I was more fortunate than many my last night in Cuba, for a messenger came to fetch me from dinner and I was able to spend the early hours with him in a house on the outskirts of Havana. As soon as we sat down. Fidel began to describe to me, compulsively as though he needed a stranger in order to taste the pleasure of recounting his story again, how on his last journey he had entered a small pueblo after dark and noticed there were no lights in the streets – only in the house of the Party. In a bar two men sat playing dominoes and he sat down with them and joined the game. The rumour of his presence spread and the villagers gathered. They demanded a speech. (I was reminded how an intellectual had told me that in 1965, the bad year of drought and political uncertainty, Fidel had not spoken once between July 26, the National Day, and October, and how people had become nervous and unsettled by his silence.) In this pueblo he told them he would return another day to speak: now he wanted to ask questions . . . the shrewd humorous Socratic eyes looked me quickly over . . . he discovered why there were no lights in the street, how far a man had to walk to get his shoes repaired, how deeply dependent they were upon a town some fifteen kilometres away . . . they were small details, probably familiar to any country dweller, but most of his adult years have been spent in war, prison or exile. Now at forty he is really beginning to live. I had sometimes wondered how he would fare with the heroic days in the Sierra Maestre over, but perhaps the heroic days for him are only just beginning.
He spoke about that pueblo for more than half an hour: I would interrupt with a question and he would stop in mid-sentence, replying quickly and without hesitation, then pick up the unfinished phrase exactly where it had been left. He would change in a flash from the sly humorous observer to the enthusiast. If I had not missed him in the Isla Turiguano, if I had been with him in the country, I would have seen what he saw, I would have been present at the birth of his idea. It had come to him suddenly there, over the dominoes . . .
He intended to make an experiment in this remote pueblo. The inhabitants would be removed from their dependence on the town. Everything they needed would be provided free of charge. Their houses would be free (already in his speech of August 29 he had foreseen the universal abolition of rents in 1970), they already had a primary school – a secondary school would be built, they would have their own generator of electricity, there would be a nursery for the children and a communal restaurant free of charge which would relieve the women of most work in the home (‘In my opinion this will help many marriages to last’), there would be a free cinema twice a week, a cobbler cobbling free. Money would not be abolished, but the need of money would practically disappear. Socialism in one country had been tried elsewhere. This would be Communism in one pueblo. Sociologists and psychologists would watch the experiment. How would the people use their greater leisure? Would productivity rise or fall? And if the experiment didn’t work? If productivity didn’t rise? ‘We shall have to think again.’ How seldom have Communist leaders allowed that degree of doubt in any plan?
Fidel is a Marxist, but an empirical Marxist, who plays Communism by ear and not by book. Speculation to him is more important than dogma, and he rejoices in the name of heretic. ‘We belong to no sect, we belong to no international freemasonry, to no church. We are heretics, yes, heretics – fine, let them call us heretics.’ And again in the same speech: ‘If there exists a Marxist-Leninist party which knows by heart all the “Dialectic of History” and everything written by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and still does not do a damned thing about it, are others obliged to wait and not make revolution?’ He sees Communism, elsewhere becoming conservative and bureaucratic – revolution dying on an office desk within tightly drawn national frontiers. (I suggested to him that Russia was now nearer to a managerial revolution than a Communist one. He had not read James Burnham’s book, but a note was made to buy it.)
In his turn he listened, with sympathy, while I argued for the possibility, not of a mere chilly co-existence, but of cooperation between Catholicism and Communism. On both sides the philosophy of Marx forms a wide area of disagreement, but this man will never allow a nineteenth-century philosophy to stand between him and any action to advance the economic aims of Communism. Of the Papal Nuncio in Cuba he spoke in terms of warm friendship and respect. Just across the water lie the great impoverished areas of South America – poverty and riches in revolutionary juxtaposition – vast opportunities for Communist expansion denied to Russia in Europe. Catholicism in Cuba has always been a religion of the bourgeoisie and so without deep roots: the religion of the peasant is Afro-Christian – Ogoune and Erzulie and Legba share their altars as in Haiti with a Christian god. But in South America, with the possible exception of Brazil, the Catholic Church is the natural religion of the peasant, and if Communism is to be imported from Cuba, Fidel will not appear in South America as the persecutor of the Church. Nor would it be his wish. The enemies of the Church in Cuba are not the Communist leaders: they are Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Fulton Sheen, those doughty champions of cold war and counter-revolution, churchmen for whom Pope John XXIII seems to have lived in vain.
As Russia drifts towards state capitalism and China towards some fantastic variant of her own (Granma has been mercilessly funny about the cult of Mao Tse Tung), Cuba may well become the real testing ground of Communism. There is something of the Athenian forum here – the island is small enough for the people to be consulted, informed, confided in: they can see their leaders day by day in the streets of their towns and villages. Those four-hour speeches of Fidel are not made up of evasions and oratorical tricks and big abstract words – they are full of information, down to earth, filled with detail; from them we learn the worst, more than from any enemy, because he trusts his people – the ‘appalling’ situation in Moa, the lack of sewerage in Nueva Geron. His speeches are nearer to Cobbett than Churchill and in my opinion the greater for that. The enormous will to educate is there, as in the new schools and technical colleges which are transforming the countryside. Nor does Fidel lay down decisions already taken: he announces mistakes, he describes dreams which may later prove to be mistakes: he is the revolutionary brain visibly in action, like one of those glass-sided clocks in which you can see the wheels in motion. A girl said to me with excited anticipation as Fidel began to speak on August 29; ‘We never know what he may say.’ The same is hardly true of our politicians.
This man, so Pauline in his labours and in his escapes from suffering and death, has a quality of generosity which calls for loyalty. (Of the original twelve followers who reached the Sierra Maestre two have died but none has defected.) A young minister, at the time in charge of agriculture, made a bad administrative blunder which deprived Havana temporarily of milk. Fidel told him that if he respected himself he would go into voluntary exile to the Isle of Pines. He went for six months and worked there on a farm. ‘What would have happened.’ I asked, ‘if you had not gone?’ ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘but I would have felt outside the revolution.’
‘All nerves are strung for the future, and prepared to enjoy the present’. Sir Walter Scott wrote of a very different revolution. ‘All?’ no, not all. Two American planes a day coming from Miami arrive at Veradero, the holiday resort outside Havana, and are filled with refugees who are brought to the airport in Leyland buses. Twice a week the Iberian airlines, which have arrived in Havana almost empty, depart with every seat filled, both first class and tourist. Anyone not of military age (else young Cubans might be called up for the army in Vietnam) is free to leave with one bundle or suitcase. A sympathetic visitor like myself lives, of course, in the bright sunlight of the revolution; these Cubans who have chosen exile must have seen the shadows, some of them perhaps imaginary, some of them real enough.
1966
3. The Spy
ESPIONAGE today is really a branch of psychological warfare. The main objective is to sow mistrust between allies in the enemy’s camp. Fuchs and Nunn May may have enabled Russia to advance their manufacture of atomic bombs b
y a few years, but sooner or later in any case the Soviet would have reached sufficient parity in the ability to destroy the world and the interval, whether short or long, contained no real danger. The West, after the traumatic shock of Hiroshima, was not prepared to make another unilateral atomic attack.
The real value of the two scientists to the Soviet was not the benefit they received from their scientific information but from their capture, and the breakdown in Anglo-American relations which followed. A spy allowed to continue his work without interference is far less dangerous than the spy who is caught. How right SIS was to defend Philby and how wrong MI5 to force him into the open. The West suffered more from his flight than from his espionage.
I sometimes like to imagine what would have occurred if Kim Philby had in fact, as many foretold, become C, the Chief of the Secret Service. The kind of information he would have had at his disposal as C could hardly have increased greatly in interest, and it might even have diminished: no nuts and bolts, only the minutes of great vacuous high-level conferences. The moment would certainly have arrived sooner or later when the KGB thought it time to arrange a tip-off to MI5, followed by C’s successful flight and the world’s laughter.
Since espionage has taken to psychological warfare, it has taken, too, to literature, so that it is just as well to examine carefully any spy memoirs. All the same My Silent War is not the book which Kim Philby’s enemies anticipated. His autobiography is an honest one, well written, often amusing, and the story he has to tell, after the flight of Burgess and Maclean, is more gripping than any novel of espionage I can remember. We were told to expect a lot of propaganda, but it contains none, unless a dignified statement of his beliefs and motives can be called propaganda. The end, of course, in his eyes is held to justify the means, but this is a view taken, perhaps less openly, by most men involved in politics, if we are to judge them by their actions, whether the politician be a Disraeli or a Wilson. ‘He betrayed his country’ – yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country? In Philby’s own eyes he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit. Anyway moral judgements are singularly out of place in espionage. ‘He sent men to their death’ is the kind of stock phrase which has been used against Philby and Blake. So does any military commander, but at least the cannon fodder of the espionage war are all volunteers. One cannot reasonably weep at the fate of the defecting spy Volkov, who was betraying his country for motives perhaps less idealist than Philby’s.
Like many Catholics who, in the reign of Elizabeth, worked for the victory of Spain, Philby has a chilling certainty in the correctness of his judgement, the logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments. How many a kindly Catholic must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope of the future as a riding anchor. Mistakes of policy would have had no effect on his faith, nor the evil done by some of his leaders. If there was a Torquemada now, he would have known in his heart that one day there would be a John XXIII. ‘It cannot be very surprising that I adopted a Communist view point in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made their choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course”. Philby writes, and he demands fairly enough what alternative there could possibly be in the bad Baldwin-Chamberlain era. ‘I saw the road leading me into the political position of the querulous outcast, of the Koestler-Crankshaw-Muggeridge variety, railing at the movement that had let me down, at the God that had failed me. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative it might have been.’
His account of the British Secret Service is devastatingly true. ‘The ease of entry surprised me. It appeared later that the only inquiry made into my past was the routine reference to MI5, who passed my name through their records and came back with the laconic statement: “Nothing recorded Against”.’ (He was luckier than I was. I had a police record, for in a libel action brought against me by Miss Shirley Temple the papers had been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the trace had therefore to be submitted to C himself.) There was even a moment when Philby wondered whether it really was the Secret Service which he had entered. His first factual reports inclined his Soviet contact to the view that he had gone into the wrong organization.
His character studies are admirable if unkind. Don’t talk to me of ghost writers: only Philby could have been responsible for these. Anyone who was in Section V will agree with his estimate of its head. Felix Cowgill, whom he was to displace. ‘Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He was one of those pure souls who denounce all opponents as “politicians”.’ The Deputy Chief of the Secret Service is immediately recognizable. ‘Vivian was long past his best – if, indeed, he had ever had one. He had a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and wet eyes.’ To C himself, Brigadier Menzies, Philby is unexpectedly kind, though perhaps the strict limitations of his praise and a certain note of high patronage would not have endeared the portrait to the subject. For Skardon, the MI5 interrogator who broke Fuchs down, he has a true craftsman’s respect.
If this book required a sub-title I would suggest: The Spy as Craftsman. No one could have a better chief than Kim Philby when he was in charge of the Iberian section of V. He worked harder than anyone and never gave the impression of labour. He was always relaxed, completely unflappable. He was in those days, of course, fighting the same war as his colleagues: the extreme strain must have come later, when he was organizing a new section to counter Russian espionage, but though then he was fighting quite a different war, he maintained his craftsman’s pride. He was determined that his new section should be organized better than any other part of the ramshackle SIS. ‘By the time our final bulky report was ready for presentation to the Chief, we felt we had produced the design of something like a service, with enough serious inducements to tempt able young men to regard it as a career for life.’ He set about recruiting with care and enthusiasm. ‘The important thing was to get hold of the good people while they were still available. With peacetime economies already in sight, it would be much easier to discard surplus staff than to find people later to fill in any gaps that might appear.’ No Soviet contact this time would be able to wonder whether he had penetrated the right outfit. A craftsman’s pride, yes, and of course something else. Only an efficient section could thoroughly test the security of the Russian service. It was a fascinating manoeuvre though only one side knew that it was a mock war.
The story of how, to attain his position, he eliminated Cowgill makes, as he admits, for ‘sour reading, just as it makes sour writing’ – one feels for a moment the sharp touch of the icicle in the heart. I saw the beginning of this affair – indeed I resigned rather than accept the promotion which was one tiny cog in the machinery of his intrigue. I attributed it then to a personal drive for power, the only characteristic in Philby which I thought disagreeable. I am glad now that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself, and so my old liking for him comes back, as I remember with pleasure those long Sunday lunches at St Albans when the whole sub-section relaxed under his leadership for a few hours of heavy drinking, and later the meetings over a pint on fire-watching nights at the pub behind St James’s Street. If one made an error of judgement he was sure to minimize it and cover it up, without criticism, with a halting stammered witticism. He had all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and of course his big loyalty was unknown to us. I find it not the least admirable of Philby’s human qualities that for all those dangerous years he put up with Burgess, without nerve or humour failing him, or his affection.
Some years later, after his clearance by Macmillan in the House of Commons, I and another old friend of Kim were together in Crowborough and we thought to look him up. There was no sign of any tending in the overgrown garden and no answer
to the bell when we rang. We looked through the windows of the ugly sprawling Edwardian house, on the borders of Ashdown forest, in this poor man’s Surrey. The post hadn’t been collected for a long time – the floor under the door was littered with advertising brochures. In the kitchen there were some empty milk bottles, and a single dirty cup and saucer in the sink. It was more like an abandoned gypsy encampment than the dwelling of a man with wife and children. We didn’t know it, but he had already left for Beirut – the last stage of his journey to Moscow, the home which he had never seen. After thirty years in the underground surely he had earned his right to a rest.
1968
[4]
PORTRAIT OF A MAIDEN LADY
READING No Place Like Home by Beverley Nichols I found myself thinking of Guy Walsingham, the author of Obsessions, in Henry James’s The Death of a Lion. It will be remembered how Mr Morrow, of The Tatler, interviewed her, for Guy Walsingham was a woman, just as Dora Forbes, author of The Other Way Round, was a man. ‘A mere pseudonym’ – that was how Mr Morrow put it – ‘convenient you know, for a lady who goes in for the larger latitude.’
A confusing literary habit, which led me to wonder a little about the author of No Place Like Home. For all I know Mr Nichols may be another Mr Walsingham. A middle-aged and maiden lady, so I picture the author, connected in some way with the Church: I would hazard a guess that she housekeeps for her brother, who may be a canon or perhaps a rural dean. In that connexion she may have met the distinguished ecclesiastics who have noticed a previous book so kindly. (‘The chapter on Sex’, writes a dean, ‘is the best sermon on the subject I have ever read.’) She is not married, that I am sure, for she finds the sight of men’s sleeping apparel oddly disturbing: ‘It was almost indecent, the way he took out pyjamas and shook them’, and on her foreign holiday, described in this book, she hints – quite innocently – at a Man. ‘His knowledge was encyclopaedic. His name was Paul. He was about forty-five. We had better leave it at that.’
Collected Essays Page 33
