At last the plane landed at Shannon, where we stopped to refuel, stretch our legs, and say good-bye to the naval commander, who was to fly north to Larne in another plane to meet his new ship. The rest of us flew east to Stranraer, where I sent telegrams to some of the people I hoped to see before catching the train south to London. I even sent one to Diana back in Washington, informing her that I had arrived in Britain safely. And forty-five hours after leaving New York, I arrived at Claridge’s.
Though buttressed with heavy timbers and sandbags, all building windows crisscrossed with tape to cut down on flying glass, the West End of London still looked much as I remembered it. The bomb damage was confined to the East End and the docks. The Americans I saw on leave were nearly all Air Force, kids most of them, just as Roosevelt had said. Some didn’t look old enough to be served alcohol, let alone fly a B-24 on a bombing mission to Hamburg.
Although it was comparatively early when I checked into my hotel, I decided to go straight to bed and drank a glass of scotch to help me find oblivion. I was finally drifting off to sleep when I heard the air-raid siren. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to the shelter, only to find that few of the other hotel guests had bothered to do the same. Returning to my room when the all-clear sounded, I had just closed my eyes again when there was another warning; this time, walking along the landing toward the emergency stairs, I met a small, piggy- looking man wearing evening dress, with red hair, round glasses, and a large cigar. He resembled a cherub thickened with alcohol and pinched with disappointment, and was quite unperturbed by the high-pitched purr-like a heavenly choir of dead cats-of the siren.
Noting my haste, the man chuckled and said, “ You must be an American. Word of advice, old boy. Don’t bother going to the shelter. It’s only a small air raid. Chances are that whatever bombs do get dropped will be somewhere east, along the Thames, and well away from the West End. Last month there were just five people killed by Jerry bombs in the whole of Great Britain.” The man puffed his cigar happily as if signaling that five dead was as trifling as a game of semi-billiards.
“Thank you, Mr…?”
“Waugh. Evelyn Waugh.”
Taking his advice, I went back to bed, downed another scotch, and, with no more disturbances, or at least none that I heard, finally slept for six hours.
When I awoke, I found that almost a dozen replies to the telegrams I had sent from Stranraer had been pushed under my door. Among all the telegrams from the diplomats and intelligence officers I hoped to see were a couple of messages from two old friends: Lord Victor Rothschild and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, with whom I had been flirting for more than ten years. In an attempt to add some color to what was already known about Katyn, I faced a great many meetings with angry Poles and stuffy British civil servants, and so I was relying on Ros and Victor to help me enjoy myself. There was also a telegram from Diana. It read: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE GLAD YOU’RE THERE, IF I’M NOT GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE? DISCUSS. That was probably Diana’s idea of a philosophical question.
After a tepid English bath, a smallish English breakfast, and a thorough look through the London Times, I left the hotel, heading for Grosvenor Square. I spent the morning there meeting various people in the London station of the OSS. David Bruce, the station chief, was a forty-four-year-old multimillionaire who had the dubious distinction of being married to the daughter of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. steel magnate, one of the world’s richest men. Several of Bruce’s executive officers were no less rich, blue-blooded, or intellectually advantaged, including Russell D’Oench, the shipping heir, and Norman Pearson, a distinguished Yale professor of English. The London station of the OSS looked like an extension of Washington’s Metropolitan Club.
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.”
