A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

by Ben Macintyre

King had been passing Foreign Office telegrams to Moscow since 1934. Elliott’s first tutor in secrecy was a double agent.

Elliott watched the celebrations, with a mixture of awe and horror, from a sixth-floor apartment in the Charlottenburger Chaussee belonging to General Nöel Mason-MacFarlane, the British military attaché in Berlin.

The general remarked under his breath to Elliott that Hitler was well within rifle range: “I am tempted to take advantage of this,” he muttered, adding that he could “pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking.”

he later made a formal request to be allowed to assassinate Hitler from his balcony. Sadly for the world, the offer was turned down.

“It is no use trying to help them to withstand the Nazi methods which they so obviously fail to understand.” Gans zu Putlitz began to feel he was “sacrificing himself for no purpose.”

“Is Hitler going to start the war before we get back at the end of the first week of September?” he asked, half in jest. Gans zu Putlitz did not smile. “On present plans the attack on Poland starts on 26 August but it may be postponed for a week, so if I were you, I’d cancel the trip.” Elliott swiftly reported this “startling statement” to Klop, who passed it on to London.

The Venlo incident was an unmitigated catastrophe. Since the Dutch were clearly involved and had lost an officer, Hitler could claim that Holland had violated its own neutrality, providing an excuse for the invasion of Holland that would follow just a few months later. The episode left the British with an ingrained suspicion of German army officers claiming to be anti-Nazi, even when, in the final stages of the war, similar such approaches were genuine.

The Venlo debacle had been “as disastrous as it was shameful,” but he also found it fascinating, an object lesson in how highly intelligent people could be duped if persuaded to believe what they most wanted to believe.

Philby gave lectures on propaganda, for which, having been a journalist, he was considered suitably trained.

Even by the heavy-drinking standards of wartime, the spies were spectacular boozers.

typical lunch with fellow officers: “To start with we always had two or three Pimm’s at a table in the bar, then a so-called ‘short-one’ well-laced with absinthe.… There would be smoked salmon or potted shrimps, then a Dover sole, jugged hare, salmon or game, and a Welsh rarebit to wind up with. Good red or white wine washed this down, and we ended with port or Kümmel.” After this blowout, Wheatley tended to sneak off to bed “for an hour to sleep it off” before returning to work.

But some saw a flicker of something else in Philby, something harder and deeper, a “calculating ambition,” a ruthless “single-mindedness.” Like Elliott, he used humor to deflect inquiry. “There was something mysterious about him,” wrote Trevor-Roper. “He never engaged you in serious conversation—it was always irony.”

Ian Fleming and Nicholas Elliott had both experienced the trauma of being educated at Durnford School; they became close friends.

Otto’s real name, which Philby would not learn for decades, was Arnold Deutsch. He was the chief recruiter for Soviet intelligence in Britain, the principal architect of what would later become known as the Cambridge spy

His first career was as publisher and publicist for the German sexologist Wilhelm Reich,

Reich developed the radical, though slightly implausible, theory that “a poor man’s sexual performance led him to fascism.”

Deutsch was on the hunt for long-term, deep-cover, ideological spies who could blend invisibly into the British establishment, for Soviet intelligence was playing a long game, laying down seed corn that could be harvested many years hence or left dormant forever. It was a simple, brilliant, durable strategy of the sort that only a state committed to permanent world revolution could have initiated. It would prove staggeringly successful.

some ways, Philby’s story is that of a man in pursuit of ever more exclusive clubs.

C. S. Lewis described the fatal British obsession with the “inner ring,” the belief that somewhere, just beyond reach, is an exclusive group holding real power and influence, which a certain sort of Englishman constantly aspires to find and join.

“Of all the passions,” wrote Lewis, “the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

Asking Philby to spy on his own father was surely a test of his commitment, and Philby passed it easily.

Deutsch reported that his new recruit “refers to his parents, who are well-to-do bourgeois, and his entire social milieu with unfeigned contempt and hatred.”

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.”

Ankara was the diplomatic capital of Turkey, but the major powers kept embassies in Istanbul, on the cusp between Europe and Asia; this was where the serious spying was done.

By 1942 some seventeen different intelligence organizations had converged on Istanbul to mix and mingle, bribe, seduce, and betray, and with them came a vast and motley host of agents and double agents, smugglers, blackmailers, arms dealers, drug runners, refugees, deserters, black-marketeers, pimps, forgers, hookers, and con artists. Rumors and secrets, some of them true, whirled around the bars and back alleys. Everyone spied on everyone else; the Turkish secret police, the Emniyet, spied on all.

“A large amount of intelligence work in the field is all about the establishment of personal relationships; of gaining other people’s confidence and on some occasions persuading people to do something against their better judgment.”

The papal legate, Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who would later become Pope John XXIII, proved to be a fund of good intelligence and a vigorous antifascist. Like so many in wartime Istanbul, Roncalli was playing a double game, dining with Papen and taking his wife’s confession while using his office to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied Europe.

Philby never shared his beliefs; he never discussed politics, even with his fellow Soviet spies; after his early ideological discussions with Arnold Deutsch, the subject of communism was seldom raised with his Soviet handlers. He had persuaded himself of the rectitude of his course back in 1934, and after that the subject was closed. He retained and sustained his certainties in perfect isolation.

Philby was telling Moscow the truth and was disbelieved but allowed to go on thinking he was believed; he was deceiving the British in order to aid the Soviets, who suspected a deception and were in turn deceiving him. Moscow’s faith in Philby seemed to ebb and flow; sometimes he was considered suspect, sometimes genuine, and sometimes both simultaneously.

Officially, wives were not allowed to accompany their husbands on diplomatic postings, to discourage any possibility of defection. Elisabeth, already a marked woman, remained in Berlin, in effect held hostage. Vermehren arrived in Istanbul in early December and began work at the Abwehr office under Leverkühn.

“They are so God-awful conscientious you never know what they’re going to do next,” Elliott complained to Philby in exasperation after sitting through another of Vermehren’s religious homilies. Vermehren was code-named “Precious,” because that is what he was, in more ways than one.

Anyone who had aided, or even merely known, the Vermehrens was now under suspicion. Vermehren’s father, mother, sisters, and brother were all rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps.

Canaris was shuffled into a meaningless job, placed under effective house arrest, and finally, following the failure of the July Plot in 1944, executed.

German intelligence was “thrown into a state of confusion just at the moment when its efficient functioning was vital to the survival of the Third Reich.”

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.

“In that family atmosphere they couldn’t conceive that there was a wrong ’un among them.”

Elliott trusted his friend Philby to keep his secrets, never suspecting that those secrets were now being put to murderous use.

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 Center, which had sent in the killers with a ready-made 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, these Catholics had been shot.”

Philby and the other Cambridge spies had been loyal throughout the war—and astonishingly productive.

In the course of the war an estimated ten thousand documents, political, economic, and military, were sent to Moscow from the London office of the NKVD.

By the end of 1946 Philby had achieved something no other spy could boast: the award of three separate medals from nationalist Spain, the communist Soviet Union, and Britain.

If Albanian communism was successfully undermined, it was believed, this would set off a “chain reaction that would roll back the tide of Soviet Imperialism.”

Stalin had backed a communist insurgency in Greece, engineered the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, and blockaded Berlin. Albania would be the target of a counterattack, in direct contravention of international law but in keeping with the new mood of aggression.

Philby liked to portray the Russian intelligence service as an organization of unparalleled efficiency. In truth, Moscow Center was frequently beset by bureaucratic bungling, inertia, and incompetence, coupled with periodic bloodletting.

Maclean was the son of a former cabinet minister, a product of public school and Cambridge, a member of the Reform Club. And so he was protected from suspicion, in Philby’s words, by the “genuine mental block which stubbornly resisted the belief that respected members of the Establishment could do such things.”

Even drunken, unhinged knicker shredding, it seemed, was no bar to advancement in the British diplomatic service if one was the “right sort.” But the short list of suspects was getting shorter, and Maclean’s name was on it.

In some ways the two memos echoed the different approaches to intelligence that were developing on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Bill Harvey’s reflected a new, American style of investigation: suspicious, quick to judge, and willing to offend. Angleton’s was written in the British MI6 tradition: based on friendship and trust in the word of a gentleman.

Philby had not run away, he was happy to help, and he was, importantly, a gentleman, a clubman, and a highflier, which meant he must be innocent.

As an officer in Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming had known him well, and the Crabb affair inspired the plot of Thunderball, in which Bond sets out to investigate the hull of the Disco Volante.

Copeland shared Angleton’s views of America’s role in the world, believing that the CIA had a right and a duty to steer political and economic events in the Middle East: “The United States had to face and define its policy in all three sectors that provided the root causes of American interests in the region: the Soviet threat, the birth of Israel, and petroleum.”