A Spy Among Friends (21 page)

None of the incursions had proved more catastrophic, more spectacularly valueless, than Operation Valuable. Undaunted, the British continued to train the ‘pixies’ in Malta, while the CIA established a separate training camp for Albanian insurgents, now including teams of parachutists, in a walled villa outside Heidelberg. ‘We knew that they would retaliate against our families,’ said one recruit, but ‘we had high hopes.’ At the same time, MI6 prepared to drop thousands of propaganda leaflets over Albania from unmanned hot air balloons: ‘The boys in London imagined a rain of pamphlets over Albanian towns with thousands of Albanians picking them out of the air, reading them and then preparing themselves for the liberation.’ The first parachutists were flown in by Polish former RAF pilots in late 1950, crossing into Albanian airspace at a height of just 200 feet to avoid radar.

The communist forces were ready and waiting. Two days earlier, hundreds of security police had poured into the area of the drop zone. A policeman was stationed in every village. They even knew the names of the arriving insurgents. Some of the parachutists were killed on landing, others captured. Only a few escaped. The next drop, the following July, was even more disastrous. One group of four parachutists was mown down immediately; another was surrounded, with two killed and two captured; the last group of four fled to a house, and barricaded themselves in. The police set fire to the building, and burned them all to death. British-trained fighters continued to filter into Albania, some by boat and others on foot across the Greek border, only to be intercepted like their predecessors. Meanwhile, across Albania, the Sigurimi began rounding up relatives and friends of the insurgents. A shared surname was enough to invite suspicion. For each guerrilla, as many as forty others were shot or thrown into prison. Two captives were ‘tied to the back of a Jeep and dragged through the streets until their bodies were reduced to a bloody pulp’. A handful of the fighters apparently escaped and sent back radio messages, urging the British and Americans to send more forces. Only much later did it emerge that the Sigurimi was running a classic double cross: the messages were sent by captives, forced to reveal their codes and transmitting with guns to their heads. ‘Our famous radio game brought about the ignominious failure of the plans of the foreign enemy,’ bragged Enver Hoxha. ‘The bands of criminals who were dropped in by parachute or infiltrated across the border at our request came like lambs to the slaughter.’

Show trials were later staged with captured survivors – propaganda spectacles at which the tortured, semi-coherent defendants condemned themselves and cursed their capitalist backers, before being sentenced to long prison terms, from which few emerged alive.

In London and Washington, as the operation lurched from failure to calamity, morale slumped, and suspicions rose. ‘It was obvious there was a leak somewhere,’ said one CIA officer. ‘We had several meetings, trying to figure out where the thing was going wrong. We had to ask ourselves how long we were prepared to go on dropping these young men into the bag.’ The British privately blamed the Americans, and vice versa. ‘Our security was very, very tight,’ insisted Colonel Smiley.

In fact, the secrecy surrounding the operation was anything but secure. Soviet intelligence had penetrated not just the Albanian émigré groups in Europe, but every other community of disgruntled exiles. James Angleton learned, through his Italian contacts, that Valuable had been ‘well and truly blown’ from the start: Italian intelligence had been watching the
Stormie Seas
from the moment she set sail for Albania. Journalists also got wind of the story. Once the first teams of guerrillas had been intercepted, the Albanian authorities were naturally braced for more. The operation was flawed from its inception: Hoxha was more firmly entrenched, and the opposition to him much weaker, than Anglo-American intelligence imagined. The planners had simply believed that ‘Albania would fall from the Soviet imperial tree like a ripe plum and other fruit would soon follow’. And they were simply wrong.

Operation Valuable might well have failed without Philby, but not so utterly, nor so bloodily. Looking back, the planners knew whom to blame for the embarrassing and unmitigated failure. ‘There is little question that Philby not only informed Moscow of overall British and American planning,’ wrote CIA historian Harry Rositzke, ‘but provided details on the individual despatch of agent teams before they arrived in Albania.’ Yuri Modin, the NKVD controller in London who passed on Philby’s messages to Moscow, was also explicit: ‘He gave us vital information about the number of men involved, the day and the time of the landing, the weapons they were bringing and their precise programme of action . . . the Soviets duly passed on Philby’s information to Albanians who set up ambushes.’

Philby later gloried in what he had done: ‘The agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on murder, sabotage and assassination. They were quite as ready as I was to contemplate bloodshed in the service of a political ideal. They knew the risks they were running. I was serving the interests of the Soviet Union and those interests required that these men were defeated. To the extent that I helped defeat them, even if it caused their deaths, I have no regrets.’

The precise death toll will never be known: somewhere between 100 and 200 Albanian guerrillas perished; if their families and other reprisal victims are taken into account, the figure rises into the thousands. Years later, those who had deployed the doomed Albanian insurgents came to the conclusion that, over the course of two lunch-filled years, James Angleton ‘gave Philby over drinks the precise coordinates for every drop zone of the CIA in Albania’.

At the heart of the tragedy lay a close friendship, and a great betrayal. Lunch at Harvey’s restaurant came with a hefty bill.

See Notes on Chapter 9

10

Homer’s Odyssey

The annual Thanksgiving party at the Angleton home in 1950 was not a sober affair. Jim and Cicely Angleton invited the entire Philby clan to their Arlington house for a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. The other guests included Wilfred Mann, a physicist in the British embassy’s science section. According to some accounts William E. Colby, future head of the CIA, was also present. All four men were deeply involved in the accelerating nuclear arms race, and the espionage attendant on it. The Soviet Union had carried out its first nuclear test a year earlier, thanks in part to Moscow’s spies penetrating the West’s atomic programme. The Venona intercepts identified one of the Soviet spies at Los Alamos labs as Klaus Fuchs, a German-born nuclear physicist. Philby had alerted Moscow Centre when the trap was closing on Fuchs, but too late to save him: he confessed under questioning and was now serving a fourteen-year prison sentence. A number of other Soviet agents were warned that they too were in danger. Several fled. Two who did not were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, organisers of a Soviet spy ring in New York. In 1953 they would be executed.

Spies were dying. President Truman was calling for a build-up of weapons to halt the spread of Soviet influence around the globe. There was talk of nuclear war, and the Western intelligence services were locked in increasingly bloody conflict with their Soviet rivals. The opposing sides in that secret war were ranged around Angleton’s dinner table, but no hint of discord marred the happy occasion, as Philby joined his friends in giving bibulous thanks for America’s bounty. ‘Jim and Kim were very fond of each other,’ recalled Cicely Angleton. ‘We all liked him.’ Philby was only thirty-eight but looked a lot older. There was already something raddled in his handsome features. The eyes remained bright and appealing, but the bags beneath them were growing heavier, and the lunches at Harvey’s were taking a toll on his waistline. ‘After a year of keeping up with Angleton,’ he wrote, ‘I took the advice of an elderly lady friend and went on a diet, dropping from thirteen stone to eleven in three months.’

These were heady times in Washington, the young superpower capital suffused with wealth and self-confidence. Philby moved easily among the leaders of this new world order, a warm and reassuring presence among the Cold Warriors. Philby was not a greedy man, but he wanted for nothing. ‘If you have a lot of money,’ reflected this secret communist at the heart of capitalist power, ‘you can organise your life in a rather pleasant way.’ Philby’s life could not have been organised more pleasantly. He urged Nicholas Elliott to come and visit him. ‘The more visitors I had in Washington,’ he wrote, ‘the more spies I got my finger into.’ And Philby wanted a finger in every spy.

On the surface, Philby might appear as serene and affable as ever, but inside a small worm of anxiety was burrowing away. The twinge he had felt on learning that a Soviet spy had been located in the wartime embassy grew markedly more uncomfortable in June 1950, when the Venona decrypts revealed a ‘valuable agent network’ operating in Britain in 1945, including a ‘particularly important’ spy codenamed ‘Stanley’. The codebreakers were gaining ground every day. Philby decided to pay a visit to the US government decoding centre at Arlington Hall, Virginia. Meredith Gardner, the chief of the Venona project, welcomed Philby to his secret word-laboratory, and later recalled the strange intensity with which the Englishman had observed the decryption teams at work, picking away at the vast spy puzzle. ‘Philby was looking on with no doubt rapt attention but he never said a word, never a word.’ Philby knew that a single word, correctly identifying ‘Stanley’ as him, would be enough to sink him.

A joint investigation by the FBI and MI5 had not yet identified the spy codenamed ‘Homer’. The investigators seemed convinced that the mole in the British embassy must be a local employee, a janitor or servant, even though the quality of the information ‘Homer’ had supplied was high grade. After leaving Washington in 1948, Donald Maclean had moved on to Cairo as counsellor and head of chancery at the British embassy. His behaviour had become increasingly bizarre under the strain of his double life, yet no one imagined that this urbane, cultured English diplomat might be a spy for Russia. 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’. But that presumption could not shield him for ever. As the investigators dug deeper, Philby kept Moscow informed of their progress. ‘Maclean should stay in his post as long as possible,’ Moscow Centre told him, while noting that it might be necessary to extract him ‘before the net closed in’.

Philby laid out his own safety net, knowing that if the Venona decrypts unmasked Maclean then all his associates would come under suspicion and the trail, eventually, could lead to Philby himself. He discreetly hinted to MI5 that he would like to expand his role in Washington, ostensibly to improve efficiency, in reality to ensure even closer monitoring of the ‘Homer’ investigation. ‘He clearly feels he is not really getting enough scope,’ wrote Guy Liddell of MI5. ‘I thought I discerned a fly thrown over me in the form of a suggestion that it was really unnecessary for us to have a Washington representative and that he could carry the whole business.’ The counter-intelligence chief resisted Philby’s veiled offer to represent MI5 as well as MI6, though not out of any suspicion of the real motive behind it. Philby also lobbied C in London to notify him in advance of any decoding breakthrough, to ‘give us more time for studying it’; and, if necessary, more time to get away.

Philby’s marriage was under severe strain once more. The Philby clan was growing, but while Philby told Nicholas Elliott of his ‘parental pride in being the father of five children’, the arrival of another baby increased the burden on Aileen, who was again showing signs of instability. She was now drinking almost as much as her husband. Their relationship took another body blow when a letter arrived from Guy Burgess, announcing cheerily: ‘I have a shock for you. I have just been posted to Washington.’ Burgess asked to stay with the Philbys ‘for a few days’, while he looked for somewhere to live. Aileen was appalled. ‘I know him only too well,’ she wrote to friends. ‘He will never leave our house.’

Burgess was still in the Foreign Office, although how he had managed to retain employment in that staid and respectable organisation remains a mystery. In a career not so much chequered as blotched, he had worked in the news department, as assistant to the minister of state in the Foreign Office, and in the Far Eastern section. Throughout that time, he supplied the Russians with every secret document he could lay his hands on, removing them in the evening and returning them in the morning after they had been copied by the Soviets. Burgess was as entertaining as ever, and pure, undiluted trouble: he boasted about his espionage contacts, made no attempt to hide his promiscuous homosexuality, and left a trail of chaos in his wake. He was usually drunk, and frequently insulting, particularly to important people. He failed to pay his bills, picked fights, identified MI6 officers in public places and went on a bender in Gibraltar of such scale that the local MI5 officer could not help being impressed: ‘I do not think that even in Gibraltar have I ever seen anyone put away so much hard liquor in so short a time.’ On another occasion he got into a fight with a Foreign Office colleague, fell down the marble steps of the Royal Automobile Club and fractured his skull, after which his behaviour grew even more extreme. Burgess was permanently on the point of being sacked. Instead, he was appointed information officer at the British embassy in Washington, a job requiring delicacy and tact for which he was monumentally unsuited. Laughably, Guy Liddell insisted that Burgess ‘was not the sort of person who would deliberately pass confidential information to unauthorised persons’. It was hoped that Burgess’s ‘eccentricities’ (code for his homosexuality) might be less conspicuous in the US. But the Foreign Office security chief warned Sir Robert Mackenzie, the security officer at the Washington embassy, that with Burgess in town, he should be prepared for even worse escapades. Mackenzie was heard to mutter: ‘What does he mean
worse
? Goats?’