Art of Betrayal Page 8

  In the real Albanian operation, the exchange was not quite so one sided. In return for American cash, Britain could offer two things – a claim (only partly true) to have wisdom and expertise on Albania and also, crucially, real estate from which to run the operation. Leftover bits of Empire, from Cyprus to Hong Kong and later Diego Garcia, always came in useful and the Americans’ propensity for favouring decolonisation certainly had its limits. ‘Whenever we want to subvert any place,’ Frank Wisner confided to an MI6 officer he wrongly believed was on his side, ‘we find that the British own an island within easy reach.’29 For Albania, the island was Malta.

  The cultural differences between the two countries’ spies are captured in McCargar’s account of attending planning meetings on either side of the Atlantic. In Washington, he arrived to find an intricate bureaucratic, organisational chart on the wall for the Albanian operation. ‘A colleague pointed at it and said we’d need 457 bodies. I didn’t think we could find 457 bodies and said that I would happily settle for six brains,’ McCargar recalled. A week later he went to London to confer. After an hour or two someone said, ‘I say, why don’t we get old Henry up here? He knows about this.’ ‘A day or two later old Henry showed up from down in Sussex and when the problem was put to him, finally agreed to undertake the task, although, as he said, “This will wreak havoc with the garden, you know. Just getting it into trim.”’ He then said he needed a grand total of six people to report to him.30

  The ‘old Henrys’ of the Albania operation were a group of Special Operations Executive (SOE) veterans who would become known as the Musketeers. During the war, the SOE had sent in men and weapons to support Albanians fighting first against the Italians and then against the Germans. There had been a sharp and bitter division between those who favoured the Communist-allied partisans and those who worked with the nationalists and royalists and who favoured the exiled King Zog (who had been ensconced for much of the war in the front line of Henley-on-Thames). The partisans had proved more willing to take on the Germans and eventually their pudgy leader Enver Hoxha had emerged triumphant, installing a Communist government which, in turn, distrusted the British for their backing of his rivals. ‘Another King down the drain!’ Churchill wrote to his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when Hoxha’s victory became apparent.31

  The SOE veterans who had worked with the nationalists were bitter at the turn of events. They talked angrily of treachery and of the machinations of the Communist sympathisers among their rivals within SOE. The key figures included Julian Amery, later a Conservative minister, Billy McLean and David Smiley – ‘the Three Musketeers’. After the war Amery had worked the overlapping worlds of Whitehall offices and the clubs of St James’s in which the demimonde of British intelligence and its hangers-on lived, telling everybody who would listen that the Albanian people were ‘seething with discontent against their Communist masters’.32 The Musketeers believed that their SOE experience of training and supporting resistance groups was the way to fight the new Cold War, without realising that this time the enemy was playing a different game. SOE had been swallowed up by MI6 which in turn had absorbed its gung-ho culture. New recruits into MI6 were trained, in classic SOE style, to place explosives by a railway line as much as to recruit agents. A divide had emerged in the culture of MI6, just as it had among their American counterparts, between those who wanted action and those who wanted intelligence. The men of action, who believed in continuing the paramilitary methods they had enjoyed in the Second World War, had the upper hand in these years. These were the men who had ‘had a good war’ and could not let go. The Chief of MI6 was unsure about the Albania operation, saying there was no point in undertaking it unless it was followed through, but he also saw it as a way of keeping the SOE ‘stinks and bangs people’ happy.33

  Colonel and Musketeer David Smiley was in charge of training the Albanians. His name crops up again and again in accounts of the clandestine wars fought by Britain from the Second World War onwards (making it perhaps ironic that a man of action not dissimilar to Bond coincidentally enjoyed the same name as le Carré’s pudgy, cerebral spy). He had been commissioned into the full plumage of the Royal Horse Guards – a world of strict formality in which he was once reprimanded for being seen at the Café de Paris wearing a dinner jacket when he should have been in white tie and tails.34 As the Second World War began, he sold his racehorse and private aeroplane and moved into irregular warfare. In 1943, he had been recruited to work for SOE in Albania, parachuting out of a Halifax bomber. He first worked with Hoxha, whom Smiley, being an old-fashioned British imperialist, argued with incessantly, before switching to the more amenable nationalist Abas Kupi. A few years after the war, an old SOE colleague now with MI6 explained that the old crew was getting back together for one more adventure.35

  In the summer of 1949 Smiley arrived at the base of operations in Malta, an isolated hill-top fort, equipped with drawbridge and moat. He lived under cover and spent the mornings at an office being as conspicuous as possible. Summer afternoons were for playing polo, sometimes with Admiral Mountbatten and his nephew Prince Philip accompanied occasionally by his wife, the then Princess Elizabeth, who stayed on the island for a while. When the Princess was crowned queen a few years later, Smiley rode alongside as commander of her escort.36

  The Albanian agents had been recruited from Displaced Persons camps and were trained by Smiley’s team of weapons experts, wireless operators and even an Oxford don who was a scholar of classical Persian. The technology was equally quirky. The batteries for the old Second World War radio sets they had were too large so they used a type of collapsible bicycle without wheels. Someone would have to pedal furiously to generate enough power to send a signal.

  By July 1950, a specially fitted private yacht, the Henrietta, had replaced the Stormie Seas. ‘We would be alongside in Malta and a taxi [with] four hooded characters would arrive,’ remembers Eric Walton, who sailed the boat.37 ‘They arrived on board blindfolded … We would take off and disappear knowing full well that the Russians or some other spies would know we were going. But what they didn’t know was that we could do 25 knots and we had long-range tanks.’ The team acquired a local reputation as top-notch smugglers, and a Greek shipping magnate even asked them to smuggle some gold in return for 10 per cent of the proceeds. The team declined.38 Walton, like many involved, felt growing sympathy for the hooded men, who came to be known as the pixies. When one died in Malta, they had to dispose of the corpse without any records and dumped the body at sea. But it was their fate on landing in Albania that really elicited sympathy even among the hard-headed MI6 men.

  The mood soured as the pixies were repeatedly ambushed on arrival. And yet the operations continued. Tony Northrop, a young MI6 officer who trained the pixies in Malta, became depressed as he watched them sail off. Lives were being thrown away, he thought.39 When one pixie disappeared from training, Northrop found him sitting on a bench in the town square. As Northrop approached, the man put his hand to his mouth. Northrop realised he was trying to swallow the cyanide pill he had been given for the mission. Northrop grabbed him by the throat and rushed him to hospital to have his stomach pumped. Northrop became so disillusioned that he told his superiors the whole thing was doomed. But still the drops continued. Too much had been invested to admit failure and turn back. ‘They had no country and no future,’ Smiley later recalled. ‘I feel very sad, to be quite frank. Looking back knowing the result, it is just heartbreaking.’40

  The Americans began in 1950 to drop their men into Albania by parachute, the planes coming in at just 200 feet to evade radar before rising to 500 feet for the jump. Washington’s political strategy had fallen apart amid interminable Albanian feuds and their agents’ fate was the same as the British. They had been expected and were surrounded, some burnt to death in a house, others shot, others captured. The Albanians, like the Latvians, began running a deception operation, forcing agents to broadcast the all-clear, leading to more agents being lured to t
heir deaths. ‘Our famous radio game brought about the ignominious failure of the plans of the foreign enemy,’ Hoxha later boasted. ‘The bands of criminals who were dropped in by parachute or infiltrated across the border at our request came like lambs to the slaughter.’41

  In London, they knew something was going wrong. George Kennedy Young, back from Vienna, began post-mortems on the Iron Curtain operations, ‘the pride and joy’ of some parts of the office.42 Using so-called ‘barium meals’ in which false information is fed into a network to see where it ends up, he became convinced they were being run by the KGB. This led to furious rows with Carr and his allies who simply did not want to accept that they had been duped. The Chief, John Sinclair, who was out of his depth, ignored the warnings. The British began to pull back, realising that the Albanian operation – codenamed ‘Valuable’ – was anything but and risked fuelling Stalin’s paranoia. Britain, having initially feared American disengagement from Europe and a return to isolationism, was also beginning to worry that perhaps the Americans were a bit too reckless and might start a war, a war in which London, not Washington, would be obliterated.

  Covert operations had fanned out beyond the Baltic States and Albania to the entire periphery of the Soviet Union including Ukraine and the Caucasus. And they all seemed to be going wrong at enormous cost in terms of lives, manpower and money.43 Eventually, the Albanians revealed their hand in a Tirana show-trial, providing the perfect pretext for Hoxha to tighten his grip. The game was up. It had gone on too long. And at the cost of many lives, maybe 100, maybe 200. But these were foreigners and volunteers who knew the risks, the British and American intelligence officers said. And this was a war.

  There were recriminations. The British thought that the Americans had been a bit amateurish. ‘I was quite convinced our security was very, very tight,’ reckoned Smiley. But the Americans thought there had been a leak. The operation had been betrayed. Who was to blame? There was an elusively simple answer to the conundrum of not just Latvia and Albania but all of the other failed MI6 operations of this period.

  As the first team were setting sail from Malta, an MI6 officer was on a much more comfortable boat journey, heading towards New York and enjoying a crate of champagne that had been delivered to his cabin. It had taken just half an hour for Kim Philby to agree to accept the position of British liaison to American intelligence which took him to the fulcrum of the secret world. He knew it was precisely what his masters in Moscow would have wanted. He had spent September inside MI6 HQ at Broadway in London being briefed on current operations, including Albania, ahead of his new posting. When he arrived, he was taken to a hotel overlooking Central Park. As he gazed out of the twenty-fifth-floor window, Philby felt sick and broke into a sweat.44

  On the day the second team landed in Albania in October 1949, Philby formally took up his job. The US no longer wanted to be as reliant on the UK as it had been in the Second World War, but the British were still the ‘big brother’ who had been in the game much longer. Philby met frequently with the head of the CIA and its staff gossiped freely with him. ‘Philby was a great charmer,’ McCargar recalled. ‘He came to us with an enormous reputation. He was known as a young Turk … and the American bureaucracy sometimes admires that kind of thing … one had the feeling one could have confidence in him.’45

  Every week, Philby would lunch with James Jesus Angleton, an increasingly influential figure in American intelligence. A wiry man with thick glasses, who grew orchids and studied poetry, Angleton cultivated an aura of being cleverer and better at playing the game of intrigue than anyone else. Educated in England and at Yale, he had known Philby during the war and, like others, admired him as a ‘professional’. In Washington, the two men drank Martinis and ate lobster at Harvey’s Restaurant as each cultivated the other and traded secret information, Philby even going to Angleton’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.46 The famous Philby charm worked on most, although a few sensed the driving ambition and coldness that lay beneath the surface. His house in Nebraska Avenue was the site for many a late-night party fuelled by pitchers of Martini. ‘They were long and very, very wet,’ McCargar recalls of those evenings. ‘We really were all afloat on a sea of drink.’47 How much did Philby know? ‘The sky was the limit,’ a CIA officer from the time later remarked. ‘He would have known as much as he wanted to find out.’48 One day, Ted Kollek, a visiting Israeli official, bumped into Philby in a corridor at CIA headquarters. ‘What is Philby doing here?’ he later asked Angleton. ‘Kim is a good friend of ours,’ Angleton replied. Kollek had been at Litzi and Philby’s wedding in Vienna back in 1934 when it was clear he had Communist sympathies. Don’t trust him, he warned Angleton. The warning was ignored.49

  Philby was one of four people co-ordinating the Iron Curtain operations to prevent agents running into each other and getting in each other’s way. He navigated the disputes between London and Washington over which exiles to back (the British liked kings, the Americans the republicans, and both argued over the use of war criminals). There was a particularly vicious battle between Harry Carr and Wisner’s people over factions in the Baltics which Philby had to smooth over.50

  ‘Do we know which of these operations is already under Russian control?’ a CIA officer asked Carr as they struggled to understand what was going wrong.

  ‘Ours isn’t,’ Carr replied.

  ‘How can you be sure that your agent isn’t under control?’ snapped the CIA officer.

  ‘We’re sure.’

  ‘But how can you be?’ persisted the American.

  ‘Because we’ve made our checks. Our group is watertight,’ Carr said.

  ‘So’s ours’, the American replied. ‘But one group is penetrated.’51

  Philby was taking the minutes, cool as ever, knowing the answer. When their Albanian operations began to go wrong, Frank Wisner apologised to Philby and said, ‘We’ll get it right next time.’52

  Angleton, according to those who worked on the operation, gave Philby over drinks the precise co-ordinates for every drop zone for the CIA in Albania.53 He may also have briefed Philby about all the other infiltration programmes behind the Iron Curtain. So everything was down to Philby.

  That is the belief those involved clung to later. ‘What had happened was that bloody man Philby was tipping off,’ Smiley would say years later with a deep bitterness in his voice.54 ‘The Americans had to tell us what they were doing and I had to tell the Americans what we were doing. This was all done through Washington and the go-between was this fellow Philby, who was told by the Americans what to tell the British, told the British what to tell the Americans. And told the Russians as well. It was a disaster.’ For Harry Carr too, it all must have been Philby. For a decade almost all the émigré operations into the USSR – from the Baltic to the Adriatic, with Poland and Ukraine along the way – had been run by the KGB. Everyone knew where to lay the blame. And the same for the Hungarian activists who ended up betrayed and jailed. And for the MI6 officers ambushed at dead drops. And for every other ill-conceived operation that ended in disaster during those years, the answer was always the same. It was all Philby. ‘We’d have been better off doing nothing,’ one CIA officer said of the years from 1945 to 1951.55 One officer who worked on the operation said all of those involved in Albania at the agency were left ‘psychologically devastated’ when they eventually discovered what Philby had done to them.56

  Philby, it was true, was perfectly placed. Through a ruthless power play, he had manoeuvred himself to become head of the newly formed Section IX in 1944. While Britain was still allied with the Soviet Union, this section was designed to prepare for MI6’s return to battle against Communism. Philby was the leading expert on Communist ideology in MI6, critiquing MI5’s papers on the USSR. ‘To my mind, the purge and the struggle against Fascism and collaboration is the current tactical expression of the class struggle,’ he wrote knowledgeably to his counterpart Roger Hollis at MI5, leading to a curious exchange between an MI6 man spying for the Sovi
ets and a future head of MI5 who would be accused of doing the same.57 Philby was able to use his position to report back to his controllers that the British were already thinking of the Soviets as a potential enemy during the war. He was fully aware of Harry Carr’s early plans for covert action. Intelligence derived not just from Philby but from his Cambridge cohorts reached Stalin personally and may well have further convinced him of the hostile intent of the West and the need to build up his own protective buffer of pliant states.

  Philby had been engaged in a high-wire act of dizzying complexity. He had staffed his new section with officers who were good – but not too good. Every day he had to decide which operations to sabotage and which to let run in order to foster his own career. He did not pass everything to Moscow, not out of any residual patriotism but because he feared that his masters would not be careful enough in using it and it might lead back to him.58 But he certainly betrayed the existence of the Albanian operations. Philby would later show no remorse over this. ‘The agents we sent into Albania were armed men intent on sabotage, murder and assassination,’ he told a biographer years later. ‘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.’59 So it was all that bloody man Philby. Was it?