Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Maclean fit all the known facts about the identity of source HOMER, but not enough facts were known to support a case against him. Finally the cryptanalysts succeeded in breaking out an additional piece of information from the intercepts: HOMER had met with his Soviet contact twice a week in New York on the pretext of visiting his pregnant wife, a pattern of activity that corresponded precisely with Maclean’s twice-a-week trips to see his pregnant wife, Melinda, who was staying in New York City with her American mother.

  It would take years to sort out the damage Maclean had done, but it was clear at once that his access to state secrets went far beyond the private communications between Churchill and Truman. According to a State Department document, Maclean had sat on a committee that “was an adjunct of the wartime British-American Combined Chiefs of Staff” and that dealt with “political and economic problems growing out of the joint conduct of the war.” Another document revealed that “Maclean had a thorough knowledge of one aspect of secret Anglo-American exchanges on the North Atlantic Pact.” Specifically, in the spring of 1948 Maclean had participated in a series of secret British-Canadian-American meetings to discuss “joining with France, the Benelux and perhaps other governments in negotiating mutual security arrangements to meet the danger of Soviet expansion.” The talks led ultimately to the creation of NATO. “If Maclean was then a Soviet agent,” the document continued, “the information he possessed concerning these talks would have been of considerable interest and some importance to the Soviet Government at that time.”

  There was more. Maclean had sat on another trilateral panel, which dealt with such fundamental atomic energy concerns as projected uranium needs and the availability of ore supplies. “Some of the information available to Maclean in 1947–48 was classified Top Secret and would then have been of interest to the Soviet Union,” a damage report conceded. He had also been issued a “nonescort” pass to the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission, a privilege not accorded even to the highest-ranking officers of the United States armed forces. When Hoover found out about that, he noted indignantly: “I was always required to have an escort.”

  As for purely British secrets Maclean had betrayed, that was a matter best left to his own government. However, one American document noted that Maclean’s supervision of the embassy code room had given him “access to all U.K. diplomatic codes and ciphers as well as the opportunity to scan all incoming and outgoing communications.” No wonder the luckless Volkov had warned the British Embassy in Istanbul that the Soviets were able to decipher cables sent to London.

  When he first fell under suspicion in the spring of 1951, Maclean was head of the Foreign Office’s American Department in London. He was placed under surveillance and denied further access to sensitive documents. Meanwhile, Burgess had arrived in London to face a disciplinary board for his indiscretions in the United States. The two were seen lunching together on several occasions.

  On Friday morning, May 25, 1951, the Foreign Office authorized MI5, the British equivalent of the FBI, to interrogate Maclean the following Monday. At almost precisely the same moment, Burgess was telling a young companion he had picked up during his transatlantic crossing that they might have to scrap their plans for a weekend in France. “A young friend of mine in the Foreign Office is in serious trouble,” he said. “I am the only one who can help him.” That afternoon, Burgess rented an Austin and drove to Maclean’s home in the outlying suburb of Tatsfield. MI5 sleuths tailed Maclean as he left his offices in Whitehall and walked to the Charing Cross station to catch the five-nineteen train, but they dropped their surveillance there for fear he would spot them. At eleven-forty-five that night, Burgess and Maclean pulled up to the slip at Southampton and boarded the cross-Channel night boat for Saint-Malo. A sailor shouted after them, asking what they planned to do about the Austin left on the pier. “Back on Monday,” they called. Later, a taxicab driver testified that he had driven two men resembling Burgess and Maclean from Saint-Malo to Rennes, where he thought they had caught a train for Paris. They were not seen again until 1956, when they appeared at a press conference in Moscow.

  Philby and Geoffrey Paterson, the MI5 representative in Washington, broke the news to the FBI’s Bob Lamphere, who had directed the American end of the search for HOMER. “They were both in a very embarrassing situation,” Lamphere recalled. “Paterson had been lying to me about where they were on the Maclean investigation,” giving no indication that it had progressed so far. As for Philby, Lamphere said, “he was wondering—as I later learned—whether we would put two and two together.” Philby apparently had not expected Burgess to accompany Maclean in his flight to Moscow. The dual disappearance had linked Philby to the case as one of only a handful of people who both knew Burgess and was aware of the suspicions against Maclean.

  Within hours of learning of Burgess’s disappearance, Philby buried his camera and the rest of his spy paraphernalia in the woods along the Potomac. Should he follow Burgess and Maclean into exile or remain in place and hope that no one would put the pieces together? “The problem resolved itself into assessment of my chances of survival, and I judged them to be considerably better than even,” Philby wrote later. “I enjoyed an enormous advantage over people like Fuchs who had little or no knowledge of intelligence work. For my part, I had worked for 11 years in the secret service…. For nearly two years I had been intimately linked to the American services…. I felt that I knew the enemy well enough to foresee in general terms the moves he was likely to make. I knew his files— his basic armament—and, above all, the limitations imposed on his procedures by law and convention.”

  The CIA’s dilemma was only slightly less perplexing than Philby’s. The Agency could not comfortably share its secrets with someone so indiscreet as to open his house to the egregious Burgess. Yet the mere fact that Philby had befriended Burgess hardly seemed sufficient grounds upon which to repudiate the official representative of MI6, embittering relations with the British and, in the bargain, damaging a man’s career—a brilliant one, at that. The situation was ready-made for equivocation and procrastination. Philby’s tour in Washington was due to end in a few months in any event. But the new Director of the CIA confronted the problem head-on.

  General Walter Bedell Smith, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s former chief of staff, whom Churchill had nicknamed “the American Bulldog,” had not asked to be CIA Director. In fact, he had twice turned down the job. Truman, disturbed by the onslaught of McCar-thyism at home and angered by the CIA’s failure to provide a warning of the Communist attack in Korea, had persisted. “As you know, I wanted to avoid the Intelligence job if possible,” Smith wrote to Eisenhower, “but in view of the general situation, and particularly the Korean affair, I did not feel I could refuse for a third time.” Smith’s reluctance was based not on a yearning for retirement after five years of war and three years as the American ambassador to Moscow but on prior acquaintance with the organization he was inheriting. Writing his friend George Allen, the American ambassador to Yugoslavia, Smith had but one favor to ask. “I assume you have in Belgrade, as we did in Moscow, some of the personnel in whom I will shortly have a direct interest. I would be grateful for your personal and secret estimate of their capabilities and qualifications. My experience in Moscow was not particularly reassuring.” To another friend he wrote simply, “I expect the worst and know I won’t be disappointed.

  As apprehensive as he was, Smith could not have anticipated the ferocity of the CIA’s running feud with the FBI. Shortly after Smith took over, Hoover learned that CIA officers had called on Bureau representatives in Mexico, Spain, and Italy to protest FBI usurpation of CIA jurisdiction abroad. Sensing a plot, the ever-suspicious Hoover immediately dispatched one of his agents to inform Smith that the FBI would not stand for such a brazen bureaucratic power play. “Smith became angry because the lowly FBI was telling him to go fuck himself,” the agent recalled. “He was so mad that when he tried to lift his coffee cup it was shaking so badly he had t
o put it down. He said, ‘I’ve got a good mind to throw you out of my office.’ I said, ‘General, neither you nor any man in your Agency is man enough to throw me out.’ Twenty minutes after I got back to the Bureau a handwritten message arrived from Smith inviting Hoover to lunch. Hoover told me to accept.” Lyman Kirkpatrick, then Smith’s executive assistant, was present for the lunch and recalled Smith saying, “Edgar, suppose you tell us what’s wrong. Why can’t we seem to get along?” “Well, General,” Hoover replied, “the first thing wrong is all these ex-Bureau people over here sniping and proselytizing, and in particular Bill Harvey.”

  Harvey was sternly counseled not to do or say anything in the future that might offend the prickly FBI Director, but the incident seemed only to enhance his stature within the CIA, for Smith would rely upon him heavily in dealing with the Philby dilemma. He began by directing Harvey, Angleton, and everyone else who had known Burgess to write down everything they knew about the missing diplomat.

  On June 18 Angleton handed in a four-page top-secret memo describing a number of Burgess’s more eccentric moments, including the night at Philby’s when he “drew an insulting caricature of one of the female guests and precipitated a social disaster.” Angleton also related an encounter with Burgess in a Georgetown restaurant. “Subject appeared unexpectedly and asked the undersigned for the loan of a few dollars,” he reported in his best bureaucratese. “He wore a peculiar garb, namely a white British naval jacket which was dirty and stained. He was intoxicated, unshaven and had, from the appearance of his eyes, not washed since he last slept. He stated that he had taken two or three days’ leave and had ‘an interesting binge’ the night before at Joe Alsop’s house…. [Burgess] ordered a drink of the cheapest Bourbon available” and babbled on about a scheme to import several thousand British naval jackets of the kind he was wearing and “sell them for fantastic profits to exclusive shops in New York.” Burgess was an automotive buff, Angleton continued, and “he pressed [me] for a date when [we] might meet in order that he might test the overdrive on the Oldsmobile.”

  As for Burgess’s relationship with Philby, Angleton noted that “Philby had consistently ‘sold’ subject as a most gifted individual. In this respect, he has served as subject’s apologist on several occasions when subject’s behavior has been a source of extreme embarrassment in the Philby household. Philby has explained away these idiosyncrasies on grounds that subject suffered a severe brain concussion in an accident which had continued to affect him periodically.”

  Angleton went on to point out that Philby’s secretary “had enjoyed a special relationship” with Burgess, but the memo stopped well short of drawing any sinister conclusions from the facts which it reported. Angleton’s memo did “not suggest any suspicion of Philby,” said a CIA officer who studied it closely. “It related two or three incidents, the bottom line of which was that you couldn’t blame Philby for what this nut Burgess had done.”

  By that point, however, Angleton’s memo was irrelevant. Five days earlier, Harvey had submitted a top-secret memo of his own, pointing out that not only was Philby close to Burgess and aware of Maclean’s peril, but he was also the officer who had presided over the abortive defection of Volkov in Istanbul. Kim Philby was a Soviet agent, the very counterintelligence officer Volkov had tried to tell the British about, Harvey concluded. Philby had sent Burgess to warn Maclean that he had been found out.

  Harvey would later tell friends that it had come to him as he sat stalled in traffic one morning on his way to work. That moment in which the anomalies in Philby’s career resolved into a pattern of betrayal where others could see only untoward coincidence had been hard earned. It had come from years of working with the files so that an isolated incident like the Volkov affair could lodge somewhere in the back of his mind to be recalled when new developments suddenly gave it meaning. It had come from the Bentley and Hiss cases, which had convinced him that good breeding was not a bar to treason—and in fact was a positive incentive. It had come from the social snubs, real or imagined, that fed his distrust of the establishment. And finally it had come from the obscene insult to his wife, which had fixed the relationship of Philby and Burgess with outraged clarity in his mind.

  Smith forwarded Harvey’s and Angleton’s memos to MI6 in London with a cover letter stating that Philby was no longer welcome as the British liaison officer in Washington. Working from Harvey’s premise, MI5 compiled a dossier against Philby, listing his left-wing youth, his marriage to Litzi Friedman, his sudden conversion to Fascism, Krivitsky’s warning about the British journalist in Spain, Volkov’s abortive defection, and the flight of Burgess and Maclean. “I have toted up the ledger and the debits outnumber the assets,” the head of MI5 informed the CIA.

  Philby played his part with customary élan, readily conceding that his association with Burgess had forever destroyed his usefulness to Her Majesty’s secret service, but steadfastly denying that he was guilty of anything more than bad judgment. He understood that no matter how persuasive the circumstantial evidence, the case against him could not be proved so long as he did not break down and confess. Even the knowledge that by now the United States had succeeded in decoding Russian cables containing his Soviet cryptonym did not shake Philby, for he correctly judged that neither the CIA nor MI6 would ever reveal such sensitive intelligence information.

  Without a confession the official verdict against Philby could go no further than “guilt unproven but suspicion remaining.” Nevertheless, the career of the man Allen Dulles called “the best spy the Russians ever had” was effectively ended, and pop-eyed Bill Harvey, the “odd man out” in the world of CIA sophisticates, deserved a major share of the credit. Cut loose from the service, Philby would drift for several years in a limbo of failed business ventures and hack writing jobs, consuming greater amounts of alcohol and earning lesser sums of money. Finally he would catch on as a low-level British agent operating under journalistic cover in the Middle East, but never again would he be in a position to betray the West’s most closely held secrets.

  He had done enough as it was, although the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union had been so uniformly unsuccessful that it was difficult to determine precisely which failures to blame on Philby. He had been privy to the details of a disastrous Anglo-American attempt to foment an uprising against the puppet Soviet regime in Albania, but Mike Burke, the CIA officer who had directed the operation from Italy, flatly asserted that “the operation would not have succeeded regardless of Philby.” Harry Rositzke, the CIA officer in charge of dropping agents behind the Iron Curtain, said that Philby “learned a great deal about our air operations,” but he quickly added that the obstacles to inserting an agent successfully into the police-state confines of the Soviet Union were overwhelming, with or without Philby. The operations Philby had been briefed on were a matter of record, but there was no telling what his many friends in the CIA and the FBI had let slip in the course of conversation. “Philby turned out to be very embarrassing to [a number of] senior officers who had told him a lot of stuff they never should have told him,” a CIA man said.

  No one had known Philby better or spent more time with him than Angleton. By the time Philby arrived in Washington in 1949 as the MI6 liaison officer, Angleton had become what Philby called “the driving force of OSO”—the CIA’s Office of Special Operations. Angleton seemed to be everywhere at once—orchestrating covert action against the Communists in Italy, cementing CIA ties with the Jewish leaders in Palestine, tracking down counterintelligence leads left over from the Bentley case—and such a broad mandate inevitably entailed frequent contacts with MI6. In addition, Philby said, “a genuine friendliness” existed between himself and Angleton. Philby claimed that he manipulated this rapport to “string him along … provoke Angleton into defending, with chapter and verse, the past record and current activities” of CIA assets. Even as he was being recalled to London for interrogation, Philby said, he was able to pass “a pleasant hour in a bar” with An
gleton, who “did not seem to appreciate the gravity of my personal situation.” If that was true, it was the second time that Angleton had met with Philby in the midst of a major crisis in the spy’s career. The first time had been in Rome in 1945, following the abortive Volkov defection. Neither time had he given the slightest indication that he suspected anything untoward.

  After Philby had been unmasked, Angleton would claim to have had his doubts about him all along. Two of Angleton’s closest friends would support that contention, but three CIA officers who reviewed the Philby file in depth insisted that Harvey was the first to point the accusing finger. Angleton explained the absence of documentary evidence to support his claim by saying that one did not put in writing something so sensitive as suspicions about the loyalty of a trusted member of a friendly intelligence service. An officer who had examined the record insisted that “Philby was the greatest blow Angleton ever suffered.”

  Angleton was not the only intelligence officer to have been duped by Philby. Until the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, everybody had been taken in. Even then, Harvey was the only American to put the pieces together, and he had been assisted by a special source of intelligence: the decoded Soviet messages. Harvey had learned about the intercepts while still at the FBI and had somehow contrived through his Bureau friends to continue reading the traffic even though the CIA had not yet been told about the code break. The decoded passages were too fragmentary to provide any hard evidence against Philby, but there was enough there to reinforce the suspicions aroused by the Volkov affair and the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Since he was not supposed to have access to the intercepts, Harvey could make no mention of them in his memo.

  Angleton, too, had a special source of intelligence on Philby. Like so many other things in Angleton’s career, this special source stemmed from his Israeli connection. Teddy Kollek had first met Philby in Vienna during the traumatic months in which he switched his allegiance to the Soviet camp. Kollek had a keen awareness of Philby’s left-wing ties. According to one account, he had actually been present at Philby’s marriage to the Communist Litzi Friedman. When Kollek arrived in the United States in 1949 as a member of a purchasing mission for the new State of Israel, he renewed his acquaintance with Philby and struck up a friendship with Angleton, the CIA man handling the Israeli account. Like everyone else meeting Angleton for the first time, Kollek was fascinated. “Jim is by no means an ordinary person,” he recalled. “He is an original thinker…. He liked to sit up talking until four or five in the morning and often spoke in riddles that you had to interpret or feel, rather than analyze with cold logic.” It was from Kollek, Angleton later said, that he first learned of Philby’s left-wing youth and his short-lived marriage to Litzi Friedman.