The Charmed Life of a Traitor

Back in London, we traced a bunch of Albanians working as lumbermen for the Forestry Commission, among whom were a survivor of an ill-fated joint MI6-CIA operation. The two agencies had armed, trained, and funded a small army of guerrillas and put them into Albania by boat and parachute in the spring of 1950. The Communist rebels in Greece were faltering, Yugoslavia’s Tito had broken with Stalin, and it was hoped that a Communist collapse in Albania would ripple throughout the Balkans. They were doomed from the start. One of the few who escaped alive told us, “They always knew we were coming.” At least 300 died. The disaster was put down to leaks from the infiltrators and the extraordinary efficiency of the Albanian frontier guards and police. Super-clever those Albanian cops, you know; they must have worked out the radio code by which the first infiltrators would signal back that it was safe to send in more men — then sent that signal when it wasn’t safe at all. The Albanian cops hadn’t worked out anything. The operation was jointly commanded by a CIA man and the British liaison officer Kim Philby.

On September 1, 1967, when we were about to publish what we had found out, I received an injunction saying it would be against national-security interests to publish anything “About identities, whereabouts, and tasks of persons of whatever status or rank, who are or have been employed by either Service (MI5 or MI6).” This was a direct attempt to wipe out our entire investigation.

I decided to ignore it.

We published “The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation” on October 1. Disturbing as our findings of Philby’s betrayals were, to me the most sobering revelation was how long Philby had been able to exploit the class-conscious and social attitudes of the club and old-school echelons of MI6. When we published our revelations, I naively expected a demand for reform. Instead there was outrage, directed not at Philby or those who protected him, but at us. Several newspapers ran stories—not discouraged by official sources—that our life story of Philby was a Soviet plant. The accusations that we were handmaidens of the KGB seemed to me the product of minds incapable of confronting a real spy story without constructing an ersatz conspiracy around its origins.

Even the rumbustious Foreign Secretary and Deputy Leader George Brown got into the act. The first I knew of it was a late-night phone call from the company chairman to my home to say: “The foreign secretary has just denounced you as a traitor at a business dinner and in front of Roy [Thomson, the owner of the paper]. You’d better be in the House of Commons tomorrow, when the foreign secretary will speak.”

I opened the next morning’s Times for the report with some trepidation. “Ebullient Mr. Brown Hits Out” was the euphemistic headline on an account of Brown’s denunciation at the dinner, “ebullient” being a press parlance adjective to get round the libel risk of saying he was drunk.

Hours later, I sat in the House of Commons gallery waiting to be dragged out by the sergeant at arms. The victim turned out to be the foreign secretary himself. That morning, he had been carpeted by the prime minister, Harold Wilson, for once again showing undue ebullience in a public place. He sat on the front benches with his head bent.

Our Philby investigation was my first prolonged experience as a new national editor dealing with central government and what, for want of a better name, I have to call the political establishment: those overlapping “charmed circles” of influence and power whose strands of DNA were the elite public schools, Oxbridge, the aristocracy, the City and the blue-chip boardrooms, the civil service, the legal profession, and the conservative press. British society had become more solvent, more meritocratic, and less deferential than it had been in the 1930s, when the Soviets saw very well how it was run by their recruitment of Burgess, Philby, Maclean, and the fourth Soviet spy, Sir Anthony Blunt, Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures.

A secret service is a secret service; I accept that. But the well-tried administrative precept that efficiency improves with accountability is not irrelevant even to the secret service.

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Abridged extract from My Paper Chase by Harold Evans published this week by Little, Brown.

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Evans is a former editor of both The Sunday Times of London (1967-81) and The Times (1981-2), editorial director of US News and World Report and president of Random House.

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