Over the coming years, as Soviet intelligence penetrated deeper into Western Europe, James Angleton and Nicholas Elliott worked ever more closely with Philby, the coordinator of Britain’s anti-Soviet operations. Yet the separate sides of Philby’s head created a peculiar paradox: if all his anti-Soviet operations failed, he would soon be out of a job; but if they succeeded too well, he risked inflicting real damage on his adopted cause. He needed to recruit good people to Section IX, but not too good, for these might actually penetrate Soviet intelligence, and discover that the most effective Soviet spy in Britain was their own boss. Jane Archer, the officer who had interrogated Krivitsky back in 1940, joined the section soon after Philby himself. He considered her ‘perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5’, and a serious threat. ‘Jane would have made a very bad enemy,’ he reflected.
As the war ended, a handful of Soviet officials with access to secret information began to contemplate defection, tempted by the attractions of life in the West. Philby was disdainful of such deserters. ‘Was it freedom they sought, or the fleshpots?’ In a way, he, too, was a defector, but he was remaining in place (though enjoying the fleshpots himself). ‘Not one of them volunteered to stay in position and risk his neck for “freedom”,’ he later wrote. ‘One and all, they cut and ran for safety.’ But Philby was haunted by the fear that a Soviet turncoat would eventually emerge with the knowledge to expose him. Here was another conundrum: the better he spied, the greater his repute within Soviet intelligence, and the higher the likelihood of eventual betrayal by a defector.
In September 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a twenty-six-year-old cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, turned up at a Canadian newspaper office with more than a hundred secret documents stuffed inside his shirt. Gouzenko’s defection would be seen, with hindsight, as the opening shot of the Cold War. This trove was the very news Philby had been dreading, for it seemed entirely possible that Gouzenko knew his identity. He immediately contacted Boris Krötenschield. ‘Stanley was a bit agitated,’ Krötenschield reported to Moscow with dry understatement. ‘I tried to calm him down. Stanley said that in connection with this he may have information of extreme urgency to pass to us.’ For the first time, as he waited anxiously for the results of Gouzenko’s debriefing, Philby may have contemplated defection to the Soviet Union. The defector exposed a major spy network in Canada, and revealed that the Soviets had obtained information about the atomic bomb project from a spy working at the Anglo-Canadian nuclear research laboratory in Montreal. But Gouzenko worked for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, not the NKVD; he knew little about Soviet espionage in Britain, and almost nothing of the Cambridge spies. Philby began to relax. This defector, it seemed, did not know his name. But the next one did.
*
In late August 1944, Chantry Hamilton Page, the vice consul in Istanbul, received a calling card for Konstantin Dmitrievich Volkov, a Soviet consular official, accompanied by an unsigned letter requesting, in very poor English, an urgent appointment. Page discussed this odd communication with the consul, and concluded that it must be a ‘prank’: someone was taking Volkov’s name in vain. Page was still suffering from injuries he had sustained in the bomb attack on the Pera Palace Hotel, and he was prone to memory lapses. He failed to answer the letter, then lost it, and finally forgot about it. A few days later, on 4 September, Volkov appeared at the consulate in person, accompanied by his wife Zoya, and demanded an audience with Page. The Russian couple were ushered into the vice consul’s office. Mrs Volkov was in a ‘deplorably nervous state’, and Volkov himself was ‘less than rock steady’. Belatedly realising that this visit might presage something important, Page summoned John Leigh Reed, first secretary at the embassy and a fluent Russian speaker, to translate. Over the next hour, Volkov laid out a proposal that promised, at a stroke, to alter the balance of power in international espionage.
Volkov explained that his official position at the consulate was cover for his real job, as deputy chief of Soviet intelligence in Turkey. Before coming to Istanbul, he explained, he had worked for some years on the British desk at Moscow Centre. He and Zoya now wished to defect to the West. His motivation was partly personal, a desire to get even after a blazing row with the Russian ambassador. The information he offered was priceless: a complete list of Soviet agent networks in Britain and Turkey, the location of the NKVD headquarters in Moscow and details of its burglar alarm system, guard schedules, training and finance, wax impressions of keys to the files, and information on Soviet interception of British communications. Nine days later Volkov was back, now with a letter laying out a deal.
The Russian had ‘obviously been preparing his defection for a long time’, for his terms were precise: he would furnish the names of 314 Soviet agents in Turkey, and a further 250 in Britain; copies of certain documents handed over by Soviet spies in Britain were now in a suitcase in an empty apartment in Moscow. Once a deal was agreed, and Volkov and his wife were safely in the West, he would reveal the address, and MI6 could collect the papers. In exchange for this haul, Volkov demanded £50,000 (equivalent to about £1.6 million today), and political asylum in Britain under a new identity. ‘I consider this sum as a minimum considering the importance of the material given to you, as a result of which all my relatives living in the territory of the USSR are doomed.’ The Russian provided just enough detail to prove that his information was genuine: among the Soviet spies in important positions in Britain, he revealed, were seven in the British intelligence services or the Foreign Office. ‘I know, for instance, that one of these agents is fulfilling the functions of head of a section of the British counter-espionage service in London.’
Volkov insisted on several more conditions. On no account should the British allude to him in wireless messages, since the Soviets had broken the British codes and were reading everything sent through official channels; the Russians also had a spy inside the British embassy, so any paperwork relating to his offer should be closely guarded, and handwritten. All further communications would be through Chantry Page, who could contact him on routine consular business without raising suspicions among his Soviet colleagues. If he did not hear from Page within twenty-one days, he would assume the deal was off, and take his information elsewhere. Volkov’s nervousness was entirely understandable. As a veteran NKVD officer he knew exactly what Moscow Centre would do, and how quickly, if it got wind of his disloyalty.
The new British ambassador to Turkey, Sir Maurice Peterson, was allergic to spies. His predecessor, Knatchbull-Hugessen, had come horribly unstuck through the spy Cicero. Peterson wanted nothing to do with such people, and his reaction to Volkov’s approach was to shovel the whole thing, as fast as possible, onto MI6: ‘No one’s going to turn my embassy into a nest of spies . . . do it through London.’ Even the MI6 station chief in Istanbul, Cyril Machray, was kept in the dark. John Reed wrote up a report, by hand, and put it in the diplomatic bag. It landed on the desk of Sir Stewart Menzies ten days later. C immediately summoned his head of Soviet counter-espionage, Kim Philby, and handed him the report. Here was another potential intelligence coup, a trove of information that might, like the Vermehren defection two years earlier, change the game completely.