The Sword and the Shield

^FOUR THE MAGNIFICENT FIVE

Among the select group of inter-war heroes of foreign intelligence whose portraits hang today on the walls of the SVR’s Memory Room at Yasenevo is the Austrian Jew Arnold Deutsch, probably the most talented of all the Great Illegals. According to an SVR official eulogy, the portrait immediately “attracts the visitor’s attention” to “its intelligent, penetrating eyes, and strong-willed countenance.” Deutsch’s role as an illegal was not publicly acknowledged by the KGB until 1990.¹ Even now, some aspects of his career are considered unsuitable for publication in Moscow.

Deutsch’s academic career was one of the most brilliant in the history of Soviet intelligence. In July 1928, two months after his twenty-fourth birthday and less than five years after entering Vienna University as an undergraduate, he was awarded the degree of PhD with distinction. Though his thesis had been on chemistry, Deutsch had also become deeply immersed in philosophy and psychology. His description of himself in university documents throughout his student years as an observant Jew (mosaisch)² was probably intended to conceal his membership of the Communist Party. Deutsch’s religious faith had been replaced by an ardent commitment to the Communist International’s vision of a new world order which would free the human race from exploitation and alienation. The revolutionary myth image of the world’s first worker-peasant state blinded both Deutsch and the ideological agents he later recruited to the increasingly brutal reality of Stalin’s Russia. Immediately after leaving Vienna University, Deutsch began secret work as a courier for OMS, Comintern’s international liaison department, traveling to Romania, Greece, Palestine and Syria. His Austrian wife, Josefine, whom he married in 1929, was also recruited by OMS.³

Deutsch’s vision of a new world order included sexual as well as political liberation. At about the time he began covert work for Comintern, he became publicly involved in the “sex-pol” (sexual politics) movement, founded by the German Communist psychologist and sexologist Wilhelm Reich, which opened clinics to bring birth control and sexual enlightenment to Viennese workers.⁴ At this stage of his career, Reich was engaged in an ambitious attempt to integrate Freudianism with Marxism and in the early stages of an eccentric research program on human sexual behavior which later earned him an undeserved reputation as “the prophet of the better orgasm.”⁵ Deutsch enthusiastically embraced Reich’s teaching that political and sexual repression were different sides of the same coin and together paved the way for fascism. He ran the Munster Verlag in Vienna which published Reich’s work and other “sex-pol” literature.⁶ Though the Viennese police were probably unaware of Deutsch’s secret work for OMS, its anti-pornography section took a keen interest in his involvement with the “sex-pol” movement.⁷

Remarkably, Deutsch combined, at least for a few years, his role as an open disciple of Reich with secret work as a Soviet agent. In 1932 he was transferred from OMS to the INO, and trained in Moscow as an OGPU illegal with the alias “Stefan Lange” and the codename STEFAN. (Later, he also used the codename OTTO.) His first posting was in France, where he established secret crossing points on the Belgian, Dutch and German borders, and made preparations to install radio equipment on French fishing boats to be used for OGPU communications in times of war.⁸ Deutsch owed his posthumous promotion to the ranks of KGB immortals to his second posting in England.

The rules protecting the identities and legends of illegals in the mid-1930s were far less rigid and elaborate than they were to become later. Early in 1934 Deutsch traveled to London under his real name, giving his profession as “university lecturer” and using his academic credentials to mix in university circles. After living in temporary accommodation, he moved to a flat in Lawn Road, Hampstead, the heartland of London’s radical intelligentsia. The “Lawn Road Flats,” as they were then known, were the first “deck-access” apartments with external walkways to be built in England (a type of construction later imitated in countless blocks of council flats) and, at the time, were probably Hampstead’s most avant-garde building. Deutsch moved into number 7, next to a flat owned by the celebrated crime novelist Agatha Christie, then writing Murder on the Orient Express. Though it is tempting to imagine Deutsch and Christie discussing the plot of her latest novel, they may never have met. Christie lived elsewhere and probably visited Lawn Road rarely, if at all, in the mid-1930s. Deutsch, in any case, is likely to have kept a low profile. While the front doors of most flats were visible from the street, Deutsch’s was concealed by a stairwell which made it possible for him and his visitors to enter and leave unobserved.⁹ Deutsch strengthened his academic cover by taking a postgraduate course in psychology at London University and possibly by part-time teaching.¹⁰ In 1935 he was joined by his wife, who had been trained in Moscow as a radio operator.¹¹

KGB files credit Deutsch during his British posting with the recruitment of twenty agents and contact with a total of twenty-nine.¹² By far the most celebrated of these agents were a group of five young Cambridge graduates, who by the Second World War were known in the Centre as “The Five”: Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. After the release of the enormously popular Western The Magnificent Seven in 1960, they were often referred to as the “Magnificent Five.” The key to Deutsch’s success was his new strategy of recruitment, approved by the Centre, based on the cultivation of young radical high-fliers from leading universities before they entered the corridors of power. As Deutsch wrote to the Centre:

Since the universities of Oxford and Cambridge provided a disproportionate number of Whitehall’s highest fliers, it was plainly logical to target Oxbridge rather than the red brick universities elsewhere. The fact that the new recruitment was based chiefly on Cambridge rather than Oxford was due largely to chance: the fact that the first potential recruit to come to Deutsch’s attention, Kim Philby, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of the other members of the “Magnificent Five,” all recruited as a direct or indirect consequence of Philby’s own recruitment, three (Blunt, Burgess and Cairncross) also came from Trinity College and the fourth (Maclean) from the neighboring Trinity Hall.¹⁴

Deutsch’s recruitment strategy was to prove a spectacular success. By the early years of the Second World War all of the Five were to succeed in penetrating either the Foreign Office or the intelligence community. The volume of high-grade intelligence which they supplied was to become so large that Moscow sometimes had difficulty coping with it.

AFTER GRADUATING FROM Cambridge in June 1933 with the conviction that “my life must be devoted to Communism,” Philby spent most of the next year in Vienna working for the MOPR (the Russian acronym of the International Workers Relief Organization) and acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party.¹⁵ While in Vienna he met and married a young Communist divorcee, Litzi Friedman, after a brief but passionate love affair which included his first experience of making love in the snow (“actually quite warm, once you got used to it,” he later recalled).¹⁶ The first to identify Philby’s potential as a Soviet agent—and probably to draw him to the attention of Arnold Deutsch—was Litzi’s friend Edith Suschitsky, who was herself recruited by Deutsch and given the unimaginative codename EDITH.¹⁷

In May 1934 Kim and Litzi Philby returned to London, arriving some weeks after Deutsch. Several months earlier Edith Suschitsky had also taken up residence in London, marrying another recruit of Deutsch’s, an English doctor named Alex Tudor Hart. The newly married couple were given the joint codename STRELA (“Arrow”).¹⁸ In June 1934 Edith Tudor Hart took Philby to his first meeting with Deutsch on a bench in Regent’s Park, London. According to a later memoir written by Philby for the KGB, Deutsch instructed him, “We need people who could penetrate into the bourgeois institutions. Penetrate them for us!”¹⁹ At this early stage, however, Deutsch did not tell Philby that he was embarking on a career as a Soviet agent. Instead, he gave him the initial impression that he was joining Comintern’s underground war against international fascism. Philby’s immediate task, Deutsch told him, was to break all visible contact with the Communist Party and to try to win the confidence of British pro-German and pro-fascist circles.²⁰ As was not uncommon at this period, Philby’s first codename, given him immediately after his meeting with Deutsch, had two versions: SÖHNCHEN in German or SYNOK in Russian—both roughly equivalent to “Sonny” in English.²¹

Half a century later, Philby still remembered his first meeting with the man he knew as “Otto” as “amazing”:

It is difficult to imagine any other controller in the entire history of the KGB as ideally suited as Deutsch to the Cambridge Five. Though four of the Five graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors,²³ Deutsch’s academic career was even more brilliant than theirs, his understanding of human character more profound and his experience of life much broader. He combined a charismatic personality and deep psychological insight with visionary faith in the future of a human race freed from the exploitation and alienation of the capitalist system. His message of liberation had all the greater appeal to the Cambridge Five because it had a sexual as well as a political dimension. All the Five were rebels against the strict sexual mores as well as the antiquated class system of inter-war Britain. Burgess and Blunt were homosexuals, Maclean a bisexual and Philby a heterosexual athlete. Cairncross, a committed heterosexual, later wrote a history of polygamy which concluded with a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Women will always prefer a 10 percent share of a first-rate man to sole ownership of a mediocre man.”²⁴ Cairncross plainly considered himself first-rate rather than mediocre. Graham Greene was charmed by Cairncross’s book. “Here at last,” he wrote to Cairncross, “is a book which will appeal strongly to all polygamists.”²⁵

During almost four years as an illegal controlling British agents, Deutsch served under three illegal residents, each of whom operated under a variety of aliases: Ignati Reif, codenamed MARR; Aleksandr Orlov, codenamed SCHWED (“Swede”); and Teodor Maly, successively codenamed PAUL, THEO and MANN. By 1938 all three were to become victims of the Terror. Reif and Maly were shot for imaginary crimes. Orlov defected just in time to North America, securing his survival by threatening to arrange for the revelation of all he knew about Soviet espionage should he be pursued by an NKVD assassination squad.²⁶ Somewhat misleadingly, a KGB/SVR-sponsored biography of Orlov published in 1993 claimed that he was “the mastermind” responsible for the recruitment of the Cambridge agents.²⁷ There are probably two reasons for this exaggeration. The first is hierarchical. Within the Soviet nomenklatura senior bureaucrats commonly claimed, and were accorded, the credit for their subordinates’ successes. The claim that Orlov, the most senior intelligence officer involved in British operations in the 1930s, “recruited” Philby is a characteristic example of this common phenomenon.²⁸ But there are also more contemporary reasons for the inflation of Orlov’s historical importance. It suits the SVR, which sees itself as the inheritor of the finest traditions of the KGB First Chief Directorate, to seek to demonstrate the foolishness of Western intelligence and security services by claiming that they failed for over thirty years to notice that the leading recruiter of the Cambridge Five and other agents was living under their noses in the United States. For several years before his death in 1973, the KGB tried to persuade Orlov to return to a comfortable flat and generous pension in Russia, where he would doubtless have been portrayed for propaganda purposes as a man who, despite being forced to flee from Stalin’s Terror, had—like Philby—“kept faith with Lenin’s Revolution” and used his superior intelligence training to take in Western intelligence agencies for many years.²⁹

In reality, Orlov spent only just over a year in London—ten days in July 1934, followed by the period from September 1934 to October 1935.³⁰ During that period Deutsch, who was subordinate in rank to Orlov, had to seek his approval for his intelligence operations. On occasion Orlov took the initiative in giving instructions to Deutsch. But the files noted by Mitrokhin make clear that the grand strategy which led to the targeting of Philby and other young Cambridge high-fliers was devised not by Orlov but by Deutsch.³¹ And, as Philby himself acknowledged, no other controller equaled Deutsch’s tactical skill in implementing that strategy.

Philby’s first major service to Soviet intelligence was to direct Deutsch to two other potential Cambridge recruits, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.³² If not already a committed Communist by the time he entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1931, Donald Maclean became one during his first year. As the handsome, academically gifted son of a former Liberal cabinet minister, Maclean must have seemed to Deutsch an almost ideal candidate to penetrate the corridors of power. On his graduation with first-class honors in modern languages in June 1934, however, Maclean showed no immediate sign of wanting a career in Whitehall. His ambition was either to teach English in the Soviet Union or to stay at Cambridge to work for a PhD. In the course of the summer he changed his mind, telling his mother that he intended to prepare for the Foreign Office entrance examinations in the following year.³³ That change of heart reflected the influence of Deutsch. The first approach to Maclean was made through Philby in August 1934. Deutsch reported that Philby had been instructed to meet Maclean, discuss his job prospects and contacts and ask him to open contact with the Communist Party and begin work for the NKVD. Maclean agreed. For the time being, however, the Centre refused to sanction meetings between Deutsch and Maclean, and contact with him for the next two months was maintained through Philby. Maclean’s first codename, like Philby’s, had two versions: WAISE in German, SIROTA in Russian—both meaning “Orphan” (an allusion to the death of his father two years earlier).³⁴

For some months Guy Burgess, then in his second year as a history research student at Trinity College preparing a thesis he was never to complete, had been enthused by the idea of conducting an underground war against fascism on behalf of the Communist International. Ironically, in view of the fact that he was soon to become one of the Magnificent Five, he seems to have been inspired by the example of the Fünfergruppen, the secret “groups of five” being formed by German Communists to organize opposition to Hitler. Maclean was, very probably, among the Communist friends with whom he discussed the (in reality rather unsuccessful) German groups of five.³⁵ When Maclean admitted, against his instructions, that he had been asked to engage in secret work,³⁶ Burgess was desperate for an invitation to join him.

In December 1934 Maclean arranged a first meeting between Deutsch and Burgess. ³⁷ Deutsch already knew that Burgess was one of the most flamboyant figures in Cambridge: a brilliant, gregarious conversationalist equally at home with the teetotal intellectual discussions of the Apostles, the socially exclusive and heavy-drinking Pitt Club and the irreverent satirical revues of the Footlights. He made no secret either of his Communist sympathies or of his enjoyment of the then illegal pleasures of homosexual “rough trade” with young working-class men. A more doctrinaire and less imaginative controller than Deutsch might well have concluded that the outrageous Burgess would be a liability rather than an asset. But Deutsch may well have sensed that Burgess’s very outrageousness would give him good, if unconventional, cover for his work as a secret agent. No existing stereotype of a Soviet spy remotely resembled Burgess.³⁸ When invited to join the Comintern’s underground struggle against fascism, Burgess told Deutsch that he was “honored and ready to sacrifice everything for the cause.” His codename MÄDCHEN³⁹ (“Little Girl,” by contrast with Philby’s codename “Sonny”) was an obvious reference to his homosexuality.

Deutsch initially told both Maclean and Burgess, like Philby, that their first task was to distance themselves from the left and conform to the ideas of the establishment in order to penetrate it successfully.⁴⁰ Maclean successfully persuaded his mother, Lady Maclean, that he had “rather gone off” his undergraduate flirtation with Communism. In August 1935 he passed the Foreign Office exams with flying colors. When asked about his “Communist views” at Cambridge, Maclean decided to “brazen it out”:

In October 1935, as a new member of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, Maclean became the first of the Magnificent Five to penetrate the corridors of power.

Burgess went about burying his Communist past with characteristic flamboyance. Late in 1935 he became personal assistant to the young rightwing gay Conservative MP Captain “Jack” Macnamara. Together they went on fact-finding missions to Nazi Germany which, according to Burgess, consisted largely of homosexual escapades with like-minded members of the Hitler Youth. Burgess built up a remarkable range of contacts among the continental “Homintern.” Chief among them was Edouard Pfeiffer, chef de cabinet to Edouard Daladier, French war minister from January 1936 to May 1940 and prime minister from April 1938 to March 1940. Burgess boasted to friends that, “He and Pfeiffer and two members of the French cabinet… had spent an evening together at a male brothel in Paris. Singing and dancing, they had danced around a table, lashing a naked boy, who was strapped to it, with leather whips.”⁴²

In February 1935 there was a security alert at the London illegal residency. Reif, operating under the alias “Max Wolisch,” was summoned for an interview at the Home Office and observed a large file in the name of Wolisch on his interviewer’s desk. Orlov reported to the Centre that the British authorities appeared to have been “digging around but could not come up with anything and decided to get rid of him.” Reif obeyed Home Office instructions to arrange for his prompt departure. Orlov feared that MI5 might also be on the trail of Deutsch and announced that as a precaution he was taking personal control of Philby, Maclean and Burgess, by now sometimes referred to as the “Three Musketeers.” Orlov believed that his own cover as an American businessman selling imported refrigerators from an office in Regent Street was still secure. In October, however, there was another security alert when he accidentally encountered a man who, some years earlier, had given him English lessons in Vienna and knew his real identity. Orlov made a hasty exit from London, never to return, leaving Deutsch to resume the running of the Cambridge recruits.⁴³

Under Deutsch’s control, Philby, Maclean and Burgess rapidly graduated as fully fledged Soviet agents. They may not have been told explicitly that they were working for the NKVD rather than assisting Comintern in its underground struggle against fascism, but they no longer needed formal notification. As Deutsch wrote later in a report for the Centre, “They all know that they are working for the Soviet Union. This was absolutely understood by them. My relations with them were based upon our Party membership.” In other words, Deutsch treated them not as subordinate agents but as comrades working under his guidance in a common cause and for the same ideals. Later, less flexible controllers than Deutsch were unhappy that Philby, Burgess and Maclean appeared to consider themselves as officers, rather than agents, of Soviet intelligence.⁴⁴ It came as a considerable shock to Philby after his defection to Moscow in 1963 to discover that, like other foreign agents, he did not possess, and would never be allowed to acquire, officer rank—hence his various attempts to mislead Western journalists into believing that he was Colonel, or even General, Philby of the KGB.⁴⁵ In his memoirs, published in 1968, Philby repeated the lie that he had “been a Soviet intelligence officer for some thirty-odd years.”⁴⁶

AFTER THE SECURITY scares of 1935, Deutsch and the illegal residency took increased precautions to evade MI5 and Special Branch surveillance. Before preparing for a meeting with an agent, usually in London, Deutsch would be driven out of town, watching carefully to see if the car was being followed. Once satisfied that he was not being tailed, he returned to London by public transport, changing several times en route. During his travels Deutsch concealed film of secret documents inside hairbrushes, travel requisites and household utensils. Reports to the Centre were usually sent in secret ink to an address in Copenhagen for forwarding to Moscow.⁴⁷

Though the KGB and SVR released interesting material in the early 1990s on the “Three Musketeers,” they avoided any reference to Norman John (“James”) Klugmann, recruited by Deutsch in 1936.⁴⁸ Klugmann and the young Marxist poet John Cornford, “James and John,” were the two most prominent Communist Party activists in Cambridge. Though Cornford was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, just after his twenty-first birthday, Klugmann went on to become head of the Party’s Propaganda and Education Department, a member of the political committee (in effect its Politburo) and the Party’s official historian. He had become a Communist at Gresham’s School, Holt, where he had been a friend and contemporary of Donald Maclean. Klugmann won an open scholarship in modern languages to Trinity College, Maclean a slightly less prestigious exhibition to the neighboring Trinity Hall. Both graduated with first-class honors. Like Maclean, Anthony Blunt’s conversion to Communism owed something to Klugmann’s influence. Blunt found him “an extremely good political theorist” who “ran the administration of the Party with great skill and energy… It was primarily he who decided what organizations and societies in Cambridge were worth penetrating [by the Communists].”⁴⁹ Klugmann had an unshakable conviction that British capitalism was close to collapse. “We simply knew, all of us, that the revolution was at hand,” he later recalled. “If anyone had suggested it wouldn’t happen in Britain for say thirty years, I’d have laughed myself sick.”⁵⁰

Since Klugmann was one of Britain’s most active young Communists, there was little prospect that, like the Five, he could convincingly distance himself from the Party and penetrate the “bourgeois apparatus.” Deutsch saw another role for Klugmann: as a talent-spotter for the NKVD, capable, when necessary, of persuading Communist students to engage in underground work rather than conventional Party militancy. Before Deutsch recruited Klugmann, the NKVD obtained the approval of the British Party leadership. There was never any likelihood that the British general secretary, Harry Pollitt, would object. Like most Western Communist leaders he believed that the interests of the Communist International required unconditional support for the Soviet Union, whatever the twists of policy in the Kremlin. With Pollitt’s consent, Klugmann was recruited by Deutsch as agent MER.⁵¹ The refusal by the SVR until 1998 to admit Klugmann’s recruitment was due to the involvement of the British Communist Party.⁵² One of the KGB’s most closely guarded secrets was the extent to which, as late as the 1980s, it expected the leaders of “fraternal parties” in the West to assist in the recruitment of agents and the fabrication of “legends” for its illegals.⁵³

IN THE SPRING of 1936 the Centre appointed another of the Great Illegals, Teodor Maly (codenamed MANN), head of the illegal London residency.⁵⁴ Like Deutsch, Maly was later included among the intelligence immortals whose portraits hung on the walls of the First Chief Directorate Memory Room. Hungarian by birth, Maly had entered a Catholic monastic order before the First World War but had volunteered for military service in 1914.⁵⁵ He was taken prisoner while serving as second lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front in 1916, and spent the rest of the war in a series of POW camps. Maly later told one of his agents:

Maly was originally posted to London in January 1936 to run the Foreign Office with cipher clerk Captain King (previously controlled by Pieck), to whom he introduced himself as an executive of the fictitious Dutch bank which King believed was paying him for classified documents. In April Maly was appointed illegal resident and henceforth shared with Deutsch in the running of the Cambridge agents. Like Deutsch, he impressed them with both his human sympathy and his visionary faith in the Communist millennium.⁵⁷

During the early months of 1937 Deutsch and Maly completed the recruitment of the Magnificent Five. At the beginning of the year, Burgess, by then a producer at the BBC, arranged a first meeting between Deutsch and Anthony Blunt, French linguist, art historian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.⁵⁸ Though the title of “Fourth Man” later accorded Blunt was a media invention rather than a KGB sobriquet, he was both the fourth of the Five to be recruited and, over forty years later, the fourth to be publicly exposed. Until the war Blunt’s chief role for the NKVD was that of talent-spotter. His first recruit, by agreement with Deutsch, was a wealthy young American Communist undergraduate at Trinity, Michael Straight (codenamed NIGEL).⁵⁹ Shortly after his own first meeting with Deutsch, Blunt invited Straight to his elegant rooms in Trinity. Straight was still shattered by the news a fortnight earlier that his close friend, John Cornford, had died a hero’s death in the Spanish Civil War. “Our friends,” Blunt told him, had been giving much thought to his future. “They have instructed me to tell you… what you must do.” “What friends?” Straight asked. “Our friends in the International, the Communist International,” Blunt replied. The “friends” had decided that Straight’s duty was to break all overt connection with the Party, get a job in Wall Street after his graduation later that year and provide Comintern with inside information. Straight protested. Cornford had given his life for the International. “Remember that,” Blunt told him. A few days later, Straight agreed. “In the course of a week,” Straight wrote later, “I had moved out of the noisy, crowded world of Cambridge into a world of shadows and echoes.” His only meeting with Deutsch, whom he mistook for a Russian, took place in London just after his graduation. Deutsch asked him for some personal documents. Straight gave him a drawing. Deutsch tore it in two, gave him one halfback and told him the other half would be returned to him by a man who would contact him in New York. ⁶⁰

The last of the Magnificent Five to be recruited, and later the last to be publicly exposed, was the “Fifth Man,” John Cairncross, a brilliant Scot who in 1934 had entered Trinity at the age of twenty-one with a scholarship in modern languages, having already studied for two years at Glasgow University and gained a licence ès lettres at the Sorbonne.⁶¹ His passionate Marxism led the Trinity Magazine to give him the nickname “The Fiery Cross,” while his remarkable facility as a linguist led the same magazine to complain, “Cairncross… learns a new language every fortnight.” ⁶² Among his college teachers in French literature was Anthony Blunt, though Cairncross later claimed that they never discussed Communism.⁶³ In 1936, after graduating with first-class honors, Cairncross passed top of the Foreign Office entrance examinations, one hundred marks ahead of the next candidate (though he did less well at the interview).⁶⁴

After Blunt had acted as talent-spotter, the initial approach to Cairncross early in 1937 was entrusted by Deutsch to Burgess⁶⁵—much as Philby had made the first recruitment overture to Maclean in 1934. The actual recruitment of Cairncross shortly afterwards was entrusted to James Klugmann.⁶⁶ On April 9 Maly informed the Centre that Cairncross had been formally recruited and given the codename MOLIÈRE.⁶⁷ Had Cairncross known his codename, he might well have objected to its transparency but would undoubtedly have found appropriate the choice of his favorite French writer, on whom he later published two scholarly studies in French. For reasons not recorded in KGB files, the codename MOLIÈRE was later replaced by that of LISZT.⁶⁸ In May Klugmann arranged Cairncross’s first rendezvous with Deutsch. According to Cairncross’s admittedly unreliable memoirs, the meeting took place one evening in Regent’s Park:

Deutsch reported to Moscow that Cairncross “was very happy that we had established contact with him and was ready to start working for us at once.”⁷⁰

Among the pre-Second World War Foreign Office documents available to both Maclean and Cairncross, and thus to the NKVD, were what Cairncross described as “a wealth of valuable information on the progress of the Civil War in Spain.”⁷¹ Only in a few cases, however, is it possible to identify individual documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which the Centre forwarded to Stalin, probably in the form of edited extracts.⁷² One such document, which seems to have made a particular impression on Stalin, is the record of talks with Hitler in November 1937 by Lord Halifax, Lord President of the Council (who, three months later, was to succeed Eden as Foreign Secretary).⁷³ Halifax’s visit to Hitler’s mountain lair, the “Eagle’s Nest” at Berchtesgaden, got off to a farcical start. As the aristocratic Halifax stepped from his car, he mistook Hitler for a footman and was about to hand him his hat and coat when a German minister hissed in his ear, “Der Führer! Der Führer! ⁷⁴ The Centre, however, saw the whole meeting as deeply sinister. The extracts from Halifax’s record of his talks with Hitler, tailored to fit Stalin’s profound distrust of British policy, emphasized that Britain viewed Nazi Germany as “the bastion of the West against Bolshevism” and would take a sympathetic view of German expansion to the east.⁷⁵ Though Halifax’s assessment of Hitler, whom he regarded as “very sincere,” was lamentably naive, his record of his comments on Germany’s role in defending the West against Communism were much more qualified than the Centre’s version of them. He told Hitler:

Such statements were music to Hitler’s ears—not because he was interested in the peaceful revision of Versailles, but because he interpreted Halifax’s rather feeble attempt at conciliation as evidence that Britain lacked the nerve to fight when the time came for him to begin a war of conquest.⁷⁶ Stalin, characteristically, saw a much more sinister purpose behind Halifax’s remarks and persuaded himself that Britain had deliberately given the green light to Nazi aggression in the east. The Foreign Office documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which recorded British attempts to appease Hitler were used by the Centre to provide the evidence which Stalin demanded of a deep-laid British plot to turn Hitler on the Soviet Union.

THOUGH KIM PHILBY ultimately became the most important of the Magnificent Five, his career took off more slowly than those of the other four. He abandoned an attempt to join the civil service after both his referees (his Trinity director of studies and a family friend) warned him that, while they admired his energy and intelligence, they would feel bound to add that his “sense of political injustice might well unfit him for administrative work.” His only minor successes before 1937 were to gain a job on an uninfluential liberal monthly, the Review of Reviews, and become a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, contemptuously described by Churchill as the “Heil Hitler Brigade.” As Philby later acknowledged, he would often turn up for meetings with Deutsch “with nothing to offer” and in need of reassurance. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave him his first important intelligence mission. He eventually persuaded a London news agency to give him a letter of accreditation as a freelance war correspondent and arrived in Spain in February 1937. “My immediate assignment,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “was to get first-hand information on all aspects of the fascist war effort.” As usual, his memoirs fail to tell the whole truth.⁷⁷

A few weeks after Philby’s departure, the London illegal residency received instructions, undoubtedly approved by Stalin himself, to order Philby to assassinate General Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist forces.⁷⁸ Maly duly passed on the order but made clear to the Centre that he did not believe Philby capable of fulfilling it.⁷⁹ Philby arrived back in London in May without even having set eyes on Franco and, Maly told the Centre, “in a very depressed state.” Philby’s fortunes improved, however, after he was taken on by The Times as one of its two correspondents in nationalist Spain.⁸⁰ At the end of the year he became a minor war hero. Three journalists sitting in a car in which he had been traveling were fatally injured by an artillery shell. Philby himself was slightly wounded. He reported modestly to Times readers, “Your correspondent… was taken to a first aid station where light head injuries were speedily treated.” “My wounding in Spain,” wrote Philby later, “helped my work—both journalism and intelligence—no end.” For the first time he gained access to Franco, who on March 2, 1938 pinned on his breast the Red Cross of Military Merit. Then, as Philby reported, “all sorts of doors opened for me.”⁸¹

The doors, however, opened too late. By the time Philby gained access to Franco, the NKVD assassination plot had been abandoned. Since the spring of 1937 the Centre had been increasingly diverted from the war against Franco by what became known as the civil war within the Civil War. The destruction of Trotskyists became a higher priority than the liquidation of Franco. By the end of 1937 the hunt for “enemies of the people” abroad took precedence over intelligence collection. The remarkable talents of the Magnificent Five had yet to be fully exploited. INO was in turmoil, caught up in the paranoia of the Great Terror, with most of its officers abroad suspected of plotting with the enemy. The age of the Great Illegals was rapidly drawing to a brutal close.