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

Although there was much in the Nazi system that offended British opinion (treatment of the Church; to a perhaps lesser extent, the treatment of Jews; treatment of Trade Unions), I was not blind to what he had done for Germany and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping Communism out of his country and, as he would feel, of blocking its passage West.

Halifax also said nothing to support German aggression in eastern Europe. His aim—unrealistic though it was—was to turn Hitler into “a good European” by offering him colonial concessions in order to persuade him to limit his European ambitions to those he could achieve peacefully. Halifax made clear, however, that Britain was prepared to contemplate the peaceful revision of Versailles:

I said that there were no doubt… questions arising out of the Versailles settlement which seemed to us capable of causing trouble if they were unwisely handled, e.g. Danzig, Austria, Czechoslovakia. On all these matters we were not necessarily concerned to stand for the status quo as today, but we were concerned to avoid such trouble of them as would be likely to cause trouble. If reasonable settlements could be reached with the free assent and goodwill of those primarily concerned we certainly had no desire to block them.

Such statements were music to Hitler’s ears—not because he was interested in the peaceful revision of Versailles, but because he interpreted Halifax’s rather feeble attempt at conciliation as evidence that Britain lacked the nerve to fight when the time came for him to begin a war of conquest.⁷⁶ Stalin, characteristically, saw a much more sinister purpose behind Halifax’s remarks and persuaded himself that Britain had deliberately given the green light to Nazi aggression in the east. The Foreign Office documents supplied by Maclean and Cairncross which recorded British attempts to appease Hitler were used by the Centre to provide the evidence which Stalin demanded of a deep-laid British plot to turn Hitler on the Soviet Union.

THOUGH KIM PHILBY ultimately became the most important of the Magnificent Five, his career took off more slowly than those of the other four. He abandoned an attempt to join the civil service after both his referees (his Trinity director of studies and a family friend) warned him that, while they admired his energy and intelligence, they would feel bound to add that his “sense of political injustice might well unfit him for administrative work.” His only minor successes before 1937 were to gain a job on an uninfluential liberal monthly, the Review of Reviews, and become a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, contemptuously described by Churchill as the “Heil Hitler Brigade.” As Philby later acknowledged, he would often turn up for meetings with Deutsch “with nothing to offer” and in need of reassurance. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War gave him his first important intelligence mission. He eventually persuaded a London news agency to give him a letter of accreditation as a freelance war correspondent and arrived in Spain in February 1937. “My immediate assignment,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “was to get first-hand information on all aspects of the fascist war effort.” As usual, his memoirs fail to tell the whole truth.⁷⁷