A Spy Among Friends (5 page)

Their relationship grew still closer when both were plucked from the outer reaches of British intelligence, and placed at the very centre, in Section V of MI6, the division devoted to counter-intelligence. MI5 was responsible for maintaining security, including the combating of enemy espionage, within the UK and British Empire. MI6 was responsible for gathering intelligence and running agents abroad. Within MI6, Section V played a specific and vital role: collecting information on enemy intelligence in foreign parts, by means of spies and defectors, and furnishing MI5 with advance warning of espionage threats to Britain. A vital link between Britain’s secret services, Section V’s task was to ‘negate, confuse, deceive, subvert, monitor or control the clandestine intelligence collection operations and agents of foreign governments or agencies’. Before the war, the section had devoted most of its energies to monitoring the spread of international communism and battling Soviet espionage; but as war progressed, it came to focus almost exclusively on the intelligence operations of the Axis powers. The Iberian Peninsula was a particular concern. Neutral Spain and Portugal stood on the frontline of the espionage war. Many of the German intelligence operations directed at Britain were launched from these two countries, and in 1941, MI6 began beefing up the Iberian operation. One evening Tommy Harris told Philby that the bosses were looking for someone ‘with a knowledge of Spain to take charge of the expanded sub-section’. Philby immediately expressed an interest; Harris spoke to Richard Brooman-White, Elliott’s friend, the chief of MI6’s Iberian operations; Brooman-White spoke to the head of MI6. ‘The Old Boy network began to operate,’ as Philby put it, and within days he was summoned to see the head of Section V.

Major Felix Cowgill was the model of the old-style intelligence officer: a former officer in the Indian police, he was rigid, combative, paranoid and quite dim. Trevor-Roper dismissed him as a ‘purblind, disastrous megalomaniac’, and Philby, privately, was equally scathing. ‘As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world.’ Cowgill was ‘suspicious and bristling’ towards anyone outside his section, blindly loyal to those within it, and no match for the Philby charm.

Philby never formally applied for the job, and Cowgill never formally offered it, but after one long, bibulous evening, Philby emerged as the new head of Section V’s Iberian department, a job which, as Philby happily noted, entailed wider responsibilities as well as ‘personal contacts with the rest of SIS and MI5’. Before Philby took up the post, however, Valentine Vivian – known as ‘Vee-Vee’ – the deputy head of MI6, decided to have another chat with Philby’s father. Hillary St John Bridger Philby was a figure of considerable notoriety. As adviser to Ibn Saud, the first monarch of Saudi Arabia, he had played (and would continue to play) a key role in the oleaginous politics of that region. He had converted to Islam, taking the name Sheikh Abdullah, spoke Arabic fluently, and would eventually marry, as his second wife, a slave girl from Baluchistan presented to him by the Saudi King. He remained, however, quintessentially English in his tastes, and wildly unpredictable in his opinions. The elder Philby’s opposition to the war had seen him arrested and briefly imprisoned, an episode that did no harm to his own social standing, or his son’s career prospects. Over lunch at the club, Colonel Vivian asked St John Philby about his son’s politics.

‘He was a bit of a communist at Cambridge, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh that was all schoolboy nonsense,’ St John Philby airily replied. ‘He’s a reformed character now.’

Nicholas Elliott, meanwhile, was making a parallel career move. In the summer of 1941, he was also transferred to Section V, with responsibility for the Netherlands. Henceforth Philby would be fighting German espionage in the Iberian Peninsula, and Elliott would be doing the same in Nazi-occupied Holland, from the next-door office. Each would be paid a salary, in cash, of £600 a year and neither, in accordance with longstanding secret services rules, would pay any tax. Philby and Elliott were now fighting shoulder to shoulder in the ‘active pursuit and liquidation of the enemy intelligence services’.

_*

Section V was not housed in London with the rest of MI6, but headquartered in Glenalmond, a large Victorian house in King Harry Lane, St Albans, some twenty miles north of the capital, codenamed ‘War Station XB’. Kim Philby and Aileen rented a cottage on the outskirts of the town.

Philby had been introduced to his future wife, on the day war was declared, by Flora Solomon, a friend from Cambridge. The daughter of a Jewish-Russian gold tycoon, Solomon was another exotic bloom in the colourful hothouse of Philby’s circle: as a young woman she had had an affair with Alexander Kerensky, the Russian Prime Minister deposed by Lenin in the October Revolution, before going on to marry a British First World War general. In 1939, she was hired to improve working conditions by Marks and Spencer, and here she met and befriended Aileen Furse, a store detective in the shop’s Marble Arch branch. ‘Aileen belonged to that class, now out of fashion, called “county”,’ wrote Solomon. ‘She was typically English, slim and attractive, fiercely patriotic.’ Working undercover, in her twinset and raincoat, she was virtually invisible when discreetly policing the aisles of Marks and Spencer. Aileen tended to disappear in a crowd, hanging back, watchful and careful. Her father had been killed in the First World War, when she was just four years old, and her upbringing in the Home Counties had been strictly conventional, boring and quite lonely. Secretly, she was ‘subject to depressions’. Aileen Furse and Kim Philby met over drinks at Solomon’s Mayfair home. Philby began talking about his experiences as a correspondent in Spain. ‘He found an avid listener in Aileen,’ wrote Solomon, and ‘the next I knew they were sharing a flat.’

Their union, it seemed to Elliott, was an ideal one, founded on a shared love of good company. Elliott liked Aileen almost as much as he liked Philby, an affection that deepened after he developed diabetes and she gently nursed him back to health. ‘She was highly intelligent,’ wrote Elliott, ‘very human, full of courage and had a pleasant sense of humour.’ Indeed, Aileen was just the sort of wife he hoped for himself: loyal, discreet, patriotic, and willing to laugh at his jokes. The Philbys’ first child, a daughter, was born in 1941; a son followed the next year, and another the year after that. Philby was a doting father, Elliot noted approvingly, bursting with ‘parental pride’.

The Philby home became a gathering place for the young intelligence officers of Section V, an out-of-town version of the Harris salon in London, where the doors, and various bottles, were always open. Graham Greene, then one of Philby’s deputies, recalled the ‘long Sunday lunches in St Albans when the whole subsection relaxed under his leadership for a few hours of heavy drinking’. Philby was adored by his colleagues, who recalled his ‘small loyalties’, his generosity of spirit, and his distaste for petty office politics. ‘He had something about him – an aura of lovable authority like some romantic platoon commander – which made people want to appear at their best in front of him. Even his senior officers recognised his abilities and deferred to him.’

Section V was a tight-knit little community, just a dozen officers and their deputies, and a similar number of support staff. Officers and secretaries were on Christian-name terms, and some were on more intimate terms than that. Philby’s ‘merry band’ included his old school friend Tim Milne, a jovial eccentric named Trevor Wilson, who had formerly been ‘a purchaser of skunk excrement in Abyssinia for the French perfume company Molyneux’, and Jack Ivens, a fruit exporter who spoke fluent Spanish. The local townsfolk were led to believe that the educated young men and women in the big house were a team of archaeologists from the British Museum, excavating the ruins of Verulamium, the Roman name for St Albans. Mrs Rennit, the cook, served solid English fare, and fish and chips on Fridays. At weekends, they played cricket on the pitch behind Glenalmond, before repairing to the King Harry pub next door.

Colonel Cowgill was the boss, but Philby was the animating spirit of the group: ‘The sense of dedication and purpose to whatever he was doing gleamed through and inspired men to follow him.’ Elliott was not alone in his adulation. ‘No one could have been a better chief than Kim Philby,’ wrote Graham Greene. ‘He worked harder than anyone else and never gave the impression of labour. He was always relaxed, completely unflappable.’ In even the most casual bureaucracies there is room for jockeying, but Philby was the epitome of loyalty. ‘If one made an error of judgment he was sure to minimise it and cover it up, without criticism.’ Desmond Bristow, a new Spanish-speaking recruit, arrived at Glenalmond in September 1941, and was welcomed by Philby, ‘a gentle-looking man with smiling eyes and an air of confidence. My first impression was of a man of quiet intellectual charm . . . he had a spiritual tranquillity about him.’ The ‘cosiness’ of Section V distinguished it from other, more reserved parts of MI6. The team kept few secrets from one another, official or otherwise. ‘It was not difficult to find out what colleagues were doing,’ wrote Philby. ‘What was known to one would be known to all.’

The admiration of his subordinates was echoed by the approbation of Philby’s superiors. Felix Cowgill called him ‘a good cricket umpire’. There could be no higher praise. Here was a man who played by the most honourable rules. But some saw a flicker of something else in Philby, something harder and deeper, a ‘calculating ambition’, a ruthless ‘single-mindedness’. Like Elliott, he used humour to deflect inquiry. ‘There was something mysterious about him,’ wrote Trevor-Roper. ‘He never engaged you in serious conversation – it was always irony.’

As head of the Iberian section, Philby faced a formidable challenge. Although Spain and Portugal were officially neutral non-combatants in the war, in reality both countries tolerated, and even actively encouraged, German espionage on a grand scale. Wilhelm Leissner, the Abwehr chief in Spain, presided over a well-funded, sprawling intelligence network made up of more than 200 officers (more than half the German diplomatic presence) with some 1,500 agents deployed around the country. Leissner’s principal target was Britain: recruiting and despatching spies to the UK, bugging the British embassy, bribing Spanish officials and sabotaging British shipping. Portugal was another hotbed of espionage, although Abwehr operations were less efficient under the command of a dissolute German aristocrat named Ludovico von Karsthoff. The Abwehr poured spies and cash into Spain and Portugal, but in his duel with Leissner and Karsthoff Philby had one overwhelming advantage: Bletchley Park, the top-secret decoding station where intercepted German wireless messages were decrypted, furnishing a priceless insight into Nazi intelligence. ‘It was not long before we had a very full picture of the Abwehr in the Peninsula,’ wrote Philby. That information would soon be put ‘to good use in disrupting, or at least seriously embarrassing, the enemy on his own chosen ground’.

Nicholas Elliott’s task of attacking German intelligence in the Netherlands, his former stamping ground, was a different proposition, and even harder. The Abwehr in Nazi-occupied Holland was highly effective, recruiting, training and despatching a stream of spies to Britain. By contrast, infiltrating agents into Holland was exceptionally difficult. The few networks that had survived the Venlo incident were riddled with Nazi informers.

In a plot that smacks of James Bond (and has all the hallmarks of an Elliott ruse) a Dutch agent named Peter Tazelaar was put ashore near the seafront casino at Scheveningen, wearing full evening dress covered with a rubber suit to keep him dry. Once ashore, Tazelaar peeled off his outer suit and began to ‘mingle with the crowd on the front’ in his dinner jacket, which had been sprinkled with brandy to reinforce the ‘party-goer’s image’. Formally dressed and alcoholically perfumed, Tazelaar successfully made it past the German guards, and picked up a radio previously dropped by parachute. The echo of 007 may not be coincidental: among the young blades of British intelligence at this time was a young officer in the Naval Intelligence Department named Ian Fleming, the future author of the James Bond books. Ian Fleming and Nicholas Elliott had both experienced the trauma of being educated at Durnford School; they became close friends.

Peter Tazelaar was one of the few to make it back to Britain. Of the fifteen agents sent into Holland between June 1940 and December 1941, only four survived, thanks to the brutal efficiency of Major Hermann Giskes, the head of Abwehr counter-intelligence in Holland, Elliott’s opposite number. In August 1941, Giskes intercepted a team of Dutch SOE agents shipped into Holland by fast torpedo boat and forced them, under threat of execution, to send encrypted wireless messages back to Britain, luring more spies across the water. Some fifty-five Dutch agents were subsequently captured and dozens executed, in a Double Cross operation codenamed
Englandspiel
(‘The England Game’), before two managed to escape and alert the British to the fact that they were being hoaxed. Winding up the operation, Giskes sent a final, mocking wireless message: ‘This is the last time you are trying to make business in Netherlands without our assistance Stop we think this rather unfair in view our long and successful co-operation as your sole agents Stop but never mind whenever you will come to pay a visit to the Continent you may be assured that you will be received with the same care and result as all those who you sent us before Stop so long.’ The episode was, in Philby’s words, ‘an operational disaster’, but almost equally alarming was the discovery that German intelligence in Holland had managed to slip at least one spy into Britain undetected.

In the spring of 1941, the body of a Dutchman was found in an air raid shelter in Cambridge. His name, unimprovably, was Engelbertus Fukken. In his pockets and suitcase were found a Dutch passport, a forged identity card, and one shilling and sixpence. He had parachuted into Buckinghamshire five months earlier, passed himself off as a refugee and shot himself in the head when he ran out of money. No Nazi spy had managed to remain at large for so long, and there was no trace of him in the Bletchley Park intercepts, which raised, for Elliott, the worrying possibility that there might be others at large.