If Kim Philby was in any doubt about the nature of the meeting he was about to have with an MI5 interrogator in December 1951, it was rapidly dispelled when the most damaging Soviet double-agent of the Cold War asked if he could smoke.
With polite if terse understatement, his inquisitor told him that he would prefer it if Philby, who at that time remained one of the highest-ranking officers in MI6, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, did not light up as “it was a formal occasion”.
The man asking the questions was Helenus Milmo, my grandfather. A barrister who had worked for MI5 during the Second World War, he had answered a call from his former Security Service colleagues to try to get to the bottom of growing suspicions about Philby’s loyalty just months after two other members of the Cambridge Spy Ring – Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess – had fled the country and defected to Russia.
Some 73 years after the four-hour encounter between Philby and Helenus, the yellowed, 92-page transcript of that conversation has been released at the National Archives in Kew, west London.
It casts new light on both how my grandfather and MI5 sought to ensnare “Peach”, as Philby was known to the Security Service, but also the cool ruthlessness of a traitor who would remain hidden for another 12 years and who barely blinked when confronted by my grandfather with evidence that just months earlier he had sent a man to his death to save his skin.
The interrogation at MI5’s austere headquarters in that 50s winter came at a time of crisis for Britain’s intelligence services. The disappearance of Burgess and Maclean, both Foreign Office diplomats, in May 1951 was not only deeply embarrassing but also left open the gnawing belief that a wider Russian espionage network was operating in the highest echelons of the British state.
It was my grandfather’s job to use all the analytical skills which would later see him become a High Court judge to take Philby through a jigsaw of evidence – ranging from the jaw-dropping suggestion that he had been sent by the KGB as a young journalist to assassinate Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to the fact he had housed Burgess in his Washington home – which MI5 believed amounted to damning proof that he too was a mole.
According to previous accounts of the interrogation, Helenus’s role had been to verbally bludgeon “Peach” into an admission of his treachery. These papers suggest the truth is a good deal more subtle.
Certainly, my grandfather believed he had a bomb-proof case against the debonair spy sat before him. He told Philby that his previous explanations of the suspicions against him “contain a considerable proportion of half-truths… and a very disturbing body of downright falsehoods”.
What followed was a forensic tour of the moments in Philby’s career where his behaviour tallied with the activities of a Soviet spy rather than a British intelligence officer. At times, Philby floundered and admitted he could provide little or no logical explanation for his actions – acknowledging at one point that the actions of Burgess and Maclean had put him in a “tough spot”.
But at the same time, the transcript makes clear that Helenus was dealing with a maestro of duplicity, capable of throwing just enough dust in the eyes of his pursuers to obscure his treachery with a web of excuses, half-truths and disingenuous puzzlement.
In one particularly bone-chilling moment, it was put to Philby that he is was likely to be the source of a leak from London which resulted in the interception by Soviet intelligence of Konstantin Volkov, a Russian diplomat based in Turkey who had told his British counterparts that he could reveal the identities of three double-agents operating in the Foreign Office and M16 – namely, Burgess, Maclean and Philby.
Philby, who eventually defected to Moscow in 1963, later admitted that he had betrayed Volkov to his Russian handler in London in the knowledge that the would-be defector would probably be murdered. As it was, the Russian was abducted, drugged and then executed in Moscow.
Asked by my grandfather if he “despised” the man he must have known he had sent to his death, Philby replied without an apparent flicker of emotion: “He was just a defector.”
Helenus never spoke of his encounter with “Peach”, but his words still echo with a belief that if only he had been able to put Philby before a jury, only one verdict could be returned. In the aftermath of the interrogation, my grandfather wrote a further report for MI5 putting forward an iron-clad conclusion – that Philby “is and has been for many years a Soviet agent”.
Spain is punishing Brits with its 100% tax – more fool them