I don’t agree with the BassettMatthews line (‘War and peace plots’, Lobster 51) on (i) Chamberlain’s flight to see Hitler in the Munich crisis (it was to avert a war, not a coup) and (ii) Philby’s criminal responsibility for prolonging World War Two.
The latter point credits far too much influence to one individual. The fact was that the German peace plotters were not trusted by Churchill and Eden, let alone by people like Philby. The Canaris group, as Matthews shows, did not offer to stop the war against the USSR, and a nationalist-dominated greater German state hegemonic over most of central and eastern Europe was neither a British nor an American interest let alone a Soviet one. In any case what guarantee was there of success? Coup plots had been tried before and failed since the resistance was penetrated by the SS (and in some cases it was the SS, as shown by Schellenberg’s constant dickering with the allies and Himmler’s attempt to seize power at the end of the war). The British and Americans could never be sure who they were talking to: SIS had had its fingers badly burned in the Venlo episode of November 1939 when what looked like a bona fide coup against Hitler turned into a massive embarrassment, with the British agents who were negotiating with the ‘resistance’ being carted off to imprisonment in Germany.
SIS did provide some logistical support to the plotters at times (even the 20 July 1944 bomb was a British one) but it would hardly be reasonable in the circumstances to expect a responsible official and still less a front-line politician such as the PM or Foreign Secretary to have gone any further. And finally, the record shows that there was no effort at disguising the extent of German resistance and peace plots: the archives are full of them (see my Profits of Peace). It would have been ludicrous for Philby to try to distort and/or bury this information. He could never have done it anyway. It was coming in from all the remaining neutral capitals in Europe, not just from Lisbon. And in the end the problem was the trustworthiness and reliability of the plotters, not sinister characters at home.