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OSS If today you walk down Duke Street or St. James’s from Piccadilly toward Pall Mall, you enter a London of art dealers, banks, and men’s clothing shops. There are paintings by Raphael on sale, if you would like to buy one, or you might wish to have a pair of shoes made for five hundred pounds; you could look into Christie’s to see what sort of antiques are on offer this week, or strike out west to the Ritz for lunch before an afternoon of shopping at Harrods. It is a world where middle-aged Englishmen wearing butcher-striped Turnbull & Asser shirts and double-vented suits shout across tea tables at their wives about the lack of decent food in the Seychelles, while their daughters and someone else’s sons (or someone else’s daughters) meet at Quaglino’s or Green’s, and the streets are filled with limousines carrying Gulf harems: a gilded hijab frame, kohl eyes, black chadors over iridescent couture. Fifty years ago these cobbled streets were the center of the secret war. The headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service were across the Park, in Broadway, behind New Scotland Yard, midway between Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. We can listen to someone who was there describe its physical arrangements and those in St. James’s: “Broadway was a dingy building, a warren of wooden partitions and frosted glass windows. It had eight floors served by an ancient lift . . . It was a short walk from Broadway Buildings across St. James’s Park to the wartime headquarters of MI5 in St. James’s Street. But the difference in style was considerable. Even the entrance compared favourably with the dingy hall at Broadway, and the first good impression was confirmed upstairs. The offices looked like offices; so far as I know, there were none of the makeshift rabbit hutches that disfigured so much of Broadway. The officers sat at desks uncluttered by dog-eared paper. At most, half-a-dozen neat files, each nicely indexed and cross-indexed, would be awaiting treatment.”1 In 1943, Section V (counterespionage) of MI6 moved to offices on Ryder Street. “We were two minutes from MI5 and fifteen from Broadway. If we came to work early, we could look down from our windows and see Quaglino’s offloading its horrible garbage from the night before . . . When Section V 34 chapter three moved into its Ryder Street premises, Norman Pearson and his colleagues had taken office-space, with Cowgill’s backing, in the same building.”2 That voice belonged to H.A.R.(Kim) Philby,who worked at the time for SIS, formerly MI6, the British foreign intelligence service. MI5 is the designation of British domestic intelligence. Pearson, of Yale University, James Angleton’s mentor, had moved from New Haven to work in X-2, the counterintelligence department of the Office of Strategic Services, a new American intelligence agency headed by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and First World War hero. These are some of the organizations and people that would form James Angleton’s world during the Second World War. Kim Philby is as readable a guide as any—better than most in some ways—to the bureaucratic intricacies of the British Secret Intelligence Service during the war. In My Silent War, a book that he wrote in cooperation with his colleagues in the Soviet intelligence service, he tells us that “SIS is the only British service authorised to collect secret information from foreign countries by illegal means . . .” The basis of SIS activity is the network of agents, almost always of foreign nationality. These agents work, directly or indirectly, under the control of an SIS office, known as a “station,” housed in a British Embassy and thus protected from the action of local authorities by diplomatic convention . . . Information collected by agents finds its way, directly or by devious means, to the local SIS station responsible for their recruitment in the first place. There it is given a preliminary assessment, for value and accuracy, by SIS officers disguised as diplomats. If considered of interest, the information is transmitted, with appropriate comment, to London headquarters. Transmission is normally by foreign service communications, radio or diplomatic bag, according to the degree of urgency.3 That is how both services that employed Philby worked in the field. It was the model followed by the Americans when setting up...

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