A Spy Among Friends (20 page)

Just a few days after his arrival in Washington, Philby was appointed joint-commander of the Anglo-American Special Policy Committee, responsible for running the Albanian operation with his American opposite number, James McCargar. The Americans would play an increasing role in Operation Valuable (which they codenamed, perhaps more realistically, ‘Fiend’), not least by financing it, but Philby ‘was the one who made all the operational decisions’.

_*

James McCargar was a former journalist from a wealthy Californian family, who had made a name for himself in the post-war period by arranging escape routes out of Hungary for scientists and intellectuals fleeing communism. He smuggled one Romanian woman out in the boot of his car, and then married her. Like many American intelligence officers of the time, McCargar had an exaggerated respect for his British counterparts, and his new colleague came with glowing credentials. ‘Philby was a great charmer. He came to us with an enormous reputation,’ recalled McCargar. ‘One had the feeling one could have confidence in him.’ Philby seemed to exemplify the sort of qualities that Americans hoped to see in their British allies: cheerful, resolute, witty and exceedingly generous with the bottle. ‘He had charm, warmth and an engaging, self-deprecating humour,’ said McCargar. ‘He drank a lot, but then so did we all in those days. We floated out of the war on a sea of drink without its having much effect. I considered him a friend.’

Philby loved Washington, and Washington loved him. Doors were flung open, the invitations poured in, and few people needed to meet him more than once before they, too, considered him a friend. Aileen also seemed to find strength in Washington’s welcoming atmosphere. The family moved into a large, two-storey house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, which was soon a riot of children’s toys, full ashtrays and empty bottles. In Nicholas Elliott’s words, Philby was ‘undoubtedly devoted to his children’, a trait which further endeared him to his new American friends and colleagues: here was a family man, the quintessential English gentleman, a man one could trust. Within weeks, it seems, Philby had made contact with just about everyone of note in American intelligence. To their faces he was politeness personified; behind their backs, vituperative. There was Johnny Boyd, assistant director of the FBI (‘by any objective standard, a dreadful man’); Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Policy Coordination (‘balding and self-importantly running to fat’); Bill Harvey of CIA counter-intelligence (‘a former FBI man . . . sacked for drunkenness’); CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith (‘a cold, fishy eye’); deputy CIA head and future chief Allen Dulles (‘bumbling’); Bob Lamphere of the FBI (‘puddingy’) and many more. The house on Nebraska Avenue soon became a gathering place for Washington’s intelligence elite. ‘He entertained a lot of Americans,’ said another CIA officer. ‘The wine flowed, and the whisky too.’ Aileen played the role of salon hostess, tottering around with trays of drinks, and drinking her fair share. One guest recalled only this of Philby’s parties: ‘They were long, and very, very wet.’

Philby seemed to invite intimacy. His knowing smile, ‘suggestive of complicity in some private joke, conveyed an unspoken understanding of the underlying ironies of our work’. He made a point of dropping in on the offices of American colleagues and counterparts in the late afternoon, knowing that his hosts would sooner or later (and usually sooner) ‘suggest drifting out to a friendly bar for a further round of shop talk’. Trading internal information is a particular weakness of the intelligence world; spies cannot explain their work to outsiders, so they seize every opportunity to discuss it with their own kind. ‘Intelligence officers talk trade among themselves all the time,’ said one CIA officer. ‘Philby was privy to a hell of a lot beyond what he should have known.’ The CIA and FBI were rivals, sometimes viciously so, with a peculiar social division between the two arms of American intelligence that was echoed by the competition between MI5 and MI6. Philby characterised CIA operatives as upper-class wine-drinkers, while the FBI were earthier beer-drinking types; Philby was happy to drink quantities of both, with either, while trying to ‘please one party without offending the other’. Philby’s office was in the British embassy, but he was often to be found at the CIA or FBI headquarters, or the Pentagon, where a room was set aside for meetings on the Albanian operation. Few subjects were out of bounds: ‘The sky was the limit . . . he would have known as much as he wanted to find out.’

James Angleton was now chief of Staff A, in command of foreign intelligence operations, and in Philby’s estimation ‘the driving force’ within the intelligence-gathering division of the CIA. A strange mystique clung to Angleton; he used the name ‘Lothar Metzl’, and invented a cover story that he had been a Viennese café pianist before the war. Behind his house in the suburbs of North Arlington he constructed a heated greenhouse, the better to cultivate his orchids and his aura of knowing eccentricity. In the basement he polished semi-precious stones. He carried a gold fob watch; his suits and accent remained distinctly English. Angleton tended to describe his work in fishing metaphors: ‘I got a few nibbles last night,’ he would remark obscurely, after an evening trawling the files. In intelligence circles he inspired admiration, gossip and some fear. ‘It was the belief within the CIA that Angleton possessed more secrets than anyone else, and grasped their meaning better than anyone else.’

Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, was the most famous restaurant in the capital, probably the most expensive, and certainly the most exclusive. Harvey’s Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Oyster Saloon started serving steamed oysters, broiled lobster and Crab Imperial in 1820, and had continued to do so, in colossal quantities, ever since. In 1863, notwithstanding the Civil War, Harvey’s diners were getting through 500 wagonloads of oysters a week. Every US President since Ulysses S. Grant had dined there, and the restaurant enjoyed an unrivalled reputation as the place to be seen for people of power and influence. The black waiters in pressed white uniforms were discreet, the Martinis potent, the napkins stiff as cardboard and the tables spaced far enough apart to ensure privacy for the most secret conversations. Ladies entered by a separate entrance, and were not permitted in the main dining room. Most evenings, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover could be seen at his corner table, eating with Clyde Tolson, his deputy, and possibly his lover. Hoover was said to be addicted to Harvey’s oysters; he never paid for his meals.

Angleton and Philby began to lunch regularly at Harvey’s restaurant, at first once a week, then three times a fortnight. They spoke on the telephone at least every other day. Their lunches became a sort of ritual, a ‘habit’ in Philby’s words, beginning with bourbon on the rocks and proceeding through lobster and wine and ending in brandy and cigars. Philby was impressed both by Angleton’s grasp of intelligence and his appetite for food and drink. ‘He demonstrated regularly that overwork was not his only vice,’ wrote Philby. ‘He was one of the thinnest men I have ever met, and one of the biggest eaters. Lucky Jim!’ The two men could be seen, hunched in animated conversation, talking, drinking, laughing and enjoying their shared love of secrecy. Angleton had few close friends, and fewer confidants. Philby had many friends, and had refined the giving and receiving of confidences to an art form. They fitted one another perfectly.

‘Our close association was, I am sure, inspired by genuine friendliness,’ wrote Philby. ‘But we both had ulterior motives . . . By cultivating me to the full, he could better keep me under wraps. For my part, I was more than content to string him along. The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he would suspect covert action. Who gained most from this complex game I cannot say. But I had one big advantage. I knew what he was doing for CIA and he knew what I was doing for SIS. But the real nature of my interest was something he did not know.’ Beneath their friendship was an unspoken competition to see who could out-think, and out-drink, the other. Angleton, according to one associate, ‘used to pride himself that he could drink Kim under the table and still walk away with useful information. Can you imagine how much information he had to trade in those booze-ups?’

‘Our discussions ranged over the whole world,’ Philby recalled. They spoke of the various covert operations against the Soviet Union, the anti-communist insurgents being slipped into Albania and other countries behind the Iron Curtain; they discussed the intelligence operations under way in France, Italy and Germany, and resources pouring into anti-communist projects worldwide, including the recruiting of exiles for subversion behind the Iron Curtain. ‘Both CIA and SIS were up to their ears in émigré politics,’ wrote Philby. Angleton explained how the CIA had taken over the anti-Soviet spy network established by Reinhard Gehlen, the former chief of German intelligence on the Eastern Front who had offered his services to the US after surrendering in 1945. Gehlen’s spies and informants included many former Nazis, but the CIA was not choosy about its allies in the new war against communism. By 1948 the CIA was funnelling some $1.5 million (around $14.5 million today) into Gehlen’s spy ring. Philby was all ears: ‘Many of Harvey’s lobsters went to provoke Angleton into defending, with chapter and verse, the past record and current activities of the von Gehlen organisation.’ CIA interventions in Greece and Turkey to hold back communism; covert operations in Iran, the Baltics and Guatemala; secret American plans in Chile, Cuba, Angola and Indonesia; blueprints for Allied cooperation in the event of war with the USSR. All this and more was laid before Philby, between friends, as Angleton gorged and gossiped over the starched tablecloths and full glasses at Harvey’s. ‘During those long, boozy lunches and dinners, Philby must have picked him clean,’ a fellow officer later wrote.

But Philby and Angleton were also professionals. After every lunch, Angleton returned to his office, and dictated a long memo to his secretary, Gloria Loomis, reporting in detail his discussions with the obliging MI6 liaison chief. ‘Everything was written up,’ Loomis later insisted. Philby did likewise, dictating his own memo for MI6 to his secretary Edith Whitfield, who had accompanied him to Washington from Istanbul (much to Aileen’s annoyance). Later, at home in Nebraska Avenue, Philby would write up his own notes, for other eyes.

_*

Philby liked to portray the Soviet intelligence service as an organisation of unparalleled efficiency. In truth, Moscow Centre was frequently beset by bureaucratic bungling, inertia and incompetence, coupled with periodic blood-letting. Before Philby’s arrival, the Soviet spy outpost in Washington had been through a period of ‘chaotic’ turbulence, with the recall of two successive
rezidents
. Initially, Philby had no direct contact with Soviet intelligence in the US, preferring to send any information via Guy Burgess in London, as he had from Istanbul. Finally, four months after Philby’s arrival, Moscow woke up to the realisation that it should take better care of its veteran spy.

On 5 March a young man stepped off the ship
Batory
, newly arrived in New York harbour from Gdynia in Poland. His passport proclaimed him to be an American citizen of Polish origin named Ivan Kovalik; his real name was Valeri Mikhailovich Makayev, a thirty-two-year-old Russian intelligence officer with orders to establish himself under cover in New York and arrange a way for Philby to communicate with Moscow Centre. Makayev swiftly obtained a job teaching musical composition at New York University, and started an affair with a Polish dancer who owned a ballet school in Manhattan. Makayev was a good musician, and one of nature’s romantics, but he was a hopeless case officer. His bosses had supplied him with $25,000 for his mission, which he proceeded to spend, mostly on himself and his ballerina. Finally, Makayev got word to Philby that he had arrived. They met in New York, and Philby’s newly arrived case officer handed over a camera for photographing documents. Thereafter, they would rendezvous at different points between New York and Washington, in Baltimore or Philadelphia. After nine months, Makayev had managed to set up two communication channels to Moscow, using a Finnish seaman as a courier and a postal route via an agent in London. The system was slow and cumbersome; Philby was wary of face-to-face meetings, and unimpressed by his new case officer; Makayev was much more interested in ballet than espionage. Philby was producing more valuable intelligence for Moscow than at any time in his life, yet he had never been run more incompetently.

Frank Wisner, the CIA officer in charge of insurgent operations behind the Iron Curtain, was baffled: every bid to undermine communism by secretly fomenting resistance within the USSR and among its satellites seemed to be going spectacularly wrong. But Wisner – or ‘The Whiz’, as he liked to be known – refused to be downcast, let alone change tack. Despite a disappointing start, the Albanian operation would continue. ‘We’ll get it right next time,’ Wisner promised Philby.

But they did not get it right. Instead, it continued to go wrong, and not just in Albania. Funds, equipment and arms were funnelled to the anti-communist resistance in Poland, which turned out to be nothing more than a front, operated by Soviet intelligence. Anti-communist Lithuanians, Estonians and Armenians were recruited, and then dropped into their homelands by British and American planes; nationalist White Russians were sent in to continue the fight against the Bolsheviks. Almost all mysteriously disappeared. ‘We had agents parachuting in, floating in, walking in, boating in,’ said one former CIA officer. ‘Virtually all these operations were complete failures . . . they were all rolled up.’ The CIA and MI6 kept one another informed of exactly where and when their respective teams were going in, to avoid overlap and confusion. Philby, as the liaison officer in Washington, was responsible for passing on ‘the timing and geographical co-ordinates’ from one intelligence agency to another, and then another. Ukraine was considered particularly fertile ground for an insurgency, with an established resistance group active in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1949, the first British-trained team of Ukrainian insurgents was sent in with radio equipment. They were never heard of again. Two more teams followed the next year, and then three more six-man units were parachuted to drop points in Ukraine and inside the Polish border. All vanished. ‘I do not know what happened to the parties concerned,’ Philby later wrote, with ruthless irony. ‘But I can make an informed guess.’