The Charmed Life of a Traitor

“Precisely.”

This meant not only that any intelligence operations against the Soviets were doomed from the start but that the days of all the MI6 agents already in place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were numbered.

In the Sunday Times office we puzzled over why Philby’s crimes had remained undetected for so long. Surely any one of a number of KGB defectors could have given the game away? The sheriff of Shropshire gave us an answer. Mr. John Reed was then living in a great house in a forest, but before retiring he’d been first secretary in our embassy in Turkey in the last year of the war. He wrote to me, worried how our series might portray his role in a great blunder.

I sent Knightley to see him. He would talk only anonymously. Thus masked, he told a fascinating tale. On a hot August day in 1945, the area head of the Russian secret service (the NKVD, later the KGB), one Konstantin Volkov, had walked into the consulate in Istanbul seeking asylum. For a safe passage to Cyprus and living money, he would identify Soviet spy networks. “In return he told me he would offer the real names of three Soviet agents working in Britain, two of them in the Foreign Office, one the head of a counterespionage organization in London,” Reed said.

The ambassador, Sir Maurice Peterson, wanted nothing to do with the nasty business of spies. He told Reed to let London handle it. Reed sent the information to London in a secure diplomatic bag and waited for a response. It took two weeks for an agent to arrive to debrief Volkov. That agent was none other than Kim Philby.

Volkov was not found; he was never seen again. Philby, who must have had a fright that he was so nearly outed, had taken time with his Soviet masters to organize a safe passage for Volkov—but not to Cyprus. A Soviet military aircraft made an irregular landing at Istanbul airport and within minutes took off again after a heavily bandaged figure on a stretcher was carried to the plane. “The incident convinced me,” said Reed, “that Philby was either a Soviet agent or unbelievably incompetent. I took what seemed to me at the time the appropriate action.” Nothing happened. Knightley reported, “The memory of the betrayal made Reed’s voice shake.”

If Philby was that important in 1945, what was he doing in Washington from 1949 under the cover of being first secretary in the embassy? Any public attention had been on his possible role in tipping off Burgess and Maclean. I sent two reporters to Washington.

Knightley called the CIA which helpfully—such a contrast with Britain—suggested he talk to a Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, who had been with the CIA since it was set up in 1947. This was a few years before Ian Fleming created the Bond fantasies—but in the early post war years the Americans had been in awe of MI6 for its legendary history and the dazzling code-breaking achievements that had won the Battle of the Atlantic.

Kirkpatrick knew Philby. When Knightley found him, he’d just retired as executive director of the agency. He had contracted polio in Asia on CIA business and was teaching politics from a wheelchair at Brown University. He combined secret knowledge with an intellectual zest for freedom. He wouldn’t go into detail, but on the main point he didn’t equivocate: “Philby was your liaison officer with the CIA and FBI.”

This was as astounding as Whitwell’s revelation. It meant that for three years of the Cold War, Philby had been at the heart of Western intelligence operations. Put another way, having penetrated the SIS, he was then able to penetrate the CIA. The CIA director, General Walter Bedell Smith, gave Philby clearance at all levels, which meant that in a secret service’s typically compartmentalized operations, Philby would have known as much as anyone except the director himself and perhaps one or two assistant directors, like Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick would not say much more than “have a look at Albania.”