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

positive quality, apart from personal charm of an attractively simple variety, was a fiendish capacity for work. Every evening, he took home bulging briefcases and worked far into the small hours. Friday nights, as a regular habit, he worked right round the clock. Mornings would find him, tired but still driving, presiding over a conference of his sub-section heads and steadily knocking an array of pipes to wreckage on a stone ashtray. He stood by his own staff far beyond the call of loyalty, retaining many long after their idleness or incompetence had been proved. To the outer world, he presented a suspicious and bristling front, ever ready to see attempts to limit his field of action or diminish his authority. By the time I joined Section V, he was already on the worst of terms, not only with MI5, but also with RSS, GC & CS and several other SIS sections as well. Glenalmond, the St. Albans house in which Section V had established its headquarters, already felt like a hedgehog position; Cowgill revelled in his isolation. He was one of those pure souls who denounce all opponents as “politicians.”
    Unfortunately, Cowgill was up against a formidable array of brains. Most of our dealings with GC & CS on the subject of German intelligence wireless traffic were with Page and Palmer, both familiar figures in Oxford. RSS presented the even more formidable Oxonian combination of [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire and Charles Stuart. Herbert Hart, another Oxonian, confronted him in MI5, though here Cambridge too got a look in with Victor Rothschild, * the MI5 anti-sabotage expert. All these men outclassed Cowgill in brainpower, and some of them could match his combativeness. Trevor-Roper, for instance, was never a meek academic; and it was characteristic of Cowgill’sotherworldliness that he should have once threatened Trevor-Roper with court martial. It is a tribute to Cowgill that he fought this combination for nearly five years without realizing the hopelessness of his struggle. How often would he fling off a furious minute denouncing this or that colleague, and then softly murmur, with a gleam of triumph, “and now let’s get on and fight the Germans!”
    The main issue on which these personal battles were joined was control of the material derived from the interception of German intelligence-signals traffic. When the question first arose, the Chief of SIS had vested control in the head of Section V. There was plenty to be said for the ruling, and, to the best of my knowledge, it was never seriously challenged. What was challenged was the way in which Cowgill exercised his control. He realized at once that he had been dealt a trump card, and from the beginning he guarded it jealously, even to the point of withholding information that might have been put to effective use. His foes held him guilty of seriously restrictive practices, while he held them at least potentially guilty of disregarding totally the security of the source. After a hassle with Cowgill, Dick White, then Assistant Director of the MI5 Intelligence Division, claimed to have had a nightmare in which the material concerned was on sale at the newsstands.
    Cowgill’s relations with the rest of SIS posed problems of a different order. Here he was faced, not with what he regarded as excessive interest in his doings, but with the danger of total neglect. During the war, offensive intelligence absorbed most of the energies of SIS. Counter-espionage, with its emphasis on defence, was reduced to Cinderella status. This was largely due to the influence of Claude Dansey, * who was then Assistant Chief of the Secret Service, or briefly ACSS. He was an elderly gentleman of austerely limited outlook who regarded counter-espionage as a waste of effort in wartime, and lost no opportunity in saying so. His specialtywas the barbed little minute, which creates a maximum of resentment to no obvious purpose.
    The cause of counter-espionage should have been