Kim Philby: The Russians Make a Fatal Mistake (Ep 2)

The Rest Is Classified

The episode details the escalating tension within the Cambridge Spy Ring as the Venona project begins to expose Soviet penetrations in the W

Key takeaways

• The Venona project used decrypted Soviet telegrams to identify high-level agents like 'Homer' (Donald Maclean).
• The KGB viewed the escape of Guy Burgess alongside Maclean as a strategic blunder that alerted Western intelligence to the ring's existence.

Main topics

• The Venona Project
• The Cambridge Spy Ring

Notable quotes

The bird, meaning McClane, has flown.

Conclusion

A gripping account of how a single moment of chaotic flight transforme

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:03) For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Speaker 5 (0:24) Kim Philby is MI6's man in Washington, and he's also working for the Soviet KGB. But he's about to discover that investigations by Western intelligence could lead directly to his demise. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And Gordon, last time we left off with Kim Philby working for MI6 in Washington as the head of station. He's working directly with the CIA counterparts. He's also... compromising all manner of covert action operations, in particular, covert action operations that are being undertaken by the CIA and MI6 into Eastern Europe, places like Albania, where exile networks that are being smuggled in, Philby is compromising to his Soviet handlers. He's also got this very chaotic personal life going on at home, drinking heavily, of course, partying. He's got his friend. Guy Burgess, an unwelcome houseguest who has arrived in Washington and is living in Kim Philby's basement. Guy Burgess, of course, also working for the Soviet KGB. And Kim Philby is beginning to realize that there are investigations ongoing into penetrations of the British Foreign Office in particular. And these are investigations that could lead directly to him. But first, a word from our sponsors at HP. Speaker 5 (1:53) This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence, you quickly learn that you are only as strong as the network around you. It's rarely a single major event that undermines an operation. It's the gaps between systems. That's where information Speaker 7 (2:07) leaks. It's the same in business. Leaders face a constant battle against strict timelines, mismatched tools, and the worry their security... isn't as tight as they think it is. 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David, how much of your life do you reckon you've spent online? Well, just the best parts with you, Gordon. Well, David, NordVPN has actually mapped this out. And in the UK, we spend just over a... third of our lives online. That is 27 years. That's a whole parallel life that needs protecting. And that's where NordVPN comes in. Much more than just a VPN, they're built-in next-gen antivirus. acts as your first line of defence. To get our exclusive discount on your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com slash rest is classified. It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. That's nordvpn.com slash rest is classified. And the link is in the episode description. Speaker 7 (4:09) So, Speaker 5 (4:09) Gordon, these investigations, what are they and how are they beginning to alarm Speaker 7 (4:15) Philby? Well, if you remember, when he was on his way out to Washington, September 1949, at MI6 headquarters, he briefed about a very, very secret operation to look for leaks to the Russians during the war. And these investigations are going to be continuing in the background as he arrives in Washington, but picking up pace. And he's going to be given a pretty unique and special insight into it because it's one of the deepest secrets that the West have. And it's something called Venona. And it's so secret that the existence of Venona was only declassified in 1995. That's wild. That's 50 years, basically, after it starts. And actually, as for reasons we'll come to, many in the CIA and even the president of the United States, President Truman at the time, are not told about Venona because of its sensitivity. Why would the Speaker 5 (5:12) president need to know, right? Why would the president need to know? Speaker 7 (5:15) So what is it? During the war, there were telegrams sent by Soviet spies back to Moscow and they'd been intercepted. Now, they were encrypted. They were in code. And the Soviets used something called one-time pads to encode the messages, which is supposed to be unbreakable. Speaker 5 (5:32) And I will note that I actually, as we were preparing this, went deep into how one-time pads work. And wrote down a bunch of notes and helpful examples of how they work. And Gordon said... Too much. I think this is too much. So we will include some of that detail in our newsletter. That's right. Which I would encourage. everyone to sign up for at therestisclassified.com, but I won't go into it here. Exactly. This is a rare case where I respond positively to Speaker 7 (6:00) being edited by Gordon Carrera. Thank you very much, David. But that's right, because the key thing to understand is that they're supposed to be unbreakable. If you use one-time pads correctly, and the clue is in the name, use them once, then you can't break the codes. But... It is actually impossible. It is impossible. It's literally impossible. But... The US discovers that during the war there'd been a printing error by the Soviets and they'd reused some of their one-time pads. And so what they're now doing is going back over all the messages they've intercepted effectively by hand and seeing if they can break them using the fact that they might have reused some of the pads. It's really complex, slow, painstaking work. You get fragments of messages where there'll be something saying, Someone with a particular code name, not their real name, is meeting their handler in New York or Washington on this date or at this place. And then you've got to do all this detective work to try and work out, well, who might that be? Try and establish their exact identity. So this is really alarming, though, because as they start to do this, the Americans are going to realize that they are deeply penetrated. by the Soviets, and that there had been something like 200 agents operating on behalf of what's effectively the KGB, Soviet intelligence, in the US during the war. Many of them are in government. At least five were in Office of Strategic Services, which is the forerunner of the CIA. They're fearful that some of them might still be in the CIA at senior levels, now it's started, or be around the White House. people who are there, which is hence why they're really restricting who they tell, including the president, because, well, what if some of his aides might be amongst those potential Soviet agents? So this is a really sensitive operation. Makes sense. Let's let Kim Philby in on it. Speaker 5 (7:57) Yeah, right. Speaker 7 (7:58) Because he's head of station for the M.I.C. The president Speaker 5 (8:01) doesn't know. But it is important to say, though, that some of the suspicion around potential agents. has fallen on the Brits. Yeah, that's right. And so... Hence Speaker 7 (8:12) why you would tell him. Yeah, because it's a joint project, a joint US-UK code-breaking project to try and break these codes. There's joint investigations because there's British leads as well. So they're working with MI5 as well as MI6 to kind of work out who people are. Some of the leads point to leakages in the US. but maybe from Brits. So for all those reasons, you've got to involve the Brits. And that means Kim Philby. What is wild is this incredibly secret operation. Kim Philby actually has a pass. We talked about him having a pass to the CIA. He's got a pass to Arlington Hall, which is home of the US codebreakers. So at various points, he actually goes to see the codebreakers working on Venona. And he stands over the shoulder of Meredith Gardner, who is the lead codebreaker, and watches him as he's decrypting and working on Venona messages. Speaker 5 (9:07) Meredith, that's kind of interesting. Would you scoot over a little bit and see Speaker 7 (9:09) me? Let me Speaker 5 (9:09) just have a little look at that. Show me what you're doing. Speaker 7 (9:12) I mean, and the messages are worrying because in 1950, so soon after Philby arrives, there's references, very vague references, to a valuable London network and a spy called Stanley. Now, this is actually Philby himself, is Stanley. Does he know? I don't. Well, he must suspect that the London network is his network because he was in London during the war. Whether he knows his code now is a bit less clear. But fortunately for him, there's not much about Stanley and the London network in the messages that are being broken. But there's lots of other interesting things. So one of the things is it points to why the Soviets were able to make such progress on... the atomic bomb much faster than everyone expected because they were stealing secrets from the Manhattan Project, from Los Alamos. And actually, it's going to lead to Venona to Klaus Fuchs. Friend of the pod. Friend of the pod. We did some early episodes on him, didn't we? We did. And Philby, it Speaker 5 (10:12) seems that he may have actually tried to warn Fuchs. Yeah. That he was compromised, maybe using Guy Burgess as a barrier. Yeah, to try and get a message back. Speaker 7 (10:22) They couldn't get the message back in time. It seems to have failed to get back via the Soviets to Fuchs that he was under suspicion. So Fuchs gets arrested and breaks and, you know, is caught. But there's another even bigger problem. And that's that there is also a lead from Venona, from these decryptive messages, into a spy who the Soviets codename Homer. Guess the odyssey. It's interesting, isn't it? And Homer was leaking secrets from the British embassy in Washington, 1944 to 5. The Pheebs are leading this with MI5 involved. And Philby, he's been aware of that from when he went out to Washington, but he's going to watch it develop. And at first, it's really funny because the investigators are like, well, it couldn't possibly be a proper diplomat. Speaker 5 (11:13) Yeah, obviously not. It's got to be some low-level. It's got to be some low-level. Speaker 7 (11:17) Some Speaker 5 (11:17) low-level scumbag. Speaker 7 (11:19) Cleaner, Speaker 5 (11:19) perhaps. Speaker 7 (11:20) And so, you know, no proper person from the Foreign Office would ever be a spy. So they look at, like, local hires in Washington. I think Philby says that there's a charlady, so kind of effectively a cleaner, with a Latvian grandmother who had a 15-page report compiled on their private life. Because they're like, it must be someone with, you know, Soviet links like that. But the problem for Philby is... they're soon going to zero in that it might be someone more significant. And it's someone who Philby knows. Because Speaker 5 (11:49) Philby talent spotted this guy at Cambridge years Speaker 7 (11:54) earlier. It's Donald McLean. Exactly. And it's Donald McLean who is another one of those Cambridge spies who had been at Cambridge with Philby at this period in the early 30s, who Philby had suggested to the Soviets, who would be a good recruit, who's an ardent communist. And Donald Maclean is another one of these really curious characters. I mean, all the Cambridge spies, I think, are kind of, they're all kind of interesting and weird in a very British way. But Donald Maclean is, to some extent, had been the golden boy at the Foreign Office. You know, son of a cabinet minister, incredibly smart, high flyer. What people don't realize is he's an absolute ideological communist. He is really... We talked a bit about Philby being a kind of romantic communist, but definitely a communist. And others, there's anti-fascism going, I think McLean is a communist. He's a kind of Marxist ideologue. And you think that's different from Philby? I think it's a good question. I think Philby, there's a bit of anti-fascism. There's a bit of adventure. I think how much Philby really digested the works of Marx, I think McLean definitely did. I think he's the most committed of them. And the problem is he had been in Washington at this time, 1944 to 45. And the truth is he'd been an incredibly important spy for the KGB, for the Soviets. Being in Washington during the war, he's seeing all the kind of the traffic between, you know, President Roosevelt and Churchill, you know, about plans, about the negotiations with Stalin, about the early atomic. bomb plans, and he's feeding all of that to the Soviet Union. He is a big spy. But the problem is, McLean is now in a bad way. Also a theme of this series, I think, is Speaker 5 (13:43) people sort of beginning Speaker 7 (13:45) to crack under pressure. And McLean's crack up is pretty spectacular. Because after the war, after Washington, he goes to Cairo, and he's promoted very fast to a senior position in Cairo at the Foreign Office. But he's starting to self-destruct. He drinks a lot. another theme for the podcast. He loses it when drunk, though. And I find this interesting because I think Philby somehow manages to keep control when he's drunk. Which is astounding when you Speaker 6 (14:13) consider Speaker 7 (14:13) how much he's drinking. Speaker 5 (14:14) Yeah. Speaker 6 (14:15) But Speaker 5 (14:15) it does seem a pretty consistent read on Philby by those around him is that he's not becoming someone else when he's drinking. He's very much in control of what he says and what he does. Whereas Speaker 7 (14:27) McLean, I think, loses it when he's drunk. And, you know, in Cairo. Exhibit A. Exhibit A. When he comes home late, rather than ring the bell, he stands outside, and he's obviously drunk, and barks like a dog in Cairo until he's let in. I mean, that's not normal behavior. That's how you get into the goal-hanger offices here in London, right, Gordon? Exactly.