Do we need more spies? And more traitors?

Treason is a terrible offence. Why, even after the British abolished the death penalty for murder, one of the few offences for which it was retained was high treason. That was the case until the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law finally did away with capital punishment altogether. But I suspect most of us still think of betrayal as one of the basest of crimes.

Perhaps the most notorious of British traitors, and the most fascinating, is Kim Philby. For the best part of thirty years, he was an agent of the Soviet Union's KGB, who was deeply embedded inside Britain’s own secret intelligence service, MI6. Any information of importance known to MI6 was immediately known to the KGB too. Since James Jesus Angleton, then a rising star of the CIA, was in the habit of confiding pretty much everything he knew to Philby, that meant that most of the CIA’s secrets were also being shared with the KGB.

Some of the missions Philby betrayed inspire little sympathy in me. 

For instance, I have no time for joint MI6 and CIA operations which sent young Albanian men being to their home country, to carry out actions that would be most generously described as sabotage, more harshly as terrorism, in order to weaken the Communist regime and ultimately foment an uprising against it. On the other hand, I find it somewhat nauseating that every single one of those missions was betrayed by Philby. Possibly 200 of these young men were captured and put to death, often in the most atrocious way. Even worse, the number rises to some 2000 when you include the friends and relatives, and even the unfortunates who happened to share the same surname as a captive, who suffered the same fate.

What Philby did was by no means pretty. But there’s no doubt that he showed a lot of guts and ingenuity, with which he turned MI6 inside out, and made some of the most senior figures in the CIA look pretty silly too. It’s a remarkable story, extremely well told by Ben MacIntyre in his book A Spy Among Friends. The title neatly expresses the thinking that put Philby above suspicion among people, his friends from childhood, who ran the secret service and regarded him as ‘one of us’.

Oleg Gordievsky in 1994
Photo from The Times

MI6 wasn’t, however, without its riposte to the KGB for Philby. In his latest book, The Spy and the Traitor, Ben MacIntyre tells another story, rather less well-known than Philby’s but fully as compelling. In Oleg Gordievsky, MI6 recruited its own double agent, deep within the KGB – he ended up with the rank of colonel – who was Philby’s mirror image, ostensibly serving the KGB, in reality betraying its secrets to British intelligence.

The book is well worth reading, an excellent tale of intrigue, peril, betrayal and loyalty. But one of the most interesting stories it tells is of the visit by Mikahil Gorbachev, then the newly appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, to Britain in 1984. It was one of the most successful, and above all cordial, visits by a Soviet leader to the West. Maggie Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, declared that Gorbachev was someone with whom the West “could do business”.

At the time, Gordievsky, by then a well-established MI6 agent, was head of the political intelligence department in the KGB station (rezidentura) in London. This put him in a pivotal position for the visit. As MacIntyre explains:

As head of political intelligence in the rezidentura, he would be responsible for briefing Moscow on what Gorbachev should expect; as a British agent, he would also be briefing MI6 on Russian preparations for the visit. Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides.

Ben MacIntyre and his excellent book on Gordievsky

The same man was briefing both the British and the Soviets. And far from leading to the collapse of the talks, it ensured their success. Unlike Philby, Gordievsky betrayed no one to his death. But in this operation, as in several others that were nearly as significant, he did a great deal more than Philby to advance the cause the Soviet agent claimed to serve: making the world a safer place. And yet Gordievsky was just as assuredly committing treason.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps the greatest danger to world peace is state secrecy. And one of the best ways of countering that danger is to have talented spies betraying those secrets, effectively and repeatedly.

Treason is a terrible crime. But, paradoxically, maybe we need rather more spies keeping everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. 

And rather more traitors, not fewer.

England their England

It’s been fun to re-read Ben McIntyre’s biography of Kim Philby.

These days, Philby’s name may not be as well-known as it was in my youth. He was the man once tipped to lead Britain’s counter-espionage service, MI6, and who was involved in practically every major operation it had run between 1940 and 1951. Then he fell under suspicion of being a spy for the Soviet Union, and having therefore betrayed every single one of those operations, but the charges weren’t proved at the time. Indeed, four years later he was back in British intelligence and spying for both his masters – MI6 and the Russian KGB – until he was finally and conclusively exposed in 1963 when he defected to Moscow.

The biography’s title is apt: A Spy among Friends. Philby was recruited by the Russians in the 1930s, but waltzed into MI6 in 1940 with barely a question to answer. He had been educated at one of Britain’s great public schools (as we confusingly call our major private schools) and one of the ancient universities, Cambridge. He belonged to an elite of friends or at worst friends-of-friends, who knew that each could trust each of the others.

Kim Philby: a joy to his friends. Whom he joyfully betrayed

His closest friend, and the man he therefore duped most comprehensively, was Nicholas Elliott, who explained his own recruitment into MI6:

There was no serious vetting procedure. Sir Nevile [Bland, a senior diplomat] simply told the Foreign Office that I was all right because he knew e and had been at Eton with my father.

Membership of this elite group simply opened all doors and Philby, like Elliott, simply slid through them into the very heart of Britain’s secret world, where he could betray and harm the most.

That leaves me with some contradictory feelings. I find that sloppy, incompetent elite deeply unpleasant. It runs the country still, chiefly through its control of the top positions in business, the services and politics (principally through the Conservative Party). A fine example of that elite would be David Cameron, who was Prime Minister from 2010 to 2015 and whose legacy is Brexit.

In a sense, then, I suppose I should approve rather than censure Philby. He acted out of communist conviction. A man of the left taking on a deeply entrenched, massively incompetent and shamefully complacent group of rulers firmly anchored to the right. But I just can’t see anything admirable in what he did.

Perhaps it’s because of the cold-bloodedness and cruelty of his treachery. For instance, several hundred young Albanians were sent by the CIA and MI6 into their homeland to foment unrest against the then Communist government of Enver Hoxha. It strikes me as a brainless thing to have done, undoubtedly illegal, and violent in intent. But I can’t bring myself to like the action taken by Philby, who ensure that they went to their deaths by betraying them to the Soviets. Still worse, several thousand others died with them: relatives, friends, sometimes even people unfortunate enough to share a surname with one of the infiltrated subversives.

I don’t know. I don’t find anything admirable in that. In much the same way as I find it hard to admire a murderer, however unpleasant the victim.

Then there’s another reason. Because another possible title for McIntire’s book could have been An Englishman Abroad, had the title not already been taken by an excellent TV film about another of the Soviet spies who worked inside MI6, Guy Burgess. Even when Philby made it to Moscow, he never stopped hankering for English things. Phillip Knightley, from the spy-hunting service, MI5 – MI6’s rivals – claimed to know what Philby longed for in Moscow:

He’s a totally sad man, dreaming of a cottage in Sussex with roses around the door.

When Philby’s third wife left him in the Soviet Union, his gift to her was telling: the school scarf he had kept since his time at Westminster. He clearly felt a deep bond of loyalty to the very institutions he was betraying.

The Soviets recognised his Englishness. When Philby married his fourth wife in Moscow, the KGB’s present was a quintessentially English tea set in bone china. Even Philby himself described himself as “wholly and irreversibly English”.

Strangely enough, I too feel profoundly English. But mine is a different England from his. I recently watched The Happy Prince, a TV film on Oscar Wilde’s decline into death. In it, Wilde at one point describes England as the natural home of hypocrisy. That’s the England that Philby belonged to, champion of deception that he was.

Sadly, it seems to me that Brexit Britain has chosen to become that kind of nation. Certainly, the like of Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, leaders of the Brexit movement, belong to precisely the same type of entitled, self-selected, public-school and ancient university-educated elite that spawned Philby.

I belong, in some deeply-rooted sense, to England. But that kind of England is not where I want to live. Which is why I don’t live there any more.

The story of Kim Philby reminds me of exactly why.

Born to rule over us. And we want them to do it again...

“Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves…”

A gem of a description. Through the voice of one of his most colourful characters, Connie Sachs in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carré elegantly sums up the tragedy of the men of privilege who grew up in thirties Britain. Their generation provided some of the most swashbuckling of our spies – and of our traitors.

Kim Philby. "One of us" and not to be touched
even though he was working for them

They were educated at the finest schools and universities. Their background, their families and their training guaranteed them entry to any clubs, ministry or intelligence agency they chose. According to Ben Macintyre’s excellent book, A Spy among Friends, the most infamous of our traitors, Kim Philby, was interviewed for recruitment into counter-espionage agency MI6by a Miss Marjorie Maxse. She was:

…chief organisation officer for the Conservative Party, a role that apparently equipped her to identify people who would be good at spreading propaganda and blowing things up.

Valentine Vivian, then Deputy Head of MI6, explained his decision to clear Philby for recruitment, in what MacIntyre describes as the “quintessential definition of Britain’s Old Boys network”:

I was asked about him, and said I knew his people.

Macintyre provides invaluable insight into the workings of the British establishment. Philby drifted through that world with untroubled ease. Even after he was exposed as a double agent. In an Afterword, John Le Carré reproduces extracts from his notes of an interview he conducted with Nick Elliott, the last MI6 agent to interrogate Philby before he defected to Russia. At the time, PHilby was in Beirut. Elliott explained that nobody wanted him back in London, where a trial would only have been deeply embarrassing. But, Le Carré suggested, more extreme, even terminal, measures, could have been taken:

”… could you have him killed, liquidated?”

“My dear chap. One of us.”

One of us. Indeed. A commoner like George Blake, who passed British secrets to the Russians, could be condemned to 42 years in gaol, but not a Phlby. Allowing him to flee to Moscow was the only thing for a gentleman.

Micintyre doesn’t try to count the number of agents who were killed as a result of Philby’s spying. For a wonderful object lesson of his betrayals and British establishment ineptitude, we need only turn to Western action against Albania. The US and British decided that it would make sense to select young men from among Albanian refugees, train them, arm them and send them back into their country to foment revolution against its Communist government.

One might question the wisdom of this policy. Think Vietnam. Cuba. Cambodia. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The cause of democracy hasn’t been particularly advanced by Western interventions. But then, experience does rather show that the establishment of our great nations isn’t distinguished by good judgement or principle, even when it isn’t actively engaged in treason. I don’t approve of what the infiltrators into Albania were planning to do, and they may well have been thoroughly unpleasant people.

Even so, it’s painful to think of those young men taking their training, their weapons and their lives into their hands, to back Western plans ostensibly designed to promote their freedom, only to find that the secret police knew the time and place of their landing in the country and were waiting for them. Few got out. Most were tortured, imprisoned or killed, as were their families, their friends and even people who had the misfortune to share a surname with one of the infiltrators. Two agents were tied to the back of a jeep and dragged around until they were reduced to bloody pulp.

Their fates were sealed by Philiby. And yet the establishment, who sent the young men, felt that no punishment was appropriate.

Not for “one of us”.

Of course, when I say, “one of us”, I really mean “one of them”. This was a tiny number of people, bound by friendship and blood, especially blood. Their families had passed power from generation to generation, for centuries. As Connie Sachs understood, they had been bred to run an Empire and, after World War 2, there was no Empire for them to rule. Betrayal was an outlet for their pent-up frustration.

Sadly, that establishment hasn’t gone away. The more recent generations have lowered their sights and no longer aspire to Empire. But in all other respects they continue the tradition. The previous British Prime Minister, David Cameron, had been a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, made up of entitled sons of the obscenely rich for whom a night out was to wreck a restaurant and have Daddy pop by to pay for the damage the next day.

Britain’s current Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, was a contemporary in the same Club. Born to rule, bred to behave badly.

One of the great advantages of the European Union is that it put a limited brake on their behaviour.

It’s interesting that a major aim of the Brexit movement is to “bring back control”. Free us up from those tiresome constraints from Brussels.

So that those born to rule can take control back and rule again.

God help us all.