◆ SpookStack

known os “She stockbrokers,” who gave the Service its connection with White's Club, one of London's most exclusive men's clubs. This notorious Haison stands at the center of any picture of the wartime secret service. And it epitomizes the rougish, dilettante quality of ML6, of which the rest of Whitehall, and especially the embroyonic professionals of MLS, were to become in- creasingly contemptuous over the next decade. Most of the top brass be- Jonged there, including Sir Steward Menzies, the MI-6 chief until) 1951 and the model for Ian Fleming's fic- The etiquette of the time tional security chief “M." was to leave Menzie alone with his personal assistant when they were together, since it was understood that \they were “running the secret service or something.” White’s provided, too, a fertile source for emergency wartime recruits, on the basic English principle that if you could not trust your club, who could you trust? As for Menzies himself, one former subordinate re- calls: “He wag terrifying to ity bgfause he acted instinct. He a single case , yet he often ith the answer.” Countes Espionage Ki hilpy became part of Section Five of MI-6 which was responsible for counter-espionage, or more exactly, spying on the Ger- man spies. Through per- sonal contact supplied by his old colleague Guy Bur- Bess, Philby became head ofthe Iberian subsection, “Phil just did not have the contacts to get that sort of job on his own,” said one of his colleagues. “I know it was Burgess who rang up someone and got him tn.” The Iberian subsection's theater was a vital one. Spain was a neutral, friend- ly to Germany, and provided the perfect base for opera: tions against Britain's com- munications keystone, Gi- braltar. Portugal was friendly to Beitain, but Portuguese Mozambique was the center of German espionage operations in southern Africa, It was in this connection that Philby sent Malcolm Muggeridge to Lourenco Marques and Graham Greene to Sierra Leone. As a boss, Philby was a quick success. He possessed both grasp and human sym- pathy, faculties which evi- dently won him intense per- sonal loyalty. This was to be a feature of his entire eareer, and it is with an al- Most unspeakable sense of irony that associates recall the word which they always felt summed him up: “in- tegrity.” “You didn't just like him, admire him, agree with him,” says one man who saw him often from the war, until his defection. “You worshipped him.” By 193, two years after coming in, Philby was firm- ly established as one of Menzies’ very best men. But by early 1944 Philby was getting bored by the limitations of the Iberian subsection. It was then that Menzies -asked Philby, just a few months before D-Day, to re- “ vive the defunct counter- espionage operation uinst them has recalled, the Soviet Union. To Philby, this must have seemed the” ultimate opportunity, and also to represent the ulti- mate folly of the men above him. Philby’s appointment is a measure of the blind faith in him on the part of his superiors, whose own repu- tations had been aided by Philby's work. Had Philby’s early Communist experience been forgotten? Had it been obliterated irom the record by his excellent perform- ance? Or was it, just con- eeivably, noted and, in a mo- ment of supreme political naivete, ignored? The aging colonel who was the sole incumbent of the inactive Soviet section was pensioned off, and Phil- ‘by moved in to build an em- pire which, within 18 months, occupied an entire floor and employed more than 100 people. Within two years, the section had ac- cumulated a vast store of in- formation on Communists in Western countries, Iront or- ganizations and the other now-familiar stuff of Cold War counter-espionage. And Kim Philby had acquired the confidence of his staff. > “He could get them to do anything for him,” one of This witness remembers that everyone there came from a strict security back- ground, where the rigid tradition. was that office desks should be locked at night. But Kim broke that tradition as he broke s0 many others. “Don't worry about that,” he said, “I'll lock them up later.” “I didn’t like to do it,” this witness now says, “but he was so charming that I couldn't refuse anything he asked.” eS