Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

The decline in the number of reports to the Centre during 1949—about forty a month fewer than during the latter months of 1948—was due chiefly to what the files describe as a “deterioration in the operational situation” at the beginning of the year, caused by heightened surveillance by the internal security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), and the Sûreté. On March 12, 1949 the Centre warned the Paris residency of the danger of continuing to meet agents on the street or in cafés and restaurants and advised it to make much greater use of dead letter-boxes, messages in invisible ink and radio communication. The residency was also instructed to train its agents to recognize and evade surveillance, and to instruct them on how to behave if questioned or arrested. A month later the residency reported to the Centre that, though it was impracticable to abandon completely street meetings with agents, security had been much improved. Case officers were now forbidden to go directly from the embassy or any other Soviet premises to meet an agent. Before each meeting the officer was picked up by a residency driver at a pre-arranged location and driven to the area of the rendezvous, after elaborate security checks designed to detect surveillance. Following the meeting the case officer would pass on any materials supplied by the agent to another residency officer in a “brush contact” as they walked past each other. Both times and places of meetings with agents were regularly changed, and more rendezvous were arranged in churches, theaters, exhibitions and locations outside Paris. 105

As a further security precaution, the frequency of meetings with agents was also reduced. The six most valuable were seen twice a month, ten other agents were met once a month and another seven once every two months. Less important agents were either put on ice or contacted by pre-arranged signals only as the need arose. After a year operating the new security procedures, the Paris residency reported that operating conditions had improved. On April 22, 1950 it informed the Centre that it was in contact with almost fifty agents—twice as many as a year before. 106For most of the next decade the residency was to provide better intelligence than its counterparts in Britain and the United States. 107

THE ORGANIZATIONAL CONFUSION of Soviet foreign intelligence in the late 1940s was reflected in the running of its three most productive British agents. Remarkably, even Kim Philby had no regular controller during his term as head of station in Turkey from 1947 to 1949. Except during visits to London, he communicated with Soviet intelligence via Guy Burgess. Burgess’s behavior, however, was becoming increasingly erratic. To his controller, Yuri Modin, it seemed “that his nerve was going, and that he could no longer take the strain of his double life.” 108A trip by Burgess to Gibraltar and Tangier in the autumn of 1949 turned into what Goronwy Rees called a “wild odyssey of indiscretions”: among them failing to pay his hotel bills, publicly identifying British intelligence officers and drunkenly singing in local bars, “Little boys are cheap today, cheaper than yesterday.” Burgess was surprised not to be sacked on his return to London. 109Once back in the Foreign Office, however, he resumed his career as a dedicated Soviet agent, supplying large quantities of classified papers. On December 7, 1949, for example, he handed Modin 168 documents, totaling 660 pages. KGB files also credit Burgess with using Anglo-American policy differences over the People’s Republic of China, established in October 1949, to cause friction in the “Special Relationship.” 110

Donald Maclean was under even greater strain than Burgess. His posting to Cairo in October 1948 as counselor and head of chancery at the age of only thirty-five seemed to set him on a path which would lead him to the top of the diplomatic service, or a position close to it. But Maclean became deeply depressed at his insensitive handling by the Cairo residency. The documents he supplied were accepted without comment and no indication was given by the Centre of what was expected of him. In December 1949 Maclean attached to a bundle of classified diplomatic documents a note asking to be allowed to give up his work for Soviet intelligence. The Cairo residency gave so little thought to running Maclean that it forwarded his note unread to Moscow. Incredibly, the Centre also ignored it. Not till Maclean sent another appeal in April 1950, asking to be released from the intolerable strain of his double life, did he attract the Centre’s attention. It then read for the first time the letter he had sent four months earlier. 111

While the Centre was deliberating, Maclean went berserk. One evening in May, while in a drunken rage, he and his drinking companion Philip Toynbee broke into the flat of two female members of the US embassy, ransacked their bedroom, ripped apart their underclothes, then moved on to destroy the bathroom. There, Toynbee later recalled, “Donald raises a large mirror above his head and crashes it into the bath, when to my amazement and delight, alas, the bath breaks in two while the mirror remains intact.” A few days later Maclean was sent back to London where the Foreign Office gave him the summer off and paid for treatment by a psychiatrist who diagnosed overwork, marital problems and repressed homosexuality. In the autumn, apparently back in control of himself, at least in office hours, he was made head of the American desk in the Foreign Office. 112

The impact of Burgess’s and Maclean’s intelligence in Moscow was heightened by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Maclean’s deputy on the American desk, Robert Cecil, later concluded that the Kremlin must have found the documents provided by Maclean “of inestimable value in advising the Chinese and the North Koreans on strategy and negotiating positions.” 113In addition to supplying classified documents, Maclean and Burgess also put their own anti-American gloss on them and thus strengthened Soviet fears that the United States might escalate the Korean conflict into world war. For perhaps the first time in his diplomatic career, Maclean showed open sympathy in a Foreign Office minute with the crude Stalinist analysis of the inherently aggressive designs of American finance capital. There was, he said, “some point” to the argument that the American economy was now so geared to the military machine that all-out war might seem preferable to a recession produced by demobilization. 114

The Centre’s most prized British agent, however, remained Kim Philby, who, it was hoped, would one day rise to become Chief of the Secret Service. In the autumn of 1949 he was appointed SIS station commander in Washington. Philby was exultant. His new posting, he later wrote, brought him “right back into the middle of intelligence policy-making” and gave him “a close-up view of the American intelligence organizations.” 115

Before his departure for the United States, Philby was “indoctrinated” into the VENONA secret. Though aware of the possibility that one of the decrypts might identify him as a Soviet agent, he was doubtless reassured to discover that VENONA provided comparatively little information on NKGB activities in Britain. 116The bulk of the Soviet intelligence decrypts concerned operations in the United States. In late September 1949, immediately after the successful test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, Philby discovered during his VENONA briefing that the atom spy CHARLES in Los Alamos had been identified as Klaus Fuchs. The Centre promptly warned those of its American agents who had been in contact with Fuchs that they might have to escape through Mexico. 117It did not, however, succeed in warning Fuchs, who in April 1950 was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. 118