A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

9

Stormy Seas

Bido Kuka crouched in the hold of the Stormie Seas, huddled alongside the other fighters clutching their German Schmeisser submachine guns, as the boat rose and fell queasily in the dark Adriatic swell. Kuka felt patriotic, excited and scared. Mostly, he felt seasick. A pouch filled with gold sovereigns was strapped inside his belt. Taped to the inside of his wristwatch was a single cyanide pill, for use should he fall into the hands of the Albanian secret police, the Sigurimi. In his knapsack he carried a map, medical supplies, hand grenades, enough rations to survive for a week in the mountains, Albanian currency, propaganda leaflets, and photographs of the émigré anti-communist leaders to show to the people and inspire them to rise up against the hated dictator, Enver Hoxha. Through the porthole, the jagged cliffs of Karaburun rose blackly against the moonless night sky, the edge of a country Kuka had not seen for three years. The Englishmen could be heard on deck, whispering muffled orders as the boat drew inshore. They were strange, these Englishmen, huge sun-reddened men, who spoke a barely comprehensible language and laughed when there was nothing funny to laugh at. They had brought along a dog, called Lean-To; one had even brought his wife. They were pretending to be on a boating holiday. The man called ‘Lofty’ kept his binoculars trained on the cliffs. The one called ‘Geoffrey’ rehearsed, once more, the procedure for operating the wireless, a bulky contraption powered by a machine that looked like a bicycle without wheels. Kuka and his eight companions smoked in nervy silence. The Stormie Seas edged towards the Albanian shore.

Six months earlier Bido Kuka had been recruited for Operation Valuable in a displaced persons camp outside Rome. Kuka was a ‘Ballist’, a member of the Balli Kombëtar, the Albanian nationalist group who had fought the Nazis during the war, and then the communists after it. With the communist takeover of Albania hundreds of Ballists had been arrested, tortured and killed, and Kuka had fled, with other nationalists, to Italy. Since then he had spent three miserable years in Fraschetti camp, nursing his loathing of communism, rehearsing the Balli Kombëtar motto ‘Albania for the Albanians, Death to the Traitors’, and plotting his return. When he was approached by a fellow émigré and asked to join a new guerrilla unit for secret anti-communist operations inside Albania, he did not hesitate. As another recruit put it: ‘There was no question of refusing. When your life is devoted to your country you are prepared to do anything to help it.’ On 14 July 1949, Kuka and a fellow Ballist named Sami Lepenica boarded a military plane in Rome, and flew to the British island of Malta in the Mediterranean. They had no travel documents. A British Army officer, flapping a red handkerchief by way of a recognition signal, marched them past the customs barrier, and into a car. An hour later the bemused Albanians arrived at the gateway to a large castle, surrounded by a moat: Fort Bingemma, a Victorian citadel on the island’s southwest corner, selected by British intelligence as the ideal place from which to launch an anti-communist counter-revolution.

Over the next three months, Kuka and some thirty other Albanian recruits underwent intensive training under the watchful (if slightly mad) eye of Lieutenant-Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley, an aristocratic British Army officer with a legendary taste for derring-do. During the war Smiley had fought the Italians in Abyssinia as part of the Somaliland Camel Corps, foiled a German-backed coup to unseat the King of Iraq, fought alongside Siamese guerrillas and liberated 4,000 Allied prisoners (‘all absolutely stark naked except for a ball bag’), from the Japanese camp at Ubon. But it was in Albania that he earned his reputation for raw courage: in 1943 he parachuted into northern Greece, and set about blowing up bridges, ambushing German troops, and training guerrillas. He emerged from the war with a deep love of Albania, a loathing for Hoxha and the communists, a Military Cross, and facial scars from a prematurely exploding briefcase. When MI6 needed someone to equip, train and infiltrate anti-communist fighters into Albania, Smiley was the obvious choice. He was imperialist, fearless, romantic and unwary, and in all these respects, he was a neat reflection of Operation Valuable.

The training programme was brief but intensive, and conducted amid rigid secrecy. A series of British instructors, including an eccentric Oxford don, provided instruction in map-reading, unarmed combat, machine-gun marksmanship, and operating a radio with a pedal generator. Since the instructors spoke no Albanian, and the Albanians spoke not a word of English, training was conducted in sign language. This explains why Kuka’s conception of his mission was somewhat vague: get into Albania, head for his hometown near the Greek border, sound out the possibilities for armed insurrection, then get out and report back. None of the recruits were officers, and few had any military training. Life in the camps had left some with malnutrition, and all were quite small. The British, with more than a hint of condescension, called them ‘the pixies’.

In late September, Bido Kuka and eight other recruits were taken to Otranto on the Italian coast, fifty-five miles across the Adriatic from Albania. Disguised as local fishermen, they were loaded into a fishing vessel, and at a rendezvous point twenty miles off the Albanian coast, they were transferred to the Stormie Seas, a forty-three-ton schooner painted to resemble a pleasure boat but containing a mighty ninety-horsepower engine, concealed fuel tanks and enough munitions to start a small war. The Stormie Seas was commanded by Sam Barclay and John Leatham, two intrepid former Royal Navy officers who had spent the previous year running supplies from Athens to Salonika for the forces fighting the Greek communist guerrillas. MI6 offered them the sum of £50 to transport the insurgents to the Albanian coast, which Leatham thought was more than generous: ‘We were looking only for free adventure and a living.’

Shortly after 9 p.m. on 3 October, 200 yards off the Karaburun peninsula, the heavily armed ‘pixies’ clambered into two rubber boats and headed towards a cove, rowed by two stout former marines, ‘Lofty’ Cooling and Derby Allen. The Karaburun was barely inhabited, a wild place of goat tracks and thorny scrub. Having dropped off the men and their equipment, the Englishmen rowed back to the Stormie Seas. Looking back at the retreating coast, they saw a light flash suddenly at the cliff top, and then go out again. The nine pixies were already heading up the cliff. The going was slow in the deep darkness. As dawn broke, they split into two parties. Bido Kuka and four others, including his friend Ramis Matuka and his cousin Ahmet, headed south towards his home region, while the remaining four, led by Sami Lepenica, headed north. As they separated, Kuka was struck by a sudden foreboding, the sensation, intense but unfocused, ‘that the communists were ready and waiting for them’.

After a day spent hiding in a cave, Kuka and his men set off again at nightfall. In the morning they approached the village of Gjorm, a wartime centre of resistance and home to many Balli Kombëtar sympathisers. As they drew near, a young girl ran towards them shouting: ‘Brothers, you’re all going to be killed!’ Breathlessly, she explained that the other group had already been ambushed by government forces: three of the four had been killed, including Lepenica, and the fourth had vanished. Two days earlier no less a personage than Beqir Balluku, the Albanian army chief of staff, had arrived with hundreds of troops, and the Karaburun ridge was crawling with government forces, scouring every village, track, cave and gully for the ‘fascist terrorists’. Local shepherds had been instructed to report anything suspicious, on pain of death. The Albanian guerrillas thanked the girl, gratefully seized the bread and milk she offered, and ran.

*

At the very moment Bido Kuka was scrambling for his life through the Albanian mountains, Kim Philby was steaming towards New York aboard the RMS Caronia, the most luxurious ocean liner afloat. His many friends in MI5 and MI6 had given him a ‘memorable send-off’. The Caronia was barely a year old; a spectacular floating hotel nicknamed the ‘Green Goddess’ on account of her pale green livery. She was fitted with every modern luxury, including sumptuous Art Deco interiors, an open-air lido and terraced decks. The only class of travel was first. Described as ‘a private club afloat’, the liner had 400 catering staff for 700 passengers. On arriving in his panelled cabin with private bathroom, Philby had found a crate of champagne awaiting him, a gift from a ‘disgustingly rich friend’, Victor Rothschild. Philby might have disapproved of Rothschild’s riches, but he thoroughly approved of his champagne. The seven-day voyage was made all the more pleasant by the company of the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, an affable clubland acquaintance of Philby’s with a walrus moustache and a terrific thirst. Philby and Lancaster settled into the cocktail bar, and started drinking their way to America. ‘I began to feel that I would enjoy my first transatlantic crossing,’ wrote Philby.

The Caronia docked in New York on 7 October. The FBI sent out a motor launch to meet Philby; like Bido Kuka, he was whisked through customs without any of the usual formalities. That night he stayed in a high-rise hotel overlooking Central Park, before catching the train to Washington DC. Alongside the track the sumac shrubs were still in flower, but autumn was in the air and the leaves were beginning to turn. Philby’s first glimpse of the American landscape took his breath away. The fall, he later wrote, is ‘one of the few glories of America which Americans have never exaggerated because exaggeration is impossible’.

At Union Station, he was met by Peter Dwyer of MI6, the outgoing station chief, and immediately plunged into a whirlwind of introductions and meetings, with officials of the CIA, FBI, the State Department and the Canadian secret service. All were delighted to shake hands with this urbane Englishman whose impressive reputation preceded him – but none more than James Jesus Angleton, his former protégé, now a powerful figure in the CIA. Angleton had prepared the ground, telling his American colleagues about Philby’s wartime work and how much he ‘admired him as a “professional”’. The Anglo-American intelligence relationship was still close in 1949, and no two spies symbolised that intimacy more than Kim Philby and James Angleton.

Angleton remained, in many ways, an Englishman. ‘I was brought up in England in my formative years,’ he said, many years later, ‘and I must confess that I learned, at least I was disciplined to learn, certain features of life, and what I regarded as duty.’ Honour, loyalty, handmade suits, strong drinks, deep leather armchairs in smoky clubs: this was the kind of England that Angleton had come to know, and admire, through Philby and Elliott. There was an element within American intelligence that took a more hard-eyed view of Britain’s continuing claims to greatness, a younger generation unmoved by the nostalgic bonds of war, but Angleton was not of that stamp. His time in Ryder Street had left a permanent imprint on him, personally and professionally. Philby had introduced him to the arcane mysteries of the Double Cross system, the strange, endlessly reflecting conundrum of counter-intelligence, and the very British idea that only a few, a select few, can be truly trusted. Philby was Angleton’s souvenir of war, a time of duty, unshakeable alliance and dependability. Angleton paraded his English friend around Washington like a trophy.

While Philby was clinking glasses in Washington, on the other side of the world, David Smiley waited, with mounting unease, for the Albanian guerrillas to make contact. Twice a day, morning and evening, the MI6 radio operator stationed in a large mansion on the coast of Corfu tuned in at the agreed time, but a week had passed with no word from the pixies. Finally a hasty message was picked up, sent from the caves above Gjorm where Kuka and his team were in hiding: ‘Things have gone wrong . . . three men killed . . . police know everything about us.’ The Albanians were terrified: the bulky generator gave out a high-pitched whining sound when pedalled at full speed, the noise bouncing off the hills and threatening to reveal them. They were running out of food, and dared not descend to the village to beg or steal more. Bido Kuka persuaded the others to make a break for it and try to reach his home village of Nivica just twenty-five miles to the south. The route passed though inhospitable terrain and the government forces were doubtless still out in force, but from Nivica it was only thirty-five miles to the Greek border.

A four-day trek, walking at night, skirting patrols and hiding during daylight, brought them to the home Kuka had last seen three years earlier. He was welcomed, but cautiously. When Kuka explained that they were the vanguard of a British-backed force that would overthrow Hoxha, the villagers were sceptical: Why were they so few in number? Where were the British? Where were the guns? Kuka sensed that even here, they faced mortal danger. The group declined offers to spend the night in the village. They retreated instead to the mountains, and agreed to push on for the border as fast as possible, in two groups: Bido Kuka, Ramis Matuka and a third man headed south; his cousin Ahmet and the fifth man took a more direct route. Patrols were everywhere; three times, Kuka’s group narrowly avoided capture. They were still a dozen miles from the border, trudging through a narrow ravine, when a voice boomed out of the darkness demanding that they identify themselves or be shot down. ‘Who are you?’ called Kuka, cocking his machine gun. ‘Police,’ came the answer. The three men opened fire. The police, dug in above them, returned fire. Ramis Matuka fell dead. Kuka and his last companion, firing wildly, fled into the woods.

Three days later, exhausted and famished, Kuka and his comrade finally reached the Greek border. They were immediately arrested, jailed by the Greek police and interrogated. Kuka stuck to his story that he was ‘Enver Zenelli’, the name on his forged Albanian identity card. ‘We said we were ordinary Albanians fleeing the country.’ The Greek border guards were disbelieving, ‘and would have shot them for tuppence’. After several weeks, a British officer appeared. Kuka uttered the code phrase agreed back in Malta: ‘The sun has risen.’ Finally they were free. The survivors were flown to Athens, lodged in a safe house, and debriefed by two British intelligence officers.

By any objective estimate, the first phase of Operation Valuable had been a debacle. Of the nine guerrillas who landed in October, four were dead, one almost certainly captured, one had vanished, the others had barely escaped with their lives, and ‘several Albanian civilians had also been arrested and killed’, accused of aiding the guerrillas. A second landing group, arriving soon after the first, had fared little better. The Albanian forces were primed and waiting, clearly aware of the incursion, if not of its precise timing and location.

With understatement verging on fantasy, MI6 described the first phase of the operation merely as ‘disappointing’. The loss of half the initial force was a setback but not a disaster, and the death toll was ‘judged by wartime standards to be acceptable’. Colonel Smiley vowed to press ahead, with fresh incursions, better-trained guerrillas, and greater US involvement. Albania would not be won overnight, and ‘it would be wrong to abandon such an important exercise’, particularly now that MI6 had one of its highest fliers installed in Washington, ready and more than willing to liaise with the Americans on the next stage of Operation Valuable.

Just a few days after his arrival in Washington, Philby was appointed joint-commander of the Anglo-American Special Policy Committee, responsible for running the Albanian operation with his American opposite number, James McCargar. The Americans would play an increasing role in Operation Valuable (which they codenamed, perhaps more realistically, ‘Fiend’), not least by financing it, but Philby ‘was the one who made all the operational decisions’.

*

James McCargar was a former journalist from a wealthy Californian family, who had made a name for himself in the post-war period by arranging escape routes out of Hungary for scientists and intellectuals fleeing communism. He smuggled one Romanian woman out in the boot of his car, and then married her. Like many American intelligence officers of the time, McCargar had an exaggerated respect for his British counterparts, and his new colleague came with glowing credentials. ‘Philby was a great charmer. He came to us with an enormous reputation,’ recalled McCargar. ‘One had the feeling one could have confidence in him.’ Philby seemed to exemplify the sort of qualities that Americans hoped to see in their British allies: cheerful, resolute, witty and exceedingly generous with the bottle. ‘He had charm, warmth and an engaging, self-deprecating humour,’ said McCargar. ‘He drank a lot, but then so did we all in those days. We floated out of the war on a sea of drink without its having much effect. I considered him a friend.’

Philby loved Washington, and Washington loved him. Doors were flung open, the invitations poured in, and few people needed to meet him more than once before they, too, considered him a friend. Aileen also seemed to find strength in Washington’s welcoming atmosphere. The family moved into a large, two-storey house at 4100 Nebraska Avenue, which was soon a riot of children’s toys, full ashtrays and empty bottles. In Nicholas Elliott’s words, Philby was ‘undoubtedly devoted to his children’, a trait which further endeared him to his new American friends and colleagues: here was a family man, the quintessential English gentleman, a man one could trust. Within weeks, it seems, Philby had made contact with just about everyone of note in American intelligence. To their faces he was politeness personified; behind their backs, vituperative. There was Johnny Boyd, assistant director of the FBI (‘by any objective standard, a dreadful man’); Frank Wisner, head of the Office of Policy Coordination (‘balding and self-importantly running to fat’); Bill Harvey of CIA counter-intelligence (‘a former FBI man . . . sacked for drunkenness’); CIA chief Walter Bedell Smith (‘a cold, fishy eye’); deputy CIA head and future chief Allen Dulles (‘bumbling’); Bob Lamphere of the FBI (‘puddingy’) and many more. The house on Nebraska Avenue soon became a gathering place for Washington’s intelligence elite. ‘He entertained a lot of Americans,’ said another CIA officer. ‘The wine flowed, and the whisky too.’ Aileen played the role of salon hostess, tottering around with trays of drinks, and drinking her fair share. One guest recalled only this of Philby’s parties: ‘They were long, and very, very wet.’

Philby seemed to invite intimacy. His knowing smile, ‘suggestive of complicity in some private joke, conveyed an unspoken understanding of the underlying ironies of our work’. He made a point of dropping in on the offices of American colleagues and counterparts in the late afternoon, knowing that his hosts would sooner or later (and usually sooner) ‘suggest drifting out to a friendly bar for a further round of shop talk’. Trading internal information is a particular weakness of the intelligence world; spies cannot explain their work to outsiders, so they seize every opportunity to discuss it with their own kind. ‘Intelligence officers talk trade among themselves all the time,’ said one CIA officer. ‘Philby was privy to a hell of a lot beyond what he should have known.’ The CIA and FBI were rivals, sometimes viciously so, with a peculiar social division between the two arms of American intelligence that was echoed by the competition between MI5 and MI6. Philby characterised CIA operatives as upper-class wine-drinkers, while the FBI were earthier beer-drinking types; Philby was happy to drink quantities of both, with either, while trying to ‘please one party without offending the other’. Philby’s office was in the British embassy, but he was often to be found at the CIA or FBI headquarters, or the Pentagon, where a room was set aside for meetings on the Albanian operation. Few subjects were out of bounds: ‘The sky was the limit . . . he would have known as much as he wanted to find out.’

James Angleton was now chief of Staff A, in command of foreign intelligence operations, and in Philby’s estimation ‘the driving force’ within the intelligence-gathering division of the CIA. A strange mystique clung to Angleton; he used the name ‘Lothar Metzl’, and invented a cover story that he had been a Viennese café pianist before the war. Behind his house in the suburbs of North Arlington he constructed a heated greenhouse, the better to cultivate his orchids and his aura of knowing eccentricity. In the basement he polished semi-precious stones. He carried a gold fob watch; his suits and accent remained distinctly English. Angleton tended to describe his work in fishing metaphors: ‘I got a few nibbles last night,’ he would remark obscurely, after an evening trawling the files. In intelligence circles he inspired admiration, gossip and some fear. ‘It was the belief within the CIA that Angleton possessed more secrets than anyone else, and grasped their meaning better than anyone else.’

Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, was the most famous restaurant in the capital, probably the most expensive, and certainly the most exclusive. Harvey’s Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Oyster Saloon started serving steamed oysters, broiled lobster and Crab Imperial in 1820, and had continued to do so, in colossal quantities, ever since. In 1863, notwithstanding the Civil War, Harvey’s diners were getting through 500 wagonloads of oysters a week. Every US President since Ulysses S. Grant had dined there, and the restaurant enjoyed an unrivalled reputation as the place to be seen for people of power and influence. The black waiters in pressed white uniforms were discreet, the Martinis potent, the napkins stiff as cardboard and the tables spaced far enough apart to ensure privacy for the most secret conversations. Ladies entered by a separate entrance, and were not permitted in the main dining room. Most evenings, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover could be seen at his corner table, eating with Clyde Tolson, his deputy, and possibly his lover. Hoover was said to be addicted to Harvey’s oysters; he never paid for his meals.

Angleton and Philby began to lunch regularly at Harvey’s restaurant, at first once a week, then three times a fortnight. They spoke on the telephone at least every other day. Their lunches became a sort of ritual, a ‘habit’ in Philby’s words, beginning with bourbon on the rocks and proceeding through lobster and wine and ending in brandy and cigars. Philby was impressed both by Angleton’s grasp of intelligence and his appetite for food and drink. ‘He demonstrated regularly that overwork was not his only vice,’ wrote Philby. ‘He was one of the thinnest men I have ever met, and one of the biggest eaters. Lucky Jim!’ The two men could be seen, hunched in animated conversation, talking, drinking, laughing and enjoying their shared love of secrecy. Angleton had few close friends, and fewer confidants. Philby had many friends, and had refined the giving and receiving of confidences to an art form. They fitted one another perfectly.

‘Our close association was, I am sure, inspired by genuine friendliness,’ wrote Philby. ‘But we both had ulterior motives . . . By cultivating me to the full, he could better keep me under wraps. For my part, I was more than content to string him along. The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he would suspect covert action. Who gained most from this complex game I cannot say. But I had one big advantage. I knew what he was doing for CIA and he knew what I was doing for SIS. But the real nature of my interest was something he did not know.’ Beneath their friendship was an unspoken competition to see who could out-think, and out-drink, the other. Angleton, according to one associate, ‘used to pride himself that he could drink Kim under the table and still walk away with useful information. Can you imagine how much information he had to trade in those booze-ups?’

‘Our discussions ranged over the whole world,’ Philby recalled. They spoke of the various covert operations against the Soviet Union, the anti-communist insurgents being slipped into Albania and other countries behind the Iron Curtain; they discussed the intelligence operations under way in France, Italy and Germany, and resources pouring into anti-communist projects worldwide, including the recruiting of exiles for subversion behind the Iron Curtain. ‘Both CIA and SIS were up to their ears in émigré politics,’ wrote Philby. Angleton explained how the CIA had taken over the anti-Soviet spy network established by Reinhard Gehlen, the former chief of German intelligence on the Eastern Front who had offered his services to the US after surrendering in 1945. Gehlen’s spies and informants included many former Nazis, but the CIA was not choosy about its allies in the new war against communism. By 1948 the CIA was funnelling some $1.5 million (around $14.5 million today) into Gehlen’s spy ring. Philby was all ears: ‘Many of Harvey’s lobsters went to provoke Angleton into defending, with chapter and verse, the past record and current activities of the von Gehlen organisation.’ CIA interventions in Greece and Turkey to hold back communism; covert operations in Iran, the Baltics and Guatemala; secret American plans in Chile, Cuba, Angola and Indonesia; blueprints for Allied cooperation in the event of war with the USSR. All this and more was laid before Philby, between friends, as Angleton gorged and gossiped over the starched tablecloths and full glasses at Harvey’s. ‘During those long, boozy lunches and dinners, Philby must have picked him clean,’ a fellow officer later wrote.

But Philby and Angleton were also professionals. After every lunch, Angleton returned to his office, and dictated a long memo to his secretary, Gloria Loomis, reporting in detail his discussions with the obliging MI6 liaison chief. ‘Everything was written up,’ Loomis later insisted. Philby did likewise, dictating his own memo for MI6 to his secretary Edith Whitfield, who had accompanied him to Washington from Istanbul (much to Aileen’s annoyance). Later, at home in Nebraska Avenue, Philby would write up his own notes, for other eyes.

*

Philby liked to portray the Soviet intelligence service as an organisation of unparalleled efficiency. In truth, Moscow Centre was frequently beset by bureaucratic bungling, inertia and incompetence, coupled with periodic blood-letting. Before Philby’s arrival, the Soviet spy outpost in Washington had been through a period of ‘chaotic’ turbulence, with the recall of two successive rezidents. Initially, Philby had no direct contact with Soviet intelligence in the US, preferring to send any information via Guy Burgess in London, as he had from Istanbul. Finally, four months after Philby’s arrival, Moscow woke up to the realisation that it should take better care of its veteran spy.

On 5 March a young man stepped off the ship Batory, newly arrived in New York harbour from Gdynia in Poland. His passport proclaimed him to be an American citizen of Polish origin named Ivan Kovalik; his real name was Valeri Mikhailovich Makayev, a thirty-two-year-old Russian intelligence officer with orders to establish himself under cover in New York and arrange a way for Philby to communicate with Moscow Centre. Makayev swiftly obtained a job teaching musical composition at New York University, and started an affair with a Polish dancer who owned a ballet school in Manhattan. Makayev was a good musician, and one of nature’s romantics, but he was a hopeless case officer. His bosses had supplied him with $25,000 for his mission, which he proceeded to spend, mostly on himself and his ballerina. Finally, Makayev got word to Philby that he had arrived. They met in New York, and Philby’s newly arrived case officer handed over a camera for photographing documents. Thereafter, they would rendezvous at different points between New York and Washington, in Baltimore or Philadelphia. After nine months, Makayev had managed to set up two communication channels to Moscow, using a Finnish seaman as a courier and a postal route via an agent in London. The system was slow and cumbersome; Philby was wary of face-to-face meetings, and unimpressed by his new case officer; Makayev was much more interested in ballet than espionage. Philby was producing more valuable intelligence for Moscow than at any time in his life, yet he had never been run more incompetently.

Frank Wisner, the CIA officer in charge of insurgent operations behind the Iron Curtain, was baffled: every bid to undermine communism by secretly fomenting resistance within the USSR and among its satellites seemed to be going spectacularly wrong. But Wisner – or ‘The Whiz’, as he liked to be known – refused to be downcast, let alone change tack. Despite a disappointing start, the Albanian operation would continue. ‘We’ll get it right next time,’ Wisner promised Philby.

But they did not get it right. Instead, it continued to go wrong, and not just in Albania. Funds, equipment and arms were funnelled to the anti-communist resistance in Poland, which turned out to be nothing more than a front, operated by Soviet intelligence. Anti-communist Lithuanians, Estonians and Armenians were recruited, and then dropped into their homelands by British and American planes; nationalist White Russians were sent in to continue the fight against the Bolsheviks. Almost all mysteriously disappeared. ‘We had agents parachuting in, floating in, walking in, boating in,’ said one former CIA officer. ‘Virtually all these operations were complete failures . . . they were all rolled up.’ The CIA and MI6 kept one another informed of exactly where and when their respective teams were going in, to avoid overlap and confusion. Philby, as the liaison officer in Washington, was responsible for passing on ‘the timing and geographical co-ordinates’ from one intelligence agency to another, and then another. Ukraine was considered particularly fertile ground for an insurgency, with an established resistance group active in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1949, the first British-trained team of Ukrainian insurgents was sent in with radio equipment. They were never heard of again. Two more teams followed the next year, and then three more six-man units were parachuted to drop points in Ukraine and inside the Polish border. All vanished. ‘I do not know what happened to the parties concerned,’ Philby later wrote, with ruthless irony. ‘But I can make an informed guess.’

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