Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  As The Times’s correspondent with Franco’s army, Philby was decorated by the Generalissimo himself and reviled by his former comrades of the left, many of whom were dying on the other side of the lines. A narrow escape from death when a Russian artillery shell killed three occupants of the car in which Philby was riding was not close enough as far as his former comrades were concerned. They could not know that he was serving the cause with as much valor and daring as they. Their contempt must have vexed Philby deeply, but he let his guard slip only once—when Eric Gedye, a journalist Philby had known and respected in Vienna, lamented to Litzi about the bad company into which her wayward husband had fallen. “Months later, when I’d forgotten the incident, she telephoned me out of the blue with a message from Kim,” Gedye recalled. “It was simply this: ‘Tell Eric not to be misled by appearances. I’m exactly what I’ve always been.’ ” The cryptic message was revealing only in retrospect. For some time to come, everyone would continue to be misled by appearances.

  So well had Philby changed his colors that had there been any concern over his ideological tendencies when he applied for work with British intelligence, it would have been over his Fascist, not his Communist, leanings. But there was no concern at all. Philby had gone to the right school, worked for the right newspaper, joined the right club. His father, the noted Arabist St. John Philby, was a personal acquaintance of two of the highest-ranking officers in MI6. As Colonel Valentine Vivian, deputy chief of MI6, put it, “I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people.”

  After a brief fling in propaganda operations, Philby joined Section Five of MI6, the counterespionage division of Britain’s secret service. From the start he was regarded as a comer. Graham Greene, the novelist, worked for him during the war and said that “no one could have been a better chief than Kim Philby…. He worked harder than anyone and never gave the impression of labor. He was always relaxed, completely unflappable.” Philby was considered so valuable that when The Times tried to hire him back, the Foreign Office, speaking for the officially nonexistent MI6, replied that “we should be bound to recommend most strongly against his removal from his present job…. His present work is so important, and he performs it with such ability that I am afraid his departure would be a real loss to us.”

  If “Philby was the most gifted of the British,” as one intelligence officer said, “Angleton was the most gifted of the Americans.” A fellow X-2 officer said that “Jim was a very respected American among our British counterparts. He was probably more on a basis of equality with his British counterparts than anybody.” Specifically, Angleton was permitted access to the jealously guarded ICE traffic, the intercepted messages in the German Abwehr code, which the British had succeeded in breaking. It was entirely natural that Angleton and Philby should gravitate toward one another. Although Angleton was five years Philby’s junior, they had much in common. Both had expatriate fathers—Angleton’s in Italy and Philby’s in Arabia—and both had been drawn toward establishment institutions—Angleton to Yale, Harvard Law, and the OSS; Philby to Cambridge, The Times, and MI6. In addition, they shared a fascination with counterintelligence—a fascination that in Philby arose from the necessities of his double life, and in Angleton stemmed from an intellectual predilection for the complex. According to one officer, “Philby was Angleton’s prime tutor in counterintelligence,” although the same might have been said about any number of Americans assigned to X-2 in London. In later years more than a little irony would attach to the fact that the Americans, and Angleton in particular, had studied the art of counterintelligence under the Soviet Union’s master penetration agent.

  The British enjoyed considerable success with their “double-cross” operations during World War II, capturing Nazi spies in England and turning them into double agents who both revealed the workings of German intelligence and sent back deliberately misleading information to Berlin. The intricacies of the double-cross system were described in an official report by John Masterman, who wrote that “the best agents for deception on a high-level are long-distance agents who have been carefully built up and who have served a long apprenticeship before any major deception is attempted through them.” During the apprenticeship, however, a double agent “is not an asset but a liability,” Masterman noted, for the buildup “process implies that he must communicate a great deal of true information.” The greater the desired deception, the higher the value of accurate intelligence that had to be given away in order to establish the agent’s “bona fides.” The challenge was to draw the balance so that the agent did “not give to the enemy information so valuable that it would be likely to outweigh any subsequent benefits which might accrue through him.”

  Masterman’s double-cross principles were as instructive for the detection of double agents as for their running. Although in the first instance an agent’s bona fides would be judged by the accuracy of the intelligence he provided, he could not be accepted as genuine on that basis alone. The value of his intelligence had to be weighed against whatever deception the enemy might be able to achieve if the agent were really a double agent. It was a most difficult calculation, since the nature of the deception could only be guessed at by assuming that it had to be worth more than the accurate intelligence the enemy was willing to give up. The more valuable the intelligence, the greater the potential deception would have to be. Carried to its logical extreme, the calculation became an absurdity, since it was always possible to conjure up a deception that was greater than the intelligence. Everything read backward, as in a mirror. The more valuable an agent’s service, the more reason to fear a deception. The greater the truth, in short, the bigger the lie. That paradoxical principle would serve as the bedrock of Angleton’s own counterintelligence theories for the next thirty years.

  Late in 1944 Angleton was dispatched to Italy to assume control of OSS counterintelligence operations as the Allied forces drove northward up the peninsula against the retreating German army. The Germans surrendered in May of 1945, and shortly afterward the OSS in Italy and elsewhere was disbanded. While officials in Washington bickered over the form that America’s peacetime espionage establishment would take, Angleton stayed on in Rome as commanding officer of a small caretaker organization called the 2677th Regiment of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). At the age of twenty-eight, he was the senior American intelligence officer in Italy. “He was a little bit too young for the job,” an SSU officer in Trieste thought. “I felt that perhaps he didn’t have the wherewithal to do the job.”

  The veterans of the OSS in Italy, mostly young toughs of Italian-American extraction who had spent the war in the trenches and in some cases behind enemy lines, did not know what to make of this Ivy League aesthete who had sat out the war in London. “He struck us right off the bat as weird,” one of them said. “The guy was just in another world.” At the SSU offices on the Via Archimede, Angleton’s would always be the lone light burning in the middle of the night. “I caught him one night,” an SSU officer recalled. “He had all these goddamn poetry books out.” When his light was not burning, Angleton might be found in Genoa, paying a visit to the expatriate Ezra Pound, who was being held on charges of treason for his wartime broadcasts of Fascist propaganda. Angleton quickly became known behind his back as “the Poet,” or, more derisively, as “the Cadaver” because of his emaciated appearance. The women in the office found this enigmatic wraith somewhat attractive. “Fatten him up and he’d look like Gregory Peck,” they said. If Angleton resembled Gregory Peck physically, spiritually he was a ringer for the Romantic poet John Keats. Like Keats, Angleton had come to Rome to die of tuberculosis. “Every day he was complaining he was dying of TB,” one of the SSU men said. “He had a premonition that within three years he’d be dead.”

  Whether that premonition was based on sound medical advice or on mere Romantic angst, there was nothing resigned or fatalistic about Angleton, who despite his failing health and poetic reveries easily dominated and intimidated those beneath him. “
Whenever you went to Rome to meet with Angleton, you found him propped up behind his desk facing you through two big stacks of papers,” an SSU officer from Milan recalled. “You would sit on a sofa across from the desk and he would peer at you through this valley of papers. The sofa had broken springs and as a result you were about two feet below his face. He always made you feel like this…. One of the qualities required to work for Angleton is detachable testicles…. He wants complete and absolute mastery over the minds of the people that work for him.” Angleton brooked no rivals, real or imagined. Max Corvo, a veteran of the OSS in Italy, related what happened when he returned to Rome as a civilian after the war. “Jim thoroughly suspected that I had been sent there either to undermine him or take over for him. He never hesitated to show his animosity. One of my wife’s friends who was stationed in Rome with SSU was fired on the spot because she associated with us…. He suspected everybody…. He would spend an hour and a half every morning going through his office to see if it had been bugged.”

  No matter what they thought of Angleton’s quirks, both superiors and subordinates agreed that he was a first-rate spy. Colonel William Quinn, head of the SSU, recalled his impression of Angleton during a trip through Austria, Switzerland, and Italy in the spring of 1946. “I was amazed at the breadth of his understanding and knowledge,” Quinn said. “I felt we really had a jewel.” In May of 1946 Angleton’s skills were recognized with a decoration personally bestowed by the king of Italy. “He really came up with some amazing things,” one officer said. Angleton later confided to a friend that he had ferreted out the secret correspondence between Hitler and Mussolini that was used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, as well as the exchange of letters between Stalin and Tito that foreshadowed their 1948 split. Through his close ties with the renascent Italian carabinieri—“He bribed all the police as they were being put back together,” one colleague said—Angleton, by his own account, acquired the Soviet instructions to the Italian Communists for supporting the civil war in Greece. Even a war-grizzled veteran who personally disliked the young upstart with his “brand-new trench coat and bright shiny second lieutenant bars” had to concede that “the guy was really damned good.”

  Angleton’s men fanned out through postwar Italy, recruiting agents at every level, a relatively simple task given the hold the conquering Americans had on the country’s political and economic future. Men who had lost everything in the war or who faced the prospect of languishing in a prison camp could easily be persuaded to cooperate. A major on the Italian General Staff told one of Angleton’s men that all he wanted from life was an assignment to Bulgaria, Rumania, or Turkey. His desires were relayed to Angleton, and “within six months this particular major became the military attaché in Istanbul,” an SSU officer said. “I imagine that a guy like that worked for the rest of his life for us.” A prominent banker from Milan was suddenly released from an internment camp and thereafter served as a conduit for secret payments to American agents in northern Italy. Another Italian was so indebted to the SSU that he allowed himself to be smuggled into Switzerland in the trunk of a car so that a plastic surgeon from Bern could give a more Oriental slant to his eyes before he was dispatched to the Far East as a long-range undercover agent.

  The Americans were not the only ones recruiting agents, and frequently the greatest challenge Angleton faced was keeping his newfound assets away from British and French intelligence operatives. When the head of German counterintelligence for northern Italy, Georg Sessler, surrendered his entire network, including his mistress, Angleton ordered the windfall kept from the British, who he feared would simply execute the Nazi spy. When the British found out about Sessler on their own, Angleton was forced to relinquish him to a prisoner-of-war camp, but before he could be brought to trial, the SSU arranged his escape by bribing his Italian jailers. The SSU gave Sessler a new identity, reunited him with his mistress, and established the couple as proprietors of a pension in the south of France. “He’s long-term,” an SSU officer said of the eternally grateful Sessler.

  With so many intelligence agencies shopping for agents, it was inevitable that some would sell their services to more than one bidder. The SSU had tapped a particularly rich vein by paying $100 a week to a code clerk in the Vatican for a daily synopsis of the intelligence reports sent in by the papal nuncios around the world. Each day an Italian newspaperman who served as the go-between would deliver an envelope containing the synopsis to a kiosk in the Piazza Bologna, where a second runner would pick it up and deliver it to the SSU offices. Suspicious about who else might be receiving copies of the synopsis, Angleton ordered an observation post set up in an apartment overlooking the piazza. “We watched the guy bring the envelope to the kiosk,” an SSU man recalled, “only some days it would be as many as three envelopes.” One of the extra envelopes was being picked up by a runner for the Russian Embassy. The SSU agents filmed the entire sequence from their observation post and delivered a tightly edited version to Myron Taylor, the American envoy to the Vatican, who arranged a private screening for Pope Pius XII. The next day “that clerk disappeared from the face of the earth,” an SSU officer said. “No trace.”

  Of all the sources Angleton tapped in Italy, perhaps the most valuable was the Jewish underground, which was organizing the exodus of survivors of the Holocaust through Italy to Palestine. Fighting for their very existence, the Jews had of necessity developed the most tenacious and most effective underground network in Eastern Europe. Angleton won their trust, establishing a bond that would give him special standing in the new state of Israel. One of Angleton’s Israeli confidants, Teddy Kollek, who many years later would become mayor of Jerusalem, explained the bond in an almost mystical way. “I believe Jim saw in Israel a true ally at a time when belief in a mission had become a rare concept,” Kollek wrote. “He found comparatively more faith in Israel, and more determination to act on that faith, than anywhere else in the world.” An American who worked closely with Angleton on Israeli affairs gave a more pragmatic explanation, saying that Angleton saw Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel as a pipeline through which the KGB could send its spies into the Middle East and even to the United States. The KGB was in a perfect position to blackmail Soviet Jews, agreeing to let them out but threatening reprisals against the family members left behind if the émigrés did not carry out their espionage missions. United in the common purpose of weeding out Soviet espionage agents, “the Israelis gave him their sources behind the Iron Curtain,” another officer said. “He got some sensational documents from these sources.”

  Angleton’s sources were of no use to him, however, when it came to spotting one Russian spy who in September of 1945 stood, quite literally, before his eyes. In later years Angleton would disclose to only a very few people that Kim Philby had stopped off to see him in Rome on his way back to London from Istanbul, where, it turned out, he had just completed one of the more ticklish missions of his double life.

  The mission had begun about a month before, when Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, called Philby into his office to evaluate a report that Konstantin Volkov, nominally a minor consular official but in reality the senior Soviet intelligence officer in Istanbul, wanted to defect. In return for money and asylum, Volkov was prepared to reveal the true names of two British spies inside the Foreign Office and a third who was a counterintelligence officer. Philby probably had some idea of who the two spies in the Foreign Office might be, and he certainly had no doubt about the identity of the counterintelligence officer. If Volkov were permitted to tell his story, Philby would surely be undone. “I stared at the papers rather longer than necessary to compose my thoughts,” he related years later in his memoirs. “I told the chief that I thought we were on to something of the greatest importance.” Philby said he needed “a little time to dig into the background” and would report to the chief with recommendations for action first thing the following morning.

  Ten days had already elapsed since Volkov first made contact
with the British Embassy in Istanbul, insisting that all communications be by diplomatic pouch because the Russians were able to decipher some of the British cable traffic. Playing for time, Philby alerted his Soviet handler to the impending disaster, then advised Menzies that Volkov’s warning against use of telegraphic communications required “that somebody fully briefed should be sent out from London to take charge on the spot.” Three days after word of Volkov’s approach had reached London, Philby was on a plane for Istanbul via Cairo. His arrival was delayed two days by an electrical storm that forced his plane to set down in Tunis, and another two days were wasted in Istanbul while he awaited the British ambassador’s personal approval to proceed.

  The plan for recontacting Volkov was a simple one. A British diplomat was to invite him to his office for a piece of routine consular business. Philby watched as the diplomat, whom he called Page, dialed the Soviet consulate. “Page’s face was a study in puzzlement, telling me that a hitch had developed. When he put the receiver down he shook his head at me…. ‘I asked for Volkov, and a man came on, saying he was Volkov. But it wasn’t Volkov. I know Volkov’s voice perfectly well. I’ve spoken to him dozens of times.’ Page tried again, but this time got no further than the telephone operator. ‘She said he was out,’ said Page indignantly. ‘A minute ago she put me on to him.’ ” The next day Philby and Page tried again. “I heard the faint echo of a woman’s voice, then a sharp click,” Philby related. “Page looked foolishly at the silent receiver in his hand. ‘What do you make of that? I asked for Volkov, and the girl said “Volkov’s in Moscow.” Then there was a sort of scuffle and slam, and the line went dead.’ ” Page made one more try, this time in person at the Soviet consulate. “Nobody’s ever heard of Volkov,” he fumed to Philby upon his return. The case was dead—and probably Volkov as well.