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

defended, at that high level, by Valentine Vivian, * whose title was Deputy Chief of the Secret Service, or DCSS. He was a former Indian policeman, and had been head of Section V before the war. But Vivian was long past his best—if, indeed, he had ever had one. He had a reedy figure, carefully dressed crinkles in his hair, and wet eyes. He cringed before Dansey’s little minutes, and shook his head sadly at his defeats, which were frequent. Shortly before I joined Section V, Cowgill had brushed Vivian aside, making little effort to hide his contempt. It was no thanks to Vivian that Cowgill finally won his battle for increased appropriations for Section V, and with Vivian that was to rankle. It may seem that the feelings of so ineffectual a man scarcely require mention in a book of this kind. But, at a later stage, they were to play a critical part in my career.
    It was more than a year before I was directly affected by these high-level rivalries. My first duty was to do my job and learn it at the same time. I was given precious little guidance from above, and soon became indebted to my head secretary, an experienced girl who had been in the service before the war and was able, despite chronic ill health, to keep me from the worst pitfalls. The volume of work was monstrous. As a result of staff increases, we were now six in the Iberian sub-section, doing the work which two were supposed to have done before. Small wonder that one of them committed suicide. We were still regularly swamped with incoming mail. Some allowance must be made, of course, for Parkinson’s Law; even so, like many of my colleagues, I could only keep pace with my towering “in-trays” by taking a fat briefcase home in the evenings. Every day brought a few telegrams from Madrid, Tangier orLisbon. We received showers of minutes from other sections of SIS and of letters from MI5. Once a week, we received depressingly heavy bags from the Peninsula, where our representatives were still thrashing around in the dark. For every lead that produced results of any kind, a dozen lured us tortuously into dead ends.
    A typical muddle confronted me at an early stage. An SIS agent in Madrid stole the diary of a certain Alcazar de Velasco, a particularly nasty Falangist from the Spanish Press Office, who had visited England a month or two previously. The diary stated explicitly that he had recruited a network of agents on behalf of the German Abwehr; names, addresses, and assignments were given in detail. It was not until many weeks’ work had been wasted that we reached what was surely the correct conclusion, namely, that the diary, though undoubtedly the work of Alcazar de Velasco himself, was fraudulent from beginning to end, and had been concocted solely for the purpose of extracting money from the Germans.
    Yet the theft was not entirely fruitless. We had long suspected Luis Calvo, a Spanish journalist working in London, of passing to Spain information that might comfort, and possibly aid, the enemy. The fact that his name appeared in the diary as a recruit for the Alcazar de Velasco network suggested a promising means of extracting a confession, spurious though we thought the entry to be. Calvo was accordingly arrested and taken to the “tough” interrogation centre on Ham Common. No physical violence was used to break him down. He was merely stripped naked and propelled into the presence of the camp commandant, a monocled Prussian type called Stephens who punctuated his questions by slapping his riding-boots with a swagger-stick. We had made a correct assessment of Calvo’s nerve. Appalled by his compatriot’s frivolous treachery, and doubtless by the swagger-stick, he said enough about his activity to warrant his captivity for the duration. Another by-product of the famous diary was derived from the fact that it mentioned Brugada, the Spanish Press Attaché in London, in compromising terms. Brugada was the last person to want a scandal, and proved