The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB

Deutsch’s recruitment strategy was to prove a spectacular success. By the early years of the Second World War all of the Five were to succeed in penetrating either the Foreign Office or the intelligence community. The volume of high-grade intelligence which they supplied was to become so large that Moscow sometimes had difficulty coping with it.

AFTER GRADUATING FROM Cambridge in June 1933 with the conviction that “my life must be devoted to Communism,” Philby spent most of the next year in Vienna working for the MOPR (the Russian acronym of the International Workers Relief Organization) and acting as a courier for the underground Austrian Communist Party.¹⁵ While in Vienna he met and married a young Communist divorcee, Litzi Friedman, after a brief but passionate love affair which included his first experience of making love in the snow (“actually quite warm, once you got used to it,” he later recalled).¹⁶ The first to identify Philby’s potential as a Soviet agent—and probably to draw him to the attention of Arnold Deutsch—was Litzi’s friend Edith Suschitsky, who was herself recruited by Deutsch and given the unimaginative codename EDITH.¹⁷

In May 1934 Kim and Litzi Philby returned to London, arriving some weeks after Deutsch. Several months earlier Edith Suschitsky had also taken up residence in London, marrying another recruit of Deutsch’s, an English doctor named Alex Tudor Hart. The newly married couple were given the joint codename STRELA (“Arrow”).¹⁸ In June 1934 Edith Tudor Hart took Philby to his first meeting with Deutsch on a bench in Regent’s Park, London. According to a later memoir written by Philby for the KGB, Deutsch instructed him, “We need people who could penetrate into the bourgeois institutions. Penetrate them for us!”¹⁹ At this early stage, however, Deutsch did not tell Philby that he was embarking on a career as a Soviet agent. Instead, he gave him the initial impression that he was joining Comintern’s underground war against international fascism. Philby’s immediate task, Deutsch told him, was to break all visible contact with the Communist Party and to try to win the confidence of British pro-German and pro-fascist circles.²⁰ As was not uncommon at this period, Philby’s first codename, given him immediately after his meeting with Deutsch, had two versions: SÖHNCHEN in German or SYNOK in Russian—both roughly equivalent to “Sonny” in English.²¹

Half a century later, Philby still remembered his first meeting with the man he knew as “Otto” as “amazing”:

He was a marvelous man. Simply marvelous. I felt that immediately. And [the feeling] never left me… The first thing you noticed about him were his eyes. He looked at you as if nothing more important in life than you and talking to you existed at that moment… And he had a marvelous sense of humor.²²

It is difficult to imagine any other controller in the entire history of the KGB as ideally suited as Deutsch to the Cambridge Five. Though four of the Five graduated from Cambridge with first-class honors,²³ Deutsch’s academic career was even more brilliant than theirs, his understanding of human character more profound and his experience of life much broader. He combined a charismatic personality and deep psychological insight with visionary faith in the future of a human race freed from the exploitation and alienation of the capitalist system. His message of liberation had all the greater appeal to the Cambridge Five because it had a sexual as well as a political dimension. All the Five were rebels against the strict sexual mores as well as the antiquated class system of inter-war Britain. Burgess and Blunt were homosexuals, Maclean a bisexual and Philby a heterosexual athlete. Cairncross, a committed heterosexual, later wrote a history of polygamy which concluded with a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: “Women will always prefer a 10 percent share of a first-rate man to sole ownership of a mediocre man.”²⁴ Cairncross plainly considered himself first-rate rather than mediocre. Graham Greene was charmed by Cairncross’s book. “Here at last,” he wrote to Cairncross, “is a book which will appeal strongly to all polygamists.”²⁵