Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

It is a sobering thought that, but for the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist idea, the Old World, if not the whole world, would now be ruled by Hitler and Hirohito. It is a matter of great pride to me that I was invited, at so early an age, to play my infinitesimal part in building up that power… When the proposition [to join Soviet intelligence] was made to me, I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an élite force. 118

Scarcely had My Silent War been published than an American high school student, inspired by Philby’s example, arrived in Moscow on a tourist visa and offered his services to the KGB. Though aged only sixteen (the youngest Western recruit recorded in the files seen by Mitrokhin), he was signed up in July 1968, with Andropov’s personal approval, as agent SYNOK (“Sonny”) 119—the same codename as that which had been given to Philby on his recruitment in 1934. 120SYNOK’s file notes that he came from a well-to-do family, had an idealistic commitment to the Soviet Union and was imbued with a romantic notion of intelligence work. After a second meeting with SYNOK in Mexico on October 19, it was decided to train him as an illegal agent. Over the next few months, however, either SYNOK or his parents had second thoughts and he failed to show up at the next pre-arranged rendezvous in London.

It may be a sign of how few other bright, ideologically committed young Westerners were inspired to follow Philby’s example (no others are recorded in Mitrokhin’s notes) that the KGB continued intermittently to try to renew contact with SYNOK for more than a decade. In 1978 a KGB officer discovered from SYNOK’s father that he was in Mexico, but failed to track him down. Two years later, his mother was tricked into revealing that he was in San Francisco and giving his address. In December 1980 the operations officer who had met him in Mexico twelve years earlier wrote to SYNOK in San Francisco, inviting him to another meeting in Mexico and giving an East German cover address to which to reply. When no reply was received, the KGB seems, at long last, to have given up. 121

Though a new generation of Philbys failed to materialize, memories of the Magnificent Five continued to enhance the prestige of the London residency. Even in the Gorbachev era, operations in Britain during the Second World War and the quarter century afterward were still held up as a model for young intelligence officers at the FCD training school, the Andropov Institute. The three main faculty heads in the institute had all made their reputations in the London residency. Yuri Modin, who was in charge of political intelligence training, was a former controller of the Magnificent Five. Ivan Shishkin, head of counter-intelligence, had run Line KR in London from 1966 to 1970. Vladimir Barkovsky, who ran ST espionage training, had specialized in that field in London from 1941 to 1946. 122

If the golden age of KGB operations in London had ended with the demise of the Magnificent Five in 1951, the silver age came to an even more abrupt conclusion twenty years later with the defection of Oleg Lyalin and the mass expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers. 123Henceforth MI5 surveillance was no longer swamped by the sheer numbers of Soviet intelligence personnel. Oleg Gordievsky remembers the British operation FOOT as “a bombshell, an earthquake of an expulsion, without precedent, an event that shocked the Centre profoundly.” 124According to Oleg Kalugin, “our intelligence gathering activities in England suffered a blow from which they never recovered.” 125For the remainder of the Cold War the KGB probably found it more difficult to collect high-grade intelligence in London than in almost any other Western capital.

Despite Moscow’s public expressions of righteous indignation after the expulsion of 105 KGB and GRU officers from London in September 1971, the Centre knew that it had suffered a public relations disaster. The centerpiece of its active measures campaign to turn the tables on British intelligence and discredit the British expulsions was the former rising star of SIS, Kim Philby. Philby, however, was in no fit state to be seen in public. Since the publication of his memoirs in 1968, the KGB seemed to have no further use for him and Philby roamed round Russia on a series of almost suicidal drinking bouts which sometimes left him oblivious of where he was, uncertain whether it was night or day. During the early 1970s he was slowly pulled back from alcoholic oblivion by Rufa, “the woman I had been waiting for all my life.” 1

Though the Centre judged, no doubt correctly, after operation FOOT that Philby was still in no condition to give a press conference, it used a lengthy interview with him in Izvestia on October 1, 1971 to denounce the “slanderous allegations” in the “right-wing bourgeois British press” that the Soviet officials expelled from London had been engaged in espionage. In striking contrast with the far more sophisticated tone of Philby’s memoirs published three years earlier, the interview regurgitates a series of stereotypical denunciations of British “ruling circles:”

It should be said that spy mania, the fabrication of slanderous inventions in regard to the Soviet Union, is nothing new in the activities of the ruling circles in England. Definite, concrete political aims are always behind such activities.

This time also, the intensive anti-Soviet provocation and the large scale of the false accusations in regard to Soviet officials in London, as well as the timing of this action, reveal the premeditated character of the activities of the Conservatives who now hold power.

These activities are directed at putting the brakes on the process of lessening tension in Europe.

It is no accident that, as was reflected in the English bourgeois press, government circles showed evident displeasure at, and I should say fear of, the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, which is directed towards normalization of the international situation.

Philby can scarcely have composed these turgid platitudes himself. The probability is that they were simply submitted to him by the KGB for signature. Philby added to them some personal memories of the anti-Soviet “psychological warfare” conducted by British intelligence—though there was a certain irony to his claim that “SIS did not interrupt their subversive operations against the Soviet Union even at the time of the war against Hitler’s Germany.” 2In reality, the lack of evidence of anti-Soviet subversion in the wartime SIS reports provided by Philby had led the Centre to suspect him of disinformation. 3The fact that Philby identified SIS officers, real and alleged, who had been stationed in the Middle East since he had defected from Beirut in 1963 is further evidence that much, if not all, of his interview was scripted for him by the Centre. 4Among the British intelligence officers in Beirut identified in his interview was the young David Spedding who, a quarter of a century later, became chief of SIS. 5

So, far from limiting the damage done by the London expulsions, Philby’s interview turned into another public relations fiasco. Tass was promptly sued for libel by four prominent Lebanese citizens named in the interview as British agents: Robert Abella, editor-publisher of the Beirut weekly Al Zaman; Dori Chamoun, son of former President Camille Chamoun; Emir Farid Chehab, former Lebanese security chief; and Ahmed Isbir, a deputy in the Lebanese parliament. 6The Soviet ambassador in Beirut sought to distance his government from the law suit by declaring that the whole affair was “purely journalistic” and that “the Soviet Union as a state had no connection with it.” He quickly backtracked, however, when the head of the Tass bureau in Beirut, Nikolai Borisovich Filatov, was included in the law suit, claiming that Tass was “a government news agency” and that Filatov was covered by diplomatic immunity. 7To make matters worse, the Communist lawyer chosen by the embassy to act for Tass was believed by the Centre to be an SIS agent. 8Before the case came to trial the Beirut residency withdrew Filatov and his family to Moscow. 9In May 1972 the Tass Lebanese bureau chief, Raymond Saadeh, who was unable to claim diplomatic immunity, was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay damages of 40,000 Lebanese pounds to each of the plaintiffs—a sentence later reduced on appeal to a fine of 1,000 and damages of 10,000 Lebanese pounds each (a total of about 6,000 pounds sterling). Tass was further humiliated by being ordered to report the judgment against it. The story appeared in The Times under the headline, “Tass ordered to pay for libel by Mr. Kim Philby.” 10