Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  ‘It concerns Mrs Philby. As you know, she is currently in London. Her husband is in Moscow, where she is apparently keen to join him. That would not be ideal, from our point of view. However, that’s not your concern. Mrs Philby is being pestered by the media and deserted by many of her friends. According to CME, who sees her on a fairly regular basis, she feels isolated and lonely. I would like you to’, he cleared his throat, ‘befriend her. Nothing more. She will know from the outset that you work for us. I do not want to put one of our women agents on to this – Miss Fields is too busy, for one thing, and Miss Pelham-Hill is not, perhaps, the kind of woman to engage another’s trust. You will do the job very well. All I want is to make her happy. You know the kind of thing,’ he looked slightly perplexed – ‘tea, shopping, a woman’s ear …’

  He took his pipe out of his mouth and started fiddling with it. ‘I am bound to say, at this point, that you are in no way compelled to do this. It is outside your job description and you would be within your rights to refuse.’

  I stopped him. ‘Sir, if it helps, I’d be happy to do it. I would find it interesting to meet Mrs Philby and will try to do anything in my power to make her happy in London.’

  M gave one of his rare smiles and pushed the file across his desk. ‘You will find all the background in here. You’d better have a word with CME first. He knows her well. Anything else, ask Chief of Staff.’

  I returned to my desk, excited at the prospect of an assignment of my own.

  August

  As an undergraduate, I had always taken a perverse pride in the knowledge that I shared an alma mater with ‘the Cambridge Spies’. Their names added a frisson to the long list of Trinity College alumni that I would trot out for the benefit of any passing visitor: Newton, Wittgenstein, Marvell, Thackeray, Nabokov, Byron … Philby, Burgess and Blunt. Certainly they seemed to me to have done no lasting damage to the largest, richest and arguably most venerable of Cambridge’s colleges. It was only relatively recently, not long before my peremptory dismissal from the university, that I realised that a degree of sensitivity remained about these more infamous former students. I was sitting at High Table next to a senior colleague, who had joined the college in 1952 – the year following Burgess and Maclean’s flight to Moscow. ‘Wouldn’t want any more scandal of that type,’ he muttered over the port decanter. ‘Best keep the college well away from any taint of espionage – for the wrong side, you understand.’ He jiggled an unkempt eyebrow at me, before shuffling off to the Senior Common Room. I was surprised: I’d assumed that the upper reaches of academia were exempt from that sort of stuffy patriotism.

  It is now generally accepted that there were five members of the inner circle: Philby, Burgess, Donald Maclean (a Trinity Hall alumnus), Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. All were members of the Apostles, a dining and debating club where the clever young men of the day would argue passionately about the causes closest to their hearts. Many of the Apostles were members of the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS) and later the Communist Party. In the 1930s, it made intellectual sense: the economies of the West were sunk in depression, with the starving forming long lines at inadequately supplied soup kitchens, and as fascism swept across Spain and Germany its antithesis appeared increasingly attractive to independent thinkers.

  Philby was never going to be a conformer. His father, Harry St John Philby, was an ardent Arabist, who converted to Islam and served as adviser to the King of Saudi Arabia – who, as a token of gratitude, gave him a Baluchi slave girl to be his second wife. Kim – born in India, fluent in Urdu, and nicknamed after Kipling’s hero – excelled at Westminster School, but found the lure of politics more exciting than his academic studies at Cambridge. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1931 general election, and became treasurer of the CUSS. Handsome, slightly built, with a stutter that became more pronounced when he was nervous or angry, by all accounts he was a charming man. After graduation, he bought a motorcycle and drove to Vienna, where he threw in his lot with the Communist underground and met and married his first wife, Litzi Friedman, a Communist activist in need of a British passport.

  Back in London, in May 1934 Philby was visited by a friend from Vienna, who asked whether he would like to meet a man of ‘decisive importance’. Two days later he had his first rendezvous with ‘Otto’ in Regent’s Park. ‘Our conversation lasted less than an hour, but within a few minutes it was clear that, although Otto said nothing in so many words, I was being approached with a view to recruitment into one of the Soviet Special Services,’ Philby later recalled. ‘Long before he finished, I had decided to accept.’

  It was the beginning of twenty-nine years of secret servitude. It was Otto who asked Philby to compile a list of his Cambridge friends and acquaintances, with biographical details about each of them – particularly their political sympathies. Donald Maclean was near the top of the list. Burgess was there, and probably Blunt and Cairncross too, although Philby never admitted to having had a direct role in their recruitment. It was Otto’s successor as handler, ‘Theo’, who suggested some years later that Philby should find a way to join the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

  That Philby – and his cohorts – should have managed to work at the heart of the British intelligence services for upwards of a decade does not reflect well on the internal security of those organisations. In other areas, however, the SIS and the Security Service (MI5) were mostly admired and feared by their counterparts and adversaries around the world. Both had an outstandingly ‘successful’ war, helped in no small measure by Philby and his Cambridge comrades, even though they were sharing classified information, particularly about the German Enigma codes, with our allies in Moscow in what seemed to them to be a justifiable deception.

  It was after the war, when the West’s allegiances shifted and resettled, with the Soviet Union placing itself firmly on the other side of an ideological – and increasingly physical – divide, that their work became more hazardous, and damaging for Britain. But by then, the spies had no possibility of an elegant exit. As Philby knew, to break with Soviet intelligence would lead either to a British cell or to a Russian bullet. So he maintained his faith and continued to serve his Soviet master with whatever he could supply – until the point, at the end of 1962, when he was confronted with the knowledge that the KGB defector Anatoly Golitsyn had irrevocably betrayed his secret.

  When the Chief of the Middle Eastern section, Alexander ‘Dingle’ Delavigne, was sent to interview Philby in Beirut in December 1962, he reported back to London that Philby had shown no surprise. He had clearly been forewarned by someone in the inner sanctum of SIS.

  Thursday, 1st August

  I got in early this morning and opened Eleanor Philby’s file. On the first page, there was a photograph of an attractive woman with a warm smile. She was sitting in a deck-chair, on a balcony perhaps, wearing an over-sized man’s shirt and smoking a cigarette. I liked her face; she was older than me, but looked as if she could be a friend. I started reading the dry details of her life. She was born in Seattle in 1913, the only child of Irish-American parents. She graduated from the University of Washington and, aged twenty, moved to California to study art. When war broke out, she moved to New York and in 1943, in search of adventure, to Istanbul. After peace came, she continued her wanderings around Europe. In 1948, then thirty-five, she married a New York Times journalist, Sam Pope Brewer. They had a daughter, Ann, and a series of far-flung postings which culminated, in 1956, with his appointment as the paper’s chief Middle Eastern correspondent, based in Beirut. Even in dry black and white, it sounded like an exciting life, but the real adventure was still to come.

  According to the file, it was later that year – while her husband was out of town on an assignment – that she first met Kim Philby, who was working as a correspondent for the Observer and the Economist, in the bar of the St George’s Hotel. Their relationship developed and on January 24th, 1959, soon after the death of Philby’s previous wife a
nd only months after her divorce papers came through, they married, at Holborn Register Office in London. According to unnamed sources, it appeared to be a happy marriage, though both Philbys exhibited an increasingly voracious appetite for spirits. Frequently over the year before he disappeared, after a session in a bar or even on a picnic, Kim had to be poured into a taxi and sent home, with Eleanor not noticeably more in control of her faculties. On New Year’s Eve, three weeks before he disappeared, he slipped in the bathroom and cracked his head open. The doctor at the American Hospital said that had he one more ounce of alcohol in his blood, he would have died. Throughout all this, he always managed to file his articles on time – and never gave any hint of his double life.

  With hindsight, his drinking problem was explicable. He must have known the net was closing in on him. She, presumably, drank to keep him company. I looked again at the photograph and felt a growing sympathy for her. I phoned Janet and asked if I could see Dingle.

  He was full of wit and courtesy, as usual, as he ushered me into a comfortable leather armchair in the corner of his room and came to sit opposite, crossing his polished half-brogues elegantly at the ankle. ‘Margaret and I are very fond of Eleanor,’ he told me. ‘She’s a good, brave gal and she adores Kim. She hadn’t the foggiest what he was up to, of course. He took us all in, I’m afraid.’ His eyes, behind round-rimmed spectacles, did not waver, though when I happened to look down, I saw that the whites of his knuckles were showing where his hands were tightly grasped together. ‘I’m furious with Kim for what he did, but as much as anything for how he abandoned Eleanor. He couldn’t have done so in a manner more calculated to distress her. You’ll find her in a pretty sorry state now: she alternates between high excitement at the idea of joining him in Moscow and fear when she contemplates what she’ll have to forgo for him – her daughter, her family, possibly her freedom. If she goes to Russia, I don’t know whether she’ll ever be allowed back. It’s sad, because she’s not a political creature. She married Kim because she loved him, for better and for worse, and she still does. He’s a damnably charming fellow. He’s always had this great effect on women: they love him dearly, though he’s not always treated them fairly. Not at all.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Eleanor will like you, Jane, and God knows she needs a friend.’

  Monday, 5th August

  Prenderghast was sentenced today. Forty-two years for three counts of contravening the Official Secrets Act. Everyone I spoke to was stunned at the severity of the sentence, even though the Chief Justice had referred to ‘hundreds of agents’ having been blown by P, at least forty of whom had been killed as a result of his treachery.

  Talking to Bill later, he said it was a political sentence, designed to placate the Americans. Between them, the PM, the Attorney-General and the Lord Chief Justice had apparently cooked up a term that was meant to demonstrate how seriously we take betrayal, and the degree of our ‘commitment to eradicate the cancer of treachery within the intelligence services’. I know M has had repeated meetings with his opposite number, who was in London for the verdict, stressing that the necessary security adjustments had been made to ensure that this couldn’t reoccur. He surely did not mention the fear here that Prenderghast had an accomplice within the Office.

  On the news, there was footage of a small man with a jacket over his head being bundled into a police van and driven off to Wormwood Scrubs. Forty-two years: when his sentence is served, he’ll be eighty-six – too old for further treachery.

  Wednesday, 14th August

  A day like no other. It started this morning with a telephone call from the Chief Security Officer. He sounded unusually agitated and asked for an immediate appointment with M. I told him that M was over with the Minister. A few minutes later, he bounded up the stairs, a cigarette between his fingers, and rapped sharply on Bill’s door. ‘Tanner,’ I heard him say. ‘I need to talk to you urgently.’ He walked into the room and, without shutting the door, proceeded to recount the details of a telephone conversation he had just overheard.

  ‘Twenty minutes ago, a man telephoned the Ministry switchboard and identified himself as James Bond, agent 007. He was transferred, as per protocol, to Liaison. Walker was on duty – extremely bright chap. When he asked who was calling, the man once again said, “This is Commander James Bond speaking. Number 007,” and repeated his request to speak to M.’

  ‘Another crank?’ Bill asked.

  ‘I’m not so sure. Just wait. Liaison patched the call through to me and I listened as he kept him talking long enough for Special Branch to trace the number. Walker asked him again who it was he wanted to speak to. “Admiral Miles Messervy,” he said, in a low voice. “He is head of a department in your Ministry. The number of his room used to be twelve on the eighth floor. He used to have a secretary called Miss Moneypenny. Good-looking girl. Brunette. Well let’s see, it’s Wednesday. Shall I tell you what’ll be the main dish on the menu in the staff canteen? It should be steak-and-kidney pudding.”’

  Bill looked up at that. ‘Good God! Do you think it might be him?’

  ‘I didn’t like that bit about the steak-and-kidney either. I’ve passed him on to the Soft Man1 at X Section. X is on leave, sadly, though it’s probably best anyway that it’s not someone 007 knows … if indeed it is 007. He’s on his way now to Kensington Cloisters.’2

  ‘Thank you,’ Bill replied. ‘I’ll notify M as soon as he gets in. We should be on our guard about this.’

  Once he had gone, Bill appeared at my door. ‘Heard all that, Penny?’ he asked. ‘A good-looking brunette, eh?’ I could tell, despite the attempt at levity, that he was tense. I didn’t quite know what to feel. My heart was beating fast and I had an inexplicable urge to cry, which I just managed to control by repeating over and over, ‘It is probably another hoax, probably another hoax.’ I couldn’t begin to think about what would happen if it wasn’t. James back from the dead?

  M returned from the Ministry and Bill told him the news. I wasn’t there to see his reaction, but can imagine that he exhibited no emotion, if indeed he felt any. He is impenetrable.

  Over the next hour, reports kept coming in, which I took immediately into M.

  Special Branch had traced the phone call to the Ritz and picked up the target at the Arlington Street entrance. His room had been taken under the name of Frank Westmacott, company director.

  A photograph taken was sent over here immediately by dispatch rider. Q Branch developed it and brought it up. I got a brief glimpse as M opened the file. It certainly looked like James, but then I know what can be done with skilled plastic surgery.

  Fifteen minutes later, we received details of his coat – a Burberry mackintosh bought yesterday.

  Then information on his arrival in the country from Immigration: he had flown in yesterday from West Berlin.

  Then his fingerprints.

  Next, the Chief Security Officer called up, asking to see M immediately. I showed him in and as I was closing the door, I just caught him saying, ‘The Soft Man thinks it must be 007 …’ James back? It was too good to be true. I suppressed the urge to run along the corridors, shouting the news. Bill was summoned into M’s office to join them and when he came out he rushed straight through my room with a deep frown on his face.

  Twenty minutes later, he marched back through M’s door, barely stopping to knock on the door. He was still in there when I was notified by the concierge that Commander Bond was on his way up. With a stomach-tightening cocktail of nerves and excitement, I went to the lift to meet him. The doors opened and my heart gave a jump. It was James all right – no doubt about it: the same grey-blue eyes, the wayward comma of hair straying over his right eyebrow. I was on the point of rushing forward to embrace him, when he stepped out and said, ‘Hello, Miss Moneypenny. Good to see you again,’ in a cold, emotionless voice. There was only a pretence of a smile, no joke, and when had he ever called me Miss Moneypenny? That instant, I knew there was something seriously wrong.

  In
a state of turmoil, I started walking towards my office, with James following a few steps behind. I opened the door and went over to my desk and automatically pressed the intercom to notify M of his arrival. Then I sat down. My mind was churning furiously, trying to think of a way to keep him away from M.

  He stood in front of my desk, looking at me with that same empty smile, as I fought desperately for something to say. After what seemed like hours, Bill came through M’s door. James looked up and said, ‘Hello, Bill,’ but he didn’t hold out his hand. Bill is – was – his best friend. How could he greet him so coldly? I had to do something. I looked at Bill, trying to convey my doubts, hoping that he wouldn’t let this strange husk of 007 go through M’s door. Nothing good could come of it. ‘Hello, old chap. Long time no see,’ he replied, in a forced attempt at jollity. I shook my head at him, but he gave me a fierce glare. ‘M would like to see 007 straight away.’

  I said the first thing that came into my head. I can’t remember exactly what it was – something to the effect that M had an important meeting – but Bill was not to be swayed.

  ‘M says you must get him out of it,’ he said curtly. Then he turned to the James figure and told him to go in. ‘Come and have a gossip after M’s finished with you.’

  As James walked through the door, I started shaking uncontrollably. ‘Oh, Bill,’ I said. ‘There’s something wrong with him.’

  He gave me a quick squeeze and told me to calm down and then swiftly disappeared into his office, shutting the door behind him. A bare ten minutes later, he burst back through, along with Head of Security, and straight into M’s office. I didn’t see what happened, but they must have leapt on James, as by the time I got to the door they were heaving him to his feet. He appeared to be in a dead faint.

  I looked past them to where, to my astonishment, there was a glass screen in front of M’s desk. Brown liquid was dripping slowly down the middle of the glass. I couldn’t drag my eyes away; it was as if I were paralysed. Still rooted to the spot, I was aware of some movement, as M walked around the side of the glass. Suddenly everything was happening at once. Someone was shouting, ‘Cyanide. We must all get out of here. Bloody quick.’ A foot kicked out and I saw a pistol skipping across the carpet. Then M was being ordered to leave the room. Head of Security and Bill followed, dragging James with them into Bill’s room.