The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  The novel was released in London and New York in May 1943. Many reviewers were confused by the ambition of the book – they thought it too complex, but book-buyers had no such reservations: in Britain alone it sold eighteen thousand copies.4 Paramount British Productions bought the film rights just on the strength of the title.5 Decades later Greene recalled that he was ‘overjoyed’ to receive £10,000 for the rights. According to the contract, the price was £2,250.6 Presumably, he confused currencies – the pound was worth about four dollars in 1943.7 And perhaps the event loomed so large in memory that it felt like he had received £10,000.

  At the beginning of March 1943, Greene had returned to England and was thrust back into the old dilemmas. He visited Vivien and the children in Oxford, but spent little time there.8 He was often at the flats in Gower Mews and, from November 1943, at 18 Gordon Square, which he shared with Dorothy Glover. Vivien knew what was going on, but wanted the marriage to continue. They were certainly quarreling, and shortly after his return from Freetown a drunken Greene wrote to her from a pub that he had told many lies in his life and that he wished to die: ‘I hate life & I hate myself & I love you.’ In May he responded to a sad letter of hers by saying that he felt he had ‘fooled’ her: ‘I really feel that it would have been better for you if I’d been torpedoed or plane crashed’.9 This line of reasoning, that a bad husband’s death could be good for his wife, would re-emerge in The Heart of the Matter.

  Greene’s return from Africa triggered a number of extreme moods. Having seen a stage production of Brighton Rock in Oxford on 2 March, he was still incandescent two days later when he wrote a letter to his agent, Laurence Pollinger, saying he ‘was horrified by certain changes: these seemed to me to ruin the play for the sake of allowing Hermione Baddeley [as Ida] to fling a heart throb to the back of the gallery. She is a very bad piece of miscasting: her performance is on the overacted level of a revue sketch & her grotesqueness is all wrong for the part.’ The story itself had been stripped of its Catholic elements, including the priest’s closing speech about the ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’. This change violated his agreement with the producer, so Greene was prepared to seek an injunction and insisted that his name be removed from all advertising.10 When confronted by Pollinger with Greene’s demands, the producer backed down. The script was revised according to Greene’s wishes, and Hermione Baddeley reined in.

  The play, the novel, and the troubles in his marriage all mattered greatly to him and had to be dealt with after his long absence, but the return to England landed him in the middle of even greater complexities, which he seemed not to detect. Having often written about betrayal, he was now going to work beside men who turned out to be traitors.

  20

  CANARIES AND DEFECTORS

  Greene’s intelligence work in 1943–4 has been widely discussed, but the evidence concerning it is by its nature scant. He had been recalled from Freetown to work in the Iberian subsection of SIS Section V, which was dedicated to counter-intelligence. Since the summer of 1941 this subsection was headed by the penetration agent Kim Philby, who had been sending Greene his orders and had generally taken his side in the dispute with Lagos.

  Greene was put in charge of the Portugal desk in the Section V headquarters, first at Glenalmond House, an Edwardian mansion in St Albans in Hertfordshire, and then from late July 1943 at 14 Ryder Street, off St James’s Street, in London.1 Greene’s subsection had been expanded from two to six officers, each with his own territory; among them was a fellow Catholic, Arthur George Trevor-Wilson,2 who would later become Greene’s most trusted associate in Indochina.

  The key point about Greene’s work was that the supposedly neutral Salazar regime in Portugal, like that of Franco in Spain, was sympathetic to the Axis powers and allowed the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, to operate on its soil.3 However, the Salazar regime was not as openly pro-Nazi as the Spanish government, so Section V had to conduct itself more cautiously there for fear of driving them further into the Nazi camp.4 Spies being sent to Britain would often come via Portugal or Spain, and in theory MI6 would identify these people while still abroad and pass the information to MI5, which would pick them up once they arrived in Britain. The difference between counter-intelligence conducted by MI6 and the work of MI5 often boiled down to a question of territory. Hampered by rivalries with MI5, MI6 expanded its operations in Spain and Portugal.5

  What did Greene’s job involve? His first, very tiresome task was to produce a large index, known as a ‘Purple Primer’, of enemy intelligence officers, agents, and contacts in Portugal; Philby wrote an introduction; his deputy Tim Milne (nephew of A. A. Milne) updated and enlarged it, and later wrote in his memoir: ‘Perhaps this entitles me to go down in history as the co-author, with Graham Greene and H. A. R. Philby, of a volume privately published, in limited edition, with numbered copies.’6

  Much of Greene’s work would have involved signals intelligence, now called SIGINT.7 He would have processed two kinds of material from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park: ISK (‘Intelligence Services Knox’, named after Dilly Knox, who led the Enigma codebreakers); and ISOS (‘Intelligence Services Oliver Strachey’, named after the leader of the section breaking Abwehr hand ciphers).8 Whereas in Sierra Leone Greene was searching ships and making forays to the border, at St Albans he was tied to a desk, poring over intercepts, as well as a certain amount of intelligence from human sources – what is now referred to as HUMINT.

  In Milne’s recollection, Greene was not all that interested in intelligence work, especially as the Allies were becoming so dominant in the field. What got his attention was the plight of agents who suffered as a consequence of serving in SIS. For weeks, he ‘bombarded’ his colleagues with pleas for a man jailed in Lisbon and was also known for entertaining marginal comments on documents, as on a letter from an officer in Lisbon: ‘Poor old —, bashing about like a bull in a china shop, letting in great glimpses of the obvious.’9

  One man whom the subsection tracked carefully was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Philby proposed tossing a couple of grenades into his hotel room, but his superiors rejected this plan since they knew that Canaris was secretly opposed to Hitler, wanted an early peace, and might be counted on to lead a coup. Indeed, Philby’s desire to get rid of Canaris was precisely in line with Soviet plans to come as far west into Europe as possible, something a negotiated peace would prevent.10 As Philby’s subordinate, Greene harassed Canaris personally by sending word of his whereabouts to the Portuguese police.11 Arrested as part of von Stauffenberg’s plot against Hitler, Canaris was executed by garroting in April 1945.

  Greene was involved with running some double agents, among them one codenamed ‘Josef’, a Russian seaman who had been trained as a spy by the Soviets but then lost touch with them. MI6 ran him against the Japanese in Lisbon for two years, with Greene handling and interpreting much of the ISOS traffic relating to him. In the intelligence file for this case there is a curious correspondence between Greene and Richmond Stopford, one of Josef’s case officers, about a suspected spy aboard a ship headed to Britain who could be identified by the four canaries he had with him. In his letter of 29 December 1943, Greene, perhaps thinking of his children, added, ‘Your secretary has promised to reserve me one canary.’12 Tim Butcher wonders whether these canaries might have something to do with an effort by Greene and others to get around Philby and make contact with Canaris.13 The historian of intelligence Nigel West, however, thinks not.14 His view is, essentially, that even in the secret world sometimes the canaries are real.

  The Iberian subsection had some involvement in one of the war’s most important pieces of strategic deception – the ‘Garbo’ case. Greene’s own involvement in this affair was slight, but the story, and some others similar to it, remained with him and helped to shape the plot of Our Man in Havana. This complicated tale was unravelled by West.15 In January 1941, a Spaniard named Juan Pujol García, who hated Hitler, offered himself t
o the British embassy in Madrid as a willing spy against the Germans. Under orders to be discreet and to create no incidents, they sent him packing. Undaunted, he went to the German embassy and volunteered to go to Britain as a journalist and spy on their behalf. By October, he was in Portugal sending the Germans bogus reports, concocted with the aid of a Baedeker, a Bradshaw, and an Ordnance Survey map. In his first message, he claimed the assistance of a pilot with KLM – in fact, a KLM pilot was known to the British as a spy. In another message, his description of a convoy of ships from Liverpool to Malta bore a freakish resemblance to one that actually sailed. Intercepting these reports, British intelligence at first believed that an expert spy was at work. Pujol then contacted an American official in Lisbon who took him seriously, just as the British worked out that he was really operating from Portugal. He was taken by ship to Gibraltar then flown to England in April 1942. Having been originally codenamed ‘Bovril’, he was renamed ‘Garbo’ in tribute to his acting skills.

  Handled by Tomás Harris of MI5, he fed a great deal of false information to the Germans, and convinced them of the reality of his twenty-six invented sub-agents. He was a prized asset of German intelligence. Just before D-Day a message of his had great influence on the High Command, helping to convince them that landings at Normandy were a diversion and that the real attack would come at Pas de Calais. Indeed, that message, initialled by Field Marshal Jodl and presented to Hitler, helped to muddle German thinking at a key moment and so buy time for the invasion force. A hero to both sides, Juan Pujol García was secretly awarded both an MBE and an Iron Cross.

  During his time in Section V Greene struck up friendships with two of the five members of the Cambridge spy ring. His friendship with John Cairncross began in June 1943 with them taking the same train to St Albans. Greene asked the Scotsman what he was reading; it turned out to be England Made Me, which he was enjoying very much. Pleased, Greene described it as not bad. Cairncross kept talking and said there were better books by this author, such as The Power and the Glory. Getting the sense that his travelling companion was himself a writer, he asked whether he actually knew Graham Greene, to which came the reply, ‘I am Graham Greene.’16

  At St Albans, Cairncross was technically Greene’s subordinate but was shunted off to other work.17 A fondness developed between them, and Greene dubbed him ‘Claymore’. However, having been recruited by the Soviets in 1937, Cairncross was not a benign figure. Fluent in German, he was sent in 1942 to work on Ultra decrypts at Bletchley and provided the Soviets with thousands of documents, some of which contributed to their victory at the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. After about a year at Bletchley, he suffered eye strain and was moved to a job in SIS Section V. When the war was over, he entered the civil service and provided the Soviets with an array of sensitive military information, including nuclear secrets. Once Burgess and Maclean defected in 1951, Cairncross was suspected of treason and forced out of the civil service; he confessed to MI5 in 1964.18 Shortly after Anthony Blunt’s exposure in 1979, Cairncross was publicly identified as the fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring.19 In the 1980s he turned to Greene for help with a memoir and his problems of residency in France, sending him many long letters. Always sympathetic to outcasts and underdogs, Greene tried to help.

  On a day-to-day basis in 1943–4, Greene saw much more of Kim Philby than of John Cairncross. At first glance, Greene and the Cambridge spies seem to belong to the same class and generation, but Greene felt there were subtle differences: ‘All the five concerned were at Cambridge long after I was at Oxford. Generations at university go in three years. I belong to the 1922 generation and Kim and the others belonged to a much later one – at the beginning of the thirties. It was then apparent that Germany was the main threat and the hunger marchers were busy. It was more natural in the early thirties to side with our possible ally Russia.’20

  Convinced of the truth of Marxism at university, Philby was recruited by the NKVD in 1934. At the instruction of his controllers he reinvented himself as a man of the right, in 1937 going to Spain for The Times, where he wrote admiringly about Franco. Brought into the intelligence services by Guy Burgess, he moved to Section V in 1941, where he was given charge of the Iberian subsection. In the following year, he was also made responsible for Italy and North Africa, including Sierra Leone. While at St Albans he scoured the archives, especially the two-volume ‘Source Book’ detailing all SIS agents in the Soviet Union.21

  Intelligent and charismatic, Philby was popular with his colleagues. Greene enjoyed his company, recalling long boozy pub lunches on Sundays in St Albans, and other drinking sessions around St James’s. According to Greene, Philby went out of his way to hide the errors of his subordinates.22 Of course, his loyalty was strictly superficial, as he had laid bare the workings of Section V to his Soviet controllers; in their archives, even Greene has a codename, LORAN.23 A high-functioning alcoholic, Philby still managed to keep his own secrets, exercising an aloof charm that sometimes looked like intimacy. He could, however, be severe. A secretary walked into Greene’s office one day to find him in a fury. Asked what had happened, he replied, ‘I’ve just had a caning from the headmaster.’24

  With the war ending, German espionage was fading, and it was necessary to refocus counter-intelligence on the Soviets. Beginning on a small scale, with a retired MI5 officer in charge, a new unit, Section IX, was established for this purpose. Philby told his controllers what was going on, and they insisted that he get himself appointed head of this new section, a job that would ordinarily have gone to Felix Cowgill, the capable but sometimes cantankerous head of Section V.25 Philby began manoeuvring in March and finally got the appointment in September, while Cowgill was travelling in Italy. On his return, Cowgill protested in vain to ‘C’ (the chief of MI6, Stewart Menzies) and resigned shortly after. Philby was now in control of the efforts of MI6 against Soviet spies.

  In the midst of this plotting, Graham Greene left MI6. Indeed, his resignation coincided with D-Day, and it is difficult to understand how a trusted intelligence officer could leave the service at a crucial moment in the war. Twenty-four years later, Greene offered this account in his preface to Philby’s memoir, My Silent War:

  I saw the beginning of this affair [Section IX] – 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 I thought disagreeable. I am now glad that I was wrong. He was serving a cause and not himself, and so my old liking for him comes back.26

  Greene liked to deal in provocations – here he suggests that an ambitious bureaucrat is morally worse than a mole who sent many people to their deaths in the service of Stalin. Why did Greene leave at such an unlikely moment?

  One might speculate that Philby tried to recruit him as an agent, and Greene decided that he should quit rather than turn Philby in – or perhaps he reported Philby and was then removed from Section V to prevent word getting out. The problem with this suggestion, as Nigel West observes, is that Philby was highly unlikely to have attempted independent recruitment, having tried it once and been rebuked by the NKVD. And, indeed, he made no independent approach to Tim Milne, who would have been a more likely target.27 Philby was himself an intelligence asset of unsurpassed value and his controllers did not want him taking large risks for small rewards; Greene possessed no knowledge that was not available to Philby.

  Milne maintains that it is wrong to see Philby as trying to take over Section V in early 1944.28 In September 1943, Cowgill promoted Philby to a position from which he controlled much of Section V anyway, and Milne was made head of the Iberian subsection. By late winter Philby was focused on Section IX. A routine promotion was offered to Greene at about this time, and he took Philby, Milne, and an administrative officer to a pleasant lunch at the Café Royal to persuade them to leave him in his current post. In June, he resigned altogether.

  Two of Greene’s biographers have
suggested that he somehow saw into Philby’s mind and intuited betrayal.29 This is a sentimental, even fantastical, reading of the situation in an attempt to set up an interpretation of the character of Harry Lime in The Third Man – Greene had actually been describing betrayals of mentors and dominant friends since The Man Within, and having experienced Carter at school he did not need Philby to inspire that sort of fiction.

  For Tim Milne, the memory of those years became a very raw point. In his last interrogation by Nicholas Elliott before defecting in 1962, Philby said that he had suggested Milne to his controllers as a possible recruit but they rejected the idea. Although cleared and allowed to continue working in sensitive posts, Milne was mortified. He wrote a memoir of Philby, which was accepted for publication in 1979, but SIS refused its permission; Milne died in 2010 at the age of ninety-seven, and his family arranged for its publication four years later. In it he says that after seeing Greene’s account of his resignation, he took the matter up with him, and asked for details to substantiate the comments. Greene said he could remember nothing specific, just an impression of ambition and intrigue on the part of Philby.30 It is entirely possible, then, that Greene had read subsequent revelations about Philby into his memories of 1944.

  Simpler answers present themselves. Greene was a man easily bored. He had been doing desk work for a year at a very modest salary and was tired of it. Indeed, he never held a desk job for very long, always craving change, distraction, and stimulation. By 1 May 1944 the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office offered him a job with a promise to send him to France following the invasion.31 Accepting promotion at Section V would have increased the demands on his time and likely set up a post-war career in MI6, but, as we shall see in the next chapter, he already had a job waiting for him at the publishing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode.