A Spy Among Friends

by Ben MacIntyre

  *

  The work of Section V, battling German espionage around the world, was fascinating, complicated, and frequently frustrating. ‘For every lead that produced results,’ wrote Philby, ‘a dozen lured us tortuously into dead ends.’ Elliott found the ‘monstrous’ volume of paperwork – an essential part of intelligence – particularly tedious, and tried to emulate Philby’s brisk memo-writing style, ‘a model of economy and lucidity’. The officers of Section V might complain about the hours, but they formed a tight-knit group, with their own bonding rituals and routine: Sunday lunch at the Philbys’, cricket at weekends, drinks at the King Harry, a club dinner in London from time to time, and occasional weekends at Eton. ‘I had the advantage of being able to invite these friends to spend a night from time to time with my parents, who were fortunate enough to have some old retainers to help cope with a very large house,’ wrote Elliott.

  Philby seemed to be working twice as hard as anyone else, which was unsurprising, since he was working for two masters or, more precisely, appearing to serve one, for the benefit of the other. As Philby’s influence on British intelligence grew, so did his importance to the Soviets. Moscow Centre sent a message to its London rezident, describing Sonny as ‘an interesting and promising agent’ and ordering that he be put to greater use. Philby responded with devoted diligence. On night duty in Broadway, he combed incoming telegrams for anything of interest to the NKVD; messages between London and the military mission in Moscow were ‘especially valuable’. He described everyone in Section V with waspish precision. Elliott was not the only colleague who would have been shocked to discover Philby’s secret opinion: his boss Felix Cowgill had ‘few social graces’; his school friend Tim Milne was ‘inclined towards inertia’; Trevor Wilson, the former skunk-dung collector, had a ‘weakness [for] women’, and young Desmond Bristow was ‘the weak link . . . owing to immaturity and inferior brain’.

  Every evening, Philby took home a ‘fat briefcase’, and sat in his study laboriously copying out files, while Aileen cooked dinner and looked after the children. He even reported on Aileen, like some commissar assessing the ideological weakness of his nearest kin: ‘Her political views are Socialistic, but like the majority of the wealthy middle class, she has an almost ineradicable tendency towards a definite form of philistinism (petite bourgeoisie) namely: she believes in upbringing, the British navy, personal freedom, democracy, the constitutional system, honour etc . . . I am certain that I can cure her of these confusions, although of course I haven’t yet attempted to do so; I hope that the revolutionary situation will give her the necessary shake-up and cause a correct revolutionary response.’ Marriage, family, friendships: all were subservient to the demands of revolutionary orthodoxy.

  Philby did whatever his Soviet controllers asked, although he found it ‘difficult, exhausting and often very ordinary, even boring work that required enormous patience, will power and control’. It was also nerve-racking. Philby suffered ‘twinges of panic’, his controller reported, which was hardly surprising, since he was playing an astonishingly precarious game. If just one Soviet intelligence officer switched sides and identified him to the British secret service, he was doomed. One had very nearly done so.

  In 1937, a Soviet intelligence officer named Walter Krivitsky had defected to the West, bringing with him a dowry of top-level intelligence, including the identities of no fewer than seventy Soviet intelligence personnel working abroad. Krivitsky’s defection had led to the arrest and trial of John King, Elliott’s former coding instructor. But much of his information was contradictory and fragmentary. In 1940 he was debriefed by the MI5 officer Jane Archer, in St Ermin’s Hotel, where Philby had been recruited to MI6. The interview did not start well when Krivitsky (alias ‘Mr Thomas’) was offered a saccharin tablet for his tea (sugar was rationed). He immediately assumed this was a poisoned pill and that he was being murdered by the British secret service, albeit rather obviously, and very politely. Once that moment of social embarrassment had passed, Krivitsky opened up and revealed an important new nugget of information: during the Spanish Civil War, Soviet intelligence had sent an agent to kill General Franco. Krivitsky could not provide a name, or any other specifics, but described the would-be assassin as ‘a young Englishman, a journalist of good family, an idealist and fanatical anti-Nazi’. MI5 launched an investigation, but there had been several well-born journalists in Spain in the 1930s, and the inquiry fizzled out. No one thought to connect the tip with Philby. The clue would rattle around British intelligence for years, before assuming vast significance many years later.

  Philby was slaving for the Soviet cause, risking his life and prepared to report on whatever interested Moscow, including his father, his wife and his best friend. Yet Moscow was not happy. The Cambridge spies – Guy Burgess in MI6, Donald Maclean in the Foreign Office, Anthony Blunt in MI5, John Cairncross in Bletchley Park and Kim Philby in Section V – were producing top-level intelligence. But their very productivity posed a conundrum. In the insanely distrustful world of Soviet espionage, the quality, quantity and consistency of this information rendered it suspect. A misgiving began to take root in Moscow that British intelligence must be mounting an elaborate, multi-layered deception through Philby and his friends; they must all be double agents. Moreover, Philby’s story failed to meet firmly held Soviet preconceptions: MI6 was supposed to be impregnable, yet Philby had practically sauntered into the organisation; he had been a left-winger at university, yet supposedly rigorous background checks had failed to pick this up; he had been asked to find evidence that his own father was a spy, and had failed to do so.

  Was Philby a plant? Was he shielding his father? Was he, too, an enemy of the people, masquerading as a friend? To find out, a test was set. The information provided by Philby was all very well, but what interested Moscow most was the identity of British spies within the Soviet Union; who had MI6 recruited in the USSR, what were their names, and what Soviet secrets had they revealed? If Philby exposed these spies, then he was reliable and loyal; but if not, then Moscow would draw its own conclusions. Philby politely pointed out that his role in MI6 was catching enemy spies, not agent-running, which was the responsibility of a different section, in a completely different place. But Moscow was adamant: ‘We told him he must use whatever plausible and reasonable pretexts in order to get these files.’ As his former controller Theodore Maly had discovered to his cost, in the warped logic of Stalinism, refusing to do something just because it was impossible was a sign of disloyalty. Philby obediently set to work.

  The Central Registry was the memory and reference library of MI6, housed at Prae Wood in St Albans, next door to Section V headquarters. The registry source books collated the personal files of all current British secret agents, and every agent who had spied for Britain since the creation of MI6 in 1909, including names, codenames, aliases, character, performance and pay, a running tally of MI6 spies across the world. Presiding over this fabulously important and dangerous trove of secrets was Captain William Woodfield, the chief registrar, a puce-faced former policeman whose drinking habits were extreme even by MI6 standards. In a description for his Soviet controller, Philby described Woodfield with typical concision: ‘About 58, 5 feet 6 inches, slight build, dark hair, bald on top, wears glasses, long narrow face, formerly attached for some years to Special Branch.’ Woodfield liked dirty jokes and pink gin: Philby made a point of seeking him out at the King Harry pub, and supplying him with copious quantities of both. Soon they were the best of drinking buddies, and when Philby asked to see the source books for Spain and Portugal, Woodfield signed them out without question. The Iberian Peninsula was Philby’s sphere of work, and he had every reason to be interested in the MI6 agents in the region. Next, Philby requested the source books for the Soviet Union. Again Woodfield obliged, never pausing to wonder why his amiable new pub-chum was digging into an area so far removed from his allotted patch.

  Philby duly sent a report to Moscow. It described Britain’s sp
ies in the Soviet Union with typical bluntness: ‘There aren’t any.’ The station chief of MI6 in Moscow had not recruited a single major spy in the Soviet Union, Philby reported, and had only a few minor informants, mostly Poles. The USSR, moreover, was ‘tenth on the list of countries to which agents are to be sent’. The files showed there was no British spy network in Soviet Russia, no MI6 espionage campaign, and ‘no Soviet citizens whatsoever who worked as secret agents either in Moscow or anywhere else on Soviet territory’. The report was received with incredulity; Moscow’s paranoia, and sense of self-importance, combined to provoke a reaction of furious disbelief. The Soviet Union was a world power and MI6 was the most feared intelligence organisation in the world; it therefore stood to reason that Britain must be spying on the USSR. If Philby said otherwise, then he must be lying. That Britain could conceivably relegate the mighty Soviet state to number ten on its espionage target list was an ‘obvious absurdity’ (and frankly quite wounding). An outraged Soviet intelligence officer took a red pen, and scrawled two large and angry question marks over the report. Philby’s assertion was ‘highly suspicious’; his failure to corroborate expectations was ‘dubious’; henceforth he must be ‘tested and retested’. In truth, British intelligence was overwhelmingly focused on the Nazi threat, and since Moscow had become an ally the Foreign Office had imposed strict restrictions on covert activities inside the Soviet Union. But when Anthony Blunt confirmed that MI6 had no secret agents in the USSR, he too fell under suspicion; Philby and Blunt must be in league. And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth, and was disbelieved, because the truth contradicted Moscow’s expectations.

  Philby’s successful and unauthorised foray into the Soviet files was a remarkable feat of espionage, and a complete waste of time: it not only deepened Moscow’s suspicions, but very nearly ended Philby’s career. One morning, Bill Woodfield, of the beetroot complexion, sent a polite note asking him to return the Soviet source books; Philby responded that he had already done so. Woodfield, a sloppy drunk but a meticulous librarian, said that there was only one Soviet source book on the shelves, and the registry had no record of the second volume being returned. Philby was convinced the books had been sent back to the repository, but nonetheless turned his office ‘upside down’ in a fruitless search for the missing volume. He met Woodfield at the King Harry ‘to discuss the mystery over a few pink gins’ and discovered to his horror that, under registry rules, C would have to be informed of the missing records. This was Friday. Woodfield said he would send a memo on Monday. Nothing to worry about, said Bill: just paperwork. Philby was now in deep peril. Menzies might understand, even applaud, his interest in MI6 agents in Spain and Portugal, but he would surely wonder what on earth his protégé was doing with material on the Soviet Union, an area ‘far outside the normal scope of [his] duties’. At best Philby would have some tricky explaining to do; at worst, he was sunk.

  After a weekend of simmering panic, Monday came, and with it a last-minute reprieve. Woodfield’s secretary, who had been ill with flu for a few days, returned to work and explained that she had amalgamated the two source books into one volume to save shelf space. Philby had indeed returned the files. Woodfield offered profuse apologies for the embarrassing mix-up, over ‘another flood of pink gin’. Had Woodfield’s secretary been slightly more ill, for longer, or had Woodfield been a little less pickled, then Philby’s story would have ended then and there. But his luck held: he had escaped a Republican shell in Spain, dodged the clue furnished by the defector Krivitsky, and narrowly avoided exposure for trawling the Soviet files. ‘Luck played an enormous role in my life,’ he later wrote. ‘But you have to know how to use luck.’

  *

  Nicholas Elliott was becoming restless. Life in St Albans was pleasant enough, but ‘cloistered’. Running counter-intelligence operations in occupied Holland involved a great deal of memo-writing for meagre results, and nothing in the way of action. The world of intelligence, he concluded, was divided into ‘those who sit at desks at home analysing and evaluating the information as it comes in, and those who go out into the highways and byways of the world in order to get hold of it’. Philby was of the former sort, a gifted analyst and collator of facts, but Elliott belonged to the latter type, and he was ‘anxious to get away to another theatre of war’. He longed to travel, partly in reaction to his father’s acute distrust of ‘abroad’. (‘All foreigners are bloody unless they climb mountains,’ Claude insisted, ‘and Germans are bloody even if they do.’) Elliott hungered for risk. With Philby’s support, he began lobbying for a more active role in the field, preferably somewhere dangerous. In the spring of 1942, Elliott was summoned to Cowgill’s office and told he would soon be heading to Cairo, and from there to Istanbul as Section V’s representative in Turkey. At the age of twenty-six, Nicholas Elliott would be running counter-espionage operations in an espionage hothouse, for Turkey was neutral and, like Spain and Portugal, the scene of a fierce, secret war. ‘I was delighted,’ he wrote. Philby threw a farewell party for him. The next day, 11 May 1942, Acting Lieutenant Elliott climbed, somewhat unsteadily, up the gangplank of a 5,000-ton passenger cargo vessel in Liverpool docks, part of a forty-ship convoy bound for Africa.

  Elliott spent the three-week passage to Lagos playing bridge with an SOE officer ‘who was being sent out to Angola to blow things up’, taking his turn to man the ancient Japanese gun mounted on the stern, and tucking into a ‘well-stocked bar’. Although never a drinker in Philby’s league, Elliott was a keen tippler – despite his diabetes, which he treated merely by avoiding sugar. Most of his colleagues were entirely unaware that he was diabetic; with typical recklessness Elliott was not about to let his health stand in the way of a good time. When the ship put in at Freetown, he was greeted on the quayside by Graham Greene, who was now the somewhat disgruntled MI6 representative in Sierra Leone – a good place to gather material for fiction, but an intelligence backwater. Greene took one look at Elliott and proclaimed him ‘the tattiest army officer I had ever seen’. Over a drink, Greene explained that his principal concern was ‘the shortage of contraceptives in Sierra Leone’, a problem Elliott ‘managed to alleviate through the generosity of some of our passengers’. Elliott assumed these were for Greene’s personal use: in fact, the future novelist had set up a ‘roving brothel’ to entice secrets out of ‘two lonely Germans suspected of spying on British shipping’, and his brothel workers were demanding protection from venereal disease.

  In Lagos, Elliott transferred to a Dakota transport plane, and five days later he reached Cairo, after hopscotching across Africa via Kano, Fort Lamy, El Fasher and Khartoum. On reporting to Intelligence Headquarters, Elliott was informed that his first job was to take a lorry-load of confidential files to Jerusalem for safekeeping, before travelling on to Beirut. He would then catch the fabled Taurus Express to Turkey.

  The elderly train puffed slowly up the Taurus Mountains and then ambled gently across the Anatolian plateau to Ankara, and on to Istanbul, never exceeding thirty miles an hour and stopping frequently for no discernible reason. The food in the restaurant car was excellent, and Elliott found the journey a ‘delight’, made still more pleasant still by the company of his new secretary, a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth Holberton.

  Elliott was rather struck by Miss Holberton. She had spent the early part of the war in the Motorised Transport Corps, driving Jeeps in the desert, before becoming a secretary at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Cairo. She was quick-witted, resourceful, beautiful in a demure sort of way, a devoted Catholic and quite posh. Her father was a former managing director of the Bombay Burmah Trading Company and her mother descended from a long line of Irish judges. They got on famously. When the train ran out of supplies of water, the conductor brought Elizabeth a bottle of Turkish Cointreau in which to brush her teeth. She declared the experience refreshing. Elliott liked that.

  Ankara was the diplomatic capital of Turkey, but the major powers kept embassies in Istanb
ul, on the cusp between Europe and Asia; this was where the serious spying was done. Britain’s ambassador to Turkey was Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen, a diplomat of the old school who spent much of his time on the ambassadorial yacht and was, perhaps inevitably, an Old Etonian friend of Elliott’s father. Hugessen adopted an attitude of ‘pained tolerance’ towards the activities of British intelligence in Turkey. Formally a junior diplomat, Elliott joined a swiftly expanding, multi-layered British intelligence force under the overall command of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Gibson, a veteran MI6 professional of ‘great ability and energy’. ‘Gibbie’ oversaw a vast system of intelligence-gathering and agent-running, extending from Turkey into Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia and Hungary. As the representative of Section V, Elliott’s task was to undermine enemy intelligence operations, principally those of the Abwehr. Gibson gave Elliott a fairly free rein to explore and attack espionage targets in Turkey, and there were plenty to choose from.

  Istanbul was ‘one of the great espionage entrepôts of the war’, in the words of MI6’s official historian. The city was just forty miles from Nazi-occupied Bulgaria; it was Germany’s gateway to the Middle East, and an access point for the Allies into occupied Europe. The Turks feared the Germans, distrusted the Soviets, and felt little love for either the British or the Americans. But the authorities were prepared to tolerate espionage by foreign powers, so long as this did not impinge on Turkish sovereignty, and the spies did not get caught. By 1942, some seventeen different intelligence organisations had converged on Istanbul, to mix and mingle, bribe, seduce and betray, and with them came a vast and motley host of agents and double agents, smugglers, blackmailers, arms dealers, drug-runners, refugees, deserters, black-marketeers, pimps, forgers, hookers and spivs. Rumours and secrets, some of them true, whirled around the bars and back alleys. Everyone spied on everyone else; the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet, spied on all. Some Turkish officials were prepared to cooperate on intelligence sharing, if the price was right, but every so often, if the spying became too brazen or insufficiently remunerative, the Emniyet would stage an arrest. The spy battle was intense, and oddly intimate. The head of the Abwehr was on nodding terms with his opposite numbers in MI6 and Soviet intelligence. ‘Everyone was well informed as to the identity of everyone else,’ wrote Elliott. When one or other of the intelligence chiefs entered the ballroom of the Park Hotel, the band would strike up the song ‘Boo, Boo, Baby, I’m a Spy’: