In offering Philby immunity from prosecution, Elliott threatened that without a deal he would be harassed until his living arrangements became intolerable. It was apparently suggested that his bank account could be frozen, that the Observer and other potential employers would be warned against using his stories and that his residence permit in Beirut might be rescinded. It is likely that Philby was tempted by the immunity-from-prosecution deal. He admitted working for Soviet Russia from 1936 until 1946, and to tipping off Maclean in 1951, but did not admit to his Cold War activities. Transcripts of the taped and drunken talk between Elliott and Philby are not publicly available. We do not know whether Elliott said that London had new information that incriminated Philby. Did he mention Flora Solomon, or leave Philby to think that the source was Golitsyn or Blake? The accounts of these discussions given by Philby to the KGB were self-servingly inaccurate.
Hollis and White were relieved by Elliott’s account of Philby’s attitude, and reported to Edgar Hoover that the damage to US interests of Philby’s espionage had been limited to the war years – for four of which the Soviet Union and the United States had been allies. The Nunn May precedent, in which the British security services had chosen to investigate spying over a truncated period, and had ignored a longer, more untidy time-span, was being followed. Philby, however, was either fooling Elliott when he seemed receptive to the immunity deal or had second thoughts. Perhaps there was also a calculation in London that if Philby was allowed to make an easy escape, Moscow Centre might suspect his loyalty, doubt his material and treat him as a disinformant. Elliott left Beirut, with responsibility for monitoring Philby devolved to Peter Lunn. On the night of 23 January 1963 Philby seems to have tramped through the streets of Beirut to check that he was not being tracked, to have donned the disguise of a Russian merchant seaman and then to have boarded the freighter Dolmatova, which unexpectedly weighed anchor without loading its cargo and steamed to a Soviet port. From Moscow he sent White a message: ‘You have won this round, but I assure you that I will win the last.’26
White was exasperated by misrepresentations of this episode. Criticizing John le Carré’s essay of 1968, for example, he wrote that the novelist showed ‘his longing for Br. Intelligence to match the K.G.B. in ruthlessness & cunning – & ends to justify all means’. Le Carré had suggested that SIS should have kidnapped or murdered Philby in Beirut in 1962. ‘But’, wrote White, ‘corpses of already famous 3rd men are more easily disposed of in novels than among Br. Diplomats & Home Office officials. Moreover in terms of legal evidence it could still quite easily have been said that the wrong man had been disposed of. Who in our democracy accepts responsibilities of this kind?’27
The handling of Philby’s Beirut interrogation, and the ease with which he fled, convinced the paranoiacs – Angleton in the CIA, Wright and Martin in MI5 – that there had been betrayal within the British intelligence services. Angleton was traumatized by the defection of his once trusted friend. He felt humiliated and fractured by having been outwitted and out-drunk. He lost objectivity in assessing people as he developed a malignant obsession with conspiracies. One of Philby’s greatest achievements was to tip Angleton into clinical paranoia after 1963. Angleton sat at his desk in Langley, Virginia, chain-smoking behind drawn curtains, scouring old files and spreading crazy, destructive suspicions within the CIA.28
For six months the fires of the story of Philby’s disappearance were banked: Whitehall wished to avoid yet another scorching of the government and the civil service, and made no public admission; and journalists feared getting burnt in a libel action if they reported the defection and Philby then reappeared in the west. (SIS was known to encourage its agents, such as Greville Wynne, who was imprisoned for spying by the Soviets in 1963–4, to supplement their pensions by suing newspapers which called them spies: there was never any evidence that the newspapers could use in justification.) Then, on 1 July 1963, a Cabinet minister, Edward Heath, surprised the House of Commons with a statement that Philby had defected to Russia and was the Third Man in the Burgess–Maclean case. Once again the press went berserk. New fusillades were launched at the Establishment. As the Daily Mirror editorialized,
Hardly a day goes by without some fresh revelation of how the Old Boys work in high places to keep the Old Boys in high places.
Don’t worry, Old Boy, if you’re found out – there are buckets and buckets of surplus whitewash in Whitehall, and your friends will see you through …
Look at what happened to Maclean. Working for the Foreign Office in Cairo he was as soused as a herring, involved in wild and disgraceful episodes which no business concern would tolerate for a second in its messenger-boys.
Fired? Not on your life, Old Boy. Dear old Donald was given a rest until his hangovers cleared up, and then he was given another Foreign Office top job.
…
It is beginning to look as if the whole of the Tory Party approves of the cover-up, hush-up, keep-it-dark, Old Boys technique of getting in power and staying in power – and to hell with what the country thinks.29
Two months later, on 30 August, Burgess died of acute liver failure. Norman Ewer, under the byline ‘Britain’s most experienced diplomatic correspondent’, wrote an assessment of his fellow Soviet spy for the Daily Herald. ‘All his life he was a highly talented, deeply unhappy misfit. Whether a misfit because he was homosexual or homosexual because he was a misfit is a matter for psychologists.’ Following Driberg’s artful misdirection, Ewer doubted that Burgess had ever been a communist of Maclean’s sincerity. He was a mere escapist whose disappearance had been no more significant than ‘a flight from a society in which he could find no place’. Burgess’s death terminated those mischievous, plausible, distorting press interviews which for seven years he had lobbed into the west as mini-projectiles of propaganda. But with Philby in Moscow a new phase of disinformation could begin. A weightier means than telephone calls to Driberg, namely the Anglophone world’s hunger for spy stories and publishers’ avidity for proven bestsellers, was available for KGB manipulation.30
Bestsellers
The era of the spy bestseller began in 1956 with the publication as a Pan cheap paperback of Ian Fleming’s novel Casino Royale, which had received little attention when issued in hardback as the earliest James Bond adventure in 1953. Fiction prepared the way for the ostensibly non-fiction works that prolonged and loudened the impact of the Cambridge spies. Fleming’s thrillers, Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and The Looking Glass War (1965) preceded the investigations by the Sunday Times researchers known as the Insight Team and Philby’s memoirs. Their commercial success was an incentive for the works of Andrew Boyle, Anthony Cave Brown, John Costello, Richard Deacon and Chapman Pincher. Already in 1968 Dick White regretted that ‘the rational aspects of the intelligence function [were] distorted as they so often are in the public mind by the melodramas of the fiction writers’. He nevertheless recommended to Hugh Trevor-Roper an American bestseller of 1967, Topaz by Leon Uris: ‘a rather badly written novel’, but ‘worth reading because partly based on authentic inside information’. Generally, though, the smudged and crooked lines of fiction-writers and journalists made the truth ever more illegible.31
If the James Bond phenomenon was launched by the Pan paperback of Casino Royale, it was blasted skyward in 1957 when the Daily Express ran a comic serial adaptation of From Russia with Love and it became unstoppable after the film version of Dr No had been released in 1962. Fleming’s James Bond, as distinct from the cinema version, had unimpeachable upper-middle-class antecedents. He was the son of a senior manager of the Vickers armaments company, an Old Etonian, honoured as a Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, at ease in St James’s clubs but disappointed in post-war England. He relished his privileges, drove a Bentley, bought groceries from Fortnum & Mason, drank coffee from a Queen Anne silver pot and impersonated a herald from the College of Arms. For readers, he
fulfilled a reassuring fantasy of Britain’s endurance as a world power by besting not only Soviet agents but foreigners such as the Albanian money-launderer known as Le Chiffre, the Polish-Greek master-criminal Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Italian racketeer Emilio Largo, the Latvian metallurgist Auric Goldfinger and the Aryan supremacist Hugo Drax.
Fleming had little respect for the charades of parliamentary government. He attended a debate in the House of Commons only once, in 1938, when the Chamberlain government’s policy towards Mussolini’s Italy was under discussion. ‘I found the hollowness and futility of the speeches degrading and infantile, and the well-fed, deep-throated “Hear Hears” for each mendacious platitude verging on the obscene,’ he recalled in 1959. Asked what he would do if he was Prime Minister, he replied that he would try to ‘stop people being ashamed of themselves’ and to raise individual self-respect. ‘The fact that taxation, controls and certain features of the Welfare State have turned the majority of us into petty criminals, liars and work-dodgers is … having a very bad effect on the psyche of the kingdom.’ He understood that just as rationing created the opportunities for black-market spivs, and the prohibition of narcotics provided a profit incentive for drug-smuggling, so high taxation induced tax evasion. The psyche of the United Kingdom, Fleming thought, was increasingly banal, childishly petulant and (as he showed by his preoccupation with luxury brand names) pretentiously consumerist. ‘You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands,’ a Japanese master-spy says in You Only Live Twice (1964). ‘When you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world.’ Successive governments had ceded control of economic matters to collective bargaining and strikes. ‘This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so admired. In its place, we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers after pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family and of your so-called aristocracy in the pages of the most debased newspapers in the world.’32
The big profits from Deighton, Fleming and le Carré novels induced publishers to diversify into espionage memoirs and popular spy histories. This occurred at a time when respect for Whitehall was being weakened even as the mandarins’ freedom to explain their decisions and recount their careers to the public was being circumscribed. Sir George Mallaby’s memoirs From My Level (1965) provoked Sir Laurence Helsby, head of the civil service, to circularize permanent secretaries and heads of overseas missions insisting that ministers must have ‘full confidence that they can speak their minds plainly in front of their official advisers without any fear that unguarded remarks may be stored up for publication’. Helsby condemned officials who abused positions of trust by keeping diaries or private records that could later be exploited ‘for personal profit or acclaim’. Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh, UK representative to NATO, who twenty years later published his FO diary covering the Suez crisis, retorted to Helsby that this instruction marked ‘a serious step in the downgrading and devitalisation of civil servants’. Ministers could not expect advisers of any intelligence to be nullities ‘without memory or judgement, in whose presence the talk and behaviour of the Ministers are to be as if they had never been. A man is responsible for his acts and his statements wherever he makes them and must learn to judge what confidence he can place in others and to use discretion. Politicians surely cannot be given a kind of blanket exemption from this human condition. There is also History to consider and the claims of truth.’ Shuckburgh concluded with a prescient warning for Helsby: ‘If we are not careful we shall turn ourselves, the civil servants, into intellectual eunuchs and un-men, and create in our politicians a wholly erroneous idea of their immunity from the normal human responsibilities.’33
Shuckburgh’s remark had sharper point in a period when officials were receiving abuse in a way that had previously been restricted to politicians. The Sunday Times Insight Team’s compilation Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation was an unforgiving exercise which spared no one in Whitehall. ‘The Philby stuff in the Sunday papers has been very tiresome,’ Dick White wrote in October 1967 after the book’s publication. ‘My present service [SIS] is criticised in every possible way for their handling of the matter. My previous service [MI5] comes out of it fairly well.’ The position taken by both the Observer and Sunday Times was, in White’s words, that ‘the brilliant work of the war was sacrificed and nullified in the years immediately after peace by the traitors in our entrails’. White particularly resented the Insight Team’s accusation that ‘successive British governments have allowed the public to believe that Philby was a defecting journalist of minor importance – and have tried to deny the state of grotesque dilapidation (now belatedly remedied) that allowed him to do what he did’. As J. C. Masterman commented of the Insight publicity, ‘the generality of people do not discriminate between the work of different parts of the service. I doubt whether they have any idea of the difference in the function of M.I.5 and M.I.6. What they feel is a mistrust of the “Secret Service” – they feel this, I am sure, because the failures are broadcast everywhere & the successes entirely concealed.’34
Hugh Trevor-Roper, as a former intelligence officer, had been asked to provide an authoritative introduction to the Sunday Times book, but it was perhaps thought that his temperance, precision and irony were too selective a taste for commercial success. Trevor-Roper was usurped in this role by the suspense novelist le Carré. Writing in commiseration to Trevor-Roper, White averred that the ‘high-pitched hysterical denunciations [in le Carré’s introduction] are quite ridiculous & will merely cause laughter among the younger members of my service’. The blame was not entirely le Carré’s, he thought. There was ‘a substratum of truth’ to the Insight Team’s presentation of the Philby case, but overall it was ‘full of misconceptions, gaps in knowledge & sheer prejudice’. The journalists were ‘sickeningly self-righteous’, procedurally flawed and factually incomplete. For them the story had to be presented as ‘a public scandal, the revelation of which puts the authors into the role of knights in shining armour’. They seemed unaware ‘that you cannot hope to write a sound historical piece about an event in the continuous secret struggle between intelligence services when both sides are only going to reveal the facts that suit them. In our case there is the need to live to fight another day.’ The Insight Team never ‘stopped to think that the background against which we had to handle the Philby case was very different from their own gleanings from published material. It was enriched from the study of many similar not less important cases in the western world & from the revelations of some 30 or so defectors from the K.G.B. The experience of the Philby case is of course a part & an important part of our knowledge of what the western world is faced by in the K.G.B.’35
A Sunday Times foreign correspondent, Murray Sayle, had several interviews with Philby during 1967. He concluded, in the summary of his colleague Bruce Page, that ‘Philby was more Soviet loyalist than Communist,’ well grounded in Marxist-Leninist doctrines, but with attitudes to China, Africa and Latin America that were ‘vehemently those of a Russian national Communist’. Philby expressed, for example, ‘puzzled indignation about the Maoists. (“These people have got the sauce to say that we are in Asia as a colonial power!”)’. Sayle found him polite, worldly and arrogant: ‘although his allegiance to, and admiration for, the Soviet elite (of which he counts himself a member) is complete, it is accompanied by a certain genial contempt for the Russians’. ‘Communism’, Philby told Sayle, ‘must be a pretty good system if even these Russians can run it.’36
In 1968, under KGB auspices, Philby published a memoir of the period before 1956 entitled My Silent War. It was a medley of fact and fiction, history and disinformation, in
tended to serve Soviet aims by damaging the British security services. It received an astonishing measure of credence from reviewers and journalists meeting deadlines: the fact is that it was the literary equivalent of a prisoner’s evidence from the dock about his movements on the night of the crime. When a sound historian such as Angleton’s biographer Michael Holzman refers to White as ‘a man of impeccably bad judgment’, it is under the influence of Philby’s hostile memoirs.37
Moscow’s negative propaganda about Whitehall was not countered by positive news about the successes of MI5 and SIS. Lord Normanbrook, the former Cabinet Secretary, told Masterman that it was impossible to permit publication of his historical treatise on the XX System because of the stories generated by or concerning the Cambridge spies and cognate scandals. ‘Many people know that the Service was greatly strengthened during the war by the recruitment of people, like yourself, who would never be found within it in peace time,’ wrote Normanbrook, ‘and part of the newspaper case against the Service is that it is not now what it was: its glories have departed.’ That being so, the Cabinet Office feared that readers of Masterman’s book would doubt that MI5 was still as efficient as a counter-espionage organization as it had been in the war years. The secret services fully appreciated the importance of ‘public image’ and knew that they had a low rating with the public. ‘The difficulty is to do something about it without damaging ourselves still further,’ White explained to Masterman. ‘We don’t like getting into a public “answer back” position when we know that we can really only use a fraction of the evidence.’38
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