Full Transcript for MOSCOW Complex Espionage Dynamics in Wartime — Part Three ANTONIA SENIOR (HOUR 1) 3 111226

cover, he has sort of jettisoned all ostensible 36 00:02:27.810 --> 00:02:29.569 signs of communism. So at this point, he's kind of 37 00:02:29.650 --> 00:02:34.409 cosplaying at being a fascist. He is so enthusiastically pro-Franco 38 00:02:34.430 --> 00:02:36.389 during the Spanish Civil War that he actually gets a 39 00:02:36.430 --> 00:02:39.219 medal from Franco. And he will actually end the period 40 00:02:39.240 --> 00:02:42.280 I'm writing about with medals from Franco, Churchill and Stalin, 41 00:02:42.319 --> 00:02:47.740 which is probably a relatively rare triumvirate. So he's in 42 00:02:47.800 --> 00:02:50.990 Spain and his handler, interestingly, in Spain is a guy 43 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:53.650 called Alexander Orloff. And Philby will kind of cross the 44 00:02:53.669 --> 00:02:58.210 border and give Orloff anything he can Orloff, who Philby 45 00:02:58.340 --> 00:03:01.530 admires deeply, he thinks he's marvellous. He says he's a wonderful, 46 00:03:01.629 --> 00:03:05.729 wonderful man, but utterly ruthless. And Orloff is the same 47 00:03:05.789 --> 00:03:11.909 man who is responsible for the Stalinist oppressions and brutality 48 00:03:12.550 --> 00:03:17.680 towards the Trotskyists in Barcelona. So effectively, Orwell and Philby, 49 00:03:17.719 --> 00:03:20.460 George Orwell and Kim Philby, see the same things in 50 00:03:20.520 --> 00:03:25.400 Spain as and they reach totally different conclusions. For Philby, 51 00:03:25.580 --> 00:03:28.340 the Stalinist oppressions are part of the point. They're not 52 00:03:28.520 --> 00:03:32.439 a problem for him. He comes back from Spain, and 53 00:03:32.460 --> 00:03:34.080 he's done so well as a journalist that when the 54 00:03:34.139 --> 00:03:38.120 war breaks out, he's sent into France as a journalist 55 00:03:38.139 --> 00:03:41.879 for the Times newspaper, embedded with the British Expeditionary Force, 56 00:03:41.919 --> 00:03:46.569 the army in continental Europe. And he's sort of out 57 00:03:46.610 --> 00:03:51.169 of contact for some of this period because... Um, a 58 00:03:51.229 --> 00:03:54.219 lot of the men who, and women, but the men 59 00:03:54.280 --> 00:03:56.080 mainly who the Cambridge five have been dealing with in 60 00:03:56.099 --> 00:03:59.620 the thirties are caught up in Stalin's terror. Again, you 61 00:03:59.659 --> 00:04:01.699 would think this might give them pause for thought. The 62 00:04:01.840 --> 00:04:04.840 only men they know connected to the communist regime have 63 00:04:04.909 --> 00:04:10.849 been basically, uh, eradicated or recalled to be eradicated by Stalin. 64 00:04:10.889 --> 00:04:12.990 And they know exactly that this is happening. This is not, 65 00:04:13.090 --> 00:04:13.810 this is not, you. 66 00:04:13.770 --> 00:04:14.289 Know, a secret. 67 00:04:15.169 --> 00:04:21.449 So Philby is, uh, in France with the British Expeditionary Force, 68 00:04:21.550 --> 00:04:24.569 giving anything he can to the Soviets by any means possible, 69 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:30.019 which is sometimes torturous. Again, even though at this point, 70 00:04:30.519 --> 00:04:32.600 Hitler and Stalin are allies, right? 71 00:04:33.120 --> 00:04:34.579 It's absolutely extraordinary. 72 00:04:34.680 --> 00:04:38.540 A possible source of energy for Philby is his first 73 00:04:38.600 --> 00:04:41.779 marriage to Litzy Friedman. What a dynamo. What do we 74 00:04:41.819 --> 00:04:42.589 need to know about her? 75 00:04:43.720 --> 00:04:45.899 Yeah, so Litzy is the kind of linchpin to his 76 00:04:45.980 --> 00:04:48.889 early life. He meets her when he comes out of Cambridge. 77 00:04:48.910 --> 00:04:52.370 He goes on a sort of gap year essentially to 78 00:04:53.250 --> 00:04:56.149 Austria and he kind of joins in revolutionary activities and 79 00:04:56.189 --> 00:05:00.910 he meets Litzy there. Litzy is a communist and Jewish 80 00:05:01.310 --> 00:05:04.500 and very active in the movement. And it's actually through 81 00:05:04.680 --> 00:05:10.259 Litzy and her communist colleague, Edith Tudor Hart, that Kim 82 00:05:10.279 --> 00:05:11.160 Philby is introduced to. 83 00:05:11.160 --> 00:05:12.579 Arnold Deutsch in the first place. 84 00:05:13.220 --> 00:05:15.860 And there are bits, you know, a lot of this 85 00:05:15.879 --> 00:05:17.980 timeline is tight, torturous, and I don't want to bog 86 00:05:18.040 --> 00:05:20.170 us down in detail. But there are moments in this 87 00:05:20.250 --> 00:05:24.189 period when Philby is a journalist and the terror has 88 00:05:24.230 --> 00:05:28.110 kind of decimated his contact procedures, where in order to 89 00:05:28.149 --> 00:05:30.529 get what information he can to the Soviets, he uses 90 00:05:30.610 --> 00:05:32.089 Litzy and Edith. 91 00:05:31.810 --> 00:05:34.250 To kind of pass on whatever information he can. 92 00:05:35.139 --> 00:05:40.139 So, yeah, she's super involved and, you know, a really extraordinary, 93 00:05:40.199 --> 00:05:43.560 and another extraordinary woman at the peripheries of this story. 94 00:05:43.879 --> 00:05:47.660 I tried to imagine the look in Melinda's eyes and 95 00:05:48.300 --> 00:05:54.509 Litzy's eyes when they realized that McLean and Philby were 96 00:05:54.569 --> 00:05:56.970 actually going to do it, were actually going to spy 97 00:05:56.990 --> 00:05:57.649 for the Soviets. 98 00:05:58.110 --> 00:05:58.910 Do you think they. 99 00:06:00.290 --> 00:06:02.949 Saw it as a success in their lives, a threat? 100 00:06:03.009 --> 00:06:04.089 How did they regard it? 101 00:06:05.610 --> 00:06:08.629 Well, Litzy brought him into the game effectively. So we 102 00:06:08.649 --> 00:06:10.459 know she was OK with it. And she was a 103 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:15.120 very committed communist ideologue. I mean, she's all in. And 104 00:06:15.180 --> 00:06:17.639 she does her own, you know, does what she can herself. 105 00:06:17.740 --> 00:06:20.040 It's just she's obviously not as connected as Philby. It's 106

00:06:20.079 --> 00:06:22.509 much harder to be connected with the British establishment when 107 00:06:22.529 --> 00:06:25.589 you're an Austrian communist Jew than if you're Kim Philby. 108 00:06:27.569 --> 00:06:31.579 For Melinda, again, we only have sort of flickers of 109 00:06:31.860 --> 00:06:34.800 her involvement but there's bits later in the story where 110 00:06:34.959 --> 00:06:37.259 you know mclean's struggling to make contacts and he offers 111 00:06:37.319 --> 00:06:39.300 up melinda as a kind of conduit. 112 00:06:39.500 --> 00:06:42.279 Um she has moments of great. 113 00:06:42.019 --> 00:06:45.220 Unhappiness in her marriage to donald mclean massive unhappiness which 114 00:06:45.240 --> 00:06:46.680 we might talk about later but none of those seem 115 00:06:46.699 --> 00:06:48.939 to be related to his activities as a communist spy 116 00:06:48.959 --> 00:06:51.660 they're more related to the fact that he's a um 117 00:06:52.279 --> 00:06:55.939 a wife beating drunken philandra so i think that's more 118 00:06:55.959 --> 00:06:59.209 of a preoccupation in one sense for melinda Yes, a 119 00:06:59.250 --> 00:07:01.319 little bit of a pink chin goes a long way 120 00:07:01.379 --> 00:07:01.759 with him. 121 00:07:01.779 --> 00:07:08.500 Now, with Philby, he's back in London now and the 122 00:07:08.540 --> 00:07:13.019 war's on. He's no longer pretending that the Soviets are 123 00:07:13.079 --> 00:07:17.100 allied with the Germans after the attack on Barbarossa. There's 124 00:07:17.180 --> 00:07:22.740 reason to believe that Philby passed on news of Barbarossa. 125 00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:25.300 I get confused whether McLean or Philby at this point 126 00:07:25.660 --> 00:07:30.319 have access to secrets that are that Which one was 127 00:07:30.350 --> 00:07:33.490 it that might have alerted Moscow? 128 00:07:33.649 --> 00:07:38.610 So I don't, they're not necessarily much, there's no evidence 129 00:07:38.629 --> 00:07:41.490 that they gave anything that was particularly crucial around Barbarossa. 130 00:07:41.529 --> 00:07:44.360 And apart from anything else, Stalin had an awful lot 131 00:07:44.379 --> 00:07:47.500 of information in the run-up to Barbarossa and chose to 132 00:07:47.540 --> 00:07:49.339 disbelieve it. So, I mean, that does lead us to 133 00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:52.959 a slightly different point about intelligence that, you know, you 134 00:07:53.000 --> 00:07:56.879 can get the best intelligence in the world, but what 135 00:07:56.959 --> 00:08:00.389 matters is how seriously it's taken by the people, you know, 136 00:08:00.709 --> 00:08:03.910 who that intelligence is serving. So when Stalin refuses to 137 00:08:03.949 --> 00:08:07.529 believe the intelligence around Barbarossa and doesn't act, that, you know, 138 00:08:07.670 --> 00:08:12.189 that renders that intelligence that he's had relatively moot. What 139 00:08:12.250 --> 00:08:15.480 happens in this period, though, is really fascinating because at 140 00:08:15.500 --> 00:08:16.040 the beginning of the. 141 00:08:16.060 --> 00:08:18.500 War, you know, Philby had been out in the cold. 142 00:08:18.839 --> 00:08:23.589 Arnold Deutsch's kind of original gamble hadn't looked like it 143 00:08:23.649 --> 00:08:27.310 had been that successful. There was periods where actually Philby's 144 00:08:27.490 --> 00:08:29.290 out of contact with Soviet intelligence and he tries to 145 00:08:29.329 --> 00:08:31.750 get back in contact with them and they're not interested. 146 00:08:31.800 --> 00:08:34.820 They don't care. Who is this random with no access? 147 00:08:34.860 --> 00:08:35.720 We don't really care about him. 148 00:08:36.480 --> 00:08:40.399 Then, when the war sort of breaks out in earnest, 149 00:08:40.440 --> 00:08:43.659 there's this kind of desperate scramble within the secret parts 150 00:08:43.679 --> 00:08:47.070 of the British state to recruit men because all the 151 00:08:47.230 --> 00:08:50.570 secret bits of the state are expanding massively. So, MI6, 152 00:08:50.610 --> 00:08:55.429 British Foreign Intelligence, increases tenfold. MI5, Domestic Intelligence, increases tenfold. 153 00:08:55.769 --> 00:08:59.190 Whole different organisations are set up, like the Special Operations Executive. 154 00:08:59.509 --> 00:09:01.379 So there's a desperate scramble for men. And it's at 155 00:09:01.480 --> 00:09:04.149 this point that Kim Philby, from having been a kind of, 156 00:09:04.740 --> 00:09:08.179 you know, fringe journalist, a very good journalist, but a 157 00:09:08.200 --> 00:09:11.419 fringe one, is taken into the heart of the British 158 00:09:11.440 --> 00:09:15.850 secret state because he gets a job with MI6. And 159 00:09:15.870 --> 00:09:20.279 he's initially kind of, in an early version of the 160 00:09:20.320 --> 00:09:24.210 Special Operations Executive, but then very soon he moves into 161 00:09:24.389 --> 00:09:27.409 MI6 proper. And at that point, obviously, the Soviets are 162 00:09:27.690 --> 00:09:29.970 much more interested in him and his information. 163 00:09:30.429 --> 00:09:34.110 And is it Philby who brings Burgess in or Burgess 164 00:09:34.129 --> 00:09:36.220 who brings Philby in at this point? 165 00:09:37.919 --> 00:09:38.600 Into MI6. 166 00:09:38.639 --> 00:09:41.940 So Philby will later claim that, will come up with 167 00:09:41.980 --> 00:09:44.710 this strategy, like story that he meets this woman on 168 00:09:44.730 --> 00:09:46.950 the train who recruits him, et cetera, et cetera. But 169 00:09:47.009 --> 00:09:49.700 I followed all of that through the archives and there's 170 00:09:49.700 --> 00:09:52.309 huge amounts of new archival stuff out there. 171 00:09:52.309 --> 00:09:53.580 And it seems nonsense. 172 00:09:53.580 --> 00:09:57.179 It looks like it was Burgess who brought uh, Philby 173 00:09:57.240 --> 00:09:59.039 in because Burgess is sort of in and out of 174 00:09:59.080 --> 00:09:59.960 different bits of government. 175 00:09:59.980 --> 00:10:02.600 So, so it's Burgess who initially brings Philby in. 176 00:10:03.220 --> 00:10:06.500 Um, and then, you know, there are, there are moments 177 00:10:06.600 --> 00:10:09.740 where people kind of flag wasn't Philby a bit of 178 00:10:09.779 --> 00:10:12.070 a communist, you know, does it matter? And then, you know, 179 00:10:12.090 --> 00:10:16.210 there were moments where, um, you could, um, hope that 180 00:10:16.269 --> 00:10:18.070 somebody would be a little bit more on the ball, 181 00:10:18.090 --> 00:10:20.570 but they're not. And the thing about Philby, I should say, 182 00:10:20.590 --> 00:10:25.909 is he is incredibly good at every job he ever does. 183 00:10:26.179 --> 00:10:28.539 The times when he was a journalist there adore him, 184 00:10:28.679 --> 00:10:31.480 constantly trying to promote him and pinch him back. You know, 185 00:10:31.519 --> 00:10:36.639 he's an incredible success at MI6. And obviously the Soviets mostly, 186 00:10:36.679 --> 00:10:38.620 there's a period where they don't, but they mostly adore him. 187 00:10:39.039 --> 00:10:44.730 He is incredibly charming. He's incredibly convincing and, He's incredibly clubbable. 188 00:10:44.970 --> 00:10:48.110 He's handsome, too, which makes a difference, I guess, in 189 00:10:48.169 --> 00:10:49.509 how people perceive you. 190 00:10:49.590 --> 00:10:52.730 Women love Philby. A lot of women help him out 191 00:10:52.850 --> 00:10:54.529 at various junctures. 192 00:10:55.210 --> 00:11:00.720 So, yeah, he's a very attractive figure to those who 193 00:11:00.779 --> 00:11:01.899 only see the sheen. 194 00:11:02.820 --> 00:11:05.919 We need to now spend time with another one of 195 00:11:05.960 --> 00:11:10.419 the Cambridge Five. This time it'll be a genuine apostle. 196 00:11:10.960 --> 00:11:15.549 His name is Burgess. The book is Stalin's Apostles, the 197 00:11:15.610 --> 00:11:18.649 Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire. Antonio 198 00:11:18.710 --> 00:11:21.379 Senior is the author. I'm John Batchelor.