A Spy Among Friends (11 page)

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 intelligence 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.’

Even the most ideologically driven people usually need to test their convictions; to have others understand them, support them or challenge them. Philby never shared his beliefs; he never discussed politics, even with his fellow Soviet spies; after his early ideological discussions with Arnold Deutsch, the subject of communism was seldom raised with his Soviet handlers. He had persuaded himself of the rectitude of his course back in 1934, and after that the subject was closed. He retained and sustained his certainties in perfect isolation.

One of the richer ironies of Philby’s position is that while he could do no wrong in British eyes, in Moscow he continued to be viewed with mistrust. The main source of Soviet suspicion was a plump, blonde, highly intelligent, politically doctrinaire and fabulously paranoid NKVD analyst named Elena Modrzhinskaya, the head of the British department at Moscow Centre. Like many who lived through Stalin’s Purges, fear, propaganda and obedience had left a deep residue of mistrust in the soul of Modrzhinskaya, one of the very few women in a senior position within Soviet intelligence. She suspected a gigantic plot: she simply could not credit the ‘incomprehensible’ risks the Cambridge spies claimed they were taking on behalf of the Soviets; it was surely impossible that men with communist pasts could enter the British secret service so easily, and rise so fast; the British were known to be foisting an elaborate deception on the Nazis, and it stood to reason that they must be attempting to do the same thing to Moscow. In short, she simply could not, and would not, believe that Philby was what he proclaimed himself to be: ‘A straight penetration agent working in the Soviet interest.’ Philby was a plant, an imposter, a double-crosser: ‘He is lying to us in a most insolent manner.’ Anatoly Gorsky, the new
rezident
in London, was instructed to find out exactly what disinformation was being spread by Philby and the other British double agents. In time, the Centre would even despatch undercover agents to trail them, and collect incriminating evidence. The surveillance team spoke no English and got repeatedly lost, a problem they ascribed to brilliant spycraft on the part of Philby and the others, rather than their own inability to read a map. The Soviets set out to find evidence that did not exist, and when they failed to find it assumed this must be proof of how well that evidence had been hidden. In the end, Philby’s very Englishness rendered him suspect. As Yuri Modin, the Soviet officer who would take over the Cambridge spy network, observed: ‘He was so completely, psychologically and physically, the British intelligence officer that I could never quite accept that he was one of us, a Marxist in the clandestine service of the Soviet Union.’

Modrzhinskaya’s suspicions of disloyalty did not outwardly alter the way Philby was handled by his Soviet controllers. Gorsky was ordered to maintain contact with the British spies ‘in such a manner as to reinforce their conviction that we trust them completely’. Here, then, was a truly bizarre situation: Philby was telling Moscow the truth, but was disbelieved, and allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the Soviets, who suspected a deception, and were in turn deceiving him. Moscow’s faith in Philby seemed to ebb and flow; sometimes he was considered suspect, and sometimes genuine, and sometimes both simultaneously.

Britain and the USSR had been allies ever since Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Philby could argue that, by passing on information to Moscow, he was simply helping an ally and supporting the ‘single-front struggle against fascism’. His colleagues in MI6 and OSS would not have seen matters that way. Some high-grade intelligence was already passing between London and Moscow, but in restricted form, for both sides continued to view one another with deep suspicion. Philby was passing on secrets that his bosses in MI6 would never have dreamed of sharing with Stalin: deception operations, the identities of agents and officers, and a detailed (and damning) picture of the very structure of the secret service itself. There was also the danger – never confirmed or disproved – that German spies had penetrated Soviet intelligence, and information supplied by the Cambridge network was passing back to Berlin. If that possibility crossed Philby’s mind, it does not seem to have worried him. His loyalty was to Moscow; what Moscow did with the information he provided was not his concern. He knew he was committing treason by spying for a foreign power, and the implications of doing so. If caught, he would almost certainly be prosecuted under the Treachery Act of 1940, which carried the death penalty.

Death was part of the game. Philby had accepted the liquidation of his much-loved Soviet handlers with the acquiescence of a true believer. More than a dozen spies intercepted through the Bletchley Park decrypts had ended their lives on the gallows or in front of a firing squad. British intelligence was not above ‘bumping off’ enemy spies, to use the cheery euphemism favoured by MI6. Philby would later claim that he had done his ‘modest bit towards helping to win the war’, by killing large numbers of Germans. He saw himself as a combatant, albeit one who fought from behind a desk, with all the risks that war involves. But as the war headed to its climax, Philby’s espionage career was about to enter a new and much more lethal phase, in which he would help to destroy not Nazi spies, but ordinary men and women whose only crime was to oppose the political creed he had espoused. Philby would soon kill for the communist cause and Nicholas Elliott, unwittingly, would help him.

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