123. Kim Philby: Communist Double Agent In London (Ep 3)

17:28David:Well, as we know from our series on Bill Donovan, this is Bill Donovan's OSS. This is the glorious amateurs that he's created. And, you know, as we did in the Donovan story, didn't we? Donovan spent a lot of time in London, and there's a massive London station for OSS.

17:45Gordon:Donovan's just holed up at Claridge's for most of the floor, right?

17:48David:I mean, so... Popping between seeing the chief at White's and Donovan at Claridge's. It's wartime life. But OSS has a counterintelligence section, which is called X2. I like that name. That's good. I know. It's a good name. And X2 is going to be based next to Philby's Section 5 at Rider Street. And the Americans start off, I mean, as we discussed, I think, in our Donovan series, pretty fresh to the game. So another MI6 officer who goes on to become a writer, Malcolm Muggeridge, has a description of the arrival of the Americans as, again, this is pretty sexist language, excuse us, but this is the language of the time and I think does give you an insight into the way people talk back then.

18:33David:But he describes the arrival of the Americans as like a bunch of innocent young maidens who are about to be deflowered in the old intelligence brothel that was MI6. All too soon, they were ravished and corrupted. It's pretty gross. It's pretty gross, isn't it? Yeah. But it's clearly how the MI6 kind of crew look at it. It's like, here come the fresh-faced Americans. We're going to show them the game. I think that's what you get from the quote, don't you think?

19:02Gordon:I agree. And I guess this is where I think this is also interesting about Philby. Philby kind of, he's involved in this effort to collaborate with and to some degree train and influence the Americans. But he also doesn't really like the Americans, does he, Gordon? No, I think all through his life, he seems to be, I think he's got that, definitely that attitude, which is quite British kind of.

19:31David:I mean Philby's a child of empire isn't he and I think even if his dad is quite anti-colonialist there is also that kind of slight resentment of the rising power of America from a certain section of the British kind of establishment at this time so some are kind of on board with the rise of the Americans and others are resentful and I think secretly Philby comes from the kind of resentful world but hides it very very well you know and will hide it all through the following years. But that definitely is a factor beneath the surface. But Philby's there. He gives talks to these new Americans, the OSS guys, and how to turn agents and double them back against the Nazis.

20:14David:Gets to know David Bruce, who will become the London chief of OSS and who ends up on the beach at Normandy with Donovan, famously, as we heard last time.

20:24Gordon:He was with Donovan when they They had the realization that they had left their suicide pills back at Claridge's, right?

20:31David:At Claridge's, exactly.

20:32Gordon:And had not brought them for the landing and were concerned that perhaps some of the Claridge's staff needed to be warned about. I think Donovan described it as the dangerous medicines in my bathroom. Exactly. Put a call in back to the porter at Claridge's. Philby's also connected with James Jesus Ankleton, who will become the head of the CIS counterintelligence staff and very nearly come close to wrecking the place from the inside out because of his exceptional paranoia. But at this point is really a very serious Anglophile and gets close to Philby. Philby kind of tutors Angleton in the craft of intelligence, which I find very ironic.

21:14Gordon:And that will be a friendship that the CIA will pay very dearly for in the coming decades.

21:22David:Yeah, that's right. I think the legacy of that friendship between Angleton and Philby and the betrayal of Angleton by Philby is, you're right, going to absolutely, I mean, it's going to shape the CIA during a significant part of the Cold War. So it's, again, one of the kind of reasons why Philby is such a kind of consequential character. I mean, Philby all this time, I guess, is still meeting his handlers. And the advantage now is, I mean, we talked last time, about how he'd at some point lost a bit of contact with them and the relationship was kind of you know tricky and breaking down and he's the one pressing to to meet them again and of course he's now back in touch with them germany has invaded the soviet union so the nazi soviet packet is over so at least now he's kind of can tell himself he's working by working for the soviet union he's working actually for an ally of the uk i mean maybe helps him psychologically a bit.

22:17David:And he's meeting his handlers every 10 to 12 days. I mean, what I find fascinating is he just can take files out of the office. I mean, on this very interesting tape we're going to hear for members where you hear Philby talking about his career and what he does. I mean, he describes this. He basically said, I just walked out the office with a briefcase of documents, you know, and files and takes them home. This is even true today.

22:45Gordon:A lot of the security is done at the front end where you figure out if you can trust somebody. And then it becomes this system of, well, everyone inside has sort of been vetted. At the CIA, if you wanted to, I mean, you could print off documents and you just walk out of the building with them in your bag. We all think of these like elaborate security checks as you're walking out the door. The reality is, you know, you just walk out with stuff. You really can. You know, it's harder to bring electronics in or out, but like if you just want paper, I mean, it's just not that hard.

23:17David:Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think it is surprising to think how easy it is. And Philby takes advantage of that. And he also volunteers for night duty at Broadway HQ, where he can kind of get access to even more material. So he's got details of plans, intentions, personnel, capabilities of the German intelligence agencies, who he's obviously spying on because that's his job, you know, his official job. he's got details of the british intelligence agencies operations and personnel and what they're up to because that's where he's working and because he's liaising so closely with the americans he's got that and you can pass all of that you know to his his soviet handlers and yes it's tons of stuff but it's so interesting because the soviets what they're interested in actually partly a sign that the brits and the americans might be reaching out to the germans to make a separate peace from them you know to kind of lock out the soviet union that's their what's they're worried about.

24:11David:But I just think this is the wild bit about the Filby story, so many wild bits about it. But the reality is they are not getting the most out of this agent with the most astonishing access because they don't trust him and they're not asking the right questions. I mean, there's one early sign of that when he's back in the kind of training school before he joins MI6 proper. He tells them that the Soviet Union is only the 10th country on the priority list for agents, and they're not training any to be sent there. And the Soviets go, that can't be right. We're the top priority, surely, for the Brits, for MI6.

24:49David:So the officer who gets that report underlines that passage and puts two large red question marks in the margin. But now, in the middle of the war, what's even crazier is that there are some in Moscow who are going to become convinced that Philby is a double agent, that he has been planted by British intelligence. November 1942 in the NKVD which is the kind of forerunner of the KGB there's this female analyst called Elena Modzrinskaya I think I've got that right that's good yeah it's not bad was it who I like to think is a kind of female Minnie McCloskey yes I mean she's a kind of blue-eyed blonde but apart from that she's a kind of she's an analyst she's a kind of you know in the NKVD her job is to kind of look at the files so you can you can sympathize with with Elena I mean, maybe even you can summarize why she'd think Philby might be a badden.

25:46Gordon:I guess if you put yourself in the perspective of an NKVD mini McCloskey in the fall of, or autumn, as you would say, Gordon, of 1942, if the stuff is too good, if it's really, really good, that, weirdly enough, can be a cause for suspicion. flag it. You say, well, how does he have this access? Is this stuff that is being fed to us to get us hooked on it so that the Brits can kind of pipe disinformation into our system? So that's kind of one. I mean, I think the other one is Philby's failure to provide information on British operations against the Soviet Union. And Philby, of course, is saying, well, it's because we're not doing anything.

26:36Gordon:But the other way to interpret that is that that's exactly the kind of stuff that the Brits, if they're using Philby as a double, would hold back. They wouldn't give you anything real about London's efforts to penetrate the Kremlin or the Soviet military or intelligence services or anything like that. And they do push Philby though, don't they? to look for agents inside the USSR. And there just aren't any, right? No, no. And so that information could be interpreted by the NKVD, Manny McCloskey, in kind of multiple ways, right?

27:16David:It's so interesting because they're convinced there must be. So they say, you know, even though he's obviously not dealing directly with anything to do with the Soviet Union, they say, can you get into the archive? And so Philby gets to know the archivist for MIC. So this is up in St. Albans because the archive at that point is up in St. Albans. And him and the archivist, they both like pink gin, which I'm not particularly a fan of. But he persuades the archivist to let him borrow files. It's back to that point where he can suddenly start borrowing them overnight and hand them back the next day.

27:46David:And he gets the files on the kind of source books, which are the details of MI6 operations on the Soviet Union, which has got kind of the code names for any agents. Philby nearly panics because at one point there's an investigation because one of them's gone missing until the secretary reveals actually it hadn't gone missing. She'd combined two of them into one. But there's a moment of panic. But yeah, he kind of looks at these sourcebooks. He feeds the information back to Moscow. And Moscow is like, how can there not be an MI6 station in Moscow? How can they not have a secret outfit running agents in Moscow?

28:21David:Why is there no agent network inside the USSR? are. Because I think also, this is really interesting, from the Russian point of view, MI6 has been the main enemy. It has been the arch plotters, back to the great game in Central Asia before the revolution, and then after the Bolshevik revolution. They are convinced, they are convinced, and I mean, they still are today, that MI6 are the kind of arch plotters of the overthrow of the Bolsheviks. So the idea, when Philby said, There's nothing there. They just can't believe it, can they?

28:53Gordon:Oh, I guess it's classic mirror imaging. Yeah. It's a mindset and analytical trap that is very easy to fall into if you're a human being or if you're a big state bureaucracy. You just think, well, we're doing this. The other side must be doing the same thing. And here, it just wasn't true.

29:11David:Yeah.

29:12Gordon:The other piece of this, though, is that, and I guess why it would be so shocking to the NKVD that the Brits don't have a network or a station inside Moscow is that from another member of the Cambridge Five, Anthony Blunt, the NKVD knows that the Brits are running this pretty elaborate double cross system to turn German agents to their own purposes, right? So there's an understanding that the Brits are capable of this. So you would think, well, if you're doing it against the Nazis, why wouldn't you be running the same kind of system against us? And the reality is they weren't.

29:51David:Yeah. I mean, it's funny, isn't it? Because they also look at the stuff we've looked at, which is like, how did Philby get into MI6 so quickly? You know, especially when he was like, he had an Austrian communist wife, Litsy. How did no one spot, you know, the fact he'd been a communist at Cambridge? So they're looking at it and thinking to themselves, hang on a sec, isn't that a little bit suspicious? And they actually -

30:15Gordon:They would have shot this guy already. They're like, we would have shot this guy five years ago.

30:19David:Yeah, we'd have purged him for that. We'd have purged this guy. And so they keep asking, it's fascinating, they keep asking Philby questions about his biography. And the reason is because they are just trying to understand how he got where he did. You know, they're trying to check him out still. And they're just so suspicious of how easily he gets into MI6. And then, as you say, yeah, because they know that the Brits are cunning enough to do double agent operations, turning Nazi agents back against them, They think maybe that's Philby. So this Elena, the mini McCloskey, starts thinking, well, actually, Philby is a penetration agent into the Soviet system.

30:56David:In other words, the whole thing in Cambridge of becoming a communist, that was building cover on the orders of British intelligence in order to attract the attention of Soviet recruiters. And of course, you know, the bit that makes sense for this is they have already been convinced that Philby's dad was a British spy, which he wasn't. So it makes absolute sense that Philby's dad is pulling the strings somehow of this master plan of getting his son to go to fake being communist, to get inside the Soviet system, but actually always be a double agent for MI6. I mean, it's a kind of wild plan, but you can also see if you think the Brits are genuinely cunning, if you don't know that MI6 is actually a disaster zone at this point, you can see why you might believe it, can't you?

31:47Gordon:Yeah, it's a great example of being able to twist yourself into such sort of intellectual knots that you have, you've essentially mistaken incompetence on the part of a huge swath of the British system for an elaborate master plan to undermine the Soviet Union.

32:07David:Yeah.

32:07Gordon:But the people running the Cambridge spies, the actual handlers, don't ascribe to this view. They see Philby and the Five as genuine Soviet penetrations of the British system.

32:23David:Yeah, exactly. So we should say that this is the Elena, the analyst's view, which is kind of one faction. But then there's another faction within the NKVD, the KGB, which takes the opposite view, which is, no, no, no, these guys are for real. and particularly the handlers who are dealing with Philby out in London and elsewhere, they all believe he and the other agents are for real. So there's a kind of battle which is ebbing and flowing in the Soviet bureaucracy about how much to believe them. And at one point, you know, late 43, there's kind of caution around them. That's the point where they think most of them might be bad, apart from weirdly Donald Maclean, who they think is more likely to be for real.

33:02David:And they want to retain contact with the Cambridge spies because they can see they are getting valuable stuff from them, particularly about the Germans. And they're thinking, well, we don't want to cut off because then we might tip off to the British that we know about their double agent operation. I mean, they even send eight surveillance operatives to London to follow the Cambridge spies to see if they're meeting kind of MI5 handlers, their double agent handlers. And these are people who are in Russian clothes, don't speak English and don't find anything because there's nothing there to find.

33:33David:But it's kind of crazy, isn't it? I mean, it's kind of almost Keystone Cop stuff. But of course, they're still getting this great information from them. And they get top-level stuff from John Cairncross and from Bletchley Park, because he's got access to Bletchley, which actually, you know, it's amazingly valuable, this stuff, to the Soviet Union. Because it helps them at the famous Kursk battle. and the Bletchley decrypts he passes on supposedly helped them launch preemptive strikes on some of the German airfields. So, you know, this is as good intelligence as you get. So eventually that kind of balance of opinion will swing back to the idea, these guys are for real.

34:12David:The stuff is just too good to ignore. And so, you know, Philby finally, you know, by 44 is back in the good books. also maybe there

34:21Gordon:Gordon with with Philby now codenamed Stanley in the good graces of his NKVD Soviet handlers let's take a break when we come back we'll see how Philby pulls off a massive intelligence coup we're leaving today and entering a world of Mickey Mouse waving princess meeting and greeting lightsaber clashing the Twilight Zone tower of terror dropping banshee flying Space Mountain launching Galaxy rewinding Galaxy rewinding Fireworks igniting World of Other Worlds For whatever you love Infinite worlds await at the most magical place on Earth Walt Disney World Resort This episode is brought to you by Indeed Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C.

35:19Gordon:According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

35:34David:On December 12th, Disney Plus invites you to go behind the scenes with Taylor Swift in an exclusive six-episode docuseries.

35:43Gordon:I wanted to give something to the fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book.

35:48David:The end of an era. And don't miss Taylor Swift, The Era's Tour, the final show featuring for the first time

35:57Gordon:the Tortured Poets Department. Streaming December 12th, only on Disney+.

36:07Gordon:Welcome back. The tide is turning in the war, Gordon, and the Brits are looking at the Soviet Union in a new light.

36:18David:Yeah, that's right. So in the middle of the war, suddenly the Brits start thinking about, well, maybe we should be spying on the Soviets. And they're going to start a new Section 9, and they're going to start that in May 1943, which is super secret. And its aim is going to be to spy on the Soviet Union and penetrate Soviet intelligence. And Valentine Vivian draws up a proposal of how to do this and the kind of methods and techniques which will be used. And of course, you know, this is greeted with much excitement in Moscow because it suddenly confirms their suspicions that they are, of course, the real enemy.

36:53David:Now, initially, the head of this section is someone, an expert from MI5. But then the job as the permanent head of Section 9 is opening up in 1944. now the logical person to put in charge of it is Felix Cowgill who's the head of section five Philby's boss he's an anti-communist expert but of course when Philby tells his Russian handlers about this new section and about the fact that the job is coming up to head it they are like get that job you do whatever it takes to get that job and you can see why they think it and in his memoir this very dodgy memoir called my silent war philby implies you know he he does some kind of brilliant maneuvering i think it's only half true because a lot of it is going to be kind of cowgill's mistakes that stop him because i mean the thing is the new job involves working very closely with mi5 and they of course as we heard hate cowgill because he doesn't share anything with them and philby then arranges to make sure that everyone making the appointment in the decision knows how bad Calgill's relationship with MI5 without Philby's fingerprints being on that so he does it quite subtly and he does exactly the same with the foreign office who also don't like Calgill and also Calgill is in a massive row at that point because he's in a row with everyone with Hoover you know J Edgar Hoover at the FBI and again kind of Philby makes sure subtly though that everyone knows that Cowgirl just doesn't get on with the partners.

38:28David:So in all the kind of spy novels, David, this kind of bureaucratic maneuvering is the kind of thing that happens. I mean, here it really is happening. Yeah. Do you reckon that happens in the CIA when a big job comes up? Are people kind of gently, subtly knifing each other in the back?

38:46Gordon:I'm sure it happens. I mean, the reality is there just aren't that many senior jobs. There tend to be more senior people and there are sort of good jobs. And so there is competition over them or there can be. Doesn't this happen in every organization?

39:03David:Yeah, maybe.

39:03Gordon:If you have an organization that's got some scale and importance, you're going to have people who fight over the limited number of good spots. I mean -

39:15David:Never happened to the BBC. Let me just make that clear though.

39:17Gordon:Okay, yeah. The BBC is a very egalitarian, meritocratic organization.

39:23David:Never anything like that when I was there, just to clarify.

39:26Gordon:That's the Guy Burgess legacy, right, Gordon, at BBC? Exactly. Yeah. But Philby, he is kind of a natural choice for this job. He's got a reputation as being a hardworking MI6 officer. He knows Europe. He speaks many of its languages, well-traveled. He gets along well with others. So in some ways, he's a very natural pick.

39:49David:Yeah, I think that's right. And Calgill is just a bit too difficult. So, I mean, Philby does do this brilliantly. And, you know, he will get the job in September 1944. Calgill is furious. And I mean, he goes on to resign from being head of Section 5 and actually ends up leaving MI6 shortly afterwards so you know that's it so tim milne philby's old friend then takes over section five and philby will still be supervising that but tim milne it's very interesting because he again in his memoir he says um people express surprise you know in hindsight that i didn't come forward at the time of kim's appointment and inform my superiors that he'd held communist views before the war and milne says in 1944 it didn't seem at all likely that he stood where he had in 1933.

40:40David:People do change their views, particularly those who form extremist opinions at university. This is all well understood. It's obviously Tim Milne thinking in later life, how did you not point out that the person who's just been appointed to head anti-Soviet activities was a communist at Cambridge? Milne is another one who's a friend of Kim, knows it, knows it, and doesn't raise it. He'd been with Philby. It's fascinating, isn't it? All these people who just kind of turn a blind eye to it, really.

41:13Gordon:I mean, who wasn't a communist back in 1932 at Cambridge?

41:17David:Well, it feels like everyone was, I think, yeah.

41:20Gordon:Everybody was. Many young, well-educated people at this time would have dabbled with it in their university days, right? That would not have been uncommon. So in some ways, Philby's father's comment to VV that, oh, this is sort of youthful indiscretion, would have resonated because it would have been the experience of so many other people who were sort of moving into these types of important jobs during the war.

41:46David:Yeah, I think that's right. But it is an amazing triumph. Philby is now head of Section 9 and takes on a new title from late 1944 for a couple of years. He's now in the Broadway headquarters building as a senior officer, he is in charge of running operations into and against the Soviet Union. I mean, the existence of this section is at first really secret. And I love this fact. They're told at first not to tell the Americans about it because they're worried it might leak to the Russians through the Americans. Little do they know that Philby's kept them well informed all the time. And eventually the Americans are told and they are told that all American intelligence services working against the Soviet Union are to coordinate their work through Philby.

42:37David:And so now he can pass, I mean, you know, it's just crazy. He could pass on details of all MI6, German, American operations. You know, he's passing on really useful details to the Russians, including about people who are anti-Soviet and spying for the Germans, who, when the Soviets then occupy the country at the end of the war, can be picked up. And, you know, we know what happens to them. He's also able to protect some of the other Cambridge recruits from MI5's interest. I mean, it's a complete triumph for Moscow because their man is running operations against them. I mean, you don't get better than that, do you, in kind of in spy terms?

43:20Gordon:It reminds me of the position that Oleg Gordievsky, who we did a series on last year, he's effectively running the KGB's operations in London while he's working for MI6. I mean, it really doesn't get much better than that. It does make me think at this point, Gordon, do we have a sense of the human cost of Philby's betrayal? Because he's in a position here in Section 9 that is very valuable to the Russians, but it's also, it has to be handled very delicately, doesn't it? Because they have to really think very carefully about how the Russians use the information he passes. Because as an example, and just to kind of illustrate how risky all this is, if the Brits develop an asset, an agent inside the Soviet Union, if the Soviets arrest that person, there will be inevitably an investigation in London about why that happened.

44:26Gordon:And you have to be very careful that investigation doesn't lead back to Kim Philby. And so you would just have to be very thoughtful about how you balance all this stuff. But my point is, there's going to be a human cost to his betrayal here, because he is going to be essentially handing over the identities of agents and networks and things like that to the Soviets who can then make a decision about rolling them up. I mean, do we have a sense of what that body count is starting to add up to at this point?

44:56David:At this point in the war, it's not yet mounting up that much, because I think at this point, they are still basically conceptualising how will we do this at the end of the war, and they're not yet into the new world of actually running some of those agents. So I think at this point, a lot more of the agents he's giving away are actually German agents who are spying against the Soviets, who he learns about and who then get killed. you're right though this is going to become the high wire act for filby as time goes on but they you know from the moscow's point of view this is just amazing and you know their suspicions have passed elena millie mccloskey is retired you know and has been pushed away they know they're onto a winner basically late 45 he's awarded order of the red banner next year he gets a british obe and that of course goes with his medal from franco i mean in terms of you know collection of medals that's pretty good um and then as the war is ending he goes to berlin with tim milne just as the kind of war's coming to an end so it's the two old friends you know of course they traveled around europe in the 30s together philby is there planning what new stations mi6 should open across europe they know it's hard to penetrate the soviet union itself to run agents in there so they're trying to work out you know which countries could we open up stations where we can use to send agents into the Soviet Union.

46:19David:And Milne writes, you know, we paid a visit to Hitler's chancellery, badly damaged, but not totally destroyed. His office was still littered with broken glass and debris. A light bulb somehow intact was lying on the floor. And I threw it at the huge marble top desk where it burst with a satisfying report, a cheap and childish gesture for which I felt no shame. And then the two of them go to look at the place at Potsdamer Straße, where they'd seen that Nazi torchlight rally in the early 30s. So it's a kind of weird circle for Philby. They then get cooked. This is a weird detail you find when you read all these memoirs.

46:56David:They have a meal cooked by someone who's using Eva Braun's, who's Hitler's partner, who's now dead, her cooker. And they get nearly poisoned by a cook who serves them insecticide by mistake. And so Philby ends up kind of semi-delirious and nearly kind of dying during that trip, which is also the moment that they learned this most dramatic news that the Americans have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A moment when the world changes and you get this sense of the Second World War closing, but also the dawn of what will be and become known as the Cold War, in which Kim Philby is going to play this absolutely pivotal role in its early years.

47:43Gordon:So maybe there, Gordon, with Kim Philby, hopped up on insecticide and wandering the streets of Berlin at the end of the war. Let's end. And when we come back next time for the thrilling finale of this series, Exploring the Life of the Young Kim Philby, we'll see how this tightrope walk that he's managing is going to become much more important and much more precarious.

48:10David:If you want to hear that right away, you can by joining the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com and you get more. You get an interview with Antonia Senior, who's the author of a fantastic new book about the Cambridge spies, and you will also get the very special chance to hear from the man himself, Kim Philby. It is an amazingly honest account by Kim Philby about his activities in these years. So it's a really fascinating chance to hear Philby's voice talking about some of the things we've been discussing in these episodes. So that's there for club members. That will be there this week.

48:49David:And of course, you can join at therestisclassified.com. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Thank you.