The Defence of the Realm (80 page)

Philby's sense that he had been worsted by Milmo, despite the lack of the evidence against him required for a successful prosecution, doubtless accounts for the fury he expressed afterwards to his friends in SIS. B4 (M. E. D. Cumming) noted on 14 January 1952:

Nicholas Elliott [of SIS] again referred to PEACH [Philby]'s intense anger with M.I.5 over the Milmo interrogation. He said that PEACH did not in any way object to such an independent interrogation being carried out but he did resent the fact that after his friendly conversations with Dick White, he should be virtually enticed to London under false pretences and then thrown straight into what proved to be a formal enquiry at which even his request to smoke was refused.
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In the hope of extracting a confession or usable evidence against him, the Service sent its leading interrogator, Jim Skardon, to call on Philby at home. Philby found Skardon ‘scrupulously courteous, his manner verging on the exquisite; nothing could have been more flattering than the cosy warmth of his interest in my views and actions.' In the previous year, however, Philby had followed with great attention the way that ‘Skardon wormed his way into Fuchs's confidence' in meetings at his home and was thus forewarned about his subtle interrogation methods: ‘During our first long conversation, I detected and evaded two little traps which he laid for me with deftness and precision. But I had scarcely begun congratulating myself when the thought struck me that he may have laid others which I had not detected.'
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Skardon, however, was at least partly taken in. Philby, he reported, ‘created a much more favourable impression than I would have expected'. He concluded that the case against Philby was unproven.
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The flight of Burgess and Maclean in May 1951 and the recall of Philby from Washington, like the Fuchs case a year before, produced another crisis in the Special Relationship. Sillitoe flew to Washington to brief, and attempt to mollify, the irascible J. Edgar Hoover in person. As well as undertaking the difficult task of trying to reassure a sceptical Hoover about the current state of British security, he quickly found himself caught in cross-fire between the Bureau and the CIA. Hoover was affronted that the
DCI, General Bedell Smith, had learned from British liaison of the existence of the VENONA decrypts which identified Maclean as Agent HOMER.
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Though Hoover had been content for MI5 to have access to VENONA, he was determined that the supposedly insecure CIA should not.
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For the small circle of those indoctrinated into the VENONA secret, the consequences of Philby's presumed treachery were particularly devastating. If Philby was indeed a Soviet agent, then the actual text of some of the VENONA decrypts must have been passed on to Moscow. In January 1952 Arthur Martin (B2b) had the unenviable task of going to GCHQ (then at Eastcote in the London suburbs) to tell the Director, Group Captain Jones, that ‘it should be assumed that Philby was a spy throughout his service with SIS': ‘It was quite clear that this came as a considerable shock to Jones. Whatever he had been told by “C” he had certainly not realised that our conclusions were as definite as this, nor had he been told that the Americans were being kept informed.'
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As well as ending Philby's career as an SIS officer (though not his contacts with his former Service), the defection of Burgess and Maclean also cast suspicion on John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt. Immediately after the defection, Blunt went through Burgess's flat, searching for and destroying incriminating documents. He failed, however, to notice a series of unsigned notes describing confidential discussions in Whitehall in 1939. In 1952, in the course of a lengthy Security Service investigation, Sir John Colville, one of those mentioned in the notes, was able to identify the author as Cairncross.
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During questioning by Jim Skardon, Cairncross acknowledged that he had written the notes (he could scarcely do otherwise) but denied that he knew Burgess was a Soviet agent. An SIS officer, who had himself been a Communist at Cambridge, however, identified Cairncross as a Party member while at Trinity College. Cairncross was suspended from the Treasury and soon afterwards forced to resign.
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A4 began surveillance of Cairncross and followed him to the location of a hurriedly arranged meeting with his controller, Yuri Modin, on 7 April 1952.
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Just in time, Modin noticed the surveillance and turned back. Cairncross, however, proceeded to Gunnersbury Park (presumably the rendezvous agreed with Modin) where, though a non-smoker, he was observed for some time chain-smoking. When later questioned by Skardon about this incident, Cairncross initially produced no coherent explanation. Next day he claimed that he had been on his way to a secret assignation with a married French woman, who had failed to turn up. Owing to what he claimed were his lover's strict security precautions during their affair, he did not even know where she lived. Skardon, remarkably, was taken in
by this improbable tale and reported: ‘I think he has told me the truth.' His great strength as an interrogator – his ability, as in the case of Fuchs, to gain the confidence of some of those he questioned – was also his weakness.
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Immediately after the defection of Burgess and Maclean, the Centre instructed Modin to press Blunt, whom it knew to be under suspicion as Burgess's friend and former flatmate, to follow them to Moscow. Unwilling to exchange the congenial, prestigious surroundings of the Courtauld Institute for the bleak socialist realism of Stalin's Russia, Blunt refused. ‘I know perfectly well how your people live,' Blunt told his controller, ‘and I can assure you it would be very hard, almost unbearable, for me to do likewise.' Modin, by his own account, was left speechless. Blunt was rightly confident that MI5 had no hard evidence against him.
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Like Cairncross, Blunt successfully deceived Skardon, though for different reasons. In Blunt's case, Skardon believed that his concealment of much of what he knew about Burgess was to be explained by gay culture rather than by recruitment as a Soviet agent. He reported on 21 April 1952:

As the result of my discussions with Blunt, I left with the strong impression that the overwhelming loyalty of one homosexual for another will be a bar to a successful examination of this man until these inhibitions are broken down and the obsessions removed from his mind. Whether I am the best person to conduct this psychoanalytic exercise time alone will show.
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Three weeks later, Skardon had given up hope of learning more from Blunt: ‘I am left with the strong impression that whatever Blunt knows he has passed on to the authorities. There may be incidents of tremendous significance yet to be unearthed but they will probably only be developed in the course of time as the result of further information coming our way.'
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The search for further evidence against both Philby and Blunt was complicated by misinterpretation of fragmentary clues in the VENONA decrypts. It was a number of years before the Security Service realized that Philby was the agent STANLEY, who – as one of the September 1945 decrypts implied – was the most important of the ‘valuable' British agent network. For several years those indoctrinated into VENONA misidentified Philby as the agent codenamed JOHNSON (who was in reality Anthony Blunt), though HICKS was correctly identified as Burgess. J. C. Robertson (D1, in charge of investigating Soviet espionage) minuted to Hollis, the DDG, in May 1954, ‘We have for some time thought that “HICKS” might be Burgess and “JOHNSON” Philby. I now definitely favour this theory.'
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For three years after Philby's recall from Washington, his controller in London, Yuri Modin, considered it too dangerous to resume direct contact with him because of Security Service surveillance. In 1954 Modin made contact through what Philby called ‘the most ingenious of routes'. The route was Anthony Blunt. One evening after a talk by Blunt at the Courtauld Institute, Modin approached him, probably for the first time since 1951, handed him a postcard reproduction of a painting and asked for his opinion of it. On the reverse was a message in Burgess's distinctive handwriting giving a rendezvous for the following evening at the Angel public house on the Caledonian Road. At the Angel, Modin asked Blunt to set up a meeting for him with Philby. The main message which Modin passed to Philby at their meeting, the first for several years, was one of reassurance which, so Philby later claimed, left him ‘with refreshed spirit'.
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Philby's immediate need for spiritual refreshment sprang from the wellpublicized defection of the KGB resident in Australia, Vladimir Petrov, and his wife Evdokia (then being extensively debriefed by a Security Service officer),
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who provided intelligence on Burgess and Maclean, including the first hard (as opposed to circumstantial) evidence that both were in Moscow. Modin was able to reassure Philby that Petrov knew nothing about his career as a Soviet agent.
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Philby was further reassured by support from former colleagues in SIS. Ronnie Reed, who worked on the VENONA material in D Branch, later recalled ‘the intense disagreement between our two services on Philby':

. . . MI6 felt strongly that we had as good a candidate for the leakages from British Intelligence in the person of Guy Liddell. He said that MI6 were at pains to point out that Liddell had parted from his wife, had a faintly homosexual air about him and, during the war, had been a close friend of Burgess, Philby and Blunt.
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On 20 July 1955 ‘C', Major General Sir John ‘Sinbad' Sinclair, wrote to the DG, Sir Dick White, arguing that there was mounting evidence that, as a result of Milmo's supposedly biased interrogation, Philby had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice.
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Two days later, White agreed to a joint MI5-SIS re-examination of the Philby case. Philby said that he welcomed the chance to clear his name. On 7, 10 and 11 October two SIS officers questioned Philby at length. The Security Service officer and transcribers present were deeply dissatisfied with the proceedings, putting on file their belief that one of the questioners was prejudiced in Philby's favour, repeatedly helping him find answers to awkward questions and never pressing questions which he failed to answer.
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By the time the questioning took place, both MI5 and SIS were aware
that claims that Philby was the ‘Third Man' who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean before their flight to Moscow were about to become public. J. Edgar Hoover had been outraged at the failure of a White Paper on the defection of Burgess and Maclean, published on 23 September, to make any reference to the suspicions surrounding Philby, and set out to force a full-scale British official investigation by leaking the story to the press. On 23 October, the New York
Sunday News
named Philby as the Third Man. Though Philby's house was quickly surrounded by the press, forcing him to take refuge in his mother's flat where he buried the telephone under a pile of cushions, British newspapers were deterred from identifying him by fears of being sued for libel. Two days later the Labour MP Marcus Lipton asked at Prime Minister's Question Time in the Commons:

Has the Prime Minister made up his mind to cover up at all costs the dubious third man activities of Mr Harold Philby who was First Secretary at the Washington embassy a little time ago, and is he determined to stifle all discussion on the very great matters which were evaded in the wretched White Paper, which is an insult to the intelligence of the country?

Philby first realized that he had been named in the Commons while travelling on the London tube and seeing the story on the front page of a neighbour's
Evening Standard.
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Lipton's question played into Philby's hands. Harold Macmillan, Foreign Secretary in the Eden government, who was forced to comment on the allegation during the debate on the White Paper on 7 November, had no realistic option but to clear him of the charges against him.
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Next day Philby gave a triumphant press conference in his mother's living room, shamelessly telling the assembled journalists: ‘The last time I spoke to a Communist, knowing he was one, was in 1934.'
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Macmillan was unaware that, almost a month before, new evidence had emerged which strengthened the case against Philby. While working at GCHQ as liaison officer for NSA, the US SIGINT agency founded in 1952, Meredith Gardner produced, for the first time for several years, an important VENONA decrypt of a message from the Centre to the London residency. The decrypt, dated 17 September 1945, was first shown to D1A (C. P. C. de Wesselow), one of the small circle of VENONA initiates in the Security Service, at GCHQ on 10 October 1955. It read as follows: ‘[Eight groups unrecovered] STANLEY about the events in Canada in the line of the Neighbours' work. [B% Report] STANLEY's information.' Given the date and the reference to the ‘Neighbours' (GRU), the ‘events in Canada' were plainly the Gouzenko case, with which Philby was closely involved. De Wesselow argued that, taking into account another reference
to STANLEY in a decrypt of the following day, 18 September 1945, he was ‘clearly a long established Soviet agent':
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‘There is no record in our files that any officer in S.I.S. was aware of the [Gouzenko] case, other than “C” himself and Mr Philby'.
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A re-examination of the case by Director D (A. M. MacDonald) a decade later concluded:

What does appear strange is the fact that although Philby's case was very much under review in September 1955 when the first [version of the] decrypt was available, no one in the Security Service or MI6 directly related STANLEY to Philby. There were admittedly other candidates but I should have thought that in the light of our knowledge of the Philby case at the end of 1955 he would have been regarded as a strong candidate for STANLEY.
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