Pearson, in charge of the OSS London Bureau’s effort to counter German intelligence, was a published poet. Having sorted me out some ration coupons, he volunteered to squire me around London’s intelligence community. He was a year my junior, and a little on the thin side, made thinner by the food, or rather the lack of food available in the London shops. His suit, tailored in America, was now a couple of sizes too big for him.
Pearson was good company and hardly the kind of desperado most people would have expected in an intelligence job. But this was typical of our service. Even after three months’ instruction in security and espionage from the OSS training center at Catoctin Mountain, there were few of my colleagues-Ivy League lawyers and academics, like myself-who ever saw the need to behave like a military organization, or even a quasi-military one. The joke around Washington was that being an officer with the OSS was “a cellophane commission”: you could see through it, but it kept the draft off. And there was no getting away from the fact that for many of the younger officers, the OSS was a bit of an adventure and an escape from the rigors of ordinary military service. Quite a few officers were insubordinate as a matter of principle, and so-called orders were often put to a vote. And yet, through all of this, the OSS held together and did some useful work. Pearson was if anything more conscientious and soldierlike than most.
Pearson took me to the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, the center of British counterintelligence. They were housed at 54 Broadway Buildings, a dingy structure of makeshift offices filled with staff in dowdy-looking civilian clothes.
Pearson introduced me to some of the section officers who had prepared much of the Katyn material used by Sir Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile. It was Major King, the officer who had evaluated the original reports, who alerted me to the fact that whatever clarity existed with regard to Katyn was about to be muddied:
“The Soviet armies under General Sokolowski and General Jermienko recaptured Smolensk just two weeks ago, on September twenty-fifth,” he explained. “They retook the region of the Katyn Forest grave sites a few days later. So the exhumations the Germans had declared would take place in the autumn are now impossible. The chances are, of course, that the Russians will dig up the bodies again and produce their own report, blaming Jerry. But that’s not really my patch. You’d best speak to the chaps in Section Nine. Philby handles the interpretation of all the Russian intelligence we get.”
I smiled. “Kim Philby?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
I nodded. “From before the war. When we were students, in Vienna. Where can I find him?”
“Seventh floor.”
Kim Philby looked more like a master in an English public school than an officer in the SIS. He wore an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a pair of brown corduroy trousers held up by red suspenders, a flannel shirt, and a stained silk tie. Not very tall, he looked lean and even more undernourished than Pearson, and he smelled strongly of tobacco. It was almost ten years since I had seen him but he hadn’t changed very much. He still looked shifty and guarded. Seeing me standing next to his untidy desk, Philby stood, smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Pearson.
“My God, Willard Mayer. What on earth are you doing here?”
“Hello, Kim. I’m with the OSS.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew this chap, Norman.”
“We’ve only just met,” said Pearson.
“I’m here for a week,” I explained. “Then it’s back to Washington.”
“Sit down. Make yourselves at home. Catherine! Could you bring us all some tea, please?”
Still smiling uncertainly, Philby surveyed me steadily.
“The last time I saw you,” I said, “you were getting married. At the town hall in Vienna.”
“February 1934. My God, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself.”
“How is Litzi?”
“Christ only knows. I haven’t seen her in a long time. We’re separated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We never really got on. Can’t think why I married her. She was too wild, too bloody radical.”
“Perhaps we all were.”
“Maybe. Anyway, I have Aileen now. Two children. A girl and then a boy. And another on the way, for my sins. Are you married, Will?”
“Not so far.”
“Sensible fellow. You played the field, as I recall. And usually won. So what brings you up here to the homely comforts of Section Nine?”
“Because I hear you’re the Russian expert, Kim.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Philby lit a cigarette and, tucking one hand underneath his armpit, smoked briskly. A ten-shilling note protruded from the none-too-clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. “But we have our moments of inspiration.”
The tea arrived. Philby glanced at his pocket watch, busied himself sorting out the chipped cups and saucers, and then, removing the lid, glanced inside the great brown enamelware pot, like the Mad Hatter looking for the dormouse. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, I said to myself, how I wonder what you’re at.
“I’m investigating the Katyn Forest massacre,” I said. “For President Roosevelt. And I was wondering if you had any insight as to what might happen now that the Russians are in possession of that region again.”
Philby shrugged and poured the tea. “I expect the Supreme Council will appoint some sort of extraordinary state commission to investigate crimes committed by the German Fascist invaders, or some nonsense like that. To prove it was all a dastardly plot cooked up by the Jerries to disturb the harmonious unity of the Allies.” He picked a piece of tobacco off his lip. “Which is no more than our own foreign secretary, Mr. Eden, said in the House of Commons a while back.”
“Saying it is one thing. Believing it is quite another.”
“Well, you’d probably know more about that than me, old boy.” He stirred his tea thoughtfully, like a man mixing paint. “But let’s see, now. The Ivans will appoint a bunch of academicians and authors to the commission. Someone from the Smolensk Regional Executive. A People’s Commissar for this or that. Someone from the Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Medical chap from the Red Army, probably. That kind of thing.”
I sipped the tea and found it too strong to be palatable. When they took away the pot, they’d probably use the dregs to paint a wooden fence. “Do you think the Soviets will invite anyone independent to join such a commission as you describe?”
“You put your finger right on it, Willard old boy. Independent. How is that independence to be guaranteed? The Germans have got their report. Roosevelt is going to have his. And now I expect the Russians will want theirs. I suppose people will have to make up their minds about what to believe. If you think in terms of global struggle, this kind of thing is inevitable. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the Russians are still our allies and we will have to learn to work with them if we are going to win this war.”
He seemed to have finished his analysis, and I stood up and thanked him for his time.
“Anything for our American cousins.”
Pearson added his thanks, and Philby said to me, “Norman is notable for being the least bewildered fellow in Grosvenor Square.” He’d brightened noticeably now that I’d said I was leaving. “We do our best not to be too dry or intimidating for you American chaps, but we cannot know how we seem. That we have survived unconquered thus far is because we have let nothing affect us. Not ration cards, not German bombs, no, not even the English weather-eh, Norman?”
Leaving Pearson at Broadway Buildings, I walked back across the park, pondering the renewal of my acquaintance with Kim Philby. I had known Harold “Kim” Philby for a brief period before the war. In late 1933, just down from Cambridge, Philby had arrived in Vienna on a motorcycle. Four years younger than me and the son of a famous British explorer, Philby had thrown himself into working for Vienna’s left-wing resistance, with little thought for his own safety. After nine Socialist leaders had been lynched by the Heimwehr, Austria’s right-wing, pro-Nazi militia, he and I had helped to hide wanted leftists until they could be smuggled out of the country to Czechoslovakia.