My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (4 page)

It was just as well, for my first challenges came in Germany and in Fascist Spain, both countries with a short way of despatching enemy intelligence agents. My reward came during the Spanish
war, when I learnt that my probationary period was considered at an end; I emerged from the conflict as a fully-fledged officer of the Soviet service.

How did it all begin? My decision to play an active part in the struggle against reaction was not the result of sudden conversion. My earliest thoughts on politics turned me towards the labour movement; and one of my first acts on going up to Cambridge in 1929 was to join the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS). For the first two years, I attended its meetings with regularity, but otherwise took little part in its proceedings. Through general reading, I became gradually aware that the Labour Party in Britain stood well apart from the mainstream of the Left as a world-wide force. But the real turning-point in my thinking came with the demoralisation and rout of the Labour Party in 1931. It seemed incredible that the party should be so helpless against the reserve strength which reaction could mobilise in times of crisis. More important still, the fact that a supposedly sophisticated electorate had been stampeded by the cynical propaganda of the day threw serious doubt on the validity of the assumptions underlying parliamentary democracy as a whole.

This book is not a history or a treatise or a polemic. It is a personal record, and I intend to stray as little as possible from my main theme. It is therefore enough to say at this point that it was the Labour disaster of 1931 which first set me seriously to thinking about possible alternatives to the Labour Party. I began to take a more active part in the proceedings of the CUSS, and was its Treasurer in 1932–3. This brought me into contact with streams of Left-wing opinion critical of the Labour Party, notably with the Communists. Extensive reading and growing appreciation of the classics of European Socialism alternated with vigorous and sometimes heated discussions within the Society. It was a slow and brain-racking process; my transition from a Socialist viewpoint to a Communist one took two years. It was not until my last term at Cambridge, in the summer of 1933, that I threw off my last doubts.
I left the university with a degree and with the conviction that my life must be devoted to Communism.

I have long since lost my degree (indeed, I think it is the possession of MI5).
^*
But I have retained the conviction. It is here, perhaps, that a doubt may assail the reader. It cannot be so very surprising that I adopted a Communist viewpoint in the thirties; so many of my contemporaries made the same choice. But many of those who made the choice in those days changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I stayed the course. It is reasonable to ask why.

It is extremely difficult for the ordinary human being, lacking the gift of total recall, to describe exactly how he reached such-and-such a decision more than thirty years ago. In my own case, an attempt to do so would make appallingly tedious reading. But, as the question will be asked, it must be answered, even if the answer takes the form of gross over-simplification.

It seemed to me, when it became clear that much was going badly wrong in the Soviet Union, that I had three possible courses of action. First, I could give up politics altogether. This I knew to be quite impossible. It is true that I have tastes and enthusiasms outside politics; but it is politics alone that give them meaning and coherence. Second, I could continue political activity on a totally different basis. But where was I to go? The politics of the Baldwin-Chamberlain era struck me then, as they strike me now, as much more than the politics of folly. The folly was evil. I saw the road leading me into the political position of the querulous outcast, of the Koestler-Crankshaw-Muggeridge variety, railing at the movement that had let
me
down, at the God that had failed
me
. This seemed a ghastly fate, however lucrative it might have been.

The third course of action open to me was to stick it out, in the confident faith that the principles of the Revolution would
outlive the aberration of individuals, however enormous. It was the course I chose, guided partly by reason, partly by instinct. Graham Greene, in a book appropriately called
The Confidential Agent
, imagines a scene in which the heroine asks the hero if his leaders are any better than the others. “No. Of course not,” he replied. “But I still prefer the people they lead—even if they lead them all wrong.” “The poor, right or wrong,” she scoffed. “It’s no worse—is it?—than my country, right or wrong. You choose your side once and for all—of course, it may be the wrong side. Only history can tell that.”

The passage throws some light on my attitude in the depths of the Stalin cult. But I now have no doubt about the verdict of history. My persisting faith in Communism does not mean that my views and attitudes have remained fossilized for thirty-odd years. They have been influenced and modified, sometimes rudely, by the appalling events of my lifetime. I have quarrelled with my political friends on major issues, and still do so. There is still an awful lot of work ahead; there will be ups and downs. Advances which, thirty years ago, I hoped to see in my lifetime, may have to wait a generation or two. But, as I look over Moscow from my study window, I can see the solid foundations of the future I glimpsed at Cambridge.

Finally, it is a sobering thought that, but for the power of the Soviet Union and the Communist idea, the Old World, if not the whole world, would now be ruled by Hitler and Hirohito. It is a matter of great pride to me that I was invited, at so early an age, to play my infinitesimal part in building up that power. How, where and when I became a member of the Soviet intelligence service is a matter for myself and my comrades. I will only say that, when the proposition was made to me, I did not hesitate. One does not look twice at an offer of enrolment in an elite force.

L
IST OF
A
BBREVIATIONS

C
URTAIN
R
AISER
: A W
HIFF OF THE
F
IRING
S
QUAD

It was quite early in my career as a Soviet intelligence official that I first ran into serious trouble, escaping, almost literally, by the skin of my teeth. It was in April 1937, when my headquarters were at Seville in the south of Spain. My immediate assignment was to get first-hand information on all aspects of the Fascist war effort. The arrangement was that I should transmit the bulk of my information by hand to Soviet contacts in France or, more occasionally, in England. But for urgent communications, I had been provided with a code and a number of cover-addresses outside Spain.

Before I left England, instructions in the use of the code were committed to a tiny piece of substance resembling rice-paper, which I habitually kept in the ticket-pocket of my trousers. It was this tiny object that nearly brought me face to face with the firing squad.

After a few busy weeks in Seville and the surrounding countryside, my eye fell on a poster advertising a bull-fight to be held on the following Sunday in Córdoba. The front line then ran just twenty-five miles east of Córdoba, between Montoro and Andújar, and the chance of seeing a bull-fight so close to a front which I had not yet visited seemed too good to be missed. I decided to spend a
long weekend at Córdoba, including attendance at the Sunday
corrida
. I went to the
Capitania
, the military headquarters in Seville, to get the necessary pass, but a friendly major waved me away. A pass was not required for Córdoba, he said. All I had to do was get on the train and go.

On the Friday before the bull-fight, I boarded the morning train at Seville, sharing a compartment with a group of Italian infantry officers. Always on the job, as the saying goes, I asked them to have dinner with me in Córdoba, but they explained courteously that they would not have time. They would be too busy in the brothels before moving up to the front next day. I took a room in the Hotel del Gran Capitan, enjoyed a solitary meal, and walked the scented streets in a happy daze until about midnight when I returned to the hotel and went to bed.

I was aroused from a deep sleep by thunderous hammering on the door. When I opened, two Civil Guards stamped into the room. They told me to pack my bag and accompany them to headquarters. To my question why, the senior of the two, a corporal, answered simply, “
Ordenes
.”

I slept heavily in those days. Besides, I was at the disadvantage of confronting, in my pyjamas, two heavily booted men with rifles and revolvers. Half asleep and half scared, my brain reacted with less than the speed of light. I was conscious that something might have to be done about the tell-tale paper tucked away in my trousers; but how to get rid of it? My mind moved vaguely in the direction of bathrooms, but I had taken a room without a bath. By the time I had dressed and packed, and the Civil Guards had turned over my bedclothes, I had got no further than a sluggish resolve to get rid of my scrap of paper somehow on the way from the hotel to Civil Guard headquarters.

When we got into the street, I found that it was not going to be easy. I had only one free hand; the other gripped my suitcase. My escort, evidently well trained, kept a steady pace behind me all the way, watching me, for all I knew, like hawks. So the incriminating material was still on me when I was shown into an office lit by a
single bright naked bulb shining on a large, well-polished table. Opposite me stood an undersized major of the Civil Guard, elderly, bald and sour. With eyes fixed to the table, he listened perfunctorily to the report of the corporal who had brought me in.

The major examined my passport at length. “Where,” he asked me, “is your permission to visit Córdoba?” I repeated what I had been told at the
Capitania
in Seville, but he brushed my words aside. Impossible, he said flatly; everyone knew that a permit was necessary for Córdoba. Why had I come to Córdoba? To see the bull-fight? Where was my ticket? I hadn’t got one? I had only just arrived and was going to buy one in the morning? A likely story! And so on. With every fresh outburst of scepticism, I became aware, with growing unease, that my interrogator was a confirmed Anglophobe. There were plenty of Anglophobes in those days in Spain, on both sides of the line. But by this time my brain was beginning to work normally, and I began to see possibilities in that wide expanse of gleaming table.

With an air of utter disbelief, the major and the two men who had arrested me turned to my suitcase. With unexpected delicacy, they drew on gloves and unpacked it item by item, probing each article with their fingers and holding it up to the light. Finding nothing suspicious in my change of underwear, they next examined the suitcase, tapping its surface carefully and measuring its inner and outer dimensions. There was a sigh when its innocence was established beyond doubt. For a second, I hoped that that would be the end of it, and that I would simply be told to get out of town by the first available train—but only for a second.

“And now,” said the major nastily, “what about you?”

He asked me to turn out my pockets. I could no longer postpone action. Taking first my wallet, I threw it down on that fine table, giving it at the last moment a flick of the wrist which sent it spinning towards the far end. As I had hoped, all three men made a dive at it, spreadeagling themselves across the table. Confronted by three pairs of buttocks, I scooped the scrap of paper out of my trousers, a crunch and a swallow, and it was gone. I emptied my remaining
pockets with a light heart, and the major fortunately spared me the intimacies of a rigorous body-search. He gave me instead a dry little lecture on the Communists dominating the British Government, and ordered me to get out of Córdoba next day. I was paying my hotel bill in the morning when my two friends of the Civil Guard emerged from a recess in the lounge and asked if they might share my taxi to the station. As I boarded the Seville-bound coach, I gave them a packet of English cigarettes, and they waved to me happily as the train pulled out.

It was not a heroic episode. Even if my coding instructions had been found, my British passport would probably have saved me from the death sentence. But in subsequent years I have often had occasion to reflect that the really risky operation is not usually the one which brings most danger, since real risks can be assessed in advance and precautions taken to obviate them. It is the almost meaningless incident, like the one described above, that often puts one to mortal hazard.