I’m involved in a dangerous game,
Every other day I change my name,
The face is different but the body’s the same,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
You have heard of Mata Hari,
We did business cash and carry,
Poppa caught us and we had to marry,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
Now, as a lad, I’m not so bad,
In fact, I’m a darn good lover,
But look my sweet, let’s be discreet,
And do this under cover.
I’m so cocky I could swagger,
The things I know would make you stagger,
I’m ten percent cloak and ninety percent dagger,
Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy!
But the dagger beneath the cloak was razor sharp. Just two months before Elliott’s arrival, a Macedonian student had attempted to assassinate the German ambassador Franz von Papen, but the bomb exploded prematurely, blowing up the assassin and only injuring the German diplomat. Moscow blamed the Gestapo; the Germans blamed the Allies; von Papen suspected the British. The plot was almost certainly the work of the Soviet NKVD. A year earlier, a German suitcase bomb planted in the lobby at the Pera Palace Hotel had killed a member of the British consular staff, and badly injured the vice consul, Chantry Page. Espionage in Istanbul, as the MI6 station chief Harold Gibson observed, was ‘not a kid glove affair’.
Elliott was immediately seduced by Istanbul’s sleazy glamour. He moved into an office in the embassy ‘crammed from top to bottom with intelligence operatives engaged in various aspects of skulduggery’, and a garden surprisingly full of copulating tortoises, and plunged into the espionage fray. On his first evening he was swept up by Major Bernard O’Leary, an enormous multilingual former cavalry officer, ‘extremely erudite, but irredeemably idle’, who was responsible for liaison with Turkish intelligence. O’Leary announced they were going to Taksim’s, the spy centre of Istanbul, a cross between a restaurant, a nightclub, a cabaret and a casino. ‘Its clientele,’ wrote Elliott, ‘combined the representatives – mainly engaged in espionage – of all the Axis and Allied powers.’ Taksim’s was run by a charming White Russian who accepted bribes from everyone, without favouritism, and endeavoured to place rival spies at adjacent tables to facilitate eavesdropping. The waitresses were said to be former Czarist duchesses. Nothing at Taksim’s was quite as it seemed. One night Elliott was admiring the club’s resident belly-dancer, a stunning woman with ‘white-coloured skin and jet black hair’, when she fell off the stage, twisted an ankle and swore loudly in a thick Yorkshire accent: she was from Bradford. When not at Taksim’s, Elliott might be found at Ellie’s Bar, a favourite watering-hole of British military personnel that served ‘a ferocious dry Martini with the kick of a horse’. Ellie was buxom, blonde and thought to be Romanian. She ‘spoke excellent English, and purported to fear and hate the Germans’. In fact, Elliott discovered, she was in German pay, employed by the Abwehr to get British officers as drunk as possible in the hope that they would eventually divulge valuable information.
Elliott set about making friends with the sort of people who would have made his father shudder. In later years, he wrote that ‘the capacity for friendship is a particularly important characteristic’ in an intelligence officer. ‘A large amount of intelligence work in the field is all about the establishment of personal relationships; of gaining other people’s confidence and on some occasions persuading people to do something against their better judgement.’ He befriended the Russian maître d’ at Taksim’s, and the waiters at Ellie’s Bar; he went drinking with a former Czarist guards officer called Roman Sudakov, who was plugged into Russian intelligence and agreed to work for MI6; he got to know the porters at the embassies, the consular officials and the clerks at the telegraph office. He made contacts among the press corps, and Lars the fisherman who plied the Bosphorus and did a little smuggling and information-gathering to supplement the catch. He made a particular point of befriending the conductors on the wagon-lits of the Taurus Express, who were much in demand as couriers for the intelligence organisations, since the railway was the only reliable way of getting from Turkey to the Middle East. The conductors would supply information about who was travelling where, report gossip, smuggle documents and even, for an additional consideration, steal travel papers. They were for sale to the highest bidder, but to none exclusively: ‘One particularly remarkable man at one stage was working for both the Abwehr and the SD [Sicherheitsdienst] (each unknown to the other); for the Italians, and for the Japanese; as well as for the British.’
At the other end of Istanbul society, Elliott mixed with high-ranking officials, military officers, diplomats and religious leaders. The papal legate, Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, proved to be a fund of good intelligence, and a vigorous anti-fascist. Like so many in wartime Istanbul, Roncalli was playing a double game, dining with von Papen and taking his wife’s confession, while using his office to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe. A few months after they became friends, Elliott discovered that Roncalli’s assistant, one Monsignor Rici, ‘a most unattractive little man’, was a spy, ‘operating a clandestine wireless set on behalf of the Italian military intelligence’. Elliott tipped off the Turkish secret police and had Rici arrested. When he informed Roncalli, with some embarrassment, that his assistant was likely to be spending a considerable period breaking rocks in an Anatolian penal colony, the future Pope merely shrugged, leaving Elliott with the strong impression that he ‘was not altogether displeased’.
After just a few months in Istanbul, Elliott concluded there were ‘more people involved in various forms of skulduggery per head of population than any other city in the world’. And he had identified a good proportion of them: German intelligence officers, Italian agents, Polish, Czech and Yugoslavian informers, Free French and Jewish Agency spies, and officers of the NKVD and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). ‘All were kept under close observation by the Turks, who ran their own informers.’
Elliott’s energetic counter-intelligence activities met with approval in London. Sir Stewart Menzies had always had what Philby called a ‘schoolboyish’ attitude to counter-espionage: ‘Bars, beards and blondes.’ Elliott was experiencing plenty of all three, and his stock rose still higher when one of his informants on the Taurus Express handed over a bomb, saying he had been given the device by the Japanese military attaché, Colonel Tateishi, with instructions to detonate it on the line between Aleppo and Tripoli. Elliott gingerly handed the package over to the counter-sabotage section in Istanbul, and paid his informant a large bonus; the informant told Colonel Tateishi the bomb had failed to detonate, and demanded another bonus. Everyone was happy.
Elliott relished his new posting. Even a nasty bout of foot and mouth disease picked up on his travels could not blunt his happiness. And he was falling in love. Elizabeth Holberton was proving to be more than just an excellent secretary. Her Catholicism and his cordial aversion to all religion did nothing to hinder a blossoming relationship. They went everywhere together, and drank quantities of Egyptian Bordeaux, which Elliott declared ‘the worst claret I have ever drunk’. Shy beneath his bonhomie, it took Elliott months to summon up the courage to say what was on his mind. A cocktail made for spies finally did the trick: ‘After three of Ellie’s volcanic Martinis we decided to get married.’ Marriages between officers and their secretaries were something of a tradition in MI6, where secrecy bred a special sort of intimacy. Even C was conducting a long-running affair with his secretary.
Elliott dashed off a letter to Sir Edgar Holberton saying that he planned to marry his daughter and ‘hoping he didn’t mind’. Even if Sir Edgar had minded, it would have made no difference, for Elliott had no intention of waiting for a reply. Roman Sudakov, his best man, threw a stag party for him at the Park Hotel – an event made even more auspicious by the presence at the next table of von Papen, the German amba
ssador, and his military attaché. After the ceremony on 10 April 1943, performed by Monsignor Roncalli in the papal legate’s private chapel, the newlyweds moved into a flat with a view over the Golden Horn – accompanied by a tiny Russian cook named Yaroslav, who made vodka in the bath and began teaching Elliott to speak Russian.
Philby was delighted by Elliott’s success, his growing reputation and the news of his marriage. Nicholas Elliott was a rising star in the service, and a valued friend, and no one understood the value of friendship better than Kim Philby.
See Notes on Chapter 4
5
Three Young Spies
Philby’s life in the English suburbs seemed drab in comparison to Elliott’s colourful experiences on the frontline of the espionage battle. St Albans was a long way from Istanbul. In Philby’s opinion, it was too far from anywhere, including London, where the important intelligence decisions were being made, and the most valuable secrets might be found. Early in 1943, Felix Cowgill announced that Section V would be moving to new premises on Ryder Street, in the heart of St James’s. Philby was elated, since the new office would be just ‘two minutes from MI5 and 15 from Broadway’, the MI6 headquarters. He would now be closer to his club, closer to the gossipy parties hosted by Tommy Harris, and closer to his Soviet handlers. Ryder Street was also the ideal vantage point from which to assess, befriend and manipulate an important new force in the wartime intelligence battle.
The attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted America into the war, and brought into being the Office of Strategic Services, a new and well-funded intelligence service presided over by the extrovert, hard-driving lawyer William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. The OSS would eventually evolve into the CIA, the most powerful intelligence service in the world, but in 1942 America was still new to the game of wartime intelligence, long on resources and energy, but short on expertise. The first OSS officers began arriving in London, keen to learn, late in 1942, and occupied offices in Ryder Street. Malcolm Muggeridge compared them to innocent young maidens, about to be deflowered in ‘the frowsty old intelligence brothel’ that was MI6. Philby was unimpressed with the first American arrivals, ‘a notably bewildered group’. Even their leader Norman Holmes Pearson, a Yale academic, was scathing about his own team, describing them as ‘a bunch of amateur bums’. Novices they may have been, but they were also frightfully keen, in a way the hardened veterans of MI6 found rather quaint. ‘They lost no opportunity of telling us that they had come to school,’ wrote Philby, who, as a respected three-year veteran of the service, was about to become one of their most influential instructors, briefing the Americans on the work of MI6’s counter-espionage section, the structure of the British secret services and decoding operations at Bletchley Park. Philby dismissed these eager Americans as a ‘pain in the neck’, but there was one who stood out from the rest: a tall, intense, cadaverously thin young man, who wrote poetry, cultivated tropical plants, and studied the minutiae of espionage with the dedication of a true obsessive. His name was James Jesus Angleton and he would rise, in time, to become one of the most powerful and controversial spies in history. Angleton was the product of a romantic and unlikely marriage between Hugh Angleton, a soldier turned cash-register salesman, and Carmen Mercedes Moreno, an uneducated, fiery and exceptionally beautiful woman from Nogales, Arizona, with a mixture of Mexican and Apache blood. The two had met in 1916, when Hugh Angleton was serving as a cavalry officer under General Pershing during the campaign against the Mexican rebel Pancho Villa. James Angleton was born in 1917 in Boise, Idaho, and given the middle name Jesus by his Catholic mother – he hated it, but with his ascetic looks and oddly spiritual air, the name fitted him. The boy was fourteen when his father moved to Italy to run, and then own, the Milan branch of the National Cash Register Company. The young Angleton was sent to England for his education, first at a prep school in Buckinghamshire, and then at Malvern College, a British public school firmly in the Victorian tradition. He became a Boy Scout, a prefect, and joined the Officer Training Corps. These were, in Angleton’s words, his ‘formative years’: he left Malvern with courteous manners, a sense of fair play, an air of cultivated eccentricity and a faint English accent that never left him. The boy from Idaho was already ‘more English than the English’, a disguise he would wear, along with his Savile Row suits, for the rest of his life. He enrolled at Yale in 1937 to study English literature, but spent most of his time listening to jazz, chasing girls and running a literary magazine, Furioso, which published the work of such notable poets as Ezra Pound and e.e.cummings, both of whom became his friends. An insomniac night-owl, Angleton developed a reputation as a fierce anti-communist and an aesthete: he wrote romantic verse, most of it execrable, and was nicknamed The Poet. His classmates found him enigmatic, ‘a mysterious person, with dark mysterious looks’. Soon after Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the US Army, and through his former English professor, Norman Pearson, was offered work in London in the newly formed OSS. Before heading to England, he married a twenty-one-year-old heiress to a Minnesota lumber fortune. It was a slightly odd thing to do, but then much of what Jim Angleton did was unexpected. ‘What a miracle of momentous complexity is The Poet,’ wrote e.e.cummings to a mutual friend.
Angleton was attached to X-2, the OSS counter-intelligence section and the direct counterpart of MI6’s Section V. X-2 would eventually expand to take up the entire second floor of the Ryder Street building, while Section V occupied the floor above. Philby was drafted in to lecture the newcomers on the ‘arts and crafts’ of counter-espionage, penetrating enemy intelligence organisations, and the running of double agents. As one American officer observed, ‘I do remember being very impressed. He really knew what he was doing.’
Philby took a shine to the twenty-four-year-old American, and later wrote that Angleton ‘earned my respect by openly rejecting the Anglomania’ of so many of the new American arrivals. Angleton did not need to be Anglophile since he was, in many ways, so very English already. The extent of the friendship between Philby and Angleton at this point is hard to gauge since Angleton’s allies later tried to downplay it, just as his enemies tended to exaggerate it. According to Angleton’s biographer, ‘Philby may have felt he had a mentoring relationship with Angleton; Angleton may have shared that feeling.’ The two men became patron and protégé, the expert and the prodigy. ‘Philby was one of Angleton’s instructors, his prime tutor in counter-intelligence; Angleton came to look up to him as an elder-brother figure.’ Philby enjoyed having acolytes, and Angleton may have filled a gap left by Nicholas Elliott’s absence. The new arrivals and the old hands got to know one another over drinks, lots of them. ‘Our European friends were formidable consumers of alcoholic beverages, with apparently little effect,’ recalled one OSS officer. Angleton could drink with a Philby-like determination, but then he did everything with an intensity that others found impressive, and slightly odd. He moved a cot-bed into his Ryder Street office, and seemed to spend most of the night studying the esoteric secrets of counter-espionage with devout fervour, ‘as if they contained the secret of the Trinity’. He mixed with writers and poets, including William Empson and T. S. Eliot, and occasionally inserted a poem into his reports. Empson noted his ‘restless appetite for organising things’. Colleagues in OSS found him ‘extremely brilliant, but a little strange . . . full of impossible, colossal ideas’. Angleton was a little like one of the rare orchids he would later cultivate with such dedication: an exotic hybrid, a Mexican-Apache-Midwestern English-sounding poet-spy, rare and remarkable, alluring to some, but faintly sinister to those who prefer simpler flora. The bosses recognised that Angleton, for all his peculiarities, had found a vocation, and after six months he was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant and made chief of the Italian desk of X-2, controlling counter-intelligence operations in the country where he had spent much of his youth. His rapid ascent was due, in part, to Philby’s tutelage and patronage, and Angleton would later cite him as an inspiration. ‘Once I met Philby, the world of int
elligence that had once interested me consumed me,’ he said. ‘He had taken on the Nazis and Fascists head-on and penetrated their operations in Spain and Germany. His sophistication and experience appealed to us . . . Kim taught me a great deal.’
With his mixture of charm and competence, Philby’s stature within Allied intelligence continued to grow, along with his responsibilities. Late in 1942, Cowgill asked him to take over counter-intelligence operations in North Africa, an area of key importance with the impending Allied invasion of French Morocco and Algeria. The region had previously been the responsibility of Captain Felix Russi, a former soldier from Gibraltar whom Philby described to his Soviet handlers as ‘an almost total moron’. Philby was happy to colonise his region. ‘We had achieved a fair stranglehold on the Abwehr in Spain and Portugal,’ he wrote, and ‘there was no reason why I should not shoulder additional responsibilities.’ A few months later, his brief expanded yet again, to include counter-espionage in Italy (the region James Angleton would soon cover, in parallel, for OSS). Soon after the move to London, Cowgill asked Philby to act as his deputy ‘in all intelligence matters’ while he paid a three-week visit to the US on MI6 business. Philby reflected, with wry false modesty, that he was ‘beginning to make a career in the secret service’. Promotion, however, was only a means to an end. ‘I regarded my SIS appointments purely in the light of cover jobs, to be carried out sufficiently well to ensure my attaining positions in which my service to the Soviet Union would be most effective.’
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