Characteristically, Burgess sensed he was being denied admission to a most enjoyable and risky party, and brazenly barged his way in. One night he confronted Maclean: ‘Do you think that I believe for even one jot that you have stopped being a communist? You’re simply up to something.’ A little reluctantly, Deutsch added Burgess to his roster. Burgess duly announced, with maximum fanfare, that he had swapped Marx for Mussolini, and was now a devotee of Italian fascism. It was Burgess who subsequently introduced Deutsch to yet another recruit, Anthony Blunt, already an art historian of note. Slowly, discreetly, with paternal diligence and Philby’s help, Deutsch added one link after another to the Cambridge spy chain.
While Deutsch handled recruitment, much of the day-to-day management of the spies was carried out by another ‘illegal’, Theodore Stephanovich Maly, a Hungarian former monk who, as an army chaplain during the First World War, had been taken prisoner in the Carpathians and witnessed such appalling horrors that he emerged a revolutionary: ‘I lost my faith in God and when the revolution broke out I joined the Bolsheviks. I became a communist and have always remained one.’ After training as an agent-runner, he arrived in London in 1932, under the alias Paul Hardt. For a spy, Maly was conspicuous, standing six feet four inches tall, with a ‘shiny grey complexion’, and gold fillings in his front teeth. But he was a most subtle controller, who shared Deutsch’s admiration for Philby, describing him as ‘an inspirational figure, a true comrade and idealist’. The feeling was reciprocated; in Philby’s mind the bewitching personalities of his handlers were indistinguishable from their political allure: ‘Both of them were intelligent and experienced professionals, as well as genuinely very good people.’
Philby’s work for the Anglo-German Trade Gazette came to an abrupt end in 1936 when the Nazis withdrew financial support. But by then, Moscow Centre had other plans for him. Civil war had erupted in Spain between the Republican forces and the fascist-backed Nationalist rebels under General Franco. Philby was instructed to spy on the Nationalists, using freelance journalism as a cover, and report back on troop movements, communications, morale, and the military support being provided to Franco’s forces by Germany and Italy. Moscow would pay for his passage. Philby ‘handles our money very carefully’, Deutsch told his bosses. In Spain, Philby quickly ingratiated himself with Franco’s press officers, and began sending well-informed articles to British newspapers, notably The Times. On a return trip to Britain, he persuaded Britain’s most influential paper to appoint him special correspondent in Spain: ‘We have great difficulty getting any information at all from the Franco side,’ Ralph Deakin, The Times’s foreign editor, told Philby.
Meanwhile Philby assiduously gathered intelligence for his Soviet spymasters, on ‘unit strengths and locations, gun calibres, tank performance’ and other military information. This he sent in code to ‘Mademoiselle Dupont’ in Paris (to an address which he later learned was the Soviet embassy itself). He began an affair with Frances Doble, Lady Lindsay-Hogg, an aristocratic former actress ten years his senior, a supporter of Franco and ‘a royalist of the most right-wing kind’ who gave him access to Franco’s inner circle. ‘I would be lying if I said I started the affair only for the sake of my work,’ he later observed. Philby was untroubled about making love to someone whose opinions he despised.
Philby’s controller in Paris, a Latvian named Ozolin-Haskins, was full of praise: ‘He works with great willingness [and] always knows what might be of interest to us. He never asks for money. He lives modestly.’ Nor did Philby neglect his role as a recruiter for the cause. During a return trip to London, he lunched with Flora Solomon, the Marks and Spencer executive who would later introduce him to Aileen. Despite her inherited wealth, and marriage to a general-turned-stockbroker, Flora Solomon was firmly on the left. According to one MI5 officer, she had ‘obviously been in the thick of things in mid-1930s, part inspiration, part fellow accomplice, and part courier’. During the conversation, Philby remarked, in an intense undertone, that he was ‘doing a very dangerous job for peace and that he needed help. Would she help him in his task? It would be a great thing if she would join the cause.’ He did not specify what his ‘important work for peace’ entailed, but insisted ‘You should be doing it too, Flora.’ Solomon, surprised at what was unmistakably an invitation to take on covert and dangerous work for communism, turned down the offer but told Philby ‘he could always come to her if he was desperate’. She would not forget that strange exchange.
In Moscow a still more radical plan was being hatched for Agent Sonny. Philby had already been asked to report on General Franco’s security arrangements. Now Moscow Centre wondered whether he might be able to get close enough to the Caudillo to kill him, and deliver a devastating blow to the Nazi-backed Nationalists. The officer with the unenviable task of passing on this idea was Theodore Maly, who knew that it was virtually impossible to achieve and, even if possible, suicidal. Maly discussed the proposal with Philby, but then sent a message to the Centre quashing the idea, fully aware that in doing so he was inviting Moscow’s mortal displeasure. ‘Even if he had been able to get close to Franco . . . then he, despite his willingness, would not be able to do what is expected of him. For all his loyalty and willingness to sacrifice himself, he does not have the physical courage and other qualities necessary.’ The plan was quietly dropped, but it was another mark of Philby’s growing status in Soviet eyes: in just four years he had gone from a raw recruit to a potential assassin. The Times was also impressed with his performance: ‘They are very pleased with Kim, they have the highest opinion of him,’ the diarist Harold Nicolson told Guy Burgess. ‘He has made a name for himself very quickly.’ That reputation expanded hugely when, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, New Year’s Eve 1937, Philby narrowly avoided being killed by a Republican shell (of Russian manufacture) while covering the battle of Teruel. The award of a medal from Franco himself convinced the Nationalists that Philby was, as one Spanish officer put it, ‘a decent chap’.
In the summer of 1939, with Franco victorious in Spain, Philby returned to London to a warm reception from his colleagues at The Times. There was no equivalent welcome from his Soviet spy friends, for the simple reason that they were all dead, or had disappeared, swept away by Stalin’s Terror. In the wild, murderous paranoia of the Purges, anyone with foreign links was suspected of disloyalty, and the outposts of Soviet intelligence came under particular suspicion. Theodore Maly was among the first to be recalled to Moscow, an obvious suspect on account of his religious background: ‘I know that as a former priest I haven’t got a chance. But I’ve decided to go there so that nobody can say “That priest might have been a real spy after all”.’ Maly was tortured in the cells of the Lubiyanka, headquarters of the secret police, until he eventually confessed to being a German spy, and was then shot in the head.
The fate of Arnold Deutsch has never been fully explained. Philby would later claim he had died when a ship taking him to America, the Donbass, was torpedoed by a U-boat, thus making him a victim of Hitler’s aggression rather than Stalin’s. The KGB history reports he died en route to South America, but another KGB report claims he was heading to New York. It seems just as probable that bright-eyed ‘Otto’, founder-recruiter of the Cambridge spy chain, shared Maly’s fate. As a foreign-born, Jewish intellectual who had spent years abroad, he was a likely candidate for purging.