[I present the final segment in my series ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, offering a bold but confident hypothesis concerning Stalin’s objectives for the mission of sending agents to Norway disguised as British RAF officers. I have added a page containing the whole report in PDF format at ‘Airmen Who Died Twice’ (PDF), which may make the experience easier. This process is something of an experiment for me. I hope to improve the presentation soon. Feedback and tips appreciated!]
Chapter 7: Resistance in Norway
The overwhelming questions to be answered regarding the Soviet Union’s ability to stow two agents on a British plane, dressed in RAF uniforms, to parachute into southern Norway in September 1944 are: What possible objective could such a mission have had? And why would the RAF agree to such a foolhardy and potentially embarrassing adventure? The assumption must be that, for the mission to be successful, the agents, probably incapable of speaking fluent and unaccented English, would have been deemed capable of carrying out the impersonation of legitimate British officers, and thus of gaining access to the circle of a communist leader in whom Joseph Stalin had a particular interest. His name was Peder Furubotn, and he had for some time been incurring Stalin’s acute displeasure. Yet, if anything went wrong – or, equally astounding, even if the project were successful – the agents’ costume would immediately have implicated the RAF, with highly embarrassing implications.
In the analysis of these conundrums, it is useful to recapitulate the role of Norway in the war, its occupation by German forces, the collaboration or competition between various sabotage organizations and the nation’s governments at home and in exile, and the tenuous and contradictory relationship it held with the Soviet Union, a nominal ally. Norway was separated from Stalin’s fortress only by a thin section of the Finnish Petsamo region, an area rich in minerals, however, and thus bearing strategic importance.
The country had been ill-equipped to resist the German invasion of April 9, 1940. Hitler had designs on Norway’s natural resources, including its hydro-electric power, but he also needed to control the flow of iron-ore from neutral Sweden across the natural land-route. Great Britain and France had been aware of the threat, and they had prepared to send an Expeditionary Force to gain control of the valuable port of Narvik. This was conceived during the war between Finland and the Soviet Union, which started in September 1939. At that time, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were signatories to a joint non-aggression pact, and control of Finland had been granted to Stalin for purposes of national self-defence. Any communist-inspired resistance movements against the Germans were forbidden – until, of course, the Barbarossa invasion of Russia in June 1941 changed all the rules.
Britain in fact had had to beat a hasty retreat, assisting with the escape of the Norwegian royal family to London to create a government-in-exile in June 1940. It had overestimated the power of its own navy and misread the intentions of the Wehrmacht. Thus Norway fell into the category of occupied territory, and a cowed population had to decide what form resistance to the German invaders should take. In fact, the Nazis were overall more indulgent with the Norwegians than they were with other conquered nations: they regarded the Nordic race as Aryan brothers, and hoped to integrate the populace into the New Order when the war was won. That favouritism, however, did not extend to mercy when violence was exacted against their police and military forces, with some harsh reprisals enacted, and this tension played a major role in the following years.
Routes of Arctic Convoys
Soon after Barbarossa, however, Norway took on fresh significance when Churchill and Roosevelt resolved, in August 1941, to assist the Soviet Union by sending supplies through the Arctic convoy system. This required ships to navigate the dangerous Norwegian and Barents seas to reach, primarily, the ports of Murmansk and Archangel, skirting the northern coasts of Norway, and thus becoming potential prey to German craft berthed in Norwegian ports and inlets, such as the battleship Tirpitz. The convoys continued (with some interruptions) until the end of the war. Stalin kept a close eye on Norway, and he evolved his strategy as the war progressed.
The accounts of resistance in Norway present a contradictory picture: some display ignorance, others practice concealment, and others distort (for political reasons). It is consequently often difficult to pin down the details of events – both their motivations and their outcomes. It seems to me that both London (in the guise of the government-in-exile and SOE) and Moscow (the NKGB) believed that they were controlling the strings, when in fact the agencies on the ground often pursued unlikely alliances to further their goals. I here try to concentrate on the less controversial facts, identifying the main motifs in the plotline.
The British Special Operations Executive trained and prepared a vigorous Norwegian section to carry out sabotage within Norway, which became more intense when the British suspected the Nazis of creating ‘heavy water’ as an important part of the project to build an atomic bomb. Yet fierce reprisals in response to SOE raids alarmed the major resistance organization in place, Milorg, and it resolved instead on a more passive approach, and to focus on preparation to assist invading forces for the time when the Nazis began to lose the war. Milorg was led by a lawyer, Jens Hauge, an enigmatic and controversial figure, who had sought a medical discharge from military service in 1939. He joined in early 1942. The tensions between SOE and Milorg were then resolved by the creation of the Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee in the spring of 1942, and SOE’s independent course was officially halted by October of that year. Yet Milorg did not halt its own sabotage activities, and it pursued a course of assassinations of known traitors.
There was, however, another resistance group, Osvald, which evolved out of the pre-war antifascist Wollweber League, and was led by the more aggressive Asbjorn Sunde. He invoked the assistance of the Communist Party (now strictly underground), and established training centres around the country. Sunde was a tougher character, a sailor who had learned sabotage and assassination in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the Communists for the Republican movement against Franco’s Nationalists, and he was a loyal Stalinist. Thus a pattern familiar elsewhere in occupied Europe emerged: certain resistance groups were set on restoring the pre-war political configuration (such as SOE collaborating with the royalist/social democratic government-in-exile), while others were being directed by Moscow in preparation for a post-war communist takeover. Sunde was ordered to minimize sabotage activity, and to concentrate instead on providing intelligence to his NKGB bosses. Yet the relationships appear to have been very complex: the government-in-exile sometimes gave directions to the Stalinist Osvald group on sabotage projects, and it appears that even Milorg collaborated with it, engaging Sunde’s hitmen to carry out its targeted assassinations.
Added to this recipe was the afore-mentioned Peder Furubotn, leader of the Communist Party in Norway. Furubotn’s organizational skills and connections allowed him to sponsor resistance groups in Oslo, Bergen, and Hallingdal. He was also a controversial figure, known for his independence of thought: he was an outlier, a provincial, with his power-base in Bergen away from the capital centre of Oslo. But he was also a dedicated patriot who desired to bring a domestic Communist regime to Norway after the war through democratic processes, not under the thrall of the Soviet Union (rather like an unauthoritarian Tito). He had in fact spent the years 1930-1938 in Moscow, an experience that included the witnessing of the Great Purge and the execution of some of his friends, which assuredly made him deviate from the solid Stalinist line he had taken up in the 1920s.
Professor Titlestad
According to his biographer, Professor Torgrim Titlestad, who has uniquely been able to inspect Russian archives, Furubotn had long been under the threat of execution, since in Moscow he had aligned himself closely with Bukharin, the executed ‘traitor’, and had refused to declare his public support for the outcome of the show-trials in 1938. Before Barbarossa, the Norwegian Communist party had tried to have Furubotn, who had from Bergen independently undertaken resistance in that period, removed from the Party, but the tables were turned when the Soviet Union became an enemy of the Nazi occupiers. At the time most other important Norwegian communists had either been killed, were in the hands of the Germans, or were refugees in Sweden, and Furubotn was elected General Secretary at the end of 1941. This was in defiance of Stalin’s orders of 1938 (when Furubotn was banished back to Norway from Moscow), that he should hold no senior position in the Party.
Furubotn was able to work independently for many years. He was a survivor. In spite of frequent unsuccessful attempts to bring him in line, during the war Moscow lacked local resources or the military reach to change his behaviour, or to remove him from office. At first glance, the need to have him out of the picture should have appeared less urgent as the war progressed, since Norway (apart from the strategic Petsamo region) did not feature strongly in Stalin’s plans for territorial control of Europe. It was not a conventional ‘buffer state’, hardly a threat to his ambitions, and Stalin accepted that it was part of the ‘western’ sphere of influence. The Soviet dictator did not want to waste resources in trying to control it, although he supported British-American desires to prevent valuable troops from being transferred from Norway to the battle zones in Germany, and he did collaborate with the British and Americans in the plan to oust the Nazis from the Finnmark (the North-east Norwegian territory abutting the Soviet Union).
Sunde’s Osvald group – perhaps surprisingly, given Sunde’s Stalinist aims – gained his funds primarily from the government-in-exile in London, supplemented occasionally by Moscow (through the agency of the Soviet legation in Stockholm, as the VENONA transcripts show). Yet Sunde looked to his rival, Furubotn, for funds, too. In September 1942 he agreed to supply guards at Furubotn’s central camp of the Norwegian Communist Party (NKP) in Hemsedal, in exchange for a continuing supply of money and materiel from the NKP leader. Furubotn had tried to make Sunde sabotage-leader for the NKP, but on the condition that he break his ties with Moscow – something Sunde refused to do, which strained the relationship, and led to severe friction by the end of 1943. Sunde established a training centre in Rukkekdalen in the winter of 1942, and recruited a network of saboteurs in the Torpo-Gol and Nesbyen areas, in the Hallingdal valley. This was the same area used by Milorg to establish its ‘Elg’ base in the early summer of 1944.
Reichskommissar Terboven
Yet the decreasing effectiveness of sabotage, and the costs of maintaining the subversive units, prompted a change of plan. By February 1944, Milorg, alongside the Foreign Office, SOE, and the OSS, had openly disparaged the Communist sabotage efforts, and had applied pressure on Osvald to reduce its aid for Furubotn. The feud between Sunde and Furubotn (which had sharpened when Furubotn had threatened to kill Sunde if he followed through on a plan to assassinate the Nazi Commissar Terboven) intensified. A month later, Sunde did indeed withdraw protection for Furubotn and his network, and he turned his attention to Norwegian exile groups in Sweden. The British increased their operations in support of eventually ousting the Germans: Operation FIRECREST was launched by sea in April 1944, a four-man team landing and then starting to give weapons training. In May, Moscow, through Pavel Sudoplatov (of Special Tasks), ordered Sunde to wind up his organization, and refrain from any further sabotage, Stalin explicitly admitting that the British were in charge in southern Norway, and that the theatre was too far away from Moscow for it to exert any influence. In June, however, Sunde’s network, including Furubotn’s group, came under fresh attack from the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht in Operation ALMENRAUSCH.
Furubotn did not respond well to these moves, and he was increasingly isolated: he had enemies in Hauge and Sunde already, but now, with his autonomous subversion efforts, became an irritant to the British to compound the enmity to him maintained by Stalin. That may have been a fresh pretext for Stalin to want to have him eliminated – as a proven ‘Trotskyist’ defying the policy of the vozhd – and a move against him could represent a useful gesture to his allies. Furubotn had incurred Stalin’s anger by defying his order to stay out of the Party organization when he had returned to Norway, by executing subversive campaigns during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact (which he had openly criticized), by refusing orders to move to Sweden (where he feared he might be killed), by expressing support for the Norwegian government-in-exile in London, for attempting to wean Sunde away from the NKGB, and for openly publishing anti-Stalinist tracts in the summer of 1944. Others had been killed for less, and Furubotn believed that attempts would be made on his life on his home territory. Professor Titlestad has suggested that Moscow may have recommended to Sunde that he remove his security details from Furubuton’s hideout, thus perhaps allowing the Gestapo to infiltrate the NKP, and to take on the task of eliminating Furubotn. Yet Furubotn had escaped the ALMENRAUSCH assault, despite Sunde’s apparent betrayal, and may thereby have come afresh in Stalin’s sights.
The circumstances of the ALMENRAUSCH operation are puzzling. If a sizeable force assembled by the Wehrmacht with the help of the State Police (the Statspolitiet) did in fact conduct a punitive operation against Norwegian resistance forces (including Milorg, and the two factions of the KPN) on June 13, 1944, it is astonishing how little loss of life there was. The Wikipedia entry (the only account in English, I believe) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Almenrausch indicates that a force of eight-hundred was deployed, but that the operation was largely unsuccessful, even though it attacked a ‘secret’ hideout. Eight communists were arrested, but only one was executed. That does not sound like a typical Nazi response. Professor Titlestad explains it as a combination of the Nazis not wanting to kill a large number of fellow-Aryans, as well as a degree of nervousness about the chances of survival of the members of this punitive force in a hostile rural region. Yet the Professor also writes that Furubotn had been the Gestapo’s most wanted man, and that it had tortured and killed Norwegians in an attempt to track him down. The decisive outcome for Stalin, however, was that, in July 1944, Furubotn was still alive.
If an agreement solely for the infiltration by air by NKGB agents to Furubotn’s camp, without any explicit goal of assassination, did take place between Stalin and Churchill (which must be the least alarming hypothesis), it occurred at a time when relationships between Great Britain and the Soviet Union were rapidly deteriorating. SOE had grown frustrated with the lack of co-operation in Moscow, and the Foreign Office was infuriated by Stalin’s abuse of its Military Mission there. The Warsaw Uprising, when Stalin refused to allow Allied planes to refuel on Soviet territory, and the Red Army watched what was happening from across the Vistula, contributed to the discord. In addition, the pressure on the War Cabinet to return to the Soviet Union all POWs they had been liberating, and the lack of co-operation from the Russians over the efforts to attack the Tirpitz, conspired largely to an atmosphere of utter distrust. On August 18, Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Orme Sargent even declared that the Soviet Union was the future Enemy Number 1.
What is certain that some intense discussions took place in London towards the end of August, with Milorg’s chief, Hauge, visiting for four weeks, having been authorized to use the ‘bearing ball’ run by Mosquito from Stockholm to Leuchars. One outcome of that visit was that Milorg now became known as ‘Home Forces’. According to one account, sensing that victory was in sight, the ANCC in January had authorized the provision of a large amount of weaponry to Milorg, and in June SHAEF (now having taken charge of SOE projects) approved of attacks on Nazi industries and lines of communication. Professor Færøy, on the other hand, has stated very confidently that these increased shipments did not take place until ‘the autumn’. The scope of military coordination debated then included measures to counter German scorched earth policy, the capture of Gestapo documents, the destruction of the Gestapo HQ in Oslo and (perhaps most provocatively) a list of agreed assassination targets. Hauge’s meetings in Britain to determine these policies were held at senior level with the Norwegian Government in exile, with Special Forces Headquarters, with the Anglo-Norwegian Collaboration Committee, and with Viscount Selborne, the Minister of Economic Warfare in London, as well as with General Thorne in Edinburgh. Thorne was responsible for the deception plan of FORTITUDE NORTH, as well as for the preparation for the liberation of Norway. Yet, because of the sensitivity of the conspiracy, it is hard not to conclude that the meetings in the United Kingdom must have been entirely coincidental to the plot against Furubotn.
More reliable wireless communications were now being established between SOE and Milorg, and, in Operation GOLDEN EAGLE, two more agents were dropped directly in the Hallingdal area on August 28, to help establish the Elg base with improved radio contact, and to enable preparation for further intensive and frequent drops of supplies over the following months. And then, as Britain started to consolidate its hold over subversive operations in southern Norway, in early September 1944 the very sudden and highly momentous intelligence arrived that Stalin had approved the launching of attacks on the Tirpitz from Soviet territory, which caused a sudden flurry of changes to the PARAVANE project.
Whether the planned assassination of Furubotn (which is posited here as the motivation for the infiltration into southern Norway of Stalin’s agents) was related to the permission Stalin gave for British bombers to fly from Soviet airfields is probably unverifiable. The British must have had something important to gain from the arrangement, but any decision taken must have occurred at the highest levels of command. It is possible that Churchill did not know what Stalin’s precise plan for his agents was, but his agreement in allowing them to assume the identities of live RAF officers is extremely incriminating. If any knowledge of the details of the conspiracy did exist, it must surely have been restricted to Churchill and Gubbins, the head of SOE. SOE/MI6 had a direct – but highly insecure – line to Moscow through its representative George Hill, who was on good terms with Stalin, so negotiations could have been carried on through that medium. The relevant archival material shows some intense exchanges between London and Moscow in August and early September of 1944, but nothing obviously attributable to the Furubotn plot.
As for the RAF, it would obviously have known that it was being ordered to mount a highly irregular operation, but the leaders (i.e. Portal, Harris, Cochrane, McMullen, and Bottomley at the Air Ministry) would not have been aware that the objective of the mission was in fact assassination. They were probably informed that the subterfuge was simply part of an extended PICKAXE operation (i.e. one in a series of co-operative ventures between SOE and the NKGB), where Soviet agents had to be infiltrated in disguise in order that they would be welcomed properly by Hauge’s Milorg network. They would not have known that Sunde (probably) would then lead the twosome to Furubotn’s lair.
Stalin and Churchill
On the other hand, it was a low-risk undertaking for Stalin: he did not care about the fate of agents sent abroad on sabotage missions; their lives were expendable, and, since they would be wearing RAF uniforms, it would be difficult to trace anything to him, in any case. But for the British, it was a highly dangerous operation, involving deceit, not just with RAF crewmen, but with the Norwegian government, who, if its members learned of the plot, would not have taken kindly to the phenomenon of murder missions by foreign Communist infiltrators being abetted by their close wartime ally. Even if the mission had been successful, and the perpetrators had in some way been removed without their masquerade being detected, word might have leaked out, because of the packed Lancaster, the airmen who made it back safely, and the knowledge of the impersonated officers returning home. But if it failed – and in such a disastrous and spectacular fashion, as it did – the repercussions could have been tragic and far-reaching. Yet the destruction of the plane, and all inside it, managed to impose an eighty-year silence that has succeeded in exculpating all the perpetrators.
[I thank Professors Titlestad and Færøy for their advice on this chapter. The opinions represented here are of course my own, and I likewise take responsibility for any errors. coldspur]
Chapter 8: Conclusions
No documentation to prove that Churchill and Stalin conspired to launch the operation to Hallingdal has appeared, and it probably never will. Yet such a decision, to have NKGB agents dressed up in the uniforms of living RAF officers, and be equipped with their ID-tags, can have been authorized only at the very top. It was assuredly not an SOE operation (although SOE radios and servicemen were certainly employed); nor was it an idea of Bomber Command, which would have been fiercely resistant to the subterfuges and risks associated with such an enterprise. Churchill’s irrational and misguided desires to placate Stalin must have convinced him that the Generalissimo’s demands were worth acceding to. The opportunity to carry out an attack on the Tirpitz from Soviet territory, with a presumed greater chance of success than flying directly from Scotland, must have been irresistible to him.
Lancaster at Yagodnik
One can imagine the strained atmosphere when Lancaster PB416 prepared for take-off at Yagodnik on September 17, 1944. Because of the damaged and unusable planes left behind, their crews had to be allotted to the remaining flightworthy aircraft, resulting in crowded conditions. The mood would probably have been very positive, however, given the (modest) degree of success of PARAVANE, and the prospect of returning home with no loss of squadron life. And yet two Soviet citizens were foisted on this particular team, and the members must have been informed that the couple, equipped with parachutes, was to be dropped somewhere along the flightpath. They might not have known that the agents were masquerading as British fellow-airmen underneath their jackets, but they were probably disconcerted about this irregular deviation from the plans.
Etnedal
PB416 was never blown off course by inclement weather, as RAF reports later claimed. As the last plane in loose formation, it peeled off from the chain ahead of it off the coast of Sweden, and made a course for southern Norway. We know it was expected, because the navigator radioed his co-ordinates over Oystogo in Etnedal when the plane arrived there soon after one o’clock in the morning of September 17. These measures were recorded without alarm, even though the location was over three hundred miles to the north-west of the path on which the rest of the sixteen Lancasters were cruising home.
What went wrong? One can perhaps imagine that the NKGB agents had second thoughts – not that they probably had any first thoughts of their own volition over the exploit. Threats had probably been made concerning their families. They knew that they must be on a suicide mission: even if they were successful in finding Furubotn, and assassinating him, they would not survive long in their British greatcoats, with their British ID-tags, but probably owning only a smattering of English, if any. Furthermore, they had to survive the parachute drop itself. It is highly unlikely that they had had parachute training, let alone from a British bomber, and the prospect of landing correctly on hard ground uninjured, and then meeting up with a friendly reception committee, must have seemed distant.
One could conjecture that they perhaps tried to convince the pilot that he should abandon the drop, and take his ‘stowaways’ onwards to Scotland. But Squadron-Leader Levy had his orders, and he would not have wanted to present himself at Lossiemouth with two illegal NKGB agents in his complement of passengers, with much explaining to do, and no doubt flak to be received from the high-ups. The agents were probably armed. Perhaps some sort of skirmish took place, and the plane circled while attempts to resolve the issue, with Levy trying to convince the agents of their duty, took place. The dangers of the terrain went unnoticed, and the plane hit a treetop on the mountain in the Saupeset valley above the town of Nesbyen.
RAF at Dyce, Aberdeen, which had been tracking the movements of PB416, must have known of the mission, and soon assumed that the plane was lost without any survivors. Yet the details appear, strangely, to have escaped their notice. If the Milorg reception-party, aided by SOE agents recently arrived (and maybe attended by Sunde), were in wireless contact (which they surely were, to have been able to finalize the arrangements), they would have transmitted the facts about the horrific collision with the mountain, and presumably have added that there could have been no survivors. Local civilians quickly erected a cross to indicate the ten bodies discovered, which they promptly buried. And yet this news never reached Bomber Command, or, if it did, was ignored. After the defeat of the Germans in May 1945 locals remembered the dead airmen with a hand-painted plaque in Norwegian.
The fact was that it was more convenient for the full list of crew members to remain unknown and unknowable. The story about NKGB ‘stowaways’ could thus remain a secret for a while: the facts buried in red tape and obfuscation – the fog of war. Yet that calm was disturbed when the initial Graves Report was issued in July 1945, and then altered the following month, after an on-site inspection of the markers in Nesbyen revealed the names of Wyness and Williams among the casualties. By then, of course, Wyness and Williams were dead, and could tell no tales. Some coughing, and shuffling of papers resulted, and by the end of December 1946 the final report was able to declare that one unknown airman (of undefined nationality, but perhaps that need not be explicitly stated) had perished alongside the nine certain casualties. No one seemed to want to pose the question: how could the RAF not know who had boarded PB416 in Yagodnik?
Even in this decade an incurious listlessness governs the attitudes of the War Graves Commission in England. Its representative acknowledges the paradoxes articulated in the records, but he shows no interest in taking the matter further. One could assume, perhaps, that corporate memory in the RAF (and in other departments of the UK government) endures to the extent that its employees and associates are firmly cautioned not to encourage any members of the public to press too hard on certain matters. One can admire the dedication that such civil servants (and volunteers) apply to maintaining histories and records while at the same time one has to challenge their lack of resolve.
617 Squadron Badge
As another example, in 2021, the painstaking Nigel Austin posed a question to the Official Historian of the 617 Squadron Association about the procedures involved in compiling a Flight Loss Card. (There is no mention of the loss of Lancaster PB416 on the Association’s web-page.) Dr Owen patiently explained the roles of the Air Ministry, Bomber Command, and the International Red Cross, and suggested that lines of communication became tangled during the investigations. He implied that the initial reports were confused because it seemed that items of clothing belonging to Wyness and Williams had presumably been borrowed, but he overlooked the issue of ID-tags. It was as if this were the first time that anyone associated with the Squadron has investigate the enigma, and Owen concluded his response as follows: “The more one looks, more gaps and unanswered/unanswerable questions emerge with regard to this loss”. Is the word ‘unanswerable’ telling – a sign of policy? In any case, no follow-up occurs.
Even today, almost eighty years after the events, it would be politically highly embarrassing for the truth to be conceded. First is the fact of the cover-up itself – a betrayal of openness, a disgraceful lack of admission of responsibility to the relatives of those who died in the crash, and a promotion of lies about its cause. Second is the damage it performs to the reputations of those involved – the institutions themselves, of course, but also those who led them, and in particular Winston Churchill, with his sentimental behaviour towards Stalin, and his unforgivable tendency to relish picaresque adventures, and to become too involved in them. That is an aspect that his biographers have touched on, but – alongside his interventions in the betrayal of SOE ‘F’ circuits in France in the summer of 1943 – it merits much greater attention.
Churchill had conflicting motives: to make a bold enough gesture to appease Stalin, but to keep it so secret that he would not offend the Norwegian government. Sadly, his obsession over Tirpitz was misguided: he did not know how sparse were its fuel supplies; he did not realize how cautious Hitler’s plans were for deploying the battleship, in his anxiety to protect his Nordic fleet; and he was unaware of utterly low the morale of the Tirpitz crew had sunk, frustrated by inactivity and the barrenness of northern Norway. Yet he surely could not have imagined that the destruction of the Lancaster aircraft, and all on board, could have been a possible outcome of his reckless agreement. The plane having reached Oystogo, it could have continued its flight, taking the Soviet agents to Scotland, where they would never have been heard of again, without Stalin being any the wiser. Whether the impersonators were anguished that the mission had been abandoned, or whether they pressured the pilot to cancel the drop, and save them, will almost certainly never be known. Yet the ineluctable fact that nothing about the operation ever seems to have leaked out from Norwegian sources who were involved on the ground is perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of this tragic event.
As for Stalin, it should come as no surprise that he would pursue such an adventure. He was ruthless, exploited weaknesses in his allies (both Churchill and Roosevelt), and single-mindedly hunted down anyone who challenged his authority. Furubotn would have been just another victim in the line of such as Ignace Reiss, Juliet Poyntz, Walter Krivitsky, Leon Trotsky, and a whole lot more. The opportunity arose, Stalin grabbed it, and he formulated the plot in a way that it could not be easily traced to any of his decisions, whether it succeeded or not. Not that any attribution to his scheming would have worried him: everything would have simply been denied.
Peder Furubotn probably never knew about the exploit, or that he had avoided yet another attempt on his life. Did he really deserve the fate that Stalin had decreed for him? Professor Titlestad has devoted a large part of his career to investigating Furubotn, and he has written a biography of him, unfortunately not yet published. The Professor has created, however, a website dedicated to his researches, at https://furubotnarkivene.no/, and the ‘English’ tab introduces the visitor to a very useful article on his subject. What is startling to this writer is that the Professor sets out to rehabilitate Furubotn, describing him as ‘one of Norway’s most colorful and charismatic political leaders of the 20th century’ and that ‘for five years, he fought a life-and-death battle to avoid being killed by the Gestapo in Norway and became a role model for surviving the illegal struggle against the overwhelmingly powerful German occupation and its Norwegian collaborators in the NS [the Nasjonal Samling, the only legal party in Norway from 1942 to 1945]’. That was not how I had initially interpreted his role, but Furubotn’s daring example was converted into significant success for the Communist Party after the war.
Professor Titlestad present some fascinating insights into Furubotn’s post-war career, when he even returned to Moscow and remained unscathed, describing him as a more constitutionally sensitive Communist, perhaps a ‘Euro-communist’ of the kind that excited leftist politicians in the western democracies in the 1950s. While I am in any case unqualified to comment on such analysis, this article focusses on the war years alone, and it seems that the record of Furubotn’s activities between 1940 and 1945 is very hazy. It is difficult to track at what time the revolutionary Communist morphed into the simpler and rather sentimental left-winger that the post-war record shows. What is clear, however, is that Furubotn defied Stalin too many times, and his enemies within the KPN made sure that accounts of his misconduct got back to the vozhd.
I thus have to express some reservations about Furubotn’s heroism and reputation. Furubotn seems rather a sorry figure to me: a man lacking formal education who learned about Marxism only when he went to Moscow, and who, after the war, drifted into a vague socialism that invoked the Bible as often as it brought in The Communist Manifesto. If Furubotn had been a Communist during the war, whether Stalinist or not, the mission of a communist was class warfare, authoritarian control (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’, of course, which was a ridiculous slogan). The institution of Communist power always ended in the incarceration or execution of class enemies, and the abandonment of any constitutional safeguards. The senior resistance organization, Milorg, detested the Communist Party, whether it was Sunde’s or Furubotn’s, and Milorg became the official voice of the people representing the government-in-exile. Yet the Communist message still resonated strongly among major sectors of Norway’s population.
I thus maintain a few doubts about the Professor’s assessment of the integrity of Furubotn and his motives. He writes, also, that the Oslo Harbour sabotage operation orchestrated by Furubotn in the autumn of 1944 was an epochal event. “This activity, which carried the death penalty from the German side, greatly contributed to keeping the hope of liberation alive among Norwegians”, he writes. Yet such an attack went entirely against the grain of what Milorg (and, reportedly the Stalinist rump group led by Sunde) was trying to achieve, and the reprisals could have been severe. Most Norwegians must have realized by then that the Nazis were on the run, and that the Allies were moving inexorably into occupied countries, including Norway. Which Norwegians would have been excited about the destruction of the capital’s port by a subversive revolutionary at that stage of the war?
One last aspect of what appears to me to be a controversy lies in the Professor’s account of Furubotn’s time in Moscow before the war. He somewhat mysteriously writes that ‘Stalin reluctantly allowed him to return to Norway in the autumn of 1938 after 8 years in Moscow’, adding that Stalin kept the family of his son, Gilbert, in the Soviet Union as hostages. I was not aware that Stalin undertook any action ‘reluctantly’, which suggests unrealistically that the vozhd would actually listen to advice from his ministers – and that that group would actually proffer advice to him rather than simply await instructions. (The Black Book of Communism states that Furubotn ‘escaped’ from Moscow.) Elsewhere, Professor Titlestad notes that Furubotn was sent back and essentially demoted to serve a minor role in the Party in his hometown of Bergen, and the Professor has explained to me, having inspected KGB archives in Moscow, that Stalin let him go because he believed that the Gestapo would perform the murderous job for him. Yet Stalin’s ability to recall that he had let Furubotn slip through his fingers would give him additional incentive to extinguish the rebel: the PARAVANE episode of September 1944 was not the first attempt to silence Furubotn for good.
Nikolai Bukharin
The other observation that I found incongruous was the categorization of Nikolai Bukharin, whom Furubotn admired, and whom Sunde had apparently invoked alongside Genrikh Yagoda in denouncing Furubotn. Professor Titlestad writes: “Bukharin had long been one of the leading liberal Soviet leaders after the revolution in 1917, and his trial attracted significant international attention.” I believe that this is a serious misconception. Bukharin was innocent of most of the crimes he was accused of (but perhaps not that of threatening Stalin’s power), but he was no ‘liberal’. He was a Bolshevik who had enthusiastically embraced the revolution, and he was until his death a firm champion of the ‘glorious Cheka’ and its barbarous methods. A too facile equivalence of Bukharin and Furubotn glosses over what Furubotn might have become.
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Postscript
Lastly, a few observations on methodology. My collaborator on this project, Nigel Austin, has been a determined sleuth, tracking down arcane sources, identifying persons who have some connection with the mystery, and refusing to let go. I know, however, that he was continually on the search for proof of exactly what happened on that night in September, the proverbial ‘smoking gun’, and he might have proceeded forever until he found such. I have occasionally been able to track down such items in my attempts to solve intelligence mysteries, such as with the memorandum about Guy Burgess and the Comintern, the Letter from Geneva concerning Len and Ursula Beurton, and the article in the Viennese newspaper that revealed much about MI6 and Kim Philby, but such moments are very rare.
I decided to explain to Nigel that historiography is frequently an exercise of the imagination, a detective investigation, in which one searches for clues, and then tries to construct a pattern of behaviour and events that can explain what is superficially inexplicable. There is not going to be a solid paper-trail in a case as complex as this. And that is how it was with ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’. To me, the borrowed uniforms and ID-tags suggested stowaways of some kind. Yet in those conditions the stowaways could not have been furtive: they must have had approval. They could not have been British airmen: that group was completely accounted for. They must therefore have been agents, saboteurs, spies, of some kind. They would not have been Norwegian communists in exile: such persons would not have had to disguise themselves that way, impersonating British RAF crew members. They must have been NKGB agents – Russians. And if they were agents, they must have had a mission. And the obvious mission was assassination. A study of Norwegian resistance quickly came up with the name of Peder Furubotn, who had offended Stalin.
Thus was the theory constructed. It all seemed rather tenuous: had Furubotn really annoyed Stalin that much? And why would Stalin choose that time to set his murder-squad off the leash? And then the encounter with Professor Titlestad’s latest research indicated that assassination attempts had already been made against Furubotn. Stalin could no longer rely on the Gestapo or the Sunde organization to get rid of his foe. So he took on the task himself, and invoked the gullible Churchill to assist him. As the cliché goes: ‘The rest is history’. But in this case it has not been so – until now. And it would be commendable if the British Government, through the Ministry of Defence, made some sort of statement and apology to the public and to the relatives of the dead airmen in time for the eightieth anniversary of the crash on September 17, 2024.
When first we practise to deceive!” (Sir Walter Scott, Marmion)
In this bulletin, I use some correspondence as a trigger to invoke a more detailed analysis of Dick White’s plot to leak information on Kim Philby to the CIA – the exercise that his representative in Washington characterized as an ‘ingenious scheme’ – and to re-assess White’s overall track-record as a counter-espionage officer.
Contents:
An Uncomfortable Exchange
The Letter from Mr. Even-Shoshan
Re-Assessing Dick White’s Plot
Milicent Bagot’s Dossier
The Strange Reactions of Robert Lamphere
Deeper Implications
White’s Predicament
PEACH
Enter ‘Buster’ Milmo
‘The Imperfect English Counter-Espionage Officer’
Postscript: The Lost Philby Chapters
* * * * * * * * * * * *
An Uncomfortable Exchange
I often reflect on the various email exchanges I have with two groups of individuals. The first I shall call ‘members of the public’, namely amateur enthusiasts for intelligence matters, former intelligence officers, journalists, and writers of histories and biographies with no relevant academic qualifications. The second is simply ‘academics’, professional historians with doctorates or professorships teaching at universities. The messages from the first group are almost uniformly engaging, showing humility, a genuine curiosity and willingness to engage in sensible discussion, patience, and an appropriate degree of scepticism, as well as a readiness to express complimentary remarks about my research. The academics, on the other hand (if they respond at all, of course) are generally – but not always – abrupt, dogmatic, patronising, intemperate, and stingy with any praise.
I was reminded of this contrast during two recent conversations I had with persons I have never met. The first was a female academic (whom I shall not name – unless there is an overwhelming demand for her identification from coldspur readers) whom I had approached concerning Kim Philby. She responded quite pleasantly to start with, and I sent her a late draft of my February coldspur article on Smolka. Her immediate response was ‘Yes, I know the whole Smolka story’, and she described a recent project concerning him that she had worked on. This was a clear message to me that she was the undisputed expert on Smolka, and that she had nothing to learn from any other source. (I do dislike know-alls.)
And then, when I suggested that Edith Tudor-Hart’s role had been greatly exaggerated by such persons as Anthony Blunt (as well as the KGB), she immediately accused me of having male chauvinist tendencies, telling me that I underestimated the work of female intelligence officers. This was an extraordinarily illogical – and faintly insulting – conclusion to come to, and I responded that I was a big fan of Jane Sissmore/Archer, and that I recognized what Daphne Park had achieved. I also mentioned that I had recently read Helen Fry’s Women in Intelligence, and learned much from it. She ignored my response, and then questioned me about the planting of the 1934 press article about Philby, which I had ascribed to MI6, and lectured me that Philby had had nothing to do with MI6 at that time.
It was quite obvious that she had not read the piece I sent her (nor was she familiar with Fry’s book), so I gently drew her attention to it again, asking her whether she had already encountered everything that I had uncovered about Smolka. She quickly wrote back a hot-headed message titled ‘Philby working for MI6 in 1933 is SO NUTS!’, and I quote the full content of her text (which lacked any salutations):
Helen Fry cannot be serious. This is the most ludicrous theory ever.
Christopher Andrew must be laughing his head off (but you will probably say he is establishment and we have to believe in conspiracies instead).
Regarding Smolka: Yes of course he was working for the Russians. That is hardly new (I did not mean you should try to read Russian books. I mean their archive releases. Go to their websites)
Korda and Greene had other things to do in Vienna in 1948 than interviewing the little fish Smolka. (Ever heard of Peter Lunn and his tunnels?)
And one did not need Smolka to learn about penicillin and sewers (yes, I know that Montagu claimed his short story was vital etc) If you read German, go through the newspaper collection ANNO. It is online. They were covering these stories all the time. It was public knowledge.
My first reaction was to wonder whether the lady harboured any inherent prejudices against all female historians, but I quickly put that unchivalrous thought behind me, and turned to the substance. It seemed to me that not only had my correspondent not read carefully anything I had written, but that she also was grabbing the wrong end of the stick with her rhetorical and ill-mannered flourishes. Specifically:
It did not appear that she had read Helen Fry’s Spymaster, for she would otherwise acknowledge that Fry actually cites a retired MI6 source who made the claim about ‘Philby always working for MI6’, while she (Fry) cast doubts on its veracity. Moreover, Fry withdrew that assertion in the second edition of the book, a move that I ascribed to the fact that she had been ‘nobbled’ by the authorities. My correspondent shows no awareness of these events, and thus her opinion on the ludicrousness of the assertion is ill-directed and lacks any substance.
Why the reactions (cachinnatory or otherwise) of the ‘great Yoda of intelligence studies’ [M.S. Goodman] had to be invoked was a mystery to me. After all, Andrew is the authorized historian of MI5, not MI6, and his pronouncements on these matters have been erratic. It was he who declared, almost a decade ago, that his findings on the very relevant Eric Roberts correspondence would ‘keep the conspiracy theorists busy for fourteen more years’, but he then suffered from an attack of amnesia when asked to recall the circumstances behind that observation. The woman is clearly an acolyte of Andrew: she echoes the clumsy characterization that anyone who suggests that a conspiracy may be lurking behind any event is an irredeemable (and maybe congenital) ‘conspiracy theorist’, while implying that all the reputable scholars like her and Andrew (the ‘Establishment’, presumably) exclude conspiracies from their analyses as a matter of principle.
The lecturette on the fact that Smolka ‘of course’ (a typical donnish insertion) was working for the Russians was naive and patronising. The fact that he was a Soviet spy is incontrovertible: the issue at stake was whether he had been recruited by the NKVD in 1933 or 1934, or whether, as Philby claimed in 1980, that it was he who had done so in 1939-1940. One major point of my article was to show how absurd Philby’s claim was, and how it must have been arranged by the KGB on Smolka’s death. My correspondent declined to engage me on this matter. She expresses far too confident an opinion of the reliability of Russian archival sources (a language she does not use, incidentally).
She continued her bossy lesson with another arrogant remark about Peter Lunn. Indeed, ma’am, I am familiar with Lunn and his project (‘Operation CONFLICT’) to eavesdrop on Soviet telephone communications in the tunnels below the French and British zones in Vienna. Only Lunn – according to Stephen Dorril – did not replace Young as station chief until 1949, and the first recognition of the telephone cable infrastructure did not occur until late 1948, almost a year after the Greene encounter with Smolka. The woman’s insinuation is that Greene and Korda would have been involved with the operation. But Korda did not accompany Greene to Vienna at that time, and, even if the project had occurred earlier, there is no earthly way that Greene, an ex-MI6 officer with no engineering background, would have been introduced to such a sensitive project. With Philby under suspicion at the time, it would have been hugely irresponsible to have exposed any aspects of CONFLICT to Greene, Philby’s old crony in Section V of MI6.
Lastly, she fails to acknowledge that I myself had questioned the fact that Smolka had been the source of the anecdotes about adulterated penicillin and transport through the sewers, and that I had suggested that the story had been created as a useful distraction from the real reason that Greene was sent to interview him. What she means by ‘they were covering these stories all the time’, or that ‘it was public knowledge’ eludes me. That the Viennese press in 1948 was writing about fake penicillin, and that everybody knew about it? She fails to provide the evidence. It was indeed the ANNO archive that allowed me to re-present the extraordinary article about the Philby marriage in the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung from May 1934. As for challenging my ability to read German, I actually told her that I studied the language at Oxford: she may not have encountered my translations of Honigmann yet. Yet she chooses to disbelieve me, and thinks that I used Google Translate.
You will notice that this person does not have the graciousness to say one good word about my research, or to admit that she learned anything at all from it. Her whole behaviour was clumsy, waspish, unscholarly, supercilious and offensive. It is as if she wanted to reinforce through her responses the characteristics of donnishness in all their darker aspects, and to teach this upstart a lesson. I did not respond to her outburst, but merely added her name to the List.
The Letter from Mr. Even-Shoshan
On the other hand, some conversations can be very pleasant. A week earlier, I had received an email from a fresh correspondent, one Moshe Even-Shoshan, who lives in Pennsylvania. He had just finished reading Misdefending the Realm, and, after a complimentary comment, wrote:
Yet I still struggle with the crucial question why the original approach, of the 1920s and early 1930s, to Communist/Soviet espionage changed so drastically in the critical period that you study—precisely and ironically on the background of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. In the last chapter, you pin the rap, to use detective novel parlance, on Dick White. But on the eve/at the beginning of WWII (for Great Britain, as opposed to the USA), he was just the first university recruit to MI5. So how could one “blame” him? After all, it was Liddell who brought Blunt in and who socialized with characters who should have not have been touched with a ten foot pole.
I look forward eagerly to your comments.
After thanking Mr. Even-Shoshan for his interest, I replied as follows:
I think your question is a very shrewd one, and it is one that has occupied me again of late, since I have started preparing a future edition of coldspur that will provide a topographical guide to my research since I published MTR.
I stand by what I wrote on p 75, as a decent account of the debacle, and how it has shifted since 1940, including Andrew’s rather shameful comments. Yet I believe that some recent research of mine – involving Philby and Smolka, the second installment on whom will appear in a couple of weeks’ time, and will reinforce the points I am about to make – sheds some further light on the passivity of MI5.
The main problem at the time was a lack of intellectual leadership in the Soviet counter-espionage business. Jane Archer was obviously outstanding, but she was a woman in a man’s world, and she fell foul of political intrigues, I suspect. Whether those intrigues were initiated by communist sympathizers, one can only guess. But she was taken off the case, and Hollis was a poor substitute.
I see White’s entry as an attempt to bring more serious intellectual heft into the organization. Some military men have declared that more soldierly than academic skills should have been brought in to counter the communist threat, but my view is that a more subtle assessment of Moscow’s strategies was required. Liddell was sharp, but he was essentially a policeman, and was surrounded by such. The dominant belief within MI5 was that Soviet spies would have to emanate from the CPGB – a policeman’s response, ignoring what Krivitsky said, and Petrie let Soviet counter-intelligence wither on the vine during WWII. The successes of Trevor-Roper (against the Abwehr), Austin (against the Wehrmacht – see https://coldspur.com/summer-2023-round-up/), and, to a lesser extent, Masterman on XX, showed that an Oxford don had a powerful role to play in building up intelligence about an enemy agency. In my piece on Austin, I made the point that his skills and processes should have been applied within MI5 in creating a model of the Comintern, and how it worked. White failed in this exercise, since he did not push for it, and he was in many ways a weak man (and he married a Communist). He failed to see through Burgess, Blunt – even Rothschild – and felt humiliated.
Then there was the problem of leakage. From the Home Office, Jenifer Hart passed on to Berlin and Burgess the details of the Krivitsky business. One must also have questions about Stephen Alley, who translated between Archer and Krivitsky. He is still largely a mystery, with maybe torn allegiances. The NKVD had an opportunity to move, sway MI5 opinion, and stifle any further investigations.
And my recent research on Smolka, and his relationship with Philby, introduces a far more important dimension. My hypothesis has been that Philby, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, essentially pretended to break away from the Comintern and offer his services (alongside those of Litzy) to MI6, where Claude Dansey was having his whimsical ideas of ‘turning’ known Communist agents (including Ursula Kuczynski and Smolka) into assets for the Secret Intelligence Service. Philby fitted into that pattern. It was a disaster that MI6 has ever since tried to cover up. But, if Philby had been regarded as a friend in late 1939, it would explain why following up, in January 1940, on his activities in Spain would have not been given much attention. After all, Philby would have explained them away. But one of the reasons he moved when he did was because he knew what Krivitsky was saying in the USA, and probably that MI5 was planning to ask him over . . .
Mr Even-Shoshan was sympathetic to my analysis, responding as follows:
I agree with you totally that a more subtle assessment of Moscow’s strategies was required than a pure policeman’s approach and therefore an academic’s approach and experience would have been appropriate. You mentioned Trevor-Roper’s work at the RSS on the Abwehr. I would add, to make the point sharply, his RSS/RAB colleague Stuart Hampshire’s Nov. 1942 report ‘Canaris and Himmler’, where SH “concluded that this struggle [with Himmler’s SD] for secret intelligence was a symptom of a wider struggle for power between the Nazi party and the German General Staff.” (Adam Sisman, An Honorable Englishman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 121). This conclusion of RH is, of course, of crucial importance to the question of whether WWII could have been ended much earlier through a negotiated peace with certain forces in Germany. And this, of course, links to Philby’s baleful impact as a Soviet agent – I recall that HTR said Philby prevented this report from going to the British leadership or, perhaps, even just to the top of SIS. It was in the interest of Stalin that the war drag on until Stalin was able to extend his power westward through his eventual “satellite” Communist states–and also to increase his influence in Western Europe through the CPs (especially the French CP), which were able to gain stature as resistance forces. I think you have downplayed Philby’s actual impact on affairs as compared others in the Cambridge Five. But could this one act of Philby have been of great consequence?
This addition of Hampshire to the list of dons was a useful one, and I was able to locate the cited report in a file described, however, as containing exclusively contributions by Trevor-Roper, namely HW 19/347 at Kew, as listed by Edward Harrison in his Introduction to Trevor-Roper’s Secret World. I subsequently commissioned photographs of the file. Yet the result was puzzling: Sisman gets the year of the report wrong (it is dated June 5, 1943), Hampshire’s name is never mentioned, and the tone of the report’s conclusions is much less dramatic than is implied by Sisman. Moreover, the writer offers no sources for his anecdotes outside two references to Philby’s memoir. Sisman’s reliability as a chronicler must be questioned: it is as if Trevor-Roper (or Hampshire, perhaps) wanted to embellish evidence of his colleague’s treachery in order to enhance the record, and distance himself from the mole.
As for my assessment of Philby’s relative influence on military outcomes, I do not recall ever analyzing this topic in detail. I shall simply point out here that Philby started providing intelligence much later than the other members of the quintet, and he was initially distrusted. An interesting matter to be pursued another time, perhaps.
Re-Assessing Dick White’s Plot
One of the reasons why Mr Even-Shoshan’s letter was so timely was the fact that I had been planning to write about Dick White’s very bizarre behaviour during the compilation of his report on Philby in the autumn of 1951. In my Year-End Round-Up published last December, the leading sentence in my ‘Research Agenda’ section ran as follows: “I want to explore more thoroughly where Milmo derived his facts about Kim and Litzy in his December 1951 report, and why White failed to disclose them in his report issued just beforehand.” To summarize the relevant facts concerning White’s activities (as described in https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-in-1951-alarms-and-diversions/ ):a file on Philby had been maintained since 1934 (PF 40408 – and, incidentally, someone has whispered to me that this folder contains over 16 discrete files); Dick White had instructed Milicent Bagot to use this file when preparing the dossier for the FBI/CIA before the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean; and he had had access to it for his summer 1951 report, the release of which was curiously delayed until November. Yet he had used it very selectively.
Dick White
For a comprehensive background on the events of 1951, I recommend to readers that they return to the second half of my post from April 2019 (https://coldspur.com/the-importance-of-chronology-with-special-reference-to-liddell-philby/) and my account, two months later, of Dick White’s scheming (https://coldspur.com/dick-whites-devilish-plot/). This plot was designed so that MI5 could pass confidential information, via Robert Lamphere in the FBI, to the CIA so that the latter could inform MI6 of their strong suspicions about Philby, thus forcing a breach between MI6 and Philby that would not be attributed to White and MI5. Readers should recall that White had communicated his intention to mislead Lamphere and the FBI as early as May 25, the day that Burgess and Maclean disappeared, and that his representative in Washington, Geoffrey Harrison, acknowledged the scheme four days later. The purpose of this month’s bulletin, in the context of my exchange with Mr. Even-Shoshan, is to focus on Dick White’s character, motivations, and abilities as reflected in his very deceptive and discreditable performance in 1951, and to draw long-term conclusions about MI5’s failures in counter-espionage.
I have just re-read those posts of five years ago, and I would hardly change a word. My findings since have only reinforced the conclusions I made then, adding further evidence to support the hypotheses of Dick White’s misplaced ingenuity, and of Lamphere’s conspiratorial support. What I did not cover at the time were the exact circumstances behind the material that Martin released to Lamphere of the FBI when he and Sillitoe visited Washington in June 1951, where that information came from, why some highly confidential facts about Krivitsky were included, why the reaction of the FBI concerning Krivitsky seemed so passive at the time, or why the exact role of the CIA’s Bill Harvey has since been obscured. One major fresh consideration to be taken into account, however, is my recent conclusion that Philby had made a false renunciation of his communist allegiances to MI6 in 1939, just before the Krivitsky interrogations. In my opinion MI5 and MI6 would therefore, in 1951, have had additional reasons for being on guard against possibly traitorous behaviour from Kim and Litzy. The details of White’s plotting come into sharper focus because of the events of 1939.
Milicent Bagot’s Dossier
The MacGuffin in the plot is the dossier prepared by Milicent Bagot at the request of Dick White. While White claimed to his biographer that this was compiled only after Martin and Sillitoe returned from Washington, it is obvious that Martin took it with him to show to the FBI agent Robert Lamphere. And White must not simply have asked for a general trawl to see what could be found: he must have been very familiar with the Philby file where everything relating to its subject had been collected. A very telling detail is released in The Perfect English Spy, Tom Bower’s biography of White, where Jane Archer (who was assisting Bagot on the project, having recently returned to MI5 after her spell under Philby in MI6) is shown to contribute a breakthrough finding. White misleadingly presents its timing as occurring after his interrogations of Philby in June 1951. The passage runs as follows (and was provided to Bower by a confidential insider at MI5):
Shortly after that encounter, White immersed himself in the research prepared by Arthur Martin and Jane Archer about Philby’s past. For the first time, Archer produced a thin MI5 file compiled in 1939 and then forgotten. A report contrasting Philby’s communist sympathies at Cambridge and his sudden espousal of fascism made a deep impression. Alongside was Philby’s own résumé. One coincidence was interesting. Philby mentioned his employment by The Times covering the Spanish civil war. Krivitsky had claimed that among the Soviet agents he controlled from Barcelona was one unnamed English journalist.
Now the significance of this sparkling item from a file that was by then – contrary to how White characterized it – quite thick may not come as a shock to any dedicated coldspur reader, but to the uninitiated, it should have sent out some shrill warning signals. What was Philby doing in 1939, providing details of his career to MI5, and even admitting to his role as a journalist working in Spain? Why was he providing a résumé when he was not being interviewed for a job with MI5? The submission of this data to his file occurred just before Krivitsky arrived in the UK: how could it happen that MI5 failed to follow up at all and make the obvious connection? The reasons for this paradox appear to have eluded all the other historians. Yet the facts fit in perfectly with my theory that, in September 1939, Philby concluded a deal with MI6 and MI5 whereby he admitted his past career working for the Comintern, but agreed to switch back his allegiances to his fatherland, and bring along Litzy with him, while they would both pretend to be working for the Soviets still. In such circumstances, MI5 and MI6 would acknowledge Philby’s journalist role in Spain, but they would forgive it as a youthful mistake.
The reference to Krivitsky is very poignant, since an even more prominent hint was dropped by the defector about ‘the Imperial Council spy’. The placement of these two items by Jane Archer (who wrote the summary back in 1940) is fascinating, and significant in the light of future events: the description of the Imperial Council leakage appears prominently in the Appendix to Chapter 2, concerning OGPU agents in the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. Archer qualifies Krivitsky’s suggestion that the candidate attended Eton and Oxford by adding that Krivitsky conceded that he might have got those details wrong. The item about the ‘young Englishman, however, ‘a journalist of good family, and idealist and fanatical anti-Nazi’ recruited by Theodore Maly to assassinate Franco, appears only as a marginal note under Maly’s entry in the list of Soviet Agents mentioned by Krivitsky. It could well have been overlooked by the casual reader – but not by the experts.
I here re-present the seven points in the package delivered by Arthur Martin to Lamphere, as they appeared in my April 2019 bulletin:
Maclean, Burgess and Philby had all been communists at Cambridge
Philby had become pro-German to build his cover story
Philby had married the communist Litzi Friedman
Krivitsky had pointed to a journalist in Spain (who was in fact Philby)
Philby was involved in the Volkov affair
Philby was involved in infiltrating Georgian agents into Armenia
Philby was suspected of assisting in the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean.
What is important to note is that most of this list was prepared before Maclean had been officially identified as the ‘Imperial Council spy’, and thence as HOMER. (Item 7 clearly had to have been added after the May 25 debacle.) Yet that conclusion had not been communicated to the FBI, and the relevant datum is not included in the list, which focuses sharply on Philby. Armed with it, Martin flew out to Washington at the same time that Philby was returning to London on his recall.
The Strange Reactions of Robert Lamphere
Robert Lamphere
One puzzling aspect of Lamphere’s account of the briefing is the fact that it is not absolutely clear that all that he describes (on pages 232-237 of The FBI-KGB War) derives from the memoranda that Martin brought with him. The dominant impression given in his narrative was that the whole cavalcade of facts concerning the careers of Maclean, Burgess and Philby came from Martin at that time, but he also hints that he fleshed out his story with information learned since then. (His book came out in 1986.) What he wrote is not precise:
The memoranda that Martin gave to me outlined the lives of all three men as they were then known to MI-5. Over the years since 1951, many details have been added to the portraits of Burgess, Maclean and Philby, but the basic facts of their lives remain substantially the same as when I first learned the details that June.
Thus we cannot be sure how much of what Lamphere reports thereafter derives from the Martin memoranda, and what is later embellishment – or even correction.
In any event, it is salutary to compare his description of how the revelations occurred with that of White. Lamphere described Martin’s visit by recording his own remonstrations about MI5’s lack of honesty over its closing in on Maclean, and then by emphasizing his own suspicions about Philby in the Burgess-Maclean disappearances. The exchange went as follows:
“That makes it doubly hard for me to admit all this. However, I have for you now several memoranda which go into the background of Burgess and Maclean.”
“Where does Philby fit in? Burgess was living with him.”
Somewhat relieved, Martin replied, “Most of what I have to tell you relates to Philby. We now have the gravest suspicions about him.” (The FBI-KGB Wars, p 232)
This strikes me as stilted and artificial. Why, when being offered some surely intriguing morsels about Burgess and Maclean, would Lamphere sharply switch the subject to Philby? And why, if Martin was planning to divulge some critical information about Philby anyway, would he be ‘relieved’ that Lamphere brought the subject up?
Dick White presented it otherwise to his biographer. After reporting how Sillitoe and Martin had experienced their awkward interview with Hoover, in which Hoover ranted most of the time, Bower’s narrative runs as follows:
Arthur Martin’s subsequent conversations with FBI officers, especially Lamphere, were focused upon Burgess. As recollections of the antipathy and outrage they had felt towards the dishevelled diplomat were rekindled, the Americans recalled that that his host, Kim Philby, had been remarkably supportive of him. (The Perfect English Spy, pp 120-121)
Again, this is a strained path of logic, contradicting what Lamphere wrote. In any event, Philby’s behaviour towards Burgess might have been caused by natural loyalty. Burgess had been shown to be a boor, but there had been no evidence that he was a spy. If he had been, and Philby did not know about it, he would have supported him. On the other hand, if Philby were guilty, too, one might have expected him to distance himself. The two accounts are certainly at variance, even though both of them attempt to show a natural progression for the discussion switching rapidly to Philby.
Yet other passages are more precise. For example, Lamphere devotes a paragraph to the Krivitsky affair, although he does get the date of the interrogations wrong, and he inserts an ‘as you’ll recall’ to the reader, suggesting that some of what he writes about is information imparted earlier. He then highlights the claims that Krivitsky made about two agents: one ‘a Scotsman of good family who had been educated at Oxford and Eton’ – erroneous in detail, of course, and corrected by Lamphere in his text; and the other ‘a journalist, a man who had been with the Franco forces during the recent Civil War’. And he cites, as the fourth of the ‘Seven Points’ the fact of Krivitsky’s referring to the journalist in Spain, and that it had been used as one of the arguments pointing suspicion at Philby.
Yet what astonishes me is Lamphere’s reaction. His first (and only) impulse is to express the wish that he would have liked to interrogate Philby on all these matters. (He was unable to, primarily because Philby had already been recalled to England, but the spy would obviously not have agreed to be ‘interrogated’ by a foreign intelligence officer.) If, as Lamphere claimed, this was the first occasion when he had learned of the political leanings and disloyalties of those three prominent persons, one would have expected him to have expostulated, and demanded to know how long the British had known those facts. His passivity is inexplicable: he must have been confided in already. Moreover, it would have been scandalous for MI5 to have passed across highly incendiary documents to a foreign power without very tight safeguards. The whole process had been set up.
Moreover, Lamphere appears utterly unimpressed with the factoid concerning the journalist. One might have expected him, if had encountered the Spanish reference beforehand, to declaim: “What? You can now associate the journalist in Spain with Kim Philby? When did you achieve that?” Yet he is totally unsurprised. And what he did not do was to request a copy of the complete report on Krivitsky, which would appear to have been a much more sensible and professional response. After all, Krivitsky was well-known in the USA, had given evidence to a congressional committee, had published a book, and had been assassinated (almost certainly) some time after his return. Would not any smart, inquisitive intelligence officer have wanted to inspect the primary source material? Is it possible that Martin had brought a copy of the full report with him?
I thought it unlikely. The report was a bulky one. Lamphere refers only to ‘memoranda’. If he had seen the full report, one would expect that he would have written about it. By 1986, its contents of were public knowledge. Gary Kern, in his superb study of Krivitsky, A Death in Washington, credits Gordon Brook-Shepherd with breaking the news about Krivitsky in his Storm Petrels, published in 1977, in which he gave a full account. Brook-Shepherd had clearly been given access to the Krivitsky file by MI5, and authorization to write his book, in an attempt to reverse recent Soviet propaganda claims. It is true that the report (or at least a summary of it) had been circulated to government offices in 1940 by Vernon Kell, as Kern relates, and as I explained in Misdefending the Realm, including the Home Office, where the spy Jenifer Hart saw it. Yet that meant that the beneficiaries would have been the Soviets, not the Americans, and if anyone had passed it on across the Atlantic, I concluded that the revelations would surely have prompted questions well before 1951.
Deeper Implications
On the other hand, why did White, after requesting Milicent Bagot to create the dossier on Philby, and presenting it to Martin to pass on to the FBI (without the knowledge of White’s boss, Percy Sillitoe), include such a provocative and incriminating lead in the package? After all, even if the FBI/CIA had learned through some clandestine source about the tip concerning a journalist in Spain, they probably never knew that Philby fitted that profile, and thus would not have made the connection! True, it might add another brick to the rapidly growing structure of evidence against Philby, but, at the same time, the disclosure opened up the possibility of serious accusations being laid against MI5. If the Security Service had had this factoid in their hands since 1940, why had it not been able to follow up the lead, and identify Philby? There could not have been that many British journalists working closely with Franco in Spain in 1937 – certainly fewer than the number of diplomats who might have had access to confidential material in the British Embassy in 1944-1945 . . .
Either White was behaving remarkably stupidly, or he had come to an agreement with his American counterparts already, or he was trying on a risky bluff. In any case, he received the reaction he wanted. When Lamphere passed on the memoranda to his ex-colleague Bill Harvey, now in the CIA – an action incidentally not recorded by Lamphere, who grants Harvey and Bedell Smith the perspicacity of coming up with the same conclusions independently – Harvey latched on to items 3 and 5 on the list, namely the fact that Philby had married a known Soviet agent Litzi Friedmann, and the circumstances of the Volkov affair. He also introduced the ELLI phenomenon originating from Gouzenko. The exposure of the Krivitsky hints, and the lack of follow-up, appeared to have been forgotten.
And then I recalled vaguely an item in the PEACH archive, from KV 6/142-2, and retrieved it. Serial 351A, dated April 9, 1951, consists of a letter written by MI5’s man in Washington, Geoffrey Patterson, to the Director-General (Sillitoe). The second paragraph runs:
When I visited Lamphere today he asked me casually whether we had ever given the F.B.I. a copy of Krivitsky’s statement about the source in the Foreign Office. I told him I did not know and that there was no copy in my office. He then told me he would make enquiries within the Bureau to see what they had. Patterson continued:
I think we can assume that Lamphere’s mind is running along parallel lines to our own and that it will not be long before he asks us which members of the Embassy fit in with Krivitsky’s description. By a process of elimination he will probably end up with the same conclusions as we have.
This was extraordinary! Lamphere worked for the FBI: why would he be referring to it as a separate entity? He himself was obviously familiar with the (perhaps partial) contents of the Krivitsky report already. He must have been shown it in confidence – no doubt by a colleague in MI5, presumably Patterson. Yet, if had encountered the ‘journalist in Spain’ reference at this time, he would not have seen it as having any relevance to the HOMER investigation. Patterson in turn showed that he was familiar with the material, and that he had surely read the report (and not simply been informed of its contents), since he admitted that there was no copy in his office. He also showed that he thought it quite regular for Lamphere to be familiar with the report, perhaps carelessly forgetting that he had shared it with Lamphere confidentially, and betraying that fact to history. Why would Patterson not be surprised by the fact that Lamphere alone has knowledge not available to the rest of the FBI, and had not passed on the information to his colleagues, unless he and Lamphere were alone privy to the deal? The exchange is all very phony.
In addition, the irony of this episode lies in the fact that Patterson was then working closely with Philby to try to determine who the spy in the Embassy was. Philby would have become aware of this exchange, and of the fact that Lamphere had access to a vital pointer to Maclean. He might thus have also suspected that Lamphere knew about the journalist in Spain, which could have been alarming. Was MI5 trying to put the wind up Philby, to draw him out? Philby knew that Maclean was HOMER, of course, and the current hunch of the British cross-Atlantic team was that Maclean was indeed the prime suspect, with Gore-Booth an alternative. Indeed, Philby pushed the latter theory: Gore-Booth had the unfortunate qualifications of having attended Eton and Oxford, which temporarily placed him Number 1 on the charts in the Foreign Office assessments. Yet MI5 and the Foreign Office did not want to let the Americans know of their conclusions before they were ready to move, and they also did not want the Americans to work it out themselves.
At this time, the British were making careful comparisons between Krivitsky’s description of the ‘Imperial Council Spy’ and Maclean. Was the FBI following similar leads, with inferior information? No result of Lamphere’s investigations has survived, but on April 18, a remarkable letter from Arthur Martin of B2b (yes, him of the FEABRE/HONIGMANN/TUDOR-HART saga) to Patterson appears on file. A critical paragraph runs:
I don’t think we need worry unduly about the F.B.I request for a copy of Krivitsky’s statement. In fact they received from us, through S.I.S., an expurgated version of what KRIVITSKY said which omitted any reference to the “Imperial Council” source. However, they would undoubtedly have heard of this source from Don LEVINE who, you will remember, ‘ghosted’ KRIVITSKY’s book and would almost certainly have received this information during his conversations with KRIVITSKY. If the F.B.I. raise the subject again I think you should simply feign complete ignorance but if they press hard agree to refer the request to me.
This note reflects the fact that, at a meeting in London on April 17, Dick White had reported that the FBI had asked for a fuller [sic] version of the Krivitsky material. Lamphere had presumably followed up, discovered that the Bureau had located its expurgated copy, and was now requesting the full Monty.
What to make of all this?
MI6, whenever they forwarded the Krivitsky report to the FBI, had obviously been sensitive and embarrassed enough about Krivitsky’s references to the ‘Imperial Council’ source to want to conceal the information. (What else did they hide, one wonders? And did they redact it in a noticeable fashion, or merely re-present the harmless sections?)
Unless Lamphere was dissembling, he was in April unaware that anyone in the FBI had seen the report. And maybe it had been buried and forgotten: certainly he had not been able to rely on his bosses to share its contents with him.
On the other hand, Lamphere had been confided in by MI5 to the extent that he knew about (some of, maybe all) the expurgated sections, but had apparently withheld the nature of this confidential statement from his colleagues in the FBI. That explains his lack of interest in seeing the whole report, and instead his expressed desire to interrogate Philby.
Martin (as is habitual) had been kept in the dark. He failed to distinguish between the FBI in general, and Lamphere in particular, and somehow thought that Patterson, if pressed, would be able to feign ignorance if Lamphere were to raise the topic of the ‘Imperial Spy’ with him. This was despite the fact that Patterson’s earlier correspondence indicated irrefutably that he, Patterson, had discussed the topic with Lamphere.
Martin was again shown as being somewhat slow. He failed to detect the difference between the full Krivitsky material and the expurgated version, or to realize why the FBI might want to see the former.
Lamphere’s loyalties and sympathies would appear to have been as much with MI5 as they were with his employers, the FBI. (He bore some animosity to the chief of the FBI, Edgar J. Hoover.) Moreover, his first step when Martin arrived with the incriminating dossier was to leak it to his ex-FBI colleague, Bill Harvey, now working for the CIA. Yet he concealed this action in his memoir, and made no mention of Harvey’s report, or its introduction of ELLI. It strongly suggests that Lamphere was a party to White’s Devilish Plot.
Lamphere may even have been obstructing the official American inquiry, since memoranda on file indicate that he stated, as late as May 1, that he was still undecided as to whether the spy was British or American, and that he wanted attention spent on Halpern. This trend is reinforced by the fact that, as the FBI was reported to be heating up its inquiries, on May 7, the bureau was reported by Patterson to be ‘thinking in terms of HALPERN and FISHER’.
In his report to Bedell Smith condemning Philby, Harvey of the CIA focused on the Volkov affair, and Philby’s marriage to Litzy, while introducing the Gouzenko references to ELLI in place of inspection of the Krivitsky reference. That was probably because he could not have been expected to know about Krivitsky’s description of a journalist in Spain, let alone that that role could have been linked to Philby. In addition, it helped to distinguish his conclusions from what Martin had passed to Lamphere.
White’s gesture of help towards Bedell Smith may have arisen from his service with the General towards the end of the war. (White had been appointed deputy counter-intelligence adviser to Bedell Smith, then Eisenhower’s chief of staff.) Bedell Smith had rebuked White for openly opposing USA policy over counter-intelligence issues: at the time, White had not felt confident enough to hold his ground.
General Bedell Smith in Moscow
Yet the most dramatic conclusion must be the fact that some weeks before Burgess and Maclean disappeared, when Maclean had still not been solidly identified, when Burgess was officially not regarded as involved at all, and Philby was not only out of the picture but part of the team working on the leakage, MI5 had been preparing a dossier that essentially presented not just Maclean, but also Burgessand Philby, as long-term Soviet agents. (What information MI5 had gathered on Burgess, and what suspicions the service had about him at this time, are important questions – as some coldspur readers have pointed out – that will have to be deferred for analysis another time.)
White’s Predicament
It is no wonder that White attempted to present the sequence of events as markedly at variance with the facts. He had to pretend that the project of identifying Homer had focused on Maclean, and that MI5 had no suspicions that Burgess was involved – or even harboured any concerns about Philby’s involvement. He had to imply that the first accusations against Philby came from the CIA, and that Philby returned after the visit by Sillitoe and Martin. He had to conceal the mission undertaken by Martin to leak the dossier to Lamphere. He had to claim that it was only after Martin’s return from Washington that a proper investigation into Philby’s past was undertaken, and that, with Bagot’s help, a dossier was then created and passed to MI6’s chief, Stewart Menzies. As I have described elsewhere, White’s description of events, as relayed first to Andrew Boyle and then to his biographer, Tom Bower, is a tissue of lies. Moreover, it is as if Bower, who lists Lamphere’s book in his bibliography, and uses it in his endnotes, did not read it properly, since he fails to identify the contradictions, ignoring completely Lamphere’s account of how Arthur Martin passed him the detailed dossier. It is worthwhile here recapitulating – and slightly expanding – White’s version of events, as essentially displayed in Chapter 5 of A Perfect English Spy.
In the early days of the investigation after Burgess and Maclean absconded (May 28), MI5 was very much reliant on the testimony of Goronwy Rees, who had volunteered information about Guy Burgess, Burgess having left a message for Rees just before he disappeared. Even though Burgess was quickly confirmed as the person who had rented the Austin A40 left on the quay at Southampton, Dick White claimed to his biographer that he could not believe that Burgess had been an accomplice to Maclean. He said that he was astonished at Rees’s descriptions of Burgess’s past, even though Anthony Blunt, a close friend of Guy Liddell, had helpfully suggested that Burgess might have escaped with Maclean. This was all clumsy dissimulation, in light of the contents of the dossier compiled for Lamphere.
Yet, when White described the meetings between Arthur Martin and Lamphere, he indicated that the conversations were focused on Burgess. This is astonishing, as the main part of the dossier outlined by Lamphere – which White does not mention at all – concentrated on Philby. White attempted to explain this outcome by virtue of the fact that the Americans recalled that Philby had been very supportive of Burgess, and that their investigation therefore was re-directed at Philby. This was simply a clumsy effort by White to explain why the coming broadside from Washington was targetting Philby, when White himself had set up Lamphere & co. with the ammunition.
White went on to state that, soon after Sillitoe’s return to London (actually on June 18, alongside Martin, who had held his meetings without Sillitoe in attendance), ‘a long message arrived from Philby’ offering his thoughts about Burgess. That implies that Philby was still in Washington, but in truth he had already been recalled by Menzies, and he arrived the day after the departure from London of Martin and Sillitoe (on June 12). White would also have in mind another infamous message, suggesting that Maclean might be the guilty party, which Philby had sent on April 2 (see KV 6/142). Yet Philby wrote a further attempt to distract attention from himself on June 4, when he indeed wrote to Menzies about some of Burgess’s dubious habits, and his suspected Marxism. That must be the missive to which White was referring, although why a telegraphed message should have taken so long to arrive on White’s desk is highly questionable. His dating of its arrival serves to postpone the timing of Philby’s departure from the USA.
Thus White’s account of the process of interrogating Philby is mendacious. In his recollection, after the return of Sillitoe and Martin (undated, of course, but actually June 18) White approached Jock Sinclair of MI6, and convinced him that Philby would be of use in London in the inquiries. (Philby had already been in London for a week.) Jack Easton then sent a handwritten message to Philby warning him of an imminent recall – which was in no way ascribable to any misdemeanours. And only at that stage, according to White, did MI5 set to work, preparing for Philby’s return:
Over the next few days, White and Martin diligently compiled a record of Philby’s work. There was the discovery that Philby’s first wife, Litzi Friedmann, was an Austrian communist. In 1946, White had been asked by SIS to check on Litzi after Philby had applied for permission to divorce his youthful transgression . . .
There was also Philby’s handling of the Volkov defection in 1945. Konstantin Volkov’s offer to defect had been negotiated with John Reed, a first secretary at the British Embassy in Turkey. . . .
Bower notes without comment that no attempt was made to question Reed before Philby’s return from Washington. Of course, it is absurd to accept that MI5, having maintained a dossier on Philby, would acquaint itself with its contents only at this late stage of the game. If White, as he admitted, had been involved with the embarrassing business of Kim’s wanting a divorce from Litzy in the summer of 1946, when her background was well-known, how could he have suddenly ‘discovered’ those facts in 1951? All the work had already been performed for Martin’s and Lamphere’s benefit.
Next followed the interrogations. Easton had been provoked to have suspicions about Philby himself, but why Sinclair did not object strongly to the process, having been told that Philby’s recall was imply for amicable discussions, is not explored by Bower. White was not practiced in interrogation, and did not prepare himself properly: thus he failed to get any admission or confession out of his subject. Philby simply stuck to his guns, and refused to admit anything, or to concede any of White’s points, knowing that without a confession his accusers were powerless. There was a certain farcical aspect to the exchanges, however. As Philby and White jousted over the funding of Philby’s trip to Spain, White knew that the NKVD had been his paymaster, while Philby had to pretend otherwise in order to ward of Jack Easton, innocently attending the interrogations.
Irrespective of White’s mendacious account of the events, and the inability of his biographer to unravel its contradictions, a balance-sheet of White’s situation can be drawn up. On the credit side, Philby had been forced to resign; the FBI and CIA appeared not to be disturbed by the revelations, which could have rebounded harshly on White and MI5 generally; White’s devious tricks had not been picked up by Petrie or Liddell; his cohorts of Martin, Archer and Bagot kept their silence; hardly anyone outside the intelligence services would have ever heard of Philby; and Attlee and his administration were too consumed with other matters to want to stir up trouble with spies On the debit side, MI6 was not unified in its attitude to Philby, with Sinclair, Vivian and Nicholas Elliott stoutly defending him, Easton supportive (until July, when he became a fierce critic), and Menzies forced to sit on the fence; the flurry of documents circulating could well have come to the attention of politicians who might ask why on earth MI5 had been so sluggish; Guy Liddell was pursuing the eponymously named PEACH inquiry into the possible misdemeanours of Philby; the Foreign Office, in the guise of the Washington Security Officer, James Mackenzie, was also revisiting Philby’s behaviour in Washington; and Harvey in the CIA had resuscitated the spectre of ELLI, something White considered a dead issue by then, but one which could have opened a whole fresh disclosure of uncomfortable secrets concerning SOE and the Soviet Union from the war period.
Dick White surely hoped that things would blow over. But unconnected events suddenly changed the rules.
PEACH
After the interrogations, Dick White had reportedly submitted a report to Menzies constituting the case against Philby. It has not come to light. According to what White then told Andrew Boyle and Tom Bower, he then busied himself with an intense study of the connections and affiliations of the Cambridge graduates of the early 1930s, remorsefully admitting that MI5 had not been thorough enough. Yet he also complained that the establishment resented their digging around, and its members in influential places came to their friends’ defence. This was much of a sham show by White: he had had ample time to consider the facts back in 1939 and 1940, when Philby’s malfeasances had come to notice. Moreover, he still showed loyalty to Anthony Blunt, who had also been an Apostle at Cambridge, had visited the Soviet Union in 1934 with Burgess and (despite what Bower writes), had remained friends with him, and had maintained his communist opinions, as was evident when he was recruited by MI5 in 1940. That was an utterly naïve display by White.
MI5’s initial focus during the PEACH inquiry seemed to be on confirming that Philby had been a Soviet agent. Yet what did that mean? The Security Service had no evidence that he had passed on secrets of any kind: he was not trapped from VENONA decrypts. With the Foreign Office investigations, the attention appeared to shift smoothly to another domain: ascertaining whether Philby could have been the man who had alerted Maclean to the imminent interrogation, thus proving his guilt. This line of inquiry was flawed on three counts: the ability of Philby to gain up-to-date information, and then communicate with Maclean from Washington, must have been thin, to say the least; the interrogation was not imminent, but planned for a day a couple of weeks later; and, in principle, Philby might have wanted to save the skin of his friend without necessarily being employed by the NKGB. White and MI5 knew better, of course, but it was a politically more astute strategy to pursue the ‘Third Man’ angle.
White had tried to disqualify himself from the inquiry, on the grounds that ELLI and Volkov were not in his bailiwick – a rather feeble declaration. Thus the substance and the timing of his report are both very bizarre. During the summer (as I have explained elsewhere) matters started heating up, what with the CIA getting antsy again, and demanding more action, Liddell visiting the USA, and getting messages that he could not rationalize because of his exclusion from the plot, and the Foreign Office also stirring the pot afresh. When Liddell returned from leave in August and wrote that things were looking bleaker for Philby, it is not clear what he was referring to, and White’s report (not issued until the end of November) does not reflect any fresh discoveries – not even the quirky letter that reported that H. A. R. Philpott had indeed been a journalist in Spain in 1937. Why would such a spurious item be so prominently added to the archive at that late stage? Now that Jane Archer’s recovery has been publicized, it appears as a clumsy KGB-type spravka inserted in the file to give the impression that vague pointers to Philby in Spain surfaced only in the summer of 1951.
The Philpott Memorandum
Thus White’s report, presented without any fanfare or explanation in FCO 158/27 as being distributed on November 30, may have been a modest revision to what he submitted to Menzies back in June. The tone of the text suggests, however, that more serious investigations of material undertaken during the summer had strengthened the case that Philby was a Soviet agent, but the linkage between that assertion and the desirability of determining who had leaked information to Maclean before he escaped is never made clear. The report is in many ways a re-working of the ‘Seven Points’. It is, however, very superficial on the ties with Litzi. It states that Philby did indeed go to Spain as a journalist (as had been declared to Lamphere back in June), but it does not explain how this information was derived. Without identifying the project itself, it adds the details of the VENONA decryption exercise, and the changes which the Soviets made in December 1949. It does not mention ELLI.
Yet it is also mendacious. White cites the Krivitsky testimony, noting that the plan to assassinate Franco ‘did not mature’, and then adds: ‘but Krivitsky says he is pretty certain that the “imperial council source”, namely Maclean, would have been amongst the friends of the young man sent to Spain’. That is nonsense: moreover, Krivitsky was long dead by then, and the use of the present tense is incongruous. Krivitsky is not on record of saying any such thing (I am not sure what the original Russian for ‘pretty certain’ would have been), and there is no linkage between the two in the Krivitsky report. White goes on to repeat, several times, the vague assertion that Philby and Maclean must have been well acquainted, and he uses this claim to conclude that Philby was ‘the most likely person to have been responsible for alerting Maclean’.
The irony was that, even if Philby had managed to warn Maclean of the impending interrogation from afar in Washington, it would have been the least of his considerable sins. White and Menzies must have come to that conclusion, and dreaded what might come out of the woodwork. If only they could just shuffle him off quietly to the side, and hope the story died down . . .
Enter ‘Buster’ Milmo
What upset their musings was the General Election in October, with Churchill’s Tories returning to replace the Attlee administration, and displaying a traditionally more robust response to the evidence of Soviet penetration. As I explained in my May 2023 piece, both Eden and Churchill were badly briefed, and Churchill, with typical impetuosity, insisted that Milmo’s interrogation of Philby be advanced a week, to December 12, only five days after Liddell had accompanied Sillitoe to listen to Eden’s fears about another scandal, and only two weeks after White’s document had been distributed. The main concern seemed to be that Philby would flee the country (one of the reasons why Churchill demanded haste): the belief was that a confession would be gained from Philby, although the implications of putting him in the dock were not clearly thought through. A vague desire of convincing the Americans that ‘we are resolute in clearing up Soviet espionage in the United Kingdom’ was expressed. What was not planned for was an outcome where Philby denied everything, and in which MI5 and the Foreign Office were left helpless in the stand-off.
Helenus Milmo, Q.C.
Milmo was given his instructions on December 3: he conducted his interrogation on December 12. During that time he studied a dossier (‘a very full one’, though how he knew that is not evident) prepared for him, no doubt by Arthur Martin. Again, I shall not repeat my analysis of Milmo’s report from last May: what intrigues me is the fresh evidence that he turned up – clearly not ‘fresh’ to him, as it must all have been new – but fresh in the sense that White had curiously avoided mentioning it. I listed seventeen items that MI5 had appeared to have dredged up during the summer, all of them relating to events before the outbreak of the war. The most startling are perhaps the details of Litzy’s movements in Europe between 1934 and 1937, and her banking arrangements. I find it impossible to believe that these items were discovered and prepared especially for Milmo’s benefit, considering the short time between his appointment and the interrogations. But neither do I think it likely that MI5 came up with these gems by trawling through previously arcane folders in the summer of 1951, or by making requests to the Immigration authorities about her movements. They must have all been in Philby’s Personal File, and they had been entered there at the time that the events occurred.
So why did Dick White appear unaware of them in his report? It is inconceivable that he was not familiar with the details. After all, he had reported to his biographer the item whereby Philby’s role as a journalist had been ‘discovered’ by Jane Archer – a nugget, by the way, that was noticeably absent from Milmo’s Appendix. First of all, his report must have been written some time beforehand, at a time when he thought matters were settling down, and surely not in the knowledge that Milmo was about to embark on another interrogation. Second, the report must have been pulled out to provide evidence that MI5 had been doing some kind of investigation, but it ran the risk of harming the reputation of White and the Security Service because of its shallowness. Yet the most provocative aspect of the dossier is that it closes in 1939, the time when Philby (as I claim) performed his deal with MI5 and MI6. The file no doubt moved into a ‘Y’ category with special security status at that time, and its contents were not made available to casual researchers in MI5. The intent was to show that Philby had been a careless and subversive operator in his early years, but that there was no evidence of any treacherous activity once war broke out.
The risks were enormous, however. Anyone reading Milmo’s Appendix should have expostulated: “You mean, you had all this information on Philby in the 1930s, and you still employed him in SOE and MI6, and promoted him to high positions, even head of Soviet counter-intelligence??”, and wondered why the routine checks were not made. As I have explained before, it is documented that, on June 18, 1940, MI6 made a telephone inquiry to MI5, requesting a trace on Philby, but all the Security Service came up with was a record of his previous membership of the Anglo-German Fellowship. (For example, the item on his role as a journalist in Franco’s Spain, matching the Krivitsky tip, was conveniently overlooked.)
Certainly, only a carefully doctored subset of Philby’s file would have been presented to Milmo for inspection. Milmo might have been presented with the specially crafted September evidence about Philpott the journalist in Spain, but assuredly not the original 1939 entry, so that it would appear that the Spanish connection was only a recent discovery. Yet, in his report, Milmo refers neither to the résumé information that Jane Archer ‘discovered’ nor to the dubious ‘Philpott’ memorandum, instead writing:
There is no proof that PHILBY was in fact the agent referred to in the above statement but this information fits him like a glove and no the alternative candidate has been found.
The ‘above statement’ cites the phrase attributed to Krivitsky concerning his being ‘pretty certain’ about the friendship between the Imperial Council spy and the journalist, so it is clear that Milmo is merely parroting what White had written. He had had no time to undertake any original investigation: the dossier presented to him was not as ‘full’ as he supposed.
Nevertheless, White’s leaving it to Milmo (who worked for MI5 during the war) to come up with the documentation of all those telling stories is unfathomable. He should have been mortified that Milmo would be allowed to be the first to reveal some of the unpleasant secrets in the MI5 files. One can only assume that he had no choice, and matters were by then beyond his control. Alternatively, he would probably have claimed that he never would have had a chance of viewing the records that Arthur Martin and Jane Archer managed to dredge up from the vaults for Milmo’s benefit. Yet he must also have figured that, if someone were incisive enough to question MI5’s thoroughness in this respect, the matter would come back to rebound primarily on Menzies. Menzies and White knew the score, were both party to the confession and deal that Philby engineered, and protected each other, but no one in authority was smart enough to challenge them.
‘The Imperfect English Counter-Espionage Officer’
‘For he himself has said it,
And it’s greatly to his credit,
That he is an Englishman!’ (W.S. Gilbert, HMS Pinafore)
I have previously pointed out that The Perfect English Spy was one of the worst-selected titles for an intelligence biography. Dick White scored one out of three: he was indisputably English. But he was primarily a counter-espionage officer, not a spy. And his performance was frequently poor. Whatever native intelligence he possessed was too often directed at schemes to confound his rivals and allies rather than towards thinking strategically about the enduring enemy. White was treading very dangerous ground, but he must have calculated that no archival material would be released in his lifetime to undermine his account of what happened. In that respect, he was right, but a more careful analysis by his biographer should have pointed out the contradictions.
Mr. Even-Shoshan is nevertheless correct: few of the errors of 1940 can be laid directly at White’s door. After the opportunity that Krivitsky placed before MI5, the service was in confusion. Jane Archer was pushed aside in bizarre circumstances. Vernon Kell was overwhelmed by the illusory German ‘Fifth Column’ crisis, and then deposed. Liddell was ineffectual. Churchill’s Security Executive caused demoralization. The implications of Krivitsky’s death in Washington were overlooked. Petrie came in to restore order, but completely mismanaged the Soviet counter-espionage effort during the war. It was delegated to the unimaginative Hollis, who was charged with keeping an eye on the Party. Others who spoke up about the Communist threat (Harker, Curry, Knight) did not have enough clout, and were not leadership material. By 1945, when White took over B Section, most of the damage was done.
At the outset of war, however, White had been quickly introduced to some of MI5’s major projects. He had opportunities to break through, and shine, but was at that time guileless, too ingenuous. He was present at some Krivitsky interrogations, but he did not trust the defector since he himself lacked appreciation for the cunning and dissimulation essential for spycraft, and he thus classified all Krivitsky’s pointers as worthless. In dealing with Whitehall over the double-cross operation, White decided to be deferential, and that behaviour let him down when he tried to criticize Beaverbrook’s policy for hiring communists. Indeed, Roger Hollis (who had not completed his degree course at Oxford) was more forceful than White over the communist threat. Bower writes that White’s attitude towards communism at that time was ‘benign’. White never raised any objections to Smolka’s employment: he admitted that communist penetration was a side-issue. When Percy Sillitoe was appointed Director-General after the war, and White took over the counter-espionage B Division from Liddell, Hollis remained more hawkish than White. Again, White kowtowed to Whitehall.
White had been the first graduate to be employed by MI5, which was significant, in that it represented a development away from Special Branch police officers and military men. Yet he did not possess a first-rate brain: he had gained only a second-class degree in history at Christ Church, Oxford, and had been assessed by his tutor as being a little slow to ‘get going’. Thus he was not a ‘don’ with a post-graduate degree: in fact he had been turned down for a university appointment. (His mentor at Christ Church, was another history don, John Masterman, who came to work for him during the war, and led the XX Committee). Moreover, White complained, when he belatedly tried to understand the mechanics and structure of Soviet subversion, that he was constantly thwarted by ‘the intellectuals’. On the other hand, he mixed well with the Oxford group – especially what was known as the Christ Church mafia: Masterman, Gibert Ryle, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Charles Stuart, and Denys Page (MI5’s representative at Bletchley Park). Moreover, given his relationship with Blunt, this was a rather simplistic view of the world, and reflected a lack of toughness, of the keen curiosity that is essential for counter-intelligence work.
On the other hand, perhaps reflecting the mutual admiration society of Christ Church men, Trevor-Roper spoke highly of him:
He was a true professional in his methods, but what we most admired was his intellectual lucidity, his equanimity, his unfailing sense of proportion and humour . . . He believed that all problems are soluble by reason; and he never lost his balance.
That would be a positive assessment for a clubbable civil servant, yet what was required of someone prepared to confront the KGB were steelier qualities: greater cynicism and less optimism; an appreciation of the presence of the irrational and cruel. Dropping that ‘sense of proportion’ might have been a useful guardrail against Stalin’s evils. An echo of that assessment came from Kim Philby, who wrote to Trevor-Roper (in a letter dated April 30, 1968) that his survival from his interrogation had been gained courtesy of the ‘ineffective’ White, who was ‘pretty nondescript besides such colleagues as Liddell, Hart, Blunt, Rothschild and Masterman’.
As Tom Bower points out, there were some sour grapes behind that observation, and he points out that none of the officers named ‘would have been minded to lead the charge against Philby’. He is right: Liddell was cerebral, but lacked confidence and guts; Hart was a very meek and mixed-up personality; Blunt’s reputation for scholarship and clear-thinking was obviously blasted after his exposure; Rothschild was a devious and vainglorious character, with dubious motivations; Masterman was surely equipped to enjoy a quiet life, skillfully organizing the XX Committee. Trevor-Roper acknowledged Philby’s grudge and poorly disguised motivations in a tribute to White in Christ Church Report, 1993, where he disparaged Philby’s letter. Yet Philby was overall on the mark: White blew his opportunity.
As I indicated in my response to Mr. Even-Shoshan, I think the comparison should lie elsewhere. In writing on what makes a good Intelligence Officer, in my piece from last December (https://coldspur.com/a-wintry-miscellany/ ), I wrote:
In conclusion, after reading the biography of J. L. Austin, I realized that it was a figure like him that MI5 (and MI6) desperately needed to coordinate intelligence about Soviet intentions and practice in all their aspects – Leninist and Stalinist doctrine, the Comintern and its successors, Moscow’s relationship with the CPGB, the role of spies, illegals and agents of influence, the use of propaganda and subversion. Austin’s capacity for hard work, his ability to learn, his excellent memory, his historical sense, his patience, his lack of sentimentality, and his synthetic abilities in interpretation all gave him an unmatched capability. Two heads of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith and William Casey, were both highly impressed with Austin’s work, and tried to bring his disciplines to work in reforming the organization.
J. L. Austin
Thus Bedell Smith, for whom White had served in Germany at the end of the war, thought more highly of Austin. White had had an opportunity to bring his expertise to bear in the immediate post-war years, and to dedicate appropriate analysis to the warning signs. The intelligence concerning Blunt, Feabre, Honigmann, Smolka, Broda, Tudor-Hart, Nunn May, Philby (abetted by Gouzenko and Volkov), as well as Alexander Foote, and Ursula and Len Beurton, followed by the Fuchs case, should have formed a pattern. Yet, facing the unthinkable, he failed to grasp the nettle. He set about concentrating on cover-ups, saving his own career, helping to ensure the survival of MI5 by lying to his bosses, and then persuading Sillitoe in turn to lie to Attlee over the Fuchs business. Afterwards, he felt like resigning when severely rebuked by Sillitoe, yet was convinced by Liddell that he should soldier on, only then to betray Liddell in his quest for the top job. And then, later, when chief of MI6, he undermined his former service by encouraging rumours of Soviet penetration of MI5 – the ‘ELLI’ fiasco. It was a selfish and dishonourable end to his career.
So that is my conclusion about White: on the surface, a heartily good fellow who knew how to deal with Whitehall, but altogether too decent a chap to take on the monstrosities and wiles of Stalin. ‘The schoolmaster’, as Malcolm Muggeridge called him after hearing of his promotion to Director-General. True, he was not immediately responsible for the policies of Section B when he arrived in MI5. He soon had an opportunity to extend a fundamental influence, however, but he failed to do so. He was not comfortable speaking ‘truth to power’. He disbelieved the harsh truths from Krivitsky, but succumbed to the flattery and attention of Blunt. He showed some worldly wisdom, and was not without ingenuity himself, as his plot with the CIA demonstrates, but he quickly wove himself a tangled web which should have been impossible to escape. He did escape for a long time, however, and even received a bountiful biography, and accolades, which have positively enhanced his reputation. The crucial factor was that he was fortunate in that his political bosses were not very smart, either.
Postscript: The Lost Philby Chapters
As a result of another amiable email from a regular correspondent, I followed up a lead on the chapters of Philby’s autobiography that failed to be included in My Silent War. The writer drew my attention to a story published on-line by the BBC, at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67456282. My informant went on to tell me that Philby’s widow had been trying to sell some of their possessions after the fall of the Soviet Union, yet, shortly before the auction was to take place, MI6 became rather nervous about what might be revealed, and persuaded the auction house to remove the more sensitive portions of the memoir. Money changed hands, and the censored material is now reportedly held in the MI6 vault.
From the photographs of the excerpts, I was able to determine that what was presented by the Spyscape Museum actually represented the extra two chapters that were published in The Private Life of Kim Philby, by Rufina Philby, assisted by Hayden Peake and Mikhail Lyubimov, published in 2000. They appear as ‘Autobiographical Reminiscences’ on pages 206 to 243: the first covers Philby’s early years, while the second starts with Philby’s arrival with his new bride in London in the spring of 1934, and describes his recruitment by Arnold Deutsch. So what might the withdrawn chapters have contained? It occurred to me that Philby’s time in Vienna was completely absent, and that he might well have written a chapter describing his experiences there – the revelation of which would have been very embarrassing for MI6.
I decided to contact Shari Kashani, Head of Collections and Curation at Spyscape. She was very helpful and appreciative. Portions of the two chapters had originally appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, in 1993: she very kindly sent me images of the extracts. But she (and Skyscape) did not even know that the two chapters had appeared in the Private Life book published in 2000! So we know that what Skyscape owns appears to correspond to what Rufina handed over. Yet, as I pointed out to her, it is odd that the memoir would jump from childhood reminiscences to London in 1934, without covering the tumultuous days in Vienna. I wrote to her:
I find it all intriguing, because Philby’s memoir (My Silent War) is judged to have been written with the KGB looking over his shoulder, and is very unreliable. One might think that Philby would perhaps have tried to correct some false impressions, but the second chapter (concerning his recruitment) is probably just as unreliable. For example, he starts off by writing about his return by train via Berlin and Paris, but E. H. Cookridge, who knew him well in Vienna, wrote in his memoir that Kim and Litzy returned to the UK on a motorcycle . . . The fact that he did not write about the controversial time in Vienna (that would have preceded this chapter) is also provocative.
Ms. Kashani replied:
Thank you so much for sharing that very interesting information. When we purchased the memoir, it was specified that the work was unpublished, hence we didn’t know of its inclusion in Rufina’s memoir. You are correct – the work comprises 48 typewritten pages, and then additional pages of edits. Nevertheless, we are thrilled to have the memoir and its document holder as part of our collection, and very happy to know that the public have access to Philby’s words in this 2000 compilation.
Finally, I informed her of the story of MI6’s intervention, and gently pointed out that Spyscape might have been misled over the exclusivity of the chapters the firm did buy (since they were unaware that they had been published in book form), and that it may also have purchased less than was originally described. She had confirmed to me that there were only 48 pages extant, which number matches that stated by Peake in his Introduction in the book. On the other hand, in an article in The New York Times of 1994 (‘Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia’), Ron Rosenbaum described how he had been able to inspect the consignment of Philbyana received from Moscow when he visited Sotheby’s, and that among the papers he discovered the unfinished biography. “Five [sic!] chapters in manuscript pages whose publication the K.G.B. had apparently prohibited”, he wrote. This was apparently news that Spyscape did not want to hear, as she did not respond to my comments: her previously very affable communications ceased over two months ago. She and her bosses were presumably no longer ‘thrilled’. In a way, I was sorry to detect her chagrin, but I had hoped she might follow-up my lead more aggressively.
So it seems there exist two chapters as yet unpublished. Can anyone out there add anything else?
Late News: I have compiled Omnibus Editions of a) the demise of PROSPER, and b) recent bulletins on Kim Philby, that can both be inspected via the Reports and Articles page at https://coldspur.com/reviews/.
(This bulletin contains the third segment of my study of ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, which explains why two Soviet agents were carried on board a British Lancaster aircraft in September 1944, a flight that ended in disaster when the plane crashed into a hill in Norway. For the previous two segments, please turn to Part 1 and Part 2.)
The Lofotens
Chapter 5: Intelligence Manœuvres
The implications of co-operation between the RAF and the NKGB in infiltrating Soviet citizens with subversive objectives into a third country occupied by the enemy are highly significant. It is such a sensitive issue that one would have to conclude that one of Britain’s wartime intelligence organizations was involved. Admittedly, southern Norway was beyond the regular range where the Soviets were able to drop agents for intelligence purposes, but they would not have sought British assistance unless it were not a routine operation. It does not appear that they wanted to parachute in a spy or saboteur blind, without some sort of reception committee. Hence they must have been seeking help from British or British-trained contacts on the ground. Such a pattern is not unprecedented, but the utter lack of any reference, in the records of the RAF and the intelligence agencies, to the joint operation over Norway points not just to a highly clandestine operation, but also to a monumental embarrassment when it ended so dismally and tragically.
The two institutions that maintained networks in countries occupied by the Nazis were the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, sometimes known as MI6). The first was essentially a sabotage organization, a civil unit reporting to the Ministry of Political Warfare, although many of its leaders were military men. It had been created by Winston Churchill in 1940, specifically to cause havoc behind enemy lines. SIS, on the other hand, was an intelligence-gathering service with some history that worked more by stealth. It resented SOE’s very existence, since the business of sabotage tended to draw the attention of the enemy, while the agents of SIS worked as quietly as possible. Moreover, the fact that SOE had agents in the field meant that they were also a provider of intelligence. Claude Dansey, the assistant chief of SIS, made it his mission to undermine SOE whenever he could.
Hugh Dalton
SOE had an occasionally very strained relationship with the governments-in-exile of the countries where they built their networks. Hugh Dalton, the first minister responsible for SOE, was a socialist who viewed the mission of his organization to enhance the possibility of implementing socialist ‘revolutions’ throughout Europe after the Nazi foe had been defeated. Such a strategy was anathema to most governments-in-exile which, composed of members of the pre-war ruling class, hoped to reinstall the previous form of government, and its attendant privileges, after the war. In addition, Dalton was a notorious showman, who misrepresented SOE’s achievements in Norway, and over-promised to Churchill what the section could achieve. In turn, Churchill, ever the romantic, in February 1942 told the Norwegian government-in-exile that Norway would be the first country to be liberated – a foolish claim.
On the ground, however, much of the strongest resistance to the fascists came from underground communist groups, who had suspended their disgust when the Nazi-Soviet pact occurred. After June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin’s dictatorship became an ally of the western democracies, these cells renewed their vigorous ambitions for proper (not Daltonian) revolution. A pattern across Europe occurred whereby weapons and supplies dropped by parachute, intended for patriot forces, frequently ended up in units taking orders from Stalin. The perennial problem with SOE was that its strategy was apparently to prepare patriot armies for the coming arrival of British troops, but that event often took years in the making, or never happened at all, which was damaging to morale. Moreover, there was a permanent risk of arms caches being discovered by the Germans, or simply falling into disrepair. SOE’s management of expectations was poor, to say the least.
Frank Foley
This pattern repeated itself in Norway. Before the war, the SIS station in Oslo reported through Stockholm, but after some embarrassing events in Sweden, Frank Foley (who had been posted to Oslo in September 1939) returned to London in early 1940, and was put in charge of the whole of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. The Royal Navy soon made demands on SIS for intelligence on German naval movements along the coast. The arrival of SOE agents complicated matters, however: Norway was too thinly populated for networks to remain isolated, and there were several clashes between the two organizations. Moreover, SOE initially worked independently of both the Norwegian government-in-exile, and of Milorg, the military arm of the Norwegian Home Front, which, despite its name, was more focused on the future liberation of the country than attention-drawing sabotage adventures. SOE kept clear of it, as it regarded its security as lax. Likewise, the small communist groups also stayed apart from Milorg. They criticized it for its passivity, and were less concerned about Nazi brutalities.
The Lofotens Raid
Thus some harsh lessons were learned. The reprisals after the Lofotens raid of December 1941 triggered Norwegian animosity to SOE, which led to the establishment of a Joint Anglo-Norwegian Committee in London in February 1942. In January, a new SOE Norwegian section was split off from the Scandinavian unit, and the very pragmatic John Wilson had been appointed its head. Yet it took time for the Committee to exert any influence. In April 1942, mismanaged landings at the community of Telavåg, involving mis-steps by both MI6 and SOE in which two Gestapo officers were killed, led to fearsome reprisals. SOE accordingly made contact with Milorg in September of that year, in a spirit of collaboration. It took the first major operation undertaken by SOE and Combined Operations forces (commandos), the November 1942 attempt to land gliders in an attack on the Vermork heavy-water plant, to change policy. The assault was a disaster. The participants were executed: severe reprisals on the civilian population followed. Both Milorg and the government in London were horrified, and their disgust led to a more cautious approach to sabotage. The eventual sinking, in February 1944, of the steamer carrying heavy water on Lake Tinnsjo bolstered SOE’s reputation, but twenty-six persons were drowned in the process.
Reprisals after TelavagNorsk Hydro, Vermork
1943 was a transition year. After Milorg had supported, in April, an attack by the communist Sunde’s group on labour offices in Oslo, the government in exile called it to stop collaborating with communist organizations. In May, at a conference in Sweden, Milorg agreed that its future activities would be determined by the Allied Supreme Command, and that its mission would be to prepare for liberation. Norway had a role to play in diversionary exercises away from the main European theatre (Operation TINDALL, as part of the COCKADE deception plan), and some weaponry was parachuted in for the Norwegian resistance. Yet SOE itself suffered a major setback that autumn, when the infiltration of its Dutch and French circuits was discovered by the Chiefs of Staff. SOE survived (thanks to Churchill’s intervention), but was put under military control, the Norwegian Section of SOE coming under Special Forces Headquarters in May 1944. Soon afterwards General Eisenhower sent out a stern message to the Norwegians that, in the wake of the Normandy landings, no national uprising should take place, as the Allies had no immediate plans to invade their country. A predictable lowering of morale ensued, and, in recompense, some steady carefully-targeted sabotage operations were encouraged.
The early months of 1944 had created a new climate, however. In February, the Foreign Office reported that uncontrolled sabotage by the Communists was increasing, sometimes with the aid of arms supplied by SOE. That was not part of the plan. In May, the Germans tried to press-gang Norwegian workers for work in the Reich, and hundreds of youths fled to the mountains, thus creating a kind of Norwegian ‘maquis’. An unuathorized but efficient group known as the ‘Oslo Gang’ reached a peak of sabotage activity in August. On August 17, Milorg executed a very damaging operation in which an oil storage depot at Son, on the Oslofjord, was exploded. More serious plans for guerrilla attacks were forged, and in May 1944, four sites were identified for the congregation of partisans, one of which was at Elg, north-west of Oslo – a few miles from Nesbyen, the site of the crash. Two men parachuted into Elg on August 31, 1944, and over a hundred men assembled there, with weapons and food stockpiled. That same month Jens Hauge, the head of Milorg, had travelled to London for four weeks of consultations with SOE, Army chiefs, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the Norwegian government-in-exile, and he crossed back into Norway from Sweden.
Meanwhile, SIS in Sweden had been experiencing its own tribulations. The Admiralty applied pressure on the organization to provide intelligence on Kirkenes, on the Norway/Russia border, which led to a catastrophic joint project with the Soviets, where two SIS agents were flown into an airbase in August 1942. Instead of parachuting them in promptly, however, the Russians held them for two months, and then dropped them, improperly equipped, into Finland rather than Norway. They were captured, handed over to the Germans, and shot. Soon afterwards, the hapless head of station John Martin was replaced by the Russian-speaking Cyril Cheshire, but the lessons from trying to collaborate with the Soviets on clandestine operations appeared not to have been passed on, and properly internalized.
Improbably, the closest cooperation between SOE and SIS occurred within the section of SOE that worked in the Soviet Union. At the end of 1941, an exchange of missions between London and Moscow had been set up, with an old WWI Russia veteran George Hill appointed as leader. He took a small group with him to start negotiating with the NKVD on shared sabotage endeavours, while the obdurate Colonel Chichaev took up a corresponding post in London. The whole project was highly controversial, since the Soviets wanted SOE help in parachuting agents into Western Europe, which was out of reach of their aircraft. The governments-in-exile would have had a fit if they had known that a British intelligence unit was abetting a potential Communist revolution in their home countries. Moreover, the Foreign Office – quite enthusiastic about ‘co-operating’ with Soviet diplomats – was alarmed at the prospect of collaboration with Communists in more murky quarters.
As it turned out, the operation (named PICKAXE) was for many reasons a disaster, and incriminations started to flow both ways. Collaboration was called off in practical terms by early 1944. Yet by then, the SOE mission in Moscow had been badly abused by the NKGB (as the NKVD became). Hill had probably been appointed by Menzies, the head of SIS, and he represented both SIS and SOE in some of his agent management roles. Unfortunately his cipher-clerk, George Graham (who was of Russian aristocratic birth), allowed himself to be suborned by NKGB intrigues, with the result that Soviet intelligence gained access to SIS codes and cyphers. How that helped Stalin in his preparation for Yalta is an untold story.
A further group in the drama was the 30 Mission, a British military unit sent out to Moscow in 1941, charged with exchanging military intelligence as a way of improving Allied combat against the Nazis. This was another troubled enterprise, since the officers who went there mostly returned in disgust after a short spell, frustrated by Soviet obtuseness and secrecy. Its negotiations had to take place via contacts in a department of the NKGB, and its direct exchanges with the Red Army (and even more so, the Air Force, which was subsidiary to the Army and Navy) were few and constrained. With the Arctic Convoys playing a large role in sustaining the Soviet Union’s goodwill, and ability to counter the Wehrmacht, a large body of sailors and other men was required in Murmansk, a presence that alarmed the NKGB, for fear of ideological infection of the local populace. 30 Mission was the hub through which all the problems and challenges had to be routed: General Martel, and his successor, General Burrows, tried vainly to make the Soviets see reason, and concluded that resolution and hard bargaining produced better results than attempts to please their reluctant hosts.
Voskresenskaya-Rybkina
Last but not least was the offensive arm of the NKVD/NKGB. In July 1941, after Barbarossa, Pavel Sudoplatov was appointed director of the Administration of Special Tasks, charged with sabotage and political assassination abroad. (Sudoplatov had been overall responsible for the murder of Leon Trotsky in 1940.) One of his closest associates was a woman called Zoya Voskresenskaya, also known as Rybkina, via marriage, and as a working alias, Madam Yartseva. Rybkina was sent by Sudoplatov to Stockholm, ostensibly as the press attaché to the Ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai, but in fact as the head of the NKVD station, which exercised a firm control over the activities of all the staff. Her husband, who went by Boris Yartsev as a junior diplomatic official in Stockholm, returned to Moscow in 1943, was present at Yalta, and met his death in Czechoslovakia, in 1947, in one of those mysterious car crashes that prematurely took the lives of intelligence officers who fell out of favour.
In his memoirs, Sudoplatov wrote glowingly about his protegée, who had actually been his handler in Helsinki at the beginning of his career. In 1942, Sudoplatov was also put in charge of collecting information about atomic weaponry, and agents working for Rybkina in Sweden gained information from Lisa Meitner, who had discovered fission with her nephew, Otto Frisch. Sudoplatov claimed that the British knew about the NKGB’s networks in Sweden, and that they were collaborating with the Soviets on joint sabotage operations in Europe. Like many agents who worked under Beria, she was purged (but not imprisoned or killed) after Beria’s own execution.
The deHavilland Mosquito
Yet the most remarkable aspect of Rybkina’s possible contribution to this story is the journey she made to the United Kingdom in February 1944. The VENONA transcripts inform us that Vasily Razin, the First Secretary at the Stockholm Legation, informed Lt.-General Pavel Fitin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Directorate in Moscow, that IRINA (Rybkina) had successfully arrived in England, by air, on February 6. This flight was operated as part of the so-called ‘ball-bearing’ run, almost certainly deploying a modified Mosquito. It was actually run by the Norwegian Air Force, but under civilian registration, with crews wearing BOAC uniforms and carrying British passports. It was a harrowing and dangerous experience: there was room for only one clandestine passenger, in the bomb-bay. Niels Bohr, the atomic scientist, was one beneficiary, and almost died from lack of oxygen.
The Mosquito Bomb-bay
Why permission should be granted to a known Soviet intelligence agent to take advantage of such a facility is mysterious, and can only point to some very high-level and secret negotiations. What is more, soon after Rybkina arrived, Colonel Chichaev had a private meeting with Colin Gubbins of SOE, a record of which may never have been made. Whether these events were related to the sudden movements in August, 1944, when Colonel Burrows of 30 Mission was recalled to London, his opposite number in the NKGB, General Slavin, disappeared abroad on some unspecified business, Jens Hauge, the head of Milorg, also travelled to London to meet with SOE officers, and two SOE agents were parachuted into the mountainous country north-west of Oslo, is still a matter of speculation. The coincidences are remarkable, yet the need for extreme secrecy over the negotiations with Stalin probably indicates that the particulars of the parachute drop were not on the agenda of the meetings.
Chapter 6: Stalin’s Organs
‘Smersh’ by Vadim Birstein
The rationale behind Stalin’s constant re-organization of his security apparatus is sometimes hard to unravel. In 1943, he separated some functions from the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) into a structure that had briefly existed in 1941, the NKGB (The People’s Commissariat for State Security). The latter was supposed to focus on the territories that had been briefly held between 1939 and 1941, and were shortly expected to return under Soviet rule, such as the Baltic States. But it lacked ample security forces. The NKVD had its foreign mission withdrawn, and concentrated on domestic affairs, such as surveillance of the citizenry, and management of the GULAG. At the same time, Stalin created a new body, SMERSH (‘Death to Spies!’), peeling off those cadres in the NKVD responsible for monitoring disaffection and cowardice in the armed forces. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, Stalin made this move to prevent his NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria from interfering with military promotions – and demotions.
SMERSH existed between April 1943 and May 1946. Its head was Viktor Abakumov, who, like many of Stalin’s security and intelligence chiefs, came to a grisly end. Yet, while its initial task was to root out corruption in the military, it soon took over a more aggressive role identifying and eliminating real or imagined opponents of the Soviet regime in newly conquered territories. Moreover, while the initial threat was identified as German infiltration of the armed forces, its innate suspicion of foreigners in general meant that it turned its attention on the presence of Allied forces on Soviet territory. Notably, supervision of the American air bases in Ukraine had become the responsibility of SMERSH, alongside keeping a close eye on the naval mission in Murmansk supporting the convoys, and on the short-lived presence of PARAVANE operational staff at Yagodnik.
Foreigners might not only be spies: they might also exert a pernicious influence on Soviet citizenry, and the records show that the organs assiduously kept a watch on any liaisons between Soviet citizens and members of the visiting armed forces and their support crews, and followed up with dire threats. Yet the war diaries of the PARAVANE operation do indeed show that some officers showed a more than casual interest in Soviet installations of technology, such as communications. The fact that such interest paled into insignificance against the wholesale theft of Western technology and ideas that the GRU (Military Intelligence) and the NKVD/NKGB had been undertaking for years was irrelevant to the earnestness of SMERSH’s hunt to extirpate any such activity.
Mikhail Ryumin
A SMERSH officer submitted a report on the PARAVANE operation on October 6, 1944, casting doubts on the true motives of the RAF members who led it. The report was probably written by a sadistic thug called Mikhail Ryumin, who was head of the Counter-Intelligence White Army Flotilla, reporting directly to Admiral Panteleyev in Archangel and Abakumov in Moscow. Ryumin had moved up the NKVD ranks by being a protégé of Nikolai Yezhov, the short-lived executor of Stalin’s most dreadful purges, but had survived after Yezhov’s execution. He was later a prime mover in the so-called ‘Doctors’ Plot’, a mirage of Jewish conspiracy conceived by Stalin, and he even denounced his boss, Abakumov. Stalin fired him for incompetence, however, and, after the dictator’s death, Beria had Ryumin arrested and executed.
Ryumin’s report shows that he had a hazy understanding of the PARAVANE mission, emphasizing the failure of the attack on the Tirpitz as a cover for the true objective of seeking information about Soviet military installations (“It can be concluded that under the pretext of the shuttle operation, the flight had an exclusively reconnaissance purpose.”). He refers to the loss of one Lancaster over Norwegian territory, but indicates mistakenly that the return flights were undertaking another bombing raid on the battleship. As evidence for his conclusions about ulterior purposes of the mission, he lists misleading data about the weight and explosive capacity of the Tallboy bomb, the pilots’ cancellations of call-signs on the radio, and an understatement of the number of officers and men who would be arriving (which was, in fact, justified).
The fact that he had been kept in the dark about the true circumstances surrounding the change of plan is shown by the fact that he attributes the haphazard landings at various airfields to a deliberate ploy by the RAF to determine the location, size, and condition of those same airfields. Of course, his report may have been crafted to show the appropriate communist diligence in disparaging the RAF’s failure to sink the Tirpitz, the objective of Operation PARAVANE. Its timing, moreover, could be significant: it was submitted to his boss, Abakumov, three days before the start of the so-called ‘Tolstoy’ Conference in Moscow, where Stalin hosted Churchill and Eden, and the notorious agreements about the carve-up of Europe were made without Roosevelt’s presence.
Group Captain McMullen
Yet some inappropriate nosing around was undertaken by some of the RAF contingent (see Chapter 3). Captain Abercrombie, who had joined the (military) 30 Mission in Moscow the previous April, sought permission to take photographs without constraints, and asked questions about the radio and power stations in Archangel. Ryumin also had negative things to say about a Lieutenant-Colonel Happen, who, after a request by Group Captain McMullen to travel via Moscow, Stalingrad and Tehran to Cairo been rejected, apparently made disparaging remarks and spread ‘anti-Soviet sentiments’. The fact was that the RAF members generally had good relations with their opposite numbers in the Soviet Naval Air Force, and probably said too much in unguarded moments. Such conversations were bound to be overheard by or reported to the SMERSH commissars embedded in the units. (An Appendix to the War Diary refers to ‘the sprinkling of N.K.V.D. personnel (male and female) to check that the interests of the Communist Party are not prejudiced’.) The Diary nevertheless expresses great appreciation of the support they received, especially from Colonel Loginov, who was Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Air Forces of the White Sea Flotilla, and McMullen wrote generous letters of thanks. These commendations (which may have been largely political) would have cut no ice with Ryumin.
Pavel Sudoplatov
One significant Soviet officer who was familiar with Ryumin (and had a low opinion of him) was Pavel Sudoplatov, who had been appointed head of the NKVD ‘Special Tasks’ unit in July 1941. Sudoplatov, who had engineered the assassination of Trotsky, was thus responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines, as well as further assassinations. He also took on a major role in handling disinformation exercises to fool the Germans about a potential anti-Soviet movement within the Soviet Union, as well as Operation MONASTERY, which aimed to penetrate the Abwehr’s intelligence network behind Soviet lines. Abakumov was jealous of Sudoplatov’s role, wanting it for himself, and challenged him in 1942 to turn over all radio deception games against the Germans to him. He was partially successful, but Sudoplatov kept the MONASTERY operation, as well as the COURIERS operation, which claimed the existence of an anti-Soviet faction within the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus the rivalries between Sudoplatov and Abakumov may have contributed to some mis-steps in the execution of the mission to Nesbyen.
The relevance of these connections is important in the PARAVANE story because of Sudoplatov’s relationship with the NKVD officer Zoya Voskresenskaya, also known as Rybkina, after her marriage to another NKVD officer. She had worked for Sudoplatov at the beginning of the war, planning sabotage, and training partisans, when she and her husband were suddenly sent to Stockholm, where she was appointed nominally the press attaché to the Ambassador, Alexandra Kollontai, and took up the name Yartseva. Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, a neutral country, was, like Portugal’s Lisbon, a nest of spies and intelligence-gathering, and it controlled through regular communication the Stalinist faction of the Norwegian Communist Party, as well as providing it with funds. Yartseva was actually the most important person in the Embassy, and was also responsible for controlling the receipt and transmission of all the intelligence coming from the Soviet Union’s Rote Kapelle network in Germany. (Ian Fleming’s Rosa Klebb was reputedly based on her.)
Voskresenskaya-Rybkina
Sudoplatov’s relationship with Yartseva went back many years, since she had actually been his controller in Finland in the early 1930s, and they stayed in close touch. Yartseva had more recently been involved with Sudoplatov’s COURIERS operation, controlling members of the clergy in Kalinin. Sudoplatov also claimed that Yartseva was part of his management team on the ENORMOZ (atomic weapons) project, but his version of events has been challenged by Western experts. Yet they did have another important colleague – Colonel Chichaev, the NKVD representative in London charged with liaising with SOE and its Russian section, and maybe even handling some of the NKVD’s nest of spies. Chichaev had spent time at the Stockholm Embassy in 1940, working with Yartseva.
These threads would come together as Stalin’s strategy for Scandinavia took shape. His ambitions were overall modest for neighbouring territories that were not to be occupied by the Red Army. Finland was problematic. It had a long border with the Soviet Union, and after losing a war in 1940 against the Communist regime – in which the Red Army was at first humiliated – the country had dangerously aligned itself with Nazi Germany, in the belief that Hitler would be the victor. While Stalin respected the Finns for their courage, he resolved to exploit them because of their support of the Fascists rather than waste military forces in conquering them. He was anxious to gain strategically useful territories from them, such as islands in the Gulf of Finland, in order to give him protection for the port of Leningrad and the Baltic States, and regain ownership of the Petsamo (Russian: Pechenga) region in the far north, with its valuable nickel mines. Moreover, the Communist Party was strong in Finland, although Stalin had purged many of its leading members in Moscow.
Pechenga
Sweden was not really a consideration: it had remained neutral during the war, and was geographically not so relevant. Norway had been occupied by the Nazis, and harboured a somewhat subdued resistance movement. Despite the lack of contiguity, some of Stalin’s ministers had pressed for Sweden and Norway to come under the Soviet ‘sphere of influence’, with Norway’s Communist Party a potential asset. The Norwegian government-in-exile was fearful that the Red Army would make incursions through the north of the country, and in early 1944 made appeasing overtures through the Soviet ambassador to avert the possibility. While Stalin probably found satisfaction in keeping that threat alive, and gaining concessions from the Norwegians, he in fact did not want to move Red Army divisions to Norway. He would prefer that the British take responsibility for clearing the country of Nazi troops, although he did not want the latter pouring into Northern Russia. (The negotiated restoration of Pechenga would present the Soviet Union with a narrow border with Norway.) Thus, in the summer of 1944, he pressed Churchill and Eden to take a leading role in the liberation of Norway, and gained a concession from them in August that Finland naturally fell in his bailiwick, and that the British had no strategic interests there.
The western Allies wanted to consolidate their assaults into western Europe and Germany before dealing with the Wehrmacht in Norway: to that end the Chiefs-of-Staff had developed an operational feint called RANKIN designed to pin German troops in Norway through the D-Day invasions. On the other hand, the British did not want premature uprisings in Norway, hoping to preserve the partisan forces to hold their fire until the real day of reckoning. They were aware, however, of maverick Communist Party guerrilla units continuing to cause trouble. Yet Stalin, as in France, did not want any Communists to engage in provocative behaviour and risk turning the Americans against him before the Nazis had been beaten. Thus British and Soviet needs in the area began to converge. Stalin wanted to sign a pact with Finland, using it as a proxy. He planned to demand from it the harassment of German divisions in the north of the country, as he wanted to move the few divisions he maintained on the Finnish border to the vital German battlefield, and he sought British assistance in the endeavour.
On September 19, 1944, a few days after the PARAVANE Operation was executed, the Moscow Armistice was signed by representatives of Finland, the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The British War Cabinet had reviewed its protocols as early as September 7. They laid out some strict conditions: for example, the withdrawal of Finnish troops to the frontier as it existed in 1940; Finland to be responsible for disarming German land, air and naval forces in the country; the transfer to the Soviet Union of critical territories, such as Pechenga; the provision of up to three hundred million dollars’ worth of goods as indemnification for Soviet losses; and the handover of airfields in southern Finland for the Soviets to attack German forces in the Baltic States. Whether this last item was part of a quid pro quo with the British for the use of Soviet airfields in the attacks on the Tirpitz is not stated. But the timing is intriguing, and Stalin was accustomed to including ‘secret’ protocols in his political agreements.
The negotiations that led up to this agreement are regrettably opaque. Yet the intrigues in sending Yartseva to London in February 1944, and the subsequent meetings (see Chapter 5) must have had some serious objectives. Stockholm was a notoriously isolated location: it took the Petrovs nine months to reach it from Moscow in 1942. For Yartseva to gain approval from the British and Norwegian governments for a valuable place on the ball-bearing run to Leuchars in Scotland (and presumably a return flight) must have meant that they considered she had both clout and information of great value, and that it was both safe and wise to allow her to have discussions with Chichaev. What political backdrop could have led to such a concession?
(The final part of this story will appear on April 15.)
When the decision to launch the attack from Soviet soil was made at this late stage, on 11th September, the security questions raised in April 1943 were sadly overlooked. Bomber Command (or whoever was calling the shots) was apparently able to take the final decision without further consultations with the Soviet Air Force. Amazingly, approval for this revised plan must have been received immediately. It is probable that Stalin now encouraged it, as it would enable him to lay his hands upon the Tallboy itself, and not simply bombers with empty payloads, as well as to exploit the homeward flight of a Lancaster for his own devious purposes. It is certain that an agreement in principle had been hammered out some time beforehand, but that Stalin had wanted to wait until the Warsaw Uprising had been quashed before granting permission.
Preparations for the refined operation were very hurried. One significant outcome of the new arrangement was that, on that same day, 11th September, the Lancasters flew directly from Bardney and Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire to Yagodnik, while the Liberators (which were originally scheduled to arrive in an advance party to prepare for the Lancasters’ arrival) proceeded to Lossiemouth, and then Unst in the Shetlands, for re-fuelling. This was to have serious implications when one third of the Lancasters lost their way in looking for Yagodnik. One of the reasons that the Liberators were originally supposed to arrive before the Lancasters was to provide improved VHF radio guidance, and the reliance on confusing Soviet signals and beacons certainly contributed to the errant landings and resultant written off aircraft. Moreover, the weather in Yagodnik was, in McMullen’s words, ‘appalling’. Whatever forecast had been issued from London was completely off the mark, and the Soviets (who had surely provided the forecasts themselves, and in fact given one for the day after the arrivals) were amazed that the planes had attempted the journey in such conditions.
Routes to Yagodnik
Thus, ironically, while the ground-rules of the Operational Order had been ostensibly changed because of unfavourable weather forecasts for Altenfjord, the whole mission was jeopardized because of a failure to predict very poor weather in Archangel, the error in not implementing proper communications and signalling protocols, and the delay in sending out the Liberators which were intended to guide and welcome the Lancasters to Yagodnik. It all comprises an extraordinarily incompetent example of leadership and decision-making. One might suspect, nevertheless, that the Soviets were not too concerned about the safe arrival of all the planes. After all, there was valuable new technology to be inspected and exploited. In the developing saga of the disaster at Nesbyen, the immobility of some grounded aircraft in the swamps and forests around Archangel would turn out to have dire and unexpected consequences.
Group Captain McMullen, in his report following Paravane, stated that atrocious weather conditions from the Finnish border, incompatible call signals between Russian and English alphabets, lack of WT beacon information, and maps without towns or railways led to the scattering of one third of the planes of Squadrons 9 and 617 on arrival in Russia. Only twenty-three Lancasters, one Liberator, and one Mosquito, from a total of thirty-nine aircraft, landed safely at Yagodnik on 11th September. The remaining fourteen planes and forty-two Lancaster crewmen, with their hi-tech munitions, crash landed or were diverted to Kergostov, Vascova and Onega. These became the object of a frantic Anglo/Soviet search and rescue operation on September 12. One of the pilots added that lack of fuel was a major cause for these forced landings. McMullen did not mention this factor in his report.
In spite of the lack of English-speaking Russians or RAF interpreters there was a concerted and effective drive to locate and retrieve the fourteen lost planes and crews. Soviet efforts are illustrated by the parachutist who was dropped by one crash-site and then guided the crew to a lake where it was collected by a Soviet flying boat for return to Yagodnik. Squadron Leader Harman noted in the official diary: “We were very fortunate that we have no casualties”. All forty-two RAF crew were safely returned to their Squadrons within forty-eight hours. McMullen and his Soviet counterpart Colonel Loginov worked closely to coordinate the rescue so that, by 14th September, twenty Lancasters with Tallboys, six Lancasters with Johnny Walkers, one Mosquito film unit and both Liberators were in place at Yagodnik ready for the assault on Tirpitz.
The Airstrip at Yagodnik
McMullen made clear that very few of the expected facilities to ensure a successful mission were in place on site. The essential refuelling was limited by bowser numbers and capacity to 6 x 350 gallons instead of the 8 x 3,500 gallons and 4 x 2,000 gallons expected. As a result, the Squadron was not ready to fly for another twenty-four hours, delaying action until 14th September. It is almost an understatement when he asserted: “Misleading intelligence of this kind can be most embarrassing and can even ruin all chances of success”. What is not clear is whether he was blaming British 30 Mission in Moscow, 5 Group in UK, or the Soviet authorities at Yagodnik for the misinformation supplied to Squadrons 9 and 617 before 11th September. He concluded that close cooperation with 30 Mission was essential to operate in Russia, implying that this had not been a priority for 5 Group in the UK.
Ralph Cochrane, Air Vice Marshal at 5 Group Headquarters, Swinderby was responsible for coordinating the Squadrons for Paravane, reporting to Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command. Cochrane had no doubt that the careful work of his planning staff at 5 Group was responsible for the success of the operation, as he declared to Harris on 15th October. He acknowledged none of the practical problems which plagued McMullen in Russia nor why basic technical coordination with the Russians essential for navigation was not prepared by his planning staff and communicated to the crews.
Tirpitz in Kafjord, inner to Altenfjord
On the 15th September at 9.30 am, over a twenty-three minute period, twenty-six Lancasters and one Mosquito took off to attack the Tirpitz in Altenfjord. They flew at 1,000 feet until they reached the Finnish border, when an altitude of 12,000-14,000 feet was maintained over Norway. Within sixty miles of the target all planes, in four waves, would dive to bombing height to despatch their Tallboy and Johnny Walker bombs. Flak was intense from shore and ship, but it was ineffective. There was no German fighter plane opposition. Although surprise was achieved by using the southerly approach against Tirpitz, the smokescreen to hide the battleship was in place within seven minutes of the RAF arrival.
In the debriefing after the attack the crews confirmed that one of the seventeen Tallboys had hit the target: sixteen did not. The outcome from the deployment of the Johnny Walker bombs designed to target the hull of the ship ‘walking’ through the sea was uncertain. At 18.20 the battleship remained afloat. The Mosquito film crew was not able to secure a damage report until 20th September: it appeared to show a possible hit. The disappointing result was heightened by the knowledge that Tallboy and the SABS (Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight) were radically new weapons designed to be accurate within a hundred yards and to destroy any obstacle. Only Squadron 617 was equipped to deliver the 12,000 lb. rotating bomb guided by computerized SABS at 715 mph, which detonated only from inside the target. On 15th October Cochrane told Harris: “None but the heaviest and strongest type of bomb could penetrate (Tirpitz’s) horizontal armour and burst within the ship.”
With the safe return of all Lancasters late on 15th September from Altenfjord, McMullen had two priorities: first, the refuelling and repair of the planes for return to the UK and active duties over Germany, and second, the salvage of the munitions scattered across the region. By 19th September Thomas Williams, assistant Chief of Air Staff, was anxiously demanding information from Harris and Cochrane on radar equipment, gun sights and bomb sights on board the Lancasters that had crashed on arrival on in Russia. A systematic campaign was launched by RAF to salvage or destroy any technology which their Russian hosts might be keen to acquire, although the RAF remained awkwardly reliant on Russian aircraft to reach the remote wrecks.
By the 20th September the chief engineer reported that all fuses and detonators had been removed from the remaining Tallboys and returned to the UK. McMullen was under instruction to retrieve everything of value from the wrecks. Despite Williams’s concern that the Russians would not allow retrieval of the Tallboys, 30 Mission was able to confirm their safe shipment to the UK on 3rd November. As a Soviet engineer wryly observed of his RAF allies: “The British dismantled or destroyed radars, radio stations, bombsights. All aircraft were stripped of the most scarce power units.” The limits of Anglo-Soviet military cooperation were clear.
The enthusiastic cooperation leading to the Tirpitz attack was replaced by growing strains between both sides. Squadron Leader Harman’s official diary charted this tortuous breakdown. On 18th September McMullen secured agreement from Loginov for the use of the Russian Dakota to inspect crashes at Belomorsk and Vascova. On the 19th September the plane was suddenly not available. Finally, on 20th September, ‘after a lot of pressure had been put on the Russians’, McMullen was able to visit the sites. When, however, a repeat exercise was attempted on 24th September with the RAF Mosquito, fuel was denied by the Russians. While thirty Lancasters, with one exception, had returned safely to the UK by 17th September; the Liberators loaded with the salvaged equipment were trapped at Yagodnik as the weather deteriorated. McMullen tried to secure Russian permission on 22nd and 24th September to fly south via Moscow to escape the northern storms: this was refused. At one point Harman despaired at the prospect of spending the winter in Russia.
Was this Russian recalcitrance due to disappointment at the apparent failure of the RAF attack on Tirpitz? Had the Russians become angry that the British were so determined to deny them access to the Tallboy and SABS technology? A report on 5th October by Mikhail Ryumin, head of SMERSH Secret Police in Archangel to his Moscow Head Office provides a clue. Describing the activities of Flight Lieutenant Abercrombie seconded from 30 Mission Moscow ‘who sought permission to take photographs as he pleases’, he added that he ‘persistently asked where the radio and power stations are located in Archangel.’, while his colleague Wing Commander Hughes was carefully recording the size and state of various Russian airfields.
If this British research was simply practical preparation for Paravane a secret Appendix in the 15th October report to Cochrane appears to confirm the Secret Police’s worst fears: “Some details regarding North Russian Airfields were obtainable but it was not possible to get much information from the Russians without arousing their suspicions. For instance it is rumoured that a very big airfield is being constructed near Molotovsk, and during a flight from Yagodnik to Belomorsk the Russian pilot could not be induced to get off track to permit one to see this rumoured airfield.” This was the same flight which McMullen and Hughes took on 20th September in the Russian Dakota to inspect the Lancaster crashes.
Group Captain McMullen was at the centre of this swirling confusion of military cooperation and political subterfuge. His praise for the Russian military was generous. “They gave full and free cooperation in every respect”, he wrote, which contradicted Harman’s meticulous record of Russian obstruction from 17th September. McMullen blamed ‘misleading intelligence’ for almost ruining the Operation, much of which originated from the Russian sources at Yagodnik. His official final letter to Russian commanders and Yagodnik ground staff was glowingly uncritical: “Your cooperation enabled us to gather the force sent to attack the Tirpitz. For that we shall always be in your debt.” On the other hand, in private to Cochrane, he conceded: “The praise in the letters is lavish, but I was advised that the Russians value this kind of thing.”
Yet a man who tacked his position to suit the audience of the moment was adamant on one point: he strongly recommended to Cochrane that Colonel Loginov, Major General Dyzmba and Vice Admiral Pantaleyev be awarded the highest British honours for their service to the RAF in Yagodnik. Although Cochrane was silent on this point in his report to Harris, the Foreign Office obliged with CB and CBE honours to all three Russians. We can only surmise whether this repayment for the debt that McMullen confirms he owes his hosts was given freely or under duress.
On 27th September the two Liberators finally left Yagodnik, eleven days after the attack on Tirpitz and the subsequent mysterious crash of Lancaster PB416 in southern Norway.
Chapter 4: The Crash at Saupeset
Nesbyen Cemetery
At about 5:15 pm on 16th September, 1944, the first group of sixteen Lancaster bombers, with a total of a hundred and thirty-one crew, took off over a two-hour period to return to the UK, over the airspace of neutral Sweden, avoiding occupied Norway. Each plane, which normally had a crew of seven, was carrying extra passengers because of the disabled planes that had had to be left behind. Leading the group, Wing Commander Tait confirmed his safe return to the UK at 1:39 am on September 17, after a fair-weather flight. All the other planes returned safely, except the Lancaster piloted by Frank Levy, PB416.
At 5.20 pm the following day, Group Commander McMullen, on temporary assignment in Yagodnik, near Archangel, sent a Top Secret WT (wireless transmission) concerning the disappearance of Lancaster PB416, assumed missing, to Ralph Cochrane, Commander of 5 Group, to Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, to Sir Thomas Williams, Assistant Chief of Air Staff at the Air Ministry in Whitehall, and to the 30 Mission in Moscow. It ran: “Following were crew of Victor 617 Squadron: Levy, Groom, Fox, Peckham, McGuire, McNally, Thomas, Naylor, Shea.” McMullen was responsible for the overall organisation of Operation PARAVANE, the air assault on the German battleship Tirpitz, from the airbase at Yagodnik, including liaison with his immediate RAF commanders in the UK, Cochrane and Harris. He also reported to Williams at the Air Ministry in London, who was responsible for defining operational requirements, and to 30 Mission Moscow. 30 Mission coordinated the project with the Soviet armed forces as well as with the British base at Archangel across the river Dvina from Yagodnik.
In the ORB (Operations Record Book) entry from the end of September Squadron Leader Tait stated: “This aircraft was lost on the return from Yagodnik to base on 17/9/44. An acknowledgement for a QDF (map location fix) from Dyce was received at 0121 GMT. Nothing else was heard from this aircraft.” Willie Tait had recently been promoted commander of No 617 Squadron that had achieved fame for its ‘bouncing bomb’ raids against the Möhne and Edersee dams in 1943. He held responsibility for the attack on the battleship Tirpitz launched by the RAF squadrons at Yagodnik. At 15.05 on 17th September Squadron Leader Harman had confirmed the coordinates of the QDF request from PB416 in the Squadron Diary as 60 50 North 009 45 East. Harman was both a Squadron Leader and Acting Adjutant for Operation PARAVANE. In the latter role he compiled a daily diary of the Operation, which was supplied to Group Commander McMullen.
The QDF coordinates refer to Oystogo, in southern Norway, a remote hamlet in a grassy valley with steep mountains on two sides. The river Etna runs through the valley. It is about fifty miles from Saupeset where Lancaster PB416 crashed, three-hundred-and-thirty miles off course from the rest of the group of sixteen Lancasters returning to the UK. The RAF Flight Loss Card for PB416 confirmed the crash location as lying approximately 110 km north-west of Oslo at about 0138 GMT. Nine crewmen were shown on board, the same as the details on McMullen’s wireless telegram.
PB416’s Flight Loss Card
It is both curious and provocative that Norway was identified as the target. There was no indication that this aircraft had been engaged in Operation PARAVANE and was supposed to be flying home from Yagodnik. In general RAF records present specific, functional, and accurate data. The clerk who completed the Loss Card would have used information provided by RAF No 617 Squadron. This is the only known official record confirming Norway as PB416’s target for this date, and it was clearly not considered a problem to state the target as Norway so soon after the crash. In other words, PB416 was meant to be over Norway and had confirmed its target by the transmission of its coordinates, over Oystogo, to RAF Dyce Aberdeen. By this reckoning the location of PB416 was not an accident: it had reached its target by 0121 GMT on 17th September and confirmed the same to the RAF base in the UK.
On 15th October Cochrane confirmed to Harris: “With the exception of one aircraft which is presumed to have crashed in Norway all aircraft in Russia less the six which could not be repaired had arrived back in this country by September 28th”. The site of the crash is well documented. At a height of about 3,500 feet, Saupeset is a steeply wooded ridge overlooking a valley with the village of Nesbyen below. Saupeset is used for summer pasture with few human inhabitants. A Lancaster bomber exploding on impact with at least one third of its fuel unused would have been a colossal shock to the remote rural scene. In the days following, a shallow mass grave was dug in the rocky ground close by the crash, most probably by local residents from Nesbyen. No names were permitted to be recorded by the German authorities, whose Gestapo Headquarters at Gol was about ten miles away. With active Norwegian Resistance from Milorg in the Hallingdal area the Germans were determined to minimise any boost to local morale which this unexpected British Lancaster might have supported. In spite of the Germans, the local Norwegians erected a simple wooden cross with ten nails to represent the ten bodies they had buried.
The Grave at Saupeset
The next official document to appear was the initial registration made by the GRU (Grave Registration Unit) on 24th July 1945, two months after the German surrender in Europe. This was the first stage of the task of the War Graves Commission, namely to identify graves, reconcile names of casualties and where required prepare reburial to a designated military cemetery. This July registration by Captain Byrne confirmed eleven bodies as casualties of the crash of PB416. Strangely the same document was amended on 22nd August 1945 by Captain Byrne to show only nine bodies, which of course tallies with the RAF Crash Card from September 1944. The two names deleted in August from the initial July register were Squadron Leader Wyness and Flight Lieutenant Williams.
Squadron-Leader Wyness (front left)
It is puzzling why there should have been such confusion over the most simple of tasks, namely confirming the number of crew on board a Lancaster departing the Soviet Union and determining the number of bodies found at the crash site of the same plane on a remote mountain in Norway. The evidence is moreover contradictory. One clue was an unofficial memorial panel, hand painted with Norwegian text, which was installed at the crash site. According to local sources it was attached to the cross with ten nails as soon as the Germans had retreated from the area in May 1945. The panel confirmed ten RAF crew as casualties, including Williams and Wyness. These were the same airmen who were included on the British GRU report in July and then deleted in August 1945. Curiously the Norwegian panel omits Flight Sergeant McGuire, who is included in all RAF and GRU records. If McGuire’s name had been added to the Norwegian memorial panel in May 1945, the total number of casualties would have been eleven.
Memorial Panel
The Norwegian list was based on the physical identity of the casualties before burial in September 1944. Their names were confirmed by the ‘dog tags’ worn on the wrist and the ID on each serviceman’s uniform. A severe crash and explosion might have made verification of bodies difficult, but the Norwegian panel confirms the clear identity of ten airmen, with the exception of McGuire, which tallies exactly with the same ten names in the GRU report in July. This implies that the ‘dog tags’ were readable on ten bodies. This assessment further suggests that the initial British GRU list in July 1945 was based both on RAF records and cross referenced with local Norwegian records including the memorial panel. Otherwise the names of Williams and Wyness would not have been included. It is unlikely that the mass grave on Saupeset was exhumed by the British in July 1945, since the fact that McGuire’s ID was missing would otherwise have been questioned by Captain Byrne in his report to the RAF. The question must be asked: Why did Captain Byrne delete Williams and Wyness from the GRU list on 22nd August 1945? The reason is that, although the ‘dog tags’ and uniforms of these two airmen were found at the crash site, these two officers were not on flight PB416 from Yagodnik.
The Squadron records show Williams was hospitalized at Yagodnik with severe dysentery on 16th September when PB416 took off. (Perhaps that is the reason his uniform was ‘borrowed’). Wyness did indeed leave Yagodnik with the sixteen Lancasters on 16th September, but as a passenger on Flight Lieutenant Iveson’s Lancaster ME554, which landed safely in the UK at 0124 GMT on 17th September. (Wyness’ own plane had crashed on landing on 11th September and was abandoned in the Soviet Union.) But both the Norwegian memorial and July 24th GRU record confirm the identities of Williams and Wyness at the crash site. If Williams and Wyness were not on board PB416 on 16th September, who, then, were wearing their uniforms and IDs when the plane crashed at Saupeset?
Wyness’s plane grounded
We know for certain that Williams and Wyness were not passengers. Their fate was one shared by many brave airmen who served their country and flew with Bomber Command. Together with six other Lancasters of 617 Squadron, on a missionto bomb the Kembs barrier on the river Rhine, their plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at Rheinweiler, Germany on 7th October 1944. Although they successfully bailed out before impact, they were captured by German troops and executed, in breach of the Geneva Convention for the treatment of prisoners-of-war. Wyness, aged 24, the pilot, was buried at Choloy, in France and Williams, aged 22, was buried in the Dürnbach Cemetery, in Germany.
In MemoriamIn Memoriam
By 1946, further notifications in the record had been made. The Grave Registration document early that year shows ten allocated graves in the cemetery, one of which, XII G2, has been left blank and is later overtyped, “UNKNOWN BRITISH AIRMAN 17.9.44”. This document confirms the reburial of the bodies from the top of Saupeset to individual graves in the church yard below. These details were reconfirmed in the Graves Concentration Report of 9th August 1946. The record now states that ten bodies had been transferred from Saupeset and re-interred at Nesbyen, with nine names matching those in the RAF Crash report plus one ‘unknown British airman’. McGuire was included: Wyness and Williams had been withdrawn. The resolution thus appears to reflect faithfully the RAF Flight Loss Card, perhaps ascribing the extra body to a clerical oversight.
Final Report on PB416
When asked about the inconsistency of GRU and RAF records for PB416 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) confirmed that all data was based on the lists supplied by the Germans at the time of the initial burial, forwarded to the Red Cross and subsequently to the RAF. When the Red Cross and International Red Cross were requested, however, for their record of the accident, both confirmed that they had no information of either the crash or any of the casualties at Saupeset on 17th September 1944. When asked about the Norwegian memorial from May 1945 the CWGC said they had no knowledge of its existence.
So why did the first GRU report of July 1945 include Williams and Wyness, while RAF records did not? The implication is that Captain Byrne of the GRU, on the first British visit to the crash site, took the details he had been given from the RAF crash card, which showed the nine names. On discovering the new names of Wyness and Williams from the local Norwegian memorial, he simply added them to give a total of eleven casualties. Yet McMullen was clearly aware that Williams and Wyness were not on board PB416 on 16th September and knew that they had become casualties in Germany on 7th October 1944, not in Norway. After submitting his list of eleven names to RAF on 24th July 1945, Byrne was surely advised to delete the names of Williams and Wyness, which he did on 22nd August. This left a total of nine casualties, consistent with the RAF version, but not with the Norwegian memorial that showed they had buried ten bodies, with ten readable ID tags, the year before. That may explain the need for the addition of the ‘unknown British airman’ for the reburial in March 1946 to bring the total number of graves at Nesbyen to ten.
How could one set of IDs been lost? PB416 was carrying approximately 800 gallons of fuel on impact, so it is quite possible that the eleventh body was so badly burned in the crash that the airman’s ID was unrecognizable. This probably explains why McGuire’s name was missing from the Norwegian memorial panel. Yet the lack of any process to reconcile differences is disturbing. When the RAF received Byrne’s report of 11 bodies at the mass grave on 24th July 1945 it was the first time that McMullen’s account of nine casualties on PB416 had been challenged. McMullen was still Commander at RAF Bardney at this time, and he was presumably a difficult man to challenge. His list of nine RAF airmen was partially accurate, but he had omitted the identity and existence of the two passengers who must have been wearing the uniforms of Williams and Wyness, which brought the true total of people on board PB416 to eleven.
A local story has circulated in Nesbyen that, after the first British inspection in July 1945, a transportation was arranged by British troops with local assistance to move one body from the Saupeset grave to the British Embassy in Oslo. If the story is true it aligns with RAF instructions to Byrne in August 1945 to reduce the number of identifiable casualties in the report from eleven to nine, while honoring the Norwegian memorial, with its count of ten. Unlike the GRU, the RAF and McMullen were aware of the number of people who boarded PB416 at Yagodnik on 16th September, 1944, and that by physically removing one casualty from the mass grave this would leave ten bodies on Saupeset. The RAF had to admit that Wyness and Williams had not been on the flight, because of subsequent events, but they had to bury the fact that their uniforms and IDs had been borrowed by unnamed passengers and had been found at the crash site. The final step in adjusting the body count was made public in March 1946 when the casualties were reburied at Nesbyen, ready for visits by families from the UK. A tenth body was now added to the adjusted GRU reports in March, confirmed in August 1946 and designated ‘Unknown British Airman’. It is certain that McMullen was aware that the tenth and eleventh bodies were neither RAF nor British: hence there was little risk of their families being aware that the GRU or the RAF had been involved with the burial of foreign servicemen in a British War Cemetery in a remote part of Norway.
Defence Attache Matt Skuse in Nesbyen Graveyard
This total perfectly aligned with the 10 new gravestones in Nesbyen cemetery for the ten bodies brought down from Saupeset in Spring 1946. It is likely that the instruction for this change by GRU was made and approved by the RAF in line with previous changes by the GRU. If the eleventh body was transported to the British Embassy in summer 1945 it would have required an order from the RAF and official sanction from the Foreign Office in London. Yet, by making one body physically disappear to the British Embassy in 1945, and the second body being made anonymous as ‘Unknown British Airman’ in 1946, it was as though the two persons wearing the uniforms of Williams and Wyness had never existed and certainly could not be traced.
But they did exist. What next has to be investigated are the questions of who might have been wearing the uniforms belonging to Williams and Wyness, why they were on board an RAF Lancaster three-hundred-and-thirty miles off route in Southern Norway, and why the RAF, the CWGC and local Norwegians still prefer not to discuss the matter. For they were certainly Soviet agents authorized at the highest level to be flown on a secret mission to Norway.
The status and allegiance of the influential Austrian Peter Smolka (who changed his name to ‘Smollett’ when he was naturalized in 1938: I shall refer to him throughout my postings as ‘Smolka’ – except when quoting other works directly – as that is the name he reverted to after he returned to Austria) are a matter of some controversy. An apparently tireless worker for the Soviet cause, his role as a Soviet agent has been denied by his son, yet Soviet archives clearly identify him as an NKVD operative with the cryptonym ‘ABO’. In this bulletin, I present the first results of a research project involving the inspection of source material (with special attention to a detailed analysis of the extensive files released by the National Archives in 2015) in an attempt to verify the period for which Smolka might have been active on the NKVD’s behalf, and to discover the interactions he had with British Intelligence. In this first report I survey and summarize the generic literature on Smolka, and present my analysis of his career up to the end of 1934, after a momentous year experienced by Smolka and his colleague Kim Philby, one not without controversy.
Peter Smolka (fourth from left, back row) in Vienna, 1926
I divide Smolka’s career into six main chapters : i) his arrival in the UK in 1930, up to his visits to Vienna in 1934, and the months thereafter: ii) the years spent before the war, up to his supposed ‘recruitment’ to the NKVD by Philby in 1939 (or soon after); iii) his career during the war, highlighted by his prominence in the Ministry of Information; iv) his post-war activity in Vienna up to 1948, including his involvement with Graham Greene over the screenplay for the movie TheThird Man, and what that relationship reveals about his early career; v) the renewed interest shown in him between 1949 and 1951, when, after the escape of Burgess and Maclean, documents incriminating Smolka were found in Burgess’s flat; and vi) the desultory investigation that followed, interleaved with one or two dramatic flourishes, culminating in Arthur Martin’s ‘interrogation’ of Smolka in October 1961. I organize this introduction by first describing the literature published before the release of the Kew material in 2015, next by analyzing what has been since issued that exploits those same files, and lastly by inspecting the considerable literature on Graham Greene and Smolka, which merits a category in its own right. I shall then use the Smolka Personal Files as a backdrop for interpreting what the highly contradictory third-party accounts report. In a bulletin to appear next month, I shall cover the last five chapters, including Smolka’s assimilation into, and acceptance by, leading establishment offices, his service as a Soviet propagandist during the war, followed by his return to Vienna as a correspondent for The Times, when he gained the attention of MI6 after it was reported that he had joined the Communist Party. Now that I have performed my preliminary investigation, I believe that the results are very dramatic, and that they will help clear up some earlier mysteries.
A reminder about my approach to archival documents: I do not take them at face value. I ask myself the following questions:
Who is the author of the document?
What did he or she know at the time?
What was he or she trying to achieve in writing this item?
What does the framework and incidental data of the document (modes of address, redacted information, unredacted information, references, handwritten annotations, missing information, etc. etc.) tell me about its context?
Why was this particular document inserted into the archive?
How does the information therein compare with other sources (e.g. memoirs)?
Similar questions have to be addressed to memoirs themselves.
Sources: Smolka in the UK
While long-standing government files occasionally refer to Smolka’s involvement with the Ministry of Information and with the BBC, the primary source material consists of the four files KV 2/4167-4170 representing Smolka’s MI5 Personal File 39680, which were released by the National Archives at Kew in 2015. They cover the period from when he arrived in the UK as an eighteen-year-old in 1930 up until early 1962, shortly after he left the UK for the last time, having undergone a very feeble interrogation by Arthur Martin. These files are thus the prime source for Smolka’s overall career: writers on intelligence matters who discussed Smolka before 2015 had to rely on snippets in general files, informal recollections and anecdotes, or (in one case) bootlegged extracts from official archives that were made available furtively. I point out that a supplemental ‘Y’ file – a highly secure Annex to his Personal File – was maintained by MI5, the contents of which are of course unavailable.
Smolka had started to come to the attention of authors in the 1980s, when documents relating to the wartime Ministry of Information were released. In Their Trade is Treachery (1981), Chapman Pincher made a brief reference to Smolka’s questionable role at the Ministry, and he pointed out that the debriefings of Anthony Blunt (a secret that must have been divulged to him) had confirmed that Smolka had been a Soviet agent. Anthony Glees, while also lacking access to such archival material, picked up the story and made a strong case about Smolka’s pernicious role in his 1987 book, Secrets of the Service. He made the confident assertion that ‘there is now overwhelming evidence to suggest that one of Bracken’s most trusted advisers, Peter Smolka-Smollett, was a Communist mole’. Yet, apart from the familiar tale of Smolka as a cagey propagandist for Stalin in the Ministry of Information, Glees did not provide any evidence that Smolka had actually been recruited by the NKVD at that time. He referred to the regular meetings that Smolka had at the Soviet Embassy, but those arrangements were in no way out of order, given Smolka’s position.
I suspect, however, that Glees was the first to publish Smolka’s detailed strategy for projecting the Soviet Union’s influence on British policy, although it is sometimes hard to follow Glees’s narrative and use of sources. He made much of the fact that Smolka was a close friend of Brendan Bracken (without explaining how that friendship occurred), and that he thereby conspired with him to oust Hugh Dalton as the head of the SOE. I find much questionable about this theory, however. Glees wrote a lot about ‘moles and agents’ within SOE, but few are identified, and it is not clear how they affected propaganda at a time when SOE was focussed primarily on sabotage and secondarily on intelligence-gathering. The overall conclusion, in the context of the timing of the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, of Smolka’s promotion, of the maturity into action of SOE, and of Dalton’s dismissal, does not make sense to me.
Another controversial contribution was W. J. West’s The Truth About Hollis (1989). While professing to have had no access to secret sources – or even knowingly to have spoken to any MI5 officer – West (no relation to Nigel West) had clearly been shown portions of Smolka’s Personal File, no doubt according to some manner of controlled leakage. For West was an overt member of the ‘Hollis is guilty’ school. West’s contribution is nevertheless very useful. Exploiting Foreign Office and BBC archives, he gives a very sensible analysis of Smolka’s ‘adoption’ by Rex Leeper, his collaboration with Guy Burgess, and his extensive propaganda work at the Ministry of Information. He even includes a two-page circular issued by Smolka in February 1943, titled Arguments to Counter the Ideological Fear of ‘Bolshevism’, which he sources to his own earlier 1985 work Orwell: The War Commentaries. It is an astonishingly mendacious piece, and should have raised a storm.
Further anecdotes surfaced in the next two decades, some from unreliable memoirs, others from Russian sources. Discoveries made by Oleg Gordievsky from Soviet archives were revealed in KGB: The Inside Story (1990) by Christopher Andrew and Gordievsky: they stated firmly that Smolka had been a Soviet agent, suggesting that he had been recruited some time before 1939 (the year in which Philby claimed to have engaged him). Through that assertion, without mentioning Philby, since they would not have been aware then of Philby’s claims, they reinforced the notion of Smolka’s longevity as an agent. They also recorded that, during the Slánský trial in Prague, in November 1952, Smolka was publicly denounced as an ‘imperialist agent’, characterizing this charge, perhaps a little naively, as ‘absurd’. A plan to kidnap Smolka from Austria, and to bring him to Moscow to answer allegations that ‘during the war he had recruited another Jew, Ivan Maisky, then Soviet Ambassador in London, to the British SIS’ was abandoned. Andrew and Gordievsky attribute these events to Stalin’s generic purge of Jews from the upper echelons, but Smolka’s escape from his Czech persecutors suggests that some intervention may have taken place.
It was in fact in Genrikh Borovik’s Philby Files (1994), where some dubious but henceforth much quoted reminiscences from Philby about his recruiting Smolka first surfaced, while Yuri Modin’s My Five Cambridge Friends (also 1994) offered one or two important insights. Modin provocatively asserted that Philby had met Smolka in Vienna in 1934 (without explaining anything about the circumstances), and he added that Smolka was an NKVD agent when he worked with Guy Burgess at the BBC in 1941 (but said nothing about the manner and timing of his recruitment). The Crown Jewels (1998), by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, exploited documents sent by the London-based spies to Moscow, and eventually inspected in the KGB vaults, in which Smolka occasionally appears. Yet the authors appeared to take at face value what Philby wrote in his reports, and how he later explained them, and they also displayed an inappropriately high degree of trust in what Moscow Centre declared about its relationship with Smolka.
In 2012, Gordon Corera offered up The Art of Betrayal, subtitled The Secret History of MI6, a rather hectic, journalistic approach that includes some valuable source material, but does not regard the dating of events as important. He introduced Smolka in the context of the Third Man saga, and described him, almost casually, as having passed information to the Soviet Union ‘from at least the start of the Second World War’. It is exclusively here that we learn that Philby returned to Vienna for a brief visit after the war, sourced to a tape-recording by Bruce Lockhart that the Imperial War Museum has withdrawn (Chapter 1, Note 19). Yet Corera danced around the circumstances of the friendship between Philby and Smolka, merely noting that the latter was ‘a friend of Litzi’s who had come to London’, the event undated. The author did not acknowledge any contribution by Smolka to the rescue work performed by Kim and Litzi in 1934. Thus Corera neither revealed nor corroborated relevant ‘secrets’ about Smolka and MI6 that had in fact been aired before, although he did re-present the startling insight first voiced by Andrew and Gordievsky concerning the KGB charges against Smolka during the Prague trials. He wrote that Anatoly Golitsyn, before he defected to the British, discovered in late 1954 in his predecessor’s file at the KGB Residency in Vienna an old letter from the head of the KGB British Department requesting ‘the kidnapping of Peter Smollett to answer charges that he had been working for MI6’.
The problem is that so many works show a cavalier approach to what has been written before. They either overlook previous assertions or disclosures, or accept them unquestioningly, but almost always fail to inspect them properly, to attempt to verify them, or to analyze in any depth the contradictions of multiple narratives that are crying out for resolution. For example, as late as 2015 Boris Volodarsky, in Stalin’s Agent (a book purportedly about Nikolai Orlov, but one rambling across many spheres) offered a wild summary on Smolka, with some vague and unattributed claims (‘Some say that Smolka got his job at the Ministry of Information through Brendan Bracken’), and several incorrect dates. Many of these works are similarly not accurately sourced, and, in general, one has to be very careful in determining who is echoing whom, and where the stories started. Anything that the habitual liar Kim Philby wrote should be treated very cautiously. As always, a close examination of chronology and geography is required to test many of the ‘facts’ that are presented by these authors.
For instance, the book by Andrew and Gordievsky, bolstered by the authority that the latter enjoyed by virtue of his inspection of KGB files, claimed that Smolka and his wife were trapped in Prague when Hitler visited it (after occupation, on March 19) in 1939, and that they thus had to seek refuge in the British Embassy. An endnote indicates that this fact derived from W. J. West’s volume. West had in fact dug out a memorandum, dated November 1938, from Smolka to Rex Leeper, laying out his plans to visit Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest and Berne. Indeed the assertion about his escape from Prague does appear in West’s text, and he claimed that Smolka got away alongside one Otto Strassner ‘and other anti-Nazi leaders’, after which he and his wife returned immediately to London – which would suggest that the visits to other capitals were abandoned. Yet West provided no source for his story. The chronology in the Smolka files (which were not officially available in 1989, when West’s book was published) leaves a puzzling gap between November 1938 and September 1939, although serial no. 116a in KV 2/4168 states that, in April 1939, Smolka went to Switzerland with letters of recommendation from Rex Leeper (his sponsor at the Ministry of Information). No embarkation or disembarkation records for either of these purported journeys have been made available. Moreover, the Smolkas’ second son, Timothy, was born on October 12, 1938, so it seems to me unlikely that Lotty, even if it had made political sense for her to accompany her husband to Prague, would have abandoned her sons at that critical time. In addition, Smolka was a UK subject by then, so should have been in no danger.
Yet confirmations of Smolka’s presence in Prague are offered by Purvis and Hulbert. In the BBC archives, they uncovered a memorandum from George Barnes, the Assistant-Director of Talks, to Guy Burgess, notifying him that Smolka had been pencilled in for a talk on March 14, 1941, since he had been in Prague when the Germans entered the Czech capital on March 14, 1939. The duo even discovered a sound recording of the programme, and heard Smolka vividly describe what happened, when reporting for the Exchange Telegraph news agency – which must be one of the most genuine artifacts in this messy tale. They add that the Foreign Office indeed had helped to get Smolka out of Prague. Lotty is not mentioned in this scenario, but Smolka presumably quickly returned from the UK to mainland Europe, but for an abbreviated tour solely to Switzerland. But why was the Berne expedition, but none of the Prague incident, recorded in his Personal File?
Somewhere, behind all this, a truth might be found. It would appear that West was working from a different source, since he appears not to be familiar with those particular BBC exchanges. Maybe a reappraisal of the sound recording, or some delving into the activities of Otto Strassner, might reveal more, but the whole sequence of events is typical of the muddle that surrounds these archival remnants.
Sources:Smolka’s Personal File
The contents of the files at Kew are very rich in many ways, and merit close attention, since they display many anomalies that have not been picked up by any commentators, so far as I can judge. There exists also a Home Office file on Smolka’s naturalization request (HO 405/47416) – superficially not very significant, apart from the fact that two pages of extracts (405/47416/1) are closed, and not to be opened until January 1, 2034. The journalist Mark Hollingsworth (whose book I reviewed in October), had submitted a Freedom of Information request to have this item released immediately. His first appeal was rejected, quite absurdly, on the grounds that an MI5 officer was therein identified. Hollingsworth therefore took the process up to a higher level, but his request was again rejected. The logic for withholding details of a naturalization request from eight-five years ago by someone now accepted as having been a Soviet agent is indefensible: the decision represents sheer bureaucratic obtuseness, and merely draws attention to an area of embarrassment. Of course, there must be something to hide, and matters of institutional pride and shame are at stake. The fact that January 1934 happens to be the centenary of Philby’s presence in Vienna, when he was, according to some accounts, in the company of Smolka, might suggest what matters the closed papers address.
My analysis of the files, in which I integrate the intelligence found there with the surrounding memoirs and histories, will be prominent in the sections that follow. I here summarize recent publications by those who have, to some degree, studied them. As far as independent scrutiny in the recent, post-2015 literature is concerned, I believe the only serious analysis of the KV material has been undertaken by Stewart Purvis and Jeff Hulbert, in their 2016 book on Guy Burgess The Spy Who Knew Everyone. The authors have also brought fresh light on Smolka by their discovery of records in the BBC Archives (many of which were actually first revealed by W. J. West), although these items are remarkable more for their curiosity value than for anything they shed on Smolka’s allegiances, and his ability to outwit his hosts. Purvis and Hulbert also refer to some vital memoirs and histories that help flesh out the story, although, probably because their emphasis is on showing how Smolka contributed to Burgess’s traitorousness, they neglect to discuss some of the anomalies in the record, and avoid any inspection of the Graham Greene connection that helps illuminate the details of Smolka’s career and time-line.
Richard Davenport-Hines, in Enemies Within (2016), also gives a respectable but superficial summary of the Smolka files. He has appeared only to skim them: on the other hand, his analysis is enhanced by his bringing to the discussion some worldly and enlightening insights from contemporary political events. He offers some trenchant (and contentious) judgments, but his canvas is so broad that many of the paradoxes and subtleties of Smolka’s career have eluded him. At least he provides detailed references, and he does provide an original perspective on the Graham Greene connection. Helen Fry misses an opportunity to shed light on Smolka in a very confusing and muddled paragraph in her 2021 book, Spymaster, her profile of the MI6 head-of-station in 1934 in Vienna, Thomas Kendrick.
Mark Hollingsworth’s Agents of Influence (2023) would seem to be the first book that attempts to integrate the available archival material from Kew with the rich seam of narratives on the Third Man extravaganzas (see below). The author offers a useful and colourful synopsis of Smolka’s career. Unfortunately, Hollingsworth undermines his story by presenting Smolka as a prime example of an ‘agent of influence’, rather than a confirmed spy. While it is true that he exerted influence as a propagandist, such a classification understates his more serious role. Hollingsworth cites Corera and Gordievsky in support of his thesis, yet Corera himself reported that Smolka handed over information to the Soviets, and Gordievsky confidently declared that Smolka was a spy. That knowledge is now clear from the reports of information provably originating from Smolka being found in Guy Burgess’s effects after the latter disappeared, a fact that Hollingsworth acknowledges. And if Smolka passed on confidential information to Burgess, he certainly would have done the same to Maisky, the Soviet ambassador. In addition, Hollingsworth, while echoing the dramatic story that Smolka worked alongside Kim and Litzy in the sewers in 1934 (which surely demands closer inspection), nevertheless presents Smolka as being largely influenced by Philby, contrary to the evidence. Hollingsworth also trusts Philby’s account that it was he who recruited Smolka to the NKVD, thus implicitly suggesting that Smolka’s activities were all very innocent up until then.
Sources: ‘The Third Man’ Movie
The fourth chapter primarily concerns Graham Greene, and his visit to Vienna in 1948 to perform research for his screenplay for the film to be directed by Carol Reed, The Third Man. There Greene met Smolka (who had returned to Vienna after the war as a correspondent for the ‘Times’, and did not relinquish that position until May 1949), and the overall evidence points to the fact that Smolka contributed in some way to the screenplay, thereby betraying some of his activities from the 1930s, and probably intimating darker arrangements. The literature in this domain is quite rich. As always, however, the accounts are not consistent, but they are frequently very provocative.
Graham Greene’s ‘Ways of Escape’
Graham Greene: Greene’s account of the adventure in his memoir Ways of Escape (1980) is full of deceit, as would be revealed years after when the archives of the London Films Production were inspected, and Elizabeth Montagu in 1997 started to disclose to researchers sections of her unpublished memoir, which eventually saw the light of day in 2003. Greene makes no mention of his stint at the Ministry of Information in the summer of 1940, where he might have encountered Smolka. He does not disclose how Alexander Korda (the producer of the movie, and an MI6 asset) arranged his itinerary in 1948, and he offers specious arguments for his spending a week in Prague after leaving Vienna, when he was supposed to be in Rome. He never mentions Montagu (who worked for Korda, and apparently arranged his meetings in Vienna): nor does he record his contacts with Smolka, or the controversies that surrounded the latter’s contract with Korda’s film company. He describes an unlikely evening with Elizabeth Bowen, which is nevertheless verifiable from other sources (including Bowen herself), and thus not simply a mask for an outing with Elizabeth Montagu. The overall account is, however, a typical Greenian charade, and serves only to demonstrate that he wished to conceal the nature of the events.
Michael Shelden’s ‘Graham Greene: The Enemy Within’
Michael Shelden: Shelden was the first (unauthorized) biographer of Greene, his 1994 book being published in the UK with the suffix The Man Within and in the USA as The Enemy Within. While much private material was therefore withheld from him, Shelden struggled mightily with the mass of anecdotes he was able to collect, and strained to impart a coherent explanation of what was happening. Significantly, he interviewed Lotty Smolka and her sons, as well as Elizabeth Montagu, who must have shown him some of her then unpublished memoir. In that way, a probably more accurate account of Greene’s activity in Vienna comes out, with his being introduced to Smolka by Montagu, who arranged Greene’s meetings with journalists and businessmen. Thus Shelden attributes to Smolka a role as the source of the anecdotes about the diluted penicillin, the sewers, and the bizarre sharing of facilities by the Four Occupying Powers, since Smolka had apparently written some short stories on these phenomena, which he passed over to Greene. This leads into a startling direct reference to Smolka’s subversive activity in Vienna in 1934, something that Lotty Smolka confirmed to him, yet Shelden sees nothing noteworthy in this extraordinary revelation. He also refers to a contract that Smolka signed with Korda that expressly proscribed him from seeking any other monies or publicity over ‘The Third Man’, and relays Elizabeth Montagu’s disgust and puzzlement over this rather clandestine and suspicious agreement.
While Shelden also explains that Korda was working part-time for MI6 (for such services he had in fact been knighted in 1942 on Churchill’s recommendation), he cannot contrive any coherent explanation for what schemes might have been going on at the time. He does indeed claim that the 1948 trip was cover for MI6 investigations in what was going on (‘keeping an eye on the volatile political situations in both countries’), but MI6 had very capable representatives at the time, especially in Austria, where the distinguished George Kennedy Young was head of station. It sounds like a very lame explanation. He very oddly suggests that Greene was possibly working under private instructions from Philby himself, who was ‘still the blue-eyed boy of the service’ (hardly an accurate representation at this time). He judges it a coincidence that Montagu would lead Greene straight to Smolka, although ‘he was the one man in Vienna who could discuss Philby’s past in detail and who could do it in English’. There is a lot of hidden menace in that suggestion of the Smolka-Philby intimacy, but it remains unexplored: why Smolka would volunteer information about his fellow-agent (a suspected spy) to a former MI6 officer is left unexplained. Shelden is clearly out of his depth.
Norman Sherry’s ‘Life of Graham Greene: Volume 2’
Norman Sherry: Graham Greene selected Sherry as his authorized biographer, and his massive and rather self-indulgent study, The Life of Graham Greene, appeared in three parts, with Volume 2 (1939-1955) – which is the critical item for my analysis – being published in 1994. Sherry had eventually fallen into disfavour with both Greene (who died in 1991) and his family, since he inevitably presented some less illustrious aspects of Greene’s career and personality. Sherry does reflect many incidents of Greene’s employment with MI6, but his preference is for literary analysis, and he is not tuned to the multilayered character of intelligence and counter-intelligence manœuvres. He thus struggles to interpret conflicting information, and leaves several paradoxes unanswered.
For example, his chronology for Greene’s sojourn in Vienna is simply careless. He has Greene ‘reluctantly’ going to Vienna in February 1948: Greene wanted to get his preliminary research for the plot of his screenplay over with quickly, so that he could soon rendezvous with his lover, Catherine Walston, in Rome. Sherry makes an incongruous observation: “He thought of leaving Vienna by train because it would have been easier to reach Italy that way, but for the sake of adventure, he decided to fly.” My research indeed shows that there were no commercial flights between Vienna and Rome at that time: voyagers had to travel by train, but neither were there flights between Prague and Rome. Greene therefore took a plane to Prague, since he apparently did not want to miss an exciting story in the Czech capital. Revolution was breaking out. So much for urgently wanting to be re-united with Catherine: he delayed his assignation unduly.
Sherry does report that Greene spent six or more hours with Smolka on the night of February 17 (which would suggest some very intense discussions), and he next mentions the Elizabeth Bowen cocktail party on February 21. Greene had written to Catherine on February 18, reminding her that he had seen her only a week beforehand (which, if true, would place his departure from England on about February 12), and Greene then stated that he left Vienna on February 23 for Prague, where he stayed for a week. On February 27, a paragraph about him appeared in the News Chronicle. Lastly, Sherry informs us that Greene then met Catherine in Rome in late February, where he started writing his screenplay. Yet, according to the chronology, Greene could not have left Prague until early March. Someone is obviously lying, and Sherry is not shrewd enough to suspect that Greene may have had more official business in Prague.
Greene’s return to Vienna in June, accompanied by Carol Reed, is also covered. Sherry states that the pair went to the Soviet zone, that Greene spent time in the sewers with Elizabeth Montagu and the sewer police, and that on his penultimate day there, the famous Beauclerk told him the story about the penicillin racket. Only now does Sherry concede that Smolka may have been the source of such anecdotes, adding that Greene also visited the Soviet zone with Smolka, and that they spent several nights (evenings?) together. Perhaps uncertain where he stands, Sherry cites Montagu as the authority for the stories of penicillin, and credits Smolka’s short stories as a more likely source than Beauclerk. Whether such tales were ever written must remain a mystery.
W. J. West’s ‘Quest for Graham Greene’
W.J. West: W. J. West returned to the fray in his 1997 book The Quest for Graham Greene. For some reason he is very dismissive of Shelden’s work, and largely ignores Sherry’s, especially when it comes to Smolka. Preferring to believe Greene’s own account, as revealed in the author’s papers at Boston College, he recognizes the contract that Smolka signed, but describes it as a possible ‘cover for some other less avowable reason for payment’. (That is a tantalizing observation, however, that may have a lot of merit.) Yet West seems rather naïve about the context: he describes Smolka simply as a ‘freelance journalist’. He suggests that the papers at Boston College indicate that a priest had apparently written to Greene in 1950, inquiring about the source of the penicillin story, and Greene had replied that he acquired it from the ‘chief of police’ (actually the MI6 officer), Beauclerk. West accepts this at face value, ignoring the evidence that Montagu had provided. He does suggest that Greene already knew about Philby’s adventures in the sewers, without explaining where he gained this insight. It is another very uneven compilation that could have benefitted from some stricter discipline.
Charles Drazin’s ‘In Search of the Third Man’
Charles Drazin: Another author who interviewed Montagu was Charles Drazin, a London-based author and film-historian, who presented a timeline that conflicted with hers in his 1999 book In Search of the Third Man. Here he has Montagu being charged with her mission from Korda in December 1947 (as opposed to her claim of ‘early February’), without any overt explanation as to whether her presence was coincidental, or part of a deeper plot to set the stage. Yet Drazin also dug out a letter of January 5, 1948 from Korda to Greene, instructing him to go to Vienna for three weeks and then to Rome for five weeks for purposes of research work. The proximity of the two events suggests that they occurred in tandem.
Drazin was able to exploit the archives of London Films Productions, and thus presents some original documents. He largely follows the Montagu line about her introduction of Smolka to Greene, and the source of the anecdotes, indicating that Montagu learned about Smolka’s stories before Greene arrived. He adds the fascinating detail that Smolka asked Greene’s literary agents, Pearn, Pollinger & Higham, to handle negotiations of the contract for him, and that he seemed happy with the whole process. Drazin uncovered a signed contract returned by Smolka on September 21, 1948. It all suggests a harmonious and amicable relationship between the couple. He also records that Montagu told him that she suspected duplicity in what Greene was up to –maybe a disingenuous observation on her part.
Elizabeth Montagu’s ‘Honourable Rebel’
Elizabeth Montagu: The part-time OSS and MI6 asset Elizabeth Montagu clearly played a significant role in the affairs in Vienna, but her own evidence is riddled with controversy and contradictions. Montagu, the daughter of Lord John Montagu of Beaulieu, was a member of the Mechanised Transport Corps in France in 1940, and she became stranded when she declined an opportunity to sail back to the UK. Hunted by the Gestapo, she managed to escape to Switzerland, and eventually worked for Alan Dulles of the OSS. After the war she was employed by Sir Alexander Korda, who sent her on a mission to Eastern Europe early in 1948. She had been interviewed by Shelden (and others) in 1993, revealing to him portions of her then unpublished memoir, which revealed much about the bizarre encounters between Greene and Smolka in Vienna in February 1948, and her disdain for the contract that Smolka eventually signed. Yet, when the memoir Honourable Rebel appeared in 2003, a year after her death, the text was much more cautious and restrained. While she described introducing Greene to Smolka, and the fact that Smolka handed over to Greene a manuscript, hoping to get his stories published, she even suggested that Greene might have acquired the penicillin story from other sources in Vienna at the time.
Yet far more serious questions have to be asked about the accuracy of her account. The chronology does not make sense: it is physically impossible. First, she recalls that Korda summoned her to his office to outline her mission in Eastern Europe ‘early in February’. She then describes making an emergency exit from Prague, via a US army plane, to Vienna, just after the February revolution, and then spending a few days in Vienna before receiving a telegram from Korda that Graham Greene would soon be on his way, and that he would need her help. Yet Greene arrived in Vienna, verifiably, on February 12, and left – for Prague, of all places, when he was supposed to be going to Rome! – on February 23. And the revolution in Prague took place on February 21, when Gottwald, on Stalin’s orders, seized power. Montagu’s interviews in Prague must either have been a fantasy, or have occurred after her time in Vienna. It seems to me that she must have been complicit in the whole escapade, was encouraged by MI6 to conceal her tracks after her oral revelations, and then left a deceptive paper-trail in the published memoir, not to be released until after her death. I shall explore this remarkable distortion of the truth in next month’s segment, after I have tried to cross-check dates and sources more deeply, but I suspect that the accounts may be irreconcilable.
Peter Foges: An astonishing contribution to the saga appeared in 2016, in the relatively obscure Lapham’s Quarterly – and then only in an on-line segment, visible at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/my-spy . (I have all fifteen years of Lapham’s Quarterly, a fascinating thematic collection of writings and art, in a pile in my library extension.) It was written by one Peter Foges, a film and television producer, who had been in the enigmatic situation of having Smolka, atheist and Jew, as a godparent. A photograph of this remarkable ceremony, held at Liverpool Cathedral in 1944, appears in the article (see below). Peter Foges’s father had known Smolka in Vienna, and Foges fils informs us that Smolka met Kim Philby through Litzy, who was a good friend of his. Moreover, he states that the three of them worked in the sewers together in 1934, and then Smolka followed them to London. I believe that, while hints have been made about Smolka’s presence in Vienna at this time, this is the first occurrence of any claim that Smolka and Philby had been communist collaborators, and the assertion has monumental implications, into which I shall delve later in this bulletin.
The Baptism of Peter Foges (Smolka in centre); Liverpool Cathedral, 1944
The rest of Foges’s account is error-strewn and woolly. He makes unattributed claims about Smolka’s recruitment by the Soviets (Maly?), and he seems to be unaware of Smolka’s previous time in the UK. He gets dates wrong, and echoes the relationship with Bracken (‘Bracken took a shine to Smolka and fell for his flattery’) without providing a source. He also makes the astonishing claim that Bracken himself ‘dragooned’ Smolka into helping write the script for The Third Man, and that Smolka was even flown in specially for a meeting with Korda and Bracken to plan that the movie take place in Vienna, so that Korda’s wealth locked up there could be exploited. Thus the overall tone of the piece is a bit shrill and questionable, while the first-hand exposure to Smolka that Foges père experienced in Vienna has the ring of truth.
Jean Fromenthal’s ‘Prague Coup’
Jean-Luc Fromenthal: An unlikely contribution to the debate crops up with The Prague Coup, a graphic novel written by Jean-Luc Fromenthal, and illustrated (sometimes very salaciously) by Miles Hyman, which appeared in 2018. The nuggets to be derived do not originate in the story itself, but in the Afterwords. Fromenthal echoes the assertion that Korda wanted to set the film in Vienna since he owned blocked funds in an Austrian subsidiary, Wien-Film, but he also suggests that Greene was actually on a mission to uncover evidence that there was a dangerous mole within MI6 – namely Kim Philby – and that Greene was dispatched to uncover Philby’s tracks. In this context, Smolka’s previous acquaintance with Philby is very poignant, and Fromenthal makes the provocative claim that the pair had met in London, in 1933, i.e. before Philby ventured to Vienna, and that it was Smolka who introduced Kim to Litzy (although the author is incorrect on his dating of Philby’s journey). He boldly declares that Smolka had been an agent of the NKVD, already known as ABO, as far back as 1933. Sadly, Fromenthal does not link any of his assertions to the fascinating Bibliography he offers at the end of the book, so it is impossible to trace these references.
What could also be vital evidence in support of Greene’s mission on behalf of MI6 is the role of one Colonel John Codrington. Fromenthal describes him as ‘a former agent of Claud [sic] Dansey’ (the vice-director of MI6), and he presents his role at the heart of Korda’s organization ‘to facilitate the movement of London Films personnel abroad, during an era in which the British government enforced heavy restrictions in that respect’. Codrington was thus able to make all the arrangements for Greene’s trip to Vienna – and to Prague, the latter excursion being described by Fromenthal as ‘an unforeseen (and to this day unexplained) extension to the journey’. Fromenthal distrusts what Greene said about Beauclerk, and attributes to Smolka the contributions on the penicillin and sewer material.
Thomas Riegeler: Lastly, a prominent article about this whole exercise was written by Dr. Thomas Riegeler in 2020, in the Journal of Austrian-American Studies. Titled The Spy Story behind The Third Man, it trawls widely, and occasionally in depth, through the literature concerning the movie. I learned about several items that had escaped my attention, including the Austrian periodical, The Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies, which devoted a special issue (Volume 12, no.2, [2018]) to ‘The Third Man’, as well as the works by Elizabeth Montagu, and Jean-Luc Fromenthal and Miles Hyman, described above in this report. Riegeler also enjoyed conversations with Smolka’s widow, and their children. (I applied via the Journal’s website to purchase a copy of that important issue, but I have received no reply from the institution.)
Riegeler sets himself an ambitious agenda, describing the role of his article as follows: “By drawing upon archival material as well as secondary literature, this article explores this other history of The Third Man and puts the film in the context of postwar Austria, and highlights how real-life events and personalities inspired its story”. Yet Riegeler unfortunately appears to practice no identifiable methodology, and is very ingenuous. He treats all evidence and testimony as of equal value, and fails to investigate where and why conflicting accounts of the events surface. This defect is especially apparent when he reproduces the statements of Smolka’s son Timothy. These claims fly in the face of what others assert about his father’s activities and loyalties, and Riegeler does not question how objective or insightful Timothy might have been when talking to him.
For example, he weakly characterizes Smolka as ‘a possible Soviet spy’, appearing to trust what Timothy, who downplayed his father’s involvement, told him. Timothy claimed that Smolka père had never been a member of the Communist Party, and never a Soviet agent. Riegeler reports that Timothy stated that his brother Peter had discovered documents in Moscow that Smolka had been judged unsuitable as a spy, as he was ‘far too attached to his family’ – all quite absurd, and flying in the face of what Riegeler himself writes elsewhere, when he cites Andrew and Mitrokhin. Likewise, the other son, Peter, minimized his father’s role in supplying anecdotes about the penicillin scam, ‘as his father never spoke about it’. Elsewhere, Riegeler is haphazard and wrong about dates (for instance when discussing the ‘divorce’, and Litzy’s departure for Berlin, as well as Montagu’s activities in Switzerland). He bizarrely describes the first sacrifice that Philby made was ‘to divorce Litzy’. While Hollingsworth states that the Third Man’s Harry Lime was based partly on Smolka, Riegeler asserts that the inspiration for him was Philby himself.
Additional Material: As a coda, I present two important contributions from MI6 sources. The first is a valuable observation on George Kennedy Young, who was head of the MI6 station in Vienna when Greene arrived. He was a Cold War hawk who constantly criticized Western passivity in the face of Communist aggression. In 1984, he published Subversion and the British Riposte, which described his frustrations. He ran agents, defectors persuaded to stay in place for a while, no doubt, and wrote (p 10) that ‘by the autumn of 1947 the Soviet intention to bring Jugoslavia and Czechoslovakia to heel had become known through defectors’. In a 2020 tribute to Young (see https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/george-kennedy-young-banker-writer-soldier-spy/) , Rory Cormac wrote that in the autumn of 1947 Young ‘had warned London of the threat of a communist takeover in Prague’. The decision to send Greene to Prague must be viewed in the context of this advice.
The second comes from the writer Jeremy Duns, who has made his writing on intelligence matters available at www.jeremy-duns.com . After the war, the journalist Antony Terry (who had performed very creditably during the war in various roles, but had been incarcerated by the Germans) was recruited by Ian Fleming’s ‘Mercury’ network, and posted to Vienna to work for MI6, while also being employed as a correspondent for the Sunday Times. Duns relies on the reminiscences of Terry’s wife, Rachel, for some of his accounts of Smolka, whom they encountered there. Terry took over some of Kennedy Young’s agents, and Duns writes: “Also reporting from Vienna at this time was a Daily Express correspondent, Peter Smollett, who was not all he seemed.” He continues:
After the war, Smolka returned to Vienna as a correspondent, carrying out much the same job for Soviet intelligence as Terry was for M.I.6. Smolka was a familiar face in the British press pack, but Rachel Terry soon began to distrust him. “In November (1947) Picture Post wanted an article on a foreign correspondent’s life in an Occupied city, and Peter Smolka proposed this to my husband as something in his gift. Smolka had the permits necessary to go to such places as Klosterneuburg, impossible to get from the Russians except on an official level. He also invited us and the photographer, the wife of the editor of Picture Post, to dine at the British Officers’ Club in Palais Kinsky with a woman Russian colonel, whose picture duly appeared with us all in the magazine. This was something so unheard-of that even I could see something odd in it. It could only have occurred with official Soviet approval, and to get permission for foreign publicity of that kind proved intimate and high-level contacts.”
Rachel Terry wrote this in 1984, and even then was being a little coy: the ‘woman Russian colonel’ was in fact Emma Woolf, a senior Soviet intelligence officer.
Duns assumes that this information would have been passed back to Young, but he notes that the British did nothing at that time, despite Smolka’s obvious links to Soviet intelligence. His article cannot be relied on absolutely: his chronology is erratic, and, like many, he has been taken in by KGB files concerning Smolka’s recruitment by Philby – a subject that I shall take up next month. Yet he revealed a very useful source.
I discovered the published source for these anecdotes. In the December 1984 issue of Encounter magazine, the thriller writer Sarah Gainham (the pseudonym of Rachel Terry, then Ames, née Stainer) submitted a long letter titled ‘Smolka “the Spy”’, which, while casting doubt on the reliability of the claim that Smolka had been a Soviet agent, did describe some aspects of his very unusual behaviour when she became acquainted with him in Vienna after the war. I have acquired a copy of the Encounter issue in question, and I shall report fully in next month’s coldspur.
Research Questions
While the overriding questions: ‘When was Smolka recruited as a Soviet agent?’; and ‘What was his relationship with British Intelligence?’ have driven my research, as I made my first pass through all the material described above, I compiled a list of subsidiary questions, as follows:
Why was Smolka so rapidly approved for naturalization (in contrast to such as Honigmann)?
Why did the authorities ignore the implications of his visits to the Soviet Union and his propagandist book?
Why did MI5 and MI6 show so little interest in Smolka’s travel in 1933, and misrepresent the facts later?
Did Smolka truly assist Philby in the sewers of Vienna in 1934?
Why was Smolka’s presence in Vienna not noticed or recorded by MI6?
Why did Smolka declare that he did not meet Philby until late in 1934?
If he did indeed meet Philby only then, why did they so quickly agree to set up a news agency together?
Why was news of Philby’s open collaboration with Smolka not received with alarm by MI5?
Why did Smolka rise so quickly in government circles, leading to his recruitment by the Foreign Office, and eventually the O.B.E.?
In what manner did Brendan Bracken become convinced of Smolka’s value?
Why were the objections of the MI5 ignored, and why was Smolka’s case deemed ‘difficult’?
Why were the suspicious of leakage from the MoI in 1940, described by Beaumont-Nesbit, ignored?
Why did Rex Leeper, abetted by Vansittart and Peak, support him so actively, ignoring the fact that he surrounded himself with Germans and Austrians at his news agency?
Was it really Moura Budberg who enabled Smolka to be recruited by the MoI?
Why did Vivian of MI6 minimize his importance and influence?
Why did Brooman-White of MI5 trust Philby’s opinion of Smolka in 1942?
Who actually first made contact with Smolka in Vienna in 1948?
Why did Smolka accept such a one-sided contract?
Why did Arthur Martin give him such an inept interrogation in 1961?
Why were the contradictions in his account not picked up?
How did Smolka avoid the Czech show-trials?
How, when he was apparently at death’s door, did Smolka manage to survive another twenty years?
Why were suggestions made that Smolka’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1948 might have been made on secret intelligence business?
Why did MI5 think it might be able to persuade Smolka to ‘defect’ to the British?
Why are so many of Smolka’s activities omitted from his PFs?
When did MI6/MI5 become convinced that Smolka was a Soviet agent?
Why do critics believe Philby’s claim that he recruited Smolka as an NKVD agent in 1939 as ABO?
Why did Graham Greene and Elizabeth Montagu lie about the details of their itinerary in February 1948?
Why did Greene travel to Prague after Vienna, when he was supposed to be in Rome?
What was the role of George Kennedy Young (head of MI6 station in Vienna) at the time of the Greene-Smolka meetings?
(The relevance of several of these may not yet be apparent to the reader, as they derive from a close study of Smolka’s Personal File.)
I thus turn to a detailed analysis of the story of Smolka’s adventure with the United Kingdom, starting in 1930.
Chapter 1:1930-1934– Finding his Feet
Smolka’s Authorization by ‘Der Tag’
A significant fact about Smolka’s arrival at Dover on September 29, 1930 is that he was only twelve days beyond his eighteenth birthday. This was an early age for anyone to start engaging in nefarious activities. Yet his presence was quickly noted by MI5, who received a report in November that Smolka had arrived in Marseilles from Barcelona on August 18, that he had immediately been expelled by the French authorities, on August 20, for taking photographs at the port of Marseilles, and that he was suspected of being an Italian spy. Where he spent the intervening weeks is not clear, but he also came to the notice of the Metropolitan Police when his presence at a meeting of the ‘Friends of India’ society in Trafalgar Square was noticed on November 15. (An MI5 report states that that society ‘is described by I.P.I. as a Socialistic society composed mainly of Quaker cranks and Ghandi [sic, should be ‘Gandhi’] worshippers’.)
Smolka was actually interrogated after this event, and Scotland Yard informed B1b in MI5 of the outcome. Moreover, Smolka misleadingly admitted that he had been detained by the French police after attending a meeting. When the French authorities were consulted, they provided the true story, and added that Smolka had given his occupation as a journalist working for Die Zeitschrift der Neuen Jugend. Smolka produced evidence for the Metropolitan Police that he was attending a course at the London School of Economics, ‘taking a general course as a scholarship student of the Austrian government’. Whether the officials in Vienna knew or approved of their student’s wayward travel and offenses is not stated, but no indication is given that MI5 followed up with the Austrian Embassy to verify Smolka’s claims.
Nevertheless, MI5 increased its surveillance of Smolka, watching his movements, and also applying for a warrant to have his mail opened. They thus learned that he was keen on taking photographs of people in straitened circumstances, that he showed communist sympathies, and that his future bride, Lotty, wrote to him congratulating him on learning Russian. He was successful in getting some of his reports accepted by Austrian periodicals. MI5 also started keeping tabs on some of his friends and associates. His permit required him to leave the country within six months, so he departed from Dover for Ostend on March 25, 1931. MI5 knew from his recent correspondence that his destination was Vienna.
Smolka was away for a couple of years, arriving in Folkestone from Boulogne on May 6, 1933. He was accompanied by his wife, and stated that he was now a journalist for the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. If Smolka had been recruited by the NKVD, early 1933 would have been the obvious time, as the organization was intensifying its infiltration of the Western democracies. Arnold Deutsch had received his training in Moscow in January. The Orlovs had returned to Vienna in March, and, after a short spell in prison, left for Prague and Berlin, and arrived in Geneva in September. In March, Rudolf Katz was sent by Moscow to join Willi Műnzenberg in Paris. He arrived in the UK soon afterwards. In April, Robert Kuczynski fled to Czechoslovakia, then to Geneva, and arrived in the UK at the end of the month. Edith Suschitzky was arrested in Vienna in May, and married Tudor-Hart in August, thereby gaining her British passport. That same month, Deutsch, back in Vienna, recruited the couple as STRELA. In July, Klaus Fuchs was dispatched from Germany to Paris. John Cairncross spent the summer in Vienna. Ignaty Reif was sent to Britain in August.
And it is now that the record starts to take a strange turn. On August 24, Smolka sent a letter to the Under-Secretary of State at the Home office, in which he referred to a recent conversation he had with a Mr. Hoare of that department. He requested that he and his wife be allowed to stay in the country further, given his new role as special correspondent for the Neue Frei Presse to the Worlds [sic] Economic Conference, indicating that they were economically self-sufficient. On September 6, a Mr E. N. Cooper replied to say that the Secretary of State would ‘raise no objection’ to the prolongment of the couple’s stay in the United Kingdom.
Was something being fixed behind the scenes? The statement that no objection would be raised strongly suggests that others might do so. And who was the Mr Hoare with whom Smolka had spoken? Could it be the future Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, who took up that office in 1937? Hoare clearly did not work for the Home Office at that time, since he was Secretary of State for India, but he spoke Russian, and had been a liaison officer inside MI6 to Russian Intelligence during World War I. John Gilmour, a Scottish Unionist, was the Home Secretary between 1932 and 1935, but does not appear to have achieved much of distinction: maybe he did not know exactly what was going on. Hoare himself was deeply involved with the Round Table conferences discussing India’s constitution that summer (a topic of great interest to Smolka, incidentally), and would not naturally have had reason to be distracted by the appeal of an Austrian émigré. Yet, given his questionable status, how Smolka arranged to have any personal discussion with any Hoare of influence, whether working in the Home Office or not, is something of a surprise.
MI5 appeared not to be disarmed by this recognition. On October 6, they requested the GPO to pass on all of Smolka’s correspondence for a fortnight (‘the usual list of letters’). There were only five letters during this period, but four came from Vienna (their contents were not filed). And immediately this fortnight was over, Smolka started to exploit his new status by some provocative travel. He left Folkestone for Boulogne on November 25, returning to Newhaven on December 12. A further batch of over twenty letters had been intercepted during this period, again mostly from Vienna – not all from the NeueFreie Presse. Thereafter the record turns eerily silent, with the next item constituting Smolka’s departure for Boulogne on August 1, and onward to Vienna, at which time the mail interception process resumes.
What do we know from other sources about Smolka’s movements during this time? Modin wrote that Philby met Smolka in Austria in 1934. Foges stated that Smolka worked with Litzy and Kim in the sewers. Drazin indicated that Smolka had met Philby in London in 1933, and that he returned to Vienna a year later. (That could refer to the August trip.) Drazin also claimed with confidence that Smolka presented Litzy to Philby. That could also not be precisely true: Philby arrived in Vienna in late summer, and he met Litzy soon afterwards. But Smolka, who returned to Britain a month before Philby was directed to go to work in Vienna as a courier, could have given Kim an introduction orally before the latter left. Shelden claimed (probably based on what Lotty Smolka told him) that Litzy introduced her future husband to Smolka, thus placing the encounter between mid-January and mid-February. Yet that sounds like a deception: since Litzy was Lotty’s best friend from their schooldays, it seems more probable that Smolka would have recommended that Philby stay with the Kollmanns when he advised him in the summer of 1933. The various testimonies to Smolka’s contribution to subterranean lore would nevertheless seem to show that he had indeed been active in the sewers.
One of two explanations seem possible to me: a) the accounts of Smolka’s work for the Viennese communists that spring of 1934 are pure fantasy; or b) the British authorities covered up the records of the travel of the Smolkas. The evidence in support of the former is flimsy, of ‘dog in the night-time’ character. No one outside the Smolka family appears to have recorded his presence and activity. Why did no one employed by MI6 (either officially or unofficially) notice Smolka’s presence in Vienna, especially since he was close to Litzy and Kim? Would he have attended the wedding? E. H. Cookridge, who was political editor of an unnamed morning newspaper, does not mention him. G. E. R. Gedye apparently did not notice him. The head of MI6 Station Thomas Kendrick apparently sent no report on him, and there were various English-men and -women floating around Vienna, for example Stephen Spender, Hugh and Dora Gaitskell, John Lehmann, Naomi Mitchison, Emma Cadbury, as well as the American Muriel Gardiner, none of whom appeared to detect or remark on his presence.
Yet, if the testimony of Montagu can be relied upon, Smolka drew upon his experiences to write some insightful short stories. And why would his wife and Foges draw attention to such escapades, except perhaps to elevate Smolka’s heroism? (The photographs of him suggest a fastidious character perhaps rather diffident about soiling himself in the sewers.) Yet several questions need answering. Why would the Neue Freie Presse, having just installed a new head in its London bureau, very soon after call him back to Vienna for several months? – unless it had been compliant in the whole endeavour, which is not out of the question. The major piece in the puzzle lies in the behaviour of the British authorities.
Peter Smolka in London (not dressed for the sewers)
Whether or not Smolka did spend some time in Vienna in the spring of 1934, his Personal File, with its utter lack of entries between December 1933 and August 1934 represents incriminating evidence either way. If Smolka (and his wife) did leave the country – and return to it – during that time, the port officials should have recorded the fact, and informed MI5. If they did so, the information was suppressed. And if the couple never left, one would expect conventional monitoring of them to have continued. But there is nothing. Why would MI5, having been surveilling Smolka closely, suddenly be so casual and uninterested in the activities of a known Communist who made frequent trips to the Continent? Moreover, when Smolka gave an account, in his naturalization request of 1938, of all his movements abroad, he omitted any reference to travel between December 1933 and August 1934, which would have constituted a signed perjurious statement if he had indeed visited Vienna.
Was Kendrick, in Vienna, told to turn a blind eye? He has been accused of negligence. In her biography of him, Spymaster, Helen Fry wrote that he overlooked ‘the majority of the prominent, potentially dangerous, communists in Vienna’, which group may have included Smolka. Her focus shifted, however, as she shifted to make the following controversial statement:
It is, however, possible – though not yet definitely proven – that Philby went to Vienna in 1933 to penetrate the communist network for SIS and was, in fact, working for Kendrick.
I discussed these assertions a few months ago, in https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-always-working-for-sis/, and explained why I thought that hypothesis unlikely. Yet I pointed out that the earlier 2014 version of the book contained an even more shocking claim, made to Fry by a source who wished to remain anonymous, that Philby had ‘always been working for us [i.e. MI6]’. The person told her that it would ‘destroy the book if you say so openly’. Fry did as much, however, by quoting him, and then decided to remove this provocative assertion from the sanitized edition. My conclusion was that she had indeed been nobbled.
Of course her informant may have been a relic who had had ‘intelligence’ passed on to him from the ‘robber barons’ of MI6 who believed that Philby was innocent, and claimed that he had been manipulated by MI6 to pass on misinformation to the Russians. Yet it was a bit ridiculous to assert, as late as 2014, decades after Philby’s escape, confessional memoir, and death, that he had always been a loyal servant of MI6. After all, what did the informant know of 1933? What did ‘always’ mean? Thus the warning may simply have been a traditional smokescreen by current MI6 officers to cause as much confusion as possible. After all, if there was anyone who ‘had always been working’ for the KGB or any of its predecessor structures, it was Kim Philby.
Moreover, there are important issues of tradecraft to be considered. If Philby, as E. H. Cookridge reported, told him that he had close contacts with the Soviet Consul, Ivan Vorobyev, and Vladimir Alexeievich Antonov-Ovseyenko, later to be revealed as an OGPU officer, it was remarkably stupid of the Englishman. It caused a breach between him, on the one hand, and Cookridge and his anti-communist friends on the other: Philby must have misjudged his colleague’s probable reaction. Thus, if MI6 had in reality tried to exploit Philby’s presence in subversive circles to infiltrate the Communist organization in Vienna, Hendrick must have firmly believed a) that Philby was naturally loyal to the British democratic cause, and to MI6; and b) that the Communists could not possibly have any inkling that Philby was working secretly for British Intelligence. If, as seems clear, Philby did spill the beans, he had been remarkably poorly briefed. Indeed, Cookridge assumed that Philby had been compromised by the summer of 1934, and had to leave Vienna in a hurry [in fact in April]. It was more likely that MI6, if it had put out feelers to Philby, suspected that their game may have been rumbled. If the OGPU had smelled a rat, Philby would have been permanently discarded – unless he had been able to convince his contacts at the Consulate that he was in fact loyal to them, and that he was cleverly manipulating Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service. That would suggest, of course, that he had already been recruited by the Soviets.
All this makes the release of information on the Philby wedding to the Austrian Press even more poignant and dramatic. The item (see below) was published in the Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung on May 25, 1934. I extract, highlight, and translate or paraphrase the more significant portions of it. (Readers should recall that Philby had been married to Litzy on February 24, 1934, and the pair had left Vienna on April 28.) The headline reads: ‘A Viennese woman marries into the court of Ibn Saud’, which must have come as a rather startling revelation to those who knew the young leftist firebrand. Litzy was already an agent of the OGPU, was under strict police surveillance, and had probably been set up as part of a honeytrap to capture the young Briton, which makes the following story even more absurd.
Report on Philby Marriage: ‘Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung’, May 26, 1934
The column, having introduced Litzy Kollman [sic] as a student, mentions her marriage to ‘Mr H. K. Philby’, who is identified solely by virtue of his father, a two-decade-long advisor to the King of Hejaz, who had enjoyed such great influence with the King that he was frequently dubbed ‘the secret Chancellor of Ibn Saud’. This was not strictly true. Ibn Saud was the King of Saudi Arabia, and he had annexed the kingdom of Hejaz a couple of years beforehand. No matter. The writer then attempts to set up Litzy as a dedicated scholar with ambitions of becoming a legal expert with the practice of Dr. Joseph Zitter. According to the report, she then encountered Philby in her circle of student-colleagues, ‘a young, elegant Englishman, who, after Eton and Cambridge, and after the obligatory world tour, had come to Vienna to attend the world-famous College of Diplomacy’. Who provided the writer with this nonsense is not clear.
Naturally, the couple fell in love, and the young Viennese treasure is reported to be no longer in her home city. “She is already installed in the lordly mansion of the Philbys, where her husband prepares himself for entry to Great Britain’s diplomatic service”. The writer continues: “Inspired, and still amazed by her fresh good fortune, Lizzy Philby writes to her friends in Vienna of the fairy-tale luxury that surrounds her [no flea-bitten pad in Hampstead, then, under the eye of a sternly disapproving mother-in-law], and also of the long journey that awaits her: H. K. Philby, her husband, is shortly to be transferred ‘with special disposition’ to the court of Ibn Saud.” The column then switches to a long explanation of the history of the region, and of Philby Senior’s role since the end of World War I.
Harry St. J. Philby is described as being ‘a good son of Great Britain and a good friend of Ibn Saud’, but in reality Philby worked mostly against British interests. He opposed the Balfour Declaration, and he worked behind Britain’s back in seeking out agreements on oil concessions with the USA, and even with Spain and Nazi Germany. There are veiled references to Nazi affinities: Philby père is quoted as writing that he considered Ibn Saud ‘the outstanding Arab “Fűhrer” and ‘founder of the incipient Arab “Reich”’ – all very deliberate and weighty words. Readers of the column are advised to watch developments in this sphere closely. “They should expect to hear a lot more about the Arab conqueror Ibn Saud, and, according to past events Philby will surely loom in the background, but not to one side.”
And how does this scenario affect our young, happy couple? The conclusion is muddled, and sentimental. “The petite Viennese Lizzy Kollmann, now Mrs. Philby, will soon reside at the court of the Arab ruler. Whatever the British Foreign Office may demand, and however Arab interests may interfere with Lizzy Philby’s private life – some time during the next year she will return to Vienna: H. St. J. Philby [sic: should be ‘H.K.’] has promised that to his mother-in-law, Mrs Kollmann. And H. St. Philby, the secret Chancellor of Hejaz, has confirmed it.”
How the British Embassy thought it could get away with this charade is unbelievable. After all, there were several Britons still around in Vienna who knew enough about the real life of Litzy and Kim – including the fact that she was not a Kollman at the time of her marriage, and that the innocent young student had already married and divorced one Karl Friedmann. In Treason in the Blood, Anthony Cave Brown wrote of the marriage: “All who were interested heard about it and gossiped about it, and the British community in Vienna was astonished.” It seems that Kendrick must have been under pressure to show that the British authorities had no knowledge of any subversive activities on the part of Kim, and that he needed to present him as a true cion of his right-wing father. It was trying to send a subtle message to the Soviet Consulate. Yet the column is an extraordinarily clumsy creation. Why did they think the Soviets would be taken in? And why was everyone silent over this disinformation? The visitors from the UK surely must have read it. For example, it is not clear how long Cookridge stayed in Vienna (he was later incarcerated in Dachau and Buchenwald by the Gestapo), but he made no mention of it in The Third Man.
All this sub-plot about the Philby wedding leads back to Smolka, if indeed he were still around. If so, he must surely have read the piece, and he would have enjoyed discussing it with his handlers at the Soviet Consulate. Maybe he even had a hand in composing it, with his journalistic skills, and love of intrigue. For one has to start asking the very searching question that this pattern of activity provokes. Did MI6 believe that they had a similar influence over Smolka at this time as they did over Philby? Had they made overtures to him, back in England in 1933, with the idea that he might become an informer for them in the Communist camp? And did they then start to dangle his pal Philby in a similar manner when they discovered what he was up to with Litzy? And had that part of the plot even been dreamed up in London?
I shall return to that controversial conjecture next month, and here tidy up the loose ends of 1934. In any case, Arnold Deutsch left Vienna for London in May, quickly on the heels of the newlyweds (some write that he left before them). If we are to believe Philby’s account of the events that followed, the spy was recruited after some furtive meetings with Deutsch, arranged through the intermediary Edith Tudor-Hart. Yet that schemery was not necessary: it is much more likely that Deutsch was dispatched to verify the determination and loyalty of the OGPU’s new recruit after the rumours in Vienna. Moreover, Philby’s timetable is impossible: if he left Vienna on April 28, and travelled via Prague and Paris by motorcycle (as Cookridge recorded), he would not have been able to attend the May Day parade in Camden (as Philby later claimed).
An alternative scenario, as described briefly in the later chapters of memoir by Philby (published in The Private Life of Kim Philby) suggests that he and Litzy travelled by train, via Berlin and Paris.
Meanwhile, what were the Smolkas doing during the summer, how did they survive, and when did they return to the UK? No record appears to exist. Maybe he was being maintained safely by his Soviet protectors until they gained verification that his comrade from the sewers was reliable, and that it was safe for him to return to the United Kingdom. The owners of the Neue Frei Presse were presumably still complaisant. And then Smolka returned to Vienna in early August, 1934. Perhaps his task was to inform his bosses, in person, that the ring was safe, to confirm that Philby was reliable, and had been formally recruited by Deutsch. For the Comintern wheels were in motion again.
The very same day that he returned, on September 4, Litzy left England for France, and then Spain. Orlov left Vienna for Paris, then London, in mid-September, and his family joined him soon afterwards. Guy Burgess (who had written to Isaiah Berlin in May, informing him that Philby had just returned from ‘fighting in Vienna’) wrote to Berlin early in September to let him know that Philby was staying with him. The PEACH files even inform us that Litzy returned to Vienna, for one month, on September 21 – a dangerous exploit had she not been protected by her British passport. In October, Edith Tudor-Hart recruited Arthur Wynn at Oxford, and Philby was instructed to introduce Donald Maclean to Ignaty Reif. On November 7, the MASK traffic reported that MARY (Litzy) had arrived back safely in London.
MI5 did not appear unduly surprised or excited about Smolka’s re-appearance, as if it were completely routine for a communist under surveillance to have taken another trip to a highly volatile city. One might expect urgent confabulations with MI6 to have taken place: if they did, nothing has survived in MI5 files. A week after Smolka’s return, ‘Tar’ Robertson requested of the G.P.O. a ‘return’ of all correspondence addressed to him, such intervention to last for a fortnight. This is an unusual formulation: a warrant for inspection of a suspect’s mail conventionally ran as follows: “I hereby authorize and request you to detain, open and produce for my inspection all postal packets and telegrams addressed to . . .”. Similar requests had been made in October and November 1933: it seems that a list of all correspondence, with senders identified only if they appeared on the envelope, was the result. Vienna again features strongly, and there is an intriguing letter arriving on September 17 from Guetan in Spain, against which someone has scribbled a half-obscured note mentioning ‘Lizy’. In any case, Robertson was interested enough to request the Home Office file (638153) on Smolka, which contained his Alien record, and the correspondence with the Home Office from November 1933.
Jasper Harker then picked up the baton, writing to Sir Arthur Willert at the Foreign Office for a list of all accredited representatives of the Neue Frei Presse. Willert was under the impression that Smolka, the chief representative of the publication, had been chief for some years, and had just announced that he had hired an assistant, Dr. Robert Ehrenzweig. In a handwritten note, Willert added that Smolka is ‘rather a bore, but decent’, and had an office at the Times premises on Printing House Square. No obvious action results from this inquiry.
As all this busy re-energizing of networks was taking place, and MI5 rather laboriously started paying attention to Smolka again, he then took what might have appeared to be an unnecessarily bold step. Writing as London Editor of the Neue Freie Presse, on notepaper listing its address as Printing House Square, on November 15 he alerted the Undersecretary of State at the Home Office to his intention to form the London Continental News Ltd., along with his British colleague Mr. H. A. R. Philby. He hopes that the Home Office will not raise any objections, and adds in a handwritten addendum: “I have at the same time informed the Press Department of the Foreign Office on this matter.”
While it may seem a little premature for Smolka to have informed the Foreign Office before he had gained permission from the Home Office, this seems a remarkably flamboyant way of drawing attention to his association with Philby. Was it really necessary? The formal response is not included in the file, but extracts from the Home Office papers indicate that a letter was sent to him on January 3, 1935, stating that the Office had no objections, and Harker concurred with that decision.
As so often occurs with these sagas concerning British Intelligence and Communist agents and spies (Ursula Kuczynski, Tudor-Hart, Litzy and Kim Philby, Smolka), one has to pose the challenging questions: Why was the OGPU/NKVD/KGB so brazen in the gestures it threw out? And why were MI5 and MI6 so sluggish and inattentive in their response? It was surely unnecessary for Smolka to draw the attention of the British authorities to his close association with someone who had been watched contributing to leftist subversion in Vienna. One can only assume that he did it as an act of bravado, to prove to himself (and maybe his bosses) that he and Philby were both considered harmless.
As for MI5, who clearly maintained an active file on Philby, the passivity over this letter from Smolka, however superficially uncontroversial, is astounding. The letter was not weeded out at the time. Either someone who had no idea who Philby was (despite the recognition that he had been allocated a PF) added it to the file in innocence, and no senior officer checked what was happening. Alternatively, someone in authority decided that this was all above board, and gave no cause for concern. And why did the document not ring alarm-bells when it was discovered in the late 1940s (as it surely must have been), when Philby began to fall under suspicion? Yet, even in 2015, no one deemed that the publication of the letter was damaging, and that the lack of activity thereafter might prompt some awkward questions.
I offer another explanation for the remarkable number of hints about Philby’s misdemeanours to be found in the archive. MI5 officers were dismayed by the conduct of their ex-chief, Dick White, when he was transferred to lead the rival organization, MI6, and later shown to have been taken in by Anthony Blunt during the war. White then compounded his guilt by allowing Philby to flee unpunished, and then by initiating a damaging search within MI5 for the fictitious ‘agent ELLI’, bringing Hollis, Mitchell, McBarnet and others under suspicion. A generous sprinkling of notes incriminating Philby, and thus embarrassing MI6, was made across various files, awaiting someone in posterity to integrate them into a coherent story, and thereby clear MI5 of any further betrayal.
The last observation I make at this juncture is that another familiar pattern shows itself – the fact that senior officers in MI5 (and probably MI6) made decisions of highly strategic import that they did not confide to their underlings. Thus we encounter the familiar phenomenon of organizational dissonance: a story of eager young officers asking searching questions, but being discouraged when their managers try to diminish the significance of their inquiries, and attribute the suspicious signals to misunderstanding or some kind of prejudice.
Conclusion
This investigation has perhaps been the most challenging that I have ever set myself. The source material is cluttered with lies, deceptions, omissions and evasions. Yet behind it all there must be a narrative that makes sense. There always is. All the actors must have believed that each step that they undertook was either furthering their career (or perhaps preventing it from coming to a grisly end), contributing to the success of the agency for which they worked, or even helping the cause of the nation or movement to which they were ultimately committed. Their priorities were normally in that order. Yet I do not believe that any documents are suddenly going to come to light that will undeniably and permanently clear matters up.
Those readers who have been following my posts over the past few years will probably be able to guess where this line of research is leading. Next month I shall present my analysis of the final five chapters of the Smolka story. In the meantime, however, I appeal to you to get in touch with me – on errors of fact, on mistakes of logic or interpretation, on overlooked source material, on misunderstood procedures. I need all the help that I can get.
This Special Bulletin consists of the first two chapters of a report ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’, the culmination of a project to investigate a mysterious airplane crash in Norway in September 1944. The events were first described in June 2022 on this website at https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-the-airmen-who-died-twice/. The complete article contains eight chapters: I shall publish two more in each of the following three months. In that way, the full account shall be available for the British authorities to respond to in time for the solemn eightieth anniversary of the crash of PB416 at Saupeset in Norway on September 17, 2024. I believe the relatives of those crew members killed in the accident deserve a proper apology for the deception and attempt at a cover-up that quickly followed the incident.
I want to give full credit to the role that my collaborator, Nigel Austin, played in this research project. The original idea was his. He discovered some traces of the clumsily muddled story, and uniquely identified the contradictions in what little archival material existed. He then doggedly chased down resources and spokespersons for various organizations that were involved. He contacted me for assistance in providing some method and structure to his endeavour, and I was gripped enough by the drama and paradoxes in his outline to want to work with him. Unfortunately, some personal problems prevented Nigel from completing his side of our agreement, and I decided to take over the project before the details escaped from my overtaxed brain. I thus performed some original research on my own, and also turned Nigel’s observations into a narrative that I hope both instructs and explains. I also believed that it was very important that the story be published well before the eightieth anniversary, and, since no commitment from any historical magazine had been secured in time, I decided to use coldspur as the medium.
Readers will notice that the report lacks any Footnotes. I took this approach in order to broaden the appeal of the text. However, I believe that the narrative is adequately sprinkled with references that will convince readers of the scholarly nature of the investigation. Sources can be supplied, and I shall list them separately, later. On the other hand, many of the communications that must have occurred are not traceable, and probably never will be. That is in the nature of highly confidential government undertakings. Thus the work is a hypothesis lacking firm proofs, but offering enough credible evidence to provide as watertight an argument as can be expected. I hope that, through the publication of these eight chapters, readers around the globe may be prompted to discover and present fresh memoirs, letters, or other documents that will flesh out the story. Or, of course, blow it apart. Because historiography is never finished.
Appearing here on February 15: Chapter 3 (‘The RAF in Yagodnik’) and Chapter 4 (‘The Crash at Saupeset’). Enter the date in your calendar now! And, if you have observations or details to add to the story, please send them to me at antonypercy@aol.com.
Chapter 1: Introduction and Historical Background
The saga of ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’ is a story about a rash deviation from a serious World War II aerial operation that went horribly wrong. It is a tale about hazardous decisions made under pressure, in a climate of tensions across political, geographical, linguistic, cultural and temporal boundaries. It contains aspects of deep secrecy, betrayal, deception and self-delusion, and has ever since remained a mystery to most British government officials who have had to deal with its legacy. And, above all, it is a story of sacrifice, of brave young men who, having committed to risk their lives in genuine opposition to a real enemy, perished in an unnecessary and highly risky enterprise that should never have seen the light of day.
Battleship Tirpitz
The official – and well-documented – engagement was Operation PARAVANE, which was prepared in August 1944, and took place the following month. PARAVANE was a project undertaken by the RAF to bomb the Nazi battleship, Tirpitz, lying in a Norwegian fjord, and ready to attack the British-American convoys that were transporting valuable matériel to Stalin, via the ports of Murmansk and Archangel. After the foray against the Tirpitz was completed, launched from Soviet territory, and a reduced set of aircraft was being prepared to bring the airmen home to the United Kingdom, a decision was made to re-route one of the aircraft over Swedish airspace to a location over southern Norway, where two parachutists were to be dropped to undertake a dangerous mission. Having arrived at its destination, the plane crashed into a mountain, and all aboard lost their lives. This series of articles offers an explanation of what events and negotiations led to the disaster.
At the time that Operation PARAVANE was executed, the war against the Axis forces was considered by most military experts to have been nominally won. The Western Allies had made a successful re-entry to Normandy in June 1944, and were advancing steadily towards the German borders. By the end of August, Paris had been re-occupied. The Soviet Red Army had advanced on a broad front from Bucharest to the River Dvina in Latvia, and General Rokossovsky’s Army was approaching Warsaw. British, Canadian and American troops had begun to cross the Gothic Line in the Apennines of Italy. Inside Germany, opposition to Hitler was mounting. On July 20, the plot to assassinate him had taken place, although the dictator escaped with injuries. The Allies demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ meant, however, that many more months of intense fighting would take place before the Germans capitulated.
Great Britain and the Soviet Union had always enjoyed a fragile relationship in the conflict with Nazi Germany. When the contradictions of the Nazi-Soviet pact were unveiled by Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941, Churchill had immediately expressed urgent support for his erstwhile ideological foe, who had helped Germany with valuable matériel in its assault on Britain. Stalin had responded by quickly making unreasonable demands on Britain, and used his network of spies to gain intelligence, and his agents of influence and ‘useful idiots’ to further the Soviet cause with the British citizenry. After making a private foolish and unauthorized commitment to Stalin about launching a ‘second front’ in France way before the Allies were ready, Churchill was continuously nervous about the dictator’s moods. Yet, after the Soviets repelled the German advance at Stalingrad in February 1943, the balance of power shifted markedly.
In this context, Churchill’s desire to destroy the battleship Tirpitz might be viewed as a bit obsessive. The U-Boat threat in the Atlantic had been largely eliminated, but Britain was still committed to delivering matériel to Stalin through the Arctic Convoys, and the presence of Tirpitz at Altenfjord in Northern Norway represented a large menace to their safety. After the disastrous scattering of the convoy to Murmansk, PQ17, in July 1942, the convoys had been suspended for a few months, and again in the summer of 1943, because of preparations for Operation TORCH. On October 1, 1943, however, Churchill, always eager to appease the demanding Stalin, had assured the Soviet leader that they would resume in mid-November. Moreover, the Soviets had been difficult and prickly over the British presence in Murmansk, ordering two communications stations there to close. In April 1944, British aircraft had tried to attack the Tirpitz from Scottish bases with Barracuda bombers, but they had caused little damage. They followed up during the summer with six further futile attempts, at considerable expense of fuel and ammunition, but were foiled by bad weather and the ship’s defences.
Shrewd observers – especially in the War Office – had already recognized that the Soviet Union was going to be an ideological and maybe real adversary after the war, as Stalin’s plans for subjugating the countries of eastern Europe became clear. Despite the Foreign Office’s enduring belief that Stalin and his commissars would behave like English gentlemen if they were approached with a spirit of cooperation, the Soviets remained uncompromising, suspicious, secretive, and very protective of their country’s subjects. Any intrusion from the West was interpreted as espionage, and as an initiative designed to subvert the Communist empire. Attempts to share intelligence between Britain’s services (i.e. SOE and MI6) and the NKVD had collapsed in mutual incriminations, and SOE was ready to withdraw its station in Moscow in the spring of 1944. Thus the opportunity for cooperation over bombing raids on the Tirpitz would have seemed to be unpromising.
Such qualms would be reinforced by the scandalous behaviour of the Soviet Union during the Warsaw Uprising, which had started on August 1. It was on the Poles’ behalf that Britain had declared war on Germany back in September 1939, and a vigorous Polish government-in-exile in London was keen to see it resume a traditional role in a freed Poland after the Germans had been expelled. Churchill (and, to a lesser extent Roosevelt) was anxious to provide all the help he could to the beleaguered Poles in Warsaw, but was restricted in having to launch support flights from bases in the United Kingdom and in Brindisi, Italy. Stalin had other ideas: he had created the so-called Polish Committee for National Liberation on July 22, and planned to install a Communist regime in Warsaw when the Soviets took the city from Germany. He refused to offer any support to the rebels from his troops on the other side of the Vistula, and rejected Churchill’s requests for landing-grounds behind Soviet-held territory. Stalin was now more universally accepted, even by Britain’s Foreign Office, as an untrustworthy partner.
Thus the Cold War could be said to have started, not with the revelations about Soviet atom spies in September 1945, not at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, but on the banks of the Vistula in September 1944. When Churchill later met Stalin at the ‘Tolstoy’ talks in Moscow in early October, a rather cynical carve-up of Europe was arranged. At this convention Stalin also made stringent demands for a new Polish-Russian border, roughly equating to the old Curzon Line, but forcing the important city of Lvov to be on the Russian side. Churchill was required to return to London to take this dismal message to the Poles, having already upset them with his refusal to challenge Stalin on the circumstances of the Katyn massacres of 1940. The political climate for the British gaining a high degree of collaboration from the NKVD and Soviet Air Force on an aerial mission that required the use of Soviet airfields for an assault on the Tirpitz would therefore seem to have been entirely hostile.
Yet some measure of cooperation had taken root in the summer of 1944. A combined military mission to Moscow had been established as long ago as July 1941. At that time the role of the 30 Mission (as it was dubbed) was more of an intelligence-gathering exercise, as the British War Office and Foreign Office believed then that the Soviet Union would collapse in a matter of weeks before the Nazi onslaught. It was led by a rather foppish Major Macfarlane, whose intelligence background irritated his hosts. In April 1944, however, just as NKVD-SOE relationships had broken dramatically apart, a Lieutenant Abercrombie was sent out to try to define some manner of shared objectives. These background negotiations turned out to be pivotal for the ability of Bomber Command to make rapid changes to its plans at the beginning of September 1944. After the success using the Tallboy bomb in raids on French ports, a fresh approach using these new weapons was considered, initially involving bombers stretching their fuel resources by flying again from Lincolnshire and Scotland to the northern fjords of Norway.
It was in this context that the plans for Operation PARAVANE were made.
Chapter 2: Planning for PARAVANE
Tirpitz in Kafjord, inner to Altenfjord
It was only after June 1944, when successful operations using the 12,000 lb. Tallboy bomb were carried out in France, that the Royal Air Force started to consider using the weapon against the German battleship Tirpitz, berthed at Altenfjord in northern Norway. Yet there was a catch: the only aircraft that could carry such a heavy bomb was a modified version of the Avro Lancaster. After detailed analysis RAF Bomber Command concluded in August that an operation to deploy a squadron of Lancasters for a direct raid from Scotland was not feasible because of the aircraft’s fuel capacity. They thus considered using a base in the northern Soviet Union, Vaenga 1, near Murmansk, as an intermediate refuelling station after the raid.
This airfield, Vaenga 1, was already known to the RAF, as it had been used by Coastal Command (151 Wing) back in 1941, shortly after the Soviet Union became an ally. Hampdens and Mosquitoes had been sent there for training Soviet crews. In April 1943, Coastal Command had evaluated Operation HIGHBALL, using the newly formed 618 Squadron with specially modified Mosquito aircraft, and the Barnes Wallis-designed bouncing bomb, to attack the Tirpitz. Vaenga had been considered as a possible destination, or even launching-site for the operation, but concerns were expressed about the security aspects of exposing technological secrets to the Soviets, and for a variety of reasons the project was abandoned.
Hurricanes at Vaenga Airfield
At the instigation of the Americans, who first came up with the idea of using Soviet bases for shuttle bombing, General Ismay, at the Moscow Conference of October-November 1943, had made a request for the provision of such bases on Russian territory. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also made a request for the Russians to exchange codes and procedures for communicating weather information, and instructed the US and GB Missions in Moscow to follow up. In April 1944, the question of bombing the Tirpitz was raised by Admiral Fisher at the first Mission Conference held by General Burrows (who had replaced General Martel in March). In May Burrows started defining procedures for how airmen stranded in Soviet territory should identify themselves, suggesting strongly that some agreement for the RAF to operate over Russia had been worked out. Briefly, negotiations appeared to improve, as the Soviets articulated plans for attacking the Germans in Northern Norway, which the British believed might assist the BODYGUARD deception. While that venture came to nothing, by August 1944 it appears to have been Bomber Command’s understanding that gaining approval for an operation that required landing on Soviet soil would be a formality. A message dated August 28 indicates that permission would nevertheless have to be sought through the Mission in Moscow.
The formal request was made on September 1, for an operation scheduled to take place on September 7 – an alarmingly short period for gaining approval, and then planning and implementing all the support and infrastructure required. While that approval appeared to be very quickly forthcoming, however, a setback occurred. Vaenga was quickly deemed to be unsuitable. The same day, Air Vice-Marshal Walmsley of Bomber Command, working on a survey recently undertaken by a Squadron Leader in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, wrote to Air Commodore Bufton in the Air Ministry requesting that alternatives in the Archangel area be investigated. The primary obstacle seemed to be that Vaenga’s proximity to the target meant that it could be exposed to raids from the German Air Force (although it should not have needed photographic research to confirm that). Moreover, the runways were probably of inferior quality.
Yagodnik Airfield
The outcome was that from a shortlist of a few other airfields, Yagodnik, on an island south-west of Archangel, almost 400 miles from Murmansk, rapidly became the favourite. It possessed a solid runway that could be extended to 1500 yards – shorter than that at Vaenga, but adequate, as the minimum length required was 1400 yards. One intriguing fact is found in a report describing the airfield, dated as far back as May 22, 1944. That survey pointed out that Yagodnik had been used by fighters and bombers, specifically the Petlyakov PE-8, a rather clumsy and accident-prone heavy bomber formally known as the TB-7. The fact that British personnel had been given permission to inspect such facilities, without any accusations of spying, suggests that negotiations for possible use by the RAF had been going on for some time. That may explain why Air Marshall Harris could take for granted at this late stage that the Soviets would agree to such an initiative, despite their customarily extreme wariness of foreigners. Any such move would have had to be approved by Stalin, and the role of 30 Mission as an intermediary in Moscow reinforces that assumption.
The willingness of Stalin to cooperate needs to be analyzed in the context of events in the recent past. Chapter 1 of this story described the ill feeling that had been engendered by his lack of support for the air drops of his western allies, who were trying to assist the Warsaw Uprising. Yet a lesser known scheme involving the United States at Poltava (an airbase in the Ukraine, west of Kharkiv) should also be taken into account. This precedent for the use of Soviet airbases had recently occurred as Operation FRANTIC, whereby the Soviets granted rights to the USA Air Force to conduct bombing-raids from Poltava on German territory between June and September 1944. This operation was not without controversy, however: the Americans were abused by the Soviets, especially when, on June 21, Soviet air defences failed to prevent a highly destructive raid on US aircraft by German airplanes, all of which escaped intact. Moreover, by that time, with the Soviet land forces moving close to Germany, the value of the base had sharply diminished. The important manufacturing targets identified by the Soviets were actually closer to Great Britain than Poltava.
Poltava Airfield
What is more, the Soviets had exploited the presence of American aircraft on their soil by stealing technology secrets. In the light of their own very weak capabilities in this domain, they were keenly interested in the American technique of strategic bombing. Stalin issued strict instructions that every detail of American advanced technology be recorded by the Soviet Air Force, and the latter salvaged materials from aircraft that had crash-landed on Russian soil. They also learned all about the procedures of American ground-to-air-to-ground communications. Thus the opportunity to learn from the RAF about the Tallboy bomb and its method of delivery would have been highly valuable for future Soviet military capabilities. Stalin may have been sympathetic to the project to eliminate Tirpitz, but he had more devious goals in cooperating with Bomber Command. While the vozhd was extremely wary of any Soviet citizens’ being exposed to foreign influences, and the NKGB and SMERSH were trained to consider all such persons on their soil as spies, the arrangement of procuring advanced British technology on Russian soil (or swamp) would deliver more important prizes.
In fact, a more detailed examination of the War Diary of 30 Mission indicates that Stalin had become a more encouraging force behind the project for launching air operations over Norway. When General Burrows took over from the rather ineffectual General Martel, he started to introduce more discipline and determination into his dealings with the Soviets, including better treatment for casualties from convoy operations, and a loosening of the absurd rules about the issuance of visas to returning British officers. He pursued more aggressively the return of radio equipment seized by Soviet customs officials. And, as mentioned above, he started seeking procedures for assisting British aircrew members, possibly stranded on Soviet soil, to help identify themselves to the Red Army or the NKGB, a measure that must indicate that he expected British planes to be operating over Soviet territory. The Soviets were habitually unco-operative, but Burrows learned that they responded better to hard bargaining.
In any case, following the positive signal from the Kremlin, more detailed preparations were briskly made. To accompany the squadrons of Lancasters, Liberator aircraft would be required to carry maintenance engineers and spares. Group Captain McMullen was made responsible for the discipline, quartering and messing of all crews, and was scheduled to fly out in a Liberator in advance of the Lancaster squadrons. His role was to establish communications protocols, and rules for the use of beacons, and relay them to the UK, so that the arriving aircraft could safely find their way to Yagodnik. He had to arrange for the provision of fuel and oil to supply the aircraft for their journey home. He was also to be responsible for dispatching the operational air party on its return flight, or should the original operation have been abortive, on a repeat operation. He was to keep in close contact with British Naval authorities in Archangel and the Air Attaché in Moscow. All in all, it was an astonishingly complex and difficult task to be completed in just a few days, with issues of terrain, security, politics, language and electronic communications to be sorted out. Despite all the challenges, on September 7, the Operational Order was issued for all aircraft to be moved to the forward bases at Lossiemouth, Kinloss and Milltown.
Yet a very late revision to the plan occurred. As a further complication, Bomber Command had, after intense calculations and trials, concluded on September 11 that PARAVANE would better be launched from inside Soviet territory (and not simply use such bases for refuelling). The reason offered later was that the weather was primarily responsible, but also because the closeness of the Russian bases to northern Norway was less demanding on fuel requirements. In addition, the location would enable a surprise, and thus potentially more successful, attack from the south-east, since German Radio-Detection Finding apparatus would be less effective in spotting raids from that direction. Thus the new plan required the squadrons to fly directly to the Archangel area, there to rest and refuel, before launching the attack on the Tirpitz, and then returning to Yagodnik.
Operation PARAVANE (revised)
Who actually conceived this new plan is an enigma: the conclusions appeared to have been arrived at without consulting the Soviets. More sympathetic messages had recently been arriving from Stalin, however. At the end of August, he had floated the idea of creating an International Air Corps, to which Churchill responded enthusiastically. And on September 9, Stalin had announced that he would allow Allied planes to be launched from Ukrainian territory to support the Warsaw uprising – a hopelessly late gesture to save the Poles, but an indication that the presence of the RAF in northern Russia would now be treated more positively. This move was all the more significant since the Soviet Foreign Minister Vyshinski had recently forbidden any US planes assisting the Warsaw Uprising from returning to their base at Poltava.
This change of plan also presents some paradoxes. The archive does not state who made the decision: some historians claim it was Harris. At the end of August, Air Vice-Marshal Cochrane had been involved in intense trials with Squadron-Leader Tait that suggest that he had set out to ‘prove’ that the Tirpitz would be out of range, as if he had been commissioned to provide evidence for a decision already made. Despite coming to conclusions, presumably, that a direct flight to Altenfjord for the assault before landing in northern Russia would not be feasible, the existing plan must have been passed up to Harris for him to adjudicate. Why did Cochrane not propose an alternative plan? He either a) wanted the whole operation called off; b) was not aware of the possibility of an alternative approach by launching the attack from Soviet territory; or c) was party to an elaborate ruse, and pretended to play the innocent.
One account suggests that the USAAF had been the Soviets’ preferred choice as a collaborator for the assault on the Tirpitz. While Stalin did not have serious designs on occupying Norway (he was not even considering re-entering his contiguous neighbour Finland, despite the fact that it had been an adversary during the war), he was interested in gaining part of the Finnmark territory to the North, which would give him access to valuable mines, but yield a short frontier with Norway. In this regard, he still considered the Tirpitz a threat. But he disparaged the multiple, expensive, but unsuccessful series of raids on the battleship by the British, and hoped that the Americans might consider a second base in northern Russia. The Americans had been too chastened by the Poltava experience, however, and, with Germany on the run, Roosevelt was not interested in further buccaneering exploits in the European theatre of war. Thus Stalin turned to the British.
The archival material does suggest that a higher authority was involved. Harris’s memorandum announcing the change is directed to the Admiralty, with a copy sent to Bottomley at the Air Ministry. A memorandum from the Air Ministry informing 30 Mission of the change of plan has a time-stamp of three minutes earlier, however, indicating perhaps that both Bomber Command and the Air Ministry had recently been informed of the new directives. The Air Ministry memorandum attributed the change of plan to ‘weather conditions’ in the target area being too variable: Harris does not provide that as a reason. Moreover, Harris does not take responsibility in his own text, writing instead that ‘It has now been decided’ that the bombers will fly directly ‘from English bases’ (i.e. not via Lossiemouth or Unst) to Yagodnik. The implication is that the decision to launch the attack from Yagodnik had already been made, and it was the details on the route that were important. It is clear, from the anomalous and incongruous cables exchanged between Bomber Command, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty, the Naval Station in Murmansk, and 30 Mission in Moscow that an elaborate smokescreen was being created to conceal the secrecy and irregularity of the agreement with Stalin to use Soviet bases. The apparent rapid decision about a direct flight would have alarming and fateful consequences.
A Memorial : The Shooting of Protestors at a Soviet Prison Camp in December 1923
In Memoriam: On December 19, 1923, six prisoners were shot at the Savvatievsky monastery compound, which was located on an island in the White Sea and had been converted by the Cheka into a camp for political prisoners. The four men and two women, from ages 23 to 37, had staged an open protest about living conditions at the camp, and either perished on the spot, or died soon after from their wounds. The remembrance of this event is especially poignant since Memorial, the Russian organization that has striven to keep alive records of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, such as this, has been shut down by President Putin.
While I wish all coldspur readers the compliments of the season, I warn them that this bulletin does contain some cheerless, even curmudgeonly, observations.
The Personal Files (PFs) maintained by MI5 represent a rich but often enigmatic resource. They are sometimes converted into a new series of identities in the KV/2 class, KV being the Reference for the Security Service (MI5). Thus most descriptors of individual KV/2 units will declare the number of the PF from which its content is assembled. Yet many PFs have not been released: there exists no master list of such files, but some of their identities can be easily detected since they appear as unredacted annotations made on the pages of many released files. Furthermore, the system used for PFs appears to have allocated numbers in sequential order, with the result that the approximate date of the creation of ‘ghost’ PFs can be quite readily determined.
For example, coldspur readers will by now be familiar with the PF number allocated to Litzy Philby, 68261, since handwritten inscriptions made on items in the Tudor-Hart files (and in others) request that a copy of certain items (letters, memoranda, etc.) be placed in her file – which she may well have shared with her husband. Thus a stab could be made at establishing when her file was opened by studying the dates of released files of PFs holding numbers close to hers. In fact I have started to create a spreadsheet in which I record the PF numbers and their corresponding KV/2 identities, and if a PF has not been released, I enter it in sequence with a reference to the KV in which it appears. I thus have codes for a) unreleased, b) released but undigitized, and c) released and digitized entries, and, if possible, a date on which the file was created. (Undigitized files have to be inspected on site, or, since I have not travelled to Kew for several years, to be photographed professionally by my London-based researcher.)
I have found anomalies. For instance, it appears that a bevy of PFs was created after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, with numbers allocated, as the investigation gathered steam, to suspected associates as well as the escapees themselves, such as Philby (PEACH), Blunt (masked as BLUNDEN because of his wartime employment by MI5), and Goronwy Rees (who had volunteered vital information soon afterwards). Yet the suggestion that the collection of material was initiated at this time (May-June 1951) is belied by the fact that the released file on Rees (for instance) contains material that derives from the 1930s. A reference to Philby’s file (PF 604502), dated November 1946, can be seen in the file of the Sicherheitsdienst officer Protze (KV 2/1741). That would suggest that pre-existing PFs on some of these characters had been maintained for some years, but that they were suppressed, for reasons of ‘security’, and that the appearance of a completely fresh inquiry was promoted by the creation of ‘new’ files that may have incorporated older material, and may even have been in existence for a while.
Thus a large number of identifiable but unavailable files exist (unless some of them have been destroyed). Why have they not been released? It could be that the authorities are embarrassed – by the unnecessary surveillance of persons who were of no danger whatsoever, or by the ineffective observations of individuals who were clearly guilty of subversive or treasonable activity. Sometimes specious reasons about protecting family members are given. (I have recently started a project to list all the archival material related to Guy Burgess that appears in the National Archives Directory, consisting of two or three hundred discrete items, mostly in the Foreign and Colonial Office records. It is a shocking story – with many items permanently retained, and many closed but due for opening in the next few decades, including some not to be released until January 2073 (!) – that I shall report on fully in a future coldspur bulletin.)
I have a very pragmatic and inquisitive approach to interpreting all this. One of my on-line colleagues (who has a background with British intelligence) claims that he knows how the system works, and that any anomaly he finds in the records is due to mistakes made by officers, or by the custodians of the Registry. You might call his methodology an a priori interpretation. Since I have no preconceived notions of how the system was designed and implemented, I am a little more sceptical. I tend to regard all manifestations as features of the system, supplemented by possible attempts to cover tracks. You could call my approach an a posteriori one.
One of the anomalies is the fact that certain individuals were given separate classifications, under the KV/6 reference instead of KV/2, representing so-called ‘List’ files. An example is Georg Honigmann (KV 6/113 & 114), whose source is given as L169/65. The Kew Catalogue describes this category rather obliquely and circuitously in the following terms: ‘relating to investigations carried out on related individuals or organisations (for example, investigations into SOE personnel forming part of the SOE ‘list’)’. That is not very helpful. In what way, for instance, would Honigmann have been considered part of a ‘list’ when he arrived in the UK in 1931? I am looking out for other persons of interest in the KV/6 series in an attempt to derive a pattern, and have already collected a small but interesting set.
My study has been complemented by the inspection of some archival material concerning the Registry itself, namely KV 4/21: ‘Report on the Operations of the Registry During the War 1939-1945’. DDO (‘R.H.’, namely Reginald Horrocks) started by describing the state of the Registry in June 1940, when ‘the organization of the service had all but broken down’. The Registry had been allowed to lapse ‘into a most lamentable position’. It seemed that inertia had encouraged information to be gathered in ‘subject’ files, which made extraction of intelligence on individuals particularly difficult. He summarized the problem as follows:
The basic system of filing was inefficient and inelastic. While a diminishing number of individual files were made the records of those individuals on which interest centred (Aliens, Right and Left Wingers) were filed on a subject basis (i.e. Communists in Northumberland). [‘Seriously?’ – coldspur] The effect was, that to obtain complete information regarding an individual several files were needed, many of which were required by other Offices for other individuals. So few obtained the files they needed and Officers’ rooms were stacked with unanswered correspondence and with files all awaiting other files which could not be obtained. Personal files were classified in series, this being a quite unnecessary complication in the process of file making.
Happily, this mess was rapidly cleaned up, and new systems were introduced. Unfortunately, a bombing raid in September 1940 destroyed some of the records of the new Central Index, but its reconstruction was completed by June 1941. According to Jack Curry, this extended period of turmoil, which severely affected morale, was brought to an end only when Petrie approved Horrocks’s scheme. The former chaos, however, may help to explain why searches were often unsuccessful when they should have uncovered incriminating material. Whether the ‘subject’ files corresponded in some way to ‘List’ files is not clear however. The Kew rubric on ‘Lists’ refers, for example, to SOE, which was not created until this exercise was under way. The fact that Georg Honigmann remained in a ‘List’ file, and was never granted a Personal File, may indicate that he was of no particular interest. On the other hand, an alarming note in the report states that ‘In 1940 a number of the old files of no current interest were destroyed’. [How did they know the files contained nothing of interest?] Perhaps the survival of Honigmann’s file is a lucky accident.
Lastly (for the time being, anyway) I refer to one critical file revealed by this practice. In a recent post (https://coldspur.com/kim-philby-always-working-for-sis/ ) I expressed my incredulity that, if a file had been opened on John Lehmann when he travelled to Vienna as an obvious left-winger, one would not have been opened on Kim Philby. Lehmann’ s PF number is 41490, and the first entry in it is dated October 1, 1932. In fact, MI5 picked him up after he was mentioned in a letter by Gerald Hamilton, a few months before he went to Austria. The highly dubious Peter Smolka (later to be named Smollett) had a file opened on him when he arrived in the UK in November 1930. Its number is 39680. And when Smolka asked the Home Office to allow him to set up the Intercontinental News Agency with his colleague H. A. R. Philby, in November 1934, a handwritten note on the letter (visible at ser. 62a in KV/2 4167) indicates that the aforementioned Philby has a PF numbered 40408. That would appear to show that a file on Philby was probably started during 1931, when he was up at Cambridge . . . I wonder what happened to it.
Smolka’s Letter of November 15, 1934
2. Was Kim Philby a Bigamist?
There once was a person from Lyme
Who married three wives at a time.
When asked: ‘Why a third?’,
He said: ‘One’s absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime.’
(attributed to William Cosmo Monkhouse)
A brief synopsis of the saga of Kim Philby’s ‘divorce’, as conventionally represented, runs as follows: He failed to divorce Litzi when they drifted apart, even when he started cohabiting with Aileen Furse in 1940, and had children with her. In August 1946, he reputedly woke up to the idea that he should legitimize his relationship with Aileen, and confessed the existence of his marriage with Litzy to his former boss at MI6, Valentine Vivian. He subsequently contacted Litzy (who had left England by then), and gained her agreement to a divorce, which was finalized in Paris (or maybe Vienna) in early September. He married Aileen on September 25. Litzy was then free to marry Georg Honigmann, which, by most accounts – including the memoirs by their daughter-to-be, Barbara – took place later that year, or in early 1947. Yet records maintained by Barbara Honigmann’s extended family on the genealogical website, Geni, indicate that Litzy and Georg were ‘partners’, not ‘spouses’. Litzy’s Wikipedia entry states merely that she lived with Honigmann, with no mention of marriage. In his biography of Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, Anthony Cave-Brown wrote that Kim married Aileen bigamously, without offering evidence either way, or even investigating why, if he was correct, the events were not pursued by the authorities.
One of the most astonishing aspects of this case is the lack of curiosity on the part of those writers who have blandly accepted Philby’s account of the ‘divorce’, without any tangible evidence, and who have ignored the absurdities of the arrangements by which he gained his decree – which would presumably have been an essential piece of evidence for his marriage to Aileen. (Otherwise why did he bother? He had already lied to a colleague in MI6 that Litzy had been his ‘first wife’.) I have thus been drawn into the dark web of Geni, in an attempt to pin down the evidence that Georg and Litzy were only ‘partners’, not husband and wife. Of course, in principle, based on hearsay and memoirs, it is far easier to suggest that the couple were legally married than they were not, especially as the Berlin marriage records will not be released until eighty years after the event, thus in 2026 (or 2027), and the ‘fact’ of Kim’s marriage to Aileen would strongly suggest that he was a single man again at the time. When we can inspect those records, the matter should be settled one way or the other.
Geni is not wholly satisfactory. The data is maintained by a string of semi-anonymous characters, who apparently do not have to show their accreditation when they maintain genealogical information, are not required to identify sources, and all too often rely on Wikipedia for relevant ‘facts’. They offer email addresses, but often fall into desuetude, and do not respond to inquiries. Yet some valuable details can emerge. While I have not been able to get a response from the person responsible for the information concerning Barbara and her parents’ partnership, I have succeeded in exchanging messages with some genealogists and serious amateurs who have given me some important leads. As for Barbara herself, she is reported to dislike any ‘prying’ into her life, which I thought was a bit rich. After all, if you are going to try to draw in the public by writing very personal memoirs (Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, about her mother, and Georg, about her father) that contain multiple untruths and contradictions, you can hardly expect the intellectually curious to turn off their inquiries when matters become a little sensitive. It reminds me of Peter Cook, and his pastiche on Greta Garbo (‘Emma Bargo’), who goes around with a megaphone declaring ‘I Vant to be Alone!’. [see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGVcgZkMxWk]
Peter Cook as Emma Bargo
I have discovered some important facts. When I wrote about Georg’s cousins in last month’s posting, I assumed that Andreas and Johannes were the children of Georg’s brother Heinrich. But Heinrich died in World War I, unmarried, before the boys were born (and Barbara understated their ages, for some reason). On reinspecting Barbara’s text, I noticed that she had described Andreas as ‘ein Cousin zweiten Grades’, which can mean either ‘second cousin’, or ‘first cousin once removed’. The latter relationship turns out to be the correct one: Andreas and Johannes were Schuelers, the grand-children of Georg Senior’s (Georg’s father’s) sister Elise. Elise married Baruch Spitz, and their daughter, Hedwig, married Alfred Schueler. They had the two sons. Hedwig was thus Georg Junior’s first cousin. I also learned that Barbara Honigmann has two (unidentified) siblings, by all accounts also the children of Litzy and Georg, although the displayed genealogical information is very confusing. Barbara’s husband (Oppermann) is recorded on Wikipedia as having taken Barbara’s surname as his own, but one of her siblings also married an Oppermann while assuming the Honigmann surname. In contradiction of this intelligence, Barbara declared in her memoir that she was an only child – and she surely was the expert in this matter. I am not sure what is going on here.
When I tried to contact the primary author (Decker) of the posting about the ‘partnership’, however, I was thwarted, and received no response. On the other hand, I did manage to initiate an email exchange with two other members of the extended Honigmann clan, who were able to supply comprehensive details of the family tree (excluding living members, apart from Barbara). From open information, however, I was able to identify a great-nephew of Barbara, one Leon Rieding, who is apparently in agreement with Mr. Decker’s posting. I attempted to get in touch with him through a surrogate to determine whence comes his intelligence, but he was one of those shadowy figures who do not respond to emails.
And then I returned to Barbara’s memoir Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (A Chapter from My Life), and discovered some startling disclosures. She writes of her mother: “In marrying my father in Berlin, she evidently completely blocked out her second marriage with Philby, being content to produce the divorce decree from her first marriage. The requirement to produce a certificate of capacity to marry was certainly fulfilled in a formal fashion, but it was bogus.” She also reveals an extraordinary ‘admission’ from her mother, who told her: “It was in 1942, I think, that I divorced Kim, or perhaps in 1944 or 1945, unless it was in 1946. I have forgotten what year it was that we saw each other for the last time.” Barbara is stupefied that her mother cannot recall the date of her divorce: Litzy is clearly trying to cover up in some confusion, but all that she can add is that she cannot even recall the date when she divorced Georg, as if she suffered from amnesia in this department.
Later, Litzy tells her daughter that she left the UK for Paris ‘in the spring of 1946’ – definitely untrue – and made her way to Berlin. Yet she had to take a detour via Prague, where she met up with her schoolfriend Lotte, the wife of Smolka, before taking the train to Dresden. At no stage of this explanation does she make any reference to her divorce from Kim, in contrast to her husband’s very dramatic, though detail-free, narrative. It is quite incredible that she could have failed to recall such life-defining events if she had indeed managed to gain the divorce decree in Paris or Prague, and she tries on the pretense that the legal separation had taken place some time before.
Of course, the obvious place to gain their divorce would have been the city where they married – Vienna. Borovik, in The Philby Files, claimed that Kim saw Litzy in Vienna. And indeed, Kim has been recorded as making a secret visit there ‘after the war’. The infamous Note 19 in Chapter 1 of Gordon Corera’s Art of Betrayal cites the tape by Bruce Lockhart making a reference to Kim’s presence there, an item ‘since . . . withdrawn from the Imperial War Museum’. Yet Litzy made no mention of visiting Vienna, and the records discovered by British Military Intelligence in January 1952 (where they astonishingly refer to Litzy’s marriage to ‘Harold Adrian Russel’ on February 24, 1934) show no recognition of their subsequent divorce, and no knowledge of the couple since they left for England on April 28. If the divorce had been made official there, presumably MI6, as well as Kim and Litzy, would have found it useful to provide evidence.
These claims to Barbara about her divorce and subsequent ‘marriage’ to Georg are thus highly provocative. It would appear that Litzy maintained the fiction that her marriage to Honigmann took place, despite the frauds committed. Otherwise why would Barbara reveal such an unlikely tale? And why (and when) did Litzy confide this truth to her daughter? (I cannot believe that Georg was unaware of the lapse.) Thus we then have to consider the scenarios:
1) The authorities were convinced by the evidence, and approved the marriage, while Litzy and Georg were complicit in a bigamous arrangement, about which no one else knew until Barbara dropped her clumsy hints. Presumably Litzy would have had to show an ID at the ceremony, and her current British passport would have declared her to be a ‘Philby’: the methods of the East Berlin authorities are unknown by me. (How concerned they were about such bourgeois considerations is another matter, I suppose. If MI6 could prevail on a London registry office to connive at a bigamous marriage, I am sure that the KGB could do the same.) In that case, if a marriage was formalized, a ‘divorce’ could have been accepted in 1953, or whenever it was, but the deception would endure through George’s further two marriages.
2) The marriage was not allowed (or even attempted), and Georg and Litzy were indeed just ‘partners’ (as Mr. Decker indicates), but they were not punished for any attempted deception, since the KGB was partly responsible for the predicament they were in. Barbara was consequently misled. Thus, when the affair fell apart, Georg was free to re-marry, but Litzy was not. And that might explain her later very sentimental reflections on Kim, and her resistance to joining in matrimony with any of her several admirers, since she was still Kim’s legal wife.
I favour the second interpretation. The evidence I have assembled (the claims from Cave-Brown, the very improbable logistics, Litzy’s vagueness and selective amnesia over some of the major events in her life and her later nostalgia for Kim, the bold assertions on the Geni family tree, the nervousness in the Home Office and MI5 about Litzy’s possible return to the UK, and the Home Office’s apparent determination to keep the Honigmann file closed) suggests to me that the divorce never took place. And that has monumental implications for the Philby and Honigmann families.
Lastly, I reproduce an astonishing article (tracked down by one of my collaborators through the Geni link) from the Vienna press of May 1934, filled with untruths about the circumstances of Kim’s sojourn in Vienna, and obviously placed by MI6 in an attempt to distance Kim and Litzy from their communist actions, and present them as closely tied to Kim’s father, the fascist, Hitler sympathizer and Arabist Harry St. John Philby, while emphasizing Kim’s ‘aristocratic’ background. This is a story with enormous implications that I shall return to next month.
Report on Philby Marriage: ‘Illustrierte Kronen Zeitung’, May 24, 1934
3. Hannah Coler’s ‘Cambridge 5’
Some coldspur readers may recall my distant and short-lived contact with the prickly and elusive historian Jonathan Haslam, and his subsequent disinclination to respond to my written letter during my investigations into ‘Gibby’s Spy’. I have discovered that he is now the partner of the German historian Karina Urbach, whose book Go-Betweens for Hitler I had enjoyed several years ago. I even exchanged emails with her afterwards (in 2014 and 2017), and have been able to retrieve from my personal computer archives our very positive conversations about the Hohenlohes, and my researches on Churchill, Halifax and Burgess. Urbach is definitely a class act. She and Haslam co-edited a book titled Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918-1989 that, I must confess, I have not yet read.
‘Cambridge 5’
Somehow I discovered that Urbach had written a novel, in German, bearing the title Cambridge 5: Zeit fűr Verräter (‘Time for Traitors’), but appearing under the pseudonym ‘Hannah Coler’. The topic was clear: I had to read it. The book arrived, and I retrieved my 1968 German skills to work on it. Only when I was three-quarters of the way through its 400-odd pages did I learn – after inspecting Urbach’s Wikipedia page – that what appeared to be an English translation had been prepared and published! A search on amazon (not on ‘Coler’, but on ‘Urbach’) had come up with the rather mysterious title The Cambridge Five: A Captivating Guide to the Russian Spies in Britain Who Passed on Information to the Soviet Union During World War II, with the author’s name rather bizarrely offered as ‘Captivating History’. (I do not see how the ‘Urbach’ in the Search found its target.)
I am sure, however, that this is not the novel, but simply a potted guide, maybe based on the imaginary thesis on Philby written by Wera, one of the characters in the book. Large chunks of her work are ‘extracted’ in the book’s pages. I am not going to acquire the English book to prove my hypothesis. I am not sure why this enterprise was thought worthwhile: indeed the German texts presented could act as an informative guide to German readers who know no English, and have thus not been exposed to the wealth of books about the Five, but another publication in English about Philby would appear to have little new to offer.
But back to the novel. It really was quite enjoyable, mainly because Ms. Urbach is obviously very familiar with Cambridge, and the English scene in general, and writes with flair, humour, and a wry affection for the personalities and pretensions of those figures who coloured media and academic life in the early 2010s. The plot revolves around three generations of students: the Cambridge 5, their leftist successors, engaging in protests in the 1970s, and three doctoral students in 2014, working on their theses under one of the previous activists, the womanizer Professor Hunt. Hunt becomes involved in a murder mystery, since one of his former colleagues (and the father of one of the trio of doctoral candidates) is found stabbed to death in Hunt’s rooms at New College. Thus echoes of 1930s revolt, attachment to causes, recruitment by the Russians, betrayal and revenge reverberate across the three generations.
The main thread of the book is the idea that Wera, the German student (whose name echoes that of Urbach’s mother: the author also explains in a postscript that her elderly father had worked as an agent for the CIA) has selected as her thesis a detailed analysis of Kim Philby, and occupies the rooms at Trinity College that were once Philby’s. The novel is interspersed with chapters of her findings as they evolve, and as they are presented to her supervisor, Professor Hunt. She exploits the Mitrokhin Archive (with the help of a Russian girl called Polina), and is presented as revealing hitherto unknown ‘facts’ about Philby. This was, for me, the weakest part of the book, although I can imagine that German readers would be fascinated. The texts of the thesis are unannotated, and thus lack sources, and the ability of Wera to comprehend the multiple cultural and social aspects of the 1930s milieu is unexplained.
The sources for Urbach’s findings about Philby and his traitorous colleagues would appear to consist of the writings of Macintyre, Knightley, Modin, and Philby himself, as well as the usual suspects of background literature (e.g. Andrew, Costello, West, and her partner Haslam). She does also list Barbara Honigmann, but there appear no breakthrough insights. She lists nothing from the National Archives in her Sources, which is astonishing. Admittedly, the Flora Solomon file was released too late for the project, but the Honigmann and Tudor-Hart folders should have been inspected by the time Urbach wrote her book, and what little has been released about Philby’s interrogations in 1951 should also have provided a richer context.
Some early observations caught my eye. Hunt, who is initially very disdainful of Wera’s ability to shed any fresh light on the paradoxes of Philby’s career, is impressed by her spunk, ambition, and skills of observation. He gives her some advice on the research process. He is very disparaging about the role of authorized historians who are fed documents to analyze, and are thus manipulated. He encourages her to look for details that other historians might have overlooked, and advises her to learn Russian, so that she will not be reliant on translators who might deceive her.
All this was very close to my principles, as I have repeatedly written on coldspur, and I wondered whether this exchange was a key to the eventual plot, and resolution of the skullduggery to come. As it turned out, it was a red herring. But I was energized enough by what must be Urbach’s beliefs about ‘official’ historiography of intelligence matters to reach out to her by email, and draw attention to my recent articles on Philby, which I thought might throw Wera’s apparent ‘breakthrough’ up into the air. I sent a congratulatory and very amiable message to her. It was not rejected outright (as if her address were no longer valid), but in the six weeks since, I have received no acknowledgment or reply. I know that she now resides in Cambridge, England, ‘with her family’. I hope that Haslam is not influencing her modus operandi, but she now appears to have taken on the persona of a media celebrity who needs to be protected from the public at large. She has her own website (at https://karinaurbach.org.uk/ ), and the ‘Contact’ button directs potential communicants to her agent. My opinion of her has gone down.
4. The Rejuvenation of Dick Ellis
Over the years I have had dozens of exchanges – well over a hundred – with persons around the world who discovered coldspur, and had some observation or question for me. Apart from Henry Hardy (whom I actually approached early on in my researches) I have not met any of these people, but I appreciate you all. I have spoken on the telephone to merely two or three. Some disappear suddenly, and then reappear years later. Others appear to go off the radar, as if they had been trapped by the 21st-century equivalent of Radio Direction Funding – email surveillance. One or two, I have regretfully learned, have died. Many wish to remain anonymous. Each of them has idiosyncratic ways of communicating, and follows different email etiquette. I try to match them, but I find it strange that some ‘correspondents’, having received an encouraging reply from me, decline to acknowledge it. (If I have failed to respond to anyone trying to contact me, or not thanked a contact for a contribution, or have left a query hanging in the air, I apologize.)
After my recent book review of Jesse Fink’s Eagle in the Mirror, I received a series of emails pointing to useful material from someone with an email name of ‘Dr. Jonathon Empson’, who did not introduce himself, or describe his background, or explain why he was sending me the links. He sounded like an academic (rather than a medical practitioner), one who has studied intelligence matters, or even worked in such organizations. He drew attention to two of the well-known photographs of Ellis that appear in Fink’s book, suggesting that the subject had aged considerably between 1923 and 1927, when a photograph of him had been taken by the British Chamber of Commerce in Vienna. Readers can compare the two:
Dick Ellis in 1919 & 1927
The Doctor merely observed that there was a ‘discernible difference’ between the two images, describing the second as follows: ‘a different person – haunted, and may hint to his first undeclared contact with an opposition service’. I do not believe he was suggesting that the photograph was actually of someone else. When Fink presented the second photograph, he simply noted that Ellis ‘had aged rapidly’. Yet it now occurs to me: can it really be the same person? Apart from the filling-out of the face, and the receding hairline, are the ears not markedly different?
And then there is a third photograph, also reproduced by Fink, taken at a wedding in London in 1933, six years later, with Dick Ellis on the right (see below). Has he not regained some of his youthful demeanor, with his face regaining its less fleshy shape? Fink does not comment on it. I sent an email to Fink just after I received the Doctor’s message, without mentioning the photographs, as I incidentally wanted to point out to him the fact that Ellis’s book on the League of Nations may have been written by the Communist Konni Zilliacus (Fink had referred to the article making the claim, but had not mentioned it in detail), and also to alert him to the fact that Jimmy Burns’s very poor new book on the insignificant Walter Bell, The Faithful Spy, contained excerpts of correspondence on Ellis that he would probably be interested in.
Dick Ellis (on right) in 1933
For several weeks I never heard back from Fink, so had not presented this enigma to him. I imagined that he was still upset over my review, as his post on coldspur suggests. And then, on December 14, I did receive a message from him: he had completely overlooked my message in his inbox, so I was able to rewrite this paragraph in time. As for the Doctor (whose name is almost certainly a pseudonym), I do request of my informants that they identify themselves properly, although I of course always respect any desires for secrecy and confidentiality if their position requires it. One primary rule of intelligence gathering is to try to verify the reliability of a source. The Doctor, despite his flattering remarks and apparently astute observations, is an obvious ‘dangle’, and an irritation. At the same time, I somewhat wryly deemed that Fink was perhaps a double agent, who couldn’t work out whether he should be working for the Potboilers or for the Scholars, but professional relations between us have been restored, and we have discussed a quite shameful review of Fink’s book by Nigel West in The Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence.
But does anyone else have an opinion about the puzzling rejuvenation of Dick Ellis? Recall that, when discussing the testimony of Protze, Kim Philby had stated that the Ellis whom Protze had encountered was shown to be ‘(a) a White Russian and not an Englishman, and (b) a fraud and a forger’. Answers on a postcard, please, or via a posting on coldspur, or an email to antonypercy@aol.com.
5. The Book Review Magazines
I subscribe to four journals dedicated primarily to reviewing books, Literary Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. I occasionally write letters to the Editors of each, some of which I have reproduced on coldspur, and the writing of this section has been prompted by the non-publication of a recent letter by me.
The best of the four is undoubtedly Literary Review. It offers reviews of a wide range of books across many subjects, both fiction and non-fiction. The reviewers are almost always very well qualified, and directed to write concise and compact critiques of the volumes selected. They are obviously encouraged to give unfiltered opinions about a book’s merits and flaws, such as the novelty of its research, or its overlooking of important sources. There is no room for them to expand on all they know about the subject, and then briefly mention the writer towards the end, which is a policy some other magazines appear to promote. In addition, there is no apparent log-rolling, although I do find a little hypocritical the semi-apologies for expressed ‘quibbles’ and ‘niggles’ when they list mistakes they have found. Its Letters section is its weakest part, publishing mostly uncontroversial and trivial comments – but it allocates very little space to this intrinsically rewarding exercise. I wish all the magazines under review would provide more space for readers’ letters, and also offer more details about the qualifications of the reviewers it engages.
The Times Literary Supplement comes in second ahead of the two Book Reviews. It maintains a weekly schedule, and offers a fairly broad array of topic headings, with some reviews much shorter than others, although it sometime strains to find capable objective reviewers in all the domains it covers, and is liable to offer weak assessments based on good fellowship or potential mutual admiration. It does not take itself too seriously: it provides a full page for readers’ letters, although what is published tends to be on the dull side, dominated by sometimes pedantic corrections from around the world, and frequently including ripostes from authors who feel that they have been short-changed or misrepresented in earlier reviews. It regularly covers film, television and other media, which to me is supererogatory, and outside its mission. The style of the reviews is overall lively and engaging: the editor since 2020, Martin Ivens (who formerly was editor of the Sunday Times), overall maintains an expert but ironic touch.
I place the fortnightly New York Review of Books above its London cousin because, while they both occasionally (but not frequently enough, in my opinion) publish outstanding critical reviews, and both select too many very obscure and marginal items, the NYRB does not contain as much political polemic as does the LRB. It covers a gratifying number of books pertaining to Europe, which is important, as I regret my interest in USA history and political affairs is not as great as it should be. I always welcome Ferdinand Mount and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, as well as Marina Warner and Miranda Seymour, who are regular though infrequent contributors: in a brief column in the TLS on October 20, on the achievement of the NYRB’s sixtieth anniversary, recognition of the British influence on the magazine was stated. (I was also pleased to see that the editor, Emily Greenhouse, is allergic to the expression ‘the lived experience’.) The Letters section is, however, the weakest of all four, dedicated primarily to long and fairly abstruse debates between authors and critics.
So why do I subscribe to the London Review of Books (also a fortnightly)? It is sadly still in the shadow of the rather dire Mary-Kay Wilmers (her of the Eitingon family), who, having retired from the editorship a year or so go, still endures in an advisory capacity as ‘Consulting Editor’. But her enthusiasm for very long leftist essays (and her taste, presumably, for really dreadful ‘poetry’) remains, with such as Perry Anderson to the fore among several writers, often from Embankment universities, who indulge themselves mostly in Pikettyish criticisms of free enterprise – presented often as the phenomenon of ‘late-stage capitalism’. Deploring Trump has also been a popular hobbyhorse in articles (not book-reviews!), and I have asked the editors why I should be paying for such obsessions when the magazine is supposed to be a London Review of Books?
I have received no answer.
Yet occasionally an issue of the LRB will be so spectacular that it makes the annual subscription worthwhile, such as that of early October this year, which featured a superbly entertaining review by Lorna Finlayson on some books on animal rights and speciesism (by Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum), as well as an outstanding review of Orwell material by Colin Burrow. Thus I persevere, bypassing some very ordinary submissions, waiting for the next masterpiece. Moreover, one aspect of the LRB amazes me: it employs a simply gigantic staff, which it proudly lists on its title page. It puts the respective display by the TLS to shame (see images below). How on earth a straightforward literary magazine can afford to sustain all these positions is quite remarkable – and these are only the heads of departments. Could they not double up on some of these duties? And what do all these people do in the afternoons? One wonders whether it is all being subsidized by some generous benefactor, such as the Soros foundation. If it were, I am sure the truth would have come out, but it is all very mysterious to me.
The London Review of Books staffThe TLS Staff
This is all as way of introduction to another unpublished letter. In August, the TLS published a review by a Professor Krishnan Kumar titled This Is Britain. I do not need to quote any part of it, as I believe the letter I sent to the Editor adequately reflects the problem. It ran as follows:
I wonder whether I was the only reader to be profoundly disturbed by some of Professor Kumar’s remarks in his review of books on the vexed issue of ‘race’ (‘This is Britain’, August 11). Most alarming was his statement that, in Britain, ‘mixed-race people are now the fastest-growing ethnic group’. The implication behind this assertion is that each partner in a ‘mixed-race’ marriage (or relationship) must be of ‘unmixed’ or ‘pure’ race, which is not only nonsensical, but also deeply insulting, by resuscitating a doctrine that has been clearly discredited. Kumar compounds his error by classifying such pairs as an ‘ethnic group’, which, given the undeniable different backgrounds of the members, makes the integrity of that highly questionable concept even more absurd.
He makes further categorical mistakes, such as reinforcing the notion that it makes sense to collect ‘Asians’ in a group, and make stereotypical observations about them (‘they are less inclined to intermarry’), as if it made sense to consider immigrants from Iran to Japan, and everywhere in between, as a viable entity worth studying, and one that displayed consistent behavioural characteristics.
It is sad to see how the sociological academics and the census bureaucrats, initially in the USA, but now, apparently, in Britain, too, have ousted the anthropologists and evolutionary biologists in occupying the spheres of social influence. Their obsession with racial classification has encouraged millions to believe that their ‘identity’ can be defined primarily by some tribal heritage, when all it does is to encourage stereotypes, and to promote some unscientific thinking.
My letter was not published. Thus is this sub-Marxian claptrap further established. Kumar, the current Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, was educated at Cambridge University and took his postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics. He presumably developed his ideas when he was studying for his doctorate, and encountered no resistance. He was then appointed Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Kent, and was able to guide the curriculum and modes of thinking. Since 1971, he has published several books, which his academic colleagues probably praised. Having been away from Britain for twenty years, he was invited to submit a review of three books on ‘race’ and ‘race relations’, and the Editor was either unable or unwilling to challenge him on the primitive and undisciplined points he made. When these absurd ideas, with their outrageous definitions, appeared in print, several readers may have been shocked, but I may have been the only subscriber to take the trouble to write. And the editor decided to ignore my letter.
In such a fashion do insidious and dangerously divisive ideas become accepted. The cult of defining everyone by the so-called ethnic groups or classes that they are claimed to have belonged to since birth, inheriting the victim or oppressor status of their predecessors, is rammed home without any subtlety or scientific understanding. And, as I was writing this piece, I came across a relevant passage by Lionel Trilling (whose windy abstractions and vague generalisations I am mostly not a fan of) in The Sense of the Past (1942), published in The Liberal Imagination:
This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking, and now the errors of academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfillment in policy and action.
Soon after, I read the following, written by John Gay in his new book The New Leviathans, and cited by John Banville in his NYRB review of December 21:
In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals. Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased. This repression is not the work of governments. The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society.
If I had not just passed my seventy-seventh birthday, I might get really steamed up about this travesty. Yet it appears I have allies. On the other hand, maybe I would gain greater attention if I wrote on Christ Church notepaper: the first letter published in the December 15 issue of the TLS was written by Richard Swinburne, from Oriel College, and contains the following nonsense:
Of course ‘an extreme improbability is not an impossibility’, as Edward Greenwood writes (Letters, December 8); but the issue is whether it is rational to believe (in the absence of contrary evidence) that an event (such as the universe being so precisely fine-tuned for life) that would be extremely improbable if it had occurred without a cause, did not have a cause. We should only do this if we cannot postulate a simple explanation of it. But in the case of the universe, we can postulate a very simple explanation, that it was caused by a very simple cause (God, one entity with one essential property, omnipotence), which, I have argued, would make its occurrence probable.
Between superstition and pseudo-science lies sense.
6. Research Agenda
At the beginning of the year, I never expected to be spending so much time on Kim Philby and his various associates, and thus several projects that I had planned have been deferred. Yet they remain on my active list, and I make notes occasionally in preparation for tackling such themes seriously when a vacant spot in the docket turns up.
There is still some unfinished business concerning the Philby investigations. I want to explore more thoroughly where Milmo derived his facts about Kim and Litzy in his December 1951 report, and why White failed to disclose them in his report issued just beforehand. I need to unravel the very strange ‘Stevenson’ business in the Tudor-Hart files, and try to ascertain whether the mystery informant was indeed Graham Greene. A major new thrust will be an in-depth examination of the files on Peter Smollett/Smolka. A cursory look – supplemented by research into Graham Greene, and his dealings with Smolka in Vienna in 1948 – has convinced me that several major anomalies exist in the relationship between Philby and Smollett, and these have been glossed over in all the literature. I need to explore exactly what MI5 knew about Guy Burgess before the notorious escape, and analyze closely the post-mortems that occurred. My analysis of the complete Burgess trove at Kew needs to be completed, and the recently released Rothschild files are straining for my attention. I also have a daunting set of Russian books on intelligence lying on a table, waiting to be tackled.
Matters of peripheral interest endure. I want to compare Chapman Pincher’s fanciful accounts of what Roger Hollis was allegedly doing in Soviet counter-espionage after the war with the more mundane accounts that can be found in source records, such as in the diaries of Guy Liddell, who sprinkles his journals with valuable tidbits concerning the actions of Roger (including his frequent periods of leave and sickness). I’d like to engage in a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of ‘double agents’, and to produce examples from a broad set of initiatives beyond the rather hackneyed and mis-represented set of that species, namely the ‘Abwehr’ agents manipulated to deceive the Germans over the Normandy crossings. I want to investigate the controversies and lawsuits that challenged the first appearance of M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France. [This topic has been partially addressed by Christopher J. Murphy in a recent article in Intelligence and National Security, published on-line on December 22 at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02684527.2023.2291873 , but I believe Murphy has refrained from touching the serious, more long-lasting, issues associated with the debacle.] Now that I have acquired the files of the prominent Sicherheitsdienst officers who were interrogated after the war, I also want to develop a more rigorous schematic of the activities of Dick Ellis, and what he was claimed to get up to, probably by scouring the original German transcripts of the interrogations.
Other projects go some way back. I have always wanted to understand better exactly what codebooks John Tiltman managed to recover from Petsamo, and when, how they were passed on to the Americans, and how they helped the VENONA project. One longstanding exercise is an investigation into the inquiries that Alan Foote made into the Gouzenko affair, and the connections between the Canadian spies and the Rote Drei in Switzerland. I have not yet studied closely the massive set of Petrov files, which I believe may have much to reveal about Soviet techniques, and possible links to agents who have not been properly identified. I want to examine the cables that were sent by MI6 and the Embassy from Kuibyshev and Moscow in 1943-44, as I believe that George Graham had passed over the cipher- and code-books, and the information transmitted in such telegrams may shed a shocking light on how much Stalin knew about Allied tactics. I also want to pick up my story about the ‘heretic’ communists who fought for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, and then apparently switched their allegiance, such as Humphrey Slater.
Lastly, I have a few more administrative projects to accomplish. I plan to finish my topographical guide to the coldspur collection, and publish it early next year. I’d like to spend some more serious effort on the post-war organization of MI5, which has not received the attention it deserves. Over time, I shall flesh out my spreadsheet of missing cross-references of MI5 Personal Files, offer some sort of chronology, and, maybe with the help of recently photographed files concerning the Registry, describe the processes by which it was maintained.
I thus have plenty to occupy me for a while, and I shall be a much older man than I am now when I complete this assignment – if ever! I am always eager to hear from coldspur readers of other topics worth investigating, as I may find them automatically engaging and thus worthy of elevation in priorities (such as Jesse Fink and his study of Dick Ellis), but I may have to decline. Of course, if Calder Walton wants me to contribute something to his much-awaited three-volume Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence, of which he is General Editor, he only has to contact me, and I shall name my fee . . .
STOP PRESS: As I was tidying up this piece on December 29, I was alerted to a large new release of files from The National Archives, involving much on the ‘Spycatcher’ case, as well as on Joan Miller’s One Girl’s War, and on Victor Rothschild’s grumblings. From a quick inspection the Joan Miller material looks very disappointing, but it will mean a lot more work – and I haven’t yet studied the already released Rothschild files. Maybe I need to hire a research assistant, but, hang on, that would be contrary to my principles . . . (I note in my Commonplace file this month an incident where a Professor tried to blame an example of plagiarism on sloppy work by his research assistants. Tsk! Tsk!)
7. ‘The Airmen Who Died Twice’
A few correspondents have asked me what happened to this project (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-the-airmen-who-died-twice/ ). My colleague Nigel Austin and I were rattling along quite well, having completed six chapters of a planned ten, when Nigel sadly succumbed to some personal problems, and was consequently unable to fulfill his side of the research and writing. I waited patiently for many months, but my interest (alongside my ability to understand and explain work already done) was starting to flag, so I had to let him know that I would have to complete the project by myself. It is a fascinating and ground-breaking story, and I am very keen to see it published.
One of the major chapters to be written, however, concerns the state of Norwegian Resistance during World War II, the political tensions between the different factions, and how Stalin hoped to exploit them. This is not a topic that I am intimately familiar with, and I have performed very little of my own research. I am thus going to have to dedicate a large amount of time in between my other monthly projects to attempt to gain some kind of expertise over the subject-matter. I do not want to start publishing earlier segments (which are in good shape, I believe) until I am confident that the complete story has coherence and quality, and that it is properly defensible. When I am ready, I plan to publish a couple of chapters at the mid-point of each month, as a contrast to the monthly bulletins, in a way that will allow the narrative to have some momentum. I’ll report again in a month or two.
8. ‘This I Cannot Forget’
‘This I Cannot Forget’
One of the most moving books that I read this year was the memoir by Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed after one of Stalin’s show trials in 1938. Larina was twenty-six years younger than Bukharin, but had known him since she was a child, since her step-father was a colleague of Bukharin’s in early Bolshevik days. She and her husband knew that the inevitable would happen as the noose tightened, and previous friends began to denounce Bukharin for bogus plots to re-install capitalism and assassinate Stalin. Before the trial, she was exiled, with her infant son sent to a children’s home, then learned of her husband’s death, was interrogated and incarcerated in prison-camps, and was fortunate not to have been executed herself by the NKVD.
Before he was arrested, Bukharin managed to persuade his wife to learn by heart a testimony protesting his innocence, something she repeated to herself every day, occasionally committing it to paper, but each time destroying it because of its incriminating implications for her. Eventually, after Stain’s death, and Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ 1956 speech denouncing the dictator and his crimes, and the relative Thaw that followed, Larina in 1961 delivered the testimony to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, hoping that it would be published. It did not appear until 1988.
I had conveniently seen Bukharin only as a noble victim, someone who had had the guts to stand up to Stalin, and to attempt to moderate such disasters as the forced collectivization of the peasants, someone who had tried to put a human face on communism. Stalin never forgot a slight, or a challenge, and had planned the murder of those who had ever disagreed with him, or stood in his way, over many years, manipulating them at his will. His victims would appeal to him, stupidly imagining that it was the NKVD that was at fault, when in fact it was merely a creature carrying out his bidding.
And then I read Bukharin’s testament in Larina’s book. An early paragraph runs as follows:
Dzerzhinsky is no more; the wonderful traditions of the Cheka have gradually receded into the past, those traditions by which the revolutionary idea governed all its actions, justified cruelty towards enemies, safeguarded the state against any counter-revolution. For this reason, the organs of the Cheka won a special trust, a special honor, an authority and respect.
Bukharin went on to contrast the nobility of the Cheka with the ‘degenerate and dissolute organs of the NKVD’. Yet these are not the words of a humanist communist: they reflect the opinions of a bloodthirsty and vengeful Bolshevik, ready to approve the extermination of all ‘class enemies’, including the barbarous treatment of the protestors at the Savvatievsky monastery. For that is what the Cheka, with its ‘wonderful traditions’, was under Lenin – an executor of terrorism and persecution for its own sake, with anyone who showed the smallest sign of ‘privilege’, from Boy Scout medals to aristocratic background, as someone worthy of being exterminated. Any sympathy I had had for Bukharin instantly disappeared.
Nikolai Bukharin
I wrote about the horrors of the Red Terror last year, in my review of books by Antony Beevor and Donald Rayfield. And I was recently exposed to a personal account of exposure to it when I read The Unmaking of a Russian, by Nicholas Wreden. (I bought a copy of a 1935 first edition of this work, signed by the author, for $4 in a second-hand bookstore a few years ago, but had never got round to reading it until I catalogued it in ‘LibraryThing’.) Wreden offers a fascinating description of the chaos of Petrograd in 1918, how ‘enemies of the people’ were summarily executed by the Cheka, and his narrow escapes from such a fate. He also has a gripping story to tell about fighting for the Whites in Estonia, before he manages to gain a retreat to Denmark. Ironically, from his eventual seclusion in the United States, he saw the NKVD on the road to reform by the early nineteen-thirties – an opinion directly opposed to that of Bukharin.
Remarkably, only one of the quoted letters from readers reacting to Larina’s publication in Znamya in 1988 displayed the same reaction that I had. Professor Yevgeny Stanislavsky, after suggesting that all those who had facilitated Stalin’s rise to power were themselves guilty, wrote: It occurs to me that if we had not had the most brutal so-called Red Terror immediately after October [1917], when we exterminated the better part of the Russian intelligentsia or forced it to abandon Russia, and simultaneously exterminated or expelled the technical specialists, the progressively minded bourgeoisie, when we destroyed anyone who was ‘not with us’, when we savagely shot the entire family of Romanovs, including the children, if we had not had that, we would not have had Stalinism.
He finished his letter by writing:
But reading the memoirs of victims of Stalin’s repression, I feel my blood ‘run cold’ and involuntarily there come to mind the atrocities of theGerman fascists, whom we properly judged (alive and dead) with the full severity of the law.
Well said, Professor.
9. J. B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’
This summer I read J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. I had acquired a handsome Folio Society edition some years back, enhanced by some period photographs of the time, and an introduction by Margaret Drabble. Priestley is an author who seemed to go out of favour in the latter half of the twentieth century, although there has been a recent revival. I regret that I have read very few of his other works, although my father must have been an enthusiast in the 1930 and 1940s, as I recall that he had a prominent copy of J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time lying around the house, as well as editions of Priestley’s ‘time’ plays that were influenced by it.
J. B. Priestley
A very clear recollection of listening to a radio version of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls stays with me, however. It must have been in about 1960 (I can find no record or cast-list on the Web), and I was enthralled. My younger brother, Michael, my mother, and I listened to it on an evening when my father was out at some committee meeting: I was not only captivated by the plot, but recalled how my mother instructed her two boys not to inform our father that we had listened to it. She did not explicitly say why, but, since the play involved rape, prostitution and alcoholism, it was very clear what the reason was. Those were not subjects that youngsters in 1960 should have been exposed to, and she would have been criticized for allowing us to listen in. Nowadays, I notice, the play is a GCSE set text.
I was astounded to learn that An Inspector Calls was first produced on stage in Moscow in August 1945, purportedly on the grounds that no theatre in England was available for staging it. I find that hard to believe, and it was a very foolish decision by Priestley, about whom suspicions of communist sympathies were immediately expressed. I noticed also that, in his recent sequel to his biography of John le Carré, The Secret Life of John le Carré, Adam Sisman records his subject’s nervousness about the role of his biographer. Le Carré had written to his brother, Tony, that it was odd ‘to have an “Inspector Calls” in one’s life, going round ringing doorbells from one’s past, & not always coming up with very edifying results . . .’
And then, while I was ready to complete the writing of this month’s edition of coldspur, I came across during a book-cataloguing stint a copy of Priestley’s Margin Released, in a black faux leather edition published by Heron Books in 1962. It has a price of £2 inside, so I must have bought it in England, but had never read it. It is subtitled ‘A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections’, and I have enjoyed fewer books more this year. Priestley is opinionated, but engaging, unpretentious, and eminently sensible, and writes in flawless English about his experiences in various fields of writing. Occasionally he is pompous and deceptive. He gives no account of his lawsuit for libel against Graham Greene, about which I read in Norman Sherry’s biography of the rival writer. On page 63 he offered the following insight, however: “Managers who were obdurate if the mill girls wanted another shilling a week could be found in distant pubs turning the prettiest and weakest of them into tarts. (Over thirty years later I made some use of these discoveries in a play, An Inspector Calls, set in 1912.)”
To return to my main topic: English Journey is a wonderfully crafted portrait of a country just starting to emerge from the worst of the Depression, published in 1934, and Priestley’s only rarely sinks into sentimentality. As a proud Yorkshireman, he was distressed at the apparent wastage of human capability that was evident from wide scale unemployment, but he admired the resilience of the affected communities that he encountered, with a familiar divide affecting the North and The South (where light industry was starting to take off). His socialism was obvious, but it was never dogmatic, and he was clear that the rigours and cruelties of Communism should never be part of any political response. His love of, and appreciation for, the countryside, as well as his delight in literature and music, are always apparent. Towards the end, he becomes somewhat repetitive, and occasionally maudlin, but I found the book very evocative of a fascinating period in English social history.
1933 had been a critical year for Europe. Hitler had come to power, and banned the Communist Party. Many of its members fled to the Soviet Union: most of them were later shot by Stalin. Stalin himself had become emboldened by his ability to endure unchallenged the horrors of dekulakization and the Ukrainian famine (the Holodomor) to prepare for a fresh series of purges, starting with the assassination of Kirov. Just as Britain started to crawl out of its slump, Kim Philby decided to throw in his lot with the Communist horror. English Journey remains a timely contrasting perspective.
10. The coldspur Archive
I am happy to report that I have signed an agreement with an academic institution that commits me to entrusting to it my library and archive, with the university allocating a separate space for my collection, and providing indexing and electronic gateway access. I look forward to providing more detail about this arrangement early next year.
The good news is that I now have a home for my library without it’s being broken up and its contents dispersed, or even destroyed. I believe the accumulated volumes are so much more valuable as a unit, and that my collection constitutes a unique set of books on twentieth-century history and literature. The bad news is that at some stage in the next few years I shall be deprived of instant access to my non-electronic resources. Thus, with a full agenda of research still to be executed, I may have to re-assess my plans!
Meanwhile, I continue with my project to record every volume (or, at least, all those books that will be of interest for the Special Collection) on LibraryThing for eventual export to the university authorities. I have now started a routine whereby, every Sunday morning, I spend a couple of hours cataloguing another hundred books, and, as of this date, have entered about 2,200 volumes. Several more months of work await me . . .
11. Mental Health
A couple of months ago I underwent my annual medical check-up, and shortly afterwards received an invoice from my doctor. It was not a large one, for an amount not covered my Medicare, but I was startled to read a couple of line items in the statement. The listing describes the treatment, the standard fee that the doctor would charge for someone uninsured (‘Initial Cost’), the adjustment to reflect the fee agreed with Medicare (or other insurance provider, presumably) for the treatment (‘Insurance Adjustment’), the amount actually reimbursed to the doctor (‘Insurance Paid’) and any remaining amount owed by the patient (‘You owe’.)
‘Wellness Visit’
As can be seen my treatment included a ‘Medicare Annual Depression Screen’, estimated to take 5-15 minutes, and a ‘Medicare Annual Alcohol Misuse Screening’, also 5-15 minutes. I recall telling the nurse that I enjoyed one glass of white wine a day (I could have lied, of course), and discussing with the doctor for a couple of minutes what depressing times we live in, what with tribal conflicts around the world, Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyahu and other monsters, as well as the challenges of dealing with Greta Thunberg and Sam Bankman-Fried. I thus thought that this allocation was a bit excessive. After all, what would anyone do about my ‘depression’? The fact is that everyone seems to be concerned about ‘mental health’ these days, and media icons even self-diagnose, as if they were quite competent in distinguishing between various forms of mental stability or instability. Yet anxiety, grief, even despair, are part and parcel of human existence, and, if one is not allowed to feel depressed occasionally about the reality and prospects of old age, then the world has come to a pretty pass. I thought of Hugh Kingsmill’s parody of A. E. Housman:
What? Still alive at twenty-two?
A fine, upstanding youth like you.
I suppose the authorities at Medicare need to be on the alert lest I convert any dire thoughts into harmful actions against my fellow-citizens, but this whole process appears to me at a piece of bureaucracy run amok. Plus it is deceitful. The doctor was paid for processes that were completed in a minute or two. When I paid my bill, I suggested to him that we drop these ‘screenings’ next year, and divert to those who truly need help the taxpayers’ $40 it will probably cost by then. As for my predicament, as Mona Lott said in the World War 2 wireless series It’s That Man Again: “It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.”
‘It’s That Man Again’
12. Coffeehouse Talk
Some time earlier this month, I was sitting in one of Wilmington’s more fashionable coffee-houses, when I couldn’t help overhearing a monologue from a woman at the next table. I made a few mental notes on what she was saying to her companion . . . .
“I think that everyone should have access to free child-care staffed by competent professionals who probably don’t have children of their own to care for so that all can undertake safe, well-paid and fulfilling stress-free jobs that allow them to stay out of poverty, and live in a solar-powered home in a crime-free and multi-ethnic neighborhood, close to good schools with excellent teacher quality and teacher-to-student ratios, while not actually depriving anyone else from an underprivileged minority of the employment opportunity, and should be able to enjoy healthy foods, the cultivation of which does not require the exploitation of the labor of any children or disadvantaged persons, as well as enough material goods that also do not derive from any similar exploitation, and certainly did not in their manufacture cause any environmental degradation, or challenge the survival of any threatened species, or damage to a World Heritage site, or harm any local cultural traditions that should nevertheless evolve to be respectful of women’s and minority rights (especially of the LBGTQ community), and be able to enjoy the occasional holiday abroad while maintaining a low carbon footprint, thus without negatively affecting climate change (although I worry about the enormous demands for water that converting airplanes to run on ethanol will cause), as well as having free access to first-rate medical care, including the availability of a cardiologist and endocrinologist within a twenty-minute drive, using suitably qualified immigrants if necessary while not exploiting anybody and not depriving underdeveloped or developing countries of the home-grown skills they need to emerge from poverty (in a way that avoids the perennial social injustices and ills of developed countries), and enjoy the benefits of a well-staffed care-home nearby, subsidised by the government, so that their aged parents can be looked after by dedicated carers, but can be visited regularly at weekends, and that their investments for their own retirement income grow regularly, with the companies they own shares in making satisfactory (but not excessive) profits while pleasing all their ‘stakeholders’ and engaging in sustainable business models without having to behave in a predatory manner by underpaying their workers or indulging in practices that might harm the planet or contribute to global warming, and can use an eco-friendly car to exercise their right to explore the country and visit protected national parks without interfering with the rights of indigenous peoples to indulge in traditional practices (that may in fact be harmful to them, and in poor taste), or worrying whether such areas in other countries where the laws are less restrictive will have to be exploited for the rare earths that have to be mined for the construction of the batteries needed for such vehicles, or that the surveys that have to be carried out for offshore wind farms will not harm the fragile whale populations, and that their implementation will not require excessive use of energy and steel, or result in massive blots on the landscape, or damage populations of any rare bird species, or that the mining of cobalt, graphite and other elements required to manufacture such items will not cause environmental devastation, civic discord, or harm to any tribal heritage (although the whole notion of tribes that have to stay on their reservations and marry within their own community in order to preserve their tribal identity is a deeply troubling one for any progressive and emancipated thinker . . . and were you aware that many of the Cherokee Indians on the protected reservations are not Cherokees at all, but black slaves who were captured ? . . .)”
I had heard enough. I drank up my Reserve Hazelnut Bianco Latte and left.
The Eagle in the Mirror by Jesse Fink: Black and White Publishing (2023), 319 pages
Follow the Pipelines by Charlotte Dennett: Chelsea Green Publishing (2020), 349 pages
Agents of Influence by Mark Hollingsworth: Oneworld Publications (2023), 310 pages
Spies by Calder Walton: Simon and Schuster (2023), 672 pages
* * * * * * * * * *
‘The Eagle in the Mirror’
The Eagle in the Mirror by Jesse Fink
A few months ago I was contacted by a new ‘recruit’ to coldspur, Jesse Fink, who had been following my coverage of the identity of ELLI. He wanted to know whether I had rejected Charles Ellis (known as ‘Dick’), the MI6 officer, as a candidate for the elusive penetration agent in British intelligence named by Gouzenko. Given the close equivalence between the two names (and the NKVD’s frequently unimaginative choice of cryptonyms), this was a very reasonable inquiry. I replied that I thought it highly unlikely, for reasons of chronology and logistics, but did at the same time refer to Ellis as a ‘scoundrel’.
Mr. Fink was quick to point out that Ellis’s disreputable reputation was probably unjustified, and I have since had to admit that my judgment was based on what has been written about him by such as Nigel West, Chapman Pincher and Peter Wright, without any scholarly safeguards. I had not studied any source documentation myself, and the exercise reminded me that I should never offer an ‘expert’ opinion on anybody in the intelligence world without having performed the proper research myself, or absorbing what someone with a respectable methodology has done him- or her-self. Mr Fink did offer me some flattering comments on the coldspur site: he also told me that he was working on a biography of Ellis that would be published in the summer of 2023, and that his book would rehabilitate Ellis.
I immediately ordered it from amazon.uk: it arrived a few weeks later, and I set about it at the beginning of September. I have dedicated a large amount of space to this review because a) a proper account of the life of Ellis needs to be told; b) Fink has performed an admirable job of tracking down some diverse and obscure sources, and has thus made a highly significant contribution to the literature of intelligence; and c) the exercise brings up a number of issues to do with tradecraft and terminology that interest me greatly. Yet I confess that I am less than enthusiastic about Fink’s rather shrill treatment of the material, and the promotion of the book. For example, Fink chose to title it The Eagle in the Mirror because, as he asks, perhaps rhetorically, on p xxxix:
Where did his loyalties lie? For a man whose name was inextricably linked with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the United States of America, what national eagle – Russian, German, American – was staring back at him? Was he truly innocent or guilty?
‘Inextricably linked’? By whom? When? Moreover, since Fink concludes his analysis by asserting that Ellis was an innocent man, and a loyal servant of the Crown, it would appear that he has performed the extrication himself, and that he would judge that his hero saw no eagles but instead the Lion and the Unicorn when he looked into the mirror.
In addition, in the interests of gaining commercial success with his work, I believe Fink has allowed his agent and publicity machine to hyperbolize the questions surrounding Ellis, and his resolution of them. ‘The Greatest Spy Story Never Told’; ‘In Search of War Hero, Master Spy [sic!] and Alleged Traitor’, and a quote from Phillip Knightley claiming absurdly that Ellis ’was James Bond’ adorn the covers. Fink would assert that such exaggeration is needed to help make the book sell at the airport bookstalls, but once the reader is captured, he or she (in my opinion) could well handle a more sober story.
Jesse Fink
The author has fallen into the trap of what I now call the ‘Max Archer Dilemma’ of writing on intelligence, after the fictional character in Matthew Richardson’s Agent Scarlet (see https://coldspur.com/summer-2023-round-up/ ). In August I wrote, firstly citing Richardson:
“He’d glamorized them, emphasized the sex and the danger, even hoped they might be optioned in a splashy bidding war by Hollywood and hungrily consumed by the masses.” That is absurd: you cannot be the pot-boiling Ben Macintyre and the dryasdust Michael S. Goodman at the same time.
(Not that Max Archer, or his creator, appeared to recognize the Dilemma – unlike Mr Fink, an established author, who described to me the exact same quandary in which he found himself.) The problem is that an author can melodramatize the events for the benefit of a large, popular readership, but those readers will not appreciate the scholarly references and endnotes. The serious readers, meanwhile, will be dismayed by the writer’s joining the potboilers, and not treating the material in a disciplined fashion.
The verifiable facts of Ellis’s career are meagre, and the allegations about him predictably murky. He was born in Australia in 1895, and came to the United Kingdom just before World War I, in which he served with distinction. He was sent to Transcaspia, on a mission against the Bolsheviks. After studying Russian at St. Edmund Hall at Oxford University (or maybe the Sorbonne), he joined MI6 in 1923, and was assigned to various posts around Europe. That year he also married a Ukrainian ‘White Russian’, Lilia Zelensky. In 1928 he published a long and ‘impenetrable’ (according to Fink) book titled The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations. He returned to the UK in 1938 to supervise the interception of telephone communications between Ribbentrop’s Embassy and Berlin. He then spent a short time collecting intelligence in Berlin, where he used the services of his brother-in-law, Zelensky, and a notorious ‘trader’ of information, Vladimir von Petrov, who was another White Russian working at the Japanese Embassy. For most of World War II he worked for William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination in New York, taking charge of intelligence interests, and then helping to establish the USA’s OSS. After the war, he worked for MI6 in the Far East, and helped set up the Australian Intelligence Service. He retired in 1953, and died in Eastbourne, England in 1975.
Matters took an eerie turn in 1946, when captured Sicherheitsdienst officers described to their interrogators a ‘Captain Ellis’ who had provided them with intelligence secrets. Chief among them was Richard Protze, and investigators in Chile tried to follow up the connection with von Petrov after a tip from MI5 located Ellis’s sometime informant there. This led to discovering an association with another dubious character, Anton Turkhul, a colleague of von Petrov’s, who ran a White Russian resistance movement in Paris (certainly infiltrated by the NKVD). When this information was brought to Kim Philby’s attention in the summer of 1946, he oddly denied that he knew anyone named ‘Ellis’. Furthermore, Ellis was at some stage suspected of being blackmailed by the Soviets (since they knew of his indiscretions, von Petrov may have always been their creature, and they may have had some power over Ellis’s wife’s relatives) to work for the Moscow cause, but details of this claim are very skimpy. (Fink’s Index is not completely reliable, and on trying to re-establish the root of the Soviet allegations, all I could come up with were some vague claims made by Peter Wright that echoed an unpublished MI6 report.) Later, in 1954, Ellis was reported to have fled from Australia in somewhat of a panic after learning that a Petrov was about to defect: presumably Ellis believed that ‘Petrov’ was ‘von Petrov’, and might thus unmask him. As Mr Fink points out, Richard V. Hall debunked this theory in A Spy’s Revenge, showing how the chronology simply didn’t work.
The outcome was that Peter Wright, as part of the FLUENCY operation that investigated Soviet penetration of MI6 after Philby’s abscondment in 1963, began a serious study of Ellis’s possible treachery. Fink hints at a deeper study that had been carried out by MI6 officer William Steedman for many years, but the details of that project, named EMERTON, are very sparse. (Nigel West has informed me of the existence of a report that Steedman wrote, which might shed some important light on the events, but it has not been released outside MI6.) In 1966 Ellis was apparently prompted to confess to handing over intelligence to the Nazis shortly before the Venlo incident of 1939, but vigorously denied ever acting as a Soviet agent. This whole sordid story is covered by Fink – although not in a very logical and straightforward manner. (His narrative moves around in time, in that post-modern manner favoured by many writers: it is a technique I find unappealing.) What makes the claims so challenging is that no record of Ellis’s interrogation or confession has been shown to exist.
So where do the stories come from? Primarily they were fed to Nigel West, by Arthur Martin, and to Chapman Pincher, by Peter Wright, complemented by off-the-record interviews with senior or retired MI6 officers, whose intentions regarding Ellis may not have been truly honourable. This is a shockingly disreputable phenomenon. Mr Fink records the leakages, but fails to engage seriously with the duplicity on the part of the authorities, who, while stressing selectively the importance of honouring the Official Secrets Act, allowed such transgressions to pass unremarked and unpunished. I shall return to this aspect of the case later.
One of Fink’s sources for the EMERTON project is Nigel West’s At Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and I believe that it is important to add some context here. The head of Counter-Intelligence in MI6 at the time (1965-66) was Christopher Philpotts, who, though a leading candidate to replace Dick White as Chief, had not been recommended by him, and was then overlooked for the post of the deputy to the new Chief, John Rennie, who favoured Maurice Oldfield. Philpotts had been appointed Director of Counter-Intelligence, and had been conducting a vigorous purge of suspect officers, especially those who had concealed their Communist sympathies or affiliations. Out went Andrew King and Donald Prater: Tony Milne (Litzi Philby’s one-time lover) was forced to resign. West comments that the ‘ebullient’ Philpotts became a very unpopular figure. He had also supervised the inquisition into Ellis, who had ‘confessed’ to betraying information found in Nazi files that had been misattributed to the victims of Venlo, Best and Stevens. Yet he was not punished in any way for this transgression (he had retired in 1953), even though West writes that Steedman’s report concluded that Ellis ‘most likely had succumbed to Soviet pressure after the war’.
Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis
Is that all there was? A disgruntled ex-Royal Navy officer making vague assertions that were essentially unverifiable? What was the evidence that Ellis had been blackmailed by the Soviets after the war? The accusations were ‘unresolved’. Steedman took early retirement in 1970, but presumably felt free to brief journalists such as Nigel West in informal meetings that were not blessed with official authority, but presumably also tacitly allowed to occur. This aspect of the case seems rather preposterous to me, and may have been swollen only by the obsessions of Peter Wright (who served alongside Philpotts on the FLUENCY Committee and its successor, K7). The case against Ellis for undisciplined and possibly traitorous behaviour towards the Nazis seems strong, but the accusations of aiding Moscow come across as very flimsy.
Mr Fink very precisely nails the highly speculative aspect of these accusations. West’s pronouncements display the precariousness of these charges. West had raised the canard in his 1982 history of MI5 between 1945 and 1972, A Matter of Trust, where he wrote, very hypothetically, “As a German linguist, Ellis had been one of the MI6 officers assigned to translating the [Hitler–Von Ribbentrop] transcriptions. Might he have betrayed it to the Russians, who in turn had told their ally, Nazi Germany?” Yet in April 1983, he was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying: “There is only minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the contention that Ellis was ever a Soviet agent.” And I point out, that, when West’s Molehunt appeared in 1987, nary a mention of the accusations against Ellis was made. Yet, in the 2014 edition of the Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence, edited by West, the entry for Ellis includes these very speculative sentences:
The news that Ellis had partially admitted his guilt was revealed by Peter Wright, who also subscribed to the view that the KGB would have been bound to exploit his treason immediately after the war, if not sooner. Wright was convinced that because Ellis’ first brother-in-law was a known Soviet agent it was almost a certainty that he had succumbed to a KGB threat to expose him.
I find this casual citing of Wright as an authority rather disgraceful. It is certainly unscholarly.
Yet, in his ‘Author’s Notes’, Fink poses the rhetorical question: ‘Was Ellis a traitor or forgotten war hero or both? That is ultimately for the reader to decide’. Fink’s own conclusion is to deem Ellis innocent of both charges (namely working for the Nazis as well as the Soviets), which would appear to undermine the invitation he offers, and to misrepresent the probable reality by drawing an equivalence between the Nazi and Soviet allegations (the two ‘eagles’). I believe, moreover, that the question has been wrongly posed, as it presents an exaggeratedly false contrast.
I have to declare that I think much of the confusion about what posterity thinks of Ellis comes down to misuse of terminology. Mr Fink cites William Stevenson, the biographer of the BSC chief Bill Stephenson, who described Ellis as a ‘super-mole’. Yet, instead of debunking the absurdity of this categorization, Mr Fink tries to exploit it by raising the temperature and asking the rhetorical question: ‘Was Ellis a super-mole?’. I would state emphatically that Ellis was never a ‘mole’ (let alone a ‘super-mole’, which I think is really melodramatic), or a double (or triple) agent. If anything, he could have become an ‘agent-in-place’, exploited by a hostile intelligence service, but not for an extensive time. This re-assessment completely changes the tenor of the debate.
Mr Fink adopts the popular notion of ‘double agent’ to cover a multitude of roles, which I would organize as ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’. (For a refresher on classifications of agents, I refer readers to my piece at https://coldspur.com/double-crossing-the-soviets/.) For example, a ‘vertical’ double- (or triple-) agent would be Agent Zigzag (Eddie Chapman), who bounced between British Intelligence and the Abwehr, with no one being sure where his true allegiances were. Another example would be Hilde Beetz, who worked for the Sicherheitsdienst in trying to secure the Ciano Diaries, but then fell in love with Mussolini’s son-in-law, and tried to sabotage the project. (‘Turning’ someone ideologically is a very unlikely process, as SOE found when it tried to insert ‘turned’ German POWs into Austria and Germany. John Bevan of the London Controlling Section preferred to call the spies sent in by the Abwehr, and managed by the XX Committee and B1A, in MI5 as ‘controlled enemy agents’ rather than ‘double agents’.) The point being that characters who allow themselves to drift into double-agent status quickly abandon any political allegiances, and focus almost exclusively on their own survival, and eventually have to be discarded, incarcerated or destroyed (by either side) since they become a liability, and too dangerous. The service that believes that it originally recruited such an agent, but now questions whether he or she is betraying it, has to be very careful extricating itself from the arrangement, lest the enemy come to learn about the means by which the treachery was discovered (such as intercepted radio messages), and thus expose other relationships.
On the other hand, Mr Fink also classifies as ‘triple agents’ characters like von Petrov, who sold information to three (or four) different intelligence services – even though his prime allegiance was claimed to be to the GRU. Yet such horizontal figures should not be called such: they are really ‘traders’, not directly employed by any individual service, but seizing opportunities where they can, and thus in no way should they be described as ‘moles’ or ‘double agents’. On page 59, for instance, Mr Fink writes about Ellis and his high-stakes game of running double agents like Turkhul and von Petrov. What does this mean? That he (but not his bosses) knew they were working for the Germans as well (vertical) or that they were traders (horizontal) whose information might not be reliable or exclusive and were entitled to do what they did so long as they could get away with it? The GRU, the Abwehr and MI6 all thought they were ‘running’ von Petrov: none of them was.
As Mr Fink points out, Ellis was ideologically opposed to the Communists, and that poses for him the question: how could he have been a Soviet agent? He was also opposed to Nazism, but that didn’t stop him taking money from a tainted source, apparently. Yet ideology doesn’t come into it when you can be blackmailed, or threatened by potential harm to relatives in the Soviet Union. In my recent Round-up (https://coldspur.com/summer-2023-round-up/) I listed several MI6 officers who were exposed in this way. Ellis should probably be added to that list, as his Ukrainian wife (and her family) could have given an opportunity for the NKVD to suborn him – as they did with so many others in that situation, such as Harold Gibson. Contrary to what Ellis appeared to believe, there was no dishonour or suspicion attached to speaking Russian, or having a Russian wife. That was a characteristic considered desirable by MI6 recruiters in the inter-war period.
The main point I have been trying to make in recent coldspur posts is that, just because a spy or informer works for an intelligence service, that does not automatically make him a ‘double agent’. (This is a fiction that Adam Sisman lazily helps to perpetuate in his recent Secret Life of John le Carré.) Philby was a penetration agent whose loyalty was always to the Soviet Union. He was an officer in MI6 (by the way, it is only in the USA-FBI that ‘officers’ are called ‘agents’: in MI5 a spy employed off the books by Maxwell Knight to infiltrate, say, the CPGB, would be classified as an ‘agent’), and calling Philby a ‘double agent’ causes great confusion when comparisons are made with phenomena like the Double-Cross operation. Ellis did not ‘penetrate’ MI6 as an impostor: he was employed by the Service as a candidate with assuredly noble ambitions, but may have engaged in dubious transactions without official approval, probably succumbing to manipulation because of his money problems. My conclusion is that Pincher’s and West’s and Wright’s accusations about Ellis severely miss the point in making comparisons with Philby, and Ellis in his defence in 1965 must have been too flummoxed to respond properly.
The book could have benefitted from the production of a reliable time-line for Ellis’s activities, for I found it impossible to trace his movements. What was he doing in 1938-1939? Translating intercepted messages between Ribbentrop and Hitler? Vacationing in France? Sending reports back from Berlin to London? Masquerading as an Englishman in Belgium or the Netherlands? And if Ellis was a Soviet agent, how did the GRU/KGB contact him after the war? I regret I also found it very difficult to track the incriminating statements from the Protze files, for example. It would have been very useful if Fink could have supplied more precise references, namely serial numbers. No dates for the encounter with ‘the Russian posing as a Captain Ellis’ in Brussels (not Paris!) are provided by the archive. I need to inspect the exact context in which ‘Captain Ellis’ was referred to, and to examine closely Philby’s documented but bizarre claim to be ignorant of who ‘Ellis’ was. (It appears that Gwyer of MI5 presented only a summary of Protze’s testimony to Philby, not the original translation.) I have since downloaded those files (on Protze, Wehr-Bei, etc.) that have already been digitized, and I have also commissioned photographs of the von Petrov archive.
Mr Fink has performed some extremely important research, looking into many original sources. He provides an excellent Bibliography. Yet he occasionally nods, citing secondary references (including me) rather than the originals. For instance, he quotes Wright (of all people!) on Krivitsky. Yet Krivitsky, during his interrogation by MI5, never stated that von Petrov had a source in British intelligence, contrary to what Pincher and Wright claimed. Krivitsky said that he checked von Petrov’s reports, discovered that they had probably been translated from articles in the Times written by ‘Augur’, and when von Petrov was challenged, his reputation fell. I note also that Anthony Cavendish, in Inside Intelligence, wrote that George Young, who was responsible for dissolving the Sicherheitsdienst after the war, had recalled that ‘the OKH (Army High Command) pre-war files on the United Kingdom largely contained cuttings from the News of the World.’ Thus do intelligence-gatherers weave their magic, trying to sustain their existence and to enhance their reputation.
I have since investigated, and I have learned that ‘Augur’ was in fact Vladimir Poliakoff (1864-1956). Indeed, a Poliakoff brother is mentioned as a possible source in Appendix 10 of KV 2/2468, p 40 – one of the files pertaining to Helmuth Wehr-Bei, who worked for Protze. A few other errors appear. Fink describes Roger Hollis as ‘Philby’s superior’ (p 130). His coverage of Philby’s movements in 1947 is inaccurate. He quotes without correction Montgomery Hyde’s claim that Ellis was recruited by ‘SIS’s Colin Gubbins’ to purge British intelligence files (p 154), but Gubbins never worked for SIS. On page 136 Fink records that Philby resigned from MI6 in July 1951: on page 148 he states that he was sacked ‘by a reluctant MI6’ in 1955.
In any event, Ellis was assuredly not entirely innocent. Working from Fink’s material, I compiled a list of errors that Ellis probably made:
Trusting his brother-in-law and von Petrov (poor tradecraft)
Handing over secret information (the MI6 ‘battle plan’) without authority (although it would probably have been denied)
Not considering implications of exposing himself to the Abwehr and the GRU
Not cutting off contacts with von Petrov once his relationships were established (decontamination)
Handing over details of the Ribbentrop telephone interceptions (though the proof of this activity is still debatable)
Getting into money problems (which may not have involved his wife’s medical expenses, contrary to what he claimed)
Pocketing money that he was given, and not revealing it
Drawing Stalin’s attention by criticizing the Soviet Union
Deleting his first marriage from his ‘Who’s Who’ entry
Wrongly describing son Olik as by Barbara, second wife
Lying about his fiancées [sic] back in England
Trying to contact Philby on his return to the UK, despite instructions not to do so
Maybe there were others: in any case, this is not the behaviour of a man with no conscience. But it does suggest someone who lacked the guile and suspiciousness to be a successful agent-handler. One wonders, therefore, about his effectiveness as a developer of the OSS’s methods in such areas: his deep interest in the workings of the League of Nations is not suggestive of the type of mind that is attuned to the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence. Mr Fink’s book shows that he was something of an idealist, and he should have been given some careful tuition and guidance before being thrown into the dangerous world of deception, subterfuge and disinformation.
What is the source of the ‘confession’? This seems to me to be crucial. Without any documentation, how much are we to believe? Apart from the major divulgences from Martin and Wright, Nigel West told me that it was also recounted to him by Christopher Philpotts, the chief security officer, in the presence of Michael Wrigley, another MI6 officer, as if it had been an in-house briefing. He then later indicated that the subject came up in conversation at a casual lunch between the three, well after Philpotts had retired. What was Wrigley doing there? Was Philpotts in contravention of the Official Secrets Act? Were the claims malevolent, as part of the anti-Philby ‘Hollis as mole’ movement? Did it suit MI6 to have serious slurs thrown on Ellis’s reputation? Or were the stories accurate, but blown out of proportion by West and Pincher?
This incident seems remarkable to me in the way that it eerily echoes what transpired at the Spycatcher trial in Melbourne in 1985-86. Malcom Turnbull, defending Peter Wright, challenged the British Government in the shape of Sir Robert Armstrong over its failure to prosecute Arthur Martin, who provided Nigel West with information for his book on MI5, A Mattter of Trust, as well as Wright himself, who provided Chapman Pincher with his insider stories for Their Trade is Treachery and Too Secret Too Long. Turnbull also persisted in asking why the Government chose not to try to prevent publication of the two books. If the facts of Ellis’s ‘confession’, which may have been extracted under pressure, are true, his admissions and protestations seem vaguely convincing: maybe there is no smoke without fire. Yet what I think is scandalous is that MI6 very selectively released information on Ellis to writers – none of them professional historians – whereupon the latter delivered conclusions, harmful to Ellis’s reputation, based on material that cannot be inspected, verified or contested by anyone else.
Richard V. Hall is one who – correctly, in my opinion – draws parallels between the leakage of information concerning Hollis, and that about Ellis. It was as if the authorities failed to prosecute West and Pincher because it was convenient to cast slurs about Hollis’s loyalty as a method of covering up the deficiencies and oversights of both MI5 and MI6 in dealing with Soviet penetration agents, from Fuchs to Blake and Philby. Neither Hollis nor Ellis was around to defend himself. Yet Mr Justice Powell explicitly rejected Turnbull’s assertion that there had been a conspiracy to achieve that goal, while not acknowledging that there could have been any other reason, except for laziness or incompetence in the sluggishness of Sir Robert Armstrong and his office. What is also remarkable (as Mr Fink carefully explains) is the fact that both White and Oldfield were convinced of Ellis’s overall integrity, but did not have the guts to step in and quash the allegations. As I have written before, it suited the devious White to have indeterminable questions hanging over Hollis as a way of distracting the world from his own failures (Fuchs, Blunt, etc.), and Ellis may have fallen into the same mould. Both gentlemen were dead, and could not defend themselves.
In summary, if we scale back the ‘super-mole’ allegations, and concentrate on the indiscretions in Germany in 1939, we have a much simpler case to consider. Ellis was obviously not in that category – not a Philby – but, at the same time, I don’t think he can be vindicated and rehabilitated in the confident manner in which Fink concludes his analysis. I would adjust my assessment of him as a ‘scoundrel’ to perhaps a ‘fool’, or, maybe more appropriately, an intelligent and well-intentioned man who was naive in many respects, and did several foolish things.
Devotees of possible subversion of MI5 and MI6 should read this book, but not get distracted by the hyperbole and rhetoric, which represent (to me, at any rate) a rather regrettable variety of disinformation. Do read the excellent Endnotes carefully, and follow up where you can. And we should be thankful that, owing to the hopes of Mr Fink’s publisher for a success of Macintyresque proportions, The Eagle in the Mirror did actually reach the bookstalls. Otherwise it would have been difficult for any of us intelligence mavens to have enjoyed the benefits of Mr Fink’s industry. I suppose that is the price we have to pay for bringing fresh research into the open, and I trust that coldspur will be indulged for a more methodical analysis and refinement of Mr Fink’s excellent hard work in a way that enhances rather than impairs his commercial success.
Follow the Pipelines by Charlotte Dennett
‘Follow the Pipelines’
Charlotte Dennett is an American investigative journalist who has been on a mission to discover whether any foul play was involved in the death of her father in an aircraft accident in Ethiopia on March 24, 1947, when she was only six weeks old. I was drawn to Dennett’s story because a search that I initiated indicated that she suspected that Kim Philby might have been responsible for arranging the sabotage that brought down the plane. Charlotte’s father, Daniel, was working at the time for the Central Intelligence Group – the precursor to the CIA – and the plane was carrying 2000 pounds of highly secret radio equipment to Addis Ababa. As unlikely as it seemed to me that Philby would have been involved in such violent exercises just after he had been sent out to Turkey, in January 1947, I thought I ought to check out her story.
Charlotte’s brother, Daniel C. Dennett III, may be a better-known name than Charlotte. He is an eminent cognitive scientist and philosopher, famous for his forthright atheism. (A review of his autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking, by Julian Baggini, combined with an interview, appears in the November issue of Prospect, and a deeper review, by Nigel Warburton, appears in the Times Literary Supplement of October 20.) He was invited to write a Foreword for Follow the Pipelines where he rather bewilderingly spends most of its three-page text speculating whether Kim Philby was in fact a ‘triple agent’ when he turned up in Moscow in 1963. (That inevitable confusion over ‘double agents’ again.) Dennett implies that MI6 knew that Kim was always loyal to the British cause, and that he could thus safely be despatched to impart disinformation to his KGB handlers. Dennett even provides an imaginary speech of one-hundred and twenty words that Philby’s superior officers gave to him some time after they interrogated him in 1951, and instructed him to continue giving information to Moscow.
Daniel Dennett
This is such obvious nonsense that I am amazed that Dennett was allowed to get away with it. Baggini quotes from Dennett’s book, where the author states that it is the story of ‘how I became such a good thinker’. Not a modest man, clearly. But we should be wary of philosophers like Dennett and the late Derek Parfit telling us what to do. They are not the most practical of people, their expertise is not automatically transferrable to other fields, and, like economists, they disagree wholeheartedly amongst themselves, as Warburton shows. (Apparently, Dennett is a ‘compatibilist’, like his hero, David Hume, but ‘compatibilist’ is not a word that my Chambers Dictionary recognizes.) Warburton also reports that Dennett ‘adored’ his father, which sounds a little precocious for a boy who was just five years old at the time of the sad event. Would Charlotte’s analysis turn out to be any more sober, I wondered?
When Ms. Dennett sticks to writing about the machinations of oil companies, and their manipulation of governments in their attempts to construct pipelines that will take the petroleum to ports in the Mediterranean for their Western customers, she writes very well. She includes several highly useful and well-designed maps that display the proposed routes, and the sometimes hostile and barren territories that they had to cross over, in the sixty-five years since the end of World War II. Despite deploying that irritating technique of jumping around chronologically, as if the reader would be excited and fascinated by the choppy experience the author had in discovering the facts and rumours surrounding her father’s sad demise, she keeps a firm grip on the main outlines of the story concerning the competition for oil revenues in the Middle East.
But I do not want to discuss or analyze that dominant story in this review. It is the possible linkage between Philby and the unexplained plane crash that absorbs me. How did Dennett arrive at Philby? The author’s quest had started in a classically novelettish way – by inspecting a trunk in the attic after her mother died, and finding letters and papers. She interviewed an old comrade of her father’s, tried to gain the release of documents from the US National Archives, read many contemporary news stories, and studied the history of the region and the search for oil. She learned from some sources that the plane crash was probably due to sabotage. She came to the conclusion that it was not just the Russians who were butting heads with the Americans in 1946 and 1947 in the region: French and British colonial interests were clashing with the American plans for expansion and oil exploitation as well. And she identified Kim Philby as one of the ‘purported enemies’ of her father at the time of the fatal flight.
I believe that Dennett’s whole thesis is greatly undermined by the circumstances of her father’s death. She explains that a more important person, the US military attaché in Saudi Arabia, Colonel McNown, was scheduled to fly on the ill-starred flight, and that Dennett at the last minute gained the seat reserved for McNown, as the latter deplaned in Jidda, thus aborting his planned trip to Eritrea and Ethiopia. If indeed an assassination attempt was being planned with some meticulousness, and Dennett had been the real target, the fortuitous event of McNown’s change of itinerary does not make sense. Be that as it may, Charlotte Dennett resolutely pursues her prey.
The CIA had refused to hand over any documents from the period January 1 to March 31, so Charlotte delved around herself. Yet her account of Philby’s status and movements is a little suspect. She introduces her target by stating (p 121) that ‘he had become an acute embarrassment to both the British and the Americans for having moled his way into the highest levels of British intelligence on behalf of the Soviets, and in the process had sent many Western operatives to their deaths.’ That is a heavy brew for the end of 1946: Philby was indeed under deep suspicion at that time, and his posting to Istanbul could be interpreted to indicate that MI6 realized that such a questionable officer had to be removed from the leadership of Section IX, Soviet counter-intelligence.
Yet the implication that Philby’s treachery was broadly accepted at that time (‘an acute embarrassment’) is very much overstated, and the suggestion that he had sent ‘many operatives to their deaths’ premature. Moreover, it directly contradicts what her brother asserts about the awareness of Philby’s guilt by his bosses! I imagine that Dennett is referring primarily to Operation VALUABLE, whereby Philby may have betrayed plans for infiltrating guerrillas into Albania, but that did not occur until October 1949. (According to Stephen Dorril, SOE was fomenting unrest in Albania in 1946, but Philby was not involved then.) If Dennett was thinking of murkier deeds betraying agents in Austria, that might have occurred in 1946, but the evidence for that is hazy, and Dennett does not appear to be familiar with any details. Any such betrayal, moreover, did not involve ‘sending operatives to their deaths’.
It is true that Philby had been appointed, in the autumn of 1946, chief of counter-intelligence in Istanbul – not for the whole of the Middle East, as Dennett claims, but with a much more focussed responsibility, according to most sources, namely trying to determine the activities of Soviet spies in Turkey. He had been sent out there (according to E. H. Cookridge) in February 1947. In The Third Man, Cookridge emphasized that Philby had been asked to visit Arab states in an effort to discover how they were responding to Soviet approaches, and Kim’s father was viewed as a useful intermediary in that role. But that visit did not leave much time or opportunity for Philby to carry out devious schemes before the death of Dennett’s father in March. The author speculates on how much Philby would have revealed to the Soviets – and the British – about her father’s activities in the region. She claims that Philby spent most of January 1947 visiting his father in Saudi Arabia, and that the two of them flew to the British military base in Taif, above Jeddah, where Kim spent thirty-six hours with the head of the military mission before ‘returning’ to Istanbul. On March 10, Dennett likewise visited Taif, but the significance of that coincidence is not explored.
I wish I had a good handle on Philby’s movements in January 1947. Anthony Cave-Brown (in Treason in the Blood) writes that Philby left London for Istanbul ‘in January 1947’, travelling via Cairo. He then apparently went on to Jiddah, and then Riyadh, where he spent ‘five nights and six days’, before spending a couple of days in Taif. “Then,” Cave-Brown writes, “Kim left for Istanbul, where he formally took up his position in the middle of January.” (He later corrects that assertion to state that Philby arrived in Istanbul as station commander on January 26.) Cave-Brown’s sources are not specified clearly, but he may have been using the St. John Philby papers at St. Antony’s College, and a biography of him by Elizabeth Monroe, Philby of Arabia.
Yet I was under the impression (thanks to Jesse Fink) that, on January 24, 1947, Philby was still in London, writing to Joan Paine of MI5 about the status of the German Sicherheitsdienst officer Richard Protze, who had provided testimony in the Charles Ellis case. That did not square up with a Philby tour of the Middle East before ‘returning to Istanbul’. So I returned to Protze’s files (in this case, KV 2/1741) and concluded that, while the letter from MI6 to Paine followed up a signed letter from Philby in November, this one was not from him. The office location was the same, but the name of the author had been redacted, and, unlike the circumstances of the preceding November 1946 letter, there was no handwritten annotation to request that the letter be copied to the ‘PHILBY’ file. He must have left London by then. I believe that Mr Fink agrees with my assessment.
Philby’s presence in the area, however, did not alone signify his culpability. What other evidence was there? Philby was entirely a suspect by association: Dennett claims that his name ‘had come up’ in connection with the death of Sikorsky in a plane-crash off Gibraltar in July 1943, since he was head of the Iberian section of MI6, and he had visited Spain two months beforehand. (While quoting Cave-Brown liberally, she somehow chooses to overlook his statement that the crash was caused by a lunch bag left behind by a workman that broke loose and interfered with the controls.) Philby had been an educator at SOE: therefore he must have been familiar with explosives. (!) He had married a Jew, so he would have developed Zionist sympathies. (Most of the Communists in London, including Litzy, were more focused on installing Communism in their homelands than dealing with the intricacies of Zionism.) And Dennett’s rhetorical questions then reach new heights: might the interests of Philby’s dual masters (the British and the Soviets) converged? “Might they have arranged, through Philby, to have the Irgun Zvai Le’Umi or Greek communists to do their dirty work?”, she asks.
It was at this stage that my patience began to run out. Yet Dennett was not finished. She suggests that Philby had been keeping an eye on events in the Levant from his office in London. She cites a report that he sent to the Foreign Office on July 9, 1946, warning of an imminent ‘Irgun plot to attack British diplomatic personnel and facilities in Beirut’, a notice that apparently prompted the British [Foreign Office? It is not clear] to send to Lebanon two of the country’s highest intelligence officers in Palestine – an unsourced claim. “Some of Philby’s chroniclers [unidentified]”, she writes, “have interpreted this as a ploy by Philby’s Soviet handlers to divert senior British Intelligence officers away from Palestine to Lebanon at the very time when the Irgun’s plot to bomb the British King David Hotel in Jerusalem was about to happen”. (The latter event did take place on July 22.) That sounds to me a rather clumsy way of implicating Philby in nefarious behaviour, if it were true. Yet Dennett goes on to state that bombing of the British and American Embassies in Beirut did in fact occur on August 9. So what is your point, madam? She explains it all as a ruse by Philby to stay in good stead with his British handlers, as they might have otherwise suspected that he was the ‘double agent’ that he in fact was. But hadn’t she earlier written that they knew he was a mole already?
I had to read this report by Philby. Palestine, after all, was a British mandate, and, as such, MI5 was responsible for its security, through its SIME office in Cairo, not MI6. The officer Anthony Cavendish had been posted there in the summer of 1946, and was working for B Division of SIME, under Maurice Oldfield’s leadership, trying to counter the activities of the illegal organizations working against the British in Palestine. So how could Philby have been meddling in MI5’s business? Dennett cites Calder Walton’s Empire of Secrets, p 103, as her source, so I turned to it. In fact, Walton interprets the warning as being an inaccurate pointer to the Beirut bombing, but waffles about Philby’s motivations. Irrespective of other considerations, Philby would not have done anything so reckless without precise directives from Moscow, whose policy towards Palestine, in Walton’s words, ‘had not yet crystallized’. Moreover, Walton gets the reference wrong. He cites it as serial 108b in KV 4/36, and gives it a date of July 9, 1945 (!). I determined that the file is actually KV 5/36, and it is accurately identified as such by Bruce Hoffman in his book Anonymous Soldiers.
I rapidly commissioned photographs of KV 5/36 from London. Philby’s contribution turns out to be a quite unremarkable entry. On July 9, 1946, he indeed passed on intelligence received from ‘a usually reliable source’ indicating that several members of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (the most violent of the three Jewish underground organizations) had arrived in Beirut, with a supposed mission of sabotaging His Majesty’s Legation building. This letter was sent to the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and MI5, and was part of Philby’s role as the liaison with MI5. It was one of the permanent irritations for British intelligence that, while MI5 and MI6 were organized on geographical lines (MI5 handling the Empire, MI6 foreign territories), agents working for their enemies, e.g. the NKVD, the Abwehr, and Irgun, would obstinately not respect these artificial boundaries, but cross them, and make surveillance more difficult. Intelligence-sharing between MI5 and MI6 was thus absolutely critical.
The SIME station in Jerusalem was duly informed of the warning, and deeper insights were requested of it. On July 21, Oldfield and Isham – actually Sir Gyles Isham, the Defence Security Officer, to whom Cavendish reported administratively – responded by cable that they could not shed any light on the matter, as they were not in possession of any relevant intelligence. The very next day, the deadly blast at the King David Hotel occurred. It does not sound as if SIME was distracted by the Lebanon threat, but that the message was passed on too sluggishly, and that Oldfield and Isham were not on top of things to the extent that they later claimed. Irgun later admitted that the loss of life (British and Jewish) had hurt their cause: an attempt to find signs of Soviet manipulation behind the scenes does not convince at all.
Thus Dennettt suggests a scenario of absurd proportions. Philby, who had no field experience, and no knowledge of sabotage exercises or materials, as a prelude to his posting in Istanbul to focus on the Soviets, is sent on a semi-private mission to visit his anti-Semitic father and gain intelligence from the Saudis. During this short visit, he manages, despite the fact that Palestine is MI5’s territory, not MI6’s, to make contact, unnoticed by SIME, with a Jewish underground organization in order to arrange the assassination of an American who was not even scheduled to be on the plane that crashed two months later on a flight from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia. Moreover, he draws attention to himself by passing on a legitimate warning of a terrorist attack that is not taken seriously enough. If his name had ever been associated with the project, it would have caused a massive stink with the Americans, the British, the Saudis, and the Soviets, and his career in Turkey would have been over.
Charlotte Dennett
Charlotte Dennett is understandably upset about the mystery that surrounds the death of her father, and she is probably justified in believing that information is being withheld from her. Her practice of selectively plucking possibly incriminating evidence of Philby’s culpability from her published sources is, however, simply irresponsible. To allocate blame to Kim Philby may be cathartic, but is, in my view, quite absurd. The man was odious, and thus his reputation encourages undisciplined writers to ascribe all manner of evils to him. As an example, Anthony Cavendish, referred to earlier, was quick, when Philby absconded, to blame him for the miserable failure of the project to insert exiled Latvians behind the lines in 1949-1950 (Operation JUNGLE), even though Philby had been in Washington at the time. Moreover, it may suit those who know more to have the cloud of suspicion hang over him. It reminds me again of Dick White, happy to have unending and irresolvable investigations into the deceased Roger Hollis as a Soviet mole being carried on, as the process distracted attention from his own obvious failings. Some of the research in this highly-flawed book is admirable, but its dominant thesis is pure self-delusion and rhetoric. In that respect, another work in the infamous ‘Kim &’ series (see https://coldspur.com/2021-year-end-roundup/ ): Kim and the Dybbukim.
Agents of Influence by Mark Hollingsworth
‘Agents of Influence’
Between the 1930s and the 1960s, a hierarchy of Communist sympathizers existed. First were the signed-up members of the Communist Party itself, unashamed of their allegiance, openly declaring their commitment to the Leninist-Stalinist cause, such as Dave Springhall. Next were the fellow-travellers, those who did not go so far as to join the Party, but openly expressed their sympathies for the movement, such as The Red Dean, Canon Hewlett Johnson, or the lawyer Denis Pritt – the classical ‘useful idiot’. More shady were the Comintern or NKVD agents, resident legally, perhaps by marriage, acting as couriers and recruiters, and sometimes propagandists, such as Edith Tudor-Hart and Peter Smolka. Then there were the Illegals, probably bearing a false identity that allowed them to maintain residence in the UK for a while, and act as recruiters for Moscow, or as clandestine messengers, such as Arnold Deutsch. Next were the notorious native penetration agents, disguising their commitments, and exploiting their background to gain entry into the corridors of power, and betray secrets to their Soviet masters, such as Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. But perhaps equally as dangerous were the agents of influence, acting to support the Communist revolution, but being careful to perform their task with subterfuge and subtlety, never openly indicating their allegiance, and ensuring that they were never contaminated by any hint of espionage. The best example was Victor Rothschild, who recommended that MI5 hire Anthony Blunt.
I titled Chapter 6 of Misdefending the Realm ‘Agents of Influence’, and I used it to highlight the pernicious effects that the actions of Isaiah Berlin and Victor Rothschild had on the ability of MI5 to defend the realm, in that, between them, they made Marx respectable and minimized the dangers of academic communists, thus encouraging counter-intelligence officers to lower their resistance. For those few coldspur readers who may not have a copy of the book readily at hand, I reproduce here a key paragraph:
The subject of ‘agents of influence’ has not received the attention it deserves, yet some commentators assert that such persons could be even more dangerous than ‘penetration agents’, spies who handed over documents. While spies provided the enemy with information that might help with policy or with negotiations (such as Soviet preparation for the Yalta conference), agents of influence could directly manipulate policy so that such manoeuvres were no longer necessary. Such agents worked in a twilight world: not members of the Communist Party, but identified by the Soviets as allies with an ability to influence domestic policy. (Such figures were frequently named in messages exchanged between the rezidentura and Moscow, as the VENONA decrypts show. Not all persons identified were agents of influence, but the cryptonyms of many who must have performed damage have still not been assigned to their real counterparts.) These agents were careful never to be engaged in the act of passing physicalinformation to a Soviet handler, but might consort with Soviet diplomats in their official roles.
One important aspect of the term is that it refers to ‘agents’, suggesting that the hostile power has some sort of relationship with them, if not direct recruitment, at least a familiarity with them, and maybe some control over their behaviour (in the case of Berlin, for instance, who still had relatives in the Soviet Union). The literature has not been served well in this regard: the Wikipedia entry is a mess, as its ‘talk’ section confirms, and there is a tendency to include conventional spies (such as Alger Hiss) in this category. Thus my interest was provoked, a few months ago, when I learned that a book titled Agents of Influence had been published.
Mark Hollingsworth
It is written by Mark Hollingsworth, described as ‘a journalist and historian’ on the flyleaf. Hollingsworth is further described as ‘author of ten books, notably Londongrad: From Russia with Cash, Saudi Babylon, an acclaimed study of MI5 and a biography of Mark Thatcher’. That uncertain punctuation is misleading. Is the ‘acclaimed study of MI5’ in apposition to Saudi Babylon, further describing it, or is it a separate volume? Presumably the latter, but if so, and if it has been ‘acclaimed’, surely the title merits being given? An inspection of Hollingsworth’s website indicates that no such book is listed, and it took a trawl of amazon to discover that it must refer to a 1999 volume titled Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair. Yet I then read in a frontispiece to the book under review that Hollingsworth had co-authored a book with Nick Fielding bearing that same initial part of the title, but subtitled ‘MI5 and the War on Terrorism’. So I do not know where the acclaim came from, and I have no idea what is going on. Not a good start if the author himself wants to conceal the existence of one his major works, or to cast some mystery over its title.
The book does not have a very inspiring beginning. The first chapter (‘The Covert Art of War’) plods through all the familiar territory of the evolution of Soviet intelligence since the Revolution, and then informs us that, on March 13, 1954 ‘the KGB was born.’ That led me to believe that this was going to be a book about the KGB era. And then Hollingsworth stumbles as he tries to get into his stride in Chapter 2: ‘Agents of Influence’. He introduces the person of Peter Smolka via a discussion on Graham Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man, on which Smolka had reputedly advised the author on the plot-line, as well as showing him the sewers in the communist sector of Vienna, and writes:
But what nobody knew at the time was that Smolka was in fact an NKVD agent of influence and had been secretly working for the Soviet Union since late 1939, after being recruited by the notorious double agent Kim Philby.
I find so much to dispute in this sentence that I could probably dedicate a whole coldspur bulletin to it – and shall probably do so, one day. The notion that Philby had recruited Smolka (or Smollett, to which he had changed his name after British naturalization) was one that Philby himself promoted, but it is far more likely that Smolka had become a servant (with the cryptonym ABO) of the NKVD much earlier, and Borovik’s book subtly suggests this. Nevertheless, Philby got into trouble with Gorsky, his NKVD handler, for approaching Smolka without authority. (In that case, one might ask, why was Smolka given the cryptonym ABO by Moscow Centre?) Smolka was thus as much an ‘agent of influence’ as was Philby a ‘double agent’. He was surely sent to the UK to penetrate British institutions, and ended up exerting influence, since he was hired by the Ministry of Information to help with propaganda efforts, and thus abetted the cause of the Soviet Union quite dramatically. If conventional agents wielded no ‘influence’ at all, they would not be of much use, but to categorize every agent who assists with propaganda or disinformation as an ‘agent of influence’ diminishes the whole debate.
Peter Smollett (Smolka)
Did ‘nobody’ know of Smolka’s loyalties at the time? I find it hard to believe. When Smolka arrived in the United Kingdom in 1931, he had red flags over him from a police report in France. He was known to be a communist, he travelled at least once to the Soviet Union and wrote an unpleasant book extolling its merits, and yet he was granted naturalization, was recruited by the Ministry of Information to head its Russian Section, and even given an O.B.E. Moreover, he had been in close contact with Philby since 1934. Hollingsworth mentions that Litzi Friedman was a close friend of Smolka’s, but does not reveal that his wife, Lotte, had been Litzi’s closest school-friend. Hollingsworth also claims that Smolka had returned to Vienna, and that he, Litzy and Kim, had helped smuggle Austrian socialists through the sewers. Yet he does not provide a source for this anecdote: I suspect it may come from Smolka’s godson, Peter Foges. Moreover, in a feeble interrogation by the inept Arthur Martin in 1961, Smolka claimed that he was not aware that Kim had married Litzi until he met him in the autumn of 1934.
In this instance (and probably others), Smolka was almost certainly lying. His story has not been fully told, and a detailed inspection of his extensive archival material (released in 2015) reveals some very troubling facts. I have started to inspect Smolka’s embarkation and disembarkation records in an effort to define his movements in the nineteen-thirties, and have come across much that is startling, and very provocative, on which I shall report in due course. E. H. Cookridge, who was in Vienna at the time, does not mention Smolka in The Third Man. Information on Smolka supplied by such as Boris Volodarsky is very confusing. Yet other snippets, including Smolka’s co-operation with Graham Greene on the script of The Third Man (the movie, not directly related to Cookridge’s book) suggest that some of Smolka’s activities in the mid-thirties must have been connived at, and concealed, by MI5 and MI6. Purvis and Hulbert, in The Spy Who Knew Everyone, have provided the best coverage of Smolka that I have seen so far, but they are far too trusting of Kim Philby’s testimony, and ignore some important markers in Smolka’s files.
I do not propose to analyze the rest of the book in any detail. Hollingsworth is really writing an account of Soviet subversion and propaganda. While he has many interesting anecdotes to impart, I merely offer the flavour of his material, by reproducing an important paragraph:
The term ‘agent of influence’, a literal translation of the Russian term ‘agent Villanova’, is both elastic and multifaceted. Many such agents are not official spies in the conventional sense – that is hired to complete a mission assigned by a KGB case officer. Some are not even aware that the Soviet diplomat they are meeting is in fact an intelligence officer. Only a few become registered agents. Instead the relationship is informal and covers a broad spectrum of social and professional relationships – from casual lunch partners to close personal friendships. Usually they are journalists, politicians, civil servants, bankers, lobbyists, and, in more recent years IT and social media specialists. Their mission is simple – to secretly exert influence, spread disinformation and destabilize the enemies of Russia.
I think Hollingsworth’s agenda is clear.
After describing the antics of Victor Louis, another famous ‘agent of influence’, Hollingsworth then deviates wildly off the rails, spending chapters on surveillance in Moscow, and honey-traps: as his blurbs from such as Edward Lucas and Christopher Steele testify, his story is simply another account of Soviet intelligence operations against the West. Thus he spends many pages relating the processes of inveigling victims such as Jeremy Wolfenden and Anthony Courtney, and includes the notorious paid stooge Robert Maxwell in his gallery of ‘agents of influence’. Maxwell even appears in a photograph with his crony Leonid Brezhnev, and is boldly described as a Soviet agent. (Nothing subtle or discreet about that.) Hollingsworth does, however, provide a useful Appendix of KGB Forgeries, but the book has drifted far from the subject by then.
One last aspect I shall comment on. Edward Lucas says that Hollingsworth’s history of active measures is ‘deeply researched’. Hollingsworth describes himself as an historian, but it is clear that most of the work he undertook was having conversations with various intelligence personnel, ‘many of whom were anxious to remain anonymous’. In his Acknowledgements, however, he gives credit to ‘George Nixon, my brilliant researcher, who did a fantastic and tireless job in tracking down obscure documents from archives, compiling profiles of individuals and tracing sources. His Russian language skills were also useful’. Indeed: I can well imagine. But how did Hollingsworth assess Nixon’s ability to distinguish between facts, lies and disinformation, and to handle the inevitable contradictions that arise from intelligence archives? Serious historians work at the coalface themselves, and perform their own interpretations.
Spies by Calder Walton
‘Spies’
I have to admit that I approached Calder Walton’s panoramic study of the intelligence wars between ‘East’ and ‘West’ with a good measure of diffidence. The first reason was the author himself, who has studiously ignored me on a couple of occasions, and whom I have been tempted to mock gently (see my December 2021 Round-up at https://coldspur.com/2021-year-end-roundup/ ). I had been encouraged to contact him because of a project on which he had reputedly embarked – the Cambridge History of Espionage and Intelligence – of which he is stated to be General Editor, alongside his long-time mentor, Christopher Andrew. The Belfer School at the Harvard Kennedy Center informs us that the publication of this three-volume work will appear in 2022 [sic]. I can only assume that the crackerjack international team of ‘historians and ex-intelligence practitioners’ was held up by the discovery of the coldspur trove, which necessitated a careful revision of many of the work’s chapters.
The second reason is that I find it difficult to get excited about fresh encyclopedic coverage of broad subjects such as this. A new comprehensive study surely needs a major set of revelations from new archival material – especially from foreign sources – or a dramatically new philosophical approach, in order to justify the quantity of analysis offered. Walton makes some claims, mainly about newly released Russian archives (which I shall investigate more deeply later), but it is hard to conclude that they contribute to any major new findings. It seemed to me that ninety per cent of what Walton wrote here was familiar, even if I could not unerringly identify the source on every occasion. Yet, if the reader has digested Christopher Andrew’s KGB, MacDonald Hastings Secret Wars, Phillip Knightley’s Second Oldest Profession, David Dallin’s Soviet Espionage, Stephen Dorril’s MI6, John Haynes’s Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, any number of books on the Cambridge Five, and a few other popular titles, I suspect that most of what Walton lays out will be familiar.
In many respects, it is a very enjoyable read. Walton romps through the decades in a sprightly fashion, and presents many examples to explain how intelligence wars developed over a hundred years, and to reinforce his primary message of the importance of continual investment in espionage and counter-espionage to be maintained by the West in the face of the threats from the East, which now, of course, includes China. That is perhaps not a surprising message, and thus I looked for fresh insights as to exactly what our intelligence services should be doing differently. But to whom is the book targeted? It appears to be the only marginally-informed general reader, and it is not clear how his or her knowledge will be able to influence strategy. For instance, at one point (page 90), he writes: “The most important intelligence body during World War II was one that you have probably never heard of, the London Controlling Section.” That sounds a little condescending, and if his target reader is going to be that ill-informed, I do not see how he or she will appreciate or understand the wealth of arcane sources cited in the Endnotes, which include a number of books and archival material in Russian.
Walton also has a rather irritating practice of preening over his exclusive access to secret archives, and his one-on-one interviews with important intelligence personnel, British, American and Russian. He proudly reminds us of his privileged access, under the patronage of Christopher Andrew, to MI5 files when he contributed to Andrew’s authorized history, and he frequently quotes conversations he has had with presumably influential officers on both sides of the East/West divide. Whether he should have trusted what those persons told him is another story. Writers should always be on their guard when they are being flattered by bigwigs who may view their contacts as useful mediums by which to transmit a message: one thinks inevitably of Peter Wright and Chapman Pincher. “GCHQ insiders confidently told me . . .” is one such example (p 250). Others include: “SOE’s official historian, M. R. D. Foot, once told me. . . .” ( p 84); “As the then director of US National Intelligence, James Clapper, told me. . . .” (p 509); “A former MI6 senior officer, on the condition of anonymity, said. . . .” (p 414); “According to former Soviet intelligence officers. . . .” (p 333).
Calder Walton
All of which brings me round to methodology. Walton describes his methodology in the following terms: “synthesize contemporary records and newspapers, private papers, memoirs, and oral interviews”. But that is not a methodology, it is a process crying out for some discipline. Moreover, missing from those sources is archival material, the recently released Russian variety of which he is eager to quote, although submerged in so much vagueness that it is difficult to verify. One of Walton’s somewhat obtuse techniques is to present a paragraph that contains multiple assertions, and then affix an Endnote number at the end. (This is a technique he tried to defend in his first book, Empire of Secrets.) When one looks up the reference, one may encounter multiple sources, and it is impossible to associate any of them with any single feature of his text. And I am not sure that all these are trustworthy. For instance, a typically controversial passage runs as follows:
Within the Kremlin today, Soviet agents from early in the Cold War, like Fuchs and the five Cambridge Spies, occupy pride of place in the annals of foreign intelligence. The SVR showered them in hagiographical terms on its centenary in 2021. The reality is different. Contrary to the impression given by the SVR, these agents conducted their hugely damaging espionage for Moscow at times despite, rather than because of, the KGB and Stalin. The damage they inflicted on British and American national security was the result of their motivation and skill as spies, not the professionalism and methods of the KGB, which at times badly let them down. Furthermore, contrary to what the SVR portrays today, British intelligence came close to catching all of them.
This paragraph contains such a mixture of provocative assertions and unlikely claims that I was very eager to read what sources it was based on. ‘Catching’ spies, especially those who were native subjects or who had been granted naturalization, was a problematic concept in the administration of British democracy, with confessions normally required (c.f. Fuchs and Blake), and the publicity of criminal trials avoided. Thus I imagined that the statement about the spies’ proximal capture must surely have come from some previously unreleased British source. The relevant Endnote runs, however, as follows:
Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Rossiyskoy Federatsii 100 let, p. 98, and chaps. 7 [pp 89-93], 13 [pp. 146-159]; Primakov, Ocherki ob Istorii Vneshney Razvedki, vol 3. 20-60; Dolgopolov, Kim Filbi, p. 17.
Now, as you rush to your local library to check out these works, I shall point out that I do have a copy of Dolgopolov’s biography of Philby, and page 17 contains nothing of relevance to these matters. I do not believe that the bland reference to forty pages of another text of a probably propagandist nature, without any discrimination or analysis, constitutes serious scholarship. If Walton had focused in his book on a detailed analysis of such new writing from Russia, he might have made a significant new contribution to his area of study, but I can only stand in amazement at such haughtiness. (In another donnish aside, in Chapter 17, Note 55, he writes: “This is disputed, of course, in commentaries such as Shebarshin, Ruka Moskvy, pp. 264-66.” ‘Of course’! How could I have overlooked them?)
Thus Walton wraps his manuscript in a series of references to obscure and almost impossibly unverifiable sources. He even has the effrontery to suggest that some of these archives were opened for his unique benefit. (“Russian archives, uncovered for this book, suggest that the FBI’s suspicions about Nambiar were correct.” p 371). Yet it is never clear who inspected these archives, namely the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, the State Archives of Ukraine, the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, and the Russian State Archive of Sociology-Political History. Walton does not confess to a knowledge of Russian, and he omits any mention of a visit to Russia under his brief Appendix ‘Methodology and Sources’. His Acknowledgments contain no message of thanks to any translators, or Russian citizens who ploughed the State archives. Can he personally attest to the reliability of the material cited? It is a mystery, and I think it is a very dubious performance.
In fact, Walton’s text sometimes gives the impression of having been written by a committee. Early on, he stresses that one of the lessons he wants to impart is that the Cold War did not end with the dismantling of the Soviet Empire in 1991. Yet multiple times he refers to the ‘end of the Cold War’ (e.g. p 22, p 324, p 329, p 432, p 448). His mentor Christopher Andrew is thanked for reading the whole text, but I wonder how carefully he attended to some of the pronouncements from the pulpit? Several judgments seem ill-considered: though not startling enough to shock, they are so carelessly phrased as to indicate less than sustained reflection, and misrepresent an often more complicated reality. For example:
P 7: From 1917 onward, these three powers, the Soviet Union in the East, and Britain and the United States in the West, have thus waged an intelligence war based on two competing ideological systems, vying for global supremacy.
Whether the muddle of liberal democracy should be considered an ‘ideology’ is highly debatable. Unlike the Soviet Union’s belief that Communism would eventually prevail everywhere, neither the USA nor Great Britain pursued a strategy of ‘world domination’: the omission of Nazi Germany in this summary is bizarre. Russia no longer promotes an ideology of world supremacy, but a nationalist philosophy intent on regaining traditional lands and trying to protect a mythical sense of Russian identity.
P 37: MI6 archives reveal that it had little intelligence from inside Russia in the first chaotic months of Bolshevik rule.
In fact, the early months of Bolshevik rule were probably the only time that MI6 had any good intelligence coming out of Russia, from such as Paul Dukes, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, George Hill, and Stephen Alley. The Cheka was soon to manipulate Western attempts at espionage through the ‘Trust’ operation. MI6 never controlled any spies (penetration agents) in the Soviet Union.
P 84: SOE’s official historian, M. R. D. Foot, once told me that its greatest success was to ‘give resistance movements in occupied countries the moral courage to fight”. Hastings has correctly noted: ‘true achievement was felt after the war, not during it.’ “Never could enemies of democracy claim that Britain and the United States had abandoned the occupied nations to their fate.
The issue of SOE’s role, and its reputation with occupied countries, is far more complex, given (for example) the various betrayals and incompetence shown in France and the Netherlands, and the abandonment of the Poles. Reprisals discouraged subversion in Norway, and eliminated it in Czechoslovakia.
P 91: Thanks to ULTRA, London’s intelligence chiefs identified every wartime Axis agent sent to Britain, approximately one hundred and fifteen in total. MI5’s counterespionage outfit, B Division, captured and turned thirty of them into double agents, using them to send disinformation back to the Axis powers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
This is a great distortion. ULTRA did allow MI5 to trace the acceptance of a few agents managed by the Abwehr. But the number of 115 seems to have been plucked out of the air, ULTRA made little contribution outside Europe, and Petrie’s claims are exaggerated.
P 191: In truth, the KGB badly let Philby down, and he, in turn, betrayed his fellow Soviet agents, Burgess and MacLean.
It is not clear in what way the KGB let Philby down. He had behaved irresponsibly in inviting Burgess to lodge with him in Washington. He did, indeed, draw attention to doubts about Burgess and Maclean in an attempt to save his skin when he knew they were lost. Moscow did, however, ‘rescue’ Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
P 301: In 1945, the United States and Britain had different strategies for the postwar world. Their differences centered on Europe’s empires. As Churchill roared, he did not become prime minister ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’
Roosevelt had continually undermined Britain’s imperial ambitions throughout the war. Soon after the war, Churchill was ousted, and Attlee took over. The quotation derives from 1942. Churchill did return to the Premiership, but the main dismantling of the Empire is generally attributed to Attlee and Macmillan.
P 518: At key moments, Soviet intelligence officers badly let down the Cambridge spies, failing to appear at meetings and placing so much pressure on them that at least one, Donald Maclean, had a nervous breakdown.
One might ask how much of the pressure on the spies was self-induced, since one would not expect the NKVD/KGB to act in any other way. In a way, the Foreign Office was far too indulgent to Maclean’s ‘mental health’ issues.
P 532: It would alas be unsurprising to discover that a Chinese Kim Philby or Rick Ames is already working inside U.S. or British intelligence, disclosing Western secrets.
There might well be mercenary spies providing secrets to the Chinese, or Chinese citizens in the USA or GB legally doing the same, but it is highly improbable that any US or British native has committed himself to betrayal because of a conversion to the strange Chinese political cause of authoritarian party control and managed capitalism, analogous to the commitment that Philby made to Communism.
P 539: While there is not a clash now between communism and capitalism, the century’s struggle does have an ideological component to it: between authoritarianism and liberal democracy.
This restatement is incorrect. The original clash was indeed between totalitarianism and liberal democracy, not communism vs. capitalism, which was an item of Leninist/Stalinist propaganda, too simplistically adopted by many western commentators. This century’s clash is more of an economic one, yet China and Russia present very different threats in their dealings with the West.
These few examples reinforce the point I made about the risk of ‘encyclopedic’ studies (see coldspur of November 2022 at https://coldspur.com/an-armful-of-history-books/ ) struggling to show authority over a wide range of topics. If you are going to set yourself up as an A.J. P. Taylor or a Simon Sebag-Montefiore, you need to have strong credentials and to have done your homework thoroughly.
Moreover, Walton makes several minor mistakes in territory that should be closer to home – and should have been picked up by Christopher Andrew. He ascribes the policy of recruiting idealistic young university graduates to Arnold Deutsch (p 56), when Deutsch was one of the executors of the policy. (I cannot locate the source, but I believe the architect was Trilisser, or maybe Artuzov.) He writes that MI6 chief Sinclair acquired Bletchley Park at the outbreak of the war (p 72), but the purchase occurred in 1938. The ‘Jedburgh’ teams of SOE/OSS agents were not named after the place where they were trained (p 82): the name just happened to be next in the list of codenames. The inquiries into Nunn May in Canada in 1945 were not carried out by MI5’s liaison officer in Ottawa, Cyril Mills (p 131), as he was already on his way home, having been demobilized. Jane Archer was no longer Jane Sissmore, and about to marry John Archer, in 1945( p 133): she had married him on the outbreak of war. Stalin’s military aims in the late 1940s were not an unknown factor (p 150): the defector Tokayev had described them in Stalin Means War. It is not true that Philby and Burgess worked out their plan without informing the KGB rezidentura (p 191): the KGB had been alerted, and it was never Philby’s intention that Burgess should accompany Maclean to Moscow. The NSA and its defence contractors did not replace vacuum tubes with computers using magnetic tape and tape drives for their calculations (p 246): tapes are storage devices. Walton does, however, sensibly judge that Roger Hollis was not a Soviet mole, as he would in that case have alerted the KGB to the danger that Gordon Lonsdale was in (note on p 590.)
The final chapter, on the Chinese threat, appears to have been written in a rush. Abbreviations are not explained: that dreadful phrase ‘the intelligence community’ appears seven times in just over one page, showing a lack of serious thought, and the arguments are often trite. Walton goes to town in explaining the Chinese threat, providing a rich set of examples of how it is attempting to subvert western institutions, steal technology, hack into important data centers, and play havoc with social media, mimicking much of the traditional Soviet playbook. Yet he appears to forget that the advice he had offered in his Foreword (“What is required is forward thinking and imagination: open-source intelligence collection, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and super-computing.”) is simply inadequate and outdated – a laundry list that any alert non-specialist could have compiled. The Chinese have advanced far in the deployment of technology itself, not only to challenge Western security (Walton does not mention the threat to encryption embodied in quantum computing improvements, for example), but to impose strict controls on its own citizens, that conventional mechanisms are no longer adequate.
Walton ignores the fact that pluralist Britain and the USA are at a great disadvantage when dealing with the authoritarian control of the Chinese Communist Party. In the West, governments are temporary and fractured: they do not control business, academia or the media. Walton never mentions dubious projects such as the China Forum at Jesus College, Cambridge, which is an echo of those ‘Friends of Russia’ and ‘Peace Movements’ sponsored by Soviet intelligence. His prognostication is shallow, and his advice usually obvious or second-rate: ‘Good intelligence will be key for Western policymakers’; ‘The West must seek well-placed spies like Gordievsky to complement open-source information’; ‘Strategy toward China must be based on strategic empathy’ [without explaining what that entails]; ‘A campaign for digital literacy is required to counter disinformation’; ‘Western governments must expect the intelligence wars to persist’; ‘The U.S. government must disclose, challenge and debate clandestine Chinese activities’.
What the average reader is supposed to do with this woolly advice is not clear, nor do I expect that the diverse organs of Western civilization (‘the West’) will pick up his entreaties with vigour and single-mindedness. Liberal democracies are indeed a muddle, but we should celebrate and value them for that superiority over any stifling authoritarian governments. Perhaps the Chinese ‘experiment’ will collapse under its own contradictions, but, as with Putin, we can never know whether what replaces President Xi and his oppressive edifice will be better or worse, or how the Communist Party will react to growing dissatisfaction and frustration among its citizens. (“A people’s revolution, comrades? Oh, perhaps not. We tried that already.”) Untangling tight business relationships with China will undoubtedly be messy, but that would appear to be the number one priority.
It is probably clear to coldspur readers by now that the more I delved into this meretricious book, the less I liked it. If Walton had chosen a particular theme, such as the revelations that recently uncovered Russian archives throw on intelligence matters (and why they should be trusted), or a detailed study of the practices of Chinese subversion and counter-intelligence, he might have made a valuable contribution to intelligence studies. Instead he dispenses his self-satisfied and cliché-ridden analysis to no great effect, and displays some bizarre judgments and opinions. On lighter matters, at one stage he writes of ‘the impossibly named Kermit Roosevelt’, an appellation that strikes me as no more absurd than ‘Calder Walton’ (or even ‘Walton Calder’). He also offers (on page 91) an arch observation on T. A. Robertson of the XX Committee, noting that Robertson ‘delighted’ his fellow officers in MI5 when he turned up for work in trews or kilt. In what was certainly Geoffrey Elliott’s weakest book, his profile of Robertson titled Gentleman Spymaster, the author informs us that, at the outbreak of war, Robertson sported his Seaforth Highlanders trews, and was soon given the name ‘Passion Pants’ by the secretarial staff in MI5. I suspect that it was more likely that his colleagues mumbled: “Look at that prat Robertson, prancing around in that Scottish rig, trying to charm the ladies. Who does he think he is? Bonnie Prince Charlie?”
We shall never know.
(P.S. I heartily recommend The Red Hotel by Alan Philps, a very sure-handed and insightful account of how Stalin manipulated the foreign Press Corps in Moscow between 1941 and 1945, and, for those who enjoy more recherché history, who may have liked my article Homage to Ruthenia (https://coldspur.com/reviews/homage-to-ruthenia/ ), or have savoured the works of Joseph Roth or Gregor von Rezzori, I point you towards Goodbye, Eastern Europe, by Jakob Mikanowski. This is a rich account of the way that distinctive local communities, from Riga to Tirana, had over the centuries held together but had then been broken tragically apart, and drawn into mortal conflict, when they came under the scourge of the twin monsters of Nazism and Communism.)
‘The Red Hotel’ by Alan Philps‘Goodbye Eastern Europe’ by Jacob Mikanowski
Georg and Litzi Honigmann did not in fact become a couple officially until they married in East Berlin in late 1946. And that event may not have been legal and genuine, if the questionable divorce of Litzi and Kim Philby did not actually take place. That would not have worried the MGB *, but it would have raised severe problems for Kim, since he went through a hasty wedding ceremony with Aileen on September 25. He later vigorously spoke to his interlocutors of the disastrous effects that charges of bigamy would have had on his career. Georg and Litzi were, however, an ‘item’ in the UK between 1942 and 1946, and this report explores aspects of Litzi’s identity during that period, as well as Georg’s very puzzling experiences with the Home Office and Immigration authorities since he first applied for naturalization back in 1936.
(* The NKVD/NKGB was reorganized as the MGB in March 1946: the KGB was not created until 1954. In common with other writers, I sometime use ‘KGB’ as the generic term for the Soviet counter-intelligence service.)
This report is divided into two sections:1) The Phenomenon of Litzy Feabre, and 2) The Honigmann Files.
The Phenomenon of Litzy Feabre
Introduction
One of the most puzzling phenomena arising from a study of the archives concerning communist activity in Britain at the end of World War II is the alias given to Litzi Philby, the NKVD agent married to Kim Philby. She returned to Britain from France in January 1940, and at some stage afterwards she was referred to in MI5 reports and memoranda as ‘Litzi Feabre’ (sometimes ‘Feavre’), with the first archival evidence dated August 1945. I do not believe anyone has written about this phenomenon: if you perform a Google search on the term, all you will find are two coldspur reports, and Keith Ellison’s e-book, the relevant section of which was spawned by the coverage that I laid out. Keith Ellison and I have been exploring the probable cause and purpose of this nomenclature, and I use this report as a means of describing the debate.
But what are the incidences of Litzi Feabre’s appearance, and where can they be found? I list and reproduce below the entries from the National Archives on Engelbert Broda, Edith Tudor-Hart and Georg Honigmann (including some items closely related that do not mention FEABRE) in chronological order, in The Source Material. Before that, however, a slight detour.
MI5 Organization
In order for the operational dynamics to be understood, I believe that an explanation of the organization of MI5 is essential. Soon after David Petrie became Director-General in June 1941, he moved ‘subversion’ responsibilities (B4) out of B Division (now focused exclusively on German counter-espionage) to F2 in F Division (‘Subversive Activities’), under Roger Hollis. F. B. Aikin-Sneath covered Right Wing and Nationalist Movements in F3, while Roger Fulford was responsible for Pacifist Movements in F4. E Division was responsible for Alien Control, organized primarily around geographical national groups, with the prime section consisting of E5 (German and Austrian Subjects) under J. D. Denniston.
The unit ‘Agents’, a highly secretive section deploying spies to infiltrate potentially hostile organizations such as the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), sometimes referred to as ‘M Division’ because of its pre-war identity, remained in B Division as B2 under Maxwell Knight. B6 was designated ‘Watchers’, responsible for organizing surveillance through the Metropolitan Police Special Branch: its head was probably John Ottaway. In 1942, Knight’s B2 (‘Agents’) became B5b, reporting through Burt in B5 (‘Investigative Staff’) directly to Guy Liddell – as did B6 – and thus bypassing the management by Deputy Director Dick White, who was responsible for the rest of B Division. The B2 slot was thus vacated. E Division remained ‘Alien Control’, but E5 had been renamed ‘German and Austrian Camp Administration and Intelligence’, still under Denniston. F3 and F4 had been consolidated into a new F3, under T. M. Shelford.
At the end of the war, F2 was designated ‘Communism and Left-Wing Movements’, further split into F2a, under David Clarke, monitoring the activities of the Communist Party, F2b, under Milicent Bagot, studying International Communism, and F2c, under Hugh Shillito, monitoring Soviet espionage. E5 remained the same in E Division (still Alien Control). After Percy Sillitoe replaced Petrie in 1946, with the arrival of the Cold War he instituted some changes, at last addressing the anomalous position of Communist counter-espionage. F Division was absorbed into B Division, and designated B1, still under Roger Hollis. Thereafter, B1a covered ‘Left Wing Subversive Activities’, B1b and B1c were both (mysteriously) designated as responsible for ‘Russian and Communist Espionage Investigation’, while Bagot’s unit became B1d (’International Communism’). B2 came back to life as a separate counter-espionage unit concentrating on a vague assortment of non-Communist non-Russian national groups, split geographically into B2a and B2b. B6 endured as ‘Watchers’.
In November 1947 B1b and B1c were shifted into B2, which dealt exclusively with ‘Russian and Russian Satellite Espionage’, and was divided into B2a (‘Investigation’) and B2b (‘Information’). The former B2a and B2b units were subsumed into a new B1d (‘Residual Counter-Subversive and Counter-Espionage Activities’). Bagot’s B1d became B1b (still ‘International Communism’), but rather incongruously located separately from B2. (In the excerpts below, Bagot is seen as representing both B1b and B1c in the months before the November 1947 re-organization.) B5 and B6 were then integrated into a motley B4 section: B6 became B4d, now under Harry Hunter, while Knight’s B5b (‘Agents and Informers’) became B4c.
Further changes occurred during the next few years. In March 1951, the new head of B1, John Marriott, set up a new structure for his section, with Maxwell Knight’s B4c being incorporated into B1 as B1k. Knight’s section thus came to reside under the same roof as the classical counter-espionage units. B1a (‘British Communist Party/Organization’) sat alongside B1b (‘International Communism’), while several other units within B1 covered multiple aspects of Communist activity in the country. B2 was presumably left untouched, since B2a and B2b appear from the evidence to have endured well into 1952. At some stage, William (‘Jim’) Skardon took over B4d.
The important lesson to be taken from this description of some often incongruous and complex transformations is that the surveillance activities of the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police were consistently distant from the counter-espionage units within F and B Divisions, and that Maxwell Knight’s ‘Agents’ unit was for most of the period under review both logically and physically removed from those same sections, and not under the same management. Moreover, during the war, uncertainty over how to treat ‘refugees’ from German-speaking countries (were they Nazi sympathizers, Communist subversives, or friendly asylum-seekers?) was reflected in the split between geography and ideology represented by dispersal of responsibilities across B, D and E Divisions. Knowledge could thus be quite easily compartmentalized, and was not easily exchanged or consolidated. It was quite a chaotic set-up.
(I have relied largely on The Security Service, 1908-1945: The Official History by John Curry, and MI5, the Cold War and the Rule of Law, by K.D. Ewing, John Mahoney, and Andrew Moretta (2020), supplemented briefly by Nigel West’s two histories of MI5 (MI5 and M.I.5. 1945-1972) for this analysis of the flux of MI5’s organization. Christopher Andrew’s authorized history is of little value in this domain. I have the archival material used by Ewing, Mahoney and Moretta on my desktop, but have not yet studied it in detail.)
The Source Material
(A) KV 2/1013 (Tudor-Hart)
Serial 88a, from E5 (L), to F2b through F2a (Miss Ogilvie) 9.9.45 (copied into KV 6/113 at serial 40A, identifying source L [LAMB] as KASPAR [an ‘agent’ or ‘informer’ named Laemmel working for Maxwell Knight])
‘Edith Tudor-Hart has gathered around her an interesting circle of intellectuals, some of whom are members of the Communist Party and some only sympathisers. . . .’
‘E T-H’s circle includes: Lizzy FEAVRE or FEABRE née Kalmann of 96 Wellesley Court, N.W.8. She was born in Vienna and left about 1934 for the U.K. Later she went to France where she lived for about three years and married an Englishman there thus acquiring British nationality. She is separated from her husband and was living with Dr. Georg HONIGMANN whom she recently left owing to a disagreement. She is at present ill and is living somewhere in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, N.W.3. She is a member of the British Communist Party and a shop-steward.’
(B) KV 2/1013 (Tudor-Hart)
Serial 93z, extract from xxxxx report, for T-H, 12.2.46
‘Edith TUDOR HART is said to be in touch with a certain Anna WOLF who is apparently attached to the American diplomatic representative in Vienna, and is a close friend of Lizzy Feavre.’
(C) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 46a, from B2B via F2ab and Source KASPAR, 28.5.46
‘Capt. ATKINSON, 775 Coy. R.A.M.C, C.M.F., is in correspondence with Lizzy FEAVRE whose friend, Dr. Georg HONIGMANN recently left for Berlin where he joined the Communists (see report of *18.1.46).’
* Does not appear in Minute Sheet or File
(D) KV 2/1014 (Tudor-Hart)
Serial 103a, B2b to F2ab (Smith), 20.6.46
‘Lizzy FEAVRE has been more active during the last few weeks, while Ala LOEW-BEER seems to have retired and Edith TUDOR-HART is engaged mainly in Austrian activities in connection with the ‘FRIENDS of AUSTRIA.’
‘Among Lizzy FEAVRE’s contacts the following are worth mentioning: – Catherine WEIZENBAUM in Paris, prominent in the Austrian World Movement; a certain Lubinsky, also in contact with Edith; Dora WIMBORNE, member of the C.P.G.B.’
(E) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 47A, from B2b via F2ab and Source KASPAR, 28.6.46
‘It has been learned that Georg HONIGMANN (see reports of the *18.1.46. and 28.5.46.) had left this country some weeks ago to take up a post with the propaganda section of the British Control Commission in Hamburg. After his arrival in Berlin he seized the first opportunity to disappear and is said to be working for the Russians. He is in communication with his friend Lizzy FEAVRE, and the latter related scornfully that the whole British Security Service and the Police in Germany have been searching for him on the assumption that he had been kidnapped by the Russians.’
* Does not appear in Minute Sheet or File
(F) KV 2/2354 (Broda)
Serial 361Z, B2b to F2ab, 23.7.46 from source KASPAR (LAMB), No. 165, 20.7.46
‘It would appear that E. BRODA and his former collaborators have been withdrawn from intelligence work and are more or less inactive at present. This holds good for Edith TUDOR-HART too and even for Lizzy FEAVRE who seemed to play a somewhat more important part during the last few weeks and still displays much more activity than the others, but she admitted that she had to refrain from such work owing to the fact that her friend, Dr. Georg HONIGMANN, had taken up work in the Russian zone (see report of 26.6.46). She intends to go to Paris on the 5.9.46 and from there on a special party mission to Prague. She also intends to visit DR. HONIGMANN in Berlin. She has already got her passport and visas and also the ticket of the Air France, issued in the name of Lizzy Philly which seems to be her real name, though she has always been called FEAVRE and even received mail under this name.’
(G) KV2/1014 (Tudor-Hart)
Serial 109a, B4c/FCD (F. C. Derbyshire) to B1a (Wethered), 6.11.46
‘Edith TUDOR-HART has resumed contact with J. DESSER and also with Bert BRANDT, a C.P.G.B. member (a close friend of Lizy PHILBY through whom he got acquainted with Edith.)
‘Lizzy PHILBY@FEAVRE (see report of *15.8.46) is in Berlin, working together with Dr. HONIGMANN.’
* Does not appear in Minute Sheet or File
(H) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 56A, copy in PF/68261/Y, shown to Col. Vivian by B1 on 7.7.47 on ‘Alice (Lizzy) HONIGMANN @ FEAVRE nee KOLLMAN or KOHLMANN’.
‘Alice HONIGMANN @ LIZZY FEAVRE first came to notice in September 1945 when she was reported to be a member of the British Communist Party and a shop steward, and to belong to Edith TUDOR-HART’s circle of Communists and Communist sympathizers’.
(I) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 57a, from Bagot (B1c) to Milne of MI6, 9.7.47
‘Alice Lizzy HONIGMANN, alias Lizzy FEAVRE née KOLLMANN or KOHLMANN, height 5 ft. 5ins., possessing black eyes and brown hair, was born in Vienna on 2nd May, 1910. She first came to notice in September, 1945 when she was reported to be a member of the British Communist Party and a shop steward, and to belong to Edith TUDOR-HART’s circle of Communists and Communist sympathisers.’
‘Alice HONIGMANN first came to England in 1933. She acquired British nationality by marriage, but separated from her husband and lived with Dr. Georg HONIGMANN. The latter left England for Germany in May, 1946. Two months later it was reported that Alice HONIGMANN, although still a keen member of Edith TUDOR-HART’s circle, had had to restrain her activities as HONIGMANN had taken up work in the Russian zone. Her contacts abroad were said to have included Magda GRAN-PIERRE, Budapest, 12, Kovas utcza No. 46, who was reputed to be an important agent in the Hungarian Communist Intelligence network.’
‘Alice HONIGMANN left England at the end of August, 1946, and went from Paris to Prague on 5th September. In November, 1946 it was reported that she was in Berlin working with Dr. HONIGMANN, to whom she has since been married’.
(J) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 60a from Bagot (B1b) to MI6, 13.8.47
‘We are now informed that this woman (Alice Lizzy HONIGMANN) is travelling extensively in Europe and that she may visit the U.K. in the near future, using her British passport’.
(K) KV 2/2014 (Tudor-Hart) & Extract at serial 61B in KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 143b, Martin’s interview with LAMB on 3.10.51
‘LAMB met Lizzy PHILBY spasmodically between 1944 and 1946 in London. His impressions of Lizzy were therefore first hand, but his knowledge of her background was derived almost entirely from Edith TUDOR-HART [redactions]. LAMB did not know when or whence Lizzy came to the UK, nor did he (until a few weeks ago) know anything more about her second husband than that his name was Philby. He still had no idea when or where they were married or when they were divorced. His one firm conviction was that Lizzy lived in a flat in Paris before the war on a fairly lavish scale. When asked how he knew she lived well while in Paris, He remembered Lizzy had a bill for £150 for storage of her furniture in Paris throughout the war, from which he had deduced that her possessions there must have been fairly substantial.’ He first met Lizzy in 1944 when she was living with Dr. Georg Honigmann.
‘LAMB said that (until a few weeks ago) he knew nothing of PHILBY except that he and Lizzy were divorced by 1944 (note – this is in fact not true). He had the impression, however, that although divorced they were still on good terms.’ [Document torn] ‘Lizzy knew and visited PHILBY’s second [sic!] wife and two children.’
(L) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 63A, B4d source report, 16.10.51
‘Edith TUDOR-HART does not know whether Alice HONIGMANN still has her British nationality, but assumes this may be so as the latter once said that was her intention. Edith TUDOR-HART did not know anything about her pre-war activities in France.’
(M) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 62A, from Arthur Martin to MI6 [almost certainly Philby], 18.10.51
“We are anxious to obtain any information which may be available in Germany concerning Mrs. Alice HONIGMANN. She was born in Vienna on 2.5.1910, the daughter of Iszo and Gisela KALLMANN (or KOHLMANN), the former a naturalized German of Hungarian origin. Mrs. HONIGMANN first married in Vienna a man named FRIEDMANN of whom no personal particulars are available. In 1934 she married a British subject with whom she lived in the U.K. until 1937. Between 1937 and 1940 she had an address in Paris. 67 Quai d’Orsay, but she frequently visited the U.K. and in 1940 resumed permanent residence here. She met her present husband in 1942, or thereabouts, and lived with him until they both left the U.K. in 1946.’
‘We would be very grateful for any information you can obtain about Mrs. HONIGMANN’s past . . .’
(N) KV 2/4091 (Tudor-Hart)
Serial 166a, report by B2a (A. F. Burbidge), 1.12.51
‘From 1945 onwards, xxxxx began to submit regular reports on TUDOR-HART. She was said to have gathered an interesting circle of intellectuals around her and to have organized discussion groups. The circle, which contained such persons as D. N. PRITT, Lizzy FEAVRE, Arthur WYNN and prominent Austrian communists in the United Kingdom, flourished throughout 1945 and up to mid-1946, when it appears to have declined.’
‘Edith TUDOR-HART was first reported to be in touch with Lizzy FEAVRE in the United Kingdom in September 1945, when Lizzy was described as a member of the TUDOR-HART circle. They may, conceivably have been known to each other before that date, having both previously lived in Vienna. Certainly both were in Vienna together between 1931 and 1933. From the reports received from XXXX in 1945 and 1946, Lizzy FEAVRE and George HONIGMANN (with whom FEAVRE was then living) were members of the TUDOR-HART circle . . . .’
‘The parallel of her marriage to Alexander TUDOR-HART and Lizzy FRIEDMANN’s to PEACH is worth some consideration. In both cases the husband, a British national, went to Vienna to marry a woman with a known communist, and possibly R.I.S. or Comintern, background. These marriages were contracted at a time of political turmoil in Austria, when the R.I.S. and Comintern might well have sought such means to protect their agents.’
‘It is also clear that Edith had post-1940 information about PEACH, since she was able to describe him (albeit somewhat inaccurately) as an ace man in M.I.5. This information may, of course, have come from Lizzy.’
(O) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 63B, B2a, 9.1.52
‘Cross reference to B.2. A report of an interview with Edith TUDOR HART ostensibly in connection with George HOENIGMAN, the real subject of the inquiry being Lizzie HOENIGMAN and her former husband the subject of PF 604,584. No information of value was gained as a result of the interview, altho’ Mrs. TUDOR HART admitted that she knew HOENIGMAN.’
(P) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 66Z, B4d source report, 27.8.52
re Alice HONIGMANN formerly FRIEDMANN nee KOHLMANN and mentioning George Honigmann [no mention of PHILBY or FEABRE]
(Q) KV 6/113 (Honigmann)
Serial 69A, B4d report to B2a (Simkins), 13.10.52
‘From the enclosed issue of ‘Democratic German Report’ it will be seen that Dr. Georg HONIGMANN, husband of Alice HONIGMANN, formerly FRIEDMANN née KOHLMANN [i.e. no mention of PHILBY!] . . .is at present deputising for the editor of ‘Democratic German Report’ as John PEET is on holiday.”
[Alice Honigmann annotated as PF 68261: manuscript also indicates ‘Copy to PF Lizzy PHILBY’]
(R) KV 2/2354 (Broda)
Serial 495A, 14.10.53 in report by Phillimore of B2b
‘April 1946: a vetting inquiry was received for permission for BRODA to lecture in prisoner-of-war camps but P.I.D. decided not to employ him. BRODA was also reported to be in contact with Lizzi PHILBY amongst others.’ [actually KASPAR said ‘Lizzy PHILLY’]
Analysis
These few entries present several conundrums.
Time-period: There are two entries from August and September 1945, a cluster in the months between May 1946 and August 1947, and an occasional retrospective reference from the early 1950s. Given that Litzi Philby had left the country in September 1946, apparently for good, one might expect that, after that date, any coyness or secrecy about her identity and alias would have been eliminated in the exchanges that took place between various MI5 sections, or even in messages sent to the companion service, MI6. In addition, while the archival material records the existence of the FEABRE alias only after the war, it does not necessarily mean that it was not used earlier.
Comprehensiveness: Apart from the noted missing items (in ‘C’, ‘E’, and ‘F’), the texts hint at an untold story. If LAMB first met Lizzy FEAVRE in 1944 (‘K’) – probably at the time that she and Tudor-Hart joined the CPGB – why was her appearance not remarked upon, and not recorded, until August 1945 (‘B’)? LAMB had presumably been introduced to her by Edith Tudor-Hart, and, given the circumstances, one would expect her entrance to the scene to be worthy of attention. In ‘N’, Burbidge speculates about a possible acquaintanceship between TUDOR-HART and Litzi PHILBY, and even suggests that TUDOR-HART may have gained her knowledge of Kim PHILBY from Litzi – well before 1945.
Formulation: The name ‘FEABRE’ (or ‘FEAVRE’) is presented in multiple ways. Item ‘G’ refers to her as ‘Lizzy PHILBY@FEAVRE’, which strongly suggests that ‘FEAVRE’ is a cryptonym, the ‘@’ sign being a convention used by MI5 to denote agents working under cover. Elsewhere the name ‘Lizzy Feabre’ is used as a simple denominative, as if it were her only name (e.g. ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’). And then it sometimes appears as one of her many names, as in ‘I’, ‘Alice Lizzy HONIGMANN, alias Lizzy FEAVRE née KOLLMANN or KOHLMANN’, where it is undeniably presented as an assumed, not a real, name.
Authenticity: The brief biography introduced in ‘B’ (and bizarrely echoed in ‘M’) is clearly bogus. Senior officers in MI5 surely knew when, and to whom, Litzi had been married, and yet a spurious story about her marrying an Englishman in France (with the very un-English surname of ‘FEABRE’) is allowed to flourish. Extraordinarily, Arthur Martin repeats this myth as late as October 1951, in his memorandum to MI6 (‘L’), where he feigns to admit that he does not know that Lizzy had once been married to his addressee, but also omits to record the name of the Englishman whom Litzi had married in France. (It should be borne in mind that Martin had been recruited to MI5 from the Radio Security Service on Kim Philby’s recommendation, so reading between the lines may be appropriate here.)
Cognition: Officers in various sections of MI5 display an unbelievable level of cognitive dissonance. For example, why, if Derbyshire in B4c (‘G’) can openly equate Lizzy FEAVRE with Lizzy Philby in the space of one memorandum in November 1946, how is it that Bagot in B1c fails to record the equivalence a few months later (‘I’)? Why would the report by Burbidge (‘N’) fail to connect directly the two identities of Lizzy Feavre and Lizzy Philby?
Integrity: The evidence on FEABRE comes almost exclusively from MI5’s agent LAMB, also known as KASPAR, who had inveigled himself into Edith Tudor-Hart’s confidence. He submitted reports to B2, but he would not have had access to MI5’s intelligence gained from telephone or postal surveillance – something that was imposed on Tudor-Hart throughout the war. LAMB is nevertheless reported as describing mail that Litzi has received under her alias: no other evidence of that appears in the archive. Moreover, his apparent knowledge of her correspondence (acquisition of travel tickets, bills from Paris) cannot be explained. It suggests that MI5 officers were perhaps ascribing intelligence gained through telephone and mail interception (about which they might have been embarrassed) to agents who had managed to get close to their targets, and they even inserted such facts into transcripts of an interview (‘F’ & ‘K’).
Contradictions: The statements of LAMB (massaged, no doubt, by his handlers) are frequently contradictory. He originally reported (‘B’) that Litzi had married a man called Feavre in France, but in his interview by Martin (‘K’) he states that ‘he did not know when or whence Lizzy came to the UK, nor did he (until a few weeks ago) know anything more about her second husband than that his name was Philby. He still had no idea when or where they were married or when they were divorced.’ Yet he soon after claims they were divorced in 1944 (an assertion that Philby had already reinforced in 1943, according to Ian Milne’s memoir). In ‘F’ he is reported as saying that Litzi had already got her passport and visas and also the ticket of the Air France, issued in the name of Lizzy Philly [sic]. He adds: ‘. . . which seems to be her real name, though she has always been called FEAVRE and even received mail under this name.’ The use of ‘always’ is ambiguous: on the one hand, it could mean ‘for the longest time’, or on the other, ‘exclusively’, ‘without exception’. Irrespective of which meaning was intended, it is not clear how LAMB could make that claim, since he did not have complete access to all her movements. He was surely not in a position to see her mail, and, in any case, was such mail addressed to FEAVRE or FEABRE? One would expect only one version of the name to be used in correspondence. Maybe Tudor-Hart informed him, but it sounds as if this intelligence came from elsewhere.
Deception: In whatever way the evidence is examined, it is clear that a large amount of information is being withheld, or misinformation is being distributed, or that deception (namely the dissemination of disinformation) is being carried out. Either the scribes are in ignorance or misinformed (but then why do their recipients or supervisors not correct them?), or they have been instructed to conceal or distort the truth, or chaos exists to the extent that no one really knows what is the real identity of the person known as FEABRE. For example, why would a really sharp and experienced officer such as Bagot conceal the relationship with PHILBY when she writes (in ‘I’) about Litzy KOHLMANN/FEABRE/HONIGMANN? Why would Litzy’s status as sometime wife of PHILBY be overlooked in ‘Q’?
One highly significant aspect of the fragments, however, is the process of ‘extracting’ or ‘copying’ to other Personal Files. In almost every incidence where the name ‘FEABRE’ or ‘FEAVRE’ appears in a document, a handwritten annotation indicates that the item is to be copied to the PHILBY Personal File (PF 68261), sometimes to the ‘Y’ (Confidential’) folder. This activity strongly suggests that, at the time an original memorandum, letter, or report was written, when it was filed in its native location, the item was recorded in the multiple corresponding files belonging to the persons referenced in it [see extracts from KV 2/1013 below].
KV 2/1013, serial 68a (page 1)KV 2/1013, serial 68a (page 2)
Why can I be confident that these entries were made at the same time? From a procedural standpoint, it would have been most efficient to populate the relevant files at the time of the event: a later trawl through the archives to discover necessary duplications would have been not only a time-wasting process, but would mean that the files would unavoidably have been out-of-date for a while. Moreover, the annotations look as if they have been made in the same script and ink-colour as other comments. On the figure above, the date ‘16 SEP 1945’ boldly indicates the date the report entered the archive.
Thus it is safe to conclude that the equivalence of Lizzy Feabre and Litzi Philby was known – at least to senior officers, and to the custodian of the Registry – at the time each entry concerning FEABRE/FEAVRE was made. In that case, one has to consider, again, why this fact was not generally known among the junior officers.
One Theory
As readers will recall, I recently presented the hypothesis that Kim and Litzi Philby had approached MI6 (and, vicariously, MI5) in the guise of reformed characters who, in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact, wanted to assist the services in countering Soviet subversion. The alternative theory (and the one that has persevered in the literature) is that the Philbys were working exclusively for the NKVD, and successfully concealed their activities from MI5 and MI6. This hypothesis, however, is unable to accommodate a number of startling events, from Kim’s arrangements to bring Litzi home from France at the end of 1939 with the support of the Home Office, through the failure to explore the hints from Krivitsky and the lax surveillance of Litzi during the war when she bore two identities, to the reluctance to interrogate her during the summer of 1946 after Honigmann had absquatulated from a position with the Control Commission in Germany to join the Communists in East Berlin.
My research colleague Keith Ellison is not [yet?] convinced of my thesis, although he has failed to advance any rival theory that can address the paradoxes and enigmas of the archival record. As an example of his scepticism, he has challenged my interim conclusion that ‘FEABRE’ was a (maybe accidental) nomenclature exploited by MI5 to disguise its imagined manipulation of Litzi Philby, and suggests that it was Litzi herself who constructed her alias as a way of disguising her identity from her Communist associates – apart, of course, from her close friend Edith Tudor-Hart. His argument runs (as I understand it) as follows:
Kim Philby did not have MI6 looking over his shoulder in late 1939 when he was helping Litzi in and out of the country, and thus the Secret Intelligence Service would not have known of her existence and movements. Litzi needed to protect the good name and reputation of Kim when she became involved in Communist Party (CP) work in the UK, and thus adopted the alias. She appears (to Ellison) to have been a member of the British CP acting as a liaison to the Austrian CP represented by Edith Tudor-Hart. Since there is no mention in MI5 files of Feabre until September 1945, and no evidence of a link between Feabre and Philby until the report from KASPAR in 1946, it is safe to assume that this was a recent discovery by the Security Service. KASPAR’s report confirms that the communists that she met (apart from Tudor-Hart) all knew her as Feabre, not Philby. The first time that she came to the notice of MI6 in her own right is when she applied for a job in 1943, and used Kim Philby as a referee. In August 1946, Philby approached his boss, Valentine Vivian, to let him know he wanted a divorce: this was the first time that Vivian had heard of Philby’s marriage to a Communist, and he requested a ‘trace’ from MI5. After the war, MI5 exploited Litzi’s alias when they corresponded with external organisations (primarily MI6), although the reason for that strategy is obscure. Likewise, when MI5 corresponded with junior staff in MI6, yet failed to make clear that Feabre and Philby were the same person, they were trying to perform some unexplained cover-up ‘for the record’.
I see several problems with this hypothesis, namely:
My first instincts were to imagine that, during the late 1930s, Litzi’s movements across Europe had probably been closely monitored by MI5, abetted by MI6, which was responsible for surveillance activity on foreign territory. After all, that is what happened to multiple other suspected Communist subversives, and Helenus Milmo’s report on the Philby interrogations strongly indicates such a process. Yet I concede that Keith Ellison is probably correct when he asserts that Milmo’s conclusions may have been derived exclusively from an inspection of Litzi’s passport. That theory raises many more questions, however: Milmo’s project was rushed, and he had no opportunity or time to initiate fresh investigations into Litzi’s past. Thus, if MI5 had indeed acquired Litzi’s old passport in a project between the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean and the presentation of files to Milmo, why did Dick White not exploit the results in his November report? (This is a complex but very important issue, and I plan to analyze it in more detail in a future coldspur bulletin.)
Valentine Vivian’s claim about his ignorance about Litzi’s past must be utterly phony. He entrusted his recall of events from August 1946 to Seale and McConville, the biographers of Philby, shortly before he died, but he was surely trying to whitewash his past. He presented himself as Philby’s boss at the time. No independent verification of his assertions is possible, and his attempt to present himself as an ingénu in the whole Litzi Philby saga is simply feeble. What is more, Philby himself supplied information to his Moscow bosses that Vivian had been moved aside to his staff Security position in March of 1946, information that can be confirmed from other sources. Vivian was no longer Philby’s boss in August 1946, and John Easton (to whom Philby now reported) would not have looked kindly on Philby’s bypassing the chain of command.
There would have been nothing more obvious to the authorities that Litzi was involved in surreptitious behaviour than an attempt by her to create a new identity. (She would not have dared assume any such role without NKVD’s approval.) Moreover, if she was working exclusively as an agent for the NKVD, the first thing that she would have been instructed to do was to avoid the CPGB. The NKVD knew it was bugged, and the whole point of Moscow-controlled subversive operations was to have them undertaken by non-party agents. It is probable that Litzi joined the CPGB only towards the end of the war (probably in late 1944), as the archive suggests, but, if Litzi seriously wanted to ‘protect the good name and reputation of Kim’ under orders from Moscow, she would have stayed firmly away from the Party.
Philby joined MI6 only in 1941, and did not regain the confidence of his Moscow masters until 1944. Before then he was the subsidiary figure to Litzi. Moscow was in no way embarrassed or threatened by having their failed agent Kim Philby associated with Litzi, and even believed that her marriage to him needed to be protected in order for her to maintain residential status.
If Litzi had been seen to mix in communist circles at all, and presented herself as ‘Litzi Feabre’, the interest of MI5 would have been perked immediately. She visited the Bentinck Street apartment rented from Lord Rothschild by Blunt and Burgess, and showed her marital status with Kim quite openly. It appears that they were not uncomfortable about her new identity. And she confidently approached her husband for a reference for a job in 1943, not hiding under any spurious alias. Yet a fresh ‘legend’ was suddenly attached to her. The MI5 agent LAMB reported that Litzi had arrived in the UK in 1934, and then moved to France, where she married an Englishman, consequently gaining British citizenship. Apart from the anomaly that an Englishman would be unlikely to bear the surname ‘Feabre’, if Litzi presented this as fact, she would have risked being imprisoned for bigamy, or being deported. If she had been viewed by MI5 as a potentially dangerous Communist agent, presenting a false biography would have immediately gained MI5’s attention. That this did not happen suggests that she was not the source of the story.
It would be utterly irresponsible for anyone in MI5, knowing that Litzi’s cover as ‘Feabre’ was bogus and criminal, to pretend that it was not so, and to decide to exploit that subterfuge to deceive their contacts in MI6 by disguising her real identity. LAMB’s note of July 20, 1946 indicates that he then believed that her real name was ‘PHILLY’ (sic), but, up until then, he had not expressed any uncertainty about her name of ‘Feavre’.
In the same memorandum, LAMB claimed that Litzi had ‘always’ been called ‘Feavre’, which suggests a far more long-standing arrangement, or a degree of knowledge that he could not possibly claim. While he stated that he had become acquainted with her only in 1944, that assertion either indicates a closer and more enduring awareness of Litzi’s history than is referred to in the archival material, or perhaps reveals what he had been told by others, conceivably Edith Tudor-Hart, but more probably MI5 officers. Moreover, it would hardly make sense for Litzi to live openly as Mrs. Philby for five years, before deciding to change her name.
LAMB mentions mail that Lizzy has received under her alias, but no other evidence of that appears in the archive. LAMB, as an agent of MI5, would not have been privy to warrants intercepting mail, and his apparent knowledge of her correspondence, including the acquisition of travel tickets, cannot be explained. This would appear to be an example of MI5’s mis-attributing the acquisition of intelligence through clandestine means such as Post Office Warrants by means of indications that human agents in contact with targets are the source.
This narrative cannot explain the extraordinary events of the summer of 1946. Georg Honigmann absconded at the end of May: his relationship with Litzi was well-known. If Litzi had been a hostile Soviet agent, she would immediately have been interrogated, and restrictions placed on her travel. The archives show signs of panic on the part of MI5, yet they never take any steps to re-inspect Honigmann’s curriculum vitae, or explore the connections that Honigmann might have had with other subversive elements. Instead the major activity in this scenario appears to be a contrived negotiation between Kim Philby and Valentine Vivian to organize his divorce from Litzi.
An Alternative Scenario
I believe the sequence of events was more on the following lines:
In September 1939, Kim Philby achieved a deal with MI6/MI5 whereby, since he and Litzi had renounced any sympathies for the Soviet Union after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he and his wife would work for British interests. While it took Kim a while to be recruited by any intelligence service, Litzi was free to start her infiltration of Communist organizations in Britain, including the Austrian Council run by Eva Kolmer and the CPGB. She would have confided the subterfuge to her friend of long standing, Edith Tudor-Hart, who introduced her to her contacts, including her lover Engelbert Broda, the chairman of the Austrian Communist Party in exile. No doubt, in the spirit of conspiratsia, Litzi’s true name had to be concealed from some less reliable colleagues, and her surname may not have been revealed. Security was tight: Tudor-Hart withheld Broda’s address and telephone-number from other members of the group.
Litzi was active while Kim was trying to make his mark and reputation. She was probably responsible for the long report on the Austrian Council of March 1941 (i.e. before Operation Barbarossa), which was presented in Tudor-Hart’s file anonymously, and she later acted as a courier for Broda, carrying secrets on atomic weapons research. She assumed herself safe, as she visited Lord Rothschild’s apartments at Bentinck Street, accompanied by her husband. But, at some stage, her presence was noted by outsiders, such as the MI5 agent Josef Laemmel (KASPAR/LAMB), and hints to her identity appeared.
According to KASPAR, Litzi did not join the CPGB until about August 1944. Whether this came from pressure by MI5, or an order from the NKVD, is not clear. Even if she had joined earlier, the NKVD would have had to condone the move in the knowledge that she was pretending to be an MI5 snooper. After all, MI5 might have started to make demands on her to deliver more, but she surely would not have dared to disobey Moscow. If she did adopt the ‘FEABRE’ alias at this time (unwittingly or not), it would have been very convenient for MI5 to have her real name disguised, even though it may have happened by accident. There are other aspects of the CPGB connection that may be important. In 1943 Dave Springhall had brought the CPGB into disrepute with Moscow because of the Desmond Uren espionage business, and the NKVD may have wanted to purge the organization. They knew the HQ was bugged, from what Blunt told them. Moreover, Kim Philby had recently been restored to better favour after the doubts of Modrzhinskaya had been dispelled, and Litzi’s project with Broda had been completed. Thus the shift of emphasis moved from Litzi to Kim. The NKVD could not withdraw Litzi from activities altogether, as that would provoke suspicion from MI5.
If MI5, under the delusion that they were in control of Litzi Philby, suddenly heard that she was presenting herself as ‘Litzy Feabre’, they would have asked themselves (and her) why that was. On the other hand, if they believed that she were possibly a hostile element (i.e. a true subversive not under their control), they could have arraigned her for her fable of marrying an Englishman in France, which would mean that she had entered the country under false pretences. Yet when she introduced herself under her real name for the job application in 1943, they were not taken aback by the news at all. Edith Tudor-Hart surely did not imagine that the alias and back-up story would come to the notice of MI5, but Litzi clearly did.
Why FEABRE/FEAVRE? It sounds vaguely French, which might point to her recent residence in France, although that does not tally with the claim that she had married an Englishman there. Why would she (or anyone else) come up with such a strange name? The form is unusual: one might expect an acute accent on the first ‘e’. What is its origin? Is it related to the more familiar French name ‘Lefèvre’, meaning ‘Smith’ (cf. homo faber) – a rather feeble stab at a plausible but not easily traceable heritage? I note that the French traitor in SOE at the time, Henri Déricourt, owned the alias ‘Henri Fabre’ until he became too conspicuous by it, and it was dropped. And the name FEABRE or FEAVRE does not appear to have existed in any register from that period.
Alternatively, was it a phonetic representation of a name that the (Austrian) witness heard – even a distortion of ‘PHILBY’? The fact that it appears in two spellings suggests it might have had that origin, and the duplication is reinforced in the archives. Senior MI5 officers may have been pleased with the fact that there was apparent confusion over her name, even though they knew perfectly well who she was. Every entry to the archives of Tudor-Hart, Honigmann and Broda that mentioned FEABRE/FEAVRE was routinely copied to the PHILBY file. The fact that some experienced MI5 officers (e.g. Bagot, Martin) appeared to go along with the deception in rather a clumsy fashion, while other junior officers (e.g. Derbyshire and Burbidge) seemed to be genuinely in the dark, suggests that control over the archives was strictly administered, and that not everyone was authorized to inspect the files.
Thus when Litzi’s lover, Georg Honigmann, having been approved in April 1946 for a propaganda position with the Control Commission in Germany, decamped to the Soviet Sector, MI5 must have reacted with alarm. At first suspecting that Honigmann may have been kidnapped (as was revealed by Litzi herself, who must still have been close to her ‘handlers’ in MI5), they had to face a stark reality. They had believed that they had been controlling her and Kim, but had to face the possibility that they had made a serious misjudgment. Yet, for two more months, they apparently did nothing. If they interviewed Litzi about her intentions, there is no record of it, and Litzi left the UK for Paris, probably in late August, and moved on to Prague on September 5, taking the ashes of FEABRE with her. We can deduce from the archive that no attempt had been made to prevent her gaining a passport and visa. Perhaps by then MI5 had concluded that having her dumped behind the Iron Curtain was the best outcome, in the same manner that MI6 decided upon the disposition of her second husband seventeen years later.
(A close inspection of the timeline shows how logistically difficult it would have been for Kim and Litzi to have gained their divorce. Since Litzi left Paris for Prague on September 5, it is unlikely that she would have returned to the French capital by September 18, the date on which – according to Ben Macintyre – Kim found her there, and arranged the divorce, just one week before Kim’s ‘marriage’ to Aileen in London on September 25.)
It is probable that the NKVD undertook a rigorous interrogation of Honigmann in order to verify the loyalties of his mistress, and those of her husband. Indeed, that might have been the prime purpose of his ‘kidnapping’. The doubts about the possible manipulation of Philby (and his Cambridge cohorts) by British Intelligence, which had occupied Moscow minds so earnestly in 1944, had possibly never been completely quashed. The fact that they did not mind drawing attention to Honigmann’s abscondment suggests that they were at that stage quite prepared to sacrifice Kim and Litzi, and that Honigmann might even have been the biggest fish in this particular pool. Having been assured by Honigmann of the Philbys’ reliability, they then gave the go-ahead for the divorce, brought Litzi ‘home’ (since her role was complete), and allowed Kim to pursue his career working for the KGB.
The shock of recognition that the service had been betrayed might explain the curious set of messages sent soon after by Mitchell, Bagot and Martin to MI6. Litzi was from the Philby camp, and her absconding to the Communists must have steeled the collective disgust of MI5 officers for their ‘colleague’ in the Secret Intelligence Service. Thus some acidly disguised pro forma requests concerning Litzi, and MI6’s familiarity with her, could serve both as the correct protocol for due diligence, while also causing the maximum amount of embarrassment to their rival.
The Honigmann Files
Introduction
I explained the story behind the eventual release of HO 382/255 in my bulletin last month (see http://www.coldspur.com/summer-2023-round-up/ ). My first reaction on learning that a separate file on Honigmann had been created (and retained) was: ‘Why had it been considered necessary or desirable?’, since KV 6/113 contains information about Honigmann’s 1936 application for naturalization. But I quickly realized, since this was a Home Office Aliens file, H 5439, that there may well have been circumstances that MI5 (responsible for maintaining the KV series) was not aware of, and that other political considerations may have come into play. KV 6/113 dips fairly regularly into the HO file on Honigmann. (This account below corrects some minor errors from my previous analysis.)
KV 6/113
Since the bulk of HO 382/255 concerns the naturalization request, it is worth recapping what is covered in KV 6/113. The file starts with Honigmann’s registration as an alien on his arrival on February 23, 1931 at Harwich, coming from the Hook of Holland. (His Wikipedia entry postdates his arrival to 1933, perhaps to suggest that he was a victim of Hitlerism.) At some stage he must have married his wife, Ruth née Bachert, as she appears in an extract from the Aliens file H 5439. (The exact date is recorded later, qv. infra.) The next record is a request to the Special Branch for any information on Honigmann, dated August 15, 1936, as the subject had applied for Certificates of Naturalization on April 18 of that year. The application was refused on July 24, 1937. Several months later, on March 29, 1938, an intervention by Kenneth de Courcy is noted: DeCourcy writes personally to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, stating that Honigmann wishes to ‘go to the Far East to continue his journalistic career’, and, since he has no passport, needs a document of identity, something that was granted exactly four months later.
Exactly where Honigmann went next is obscure – probably not the Far East. On December 17, 1938, he returned to Dover, on his way to see Dr. Nello Zezi, as ‘correspondent of Czech newspapers’. Helpfully, he bore introductory letters from the Foreign Office in Prague. Apparently, Exchange Telegraph wanted to employ him as a journalist for their new service to continental countries. MI5 recorded the request on February 17, 1939, and declared it had no ‘obs.’ (presumably ‘objections’). Honigmann’s career seemed to be flourishing. On April 13, 1939, the BBC sent in his name to MI5 as one to be ‘vetted’.
Soon afterwards, events took a rather bizarre turn. On behalf of an outfit called Moenckemeyer Press Photos in New York, Honigmann wrote on April 14 to the War Office requesting ‘photographs relating to British Rearmament, Recruiting W.A.T.S. etc. for publication in American newspapers and periodicals’, which caused an alarmed Public Relations Officer to contact MI5 to determine what they knew about Honigmann and this relationship. H. H. Bacon replied on April 27, in some confusion, since he believed that MI5 had first taken an interest in Honigmann when he arrived in 1939 (to which someone annotated ‘31’), adding that Honigmann’s 1936 request for naturalization had been refused by the Home Office. Yet, soon after, on August 21, Honigmann again applied for naturalization, and another request to the Special Branch for information on him was made. The result came back: ‘Nothing recorded against’.
This was not a suitable time for German nationals (even if they had had their native passport renewal declined) to be applying for British naturalization, and his application was suspended. The status and presumed loyalties of all German exiles were inspected. While MI5 reported ‘no objections’ on November 9, Honigmann appeared before a tribunal on December 22, but was nevertheless cleared, his bona fides clearly seen as acceptable. Indeed, he was mentioned on a list of persons to be vetted for employment at the Press and Censorship Bureau (of the Ministry of Information, presumably) on January 29, 1940, and he was granted exemption from internment on March 15, 1940.
When Churchill took over from Chamberlain in May 1940, the fears about a ‘Fifth Column’ were mistakenly and artificially intensified, and internment was applied much more rigorously. “Collar the lot” became the watchword, and most Germans and Austrians fell into Category A * as the tribunals met. Honigmann had to face a firmer test on July 19, and was consequently interned on the Isle of Man, and eventually sent to Canada. A later extract from his Home Office file, dated August 7, 1940, declares that a Metropolitan Police report determined his fate: “ . . .as a journalist he would know all the channels for sending information abroad; he had been refused naturalization and did not favourably impress the Chairman.” A minute by MI5’s H.K.D.R. to the Home Office runs as follows:
We have nothing recorded against this alien, but observe that his application for naturalization was refused in 1937. Further, he was placed in Category “B” by the Tribunal and it may therefore be assumed that he did not make a good impression upon it.
Recent events have presumably restricted the opportunities for propaganda in the Balkans, and the case as it stands at present hardly seems to us to warrant the release of a Category “B” enemy alien.
[* “Upon the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, some 70,000 UK resident Germans and Austrians became classed as enemy aliens. By 28 September, the Aliens Department of the Home Office had set up internment tribunals throughout the country headed by government officials and local representatives, to examine every UK registered enemy alien over the age of 16 (since 1914 all aliens over the age of 16 had needed to register their details at local police offices, a requirement of the 1914 Aliens Registration Act (4 & 5 Geo. V c.12). The object was to divide the aliens into three categories: Category A, to be interned; Category B, to be exempt from internment but subject to the restrictions decreed by the Special Order; and Category C, to be exempt from both internment and restrictions.” from the National Archives website.]
There follows a fascinating report, extracted partly as summaries from the Home Office file, including a detailed timeline of Honigmann’s career since applying for naturalization. It states that he married Ruth at Frankfurt-am-Main on December 12, 1932, and lists items of correspondence that were exchanged after the Naturalization Application was refused. (A Special Branch report of March 1944 indicates that the couple was granted a divorce on November 23, 1942.) The items include summaries of two letters sent by Sir Charles Peake on behalf of Exchange Telegraph, the latter (dated June 7, 1940) claiming that Honigmann ‘is doing important work in the national interest for the company’, and the scribe notes that ‘Sir Charles has heard good reports of him’.
The Home Office appears to be performing some of MI5’s work for them, since the final long paragraph (‘FROM MINUTES’) casts doubt on the indispensability of Honigmann, indicating that he now works for Reuter’s, and explains:
REUTER, working in close co-operation with Ministry of Information, have a very complete service, although I understand they have thought it wise to discharge a number of ‘C’ Class aliens formerly in their employ. HONIGMANN is ‘B’ Class, and on that account alone it would be difficult to justify his release. I understand from a confidential source that this application emanates from a certain SMOLLETT, a naturalized British subject, formerly SMOLKA of Austro-Czech origin. This man was formerly employed by EXCHANGE TELEGRAPH CO., and has succeeded in obtaining a post in Ministry of Information. He was at one time in the service of the ‘Times’, but was dismissed.
The anonymous author then hands over the file to MI5 for follow-up.
Questions over Honigmann’s reliability after his internment (‘arrest’) triggered a search by Special Branch of his premises, a sub-let in Russell Court in Woburn Place, W.C.1., and a few of the items retrieved appear in the file. Among some copies of amateurishly created letters sent to the Home Office pleading his case is a letter dated October 31, 1939, addressed to the Under-Secretary of State. It challenges the restrictions placed up on him by the tribunal of October 19, and is of interest because it lists a diverse set of referees willing to speak on his behalf, including Sir Wilfred King (Chairman and Managing Director of the Exchange Telegraph), Count Huyn (late Press Attaché of the Austrian Legation, c/o British Broadcasting Corp.), Brigadier Lawson (General Manager, The Daily Telegraph), J. Rea Price (City Editor, The Star), and H. P. Smollett (c/o Ministry of Information).
As early as August 20, 1940, a person named H. H. Prestige suggested that Honigmann should be released under category 6, and a Home Office minute of September 12, recorded that the Ministry of Information ‘urgently require this man’. Honigmann was eventually released from internment in Canada, and arrived back in the UK on 11 January 1941, yet still under restrictions with a ‘C’ classification. It took more than a year for Peter de Mendelssohn of the Exchange Telegraph (who features importantly in later events) to write to J. H. Brebner, the Director of the News Division at the Ministry of Information, to request his help in having these restrictions removed. Brebner wrote to the Home Office; the Home Office contacted MI5; and on March 20, 1942, F.B. Aikin-Sneath of E2b (formerly head of F3, I note) reported that the section had no adverse record of Honigman – or any of the other three journalists listed. Another extract from the Home Office file states that Honigmann was originally refused naturalization (in 1937) because ‘not enough evidence of identifying himself with this country and had married a German wife in 1932’ – hardly a convincing and copper-bottomed reason, one might think. Meanwhile, an informer had let MI5 know that Ruth had expressed un-British opinions, but on April 5 G. G. Hardie of E5 dismissed the allegation, and expressed confidence in both Honigmanns.
Yet the doubts continued. A spy in the German League of Culture (‘M.D.’) reported to E7(S) in MI5 of questionable alliances by Georg. A report dated June 8, 1942, runs as follows:
. . . . . HONIGMANN, a journalist with the EXCHANGE [TELEGRAPH] and Dr. Jan PETERSEN, also believed to be employed by the same press bureau both play a very important part in the Kulturbund. Although they are not members of the Communist (KPD) they take part in certain meetings of the Party. Their connections with British circles are very valuable to the Party. Apart from this they provide the “Inside Germany” office with very important news items. They both belong to the propaganda department of the Kulturbund and look after its archives. At the moment they are in the process of building up the newly created Press Department of the Kulturbund. Ilse KRONER, former member of the KJVD who now has an important job in the “Inside Germany” office works in the closest collaboration with them.
This revelation piqued the interest of a certain ‘W.A.Y.’ (in fact W. A. Younger) in B2, who accordingly on July 7 wrote to Milicent Bagot in F2b, letting her know that the Party was concerned about Honigmann’s ‘attachment to Communism coming out in the open’, and seeking her opinion on the subject. KASPAR reported on July 24 that Honigmann had been accepted as a member of the communist National Group of German Trade Unionists, and a further memo on August 10, based on a Special Branch report, indicated that Honigmann had joined the “Kader Organisation” and was receiving training in Red Guard techniques (from 1917) in order to prepare for the revolution after Hitler’s fall from power. This was a serious development.
Bagot detected an anomaly, however. On September 20 she made a request to E5 for any information that KASPAR could provide on Honigmann, ‘as it seems curious that a man who has been backed in the past by Kenneth de Courcy should now be described as a Communist and a member of the Cadre Organisation set up by the Central Committee of the German Communist Party here’. (De Courcy was a notorious right-winger who caused constant trouble to the authorities when distributing his Intelligence Digest, as is shown in Guy Liddell’s Diaries.) Bagot had clearly picked up the fact of de Courcy’s earnest support of Honigmann back in 1938 (qv. supra). Perhaps because of this unlikely alliance, in a memorandum of October 25, Bagot expressed her scepticism of the danger, and judged that Honigmann’s status had been exaggerated. By then, however, the Home Office had supplied her with further items from its Aliens file.
Kenneth de Courcy
A memorandum (from the Home Office) to the Special Branch, dated September 24, points out that, contrary to the statement made by de Courcy, Honigmann almost certainly never went to the Far East. It requested the Branch to acquire further information about the members and Headquarters of the Cadre. On October 1, E5, using intelligence gained from LAMB, wrote to Bagot in confident tones:
There can be no doubt that this man belonged to the German Communist Party for many years. He comes from a bourgeois family, and never took part in political activities in Germany, where, as here, he adopted a bourgeois camouflage. It is only during the last few months that he came into the foreground in the press section of the Kulturbund, in which he has developed considerable activity.
This assessment would appear to grant the rather timid and indecisive Honigmann a deviousness and guile that he probably did not possess. Moreover, I recall that it was the same LAMB who told Martin that he did not believe that Honigmann had any firm political views until he met Litzi. On the other hand, it was possible that Honigmann had been indoctrinated by the communist agitator Leopold Hornik while in internment in Canada, and he kept up correspondence with him after his (Honigmann’s) release – letters that were intercepted by the Post Office and Special Branch. Nevertheless, Bagot was concerned, and wrote a memorandum to Younger (now mysteriously identified as ‘M.S./London/WAY/C’), drawing his attention to the recent Special Branch report, and the fact that Younger’s testimony of July 7 had not been included there.
Thereafter, the Home Office and MI5 appear to be tracking each other’s investigations, and extracting each other’s reports into their files. Rather surprisingly, an E5 memorandum relays that LAMB had now established that Dr. Honigmann of the Kulturbund is the same person as Dr George [sic] Friedrich Honigmann who appears in MI5 files. This is represented in Home Office files as coming from source ‘Hi’, and is in turn extracted by MI5. ‘Hi’ (namely LAMB) had reported that, at the Annual General Meeting of the Kulturbund, a new committee was elected, under the administration of three returning officers, the notorious Jűrgen Kuczynski (brother of SONIA), Louis Holzinger, and Alfred Ungar, and that Dr. Hoenigmann (sic) was elected as a London delegate.
The archive then becomes more fragmented. On July 7, 1943, Honigman is reported to be a member of the “Advanced Progressive” Group of the KPD, and thus a hard-liner, even while he is still working at the Ministry of Information. By August 23, he has joined the staff of the Freie Tribűne, as E5 reports to Bagot (F2b). On November 16, Miss Wendy Ogilvie in F2a is told that Honigmann will soon be leaving the Exchange Telegraph for a job with Reuters, as Co-ordinator of Foreign Services. In April 1944, Special Branch issues a dossier that sums up Honigman’s career (including the date of his divorce), and includes the fact on September 9, 1943, he had sent a telegram of support to Erich Weinert, the chairman of the National Committee of Free Germans in Moscow. A further revelation from KASPAR (aka LAMB) on November 4, 1944, states that Ruth Honigmann is ‘largely in sympathy with Communist aims’, but was not so active politically as her former husband.
This section of the file concludes with Honigmann’s military permit to travel (on a one-way ticket) to Hamburg at the request of the Control Commission. A note from a Colonel J. H. Adam (probably attached to the Home Office) to the Intelligence Staff, dated May 7, 1946, notifies the addressee (Lt.-Col. A. W. McMurray) of the permit, but adds:
Our records show that he has belonged to the German Communist Party for many years, though it is only recently that he came to the foreground in the Press Section of the Kulturbund, in which he has developed considerable activity. Prior to this he kept Communist activities under close cover.
It would appear to constitute a very equivocal endorsement of such an appointment. McMurray should have been alarmed. On May 10, B. H. Smith of F2ab wrote a letter to Kim Philby (in this case clearly named at the foot of the letter, including his O.B.E.) reproducing for him Honigmann’s bio, and letting him know that, even though Honigmann was not actually employed by the Control Commission, he would be working in the Hamburg area. No doubt Litzi had already told Philby of this assignment. As the ‘Sources’ above confirm, Honigmann had by the end of the month joined the Communists in Berlin.
Analysis
This detailed study provoked multiple reactions and questions in my mind, which I group in four major sectors: Chaotic Surveillance, Honigmann’s Ideology, Relationships, and Selection by the Control Commission.
Chaotic Surveillance:
What strikes me as extraordinary – almost unforgiveable – is the shambles of the surveillance of Honigmann, and the failure to analyze the evidence properly. Apart from the fact that the Home Office appears to be carrying on its own investigations, the attention to Honigmann is scattered all over the map of MI5. Memoranda are passed around the divisions, speculative profiles are created, claims and assertions are lazily echoed, but no one wants to own the problem. It is not for lack of resources, since vast amounts of time were obviously spent in tracking Honigmann’s movements, but not a single officer has the perspicacity and energy to try to make sense of it all, and to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Even Milicent Bagot, normally the shrewdest of operatives, is diffident, perhaps unsettled by the de Courcy endorsement.
Thus all manner of signals are missed or underestimated: the funding of foreign travel in the 1930s, the phony visit to the Far East, the employment by the Exchange Telegraph, the communications with Hornik, the support from Smolka/Smollett, the associations with Communist groups, including Edith Tudor-Hart’s circle, the appointment to the Kulturbund, the connection with Jűrgen Kuczynski (at a time when Honigmann is working for the Ministry of Information), the slowness of reconciling two ‘Honigmanns’, the Cadre training for violent insurrections, the telegram of support to the ‘Free Germans’ in Moscow. All this is complicated by the contradictory testimony of KASPAR/LAMB, who cannot be sure when Honigmann was first radicalized. It is all a mess.
Honigmann’s Ideology:
Was Honigmann actually a deep Soviet agent from the start? One has, perhaps, to be sceptical of the later obituaries that presented him as a wishy-washy milquetoast figure who was easily swayed – and did not become a convinced communist until he met Litzi. (He would not have met Litzi unless he were already closely involved with Communist groups.) The fact that Moscow exfiltrated him first in 1946, perhaps as a way of verifying the loyalty of Kim and Litzi, could well lead to the conclusion that he had been an important asset for many years. Thus the influence that Hornik was claimed to wield over him in Canada could also be illusionary. If so, the endorsement by de Courcy was a master-stroke, and Honigmann must have performed a clever job in convincing the disciple of the far right (though not a Fascist) where his sympathies lay.
Otherwise, his progress in the ranks shows the determination of the typical apparatchik. As a member of the new department of the Exchange Telegraph formed to promote anti-fascist propaganda to central and eastern Europe, he quickly gained respect. After release from internment, he joined the ranks of the necessary communist organizations, and made the right noises (although his attendance at meetings was rather spotty). It would have been difficult for any serious analyst to doubt his commitment, with the only possible reservations emanating from the fact that, post Barbarossa, he was working in the cause of a ‘gallant ally’, and between 1941 and 1944 speaking up against the Soviet Union had its political disadvantages in Britain.
Relationships:
But where was Litzi in all this, when did their relationship take off, and why was her intimacy with Honigmann not investigated more closely? First of all, I have to dismiss (again: see http://www.coldspur.com/litzi-philby-under-the-covers/ ) the claim that Kim Philby made when he spoke to Phillip Knightley, namely that, when he returned to London in the summer of 1940, he found that she was living with Honigmann (The Master Spy, p 75). If that had been so, Honigmann’s wife, Ruth, would presumably have been up in arms and clamouring for a divorce much earlier. Moreover, Honigmann was re-arrested, interned on the Isle of Man in July, and sent to Canada on August 7, 1940 (not in June, as I reported in that earlier posting). And Georg made a determined effort to get Ruth released from internment after his return from Canada at the beginning of 1941, which suggests that their relationship was still on stable footing at that time. When his lodgings were inspected during his absence in 1940, there is no indication that Litzi was holding the fort for him.
I find it much more probable that Honigmann met Litzi after he was introduced to Edith Tudor-Hart’s circle. Indeed, as I have also previously recorded, Helenus Milmo’s Appendix to the PEACH case specifically states that Litzi started living with Honigmann in 1942. This liaison must surely have been authorized – or even ordered – by Moscow Centre. The fact that the Honigmanns were granted their divorce in November of that year suggests that Ruth discovered the relationship fairly soon after it was established. She may, of course, have been party to the whole arrangement. The archive suggests that she was not a vigorous communist, although she was broadly in support of her husband’s political activities, and thus she was not likely to have sought a divorce on grounds of some philosophical incompatibility.
Yet the dominant question remains. Given the knowledge of Litzi’s background and activities, why did MI5 and the Home Office not make more of the association to determine Georg’s role, and why did the NKVD encourage such a liaison that could, and should, have drawn unneeded interest to the subversive activities of their agents?
Selection by the Control Commission:
What is astounding is the fact that Honigmann, with all his ideological baggage, should have been selected as a suitable person to help with the denazifying process in the British Zone of control. The makers of notes on file seem completely comfortable with the fact that, despite Honigman’s track-record as a Communist agitator, he should be approved (with a one-way ticket, admittedly) for a position in Hamburg. This was May, 1946, after all, when the Cold War was well under way. All that B. H. Smith, representing F2ab, can say, to Major Mars in C1 on May 1, 1946, is that Mars should probably warn his link with the Control Commission that their man is a Communist. I note here that Honigman’s colleague, Jűrgen Kuczynski, was selected by the OSS to help in survey work, and with vetting agents for insertion into Germany, but OSS was a notoriously pro-Communist organization, unlike its British counterparts.
It may be worth recording that Anthony Cave-Brown, in his biography of Stewart Menzies (pp 694-695), asserts that Honigmann was ‘a man who was known to SIS and MI5 as a Soviet secret agent’, and he implies that Litzi was a subsidiary character in such activities. He provides no source for this affirmation, but is characteristically slipshod in his account of that summer, since he has Philby’s request to Vivian ‘for leave to request a divorce’ occurring when Litzi had already arrived in Berlin, and was cohabiting with Georg. Cave-Brown declares that Philby’s marriage was bigamous, but never explores the obvious conundrum that, if his bosses believed that Litzi were already in East Berlin, the mechanics of the couple’s gaining a divorce would have been practically impossible.
I have noted beforehand the fact that Peter von Mendelssohn of the Exchange Telegraph had recommended Honigmann for the Control Commission post, and that he was distraught when he learned that his man had flown the coop. Mendelssohn may well be innocent, as he was not directly involved with the communist cell set up under the banner. It is much more likely that Honigmann’s crony Peter Smollett (aka Smolka), occupying an influential post at the Ministry of Information, had helped set him up. I note also that Honigmann had joined Reuter’s in November 1943, and had at some time become head of its European service. While that appointment begs the question of who was responsible for hiring him, it helps to explain the prestige he owned. Yet it is still dumbfounding that, unless the Control Commission was riddled with personnel who believed that the best way to neutralize ex-Nazis was to inspire them with Communism, anyone in authority would have accepted Honigmann, given his track-record, and his presumed objective of having the British Sector of Germany incorporated into the Soviet Empire. I recall, however, that in 1946 the Labour Party was at its most vocal in chanting ‘socialist revolution’ as the remedy for the sins of Nazism (and the errors of the Tory Party at home), and it would not have regarded a friend of Moscow such as Honigmann as an unsuitable appointment.
In conclusion, I then turned to HO 382/255 in the hope that it might answer some of my questions.
HO 382/255
I remind readers of one of the paragraphs I received from the Kew Security Officer when it informed me of the (partial) release of the file:
We have applied the Section 23(1) exemption to information in the file relating to the Security Service. We shall continue to protect such information for the personal security of the individuals involved and the national security of the United Kingdom. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that may assist those determined to undermine the security of the United Kingdom and its citizens.
This was tasty, hinting at sensitive secrets that I might be able to winkle out by spotting the reacted segments, and applying some analysis. But how could the security interest of 2023 be possibly undermined by passport information recorded over sixty years ago?
The file is in one respect vastly disappointing. It contains 260 pages: the first 228 consists of Honigmann’s Home Office file. This initial section contains only one redacted item of information – apparently an MI5 report on the letter of March 1942 from a Swiss-born Mrs. Penton to her friend Mr. Bluett in the Internment Camps Division, denouncing Ruth, and making accusations about her loyalty. (Was this perhaps related to the alienation of her husband’s affections by Litzi Philby?) The file thus serves mainly to contribute details to the story of Honigmann’s internment and occupations during World War II, but really adds little of importance to the account that can be derived from reading KV 6/113 and 6/114, apart from the presentation of some relevant documents. In fact it offers a much sparser account of his travails. The sensitive material that must have provoked the file’s retention is contained mainly in the second section, which includes correspondence and items relating to a short visit made by Barbara Honigmann, the daughter of Georg and Litzi, to the UK in 1960.
The reader can thus learn from this first section more details about Honigmann’s application for naturalization, including his turning for professional help after working by himself to start with. A Metropolitan Police Report of December 12, 1936, gives full details about his life, employment and finances. It claims that Honigmann ‘does not appear to have any subversive inclinations or associations’, and ‘appears to be respectable and loyal to this country’. (Yet the refusal to grant naturalization was based on a judgment that Honigmann ‘has not yet sufficiently identified himself with this country’ – a bizarrely expressed opinion, to say the least.) The backgrounds of his referees are listed.
Honigmann made his first request in 1936, which was refused in July 1937. He then turned to a solicitor, who made an appeal, offering the names of several prominent citizens who would support his cause, including the M.P. for Smethwick, A. R. Wise, and Kenneth de Courcy. In fact de Courcy wrote two personal letters to Sir Samuel Hoare, the Home Secretary, the first on March 16, 1938, and the second on March 29, which would appear to be a gross abuse of the acquaintance he had with that politician. The first letter is a long appeal on Honigmann’s behalf, since the journalist reputedly wanted to go to the Far East. (Someone has scrawled: ‘Honigmann is [redacted] good’ on the second letter, which suggests a pejorative remark.) Hoare informed the firm that he could not re-consider it, but declared that Honigmann could submit a fresh application, although ‘no undertaking can be given that it will be successful on this occasion’.
After a few entries concerning Honigmann’s successful application for a Certificate of Identity (essentially a Nansen passport for a stateless person enabling him to travel) the file moves to restrictions placed on Honigmann’s mobility after the outbreak of war. His second application for naturalization – again endorsed by de Courcy – had been interrupted. Honigmann wrote an appeal to the Under Secretary of State on October 31, pleading his case for tight travel restrictions to be removed – and incidentally telling an untruth when he claimed that he had ‘remained in England’ ever since 1931. (His earlier request for identification papers had listed multiple holiday trips he had made around Europe, as well as an extended visit to the USA.) One remarkable entry is a letter to Sir Alexander Maxwell (the new Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office), dated June 14, from a gentleman whose name is indistinct (see Figure below). It includes the following statement:
As I explained on the telephone, I know Dr. Georg Honigmann and his wife and also her sister and brother-in-law, Baron and Baroness von Hirsch who have been living at my country house near Haselmere for some months.
This must be Baron Donald von Hirsch, the first husband of Ruth Honigmann’s sister Katherine Bachert, who had fled to England from Merano in September 1938.
Letter from Sydney Arnold
The ingenious sleuth Phil Tomaselli was able to inform me that the author of the letter was Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Hale, formerly both a Liberal and Labour MP and a one-time Paymaster General (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Arnold,_1st_Baron_Arnold). Furthermore, in Sept 1939 the von Hirsches were staying with Arnold at Marley Corner [maybe Marley Manor?], Haslemere: the host rather mysteriously described himself as ‘a retired stockbroker’. What is striking about this relationship is that Arnold was a noted appeaser who had been a co-signatory of a letter to the Times advocating conciliation with Hitler.
Honigmann gained fresh championing of his cause to be released from travel restrictions, including the ever-present de Courcy, on December 1, 1939. But then the clamp-down of May 1940, when the Fifth Column scare was loudly trumpeted, ensured that both Georg and Ruth were interned as members of Class ‘B’, the order being issued on May 26, with the process itself occurring on June 13. On July 4, Honigmann sailed to Canada on the S.S. Sobieski, while Ruth remained on the Isle of Man in Port Erin. Almost immediately, pleas were made on his behalf. On July 19 MI5 informed the Home Office that nothing justified his release, but Sir Charles Peake of the Exchange Telegraph soon started to apply pressure, which was reinforced by the Ministry of Information. The Ministry identified several other journalists whose ‘release is regarded as in the national interest’ including Fritz Kessler and Ernest Meyer. In a report compiled by the Exchange Telegraph, the relationship between the service and the Ministry was clearly outlined:
Since the outbreak of the war, the Continental Dept. of the Exchange Telegraph Co. have to a growing extent cooperated with the Foreign Publicity Dept of the MOI with the result that they have now completely sub-ordinated themselves to the MOI and are virtually acting as one of the Ministry’s direct publicity channels in neutral countries.
The outcome was that a decision to release Honigmann was made on September 23, and a request to do so was sent to the High Commissioner for Canada (in London) on October 11. He wrote a letter agreeing to the decision on November 6, but because of an unexplained delay Honigmann did not land in Liverpool until January 11. A Home Office letter to his solicitors, written as late as December 20, states that ‘it has been decided to bring G. Honigmann back from Canada’. His wife was also affected: a strong testimony to her loyalty to Britain was communicated by prominent names at the Manchester Guardian, but unfortunately, a bureaucratic mix-up contributed to Ruth’s still being held at the time of her husband’s arrival. Georg had to write a letter of appeal: she was interviewed on January 24, and declared that she wanted to go back and live with her husband again. Her release order was issued on February 3, and she and Georg were reunited at the flat of Ruth’s mother at 2 Hillsleigh Road, London W.8.
What of the remaining section? It seems that MI5 had approached the Home Office in February 1953, sending some information that caused the file to be given a higher secrecy rating. This fresh initiative was surely prompted by the recent arrest for questioning of Georg and Litzi in Berlin, since KV 6/114 records that it was decided on February 19 that Honigmann would not be allowed back in the UK. (This occurred after J. D. Robertson, maybe unwisely, had suggested to MI6 that overtures should be made to the disgraced Honigmanns with a view possibly to bringing them back to the UK so that MI5 could learn more about Soviet espionage. Unsurprisingly, this idea apparently did not go far.) The file thereafter underwent a review process around every seven years. A letter that month from Chief Inspector C.P. J. Ruck to the Immigration Officer appears to articulate a concern that Honigmann might visit the UK some time soon. It requests that his ‘UK address, and particulars of foreign visas and documents of interest, arrival and departure’ should be obtained ‘discreetly’ and sent to MI5. As supplementary evidence, Honigmann’s application for a new military Certificate of Identity, dated April 11, 1946, is enclosed: Honigmann stated that he might plan to return to the UK ‘if occasion arises’.
A note dated February 19, 1960 indicates that the file has been reviewed, that the present classification should remain, and that MI5 should be approached again in another seven years. Part of the message to ‘Box 500’ (MI5) of March 3, 1967 has been redacted: a week later, a note echoes the process (with some acceleration), indicating that the ‘Almanack’ should be reviewed on February 25, 1970. On that date, MI5 is again consulted to determine whether the ‘S.C. No. 18465’ has to be retained. A further, more substantial, segment has been redacted, and another, on February 25, 1974. On that date a Mr Anderson notes to Miss Spencer: “Honigmann is no longer listed in the Directory of S.I.F.O.s. Perhaps you could discover if Box 500 still have an interest in this man.”
What ‘SIFO’ stands for I have no idea (Suspect Index for Observation?), but it is clearly a file of suspicious persons of some sort. Spencer further writes, on August 22, 1974: ‘Have you any recent information on this man or comments on the cancellation of the suspect circular for him?”. And the saga continues – more reviews, more redacted segments, until a stamp on October 4, 1977 boldly declares: Deleted from Suspect Index’. What is also clear is that, in June 1965, Honigmann’s file had been amended from ‘Secret’ to ‘Confidential’.
The last few pages concern the May 1960 application for an entry visa for Honigmann’s daughter, Barbara, aged 11, who has been invited to stay with her father’s friends, the Newmarks, in Tring for four weeks. The Home Office can see no reason why it should not be granted. It is specified that her parents will not travel, but what is remarkable is the fact that her mother, Litzy Honigmann, is never mentioned in the exchanges. The visa was granted, Barbara arrived, and MI5 presumably breathed a sigh of relief when she returned to East Germany, and they had avoided having to deal with her two notorious parents. It seems that the planned retention period of a hundred years (2060) was probably coincidental to Barbara’s visit, however.
Analysis
Two primary questions occupy me: ‘Why was Honigmann’s application for naturalization refused in 1938?’ and ‘What prompted the consternation in February 1953?’. Both questions may, of course, be directly related to the initial decisions to maintain his file as ‘Secret’, and then ‘Confidential’. Considering them might help contribute to a better understanding of his status, and the alarm it caused.
The rejection by the Home Office is very strange. Honigmann appears to have all the qualities that an applicant should display: he is cultivated, urbane, manifestly anti-Nazi, and has sophisticated and respectable allies and sponsors who testify to his merits. The fact that this list includes both the right-wing de Courcy as well as the leftist Smollett might suggest that he was an intellectual of some independence of mind. On the other hand, Smollett (who had first arrived in Britain as Peter Smolka in 1930) successfully applied for naturalization in 1938, upon which event he changed his name. Yet Smolka had been expelled from France as a spy, was known to have voiced communist opinions, had travelled to the Soviet Union twice during the 1930s, and published a book sympathetic to the Soviet regime.
Honigmann was overtly rejected because he had ‘not yet sufficiently identified himself with this country’, even though the Metropolitan Police gave him a positive assessment of his loyalty, and MI5 harbored no objections. By 1938, ‘anti-fascism’ rather than ‘anti-communism’ would have been a more acceptable ideology. He apparently did not carry himself well in his interview, but it is difficult to see how he could have spoiled his chances unless he had been very clumsy. Did the Home Office have access to other information that might have disqualified him? After all, the rejections occurred before all the subversive incidents catalogued above occurred, and he was considered reliable enough to be offered the position by the Control Commission in 1946. Thus it seems unlikely that he had been identified by the Foreign Office as a dangerous subversive: Smolka (agent ABO of the NKVD) had been constantly surveilled and his correspondence intercepted, yet managed to evade any intense scrutiny when he pursued a similar path.
The timing of the request from MI5 in late February 1953 for a watch to be kept on Honigmann’s possible entry to the UK is exquisite. Georg and Litzi had just been released from prison in a Stalin-directed purge of Jews and agents who might have come under ‘bourgeois’ influence abroad. When MI5 learned about this from the press, they might have imagined that the couple would seek to flee back to the UK. (The fact that the DDR would have denied them that capability would have eluded the Security Service.) If they did so, any number of awkward secrets might be revealed. The file suggests that Honigmann’s papers would have entitled him to return: he had declared a possible intention in 1946 when he submitted his application. Yet KV 6/114 (ser 84a.) of February 19 clearly states that Honigmann would not be allowed to return: “Please inform P.C.O. [Passport Control Officer: alias for MI6 representative] Germany/Austria that the above should not be granted a visa to enter the United Kingdom without reference to this office”. On the other hand, Ruck’s message to the Immigration Officer requests information to be telephoned to MI5 ‘on arrival or departure’, as if the objective of prohibition were unenforceable.
It is not clear whether Litzi’s passport was still valid in 1953. It will be recalled that she had gained a renewal in the summer of 1946, and her status as a British subject would not have been annulled simply because of her divorce from Kim. (KV 6/113 – Item ‘J’ – does refer to an August 1947 rumour that she might be planning a return visit to the UK.) At this stage, however, the Home Office would not have maintained a file on Litzi. They were not aware of her relationship with Georg when the latter departed in May 1946. MI5 was surely issuing the same edicts for Litzi, however, but they would have been stored in the ‘Philby’ file. Perhaps the redacted segments in HO 382/255 introduce Litzi to the Home Office’s consideration of the equation.
A few weeks later, Stalin was dead, which gave enormous breathing-space, and eventual rehabilitation, to the Honigmanns. So had the danger quickly passed? Apparently not, because of the continued moratorium on the files. MI5 was presumably still concerned about a re-appearance of the pair. But who might have been damaged by any revelations? It cannot be the Honigmanns and any offspring they had. Recall that the wording in the response to the FOI runs as follows: “We shall continue to protect such information for the personal security of the individuals involved and the national security of the United Kingdom.” MI5’s sensitivities cannot extend to concerns about two probable KGB agents, both of whom died decades ago, even if one of them might have kept an expired British passport . . .
I suspect that it is more likely that the security of certain British subjects was under consideration, and the obvious candidates were the offspring of the Kim/Aileen marriage, and their successors. It is undeniable that the first three children were born out of wedlock, and Aileen was pregnant with their fourth when the wedding ceremony took place in September 1946. If Litzi had confided to Georg that a divorce from Kim had not actually taken place (as Cave-Brown and Easton claimed), that would have made Kim a bigamist, and cast a shadow over his innocent descendants. Moreover, it would have caused a real black eye for MI6, who presumably had no evidence of the divorce proceedings, found the sequence of events as implausible as I have, and wanted to shut the whole matter up – until 2060, by which time anyone would presumably have lost interest. Are there any other theories out there?
Conclusion
Honigmann remains a mystery. Why was the KGB so interested in him? He was neither an influential propagandist, nor did he have the opportunity to gain access to secret material. He openly displayed his pro-communist leanings in his associations with the Kulturbund, and he was presumably approved to take on the role of Litzi’s lover and confidant. Maybe it was because of his essential blandness that he fell beneath the radar screen, and was chosen to keep an eye on Litzi. Yet his absence in East Berlin in the summer of 1946, while Litzi remained in Britain, inviolate and relaxed, must constitute one of the oddest aspects of the Philby affair. In the hope that it might reveal a lot more, I ordered Barbara Honigmann’s memoir of her father, titled simply Georg. It arrived towards the end of the month, and I have now read it. It is beautifully written, exploiting both MI5 and STASI files, as well as what Georg communicated to his daughter both orally and in writing. It does indeed contain some fascinating insights, and it will cause some dramatic changes to be made to my conclusions above – unless, of course, Georg was not telling the truth . . . I shall report fully in a couple of months’ time.
Ellis, Ker-Seymer, Déricourt, Austin, Orwell, Berlin
The Love-Lives of the Philosophers
Coldspur: Method, Archive & Topography
Introduction
For this August bulletin, I decided I needed to take a break from the intensive research into Kim Philby that has occupied me over the past few months. I suffered a nasty bout of Covid in June, which knocked the stuffing out of me, and also put a dent in my research agenda. So, in this summer round-up, I take instead the opportunity for the more leisurely exercise of catching up with various intelligence-related events and activities. This tour d’horizon has turned out to be a bit more expansive than originally planned: I hope every coldspur reader will find herein something of interest.
The Cyber-Attack
My website suffered a short-lived, but alarming, disruption in early June. I was working from my iPad when I was suddenly unable to access any coldspur page except the home page. I immediately went to my PC, only to find that the same problem occurred, with some message indicating that the page I was seeking was unavailable. This happened in the evening, so I sent off a message to the support desk of my web hoster, and awaited a response. Early the next morning I received a message back suggesting that I clear my browser cache, and, having done so, I saw the apparent return of the complete coldspur site.
So I turned to my PC, and then discovered that there was no cache problem there: the site was available likewise, so I quickly concluded that something else had been at fault. Moreover, I then noticed that a few of the recent comments made by visitors were no longer visible. It looked as if there had been a problem in the regular back-up/recovery procedures. I brought this fact to the attention of the support person, who then dug an even greater hole for herself by stating that such procedures were not the responsibility of her company, and that I needed to get in touch with the outfit that actually hosted the site. Her company was responsible only for managing the WordPress environment.
Now, there are few things that rouse my ire more quickly than technical support organizations who guess, or bluff, or try to deceive me. I have no business relationship with any other entity, and, indeed, I have to declare this outfit as my ‘web hoster’ each year when I renew my contract for www.coldspur.com with GoDaddy. I thus contacted the President of the company in some frustration, and asked him to sort it out. The outcome was that he did get involved, and had to apologize for his support person, who ‘misspoke’, yet he himself was guilty of some prevarication. He started off by stating that the management of the site had indeed been entrusted to a ‘third party’ (which suggests a separate legal entity to me), but he then backtracked somewhat in asserting that the management of all WordPress sites had been consolidated on to a single server. When I pressed him, he admitted that part of his business was in fact outsourced to another company. He could not explain what had happened, but confirmed that the few missing comments were indeed lost for ever.
I am not happy about this at all, and have requested a more thorough approach to data archiving and data quality. In the meantime, I apologize to those couple of coldspur readers whose comments were lost, and especially to David Coppin who took the time to try to re-create his comments.
And then, on the morning of July 30, coldspur became completely unavailable. I informed the web hoster, and soon received an acknowledgment, as well as a message from the President of the company that his team was working on the problem, and that it would contact me as soon it made progress. I wondered whether the outage was due to Chinese malware, since a disturbing story appeared in the New York Times the same day, alerting readers to the exposure of critical national infrastructure by China’s malicious actions. I reflected, however, that the availability of coldspur is probably not vital to the safety and integrity of the social fabric of the United States. I thought it far more likely that MI5, anticipating another blistering post on August 1, and suspecting that coldspur’s defences would be on low alert on a Sunday, had decided to disrupt its availability.
The site was down for about twelve hours. I learned later that the problem had not just affected coldspur: it had been in fact been caused by a Chinese DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack! No virus or malware had infiltrated the servers, but a blitz of messages brought the installation to its knees, and a range of new IP addresses had to be added to the firewall. Who would have thought a relatively minor installation in North Carolina would come under attack? Was this random? Or did the Chinese have some knowledge of which websites were maintained by this hoster? I was also interested in whether the Department of Homeland Security keeps track of all such attacks. The President of the company told me that he had reported the onslaught to his upstream provider (a wholesale manager of IP addresses and traffic), but it does not seem that there is a requirement to inform the government. Given the source of the invasion, and the current ferment over China’s cyberattacks, that strikes me as odd.
Kim Philby
In the Spectator of June 10, Douglas Murray wrote a column ‘How to dismantle history’, selecting as his subject the TV adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s Colditz. He introduced the author in the following terms: “He is a fine popular regurgitator of history who has previously brought to public notice such things as the hitherto untold story of a spy named Kim Philby.” Apart from the fact that the adaptation of A Spy Among Friends apparently contains some creative flourishes that would tend to undermine its reliability as a historical record (I have not watched it), I was struck by the paradox: if the story of Philby is ‘hitherto untold’, how could Macintyre ‘regurgitate’ it?
I did not expect, a few months ago, that I would be dedicating so much of my research and writing time this year to Philby. I know that several coldspur readers have devoured everything they could find about Philby over the years, and I have been much the same – but without paying really close attention to the details (apart from my inspection of all the accounts of his recruitment by the NKVD in 1933-1934, as laid out in Misdefending the Realm.) Thus I succumbed to the familiar broad-brushed arc of his career: the marriage to Litzi, the recruitment by Arnold Deutsch, the assignments in Spain, the attachment to SOE, and then to MI6, the near disastrous exposure by Volkov, the interlude in Turkey, the posting to Washington, the secrets revealed by VENONA, the postulated ‘Third Man’ role with Burgess and Maclean, the investigations, the time in the wilderness, and the eventual escape from Beirut.
Dominating this career was Philby’s memoir My Silent War, which seems to have been cited quite indiscriminately by any number of writers, including the ‘authorized’ historian, Christopher Andrew, even though its source and sponsorship should have given grounds for severe scepticism. I have pointed out before that, when in that text Philby identifies his past employer as MI5, it serves as a kind of radio security check, whereby he informs his readers in Britain that they shouldn’t really take all that he writes very seriously, as everything is under the control of the KGB (who in general never understood the difference between MI5 and MI6.)
Then, at the beginning of this year, a few queries from coldspur readers (and especially some exchanges with Keith Ellison) prompted me again to dig into aspects of Philby’s career, gather a few archives that I had overlooked, re-inspect some folders that I already had on my desk, and start building a chronology for some of the more controversial events in Philby’s career. Writing the reports of the past few months has been a fascinating experience, and has made me believe that a brand new biography of Philby is required, one that would not automatically ‘regurgitate’ all the falsehood of his memoirs, and the exculpatory asides of those officers who were supposed to have been monitoring him, but instead point out some of the anomalies and confront the fact that, on many aspects of his troublesome life, we simply do not know exactly what happened.
And there is more work to be done, for example on the origin of the Litzi Feabre alias, verification of what must have been a very shaky divorce settlement, what was known about Burgess’s connections before 1951, the Foreign Office post-mortems, and the mysteries of Philby’s last few years with MI6, including the falsehoods passed on by Nicholas Elliott. In that context, while reading recently Burton Hersh’s history of the CIA, The Old Boys, I came across the following passage: “He [Wisner] downplayed American annoyances at the pigheadedness of the English at suggestions that they get busy or flutter their people, stop mincing around and bring the Philby situation to a head. At Dulles’s urging, Wisner got close enough to Roger Hollis [1959] to break loose ‘a really valuable body of evidence about Philby,’ Cleve Cram says, ‘which filled in a lot of the chinks and helped overcome the horrified reaction around the Agency when we were given to understand that MI6 was running him still’.” What might Hollis have known, and what could he possibly have told Wisner that would have calmed the concerns of the restless Americans?
Moreover, in recent weeks, fresh leads have sprung up to be investigated: Vivian’s dissimulations of August 1946; Philby’s postwar presence in Vienna and the missing Bruce Lockhart tape; the surprising addition of Philby to the circle of acquaintances of the psychiatrist Eric Strauss; the debate about ‘STEVENSON’; and a suggestion in a recent book by Charlotte Dennett (Follow the Pipelines) that Philby was involved in the 1947 death of her father, the CIA agent Daniel Dennett, in an aircrash. I have ordered the book, and shall report more later. Perhaps most significant is the acquisition of the MI5 December 1939 Staff Lists from the National Archives, that include a ‘Miss Furse’ working in C2b. Keith Ellison has pointed out to me that Yuri Modin wrote, in My 5 Cambridge Friends, that Philby, at the time he was recruited by MI6 in 1941, ‘was having a passionate love affair with Aileen Furse, who worked in the MI5 archive department’. So was Aileen already working for MI5 when she met Kim at the Solomon/Birch luncheon? And was she thus able to wield some power over him?
‘Among Others’ by Michael Frayn
Lastly, towards the end of the month, while reading Michael Frayn’s new collection Among Others: Friendships and Encounters, I learned that Frayn had innocently introduced his college (Emmanuel, Cambridge) friend John Sackur to Harold Evans of the Sunday Times in 1967. The encounter did not go well, since the paper was deep into its investigation of Philby, and Evans discovered (from his deputy editor, Frank Giles) that Sackur worked for MI6. Frayn postulates that Sackur may have been sent to Evans on a mission to try to control the narrative, and that he, Frayn, was used as a channel. Frayn led me back to Evans’s account in his memoir My Paper Chase (which I had read when it came out, but had forgotten the episode), but that did not seem to me to represent the whole story. Where else had I read about it?
Evans refers to Phillip Knightley’s belief that Sackur was a member of a dissident group inside MI6. Knightley had argued in 1998, in an article in British Journalism Review, that Sackur was in fact a member of a ‘ginger group’ who wanted the Philby inquiry to go ahead, so that further Soviet agents could be unmasked. My first thought was that was equally unlikely, and a check on Chistopher Moran’s Classified seemed to confirm that what the Sunday Times was about to reveal was way beyond the control of MI6, or even the UK government. It would have been pointless and clumsy to try to encourage the investigation in person. Moran had suggested that Sackur had probably been sent as a spy to discover exactly what the Sunday Times had put together, and that he reported to his bosses the extent of the possible damage.
I needed to find the article. David Spark, in his book Investigative Reporting, sources Knightley’s comments as Volume 9, Number 2 of the British JournalismReview, in June 1998, where an abstract of Knightley’s riposte to a critical piece by his ex-colleague Bruce Page piece can be seen (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095647489800900206). It reads: “In the last issue of the British Journalism Review Bruce Page criticired [sic] a former Sunday Times colleague, PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, for his role in the paper’s investigative campaigns 30 yearr [sic] ago. Knightley now exercises his right of reply.”Yet nothing by Bruce Page in 1998 can be found via a search on the Review’s website. In fact, Page did write a piece criticizing Knightley in Volume 9, Number 1, with his authorship not indexed, but his focus was apparently on thalidomide. I needed to find out how the riposte switched to Philby.
After a while, I managed to get a copy of the Knightley piece, titled ‘The inside story of Philby’s exposure’. The facts are predictably elusive but the interpretation of what happened comes down partly to timing. Knightley starts off by setting the introduction by Frayn to Evans as occurring ‘when The Sunday Times was sniffing around the story’ of Philby, i.e. when any conclusions would have been very tentative, and he reports that Sackur appeared to be taken aback when Evans told him that the paper was looking into the life of ‘your old Foreign Office colleague’, Kim Philby. Sackur’s response was extreme: he immediately elevated the potential political embarrassment such an investigation would provoke, and described Philby as ‘a copper-bottomed bastard’. This exchange would suggest that Evans and his team did not yet know that Philby worked for MI6, and that Evans learned of Sackur’s employer only soon afterwards, when Sackur met Giles. Naturally, Sackur’s outburst encouraged Evans to pursue the case even more determinedly. (Evans recounts all this in his memoir.)
The disagreement between Page and Knightley comes down to the reason why Sackur appeared in Evans’s office. Page believed that it was coincidence, and that Sackur genuinely wanted to leave the ‘Foreign Office’ (i.e. MI6) for a journalistic career, while Knightley was convinced that Sackur was one of the ‘young Turks’ who were disgusted that their senior officers in MI6 would not let him (and Stephen de Mowbray and Arthur Martin) continue their molehunt, and Sackur thus wanted to encourage the exposure of Philby. In this scenario, Sackur must have gained a smell of what the Sunday Times was up to: his surprise was feigned, and his melodramatic response deliberate. Yet Evans’s conclusion was that Sackur ‘was not a plant, but a young man whose conscience would give him no rest’.
Moran, writing in 2013, had had access, however, to the private papers of George Wigg, the Paymaster-General in Harold Wilson’s government, which confirmed that Sackur had indeed gone on a fishing-trip, and, having learned the extent of the investigation, alerted his bosses and sent Whitehall in a tizzy. Maybe his behaviour in front of Evans was to gain the trust and confidence of Bruce Page, which certainly occurred when the leader of the ‘Insight’ team took Sackur for a liquid lunch at Manzi’s seafood restaurant in Soho. In this scenario, the disclosure of facts that Sackur revealed to Page at their meeting may have been a deliberate attempt to distract the paper from the more serious crimes of Philby. Evans even records that Sackur gave broad hints about Philby’s transgressions in World War II rather than in the Cold War, which his team ‘eventually’ was able to determine as relating to Germany’s plans for a separate peace, and the purging of Catholic opposition to the communists in Germany – actually after the war. All very odd. As Frayn describes, Sackur was a deceiver par excellence.
And what happened to John Sackur? Frayn and Evans write that he died young. Outside Frayn’s vignette (Sackur’s non-appearance at a college reunion inspired Frayn’s play Donkeys’ Years), I have been able to find a few references to him. Daphne Park’s best friend was a Jean Sackur. Was she related, I wonder? The answer came from Paddy Hayes, the author of Queen of Spies, his biography of Park. He had interviewed Jean Sackur, who had been married to John, and divorced from him some time in the 1960s. Ancestry.com confirms that Christopher John Sackur was born in Wharfedale, Yorkshire, on February 8, 1933 (his mother née Humphries), and died on January 24, 1986, in Bury St Edmunds. (see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/241252354/christopher-john-sackur). He married Jean La Fontaine in the summer of 1958, in Cambridge, married a woman named Morgan in 1974, and further married Joanna Butt in May 1985. Hayes writes that Sackur was offered a job by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, but that MI6 would not let him go there, after which he became a successful management consultant. Another report states that Sackur was one of those officers ‘burned’ by the revelations of George Blake to his Moscow bosses, and that John Quine, head of MI6 counter-intelligence, decided that Sackur had to resign. As with all such stories, the truth is hard to pin down.
The Scarlet Papers
As I was drafting the section above, I came across, in the May issue of Literary Review, a short review of a novel by one Matthew Richardson, titled The Scarlet Papers. It started off as follows:
This magnificent spy novel sees disappointed academic Max summoned to a secret interview with Scarlet King, an elderly woman he has never met. His expertise being the history of the intelligence services, he knows that she was once the most senior woman in MI6 and one of the greatest specialists on the Soviet Union.
‘The Scarlet Papers’ by Matthew Richardson
After giving a glimpse of the plot (without really spoiling the reader’s future enjoyment) the author of the review (Natasha Cooper) continues:
Richardson uses plenty of real names to provide authenticity, from John le Carré and Vasily Mitrokhin to Sergei Skripal, Maurice Oldfield and even Churchill’s confidant Professor Lindemann. He draws upon his own experiences as a researcher and speechwriter in Westminster, with the result that his political and civil service characters behave in ways that are entirely convincing.
Well, up to a point, Ms. Cooper. I of course had to acquire the book after this endorsement, and was entertained by the smoothly-written novel. Perhaps it does not need to be mentioned that Kim Philby plays a semi-prominent role, something that piqued my attention even more. But authenticity requires more than dropping in famous names from the world of intelligence, using all the established jargon of spycraft, and scattering dozens of well-known (even overused) anecdotes that have populated the literature over the past fifty years. It requires chronological exactitude, and attention to detail in background, careers, expertise, achievements, psychology and motivations.
The problem starts with Scarlet King herself, who is described as being in her nineties at the time of the action – in fact given more precisely as ninety-five in one passage. Her first assignment with MI6 was in Vienna in 1946. Thus, if she were, say, twenty-five years old at the time, the action would probably be no later than 2016. (At one point, Richardson writes that she was only twenty-one when she took on her first assignment for MI6 in Vienna in 1946 – highly improbable!) Yet, in one scene, Scarlet is accused of possibly meeting Philby at the SOE training school at Beaulieu in Hampshire, since she had worked previously for SOE. Philby was dismissed from SOE in the summer of 1941, however, and soon after joined MI6, which, to require King to be of a reasonable age to be employed by SOE, would probably bring the current events forward a few years. And then we learn that she attended Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University, gaining her degree in Modern Languages, which means that she must have completed it in the summer of 1939 or 1940 (at the latest) to be recruited by SOE, which would give her a probable birth-year of about 1917.
Now matters start to get stretched the other end. From ‘authentic’ remarks made by MI5 officers, we learn that ‘current’ events must be occurring after 2018, since the attempted assassination on Skripal in Salisbury is referred to as an event worth recalling. Next, we learn that the year must be in the 2020s, as Brexit (January 2020) is referred to as a past happening. Thus Scarlet King suddenly would have to be a centenarian – and a very sprightly one, at that. But then Richardson informs his readers that King was born in 1923, and was ‘recruited’ (by what organization I shall not divulge) at the tender age of thirteen. She then is described as appearing in sub fusc at Oxford, which meant she must have been admitted to the university at a very young age to be ready to work at SOE in 1940. Yet later in the book, we are told that she went up to Oxford after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact in the autumn of 1939, which would make her recruitment in by SOE in 1940 utterly impossible. Nevertheless, King continually draws on her experiences during training at the SOE school in Arisaig. She is again described as being aged ninety-five in what must be 2021 or 2022. It is all a mess.
The curriculum vitae of the historian embroiled in the plot (Max Archer) is just as dubious. He is aged forty-two at the time of the events, which has him born in (say) 1980. He earned a double-first at Cambridge (under Christopher Andrew), took a Master’s degree, and then, having been rejected for a job in MI6 at the end of 2001, was accepted to take a Ph.D. at Harvard. He then returned to the UK, working as an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, which must have taken him up to about 2005. He went on to write two books that gave him his reputation: a volume titled Double Agents: A History, and The Honourable Traitor: An Unauthorized Life of Kim Philby. No dates are given for these publications, but they did apparently necessitate some heavy years of toil. Yet Max is described as having been a consultant to the BBC series The Cambridge Spies (not something one should be very proud of, by the way, because of the way it played around with the facts). That production came out in 2003, however, when Max was presumably completing his doctorate in Boston.
Moreover, the two publications in his name cast serious doubts on Archer’s professional excellence. Richardson himself throws around the term ‘double agents’ carelessly (using them to categorize Philby and Blunt, for example), when what he really means is ‘agents in place’, ‘penetration agents’, or simply ‘traitors’. Just because a person betraying his country happens to work for an intelligence service does not make him a ‘double agent’. (Michael Holzman, Ben Macintyre, Tim Tate, et al., please note.) That Richardson is aware of this semantic error is made evident in a speech that he allocates to Max Archer (p 264): “‘My academic research is on double agents’, he said, steadying his voice. ‘Intelligence officers who officially work for one side but secretly work for the other. The thing is, technically, some intelligence historians dispute the use of the term “double agents” for professional spies like Philby and the Cambridge Five.’” Why, if he were a serious historian who wanted to make his reputation, Archer would go against the grain of what ‘some’ intelligence historians affirm (how many are there, anyway?), and promote an incorrect and unrecognized classification, Richardson does not explain.
Likewise, the account of his biography of Philby is unconvincing and ambiguous. Archer is supposed to have spent years in the archives digging out the facts about Philby, but the whole point of Kim is that there was practically no archival evidence available about him – certainly not in the early 2000s, and the books about him relied largely on the secretive investigations and interviews conducted by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ team, unreliable memoirs from his colleagues, as well as Philby’s own highly dubious account, My Silent War. Yet Archer is described as taking four years to write his biography, and the Endnotes took twelve months. What they could have contained, for a professedly serious academic publication, would have been very thin gruel. (Even if he had had access to the same MI5 files that Christopher Andrew was able to inspect – impossible, by the way, since there were no historians ‘authorized’ before Andrew – most of his Endnotes would simply have stated ‘Security Service Archives’.) Yet Archer later explains that both his books were tuned for a less demanding market (p 228): “He’d glamorized them, emphasized the sex and the danger, even hoped they might be optioned in a splashy bidding war by Hollywood and hungrily consumed by the masses.” That is absurd: you cannot be the pot-boiling Ben Macintyre and the dryasdust Michael S. Goodman at the same time.
I could cite more – but enough. The book is pure hokum – quite enjoyable hokum – but still hokum. If the fictional characters are too closely tethered to real figures, credibility is quickly undermined, while if they also lack their own coherence in the imagined world, the whole edifice crumbles. What publishers in this sphere need are not Sensitivity readers but Authenticity Readers.
What’s New at Kew
In March of this year, I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the National Archives at Kew. I had noticed that HO 382/255, a file on Georg Honigmann and his daughter Barbara (by Kim Philby’s former wife, Litzi) relating to their passport status, had been withheld, not to be released until 2061! This was shocking. I could not understand why information on the Honigmanns could still be regarded as sensitive. After all, Georg had absconded to East Berlin in 1946, seventy-seven years ago, and Litzi had joined him soon afterwards, whereupon they were married. Barbara was born in 1949. The file was closed, it seems, in December 1960, and an arbitrary retention period of one hundred years allocated. Why would the Home Office need to maintain information on these people for so long, and who might be affected by its disclosure? Was something embarrassing about Litzi included, perhaps?
The initial response was not encouraging, but due process was followed. At last, on June 28, I received the following message from the Quality Manager at the National Archives:
Thank you for your enquiry regarding a review of:
HO 382/255 – HONIGMANN, George [sic] Friedrich Wolfgang: German. HONIGMANN, Barbara: German
Please accept our apologies for the delays in responding to your Freedom of Information request.
I can now confirm that a redacted version of this record will be made available for public viewing at The National Archives, Kew by 5 July 2023. We have outlined your options for accessing the record at the end of this response.
We have had to carry out a public interest test. This was because some of the information you requested is covered by the Section 23(1) exemption, which by virtue of Section 64(2), becomes a qualified exemption where information falling within it is contained in a historical record in a public record office, such as The National Archives. Section 23 exempts from public disclosure, information that is directly or indirectly supplied by, or relates to, certain organisations dealing with security matters listed at Section 23(3).
After careful consideration, the public interest in releasing some of the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption.
We have applied the Section 23(1) exemption to information in the file relating to the Security Service. We shall continue to protect such information for the personal security of the individuals involved and the national security of the United Kingdom. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that may assist those determined to undermine the security of the United Kingdom and its citizens.
The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a “public interest” in favour of disclosure. In this case disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not, therefore, benefit the public good.
I scanned a copy of a police report from this record in order to obtain the Metropolitan Police’s approval to release their Special Branch generated material, (something I am obliged to do under the Freedom of Information Act). As they have stated that they have no objection to release, I have attached a copy of the scan so that you at least have some details to look at while waiting for the file to be made available in full.
The file has now been returned to the repository.
My London-based researcher has recently viewed and photographed the file, and I received it on August 9. There does not, at first glance, appear to be anything controversial in it, apart from the fact that Barbara Honigmann (who is still alive), the daughter of Georg and Litzi (sometime Philby) Honigmann applied to spend a month in the United Kingdom when she was eleven years old, in 1960! No doubt there are other secrets within. I shall provide a full report on it in my September bulletin. One thing that had struck me is that Honigmann is described in the header as being ‘German’, yet a sample of the file sent to me by the Quality Manager reports on Honigmann’s application for British naturalization in 1936, on the basis that he promised that he ‘he had no intention for making application to the German authorities for permission to retain his German citizenship if granted British naturalization’. Puzzled, I returned to the Honigmann files previously released, and then discovered that Honigman’s application for naturalization was rejected because of his communist sympathies.
Intelligence Officers
I frequently ask myself: what makes a good intelligence officer, and were those recruited by MI5 in wartime well-suited to their career? Selecting a profession has a high degree of chance about it, in my opinion. I almost went into teaching (and took a post-graduate degree in education), but I think I would have been a very poor schoolmaster. (Several persons I have encountered said that I should have been a lawyer.) Fortunately I joined IBM instead, and finished my career in a job of technology analysis that I believe was ideal for me, demanding business acumen, technical knowledge and experience, good analytical and communications skills, and a healthy lack of idealism. And one thinks of doctors: presumably all doctors who pass their final examinations must be qualified, but one would expect a vastly different set of skills between those who passed with flying colours and those who always confused the ileum with the ilium.
Were the Oxbridge dons, lawyers, and acquaintances from the Club uniquely suited to the positions found for them in MI5 when it was recruiting furiously in 1940? Perhaps on the principle that smart persons can adapt to the demands of any particular job, it made sense, but training and preparation were practically non-existent, and the management infrastructure was woefully inefficient. Moreover, there were different kinds of skill required: more cerebral, contemplative assessment of evidence, with a background of history and politics required; interrogatory skills in challenging and verifying the stories of suspected spies; the more people-oriented capabilities of emotional intelligence and patience in running agents.
Allen Dulles
I recently came across what Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, wrote about ideal intelligence officers. In The Craft of Intelligence appears the following:
“When I recently addressed a class of junior trainees at CIA I tried to list what I thought were the qualities of a good intelligence officer. They were:
Be perceptive about people
Be able to work well with others under difficult conditions
Learn to discern between fact and fiction
Be able to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials
Possess inquisitiveness
Have a large amount of ingenuity
Pay appropriate attention to detail
Be able to express ideas clearly, briefly and very important, interestingly
Learn when to keep your mouth shut.”
As afterthoughts to what he presented in his lecture, he added other desirable characteristics: an understanding of other points of view; no rigidity or closed-mindedness; lack of ambitiousness or rewards in fame or fortune.
It’s not a bad list: I wonder whether his trainees were screened before they were hired, or whether he thought that some of the qualities could be inculcated into them? I might add a hard-headed, even cynical, perspective on how the world works, a degree of humility, and a sense of humour, even to the extent of not taking oneself too seriously. (Are you listening back there, Angleton?) And I was reminded of the sentences that Stella Rimington included in her memoir concerning Peter Wright (that I used in my July coldspur):
But it [counter-espionage work] is not the quick jumping to conclusions and the twisting of facts to meet the theory which Peter Wright went in for in those days. He was in fact by then [1972] everything which a counter-espionage officer should not be. He was self-important, he had an over-developed imagination and an obsessive personality which had turned into paranoia. And above all he was lazy.
Wright would have failed the Dulles test quite dramatically.
But what about his colleagues, in MI5 and MI6? Were they much better? Consider the very smart and cerebral but rather romantic and impressionable Guy Liddell, lacking confidence in expressing his opinions forthrightly; the ambitious and political Dick White, who manipulated others to protect his position; the bumbling and easily influenced Arthur Martin, who certainly could not keep quiet when he needed to; the insightful but neurotic and demanding John Curry; the vain and detached Valentine Vivian, suffering from depression, who did not have the brain-power to recognize what he was up against; the unpopular and heartless loner Claud Dansey, whose deviousness led him into some dismal traps; the well-intentioned but cautious and unbrilliant Roger Hollis, who really just wanted to stay out of trouble and play golf; the misplaced Percy Sillitoe, treating counter-espionage as a police exercise, who had to call in from the USA for instructions. In comparison with this lot, I suspect that Jasper Harker and Felix Cowgill may have received an undeservedly bad press.
On the other hand, I believe the true stars were more junior officers like Jane Archer (née Sissmore), Michael Serpell and Hugh Shillito, who had their fingers on the pulse, but for various reasons were pushed aside or became disheartened. And one has to recognize that it would take a very persistent and confident MI5 leadership, with carefully prepared arguments and principles, to withstand some of the political pressures. If Petrie, Liddell and White had insisted to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, just after the Soviet Union had entered the war as an ally in the summer of 1941, that Klaus Fuchs should in no circumstances be employed on the Tube Alloys project because he was a known Communist, their careers might have been put in jeopardy.
And what about all those MI6 officers with Russian connections – Alexander McKibbin, Henry Carr, Paul Dukes, Stephen Alley, George Hill, Wilfred Dunderdale, Harold Gibson, George Graham, and maybe others? They were selected because they spoke Russian, and knew the country: some of them had wives from tsarist times. Obvious candidates to handle agents behind the lines. But of course those qualifications represented a massive exposure. Their skills and background stood out a mile to the various Russian Intelligence Services over the years, and they were ideal candidates for manipulation by the NKVD through the issuance of threats to family members still residing in the Soviet Union. Unimaginative heads of MI6 could not spot the danger, and the cause of counter-intelligence – injured of course by Philby – was mortally damaged.
It was not easy. And re-discovering a passage in the 1944 Bland Report (which made recommendations about the future organization of MI6) caused me to reflect that the leadership of the Services sometimes failed to come to grips properly with their missions. Keith Jeffery cites a statement inserted by Stewart Menzies (after influence from the rather flimsy Peter Loxley, Alexander Cadogan’s Private Secretary, who was tragically killed in an aircraft accident on his way to Yalta), which tried to steer an apolitical track:
We think it is important that those concerned [eh?] in the S.I.S. should always bear in mind that they ae not called upon to investigate such organisations [Nazis, Communists, Anarchists, etc.] because of their political ideology; and that they should therefore only engage in such investigations when there is prima facie evidence that the organization in question may be used as instruments of espionage, or otherwise when specifically requested to do . . . We consider it to be of great importance that the S.I.S. should avoid incurring any suspicion that it is the instrument of any political creed in this country, and we believe therefore that C would always be well advised to seek guidance from the Foreign Office as to what political parties in foreign countries need special watching, and for how long.
This seems to me to be taking neutrality too far. (It was at a time when factions in the Foreign Office were strenuously promoting ‘co-operation’ with the Soviet Union.) Defending the Realm, the Constitution (no matter how dispersed or vague it was) – even the Empire – was presumably what MI6 and MI5 were supposed to be doing: confounding the knavish tricks of those who wanted to overthrow them could hardly be construed as adopting a political ideology. This must have raised a few guffaws in the Kremlin.
In conclusion, after reading the biography of J. L. Austin (q.v. infra), I realized that it was a figure like him that MI5 (and MI6) desperately needed to coordinate intelligence about Soviet intentions and practice in all their aspects – Leninist and Stalinist doctrine, the Comintern and its successors, Moscow’s relationship with the CPGB, the role of spies, illegals and agents of influence, the use of propaganda and subversion. Austin’s capacity for hard work, his ability to learn, his excellent memory, his historical sense, his patience, his lack of sentimentality, and his synthetic abilities in interpretation all gave him an unmatched capability. Two heads of the CIA, Walter Bedell Smith (q.v. infra) and William Casey, were both highly impressed with Austin’s work, and tried to bring his disciplines to work in reforming the organization.
But instead, MI5 and MI6 got Hollis and Vivian.
The Lady Novelists
If W. S. Gilbert’s text for The Mikado had had to undergo the surveillance of a ‘sensitivity reader’, we would have been spared the appearance of ‘the lady novelist’ in Ko-Ko’s list of persons who ‘never would be missed’. Lest anyone be under the misapprehension that I carry any bias against members of this category, I hasten to point out that I am an enthusiastic fan of Angel Thirkell, Helen MacInnes, Olivia Manning, Barbara Pym, and Elizabeth Taylor. Thus I trust that my recent criticisms of Kate Atkinson, Rebecca Stanford and Charlotte Philby will not be interpreted as a sad case of male chauvinism. As is evident, I mete out the same harsh treatment to characters like Matthew Richardson.
Unfortunately, when I wrote to Charlotte Philby, suggesting that her obvious talents might be better applied to writing a non-fictional account of her grandfather’s marriage with Litzi instead of an imagined tale of his relationship with Edith Tudor-Hart, she reacted badly, believing that I was being facetious. (An unremarkable conclusion, should she have happened to know me, but in this case I was behaving utterly sincerely.) I immediately tried to repair the damage, but heard no more from her. I wonder whether she has been tracking the saga on coldspur. . . . Nevertheless, I remain a sucker for picking up these creative attempts to write convincing fiction based on a distortion of historical events.
The latest in this genre that I read was a title that caught my eye on the Barnes & Noble best-selling table – The Paris Spy by Susan Elia Macneal. Since it involved an SOE agent in 1942, as the plans for the ‘invasion’ of France are being made, I thought I should give it a go. Heaven knows, the author might have dug out some new source I had overlooked. When I inspected the bibliography at the back, I could tell that she had immersed herself deeply into the goings-on with F Section, Buckmaster, Déricourt, Atkins, Dansey, Khan and company.
‘The Paris Spy’ by Susan Elia Macneal
The novel turned out to be another mess of fiction and ‘authenticity’. At times, Macneal introduces real characters in her plot, but introduces the main actors by hiding their real-life models behind imagined names. Thus James Lebeau is based on Henri Déricourt, Henry Gaskell on Maurice Buckmaster, Diana Lynd on Vera Atkins, and George Bishop on Claude Dansey. (Occasionally she forgets where she is, and refers to such characters by the names of their prototypes.) The author admits, proudly, that her story is ‘fiction, pure fiction’ but then acknowledges her debt to Phyllis Brooks Shafer, retired Berkeley Professor, as well as Ronald J. Granieri, director of research and lecturer in history at the Lauder Institute at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, for their contribution by checking her manuscripts for historical accuracy.
But what can ‘historical accuracy’ mean in such a scenario? The plot is quite absurd, with a larger-than-life appearance by Coco Chanel, implausibly simplified radio transmissions, miraculous escapes – one aided by an accommodating Nazi officer – the seizure of prisoners of the Germans, and an unlikely flight back to the United Kingdom in which the Déricourt character pilots the Lysander, but has to be subdued and rendered unconscious, whereafter the heroine (who has never flown a plane beforehand) manages to bring it home with the help of a groggy RAF officer. It is not to say that the book lacks style: wartime Paris is described with obvious care, and Macneal has a good knack for dialogue. All harmless nonsense, I suppose, and it seems that there is an audience for such hokum which does not care about the extravagances and distortions.
Beverly Gage and ‘G-Man’
‘G-Man’ by Beverly Gage
One of my summer reading assignments was to read Beverly Gage’s critically acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the long-lasting director of the F.B.I. Now, I have never regarded Hoover as a very estimable or sympathetic figure: I detected a high degree of hypocrisy in his private life, and judged his commitment to dirty tricks disgraceful. I considered that his approach to segregation and civil rights, and his obstinacy in deeming the movements behind them as being inevitably controlled by Soviet intelligence, were simply foolish. I had also been disturbed by Hoover’s inappropriate championing of the Catholic Church – something that Gage dispenses with fairly sympathetically in just three pages – and was thus intrigued to read, in the July issue of History Today, a review of a new book on his influence in this sphere, titled The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism, by Lerone A. Martin. The reviewer, Daniel Rey, writes: “From Hoover’s petty squabbling over biblical disputes to his flagrant abuse of the separation of church and state, the details in Martin’s book are astonishing.” I doubt whether I shall get round to reading this – one can take only so much Hoover in one decade – but it just shows that the ‘definitive’ biography will never be written.
Yet Gage manages to describe Hoover as a vaguely respectable character, politically savvy and ready to adjust – obviously something he would have had to perform if he managed to fulfill his duties under eight different US presidents, from Coolidge to Nixon. If a biographer is going to spend that amount of time on any character, he or she will probably present a mostly positive angle on the subject. I was surprised, however, given what I recalled of Anthony Summers’s 1993 biography of Hoover, how little time she spent on Hoover’s secret files on politicians, items that he used to threaten anyone who challenged him. Why, for instance, could Richard Nixon not bring himself to fire Hoover when all his aides were pressing him to do so? Gage also has no room to explore the way her subject was sometimes lampooned. In 1964, the satirist Art Buchwald wrote a column claiming that Hoover was a ‘mythical person first thought up by Reader’s Digest’, which magazine took the name from the manufacturer of kitchen equipment. Hoover was not amused.
Hoover had appeared on my screen because of his demand to have Fuchs interrogated in prison by an FBI officer, because of the episodes involving Philby, Burgess and Maclean, because of his energetic anti-communist stance, and because he had tried to prevent the CIA learning about VENONA. I had always been a bit puzzled about his relative patience with the visits of MI5 chiefs and vice-chiefs (e.g. Sillitoe, Liddell, Hollis) who had gone to Washington in an attempt to appease him, since he must have considered the set-up at the Security Service impossibly leaky and not managed on the strict procedural and hierarchical lines that he prided himself on developing for the FBI. In fact, Hollis and Liddell do not appear in Gage’s index (there is no mention of Hoover’s gift of golf-clubs to Hollis), and Sillitoe is mentioned only in the context of his giving an honorary knighthood to Hoover at the British Embassy in 1951. Gage is very weak on matters of international intelligence, such as the complicated relations between the CIA and the FBI when it came to the handling of Soviet defectors and agents-in-place, most notably Michał Golenewski. That all goes to show, I suppose, that you can write a rich 837-page biography without touching some of the critical aspects of a life, and that Gage has a naturally domestic focus.
Gage overall writes quite elegantly (I do not understand why she capitalizes ‘Black’, but not ‘white’, but observe that this anomalous usage extends to the pages of the Times Literary Supplement), and her narrative moves forward strongly. Yet I wondered whether her perspective lost some of its individuality in the process of writing. In her Acknowledgments she gives credit to no less than one-hundred-and-twenty-eight individuals, and it is difficult for me to see how she could listen to the opinions of that many persons without compromising her independence of voice. For example, she shows a less than authoritative stance on the issues of ‘racial and social justice’, and the competition between ‘capitalism and communism’, and sometimes evades judgments where a more confident scholar would have put her oar in. The sources she gives are overall thorough, although it worries me when a respectable academic relies on Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends and Phillip Knightley’s The Master Spy for her intelligence on Kim Philby, and she also cites Amy Knight’s highly flawed When the Cold War Began for her information on the Gouzenko case. How can I trust her authority on the topics and authors with which I am not familiar?
One of her woollier assertions really stopped me in my tracks. On page 418, she writes: “One Venona cable even hinted that Walter Bedell Smith, director of the CIA beginning in 1950, might have been turned by the Soviets during his time in Moscow as American ambassador.” No commentary is supplied: no source for this claim is given. I judge that observation so shocking, with highly grave implications if true, that it should never have been allowed to appear in the text so baldly. If the evidence is flimsy, the observation should have been omitted. If it is not, a proper analysis should have been offered. I can find no reference to Bedell Smith in either of the two primary American works on the VENONA project, namely the book by Haynes & Klehr, and that by Romerstein & Breindel. Moreover, I cannot imagine anyone less likely to have been ‘turned’ (whatever that means in this context) than Bedell Smith. I accordingly sent a polite email to Professor Gage, asking her to provide me with the source statement, and to explain exactly what she meant. (Writing emails to authors is frequently a thankless task: non-academics tend to hide behind their agents or their publishers, but academics normally display an email address somewhere on the institution’s website, and that is how I was able to target Professor Gage’s inbox – or spam folder.)
I received no acknowledgment or reply. I put her on the List.
Summer Biographies
It is a rich summer for the publication of biographies. Jesse Fink, who declared himself a coldspur enthusiast a few months ago, is a British-Australian author. His latest offering, as he posted, is a life of the intelligence officer Charles ‘Dick’ Ellis, titled The Eagle in the Mirror, and his objective is to refute the common claim that his subject was a ‘scoundrel’ – contrary to what I, like many others, believed. In order to get my hands on this book as soon as possible, I ordered it from amazon.uk, and eagerly look forward to its arrival, and learning what the facts about this mysterious character are.
I also read in a recent Spectator a review of a recently-published biography of the photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, written by Sarah Knights. Attentive coldspur readers will recall that I covered this little-known character in a piece from February 2019, Two Cambridge Spies – Dutch Connections (1) ( https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-1/) , where I explored Ker-Seymer’s links with Donald Maclean, and whether she was the elusive ‘Barbara’ to whom Goronwy Rees referred. Duncan Fallowell’s review in the magazine was hardly compulsive: “She took some attractive photo-portraits before the war in her studio above Asprey’s and that was it.” I wondered, if Ker-Seymer was so insignificant, why Knights deemed her worthy of a biography. Was anything about Maclean to be revealed in the book? I doubt whether I shall bother to acquire it, since Knights may not have advanced so far as I did in my researches. Maybe somebody out there reading this report will know more, and inform me.
At some stage I am also expecting the arrival of Robert Lyman’s book on the double-agent Henri Dericourt. Lyman, a somewhat arrogant New Zealander (in his self-promotion, he always prefixes his name with ‘Dr.’, in my mind a rather pretentious habit when exercised by those who are not medical practitioners), appears not to have been chastened by the drubbing that Patrick Marnham gave him recently on coldspur (see https://coldspur.com/special-bulletin-patrick-marnham-responds-to-robert-lyman/ ). For example, it has been reported to me that Lyman was enthusiastically touting his ‘new’ researches at the Chalke Valley History Festival in June. Patrick and I are very sceptical that Lyman will have come up with any fresh insights after his time at Kew, and it seems to us that he is being set up by Mark Seaman and the other Foreign Office propagandists as the successor to the now much subdued Francis Suttill. I suppose I shall have to acquire his book when it comes out, in the cause of research completeness, but, again, if any coldspur reader can perform the job for me first, and advise me accordingly, I should be very grateful.
‘J. L. Austin’ by M. W. Rowe
On August 4, I received my copy of M. W. Rowe’s J. L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer, which was reported (in a Spectator review) to have a fascinating account of the Oxford philosopher’s contribution to intelligence in World War II. It weighed in heftily at just over two pounds, with 660 pages. I completed it on August 19: it is a monumental work, a tour de force in many aspects, but ultimately unsatisfactory. The problem is that it actually consists of three separate books: a conventional biography of Austin, a study of military intelligence in World War II, to which Austin contributed mightily, and an account of Ordinary Language Philosophy in post-war Oxford. None of these three subjects is probably worthy of a separate volume, yet, when merged together, they produce something rather indigestible.
Austin tragically died very young, of lung cancer at the age of forty-eight, and the events of his life, outside the war service and the linguistic battles at Oxford, do not contain enough of interest to fill a biography. The cause is not helped by a very stodgy and irrelevant genealogical introduction, which, by focussing on only one patrilineal thread, does not do justice to the scope of Austin’s heritage, and sentimentally makes some rather unrigorous conclusions. I cite here an example of Rowe’s whimsical day-dreaming: “It is pleasing to think that two mordant intellects and fine prose stylists – the J. Austen who wrote Sense and Sensibility and the J. Austin who wrote Sense and Sensibilia – are related, even if their closest common ancestor is to be found in the late fifteenth century.” That is a rather desperate effort.
On the other hand, the middle section, on intelligence on wartime, is fascinating, and sheds vital fresh light on Austin’s contribution, especially concerning the D-Day landings, that has not been published beforehand. Yet the author chooses to include a host of ancillary information about the conflict that has little to do with Austin’s life. The last section is simply tedious: Austin’s apparent obsession with the detailed inspection and promotion of ‘Ordinary Language’ to solve ‘philosophical problems’ (that are undefined) seems to this reader quite futile, since that school of philosophy combines a mixture of the palpably obvious with a failure to understand that language is an infinitely deceptive tool, and that the spoken form, through emphasis and intonation, introduces a whole fresh dimension of significance and meaning. Rowe quotes something that Isaiah Berlin, in a typically arch and equivocal manner, wrote about Austin, as the philosopher was dying, that, to my mind, ironically undermines the whole principle of ‘Ordinary Language’: “ . . . I think on the whole that he is the cleverest man I have ever known – in curious ways also the nicest, perhaps not the nicest, but wonderfully benevolent, kind, good and just, despite all his little vanities, etc.” Analyzing the difference between ‘the nicest’ and ‘the nicest’ could have occupied a whole seminar. I recall reading, in my late teens, Language, Truth and Logic, by Austin’s adversary, A. J. Ayer, followed by Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, and then Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things, which tried to demolish the kernel of Austin’s ‘Ordinary Language’ ideas. My vague recollection is that I found Gellner, despite his rather lush and imprecise prose, the most convincing.
‘Sense and Sensibilia’ by J. L. Austin
The book is not helped by a too rich set of distracting Footnotes, mostly clarifying who some rather obscure and less obscure persons were – all of which could have been relegated to a Biographical Appendix, so that the reader could more easily discover what nuggets and insights the author wanted to mention that he did not judge were appropriate to include in his narrative. This clutter is reflected in a less-than-useful Index, which is dominated by the same hundreds of personal names, while ignoring many of the more vital entities (such as wartime Operations) in which I had interest. I was also puzzled that no analysis of Austin’s precipitous demise was given. He had been a dedicated pipe-smoker – like thousands of his generation – but why did he succumb so early to squamous cell carcinoma? (My father, who was born a month before Austin, also smoked a pipe intensively until the 1970s, but outlived him by forty-five years.) And how come that Austin, a resolute atheist, was given a grand memorial service in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin? I should also have liked to learn more about the contribution of Austin’s loyal and admirable widow, Jean, who, as I picked up from a New York Times review of Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure, carried on teaching philosophy at Oxford after her husband’s death. So – a necessary read, in many ways, but it is hard to see at which audience this dense tome is targeted.
And then there are the reissues of two famous works: D. J. Taylor’s biography of George Orwell, and Michael Ignatieff’s revised life of Isaiah Berlin. I have an extensive supply of Orwell-related literature in one of my bookcases, including Taylor’s Life, the biographies by Crick, Meyer, Bowker, Shelden, and dozens of volumes that inspect various aspects of Orwell’s life and works, as well as an almost full set of the magnificent Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison. In view of my breakthrough research in 2004 suggesting that Orwell had Asperger’s Syndrome – a diagnosis later confirmed by Professor Michael Fitzgerald in his 2005 book The Genesis of Artistic Creativity (see https://coldspur.com/reviews/orwells-clock/ ), I was keen to learn how Taylor had treated this information in Orwell: The New Life. I had written to Taylor many years ago, and pointed him to my article posted on coldspur, so he must have been aware of the theory.
‘Orwell: The New Life’ by D. J. Taylor
The book duly arrived. I checked out the index: no mention of Fitzgerald or Percy or Asperger’s. Yet the flyleaf declares that the book uses ‘a wide range of previously unknown sources’, and that it is ‘poignant, far-reaching, and critically astute’. I read all of its 540 dense pages, and enjoyed it, but did not learn much more than I gained from the 2003 version, and it sometimes is simply too encyclopaedic. Indeed, the resident literary lampoonist and satirist at Private Eye captured the spirit of it in a short parody published a few weeks ago. While his contributions are always presented anonymously, I know that the author’s identity is – D. J. Taylor.
So what happened? I was apparently not the only reader to wonder about Taylor’s disdain. Alexander Larman, in a review of the biography in the July issue of The Spectator World, wrote:
“Taylor shies away from any suggestion that Orwell was on the autism spectrum, but judging by many of the actions depicted in this necessarily lengthy but never self-indulgent book, he suffered from at least a moderate form of Asperger syndrome, which might explain his often uncomprehendingly forthright attitude towards his fellow writers.” Yet that is only partly true. Taylor does not ‘shy away’: he never even engages with the hypothesis, which represents a very bizarre way of treating fresh research. Ignoring coldspur is perhaps pardonable, but pretending that the relevant publication by the very prominent Professor Fitzgerald had no merit is surely inexcusable. Since a review of the book also appeared in Literary Review, I sent a letter to the Editor of that excellent magazine describing my puzzlement, and drawing attention to both my article and the book by Professor Fitzgerald. He declined to print my letter.
Soon afterwards, I read in the Wall Street Journal of August 12-13 a very positive review of a book titled Wifedom, a biography of Orwell’s first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, by Anna Funder. The reviewer, Donna Rifkind, wrote:
Ms. Funder clearly believes that Eilleen’s role in Orwell’s life has been undervalued. She balks at the ways Orwell views “women – as wives – in terms of what they do for him, or ‘demand’ of him.” His exalted status, she implies, has obscured how tyrannical this hater of tyrannies could be, how insensitive he was towards the women who best understood him.
It has been shown that Orwell treated several women in his life in a severely abusive manner. Taylor definitely soft-pedalled this aspect of his hero. It sounds as if a new version of his work is called for . . .
And then there was Michael Ignatieff and Isaiah Berlin. I learned from a Facebook post by Henry Hardy (Berlin’s long-time amanuensis and editor) that a revised edition of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, first published in 1998, was to appear this summer. I awaited its appearance eagerly. After all, in my study of Berlin, most prominently in my 2015 History Today article The Undercover Egghead (see https://coldspur.com/the-undercover-egghead/), in my comprehensive coverage in Misdefending the Realm (2017), and in my elegiac contribution in Isaiah in Love (see https://coldspur.com/isaiah-in-love/), I had done much to disclose Berlin’s involvement with intelligence, frequently of a highly dubious nature, which Berlin, in his conversations with Ignatieff, and in his own writings, had very strenuously denied. Surely Henry Hardy would have alerted Ignatieff to my contributions: Hardy had attended the lecture at Buckingham University where I first unveiled The Undercover Egghead, he was familiar with Misdefending the Realm, and had complimented me (he is not one to dispense praise easily) on Isaiah in Love.
‘Isaiah Berlin: A Life’ by Michael Ignatieff
I had enjoyed the first edition of the Life, but thought it intellectually lazy. I do not know how one can write a serious biography when one is mainly dependent upon the reminiscences of the subject himself. Ignatieff brought a cultured and refined perspective to the incidents in Berlin’s life, but it was far too hagiographic, focused too much on Berlin’s frequently garbled thinking without analyzing it critically, and lacked objectivity and discipline in covering the essence of Berlin’s ‘Jewishness’ (whatever that means), and his adherence to ‘Judaism’ and Zionism. Thus I had great expectations that the new edition would address many of the faults of the first, and take into consideration the bulk of what has been written about Berlin in the past twenty-five years.
The arrival of the book was a colossal disappointment. It is described as a ‘fully revised definitive edition’, ‘a magisterial biography’. No new blurbs are listed, however: Doris Lessing’s tribute is highlighted, but she died in 2013. That was not a good sign. In his Preface, Ignatieff writes that ‘a steady stream of articles, books and commentary have explored Berlin’s ideas. In this new edition, I have tried to incorporate as much of this new material as possible’. He claims that he has also ‘tried to clarify Berlin’s relations with important figures’, but his interest is superficial. He maintains the individual chapters that carved up the first edition. His Endnotes reveal only about three books that have been published since 1998, and two of those consist of reminiscences of Berlin, one of which is by Henry Hardy himself. ‘Definitive’ it is not. Even Hardy agrees that a proper authoritative and objective life of Berlin remains to be written.
Thus we read no fresh analysis of Berlin’s activities in the intelligence world. The story that Guy Burgess was on a mission to Russia, for MI5 (an error, since any overseas engagement would have been undertaken by MI6), and that he wanted Berlin to be appointed as a Press Officer at the British Embassy in Moscow, is carelessly repeated, as is Berlin’s denial that he ‘had ever been sent on a secret mission anywhere by anyone’, in response to Goronwy Rees’s assertions in his People article in 1956. None of the many incidents that I describe in my articles, from the visit to sub-Carpathian Ruthenia in the summer of 1933 (see https://coldspur.com/reviews/homage-to-ruthenia/) , through the strange negotiations with Chaim Weizman at the end of 1940, to the furtive meetings in Washington with Anatoly Gorsky, the previous handler of the Cambridge Five in London, starting in December 1944, is covered. I also note (something that I overlooked in the first edition) that Berlin ‘gave every assistance to Peter Wright . . . .who called in search of any other accomplices Burgess might have had inside academe or the Establishment’. What possibly might Berlin have known if he was never involved with Intelligence?
Henry Hardy (who worked closely with the author on the notes and sources, and the editing of the book) agrees with me that Ignatieff is guilty of misleading his audience, and wrote to me declaring that ‘he shouldn’t have pretended to have done more than he did, and he should have made the case for leaving the book essentially unaltered’, adding that he didn’t think Ignatieff could be bothered to perform any more research. It is all rather sad, and the Pushkin Press should be embarrassed over this sorry effort to present the thing as a ‘fully revised definitive edition’. I have not seen any reviews yet, but I shall watch out to detect whether anybody has the same reaction as I did. (The Summer Special issue of Prospect carried an encapsulation of Berlin’s ideas by Ignatieff, suggesting that his Concepts of Liberty could act as guidance for the political challenges of today, but I found it too abstract and unconnected – as useless as the ideas of his adversary, John Rawls, Daniel Chandler’s biography of whom was reviewed a few pages on.)
The Love-Lives of the Philosophers
As I read Ignatieff’s book, I made notes on items that I thought were incorrect, or examples of sloppy or imprecise writing. I sent these to Henry Hardy, and some lively exchanges followed. One particular item that caught my eye was a sentence in the first paragraph of Chapter 15, where Ignatieff describes a scene at a beach outside Portofino in 1956. He lists some characters visible in Aline Berlin’s home movie, including ‘Stuart Hampshire and his son Julian Ayer’. Ayer? What did that mean? Had a few words been omitted? I know that Hampshire and Ayer (A. J. or ‘Freddie’, the logical positivist) were closely associated, but why would Hampshire’s son be called Julian Ayer? (Hampshire is of intelligence interest to me, since he worked with Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Radio Analysis Bureau of the Radio Security Service in World War II, and, despite a slightly questionable reputation, was invited by the government to conduct an audit of Britain’s intelligence services, and specifically GCHQ, in 1965.) I also checked out the first edition: there the text runs simply ‘Stuart Hampshire and his son Julian’. So I asked Hardy about it: was this a mistake? His first response was to inform me that Julian was indeed Hampshire’s son, but was known as Ayer. From straightforward research on Wikipedia, I established that Hampshire had married Ayer’s first wife, Renée Lees, and I assumed that Julian was thus his stepson.
Stuart Hampshire
Yet further investigations pointed to something more sinister. Hardy then told me that Julian was not Hampshire’s stepson: he was Hampshire’s biological son, ‘conceived before his parents were married’. This, however, turned out to be something of an understatement, and I sent my consequent discoveries to Hardy: “A long time before his ‘parents’ were married! All very strange. Julian was apparently born in 1939, but Ayer did not divorce Renée Lees until 1945, and Hampshire did not marry her until 1961. Thus Julian’s status at Portofino in 1956 was indeed ambiguous. On-line information on him describes him as Ayer’s ‘adopted son’”. Moreover, when I returned to Hampshire’s Wikipedia entry that morning, references to Julian (that I had picked up a couple of days ago) had disappeared, even though the last date of change was given as July 23. It seems that Hampshire’s daughter, Belinda, was also a product of his liaison with Renée Lees.
I detect some awkwardness over these events. Sadly, Julian was drowned in the tsunami disaster of 2004: maybe Ignatieff judged that it was time to open up about these relationships. By simply adding ‘Ayer’ to ‘Julian’, however, he provoked far more questions than he closed. What were his motivations?
And then, the very same day on which I was pursuing this inquiry, I read a column in the Spectator of July 22 by Charles Moore where he explained that the father of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was Churchill’s private secretary Sir Anthony Montague Browne. His mother, Lady Williams of Elvel, admitted that she had gone to bed with Browne, ‘fuelled by a large amount of alcohol on both sides’, probably the night before she eloped with Gavin Welby. DNA tests gave a 97.78 probability that Montague-Browne was Welby’s father. What is it about the sexual mores of the Great and the Good, and what do they think they are they up to, lecturing to us about Morality? I knew that Freddie Ayer was a relentless satyr, but it seems that his habits were adopted by many of his friends and contemporaries. One of the fresh revelations in Ignatieff’s book is that Isaiah Berlin, after his marriage to Aline, not only carried on his affair with the sometime Soviet agent Jenifer Hart (which I had learned from Nicola Lacey’s biography of her husband H. L. A. Hart), but also conducted one with the Oxford sociologist (and later head of Newnham College, Cambridge) Jean Floud. Floud, née Macdonald, had married Peter Floud, and joined the Communist Party with him in 1938. Peter Floud’s brother Bernard was probably a member of the Oxford Group of spies, and committed suicide as the net closed in in 1967. Maybe it was over details concerning that circle that Berlin was able to clarify matters for Peter Wright.
Coldspur: Method, Archive & Topography
Method
It occurs to me that it might be useful to describe the method(ology) behind my conclusions posted on coldspur, and how I treat comments submitted by readers. My researches are undertaken with the suspicion that most accounts of events in the world of espionage and counter-espionage are probably inaccurate, and a detailed study frequently reveals anomalies in time, geography and psychology, as well as conflicts between different records. (The full methodology I applied when performing my doctoral thesis can be inspected at https://coldspur.com/reviews/the-chapter-on-methodology/. )
My writing is designed to counter the baleful influences of at least four groups: 1) Those who write memoirs, or confide ‘remembrances’ to their biographers, when their primary objective is to beautify their reputation; 2) The bureaucrats, such as the ‘Foreign Office advisors’ who guide (for example) SOE researchers away from embarrassing material, and government employees (current or retired) who display indulgence to their ‘colleagues’ for sentimental reasons; 3) The amateur historians who distort the facts out of carelessness or a desire to glorify their subjects, or look for publicity by promoting melodramatic theories; and 4) The authorized historians who breach their professional objectivity by agreeing with their sponsors to constrain their areas of research.
What I am doing is, I suppose, ‘investigative reporting’, but of recent history, not current events. The experts in this subject encourage the maintenance of a large number of human sources – giving as an example the Sunday Times team researching Philby. Yet it requires an open mind and a good nose to distinguish between probable facts and possible disinformation when dealing with such sources: Bruce Page with Sackur, Seale and McConville with Vivian, Chapman Pincher and Anthony Glees with White and Reilly. Thus ‘sources’ can be a two-edged sword. I have enjoyed the contributions of very few ‘live’ inputs during my research. Moreover, it probably explains another dimension of the 70-year rule for releasing archival material. That limitation is frequently explained as a mechanism to protect the living, or their relatives. Yet it is just as useful for the authorities in preventing the insiders from being interrogated by inquisitive researchers, since they are no longer with us.
As I process the information available, and publish my conclusions, I am of course merely developing hypotheses. I never pretend that they are the last word on the subject, and I encourage challenges to them. Contrary to the belief of some, an accurate account of what really happened is not going to magically appear from an exhaustive presentation of all the ‘facts’. Some records may never be released, disinformation has been inserted into the archives, and memoirs are notoriously unreliable. I note the following statement from M. W. Rowe’s biography of J. L. Austin, where the author comments on the challenge of dealing with less than conclusive evidence: “ . . . truth is ultimately more likely to emerge from a bold, crisp and refutable claim than a range of hesitated options; and a full discussion of every option would weigh down the story and take up too much space.”
Well, I suppose my texts could be crisper, but I do believe that recording a detailed exposition of my material is essential for the benefit of posterity, since it will not appear anywhere else. I develop my hypotheses from a meticulous examination of information from multiple sources, and try to interpret/transform a series of discrete events into the structure of a plausible theory (such as my recent hypothesis that in 1939/40 Kim and Litzy Philby presented themselves to MI5 and MI6 as turncoats from Communism). Now a thesis such as this, which helps to explain a number of riddles and paradoxes, could be refuted, but that will not happen simply because one (or more) of the links in the chain can be broken. For example, some readers have challenged my suggestion that the informant to MI5 in 1953 was Graham Greene, and they may be right. Yet, even if that person is never correctly identified, it cannot detract from the fact that someone, almost certainly from MI6, told MI5 that the psychiatrist Eric Strauss knew more than he should have about Philby’s exploits in Turkey.
Thus most of the comments that I gratefully receive on coldspur help me to refine the arguments, and correct errors. So far, no one has submitted any evidence that causes me to retract a theory, though I am ready to do so, if appropriate. To any sceptics, I sometimes reply: “Show me an alternative explanation that fits the facts!”, but that may be unreasonable, as they have neither the time nor the interest to go that far, and they might disagree with me over what the ‘facts’ are. I should love to participate in a forum that explored these rival ideas, such as a debate at Lancaster House (probably not chaired by Mark Seaman), but that is unlikely to happen. Coldspur under WordPress is not the most efficient chat-room for exploring rival ideas, but it is what I have, and the ability to follow up controversies in my own space and time enables me to avoid the noise and muddle of other media.
Archive
As I have previously written, I have been trying to find a home for my substantial library, and a custodian for coldspur, for the time when I am no longer around. I believe I have found a suitable educational institution who is eager to house my collection and provide a portal to my research and other archival material, but I have nothing in writing yet, so I am reluctant to say any more until a firm agreement has been reached. What has emerged from the discourse so far is the requirement to have my collection of books catalogued, and I have thus been involved in working with a website called LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/home) to enter the details of the relevant volumes in my library.
So far I have entered about fifteen-hundred items on intelligence, history and general biography, with a few thousand still to be processed. (It may be that the institution will not want all my library, which contains a large selection of fiction, books on language, poetry and humour, including a particularly rich assortment of volumes of comic and nonsensical verse.) It has been a fascinating exercise: LibraryThing offers a choice of search engines to locate a title, normally by ISBN, such as amazon, the Library of Congress, and the British Library. I have found that amazon is by far the fastest and the most reliable. Very oddly, even when a book is identified with a ‘Library of Congress’ number, for instance, that search capability usually fails to come up with a candidate. For older books, of course, when no ISBN number existed, I have to enter search arguments by title and author, and make annotations. Occasionally no entry at all can be found, and I have to input all the details (publisher, date, etc.) myself. I place a little sticky label on each book entered, in order to control where I am.
One revelation for me has been how chaotic the ISBN system is. It looks as if it maintains an erratic ‘significance’ in its coding (and we data modellers know how error-prone such coding systems can be, as, for example, that used for postcodes in the UK), but I don’t know what it is, and there appears to be little consistency between what should be related entries, and books republished in a different format frequently own vastly different identifiers. I also found that some newish books remarkably have no ISBNs printed within them, and that some have them, but they are wrong, or have been used by other books before them. One of my on-line correspondents has made a detailed study of ISBNs and formats, and I may return to this issue at some stage.
A fascinating benefit from this exercise is that the user of LibraryThing can determine how many other users own the same volumes. This feature is a little unreliable, however, as it does not distinguish between different editions, but works only by title. Thus my owning a very rare nineteenth-century edition of a memoir, for example, may appear to be echoed in a count of other registers when the latter probably reflect much later re-prints. Occasionally, I find that I am the sole owner of a particular volume, which is a pleasing discovery.
I hope to report more on this project soon.
Topography
As the volume of research on coldspur has increased, I find it more and more difficult to track down references, statements and conclusions that I have made. (My bulletins have been going on for over eight years now, comprising what I estimate to be about one-and-a half million words – not all of serious import, of course.) An Index would be highly desirable, but I do not think the creation of one is going to happen. The internal search capability within WordPress is somewhat useful, but it identifies only the entry that contains the reference(s), and is thus very laborious. I do preserve the original Word version of each posting, so I can go back to an individual report and execute a search that highlights each reference. But I have found that an inadequate mechanism.
I know that there are procedures out there that can convert text, even extracted from coldspur itself, and convert into a PDF, maybe with Index entries, and that would be a great help, but would not go far enough. For an Index to be useful, it needs qualification of the entry (how many of you have been frustrated to look up, say, ‘Philby’, in the Index of a book, and find a list of twenty-eight page numbers without any indication of what aspect of ‘Philby’ each covers?). I know, from my experience in compiling the Index for Misdefending the Realm how desirable such a capability is, but also how tedious an exercise it is.
The other aspect of this dilemma is the fact that I now detect multiple linkages between my research projects that were not obvious beforehand, such as the manipulation of the FBI/CIA by Dick White in 1951 and the investigations into Philby that summer, or the involvement of Claude Dansey in the attempts to ‘turn’ Ursula Kuczynski, Henri Déricourt, and, possibly, Litzi Philby. Thus I plan to provide some sort of guide to the coldspur archive, organized along chronological lines, that will highlight important threads and related events, and provide direct pointers to the urls, as well as the position of the relevant text within the report itself, so that the required information may be found more easily. That is my hope, anyway. I plan to start this project soon, and I hope to deliver the results before the end of the year.
