Kim Philby

by Tim Milne

  I think that if the facts about the NKVD traffic had been generally known in SIS there would have been a much greater tendency to believe Kim guilty. One also wonders to what extent those who briefed Harold Macmillan before his statement in the House of Commons in November 1955 were aware of this particular evidence, on the face of it fairly damning.

  The line that Kim took after the disappearance of Maclean and Guy Burgess, as related in his book, contains a further inconsistency. Before he was summoned back from Washington, Kim had several post-mortem discussions with Geoffrey Paterson, the local MI5 representative, and Bobby Mackenzie, the embassy security officer. Kim put forward a theory of how events might have gone. Maclean, he suggested, had discovered he was under suspicion and being followed. But this would make it extremely difficult for him to attempt any contact with the Russians, without which his chances of escape were greatly reduced. The fortuitous arrival of Burgess offered a way out, because Burgess could make the necessary arrangements through his own Soviet contact. The reason why Burgess also fled, Kim suggested, was because he was near the end of his tether and his Russian friends thought it safest to remove him from the scene. In Washington Kim stuck to this reconstruction of events, and was able to use it to good effect with the FBI. It assumed, of course, that Burgess had been a Soviet agent. Yet three pages and a few days later we find Kim back in London, telling Dick White of MI5 that it was almost inconceivable that anyone as notoriously indiscreet as Burgess could have been a secret agent of any kind, let alone a Soviet agent. If anyone ever taxed him with this inconsistency, he does not mention it.

  In conversation with me – or other friends as far as I know – Kim never referred to the ordeal he had been through. Nor did he try to refute, or even mention, the evidence that had been brought against him. Only once did he discuss any part of the matter with me. One evening after he had been having supper with us he began to talk a little about Guy Burgess. Life for Guy, he said, had evidently become absolutely hopeless by 1951, and if he was indeed a Russian spy the strain on him must have been intolerable. Kim went on to say that he had been searching in his memory for any evidence which might point to the truth about Guy, and had remembered one possibly significant thing: during the war Guy had for a time assiduously sought the company of a lady of illustrious family who was working at Bletchley. Conceivably, Kim surmised, Guy had been hoping she would eventually talk indiscreetly to him about her work. Taken somewhat aback, I asked whether he was expecting me to pass this on to the security people. ‘Why yes,’ said Kim in surprise, ‘that’s why I mentioned it.’

  The more I thought of it afterwards the more puzzling I found this incident. Two things seemed absolutely obvious. First, if Guy really had been cultivating this lady’s company so busily, the fact was sure by now to be well known. Second, the reason why he had done so was much more likely to be connected with her famous name than with anything else. Guy could never resist a celebrity; as Denis Greenhill put it in a Times article, ‘I have never heard a name-dropper in the same class’. When I mentioned this story in the appropriate quarter it aroused no interest at all, presumably for the reasons I have suggested.

  During the winter of 1952–53 we had several other evening visits from Kim at our small flat in Chancery Lane. His export–import job was in the City, not far away, and often he preferred to spend the night at his mother’s flat in Drayton Gardens rather than get back to Rickmansworth. Together we all listened to the American Presidential election results, Kim ardently supporting Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower. Another evening he insisted on cooking us a superb lobster paella, taking everything upon himself from buying and killing the lobster to finally serving up. Once he got very drunk. It so happened that we had been painting the bathroom. Kim lurched in, leant heavily on the window ledge and left a permanent impression of his hand, like the footprints of the famous in the wet cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. If by any chance some later occupant of the first-floor flat at Chancery Lane ever found that the bathroom window ledge still bore faint traces of a hand that is how it came about.

  Another of his visits also had enduring results, of a very different kind. Not long after he arrived, an old friend of Marie’s and mine from Benson days, Connie,1 happened to drop in. Although we had known her for sixteen years she and Kim had apparently not met before. They got on well from the start. Connie too was working in a commercial office and it seemed that she might be able to put him in the way of some business. Before she left they had arranged to meet again. Quite soon Connie’s flat in Highgate had replaced Drayton Gardens as Kim’s pied-à-terre in London. The affair lasted, in one degree or another, until he left for Beirut in 1956.

  Kim was still spending much of his time at The Sun Box with Aileen and the five children. The marriage had been in difficulties since Istanbul and if he had not met Connie he would no doubt have met someone else. This did not alter the fact that, however unintentionally, Marie and I had been the means of introducing them, and a note of falseness had been brought into our relations with Aileen, whom we had always liked. The occasional weekends or Sundays we spent at Rickmansworth were rather sad occasions. The casual friendly take-it-or-leave-it hospitality was still there, we still had to climb into bed over kiddie-cars and collapsible paddling pools, but there was now much less to laugh at. There was also less to talk about, now that shop was ruled out. I could not discuss SIS matters with Kim – not even what was happening to his former friends in the service – and he was careful never to ask questions. For ten years, while we had been together in SIS, there had always been so much to talk about: not only the endlessly fascinating work itself, but our richly assorted colleagues and contacts and the many parts of the world that the work might take us to. The fact that we did not have very many private interests in common had not mattered.

  I have read that during this period he was drinking heavily, but that was not my impression. For one thing money was too short. The dominant memory I retain of visits to the Philby family in these years is that of young children: five of theirs, one of ours and sometimes neighbourly additions. There was a permanent fairly well-behaved hullabaloo. With all their troubles, Kim and Aileen were good parents. Kim’s children meant an enormous amount to him. I have a strong feeling that, if it had not been for the five of them, he might well have been tempted to defect during this period. This would not have presented great operational difficulties. He was not debarred from travelling abroad. According to his book, he visited Madrid as a freelance journalist in 1952 (I do not remember this but I was probably still in Germany). Later, if my memory is correct, he flew to Tripoli in Libya on export–import business, and in 1954 he took Connie to Majorca to stay with Tommy and Hilda. He speaks in his book of having considered escape several times during this period, and mentions an escape plan, designed originally for America, but requiring only minor modifications to adapt it to Europe. I cannot see that much planning was necessary. He could simply have travelled on his existing British passport to some Western country having air communications with the Soviet bloc, from where, after visiting the Soviet embassy or possibly the Aeroflot office and obtaining a visa, he could have flown on to Moscow, Prague or elsewhere. All that would have needed arranging beforehand was a means of identifying himself to the embassy for what he was. Who would – or could – have stopped him at any point?

  His export–import job folded up after some months, and for two years or more he had no real employment outside desultory journalism. At one moment he had hopes of being engaged to do some work on the script of a film, an ambitious project about the life of primitive man. ‘It’s got one thing going for it,’ said Kim. ‘I don’t believe there’s ever before been a film showing men and women completely naked.’ One fairly well-known actor was said to be interested, and Kim attended a few meetings, but nothing came of the idea.

  Kim began to spend less and less time at The Sun Box, and our own visits there became rarer. We continued to see Aileen
occasionally, however, partly because our daughter had gone to a kindergarten attended also at different times by three of the Philby children, Tommy, Miranda and the youngest boy, Harry: the third generation of Philbys and Milnes to be at school together. But we also saw Connie and Kim in London. Some kind of rift arose between us and the two of them. The immediate cause was never clear at the time and now escapes me altogether, but the underlying reason must have been that we were seeing both Kim and Aileen, sometimes together but usually separately, and were finding ourselves in an ever-falser position. Before long, the rift was patched up and Kim and I had a drink together. Exceptionally, he talked of personal matters and his estrangement from Aileen. I asked whether the Burgess–Maclean affair had made matters worse. On the contrary, said Kim, it had helped to bring them together for a time.

  In about 1954 the family moved from Rickmansworth to a house near Crowborough, Sussex, which we visited once or twice. My London stint was now nearing its end, and we were preparing for a move to Berne. In the summer of 1955 we gave a farewell party to which we invited Kim and Connie. It was rather a disastrous affair. Not only Kim but, surprisingly, Connie got tight. For once in my life I lost my temper with Kim and bawled him out. They came round the next day, disarmingly contrite, and we all laughed it off.

  The worst of his bad time was now nearly over, but first the suspicions which had lain dormant for so long were to come into the open. The change began with an article in The People in September 1955 in which Vladimir Petrov, a Soviet defector of the previous year, asserted that Burgess and Maclean had been Soviet agents ever since their Cambridge days and had defected to avoid arrest. The government was forced to issue a long-promised but not very informative White Paper on the two men. Fleet Street was full of rumours about a Third Man who had warned them. These culminated in Marcus Lipton’s question in the House on 25 October, naming Kim openly for the first time. Marie and I were now on the point of leaving for Switzerland. We had a farewell dinner with Kim at a restaurant and drove him back to his mother’s flat at Drayton Gardens, which had been under siege by reporters for some days. Kim asked us to drop him at the back of the building so that he could climb up the fire escape. For a man facing a supreme crisis in his life, he was remarkably calm and cheerful. We were already in Berne by the time Harold Macmillan made his statement in the Commons: ‘I have no reason to conclude that Mr Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of this country.’

  At first I did not regard the statement as making a radical difference, except that the press hunt was now called off. Nothing, as far as I knew, had come to light to remove any suspicions that MI5 or SIS might have entertained for the last four years; whatever evidence they had, for or against him, remained exactly the same. The government, forced to make a statement, had followed the principle of ‘innocent till proved guilty’. But before long it appeared that the atmosphere had changed after the parliamentary statement, and that Kim, while certainly not restored to official trust and favour, was no longer considered a total outcast. In July, shortly after Colonel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, I received an elated postcard from Kim: he was back in journalism and about to take off for Beirut as The Observer’s correspondent.2 ‘What’s the betting I’ll be a war reporter again within six months?’ And so he was, in half that time.

  It was not until July 1957 that I saw him again. At the beginning of that year I had been brought back to a London post which involved much travelling. Fairly soon I found myself visiting Beirut. Kim and I had a pleasant and rather mellow evening together, slightly marred at the end by my speaking of Connie. Though I did not know it, and indeed had never heard of her, he was already in love with Eleanor Brewer. Reminders of discarded lives were not welcome.

  In December Aileen died. Marie and I had last seen her only a month or so earlier, when the three of us took an assortment of children to the zoo. Kim came back for the funeral. Characteristically, he insisted that the youngest children should not be told of her death before he arrived, as he wished to tell them himself; he was never one to shirk an unpleasant duty. He stayed in England a few weeks, clearing up family affairs. Marie and I went down for a final weekend at Crowborough, not more than a fortnight after Aileen’s death. It could hardly be described as a happy occasion, but the atmosphere was in a way almost light hearted. This was nearly the last time we were to see any of the children. Jo was growing up to be a very pretty girl. The two elder boys, John and Tommy, just turned fifteen and fourteen, were learning to drive. Kim and I took them out in the old car Aileen had been using, and Kim made each of them take the wheel for a mile or two on the public road. The boys drove just as well as any learners of legal age, but the incident surprised me – it was so out of keeping with the law-abiding Kim I had known.

  He returned to Beirut, leaving the children in the care of a sister of Aileen’s and other relatives. After twenty years I was once again following his career from the press, that is to say his despatches in The Observer. But one story came through on the grapevine which in its first bald presentation was most alarming. Kim, it was said, had tried to commit suicide by jumping off a high balcony, and had been restrained just in time. A later version was less dramatic: he had got very drunk at a party in a fifth-floor flat and had been seen with one leg over the balcony railing, saying he was sick of this bloody party and was getting out. Somebody pulled him back. Probably, if the story is true, he was too drunk to realise what floor he was on.

  I had occasion to visit Beirut again in October 1958. This time Kim said, ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ and presented Eleanor as his fiancée. That he should be marrying again was quite to be expected, but that it should be an American was not; however, Eleanor, if not déracinée, was at least somewhat internationalised by the travelling life she had led for many years. Whereas I had quickly got on terms with Aileen – and Lizy for that matter – I cannot say that I ever came to know Eleanor. She gave the impression that she lacked personality, that her life was shaped for her by others; she seemed something of a lame duck. And yet her book on Kim reveals her as a sensitive, intelligent and sympathetic person. Obviously I missed most of this.

  The two of them came to London in December of that year, but after an initial evening together Marie and I did not see or hear from them for some weeks. Then out of the blue Kim telephoned me at my office one Friday evening to ask me to be a witness the next morning at their wedding. I do not know why he left it so late. I had a slight feeling that he thought I would be reluctant to take it on. Anyway, at eleven the next morning Jack Ivens and I, together with Nina and Marie, were at the register office in Russell Square to see them on their way, for better or worse. I think there were no other guests at the ceremony, but a few dropped in at the Ivens house afterwards.

  Douglas and Patsy Collins had lent the couple their London flat, a very smart place in Hertford Street where we were invited for a farewell drink before they left for Beirut. We arrived at about half past six to be met at the door by an extremely shaken Eleanor. Kim had passed out and was supine on his bed. Eleanor, Marie and I and the only other guests, the Ivenses, sat around talking uneasily for an hour or two until Kim finally made a brief and groggy appearance. I had scarcely ever known him get drunk in this way, without benefit of outside company. He and Eleanor had apparently had an alcoholic lunch and then gone on drinking.

  This was the last time I was to see him for nearly three years. At the end of 1959 I was transferred to Tokyo. When I arrived back in London on leave in November 1961 it so happened that Kim and Eleanor were there on a short visit. The four of us met at our wartime favourite, the Unicorn in Jermyn Street. Kim mentioned – though I never heard more of this – that he might later be visiting Tokyo with Eleanor on journalistic business. They had planned to return to Beirut the following Sunday, overland as far as Paris, and we arranged to have a last drink on the morning of that day at a pub in Strand-on-the-Green, near where we were staying with Kim’s sister Pat. Regrettably we
turned up very late, and the rest of the party – Kim, Eleanor, Pat, Jo and her fiancé – were already on their way back from the pub when we arrived. Kim was a little annoyed. ‘We’d given you up and written you a note,’ he said, and handed me one of his visiting cards, on the back of which he had inscribed in his unforgettable handwriting a message which ran like this: ‘Nothing can excuse defection. God rot you all – but look after Jo.’ Unaccountably the signature, still in Kim’s writing, was ‘Eleanor Philby’. Fussed at being late, we took little note of the message – which incidentally did not appear to be in any way private, even though Jo was there – and would no doubt have thrown the card away if we had not used it to take down Pat and Jo’s telephone numbers. We came across it nearly two years later when packing up before leaving Tokyo. By that time Kim had indeed defected. It is easy now to read all sorts of meanings into this card, but the only one I read into the first four words at the time was that we had let him down by being too late to say goodbye. It was natural, among people accustomed to intelligence jargon, to use a term like defection light-heartedly to mean some minor social dereliction. In any case ‘Nothing can excuse defection’, in the ordinary sense of the word, makes no sense in the context of his life. It is clear from his book that he had had an escape plan for many years. One might as well say ‘Nothing can excuse a lifeboat’ on an ocean liner.