The Importance of Chronology (with special reference to Liddell & Philby)

I had been hoping to deliver the next chapter in The Mystery of the Undetected Radios this month, but I have been thwarted by circumstances. Towards the end of March, I suffered a recurrence of tendinitis caused by whiplash to my neck in a traffic accident thirty-five years ago, and started undergoing a three-month treatment of spinal decompression. This process fixed the problem last time I had it seven years ago, but I must have been negligent on maintenance, and the complaint suddenly returned with a vengeance, with acute stabbing pain in my neck and shoulder. Yet, when my doctor gave me cortisone and lidocaine injections, they did not seem to be having an effect. Moreover, he also prescribed painkillers and a muscle relaxant, which likewise did not ease my condition. After a very painful and sleep-deprived weekend at the beginning of April, I saw the doctor again, and he very quickly identified the culprit as shingles. This was puzzling, as only last summer I had undertaken the course of anti-shingles vaccine. My doctor had not encountered a case of a vaccinated person catching the disease. Could the GRU or MI5 have been involved? No explanation has been excluded.

What it means is that for several weeks I could not work at my desktop for more than 5-10 minutes at a time, which made the task of researching files, checking my notes, and compiling fresh text impossible. I also realized that there were at least three more books I needed to read to cover the 1941-1942 period adequately: M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in the Low Countries, Hermann Giskes’s London Calling North Pole, and a volume that came out only a few weeks ago, Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret Army. I have also read from cover to cover David Stafford’s Britain and European Resistance 1940-1945, a work that I have owned for a long time, but only dipped into beforehand. I have acquired the other three, and read all four now, but have only recently been able to transcribe my notes, and enter items in my chronology.

For the issue dated April 18, the London Review of Books commissioned from a ‘writer’ with the improbable name of Colm Tóibín – an Hibernian, I would wager – an article of some 9,000 words that described his experiences with testicular cancer. I am deeply sorry about the gentleman’s condition, but this self-indulgent piece was of such relentless tediousness that I can only conclude that the editrix of the LRB, Mary-Kay Wilmers (she with the Eitingon connections), presented it as an effort to win some obscure journalistic contest. While judging myself capable of similar medical discourse, I can assure coldspur readers that I shall not burden them with comparable distressing details of my complaints. During my disability (which has now mercifully abated), I was able, however, to create instead fresh text in relative comfort on my iPad, and hence present a report for April on an important intelligence-related subject that did not require close, integrative research.  Restored almost to tip-top form, I was able to resume work on my PC towards the end of the month, and thus I also present some updates to the Liddell affair, which, I hope, will fascinate my readers as much as they fascinated me. This bulletin, which started out as a reasonably modest report, took on a vigorous new life in the last week of the month. It could probably merit a post on its own, but, having invested some thought in putting this methodological introduction together, I decided to remain with it as the lead. Moreover, the analysis of Liddell and Philby represents an outstanding example of why attention to chronology is important.

The Importance of Chronology

For me, one of the most annoying aspects of any historical book, or volume of biography, is inattention to chronology. I read a few pages, unanchored precisely by date, and then suddenly come across a phrase like ‘the following spring’. What year are we talking about? I suspect that the author him- or her-self has only a hazy idea of what is happening when he or she [I refuse to use the fashionable ‘they’ in this situation] carelessly lays out events out of sequence, and thereby does not provide solid references in the calendar for many critical happenings.

I am under no delusions about causes and seriality. The proximity of an event to another does not necessarily indicate that the earlier one influenced the second, but it is very important to place events in their proper sequence, and tether them precisely. (What is undeniable, pace J. B. Priestley, is that events with a verifiable date cannot have exerted any influence on events proven to have occurred earlier.) Very rarely do original sources lack a date attached to them, and they should be echoed in any text that exploits them. Moreover, for the historian, organization of dates coming from disparate sources can show new patterns of discovery that might not otherwise have been apparent. I think, for example, of my locating the row over authority between Jane Archer and Guy Liddell that was not covered properly in the latter’s Diaries when he described the circumstances of her sacking.

Accordingly, the creation and maintenance of a detailed chronology have been integral to my research methodology ever since I set out on what evolved to become my doctoral thesis. I maintain a Word document of over three hundred pages, covering military and political, but chiefly intelligence and counter-intelligence, events for four decades in the twentieth century. There are almost 300 pages of pure timeline, with 13 pages of references, constituting about 500 different sources, including 30 from the National Archives. I try to maintain every entry to a single line. The years 1936 to 1950 are particularly densely covered: for example, the year 1940 has over 2400 entries. Each entry has at least one source appended to it. (See sample page)

The Preamble to the document reads as follows:

Chronology: WWII – Prelude & Aftermath

This chronology is constructed to provide a guide to the history of intelligence and counter-intelligence in Britain and the US between 1917 and 1956, and focuses on key dates relating to:

a) the recruitment and establishment of Soviet agents in British intelligence, and their subsequent deeds and movements;

b) the actions by Soviet intelligence agencies to subvert British institutions:

c) the plot by Guy Burgess and Isaiah Berlin to go to Moscow in the summer of 1940;

d) attempts by MI5 (and its predecessor, the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch) to counter subversion and Fifth Columns; 

e) the various reorganisations of British Intelligence;

f) the WWII rivalry between the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Office for controlling propaganda, especially in the USA;

g) the purging of OGPU/NKVD agents by Stalin, with special reference to the revelations, and death, of Walter Krivitsky;

h) activities involving Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, and his contacts in the UK and the Soviet Union;

i) the stealing of US/GB atomic power secrets by the Soviet Union, with special reference to Stalin’s manipulation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and the espionage activities of Klaus Fuchs;

j) revelations about the massacre of Jews by the Nazis;

k) pre-war negotiations between Zionists and the UK government, and subsequent actions to further or delay the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948;

l) the evolution (and decline) of communistic/anti-fascist thought among British intellectuals;

m) attitudes of British politicians towards the Soviet Union between the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and Barbarossa;

n) Walter Krivitsky’s revelations about Stalin’s negotiations with Germany and his supply of arms to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War;

o) the growing awareness by the US and GB of the coming postwar threat posed by the Soviet Union as WWII proceeded, and its effect on intelligence sharing;

p) activities associated with the detection and decryption of illicit radio transmissions in WWII, and decryption of enemy (including Soviet) communications, especially involving disagreements between SIS and MI5;

q) the Nazis’ successes in unmasking members of the Soviet spy network, the ‘Red Orchestra’, especially as it relates to Alexander Foote and the ‘Rote Drei’ in Switzerland;

r) the activities of British communists in the International Brigades in Spain;

s) the effect of the failure to follow up Krivitsky’s warnings on Allied negotiations for postwar security, and the onset of the Cold War;

t) the activities of US-based, and Canada-based, Soviet spies with British links;

u) the management of the Double-Cross operation, and its effect on other disinformation campaigns;

v) the Abwehr’s management of spies sent to Britain for intelligence or sabotage purposes, and Britain’s responses.

(The somewhat erratic structure of this list, which I have not re-ordered through time, shows the evolution of my research focus.)

Readers can probably now understand how critical a part of my methodology the chronology is. It gives me the following benefits:

a) On looking up an event, I can quickly identify its source, and go back to my notes on each book listed (taking notes after the conclusion of reading a book is an equally important part of the methodology). Dates are a vital part of the notes: page numbers are listed, and I can go back to the original text, if necessary. (I own an overwhelming majority of the books.)

b) I can immediately spot anomalies in dates, such as occasions where different authors represent the same event differently. This allows me to verify sources, and give some indication of reliability. Dubious unconfirmed events are marked with a ‘?’.

c) I can examine the authority of references. Authenticity is not automatically guaranteed simply because multiple historians or journalists quote an identical date. They may all be using the same defective source, such as Professor Hinsley’s dubious claim about Churchill’s ordering interception of Soviet messages to cease. Weight does not necessarily indicate quality.

d) Insights can be gained by the adjacency of apparently unrelated themes, and common names appearing in discrete threads. They allow new hypotheses to be explored, and fresh analysis of subject-matter to take place (such as the progress in Radio direction-finding across different countries and zones).

e) Word’s Search capability allows me to highlight the occurrence of any name within the whole Chronology, thus simplifying the tracking of the career or activities of any prominent figure.

It all leads me to a vital principle of my methodology: A chronology will never be able to write the story by itself, but the creation of a proper narrative will be impossible without a rigorous chronology. The maintenance and exploitation of this document are thus my ‘Crown Jewels’, my ‘secret sauce’. One day I may make it universally acceptable (or even have it published as a book?). I have shared extracts of it with other historians, but no one else has seen the complete artefact.

Another aspect of chronology that intrigues me is the relationship of publications to the dates of release of official material, or the issuance of authorised histories. As far as British counterintelligence is concerned, one can identify seminal events that changed the historiography of espionage (e.g. Gouzenko’s defection in 1945, Fuchs’s confession in 1950, the escape of Burgess and Maclean in 1951) and can map also critical government-sponsored or -approved publications, such as the admission of the Double-cross system (in 1972), the disclosures about the Ultra Secret (in 1974), or the Official Histories of British Intelligence in WWII (starting in 1979), which freed many others to talk. Yet in the background one can detect a vast amount of noise – memoirs and off-the-record briefings from intelligence officers who felt that the real story was not being told, or wanting to influence the history to show themselves in better light.

When reading any book that claims insights into these events, one has therefore to ask: ‘Where did the author derive his/her information?’; ‘Why was the Official Secrets Act not applied?’; ‘Should some of these exercises be treated as government-controlled disinformation’? One thinks of the slew of romanticized and frequently erroneous accounts of espionage and counter-espionage that came out in the decade following WWII, often brazenly declaring the help the authors gained from government departments such as the War Office. Of course, the perpetrators never imagined that official archive material would be released at some time to contradict the errors of their analyses. But that did not matter, as all the authors would be dead by then. Yet books still come out that cite some of these flights of fancy as if they contained relevant facts.

To complete the story, one would also have to list all the critical archival material that has been made available in the past twenty years. I have not done that here, as my Chronology focuses on the first 60 years after the outbreak of WWII. Here follows a personal, and highly selective, account of dates (in years, only), which the general reader may find useful in tracking the history of intelligence matters affecting the UK since WWII, and putting accounts of it into proper perspective. I encourage readers to send me additions to the list that would help clarify the dynamics.

Key events in Espionage History (MI5, and to lesser extent SIS)

1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact

1940 Krivitsky’s revelations to MI5 & SIS

1940 Blunt & Rothschild recruited by MI5

1940 Double-Cross System set up

1941 Krivitsky murdered

1941 Germany invades the Soviet Union

1941 USA enters the war

1942-43 German Englandspiel turns Dutch SOE network

1943 Comintern ‘dismantled’

1943 VENONA project of decryption of Soviet cables starts

1944 Leo Long detected spying in MI14

1945 Gouzenko defects in Canada

1945 Volkov (would-be defector from Ankara) betrayed by Philby

1947 Cookridge publishes ‘Secrets of the British Secret Services’

1949 Foote’s ‘Handbook for Spies’ published (ghost-written by MI5)

1950 Fuchs convicted

1951 Burgess & Maclean abscond

1952 Cairncross’s first ‘confession’

1953 Giskes reveals Englandspiel (control of Dutch SOE)

1954 Petrov defects in Australia: confirms careers of Burgess and Maclean

1956 Gaitskell dies, with suspicions of Soviet poisoning

1956 Goronwy Rees’s disclosures about Burgess in ‘People’

1962 Golitsyn’s defection confirms treachery of Philby: ‘the five’

1963 Philby defects

1963 Straight betrays Blunt

1964 Cairncross confesses to MI5

1966 Publication of ‘SOE in France’ & AJP Taylor’s ‘History 1914-1945’

1967 Philby’s ‘My Silent War’ published

1967 Phillip Knightley’s exposé of Philby in the ‘Sunday Times’

1968 Trevor-Roper reveals decryption of Abwehr messages in Canaris essay

1972 ‘The XX System’ by John Masterman appears

1972 Ritter publishes ‘Deckname Dr. Rantzau’

1973 Malcolm Muggeridge publishes ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time’

1973 Seale and McConville hint at VENONA programme in book on Philby

1974 Winterbotham reveals ULTRA secret

1978 David Kahn publishes ‘Hitler’s Spies’

1979 Andrew Boyle’s ‘Climate of Treason’ published: Blunt outed

1979 Thatcher announces Blunt’s pardon

1979 Penrose outs Cairncross

1979 Rees’s deathbed revelations

1979 Volume 1 of Hinsley’s History appears

1980 David Martin’s ‘Wilderness of Mirrors’ identifies VENONA

1981 Nigel West publishes ‘MI5’ (with information from disenchanted White)

1981 Volume 2 of Hinsley’s History appears

1981 Harold Macmillan publicly denounces Michael Howard for irresponsibility

1982 Existence of VENONA starts to leak out

1983 Nigel West publishes ‘MI6’

1984 Pincher’s ‘Too Secret Too Long’ accuses Hollis

1984 Volume 3 of Hinsley’s History appears

1985 Gordievsky escapes to UK

1986 Nigel West publishes ‘GCHQ’

1986 Joan Miller publishes ‘One Girl’s War’

1986 Lamphere publishes ‘FBI-KGB War’

1987 Peter Wright publishes ‘Spycatcher’

1989 Government recognizes MI5

1990 Volume 4 of Hinsley’s History appears

1990 Volume 5 of History (Howard) appears

1991 Nigel West writes about VENONA in ‘7 Spies . . .’

1991 End of Communist regime in Russia

1992 Mitrokhin brings his Archive to the UK

1992 Queen recognizes SIS in speech to parliament

1993 Primakov identifies threat from NATO

1994 Intelligence Services Act: Existence of SIS & GCHQ acknowledged

1994 Weinstein given access to KGB files

1994 Aldrich Ames convicted

1996 USA declassifies VENONA materials

1999 Nigel West publishes book on VENONA

1999 Haynes & Klehr publish book on VENONA

2000 Weinstein’s ‘Haunted Wood’ published

2009 History of MI5 appears

2010 History of SIS appears

2014 First volume of History of JIC appears

2017 History of GCHQ commissioned

This litany of publication shows a number of developing themes and tensions, namely:

i) the overall desire of government organizations to maintain a veil of secrecy over intelligence operations;

ii) the eagerness of journalists and (some) agents and officers involved in intelligence to reveal clandestine operations to the public;

iii) the expressed need by the security services to assist public relations efforts by selective breach of the Official Secrets Act, and granting controlled access to certified materials, or leaking certain information;

iv) simultaneous prosecution of authors trying to breach the OSA when the authorities believe such disclosures might harm the reputation of the intelligence services, on the pretext that national security is at risk;

v) unofficial leaking of information to journalists and historians by insiders frustrated by prolonged secrecy, and perhaps anxious to establish their own legacy;

vi) a recognition by the authorities that information may be revealed from other countries (e.g. the USA, Germany and Russia), a process they cannot control, while that information may or may not be any more reliable than domestic archives;

vii) with the fading-away of uncontrollable ‘amateurs’ successfully telling their stories of war-time exploits, the new professional heads of intelligence agencies attempt to re-tighten the screws of security (this is a point made by Hugh Trevor-Roper in a 1981 letter to Lord Annan);

viii) an eventual, though sometimes reluctant, admission by the authorities that it is now acceptable for an ‘authorised’ or ‘official’ history to be told, and the commissioning of respectable and reliable scholars to perform exclusive research on security organizations;

ix) the appearance of authoritative-sounding such histories, which are incomplete, unverifiable, and frequently cite questionable facts or conclusions from works published in the controversial period;

x) the fostering of the belief that, now such an official history has been written, it can be viewed as reliable, and need not be examined or contested;

xi) the incorporation of such lore, both from official histories and semi-historical accounts, into such presumed reliable references as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography;

xii) the declassification of archival material which, if inspected closely and properly synthesized, sheds doubts on some of the main assertions of the histories;

xiii) the tendency for new history-writing to drill down into horizontal cases of personal appeal rather than attempt to integrate more complex cross-disciplinary topics;

xiv) a mutually reinforcing admiration process between the experts and the authorised historians, who are reluctant to have their reputations spoiled by any admission of errors;

xv) a state of confusion, where the reading public is faced with a mixture of fact and fiction, finding it difficult to find bearings in a world of circular regurgitation of dubious reportage, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the chaotic aggregation of information on the Web.

xvi) the gradual disappearance of capable and affordable professionals chartered with acting as gatekeepers to maintain integrity in the historiography of Intelligence matters.

And I suppose that’s a good way of reminding myself why Coldspur exists.

Finally, I want to expand on this matter of ‘gatekeepers’. Shortly before I left Gartner Group in 1999, a case was made for opening up all of the company’s research on the Web, as ‘everybody was doing it’. I strongly resisted this, saying that anything given away for free would essentially be seen as valueless, and no better than anything else published there. It would have reduced Gartner’s business to a conference and consulting affair, rather than a leveraged product. To this day, I support strongly those on-line publishers who are subscription-based, and who presumably believe they can command decent fees through a commitment to excellence. On the other hand, I never make a charitable donation to any free site (such as the undisciplined and unreliable Wikipedia), since the outfit does not have a business model that drives quality, and I have no wish to encourage such unscholarliness.

Yet there are challenges in trying to compete with an advertising model. For example, in the Intelligence world, Taylor and Francis has acquired prominent publishers, and offers access to their on-line journals through subscriptions. These publications are in many ways essential reading for the serious analyst, but the fees are penal for the individual researcher not affiliated with an academic institution. (It was a long struggle to get hold of critical articles even when I was affiliated with the University of Buckingham.) I have suggested alternative plans to T & F (who also offer enhanced packages of National Archives material): the company has acknowledged the problem, but is inflexible.

I have an especial interest in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which also offers a subscription service. Several years ago, I was commissioned to create an entry for the architect Gordon Kaufmann. (see http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-98440) This exercise involved much self-education, the acquisition of a few books on architecture, some fee-based exploration of genealogy sites, visits to libraries in Palo Alto and London, and to a house in Sussex, email exchanges with historians of California, and some patient detective work. I was proud of the final result, which was well annotated, and closely inspected by the ODNB editor. The entry was used as a showcase sample to promote the new on-line version of the ODNB. I was paid a modest amount for my work, and offered a 50% reduction in fees for a year’s access to the electronic version of the Dictionary.

I had no complaints about this. I was very happy to perform the work, believing that it is becoming for those who have benefitted from the education system at Oxford (for example) to contribute to scholarship in what ways they can, even if the beneficiary is a commercial enterprise. That is one of the many ways the public (‘the little platoons’) assists in the continuity of Britain’s cultural heritage. I did not become a regular subscriber, however: I can drive thirty-five miles to the University of North Carolina library in Wilmington to inspect the on-line edition.

This, when I went, a few weeks ago, to look up the entry for Guy Liddell (see last month’s post), I was shocked and disgusted. The piece was riddled with errors, and looked as if had been composed in a couple of hours, without any editorial supervision. It debases the whole value principle of the ODNB. It would have been better not to have published any entry at all instead of this shoddy compilation. I have brought my dismay to the attention of my contact there, and received, a couple of weeks ago, an acknowledgment of my message. Since then – nothing. I await the next step with interest, and shall report what happens on coldspur.

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Guy Liddell, Eric Roberts and Kim Philby

The Cookridge Archive

Perspicacious readers will recall that in February of this year, I made the following observation concerning the irritatingly vague references given by the author of The Climate of Treason, Andrew Boyle:

“While I have not performed a cross-reference, I would hazard that most of the correspondence with these persons is to be found in the Boyle Archive, where individual letter-writers are clearly identified. Of this period, Boyle writes, for example (p 455, Note 15): “Confidential information to the author as attested in E. H. Cookridge’s notes from Guy Liddell of MI5.” One might react: What on earth was Liddell doing speaking to Cookridge? Did Cookridge (who died on January 1, 1979) ever publish an account of these confidences? Did Boyle consider, now that Liddell and Cookridge were both dead, that he could safely write about these secrets, or did he still fear the Wrath of White? I hope that a study of the correspondence with Cookridge will clear some of this up.”

I inquired of the Cambridge University Library about the availability of selections from the Boyle archive, and, at considerable expense, ordered a sample of photographs of items of Boyle’s correspondence, namely his exchanges with Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Muggeridge and E. H. Cookridge. These arrived at the beginning of April, but were largely disappointing. I was, however, able to determine in what circumstances Cookridge had consulted Guy Liddell, and to establish what Liddell said to him (or, at least, what Cookridge claimed he said). Unfortunately, Boyle and Cookridge converse somewhat at cross-purposes, and the loose ends from their correspondence are never neatly tied up. Two questions that Boyle posed to Cookridge, on August 30, 1977, run as follows:

“3) Was the substance, or even outline, of the Krivitsky testimony ever made known? If not, why do people refer to it as though they were familiar with it?

4) In stating ‘I believe that originally Philby was introduced by Springall to Leonid Tolokovisky [sic]’, what is your evidence – or is this merely a hunch?”

Cookridge’s answers, given on September 5, were:

“3) Krivitsky referred to it in his book ‘I Was Stalin’s Agent’ (Hamish Hamilton, 1939) and I believe Elsa Poretsky mentions something about it when dealing with some detail with Krivitsky’s activities. I recall to have seen something of interest in Krivitsky’s testimony published in the House Reports of the Un-American Activities Committee. That was many years after his death.

4) No, it’s not just a hunch. But unfortunately the people who had good evidence are dead. One was Guy Maynard Liddell. He was Deputy Director of M.I.5 to Sir David Petrie, later head of B-division under Sir Percy Sillitoe from 1945 to about 1952. He later became Director of Security for the Atomic Energy Authority. In 1955 when the ‘Third Man’ business bust, he was asked to go to Washington and investigate Philby’s activities. He also knew – from the secret investigations conducted about Philby’s past – all about Philby. About a year or two before Liddell’s death (in 1960) I had a talk with him on a quite different subject. I intended to write about the suspected betrayal of the Arnhem operation. Liddell (with a captain of Mil. Intell. named Wall) interrogated the suspected Dutch traitor Christiaan Lindemans in November 1944 in Holland and then at a London ‘cage’ (020). I wanted to learn from what he got out of Lindemans and he did tell me a lot. In the course of our conversation we got to Philby (who had by then, of course, gone to Beirut). I told him that I knew Philby in Vienna and he told me that he knew Philby was recruited in London or Cambridge by a Russian agent of the Cagan [Cahan? : coldspur] team. I can’t remember whether he mentioned Tolokonsky (NOT Tolokovisky) and Aslakov. I was then not yet concerned with the Philby story. Much later I learned from Derek Mark, editor of the Daily Express (who had initiated the big hunt after Philby) that several of his reporters, particularly John Mather, found out that the controller of Philby was Tolokonsky. I believe the Daily Express did publish it there.”

The answer to ‘3’ famously misses the point. Boyle was assuredly referring to Krivitsky’s testimony given to his MI5 & SIS interrogators in January 1940, not what he declared to US Senate inquiries before he made his visit to the United Kingdom. This is remarkably obtuse of Cookridge, unless he seriously did not know about Krivitsky’s exploits with Jane Archer and company. As for Douglas ‘Dave’ Springhall, the communist spy jailed in 1943, I have no idea why Philby would ever have dealt with him, although some books do still claim, as did Cookridge, that it was Springhall who recruited Philby in 1933, acting as an intermediary for Tolokonsky and Cahan.

Yet it is Cookridge’s reference to Liddell’s visit to Washington that primarily intrigued me. Allowing for Cookridge’s mistakes over Liddell’s roles under Petrie and Liddell before he left MI5, as well as the date of Liddell’s death (1958), it is unlikely that he would have confused Liddell’s visit to Washington on March 14, 1946 (which is confirmed by USA archives) with a post-retirement voyage in 1955. It would have been unusual for Liddell to have been brought out of his retirement from MI5 to consult with Washington, unless Dick White (who was Director-General until 1956) believed that under cover, and because of previous relationships, it would be preferable to send out on a special assignment Guy Liddell than, say – ahem –  White’s deputy and successor, Roger Hollis.

The Philby Inquiry

This was a difficult year for the Philby inquiry. By then, MI5 leaders were convinced that he was the ‘Third Man’, but SIS was defending him. In August 1954, Vladimir Petrov had defected in Australia, and brought confirmation that Burgess and Maclean had been tipped off. Yet defining what action to take was a hazardous project. Moreover, the new head of SIS, John ‘Sinbad’ Sinclair, who had replaced Stewart Menzies in 1953, came to Philby’s defence, writing to Dick White on July 20, 1955 that the interrogation of Philby by Helenus Milmo had been biased, and that Philby was being unfairly treated. The story of Petrov’s defection broke on September 18, 1955, when the Royal Commission in Australia published its report, but Philby was given a soft interrogation by SIS on October 7, which infuriated Dick White.

Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, who was convinced of Philby’s guilt, expressed similar frustration at Philby’s continuing to live scot-free and unchallenged. As Ben Macintyre reports in A Spy Among Friends, on Sunday, October 23, the New York Sunday News ran a story naming Philby as the Third Man. This publication led to the famous questions by Marcus Lipton in the House of Commons, Harold Macmillan’s feeble denial, and Philby’s eventual manipulation of the Press to convince them of his innocence. In his 1968 book The Third Man, Cookridge states that a journalist showed Lipton the story from the Sunday News, but says that the story was written by the paper’s London correspondent, ‘an American, known for his associations with the C.I.A.’  That could have been a blind, although the FBI agent Robert Lamphere, in his book The FBI-KGB War, tells us that the informant was his friend, the CIA’s Bill Harvey. Perhaps Liddell had been sent out as an emissary to Hoover to help stoke the fires, and fight the battle on White’s behalf without drawing SIS’s attention? Given the timing and the circumstances, it is difficult to project any other rationale, and this would follow a pattern (as I explain later). Liddell must have been very flattered.

The next question that must be posed is: was Liddell indeed the major source for Cookridge’s assertions in The Third Man? Describing Lipton’s question in the House of Commons, Cookridge informs us that Lipton remarked that he had further information but could not disclose it because it concerned ‘secret agents’, and that this observation was understood as meaning that it came from somebody in M.I.5.  Cookridge then laconically adds: “It is not for me to interpret Colonel Lipton’s remark, but we know now that he had good reason to believe his information was correct, thought whether it emanated from Dick White or the New York Sunday News must remain a matter of speculation.” In other words, in the vernacular of House of Cards: “You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment”.

Cookridge’s comments to Andrew Boyle suggest very strongly that Liddell was his source. In his Preface to The Third Man, Cookridge rather disingenuously attributes his ability to get a scoop to his work as a political journalist. Intriguingly, he says he started the book that very same year, 1955. “At that time (and for eleven years) I was the political correspondent of a British newspaper. Through my work in the Lobby of the House of Commons I had access to sources of information not available to the public. But because of the confidential nature of much of this information  . . .  I was compelled to put away the Philby manuscript.” Yet his confidence to Andrew Boyle twenty-two years later, when he probably suspected all had blown over, reveals an apparently critical role that Liddell played in disclosing MI5’s substantial evidence against Philby.

Who Recruited Philby?

This leads directly into another aspect that intrigued me, namely the reference to Cahan, and possibly Tolokonsky. A search of books that cite the fact that Philby was originally recruited by Cahan and Tolokonsky leads normally to Andrew Boyle as the source, and we can now see that Boyle relied on Cookridge, and Cookridge apparently on Liddell. In The Third Man Cookridge reported that Springhall, early in 1933 at a house in Rosary Gardens in London, introduced Kim Philby ‘to his new masters, Leonid Tolokonski [sic] and George Aslakoff, and there he received his initial briefing.’ The Soviet officers then (according to Cookridge) directed Philby to go to Vienna, to work as a courier ‘maintaining communications between the outlawed leaders of the Austrian Communists and GB agents in Vienna and the ‘foreign bureaus’ of the Comintern which functioned without interference in Prague’.

So why, the incident recollected in tranquillity, did Cookridge misrepresent what happened? When he wrote to Boyle that he could not recall whether Liddell mentioned Tolokonsky or Aslakoff, did he not have a copy of his book at hand? Perhaps when he wrote his book he was relying on the supposed publication of the ‘facts’ by the Daily Express rather than his briefing by Liddell. (I cannot find any Daily Express reference to Cahan on www.newspapers.com, but, of course, that does not mean that one did not exist.) It is thus impossible to ascertain whether the Daily Express received its information likewise from Liddell, who may have been on a mission to enlighten Fleet Street in MI5’s campaign against SIS.

Yet how did Liddell, if he was indeed aware of Philby’s recruitment, learn about it? There are no files for ‘Samuel Cahan’, ‘Tolokonsky’ or ‘Aslakoff’ at the National Archives. Christopher Andrew’s authorized history contains no reference to any of them. Nor do their names appear in the PEACH materials, as recently displayed in Cold War Spymaster (see last month’s blog). Anthony Cave-Brown does not refer to them in Treason in the Blood. Even that exhaustive and prodigious chronicler of Stalin’s espionage, Boris Volodarsky, in Stalin’s Agent, has only a fleeting sentence on Tolokonsky, recording his murder in Siberia in 1936. All of these phenomena are very puzzling, even disturbing. Is it possible that Liddell alone knew about the recruitment? After all, Cookridge told Boyle that ‘he’ (Liddell) knew about it, not that MI5 knew about it. Was that not an odd way for Liddell, and then Cookridge, to represent the lesson? It would appear that, if MI5’s senior officers were aware of the story, they managed to throw a wrap over it, and suppress any information that they held on the KGB or GRU officers in London. But why would they do that?

(The only other reference to Tolokonsky that I have found is in a novel based around Kim Philby and his Russian handler, given the name Orloff, titled A Spy In Winter, by one Michael Hastings, published in 1984. ‘Michael Hastings’ is a pseudonym of Michael Ben-Zohar, an Israeli historian born in Bulgaria, and the author has Orloff declare: “Until I came into the open, the British secret services believed that Maly and Tolokonsky had recruited and run Philby.” Whatever his sources were, Ben-Zohar’s text suggests that there was some substance behind the Tolokonsky claim. Of course, he may simply have used what he read in The Climate of Treason or The Third Man as a useful aid to authenticity. I have attempted to contact Ben-Zohar via his publisher, but, as so often happens in such cases, I have not even received an acknowledgment of my inquiry.)

If Liddell had exclusive knowledge, therefore, it could not have come from shared sources, such as Gouzenko or Petrov, unless he had private conversations with them. And there is no evidence of that. Candidates, therefore would have to include Krivitsky (with whom Liddell did have one-on-one discussions, the details of which were reacted from his Diaries) or maybe Douglas Springhall. Another candidate might be Fred Copeman, who was a close comrade of Springhall’s in 1933, but later turned respectable, and may have been an informer for MI5.

Krivitsky seems highly unlikely. I believe no mention of the triad of Cahan, Tolokovsky or Aslakoff appears in the transcripts of his interrogations. And 1940 would be very early for Liddell to receive a tip on Philby and do nothing about it. Moreover, Krivitsky had shown himself unwilling to reveal Philby’s identity as the journalist sent to Franco’s Spain under cover. Springhall is problematical. On my desktop computer, I have twenty-seven bulky PDFs from his files at the National Archives, which I have not yet inspected properly. They provide a fairly exhaustive account of his movements, but Special Branch did not appear to track him having a meeting with members of the Soviet Embassy in 1933. (Springhall did make a request to visit Cambridge in March of that year, however.) I suppose it is possible that Liddell had an interview with the communist activist at the time of his conviction in 1943, but it is improbable that a record of such a conversation has lain undiscovered. Somewhere in that archive (according to Springhall’s Wikipedia entry) is a suggestion that Springhall was working for the GRU from 1932 onwards, but locating that record is a task that will have to wait – unless any alert reader is already familiar with the whole of KV 2/2063-2065 & KV 2/1594-1598 . . .

Liddell and Eric Roberts

All this links to the third leg of this particular inquiry, which casts dramatic new light on the compelling question of whether British intelligence nourished stronger suspicions about the activities of the Cambridge Five well before they admitted so to the public. “It has been brought to my attention” (as Sir Edward Heath was accustomed to start his letters of complaint to the Spectator, presumably being too busy or too important to read the magazine himself), that, in other records recently declassified and released to the National Archives, Guy Liddell pointed out as early as 1947 that a spy existed in SIS.  This astonishing story concerns the MI5 officer, Eric Roberts, and the germ of it can be found on the MI5 website at https://www.mi5.gov.uk/eric-roberts-undercover-work-in-world-war-ii. A more detailed explanation can be seen in a BBC article posted back in 2015, where Christopher Andrew is quoted commenting on an extraordinary testimony that Eric Roberts left behind. The story can be inspected at https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358, and contains the dramatic statement: “In 1947 Roberts was seconded to Vienna to work with MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Before Roberts went, he spoke to Liddell. According to Roberts, Liddell warned him ‘there was a traitor operating at the highest level’ of the SIS.”

Before I analyse this vital claim, I need to step back and critique the way this story has been presented, as I think the whole issue of the ‘Fifth Column’ has been distorted., and that the MI5 bulletin contributes to the muddle. As you will see, the piece starts: “In the early part of WWII  . . .”, and goes on: “It was hoped by this means to ‘surface’ others of a similar pro-Nazi persuasion who might be capable of forming a fascist 5th Column – still a major source of anxiety for MI5 so long as invasion remained a threat.” Yet the narrative suddenly jumps to ‘early 1942’, when Eric Roberts’s role was decided, namely almost halfway through the war. Hitler had in fact called off the invasion by September 1940, and, though Britain had to prepare for it still throughout much of 1941, by the end of that year, the conditions of engagement had changed considerably. Both the Soviet Union and the United States had joined the Allies, and the focus was then on the question of when a so-called ‘Second Front’ (a misleading Soviet-inspired term, as Britain was already fighting the Germans on several fronts) would be opened, and a European invasion begun. Thus, with the Abwehr’s network of agents already controlled by the Double-Cross system, the manipulation of a rather tawdry set of Nazi sympathisers, in the belief that MI5 was warding off a dangerous threat, seems a somewhat quixotic and perhaps a merely futile exercise. This was no ‘Fifth Column’, since the Wehrmacht surely was unaware that any of these persons were active on its behalf, and the MI5 piece rightly suggests that they could probably not have been prosecuted because of the ‘spectre of provocation’.

The records of Eric Roberts and this adventure can be inspected at KV 2/3783 & 2/3784 in the National Archives. The latter is downloadable at no charge, and contains the myriad conversations between Roberts and his Nazi sympathisers that were recorded. Unfortunately, the former, which must contain the more interesting articles described in the BBC story, has not been digitized, and I have thus not yet been able to inspect it. (As I was completing this story for my press deadline, I heard from my researcher in London that the 14-page testimonial is not in the archive, but presumably owned by the Roberts family. Given the publicity on the MI5 and BBC sites, including Christopher Andrew’s provocative comments that appear below, it would seem that the family is seeking greater attention to Eric Roberts’s claims, so I am hopeful of gaining access via the BBC.) It also occurs to me that Kate Atkinson, whose novel Transcription I reviewed on this site a few months ago, exploits these recordings, and Henry Hemming, whose biography of Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster, I read when it came out in 2017, also describes the activities of Roberts. I should probably annotate my review of Atkinson’s work, although I think her timetable becomes even messier, given the period at which the events occurred. Hemming, whose approach to chronology is also a little wayward, in his concentration on Maxwell Knight, appears not to have exploited this mine of information.

Additionally, it was with some amusement that I read the MI5 comment: “For a variety of reasons, until very recently the story of her [Marita Perigoe’s] group and Eric Roberts’ achievements had gone largely unseen by MI5 historians and accordingly the significance of these events was unnoticed.” MI5 ‘historians’? Who might they be, I wonder? Since Andrew’s authorised history came out some six years before these files were released, did MI5 for some reason forget to draw the historian’s attention to their existence when our intrepid researcher was being walked round the archives? Would the MI5 spokesperson be prepared to explain what the ‘variety of reasons’ was? Was MI5 perhaps embarrassed at some of the revelations that came forth from the 14-page document that Andrew is quoted as describing in the following terms: “It’s the most extraordinary intelligence document I’ve ever seen. It’s 14 pages long – it will keep conspiracy theorists going for another 14 years”? Well, here is one professional conspiracy theorist who can’t wait to get his hands on it. If it is going to keep us busy, we have to see the document.

Yet it is Roberts’s friendship with Guy Liddell that is for me the most compelling aspect of the story. In 1947, before his secondment to Vienna, we learn that Eric Roberts was warned by his friend that ‘there was a traitor operating at the highest level of the SIS’. Roberts thus credited Liddell with helping him in an awkward situation, but, when he returned to London in 1949, and asked his friend whether the traitor had been identified, Liddell ‘evaded the question’. That is surely evidence that he was not alone in his suspicions, but had been told to clam up. If we inspect my Chronology above, it is clear that the predecessor event that might have convinced Liddell of the guilt of a senior officer in SIS would clearly have been the hapless attempt to defect from Istanbul, Turkey by Konstantin Volkov, on August 16, 1945. We now know of Philby’s manoeuvres to have the informant captured, with the result that Volkov was drugged and executed by Moscow before London could work out what was going on.  (This was before the notorious episode of Teddy Kollek, who had witnessed what Philby was up to in Vienna in 1934, being shocked by spotting Philby in a diplomatic role in Washington in 1949.) Did Liddell rumble Philby then? The reason that this question is so important is that conventional accounts of the ‘Third Man’ scandal have focused on the identification of Philby as a possible traitor only after the abscondment of Burgess and Maclean in 1951.

I present Liddell’s relevant Diary entry for October 5, 1945 in its entirety: “The case of the renegade WOLKOFF in the Soviet Embassy in Istanbul has broken down. In accordance with instructions he was telephoned to at the Soviet consulate. The telephone was answered by the Russian Consul-General on the first occasion and on the second by a man speaking English claiming to be WOLKOFF but clearly was not. Finally, contact was made with the Russian telephone operator who said that WOLKOFF had left for Moscow. Subsequent enquiries showed that he and his wife left by plane for Russia on Sept.26. Wolkoff had ovvered [sic: ‘offered’] to give a very considerable amount of information but much of it appeared to be in Moscow. WOLKOFF estimated that there were 9 agents in London of one of whom was said to be the ‘head of a section of the British counter-espionage service’. WOLKOFF said he could also produce a list of the known regular NKGB agents of the military and civil intelligence and of the sub-agents they employed. In the list are noted about 250 known or less well known agents of the above-mentioned services with details. Also available were copies of correspondence between London and General Hill of SOE in Moscow. WOLKOFF maintained that the Soviet authorities had been able to read all cypher messages between our F.O. and Embassy in Moscow and in addition to Hill’s messages [line redacted] the Russians had according to WOLKOFF two agents inside the F.O. and 7 inside the British Intelligence Service.”

Does this indicate that he believed that Philby was the guilty party? Maybe he was already starting to question why such a valuable potential operation had suddenly turned so sour. We should also recall that Jane Archer, the author of the Krivitsky report, had returned to MI5, probably at the beginning of 1946, from working for Philby in Section V of SIS. It seems inconceivable that she and Liddell would not have discussed her previous boss, the Volkov incident, and maybe started to look more closely at Philby’s career. Archer would have been fascinated by the information revealed in Liddell’s diary entry, and Philby, who wrote of her knowledge of the ‘journalist in Spain’ in My Silent War, might have been alarmed by her return to MI5. Did Liddell also discuss the affair with Dick White? Not so certainly, but White (who was by now taking charge of MI5, as I explained in last month’s report, and moving to squeeze out his mentor at the top) may have cautioned him to silence, unaware that Liddell had shared his suspicions with Roberts. With Blunt (as I confidently assert) recently unmasked in MI5, and Philby a strong suspect in SIS, White may have felt that they could control the poison – and preserve the reputation of the service. As we see, Liddell was going to have to suppress his suspicions when his friend Roberts returned from Vienna, suggesting that he was not alone in harbouring serious doubts about Philby’s loyalties, but that pressure was being applied not to rock the boat. That was not the behavior of a Soviet mole, but of a weak and frightened man.

Confusion in Washington

Moreover, my overseas informant (who wishes to remain anonymous) has pointed out to me a dramatic new twist to the story. In the 1967 Sunday Times article that broke the Philby story, there appears a provocative statement concerning Philby after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean in May 1951. It runs as follows: “The weekend after the defection, a four-man team, led by G. A. Carey-Foster, the head of Q-Branch in the Foreign Office, flew to Washington and questioned Philby. Almost immediately afterwards Philby was withdrawn from his post as CIA/SIS liaison officer: apart from any suspicions the British had, the Americans were no longer prepared to deal with him.” If this were true, the team presumably flew out to forestall any attempt by Philby to defect, which must have meant that MI5 and the Foreign Office harboured deep suspicions about Philby’s loyalties, and were very quick to adopt a ‘Third Man’ theory. So what happened to this story? The cavalcade of events constitutes an excellent example of the importance of Chronology.

Surprisingly, the claim does not appear in the 1968 book that followed the Sunday Times article – The Philby Conspiracy, by the Sunday Times journalists Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightley. In fact, the only publication where I have been able to find the story duplicated is in that now familiar compendium, E. H. Cookridge’s The Third Man, where he wrote (p 208): “What followed was a world sensation. Sir Percy Sillitoe flew to Washington six days after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean; he was preceded by a team, led by Mr. Carey-Foster, sent to interrogate Philby.” This account, if only partially true (Sillitoe did not fly out until two weeks after the spies’ absence was noticed), would tend to confirm the preparedness of British security organs to spring into action. But where did Cookridge get his information from? The Sunday Times? Or the same source who provided it to the newspaper? It is not clear, and, unless the Cookridge archive can shed light on the matter, we shall probably never know.

The circumstances of Philby’s departure from the USA at that time are represented inconsistently in the literature. Perhaps the most detailed account of the goings-on is S. J. Hamrick’s 2004 opus Deceiving the Deceivers. Hamrick was a former US intelligence officer who believed that MI5 and the Foreign Office had deceived the British public – and the CIA – about their investigation into Maclean and Philby. Unfortunately, Hamrick, who compiled a detailed chronicle of the events leading up to Burgess and Maclean’s disappearance, spun a yarn that had Dick White and the RAF trying to use Philby in an extravagant operation to feed false information on atomic weapons to the Soviets. This fantasy was deftly dissected and trashed by Nigel West himself, in a review titled ‘Who’s Fooling Who?’, which appeared in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence in 2006. (Yet West lists the work as a source in Cold War Spymaster, without any explanation why a work that he has panned elsewhere has suddenly become worthy of being recommended to his readership. A very bizarre practice, which must be condemned.) The account of Philby’s departure is quite clear, however: he received a telegram recalling him to London before Sillitoe and Martin flew out, and arrived the day they left London.

As I delved more deeply into the various accounts of Philby’s recall in early June 1951 (I have made notes from about twenty), I realized that the whole saga is more complicated, more puzzling, and more disturbing than I ever imagined. I cannot possibly do justice do it in this report, and shall have to dedicate a whole future instalment of coldspur to the full exploration of the inconsistencies. It may not surprise readers to learn that one of the latest renderings, Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5, Defend the Realm (2009), despite having all the records at the author’s disposal, seems to me to have got the timetable dramatically wrong. (Chronology again!) On the other hand, the supposed visit to Washington by Carey Foster and his team may be purely mythical – and may not matter much. So I shall here simply outline my main findings and conclusions.

First, let us step back a bit. Just before Kim Philby was posted to Washington in September 1949, as the liaison for British intelligence with the US government, he was briefed by Maurice Oldfield, deputy head of counter-intelligence in SIS, about the VENONA project. This programme, by which certain wartime cables between Moscow and outlying embassies had been (partially) decrypted by US and GB teams, had by then thrown up the cryptonym HOMER as an important source of highly sensitive information passed on to the Soviets. It was Philby’s job to assist the FBI in identifying possible suspects. Given that the ‘Foreign Office’ spy (namely Maclean) had been identified, but not named, by Krivitsky, it took an unconscionably long time for British intelligence to whittle down the candidates for this breach to Maclean himself. MI5 would later claim that only in April 1951 could HOMER’s identity be firmly nailed on to Maclean, after which the bumbling investigation (hindered by the Foreign Office) sputtered along so ineptly that it allowed Burgess and Maclean to escape on May 25.

The whole point of the investigation was to delay and prevaricate. Yet, when the story broke to the astounded FBI and CIA, MI5 had to act fast to try to restore confidence. The records point dominantly to the fact that Percy Sillitoe, the Director-General of MI5, accompanied by one of his junior officers, Arthur Martin, flew out to Washington the same day that Philby, who had been recalled, flew into Heathrow (June 12). (Philby had given the impression to his friends, such as James Angleton, that he would be returning.) Yet the files at the National Archives in Kew show that this goodwill trip had been planned before Burgess and Maclean escaped, as part of the charm offensive that MI5 knew it would have to undertake when Maclean was brought in for questioning. The days June 12/13 had already been chosen, at the planning meeting for the interrogation of Maclean, on May 23, as the dates to speak to Hoover. The records show that Sillitoe intended to inform Hoover of the name of the ‘principle suspect’.

In the changed circumstances, however, with the renegades escaping under MI5’s noses, a different strategy was required. Arthur Martin brought a sharp seven-point memorandum with him, which he apologetically shared with his FBI contact Robert Lamphere, while his chief had a meeting with his counterpart, Edgar Hoover. This report listed some major damning reasons why Philby was seen as a security risk, and clearly would be interpreted as putting an end to his career with SIS. Lamphere documented them (in The FBI-KGB War) as follows:

1. Maclean, Burgess and Philby had all been communists at Cambridge
2. Philby had become pro-German to build his cover story
3. Philby had married the communist Litzi Friedman
4. Krivitsky had pointed to a journalist in Spain (who was in fact Philby)
5. Philby was involved in the Volkov affair
6. Philby was involved in infiltrating Georgian agents into Armenia
7. Philby was suspected in assisting in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.

It had presumably not been the plan to open up so blatantly when preparations for the visit were originally made. Yet Sillitoe did not take this memorandum to Hoover.

The CIA Takes Charge?

When Bedell Smith, the head of the CIA, heard of the Burgess-Maclean fiasco, he apparently asked his lieutenants to write up reports on what they knew about Philby. Even though there had been no deep briefing of the CIA by Sillitoe and Martin, one of Smith’s officers, Bill Harvey, responsible for countering Soviet espionage, used information which was uncannily similar to that supplied by Martin to give meat to his account. James Angleton, the other prominent agent, wrote more about the rude behavior of Burgess in Washington, but was overall more forgiving of Philby. Bedell Smith then wrote to Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS, insisting that Philby never represent the British government again – as if he had been unaware of the Martin submission. What is most critical for this story, however, is the fact that Harvey’s report was dated June 18, the day Sillitoe and Martin returned to London after their conversations with their counterparts in the FBI. Philby was already out of the country.

It is important to note a few important aspects of Philby’s recall. The first concerns the fact that Stewart Menzies, the head of SIS, very quickly sent a recall message to Philby after his friends had fled. That would suggest that Menzies, who was later to become a stout defender of this high-flying officer, at the time had doubts about him – perhaps because some analysts were suggesting that Philby was ‘STANLEY’ in the VENONA decrypts – and recognized that Philby was a security risk. Yet a disturbing part of the recall was the unusual behavior of Menzies, in that he first sent a letter to Philby, in which he warned him that an official telegram would soon be arriving. Some interpreters of this (e.g. Hamrick) have suggested that this was an alert for Philby to indicate that he should fly the coop if he wanted to. It is difficult to imagine Menzies taking advice on this matter from anyone else.

As Genrikh Borovik recorded in The Philby Files (1994) (and confirmable in KV 6/143 at Kew) Philby was also asked by MI5, by telegram, to contribute an opinion on the Burgess and Maclean affair before the letter from Menzies came through. He sent two messages back, of which the second, dated June 6,is on file, and danced a cautiously informative line, dropping hints about the pair’s possible association and friendship, and identifying possibly incriminating property (a sun-lamp, a camera, books by Stalin) in Burgess’s possession. It was crafted to provide just enough awareness to show a degree of observation, but not enough to have implicated himself.

Hamrick reports that the letter-carrier was one John Drew, who ‘happened to be leaving for Washington on official business’, and that the letter had been written at Menzies’ request. “The purpose was to warn Philby of the coming cable recalling him to London so he could quickly pack up and hustle out of town before Percy Sillitoe arrived for his talks with J. Edgar Hoover. MI6 wanted to make sure Philby was beyond Hoover’s grasp and unavailable for FBI interrogation.” That sounds fraudulent and unlikely to me: why on earth would Philby, as an SIS employee, have to submit to interrogation by the FBI? If accurate, however, it also shows that Menzies was aware of the planned Sillitoe visit: Patrick Reilly, identified as ‘SIS Foreign Office Adviser’, attended the vital planning meeting on May 24 at which the timetable was laid out. Reilly had also been Menzies’s private secretary during the war, so Menzies would quickly have learned all that was going on. Reilly (who was the gentleman selected to prepare, a few years later, the lie to the House of Commons about Burgess’s career with the Foreign Office) could have also been called ‘Foreign Office SIS Adviser’.

Another significant fact is that Philby maintained cordial relations with his contacts in the CIA (for example, James Angleton) right up to his departure. That would indicate that the CIA did not connect any dots until after he had left, for whatever reason, and that Bill Harvey’s work on building a case against Philby did not occur until Sillitoe and Martin had arrived in Washington. No record of Harvey’s report to Bedell Smith, which has received so much attention in the various accounts of this period, exists. Gordon Corera, in The Art of Betrayal (2012) informs us that he made repeated requests through the Freedom of Information Act, but came up with nothing. (Corera, by the way, is another historian who ignores the chronology: he has ‘Washington’ insisting that Philby leave.)

Moreover, Corera also has Harvey sending his memorandum not to Smith, but to Allen Dulles, who was Deputy-Director of Plans at that time. Yet this was assuredly a different memorandum. The Cleveland Cram Archive at George Washington University reveals that Harvey and Angleton probably submitted two separate memoranda: when Jack Easton of SIS returned to Washington in July, he pointed out that Sillitoe had been given these memoranda by the CIA, and that the one written by Harvey claimed that Philby was ‘ELLI’. That assertion was not part of the Martin-Lamphere-Harvey communication, and it would appear clear that Harvey had been instructed not to let the Director-General of MI5 see the infamous memorandum with the seven points. In addition, the missive to Dulles was dated June 15, while that to Smith was written two days earlier, immediately after Lamphere’s meeting with Martin.

Christopher Andrew is another of those observers who assert that Philby was recalled because of Bedell Smith’s ‘prompt’ action in demanding Philby’s recall, and that such a demand then required Sillitoe to travel to Washington to mollify Bedell Smith! Moreover, Andrew makes no reference to the seven-point memorandum which Lamphere clearly described in his book, published as early as 1986. Even Anthony Cave Brown, not regarded as the most reliable of historians, reflected the Martin disclosures, in his 1994 epic Treason in the Blood, although he suggested that the dossier on Philby was created by Martin in a rush, when he inspected the records on Philby only after Burgess and Maclean were shown to have flown (May 28) –  a highly improbable scenario. While a fresh decision was no doubt made to communicate its contents to Lamphere, the dossier had surely been compiled beforehand. Nigel West, in his recent Coldwar Spymaster (see last month’s report) quotes Liddell’s diary entry of June 18, when he shares Sillitoe’s statement of regret that the FBI had not been shown the shortlist, but otherwise does not explain the circumstances by which this memorandum was created and passed on.

The comments in Liddell’s diary indicate a highly significant and devious plot, however.  On June 14, he reports that Sillitoe has sent in a telegram, ‘saying that the CIA are already conducting enquiries about Philby, whom they regard as persona non grata, and that the FBI may take up the running before long. He [Sillitoe] thinks, however, that we should disclose to the FBI now that Kim’s first wife was a Communist’. Liddell was doubtful about providing this information, and recorded that the decision should be left to Sillitoe: “.  . .  he should make it clear that no proper assessment of Philby’s position has so far been possible.” Apart from the absurdity of the Director-General of MI5 having to telegram home for instructions (I cannot see J. Edgar Hoover calling back from Topeka, Kansas to ask his subordinates ‘What should I do?’), Liddell’s state of ignorance would seem to be confirmed.

Given that Martin had just informed Lamphere of the fact of Philby’s first marriage, as one of the seven points, it would appear to prove that (unless Liddell had been creating fake entries for posterity) i) Liddell himself knew nothing of Martin and his seven points; ii) Sillitoe knew nothing of the seven points, and iii) Lamphere could be trusted not to have shared what he was told with his colleagues at the FBI. The only person who could have managed this whole exercise was Dick White. As it turned out, Sillitoe went on to have a meeting with Bedell Smith, but since he had been deliberately kept in the dark about the mission of his sidekick Martin, it is safe to assume that he could have told Bedell Smith nothing about MI5’s dossier on Philby. Ironically, as late as June 27, Liddell records in his diary that White ‘has agreed a memorandum with SIS on the subject of Kim Philby, which is to go to the FBI’. Dick White must have struggled to keep a straight face.

The American side of the story is equally bizarre, with the CIA’s Bill Harvey clearly trying to steal the thunder, claiming he had come to his conclusions about Philby while stuck in traffic on the way to work. (In his 2001 Secret History of the CIA Joseph J. Trento relates an alternative version which Harvey used to tell his team in Berlin, where he was posted in 1953 – that the breakthrough occurred while he was sitting in the barber’s chair: maybe he had trouble remembering his legend.) Harvey was an unusual character, in that he had been recruited from the FBI in 1950 after he had effectively been fired from Hoover’s organisation, probably because a hangover caused him to miss an appointment. Trento, citing William R. Corson, offers a more dramatic explanation – that Hoover set up the incident, so that he could infiltrate Harvey into the CIA as a mole. Whether that is true or not, Harvey had also been enraged when Guy Burgess drew an unflattering caricature of his wife at a party hosted by the Philbys. The story of his epiphany comes from the very influential, but woolly and unreliable 1980 book, Wilderness of Mirrors, by the journalist David Martin, who echoed the claim that Bedell Smith gathered Angleton’s and Harvey’s reports, and let Menzies know that Philby was no longer welcome in Washington. Martin went on to write, in blissful ignorance of what his namesake Arthur had provided, that MI5, ‘working from Harvey’s premise’ then compiled a dossier against Philby that included the seven points of light. “I have toted [sic] up the ledger and the debits outnumber the assets’, he had the head of MI5 (i.e. not Menzies, but Sillitoe) then informing the CIA in response. Wilderness of Mirrors builds up a paean to Harvey as ‘the man who unmasked Philby’ and upstaged his rival James Angleton, the start of a lifelong reputation that was then reinforced by everyone who read Martin’s book: it was all a sham.

In his profile of Philby, The Master Spy (1982), Phillip Knightley (who interviewed his subject in Moscow) manages to record both anecdotes in the space of two pages – Harvey’s extraordinary insight, and the fact that Lamphere was informed by Arthur Martin of the seven points – without recognizing the paradox. Moreover, he also echoes David Martin’s absurd claim that White then endorsed the Bedell Smith report by compiling its own dossier on Philby.  As a weird adjunct to his written testimony, Lamphere then informed Knightley that Martin was accompanied by White himself in a visit to Washington after the Bedell submission, and thereby convinced him of Philby’s guilt! Knightley’s account is typical of this genre in showing an utterly undisciplined approach to chronology, an impressionability to unreliable sources, and a lack of rigorous methodology to sort out conflicts.

Lamphere thus seemed to contradict himself, sealing the fact of his complicity in the plot. As further evidence, Lamphere, who documented the Arthur Martin revelations in 1986, appeared not to object to this flagrant distortion of the truth when Burton Hersh, in The Old Boys (1992) regurgitated this story that appeared in the more definitive history of the CIA, John Ranelagh’s The Agency (1986). The CIA and the FBI were fierce rivals, and culturally very different. Why would he not call out his vainglorious counterpart, and correct the record? (Questioning the possible motives of participants is another aspect of my methodology.) Probably because Harvey was his friend and ally, and they agreed that it was the best way of getting rid of the odious Philby.

Dick White’s Plot

My theory about this is, therefore, that Lamphere knew that a wily plot was under way, and went along with it to enhance the CIA’s reputation. I suspect that Dick White, alerted by Liddell (and maybe by the very astute Maurice Oldfield, an SIS officer who had come to similar conclusions about Philby, but was not yet influential enough to challenge Menzies) crafted the policy of leaking a dossier on Philby to the CIA via Lamphere, so that the CIA could challenge SIS on it, thus deflecting the source of the attack away from MI5. Since Harvey was an ex-FBI man, he had a special relationship with his former colleague: he and Lamphere were old friends. The CIA had been depressed by its recent failed exploits in Albania, with which Philby had been involved, and MI5 was in no shape to make any open criticisms of SIS, what with the Fuchs fiasco fresh in its collective minds. What better way for MI5 of raising its esteem in the opinion of the CIA, and diverting attention to the misfortunes of SIS, than enabling the passing on to the CIA secret information with which it could assail SIS, and secure Philby’s demise?

Thus Lamphere became a willing participant in the scheme, and remained silent. In his book, he very smoothly elides over Harvey’s ‘breakthrough’: “In the summer of 1951, in my in-service lectures to FBI field agents, I was discussing Philby as a major spy; simultaneously, over at the CIA, Bill Harvey and Jim Angleton had no doubts about Philby’s perfidy.” He says nothing about Harvey’s ‘Aha!’ moment when stuck in traffic. He subdued his ego for the greater cause. By 1986, however, he no doubt felt that it was safe to explain what really happened. Yet no one picked him up: instead we read all these stories, no doubt encouraged by the CIA, of MI5 responding to the shrewd insights of its operatives by compiling its dossier on Philby in response to the CIA’s breakthroughs.

MI5 was thus clearly trying to play a very cagey game, no doubt inspired by Dick White rather than the bemused Sillitoe or the cautious Liddell, playing off the Foreign Office and SIS, and attempting to curry favour with the CIA, minimizing MI5’s culpability in the sluggish investigation into HOMER. The service surely had compiled a dossier on Philby much earlier (as the Roberts-Liddell exchanges will probably confirm), and many commentators, such as Hamrick, imply that the study of the VENONA texts had led White and co. to Maclean much earlier than MI5 later claimed. SIS’s passivity in the whole affair is a bit surprising, unless Menzies and White (acting on behalf of the confused Sillitoe) had done a deal whereby they would quietly ‘bury’ Philby in the same way that White and Liddell had smothered any disclosures about Anthony Blunt and Leo Long. Yet the fact that Menzies sent his emissary Jack Easton out to Washington in July to explain to Bedell Smith that Philby’s only identified transgression so far had been to board Guy Burgess in his Washington home indicated that SIS was probably not aware of the beans that had been spilled by Arthur Martin earlier.

As for Liddell, it was surprising that he was not sent on the mission with Sillitoe – after all, he was Sillitoe’s deputy, was nominally in charge of the investigation, and knew as much as anybody about Soviet espionage – but maybe he was considered not devious enough, and might have betrayed the fact that he had harboured suspicions about Philby for some years already. White may have therefore manoeuvered Martin into the assignment, as a less imaginative spokesperson. Yet Tom Bower’s biography of White, The Perfect English Spy, offers a different explanation. The account of these weeks is a chronological disaster, as White clearly wanted to deceive his interlocutor. The future head of MI5 and SIS gave his biographer a complete tissue of lies, not only massively confusing the timetable of events, but omitting some vital aspects of the story. Again, this episode merits a report of its own, and I need to interweave the claimed chronology with my previous account of Liddell’s meetings with Rees and Blunt (see https://coldspur.com/donald-macleans-handiwork ), so I shall just highlight the main travesties here.

Among the distortions, Bower has White approaching John Sinclair, the deputy-director of SIS, after Sillitoe’s return from the USA, requesting that Philby be brought back to England for questioning, while indicating that Philby was not under suspicion at that time. He makes no mention of the detailed plans for visiting Washington that Kew has now disclosed, most significantly overlooking the dossier that Arthur Martin shared with Lamphere, instead saying that Martin’s conversations with Lamphere ‘were focused on Burgess’. Instead, White has himself and Martin compiling the dossier after the request to Philby went out. Moreover, he repeats the story of the letter of warning to Philby before the telegram, but again, being sent after Sillitoe and Martin had returned. It is apparent, also, that White told Bower that he wanted Liddell out of the investigation because of Liddell’s associations with Burgess and his injudicious meeting with Blunt, and Liddell’s foolish request to Blunt to open Burgess’s flat to look for clues and correspondence.

White hints broadly to his biographer that Liddell came under suspicion as a Soviet spy, yet on January 2, 1980, he would declare (as reported by the Canberra Times) that “Any suggestion that Liddell was a Russian agent is the most awful, rotten nonsense. I knew him well and never had the slightest doubt about his good faith.” What is also remarkable is the evidence, in the Cleveland Cram files, that, when White came over to Washington in January 1952, he admitted to Scott, Dulles and Wisner in the CIA that Philby had been spying for the Soviets up until 1945, but had then ‘probably stopped’ his activities. That was an extraordinarily reckless statement to make, especially in view of the fact that MI5 had not elicited a confession from Philby, and that Harold Macmillan would go on to clear him, to the House of Commons, in 1955. It was overall a very slippery, mendacious performance by White in trying to put a positive seal on his legacy, concealing the bulk of the facts, and shifting the blame to Liddell when he, White, was just as responsible as his mentor. After all, if, as I claim is true, Blunt and Leo Long were discovered spying in 1944, White and Liddell should both have steered very clear of Blunt in 1951. ‘Dick White – A Re-assessment’ is urgently required.

But why MI5 thought that it had to bow to Foreign Office pressure, and could get away honourably, and without detection, with showing Lamphere the seven-point memorandum while concealing it from Hoover remains a puzzlement. It is all very amateurish, suggesting perhaps that the Foreign Office, which in May had been insistent that Martin not tell the FBI that Maclean was a suspect, was in on the ruse, perhaps believing that it would move attention away from Maclean to Philby. The whole saga demands further analysis.

Conclusion (for now)

In conclusion, therefore, it would appear that the judgments made against Philby by Liddell in 1947 were indeed shared, but suppressed. If there is one continuous theme to my research, it is the fact that awareness of the Cambridge Five’s treachery existed well before the authorities admitted it: Burgess with the Comintern in 1940, Blunt in 1944, Philby by 1947, Cairncross in 1952, and Maclean in 1949 – or even earlier. We also have new dimensions to Liddell’s career – an insider who guessed too much too soon in 1947, a senior officer, during the vital Philby inquiry in 1951, being pushed aside and outwitted by someone who would vanquish him in the competition for Director-General a year later, and then a possible secret assignment for the same erstwhile colleague in 1955, after his retirement from MI5. And was he perhaps an articulate and expert source to favoured journalists, trying to get the hidden facts revealed in some way without his fingerprints detectable on the medium?

The irony is that E. H. Cookridge, of all observers, because of his first-hand knowledge of Philby’s activities in Vienna, should be the one to learn from Liddell of Philby’s recruitment before he set out for Austria. The conversation must have been two-way: no doubt Cookridge helped fill in the background to Philby’s communist agitation for Liddell. In 1968, however, with Liddell dead, Cookridge still felt he could not identify his source when he wrote The Third Man, but no doubt sensed the sands of time were running out when he communicated with Andrew Boyle in 1977. There is work to do: trying to inspect travel records for 1955, having a look at the  photographs of KV 2/3783, applying to the BBC for access to Roberts’s testimonial, wading through the voluminous Springhall files myself, tracking down those CIA memoranda, reading Bayard Stockton’s biography of Bill Harvey, Flawed Patriot, applying some more rigorous structure to the events of May and June 1951 (including re-inspecting KV 6/143, and attempting to integrate Dick White’s erroneous chronology), and, maybe most significant of all, gaining access to the Cookridge archive at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Is there anyone out there who can help with that last task?

Oh, and by the way, is there anyone in MI5 or SIS keeping tabs on coldspur? If such a person has any questions – or any tips – you know how to get hold of me.

This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.