The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  *

  However extreme the circumstances, Greene could not be persuaded to abandon a friend (the opposite was also true – he never relented in his instantaneous dislikes). One night, at his home in Antibes, I quoted to Greene his own words about his childhood betrayer, Wheeler, whom he never forgave: ‘I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone.’ I asked him whether he still agreed with his description of what constituted a nightmare: ‘What would be the point in preparing to prevent an attack when your best friend might suddenly, without any reason, turn into your worst enemy?’

  Once he agreed, I suggested that Philby had acted like Wheeler, only Philby’s betrayal, as in the case of the infiltration of Albanian revolutionaries into Albania, had had fatal consequences. Philby sent his own agents into Albania and then betrayed them to the Russians. They were caught on landing and shot. Greene’s answer sounded as if he’d been briefed by Philby: ‘They were going into their country armed to do damage to that country. They were killed instead of killing.’19

  In giving this answer, Greene became highly flushed – the only occasion I remember the edge of his wrath. He thought that I had tricked him into agreeing with his earlier definition of what constitutes a nightmare before discussing Philby. ‘In Philby’s case it wasn’t for personal gain,’ he kept insisting. That his friend had acted out of a belief in communism, acted idealistically, was enough for Greene to forgive Philby – or so it would seem.

  Greene’s passionate belief in friendship carried conviction and is best described by E. M. Forster’s famous but somewhat asinine phrase: ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’ Greene made this point in reverse in his introduction to Philby’s memoirs My Silent War. ‘[Philby] betrayed his country, yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?’ Now Greene was fascinated by persons on the verge of losing their faith, persons with divided loyalties, but Philby, as he himself tells us, never lost his faith in communism.

  Nicholas Elliott, who knew Philby better than anyone, admitted that though outwardly a kindly man: ‘Inwardly he must have been cold, calculating and cruel – traits which he cleverly concealed from his friends and colleagues.’20 Possibly Philby wasn’t a communist: he was a nihilist. Only nihilism truly embraced gives the strength for continuous, conscientious betrayal. It was the author John Le Carré’s view that Philby never altogether left the world he forswore: that he enjoyed the Establishment, its camaraderie and institutional warmth, and remained to the end dependent on the people he deceived because he belonged – the right school, the right accent.21

  Certainly to the end Philby ‘expected and received the indulgence owing to his moderation, good breeding and boyish, flirtatious charm’.22 Philby’s view of himself comes out with remarkable clarity in one of his love letters to his third wife, Eleanor Brewer: ‘I am full of faults and weaknesses, of course, but nevertheless in some odd way lovable.’23 In some odd way lovable – that’s what Philby thought would bring him through and save him from the punishment he warranted and from which he escaped when he defected to Russia on 23 January 1963.

  Greene came to Philby’s rescue on 14 July 1963, when an article appeared in the Sunday Times entitled ‘Security in Room 51’. He wrote the humorous piece with the intention of reducing the hysteria surrounding Kim Philby’s defection and flight to Moscow. He recalled the war years when he and Philby were intelligence officers together in Ryder Street: ‘Often during these last weeks, as the word “security” becomes more and more an ugly one, I look back with nostalgia to the happy carefree months I spent in 1943 and 1944 working in a large Edwardian house off St. James’s Street.’

  ‘Security in those days’, he wrote, ‘was quite a flippant word; we were not concerned with the fate of Governments, we were free from Press and Parliament, we were able to enjoy our small secrets. Even MI5 was only a voice down the telephone.’ The United States and Britain had their separate agencies in the same house, but on different floors: ‘The house was divided between two organizations. On the upper floor lived a group – rather suspect to us – belonging to the O.S.S., the predecessors of the C.I.A.’

  To reduce the significance of ‘betrayals’ by double agents Burgess, Maclean and Philby, and to turn the tables, Greene speculated: ‘what treacheries may yet be disclosed under a different regime? Which of us in the far past at Oxford and Cambridge had become corrupted by the capitalist way of life?’

  Indeed, Greene made fun of the whole question of security: ‘Security was a game we played less against the enemy than against the allies on the upper floor’, and ‘secrets’ because of a danger from bombs ‘might be blasted one night over the whole of St. James’s, with all kinds of documents drifting into Boodles and White’s’. Describing a rule that all secret documents be locked in a safe before the owner left the building, Greene recalled another mischievous prank carried out by him in his war with officialdom. Those on fire-guard duty had to search the building and deposit any documents left exposed on the night duty-officer’s desk. The culprit next day would be reprimanded and fined.

  My own turn of duty as fire-guard came round once a week. I looked forward to that night with pleasure, because I had discovered a steel cupboard in one of the O.S.S. offices which was buckled. With a little effort I could insert my fingers and pull out sheaves of paper marked Top Secret.

  He stacked the OSS documents on the duty-officer’s desk, choosing a moment when he was not in the room. The next morning a fine was exacted ‘from our puzzled and harassed allies’. The game went on for some weeks before the source of the documents was discovered. He thought it possible that he gave himself away to his boss Kim Philby ‘over drinks in the King’s Arms behind St. James’s Street, where we would meet between sirens’. One day he found an office order on his desk: ‘For Fire-Guard Officers. In future the steel cupboard in room 51 is to be regarded as a safe and documents locked in the cupboard are to be regarded as secure.’ ‘Gently, tactfully, without publicity,’ Greene noted, ‘the rules of security had been altered to contain rather than to close the leak.’24

  It was the amusing side of their work that both Greene and Philby described when speaking of Ryder Street. Philby gave the impression in his letters to me that counter-espionage was a schoolboy’s game, not a life dealing with betrayal and death: ‘Much of our work had to be taken as a lark if one wanted to stay compos mentis.’25

  In the penultimate decade of his life, Greene spoke more soberly about the dangers of being an agent:

  The ‘turning’ of a KGB man, for instance, would never surprise me, because the profession can become a sort of game as abstract as chess: the spy takes more interest in the mechanics of his calling than in its ultimate goal – the defence of his country. The ‘game’ (a serious game) achieves such a degree of sophistication that the player loses sight of his moral values.

  But he still sought to praise Philby: ‘I can understand a man’s temptation to turn double agent, for the game becomes more interesting. Perhaps my childhood experience of divided loyalties has helped me to sympathize with people like Kim Philby, who have gone to the limit with their divided loyalties. I myself would not be capable of such courage, of such a force of conviction.’26

  No doubt Greene liked and admired Philby – many did. Here was a man raised in the traditions of integrity and public service, ostensibly the best kind of Briton, a brilliant intelligence officer, suddenly revealed as a traitor to his country. His friends must have felt deeply his duplicity and betrayal. Only Greene remained a staunch supporter, becoming Philby’s leading, and sole, apologist: this support earned him the opprobrium of the nation’s journalists.

  In his introduction to Philby’s autobiography, My Silent War, Greene suggested that Philby’s betrayal was prompted by his idealistic concern with the future of his country: ‘In Philby’s own eyes he was workin
g for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit.’ And Greene placed Philby’s betrayal in an historical perspective by comparing his betrayal with that of the English Catholic conspirators who worked for a Spanish conquest of their own country during the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and argued that a kindly Catholic ‘must have endured the long bad days of the Inquisition with this hope of the future as a riding anchor. Mistakes of policy would have had no effect on his faith, nor the evil done by some of his leaders.’

  What follows is a statement to be marvelled at as Greene defended his friend: ‘If there was a Torquemada now, he would have known in his heart that one day there would be a John XXIII.’ Surely an immediate evil is not mitigated by a future good four hundred years hence. Greene must have known that the future is made up of any number of possibilities none of which we can foresee. How could his subtle mind indulge in such intellectual folly? Such an argument allowed Philby to ignore the personal burden of responsibility, which we all share. When Philby sent his own agents to Albania and certain death, he made himself a privileged executioner of unsuspecting victims.

  Philby was captivated by his old friend’s willingness to write an introduction to his autobiography. It was a daring thing to do, for it brought them permanently together in a mutual challenge to non-communist authority. In the mind of the general public, such continued friendship was disturbing, but it seemed Greene was untroubled by his public reputation. In many commentators’ eyes, so popular was his work, so welcome was the clarity of his letters to the press, so engaging the outspokenness of his views – he was for the victim and aren’t we all victims? – that he was looked upon as the joker in the pack and allowed any freedom.

  Greene’s consistent support touched Philby and when asked in 1975 what he would like if he had a magic wand, he replied: ‘Graham Greene on the other side of the table, and a bottle of wine between us.’ Philby got his wish. In 1987 alone Greene visited the Soviet Union three times and met Philby on four separate occasions.

  In the last year of Philby’s life, Greene showed himself to be a genuine friend by urging the authorities to relent and let Philby visit England with impunity and again spoke of the purity of Philby’s motives. Did Philby ever secretly visit England? Probably only in a dream of Greene’s:

  In January 1980 Kim Philby came to see me secretly in London. He was not as I remembered him – he was furtive and sharp-featured, and I was disappointed … He had come from Havana by an English boat and I asked him whether he wasn’t afraid of being arrested … but he gave me vaguely to understand that he was safe now. All the same, when he came to leave he readily accepted my offer to walk in front of him. There was one man in particular he had seen come out of a room into the corridor who was dangerous.27

  We can only speculate whether Philby visited England, but he did visit Havana (I have a copy of a postcard and follow-up letter he sent to Greene from Cuba) and for security reasons was only allowed to travel by boat.

  Greene never commented about his attitude towards those who attacked him, but he had to endure virulent criticism from journalists and scholars alike over the years. A. N. Wilson’s article, ‘GRAHAM GREENE AND A COMPANION OF DISHONOUR’, whilst a little more vituperative than most, sums up the opinion of many. The article speaks of how Greene’s actions may be seen as praiseworthy from a certain perspective:

  By certain codes of conduct there could even be said to be something noble in Mr Greene’s refusal to drop an old friend just because he happens to be a traitor who betrayed agents to their death … There are two answers to that. One is a general answer. The other relates specifically to Mr Greene. First the general answer. In the world of public school from which Mr Greene has never really escaped there is or used to be a code of heroic friendship. If you were friends with a chap you went on being friends even when all the other chaps said he was a rotter … even if he … was actually expelled from school for misconduct. This code to a large degree continues into grown-up life for a high proportion of middle class Englishmen. A friend goes on being a friend however badly he has behaved.

  But Wilson asserts, ‘Moscow isn’t the parish of St. James. And Philby is not just a naughty boy who was thrown out of school for smoking behind the gym. He is a dangerous traitor.’ Since Greene had had a holiday with Philby, Wilson excoriated Greene: ‘To have a holiday with Philby, is morally on a par with having a holiday with Dr Goebbels while this country was at war with Nazi Germany.’ This last was a piece of extravagance, but the article saw Greene as mischief-maker and the wayward darling of the Establishment: Philby as a ‘pathetic drink-sozzled bore’.28

  The editorial that appeared in the Daily Telegraph when Philby died examined the view of Greene and other left-wing sympathisers: ‘More than a few journalists and Left-wing sympathizers have chosen to find [Philby] an amusing rogue, who merely chose the other side in The Great Game, in much the same spirit that a Zimbabwean cricketer might decide to build a Test career playing for England. Mr Graham Greene appeared to find Philby veritably companionable.’ The editorial added, ‘This faction regards the intelligence services with derision, and official secrets as a source of mirth.’29

  Was Greene’s attitude chiefly based on his expressed desire to support those ‘who lie outside the boundaries of state approval’, or could the off-the-cuff remarks of Evelyn Waugh unexpectedly carry genuine weight? ‘I think Greene’s a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is a cover up.’30

  I am certain that Greene saw himself as a genuine friend of Philby’s, but as extraordinary as it may sound, I believe he was serving a larger purpose in remaining a close friend of Philby’s: he bore deliberately the burden of scandalised criticism from his literary, political and religious enemies in order to sustain a special loyalty to his own country.

  Interviewed by Anne-Elizabeth Moutet in 1987, Greene gave the game away slightly when speaking of his personal correspondence with Philby: ‘“Well, if there was anything political in it, I knew that Kim would know that I would pass it on to Maurice Oldfield [then head of SIS], so it was either information or disinformation …” he says, letting his voice trail off.’31 What is important here is his admission that Philby’s letters, if ‘political’, would be handed over to the SIS.

  The correspondence was of greater significance than simply letting Greene know where Philby was at any given time. I suspect that SIS Philby-watchers never gave up the hope that he might contact someone in the West clandestinely; there was only one friend Philby could have used – Greene. Indeed Philby had tried earlier on, unsuccessfully, to lure his old friend Nicholas Elliott to a meeting in Helsinki. Later, when ‘the formidable’ Maurice Oldfield became ‘C’, the head of the SIS, he, I believe, hit on the idea of using Greene for this task.

  One reason Philby might have needed such a contact was to enable him to carry on the ‘game’ of espionage, perhaps as an antidote to taedium vitae. He would wish to continue his double life, if this were possible, in any country and on any side – a double agent on the lookout to become a triple agent. It would not have been beyond his conceit. In spite of public honours he received in Russia, his Order of the Red Banner, his Order of Friendship of Peoples, his Order of Lenin (plaintively Philby said to Philip Knightley: ‘It’s equivalent to a K. you know’), he might have wished to contact the West precisely because he was not trusted by the KGB.

  There is evidence for this in an anecdote related by Greene. When the Russian poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko came to visit Greene, Yevtushenko became critical of the KGB. Jokingly, Greene warned him to be careful for he had a friend who was a general in the KGB, which momentarily disturbed Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko guessed that Greene had Philby in mind:

  ‘What, that traitor?’ ‘Yes, but he’s not a traitor. He’s a communist.’ Yevtushenko replied, ‘Do you believe that?’32

  Although Philby may have had the privileges of a general in the KGB, and though he himself spoke of holding the rank of a general in
the KGB, in fact he was never a general or even an officer in the KGB. Throughout his life in Russia he remained an agent known by the simple codename of ‘Tom’.33

  During his early years as a defector, Philby came to realise that the KGB had no intention of using him to his full potential. At least two successive heads of the KGB, Shelepin (1958–61) and his protégé, Semichastni (1961–7), distrusted Philby. Even those Russians who liked and admired him, especially Generals Kalugin and Lyubimov, never fully trusted him. His one time handler, Yuri Modin, said as recently as 1992: ‘I wonder whether Kim cheated us like he cheated everyone else?’34

  Certainly the authorities placed Philby under certain restrictions. When he first defected, he was denied an opportunity to visit his friend Guy Burgess, who was dying of alcoholism, and when visiting Cuba he was permitted to go only by ship, to forestall any attempt he might make to leave Russia. He was not even allowed to visit KGB headquarters until fifteen years after his defection – so much for his boast that he had the implied rank of a KGB general.

  The second reason Philby might have for getting in touch with Greene was that over a long period Greene had been angling for him to do so. He was the big fish in the Russian sea and only Greene could hook him. To contact Philby might well have been important even in the higher reaches of office since it provided a private contact between the British and the Soviet Governments by way of the KGB. I have an extraordinary letter dated 22 January 1980 and addressed to the head of the SIS, which is tantalising in the speculation it engenders:

  I enclose herewith a xerox-copy of the postcard which Kim sent to Graham in January last year from Cuba. I also enclose a copy of a letter from Kim to Graham dated 2nd January this year, together with a xerox-copy of the envelope. Graham has the originals. The postcard came out of the blue, and Graham replied to it. Kim refers to this reply. The next communication was a letter Graham wrote to him on the subject of Iran, suggesting that there could be mutual action between the two great powers which could vastly aid Salt II and that to establish a common frontier, with a face to face position, was less dangerous perhaps than playing games against each other in neutral territory. Kim is referring to this Iran letter from Graham, which Graham had written before Afghanistan, and therefore Afghanistan is Kim’s own addition to the correspondence.