by Tim Milne
Guy, for all his awfulness, unreliability, malicious tongue and capacity for self-destruction, could be oddly appealing. He let his weaknesses appear, something that Kim seldom did. Indeed he wore almost everything on his sleeve, his celebrity-snobbery and namedropping, his sentimentality, his homosexuality; he never seemed to bother about covering up. One evening he told the story, new to me, of the founder of SIS, Captain Smith-Cumming, who was said, when trapped after a road accident, to have amputated his own leg in order to get to his dying son: at the end Guy burst into tears, to our embarrassment more than his. That same evening the conversation, unusually, turned to basic politics. Guy was talking about the future prospects of conflicting ideologies. Kim suggested that perhaps some ‘new synthesis’ might emerge – specifically, in the context, of capitalism and communism. No doubt he and Guy were throwing a little dust in the eyes of those present.
Kim, Guy, Marie and I went for one or two countryside drives in the jeep; Guy would sit at the back singing endlessly ‘Don’t dilly-dally on the way’ and a peculiar ditty of his own invention, ‘I’m a tired old all-in wrestler, roaming round the old Black Sea’. Always there would be stories about the famous and his encounters with them. ‘If I’d had a choice’, he would say, ‘of meeting either Churchill or Stalin or Roosevelt, but only one of them, I wonder which it would have been. As it is, I’ve met Churchill…’ He was far from being a mere namedropper; he could talk interestingly, often brilliantly, about his celebrities, and indeed about many subjects. But his supposedly great intellectual gifts must, as far as I am concerned, be taken on trust: for what little it is worth, my own opinion would be that he simply did not have the essential application or staying power for intellectual achievement, even on a modest Foreign Office level. Tom Driberg5 has credited him with political prescience: apparently Guy, in Moscow, tipped Harold Macmillan to succeed Anthony Eden as Prime Minister when all the experts were supposedly saying ‘Rab’ Butler. Not, I would have thought, a very long shot; and against it can be set a prophecy he made at Istanbul that Hector McNeil would be the next Prime Minister but two.
What did the Russians make of him? If Kim’s story is true that Guy had acted as courier for him in Spain in order to replenish his funds, this seems to imply that Guy was in direct touch with the Russians – or at least with a trusted agent of theirs – as early as 1937; in other words, he was not simply a subagent of Kim’s, having contact with Soviet intelligence through Kim alone. As personal assistant to McNeil and to some extent in other posts he was in a position to become an important Soviet informant in his own right. Was he so used? Or did the Russians despair of ever getting hard straight intelligence from this mercurial over-subjective contact? He must have been as great a headache to them as he was to his Foreign Office masters. There is a scene in the film Carry on Spying where Kenneth Williams, as a preposterous Secret Service agent, has a meeting with the chief and his deputy. As Williams leaves the chief’s office – contriving to break the glass-panelled door in the process – the deputy speaks from a full heart: ‘If only the other side would make him a decent offer!’ In 1951 there must have been many long-suffering people in the Foreign Service and outside who breathed a sigh of relief when Guy finally accepted a decent offer from the other side – or more probably extracted it; characteristically, he seems to have invited himself.
After Aileen, Guy is the most tragic character in this whole story. Almost everything he touched turned to failure in the end. Unlike Kim he did not have the nerve for the role he was called upon to play. I wonder if some hint of this showed itself on his visit to Istanbul, and contributed to Kim’s anxiety when Guy failed to return that evening. Poor Guy: banished as it were to Siberia at the age of forty (almost literally so, for the first two or three years of his exile had to be spent in Kuibyshev).6 Obviously he hated living in Russia, even in Moscow: and when Kim, his friend of thirty years, finally turned up, Guy was already dying.7
Our daughter duly arrived, not without minor incident. We were in Asia, the American Hospital was in Europe. Because the ferries stopped early in the evening, Kim had arranged a fallback plan. If things started at night, we would telephone the embassy. A posse consisting of one of the embassy guards and Kim’s assistant would then make all speed by road along the European bank to a point opposite Vaniköy. There a fisherman had promised he would row them across the fast-running Bosphorus. There was no possibility, he said, of anything going wrong because he slept in his boat all year round. At midnight on 1 September this plan had to be put into operation. The boat was a long time reaching us, and it turned out that the boatman had chosen that one night to go off on a spree. Kim’s resourceful assistant had seized the first boat he saw, and he and the embassy guard managed eventually to make landfall at Vaniköy. Kim, Marie and I piled in; Guy wanted to come but the boat was too full. Carried southwards by the current, we landed two miles from where the embassy car was waiting: more delay. Altogether we took three hours door to door and perhaps it was just as well it all turned out to be a false alarm. A week later when the real thing began, we caught the ferry like any commuter. By that time Guy had gone. We never saw him again.
It had not been a good summer for Kim. For the first time since I had known him things had begun to get him down. He was as hospitable and generous as ever, but often rather morose, more easily given to irritation, even anger. Once I came back from the hospital at six in the evening to find him almost incoherently drunk; he had caught the cook red-handed in some misdemeanour and had fired him on the spot. It is possible that during these weeks some new trouble had arisen in his secret life; Guy might have brought unwelcome information, or there may have been fears of another knowledgeable defector. But at this time his domestic troubles seemed quite enough to account for the change.
Leaving Marie and the baby to come on by air, I returned overland to Teheran: three nights in a Turkish sleeper to Erzurum, then by road with a friend who had brought his car from Tabriz. We passed below Ararat, which with its lesser partner dominates the surrounding countryside as does Fuji in Japan. This was one of Kim’s favourite parts of Turkey. Though I preferred in general the more uncompromising terrain of northern Persia, I had to concede him Ararat. I would like to have travelled with him in eastern Turkey, or for that matter in Persia, but it was not to be.
I saw Kim only once in the next three years. In the late summer of 1949 he was selected for the exacting post of SIS representative in Washington, with responsibility for liaison with CIA and FBI headquarters. It was an important upward step in his career. His period of preparatory briefing in London partly coincided with my own home leave from Teheran, and we ran into one another in Head Office. He took me off for lunch at Mrs Alleyne’s flat in Cadogan Gardens, where the family were staying. Soon afterwards he left for America and for the time being passed out of my life. I had no direct news of him after returning to Teheran, and the only item that reached me indirectly was that Guy had also been posted to Washington and was believed to be staying with Kim.
Early in June 1951, some three months before I was due to be posted home – Marie and my daughter had already flown back – I was having a drink at the house of some embassy friends. They happened to turn on the BBC short-wave news. Reception was poor, but through the crackles we caught a few words of an announcement about two missing Foreign Office officials. The name of Guy Burgess came through, though Maclean’s was lost. So unaware was I of possible implications that I was merely intrigued and rather amused; I thought he’d turn up under a table in Paris or somewhere. As the days went on I learnt a little more from The Times but not much. Telegrams from the Foreign Office gave news of possible sightings: one such had them on their way to Turkey or Persia. Once all this had died down, I thought little of the matter. It had not crossed my mind that Kim might be seriously involved. In the Teheran embassy we too were caught up in a crisis of a different kind: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had been nationalised, the Prime Minister had been murdered, Mohamme
d Musaddiq had taken his place, and there were riots and anti-British demonstrations.
An old friend of mine, Robin Zaehner,8 who had worked in Teheran for SOE during the war and usually turned up there when anything interesting was happening, arrived in July. His first words to me were, ‘Your friend Kim Philby’s in trouble.’ I was surprised and asked why. ‘Well, Burgess was a friend of his and was actually staying with him.’ This did not strike me as an adequate reason, but Zaehner had no other information, and I soon put it out of my mind. It was not until September, on my way back to England, that I heard things were serious. Finally in Rome I learnt that Kim had resigned. Even then the general office belief was that he’d had to go simply to preserve good relations with the Americans. It was said that CIA and FBI officials had been displeased to find, when they came along to Kim’s house for a confidential chat, that Guy always seemed to be around. It was also alleged that Kim had more than once caused embarrassment by being drunk on semi-official occasions. I think now that people were trying to find excuses for what was still unbelievable. There were very few people in the service who had inspired so much trust and respect as Kim, and so much affection among those who had worked closely with him. It seemed impossible that he had done anything worse than act a little unwisely.
I finally arrived back in London in October, after staying with friends and relatives in Istanbul, Athens and Geneva as well as Rome. No one had asked me to speed my journey, although my friendship with Kim was very well known. Not indeed that I would have had any very important information to give even if I had been summoned home at once. By the time I reached London his politics at Cambridge and many other matters must have been gone over in the greatest detail.
Soon after we arrived, Marie and I had dinner with Kim and Aileen at the home of mutual friends. It was the first time we had seen him for two years. As he came in he grinned at me half-sheepishly, half-naughtily; I was reminded of Churchill’s words, ‘I’ve been in rather a scrape’. He obviously did not want to talk about what had happened, and I did not try to probe. I had the impression that he felt deeply humiliated. Nor did I learn much more from my office colleagues. Most were reluctant to talk about the affair, already several months old, or about Kim himself: he had become largely an unperson. As an old friend I felt somewhat inhibited about asking questions. But it was comforting to find that at least there did not appear to be a witch-hunt against everyone who had known him well; and my work was unaffected.
As it happened I spent very little time in England. In Rome I had been told that before I took up my expected London job I was to spend a few months in Germany. We had time to go out to Hertfordshire to see the house at Rickmansworth that Kim and Aileen had rented but were not yet living in, and help them pull down some of the obscuring ivy and other lush growth. But in truth Kim was now in the wilderness, and was to remain there for the next five years.
Notes
1. A Scottish Labour politician and junior minister of state at the Foreign Office. Burgess was his private secretary before the Washington posting.
2. The British Expeditionary Force in France, evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940.
3. Officer of the Legion of Merit, an award for ‘exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services and achievement’. Only awarded to those in uniform.
4. The book, published by Macmillan in 1937, recounts the voyage Robert Byron undertook in the company of the author Christopher Sykes between August 1933 and July 1934 to the legendary Oxiana, the region surrounding the Amu River, whose flow effectively delineates the northern border of Afghanistan with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Their adventurous expedition took them across Palestine (Israel and Lebanon today), Syria, Iraq, Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan, to end in British-ruled Pakistan.
5. Tom Driberg (later Baron Bradwell of Bradwell) was a British journalist, politician and member of Parliament for twenty-eight years. An open communist for twenty years and a close friend of Guy Burgess, he was later to visit him in Moscow, after which he wrote the book Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1956.
6. Renamed Samara in 1991.
7. Although Philby arrived in Moscow in late January 1963, he did not get to meet Burgess before the latter’s death on 30 August that year in a Moscow hospital. As Philby related to Phillip Knightley in Moscow in 1988, ‘They kept us apart when I arrived, to avoid recriminations. I didn’t get to see him before he died.’ (Quoted in Phillip Knightley, Philby: The Life and Views of the KGB Masterspy, André Deutsch, London, 1988, p. 223.)
8. An intelligence officer with an exceptional knowledge of Iran, and a noted linguist and scholar. He was elected Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University and a fellow of All Souls.
9
OVER AND OUT
Most people go through a bad patch or two in their lives, but the ordeal Kim now went through was of a different order. His world seemed to have collapsed about him. The brilliant career, the high hopes had vanished and he was now an outcast, under serious suspicion. Aileen told Marie later that for several weeks their Rickmansworth house, The Sun Box, was under surveillance by a team of workmen not very convincingly engaged in digging up the road. Perhaps so, or perhaps they were simply rather lazy workmen; once you think you are being watched or followed everything becomes sinister. Kim, according to Aileen, was in a state almost of shock, and hated to be left alone; at the same time he would not stir from the house if he could help it.
This was the period of the main MI5 interrogation, that is to say the ‘judicial inquiry’ of November 1951 conducted by H. P. Milmo, previously of MI5 and by this time a KC, and the subsequent sessions Kim had with the expert interrogator Jim Skardon. In Germany I heard little of what went on except for one or two scraps, not necessarily reliable. It was said for instance that when Kim tried to light a cigarette Milmo snatched it angrily from his mouth and hurled it to the floor. I also heard – this may have come later from Aileen – that Kim was personally distressed by having to face interrogation at the hands of old MI5 colleagues like Dick White and Milmo who had once thought so highly of him. It may seem strange that the attitude of SIS and MI5 friends should have mattered so much to him, but I am sure that one part of Kim was fully and genuinely involved in his SIS life, and as much interested in his work and in the company and good opinion of his colleagues as any other SIS officer. I do not think this is necessarily true of any spy in Kim’s position; for instance I doubt if it altogether applies to George Blake, although as I never knew Blake well – or at all outside the office – this is only an impression.
By the time Marie and I came back to England in August 1952 Kim’s interrogation was over, with evidently inconclusive results, and the heat had been taken off. But the hopelessness remained. All official or semi-official jobs were, of course, closed to him. It was some time before he was able to find, through Jack Ivens, a place in a trading firm, where he stayed for several months. Kim had no gift for minor commerce. It was sad to see him reduced to a dreary job which was both beneath his abilities and, in a sense, above them; like watching a Czech professor forced to sweep the streets, and not doing it very well. It may have been difficult for Kim, a natural elitist, to come to terms with humdrum uncongenial work. But I suppose he would have buckled down to it if he had had to; one now sees that he had his eyes on something else, a chance to serve the Russians again.
For the next three years, until we were posted abroad in October 1955, Marie and I saw either the whole family or Kim by himself quite frequently, usually at intervals of a few weeks at most. I had no instructions from my employers not to see him; equally, I had no instructions to see and report on him, though Kim may possibly have wondered whether I had. Most of his old friends in SIS and other official departments thought it wiser not to know him; indeed I can remember only one other person still so employed who continued to see him at all regularly. One or two who had left, like Dick Brooman-White (by the
n a Conservative MP) and Jack Ivens, remained faithful. Jack and his Greek wife Nina in particular, intensely warm-hearted people whose politics were probably the opposite of Kim’s, tried to help him. Kim was very genuinely grateful – ‘They’re pure gold,’ he said. Of his and Aileen’s other friends at this time I remember especially Douglas Collins, who had founded the Goya perfume firm, and his wife Patsy, who had been a school friend of Aileen’s. But Tommy and Hilda Harris had retired to Majorca, and seldom came to England: I never saw them after about 1946.
Many people in SIS who, like me, knew very little of the case against Kim clung to the belief that he was innocent of any serious offence, although we recognised we were in no real position to judge. One important thing we did not know – and I only know it now having read My Silent War – was that among the evidence brought against him in the MI5 interrogation were two very sinister little items. Two days after the Volkov information reached London in 1945 there had been a ‘spectacular’ rise in the volume of NKVD telegraphic traffic between London and Moscow, followed by a parallel rise in the traffic between Moscow and Istanbul; and in September 1949, shortly after Kim had learnt that the British and Americans were investigating a suspected leakage from the British embassy in Washington some years earlier, there had been a similar rise in NKVD traffic. Kim does not say whether MI5 showed him any statistics to support these statements or merely left him to take them on trust. If the latter, one cannot exclude that MI5 may have been bluffing a little, and exaggerating lesser rises of a kind that must have occurred frequently. But either way Kim’s reply probably helped to confirm their belief in his guilt: asked if he could explain the jumps in traffic, he replied simply that he could not. This is hardly the reaction of an innocent man. Kim’s line hitherto had been to argue that the reason why Donald Maclean had been alerted to danger was that he had observed both that he was being followed and that certain categories of secret papers had been withdrawn from him; in other words, there was no need to postulate a Third Man. But here was new and independent evidence to suggest that the Russians might have indeed been tipped off, at least about Volkov. One would have expected an innocent man, after very little thought, to have pointed out to his interrogators that, if the figures meant anything at all, then MI5 ought to be looking for someone who was still at large.