The Central Registry was the memory and reference library of MI6, housed at Prae Wood in St Albans, next door to Section V headquarters. The registry source books collated the personal files of all current British secret agents, and every agent who had spied for Britain since the creation of MI6 in 1909, including names, codenames, aliases, character, performance and pay, a running tally of MI6 spies across the world. Presiding over this fabulously important and dangerous trove of secrets was Captain William Woodfield, the chief registrar, a puce-faced former policeman whose drinking habits were extreme even by MI6 standards. In a description for his Soviet controller, Philby described Woodfield with typical concision: ‘About 58, 5 feet 6 inches, slight build, dark hair, bald on top, wears glasses, long narrow face, formerly attached for some years to Special Branch.’ Woodfield liked dirty jokes and pink gin: Philby made a point of seeking him out at the King Harry pub, and supplying him with copious quantities of both. Soon they were the best of drinking buddies, and when Philby asked to see the source books for Spain and Portugal, Woodfield signed them out without question. The Iberian Peninsula was Philby’s sphere of work, and he had every reason to be interested in the MI6 agents in the region. Next, Philby requested the source books for the Soviet Union. Again Woodfield obliged, never pausing to wonder why his amiable new pub-chum was digging into an area so far removed from his allotted patch.
Philby duly sent a report to Moscow. It described Britain’s spies in the Soviet Union with typical bluntness: ‘There aren’t any.’ The station chief of MI6 in Moscow had not recruited a single major spy in the Soviet Union, Philby reported, and had only a few minor informants, mostly Poles. The USSR, moreover, was ‘tenth on the list of countries to which agents are to be sent’. The files showed there was no British spy network in Soviet Russia, no MI6 espionage campaign, and ‘no Soviet citizens whatsoever who worked as secret agents either in Moscow or anywhere else on Soviet territory’. The report was received with incredulity; Moscow’s paranoia, and sense of self-importance, combined to provoke a reaction of furious disbelief. The Soviet Union was a world power and MI6 was the most feared intelligence organisation in the world; it therefore stood to reason that Britain must be spying on the USSR. If Philby said otherwise, then he must be lying. That Britain could conceivably relegate the mighty Soviet state to number ten on its espionage target list was an ‘obvious absurdity’ (and frankly quite wounding). An outraged Soviet intelligence officer took a red pen, and scrawled two large and angry question marks over the report. Philby’s assertion was ‘highly suspicious’; his failure to corroborate expectations was ‘dubious’; henceforth he must be ‘tested and retested’. In truth, British intelligence was overwhelmingly focused on the Nazi threat, and since Moscow had become an ally the Foreign Office had imposed strict restrictions on covert activities inside the Soviet Union. But when Anthony Blunt confirmed that MI6 had no secret agents in the USSR, he too fell under suspicion; Philby and Blunt must be in league. And so began a bizarre situation in which Philby told Moscow the truth, and was disbelieved, because the truth contradicted Moscow’s expectations.
Philby’s successful and unauthorised foray into the Soviet files was a remarkable feat of espionage, and a complete waste of time: it not only deepened Moscow’s suspicions, but very nearly ended Philby’s career. One morning, Bill Woodfield, of the beetroot complexion, sent a polite note asking him to return the Soviet source books; Philby responded that he had already done so. Woodfield, a sloppy drunk but a meticulous librarian, said that there was only one Soviet source book on the shelves, and the registry had no record of the second volume being returned. Philby was convinced the books had been sent back to the repository, but nonetheless turned his office ‘upside down’ in a fruitless search for the missing volume. He met Woodfield at the King Harry ‘to discuss the mystery over a few pink gins’ and discovered to his horror that, under registry rules, C would have to be informed of the missing records. This was Friday. Woodfield said he would send a memo on Monday. Nothing to worry about, said Bilclass="underline" just paperwork. Philby was now in deep peril. Menzies might understand, even applaud, his interest in MI6 agents in Spain and Portugal, but he would surely wonder what on earth his protégé was doing with material on the Soviet Union, an area ‘far outside the normal scope of [his] duties’. At best Philby would have some tricky explaining to do; at worst, he was sunk.
After a weekend of simmering panic, Monday came, and with it a last-minute reprieve. Woodfield’s secretary, who had been ill with flu for a few days, returned to work and explained that she had amalgamated the two source books into one volume to save shelf space. Philby had indeed returned the files. Woodfield offered profuse apologies for the embarrassing mix-up, over ‘another flood of pink gin’. Had Woodfield’s secretary been slightly more ill, for longer, or had Woodfield been a little less pickled, then Philby’s story would have ended then and there. But his luck held: he had escaped a Republican shell in Spain, dodged the clue furnished by the defector Krivitsky, and narrowly avoided exposure for trawling the Soviet files. ‘Luck played an enormous role in my life,’ he later wrote. ‘But you have to know how to use luck.’
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Nicholas Elliott was becoming restless. Life in St Albans was pleasant enough, but ‘cloistered’. Running counter-intelligence operations in occupied Holland involved a great deal of memo-writing for meagre results, and nothing in the way of action. The world of intelligence, he concluded, was divided into ‘those who sit at desks at home analysing and evaluating the information as it comes in, and those who go out into the highways and byways of the world in order to get hold of it’. Philby was of the former sort, a gifted analyst and collator of facts, but Elliott belonged to the latter type, and he was ‘anxious to get away to another theatre of war’. He longed to travel, partly in reaction to his father’s acute distrust of ‘abroad’. (‘All foreigners are bloody unless they climb mountains,’ Claude insisted, ‘and Germans are bloody even if they do.’) Elliott hungered for risk. With Philby’s support, he began lobbying for a more active role in the field, preferably somewhere dangerous. In the spring of 1942, Elliott was summoned to Cowgill’s office and told he would soon be heading to Cairo, and from there to Istanbul as Section V’s representative in Turkey. At the age of twenty-six, Nicholas Elliott would be running counter-espionage operations in an espionage hothouse, for Turkey was neutral and, like Spain and Portugal, the scene of a fierce, secret war. ‘I was delighted,’ he wrote. Philby threw a farewell party for him. The next day, 11 May 1942, Acting Lieutenant Elliott climbed, somewhat unsteadily, up the gangplank of a 5,000-ton passenger cargo vessel in Liverpool docks, part of a forty-ship convoy bound for Africa.