What follows in my minute of the meeting is a half page of shorthand notes that were blacked out by Father.
My minute resumes with my observation that Father was tapping the fingertips of his right hand on the knuckles of his left hand, a secret signal to me that the interview had run its course. “Excuse the interruption, Father—”
Quex turned on me in mock irritation. “What is it now, Evelyn?”
“It is almost four. You are supposed to be on the carpet of the F.O. at four forty-five sharp to discuss the proposed cutbacks in SIS funding.” I seem to recall Father’s nautical chronometer on the wall behind his desk delicately sounding eight bells as I said this.
Father turned back to the Hajj. “Can we agree that this meeting never took place?”
“What meeting?” the Hajj said with what can only be described as a conspiratorial smirk, which, come to think of it, made him look nearly human. One caught a glimpse of what a woman might see in this unconventional figure of a man.
Father rose stiffly to his feet. “Jolly decent of you to drop by and share your views with us, St John. Always fascinating to hear what the world might look to be from Jiddah.”
“Hear, hear,” Colonel Menzies said.
“My sentiments precisely,” Colonel Vivian agreed.
St John Philby reached down to tie up the laces of his runners. “Yes, so you’re turning me out to the mercies of your asphalt jungle, are you?”
Father said, “Quite.”
At this point my minute replicates the words that appear on the silver screen moments before the last reel of a film runs free: The End.
5: LONDON, AUTUMN 1936
Where Three Birds Are Killed with One Stone
If the recruitment phase can be said to come under the heading of art—seduction, whether of a prospective lover or a prospective espionage agent, is certainly an art—what followed can be best described as craft. Or more precisely, tradecraft, to use the term we professionals employ. Setting up meetings was the first order of business. The tradecraft involved was fairly straightforward. Harold Adrian Philby, nickname Kim, cryptonym Sonny, and yours truly, Teodor Stepanovich Maly, the London Rezident Sonny knew only as Otto, would meet at nine- and eleven-day intervals (the irregularity was a precaution) at alternating locations, with fallback locations if for any reason one of us failed to turn up; with telephone numbers where seemingly innocuous messages could be left on new Swiss magnetic-tape answering machines, which I had to justify before Moscow Centre would permit them to be included in the Rezidentura’s budget. As I recall, the first several meetings were devoted to the creation of a persona, which is defined by the august Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1934 (a copy of which was, thanks to me, in the Soviet Embassy library), as the role one assumes in public, as distinguished from the inner self. The role Sonny would henceforth assume in public was that of an upper-class educated English gentleman who, like many of his schoolmates, had flirted with Socialism during his Cambridge years; had gone so far as to motorcycle to Vienna to help refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany; had married a Jewish girl in order to qualify her for a British passport and bring her to safety in England. With the passage of time, this same young man had come to his senses with respect to politics, which is to say he had matured into a right-of-center conservative who wanted nothing more than to settle down to career and family and get on with life. We worked out the general lines in our first sessions and the details in subsequent sessions. I found Sonny to be a quick learner—it often happened that I started a sentence and he saw where it was going and finished it for me.
He kept me up to date on the progress he was making in the construction of his persona. He sorted through his books and got rid of the ones that would identify its owner as someone with leftist sympathies. He cancelled his subscription to the Daily Worker and subscribed instead to The Times of London, with its vaguely pro-German orientation. To give credibility to his new conservative persona, Sonny joined the Anglo-German Fellowship, a group organized to improve relations between England and Germany, going so far (with my encouragement) as to frequent the German Embassy in London; making use of his press credentials as a subeditor of the Review of Reviews, he had several conversations with the German ambassador, Herr Ribbentrop, during which Sonny was careful to repeat his father’s mantra about the need for a Christian settlement to British-German differences. Most importantly, Sonny began cutting his links with his leftist Cambridge friends.
I instructed Sonny to make the effort to get on better terms with the man he invariably referred to as his sainted father, St John Philby, who was less than pleased when his son turned up in London married to a Hungarian Jewess-cum-Communist. Kim wrote his father a rambling letter in which he explained away his leftist sympathies as misplaced youthful idealism and described his conversations with Ribbentrop. This worked out so well that Kim and his wife were invited to lodge in his father’s London flat. It was at this point that I gave Sonny his first espionage assignment: I instructed him to go through his father’s papers to see if there was any connection between St John and the chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, the mysterious Admiral Sinclair. Sonny passed this initial test with what the English refer to as airborne colors: He brought me duplicates of three letters, copied off by Sonny in miniscule handwriting, each signed by someone named Hugh, which I knew to be the Christian name of Admiral Sinclair. Apparently he and St John were acquainted with each other from Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. In one of the letters, Hugh brought St John up-to-date on mutual friends from those days. Regrettably, the letters revealed no state secrets. In the last of the three, bearing a quite recent date, Admiral Sinclair invited St John to come by Caxton House for a drink the next time he found himself in London. From the way the invitation was worded, I gathered that St John Philby was not an actual member of the British Secret Intelligence Service but, given his close relationship with the Saudi ruler ibn Saud, more like an occasional consultant.
Sonny’s second assignment—one of the most important missions in the business of espionage—was to suggest which of his old Trinity College friends might be recruited to work for the Communist internationale and, eventually, Moscow Centre itself. Kim turned up at our next meeting with a list, written out on the back of an envelope in the simple book code (page number, line number, letter number) I had taught him. It was impossible to decipher unless you knew which book he was working from. In this particular case it was the copy of the Hilton novel Lost Horizon that his father had given him when Sonny came down from Cambridge. Both Sonny and I had been fascinated by the book’s tale of a mythical Himalayan utopia called Shangri-La. (I remember him joking that if he were ever to be unmasked as a Soviet spy, he wanted to be exfiltrated to Shangri-La. Being a staunch Communist, I assured him Stalin’s Soviet Russia was the nearest thing to a Shangri-La on earth.) I still have Kim’s envelope which, deciphered, reads:
Donald Maclean
Guy Burgess
Anthony Blunt
John Cairncross
Sonny knew them all from the Socialist circle at Cambridge. When we went over the list at one of our sessions, he described Maclean (who was immediately assigned the cryptonym Orphan) as a fervent Marxist and one of the original organizers of the Cambridge Communist cell. Sonny seemed to think that Maclean was our best bet: twenty-two years old, raised on the Island of Tiree off the Scottish coast, he had earned a first at Cambridge in foreign languages and seemed destined for a brilliant career in the Foreign Office.
I discussed Maclean with my deputy at the Rezidentura, Anatoly Gorsky, cryptonym Kapp, then sent a memorandum to Moscow Centre with Maclean’s pedigree and our estimation that, in accordance with my strategy of long-term penetrations, we ought to attempt to recruit him. When Moscow Centre failed to respond I began to wonder if my telegram had gone astray. I sent it a second time. The response, which came back that evening, was terse to the point of rudeness.
From: Moscow Centr
e.
To: Teodor Stepanovich Maly.
Subject: Recruitment of Orphan by London Rezident.
Reference: Your telegram of 12 November 1936.
Authorization granted. Try but if the milk curdles you must drink it.
No one to my knowledge has suggested that working for Moscow Centre had anything in common with a pleasure cruise.
I assigned Sonny the task of recruiting Maclean. He was reluctant at first. “How the hell do I raise the matter in a way that doesn’t compromise me if he says no?”
“From what you’ve told me, I think he is enough of a Marxist to forget the conversation took place if he should decide to decline,” I said.
“I’ve never done anything like this before. What do I say?”
“Say what I said to you: You can sell the Daily Worker on street corners or you can join in the common fight against Fascism.”
“By golly, I’ll try,” Sonny said. And he did. He went up to Cambridge and took Maclean to supper at a local watering hole. Making the pitch turned out to be easier than Sonny had imagined. Maclean suspected that Philby himself had been recruited by the Soviets and said so. How else to explain his recent cutting off contact with the Cambridge crowd? Sonny played his cards close to his spencer, as the English say. He didn’t admit anything, but he didn’t deny it either. And when he came to the point—when he asked Maclean if he wanted to join in the struggle against Fascism—Orphan (as I now called him in my reports to Moscow Centre) simply smiled. “Who are you working for?” he asked. “The Kominturn? The Third Internationale? The NKVD? What the cheap Fleet Street sheets call Moscow Centre?”
Sonny told me he smiled back and said, “All of the above” as if he were responding to a multiple-choice question on a Cambridge quiz.
The two apparently burst out laughing.
Which is how Maclean came to be recruited.
Guy Burgess, the second name on Sonny’s original list, was another matter altogether. Sonny himself expressed serious reservations about the recruitment of Guy Burgess. As an undergraduate, Burgess (who was assigned the cryptonym Maiden) had dazzled his contemporaries and his professors alike with the reach of his intellect, so much so that he had been elected to the elite Cambridge Society of Apostles. Curiously, at a recent lunch with Kim, Burgess had gone so far as to suggest that he and Sonny should become Soviet spies.
“What did you say?”
“I told him he was mad.”
“Was he?”
“Knowing Guy, it’s quite possible he was passing off a serious idea as if it were a joke.”
“Assuming he is willing to work for Moscow Centre, would he submit to discipline?”
“I am b-bound to tell you that Guy is an enfant terrible,” Sonny replied. “He used to go to leftist demonstrations in his roadster, driving up onto the sidewalk and gunning the engine to scatter counterdemonstrators. It’s a miracle he wasn’t arrested. The heart of the p-problem is that Guy flaunts his homosexuality every occasion he gets. It would take a skilled Soviet controller to restrain him.”
“There might be advantages to being homosexual.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“A great many upper-class Englishmen—in government, in parliament, in banking, in the press—are said to be homosexual, or at least bisexual. A homosexual intelligence agent could have the same success seducing targets as, say, a beautiful female agent. Professional intelligence operatives call that a honey trap. I shall discuss Burgess with my associates in the Rezidentura.”
Before we could reach a decision, this Burgess fellow forced our hand. He obviously had a sixth sense for the subtleties of undercover work because he quickly grasped that both Sonny and Orphan were cutting their ties to their Cambridge Socialist comrades. He raised the subject with Orphan directly, telling Maclean that he suspected something was afoot. “You fellows don’t fool me—posing as repentant Socialists turned conservative. You and Philby are up to something.” Maclean, exasperated, told him: “Shut your trap, will you. I am still who I was. I can’t say more.” Burgess said, “No need to say more. You and Kim work for Moscow.” I can tell you that he wormed enough out of Maclean to come round to see my man Philby in London. “I have put two and two together,” Burgess exclaimed, according to the detailed report of the conversation Sonny provided.
“Did you arrive at four?”
“I most certainly did,” Burgess said. “One would have to be deaf and dumb not to have seen it. You and Don Maclean have been recruited by the Soviets. Own up, Kim. You do remember it was me who first suggested we spy for the Russians? How in the name of our long friendship can you cross this Rubicon without taking me with you? I feel obliged to tell you I consider it extremely disloyal of you to leave me behind.”
Which is how Guy Burgess came to be recruited.
The months following Philby’s coming on board—I may say the two years—were devoted to his education as a spy. In our Soviet Union, prospective agents are given four years of round-the-clock schooling at a secret training camp before they are sent into the field. Breaking in an agent in a hostile environment, which is what England represented for us, is an enormous challenge for both the teacher (in this case me) and the student; I had to cover a four-year curriculum in semimonthly meetings, each of which lasted forty-five minutes. In addition to learning various simple cipher and secret writing techniques (Moscow Centre favored using urine as ink, unlike the British, who preferred lemon juice), he had to master the art of getting lost in a crowd even in the absence of one; of becoming inconspicuous. For this he had a natural talent; in any given group of people, Sonny was the last one you’d take for an espionage agent. He had to perfect the art of making sure he was not being followed without alerting the person who might be following him that he was making sure he was not being followed. All tricks of the trade, so to speak. Tedious stuff, but essential to a Soviet espionage agent operating in a capitalist environment, meeting regularly with his control, in Philby’s particular case trying to explain away a distinct left-wing footprint as youthful exuberance and establish himself as a solid conservative citizen of Great Britain.
During this incubation period, Philby applied for various low-level posts in government, at the Foreign Office in particular, and later on Fleet Street in the hope of being offered a position that would lead to a career in journalism. None of these applications even reached the interview stage. When I analyzed the situation with the comrades in the Rezidentura, we concluded that Philby must be on some sort of black list. We excluded the possibility that British intelligence was aware he’d been recruited by us; he would have been arrested if that were the case. We also excluded the possibility that it was his left-wing Cambridge past that was impeding his career; both Maclean and Burgess, despite having similar curricula vitae as Philby, seemed to have a foot in the door of the Foreign Office. Which narrowed the problem down to Philby’s involvement with the Socialist-Communist movement in Vienna during the Dollfuss affair, and most particularly his marriage to a Hungarian-Jewish woman known to be a Communist activist (and perhaps suspected of being an agent for the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del—the Peoples’ Commissariat for Internal Affairs).
It was toward the end of 1936 that I devised a course of action that would neutralize both these obstacles with one stroke.
“Crikey Moses! Did I hear right? You want me to go where?”
“Spain.”
“My sainted father took me on a tour of Moorish Spain when I was in my teens. Might be a b-bit dodgy going back now, what with a civil war raging?”
“But that’s the point of your going, Kim. What could be more natural than a young Cambridge graduate, stuck in a career rut as a subeditor for a weekly review, striking out on his own as a freelance journalist? Sell off your books and records to explain away how you finance the trip. Perhaps you could ask your father for a small loan—he funded your trip to Vienna, didn’t he? You could write articles from the battlefront. Get your byl
ine into London newspapers. If you do decently, one of the big sheets—perhaps even The Times—will hire you as a permanent correspondent. Your career will be up and running. No telling where you could wind up. There are more than a few in the Foreign Office, even the British Secret Intelligence Service, who started out as journalists.”
Philby began to see the merits of my idea. “Covering a war could be exciting. I will admit that my heart is with the Republicans—not a few of my Cambridge comrades have enlisted in the International B-Brigade and are fighting against the Fascist Falange in Spain. It would be b-bloody marvelous to get their stories into the newspapers.”
“You wouldn’t be reporting from the Republican side, Kim. You would report from Franco’s side.”
“You want me to write about Fascists!”
“Absolutely. There are dozens of famous journalists covering the Republicans—that American Hemingway, the Hungarian Capa, the Englishman Orwell. You would be hard put to compete with them. But as there are so few journalists reporting from the Nationalist side, your dispatches would likely be front-page news. They would be dispassionate, unbiased, balanced, even slightly pro-Franco, which would dispel any suspicion you were at heart a Communist and pro-Soviet. Your loyalty to the British government would be visible in print. Mark my words, Kim: Doors will open for you.”
Philby thought about this. “What about Litzi?” he asked.
“What about Litzi?”
“Would she accompany me to Spain?”
“It would be best if she remained in London.”
“But that would involve a separation.”
When I didn’t immediately reply, Philby said, “Ahhh. I am quite thick not to see what you’re p-plotting.”
“What am I plotting?”
“One way or another, you want me to leave Litzi. Covering the Spanish war would kill two b-birds with one stone. Paint over my Socialist background with a right-of-center veneer, mark p-paid to my marriage to a known Communist.”