My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy by Kim Philby Read Free Book Online

was withholding information, but also that SIS was not getting enough anyway. This was a charge that Cowgill could not ignore; he felt much the same himself. But he was not strong enough to force through the necessary diversion of existing SIS resources to counter-espionage goals. He preferred to circumvent the existing establishment by having specialist officers of his own attached to overseas stations. Nominally, such officers came under the general administration and control of the “G” sections; but most of the latter were far too busy to pay them any attention, and their day-to-day instructions emanated direct from Section V. The “G” officer in charge of Spain and Portugal, for instance, was a certain Fenwick, who had come to SIS from the oil business. He acquiesced, with only a minimum of grumbling, in the posting of counter-espionage specialists to Madrid, Lisbon, Gibraltar and Tangier, and within weeks had practically forgotten all about them. So all went smoothly, provided I paid him a courtesy call every now and then and (in his own words) “munched a chop” with him. The general effect of this arrangement was that Section V, though still a Circulating Section in name, acquired some of the functions of a “G” Section. It became a hybrid, regarded with a degree of suspicious incomprehension by the rest of SIS. The position suited Cowgill well. It enabled him to claim that counter-espionage was an esoteric art, calling for wisdom not revealed to the common run of intelligence officers. He thus acquired a certain immunity from criticism within SIS. Unfortunately, he could not expect the same respectful hearing from M15.
    Although I have said that SIS is the only British organization authorized to collect information by illegal means, it does not followthat it is alone in collecting secret intelligence. By interception of wireless signals, it is possible to obtain huge quantities of secret intelligence without breaking any national or international law. Before wireless messages can be read, they must be decyphered. This was done in wartime Britain by the so-called Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley. Much of their work was brilliantly successful. I must leave it to learned opinion to decide how much more could have been achieved if the wrangling inside GC & CS had been reduced to manageable proportions. (The same could be said of most government departments, not to mention the universities in peacetime.)
    To sum up very briefly the place of Section V in the intelligence world: as part of SIS, it was responsible for the collection of counterespionage information from foreign countries by illegal means. The department chiefly interested in its intelligence was MI5, which was responsible for the security of British territory and therefore required as much advance news as possible of foreign attempts to penetrate British secrets. Some of the work of Section V was also of interest to other departments. For instance, the Foreign Office had a direct interest in the facilities offered by neutral governments to the German intelligence services. The efforts of Section V were at first supplemented by the Radio Security Service (RSS), which intercepted enemy intelligence signals, and by GC & CS, which read them. Before the war had gone on long, these roles were in fact reversed. Section V’s investigations abroad were directed mostly to filling in the gaps in the extraordinarily comprehensive picture derived from signals intelligence.
    It is now time to turn to some of the personalities involved, many of whom loom large in my subsequent story. The head of Section V, as I have mentioned, was Felix Cowgill. * He had come to SIS from the Indian police shortly before the war, and had alreadymade his mark. His intellectual endowment was slender. As an intelligence officer, he was inhibited by lack of imagination, inattention to detail and sheer ignorance of the world we were fighting in. His most conspicuous