by Philip Kerr
At Katyn there had been a systematic attempt by the Russians to liquidate the national leaders of Polish independence. And it was clear to me that Stalin, no less than Hitler, had wanted to reduce Poland to the level of a subject state within his empire. Just as important, however, he had wanted revenge on the Poles for the defeat they had inflicted on the Red Army and on its commander—Stalin himself—at the Battle of Lvov in July 1920.
I had witnessed the Russian hatred of the Poles at first hand and in circumstances that even now, more than five years later, I still found troubling. No, “troubling” didn’t really cover it; potentially dangerous was more like it. To have one skeleton in my OSS locker was a misfortune, but to have two looked like a serious predicament.
The Coronado gave a lurch as we hit some turbulence, and the naval commander groaned.
“Don’t worry about that,” said the USAAF colonel. “Try to think of an air pocket as something to catch the plane rather than to trip it up.”
“Would anyone care for a drink?” asked the British general. He was wearing breeches, tall riding boots with buckles, and a thick belted tunic that looked as if it had been tailored before the year
1900. A woolly-bear caterpillar clung tenaciously to his upper lip underneath a hooked nose. With fine, peaceful, well-manicured hands, the general threw open a large and well-provisioned hamper basket and took out a flat pint of bonded bourbon. A minute later the four of us were libating the benevolence of the gods of transatlantic air travel.
“Is this your first time in London?” asked the general, offering me a shoe-sized sandwich from a shoebox-sized tin.
“I was there before the war. At the time I was thinking of going up to Cambridge to do a doctorate in philosophy.”
“And did you? Go up to Cambridge?”
“No, I went to Vienna instead.”
The general’s Wellington-sized nose wrinkled with disbelief. “Vienna? Good God. What on earth possessed you to do that?”
I shrugged. “At the time it seemed like the place to be.” And added, “I also had some family there.”
After that the general regarded me somewhat as if I might be a Nazi spy. Or a relative of the Führer perhaps. Hitler may have been the leader of Germany, but the general didn’t look as if he had forgotten Hitler had been born in Austria and had spent much of his young adult life knocking around Vienna. If I had said I had shared rooms at Wittenberg with Faustus he could not have regarded me with more suspicion, and we fell silent.
Arriving in Vienna at the age of just twenty-three, my Sheldon Travelling Fellowship supplemented by a very generous allowance from my mother’s even richer aunt, the Baroness von Bingen, not to mention the use of her very elegant apartment in the city’s exclusive Prinz Eugen Strasse, I had been almost immediately involved with the Vienna Circle—then the intellectual center of liberal European philosophy and notable for its opposition to the prevailing metaphysical and idealist trend of German philosophy. Which is just another way of saying that all of us were the self-annointed apostles of Einstein and relativity theory.
Moritz Schlick, my near neighbor in Vienna and the Vienna Circle’s leader, had invited me to join the group. The circle’s aim was to make philosophy more scientific, and while I had found it hard to feel much in common with them—several of the circle’s members were theoretical physicists, about as easy to talk to as men from Mars—it soon became clear that just to be involved with philosophy and the Vienna Circle was in itself a political act. The Nazis were set on the persecution of all those who didn’t agree with them, including the Vienna Circle, quite a few of whom were Jews. And after the election of the pro-Nazi Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria, I decided to join the Communist Party. It was a party to which I belonged until the long, hot, and, for me, promiscuous summer of 1938.
By then I was living and lecturing in Berlin, where I was engaged in an affair with a Polish aristocrat, the Princess Elena Pontiatowska. She was a close friend of Christiane Lundgren, a UFA film studio actress who was herself sleeping with Josef Goebbels. Through Christiane I ended up meeting Goebbels socially on several occasions and, because of my Communist Party membership, of which neither Goebbels nor the princess was aware (nor, for that matter, did they know anything of my being half Jewish), it was not long before I found myself approached by the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, and asked if I would spy on the German minister.
The idea of spying on the Nazis held considerable appeal. It was already clear there was going to be another European war. I told myself I would be doing my anti-Fascist bit in the way others had done during the Spanish Civil War. And so I agreed to report on any conversations I had with Goebbels. But after the Munich agreement in September of 1938, I became more actively involved. I agreed to accept an invitation to join the Abwehr, the military intelligence wing of the German army, with a view to supplying more detailed information to the NKVD.
In order to magnify my informal standing in the Abwehr, the NKVD provided me with some information that, at the time, I thought to be harmless. Later on, I discovered, to my horror, that the NKVD had used me to give the Nazis the names of three members of the Polish Secret Service. These three agents, one of them a woman just twenty-two years of age, were subsequently arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, tried by a German People’s Court, and guillotined at the notorious Plotzensee Prison in November 1938. Sickened at having been used by the Russians to rid themselves of people they regarded with no less hatred than they regarded the Germans, I severed my contacts with the NKVD, resigned my lectureship at Berlin University, and returned home to Harvard with my tail between my legs.
The plane lurched again and then seemed to wallow like a small ship in the trough of an invisible wave.
I now regarded my former membership in the German Communist Party as a youthful indiscretion. I told myself that if I was ever in Berlin or Vienna again it would be because the war was over, in which case what the OSS might think of my former political allegiances would hardly matter very much.
At last the plane landed at Shannon, where we stopped to refuel, stretch our legs, and say good-bye to the naval commander, who was to fly north to Larne in another plane to meet his new ship. The rest of us flew east to Stranraer, where I sent telegrams to some of the people I hoped to see before catching the train south to London. I even sent one to Diana back in Washington, informing her that I had arrived in Britain safely. And forty-five hours after leaving New York, I arrived at Claridge’s.
Though buttressed with heavy timbers and sandbags, all building windows crisscrossed with tape to cut down on flying glass, the West End of London still looked much as I remembered it. The bomb damage was confined to the East End and the docks. The Americans I saw on leave were nearly all Air Force, kids most of them, just as Roosevelt had said. Some didn’t look old enough to be served alcohol, let alone fly a B-24 on a bombing mission to Hamburg.
Although it was comparatively early when I checked into my hotel, I decided to go straight to bed and drank a glass of scotch to help me find oblivion. I was finally drifting off to sleep when I heard the air-raid siren. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to the shelter, only to find that few of the other hotel guests had bothered to do the same. Returning to my room when the all-clear sounded, I had just closed my eyes again when there was another warning; this time, walking along the landing toward the emergency stairs, I met a small, piggy-looking man wearing evening dress, with red hair, round glasses, and a large cigar. He resembled a cherub thickened with alcohol and pinched with disappointment, and was quite unperturbed by the high-pitched purr—like a heavenly choir of dead cats—of the siren.
Noting my haste, the man chuckled and said, “ You must be an American. Word of advice, old boy. Don’t bother going to the shelter. It’s only a small air raid. Chances are that whatever bombs do get dropped will be somewhere east, along the Thames, and well away from the West End. Last month there were just five
people killed by Jerry bombs in the whole of Great Britain.” The man puffed his cigar happily as if signaling that five dead was as trifling as a game of semi-billiards.
“Thank you, Mr. . . . ?”
“Waugh. Evelyn Waugh.”
Taking his advice, I went back to bed, downed another scotch, and, with no more disturbances, or at least none that I heard, finally slept for six hours.
When I awoke, I found that almost a dozen replies to the telegrams I had sent from Stranraer had been pushed under my door. Among all the telegrams from the diplomats and intelligence officers I hoped to see were a couple of messages from two old friends: Lord Victor Rothschild and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, with whom I had been flirting for more than ten years. In an attempt to add some color to what was already known about Katyn, I faced a great many meetings with angry Poles and stuffy British civil servants, and so I was relying on Ros and Victor to help me enjoy myself. There was also a telegram from Diana. It read: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE GLAD YOU’RE THERE, IF I’M NOT GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE? DISCUSS. That was probably Diana’s idea of a philosophical question.
After a tepid English bath, a smallish English breakfast, and a thorough look through the London Times, I left the hotel, heading for Grosvenor Square. I spent the morning there meeting various people in the London station of the OSS. David Bruce, the station chief, was a forty-four-year-old multimillionaire who had the dubious distinction of being married to the daughter of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. steel magnate, one of the world’s richest men. Several of Bruce’s executive officers were no less rich, blue-blooded, or intellectually advantaged, including Russell D’Oench, the shipping heir, and Norman Pearson, a distinguished Yale professor of English. The London station of the OSS looked like an extension of Washington’s Metropolitan Club.
Pearson, in charge of the OSS London Bureau’s effort to counter German intelligence, was a published poet. Having sorted me out some ration coupons, he volunteered to squire me around London’s intelligence community. He was a year my junior, and a little on the thin side, made thinner by the food, or rather the lack of food available in the London shops. His suit, tailored in America, was now a couple of sizes too big for him.
Pearson was good company and hardly the kind of desperado most people would have expected in an intelligence job. But this was typical of our service. Even after three months’ instruction in security and espionage from the OSS training center at Catoctin Mountain, there were few of my colleagues—Ivy League lawyers and academics, like myself—who ever saw the need to behave like a military organization, or even a quasi-military one. The joke around Washington was that being an officer with the OSS was “a cellophane commission”: you could see through it, but it kept the draft off. And there was no getting away from the fact that for many of the younger officers, the OSS was a bit of an adventure and an escape from the rigors of ordinary military service. Quite a few officers were insubordinate as a matter of principle, and so-called orders were often put to a vote. And yet, through all of this, the OSS held together and did some useful work. Pearson was if anything more conscientious and soldierlike than most.
Pearson took me to the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, the center of British counterintelligence. They were housed at 54 Broadway Buildings, a dingy structure of makeshift offices filled with staff in dowdy-looking civilian clothes.
Pearson introduced me to some of the section officers who had prepared much of the Katyn material used by Sir Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile. It was Major King, the officer who had evaluated the original reports, who alerted me to the fact that whatever clarity existed with regard to Katyn was about to be muddied:
“The Soviet armies under General Sokolowski and General Jermienko recaptured Smolensk just two weeks ago, on September twenty-fifth,” he explained. “They retook the region of the Katyn Forest grave sites a few days later. So the exhumations the Germans had declared would take place in the autumn are now impossible. The chances are, of course, that the Russians will dig up the bodies again and produce their own report, blaming Jerry. But that’s not really my patch. You’d best speak to the chaps in Section Nine. Philby handles the interpretation of all the Russian intelligence we get.”
I smiled. “Kim Philby?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
I nodded. “From before the war. When we were students, in Vienna. Where can I find him?”
“Seventh floor.”
Kim Philby looked more like a master in an English public school than an officer in the SIS. He wore an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a pair of brown corduroy trousers held up by red suspenders, a flannel shirt, and a stained silk tie. Not very tall, he looked lean and even more undernourished than Pearson, and he smelled strongly of tobacco. It was almost ten years since I had seen him but he hadn’t changed very much. He still looked shifty and guarded. Seeing me standing next to his untidy desk, Philby stood, smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Pearson.
“My God, Willard Mayer. What on earth are you doing here?”
“Hello, Kim. I’m with the OSS.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew this chap, Norman.”
“We’ve only just met,” said Pearson.
“I’m here for a week,” I explained. “Then it’s back to Washington.”
“Sit down. Make yourselves at home. Catherine! Could you bring us all some tea, please?”
Still smiling uncertainly, Philby surveyed me steadily.
“The last time I saw you,” I said, “you were getting married. At the town hall in Vienna.”
“February 1934. My God, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself.”
“How is Litzi?”
“Christ only knows. I haven’t seen her in a long time. We’re separated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We never really got on. Can’t think why I married her. She was too wild, too bloody radical.”
“Perhaps we all were.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I have Aileen now. Two children. A girl and then a boy. And another on the way, for my sins. Are you married, Will?”
“Not so far.”
“Sensible fellow. You played the field, as I recall. And usually won. So what brings you up here to the homely comforts of Section Nine?”
“Because I hear you’re the Russian expert, Kim.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Philby lit a cigarette and, tucking one hand underneath his armpit, smoked briskly. A ten-shilling note protruded from the none-too-clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. “But we have our moments of inspiration.”
The tea arrived. Philby glanced at his pocket watch, busied himself sorting out the chipped cups and saucers, and then, removing the lid, glanced inside the great brown enamelware pot, like the Mad Hatter looking for the dormouse. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, I said to myself, how I wonder what you’re at.
“I’m investigating the Katyn Forest massacre,” I said. “For President Roosevelt. And I was wondering if you had any insight as to what might happen now that the Russians are in possession of that region again.”
Philby shrugged and poured the tea. “I expect the Supreme Council will appoint some sort of extraordinary state commission to investigate crimes committed by the German Fascist invaders, or some nonsense like that. To prove it was all a dastardly plot cooked up by the Jerries to disturb the harmonious unity of the Allies.” He picked a piece of tobacco off his lip. “Which is no more than our own foreign secretary, Mr. Eden, said in the House of Commons a while back.”
“Saying it is one thing. Believing it is quite another.”
“Well, you’d probably know more about that than me, old boy.” He stirred his tea thoughtfully, like a man mixing paint. “But let’s see, now. The Ivans will appoint a bunch of academicians and authors to the commission. Someone from the Smolensk Regional Executive. A People’s Commissar for this or that. Someone from t
he Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Medical chap from the Red Army, probably. That kind of thing.”
I sipped the tea and found it too strong to be palatable. When they took away the pot, they’d probably use the dregs to paint a wooden fence. “Do you think the Soviets will invite anyone independent to join such a commission as you describe?”
“You put your finger right on it, Willard old boy. Independent. How is that independence to be guaranteed? The Germans have got their report. Roosevelt is going to have his. And now I expect the Russians will want theirs. I suppose people will have to make up their minds about what to believe. If you think in terms of global struggle, this kind of thing is inevitable. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the Russians are still our allies and we will have to learn to work with them if we are going to win this war.”
He seemed to have finished his analysis, and I stood up and thanked him for his time.
“Anything for our American cousins.”
Pearson added his thanks, and Philby said to me, “Norman is notable for being the least bewildered fellow in Grosvenor Square.” He’d brightened noticeably now that I’d said I was leaving. “We do our best not to be too dry or intimidating for you American chaps, but we cannot know how we seem. That we have survived unconquered thus far is because we have let nothing affect us. Not ration cards, not German bombs, no, not even the English weather—eh, Norman?”
Leaving Pearson at Broadway Buildings, I walked back across the park, pondering the renewal of my acquaintance with Kim Philby. I had known Harold “Kim” Philby for a brief period before the war. In late 1933, just down from Cambridge, Philby had arrived in Vienna on a motorcycle. Four years younger than me and the son of a famous British explorer, Philby had thrown himself into working for Vienna’s left-wing resistance, with little thought for his own safety. After nine Socialist leaders had been lynched by the Heimwehr, Austria’s right-wing, pro-Nazi militia, he and I had helped to hide wanted leftists until they could be smuggled out of the country to Czechoslovakia.
