Kim Philby by Tim Milne

Author:Tim Milne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781849547239
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2014-04-16T07:00:00+00:00

8

DECLINE AND FALL

Almost the first lesson I learnt in Section V was that spying is a mug’s game. Here were all these German agents, unmasked not through any fault of their own or of the case officers running them but simply because the German cypher was not completely secure. Towards the end of the war German agents were also, and increasingly, given away by Abwehr officers who defected to our side or were captured. Indeed, this eventually became an embarrassment to MI5 in their running of double agents: an Abwehr officer would say on arrival, ‘There’s an agent reporting on all your troop movements around Portsmouth. Here are the details – now you can pull him in.’

It was not to be supposed that the same cypher weaknesses would be found in the Soviet intelligence services, still less that we would be capturing any of their officers on the battlefield. But occasionally one of these officers would defect. Already Walter Krivitsky, who came over to the West in 1937, had told MI5 that the Russians had sent a young English journalist to Spain during the Civil War, a lead that apparently was not followed up. Now in the later months of 1945 there were two more danger signs for Kim, one minor, the other a flashing red light. The lesser case was that of Igor Guzenko, a cypher clerk in the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, who defected and in due course gave away a number of Soviet agents in Canada. One of them, Gordon Lunan, had been a colleague of mine in Benson’s before he emigrated to Canada in 1938 or 1939, though he was then a youth of about nineteen without, as far as I knew, marked political leanings. Lunan went down for six years. The other and (for Kim) much more important case was the attempted defection of Konstantin Volkov in Istanbul. The story has been recounted at length in the Philby books, especially his own. Assuming Kim’s account is correct, Volkov, nominally a Soviet vice-consul in Istanbul, secretly approached the British consulate general there in August. He sought asylum in Britain and offered in return to give much information about the NKVD, of which he claimed to be an officer. In particular he offered to identify three Soviet agents in Britain, namely the head of a counter-espionage organisation in London and two Foreign Office men. But he stipulated that all communication between Istanbul and London on the subject should be by diplomatic bag because the Russians had broken certain British cyphers. Kim had heard nothing of the case when he was summoned to the chief’s office and shown the letter from Istanbul outlining Volkov’s offer. In front of the chief he had to read what might almost have amounted to his own death warrant, not to mention that of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Yet it seems that he showed no sign of shock and aroused no suspicion. That evening he got word to the Russians, and the next day persuaded the chief to send him to Istanbul to investigate.

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