Security officer: ‘Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.’
Nicholas Elliott: ‘As you wish colonel.’
Officer: ‘Does your wife know what you do?’
Elliott: ‘Yes.’
Officer: ‘How did that come about?’
Elliott: ‘She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.’
Officer: ‘Quite so. What about your mother?’
Elliott: ‘She thinks I’m in something called SIS, which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.’
Officer: ‘Good God! How did she come to know that?’
Elliott: ‘A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.’
Officer: ‘Then what about your father?’
Elliott: ‘He thinks I’m a spy.’
Officer: ‘Why should he think you’re a spy?’
Elliott: ‘Because the Chief told him in the bar at White’s.’
And that, once again, was that.
Elliott and Philby existed within the inner circle of Britain’s ruling class, where mutual trust was so absolute and unquestioned that there was no need for elaborate security precautions. They were all part of the same family. ‘For centuries the Office had operated on trust,’ said George Carey Foster, the Foreign Office security officer. ‘In that family atmosphere they couldn’t conceive that there was a wrong ’un among them.’ Elliott trusted his wife to keep a secret; Elliott’s employer trusted his father to keep a secret; and Elliott trusted his friend Philby to keep his secrets, never suspecting that those secrets were now being put to murderous use.
The information passed on by the Vermehrens included a detailed description ‘of all their contacts in the Catholic underground in Germany, and the role they could play in a post-war democratic and Christian Germany’. This was intelligence of the greatest value, since it listed the names, addresses and occupations of all those who, like the Vermehrens, opposed Hitler but wished to prevent a communist takeover of their country – the ‘leading Catholic activists who could be instrumental in the post-war period in helping the Allies establish an anti-communist government in Germany’. For obvious reasons, with the Red Army poised to march into Germany from the East, MI6 did not pass this list on to Moscow.
But Philby did.
After the war, Allied officers went in search of the anti-communist activists identified by the Vermehrens, people who ‘could have formed the backbone of a Conservative Christian post-war German political leadership’. They found none of them: ‘All had been deported or liquidated.’ The final months of the war were bloody and chaotic: Nazi loyalists killed some 5,000 people in the wake of the July Plot, including many in the Catholic resistance. It was not until years later that MI5 worked out what had really happened: Philby had passed the list to his Soviet controller, who had passed it to Moscow Centre, which had sent in the killers with a readymade shopping-list of influential ideological opponents to be eliminated as Stalin’s armies advanced. ‘Because Moscow had decided to eliminate all non-communist opposition in Germany,’ writes Phillip Knightley, ‘these Catholics had been shot.’
No one knows how many died as a consequence of Philby’s actions, because MI5 and MI6 have never released Vermehren’s list. In his diary, Liddell of MI5 noted reports that Soviet forces were liquidating opposition in East Germany in the ‘drive against the Catholic Church, which the Russians recognise as the most powerful international force in opposition to communism’. Years later, Philby observed: ‘I was responsible for the deaths of a considerable number of Germans.’ It was assumed he was referring to Nazis, but among his victims were also an unknown number of German anti-Nazis, who perished because they did not share Philby’s politics. Any lingering doubts Moscow may have had about Philby seem to have evaporated at this moment.
The Vermehrens believed they were alerting the Allies to the men and women who might save Germany from communism; unwittingly, they were handing them over to Moscow. Through Philby’s betrayal, Elliott’s greatest triumph was a secret, sordid tragedy.
See Notes on Chapter 6
7
The Soviet Defector
D-Day was approaching, the Allies were advancing and Kim Philby, Nick Elliott and their OSS colleague Jim Angleton, like so many others who had come of age in war, began to wonder what they would do with their lives when it was over. Each was determined to remain in the intelligence game, and make a career of it; each had found success in the arcane art of espionage, and all three were destined for rapid promotion, two through merit, and one by an office putsch.
As the Nazi threat receded, the fear of Soviet espionage revived. Before the war, MI5 and MI6 had expended considerable energy, resources and anxiety on combating the communist menace, both inside and outside Britain. But the overwhelming challenge of the war with Germany, and the alliance with Stalin, had diverted attention from Moscow’s covert activities. By 1944 the Soviet espionage threat was coming back into sharp focus. ‘We’ve been penetrated by the communists,’ Sir Stewart Menzies told Angleton, ‘and they’re on the inside, but we don’t know exactly how.’ Waking up to the threat of communism from within, the chiefs of British intelligence were increasingly aware that new weapons, and a restructured service, would be needed to take on ‘the next enemy’, the Soviet Union. The battle lines of the Cold War were being drawn.
In March 1944, Philby suggested to C that the time had come to resume the fight against communist spies by establishing a new section, Section IX, for the ‘professional handling of any cases coming to our notice involving Communists or people concerned in Soviet espionage’. C was enthusiastic, and so was the Foreign Office ‘provided you do not do anything in the USSR itself (despite Soviet espionage in this country)’. An MI5 officer, Jack Curry, was initially placed in charge, but the obvious person to run the new division in the long term was the experienced head of Section V, Felix Cowgill. Philby later claimed that Moscow ordered him to elbow aside Cowgill, a task he did not relish. ‘I must do everything, but everything, to ensure that I become head of Section IX,’ Philby wrote. ‘Cowgill must go.’ It seems more likely that Philby suggested the setting up of Section IX with the firm intention of taking it over, and Cowgill was in the way.
The removal of Cowgill was carried out with surgical detachment, and no remorse. Philby carefully stoked the antagonism between Cowgill and his senior colleagues, brittle Valentine Vivian and venomous Claude Dansey; he whispered darkly to those in authority of the sour relations between Cowgill and MI5; and he manoeuvred himself into a position as prime candidate to take over Section IX in Cowgill’s stead. Finally, in September 1944, Philby was summoned to C’s office, received with ‘great warmth’, and told that he would be running the new Soviet section. Philby accepted with pleasure, but not before planting a small and suitably deferential suggestion in C’s mind. Since Cowgill’s dealings with MI5 had been so bad, might it be sensible to ensure the sister service had no objection to his own appointment? Philby was not remotely fearful that MI5, where he had many friends, would actually challenge his promotion. He merely wanted to be sure that MI5’s fingerprints were all over this decision; that way, if the Security Service should ever investigate how he had come to be in such a powerful position, he could point out that they had helped to put him there. Menzies swiftly became convinced that ‘the idea was his own’. When Cowgill discovered he had been passed over for the top job, he resigned in fury, as Philby knew he would.