from prosecution. In the meantime, ‘Although the information he provided seemed sometimes vague, confusing and contradictory, he appeared to co-operate honestly during the numerous interviews which followed his initial admission.'
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The decisive breakthrough in the Service's investigation of Anthony Blunt came when the American Michael Straight admitted that Blunt had
recruited him while he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Arthur Martin called on Blunt at the Courtauld Institute on the evening of 23 April 1964 and asked him to recall all he knew about Michael Straight. Martin ‘noticed that by this time Blunt's right cheek was twitching a good deal' and ‘allowed a long pause before saying that Michael Straight's account was rather different from his'. He then offered Blunt ‘an absolute assurance that no action would be taken against him if he now told me the truth':