Young Philby (13 page)

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 Centre.

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 byline 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.”

“Three birds with one stone, Kim. We have informants on the Republican side but next to nothing on Franco’s side. As an Englishman with a reputation for being a friend of Franco’s principal sponsor, Germany, you would be ideally positioned to obtain information on Franco’s order of battle, on troop movements, on the matériel and pilots that Hitler and Mussolini are providing to the Fascists.”

I remember we were sitting on the bench across from the new Battersea Power Station on Kirtling Street at the time of this conversation. It was lunch hour. Men with identical bowler hats planted on their heads strolled the sidewalk. A boy in knickerbockers hawked newspapers on the corner, calling out the headlines in a shrill singsong voice.
Edward planning to abdicate throne to marry American divorcée Simpson. Defying League of Nations Hitler tightens grip on Rhineland
. I was wearing my bowler and balancing my umbrella across my knees. I retain an indelible image of Kim shelling peanuts to feed the pigeons prowling the gutter. He concentrated on the pigeons for a long while. Finally he said, “How do you think they learn to eat the nuts and not the shells?”

“Painful experience.”

“That’s a coincidence—it’s my alma mater. The school of p-p-painful experience.” He nodded as if he had come to a decision. “Of course I shall have to speak with Litzi.”

“I have already spoken with Litzi.”

He turned to me in surprise. “When? She didn’t say a word about it to me.”

“She is still under Centre discipline. I instructed her not to. We met last week at the tearoom in the Brook Street hotel. I explained to her what I had in mind for you. Litzi is a good soldier, a good Communist. There is a line in English poetry that describes her perfectly:
They also serve who only stand and wait
. When we spoke, she said she’d seen the writing on the wall when you told her you’d agreed to be recruited—she understood that you and she would eventually have to separate. She realizes she is a liability to you, a drag on your career. She realizes this has to end if you are to be of service to the anti-Fascist
internationale
. People would understand your marrying a Jewess to save her from persecution. People will understand your decision to leave her once she was safely in England.”