A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men by Shannon Monaghan

Author:Shannon Monaghan [Monaghan, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

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For Smiley, the explanation hinging around Kim Philby’s betrayal was so convincing because it felt so familiar. He had seen it before with James Klugmann, the NKVD agent stationed in the SOE staff offices of Cairo and Bari.

Klugmann, with his organized (if sometimes unwitting) fellow travelers in the office, had seen his desires realized: British policy shifted from supporting the royalist Mihailović in Yugoslavia to the Communist Tito, and from backing various groups in Albania to exclusively supporting Enver Hoxha’s Communist Partisans. There were other factors that goaded Churchill into changing his mind about Yugoslavia, not the least of them being the Top Secret ULTRA decrypts. Like Philby with Operation Valuable, Klugmann could not claim complete credit for the coup. But neither man could be accused of not trying his utmost.

Klugmann was not satisfied by Tito’s victory. In addition to his manipulation of the staff office, he himself had passed information to Tito’s headquarters. He provided both specific military intelligence and broader advice. He told Tito and his men how to “adapt their tactics”—not against their enemies but with British officers in the field, like Churchill appointee Fitzroy Maclean. Klugmann told the Communists how to present the most attractive face to his own superiors, however false that image might be. He knew what the senior British officers were looking for, and by revealing what that was to Tito’s men, he was setting the other British officers up to hear only what they wanted to hear.

Klugmann had been delighted on the “great day” in the spring of 1944 when SOE’s headquarters had recalled all British missions to the Chetnik (nationalist, royalist, and conservative) resistance in Yugoslavia. Tito had already defeated the royalist leader Mihailović. Now he had captured him and was putting the royalist on trial for his life. A guilty verdict was guaranteed. No one doubted that the sentence would be execution.

Klugmann was incensed to learn that a few British officers who had served with the royalists were being allowed to send factual evidence in support of Mihailović. Those officers believed that he had been framed as a collaborator. Many downed American pilots spearheaded a Western mission to give evidence. Klugmann demanded to be able to send his own evidence, though he had never been in the field.

Why Klugmann felt the need to supply evidence against a man whose trial was fixed was unclear. Klugmann had been so clever, so subtle. Now his hand slipped ever so slightly.

MI5 was onto him again. His moves against Mihailović appeared to be the straw that would break the camel’s back. But, again, Klugmann was lucky in his friends. Guy Burgess warned their shared handler that Klugmann had been recorded in damning conversation.

Then, Roger Hollis, head of MI5, received several phone calls from an officer in the upper reaches of MI6. The MI6 officer asked MI5 to wave off. There was really nothing to see here. He reminded Hollis of their conversation in a cover note to the transcripts examining Klugmann’s attempts to testify against Mihailović.

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